2011-2012 Quarto by Quarto

Vol. LXIII // 2011-2012 Literary Magazine of the Columbia University Undergraduate Writing Program

TA B L E of CONTENTS COLETTE MCINTYRE Carya tomentosa · 7 MINA SECKIN symptom/side-effect: · 10 HENRY RING Faerie Bones · 11 ANDY NICOLE BOWERS Lines for an Executioner · 18 Country Song · 19 CHLOE CAMPBELL efforts · 21 LIVIA HUANG Video Games · 22 TORSTEN ODLAND Your Small Role · 27 MARSHALL THOMAS Ham to Noah · 30 Three Wild Guesses at Willis McGahee · 31

AUGUSTO CORVALAN Fly-By-Nights · 32

YANYI LUO Uses for retired tattoos · 35

DALTON LABARGE From In Side a Warm Loose Bag, My Body · 36

CONTEST WINNERS

MARSHALL THOMAS El Mundo Department Store, 6 PM · 38 Obama Pizza · 39 MERIAM RAOUF P.O.S. · 41 DALTON LABARGE Ambulance Driver’s Song · 51 CHARLINE TETIYEVSKY The Night After Mario Richards Forgot Who He Was, Who His Father Was, That His Mother, Before She Died, Had Always Told Him to Stay Off the Kitchen Table · 52 MAURICE DECAUL Dujla Wal Furat · 54 MALCOLM CULLETON Three Rivers · 66 TIAN BU Infection · 74 Year of the Pig · 75

E D I TO R S ’ N OT E Dear Readers, Quarto couldn’t be more thrilled to bring you our 63rd issue of poetry and prose from the Columbia undergraduate community. From hundreds of submissions, our board has spent months selecting pieces for this magazine. Its pages collage together everything from the Chinese Lunar Calendar to NFL injuries, country music to ambulance sirens. We are especially excited to showcase the winners of the reinstated Quarto Award, which was judged this year by poet Mary Jo Bang. We’re also proud to publish the audience-selected winner of our annual Submit and Mingle Event. In addition to this print magazine, we have launched a new website to host our decades of digital archives, as well as the inter-university consortium, featuring undergraduate literature from around the globe. Find it at www.quartomag.com. On a more serious note, the Columbia community was devastated by the loss of Tian Bu (CC’13), whose beautiful poems we feel privileged to share with you. Without knowing Tian’s identity, our board unanimously accepted two works that she submitted before she passed. We would like to thank her family for giving permission to publish these works. We dedicate this issue to Tian’s memory. After three years on Quarto’s board, we feel so proud to present this issue to you as a parting gift. Noelle Bodick and Rebecca Kutzer-Rice Executive Editors, 2011-2012

Car ya tomentosa COLETTE MCINTYRE

Daddy was a butcher, a hog man. His red hands slick with fat, he strung his pigs from the hickory tree in the backyard. Claw hammer pinned to his side. Copper nails askance, growing like fall corn stalks from the thin line of his mouth. Eyes held in a cup of sun. He pressed their muted bodies against the trunk. The wood was dense so he swung hard. Grunted. The hogs levitated, shook, jaws wobbled in bacchus laughter. Their Roman shoulders grew feverish. Their throats dripped onto the sunken land. At night the bodies swayed slowly, back, forth, emptied pendulums restoring gravity in the thin Carolina soil. Daddy said they bled best when hung. He used a .22 caliber to kill his hogs, pressed the mouth of the rifle to the dirt-caked ridge of skull between their tiny eyes. The anxiety 7

boiled their blood. Squeals. He stuck ‘em, sneaked the blade right beneath the breastbone. Everything goes. He took those red hands and pulled out the packaged parts of ‘em. The ground looked like wartime. He would pull a cotton handkerchief out from a fold, wipe down his oak face, wince. He poured cool water on the hogs—cupped red hands hands red cupped water splashing down wooly haunches.The harvested pigs dripped clean. He burned off their fur, peeled their hooves, dragged them from their blood. He butchered on an unhinged door, all heat swollen knuckles, sunstroke knives. The hickory flowers mixed with the fire clouds of the smokehouse. Autumn smelt yellow and burnt.

COLETTE MCINTYRE 8

Daddy was a real mean son of a bitch. He was angry meat on thick bones. A mudslide walk. Thumbs in his pockets and a carbon stare. He took bootleg bourbon by the mouthful and got barrel bodied. Shotgunned. Once he broke Rena’s wrist, grabbed her bird arm as it fluttered out the sidedoor. It was big red hand red face

holds her chest now, cradles herself inward. Rena hopped in the back of a pickup with four city soft boys, sends postcards from Charleston with no return address. He, he who handled meat and ate all the stew with his red hands, died of liver cancer, spitting up green sick when we all thought he was colored black. And the hickory tree stands, still, coils of bloodied rope swinging from its branches: back—forth—back—forth— blacking out strands of the reddened sun.

COLETTE MCINTYRE

where in the hell ya goin? her neck swelling into ropey veins the acid of his underarms and the shadows of the tied hogs swinging under their feet. November he shattered Ma’s collarbone. Her face got mountainous. He ruptured her spleen. It was ‘cause Ma gave him bad stew, gave him lip she got broke. Daddy snapped off a hickory switch, beat her in the oven warm kitchen. The wood was dense so he swung hard. Grunted. Ma

symptom/side-effect: MINA SECKIN

truck darling, you mutter and call me sometimes, and your humming i can fancy. i can be eligible to perform in the dark for you. spit apple seeds out between my lips onto the flying roadside, screaming singing out of your truck’s window. outside colors in blur or maybe i will be standing on roadside kicking a roadside plastic container forgotten and not even properly disposed. there can be a difference. apples, or maybe other fruits, can make you smell better down there, you know. i can tell you know. you’ve noticed. people can just tell these sorts of things when they’re doing things with one another. holding into and between one another. if the seeds don’t get stuck between my teeth maybe i won’t seem to be biting you with my mouth. maybe you can get used to seeds living in my body. maybe you will be back to zip the fluids out after it all. a stomach, mine tender. maybe it is not a stomach anymore, in utero & figgy. distinguish yourself, or myself, between symptom and side effect. what things can be controlled by the body:

Faerie Bones HENRY RING

Wynn tells me to pee in the box. We are out by his tree, in the woods behind his house. He’s put the wooden box with the baby’s shirt and the Drano and the honey and the little glass bottle of almond extract and the single jack onto the ground. They’re all mashed together in sort of a thick paste against one wall. The air is cool and wet, the needles on the tree still dripping. It’s the only way we can catch one, he says. I know, I say. I just don’t have to pee right now. I’ll go first, he says. He unbuttons his cargo pants and then he tells me to look away, and I hear a few drops splatter into the mess in the box. Okay, he says. Now you. I walk until the toe of my left shoe touches the box, and he turns away. I unzip, and there is a pause and the slight wind dies and I know Wynn is waiting for the noise of me peeing, that he is waiting for confirmation. I cannot pee and I cannot pee, and a minute goes by and my face is bright red now, and it occurs to me that all of this is shameful. I pee. We go to the hole in the grassy meadow, Wynn carrying the box with a hooked finger. He drops it carefully in the hole, so that the slit in the lid of the box will remain exposed as we bury the rest of it. We scoop dirt onto it with our feet. Thick, wet clods like curds of milk. He tells me that now we can get one, can trap one. The honey and the toys and the smell of almonds will draw one, and the Drano will poison it, and the urine will trap it there, binding it until it dies. We can let it sit out here until it’s just bones, just to be sure. Then we can dig up the box and take the bones for baubles. Wynn’s tree is full with baubles. They hang from almost every branch. Little bits of string, wrapped around pinecones and pieces of sage and bundles of dry grass and broken glass and shiny foil and thistle flowers and chicken bones and a cat skull. I ask him what the baubles do, and he tells me that they don’t do anything. That they’re for the keeping, for the having. I do not press him, and as we walk back to the house I begin to scrape the mud on my shoes onto his gravel driveway so his mother will not be angry. My mother tells me that in the fall, Wynn will go to a private school somewhere in California. That it’s a boarding school. I ask her what Wynn has done wrong, and she tells me that he has done nothing wrong. That his parents simply think he can get a better education there. 11

So why aren’t I going to boarding school? Because it’s very, very expensive. She drives for a while. At a red light, she stops and does not let her forward momentum carry her head down. She says that Great Falls has GATE. And the peer mediation program. And those acting classes. And Morgan is already there. She says it’s great. Morgan, I think, does not say that. Morgan goes into the bathroom and turns the tap on and puts a towel under the door, and then the whole upstairs starts to smell like incense, but with something weird and cloying underneath it. She goes to cross-country practice, and when she gets home, covered in sweat, she has a single banana and goes out with all of her white blonde Christian friends whose names I cannot learn because they all look the same. Not that there are that many girls that aren’t white, blonde, and Christian in Great Falls. I tell my mother that I will miss Wynn very much. I ask if he will visit me. My mother smiles. She tells me he will be home for a month at Christmas and for all of summer.

HENRY RING 12

Wynn tells me that if a rat’s blood were boiled down, refined to a point of hyper-potency, that it would contain so many different diseases in such high concentrations that it would actually be corrosive to the flesh. I have read the Hot Zone, as I was getting bored with the Redwall series, and high concentrations of Ebola seem plausible enough as a weapon. I tell Wynn that my Barbarian empties his backpack in the middle of the road where he stands and begins to fill it with the rats running out of the plague-infested village. Wynn asks me how full I want to get the bag. Figuring to err on the safe side, I tell him that I want the bag filled to the brim. The operation takes my hulking half-orc until dark to complete. Then he starts a fire, builds it into a crackling blaze. He takes each rat, cuts it open, and drains its blood into a large metal pot. He adds water. He slowly heats and cools the fetid mixture for fifteen hours, until it’s the color of a faded felt patch. Exhausted, he leaves the murky mixture to cool by the side of the fire. He curls up on the opposite side in the dim morning light, closes his eyes, and coughs once before falling into a deep, nightmarish sleep. Wynn tells me that I’m going to lose about half of my health from trying to deal with the plague rats, and probably go blind. But you get this, he says. He slides a piece of paper across the carpeted floor of the basement. It’s labeled “improvised plague sludge” and will give drastic and terrifying penalties to anyone it’s slopped onto. There’s a picture he’s drawn next to it: a fat dwarf melting and screaming.

My sister leaves her Cosmopolitan magazines lying around the bathroom, and they are like candy for my raging libido. She leaves for cross country practice after my parents leave for work, usually around ten a.m. She can drive now, so I can’t rely on my parents’ usually predictable scheduling to figure out when I can masturbate. The Cosmos have told me nearly a thousand sex tips. The mind reels. I am careful to read every word, to return them exactly as I found them. I sometimes steal them from my sister’s room. I must be very careful at all times to keep anyone from discovering me or discovering how I’m spending a good chunk of my summer hours alone. Discovery of my preparations, if not the action itself, will be fatal. Invisibility is the key word, and I find myself whispering it whenever I open the door to her room. When she is gone to the lake on Wednesdays, sometimes I will masturbate in different places around the house. The sofa downstairs. The kitchen. The laundry room. Her room. I ask Wynn. He tells me that it’s the best thing that ever happens to you, after your first orgasm. I nod. He asks me if I’ve ever seen a woman’s thing, and I tell him that, no, I haven’t. He says that I really need to find a good picture where the girl’s legs are splayed. The idea is really hot. The diagrams in sex ed are useless. I want to round out my fantasies with real images, not just the vague motions and sensations that go on in my dreams

HENRY RING

Cool, I say, and he shushes me. It’s nearly one a.m. I ask if we can stop for the night, and he shrugs. The dice and papers and books lie open in front of us. Incense burns from a clay skull on his bookshelf. He’s got the entire His Dark Materials set and a cowboy bedspread from five or six years ago. I ask him if we can go out into the woods, and he says maybe later. He goes to get a glass of water and takes a long time. I flip through the handbook and then put it away in my backpack, with the dice and the paper. He comes back and says that he heard his mom moving around. She’s an insomniac, and she’s high-strung. He’s not very descriptive, which is unusual for him. He says that we should probably go to bed. I pull the cot out of the closet and unfold it. He brings me a sleeping bag from the den. He gives me a pillow from his bed. He turns the lights off. I can hear him taking his clothing off in the dark. I lay in my briefs and my t-shirt in the sleeping bag that smells like incense. I ask if we can talk, and I can hear him move, shrugging in the dark. He sits on the edge of his bed, and I can see him in the moonlight coming through his basement window. There’s a pause. I hear him breathing. The smell of incense is very strong.

in the moments before I wake up late at night with my own spend suddenly on my stomach. I invite Nick and Chris over. They are friends from home room. I put my handbooks and my hobbies and my sketches and the few baubles I’ve created in an old box that has fancy pears on the sides of it. I tuck the box under a drawer in my bureau, in an open space against the floor where it will not be found. The doorbell rings, and they stand there in the heat. I ask Dad if we can play with the fireworks left over from last year. He seems to consider it for a while. He asks me if I can be safe with them. I tell him I can. He tells me not to use the big ones, and I tell him I won’t. He tells me that Nick and Chris are my responsibility now. We bike down the hill almost a half mile to an anthill I saw everyday when I walked home during the spring. It’s almost as high as my knee, and it’s made of woven straw. But you couldn’t tell that. There’s a carpet of big red and black ants swarming on it. Each one the size of my thumbnail, looking swollen and blistered instead of segmented. I remember Wynn saying that an ant can bite over and over again, which hurts, but what gets you is its stinger, which is smooth like a wasp’s, but is full of formic acid. An ant crawled into a kid’s ear in Florida, and it stung him, and the acid melted through his eardrum, and the fluid in his inner ear leaked out, and he couldn’t do anything more than crawl and vomit for two months. I show Nick and Chris the anthill, and we start pushing firecrackers into the mound. Thin round tubes with those short, crazy fuses you can’t trust. Lady Fingers and Black Cats and M60s and Water Dynamite. But there’s no real structure. Each blast has nothing to push against. I read Horrible Histories, and it said that the Chinese invented bombs by making gunpowder burn under pressure. Pressure was the important bit—a supporting structure. Otherwise the gunpowder was just a flashy way to make little bits of fire. Pressure turned it into a bomb. As it burned, gunpowder turned into hot air and flames, and they expanded, and whatever was holding in all of that hot air burst, sending shrapnel flying around. Shrapnel was very cool. I tell Nick and Chris that the blasts needed further containment to destroy the anthill. Chris nods, blankly. Nick lights another firework and throws it underhand on top of the anthill. Then someone is yelling at us. A middle-aged guy coming across his lawn a hundred feet away. He’s screaming about us setting off fireworks in the neighborhood. We bike away. HENRY RING 14

Wynn throws another pine branch on the fire and tells me that Thatcher has a horseback riding program. That it sits on a plateau overlooking an orange grove. That it’s a ten minute trip to the ocean, where he will be

I am looking for Cosmos in Morgan’s room, and I check under her bed and find a half-empty bottle of alcohol sitting on the dusty carpet in the corner. The liquid inside is brown, and I want to say it’s scotch, but I think scotch is too expensive for her to have. This is illegal, I think. Illegal and dangerous. I wonder if I should have some. I wonder if Morgan is drunk all the time. I decide that she probably isn’t, because my parents have been drunk, and they would spot the difference from years of experience. I leave

HENRY RING

taking surfing lessons in the fall. I tell him I never really trusted horses, and he nods, saying that there are Inuit tribes that still believe horses are actually demons, that to ride one is to surrender yourself to them, to be scooped out of your own body and be deposited, soulless, at your destination. I add another set of branches. My father likes me to burn this stuff, helped me dig the pit out here in the backyard. It’s nearly five feet across, a round hole in the sod filled with branches. Too hot to go near, but Wynn and I still throw branches at the burning pile that’s now as high as my waist. Wynn tells me that his sister is going to go to high school in Kalispell, which is almost three hours away. He says that she’ll live with an aunt for five days a week. He says that they have a good basketball team. I nod and add more wood to the fire, watch it burn. I tell him that wildfires are technically the least dangerous natural disaster. That even a firestorm, when racing up a hill at the maximum speed of a subway train, doesn’t really do that much damage. Because the woods are empty, he says, and he throws a juniper branch onto the fire, because there’s no one to stand in the way. It burns trees and grass, and that’s actually pretty good. That means that new growth can come up. That the big old, dead trees that blocked out the sunlight, they’re dead, they’re ashes, and some of them— Ponderosas, he says. Ponderosas only have cones that open if they get warmed up to hundreds of degrees. They need to burn before they can live. The wind shifts, and the smell of smoke and the sudden breathlessness of fire heat pushes my lips shut. There was a queen in Shakespeare who swallowed fire, I think, who inhaled it, and it burned out her lungs. Yeah, Wynn says. But Ponderosas only do that in a narrow temperature range. One hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty. Any less and the seeds don’t open, any more and they die. He throws more branches on the fire. We build it high in the dark. The smoke is lost because there is no moon and the fire is not nearly bright enough. But the sparks dance in a shifting column above us, waiting.

Morgan’s room and cannot find a reason to masturbate until, late that night, I think about Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I fall asleep. I dream that Morgan comes home late, and Mom and Dad have to help her shower under the cold stream of water that Mrs. Morrical, my gym teacher, says will not reduce her BAC, but may in fact increase Morgan’s own perception that she is sober. I wonder if they think that they can wash the alcohol out of her. They scrub at her clothes, her mouth, the bottoms of her feet. She has left for the lake by the time I get up. I walk alone down to the anthill. The ants like scurrying blisters. I bring my foot down. I stomp with both feet. I kick. I go down on one knee, and I scoop up handfuls of the nest. I throw them into the grass, into the street. The ants sting. Wynn is wrong about how much it hurts. I keep scooping, and I remember one of my books on tape. It was a collection of horror stories. One of them was called Leiningen Versus the Ants. A guy hated the ants so much that when they came to his plantation, he rode out into them, into a mile of army ants, and they ate his horse out from under him. The ants are on my arms and my fingers, and one stings or bites me under the fingernail. There are others inside my socks and my jeans. I run home as they sting and bite and claw at me. In the shower I stand under the water and do not move. Everything seems very vivid. There is a little chip in the ceramic on the edge of the tub, and I cannot tell if it was there before. Then I feel something, swear there are more in my hair. I move my hands, pat myself, try to pop them. Like scurrying blisters.

HENRY RING 16

As we come out of the woods still under the stars, Wynn tells me that two of his friends had a gay night last month. I nod and realize he can’t really see me in the dark. I ask what they did. Wynn says that it’s safe because it’s only two friends. And they promise not to tell anyone, and then they can do whatever they want to, for just one night. But that’s all. Just once. Unless they want to do it again. I ask Wynn how he knows about it, if it’s such a secret. He tells me that they both told him, together, once. Later I will wonder why the answer came so quickly to his mind. Wynn then describes the idea of mutual masturbation. I do not tell him, but I’ve already masturbated with Wynn in the room, while he was sleeping, once. I imagine what Wynn’s penis must look like. We cross the field, and we sit under Wynn’s tree, the conjuring tree. He climbs it easily in the dark, but only to the lowest branch. His voice comes out of the dark in a smooth whisper. He tells me everything. How the two boys stripped naked in front of each other late at night. How they pressed together and felt contact and a sudden rush of blood down there

and kissed. The honey one of them produced. How the tongue probably felt against the underside of the penis. He says that honey takes longer to lick off. That it makes everything difficult. Then he describes how things progressed to the floor, where their hands found each other and they came like a sudden act of God, a rushing force. My clothes feel strange on me. I’m aware of the way the t-shirt rubs against my chest, gently pulling at my nipples. The way my boxers just gently touch up against me. A light touch. There is no wind, but Wynn has moved, and the branch shakes, and I hear that tinkle of bones and metal and glass in the dark. I shiver. Wynn smells like incense in the dark, and even from four feet away, the scent is on him like a shroud. We should go in, he says. And be quiet. My mother will hear us, otherwise. He begins to walk back towards the house, and I do not follow. He turns back and walks until he is very close to me. His head is almost three inches higher than mine. His voice is flat in the dark. We could do that too, sometime.

HENRY RING

August is wildfire month in the West, and it’s strange that things are off to a late start. When I wake up I can feel it in my sinuses, an ashy, dead buildup. I think about the people burned alive by volcanic ash at Vesuvius and wonder if the last people to die, if maybe, as they breathed the burning ash, bits of their friends went up into their noses, clung to their eyes and made them water. The sun bleeds heat, and ashes stick to the sweat on my arms as I walk the mile from the bus stop to our house. The wind patterns, apparently, have changed. They’re saying there’s a big fire in California now. That that’s where the smoke’s coming from. I hope Wynn’s horse tried to kill him. There is a dense smoke shape on the horizon like a mushroom cloud. These fungi will grow all around us now, from spores made of lightning and burning cigarette butts. I hope that it is just over a hundred and fifty degrees wherever Wynn is. I do not want to have to share. I do not want to have to hide my plans in a pear box. I want to have him, his bones, for the keeping.

Lines for an Executioner

(Utah, 1985)

A N DY N I C O L E B O W E R S I. The Firing Squad Fourteen years after the recoil, I can still feel every cold groove in the body, and that spot where stock met shoulder prickles electric, the socket of a phantom limb. Now something quick as a rodent trips wires in the dark of me, so that I will be chopping firewood or kneeling in mulch, shaking cutworms from the young tomatoes, and I will fall through a trapdoor into that prison yard, that plywood chair, that hooded face. II. The Hunt In whiskey dreams, I stalk a wounded stag through the pine trees, run down the trail he leaks in the frost until I am ten yards away, five. Now the snow is falling backward. Now the night sky is unbolting, and the moon hangs inside out. In the final black of the clearing, there is only what I have no name for, blue-scorched in the muzzle-flash.

Countr y Song A N DY N I C O L E B O W E R S

1. Because you took your headful of ugly angels & sped off in a Coupe de Ville, Tacoma-bound, because of 40 oz. cooled in the storm cellar, because of analgesics & Townes Van Zandt & the song about the deadmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s valentine, I decide on another year of this living on half-light. Across the street, a girl stands naked in her window. I watch her limbs go blue with dusk as I adjust my chemistry, wanting to remember what I surely knew before there was a word for longing: something rusted-over & understood like the taste of animal. 2. Last night, I drove out to the moon, past scrap metal & uranium tailings, yellow skeletons of pack mules. With headlights off, I let the dark come in around me & remembered how I once was 17 & bruised with breakneck love: peroxide hair, scar tissue, glove box full of amphetamines. How you said I was your Wrecking Ball, your Teenage Queen, your Bird on a Wire, & this was true. 3. On the dresser, I keep an ampoule of sky, over the bed, a velvet painting of Elvis. In the corner, the television sputters bluely, & down at the mill, pines float, corpselike, in creosote, give up the tiny secret lives inside. 19

Facedown on the mattress, I know the honky-tonk has closed & the lumberyard boys have done red things under sodium lamps. I know that soon I will be cool & insentient as river clay, making my own love to June bugs & neon & the far-off keening of a slide guitar.

ANDY NICOLE BOWERS 20

effor ts CHLOE CAMPBELL

She picked up the book with her body. Wintered hands, fingersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;corrugated vestigial tails of adolescence. Knees and head kiss, she picked up the book with her body. Marooned half moons dot her, pretzel salted, the past tense of a ladiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; magazine clipping. Slim grip of the binding, red creases tattoos of her efforts. She picked up the book with her body, mumbled the price of plums, of the browning of flowers, of the smudge on polished aluminum vases. She gave a season of your self, a her in a shut room, clipped removed the snags and hangs, she picked up the book with her body and the words catch in her throat, mixing with the cloudy burn of acetone, the helium scrapings, creaks out the chrysalisbyzantine the book the plums the curled brown leaves lord lord lord

Video Games LIVIA HUANG

Lou thinks of rooms where men pump their penises in and out of pockets in the walls. They press against the perimeter like figures in a frieze, feet on sandpaper foot-shapes whose toes have gone black from strain. Thinned lube, rubber grips, pushing to close the gaps between molecules. They are shivering close, skimming up an asymptote. One man breaks protocol and hisses to the wall, “I’m going to come, I’m going to come.” He shudders into silence and after resting a bit, withdraws and showers in another room before going home. Lou decides to call him Sam. “Hello?” The woman who opens the door blinks against the sunlight. “Ms. Dudek?” Lou smiles. “I’m Lou, I called an hour ago? Steven’s sick so I’m making the rounds today.” He inclines his head. “May I come in?” “Oh yes, please.” Inside, it smells like socks. Lou sees other rooms but Ms. Dudek leads him into the kitchen and motions him to set down his bag and sit at the table. Colored magnets on the fridge spell out ‘RXADF?,’ ‘EG,’ and ‘ZIP!’ “Do you want coffee? I only have instant.” “Oh, I’m fine, trying to cut down and everything.” “That’s good. It’s such a bad habit, I don’t know why I even keep any.” She laughs a little bit. “Totally understandable.” Lou crosses an ankle over a knee, slouching to keep it casual. “How are things going around here?” “Fine. I think I’m sleeping better.” “How many hours?” “Six to seven. Maybe eight on a good day. That’s normal, right?” “Just about.” “Yeah, I thought so.” “And how is Mr. Dudek?” “Oh, you know.” She jangles her foot, flashing a toe-ring or two. “I’m sure you’ve read his file.” “He still stubborn?” Lou uses “stubborn” too often at work, he thinks. “Still a dick,” she says, flipping her head down to knot the hair. “He threw the remote last time, when Steven was late. He said he was costing him minutes in the jacket and then he threw the remote through that window there. I know you guys can’t help if the other sucker doesn’t want to stop, but assholes like my husband,” she sighs, rolling her eyes, “they

Upstairs, he looks over her shoulder into the dim room. Mr. Dudek lies on an overstuffed recliner playing video games, immobile save the mashing of thumbs. “Ron, the jacket’s here.” “Good.” He pauses the game mid-carnage (so much pulp) and looks at Lou. “Did they replace Steven?” “Steven’s sick, Mr. Dudek.” Lou edges around Ms. Dudek and starts unpacking his bag. “You threw a remote, remember?” she says. “He was late, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t stick your nose into my business.” “My insurance pays for your business. I’ll crap your business and serve it for tea.” “Serve this house for tea, okay? Where did it come from? You see how she looks at me, with that neck? She’s not young anymore but she doesn’t deserve that neck.” Lou draws out the jacket and turns away as Mr. Dudek starts stripping. Lou hears the crumple of a nylon windbreaker and more until Mr. Dudek clears his throat. He stands like a colonel in underwear and socks. Ms. Dudek snickers (“Why don’t you leave already?” Mr. Dudek says)

LIVIA HUANG

don’t want to get it.” Lou nods to demonstrate sympathy. These people; they rely too much on each other. They try to run with bad knees and when the joints explode and the pavement whams up, they bleed out, all askew and wondering where love went. “It’s hard taking care of other people,” he says. Again, he thinks of the rooms with the pockets. Self-Serve’s the future, everybody agreed. He had gone regularly a decade ago, when the loneliness of a new city clawed shame in the balls and said suck it shame, Lou’s my koala now. The rooms were very popular for a while, but then the companies got greedy, and they were shut down. After a few missteps (booths, home kits), a spawn-company started clinical trials on the jacket, already a top performer in tertiary markets. Something crashes down the stairs. Ms. Dudek swivels to the ceiling. “Fuck it, Ron! You throw shit one more time, you’re getting it back in the face.” Lou wrinkles his forehead. “Has he been doing this for a while now?” “Yes, he’s a real pro. A real fucking pro, Ron, did you hear that?” Lou makes a neutral noise and reaches for his bag. “Well, no reason to delay. This must be a lot to deal with all the time.” “Everyone’s a pro in this house,” she says.

and Lou keeps his eyes on the jacket as he begins fitting it. It’s more like a blanket with sleeves and legs than a jacket, going over the whole body and hooding the head like mummy wrappings of one cloth. Lou smuggled a jacket home, but doesn’t use it much. It’s too hard to put on alone and then too easy to drift off inside until it sucks all electricity from the house, and you’re left like a sausage in casing, sober in the dark. “Let me know if you’re uncomfortable,” he says. He finishes strapping in Mr. Dudek, plugs in the cord, and starts adjusting the control for his height and weight. “You’ve done this before, I know, but I’m just going to repeat that I have to stop it once your minutes are over. You didn’t eat before, right?“ “No, last time I did, the meds made me throw up.” “Okay then.” Ms. Dudek watches from the corner as Lou pushes a syringe of liquid into Mr. Dudek’s arm. “You good?” “Yeah, I’m good.” He closes his eyes. Lou starts the timer and pulls out some reading. “You can go now,“ he says to Ms. Dudek. “I’ll let you know when he needs you.” She nods and goes downstairs. The groans start about fifteen minutes in, within the normal range. Lou looks up from his book. In the recliner, the jacket pulses as it kneads Mr. Dudek in measured waves. Ejaculation is not uncommon; they put a disposable sleeve there for that purpose. Lou returns to his book, the page yawping as it drags across his shirt.

LIVIA HUANG 24

“Listen, Suzanne, I’m so sorry.” Mr. Dudek makes noises that bubble falsetto. Lou checks his watch. Forty-five minutes in, should be right. “Ms. Dudek?” he calls. “I was messed up, baby.” “Ms. Dudek?” “Why did this happen, Suze?” Lou puts down his book and walks to the doorway, just as Ms. Dudek arrives and sidles past, looking tired. She takes his head, which lolls from side to side, and presses her face against his. “You know I didn’t mean to,” he says thickly. “I was messed up.” “I know,” she says, into his neck. “They came and I couldn’t stop them. You know why I let her go? Because I was a messed up shit and didn’t love her enough.” “No, we loved her enough.” “I let them take her.” He starts crying in slow motion, heaves plateaus instead of hiccups. “It’s too much for me.” “It’s okay.” “I know we could be really good this time.”

At home, he dials the phone and waits. “Hello?” “Yes, is this Monica?” “Yes, it’s Monica. What should I call you?” “It doesn’t matter, I guess. Do you think you could forgive me?” “For what, baby?” “It doesn’t matter, Monica. I was so stupid and messed everything up.” “Yeah, but it’s all right, I forgive you, okay?” “I’m sorry, I want you to know that. I wasn’t man enough for you, and I’m not afraid to admit it.” “You’re my man, that’s all that matters.” “I don’t know, Monica. I don’t think I’m strong enough.” “We’re strong together. You know I’ll always be here for you.” “Do you hate me, Monica? I deserve it. I treated you so bad. Maybe if you didn’t look at me like that all the time I could get better. I’m not accusing you or anything.” “I know you wouldn’t.” “Thanks. It’s just sometimes I get a feeling, like I’m sitting in a microwave with the timer clicking up, and it’s a bad feeling you know?” “Not really, baby.” “Like the timer’s counting up, not down, climbing until the display says nine nine nine nine and then when the numbers change on their own, you’re just watching yourself spin on slow fry. Do you know what that feels like? I look at my hand and I think the fingers’ll go black from the tips any minute, if I look hard enough.” “You gotta relax.” “You think I’m selfish right? I don’t want you to worry about me. You shouldn’t feel sorry if anything happens to me, okay? I know I’m a shit.” “Baby, you’re not a shit.” “Honestly, I think we could be the best, if only we really tried. We would love each other so much.” “Oh, I know. You don’t have to tell me that.” “That’s true, you have lots of insight.”

LIVIA HUANG

“I know,” she says into his neck. Lou looks at his watch. “Listen Suze, I miss you all the time. I see you every day but I miss you. Let’s start over, okay? We’ll do it good this time.” “Yes.” “I just wanted you to know that.” “Yes.” Lou logs the time, nine minutes left.

“I do my best.” “Yes.” “Mm.” “Do you need anything else, baby?” “No, it’s okay. Thank you. Would you mind if I called again, Monica?” “Why would I mind?” “I don’t know. Bye, Monica.” Lou hangs up and pours a glass of milk from the fridge. It gurgles down very cold and too fast, lands with a thud in the hatch of his stomach. Milk mustache! He wipes it on the back of his hand as he walks to the bed, undresses, and wedges himself between the layers. It is not very late, but there’s nothing else to do. He rumbles a stanza in half-time to watch his stomach rise under the sheets. He is a plane, sifting through atmospheric strata. He switches levels, but they are all just different densities of water in the air; nothing changes except the travel time from one drop to the other, which is negligible anyway, because planes are machines, and they’re cooler than birds, though birds are kind of machines too. They stare at him from the sidewalk, and he hates having to figure out when to walk around them or straight ahead. Would they fly up now, or now, in beaky panic? He hates them. He has too much hate in his heart to sleep. Still, Lou shuts his eyes and tries to conjure the morning. Tomorrow he will go to the gym and swim between strangers.

LIVIA HUANG 26

Your Small Role TO R S T E N O D L A N D

Wherever you’ve walked you’ve left a spray of your dried-up skin. Know that. Know that all fallen leaves and all the dropped hairs you’ve scattered across North America are steadily adding a new layer to the planet. Know that you are starring in a mass decay. Even your lawn is a history of dead horses and spoiled fruit. Deep underground, the earth is fermenting Shakespeare and your great-great grandfather together into a pungent, lively wine for ghosts, who are partying like you would not believe, trying to remember how sweet and strong it was to be made of meat.

CONTEST WINNERS

Ham to Noah MARSHALL THOMAS Quar to Award Winner

trauma trauma and my indifference is great ⋅ you give us scuffed breads then run to rot all quiet ⋅ you ugly dad ⋅ thumb dicked dad ⋅ I barely did shit ⋅ you won’t come find me down south ⋅ I’m fashioning holy objects ⋅ much newer, herbed and spiced ⋅ rich meats in pans of sauce ⋅ and a lot of fast talking ⋅ keep doing what you’re doing

Three Wild Guesses at Willis McGahee * MARSHALL THOMAS Q u a r t o A w a r d R u n n e r- U p 1. They carry me away in a small green cart. Each crack we pass over jolts my leg. My patella wanders. It slides up towards my thigh as we climb the gentle slope of the tunnel leading outside. Everything re-found its place real fast. The leg went straight and redrew its lines. My nose even sensed the salt at the top of my pads where my neck’s sweat had soaked them, for a while. A weight from nowhere. I have some things to be grateful for. 2. There were going to be alpaca rugs and flinty columns of champagne. Three sleek dogs. Rotundas in my home. “Investments,” I told my mom. It is the coolest thing, son. Money is cooler than your most elaborate bathroom. A football field is padded with small black rubber pellets that hold the plastic grass in place. These covered my black leg, invisible from five feet away. I looked around. The silver of their helmets, pouring and foul. 3. The men around me do not love me. Can be lawn mowed after all. A blade in blades. When it came, my teeth landed one on top of the other: ideal rows. Fence posts, saplings, radio towers... was purer than these last Saturday, filthy pink now. The spectators curl as if covered in drying mucus. Saw the lines painted onto the field become ropes carrying numbers into the air. They’re hiding in the blimp. The fans went home. At least to me they did. Whole knees is home. My own leg, served to me as an inanimate object.

*In 2003, during the national championship game, Willis McGahee of the University of Miami suffered one of the most sickening injuries in college football history. A low tackle bent his knee backwards, tearing his ACL, MCL, and PCL.

Fly-By-Nights A U G U S TO C O R V A L A N Quar to Award Honorable Mention Nothing ever happens in this town, said K. Neighborhood Code: no fences that block the view of the yard from the street. All fences must be either painted white or a natural brown color. Growing up, I got $3 haircuts at a place called The Barbershop. It was operated by Lenny and Lenny Jr., both of whom wore gold watches and chains. The place shut down when Lenny Jr. was incarcerated for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and Lenny was arraigned for racketeering. For two years, a large white truck with the words “Cow’s Ice Cream Truck” frequented the area. I was under explicit orders not to approach it. It never played any sort of music and was never seen to stop anywhere. Neighborhood Code: no excessively loud music after 10 p.m. Parties larger than 10 people must be announced to neighbors. K. had an uncle who lived on the outskirts of town. K. had to house-sit from time to time, since his uncle was almost always on business trips to Eastern Europe. He claimed to sell toothbrushes there. The house had no running water. One of G.’s estranged uncles needed help moving to a new home. For our aid, he promised to pay us $100. We managed to throw away pounds of newspapers, clothing, and stacks of objects so encrusted with mold we weren’t sure what they were. He offered to pay us with the change we found scattered on his floor instead. It fit into a large water drum and had to be washed clean on a tarp. It was $2000. Firsts—death memory: K.’s neighbor, who held a judge hostage in his house. Who forgot his heart medicine and died during negotiations. Mr. S. went to the same middle school where he now taught. His summer job back then was digging graves.

There was ever only one piece of graffiti, a nonsense phrase on a crumbling brick wall next to a McDonald’s. The city planted an enormous tree there a week later. To get out of here and never come back, being G.’s dream. This being, he reasoned, fly-over country. Mr. S.’s mother, who used to work as a professional cheerleader. Told me he can still remember his neighbors peering through her windows. His father being away, running a cult in southern Utah. Neighborhood Code: Under 18 curfew on weekdays: 10 p.m. Under 18 curfew on weekends: 12 a.m. M. and I learning how to parallel park at a university lot. Where students would toss us cans of beer from their windows when we did a good job. Code Word—stop and sip: M.D.’s father, who was a senior police officer. During late nights, he would sometimes pull over some of the neighborhood kids. It was well known that intoxication was never a problem as long as you knew the right names. Even before we could gamble, C. and I would often go to a horse track on the outskirts of town. We would frequently meet Jack King-of-the-Track there, a public defender. He would place some bets for us if we agreed to answer his phone and pretend it was the wrong number. M.D.’s neighbors, who for years illegally raised pigs in their backyard.

It was at the horse track where I acquired a vintage Blue Moon glass. It had been abandoned by the sink in the men’s bathroom, so I snagged it and hid it under my black peacoat. A large man wearing jean overalls approached me, and I knew I was going to get kicked out, at best. He asked me if I was Big Sugar. I said no, and he politely excused himself and left. Code Word—street shots: Coined by C., and used to refer to the large number of drinks one could acquire for free simply by walking down the right streets on Friday nights.

AUGUSTO CORVALAN

Firsts—roadtrip: driving to a particular bend in the Wabash River to pick up C.’s father after he was asked to leave a gambling boat cruise.

The Chinese restaurant M. and I once explored. They served a $10 buffet that consisted mostly of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and assorted steamed vegetables. Halfway through the meal, I asked the waitress if I could use the bathroom, but she shook her head no and walked away without saying a word. A couple of months later the restaurant disappeared. The unknown woman who held up one of the gun stores and was never seen again. When I was 12, I got hit by a baseball right where the nose meets the upper lip and I survived, the head football coach told me once, proudly. He shot himself after buying a new car. You’re lucky you’re getting out, repeated to me. You’re lucky you can. G., who moved to Florida to work in a golf course. Whose house now contains strangers. Mr. S., who’ll die where he was born. Who I’ll never see again. C. who lives on the outskirts of town. Waiting for something better to happen, as he put it. Who tells me nothing has changed at the horse track. Nashville’s the only place you can play guitar now, K. said before leaving. C.’s father, who embezzled hundreds of thousands. Who hung himself. In the same house his parents lived in, now lives M.

AUGUSTO CORVALAN 34

Uses for retired tattoos YA N Y I L U O Quar to Award Honorable Mention we still had sex after I started going blind she would turn the lights off knowing that I hated how brightly I could see darkness in blackness I clung to the stitch outlines of her tattoo oblong feathers wearied and strung in the naked of her shoulder blades in blackness I wet my fingers on the embroidery and learned to sew those lines between shadows and pieces of night before dawn and the darkness of a closed mouth at last very delicately I peeled the blacklines from her skin and stuffed the quilt with oblong feathers I saw her all through winter

From In Side a Warm Loose Bag, My Body D A LTO N L A B A R G E Winner of Quar to’s annual Submit & Mingle Reading Something celestial, ask of the living and they wouldn’t know what to call it, inches chilly up the scaffold of roots, my bones wetter tonight and colder still. Guess there’s weeks across the leathery sheath that used to be my skin. I feel time, same way you feel biting into an orange. I can’t feel critters anymore, who go away with mouthfuls, nor the warm plastic tarping that is my shroud. If I could knock you in the little tuft for choosing a site too close to running water, for leaving my eyes uncovered. That’d be feeding a dead horse, so you’d say. So I would have to apologize. The field you chose is spacious, unlike the town cemetery. There, the dead are stacked and they argue like sardines. You left me smelling of wax and lavender, not formaldehyde. Little hands that spared me the touch of a wiry old undertaker. My spot is shallow enough to feel the air, albeit still lonesome at times. Don’t feel too bad. I can still hear the sparrows. Half of my afterlife counting the branches I imagine them calling from. They tell their stories and I’ve practiced getting close

enough to collect one. I concentrate mostly on making myself smaller. There’s a trick to leaving this purpling caul like capillaries but I’ve only managed once, briefly. Light pooled in like braided ropes, filling my encasing with colors I couldn’t decipher. (I saw through them, saw you naked on a couch, focused on your face projected on my tarp). Your face with the white noise of migratory skeins. If you remember me, please forgo my body. What is left of it you wouldn’t care to recognize. Behind me is what remains, the daily parts and thoughts loose like worms. I’ve since stopped believing in limits, though you wouldn’t be awaiting my specter. See, above ground you digest the world with your little senses beneath you I am sonar if you listen with the right intention. Moving around my sac is like swimming between the mouths of flesh and eternity, Beyond this lies a fabric that stitches everyone together. Your face graceless with shoals of geese heading westward. You wouldn’t believe how far being graceless goes; beyond the smirk you tout around, into the breadth of creation

watch for birds that you’ll confuse with the weather. I’ll have molded them for your little ears. The song you won’t hear is the one I will have taught them.

DALTON LABARGE

that conjured us from the polluted rivers. Should I get there sometime soon,

El Mundo Depar tment Store , 6 PM MARSHALL THOMAS

Wading through mesh again, where mesh is lush. A wide floor of people I can’t speak to, and I slide among boxes. “Fits a 12” pizza!” This from a small microwave to age under your cabinets. Black marker on china, a 49 piece set. Imagine wreaths around your macaroni. Flowers like sugar with a cold. Can openers deglisten against the wall. All is pale. Am I anything but racist in El Mundo? I see glasses with strawberries, roses, lemons. For 8 ounces of cool juice—that is what I am for too. Toilet seats available, a very wide selection. Some marbled, one a massive padded rose. A woman sorts backpacks in patience. I pick out two tablecloths, “European Damask 100% polyester,” because I have never stopped feeling like I’m shoplifting. Taking mental notes about people who don’t speak English is shoplifting. The woman before me buys a negligée of roses. If she would stand on horseback and throw roses everywhere in El Mundo where they aren’t already, to toasters, snug in crew socks, landing clumsy on dishracks, truly an ass flower. She would lean back most happy without me, on the stairs.

Obama Pizza MARSHALL THOMAS

grands him even if he shakes hands with bark men, unripe tomato wrapped in his tongue, spotted windows pizza windows, is he upstairs, laid out on the hardwood floor of a vacant unit, propping his head on an elbow, does he watch awnings sleep as livestock, can I ascend, lay a leather jacket on his knees, once he tried to pick up michelle thinking it was sasha, mops tiles to sheen and no one can disdain clean tiles, not even chief, covers its own walls with fried photographs, a hologram flag, can I eat anything I applaud, when he won, black people loved camcorders, swung 125th with them, camcorders oiled the street and rubbed it like a dry leg, oils the afternoon

plate with pizza, is he busy, buttoning a light shirt upstairs, misunderstands questions of sweet tea, defends the rite, gives bread in honor of our strongest heron

MARSHALL THOMAS 40

P.O.S. M E R I A M R AO U F

fish 1 |fi SH|

noun (pl. same or fish·es) a limbless cold-blooded vertebrate animal with gills and fins and living wholly in water : the sea is thick with fish

--I can feel a sort of warm breath beside me, on my neck, the part of my neck that is most uncomfortable on airplanes. The part of my neck that doesn’t know how to situate itself in a public place, tossing, turning, swimming. We are lying naked on your blue comforter, and you ask me and you tell me that I don’t like to sleep with blankets over me. I turn right, I turn left, and the inflatable pillow sits under me, breathing on my neck. I feel a hand on my hair, pushing fingers toward my scalp, my scales peeling off, the stench of fish in the room. It is warm, and you are warm, and the light is yellow, and there is a feeling like I have to go back into the water, back into the air, back into my room. Your finger in my hair, you ask me how many brothers I have and tell me that you don’t like the word “slut,” and that you have a little sister who knows how to fly. I tell you I want to know how to fly, and you smile, and I can already feel you turning away, melting, like wax I will never be able to make a candle out of. It occurs to me that I don’t know how candles are made and that it involves walking around a room with a string and that it requires a legion of patience I was never invited to. Your hand on my hair, you tell me it’s big and it’s curly, and it starts to get bigger and curlier until it fills the whole room. Huge brown locks and blond locks and red locks fill the entire room, of me, and of other girls you’ve been with, until I’m so much myself that I can no longer see you or remember you. I cannot find a match for you, and yet you are melting, melting like the leather on the luxury car that my dad bought himself after he almost died, and smiled about it, and didn’t even call me. Warm like the car that he loved and he just smiled, with a sinking heart that he rarely shows anyone, walking like an Egyptian, walking like a zombie, walking like a man in uniform. He speaks strong like a man in uniform, like a man on a unicorn, like a man that was just born. I didn’t even know that he could have died until something was missing from the way he smiled, neglecting to wear his neck brace and being in pain. I did not know when my mother had surgery, or a haircut, or cancer. I did not know any of these things, because of the 41

monsters I live with, the wild things who live in the woods, past “being dramatic,” past “get a real job,” hiding their real intimacy from the people we love. You kiss me harder and softer than I’ve ever been kissed, and you say “nice to meet you,” and I smile because I don’t want to say anything to make you feel weird, make you feel blue, make you feel anything. They are bright, they are warm, they are sunny, and there is a feeling like I have to go back into the water, back to my room, back to the sky.

Brown·ie 1 | brounē| |

noun (pl. -ies) 1 a member of the junior branch of the Girl Scouts, for girls aged between about 6 and 8. [ORIGIN: so named because of the color of the uniform.] 2 (brownie) a small square of rich cake, typically chocolate cake with nuts. 3 (brownie) a benevolent elf supposed to haunt houses and do housework secretly. [ORIGIN: diminutive of BROWN ; a “wee brown man” often appears in Scottish ballads and fairy tales; compare with Old Norse svartálfar, the dark elves of the Edda.]

MERIAM RAOUF 42

--They are downstairs, and they are yelling, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere in the entire room that makes any sense. There’s the distinct smell of shampoo, and I think maybe she will throw a plate, and I wonder what her name was before Mom. I think about that time our brother kicked the wall after he lost that video game and never got to beat Bowser. Our parents bought him a new wall and told him that Santa forgives little boys sometimes, even though we are Muslims and we don’t go to mosque, or synagogue, or church. I can hear their voices through the wall the way I’ve heard them before, the way I hear them now, and the way I will hear them forever. Your room is a lighter blue than it was a few years ago, and you told Mom to paint it whatever color she pleased, but just not to move, not to reorganize, not to rifle through your things. I sit on your bed waiting for you to look up, waiting for the family dinner, waiting for the doctor in the lobby. I want to talk to you about them but you are over it, gainfully unamused, painfully unemployed. You talk to me about your friend Greg who named his cat Greg, and how he hides under things, between mattresses. I remember long hours just sitting with you on those blue couches that were cold and reading you game cheats from that dorky white binder. Those couches were cold until I was sitting there for a long time, next to you, level after level. There was scary music, and we were both scared, and we wanted you to beat the demon. I don’t say anything because I don’t want to mess anything up. I’m a vegetarian turned vegan turned woman who doesn’t look anyone in the eye.

I remember that age and how it was a time when I looked down because Rose takes her clothes off in Titanic. I remember being scared of the female body and thinking I was too young for this. I remember how they got in that car together and sweated together, and I remember wanting that warmth but not knowing what it was. “I’ll never let go, Jack,” she says, her hand all cold. I remember baking, not wanting Mom to tell me what to do, and reading “100 strokes” on the box, next to where it said, “Betty Crocker knows.” I remember how I used to say, “Betty Crocker’s nose,” and she would laugh because she loves me. I’m stirring; I imagine I’m rowing like I did when we went on that whitewater rafting trip, and I saw Mom laugh and smile, and we did not use plates. I stir the batter and imagine I am rowing a boat in a chocolate river. Row, the box says. I comply, and I think about how hurt Mom was that I never introduced her to my boyfriend, and how hurt he was that he could never know my family, and how I never wanted to glue two parts of myself together. Next to all this, there’s an ugly tissue paper collage I made Dad in the fifth grade. He tells me that he loves it, and I don’t have time to believe him. I am not old enough or young enough or smart enough to want to do anything except smash color together with paint. Row. I remember how hard it was to grind together, my whole body mixing brownie batter. Rose floats there on this old wooden door for an indefinite amount of time, holding onto Leo DiCaprio before he gets all famous, before he gets all dead and makes his debut. It lasts a really long time, until eventually she is bored, and everything smells like baked goods, and half the theater has emptied out. No one is holding their breath, and they think maybe Jack will float there, half-dead forever. I ask you if Dad’s really gonna move out, and you hug me, and we cry, and we feel like little kids again.

ap·er·ture ||apƏr| CH Ər| noun chiefly technical an opening, hole or gap : the bell ropes passed through apertures in the ceiling. · a space through which light passes in an optical or photographic instrument, esp. the variable opening by which light enters a camera.

--We sort of just sat there on his bed and watched the flame burn out on the table across from us, not thinking that it might hurt us, unaware of the small pause, the small surplus, the small dividend. In France, in the UK, in

MERIAM RAOUF

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin apertura, from apert- ‘opened,’ from aperire ‘to open.’

MERIAM RAOUF 44

the domain of all things fire-safe, flaming shots are taken through a straw, with precaution, before the O-shaped scar, before the dumb, before the drunkenness. We are the smoking baristas, the pregnant winos, the honest liars promising to operate heavy machinery. I ask him for a cigarette, for a favor, for a sobering truth so I can keep a straight face, and he says the Holocaust, he says dead kittens, he says a holocaust of dead kittens, but I laugh and I want to kiss him, I want to punch him, I want to ignore him. In that moment, between safety and mediocrity, there was a silence, and you could have heard someone tell us to use a comma, or a period, or a question mark, but we weren’t listening, and we were dancing around a fire, with more, and more, and more variables. I knew the next day that I would have to tell you and that it wouldn’t really taste good coming out of my mouth, like an old Scotch, or a TV dinner, and everything would smell like Bacon. I didn’t think to be nice when we met because you are pretty and a girl and athletic. Now, I remembered the warm blackness that came out of his throat and the barrage of questions that followed me around, like it was waiting for me in front of the elevators. I remember wearing clothing and how everything felt like Velcro and Polaroid cameras, permanent, and dangerous, and temporary. In a few minutes, in a few hours, in a few outfit changes, you will be sitting on my couch, and you will be asking me why I did it, who I am, and what are my intentions with your daughter. In a moment, in a yawn, in a nap, my refrigerator sounds like it’s about to implode, and you call me, and you’re crying, and I kick him out of my room in a rush with no dinner, no explanation, no kiss. You want to talk, and you want to cry, and I keep looking at how your knee is under a layer of denim. I wonder if you have any bug bites, and if my dad’s fax machine is finally working, because I remember that the pound sign used to stick downward when it got pushed, never coming back up, never able, never recuperating. I hear the music from that CD that I bought in one of those department stores in the seventh grade. I am nervously rubbing my hand, and it feels waxy like that big yellow candle I stole from a girl named Jenny because I was jealous. You’re crying, and I’m crying, and no one is filling out paperwork or tax forms or admission letters. You’re inching away from me on the green material of my couch, and you sound like a cartoon I used to love. You ask me never to see him again, and I’m pouring out sensitive, pouring out genuine, pouring out deceitful onto the street outside that concert that I went to when I got too drunk. I give you this big camera, and I tell you to take whatever picture you want and that it doesn’t matter what bagel you get me. You have shiny black hair, and after this conversation with you, I am invisible. I learn that you are not going to know me, and that I will never get to kiss him again because I need to feel honest, because I still

feel bad about the lamp, about the fixture, beneath the fabric. I think about his lip and how little kids push at the water fountain and about the idea of demanding a refund. I think about his burnt palm, with the scar in the shape of a Q , a line, and a circle, and about how black holes suck something into them, and then thrust them back out, ignoring the limitations, the tightness, the breaths between laughter and pulling. I take one last look at him, and then I never really know him after that because everything changes. I never do see you again, but sometimes I think about puffy green eye shadow and how my dog is afraid of vacuums. You are young, and he doesn’t really matter, but a year later when another girl is crying, something inside me has turned off, and all I can think about are Belgian waffle recipes and the inventor of the pacemaker. A year later, when I am somewhere else, with a different man’s hands in my brain, I will not think about treading lightly.

lev·er | levƏr;

| | lēvƏr| noun a rigid bar resting on a pivot, used to help move a heavy or firmly fixed load with one end when pressure is applied to the other. · a projecting arm or handle that is moved to operate a mechanism : she pulled a lever at the base of the cage. · figurative a means of exerting pressure on someone to act in a particular way : rich countries increasingly use foreign aid as a lever to promote political pluralism.

--I am not sure about many things or theorems or constitutions or declarations of independence, of slavery, of bankruptcy. I remember that song from the 80s and it sort of bounces around in my head whenever I’m in the shower, and sometimes it falls out when I clean the metal part of my ear that Mom hates. I think about her arms and your five o’clock shadow that comes at three, four, and five a.m. when you are still not home. Your eyes get all big, and you ask me what effect everything has had on me, and I picture oranges from Florida, and California, and Tropicana. I think about old expressions like loony bin, and there seems to be some kind of wind approaching, a lot like there was in that storm back in 2003, 2004, or 2005 when the snow was too heavy and the patio collapsed off the side

MERIAM RAOUF

verb [ trans. ] lift or move with a lever : she levered a lid off the pot with a screwdriver. · move (someone or something) with a concerted physical effort : she levered herself up against the pillows. · [ intrans. ] use a lever : the men got hold of the coffin and levered at it with crowbars.

MERIAM RAOUF 46

of our house. As I’m saying the words “I don’t know,” I can feel our table be lifted off the ground by a balloon getting larger and larger underneath, the cups sliding onto the floor, smashing. When this happens I can smell coffee in the air like waking up every day last year, not wanting to move all day while my roommate did her organic chemistry homework. There are familiar molecule diagrams fizzing out of my brain, out of my neurons like soda. Soon carbon escapes leaving a flat truth that no one wants to drink. I pick up every wedding invitation I’ve ever received, and all I can think about are the written-out numbers and how you’ve raised two men who understand the importance of the unimportance of centerpieces. You may never really understand, and you may have a suitcase of regret attached to your ankles, but I eat bacon and I never feel bad about it. I think about your calligraphy pens and how my children will know nothing about the 20th century and its loud neon fax machine handshakes. I think about your twenty-first birthday, your twenty-first bill, and your twentyfirst smile. My mother snarls whenever she thinks about your home in Brooklyn, and the sound the bugs made in an apartment that smelled like garlic and cheap thrill. You put your hand down on the table and ask me why I’m looking elsewhere, and I tell you I’m tired, but I’m really thinking about the man who invented Velcro by accident, picking stubborn pieces of cotton off his corduroys, or maybe denim, or just slacks. I take a drink of water, and my mother is a depressed woman with ulcers that stop her from walking, from going, from doing, from dancing. I think about backwash and the outfit that Jasmine wears in the last scene of Aladdin, when she’s screaming, trapped in a timepiece, in a wristwatch, in an hourglass. I tell you that I love the way a bat’s skeleton looks, and you tell me that you think Mom needs some help with certain things. I think about house sales and salsa dancing and other things she loves. I think about the word “Mom” and how it is a word and a name and doesn’t sound like “mother.” There aren’t many pigeons that get much respect, there aren’t many writers who make money, there aren’t many doctors with families. There are many fewer heavy smokers than in the 60s, and I am up late researching the liver and being amazed at its determination, motivation, like a cat on a rope, on a motivational poster from the fourth grade: hang in there. I remember my pet mealworm that I accidentally stepped on, my iguana I forgot to feed, and my birds that died of old age. I think about limes and scurvy and Steve Urkel and bite into my grilled cheese. Something beeps and I tell you I can’t listen to any of this but you tell me anyway and the waitress whose name is Robin or Emily or Em asks if we’re “still working on this.” You nod your head, and I can hear the tells, the inkwells, and the water tastes metallic, tastes tap, tastes like a problem that only a high-class person could afford. After you leave, I realize that I

will likely make half of your money, and I’m breathing into a paper bag, a parachute, a novel for a palm-on-my-back half an hour. I remember the bees’ nest and fiscal responsibility and the feeling of jumping in a pool stoned. I think about your regrets and the colleges that my brothers, your sons, those men, didn’t go to, and the drugs they never tried, paths they never took. You are a man full of regrets, full of change, full of possibility, and you ask me who I think you are, and if I think you are controlling. I say no, but that you are a man who has never known sarcasm, and I take three, two, one more gulp of my water. I am not thirsty but you will always need me to take care of you, and I will always be awake at four a.m, hey Em, ahem. I will look at you, and you will know that I mean what I say when I point to the part of your ear that makes me the most nauseous. You will give me one of those heavy blinks, and I will remember the smell of your mother’s house always, and she will never have to know a man who wears a Bluetooth in a family photo.

state |stāt|

--I’ve seen your old bedroom, your old dust, and your aged children. I walked into your apartment in Egypt where you raised my father, with vintage paisley and velvet elegance. I think about Buddhist warnings against a doom of duality, of dichotomy, of duplicity, between sacred things, and secular things, and secret things, breaking neatly in two, with lava furious in between. I think about your orange, paneled kitchen, your brown glassware, and how you are always whispering into my ear. I think about the 70s and how you probably didn’t have a typewriter or a lover or a boyfriend. There are suspenders, there are bed sheets, there are old mattresses, and there is no cued laughter. You are not a lady who curses

MERIAM RAOUF

noun 1 the particular condition that someone or something is in at a specific time : the state of the company’s finances | we’re worried about her state of mind. · a physical condition as regards internal or molecular form or structure : water in a liquid state. · [in sing.] (a state) informal an agitated or anxious condition : don’t get into a state. · [in sing.] informal a dirty or untidy condition : look at the state of you—what a mess! · Physics short for QUANTUM STATE . 2 a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government : the state of Israel. · an organized political community or area forming part of a federal republic : the German state of Bavaria. water in a liquid state. · (the States) informal term for UNITED STATES .

MERIAM RAOUF 48

or insults or forgets unbrushed hair. You don’t know anything about the 1980s or the type of people who ski. There’s a bruise on my leg from sitting in front of my computer with my legs up, the way my dad yells about, watching shows with a brand of humor so far from your aesthetic. I think about the sound of feet shuffling and a Me who hums constantly and refuses to focus. I wonder how much of you I have made up, or constructed, and I think about stem cell research and Kit Kat bars. I think about how my dad says “luminous” with a long eu sound, like a self-conscious Stan, or a Jeff, thinking about their nametag handwriting. I think about how you have to rip off a piece of yourself to reproduce asexually or force something through yourself to reproduce sexually. I think about Mormons and how they have a glass door atrium on that one show I watched a few episodes of, in color with polygamy, and controversy, played by actors, put forth by Hollywood social politics. You were a lady whose never read books about being a lady, who folds and washes and dry-cleans. I’ve seen the dust in your apartment, and my mother has turned the room from a silly, sad photo album, to a twobedroom shrapnel scene. You would be happy to hear that I am pretty, and I write, and I am passionate, and that your t-eu-bedroom is a much cleaner place to live, to breathe, to look at. I don’t feel I need to lie to you, to promise someone that isn’t real. You know who I am, because you’re dead, and your soul is sweet like peaches and overused metaphors. You’re dead, and you’re not Bruce Willis, you’re not Uma’s Bill to pay, you’re not working for Steve Zissou. You’re nothing that has ever been expressed, written about, or satirized by Tina Fey, Amy Sedaris, or anyone seeking endorsement. You would nod when I say that I am a writer, or that I unplan and unwind and unspool. I think about law school and smoking weed and drinking too much. I look at the concrete, my hungover breakfast just a re-run on the floor, and remember that episode of The Simpsons where they go to a cardboard box factory. You are overwritten as an archetype, but under-expressed as a person. Your apartment smells like you, and I wonder if you would have remembered your lines when my parents were fighting, throwing, building on top of me. My mother has a silly love, always telling me to wear a coat, to fill out the right forms, and fearing nose piercings as a cultural, narcotic, American rebellion. I think about how you seem like you’d be like my aunt, drinking, intellectual, rebellious but different, with gloves, politeness, grace. You are not related to my aunt, but her mother fucked the same man, so there is saliva, there is blood, and there are gooey, Jell-O-making, emotional associations. I think about how I used to read aloud and about Anne Hathaway becoming a princess and how I won’t be a Buddhist

because I love to adore, to abuse material things. I want to tell you that I’ve always wanted to be a dog, and I want you to laugh at me like you know, smiling, with your legs on the floor, crossed at the ankles. You don’t speak my language, you don’t live on my plane, on my floor, on my étage. You are un-American, you are an inanimate eminence, you are an immaterial immigrant, and your son has never stopped missing you. You have nodded at all the right times and been at all the right soccer games. You have smiled, you have curtsied, and I could hear you, rumbling back there in the walls, long after the curtain closed.

--The phrases of little girls playing jump rope are very small and will fit in any carry-on as long as you put them in plastic containers, in a plastic bag, and zip everything shut. You can put these phrases in these decorative boxes, or you can throw them out and just get potpourri or throw pillows or anything lace really, but eventually everyone’s going to know a woman lives there. She’ll leave her watch on the windowsill when she does the dishes after you cook dinner together, and people will know she was there, and nothing except the smell of perfume is going to make you feel like you should go anywhere. It will all be very cliché, but you will love her, and you will remain friends your whole lives. You think about how I once told you that she was a catch, and that you should never let her get away, and how you and your girlfriend both made this patient omelet for me a few years ago. Our grandfather says quietly, “You have to crack an egg to make an omelet, but you have to crack your back to make a baby.” I don’t know what that means but I hate our grandfather for how he raised his sons and hit his daughter and rarely spoke. When you told me to lie about the watch, I told you I would and thought about parachuting and scuba diving and flying in airplanes and all the things that require a suspension of belief. I think about vertebrae and how you hurt your back when you were seventeen and how you barely noticed the pain until something sharp clicked, and now you have a special desk chair and an expensive comfy bed that pushes in and notices when you get up, when you move, when you flinch. Dad takes a bite out of a peach, and his mustache curves around the fruit, and it reminds me of that time I found a dime bag in your room, and you told me it was from your friend’s coat, and I cried, and I believed you.

MERIAM RAOUF

a condition in which part of an organ is displaced and protrudes through the wall of the cavity containing it (often involving the intestine at a weak point in the abdominal wall).

Mom drives up to your college and makes sure you are not a stripper, and not on cocaine and not whatever else immigrants think can go wrong with a child. You come home, you knock on the door, and you are bearded, and I love you. I hug you so hard because I miss making fun of everything, and I miss the way you always stand up straight.You put your hand on my head, and I wonder if you love me and if we went to high school, whether we could really be friends. I think about the times when I ask you what you’re doing, and you don’t respond right away. Mom and Dad wince whenever you are flipping off the diving board, and they wonder about how I am doing all of the time. I tell them I am doing well, and when they ask, repeated repeated repeated what my insurance coverage is, I can no longer hide. I have been hoping they would not cancel the insurance so that next year, I can go see a therapist with black hair named Drida or Deirdre or Bill. I told you that I was hurt, and that I had done it to myself, and you’re the only one I could tell that it happened, and you stood up straight, you stayed in tow the way I needed. You did not panic like a drunk hamster might, you kept on pedaling on the warm hill. Right now I am looking at your big brown eyes, and you are eating a meal with me, and your voice sounds like whiskey. I tell you I need you because I think girls are mean, and I need to know that I am golden inside, the way you see me, a girl of googly-eyed valentines that come two weeks late, and a girl of patient egg omelets. I pour the story to you, and you say it’s okay because you like listening better, and everything smells like hangover ziti. I don’t know where I am, and my universe feels like a hallway of girls who are mean and have shiny hair. You tell me, nearly crying, that you are always singing my praises, in high school, in hamster cages, and fearlessly in irrelevance.

MERIAM RAOUF 50

Ambulance Driver’s Song D A LTO N L A B A R G E

O woe to the flashes, the red lights that paint the back ways I’ve sped, the litter of country roads like slaughterhouses, cruising past forgotten seats of machinery accidents; high on defibrillator juices and comatose from the torsional paces of ventilators. I’ve held a breath till foam and counted the stammer, pulses like steps to the beating winds who nurse an exodus of injured cows from town. Long gone are whole limbs into turbines; I wonder where you keep the collection. A conference of skulls on the directors’ desk that smile and say they don’t know you. Woe to the winds bottled up, woe your needle fear and osmotic coil thru the catheter and of all the faces, belly up, none of which have been the curl of your survival. My yowl, electric, searches you through the gangrene night a directive to show yourself. Are you the fruit of this next week’s firework mishap? O woe be the mastication of trailers you never lived in. O the graveyard shift and lo, the chagrin wherein so many tombstones are turned over for you. My call when bending its throat won’t be heard but wept. It pronounces your name with the jackal’s voice and summons from the barn fire another empty stretcher.

The Night After Mar io Richards For got Who He Was, Who His Father Was, That His Mother, Before She Died, Had Always Told Him to Stay Off the Kitchen Table CHARLINE TETIYEVSKY

He’s convinced: the staccato whine that manifests itself in Mario’s lower bowels after he fucks on Momma’s old kitchen table is just another way for his body to remind itself he loves her. What’s the point in memory if it isn’t visceral? Girl’s not fazed by flatulence; she’s smelled worse and she’s got things to smoke and cutlery to steal and Mario just lets her because whose house is this anyway? He’s not sure why he had the keys or why he knew to tell the cab driver to come here, he’d never seen the place before, he swears on his mother’s grave because somewhere, deep down in the recesses of his reptilian brain, the one thing he knows is that she’s dead. Crackwhore is impressed by the granite countertops. She says it as she crosses her scabbed legs over one another. There’s no pictures on the walls ‘cause Mario’s father doesn’t like having to look at the wife he’s lost. He’s in Boca now, Mario’s father, looking at nothing but crushed pebbles and white polka dot bikinis on blue varicose asses, he’s making passes at no one and getting drunk off of margaritas that are too strong on the salty rim. He considers white polka dots and uses grief as an excuse when the women notice him starting to blush. Under some different conditions, salt might be a good opening line for approaching the bartender. The suntan lotion is expired but he doesn’t read labels, just squeezes a thick line onto his arms and rubs and doesn’t question the sting on his skin. Nothing like a slick white coat to get the girls all hot and bothered, reminds them and Mario’s father of things his flowery shorts can’t contain. Maybe Mario’s mother is somewhere on the coast, too, if heaven is covered in resorts and adult diapers discarded hastily in the heat of passion. Here, in Mario’s father’s house, he has no need for a father. He’s got all the things he needs—he’s got his wallet and the keys to this place, he’s 52

got plans to pull the damask window treatments off their rods. He’s got bananas with brown spots and abandoned plans for baking and somewhere behind the television there is a mechanism that tells the sprinkler when to run.

Charline Tetiyevsky

Crackwhore lights up and Mario doesn’t care, when the rocks sparkle and explode they make her look like momma Mary. He’s got a bottle of Patrón and a kitchen with dimmable lights, a box of Trojans that grip him right and he’s so caught up in not tearing the latex that he can’t hear Crackwhore tell him she can practically see the dead weight of mourning calcifying on his tongue.

Dujla Wal Furat MAURICE DEC AUL

I * My auntie said to me become a doctor. I was 10 I said no auntie I’m too afraid to see someone’s blood She said become a lawyer your mother works hard go make money buy your mother a house I’m joining the military “great be a doctor become a lawyer in the military remember Yale baby” No you don’t understand what I mean I said I said I mean to join the infantry she never raised an eye just always knew I would become a doctor a lawyer she kissed me and gave me money 54

like always I was like her and my uncle’s first son * Operation Desert Shield turns into a wild storm over Iraq and Kuwait I watched in wonder on TV and I looked at the new dead each day in the daily news paper I exchanged desert storm cards with other boys Yo Taywan gimme that Stormin Norman for this Ah 64 Apache I exploded with delight as I watched on TV when Norman marched with his soldiers up the canyon reserved for the Giants the Yankees

As Tornadoes dived to earth at the beginning on the news someone stood chanting no blood for oil no war no war what war? There’s nothing to see here I don’t see war just fast jets

Maurice Decaul

and images of a Marine cutting loose with a fifty atop a humvee in Khafji and later the same victorious Norman pointing to a car recorded on the gun camera right before hell’s fires consumed the luckiest man in Iraq Norman nodded with a wink ha ha again we all fell for the joke ha ha ha Norman that’s a good one brother bloodless except for anyone below a Strike Eagle on station technology accuracy sterile *

Maurice Decaul 56

Auntie auntie gonna join the Marines did you hear how they fought in Khafji? auntie gonna join the Marine infantry they’re the best trained

so you shouldn’t worry when I get over to war I know I’ll come home she kissed me okay okay but don’t forget we talked about Yale a hug a kiss I only want what’s best my love trust me honey strive for more than I can give you II

In the barracks a Marine lay dying fluid draining from his ears He was warm eyes motionless training was supposed to prepare us when in doubt fall back to your training all the training was not enough to edit the spectacle of him dying from memory eyes

Maurice Decaul

black before the sun crossed the Atlantic *

Maurice Decaul 58

Standing in front of Ba’ath party headquarters we waited for the ever-present white & orange taxis to dissipate today we only need answers from drivers of white sedans I commanded a driver Show me your ID Where do you live? This war is still young & rumors persist about men who look like these men “Don’t take chances be professional be polite kill anyone you have to” We’re reminded “you’re not conquerors you’re here to assist these people’’ I think, assist these people as I searched the driver’s home for weapons I imagine are under his bed or in his closet his wife looks on I emptied their underwear drawer her eyes are blue like the base of a glacier I can only guess what she must’ve been thinking I was thinking—his guns

are buried outside — ‫لقو الحقيقة‬ eight years later I lay in bed with my woman She has never asked about war

I had a premonition as the minibus revved up I watched the men hammer their chests & thought the trigger-pull of an M16 is seven pounds rest the hooked metal between the first & second joint of your index finger depress the mechanism reaches the point of limited options beyond stares one of death’s faces dust & sand lead & green phosphorescence bang the driver’s foot enforces its will on the accelerator there’s no more pounding instead crushing revving revving revving my own heavy breathing the snap of a fresh magazine being inserted Suicide bombers? Shia, those men

Maurice Decaul

are Shia they’re praying look slow down your breathing sip some water don’t get lost in this war *

Maurice Decaul 60

Carried the machine gun up a ladder put down the tripod to set the desert afire while in the distance the pipeline burns off the land’s waning health Yeah, it really is like in the movies MI C K EY MO U SE Mickey Mouse Mickey Mouse Mickey Mouse Mickey Mouse MI C K EY MO U SE someone called battle stations someone else is laughing Someone’s called a ceasefire hope no one was in the white home cease fucking firing did you hit the men scrambling to the river take a patrol set an ambush this is totally snafu this is so fucking fubar too tired full moon see the world in green

American boys killing time where’s the sat phone I need to call home lie to someone say mom, everything’s wonderful

There would’ve been rioting the Brits fucked up the boy they killed was too young. It didn’t matter the circumstance I never anticipated the weight of regret being so heavy unloading his casket from within the cargo bay of a Chinook is the closest most of us would come to facing wars most horrible metaphors except for the time a mother walked up with her baby now one black night instead of sleep we crowd the belly of the Chinook unstrap its breathless cargo watch as tracers mingle with stars I try to not let myself drift too far. Seven years & I’m still figuring out how to make my way back

Maurice Decaul

III *

Maurice Decaul 62

Can’t sleep without you Olivia Damn girl you’re so exquisite gonna tape you inside my helmet gonna trade you to that fedayeen kid for a coke gonna love you up before setting your likeness a cinder burst my lips can’t stand it came home and walked with too big a swag damn straight gonna fight with anyone who comes round love me tell me whose faces are burning through my walls? with closed eyes teeth coming round each night insomnia Olivia come back to me Olivia put my restive conscience to sleep

Olivia where are you Olivia? Olivia? Olivia? * Woke again rockets crashing doctors dare darkness. Dance an internal soliloquy shape shifters shuffle static sterility one two three traumatic brain injury automatic amputations & first kisses linger Stone bronze stone steel stone bronze Mermaids walk Black-hawks cruise Je tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;adore Je tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;adore ou est ce que la papillon?

From here, I can see the musicians in Dodge through a window packing their instruments a violin, a trombone one still plays his saxophone

Maurice Decaul

Maurice Decaul 64

Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dancing and I watch him my headphones play Metallicaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Orion I tap along keeping cadence as the music begins to crescendo, my mind wanders back to Iraq, I taste dust on my tongue and now my brain plays a game with me the weight returns to my shoulders pressing down the interceptor with both Sappi plates twelve magazines 360 dove-tail rounds every fifth a tracer a thousand more in a bandoleer. In my palm the Beretta rests my hands tighten to fists my thumb works the ambidextrous safety my headphones croon sanitarium reminding me where my thoughts often lead The drum beats signal diminuendo I see him still making love to his saxophone *

Maurice Decaul

I lay like a Wehrmacht soldier digging my toes into sandstone measuring elevation imagining the cacophony of MG42s rattling trying to curtail the inevitable & my excitement of being a tourist at Dog Red escapes my diaphragm as a groan beneath me school children congregate & examine the muzzle break of an 88 now too worn-out to drive them back deflated, I scooted to the edge of the casement peering onto a beach that carried on to eternity

Three River s M A L C O L M C U L L E TO N The Eastern River tumbles from highland creeks, stretches uniform across the low hills and thirsty farm villages; it is a muddy band that caroms gently against banks, bridges, and abutments, tracing a muddy band to the sea. The river twists across an acute bend, strengthened by the drainage of high coastal marshes; it begins to widen, to deepen, to carry large fish, dolphins even, porpoises. The river gropes to find itself against vast expanses of red cedar and sandy soil, eventually evaporating into a short, rounded bay. It exhales dirt and fishes, and inhales salt-brine from the pagan sea. But elsewhere, spilling across a broad arc, forming in slow magnificence from the melt of ancient glaciers, the Western River rumbles to life. * From the ledge of the patio, a great wilderness spread forth; an eroded terrain of mud and tufts of grass. Here I had foraged daily in springs and summers, surveying the bladed forest that sloped gently down towards the swingset, trowling into the earth for roots or jagged rocks: the decaying bones of dinosaurs. Now, I saw a deep trench cut out through the tamable east edge of the jungle: this year, there would be a river. “You can’t dig out that way,” I told Dylan Roper, who lingered always around the back spigot of our house. “Mom doesn’t want the river going too close to the side garden. She also doesn’t want it getting underneath the Bethmans’ new driveway. Also, we need it to empty into the Marsh of Doom.” Dylan was a year younger than me, dumb and stubborn, and usually a sore loser. Still, he was my only friend who lived in the neighborhood. “Fine,” he said, “be that way.” He growled and started beating a root with his trowel while I descended from the patio to dig into the soft dirt bordering the trunk of an ancient yellow sycamore. It was here that I would carve out the ocean: just downstream from the perceived Dead Man Falls, a place where the quick-moving rapids would dissipate, forming rogue currents that would swill back in on each other, stalling, whirlpooling, or standing still. “The Ocean will be a great danger,” I predicted. “It will trap all of your boats.” “Not when I dig an escape channel,” said Dylan, “which I’m doing.” “You can’t escape The Ocean,” I warned him. “It is the Charybdis of the Sea.” I was rather well-read for fourth grade. Sometimes, it seemed

Malcolm Culleton

that Dylan was the only person who could stand this. * The Western River is older than mountains. Its basin is Mesozoic; a jagged limestone sheet, it has cracked under the weight of glaciers, shifted with tectonic plates, has shattered, burst, eroded, and formed again. It once was wider even than it is now, a broad spill with smooth receding shores, a place where mammoths came to drink. It has shuddered in the ash of meteors, surged with a primal tidal pull; in eons, it has carved a stubborn cleft into the fabric of the earth. And this is how men found it: a lurching spine, a wide steel hulk of water, fogged, splayed across a base of grassland and limestone—inhabiting a broad, rolling gorge and drifting to the sea; shallow, but treacherous. Floodwaters spilling into nearby oxbow basins, depressions sagging as the glacial seaway erodes the earth. This water comes from a thousand places; no one knows how many streams flow into the Western River. On clear days—occasionally—you can squint out across it to the other bank. * On warm days the duty teacher at recess would turn on the hose and let us play “stream,” but none of the other kids knew the potential of rivers. The channel staggered generally downhill: was shallow, sandy, and often frayed; some filled it with sticks or playground woodchips, dammed it dumbly with arrays of small rocks, unleashed “mother lodes” that would tumble and dissipate, trickling uselessly in all directions towards the second-grade woods. As usual, I stood aloof from them, watched from the tree house as Gil Jacobs tried to coax the water into a poorly constructed tunnel, sniggered at Katie Scott and Paige McCormick when the dumb girls slipped and got their butts wet. “I have no working knowledge of streams,” I would tell Dylan later, standing tall over the grassblade forest of our lawn, observing his work as he stooped to carve out a channel with my mother’s pilfered trowel. “I consider them only from above.” * The Eastern River once teemed with life: shad, trout, crayfish, turtles, otters, freshwater crabs. There were thousands more even, invertebrate colonists, trilobites, barnacles and lichen older than civilization. The mountains were a primal sanctuary, the low marshes teemed with crickets, fowl, and bullfrogs, newts crawled out from beneath every rock. The Eastern River was once a vital artery, mother stream to the pulsing blood of a living earth. But you would not recognize this now. The first thing that explorers did with the Eastern River was to determine exactly how far up they could dredge it, and craned barges glided up and down from the new capital, cutting deep furrows into the

Malcolm Culleton 68

murky soil. Canals were laid, towpaths trampled, sawmills, steel mills, shipyards, lock dams, and double-tressed bridges—all of these emerged beside the deepened channel. With the salt-brine came larger and larger ships; steamboats, tankers, ferries, even submarines. The men tried to dig a canal across the flatlands, through the dairy farms and marshes and sandy woods to connect with the Western River, but the project was delayed by industrial accidents. Eventually, it was made obsolete by the railways. The story of the Western River is different: it empties into a long, twisting, brackish bay which lays out across two hundred miles of dunes and marshes, cutting jagged inlets, its widening mouth consuming all. This was all part of the Western River, but was later eroded by ice ages, coastal storms, the draining of marshes and underground aquifers. The first settlers here found the inlets amenable—easily forded, sheltered, teeming with crayfish and crabs. It is on these that they constructed their cities, tilled the soil, cut lumber, and constructed aqueducts. Only a few days of surveying revealed the Western River itself to be unnavigable. To this day, they remain settled in low estuarial ports; it is rare that any venture inland along the Western River. * Dylan’s first boat—made of two slanted two-pieces and one four-piece, was called the SpeedBolt, and although it got stuck on half a dozen different roots during its maiden voyage it still beat out the Scott Rolen by almost ten seconds. “My boat’s a winner!” He proclaimed. “Well it was built with my Legos.” The Ocean had meant the death of the Scott Rolen, which had veered off sideways almost immediately, doomed to chase its stern in a muddy, slow-moving whirlpool. “Besides, you would’ve been stuck forever if not for that five second root rule that I proposed.” “Hah! Your dumb ocean backfired on you. Your stupid Scott Rolen boat will never win, just like your stupid Phillies.” “Well I’m making a new rule. No three piece boats. You have to have at least four Legos on there now.” “Why, just because my boat won? Why don’t you just make a new boat?” As much as Dylan tended to lack insight, he had a point here. The next boat I made had just three pieces: two triple flats and a two box for flotation. I named it after something I had seen on a class trip to the Canal Museum: Lockdam. * The Eastern River Commission was created to address civil and environmental issues all along the river’s 500 mile watershed. The

Malcolm Culleton

Commission has had to deal with a huge variety of concerns: a rising water table, high shipping costs for lumber, possible risks of dumping and steel mill runoff, safety of water purification, the Capital Aqueduct system, the draining of marshes caused by high-end developers, and the accidental introduction of alien species of carnivorous and insatiable fish. In the North, where the river wraps its way around the jagged mountains, new bridges must pass Commission inspection to ensure that they will not crumble during landslides or crack during harsh winters or sway off their spans in times of heavy wind. Trends of heavy flooding began on the Eastern River only fifty years after the arrival of the first settlers, and now levees have been fortified across the lower basin. In order to acquire the proper land resources for this project, the Commission was forced to displace a number of recently settled families, compensating them for the decreased value of their floodravished farms. One of these displaced families, named Gray, wandered inland towards new and unsettled territory—and were blocked abruptly on the broad bank of the steely Western River. They established Gray’s Ferry, the first such crossing to the west, pioneering a thin, simple model of raft that could float over the shallow snags and endless sinkholes that scattered across the limestone riverbed. The ferry is still there, and there is a town of Gray’s Ferry, numbering a few thousand residents, and a corresponding smaller village at the landing on the opposite bank. Gray’s flat-bottom raft is still operated, though few cross the Western River. * Before long, Dylan and I (well, mostly me) had the entire stream codified: each bend was named, each channel formally dredged, each island complete with its own mythology. Though the starting pool, cut with help from the pressure of the hose, was deep, the lowland portion of the stream—below the ocean—was flat and grassy, requiring constant maintenance. With rocks, sticks, and hard mud, we packed its banks tight, locking in enough water to ensure safe passage. From the top, the water twisted furiously towards this precarious marsh; squinting, I traced in my head a map of civilization, outlining the flat and stable places where great cities would rise. There were also new regulations, painstakingly argued between us, occasionally to the verge of tears. In addition to the five-second root rule, there was also a whirlpool rule whereby one could intervene after ten seconds. Single boats had been replaced with entire fleets—mine consisting of the Lockdam, the Argonaut, the Ictheosaur, and the newly-constructed Curt Schilling. Some boats were designed to squirm through roots and tumble swiftly in rapids, while others had extra floatation to get through oceans

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and deeper water. These were the customs of our two-man enterprise when Jarrett, my brother, decided he wanted in. “Have you guys thought about doing races in several laps?” Jarrett asked. He was two years older than me and more practical; I didn’t like that he was making suggestions. “What do you mean?” asked Dylan. “Like when your boat passes into the finishing marsh, you pull it out and run it back up to the top.” “That sounds impractical,” I said. “Are you kidding me, Chad? The river’s only like 25 feet long.” “Yeah,” said Dylan, “and you’d have to run fast to maintain your lead.” “Unfair, you’re faster than me.” “Well just build better boats then, Chad.” “Yeah,” Jarrett said, “build better boats, Chad. So who wants to race my first boat? I call it the U.S.S. Buttwipe.” Seeing I had been outvoted, I spat into the stewing puddle of the ocean and with muddy fingers pulled the Curt Schilling from my windowsill cache. “Three laps for this one,” Jarrett said. “Loser has to pick all the Legos out of the mud.” * After many years, the Eastern Engineers, along with their counterparts from the southern reaches of the Western River Bay, imposed their highways; to the north and from the east, with iron, cement and steel they attacked the great schism of the Western River. They built reservoirs, hydroelectric dams, highways zagging along cement cliffs, fisted in between the draining currents and the chain-link crests of new government levees. And yet even now they can go only so far—smokestacks straddle bends, looming factories to emptiness saluting the untamable stew of grey water. At Gray’s Ferry, there is now a bridge; the ferry carries tourist traffic only. Nearby, reservoirs dot treelines across the glacial ridges, pumping Western River water upward with mechanical pressure; pristine water of the Western River, to be purified and carried through an underground system of aqueducts—water to supply the clamoring folks of the Eastern Capital, on the Eastern River, where the water runs foamy yellow and spreads through the ship-channel disfigured, cast aside; gleaming with seeped-over floating rainbows. * Jarrett decided to dig a new channel, so I countered with a tunnel. I somehow bored enough space for water to push through the Upper Island, but there was a secret root hiding in there, and not all boats would emerge—some became victims to the Scylla of the Central Pass. But

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Jarrett’s boats never got stuck there. The stream was extended another five feet by consensus. A rulebook was established; generally my work, as I had become self-appointed recordkeeper. I also—somewhat privately—began to keep statistics on the old computer in our basement, using an outdated spreadsheet program. If I could not build the greatest boats, numbers would mean everything to me: The Curt Schilling (6/13/2000-7/5/2000). Wins: 32. Second place: 14. Lost: 11. Skill: ocean. Ictheosaur (6/7/2000-?). Wins: 14. Second place: 3. Lost: 52. Skill: rapids. The Argonaut (6/3/2000-6/25/2000). Wins: 8. Second place: 3. Lost: 14. Skill: floatation. The Scott Rolen (5/28/2000-5/28/2000). Wins: 0. Lost: 1. Skill: nothing. Even when I broke them down numerically, the patterns were not encouraging. I additionally kept a leader board and a list of stream-wide records. Most places on this list were held by boats of Dylan’s. “Marathons” were another one of Jarrett’s ideas. They were twelve lap races, and you were allowed to deploy all of the boats in your rotation. It was during one of these marathons that the Curt Schilling met its fate. “Dylan, your boat is behind!” “Well I ran here first, so I put in now.” “That’s not how it goes.” “It always was. You made that rule yourself.” “No, it was dumb Jarrett.” “Stop it—noooooooooo!” The boat flew from my hand and shattered against the flagstone where we rested the hose. I spend the rest of the afternoon searching through the wilderness of the backyard stream, the deep forest that rose in green blades, the thick alluvial mud, the distant, crumbling deserts of the Bethman’s driveway. One piece—a “oner”— would never return. As I constructed a substitute for the Curt Schilling, I pictured the tiny shard of plastic dug in somewhere, and soon the Legos in the bin felt like broken slabs of machinery, creaking noisily through my mud-caked fingers. “So where’s your dumb Schilling boat, Chad?” Asked Dylan. “Gone,” I replied, trying to look mystical. “It is now junk in the marshes. A dim graveyard to bubbling progress.” Soon I would learn new stories, read books I had never thought of before. For instance, I spent that very evening with the World Atlas that my parents kept inside the drawer of the coffee table. While the Phillies lost emphatically on Channel 57, I held the open book to my face, tracing

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my fingers along the bold blue threads of the earth’s great rivers. * When the first settlers snaked their ships up through the chaotic bay of the Western River, they beheld its bellowing mouth, saw it extended upwards into the empty rolling pastures, figured—by trigonometry—that at the horizon line the river was still at least two miles wide. This excited the sailors, and one boat was sent to chart the river, to journey as far as it could, to survey and tame the great Western River Wilderness. The men were excited by the prospects of the wide river. They thought they could find gold there, or zinc—thought it was not a river at all, but a natural canal, a brackish branch of some inland connecting sea. It could connect the oceans, they thought, this Western River; it could be the link that binds a fortune together, the keystone to an arch that spans the entire breadth of a blank blue world. They waved the surveyors off with great fanfare, feasted in halls where great geographers toasted optimistic speeches. Emboldened and hopeful, they built towers overlooking the river’s mouth, and waited. The towers have crumbled and fallen, replaced by smokestacks and skyscrapers. The geographers since turned to lawyers, congressmen, and engineers. They have girded the lower parts of the river in smoke and concrete. But still they are waiting.... The ship is yet to return, but they hold out that it will some day; the ship will return with riches from that great inland sea. * One day, Dylan, Jarrett, and I finally decided we were sick of our stream. It was August, but a chilly day—rain drizzled under bursting clouds, the symptoms of a dissipating hurricane that swirled somewhere beyond the coast. “You guys want to go down to the real stream?” Jarrett asked. “Eh...” “Come on, Chad.” “You mean,” said Dylan, “the Eastern River?” It took only half an hour to walk there, digging through the brambles and spiked overgrowth that spread backwards from the far end of the yard, which we had always assumed simply regressed into darkness. The river was still fairly narrow by our house, and was low in spite of the constant rain: a new development rose just out of view on the opposite bank. Pockets of water swilled amongst the thorns and sumac of the lumpy shore, creating small tide-pools formed from swirling yellow currents, tiny channels trickling over rocks in braided threads before pooling in front of a slimy log and slipping back into the dark hull of the mother stream. Excitedly, I followed the currents with my eyes, surveyed the deep pools

Malcolm Culleton

and numerous rapid channels: it was as if the river itself had built a course solely for our use. “Ictheosaur beats Bloodaxe,” I challenged Dylan, and with my head start I beat him in tramping through the brambles, kicking aside several flattened beer cans as I made my descent. With our hands quivering in the spitting rain, we dropped the boats into the grey pool. They sat there, the Ictheosaur and Bloodaxe, circling gently, failing to catch the current. “Alright, start down here at the rapids,” Dylan said, poking his boat with a stick until it reached the mouth of the pool. It tumbled down over the rocks before disappearing somewhere under the overhanging trunk of a tree. “Hmm,” said Jarrett, watching from the top of the bank. “I guess this is kinda stupid.” “Yea,” said Dylan. “I lost my boat.” I looked back down on my own feeble bunch of plastic as it bobbed uselessly in a river that was far too massive, collecting only a thin trail of whitish foam. I knew instinctively that we would not come back here. We would idle away the rest of the summer in the yard, manufacturing more features for our own river. After much moaning, Dylan would rebuild the Bloodaxe using almost the exact same pieces. Jarrett soon stopped caring altogether. And I would continue to read the Atlas, would even move on to encyclopedias, nature documentaries, and books of natural history. And when a heavy thunderstorm wiped out most of our work in the backyard wilderness, I resolved once again to study rivers only from above.

Infection TIAN BU

In the summer before fifth grade I was infected by a mysterious disease that began not long before my parents decided to move from Georgia to South Carolina. A worm crawled into an open vein on my leg while I was searching for goldfish in the woods. From then on I could walk through fire and draw silk out from my underarms. Every piece of wood I touched turned into soap. I could not eat sugar; a gumdrop made me go blind for an entire afternoon. One particularly hot day I climbed the ladder to the spirit world and wiped the flies off the faces of dead angels. And then what? My new classmates would ask. The Move changed everything forever, I would say. For three days afterward I lay on the cheap kitchen table in our new apartment, bleeding like a fish. And then what? The disease passed in a scarlet phlegm and I settled down. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the story, I would tell them when they formed an arc around me on the playground, beautiful kids with knives in their hands like tiny churches. To them, to you the sullen reader, hear me: the story is the disease; it drinks only from the thick water of the heart.

Year of the Pig TIAN BU

From the belly of the blessed pig I was born pink with tumor, fat with grief, unwrapped from between her intestines, her three stomachs, their lovely rot, from the cradle of the sliced halves of her buttocks, and covered with bloody jelly they pulled me out by the roots, nerves, hair still sweetly dripping with entrails, into the room, womb emptied, then the damp nervous doctor, the nervous nurse both in black coats drooped together by a wall looked for ropes, hooks, skins, found finally death in the heavy tits and sour treasures of my brilliant sow, who had held and endured that sick crystal, glittering clog wound inside her with small violent strings, the gem Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d sought as I sang climbing into her eternal eating jowls: the song of her I cannot name or love.

C O N T R I B U TO R S COLETTE MCINTYRE (BC ‘12) isn’t a ladies man, she’s a landmine. MINA SECKIN is a freshman at Columbia University. She’s originally from Brooklyn, New York. She loves incorporating images of food into her writing—even if she isn’t hungry or just ate. Donuts, she finds, are particularly fun to write about. HENRY RING wrote his first piece from the point of view of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He likes to think that, somehow, there’s a little bit of that story in everything he’s written since. ANDY NICOLE BOWERS is a junior at Columbia College. Her poems have appeared in The Hill (Cambridge University), The Columbia Review, Columbia New Poetry, and last year’s issue of Quarto. She likes vintage taxidermy. CHLOE CAMPBELL is a graduating senior, majoring in creative writing— poetry and English, at Columbia College of Columbia University. She’s from Southeastern Ohio, and really enjoys playing the ukulele, speaking Irish, and skyping with her pets, though usually not simultaneously. She’s so honored to be included in the 2011-2012 Quarto. LIVIA HUANG snacks. TORSTEN ODLAND is a freshman in CC, planning to major in creative writing. He was born in Illinois and his interests include coffee and Dinosaur Jr. MARSHALL THOMAS, CC ‘12, is “ridin’ in my whip, racin’ to her place/ Talkin’ to myself preparin’ to tell her to her face/She opened up the door and didn’t wanna come near me/I said ‘One second baby! Please hear me!’” AUGUSTO CORVALAN is a junior in Columbia College. You can see more of his work in the anthology Winter Canons, One Buck Horror, Midwest Literary Magazine, Potluck Literary Magazine, and others. YANYI LUO spends a lot of time thinking about the perfect choreography to Beyonce’s “Diva.” Her current writing explores the themes of old people and war. 76

DALTON LABARGE is Akwé:kon énska entitewahwe’nón:ni ne onkwa’ni kòn: ra tá non teiethinonhwa rá: ton ne onkweh shón:’a ne akwé: kon skén: nen akén ha ke tsi teiokwa ta wén: rie ne kén tho ohontsià: ke te wèn: te ron. MERIAM RAOUF, second-generation Egyptian raised in the heartland of suburban New Jersey, has been published on Bwog.com, Popsense, and The Columbia Review. Meriam has lived in Writer’s House and worked with Artists Reaching Out as a creating writing instructor. Meriam is studying creative writing and visual arts at Columbia College. CHARLINE TETIYEVSKY is being told that it’s probably time to grow up. But she’s never really listened to her cat’s advice before, and she’s not likely to start now. MAURICE DECAUL is a student at Columbia University School of General Studies, studying creative writing. Maurice has contributed to The New York Times’ Home Fires Blog and has had work featured on Newsweek.com, and in Sierra Magazine. MALCOLM CULLETON is a Columbia College senior studying creative writing and history—or, as he calls it, “tall tales.” He grew up somewhere between the woods and the suburbs in Eastern Pennsylvania, a land of rapidly-fading American mythology. He hopes to get as much of it down on paper as he can. TIAN BU, known as Tina by friends on campus, was a third year Columbia College student from Greenville, South Carolina. Tina was a talented writer, and a gifted artist, and musician. This issue of Quarto is dedicated in her memory.

MASTHEAD Executive Editors

Noelle Bodick Rebecca Kutzer-Rice

Managing Editor

Kristine Lu

Visual Editors

Rowan Buchanan Natalie Molina

Events Editor

Sarina Bhandari

Community Outreach Editor

Rega Jha

Web Editor

Emma Stein

Reading Editor

Diana Clarke

Editorial Staff

Jared Frieder Diana Guyton Allen Johnson Leena Mahan Michael Menna Aliza Polkes Claire Sabel Drew Westcott Victoria Wills Eric Wohlstadter

Faculty Advisor

Amy Benson

COPYRIGHT Quarto accepts submissions of poetry and prose. Send work to quarto@columbia.edu Questions and correspondence to: exec.quarto@gmail.com © 2012 by Quarto Literary Magazine All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists upon publication. Collage elements on magazine cover courtesy of Martin Pettitt (martin. pettitt@gmail.com), quaddles.deviantart.com, jaybird-stock.deviantart. com, and Richard Davis (studiodavis.co.za).

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S To Dorla McIntosh for her many hugs and endless support of this magazine and the people inside. Mary Jo Bang for judging the Quarto Award. Melody Nixon for being our events angel. Jonah ParzenJohnson for creating our beautiful website. Senior Stories and Live at Lerner for epic event collaboration. Mark Hay and the IPA for helping build the writing community at Columbia. Barry Zucker for holding our hands through the publication process—again. The family of Tian Bu for letting us share her inspiring pieces. The faculty of the Creative Writing Department for your continued support and mentorship. And to our many talented writers—thank you for making Quarto come true.