Noctua Review 2022 - Vol. XV by Noctua Review

NOCTUA LITERARY MAGAZINE

Noctua 2022 Vol. XV – 2022

First published by Noctua Literary Magazine 2022 Copyright © 2022 by Noctua Literary Magazine All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission. First edition This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy. Find out more at reedsy.com

We thank all of our wonderful staff and our amazing contributors for making this all possible.

Contents Masthead

iii

Dancing to Vinahouse

Among Hungry Ghosts

My Father Taught Me How to Find the Magic of Trees

Rivers

The history of the world for as long as I can remember

Exploration of Sheep’s Head Way, Ireland

HELL IS A NIGHT

Half-tree

PROSPECTING

10-57

Looking at Gabriel

Breakthrough

What Should We Do If the Cat Dies in the Middle of the...

Sky at Morning

Infections Evolving with Time

Bird Shit At Dusk

For us the earth is well prepared

DRAUGHT

Hoffa

Cream

Eucalyptus

Where the Show Goes On

Hattie

Love at a Food Stand

I Am Become Death

Thirst

Contributors

Noctua Review

MFA in Creative Writing

Also by Noctua Literary Magazine

Masthead

Ben Pello Editor in Chief Sarah Weynand Poetry Editor Elizabeth Richter Poetry Editor Jacob McElligott Fiction Editor Grace Collins-Hovey Fiction Editor Laura Charlton Fiction Editor Salvatore Ghamo Fiction Editor Noctua Review is the annual literary journal produced by the MFA program at Southern Connecticut State University. We are staffed solely by MFA students. iii

Dancing to Vinahouse

Jey Ley

Danceless bodies have secret languages they speak at home, away from others. For me, Vinahouse: music that could make municipal tax code dance like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Popular ballads & folksongs of Vietnam, remixed into EDM. Long before TikTokers, I was dancing to Vinahouse, & long after them I will. 1

Among Hungry Ghosts

Jey Ley

There are no heroes among hungry ghosts, Only hunger. But this is not the realm of hungry ghosts, Right? At least I am not a hungry ghost, …

My Father Taught Me How to Find the Magic of Trees

Ifeoluwa Ayandele

Don’t call me broken because I write my father into this poem & carry borders on my shoulder girdle & pray I will understand the truth about Christmas trees. Last December, my father grew a Christmas tree in our front porch & lit candles around it & asked me to dance around the light, for herein lays glory. My father says trees are the glory of man & god is the glory of trees. I danced around the Christmas tree like boys scout around camp fire. But I didn’t know that every initiation begins with a dance & the road to glory is in the skin of brokenness. Meanwhile, when I carry my skin across foreign borders, I carry a Christmas tree in my eyes, for my eyes have seen 3

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the glory of rebirth & I become the son of glory who listens to the light of grace in his father’s voice. Later, before my father becomes an icicle on the Christmas tree, he says grace is found in the fellowship at home & your sparkles won’t be under the feet of strangers who don’t know how your backpack holds the memory of how you danced around lit candles to find the magic of trees.

Rivers

Maria Rose Woodson

We are nesting dolls. My mother rests inside me. Her mother rests inside her. We hold closed doors dearly. Rivers taught me how to hold what cannot be held: all the ephemeral hems. Hem of light. Hem of hours. Hem of healing. Sometimes just touch knots the fray. Fingers cradling cheek. Toes startled in a cold creek. A hand on the small of your back, pushing you, pushing you, 5

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in higher arcs as you swing up to the sun. This is the way back from echo, edge, when stars fall, dazzle in free fall, leave us gathering around the depression of past light. River is the rippling hammock where moonlight rests at night. Teaching me: light falls. Is never lost. I flow, holding what is never lost.

The history of the world for as long as I can remember

Casey Killingsworth

As far as I know there really is some pattern to the billions of poems we have left behind, you know, the old applications for jobs we never got, clandestine napkin messages to waitresses in the bars we drank at, the arguments we had with our wives that ended up as divorce documents, all those scraps of paper still orbiting the world like greenhouse gases. At least that’s the way I see it. Sometimes I like to believe all those scraps, the slices of memoirs we sacrificed for a single moment’s clear image of the universe, they’re like those little birds always flying synchronously together like storm clouds in the wind, an arc or maybe not an arc but all moving in the same direction, because all we can do is look up to try to figure out what they mean. But we can’t.

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So how about this: what if all of history is contained in some woman you barely know, say an older woman, say one who checks your groceries out at the local market, who worked at Subway every Saturday of her life but caught a break when she got hired at the store and then got promoted to manager—which you didn’t know because, you know, you’re busy too—which really helped because her partner of 28 years died and she had to make it on her own, what if all of history was defined in terms of her, everything that ever was, and is, poured into a vessel the size of the person scanning your cereal, hanging onto her every rotation around the earth? What if?

Exploration of Sheep’s Head Way, Ireland

Nancy Manning

Pondering whether I am island or inlet, if the soul is external and the earth hollow, I find myself lost the third time on this trail. Through low-lying cloud that kisses ground, I am caught in the clutter of fern. I see only green. No one is around. Deeper and deeper, ground swallows my legs. As I am sucked down in bog, made to fall. Somehow I stand, learn to balance, free my limbs, backtrack to shore. Relocate the trail for hikers and continue on. Now before me a bleached carcass of skull and ribs and spine, spit back from the sea. I discover a cave, dark and inviting. 9

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A hidden home for Druids maybe. A mouth of rock. My momentary shelter from rain and wind. The walls damp, I need a flashlight to see. An early explorer may have sheltered here. Heard a banshee wail. Two seabirds coast overhead, remind me I have returned to this island to renew a love of land, people. I reattach my tether to the world. Put pen back on paper. Continue building foundations under my dreams.

HELL IS A NIGHT

John Tustin

Hell is a night In which you lie alone in the dark Flat on your back And you caress your own thighs The way she used to do – No, the way you used to wish she would do On the rare night you spent together; Wishing also on those rare nights That her mind was not on a hundred other things, Ninety of which she kept to herself. Hell is a night In which you get that tingle in your stomach, Just for a second, The way you used to get it when she’d show up With her smile you thought was only for you. You pace back and forth, You peer out the window through the blinds, 11

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Out into the dark – Looking for nothing and finding nothing; Contemplating calling someone but you never do Get around to calling anyone; Hoping that tingle in your stomach will last More than a moment without her there But it never does. Knowing that even if she was there You’d never get the total feeling back And that tingle just wouldn’t be quite the same. Hell is a night In which you still think about her, Knowing she never fully loved you But trying to go back to those moments When you thought she did. Going back in time in your head and lying to yourself – You stupid, silly man Who caresses his own thighs in the dark And wishes his hands were her hands Even though her hands never caressed your thighs in the dark The way you thought they should have, The way you pleaded in your head for her To caress them.

Half-tree

Kari Wergeland

The half-tree now weathered wood on the beach, gray like a dead whale. This extra tall stump sports a flat clean cut on the decapitated end. The other is a massive jumble that once moved in the earth to anchor growth. Now this mess of origin is exposed; the half-tree lies on its side. Plant matter that once drank moisture reveals dark places where dirt was, swirls chaos and curves, octopi arms. If only you could get this corpse to stand – flip it upside down – plunge the neck into the sand.

PROSPECTING

Lauro Paolmba

We ascend from the word mine where blasts both triggered and unintended have sooted us with yarns, strangers, plots, metaphors, newfound veins and juxtapositions Snapping off our helmet lamps we void the dusty gunny sacks hefty with dross and fool’s gold fingers crossed for a treasure lode suitable for smelting We scrub off the seclusion to render ourselves sociable again nod our involvement note their compulsions but ears panning for the whistle calling us back to tunnel 14

10-57

Andrew Furst

My world rests on itself, Self-cleaning refrigerators. And you. My world wears itself. Funerals buy my suits, And shoes, and discomfort. The discomfort of Polyester and death. My world wears its discomfort with itself and my need for you.

Looking at Gabriel

Nathan Nathan Nicolou Nicolau

Light and fog swirling into an everlasting night. The swishing of brushes, an open sea. The color of their wings, pure as choirs. Spirits are not absolute. They are not a guardian. They are not refugees. They are a listener— a comforter— an amplifier of expression. Jazz is the closest thing we have to speaking in tongues. Only those gifted can talk. But their words come out too shallow, too spiteful for our fathers to listen. That’s why we are damned in light. 16

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Jazz is played in groups but felt alone. The tears inside. Their smiles shadow someone else. There’s a genealogy of soul stretching back to the time when people cried for their mothers. Back when people died for this music, they wander now, looking for each other. Lost in their own prejudices. Are we slaves to our past? Is predetermination a curse? What does it matter? The moon is too high to answer questions like that. Let that night close us out. Our moments cannot be wasted on old thoughts, old friends, old traditions— but if only it was that easy. We empty our minds until it all ends. That’s why we’re all here listening to the winged man on stage crying. He can’t speak our native language. That’s why his sobs come out from a mouthful of brass. 17

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His glassy eyes pierce us. He would renounce it all like his brethren just to hold us in his arms once more, to shield us. Only he sees the cages locked by our pasts. It angers him, but it has to be so. This is what makes us different from our creator. But every so often, just as predicted, a shepherdless lamb comes to rest in this crowd beyond the stage. He listens to Gabriel’s song and dreams of a new future, one not soiled by a path determined. Gabriel plays softer and softer and softer for them.

Breakthrough

Dave Neilsen

The roly poly had only a moment to enjoy the warm dry hut of its body rolled up tight against the universe before the worker’s boot squashed it into oblivion. But in that split second before death, in that infinitesimally small fraction of existence, it remembered something. Pretty remarkable for a bug.

What Should We Do If the Cat Dies in the Middle of the Night?

Keith Dunlap

What should we do if the cat dies in the middle of the night? Should we take him outside, with our barely functioning flashlights, and try to bury him in the hard-pack January ground, heft some larger than average stone, and place it over his shallow grave to memorialize him and keep the scavengers away? What should we do? Put his already stiffening form in a paper grocery bag? Or leave him sideways, as if he were standing, on the floor, as a kind of reproach to our breakfast, to our sleeping through the night, waiting until the veterinarian opens its doors to accept this solid lifeless fact, the corpse of our sickly, incontinent, somnambulant cat? 20

WHAT SHOULD WE DO IF THE CAT DIES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE...

What should we do? Write an essay or a poem? Or call my sister on the phone to tell her that the cat whom we adopted from my father when he moved into a home, almost two-and-one-half years ago, just before he died at the age of ninety-five, the cat whose name we changed from Beauregard to Toby, (my father called him Bo,)—let my sister know that the last vestige of my father’s peculiar existence is no longer alive? What should we do?

Sky at Morning

Donna Pucciani

Today, just white overhead, rain woven with invisible threads in the nondescript fabric of daybreak, like a week made of Mondays. The sky’s full of waiting. Scatter, ye gumdrops of sun! Go back to your too-bright jars of splintered noons! Here is the luminosity of whatever came before, merging with whatever will come, the secret wishes of a universe caught between hope and despair. The past has shredded itself like old newspaper, the future opaque, a blank notebook 22

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awaiting our script, our sighs, foreshortened dreams, our lifelong ambiguities paper boats on the clouds’ slow sailing. The blank page of morning holds the miracle of ambivalence like a pearl in an oyster, pins belief and incredulity together on the not-quite-silken dawn, weds the precious with the unfathomable, the salt of the sea heavy between the shore and a school of wide-eyed fish.

Infections Evolving with Time

“Do they have memories? Just shadows in the mind like a hand passing between a candle and a wall.” - Stephen Dobyns

Julienne Maui Castelo Mangawang

In suffering, I learned humans were infections evolving with time. I left people my bloodline chained me to, wishing for my former body indulged by carrion beetles and ants breaking flesh into earth. I rested beneath a house nurturing generations of humans carrying diseases and grudges into rooms and onto plates. They passed on the vestiges of death to their own kind. I listened to the rambling of a woman who thought her child for a punching bag. Weeping ricocheted from walls and broke through the floor. A flood of beer came from beyond and I recalled 24

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bottles red with the handprint of a man who claimed my face. Silence ensued when I heard his voice rumbling from the other side. Prayers he memorized never really saved him. Time had him accumulate years until the day he coughed. Down all the beers went and that is how he accepted he lost any sense of smell. He no longer had meaning on a bed. There was nothing next when his sight dimmed. Only maggots, on the twenty-fourth hour, met his taste and scent. In suffering, humans brought infections evolving with time. I rose from the floor of a house in renovation and forgot him in the bedroom years ago.

Bird Shit At Dusk

Shilo Niziolek

In Italy it is supposed to be good luck or a good sign when a bird shits on you. When I was a child in the heat of Wyoming summers, we would set up a tent in the side yard of our trailer and camp out under the fathomless western sky. On the few nights my mom wasn’t working, trying to provide for three children on her own, she would read to us, and on one such camp-yard night we laid in the grass, poking out from the jaws of the tent opening. A flock of birds flew overhead and I turned my face of childhood wonder toward the clouds at which point one of the flock released a cannon ball of shit into my eye and on to my 26

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Precious Moments bible. By then I was already questioning God about his existence. Was he a dream that someone else had concocted? Was I a dream inside someone’s mind, but if so, who was it that dreamt of me and how were they created? Now, at 31 I’ve nearly died more times than one, and in the dark of death I haven’t seen a single thing I lay in the hammock near the bird feeders, and watch their shadows flit above my languid body. Every time one flies above, I think, please don’t shit on me. But when they pass by without a blunder, I wonder if my luck has passed, if I never had any to begin with. Maybe the birds won’t shit on me because god is just a word and the only holy thing left in me is this desire to be blessed, anointed, baptized by bird shit falling from the sky, as if tiny feathery angels make the judgement calls about who lives and who will die.

For us the earth is well prepared

Devon Brock

—From the deerpath that lopes over the rise and up to the rock that hangs above the ravine, to the toeholds and fingerholds down to the brook below, where a turtle lifts its head through the algae and breathes.

DRAUGHT

Elizabeth Wing

Last winter I spooled words back into my lungs Swung hard and split the cedar Curled with you, feverish & rosy, in a cocoon of sheepskin When you were welted red with poison oak You ignored science The gashes bled through: my ivied-over girlhood, witchpride strong as juniper. The holy Yawn of cave. Billboard disagreements, amen. The things I’d sharpie on post-its to my roommates: (Here’s what I need from you and here’s where I draw the line & you’re worthy of all the good things & god is dead) Everything flung in hoarse orbits around you Today I didn’t text you the pictures of a fox I knew you’d love, poking along the road Dishes undone under a blood moon: I step out into the night that smells like gasoline& peonies

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Used to like how you clamped onto my hand like a deep-sea clam when I tried to leave We wore grime in our hair like we’d invented truth I could draw whole taxonomies of shame With scabby eye-holes looking in The pith of spotted hemlock in our teeth Salamander skin, necklace of abalone & silver I unspool/ and I throw it all in

Hoffa

William Heath

Hoffa!—a name like a shout. A working stiff, he’d rather settle matters with his fists. “Do unto others— first” was his motto. He had a surly, truculent grandeur—shoving a grapefruit into a dame’s face ala James Cagney his opening gambit. A tough guy straight off the loading docks, he took on the Kennedys like John Henry vs. the steam hammer. Before his birth an Indiana doctor thought his mother had a tumor, hence his ugly nickname as a kid. When the family moved to Detroit, at Fisher Body he polished radiator caps. For his first strike as a Teamster the men refused to load strawberries: negotiate, they said, or watch them rot. Back in those days 31

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cops smacked you upside the head just for talking union. He told his local his job was to get working men top dollar, not to throw no picnics. He wore white socks, snored at the opera, but didn’t run around on his wife Josephine; the one time he danced, his daughter’s wedding. No cussing at home, the union hall something else, his lips twitched saying “sonofabitch,”—he made no idle threats. A stand-up guy, he beat rap after rap but never shoulda bad-mouthed Bobby or gone to that restaurant to meet Tony Jack and Tony Pro. Everybody kept asking where Jimmy was buried, no one assumed he’d ascended into heaven. Yet “Hoffa” shouted loud enough is not an empty sound.

Cream

David Romanda

She came to bed with these dots of cream on her face. It was our first time sharing a bed to sleep. She told me to be careful when I kissed her. Then, “Look, if you could just not kiss me that would be better.”

Eucalyptus

Terry Sanville

A full moon turned the tops of the coastal dunes blue and shone silver off the Pacific. Alex sat next to Sophia, not touching, silent. They stared into the bonfire fueled by creosote bush and sage. Its smoke filled the air with a musky, earthy scent. Sophia’s shoulders shook. With her head bowed, her long blonde hair hid her face. Alex turned, reached out and raised her chin. He leaned forward and lightly kissed each tear-filled eye, tasting the salt. Her trembling lips felt as soft as he remembered from months before. “I’ve gotta go,” he said. “Not yet.” “It’ll get easier.” “Easier for whom?” Alex dropped her hand and struggled to his feet in the deep sand. “Goodbye, Sophia . . . sorry.” He moved along the trail and into the nearby trees, using his cell phone light to guide the way. The eucalyptus rustled in the onshore breeze, their scimitar leaves rattling. Don’t look back. 34

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Whatever you do, don’t look back. Don’t look. But he did. Sophia sat cross-legged before the fire, still close enough for Alex to hear her sobs. She beat her legs with her fists and rocked back and forth. A night heron called. Alex stared at his cell phone screen. With trembling fingers he texted, “Sophia, are you all right?” Her cell buzzed and she dug into her purse and retrieved the phone. She stared at it for a long time before answering, “No.” Alex’s cell buzzed when he received her reply. Sophia turned and stared toward the trees where he hid. She struggled to her feet, the curve of her belly mirroring the curve of the moon. She faced him across the darkness, a ghostly silhouette rimmed in soft blue. Alex felt that exquisite pain, that internal compression that can bend iron. He took a step back into the trees and breathed in their fragrance. The eucalyptus rattled even louder. He moved forward, toward the fire and Sophia.

Where the Show Goes On

Soramimi Hanarejima

After her favorite TV show gets cancelled mid-season, she makes weekly trips to an alternate universe where the show is still airing. There, in the comfort of her counterpart’s sofa, she watches new episodes, enthralled by the stunningly clever plot twists and ever-shifting dynamics between characters. Which she and her counterpart vehemently comment on during the commercial breaks. Except when the show is going through one of its occasional lulls. Then they chitchat about life when the ads run. One evening, the episode is particularly slow, and when it cuts to the commercials, her counterpart gushes about a recent trip to the Sensoreum. “What’s that?” she asks. “Oh, a place that offers this huge range of sensory experiences,” her counterpart answers. “I’ll take you there. We can even go this weekend, if you don’t have plans. It’ll be fun.” And it is.

Utterly mind blowing as she wears a brain-

stimulation cap and luxuriates in the goosebumps pricked by what feels like invisible feathers stroking her forearms. It’s 36

WHERE THE SHOW GOES ON

just her in a cushy arm chair having this “synthetic experience” in a white-walled booth, and it’s just perfect. A few minutes later, she’s melting [away] in the warm, gentle pressure of a phantasmal hug, then trembling with glee when her body seems to be enveloped by a tropical breeze that is only swaths of neurons firing. “If you liked that, then you’ll love the Auditoreum and Simulacreum,” her counterpart says when they meet in the lobby afterwards. Still atingle from the final sensation of floating in viscous warmth—“the honey bath”—she is thoroughly game for more. The next Saturday, her counterpart takes her on a whirlwind tour of sensory venues. One plunges her into hyperreal soundscapes; another presents wondrous, innovative materials to touch and even taste in some cases; all enchant her with novelty and nuance. Afterwards, she and her counterpart go out for a dinner of poké and green curry. Both exhilarate her palate and serve as the final encouragement necessary for her to declare that she will visit this world more often and enjoy the delights it offers. Her counterpart squeals boisterously at the promise of spending more time together. But two days later, gamma ray bursts make all inter-world travel impossible. At least they don’t obliterate most terrestrial life, as these GRBs undoubtedly would if their path through interstellar space were a few hundred light years closer. Instead, the GRBs just streak the sky with green, make TV broadcasts fuzzy and keep her stuck in her own world until they are over. Which could be weeks from now. So in the meantime, what does she do about her newly ignited craving for sensory stimulation? Ignore it? Suppress it? Try to satiate it with the low-tech, 37

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comparatively paltry options available in her own world? When the auroral sky is especially verdant one afternoon, she brews a pot of tea, for the caffeine that might help her think through this. Waiting for the leaves to steep, stares out the kitchen window. Beyond its dusty glass pane, the cityscape appears to lie beneath the emerald waters of a glacial lake—like she could open the window then glide by buildings and float over traffic. Thinking now of the air as water and herself a mermaid in it, she knows that her newfound intrigue with salient sensations is a piece (possibly a crucial one) to a puzzle that has long existed in her mind—that is an aspect of her mind, related to some fundamental question about herself or the world or both that’s been waiting just over her mental horizon, past all the thoughts she’s aware of. And now she’s closer to it, able to tell that this question and its answer have an importance—a significance that is not so much urgent as inevitable, that she will have to face, regardless of which worlds she does and doesn’t have access to. Can I move toward… whatever this is? she wonders. She pours the first cup of tea. Time to see how far this pot gets her.

Hattie

RW Franklin

So here’s the thing about men and me: there is no thing. They just don’t see me. My whole life I’ve been in the background. I like to imagine I have those captivating blue eyes with that contrasting black hair that shines blue in the right light. I like to look in the mirror and pretend I see an hourglass figure. Instead my muddled gray eyes see only the truth: dull graying hair and dimpled thick thighs that shake with every step. In high school my parents always told me it was good that guys didn’t notice me because it meant I wouldn’t have to deal with temptation. What they never knew is that I never wanted the attention of just men. The problem there—I’ve never stood out to women either. I was taught to keep my head down and now that I’m not living at home, it’s hard to untrain myself from those teachings. I want to wear fire red lipstick and show cleavage. I want my skirt to slide up my ham-sized thighs when I sit down. “What are you working on?” The voice near my ear startles me. I turn to find brown eyes and brown skin close to me. I remove the AirPods streaming music straight into my consciousness 39

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and the sounds of the diner spill in. “An essay.” I say and bow my eyes as if I’m ashamed he caught me in the act of bearing my soul for Dame Magazine which may or may not accept my piece. “I’m sorry for interrupting you, but you looked so intense that I thought you might need to take a break.” He stands up straighter and puts his hands in his pockets. A small smile dances on my lips. “OK.” I say. He motions toward the bench across from me and I nod. “I’m Charles.” He says as he sits down. “Hattie.” I say. He smiles and I try to determine what game he’s playing. “What kind of essay are you working on?” He asks. “A personal essay.” I say and slip my straw between my lips. He rests his arms on the table. His fingers play with the edges of the paper menu. It’s the kind of menu that has a line drawing on the back for kids to color when they start to drive their parents crazy. “You write for a living or is this just something you do on the side?” His hands look soft. His nails are trimmed neat—rounded edges that end just below his fingertips. I wonder how his fingers would feel against my skin. “For now, I do it on the side, but maybe one day…” I clasp my fingers under the table and squeeze then twist. I pull my lips into a thin line and then try to relax them again. I look up at his face and his eyes are looking straight into mine. He has what my aunt would call “kind eyes”. “My sister is a freelance writer.” He says. “She could maybe give you a few pointers on how to make it a full-time career. If you’d be interested in talking to her, I’m sure I could give her 40

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your number.” This pulls a smile from me. I doubt he has a sister that writes, but what a smooth way of asking for my number. “Maybe. What kind of writing does she do?” I take another sip of my pop and am pleased with myself for thinking on my feet and not just saying yes. “She writes mostly travel articles. ‘10 best places to travel this winter’, that sort of thing.” His lips are full and have just the softest touch of pink. Would they tickle my neck or cause it to burn? His teeth are white. Does he bite hard? I nod my understanding. “That’s cool.” I decide to stop beating around the bush. “OK, so what exactly are you doing?” The corners of his eyes pinch. His head cocks slightly to the side. “What do you mean?” I look around the room for watching eyes—his group of buddies waiting for him to complete some sort of dare—but the other diners are uninterested. “I know I’m not that interesting, especially not for you to just come sit down randomly with me. So what is it? What’s the deal?” His mouth hangs open for a second. His tongue is juicy and red. I want to bite into it like a ripe strawberry. He closes his mouth and laughs looking down at his hands. “OK, you caught me.” A-ha! I think to myself. “I was sitting over there watching you work and you just looked so concentrated and…” He pauses and I look up. He blinks and I feel like it happens in slow motion as my eyes travel back down to his mouth. “…beautiful.” He finishes with a shrug. “So I took a chance and came over to talk to you.” I like to imagine his name is Charles. Charles and Hattie. They go together, right? If only Charles was real. Well, he is real, but I don’t know his name and I certainly have never spoken to him. 41

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His skin is real. His eyes are real. His mouth, oh his delicious mouth, that is definitely real. His hands, with their manicured nails and soft skin, are real. He always leaves at least a one seat gap between us at the bar of the restaurant where we both like to work. I work silently on my laptop. He works silently on his. I know he wants more just like I do. I sneak a glance. “Can I get you a refill?” He looks my way as the waitress reaches for my glass. My head snaps forward. “Sure.” I say and go back to typing. See the thing about me is: there is no thing.

Love at a Food Stand

Timothy Dodd

Each weekday they met at the bottom of the university’s steps around half past three, except on Tuesdays when they met at noon. When her classes finished, he’d arrive most days from his job at Andok’s. Some days they would stand there for a few minutes, smiling and petting and talking. Some days they’d head right off in a jeepney. But some days they’d stop and get a snack and juice at my street corner stand. At first they didn’t interest me any more than the other customers. Why should they? Young lovers might give you a momentary dream or a recollection of your own past love, but the more you observe them the more disillusioning, even annoying, they become. Antonio seemed to have a new hairstyle almost every day. I assume it pleased her. They tell me now you can just use this gel to fix it however you want. Most of the time he’d have on his Andok’s uniform: lemon polo shirt tucked in black pants. If not, he’d show up in sneakers, jeans and those popular t-shirts young people wear—I don’t know the names. But he walked with a slight limp, the deformity of an in-turned foot. 43

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You’d know after one look that Ferry, on the other hand, could enter beauty contests, even though I got the feeling she despised them. Like Antonio, she dressed in uniform: hers a navy blue skirt and white blouse for university. She wore simple, black slip-on shoes and usually only a bit of makeup, eyeliner and lipstick, to accentuate her full lips and high cheek bones. Her long black hair, whether simply combed or styled, isn’t anything unique on our crowded streets, but marvelous nonetheless. When they visited the snack stand, Antonio always paid: often for young, fresh coconuts and maruya. They talked with each other about typical topics: her school friends and assignments in elementary education, clothing, and pop music, mixed with jokes or a little teasing that resulted in Ferry lightly slapping Antonio’s thigh or knee. She came from a humble background—her father a fisherman in Samar where she grew up until he died of stomach cancer and her mother carted her and her younger brother to Cubao to live with an elder sister. In little less than a year, her mother remarried. Rudillo, the owner of a small bakery in Cebu, adored his new stepchildren, but particularly Ferry, who he set out to spoil. They followed him back to the Visayas. Antonio, on the other hand, lived all his life in nearby Naga: his father a welder who worked many years in Saudi Arabia before hurting his back, his mother a field manager in a small real estate company. With six sons and three daughters the Salcedos always had enough, but never more than what they needed day to day. Normally every two or three times Ferry and Antonio came to my stand they were arguing. She could get under his skin, often resulting from jealousy: her talking to other boys or not returning his phone calls and texts promptly. Ferry always 44

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spoke calmly and quietly, which in the middle of an argument got under Antonio’s skin even more—his voice, gritty and a bit raspy, growing more urgent. Most times they would get up and walk away before the argument reached its uglier moments, when he’d throw things and sound like a car without a muffler. There was one day, however—I remember it was the day of a jeepney strike when protesters had blocked traffic as they walked with large banners up Osmeña Boulevard, making noise with drums and whistles—when one of my small ketchup dispensers on the counter outside the window landed on the burner inside my cart. Antonio had tossed it as he fumed, jumping off his stool and ripping leaves off the trees and bushes that lined the university’s perimeter, even threatening to thrown himself into traffic. I had to wonder which one was at fault and how they kept together. But then maybe that was obvious once you looked over at her sitting on the wooden bench: the little turned up nose, silky black hair, shiny skin, eyes that looked like eternity. Intelligent and charismatic too—Ferry would never lose her cool. She could have had most any of the young men, but it seemed she didn’t go for the partiers and players. I guessed she wanted a kindhearted, religious, devoted boy without muscles and macho. I don’t know, maybe she liked someone she could manipulate. Even I told him a day after one of their arguments, while Ferry was still in class, “Don’t let that one go.” But that just goes to show that men, like me, are idiots and never learn: we value too strongly the appearance. Perhaps. When I say each weekday they’d meet at the bottom of the university’s steps around half past three, except on Tuesdays when they met at noon, I mean they had met like that for years, since she started as a freshman at Cebu Normal University and 45

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lived in a nearby boardinghouse. During that time, Antonio left Naga to live with a brother in Cebu, and went back to complete high school there. I was unclear as to why he originally had stopped attending high school in Naga in the first place. In any case, their relationship had started even before that, and their parents back in Naga were well-aware; during holidays or school vacations he’d visit her parents’ home to spend an afternoon or evening with her. Unlike many agreements these days, their love remained innocent—light kissing the extent of it. Antonio, the perfect gentlemen, never missed a birthday, anniversary, or holiday without presenting flowers and chocolates, the latter preferred by Ferry. And whenever she had a problem, most frequently because of the strictness of her parents who didn’t mesh so well with her independent streak, Antonio always comforted her, telling her soft little words of encouragement as the traffic sliced through the streets behind us. On the day the state funeral of the former president moved through town, a motorcade of more than one hundred vehicles honking their horns to thousands of people lining the streets, many in tears, Antonio came to the stand crying also. I was surprised, thinking he was never interested in politics. He sat down on the bench as usual, but ordered nothing. He bawled, in fact, and I handed him a few napkins from the dispenser to wipe his face. Classes were cancelled, so Ferry was not with him. Only two other customers came to the cart while Antonio sat there, and they placed quick orders and were on their way, wrapped up like everyone else in the funeral procession. After twenty minutes of seeing his distress, with no sign he would order food or depart any time soon, I placed a bowl of kwek kwek in front of him without waiting for him to accept or decline. They stayed untouched for five minutes before he 46

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finally lifted his head and put a skewer through the first of three. I watched him chew slowly, in a daze. He starred with empty expression, leaning toward the wall of the cart which was no more than a foot in front of his face, only the red from his eyes reflecting any life in his face. When he finished the three eggs, only the bright red chilies left swimming in the vinegar at the bottom of the dish, he handed me pesos for an orange soda. He finished the can in less than a minute, then put his head back down on the ledge of my cart. For one of the few days in all my twenty-eight years of work, I stood inside my cart with little to do, my arms folded. “What happened, my friend?” I finally asked. He was quick to offer me the news. “She left me,” he said softly, without emotion. “Get your head up, son. She might come back. And even if she doesn’t, you know, it happens. Happened to me twice actually. You’ll find another, and she might even be better. Trust me.” “No. She left me for a foreigner.” “Don’t worry about that. Foreigner or local, a loss is a loss,” I said, wiping my hand on my apron. “American?” “A forty-two-year-old doctor from Amsterdam. Met on a dating website. He came here once, for less than a week, and now they’re engaged.” I turned around to pick up a fish ball. “And you’re sure? You heard it from her mouth? Not from gossip or a friend?” I didn’t get an answer, so I turned back to look at him. He had gone. I exited my cart to see if Antonio stood nearby, but there was no sign of him despite few people around in what is normally a chaotic sidewalk and street. Five minutes later, when I walked to the front of the cart to pick up his bowl and empty soda can, I found he had left a small notebook and ballpoint 47

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pen. I assumed he had just forgotten it, and I wondered if he had departed in a rush. At first I wasn’t even sure the notebook belonged to Antonio, but I opened to the first page and saw his name printed in neat, black letters at the top right—first name only. The spot where his surname would have followed had been neatly ripped out, leaving a little hole in the corner of the page. Out of curiosity of course, I turned to the second page and found a few lines scribbled, with some words and phrases crossed out. I read the words, surprisingly emotional and not so long or complicated that they lost my attention, words that reminded me of something poetic. I figured they were quotes Antonio had copied down. I hadn’t read poetry since the required reading of Jose Rizal in high school. People then, as now, were always more interested in sports and girls, or clothes and boys. After reading the words twice I turned the page in the notebook, but there was nothing more written. I thought I might find a telephone number so I could call Antonio and let him know about the notebook. Or maybe even find his email—one of my daughters could help me contact him through that if necessary. But there was nothing. Then I figured the notebook probably wasn’t that important to Antonio anyway, and that I could just return it to him whenever he came back to my stand in a couple of days, even if he didn’t remember leaving his things. I put the little notebook in the pocket of my apron and looked out at the empty streets, the university behind me silent, and nearly all of the businesses across the street closed for the day. Then I walked back inside my cart and placed the notebook high up on the shelf where I keep my business certificate and other important papers. To my surprise and disappointment, a week passed and Antonio did not return. In fact, I never saw him again. The 48

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following Friday I carried his notebook home, and while resting after dinner I showed the lines to my daughter. After some discussion and checking online, Claire said they weren’t quotes at all. “If they were famous quotes, we could find them on the internet, Dad. I’m sure these are that boy’s own words. It’s like a poem. Fiery, too. Moving.” After that, I just called Antonio’s word a poem. The next day I walked over to Andok’s and asked for Antonio by name, but they said no Antonio had ever worked there. And on Sunday I went all the way to Naga, went to the cathedral and the main square and the town’s Baywalk and asked randomly for Antonios and Ferrys. An hour of searching proved nothing but my own stupidity, but yet on Monday morning I still went to the university, kicking myself for not thinking to go there first. I asked for a fourth-year Ferry, but surprisingly I was told there were no fourth-year students named Ferry. I began to retrace my own thoughts about this girl and boy. Had I mistaken their names somehow? Was there information that might help me locate them which hadn’t registered? And was this so important anyway? A notebook and some poetic lines from a boy whose girlfriend had just broken up with him—what’s so unique about that? But somehow it all persisted, kept sticking to my brain. After the notebook sat another week on the shelf inside my food cart, no updates on Antonio or Ferry, I decided to copy the words freshly on a new piece of paper, in bold ink, then took two little pieces of tape and attached the poem inside my cart. I would read the words each morning when I arrived, and usually before I departed in the evening as well. Sometimes I’d read the poem more than twice a day. I did this on every day of work, six days a week. It became like a prayer. 49

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On the joyous, yet hectic, day that I finally retired eleven years later, I sold my food cart and all the utensils inside. Before selling it, I scraped off the two little pieces of tape which had by then grown to become part of the cart itself, and took the poem down, took it home with me. It was good tape to last that long, I should add—an American soldier had actually given me the half-used roll—and the poem was the only thing I kept from all my years of working my food stand. At home, I found a new place for the little poem, a little spot on the wall in my den, next to the photos of children and grandchildren. I put it right next to the last photo ever taken of my late wife, Miriam. In fact, I almost read Antonio’s words at her funeral, but I talked myself out of it at the last minute and let the words sit in my pocket, thinking how people might react when learning the words were from a young man jilted in love who once sat at my food cart over a decade ago, and nothing more. But then later, after the funeral, I regretted not reading that little poem. I thought, why shouldn’t I have read it? We really don’t know in this life where or when we’ll find love. I mean, a love that actually means something to you. We don’t know how it will reach us. We often don’t even know when it’s a love worth pursuing. And, sadly, we don’t know when a love will leave you with empty hands. It might be the lost love of Antonio. Or the day your wife of forty years passes on. It might be the day your first child is born, or it might be the days the child grows up and you see a heart losing interest in you. It might be the one you meet in a foreign country. Or the one who loves you a little, but loves someone else more. It might be the day you wake up and realize you have lost the zeal for life—that you only wake up tired, wash because you must, eat the same breakfast, and rush 50

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off to work to make ends meet. It might be the day you realize the freshness of life is gone, and that you’re on the road to a gravestone and nothing more. Since I never read the words out at my beloved wife’s funeral, would you like to read the words now? You must be wondering, what are these words of Antonio that stuck with me for so long? I could tell you what he wrote. But, then again, honestly, shouldn’t you find your own words? Your own words to love? From a poem. From a song. From some mystery. Yes, find the words that teach you whether you’ve ever been in love or not. No matter they may come from an unlikely source. No matter if they cause discomfort or even pain. Find them. Don’t wait until they fall in your lap like they did for me. For waiting may mean they never come, and without them, you might never understand what it is you have, or what it is you cannot afford to lose.

I Am Become Death

Ian Peterkin

Gbolahan sat in his office, waiting for the Zoom moderator, presumably his soon-to-be ex-wife’s lawyer to open the room. Open. How could he just leave the tabs out? Of course, they were incognito, but that didn’t matter. And the things he had to admit to in counseling. His index finger circled the touchpad as he waited. The files. The ToR browser. The VPN. The subscriptions. He breathed in deeply, looking down at his coffee. He looked up at one of the cleaners making his way down the hall. It was strange being back. A half an hour earlier, he had gone to the university’s Starbucks. He looked around at the students. No real hum. No real [indistinct chatter]. Everyone seemed to be looking at their smartphones. It was engineers and scientists like him who made all of this possible. Like many of his undergrad friends in CS, he had gone into NetSec, only getting a small glimpse of what was coming. The things that AI could do. There was already a company that produced holographic models of deceased loved ones, but when it was acquired by another company, one that specialized in upscaling images and audio, some people stopped going to work. Others had found other 52

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uses for the tech, not using old recordings of family members but that of performers. Gbolahan thought that things were going to be okay, that he and his wife would stay together, if for no other reason, for their two children, a five-year-old and an infant. He had vaguely remembered a news segment about another university and its STEAM project. They thought it would be great to pair mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers with their colleagues in the fine arts. There was a simple prompt, a simple query, although its answer is complex: What Does It Mean to Be Human? He had altogether forgotten that clip until it made frontpage news. A computer scientist, who had been working on AI, had been coupled with a digital artist. The digital artist had discussed her work, taking photographs of people and then taking those photographs to create a mosaic, one that when viewed from a distance created a single image of someone else. Their collaboration had seemed unfruitful—at first. The program was supposed to do the same thing, but it did nothing for two weeks. The computer scientist had thought there was some kind of error in the code, but then, in the third week, it started to generate a changing image, a protean face that morphed into new faces at regular intervals. The program had scoured the Internet, cobbling together a petabyte of images: pornography, corpses, and people in extremis. Upon closer inspection, they discovered that some of the tiny images were of regular people, men whose computer cameras had been hacked and accessed while they were watching porn, men whose images were recorded in a dark corner of the Web, not knowing that their orgasmic faces would be used for this art instillation. Men’s Rights activists had threatened to sue the university, 53

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saying that men’s privacy had been violated and that men should not be publicly shamed for how they use their bodies. They said that the art instillation was tantamount to revenge porn. There were sad-eyed males behind them, shying away from the cameras. The university refused to take it down, claiming that it was not in the practice of destroying or censoring art and that anything found on the Web was a human artifact. The result was hard to imagine. Lines zig-zagging around the university. The small gallery, that heretofore had never had more than 50 people, suddenly had a waitlist. The big image could be of a corpse, mouth agape, or it could be of a man, a rictus of what seemed like pain, his mouth open in a primal scream, or it could be of a face full of terror, pleading, or questioning. People observed the screen for hours, some of whom left with a certain twitch at the crow’s feet of one eye. Others got up close, taking pictures of the smaller images, which contained the same kinds of images. It had become a game for some, trying to unmask all of the men. Someone figured out a way to capture the big image and then zoom in on all of the smaller images and then post pages and pages of the individuals in those images to the Internet. It became a game: Whose husband, grandfather, father, stepfather, uncle, cousin, brother, or son can you find? It did not take long for Gbolahan’s wife to find him. The Zoom screen showed that the host was about to let him in. As it loaded, he thought about a video that he had seen in grad school, some class about ethics, and in the video, a man who looked more than haunted, a man who looked absolutely ghoulish, talked about his thoughts after the first nuclear blast, “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita…” 54

Thirst

Melissa Dennihy

Now that things are as bad as they are, it’s shameful, and almost incomprehensible, to think about what we used to do. Pouring out half a bottle because it had gone lukewarm in the car on a sunny afternoon. Filling an entire bucket to clean the floor. Leaving cups by the children’s beds every night, night after night, just to find them untouched every morning, except for the occasional fruit fly that would be floating atop the surface, drowned. I like to tell myself I was never extravagantly wasteful. We never used a sprinkler system for the lawn, back at the house. I taught the kids years ago to urinate in the shower rather than wasting a flush. When things first started getting bad—like, can’t ignore it anymore bad—we stopped bathing the dog and let the rain do that job. Lots of people were still taking their dogs to groomers then. The chihuahuas with their little pink bows, black labs with shining coats, terriers with plaid kerchiefs tied around their necks. An embarrassing dead giveaway of what had been wasted on them. But still, every drop counts, right? That’s the slogan, isn’t it? 55

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So wasn’t pouring a warm bottle down the sink just as reckless as having that pristine, Crayola-green grass? Just as grotesque as a dog wearing a bowtie? Given where we all ended up, it feels hard to point fingers. It’s funny what your mind fixates on. On the news, again and again, the same dire warnings: we have to save more; we have to do better. Scarcity has gotten so bad that entire species have been wiped out, entire regions have become uninhabitable. New species and new cities are added to the growing list each day. But most of the time, I’ll be honest, I can’t think about all that. The circling of my thoughts covers a much smaller radius. Over the past few days, for example, I keep thinking about houseplants. I miss them. It’s illegal now to have any, and what I wouldn’t give for a little potted anthruirum—they hardly require water!—or even just a snake plant. You can do thirty days for having one of those. It’s cactuses only, and even there, only certain kinds are permitted. You wouldn’t think it’d make much of a difference, not to be able to have indoor plants, but it does. Oh, it does. When I’m not thinking about plants, I think a lot about bathing. A long, hot shower would be sublime. I dream of showers now the way I used to dream of the children’s father in the first months after he was gone: waking with a deep, cavernous longing for something so absurdly out of reach that it feels ridiculous to think of it, even in a dream. Showering was one area where I was pretty wasteful in the before times, I’ll admit. I’d stand in there for over an hour at a time, letting the steam caress me and the heat take my breath away, and crying, always crying, so hard that my salty tears merged indistinguishably with the stream from the tap, becoming the same heavy, endless flow. I’d stop only when the hot stream had run over me for so long I’d feel I was about to faint, or 56

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choke—and then I’d step out and shake my body free of all the lingering droplets, letting little puddles accumulate all over the tiles. I would leave the puddles to air-dry slowly, never bothering to wipe them up, even though I would often slip unexpectedly as I crossed back and forth across the large marble floor of our master bathroom. Now, I take a ten-second bird bath at the sink once a week, but only when the kids aren’t watching, or else they’ll want to take one too. They don’t need it, young as they are. Our day for household showering is the third Sunday of the month. Like the houseplant thing, you can do time for violating this: thirty days for showering out of turn, even on the first offense. No leniency. A second offense and you’ll go away for a year. Anna, our neighbor back at the house, suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder her entire life, since she was a little girl. She had to wash her hands at least once every hour, for all the years we lived next to her. If she couldn’t wash her hands, she’d panic, go short of breath, start to wheeze, and rip at her cuticles until they bled. She’s away now. Doing fifteen years for repeated offenses. Things have been hard for people like her. Things have been hard for all of us, though. Jonah keeps saying he misses the rain, a comment that strikes me as almost comical, because he doesn’t even know what rain is. He’s seven, which means he’s never seen a real day of rain in his life. I showed him a video on my cell that I took over a decade ago, down in Savannah, of a real rainstorm, sheets of rain coming straight down from the sky like dozens of panes of glass being dropped all at once from a rooftop. His eyes widened in the same way they do when he’s watching a horror movie. After that, he kept going on about the rain: when is it coming, how come it never rains like it did in the video, don’t you think it looks like 57

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maybe it’ll rain today? He’d started to sound less like a little boy and more like an old man with dementia. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the rain isn’t coming, just like you wouldn’t tell an old man in a nursing home that his sweetheart, dead for thirty years, isn’t coming today either. Lili doesn’t mind as much about the rain itself, but I know she worries about other things. She’s ten, so she can remember some real rainfalls. But she’s also old enough to remember when we started finding dead birds by the dozens in our backyard, their red and blue and brown bodies scattered like colorful drops of paint across the green grass. She can remember when we had to switch from the supermarket, with its dizzying array of aisles and brands and choices, to the rationing station and its long lines of tired, angry people. She can remember when we first found out they were instituting assigned days for showering. Lili loved bath time as a baby. She never cried, never fussed or squirmed. She’d sit in the tub while I shampooed her soft, silken strands of jet black baby hair, head tilted back and eyes closed, like a suburban housewife having her scalp massaged at an upscale salon. She’d protest when it was time to get out, splashing me lightly. As I toweled her dry, she’d pop the tiny, iridescent bubbles that still clung to her baby-soft skin and giggle with delight. Many times in her first year, it was these little giggles that brought me back from moments of depression so deep, so all-consuming, that I forgot I was bathing my daughter and could think only of drowning myself in that tub. Water could be an escape, too. *** We had to leave home right after Lili’s third birthday. I was 58

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eight months pregnant with Jonah and every inch of my body was swollen and aching with the heft of my basketball-sized belly. Packing up the little we could take and moving halfway across the country was not how I had pictured the final weeks of the pregnancy, but there was no choice in the matter. Everyone was going. The displacements and resettlements have been challenging for the children, but it’s not just that. This is our seventh resettlement since we left home that first year, and each time we are displaced, I worry more and more that the next time we have to migrate, there won’t be any place left for us to resettle. The hostility among those who got to this place first is palpable, thick as the dense, hot air, like you could cut right into it. I understand their anger. I do. If I had been here first, I would be a pitbull about it, all teeth and snarl to protect my turf. But because I didn’t get here first, I have to pretend like I don’t understand. As new arrivals, we try to guilt the already-settled, calling them selfish and inhumane, hoping to coax them into sharing some of their supplies with us. They don’t share, though. Why would they? I wouldn’t. Thirst makes a monster of all of us. *** Just before lunch, Lili and Jonah came in from outside and flopped down on the ragged futon with their iPads, both of them slick with sweat. A few minutes later, Lili glanced up from her screen and said, “Mom, there’s a dead lady outside.” “What?” “There’s a dead lady outside,” she repeated, and then put her 59

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headphones over her ears. “Outside where?” I didn’t understand why her voice was so calm, matter-offact, why her brother wasn’t saying anything at all, why they were both already buried in their devices like seeing a dead lady was no more unusual than seeing a live one. “Right outside,” Jonah said wearily, “on the street. Just go look.” I ran to draw the blinds and saw the crowd gathered just up the road. I glanced back at the kids, still seemingly uninterested in what they had just reported, and then raced out the door and up the street. I stopped just short of the gathered crowd to listen, not quite sure what to expect. “Must’ve been dehydration. Damn near 130 degrees out today,” said a tall, bony man wearing a wide-brimmed hat. “There’s no station anywhere around here, either. Not surprising.” “Water stations aren’t for settlement folks. What do they care if we’re dying in the streets?” another man shot back. I could see bits of spittle flying from his mouth and glinting in the sunlight as he spoke. I pushed my way to where the woman was splayed on the hot concrete, dozens of people swarming around her lifeless body. She was in her mid-60s, around my mother’s age. She was dressed simply but neatly, and her makeup was done, curled eyelashes and lined brows; but her lips were cracked open and caked with thick, worm-like strings of dried blood. Her skin was translucent, and it looked like you could unwrap her, peel her body like a banana to reveal the pulpy organs beneath. “How long has she been here?” I asked. “Most of the morning,” a young man standing next to me 60

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replied. He leered over her body, peering down at it as if he were examining some especially interesting artifact in a glass case at a museum. “Most of the morning? It’s 11:30! Why hasn’t anyone come for her?” “Who’s going to come?” the man asked, brusque laughter in his voice. “Who’s got energy to spare on a job like this, on a day like today?” “So what, then, they’re going to leave a corpse in the street?” I asked, aware of how my voice was rising, a screeching sound I hated. “Till dusk they are. That’s how they do it around here. Unless you want to drag that body away yourself.” He looked up at me then, his eyes twinkling playfully. “Ever dragged a dead body before? Makes you real thirsty.” *** I dreamt of her that night. I dreamt of bringing her body back to life, a kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but instead of air, it was water, water flowing from my mouth to hers, life-giving water, filling her lungs, rushing through her veins, her heart and mine both bursting to full, spilling over until the water flowed out of us both like a sea. *** The next morning, I caught Jonah at the tap, filling a tiny bottle cap. “Jonah! What on earth? Why?” He startled and flipped the cap over, the droplets scattering 61

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across the countertop. I rushed to save them, realized it was useless, stopped. “There’s a dragonfly,” he said quietly, a note of sorrow in his boyish voice. “It can’t move. I think it’s dying. It must be thirsty. I wanted it to have something to drink while it dies.” I stared at him, aghast. I felt myself boiling with rage. I wanted to shake him, slap him. “Jonah.” He looked away from me guiltily. “Yesterday, just yesterday, you passed a dead woman in the street without a blink of an eye, and now you’re wasting water on a dragonfly.” “It’s not a waste,” Jonah muttered. “It is a waste, Jonah! You know that water is measured! You can’t just go taking it for whatever you want! For a dragonfly!” He turned and stomped off, slamming the screen door to our small patch of backyard behind him. I peered out the window and saw him crouching in the dust, looking forlornly at the dying insect. A few moments later, he came in and took a pair of scissors from the cabinet. “What are you doing with those?” I asked. “Nothing.” He slammed the door again. I sighed. No rain again. No water for Jonah’s dragonfly. I remembered my own love affair with hummingbirds as a child, how I would fill our smallest Tupperware containers with sugared water to attract them, dazzled by the shimmering spectrum of color and light wavering across their tiny breasts. I wished then, really wished, that I could give Jonah the cap filled with water, let him aid his dying bug. But he had to learn. Plus, his cavalier disregard for the dead woman in the street still unsettled me. Why was he more concerned with a bug than with her? I peered out the window again, to where he was still crouched 62

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in the dust, only now, he held the dragonfly tightly, its microscopic head cinched between his thumb and pointer finger. With his other hand, he was using the scissors to cut the dragonfly into small, even pieces, starting from the back of the body and moving forward, snipping with the precision of a surgeon. I stood frozen in place. I wanted to call out to him, tell him to stop it immediately, ask him where he had learned to act so cruelly. But I said nothing. I watched him, and when he was finished, I took the plastic bottle cap that sat empty on the counter and flung it across the room, a gesture so small, so pathetic, that it made me laugh amidst my terror. Outside, Jonah scattered the bits of chopped bug in the dusty grass and then kicked them away angrily. *** Lili asked if we could all shower together this Sunday, when it’s our turn. I wasn’t sure how to reply. At ten, Lili’s breasts are already starting to bud, and at seven, Jonah is starting to ask questions about the differences between girl bodies and boy bodies. I pictured all three of us crammed together in that tight, steamy space and thought it might be inappropriate. I don’t know the rules about these sorts of things, and I don’t have any parent friends to ask. I wondered if Lili got the idea from another one of the kids on the settlement. “Do your friends shower together with their families?” “I dunno.” Lili shrugged. “I just thought it might be better. We could all stay in a little longer if we went together.” She was right about that. The three minutes allotted per person were hardly enough time to scrub one’s self over thoroughly. Having nine minutes would be unimaginably lush. Still, 63

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though, it would be nine minutes shared with the two of them, their dirty, grubby bodies competing with my space—and my silence—during a ritual that had become near spiritual for me. I looked forward to those three-minute, once-a-month showers with an anticipation I can hardly describe, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to sacrifice it. I thought about it all day on Saturday. Finally, I decided it was just one shower, one month. If it was awful, we could go back to the old routine next month. As we were eating dinner on Saturday night, I told Lili we’d go through with her plan: the kids should be ready to shower in the morning at ten on the dot, instead of the usual 10:10 for Lili and 10:20 for Jonah. Lili clapped her hands excitedly, but Jonah looked weirded out. “I don’t want to shower with you guys. I’m the only boy. It’s gross.” “We’re just going to try it, Jonah,” I said. “The extra time will be nice. You can give that mop a good wash.” Jonah rolled his eyes, but showed a faint hint of a smile. He brushed away the thick hair that was forever falling over his forehead, making his small, heart-shaped face look even smaller. In the early morning, for just a few moments, it actually looked like it might rain. I knew it wouldn’t, of course—it didn’t feel like rain in any way—but when I first looked out at the sky, it had that foreboding look, slate gray and heavy, and the sun had yet to burn off all the clouds. I tried to wake Jonah up to see, but his grumbled protests made clear that he wasn’t interested. Looks like rain isn’t rain. I decided to let them sleep a while longer. They could eat after we showered. I spent the next hour trying to make things a little special. Not special as in how-things-used-to-be special. Just a 64

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little better than usual, I guess. I dug out three ragged bathrobes from the garbage bag of clothes we kept in a corner. Two of the robes, originally white but now a dirty, grayish color, were mine from stays in maternity wards. The other, navy blue, belonged to the kids’ father, before he was gone. I wondered for a moment if we shouldn’t use that one and then decided, to hell with it, we carried it all the way here. I placed all three robes outside on the front rail, where the sun, now blazing brightly through the last of the morning clouds, would heat them up while we showered. I stirred eggs and sand-like pancake batter in a little bowl, trying to ignore that the eggs smelt a little off, and wishing I could add something else to the mixture to thin it. I placed the bowl away in the fridge for after the shower, and set the table with three plastic plates, remembering the beautiful, hand-painted ceramic dining set we lost in the first displacement. I looked at the red plastic plates atop the small, foldaway table and longed so deeply for an elegant vase filled with freshly-cut flowers that I had to laugh at myself. The kids wouldn’t even understand the concept. At around 9:30, I went back into their room. They’re both sleeping later and later these days, part of their ongoing transformation into surly, aloof little people who act as if I am not their mother, but a strange, slightly bothersome woman they share a house with. I wondered again if this was weird, inappropriate, what we were about to do. But I kept thinking about those nine minutes, and I woke them up. “Almost time to shower!” I trilled, aware that I sounded much bubblier than I felt, as if I were waking them for Christmas morning—or a rainstorm—and not the strange experience of getting naked and washing themselves alongside a sibling and a parent. 65

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Lili rolled over, emerging from sleep, and murmured, “I can’t wait for the extra time.” “This is gonna be disgusting,” Jonah said, from under the blanket he had pulled over his head. I laughed. “It’s going to be lovely. Get ready.” Our designated times for showering began at 10:00am on the third Sunday of every month. Normally, I would turn on the water at exactly 10:00 and bathe until 10:03. By 10:04, I was out and toweling off, so Lili could enter and prepare for her shower, which she took from exactly 10:10 to 10:13. She was out by 10:14, and then Jonah would get ready for his 10:20 slot. If we were late, or if there was a hiccup in the process, we had to either skip the showers or pay a fine. The kids knew we could not afford either option, and they were as used to the routine as I was. By 9:55, we were all ready to go, time now to spare. We gathered in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom door, looking awkwardly at one another. Lili, noticing the robes in my arms, reached out and silently fingered the worn fabric of the navy blue one. Jonah stared at the robe as his sister touched it, but said nothing. At 9:57, I went into the bathroom and placed the robes, still warm from the sun, on top of the toilet seat in a neat pile. I shyly removed my clothes, and then motioned for the children to come in and do the same, but they didn’t move. I sighed and put my phone on the sink top, watching it hawkishly. The instant the screen flicked to 10:00am, I reached for the shower knob. But for once, I did not rush. I turned the knob slowly, caressingly. It felt heavenly in my hand. But no water came out. I heard a tiny sound, a sharp gasp, and realized the sound was my own. Where was the water? 66

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The kids crowded in behind me. “What’s happening?” Lili asked, and already I could hear that she was afraid. “I don’t know, honey. Probably nothing. We might just need a plumber. But go turn on the news and check, okay?” Lili stayed where she was, staring at my hand, which still held the shower knob, but was now clenching it tightly, no longer a tender caress. Jonah looked from me, to the knob, and back to me with an unnerving glare before retreating to the living room. I heard the TV come on. “Channel 5!” I called out to him. When he didn’t respond, I hollered again. “Anything? What are they saying?” He came back into the bathroom, feet dragging. “Water’s off.” “What? Why?” “I dunno, Mom. I came back in here to tell you what they said. No water in the whole settlement as of midnight last night.” I threw on the navy blue robe, glancing at Lili as I tied its belt around my waist. Her eyes were so wide. I looked away. “Go listen to what they’re saying, Jonah, while I keep fiddling with this.” But I knew fiddling was pointless, that we did not need a plumber, that I had lied to Lili again, so I dropped my hand from the knob and walked out of the bathroom. Lili trailed silently behind me. On the news, a blond-haired woman wearing a coral dress and white high heels was talking loudly at the camera. “…executive order went into effect as of midnight, after an announcement was released last week.” “Announcement?” I said incredulously. “What announce67

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ment?” Jonah glowered at me, scorn contorting his face, like I had missed an emergency alert text warning us about this: stupid woman, incompetent mother, what would we do now? But this was not the first time, not the first settlement. Water had been stripped away from us without notice before: here one day, gone the next. I went outside, still in the blue bathrobe, and knew then, for sure, that I hadn’t missed an emergency alert. The streets were churning, brimming with folks’ anger and their rage. Their thirst. Nobody had known the water would be turned off. Few were prepared. It would not be coming back on until Tuesday, almost seventy-two hours from now. Many people didn’t have enough to drink in the meantime. Some of them would die of thirst. These inevitabilities were frightening but not unfamiliar to the settlers. They knew there was nothing to be done. The performance of their rage was simply a habit, a hollow gesture. It was a waste of energy, really. They shouldn’t parch their throats like that, I thought. I allowed myself to think then of the ten gallons I had purchased from an illegal vendor during the first week we arrived here, meeting him in the pre-dawn darkness on the settlement’s western outskirts. It had been sheer luck that I had crossed paths with him during our last migration, and luckier still that I’d been able to connect with him again upon resettling. He charged me an exorbitant price—$80 a gallon—and issued a series of sternly whispered threats about what would happen to me and my children if I told anyone where I had gotten them, his piercing eyes holding my gaze like magnets as he spoke. I paid him, promised to keep quiet, and fled, pushing my cart as quickly as I could through tangles of brush that scratched at my 68

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arms and chest. I hid the gallons in the half-collapsed shed set away in a corner of our yard, finishing just as the sun had started to rise. My body had trembled furiously as I secured the shed door with a padlock, walked inside, and, still covered in dirt and dust, collapsed into bed, where I stayed shaking for hours on end, long after daylight had blazed through my window. Now, I felt vindicated. It had been worth it. I was right to take the risk. We would be safe. Wordlessly, I turned my back on the street and went inside. *** Lili was sobbing, which irritated me, because heavy, prolonged crying can cause dehydration. Of course, the kids are perpetually dehydrated—we all are—but I couldn’t afford to have it getting any worse at a time like this. “Lili, you have to stop. It’s okay. They’re going to turn the water back on. Everything’s going to be fine.” She looked up at me. “I’m sorry for the dead woman,” she whispered. “The what?” “The dead woman. I’m sorry for her.” She paused and let out a hiccup. “I’m sorry she’s dead. And I’m sorry Jonah and I kicked her.” “You kicked her?” Lili started crying more loudly. Jonah looked up from his iPad and rolled his eyes at his sister, letting out an exasperated puff of air, as if he knew all along that she would give away their secret. For the second time in two days, I felt a chill run down my spine watching my cold, callous child. How had he become this way? My love for him was the deepest well, but I had to 69

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reach deeper down into it each time to touch water. “Jonah, honey,” I said to him, guiltily deciding to bypass the dead woman and the kicking for now, “do you want to watch that video of the rainstorm?” “No,” he replied instantly. “What rainstorm?” Lili asked. I realized she had never seen the video, and suddenly, I felt desperately, acutely, that I did not want to show it to her. I waited, silent, letting Lili’s question linger in the air. “Some dumb video Mom has on her phone,” Jonah said. “It’s like, a hundred years old and really blurry.” Sweet boy. Good, good boy. “Oh. Sounds boring.” Lili plugged her iPad into the wall, and, still snuffling, slumped over the side of the futon while she waited for it to charge. Her brother continued to flick, scroll, flick. “I’m going outside again for a while,” I told them then. “Stay here. I want to check in with some of the neighbors.” “We don’t have ‘neighbors,’ Mom,” Lili muttered, without looking up. Jonah said nothing, keeping his eyes locked on his iPad. Flick, scroll. Flick, scroll. I stood silently, staring at them.

They reminded me of

little glass dolls, and without warning, I suddenly envisioned smashing them to bits. I grabbed my phone and went out to the backyard, letting the screen door slam loudly behind me. *** I had lost time. It happens often. It’s a trauma response. Black holes, dark voids, nothing there while I’m gone, nothing there when I get 70

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back. Had I been standing out there for a minute? An hour? Three hours? I looked back through the door and saw the kids were still on the futon, clutching their devices. No way of telling by looking at them. I looked up at the sky. No sun. It looked like rain again, actually. Mocking Jonah. Mocking me. However long I had been out there, the kids hadn’t seemed to mind my absence. They knew I wasn’t going to come back with any news. There was nothing to report beyond the obvious. They had no expectations that I could change this for them in any way. Stupid woman. Incompetent mother. Across the tiny stretch of land at the back of our house, near the shed, was a rust-colored picnic table. It looked like it had been there for about a hundred years. Lopsided and wobbly, the corners of its tabletop were crumbling away, and a thick moss had spread up the legs of its benches. It didn’t look steady enough to sit on or use for eating. But it looked welcoming, like something warm I remembered from my past. I walked across the yard, got down on all fours, and crawled under the table. The tabletop created a canopy over my head that made the world feel soft and dark. I thought about Jonah, and Lili, the blue bathrobe, the shower knob, the dead woman in the street, and I decided to give in. I let my body lose time again. I ceased fighting the drowning feeling and allowed myself to be pulled under, into the depths of a blank nothingness. I waited for it to wash over me fully, to seize me in its grip and drag me away. As I stared up at the bottom of the picnic table from where I lay in the grass and the dirt, I sensed my vision blurring, my hearing falling away, my arms and legs going numb. Then I was gone. When I awoke, it was dark. Dark enough to know that this time it had been hours, not moments. But the kids still hadn’t come looking for me. I was thirsty, so thirsty. I rolled out from 71

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under the table and looked up at the sky. No rain. Not Savannah all those years ago. Here. Now. This. I wanted to scream then, to hurl my body against the rotting wood of the heavy table again and again, until it was annihilated. I thought of the dragonfly, its carcass scattered in chopped bits somewhere nearby, and envied its bliss. Pulling myself up from the ground, I brushed clumps of grass from my thighs and the backs of my arms, realizing in doing so that I had been feasted upon by mosquitos. Fresh bites were popping up all over. I also realized I had been crying. I could taste the salty traces of the water that had run down my cheeks and over my lips. How long had I been out here? I walked to the screen door and peered in. It was dark, but I could make out the sleeping shapes of Lili and Jonah on the futon, still in the same spots I’d left them. I thought of how thirsty they must be. I wanted to wake them up with a cool drink of water, ice cubes tinkling against the sides of the glass, and let them take turns gulping it down. Instead, I opened the door as quietly as possible and slipped past them, down the hallway to the bathroom. The two grayish bathrobes were still sitting on top of the toilet. I thought again of the reserve gallons in the shed. We would need some of them to get us through the next few days, but maybe I could use just one now, to wash up, and soak my aching feet. There were nine others, after all. I stood for a few moments, hesitating, before telling myself I ought to at least go check on them, make sure that the padlock was still in place. I tiptoed back down the hallway, moving with painstaking care past the children as they slept, and slipped out the back door. The night was blanketed with a hot, heavy silence, and it was even darker than when I had awoken under the picnic table. There were no stars. I scampered to the shed and struggled with 72

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the padlock in the darkness, using my cell phone as a flashlight. Once inside the stifling, windowless room, I ran to pull aside the crates I had stacked in front of the gallons to hide them. They were there, all ten of them. I stared at the gleaming plastic jugs, feeling my stomach flip. I wished there were more: thirty, or fifty. But there were only ten. I knew then, without wanting to know, what I had come here to do with them. I knew I would not use just one. For the next hour, I surreptitiously smuggled the gallons from the shed to the house in the noiseless night, feeling like a burglar, or a raccoon. Once they were all scattered around me in the kitchen, my sacred, illicit bounty, I heated gallon after gallon on the stove until each one boiled, then carried the heavy steel pot down the hallway to the bathroom, where I transferred the water into the tub. Along the way, droplets sloshed over the side of the pot and spilled to the carpet. I smiled at this, relishing the waste. When the process was finally complete, I stood gazing over the tub in awe. My arms ached and I was covered in a thick layer of sweat that pooled under my breasts and trickled down my ribs and the backs of my knees. Ten gallons hadn’t been nearly enough to fill the tub; in fact, the water was no more than a few inches deep. But staring down into that pool of crystalline liquid felt like standing on the shore of a vast ocean. I stripped my clothes off, pulled up the video of the Savannah rainstorm on my phone, and sunk my body into the water, already lukewarm, but reverent nonetheless. I walked my feet and legs out of the tub and up the bathroom wall, so I could submerge my torso, shoulders, and neck more fully. I watched as my breasts slipped under, only the tips of my nipples still poking out above the water’s surface. I slipped down further, until my lips and nose 73

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were covered, and then reached out to where my phone sat on the tub’s edge and pressed play on the video, letting the sounds of rainfall surround me. I closed my eyes, balled my hands into fists which I placed firmly over my chest, and waited for darkness. I thought of hour-long showers. I thought of rain falling down in sheets from the Georgia sky. I thought of steam, tears, streams, choking me, freeing me. I did not think of the children. I did not think of the danger I had put them in. I did not think of what would happen tomorrow. I thought of the dead woman in the street, but I did not think about how the children had kicked her. I did not picture her cracked, blood-strewn lips, or the way the heat from the concrete had shimmered and danced around her corpse. I saw only the heavens raining down on her, thick, heavy, rivulets of rain, and her body rising up alongside mine, light as a feather, stiff as a board, to the skies.

Contributors

(Alphabetical by Last Name) Ifeoluwa Ayandele is from Nigeria. His work is published in The McNeese Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, Cider Press Review, Rattle, Tiny Spoon, Paper Dragon, Rigorous, Harbor Review, Ghost City Review, The Ilanot Review, Pidgeonholes, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Verse Daily and elsewhere. He is nominated for the 2021 Best of the Net and tweets @IAyandele. Devon Brock is a cook and poet living in South Dakota with his wife and dog. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, West Trade Journal, SPANK the CARP and La Piccioletta Barca among others. He is a Poet-in-Residence at The Baram House. Melissa Dennihy is an Associate Professor of English at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, where she teach courses in composition and literature. She is also a contributing writer for a number of outlets, including EcoLit Books, Ms. Magazine, and Inside Higher Ed, and has been published widely in academic journals. Timothy Dodd is from Mink Shoals, WV, and is the author of 75

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Fissures, and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press). His stories have appeared in Yemassee, Broad River Review, Glassworks Magazine, and other places, including the 2015 edition of Noctua Review. He has placed poetry in The Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Roanoke Review, and elsewhere. His second collection of stories, Men in Midnight Bloom, is forthcoming (Cowboy Jamboree Press), as is his first collection of poetry, Modern Ancient (High Window Press). He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, as well as the University of Texas El Paso’s MFA in creative writing program. Keith Dunlap’s first collection of poems, Storyland, was published in June 2016 by Hip Pocket Press. A chapbook, My Father’s Death My Brother’s Death My Own followed in 2018. His work has appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Baltimore Review, The Brooklyn Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Georgetown Review, Jabberwock Review, Poet Lore, Sou’wester, and The Tule Review among other places. He was a former co-editor of The Columbia Review and former coeditor of Cutbank, having received his M.F.A. from the University of Montana. He now lives in Portland, Maine. RW Franklin lives in Northeast Ohio with her incredibly supportive husband. Her writing has appeared in The Elevation Review, Jenny Magazine, and Five:2:One Magazine’s #thesideshow. She was awarded runner-up of Lit Youngstown’s 2019 Short Short Fiction Contest and she leads the Writing Club at her local YMCA. Her website is www.rwfranklin.com. Andrew Furst is a poet, artist, author, Buddhist teacher, photographer, musician, and a technologist. His poetry has appeared 76

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in The Chaffin Journal, Gravitas, Dime Show Review, and Levee Magazine. His art has been featured in the Emerson Review. Learn more about Andrew by visiting www.andrewfurst.net. Casey Killingsworth has work in The American Journal of Poetry, Two Thirds North, and other journals. His first book of poems, A Handbook for Water was released by Cranberry Press in 1995 and his new collection is A nest blew down (Kelsay Books 2021). Casey has a Master’s degree from Reed College. Jey Ley is a visual artist and aspiring writer from Columbus, Ohio. Jey holds a BA in Philosophy from Berea College and an MPA from the University of Delaware. Some of their artwork and other writings can be found on Instagram via @jeyleyjey. Julienne Maui Castelo Mangawang is taking up her MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines — Diliman. Her poems, essays, and short stories are published in ฀฀฀฀ Voice &Verse Poetry Magazine, ALPAS Online Journal, Inklette Magazine, The Rising Phoenix Review, Revolt Magazine PH, Vox Populi PH, and is forthcoming in The Rumpus. She is also the author of the book, Aftermath (Drawn Out), published by Rebo Press Book Publishing in the Philippines. Nancy Manning holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Connecticut State University. Her work has appeared in an eclectic mix of publications. Her first poetry collection is entitled Amethyst Garden and her novel Undertow of Silence won the TAG publishing award. She teaches high school English classes in Beacon Falls, Connecticut.

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Nathan Nicolau is a writer/poet based in Charlotte, NC. Since his published debut in 2019, his work has been featured on multiple websites and magazines. He is also the owner and Editor-inChief of New Note Poetry, an indie poetry publisher and poetry magazine. Find out more about him at nathannicolau.com. Dave Nielsen is the author of Unfinished Figures, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. He studied English at the University of Cincinnati. Shilo Niziolek’s work has appeared in Juked, Entropy, [PANK], HerStry, among others, and is forthcoming in Pork Belly Press. Shilo’s CNF manuscript, Fever, was first runner-up in the Red Hen Press Quill Prose Prize and a finalist in Zone 3 Press’s CNF 2021 Book Award. Lauro Palomba has taught ESL and done stints as a freelance journalist and speechwriter. Ian Peterkin is currently a PhD candidate in English with a focus in creative writing at The University of Southern Mississippi. c a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, Gradiva, ParisLitUp, Meniscus, Agenda and other journals. Her most recent book of poetry is EDGES. David Romanda lives in Kawasaki City, Japan. His work has appeared in places such as Gargoyle Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Main Street Rag, PANK, and Puerto del Sol. Romanda is the author of one chapbook, “I’m Sick of Pale Blue Skies” 78

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(Ethel Press, 2021). His first poetry collection, “the broken bird feeder,” is slated for publication in fall 2022. Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With graduate degree from Howard University, in the past six years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and photography in over 175 journals on five continents. Publications include Barren, Bombay Gin, Burningword, Camas, Columbia Journal, Hippocampus, Ilanot Review, Kestrel, Litro, Lunch Ticket, Manchester Review, Montana Mouthful, New World Writing, Stonecoast, The Atlantic, and Typehouse. A nonfiction piece led to appearances in a documentary series broadcast internationally. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five preschoolers—split their time between city and mountains. Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time, producing short stories, essays, and novels. His short stories have been accepted more than 450 times by journals, magazines, and anthologies including The Potomac Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He was nominated twice for Pushcart Prizes and once for inclusion in Best of the Net anthology. Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist – who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing. John Tustin is currently suffering in exile on the island of Elba but hopes to return to you soon. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online. 79

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Elizabeth Wing’s prose and poetry has appeared in venues including 7x7, the Decadent Review, Up North Lit, The West Marin Review, Outlook Springs, and Underground. A Pratt Institute Dropout, she has worked as a popsicle vendor, wildland firefighter, trail builder, and outdoor educator. She is the proud owner of a 2001 Subaru Outback painted with Cthulu tentacles. Kari Wergeland, who hails from Davis, California, is a librarian and writer. Her work has appeared in many journals, including New Millennium Writings, Pembroke Magazine, and Chariton Review. Her chapbook, Breast Cancer: A Poem in Five Acts, has been named an Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist. Meanwhile, her long library career has taken her into libraries up and down the West Coast. At some point in all of this, she served as a children’s book reviewer for The Seattle Times. Rose Maria Woodson has been published in Revolute, Black Fork Review, Inkwell, Cider Press Review, Penumbra Online and elsewhere. She holds an MA in creative writing from Northwestern University.

Noctua Review

Southern Connecticut State University The Noctua Review is the annual literary magazine produced by the Southern Connecticut State University MFA program. It was the brain child of graduate student (now professor) Lois Lake Church and launched its inaugural issue in 2008. We’re always looking for narratives with strong characters, memorable imagery, and maybe a touch of lyricism; for poetry that embraces the economy of language and expresses that which is unexpressable. The staff is solely comprised of MFA students and the lineup changes each Fall semester. We will be open again for submissions for Issue XVI in the Fall of 2022. Visit us as www.noctuareview.com.

MFA in Creative Writing

Southern Connecticut State University The MFA in Creative Writing at Southern Connecticut State University is a flexible full-residency, terminal-degree program that prepares students for careers as publishing writers, teachers, editors, and professionals, in the publishing world. We work with students who attend full-time and students who attend part-time, and we are committed to working with the student’s needs in mind. Our curriculum focuses on the development of the writer through experiences in the writing workshops and the creative thesis, but writers also need to be readers and study literature, so our students study literature from ancient world lit to contemporary lit with experts in each field. Other courses focus on literary theory, competition, and rhetoric, and teaching collegiate-level writing. In some cases, MFA students may also teach their own courses. Our MFA program in Creative Writing is designed for graduate fiction writers and poets who Have the skills and experience to become publishing writers; Having the experience and depth of knowledge to become university instructors of creative and expositor writing; 82

Have a comprehensive foundation in intensive literary study, literary analysis, literary theory, and critical writing; Become versatile critical thinkers and perceptive, able communicators, prepared for the post-graduate job market, in positions such as freelance writers, editors, grant writers, teachers, technical writers, proof-readers, copyeditors, publicists, media and marketing associates, freelance reporters, and administrators in arts organizations. In addition to publishing poems and stories in national literary journals, our students have published novels, collections of stories, memoirs, and collections of poems. For more information on Southern’s MFA program, please visit: www/southernct.edu/program/English-mfa-creativewriting

Also by Noctua Literary Magazine

2021 Issue https://www.noctuareview.com/archive The 2021 issue, along with all of our previous issues, is available on our website.

Noctua Review 2022 - Vol. XV

Articles inside

MFA in Creative Writing

Noctua Review

Contributors

Thirst

Love at a Food Stand

Where the Show Goes On

I Am Become Death

Hattie

Hoffa

Cream

For us the earth is well prepared

Infections Evolving with Time

of Trees

Sky at Morning

Breakthrough

Bird Shit At Dusk

The history of the world for as long as I can remember

Middle of the

Half-tree