Perception Magazine Fall 2014

Perception.syr@gmail.com Fall 2014

Syracuse University Volume XV, Issue 24

Linger here |

1

Perception is a free literary magazine published once during each academic semester by undergraduate students at Syracuse University. Address editorial correspondence to perception.syr@gmail.com.

We hope to inspire, to anger, to unleash, to exalt, to yield, to offend. We hope we can share what we deem necessary to existence, art and love and words, with those who haven’t been touched yet.

Perception is now accepting submissions for the Spring 2015 issue.

Send poetry, prose & artwork to perception.syr@gmail.com.

2

| Perception

the insiders Editor-In-Chief

Yevgeniya Muravyova

Managing Editors

Brandie Pullen

Chief Designer

Yat Sze Austin Cheng

Treasurer

Nittika Mehra

Communications Chair

Charlotte Balogh

Co-Communications Chair

Sylvia Jiang

Designer

Shelby Netschke

Editors

Sarah Peck Addie Parsons Korey Lane

Advertisers

Charlottle Balogh Adrian Lee Eva Charleroy Quinn Weber Chinedu Ubachukwu Korey Lane Kelsey Burke Taylor Arias Cody Benbow Dynami Baiz

Readers

Julia Teti Jennifer Rasnovski Eva de Charleroy Emily Markowski Charlotte Balogh Ashley C Mixson Brandon Mixson Sarah Peck Audrey O’Donnell

Linger here |

3

Addie Parsons Korey Lane Christine Bader Taylor Arias Nittika Mehra Stephanie Haber Josh Dolph Kellie Miller

MANY THANKS,

Sarah Harwell Michael Burkard The ETS Department The WRT Department Vicki Risa Smith Lou Ann Payne Daphne Stowe Terri Zollo Melanie Ann Stopyra The Student Association All of the professors who encouraged their students to submit

4

| Perception

the contributors 8

Editor’s Letter

undergraduate writing Frieda A Projansky Haiyun Xu Benjamin G Engelhardt Michelle Polizzi Alexander Vélez Burgos Chiara A Klein Spencer Garrison Carly Elizabeth Benson Farrell Greenwald Brenner Claire Maxine Dunderman Eva R DeCharleroy

Korey Raye Lane Christine Nicole Bader Lorissa Anne Cournoyer Selina Kaya Mohr Rachel Elizabeth Mandel Eden Ariel Lapsley Adeyemi Adediran Christine Nicole Bader Kathryn Anne Frentchak Alison R Searcy Karli Ann Gasteiger Mary Mik

12 16 19 20 24 29 30 36 39 85 40 46 62 66 49 77 55 56 58 61 64 69 72 74 82 87 95 90 96

Sleep On Vantage Points Agoraphobia Red The Loudest Silence El Hombre de las Ideas Untitled Choking on Grass You are not a God My Grandmother, the Dementor Library Smokers My Professor’s Dog Ate My Muffin. I Cried.

Halfway Dust of Dakota FRICTION Clenched Puppets Extremities The Beginning The Midnight Peddler Ghosts of Autumn Coffee Stains Becoming Victoria Aftermath Excerpt Sonia The Absolute Anatomy of Yours Truly, Karli Excerpt from an Hour-Glassed Dream A Misunderstanding Honey Bird Linger here |

5

undergraduate art Isabella Barrionuevo

Alex Aronson

Brooke Bower

Jenny-Lee Aciu

Nittika Mehra Annemaria Menna Holly Wilson

10 11 57 100 15 54 73 18 23 35 28 38 45 76 48 68 60 84 65 89 94 99

Lily Nail Love Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth California Dreaming 2 California Dreaming 1 California Dreaming 3 Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Dark Matter Untitled Untitled

graduate writing Chen Chen

Joseph Baiz

6

| Perception

102 106 113 103 107

Ode to Hexagon Confession my soul, you’re shit at everything Inanna and Irkalla Lapis

faculty writing John Colasacco

115 Untitled FRONT COVER ART BY Carly Benson “Ambiguous” INSIDE COVER ART BY Isabella Barrionuevo “Untitled” BACK COVER ART BY Christina Mastrull “Untitled” BACK INSIDE COVER ART BY Jenny-Lee Aciu “Untitled”

Linger here |

7

Letter Editor's The growth of Perception Magazine has been incredible over the past year, it is transforming into a sleek, professional, and one of a kind Arts and Literary mag. The designers, editors and of course submitters have raised the standards for all creative magazines on the SU campus.

The Fall 2014 edition does not only showcase some of the most talented individuals in Syracuse as it does every year, but it also breaks into the cutting edge design aesthetic of our generation.

This specific Issue is the mirror’s reflection of the individual-self as it is introspective, reflective, and critical on the actions and thoughts of the self and its relation to the people around them. The relationships, connections, and disconnections between multiple people is played with, tested, changed, and transpired.

In the past, these letters have been much longer, but I feel the only thing that really needs to be said is: Read it. Look inside it. Start to feel the voice of the community. It is all here—words could not describe the strength of the pieces within.

Thank you for picking up the 24th Issue of Perception Magazine.

“Some people live more in 20 years than others do in 80.

It’s not the time that matters, it’s the person.”

— The Doctor, Season 3, Episode 6 Sincerely, Yevgeniya Muravyova Yevgeniya Muravyova Editor-in-Chief

8

| Perception

undergraduate

Linger here |

9

Isabella Barrionuevo “Lily” 10

| Perception

Isabella Barrionuevo “Nail” Linger here |

11

Frieda A Projansky Sleep On Vantage Points 1: Veins like you cracked the faults yourself With the weight of a mere backpack.

Veins like we get no rain near distant mountains.

If there are mountains, we don’t have a trail map and A window is all we need to forget the other half And my knees said: I’m feeling angular.

And if my cloth turns into a Kite then maybe I won’t Ask you to catch it.

They sit and dull down Like the rectangles we all are.

I won’t pursue you, he said to The left. I just need to scrape your purse.

2: The sun makes us sleepy as canines Sleep on vantage points.

There’s about four vantage points And three sleeping canines And I’m so awake I can feel myself tripping on Cobwebbed cobblestone All the way down a foreign path Until I reach bricks.

Red paint wishes it were bricks.

I’d tell them this, but shhh They’re sleeping.

3: You’re so lovely you should Be on a rug. Tapestry.

Lounging like I taped your 12

| Perception

Skin to the couch fabric.

I don’t need a chandelier When I have streamers of Serpents. Don’t be petulant, You have too many volts of unused energy.

Neon, even if you had a generator, You would not generate Enough resistance to be electric.

And so he lived on a Cord and chewed away At what he could have been: Thin and long and useful.

4: Except I’m useless and used more And used to it.

There’s a handless palm tree That I can’t handle right now So I strut into the stream And swallow fragments of pictures Until I sell enough scriptures To keep my pen afloat.

5: Banks leading into huts.

This is not the Hudson.

This is where your ancestors Fished and watched you mull rice, If that’s even the term.

It felt temporary and terminal And even under straw, It’s like a routine I can’t Stray from.

Tell us the tale of how The organisms were more like Found fossils.

How the forecasts were more like Linger here |

13

Past actors.

How the neighbors Were more like your pen pals.

6: There’s something satisfying About good placement.

When you find a cardboard box That’s a prism.

I am not black and white, I am greyscale.

And when the solar system Is having a good performance We sell out shadows and Take all your pigments.

It is permitted for me to sit inside A prism. It’s like the front row seat To a colorless chrome.

7: Dislike nothing more than tiles.

Is why I refuse to wear goggles On pool floors. It isn’t real water.

Nothing lives here, not Even bacteria. Nothing, not even My backstroke can evolve here.

I feel the chlorine eat at everything I learned four minutes ago: Mountains, kites, bricks, cords, pens, straw.

If you don’t wear goggles then keep Your eyes closed.

I wonder if chlorine will eat at my pupils, I can’t learn here anyway.

And so I open my eyes but all I see is tile.

Chlorined tile.

14

| Perception

Alex Aronson “California Dreaming 2” Linger here |

15

Haiyun Xu Agoraphobia How did I come here Feeling dizzy and wheezy Why were they coming and passing me by In such a hurry Who placed me in the crowd With the hustle and bustle of the city Sunbeam whirled with motes People, cars and buildings Crumbled into a rainbow of colors.

Hearing Hasty passers-by Walking, dancing and waving Feeling Come-n-go Knowing, loving and hating Suddenly, I became a rest point in the flood Stunned, bewildered and silent Who created this game?

How would her stop it?

I felt myself sinking in a wordless grief.

This is how I got agoraphobia On a yellowish square I stood in the crowd Laughing, dancing and swirling Nobody perceived my fear 16

| Perception

I was dancing in a mysterious way People threw me weird glances But I didn’t care I expressed my fears through my body Which they would never understand The point gradually disappeared in the stream It’s my way and my fate.

Linger here |

17

Brooke Bower “Untitled”

| Perception

18

Benjamin G Engelhardt Red Other than a ricochet I can’t think of how luck has ever come my way.

Opportunity usually skips this house Beware of dogs; there’s no candy here.

We don’t celebrate We drown, then hollow out.

So where’s the party?

He’s looking to get bodied --- Naughty in the streets Doubled up on fucked up frat bros and their ladies Each with a story – not one anyone cares about Mind you --- They won’t So he goes home alone But He’s never alone with his troubles Never Alone; Forever alone The internet is so near sited Probably why he never gets past the first five minutes on Porn Hub So I guess he’s like all of us Lying to himself about the semantics of joy Chasing the Rabbit To the end of the earth Or the first bottle that reads Drink Me.

Linger here |

19

Michelle Polizzi The Loudest Silence A forgotten moment lingers on the edge of consciousness, waiting for some familiar melody that helps it pervade this current state of mind.

Our memory traces the map of those nostalgic rhythms, and suddenly we feel ourselves gliding on a bicycle down an unmarked dusty road, passing beneath the cool, blue shadows of the pine trees with the emerald world flickering past. We hear the lost voice of our childhood best friend calling out to us, and we can almost make out her face as she meanders around potholes and basks in the bliss of summertime, stopping to lay her body down inside an empty, amber wheat field. There is something in the notes that draws us closer to the core of our senses and challenges us to become immersed in everything that encompasses what once was, to sense again the minute details that defined a fleeting moment in our existence, otherwise forgotten.

I have always turned to music when I was lost; especially when my heart was broken, and most often when I just needed something there to remind me what it felt like to be in lust with the life I once led. There came a time when that all changed, when I learned that remembering was something to be purposely avoided, when tragedy cut so close to me that it ravaged everything I once thought was true. What does it mean, then, to choose silence? To ignore the memories and ideas and lost lives so remembered in that chorus we used to chant so loudly. To ignore those times that are certain now to reside in the past, laid to rest along with someone we once knew.

My silence began along the interstate belt from Boston to New York; it crept upon me as I overcame my aversion to driving and succumbed to the mindlessness of the flattened landscape. The air of the Ray’s car was so thick and heavy with everything, it seemed as though the two of us were being dragged backwards like a weighted anchor in a deep ocean current—all the while we were moving forward to the destination we feared most. The music choices felt more inapt with every mile, but either way we needed it to speak for us, to perpetuate some reminiscence of human life around that quiet we carried within us. And no matter how much we dreaded the end of that drive, the road still led us to Southampton.

20

| Perception

Hours of silence passed me by and I found myself eavesdropping on my best friend Hannah, deep in the early hours of the night, while lying on a blow up mattress next to Ray on the floor of a hotel I wasn’t paying for. I was fighting against the noise of the air conditioner beside me, and the passing of cars on the highway outside. Their voices rose above the white noise of suburbia, or perhaps it was that I just wanted to hear badly enough what they were saying. I wanted to hear every detail spoken on Sam’s lips; he was the only person who saw everything that happened that night in late July. Sam and Hannah were sitting on the floor at the edge of the bed, folded into one another in a twisted heap of mourning. Their words lingered somewhere in the delicate spaces between real conversation and an intentional whisper that implied they didn’t want anyone to hear. Sam’s voice didn’t even sound like his own, my friend had become a stranger to me, but only because I knew that he was now a stranger to himself. Hannah spent the night asking Sam questions about the end of her boyfriend’s life, Sam recounted the final hours spent with his best friend, and I stayed up listening it all. I know that they had talked about it already, but I also knew that through that endless week of awaking to the nightmare that was now her life, she needed to hear it again.

In a circumstance of overwhelming silence, when people are so lost for words, eavesdropping comes as second nature. It becomes something almost essential. For if you can’t find any words to use that don’t seem convoluted or inappropriate, what then, should you do with that silence?

Do you wallow in it, embrace it, or keep it for yourself ? Listening to those around you is the one way in which you can somehow get outside of your madly spinning mind and prepare for the situations about to transpire in the days to come, when you eventually find your words. Then, eavesdropping stands to give you meaning in the silent spaces, a thing to make sense of your broken voice, something to break through the quiet that you would otherwise find unbearable.

I still hadn’t found my words on the day of the funeral. It was raining, and the gray sky pushed so far down into the road it was as if it didn’t want us to go where we were going. Seven of our girlfriends from college sat together in the truck, silent albeit the whir of the giant wheels against the water. We had made ourselves look pristine with expertly pinned buns and darkened eyelashes, which now stuck together in waterproof clumps and awaited the inevitable optic monsoon that was soon to begin.

Linger here |

21

“No music,” someone said, “not now.” Hannah sat in the passenger seat just in front of me, but she had never seemed so far away. I wanted to grab her hand, to touch her, to give her the love she had lost and tell her it would be okay. But something of her felt untouchable, and even more, I really didn’t know if it would be okay. Everything was delicate, serene, sacred. It was as if the world had become dull and muted, and time continued only in a blurred, confused slow motion. The amount of suffering around me was so great that I was certain the earth had halted on its heels and turned backwards the other way, just for Hannah. The truck turned right into the parking lot of the funeral home and she broke the silence with a cry, “We shouldn’t be here! We shouldn’t be here!” she yelled it twice, as if the repetition would negate its truth and allow us to turn around and drive back into our former lives.

Later that night, after everything was over, I played music from my computer in the little conference room in the first floor of the hotel.

I struggled to find something I wanted to listen to; everything was awful and wrong and he would have hated every song that came onto that Pandora station. I didn’t want to be in charge of the music; I wanted someone else to pick. I couldn’t be responsible for triggering a memory. I couldn’t look into the eyes of Hannah or Sam and know how much they missed him when they heard that song I played.

Seven months have passed, and these days, we welcome those forgotten memories with open arms. I turn up the radio, plug in my earphones, and dance to every chorus that makes me feel alive. I never forget that in the future, these songs are what will bring me home to what it feels like to be me, right now in this moment. In the days following a tragedy I think people just turn up differently; something inside them changes. We start to shift away from the old and embrace a new entity, a growing seed of what we will inevitably become. We just don’t understand yet, and we continue on until a familiar song plays and we think of what once was, not of what is. And that is how we learn to accept change, how we move on and find reverence in those memories we hold within us. No one can know when and where a certain song will make those moments unfold, but they are the most important. How lucky we are, to be able to carry along those dusty film reels in our minds and on some special day, relive a fleeting moment spent with someone we’ve since lost.

22

| Perception

Brooke Bower “Untitled”

Linger here |

23

Alexander Vélez Burgos El Hombre de las Ideas Cuando sale el Sol y el mundo responde, la Tierra tiembla con los pasos de este Hombre. “¿Quién es este Hombre que se queda de pie?”

Es el Hombre de las Ideas, el pensador, Sócrates.

Pluma sobre papel actuando como debe ser.

Palabra convertida en hecho hasta la muerte sigue fiel. “¿Quién es este Hombre que desafía con la mirada?”

Es el Hombre de las Ideas, el comandante, Che Guevara.

Vagabundo voluntario rezando por el que hace daño.

Sin juicio vive perdonando a la oveja negra del rebaño. “¿Quién es este Hombre a quien se le arrodillan en el piso?”

Es el Hombre de las Ideas, el servidor, Jesucristo.

Corazón valiente, 24

| Perception

tierno y consciente.

Estructura del hierro.

Alma de fuego. “¿Quién es este Hombre que comparte lo que tiene?”

Es el Hombre de las Ideas, el pelotero, Sr. Clemente.

Educación formal.

Ilustración que, con razón, llega natural.

Establece mensaje de una raza unida: El ser humano sin fronteras, sin palabra mal entendida. “¿Quién es este Hombre que grita ‘I Have a Dream’?”

Es el Hombre de las Ideas, el soñador, Luther King.

El hombre que nace, muere, su sudor en la Historia, desapercibida, pero este Hombre, sudor que en tinta convierte, e Historia inmortaliza, escapa las garras de la llamada Muerte.

Porque, Hombre que entre mortales se pasea, el tiempo también pudre al Hombre de las Ideas. ¡Y no he de extrañar! ¡No he de llorar! ¡No he de perder fe!

Porque el Hombre que nace, muere, pero las ideas, las ideas nunca mueren.

Linger here |

25

English translation...

Man of Ideas When the sun rises and the world responds, the Earth trembles with the steps of this Man. “Who is this Man that is still standing?”

He is the Man of Ideas, the thinker, Socrates.

Pen over paper acting as it should.

Words converted into acts remains faithful to the death.

“Who is this Man that defies authority with every look?”

He is the Man of Ideas, the commander, Che Guevara.

Volunteer vagabond praying for the hurtful.

Without judgments he lives forgiving the black sheep of the flock.

“Who is this Man whom people kneel on the floor for?”

He is the Man of Ideas, the server, Jesus Christ.

Brave hearted, 26

| Perception

tender and conscience.

Iron structured.

Soul of fire.

“Who is this Man sharing what he has?”

He is the Man of Ideas, the baseball player , Roberto Clemente.

Formal education.

Enlightenment that, accompanied with Reason, comes by nature.

Establishes a message of a united race: The human race without borders, without the misunderstanding of words.

“Who is this Man who screams ‘I Have a Dream’?”

He is the Man of Ideas, the dreamer, Martin Luther King.

The man that is born, dies, his sweat in history, unnoticed, but this Man, whose sweat converts into ink, and becomes immortalized in the pages History, escapes the clutches of the so-called Death.

Because, Man that lives among mortals, time also rots the Man of Ideas.

And one shall not mourn!

One shall not cry!

One shall not lose faith!

Because the Man that is born, dies, but ideas, ideas never die.

Linger here |

27

Jenny-Lee Aciu “Untitled”

28

| Perception

Chiara A Klein Untitled my heavy eyes are dark caverns great yawns of ancient geology, they carry the wind like midnight silence down an empty highway, the stars barely visible but their brightness not dimmed apologetic guardians, they remember a fall to earth. and are thankful for their celestial vantage down on the canyon floor, I can walk with myself. and though light may streak above me, I am safe in this quiet armored in rock, only my eyes turn upwards

Linger here |

29

Spencer Garrison Choking on Grass Mom was probably too busy Keeping Up With the Kardashians to notice that Dad had been lying facedown in the mulch nearing twenty minutes now. As the credits rolled, advertising an episode in which Kris Jenner eats an edible, Mom probably didn’t pay attention to the fact that she’d been phased out and tuned in for, to her, a totally indeterminable length of time, and in one beat looked away from the television only to feel suddenly hungry and alone. She probably thought, “What’s my husband making for dinner?”

Sam was on his way home and, being at the time in what he looks at now as the last of his ‘happy days,” his initial reaction was to laugh when answering the phone to his brother’s manic-dramatic voice repeating, “Dad is dead, dad is dead, dad is dead,” all in fumbling overly-excited mouth noises trying not to cry. Sam still can’t help but think of the way his brother repeated those three words over and over again as being “seriously funny,” but in that moment he quickly found himself hunching over the steering wheel, speeding back home, screaming wildly, very Lifetime Original Series-worthy.

If you were in the living room with Mom, you’d probably have been able to do something about it. Imagine sitting across the room and out the window right past her shoulder you can see Dad laying mulch outside ten feet from the house. You look to the TV and Kim is taking pictures of herself for Kanye. You look out the window and Dad is on his knees looking like he’s praying. You look to the TV and Kim is making overly-excited mouth noises trying not to cry. Dad is facedown in the mulch. Kim is crying. Dad is dying. Mom is expressionless. You’re not actually there, you’re just tuning in. And the thirty minutes it takes for Mom to look outside is better than anything on TV. When Sam got home, he remembers feeling inconvenienced as ambulances took up his usual parking spot in the driveway. The way he remembers the memory is this: The sun is setting behind his home, forming stilted shadows cast from blurry figures in the drive that appear to shoot an orangeish yellow sunlight from the outlines of their bodies over the grass and directed at him. The light makes Sam squint and he can only see in high exposure before things come into focus, making him feel 30

| Perception

like the action before his eyes is already the memory he would be trying to remember later on. White sheet, orange light, a sulking shadow, a body underneath, a deer behind the trees, his brother’s goofy frown walking towards him, Mom screaming in the side of the yard choking on grass - he remembers feeling late to the party. In his journal and on his blog, Sam described the events of this day as “extraterrestrial in nature,” namely the sunlit mountain of fresh mulch in the driveway that reminded him of Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Sam is sure that no one else remembered things the way he did.

If you were in the living room with Mom, you’d probably have covered your ears when she screamed and felt some terrible turning in your stomach on seeing the way her face changed from wife to widow in less than five seconds. Her veins probably bulged, grey hairs burst out, her horrified expression could’ve morphed her face giving her the appearance of someone else entirely and you would have seen it happen.

You could’ve seen it all play out from your seat across from her, watching through the window as the police were called and Sam’s brother pried a rake from Dad’s hands, flipping him over and punching helplessly at his chest in between kissing parted blue lips. Dad wearing blue lipstick, Dad playing dead, Dad still barely breathing with a busted heart- you’d see Sam’s brother probably screaming and be embarrassed for him, especially shameful when the paramedics arrive and take one glimpse at Dad before covering him in a white sheet. “Dad is dead, dad is dead, dad is dead” and you can give your eyes a rest now.

Sam used to occupy himself with death fantasies of close family members. In fifth grade, Sam’s grandmother stayed a week in his house, and every morning he would make himself sick ten minutes into the morning bus ride so the driver would maybe turn around and take him home. The most effective method involved Sam fake vomiting a mouthful of Sunny D all over the floor, letting it slide around as kids screamed and lifted their feet onto the seats. Sam figured out that these sort of dramas play out better with an audience. If he ended up making it to school, he would cry in class during the Pledge of Allegiance and shove his fingers down his throat in the nurse’s bathroom. Sam couldn’t understand why, but the Pledge of Allegiance could still make him cry today if he thought about it hard enough. When he was found out, no one asked Sam why he didn’t want to go to school; they just made sure he knew he Linger here |

31

had no choice. He’s still not sure if it was because he was afraid of his grandma dying or if he just didn’t want to go.

Sam remembers asking, “what happened” and his brother saying, “he’s gone” and his mother screaming in the side of the yard still wearing her PJs he saw her in that morning. Even the neighbors were crying.

Before pulling into his suburb, Sam had gotten a text from a neighborhood boy who had seen the ambulances. While watching his mother cry in the yard, Sam texted back “my dad is dead.” He immediately copied and pasted this message to various other friends, receiving mixed reviews.

There are deep implications with Dad passing away. Mom hadn’t worked a real job in years, Dad used to call her job “her hobby”. It’s like how Goosebumps taps into those sorts of childhood anxieties. Synopsis of a Goosebumps episode: “Dad got fired from his job and won’t come out of the basement all day. He’s acting strange and mom is going out of town leaving us home with him alone. We’re scared.” Synopsis of Sam’s situation: “Dad’s job was stressing him out. Dad was coming home red faced and angry most nights. Now dad is dead, he’s lying under a white sheet in the backyard. Dad’s lying next to the hundred trees he planted and they’ll decompose after him just like us without his care.

We’re scared.” Sam eventually thought of his own Goosebumps episode called ‘Night of the Living Dad’ in which Dad came back to life to be the only existing zombie, ending with the government paying Sam’s family hundreds of thousands of dollars to do research on him, completely eliminating any monetary fallbacks from their loss and putting the family at ease. Sam imagined being able to visit zombified Dad in science labs on the weekends, preferable to visiting a graveyard, which he never did.

Sam remembers being told by the police that they were going to take the body, so they had to say their final goodbyes. Sam remembered looking up from his phone and wondering why they had to take the body, feeling dumb immediately and putting his phone away.

If you tune back in through the living room window, you’d probably marvel at the landscaping job Dad did as long as the detectives investigating the area around his body aren’t in the way. Before they bought the house the yard was barren, now the three acres are covered in over two hundred trees and shrubs Dad had planted single-handedly over the years. His favorite tree was the weeping willow- he planted four of them, two of which you can see at the end of the yard through the window. Its 32

| Perception

unfortunate Dad couldn’t get through the mulching that day; the yard was beginning to look the best it ever had. Normally when Dad would get done in the yard on the weekends he’d sit in his lawn chair with a Coors Light to survey the day’s work and get to making dinner for the family.

Sam didn’t understand this sort of self-fulfillment, this decision his Dad had made to still be active outside of his already busy career, sensing his self-gratification after working in the yard all day or cooking an especially complex meal for the family. Sam later attributed this to the idea that at some point in life happiness comes down to a decision to be active, something he would struggle with through his early twenties and get a brief glimpse of upon feeling some sort of otherworldly drive that propelled him to buy and plant a tree in his backyard the summer after Dad died.

If you’re still looking through the window, you can see Mom, Sam, and his brother all come into frame.

The first time Sam experienced a death close to him and his family, one not dreamt up on the morning bus rides to school, was in the hospital as they pulled the plug on Dad’s brother. Sam was in seventh grade and remembers family saying their goodbyes after deciding to play Don McLean’s “The Day the Music Died” through an iPod speaker, everyone pretending he could hear it all through the coma. Sam remembered feeling bad, not about his Uncle, but about his family. Dad’s brother was a closet homosexual, eventually exiled by his father and welcomed by the needle-sharing men in musty basements of Indianapolis where they’d shoot heroin and play around with ‘casting’, something Mom described as “a fetish involving restricting one partner in a cast-like material so the others could... Well, it’s weird and scary”. Dad’s brother fooling around with the neighbor boy in the back of the barn, Dad’s brother getting married to a woman, Dad’s brother having a kid, Dad’s brother coming out, getting a divorce, skinnier every Christmas, sharing needles, blue lipstick, not moving, now down to bone in a hospital bed - Sam remembers feelings hanging heavy in the hospital room, needing only to see his grandfather’s fat lips tremble with regret to realize that death could bring out the worst truths in people. Dad’s lip trembled too. After leaving the hospital, Sam stopped his preoccupations with death that had been prevalent since elementary school. Soon after this, he went through an emo phase that lasted a year.

Sam remembers walking around the side of the house and feelLinger here |

33

ing for the first time like this was happening in the present. The way he remembers the memory is this: White sheet, kneeling down, Mom is crying, brother is crying, Sam is crying, Dad is dead, left leg outside of the blanket just like he slept every night. Mom’s hand was shaking as she took Dad’s wristwatch off; Sam wanted to look underneath the blanket. He remembers pulling off Dad’s work gloves, he remembers holding his hand and wondering if Dad had thought about death enough in preparation for this moment to where he could recognize and accept the signs before leaving into some other dimension. Sam wanted to know if his Dad was scared, he wanted to know what he saw when falling to the ground, if he screamed for Mom, if he saw Kim crying on the TV, if he saw his garden as incomplete. Sam remembers nothing but white sheet, green grass, and orange sun.

If you were looking through the window behind Mom’s seat, you’d have seen a deer run across the backyard while the family was knelt down blubbering around the sheet and felt like it meant something. The neighbors told Mom about the deer and she started sobbing, believing it to be Dad after leaving his body to say one last “goodbye”. Sam cringed at these sort of post-death thoughts. The day after Dad’s death was April 1st, and if you were in the living room that day you would’ve heard Mom say, “it seems like one elaborate hoax.” If you stayed in the seat across from Mom’s, you would’ve seen her sitting in the chair for the next few days watching Long Island Medium. If you looked out right past her shoulder and through the window you’d maybe see Sam and his brother finishing laying the mulch and notice how much Sam’s brother looked like Dad. You might be able to catch that Sam felt like his brother was trying to assume a fatherly role and see as Sam began to detest his brother that day. You’d see Sam at eighteen years sitting in the lawn picking at mulch, Sam staring straight into the sun until his vision got spotty, Sam realizing he never got to the age of understanding his parents, Sam unsure of what hard work meant, Sam planting a tree one day, having a Coors Light in a lawn chair and imagining the sun on his shoulder as Dad’s hand of approval. If you were in the seat across from Mom, you’d have noticed that the kids had moved out long ago and she was alone except for two dogs. You’d see a deer statue through the window. You’d see Mom still watching Long Island Medium and doing research on how to get on the show. Maybe one day you could see Mom finally decide to 34

| Perception

stand up, shut off the TV, and close the blinds, but she looks so at peace with the TV. Let her have it. You can close the blinds yourself if you’re done watching.

Brooke Bower “Untitled”

Linger here |

35

Carly Elizabeth Benson You are not a God You are not a god, the professor preached Across the panorama of wrinkled hoodies and falling eyelids Succumbing to the dark circles above their cheeks The eyes only moved to see the clocks hand Reaching with Each Tick To pull their talking stomachs toward the café.

To eat the food from the chickens Pushed together closer than the collection of t-shirts Bulging out of your top drawer that hardly shuts.

The shirts I didn’t need to buy.

You are not a god, he said.

How badly sleepy boy wished he could just turn off the lights With his drained eyes and take a nap.

The lights we leave on The light above the bed that I left on So I can see when I’m in the shower The shower that we let drip Drip Drip So we can be warm JUST ANOTHER FIVE MINUTES While he sleeps dirty and cold Under a sheet of cardboard And the delta Shows the bottom depths of its mouth yearning for WATER I watched her look at the clock, WATER She forgot it, how could she slip up on something so routine?

She needs water to swallow the hormones 36

| Perception

That the fish soon will.

You are not a god You are a species You are like the fish Like the grass Like the chickens You are a part of the web in which you alter You are not a god.

The clock snatched the students with its nearing hand Whisking them To the shower To the cafĂŠ And to the t-shirt drawer.

You are not a god.

Linger here |

37

Jenny-Lee Aciu “Untitled”

| Perception

38

Farrell Greenwald Brenner My Grandmother, the Dementor It is in the silences the gaps between the words between the ums and the ers that the fear grips me icily as I realize she has forgotten “Where, ah, did I leave...my, uh...glasses?” (two feet to her left) “Er, have the dogs been fed yet today?” (sixth time she’s asked) “And, uh, you go to, hem, Buff State...isn’t that right?” (my Orange pride shatters) And then there are my silences, too as I gather up that wounded pride and glue it back together into a tangerine mosaic and remind myself how childishly selfish it is that my feelings are hurt by her dementia “Um, no, I go to Syracuse, granma...like granpa did?”

I schlep through those milky blue eyes searching for the recognition of me, as me As she loses herself to the cobwebs and the dusty light I lose myself in the quagmire, sinking into the struggle We grasp at each other but something is pulling her away upward A sinister smile plays on her lips A shadow crosses her face Because she knows that even already I am ruled by the silences

Linger here |

39

Claire Maxine Dunderman My Professor’s Dog Ate My Muffin. I Cried.

Did you ever have a rough start to your morning?

Did a dog ever eat your muffin in class?

Did you cry about it?

Before I go any further, I want to be clear about something. This is the story that I use to truly test people, usually people who don’t know me very well. I tell this as an icebreaker with acquaintance-potential-friend types. Will this person handle being my friend? I think to myself, as they say, “yeah, sure, let me hear it!”

I also tell this to guys that I’m interested in – you know, when you go on those pre-dates and you tell each other stories to give off that I’muber-datable impression. Luckily, I have the art of giving off the wrong impression boiled down to a science and this story is merely just part of the experimentation. I look at his soft eyes and slight smirk and I know what he’s thinking, but I think to myself, Yeah… but will you want to

handle me?

And, as a sick sort of challenge for myself, I think, I bet not.

This horrifies my mom.

“Claire, it’s funnier when they know you,” she pleads. “Let them get to know you first… Please.”

But I can’t help it. It’s almost as if I feel like I owe them the truth, you know? It’s not just because weird things like this happen to me a lot… it’s also because of my reaction to these sorts of situations.

The date was nondescript and the morning dew on the grass was average. It was just a normal day; I was getting ready to go to a normal 9:30 AM class and, surprisingly, I was not running late. I strutted confidently into the dining hall. Nary a soul was near the pastries.

This kingdom is mine, I thought, drinking in the possibilities.

I looked at the shelves and the potential breakfast delicacies bathing in fluorescent light, their sweet smells pulling me in. I wanted it all.

But then I saw it. It was a blueberry muffin with some clear sugar sprinkles placed haphazardly on a glazed top. A black paper muffin cup hugged its gooey core.

My precious, I thought, channeling my inner Gollum.

As I put the one to rule all muffins in my outer backpack pouch 40

| Perception

and walked into class, I would soon come to find that I had gambled too heavily. Too succulent of a treat was not destined in my stomach.

It would be in the stomach of a Rottweiler.

“Isn’t she just the cutest??” my professor gushed. I sat down in my seat, stiff, and placed my backpack on the table.

“Yeah,” I said.

I lamented that the day that I was early to class was the day that my professor brought in the type of dog that ran over me while I was a kid. The memory still persists as one of true abject horror. I was standing innocently in a soccer field, not even a tween, and then all of a sudden a sleek bear-like figure stampeded over my small body.

And now one of them was sniffing my bag.

I pulled it closer to me. I had to protect my breakfast treasure.

Minutes passed and the rest of the class filed in, muffin-less and dark circles glowing under their eyes.

I am queen, I thought.

Until the pop quiz.

Why would she give a pop quiz on my day of muffin triumph? A perfectly good morning was now soured as I apathetically looked at the questions. I had… glazed… over the chapter.

Glazed, heh heh, I thought. Stupid jokes would pull me through.

But I was wrong. By the end of the quiz, I was drained and overwhelmed. It was MUFFIN DAY. I thought. I couldn’t just have one day

of muffin-y bliss?

And so I did what I had started doing in first grade whenever I felt like crying over bewildering circumstances. I went to the bathroom.

I didn’t cry this time, though, but it did help calm me down. The quiz wasn’t worth that many points and I would just actually read the chapter the next time. It would be okay.

If only I could have guessed what the next two minutes of my life had in store for me.

First off, I was already a little shaken with the dog and the quiz and all. But walking into a room of laptops simultaneously playing George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words stand-up bit was pure disorientation. Later and after the madness, I would be told that it was because the projector wasn’t working.

The echo-y shouts of profanity paled, however, in comparison to Linger here |

41

the bizarreness of my professor just losing it at the sight of me. I mean it – she was practically in tears watching me tip toe to my seat.

“Claire… Claire I am so sorry,” she said, gasping for breath between laughter.

I had been so focused on the laptops that I had failed to notice the carnage on my table. Crumbs… crumbs were everywhere. My backpack askew, the dog was nuzzling her nose into…

Oh no.

My tablemates witnessed my reaction and started to laugh too, bemused at my look of genuine disappointment, surprise and anger. I knew that they weren’t really laughing at me, but it didn’t help. I’ve had to learn over the years that there’s a reason why my peers can pick on me easily (I react and I am sometimes – if not most times – very weird) and that I shouldn’t always blame them, but in this moment, that logic went out the door.

In that moment, I was back in elementary school.

My adult consciousness shut down and before I could process what was going on I was bawling. This made the room dead silent except for the weird echoes of George Carlin bouncing around in the room. With everyone dumbstruck and staring at me, I hightailed it out of there.

I felt like I was coming back down to Earth from wherever the hell I go whenever I get like that while I was crying in a stall in the bathroom and calling my mom. With the phone ringing, my first sane thoughts came through my mind.

What do I even tell Mom? Why am I even calling her? What just happened?

“Hi Claire!” She said, sunny and blissfully unaware of my current state of mind.

“Hi Mom,” I said, garbled.

“Claire… Claire what’s wrong?”

My mom has told me that she can tell within the first two seconds of a phone conversation if I am fine or not. “I usually listen for an echo,” is what she says. “That’s how I know you’re in the bathroom.”

“Mom… I was in class, and it was the professors dog, and I went to the bathroom, and it ate my muffin.”

I wish I could actually type the true iterations of words that came out of my mouth because it did not sound like that.

42

| Perception

“Wait, what? Did the dog eat a muffin? Did it die?”

“No… it ate my muffin.”

“It… what?” Her voice was becoming less concerned and more incredulous.

“Yeah… it ate my muffin. I got it from the dining hall.”

“What?!” she practically shouted, holding back her laughter.

I started to giggle. “Um, yeah, I guess it’s kind of weird.”

She didn’t hold back this time.

“Oh my gosh Claire… I thought the dog had died or something!

Oh my gosh! So what did you do?”

“I ran out of the room crying.”

“Oh my gosh!” It was the sort of voice she used only when she was laughing so hard that she was crying. After a few minutes of bewildered laughing, we both calmed down.

“Okay, well, you should go back to class then. Maybe they’ll know not to bring dogs in the school anymore!” she said.

Feeling better, I hung up. I washed my hands and dried off my tears. And then the pit of my stomach dropped.

I have to go back in there.

I am no stranger to public crying and to public humiliation. Again, another art form I have mastered. But this… this was different. My reaction hadn’t just been weird; it had been jarring.

As I walked back in the class, everyone, and I mean everyone, turned to look at me. The dog was back at my backpack and my tablemates in stunned silence shooed the dog away as quickly as they could, afraid of another outburst from me. I sat down. The class continued in awkward, muffin-less silence.

My world was salvaged when the class finally was over. I tried to scoot out as fast I could but my professor got to me first.

“Claire… I am so, so sorry.”

“Really, you don’t need to feel bad about it,” I said, nearly crying again. Why am I crying NOW? I thought I could save just a tiny bit of dignity by playing up the fact that a Rottweiler really did run me over as a kid.

“Oh my gosh… I should have known,” she said.

“It’s really fine, really,” I said, one foot out of the door already.

“Take this,” she said, and she stuffed a five-dollar bill into my hand.

Linger here |

43

Before I could say, “oh no, you shouldn’t have to do that,” she was out the door as quickly as the Roadrunner darts out of frame.

Stunned, I walked out into the late morning day and made my way to the library like a zombie. I was going to attempt to get work done before my next class, but deep down I knew that any attempt of brain functionality would be futile.

Until I saw the café counter.

Next to the deli line was a pastry basket. It didn’t have a blueberry muffin, but it had something better. A coffee cake muffin.

It was like I was making the connection in my mind for the first time that money could buy food.

I… could still have… a muffin.

I beamed at the cashier who exchanged my cash for muffin and I didn’t mind the odd look she gave me.

“Thank you… Thank you so much,” I whispered to her.

“Umm, you’re welcome?” she said.

I walked away and found a perfect study spot. The chair was comfortable and books and windows surrounded me.

And, gingerly… respectfully… I started to eat my muffin, never feeling as happy as I did in that moment.

44

| Perception

Linger here |

45

Jenny-Lee Aciu “Untitled”

Eva R DeCharleroy Halfway I live in New York.

At night, There is a place I drift into, Halfway between being awake and The forgetfulness of sleep.

I came here,

Because I had dreams.

I feel myself float as if I’ve been encapsulated by Nitrous gas.

I can’t laugh, But I imagine that I can.

I see the small blue overalls, White cotton shirt tucked underneath— Missing from my smile, Two front teeth.

They say that life Is bigger here, But it’s not It’s crowded.

We schedule every moment Down to the wire, Leaving little room to think— People on the streets leave, Little room to move or breathe.

46

| Perception

I am alone with my thoughts here.

It is empty, But waiting to be filled.

I am alone but I have the giant spires for company; The purple streaked Badlands to Guard me from wind; The tall prairie grass to shade my feet.

It was sheltering, To be left with nothing and no one to see.

Umbrella.

I always remember to take My umbrella.

It rains often, As if there is mourning here.

But I never forget things; My mind is wound as tight and sharp As the springs that make the umbrella Burst openThe sky at a Midwestern sunset Always looks like the splitting of a wound, Burst open.

The atmosphere Ripped, Insides rushing out, Raw and exposed.

It’s injured but It’s beautiful.

Linger here |

47

Nittka Mehra “Untitled”

48

| Perception

Korey Raye Lane Clenched She’d said it a million times. “My dad’s dead,” or “he died, actually,” something like that. It always came up. She just couldn’t avoid it.

But tonight, when she was asked what her father did for a living, she replied with a curt, “I don’t have a dad.”

She couldn’t believe the words she was saying, as they so horridly spilled out of her mouth. She hated herself. As the words left her lips, she felt dead, like a corpse on the ground, the words maggots crawling out from her every crevice. She took a short, ragged breath in and felt it catch in her throat. She wanted to correct herself, to say that she did have a dad, or, she used to anyways. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t make the words come out. Those five earlier ones had scurried out with such ease, but now, now she was stuck. She didn’t know how to fix it. She didn’t know what to do. So, Tiffany did what Tiffany does best, Tiffany smiled.

Smiling was easy. She’d done it so much it had stopped feeling like anything at all when her small mouth curved upwards and crinkles formed on the corners of her eyes. When Tiffany smiled, people noticed.

They noticed her long, golden hair. They noticed how her eyes were a shade of blue so much like the sky in the middle of a hot afternoon.

How her features were all just the right size and her body was the kind both women and men dreamed about. Yes, when Tiffany smiled, people noticed. And she used that entirely to her advantage.

“What about you?” Tiffany asked. “Tell me about your family.”

She adjusted her necklace as she leaned in to hear her date’s response.

He was handsome. Definitely handsome. His eyes were a golden brown, which reminded Tiffany of her dad. He was sweet, too. Smart, wealthy, went to church every week. Her family would love him. But Tiffany hadn’t heard any of what he’d just said. She felt far away, like she did a lot of the time. She didn’t belong here, as much as she wanted to. She just didn’t.

She let the evening continue, and acted like her usual, pleasant self.

But she just wanted to get out.

“Sure you don’t want any wine?” Todd asked.

“I’m good, thank you though,” Tiffany responded as she avoided Todd’s eyes, smiling down at her plate. She’d ordered the steak. Her dad Linger here |

49

had loved steak, so Tiffany did too. She tried to picture her dad, something she did when she was feeling weak. She saw his eyes, that part was easy. Then his hair, thick and black. His skin, naturally tan and dark—so unlike Tiffany’s own pale flesh. Then there was his smile. That was always the tricky part. Tiffany’s eyebrows furrowed together as she tried to finish the puzzle that was her dad. But, she couldn’t. She’d forgotten. She hated herself for that too.

The evening drew to a close, and Todd walked her back to her apartment. It was snowing outside. Tiffany loved the snow. While she was fumbling for her keys, Todd asked to see Tiffany again. She knew she should say yes, he was just the type of guy she’d always imagined herself being with. She knew she should say yes, but he’d had two glasses of wine at dinner and he had wanted more and Tiffany couldn’t deal with that.

Not now. But she also couldn’t deal with saying no.

“Sure,” she said, smiling. Todd kissed her goodnight, on the cheek of course, and Tiffany closed her door. *** Tiffany had never been drunk. In college, she’d perfected the art of nursing a beer. On her 21st birthday she’d played sick, and lay in bed watching old westerns. She somehow managed to never tell anyone.

Maybe she’d gotten really good at playing it cool. Or maybe people just didn’t care.

Tiffany kept a bottle of whiskey in her house at all times. It never got opened, or touched for that matter, but it was always there. It was there as a test. It was there as a reminder, a reminder of what Tiffany had found empty at the bottom of her dad’s truck that day. It was there to cover up her dryness. It was there, waiting.

Sitting on her couch, thinking of an excuse to bail on her next date with Todd, Tiffany saw the bottle of whiskey. She stood up and walked toward it. She’d made a promise. She reached her arm out, her hand slowly grazing the neck of the bottle. She said she never would. She lifted it up, inspecting it closely.

Things change, she thought.

An hour later, and Tiffany was back on her couch, the bottle still unopened. The snow had begun to fall heavier and heavier out her window. Thoughts flooded her mind as she stared at the murder weapon in 50

| Perception

front of her. She came up with a million reasons why she should just open it. She was 23, it was legal, and she’d been through a lot. But that one reason stuck with her.

“I don’t have a dad,” she’d said. As if she’d never known him. As if she’d never been disappointed in him, or proud, when he’d gone to rehab. Twice.

“I don’t have a dad,” she’d said, so calmly, as if that day had never happened. When she found him and fell to the ground and all she knew was darkness and all she was was a body, drifting through the days of nothingness. As if he hadn’t drank himself to death.

“I don’t have a dad,” she’d said, as if her promise to never let that become an option for her meant nothing.

Maybe it didn’t.

Tiffany looked at the bottle. She looked at the bottle and thought of her dad. She’d always hated telling people that her dad had been an alcoholic. As soon as those nine letters poured from her mouth, she saw change. The person who’d asked immediately regretted asking. They imagined a raging drinker who beat his family and wore white tank tops and never knew love. They imagined a monster. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. He’d been her savior, Tiffany’s dad. When she’d gotten in trouble when she was younger, she begged for her dad to be her punisher. He never spanked. He’d said he was afraid to. Afraid to hurt his little girl. Instead, he’d sit down, pull Tiffany into his lap, kiss the top of her head and tell her that she couldn’t do that again, but he understood why she did and he wasn’t mad. Tiffany, afraid of disappointing him, would always ask the same question. Sitting there, enveloped in love, she’d ask if he hated her now. The first time she’d asked it, her dad had been shocked and upset. But as time went on, and Tiffany developed an attitude that required more frequent punishment, her father chuckled at the question. Tiffany would look up, see his eyes closed in content, his mouth curved upwards in a smile, and she just knew, everything would be okay. He’d saved her.

Now, in her apartment with the bottle of whiskey right in front of her, Tiffany wasn’t too sure things would be okay. Her dad was gone, and her head had ached trying to piece together just that one memory. Tiffany’s vision blurred. She tasted salt. She kept forgetting, With her memory fading, Tiffany’s anger grew. She felt that feeling Linger here |

51

in her stomach, the empty one. The one that made her clench all her muscles together to make it go away. She missed her dad. Her thoughts weighed her down. She slowly slid from the couch to the floor. She stayed there for the longest time, clenching. Clenching to remember, and clenching to forget.

Her phone rang, and Tiffany saw her mother’s face flash across the screen, waking her from her trance. She smiled. Tiffany’s mom was her best friend. But she couldn’t talk to her about this. Tiffany used to blame all of her dad on her mom. She once despised her mom and thought she was the reason for all the clenching. And even now, years later when they were so close, they never talked about him, Tiffany’s dad. It didn’t happen. He was forbidden. If his name was mentioned, they both tightened and tensed up, a barrier forming between them.

She let it go to voicemail.

Tiffany pulled her legs in close, and wrapped her arms around them—she needed a hug. An embrace. Her mom’s face flashing across that screen, so fleeting, had made her cold. The snow kept falling outside, steady as a heartbeat. The bottle of whiskey still sat in front of her, taunting and tempting her, bringing her back to that day. She tasted more salt and her mouth opened in despair. She knew she’d made a sound, that gasping sound made by the desperation in her soul, but she didn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear it. She was back to that day, years ago. The day of whiskey and trucks and stickers in her feet and crying and people and hurt. The day her dad died.

It had been his weekend, the Saturday Tiffany found her dad, face down in the water. It had been his weekend, but she hadn’t seen him since Friday night when they’d sat on the couch and watched “True Grit.”

He’d loved old westerns. Saturday morning she’d woken up late, and was immediately worried. She was usually dragged out of bed before dawn to go fishing at the pond, but not that Saturday. That Saturday was different. She slept in until nine and woke up to silence. She called out, shattering the quiet. He wasn’t there. Outside, his truck was gone. Panicked, her heart thrashing in her chest, Tiffany grabbed the keys to the ATV and drove to the pond, not bothering to put shoes on. The drive there was awful; fast and slow and awful. She’d felt frozen, like she couldn’t get there fast enough. And then she got there and she wasn’t sure she could do it.

Tiffany knew. She knew what she would find that Saturday. She’d 52

| Perception

felt it in her, this anxious feeling of something terrible happening, growing, expanding. And now it was coming true.

She walked to the truck—empty, except for the bottle, abandoned on the floorboard. She looked up and saw him—her savior, face down in the water, gone forever.

Now, back on her chill apartment floor, Tiffany was reminded of a Bible story. The one where Jesus walks on the water to save his disciples.

Tiffany scoffed. Her dad didn’t walk on water. He’d gotten drunk and fell in it. And died. Tiffany wasn’t so sure now that he was her savior.

The wind outside was blowing harder, the snow never ceasing. Tiffany reached for the bottle.

She grabbed it and stood up, walking to the kitchen in search of a glass. Drinking wouldn’t turn her into her father. She needed to prove that. She needed to prove her strength. Her dad wasn’t a bad man, he’d just had his demons, everyone did. She poured, the caramel-colored liquid splashing into the glass, oblivious to its power. Tiffany set the bottle down and picked up the glass, bringing it to her mouth. She sniffed.

She’d never liked the smell of alcohol, it carried with it empty plastic cups found in her dad’s bathroom and forgotten weekends. But tonight, tonight she embraced the smell, she ran towards it with open arms, ready to accept it and all it brought with it. She thought.

Tiffany took a sharp breath in. She was scared. She’d never lost control of herself or her body. She’d always been the master, in charge of it all. She was too afraid to take a sleeping pill, because the thought of this other thing knocking her out and making her sleep made her feel vulnerable. Her hand was shaking, and Tiffany didn’t know how to stop it. Her whole body was shaking. She was cold again, and alone. She tried to breathe, in and out, in and out, to calm herself, but that only made it worse. She knew how to breathe. She didn’t know how to live.

The glass fell, shattering on the ground, causing Tiffany to scream.

The scream turned into a cry as tears began to flood her vision, salt overcoming her taste buds. Clenching.

She walked back to the living room, picking up her phone. Outside, the snow was no longer falling, and the sky was clear. She dialed the number and waited for an answer. There was an answer on the third ring.

“Mom?” she sobbed.

Linger here |

53

Alex Aronson “California Dreaming 1”

54

| Perception

Christine Nicole Bader Extremities I never know what to do with my hands.

My fingers tap on surfaces and refuse to keep still.

I always walk too fast like I’ve got somewhere important to go but I don’t.

I think I need caffeine most of time and then I can’t sleep.

Lately I’ve been drinking too much alcohol and the details escape me from the previous night.

I don’t know what to do with my hands and I don’t know if that’s alright.

Linger here |

55

Lorissa Anne Cournoyer The Beginning Open your mouth and let the clouds come out so that they linger in the air between us until one of us says boo.

I shut my eyes and I can finally, finally, See the colors of January.

When I see at you I can’t help but imagine the way you fall asleep And what you think about when you look at your hands.

Sew my skin to yours because I never want to have to cross the street alone again and have the dogs bark at the way my skirt casts shadows.

If you just fall towards the cement I promise you there will be daisies waiting when you hit the bottom.

You won’t be able to celebrate Halloween without thinking about the way my legs cross when I’m scared and that someday you hope to be the one that keeps them apart.

You’ll want me so bad that the same cotton strings that pull on your heart will make you buckle your knees all at once and fall further into the daisies and the shades of white that you never knew were there.

I promise you Blink three times and pucker your lips because I’ll be on the other side Give me a chance and I’ll make your chest hurt in that good kind of way, in that addicting kind of way that you get when you swap your judgment for whiskey and lose your earrings in a bathroom sink.

Open your eyes and close your mouth and let me into the pulse your body makes when you see me.

Lay on the table I’ll mind my p’s and q’s and I stain your skin with ink 56

| Perception

I’ll press down so they stay there and pages will pour from your fingertips And that every time you look up the sky will be tinged with the way my hair Falls across the sheets.

Trust me.

Isabella Barrionuevo “Love”

Linger here |

57

58

| Perception

As I rub two quarters together in my pocket the clock on my wrist hits strand like a guitar stroke and I feel it all...

The midnight howling of a lonely steam train calling for it’s lady in red, The angst hidden within black palpitated pumping fists of protest...

The jangling of chump change rattling inside the beard of a smiling concrete corpse the juggle and shuffle of feet scuffling against the metal to go to and to all caught between the distant murmurs of shrill laughter and jolted violence from a moonlit window The silhouette of a young girl with yellow curls and her bear, bowing before the stars The stumble of drunken knobbly knees holding the weight of an unknown lover The smell of rotten smoke and a breath of fresh paved cement and car gasoline The click clack click clack click clack of small heels and the occasional smack of hubba bubba pattering through the fields of tar and grass Dogs calling and whooping running wild through the twilight streets of dusk with there heads thrown back pretending for one night, to be the wolves.

Selina Kaya Mohr The Midnight Peddler

Linger here |

59

The bartering and barking of dimes, names, coins and thoughts all slung together in a slang of vernacular on the grimy street corner The echoes of sirens prancing off of dark putrid tunnel walls as horses slowly clop from the sidelines like parasites of the night The smell of winter hits like the crumbling of ash with that of a withering wilted disdain The last of the old, cobbles slowly down the street with her cane, arch of a back, and her pin of pageantry curls- a distant reminder...

A gray and black cat smoothy whistles in the distance the city’s crooning rooster, And just like the snap of the index and middle finger , A paper boy silently hustles from house to house a small sweat forming from his furrowed brow.

And I, still rubbing two 25 cent pieces together in my black corduroy pocket snap up my brass Swedish made pocket watch, with the deft of my left and gently recede with the stroke of the clock.

Annemaria Menna “Untitled”

60

| Perception

Rachel Elizabeth Mandel Ghosts of Autumn Fallen leaves litter the autumn ground, ghostly entrails of the vibrancy of spring.

No crime but time has condemned them to this end – to vanish passively by whims of fate, scattered to infinity by crisp winds or ground to dust beneath so many unthinking feet.

Yet in death they live on still a crumpled, crackling reminder of what was, will be.

Linger here |

61

Eva R DeCharleroy Dust of Dakota There were days when I Lost words, But my thoughts floated Like twisting music notes, Coursing over spire mountains Dotting the landscape and The Ponderosa pines.

I had no need then To write the moments I lived in, For they repeated themselves, Rolling over one another like The long prairie grasses.

Up every day With the slanting sun across my Sandpaper-colored carpet, Life was spent freely, No tax on the fresh air; Out to play and Imagine other worlds, I stayed until the sun told me The watch’s time.

I had no need to write then But I wished for a different life I wished for a change Not because I knew what waited, But because I had no earthly idea.

62

| Perception

I write now Because the moments Became memories, My wish granted, The changes plentiful, My setting morphed, The fantasies relinquished.

Dust of Dakota, Dried on the soles of my feet, I write before what was simple, Escapes from what is now Inside me; I write before The filling Of the ocean floor, The drowning Of the fossils, The sun cast over by blankets Of cotton clouds, Their home made over my Bottomless stretch of sea.

Linger here |

63

Eden Ariel Lapsley Coffee Stains I feel like an old woman’s coffee mug with black rings at the center and red lipstick stains at the rim.

Like I’ve been filled and emptied too many times with hot, steaming liquid that was sipped out slowly leaving a cloudy, dark pool at the bottom that separates and cools.

Always placed on the bottom shelf of a high, wooden cupboard at night.

A cupboard with a broken door, that hangs a little low and leaves a crack to let the light in, just a little.

At night the moon peers in at the chipped cups and cracked china and wonders if it is a mirror, she thinks she understands, but she doesn’t have a handle and she isn’t liable to shatter.

Sometimes I wish it’d just happen.

A slip of the hand, a touch of an elbow and it’d be over, over the side and onto the floor, no more lips, no more stains.

64

| Perception

Holly Wilson “Untitled�

Linger here |

65

Eva R DeCharleroy FRICTION You were once Clad in the obliviousness That comes with the young— You had goals, A life ahead mapped out that Would leave this one in the dust.

But, You made scars on your skin, Once the color of wet, Atlantic coast sand, Like the rough rocks Made smooth by the water, You let everything rub over you The wrong way— You let the waves break you apart and The scars on your skin were Leaving scars Inside yourself.

You, You with infinite talent, Threw away your life in A sea of sadness, Overflowing and billowing out, The coastline Receding— Your lost dreams lay at the bottom.

You call me and You’ve overdosed on Xanex, (Again)— Gone to the hospital because 66

| Perception

Coke’s seduced you, (Again)— Ask will I hold your hand while I watch you slip your life like a paper note Through the neck of a bottle?

(Of course).

No. No more.

You act like a child but You could be a poet, An artist, A visionary; For the words you weave in private are pretty, But they are merely fiction to you.

What’s real is Off the page and it’s From the real You cannot get away— What’s real is that your mother Didn’t want you, And your new mother seems Not to need you but I want you, I need you— I need you to see What you could be, With the light of the stage set around you, Stranded on this island but Forgetting the sky is still bright.

I need you to stop— Stop resisting the friction of life Rubbing against you, Turning your tough exterior underfoot to Remnants of sand.

Linger here |

67

Nittika Mehra “Untitled” 68

| Perception

Adeyemi Adediran Becoming Victoria It rained the day I entered the world, the storm that raged was one of a kind. My mother would tell me later that the town had never experienced such a destructive storm before I was born and that it would be the last. As a kid I used to believe this phenomenon was a pointer to my uniqueness, that the forces of nature had to come out in their full force to welcome me into their midst, I felt indestructible, God’s own chosen child prepared for unparalleled greatness.

At my birth I was christened Victor Stephenson, but my legal documents now read Victoria Stephenson. I was a man, now I am a woman.

My mother told me that she wanted a girl when she got pregnant. A devout Christian, she refused a sonogram. She always said the Just shall live by faith, so, she chose to believe that God would grant her wish. The baby pictures I have are those of a tiny beautiful boy dressed in pink girlish clothes. They were products of God’s failure in his job of catering for my Mother’s every need.

You see, my mother used to be a crackhead. She told me God saved her from the bondage of crack when she met Pastor Jones. She was a prostitute, selling herself to feed her addiction. She sometimes got lucky enough to get an occasional sugar daddy, old men who would keep her around for a while, but they always left after they had their fill. Now, God had become her sugar daddy, the ever-effervescent supplier of her needs.

Mother thought it fit to have a child because of loneliness. She was tired of being alone, trudging through life on her own without someone in her corner. So she always dreamed of having a baby girl, her friend and confidant to share everything with. When I think of it, Mama probably married Pastor Jones because she needed a daughter and could not just hop on any man on the street to provide her one because the bible prohibited fornication. The memories I have of Pastor Jones are of him on top of Mama grunting, telling her to say he was the man. We lived in a one room apartment, barely had enough to eat but God was always our provider, at least that was what Pastor Jones told me whenever I cried for more food.

I was six years old when Kimberly came to the house. I had opened the door for her after the repeated heavy pounding that she obviously Linger here |

69

thought passed for a knock. I remember her name because I always wondered how an ugly fiend could have such a beautiful name. When I saw her, I was immediately distressed by her presence. She was a tall, slightly hunched, ugly thing. Her hair had receded, almost bald, probably aided by years of perming and other vanities, as Pastor Jones called them. She asked for Damien, but I simply looked up at her wondering if she could also have possibly been created in God’s image as the Sunday school teacher said we all were. I was still looking at her, mute and uncomfortable when Pastor Jones and Mama showed up; they had gone to the next apartment to evangelize. That night, Pastor Jones packed out of the house and left with his wife Kimberly. We never saw him again.

I was Victor, I am now Victoria. I was in High school when I realized I wanted to be a girl. I always wanted to dress like a girl but was too scared to do so. I did not want to be ostracized. High school could be a very cruel place; sometimes I wondered how young people could be so mean. The best time to let out that side was always Halloween. I would dress in cute pink cheerleaders’ clothes and pom poms. Those were the best of times. I could be myself without fear or shame because everyone had the masks of new personalities on, no one knew mine was the real me; what they thought to be the real me, was my mask.

I still think about the day I told Mama I wanted to become Victoria. I was sure she would be happy. She had wanted a baby girl for so long. The look on her face will haunt me forever. It was dismay mixed with an undisguised disgust. God, she told me, could not allow something so abnormal. She recommended a week of fasting and prayers and special sessions with her new Pastor. A lanky old man aptly called Reverend Dick Slick.

I wished Mama had gone with me to the surgery. I needed the moral support. But she was in Church that day begging God to rather make the surgery go wrong so I could leave this wicked world as she puts it and meet God when he could still recognize me. After the surgery, it was a while before I could adjust to the person that stared back at me from the mirror. I finally got what I wanted, a pair of breasts, a vagina, but I still lacked the feminine figure and spark that made men go weak in the knees.

In the loneliness that took over I started dreaming of death. Not the fearful entity with a club or a pitchfork, dressed in black robes, but a 70

| Perception

soothing, gentle-looking being who would take me out of the miserable world. God was the only problem. I wondered if he would still love or even recognize me. Sometimes, I pray to God. But in my prayers God is a she. A being who understood my feelings as a woman would.

I am Victoria, but I used to be Victor. I go to Church, I want to learn to love God, but I do not think he loves me. At least not the way I am.

Linger here |

71

Christine Nicole Bader Aftermath I can’t remember what’s real Or a dream.

My stomach growls My body aches.

A reminder that I’m alive I think.

I see you everywhere My bed, my car, the streets.

You never smile You scowl, look away, retreat.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I can’t get away Or don’t want to.

What extraordinary defeat.

72

| Perception

Linger here |

73

Alex Aronson “California Dreaming 3”

Kathryn Anne Frentchak Excerpt This is the story of a young woman, backpacking in the Ural Mountains.

She was a week out from the last town she had passed through when it began to rain. Luckily for the young woman, the area was not wholly uninhabited; she had passed an inn on the road only a mile back. The young woman turned around and headed for the inn.

It was truly the middle of nowhere. The road leading past the inn was a mixture of dirt and gravel rather than pavement.

Yet there was a light in the downstairs window as the woman approached, completely soaked, and when she knocked it was only a moment before a man came to open the door.

He welcomed her in, the poor thing, wet to the bone. He apologized for the emptiness; business was bad this time of year and offered to find her some dry clothes. The young woman thanked him and waited in the kitchen, shivering in front of the fireplace. The man returned shortly, carrying a pair of women’s sweatpants and a shirt.

“The bathroom is just down the hall, the very end,” he pointed. The young woman thanked him again and followed his direction. Out of the kitchen and down a blue hallway she walked, numbered doors on either side. She stopped at the farthest door. The bathroom. The woman entered and changed out of her wet clothing. The new shirt and pants were slightly loose, as if they had belonged to a woman just a size or two bigger that the she was.

The young woman returned to the kitchen. It was growing late. The man apologized. He had already eaten supper, but there were leftovers if she was hungry.

“Will you stay the night, dear?” he asked. “The rooms are nearly all empty, it would be no trouble.” Outside the storm still growled, rain thundering on the sides of the inn. The young woman acquiesced gratefully.

“I will get fresh bedding,” said the man. He gestured towards the first floor hallway, and instructed the young woman to make herself at home.

So she stepped again into the blue hallway, leaving her things to dry by the fire. She walked past the first two rooms and tried the handle of the third. It opened to reveal a blue room. Blue wallpaper, carpet, furnishings. The sound of the storm grew louder when she opened the door, 74

| Perception

however, for a window had been left open and rain was pouring onto floor. She closed it then returned to the hallway. Directly across from her was room 104. She reached out to try the handle.

“Don’t!” The shout made her jump. The man had returned, carrying blankets and a pillow. His face was wan and his arms trembled, the covers shaking.

“I’m sorry!” She stammered. “The window was open.”

“Not that room! Please, I am sorry, I cannot explain.” The man instead opened the door to another room and the woman followed, glancing over her shoulder at 104.

The storm continued pounding through the night. It was sometime after midnight when the young woman awoke, needing a restroom. She left her room and trotted quickly down the blue hallway. It was only on her way back that she remembered door 104.

The young woman paused. It was a door completely like the others. She reached out tentatively and tried the handle. It was locked. She bent down to the keyhole and stared into the room.

There was nothing. It was blue. The same as her room and all the other rooms on the first floor. Blue carpet, blue wallpaper, blue furnishings.

How curious she thought, leaning back on her heels. Nothing out of the usual. Unable to resist the young woman brought her eye back to the keyhole.

Red. It was red.

Linger here |

75

Jenny-Lee Aciu “Untitled”

| Perception

76

Korey Raye Lane You I really didn’t know if I wanted to write you a letter, if I wanted to have anything to do with you anymore.

But then I realized, this was my chance. My chance to work this out, for me. My chance to make sense of things. My chance to have the final word, at last.

So remember, always remember, this letter is for me, not you.

You, who tore me apart in every way. You, the serpent who slithered its way into my Garden of Eden. You, who I want so badly to hate, but can’t.

This isn’t for you, this is for me.

I remember the first time it happened. We were on our way to Dallas to see my sisters. We were riding with the windows down, pushing 85, the breeze sliding its way through my fingers as I put my hand out the window—free and easy. The sun poured down on us, intensifying it all.

I remember looking over at you and smiling, thinking that all the joy in the world was right at my fingertips. Your brown eyes lit up as your worn leather boot pushed down harder and harder on the pedal. You always loved to go fast. The radio was off, the sound of the world—so beautiful to us back then—was enough.

Then it all stopped. You switched to the brakes, sending a shrill, highpitched sound throughout the truck. Words flew from your mouth, words you’d never said in front of me before. My hand left its resting place and slammed into the dash, my heart sped up when I saw you—your face a shade of red so unlike the you I knew before. The veins in your arms pronounced themselves, taunting me with their control over you, over me. I remember hearing a door slam and looking over to see you gone. My legs shook, my nervous tick taking me captive. You forced open my door, you said I’d distracted you, it was my fault. My shaking leg was annoying you, so you grabbed it and pulled my whole body out by it. I screamed as I landed on the rough gravel, but it was me who wanted to take back roads the whole way, and we’d only seen that one car pass. It was my fault. *** Linger here |

77

“When memory controls us we become puppets of the past.” Someone said that once in a documentary I watched in school. I thought it was beautiful, so I wrote it down and put a star by it—a reminder.

We never made it to Dallas, I was too bruised. You apologized on the drive home, saying driving made you tense, I’d distracted you, and if you’d hit that other guy your dad would kill you. I tried to speak, but couldn’t—you’d gotten my mouth pretty good. You took my silence as acceptance while I thought of puppets.

I’d loved you, I was so sure of it. I didn’t know who I would be without you, so I loved you. I loved you, so I thought of puppets and I forgave you—leaving the past, so sure it wouldn’t happen again.

And it didn’t, not for a while. It was beautiful again. Hot and sweet and fast and beautiful. I told myself it was a glitch, a power outage, a black out—we’d be okay, it’d make us stronger. *** The first thing I noticed about you was your hands. They were big and dark and looked capable of easily lifting me up out of my comfort zone.

They also twitched. I thought it was just a passion in you, aching to be set free. I told myself it was normal, I had my shaking leg, you had your twitching hand.

After that first time I started to notice things: your hand twitched when it was about to happen, there was a familiarity in your muscles about it, your eyes got bright just as mine would close.

There was peace in those moments, when my eyes would close. I would stop tensing up all my muscles and let it happen. I wanted to fight back, especially at the end, but your hands were so strong, so powerful, so I waited for it to pass. I closed my eyes and thought of how we were. I thought of summer and Tolstoy and vanilla ice cream with cinnamon on top. I thought of the times when your hands did beautiful things, like turn the radio to Top 40 even though you hated it. Or twirl my hair into ringlets that only lasted a moment but you said were perfect. Or cook hash browns in the mornings because I hated eggs. Or do anything but twitch. *** 78

| Perception

It was a wet June day when we met. Do you remember? The skies had opened up and finally relieved our small town of the drought we’d been enduring. Everyone said it was a miracle—rain in summer in Texas, a miracle for certain. Everyone said it was a miracle so everyone acted differently that day. Everyone smiled, everyone waved. Everyone went outside and felt the cool liquid rushing from above fall on their skin, a sensation so unfamiliar yet so right. Everyone in our town was happy, giddy, talking of Fourth of July fireworks and green grass and new lawnmowers. Everyone but you.

You walked with your head down, eyes trained on the ground below you, refusing to take part in any joy. I remember seeing you walk in to the boutique, you stuck out with your scowl and your hands. They pushed open the heavy oak doors and shook themselves dry, all over our new Oriental rugs. I panicked.

I said something to you, a greeting maybe, but you ignored it. You walked right over to the wall of candles, picked out a Cinnamon Chai, and walked right back to my counter. You didn’t speak. I recited your total, a smile plastered on my face, my heart pounding at who I was talking to. There were rumors about you. Granted, there were rumors about everyone in our town. But yours were different. They told of a boy with a messy childhood, a missing mother, an alcoholic father. They imagined a young man who should be a druggie, a drinker, anyone but the handsome man in front of me buying an herbal candle. My leg shook, I blushed.

“You’re wrong,” you said, evenly.

I tried to say something, but you cut me off.

“It should be $15.87, not $17.83. You added wrong.”

I blushed again and looked down at the hand-written receipt I’d worked on. I always hated that the store hadn’t upgraded to automatic price scanners. And now I had messed up and would have to figure a 10% discount on top of it with you staring at me.

“Hey, it’s okay,” you lifted me out of my self-hatred with a slight laugh. “A pretty girl like you shouldn’t have to do math anyways.”

Something about what you’d said rubbed me wrong, but you complimented me, and no one ever did that. My blush turned into a full-on giggle and I finally let myself look into your eyes. And I never came back. *** Linger here |

79

They say I’ll be okay. They say God has the power to heal all things, even me. They say His grace and love will wash over me and I’ll become new, in every way. But I don’t believe them. Because I haven’t felt clean since we never made it to Dallas, and I never will. Flowers come and go, but I stay. *** Your dad surprised me. He wasn’t drunk when I came over for dinner a month into our dating. He was sober, and that might have been worse. I remember his eyes, like yours, seeping into me, taking me in. I remember feeling violated by just his look. I remember sitting across from him at the table, his hand reaching out towards my thigh, my shifting, you seeing.

Yelling.

Dinner was over then. You got him to leave and apologized on his behalf.

You saved me. I thought.

After that we never went to your house again and I thought I was helping you, getting you away from him. But there was no helping you.

The next night you met my parents. I was nervous getting ready, my leg shaking so much you took notice and walked over to me. You asked what was wrong. I said I wanted it to go perfectly, I wanted them to love you.

You put your hand on my leg and it twitched as you did so. You squeezed tight, your nails digging into my flesh, leaving a red impression… but I thought it was meant to be comforting, so I smiled. You decided to wear your navy blue shirt that you said always looked good next to me. I wore my white sundress. We were perfect. You flattered my mother, told her jokes that made her eyes crinkle at the ends and her dimples come out of hiding. You talked trucks and guns with my father, planning a hunting trip at our deer reserve as soon as possible. You held my hand in yours the whole time. It never twitched. *** I still wear my ring, you remember which one? I can’t imagine you’d forget it. Funny thing is, no matter how bad I look, my ring still shines.

Just as bright as it did the first day I got it and you saw it and your hand twitched for the last time.

80

| Perception

“What the hell is that? You engaged to someone else now?”

“Only Jesus,” I replied, my voice low, attempting to calm you—I’d seen your hand.

You laughed and shook your head, you thought you could talk me out of it. We were in the bed of your truck, pillows and blankets surrounding us as we looked out at the lake—straight out of a country song. It was a cheesy date, but I didn’t care, it was a date, and those were becoming more and more rare with you. You thought you owned me.

I remember your arm around me, our backs against the back of your truck, my legs turned towards you in adoration, my hand resting on your chest. You said such sweet things, whispered them in my ear. Your words took me places and I closed my eyes, drifting off to somewhere pure and free. Then I noticed your hand, the small black square in it as it twitched.

I said no, but that didn’t stop you. Your veins came back, took control.

You were on top of me, saying you loved me, saying pain was a part of love.

Something in me clicked then. You were wrong. You’d always been wrong. I knew love, and this wasn’t it. I saw two lights shine through the darkness, I screamed. I saw your hand coming in and out of my vision as it swung at my face, shutting me up. I saw my ring, glisten in the light from that car. I reached up to stop you, my ring giving me strength, but that only made it worse. You used your legs now, you wanted it to be fast, you heard the other car. I stopped feeling a couple minutes later. There was a blur and then it was black. *** They say that it’s okay if I hate you. That that’s all part of the healing process, whatever that is. But I don’t hate you. I can’t hate you. And not because I don’t want to, because I do. I wish so much that I could hate you, and that that hate would give me something to live for and I’d walk out of this hospital with a newfound purpose, like those girls in that documentary I watched, the ones who talked about puppets.

But hating you would mean that I’m thinking of you. And I can’t do that anymore. Because you’ve had enough of me and I have had too much of you.

Linger here |

81

Alison R Searcy Sonia Growing up, I’ve heard we look just alike “Twins! You two look just like twins!”

But I don’t see it I’ve always wanted hair like yours Add mouse, go out The simplicity in your beauty Cannot be attained by just anyone The only makeup you need is God-given, natural Nails grown, hormone free Eye-lashes long and curled from sleep Freckles placed perfectly, subtly Just like He placed the stars The phone rings in that bright yellow kitchen, Laden with roosters and other innocent Familial tokens “Mom” my brothers say to me in rushed voices “Nope, I’ll get her.”

Those idiots, cant even tell the difference Your voice, my safety net Is distinctly recognized, Regardless of the masses.

Those sweet songs you sang to me In that once unfamiliar language “ay yay a ya canta no llores,” will forever dry my tears.

You were so proud when I brought home A happy letter on a page But never as proud as I was 82

| Perception

When you said that oath You were worried we wouldn’t see you Over the masses of Brown skin, black, hair, wide eyes But you stood out, Ma Then you got a letter of your own Calling you to serve your country, If just in a court room You served it proudly, Unlike the average asshole Who worms his way out.

Such diligence.

You sacrificed yourself for others Dropping a tentative future to feed crying mouths Working in the fields That look so lush to americans Corn fuels the summer after all In those white picket fence neighborhoods But it is not them who pluck it Rays of sun beating down, Flesh dripping with the moisture of exhaustion.

You worked your entire life to Escape the fields To work 9 to 5 in an office.

Much easier labor.

Your gift to yourself.

Yet I am the one Praised for reading all day, Spending your money.

Someday I’ll give you a much better gift than A letter on a page.

Someday I’ll deserve to be mistaken for you.

Linger here |

83

Annemaria Menna “Untitled” 84

| Perception

Farrell Greenwalk Brenner Library Smokers The smokers line up outside the library muttering to themselves,

We were promised books. We were promised books.

But there are none to be had.

Instead there are shelves and tables and chairs and Adderall and the luminescent faces of 20-year-old toddlers staring at their screens And a glass case protects yellowing pages from the ungodly stare of hungry eyes.

But the books are gone.

Stolen.

Or obsolete.

Same thing.

Irrelevant to mankind.

And birdkind, too.

So as the smokers respire they conspire If we can’t have them, nobody can.

Burn the books, burn down the whole damn library.

Until nothing is left but the blackened and crispy remains of Roget’s Thesaurus.

But unfortunately, book-burning (and arson in general) is illegal and therefore could rescind the smokers’ right to stand outside the library in the first place.

So instead of books they burn themselves their lung particulates blow away in the wind with each exhalation Linger here |

85

a loss of a body part on a molecular level which carries the message of sadness and protest

Breathe our burnt, bookless air.

Because the smokers know that it is worse to live in a world where there are no books (or worse, where the books are merely ghosts of books: out of reach, on a shelf too tall for a reader to grasp, and the librarian is also a ghost, unapproachable and incomprehensible).

And it is sometimes nice to imagine that instead of smoke There are books inscribed on the cigarettes And they breathe in the mourned words never to be read again.

86

| Perception

Karli Ann Gasteiger The Absolute Anatomy of Yours Truly, Karli Dear Readers, I am a first child, only child, oldest of four wild child with two flavors, like the classically contradictory soft serve twist. I’m what you call a righteously rebellious expressionist, devoting hours to my love: artistic liberalness. An overly-opinionated, color-coding control freak, a freestyle hippie child immersed in the hazy smoke of a thousand creative joints, and the hocus pocus of a witch’s brew, that is who I am. I dream in color, and I dream in red, and Pearl Jam quite obviously gets stuck in my head….. too much, one would say, that girl is too much. A dessert devouring hypocritical nutritionist nut, she’s a vanilla chai sipper and a wash-the-dishes skipper. They say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not sure my heart’s of gold; I’m tainted love laced with addiction, just like Starburst, a juicy contradiction…. I live life in the fast lane, ten miles under the speed limit, a cautiously carefree version of my own self. My body’s on the ground but my soul floats 20,000 leagues into the sky, when there’s no gravity, I don’t cry…. Because I know at that point, the tears will just get sucked up right back into my deep, sometimes hazel, sometimes honey-olive green eyes.

I am a self-centered individualist with a dash of narcissist, a coy culprit with a history of mystery who’s a black-belt in the art of flirting. Relentlessly romantic with passionate panache, they all look and say “wow, oh my gosh”… this girl has it all, but in reality, I’m just a vintage princess who doesn’t take criticism very well. They say I’m ironically, paradoxically contradictory, a sincerely sentimental nostalgia addict­­­–who tries so hard to forget you. I am a golden goddess gorgeosity atop a purple mountain majesty gazing into the crystalline salty cloudy sea, on a cloudy day though there is no rain. A constellation seeker and astrology keeper who stalks Orion, was born a Cancerian but should have been a Leo, a lion.

Who am I, you all ask me and I say, a pocket-size pretty little perfectionist by day and the dark side of the moon by night. I am the afterglow of a vampire bite, so innocuously malignant, bleeding dark chocolate cherry cordial blood. Yet still I am the sunshine mane of a dappled marzipan pony, equally as sweet, sweeter than Equal, in polarized ways. Dimmed parking garage lights, starry October nights, and Meredith Brooks coined it good but maybe not just right: I’m a bitch and I’m a lover, just a child, Linger here |

87

not a mother, such a sinful saint, and your comments and concerns are completely unwarranted, I will take no complaints. I’m not just a girl; I’m lying here, screaming at the world. Type A for my brain and type O for my blood, though many would say I’m not quite ay-ok. I’m full of sugar and spice and everything twice; I’m here today and I’m not tomorrow, drowned with joy, high off sorrow. I am an often confusing, but always faultlessly amusing, kind of girl.

Yours Truly, Karli Ann Gasteiger

88

| Perception

Linger here |

89

Holly Wilson “Dark Matter�

Mary Mik A Misunderstanding My papa’s hands were always soiled. Whether with mulch or paint or gravy from Thanksgiving leftovers, they just never seemed to be clean.

But Papa had white hair so meticulously positioned that busts in wig shop windows would drown in jealousy, and his round-tipped nose always seemed sunburnt, even in the wintertime. His belly was so swollen with hearty chuckles and Becker Farm’s rhubarb pie that I swear it had its own gravitational pull, and he carried a long, vertical scar down the center that just barely bulged beneath white t-shirts. Papa would sit in a chair that matched the shade of his nose in the kitchen’s corner and show me the big, red line again and again, because as a child, I was so utterly perplexed that somebody could survive with only one kidney, an entire organ. His Wisconsin childhood corned and calloused the bottoms of his feet into lumpy turtle shell-like platforms when walking to grade school years ago in frozen dirt winters wearing nothing but goose bumps.

I thought Buffalo’s lake effect snow was the epitome of disaster, but Papa somehow didn’t seem to mind shoveling the driveway in -3 degree wind chill. My papa had a tough skin for weather, for the terrain and all its gifts.

When I was young, I didn’t think Papa loved me, for he never openly told me he loved anything but the earth and my Nana. Rounding the corner of the blue-grey house, I was Dorothy opening the door to Oz; the backyard was a rainbow of bursting life in picturesque bloom with marigolds of sunshine yellow and conflagration orange, and almost every time, a bird was perched on the hose; water filled bird bath’s edge amongst the crimson and white roses bushels.

Peeking from behind the living room wall, I would eavesdrop on Nana and Papa’s special nighttime moments after Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!. When Nana switched off the lights to match the room to the evening’s sky, I saw Papa cup Nana’s angular face into his rough palms that pressed gently against her small, fragile jawbone like a roaring ocean tide against a soft coral and peach sunset painted sky or a steel-toed boot against a grass’s morning dew. Nana sat on the sunken-in couch from years of family gatherings and nights’ rests while Papa, bent at his waist, belly hanging low, into his hands to kiss her with such power but with 90

| Perception

even more tenderness. His full, perfectly kept milk-white mustache would tickle her thin, pale lips with a loud popping-like kiss and a “good night, dear.”

I knew Papa loved Nana, and I knew he loved his garden, but it seemed like Papa just couldn’t love me. I thought this way as a middle schooler, because I wasn’t really blood and maybe he didn’t see me as real family or because I showed my neighbor Stephanie where he hid his cash box or because I asked Nana to make me frozen waffles before school instead of him since she woke up earlier. I never understood why Papa never said out loud that he loved me when my mom, brother, sister, and I piled into our white Chevy Cavalier. Nana did.

“I love you. Have fun, and be careful on those stairs,” Nana would say.

“I love you, too, Nana,” I giggled, “and they’re just stairs.”

When I went to hug Papa goodbye, he never said, “I love you” first, so I didn’t feel prompted to say it at all. His belly was too big for my arms to wrap around when I hugged him and his scar goodbye; maybe, I thought, he kept his belly so big so I couldn’t give him hugs. I didn’t understand why he didn’t call me my name but called me Wazzy Woozy or a Nilly Nally; I wondered if he even remembered my name. I wondered if this man I called “Papa” even saw me as his grandchild at all.

He put his love into the boxy, black Dell desktop, too. Maybe, I thought, Papa didn’t love me, because I always asked to call my friends while he occupied the phone line on the dial-up computer all day researching his family tree. His, not mine. In the computer room, Papa surrounded himself with books of war and encyclopedias and dictionaries galore. On my birthday, all I wanted was the attention and affection of my family, but Nana would remind me to say “happy Veteran’s Day” to Papa for what he did in the war, for without him, maybe I wouldn’t have school off on my birthday. I wanted the day for me and only me, and I was anything but fond of sharing it with someone who I didn’t think loved me.

I didn’t like that he ate hotdogs with mayonnaise, and what was worse than waking up to a rattling alarm clock was to Papa blowing his seemingly constantly clogged nose into cloth handkerchiefs in the morning. I didn’t like the wooden toilet seat in his bathroom or how he didn’t want me taking my friends up to his room to show them how that, really Linger here |

91

and truly, his bed could fold in half with the power of a remote. I didn’t like that he answered the phone with “y’ello.” Yellow is a color, not a greeting, I thought. He had pliers and straight edges and half-filled cans of paint and heavy steel-handled scissors in his basement workshop, and I didn’t like that the pencil sharpener was screwed too high on the wall for me to reach. Even by standing on a chair when I could finally crank the handle, my pencils just never seemed to sharpen right.

Papa was sitting in front of his computer one afternoon when I sat on the floor in front of him. I asked him how long he had cancer for.

“9 years,” he told me humbly. He said he had been a survivor for 9 years and rattled off the different types he had and ones he may have in the future. I didn’t respond.

On the 14th of July 2008, I went to see Papa in a hospital. I didn’t want to go to begin with, especially when Nana warned with a gentle hand on my shoulder, “he might not be like he used to be, honey.”

At 12 years old, I was bitter and afraid, but I couldn’t let Nana go alone. Nana and I entered, and Papa rolled his head around the pillow in pain. “Oh God! Oh God!” the cancer exclaimed. I felt as if I were intruding that sterile safe of a room with the earth underneath my fingernails from the yard, something once loved by Papa. Nana went over to his side.

“Gene, this is Kit, your wife, and this is Mary,” she told him with a hand on the hospital pillow. Papa’s eyes clicked from the ceiling down to my face. He looked, but Papa didn’t see me. He could not and did not recognize my face. He gazed back to the ceiling with his mouth open, jaw hung low, almost as if it were eerily detached from his skull. His belly shrank over the last few months, the scar shrinking with it. His mustache was wilting away into his greying skin, and his hands were bony and elongated like the overgrown roots of the maple tree that cracked the pavement in the front yard.

I wanted to faint. I wanted to fall into the pile of autumn leaves collected from the backyard two autumns ago and sink into the heat of earth’s core and melt into oblivion. Papa was not supposed to be this way.

Papa was not born to be sick; he was birthed on this planet not to grow on it but to grow with it and to never shrink, to never deteriorate, to never wither with the weather or sickness or sorrow. When the sun shined, Papa shined with it, and when it rained, Papa shined. When the city got 92

| Perception

smacked with the October Storm blizzard that knocked our power for four entire days in ‘06, Papa shined. In the fog and the humidity, and during the flood watches and tornado warnings, and through blackouts and ozone depletion, Papa still shined, but in that hospital bed, Papa’s light was gone.

Cancer grappled his brain 11 days later on my sister’s birthday.

Papa battled a total of 13 years: 4 of them with war, 9 with cancer. When Papa closed his eyes the last time to the everlasting brute of cancer, the yard died, too. As he weakened, so did the garden. My nana, a frail and gentle soul, could only mend Papa with laughs and late night Jeopardy! and cards on the couch, but that wasn’t enough for a sickness of such malignant strengths.

When Nana began to donate all of his things, I wept into the cardboard boxes of white t-shirts and basement tools and war books and told her she couldn’t, that she could not take away his room.

“This was Papa’s room. This is Papa’s room, Nana, it still is,” I cried, but she sweetly told me that they had to go, that she would donate his belongings to the good people of AMVETS. With that, I grabbed a flannel shirt that fit around his once-big belly and a red and blue silk tie from his closet.

Watching his things disappear and the garden deteriorate was like sifting sand away from pebbles; as Papa and the garden and his belongings began to disappear, the once unrecognizable strings of connection between him and me began to surface. I remembered how he would bellow in laughter when I tickled his rough feet with a synthetic green duster and how he let me pull carrots and beets from the dirt and help scoop birdseed from the round, plastic garbage bin so I wouldn’t fall in. When he went to visit, Papa brought me Cowtails back from Wisconsin. I see something behind the reflection of the circles of glass in front of his eyes in photographs of us in the garden and home videos from his birthday when he let me help blow out the candles in his Pepperidge Farm cake, and I can’t help but wish I could just tell him that I know, that I now know what I didn’t in the time he had on earth. I want to tell him that whenever I get dirt under my nails or eat Cowtails or drive through open fields or say “y’ello” or think of how cancer fucking sucks that I think of him and how I now know that he loved me.

Linger here |

93

Holly Wilson “Untitled” 94

| Perception

Karli Ann Gasteiger Excerpt from an Hour-Glassed Dream Everything is serene. funny, having considered her life redeemed, Was sold to the villain for her only wish.

It takes up a whole of her, consumes What she says and what she sees in me, I love her too dearly To see her, clearly When all I see is this.

Time.

It’s running out.

And he dies just knowing Without having to know. When I tell him that I love him I mean it Like I haven’t, a prayer to whomever to shatter the hourglass slowly and Burn the sands of us this time.

Linger here |

95

Mary Mik Honey Bird A lone soul strides into a Sherwin-Williams;

he decides to recolor his “Pacific Pine” 430D-7 tan-green painted shed, cracking and peeling from seasons of

baking hot and blistering cold weather.

He proceeds to the back right corner of the store.

Upon him, a plethora of grey-blues, orange-browns, and violet-magentas.

The man disregards the reds,

like “Grenadine” S-G-180

and “Firecracker” 150B-6,

for they have not done him well in the past.

He rules out anything with a matte finish

and those with a lead base.

With no desire for the discount brands or cans in the clearance bucket,

he checks his wallet to make sure he has enough

for the best kind.

A friendly, toothy-grinned worker in a navy vest asks,

“Can I help you with anything, sir?”

The man declines;

choices made by others have done him no good in the past.

In his palms are two swatches:

one named “Honey Bird”

300B-5;

the other called “Midnight Dream” 570F-7.

With a can hooked under his arm and a significantly thinner wallet in his hand,

he smiles down at “Honey Bird.”

The man lifts the can’s lid open

with the help of a flathead screwdriver.

He stirs the happy yellow

and enjoys its sharp, new scent.

He strokes it on the shed with a heavy brush until dusk

with neat and clean precision,

then admires from the window

above the kitchen sink.

96

| Perception

The man carries the “Honey Bird” swatch in his pocket

out to his beloved shed at dawn.

Through squinting eyes, he lifts the swatch

next to the now dried slats.

“Honey Bird” looks lighter on the swatch and in the can

than on the shed’s wooden pallets.

His brows wrinkle.

They relax.

Through this minor change,

he loves “Honey Bird” all the same.

His neighbors compliment how “Honey Bird” brings light

to the shed’s once mundane existence;

the new presence

has a remarkable effect: The man notes how his room’s four walls

shine brightly with open curtains

and even more so when the sun reflects off of “Honey Bird.”

He notices how his garden of lilies and chrysanthemums

hug the perimeter of the shed,

and how “Honey Bird” stands out against the darkest night’s backdrop from the window above the kitchen sink.

Years pass on,

and the man carries the wrinkled “Honey Bird” swatch in his pocket

out to his beloved shed at dawn.

Through tired, squinted eyes, he lifts the swatch

next to the old painted slats.

“Honey Bird” looks darker on the swatch and in the can

than on the shed’s wooden pallets.

Bleached from the blazing sun

and washed out from the howling rain,

“Honey Bird” has worn chipped and matte.

The man scratches

the underside of a slat; Linger here |

97

“Honey Bird”

flakes away.

The man sees a peek of “Firecracker,” “Pacific Pine,”

and “Grenadine.”

His brows wrinkle.

They stay like this.

He must have chosen

the wrong color again.

98

| Perception

Linger here |

99

Holly Wilson “Untitled�

Isabella Barrionuevo “Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth”

| Perception

100

graduate

Linger here |

101

Chen Chen Ode to the Hexagon We got very emotional. Apple-lipped & apple-voiced, we emoted to the east. We emoted to the west.

We emoted into the sky, the sea. We had periwinkle epiphanies. We had many.

Rooftop gyrations were not out of the question. They were darkly inside the question, gyrating.

Some said we were communist Easter bunnies, fluffy villains who enjoyed every geometric shape.

But we weren’t. We were socialist athletes who loved above all, hexagons.

Didn’t you notice our honeycomb friendship bracelets?

We were the bobsled champions of the Milky Way.

102

| Perception

Joseph Baiz Inanna and Irkalla The Argument: This is an adaptation of a very old story from Sumerian mythology. The husband of Ereshkigal (or Irkalla), Queen of the Underworld, has died. Ereshkigal’s sister, Inanna, descends into the Underworld (also called Irkalla) for the funeral.

Because her wailing warped my mind; since my sister’s cries soured the air--grass was not green, grain not filling, water not cool, and wind biting.

I left the home of the lofty gods, out the gate of Enlil’s palace, taking my crown and turning downward, down, down, to death’s country.

My heart pained for my home in Heaven, and to see the Sun and Sumer’s fields.

Tired, looking like trees by the water, the dead watched and darkened my path.

Linger here |

103

Seven gates stood before me, built of bronze and black stone.

A great god guarded them all, spear raised.

I spoke these words: “Let me pass... “lest I strike you “and break this door, “beat it down; “smite the gate, “smash it to pieces, “cast you down “to crawl in the dust.”

“Let me pass... “lest in their tombs “the dead awaken “and drive the living “out of their homes.

“I shall pass, “lest the dead “the living outnumber.”

Nin-gish-zida, night’s servant, lowered his spear and let me through.

But he took my crown as toll, and my garments of lordly office were laid aside.

104

| Perception

Beyond the gates, the Great Lady Under the Earth eyed me coldly.

My crying sister, the Queen of Corpses, stepped down and stood before me.

Saying nothing, I sat down on the cruel throne of the Kingdom of Death.

She looked at me and life left me.

She stared at me and stopped my blood.

Death’s eye darkened my heart. wan I turned, and wasted away.

In her high hall, on a hook she hung my cold corpse like a cut of meat.

On earth the Sun ceased its warmth.

The branches were barren, and the black soil was piled with snow; no plants grew.

The cold came and cursed the land.

Linger here |

105

Chen Chen Confession A lot like all people, I am also a person.

In addition to being some feelings about infinity & flowers, yes, I am a person.

I’ve mailed a letter or two. I’ve said, Bless you. I’ve made three friends & asked each of them, When was the first time you held a human baby?

A non-human baby?

Say, a kitten or porcupette?

I’ve wept. & played.

I take great pleasure, spitting out my toothpaste.

106

| Perception

Joseph Baiz Lapis When all the water had boiled away into steam, all that remained in the pot was a small, smooth stone. It was round, and flat on the side that stuck to the pot, and its color was a deep red, like wine. When Nicholas lifted it out and held it in his palm, it was still warm.

It was more than the heat left over from boiling, he knew. It would always be warm, no matter when he picked it up.

He held it up to the light. He could see hairline filaments running through it, like blood vessels. It was very beautiful.

He set it down on the table in front of him, next to an old book.

Among the table’s other contents were glass vials full of strange powders; flasks of black, white, yellow, and red liquids; alembics and distilleries, crucibles and tall, blue bottles; bowls of crushed herbs, filling the room with strange aromas; and a tiny clay jar full of precious carmot.

Nicholas looked down at the stone. It was such a little thing to show after so many years of work. But he knew what it was, and after all this time, it was finally his.

He had no idea how to use it. *** Young Nicholas, very small and very quiet and clutching his mother’s hand, watched as the long black box was lowered into the hole. It was fifty-three years ago.

All of his family was there. There was his mother, of course, and his aunts and his uncles, and his cousins, and second-cousins, and relations had hadn’t even known about until today. And they were all wearing black: even Nicholas was dressed in a very small, very crisp black suit.

The women, including his mother, covered their faces with diaphanous black veils.

The box had sunk halfway into the hole. Some of Nicholas’s relatives dabbed at their noses with handkerchiefs. Others dabbed at the corners of their eyes. Nicholas kept staring.

The box had a person in it. Or at least, something that used to be a person. Was the thing in the box a person anymore?

Linger here |

107

The box touched down at the bottom of the hole. Nicholas kept staring, transfixed, until his mother tugged him away. *** Nicholas opened one of the many dusty volumes that cluttered his house, and thumbed through it until he found the right page. It wasn’t the Tablet; it was one of the many other books on the subject he’d accumulated over the years, and it had proved useless in helping him make the Stone. But perhaps in helping him use it...

The Elixir of Life is to be prepared by scraping the Stone with a small file, and then dissolving the filings in aqua vitae. It is to be kept away from all light for forty days, and then brought out into the sun, whereupon it will mature, and become the fabled draught.

He had quite a few files. He’d acquired them over the many years of his search, thinking they would be useful someday. Of course, when the time came to make the Stone, there was nothing that needed to be filed. There were plenty of things to be ground---dried herbs, dried roots, dried eggs of things he would never touch otherwise---and several things that needed to be crushed (and specifically not ground), but nothing that needed filing.

So his grinding stones were eternally stained, and his files remained pristine.

He selected one. The book didn’t specify a metal for the files, so he hoped it would do. It was not too small, not too large. It was made of a dark iron, shining faintly in the soft light. He held the stone over a bowl of alcohol, and brought the file across its warm red surface.

Iron filings dropped into the bowl. Nothing else. *** Nicholas was forty years younger, and he was leaning against a railing on a balcony, looking at the ghostly hills in the distance. There was a young woman with him, wearing a sullen expression.

“You’re definitely going, then?” Nicholas asked her.

The woman nodded.

“Yes. I’m definitely going.”

108

| Perception

“New York’s pretty far.”

“I know.”

“There’s nothing around here?”

The woman sighed. “I told you, Nick. This is important. If I take this job, this could be the start of it. My career. That thing they’re always telling us we should have.”

“Yeah,” Nicholas said. “I know.” He looked up. Though it was day, the Moon hung in the sky, as faint and translucent as the faraway hills. “Is that what you want?” he asked.

“Yes.” “It pays well?”

“Better than most.”

“You told me one time that money shouldn’t matter.”

“It shouldn’t...”

“But it does,” Nicholas finished for her.

“Yes. But it does.” She thought for a moment, then added: “There are times when I don’t want to bother. I want to just forget all this stuff and go live in a box somewhere.”

“So why don’t you?”

“I guess I come to my senses.”

“You don’t ever want to do that.” Nicholas took a deep breath, and grinned. “Someday,” he said, “I’m never going to work again.”

“Aren’t you doing that now?”

“Yeah, but I’ll also eat.”

“And how’re you gonna do that?”

Nicholas shrugged. “I dunno, I’ll find a way. I’ll turn lead into gold if I have to.”

“You can’t do that. No one can.”

“I’ll learn.”

The woman laughed. “You know what?” she said. “I bet you will.”

And Nicholas smiled at that, but it was a hollow smile; and his eyes stared out into the distance, and seemed almost afraid. *** All of his files sat in a small heap on his desk, ruined. He’d also tried grinding the stone in his sturdiest mortar and pestle set---the one Linger here |

109

made of stainless steel that he’d bought in New Orleans---and between two flat stones in the way that the Maya had ground corn. He was left with deep scratches on his mortar and pestle, and a little pit in each of the two grinding stones roughly the circumfrence of his chunk of Philosopher’s Stone.

He turned the little red jewel around in his hands, inspecting it.

There was not a single mark.

He sighed. Then he set the Stone down, opened a drawer in his old wooden desk, and removed a pair of worn leather gloves. The Stone could do more than just make the Elixir---or at least, it was supposed to.

Once he’d put the gloves on, he went over to a cabinet on the far side of the room and opened it. There was a small block inside it, most of which was covered in shiny duct tape. In a few places the tape had worn away, revealing the metal beneath to be a dull silver color.

Nicholas knew that lead and gold were very similar on a subatomic level. He didn’t know if that mattered. A few of his books said you needed the Elixir to transmute metals; if they were right, so much for that.

But they had been wrong about so many other things---only the Tablet had really been right about anything, come to think of it---he thought it was worth a shot.

Holding the block of lead in one of his gloved hands, he placed the Stone upon it. And waited.

He wondered if there was some incantation he needed to say.

“Go.” Nothing happened. *** Nicholas stood behind the counter, waiting for his shift to end. It was late at night, thirty-three years ago, and the arches of his feet ached terribly.

The shop sold books, mainly, but it also carried a few trinkets, like pyramids and crystals and crystal pyramids, which it sold to people who believed pyramids could sharpen razor blades and crystals could heal the body in vague, energy-related ways. There was a box of hematite rings on the counter, next to the cash register. Only fifty cents each.

An old man walked up to the counter, holding a paperback in one 110

| Perception

of his wrinkly hands. His hair was long and white and thin enough to be called wispy, and he hid most of his face behind a bushy white beard.

He would have looked like a wizard out of a fairy tale if he hadn’t been wearing a King Crimson T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans.

The man slammed the book on the counter and said, “Have you got the real one?”

Nicholas, who’d been spinning one of the hematite rings on the countertop like a coin, looked up. “Pardon?”

The old man crossed his arms over his potbelly. “I said, have you got the real one?”

Nicholas looked down at the book. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. He’d skimmed through some of the shop’s books on many a lunch break, and knew that The Emerald Tablet was a book about alchemy. It supposedly contained the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, actually contained lots of dense, Hermetic prose, and was a modest bestseller.

“I’m not sure what you mean, sir,” said Nicholas.

The man sighed. “That,” he said, pointing to the book, “is a bunch of nonsense. It spends a whole lotta time saying absolutely nothing. I’m looking for the real one. The one that actually says something.”

Nicholas tapped his fingers on the countertop, thinking of what to say. “Sir,” he said at last, “are you looking for a book that will actually tell you the secrets of alchemy?”

The man scoffed. “’Course I am. It’s gotta be floating around somewhere out there.” He added, “I think it’ll end up in a place like this, too. The world’s got a sense of humor that way.”

Nicholas had had his job long enough to know not to ask customers why they believed things like that. But before he could tell the old man that that was the only Emerald Tablet they had, the man’s features softened, and he seemed to be looking at something far away.

“I saw it a few times,” he said. “Belonged to my grandfather. He kept it on his desk, on a big metal stand. Looked like something out of a Hammer horror show, all leatherbound and whatnot. We never used to visit him much, but one time, when we did, I asked him what it was, and he told me. When he died, I went looking for it, but my gramma’d already sold all his old books.” He sighed and shook his head.

“Well, I’m sorry,” said Nicholas, feeling slightly awkward. “We Linger here |

111

don’t have anything like that here.”

The old man grinned, showing lots of spots where teeth used to be. He looked more like an old prospector than a wizard now. “Ah, no problem. I’ll find it one of these days. I’ve been looking too long not to.”

Then he walked out of the shop, jingling the little bell on the door as he left, and leaving Nicholas alone at the counter, thinking. *** Nicholas slouched in his armchair, holding the Stone limply in one hand and staring ahead at nothing in particular. He hadn’t realized it, but he was starting to look like that old man who’d stepped into his bookstore, so many years ago.

Not once, in all his long years of searching, had he wondered how the old man’s grandfather could have died, if he’d possessed the Stone.

He was just now realizing this.

The Tablet was a simple, practical book. It had told him, step-bystep, how to make the Stone. But it said absolutely nothing about using it.

Maybe there was another Tablet out there somewhere. The Emerald Tablet Volume II...

After a while he got up. Then he hurled the stone against the wall in an impotent rage, leaving a thin crack in the gray plaster.

112

| Perception

Chen Chen my soul, you’re shit at everything after Marin Sorescu o soul, you’re shit at everything you’re an expired condiment a bad mustard on an everything bagel i would take the everything bagel over you it has everything i would spread good butter on the bagel & with the leftover butter make a sculpture a lamb of god or two kids playing kickball i would shock the populace by combining three wholesome things butter kids kickball into one horrific thing but i guess you o my soul would be behind that too you who drink milk straight out of the carton wipe your milked up mouth on a sweaty forearm you whom i blame when i can’t keep my metaphors for you straight why don’t you get a real job i hear there’s an opening at the post office & they need someone professionally cranky

Linger here |

113

faculty

114

| Perception

John Colasacco Untitled

Two teenagers move slowly with eyes that seem to be staring straight through what’s in front of them.

Down the hall a boy shuts the door to his room so he can look at a box of tiny things under a lamp.

Out in the white barren landscapes people feel hopeless because they know they are red on the inside.

At the edge of the road a man’s eyes roll up into his head as he brings a slaughtered lamb back to life. *

Two teenagers lie lifeless on top of one another outside the restaurant in the hours just before dawn.

People come by and see them there and keep on walking toward the dead birch trees in the middle of the lake.

A few of them are talking under their breath about a vision of the sea rising up as high as a townhouse.

At the edge of the water one of them thinks he’s still at home sitting in the place where he has always sat.

*

Linger here |

115

Two teenagers sit in a parlor among strangers behind a door that closes halfway without being touched.

There’s a man in the corner laughing for no reason while another with a monotone voice offers to paint the room.

The air fills with the smell of disappeared trees as night falls and a fine mist descends on the tabletops.

Little by little they begin to recede into the distance until all that’s left is a bed in a snowy field.

116

| Perception