Noctua Review Issue 14, 2021 by Noctua Review

Noctua Review Volume xiv

Noctua Review

Vol. XIV 2021

Masthead Terri Linn Davis Editor in Chief Jonah Craggett Assistant Editor

Jess Rawling Poetry Editor Tamera Sternberger Poetry Editor

Grace Collins-Hovey Fiction Editor Manar Tomeh 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.

Noctua Review Volume XIV 2021

Southern Connecticut State University

Table of Contents Poetry Self Portrait of an Elephant Tusk by Hollie Dugas

Bedlam for Now by John T. Leonard

To Build an Owl by David Xiang

Standing In the Eye Of The Hurricane, Except It’s a 40 oz Bottle of Hurricane and the Eye Is a Fractured Looking Glass by J.B. Stone

Every Day in America is Memorial Day by J.B. Stone

In absentia by Daisy Bassen 15 Emily as I prepare the Meal-Kit Super Smashed Burgers by Darren C. Demaree

Delicately, Frozen From Aging by Emi Bergquist

Grief by Lisa DiFruscior 26 Aubade and by Jackie Chicalese

Xylomancy by Jackie Chicalese 28 familial consciousness by Robin Gow The moon that used to follow me in the car by Juheon (Julie) Rhee

35 37

My Nombres by E. García-López 38

Secondhand Smoke by Brooke Dwojak Lehmann

How It Comes to Us by Al Maginnes

Several Scenes at Once by Tamara Gray

Suspended by Laine Derr 53 Jesus and the Angels by Melissa McEwen

[11] by David Harrison Horton

Turkey Vultures by Nick Conrad

Big Wins For Poetry by R. Stempel

Dying Small by Cameron Morse

Fiction Being the Murdered Girl Detective by Cathy Ulrich

The Jeffermans Review Their Life Choices by Max Sheridan

Pasture Statues by Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi

Up North of The County Line by B. P. Herrington

Sparrows by Bruce Meyer 29 A Boy Named Neither by Vincent Antonio Rendoni

The Red Thing by Issy Flower

Gramps by Anna Trujillo 45 Pentimento by Noah Goldsher

Contributors 73

Hollie Dugas

Self Portrait of an Elephant Tusk I surfaced like a white scar, curving the interest of an entire matriarchy and tormenting an entire bloodline, stretching trunk to tail. I am protector forager, mover of obstacles. I do not want to line a piano— you, hunter, caressing me with the tips of your mud-stained fingers. I am meant for majesties. My herd mourns their dead. I have nightmares of them—without me— hemorrhaging on open fields, their large bodies sensitive to blades of grass. One day, man might take a liking to carve into me too— elephas, an ancient curse to be gouged from the head of a bull like a tooth-charm. Spare me some dignity; if anything, let me go on, untreated and raw, spend my days a tool in hand, peeling bark from trees, grazing the hide of Mother Nature like a bright husk of moon.

John T. Leonard

Bedlam for Now

Burn some sage or plant a red fern on your roof; crawl into a valley for all I care. Throw an apple peel over your shoulder and carve the initials of your lover into a beech tree. Say it with me, three times repeating;

More often than not, rage is what gets us through. All this time, what we’ve called tradition has really been backwards hope; Mercury in retrograde, untethered and terrorizing the villagers— some abandoned calcium deposit of speculation. But maybe there’s a closet where your mother hid her flask of Absolut and L&M Turkish Blends Maybe she blacked out one Sunday and topped off a daisy vase with peppermint liquor, killing your fifth-grade science fair project. Maybe you peaked into a neighbor’s bedroom window when you were seventeen, and saw the ghost of a child standing there naked; his see-through skin like a gutter soaked paper doll…the color of the suburbs. How many satellites rusted over while revolving around your terrible childhood? Can you remember

that cul-de-sac smell of honeysuckle and glyphosate, hear the blind widower, three houses down, stumble off his front porch and walk slowly onwards, into a cracking ocean of black asphalt? All those quiet tragedies, topped off with Thanksgivings at the kid’s table; trapped down in the basement with your older cousins who took turns sneaking mulled wine and passed around polaroids of animals they gutted out of sheer boredom, because the Internet was down Even now I won’t pick up the phone— Not on the first ring. And I blame the 90’s, the snake oil of technology; the grapefruit grunge of it all. That hang up culture, all hung up to dry in the infinite fields which stretched between that past and this present. Dullness growing from distance, a programmable illusion of safety. When I picture us as children, all I can see are the wine stems of our parents, folding like lawn chairs in the summer heat. We were never children of God, so much as we were the quiet shuffle of report card day. We Even Flowed like cheap printer ink, and were taught to mourn our loses in private, like one mourns the loss of their favorite porn star. Not for nothing, but the future smells like knuckles cracking. The past sounds like the echo of snow hitting tree bark, wind chimes in May. Turn on the news. There’s a war to be won. 5

David Xiang

To Build an Owl

8. Wipe sleep off with quiet droplets 8:30. Hide under shadows of electric poles 8:20. Stretch limbs 9:18. Smooth out the polymorphisms. 9:20. Peel eggs, throw shells in compost. 10:30. Paracrine signaling. 10:30. Grandpa reaching for the handrail. 10:28. I hand him his glasses. 12:50. Let the reflections rest. 1:30. What is retroperitoneal? 4. Sand the edges. 5. Wash the lettuce leaves. 7:30. Prostaglandins suppressed. 7:30. Pull weeds, grass rustling in one ear. 8. Chase after the dog, and fireflies. 10. Reenter blue light wash. 12. Another feather attached.

Cathy Ulrich

Being the Murdered Girl Detective

The thing about being the murdered girl detective is you set the plot in motion. They will bring in two boy detectives to investigate your death, All-American boy detectives, the way your parents think of All-American: blonde, blue-eyed, white. They will be all strong jawlines and furrowed brows, thoughtful silences and something deep behind his eyes. They will be men of action, they will be let into your private things, their coarse-fingered boy-hands on your diary, your undergarments, your bedsheets. Your mother will say: I always knew she’d get herself into trouble someday. Your father will put his arm around her shoulders, he will think how thin and frail she has become since your death, he will think of wind-swirling feathers, bent-spined tulips, pencil lead snapping on whitesheet paper. He will say: She did things her own way. She always did things her own way. The boy detectives will nod, take notes in separate notebooks. They will trade notes at the end of the day, they will nod and say hmm, they will both remark on your mother’s pinched mouth, the toppled wineglasses on the kitchen counter, the shuttered windows, the lingering scent of clove. The boy detectives will return to the scene of the crime, the boy detectives will examine it with fresh eyes, they will leave no stone unturned. They will interview your friends, they will go through your old cases, they will try your glasses on their own blue eyes, is this how she saw things, is this how the world looked to her. They will be on a first-name basis with the chief of police, they’ll be hand-shaking, back-clapping how’s it going today, boys.

They will tromp through your back yard with flashlights at night, they will run their hands over the hood of your car, they will go home for dinner and eat pot roast and baby potatoes with smiling parents, they will scroll through the photos on your phone, they will scour for clues. They’ll solve your murder, they’ll find your killer. Everyone will congratulate them, everyone will tell them thank you, we always knew you could do it, your mother especially, taking their hands in hers, if only she’d known you, she’ll say, if only she’d known some boys like you.

Max Sheridan

The Jeffermans Review Their Life Choices

The Jeffermans finally burrow into Bob Tanner’s bedroom It all seems so trivial now—the incessant arguments, the alimony, the acrimony—now that the Jeffermans have finally figured out a way to burrow into Bob Tanner’s bedroom at night and watch him sleeping, defenseless, next to his wife. Who, they both ask themselves, who is laughing at who now? The Jeffermans cancel their NYT subscription Elaine Jefferman tells Louis Jefferman she’s finally done it. She’s cancelled their New York Times subscription. Louis is eating breakfast. He asks a few perfunctory billing questions, finishes his toast and then retreats to the den and prostrates himself before the bubblegum-colored man with the fat baby head and retractable jaws who signed them up all those years ago, begging forgiveness. Eliza Jefferman returns home from college for Christmas For six days the Jeffermans communicate in tense sticky notes left on countertops, tables and the mantlepiece. On the seventh day, Eliza Jefferman threatens to self-immolate. You don’t understand me, she writes on her final neon green sticky note addressed to both her parents. You’ve never understood me. She ransacks the kitchen, searching for matches, but only finds old Bubbeh Jefferman, living in a peach crate under the sink.

Louis Jefferman confronts Elaine Jefferman with the perplexing news that he’s shrinking In the marriage counselor’s office, Louis Jefferman says he remembers slipping into his favorite Perry Ellis slacks and gasping when he discovered they were two sizes too long. Elaine Jefferman says she doesn’t remember snorting, nearly spilling her Martini, and saying to Louis: “Ok. Ok. You’ve caught me, Louis. I threw out your old pants and bought you these larger ones so you would think you’re shrinking. Just like in the story, Louis. I want to drive you mad! I want to reduce you to sniveling infantilism so I can steal all your money!” Louis Jefferman remembers retiring to his study, chastened, with the wrong end of the Martini shaker, wondering if he should phone his actuary just in case. Elaine Jefferman doesn’t remember going online and ordering another pair of pants for her husband, these ones four sizes too long. Isaac Jefferman quits the oboe by mail Isaac Jefferman sends a sticky note home to his parents from Berklee Music School in Boston by FedEx. He’s quitting the oboe and enrolling in culinary school in Madrid, the note says. Elaine Jefferman is on the first flight to Boston. Months later, the private investigator brings news. Elaine has been discovered in Napeague, Long Island. In a series of freak accidents, she got on the wrong flight, changed her name to Betty D’Arcy and has been living with a line cook from Morty’s Oyster Stand in Amagansett ever since—but is happy to finally be going home. Louis Jefferman remembers his wedding day When asked about his wedding day in a past life regression, Louis Jefferman recalls a howling grey wind with an amorphous, long-armed being at the center of it. He recalls shouting at the malevolent creature until his tonsils bled. He also remembers the sardine canapés Elaine said she’d ordered for the reception, but which never appeared.

The Jeffermans don’t care who poisoned the Tanners’ trapeze artist Details of the tragic death of Donovan Butty, the out-of-work trapeze artist living with next-door neighbors Bob and Fiona Tanner since birth, fail to faze the Jeffermans. Fiona Tanner is sure Elaine knows something. Something that could change everything. Louis Jefferman buys high and sells low It was the worst day ever, Louis tells his children, Eliza and Isaac, in a series of hastily scribbled sticky notes. But everything is ok now. No one will go without food or clothes this year! Except their half-brother, Rudy, who they have never met and is living in a YMCA somewhere in Cincinnati with his common-law wife, Marlene. Elaine Jefferman orders a pool (or does she?) A month after the pool was installed in their backyard as planned, Elaine begins to have doubts. When she confronts the contractor, a man named Reynolds, he also can’t remember how the pool got there. Reynolds checks his records. Nothing. Then Reynolds remembers that the pool was actually supposed to go in the neighbors’ yard. Except it wasn’t a pool the neighbors wanted, it was a flying trapeze. Elaine and Reynolds both stand at the water’s edge wondering what to do next. The Jeffermans buy their first home It’s beautiful, Elaine Jefferman tells the real estate agent. Louis Jefferman admires the gently sloping front yard. They sign the papers that afternoon. As soon as the agent leaves, the Jeffermans open a bottle of champagne in the backseat of their Ford Bronco. An eerie silence falls over their celebration as they both realize they forgot to ask the agent about municipal burrowing code.

J.B. Stone

Standing In the Eye Of The Hurricane, Except It’s a 40 oz Bottle of Hurricane and the Eye Is a Fractured Looking Glass When you’re told of all the things you inherit from your mother. The open-range valley in her smile; the bouquet shaped in her dimples; the streaks of brunette; the light brown in her eyes; the boisterous Brooklyn baritone in her voice; the courage to cry in front of others; like the scenes of Dorothy and Toto’s arrival in the Land of Oz, Judy Garland belting to the score of Over the Rainbow like an angel wrapped in technicolor, raising the ceiling inside your living room as if it were a stretch of clouds /or/ simply skimming through a scrapbook of the dead and a picture of your grandmother draped in sepiotone appears & all the two of you do is weep in each other’s arms knowing at least you’re both still here. No one ever told you how much of her demons you inherit; the pandemonium raging inside her lungs; the underbelly of chaos / turning blood streams into riot scenes; the moments of staring at a bottle with the caution of a lion tamer, knowing any moment your guard is let down, a beast is waiting / grunting / braying / salivating / for the chance to pounce. Yet amid this struggle: still you inherit. Still you inherit her strength; the courage she tucks behind the curtain of her tear ducts, the pain she smothers in a fit of her own laughter; her will; her ability to tell such a vile monster like addiction to fuck off and watch it scurry

like a warren of frightened rabbits. So cup your palms tightly to this bottle // give it a name // call it chasm / call it growth / maybe in due time: call it reminder that exposition doesn’t need to be your reason for downfall / sometimes it can be your greatest reason for moving on

J.B. Stone

Every Day in America is Memorial Day

when the front row seats to tragedy are the cheapest in the house & the house isn’t a home, but the wreckage of one the sky’s veins pulsate and pop like the stress around our wrists the clouds become stretchmarks the tension seeps into the dirt & the dirt resembles another graveyard in the making fore who are we if not a nation always lost in mourning

Daisy Bassen

In absentia

The woman with the most beautiful voice in the world Has stopped singing. She’s tired of the sound she hears Before anyone else, the bloom of each note in her mind And her throat; she cannot be astonished, singular In that regard. She may find whatever solace she wants In abdication, not least the knowledge there is greatness Occurring that has nothing to do with her. Being little Again, fine, the next-door neighbor to non-existence; Death will be as simple as asking for the cup of sugar We’re always short. The brown bread cools on the rack.

Darren C. Demaree

Emily as I prepare the Meal-Kit Super Smashed Burgers

I only concentrate on her dark hair some days. There is no better recipe. I can fuck up the simplest meal when she comes in draped in the dry waves she was given the day she was born. It’s the only tide that matters to me. Time, the ocean, a potato bun sliding off the buttered pan & on to the floor, they are consequences of a world where Emily was given such a temporary body.

Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi

Pasture Statues

Millie mooed. Cate mooed with her. The cow stared at them. Millie giggled at the old joke, a pure, authentic song. Cate giggled with her, exaggerated, trembling notes. The cow stared at them. Millie continued to pet the cow’s cheek. Cate stroked the other, looking for signs of impatience in the otherwise stoic animal, searching its blank yet somehow knowing eyes for knowledge of her charade. What made her want to release the scream that had been lodged in her throat for inconceivable minutes was how Millie, sitting comfortably in her numb arms, was so far away from screaming; Millie, who had every justification for adding her shrill voice to the one behind them. She hadn’t asked Millie if she was all right; doing so would have given her the impression something was wrong. She hadn’t asked Millie her actual name; as far as the little girl’s amiable behaviour indicated, they had known each other all their lives, and names didn’t matter. She hadn’t asked Millie her age; from the moment she took the little girl into her arms, she could tell the small human being was no older than her career. Three-years-old, Cate mused again, as she transferred Millie from one desensitized arm to the other, careful not to break contact with the cow. Three years, and once again she imagined the retirement banner, growing longer and larger as the idea cooked in her mind, advertising the pitiful number. Cate was grateful for the brown-and-white animal’s presence. Moreover, she was grateful that the cow was the first thing Millie had noticed. She wouldn’t have thought to mosey on over to the cow; instinct— training—would have told her to immediately transport the dishevelled little girl to her car; and there they would have waited for the next routine steps 17

And then she would’ve known something was wrong, she thought. And then she would’ve started screaming. A scream perforated the ambience, a cocktail of pain, fear... and perhaps a note of anger. “Mooooo!” Cate issued her loudest impersonation yet. Millie echoed her sentiments, prolonging and exaggerating the bovine language until it devolved into more giggling. Another scream smothered the laughter, and, for a terrible moment, Cate thought she felt Millie stiffen; thought she saw registration on the little girl’s suddenly sagging face. “Moo mooooo moo moo moo mooooo moo,” Cate interjected, the single word spoken in the rhythm of conversation. She fixed upon Millie’s eyes, hoping the little girl would take the bait, ready to shift her little body should she decide to go peeking behind her back, toward the scream. Millie’s bowed lips glistened, saliva pooling as she gathered her thoughts about the conflicting sounds. Cate readied her own lips with another string of nonsensical cow-speak, when Millie broke out of her trance, and fired off a meaningless statement of her own: “Mooooo mooooo mooooo”—laughter—“mooooo moo moo moo.” Relieved, Cate kept the dialogue flowing for as long and as loud as was necessary to beat the intermittent screaming from Millie’s ears. As their banter rose and fell with the outbursts behind them, she imagined how the others must have seen them: vulnerable backs; a revolving red light highlighting Millie’s arms wrapped comfortably—Or is she in shock? Cate couldn’t decide—around her neck; mooing from unseen lips; the cow itself unseen, blocked by their combined bodies. How unreal it must have appeared to them. How grotesquely real it was to her. How beautifully real it was to Millie. A terrible thought returned Cate to their cozy huddle: This is your first time, isn’t it? The scream she struggled to keep deep down in her gorge threatened to erupt. It occurred to her that this cow—not the pair grazing further down the fence, dangerously close to the break; not the calf flanked by several adults; not the others standing nonchalantly, laying nonchalantly, living nonchalantly; not the countless others that might have been a blur in Millie’s passenger window—but this cow might very well have been the very first cow Millie had ever seen. Cate mooed, and wondered if Millie could detect the underlying melancholy. You don’t need to meet a cow, she desperately wanted to assure the little girl. Not now. Not like this. She was certain that when Millie was one day no longer a size fit for one’s arms—There’s no guarantee of that, Cate sadly reminded herself—she might learn to hate the cow. 18

All cows. The way Cate hated them for what they had done to Millie. To her. To Millie’s mother. The human sounds behind them were less frequent now, quieter, the pain, the fear, the anger—if ever there was—giving themselves to realization. Cate hoped Millie’s mother would soon forget how to scream; hoped her mother forgot her daughter’s name. This line of thinking was drenched in selfishness, but Cate had accepted it... for now; may guilt torment her later. It was just that she and, more importantly, the cow had worked so damned hard to keep Millie occupied. Or are we keeping the cow occupied? Cate thought for the first time. She looked into the animal’s eyes, glossy black islands surrounded by thin halos of bloodshot white. Pulses of red light, rotating like an angry lighthouse—an eye of its own—searched those eyes, much as Cate was doing now, for knowledge. Do you see the red light? she mentally transmitted to the cow. Do you understand it? Did you see what happened before the red light? Do you understand what happened? The cow stared. Do you understand that this little girl I’m holding, the one mooing at you, the one petting your face... do you understand that her mother is the one who killed your calf? Based on its indifference, she couldn’t tell if the calf was blood-related to the cow. Would he or she—Cate couldn’t tell which—bite Millie if it understood the situation behind them? Would he or she reconsider biting if it understood the whole thing had merely been a matter of a broken fence? Would he or she refrain from seeking revenge upon Millie if it understood that the calf had wandered through the broken fence, onto the asphalt, and before Millie’s mother’s car? Would he or she rethink their potential bite if it understood that Millie’s mother had, from the looks of the finale, done her best to avoid the calf, but instead clipped its behind, sending her speeding vehicle into the ditch? Would he or she accept that the calf had been mercifully put down, quickly and painlessly, unlike Millie’s mother, who found herself wrapped deep within her metal womb, gasoline-for-placenta everywhere, unable to be reached or moved, lest she perish sooner? The cow stared. Cate focussed on Millie’s silhouette within the animal’s sheeny eye: Do you understand? A voice answered the question. Cate couldn’t make out the words, only the harshness of the voice. 19

She sensed an approaching presence, and immediately understood what was happening. In a voice tailored for Millie’s benefit, Cate said, “Please, don’t come any closer,” and resumed mooing along with Millie. “Officer?” The voice didn’t sound so harsh. Perhaps it hadn’t been at all. Perhaps, Cate decided, she was prejudiced against voices outside of she and Millie’s precious bubble. Cate sensed the intruder take another step forward. “I said don’t,” Cate said in her rosiest voice. “Officer, I need to examine the little girl,” the soft voice said. The well-meaning plea incensed Cate. She’s fine. I checked her when I pulled her out of the car. Some scratches, a few bruises, but she’s fine. I checked her. And I named her. She knew someone close to Millie must have known her real name, but for tonight, in her arms, the little girl would take the name of the first girl Cate had lost on the job. Footsteps crunched behind them. “Don’t,” Cate emphasized, momentarily breaking her character of utter serenity. Before the intruder could interject, she added: “I... just give us a few minutes, okay?” And then what? she thought. Once again, she caught Millie’s silhouette in the cow’s eye. Do you have a father? Grandmother? Grandfather? Uncles? Aunts? Anybody? Do you know your name? What would become of Millie when Cate decided enough “few minutes” had elapsed? What would become of the little girl when the cow was gone? The intruder’s footsteps—a paramedic just trying to do her job—retreated, but Cate sensed she hadn’t gone far; Millie did need to be examined. She realized the screaming had died. It made sense to her, not because the outcome was inevitable, but because the paramedic now had time to check on the only survivor. But they still had a few minutes. And so Millie mooed. Cate mooed with her. The cow stared at them.

B. P. Herrington

Up North of the County Line I. That Blood’s Too Red A faint ache like a half-remembered tune calls her out to the porch. She staves off the sun with a raised hand and sees at the faraway fence line one son, the eldest, coming in from the fields. His brother is not at his side. Her gaze hooks his eyes. The son stops in the waist-high patch of bluestem, a hoe slung over his gaunt shoulders. Along his lifted arm, the sleeve of his white shirt clings red. The mother sets a hand high on her hip and hollers out, “How come that blood?” He glances away tight-mouthed. “I say, how come—” “Blood of the gray mare,” he curtly yells. “One that pulled the plow for me.” “That blood’s too red for that.” She leans on a weathered wooden pillar in the burdensome heat. No, no. Where is my youngest? The son stammers, “Blood of the hound that chased the hare.” Her knees give. She discerns and she will not give answer to a liar. That blood’s too red. Oh, my youngest. The son strikes the earth with the hoe blade and sobs. The tired woman holds fast to the pillar. It bears her faltering down to the splintered porch planks. Oh, my son. Grasshoppers rasp in sere weeds. II. Baby Galvez When her mean cuss of a husband hightailed off to a rowdy life of bear hunting and hard drinking, he left his wife with grief in her heart and a secret in her womb. Through the autumn, her store of kindling and firewood dwindled, and her belly tightened. With no kinswomen to comfort her or lay a cold rag on her brow, she took to her bed, wailing and panting curses. 21

The child came at last and she set him on her breast, never muttering so much as a gentle word, only wincing as he suckled. When the last embers winked in the stove, the creek whispered to her. She set her feet down on the cold pine floor and rose with the babe in her arms. She went out from the cabin and drifted through pines to the dimpling waters. The cold muddy bank held her pearly feet fast. She closed her eyes to the moonlight, raised her arms and tossed the boy. The creek gulped and received him and whispered again. III. Loving Henry The silver shears glint in hearth light. She slices the last length of fabric and, turning down the fold, she whipstitches the felled hem. The needle pierces the coarse fabric at her fingertip just shy of pricking. The dress’s calico print, a field of tiny bluets, is vivid nearest the flame, trailing off to dim stars out of firelight. Far off where her ears are tuned, hoofbeats pulse through the high forest slope, coming down through the throng of hollies, onto the wide, even field. She springs up in her chemise and pantalets, bundles the corset tight and fastens the busk. The hooves drub closer. She slips the newly made dress over her head and laces the high-top kidskin shoes. The horse neighs in its halting. She pulls the latch and opens the door to a wide harvest moon. Her beau stands waiting, his hair slick to the skull, his black frock coat draping his frame. Cold wind hisses in the dropseed grass. “Been three lonesome months,” she whispers, slipping through the gate. He snatches her and she fights his arms. “You staying the night with me?” He loosens his hold and looks off at the moon. She paws his chest and laughs, “What is it now?” Even his black eyes drain. “I cannot.” “And why is that?” Her laughter withers. He braces on the split-rail fence, wagging his head. “I got a girl”— her silence pains him—“back on the Arkansas line.”

She slings her arms over his shoulders and wets his face with kisses. He cannot unhitch her grasp. He speaks and she fills his mouth with her tongue, as hard and tart as dewberries. The old desire pangs him. But a passion keener than lust stings him right through—it is a ripping, then a fire. It drowns him. The wind dwindles. There is only her quiet breath and his rasping. She tugs the silver shears out of his ribs, her chilly hands warming. He wonders at her wide eyes, each iris crowned by a reflected moon.

Emi Bergquist

Delicately, Frozen From Aging We were once dried,

held like this: dead and

your pale pink petals patterned

up towards the sun, where else does a lightlover grow? Stems branching

of white bouquets

with petrified hope asking, do

you miss your mother too? Carved from earth and wet enough into shapes

to mold the tongue

of form and function.

Cracked where the clay gets thin mouth of the neck: Kintsugi

at the filled-in

with gold dust — more beautiful is the repair than if it had never been broken.Half-dipped matte, the color of milk in coffee

brush-

stroked-briefly to feather the edge, not-quite blended together — a ring distinct for a rustic memory. The never-blossomed buds peek out from barren twigs, how delicately frozen from aging will you

the opened

want to be

or the closed?

Lisa DiFruscio

Grief

Grief disconnects the heart and head the blood, the bones, the skin it filters through this somber life and alters you within The soul agrees to bargain now in this intrepid place but it decides how long it lasts and it pervades all space Grief billows as the smoke of fire and blinds the future scene bewilders moments from the past and every wound between The soul revolts and spreads its ash a churning camouflage it reaps regret and restlessness a certain sabotage Grief grips like sands of island a shelf on nature’s quell you cannot make new castles you cannot break its spell The soul sustains in plenitude with hands and palm held free and holding on to one who’s gone leaves only more debris 26

Jackie Chicalese

Aubade

au·bade [ ō-’bäd ] n. 1. Evanescence of moon into the smaller hours of twilight. The sky beginning to smolder its magenta-warmth. My mother’s parting from my father’s stilled frame the soft stick of thistle against her heart. In a sentence: My father’s tumor renders every morning an aubade. See: fear ; See: farewell. See: Mother bent in the garden already tending to swells of white chrysanthemums. See: Preparing the casket. 22. Song of dawn chorus unspooling from robins’ throats. Waterfresh lilt rousing my father alive. Waking Song. Meaning: benediction. As in, He opens his eyes & I repent.

Jackie Chicalese

Xylomancy

I sidestep tree branches fermenting in the still puddles of last night’s storm & return with my hands empty. You’re spreading logs to sun dry before the next bonfire, your body bent small by the strange kaleidoscope of your cells into a fuller bloom. We sit close as the wood dries to fissure slowly. Grains read like nodes of tree roots haunting with thirst. I imagine the roots ingrained in the tender soil of your neck, your throat swelled raw with this abundance. Once the logs dry I help gather them. A splinter lodges inside my thumb, a worry I will carry with me for months.

I’m OK, you say. I want to ask the wood for how long, but we work in silence.

Bruce Meyer

Sparrows Margot told me her father was God. She’d been watching television in the family room, her chin propped on the back of her hands as she lay on the broadloom. A bird thudded against the picture window. The impact left a smear. She ran outside to see what kind of bird it had been. A sparrow lay on its back on the ground, fluttered its wings helplessly, then stiffened. She screamed. Margot’s father, a doctor, heard her cry out, and ran from his study. He thought something had happened to her. She pointed to the sparrow on the ground. She tried to tell him the bird was dead, but the words wouldn’t come out. Her eyes were full of tears. Her father bent down, picked the bird up in the palm of his left hand, and with his right index finger began tapping on its breast, a steady, soft beat, faster than Margot’s heartbeat but gentle. He raised the sparrow to his mouth and with his thumbnail managed to pry open its beak and breathed into the dead body. She told me how she gasped and stepped back in awe. The bird awoke. Its eyes blinked rapidly and stared at her father. Then it spread its wings. Rather than fight the tiny animal’s impulse to be free, he opened his palm and settled the bird upright in his right hand as it spread its wings and flew away. “He really was God,” she said. “I had never seen someone give life back to a dead creature. We lived by a river. The picture window of the family room faced the shoreline, and the current flowed by as steady and mesmerizing as if one ripple chased the one ahead until they both vanished. That’s the way I think of my relationship with my father, the kind of futility where birds struck the glass and flew at it again and again thinking next time they’d enter another sky. 29

Perhaps they mistook the false sky for heaven or a way forward when there was none. But when my father gave that sparrow back its life, I thought a wall between us had shattered and I was in awe.” Margot stared at her coffee. The way she looked into the cup I had the feeling she was searching for answers in it. Black. Two sugars. The bitter and the sweet all in one small, crowded container. The story of Margot. “I really thought he was God,” she repeated. “Not long after that we were in a grocery store. A woman walked up to my father and shoved him, her hand hitting hard against his left shoulder. He pretended to ignore the woman. He didn’t topple or stagger.” “’You think you’re God, don’t you?’ she shouted. My father just looked at her with sorrow in his eyes, not pity but a gloomy empathy. He must have felt what she felt right down to the center of his soul, but he said nothing.” “Was it hard growing up as his daughter?” I asked, because we were sitting there in the coffee shop, being honest with one another, and sharing stories about our deceased parents in an effort to understand just who they were long after they could explain themselves to us. “God never explains,” Margot said looking up from the cup, her fingers sliding up and down the sides to feel the warmth. “God never explains. Maybe, if he were here today, maybe over a cup of coffee in a place where he’s certain no one knows him, where his chances of running into a former patient or, heaven forbid, a nurse who worked for him, are next to nothing, he’d try to make amends. He’d tell me what he thought. He’d be honest and say something for once. The problem is honesty and medicine aren’t compatible. A person is dying. He doesn’t walk up to the person and say, ‘Hey guy, nice knowing you.’ He never said what he could have said.” “Maybe that’s for a good reason. Bedside manner,” I replied. “A doctor does what he can, but sometimes that’s never enough. It was never enough for me. I was the incurable relationship in his life.” “I know you’ve said things about how rough it was to be his daughter.” “He wanted more from me than I had to give. When I was sixteen, he presented me with a typewriter and told me I could learn to type, just as if it were easy-peasy to learn to type, and told me I could improve my grades, had to improve my grades, by doing my reports and essays on it. Then he added, ‘Any idiot can learn to type.’ He was heading back down the stairs to his study. 30

“Was he calling you his sparrow?” I asked. “I don’t know. He just said, ‘sparrow,’ and the look he gave me wasn’t anger. I would have been happy if he’d started cussing me out. I almost took his head off. But didn’t react. He looked through me. He looked as if he wanted to see something on the other side of me, something that I had put behind me and wasn’t anymore.” “To be fair, he was probably dealing with lives he was trying to save.” “To be fair?” Margot said, and I could tell there was anger in her voice because I could see rage gathering in the corners of her eyes. I knew she didn’t want to be angry with me. Why should she? I was the friend she could have coffee with. I’d just sit there and listen most of the time. I usually didn’t ask questions. I was there to listen. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to see things from her father’s perspective, but Margot gets very self-absorbed, self-absorbed to the point of rage sometimes, and I know she’s pointed that rage at herself in the past and that’s not good. “What’s fair? I wanted him to listen to my music with me. I begged for a guitar, so my mother took me out and bought me one and I was learning to play it. He shouted at me one night that I had to turn down my music or I’d be grounded for a week. So, I ran after him. I wanted to hurt him. He’d put a card in the guitar case, “Love to you from Dad,” and I held up the guitar and smashed it against the door of his study. He could have asked me why. He could have said, “You’re not getting another one.” Or have screamed at me. But no. Nothing. He put his head down into his files and did a little sweeping motion, the kind of gesture that says silently, ‘Go away,’ with his fingers pointed down. I wanted Margot to stop. Her eyes were filling with tears. I could tell she was suffering. People in the coffee shop threw us sideways glances. I think they wanted her to leave. A young guy with a beard looked up from his laptop. He shrugged then shook his head as if to say, “Tell her to stop. I’m busy with my work.” All her life people had been turning away from Margot. She’d fallen in love with a guy in her first-year university. She told me she really loved him. He wasn’t just handsome and intriguing. He was, and this was her word because it was from a time when the word meant something, ‘Groovy.’ She’d said her father didn’t ‘Dig him.’ The Sixties were a time of a ‘Generation Gap,’ when people of Margot’s age distrusted older people more than they ever had. 31

The groovy guy got high one night and beat her up. He beat Margot badly. She showed me how one cheekbone wasn’t level with the other side of her face. The beating was that bad. And she’d loved the guy. She’d told me it was what she thought love was – someone reaching across a distance, someone offering warmth and closeness that she mistook for love. Her father dropped everything he was doing. He drove three hours to her university town. When she opened her eyes, and her face was swollen and black so her eyes must have seemed like ‘two holes torn in a story,’ as she put it, her father was standing over her, reading her chart. He bent down to kiss her. She said it was too little too late and pushed him away. “Maybe he wanted to breathe into you just as he had done to the sparrow,” I said. She was silent. She turned and looked out the coffee shop window. People were passing by on the sidewalk. A policeman was writing tickets beside some of the cars and tucking them under the wipers. “There’s so much meanness in the world,” she told me. “So much…I don’t know…sometimes I’m not sure if this is the best place to live.” “You’re not thinking of killing yourself, are you?” “I tried once,” she said, her voice trailing off. “Sleeping pills. I was living with my first girlfriend. I didn’t think a girlfriend would rearrange my face. That guy gave me fractured cheekbones, a broken jaw, and a broken nose. My father arranged for the plastic surgeon. It was some guy he knew from a surgical convention or something. He wasn’t on staff at my Dad’s hospital. My old man said the surgeon played a mean round of golf, especially on the back four. I guess I was the back four. My teeth were also shattered. I took a handful of pills. My father showed up again.” “You look fine to me.” “It’s what’s underneath,” she said. “It’s what you can’t see. It’s what I loved or wanted to love and no one would make the effort to return it. Am I that hard to love? Am I that undeserving of love? Maybe you don’t get it, but in here, in my heart,” she said slapping her hand on her chest, “I feel what others don’t want me to feel and it is bloody lonely.” “But didn’t you say he was there when you woke up in the hospital each time?” “Yes, he was there, but he treated me like a patient. I wasn’t going to let him kiss me. And when my first girlfriend beat me up and I came back to our apartment and my stuff was gone and there were just bare walls, I called him. I told him what had happened. All he said on the phone was ‘Oh.’” 32

“He did buy you new stuff, though.” “He did. I came home for Christmas. We were having dinner. Mom was dying, not quickly but slowly, and I said to him, ‘Hey, why can’t you save Mom? What kind of a doctor are you?’” “He took a bite of turkey, then set down his knife and fork. ‘We should go and visit her when we’re finished,” he replied. I said, ‘we could take her some dinner and have a nurse heat it up for us,’ but he said ‘She’s not eating any more. She is disappearing before my eyes.’ Not our eyes. His eyes. It was being done to him. And nothing could save her. She’d been the go-between for us. She’d bought me a new typewriter. She’d bought my first guitar that he took credit for, and my next guitar. ‘Play this.’ she said, ‘when he’s not around the house.’” Margot doesn’t touch her guitar now. She told me that she can’t play it without thinking of him and wanting his love and hating him in the same breath. After our coffee, we both had to head in the same direction through the park, me to work and Margot to her apartment. There was an old man on a park bench. He was scattering bread crumbs for sparrows. They were pecking at the ground, and some, tamed, flew up and sat on his shoulders and arms. “They stay all winter. They never fly away,” I said. “I wish they would come to me,” she said. “It would be a miracle if I could feed them and watch them fly away.”

Vincent Antonio Rendoni

A Boy Named Neither

When I was born, my name was Tampoco. My mother, was a prostitute. She died in childbirth. Her favorite customer was the bear that haunted our mountains late in the Profiriato. Bears were everywhere then. The bear, who was my father, payed my mother in fish. In return, she gave him her pearl. We’re all animals with needs. One day, transaction became conception, and our fates were cast. The labor was long. Though I was just emerging into our burning world, I felt what my mother felt. Saw what she saw. Lights. Shooting stars. The voices of her own mother and father, long passed. As I was born, I got a glimpse of the end. In labor, I took many forms. At first, I was the magpie, screaming in the womb, trying to bargain and cheat out of the inevitable. Then, I was the armadillo, short-sighted and tenacious, rolling to evade capture. But then, at last, I was the wolf. A pup. But a wolf nevertheless. As I crowned and my mother expired, the midwife saw me with my eyes yellow and wild teeth drawn. She reached into the maternal expanses, grabbed by my snout, and slapped me until my whimper became a cry, and I became who I was. She snipped my cord. She snipped my tail. My fur shed, I was tamed and pink with no mother or beast to claim me. Was I man or beast? I was neither. And thus, tampoco.

Robin Gow

familial consciousness

we all wanted to be a son. took our faces down to the grotto where pale eyeless fish tell fortunes. anything can be a father if it is far enough away. something to be pointed to. that over there is where all my sadness came from. to be masculine is to be constantly addressing a lack of daffodils. but, just to be clear sew me with any flower you can find-i’m sick of the cement & the sorry sorry sorry. this poem is already too serious. i’m trying to say i need to be beautiful as soon as i can muster it. i have been trying to focus on poems that tell the truth. everyone was ten years old & cursed with a zoo in the heart. little beautiful cages. also ten, while making jello i dyed my fingers red to the knuckle. we brought forth wavering little planets. i cry less easily than ever before. tried to wash the red out but it persisted. looked like i stuck my fingers into a family machine. now it takes a lot to make me weep so instead 35

i watch videos of monsoons. i wash my hands with cool water instead of hot. pretend everything is a downpour. search the ceiling for another leak & find none-smooth & egg shell white. i sleep inside an embryo inside a red smudge. soon i will be someone’s father-biological or archeological & they will gesture to me as if i were a mountain. ask the elevation & i can’t tell you. i am a short but still smack my head on the ceiling. my age doubles each time i check my face. fish are useless in these endeavors. only the trees read anymore. but that is to be expected. a body is also what it will one day become. so tell me, will you be my brother? here is the photo album. here is what i want you to look like.

Juheon (Julie) Rhee

The moon that used to follow me in the car

is gone, hidden by the charred clouds. I’ve become an adult already, at fifteen. A body that has never been mine, its hair splits like lightning branches. In the mirror, the blue lips, shriveled in the cold, breaks into a smile, and a plump tongue touches on it briefly, like a predator. It distorts the face, or perhaps only straightens it out. The clock on my shelf bends and trickles down like water. I’ve been told an adult smiles, so there are pins on the face, holding the edge of the lips to the ears. The mouth opens and clamps again and again, until the springs in its plastic gum breaks, and the jaw sinks down and drools over the clothes. The girl stares at herself after the shower, her figure blurred with clouds on the mirror.

E. García-López

My Nombres

I prayed anoche to hear, once again, my stolen namesIgbo or Yoruba, maybe Guanche, and Boriken. Light unveiled a frail whisper. (DiaI gather sins and atonements that fall like night lluvia in OtoñoI bring sonrisas and scars imperfectly lashed to the formidable wrinkles of mi caraI have the piel as rings in a tree, another condition of time that dice I was hereI confess lies to the azucenas my mother buys every Sunday and puts in the clay vase shaped by the hands of my esposa-

I fling words and visiones against a wall of hours, a Pollack-like Convergence, pero of unremarkable genius. I live inside dos mundos neither one me conoce, still, I reap their wounds, sufro in their struggle-

-amanece) I divined my namesa clamor from thirsty slavesthey returned spoken with the magia from billions of estrellas so far- too far away- to hear before morning.

Brooke Dwojak Lehmann

Secondhand Smoke Autumn blows in with the smell of pine air freshener and cigarettes, and I am back in her Cougar, a car that drove stealth and fast. She smoked in the car, all through the house tanned topless in her above ground pool, proud of her D-cupped breasts and dimpled thighs. This was the first pool we swam in, before she left my uncle Carl, the one who drank all the ‘Dr. Pepper’. Mornings I watched Charlie’s Angels reruns, perched on the couch, like a well-trained parrot, repeated simple phrases, asked to use the bathroom. I wanted to be like the angels, brave, sexy, ambivalent to the weapon of choice, brazen femininity or a loaded gun. Most days, she made us macaroni and cheese sliced hotdogs, sometimes, SpaghettiOs, the alphabet themed ones, if we were lucky. After lunch, we floated in the pool until the chlorine stung our eyes bloodshot, hands shriveled up like clams.

We hung our sun faded towels and smiles, placed noodles neatly on the redwood deck, dried off in time for the ghost of my mother to return. The first time I was stung by a bee, in her pool, she sprinkled cigarette ashes on my pierced arm, said the nicotine would help numb the pain.

Issy Flower

The Red Thing I remember the way she dipped her hand into the water. It was curved, like a feather, and the water clung to her skin like diamonds on a necklace. She lifted the water into the air and whispered words over it. They were the same words we all had to whisper, but she made them different. She really did speak magic into them. The rest of us were just play-acting-- ten year olds with nothing better to do-- but she dipped her hand into Sally Robinson’s backyard bucket and cast a spell over everyone. The moment hung over us, enveloped us, and there was a sheet of glass separating us from the world. You could just about see it if you squinted. It flickered and glimmered in the little sun peeking through the rainclouds. Then, she drank the water, shook out her hand, and turned back to us, making a face like she’d eaten something sour. Her face puckered up and her features became as distorted as a peach stone. It broke the languid silence of the moment and shattered the glass, which fell over us and bounced off our skin like snowflakes. But it made us love her. She was one of us, deep down, ethereal as she was. I remember looking at her and willing her to love me too. Then she brought in the bike. No one in the neighbourhood could afford a bike, it was half the thing we cast spells for, so when she wheeled it up the dirt road we all took one full intake of breath. Thirty years later, I still recall every whorl and dip of that bike, even the way it caressed the space around it and made it something new, the same way she did. It was the most beautiful shiny-apple red, the colour of Valentine’s cards and butcher’s viscera, gloriously red, a red that wriggled under your skin and found kinship with the blood vessels inside. It had a real leather seat with a real leather smell and shining silver handlebars. The whole thing shone from the inside, was lit from the inside, glowed in contrast to the dull brick of our post-war houses. That glass hung over it too. 42

I think we were all allowed to come up and touch it, one by one. Each small girl would place her hand on that red curve and flinch at how cold it was-- colder than it looked-- before embracing its smoothness, the sheer beauty of the curve. Then, with a smile, Kelly would wave them on with her feather-like hand and let the next person touch it, so that to Kelly’s right there started to accumulate a group of girls visibly different to those on her left. A group of small Julians of Norwich: transfixed. Eventually this touching became part of the actual rituals we were meant to conduct as witches. We were part of the Nuneaton Coven, established 1973, and we had to do magic. Mostly we copied what we saw on Catweazle, which meant a lot of turning around on the spot and saying words like ‘whizzle’ in a Cornish accent. But Kelly’s bike brought something new. We had a totem, an idol, something to worship; something that we could take into ourselves, even if we didn’t understand what those things were or what they meant. We loved it to the very depths of our being. We’d draw it, write poems about it, poems that would then be cast over it at school, in the shadow of the elm trees at the edge of the field. We’d take turns to look at it in the bike shed, and place our palms on the plastic that covered it and draw circles in the dust, dioramic protections. There would be a swell of debris as your finger met the plastic, and warmth would spread up your arm, and you’d know the red spectre in front of you had received your gift. Kelly would grin and then you’d spend the rest of the afternoon trying to wipe the dirt on other people. I can’t imagine what it looked like to outsiders, all these small children standing open-mouthed at a bike no more impressive than anything you could find in Woolworth’s. But its power had cast a shield over us, just like Kelly. They both shone. Then, as we grew up, the magic diminished. The coven members discovered boys, and drifted from Sally Robinson’s back garden, one by one, the red of the bike moving to their cheeks, their lips, their skirts. Some of us clung on to the last-- even Kelly, who must have sensed that her power was fading. She was not beautiful, Kelly. We had always found her beautiful, but we were diminished day by day, and her bike, now three years old and scratched from when her brothers had used it, was diminished too. We didn’t even touch it now, when we cast our spells. It was too mud-caked. But I was still there when it was destroyed. It was the last meeting of the Nuneaton Coven. We’d decided to pack it in once and for all: bullies had got wind of it, boys were breathing down our necks; it was all too stressful. 43

Sally Robinson wasn’t even there, but inside on the telephone to Gerry Furnace from number 63. Kelly raised her hand to her lips again, whispered through them, and then said, in a voice that resounded: ‘Let’s take it to the dump.’ We followed her out neatly in procession, as she wheeled the damp red thing towards the dirt. Finally we reached the dump-- a small patch of barren land covered in old fridges and cookers and household waste. We used to imagine fairies peeping out of there, playing amongst the cans. Never saw one, though. Never stopped looking. Kelly wheeled the bike to the centre of the wasteground and stopped. Then, majestic, she raised her right hand to her mouth and blew. We did the same. We didn’t need to be told-- it was instinctive. Our breath hit the air and crystallised white. There was something in the air that had not been there before, brought about by all of us: a promise, a declaration, a truth. It hung there for a moment like smoke, like that age-old pane of shimmering glass, then dissipated, and we knew what we had to do. Kelly turned sharply away from the bike. We did as well, and filed out, and when we reached Sally Robinson’s house we walked in different directions, towards school and sex and careers and a world where Kelly was just like anyone else. I don’t think I even spoke to her again. But I looked at the bike as we walked away, exiles from paradise. It looked lonely, just sitting there in the mud, an open, festering swell of red, pitted with black and silver and brown. It looked like a strange thing, a voodoo doll, a talisman, a sore. It curved like a feather, and the cold air clung to it like diamonds. I saw Kelly’s face in it, with her red mouth, and her peach-stone face, puckered up. There was too much in that bike. It kept our secrets. I trained my eyes on it, and watched and watched as it pulsed red in the gloom, and did not turn my head away. I can still see it now.

Anna Trujillo

Gramps

For the first thirteen years of my life, Grandpa shared a house with Mom and Dad and me. He slept in my room – or maybe I should say I slept in his room. I’d spelled out my name, “Franklin,” in big letters on a sheet of construction paper and taped it to the bedroom door, and the next day Grandpa hung up his own sign, bearing bigger letters in brighter crayon hues, that read “Gramps.” He had the top bunk, and I had the bottom. At night he snored and rolled around so the mattress above me creaked, and I pretended this annoyed me, but really it was nice to wake up in the dark and know Grandpa was right there. It got really dark in that room at night in winter, so dark that I couldn’t see the pattern on my comforter or my hand in front of my face. I wasn’t scared of the dark, of course, but I still appreciated Grandpa’s snores. They helped me get my bearings. Let me know which way was up. That I was awake and not mired in some dream that was as thick and as black as real night. Grandpa was a miracle worker. I don’t say this lightly. He really was somewhat supernatural, though I didn’t realize it until after he was gone. That’s not to say he didn’t have his failings – most grievous among them, according to Mom, who was his daughter, was his unrelenting refusal to eat vegetables or fruits of any sort, though he did have a passion for prunes, which he slurped one after another from his wrinkled fingers whenever a canister of them appeared in the fridge. But the spinach he left untouched on his plate at dinnertime didn’t seem to detract from his ability to predict the weather (“It’s gonna rain tomorrow, Frank,” he said one January evening, even though temperatures had stayed well below zero all week, and sure enough, the next day brought warm winds and a sputtery drizzle) or his keen eyesight (“I’ll say,” he observed one cool June morning, staring out the living room window, “that birch tree there is crawling with ants.”

“You’re making it up,” I told him when my own squint out the window revealed no insects at all. But later I went outside to restock the outhouse with toilet paper – a job I despised on principle, since we had a working indoor bathroom and therefore no real use for the smelly old shack – and I saw that there really were hundreds of little ants swarming a sappy leak in the birch’s trunk). Grandpa was stooped and gray and bony, but other than that he seemed immune to the effects of age. In winter he liked to scale trees just like I did and plop out of their tops into deep snow. When he and Dad went hunting, Dad drove the truck back, and Grandpa stayed in the trailer with a headlamp, the carcass, and a sharp knife. He never failed to have the moose or caribou cleanly butchered by the time they got home, never mind the innumerable bumps in the road. And he sure could run fast when Mom caught him chucking the sweet potatoes she’d been saving for dinner off the porch for our Border Collie mix, Roscoe, to fetch. “Come here, Frank,” he said one Saturday, beckoning me to his armchair with a twitch of his wrinkled finger. He had a glint in his eye that let me know he had something mischievous on his mind. I slipped over and kept my voice low so my parents, in the next room, wouldn’t overhear. “What is it, Grandpa?” “I caught a musk in the air this morning,” he said. “There’s a bear out hereabouts.” “It’s March, Grandpa.” Still the dead of winter. “All the bears are hibernating.” “You listen to me, Frank,” he snapped. “I know what I smelled. If I say there’s a bear out, there’s a bear out.” “Fine,” I muttered. After thirteen years, I knew there was no point in arguing with him. “There’s a bear out.” This seemed to satisfy him. “That’s right, there is. And I’ll tell you what, Frank. The two of us are gonna shoot it.” “Shoot it, Grandpa?” “That’s right.” “But why?” “Because it’s winter!” Grandpa yelled. “And the floor of our room is cold! I need a bearskin rug to protect my old toes when I jump out of bed in the morning!” “All right,” I said quickly, trying to shush him. “But Grandpa, we can’t just go out and shoot a bear out of season. I don’t think it’s legal.” 46

“Legal, Smeagol,” he said, which made me blink, because as far as I knew Grandpa had never opened a book that wasn’t a comic, and he certainly had never read The Lord of the Rings. “I’m seventy-two years old, Frank. If I wanna shoot a bear, no one’s gonna stop me.” He was right about that, I thought. As far as I knew, no one had ever stopped Grandpa from doing anything he set his mind to. “What do you need me to do?” I asked. “Go to the fridge and get the ground moose meat your mom put there to thaw,” he said. “Get the prunes too, while you’re at it. Then bundle up and put on your boots. I’ll meet you by the outhouse in ten minutes.” “That moose meat’s for dinner,” I tried to tell him. But he wouldn’t hear it. “If I tell you to get the moose meat, you get the moose meat, Frank.” So I put on my snow pants and parka and snuck to the fridge, where I slipped the sealed Ziplock bag of moose meat into one pocket and the half-full canister of prunes into the other. Then I stepped into my boots, pulled my hat down over my ears, got my fingers lined up in my gloves, and trudged outside to the outhouse, where Grandpa was waiting with Dad’s rifle. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Grandpa said. “You open up that bag of moose meat so the bear can get a good whiff, and then you waft it in the breeze as you walk around the outhouse in a wide radius.” Several frustrating minutes followed as he explained what he meant by radius, as I was only in seventh grade and hadn’t hit geometry yet. “I don’t like this, Grandpa,” I said once I understood my part in the plan. “It sounds like you’re using me as bait.” “Don’t be daft, Frank. If you’re the bait, what’s the moose meat for?” I couldn’t think of a way to argue with this, so I asked, “What’ll you be doing, Grandpa?” “I’ll be keeping a lookout, up there on the outhouse roof. Once the bear gets in range, I’ll shoot it.” I eyed the outhouse dubiously. It was built mounted on cinderblocks, which provided some ventilation. This meant that the tip of its peaked roof, caked with snow, was at least fifteen feet off the ground. “How are you going to get up there?” “You let me worry about that.” But it turned out I did have to worry about that, because after walking all the way around the outhouse, Grandpa decided he needed me to help hoist him up. 47

He got a grip on the lowest edge of the roof and hauled himself onto it, finding footholds on my shoulders and the top of my head. “Not too comfortable,” he said once he was up and I was busy readjusting my hat. “Frank, go get me one of those kitchen chairs.” So I went back inside and lugged out one of the sturdy straightbacked wooden chairs from around the kitchen table. I brought it to the outhouse, and Grandpa had me lift it over my head so he could grab onto it and drag it onto the roof with him. He situated it at the top of the roof, two legs on either side of the apex, planted somewhat shakily into the snow. “Ah,” he sighed, settling down onto it and laying the rifle across his knees. “That’s better. Hand up those prunes.” I did, and he slurped three of them up in rapid succession. He nodded, satisfied. “Well, what are you waiting for, Frank? Get tromping.” The snow around the outhouse was hard-packed because Dad liked to keep it easy to access (“In case of a plumbing emergency,” he always said, though we’d never had any such emergency as far as I could remember). But a few steps out it got deeper and harder to flounder through. I hiked about fifty meters out and unsealed the bag of moose meat. The iron scent of raw game floated up into the winter air. “That’s it, Frank!” I heard Grandpa call from his perch, and I started wading through the knee-deep snow in a wide circle around the outhouse. I had to zigzag a few times to avoid clusters of trees, and the circle deflated slightly at one end where I cut across to avoid the house. I don’t know how many times I went around, wearing a path through the snow, waving the bag of moose meat to the right and the left. My legs got tired from walking, and my arm got sore from holding out the meat, and a hollow ache began in my belly that let me know it was long past my usual lunchtime. After a while I decided to call it quits. “Grandpa?” I called. No answer. Exasperated, I sealed the moose meat back up and trudged back to the outhouse. Grandpa was still in his chair, head drooped forward, the rifle propped on one knee and the canister of prunes on the other. His snores cut through the air like a saw. I got angry then. I’d been wandering around the yard like a lunatic, waving tonight’s dinner in front of me in the hope of drawing in a bear that was probably soundly asleep in its cave, and here Grandpa was, fast asleep, his mustache sticky with prune juice. “Grandpa, wake up,” I said. He let out the loudest snore yet. 48

“Grandpa!” I yelled. He jerked awake as though electrocuted. “Frank? Frank, what is it?” he said. And then I watched as his chair tipped over the edge of the roof, his arms and legs waved in the air in a desperate attempt to reclaim balance, and he plummeted off the side of the outhouse onto the hard-packed snow below. *** Later, Mom said it was lucky Grandpa only broke both legs and not his neck. Even so, it would be a long recovery at his age, and my parents agreed that our steep two-story house wasn’t built for a seventy-two-yearold convalescent. So one day when we all went to visit Grandpa in the hospital – the tray of chicken and corn in front of him was untouched, but he was happily slurping up a supply of prunes he must have wheedled out of a nurse – Mom told him she thought it would be best for him to move into the nursing home downtown. “Just for a while,” she said. “Just until you’re back on your feet.” “Old folks’ home?” Grandpa said, pausing with a prune halfway to his mouth. “I’m not moving into any old folks’ home. I’m moving to Florida!” And that’s exactly what he did. None of us could talk him out of it, just like we’d never been able to talk him out of anything. He bought a plane ticket from his hospital bed, and as soon as he was well enough to be discharged, he ordered Mom to load his wheelchair and suitcase into the back of her car and drive him to the airport. My parents helped him label and check his suitcase, and I leaned down to give him a hug as an airport attendant waited to wheel him through security. “Grandpa,” I whispered. “It’s my fault. I’m – ” “What’s that, Frank?” he said, starting suddenly so his bony shoulder jabbed painfully into my chest. “Speak up.” But I couldn’t bring myself to say it again. “What are you going to do in Florida?” I asked instead. He shrugged. “There’s always things that need doing. Maybe I’ll shoot some of those Florida alligators. What do you think, Frank? Want me to send you an alligator-skin rug?” I laughed, but I had to fight back tears as I watched him pass through security. As the attendant wheeled him away, he turned one last time and waved his wrinkled hand. There was nothing but a twinkle in his eyes. 49

*** Things were different at home after Grandpa left. Roscoe moped around for days, poking his nose behind the couch and into other nooks and crannies, bewildered as to where Grandpa had gone and why there were no more sweet potatoes to fetch. Mealtimes were quieter without his cranky voice declaring that the green beans or cauliflowers or steamed carrots were poison. Mom bought a canister of prunes, and it sat untouched in the fridge until she threw it away. In fall, Dad went hunting and brought home a moose, and for the first time I could remember we had to turn the garage into a butchery and figure out how to slice up the animal ourselves. But I missed Grandpa most at night. I couldn’t bring myself to take down the sign he’d hung on the door, even though the bedroom was all mine now. For a long time I’d lie awake and stare at the shadowy bottom of the bunk above me, ears straining for some creak or snore or sigh that would let me know Grandpa’s departure had just been a bad dream, but no sound ever came. Winter came again, and the nights grew long and opaquely black. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night and had to spend several minutes reorienting myself, remembering that the nightmare I’d left behind was past and fading and the dark that cocooned me now was real. But sometimes I woke up from a dream of Grandpa hunkered in a Florida swamp, canister of prunes beside him, rifle aimed at an alligator’s bumpy head, and I’d smile and roll over in bed and think maybe that was real, too.

Al Maginnes

How It Comes To Us First day of spring and a forecast for snow or freezing rain. The plants too wise to have sprouted curl quiet under cold mud. Close to here, a boy dreams of hitting baseballs in high arcs over a flawless green outfield. Somewhere a man turns his car key, hears only dry grinding under the hood. We live in a world of things determined to break promises: cars, little machines, marriages. I could tell you about the repairman who just shook his head and said, “Get a new TV.” I have told stories of times weather was betrayal, like the time your mother and I expected to wake to a morning bedded under snow. But the ground was bare, the air iron-cold, giving me a day to work in frozen mud, lashed with cold wind. Those days passed. The slow engine of spring turns and we are briefly held in the perfection I began to believe in the first time I saw you.

Tamara Gray

Several Scenes at Once I take a strand of hair and lay it in all seriousness across the dictionary, and trap it between the sheaves where it will reside until I need to know “unction” again. A strange animal is creeping across the lawn I rent, the wind is picking up, while a fly making a dash for my eye meets with my palm. Was it his face I touched? Those legs have picked across so many heaps of feces, pin-tip bits of it remain where he rests. Unlike my ancestor, I was born to be on the inside of doors, though I know what he sees.

Laine Derr

Suspended Suspended from a hanging rod, a pale child before the fall, her heart fancies itself a yellow house spider darning tight blue jeans, dream-like sutras sheltered in denim and copper.

Melissa McEwen

Jesus and the Angels A line in a poem/by Natalie Diaz goes: Angels don’t/come to the reservation. Same, girl, same, ‘cause/don’t no angels be over this way,/especially not on Ashley Street. A/few summers ago, I thought it was firecrackers but it was/gunfire I heard. I remember/hearing on the news that/it was my cousin’s son who was killed. He lived/just around the corner from me on Ashley. I /knew those firecrackers sounded strange. Strange/like how his name sounded on TV. I called/my mom. She said she had heard. So,/nope, no angels be around here,/only fleeting cloud ones. But I did see Jesus in Bum/Park the other day, sitting on a bench and he was/quite high,/robe and all. I/swear on/the Holy Bible./Urban myth shit. Everybody calls him/ Viejo. Sometimes he/wears his long hair in braids, sometimes it’s out/’xactly like the Jesus/you see depicted in pictures. All he needs now are los/zapatos de Jesus.

Noah Goldzer

Pentimento My terrific husband left alone up I-15 north leaving Salt Lake City at six in the morning on November the 26th. It hadn’t snowed but an unseemly chill condensed his breath and fogged up the windshield of his paradise blue Toyota Tacoma. He rubbed the glass with his hands, cozy and warm in the burgundy gloves my mother had knit from a double skein of Bernet’s baby blanket tiny. As the cab of his truck warmed in the light of the rising sun, he began to shed his winter clothes; overcoat, hat, scarf—also gifts from my mother—onto the passenger seat. He’d decided in haste to cut his distinct long hair and shave his familiar goatee, the absence of which let his boyish cheeks and playful green eyes shine like I hadn’t seen since before we were married. As he checked the lane behind him in his rear-view mirror, he spotted a blotch of red on his otherwise uniform teal collar, which could not be lifted with saliva alone. The Tacoma’s right-side brake light was busted—he already knew that—with a crack down the face of its transparent protector. The lights looked funny that way; like two narrow, angry eyes on the opposite ends of a wide face staring backwards, one flared red and the other shut for good. But my husband couldn’t stop: he had a long drive ahead of him, little time and, after all, it was Thanksgiving. The first cop to pull him over was an Ogden City officer on his way home, having finished the nightshift. He flashed his cruiser’s lights but let the siren sleep and the two cars drifted a mile or so down the road until a wide enough shoulder presented itself to lean on. No doubt longing for the scents of sweet yams and a stuffed turkey in his oven, the officer, an older, rather portly gentlemen, scampered toward the Tacoma to conclude his duty. “Good morning officer, and Happy Thanksgiving,” my husband announced, looking back at the policeman’s approach. 55

“Good morning,” said the officer, arriving at the driver’s-side window. “A Happy Thanksgivin’ to you, too. ‘Try not to hold you up too long. Can I have your license and registration, please?” The documents were already resting between my husband’s fingers, ready to hand over. The officer flipped through them quickly, noted the driver was a Utahn—like himself—and not much else. “Son, do you know why I stopped you?” “Oh, I’m guessing it’s the taillight, ain’t it?” said my husband. “That’s right.” The officer walked down, peered over for a quick glance at the problem and determined it simply. “Looks like you took on some damage there.” “Yup, that’s right,” my husband repeated. “A rock or somethin’ kicked up from my driveway this mornin’. I wanna get it fixed as soon as I can but, well-” “It’s the holiday,” said the officer, anticipating the end of his motorist’s sentence. “Not much you can do about it today.” “Exactly. Not much I can do about it today.” “Well,” said the officer, handing back my husband’s identifications, “bring it in to a shop first thing tomorrow, ya hear?” “I’ll tell you what officer: got the tools and a bulb at home, I’ll fix it myself after the big meal.” “Ha!” the officer laughed and shook his head. “I’m not good for nothin’ after Thanksgivin’ dinner. Just see to that taillight when you can, son.” “Yes sir,” answered my terrific husband. We don’t have car parts at home. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him fix something before. After the officer let him on his way, my husband drove for another half hour before pulling off I-15 to get a coffee in Tremonton. A friendly, eager voice greeted him through the speaker of the drive-through’s plastic billboard menu. “Welcome to McDonald’s, Happy Thanksgiving, how may I help you?” “Two sausage McMuffins, two hash-browns and a coffee—large, black, with two sugars.” “You want two sausage McMuffins, two hash-browns and a large black coffee with two sugars,” repeated the voice. “Anything else?” “No, just that.” “Okay, that’ll be $6.69. Drive around please.” 56

At the window, a slender young redhead planted the Styrofoam safety top on his coffee and looked into his cab with wide, green eyes. Her name was Harper. “Large black coffee, two sugars,” she said, holding out her hand for payment. “Uh, that’s four sugars honey,” said my husband. “Four?” Harper looked down at her notepad which, in her fine penmanship, clearly read two. “That’s right, four. I have a lot of cooking to do tonight. Gonna need all the energy I can get.” Harper scratched her chin with the butt of her pen for a moment. She looked at her customer—his youthful features paired with a confident, mature man’s smile tilting back at her—before deciding to scratch out the end of the order and re-write, four sugars. “You do the cooking, huh?” she asked, ripping off the tops of the extra packets. “Every year. I’m a family man, you know. God bless my wife, I love her, but if she could fit the turkey in the microwave, she would nuke it instead.” Harper giggled. The sugar drifted from its paper pouch and dissolved into roasted darkness. “Well, that’s very sweet. I bet most men think it’s beneath them, a woman’s work, you know?” “Oh, that’s just silly. I like to make my wife happy is all,” said my terrific husband. “She’s at home in bed the poor thing. Sick, like usual.” Those are lies too. Lies? Yes, he knows they aren’t true. I cook Thanksgiving every year—he invites his friends but not my family. And I’m at home but not in bed. In the garage. For once, I am sick, but not that way. I’m hurt. Lying on the floor. There’s blood behind my head. I can feel myself breathing but I can’t hear it. My eyes are closed and yet, I see a clean canvas, painted with visions of him in my mind. I hear him speak, I see him move, I feel his intentions through brush strokes as they form him into reality. My husband took off his knitted baby blanket gloves and handed Harper a ten-dollar bill. Their fingertips touched briefly at first, then again for longer as she dropped the change into his cupped palm. His hands were wide and firm—maybe like her daddy’s—and he only needed one to clutch both his coffee and the big, white paper bag his order came in. 57

Harper tossed in a few extra napkins and ketchup packets, just in case he needed them. She’s a watercolor—bright, unfinished, childlike. He’s oil. “Have a good Thanksgiving,” she said. “You too... Harper,” my husband replied, staring a little too long at the plastic name tag above her left breast. “Say, I hate to pry but, why are you working today? Shouldn’t you be at home?” “Oh, my shift ends in a couple hours. My boyfriend’s coming to pick me up after.” “Ah. A boyfriend.” “Yup. Say, I hope your wife feels better. Tell her I think she’s a lucky woman.” “What? Oh, right, sure.” My head throbs with pain. Strange, thinking makes it feel better. Who am I? My name is Marjorie. I was nineteen when I met my husband. He was twenty-eight. We had a shotgun marriage. I took a terrible fever in the third month and lost the baby. Perhaps that was God telling me what I needed to hear. Or maybe it was just my body. Instead, I listened to my husband. He convinced me, like he did of so many things, that it was better if no one knew, since they would surely think me a tramp—even my own mother, who had her suspicions but never raised them aloud. I was LDS, and he said he was too, though he mumbled his way through every hymn. It didn’t matter. On Saturdays, he took the bishop golfing and he coached youth baseball. He was a hit. I gaze deeply at it now; the history of my life, like a kind of vivid mural, filling in from the corners, grim but sincere, like a Courbet or a Millet. I am the nude woman gawked at. I am the peasant in the field with the sheep. There are no embracing lovers. That isn’t this story—young love and how it all went wrong. Things went wrong the instant he noticed me. The moment he spots anyone, anything, it becomes wrong. No, this is the story of a liar, a monster that everybody likes—Manet’s Absinthe Drinker, a parasite posing as a knight and painted larger-than-life. From Tremonton, he took I-84 going west until he crossed the Idaho border around a quarter after eight in the morning. The sun cleared the last bit of frost still sticking to the grassy plains on either side of the highway and its orange rays poured through the rear windshield behind my husband, pleasant and warm on the back of his head. 58

He ate as he drove, one hand on the wheel, the other dripping grease from his breakfast. On the pile of hand-made winter wear beside him he tossed a great mess of crumpled napkins, sticky wrappers and squished, red ketchup packets. The nylon of his safety belt pinched him below the chin as he leaned over to sip his coffee, so he unstrapped it. About an hour later, after his meal was well digested, my terrific husband got pulled over yet again, this time by an Idaho State Patrolman, on the long stretch of road leaving the tiny pioneer town of Glenns Ferry. This officer, a fit, clean-cut kid, yet untethered by a wife and children, and still fresh at the start of his day, took his time with the procedure. He punched the Tacoma’s plates into his machine and eye’d the DMV photo that popped up, complete with goatee and shoulder-length hair. He wrote down the place of address in his little notepad along with the registration date and my husband’s name. Then, with his stoic hand resting on his holster, as training dictated, he stepped to, closed his driver’s side door and tread cautiously toward my husband’s cab. “Good morning officer and Happy Thanksgiving,” my husband called out as the officer approached. The brush stroke of his eyebrow flurried unfavorably—it had worked the first time, why not try it again? But the young man didn’t reply in kind. He waited until he was at the window, one hand still at his side, before he calmly said, “sir, it’s not a good idea to shout at a police officer.” “But I was only wishing you a Happy Thanks-” “Even then. It’s best to be safe. Now, take your keys out of the ignition and slowly hand me your license and registration.” “Of course,” said my husband. His saturation dimmed and his sharp edges rounded on the canvas in my mind, as if he were hiding himself in a guiltless gray. The young officer studied the ID’s carefully, matching them without issue to those from his car’s computer. The hair was different, and the beard too. He looked rather more ordinary in person than on his license, but it was definitely his. The officer handed back the ID’s and took out his pen and notepad. “Do you know why I pulled you over?” My husband straightened up in his seat. “Is it my taillight, sir? I do apologize for that.” “That and you’re not wearing your seat belt.” The officer took a roundabout approach toward the brake light on the off-chance my husband, thinking himself a cop-killer, turned his ignition and put his foot down. 59

“What happened?” the officer asked. “Oh, I imagine some unmonitored children did that, perhaps with a baseball bat or some other ‘misa-appropriate’ toy. They’ve been at it for some time, defiling all the mailboxes in the neighborhood.” The officer scribbled something down. “Did you report it?” “No sir, not yet, not with the holiday and all. I figured it best not to bother my local constabulary until tomorrow. Besides, I have no shortage of quandaries to solve today.” “Care to expand?” “It’s my wife—she’s bedridden with a fever. I’m trying to hurry back to take care of her.” More scribbling. “Utah’s back that way,” said the officer, pointing in the opposite direction. “Yes sir. She’s with her mother up in Portland.” The officer tilted his neck to get a better view inside the cab. “And you stopped for breakfast?” He pointed his pen at the McMess in the passenger’s seat. “I’m afraid that’s my big Thanksgiving feast. Family comes first, you know—had no choice but to cancel dinner on account of my wife’s illness.” I’m back in Salt Lake, at our house in Sugar House. I think the bleeding has stopped but still, I cannot move. He thinks I’m dead, or otherwise I’d be sitting in a room at St. Marks, listening to him spin some yarn for the doctors. Someone will rescue me soon, one of our neighbors or my mother, coming over with a pumpkin pie in hand. They have to. But where is he going? The painting does not tell me, not yet. I can see what he wants me to see but there is more. He can hide his hues, but I know this model, I know his face. And this style, it’s clear, unidealized, truthful. It’s mine. And the fever, it’s back too. The canvas expands. I can see the thankful customers down at the Walmart Photo Center in Millcreek where I used to work. I can see myself at parties with my old college friends, having too much to drink, getting naked and and painting on each other’s backs. I was an undergrad at the College of Fine Arts, University of Utah, with a 3.7 GPA. No one in my family had ever graduated better than high school. I loved art history—its politics and waves of revolution, giving way to new modes of viewing the world. 60

Most of my friends did nudes or landscapes—the Wasatch Mountains, Bridal Veil, Mirror Lake—an easy excuse to see tits or get out of class. I sat on the porch and painted the mailman in short bursts every day as he went on his routine. I painted the crowds that gathered outside Temple Square in the winter, impatiently pushing to see the giant Christus replica. I painted my mother, sitting in her beige, cushioned recliner, crocheting a granny square afghan for no one in particular. Painting, school, my friends and partying were my life. I was happy. I was thoughtful. I was aware. It was never love—he didn’t even like me. My job paid poorly, so why not quit? Wouldn’t you be happier at home? My paintings were pretentious, outdated. No one goes for that kind of stuff anymore. My grades were good, but it was art school, not real school. They’ll give anyone an A so long as they pay tuition. He kept trying to get me pregnant and was quick to anger at my excuses. Your mother wants you to have one, you know that. Why don’t you want to make her happy? I hated guns so he bought six of them—put two in his truck, three in the bedroom closet beside my shoes and one on his person, concealed as the good law allows. I couldn’t stand country music or westerns, so we watched them all the time and the radio was always set to KSOP-FM, “Utah’s #1 Country Station”. He knew none of the words, never hunted, didn’t have a single pair of cowboy boots before he knew I couldn’t stand the sound their spurs made. And he always wanted mt to paint him. That was impossible. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, keep his shape the same, couldn’t stop changing shifting in the shade, altering his inner self. I’m just sitting here, he’d say, but that was never the case—he was always doing something else, emitting some illusion, reflecting from some imitation of real life. He was already a painting; a cheap replica. How does one make genuine a forgery? He hated my friends, too. So full of themselves. Mostly queers, except of course the ones that just want to screw you. They don’t really like you anyway. You said it yourself, they just want to see tits. He used me against me. His lot were the type our bishop would have run out from his pews—bikers, truckers, guys from those anti-government “patriot” groups. My husband had an unemployed cousin who he claimed was the boss of one, the Oregon Militia something. It never bothered him that all his friends hit on me. He had a hot, young wife. Good for the ego. We were “invited” to a gangbang. He dragged me there and after, bought me a single pink carnation with an unsigned card. I was too ashamed to see my friends after that, to finish school, to show my face. 61

He might have told them. He might have told everyone. I dropped out and put my easels in storage. My mother’s phone calls grew infrequent. Instead, she sent stuff: shopping bags, potholders, Afghan throws and winter clothes—pleasantly-colored cushions to pad the walls I might have otherwise broken through. I’d become a housewife, in need of housewife things. Outside of that, she didn’t know who I was anymore. Neither did I. He had the job so the house, the car and the truck were his. He was the husband, so my hobbies were his, our friends were his, my protection was his, all our money was his, my body was his and so was my name. I had no income, no education and no life. What else is left of a person? The inside? Instinct? That little voice in the back of your head that says, ‘get out of there? That voice is wrong, he told me. Your forehead’s hot or you’re not feeling good. That’s just the fever talking. The fever, talking. I was always sick with it, he said, a kind of mental sick—and had best stop thinking and go lie down. But it was my body that told the truth. Fever isn’t sickness—it’s conservation, it’s how your system fights infection, destroys intruders and heals itself. A fever is an alarm, the billowing flame of a lighthouse in a storm. “I’m sorry to hear all that,” said the young officer, betraying his own instinct to heap sympathy upon my husband. “I hope your wife feels better soon.” “Thank you, officer. That’s very kind of you,” said my husband. “I’ll still have to write you a ticket though.” “Yes sir, I understand. I’ll have that light fixed as soon as I get to where I’m going. Believe me.” “See that you buckle up too. It’s best to be safe.” With that, the patrolman ripped a citation from his pad, tucked away his pen and returned to his vehicle. My husband furrowed his brow and let loose a fuck you from under his breath. His hues darkened once again. He read the fine. It was for $25.00. It’s all on the canvas; a thousand little details, each awry in some way. I can see his superfluous lies—where I left my keys or when I did the laundry last, the stories about my friends who were trash talking behind your back, my taste, at once somehow both trashy and pretentious, and my quirks which were all objectively annoying, and no one liked. There were so many moments that didn’t happen like that and so many unique parts of myself I was proud of that actually, you got from me. 62

If another man looked at me, clearly, I was being a whore. If they looked away, it was because I needed to lose a few pounds. Once he had his stamp at the end of my name, I was no good at anything he didn’t want me doing and the best at anything he could take credit for. My job was to stay at home, avoid eye contact with the mailman, have dinner ready, and wear whatever pink piece of string or spiky leather garbage he was into that week. And he hid it all, safe and secure, right here where no one would find it: in my head. There’s a gash in that head now, paint pouring out, and my body’s alight with rage. The canvas is showing me my life and the fever’s keeping me from death. What happened to the brake light on that truck? He’d probably say it was just an accident but for once, he isn’t telling the story. After that, my terrific husband passed by Boise and through Nampa, Idaho around noon, looking for any car dealership or auto-body shop he could find with the lights on. There were none. An hour later he crossed the Oregon border at Ontario. His stomach started aching, and that other thing too. The sign for Exit 335 to Huntington designated itself as a rest stop so he pulled in, gathered up all the garbage from the passenger seat and made for the bathroom. As he left, he noticed an old payphone dug into a wooden booth nearby. The charge was fifty cents. He tossed his waste into a bin, pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his wallet and dialed. “Hey. Yeah, it’s me, your cousin. And to you too. No, actually, I’m heading to you. No, I can’t say more. That’s good. About four hours. No problem. See you soon.” The son of a bitch. He actually said something true. The future sketches itself in an outline of chalk: he plans to come back here with his crazy-ass cousin, a bunch of good ol’ boys, a tarp, some shovels, bleach, and who knows what else, before midnight. They’ll get rid of me before sun-up, before the mailman comes, before my mother has a chance to stop by with Thanksgiving leftovers. Well I can see you, do you know that, you asshole? I know what you’re planning! An elderly couple shrugged their shoulders and recoiled as they walked by, as if shaken by my outburst. They’re traveling for the holiday and I’ve disturbed them somehow. The wife turns to her husband, just another family man late for dinner, what else is new? Everything my husband says is innocent. Everything is a suggestion or a half-compliment or not really what he meant. You old people, you be fooled if you like but I won’t be, not anymore. That glass is shattered. 63

Eyes closed, body prone on the concrete floor of my garage, I scream. A drop of blood escapes my mouth to the canvas and lands on my husband’s forehead. He doesn’t notice it, but it’s there, a tiny speck of red acrylic, as if it were dabbed from the tip of a rigger brush. I scream again but he can’t hear me. He never could and he never wanted to. It doesn’t matter. I know just what he would say. You’re just imagining things. Unconscious people can’t talk and they sure as shit can’t see what anyone else is doing. Your forehead is hot. Your face is red. You’ve got fever again. Lay down and I’ll take care of you. But it can’t go that way this time. I’m dead if it does. If I could only show that old couple, or better yet, the police, the details of this canvas. I see the danger that awaits me but I cannot move to help myself. Why haven’t they stopped him? They need to stop him, maybe kill him, that terrific husband of mine. From the rest stop, he continued north-west on I-84 through Pleasant Valley, Baker City, North Powder, and La Grande. I see all the signs, the road, the other drivers. In Oregon, the prairie broke upon rising hills and dense coniferous forests which encroached above and all around, shielding my husband’s cab from the eye of the sun. Cars passed by or he passed them—a cable truck with its bucket crane folded in front, a semi carrying Utahn computer parts to Seattle, a white campervan hauling a singing family of five. None of them had any idea who he was, where he was going or what he planned to do to me. Again I shouted to them through the canvas. The semi seemed to swerve for a moment, and the camper driver wiped my hot perspiration from his face, but my husband’s wave and smile drew far more attention. The semi blew its horn. The campervan honked a little tune. My husband seemed nice to them. A good driver, pleasant looking too. Oh, and the poor guy had a busted brake light on Thanksgiving. 84 split in two and he took the left half, Route 244, into Oregon’s mountainous interior. There were fewer cars out there; more trees. The time was ten after three in the afternoon. Families were setting their tables for the big meal or stretching out and watching the NFL pre-game. They were happy or miserable, arguing about the last election or next year’s primaries, complaining about work, complimenting the canned cranberry sauce or introducing their boyfriends, girlfriends and themfriends to mom, dad and their stink-eyed grandpas. They had at least one thing in common. They were all alive, all warm in their homes, off the road, safe, and oblivious of my husband. 64

Only one state trooper was watching that stretch of highway on Thanksgiving. She was a thirty-nine-year old sergeant and two-time divorcee. Her kids were spending the holiday with their dad’s family, and her mother—whom she visited that morning—was asleep with her electric blanket and a dollop of mashed potato on her chin at the Timber Valley Care Center in Pendleton. Her name was Noreen Fenster-Welch, she had three misuse-of-force complaints in her file and an ounce of cheap whiskey in her coffee. Noreen spotted my husband coming around the corner near Pilot Rock at twenty above the speed limit and punched both her siren and her red and blues. She never even noticed his brake light. The shoulders were shallow, so he drifted down the road for a couple miles, looking back at her in his rear-view mirror, ignoring her commotion as much as he was able. A woman cop, he muttered, reaching a third time for his ID’s. When the embankment dropped, my husband pulled over, half his tires on the pavement, the other half in the dirt. He looked back to spot the cop’s figure as she exited her car and didn’t notice he was pushing aside the snub-nosed revolver in his glove compartment until it fell with a clunk on the floor. Darting forward to grab it, he was caught in the neck by his safety belt, which yanked him backward. Motherfucker. He unbuckled, gathered the IDs, reached for the gun and “Sir, drop the pistol.” Noreen stood beside his window with her gun pointed at his neck. “Sorry officer, I was just-” “Drop the pistol!” she repeated. I scream into the canvas again. Shoot him, Noreen! He’s got a gun. He’s gonna kill somebody. But my husband, always knowing what’s best for him, quickly let go. “Now slowly step out of the vehicle.” Without making a peep, he opened the latch and stepped out of the cab, raising his hands high into the air. Blessed, as always, he’d only seen these things in the movies. Shoot him anyway, Noreen. The painting shows me what David and your father did to you. They got away with it too. This is your chance for revenge. Put a bullet in him. Noreen stood four feet away with her Smith and Wesson trained on my terrific husband.

She twitched; a kink in her neck, a squint in her eyelid, an itch behind her ear. She can hear me. She can hear something. Noreen, help me, he’s trying to kill me. If you let him go, he’ll drive up to see his dead-beat cousin, explain everything, and drive back here to Salt Lake to finish and bury me. No one would know. It would he him telling the story again, like it always was. He’d just say I took off, that I was crazy, sick, that I’d threatened to leave him for years. Of course I threatened it. It was him who drove me crazy, him who gave me this blazing fever. Noreen, this is our chance. It’s Thanksgiving. There’s no one around for fifty miles. It would be your word against no one’s. No he-said, she-said bullshit, not this time. You have the final word. Make it goodbye, asshole. “Officer, I have a legal permit for that weapon,” said my husband. “It just fell out of the glove box while I was looking for my license.” Oh sure, tell the truth when it suits you, you bastard. “I’m just a family man trying to make it home for Thanksgiving. I was hoping to make it by five...” he slowly turned his wrist and glanced at his watch. “Still could.” His lips dipped into his jowls and his eyes widened, bright colors filled his form, soft flourishes swirled the brush across his face; a big, furry puppy dog, noble and kind. No. Fuck that. This is my canvas. I grab the brush and slash at his face with crimson and brown. The colors seem to hurt him—he winced and growled. This canvas; this style, unidealized and true, it’s mine. I have been painting it all along. The pistol in Noreen’s hand started to shake. I take the brush to her and draw out the barrel of her gun. There, now it’s certain to blow him away. With a long dab and two sets of new lines, I spread her stance to withstand the recoil. Then I dip the bristles in yellow and swirl it with orange and red—a muzzle flash, the last thing my husband should see in this world. But Noreen’s hand is still shaking. She’s afraid, afraid to kill. I could take that away from her, draw her conscience clean and her aim steady. But what would happen to Noreen afterward, after I’ve stopped painting her, stopped making her my subject? Would she be able to live with what I made her do? If I change her, will she be like me, trapped in a still life forever? This is a terrific power. A terrible power. If it was his, he would gladly use it against her. He did far more to me with less. She does not deserve that. Noreen, I’m sorry. I put down my brush. In a heartbeat, Sergeant Fenster-Welch shook off her daze, eased back the trigger of her weapon and holstered it in her belt. She took in a deep breath. 66

“It’s okay sir. Open carry is legal here in Oregon. I guess you spooked me is all. Seems it was just an honest mistake.” “Yes officer. I think it’s safe to say we spooked each other just then,” my husband said. “Do you have your license and registration?” “Sure do. They’re on the passenger seat.” What’s the use, Noreen? They won’t tell you anything. A driver’s license doesn’t say “wife-beater” or “gas-lighter” or “narcissistic sociopath”. The State of Utah, of any state, doesn’t care about those things. It doesn’t test for them like blood types. None of that is written in the bottom right hand corner. Instead, it says, “organ donor”. Noreen handed back his ID’s and wrote my husband a ticket for speeding. He volunteered the brake light. She, still shaken, pretended to care and let him go with another warning. Three police stops. His loses: $190.00 and one wife. There was just seventy miles to go before he reached his cousin’s compound outside Lonestone, Oregon; population 22 people and 340 firearms. No police roamed the roads between them. It was four o’clock. My husband put away his IDs and his revolver, strapped his safety belt across his chest and drove on, carefully. Route 244 tightened and became NF Road 053 as he passed into Umatilla National Forest, the western woodland of the Blue Mountains. Lewis and Clark passed through there on their way to the Pacific. So did the travelers of the Oregon Trail. They found gold and silver in Umatilla, fresh water, strong lumber, elk, moose, big-horn sheep, wild turkeys, salmon and trout—a natural landscape. The forest’s colors appealed to me, so I played with them as my husband drove by; adding a flourish here, a dab of paint there, to form a brewing storm cloud, an aching old tree, and endless tangles of thorny vines stretching every which way. I threw a hungry vulture into the sky and watched it circle above his slow-moving Toyota. I made the pine branches wave goodbye as he passed. As he drove towards the setting sun, I engulfed it in a sanguine glow, waiting for him. Looking down, I see a quaint yellow stripe kept him in the right lane. There was no shoulder, so a knee-high railing stood guard to keep drivers from veering into the shallow ditch on the roadside. The pavement itself was smooth, having scarcely been touched and being far too small for large vehicles. I’ll have none of that. 67

A little turpentine and a palette knife, summoned in my mind, will do the trick. The road wasn’t smooth: no, it was rough, with many bumps and potholes, accounting for years of erosion and neglect. And there was no railing at all—not for such a desolate route—only an inch or two of gravel separating NFR 053 from a sudden, six foot drop on either side. Rickety firs towered over my husband’s cab, some longing to snap free and stretch their limbs cross the road. I don’t need Noreen for this. I don’t need anyone. I can flurry my brush over the sidewalls of his tires and suddenly, they’re sucking nails. Are they going to argue? Or maybe I’ll plunge that vulture through his windshield, splatter his face in claws, feathers and shards of glass. No one really likes them anyway. Or better yet, the mountain itself—such a tired old soul—it should really lie down and crush his truck under an abyss of granite and dirt. There’s no law against a mountain doing that. That’d be just an accident. None of this is my style, I know. This isn’t mundane, every day, perhaps not even truthful. An avalanche is a force majeure, and I am not God. But they do happen. The famous disasters, captured in ink, happened both in real life and an artist’s imagination. Vesuvius really did erupt and killed thousands. London really did burn, and half the city was destroyed. My husband really did all those things to me. And it’s Thanksgiving. He’s the only one on the road. The family man. There’s no way of knowing how long my fever will last. I may be dead in an hour or in a day. But first, I’m going to finish this painting.

David Harrison Horton

[11]

To count friends on fingers scrimshawed bone requirement —I am afraid the call cannot be placed to place —Marco —Polo —Marco —Marco

Nick Conrad

Turkey Vultures Somehow overnight they have returned to their favorite tree, which each year seems to welcome a few more of these white knuckled sleepers. Culinary coroners, they huddle at dusk round road kill. Gimlet eyed, they dine on spleen, pick clean even the spine. Their shadows haunt blue sky days. Kite-like, they ride the thermals, eyeing all the while each patient’s progress.

R. Stempel

Big Wins For Poetry I’m in the car, behind the wheel—I’m a good driver if alone—of my 2013 midnight blue Sonata that isn’t really mine but my dad’s but it’s the only car I’ve ever driven and maybe the only car I ever will drive so when it inevitably dies—we all do—I’ll sink with it into rich soil—but that’s a story for another poem. I’m behind the wheel—it doesn’t matter where I’m going but for the sake of suspense, I’ll say I’m going very far away—and I pass not one not two not three but four dead deer. I contemplated telling you there were only three because it feels more symbolic but I’m trying more often to tell the truth. So, four dead deer, fully intact, their limbs folded into bows like a roadside attraction. I always notice death, no matter how small. I can spot squirrel guts kneaded into the asphalt when it bears no resemblance to the body. I almost didn’t notice the deer for that reason—they called too much attention to themselves and I’ve trained myself to avert spectacle. But there’s not much else to look at when behind the wheel and going very far away. I guess I don’t always notice death but instead the meat it leaves behind, cut and diced by disinterest. I say, A squirrel died here—dead as a verb not an adjective because I fear I’ve bought the tautology. Here lies a body—the faceless description an act of erasure, the body a weapon of spectacle. So, these deer, their limbs folded like ribbons, these deer lining the highway in the diorama we call reason, ask to be taken in—all four of them—ask us politely to look. I simply can’t wrap my head around the future.

Cameron Morse

Dying Small (excerpt 17) OK but what if I’m not ready to die a small being moment after moment? Sleepless nights my head hurts because of the tumor in my head I know there’s so much left for me to do. I know I’m not ready

to live in the realm of the Buddha nature, not ready to empty my bag of rocks at the foot of the Japanese maple, my pink granite and obsidian shards, my smooth stone painted with the face of a buffalo, not ready to let go of today’s bouquet of bony branches torn from the hand of the oak tree, the clenched fist. Forgive me, Father, I would say, in another tradition, for leaving the baby to cry in her crib. I am so thoroughly spent, wasted, yet another book is always waiting inside me, and moment after moment the poems arrive, filter in and take their seats.

Contributers Artisan baker by trade, Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi has been published in over 60 literary journals worldwide. Winner of the Scribes Valley Short Story Writing Contest, he was also a finalist in the Blood Orange Review Literary Contest, and was awarded the Popular Vote in the Best of Rejected Manuscripts Competition. In addition to several short pieces, he is currently working on his debut novel. Daisy Bassen is a poet and practicing physician who graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, McSweeney’s, and [PANK] as well as multiple other journals. She was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest, and the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. She was nominated for the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family. Emi Bergquist is a Brooklyn based poet originally from Idaho whose work often explores identity, family, grief, and spirituality. Emi is an active associate of the Poetry Society of New York, a regular cast member of The Poetry Brothel, an editor of Milk Press Books, and is a current collaborator with the Pandemic Poems Project. Emi has work in What Rough Beast, Oxford Public Philosophy, Oroboro, Passengers Journal, For Women Who Roar, and The Nervous Breakdown. Emi regularly writes commissioned poetry and donates a portion of all proceeds to charities and social justice organizations. Jackie Chicalese is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill, Italian Americana, and elsewhere. 73

Nick Conrad’s poems continue to appear in national and international journals, most recently in current issues of Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Cider Press Review, Concho River Review, The MacGuffin, North Dakota Quarterly, Visions-International and The Wayne Literary Review and have been accepted for a future issues of Blue Lake Review and Common Ground Review. His first book, Lake Erie Blues, appeared in late August, 2020 from Urban Farmhouse Press as part of their Crossroads Poetry Series. Darren C. Demaree is the author of fifteen poetry collections, most recently “Burning It Down”, (December 2020, 8th House Publishing). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, and Ted Kooser. Recent work appears or is forthcoming from Antithesis Journal, Santa Clara Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Lisa DiFruscio is a freelance writer and journalist, whose work has been published in various poetry anthologies, newspapers, and online media and websites. She has also worked for media agencies as a public relations specialist, editor, and copywriter. She is currently working on her first novel, and when not writing, enjoys spending time on her 5 acre estate with 29 maltipoos, and one standard poodle. Hollie Dugas lives in New Mexico. Her work has been selected to be included in Barrow Street, Reed Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Redivider, Pembroke, Salamander, Poet Lore, Watershed Review, Mud Season Review, Little Patuxent Review, Chiron Review, Louisiana Literature, and CALYX. Hollie has been a finalist twice for the Peseroff Prize at Breakwater Review, Greg Grummer Poetry Prize at Phoebe, Fugue’s Annual Contest, and has received Honorable Mention in Broad River Review. Additionally, “A Woman’s Confession #5,162” was selected as the winner of Western Humanities Review Mountain West Writers’ Contest (2017). Recently, Hollie has been nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets 2021. She is currently a member on the editorial board for Off the Coast. 74

Issy Flower is a writer and actor, in her third year at Durham University. Her journalism and prose writing have been published by Palatinate, the Bubble, and From the Lighthouse. Other prose has been seen in Stonecrop Magazine, Lucent Dreaming and the Common Breath ‘The Middle of a Sentence’ anthology. Upcoming projects include a short drama for the BBC. She keeps up a healthy twitter feed at @IssyFlower. E. García-López was born in Spanish Harlem. His short stories and nonfiction have appeared or upcoming in The Bitter Oleander, Desert Voice, and the anthology Operation Homecoming, among others. He has an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. Noah Goldzer is an English teacher, cat lover, pun slinger, and MFA graduate of Emerson College. His short story “Fatbergs in the Pipe” won first place at Emerson’s Graduate Student Awards in 2019 and was published by the Raw Art Review in 2020. His debut novel “Seek” was published by Martin Sisters Publishing in 2014. He is currently working on a historical fiction memoir entitled: “The King of Man.” Robin Gow is a trans poet and young adult author. They are the author of OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL DEGENERACY (Tolsun Books 2020) and the chapbook HONEYSUCKLE (Finishing Line Press 2019). Their first young adult novel, A MILLION QUIET REVOLUTIONS is slated for publication winter 2022 with FSG. Gow’s poetry has recently been published in POETRY, New Delta Review, and Washington Square Review. Gow received their MFA from Adelphi University where they were also an adjunct instructor. Gow is a managing editor at The Nasiona. Tamara Gray lives and works in upstate New York, where she is from. She enjoys unstructured time, art, writing, and, lately, running. Her blog may be an exercise in histrionics or an outrage. She has previously published poems in Cutbank, Indefinite Space and Skidrow Penthouse. unfamousairenueva.com. David Harrison Horton is a Beijing-based writer, artist, editor and curator. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Albany Poets, Otoliths, Ethel, Punk Noir, and Pennsylvania English, among others.

B. P. Herrington is a native of the Big Thicket region of Texas. His studies took him to the Royal Academy of Music where he earned a Ph.D. in music composition. He is an emerging writer whose work has recently appeared in Post Road Magazine, Euphony Journal, Pamplemousse, and Adelaide Magazine.” Brooke Dwojak Lehmann is a poet whose work focuses on recovery, disability and conscious femininity. Her poetry has been published by Tipton Journal, Parentheses Journal, Black Fox Literary Magazine, 805 Lit, Streetlight Magazine and others. She resides in Charlotte, NC after a few years of adventure in the Pacific Northwest. Find more of her work at brookelehmann.com John T. Leonard is an award-winning writer, English teacher, and poetry editor for Twyckenham Notes. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University. His previous works have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, december, Chiron Review, North Dakota Review, Roanoke Review, Punt Volat, High Shelf Press, Rappahannock Review, Levee Magazine, Mud Season Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Genre: Urban Arts, Stonecoast Review, and Trailer Park Quarterly. His work is forthcoming in The Showbear Family Circus, Passengers Journal, and The Oakland Review. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife, three cats, and two dogs. You can follow him on Twitter at @jotyleon and @TwyckenhamNotes. Al Maginnes’s eight collection Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift was published in 2020 by Redhawk Press. A new collection The Beasts That Vanish is forthcoming from Blue Horse Press. Recent poems have appeared in Louisiana Literature, Lake Effect, Jabberwock, and many other places. He teaches at Louisburg College and lives in Raleigh NC. Hartford native Melissa McEwen is a poet and multiple Pushcart nominee, whose poems have been published in various anthologies and literary publications online and in print such as The Connecticut Literary Anthology, Connecticut River Review, Rattle, and Blue Fifth Review. Bruce Meyer is author of more than sixty books of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and non-fiction. His stories have won or been shortlisted for numerous international prizes. He lives in Barrie, Ontario. 76

Cameron Morsee is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review, a poetry editor at Harbor Editions, and the author of six collections of poetry. His first, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Far Other (Woodley Press, 2020). He holds and MFA from the University of Kansas City—Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and two children. For more information, check out cameronmorsepoems.wordpress.com Vincent Antonio Rendoni is a writer based out of Seattle, Washington. He has a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Fiction Southwest, Burrow Press, Atticus Review, and Litro. Juheon (Julie) Rhee is a 15-year-old student and is currently attending International School Manila. During her free time, she enjoys reading Agatha Christie’s mysteries and hanging out with her friends. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in K’in Literary Journal, Indolent Books, 580 Split, Lunch Ticket, Cleaver Magazine among others, and has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Programs. Max Sheridan is the author of DILLO (Shotgun Honey, 2018) and a few other stories. He lives and writes in Nicosia, Cyprus. Find him at maxsheridan.com. R. Stempel is a genderqueer Ukrainian-Jewish poet and PhD candidate in English at Binghamton University. They are the author of the chapbooks Interiors (Foundlings Press, 2021) and BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT (Finishing Line Press, 2022), and their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Porter House Review, New Delta Review, SPORAZINE, Penn Review, and elsewhere. They currently live in New York with their rabbit, Diego. J.B. Stone is a neurodivergent/autistic slam poet, writer and reviewer residing in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of A Place Between Expired Dreams And Renewed Nightmares (Ghost City Press 2018) and INHUMAN ELEGIES (Ghost City Press 2020). He is the Editor-In-Chief/Reviews Editor at Variety Pack. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peach Mag, [PANK], Frontier Poetry, The Buffalo News, and elsewhere. 77

Anna Trujillo lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Her fiction has appeared in Ruminate, Relief, and Two Hawks Quarterly and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. Cathy Ulrich loved reading Nancy Drew when she was young, but she never really liked the Hardy Boys. Her work has been published in various journals, including Chestnut Review, Whale Road Review and Wigleaf. David Xiang is a poet currently studying at Harvard Medical School. At Harvard College, he studied under Jorie Graham and Josh Bell. His work has been published in Cream City Review, the Harvard Advocate, Magma Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, Roadrunner Review, among others. David was awarded the 2019 Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize in Poetry, awarded to a Harvard undergraduate for the best poem. In 2015, David served as a 2015 National Student Poet, the nation’s highest honor for youth poets.

Noctua Review

Southern Connecticut State University

The Noctua Review is the annual art and 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 XV in the fall of 2021. Past contributors must wait one year before submitting again. Visit us at 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, composition 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; -have the experience and depth of knowledge to become university instructors of creative and expository writing; -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, proofreaders, 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. We celebrate these writers by bringing them back to campus for a public reading of their work. The M.F.A. Program’s visiting writers’ and editors’ series brings nationally-renowned writers to campus to read from their work. Recent and upcoming writers include Xhenet Aliu, Steve Almond, Elise Blackwell, Andrew Hudgins, Randall Horton, Brock Clarke, Marilyn Nelson, Stewart Onan, Tom Perrotta, Alan Michael Parker, Michelle Richmond, Allison Joseph, and January O’Neill. For more information on Southern’s MFA program, please visit: www.southernct.edu/program/english-mfa-creative-writing.

Noctua Review Issue 14, 2021

Articles inside

Pentimento by Noah Goldsher

Contributors

Turkey Vultures by Nick Conrad

Dying Small by Cameron Morse

Gramps by Anna Trujillo

Several Scenes at Once by Tamara Gray

How It Comes to Us by Al Maginnes

The Red Thing by Issy Flower

Secondhand Smoke by Brooke Dwojak Lehmann

The moon that used to follow me in the car by Juheon (Julie) Rhee

familial consciousness by Robin Gow

My Nombres by E. García-López

Sparrows by Bruce Meyer

A Boy Named Neither by Vincent Antonio Rendoni

Xylomancy by Jackie Chicalese

Grief by Lisa DiFruscior