Issue 50: What Sustains

WHAT SUSTAINS / 50TH ISSUE

Spring 2019 $15

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ru’mi-nate: TO CHEW THE CUD; TO MUSE; TO MEDITATE; TO THINK AGAIN; TO PONDER

Ruminate is a nonprofit, reader-supported community chewing on the mysteries of life, faith, and art. We invite slowing down and paying attention. We love laughter. And we delight in deep reading, contemplative activism, telling stories, asking questions, and doing “small things with great love,” as Mother Teresa said.

PLEASE JOIN US.

FRONT COVER : Ruminate front covers from Issues No. 1-50.

BACK COVER : Ruminate back covers from Issues No. 1-50.

For details on cover artists, visit www.ruminatemagazine.org.

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friends

YOU R G EN E RO U S D O N AT I O N S

allow us to keep the lights on and the fire going for the artists, writers, and readers of our community. This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Spring 2019 donations gave us the financial support to make this issue of Ruminate possible.

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you!

BENEFACTORS

Darwill, Inc., Steve and Kim Franchini, Kelly and Sara McCabe, Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, John Zeilstra, Randall J. VanderMey, Brandon and Kelly Van Dyke, Jeff Marcus Wheeler PATRONS

Grace Church, Judith Dupree, Keira Havens, Katie and Ryan Jenkins, Stephanie Rossi, Lisa and Ralph Wegner, Melissa Wheeler SPONSORS

Lynda Smith-Bugge, Judith Deem Dupree, Sophfronia Scott, Jessica John, Katie and Tim Koblenz, Robyn Lee, Audrey Maydew, Cheryl Russell, Travis Schantz, Amanda Williams, Anne Pageau, Paul Willis, Mal King TO BECOME A FRIEND OF Ruminate, VISIT

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staff

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brianna Van Dyke SENIOR POETRY EDITOR

Kristin George Bagdanov FICTION EDITOR

Raven Leilani NOTES EDITOR

Josh MacIvor-Andersen VISUAL ART EDITOR

Carolyn Mount BLOG EDITOR

Charnell Peters NONFICTION EDITOR

Madison Salters MANAGING EDITOR

Rachel King CIRCULATION & PUBLISHING

Amanda Hitpas PROOFREADER

Sarah Wheeler PRINT + WEB DESIGN

Scott Laumann ASSOCIATE READERS

Carly Joy Miller Amy Sawyer

contents

POETRY NOTES

Editor’s 8 Readers’ 10 Artists’ 32, 56 Contributors’ 82 Last 86

FICTION

Sasha, Henry Hietala 44 The Estate Sale, Dara Passano 68

NONFICTION

Throwing a Hail Mary, Vina Mogg 18 The Dampening of Desire, Laura Bond 26

VISUAL ART

Seen and Unseen, Jennifer Cronin 33–36 If I Were King, Margie Criner 37–40 The Lilies How They Grow, Emily McIlroy 57–60 The art of Hanna Vogel 61–64

16 Love, Circular Saw Blade, C. T. Salazar 17 Noah’s Nameless Wife Takes Inventory, C. T. Salazar 23 Eve Begun, Arah Ko 24 Re-Genesis, Cameron Lawrence 25 Psalm 23 (II), Michael Angel Martín 30 Descendants, Emily Stoddard 41 Dear Love Poem, Dear Memory, Bess Cooley 42 But We Were Seawater, Monika Zobel 43 Safeway, L. A. Johnson 54 Small Time Paradiso, Mark Wagenaar 65 The Next Day There Were Birds, Amalie Kwassman 66 The Body’s Next Room, Sophia Stid 67 The Dash, Amy Pence 81 Ending with a Line

by Wisɫawa Szymborksa, Anya Krugovoy Silver

2019 Kalos Art Prize

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

JENNIFER CRONIN

MARGIE CRINER

Seen and Unseen

If I Were King

HONO RAB L E MEN T I O NS EMILY MCILROY AND HANNA VOGEL

F I NA L I STS MIYA HANNAN

ELIZABETH JORDAN

SUSAN HART

LEON KORTENKAMP

ANDREW HENDRIXSON

KIM RICE

PHIL IRISH

ANNE RYNEARSON

JEAN SBARRA JONES

ANGELICA SHAW

2019 Kalos Art Prize FINAL JUDGE BETTY SPACKMAN WRITES: O N S E E N A N D U N S E E N : “A sensitive and skillful response to environmental issues related to place. The images in their deliberate act of disappearing into the ground of the canvas echo the threatening demise of the land and community they reference. The work has maintained integrity as painting while also addressing a relevant and timely global problem in focused local detail. They draw attention to danger in what are subtle, compassionate laments and in so doing are effective and provocative.”

O N I F I W E R E K I N G : “This work is a clever blend of formal design and raucous imagination. The pieces both seduce and disturb with the combination of interior and exterior worlds that suggest perhaps futuristic survival units, protective pods that hold the narratives of self and society. They are skull and brain, mind and memory, society and individual, viewed through peep show openings that ask the viewer to enter the miniature stage sets as though simultaneously reliving the past and seeing into the future.”

B E T T Y S P A C K M A N is a multimedia installation artist and painter who has worked and exhibited both in Canada and internationally. She has a background in theatre, animation, performance art, and video art. Her work has often centered on cultural objects and the stories connected to them. Spackman has been a guest speaker at conferences and galleries in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Mexico and has written and illustrated art-related books. Spackman has taught studio art at various universities and community arts programs for over twenty years and has also developed The Open Studio Program, an alternative community education model for emerging artists. She is cofounder of The Fort Gallery in Fort Langley, British Columbia, Canada, a cooperative gallery in its thirteenth year of operation.

Spackman currently has a studio in Langley, BC, and is working on a painting installation about the collisions and connections between faith and science around issues of creation and posthumanism.

editor’s note

TH Í C H N H Ấ T H Ấ N H was asked in an interview “Is there a purpose for wearing the robe other than to clothe your body?” He replied, “To remind yourself that you are a monk.”

I wonder if one day you or I might also be asked a question about reminding ourselves of who we are. And you might say something about tying a strand of yellow yarn around your finger or tattooing the lines from a poem across your forearm, wrapping saffron silk and sashes around your body, wrapping your hijab around your head, hanging your crucifix over your heart. You might say something about embodying this time and space and presence, lest you look down at your hands or heart or up at your head and see no reminder. Lest you forget that you are sacred.

And you or I might go on to say that if we still miss our own embodied reminders, there will be a morning where we will wake early and see how the sun is rising and sending streams and sashes of purple into the dim blue-lit sky. Or there’ll be a night where we fall into bed and meet the story that has been waiting for us, an afternoon where we turn a corner and greet a well of wonder.

I might add something about this dream I hold, that these pages continue to be a reminder for fifty more good issues, how the very best stories and art and poems remind us of who we are, why we matter, our longings, our deepest work this day.

With gratitude for your wonder,

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WE’D ALSO LIKE TO GIVE

a special thank you to the generous and brave writers and artists who donated their time and skills to our 50 Hours of Ruminate Happenings, a celebration of our 50th issue with live, spontaneous creations made for and with our community.

WRITERS AND ARTISTS

Samuel J Adams, Levi Andalou, Allyson Armistead, Michelle Arnold Paine, Maggie Blake Bailey, Chaun Ballard, Anne Boyle, Kristin Bussard, Thom Caraway, Doug Cornett, Laurel Dowswell, Jen Stewart Fueston, Kate Gaskin, Melody S. Gee, Kristin George Bagdanov, Charity Gingerich, Keira Havens, Clemonce Heard, Catherine Hervey, Monica Jimenez, Rachel King, Hannah Kroonblawd, Matthew Landrum, Raven Leilani, Josh MacIvor-Andersen, Trinh Mai, Katie Manning, Kevin McLellan, Carly Joy Miller, Carolyn Mount, Alex Mouw, Leslie Pearson, Charnell Peters, Shann Ray, Melissa Reeser Poulin, Marilyn Robinson, Tania Runyan, Natalie Salminen Rude, Madison Salters, Karoline Strickland, Brianna Van Dyke, Jason Villemez, Mark Wagenaar, Danielle Weeks, Amanda Williams, Jessica Yuan

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EVENT, VISIT

ruminatemagazine.com/happenings

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readers’ notes ON WHAT SUSTAINS

Sitting on my daughter Elizabeth’s bed, I trace a fingertip over the new baby’s stillcrusty cheek, then across my daughter’s closed eyes—a motion that soothed her as a girl. She half-sleeps in euphoric, delirious exhaustion after twenty hours of laboring to deliver this tiny alien from womb to world.

I understand we are in the presence of a miracle in a way I could not comprehend when I had my children. I was overwhelmed then—too tired, sore, and consumed with responsibility. Now I watch, as if from a distance, as Elizabeth, my seeking, sassy child transforms into a clear-eyed mother; husband Brian into a father; me into grandmother; and Steve into Papa. Papa—a name that used to belong solely to my father.

Last year, my siblings and I ushered Papa from this world. My sister Kerry held his hands and prayed alongside him as he slipped over the border, reluctantly, into the blue. I imagine his mother, and ours, were waiting there, arms open, to receive him in another of these everyday miracles that sustain me.

MARY BETH HINES, READING, MA

“Cabbage leaves will help relieve engorged breasts,” the hospital’s lactation consultant said after I told her I wasn’t your mother, just your birth mother.

She checked her clipboard then, like this should be on there to save her the embarrassment, save me the explanation.

Today I drove to the grocery store and asked a clerk where to find the cabbage. It looked like a head of lettuce, green and round, large and firm. I placed the cabbage in the crisper at my mom’s house and when it was cold, I ripped off two leaves and slipped them into my bra. I didn’t even wash off the dirt and pesticides. I’m not worried about little things any more.

My breasts are heavy: full of milk my body made for you but will never give you. My body wants to heal by nurturing but I will have to heal without your little fingers wrapped around one of mine.

But cabbage will help. Beyond acting as a cold compress, cabbage draws toxins from the skin. Applied to bruises, cabbage encourages healing.

Earlier tonight, when I was eating alone at a restaurant, my breasts leaked when a baby cried and I got into my car and cried too. But then I made it home, wiped my tears, and removed the warm leaves. I opened the crisper and applied two cold ones.

To encourage the healing. Faster, faster, faster.

HOLLY PELESKY, OMAHA, NE

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I asked how many owl species lived in the Monterey park.

“If I answered that now, I’d just have to repeat myself later,” said our guide.

Yet once our late fortyish volunteer guide spotted a great horned female on top a eucalyptus, he eagerly imparted his encyclopedic knowledge. Sensing a story behind his hobby, I signed up for his next walk.

After two hours admiring swallows, falcons, towhees, warblers, and multiple waterfowl, I ventured a second question: what had gotten him into birding?

“I always had OCD and on returning from Afghanistan, it got worse,” he said.

“Every situation became a fight. It’s a form of PTSD. One day a friend goaded me into going birding. Following these critters from tree to tree, I discovered I had no time for angry thoughts. Now I live for bird walks.”

When I was fifteen, I was invited to skate in a seven-country exhibition tour following the world championships. The day before our team’s flight to Prague, my school issued an ultimatum: if you go, you can’t come back here. Tearfully, I stayed behind.

Hours later, the flight crashed, leaving no survivors. Initially listed among the dead, I stumbled through school where no teacher mentioned the day’s lead story.

I began seeing images of that Boeing 707 nose-diving towards the chicory field, a fuselage fragment severing a farmer’s leg. No one offered to take me birding.

Arriving at the parking lot, our guide pointed out a tiny ruby-headed bird by a

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hibiscus. “Anna’s hummingbird,” he said.

“Spectacular mating dive. A real flying machine.”

And one that doesn’t crash.

Once home from the tour, I retrieved a forgotten hummingbird feeder, filled it with sugar water, and hung it outside my kitchen window.

LORRAINE COMANOR, CARMEL VALLEY, CA

Arborglyphs is the fantastic name given to carvings on the trunks of trees. Names, initials, and records of past loves etched into the memories of living bark. There are many ancient examples, but some are more recent. Basque shepherds, herding in the United States in the nineteenth century and later, passed their solitude by carving on aspen trees, often updating them when their grazing odyssey brought them back to the same spot again.

The soldiers of World Wars I and II also sought solace in the craft. Many American GIs passed through Normandy carving their memories on over two thousand trees. Names and dates, thoughts and feelings, all recorded on fading timbers.

We are a remembering people. Our minds put flesh on the memories of the past, which then often take on a life of their own. At every funeral there is storytelling. Funny stories, favorite holidays, past achievements.

We become who we are more deeply when we recall who we were through remembering.

DAVID WHITE, CARLOW, IRELAND

readers’ notes

What sustains? Dandelions, wild chervil, cockroaches, 15,000-year-old glass sponges, the 507 year-old clam (killed by the scientist who was studying it), tardigrades—a creature that can live in boiling water, solid ice, radiation, and the vacuum of space.

What sustains me?

Honesty, generosity, not complaining about the weather or getting older.

And I once invented a language with two friends. It has an accent which no one, not even our husbands, can duplicate, so it lives and thrives completely by our use.

One friend I’ve had for forty-five years and the other for thirty, each with our own language. To this day, we still use it.

The phone rings; I hear my secret name in that inimitable accent, and I’m instantly buoyant.

“I hope,” I would answer.

Back in the States, I run my hands over the striations and ribbing, the single lighter indention from where it rested on the ground. I press the navel and lift it to my nose, straining for some secret clue to the contents.

What sustains me is the suspension of that first slice, the seeds pressed into flesh from the knife’s severing. A sign. I inhale, knowing the best will always release a sweet musky scent before I even finish the first cut. Once it is sliced and scooped and dribbling, I taste to see if hope is satisfied, or if it requires more faith.

When I am gone some winter to come, I hope my daughter still buys cantaloupes— that she will thump and sniff and taste and hope again.

SUE LARKINS WEEMS, BLYTHEWOOD, SC

DIAN PARKER, CHELSEA, VT

“Are you buying another cantaloupe?” my daughter admonishes me in the grocery store.

I balance the heavy melon in my hand, weighing its worth, its possibilities. Sweet, dripping flesh may rest beneath the reptile skin, or a stiff tasteless crunch. But I keep buying cantaloupes, out of season and in.

When we lived in Japan, a single, whole melon was a prize, wrapped in bubbledmesh netting, its price tag always raising the eyebrow of the cashier as I set it gingerly on the counter to pay.

“Is it good?” she would ask.

“Go find Nonno and tell him lunch is ready!” Mamma urges.

I toddle importantly downstairs to the ground floor. My grandfather isn’t in the work area where he and my father keep their masonry tools and sculpt granite and marble when not building or repairing the town’s stone houses. He’s not on the bench in front of our home. I scuttle to the back of the house, checking the granary room and the wine and cured-meat cellar. Out back, I go past the chicken coop and pig sty to the outhouse. I knock and call out, “Nonno!

Nonno!” No answer. I push on the door, but it bumps against his bare leg, which looks 12

too white, marble-like. I totter upstairs and report that Nonno is asleep in the cesso and won’t wake up.

I thus learned what it meant to lose someone who loved me and whom I loved unconditionally, but also that love would endure in memories of our life together, when he taught me to talk, to walk, to become me.

Whenever I return to Petrella, my Italian hometown, I visit the cemetery.

On Nonno’s tombstone I see my own name, for I was named after him. It was sculpted by his son, my father—now also buried, but in Ohio, far from our hometown. It’s a tangible reminder of my roots: the soil, the family, the culture that nurtured me.

I am now older than Nonno was on that cold April day in 1952, and yet I remain the tottering grandson of that gentle man whose hands had quarried and hewn a lifetime of rocks and had erected houses that would last for centuries; and his calloused, comforting hand still has a firm, reassuring grip on my own.

SANTE MATTEO, OXFORD, OH

It’s early Sunday and the church is empty.

I’m here to pray for other people, for needs and a love that unifies, but I’ve chosen a seat facing the wall of windows and I’m distracted by an unusual fog in the grove outside, a suspended vapor blurring the gnarled trunks and bare branches of pistachio trees. I came to pray . . . but the fog.

I want to stroll through it, disappear behind its ethereal beads, push my open hands through it, taste its sweetness, le it sustain me like manna in the wilderness.

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What is it? the Israelites had asked, puzzled by the manna. Perhaps it was curiosity, this question. I wonder if the Israelites were already lost in their freedom, indignantly perplexed by a God sending sustenance so ordinary. I wonder if What is it? was the politer version of Is this it? Is this better than chains? Hands open, teeth clenched—the prayer posture of “more” rather than praise for “enough.”

I wonder because I know the wilderness.

The wilderness coaxes truth. Truth is, I don’t want ordinary and hope deferred.

I don’t want the wilderness wandering and, sometimes, I don’t want the truth.

I want meat and ease and water that’s sweet. I want to go home, drink coffee in my slippers, wrap myself in the cover of apathy, and if my husband asks if I saw this morning’s sunrise, I’ll tell him, “No, I must have missed it. I only saw the fog.”

MICHELLE STIFFLER, MESA, AZ

I wake up suddenly from a deep dream I can’t remember, but I am unsettled. I get up and check the time. It’s 4 a.m., much too early to get up. I walk around the dark living room. I know I won’t go back to sleep, but the bed is warm, and I’m feeling what my father used to call “foggy in the head.” So I crawl back under the warm down comforter and spoon against the curve of my husband’s back. My mind is at work even though my body isn’t ready yet. I’m not worrying, just planning a menu for dinner guests, reviewing Greek verbs, calculating whether I’ve allowed enough time to get from chorus practice to my doctor’s appointment, deciding which poem to share with my poetry reader’s group. I realize my husband is awake too.

readers’ notes

“Roll over,” he says. “I’ll give you a back rub.” As his strong hands move over the tense muscles in my back, I feel myself relaxing. The next thing I know it is 7 a.m. and we are waking up together.

JANET UMBLE REEDY, WASHINGTON, DC

It is the second time I have stood in front of what feels like a roomful of strangers trying to honor a dead sister—her life, her worth, her beauty—all while the strangers watch me. Because in grief, unless you are as close to her as I was, unless you share our stories (lying on a scratchy wool living room rug watching Lady and the Tramp at 3 a.m., dancing in the kitchen to songs streamed from a phone, handwritten letters, alliances against both Mom and Dad, visits, hospitals, phone calls, walks, last times we hugged), you are a stranger.

The room fills with the notes of our brother and his girlfriend playing “Ave Maria” on their instruments. That is how it starts. No words. Just melancholy music that evokes her name filling a dusty, tall-ceilinged church, among grieving strangers, candles, and flowers.

The tears start and my niece’s warm, ten-year-old body is planted at my left side, glued to my thigh and arm. She lets me hold onto her for the whole thing. In the months that come, she draws me into games, tackles me in a pool, sits on my lap watching silly movies, and throws her

body full-length on top of mine. I say yes to everything she asks.

She sustains me. Playing games, walking, swimming, holding her, laughing.

In the bookstore before Christmas, I see an illustrated cover with my first deceased sister’s name—Fiona. How she would have loved being an aunt. I must go see our niece. I am three aunts in one body.

AMY PECHUKAS, NORTHAMPTON, MA

My house burned down as I ate currywurst in Berlin. A neighbor emailed me to break the news, and I read her message on a dusty hostel PC. I conjugated the past participle of “burned down” and pled with the receptionist to make an international phone call.

The German wasn’t correct, but panic transcends language.

I returned to Texas with a small red suitcase half-full of melting German chocolates. It was the summer before my senior year of high school, and I wondered if we would have a graduation party and where. My family slept in a yellowing La Quinta Inn, but I took refuge in the public library. Suspended in liminal homelessness, I found momentum in the movement of plot: leaping with Yossarian into the unknown, traveling with Anna Karenina from St. Petersburg to Moscow, chasing Toru across Tokyo.

Stories sustain, even when the plotline of our own life has stalled.

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Thirteen years later, I lost my home again—not the apartment at the address listed on my electric bill, but the flimsy refuge I’d built on a false foundation of achievement. My house—my life— burned down when I burned out. Again I seek shelter in narrative. I find it not between the pages of heavy novels, but in the friends who offer warm meals and whisper stories of displacement.

Shared stories sustain, especially those of loss.

A recently divorced friend recites the poem, “Now that my house has burned down, I have a better view of the rising moon.” We sit together, sharing tea, and weave beautiful tales of what we see when we look up from our ashes.

On those Saturday afternoons, I learned what it was like to be a black woman in Mount Olive, North Carolina. My grandmother told stories of a community that loved and looked out for each other.

She told me stories about picking cotton, potatoes, and strawberries to help her family make money and pay bills. She told me what it was like to work for a white family. Luckily, she is still here to continue to tell me her stories.

It is these stories that I carry with me onto campus. While I may not be welcomed by many, I know I belong. I am on that campus because my grandmother told me no one can take my education from me. It is for her that I continue to do this work.

RACHAEL PETERSEN, CAMBRIDGE, MA

NICHOLL MONTGOMERY, DORCHESTER, MA

As a black woman pursuing a PhD at a predominately white institution, I am constantly reminded that my presence is not completely welcomed. This is evidenced in the one African American faculty in the department, in the syllabi I receive each semester, and the racist graffiti on dormitory walls. Sometimes, I wonder why I continue to show up to a place that does not want me. When the doubt gets too loud, I remember that my purpose for being here is bigger than campus. Whenever I need sustenance, I call on my grandmother.

Ever since I was a child, my grandmother’s stories have sustained me. My favorite memories are of her hot-combing my hair on a Saturday afternoon. Her strong fingers massaging hair grease and history into my scalp.

I was ten years old and playing near the mouth of Western Montana’s Whitefish River, a few hundred feet from the backdoor of my grandparents’ home. At the center of the river, a bar of stones and sand rose up through the current and allowed me to stand so the water came to a point just below my knees. The stones were dusted brown and gray with a diatomaceous film. I toed at the crevices between larger stones, trying to tease out hiding crawdads that might startle and swim against the bare skin of my feet and toes. I lowered myself to my hands and knees and stared into the shallow water.

The river washed against my chest and the tip of my nose. I closed my eyes and held my breath, then let my body drop into the water. I spread my arms and legs as the river carried me downstream.

STACIA HILL, MISSOULA, MT

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C. T. SALAZAR

Love, Circular Saw Blade In the field the last cricket of summer declared itself the size of my faith, my fever like a dog’s mouth. The bird in the dog’s mouth safe against a tongue with no vocabulary for want. We hold so much in our mouths but there’s always room for loneliness.

When the holy acre said you too will find your place between flower and fang, I knew our country was destined to capsize. Nothing but oil to give the sunken garden.

When we lie down, I am the field and you are the fog.

Here—I found a corner of the world where scientists

are still searching the ocean floor for a boat named God,

who will forgive the invasive beetle species hollowing out the redwoods in the West before he considers my destructions. I love you.

I say your name all the time when you’re not around just to put more of you in the world, but the fruit are growing

teeth. The dogs are running in the field as if it were an opera house they wanted to burn down. There’s this thing spinning in me.

It could chew through the piano of my childhood, or any other shape grief hardens into. The boat named God remains unfound but there’s a small fish trapped inside it, a blue one, like a heart thirty times too small.

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C. T. SALAZAR

Noah’s Nameless Wife Takes Inventory horse heart hyena silver fish shin water yes timber pity the ark full of glow touch the lion’s it sleeps the with jewels for the field mouse was the only existed what forgotten the hawk soon we will dogs will howl learning the and nothing

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heart -ing wolf with -ing paw red eyes and proof else will starve like word will

swan spine in black tooth yes its belly tongues only while -tailed hawk swallows the mouse the field will be starve soon the a god for light howl back

Throwing a Hail Mary

VINA MOGG

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TI ME B EC OM ES ST ER IL E within hospital walls. It morphs into something

indeterminate, nondescript, like the cool grey-white paint surrounding the hospital bed where my ninety-one-year-old mother now lies.

She spent eight hours in the ER, where time is not measured by the tick of the clock—but by the sounds of the blood pressure cuff inflating, the beep of the monitor after vitals are taken, and the swipe of the curtain each time a nurse enters or exits.

This blank passing of time does not agitate my mother the way it does me as I sit on the metal chair behind the curtain. For her there is no awareness of hands proceeding clockwise on a numbered face. There is no before and after. There is no past and future, only present. Time is arrested by the amyloid plaques entangling her brain from the disease called Alzheimer’s.

This disease is not the one that confines her within grey-white walls today.

The ER staff takes multiple blood tests. While waiting for results she is admitted into a sterile isolation room in the critical-care unit.

Each time I enter the room I must follow procedure: don a blue paper gown, blue plastic gloves. Each time I exit I must reverse the procedure.

Once I ran out to the nurse’s station to tell them mom’s IV bag monitor was beeping.

The nurse noted the change, scrutinized my gown, and sternly reminded me that each time I exited I needed to dispose of the gown so as not to contaminate the rest of the unit.

Today, I return to the room for a sterile outfit. After she seems settled, I discard gloves and gown and leave to catch a few hours of sleep. Even when she is home, my rhythm of sleep is interrupted nightly since I check on her several times to make sure she hasn’t gotten out of bed or fallen.

I tried to get back to the hospital as early as I could the next day.

When I arrive, the lights are dim. She sits up in her bed, lifting a spoon of scrambled eggs to her mouth. Her grey hair is disheveled. She seems like a little mouse peeking at me with small brown eyes from her nest of wires and cords and monitors.

“Where have you been,” she asks when I walk in the door, after donning the blue paper gown and plastic gloves. “Did you abandon me?”

“Oh no, mom,” I reassure her. “I had to make sure that Lauren got to school.” My mother moved in with us when my daughter Lauren was nine years old. Now Lauren is in high school. She is used to my absence when I take mom to doctor’s appointments or adult day care. My last contact with her was a text yesterday, midmorning, to tell her I had brought Lola (“Grandma” in Filipino) to the emergency room. I wasn’t there when she came home from school or when she went to bed last night. I wanted to be there in the morning when she left for the day.

For the past eight years I have been torn between the duty to mother and the duty to daughter.

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“I’m here now.”

Her eyes soften. She begins to calm down. She lifts the spoon to her mouth again.

I notice her hand curved awkwardly in, perhaps a result of a stroke? The test results were still not in.

I offer to help with breakfast.

I lift the spoon to her mouth, giving her the soft foods, the grits, the eggs, the applesauce. The hospital bed, large and cumbersome, dwarfs her childlike frame. I wonder how many times she did this for me when I was a child, lifting a spoon to my lips with soft food. I wonder how many times I did this for my own daughter, now getting ready to head off to college.

“No more,” mom says as she shakes her head. “I have no appetite.”

I open the tiny plastic box, remove the beads of the light blue rosary, and place it in her hands.

“Here, mom, take a little of this.” I offer a sip of tea.

The smiling Indian lady stands at the door asking me to fill her request form for lunch. I go over and anticipate what my mother would like to be fed the rest of day in this barren room.

My father had the same job as the smiling Indian lady, at a veterans hospital, years ago when I was young. He pushed a metal cart up and down the corridor, serving patients for ten years to provide for us after retiring from twenty-four years of service as a sergeant in the US Army.

In my little girl’s mind, I thought he was a doctor, because he left the house in a white uniform. I did not know he was serving meals to men like himself— veterans of war. World War II. Korea. My father survived World War II by escaping from the Bataan Death March.

Now, my father is gone. And I am the one to provide care.

Now, she needs rest. She motions for me to push the tray away with a flick of her hand. “I’m tired now. I want to sleep.”

I turn off the lights, close the curtains, adjust the bed. I lean over to pull the hospital blanket over her. I remove the paper gown and gloves and step into the hallway.

The attending neurologist is at the nurse’s station. I have a brief discussion with him about mom’s condition. She is stable, and her CT scan is clear. It does not look like there was any evidence of stroke. We review and compare the notes of the

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infectious-disease doctor who admitted her to critical care. He concludes a UTI has progressed to sepsis, a life-threatening bacterial infection, one that could only be treated with IV antibiotics.

The neurologist looks me squarely in the eye and says, “You need to get your mother home. Nothing good can happen to the elderly here. There is too much disease and bacteria. The woman next door has MRSA. Once your mother’s treatment has been completed, get her out as soon as you can.”

I return to the room, don the paper gown, put the plastic gloves on my hands.

I see her hands, the ones that look like mine, with long and bony fingers and large knuckles. I see the bruises around her small wrists. They had to put restraints on her last night. In this unfamiliar setting she kept trying to climb out of the bed. Her Alzheimer’s magnified her confusion. I am reminded of this when the day nurse comes in. She sees mom resting and quietly asks me to remain in the room with her. They can only monitor her from the nurse’s station, and because of her agitation last night, they’d had to give her Ativan.

After a while she is resting soundly. I step out to the courtyard to get some fresh air. Time’s suspension within hospital walls is broken momentarily. Outside above the palm trees I see the sun is high. It must be noon. More than twenty-four hours have passed since I’d first wheeled her into the building. Inside, I’d lost track of hours measured by vital sign checks and meal trays delivered bedside.

I down a quick cup of coffee and return to the room to find the white curtain drawn shut. As I step around the curtain, I find the room is full of gowned attendants. Two nurses and two physical therapists are holding down my mother, her arms flailing and head thrashing from side to side. A tiny, Filipina physical therapist who attended to her earlier is speaking to my mom in Tagalog. She weighs no more than ninety-five pounds.

“Nanay,” the therapist coaxes, which means “mother” in Tagalog. In my limited knowledge of my mother’s language I understand the PT is trying to calm her down, soothe her, as she rattles off words beyond my comprehension. She is screaming and wrestling those trying to restrain her.

“Who are you?” my mother is shouting in Tagalog. “Why are you doing this to me?

Get them out of my room! Who are all these people?” Her restlessness and agitation are aggravated even more as they try to confine her. Because of her Alzheimer’s, the Ativan administered last night has amplified her confusion instead of calming it. The tiny Filipina PT speaks in hushed, gentle tones in mom’s native tongue, the language she reverts to when she is most confused.

“Where is my rosary? Where is my rosary?” my mother begs. She is searching, scanning the room for something familiar.

I question one of the Latina nurses. “Where can I get a rosary?” I ask. “Do you have one? Is there a priest nearby?”

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She shakes her head, trying to hold my mother down. “Try the gift shop.”

I run out of the room, discarding paper gown and gloves, rushing to the elevator. I pound the ground floor button. The doors slide open and I track into the gift shop.

“Do you have any rosaries?” I ask the attendant. She notes the flustered look on my face and points to a rounder of plastic boxes, each containing a rosary.

“Here you are. Are you okay, dear?” she asks.

“My mother, my mother,” I explain, “ . . . she needs a rosary. She has Alzheimer’s.

She is agitated. I need a rosary to help calm her down.”

“Oh, you poor dear,” she empathizes, as I hurriedly pay and take the plastic white box. “I hope your mother is okay,” she calls, as I rush out the door, back upstairs into the antiseptic room, donning a paper robe and plastic gloves once more. I open the tiny plastic box, remove the beads of the light blue rosary, and place it in her hands.

The room has emptied. There is only one nurse now. She exits after I return.

Mom is sitting up in the bed, eyes closed. With one hand she fingers the beads of the rosary in its familiar pattern, one bead for the Our Father, three beads for the Hail Mary. I watch the rise and fall of her chest slow as her lips quietly mouth words I have heard her repeat countless times since I was a little girl.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . . ” As she whispers these words of supplication, I rip off my paper gown and gloves and throw them into the trash.

I sit on the edge of the metal chair next to her hospital bed, resting my head on the thin hospital blanket.

As she continues to finger the beads with one hand, I reach for her empty hand with mine, ungloved.

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ARAH KO

Eve Begun Beg God to pull the rib bone from your body with bloody fingernails, let iron soak into the earth. Wait until loneliness swallows you whole; when she awakes, sing songs you’ve never heard before, fall on your face, buy roses and open car doors, flame in jealousy for the gentle touch she lays on the backs of beasts, the trees at dusk, the river’s soft silver. Watch her stilettos sink in mud up to the heels. Hunger. Tangle fists in dark hair, and pull. Take the fruit from her wet fingers, swallow it whole.

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CAMERON LAWRENCE

Re-Genesis This life of fracture, plates and jars slipping from the shelves—.

What it takes to keep a home after the making— the patience to remake.

The past birthed and rebirthed, waking everyday unearthed into the myth of continuance, our days in a castle of ash.

Each day, to begin our lives this way, as if a man and woman walking out of the sea toward a burning campfire, our bodies dripping salt—.

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MICHAEL ANGEL MARTĂ?N

Psalm 23 (II) The Lord prods me further into blackening greens until we collapse beside a frozen creek.

I wake up to name calling.

One peep in particular stirs up a soul in me.

The Lord prods me into a candle-lit room.

The Lord prods me to a bloody feast.

The overflow from a hole in my skull tastes like olive oil.

Please, Lord, make use of all my parts, then mount my head above the hearth.

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THE

OF DESIRE 26 LAURA BOND

WE DI D N ’ T HAV E M ON EY when I was growing up, but I didn’t know it until

fourth grade when my parents got us into a good school in a nice neighborhood in Phoenix, filled with families who did. They had big houses on old streets, new cars.

Their fathers had jobs with titles I’d never heard of: litigators, ophthalmologists, anesthesiologists.

My Dad was an electrician who had his own Christmas tree business, selling Oregon pine to wealthy suburban families every December. My mother was an artist, a stay-at-home mom who ran an underground daycare out of our house. We had a green station wagon that usually worked—though once some wires in the electrical control panel got jammed and we spent an entire year listening to an early computer-era voice warning us in an endless loop: The door is ajar. The door is ajar. The door is ajar.

Twice a day my mother drove this station wagon to the front gates of Madison Meadows School, where one’s clothes, shoes, and hair were assessed daily in the halls, the classrooms, the locker room. The notion that self-worth was determined by the volume, quality, and cuteness of one’s material possessions was accepted as an absolute truth that I evangelized to my unenlightened parents. I wanted things.

Clothes. Banana clips. Cabbage Patch dolls. I wanted things for my mother, too. I wanted her to want them, to crave a closet of stackable shoeboxes, to collect the silver rectangles of eyeshadow that lined the marble vanities in Marci Bettini’s house. In Peggy Lindauer’s. In Kari Keat’s.

In the fall of that first year, my school threw a parent/student dance, and my mom bought a dress for this rare, special occasion. It was purple with a leather belt and black stripes that met in a V. We bought it at Diamonds, for one hundred dollars. I was ecstatic.

That Christmas I convinced my dad that what my mother longed for in the deepest, most throbbing chamber of her heart was the rabbit fur coat we saw on sale at Christown Mall—the perfect gift for a woman who lived in a desert, rarely went out, and rarely had a meal she didn’t cook, serve, and eat with her children at home. We might as well have given her any of the things the other mothers owned, which she had no use for or interest in. A tennis racket, a ten-speed, a pair of skis, a passport.

Asked what she wanted for Christmas every year, my mom always said: world peace.

It drove me mad.

One Sunday after a sleepover, Mandy Arthur’s mom drove me home in her Mercedes, Mandy in the front seat. We were tired after a late night of trampoline jumping and swimming and running around her house, which was so big she claimed we’d lost a pound with every lap. It was a long drive from Scottsdale and we didn’t talk much, but when we turned onto Flynn Lane, Mandy asked me casually: “Don’t you hate it when your friend lives in a bad neighborhood, and you have to go there and you hope no one sees you?”

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When I told this story to my mother, wounded beside her on the scratchy, plaid couch where we did our best talking, she pretended it was funny. She nudged me to recite with her the limerick we’d made up about Mandy and her mom, Candy, and the material bounty of their lives, the ease and extravagance we perceived to be the pillar of their existence, a joke to soften the pain and longing it caused me: Mandy and Candy go shopping on Monday, and Tuesday, and Thursday, and Friday and Sunday. Mandy and Candy live in Paradise Valley, where you’ll find no K-Mart, and no bowling alley.

The next day my mom painted our kitchen cabinets to look like they were made of wood—like the cabinets in the houses where my dad installed ceiling fans. Like the cabinets at Mandy’s house. But it was just oil paint on particle board and it looked fake and embarrassing. I wanted real wood cabinets, and a stainless-steel sink, and a giant refrigerator, like the giant refrigerator at Jodie Hughes’ house, which was stuffed with Popsicles and Vlasic Pickles and Coke and Kraft cheese, a pantheon of namebrand snack foods blaring invitation in primary colors—everything new and inviting, abundant and functional. Expensive.

We never wanted for food in our house. And I did love our house. We all did, especially my mom. It was almost big enough, with a front yard filled with trees that gave tangerines, pecans, mulberries. Our house was at the top of a cul-de-sac, a symmetrical universe my brother and I were free to explore, always returning safely to our sunken family room, to our bookshelves and the seizures of laughter that froze and paralyzed us around the dinner table on so many nights.

One Christmas after a good tree season, my parents installed wall-sized murals in each of our bedrooms. Mine was of a blue sky. My brother’s was a picture of Earth, taken from the moon. My parents’ room had a pine forest and a big, blue lake, which reminded my mom of the thing that saved and raised her. The one good thing she remembered about her home state of Oregon.

We spent a lot of time in my parents’ room, the whole family squished in the waterbed, which rocked and bulged beneath our family pile. My brother—bless his subversive, twelve-year-old heart—made secret tape recordings of many of the hours we spent in that bed, and sometimes when I go home to Phoenix, we get drunk and listen and laugh and weep. I always want him to fast forward through the parts—and there are many—of me asking my mother for things.

Mom, can we get the Strawberry Shortcake lunch box?

Mom, Tina got a Schwinn bike with a bell. Can we get one?

Mom, unicorn stickers?

Mom, Little Orphan Annie dress?

Velcro sneakers?

Guess jeans?

Can we, Mom?

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Over and over I made her refuse me. I forced her to hurt me, which was the one thing in the entire world she did not want to do.

Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Our house was filled with my mother’s paintings—huge landscapes with orange trees, purple rivers, a kaleidoscopic palette that reflected the world as she saw it, or wished it to be. One day, years after we moved, after a bad X-ray, she said she wished she could just walk into one of those paintings, lay beside the rushing river, and go to sleep on the flat stones.

That house is still the one where I most often see my mother in dreams. But the one she died in was across town, in North Phoenix, an upgrade. We moved for the better high school, which my brother nearly flunked out of and I ditched for the arts school in a poorer part of town. The house was big and the yard was big, too, but it was more than we could afford, so my mom got a higher-paying job. She taught herself financial planning, got certificates, an office, an attaché case. But she hated it with every bit of her artistic being, and it still wasn’t enough, and we strained. Aged. Laughed less.

The smoking helped her cope. Until later, when what it caused would require a coping beyond anything any of us were prepared to muster, not even her. Especially not her—child of a maniac who grew up sleeping outside during Eugene, Oregon, winters, who was never once told she was loved until she met my sweet father, and who nonetheless managed, drawing from some inexplicable, uninherited well of grace, to tell me, on an acceptably regular basis, that she did.

We didn’t ask her what she wanted for Christmas the year before. Because we knew. She wanted her lungs, her hands, her hair, her blood, her bones. She wanted a miracle, but what she got was the opposite. Complete and total disintegration.

Before we moved to North Phoenix my mom took me to a secondhand store for the first time. It was the first stage of what would become a decades-long experiment with the dampening of desire, necessitated by circumstance as well as a changing persuasion. Gradually, I just didn’t really want stuff anymore, and this has allowed leaps, journeys. A paring down.

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EMILY STODDARD

Descendants restless for the language an ancestor spoke into the sky of their god, we sift remnants of tongues, break the breath we count in generations and this is false math— the ladder of my spine is lined by shores that were not ours to fish, by altars where we bowed and altars we burned, by prayers kept and killed &

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we are not done yet, inventing names for what will save us— even now, some speak of doves and some speak of towers

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artist’s statement JENNIFER CRONIN: SEEN AND UNSEEN I N JUN E 2 016 , I embarked on a journey to Newtok. Newtok is a small, remote

Alaska Native village, which is currently threatened by the effects of climate change.

Due to drastic erosion caused by a combination of thawing permafrost, low levels of sea ice, and strong storms, Newtok is on the brink of environmental disaster. As I stood in Newtok watching the land crumble away into the surrounding river before my eyes, I was overwhelmed by a sense of sickening irony. Newtok, so beautifully disconnected and remote, has one tragic tie with the rest of the world, which will eventually cause its demise.

Seen and Unseen illustrates and illuminates the disappearing landscape of Newtok.

Meticulously painted landscapes unravel as they disappear into a wispy haze of white paint. Screen prints, which, at first glance, appear to be nothing more than blank pages, gently beckon the viewer as they slowly reveal the subtle details of a landscape at the edge of the existence. All of this work points to the serene beauty of Newtok while simultaneously bringing to light its extreme vulnerability.

MARGIE CRINER: IF I WERE KING CURIOSITY LURKS within the human condition. I believe it should be nurtured,

engaged, at any age. I see it as the cornerstone for problem-solving, for understanding each other and situations, for building a better future. My intention as an artist is to engage that curiosity we sometimes forget still stirs in us, to offer a celebration of what we have in common, to remind us that we are all in this together, and if you look further during those everyday moments in life, you may find something that surprises you.

By hiding sculpture inside sculpture, the viewer is invited to engage his or her own curiosity as conventional expectations are reshaped, distorted, or sometimes ignored.

By offering multiple perspectives, the viewer is offered an opportunity to physically shift the way they look at something, to change his/her viewpoint.

As I move toward completing a work, I often gain a better understanding in regard to some aspect of myself or the world around me. The finished piece becomes my teacher as themes revolve around the universal everyday and banal moments like waiting, commuting, vacations, and snowstorms.

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JENNIFER CRONIN. Seen and Unseen (Newtok #1), 2017. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches.

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JENNIFER CRONIN. Seen and Unseen (Newtok #4), 2017. Screen print on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 19 inches.

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JENNIFER CRONIN. Seen and Unseen (Newtok #4), 2017 (detail). Screen print on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 19 inches.

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JENNIFER CRONIN. Seen and Unseen (Newtok #5), 2017 (detail). Screen print on Stonehenge paper, 15 x 19 inches.

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MARGIE CRINER . Hero, 2017. Exterior: walnut, mahogany, wenge, rosewood, oak, glass; Interior: paper,

archival ink, walnut, plastic, LED, 9v battery, acrylic paint. 8 x 9 x 7 inches. Private Collection.

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MARGIE CRINER . If I Were King, 2018. Exterior made from walnut, wool, and glass.

8 x 8 x 7 inches. Private Collection.

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MARGIE CRINER . If I Were King, 2018 (interior detail). Interior made from wood, metal,

plastic, paper, ink, paint, glass, and wool. 8 x 8 x 7 inches. Private Collection.

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MARGIE CRINER . The Space Between 2, 2017. Exterior: mixed hardwoods, sugar cane composite material,

MDF, and glass; Interior: plastic, wood, acrylic paint, LED, and glass. 6.5 x 8 x 5 inches.

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BESS COOLEY

Dear Love Poem, Dear Memory I’ve been writing love poems to my grandfather who has started to call me the poet, the stranger poet. He remembers the words to the old love songs, sings them from his chair to his stranger daughters, the songs of husbands away at sea though he doesn’t remember that once he was the husband away on a minesweeper scanning the bottom of the Pacific for leftover bombs, diving into the water praying they wouldn’t blow.

I’m writing love poems to the lemmings who hurl themselves into the ocean, not suicide or because everybody’s doing it but because they’ve eaten the land bare.

For my grandfather I write the family names over and over as they dive into the shallow sea: Leslie, Deborah, your daughter, your daughter.

The names bob up from the surface— anyone can see them for a moment— then watch them drown.

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MONIKA ZOBEL

But We Were Seawater Like hinges bodies rust in motion.

The sun inhales my darkest spots and you scatter across continents along the cliffs, and homelessness— a different kind of darkening.

The first humans lived in caves, knew nothing of doors or the force with which they fall into a lock. The first humans were sails filled with wind. You want, I want to be wind filled with salt, everything but rocks. Sometimes the world is like a hinge. I open and close my eyes to its corridors. Like darkness we must leave in the morning.

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L. A. JOHNSON

Safeway In the squeezed aisles, you push the cart with authority load in the little loaves, clear liquors, yellow apples that bloom under fine mist.

I have charted every face, every open window the sour scent of honeysuckle floated out of.

You weigh the apples in the metal bowl and hurt me when you bag them, a strangling, my lungs suddenly without air.

I would grieve over a tomato, its waterless future, the boxes of rainbow cereals reflect fluorescent light like ugly stained glass.

What brought us to this comfort— the rows of bright colors make me never want to eat again, meals a guilty burden. I want to be where no hands desire me. This store blazes whiter, aisles brim with bright ask: Ask of the do-good. Ask of baking wedding chicken.

You say nothing. Ask of a mother asking, ask of ringed responsibility.

To be sacred and obscene, I shed my clothes to the floor, undress the hour down to its underthings.

The air I need to breathe is fresh with salt, found only at the shore of a sea as elsewhere as abandon.

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Sasha

HENRY HIETALA

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WH E N IT SN OWS, I get the call. I drink a cup of coffee and eat two packets of instant

oatmeal. I dress like I’m going skiing—puffy gloves, long underwear, a full winter coat. I throw in some CD mixes for the route. Besides music and snow depth, nothing changes from one day to the next.

I bring my phone. Right after my shift I will call back Jeff, my ex-brother-in-law, and leave a birthday voicemail that is not for him. The thought of it, as it does every year, leaves me woozy. I stick my phone in the glove compartment of my truck.

I drive to the fairgrounds, smoking, scratching ash into a used Styrofoam cup. It’s a January night with snow falling like wet confetti over the tracks in the road. Tomorrow, hundreds of powder-hounds will head up the road that sucks into the canyon, skis rattling in the racks of their Subarus, vying for first chair to the chutes, the ridgeline, or maybe the stoner cabin in the middle of a tree run. For now the road is a clogged artery, chalked and dusted, unridden for hours. Not yet plowed.

I park between the garage and the hockey rink, turning up my wiper blades so they won’t freeze to the windshield. In front of me, the garage doors blur in the blizzard. The air isn’t very cold, but I’m getting old enough to feel it.

In the garage, four snowplows form a line, an empty space between two. One of them is in use. The city shafts newbies with the dinner shift, where they get to clear Main Street for the sip-and-steer crowd. I had to drive that route for years.

The second plow is mine. Technically she’s the property of the City of Gallatin, but I’m the only full-time employee who uses her—a benefit of longevity. My plow looks the same as the others: studded wheels, black blade, a moving arm that resembles the claw of an arcade crane. Otherwise she’s basically a big yellow dump truck. I wash, wax, Windex, and vacuum her at the end of each snow season, even though the city pays to have her cleaned. I polish every bolt, pick up every particle of dust. She’s an ugly hulking machine, but she’s mine.

Her engine stirs. Against the back wall of the garage, buckets of road salt tremble. I put the plow in gear and, using a rubber band, tie a photograph to the rearview. It’s a grainy shot of my daughter, Sasha. The birthday girl. The plow’s namesake. Like a bomber pilot honoring his war bride, I keep her photograph dangling in the cab, only removing it if a part-timer is scheduled to drive her. The picture is from sixth-grade—the last year Jeff sent one. I haven’t seen her in twelve years. * SAS HA’S S HOV EL CR EA KS. I drive her fast, flirting with the highest gear, working

the stick, making snowbanks that rise and divide house from street, lawn from gutter, sleeper from me. Streetlights catch stray fluff. Guitar ambles through the stereo. A

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passing car’s headlights fail to dim—a drunk driver, I assume. The brights barely affect me and Sasha; the blizzard is too complete. * I STA RT ED D R IV IN G after I got out of prison. My friend Max, a plow operator himself,

recommended me—every ex-con needs someone to vouch for him. The city did their best not to hire me, delaying for over a month before scheduling an interview. I played a onesided game of phone tag with the city hall secretary, whose superiors were always on

My plow looks the same as the others: studded wheels, black blade, a moving arm that resembles the claw of an arcade crane.

lunch break, even at 9 a.m. Max never told me what he had to do to get me hired. Probably feared I wouldn’t forgive the favor. Whatever he did it only half-worked: the City of Gallatin fired him during my first season. He doesn’t hold it against me; I don’t let him pay for drinks.

Max and I used to grab beers at a bar called Stockman’s. Even in the summertime, after his guiding expeditions and my landscaping shifts for the city, we made it happen.

Sometimes other guys joined us, sometimes they didn’t. We took our time with a pitcher of Coors, trading digs about coworkers and old friends who left town for brighter pastures.

We talked about snow if it was ski season, rivers if it was fly time. Most nights, Max and I stayed late. I put a second pitcher on my tab and told him about Sasha. I never had much to say—her life had been gated off from mine long before, so I only had scraps to go on from Jeff—though it felt right to tell Max. There was no one else to.

We usually left early. Between my Chevy and his Subaru, we would share a half-ass hug. There was a sweetness in it, the way we stood under the stars, the glimmer competing with the clouds and Gallatin’s growing light pollution.

Eventually Max stopped coming out. He had a newborn daughter to take care of, and with his wife heading a local tourism company, he barely had time to work his guiding job, let alone drink Colorado’s piss with his burnout buddy. After a month of unreturned texts, I gave up. I drank at other bars, alone. Without him, Stockman’s was just a bunch of alkies from high school geometry.

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It was obvious we missed each other. This fall, Max invited me over to play with his baby daughter. Right when I stepped into the living room he handed me a can of Coors— an aluminum apology. We caught up while his daughter crawled and fell in giggly spurts.

On the TV a woman added cornflakes to a casserole; I gave Max grief for watching it. His daughter tugged at my jeans so I played with her, hiding behind the couch, popping and dropping like a Whac-A-Mole. Invisible, unless she looked my way at the right instant.

Then I saw the diapers. Pampers brand, pink on the outside, the same kind I used to buy for Sasha. I stared for a second at the plastic covering. I walked out. Max followed me to the street, urging me to face him, to bare my wet face. His words glanced off me like road rocks. I drove away in my truck.

Since that day, Max has sent me baffled texts, wondering what he did wrong. He’s offered to buy me a beer at Stockman’s. He’s told me I can talk to him about anything. I haven’t responded. * SAS HA’S S HOV EL scrapes against hardpack; snow ruts disappear into stainless steel.

A car backs out of a driveway and I barely miss it, gripping the wheel tighter than usual, my gut jolting along with the tire studs. The first leg of the route has to end soon. Sasha and I leave entire blocks unplowed, the streets set to pack and melt and refreeze into black ice.

More guitar tinkles out of the speakers. Josh Ritter sings, “If this was the Cold War we could keep each other warm.” I skip to the next song. My ex-wife Gabi used to criticize me for exclusively listening to white boys with beards. She had a point, still does. But it’s what I grew up hearing. * I LAST S POK E to Sasha on her twelfth birthday. I called her mother’s phone on my way

back from the ski hill, cursing Sprint’s spotty coverage. I had trouble listening to what Sasha said, and not just because of the static between us: I was lost in the intricacies of her voice, the lift in tone, the changes brought on by more months missed. As usual I joked about her mother’s protectiveness. Sasha’s new laugh nearly blew out my phone speakers. All I wanted was to hear her laugh again, yet the second I tried, it was obvious she was laughing for my sake. She promised to call from her new cell phone.

Gabi got on the line, irritated. I wondered if she had heard the last part. Our rare phone conversations were usually dry and composed, with all the emotion of a bank employee reciting your credit history. Not then. She accused me of pitting Sasha against her and Stepdad. She had proof: a month earlier, I sent Sasha a pair of overpriced

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snowflake earrings and a four-page letter for Christmas. It pissed me off, that Gabi could talk to me that way and ruin my annual phone call.

I pulled off at a trailhead and screamed into my phone. I brought up all of the old shit: her no-show at my sentencing, Stepdad, the time I drove fifteen hours through the night to Eden Prairie and she wouldn’t give me their address or let me meet Sasha at a coffee shop.

In a rage I had never been able to muster in marriage, I said that Sasha wanted to live with me, that she secretly hated her mom. An obvious, unoriginal lie.

Anyone else would have combusted. Not her. As I grew nastier, she became more composed, steeling herself. She was calm as Sheetrock—along with my felony, it’s why I lost the divorce. In the lull between breaths, I detected echoes of everything I ever put her through. I slammed my fist on the dash.

She hung up. There was no anger in it, just a release, like cutting a trout off a line.

I didn’t regret it until the next day when I woke on the sofa, my mind ringing with a hangover and the same-old questions about my daughter. Is she short like me? Do the boys chase after her—or her them? Does she even like boys? How often does she fight with her mother? I knew then, as I stood on my ski-and-booze sore legs, that I had forfeited my right to the answers.

Her mother disconnected their landline. She had been planning to for a while, but I suspect it was related to the occasional messages I left. I didn’t know Gabi or Stepdad’s cell number. I tried their shared work phone, remembering two rings in that Stepdad retains a personal lawyer. An entitled asswipe, he litigates like fourteen-year-olds masturbate. Hell, I was lucky Stepdad never filed a restraining order. I probably have Gabi to thank for that.

Now, in Sasha’s cab, facing the cough of the dash heaters and the waver of Neil Young’s voice, my stomach turns. The thought of another year passing, of her life knotting and unraveling, stringing out in unknowable directions, tying itself to the threads of so many others while I’m tangled up in my separate loop of work and sleep and drink—it’s agonizing. Everything I know about her comes from my former brother-in-law, who feels too guilty to reveal much. Lately the only things I’ve heard about are college tours and her suspension for smoking weed in the high-school parking lot. At least part of me remains in her, even if it’s my carelessness.

The snowflakes grow larger and slower. I ease up on the wipers, plowing faster.

Inevitably, I wonder if Sasha doesn’t want to talk. It would explain a lot: she never replies to the emails Jeff forwards and I don’t receive pictures anymore. I cling to our last call as a moment of deep connection, but what if it was nothing like that and my mind has distorted the memory, infusing it with impossible hope? Every time she spoke, she might have been pretending, just to lessen my pain. Why would she want anything to do with her fuckup felon of a father?

This is how her birthdays are. I hurry through work if called in, doing a shoddy job on the streets, my thoughts flitting between mania and despair. I want to finish plowing and

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call Jeff. I want to take I-90 to I-94 to 494 to Eden Prairie. I want to meet my daughter at a coffee shop. I want to drive Sasha into a lodgepole pine and watch the fluff from the branches cover her windshield, obscuring the outside world.

The plow clatters on. * GA B I D ID N ’ T just take Sasha and leave. Our separation happened in slow motion, like a

stump rupturing more and more under each blow. Most of the ax-falls were my doing.

The first came after we moved to Gallatin. While waiting for the next rental period, we slept in the bed of my truck, a jerry-rigged honeymoon. On one of those nights, we

Every time she spoke, she might have been pretending, just to lessen my pain.

conceived Sasha. I didn’t want her—hell, I scheduled an appointment at the only abortion clinic in town, making sure it was outside of lunch hours when protesters swarmed in from the county. But Gabi was adamant. It wasn’t out of some pro-life billboard bullshit, she just wanted a baby. I didn’t argue. I had no chance of winning that fight.

Things were good for a bit. She worked twelve-hour days at a consulting firm, saving up her vacation hours. She convinced me to quit smoking, and with help from Max, I did.

I took engineering classes, leaving afternoons free for powder runs, trout fishing, and pitchers at Stockman’s. Gabi strutted her round belly whenever we got takeout burritos to satisfy her cravings. She grew to like Beck’s and O’Doul’s. I stuck with the real stuff.

Sasha popped out. After two weeks of maternity leave, Gabi went back to the office. I was on parent duty: no more classes in the morning or skiing in the afternoon or drinking in the evening; only tears and shit. I covered the outlets, dunked her in the tub, taught her how to walk, spooned slop into her mouth, and played played played with her. If I could’ve pumped out breast milk, I would’ve. Each time baby Sasha looked at me with her thistly hair and drooly smile, I felt removed from everything. Time hushed under her giggle.

Months passed without seeing my friends. On a holiday, with Gabi home from work, I snuck away for a drink. Max, bothered by my paternal confinement, cracked a joke about it. He told it in a friendly, ball-busting tone, but by the way I hogged the beer, he could tell he’d crossed a line. Max never said anything like that again, and neither did the other

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guys. What hurt more was their work talk. Max complained about clients not tipping on an expedition; Fredo complained about a hard-ass foreman on a ranch walkout; Ian complained about a line cook throwing a spatula at his head. The only person I could complain about was Sasha, and I wasn’t making any money for enduring her.

Later, Gabi gave me an earful.

“Why are you wasting time with those guys?” she asked, not looking for an answer.

“I was just blowing off steam.”

“I’m tired of you spending my money on toys and beer.”

“I’m tired of asking my wife for money.”

Sasha cried out from the crib. I bounced her in my arms, humming the way I always did.

She kept crying. Gabi hijacked her, rocking her little body back and forth. Sasha shushed.

The only thing I worked at all day and Gabi still did it better than me. I hated her for that. * TWO WE EKS LAT ER Max called and told me to meet the guys at Stockman’s. I made an

excuse, something about watching Sasha because her mother was working late.

“Bring her along!” he said. His tone was courteous, as if he was posing it to someone in mourning.

So I did. Prompted by guilt and paternal restlessness, I brought my daughter to the bar. Fredo and Ian measured hands with her. Max snuck into the Perkins next door and returned with a kids’ menu and a box of crayons. Sasha drew a squiggly shape and Max

I tried sneaking over to Sasha’s room just to give her a goodnight kiss without her mother looking over my shoulder.

led the bar in raucous applause. She giggled and beamed no matter who held her. Between beers, I answered questions. The guys were finally talking to me, not over and around me. I had something none of them had.

Gabi was waiting in front of the apartment. While I parked, she didn’t stand or lift her head. I took my time unstrapping Sasha from the car seat, bracing for one of her quiet combustions.

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The minute I walked by, she ripped Sasha from my hands.

“How many did you have?” she asked. Her voice held steady, the words trickling out of her mouth.

“Only two,” I lied.

She carried Sasha to her room. The couch was made up with an old bedsheet and pillow. I kicked off my shoes and fell into the cushions. Gabi turned off the light. I knew I couldn’t pull that shit again. * GA B I T O OK the next week off. She never let Sasha out of her sight. I tried sneaking

over to Sasha’s room just to give her a goodnight kiss without her mother looking over my shoulder. The second I reached the door, Gabi appeared. She asked me what I was doing, her face groggy, her voice cutting. I couldn’t be trusted with our daughter.

If I hadn’t been so wounded, I would’ve been impressed. She could be an incredible mother. She potty-trained Sash in three days and improvised bedtime stories. The TV stayed off. She blasted Mozart from her work laptop—music people die to, I said in as snarky a tone as I could manage. Gabi scoffed and mentioned the research about classical music and infant IQs. That got me thinking of school and how I hadn’t enrolled in two years, the semesters slipping by like signs in the road. I knew what Gabi would say if I complained, so I didn’t mention it.

Watching the two of them play, something tightened around my neck. Suffocating me.

The mother who was only recently there, and the daughter who loved her for her absence. * TH E WOR ST PA RT was not being alone with Sasha. Those moments I held her and

pretended to drop her and made faces at the TV—those were ours. No one intruded on our solitude, until she did. * TH E N EXT M ON DAY N IG HT, Max swung by. Gabi refused to greet him. Her laugh

followed me out the door, bitter and humorless, less of a warning than a private shaming.

We got our usual booth with the usual guys. I finished a pitcher on my own and went to work on a second. A man pulled up a chair, a former classmate in town for the week. It was fine, until the man acted like Max’s guiding job was an extended vacation that any idiot

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with waders and a rod could do. I asked him what the hell he does for a living. He said something about finance. I told him what I did, except I slurred the word father.

“Oh, so you’re a house-husband?”

I’d heard it before, but not with his six-figure smirk. Max shook his head at me. I clocked the asshole. Before my buddies could stop me I hauled him to his feet and hit him again. And again. Max grabbed my arm but I elbowed him away and kept punching until my hand erupted and someone tackled me to the floor.

Fredo pinned me down. The bar was empty so Gina the bartender had to call the cops herself, apologizing to me as she did it. The pain grew in my hands. Max tried to stand close to me so I couldn’t see the asshole sprawled out on his back. I moved my head and caught a glimpse of his face. Beneath the blood and snot, he seemed to wear that same smirk.

I called home from the station. An officer held the phone for me, as both of my hands were broken. Gabi picked up and told me that Max would post bail and I would stay with him. There was no “for now” attached to what she said. But her meaning mostly escaped me. In my scrambled brain, I would see Sasha the next day, the asshole wouldn’t press charges, Gabi wouldn’t divorce me and move back to Minnesota while I lost a year in Deer Lodge. She wouldn’t remarry, and Sasha wouldn’t outgrow her clothes five times over without me there to witness it.

Gabi hung up. The officer escorted me to the holding cell. When he locked the door I slumped on the bunk, counting cracks in the walls.

Then, in the time she should have, Sasha did not breach my mind. * TH E H A L FWAY POIN T on the route is the Walmart parking lot. In the far corner,

there’s usually a clunker sedan full of ski bums, criminals, or dumbass college kids taking advantage of Walmart’s overnight policy. Tonight it’s too snowy.

I clear the lot and park Sasha, taking my mandatory smoke break. Besides Chogan, the other plow-vet, none of the other drivers smoke. The break policy was put in ages ago, but it wasn’t enforced until an MDT man fell asleep and toppled a streetlamp on Main Street. I light up and watch the smoke rise and blend with the fumes from the exhaust pipe. I started again after Sasha and her mother moved away. These days I smoke two before bed, one before my shift, and one during break. On Sasha’s birthday, I puff through a whole pack, easy.

I check my pocket for a phone that isn’t there. Even if I had brought it, I can’t leave the message. Not at this hour.

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The combination of frosty air and nicotine sets my stomach at ease. I snuff the butt on the plowed asphalt and toss it in a snowbank. Later today, Jeff will forward my birthday message to Sasha, along with a gift card. Nothing more. Away from the stifling heat of the plow, I resign myself to it.

I climb up in the cab, switch CDs, and put her in gear.

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MARK WAGENAAR

Small Time Paradiso I. Sometime in the night beside a daycare beside a dry cleaner, little yellow & blue flags bloomed, half the size of a child’s hand, on four-inch metal stakes, each flying above a country.

O you tiny kingdoms, that house all the world’s dead.

II. The day wobbles along, look no hands. Midday, crossroads of nowhere & need.

What are the questions no one’s asking?

There’s a Go Fund Me page for a woman in town with cancer.

It’s been unchanged for months.

I don’t always know the right thing to do.

Someone once told me she went to bed clutching the blooms of orchids.

III. Just this year named the poorest town in the state.

From the interstate it’s a brief wash of lights, a sidelong blur.

Like the phosphorescent blue-green smear of a crushed firefly on a child’s skin, you’re running,

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arms wide, down the runway of an evening’s backyard, you will lift off soon.

IV. Delivery cars on the grey currents, neon dorsal fins glowing in the dusk. Tow trucks rattle their chains through the streets, as if fishing the wind.

V. The red tulips are last up again this year.

All at once every samara in town lets go, spinning lifeboats from the City of Clouds.

VI. I walk a razor-straight grassed-over trail through evening’s chorus line of twisting shadows.

Once a rail line, a raised welt beneath which is buried the twentieth century.

VII. Across twenty square miles of darkness a radio host’s voice gutters somebody call. Four people awake, counting this woman on the other end of a missing persons hotline— the four of us drifting in a lifeboat on the waters of wakefulness.

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artist’s statement EMILY MCILROY: THE LILIES HOW THEY GROW MY LA RG E- SCA L E WORKS on paper combine charcoal, pastel, and oil paint with

a unique process of erasure, invoking forces and life forms of the natural world as metaphors for human experiences of love, loss, grief, and transformation. Since the sudden deaths of my mother and twin brother, I have come to see my life—all life— as wilderness. Perils, wonders, powers, and weaknesses all exist there. The Lilies How They Grow is an attempt to navigate the forces and features of this territory. It is an attempt to understand and accept an existence that is at once breathtakingly beautiful, unendurably painful, infinitely fragile, and prodigiously resilient. Created as prayers for a passageway out of all that holds us back, these pieces look towards hope and faith in our capacity to love, and for the possibility of a life aligned with presence, openness, and joy. Together, these nine panels compose a vast, elemental landscape defined by rock and air, fire and ice, flesh and bone. Who are we? they ask. Who are we willing to be, to ourselves and to each other? What answers might we receive if we can be still enough to listen?

HANNA VOGEL I C R E AT E IM AG INA RY LA N D SCA PES and growths to investigate the effects of

entropy on our environments. I transform paper and steel wire into unfamiliar forms and textures that evoke growth, decay, and the tenuousness of our surroundings.

By referencing craft traditions and natural processes of decay, my work addresses aspects of physical existence on the edge of potential destruction. The physical and connotative properties of these materials speak of the possibility of their demise—a wrinkled, skin-like paper coating is stained and slowly decayed by its rusting steel wire skeleton.

Combined with this materiality, the scale of my work requests the physical and spatial consideration of the viewer. The size and placement of the objects in relation to the viewer’s body describe their psychological relationship. Some works loom down from above as if sitting in judgement or, alternately, as if they’re being kept up, out of the destructive reach of human hands. By openly displaying their own physical vulnerabilities, these objects ask the viewer to examine the entropic nature of their own human body and its relationship to its surroundings. In doing so, my works aims to cultivate compassion for the physical world around us and for our own impermanent selves.

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EMILY MCILROY. The Lilies How They Grow (I), 2018. Oil and pastel on paper, 84 x 60 inches.

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EMILY MCILROY. The Lilies How They Grow (II), 2018. Oil and pastel on paper, 84 x 60 inches.

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EMILY MCILROY. The Lilies How They Grow (III), 2018. Oil and pastel on paper, 84 x 60 inches.

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EMILY MCILROY. The Lilies How They Grow (IV), 2018 (detail). Oil and pastel on paper, 84 x 60 inches.

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HANNA VO GEL. Ebb, 2018. Steel wire, steel rods, abaca and cotton paper, pigment, rust, sealant.

5 feet 7 inches x 12 feet 8 inches x 10 feet.

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HANNA VO GEL. Was, Might Be, 2017. Steel wire, abaca and cotton paper, pigment, rust, sealant.

15 feet 3 inches x 6 feet 11 inches x 7 feet 10 inches.

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HANNA VO GEL. Was, Might Be, 2017 (detail). Steel wire, abaca and cotton paper, pigment, rust, sealant.

15 feet 3 inches x 6 feet 11 inches x 7 feet 10 inches.

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HANNA VO GEL. Pyre (Safety), 2017. Steel wire, steel rods, abaca and cotton paper, pigment, rust.

9 feet 3 inches x 5 feet 6 inches x 3 feet 8 inches (each).

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AMALIE KWASSMAN

The Next Day There Were Birds Brother claims his head is not a body of water. There is no river on the left side of his brain. He claims he could still talk when they took him out of the car. When they found him twisted around his dead father like an umbilical cord. He could enunciate words like lamppost and freedom and El Salvador and salvation and garage. He called sister an adverb, a word he used to modify everything. The doctors drained dying from his hips. Unlearned water from his tears. He said he wasn’t crying even though Brother rewound the sound of blood over and over again. Until despair looked like fruit. Looked like something he could eat. Well, choke on. Grow that despair into a shelf of skeleton. Hibernate that skeleton’s fist in the back of your throat. Let death come like this.

But the next day there were birds. Birds singing in the sewers. Brother is not rooting for the birds or the stars. He calls them those little yellow piss holes. Brother wants more scars. To crawl through the pipelines they put in heaven. On earth, he was becoming a burning mouth. Speaking through sprinklers in his head. Telling everyone this was the second time he died. The first time was seven years ago by the window with a cord around his neck. He started numbering his veins that day.

Until yesterday. Sister is writing for his ghost. His shredded life. All the hours Brother spent measuring his eyes after. To see if they were still the same.

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SOPHIA STID

The Body’s Next Room I had to live inside my body and sometimes I did not want to. My body the body that saw her on the bed, wracked.

Poured warm saltwater down skin-rivers of her scars to clean them.

Her body was the body that brought mine through the door and now mine the body bringing hers back. When she was dying, she said, I’ve never done this

before. My body the body hearing that.

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AMY PENCE

The Dash – to run or travel in great hurry . Of the instant . as the tree fell - splintered & splintering . Of the instinct, our primeval falling . to hold to what’s already found . - to strike with violence so as to break into fragments . Of the wet ground, its feral mouth . bursting full born into storm . Of that thread between – taut & troubled . Of the elemental rosebud when she came glistening from my body . her hair almost inhuman . Of thought’s needles, prime & puncturing . - to destroy,

ruin, confound . Of time : the clockface, the rock face . the slum in my mansion . the wind in my stillness . the delicate eons of a second . they call it samadhi . that deepening absorbing surprise . as in this could be my last thought . as in this

is what happens when you die . Of this romance, life . this yes

. that that.

- to

put down on paper, throw off, or sketch . the whole in my brokenness . the All in my Missingness . the path to what will happen . before it even occurs . Of what binds us, the umbilical . Of the carnal, its arching. catapult to a dry version of this flesh . - to bring to nothing, to spoil . Of thread entering the lips, suturing the secrets . stitching the unspoken . what we were told had never occurred . - to

draw through it so as to erase .

the em dash— not the en-dash .

Of the

tempest, my mother, & formlessness . Of my loss as I ran to the door . - used as a

euphemism for damn . Of this quick inevitable slice . –for what is my core is yours

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The Estate Sale

DARA PASSANO

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I SA I D I WOU L D B E T HE ON E to go and no one tried to stop me so here I am, I

announce at the gate, returned for the burial. The padlock is hairy with rust but it still opens to my key.

One problem is already solved.

The gate is different. It is resistant, caught fast by layers of vines, or curses, so overgrown it is alive. I suppose there was no need for him to have locked it but once you start questioning locks and keys, where do you stop? Must every habit defend itself.

I wrench the gate apart and inch the rental car through. The road beyond is buckled and crumbling, carpeted with weeds. Saplings grow right through the bitumen.

My tires slide over beds of wildflowers, smearing them into rainbows. The road is narrowed and almost hidden by masses of hysterical overgrowth from “the contested moradas,” as we used to call them; lands trapped in the purgatory of unresolved inheritances and bitter divorces.

This is ironic, now.

Our own morada is farther up.

They tell me the rains did not come last year, or the year before that. The creek bed is dry. The aloes are brown. The contested vineyards are stunted, their vines coiled in upon themselves, malformed and carnivorous. In the wind, the olive trees shake kinked, horny hands and the bamboo clack like hollow bones. The gravel beneath the mulberry tree is stained purple. I roll up the windows to keep out the bees, the flies, and the stink of rotting fruit. Blackberry and honeysuckle vines scritch the car. Twice I stop to clear away downed branches.

The fence posts are flayed, peeling, and tilted. Some have shattered. It must be os javalis again, the wild pigs, barreling through the fields with their cloven hooves. Yes, there had been no one here to stop them but they ought not to have done it anyway.

There ought to be limits. I bang my hands against the steering wheel. there ought to be limits.

Senhor Campos is waiting for me beneath the apricot tree, beside the empty chicken coop. He is holding a newspaper, a pipe, and a paper sack of cookies. I pull the emergency brake and open the car door into his belly. He steps back. I slide out with difficulty, not wanting my body to touch his. He is wearing a scratchy maroon sweater that is all wrong for the season. I can smell the acetyl stink of his post-siesta sweat.

Menina, he kisses my cheeks. We thought you would come today. Here, broas de mel. He hands me the paper sack. Welcome home. Does your key still work?

Of course it still works.

This apricot won’t stand if the autumn storms come. You need to irrigate, as I told him often enough. It’s a man’s business but he didn’t listen so now I’ll tell you, maybe you’ll listen. It’s a good apricot. Would be a shame to lose it. The price per kilo is set to go up, that’s what my son says. Speaking of, do you know Jorge is single now? Yes,

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yes. It didn’t work out with that Frenchwoman, not that we thought it would, and she left with the children so there he is, a bachelor again. I could ask him to call you, tell you about the apricots? And other things. A lot needs being done around here. You ought to have a man about the place, no offense. You’re like my daughter, I know you don’t mind me giving you advice.

No, of course not, I lie.

My key does indeed work, and I am relieved. Another problem solved. Coffee? I offer, gesturing for him to enter first.

It is like we are breaking into a tomb. The floor crunches with the carapaces of dead stink bugs and roly-polies. The spiders are fat, grotesquely so. Their webs cascade

Ivy has detached from the balcony and is swinging its long legs in the wind, searching for support.

down walls that—I have always insisted—are too heavy and too white. Generations might have been, might still be, butchered in here and no one would know it. We are too far away for screaming.

I turn on the water, the gas, and the electricity. A light bulb explodes. The oven clock flashes but I leave it mutely shrieking because I have no idea of the time. The glass table is spotted with greasy fingerprints. It is disgusting. I am sure I have always used a tablecloth. Also, the chair has an unfamiliar stain and someone has been burning cheap candles. Gardenia. Lavender.

It is all wrong; if the place has been closed up it should smell of mustiness and spider breath, of locks and airlessness and no trespassing, no trespassers.

We’ll eat these lovely cookies you brought, I say, distracting myself. So kind of you.

How is Senhora Campos? All recovered from her surgery?

She is indeed, with thanks to god. You’ll go into the village soon and see her, won’t you? Bring roses. Your morada has the nicest red roses.

Senhor Campos wipes the table with the sleeve of his sweater. I have come prepared with a bag of coffee but the scissors are not where I left them the last time so, not knowing what to do, I squeeze the bag and look out the window and smile. The lindens are in flower. Their pink is so pure it breaks my heart. I turn to the sink and put my hands under cold water until they stop shaking.

Senhor Campos has taken up the broom.

No, please, you really mustn’t.

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I rinse the coffeepot because I might not have been the last one to use it. As Senhor Campos sweeps the dead bugs out the front door I rip open the bag with my teeth.

Coffee grains pour across the counter and down the front of my shirt. Oh, la, I say when he looks at me.

Menina. He leans the broom against the wall and puts a hand on my arm. His hips and rump are wide, like a woman’s. It’s done now, menina, he says. You’re home. He pats my arm. You’re home, menina.

After Senhor Campos has gone I open the windows and doors to exorcise the smell of death. Then I make an inventory: shampoo that is not mine; hand soap I would never buy. The couch has been moved and under it are tatty nylon socks, mismatched like everything else. I gather them up, these foreign things, throw them into black plastic bags and lock the bags in the boot of the rental car.

Last night Carlota hugged me hard and said it would not be easy, and she would know. It was she who emptied her father’s house in Santarém after he had a heart attack and lay dead in the hallway for two weeks, or three. She had to strip the wallpaper to rid the place of the smell, she said, and her father lost four toes to the cats.

Lock the door, she told me, and never look back.

I asked her to come but this is a bad time of year for her. She gripped my cheek with one hand and my shoulder with the other and said, you can do this.

The real-estate agent is less sure. The morada is in no condition to be put on the market, she says, and now that I am here I see her point. Some paving stones have cracked. Weeds are growing in the gutters. Ivy has detached from the balcony and is swinging its long legs in the wind, searching for support. One of the shutters has warped.

A snake shoots through the long grass and I jump, startled.

Stop it. I grip my head. There is no one there. He is not coming back.

But someone, not me, has hung a new laundry line. Someone has stacked firewood.

Someone has been collecting shells. I circle these objects warily, not wanting to touch them, the way you would not touch a chicken that has been left on your doorstep with its throat slit.

I unlock the cellar door and drop down into the earth where it is dark and dank and horrible and where, by the stink of charred pork fat, it seems someone—not me—has been roasting pigs. The wine bottles have mold. The hinges of the oven door have rusted away. The floor is marked by the treads of enormous boots.

The real estate agent’s number flashes on my cell. I shut the phone off. I will pretend it ran out of battery.

At sunset I lock the doors and roll down the shades and check the locks and check the windows and check the locks again. Everything seems secure. I slump against

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the big picture window, feeling like a runner who has completed the first stage of a marathon.

The oven clock is still mutely shrieking but I still do not know the time, so I still ignore it. This negligence exhilarates me.

I move the drapes of the big picture window aside and stand between the shade and the glass to watch the lights come on along the lonely road that winds up the hill to SĂŁo Romano. At night, from a distance, with the lamps lit, this road has always made me think of Christmas. I fancy I see snow falling in the funnels of light; I fancy the pavement is white with snow. I have never been here at Christmas.

Our morada has no near neighbors. I have never even heard a car pass. Still, I leave the keys in the locks so that if someone were to happen by with, say, a copy of my key, he would not be able to get in.

I am dirty and sweaty and eager to wash but reluctant to remove my clothes.

What if he has installed recording devices? It is the sort of thing he would have done.

Cameras concealed in mustard jars. Bugs affixed to lamps.

I tell myself I am paranoid. Still, when I use the toilet, I drape a sarong around me; when I wash, I fill the bath with bubbles to my chin.

After I am clean, I put water to boil and turn on the stereo. The wind is tremendous.

The house sounds like a ship in a storm, gusting and creaking.

Was that a car door slamming?

I turn the music down. It is not enough. I try to switch the stereo off but I cannot find the button so I unplug it.

Was that a footfall in the gravel?

I cannot hear over the wind. My palms are damp. I check the locks again, I check the keys. I turn on all the lights and check every room, every corner, to see that nothing has sprung in while my back was turned.

The water is boiling. I thoughtlessly pour in an entire box of noodles.

The wind sweeps two birds out of the sky, trapping them in the fireplace. They beat their wings against the smoky glass, terrified.

I do not let them out. I know this is terrible but I would have to unlock the house if I let them out, and I cannot do that; there are monsters in the dark. I am sorry for the violence but I am afraid of the dark.

The dark.

Wait.

What am I doing?

The morada is lit up like a fireworks display. I am so visible, so obvious. Quickly, quickly, I turn off the lights, unplug the chargers, I even disconnect the oven clock. I put a match to a single candle and breathe, breathe.

The noodles are a mess, inedible. I find a jar of honey in a cupboard and I eat it with a spoon, my hand cupped around the candle flame.

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I fall asleep but wake in the dead of night with the sheet wound tight around me. I stare into the darkness and tell myself the door is locked, it is locked, and the key is in the lock. Yet still I pad down to check.

In the morning, the birds in the fireplace are dead. I take a deep breath, roll up the shades, open the shutters, and fling the doors wide.

There is no one there. There is no one there.

I am staring into a cloud. The valley is boiling with fog.

The cloud soughs into the kitchen and plays with my hems as I brew a pot of coffee.

The last of the night moths are leaving the honeysuckle vines. I long to sing but the heavy white walls might have ears; they might have eyes. I keep my mouth shut and

I want to look out the window and see the stars but I am afraid of finding faces in the glass.

dress and undress as if I were at the beach, shimmying into my underclothes beneath the protection of a towel.

It is our fortune, as women, that we learn young how to do these things; we learn young that someone is watching.

I go outside and look around, overwhelmed by how much work has to be done. The blackberry vines have overrun the contested moradas and are now creeping through our own, bursting our fences and burrowing into our fruit trees. I take the clippers to them but they are heavy and vicious, with long thirsty thorns. By midday, my fingers are purple and I am covered in scratches. Blood is crusted in the bend of my elbows and caught fast in my socks.

At siesta I close up entirely: doors, windows, shutters, shades. It is so soothing to be sealed that I stay—indoors, invisible, in bed, under covers—until long after siesta time has ended. Eventually I slide out of bed and take another bath. I float in the feeble darkness until my skin is soughing off the bone. Then I go back to bed.

Sometime in the middle of night I awake, screaming. I light a candle and eat more honey. I want to look out the window and see the stars but I am afraid of finding faces in the glass. I try imagining the stars instead. In the darkness of the empty house, in the darkness of my mind, against the darkness of my eyelids, the stars are beautiful. I breathe quietly so that if anyone is listening he will not hear my fear.

I stay indoors like this for three days.

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Dear Carlota, I write, things are well, though we could do with some rain. The apricot is in danger of falling. I’ve so many funny stories to tell you when I get back.

How’s work? Love, yours, beijinhos, etc.

Eventually I get dressed and roll up the blinds, determined to finish things.

The house needs a thorough cleaning. I run the hose through the balcony door and sluice everything down—the particles of other people’s skin, the bacteria from their mouths, their hairs and the remains of their sticky cum. I blast it away and out and the thirsty soil drinks it up. The lemon tree will grow from this. I am making lemons from filth.

I clean myself thoroughly, too. I scrub my gums and between my toes, cut my nails to the quick and rub jojoba oil into my scalp and hair until they cannot absorb any more. I douse myself in scalding water and watch old layers of me peel away and swirl down the drain in a rainbow of oil.

I also wash my breasts—hard, with twisted sisal—but it is no good; I hate them.

They hang there like a dress on a rack that has been requested but not picked up yet.

Mine, but not really. Created for someone else to enjoy. It is intolerable. I think of

There is an assumption that a woman alone, sozinha, must be lonely, but this is not always true.

ways to cut them off and suture the wounds. One night I get as far as a shallow incision on the underside of the left one, the idea being to slice it open like the belly of a fish and let the heavy mass slide out. At first there is no pain. Then I faint.

Carlota sends a message to say she is going to the Algarve. Won’t I join her? No, I think but do not write. Travel safely.

One afternoon when I am going up the stairs, sliding my hand along the banister, I feel their energy; I feel that they are here, that they will be here again, that we are overlaid in the same place, separated only by time—which is no separation at all—and I am afraid that I can never leave our morada; that I can never leave this point in time.

I know it does not make sense.

But I am certain he is here. * TH E MO RA DA IS TA K IN G SHA P E, springing back. I give of myself and the land

takes with pleasure and without remorse, like a man. I have lost weight, my fingernails

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are split, my many cuts are swollen, but the garden is cleared. The fruit trees are harvested. I have eliminated the ants and sanded and repainted the shutters.

I only wish it would rain. The apricot is so weak its lean has worsened, exposing its roots. It will not survive another year in purgatory.

One morning I escape into town to buy food. One onion, one box of rice; I should not expect to stay long. I walk along the river and take photos of the murals, for remembrance. I treat myself to a pastel de nata but the sweet is so delicious I cry all the way through and have to order two more before I am able to eat one that tastes of pastry and not of tears.

I drive back to the morada slowly, reluctantly. I check the house and peer into the cellar. It seems that no one has snuck in while I was out—but of course it is impossible to know, to really know. I cannot swear those are my muddy footprints on the flagstones; I cannot be sure that is Senhor Campos’s cigarette butt and not someone else’s.

One morning, rain clouds appear. They are wonderful, wonderful, billowing and changeable. I move my laundry rack back and forth, chasing the splashes of sunshine.

It does not rain but there is hope. Senhor Campos appears as I am unpinning the sunwarmed sheets.

I’ve come with Jorge, he says when we have rounded the house and it is too late for me to turn back to the garden.

Jorge is leaning against my apricot, making a bad situation worse. I put out my hand to forestall his beijinhos.

You have a splinter. Jorge squeezes my palm between his. I shout but he laughs, committed to this chivalry. A thorn pops out. I think he is expecting my thanks but I will not give it; I am bleeding.

I serve them coffee and blackberries and we talk about the weather. As they are leaving, Jorge invites me to a show on Saturday. I have tickets, he says. We could get a drink before.

Senhor Campos is already in the truck. He cannot have heard, yet he is smiling.

That evening I run up and down the hills. The lindens drop pink and white petals on my shoulders and I hug myself to keep them there.

There is an assumption that a woman alone, sozinha, must be lonely, but this is not always true.

On Saturday night I drive into Lisbon and find Jorge at the bar, on the roof, smoking a joint, his head framed by the outstretched arms of Jesus. My fingers are sticky with the cocktail I sloshed on my way up the stairs. I am wearing a formless t-shirt and my hair is unbrushed and not particularly clean. The other women have translucent skin and dreamy white bouffant blouses that slide off their shoulders. Their lips are painted precisely, like wax flowers. I wonder why I did not wear nice shoes, at least.

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Jorge has trimmed his beard and put on a gold chain, gold rings, and too much cologne. This time I permit his beijinhos against my cheeks. The wind off the Tagus River is a mesh of mist. He offers me his jacket and the smoke. I take three hits. My cocktail is too sweet so I gulp his beer instead. He watches me closely but does not speak. I do not speak either. What is there to say? He takes my hand and we move like a couple through the crowds to the venue.

The music is good. Someone holds me from behind as we dance. It might be Jorge.

The show has just ended and we have just exited into the street when a body soars over our heads, fluttering like a leaf to fall, fall, slowly, slowly into the pavement.

There is less noise than you would expect, but more mess. Like watermelons. Jorge pulls me back.

Spectators wave from the terrace, where the body jumped from, and from the street, where it jumped to. Another one, says a bouffant blouse beside me. She covers her painted lips with her translucent hands.

Come, come. Jorge takes hold of my arm even though we are not a couple. For the first time that night I wonder if I should make that clear to him. Come, come. He tries to pull me away.

Wait.

For what? He tugs at me again and it is hard to keep my balance. I shake him off.

He does not understand. Someone like Jorge will never understand. A body is a watery and decomposing cloak, a one-way window, a shield for a thing that flies, and just now a flying thing has shed its cloak and kept on going. It has flown straight through the ground and it is traveling down there below us. It is burrowing.

I watch the ground closely, waiting for the street to buckle. Any moment now.

Jorge loses patience and breaks into a run, jerking me along behind him.

We drive back to the village. There are no lights in the hills out here; even the stars, though watchful, are squinting. Stone walls cloak the roads and I find my gate almost by feel. I do not see the wildflower rainbows below me but I imagine them. Jorge has followed me home, though I did not ask him to, and now he follows me through the door, though I have not invited him in. For your protection, he smiles, and I am too tired to argue.

He pulls me onto the couch. I wonder why, then I understand. He is considerate.

I don’t mind the bed, I tell him. It’s better.

You’re sure.

I nod.

But halfway through there is something about his position—watchful, looming, constricting—that reminds me; there is something about this painful burrowing that merges with other, older sensations, and though I am responding to him—or because I am responding to him—there is no pleasure in the pleasure so I say, harder.

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I wish there were a way to entirely leave one’s body, and to leave it on fire so that these tissues and membranes might become ash, weighted light; impossible to ever reenter. Harder. I tense, then relax, to make the pain more resonant, more complete, but it does not work. I push him off. He apologizes and goes home. * DE A R CA RL OTA , I write, I’m incapable of ending this. There’s more work every day

and I can’t keep up. Won’t you visit? Love, love, abraços. I crumple this letter and try again.

Dear Carlota, I found a nest of pheasant eggs and now I’m terrified the mother won’t go back to it, I’m terrified I’ve ruined everything.

I crumple this letter too and it is just as well because I would rather not post letters in this village, I would rather not be asked about him. Once he brought the postmistress

I leave the apple slices on the plate because I could not eat them anymore than I could eat my own fingers.

a basket of medlars, still fuzzy with down. I put my notepaper and pens in a drawer and I close the drawer firmly.

Senhor Campos says he is sorry for me. But you can stay, he insists. Why can’t you stay? This is your home, menina.

We do not mention his son. I had assumed, with a misplaced, wistful romanticism, that Jorge would come by sooner or later to invite himself in for a cup of coffee, but so far he has not. I keep fruit and cakes on the sideboard just in case. Each time they go bad I throw them out, as one would leave food uneaten on someone else’s dinner plate.

It is past time for me to be gone, I know that. The property should be listed. The real estate agent has nearly given up on me, as has everyone else. No one calls. No one writes.

As for me, I put things into boxes and I take them out again. I bake. I sweep. I read. I spend hours with the neighbor’s bay mare. Sozinha, I call her: the lonely one. She has heavy, messy dark hair that reminds me of myself. Both of us with burrs stuck to us. I offer her apples, but Sozinha never comes close enough to take them from me.

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One afternoon I stand in the kitchen with our sharpest knife and I chop them up, these rejected apples. The knife breaks the skin with a pop and the flesh separates, just falls away, leaving bloodless chunks. I am sick with jealousy. I leave the apple

She makes us instant noodles and I smile a lot, I smile as wide as I can.

pieces on a plate because I cannot eat them any more than I could eat my own fingers.

They rot there.

Are we just a cliché, he asked me at the end of things. Of course, I answered, we are all clichés, there is nothing but cliché, there is nothing new.

One day as I am jogging I look up and see farmhouses at the top of the hill. Can they see me, I worry, are they recording this? I am grateful for the banks of vines between us.

Senhor Campos comes again, for the first time without pretext. We take our coffees onto the terrace and sit in the shade. His shirt is very clean. A finger of blackberry vine is dug into the side of his boot as if to say: no one may leave this place alive.

Menina, he says.

I have made the coffee too strong again.

It’s fine. It’s nothing. But look, there’s too much work here for one woman sozinha.

Let me find someone to help you. A man, a tractor.

I don’t want to disturb the wild things.

It’s a farm, not a preserve.

Who says? Who decides?

Make it your home, he says quietly. Then you might stay.

I leave tomorrow, I say loudly, though this is something I have only just decided. I will pack up and take away what I can. I will lock the house for good.

Senhor Campos nods. He finishes his coffee and hands me the cup.

I will not come back, he can see this, and though he had liked me before, maybe loved me, maybe even wanted me for his daughter-in-law, now that I am leaving his tribe I am innocuous.

I should not blame him for this but I do.

He drives away as the sun is lowering. The peacocks shriek. A dog barks.

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A good man, I think. But with a mind like flan—smooth on the surface and uniform all the way to the bottom.

The next day I wake up and unlock the front door and wonder, has he come while I was sleeping, will I see his reflection behind me in the window when I raise the blind.

But there is no one.

Really, no one. The sky is flat and dun colored. The cicadas rattle and rest, rattle and rest.

I fear it will never rain. I fear the morada will desiccate and blow away in the wind and I fear, most of all, that there is nothing that anyone can do about it. I tape my boxes shut and open the boot.

I am surprised to hear a car drive up. My first instinct is to lock the house, climb into the bathtub, and hope not to be shot, but it is alright, it is only Jorge.

My father thought you might need some help.

I look at him, remembering him naked. Remembering myself naked. I should be embarrassed but I am not. A man’s touch is like an intrusive wind, a jostle in a crowded bus. Nothing personal.

A moment, I say.

I go inside. He follows me.

Are these the boxes to go?

I said, I say, give me a moment.

He rolls his eyes. I hate that.

I go into the bathroom but he follows me there too. I pick up the heavy wooden stand that once supported our—then his, now my—toiletries and they slide off. Scent bottles break to pieces against the cold floor tiles.

Jesus, says Jorge.

I fling the stand into the mirror and there is a fantastic crash but no serviceable splinters come of it so I smash the mirror two times more. It explodes. Now nothing is left. We can no longer see ourselves and each other. The wall where the mirror had hung is clean, surprised looking. I drop the stand and select the longest, sharpest, neatest wedge out of the destruction. Ah, I say, holding it happily.

Whatever happened to the creature that flew into the ground in Lisbon, I wonder.

Outside that bar. Is she still down there somewhere? Is she nearby? Have I met her before but forgotten?

The bowl on the kitchen counter is full of flowers that do not open but do not die.

All the nectarines I picked have worms. The grapes are dead in the vineyard but growing wild everywhere else. I imagine that I am a jellyfish: floating, transparent, vulnerable, and filled with poison; if I go near the ocean it may not let me go. *

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JO RG E CA L L ED CA RL OTA FOR M E. I do not know what made him think to do that.

When I wake up she is on the terrace with her hand on the rail, looking away, her upright body black against the fierce sunlight.

I do have a beautiful view. I’d kill for that, some people say; I’d die for that, other people say.

She must have felt me looking because she turns around and comes into the house, shivering from the rapid drop in temperature.

She is not smiling and I think how people like me, we give our loved ones so many chances to be heroes, but it is a gift that few take. I wonder why. Do we not all yearn for redemption?

Satisfied? she asks me, her hands on her hips.

Not really, I say.

You’re lucky I was in the Algarve, she says, six flights a day. No, don’t thank me for coming, we’re friends, even if that means I’m continually having to pick up the pieces and take care of your shit. Do you ever consider me? Do you ever wonder if I want to be doing this? I have a bid due tomorrow morning and three clients tearing holes in my ass. I love you but you’re fucking selfish.

She makes us instant noodles and I smile a lot, I smile as wide as I can.

I’m fine now, I say. Thank you so very, very much for coming.

I remember when we were both here together, it must have been the last time, and he said these useless trees. He kicked one and it shivered. What’s that useless fruit again? Quince. Yeah, quince, what’s it good for, is anyone ever going to make quince jam? Are they really? I held out a jar and said, this is the quince jam I made. He laughed.

I want to tell Carlota this story but she will ask why I am telling her.

She leaves that same day in her own rental car, which is nicer than my rental car, lighter and faster. Not loaded down with cargo. I have forgotten to give her the letters I wrote her but did not send, but that is fine. I use them instead to start a last fire in the hearth. In this house it is always cold and the wind is always crying. My skin aches beneath its bandages.

I watch out the big picture window until the streetlights come to life along the road that curves up the hill to São Romano. It looks, again, as always, like Christmas. An eternal Christmas that never arrives. Perhaps I should give myself a gift.

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ANYA KRUGOVOY SILVER

Ending with a Line by Wisɫawa Szymborksa It is time for political poetry.

Time for poets to leave their gardens, to stop tending their tomatoes and roses.

Time to stop reading arcane books about then.

Flags demand to be waved in the streets, placards, scrawled in marker, wielded.

There are towers we need to storm, fences that need stoning, children who must be unlocked from cages.

We need to hang sheets from balconies, our slogans painted red and black.

Our poems should include riots, drownings, shredded organs, pardons of corrupt men, and deportations.

Only, I’m unable to write political poetry.

I prefer verses about mountains, tulips, and statues of ancient goddesses.

There’s a white woman yelling at a black woman in the parking lot, the white woman shaking her finger in unearned rage.

Apolitical poems are also political.

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contributors

L A U R A B O N D lives in Denver, where she performs regularly with The Narrators storytelling show and on the Denver Orbit podcast. A former staff writer with Westword, Denver’s alt-weekly, Laura has written for Rolling Stone, Spin, and USAA, among others. She has won multiple honors, including the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, and was the first person to receive the Alice Maxine Bowie Fellowship from Lighthouse Writers Workshop. A former mime and hand model, she is working on a book about the art of thrift-store shopping.

B E S S C O O L E Y won the 2017 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Atticus Review, Breakwater Review, and Forklift, Ohio, among other journals. Educated at Knox College and the MFA program at Purdue University, she lives in Knoxville and teaches at the University of Tennessee.

M A R G I E C R I N E R is a Chicago-based artist. Her sculptures explore universal experiences like waiting, commuting, traveling, and dreaming while offering the viewer multiple perspectives. She received a Bachelor of Science in textile design from Michigan State University in 1991 and has exhibited her work

throughout the United States. Her work has been featured in numerous publications. Criner currently works and resides in Chicago.

Sometimes starkly real, and other times other-worldly, J E N N I F E R C R O N I N employs a captivating sense of realism to explore what it means to be alive in these times. Cronin studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning her BFA in painting in 2009. She lives and works in Chicago, and is represented by Elephant Room Gallery. When she is not making art or working at her day-job in customer service, Cronin’s favorite place to be is the shore of Lake Michigan.

H E N R Y H I E T A L A grew up in Montana.

His writings have appeared in Boston Accent, Medusa’s Laugh Press, Chicago Literati, and the Susquehanna Review.

L . A . J O H N S O N is from California. She is the author of the chapbook Little Climates (Bull City Press). She received her MFA from Columbia University and is currently pursuing her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California, where she is a Provost’s Fellow. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review, the American Poetry Review, the Iowa Review, and other journals.

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A R A H K O is a writer living in the Greater Chicago area. Her work is forthcoming in the Cresset, Rust + Moth, and SIREN, among others. She is the 2018 Luci Shaw Fellow at Image. When not writing, Arah can be found correcting her name pronunciation and making a mean pot of coffee.

is originally from Brooklyn, New York. She is a current MFA candidate in the creative writing and environment program at Iowa State University and was the poetry editor of Flyway. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Booth, Punchnel’s, Hobart, and the Penn Review.

AMALIE KWASSMAN

M I C H A E L A N G E L M A R T Í N lives in Miami, Florida, with the poet Annik Adey-Babinski and their cat, Tina. He publishes sparingly and really hopes to amount to nothing. In a good way.

is the mother of four, wife to one for thirty-six years, and grandma to her grandpuppy Milo. Words unfold during yoga, painting, walks on the beach, and watching the sunrise over Mt. Rainier. She is a caregiver and an advocate for those caring for Alzheimer’s patients, is a member of the Alz Author’s Association, a guest writer on various blogs, and has an essay about caregiving VINA MOGG

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recently published in The Wonder Years, 40 Women Over 40 on Aging, Faith, Beauty and Strength, edited by Leslie Leyland Fields. Follow her thoughts at seaglasslife.com.

D A R A P A S S A N O is the author of the Guardian UK’s “Confessions of a Humanitarian” series, as well as the satire collection Give Me My Chocolate or the Turtle Dies. Dara’s fiction has appeared in Meridian, Apple Valley Review, Arcturus, Typishly, Crack the Spine, The Perfume River Anthology, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web 2018. Dara lives out of a suitcase that is most often in sub-Saharan Africa.

A M Y P E N C E authored the poetry collections Armor, Amour, The Decadent Lovely, and the chapbook, Skin’s Dark Night. Her hybrid book on Emily Dickinson—[It] Incandescent—released

by Ninebark Press in 2018, earned the Eyelands Poetry Award from Greece.

Dancing Girl Press will publish Your Posthumous Dress, a chapbook inspired

by Alexander McQueen, in 2019. She lives in Pine Lake, Georgia, tutors at a private school in Atlanta, and teaches a class in poetry writing at Emory. More at amypence.com.

contributors

E M I L Y M C I L R O Y makes art, teaches art, and walks and swims her way through various terrestrial and aquatic wildernesses. She resides amidst unruly trees in Honolulu’s Pālolo Valley, and does her daily best to meet the needs of her very vocal Siamese cat, Gormaen. When she’s not in the studio, in the water, in the forest, or somewhere else, she works at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, the Honolulu Museum of Art School, and the Hawai’i State Art Museum.

is the author of four books of poetry: The Ninety-Third Name of God (2010), I Watched You Disappear (2014), and From Nothing (2016), all published by the Louisiana State University Press, and most recently Second Bloom (2017) as part of the Poiema series of poetry by Cascade Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including the Harvard Review, the Georgia Review, Fivepoints, and Crazyhorse, among many others. Her work was included in Best American Poetry 2016, and she was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry for 2018. Her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, in Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, as an Academy of American Poets’ poem of the day, and on Poetry Daily. She taught in the English department at Mercer ANYA KRUGOVOY SILVER

University in Macon, Georgia, where she lived with her husband and son. Anya Krugovoy Silver died at age forty-nine from breast cancer.

C A M E R O N A L E X A N D E R L A W R E N C E ’s

poems appear recently or are forthcoming in the Florida Review, West Branch, The Shallow Ends, Image, Forklift Ohio, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Structo, and elsewhere. He keeps busy writing and painting in his home studio in Decatur, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and four young children.

C . T . S A L A Z A R is a Latinx poet and children’s librarian from Mississippi. He’s an environmental and gender equality activist. His micro-chapbook This Might Have Meant Fire is forthcoming from Bull City Press. He’s the editor-in-chief of Dirty Paws Poetry Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, RHINO Poetry, Grist, Tampa Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere.

S O P H I A S T I D is from California, where she grew up in a stucco house with walls three feet thick. She writes about medieval mystics, buffalo, and sisters.

Her poems can be found in Image, Crab Orchard Review, Beloit, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Ninth Letter, among others.

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E M I L Y S T O D D A R D belongs to seven acres of ironweed, bur oaks, sugar maples, herons, and hummingbirds in Michigan.

As a leader of the Amherst Writers and Artists Method, she founded Voice and Vessel, a studio that supports fellow writers and creative spirits. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Radar, Dark Mountain, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Pilgrimage, Cold Mountain Review, The Manifest-Station, and elsewhere. More at emilystoddard.com.

is an artist living in Philadelphia, PA. She received a BFA from the California College of the Arts and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In her art, she uses craft-based materials and techniques in nontraditional ways to make sculptures and installations. She has shown her work nationally and internationally and has presented and published papers internationally. She has received fellowships/grants from Yaddo, the California College of the Arts, I-Park, and Sculpture Space among others.

HANNA VOGEL

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M A R K W A G E N A A R is the author of three award-winning poetry collections, including the Saltman Prize–winning Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, just released from Red Hen Press. His fiction and poetry appear widely, including the New Yorker, Tin House, the Southern Review, Gulf Coast, the Cincinnati Review, and River Styx, among many others. He is an assistant professor at Valparaiso University.

M O N I K A Z O B E L is the author of two books of poems—An Instrument for Leaving, selected by Dorothea Lasky for the 2013 Slope Editions Book Prize (Slope Editions, 2014), and Das Innenfutter der Wörter (edition keiper, Graz, Austria, 2015). Her poems and translations have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, RHINO Poetry, Four Way Review, Redivider, Beloit Poetry Journal, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. A Fulbright and Djerassi Resident Artists Program alumna, she lives in Bremen, Germany.

last note ON WHAT SUSTAINS

I was in the house when a twelve-ton, ninety-foot oak tree fell during Hurricane Irma. My urgency to get out before the tree bisected my home was instinctual. A few months later, I invited a poetry group to use the subject of Emily Dickinson’s dash as a prompt. I wrote too, and the “dash” took on all its denotations and connotations. The elementary and necessary dash itself was one thing, living with upheaval and depression over the next eight months—as for most survivors of natural disasters—was another. What sustained: the presence of friends, old and new, time—that healer—and these dashes I make even now—material reflections in the face of immateriality.

As we become more tightly squeezed, as our sense of time and motion is hastened, as our sense of human connection becomes more amorphous, we must step back and look at the larger picture of our lives. Our world needs a new definition of strength. We need individuals who are in touch with themselves, who learn to move more slowly rather than more quickly, who are gentle enough with themselves to be compassionate with others, who allow themselves to feel deeply so that they may inspire others. We must allow ourselves to feel joy, so that we know all that is at stake. We must sustain ourselves in order to sustain the world.

AMY PENCE, POETRY

JEN CRONIN, VISUAL ART

My art is informed by sustained memories, ideas, and personal doctrines. I work intuitively, without planning, allowing the work to take its own shape. Often times I am not aware of what I’m exposing or processing until the sculpture is finished.

It is at that moment, when the piece has a voice of its own, that I step back and recognize a part of my own story. Then, the work becomes my teacher.

I might consider “Dear Love Poem, Dear Memory” an opposite idea to “what sustains.” I cared for my grandfather, who had dementia, a single summer.

He didn’t know who I was anymore, not even my name, so he called me “the poet.” There’s an unsustainability here: the memories, the names, the lemmings who eat and eat until there’s nothing left.

MARGIE CRINER, VISUAL ART

BESS COOLEY, POETRY

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A sustained note is held for a moment.

Broken from the rhythm of a piece at its peak. When released, the rest of the notes fall like raindrops, settling into closure.

On the banks of a Northwest shore during summer’s predawn, light crests behind the mountain below the Morningstar. There was my note, sustained. Summer’s glimpse of glory morning after morning sustains me in winter, where life appears fractured, brittle—a mother in and out of hospice; children leaving the nest.

Remaining notes fall into their own pattern, separate from mine. There is discord, there is resonance. A melody’s thread woven through variations. Three generations of a family, together for a season, compose a song closing on one beautiful long note, sustained.

A month after my twin brother died, I dreamt I was walking along the edge of a precipitous cliff at night. I slipped, and began plunging through abysmal blackness. Looking around for something to take hold of, I saw two tiny yellow daylilies appear. I seized their soft petals between my fingers, and pulled myself back up into the dream, into the purview of the living.

Now, whenever traction becomes weak, when I don’t remember who I am, I consider the lilies. I search for the handholds in the dark—gratitude, wonder, curiosity, humor, selfforgiveness, acceptance, presence, patience, love. I take the seeds of those life-sustaining flowers and try to grow them, not in little pairs, but in full, ferocious fields.

VINA MOGG, NONFICTION

EMILY MCILROY, VISUAL ART

My fiancé slices a Pink Lady apple in the morning and this is a heart we share.

And the heart in me and the heart in her and in the dog and in the cat are all beating. Somewhere there is a tree full of these apples and they all look like hearts. When I write poems, I’m praising something. I look for my heart in all its amazing shapes. My childhood piano. That same hawk every morning.

My friends. My fiancé tenderly lifting a cup of water to the houseplant—all these things I’ve relied on and loved I call miracle.

Three years ago, I started taking notes.

An image here, a line of dialogue there, little shards of my day. I carried around a notebook. I used my phone less.

Sometimes I inserted one of the notes into a story; usually I didn’t. I wrote not to improve or get published, but to take account of the world and, in doing so, sustain. Then I threw my phone in a river, moved to a mountain cabin, and won the Nobel. Only kidding. Sustaining isn’t about literary fame; it’s an everyday recognition of the language around you.

Don DeLillo writes, “This is the only art I’ve mastered, father—walking the streets and letting the senses collect what is routinely here.” This routine sustains me.

C. T. SALAZAR, POETRY

HENRY HIETALA, FICTION

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last note

The weather is out of sorts this winter and so am I. I need the rhythm of the seasons, but that rhythm is unthreading. We’ve had more thunderstorms in February than summer. The paths on our land that should be ready for snowshoeing are mud.

It rained so hard the other day I gave up the hope of walking to the creek. Not soon after, there were houseflies at the window, alive and hungry and outside their time.

I’m worried for the earth, but like any good worry, its seed is a worry for myself. I’m worried about losing the rhythm that holds me together. The housefly—staring back at me, reminding me of appetite and warning of absence.

An acquaintance of mine, sitting in a park one morning, sad, felt compelled to look up, where three clouds had assembled to clearly form the words “I Am.” It felt personal. She cried all day, joyfully.

Soon after, she moved to the ocean, where things really began. This story is one of the only things I know about her and when I see her, roughly once a year, I bring it up—remind her of the time she got a message from the blue sky, opening something that felt holy in her chest. Maybe we tell our stories so that someone will tell them back to us, when we need them, when we start to forget.

LAURA BOND, NONFICTION

EMILY STODDARD, POETRY

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