Penn Review: Spring 2014 (46.2) by Penn Review

Literary & Visual Arts Magazine Spring 2014 Volume 46, Issue 2

Dear Reader, At long last, it is my pleasure to present the complete 46th volume of Penn Review. Countless hours went into the writing and compilation of each of these pieces, many of which aim to capture a precise moment: a snapshot of loss, an instant of love, the last happy picture of a family. These pieces will take you on trains, cruises, and whale-watching boats to fire escapes, playgrounds, and countrysides. Find a moment to enjoy these works of art; I trust you find them worth the time and this issue worth the wait. Shoshana Akabas Editor-in-Chief

Masthead Editor in Chief Shoshana Akabas Design Editor Elan Kiderman Managing Editor Loren Miller Public Relations Director Brittney Joyce Editorial Board Elizabeth Alexander Maegan Cadet Sophia Lee Eliana Machefsky Linda Wang Hannah White Kathleen Zhou

Contents [Literary] MARION SMALLWOOD

GOD AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

SOPHIA LEE

CAESURA

SOFIA DEMOPOLOS

OTHERNESS, CONFESSED

MIGUEL ALDACO

ON DEVIL'S FOOD

KAILEY ZITANER

INTRAVENOUS

ERIN PERAZA

ON A WHALE WATCH, SOBER

PETER LABERGE

POTENTIAL ENERGY

MIGUEL ALDACO

FLYOVER COUNTRY

AILIN CAO

MURDER BALLAD

HANNAH WHITE

PAPIER MÂCHÉ

ALISON CASTLEMAN

IN OTHER WORDS, DON'T FIGHT IT

ELAN KIDERMAN

SHOSHANA AKABAS

TOPOGRAPHY

KAILEY ZITANER

[SOMETIMES]

ERICA KIMMEL

PARENTS

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

THE NATURE OF BEING

LEORA MINCER

MATTHEW CHYLAK

I WAS MAD ENOUGH TO LOVE YOU I AM BACK TO WHAT I KNOW. IT FRIGHTENS ME

JESUNG LEE

TO ASPIRING POETS

SOFIA DEMOPOLOS

THE RIGHTIOUS HOAXER

SRABONI CHATTERJEE

THE BLUE GUITARIST

KRISTEN KELLEY

SEVEN CONVERSATIONS WITH NEIL

MARGARET PENDOLEY

5:22 NBPT/RCKPRT

AUSTIN LEVITT

CRYSTALIZE

DONALD ANTENEN

THURSDAY MIDWINTER

LINDA WANG

CRUISE

SEAN SPEERS

QUEER AS A SKELETON

SARANOA MARK

EVEN IN THE COUNTRY

Contents [Art] Cover: TERRILL WARRENBURG, DEPRESSION

UNTTILED UNTITLED TRIEYE KATE VIOLA ENTWINED UNTITLED LOREN MILLER UNTITLED UNTITLED UNTITLED UNTITLED MAEGAN CADET UNTITLED TERRILL WARRENBURG UGLY VS BEAUTIFUL STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN SO CLOSE BUT SO FAR GINA DECAGNA

38 51 9 45 16 25 35 61 65 70 4 18 21

GOD AND RESEARCH MATERIALS MARION SMALLWOOD how about that pistol in my mouth like a cherry on top of that sunday morning, when i closed the blinds so the missionaries wouldn't know i was home. there was a god in their motion detectors and a little demon in my sadness flailing about so they kept knocking, knocking. and with my eye molesting the peep hole in secret with my eyes so deep you could stand in them i went against my better judgment and opened the door. the sorry gasp of god is no stranger. so i danced and danced. i do not dance with strangers. i moved very suggestively, wondering how long they would call it writhing.

CAESURA SOPHIA LEE It was a fat pause. A pregnant one — we all heard it. Saw the caesura hanging there in the air, a gaping emptiness she must have felt as ice. Its eyes, wide open, stared between the maws of my mother’s open belly. Later that night I ran into the woods, where a pond lies waiting for little girls to steal fish, where I waited — standing still and pruned as the new dead newborn cut untimely, cut precisely from my mother’s womb — for the fish. Like a kitten, it rubbed its sides against my ankles, scales scraping skin, and I looked down to wait for the moment I would close my ankles shut, quick, (but gentle,) so that I would not harm the creature. When I felt it twist between my hands, I imagined I held him in my arms, but out of the pail it slipped into the paleness of my bathtub. I poke it with a pole, as its sleek body slides through water thick with cold. Gold fringe of fin and tail, He bursts a brilliant red.

2 !

OTHERNESS, CONFESSED SOFIA DEMOPOLOS Concealed by a mosquito net, We whisper frantic, fevered terms. A look, a kiss, caress confirms – The fragrant earth, so dark and wet – What words have rendered unexpressed. The din of birds and insects wanes And waxes overhead. Remains Of savage otherness confessed Diffuse into the sluggish air. Calescent tears upon my chest, I soothe, I love, and facing west, I feel your fingers in my hair.

UGLY VS BEAUTIFUL TERRILL WARRENBURG 4 !

ON DEVIL’S FOOD 1919 MIGUEL ALDACO Ask those Black Sox those ballplayers if Arnold Rothstein’s lips smacked of milk sweat drunk on devil’s food when the fix was in. Luciano in the upstairs lavatory, hamming it up in the abattoir, turncoat henchmen boil down the bathtub in a hiss of lye while Lucky sits as if poolside by poppy plants. Employment opportunities from Five Points to Red Hook. Ask those Bowery Boys. Otherwise just hard jobs, hardly jobs so instead boy-gangsters, Irish boys, Jewish and Italian boys pocket garish green apples from side-street fruit stands, hooligans parade of produce shivering garland across Manhattan projects. Across the alleys string bridges stretched from tenement windows better suited to dribbling laundry’s lukewarm gruel than snapping suicides back at cataracts, soggy parchment in the sky. As years pass, once lawful little quakes, now these boys wait atop apartment stoops like mugging cake figurines on deck, hoping to shove pinstripe sleeves up Tommy Guns — Chicago Organ Grinders — Machine Guns draining numbers of men into sums of zero behind five and dimes and mint green soda parlors, portioning fathers into moist corpse cake delivered to the Missus whole carcass, but sometimes just choice cuts.

INTRAVENOUS KAILEY ZITANER I didn’t. I haven’t. Not in a week. Five days. An hour ago. I won’t again. I promise. Once in a red moon, I lose a quarter cup of myself from a place I hate and another quarter from a place I love I swallow light bulbs and smell my knuckles like knives hoping they’ll fill up the back of my throat with somewhere but they leave me instead with this repeatedly signing his name up and down my body like a trick that kind you do with lemon juice but then if left out in the sun too long I’m getting behind myself here. It’s just that after a while I started to notice that everything I wrapped around my limbs started 6 !

disappearing in the same way so, I bale time out of my bathtub wishing for dead nerves with my eyes glued shut with toothpaste still choking through my jugular vein that maybe if I keep cracking each rib I can let another photon into my chest and if I keep snapping my neck some of this blue-drip breaking will start to leak out of my head down so sigh my eyelids down and let the somewhere fill my skull and seep out of each lachrymal like ink it’s true I still walk with my diaphragm sewn into the pavement so I would imagine that every time I stick my finger in a flame that doesn’t flicker, that fire feels perhaps the same exhaustion that floods soma like phlegm every time I’m told I should never have been born I’d like to say that this only happens when it’s just me and the things I’m trying to yank out of my four ventricles at night, but sometimes when I’m the only person in a room the translucent noise starts to resemble crusade but !

I am an Olympian of the benthic zone every stone I throw turns into another dove So I had my shins broken from the back and front because, just like you said, there will always be a third thing and I guessed it But Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll walk with bare toes because in blindness I've painted that sound of finding because I've been the infant across the ocean crying take me back home Because by now our noses and lips bleed upward and soaked in wind toward a sun that may begin to understand me better yes, all my open paper cuts are stained made-in-china blue but beautiful things will happen to me, too

8 !

TRIEYE KATE VIOLA 9

ON A WHALE WATCH, SOBER ERIN PERAZA “It’s just that I can feel my heart. I mean, I can always feel my heart. It’s in my ears, in my knees, in my shoulder blades. Not all at once, you know. It just — it moves? It’s in my palm, now.” Carla’s coffee’s gone cold, so she dumps the final swig in the harbor. “You have a reservation for seven people, sir.” She taps her clipboard. “Says so right here.” The man on the dock tucks his palm into his pocket. “Yeah I know,” he says, “but everyone else’s hungover.” His shirt cuffs are pristine. He’s wearing a tie — he’s wearing a cardigan over his shirt and his tie. Carla makes a point of looking at his shoes. Suede. She calls him sir to his face, but in her head, he’s got an epithet. He’s Rob in English Wool. “Just me today,” he says. “You’re not dressed for a whale watch.” “No. No, I’m dressed for a wedding. It’s at the lodge later today. We’ll be back by four o’clock, right?” “Your friends realize we have a 48-hour cancellation policy?” “Yeah, they know.” Carla’s been on deck for half an hour now. Her bangs are damp from the fog. “They won’t get a refund,” she says, sweeping her hair beneath her hat. “They won’t care.” “We usually get back around one. You ought to be fine on time,” she says. She strands him on the pier a moment longer while she adjusts her rain boots, tugs the tops over 10 !

the last inch of her all-weather socks. “You really want to go on a one-man whale watch?” And Rob says he does. So he gets a rain poncho, a life vest, and his very own Illustrated Whale Fin Guide: Minke whale, Gray whale, Orca. One last-ditch effort doesn’t sway him. “It’s the last whale watch of the season, so that card’s probably as much of any whale you’re gonna see.” “I got it, Captain. No refund.” ! The bow of the catamaran tips through a bubble bath fog, and Rob curls his fingers around the clasp of his life jacket. He holds his knuckles into his kicking sternum. They’re half an hour off the mainland when Carla kills the motor. She lets the boat come to rest 40 yards off the island’s shore. “San Matilde Island… This is where they feed.” “Do they come right up to the boat?” “Sometimes.” Rob rubs at the seawater on his lenses with a cashmere thumb. “You got binoculars I could borrow?” “A kid dropped them in the water last month.” “You don’t have another set?” “Not yet.” “…what do you do while you wait?”

Carla reaches for her thermos, but remembers that it’s empty. Now she has to answer the question. “Sometimes it isn’t as long a wait as you’d think.” Carla knows she should have stopped giving tours two weeks ago. She hasn’t seen a whale since September. That’s why she doesn’t believe it when the first black orca slips by, just ten yards away. They both startle at the whale call. It sounds like a carbonbased bottlerocket, and others just like it follow. Happy foggy Fourth of July. Rob hinges at the hip to peer over the side of the boat. Another fin brushes past, level with his nose. “That’s the L Pod,” Carla says. “You recognize them by their sounds?” “No. It’s this guy’s dorsal fin.” Another black blade brushes past the catamaran. It’s been tagged. Orange spray paint. “Is that—?” “It’s a penis, yeah. There’s another one that says Be free. Not very legibly, but… High school kids.” “How many are there?” “Should be seventeen in this pod.” Rob sticks his fingers in the water. The sea is beating. “I thought you said they’d be gone by now.” “It’s so late in October. They should be.” 12 !

“So why are they still here?” Rob sees the answer first. It’s dead on the shoreline. They take the catamaran to the island. ! “These corpses do all kinds of eerie things,” Carla grimaces, walking around the whale carcass. The sand around the body is damp. “Some bloat so much they explode.” It’s still pretty fresh, though. Rob pries the mouth open. They feel the teeth and the tongue and the inside of the cheeks. “This is downright biblical,” he says. He walks around to the tail. He pulls his thumb down its rubbery fluke, makes it squeak, then he taps it up with his index and middle fingers. It bounces. “It’s really light… I bet we could lift it.” “Lift what?” Sixteen whale fins cut back and forth like tombstones in the mist, twenty yards off the beach. “These things weigh five tons, and we couldn’t lift a horse between the two of us.” “No, I really think we can.” Rob pushes up his sleeves and slides his hands, palms-up, beneath the tail. The fluke covers his forearms. He lifts with his thighs, and the whole back half of the whale peels from the sand. “You take the head,” he grins. “It’s like a balloon,” Carla whispers. “What time is it?” !

“Quarter to twelve.” There’s a shallow rut on the whale’s jaw and bristle in its pores. When Carla raises the massive chin to hers, cupping it in both palms, she can’t see Rob’s crepe-sole boots on the opposite end. But the whale’s underbelly is raining, and she knows it’s dappling the suede. “Where to now?” ! They run through the forest holding the whale above their heads like a Chinese dragon. It’s just started to rain. Carla slows, and lets the front half rush over her, dragging her fingers on the white stomach. She takes a pectoral fin in each hand, right where they meet the body and she lifts her legs. It carries her now. She’s like a paper airplane. She curls in her knees and dangles between the poplars with eyes closed. Her heart is in her chest; that’s Anatomy 101. She calls over her shoulder, “Where’s your heart, Rob?” “It’s behind my brow.” Carla dips her head backward and stretches her neck to touch the belly button with her forehead. Then she strikes her hat along the slick stomach, kneading the deep flesh with the crown of her head until she finds what must be the bottom-most rib. She keeps guiding her head forward. Her chest follows, until her arms are strained taut behind her, her body projected 45 degrees, like a galleon masthead. She touches her feet to forest floor again and keeps running through the rain.

14 !

They lay the carcass down on the railroad tracks that span the bridge between the island and the mainland. It sags there, restored to its full tonnage. The bridge creaks, so they run. And from the catamaran on the sea through the fog, they watch the body burst like fireworks when the train barges through it. Octoberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nearly over, the whale pods are gone, and later there will be wedding cake.

16 !

UNTITLED LOREN MILLER

POTENTIAL ENERGY PETER LABERGE It lies in everything like sons who hide behind porch screens and yell to fathers about dermatology and astrophysics kneading the different attractions they feel deep into silent fibers of bathroom carpets because fathers can feel like this to sons every now and again and it is true that sons can sense attractions receding into tree lines but what is more true is the evening dressed in a simple starry frock rising to greet the son and husband she watches through her cracked bedroom door

18 !

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN TERRILL WARRENBURG

FLYOVER COUNTRY MIGUEL ALDACO I saw St. Paul empty as a billboard, my sight bargaining a free fall through airplane window panes that moment my backseat TV went off. I only look down when the geometry is simple. Mahtomedi townhomes and Maplewood apartment blocks stab back like rows of shark’s teeth, arcade of triangles so the snow won’t buckle and move right in. Each address a dewey decimal, every living room gym whiffs of cathedral. That fitness of new religion considers no room for afterlife. Abuzz I dust the rafters, asylum from the prodigies who meet me on the tarmac. I pretend they’re not my nightmares, pretend I’m one of them. 21-year-old senate assistants — American Cossacks in navy pea coats comprehend the world as horse and rifle. So I get away and imagine a holiday for the dumb-dumbs and the nit-wits, the nincompoops, and harlots, all the half-pints and human hiccups — someday full pints, turned business executives, pilots, and professors. I imagine a holiday for all the re-construed connoisseurs of guffaw and lager. Even imagine a holiday from the hangovers, from the hangnails and further cavalier trifles pinched at the steaming corners of all half-baked days. !

Myself, a seed in the pee pod we call coach, settle with a drink coupon, the wettest kernel. Ever the humanitarian, imagine a vacation for those common American monsters fluffing couch pillows on Christmas Eve before tree lights go dim. Step-siblings sidestep suitcases, climb the staircase, frayed gigabytes in the hallway, need more juice. I even imagine a holiday for all the scarves dropped on train tracks, a day for bent tickets swollen hands tender digits as they scour down from the platform and fetch a baby blue Father’s Day accolade. And how about a vacation from that worst kind of racism, the dull rub of when it’s just too hard to tell. Holiday from the tin roll of trolling earbuds, a shivering zip up the escalator ricochet — exhale into Ft. Totten’s red line midnight transfer chill. I broker a vacation for that fitness trainer adrift in membrane — juggling night classes on Nabokov and tax law. Slack skinned Saturday night gargoyle, that dark wing over Georgetown libraries. Myself a scent of sleet above the ether, a paying customer, I imagine a holiday for Atlas, who on the first day of March simply collapses like a six pack, no one so grasps the weight of water and snow.

20 !

SO CLOSE BUT SO FAR TERRILL WARRENBURG 21

MURDER BALLAD AILIN CAO 1. your skull is a subway tunnel – all your friends rattle through ear to ear – they seldom rest. i didn’t want to wait for your teeth to drop like baby shoes. i didn’t want to wait. i befriended you and named each complaint with a pickaxe clink – nail to clockglass. 2. and so we walk the iron now, and so we sleep in emptied hollows – we thin the light like soup and feed the fug, hopscotch the ribs and have no need for attire or articulation, we scavenge – the lanterns along the bridges, the widow’s coin, the rattle, dropped in the crevasse. the cradle, creaking, 22 !

the scattering of ribbons. 3. and when we rest, mercury is tipped from the thermos – it ebbs – it cries itself a dozen baby moons – now orange with sodium light – now silver in your ear. your skull is a hollow nest, my friend – we sip, we sweat, we seldom rest.

PAPIER-MÂCHÉ HANNAH WHITE Here lie the days before the family imploded. I take photos on my phone to remember them in blurs. When I try to zoom in I find our history in pixels, soft and grainy like the pilaf that puréed into dust on the stove for three days in the aftermath of our spontaneous combustion. The disaster could and maybe should be observed mathematically, with the detached gloss of a magnifying glass hovering just above the leaf it’s set on fire but instead we wrap our wounds in plaster, the bile of our lower intestines stuffed into papier-mâché ponies swinging in perfect accordance with the laws of physics till that inevitable final blow. But when the blindfolds come off, I will take the baseball bat and stand upon the rubble and demand something no longer mutilated into paper strips stiffened with the clots of my blood and yours. I’ll demand a high-definition reason for this wasteland. I’ll take anything, anything at all, I will swallow willingly and even if I end up purging your bullshit’s vile aftertaste after, well, at least I’ll have filled my empty stomach for a little while. 24 !

UNTITLED LOREN MILLER 25

IN OTHER WORDS, DON’T FIGHT IT ALISON CASTLEMAN I want to find the— what is the opposite of intersection? the undoing of intersection want:

—place where feelings depart

1. for years, like a hot trickle of possible probability, he was the drop. We held apart to prolong the heart slow suspense, low simmer, so that through proximity we might always be warm never touch, never risk putting fire out. 2. A lesson on first love: being in love doesn’t make you happy. Being in love makes the whole world swollen unbearably with import or beauty or— god I wonder if there are people you always miss. 3. For lack of this, sometimes attraction is easy and doubtless, stupid, unambiguous, I don’t give two fucks 26 !

about being your friend. This one was meant for kissing. Kissing you is so familiar it is run of the mill before the first tilt.

O ELAN KIDERMAN Pardon but do you or don’t you own a figurine modeled after my figure modeled after me is it shriveled up at the brain because it’s ok if you do, i mean, i have one of you too except for that it doesn’t even have a brain at all but i’m just curious seeing as when i snap the arm off of yours i feel a sharp pain at the shoulder and i was wondering well if you did the same to yours would i feel it too and i have some corrections for it well for one could you aim the finger away from the floor feels gravitationally fastened down there aim it instead at the face as if to say “hit me here” then readjust the legs in the same way also while you’re at it put me in a place where i might get some sunlight it is much too dark in here for it to be much too dark in here for if you’re as lonesome as i say you are what am i doing holding corners accountable at spears that itch my sanity triangular horses placed in vases named after it all to which you comb your teeth to and for what it’s not as if you have much to do with it’s funny to have spoken only twice in your life (i’ve lost count on mine) but if you can’t count on life what’s the use in those men at the crosswalks holding stop signs who may as well be figurines too may as well selfishly intake the sun while children, lost as it were in the toe-stepping sense collecting barks as it were in the yard but if you’ve aimed me like i say you have then children will occupy themselves seeing as they are prone to hitting and i am prone to being and how many if any can we tip towards until there’s an excess of tips to towards let’s face its faces so as to travel through diameters and diameters of apathetics

28 !

TOPOGRAPHY SHOSHANA AKABAS I am thinking about gashes. Open wounds that cut into the fibers of each muscle. Layers of skin peeled back one at a time like turning the pages of a book. The top layer is the color of dried apricots and the deepest layer is crimson. “Tell me what you’re thinking about,” she asks. Her hair is pinned into a bun and she looks like an ostrich. “I don’t want to be here,” I say plainly. The geometric pattern I drew on the back of my hand during math class looks like a star map. “What else is on your mind?” she asks, leaning forward slightly in her chair. She crosses her legs. Then she uncrosses her legs. Then she reaches her long bony fingers up to her bun and secures one of the pins. “Can you tell me what you’re thinking about?” she asks. I look down and my long hair, the color of bricks and rust, falls over my face. My best friend, Scarlet, told me she liked my hair down, liked my poems, liked my skirt, my earrings, my dresses, my shoes, socks, eyes. She tilts her wrist slightly so she can see the face of her watch. “How’s school going?” she asks. I am thinking about Freddy, the frog we dissected in biology lab. Naming it was Sam’s idea; I tend not to get attached. I picked up our dead frog from the bucket at the front of the classroom on my way in, and, when I reached our desk, I dropped it on our tray. Sam told me to be careful with !

Freddy, so I handled the body delicately as I stretched out his arms and legs and slid the pins through the webbing of his hands and feet, deep into the cork. Sam said Freddy looked like he was being crucified. “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind,” my psychiatrist says. I tell her, “My hands smell like formaldehyde.” I hold my fingertips to my nose. “We had another lab today.” “What animal did you dissect?” “A frog.” “You enjoy biology?” I don’t think the question needs answering, but the way she sits completely still, eyes boring into mine, makes me realize that we are not on the same page. Now she is willing to wait for my answers. “Yeah,” I say. “What do you like about it?” Instead of answering, I tell her I’m going over to Sam’s house to work on the lab report later because I know that will catch her off guard. I’m expecting her to question, but it still stings when she asks, in that surprised tone, “You’re going over to a friend’s house?” After I had pinned Freddy down, Sam pulled on latex gloves and took hold of the plastic knife. Our class was larger than most biology classes, and, though there were plenty of frog corpses to go around, dissecting tools were in short supply. Freddy’s rubbery skin gave way as Sam sawed back and forth. I heard Freddy’s thin collarbone snap under the pressure of Sam’s knife and I winced at the cracking sound. 30 !

Cut horizontally, I instructed after Sam had executed a line from Freddy’s chin to his pelvis. Sam made four horizontal cuts, and then pealed back the two flaps of skin that once was Freddy’s belly, like opening double doors. I was ready with pins. After putting on gloves, I fished a stray sliver of bone out from under Freddy’s liver and then pulled out the two large pieces of the broken collarbone. I pushed the tiny bones around in my hand for a few moments, testing the sharp end against my gloved finger. Then we followed the instructions in our lab manual, identifying and cutting out each organ, and placing it on the sheet beside the frog. I don’t see the atrium, Sam said. It’s the bright red thing there. I pointed. That doesn’t look like a frog heart. I narrowed my eyes. What’s a frog heart supposed to look like? “Tell me about Sam,” she asks. “His girlfriend is pretty,” I concede. “You know her?” “No, she doesn’t go to my school. I’ve seen her. Around.” I take my straight hair that hangs over my shoulders and I pull it back into a ponytail. But I have no hair elastic, so it just falls in front of my face again. I don’t want to tell her about Sam. I know she would ruin him for me like she has everyone else. After we had removed Freddy’s liver, pancreas, and fat bodies, Sam went in for the stomach. He borrowed a scalpel 31 !

from the pair at the next table, and began to cut around the organ. As he caught a glimpse of the underbelly, the scalpel slipped out of his hands and off the table. I picked it up for him. He muttered, There’s something gross under there. I used the scalpel to push the stomach aside and saw lots of white foam. Ugh. Disgusting, I said, while leaning in to get a better look. Sam laughed and scooted his chair back. Once I cleared out the foam with a paper towel, I could see a large white growth under the stomach. Extending from it were white, thread-like lines, like the limbs of a daddy longlegs extending from its body. They wrapped around the stomach, and down Freddy’s spine. I think it’s a tumor, I whispered. “I sent a memo to your guidance counselor at school a few days ago,” she says. “Told her to put it in your teacher’s mailboxes. It’s just to explain to the teachers what you’re going through so they’re more understanding.” I am a mailroom memo. I’m thinking about cuts – smaller ones this time – like paper cuts and blisters and sores. And then I’m thinking of Scarlet’s eyes when she found the medication in my bag. You’re supposed to take it before bed, she said. We were sitting on the tiled floor of the girl’s bathroom on the third floor and the windows were wide open so the air off the river lined our lungs. Why do you need these in school? In case.

32 !

In case what? Scarlet demanded. In case you’re Lily Bart? Planning to pack some stones tomorrow too? You gonna go Plath yourself on Friday? Then she pulled out my copy of The Bell Jar. I need it, I said. No you don’t. You need to go to your session. You’re going to be late. I’m thinking about layers of skin again. “Why did you do that? I didn’t want my teachers to know,” I tell my psychiatrist. “It’s not something to be ashamed of.” She reaches her hand forward to put it on my thigh, or my shoulder, or my hand, but I scoot my chair back and the rug picks up under my seat. “I didn’t want to use it as an excuse,” I explain. “I’m sure that’s not how they see it.” The hands on the clock behind her remind me of thick, dark veins. “I’m sure they’re worried about you.” “I don’t think so,” I murmur, tucking my hair behind my ears. I “Scarlet is worried about you,” she says. “Isn’t that true?” “Scarlet is worried about me,” I echo. “She’s the one who pressed you to see me in the first place, isn’t that right?” !

“Scarlet is just scared.” “What do you think she’s scared of?” she asks. And I can see she thinks we’re getting somewhere – thinks we’ve finally gotten to the root of something. Like she’s pressed the scalpel far enough into my brain, scissored me open so she could understand like I am a cold body lying on an autopsy table. That is what Scarlet fears – that I will cease to exist. That she will turn into who I am now. She will be left desperate, talking to me the way I talk to my mother (hoping that somewhere my mother is trapped, as I am, still trying, as I do, to communicate with someone she knows will never hear her). I’m thinking of blood. I’m thinking about the map of veins on the palm of my hand. I wonder how many seconds it takes for an ounce of blood to travel around my entire body and end up back in that same spot.

34 !

UNTITLED LOREN MILLER 35

[SOMETIMES] KAILEY ZITANER Sometimes I become symptomatic of the way you thought I wasn’t of spinal mid-not-sentences beginning with words like “no” such thoughts would insist on burrowing at the edge of some 3-foot-tall cliff that somebody forgot to photograph leaving stones feeling like carcasses left out on Route 20

36 !

PARENTS ERICA KIMMEL parents pair, rant, apparently with time all things become clearer and more still between eruptions. Parents, rent a space for me and she can stay here too. Write a check. Make it thick. Slip it into my pocket and set me squawking down the sidewalks that crack beneath my fingerbones that crack too. Switch the money! The other box is emptying as this one fills that one and empties into some one. fourty thousand floats in a space that only exists in my father’s waking. We will die as we die, we die to live to tie you to the swealthy mess of what is meant to mean something to someone else who I will never be. I’ll wear a stained wife beater when my greatgreatgrandfather’s third girlfriend once but now too old to be a wife pulls two hundred one hundred dollar bills out from between her soft white curls, that fall from her head lock by lock by lock lock lock and seep beneath my skin. I’ll rip off my wife beater at my chest one day, And run naked through the streets of a new city paved with Irish slate roofs to walk on, walk on.

! 38 !

UNTITLED GINA DECAGNA !

THE NATURE OF BEING ELIZABETH ALEXANDER Herman Davis was a cockroach. He had been a cockroach all his life and his Ma and Pa had always told him it was a very distinguished thing to be. After all, his species had once fraternized with the dinosaurs, they had survived hundreds of millions of years and were thriving still. When he was just a nymph, Herman used to contemplate his misery. The life granted to him, in his eyes, was not a fair one. His Ma told him, though, that he was special. Other creatures on Earth may survive in less contempt, but think, she would tell him, think of all that you have been given, Herman. You can turn on a dime in a single stride! Tell me, what other creatures can do that? Herman would dip his antennae in agreement. Ma always knew how to make him feel better. Herman had matured into a full-grown roach. He had come to love every centimeter of his scaly body. He had moved from his parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; nest and was living with a woman in Brooklyn. He found that her pink and white wallpaper tasted sweeter than most, and she had the most wonderful collection of books, the bindings of which always satisfied his hunger. His parents had approved of his new home and bid him farewell and good luck. If only they knew, Herman wondered, why he had really chosen the small apartment above an artisan bakery. While the books were sublime, and the glue in the walls divine, it was the woman who resided there that made Herman quiver with delight. She was the most remarkable creature he had ever seen. Irene Fisher was twenty-three. She had just graduated from college with a degree in pharmaceuticals. She had chosen her major as the result of several traumatic childhood experiences. When she was three, her brother had put a dead mouse on her pillow. When she was twelve, he convinced her that if she touched a doorknob in a public place, hordes of germs would cling to her skin and eventually kill her. As many times as her practical parents begged him stop these idiotic pranks, her brother continued to torture her throughout the better half of their childhood. 39 !

Now, Irene had to sanitize every surface of a room before she could breathe normally, and she left the plastic on all of her furniture so that no germs could collect in the fabric. With her degree, she was able to secure a job as a cleanroom technician in a pharmaceutical laboratory. A room which, much to her delight, employees had to wear masks and gloves just to enter. Herman watched everyday as Irene made herself breakfast and left for work. He would scurry to the trashcan to see what she had made that day, and what she had left for him. Banana pancake day was his favorite. When she came home from work, Herman would wait in the walls. When she watched Grey's Anatomy at night Herman watched with her from under the couch. The plastic cover on the couch rubbed his back unpleasantly and irritated his antennae, but he didn't mind. It was a Wednesday in January when the harmony that existed in the small Brooklyn apartment was shattered forever. Irene made her breakfast as usual, waffles with strawberry topping. She ate while reading a copy of the New York Times, which she had arranged to be sent to her apartment. Last week's crossword answers had come in and she was meticulously correcting her work. She rubbed the eraser over every mistake enough times that a casual observer would think she was writing the correct answer for the very first time. When she finished, Irene scraped the remainder of her meal into the trashcan and proceeded to scrub the countertop clean with a vigor that guaranteed not a speck of food would survive. Placing her hospital ID next to the sink, she washed her hands, twice, and threw her purse over her shoulder. Mulling over this week's crossword, Irene walked to the door and stepped out of her apartment. As soon as the door clicked shut, Herman scrabbled out of his hiding place and across the kitchen counter. He dove into the trash and nibbled on leftover waffles. The strawberries were almost too sweet for his finely tuned sensibilities, but Irene wouldn't have known that. He then crawled back out and headed toward the cupboard. On his 40 !

way back, Herman spotted a flat piece of plastic sitting next to the sink. He noted that this was quite unusual, and abnormality in itself was unlike Irene. He was a naturally curious roach, as his parents always reminded him. When he was younger, he would always leave the nest to explore. Never leave the nest! His parents would say, there is nothing more to be feared than humans. They aren't like us Herman, they're angry and violent. As Herman made his way to the plastic slab he thought that his parents couldn't have been more wrong. He had always nurtured the hope that even humans must harbor some goodness, but it wasn't until he met Irene that he knew for sure. When he reached the slab, Herman saw that on its surface was a picture of Irene. She was smiling up at him, her hair pulled back to show her kind face better, and her eyes just as bright as they were when he saw them every morning. Herman wondered if there was a way he could bring this slab to his nest. He was musing over the physics of hauling the plastic, when the door to the apartment reopened. He didn't hear the door, and he didn't hear her footsteps. What he did hear was the shriek that followed. He looked up and saw Irene staring down at him her face twisted with a look of fear and revulsion. His parents had told him humans were angry and mean, but nothing had prepared him for the disgust that he saw in her eyes. Irene was momentarily paralyzed. Her brother's cruel jokes ran like film through her mind. The dead mouse especially, crawling with malicious parasites. She thought for a moment she might throw up, but managed to fight the urge which was repulsive in itself. After she had taken a moment to recover, she reached for the New York Times and, hyperventilating still, threw it in the general direction of the bug. The newspaper smacked the wall, but the cockroach scurried away unscathed and disappeared behind her toaster. Irene thought she might faint. She was shaking, she couldn't breathe. Every surface of the apartment seemed foreign and deadly. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed her landlord. He promised he would be up later that evening to see if he could sort out her pest problem. !

Herman burrowed under the toaster until he heard her footsteps fade. When he crawled out he half-hoped to see her there. The image of her horrified face filled with loathing was trapped inside his tiny mind. He had heard about heartbreak when she was watching Grey's Anatomy, and he supposed this was it. His small chest felt like it might burst. If she hated him, then he hated himself. He cursed a God that would make him anything less than the man he wanted to be for her. His Ma and Pa had told him that being a cockroach was a very distinguished thing to be, but he knew now they had lied to him. That evening Irene's landlord came to her apartment. She let him in and showed him where the cockroach had fled after she had thrown her newspaper at it. Herman watched this strange man poke around the toaster, and watched Irene's anxious hands clutch at her body. It was all too much for him to bear, so he reached a solemn conclusion. He must be brave for her, for this wonderful woman who could never sleep in a home where he lived. Irene screamed until she felt her lungs might give out as the cockroach skittered across the kitchen counter. Remarkably though, it stopped in the middle. She guessed her cry must have frightened it. Her landlord whipped around and she pointed a trembling finger at the bug. Her landlord took measured steps over to the counter. The bug sat still. Her landlord raised a knife (he was new to the business of extermination) and lopped off the creatureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head in one smooth motion. The head actually flew across the counter, but Irene's eyes were squeezed shut, so her landlord didn't say anything. He wasn't in the mood for head-hunting. They disposed of the body and Irene was able to breathe again and begin the disinfecting process. Herman thought to himself that being a cockroach was in fact a very special thing. As he watched Irene from the dark space beneath the toaster, he remembered that his parents 42 !

had once told him cockroaches could live for weeks while decapitated.

[I WAS MAD ENOUGH TO LOVE YOU] LEORA MINCER I was mad enough to love you forgetting all I knew about how people breathe in confidence with skin-tight denim and backless silk. The leaves turn green to red to brown and the cold hugs your chest. But I sat perched in the limbs of an evergreen tree and watched the creatures with shiny teeth grin in the clearing just beyond. You can swim in sunlight if one hand shields your eyes. And I waited for the seasons spinning grand circles on a delirious merry-go-round, your blurred imprint forever just ahead and just behind. Monkey hands glint climbing a sideways ladder to safety. I saw the meadow and dared the grass to grow, but when no one was looking I swung with stubby legs outstretched the tips of my toes never touching the sky. In the shadows at the edges proud spruces sprout. But I was mad enough to watch only that which blinded me, speared by eternal emerald needles I wanted nothing more than to fall to ignominious infinity.

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ENTWINED KATE VIOLA 45

I AM BACK TO WHAT I KNOW. IT FRIGHTENS ME MATTHEW CHYLAK I haven't learned to write poems where the basketball leaves my hand, flies through the air and spontaneously combusts. I mine experience, mine or someone else's, using cheap red wine as a refrain. I pour the café a cappella group into my crock with a bonsai tree and a few cups of milk. I stir until thickened. I keep lists of poem ideas: God as a giant squid, rewriting fortune cookies, taking the train on a sunny day. I pour sugar on everything, twist my baseball cap sideways, verb the noun to hide the fact that I’ve written poems where I smoke in the kitchen so the sensor will go off and someone somewhere will think I’ve found fire where I forget the key to my apartment building and desperately tell any girl who lets me inside how much I love her where I purposefully defy the rules I have set for myself. But you expected that, didn’t you? 46 !

I want to drink cheap red wine and die sometimes, tell my friends I love them and the times have been good. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, if poetry is a reflection of life and life is all summation. But still, I can't get myself to pull down the Christmas lights in my bedroom. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll wait for a bulb to blow instead, so the circuit breaks all at once.

TO ASPIRING POETS JESUNG LEE What Seamus Heaney forgot to tell you is that after such digging, you’ll find only a perpetual state of frustration and a used Subaru Legacy. There will certainly be no gold. But if you cannot resist the urge to hear the Sirens, make sure that they use enough rope, and listen: It is better if you suffer profoundly at that age when you can observe, but not understand. If you are not so lucky and find yourself with only Disney vacations, good private schools, and Fourth of July fireworks to work with, compensate by setting goals that you know you can’t achieve. President, billionaire, cancer-curer. It is crucial that you fail at all of these. Write about the pain, the disillusionment, the alienation of not becoming a billionaire president who cures cancer. The pain is a red-hot arrow piercing your side, a choking blue jay dying amongst smog-riddled air, a chair with only three legs and one arm. It is best if you first write about these in a villanelle or sonnet form. Count the syllables, check the rhymes. Pretend to like reading more than you actually do. Convey to everyone your disdain of merger and acquisition lawyers, for it will earn you respect from your teachers. Drink and get high as much as possible. It is possible that you are a Coleridge or a Ginsberg – perhaps you are just one vision away from stardom. When you find out that you are not, get high anyways – it will help you ignore those law school applications that your mother keeps sending you. In your workshops, write on everyone’s drafts, “There are some nice images, but the poem moves out of itself too fast.” Keep a secret list of phrases that you would like to steal: “Quiet smolder,” “shrieking hello,” “splintered beads of tears.” Much later, your most popular poem will be based on 48 !

the last of these – the original poet will be a pediatrician in Carbondale and will not read it. Champion causes that do not personally affect you. Fight for the poor, the hungry, the huddled masses, until you are one of them. Write poetry that is secretly prose in broken lines, and sneak in occasional internal rhymes and imagery to fool the professor. When caught, smile sheepishly and call it “experimental.” But despite all this, you will find out too soon that you never wanted to write poetry, that you just wanted to be a poet, and that the Subaru Legacy has terrible transmission, and only two cup holders.

THE RIGHTEOUS HOAXER SOFIA DEMOPOLOS Our house was built on the bones of sinful giants, Pre-flood infidels who never learned to tread, Who, like heathens, hurled stones and sticks at the arkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s empty frame And debauched the days away until the rain. In shallow graves they ossified Until our shovels found them. Here lyeth Goliath Whom David slew Before he knew Bathsheba. We dragged him out from beneath the floor And made a fortune off him.

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UNTITLED GINA DECAGNA 51

THE BLUE GUITARIST SRABONI CHATTERJEE (From Picasso’s Blue Period) In the worn, dust strewn skies above this concrete, bejeweled Brooklyn bridge where I sit the old guitarist serenades my whisky weary head. Not even the hysterics of the beaten drunkards, leery robbers, sewer scorched vermin can stop me this time They don’t have my number – this time. See me here? Head bowed, like you over your instrument, nylon and grainy maple and me over mine, thickened bloody sarcomeres its four chambers counting time for our slow, minor waltz. And we don’t give one goddamn. We don't play for this backdrop of a rusty city. We don’t play for those starving children, the Dalai Lama, or even the artist that painted you. We don’t play for the other seven lonely orbs of ice and rock, violently demanding a sleepy star to keep them on their humpty dumpty wall. We don’t play for the other members of the orchestra. Tonight, they are silent. Tonight, it’s just me and my old, blue guitarist. And with his broken ebony neck, and my torn, useless filaments we peel the indigo clouds from this city sky and we dance and we dance and we dance. Into an augmented reality. And with each additional measure I feel the butter of your nylon on my scarlet fingertips. 52 !

So I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mind when I drop from my perch On an old city bridge And I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mind that With every gram of mass that gravity commands, I fall into a different shade of blue.

SEVEN CONVERSATIONS WITH NEIL KRISTEN KELLY Now, when I think about that first summer in the city, it’s not the work that I was doing (even though I suppose that I liked the job alright) or about the friends that I made (even though I guess I liked them too). It always cycles back to the building I was living in, or the cat that I had found, or Neil. It’s funny, because living in that building was chance more than anything else, and the cat was sort of an accident that I never meant to keep, and I suppose Neil was a little bit of both. The apartment, for all its faults, had good rent, and it was close enough to the subway. The cat was bearable, especially when he would quietly sprawl across the rug in the sunlight, looking like someone had spilled tea across linoleum. That’s when I loved the cat best. Neil, as much as I complain about him sometimes, was pleasant to be around. So, here is the record of my summer. I picked out seven conversations with Neil, which you can print off and put into a manila folder, and you can label it as “mistakes not to happen again” with a felt-tipped marker. And we can keep it for posterity in a filing cabinet designated for “all of my great loves”, so that you can remind me that I ought to know better, or that I should have learned from the last time. Seven Conversations with Neil 1. The apartment number, 9, reflected with a bronze shine. I knocked on the door, one-two-three. It was late at night, and the sound carried down the hall. “Hello?” He opened the door. “What’s going on?” “Hi! I’m Number Thirteen – would you mind if I got onto your balcony? My cat’s gotten out.” 54 !

“Huh?” He blinked once or twice. “Oh. Right. Sure, come right in. This window is probably best for the fire escape.” He gestured at the one next to the air conditioner window box. “The air conditioner is broken, so it should already be open.” It was the same way with all of the air conditioners in the building that year – everything was perpetually broken. We had learned to accept it and to prop the windows open when it became too warm. I slipped through the open window, had to duck down to keep my head from hitting the window frame. Whispered to the cat, “Come on, Jeel. Over here. I’ve got treats.” And when the cat started walking towards me, it became “Good kitty, good boy. There’s a good boy, very good, Jeel.” “Jeel?” He reached his arms out, and took the cat as I slipped back into the room. “Short for Darjeeling.” I took the cat back. “I’m Andy, short for Andrew.” “Neil, not short for anything.” He extended a hand, and I took it. 2. “I can’t play guitar very well.” I was self-conscious to be caught singing, but of course, the whole purpose of singing on the fire escape was to be caught. “It sounded just fine before,” Neil said with a shrug. He took a drag from his cigarette. “It’s out of tune.” “The singing was fine.” “I’m out of tune, too.” !

“Could have fooled me.” He shrugged. “What was the song?” “Moon River. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, you know, the one with Audrey Hepburn?” “So here you are, singing Moon River on the balcony, waiting to fall in love with the next cosmopolitan person who comes to call?” He might have scoffed a little bit, but he also smiled a little bit, and that’s what mattered to me most at the time. “Something like that.” I lit a cigarette of my own. It was a habit that I had picked up that summer, from living where I was and spending my time the way that I did. If you ever wanted to meet neighbors, you had to be on your fire escape smoking. It was the sociable thing to do. He took a final drag, than crushed the cigarette into the sand-filled flowerpot on the stairs next to him. He waved, and then he ducked back inside. 3. “What?” “You left your book on the fire escape.” It was early in the morning, and it was a peculiar thing to talk on the phone with Neil. “Why didn’t you knock on my door?” “I’m already out of the building.” “And you saw the book?” “I’m looking at my room from the street, and I saw you left your book outside. It’s gonna rain, make sure that you pick it up or it’ll get ruined.”

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“Got it.” I replied. He hung up his phone. When I climbed out onto my balcony, sure enough, there was my book. And, on the sidewalk, there was Neil. “Thank you.” I called down, and waved a little bit. “Don’t mention it.” 4. “Andy,” Neil said on a Saturday afternoon. It was an overcast day, about to rain. “Andy, I don’t know what it is about you.” We didn’t say anything else for a long time after that. 5. Wouldn’t you like to dance, the girl said. It was all dim lighting and ambient music, and her lips were moving and her dress glossed like liquid paint around her figure as she swayed a little bit to the sound. Maybe later, Neil replied. He took another sip of his drink. I might not be around later, the girl said. There was a pout in her voice that Neil chose not to indulge. But you’ll know where to find me, she added in parting. She walked away, and the swaying of her body deflated a little bit as she tried to recover her bruised ego. “She was pretty.” I said to him off-handedly. Because it was true, she had been quite pretty. “She’s not my type.” His glass had sweat a little bit in his hand, and left a damp crescent moon on the bar. He smeared the watermark across the surface with the side of his hand. What is your type, I thought about asking, but stopped myself for fear of being too blunt. But there was a moment !

there when he looked at me, and thought that it was an answer. 6. “Why Darjeeling?” Neil asked from the couch. The cat was lying across his lap, and he scratched it behind the ears. “He’s the color of tea.” I shrugged, and sat across from him. His legs were on the table in front of the couch, so I set the glasses down carefully where he wouldn’t knock them over. “But doesn’t it just reek of colonialism?” I pushed him a little bit with my foot, and the cat rearranged itself. The ice in the glass cracked hollowly, and Neil laughed at his own joke. His foot stayed on mine. 7. “I’m moving out in September.” Neil said. The heat had driven us onto the fire escape again. The sounds of traffic and the whirring hums of the air conditioners from other buildings filled the pregnant pauses. “That’s soon.” “I got the job last week.” It was the type of bourgeois profession that everyone in the neighborhood would be judgmental of, and that everyone in the neighborhood would eventually go on to pursue. “Congratulations.” I said dryly, more vitriolic than I may have intended. “It’s not so bad.” “It’s still bad enough.” It wasn’t really the job that bothered me, because even then I had acknowledged how funny it was for all of us to be so resentful. But there wasn’t much of anything else that I could say. 58 !

“I’m sorry.” “Me too.” Only I didn’t know what it was precisely that we were apologizing for.

5:22 NBPT/RCKPRT MARGARET PENDOLEY The salt marsh is beautiful in the morning. The early shift, that’s Tim’s favorite. He rides the train in, empty and dark, sun rises out of cowlicks, surfs across grass. Past the rookery, where groggy egrets roost, trees, a crumbling tunnel, and then back doors of houses. The train barrels, conductor catches lives through glass and screens. There’s guilty pleasure in this part of the line. He savors them: woman walking with her baby, disappearing in and out of her upstairs window, couple rudely interrupted, fumbling for the blind, and toddler, for whom trains are still wonders, rushing for the door.

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UNTITLED LOREN MILLER 61

CRYSTALLIZE AUSTIN LEVITT 1) hush my darling. donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fear my darling. the lion dreamt a griffin. i witnessed a single neuron move. the phosphorus toothpick set the forest ablaze. 2) the sky: her accent was allure. crisp as the edge of a fijian postcard she held me like calypso. the breeze bore auroras. speckled chicks breathed to a drummer kicking. 3) slanted red bricks were occupied by heat phantoms. we hid in cherry blossoms. they said questioning existence is for children. do the color-blind dream in color? why yes, we learned. 4) we spun on our heads in the grass wondering why do we wear shirts. in revolution, time lost 62 !

all meaning. music is simple air trembling with emotion. 5) there was no horizon so we traced haikus in the dirt. words slipped like water lilies: our irises met sunlight playing in snowflakes on still fingertips 6) shiva told me weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re all narcoleptic. boxing with shadows all the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a stage. beauty elopes with extremity, i shivered. this wavelength reverberated through other dimensions. 7) fibonacci built the flowers we plucked. sweat formed perfect spheres on our foreheads like water does in space. i am becoming aqueous, the ultimate conductor, i, the dissolving moment.

THURSDAY MIDWINTER DONALD ANTENEN A funeral somewhere pulls urn or pine by mittens, caps, and cars the missed love of poor old poor down this year again The vomit hangs tassels and the man, vomiting sidewalk wet with his refuse fits to the trees each to be sold and lit and gathered round by other sorts of men unfit for retching Apportioned right the world would be just as it is unfair, forgetful, frostbitten placed about for puffed coats before windows for curtains pulled against snows piled under tires and feet The sidewalk grants shadows shopping banks and drifts shaking hand rivers north old fetches old, finds merry friends churched and kids stiff in homeless snow The stumbled all still sleeping then the sun keeps watch as wicked when what cold delight unfastens fast the shivering ties, the winter pen.

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UNTITLED MAEGAN CADET 65

CRUISE LINDA WANG Althea shook off snarls of hair into the trash can. She could go everywhere and meet herself, again and again, in the newest of places like a haunting. “Chase me away from myself,” she whispered, remembering the image of some boat with a rainbow sail drifting across the blue years ago. In the beach house of one of Dan’s old colleagues, was it? On Long Island. She’d looked up, and there across the room was the boat with the mauve sunset fading into the sea, framed perfectly by the little window over the sink. They’d been eating Neapolitan ice cream, and the colors somehow matched, sweetly sickening. The tropical sea would like to stun her into forgetting everything. Blindingly, blindingly blue, it could sear through the layers of her mind like a dose of radiation. Clever subterfuge. “I always forget it actually does look like that, not just in the advertisements,” she said to him as they boarded the ship: a skyscraper slumbering on its side, a floating city of carnival screams. She patted her shoulder bag. “I think I have the sunscreen.” Their cabin had a balcony. Oh, this wasn’t necessary, she said, but the box of chocolates on the white bedspread drew her over. She picked up the card. “Happy 20th anniversary!” Funny, how commercially romantic, how individualized; her lips twisted into a scornfully playful smile. He looked so satisfied with something, standing there by the porthole window, very out of place. He’d crawled out of some book cellar. She laughed to picture the sun touching that fishwhite belly, that poor limestone nose. You’ll crumble to dust, she thought. And they’d been young once in that New England sea town that looked ever more solemn and real than this place. Dan Lamond turned on the TV, awaiting the captain’s broadcast. There was a countdown to when they’d set sail. He wanted to be off so he could let go. Her hair had gotten longer, falling over her neck in a matronly bob. He was about 66 !

to be stranded, he suddenly thought. At once, the force of her mind grew invisible tendrils that curled and crept up the walls, lacing across the floor to brush his toes. He couldn’t sit still; it would cover him up. He missed his son. “Oh!” Althea said as they boomed the horn. The ship awoke. They began to slide. She looked at her husband, shyly, expectantly, reluctantly sinking because there was nowhere else to go except to regress into sappiness like smoothing youthful makeup into the wrinkles of an old crone. It was dehumanizing; her mind kicked out, flailing weak arms. She went under, expecting to choke and sputter. But she could breathe. She thought she even felt happy. They’d made the railing on the balcony chest-high. Her mind buoyed above their inundated bodies. It saw the six nights and seven days of escape before the sea flung them up and out, crashing down. A long time, it comforted. Enough time, perhaps.

QUEER AS A SKELETON SEAN SPEERS queer as a skeleton's “coming out” party – and as unnervingly confused – v but isn't that to be expected from the fleshless frame of feeling? All six feet of my being, and our folie-à-trois-wandering underwhelmed by the idea of going home empty – handed and alone. triangled glances, broken by the naivety of your love for us both, – pure and selfless as your empty closet (empty now that you've moved out) – go unanswered or stolen by exactly the wrong eye. The “I” who “god B” thrust toward Legacy battles the one who seeks the Same in the words on His lips; in the I’s of god B sameness is blasphemy.

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EVEN IN THE COUNTRY SARANOA MARK On white wicker, rocking forward toward dusk We don’t find the mosquitoes’ bite erotic It makes all the difference We are pulling blinds Pulling over roads Counting till ten, then again I’m serious this time Having the same same same same Scratching – skin beneath nail While you pull plastic threads off your skirt. Shadows become insets Floorboards warn Hear the racing cars on the highway So quickly, so late at night

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UNTITLED MAEGAN CADET

Acknowledgments Special thanks to: Jessica Lowenthal at The Kelly Writers House for endless support and guidance; SAC for funding this issue; Sophia Lee and Maegan Cadet for last minute copyediting; Brittney Joyce for her hard work publicizing and her willingness to fill whatever role required filling, even when that included attending SAC budget meetings; the dedicated editorial board that put together two fabulous issues in one school year; Elan Kiderman, our tireless and brilliant design editor who has, quite possibly, never had a bad idea in his life.

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