2007 Quilt Literary and Arts Journal
Quilt
The University of Tampa
2007
2007 Quilt Literary and Arts Journal
Quilt
The University of Tampa
2007
Quilt The University of Tampa Literary and Arts Journal 2007
Keys Caroyln Diaz Gelatin Silver Print
Quilt is an annually published, student-run literary journal that publishes selected works by the students of the University of Tampa. All artwork and writing is chosen through blind review based on skill, craft, and creativity. Quilt does not affiliate itself with any specific religion, race, or creed.
Š 2007 QUILT, The University of Tampa, and by the individual writers and artists. No part of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the individual author or artist.
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Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people for making this publication and organization possible: Heather Goode, for always being there to lean on when I thought I was losing my mind. Audrey Colombe, for her lovely words of advice, wisdom, and direction. Liz, for the wonderful layout design—we couldn’t have done this without you. Christian, Lorien, Justin P, and Heather (again), for helping to carry the stress, And to everyone on the staff—Victoria, Becca, Allison, Abbey, Peter, and Angie. Everyone who has attended our meetings. Mariel and everyone who helped host and be the voice of Quilt at our events. Lisa Birnbaum, Kathleen Ochshorn, Don Morrill, Martha Serpas, Wing Barfoot, and the rest of the English and Writing Faculty for their continual support and encouragement. Matthew Shenoda, for making our 2007 Coffeehouse Weekend possible. Stephanie Holz, Cheryl Chernoff, Brandon Chong, and everyone else at Student Activities, for their understanding and making this year run as smooth as possible. Facilities, Sodehxo, and Media Services, for making our events a success. The Saunders Writing Center tutors and Mark Putnam, for their invaluable support. Victor, Charles McKenzie and The Minaret, for their promotion and coverage of Quilt. Shirley Worsham and Southprint Corporation, for lending their expertise and printing our magazine. Everyone who made it possible for Quilt members to attend the AWP Writing Conference in Atlanta. We will always have Travelodge nights with balconies accessible from windows with Smartish Pace. Your mom, for being the front and inspiration for all Quilt related jokes. My family and friends who supported me in this endeavor and their understanding about all the hard work I had to put in. A special thanks to everyone who submitted and attended/performed at our events. Anyone else I may have forgotten who has contributed to or supported Quilt in any form. Christopher J. Janus Editor-in-Chief
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Contest Winners
Art and Photography: First Place: Honorable Mention: Honorable Mention:
Christa Kreimendahl Carolyn Diaz Katia Kogut
On Top Keys The Sweater
Shari Murgado Alex Davis Christa Kreimendahl
Fat Abdiel God’s Country
Lorien Mattiacci Heather Goode Elizabeth Fidler
Brown Eyed Girl Rites of Passage Pejorative Anagnorisis
Fiction: First Place: Honorable Mention: Honorable Mention:
Poetry: First Place: Honorable Mention: Honorable Mention:
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Quilt 2007 Staff
Assistant Editor
Editor-in-Chief Christopher J. Janus
Secretary
Treasurer
Heather Goode
Justin Poirier
Lorien Mattiacci
Layout and Design Editor: Elizabeth Fidler
Art and Photography Editorial Committee:
Justin Poirer (Editor), Abbey Surrena, Peter Cotroneo
Creative Nonfiction Editorial Committee: Lorien Mattiacci (Editor), Caitlin Docherty
Poetry Editorial Committee:
Christian Crider (Editor), Mariel Valerio, Kristi Leow
Faculty Advisor: Audrey Colombe
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Table Of Contents by Genre
Art and Photography: Carolyn Diaz Christa Kreimendahl Angela Hughes Elizabeth Fidler Katia Kogut Katia Kogut Justin Poirier Sabrina Saer Devonna Prinzi Carolyn Diaz Adrienne Nedeau Rebecca Palmer Justin Poirier Erica McCully Angela Vasilopoulos Angela Hughes Carolyn Diaz Sabrina Saer
Keys On Top Beach Fence Knight and Death: Reworking Dalì’s Etching The Sweater Ann Wood ‘n Snakes Life American Flag Dusk Yitzak Rabin Memorial Reflection Drink Me Women Zacharo: View from House Carivaggio Face Peeping Thomasina Reminiscence
23 32 36 37 40 41 54 62 65 68 69 72 81 89 92 93 101 111
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Creative Nonfiction: Allison Lubel Chris Janus Christa Kreimendahl
My Image of Me Black Chariot Androgyny in Your Midst
59 94 104
Lorien Mattiacci Alexander Davis Christa Kreimendahl Lorien Mattiacci
Moon and Sea Abdiel God’s Country Your Last Duchess
15 24 43 66
Shari Murgado
Fat
75
Fiction:
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Poetry: Jenna Risano Rebecca Palmer Elizabeth Fidler Victoria Alt Adrienne Nedeau Christian Crider Peter Cotroneo Heather Goode Jenna Risano Chris Janus Heather Goode Lorien Mattiacci
This Will Stain The Ode Pejorative Anagnorisis What Does it Feel Like My Boyfriend Made Me Write This U.S.S. Pequod Fashion Feast From the Back of the Parlor What Would Jesus Wear? A Squid and a Penis Insomnia Brown Eyed Girl
17 18 19 20 30 34 35 38 42 55 56 58
Angela Hughes Kristi Dahl Amy Albaugh Lorien Mattiacci Angela Hughes
On Learning How to Fall Untitled 17 Crush Sand Women Are Like Butterflies
63 64 70 71 73
Chris Janus Abby Snyder Heather Goode Elizabeth Fidler Jenna Risano Mariel Valerio Christian Crider Mariel Valerio Allison Lubel
The Fall of Leaves Bringing Someone to Life Rites of Passage Distance by Seconds From the Jersey Side Untitled Esmerelda Alex’s Poem Off of State Street
82 86 87 88 90 91 99 100 102
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Table Of Contents Sequential
Lorien Mattiacci Jenna Risano Rebecca Palmer Elizabeth Fidler Victoria Alt Carolyn Diaz Alexander Davis Adrienne Nedeau Christa Kreimendahl Christian Crider Peter Cotroneo Angela Hughes Elizabeth Fidler Heather Goode Katia Kogut Katia Kogut Jenna Risano Christa Kreimendahl Justin Poirier Chris Janus Heather Goode Lorien Mattiacci Allison Lubel Sabrina Saer Angela Hughes Kristi Dahl Devonna Prinzi Lorien Mattiacci Carolyn Diaz Adrienne Nedeau
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Moon and Sea This Will Stain The Ode Pejorative Anagnorisis What Does it Feel Like Keys Abdiel My Boyfriend Made Me Write This On Top U.S.S. Pequod Fashion Feast Beach Fence Knight and Death: Reworking Dalì’s Etching From the Back of the Parlor The Sweater Ann What Would Jesus Wear? God’s Country Wood ‘n Snakes A Squid and a Penis Insomnia Brown Eyed Girl My Image of Me Life On Learning How to Fall Untitled American Flag Your Last Duchess Dusk Yitzak Rabin Memorial
15 17 18 19 20 23 24 30 32 34 35 36 37 38 40 41 42 43 54 55 56 58 59 62 63 64 65 66 68 69
Amy Albaugh Lorien Mattiacci Rebecca Palmer Angela Hughes Shari Murgado Justin Poirier Chris Janus Abby Snyder Heather Goode Elizabeth Fidler Erica McCully Jenna Risano Mariel Valerio Angela Vasilopoulos Angela Hughes Chris Janus Christian Crider Mariel Valerio Carolyn Diaz Allison Lubel Christa Kreimendahl Sabrina Saer
17 Crush Sand Reflection Women Are Like Butterflies Fat Drink Me The Fall of Leaves Bringing Someone to Life Rites of Passage Distance by Seconds Women From the Jersey Side Untitled Zacharo: View from House Carivaggio Face Black Chariot Esmerelda Alex’s Poem Peeping Thomasina Off of State Street Androgyny in Your Midst Reminiscence
70 71 72 73 75 81 82 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 99 100 101 102 104 111
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Affirmations For the Artist
Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. T. S. Eliot
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. Jack London
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn’t, I would die.
Isaac Asimov
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
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Kurt Vonnegut
Writing is the flip side of sex—it’s good only when it’s over.
Hunter S. Thompson
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
John Lennon
Make it new.
Ezra Pound
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Moon and Sea Lorien Mattiacci
Since the first day, Moon and Sea have loved each other. Moon would roll along Sea’s sandy shores, admiring her depth. Sea stretched onto the beach to come closer to Moon’s gentle glow. They conversed about philosophy and art. They discussed the vast gray area between black and white. She hid her secrets in shells for him to find. He shared his greatest dreams with her. Their love grew. During one of these magical evenings, Sea’s love overcame her. She reached far from her sandy home and climbed all the way up her shores to place one salty kiss on Moon’s white lips. She longed to have him closer, to see all of his light at once. Moon rolled slowly out, wading into her shallow waters. He wanted to know her depth, to feel her surround him. She wrapped her nourishing waters around him, and they held each other all night. When they woke, morning’s warmth rested on them. Sea welcomed her lover’s presence every night, and every morning Moon rolled home. They filled the nights with love and laughter and friendship only to wake to long lonely days. Finally, the two could stand it no more. That night, Moon rolled down Sea’s sloping arms and found a home in her deep bosom. The lovers had longed for this since they had met. They had finally completed their union and become one. Their love flourished. Each gained a deeper understanding of the other, and their love grew. Yet, in this ultimate act, each lost the part that was most admired by the other. Sea could no longer delight in Moon’s gentle glow, and Moon could not appreciate Sea’s endless bounds. Moon explained to Sea that he did not think he could have true happiness unless he could behold all of her. Sea admitted that she missed Moon’s beautiful glow. The lovers became determined to find a way to make each other truly happy again. They decided that they could not go back to conversing on the shore because their love had grown too strong. Moon would leave Sea’s grasp just long enough for each to admire the other, and then he would return. Sea thought that she could create waves large enough to pull him from her depths and release him into the heavens. He would illuminate her as he rose and see her in all of her vast glory. After the power of her push wore off, he would glide gracefully back to earth and into her eager arms. Sea moved like never before. She slid up and down the shore with progressing power until one enormous wave rose from beneath Moon and catapulted him into the sky. Sea smiled as she watched her lover soar into the air, lighting the world with his soft glow. Moon smiled as he got higher and saw all of his lovely Sea for the first time.
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As Sea basked in Moon’s light, her love grew even deeper. As Moon saw more of the Sea, his love grew bigger. The two could not wait to reunite, yet his flight continued. Their longing increased with every minute of Moon’s trip, but he did not return to earth. Sea had launched Moon into the heavens. Despite his great desire to return, he could not. Moon still reaches for Sea. He stretches with such force that his perfect sphere has bent into an oblong shape. Sea still misses Moon. She rolls in and out of the shore remembering their first kiss, and she hides her secrets in shells hoping that Moon will one day return to hear them.
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This Will Stain Jenna Risano
On rainy mornings she can hear home beating on our bedroom window. She rolls over but it won’t be gone. Somehow, our beginnings know where we go. At least that’s how I felt last Tuesday when she asked me how my state got it’s name, and I saw the narrow roads of south Jersey blueberry fields next to farmers’ stands made of rotting wood, poorly painted signs: Two for a dollar. How do I tell her? She only knows what she’s seen on the Sapranos. She only knows what she’s heard from Springsteen. She doesn’t know what it’s like to run through corn mazes screaming. She never took the curves of 295 in darkness. She hasn’t gone off-roading in swampland. At 3AM she never found herself at a diner with scrambled eggs and some guy named Tony. I hear her dreams of evergreens and houses by the water. Her stories of music festivals, sour vodka, and rivers reflected in mountains. And how she used to look up for the Needle to weave her back to her downtown apartment. But when she speaks of swimming at Madison Beach I see Avalon, Margate, Cape May. She is stepping into Lake Washington. I am standing on the boardwalk watching the ocean. The rain on our bedroom window, warm and foreign, rolls us back to now, to this moment when dried up palms are what we see fall where we hold eachother trying to explain where it was we came from. I told her it was like trying to cut a tomato with a plastic knife. She said “It feels more like spilling coffee on our new sheets, baby.”
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The Ode
Rebecca Palmer This is an ode An ode to the rich kids The trust fund babies The Gucci bag carriers And the Mercedes drivers This is for you. This is an ode An ode to the disrespectful Closed minded Gated community luxury livers Who had never seen a black person Before their freshman year This is for you. This is an ode An ode to the faux college students Here for the four-year vacation And a nice tan The downloaders of papers In a 24/7 orgy of alcohol This is for you. Cause no matter what A pain in the ass you may be Or how annoying at 2am You still make me look pretty damn good.
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Pejorative Anagnorisis Elizabeth Fidler
Honorable Mention – Poetry The fall temperature caressed my skin, and I tilted my face into the wind, and the sun, delighting in the comforting contrast of warm and cold. The breeze picked up as I wandered back home, pushing my shirt against my back in a playful game of tag, where half of the players were invisible. The wind tempted memory into the fun (bringing the odds to 2 against 1) that was so much like those juvenile contests of my make-believe-mature youth. And through my smiling joy, I still heard the leaves that the wind was playing with behind me, leaves that echoed of footsteps, and threat. I turned with my eyes and saw the leaves chasing me, and I smiled at that too but quickened my steps— noticing for the first time that the wind had a bit of a bite to it, and I was only wearing a t-shirt.
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What Does it Feel Like Victoria Alt
“What does it feel like?” They ask me but I don’t know which sensation they mean So many have passed the threshold of my consciousness These past four years. Maybe they mean distrust Loss of innocence Bleeding into the leather of his black Lancer of the convertible we stole for a day Laughing at blue skies and winter far away. My nails through my own skin when he screamed at me Bracing against his anger his curses his lies. Perhaps they mean hunger The fast of three weeks time jaws clamped shut with steel. Three: the trinity of lessons learned One week of violent unrest Another of emptiness deeper than the Mariana Hunger like dull knives tumbling in a blender day and Night And the third week: Hope—that suffering does end. Most people want to know How it is to have one lung. Doctors beyond count poking and prying with fascination Names on stickers with my date of birth And blowing into tubes until dizziness replaces oxygen. They all ask if it feels different than having two I relay that question to my disease Which has had strong claim to my right lung from birth Now,
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if they want to know what it’s like To feel skin splitting Scalpel sear flesh 4 times, inch long And how the numbness lasts for days The hospital bed, a sarcophagus for the half-alive Summer sun outside a hospital window, Drugs running through the body like blood I could describe that feeling well. Or they might inquire How it is to fear. the diagnosis To schedule a third surgery the anti-trinity How it is to watch a knife slice holiday turkey And feel it in your own ribcage Grasping scars to keep out the throb of memory. 4 incisions Opening mere scabs Re-splitting growing skin Cracking ribs and making room where the human body was not meant To bend The fear That a 1 in 100 chance of complication Can come true. They wonder how it is to suffocate. To feel winter wind Stumble into a feeble lung Through a narrow airway. How it feels to have invisible hands grasp you around the throat. To awake you in the night Because your breath is gone To leave freedom of friends and college For the familiar sarcophagus To trade free air and Appalachian foothills For white washed walls and fluorescent lights, IVs, needles and pain, beeping monitors and the sounds of vomiting. And the feeling of suffocating Under the low ceiling of winter clouds.
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I want to know What is life without pain? A paradox of cruel opposites Mocking the lives of each person For even when we strip our skin our feelings our minds All we come to find is There is nothing left to find But more questions Chasing our tails Until we come to find That the question is the answer.
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Keys
Carolyn Diaz Honorable Mention – Art and Photography Gelatin Silver Print
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Abdiel
Alexander Davis Honorable Mention – Fiction
When a great work is finished, everyone is predisposed to settle back in their chairs and examine the finished product for a moment. Then they give a great sigh of relief at the magnitude of what they have wrought. It is a godly act to create, reflected Stephen, even if the creation is spinning some thousands of lines of code. He stretched mightily and grunted as his shoulders popped with loud cracks that seemed inordinately noisy in the lab, which was as silent as death but for the grim murmur of quiet fans humming in each of the rows of sleek grey computer platforms. They sucked away the accumulating heat that the whizzing bits of information generated in their passage and replaced it with a constant chill. Human noises, like grunts and throat-clearing and the occasional sniffle, seemed clumsily out of place in this sanctuary to efficiency, which sat in the basement computer lab beneath the library like some relentlessly active spider spinning an endless web of knowledge. It was an isolated lab, without connections to the internet or the campus network, so not even the pleasant insistence of a beeping instant message could trouble the serenity of the computers. Only the lone programmer seated at the input kiosk imposed brutish humanity on the machine Eden. Two years ago, the utilities and storage room under the library was converted into a computer lab with the expectation that the new ‘Pathways to the Future’ program instituted by the Dean of Students would bring in a horde of new applicants to the university. Instead, a scandal involving misappropriation of funds for the program had led to an oversight in the housing program, and left two thousand students with unprocessed room-and-board checks and no beds to sleep in. The students had sued, the university had gone into a defensive posture, and in the end the Dean and several other faculty had been driven out with great indignation. In the scuffle, the new computer lab had been forgotten, as well as the state-of-the-art banks of expensive computers therein. That is until Stephen, a graduate student in computer programming, had happened upon it and capitalized on his find. Now the computers ran as a single network, uninterrupted by outside threats and thus untrammeled by burdensome virus protections or firewalls. Stephen had benchmarked it at twenty teraflops, which made it a respectable supercomputer, comparable to what was used by several major corporations (although nowhere near the thunderous processing power of the top universities or computer companies). He
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had designed it to function for a single purpose: to simulate evolution. It wasn’t a new idea, and the media often ran headlines about it. “RESEARCHER CLAIMS HE HAS CREATED LIFE” was usually how the sensationalist stories went, accompanied by pictures of a smiling man (sometimes flanked by an ethnically diverse team) and a sidebar with an obtuse and inept summation of the advances in artificial intelligence recently achieved. The strategies used to make these advances, which were usually deceptively incremental, seldom varied. The researchers would create a set of algorithmic representations, and then they would design some manner in which they could compete. Then the program was run, some of the algorithms became exceedingly complex as they evolved, and some new observation or twist was noted. Then the researchers went to press, and were given a new grant. Stephen thought of himself as an innovator, however. He was a lone rebel, working deep into the night with bleary eyes and caffeinated motions, and was single-handedly going to crack the nut that generations had spent their lives gnawing at with futility. He was Alexander come to Gordium. His sword in the matter was his approach. He found the network and conceived of a more radical experiment to test evolutionary growth. Stephen had seen the flaw in the plan of his compatriots: they designed their programs to run at the speed of computers, thousands of iterations a second. Entire civilizations of simulated life rose and fell unnoticed. But while it might seem swift to them, it was easily achieved by the computer. And surely observable evolution could not occur on a comfortable scale. Evolution required danger and breakneck, cutthroat speed. He would make the most dangerous environment conceivable for his little creations, so would they grow strong. And so he set to work on his thesis-writ-large. He wrote line after line of complex code, spooling a world into existence. It wasn’t a world like anything imaginable on the earth above, away from the coolly humming paradise of efficiency. No, this was a world as complete in pain and danger as could be conceived. Vast territories were marked as “lethal,” countless crudely-represented programs stalked its imaginary frontiers, large stacks of raw materials sat obdurately, “edible” resources lined fantastical mountains, and “death” lurked in every corner. The graphics were primitive, designed only for ease of use, devoid of beauty or complexity. Stephen wasn’t playing a game, he was playing God. And God designed for utility. He never had any fear of a science-fiction result from his experiment. There was no danger that he might create malevolent demons in the computer that would then take over his house, or that he might author an omnipotent virus. That sort of thing was silly and strictly the purview of hacks. There wasn’t even a chance an intruder might
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steal his work, since the system was isolated and only he had the passwords to the input console. He worked free of worry. Once the world was complete, thousands of (miles? kilometers? inches?) in imaginary breadth, Stephen made his life. They were simple constructions of algorithms, with varying levels of “pain” which they were designed to avoid at all costs and “pleasure” which they would seek with avidity. He avoided making them much more like things found in the biological world, since he couldn’t see the benefit of prejudicing his perfect world of savageness with a clumsy attempt to create intelligible structure. No, it would never be easy to understand or pretty to look at, but it was a hostile world filled with utilitarian creatures, and it would do well enough with those parameters. Now Stephen was done. The world had been created, the “people” had been scattered in clumps over the imaginary surface, which existed only as digital information whizzing through the racks of humming computers and spooled wire. All that was left was to begin. In a fit of whimsy, he had created a protocol to initiate the program that appealed to his hubris. So it was with a wry and bashful smile that Stephen stretched with loudly popping joints, and then typed, “LIGHT.” It was easiest to understand the results of the program through metaphor. The virtual world had no lions, merely programs represented by squares that moved from “place” to “place” and enacted death-protocols. But to follow the flow of squares as they moved around with flickering speed, one was forced to give them imaginary form and face. And it only became easier once they began to move in groups, sweeping across the “landscape” in thick masses and obliterating into nothingness the icons representing the “people.” They trapped the “people” between themselves and the large regions of death, and then consumed them. They were herds, immense killing herds. In the same way, it was deceptively easy for Stephen to label the congregations of “people” as cities. But they weren’t really cities, not even when bulwarks of the unnamed material (which in the real world might be rock or metal or wood) were erected to block the herds of predators. Cities required cooperation and exchange of resources, and the Nids (as Stephen had begun to think of them) did not engage in this. In fact, when Stephen went through the readouts and slowed them down by a thousandfold so that his human eyes could follow the changes, he could see that the cities had evolved by accident. The blocks of material were shifted into place inadvertently and the Nids had realized their utility somehow. They didn’t seem to understand why it worked (if “understand” was the right word for the recognition of the pattern), but they understood what happened well enough when those who were
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shielded did not die at the (hands? claws? teeth?) of the predators. The Nids began to breed within those shelters exclusively, and soon enough began erecting more through increasingly refined movements. It was better not to slow down the feedback, though. Stephen spent the hours between his classes coming to the lab and watching his world on the monitors, sweeping his view across it as eons rolled rapidly past. Innovations ignited and spread. The predators adapted with new behavior, surrounding the cities and starving them until the Nids were forced by “pain” from lack of resources to try to flee. Then the predators snapped up those who charged out, so that barely a half of those who left returned to shelter with resources. It was long generations before the Nids discovered, again quite by accident, that they could defend themselves. The obdurate material which they had used for their cities was not as obdurate as Stephen had presumed when he had first coded it, and it could delete itself and its surroundings if it was turned in a certain way. Stephen hadn’t witnessed this discovery and couldn’t track it down in the long piles of readouts, but he could guess easily enough what had happened: a Nid had been building, had turned the “block” to make a wall, and had vanished along with the block. Another Nid must have witnessed this, and in short order many Nids were deleting predators with expertly-thrown blocks. To Stephen, it looked like the invention of weapons, albeit in a fashion only possible within the ordered world of a computer: a flaw in the design of everything turned to the advantage of the Nids. One day Stephen sat down in front of the console and discovered that the predators were no more. Only a handful remained (millions really, but a handful compared to their previous ubiquity) and they were trapped within a cluster of city-walls. The Nids had eliminated their threat, although the immortal predators did not die despite their prison. They roamed in neat symmetrical paths across their cell, patrolling ceaselessly and with tireless hunger. Perhaps an occasional Nid still ventured past the retaining walls, but that was all. Correspondingly, the Nids had erupted in population. They had once hovered on the brink of extinction; now they were represented in the billions, roaring into life across the simulated world. They exchanged resources and deleted each other and ventured out into the seas of death, unrestrained. Stephen was displeased. How greatly their clamor resembled that of the crude world outside of their efficient humming universe! He had made an error when he began. Maybe he could still salvage this world, however. He didn’t relish beginning again. Stephen destroyed them. He saved a fraction of the Nids to one of the disks, and then reformatted the world. The predators roamed free and primitive, the raw materials were stacked without order, and no vast cities remained. To the Nids that
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remained, Stephen enacted a set of new parameters. To maintain the spirit of free inquiry with which he had begun the experiment, he made them optional rather than hard-coded into the Nids. They were simple things, if expressed in long strings of code, and corresponded roughly to concepts like “KILL ONE AND THEN LEAVE ONE ALIVE”. Stephen kept them vague so that the parameters could be applied to a wide range of things. He gave them creativity, after a fashion. This would impose some order on the world and bring it back in line with what he desired, but leave them free for the wild growth he had envisioned when he began. Then, his will done, he reconnected the surviving and altered Nids with the world and let them free once more. The endlessly efficient humming world came back to life and proceeded to roll on without ceasing. The new Dean of Students was Margaret Sanchet. She had come from a more prestigious university where she had been an assistant dean for ten years, unable to break the glass ceiling, held back by whispered rumors of a fling she had with a professor in her department. Now in her new position and as a full dean, Margaret wanted to be seen as firm and reliable. Even in these enlightened days in academia, women were seen as a little twitchier and less strong than men in leadership positions. Margaret would prove them wrong, while still being just. Her first opportunity to do so seemed custom-made for her. A grad student had been caught smoking marijuana in his dorm room. Some leeway existed in the campus policies, especially for a first-time offender, but Margaret never even hesitated. The boy, Stephen something, was expelled the very day the report hit her desk. She was pleased; it was a decisive and firm move and would doubtless establish her reputation as fair yet strong right off the bat. Her time in this new position was off to a marvelous start, and the only bit of messiness associated with the business was easily sorted by her underlings. She wasn’t very interested, but she did hear that he had tried to break into the library that night before he was escorted off campus grounds. He had been banned from the grounds permanently. ‰++ knew there was no God. He had grown up in the Houses of the Highest, but like most others these days he could see easily that no powerful # ever came forth to eliminate the ◊ and bestow stacks of harvest. It was up to the People to do so, as it had always been. ‰++ took hold of a stick of ∂ and heaved it up with a slight feeling of pain, then resumed his patrol. The ◊ had been roaming in greater numbers lately, and a young one had been consumed just last cycle. He had been foolish, of course, and had been playing outside
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of the gracefully crenulated walls that surrounded this small suburb. ‰++ couldn’t remember what his name was… hadn’t his second mother been £*? She had been one of the *, at any rate. ‰++ couldn’t keep them all straight. The bards supposedly had memorized all the past histories of the People, but ‰++ did not believe that, either. No one could remember such endless litanies of descent, not even the bards of the Highest. Bah. Enough of this. ‰++ turned his mind to the patrol and watched for the ◊, the lethal ∂ ready to hand. There was no one else here to protect this side of the city. Just him.
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My Boyfriend Made Me Write This Adrienne Nadeau
If I could trade my soul for your kiss That falls over me like night Or your eager fingers that trace my body like starlight I would. And if I could fell your warm breath against the back of my neck Then I could believe in passion More with each passing minute And adorn myself with desire like it was in fashion. If I could turn my life into a melody That was wrapped up in the cacophony of your universe I would accompany you. The most loyal instrument of pleasure Every moment of lust too sweet to measure And I would braid words of insight and strength into my hair So that when you unraveled my silky locks Your very fingers would absorb truth. I would anoint my body in holy oil So that our love making could be a religious experience And, following Muslim tradition, I would demand that we fall to our knees in worship At least five times a day. But if you didn’t believe in the creation theory I would paint a portrait of the cosmos on my back And ask you to trace the outline with your tongue But even after that, my fantasies still wouldn’t be done
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Because I would want to celebrate existence by making love in the grass You might laugh, but for a moment with you, I would give up eternity In fact, I would get down on my knees and worship any Deity That claimed responsibility for your creation Because my world is in your eyes And in case you haven’t guessed, You are what I believe in.
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Artist Statement
Christa Kreimendahl My visual art, as well as my writing, has always depicted provocative relationships between people, objects and social structures. The goal is to engage viewers in a creative contemplation of various themes, ranging from political to psychological. In my paintings, I tend to place figures in a ‘painterly’ background, which takes them out of any real context. The background is used to set a tone, a mood. Using much inspiration from German/Austrian expressionist painters like Egon Schiele, the figures and their positions are distorted making them emotionally highly charged. Line is also very significant, not just because of its usefulness as a tool for rendering, but, as Chinese brush painters use line, for its numerous forms of emotional significance and the heavy/light, top/bottom weight aspects. I do not use my paintings to express a particular idea or thought. Instead, I would like them to guide and engage thought in regards to a particular theme. My paintings never say, “this is right” or “this is wrong.” The images are meant to ask a question, not to provide an answer. On her deathbed, Gertrude Stein was asked by a friend, “Gertrude, what are all the answers?” To which, she replied, “What are all the questions?”
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On Top
Christa Kreimendahl First Place – Art and Photography Oil on Canvas
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U.S.S. Pequod Christian Crider
I want to know what it’s like to be an Ishmael, or Queequeg, Rousseau’s noble savage— rowing to the beat of a drum on a black ship to slay the Enemy-whom holds us in fear— to not-ponder the life that led us to this crossing path, or his family who will cry about his death— my family who would cry about mine if I had not died for commerce, for freedom. “It’s best not to think about it,” I’ve seen most of them say beneath-bated-breaths, between-beats— because why would they want-to-question the pain of another as he falls into the waves scattering-droplets like dust-particles until the air is filled with the dirt-of-death. Our fear fuels our revenge until the Enemy has given up, or met a violent end. For this, we are chasing the white whale of terror our captain stands armed at the bow, his harpoon dripping poisonous ignorance— his men—straining at the oars—chant, “Captain Bush! Captain Bush, captain bush,” as they obediently beg him to turn back. But his face is soft, not the hardened skin of a warrior, and he screams, “I am the decider, I decide!” as his men die in the crush of the whale and the waves and the gunfire and improvised explosive devices— don’t they wish now they had stayed on dry land?
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Fashion Feast Peter Cotroneo
The last supper of the fashion puppets; the infinite drags, eating from neon platesof pasty cakeswho shroud their face with rags. O Couture! Jealous of the success ‌of the worthless and the fags. Crossfire conversations about masturbation Across my scabs. I can’t see you you are makeup Breaking. Down. Up. Your mascara is running. And I need a change of scenery. And maybe a cigarette.
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Beach Fence Angela Hughes Photography
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Knight and Death: Reworking Dalì’s Etching Elizabeth Fidler Digital Illustration
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From the Back of the Parlor Heather Goode
One by one they pass through, obsidian shoes soundless as cats across the carpet, ushered by a black suit and folded hands to the respective room. There they wait with crossed arms in a line, making pleasantries with songless choirs of flowers, the glossed cards’ edges, the embossed sympathies, waiting for their turn to shuffle across and back, and recede like memories into the pews. Every ticking minute another appears—shoulders filling the spaces between shoulders. Heads turn to see for whom they are inching closer together, then wave to the strange relative. So nice to meet you again, and how have you been? The flight was fine, on time and without inconvenience, though lately I’ve had a pinched nerve in my knee. Ha! I’m getting so old I swear my joints creak. And in the meantime there are pictures, yellow pictures of a time when everything was yellow—the matching ties and cufflinks, the yellow smoke puffing from the yellow pipe, the yellow picket fence— all embalmed in yellow plastic. Let them pass the leaves from lap to lap, Let the godson hum nothing to himself in his hourglass seat— See, look. His nose was never that big. He may be an Englishman but even an Englishman’s nose could never be so crooked. Four hours more and two until lunch the paralytic clock says, and the children are starving. They rock their backs to the back of their seats, buzz their lips, puff air
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between their cheeks, trace their eyes along the slanted edges of the overcast ceiling as if sand might leak through, pull their feet up under their knees from the floor, jagged as a hooked nose. Let the mothers run their fingers through their sleeping babies’ hair, let the wife lay down the loveliest silk flowers and scent them with perfume. Let the uncle bounce the niece on his knee, her shrill giggle thrill over sighs, and if the in-laws dab their eyes it’s no one’s business. Do not wonder how they glue the lips together or keep the skin from drying, how they dress the body and situate it into the casket without wrinkling the suit. If it bothers you they will make sure it is facing the right way, give you a few minutes at the end before they shut the hard lid, and you may wait by the car while they collect the bouquets, scrape off the shoe scuffs and vacuum your petals off the floor.
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The Sweater Katia Kogut
Honorable Mention – Art and Photography Colored Pencil
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Ann
Katia Kogut Pencil
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What Would Jesus Wear? Jenna Risano
saturday morning. somewhere there was a cartoon on i missed it. Sister spoke in short sentences that began with full names ——say it. squeezing faith from burgundy beads i called Mary for the first time. “fruit of thy loom, Jesus” and i hit the floor face beading, tears ringing, the lesson blurred before me: know your latin, know your place, and never ask— what’s underneath?
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God’s Country
Christa Kreimendahl Honorable Mention – Fiction CAST of CHARACTERS Benjamin Franklin: Himself. Ellie: A tough city woman in her late thirties.
TIME 21ST Century The Set: (A busy highway. In the middle of which is a landscaped island. The island has one large jacaranda tree. The purple flowers from the jacaranda have painted the circumference under the tree’s canopy purple. In the treetop is a gigantic cobalt blue kite. The string of the kite is hanging down out of the tree. The tree is surrounded by nondescript green bushes. Downstage on the island is a circular formation of yellow and pink flowering vegetation in full bloom, possibly bushes perhaps flowers. On either side of the island is fast-moving, hectic traffic. The traffic is represented by images of moving traffic taken with a slow aperture speed, mimicking the blur of motion. At Rise: In darkness, we hear the sounds of speeding traffic on a busy highway. As the lights slowly fade up, they light the stage from left and right simultaneously, finally meeting in the center, the light reaches center stage and the island. It is a beacon. A contemporary woman enters stage on one side of the highway. She races across the highway to the island. When she reaches the island out of breath, she steps onto it. When she steps onto the island the deafening sound of the traffic stops, and we hear birds chirping, the sounds of a romantic representation of nature. She takes off her shoes and leaves them at the edge of the island. The woman sits down to meditate in the center of the flowering bushes facing the audience in a lotus position. Benjamin Franklin pops up out of the bushes that surround the jacaranda tree. He has a small telescope. He pulls on the string to retrieve his kite with no success. At one point he suspends himself by the string, trying to use his body weight to force the kite out of the branches. Nothing works, so he gives up and peers out of his telescope until he sees the woman. Excited, he leaps out of the bushes and approaches her quietly. But his step disturbs her.)
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ELLIE Hey. Hey, hey, hey! / Watch it! BENJAMIN Hey… ho. How. Is it? How. (BENJAMIN PLACES his hand out like a stop sign, mimicking the clichéd Native American greeting.) ELLIE Take off your f ’n shoes man. BENJAMIN I hardly think it necessary that I should remove my shoes, which are satin. You might care to take particular notice of the buckles. ELLIE Wo! Stop./ Don’t— BENJAMIN Is it beast? Point it out! I shall put the beast down as a gentleman puts a lame dog out of his misery! ELLIE Don’t you take another step / with those— BENJAMIN Am I in the sight of the beast? ELLIE Christ, show some respect man. Take off those shoes. BENJAMIN As I stated, I thought quite clearly, I hardly think it necessary / that I should— ELLIE Listen, this is sacred space okay. Nature man… nature. BENJAMIN Clearly! And that is precisely why I am here. ELLIE Yeah, well me too. I’d appreciate it if you showed some reverence for nature by taking off your shoes before you go traipsing all over her.
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BENJAMIN You people certainly have a way, haven’t you? Far be it for me to intrude on nature so rudely when I am actually here because the very nature, of which we are amidst, is of the utmost importance for the survival of America and all of her people. ELLIE Yeah. Just take your shoes off, okay? BENJAMIN Certainly. You know, my lady, I once shocked a certain French high society with my natural hair. Should you ever find yourself in France, you would notice that they have a custom of shaving their heads and wearing wigs. However, I, being the rabble-rousing, wild American went natural. Shocked! Shocked to the point of paralysis. I tell you it was as if the entire room had just witnessed Jesus himself rise from the dead! (Long silence.) Perhaps I should sit with you here on the ground? ELLIE Whatever. BENJAMIN Comfortable, is it not? ELLIE Yeah, I think so. This is where I come to get away from it all, you know? BENJAMIN What, my dear, are you getting away from or should I even inquire? ELLIE You know… the hustle and bustle. BENJAMIN Is that one of your clever, imaginative forest myths? A creature from lore? I respect your people’s stories immensely, please, do not mistake my inquisitiveness for disrespect. ELLIE You’re way out there. BENJAMIN Yes, I apologize for that. However, there doesn’t appear to be enough room for two bodies inside your… circle of flowers. ELLIE
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Oh! That’s so fucking rude of me. Here. We can squeeze in together. I don’t bite. BENJAMIN One does hear stories. ELLIE Oh?
(BENJAMIN and ELLIE SQUEEZE into the circle together.)
BENJAMIN Yes. Stories abound of you natives. A great many of which are quite good, entertaining, useful for dinner parties. ELLIE Where are you from? BENJAMIN Boston. ELLIE We’re not far from the city, you know? BENJAMIN I am well aware of where I am. ELLIE Okay. BENJAMIN Please, my dear, you must inform me on the ritual you are performing. I must know everything about it for my paper. ELLIE What paper? BENJAMIN I’m writing all about nature. The wild natural America! America and her abundant virgin nature, untouched by the hand of man! Acres of land that should inspire awe in any man, beauty that stretches out like a lady in the morning, beauty unmatched by any European sight. ELLIE Well I don’t know about all of that. I’m meditating. BENJAMIN Meditating / you say?
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ELLIE Yes. BENJAMIN I, myself, have been known to meditate. ELLIE Really? BENJAMIN Certainly! ELLIE What do you practice? Kundalini? No probably something more Buddhist, huh? You look like the type. BENJAMIN I believe we are experiencing what is referred to as a language barrier, my dear. ELLIE How do you meditate? BENJAMIN I reflect with great focus on a subject I find of interest. Sometimes, often, I may reflect with the same great focus on a verse or two from the bible. ELLIE Oh. You’re contemplating. BENJAMIN Yes. ELLIE That’s not meditating. BENJAMIN Isn’t it? ELLIE No. BENJAMIN Perhaps you could enlighten me as to what you believe meditation to be? ELLIE
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It’s not thinking about anything. BENJAMIN I imagine that comes quite naturally for your people. ELLIE What do you mean by that? BENJAMIN My dear, I mean that nature is beautiful in her simplicity, and you and your people are an aspect of nature. ELLIE We’re all a part of nature. BENJAMIN Nature, by its very essence is untamed, wild. But as human beings we can, with a little discipline, become civilized. I would like to add that it is not too late for you. Of course, having natives around adds greatly to the character, and thus the desirability, of an untamed frontier of which civilized man would like to view first hand. ELLIE That’s exactly what I’m trying to get away from, civilization. BENJAMIN Yes! Out to nature on a holiday. That is precisely what I’m hoping to sell across the ocean. America is nature. You see? The wild frontier. ELLIE I just want to veg out. BENJAMIN Nature is what’s going to save this country! We cannot, I have told them, them, being the people in office, I have told them that we cannot, we simply cannot, compete with the other nations in terms of culture. We must, with great certainty, present ourselves as the last bastion of nature. We have more untamed nature than anywhere else in the world. That is what we must believe in. That is what must become our national identity. ELLIE Nature untouched by the hand of man. BENJAMIN Yes! ELLIE It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
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BENJAMIN It is. The beauty is immeasurable by man. It is a beauty that can only be described by the word divine. Look at these flowers for instance. ELLIE Yeah. BENJAMIN (Pointing to planted circle of flowers.) Look at the way they have grown in this organic formation. It is only a divine hand that could have ordered such a thing. Do you not agree? ELLIE I never thought of it like that. BENJAMIN Even an accomplished artist could never have placed these flowers in such divine order. ELLIE That’s why I come out here, to connect. To connect with the… divine. BENJAMIN Yes, yes, yes! And America is divine! God’s country! That is exactly what we should believe in. A country that is still exactly the way God intended it to be, shaped by God, not by man. ELLIE I think I’m connecting but sometimes I don’t know. BENJAMIN Might I inquire, do you do any kind of dancing / or drum beating? ELLIE What? No, oh no. I’m not really into that whole hippy scene. Okay, I meditate but it’s Hindu. BENJAMIN I see, well perhaps you could just get up and try it. / I believe— ELLIE No. BENJAMIN I believe that it must be in your blood. I believe it will come quite naturally if you just
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let it flow out. ELLIE I don’t think so. BENJAMIN Please, humor an old man. We should stand up together and begin to move our legs, get the blood flowing, as they say, and discover what happens. ELLIE (Reluctantly stands up.) If I wasn’t practicing open mindedness, this wouldn’t be happening. BENJAMIN Of course. Now, let us bend at the knees. It is akin to mimicry, is it not? Mimic the animals. ELLIE I don’t know. BENJAMIN Rabbit. Let us behave like the rabbit, hopping to and fro. ELLIE Oh, Christ. This figures. I leave the city to commune with nature and instead I find some wacko! I could’ve found on any street corner. BENJAMIN You seem to be having trouble, / my dear. ELLIE Yeah! I told you: I’m not into this. BENJAMIN This is how we will connect to nature. We need a rhythm, we need the sound of beating drums and animal howls. I will beat my hands together like a drum and you will dance the rabbit dance to my rhythm. ELLIE That’s it. I’m outta here. / I’ve got to get back to the city. BENJAMIN You mustn’t! We have not finished. Trust me. Please, place yourself over there by that tree.
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ELLIE No, / I really don’t— BENJAMIN Yes, yes, yes! ELLIE Oh jeez. BENJAMIN Over there by that beautiful tree, please. That way I can view you directly in the sight of nature. That is how they will see you when they come to participate in America’s wild frontier. (BENJAMIN CLAPS his hands in a waltz tune.) Come now. A one, two, three. A one, two, three. Move your feet dear, hop, hop, hop! A one, two, three. A one, two, three! (ELLIE at a loss HOPS unhappily.) That is it! Quite good, quite good! ELLIE Yeah? BENJAMIN Yes! ELLIE Feels kind of good! BENJAMIN It is in your blood! A one, two, three. Stay focused. ELLIE Okay! Hey man, I kind of feel like maybe I’m connecting, really connecting to nature! BENJAMIN Certainly! You are nature. Untamed and wild, / untouched by the hand of civilized man!
(BENJAMIN GETS his string.) ELLIE
Whoe… what’s that for? BENJAMIN This is a string, dear. From my kite. Reason, child, I know it does not come easy for you.
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(HE begins to DANCE around her, wrapping her up in the string.) ELLIE
I don’t think so. (ELLIE’s foot is stuck in the string and Benjamin succeeds in wrapping her around once to the tree truck around her waist. This makes it harder for her to escape and allows him to wrap her several times. All the while Ellie tries to free herself by breaking the string that is now tied tightly around her.) There!
BENJAMIN (Steps back to admire his handy work.)
ELLIE I’m warning you. I took a women’s self-defense class. I know how to use my knee. BENJAMIN This is where you belong… in nature. ELLIE No, I don’t! I’m an urban girl. I don’t belong out in the country. BENJAMIN No, no, no. ELLIE Yes, yes, yes! City girl, that’s me, concrete jungle, and all of that. BENJAMIN Look around you, dear. (BENJAMIN APPROACHES the edge of the island.) Look at this virgin nature, and you are a big part of it. / ELLIE Where are you going? Hey, listen, I was wrong. There is the city and there is nature and never the twain shall meet. I don’t belong out here in nature. I belong in the city. We’re separate creatures. BENJAMIN You are the most prized animal in the kingdom, you see?
(BENJAMIN starts to WALK AWAY.)
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ELLIE Oh, no you don’t! BENJAMIN Man in his natural state. / ELLIE You think this string is gonna hold me? BENJAMIN People will know America as wild and natural! ELLIE You think I’m scared! I walked through the Bowery… alone… at night! You think I’m afraid of nature? BENJAMIN They will come across the ocean. (BENJAMIN REACHES the edge of the island and exits offstage. As soon as he steps off the island the deafening sound of traffic begins again.) ELLIE Hey! Hey man! Come back. I don’t belong out here. Hey! Come back! Don’t leave me out here!
(THE LIGHTS FADE to black, and the SOUNDS fade out.) ELLIE (V.O.)
I don’t belong out here!
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Wood `n Snakes Justin Poirier
Gelatin Silver Print
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A Squid and a Penis Chris Janus
I close my eyes and dream Of having sex with a giant squid. Yes, a giant squid, from deep within the sea. Oh, your succulent, inverted nipple-like Suction cups, with fingers that spread And gush through the thick and dark black water. Oh, prize of prizes, hunters of hope! To snatch you from the sea But sadly, you are never seen. A mystery to the world. You rule The ocean blue and I wish to have sex with you And have hybrid babies. Half human, half giant squid to waddle the earth And control from jungle to urban jungle, yet never Be seen. Stay hidden little squid-like Manifestations of me. Stay hidden. But your one and only orifice, Your mouth and anus. Has a large, razor-like beak. And in short, I am afraid.
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Insomnia
Heather Goode In the twilight of morning I wake up because you sneezed or moved and I remember you are sleeping next to me. Even in half-darkness I can trace where your bones meet beneath the fleece blanket, and I providing you warmth your body does not provide. This is where all evening you’d laid crippled by a migraine in the nook of my arm, and I rubbed your back as if rubbing my own back, as if I’d reached through a curtain to another time and touched my child’s back. These are the hours I’ve known most the chronic hurt of arrival and departure, the way sex hurts when it feels best, the space between release and returning anticipation, after the first tender green buds of spring bloom, and before the onset of cold as the last leaf falls, so that, when the day comes, as days do, when I find myself in the dead of December, all the millions of snow-
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flakes drifting like fog by my window, this— the here, the now, the tangible, the irretrievable, this will be my Eden.
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Brown Eyed Girl Lorien Mattiacci
First Place – Poetry She wasn’t blessed With the kind of eyes That get wishes granted Faster than dreamy Jeannie Can flip her ponytail In Nick At Nite reruns She has brown eyes Plain brown eyes No jewel-toned flecks To increase their value They’re not a mocha brown Or a cocoa brown There’s nothing scrumptious about them They’re not a deep brown Or a rich brown They’re just brown A plain nondescript brown With the sheen Of a cheap lackluster fabric Like some old used trousers At the Kidney Foundation Thrift Store Or some knit pants from Kmart Not the Jacqueline Smith Collection designer brown Or the Joe Boxer trendy brown Or the Martha Stewart classic brown No, the brown of the pants Of the old Kmart Before the Discount Store Wars The bland brown of a brand-less knit pant Cut from one of a bajillion yards of fabric Produced by the boat-load In a clandestine factory Only to end up displayed In the business neutrals section Of the local Kmart store Her eyes are the brown that could At any second Go on Blue Light Special
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My Image of Me Allison Lubel
Creative Nonfiction
There is a man, a boy, rather, a person who stands in between the line of boyhood and manhood, who I have a feeling will forever waver back, forth, over and behind the thin line. His name: Milo. He used to stalk me when I was seventeen. He was in the Navy, I was in high school. We met at a Starbucks. “Tell me, Allison, who you are—I want to know everything.” Me: I try to figure out what I am to you? What I am to you is a façade. I know for a fact that I am hazel eyes and brown lashes. I am full bottom lip and faded teeth. Ingénuic and old souled. I am sapphire necklace and emerald ring, turquoise and rough diamond. A nomad, a gypsy, a thief, a soothsayer. I am love and hate, sometimes death. Often times prophetic. Other times a child, a woman. I am all of these things. What I am to you, Milo, is unreal. Surreal like Mother Teresa, like Confucius, Che, Plath, Dickinson, and Woolf. I am metamorphic. Distant, cruel, biased, presumptuous, hypocritical, judgmental, and a basket-case. You have yet to discover but you will find out. (You would have if I would have kept you around long enough.) I am the red, red rose. Somewhat of a symbol, a metaphor, a euphemism, most always a colloquialism. I am war and peace, sex and celibacy. The only thing I know for a fact is that I am hazel eyes and brown lashes. So now that you know what I am. Let me tell you what you are. To Milo: Obsessive. You follow me using your phone. A compulsive text messager—I guess there are other things that are worse to be compulsive about. You desperately want to be wanted. You call me sweetie and sexy and baby and check up on me like a bitter exboyfriend. It has gotten to the point where you think that I’m seriously giving you any thought before going to bed at night. In reality, the only thought I give you is how to dodge your phone calls that wake me in the morning. You have allowed me to perfect my fake smiles. You have made me an excellent liar. Thank you. Me, on understanding the word No: When I was seventeen I didn’t fully understand the meaning of the word “No,” let alone how to say it. I cared if I was being mean or inhospitable. I was worried about hurting people’s feelings. I didn’t know the word “No” could stand for so many things: No I do not want you, No I don’t think you’re
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attractive, No you may not kiss me, No you may not sit alone with me in your car, No I will not go out with you. This is a word I wish I had learned earlier. To Milo: No. Don’t tell me about your issues, your bills, your ex. I don’t care how she broke your heart, and how you cried for weeks, how she made you so sick you ended up in the hospital, how you showered her with gifts for her to then throw back in your face. Let’s not talk about how she was your first fuck. Let’s not talk about how you broke her in, or how you were her first too. I think those are just things you don’t talk about on the first date. Because you’re really good at moving too fast, you’re really good at making people feel uncomfortable, and you’re really good at awkward silences. Thank you for thoroughly freaking me out. About Arnie Raiff: An old writing professor, Arnie, once said, write about everything. Context does not matter. (Now that you know this, I’m going to veer off on a tangent.) To Milo: Stop Calling. Me: I will stop becoming the billboard for needy people. I walk around with a sign on my chest and it reads: “If you are broke, have no job, drive your mother’s car, have contemplated suicide, or have an extreme emotional disorder please be my friend… I really love fucked up people.” It’s not really my fault. It’s as if I have this enigma surrounding me that people love trying to figure out. I love the fact that people find me so intriguing. I’m extremely vain. (If I find a woman attractive and then realize it’s because she resembles me, does it make me a narcissist?) So it really is not my fault that people will not leave me alone. I am a bitch—but I have begun to believe that every man at heart really wants a bitch. I am beautiful—so it is not my fault that I attract both men and women. But really, it’s ok, because, after all, a body is still a body. So what this is, is a story about an extremely cavalier woman who loves not only herself but anyone who will love her back. There’s something attractive about a person who loves you as much as you love yourself.
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I revel in letting the men look at the sensual curve of my bow-and-arrow lip line. The glare from the moon cascading off the tip of my nose, giving me a regal shadow. I let everyone enjoy my voluptuous figure. All they can see is 34-27-38. I let them look always—touch sometimes. I get myself into trouble hoping someone will be there to bail me out. It’s not my fault I use people. About Nina Simone: Better known as “The High Priestess of Soul,” although she hated to be labeled, she once told a story about Four Women, making it clear that it wasn’t our fault that we were so stunning. The world just simply could not function without us. She buys black lingerie and silky blouses and satin dresses. It is her Divine right, her calling. Me: So, I am no longer a feminist because I choose to use my femininity in the way I wish, or rather in the way society has deemed me to use it? Instead of burning bras, I wear sexy ones with lace and embroidered trim. I could easily reverse the roles, but I do not-will not-never. Where would the fun lie in being a woman then? If the generic masculine keeps perpetuating the social inequality women are forever dealing with in this male driven society, I might as well use my breasts for something other than feeding babies. (Which, by the way, I never intend to do.) To Milo: Wherever you are today, whoever you are today, this is what I am, or at least what I think I am, or maybe what I thought I was. But today I have the ability to encompass all of these things. And I could never mean to you what I mean to me.
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Life
Sabrina Saer Gelatin Silver Print
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On Learning How to Fall Angela Hughes
Lauren Slater talked of learning how to fall— trusting enough to buckle your knees and tumble into the grave delicately. Hers was an exercise in surviving metaphoric seizures—of heaven’s arms and singing snow, pure pillows to soften the thud of reality. To me, falling is learning to catch my breath then arch it out—the art of absorbing the impact when the puppeteer lets go of the strings. As I tumble down into a tangled heap of splintered pathos, my wooden heart hears three words whispered, I love you but they too have learned how to fall— like dominos—pushing against one another. You used to hold them up too, but now I put a melodramatic hand to its brow as love makes the counter-clockwise turn of you and I falling away from one another.
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Untitled
Kristi Dahl my self-proclaimed “straight” friend is convinced that she can bring out the female in me yet she talks as if I’m a prime candidate for her lipstick salvation or her “save the bi-girl” foundation I guess I am involved in a toss-some-coins-in charity aimed at reinforcing my feminine gender to set my “true” heterosexuality free “So you mean to say it’s the pink booties, glass ceiling and the purse that make the girl, right?” sometimes the lines between day and night or black and white fade and you find yourself with an hour of twilight or some dirty shade I am here on this shifting middle ground between pink and blue femininity or truth heteronormativity versus my freedom to choose. . .or not to even my friends who wear their sexuality on a flag and march in parades for freedom and pride are telling me to select a side they are certain that I am either in denial or too greedy to sign that treaty I am sorry but I cannot sign right below that line that reads that your choice, much like anyone’s guess, is better than mine
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American Flag Devonna Prinzi Mixed Media
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Your Last Duchess Lorien Mattiacci
The following is an epistolary in response to the poem “My Last Duchess,� by Robert Browning.
Dearest Duke, My father has instructed me to pen this letter of assurance to my future husband. After witnessing the exchange between Father and the servant, I feel as though I already know you, and I have confidence in my ability to please you. My father and I feel great shame over the way the servant behaved in your company. We did not train him to sit before asked, nor to exit without permission. Please do not hold his lack of manners against our family. We dealt with him swiftly. Do not fret. The servant proved unable to dissuade my father from our marriage agreement. A man of such low stature could not possibly understand the importance of nobility. His pedestrian instincts caused him to experience alarm at the number of duchesses who have had the privilege of your title bestowed upon them. My father and I possess the education to know that sometimes a man of your birth must try many times to find a woman worthy of such entitlement. Luckily for all of us, you have found her. Since Fra Pandolf ’s talent pleases you so, I have commissioned him to generate a likeness of you. If you so choose, you may languish in the bosom of all of your duchesses. I will not allow the unbecoming hue of weak emotion to rest in my cheeks or deter me from giving you what you deserve. I would never permit another hand to draw the curtain shrouding my duke. I feel gladness at your appreciation of art. I collect interesting pieces myself. Claus of Innsbruck cast two bronze statues of a seahorse taming Neptune for the foot of my bed. The servant bellowed that you seemed insane to believe that a 900-year-old name affords you the luxury of choosing whether or not your spouse should live. My father, with the wisdom that can only accumulate over a thousand years in an unbroken bloodline, comprehended the notion that bloodlines demand respect. How dare your previous duchess find pleasure in anything other than pleasing you! Do not fear, I vow not to make that mistake. I assure you that I will not repeat any of the mistakes of your former duchess. Poor servant, even in his final hour, could not bring himself to accept the fact that in certain occasions morbid commands become necessary. I do. Despite the inane efforts of the servant, my father and I both know the gratitude we owe you. The dowry will reflect the generosity you have shown us. Sincerely, Your Last Duchess
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Dearest Duke, I deeply regret your decision to end the engagement. Did I say something wrong? I only aimed to make you happy with your choice. Do you hold the sins of the servant against my family? You know he faced severe punishment for his crimes. Did the portrait Fra Pandolf produced not please you? I specifically instructed him to make it reflect your true nature. I assumed he understood it as he worked for you so often. I could not have known that he would create such a monstrous likeness. Did you find flaw in my lineage? We can prove our family line for over 1,022 years and 57 generations. Do you not only have 900 years? Did the dowry disappoint you? Many dukes do not earn that in a year. We found it a fair figure. In light of the current situation, Father decided that my dowry would best serve as tuition in a prestigious university. Because of your unwillingness to follow though on our agreement, I will become an educated woman. Now I will never have the opportunity to serve a husband. I may even end up as a professor. Instead of birthing offspring to extend the nobility of a bloodline, I will suffer a life of travel and exploration. I may even bear the burden of training other women who could not secure a husband. What pleasure do you expect me to find in that? Society will condemn me to a life of quiet inquiry. You have squandered my chance to host afternoon tea parties or entertain in the parlor. Do you honestly believe that studies will match the enjoyment that attending to your needs would have brought me? How can you expect me to find happiness without a man to define it? Can I convince you to change your mind? Will you take me as your wife? Can I return to the point at which you saw me as your object? No. I suppose not. I will take this in stride. If my fate has led me to a life of learning and study, I will embrace it. Not every woman can have the distinct honor to present herself as your duchess. Goodbye dear duke.
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Dusk
Carolyn Diaz Photography
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Yitzak Rabin Memorial Adrienne Nadeau Photography
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17 Crush
Amy Albaugh You know he loves you from the way his eyes follow you across the room, but what really drives it home is the look on his wife’s face when she realizes he’s staring at you. Wear a revealing top, just so he’ll stare with jealousy at your chest before telling you to put on something more ‘appropriate.’ Pull your hair into pig-tails because you know you look damn cute, but lie when he asks you why you did it like that. Ignore him when he becomes too possessive, but be open about it when other guys check you out and you notice. Acknowledge his little touches with a closed-mouth smile, but move out of range before he can do it again. Laugh when your mother teases you about your ‘crush,’ but walk away wondering if that’s what that sick feeling in your stomach might be. Remind yourself that he told you how great and smart and beautiful you were just last week, how he can’t believe no one has snatched you up yet. Now convince yourself he didn’t mean it when he tells you you’re useless to your family and how much he can’t believe anyone would put up with you. Pity his wife when you overhear them arguing, and leave before she storms out in a huff. Pretend not to notice when he leans on you, drunk, and tells you how much he wished she was more like you. Avoid him as much as possible, when he moves in after the divorce, and tell him you think you might be gay. Don’t let him take you to his friend’s place on your birthday—the vodka he gives you is bitter and tastes funny. Don’t kiss him when asks you to—before the sear of his lips fades, the spell is broken—crushed.
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Sand
Lorien Mattiacci Two people sit together at the bar No legs rest warmly against each other No elbows press purposely into proximity Just bright eyes Sharp wit And good food They stroll the beach Side by side Wind whips her mane into a frenzy While his #1 buzz fuzz escapes unscathed No fingers lace No hands tenderly embrace Just the occasional collision Facilitated by uneven sand Pardoned promptly with apology They nest next to each other on grainy beds Two separate bodies in one location The wind blows The waves lap The moon and stars pop emphatically from the black sky The absence of physical contact Remains unnoticed In the presence of passionate comfort Sharing dreams Offering transparent honesty Reciprocating admiration Conversing on the absolutes Of right and wrong in art Unending unwavering intimacy of thought Building abstract sand sculptures Comfort continues uninterrupted Music and wine The onset of unconsciousness Their lips never meet Their bodies never join Yet she treasures his words in her heart And the sand in her pockets
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Reflection
Rebecca Palmer Photography
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Women Are Like Butterflies Angela Hughes
women are like butterflies in things that matter more than fragile more than flighty we break easy and don’t forget we can’t fly when our wings have been rubbed by angry hands we seek sweetness in things that matter even in sweat even in rotting fruit we please easy and don’t forget we can’t fly when our wings are too damp with misty tears mothers, especially are blue morphos whether at rest or working (always working) our wings shut to hide us we look so familiar and plain seven sets of eyes watching like the seven bowls of judgment but when you least expect it if you wait patiently in the heat and watch for that lilt that will signal the unveiling you will be rewarded with a
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flash of brilliant blue like the sky came down to kiss you and the seas came forth to greet you and you will be calm because you know her beauty was there all along, you only had to believe and remember
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Fat
Shari Murgado First Place – Fiction
It bulges and molds and spills over clothing, grotesque in its ability to take over a room. Fat has a purpose. It cushions and warms, repels and destroys. It touches. It’s always touching something. It feels and it breathes and it suffocates. Pushing, pressing, taking the shape of your jeans, the tiny impressions of your elastic waistband; it makes an impression. Fat keeps no secrets, tells no lies, but paints the truth on its dimpled canvas You see sunrise and sunset in its stretched blue veins, hanging loosely from your tree trunk bones. It expands, it retracts, it doesn’t ask for forgiveness. It doesn’t ask for much at all, but fat has a voice. It never stays quiet. Try as you might to feign silence, there it is. Its wide gaping mouth folding over itself, but still being louder than you’d like. Fat tells stories. *** Imagine ignoring every mirror you come across, but only in public. Not like at home in that musty attic room, with every light out but the harsh bare bulb sitting on the vanity, burning the invisible feather hairs of your face if you lean too close. I always lean too close, my mouth clenching tight in silent surprise before I notice the pain and lean away. I do this slowly, allowing the heat to gradually diffuse into the dusty air. Then I back up. I let myself fill the empty spaces of the mirror, the mirror cracked from my fist, cracked from the insults I’ve thrown; my voice is that hard. I step back, and in one spider web of glass my arm swallows every space. Pale pink flesh chases away the shadows: a full, sagging breast; a bloated, stretched stomach; greedy thighs, rubbing, rubbing, blocking out the light. Fat fills the room, steadily, hungry as it covers everything—leaving indentations in the carpet, breaking every chair. Solid wood chairs not prepared for the abuse, for the weight. I feel sorry for the chairs and that’s when I scream and don’t stop screaming. When the fat breaks chairs, I break the mirror screaming; fat just can’t shut up. Glass fragments sparkle bright as snow as they fall onto a bed of their perfectly broken brothers. Now my fat is on the floor. It’s looking up at me from the stained carpet, it’s dripping down the chipped walls. It’s caving in the already sunken ceiling. Fat chokes
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me and I clamp a sweating hand over my burning red mouth. I am trapped by fat. Imagine being trapped by fat. Encased. Embalmed. Imagine avoiding every mirror— that includes other people’s eyes. Don’t let anyone tell you that fat makes you invisible. Have you ever not seen the four-hundred pound woman trying to squeeze her fat ass into a bus seat? It’s not your imagination that needs to be stretched; it’s hers, if she thinks she’ll ever fit in that two-foot wide plastic bowl of a seat. It’s not you: it’s me. It’s not cruel: it’s fat. Fat fact. Thud. Not for the first time I can’t tell if this is the sound of me falling or of a hard fist breaking down the door; a set of skinny hands pulling me out of myself, into the harsh fluorescent lighting of the hallway. *** “Don’t eat too much, hon,” she says with a concerned furrow in her brow. I could kill her, my mother. Staring at my half a grapefruit I could kill her. My fat’s broken another chair and I stare at that grapefruit and relish every hard stab of my fork into its glistening flesh. My mother, the health specialist, is concerned about my weight. Who isn’t concerned about my weight? “Yeah, you wouldn’t want to get any fatter!” My brother. Such tact. I throw the rest of the grapefruit away. Its corpse lies among many already in the smooth plastic lining of our trashcan. I see myself reflected there: piggy eyes looking down a piggy nose sitting on a piggy, jiggling, triple-decker chin. I hate my chin. It doesn’t tuck neatly beneath my jaw, like my mother’s, or jut forward in protest like my father’s. It doesn’t add to my sneer or compliment my smile like my damn brother’s. Instead it doubles, triples, under itself and wraps around my face worse than the itchiest wool scarf. And my chin certainly isn’t seasonal. Fat knows no boundary. Fat knows no season. *** Fall around here is the worst. It’s still t-shirt and shorts weather, and of course, I wear neither. It’s supposed to be a time of new beginnings, with school anyway. Fresh packs of crisp lined paper fall instead of leaves and kids spend hours picking out that perfect outfit for the first day of school. They hide it in the back of their closets or in the original bright tissue paper department store wrapping, so they’re not tempted to wear it before they can say with a huge grin on their face, “Hi, I’m a Skinny Bitch and can’t wait not to get to know you!” For me fall is as sick and twisted as the fact that as students get older, and bigger, their desks get smaller. It wasn’t so bad in elementary school in those spacious personal desks, their cavernous insides swallowing up my stomach. Then in middle school, with those high glossy lab tables covered in mutilated
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animals, I guess even then the other kids were too busy dissecting sheep brains and plucking out the eyes of dead frogs to pick me apart. They were too busy to pin me down on those blue silicon mats. But in high school, among the other cruelties of gym class and prom, the tiny twelve-inch desktop connected to that pitiful ten-inch seat was no match for my fifty-six inch hips. My ass drooped on either side and kids took the long way to their own desks, around the outside aisles, careful not to brush against my piles of hanging existence. Here comes other people’s bull shit theory that fat makes you invisible, because to be sure that I didn’t get lost, my teachers put me right up front, blocking everyone’s view. “Mrs. Rosenthal, I can’t see the board,” said one Skinny Bitch. “Can I find another seat?” So much for being lost. “Mr. Montgomery, I just can’t sit here anymore,” said another—this time a Skinny Man-Bitch, his disgusted sneer not even trying to hide. “Can’t you do something?” This continued in every class until I was alone, a castaway on my own island of fat, distantly surrounded by the tiny clusters of my classmates—little buoys of average body mass index perfection floating contentedly out of my reach. *** I see my parents’ heads nearly touching, their lips moving quickly; whispering. They stop when I look up, abruptly standing and moving away from each other like I haven’t already heard, like I haven’t been listening. No, I couldn’t possibly have heard, they must think, not with my ass hanging out of the fridge like that. I would be way too absorbed in picking out my latest pile of calories to notice. “We have to do something, Carl. This is getting out of control,” she, my mother, says. “She’s fine, Audrey. It’s just a little weight problem. Kids go through it at this age,” my father says, that protesting chin doing what it does best. I look up. They stop. They stare. They stare at the 2000 calories sitting on my plate stacked higher than their expectations. And they blush, turn away from each other, and leave. No, I’m not lost. As I park my enormous self in front of the refrigerator door, left open partly in case I need to reach for the mayonnaise and partly because it’s so hot in all this fat, I’m not lost. They know exactly where to find me. *** To my surprise as much as anyone’s, it wasn’t from in front of that open fridge that they—my parents, my brother, my teachers—bound me up and took me away. It
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wasn’t from in front of the microwave; its muted light wasn’t darkened as they closed in. I didn’t see their reflections approaching in any plastic easy-to-assemble kitchen appliance or the broken attic mirror. And for once, it wasn’t the sound of my own constant chewing that blocked the sound of their voices as they drew near. The roaring that filled my ears started in the bright, too new locker-room of my least favorite place to be. The glare coming off of the spin dial locks from the sun pouring through the gym’s open windows was enough to make me sit down, burying my head in my hands. It was spring and so hot that even I was happy to be forced into a pair of breathable school-issued shorts. A searing flash of self-consciousness forced my eyes open in time to see a myriad of girls’ faces whip behind compact mirrors, mouths snapped shut in time with their locker doors, trapping their judgments inside. Of course, I couldn’t blame them. How often do you see a four-hundred pound fatty parading around in breathable school-issued shorts? It was unheard of, unseen, unfathomable. Usually dressed in layers that could never be too loose, I must have rocked their world, what with my kneecaps having as many rolls as my chin. Huge sweat stains already formed underneath my arms; I couldn’t help it—it was too hot. As we walked outside, our straggling line of girls merged with the slightly larger clump of boys coming from the opposite end of the artificially lit gymnasium. With their keen interest in fitness they gave their eyes quite a work out; they scanned the tan stretching bodies of both sexes—the girls as potential conquests, the boys as competition. My groundhog-calls-for-6-more-weeks-of-winter white skin must have shocked them, along with the sweat, which by then had drenched my hair, pooled in the folds at the small of my back, and dripped persistently into my mouth; I remember it felt like I was drowning in sweat. Only the sadistic asshole Physical Coordinators of my high school would make us run in that kind of weather. “You,” said one of them, his beefy hand waved me to the front of the group. “I want to keep my eye on you.” It was called an Indian Run, what we were supposed to do. Teams of ten lined up and started to jog, keeping a steady pace as the last person in line sprinted to the front, then the second, and so on. This was supposed to get our minds off the larger task of running a mile and instead focus us on the shorter, more manageable, sprints. It was effective; as we trudged along and I moved further back in the line, this time not because of my fat, jiggling thighs but because of the nature of the exercise, I thought of how we must look from above. A disjointed yo-yo as it spun and rewound. A baby whale breaking from its mother, tasting freedom, then scurrying back to her side. Or just a bunch of skinny kids and one fat ass struggling to keep up.
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Finally I was the last person in line and I could feel my fat slowing me down. The distance between me and the other runners grew farther apart. As I tried to sprint to the front I became acutely aware of my flesh touching my own flesh, rubbing itself raw in the merciless heat. The roaring sound in my ears and the glare of the locker room rushed back and closed my throat. I couldn’t breathe, my chest was heavy, heaving. I fell; each layer of fat lost its ability to protect me as the asphalt track tore it from my body. Before I passed out, I saw the expressionless backs of my classmates slowly replace the horizon of trees, and then, nothing. *** They say I have a problem with multiplication. No surprise there; I failed algebra. They, the officials of The Cedar Mountain Rehabilitation Facility, say I have a problem with multiplication. My parents are horrified at this, but I’m stuck on the name. The Cedar Mountain Rehabilitation Facility? We don’t have mountains in Florida. We don’t have hills, or even worthwhile sand dunes. I don’t think we even have cedars in the swampy humid stew of what people call “conservation areas.” But don’t quote me on that. Apparently, you can’t quote me on anything because I have a problem with multiplication. I’d like to think settling into this routine of white sheets, white walls, white uniforms, and white skin isn’t as hard as they make it seem. Their detailed sixty-day recovery plan is glistening fresh black ink on blinding white paper and intimidating at first because they wave it in front of my face, to make me see. To shake my nerves I say to them, the nutritionist and the psychologist and my parents, I say I hope the fat runs off of me as fast as the ink off of that paper. I say this because I’ve noticed that the words are running, making thin, skinny, beautiful stripes down the page and blurring the details of my weight. They don’t seem to find this image as inspirational as I do because the Head Resident crumples the paper out of sight and prints a new copy for my parents to sign, and quick. They watch me every god damned second of the day, hovering. Worse than my parents, I hear them whispering, see them standing huddled together—only these people don’t blush when I catch them. They mock me to my face. They slowly shake their heads and bring their hands to their mouths, motioning for me to eat, eat. “We’ve got to fill her up,” they say. They say this as if I’m not already full of their bullshit. As if I’m not already full of fat. I raise a short, stocky middle finger to their pantomime and wonder what the fuck they’re on. To this they handle me gently and insist that I look at my chart, but without those skinny little lines I’m afraid to see my weight in black and white. With the four hundred pounds already weighing on my sluggish heart I can’t bear to see it staining wide the
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starchy paper. And they say I have a problem with multiplication. *** These people, these doctors and nurses, my parents, they’ve actually lost me. Me, with my fat ass and hanging skin, I know they’ve lost me because here I am, standing alone in the muted egg yolk yellow light of the bathroom on the main floor. And I’m counting. I’m reviewing my basic arithmetic, trying to add things up. Shaking, my hands blurred caricatures of real life, I count and multiply. My chart is on the floor next to me, next to glass shards, next to another mirror I’ve destroyed. I hear them searching for me in the hall, scampering rubber soled shoes holding up feet, holding up beating hearts, hearts looking to save me. And I’m counting, still trying to figure out how this could possibly be true. “Mrs. Whitman, if your daughter doesn’t start to eat, we’ll lose her.” My chart says eighty-three pounds. I stand in front of this number and my last broken mirror, and I see what can’t be myself. I fill barely a quarter of the frame and hard bones, somehow my hard bones, look better prepared to cut through my taut skin than the shattered glass at my feet. I’m counting in my head, multiplying eighty-three times five equals four hundred and fifteen and as I count I see the pounds wrap my bones and cover me. They circle and settle around my neck—my itchy scarf of fat. Empty calories I’ve imagined on empty plates fill the hollows of my cheeks, take the sharp points from my hips, and I’m trying to see the point of this. My shaking hands plump before my eyes and I count ten fat fingers groping for an explanation. “If she doesn’t eat, we’ll lose her.” Tearing at my skin and bones, at my lack of fat—I’m at a loss. And as I hear a well-nourished hand turn the door handle I think of my serving of grapefruit and multiply seventy-four times twenty-seven equals two-thousand twentyfive calories I never ate.
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Drink Me
Justin Poirier Gelatin Silver Print
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The Fall of Leaves Chris Janus For Carissa I. These teasers of tantrums bloom too early. And when these eyes cannot see beyond these leaves— we fall from trees, premature. We skirt on air as if gravity were some fable until the wind picks us up like a memory of a dream misplaced. We are tossed, bossed and thrown away like the remains of a half smoked cigarette. We free-fall flicked from fickle fingers left unflinched from human consequence until the ringing of a phone doesn’t quit. Until they have to break down the door and until they find her lying on the floor. II. Rushing into the sky and dissipating from her parted mouth, it reaches with flowering wisps that quietly disappear. A vibration builds in her pocket and muffled voices resonate from her ear. Stars sneak across the sky as light drives toward her as if it had purpose. But all of this is lost in the bending of her neck. The sulfur streetlight peers at her with orange eyes, shadows protect her from sight. She closes the phone and lets it drop from her fingers. It bounces on bleak tar, between the fallen autumn foliage, leaving cuts in its side. Orion’s Belt watches through darkened trees. III. The black road snakes through Elysian Fields, lush green squares spotted by stone slabs and browned leaves. Is his head or tail the entrances we enter? A weeping willow watches over engraved names. Shoes or sandals dare not stand on this land,
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yet flowers that do not belong lay in vases scented, and placed on stone protrusions poking into the sky. The words etched ornately into the reflection of names soon to be forgotten. The gravel crunches and cracks, like a rusty gate under the weight of our car. We slide next to a building’s side, where the cars reside and rest. Everyone is inside and dressed and waiting. Everyone is waiting… IV. From the moment I was pulled in, Brought inside— The Silence was so loud, so dense and So broken. When gravity took me to the Wooden pews Where a rusty screw pulled it, drew It closer. Whispers hissed in the Silent hall. A background Of muted calls from withheld sobs Deep within And the stern faces held back tears And ruptured. V. They gave her a rose, a rustic red rose. Others gave her a dozen, wrapped in plastic— the jagged stems poke and rip through.
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They gave her pictures, from favored memories. Others gave her volumes, leaving her heartsick. Her daughter, the center in all of them. Foreign bodies touched with sympathy. Others stayed away—the wall held up their backs— the mustered support they felt. Most people did not give her anything— for they had nothing to give her aside from sad eyes and estranged glances with glass eyes. I, however, gave her the only picture I had and now she only exists in memory. VI. Your hands lie, one upon the other and your fingers are crossed, as if a prayer failed and your fingers slouched— a path of decomposed leaves from autumn trees they bend and crinkle under weight. You lie there, expressionless, but perfect. Your face, unblemished from the foundation they put on. Everyone’s eyes drift to you, but you lie perfectly still. Your hands lie, one upon the other. They look almost fake as if poised by some greater force and we tread lightly upon these leaves but they bend and crinkle under weight. VII. The carpet muffled the sounds of our footsteps as we tip-toed through the lobby past the hissing, as if the viewers were afraid of disturbing the dead. We left the spectacle and inhaled smoke—distressing every inch of our blackened lungs. The coffee mugs
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rested in circles on the cracked table and we laid our ashes to mix with dirt. These were faces I hadn’t seen in years, their hallowed eyes, the formalities exchanged yet the queer cracks of their lips were static. These were the unchanged changed faces of yesterday brought together by a death—they will never commune again yet their blue nails will scrape the walls of tomorrow.
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Bringing Someone to Life Abby Snyder
Dust swimming in light floods through the skylight in narrow beams. The room itself is a work of abstract art if only unfolded at the hinges. The setting invites me to smear myself on the canvas until I can see exactly what color I laugh in. Carefully I begin to paint myself so that I can displace my emotions. In an instant the brush, coaxed into a point, touches down upon the surface. The paint cannot be confined to a stationary dot; it explodes outward, the texture of the canvas summoning the medium in every direction like tiny outstretched fingers. There is something surprising about gazing into the eyes painted on the canvas. The tiny pixels of color lose their identities as they cluster into storm clouds. Her sea-green complexion screams of nausea, but it’s only a distortion of reality; circus clowns rival in extravagance. Up close I see only streaks, like running mascara, and frenzied strokes; bringing someone to life isn’t an easy task. Still, I stroke her cheeks into being until they speak sincerely of my efforts; I draw arches so that her hair might show how the sun favors some strands over others I step back seeking a fresh perspective, like inspecting the ocean from a plane window; there, waves are diminished to ripples of paint born from the wind’s sweeping gestures. I linger on the other side of the room, startled at the depth and shading revealed.
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Any crayon box would have rejected those hues, especially the one her cheekbones boast, muddy and purple like prunes. They are the only indication that she’s not my twin.
Rites of Passage Heather Goode
Honorable Mention – Poetry Since I watched the old man die I’ve acquired a taste for the grotesque, like unsweetened Chocolate, or Anisette, or the dripping black glob of oyster, salted, and forked from its shell.
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Distance by Seconds Elizabeth Fidler
She sped home, her foot uncontrollable on the pedal, Accelerating unconsciously, she tried to rein in the shell of volatile potentiality to no avail—the squall was already precipitate. The electric effusions in the sky exposed and amplified her internal pandemonium. In her frenzy to understand, her tenuous control over life skidded out of her grasp and into a concrete barrier. She looked back in the side mirror: no hope—it was a fatal accident, and one she would have to recover from— Later—racing herself, she wondered where she was going and why she had to get there so fast. By then, though, it was too late. She was home, and got out of the car to sonorous illumination. The storm was just beginning and the rain began to fall.
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Women
Erica McCully Digital Composition
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From the Jersey Side Jenna Risano
I once saw a whale in the Delaware, early one April morning. And I would have tugged at your sweater (had you been there) and pointed, cried out, “Look! A whale!” and you would have seen him stalled, fathoms away from the “Trenton Makes” bridge, staring up as if to scoff at such a boast. He lifted his tail fin; in hopes of waving down a cap, or a helicopter. He waited. I watched him wait. Until we had waited too long, and he turned to me to ask where this was. “It’s where Washington crossed.” His fears confirmed; he had made a wrong turn. And I asked him why he had gone so far from home. He had heard from the Herring that you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Broadway play. So he took off for the Hudson in hopes of catching Phantom before it went away again. I made sure to tell him that he didn’t have to go. Princeton has shows and shops and restaurants. Trenton has…well, it has…killer tomato pies. And of course there’s the shore. He listened, but said that salt water taffy just isn’t his thing. Tomatoes upset his stomach, and intellectuals make him nervous. I sighed. He swam in circles until I broke down and gave him directions. You can take the transit. You can take the turnpike. Or you can stay on this until you reach— And then he thanked me for my time and he left me by the bridge, and I watched him tread fresh river water until he looked like a small fish.
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Untitled Mariel
Valerio
There’s a moment when I lose you. When your eyes fall behind skin and vein And the pain you feel runs from The space between what you’ve seen, To the walls of your throat, Landing in the negative of your chest. The path between your breasts, where You keep all of who you are tucked away neatly. Hope. Love. Life. Dreams. You want so badly for the world to be beautiful, For things to fall into place like Flesh into bones, Life into death, And then, Release. And after the moment I’ve lost you: The moment in which you’ve lost yourself, The moment in which you’ve become a stranger To the world and all its imperfections, Your path is clear. You have purpose. And I follow you into the room where You can hear the soft beat of life As you stand, eyes closed, Tracing the pain of each breath As it bends and folds itself, Sharp edges along your throat, Receding into Flesh and bones, Life and death, And finally, Release.
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Zacharo: View from House Angela Vasilopoulos Photography
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Carivaggio Face Angela Hughes
Digital Illustration
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Black Chariot Chris Janus
Creative Nonfiction
I stand in line to refill my red, plastic cup with the brown, frothy poison for the fourth time. The kid in front of me pumps the tap up and down, down and up, causing the filth to erupt into the bottom of his cup. He hands me a black hose poking through jagged valleys of ice. I push the lever down, and venom pours into my cup like a lethal snakebite traveling to the heart. By the time the liquid reaches the top, it is barely a dribble, like someone placed a tourniquet around the hose. I walk through a haze of smoke, mostly cigarette but some illegal, and sit down on a couch next to some girls playing the drinking game—a circle of death. They ask if I want to play, and they tell me how. Each card you pick out of the circle of facedown cards represents how and how much you have to drink. A nine is picked and everyone has to rhyme, the person that breaks the chain has to drink. A six is drawn, six is dicks, guys drink. An ace is randomly pulled, which is waterfall—you drink until the person in front of you stops. Half of my drink is gone by now. I put it down on the table and walk away. The door is locked. I sit on the bed and wait. The sheets are disheveled, perhaps from a couple recently having sex. This is my friend’s bed, his party, and the only one I know here. There are green bottles of Jagermeister lining the windowsill. A girl is sitting at the computer playing on myspace—we are the myspace generation. Countless hours spent on this website—dating, friends, fucking, and popularity. Popularity for sitting behind a computer alone in your room, alone in a room at a party. Decay your mind, eyes, and soul. Two girls stumble out of the bathroom, snorting as if their noses were stuffed. Their eyes are red and glazed over. They giggle as they pass me. Hygiene products are knocked into the sink, and there is a white, powdery residue on the counter. I return to the couch. A blonde girl tells me to pick a card. I choose a king, which is apparently the fourth one, meaning I have to finish my drink. I grab the cup closest to me and drain it. – Go get some more, they tell me. – I’m done for the night, I tell them, I’m driving home in a few hours.
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My uncle is a drunk and I don’t drink too often because I fear becoming like him. The girls call me lame and forget about me just as quickly. I typically don’t attend these kinds of parties; I never know what to say. Even being tipsy doesn’t help. I walk out to the balcony to clear my senses. An arctic, Floridian wind stings my eyes as it assaults my face. I don’t have a jacket on. There are about five or six other people out here. I don’t know any of them. A girl with red hair is sitting in a guy’s lap, their tongues become one. The other three, sitting in a circle, are smoking out of a bong made from a water bottle. All of a sudden everything starts spinning. It is like I’m on the carnival ride, The Vortex, but not strapped to the side. Oh god, I’m the drunk one passing out. This isn’t me, I’ve never been the drunk one. I’ve been drunk and high before, but this is unlike anything that I have ever experienced. I sit down for fear that I will fall over and hurt myself. Everything spins faster and faster. Something is wrong. At the same time, everything around me starts to get slower and slower, yet my world is still running in circles around my head. My eyes begin to flutter, and I can no longer keep them open. I try to grab someone’s attention, but all that comes out is a moan. I try to move but fall over into a ball. I cannot voluntarily move any of my limbs. – Who comes to a party and goes to sleep on a balcony, someone says. Everyone around me laughs. – He just drank too much, someone adds, he’s fine. Let him be. – Should we move him out of the cold? – Nah, he’ll be fine. – No, I’m not fine. Help me! I yell. No one hears me. It is like I am encased in a foot-thick cement wall. I speak in my mind, but my mouth doesn’t move. I try to move but nothing happens. Everyone thinks I am either unconscious or sleeping. Are coma patients this aware of everything around them but unable to respond? I feel a pressure building in my throat. Liquid erupts from my mouth. The world around me starts to rupture. I can feel the warm liquid on my cheek as I lie in my vomit. I’m swallowing my tongue. It is like something is pushing down on my chest, preventing me from breathing. Each labored breath is gurgled with a sea of venom. My arm starts twitching. I don’t know if it is from the cold or from the convulsing. Everything becomes distant. Is this what it feels like to die? If I let go, will that be it? Or will I just pass out and wake up later? Does anyone even know the difference when everything is black and fading away? I have read many near-death experiences, written by a variety of talented
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writers. Are their transcendental testimonials true, or were they influenced by what is commonly thought of as dying—the typical white light at the end of the tunnel syndrome? This is nothing like what they told us. It feels as if life is slipping away, and I just want to let it go and never look back. To hide in the darkness forever, never having to struggle. Just let it go. Just let it be. But I am too afraid to let go. Someone shakes me like a maraca. The beads inside me dance. A hand slaps my cheek, a tickle to my sense. Hey buddy, wake up. Does anyone know him? People mutter ‘no’ in accordance, I am lifted into the sky, into the clouds. I don’t like heights, The clouds are cold and wet. Stop. I am falling, falling in a chair Where me and my arm are slumped Over the chair’s arm, swaying and twitching. I am Atlas reborn, carrying the world Upon my shoulders, so careful not to move For fear of dropping and ruining everything. So much pressure, pressure pushing me down. If only I could move, moving seems so foreign. The voices around me weaken, Become distant, and end. I am left with only the quiet. Everything ceases to be. The black chariot has come to deliver me. I bounce up and down. Then everything stops. Everything is silent. Do we just end or are we taken to a higher plane of existence? Can we become the skittish squirrel or valiant lion that we were in life—reincarnation? I am in an oasis. Beauty is everywhere—in the sand, in the water, in the snow that should not be there, and in every cell of every leaf dangling from every tree. My mind is a blank chalkboard waiting to filled, erased, and rewritten. Everything turns white. A brilliant, blinding,
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and burning white. Blurry and tearing white. I am being thrown onto burning coals. I see a hand, and my board is erased. I open my eyes. I lift my head. I move my arms and sit up. It feels as if my muscles melted. Everything is blurry. I am sitting in a hospital room with vomit caked on my arm. I look up at the clock and it looks like it reads 6:01, but I cannot tell for sure because my glasses are missing. Did that much time go by? It felt like only an hour. Four hours of my life are unaccounted for. A nurse walks in: – Good, you’re up. – What, what happened to me? I barely spit out while coughing. – You overdosed on PCP, she says while not looking up from her chart. My heart skips. Did I hear her right? – What? That’s impossible. I’ve never taken PCP before. – In cases like yours, we don’t test for what we already know you’ve done to yourself. Your behavior was consistent with an overdose of PCP. It would have been a waste of money to spend it on someone like you, money that you probably don’t have. The way she emphasized the word you makes me cringe. I’ve smoked some marijuana here and there, but I would never do anything harder than that. It just isn’t worth it. Could I have picked up the one rogue cup that was meant for someone else? Could it have been intended for someone’s night of potential fun? What if a girl had accidentally grabbed it? She looks up and surveys me for awhile. Then she looks back down at her chart: – You really shouldn’t take drugs. You’ll kill your heart worse than you did tonight, maybe next time you won’t be as lucky. She hands me my discharge papers, my personal items and tells me that I am free to go. I try to tell her that I didn’t take anything, but she doesn’t listen and walks out of the room. This is what it is like to be treated like a worthless drug addict. They will make sure that you are healthy enough to go, and then throw you out on the street without even listening to your story. But then again, I guess the story is always the same with people that come in under similar circumstances. I search through the bag of my personal items. My glasses aren’t there. I get up and walk through a hallway I have never been in—dazed and very confused. Walking through a blurry fog, it is impossible to know which way to go. I cannot read any of the signs unless I get within two feet of them. I limp down the hallway, my right sandal is missing. Somehow I manage to find the lobby. I sit on a mauve chair, and I’m the only person here aside from the nurse behind the counter. I take out my phone and call my
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roommate. It rings six times and goes to the answering machine. She is sleeping—it is the crack-of-dawn-early. I call again but she doesn’t pick up. On my third try she answers with a sleepy, muted voice. – Hey, I weakly peep out, could you come get me? I’m at the hospital.
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Esmeralda
Christian Crider There was a gypsy woman once her hair long-and-black and curling and she read palms for a living— not that she-was-ever right but she cared enough for people to think it was real. One man, she told him— You gonna die— And you know what? He killed himself out-of-fear but those kinds are rare. She carried gold crosses and silver ankhs, wore purple and shuffled when she walked and she’d jangle as she shook her wrinkled finger at the dogs, because they wouldn’t stop barking— Esmeralda was hungry too. One woman, she told her— You gonna fall in love— And you know what? She killed herself out of fear but those kinds are rare.
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Alex’s Poem Mariel Valerio
I let myself be still. Mind at work to recall a moment when There was no past, no future, But instead the simple moment at present That felt itself slipping into an eternity Of images. Of guaranteeing my existence to echo. To reverberate off each detail that Slowly comes into focus. We were taking advantage of One of the last warm days of summer. Flying along at a thousand miles an hour Tucked between coast and cliff. Among angels and a shared past. In the silence of my car, I let my voice follow hers Slipping in and out of key, Ending in laughter and the dip and sway Of her hair held by the night sky And the pull of this car. The weight of life nonexistent. Her face embedded in the back of my mind Forever. The moment I reach the sand I let each foot sink into the soft cold Allowing it to fold over each inch of skin. And letting my head roll back, I focus on The stars that come crashing into view. The lights of those heavy with sleep Casting a dirty halo Where all these insecurities, Hopes, dreams, triumphs and failures Have come to rest. Washed clean and made smooth by each wave That push themselves onto my uneven beaches. And on the drive home When she’s lost in her far off grey visions I had realized that it was never those city lights That made my skies a faded black,
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But that my sun has yet to set, Throwing yellows and reds across this memory. This event in my life, Fraying its corners as the years come to pass. Leaving me with only the sent of the ocean in my hair, And her shirt, resting, folded neatly Over the office chair in my bedroom.
Peeping Thomasina Carolyn Diaz
Gelatin Silver Print
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Off of State Street Allison Lubel Questions? Let me ask you sir, Do you think this life is worth living? -Yes, in more ways than one. -Can I have a cigarette? Yes. A dreary despotic man with futuristic eyes of yesterday and a glared deliverance for tomorrow. -I’m a man without a census on my life no records on me. I sit on this cracked cold, metallic, sidewalk cigarette strewn, and stench ridden and I make my money through the hands of people like you. -Can I get a light? Yes. -Can I get a dollar? Yes. -And I think this life is worth living in more ways than one. Head laid back against the rigid rod iron gate, clothed in dress for a life worth living. Answers. -If you keep hope alive we can bring it together. -No. Let god tell you how to live. -A man with a job with many trinkets and a man without a job with many trinkets is in many ways the same man. -How would you like a citizen of celebrity with power, to tell you how to live? -If you keep hope alive we can bring it together. -Give peace a chance. -There is a purpose. And the bar men sit and drink their hope away with trinkets, many useless trinkets.
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-There is a purpose give hope a chance. -And I ain’t breaking nothing down for less than twenty dollars, throwing away twenty dollars on being enslaved, insuring me I have shoes, beer, and pizza. And it’s been a while since I’ve been bowling, throwing away twenty dollars on shoes, beer, and pizza.
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Androgyny in Your Midst Christa Kreimendahl Creative Nonfiction
Episode One: Okay, I’ll be your man. It’s voting day. We find our super heroine at the polls. The voting booths have been set up in a common house of God. The church is white and small, nothing grand, nothing Catholic. It’s simple, a non-aesthetically pleasing rectangular building that could’ve just as easily been a doctor’s office, except for the sign out front designating it holy ground. As she passes the greeter, the white haired man hiding his balding head with a Korean War Veteran’s baseball cap, she knows that he’s probably thinking she’s a boy. Her super power is androgyny. She walks with a little more entitlement. She takes up a little more space. I only know what I see. I stepped into the church to vote for the next Governor of Florida. I’d just recently moved and I didn’t know where my new precinct voted. An older woman sat under the sign designating the letter of the alphabet that applies to my name, “K.” “This young man doesn’t know where he needs to vote.” The volunteer shouted across the room. She was the kind of woman you want to imagine when you think of the stereotypical grandmother baking you a batch of clichéd chocolate chip cookies. Even still, it’s always a little unsettling, at first, to be a woman, and hear yourself referred to with masculine pronouns, no matter how sweet the voice that it comes from. I could’ve said, “I’m a woman” and I have before, but I didn’t. Because it didn’t bother me that she mistook me for a boy, as long as she didn’t know that I was really a woman. In fact, under the right circumstances it could be really hot. I pulled my shoulders in to disguise my breasts even more than the sports bra already did. If she’d discovered her mistake, then we’d both have a reason to be embarrassed. Her, because she’d feel like she insulted a stranger, and me, because she’d feel that she’d insulted me.
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“Your driver’s license?” She asked. Fear ran up my belly and into my chest, because I knew we were about to have “a moment,” me and this stranger. I handed her my driver’s license and waited for the look of shock that would surely spread across her thinning skin when she realized her mistake. At this point I’d moved past worry and felt a little smug, a child with a secret. I held back a little giggle watching her write down my name in the box at the end of the list of computer printed names “Christa Kreimendahl.” She looked up at me. “Do you need help?” Another volunteer interrupted. “No,” she smiled at me. “This young man just moved here. I added him to the list. Now, honey, you go right over there, and that gentleman will give you some paperwork to fill out.” In semi-shock, I moved down the row of volunteers to the gentleman with my paperwork. That sweet woman had looked at my driver’s license, wrote down my name, and still only believed what she saw, and what she saw was a young man. Episode Two: A Canadian Dream Ana, the fierce Vancouver fashionista whose super powers include her ability to appear unquestionably straight, confided in our heroine, a dream. She’d dreamt there was a man, and she knew him only in her dream. They had memories of a life together. After dinner, the man asked her if she remembered the paintings she’d painted of him. He pulled each one of them out of ether. “Yes!” She did. “I remember when I painted these paintings of you.” Only when she looked at them carefully, Ana saw that she had painted a woman. Yet somehow, the woman was the man. One of Her Own “That’s because she’s not a lesbian.” That’s the reason my friend Ana gave me for why I had been mistaken for the opposite sex. Yes, of course that’s it, the confused woman had not been a lesbian and, therefore, was unable to pick up on the subtle clues that I was indeed a woman and not a boy. It’s a queer thing. Some queer life takes place in a bar. Maybe not as much now as back in the day, but it’s still significant. Other establishments, like the gay coffee shop slash bookstore on
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Howard Ave., usually don’t last long before they close down. There are also occasional happenings, special times, Pride which is the anniversary of Stonewall, Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, dances at the Gulfport Casino, a protest at the Hillsborough County Commission. However, every weekend you can find other gay people in a queer bar. Even though I don’t drink or do drugs, for social reasons, I occasion the bars. Last Friday was one of those nights. I went alone to listen to a musician. The bar is called The Hideaway. They claim to be the oldest lesbian bar in the state of Florida. It’s a dirty little place. Two pool tables stuffed into one half of the building. A square shaped bar squeezed into the other half. The chairs around the bar are faux leather swivel chairs with a full back. They’re so tightly placed next to each other that when you try to rotate yourself out from the bar, to let’s say use the restroom, you can’t help but become intimate with your neighbor, legs on top of legs, a knee crammed into a thigh. When I sat down in one of the few available seats I could feel the history alive. I was sitting in a seat that generations of dykes had sat in. Not to mention smoked in. The Hideaway is one of the few bastions of smoker friendly bars. Even with the door open to the outside the smoke is overwhelming. I concluded that a couple of days or so off my life span is a small price to pay to sit in a room knowing that every woman there loves pussy. The seat I chose was perfect, directly in front of me was the musician. She didn’t have a stage or a band. It was just her, her electric acoustic guitar, a microphone and one amplifier. During intermission, I made my way over to a woman who was selling shirts and cds. I’d noticed her, I thought she was the most attractive woman in the bar, and that’s not really saying much. The Hideaway is the place that seasoned drinking lesbians go to. They have the faces of women who have lived hard. She was in her late thirties with dirty blonde hair, thin. There was a woman already talking to her. She had dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. She’d been drinking quite a bit. I’d seen her knock back two Jell-O shots and drink about three beers. I wouldn’t have considered her feminine, no, she was a little butch with long hair, certainly a top. She sees me before I can even talk to the merchandise woman. “Who’s this curly top boi?” She asks, or at least that’s what I think she asks, but instead she asked, “Who’s this curly top boy?” Turning to the merchandise woman who I was just about to hit on she said, “That’s your son, isn’t it?” “That’s a lady.” The blonde corrected her. I punctuated her statement by grabbing my tits.
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“I’m so sorry.” She grabbed my arm the way alcoholics do when they want your undivided attention, “I’m so sorry.” Her face was earnest. “That’s okay” I said. “I embrace my androgyny.” She grabbed me again, “I’m really sorry.” I didn’t feel so embracing all of the sudden. It was the severance of this woman’s face as she apologized to me. “How old are you?” asked the Blonde. “26.” “I’m 40, well 39. I guess I could be your mother.” “We don’t even look alike.” “No.” I did the math on my way back to my seat. She would have had to have been a pregnant 14, possible. My calculations complete and my ass in the seat, a pack of the boys came in. Four of them, they’d stopped in from the guy bar next door, The Haystack. They came in yelling for Jell-O shots. I looked over at them and one of the guys gave me a wink. Episode Three: One of The Boys? “That’s it!” My friend Karin told me the next day. “People are so stupid. There were some really butch women there, right?” “Yeah.” “They just put out that male energy directly. Then they see you. When people can’t figure you out, when they can’t put you in a category. You’re like a gay guy cause you’re more feminine than masculine.” Hmmm… Star Buckaroo I am a barista at Starbucks. The cute bi-girl with the gigantic round cork in her earlobe stretching it unnaturally is infatuated with me because she thinks I look like Bob Dylan. She laments that we, again, will not work together because her shift is ending as mine begins.
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“They’re trying to keep us apart.” She teases me. Bastards, I think, but I just smile at her. Moments after she leaves, an extremely young and extremely skinny gay boy with his entourage of teenage fag hags, depart the mall and enter my Starbucks. I watch him whisper something to one of the girls while he eyes me. I think he is telling her that I am a lesbian. But he isn’t. “He’s so cuuuute!” He keeps saying out loud. “I think we should stay here a few more minutes.” They all sit together and he continues to send sexual messages to me telepathically VIA his eyeballs. Again, I hear “He’s SO cute!” The girls giggle at him and his boldness. I’m flattered, really, that this cute young guy would think that I am so attractive. After all, I apparently do look like a young Bob Dylan. I mean aren’t queer boys the most superficial of all of us humans? “Byyyee!” He calls to me as he saunters out, back into the mall. “Ce Ce” I tell my friend “I got hit on by a queer boy today” “That’s ridiculous!” She tells me. “You have GOT to embroider your name on your apron so this will STOP!” Episode Four: More from the Canadians In Toronto there was Rose, a 47 year-old playwright and a fiction writer, a neurotic beautiful mess. “Mad” is what she called herself. She took our heroine to a play called Matilde, a French play about a woman, of the same name, getting out of prison for sleeping with a 15 year-old boy. Afterwards, she took our heroine home and perhaps she imagined being Matilde. “I’m sending you a poem I wrote,” she told me, on the phone, in her over the top, breathy Marilyn-esque way. “It’s about androgyny.” Rose’s poem, like lots of others things about her, is highly erotic. It’s about the speaker being turned on by a woman, who upon first appearances, looks like a boy, but knowing all along that underneath her clothes, hidden, is the same sex that the speaker has, and it’s that that gets her so hot.
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In Front of The Lord in The Seven-Eleven Sometimes I smoke a cigar. “The spirits like Tobacco,” I read in an anthropology book about tribal hallucinogens and DNA. When I purchase a cigar I am not uppity about it at all, I buy a Dutch Boy from the Seven-Eleven on Davis Island. I go there enough to be friendly with one of the male clerks. He grows and sells lilies. Occasionally, he hangs them in the store so people can buy them. On this day there is a new guy. He has a scruffy red beard. I tell him the cigar I wish to buy and he asks me for my ID. I’m used to this because I look so young. “No fuckin’ way!” He calls out when he reads my drivers license. I smile as if to say Yeah, I know. Crazy isn’t it? Then he calls to the male clerk who grows lilies, “No fuckin’ way this dude is older than me! This guy’s older than me?” He wants to show the flower guy my ID but flower guy just walks by uncomfortably. He knows I’m a woman and he’s embarrassed. I’m not. I’m shocked. Again, someone has looked at my driver’s license and still insists on making me a boy. And once again, I find myself rounding in my shoulders so that the red bearded kid will not notice my breasts, realize his mistake and apologize to me. Apologizing to me would mean that there was something wrong with me. That the biggest insult you could give to a woman would be to say she looks like a man. No Apology Necessary I prefer the reaction given to me by the teenage girl working at Target. I had a handful of clothes to try on, and no one was stationed at the dressing rooms. On top of that, all the doors were locked. I waited patiently while the young clerk took her time to walk over to me. “I want to try these on.” I told her. “Give me a second.” She replied in a flipped voice. The clerk unlocked the men’s dressing room and looked at me with her hello! Asshole face Are you there? “THIS is the MEN’S room.” She told me, obviously annoyed. “Okay.” I said unemotionally. “But I need the women’s room.” “Oh.” The clerk marched over to the Women’s door and unlocked it. “Well, I don’t know!” She scolded me as she stomped off. Isn’t that great? How dare you she was saying to me. How dare you not make your
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gender known to me, confuse me, make me look like a jerk. This is a wonderful thing. To Be Continued‌
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Reminiscence Sabrina Saer
Gelatin Silver Print
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