The Plague Issue

Paperfinger

June 2014

The Plague Issue

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Paperfinger

June 2014

The Plague Issue

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creatives.

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Zipporah Sky

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Zipporah Sky Art

Kristiane Weeks

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myself. My art reflects my heart and personal growth. It is very helpful for my health and well being, [it’s] a wonderful meditation that allows creative energy to be expressed and shared.

I grew up inspired that my mom was a painter; it was the best thing people described about her. I wasn’t raised by her, so anything I found was gold--I felt that our art connected us. I love to travel and explore nature, and live as consciously as I can. I am always changing and wanting to be the best version of

I love Mark Henson and Gustav Klimt’s work. They both are masters at painting dreams.

Their subjects are gorgeous and very detailed, which takes patience! I admire their patience and passion.The colors they use together are beautifully vibrant, and I am a fan of whimsical color combinations. I recall drawing all my classmates in school as fairies. They would ask me to draw up all sorts of versions of them selves, as fairies. For example if they were really into cats, I would combine cat fea-

ipporah Sky Walker is twenty-two years old and full of what it really means to live. While exploring her work, we asked her about herself and how her art expresses this life-consciousness portrayed through her work (be sure to check her out on Facebook!): http://on.fb.me/1hkK9aW

tures with wings. I experience a lot of joy being able to make someone smile, so when I am asked to paint something for someone I am sure to ask their input. It is all about working together, bringing to life what is inside our imaginations. I usually use acrylics, so when I have tried Oils, it was def out of my Zone. It turned out well, just took longer. Perfect practice for patience!

I also enjoy massage therapy and dance, together with paint, these healing modalities have changed my life. I envision integrating them into a life-long practice that will support myself and others.

We are right there with you, Zipporah!

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FEATURE

short stories 10

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Chatting Brandi David

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nly two stories have been added to my News Feed > Most Recent since I last checked some-odd-amount-ofminutes-ago:

One: Ex-boyfriend’s Best-

Friend’s Girlfriend shared

a funny video: “Slow Loris eating a Rice Ball :D” It doesn’t sound funny, it doesn’t look funny, but she seems to think it’s funny. A creepy, humanoid lemur-like creatu re with cartoonish eyes stares out from the screen but appears to be lacking comedic sensibility.

“loves being wide awake at 4 am.”

Or loved being awake, about an hour ago. Maybe. She’s a popular girl, her status garnered eight likes and several comments.

At Refresh: the correspondence site had little to yield:

Teenaged Cousin: *~* just give me a reason <3 just a little bit’s enough <3 just a second we’re not broken just bent <3 and we can learn to love again *~* Unfamiliar. * * * * *

Former Drinking Buddy: picture: black bean soup: a blue bowl with dark goop and cilantro slivers and motionless bubbles.

Blinkadink!

The noise is misleading as nothing seems to have happened.

My timeline is sparse.

Appetizing.

One Like (not mine) and continued scrolling.

Bend in the River Brass Band Spring Fling Concert: invited

by Former Roommate, Former Roommate’s Husband: March: Evansville.

My status from earlier—“I want Criterion”—has one Like from Conference Colleague From Three (Or Four?) Years Ago.

Two: Bombastic Girl From Class

Could be fun.

Beneath, I made a to-do

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list and failed to accomplish anything on it (besides write said todo list).

Another Classmate gently prods me to respond to another post on another website (@Brandi, check this out!).

The bloody mess of my arm after My Pet Rabbit bit me for taking away her

cheeseburger toy is followed immediately with:

Favorite Trombone Player from High School’s video of a bunny shower.

Some pictures of pies and vegetable trays.

A post from Former Roommate, telling me

about bassoons and her daughter.

A picture of homemade danish.

A music video.

A cat.

* * * * * Waking up around Nothing new on my News Feed > Most Recent.

For a while, I just laid there. I have no new e-mail, not even in my spam folder; my web-comics are read, feedly won’t update for me anymore.

Open Messages: Hours ago my phone blinkadink!ed from Boss on Messenger: Can u grab these going in tomorrow from mish on your way in:

71D040608MF00324 Myers archives

71C011209CC00745 smith on 12-3-12

nothing on the concert;

a text-based karaoke battle beneath the song lyrics

“Its in the stars its been written in the scars on our hearts (;”

“we’re not broken just bent and we can learn to love again <3 haha omg love this song!!!!”.

The Sidebar: shop at ModCloth; get an American Express card; find a boyfriend using Zoosk.

Refresh.

Nothing changed but the digital time.

Scrolling.

Bombastic Girl From Class “loves being wide awake at 4 am.”

The comments pop up, they’re about an hour old.

“I could be doing homework, but instead I’m trying to fall back asleep by playing with my phone…clearly it’s working well.”

Like.

“I’m always up at 4am. I have to be at work at 5am.”

No like.

Five am is always a bad time to be awake after all.

“I usually get up around 7:30ish. I’m going to hate it when my alarm goes off this morning!”

I should say something.

Like.

“Me too, I was up at 3!”

Like.

Scrolling, the News Feed > Most Recent reveals:

A few Likes and comments on the soup “DE LICIOUS!”

“goin to the bar tonight?”

“Looks good, dude.”;

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Twitch of the Death Nerve

Kristiane Weeks

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NT. COUNTESS FREDRICA’S REMOTE MANSION – LIBRARY – DUSK An aged Countess Fredrica sighs, rolling her wheelchair, turning off lamps, through a darkening luxurious room.

Her red dress blends in with the Oriental rug as she wheels toward a large bay window. She looks across a shimmering, calm body of water surrounded by tall, wide trees for a moment.

She wheels away from the window, sighing again, and crosses the threshold to THE FOYER I’m sitting in the trunk of Brand on’s Honda Element, clutching a bottle of Gatorade, staring up at a tightly-pulled piece of thick cloth. The reels spun loudly while lasers traveled across cool black skies in the middle of nowhere, Florida. It was 11:30 pm on Halloween and the first film was beginning:

Bay of Blood (1971) by Mario Bava, the father of a breed of horror films known collectively as Giallo. He is the inspiration for campy-slasher body-count films like Friday the 13th (1980) and Halloween (1978). October’s cool breeze across my face and the blanket-of-stars ceiling felt like cuddling under blankets and watching The Shining as my nine-year-old self.

CUT TO:

Fredrica’s terrified face. She lets out a loud gasp. A black glovedhand wielding a long rope tied into a noose emerges from the dark, looping the noose around Fredrica’s neck. One gloved hand pushes her head forward while a black shoe simultaneously kicks her wheelchair backwards. The wheelchair rolls eerily away from her into the darkness. The rope, hanging low to the ground from the rafter,

swings lightly as she continues to gasp. She dies, her brown eyes and red mouth wide open, hands sweeping the carpet. I met the king of all classic horror, Brandon, at the Starbucks where we made espresso beverages for cranky old hags and talked about our favorite films together. He took a couple friends to the drive-in because he had free tickets—his reels were being used to show the marathon. He kept the car running and turned on the radio, tuning in to the station that matched the woman’s screaming face from the screen. Together we see brutal and attention-grabbing Italian horror, which is characteristically grueling and bloody throughout. The artistically crafted aspects adopted from Italy’s longstanding tradition of staged and articulated grand guignol, or naturalistic horror dramas, were enamoring: the plot line was mysterious yet logical, the

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finesse of costuming and the opulent reds, charming.

INT. C. FREDRICA’S MANSION – FOYER – DUSK The murderer removes his mask, wearing a thin moustache and a coy smile as he removes the gloves, he admires his work. A KNIFE flashes behind the moustached man. The blade is pointing down and swiftly lowers into his back. He gives out a short ‘myaahh’ as bright red stains his collared shirt. I was terrified and mystified. And I was determined to find more. The next day, Brandon and I sat down in his “Masterpiece Lair” and we sorted through a room of VHS tapes dedicated to horror. He gave me over 100 VHS tapes of knockoff tapings, reprints, and movies he was planning on giving to Goodwill for more space for higher-end VHS tapes and rare reels he could play at the next Halloween Horror Marathon.

CUT TO:

Another stabs falls into him in the same location in his back.

Then a gut stab. Blood smears across his face as it pours from his mouth. An ‘uft!’ is the last sound heard before tumbling to the ground, stopping under the woman still hanging from the rafter. He rolls, looking into her eyes as he dies, the thick, unusually bright blood trickles from his mouth; her arms swing around, just above his face.

Oh, it’s quite an image--two people, freshly murdered, one above the other, blood flowing out of their bodies into the open

world. It’s this type of emotionally-packed and beautifully articulated scene that makes me continuously searching for more beautiful concoctions of blood, mystery, and artfully crafted scenes. Going to a drivein theatre for an all-night movie marathon is also wuite an image.

Drive-in theatres are scarce these days, and finding ones outside of Ocala that hold vintage horror marathons are even fewer.

riff, and she wails. A heavy black CHAIN gripped by the third man comes into sight. The chain breaks skin across her dirty knee and spouts more blood before a last wail seeps from her mouth.I appreciate the scene, the bright colors and unusually bright red.

It may not be tasteful, but it does make me feel something icky—I always cringe, my stomach sinks, but I also feel alive.

As I unpack my new collection of black and white, slasher, suspense, and French and Japanese cult classics Brandon makes sure to place all the Giallo films, or Gialli, on top. Gialli is my favorite genre of horror. It appeared in the cinematic “Golden Age” of Italy in the ‘60s that experimented with stylish camerawork and extravagant Italian landscapes for the backdrop. These extravagant gestures are never limited to the scenery. There is one tape strategically placed as the peak on this VHS collection: Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972).

INT. REMOTE MOUNTAINSIDE – OUTSIDE SHACK – NOON THREE MEN walk slowly towards FEMALE SUSPECT, closing in, never breaking their gazes with her. The father of the latest murdered child comes forward and swings a TWO-BY-FOUR over his head. It slams across the dark-haired, bronzed woman’s clavicle. Blood starts flowing.

Little rivers of bright scarlet swirl around her throat as she falls to the ground, wailing. Another blow slashes her bare mid-

CUT TO:

A long-shot of the white cliffs and puffs of green trees that surround a smooth stone highway.

The THREE MEN walk away into the trees, and the FEMAL SUSPECT begins a slow journey up the mountain. The cliff makes her mangled body look small as she crawls up the whiteness.

Her bloody, muddy hand grasps the final jagged rock at the top of the cliff. Her mouth is swollen with red and her left jaw is peppered with dirt. Cars pass by, the faces all looking at her, but ignoring her. Her lips kiss the ground permanently as she dies, black eyes open, still clinging to the white rock.

Since there is no access to midnight movie festivals at drive-ins, locating and watching rare VHS tapes is my way of getting back to sensations of a raw, strictly human, emotions.

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Attack of the Cannabinoids Kristiane Weeks

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t goes by many names, but I only heard it Spice. Spice is defined by the NIDA, National Institute on Drug Ab use, as a “dried, shredded plant material with chemical additives that are responsible for their psychoactive effects.” Spice is synthetic marijuana. These chemical additives, when analyzed, show the active ingredients are designer cannabinoid compounds, not naturally occurring compounds that real marijuana possesses. It’s these natural compounds that are extracted from marijuana for medicinal purposes.

There’s a lot of mixed feelings

and attention revolving around marijuana these days, but authentic marijuana looks like cookies compared to the harmful effects of completely legal cannabinoids. This is a problem for two main reasons: synthetic marijuana mimics some of the effects of getting high, such as a sense relaxation and elevated moods, so younger adults are drawn to it, and, and more importantly, this easily-abused pseudo-drug is chemically-ridden and more dangerous than (illegal) marijuana will ever be. In 2010 it was reported over 11,000 ER visits were associated with Spice.

“Oh, you’re going to the gas station? You’ve got to pick some spice up, it’s cheap,” my roommate Anthony said over the phone. I was on my way to meet up with him, and decided I would stop by the gas station on my way. I didn’t know what spice was then, but at the front counter I asked for Mr. Smiley.

Ten dollars got me a little jar with a screw-on lid about the size of a Carmex tub. The label had a yellow smiley face on it.

I gave Mr. Smiley to Anthony and watched as he took out an envelope of white rolling papers, dumped the contents of the tub, which looked like I

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could sprinkle in an olive oil bread dip or maybe in a red pasta sauce, and rolled four cigarette-like sticks. Anthony says, “It’s like weed, but it’s legal.”

When he lit one up, it smelled like potpourri, a little, with a hint of chemicals. I instantly received a headache. How could anyone put this in his/her body? It’s random leaves sprayed with mind-altering chemicals with compounds similar to THC. But it’s not herbal at all.

There are hundreds of types of synthetic marijuana being sold as incense and potpourri in gas stations all over the country. It’s terrifyingly difficult to regulate so it’s easy to buy in public. It stays under the radar because chemicals keep changing to fit regulation. The NIDA notes because the chemical composition of many products sold as Spice is unknown, it is likely that some varieties also contain substance that could cause “dramatically different effects than the user might expect, such as hallucination, paranoia, and violent outbursts.”

they go to sleep. I’ve experienced parties where the smoke emitting from my house could be mistaken for a house fire. No one ever hallucinated, became hostile, or had seizures.

The group on my porch smoked, and the potpourri scent took over the porch. They were smoking Spice. Everyone was standing around, having a great time, and then one girl wasn’t. I saw her, a warped piece of plywood, restrictively falling, eyes and mouth wide, voice saying nothing; then she’s flat on the ground, looking up into the cosmos, seeing things none of us are seeing. Within five minutes she was dropped back into reality. She said that’s what it felt like: like waking up after being hypnotized.

“I thought I was saying help me! Help me!

I couldn’t move, I could only hear a loud ringing and see waves. I didn’t even recognize anyone.”

This is a facet of synthetic marijuana that everyone should be aware of. Random plant bit sprayed with chemicals travel from the lungs into the bloodstream and carry the chemical to the brain and trigger paranoia and violence. A twenty-five year old recently arrested for hitting and pushing two children at the grocery store admitted to using synthetic marijuana earlier that day. The county police noted how synthetic marijuana makes people “delusional and paranoid; that’s been a common trend with people using.”

Being roommates with a drug dealer meant spending ample time with strangers who looked like dirty hippies or college kids. It also meant spending ample time around a lot of people high on marijuana. One beautiful Saturday I was out on the porch, reading for class. Soon, Anthony and a few strangers gathered around with a plastic bag. All I heard was Anthony say, “if you start to panic or hallucinate, remember you’re okay and that we’re here.” This was a common cautionary statement for anyone trying new and especially hallucinogenic drugs, so I didn’t think much of it at first. But then, I remembered marijuana doesn’t make one hallucinate. I’ve even seen people “too high” before. They either stare at the sky or floor or TV or dog or picture of a dog on a book, or

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Chardonnay

on Mother’s Day Ethan Reynolds

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o be honest, I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to write this. This is officially my second Mother’s Day not being able to celebrate with my mom.

Unfortunately this isn’t one of those “I’m too poor to fly home” situations. In October of 2012, my mother passed away following a long battle with a rare form of breast cancer.

It can be kind of awkward to talk about, but not in the way you think. The worst is when people apologize. “Oh, you don’t have a mother? I’m so sorry!” Errr…wrong. Fuck you very much. I do have a mother and she’s actually with me right now.

What most fail to realize is that my mother and I accomplished so much in our short 22 years together. We had a bond that can’t be replicated. She will never leave me. I’ve never had a best friend that I could share so many laughs with.

I’ll spare you with the inside jokes, but believe me – we had many. She taught me how to drink Chardonnay in the afternoon, to make fun of her “hillbilly” heritage.

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She taught me about everything — including the finer things in life. She showed me how to stay in a Ritz Carlton, how to order at five-star restaurants and most of all, how to be courteous and respectful to everyone. Did I mention she was a politician?

Haha, yes. My mother was a politician. She was a boss ’til the very end. I mean it, too. We campaigned up until the day of her death. I mean, we had “Ward for Senate” posters on display in the hospital room she died in.

The hope was that she would get better, and I think we all naively thought she would. Maybe, just maybe, a miracle would happen and she would climb out of bed, put on one of her signature St. John suits, and march her size 4 ass up to the Iowa State Capital.

But she was going to go. She had to. It was time to let go, and just like the woman she has always been, she was going to bow out gracefully.

What I have not mentioned is that I was in the middle of a terrible break up thousands of miles

away from Iowa, and dealing with a college that seemed to make no exceptions for my situation.

Selfishly, I wanted to stay in Florida – to deal with my (then)-boyfriend and finish my last semester of school. But just like the lady she had always been, my mother waited for me. I made last-minute accommodations to fly home and say goodbye.

As you can imagine, this was an extremely difficult situation. I still remember going for a pre-hospital drink with my sister. Upon entering the hospital room my bone-thin mother woke, smelling the alcohol on my breath, to tell me that she would like a bit of whatever I had. Her humor always killed me.

Within a few days of my arrival my mother passed, and just like any other 22 year old, I was completely clueless. My dumb-founded stepfather, sister and I were left to make arrangements.

I wore jeans to the funeral, which I will always regret. The whole Senate showed up. My mother is and was my style God – I cannot imagine her grimace when she saw my look for her last big day. Fortunately, like any other good mother, I

know she is forgiving and has looked after me in many shopping sprees since. Every time I score a major sale I give her credit — just a quick “Thanks mom!” before walking out the door.

What I have learned from this situation is life is going to come at you fast. Life is going to happen.

Bad jeans might not matter: Love does. It is up to you to maneuver and make whomever, or whatever you believe in, proud.

Don’t waste your time with people who don’t love you. If I’m allowed to have a second regret (beyond my outfit), it’s the time I’ve spent worrying about my then-boyfriend, who wasn’t quite right and never was (he found a new boy the week after we split). Move forward, appreciate life, and spend it with the people who adore you, and whom you adore.

This year, celebrate your mother and cheers a nottoo-cheap glass of Chardonnay for Senator Pat Ward and my family today.

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Looking

over my shoulder Greg Madden

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hicago neighborhoods can be deceiving; an old girlfriend, noticing my paranoia and constant backward glances, remarked, “This neighborhood doesn’t look any worse than most of Elkhart,” but didn’t have much to say when I pointed to the ugly pole in the middle of my courtyard: “See the camera on that pole? It’s fake. I know because three guys tackled me there, put a gun to my head, and stole my wallet. After I got mugged the landlord put up a fake camera to increase security.”

The stories from neighbors and, more often than not, from the papers easily illustrate the danger of walking without

vigilance: three students drunk on the beach at night—they got mugged; a neighbor, also a student, drenched with the stench of illicit flowers, walking through empty alleyways sometime between three and four in the morning—she got mugged; that work-out guy whose iPod is so loud you can decipher the lyrics he’s marching to—he got mugged; they stole his “Eye of the Tiger” marching anthem.

There were plenty of times when I could have very easily been mugged: I spent an entire summer working at a call center, stopping at the liquor store for a few bottles of headache-champagne, drinking with a hopeless crush, and walking home, alone, at God knows what hour of the morning. Filled with three-

dollar-a-bottle-champagne, the sense of futility from an unrequited crush, and the potential for a miserable morning-headache (arguably caused by both).

I was too distracted to look over my shoulder—yet, I made it home every night, safely; always finding my roommate, Carl, snoring in his bed.

The day I got mugged was different from those reckless, drunk nights. I had spent the better part of the afternoon grading papers in the library, and when the sun had all but disappeared I decided to walk home. I wasn’t wearing headphones; I was sober (as liberal as Loyola can be, the library doesn’t traffic in alcohol or illicit flowers); and I wasn’t walking down any lonely alleyways.

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It’s hard to know when they started following me—if, indeed, they were following me. They could have just as easily been hiding somewhere.

Entering my courtyard I remember hearing pounding feet and at first I thought it was Carl, drunk and on an endless search for shenanigans.

But when I felt hands pushing me down to the ground, when my body fell hard into the grass—I knew it wasn’t Carl.

I felt hands holding me down. I felt a cold metallic barrel pressed to my cheek. I felt hands rifling through my pockets, taking my wallet; innumerable hands gripping my arms and neck, preventing me from moving; even more hands tearing away my backpack. A backpack filled not with a laptop, or an iPod, or even expensive textbooks. A backpack filled with graded homework and lesson plan notes. A backpack filled with innumerable hours of work. Filled with nearly everything I did that week. Full of all the detailed comments I had made for my students. A backpack filled with essays, some hand written, many that my students could have been proud of—unreplaceable.

“Please, I’m a teacher.”

“Please, there’s nothing in there but graded papers.”

“Please, don’t take them.”

drove my roommates crazy every single time I made the noisy journey up the fire-escape to have a cigarette on the roof; each step on the metal staircase reverberated through our apartment. Although I’m normally afraid of heights, the rooftop became a safe place for me. I dragged a half-way broken lawnchair up the stairs, so I could sit comfortably, taking drags from my cigarette and flicking my ashes into the little, glass ashtray I left on the roof. From my vantage point, safe in my lawnchair on the roof, I could look out over the neighborhood and watch people walking home from work and listen to the dull roar of city traffic without fear or worry.

Going up to the roof eventually became as much of a habit as looking over my shoulder to make sure no one was following. Before I moved out, the landlord—the same landlord who installed the fake camera on the ugly pole in the middle of my courtyard—found out about my safe smoking roof and threatened to bolt the fire exit shut; he didn’t see the irony in an unusable fire exit. He never followed through.

I wonder if my ashtray is still up there with my lawnchair.

They took my wallet even though it only had three dollars in it; I’ll never quite know why they left that backpack. * * * My best friend made it from South Bend to my apartment in record-breaking time so he could walk me to work the next morning—he got there faster than my parents. I was scared to go outside, scared to go to school, scared to face anything. But I did. I spent the whole day expecting innumerable hands to shove me to the ground again, every sound on my walk to the bus was yet another hand reaching out to grab me, hurt me, and steal from me. For weeks I still found myself jumping at every sound.

Afraid to step out into the courtyard alone, I

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poetry 30

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Caroline Hoadley 32

Roots My mother shows me the callouses on her hands from stripping tobacco plants. We walk to the barn where she hung stakes of leaves to dry. She points to where they kept hay for the cattle, and the winding road she walked them down when they moved them to summer pasture. The old claw footed tub by the gate marks where they drank, and she looks to the horizon when telling me how their noses froze to the ground in winter, and her father stayed out all night freeing them from the earths hold.

I have Tennessee clay in my veins. The dirt where my Grandfather rests is under my nails, under my feet, and in my mind. We plant corn in the summer and I let it crumble between my fingers, watching for the green leaves and waiting for cracked callouses to grow.

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Bahijad Hasan 34

Remember When Remember when we were small, and our dreams just feathers on our back Before we knew what it meant to fall, and the world just seemed white and black Our imaginations soared before we even thought to fly Anything seemed possible and we could simply laugh or simply cry When we could just be ourselves and not feel the need to hide We’d make out shapes in the clouds or try to count the stars in the sky A freedom of youth before the pain or the lies Before the world could weigh us down, before we needed to be Before we realized how hard life could be And figured out that sometimes even our best wouldn’t be When all we want is to be happy, safe, and loved When the good in the world was all we could see Back when it was effortless to never give up and just believe Believe things will get better, that life would be okay That no matter how hard it rained The sun would soon shine again to a brighter day Yet though that time was long ago and though we know we’ve changed so much since then We should never forget whom we came from and the child we once had been Because when our lives are at their darkest, it’s those memories that keep us going That preserve what was once just a spark, and now the light inside us, Glowing

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In the Silence If I could start a story...

I’d start with a girl all alone in a pitch black room because it’s the only place that she doesn’t have to be ashamed of who she is Where she doesn’t see her tears as a weakness but as a representation of her strength The only place where she has the courage to face her pain Where she can admit that she is not happy Where she can be selfish and the only person she has to worry about is herself She can speak aloud the truth without fear She can face the fact that she will never be the woman her family envisions She can set her emotions free her mind free without out worrying she will hurt someone Because here in the darkness there are no expectations No eyes upon her every move No judgement But even more, no one telling her ‘things will be okay’ she’s “too smart” to not understand everything she’s expected to understand she shouldn’t give up even if there’s no hope of success she should be proud of who she is regardless Because at the end of the day to her none of these things are true Only there in the darkness alone with her thoughts There she realizes that she is lost the person she shows everyone else is a lie A facade to cover her confusion, her anguish, her pain, and all the things she never wanted to face So that everyone will think she is strong like her father, like her mother, like her older sisters and all seven of her brothers But it’s also where she realizes that she doesn’t need fists, blades, or artillery to fight her battles There are many ways to be strong to be brave There in the darkness with no one else by her side She realizes just how much she has changed and finally finds her true self She realizes many of the qualities that people told her were a weakness were also strengths There in the darkness she finally discovers the words that were inside her all along The story that she’d been trying to create her entire life She remembers the dreams the ideas the pictures Why she originally bought her first poetry book/ journal She unearths her inspiration The reasons why she grew to love the masterpieces words could create There in the darkness she finds her way back to the heart of who she is and has always been With a smile she turns on the lights, opens her new notebook, picks up the closest writing utensil and begins to write And that would be the end of the story, but also The beginning

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Nayantara Dutta 38

Storm Sighting You leave me pulling grass out of the ground Trying to understand what we are It’s hard enough to stay on the same wavelength And get closer to you when your silence speaks for you And I don’t know what your words mean anymore You couldn’t adjust to this new life And let fate scatter broken glass on the staircase Distancing yourself from the world And scrubbing at spots on the windshield I’m constantly stuck in the in-betweens When you play me with your smile under the stage lights And fill me with false dreams So I’m lacing up my boots And taking you out with the trash Because you stick to me and I want To rip this glue off my fingers You anchor me down with your misery And leave me second-guessing Shivering in the chains of my own skin I kept you close but all you brought me Was dust, fog, and more rain That clogged my spirit and sent me dripping to shore I’ve been spending too long sending messages out to sea And trying to find the worlds beyond the skyline Our course was always uncharted And I’m done with squinting at the world through a telescope So I’m putting on cranberry lipstick And marking the town with my words Leaving lines on street signs and spraying walls with fluorescent paint

Sea Salt Tell me of peppermint days Dipping your toes in icy water The terracotta-paneled Spanish villa You painted in the summer Just to see the waymuted sunlight would stream through the shutters And dance across the midnight ceiling Visiting the tropics and diving into the sapphire sea Belonging to the water and shedding your skin Swimming amongst schools of fish Sifting sand through your fingers Afternoons skipping stones across the shoreline And picking water irises to keep in your hair Looking for circular trails moonbeams left behind Gazing up at indigo skies And running barefoot through cobblestone streets at twilight Treating every step like new soil

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Carly Zervis 40

Potato I think it is likely that I will be reincarnated as a potato-I have done terrible things to potatoes, in this life. They will want their revenge.

Just like you would, if you had any sense and hadn’t had enough sense to go so far, far away.

Potatoes are at a disadvantage here: eyes, but no legs.

They make terrible lovers—but excellent fries, like that place on A Street [where I never took you].

It is more likely that I will come back as a goat, stubborn and ungainly, climbing makeshift mountains that were never meant to hold my weight.

There are places in the yard where cats are buried.

Under the porch chair, dusty fur and shoes, under the couch a lighter from when you’d smoke when I wasn’t home.

There is a half-melted apple candle, a fifth of gin and sometimes, late at night out in the long driveway there is almost the thump and squeak of tires bouncing over roots.

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Ahem Dear Ben It is now officially January, the twenty-first and I did not write (you) anything Because I am lazy, really a no-good slob, drunken drooling on my cheek, an imprinted ‘A’ and part of a wire and a bit of tape.

I could have written something-hypothetically-about horses, or stale ginger ale or heartbreak (like everyone else) but really, fuck them—the smelly rotten, delicious unwashed masses that are everything we are.

And so here this is my cat is watching and this program Insistently Capitalizes Every First Goddamn Line And I just can’t do—

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Dimitri McCloghry 44

Replica Yes, I could have told you how the dominating weight of your body anticipates its next demand, how you strain in the freighted darkness like a blessing set free. Yes, I could have.

For the first time in years, I’m back at the pulsing creeks of Ohio, and cardinals are learning to drown until they get the sequence right. I see the same gassed look of your eyes when you put your head to rest tonight.

Maybe it’s relief you aren’t alone, that your garments lay scattered, brood by the glaring electric light of your phone.

Our object permanence makes us stay, you say. Our plumage. And I believe you.

Somehow I let myself breathe, relish how your chlorine scented presence brings me to a coming clarity if I learn to sink. If I.

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To a Woman Who Loved Ballet A pendulum of light made electric when you touch me. I pray we close each other like circles. I pray thorns of fire anoint our heads and everyone can see usâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; the violet flecked eyes of the carhop on Madison avenue, the family scattering like Judas upon the waking of their unrest.

Maybe the moans of a bordello will betray the whores which give them rise. Maybe we will hear it and grow tragic, struck by the union of flesh and ghost.

And the halo will provide the body, and its cries will prove the commonness in us. And you will remember the slimness of my wrists as I fracture, madly, into a ballet of longing, pulling you into me so I can heal over you.

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Litany in Afterburn I am melting into a world without lacerations or taste.

Already the fever highways conjure children into jagged houses. Later, Latin hymnals leave the holy ground, file into patients wards, start the good IVs. Somewhere, you listen to the sick need for naming. The hushed vowels venerate. The jaw of sky trembles. Breaking is our fluency. The window sills collect our dying. The dancehalls lapse into nothing. We take off our shoes and find blood inside them. We feel weak from the unready. The undreaming is our applause. Every woman is a bride tonight. My head is a wedding.

The afterburn is where you can plead to find me.

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