The Sandy River Review Spring 2016 by Sandy River Review

The Sandy River Review Spring 2016 Volume 35, Issue 4

Editor | Joshua Cardella

Assistant Editor | Konner Wilson

The Sandy River Review is published online every semester and produces an annual print issue every summer in conjunction with Alice James Books and the University of Maine at Farmington Humanities Department. Special thanks to the creative writing faculty and students, the members of the UMF Writers’ Guild, and the AJB staff for their continued support. We would like to extend special thanks to Shana Youngdahl and Alyssa Neptune for their assistance with this issue. Each contributor retains the copyright to any submitted material, and it cannot be reproduced without the author’s consent. The editors of The Sandy River Review are solely responsible for its content. Opinions herein do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, the University of Maine at Farmington, or Alice James Books. Submissions to The Sandy River Review are accepted on a rolling basis and may be emailed to submissions@sandyriverreview.com. Please visit our website at sandyriverreview.com for more information on publication and contests. Persons interested in the position of Assistant Editor may submit letters of interest to editors@sandyriverreview.com or contact the UMF Writers’ Guild. Cover Art:

Saudade | Audrey Gidman

Table of Contents

Foreword dear new lover | Audrey Gidman

meditation 38 | Audrey Gidman

tattoo | Aliza Dube

sailboat on lake como | Jenna Arcand

se manquer | Duncan Gamble

cambridge | Octavia Akoulitchev

that nobody can deny | Zack Peercy

still life | Audrey Gidman

sestina for mother | Octavia Akoulitchev

old flame | Katie Joseph

leftover crab rangoon in fridge, lower shelf |

just off the highway | Audrey Gidman

the majolica pitcher | Beth Sherman

meditation 34 | Audrey Gidman

Nathaniel Duggan

Contributorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Notes

Foreword My goal as an editor is to force art away from isolation. In creating this magazine, I want to find meaning not only in the individual poems, monologues, and stories that reside in its pages but in the way they breathe each other in. I want the work to not only have power on their own but to find strength in unity. My role, then, is to try my best to provide order, to build a sequence, to create rythym, and, if Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m lucky, to reveal that the small chasms that seem to exist from work to work are nothing but an illuision. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Joshua Cardella

The truth will set you free. But not until it’s finished with you.

—David Foster Wallace, from INFINITE JEST

Poetry

Dear New Lover

Audrey Gidman

Your hands are smooth and cool as riverwater and your eyes are good. I like your easy hips and bent geometry. Thin-wristed strength. You move well—like a ladle in milky broth. Slick and abrupt as liquid. Soothing in the innocence you think you’ve lost—it’s funny what we think we don’t have. What we find in others. New beauty marks. Your smile a fat half-moon against the dark. Tall lover. Blond lover. Taurus. You made my bones ultraviolet in my body. I give you whiskey and you become too drunk, tobacco and you cough. Crack your knuckles. Breathe with the wide chest of a bull. I like this about you: no lines among the pegged stars, no caged-in constellation. Pearls fall from our mouths when we laugh.

Poetry

Meditation 38 Audrey Gidman the leaves twist like smoke in a well-lit room; autumnal transfer. my friend offers my sister smoked salmon and arugula in the doorway; he tries to be casual. i smoke 10 grams of tobacco a day; math is good for calculating death. the leaves fall from their wrists; grace a shade of red. don’t wait until your kidneys ache to drink more water than whiskey; i am a shade of burgundy. bees drop mid-flight onto concrete; autumnal transfer. the day a palm full of sunflower seeds; a dog’s bark bouncing between brick buildings. hunger a thing that binds; when i was young my hands were small and open. there are words for what we don’t know; the dunes of the heart.

Non-Fiction

Tattoo Aliza Dube “You guys wanna watch?” I’m on my tiptoes looking over the counter that separates the waiting room from the actual tattoo parlour in T’ill Death Tattoo. I’m a little unsteady on my feet from the shot of bravery I took in the car. Max and Alex are flipping through a book of piercing examples. They stick on the final page a little too long. It’s got a pic of a vag piercing. I roll my eyes. I expected more from my college guys. “Sure. I wanna see you scream.” Max replies. I keep my “That’s what he said” comment to myself because summer is over. This is not where me and Max are anymore. We are bros now. Just friends. No benefits involved anymore. He’s got pink hair now, ten lbs lighter now. This is not what my Max looked like. He is not my Max anymore. I heard a theory once that said, if two ex-lovers are still friends, then they either were never in love to begin with or are in love still. I guess I’m still waiting to figure out where we stand. Alex is my new favorite maybe and Max’s new best friend. A onenight stand but I’d love to make it two. He’s fiddling with a fresh septum piercing. Shoulder length hair, suspiciously skinny, and a collection of longboard scars. He talks about longboarding a lot. He says it’s easy, you just have to come to terms with the fact that gravity exists, that you fall sometimes. He reminds me of enough ghosts to be my next one. There is one chair for emotional support in the studio. Max takes the seat, Alex takes Max’s lap. They mock pose like they’re a couple. They wait expectantly, watching for me to lose my mind as the hipster tattoo artist puts the needle to skin. I don’t even blink. My hands are shaking though. The hipster is trying to steady them, trying to keep my wrist still so he can carve a pine tree into it. It catches me off guard, I’m not used to somebody holding my hand and this makes them shake more. I’m not nervous; this is just what my hands do lately, they have their own Richter scale. Even my snapchats turn up blurry. “Have you ever gotten a tattoo before?” The tattoo artist asks, concerned that my tree is going to end up looking like a jelly fish. He’s trying to be compassionate, but I’m not sure he knows how. He’s got a tattoo of a hatchet over his ear and I’m pretty sure I could fit my fist through his gauged ears. Pain is a stranger to him, either that or a very close friend. “Yeah, I got two on my ribs.” Max and Alex are swapping looks like the tats I’ve mentioned are some hole in the wall only they’ve visited. I’m busy watching the needle’s hungry mouth eat up my skin, leaving black space where the flesh my mother gave me used to be. The black is fresh, new- it’s a story I am choosing to tell for myself, laid above the one that nature dealt 3

me. The boys grow bored with my indifference and leave in search of caffeine. That’s fine. I don’t need nobody to hold my hand. I’ve done this before, and will do it again. Under No Circumstances should you leave the bandage on for more than two hours. I’m in the Hannahford’s (Can’taffords) lady’s room, trying to peel off the shrink wrap surrounding my fresh ink. Max and Alex are shopping for something to mix our Tequila with because we don’t want to die tonight. Because that’s what legend tells us; only the crazy or the damned drink tequila with no chaser. We are not committed enough to fall under either category. This hospital grade tape hurts worse than the needle. Curses are flying out my mouth like Panam. “MOTHER FUCKING CHRIST!!!” “Language!” The old lady in the handicapped stall scolds, for the fifth time. “SON OF A FUCKING BITCH!!!” I can only imagine what the shoppers passing the bathroom door are thinking. I honestly don’t give a fuck. I’m in pain ripping off the world’s worst motherfucking band-aid. The tape comes off with more arm hair than I was even aware I had. I toss it in the trash with contempt. I run through the aisles shouting Max and Alex’s names like I’ve lost my parents at the mall. Alex waves to me with a flask from the booze aisle. “Hey, I’ve got one of those!” I exclaim, like this is the world’s rarest coincidence. “I’d expect nothing less.” “It’s got Marilyn Monroe on it,” I explain, “And it says, a good girl knows her limits, but a wise girl knows she has none.” He shoots me that sideways smile he reserves for when I say something that’s a cocktail of cute and self-destructive. I love that smile. I’d do anything to make that smile happen. “And that is how you die.” Alex condemns. And I’m ok with this, because Alex shot me that “poor baby” smile. This is the story I am choosing; I am the wise girl with no limits. Use Antibacterial soap and water and wipe tattoo completely clean. We’re in Max’s dorm room, back from our afternoon adventures. This is only the second time I have visited Max at his school, 2 hours away from my own. The place still feels new, like a grown up tooth breaking through the gum line. New and strange. Unstained. My wrist burns but smells like Velvet Sugar. I had accidentally 4

sprayed my tattoo with Bath and Body Works spray and now my open wound smells like baby prostitute. “Open wound” is the word the tattoo artist had used to explain the significance of the aftercare to me. “You’re dealing with an open wound here- you’ve got to be careful with it until it heals.” I didn’t know how to explain to him that I had no patience for instructions like that. If things healed right in my world, they did so by accident. “Spray the door.” Max instructs. D’Arretti is rolling spliffs on Max’s desk. I’m not sure what I think of this new character. He reminds me of a character from Looney Tunes come to life. He’s got a Salvador Dali mustache and a shock top of dyed red hair. Fifteen minutes ago he shook my hand and introduced himself as the dealer of the third floor. $5 per spliff. He’d kissed my hand like I was visiting royalty. He eyed my stilettos like they were candied. The more people I meet, the less I believe normal exists. We’ve got a window cracked but it still smells less than legal up in this dorm room. I’m using the perfume my Mama mailed to me at summer camp as a cover. She’d be so proud. Max is panicking, wringing his hands with weed-shot paranoia. D’Arretti is humming along to Spotify Premium, oblivious to his distress. “You only know you love her when you let her go….” “This song reminds me,” D’Arretti says to no one in particular “Of a girl I once loved- still love to this day.” He slows his rolling and stops to look directly at me. Under his gaze I am self conscious of every pore, every inch of my skin. He looks at me like he’s known me for a century. I shiver. “You got one of those, girlie? Someone you love but would never soberly agree to being in a relationship with again?” I want to tell this stranger that I do. That I feel this love’s absence like an amputee feels a phantom limb or in the way a child’s tongue searches sleepily for a lost baby tooth. I want to talk about how my head still spins toward whatever voice speaks his name, that I have a recognition for its syllables as if they were my own. My mouth opens as if to speak. But I can’t bring any of the words up. Max’s new girlfriend opens the door. I refuse to speak about heartbreak. That would imply that I have a heart to break. This is not the story I want to tell. Next apply a thin layer of Aquaphor. Repeat this step 3 or 4 times a day to prevent the tattoo from drying out. Max’s friend, Lily, said that I could borrow her Aquafor she had leftover from her own tattoo. She had also said we could borrow her blender for the margarita mix. Lily had apparently forgotten about these promises, because we are now sexiled from her room. My fresh ink is crinkling like a dying leaf. We are drinking the Tequila straight out the bottle, the mix Max bought left untouched in the fridge. I’m sitting next to Dio and Molly on Max’s yogibo. Dio and Molly are Max’s neighborsand maybe something more? It’s impossible to tell with 5

this crowd. Dio has that kind of perma-tan that can make any face beautiful, as if she needed help in that department. She’s an Esmerelda straight off the Disney screen with a lip stud for irony. Molly’s all-boyfriend jeans and boyish figure. Max mentioned once that she has a long distance boyfriend. We don’t talk about that though. She sports a t-shirt that’s a warped version of the Starbucks logo. “Dapacino” it reads. An incrimination. An identity. We all compliment her t-shirt at least once; it’s a custom of our culture. The three of us are circle of death-ing the first fifth of Tequila like winos living under the interstate. We try to hide our winces after each sip, it looks too much like weakness. Max’s new girlfriend looks a lot like me, but I’m not drunk enough to comment on this yet. She is nestled in his lap and he kisses the nape of her neck occasionally, like he used to kiss mine. I feel like I’m having an out of body flashback to two months ago, watching them. Blood flushes to my cheeks. In jealousy? In irritation? I’m like a five year old sometimes, expecting that everything I lick should be claimed as mine, indefinitely. With nearly a dozen flings behind me, you’d think that I’d have learned to give up on this possessiveness. But it’s a haunting I’ve never been able to exorcise. I’m working on trying to bury the past, to write a new story. Alex is sitting dangerously close to the open window. There’s no screen and he looks as though he’s deciding whether or not it would be worth it to tumble the three stories to the ground. His eyes are wide kiddie pools of Salvia, a legal hallucinogen that until this summer I had no idea existed. I’m timing out eight minutes until he’s back from his trip. There is a joint tucked defiantly behind his ear. He could have easily hidden it, but he has his hair scraped back into a ponytail. He’ll walk past his CA like this, challenging them to call him out on it. They never will. Fearless. Reckless. Stupid? When the Tattoo starts peeling… We’re in the campus courtyard, playing in the early night. It’s only 9, but the stars dance like midnight. D’Arretti and Alex are smoking. I’m freezing. I’m running around on frost pricked pavement in tights so threadbare my toes poke out the front, like I’m homeless. I’ve abandoned my heels for the night, they can retire, they’ve already made their point. The boys are watching me like I’ve jumped out of a fairy tale, like my appearance is something they can’t quite believe. I love this look they’ve got on their faces. I’d do anything to make this look happen. “Did you buy those like that?” Alex asks, plucking a loose thread on my knee like a guitar string. “No, they’re an experiment,” Alex shoots me that “poor baby” smile I adore. “I got these freshman year. No rips. I want to see what they look like by the time I graduate.” That had been the intention, anyway, but I don’t 6

think the fabric can hold up for another year and a half. Alex and D’Arretti gawk at my knees poking through the tears. “They’re a metaphor for my soul,” I think to myself. I shake the thought away. I don’t repeat it aloud. The thought is not my own. It’s a leftover from my Catholic childhood. A soul is a belief my mother had given me. It’s something I donated to Goodwill long ago, with my Barbies and jumpers. Outgrown. I trace my tattoo gingerly with a fingertip. The ink is swollen, it feels like Braille beneath my skin. I have written over my mother’s draft with my own story now. You can’t even read her handwriting anymore. No Tanning I sink down on the yogibo in Max’s dorm room. I can’t remember how I got here. Second hand smoke is woven through my hair like a braid as if it’s a natural part of me. Dio’s sitting next to me, but it takes me a second to realize because her face is busy kissing Molly’s. She spins to face me, wiping Molly’s lip gloss off the corner of her mouth. “Are you bi?” Without a beat to contemplate what border I am about to cross or what passport I will need to declare to get there, I nod my head. Her lips meet mine before I even have time to catch my breath. Katy Perry had promised me cherry chapstick, but Dio tastes like weed and Tequila, just like me. I open my eyes. Max is staring at me, his eyes wide, startled. It’s the same look he gives me when I knock a shot back like it’s water or when I drink straight from the bottle. This is what I like to call his “lifeguard face.” It says, baby you’re drowning. Out of your depth. In over your head. But he never moves a toe from the shore. I don’t need him to save me. My story has come a long way since he last left it. No Swimming I’m drowning, not in water, but in limbs, in boys lips mapping out my anatomy as if I don’t already know where everything is. I just wanted Alex, but somehow ended up with D’Aretti too, on the porch of the admissions building. Now I’m caught in the middle literally, wondering how to admit that I’m only down for ⅔ of what this is shaping out to be. I’ve got my back to Alex. He’s toying with my Led Zeplin earring between his teeth, hands about my waist like we’re at a school dance. D’Arretti has his fingers tangled in my hair, biting my lip a little while he’s kissing it. I taste blood. I dig myself closer into Alex, trying to disappear into his sweatshirt, but his wasted mind offers little protection for me now. “We shouldn’t,” D’Arretti pulls away. I catch my breath, relieved. But his eyes are still hungry and he still keeps talking, “do this here. We should go inside or find a bush or something.” I’m waiting for Alex to tell D’Arretti to fuck off. To explain that I 7

am his and his alone. Alex doesn’t say anything though. I feel his chin nod up and down against the back of my head, in agreement. I’m staring down at the borrowed shoes I am wearing, because I can’t look either of them in the eye. Take a walk in someone else’s shoes… maybe the owner of these loafers would be braver than me, brave enough to be honest about her limits. I am nothing but a scared little girl with someone else’s tongue in my mouth. Between the smoke of the boys’ cigarette butts my lungs, my heart is screaming for air. Because now I know just how much they think of me. This is not the love story I was writing. Call T’ill Death for any further questions. On the yogibo again, back from outside. I don’t remember climbing the staircase or walking down the hall, but I am here. I got one leg on Molly’s and the other on Dio’s. It’s a throne for a false queen. Frankie, one of Max’s friends who looks like an English teacher I had in high school, is listening and laughing a little too hard at everything I say; “No I don’t believe in monogamy. “If I ever have a kid it will be Chance for a boy and Karma for a girl because that’s what they will be.” “I don’t believe in love. I believe in chaos-always.” I’m waiting for someone to catch the irony, for someone to notice the smirk of a lie on my lips. But no one ever does. I don’t believe the things I say, it’s a script I wrote long ago, a part I have to play. My tough girl facade with her shell-shocked eyes fools them. Underneath I’m still waiting for my life to become the romantic comedy my mother’s movies promised me it would be. Because that’s how it works right? The cynical girl always gets the guy? Max is asleep in his girlfriend’s room. Even though I just fucked Alex, he is nowhere to be found. I feel abandoned, even though I know I am no one’s responsibility. But my own. I’m beginning to lose track of the plot line of my own existence. Frankie holds my hand and leads me to what he calls home, an identical dorm room box down the hall. I can barely tell the difference. We offer free touchups if needed. When Frankie gets bored with fucking me, he kisses me on the back of my neck. He tucks me into bed like I’m a child, turns out the light, and shuts the door. I don’t think to ask him where he is going or if he will be back. His alarm clock carves red angry numbers into the night. 11:09. It’s too early to be asleep on a Saturday night. I fling myself out of bed and paw around for my yoga pants. They have a pinky-sized hole on the ass but I don’t care. I’m stumbling down the hallway, and the walls keep moving. 8

The hallway’s getting longer. I think of Alice trying to find the garden, her wonderland. I’m like Alice, I think. But I no longer have anything I’m looking for and the metaphor falls flat. A door flings open and Chance the Rapper steps out. Or at least a guy who looks like him. “Having a fun night?” he asks with a look that’s usually reserved for Disney villains. He gestures to my neck. I catch a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror. It looks like I’ve been choked. But I know better, it’s the ghosts of five hungry mouths on my skin; Alex, D’Arretti, Dio, Molly, Frankie. “I think he missed a spot,” he says it like it’s an oversight that must be corrected. No Scratching He’s pulling me by the arm into the lady’s room. He flicks the doorstop out of the way with his foot so that no one will follow us. He pulls me into the shower. He stares at me as though he expects me to perform a magic trick for him. I don’t move. I don’t believe in magic anymore. He kisses me, toying with the hem of my tank top. “I don’t know you,” I protest. My arms stay at my sides. I’m tired, so very tired. He digs around in his pocket and pulls out a Trojan as if this is all the consent he needs. Max and Alex’s names are caught in my throat. I want to scream, want them to come rescue me because this is what happens in the movies. The girl always gets saved. But the stranger’s got me pressed against the wall. A bruise is blooming under his grip on my arm. He’s sealing out my voice with a kiss. My limbs are heavy, my eyelids are heavy on tequila, on apathy. I start counting floor tiles, counting seconds. I kiss back. “He’s gonna notice I’m gone.” I’m vague about the “he”. I don’t know whether I’m talking about Frankie, Max or Alex. Or an imaginary boyfriend. I’m trying to scare this guy off, saying hey somebody gives a shit about me. He doesn’t seem to believe me anymore than I believe myself. He doesn’t even acknowledge that I spoke at all. I pretend this is my choice as my yoga pants pool over the shower drain. I pretend it’s another one of Liza’s reckless stories. I pretend it’s like a G-eazy song, like this is something to cross off my bucket list. I begin writing the story I will tell my friends, the story I will tell Max and Alex. I mine my soul for a meaning in this because the movie of my life has to make sense. I pretend I’m not about to cry. Consult a physician at first sign of infection. Frankie’s door is locked. I locked myself out. I don’t have a key. This is not where I live. I don’t know where Frankie is or when he’s coming back. 9

I don’t really want to sleep in Frankie’s bed, but I don’t really want to sleep in the hallway either. I cringe at the thought of another (let’s face it, stranger) pressed against my skin. I want to throw up. I have never been more aware of my liver in my life. I slump against the wall. My eyelids droop, my limbs are heavy. My fingertips trace the bruise on my arm gingerly, wondering if tomorrow I will be able to play it off as a hickey. I’m dozing. I’m waiting for someone to let me in. Someone to care. Someone to give me a place to call home for the night. I’m scratching at my wrist, at the day old ink stamped there. Has it really only been a day? The outline is red and angry, my skin rejecting the ink. My body knows this doesn’t belong, my immune system is trying to get rid of the pigment but it can’t. This open wound is more than skin deep. I don’t want to process what just happened. I’m wishing that life had a backspace key and that I could just delete the past hour with the click of a button. If no one ever gets the real story, then it didn’t really happen, right?

Sailboat on Lake Como Jenna Arcand

Poetry

Se Manquer Duncan Gamble the old library is dreaming of you with your hands like warm stones left care-lessly in the tumbling three oclock sun just stirred into the robinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s egg jealous at your bali new & unspiraling across the horizon it is empty & silent & there is no dark smell of coffee to distract us from the eternity of wooden cathedral ceilings we could live here like rats among the rafters clambering across worn bluejeans love & ghosts of old books wearing thin cardigans the amber tinged musk of tired pages & holey sweaters draped in comfortable tatters the mountain flannel you wear in my dreams would be home here where there are no bookshelves for our words to transcend only pillars & converted gaslamps waiting like fishbowl apostles for the poetry of my murmuring heart & your forgetful breath your skin is so friendly we could almost be strangers gazing through the blue windows trimmed by mahogany-stained oldwood that dreams of your hair tousling endlessly in the wind on the williams art hell fire escape watching the weekend weather tumble in over the lake

Poetry

Cambridge Octavia Akoulitchev You are riveted in my mind. The sun t(here) is stillcentripetal it only pools itself onto pools of only itself. I should not be listening for the carriage of your neckgirdled by the glaring blue of walls instressed with ivy, but your totalmass abstraction has eclipsed the green. C and G minor will not resonate: you reign, ironically, supreme. Mesopotamia is roaring, yet you have made me deaf

Monologue

That Nobody Can Deny Zack Peercy [Setting: an empty room with a wooden stool. On the stool is a cheap cardboard birthday hat. PERSON enters holding a noise maker, walks towards the stool, picks up the hat, sits down, and takes their time adjusting the hat on their head.] PERSON: I think I want to kill myself. [pause] Relax, it’s a party. [PERSON points to the hat to indicate as much.] It was my mom’s idea; the party, not me killing myself. Although, she probably has a lot to do with that too. She has a new boyfriend. He has a potbelly. He can’t drink anymore because he has half a kidney or a liver or some bullshit, so he’s already broken the traditional “Mom’s boyfriend” mold, but he makes up for it by trying to assume the stereotypical patriarchal role of the family. He’s always telling my mother, in a voice more audible than he realizes, that her damn kids don’t respect him. She tries, on occasion, to talk to me about it, but the conversation devolves into a screaming match about who said what and when and where and why. My younger sister is easier to manipulate. I can’t blame her. The promise of her own room, a luxury she’s never experienced, is a compromise I don’t support, but understand. [PERSON puts the noise maker in their mouth and takes a drag.] My mother held herself to a higher standard when she smoked. A minimum wage job, slew of abusive partnerships, and single mothering three kids were all contributing factors as well, but I was the one who took away her cigarettes. Because of an anti-drug program homework assignment, a first grade version of myself walked up to her in the kitchen one morning and told her that I didn’t want her to die because she smoked. She quit the next day. I guess I had freaked her out, given her the ol’ scared straight technique. Now I think that half a pack a day might have been a better stress-reliever than online dating. She said that it was a sacrifice she made for me. In four years, she’ll say that moving in with her boyfriend was a sacrifice she made for me as well, but I know that’s not true. The reality of the situation is this: my mother was too poor to pay the rent. Potbelly offered her an escape, six school districts over, with the added bonus of his constant presence. This wasn’t an idea that was pitched to me or my sister, it merely became the reality when they would leave for several hours to go look at houses together. I believed that if I never went, it would never have to become a reality. One particular tour, the one that would become my seventh home in six years, my mother was adamant about me going. I refused. I 14

told her I would never move in with Potbelly, that he had no good qualities, that this relationship was closer to ending than she realized, just like all the rest, that I hated him, and she looked me in the eye and said “Well, I love him. So get used to it.” I never got used to it. On move in day, I was shown upstairs. It was the middle of July and humid, to say the least. While testing all of the thermostats, some jackass left the upstairs one on 85. The upstairs bathroom smelled like smoke. This is Hell, I thought. In my new room, the shades were drawn, so I flipped the light switch to get a better look at where I would be spending most of my time. What at first I thought was a burnt out lightbulb turned out to be no light at all. I don’t mean an empty socket, I mean the ceiling was bare. The light switch was just for show. These fuckers hadn’t even checked to see if I would have a light in my room. Which brings us to today. Today is my sixteenth birthday. I didn’t want to have a party. I was too embarrassed. I didn’t want to explain who that loud guy with the potbelly is, why the only light source in my room is a desk lamp from my older sister’s college dorm, why I’ve lost so much weight, why there’s a fist sized hole in my wall, but upon answering “no” to every birthday trope my mother could think of, she interpreted this as throw a surprise party for me with my family and closest friends. [A recording of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” starts playing] I want to take a serrated knife upstairs and saw out my trachea. I want to take one of the birthday candles and burn out my cornea. I want to put my jaw in the vice grip in the garage and twist until I feel it snap. I want to open my stomach and tack my intestines across the walls like birthday streamers. I want to leave the gas stove on all night and light one of my mother’s cigarettes from her secret stash so my skin can blister. But I sit on a stool in the kitchen and blow out the candles. [PERSON blows the noise maker until the lights black out.]

Still Life Audrey Gidman

Poetry

Sestina for Mother Octavia Akoulitchev Chickens’ skulls bowing, To the prayer of grains nestled under Dandelion clocks, shot up in the darkness, fell again. Your welter of English words with edges Unsanded tore The crickets’ purr in a silk rip. Some vowels overflowed from the language gap: congealed by the flutter and rip Motions of your fingers: your mother was working in the chicken factory, bowing Her forearm to the tug of the lever - as if to salute before she tore The ranks’ feathered, sprouting necks. Demi-god unbeing the being under Her orbiting fist. Humerus, elbow joint, radius, ulna, carpus: the edges Of her bones were crumbling into silt, with each tug - again. (Your eyes glittered as your fingernails spooned out her elbow sockets, like a child scraping jelly from the bowl, again and again), Some times her whole body would convulse with the pain and she would miss it. The rip Of edges Through oxygen would shriek back to the sky, unsplashed. She would curse God, watching the bowing Conveyer belt, like oil, pouring into the white heat under Neath. Around her clutch, fingernails tore The thenar, carving out half-moons. Fluorescent light soused her. Each afterward she tore Off the hands and apron that she didn’t recognize. She dreamt again That the eaves of the roof which she lay under Were tangled with the roosting bodies of the uncleaved ones - their weight about to rip Through the bowing Ceiling, on to her alabaster limbs and underwear that strained at the edges. But what choice did she have? Thinking and edges Were cancers, so she combed them like shells from the expansive white, and as pain tore 17

Through her, amplified, bowing Her being, she thanked God that she would not have to live again After. Now her daughters needed her, to rip Toast from the toaster, crack lice from their scalps, protect them from the kitchenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cigarette miasma that they floated under. The hiatus of your voice flared under The nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s luminosity, and your edges Melted to marble. Somewhere, a rip Sundered a poplar, and we listened to the sibilance of the plummeting leaves, the thud. (Gently, unpeeling from the tip) you tore Your head from the sieve of your hands, and smiled again, As the silver birch branches were bowing.

Old Flame Katie Joseph

Fiction

Leftover Crab Rangoon in Fridge, Lower Shelf

Nathaniel Duggan

As with most days, Paul feels uncomfortable. It starts in the supermarket. He puts carrots, soy sauce, and canned tuna on the sliding belt. He fumbles with his wallet. The cashier lengthens her face into a smile. He recognizes her—a biology class last semester, the classroom dusty and hot, her tussled hair filling his view. She does not recognize him. She keeps her eyes focused slightly above his left shoulder, pink nails clacking against the register as he struggles to arrange the green mass in his wallet—provided by work study jobs, refund checks, and a vague college fund his parents had brought up once while he was in middle school as a means to explain why he wasn’t allowed to buy a Nintendo Wii—in a way that equals the greenlettered digits displayed on the register. He doesn’t realize he’s been sweating slightly, in ectoplasmic bursts along his palms, until after he’s handed her the money. She tells him to have a good day. His voice catches a bit when he says, “You too, thanks.” Although it’s December, it is unusually warm and sunny as he drives back to his apartment. All the trees are bare and in the brightness their shadows stretch across the pavement like veins. Everything looks like veins to Paul today: the rust on his apartment’s tin roof, the cracks in the sidewalks, the fissures in the few passing clouds. He is restless in his skin and in his head. He feels an uncharacteristic urge to do something, so he goes for a walk. He texts seven different people during his walk asking what they’re up to. Two of these people are girls he has hoped to put his penis inside since freshman year. He is a senior now, and he doesn’t think he will manage to put his penis inside any of them, but even so his heart thuds a bit faster when Catherine replies and he arranges to meet with her in a few hours. To kill time, he visits a freshman friend in a dorm room. The friend sells him two tabs of acid and some Adderall. The friend asks where the party is at. Paul doesn’t know, so he says, shrugging a bit, remembering something he himself overhead in a hallway as a freshman once, “Middle Street.” “Cool,” the freshman says, taking Paul’s money. “Right on, man.” Paul puts the drugs in the folded brim of his hat. He still has two hours to go before he meets Catherine. He walks to the woods. There are lots of dead leaves here, and his shoes get stuck a few times in the muddy path. The woods remain persistently murky and remind him, with their shadows and gloom, more of a seafloor than they do woods. This makes him realize that he didn’t bring any water. He gets thirsty fast, his lungs feeling like strips of torn paper. He sits on a stump and rests 20

for a while. He tries to convince himself not to eat the first tab of acid. He puts the tab in his mouth. The back of his throat prickles and goes a little numb. He stands and keeps walking. Eventually he gets a little lost and finds a narrow field dotted with telephone poles. The tops of the poles glow with sunlight. It’s a little beautiful, he thinks. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and he considers how few people in the world know about this field, how the knowledge of its existence, or lack thereof, is of no consequence to their lives. His mouth is dry, and he licks his lips. He starts walking back the way he came. The acid isn’t very strong. It keeps him suspended above himself like a hesitant balloon, high enough to see his own being and all its ugly failings, but still bound too closely to not care. He takes the second tab just as he emerges from the forest and swallows a few times, feeling like there are pine needles lodged in his throat. On his way to meet Catherine, he thinks about stopping at Celeste’s apartment to grab some water. Then he remembers he and Celeste broke up last week, and he probably shouldn’t visit her anymore. A wave of cold hits him and his teeth won’t stop chattering. He has reached Celeste’s parking lot and he wavers there, watching the light slowly fade from the pavement like blood flowing in reverse to refill a slit vein. He is being melodramatic, he knows. He regrets the second tab of acid. He wants to find a blanket to crawl beneath until he feels normal again, to retreat deep within the hamster wheel of himself and tread on it forever. Catherine texts him wondering where he is. He tells her he’s sorry but he’s going to curl up in a dark place for the rest of the night. She texts him back asking if he’s okay. He puts his phone in his pocket and walks into Celeste’s apartment. She is in her room browsing the internet. “Hey,” he says. “How are you?” she says. She smiles blearily. She looks stoned. He hadn’t noticed until now how withered she looks, each arm thin as a spider’s. Her skin is palely taut, white as her overgrown fingernails. “Fine, I guess,” he says. “Tired.” He regrets coming here. He’s having trouble staying on his feet. He directs his body to her bed and lies down. “I did some acid earlier,” he says. “Just so you know.” She doesn’t turn from her computer screen. “I appreciate the PSA.” He stares at a corner where the walls intersect, feeling like he’s viewing the world through the distortion of a fish bowl. He wonders what percentage of his life he has spent lying in this bed staring at this particular corner. He remembers dimly that this was one of the reasons he decided to break up with Celeste—he couldn’t bear all the corners. He takes out his phone and texts Karla, another girl he wants to put his penis inside, to ask if she wants to hang out. She replies a few minutes later to say simply, without 21

punctuation, that she’s working. He puts his phone away. He feels lonely and unfulfilled. He tells himself, “I don’t care about anything; I’m too smart to care about anything,” but it’s a butterfly of a thought, fluttering feebly and without much conviction in his skull. Ten minutes later he heads back to his apartment. He drifts into his roommate Kyle’s room and lies down on the bed. Kyle, sitting at his desk and typing something on his computer, asks if he’s okay. “Sure,” he says. “I’m just tired.” Kyle likes karaoke, Elvis, and Chinese food. Kyle can put down a fifth of vodka and be happy in a slurred, genuinely drunk way. Paul is jealous of Kyle’s life, its unironic simplicity. The ceiling swirls and occasionally looks like a 3D projection of itself. Paul feels like a 3D projection of his own sadness. He’s being dramatic again. Kyle whistles “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” for a while before he swivels his chair to face Paul and says, “I think I’m going to have some people over later.” “That’s fine,” Paul says, feeling that it is not at all fine. He does not want to leave his apartment, but he also does not want to deal with people. He is cornered as a gerbil in its glass tank. If people come over, he will speak gibberish to them, and they will think he’s insane and be mad at him for spending his Sunday alone on acid. These fears vibrate in the rods of his bones like a barely-stifled scream. He feels bad and wants to eat all the leftover turkey in his fridge, and then go into a coma for a while, long enough that when he wakes up the world will be excitingly different, and there will be a new Harry Potter book out, and he’ll be able to blamelessly catch up on things at his own creeping pace. Instead he showers for a while. His reflection looks blotchy and unfamiliar when he climbs out. He says “Gollum” to himself, not unkindly, and laughs in a way that uncoils his spine slightly. He texts Celeste asking if she wants to get Chinese food. She picks him up, and they drive across town and buy crab rangoons. He hasn’t eaten all day, and the whole drive back his mouth waters with anticipation, but when they return to Celeste’s apartment, he lacks the motor coordination to raise the deep-fried fragments to his mouth without spilling the sauce that accompanies them on Celeste’s carpet. This brings him a sensation of intense, momentary futility. “If I can’t even eat crab rangoons,” he thinks to himself. The thought stops, hangs suspended. He manages to finish all but two of the rangoons before something heaves in his gut. He puts the leftovers back in their wire box. He leaves the box in Celeste’s refrigerator. His stomach feels like it’s withering, and he tells himself that he will never eat Chinese food again. Celeste accompanies him back to his apartment where the party is just starting. Someone set up beer pong in the back room on a table too small for beer pong. Kyle sings karaoke on a machine that looks like it came from an infomercial. Paul does not want to play beer bong or sing karaoke. He sits on the couch sipping straight rum and talks about the party in negative 22

terms to his friend Stephen. There are only twelve people here total, half of whom have never been drunk before, it seems, and they make loud, animalish noises as they slug whiskey and haphazardly fling ping pong balls. Paul thinks about all the social connections he didn’t establish throughout college, the names he failed to remember and the casual invitations to apartments he never followed up on. He can tell he is coming down from the acid because he needs to squint at the ceiling to make it ripple and distort. Celeste leaves after an hour to go to another party. Paul briefly considers asking to join her, but she exits before he can find the words. He starts drinking more and imagines Celeste having a greater quantity of fun than him. He imagines her body lying with another man’s body. The man, he figures, plays acoustic guitar and knows what street the lacrosse team parties on. Paul hates himself and the circumstances of his life. He excuses himself to the bathroom. Instead of peeing, he stares at himself in the mirror, not sure exactly what he’s looking for. He returns back downstairs to see that Kyle is still singing karaoke, and the rest of the party has migrated into the living room to watch him. “I’m going to get through all my CDs tonight,” Kyle proclaims, holding a half-empty bottle of vodka in his right hand. “If I can sing all these CDs, I’ll be happy.” Paul tries to figure out what he can do to bring himself happiness right now. He finishes his drink and still can’t come up with anything. He thinks about being somewhere else, maybe playing a video game. He thinks about calling his older brother and leaving a voicemail. He imagines saying in the voicemail, “I feel lonely and unfulfilled.” He drinks more and is glad he doesn’t leave a voicemail. His stomach begins to throb. “Rangoons,” he thinks, with the force of an epiphany, of light streaming through stained glass. “Crab rangoons will make me happy.” Someone hands him a microphone attached to the karaoke machine. He sings along in an arrhythmic monotone to sad songs he hasn’t heard since middle school. People in the room laugh encouragingly. He likes the people around him a little better. He keeps singing, and Kyle joins in, and they pass an hour like this, savoring their mutual abrasiveness. It gets late, and the guests begin to leave. Paul feels sad. He does not want to be alone inside of himself again. He texts Celeste to ask if she’s having more fun than him. She doesn’t reply. He throws his coat on and stumbles outside. The world is black and encased in an epidermal layer of ice. He walks shivering to Celeste’s apartment and wrenches open an unlocked window. Feeling primordial, like a pale larva, he squirms through the window and knocks over a fan as he tumbles inside. He wanders through semidarkness to her refrigerator. Its light swivels like a half-moon across the kitchen as he opens it. He eats the leftover crab rangoon on Celeste’s bed, careful not to let the crumbs fall on her neatly folded sheets. He feels accomplished. He 23

feels a little lonely. He pictures himself as a heart hidden away in the veiny box of itself, secure but isolated. He has indigestion. He needs to leave soon or else he will fall asleep. He thinks about tomorrow, about this bedroom without him, the sunbeams he will not see expanding along its carpeted floor, the sound of Celeste turning the lock that he will not hear. He thinks about everything that is unknowable in the universe, the fields tucked out of sight, the little secrets buried within themselves, and all he’s sure of, really, is that he will wake up tomorrow, he will drink the rest of his rum, he will be drunk before noon. He’ll feel bad, and then, like a cloud breaking, he will gradually feel happy, for no reason, then just as inexplicably he’ll feel bad again, and this cycle will repeat, for all time, in the same way that apartments will continue to exist without him, wire boxes of Chinese food will accumulate in fridges he has never seen, and the world will continue its relentless, incomprehensible distending.

Just Off the Highway Audrey Gidman

Fiction

The Majolica Pitcher Beth Sherman My mother has a summer place in Alford, MA. It’s a gorgeous house, right out of the pages of Architectural Digest. Inside, the rooms are spare and austere, with enormous windows through which you can see manicured flower beds and acres of lawn sloping down to the woods. All the furnishings are modern, with sharp angles and hard, shiny surfaces and sometimes an antique tucked artfully in a corner to relieve the general air of sterility. Everything looks expensive because it is. My mother is addicted to shopping the same way other people are addicted to drugs or sex. Luckily, she hasn’t discovered the Internet yet. Her purchases are made over the phone, through catalogs. There are seven closets in the house, six of them walk-in. Only you can’t enter because they’re cluttered with stuff she’s bought. The clothes are arranged by color. Most of the blouses and slacks still have price tags attached. There aren’t enough days in the year to wear all the sweaters. Sometimes, I catch her standing in front of the closet in her bedroom and studying what’s inside, running her fingers over the clothes the way a harpist strokes her instrument. I wonder what she’s thinking, if the sight pleases her in some way and if so, why? Every August, we go up and visit for a long weekend. The last time we were there, I walked into each of the rooms, deciding what I’d like to inherit after she dies. Yes to the Breuer chairs and the glass cocktail table. No to the series of paintings that look like scraps from a lumberyard. No to the metal sculpture shaped like an atom. Yes to the West Elm lamp I can’t afford. It was late afternoon and my husband had gone for a walk. His third of the day. My mother was in the pool, swimming laps. Seventeen times up and back. I don’t know how she settled on that number but the ritual is performed without fail. It was unseasonably cool. She had overheated the water and steam rose from its surface in vague white puffs. This was not the first time I had inventoried my mother’s possessions. I did it every so often, noting new purchases and cataloging what had disappeared. When she gets tired of the things she’s bought, she gives them to her cleaning lady or has the pool man take boxes of items to the Goodwill in Great Barrington. Once, she re-purchased a vase she had discarded. It’s made of Murano glass and has a swirling pattern of gray and silver streaks that reminds me of the fur on a cat we had when I was a child. The cat ran away and got hit by a car. She didn’t realize the vase used to be hers. When I pointed it out, she said I was mistaken. It’s futile to argue with her. She never backs down and never admits to being in the wrong. I used to get frustrated by this myopia, but now I view it as a positive. It can be quite useful to only look at one side of an 26

equation. Watching her all these years, I’ve gotten awfully good at ignoring whatever’s unpleasant and distasteful, overlooking flaws in the fabric of my relationships, pretending my life is running smoothly when it isn’t. That day, I was looking at the majolica displayed in the sitting room. It’s one of the things she collects. There have been a series of collections over the years: jadeite kitchenware, vintage salt shakers, cloche hats, Roseville pottery. I liked the majolica, but only certain pieces. Like the pitcher. It’s about 6 inches high, decorated with leaves and crocuses, in soothing shades of brown, green and lilac. The vase is perfectly proportioned and the balance of its lines contrasted with the curve of its handle and the flowers standing out in relief, somehow made me feel calmer. My mother walked in as I was putting it back. She had wrapped a towel around herself but small droplets of water fell on the pale maple floor, which made me unaccountably happy. She looked me over as she greeted me and I knew my baggy T-shirt and rumpled shorts didn’t meet her standards. “The majolica is dusty,” I announced. “Violet must have been too busy to clean it this week.” When cornered, I had learned to blame anyone but the most obvious choice. My mother nodded. “She has a lot to do. This house . . .” She gestured to the cathedral ceiling, as if the myriad responsibilities of owning such a place were floating directly above us. “We’re going to the club for dinner. The reservation is for six so you don’t have much time to put on some makeup and fix your hair.” I nodded. To please her, I’d brought rollers and purchased bright red lipstick, blue eye shadow and thick beige foundation at CVS. By the time I got done primping, I intended to look like Joan Crawford on a bender. I needn’t have bothered since dinner turned out to be the usual tense affair. My husband stared at his plate the whole time, saying next to nothing. My mother made up for his silence by talking, complaining mostly, about the weather, the wait staff, the people at adjacent tables who she didn’t know but didn’t approve of either. And I feigned interest, murmuring “uh huh” and “really” at appropriate intervals, pushing the food around my plate. That night, she had a stroke. The left side of her face sagged. She wouldn’t go to the hospital and only agreed after I said if she didn’t, I’d call 911 and two burly men would come and force her out of bed and into an ambulance. The stroke affected her speech mostly. Against medical advice, she insisted that my husband and I check her out of the hospital and drive her back to New York. As we were packing to leave the summer house, I remembered the pitcher, which I wrapped in newspaper and stuffed into my suitcase. My mother spent a month in rehab. She tried speech therapy but dismissed the therapist after a few visits not seeming to want to reclaim what had been lost. Now she has aphasia. When she searches for words, she can’t find them. It’s like having a Rolodex vocabulary in your brain and always 27

getting the cards mixed up. I don’t know if she minds or not. It’s just one more thing we don’t talk about. She never noticed the missing pitcher. In the summer, I cut the stems off the zinnias in my garden and use it as a vase.

Poetry

Meditation 34 Audrey Gidman Church bells cut through the dampening air like teeth through a wet thing, abrupt as a tear while the sky rolls over into barrelling gray pressing between blue and the graveyard embalmed in sheets of needle-pine. Corpus: body. My ankles straighten fighting the jarred lean of dayworn stones worn in that way many days does it but still just lifted from green-veined moss with enough space for dancing. And bits of flesh fallen from wide trees circling the black iron gates, wind surfing down the flanks of the nearest mountain and across the fields and up against my spine in this strange-warm October 4 oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;clock, somehow always the magic hour.

Contributorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Notes

Octavia Akoulitchev is currently studying English literature at Cambridge University, England. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, such as Brown University’s The Round and UCLA’s feminist journal, FEM. She was selected by Britain’s Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, as a winner of the HMC International Sixth Form Poetry Competition, and has performed at various spoken word events.

Jenna Arcand, 19, was born in New Hampshire and is currently pursuing a Creative Writing degree at the University of Maine at Farmington. When her words fail her, she turns to her photography.

A liza D ube is currently a junior in University of Maine at Farmington’s creative writing program. Her work is intensely personal and brutally honest. She is a big fan of #nofilter. She writes to better understand her life, but she also hopes that in reading her work, her readers will get a better understanding of their lives as well. Truth is stranger than fiction and perhaps this is why she writes it.

Nathaniel Duggan spends most of his time staring at pavement, the internet, and dregs leftover in beer glasses. His work has appeared in Rust+Moth, Minor Literature[s], and others. You can find him on Twitter @ DiggingDuggan21.

Duncan Gamble is a poet of Vermont originally from Burlington, raised in the small nowhere of Arlington, and now at UVM as a neuroscience student. He anticipates living on streets with antique names. When he is away from home, he misses the gardens, his dog, his cat, and his kitchen. He enjoys long walks on the beach, writes letters on a 1950s Royal, poems into leatherbound journals, and is in the constant act of renovating his childhood home and himself. He would be glad of your writing him or stalking him in the Zuckerbergian hinterlands of the internet. His favorite book is â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Crying of Lot 49.â&#x20AC;? Audrey Gidman has been an editor for the Sandy River Review and received her BFA from the University of Maine Farmington. She released a broadside with Foxglove Press in 2015, considers e.e. cummings and Jack Gilbert her greatest muses, and urges you to read the poetry of Hilda Morley if you have yet to.

Katie Joseph is proud of her little Canon as it has held up through international travels, beaches, rain, and being dropped more times than she’ll admit. In addition to taking pictures of everything that moves, as well as some stationary landscapes and objects, she is in the Lawn Chair Pirates and involved with the theater at UMF. One day she’ll be an excellent High School History teacher but for now she is just an average substitute.

Zack Peercy is trying to convince the University of Maine at Farmington to award him degrees in Creative Writing and Theatre. He is currently filling out the same paperwork again and plans to for a third time in the near future. His unrealistic expectations are having multiple identity crises. Interpret that as you will.

Beth Sherman is received an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her fiction has been published in Portland Review and is forthcoming in Blue Lyra Review and Joyce Quarterly. Her poetry has been published in Hawaii Pacific Review, Hartskill Review, Synecdoche, Lime Hawk, and The Evansville Review, which nominated her poem, “Minor Planets” for a Pushcart Prize in 2016. She has also written five mystery novels, published by Avon Books, a division of HarperCollins.

Editorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Notes

Editor Joshua Cardella is a senior English and Creative Writing double major at the University of Maine at Farmington. After graduation, he intends to pretend he is a writer while living in the listless doldrums of middle-class America, never truly fulfilling his unrealistic and frankly desperate expectations. Also, he might go to grad school.

Assistant Editor Konner Wilson is a Creative Writing major at the University of Maine at Farmington. She will graduate in 2017 with a Theater minor. She hopes one day to achieve something great, despite being exceedingly ordinary.