Vol I, Issue XI - October 2014 by The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society

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THE RAIN, PARTY, & DISASTER SOCIETY IS A WORKSHOP-BASED ONLINE LITERARY PUBLICATION THAT STRIVES TO GIVE REPRESENTATION TO NEW IDEAS AND THOUGHTS, TO CHALLENGE THE READER, AND TO QUESTION COMMONLY ACCEPTED OPINIONS, VALUES, ETIQUETTE, AND IDEAS. WITHIN OUR PAGES, YOU MAY FIND: WORKS THAT TACKLE HOT-BUTTON ISSUES, WORKS PRESENTED IN A STYLE THAT IS OUT OF THE ORDINARY, WORKS THAT PRESENT THE READER WITH A QUESTION OR DEBATE, AND WORKS THAT BREAK MAINSTREAM RULES WITHIN THEIR GENRE. ALL OF THE PIECES YOU FIND ON THIS SITE HAVE BEEN THROUGH OUR WORKSHOP PROCESS, DURING WHICH THE RP&D EDITORIAL STAFF WORKS CLOSELY WITH CONTRIBUTORS TO HONE THEIR VOICE AND HELP THEM TO PRODUCE THE BEST POSSIBLE WORK FOR YOU, THE READER, TO EXPERIENCE.

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Table of Contents

CHECK PLEASE, Tom Loughlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 UNSIGNIFICANTLY, OFF THE COAST, Claire-Madeline Culkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 DAUGHTER, DECONSTRUCTED, Janna Vought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 AURAL CONSISTENCY AND FRIENDS IN PERDITION, Adam Robinson . . . . . . . . . . 11 BUREAUCRATIC PATHOLOGIES, Howie Good . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12 DEAR G—, C. Noel Carson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 OBITURARY, JBMulligan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14  WOMAN TEACHING WOMAN, Jim Ross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 INFAMY, Bruce McRae . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 A PROFOUND TEACHER IN DISGUISE, Carol Keegan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 SCRAPPY PAWN, Robert Lang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 DEAREST ANGELINO, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 THE RAINS, L.F. Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 THE END, C. Noel Carson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS, Brad Garber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 I KNOW WHAT I LIKE, Linda Wisniewski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 THAT’S STUPID - A PARABLE, Adam Kane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 7:46PM SEPTEMBER 8, Krista Farris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 GROUT LINE, Kate McCorkle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 RAY’S GARDEN, Glenn Wootton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 AND YOU ARE…?, Laurel Nakai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 ELECTRIC SOCIETY, Scott Malkovsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 SONGS ABOUT WITCHES, Adam Robinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

EDITORIAL STAFF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

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CHECK PLEASE  Tom Loughlin

I am of retirement age, which I define as being eligible for Social Security. I don’t intend actually to retire for a few years yet. My future is currently tied to a campus construction project which has an anticipated two-year completion window. This is a case of rank sentimentality on my part. But I like to finish things I start, and I have a weakness for bringing things to a neat, tidy conclusion. The opening of a new building and having at least one semester to teach in it before I take that final exit (stage left, singing all the way) feels right somehow, like the passing of the baton in a relay race. Or I could really get crazy and decide that a 30-year career is a good round number, which would add another two years to the wait. Naturally, it could all go sour, and I’d be left like Moses, staring at the Promised Land but not being able to cross the River Jordan. Regardless, the end of my career as a teacher is, shall we say, nigh upon me.

So here’s my plan for retirement: I intend to check out as completely from society as possible. I want to be left pretty much alone by just about everyone and everything. I have no plans to go zip-lining in Costa Rica, or eco-cruising off the Alaska coast, or any of that type of shit. I may travel, sure, but no doubt I will stick to the traditional kinds of travel. I want to see parts of Europe, mainly cathedrals, temples and castles. Things that have lasted. Things that have endured. Things that have withstood the test of time and the brutality of humanity. I would like to walk the west coast of Ireland - alone. I would like to see Japan, particularly the countryside, and perhaps the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. That’s about it.

So apart from the absolute necessities, I am planning to end my active involvement with the human race. Basically, I just want to sit on top of my retirement savings and Social Security payments and pretty much tell America to “get the fuck off my lawn.” I don’t want to agitate for social change, get involved in any political movements, volunteer for any good causes nothing. OK, I might deliver Meals on Wheels, because I like driving, and it will get me out of the house every day. But if the food is lousy, then they can forget it as well. Why do I want to check out in this manner? Here are a few reasons.

Let’s start with the hypercritical nature of society. In America today, the culture of hypercriticism has taken over society in the form of the internet, social media, and mass media in general. It doesn’t matter where you go today or what you do; someone, somewhere, will feel duty-bound to criticize you merely for going about the business of your day. Context is now irrelevant. If you stand in line at McDonald’s to order a hamburger, and perhaps you take just a little too much time looking at the menu to decide what you want, or maybe you order the item the wrong way, or you ask a question before you order, some young person with his iPhone at the ready will tweet out what an idiot you are (“Old guy at McD takes 4ever to order. wtf? #oldpplsuck”). People no longer know how to have calm, rational conversations about differences of opinion. Moral outrage and extreme self-righteousness appear to be the new normal. Lately I find myself being extremely careful of what I say anywhere but my own home, for fear that someone will become morally outraged at my opinion and feel duty-bound to inform everyone on social media what a jerk I am. People have lost their jobs over incidents such as these. I’ll be glad to surrender mine for the freedom it will bring for me to express myself, but you won’t find me expressing it on social media. I intend to check out of that scene 4

as well, with the exception of family and very close, trusted friends who understand my context.

The next reason has to do with the incredible level of ignorance prevalent in modern culture. On the whole, people are nice, well-intentioned, and basically good. But god, are they dumb. The American oligarchy we currently have is determined to ensure that Americans grow up stupid and needy. Public education is not only a disaster, but a never-ending battleground of ideology. A liberal education that enlightens people has been crushed under the weight of the incessant, unending drumbeat favoring getting an education so as to get a good job. This makes the oligarchs happy, because as long as you continue to accept this idea, you’ll never gain enough knowledge to question the status quo. Poll after poll reveals how little Americans know about their own history, the various conspiracy theories they subscribe to, and the discredited medical information they seem to believe. No less a personality than Bill Maher agrees with me: I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. (Huffington Post, May 25, 2011) I am ill equipped to live within such an ignorant culture, so there is little sense in trying.

The never-ending insistence on selling me things, coupled with the continued invasion of privacy, has also become too much. The government is relentlessly spying on me, and corporations are forever trying to mine my personal data through whatever means possible to get me to buy more and more stuff. Right now I am trying to rid myself of any and all debt I have so as to be better able to resist the siren song of commercial America. I am in the process of trying to scale back my transportation needs (I ride my 70MPG scooter as often as I can), my computer needs (transitioning from $1200 MacBooks to $200 Chromebooks), and housing needs (accelerating mortgage payments). When the end of my working career comes, I hope to own just about all I’ll need for the basics of living for the future so I can ignore American materialism. Thankfully I never bought into materialism much anyway, so I really won’t be missing much here. There’s little I can do in terms of keeping my data private, but at the very least I can try to make myself appear to be an uninteresting and undesirable target.

Which brings me to my final reason for checking out - the apparent lack of any significant social change over the past 50 years. Now, I have tried up to this point in my life not to be that person who says life was better back when I was growing up. Life was different, and I feel safe in saying that personally I liked it better, but that doesn’t mean it was better. Many things today are much better. Cars are far better today; better gas mileage, better build, safer, and more reliable. Personal health care is also much better for those who can afford it, keeping us not just alive, but healthier and more active as we age. It’s the Golden Age of Ballparks, with dumps like Comiskey and Municipal Stadium being replaced with the likes of Camden Yards and PNC Park. But with the exception of such outliers, the general bell curve of the entropic nature of the American experiment indicates that the curve is decidedly on the downslide. We remain a racist, sexist, misogynist, narcissistic culture. We continue to get involved in wars 5

that send our young people to die for specious causes. People continue to pollute the planet and waste its resources. Religious fundamentalism of all kind continues to breed ignorance and conflict. Consumer capitalism continues to rob from the poor and give to the rich. Various myths such as the “American Dream” and “American Exceptionalism” continue to pollute our politics and our economy. I was foolish and naive enough, growing up in the 60s, to believe that we had addressed those problems. Apparently no one learned the lessons, or failed to effectively pass them on. Or they were simply ignored. At any rate, the evidence would suggest it’s foolish to try again. And at this age, I haven’t the energy - or frankly, the desire - to try beyond writing about it. I don’t have that much time left.

Haikus. Birds. The company of my wife. The silence of a night on the back porch. Gazing at a full moon from a camp in the woods. Hiking some trails. Children. Family. A few close friends. Food, shelter and clothing. Baseball. Books. An essay here and there. Maybe the occasional play. Puttering about the house. Laughter. Check, please.

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THE END

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UNSIGNIFICANTLY, OFF THE COAST Claire-Madeline Culkin

I don’t remember you, really. And this not remembering is different than forgetting because time moves forward and we get older. I no longer remember, because I have tried so hard, for so long, to forget. Sometimes, when I’m applying my make-up in the morning, or getting dressed, I notice the ghost of you in my bone structure and stare for a moment, stuck whenever it was that you left me; noticing the way my forehead is so long, the way my cheekbones are high and my chin so sharp; how this all makes the whole of my face look angular, much more so than my mother’s, even though I have always been told I look like her twin. I do, except for a few details that I mostly neglect to notice, until I do, and then I look, to myself, like a stranger.  I do remember Aunt Pat: the way she was always excited to see me. “Claire-The-Bear,” she’d say, grasping my face to kiss it, cradling my chin for a long moment before letting me go. I remember how Aunt Pat loved me. How she didn’t have to say it. How I could tell by the way she looked at me that there was only one me and I was it and she wanted to spend time with me and make me laugh and listen to my laughter as though if I were to stop laughing she would miss that sound that only little me could make.  I don’t remember if you ever looked at me that way. And this not remembering is different than willfully forgetting. I couldn’t remember, even if I wanted to.  I do remember, though, how one time, we were in a diner: you, Michael, Olivia, and me. I don’t know how old I was; I was older, but younger than fourteen, because that was how old I was the last time we spoke. Michael and Olivia were little – they will always be little, as far as I know. We were sitting in a booth. I had been seated opposite you at the table. We waited. Before our orders had been taken, but after the water had already been put on our table, the waitress came over and introduced herself. Then she stood there for a moment, with nothing to do, just looking at us; she was looking at all of us, together. Then she said something, quickly, about how we looked like such happy family. “Those are all’a’yah kids,” she said to you, pointing at Michael, Olivia and I in one swift motion with her index finger. Then, dismissively, as she turned to go, she said how she couldn’t get over the striking resemblance of each of our faces.  You smiled, glee that you could not believe stretched clear across your face. It made you look strange. You were looking directly at me—as directly as you could—and it was still as if you were not making eye contact. You were looking at me as though you couldn’t get over it either —like you couldn’t quite comprehend what it meant: I was your daughter. I love the way faces look up close. That is to say, I love the way faces look, when they are looking at me from up close. It’s better than looking in a mirror, because it feels like something, which is to say that I feel like someone.

" Some days, especially when it’s grey, I like to be in Babylon, where I am from. I like to drive to the parking lot on Montauk Highway where the sky always seems to break open, off to the west side of it, above the Pathmark and the Petsmart situated there. I like to get a coffee from Starbucks and park my car so that it faces southward, towards the Starbucks and the highway, 7

so the part where the sky opens up is off to my right. I like how my windshield frames all of this perfectly: how I can watch the cars on the highway drive clear across the road in front of me, and the cars driving through the Starbucks drive-through come towards me before turning left, or right, joining all the other cars, beverage in hand, sailing off into their day. I like how I stay; I like how still I feel.  Even the beach-weeds planted in the parking lot, there to define the traffic patterns, sway sharply like the air that moves them, jerking all around. I like the way sight moves you— makes you feel something.  Sometimes there is music with me to keep me company; other times, silence, until I open my window to let a little of the air in and break it with its razor sharp chill. I like how the salt in the air from the ocean fills me up, the way, when you hold a conch shell up to your ear, the ocean fills your ear up, and then your head, and all of the hollow spaces in your heart that a moment ago were empty. I like how, for that moment, that’s all there is—how, for that moment, that’s all I am. I love when a boy who is not yet my lover looks at me for the first times before he knows my body completely. I like when that boy looks at me, but doesn’t look me in the eye, except for only sometimes, but mostly looks at the shapes that make my face up—how it has circles, and squares, and how my forehead, and my cheek-bones, and my chin, make it look more angular than it otherwise is. It’s like they want to figure it out; it’s like they want to figure me out. I like it when I sit on top of that boy when he’s laying on the bed, the way my legs bend, kneeling on either side of him, child-like, and so adult, my hands splayed flat and firm on either side of the pillow where his head rests, eyes open wide. I like how I can watch him watching me from up high—how, after some long moments, before anything happens, he calls me gorgeous.

“Claire-The-Bear” she’d say, and  “let-me-look-at-that-face.” All those words strung together like that, the way  “I love you” is, and how it means  everything.

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DAUGHTER, DECONSTRUCTED Janna Vought

I carry an image of Daughter's   face before the change,   a choice I didn't make, never   wanted, return to the site   of her conception (monstrous coupling):   Medusa's nest. I prayed secular prayers   for a girl (no boys allowed   in my tree house). A girl:   friend/joy/love light.   Jesus/False Prophet spoke lies   in my picture book bible, promised   to bless me with something small   and quiet. Instead, I bore a fractured   doll, creature trapped like a fly   in the web of my desire.   Daughter, made from material   not approved by the FDA,   all of my failures   combined, my pale marked child, tattooed   with three faces of Eve.

What a mess I've made,   thought I did everything   right: I didn't drop   her body down too early,   let her drown in the sewer,   read Good Night Moon (moon come   down, abandon the light, follow   the train of black holes), Cinderella,   and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie   doing all of the voices, on my lap,   her small arms waving with delight.   I never left her   in a locked car to succumb   to heat, solar flare ups of her chromosomes   pluming in black mercy.

Something else manifests (Beast)   thickens her thoughts like gelatin.   Punish Daughter.

Nobody knows what's inside,   understands her trouble functioning   9

in echoed pandemonium.   Demons spear her ears with steel spikes   and porcupine spines. The tide rises/ gathers   madness, stiffens her with fear.

Daughter screams until she spits   blood, confused pronouns, misaligned   speech pattern, and lettered blocks.   She tears down language with stacked towers   of Babel, every cryptic code requires a puzzle   box to decipher. Daughter hears songs   of her own creation, accompanied   by the cicada orchestra nesting   in her wildflower garden, ignorance   a cruel blessing/protection:   stares, whispers, false sym-   pathy, concern, condemnation, disgust,   shame.

Satan plays chess with me   for Daughter—he the king, her the pawn, me   the rook. My stone walls   crumble beneath   his strength as I try to protect her—   Checkmate   What I lose is gone   forever, solid specter (ghost-girl)   in my eye. I buried her baby shoes   beneath the floor. Pine boards buckle   no matter how many times   I nail them down.

Time passes. I watch Daughter slip away.

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AURAL CONSISTENCY AND FRIENDS IN PERDITION  Adam Robinson

“White and black.  You looking for the sun, boy?  The sun doesn't shine down here.” PJ Harvey, “Plants and Rags” Long after the descent, he began the way he'd concluded. He awoke drifting face down, staring languidly into the nebulous body of water below him. He did not gasp for breath but instead took the water slowly into his lungs and questioned his status. Feeling the water inside himself, he no longer feared death—but now he had no reason to. Turning himself onto his back, he stared into the coal-black sky where nothing was visible but darkness; no sun dared illuminate his surroundings. He continued to drift until the water spit him out onto its coast, where he maintained his position but no longer moved with the ebb and flow. He looked into the sky, searching, hoping for something other than the darkness that surrounded him. As if hearing his silent plea, the sky produced a rod of lightning, briefly illuminating the darkness, just for him, and only once. He upped himself from the shore and wandered for what could have been hours, days, or even years, until he came upon a high-pitched sound, comparable to that of whistling. He could not see the source, but there was in fact a whistle, and the creaking of a rocking chair set in perpetual motion. He approached the sightless sounds and questioned them. “Is the source of these sounds an animate being, or are they simply floating this plane?” The whistle stopped but the creaking continued, and after minutes, maybe days, of inflected silence and indelicate creaking, a laughing voice replied, “It ain't floating, and it belongs to me, but I'm not sure if animate's the right word, boy.” “Then what might the right word be?” he responded. “Hell if I know,” the voice replied, the voice of an old woman. “I'm just here,” she said. “I'm just here, and I don't question it anymore.” “Where might here be exactly?” he asked. “Here is here,” she said. “And I've got no established name for it, but I think we both know where here is.” They both fell silent, but the creaking continued. He settled his back onto the cold, damp ground beside the creaking and once more assumed the drifting position, staring off into the opacity. The whistling continued and he stared into the sky, and they stayed this way for a span of time I can’t measure and will no longer try. At some point in that eternity, he spoke once more. 11

“Why is there no light here?” he inquired through the darkness. “Why should there be?” she retorted, with some vague sense of genuine interest in his question. “I guess I don't know. But I do miss the sun.” “Don't we all. But the sun ain't gonna shine here. I don't think I'd want it anymore if it did.” “But what about the flickers of light? The lightning? How often does that happen?” The woman laughed. “Lightning, huh? Did you see that when you first woke up?” “Yeah.” “Boy,” she said. “That was hope leaving you.”

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BUREAUCRATIC PATHOLOGIES  Howie Good

Admittance requires your supervisor’s signature, the dust from another planet, dolphins that spout music, obscure, anxious errands (sticking stamps on letters you’ll never mail or spending the end of August at the Hotel Ozone), photos of naked women in strange positions, half your autobiography, a belief that the day is longer than the night, and that night is the machine that makes everything disappear – the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec, manifestos, conceptions of space, regrets, the punk era, hat check girls, you.

DEAR G—  C. Noel Carson

Dear G---, I never told you this, but it bothers me the way lily pads linger under the surface as they grow, drowning themselves to reach adulthood. I’m afraid I know how they feel. Peering into the watery depths makes me shudder at the paradox: They sink their roots into one aspect and show their faces in another. These ancestral flowers, they must be doing something right to have stubbornly remained. Invaded, even. Difficult to deracinate. They remind me of you. The truth is, when I got the call, I thought you might visit me. It seemed as natural a conclusion as the funeral. They said that you were gone, but we both know that’s not really true. You changed elements is all—traded form and substance for the infinite. You reached the apex; you emerged. You yourself believed in the beyond, and so will I. I have suspected all along that our consciousness is what keeps us under—our perception is made for a lighter material than this sluggish wakefulness. Life is not our element, though it’s where we grow. Perhaps you have merely blossomed to that place that conjures past time and mystery, that determines our future, where the hunch of your back, the gnarled hand on the cane shuffles toward me, every step and shift telling the circle of your life. The stories of your own visitations planted this expectancy, but you made us come to you. Never mind; you’re busy walking on water. They say that these nymphs signal a July birth, and July is when you left. Perhaps death is merely growing up into ourselves, falling back on our roots, pollinated by the beetles and living off the light filtered through some submerged place. Always with the green hands unfolding like a page, reaching up to say, I’m here, I exist, I am waiting. They soften my grief, these water lilies, the flower of tears. Their beauty reminds me that loss is merely this: That day I leaned in to kiss your cheek, and you told me something unexpected, special, just for me. A bit of your soul unfolded like a bud, filled me up like yellow nectar. Now, your words float like pollen in my mind, hazy; they look up at me, refracted, from a lost world, reaching up to sweeten the memory, offered on the thin skin of your palm. They dart like dragonflies, too skittish to land, and to this day I can’t remember what they were.

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OBITUARY  JBMulligan

The next day, seen by others,  will be seen. Birds will flutter,  mice will scurry, leaves rattle  like dice in a cup. Streetlights  will trade: green for yellow for red.  People will watch and talk and scratch  and I won't be there. So what.  There will be there, seen and tasted,  and anything I did will be done  the way the sky does clouds.  Forever has so many pieces  and to have been just one  is enough to leave a smile  that disappears like a cat.  Nothing dies while anything is.  There's enough in that.

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WOMAN TEACHING WOMAN  Jim Ross

“I don’t know how.” “I’ll show you.” “I can’t believe this is happening.” “Believe it.” “There’s someone else here.” “Ignore it.” "Slower. Slower." "You just tell me." "My mother would kick you." "I’ll hold you.” “It's cold in here." “You’re feeling warmer already.” "Poor Richard." "Think about you." "I threw up." "You’ve been spitting a lot." "I feel less guilty now." “You said you couldn’t handle it.” “I knew you’d be interested.” “The party: should we go back now?” “The party’s here. The party’s us.”

INFAMY  Bruce McRae

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They’ll find you in some rundown boarding house, years on,  having long slipped the noose, gone rogue, as it were.  One moment you were a shining example, an ideal citizen,  and the next you’re being examined under every suspicion.  ‘America’s Most Wanted’, the newspapers called you then,  and it felt good to be desired, to have purpose –  finally mummy’s little soldier was getting the attention he deserved. With necessity for his bride, the average Joe might as easily escape notice.  It’s easy to be ‘disappeared’, to become one of les invisibles.  Until, that is, the spotlight of celebrity is suddenly turned on you,  your capture a live media event, a pay-per-view extravaganza,  your door kicked in, you in slippers, handcuffed on your way to the can,  photographed in a daze while flinching in front of an opened refrigerator,  your hair a frightening mess too, what remains of your dignity rumbled,  a mumbled statement you all-too-hastily prepare misquoted   in righteously breathy editorials for some time afterwards,  even the lawyers you’ve been assigned blushing and ashamed.

A PROFOUND TEACHER IN DISGUISE Carol Keegan

The wisest teachers with the greatest impacts on your life don’t always promote themselves with academic robes, credentialed resumes or guru reputations. In fact, looking for them solely in those guises narrows your field of attention so much that you fail to spot the real sages. The trick is to be open to wise words and examples, regardless of what you’ve been told a wise person should look or sound like.  It was like that with me, when Frandzy Baudalin showed up just two months after my stroke in 1973. Actually, he’d been there all along - sitting at the same dormitory table, three meals a day for the past year and a half. I hadn’t prepared any explanations for my lengthy absence, but the day I returned to campus and our old table at the cafeteria, the limpness up and down the left side of my body and the wooden cane in my right hand spoke for me: Carol was back to grad school and her old room at Bromley Hall in Athens, Ohio. Back, but not really back.  The stroke had nailed me, stopped me dead in my tracks. Suddenly extricated from old life plans and routines, and literally unable to run from pre-stroke tensions in my life, I’d returned to campus with no firm understanding of what had happened to me or how to go on. I had just lugged my new, broken body back there anyway, not knowing what else to do.  Walking up to that table again - three-legged this time - it seemed my job was to convince these old friends to recognize me without feeling repulsed. If ever I knew my old self had died and that I must muster up some new life for myself, I knew it in the pall of returning to our old table in the cafeteria. As Frandzy, Margaret, Bob and the others saw me coming, I knew they were shaken by the liabilities I now embodied for them (“If that could happen to Carol…”), and I felt the power of their needing not to be me. Not to be in any way like me. My sudden illness had immersed me in taboo experiences of neardeath, powerlessness, second-by-second uncertainty about my future. Not even a definitive etiology to explain my fate or show me how to prevent recurrences.   Here I was now, moving toward the old dining hall table without any comforting storylines to soothe their fears. Worse, I had not yet made sense of the stroke in my own mind, so I was raw with vulnerability to anyone else’s interpretations of my story. From now on, every time I brought my new body and its dark learnings into a conversation, I was certain innocent healthy “normals” would see little but the death in me. Until one old friend at the table proved me wrong.   Frandzy’s bodily presence at the table was unchanged: this huge-smiling, cerebralpalsied undergrad from Brooklyn, with the clenched hand and severe stutter was his old self. Before the stroke, my tweedy, supercharged grad student persona had seemed to signal we would never have much in common beyond our Bromley Hall dorm address and the habit of choosing the same cafeteria table. But now, my tripod-self seemed to elicit a new, deep alliance.   A new Frandzy emerged, determined to make me his protégé. He enrolled me quickly in his hard-won, noncredit life-survival course. He set a bet with me: by April, when my parents planned to visit, Frandzy would have weaned me off the cane as a surprise gift to them. He would take the cane from me, to ensure I never willfully relapsed.   As a 24-year-old who’d fallen one Saturday morning from Ph.D. candidate/adjunct dance faculty member to stroke survivor/physical therapy student, learning to walk again was tantamount to learning to live again. Having fallen so far, now I could appreciate the determination with which Frandzy had mastered both tasks repeatedly himself. So I

accepted the deal and just set about taking each step he called out of me. Every day after dinner at Bromley Hall, this mismatched pair walked the campus. Practicing my new walk, the second I’d acquired since birth.  Quite the pair we were, walking the hills of Athens, Ohio - first with, then without my cane. Male/female, black/white, mathematician/social scientist, afro with mustache/ ballet bun at the nape of the neck, Brooklyn/Scranton, explosive stuttering/bourgeois diction, clenched joints/ataxic limbs. An odd, odd couple immersed in our shared progress. Wandering the campus more focused on the process of moving than on our arbitrary destination each night. All around us were centers of learning for every conceivable field of study except the life-reinvention course Frandzy was helping me improvise.   Looking back 40 years, I can see Frandzy was really one of my earliest life coaches. And I like to think he gained as much from the confidence I invested in him. I hope he knew I chose to study with him because I respected (as much as I needed) the rich life curriculum he had salvaged from all his surgeries, physical therapies and determination to defy the odds society had stacked against him. Desperately, I tuned into my own need to learn how he’d done it. My pre-stroke self had never seen Frandzy’s survival skills or his generosity.  The model for our work during those early evening walks may have been focused on physical health concerns, but over the years I kept coming back to the more fundamental questions our course of study explored: When we’re at our neediest, how do we open up our field of vision enough to spot the wise ones whose counsel would best sustain us? Once we’ve mixed their stories with our own and conceived new ways of understanding our dilemma, to whom can we convey our discoveries? How do we pass along the generosity, find others who remind us of ourselves and the deep connections we too once needed in order to go on living? Answers to profound queries like these can appear, if we just throw open the drapes in our daily interactions with people on the periphery of our lives. At first glance, they might not look like philosophers, but with a little imagination, we can choose to pause, absorb and emulate their rich stories of survival.

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SCRAPPY PAWN Robert Lang

For Patti Smith Embattled troubadours  evolved the spiritual renaissance  revolving around the record player.  Breaking rural confines,  flocking for the pure grime of New York;  to find that beat,   the rhythm of their root. Treating language as an art:  drawing words to a page.  Ignoring their downtrodden misdemeanors  and the perspective of speech.  Staring at a word so long   that logic seems misspelled.   Penetrating sonic interpretations  in the raw energy of desire. Reveling in the gag reflex of a crowd.  Breathing through a heckler’s cutthroat.   Dancing the jitterbug on their knee-jerk reactions. Channeling inner beauty covered in vomit.  Lying in a pool of blood  busking their withered hearts.  Wandering debris,  snuffing complacency,  braying the joy of their malcontent. Redefining language  pouring through her hands.  Reinventing theology  through her duo-sonic.  Expressing the abstract  within the realm of sound.   Her pitches reecho  tongue flapping in perfect time.  Standing tall towards the gnarl  possessing the noble conceit of the future.

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DEAREST ANGELINO Adrian Ernesto Cepeda

Did I give you a hunger  for a shake while you were   floating   I jolted you   awake as you were   baking   late last night?   Or did you really believe   you made her earth   move when you were deep   inside her   busting   volumes,   jiggling   with delight? Don’t worry if at first   you don’t understand   stuttering   dialects   in my sidewalk talk,   think of me in Amusement Park language,   I’m like a Six Flags   warning   of a roller coaster but unlike that ride   you will experience me   on the ground   will definitely have you   praying   to a deity   you instantly rediscovered while   kneeling   so profound. Just don’t get caught bungee   jumping   or you might end up  hanging   the wrong way on some  highway overpass;  and you might want to avoid   getting wedged in L.A. traffic,   and maybe find yourself

on some scenic overpass   instead of getting stuck after one or two jolts, you will   get used to my   trembling—   P.S. please, don’t listen   to those   skyping   end of the world   PC pastors who claim...  I don’t seismically appear   because of California’s devotion   for LGBT love, Mary Jane dispensaries   or Tinsel Town values.   Don’t be after shocked,   I also spellchecked   your Hollywood land sign.   Point your quivering fingers   triggering   inside this epicenter   of this editor-at-large;  my name is San Andres,   and when you hear the sky is   tumbling   you’ll always know it is my fault.

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THE RAINS L.F. Young

The sound of the rain on our tin roof was usually so calming, but today I find myself in a foul mood. The paper is late. I don’t blame Bradley; he’s a good boy, he has perfect aim with the paper, always landing it right on the front porch, weather permitting. Today, I find myself envious of his youth, the way he pedals his bike so vigorously, never slowing his rapid legpumping drive. Damn him and his energy! I ruffle yesterday’s paper and feel the pain burn in my swollen knuckles.  “Frig this!” I growl to the paper as I shove it down between the cushion and arm of my wellworn La-Z-Boy.   “Do you want a cup of tea, Martha?”  Silence. She must be in a mood, too; this friggin’ weather could plant a burr up anyone’s behind. I head into the kitchen, fill the old steel kettle and sit it on the right front burner. Always the right front burner—it’s the only one that works half-decent on this old stove. I look at my reflection in the dull stainless steel of the kettle. You whiskered old fool, I think to myself.  “You’re just as handsome as the day I walked down the aisle toward you. What was it, forty-five years ago?”  Forty-seven years. Forty-seven years ago. My God, where did the time go? It was so hot that day, even the flowers in the church were drooping.  “There’s the whistle for the kettle.”  “The old kettle, just as good as the day we bought it at Woolworth's. How long ago was that?”   I notice a small shake in my hand as I pull the ancient teapot from the cupboard. Best not drop the pot; it’s Martha’s mother’s from God knows how far back. I throw in two teabags and one for the pot before filling the rose-painted porcelain with steaming hot water.  “Let the tea mash for a bit, Harold.”  “Remember when I asked you about that expression? In my house, we always said ‘the tea has to steep.’ Must have been the English influence you had growing up, you said. Remember that?”   “Bring the tea, darling.”  “Oh, the tea, it should be ready by now.”  The words “World’s Best Grandma” stare me in the face from the cupboard shelf, and for a minute I get a little choked up. You old fool! What is wrong with you today?  That tap-tippity-tap on the roof is going to drive me right round the bend. I carefully set Martha’s tea down beside her chair. She must have gone to the washroom, I think to myself as I head back to the kitchen.  Now, what in the world did I come in here for?  Oh yes, the tea. It must be ready by now. I pour myself a cuppa.  “Martha! What was the name of that tea we used to drink back in the day?”  She must be in the shower. “I can’t hear it for all your tap-tippity-tapping!” I shout to the ceiling. My mug sits there on the stove top, steam slowly rising above the rim. Why am I in such a foul mood? I got up this morning feeling pretty good, I went out to get the paper… Oh, the paper! “I wonder if it came yet,” I say to the kettle on my way to the living room.  One look out the front window tells me there’s still no paper. There seems to be no shortage of rain, though; rivers of water course down the street gutter to the rapidly overflowing drain.  The aged leather of my armchair forms a welcoming envelope around my old butt as I pick up the remote for the TV. One by one, I click through the channels, and one by one they reveal that there is nothing on the ancient television set worth watching.  22

“Martha, will you hurry up in there? I gotta take a pee,” I holler.  My hand falls to the newspaper tucked between the cushion and the arm rest. I fumble through the pages with my arthritic old fingers, wincing at the pain this damp weather has caused, and open the paper to the obituaries. I can hardly breathe as I read the printed words.  “Mrs. Martha Spencer passed away suddenly after a brief illness. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the Heart and Stroke Foundation.”  “Martha?”  The steam is barely visible above an untouched mug that reads “World’s Best Grandma” in bright red letters. I notice the silence now. The rain has stopped.

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THE END C. Noel Carson

You’ve missed the point again, dear. You don't save money buying discount junk.   No one admits that persistence is rape's whore brother,  the one they congratulate. In marketing, the sign  is a self-fulfilling lie. I did not wish  to be comforted with the object of my fear.  Not because of boredom, as you surmised,  but of drowning. It's not for the one sucking seawater   to be objective about swimming.  "Breathe" is disastrous in the wrong situation.  Let me set the record straight: The epitaph   of respect is "winning." #YOLO is only funny   to the one who survives. For us,  love is death's ugly cousin, the one  people fuck with a smirk  since she's only a maid to the bride.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS Brad Garber

I hear the bees are dying. I knelt down to pet the dog. What an incredible time -- that span of time. Sort of like the infinite mirror trick, and I see myself as I was milliseconds after the “Big Fucking Bang.” Did you ever notice how long it takes Captain Crunch cereal to become soggy in a bowl of cow juice? And, after that, I’m in my yard masturbating into the geraniums, a glass of water in my hand, hating water. What in the fuck is water, anyway? Two balls attached to one ball, acting like jello or Nuru Nuru gel…Why would one give a shit about neighbors? I’m not sure where this train stopped. I lost my bags, and the doctor was laughing at my symptoms. Lettuce – iceberg – is like my family. If you plaster unpalatable crap with blue cheese, it rocks! But, my neighbor came by, carrying a rubber chicken. Three people froze to death on Mt. Hood. Fruit flies are making out in my empty whiskey glass. I was at the café, eating flowers. What do you do with an empty bottle of Jack Daniels? One candle farted out of the bottle and lit my cat bed on fire. It was like the ping pong ball trick on “Priscilla.” Let me tell “what is really going on,” he said, after gnawing on the chicken with his gums. And the geraniums looked into the mirror of my stream. In Iran, a mother of three was stoned to death for fucking. I found this, an ancient implement thrown away, after digging the roots of dandelions out of my skin. The magnets of the planet will be passing through.

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I KNOW WHAT I LIKE Linda Wisniewski

One man’s art can spark this woman’s giggle fest. It happened just that way for my husband and me. Steve is a docent at an art museum in the small town where we live. He is also an artist in his own right, a potter and sculptor in wood, metal and clay. When he invited me to join him to view a sculpture exhibit in a nearby college town, I happily agreed. It was a cold and dreary day, like all the days of February here in the Philadelphia suburbs. An hour’s drive north to a town we both like, Steve driving and me beside him, knitting an intricate scarf – what could be more relaxing, peaceful and ordinary? We arrived at noon on Friday and parked in an almost empty lot. After a walk up a short hill to a rust-red brick building, we pushed open a huge glass door and entered the gallery, grateful for the short walk and the warmth inside. A young woman sat reading a textbook at a reception desk. There was no admission cost, she said, and, pushing the book away, pointed out the free brochures and poster of the sculpture exhibit. If we wished, we could buy a fortydollar catalog, but her downcast eyes and rueful smile told us she didn’t expect to make that sale. Steve and I turned to face the rest of the high-ceilinged room, about fifty feet square. Two gigantic metal sculptures arrested our attention. “Each Man Is Adam” was at least twelve feet high, and the other towered even higher, maybe thirty feet toward the ceiling. Both pieces were undeniably phallic, and so abstract I couldn’t find a way to relate them to their titles. Steve, thinking like an exhibiting sculptor, asked the receptionist how they had been brought into the building. She said she didn’t know. “They must have had to get a large truck,” Steve murmured in an aside to me. “Probably a crane, too,” I said as he knocked on “Each Man” and found it was hollow. I wished I had been there to see it installed, I thought to myself. That might have been more interesting than the art. We were the only people in the gallery besides the student, and our footsteps echoed as we walked. Also part of the show were drawings in felt pen on cream-colored paper, framed in black. I laughed incredulously at the male centric art and its titles. “Man with Seven Penises” looked like two legs with three bananas on each foot and one banana at the crotch. Yes, really, they looked just like bananas. Laughter bubbled up inside me. “Female Figure with a Big Vagina –Male Fantasy,” I read. No kidding. “Female Human Figure – Cut Off Nipple” – ouch! I stepped back and cringed. “Male Fantasy” (a line drawing of fat legs intertwined). What?? Now I was giggling uncontrollably. “Sexual Orifices” (thickly outlined black ovals at the middle and opposite ends of a long figure that I strained to see as two human bodies.) At this point, the giggles got the best of me. Tears filled my eyes as I turned to see if the receptionist was watching my immature and 25

unschooled-in-art display. She was studying the textbook open on the desk in front of her. Good. Steve raised his eyebrows and shook his head at me. He reminded me that he had gone with me to see Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum. “So,” he said, exasperated, “ceramic vaginas on plates are fine art, but this,” and he gestured at the drawings, “is so funny?” Chicago’s Dinner Party is an art installation I had long wanted to see in person. Thirty-nine places are set representing mythical and historical women. Many of the plates have flower-like sculptures to represent the vulva. Now I remembered my two grown sons and husband backing away from those dishes, half embarrassed or bemused. I didn’t know and didn’t ask, so engrossed was I in the names of each woman and how the artist had represented her on a plate. I told Steve now, in case I hadn’t already, that Chicago’s work is an important feminist icon. And those were vulvas on her plates, not vaginas. They are symbols of female power and beauty. This male sculptor’s work, in contrast, made me wonder what he was trying to say. In a later online search, I found a curator’s fairly innocuous mention of “sensuality,” with the major focus being the artist’s reclamation of steel and other industrial materials for his art. The feminist work The Dinner Party honored women who had been discounted through the ages. With this older male artist, I wondered: what was his point? Why show abstract stylized sexual organs? Perhaps that was why most of his work was “Untitled.” Chicago’s work was homage to women heroes, woman’s history, I proclaimed to Steve. “The man was just making art,” he responded. “Is that not okay?” Well, yes, I suppose it is. For some people. Accompanied by my diminishing giggles and my husband’s eye-rolling, we opened the glass doors and left the building, headed for lunch.

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THAT’S STUPID - A PARABLE Adam Kane

“That’s stupid.”  It was the first full week of seventh grade, the first time I heard, “That’s stupid.” Not that three-day week that started the Wednesday after Labor Day. The first week of seventh grade that included a Monday.  “That’s stupid.”   Occasionally, someone will say, “That’s stupid,” and also laugh, either before or after. What they actually mean is, “That’s actually pretty funny, but we’re in a public place, and I don’t want to make a scene.” This time, however, “That’s stupid,” meant exactly that.  Sometime over the course of the weekend between the first Friday and the first Monday of seventh grade I had lost the ability to make people laugh.  The classrooms were significantly darker in seventh grade than they were in sixth grade. The reason for this was the freak thunderstorm that swept through upstate New York the week prior. The middle school, in its rural location, was still without power. The school was running off generators, so only half of the fluorescents were functioning, and they had put water coolers in the hallway and duct tape over the water fountains. It was temporary, but also completely ridiculous. No one never learned anything on the Friday before the first Monday of school, or the first Monday of school for that matter. Why not postpone until the “boil water before drinking” order from the state government was no longer in effect?  But I was sure there was also a symbolic reason that seventh grade was so dark. After all, the bus stop was much further away, and I had to get on earlier in the morning. And as we waited at the bus stop on the first day of school, a high schooler with a mustache was smoking a cigarette, calmly discarding the evidence before the bus was in sight. Seventh grade was dark and scary.  My default response to this darkness was my sense of humor, which was about as dark as a Paul McCartney song. (Other than “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”)   There was a girl in my homeroom, whose name I don’t remember, that had gone to a different elementary school. She didn’t knock me off my feet or anything, but at the very least, she was a new audience. And we’d be in the same homeroom plus study hall or gym every day, so I might as well make a new friend, I remember thinking.  “New person. Hello.” I said upon meeting her the Wednesday prior, complete with a strange salute gesture I made instead of offering a handshake. I wanted to be friends with her, but I wasn’t so sure about touching her at this point.  She laughed, mimicked my awkward gesture, and said “Hello, other new person.”  (This is probably why I don’t remember her name. I did learn her name at some point, but a lot has happened between seventh grade and now.)   I was confident, then, on that Monday, when I said, “Hey ‘New Person.’” Except I used her real name.  She turned her attention away from her school-issued assignment notebook. I was given one too, but it was already lost at the bottom of my locker.  “Why do girls wear makeup and perfume?” I hesitated while she considered the premise, raising my right eyebrow like John Belushi. Only, I didn’t know who John Belushi was.  She furrowed a second and cautiously said, “Why?”  “Because,” I choked back a laugh, so as to maximize the impact of the punchline, “they’re ugly and they smell bad.”  I mugged at her like Johnny Carson for an interminable amount of time.  The 12-year-old student of comedy that I was could tell you that the joke worked on a 27

couple of different levels. For one, it was a joke without a pun or clever word play, so it was unexpected. Also, why would I tell a joke like that to a girl I had just met if I actually thought they were ugly and they smelled bad? That would be in poor taste. Plus, there was something disarming about a harmless-yet-funny insult.  Go ahead, fit me for my Friar’s Club jacket, I would have thought, had I known that I needed a jacket to get into the Friar’s Club.  She blinked once. I’ll never forget it. It was both instinctive and deliberate, as if she believed I would cease to exist when she reopened her eyes. But instead, she opened her eyes and saw me again, now with both eyebrows raised, really trying to sell the punchline. Her head tilted microscopically to the right, and without actually moving her mouth, she quietly said:  “That’s stupid.”  Clearly, she just didn’t get the joke, I thought. I should explain it to her. That would ease the tension a bit. I stammered out something about the different levels of the joke, and the theory behind why it was funny. It’s too bad I hadn’t heard that saying from E.B. White: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”  It also didn’t help that I hadn’t yet dissected a frog. That did happen on a Monday in seventh grade, but not until the sixth or seventh Monday.   After what must’ve been hours (keeping in mind that homeroom was only seven minutes long), I took a breath and choked out:  “I…um, I’m sorry.”  She looked at me quickly and made a noise, barely audible.  “Hm.”  She went back to her assignment book. The bell rang, and we both got up from our desks and went off separately down the half lit hallways. The next morning, I sat somewhere else in homeroom, making sure to keep my head down when she walked past. -Know your audience.

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7:46PM SEPTEMBER 8 Krista Farris

Satan gave this day the finger, shot dragon flames and puffs of dark violet at the sky.

We were all supposed to be in touch with our feelings and crap after such a melancholy day of rain,  go shuffling on in with everyone else, heads bowed to ladle soup in the kitchen and settle into fall,  accept the inevitable chill and seek to better humanity and all of that in our dusky hours.

But we stopped in our tracks when the sun fired one final blast behind the house

and the marvelous contradiction  turned the staid oak canopy to whorish orange lace,  lured us outside and into ourselves

for an instant

we forgot about the hours of torrents wept by the sky,  and the piddly puddles from the intermittent drizzle.

We begged the devilish star,  pleaded with its aura to prolong the heat

and fuck Mother Nature  so she’d forget the seasons  and let summer blaze  defiantly through the night.

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GROUT LINES Kate McCorkle

Go; ask Virgil. Go. Ask old blind John. Go, with your lyre and pomegranate seeds. Go ask any of the shades. See, they step from the flame—and you thought this was just smoke, smoke and mirrors. My eye to the floor, cheek on the cool, cracked tile. I can’t see the flame, but hear the sonorous voice. My eye pressed to the grout line.

" It is a canyon. It is a viaduct. The Los Angeles River. Instead of muscle cars there are hair and dust. And my blood. It pools in the grout, in the river. It is a river. And we are crossing the river, Virgil and old blind John and me. The tile is so cool on my cheek. I just want to sleep, too, sleep. You fool, you fool, why did you come?

" It was too much. Much too much. I felt it all indifference, the silence gonging in my ears, apathy infecting the blood. That was before I even heard the news. Those people shackled to a hot water heater; the three girls hidden in hell; the slaughter of the innocents. Breaking waves of cruelty and pain. I drowned and had to sleep.

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Nothing works anymore. Stop the nausea and invasion. Sever the connection for good. It is nothing. A small thing. De nada. I will flip the pencil. I will erase myself. And that is my blood with the hair and the dust and the fingernails. And it is nothing. There is nothing but the dust and dirt and blood. It was too much, being connected.  Go, and ask them, the voice persists. Virgil and old blind John. I don’t have two bits.

" It is an aqueduct, a river, and it is all too much. This is what I try and explain to you later. You, who never knew me then, who only knows me now. You shake your head in disbelief, wondering how I ever could have been that person, that selfish. I didn’t see it that way then. Former smokers are the worst when it comes to other people smoking. They’re such arrogant, self-righteous pricks, don’t you think? I bet they even buy organic. I’m not one to judge. I am telling you because I’ve been there. I’ve seen the place between, and it’s only when you try to check out, then climb out and realize how close you came, that you start to value life. We are not something to be used or used up and thrown away. And I don’t know if that’s divine or a soul or merely altruism, but there’s a reason.  I knit you. In your mother’s womb, I knit you. And maybe the reason is that you have to help me too. Or there’s someone else you’re supposed to help. 31

" Before there were stars, I knew you.

" You can think what you want. But do you believe that I believe? Is that enough? Before time began, I formed you.

Go. Go and ask Virgil and old blind John. Or you could ask me. That would be a hell of a lot easier.

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RAY’S GARDEN Glenn Wootton

At the base of the stairs to and from the Main Street Skytrain Station, just off to the west side, there once was a smoker’s area. A concrete flower planter was perched at its centre, featuring a small rhododendron bush encircled by a ring of pansies. The planter stands waist height to an average adult and is about 3½ to 4 feet circumference. Many hundreds or perhaps thousands of people had seen the planter and even enjoyed the colours and fragrances of the flowers contained in it as they passed by or stopped for a smoke. Yet very few stepped close enough to notice the plaque on top of one side of the planter that says “Ray’s Garden.” And fewer still are the number of people who can tell you who Ray was. Ray would come around once or twice a week to sweep and hose off the area around Terminal Avenue, between Main and Quebec Street. It is a passage for pedestrians, cyclists, and skateboarders, and the entrances to the headquarters of Vancity Savings Credit Union. He delivered papers to some of those businesses as well. At night the area around the bus stop is used as a public washroom, so Ray helped keep the block fresh and clean. Ray was a soft-spoken man who smiled easily, and we never heard him yelling or cursing. He stood about six feet tall, had a thin, wiry build, short grey hair, beard and moustache. He often came to work in a disheveled state, with messy clothes and a day or two of stubble on his face. He frequently stank of stale booze, even early on a weekday morning. There were also times when it was obvious he had not washed for several days. But people spoke kindly of him and were willing to tolerate all of this from a man who was trying to escape poverty. His death, an apparent murder, according to those in the know, was the result of severe blows to his head from a blunt object, and came as a bit of a shock to many who knew him. Ray’s Garden was a memorial to him, placed there by the citizens and people who live and work in the neighbourhood. Now that is all gone. It was all demolished in the project designed to improve the public transit system. The deli, the coffee retailer, the stairs and platforms, and the memorial garden for Ray. Soon, too, the memory of him and all that was once there will come to an end as well.

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AND YOU ARE…?  Laural Nakai

Once I was a blanket, woven together with many threads.  My only desire: for the strands to fall into place. To unveil the finished masterpiece.  To be whole.

Then,  in one frantic burst, the yarn was cut

and I melted,  into a pile of  scattered colors

scraps of

almost, what if,  never was  collected on the floor  and  as  the  pattern  receded  with  each  dissolving  row

I felt the pieces  fall away  like mud scraped off my lungs

I gasped

stretched out untethered and shook my fists.

I was not a blanket.  I was not the thread.  I was not the empty space.

I was the unravelling.

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ELECTRIC SOCIETY Scott Malkovsky

Clarissa recalls the days  she would push  a blue square block  into a blue square hole,

the green triangle  denied entry  waiting to find its home.

She notices  there’s nothing symmetrical about adulthood.

Her youthful dreams block isn’t the proper match  for responsibility manor  and inanimate objects have replaced her texts.

She listens  as electrical outlets teach  that it’s always the man who leaves.

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SONGS ABOUT WITCHES Adam Robinson

Shreds of displaced and forgotten lines hang heavy on my heart and head, like hexes or cryptic direction writ in Latin, or some other dead, foreign language only pedants and occultists stand learning.

And neither of which am I; so the sense they'd make to witches and ghouls, ivy-league professors and so on.... Well, they're likely more qualified to decipher what's on my mind than I am.

But if it supports my case in the least, lends me any plausible reasoning for my current condition:  I've spent countless nights staring at the moon.  Some of which wishing it would stay for the remainder, embedding its craters in the curves of my brain, guide me crashing with its tides and howling at its face.  And some writing songs about ghosts who've transformed into witches, who've left town for sunshine and porcelain dishes; as I walk into the walls of the house and not through them, trying to see the future so I can write it all down—the time and the place, forthcoming tallies on the walls from more nights spent awake, and, above all, how those nights don't contrast much from those that fall now.

And I now know for certain that the rooms are only as clean as your mind at the time.  You think you're doing well until you've realized you're suffocating beneath a mound of dirty clothes; until you've witnessed the fish eat its shit, because you've forgotten to feed it for hell knows how long.

So, I've written a letter, I'm not sure how to send. And I'm curious to hear your response.

If you pretend long enough, close every door and close yourself off, can you become invisible? Can you walk through walls, scrawl them in warnings without lifting a finger. Can you disappear without saying goodbye?

I'm walking into walls. And no matter how hard I try, they won't let me through. They say you can do anything you put your mind to, but the bruises on mine beg to differ.

And I can feel the years on my skin, like crossed out calendar dates clung to the bone beneath two decades of aging film. ISitting, waiting and staring at the walls, smeared in old graphite from the hideous scrawl—erased, re-written, erased again. Foggy patches of gray here and there, looking a lot like sad Michigan summer.

All because I've seen the future. Not literally, but I've felt it. I've forecast what's coming based on what's already happened. If those trends have anything to say about what's in store (and I believe that they do), well, here, with these walls, these smudges and these moth-eaten blankets; here is my best bet.  Every note scratched to self written where I'd see them, I've wiped away, marked void and non-applicable, and what's left of them say that even when I think I have the answers: I don't have anything, not nothing at all.

I know an older man, maybe early fifties, fought in a war, I guess. Put his life on the line for reasons of his own, reasons I don't know. And now, he waits and buses tables in a tiny, squalid Chinese restaurant. Lurched over chipped porcelain plates, bowls of hot and sour soup, one can't resist wondering what bridged the gap for him between then and now, and I wonder why, after all this time, I've not asked his fucking name.

And I've not once thought to ask which war it was he fought in, because, given his age, I don't know, maybe it should be fairly obvious.

There are plenty of wars going on, though, simultaneously, all the goddamn time. So maybe it doesn't make much of a difference. Maybe it's even irrelevant. There are wars over seas and wars unseen inside of strangers you see walking up and down the streets, clearing booths in Chinese restaurants, sleeping next to you, walking next to you, riding on broomsticks when nobody's looking.  There are wars inside of you, plenty inside of me.

A world full of wars, and they're happening all around you.

Keep that in mind when you're sitting in the dark, writing your songs about witches.

There were a lot of things I wanted to be,  just didn't know how,   didn't have the wherewithal to strive for.

I was never too good for you,  but you weren't always too good for me.

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Editorial Staff

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Jordan Rizzieri is the 90's-loving, extremely tall founder of The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society. After a having brief love affair with Western New York, Jordan now resides on Long Island, NY. She holds a degree from SUNY Fredonia in Theatre Arts (aka lying before an audience) with a minor in English (aka lying on paper). Jordan briefly experimented with playwriting (The Reunion Cycle - 2011 Buffalo Infringement Festival) and her mother's primary caregiver for over two years. She has been running a caregiver's blog on her experiences since 2011, as well as publishing essays on the topic. Now, Jordan spends her daylight hours arguing with her boyfriend's cats and at night takes on the identity of pro wrestling's sassiest critic, The Lady J. When she's not watching pro-wrestling or trying to decide what to order at the local bagel shop, she is listening to Prince and writing letters to her pen pals. Feel free to contact her with questions about the Attitude Era, comic book plot lines involving Harley Quinn, The Twilight Zone and the proper spelling of braciola.

FICTION EDITOR Adam Robinson is an aspiring writer and barista languidly skulking the wetland void of Western Michigan. Following acceptance in 2012 to Grand Rapids' Kendall College of art and design in pursuit of an education in graphic art, his love for language and literature was made priority. Now, an English major on sporadically perpetual hiatus, you can most often find him pulling shots of espresso, keying long paragraphs in the dark, secluded corner of a local café, or taking lengthy walks through the dense Michigan woods conveniently placed in his own backyard. Monotoned, fond of the semicolon and existentialist literature; listen closely and you can sometimes hear him beseech advice from the ghost of Dostoevsky (who tends not to reply).

NON-FICTION EDITOR Jennifer Lombardo, Buffalo, NY resident, works full time at a hotel in order to support her travel habit. She graduated from the University at Buffalo with a B.A. in English in the hope of becoming an editor. When she isn't making room reservations for people, she reads, cross-stitches and goes adventuring with her friends. She is especially passionate about AmeriCorps, Doctor Who and the great outdoors. Ask her any question about grammar, but don't count on her to do math correctly.

POETRY EDITOR Bee "Internet Coquette" Walsh is a New York-native living in Bedford–Stuyvesant. She graduated from SUNY Fredonia in 2010 with a B.A. in English Literature and a B.S. in International Peace and Conflict Resolution. Reciting her two majors and two minors all in one breath was a joke she told at parties. The English Department played a cruel trick on her and pioneered a Creative Writing track her final year, but she charmed her way into the Publishing course and became Poetry Editor for the school’s literary magazine, The Trident. Bee has spent the past three years trying different cities on for size and staring into the faces of people in each of them who ask her about her "career goals." An Executive Assistant in high-fashion by day, you can find her most nights working with the V-Day team to stop sexual violence against women and young girls, eating vegan sushi in the West Village or causing mischief on roofs. Run into her on the subway, and she'll be nose deep in a book. She holds deep feelings about politics, poise, and permutations. Eagerly awaiting winter weather and warm

jackets, she’d love to talk to you about fourth-wave feminism, the tattoo of the vagina on her finger, or the Oxford comma.

Contributors

"Tom Loughlin lives in the economically depressed city of Dunkirk NY, on the shores of beautiful but polluted Lake Erie. He works on occasion with the theatre community in Buffalo NY. He has a few more years left teaching at the State University of NY at Fredonia.

Claire-Madeline Culkin is an author and student of psychoanalysis. Her writing explores the way we give ourselves a sense of historicity in the telling of stories, as if we are little God’s, creating more earth with our words. In her academic studies, Claire-Madeline explores the basic human desire, in the telling of them, to survive the past; to defy time; to be made immortal. To read more of stories like these, like her author page on Facebook. She can also be found on Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Janna Vought is a poet, nonfiction, and fiction writer with more than 50 pieces published in various magazines and literary journals. She graduated from American Public University with a bachelor's degree in English and from Lindenwood University with an MFA in creative writing. She is an Association of Writing Professionals Intro Journals Project in Poetry nominee for 2013. Janna is married and the mother of two daughters, the eldest who suffers from chronic mental and developmental illnesses. She can be found on her website, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Adam Robinson is a 20-year-old barista and aspiring writer, currently existing in the wetland void of Western Michigan. Languid toward vocalizing, but a self-proclaimed observer; what thought not outwardly spoken, accounted for tenfold in a journal hidden beneath a couch cushion, maybe scrawled onto a restroom wall. You can find him on Tumblr.

Howie Good's latest book of poetry is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014) from MadHat Press. He has several poetry books forthcoming, including Fugitive Pieces (Right Hand Press) and Buddha & Co (Plain Wrap Press).

C. Noel Carlson has a bachelor's degree in creative writing from Western Michigan University where she held an editing internship for Third Coast literary magazine. She has fond memories of growing up in a cold climate, and blames her lack of small talk on too many years among snowmen. She has held many different jobs cleaning surgical tools, serving food, writing local news, cleaning up grammar, and traipsing around big corporations pretending to be someone important. Despite all that, she insists she has done a lot of interesting things, like hunting for a fallen space shuttle in Texas and paragliding while horribly ill in Jamaica. Her current goals are to climb a mountain in Colorado, chase her restless spirit to the next adventure, and find beauty everywhere. Her work has appeared in The Swan Children and on her blog.

JBMulligan has had poems and stories in several hundred magazines over the past 35 years and has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as an e-book, The City Of Now And Then. He has appeared in several anthologies, including Inside/Out: A Gathering Of Poets; The Irreal Reader (Cafe Irreal); and multiple volumes of Reflections on a Blue Planet.  39

Jim Ross wrote poetry and creative-nonfiction in his 20s, buckled down to raise a family and pursue a prolific research career, then two years ago started to re-connect with who he’d once been. He began this poem when he was 26. During this revival, he’s published in The Atlantic, Friends Journal, Pif Magazine, the Sun and South85 Journal. He splits his time between Silver Spring, MD and Berkeley Springs, WV.

Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician and a Pushcart-nominee with over 900 publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His first book, ‘The So-Called Sonnets’ is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit TheBruceMcRaeChannel on Youtube.

Carol Keegan is a 41-year stroke survivor, whose writing interests focus on the life-altering dimensions of stroke. Following her recent retirement, she began contributing occasional articles to Stroke Connection magazine, and conducting online stroke survivor writing workshops for the American Stroke Association. In 2015, she will demonstrate this new "writing-to-heal" method at the first U.S. conference of young stroke survivors.

Robert Lang is a graduate of the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford. Bronx bred, he stays in his happy place rambling prose with aspirations of an MFA in Poetics. Robert tweets and tumbles everyday cadence.

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is an L.A. poet whose work appears in the new True Romance Poems collection, 1000 Tankas for Michael Brown, The Lake Poetry, Edgar Allen Poet Journal # 2, Fukushima Poetry Anthology, Spilt Ink Poetry, Luna Luna Magazine’s Latino Poetry Project, Love Poetry Lovers and in the soon to be released, Men's Heartbreak Anthology and Poetry in Motion’s collection Poems to Fuck To. He is currently enrolled in the MFA Graduate program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

L. F. Young lives in Rural New Brunswick, Canada, with his wife and a house full of rescue dogs and cats. His book for middle grade readers, titled Ryan's Legend, was written in 1995 and was only published when he retired from the plumbing trade in 2013 by Morning Rain Publishing. He now enjoys his passion of writing, and has several short stories, a play, and many poems inspired by a trip to South Africa.

Brad Garber lives, writes, hunts for mushroom and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. He fills his home with art, music, photography, plants, rocks, bones, books, good cookin’ and love. He has published poetry in Alchemy, Red Booth Review, Front Range Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, theNewerYork, Ray’s Road Review, The Round Up, Meat for Tea, Gambling the Aisle and other quality publications. 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee.

Linda C. Wisniewski writes for a local newspaper in Bucks County, PA. Her credits include literary magazines as well as several anthologies. Linda’s memoir, Off Kilter: a Woman’s Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother and Her Polish Heritage, was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press. Visit her at www.lindawis.com and follow her on Twitter.

Adam Kane is a pop-culture enthusiast, essayist, and recovering actor living and working in Boston. You can follow him on Twitter, where he tweets about the Red Sox, Syracuse basketball and the line at Starbucks. 40

Krista Genevieve Farris writes, runs, plants, digs and raises three sons in Winchester, Virginia with her husband. She earned an MA in Anthropology from Indiana University and a BA in English and Anthropology/Sociology from Albion College. Her recent work has appeared inRight Hand Pointing, Cactus Heart, Tribeca Poetry Review, Literary Mama, The Literary Bohemian, The Rain, Party and Disaster Society (yippee!) and elsewhere.

Kate McCorkle works part-time as a freelance writer and editor because life just isn’t crazy enough with four children under eight, a husband, and dog. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Apiary Online, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and Dark house Books. She also contributes to the blog livequestions.org. Kate lives outside Philadelphia with said menagerie and swims to stave off insanity.

Glenn G. Wootton currently lives in the city of New Westminster, which is part of the Metro Vancouver area in British Columbia, Canada. He is married to Mary Joy Dela Cruz- Wootton and has one 6 ½-year-old daughter named Joyce. He has had one article published in the Spring 2013 issue of BC Nature Magazine, "The Wildlife Rescue Association of BC." He is also an active member of Royal City Literary Arts Society in New Westminster, BC and the Silver Pen Writer's Association, which is an online workshopping forum.

Laurel Nakai is a freelance writer, editor, singer-songwriter, and children's bedtime-story teller in New Jersey. She is addicted to coffee, old Elvis movies, and NaNoWriMo. Follow her creative work and musings at EverydayDivine, and ask her about her favorite beach down the shore on twitter.

Scott Malkovsky is an actor living in California who found a love for poetry after taking Creative Writing classes in college. On occasion, you can find him on Twitter.

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