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Busman" Mahan

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Sameeha Saied

Sameeha Saied

BONES

Mickey "The Flying Busman" Mahan

Guilty

Julia Cleo Fisher

One Overlapping day off But your arm was there Bare chest bearing dried tears Falling I slept colored dreams chasing anxiety adventure uncertainty I am sure your arm was bent crooked wrong numb I am sure this was not what you had in mind our one overlapping day off But your arm was there I slept head floating on dried tears And you were there I was there you are here. I think this is a bit of what love looks like.

"Feeling a little nostalgic/Do you want to hear it?"

Zoya Davis

You didn’t give me any time Any warning, no flashing red and blue lights No whistling siren to follow in the distance, Not a sound where your body erupted from the ocean bed and crashed down above my head like unruly waves at 3 am no, you didn’t give me any time any time to hastily gather up our last nightly conversations the ones where we shed our coffee and skim milk skin, voluntarily exposing our bones to the wind, flesh raw and bare, souls bruised, minds cloudy as the morning after a late night with our friends Jack and Daniel no time to tuck your last words within the slight crack you left on my skin the day you left me no time to quickly hide the sudden glances to stole, before you took that away from me too, the ones where your eyes caressed mine, almost weary but not enough tear for me to notice no time to turn off the lamp before the lampshade unfairly displayed the shadow of your slender figure against my walls, as if to say, I could turn you off but never turn you away no time no time to un-see, to un-know, to un-feel to un-love you

no time before your words broke the floor between my toes and your face tore threw my brain, oh, but you were skilled you performed an unprofessional lobotomy without morphine revealing the mis-firing neurons that were not used to your absence just yet no time or maybe you did and I just didn’t allow myself to look hard enough I didn’t see that you were stained glass, weakened from too much sun in a place that required a little too much praise I didn’t notice that you were gentle porcelain, delicate china The kind your mother took out and tenderly wiped down once a year I didn’t see that you required so much more maintenance I didn’t see that you were broken And you didn’t see that I couldn’t fix you

But after all we all know light travels faster than sound And I did see your eyes that used to be my lighthouse flicker then decease long before I heard your goodbyes But I told you I hated you way before my heart meant it, the light trapped within the dents of my soul shone just a little too bright for your eyes; weak from receding into the darkness you let build a home inside you with a lease you couldn’t quite break You said I was too good for you As if to ignore that you were once the only good in me And yes I imagined you in me In more ways than one, you took root into my earth, convincing me you’d stay a little while and let me count your tree rings

but instead of reliable soil you settled for loose uncertain sand, and though a lightning strike could mold you into beautiful crystalline geometry I wasn’t enough to set you on fire Like metal against metal Scraping to see who erodes the most, Who ruins whom first? You won So, To let you know that I’m alive More or less But more so the latter I just wrote a poem about you Do you want to hear it?

Born Again melina iavarone

Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow

Brandon Clesen

Today, I stand in a pasture of trampled grass. The baseball field, where children giggle and throw their feet from one base to the next, stands in my peripheral vision. The school also rests there. Its brick exterior welcomes the children as they tread into the doors of their overpopulated institution. A red playground once faced me, now gone and demolished with time. A fence, cold with its steel frame, faces me today. Yesterday, a small boy, with midnight black hair and a scrawny frame, dashed passed me, grinning at the prospect of beginning another adventure. He leapt up onto the black platform. Would he glide down the pole, slip down the slide, or attempt the monkey bars? He did not know nor did he care. He was only awaiting friends to begin another game of tag. His brother arrived after ambling from their home nearby. Two young children, a boy and girl, both slim with blue eyes and brunette hair, sauntered from their home across the street from the playground. They greeted each other with warmth, believing their friendship would last forever. The kids dashed around the frame of the site where their imaginations could run wild and free. Laughter and unintelligible speech under their heavy breathing punctured the humid air of the summer day. Playing for hours, they began to settle and departed with goodbyes from that evening. The boy wandered home beside his brother gasping from exhaustion, praying to the hot summer day that this play and happiness would last forever. I wonder if he is disappointed in me. Yesterday, the boy came back along with the girl, both having grown a few inches. Proceeding to the park, they brought a new girl: long brunette hair with touches of a reddish undertone hinted at by the sun’s beams caressing it, with a lacrosse stick in her right hand. They did not proceed to the playground, as that was too childish for young adults; rather, they turned to the school’s wall next to it, throwing a ball, bashing it against the brick. Their feet skidded across the burning pavement as they raced each other for the ball. They laughed and muttered secrets, allowed only for their ears. The boy glanced at his two best friends whilst one girl rushed Fall 2020 | 69

to catch the ball, unable to catch it on her first attempt. He hoped that this would last forever. I hope so as well. Yesterday, I stood in the pasture alone, the quietness deafening my ears with isolation. My eyes were alerted by a car blaring music for all to hear. The boy, in the backseat, sang to the tune materializing from the radio; the two girls joined in, jostling their bodies within the seats to the rhythm. One girl, taken from the moment, grabbed onto the steering wheel to once again maintain control. Where could they go? Anywhere, I suppose. They had liberty to be free, to enjoy life’s moments together. The boy’s attention gravitated towards the park outside his window. He remembered how the plot would be demolished soon but he gave no further thought to it. The boy and girls established their own playground within the musty 2005 Mazda hatchback: a sanctuary for their freedom to run wild. The boy stared out at his yesterday knowing this will endlessly occur. I know he is right. Tomorrow, I will no longer stand here. The cold fence, guarding the construction of a new green-colored playground, will let down its frame. The piles of dirt will be compacted back into the earth, setting a foundation for memories to be formed by the next generation. New children will begin grand adventures on the erected swings, monkey bars, and slides. Those memories will stay with them, as mine, too, shall last.

My Never Goodbye

Yasmin Nayrouz

I say goodbye Yet don’t cry And wonder why

Do I not love you? No—

This is not our end No tears to drown our future Dry eyes knowing There will be another time

I collect my thoughts and wonder What is this new life— Oh world of possibilities Please be kind

My eyes have not cried But my heart sighs With worries for tomorrow

I do not cry— Why? Because you will be there to ease my worries

I miss you But I crave independence To learn my own lessons And begin to count my blessings

Starting with you My never goodbye

Noor Zamamiri but make it pretty let's make abigail remember her suffering

Paying Attention

Camille Daniels

Don’t’ stop, don’t breathe, Just keep going, Go to school, land a job, just keep going, But can’t land a job, or start a career, Taking anything just to hold on. Thanks, Great Recession, Just keeping going. Feeling empty for every job I take, feeling unconnected to what I do, Just keep going. Never remain in one space, Just keep going, Get another degree, ignore the debt, Then a pandemic hits, Better believe it will all make sense, Just keep going. Don’t stop, don’t breathe, Just keep going. The air is polluted, It won’t help you, You’re not good enough, that’s why they don’t want you. You’re crazy to think that this will work, Why would it? Why would anything? Just keep going. Go, where? I don’t know, But you what? You know that, you must keep going. Stopping is not an option, Look at how much time has past, You’re running out of time in your “youth,” Just keep going, Nothing is going the way it is supposed to go, Just keep going, Never stop, never question, just keep going.

ROADS

Mickey "The Flying Busman" Mahan

Quarantine

Julia Cleo Fisher

I can’t focus. I can’t listen. I cannot stand another goddamn minute of holding up the weight of a Facetime call.

Lying in the Grave so Long

David Chappell

Hang me, oh hang me, And I’ll be dead and gone. Wouldn’t mind the hangin’ But the lyin’ in the grave so long, Poor boy… I been all around this world.

They always said my head was too big. Extra large hats and stretched shirt necks ran in the family, on my pa’s side, and so did curiosity. The earth turned too slowly for pa. He must have thought his feet could make it spin faster, get him more days and nights than he was entitled to. Nobody could get him to sit still, let alone settle down and raise me. Not even the all-new twentieth century could scare my pa. He said he loved to watch Life change her clothes and traveled around the world to enjoy the peep show. Grandpa Wilbur said big heads explained a lot of things. I grew up mostly with my ma’s parents, the Wilburs, because she died just after I was born. Complications, they told me when they thought I was old enough to understand a halftruth. What’s so complicated about death? My pa figured it was simple enough. He lived as if it were breathing in his ear, as if every morning might be his last. After my ma died, he gave up milking other people’s cows and joined the navy, finally wound up in a war over in the Philippines and sank the whole Spanish fleet. He kept right on sailing after that, as a civilian, a reckless farm boy ploughing the seas of the Far East aboard a rusty prow, a hired hand turned pirate raiding the ports of Hong Kong and Bombay and Zanzibar. With his energy, he could have built a pyramid or straightened out the Great Wall of China, if he’d had the patience to finish the job. Pa said the world was a huge carnival that each of us was given a ticket to at birth. Why waste what was free? Grandpa Wilbur always told me nothing was free. He sat in his stuffed chair as his maid poured his tea and explained that work was the key to success. If everyone did just as he pleased, who would grow the food, who would raise the babies, who would build the houses, who would bury the dead? Two lumps, please. Grandma 76 | Perception

said the very same thing, as if her husband were a ventriloquist. And why not? She worked her servants as hard as it took to keep the mansion fit for decent folk. She worked them so hard it tired her out, so she needed a stuffed chair and a cup of tea too. Two lumps, thank you. I knew the kindly servants better than their two bosses, except on special occasions. Wilbur heads looked normal enough, all right, but they lived in a house big enough for six families and did nothing to earn it, as far as I could tell. Grandpa Wilbur had done only one thing in his life. He got an idea and sold it. That simple. People paid him enough for it for him to pay other people to do all his work. He got fat and lazy and preached the Protestant ethic to me all my life. He even claimed that my pa would up and disappear for good one of these days and nobody would be there to bury him. Old Wilbur was an expert on burying. That idea he’d gotten, which made him so wealthy because there never was a lack of need for it, was coffins. Not your plain pine boxes, mind you, but deluxe, plush, gift-wrapped coffins to comfort the dead in their long slumber. He’d founded the American Casket Company and made millions off the sorrow of the rich and their imitators. I tried to imagine, as I sat in my stale-smelling room next to the servants’ quarters, the life that pa led. I kept a map on my wall of all the places I thought he had visited and read whatever I could about them, aloud, to a picture of my ma. She seemed to smile back knowingly from the cracked, yellowing photograph in which she remained forever young and pretty and proud, like a flower determined to survive the winter. Grandma Wilbur said my ma had been very bright and educated, had met pa when she lived with his relatives and had taught in a country one-room school for the kids of dairy farmers. The Wilburs always grew sad when they talked about her leaving home. They rarely left their heavily curtained and carpeted mausoleum themselves, except to play croquet on the vast, hedge-lined back lawn. Grandpa wanted me to go to college, study business and marry some smart woman who’d say yes to me in five languages, two of them dead, settle down and bury whoever outlasted him. Pa came back to see me sometimes, drunk and loud and ready to argue with Old Wilbur. I used to hide in the garden while they hashed out the secrets of life at the top of their lungs. When the older man was exhausted, pa would call me over to him and tell Fall 2020 | 77

me how he had seen people who just burned each other’s corpses in a pile of logs. They bent over the arms and legs as they cooked so the body would burn better, then dumped the ashes in the water to float away in a river in India. Indecent, Wilbur huffed with a shaky teacup hand. Pa told me all sorts of things I could never find in books. For example, some people wipe their butts by washing them with their left hands, and the best way to tell women from men dressed as women is by the size of their Adam’s apples. He told me that people in China stick bamboo poles through the arms of their shirts and the legs of their trousers and hang the wash out the window over the street to drip dry. Up pa would jump like a magician clown and bring the far corners of the planet to life right there in front of me. The Wilburs complained that I was only interested in geography and rode my bicycle too far off. My head was just as big as pa’s, they said, especially when I insisted on continuing to see him even after they tried to shut him out of their perfect peace for good. How could I help daydreaming about his exotic adventures? My fishbowl existence was only preparation for the coffin, Old Wilbur’s inevitable triumph over everyone else. I felt like a parasite supported by a leech and asked ma every night what to do. Once, on Father’s Day, pa whistled to me from the meadow outside my window. I snuck out to meet him and saw that he was limping. He said he’d been wounded in a knife fight on Bugis Street in Singapore and hadn’t walked right since. He said he was getting tired, too, worn out from so much wandering. I sat next to him under a big elm tree and a full moon, and watched the breeze pet the restless grasses as if they were dog’s fur. “But pa, how can you get enough of traveling?” His eyes, already red from whisky, got moist. “You know, this tree reminds me of one I sat under in Panama once, a leafy giant that fought off the tropical heat for me. Suddenly I realized I was a fool to sail halfway around the world looking for shade when I could get it right here!” “What started you sailing in the first place?” He studied my wide face with a level gaze. “Because I was lonely, I guess. I’ve never found a home as fine and safe as your ma’s love.” “You mean you’ve roamed all over just to find her again?” “Maybe,” he shrugged. “Maybe to escape her.” 78 | Perception

I started to cry. “I don’t understand. How can you do so much living over somebody’s dying?” He didn’t say a thing after that, just picked up a rock and threw that sucker as far as he could. We never even heard it come down. Grandpa Wilbur came to life all of a sudden when he bought a motorcar. It was shiny and noisy and the first in our valley. A man in a white overcoat and goggles and hat and gloves and rubber boots delivered it almost in person and drove us everywhere. Grandma stuck her feet out the back passenger door, just in case she had to jump. People ran in terror, geese honked and Jacobs the shopkeeper’s horse reared up and dumped his wagon of freshbought milk and eggs into a ditch. Grandpa Wilbur laughed like a baby and pointed at everything for Grandma, who kept her eyes closed most of the time next to me. From the top of the meadow we looked through the exhaust smoke and radiator steam at the whole dairy farm hollow and Old Wilbur cackled, “Praise God, they will really hate me now!” We got out and watched as he took the wheel himself, swerved off the road at high speed, hit a cow and flew through the air into the elm tree trunk and split his skull. Grandma said most of the money was hers, but I could have enough to go for a college education and then some. I found pa living with a waitress in sin on the edge of town and offered him my share. He stared his woman out of the room and opened a couple of warm beers for us. First we drank to Old Wilbur, all packaged up in one of his own coffins, and laughed about that. Then pa got serious. “You take that money and go to college. Your ma was educated. Smart as a preacher, she was.” “I’m joining the navy to see the world, pa.” Pa seemed shocked, then slapped his knee and laughed again. “I’ll be tied up and civilized—your head’s as big as mine, all right.” I heard the woman snoring loudly through the plasterboard wall. “You going to marry her, pa? Do you love her?” “I can’t rightly decide. She works nights and I work days.” I grabbed his wrist and looked him right in the eye. “Take my money and buy a farm and build a marriage, pa, so I’ll have a home to come back to after I sail the seven seas. Please?” He stood up and looked out the screen door at a freight train that came up fast and roared by for a few minutes. The late Fall 2020 | 79

afternoon light flickered across his balding, swollen bank of memories. “I never owned a farm before,” he smiled, “just worked for other folks. O.K. son, you’ll always be welcome.” He and I hugged heads. I stayed in town long enough to be pa’s best man and see him moved into a nice cottage behind the meadow, with a cornfield and a few cows and chickens. Even Grandma gave the bride some antique furniture, and the neighbors came over with food and drinks. We all danced to fiddle music and a professional caller and pa gave me the names of more buddies to look up than a phone directory could list. And I was free! After basic training, I went back to check up on pa and his happy home, only to find him sitting on the porch drinking whiskey and chewing the stub of a cigar. He hardly acknowledged me, just turned up his bottle. The house seemed quiet and mostly empty. “Where’s your wife, pa?” “Ran off with Jacobs the shopkeeper. She’s no farmer, can’t stand the smell of cow shit.” I tried to keep calm. “She’ll be back, I bet.” Pa snarled and broke his bottle, waved the jagged glass at me menacingly. I stepped back quickly. “What’s the matter? What have I done?” “You killed her, you bastard!” “Killed who? I never killed anybody.” “You killed your ma, dammit! You and that big head of yours. They should’ve cut her open, but you tore her apart. You and that goddamned big head of yours!” My mind went blank. I saw him knock a lantern onto the floor inside, and his cigar dropped into the kerosene spill. Dry cobs and husks began exploding like popcorn, and my own frustration surfaced. “Where you think I got this head, pa, where else but you!” He knew I was right. Angry and weeping, he staggered and fell into the engulfing flames. I turned my back on the horror of it, saw caskets lined up in front of me forever. I picked up a stone and hurled it as far as I could. It landed a little ways up the road.

Pieces of You

melina iavarone

Maya Gelsi

Eyes like high beams, hot cocktails in poison summer. If one more person looks at me, I’ll scream. I itch to sit hidden, the raw meat of me trembling and picking at its own fingers Plain of soft belly eating itself.

জীবনমুক্তি (জীবন = Everyday life, মুক্তি = Liberation)

Sagnik Basumallik

Unborn: Who am I? Born: You are the unborn, and the born: the eternal Self.

Unborn: Will I be born as a white, a black or a brown? Born: You are the Self, you are colorless.

Unborn: Will I be born as a male, a female or any other form? Born: You are the Self, both the male and the female, and everything else.

Unborn: Is my body my Self? Born: The body decays, you do not.

Unborn: Is my mind my Self? Born: The mind decays, you do not.

Unborn: Is my ego, my intellect or my pride, my Self? Born: No. The ego, intellect and pride are temporary.

Unborn: Do my experiences constitute my Self? Born: You are neither the experiencer nor the experience itself.

Unborn: Who am I? Born: You are the cause of the experience.

Unborn: What causes experience? Born: The eternal consciousness.

Unborn: What is consciousness? Born: It is the principle, the essence of everything, both the manifested and the un-manifested.

Unborn: Why is it eternal?

Born: It is without a beginning and without an end. It always exists. It manifests out of itself, exists in itself and un-manifests in itself.

Unborn: How is the Self different from the God? Born: The Self is the God. The God is the Self.

Unborn: Is God eternal? Born: God is your own Self. The Self is eternal.

Unborn: Did God create me? Born: The Self was never created, never destroyed.

Unborn: Who do these people worship? Born: They worship God.

Unborn: Why do they worship God? Born: They worship God to know the Self.

Unborn: What is the nature of the Self? Born: The Self is eternal.

Unborn: Will the Self die? Born: The Self never dies, and the Self is never born.

Unborn: What is my purpose? Born: Your purpose is to know the Self.

Unborn: How do I fulfill this purpose? Born: Through work (Karma Yoga). Through knowledge (Gyana Yoga). Through meditation (Raja Yoga). Through devotion (Bhakti Yoga).

Unborn: How should I work? Born: “You work for the sake of work, not for the fruits thereof. Give up the fruits of your actions, and embrace both success and failure.”

Unborn: What knowledge should I obtain? Born: The knowledge of the true nature of the Self, or God.

Unborn: On what should I meditate? Born: Meditate on the true nature of the Self, or God. 84 | Perception

Unborn: Who should I be devoted to? Born: Devote yourself to the true nature of Self, or God.

Unborn: What will I get out of it? Born: Equanimity of the mind.

Unborn: What will it lead to?

Born: জীবনমুক্তি (Liberation from everyday life)

Noor Zamamiri

leo sun pisces moon type beat

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