Volume 110.1

KATIE PETERSON

SANTA CLARA REVIEW

COVER ART BY ROBIN YOUNG

FRONT COVER / THE KOI POND OF AGRABAH COLLAGE

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SANTA CLARA REVIEW

VOLUME 11O / ISSUE 01

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

TERESA CONTINO

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

NIKHITA PANJNANI

POETRY EDITOR

NATE D. METZ

NONFICTION EDITOR

ALEX BECCARI

OWL EDITOR

GIANCARLO DE LEÓN ARGUETA

WEB EDITOR

NATALIE GREY

PRODUCTION EDITOR

LUCIE EDWARDS

ART EDITOR

CARLY KELLNER

FICTION EDITOR

SUN CHUNG

ADVISORY EDITOR

MIAH JEFFRA

MARKETING DIRECTOR

LUCINDA NEVILS

FACULTY ADVISOR

KIRK GLASER

ASSISTANT EDITORS

POETRY

ISABELLE FEJES

RUBY GUTIERREZ

JULIA VON GERSDORFF

NADINE KOOCHOU

FICTION

MATT OGLESBY

SEAN ROSSMEISSL

KATY WOLFF

OWL

ELYSE KENYON

MIA VILLANUEVA

MADDIE VITANZA

NONFICTION

BIANCA MARIE ABOITIZ

FRANCESCA D’URZO

EDITORIAL BOARD

LINDSEY ACQUISTAPACE

ANDREW ALBRECHT

KALIRAY ARISON

CHRISTINE MARIE BARDOS

SHIEL BASUROY

GIDEON DEVENDRA

JACKSON EDWARD FLYNN

JESSICA IBARRA

VY HOANG NGUYEN

ALEXXA RILEY

ASHLEY TANG

JASON TING

POETRY

KATIE PETERSON / STARS

XIV

KATIE PETERSON / THE ALPHABET / FOR EMILY

XV

KATIE PETERSON / FAMILY

XVII

DANIEL JOHNSON / SIMPLE POEM

1

CALEB A.P. PARKER / CATALOG: ELEVEN RESURRECTIONS

4

MEGAN KLCO KELLNER / ON THE DRIVE HOME FROM CHRISTMAS, I CHAT WITH AN AI THERAPIST

5

ISABELLE YLO / CECELIA

12

TANYA L. YOUNG / CREATION BURST

13

SABRINA BARRETO / IN RAIN

16

JOSÉ ENRIQUE MEDINA / DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS BAKING CONTEST

24

B.A. VAN SISE & LOKOSH / EXPULSION

26

B.A. VAN SISE & LOKOSH / SPAIN 29

B.A. VAN SISE & LOKOSH / LISTEN 30

LORELEI BACHT / [READING ST. VINCENT] 32

E.R. DONNELLY / EMPATHY 33

JOSÉ ENRIQUE MEDINA / USED SPANISH 38

EMILY ADAMS-AUCION / ONCE, I CONSIDERED MY BODY

MARY SIMMONS / I THINK I FLIRT, SOMETIMES, WITH LOT’S WIFE 52

JEY LEY / A HAIKU OF HER 62

ELIZABETH JIMÉNEZ MONTELONGO / I’M IN LOVE WITH THE PATRIARCHY 67

WENDY BARRY / PENELOPE UNSTICHES 69

NATALIE SCHRIEFER / DISSOLUTION

78

LUCAS SIMONE / WHEN THERE WERE TREES

79

JADEN FONG / JOSEPH DE MAISTRE, I QUESTION IF SLEEPING BIRDS SING 93

COREY S. PRESSMAN / IN THE DIM

EMILY DONALDSON / HOLLOW BONES

DEAR READER,

“Epistêmê” comes from a Greek verb that means to know or understand. Meanwhile “technê” translates to craftsmanship, craft, or art. In ancient times, philosophers would often use the two terms interchangeably, indicating that pure theory should never be separated from experience: ongoing investigation and the practice of living.

Within the following pages, you will find “epistêmê” and “technê” intertwined: an eclectic array of essays, art, poems, and stories. Whether they inspire a laugh, contemplation, desire for transformation, or a spark to pick up your own pen and let words fall out, we invite you to continue reading. Interact with the pages–let your thumbs touch their skin.

I am immensely grateful to the writers and artists who have artfully woven together theory and practice. Thank you for sharing your craft with us.

I am also extremely honored to have worked alongside an incredible team of editors and assistants, full of their own understanding and gifts, and Dr. Glaser for his neverending wisdom and guidance. Thanks to the perseverance (and many laughs) they provided, this book can be held in print.

Wherever you may be, thank you for choosing to pick up our magazine–for constructing a contemporary space for physical magazines in the digital world. Thank you for doing your own part in layering knowledge with experience.

With gratitude, and enjoy reading,

TERESA CONTINO editor in chief

DEAR READER,

We are so excited for you to enjoy Volume 110.1. However, we would like to warn you that some of the works within this issue cover sensitive subjects, including references to eating disorders, violence, and death. Please email santaclarareview@gmail.com if you would like more information regarding which works may merit content warnings.

THE SANTA CLARA REVIEW TEAM

KATIE PETERSON

featured poet

Katie Peterson is the author of five published collections of poetry, including Life in a Field (2021) and A Piece of Good News, nominated for the Northern California Book Award. Her forthcoming collection Fog and Smoke, will be published by FSG in early 2024. She directs the MFA program at the University of California at Davis. She lives in Berkeley with her husband, the photographer Young Suh, and their daughter Emily Louise.

We call days what nights leave behind. My daughter points out the stars to me (she is sitting on her father’s shoulders) as if I had not seen them before she came and might have missed them except for her eyes. You don’t need to go far to see the world. She has words and a sentence or two. You tell me what’s going fast as this.

THE ALPHABET / FOR EMILY

In your picture book of letters, the B obscures a bee. You are interested in this. My memory of language begins later. I was supposed to remember words and put them on a page, the next morning as they were called out by my teacher. I was discovering the patterns when I got lost watching my mother fold the laundry. I was imagining a line across my room and on one side, hoop-skirted ladies rode in carriages, and on the other, in the present tense, nothing could be beautiful.

I was watching the rain order the rose bush, surrender your petals. Or I got lost fighting with my sister.

* You like anything with a problem. A country could learn from this and love itself more, with all its nicks and scratches. I am afraid of giving you too much credit. Truth’s pressure on a mother terrifies as much as a monster. When a child loves the alphabet there’s nothing moral about it.

* It was in the nature of, it was fundamental to the alphabet that a person could be wrong. It was buried deep in the activity, like the idea of virginity. *

KATIE PETERSON

I tried so hard to repeat and remember but I wanted to go forward in the book. You go forward as quickly as I remember wanting to, burning through your picture books and work books so frustrated you can’t learn the way you eat your dinner— you look at that, it disappears, you destroy your obligation to it, sleepy as it turns into your fuel.

They asked me to remember the rules. But I could only memorize for pleasure. Cake and all the words that rhymed–delicious. And you could try out any sound in your head. Language means you don’t have to learn in front of other people.

C on the next page moves the problem along–what it starts with isn’t what it is. It conceals warships, hides sunken jewelry. Unfathomable to us, the sea is rising.

FAMILY poetry KATIE PETERSON

All I knew was that I would not let them die alone, the images, the image of the father with his daughter pulled into his shirt, her head tucked into his armpit like a lamb in a description of a shepherd in a novel by Thomas Hardy, arms around each other so they would not be separated if they drowned, but then they drowned.

SIMPLE POEM

I know the lake by our house. It moves from itself, ripples center to edge from displacement, maybe a body from the dive tower, or a bass hunting a fly. It sends itself outbound.

So too I go from my center to my edge, from things I know, you and you and you and you, to the fringes. I reach and follow. I ride the ripple somewhere there to somewhere here. Yourself; myself.

My mother sees me with a pen, an open notebook. She asks, What are you working on? Says, I bet you’re writing about us.

FIGURE IN FOREST

CASSIDY WATERS

oil, acrylic, and vegetable print on canvas

FIGURE ON SHORELINE

oil, acrylic, and vegetable print on canvas

CASSIDY WATERS

CALEB A.P. PARKER CATALOG: ELEVEN RESURRECTIONS poetry

2022, ink on paper, 4x6 in.

In this one, you wear a cardigan, a cross around your neck. Here, your hair is curly. Here it’s black. This one has my father at the pulpit, gesticulating like a Baptist.

Our professor had told us to make a list of other people’s mothers, to choose the one we saw in starkest relief, to write without ceasing.

I’d shared aloud, and then we’d been given three minutes to draw the scene on index cards. The rows of pews gave people trouble.

You wear a long dress and pearls in this one, looking placid, more like your own mother, who once had the gall to scold you for sitting shoulder to shoulder with a boy on the curb in front of your house. My father is balding in this one. Here, your husband is taller than you. Now a pixie cut. Now a v-shaped chin. Hair like goo sliding off your head. This one shows my father’s full face, and somehow it looks just like him.

I smear glue stick on the backs of the cards. I square their corners with my notebook’s corners. Our professor likes to say that all drawings, she is certain, in a mysterious and essential way, are alive.

MEGAN KLCO KELLNER

ON THE DRIVE HOME FROM CHRISTMAS, I CHAT WITH AN AI THERAPIST

more milk mine I want to know your heart

This is what I imagine it looks like inside my breast inside my daughter’s mouth. Crooked glands like a pine with its arms pinned to its sides clotted with snow.

Woebot asks me what I’m doing.

Trying to be patient. The baby won’t sleep.

The lake has clawed its way up to the road, laps the shoulder like a begging hand. The cars bear forward. Up here folks are mad at immigrants they’ve never met for marching North when their crops burned up. They saw it on TV. Here the lake marches straight up a wall of sand. It lays itself over the road in all phases, seeps up from the concrete in my mother-in-law’s basement. It’s my mother-in-law texting to ask where we are. It’s my daughter reaching, screaming from her carseat.

Would it be accurate to say that you are feeling anxious?

My daughter is reaching for me. My daughter reached for me all Christmas day.

Someone said, you’ll spoil her picking her up so much. I prayed that she would learn to thirst and now she drinks my shadow. All the pines have grown sideways seeking sun over big water. I distrust every piece of advice I am given.

Think of a single moment when you felt depressed.

When she clung to my body. When she didn’t.

MEGAN KLCO KELLNER

My husband is angry that I can’t keep her quiet. There is milk reflected in her iris. Miles of boarded motels stud the channels of my heart – opened with promise, stinted with signs for smoked whitefish and souvenirs. We stopped at a half-empty Kmart and the kids ran circles around racks of blankets rolled like Little Debbie snacks. The tile and the drop ceiling are the same color as the lake and the sky and my skin and my mind and everything but the treeline, a scuffed rubber buffer. My mother-in-law asked me to fix her tablet. I closed 300 browser windows.

If your negative thought had a voice what would it say?

We are not supposed to live here but we keep on trying.

We pass a whitewashed cabin blown clear through by the wind, water pooled up all around it, all around my daughter’s eyes. Its frame is a crushed consonant. She mouths mo, mo, mo.

Woebot asks if I’d like help thinking clearly.

I am thinking clearly.

At the bridge, the cables stretch up infinitely into the white. Except they don’t.

This is what the AI calls a distortion.

SARAH SHEPPARD

SATISFIED

“Can we get chicken lo mein?” I asked, as my father wrote out the order on the back of an envelope.

“You don’t want that,” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

“We’re not getting that.”

Growing up, we ate the same foods on rotation–home-cooked meals like chicken or fish, potatoes and a vegetable; pizza, but never Crazy Bread; pasta with meat sauce and garlic bread and salad; tomato soup with grilled cheese; fish sticks and fries; Chinese takeout, but only sweet and sour chicken, egg foo young, and egg rolls. If I didn’t live more than 700 miles away from home, I would have protested.

“I need you to come with me,” he said to my mother, who was moving about the kitchen cleaning the counters and preparing the table. “I need someone else.”

“Sarah, go with your dad.”

I fiddled with the radio in my father’s used pickup truck, dreading the silence. Unless it was a birthday or father’s day, my father and I didn’t talk directly. When I visited, he asked me simple questions: Was I still writing? Yes. Was I still making money? Hardly. Did I get along with my boyfriend? We’re still dating, aren’t we? Did I need money? No. When we were together in person, we exchanged simple pleasantries. And when my mother rambled on, talking too loudly or for too long, we looked at each other, rolling our eyes, and smiling.

“You’re just like him,” my mother reminds me, every time I say something she doesn’t like.

He dug into his coat jacket and handed me two folded-up papers. Coupons. In the fine print, it stipulated only one per household.

“Dad, they don’t care.”

“You can’t talk to me,” he said, before giving me step-by-step directions.

After parking at the far end of the lot, he handed me an envelope of cash. “Okay,” he said, as if we were preparing for an armed robbery. “You go first.”

Inside, I gave my last name and slid the coupon and cash across the counter. The man thanked me as I fumbled for a spare dollar from my pocket and dropped it in the glass jar. I took a seat in one of the red leather chairs, noticing two other strangers–both middle-aged men–waiting.

SARAH SHEPPARD

When my father walked in, he didn’t acknowledge me. He used the second coupon and paid in exact change. When he stepped away from the counter, he turned to a stranger and started making small talk.

I waited seven long minutes, watching my father smile, move his hands, nod, not once looking in my direction. I couldn’t help but notice the similarities. We shared the same facial structure, same blue eyes, long lashes, bushy brows. I had his curvy nose, bony chin, and thin, long lips. I looked so much like my father. How could these strangers not realize his offspring was sitting ten feet away? The longer I watched him, the more irritated I became. Would he really ignore his own daughter, and talk to strangers, just to save a few dollars?

When my name was called, I walked casually to the front. I looked in my father’s direction, expecting a glance, some kind of acknowledgment, but he kept talking, not once looking in my direction. I walked out wondering if he looked, just once, or kept the charade the whole time.

The car door was locked so I stood in the sun, waiting.

When he came out, he handed over the warm bag and said, “Good work.”

On the car ride back, we sat in silence. When we arrived home, my mother promptly took the brown paper bags and pulled out the styrofoam containers, putting large metal spoons in each. We filled plastic bowls with rice and protein, and sat at the table which my mother had adorned with matching placemats, folded-up napkins, and silverware. He didn’t talk about the trip. Not then–and not since.

No wonder I struggle with money. Every time we went out to dinner and asked for a drink like a Sprite or Shirley Temple, my father would interrupt us to say, “No, they’ll have water.” Then, “Can we get some more napkins?”

My father was the second youngest in a family of ten. He shared a small bedroom with his two older brothers. He didn’t have money growing up, didn’t take big family trips, didn’t own fancy things. After seven years of college, he found a job in security at a Detroit motor company, where he spent more than two decades. He often worked overtime to save money for after-school activities and the occasional road trip to Northern Michigan or Florida. He kept–and still keeps–cash in drawers, pockets, always afraid of running out. He tells me to keep cash on me at all times, just in case.

When we begin a road trip, years later, he asks what I need. “I could go for a Starbucks coffee,” I say, knowing there’s one near the highway.

“Too expensive,” he says. “We’ll get one at the gas station.”

SARAH SHEPPARD

“I don’t need it that bad.”

He stops anyway. “You don’t want that coffee?”

I shake my head. “No.”

When he returns, he’s holding a water bottle and a small pastry in an open bag. “Can you believe this cost $1.99?” he says, holding up the bottle.

“It said $0.89 on the counter. They shouldn’t advertise it like that if that’s not what it costs.”

I nod.

“She said she doesn’t write the signs, but that’s not right,” he says, handing me the bottle. I put the bottle between my feet, wondering what it’s like to walk through the world like this, checking receipts, comparing prices, buying the cheapest option, waiting for the next deal, or having my child pretend she’s not related to me.

He used to tell me “don’t sweat the small stuff,” and then complain when I parked too close to a building, drove off too quickly after starting the engine, left the AC running on a cool day, bought something expensive, or walked around the house barefoot.

I know he has money sitting, waiting… and for what? He drives a used car, buys groceries in bulk, refuses to eat anywhere fancy, wears the same clothes on repeat, uses the computer at the library instead of buying his own, and takes few trips, if any. My mother used to complain, saying he was “too cheap,” but watching him eat the cinnamon roll in silence, I wonder, what’s so wrong with that?

He eats the pastry, little by little, until there’s nothing left but crumbs. When he finishes, he pushes the crumpled bag into the cup of the console, smiling, clearly satisfied, before turning on the radio.

THE KOI POND OF AGRABAH

collage ROBIN YOUNG

CECELIA

is driving me home from the movie theater in her little blue car, and everything is gilded in the sodium glow of the streetlamps swooping past us.

We’re passing through our slice of American suburbia: Chili’s, Office Max, Target, gas station.

A song comes on that we both like. I say: When I have my first kiss, I want this song to be playing. She’s already had her first kiss, with a boy I don’t know from the Catholic school the next town over. It shouldn’t bother me, but it does. She laughs. In the red glare of the traffic lights, I can see the gap between her teeth.

CREATION BURST

For Tess Gallagher

Sand born to the shore comes home in my hair.

acrylic on canvas

ARMIN MELL

NICE TO MEET YOU

acrylic on canvas

ARMIN MELL

SABRINA BARRETO

IN RAIN

A watercolored window, a bay window looking onto green. The trees dripping into gray ink, the sky a pearl gulping the street. And my grandfather angling chairs and pillows outward, pulling a coffeetable into curtains. Each hand a small broad spade returning to glass with napkins and spoons, two milk mugs, his hill of cookies. Everything warm in his hands, without steam. From the den, Karen Carpenter rippling vinyl. No one else is in the house except sound. Drops down the roof and through metal gutters, the gurgles round bushes and citron roots. I dunk the golden chocolate chips and Papa copies me without looking. Rain falls in the same direction.

CYCLES

Marian spent most of her teenage years avoiding her father like the plague and pretending her mother didn’t exist, which wasn’t so hard when her mother was constantly working and her father was too high on opium to care.

She was good at slipping through the door just before curfew and locking herself tightly in her room. Her father’s snores were her only companion as they reverberated through the paper-thin walls of the apartment. Those were the nights that Marian could sink into her pillows and transport herself somewhere else, away from the mildew smells of her room and the threat of violence just beyond the door.

Then there were the nights when Marian would come back home just a little too late after being out with a friend—the nights when the 9 o’clock curfew didn’t matter so much as that feeling of time fading into the background until all she remembered was the sweetness on her tongue as the strawberry milkshake for two glided down. That feeling never lasted long enough to make her forget the look on her father’s face when the click of the door woke him up half past nine. It never lasted long enough to staunch the burning smell of smoke on his body as he stomped towards her, off-balance but target clear. It was never enough to hide the purple bruises on her body the next day. So when she turned eighteen and met an older man who was ready to settle down, the age of milkshakes and illusive time became a wished-upon dandelion. Marian took her chance and ran with it, chasing those little petals away.

She wasn’t sure why she thought leaving would put all her broken pieces back where they belonged. Her husband, Mikael, knew about Marian’s life in that apartment, but he was never equipped to help her. After being discharged from the Iranian military at twenty-two and spending the next ten years working his way into a halfway decent townhome in Sacramento, California, Mikael was tired. When Marian spent each day screaming at him for drinking too much or working too late or forgetting to clean his dirty dishes, he wouldn’t ask questions. He simply looked at her, picked up his glass of whiskey, and moved to the living room. The sounds of the late-night news channel drowned Marian out, leaving her completely and achingly alone.

**

When Marian turned twenty-one, something was wrong. Her period hadn’t come for the second month in a row and every morning, she woke

NADINE KOOCHOU

up to a churning stomach, forcing her to purge the food from the night before into the porcelain toilet bowl. One morning, she sat on the floor of the bathroom as the cold tile bit into her legs, drawing out a realization. Her heart pounded in her chest and her skin felt clammy. She stood up on shaky legs and gripped the wall for support as she looked down at the bowl of half-digested food. Her arm came up around her midsection, her wedding band glinting in the bathroom light, and when she looked in the mirror, the color drained from her face. She thought of the tiny extra bedroom Mikael used for an office, the sharp edges around the kitchen counters, the hardwood floors that covered their home, and she realized that she wasn’t ready.

She threw on a coat over her sweats, careful to cover the bit of vomit from before, and walked out of her quaint town home to the dollar store down the street. The air in the store felt stuffy, despite the winter chill outside, and the lights felt a touch too bright. She bustled through the aisles, grabbed the indistinct pink box, and tossed it onto the conveyor belt with a light thud.

The woman at the register looked to be in her mid-fifties, her curly red hair streaked with gray. Little pieces slipped out of her bun and were strewn across her face, and when she picked up the box of pregnancy tests to scan, she flashed a knowing smile at Marian.

“What are you hoping for?” she said warmly. “Boy or girl?”

Not pregnant, thought Marian. She forced her lips into a tight smile and said, “Whichever one is easier.”

The woman tossed her head back and cackled, then looked back at Marian with a smile that reached all the way to her milky blue eyes.

“Neither of them is easy, dear,” she said. **

Seventeen years later, Marian realized that—for the first time since her daughter was born—Rosie wasn’t listening to her anymore. Before, Rosie used to run everything by her mother, from homework assignments to the kids that she talked to in school. Even when she didn’t, Marian had her ways of finding things out, and she could protect her daughter from making the wrong choices. Now, Marian felt so far from her daughter. Rosie would lock herself in her room after the long school day, spend her weekends with friends instead of Marian, and was otherwise looking for ways to get away from her mother. Mikael kept telling her that Rosie was a teenager now, that she was building her own life, but something about that nagged at Marian in the back of her mind. She didn’t want to be absent from Rosie’s life the way her own mother was. She needed to make sure Rosie was safe.

NADINE KOOCHOU

Marian was washing the dishes in the kitchen one day when sneakered footsteps skipped through the doorway.

“Hey, Mom. I need to talk to you about something,” Rosie said, clad in ripped jeans and a large band tee. She slid into a stool by the counter and leaned her elbows on the cool marble surface.

“About what?” Marian turned back to her dishes as her heart clenched in her chest.

“You can’t get mad at me about this, okay? Just promise you won’t get mad first.”

Marian turned her head to look at her daughter, eyeing the way Rosie’s stiff back revealed her false sense of calm, her eyes squinting in her telltale sign of anxiousness.

“What is it? Just tell me,” Marian said.

Rosie shifted uncomfortably in her seat, took a deep breath, and spoke the words Marian dreaded since she found out she was having a daughter. “Well, there’s this boy…”

The plate in Marian’s hand slipped through her fingers, the delicate ceramic cracking beneath the white suds. One of the shards clipped her hand, drawing out a thin line of blood, but Marian’s eyes stayed locked on her daughter.

“Boy? You don’t talk to boys.”

“Mom, I go to school with boys. Of course I talk to them,” Rosie countered.

“So you think it’s okay to keep secrets from me?” Her voice rose desperately. Marian didn’t register the hurt on her daughter’s face, only that her cheeks were still round and pink with youth. She remembered the day Rosie was born—the hospital air was slightly too cold, and the room was a shade too white, but none of that mattered as Marian looked at the little form swaddled in her arms. Her face was pink then, too, and Marian felt something shift in her heart as she rocked her baby girl, hushing her distraught cries. Things would be right this time around. “Not everything in my life is stuff you need to know,” Rosie shouted. “I’m telling you right now that there’s this boy I like, and I think he likes me, too.” Her tone begged understanding, but it churned in Marian’s stomach until the rush of the kitchen sink vanished, the white walls turning to cheap wallpaper around her. The room was smaller, and mildew scents wafted through Marian’s nose.

A plate was thrown against the moldy wall, shattering into infinite microscopic pieces. Food exploded in an angry shade of red, voices howling to match the violent scene, and Marian felt small. The counters were too tall for her to reach, and the silhouette of her parents

NADINE KOOCHOU

towered above her, yet there was something ironic about the way such big moments made her feel smaller.

“You’re useless,” her father growled at her mother. “You women are useless.”

His eyes fell on Marian now, fire ringing the edges of his black pupils. Taking a few steps back, heart pounding faster by the second, Marian fled.

She ran into a lilac field, with thousands of little buds just beginning to bloom. The air around her felt chilled, not unpleasantly, but in a way that reminded her that she was alive. The breeze blew petals around Marian’s head. Delicate smells permeated her nose, and those smells felt innocent and safe. Far away from the cries in her home. Marian combed her fingers through her silky brown hair, pulling away a white bud. Except the bud was weak in her hands, and it became crushed between her small fingers.

Her father grabbed her arm and lashed her with his hand to her face once, twice, three times, her mother screaming in horror but paralyzed. Marian knew with absolute certainty then that she was far from the lilac meadow. And some deep part inside told her that field was too far for girls like her to ever reach.

“You can’t trust everyone to be good,” Marian yelled. “People aren’t good!”

Her father lashing her with his belt, gold details seeking purchase in her skin. Her mother too consumed in her own fear to stop it happening. Her husband dismissing her when she needed help.

But Rosie was not Marian, and the vision disappeared as Rosie spat out, “Why do you always react like this? I’m sick of it!”

The blood continued its trail down Marian’s hand as Rosie stomped back to her room. She slammed the door definitively, once again leaving Marian painfully alone.

Fourteen years later, Rosie got married. Three years after that, she had her first child. With nobody left in her own home, Marian visited Rosie often. She noticed a certain warmth in the air around the home, her daughter’s family filling the space in a way Marian never felt she could. There were bottles strewn around the kitchen and toys overflowing the living room and pictures crowding every surface, but the space felt cozy. Alive.

Sometimes, she watched Rosie rock her daughter to sleep at night. In the darkness of the nursery, Rosie brought her face close to her daughter’s and whispered a tune as she moved her chair back and forth.

NADINE KOOCHOU

Once the baby drifted off, Rosie kissed her forehead, told her she loved her, and placed her into her crib. Rosie smiled at the sleeping baby, and it made Marian smile, too.

One night, when Rosie shut the nursery door and followed Marian out to the kitchen, Marian felt the sting of tears filling her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Rosie questioned, concern in her voice.

“You’re such a good mother,” Marian said.

They were facing each other, Rosie leaning back on the island counter and Marian standing in front of her, arms crossed. When Rosie didn’t respond, Marian went on.

“I made it my mission in life to raise you the best I could,” she said. “I couldn’t even do that right.”

Rosie paused for a moment, staring at Marian with those same golden eyes. When she spoke, it was carefully measured.

“You did the best that you could, Mom.” Another pause. “I know your childhood wasn’t easy—you’ve told me so enough times. But I think I turned out alright.”

And her childhood wasn’t easy, but Marian couldn’t forget the way Rosie distanced herself each time she screamed at her for it.

“I’m not the reason you turned out so good. That was all you, or God, or something else. It wasn’t me.” Marian didn’t like the feeling in her throat when she tried to talk through tears. It was thick and rough and it made her feel weak.

“I don’t know, Mom,” Rosie said, allowing her frustration to win. “What do you want me to tell you? That you did everything right?”

“I just wanted you to be careful,” Marian said. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

Marian thought of the first time her daughter had her heart broken. Rosie’s boyfriend had ended things with her the day after their high school graduation, and Rosie locked herself in her room for days. Marian never forgot the way her daughter’s muffled crying sounded from the other side of her bedroom door.

“Everyone gets hurt, Mom. You couldn’t possibly protect me from that.”

“Maybe. But you never listened to me. I still wish that you would.”

“That’s because you think you know exactly what I need,” Rosie quipped, voice rising just slightly. “But you don’t. You taught me to distrust everyone around me, and even though I’m better now, I still hate you for it sometimes.”

With those words hanging in the air between them, Marian was forced to consider her daughter again. She couldn’t help but imagine

NADINE KOOCHOU

Rosie’s own husband turning his back on Rosie when she needed him most. She couldn’t help but imagine what it would look like if her daughter had her heart broken again.

“So that’s it?” Marian said. “You hate me?” Suddenly, Rosie’s eyes filled with tears. She tried to talk through the tears, but her voice wobbled with each word.

“There are some days when I wish it was that easy,” she started. “But every single time I think that I hate you, I remember who you must have been when you learned that everyone in the world wanted to hurt you. And I can’t help but love the girl inside of you that was just trying to keep me safe.”

Marian turned her head as if she had been struck, and she noticed that there was a vase of fresh flowers sitting on the kitchen island. At once, she remembered the first time she took her daughter to the farmer’s market.

Rosie was no more than six years old, wearing a yellow floral dress. Going down the strip of stalls, she bypassed the rainbow candy, the alluring hair bows, and the buttery-sweet-smelling kettle corn, running straight for the flower stand.

“Mommy!” Rosie shouted, pointing at a bouquet of lilacs. Marian jogged to catch up with her daughter.

“Look how pretty,” she said once Marian reached her. Rosie looked deep into her mother’s eyes, and Marian got lost in their warmth. “Pretty like you.”

Marian wondered then at how a child could say exactly the right thing exactly when she needed it. When Rosie said things like this, she thought that maybe she wasn’t doing such a poor job raising her daughter. She wondered at how Rosie had become her very best thing.

Marian knew that the lilacs on the counter would be dried and dead in a week’s time, but it almost seemed like the buds were growing towards her now.

When she looked back at her daughter, she noticed the milk stains on Rosie’s t-shirt and the tousled curls in her hair, and she couldn’t understand how someone so beautiful could come from so much pain. Marian broke down then, tears falling quickly, shoulders heaving with the weight of each sobbing breath. Rosie moved from her spot at the counter to her mother, wrapping herself around Marian’s slumped frame. Rosie rubbed her mother’s back, softly hushing the broken sounds filling the kitchen air.

“I know, Mom,” she said. “I know.”

At that moment, Marian thought of the screams that followed her

all her life. Rosie might never really know what it was like to constantly live with fear—but Marian didn’t want her to. Regardless of what happened, Marian would be there to protect her daughter. She decided then that Rosie would never have to be alone.

DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS BAKING CONTEST

I grabbed my mom’s old Bundt pan, the one she used to bake our birthday cakes. I poured in the batter. Then I kicked myself because I forgot to put the sour cherries in first. Last year, the judges of the Día de los Muertos Baking Contest were the ghosts of Grandma, Grandpa and Tío Arturo. They had tasted my Pan de Muertos and said, It’s pretty good, but it needs something tart. Should I add the cherries now? No... Grandma always said, Nothing tastes worse than an afterthought. So, I kept going, grating fresh coconut at full speed. My mom’s favorite fruit. I sprinkled shreds like white hairs on the batter. The pieces sank into the mixture in gestures of good-bye. Working against the midnight deadline, I opened the oven door, slid the pan in and set the timer for 20 minutes, 19 seconds, the year my mom died. Nothing to do now, but wait. I wiped sweat and flour from my forehead, poured a glass of wine. I swirled my drink, inhaled the smell, and remembered the time she showed me how to loop cinnamon twists, dash them with sugar and spice, and pinch up the edges like angels’ wings. The face of my mother appeared on the wine glass, saying, Don’t burn the bread. Last year you baked it too long. She said it in that voice of hers that was so sweet and annoying at the same time. I said, I know, Chepis, I know.

FIELDS OF PRIDE

collage CHRISTINA SAYERS

EXPULSION poetry B.A. VAN SISE & LOKOSH

Based off of Brendan Constantine’s why/because form, one poet asks four questions and another provides four answers, both without seeing the other’s work until its final assembly. In this case, these poets write not only from different points of view but from entirely different histories, united by time; in 1492, Ladino speakers were expelled from Spain, ever into diaspora. In the same year, the Spanish empire set foot in the Americas, beginning a colonial expansion that would one day take over much of the Native homelands of North America. Here, one artist writes in Chickasaw, the other in Ladino: two critically endangered, unconnected languages put near to extinction by the same expulsion.

Katihmita̱ kochchichi?

porke la kaza no es un makom, es un tiyempo

Katihmita̱ ikkochchicho?

porke somos hechos de yermo

Katihmita̱ kochchicha’chi?

porke somos hechos de agwah salado

Katihmita̱ hattak kilimpi’at hattak ilbashsha’ho̱ kochchichichi?

porke es mas facil circlar el munto ke salildo

Why are they expelling them?

because home is not a place but a time

Why are they not expelling them?

B.A. VAN SISE & LOKOSH

because we are made of wilderness

Why are they going to expel them?

because we are made of salt water

Why do powerful men expel the poor?

because it is easier to circle the mountain than climb it

ROLL OUT SUMMER

CHRISTINA SAYERS

collage

SPAIN POETRY B.A. VAN SISE & LOKOSH

Katihmita̱ Spain-at hopaaki? Onala’ ki’ya’mi.

porke muestra pel akodra el sol ke una vez la toko

Katihmita̱ “Spain-aak oktaak aaohómba” aachi?

Imanompaat i̱la.

porke solo anhelas los amores ke perdes

Katihmita̱ hopaakikaashookano De Soto-at Spain aaminticha po̱yaakni’ alattook?

porke dezhamos a muestros padres en la tierra

Katihmita̱ po̱sipóngni’ at De Soto inchokka’ alhiha’ lowasht tahlittook? Ilithá̱nahookya iichimasilhlha.

porke ese suelo se convirtio en mosotros

Why is Spain so far away? I have never gone there.

because our skin remembers the sun that once touched it

Why do they say that “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain”? Their language is strange.

because you only long for the loves you lose

Why did long ago De Soto come from Spain and come to our land?

because we left our fathers in the soil

Why did our ancestors burn completely De Soto’s houses? We know but we are asking you.

because that soil became us

LISTEN POETRY B.A. VAN SISE & LOKOSH

Katihmita̱ hánglola’na’n?

porke las kriaturas oyen i mosotros no

Kanikshoot hánglo mako’sa̱. Katihmita̱ hánglola’na’n?

porke el uniko sonido es el sonido del konosimento

Ok-ima’lakat ola. Katihmita̱ hánglola’na’n?

porke muestros serebros akodran el olam salvazhe

Omba’chika̱ ithá̱nalihma̱ taha’na. Katihmita̱ ok-ima’lakat olaka̱ hahánglola’na’n?

porke solo oyimos los sonidos de las kosas ke venen

Why should I listen?

Because children hear and we do not

There is no one listening now. Why should I listen?

Because the only sound is the sound of knowledge

The tree frogs are singing. Why should I listen?

Because our brains remember the wild world

I know it’s going to rain anyway. Why should I keep listening to the tree frogs sing?

Because we only hear the sounds of things that are coming

OUR LEGACY

CHRISTINA SAYERS

BACHT

[READING ST. VINCENT]

sunday treetops, return of the robin. lifting every leaf of the old situation, he dines on morsels of sunshine –every sorrow a battered blackbeetle.

the unspeakable has loosened its grip, bygones become a washed-out word.

red-breasted and fluting, he spells invisible joys into green. the air ribbons itself april, tender. i am

done with rolling my grey marble, calling the past a pie, long mile a melody.

i am done with longing for daffodils –i take a train, fill my hands with colour.

This poem was originally composed using words from the album “Colour Green” by Sibylle Baier, recorded between 1970 and 1973.

EMPATHY poetry E.R. DONNELLY

A bare meadow, meadow, meadow

Body half open, a candle nearly out smelling of the wash and ocean a bell, dusty and crack-fire loud before sunrise, pinching rays of heat waiting for a turn toward love and for the in-out, one-two-three to lay down the storm like a knot as forever loops to this chair and cut my hair, cut my hair and cut my hair, cut my hair

SHARP NO. 2

Six days later, lunch had become a myth. A fable. A tale students told each other in such whispered ways as to think it was a secret. Like the good kids our teachers proclaimed us to be, we walked in a straight line to the cafeteria, trying not to touch the bulletin boards, the trash cans, the vending machines, whatever stuck out just enough for us to extend our arms and connect with, see ourselves as extensions of student work, trash bags, finger-smeared glass shielding chocolates and candy.

The cafeteria was larger than the gym and already there were kids eating, talking, laughing, squirming in their seats because this was lunch and the food, from what little we knew of the world, was good. But I hadn’t eaten lunch in six school days. It was Friday. The pizza in front of me smelled better than Little Caesars, and the slices looked larger too. I had the money to buy lunch yesterday and the days before, but the pencils were too bright and shiny for me not to be persuaded by the promises they offered.

One was dark blue with swirls of black stripes that made it look like an alien zebra. Another was orange speckled with black polka dots. It had a neon green eraser, so how could I not think of Halloween, of the neighborhood filled with families and kids my age going door to door, hopeful they would receive more chocolates than they did at the last house? There was a pencil that looked like a fly’s eyes and I thought I could see my thousand reflections in it, each smiling and content that this sleek and near weightless object was all mine. There were all white pencils and pencils with black erasers and pencils that looked like they belonged behind a glass case in some important museum, so perfect and radiant even to be described.

The boy in front of me grabbed a plate. The lunch lady dropped a slice of pizza on it. I stared at the melted cheese hanging off the edges, certain that even though it looked like the phlegm that hung off my grandfather’s lips after calling out to my grandmother for more pan dulce or sweet tea, it tasted good, that it would cure the hunger that was scratching the insides of my stomach. “¿No vas a comer?” the lunch lady asked. I understood what she said but couldn’t respond to her in her language. I couldn’t even respond in English, so I shook my head and followed the line and shook my head at the lunch man who took our money and asked us to punch in our student ID in a pad with worn and greasy numbers.

I sat next to the boy in front of me. Another boy sat on my left side, and he and the boy on the other side started speaking to each other, ignoring me completely. I was too hungry to care what they were saying either way. I put my backpack in my lap, opened the smaller pocket, and, like undiscovered treasure that has never seen daylight, the pencils shined, casted an angelic glow on my face. I smiled. I had started collecting these pencils months ago, three or four every week. Then, near the end of last week, something changed. I put my 25 cents in the pencil dispenser, that silver metal box that appeared as though it belonged to some outdated robot or complicated machine and whose handle you had to turn with extra force—because what reward didn’t come with at least a little bit of hard work?—and instead of a pencil with the usual pattern coming out, a glossy purple pencil I had never seen before shot into the slot. It had swirls on it that resembled galaxies, and if I tilted it in the sunlight at just the right angle, rays of light spread out to look as if I had the force of the entire universe in my palm. No other student had one of these pencils. I was sure of it. And there was no other pencil that looked like mine. Yes, out of the nearly hundreds of pencils I had, this was the only one of its kind. But what made this pencil special was the fact that it made the other pencils special, that when I placed it in my backpack’s pocket, all the other pencils shined and looked better than they did before, as if they had crossed a threshold of importance that was shown by their gloss and ability to keep my eyes focused.

This was my cache of pencils and what better way than to make them even more special than by buying more, adding and adding until I had a collection that would be the envy of all the other students who merely had one, maybe two pencils from that same dispenser I bought mine from, and that they had to sharpen over and over again to complete schoolwork because they had no backups like I did. I completed my assignments with those plain, mustard yellow pencils. I understood what sacrifices had to be made.

The boy on my right threw a piece of pepperoni to the boy on my left. The pepperoni landed on his forearm, and he laughed and grabbed it and put it in his mouth and, with a mouthful of pizza and chocolate milk, he managed to say something the other boy found funny. Their mothers probably gave them a dollar for lunch like mine did, and they were using it like intended. But my mother never said that I had to use it only for lunch. I mean, she did at the beginning of the school year but she never said it any-

more, and I wasn’t lying when she asked me in the afternoon if I had used up what she had given me. I did. Since the end of last week, I began using up that whole dollar (given to me always in quarters) to buy four pencils, and already I had not only the pencil of all pencils, that purple galaxy pencil, but 23 new pencils to go with it. I didn’t need to get lunch. The pigs in the blanket and Frosted Flakes and cold, palm-sized pancakes and whatever else they served for breakfast in the morning was enough to hold me over until the afternoon when I got to my grandmother’s house and a plate of rice, beans, and some anonymous meat waited for me. I could survive eight-plus hours of not eating if it meant 20-plus pencils a week. By the end of the year, I could have almost a thousand. Or close to a thousand. Or at least a couple of hundred that looked like a thousand.

The boy on my left kept laughing. I glanced at his pizza and even though it was half-eaten and there was very little cheese left, it still looked delicious, still smelled fresh, still would have gone smoothly down my stomach. I sunk my head closer to my backpack, put my hand in the pocket, grabbed a handful of pencils and watched them slip from my hand like a waterfall. The purple galaxy one seemed to emerge by itself from the pile and I couldn’t help but think of God and His intention of creating the world and the universe and all of mankind. We were similar, I thought. We both worked hard for six days straight, He with the concept of life, me with the concept of this pencil collection, and I began wondering if I too should rest on this seventh day, give up the whole pencil business and run to the lunch line and give up the dollar my mother had given me this morning for the pizza the boys next to me were scarfing down as though it was their last meal. The pencils would still be there on Monday and I could start back up again then.

But then I thought, no, I am not like God. I am like Jesus. I am sacrificing myself for a larger cause, for an idea, for a possibility at something greater than myself. And like Jesus, I was suffering this momentary bout of hunger. But it would soon pass, as all worldly suffering does, and if I was tempted to eat now, if I let the boys’ laugher and burps and the occasional coughing fits they were having because they had eaten too much too fast tempt me into believing I should give up the vision I had for myself, then it would have been like handing over all of who I was to the devil. Or at least to one of his demons. Or to one of those sins that speaks about eating too much because in reality, I didn’t need to eat such a large pizza.

No, no. I just needed to wait for recess to come in a few minutes,

when we were allowed to go buy snacks and sodas and pencils and all would be right again. I would forget I was hungry again. I would look at the four shiny new objects in my hand and know that I had made the right choice, that even if I wobbled back to class, and the classroom began to appear blurry and the nurse would kneel by my side on the classroom floor with the back of her hand on my forehead asking if I could hear her and I could already hear my mother saying, “Why pencils? Why would you buy so many pencils?” and this, all of this, would become a story my mother would tell in front of my five aunts and three uncles and the countless cousins that were all older than me, and even if I couldn’t hide from their judgment and laughter was echoing into every room of our house, I would know that I could open my backpack, grab a pencil, and let my collection reassure me.

JOSÉ ENQIRUE MEDINA

USED SPANISH

Mi espaňol is an old convertible, a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado, un headlight gone missing, el otro glaring yellow as dientes unbrushed.

Don’t lean on it, sheet metal dents easily, making a terrible sonido, waking up the neighborhood. Sure, necesita new paint, tires, body work, y un chingo of other things—but, it’s mine. Look, I can prove it, have keys!

Oh, you wanna go for a ride? Well, ahorita, at this moment, it’s not, actually, running. Wait, don’t go. Why did I bring you to see it? No se, I was thinking, you know, if you’re not busy, maybe we could sit in it and look at the stars.

THE FLESH PARADE

It was early in the evening when the band at Dandy’s turned to its first slow song of the set. Elvis, the tall, dark-haired man in a red shirt and black pants who had been staring at her, came over to the table where Gwen was sitting with her friend Lori. He took the empty chair and turned it around so the backrest made contact with the table top. He sat down, crossed his arms on the chair back, and leaned over the basket of French fries on the table to ask how the Angels were doing. Gwen thought he was asking both of them at first. She had become wary of the tiresome conversational pleasantries in this part of the country. ‘How are you?’—a simple, innocuous form of address everywhere else—was here a question that would be answered with a litany of health complaints about one’s self, one’s family, one’s relationship to God. Asking that simple question could yield unwanted information about who needed a new kidney, who was back on pills, who had gone to the hospital last night for a breathing treatment. The exchange exhausted her so Gwen chose to avoid it. She said nothing. Elvis waited, then turned to face Gwen directly and tried to engage her once more.

“Well, if you don’t care, I’d really like to dance,” he said. Elvis looked deep into Gwen’s eyes and waited.

In Barvee, Gwen and Lori were known as the Angels, and tonight, the Angels wanted to be alone. They had chosen a table far from the dance floor, cornered between a row of video game machines and the bar. It was quieter back there. They could say unangelic things about their work, their plans, and the terrible day they had. The moniker had served to bond the two women who had little else in common. They used to roll their eyes at each other when someone called them Angels, and they took turns offering one another alternatives. Lori favored Hellraisers but secretly, Gwen liked being called Angel. It signaled praise, and respect, and that made her feel safe in this reckless place, where people succumbed to so much illness and misfortune. It made her feel like people would take care of her. But Gwen never told Lori that. She went along with Lori in public, accepting the nickname with mock embarrassment and humility. Nicknames were a part of the local culture. The women were outsiders to West Virginia, but they were both Southern, young, and blonde. They could get away with many things. But complaining about this town’s attempt to include them? That would be rude.

“Us Angels are having girl talk right now,” Lori said. She tilted her

NATALIE AXTON

head back and blew the smoke from her Camel Blue out the corner of her mouth. For a few seconds, no one moved. Lori could handle herself. Gwen admired that. She had seen Lori cut the locals off in a way that let them in only so much. At the drug store the checkout women would make small talk, trying to get them to talk about their employer, Mr. Tackett, and his shut-in son. Lori could cut these people off, steer them to another topic, gently reminding them they were forgetting their manners without so much as saying so. It was part of the tight social fabric here, with speech codes and gossip thick as the kudzu that swallowed the landscape every spring. Her method was clean, efficient, and it worked on Elvis. “Well, I’ll be out there if you care to join me,” he said as he stood up. He headed back to the dance floor unfulfilled, hopeful.

“I feel bad,” Gwen said when the women were alone again with their fries.

“Why?” asked Lori.

“Normally I would dance with the guy to not hurt his feelings. You know, just get it over with.” The dance floor was behind her and she looked back to the crowd of strangers pressed against one another, slow dancing. She was happy she wasn’t in Elvis’s arms, trying not to touch him in a way he might find tender, praying the song would end before he tried to make a move or the physical reality of a man and a woman in one another’s arms made itself known.

“I’m glad I’m not.”

Lori looked up from her beer.

“Dancing with him,” Gwen explained. “Thank you.”

Lori snorted and brought her beer to her mouth. Lori remained loyal to their status. It had always been the Angels against the locals. But Gwen knew she had lost Lori’s trust, maybe even her respect. Did Lori imagine that Gwen could care for anyone’s feelings, after what had happened?

They had arrived at Dandy’s before happy hour. Now that they were seated, Gwen saw that Dandy’s had been a bad choice. The place was full of Barvee’s nervous energy, of men with misplaced purpose, still struggling with the mine shutdowns. It was ugly here. The wood-paneled room was too brightly lit. Cigarette smoke clouded the dance floor. Every twenty minutes or so a man would duck out of the smoke to play at the Big Game Hunter arcade game nearest their table. The women would halt their conversation, let the man lose a few quarters shooting ten-point digital bucks and ride out the inevitable comments he would make when he passed by their table. Angels. Even in their defeat these men pretended to have the upper hand. The desperation of a hunting video game at a bar on a Friday

night was almost touching to Gwen.

At least Matt had the self-respect to play Warcraft at home, online. “‘Lady in Red’,” Lori offered when Elvis was safely out of earshot.

Gwen looked at her.

“‘Lady in Red’ was the first slow song I ever danced to. It was junior high and Eric Outhouse asked me to dance.”

Gwen twisted up her face, happy for the comic relief. “What a terrible name. What did he look like?”

“He was tall for his age. Dark hair. He was serious-looking, and that was good back then. He looked like he had his shit together. I was flattered he asked me to dance. We started doing that stupid junior high dance thing, you know where you put your arms around his neck and he puts his arms around your waist and together you shift your weight side to side and spin in a circle.”

Gwen nodded. “I remember.”

“Well Eric got an erection and I about died,” Lori said.

“The poor thing.”

“You mean me, the poor thing,” Lori said, and the two women halflaughed. Between the small-town gossip and the concern over boys, junior high wasn’t so different from where they were now. “I had done sex ed but I’d never been up close and personal with one before. What was I supposed to do?”

“What did you do?”

“I ignored it. Five years later I married the son of a bitch.”

Gwen raised her eyebrows in recognition. So his name was Eric. Eric was the reason Lori always sat at the back of the room and with her eye on the entrance. He was the reason she didn’t want any drama, didn’t want anyone in Barvee talking about her. In North Carolina, Eric had tied her to a barn post and beat her with a rake. For two years, she’d been on the run, living out of her car and sleeping in the parking lots of Dollar General stores and Walmarts between the Blue Ridge and Cumberland Gap. A Facebook message from an old high school buddy brought her to West Virginia, just 25 minutes from Barvee to a town called Matewan. It was pure coincidence she had come to join Gwen in Mr. Tackett’s employ.

No one in Barvee other than Gwen knew this about Lori. This information Lori entrusted to Gwen, and Gwen had kept her mouth shut.

“You’d never told me his name before.”

“Yeah, well. Words can’t hurt me, right?”

Lori was being facetious. They both knew that words were all they were here, all that would be left of them when they were gone. “What does it matter? I’ve stayed here too long. Lord knows what else your boyfriend

NATALIE AXTON

has been saying, or who he’s been talking to.”

Gwen didn’t recall telling Matt about Eric or North Carolina, but she let it drop.

“They call SSI the ‘retarded check,’” Gwen offered. Gwen had heard Matt and his friends say this and worse, and it bothered her. The working men talked conspiracy theories that made no sense. They made jokes about one another’s wives. They accused other men of stealing, they lied and manipulated to get what they wanted, no matter the consequences. They were free with their language in a way Gwen and Lori never could be. She couldn’t admit she knew this. Instead, she offered, “They don’t mean anything by it.” That was true too.

“Life just isn’t fair, you know,” Lori spoke into the hazy middle distance. Gwen followed her gaze, past the couples clustered around the stage and the band framed by mounted taxidermy and neon Coors Lite signs and saw her future in Barvee. It was a life measured in potlucks and yard sales, church groups, hospital visits and, yes, slow dances at Dandy’s. She would bet that she and Lori were the only people in the bar who saw such a life as one of diminished returns.

“Right. Like, they call us Angels so now we have to be perfect?”

Lori shook her head. “I’m not mad,” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette. “I’m tired. That’s all.” **

If Lori had been more reflective she would have determined that she knew very little about her fellow Angel. Gwen drove in to work from Kentucky, just across the state line. But Lori had never been to her home. Gwen said she dropped out of med school—for personal reasons—and had never found anything to move on to. Lori didn’t want to pry. When she learned Gwen was friendly with Matt, a man who lived up a holler on the Kentucky side of the river, Lori was encouraging and a little jealous. It had been years since she had had any physical comfort. Matt was strong. He climbed trees for a living. Lori didn’t know Matt’s reputation. Gwen had taken up with a timber pirate, a loose cannon. He logged area hillsides illegally and sold to a lumber yard that didn’t ask questions.

Had she known the right questions to ask, the truth about Gwen would have appeared simple: Gwen was indecisive. She had learned to sit back and let the people around her carry her to her next destination. She had followed her peer group to college, going pre-med like everyone else. She had coasted into a third-rate medical school in a place far from home. Everyone around her making decisions– pecialties, partners, hospitals–and Gwen discovered her indecisiveness was a physical place. What’s more, she had found that her indecisiveness was a place, and she could

channel it as a protective force. Gwen did live in Kentucky, and there was something thrilling about driving into West Virginia every day, seeing the Welcome to West Virginia sign ahead of her and the Welcome to Kentucky sign in her rearview mirror that boosted her, made her feel productive just for being herself. There was Kentucky Gwen and there was West Virginia Gwen. It was like living in two places at once, being free always to choose one or the other. She could stay safe and separate so long as she lived in the in-between.

It had been nice, having Lori as a friend. Gwen liked how Lori filled in those aspects of her personality, like her social savvy, that were lacking. Friendships didn’t thrive in the in-between places Gwen was drawn to now. Maybe that was the point. Gwen’s noncommittal attitude brought no one close, leading instead to non-relationships that she could easily leave, like what she had with Matt. She could be both in and out of her relationship with Matt, and that freedom was its own comfort. In and out of love with him, as people in a different time might have said. The locals had a euphemistic phrase for dating–“talking to”–that reminded Gwen of calling cards and parlors and the rituals of old-fashioned courtship. She was talking to Matt, a man who was so deeply rooted to this place. He would never move to Georgetown to work in the Toyota factory, like so many of the miners here had done. Matt was simple, and he had no critical distance from the place that had raised him. There were things Gwen could never make him understand.

Things with Lori had been different. They had lived in the in-between together, Gwen by choice; Lori, by necessity. Lori made no attempt to put down roots in this town she knew she would certainly leave. She was always worried about Eric showing up, dragging her back to that barn in North Carolina. Gwen thought that Lori took this fear to paranoia, but she appreciated that Lori was struggling. Here was one person who was in a worse position than she.

Gwen wondered how much of this truth Lori had put together. Maybe Lori looked at her friend and wondered how well she really knew the woman. Maybe she was reevaluating their friendship as one-sided and insincere. Lori with her savvy social skills. She didn’t see that they were always in service to protect her from men.

The Angels met because of a man. Marvin Tackett. At thirty-seven years old he weighed well over 600 pounds. At least that’s what was guessed to be his weight, Marvin’s father explained when Gwen called the number listed on the classified ad for a home health aide. Marvin hadn’t stepped on a scale since his last doctor’s visit, two years ago. Since then, he had rarely left the house. Marvin lived alone in a house two blocks off

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Main Street. He watched television and ate the fast food combo meals a high school buddy brought him every day.

Marvin’s father didn’t think the boy needed a nurse. He only wanted someone reliable, who would show up on time every day clean and sober. Someone who would prepare proper meals for the boy and keep the fast food out of the house. The boy’s got bad nerves, gets it from his mother, Mr. Tackett explained. He might soon be bedfast. Gwen knew the man was right to be worried. Medical school had taught her something of circulation and infection. Diabetes was rampant in the region. She wanted the work, and not for the practical training. She was interested in the way this man spoke about his son. ‘Bedfast.’ Here was a localism that struck Gwen as archaic, and that made cruel use of the suffix ‘fast.’ She sensed that Marvin’s family was embarrassed by him.

Gwen was hired over the phone. She got the key to Marvin’s house and started visiting him six days a week. They didn’t talk much. She cooked him meals of steamed vegetables and broiled chicken. She did the laundry and wiped down the countertops. Marvin remained checked out. He spent his days in his bedroom. He lived in a rowhouse downtown. Outside, people walked their dogs, sat on their porches, tended to modest gardens. In Marvin’s house, death was happening, in slow motion. She would come to watch Marvin watch television once she got dinner in the oven. There he sat, barely moving, watching reruns of “Law & Order Special Victims Unit.” She stood in the vestibule between the kitchen and the front room, peering down the hallway at Marvin in his bedroom. She could see him in profile. He embodied one of those ambiguous line drawings where you can see two images at once. If she focused her gaze one way, he looked alive. The other way and he looked dead. Kentucky Gwen was captivated. West Virginia Gwen was repulsed.

Months went by. Then Gwen received another call from Marvin’s father.

Marvin wasn’t improving. Someone must be sneaking him junk food, he suggested. The boy did seem to be getting bigger. Another woman called on the ad, he explained. I reckon it’s best if the two of you work as a team. It was true that Gwen wouldn’t be able to lift the man by herself if he should fall. But how could a man who was barely ambulatory take a spill?

Lori brought a level of dedication to the job that Gwen had never shown. She went along with it, but didn’t commit, finding in the details enough material to keep Matt, who was rail-thin and labored outside all day, entertained at night. Matt couldn’t stand the obese, he thought it was laziness that had got Marvin to six hundred pounds. He would shake his head and cuss under his breath when Gwen recounted the Angels’ rou-

tine. Everyday Lori and Gwen got to Marvin’s house at 8 am. They sponge bathed him and swatted baby powder in the tender places in the folds of his abdomen. They put him in his sweat suit and made his breakfast, a Slimfast shake he ate straight from the blender, an act that disgusted Lori but not Gwen.

The shake was meant to make him feel like an athlete. Lori insisted that Marvin get on his feet every day. For “training.” “We gotta get him to move,” she said with her usual seriousness. When the weather was right, they pushed Marvin onto his side, grappled his legs to the side of the bed, and then pushed him onto a walker.

The neighbors on Marvin’s street hadn’t seen him for years. The first time he emerged from his house, Lori and Gwen squeezing his bulk through the front door in spite of his screaming, folks came to their windows and stared. That first morning they got him to walk to the sidewalk and back. The next day he went to the mailbox. The day after that, the lamppost. It wasn’t long before he was taking steps down the block, leaning on his walker, but walking nonetheless. They had managed to get Marvin out of the house more days than not for a morning constitutional. This was why the women were known as Angels. They had done the job even Marvin’s family wasn’t willing to do.

“Which one of you come up with it?” Lori was asking about Matt. So many shifts the Angels had spent talking about Matt. Matt the tree man. Matt with the strong arms. Matt who could go for hours. Details! She had demanded of Gwen. They had laughed till they cried that morning, running the blender overtime so Marvin wouldn’t hear them talking about Gwen’s sex life.

Now Gwen saw how idealistic Lori had been–and naïve–trying to save herself by saving Marvin. Gwen had gone along with it all. Playing her parts as friend, girlfriend, Angel. That she had been messing with the natural order of things in Barvee was obvious now.

“I don’t remember,” Gwen offered. She poked at the fries with her fork and took a sip of her beer. The band started on a Lynard Skinnard cover. It was getting late, and she wanted to leave. Matt would be home by now. She could sit with him and watch TV, forget about Marvin and his father and... Lori. Or she could tell him. Matt would probably think the event funny.

Dandy’s was packed now. Elvis was still on the prowl. She watched as he approached a woman drinking alone at the bar. The woman turned away from him. Poor Elvis. Would he find anyone who wanted to dance tonight? Gwen remembered an article she had read once, about a phe -

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nomenon called mis-wanting. The article explained that people are very bad at imagining what will make them happy, at knowing what they truly want. This rang true to Gwen. So did the corollary: So many people stuck to traditional scripts–marriage, family, faith–simply because they were unimaginative. Would dancing with any of the women in Dandy’s really make Elvis happy? Or would it make him want something else, something he could take by force?

Matt wasn’t a gentleman. It helped to have a common enemy. At night, in Matt’s trailer, the two of them lying on the single bed, listening to the rain hit the metal roof, they had come up with a kind of shorthand about their workdays. That was normal, she told herself. It was part of being in a relationship. Gwen was trying. The joke itself had seemed the kind of witticism that Lori might like. Lori with her way of sizing people up. How had she missed that Lori carried a deeper connection to Marvin? That the two share an understanding of what it means to be physically trapped. Lori by her ex-husband; Marvin by his immensity. Lori. Gwen’s only friend. Once Lori left Barvee, Gwen would be alone, with Matt.

“Do you have to leave?” Gwen asked. Lori nodded, then looked to the door.

After two weeks of walking him Marvin’s neighbors had figured out what Lori and Gwen were trying to do, and they started to help. They came out on their porches or leaned out their windows every morning to wave and say ‘hi’ And ‘good to see ya.’ Marvin would wave in turn. He’d exchange pleasantries. He’d pet dogs if they were held up for him. He’d tell the women he liked their blouses, their hair. He’d accept their words of encouragement.

Gwen admitted to herself that it had all been rather nice. Positive. Hopeful. She and Lori had been doing good work.

Today, when Marvin tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and fell, he lay there, pinned by his own weight to the ground, wailing, and he never looked more alive. His arms and legs flapped. He lifted his head, eyes bulging. He hollered in pain. Lori and Gwen were useless. Even working together, they couldn’t deadlift his mass off the concrete. There was no way to get leverage, nothing they could pull him up onto. They had gotten him outside and now what? The neighbors who had become so friendly were nowhere to be seen. Surely someone would call the hospital. When EMS arrived, the men would use their reinforced stretcher and their cables and they would sort out a way to hoist Marvin into a wheelchair. Rendered almost an infant, he was so defenseless.

The neighbors kept their polite distance, let Marvin suffer in relative privacy. Watching the EMTs work, Gwen counted the days since her last period. She was late. The sheer ridiculousness of having a child in this place had made her careless, as if the thought itself rendered the fact an impossibility. Imagine: a baby in Barvee. Gwen was better than these people here. She had been out in the world. She had started med school. She read. She had another self, another life she could turn back on whenever she wanted. No, if she were pregnant, she’d go to Asheville for a termination.

The EMTs explained that Marvin would be taken to the hospital for a full round of tests. They went into the ambulance to radio it in. Marvin was on the stretcher, an oxygen tank connected to his nose. He heard the EMT dispatcher on the radio. That’s when Marvin learned that his morning constitutional was known as the “Flesh Parade.” He looked at Gwen and Lori, first with confusion, then with anger. In the space of that instant, Gwen saw her private moments with Matt turned public. The inside joke had flown from boy to boy, from Matt’s logging partner to the hands at the lumber yard and eventually to the EMT bay at hospital. Everyone in town knew the Tacketts, and although no one meant any real harm in the phrase, it would stick to Marvin just as ‘Angels’ had stuck to Lori and Gwen. It was a part of their folklore. It made sense of their world. It would remain forever. Marvin’s Angels were now his betrayers. In this naming, Gwen had become a part of Barvee in a way that Lori had not. The thought terrified her.

“I never, ever would have used that kind of language,” Lori said. “It’s just hateful. He’ll be in that wheelchair the rest of his life, you know. He’ll never leave that house again.” Lori was the authority on fear and public places. She wanted Gwen to understand that in a town as small as Barvee, you don’t choose your story, it chooses you. The Angels didn’t know that they were fired yet. Lori didn’t want to wait to find out. She needed to move on. Eric was still out there, still looking for her. She knew it.

“I’m gonna stay,” said Gwen. The words fell out of her mouth like a sentencing. They sounded like a decision.

Lori nodded her head in approval. The bartender rang a bell. It was last call. The women finished their beers and got up to go. Gwen looked back at the dance floor. Elvis was out there, dancing with a tall redhead. He caught her eye but didn’t wave.

Gwen spent that night with Matt. It was cold. The trailer was hardly insulated. She didn’t ask him about Marvin. When they were in bed,

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she climbed on top of him, hungry for the first time all night. “That’s my little slut, my fuckin’ Angel,” he breathed in her ear. After, she went to the toilet. She saw blood in the bowl when she turned to flush. She came back into the bedroom and stood against the doorframe. Matt was asleep. He looked so young. The wind blew against the thin metal walls and Gwen got back into bed. She pressed herself close to Matt. She wouldn’t ask Matt about the joke. She knew that Matt would never ask too much of Gwen. He would never ask anything at all.

REVERENCE FOR MY CELL

JEZZELLE KELLAM

graphite

THIS PLACE ISN’T MINE

JEZZELLE KELLAM

ONCE, I CONSIDERED MY BODY

most beautiful when it was disappearing; suitcase packed in five minutes, a longing that requires its own airplane seat. to master anything is difficult—

to master leaving is a life’s work. because I desired for my world to be shallow-rooted, it was—even love, that holy thing, was thin & prone to breaking. there existed in me a kind of

night that persisted & spread audaciously into morning, even after I wore the white dress, the smug half-smile of settling, even after I thought, surprised at the sneakiness of it:

oh, this must be happiness. my lover also lived in night; we touched each other in a soft, humming way that became its own half-light, a way we saw the world, not the answer

to the question but another, gentler question: something about the suitcase, which we lost or unpacked years ago. something else about the roots, which (in some unlikely midnight) thickened, thickened & held.

MARY SIMMONS

I THINK I FLIRT, SOMETIMES, WITH LOT’S WIFE

We salt our roads with women who could not let go, a cautionary tale for those who want too much, who wish to pluck stars and fill their aprons with ripe plums.

If I turn back, how could I ever settle for forgiveness and a stoked fire?

Under my heels, I crunch Lot’s wife and wonder what it is to fall asleep quickly, to stare into a wine-dark sea and wish to fill your lungs with it,

to kiss the veins of a maple leaf and sweep the future off your porch.

I see her, sometimes, in the back pew of the chapel with the domed ceilings echoing voices like steepled canyons.

She lets down her apron to reveal mice and November and a bushel of peaches, and she offers me her wares for the low price of looking over my shoulder with a resounding yes.

I am reminded, when I set my table, by the saltshakers of white and pink and red, salt harvested from the crevices of language, that wanting does not reduce us but makes us too many, grains I devour in a bite.

COEXIST

oil on canvas

DELTA N.A.

UNEXPECTED SUNSET

DELTA N.A.

oil on canvas

ESCAPE

DELTA N.A.

oil on canvas

The upstairs treatment room at my new dental clinic in Falmouth has a skylight just above the chair. Clouds pile up low in the grey late-afternoon sky as the dentist and hygienist set up their instruments and hand me a large pair of smoked-plastic eye protectors. Having been in Hong Kong in 2020 when the first Covid cases shut down the city and then moved to the UK just as England’s own lockdowns began, I’ve been unable to see a dentist until now. It’s chilly outside and will rain later. I’m already sweating.

The thing is, in 2019, as Hong Kong’s protests dragged on, I couldn’t make it to the dentist either. I’d seen Dr. Chan late the year before, but with the city on fire and the air dense with fear and tear gas, life contracted. Sometimes you could go out; sometimes you couldn’t. It was hard to make appointments when you might be shot or beaten up by the cops for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or gassed, or blasted by the water cannon. Thus, you narrowed your life down to specific routes: to and from work, the supermarket, the nearest MTR station. You surveilled. Made excuses and contingency plans. The last time I saw Dr. Chan, I boarded the wrong bus despite how long I’d lived in the city, got off on the wrong side of Causeway Bay, and had to rush across the district to my appointment. It was sweltering. I arrived sopping wet. At least I perspired in advance. Instead of commenting, she got on with it, blasting my teeth with the high-pressure saline spray device her clinic used instead of old fashioned scalers. Several months later, the police were spraying crowds of people with high pressure blasts of water that contained blue dye and a skin irritant. Hygiene took on a new meaning: scrubbing your social-media accounts of anything related to the protests. I brushed and flossed and hoped for the best. I got a job in England, got a work visa, and left. **

The new clinic is in a converted Victorian terrace house at the edge of the center of town. Most houses in the terrace have been put to commercial use: an accounting firm, a podiatrist, a social care agency, other dental clinics. As I followed the hygienist up to the treatment room, I struggled to keep my balance and had to grab the bannisters. The stairs were half the length of my boots. Now, under the skylights, I’m tapping

my toes together—think of Dorothy and her ruby slippers but the opposite ends of the feet—as the dentist jackhammers away at my teeth. I can take pain except when I can’t.

Has the process of visiting the dentist, the protocol, ever changed at all? First, there’s the anxiety. The inspection of the teeth. Maybe X-rays. Lead robe covering my chest and groin to protect the children I knew even as a kid I was never going to have. More anxiety. Will they find anything. Then, the scaler: that hellish little shrieking thing; the grinding, vibrating tiny lightning strikes. It’s not a pain you can lean into and sort of tune out. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! Bad shocks again and again. Still more anxiety. You sweat.

I know pain. I have tattoos. I’ve had plantar fasciitis, carpal tunnel, a blown rotator cuff, bad knees, IBS, a wrenched back. Sometimes simultaneously. But the loss of control here, the gibbering fear that the dentist might sneeze and plant a drill bit in my occipital lobe, makes it worse.

In Korea, where I lived before Hong Kong, a friend from work needed a root canal done, did some research, and discovered it would be cheaper to fly to Bangkok for treatment. A few days in a hotel and roundtrip airfare on a budget airline added up to less than having the procedure done in Seoul. He sent me a link to the clinic he used. The website gleamed with photos of sparkling clean white teeth and sparkling clean white walls and floors. Even better, the prices were astonishing. I could afford more than just a cleaning. Although I didn’t need anything as dire as my friend’s procedure, I’d been in Korea a year by then. Prior to leaving the US, I’d scraped by and scaled back during the dotcom crash: it cut my income in half, so dental care went by the wayside. I brushed and flossed and hoped for the best. A few years went by. I moved to Asia and had an income again. Booked the trip to Thailand. The Bangkok clinic turned out to be an icy, air-conditioned oasis, welcome and needed after the 20-minute hike from the metro in that heat. I had the retainer bar removed from the backs of my lower incisors, and half my amalgam fillings replaced with ceramic ones. You won’t need anaesthetic for this, the dentist assured me. We know how to be careful. And they did. They were. It cost less than getting a single filling in America. I had the rest replaced two years later. Without Novocaine. Both times, I left smiling.

**

British newspapers decry the lack of access to dentistry here. NHS funding has been slashed and slashed and slashed, perhaps to soften the public’s views on privatization. Enforced scarcity, but hey! At least you can get a job on an oligarch’s yacht. My colleagues talk of waiting

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lists. Some have been waiting years for their procedures. If you want dental care and you’re not in agony or bleeding, you have to pay out of pocket, which I’ll do today. I had my first appointment almost a month ago—a consultation. The dentist poked my teeth, found no cavities, and told me to make another appointment for the cleaning. The cost for these ten minutes of not much: £28. Two cancellations ensued. Their equipment broke down. I’m finally here, and I’m squirming. I have to raise a hand twice for a time-out when the darts of pain get to be too much. Overhead, the clouds tumble. Yes, it’ll probably rain. If I tap my toes together any harder, I’ll either jostle the dentist or teleport home. Should it hurt this much, and what does that mean? I’m wearing black so the sweat won’t show, or not as much. I need a shower.

After college, it took me nine years to go to the dentist. Before that, my parents paid for it, or their insurance did. I never asked. After my preteen two years of braces, the orthodontist affixed the retainer bar to the backs of my lower front teeth to keep them from moving. All my canines were yanked. My wisdom teeth, too. When the nitrous took me the latter time, I slurred “This shit’s better than pot” and went under. After graduation, though, I slid into the first of several social-services jobs that paid well only in comparison to the standards students were used to. About a year and a half into that period of slow asphyxiation, a financial counselor reviewed my outlays and bank statements and told me I couldn’t save money not because I had poor spending habits but because I wasn’t actually earning enough to get by. The last week of each month could get scary. Thus, I brushed and flossed and hoped for the best. But that metal bar across the backs of my lower front teeth was a challenge. Despite my best efforts, plaque built up and ossified. It wasn’t attractive. Before my first dental appointment in downtown Oakland, I bought a little bottle of topical anaesthetic meant for teeth and gums. It had been nine years, after all. Convinced I was in for an extravaganza of buzzing, squealing pain, I swabbed my mouth with the stuff. In fact, I might as well have gargled with it. I used about a quarter of the bottle and thought I was very clever for having thought to buy it. During the exam, the hmms and ohs and see that?s began to worry me. Halfway in, I realized I couldn’t feel the back of my throat. All that Lidocaine. Could I swallow? It seemed I could not. Was I about to drown in my own spit while my oral torturers poked and prodded and scraped at my teeth? It seemed very likely. Being fluent in American Sign Language, I managed to gesture that they needed to withdraw before I had a screaming, thrashing panic attack in that chair. The verdict? After all those years, just one cavity. There was

the bar, of course, and the reef of tartar around it. Oh, and a bit of gum disease that would require minor surgery. Nothing major, they said, don’t panic, just a pocket of infection because one of the wisdom-teeth extractions had never healed properly. Easy to fix.

“Nine years?” the hygienist asked me at the end of that ordeal appointment. “All things considered, you’ve done a good job. You should be proud of yourself.”

**

Rinse, spit into the suction device, repeat. Now, the polish: a different instrument, a different sonic assault. This time, it’s a lower-pitched whine, a more intense grind than my toothbrush at home. Dental-grade toothpaste the consistency of wet cement spatters my face. It’s gotten quite dark, I notice, but my teeth will be whiter. At least this part doesn’t hurt. Well, it borderline does. Now and then the dentist hits a sensitive spot. This brings on a resonant zing that verges on pain. My armpits are soaked and I’m glad the dentist and hygienist have masks on. I mostly trust my deodorant, but you never know.

“Please tell me this part is almost over,” I say after the second break in the proceedings.

“It is,” the dentist tells me, scowling. “I’ll have to do a couple of your teeth by hand.”

My mother used to love regaling my sister and me with stories of her own adventures in oral hygiene. She’d do this in the car on the way to the dentist. You see, she’d gone through a phase of drinking Coca-Cola. It was new then, a fad that never passed. Diet soft drinks wouldn’t become available for several more decades. Her Coke binge ended when her dentist found six cavities. It was all that sody-pop, he told my grandfather. Enraged, he insisted the dentist do the fillings with no anaesthesia. That’s too much for a little girl, the dentist begged, disbelieving. Don’t make me do that to her. My grandfather wouldn’t be swayed. The dentist apologized to my mom, and began.

Growing up, we rarely had Pepsi and Coke in the house, not that the Shasta soft drinks my parents liked were different in any meaningful way. Over time, cloying Kool-Aid in its rainbow of radioactive fake flavors gave way to lemonade and limeade I made myself. Sometimes I’d make it in the blender with ice. The recipe called for half a cup of sugar. We had breakfast cereal, too: Super Sugar Crisp, Sugar Frosted Flakes, Sugar Pops. In the ‘80s, those companies dropped the toxic S word from their products but didn’t change the ingredients much. We also always had cookies on hand as an after-school snack. Potato chips. Pop Tarts. I taught myself to bake brownies and cakes. Our teeth were under constant

MARSHALL MOORE

attack.

By the time we reached the dental clinic, Mom would have gotten to the point in the story where she had to take to her bed of pain for two days. Disallowed aspirin, she had to make do with hot compresses. Her cheeks swelled up to the size of hen’s eggs. Granny didn’t speak to her husband for three days.

“You better hope Dr. Horn doesn’t find any cavities,” Mom would say as she parked the car and switched off the engine.

One time, he did. Three, in fact, one of which went deep enough that he worried he’d break the tooth when he tried to fill it. Consternation and scowling ensued. Convinced my parents would forbid him to use anaesthetics, I went back for that appointment damp with terror. I’d had cavities before, been given Novocaine shots. To the extent that I could be rational in those moments, I figured I’d be okay this time too. There was precedent. Even so, my mother’s trademark grim glee as something painful was about to happen to my sister or me was unnerving. She liked it when we got hurt because then she could smother us. It made her feel like a good mother.

The sting of the Novocaine shots; the cool rush of nothing afterward. Can you feel this, the hygienist asked. Poke, poke. Can you still feel it. It seemed that I could, in a muffled way. This was how I learned I’m one of those people painkillers don’t always help. Yeff, I said. Thord of. Further Novocaine. I shut my eyes. We waited. The hygienist came back and prodded again. Could I still feel it? I could, very slightly now, ten percent, maybe eight. But we’d be there all day on an asymptote that would never hit zero. Best to get on with it.

The drill bansheed its way into my head. Something acrid stung my nose: dust, prickly specks of… I couldn’t identify it at first. When I realized it had to be vaporized tooth matter, I almost gagged. It took every bit of self-control I had to keep my head still, not to retch. I survived it, and I made a mental note: this was not an experience I wanted or needed to have again.

“You should really use dental floss,” my British dentist says afterward, deeply scowling.

When I tell her I’ve been flossing for more than forty years, I rarely miss a day, it seems to annoy her more. She stops short of saying she doesn’t believe me. Recommends mouthwash for my gum irritation. I’m contemplating my own irritation, and hers. I went through lockdown here after a lockdown in Hong Kong. There were the protests, the violence, the danger. As I pat my mouth dry and prepare to leave, I’m licking my teeth. They feel smoother now. They taste cleaner. The stairs creak underfoot as I make my careful way down to the lobby to pay, unsure I’ll come back. This was not

MARSHALL

an experience I want or need to have again. I wanted her to look inside my mouth, scour the trauma away from my gum lines, and maybe acknowledge what I have survived.

Outside, the first raindrops smack my aching face.

JEY LEY

A HAIKU OF HER poetry

her bangs her bangs her (wet) bangs

strands of calligraphy

FANTASY ME

Fantasy you will be everything. She’ll be the Instagram post of people. Filtered, poreless, and with an actual butt, unlike regular you, who spent countless months working out only to lose your tush and tits.

Every fantasy you’ve ever had starts with the protagonist—you— going into hiding. Willingly kidnapped from your everyday existence, you’ll be given the opportunity to remake yourself away from prying eyes.

Secluded in a secret underground bunker and committed to a diet of colorful gruel, you’ll finally learn how to lose that thick chub. Instead of wasting time with the people you love your days will be spent learning Mandarin and how to really squeeze those weak pelvic floor muscles.

It’s critical that you cease contact with the outside world. That way, you won’t get distracted by temptation. You won’t have to worry about someone offering you a cookie or asking to make you dinner. You’ll be a missing person, a ghost to your friends and family. The key is that you give them no warning, not even a hint. Otherwise, they’ll talk you out of it. Tell you you’re beautiful just as you are. They are well-meaning liars.

Your stringent diet and squat training will have you emerge hairy but BMI healthy. After laser work, a new haircut and highlights, an eyebrow threading, a bikini wax, a mani pedi, a quick trip to your dermatologist, and a set of new clothes—size 4, baby—you’ll finally be the woman I… I mean, you… always wanted to be.

You’ll finally be able to wear those low-rise jeans because they’re cool again and not because they’re the only jeans that don’t give you a raging yeast infection. Did I mention that your no-carb, no-sugar diet will lead to a Candida-free vagina? No more Monistat or awkward scratching for you.

Once you can finally meet your own eyes in the mirror, you’ll know you’re ready. You’ll send a few well-worded texts to your friends. Nothing too eager. Let’s meet for dinner and catch up.

Perhaps that day you’ll stroll into your favorite coffee shop just on the off chance you run into someone you used to know. A perfect meet-cute that will have them absolutely stunned.

“I heard you were missing, we were all really worried. The police thought you’d been kidnapped. Have you spoken to your mother…” They’ll go on and on, until they finally say what really matters: “Oh my, wow, you look fantastic, you’ve lost so much weight!”

“Oh, thanks,” you’ll say. “I just added an extra couple of glasses of

LINDSAY MORRIS

water to my diet. It’s amazing what acqua can do for your system.”

You’ll then get to bask in their awe of your willpower, feed off their admiration. You’ll take a selfie and tag it #bodypositivity. Oh, but the new me… I mean, the new you… didn’t realize your teeth had lost some of their pearly exuberance. So you’ll buy Whitestrips and hastily apply them before dinner.

You’ll wear them so long your teeth begin to glow. Perfect. Much better than before. But then, there are those eye crinkles. God, why did you ever laugh? You’ll swear to yourself, no more laughing. Dammit. Is that a zit?

Concealer, blush, eyeliner, lipstick. Now you’ll be able to make eye contact again. They’ll really be shocked now.

For the first time in years, you appreciate what you see. Gone is the chubby, acne-riddled teen. Gone is the shame of being too big to shop at the cutesy hormonal no-tits teen store. You are a fantasy come to life.

Oh dammit. You feel dampness in your panties. Perfect fantasies don’t bleed. You call up your gyno. Better get that IUD. No more periods, here I come.

You take vitamins before dinner. Not too many or the nausea will set in. Fantasy requires constant upkeep. Multi, E, D, C, biotin, fish oil. All cylinders need to fire so you can remember the Mandarin you studied in the underground bunker. Nǐ hǎo ma?

A new pair of pants, and an even newer you.

You check the temperature. It’s 27 degrees. It’s winter. Dammit. No way are you covering up your body after all this. You deserve a perfect entrance that isn’t ruined by a puffy coat. You drink shots of whiskey to numb your bare arms to the cold. But you haven’t eaten for days. Your liver reacts to the fish oil, or perhaps the alcohol content. You’re barfing into your kitchen sink.

All the better. You can be that much skinnier. You might even be able to ingest some carbs if you keep this up. Maybe you should take it up again, shove that toothbrush down deep. So close to your goal weight... of course, that ticker keeps sliding down. All bodies are beautiful. #LoveYourself

You walk into the restaurant. You’re still drunk, your arms raised by goosebumps, your breath like battery acid, your eyes glassy. You look beautiful, you look nearly perfect, they’ll love you now. Of course, they said they loved me… you… before. But that couldn’t have been real. Ugly girls don’t deserve love. That’s what your middle school bully said—that you were too fat for love.

Well, I’m not fat now.

The tables are empty. Why aren’t they here? They’re late.

What if they don’t come? They’ll come. Right? They have to. To remember me from before. To give me the likes I’ve worked so hard to earn. The likes I need in real life.

Please… I’m so tired… Please… Is this enough? Am I perfect yet?

RESPLEDENT REINCARNATION OF MEANING

oil & acrylic on canvas

IRINA GRECIUHINA

ELIZABETH JIMÉNEZ MONTELONGO

poetry

I’M IN LOVE WITH THE PATRIARCHY

I confess:

I’m in love with the patriarchy

I never noticed it

But suddenly I did And realized I was hooked

Too far gone

I tried to stay away

I told it no

But it just didn’t listen

It just stayed

Kept tempting me

Kept shape-shifting

And the more I learned

The smarter it got

Until I realized

I saw it everywhere I turned

Until I realized

It was in my home – in my bed

Until I realized it was Inside my head

So much a part of me

In my blood

My brains and bones

And I just can’t scrape it off Without destroying myself

Because it is what I’m made of And also, we’ve been so close

For so long

That I confess

I’m in love

I’m in love with the patriarchy

I’m in love

And I don’t know what to do

When it takes as much as it wants And leaves me feeling empty

ELIZABETH JIMÉNEZ MONTELONGO

Then it hits me

Just like that

I realize

I know what to do

I take as much as I want

I keep a distance

Scrape what I can

Off my brains and bones

Off my blood

Out of my head

Get out of my bed

Start looking around

Start learning

Start shape-shifting

Start listening

I say

Stay away

I’m off the hook

But the patriarchy can’t live

Without me

I noticed

PENELOPE UNSTITCHES

Does she think of the old man—or his ghost— while she un-works the weaving of his shroud? Or does she think of the work of her hands How this is the reason—not a husband long gone—that she delays, and while he’s been gone, she’s learned to be him, trickster. Now she is the one who weaves a spell and undoes what she weaves. Day and night, she stops time from moving forward–fingers nimble in reverse–working thread back through the way it came. During the day, she is careful not to show her pleasure in the slowness of the work--choosing the colors she will unravel, twining a length of it around her fingers, holding it up to the light, ignoring the gaze of the suitors. Undoing the passage of time, the scenes of trees un-curdle backwards into thread–corridors and hunts, weddings and sacrifices, the cyclamen in the rocks unblooms it -self to its leaves, then the rocks unfurl, spun out of being as if they had never been. They don’t know the difference, and they don’t see how things are made—a progression—not magic—done or undone, live or dead, but the moving of a shuttle, spun and unspun, time falling forward and back, again.

HOARDER

MINHEE CHUNG

oil on canvas

A CONVERSATION

He woke up.

He’d been stirring for some time, he didn’t know how long, but now he jolted awake with a similar kind of force to how he remembered being struck over the head and put to sleep.

He moved his arms, his legs, untangling them from the bed sheets that had been tucked neat and tight around him. The movements were slow and uncertain at first, but soon they unraveled into a ragged urgency as he fought himself free.

The sound of the sheets coming apart must have been louder than he anticipated (not that he cared, necessarily), because the next thing he knew, a figure appeared at his bedside. The shadowy room made it difficult to completely make out the face of the person standing over him, but never could he mistake them.

It was her.

She smiled down at him sadly. Even from behind the shadow obscuring her face and his vision still adjusting to being awake, he could tell.

“It looks like we really are doomed to keep repeating this over and over,” she sighed, lowering herself in one fluid motion down onto a chair situated at the bedside. “Honestly, with that blow I managed to land over your head five years ago, I thought maybe you’d never wake up again and we’d stop having to deal with all this messiness, all this carnage.”

“You mean you’d never have to?” He replied, his voice coming out as a single frayed thread, climbing out of a dry, disused throat.

“Oh, stop acting like the victim,” she swatted the thread back down with her tone, overpowering with very little effort. “We both know how brutal you were in trying to expunge my existence last time you were in control.”

He couldn’t deny that. He’d done everything in his power to get rid of her when he had the chance. Not out of any vindictiveness or hatred per se, but the knowledge that if he didn’t take the upper hand when he could, he’d never survive. No one, inside this room or outside it, would allow him to survive. His only means were by force.

Most on the outside either hated or pitied him.

Hate or pity. He hadn’t decided which was worse but had been leaning somewhat toward the latter when his counterpart struck him and

put to sleep indefinitely. **

“I have something I need to tell you,” she added, tentatively, hands clasped in her lap where she sat. “I’m... well I guess we’re... married now.” His upper body shot off the mattress, hands fumbling in the last of the loosely clinging sheets. “You got married while I was asleep?!”

“Yes. And there’s also a child,” she continued, straightforward and stoic. “You should count yourself lucky you got to sleep through the pregnancy and birth. I would not recommend it as an experience to repeat.” She chuckled beneath her breath.

He stared down at his hands, clenching the dismantled sheets, just as she returned to staring down at hers on her lap, the brief lapse into humor dissolving away as quickly as it had emerged. Taking advantage of the silent reprieve, he started moving his legs, a little at a time. A minute flex of the calves, a bend of the knees. He hissed in pain at a sharp crack in his kneecaps, semi-atrophied from disuse, but he quickly bit it back and throwing away precaution used all his strength to swing both legs over the side of the mattress, bringing himself into a sitting position, eye to eye with the companion at his side.

“I won’t play dead forever. I didn’t before and I won’t start doing it now,” he spoke to her wryly, letting the pain course through him all at once–off quickly like a Band Aid... or a torn row of surgical stitches. “But it isn’t like five, ten, fifteen years ago anymore,” she seemed unfazed by the abrupt equalization in their stature as she returned his gaze, not with any bitterness or cruelty but cool and unyielding.

“The marriage,” she continued, “The child, means my connection to the world no longer just involves a singular line, the freedom to think about myself and myself alone–or ourselves. If you trap me into submission, put me to bed, and take over as the living party for this body again, there would be consequences so bad, so devastating, you’d reconsider whether you wanted to live anymore to begin with.”

She reached out an arm from where she sat and rapped her knuckles against the nearest portion of wall, or rather the smooth bone-white dome, containing the two of them together. The sound echoed, but she smothered it with the next words she spoke. “You’re fighting an uphill battle. Always have, always will be. No matter what goes on inside this skull, the outside vessel was determined at birth. It matches me, not you.”

“You tried to kill me,” he replied, seething.

“You tried to kill me too,” she returned, without hesitation. There was a pause. The dome encapsulating the two of them fell silent, cramped and cavernous both at once.

She shook her head, gaze sinking yet again down to her lap. “I really thought I’d won this time round... I thought maybe I’d never have to have another fight with you again. But believe it or not, I don’t hate you, not anymore, anyway.” She reached out a tentative hand to place over his. “I watched you sleep, bathed your forehead, kept your linen fresh and clean. Day after day, year after year, for five years since the day I landed that last blow on your head.”

He felt the weight of her touch and let it stay there before coming back to his senses and recoiling in indignation.

“I’m not a figment of some psychosis to be managed! I’m real!”

“AND SO AM I!! ” She screamed back even louder, shedding the stoicism in one violent instant.

He tried to leap off the bed but his limbs were still clumsy. One foot stumbling over the other, his entire self collapsed and spilled over the floor like a precariously stacked tower of crude and immalleable wooden blocks. What would he have done if he hadn’t fallen short of the sitting target? How far would he have gone if his fingers had been able to stretch a little further and reach her neck rather than falling along with the rest of him down to the floor at her feet?

“I know you won’t do it, not this time.” Her voice sounded ethereal in his ears, gently invading his part of their shared mind. “You won’t do it because, like it or not, you have a conscience and there are two people out there now who need me, as I am.”

Then she stood. She circled around so that her feet met with his eyeline as he lay across the floor. “Let me help you up. ” She offered her hand.

Without much choice, he clasped it and allowed her to pull him upright. Then, with him leaning on her shoulder for support, they crossed the room together, hobbling away from the shadowy area towards the front, illuminated by two round windows, the deep black pupil in each respective center fringed with a marbled ring of color, all tucked in neatly by an outermost ring of milky white.

“See how much nicer the world looks?” She gestured outwards with her free hand. “It changed almost immediately as soon as you went to sleep. Sorry, as soon as I put you to sleep–see, I can admit to it,” she amended her words mid-sentence in response to his raised eyebrow.

“It sounds simplistic, but it really is that simple,” she continued, still holding him up to view he world that couldn’t see him.

“People are so much nicer when the mind matches the body. And when people are nicer, they’re more accommodating. If you and I have one thing in common, it’s ambition, and the raw truth is that you need to get

the right people on your side just to get your foot in the door, for anything worth doing, worth bragging about. I know you understand. Marriage and child aside, I think you’d be impressed with all I’ve achieved over these past five years, I really do.”

He remained silent, offering no other reply than to reach out the arm not being used to prop himself up against her and touch one of the windows, moist and squishy in their rounded frames. From behind, he was vaguely aware of her stepping away, leaving him to find his footing, determined not to collapse.

“There’s not enough room for two people to live comfortably in one body but I think it’s been well established that neither of us is entirely strong enough to kill the other outright.” She spoke, voice disembodied, phantasmagoric to him now as he stood on his own, facing away from her. Yet simultaneously, that same voice permeated every molecule of air he had no choice but to breathe... in and out... in and out...

He grit his teeth and stood still, refusing to turn and face her. “I know you’re not to blame,” he replied with gravel grating the inside of his throat. “But neither am I. I know how much easier life would’ve been for you without a twin aberration. But I’m also not sorry for trying to kill you.”

“Twice,” she emphasized in return, “you tried to kill me twice.”

“As did you,” he allowed one side of his mouth to curl upward, back still facing her in a newfound calm and lethargic defiance. “So the score is even on that front. Besides, as you say, you’re the default setting, I can’t compete with that... not without extreme measures at least.”

She didn’t try to make him turn around, nor did she wind her way in front of him to get a look at the expression on his face. Perhaps she didn’t need to. The air tasted and smelled of it, just as it had previously in her voice. “So does that mean you are going to try to kill me again, now you’re awake?” she questioned, calm and level. “I know you’ll gather your strength eventually. At least give me the courtesy of letting me know what to expect.”

“No, I won’t try to kill you,” he sighed. “Like you said, I have a conscience.”

He continued to stare through the windows. He could see the figure of a child now, ambling on two chubby legs. “Looks like your child needs you?” He reacted uncertainly.

“Our child.” She took him off guard with the amendment.

“And what about our husband?” He enquired, thinking he may as well have the full briefing.

“Oh, you’d like him,” she replied. “Really I think you would. He’s such a nice person, smart, and so much fun. And... you probably

KATIE GOTO-ŠVIĆ

underestimate him...”

Finally, he found the resolve to turn back round and face her, or maybe it was that he couldn’t deal anymore with the intense influx of so much reality, so much he would never have accounted for before but now had to.

He didn’t know what to say, so he just looked at her. Then he punched her in the face.

Searing pain shot down from his shoulder blade as he did it, all the way through his arm and into his fist, like fresh needles sterilized in fire, or what he imagined those tiny carnivorous fish in the Amazon River to feel like if they entered your bloodstream.

He stared down at her figure on the ground, collapsed in an explosion of blood, far more blood than he’d been expecting. She stirred, only a little at first, beneath his gaze of amalgamated horror and satisfaction. Her initial movements were so minute he thought they might rather be involuntary twitches of someone completely incapacitated. He hadn’t meant it to go that far...

He didn’t have long to ponder, though. Without warning she pulled herself up again and hit him back. A crunch and a crack filled his ears along with an explosion of sticky red from his own face–a painful reminder of just how devastating the consequences of letting his guard down could be.

Hitting the ground, he stayed there, limbs splayed–for exactly how long, he didn’t know. When her voice began to slowly trickle down to him, the sound swam amidst a tinny echo circulating in his ears.

“Do you need a hand, sir?”

Her hand reached down and he grabbed hold of it, though it took a few tries to secure a strong enough grip, both of them now slick and slippery.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

The exchange was overwrought, as if they were play-acting old fashioned gentility.

Standing eye to eye together once more, each observed the other, mutually soaked through the clothes and to the naked skin with all the blood, a dizzying amount that had splattered as far as the white walls around them in every direction.

“Let’s not betray each other again.” She coaxed out the words, fighting to subdue the shaking in her voice.

“Think we can manage?” He replied, not faring much better.

“I don’t know...”

The air was thick with metallic humidity. They continued to stand before each other, until, wordlessly, they

KATIE GOTO-ŠVIĆ

took a mutual step inward, closing the remaining distance so they could cling together, half-hunched over and drenched in steamy, sticky blood. The desperate, disheveled half-embrace teetered on a precarious balance, both holding them up and dragging them down.

oil on canvas

MINHEE CHUNG

AN OCEAN WIDE

NATALIE SCHRIEFER DISSOLUTION poetry

A redaction of the Declaration of Independence

When it becomes necessary to dissolve, separate. Throw off security— such patient sufferance. History is a history of repeated injuries, necessary for the public good. Attend to them— and to compliance. Redress in the most humble terms: interrupt the voice of the world.

LUCAS SIMONE WHEN THERE WERE TREES poetry

Wonder-fear held them long and close Hugged them like toddlers

Tugged their beards like babies

As they snaked up the mountain

Up the squirms and the spasms

Gripping scales and eyeholes wherever their fingers found them

Until the trees came free

And God’s sky burst a seam

And white sun drowned them in fog-splintering light

Then they stitched up God’s seam

With cars, cows, and crowds

And God threw the earth against his bedroom wall

DUPONT

MICHAEL HOWER

digital photography, inkjet print

MICHAEL HOWER KLOTZ

M. ROBIN COOK

THE SECRET OF THE ANSWERING fiction

“The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.”

— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“And these children that you spit on As they try to change their worlds Are immune to your consultations

They’re quite aware of what they’re going through”

— David Bowie, “Changes”

November 1977

Yesterday, at my father’s request, the congregation of our church gathered around and asked God to bless me. Specifically, they asked Him to help me kill a deer.

In my family, attending church is a duty more fundamental than work or school. It’s an imperative not to be shunned—twice on Sunday, prayer meeting on Wednesdays, plus Sunday School and Bible studies. There are things about it I love. I love singing along with the vibrant music as it echoes from the massive, vaulted ceiling. I love the earthy smell and orderly symmetry of the wood and stone architecture. I love some of the people. And there are things about it I don’t love, that paralyze me with fear, especially the preacher’s weekly admonition, delivered redfaced and bellowing, that God’s boundless love is, in fact, a closed system, reserved only for those elect among us who manage to avoid the evil pitfalls of the liar and thief, the promiscuous and the queer. Lately, that last one weighs ever more heavily on my young mind. Eternal torment is not nearly so appealing as Sunday afternoon potlucks and chasing friends around the pews. And I’m ever more at odds with the sacrament of Communion. To celebrate the torture and murder of some poor political dissident, his alleged deity and resurrection notwithstanding, by symbolically cannibalizing him doesn’t feel glorious. It just feels violent. And, well, gross. And to make matters worse, I am bothered that I seem to be the only one who notices. To everyone else, apparently, it is a holy act, a resplendent celebration. Truth is, I don’t love some of the people, though they tell me I’m supposed to. It seems every day I find some new queer thing about myself.

Anyway, finding myself at the center of a fundamentalist prayer

M. ROBIN COOK

circle was intimate and intrusive, with its laying on of hands and speaking in tongues and fervor, and I was terribly uncomfortable. I submitted stoically because it seemed important to my father, even if I couldn’t understand what interest The Almighty had in the outcome of a hunting trip. It wasn’t as if our family depended upon hunting for survival. It was just one more thing that seemed obvious to everyone but me.

But that was yesterday. Today I am loading this damned truck, and all this packing and repacking is making me crazy. Who invented these movable spaces? Some engineer in the “Trunks and Luggage Division?” Is that a job? What’s more important, I wonder, going or going through the motions? I chuckle at the double meaning of “what a load of crap.” I think, is my old man ever a stickler? Fitting it in takes planning, he says. You can’t over-pack, he says. Takes work, he says. Get your shit together, son, he says. Space is always at a premium. There’s never enough. I hold up an odd-looking gadget with some plastic parts and a tube attached. I think, what the hell? I toss it onto the growing pile haphazardly, an utterly insignificant act of defiance.

He’s very proud of this ability he has to fit a lot of stuff neatly into small places. He’s often told how he packed me, Mom, and all our belongings into a ‘62 Volkswagen with a camper and moved us from Michigan to Ohio, back to his childhood home, to the farmhouse where I’m growing up minus the arable land, sold long ago. I imagine myself in that tiny, crowded space, a year old, jammed between the cooler with road food and the diaper bag. I wonder how he fits me into his neat, compartmentalized spaces now.

I’d just turned 16. Jewish people have bar mitzvahs and Catholics have confirmations, debutantes have coming out balls, and we go deer hunting. That’s our thing. That’s this thing. Hence, the packing.

We’re only going for a week, I tell him, hoping we won’t have to take the kitchen sink. But contingencies, right? You never know what we might need out there, he says. We all know the key to any successful hunting trip lies in getting off to a good—and by that he seems to mean well-packed—start. So, I’ve got the pick-up bed loaded shipshape, I think. All that’s left are the guns. They go in last, he says. We might need to get to them in a hurry. I’m not sure what he means by that. Maybe the Soviets will decide to attack Southern Ohio? That’d be one way to get out of this, I suppose wryly. I leave a spot for them between the tent folds and the tree stands, where they’ll ride well. But I don’t put them in. He’ll probably make me redo most of this anyway.

I can see Mom working through the kitchen window. She is baking a pie in anticipation of our return. To the victors belong the

M. ROBIN COOK

crumb-covered spoils. I wave at her, smile, wonder if she’ll miss the satin panties I’m wearing under my thermal underwear. They’re just plain white, and she has lots, so I doubt it. My face flushes with shame. The heat of it feels fine in the crisp, late-autumn air. It’s a risk wearing them, out there together in the woods like we’ll be, but they are comforting. They buttress against the emptiness of this thing I’m expected to do. The old man would fucking freak out if he caught me. I know this because I’ve been caught before. It did not go well. When I was five, I asked for a Barbie for Christmas. That didn’t go well, either. I didn’t get it. He worries there is something wrong with me. I worry he’s right. Suddenly, all the heat drains from my body, and I am just cold, like maybe I’ll always be chilled deep inside. I shiver, and the violence of it is shocking. I could have refused this trip at some peril to my standing, such as it is, as my father’s son. I could have stood my ground, but I think some small part of me hopes this might snap me into manhood, into a place I’m told is my birthright, but feels as foreign as life on the moon. I wave at Mom, force a smile. I suppose she smiles back, but I can’t tell, really. The reflection of the newly risen sun and the crabapple tree outside the window obscures her features behind a mirrored veil.

I bit into an apple with a worm once. Its severed body—they’re the color of the pulp—writhed around in the tunnel that was, moments before, its entire world. It must be wonderful being surrounded by such harmony, that is until some giant monster severs you in halves and begins gnawing. My stomach knots at the memory. Gorge rises through my chest, a visible shudder trailing after. I vomited that day until I thought my stomach would rupture. I nearly retch again at the memory of it. My father had belly laughed, and I’d hated him for it. I remember thinking I’d like to force feed him a bucket of worms. I guess it was funny, but I still can’t eat apples unless Mom cuts them into pieces or bakes them in a pie. I trust her to get the worms out.

My father emerges, walking with purpose. It perplexes me how he seems to fully own whatever space he occupies. I have the sensation of shrinking when he’s nearby. He’s wearing stock red and black checked flannel beneath denim coveralls, camo hunting jacket slung casually over his arm. He’s a large man with deeply etched creases around his eyes that I suppose come from squinting so much in the sun. He walks with an ever-present stoop—intent on the ground, the way of a farmer, a role long lost to him but ever on his mind, I suspect. I imagine him lumbering between rows in lush fields, silver hair gleaming in the afternoon sun, testing the soil with his fingertips, perhaps sampling a soybean, an image I believe he would approve. Before the farm failed, I don’t imagine spot

welding door panels at a Detroit, Ford plant a third of his adult life was what he had in mind growing up around, playing a role in, all that verdancy. Furrows in his small garden are the only he tends now beside the ones on his face. Damn, I think, he’s getting old. At my age, I want to hold him an exemplar of possibility, but I can’t see past the differences between us, differences so profound they peer at me as from the sable eyes of a yawning chasm. He would insist we have all we need, more even, in everything the land gives to us. He would say it’s all good, as if the pronouncement proved the precept. He kisses my mother, who’s come to see us off, on the cheek. If he speaks to her, I don’t hear it.

He turns to me. “We all set?”

“Guess so. Just have to put the guns in. You can check my packing if you want.”

“I’m sure it’s fine, son,” he says. “Let’s hit the road. Time’s wastin’.” Still, he places the guns in himself and moves that strange gadget to another place barely a few inches from where it was, aligning it with a system only his mind can parse. Straightening it, I think, and chuckle quietly. I start to ask him what it is, but I decide with knee-jerk, visceral disgust that I don’t even give a fuck. It’s what my father does. He straightens bent things.

Still, his half-hearted burst of confidence is a development of note. I’m sure it’s fine son…

He believes it’s a rite of passage, this violent thing we do. But it comes with a bloated profusion of goddamned discordant assumptions! He thinks he’s letting go. I wonder if I’m being freed or indentured for life. I’m not even sure which is the better prospect. One thing’s certain: he’s lying to himself. He doesn’t let go of anything. He categorizes, codifies, organizes, quantifies things. He’s a hoarder. Conundrums, enigmas— they are mysteries beyond the pale. The slick feel of satin beneath my blue jeans belies any similitude for me. I was born into paradox.

I breathe deeply the crisp air. It shocks my face but quiets my mind. The morning is beautiful, I admit. We’d had a snow and ice storm for Thanksgiving. It coats everything, glistening on branches, fence rails, and wires in the bright sun.

We climb in; the old Ford pick-up grinds a few times, catches life and growls throatily. I press my forehead against the cold glass. My mom waves. I waggle my fingers. I don’t know if she sees me. This ice, it coats my heart.

Ohio farmland rolls by like those repetitive cartoon landscapes. I wonder if all of existence isn’t like this—a long series of verdant events played against the same barren backdrops. A fallow field, a rare stand of

M. ROBIN COOK

M. ROBIN COOK

un-razed oaks and maples, a farmer, work-gnarled and sun-weathered hand to plow, waving without truly seeing, much like my father. The “how to be a man” narrative repeated ad nauseum, its untold tenets as indecipherable to me as furrows in the dirt, carved there by machinery I imagine as alien, like asemic text carved into this frozen landscape. This trip is about much more than just killing an animal. It’s a search for the Rosetta stone which might unlock the language of my perturbed gender. It holds within it hope of translation. My hope or my father’s? I’m not sure. We both feel it, I suspect, but come at it from different directions—North/South, night/day, Spring/Fall, Mom’s or Dad’s underclothes. I stifle the urge to cackle. I don’t want to explain the joke to my father. I also fear it will sound just left of a sane center.

When I was ten, I took my first plane flight, a visit to my grandparents. Midwest farmland passed beneath us, reminding me of the neat rows of text in books Mom read to me when I was small. They held so much meaning, but the symbols were just marks on the page, no real-world corollary without the translation she supplied. I understand those mysteries on my own now, but this land, my place in it, the cryptic silhouette of my body in relief? This I cannot yet decipher. If there is an answer, it may as well be buried beneath this frozen ground passing mile by silent mile, accompanied by the lonely, hypnotic drone of the engine. The secret of the answering lies deep, shrouded in ice and snow. Frigid.

…the deer appears from nowhere. I raise my gun. He is tall as a tree, supple as wind. Possessed of beauty nearly beyond measure. Consummate. Potent. Teeming with the dash of life. Blissfully unaware. My heart races. My breathing slows. I tremble inside, fight to keep it from reaching my hands, from my finger on the hardened steel of the trigger…

…I am in church. Ushers pass the communion elements among us—the bread, the wine. The pastor is speaking. “Take and drink; this is the cup of my blood, which is shed for many…”

…I sight along the worn bluing of an impossibly long barrel. A path to consummation. I squeeze. I feel the recoil. There is no sound. There is…

…so much blood. It pours from every orifice—nose, ears, mouth, eyes. It pools on the frozen ground, running in spidery rivulets to… where? Steam rises from the heat of it. Its sickly, coppery smell knots my guts. My father kneels, cupping it in delicate hands—not those of an old man, worn by time, but a young boy’s hands on the wild-eyed brink of manhood. He stretches the scarlet offering toward me…

…take and drink this is the cup of my blood shed for you…

…as if the sound took its time reaching me, as if it had leagues to

travel, the report of the blast arrives, finally…

I am jolted awake by the lurching truck, the dieseling of the motor, and a distant, fading voice: this is my bloodshed…

“Wake up, boy. We’re here,” my father is saying. “You slept nearly the whole way.”

My head hurts. I feel nauseous.

“You were dreaming, talking in your sleep,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“You said, ‘they feel nice Mom they feel right,’” he tells me. “What were you dreaming about?”

“Don’t know. Can’t remember.”

“Hmm…” he mumbles. “Let’s take the guns and scout the place. Maybe we’ll scare up a rabbit for supper. We can pitch camp in a while.”

“Yeah, OK,” I say, and hop out of the warm truck into the stinging air, trying to force a bit of spring into my step.

He hands me my gun, an old Browning which had been his first, from the pick-up bed. I’d received it for my 14th birthday, a lethal castoff. I think, the Barbie would have been safer. He would disagree.

“I’ll load shot. You load slugs,” he says. He’s hoping we’ll see more than just rabbits. I slide three of the dull, red shells into the receiver and pump it once. There is finality in the metallic “click clack” that breaks the silence. It will be the only round fired on this trip.

We’re hunting on farmland belonging to a friend of my father’s. We set off across a corn field toward a copse of trees where we hope to find spots for the tree stands. It’s been a wet growing season, and corn is still drying on the stalks.

I stop for a moment and breathe deeply the frigid air. I stifle a scream, fighting a sudden urge to cradle my father’s face in both hands and thunder at him. “I. Hate. This!”

Before this, I had dutifully hunted small game with friends in the woods surrounding our house. It was just one of many expectations that came with growing up “male” in that cultural moment and position. I was a decent shot, even, having spent hours popping soda cans off fence rails with the .22 rifle I’d received for my tenth birthday. I ate the meat my mother cooked afterwards. I choked on the hypocrisy, because the fact was, I had never killed anything. When the opportunity arose, I’d shot wide or not at all. I’d decided some time ago that I just don’t like killing things. I don’t want to watch them die, and I certainly do not want to be the fucking trigger man.

But it’s not just the hunting, either. I can’t see how a goddamn violent deed makes one more of a man, or necessarily less of a woman, for

M. ROBIN COOK

ROBIN COOK

that matter. If anything, it seems to just make one a killer. At this point, I know one thing with certainty: I am terrified. It feels as if I am about to be swallowed by some Lovecraftian nightmare creature. Dinner with Cthulhu? Yeah, maybe like that.

When I was eight or nine a gang of older boys from the neighborhood marked me an easy target for torment. They’d catch me alone, tease me and laugh, call me “fat boy” and “sissy.” They’d throw rocks, take turns pushing me around, dare me to do anything about it. The oldest-looking one, the biggest of the bunch who did most of the talking—it seems bullies always require the services of a ringleader—had a dog, a friendly German Shepherd named “Tanner.” He’d wag his tail spiritedly, clearly oblivious to the drama playing out before him. I couldn’t fight them. I couldn’t outrun them. I’d do my best make myself small. I’d try to keep from crying, because the harder I cried, the more they laughed and the meaner they got. I had just wanted someone to take up for me, to be someone worth fighting for.

One time, I was playing just outside our bathroom window, when I saw them coming up the road which ran by our house. I thought, this is my chance. My father was inside washing up for dinner after work.

“Hey, fat boy,” said The Big One. “Ya gonna squeal for us, piggy? Oink, oink!”

That got The Sidekicks rolling, and soon they were all oinking and grunting at me.

My chest tightened like it’d been clamped in a vise, and I fought to hold back tears. A burning nugget of anger rose in my gut and seemed to travel throughout my body to all points. My fingernails dug into the flesh of my palms. My courage, what there was of it, was bolstered by the knowledge that my father was as close as an open window. Still, it took every ounce of gall I could muster to growl, shakily, “F-fuck you, a-assholes!”

The Big One’s eyes narrowed, his face flushing. The Sidekicks looked as if they couldn’t believe what they’d just heard. Big One spat, “Oh, you are gonna pay for that, sissy boy,” and trundled toward me, fists clenched.

I called out, “Daaaaaaaad!”

This stopped all three just long enough for my father’s voice to boom from the bathroom window, “Get your asses home, boys, before I drag you home and have a long talk with your folks! You hear me?”

Overlapping murmurs of “yes sir” and “okay” came from the group as they turned to leave, Tanner in tow. The Big One flashed a “this isn’t over” look my way and drew a thick finger across his throat.

M.

M. ROBIN COOK

My father’s voice drifted out once more. “And you, boy, you get your butt inside. Right now!”

The ass chewing that came next was enough to deflate what little was left of my tiny ego. What could an eight-year-old kid know about “fighting your own battles?”

“You can’t always come crying to your daddy, boy,” he said. “You gotta learn to stand on your own two feet,” he said, as if I had anything else to fucking stand on. “It’s for your own damn good…” he said. “I won’t always be there….”

Blah fucking blah blah.

I couldn’t know then, but yes, he would. He would always be there with me, like some angry ghost haunting some decrepit space, if not for me. Semantics, it turns out, are everything.

I am jolted from my reverie by the bellowing of a laryngitic cow. I turn to find my father blowing into the odd-looking contraption I had tossed into the truck earlier. Ahh, I think, so that’s it. A deer call works by mimicking mating sounds. I am repulsed by the sick humor inherent in teasing an animal into thinking they are about to get laid, then blasting their guts out. I think, drolly, humans just suck.

We reach a break in the field about halfway through and emerge into a surveying swath wide enough for a small tractor. I am walking with my head down when I feel my father’s hand on my shoulder. He stretches his palm out to stop me, puts a finger to his lips to quiet me, and points along the swath to my left. I turn slowly to see an enormous buck standing stock-still, eyeing us circumspectly from around 40 yards. I count ten points on a huge rack of perfectly symmetrical antlers. Tense muscles ripple beneath his taught, brown fur. My breathing slows. Bursts of delicate steam emerge from his nostrils, riding the frigid air. He glares at me with orbs of cold onyx. I wonder about battles those eyes have seen, conquests hard fought, ground taken, about generations of young sired, of miles passing beneath sure, swift hooves. I mean to rob this creature of life, to make it into a morbid trophy to adorn some future wall I do not yet own, a commentary, not on the animal’s life, but only on its death. A monument to masculine lethality. My father likes to insist, at its most fundamental, it’s only food, a bounty this place bestows upon us, as if the land had a stake in our survival. We always eat what we kill. For him, anything less would corrupt the act. But for me? I can see no more than corruption in it. We don’t always kill what we eat.

I stifle an urge to scream so the fucking thing will bolt.

Run goddamn you! Can’t you see what’s happening here?

My father stands mute. He will not shoot. His excitement is nearly

M. ROBIN COOK

palpable in the silence of the moment. He believes that I share his fervor. Isn’t that what a good son is supposed to do? Despite my warm outerwear, the satin of my mother’s stolen panties is a poor insulator, and I can feel the cold bleeding into my crotch.

I am blindsided by a flood of contradictory impulses. I swallow reflexively, attempting to hold back the rising bile. It is emotional anguish made physical, like a sudden, blinding headache. My legs are rubber. For a moment, I imagine turning the gun on myself, putting an end to this pain I feel certain will haunt me for a very long time to come. I realize, perhaps for the first time, that it has troubled me already for as long as I can remember.

They feel nice Mom. They feel right…

I want to cry out, “Fucking run, why don’t you?!” But I don’t. In the end, the cacophony in my head proves no match for this glacial silence.

Ah, but I have something that is, Mother, something that will shatter it like so much delicate crystal…

A few days after that incident with the bullies outside my house (and the one inside), I ran across a mousey-looking little kid named George Something or Other, little brother of The Big One, playing with Tanner the Oblivious Mutt down the street from our house. I suppose being bullied so much had rendered me prone to transference, and I found myself furious at little George, hating him really, for no reason other than the proverbial “shit runs downhill” effect. I pushed him, emotionally then physically, at which point the kid unleashed a firestorm of flying fists which connected quite skillfully and surprisingly with my face, body, and arms. In other words, I got my ass handed to me by a kid half my size. Even Tanner growled threateningly as I ran away, crying. My face warms, and my guts knot with shame years later as I ponder the profane impulse which had compelled me to unleash my own brand of bullying on a boy whom I believed weaker than myself, despite the butt whipping that was the outcome. Fuck, I’d had it coming. Such a delicate thread divides our best and worst selves.

The deer, not quite so unaware as Tanner, I suspect, is nonetheless failed by the instincts which have served him so well in the past. He doesn’t move.

“Please go quick.” I pray under my breath to some unnamed deity, unsure if I am thinking about the animal running away or dying. Perhaps both, perhaps neither. Perhaps I am simply asking for grace. This is my blood…

I take aim deliberately and squeeze the trigger, certain this will

be the last time I ever touch a gun if I have anything to say about it. The recoil feels like rape, and the blast which splits the silence shatters more than I can fathom, more than I could, perhaps, ever begin to reckon.

The deer remains motionless, and for a moment I entertain the optimistic thought that I have missed. Then my heart sinks as a small, crimson bloom grows in the fur just behind the animal’s shoulder blade. The buck attempts a step, listing, suddenly unable to support his own weight. He drops to all four knees with an audible thud and makes one last, anguished effort to stand. He stumbles under his own massive bulk, rolls to his side, and is still.

My father praises my marksmanship in excited tones, but he may as well be talking at me through a long tunnel, or as if my head were submerged in water. I stifle an impulse to hit him in the forehead with the butt of the Browning. Instead, I simply flash a “talk to the hand.”

I march toward the fallen animal with legs that have grown impossibly heavy. His last, tortuous breaths are expelled in rapid, shallow wheezes. He watches my approach with eyes cloudy and vacant, a once potent, furious gaze having been replaced with a sallow, distant stare. I kneel at his side and watch the blood pulse weakly from the wound.

“Why didn’t you run?” I squeak hoarsely.

… shed for many…

I am unprepared for the rush of hot tears and the onslaught of sudden fury which rises from a cavernous, dark fissure which seems to have opened inside myself. I half groan, half scream, “Why didn’t you fucking run?!”

I yank my hunting knife, another “gift” from the old man, from its sheath on my belt, and lifting the buck’s head by its rack with one hand, I gash its throat with a ferocious jerk of the finely-honed blade. Blood seeps into fur and runs onto the ground, cutting steaming, red furrows into the pristine snow. The deer shudders once—I am startled by the violence of it—and is quiet.

I hold the stained knife and shotgun toward my father. “Take these damned things,” I spit. He receives them with a perplexed look on his worn features. God, I think, he looks so old.

Mom made a big breakfast this morning—eggs, bacon, biscuits, gravy. Plenty to eat, and I remember every bite as it disgorges, spilling, steaming onto the snow. The sharp bile burns my throat, and I think, I may never be hungry again.

“You OK, kid?” Dad chuckles.

“Do I look OK?” I snap. “I killed it. It’s done. You happy?”

“Ain’t I supposed to be?”

M. ROBIN COOK

M. ROBIN COOK

I fight back more tears. It feels like, if they come, they may never stop. I say, “I can’t join your boy’s club, Dad.” I point at the stag lying dead in the snow. “I don’t know what kind of person I want to be yet, but I know it’s not this.”

“You’re not making sense, boy. It’s just an animal.”

“No, Dad, it’s more. It’s a ritual sacrifice, and I want no more part of it. I didn’t have the courage…” my voice trails, quivering, whispering almost.

“Stop this nonsense,” he says, his voice steely.

“It’s alright if you don’t understand, Dad. I don’t think you have it in you.” I think about saying “And by the way, I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” It’s the only language of which I am aware for the feelings I am experiencing, and a favorite of the analysts, tabloids and talk shows, but I don’t feel nearly brave enough, standing there with bloodied hands in a frozen corn field, to open that can of worms. Instead, I surprise myself and blurt out, “I won’t be going to church anymore, Dad. I can’t stand the hypocrisy. Besides, there’s just no one there like me.”

“Well, that’ll disappoint your mother,” he says.

“That’s a low blow, man.”

He glares at me with a start, but before he can speak, he simply lowers his gaze, shaking his head.

“You skin it,” I tell him. “I’m going back to camp. I need to change, wash this blood from my hands.”

The high autumn sun warms my face as I forge a path between the rows, out of the field.

JOSEPH DE MAISTRE, I QUESTION IF SLEEPING BIRDS SING

“We are all born despots, from the most absolute monarch in Asia to the infant who smothers a bird with its hand for the pleasure of seeing that there exists in the world a being weaker than itself.”

– Joseph de Maistre

If I smother this chickling, if I snap its wings like I snap dry twigs under my foot and crush its bones under the pressure of my own— much larger and thicker and swimming in more blood—would it not be a terrible reminder that this bird, now limp and dreaming in my hands, is stronger than I? If a dying bird screeches, might that not be considered a song?

IN THE DIM

Loud rosemary borders the barn

blueing beneath the yellow sky, exchanging paint for patina.

Inside, scribbled in scattered hay, a riddle—

Which is the greater miracle: her smile, or just before?

GARDEN PAINTING

SUSANNA HERRMANN

watercolor

HOLLOW BONES

Summer’s last inhale is onion-petal sharp, as Autumn shakes the boughs to see what holds.

Feverish leaves mend as though hand-tied by fishermen, and cast in the mountain seam.

Griffith’s gnat, blue winged olive, edges barbed to hold trout-hungry eyes still wet with cold morning.

Life’s vibrance, defiant, as dried scales and pitted bones insist: there was something wild here, once.

CONTRIBUTORS NOTES

volume 110 / issue 01

Emily Adams-Aucoin is a poet from Upstate New York who now writes from South Louisiana. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies, as well as in Electric Literature’s “The Commuter,” the Rappahannock Review, Split Rock Review, Meridian, and the Colorado Review, among other publications. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @emilyapoetry, as well as her website www.emilyadamsaucoin.com.

Natalie Axton moved to far eastern Kentucky in 2018. She has come to love Appalachian Kentucky for its stark beauty, dialect, and community. “The Flesh Parade” is part of a collection of stories inspired by the area.

Lorelei Bacht ’s poetic work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Night Heron Barks, Queerlings, SoFloPoJo, Barrelhouse, Sinking City, Stoneboat, One Art, SWWIM, and elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter @bachtlorelei and on Instagram @lorelei.bacht.writer. They are currently watching the rain instead of working on a chapbook.

Sabrina Barreto is a writer, educator, and watercolorist who was born, educated, and continues to live in the Bay Area. She earned her BA in English at Santa Clara University and MFA in Creative Writing at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She previously served as Poetry Editor of the Santa Clara Review and International Editor of Eleven Eleven. She has shelved freelance writing to teach inner-city children through the Marigold Project and San Francisco’s Day of the Dead alongside activist and fellow writer and painter Rosa de Anda. She is a recipient of the Canterbury Fellowship, Academy of American Poets Prize, and two consecutive Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prizes. Her writing appears in Ramblr and The Bohemian among others, and again now in the Santa Clara Review.

Wendy Barry is a Connecticut Yankee living in South Carolina. She is the co-editor of The Annotated Anne of Green Gables from Oxford University Press. She is a poet, gardener, jewelry-maker, painter, teacher, and friend to dogs.

M Robin Cook is a nonbinary trans woman living and loving in Los Angeles. She writes poetry, prose and music, and draws and dabbles in photography and film. Her stories, poems and drawings have appeared in EOAGH, The Collection, and E-Ratio.

Minhee Chung is a Bay Area native currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Chicago. As a first-generation American, she uses her work to explore the dynamics between race, socioeconomic status, and gender while also attempting to reshape current views of nationality. She mainly works in oil and acrylic.

Emily Donaldson writes as a way to explore the relationship between the

natural and our inner worlds. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications of The Bluebird Word, Wild Roof Journal, and Wizards in Space Literary Magazine. When not writing, they are probably playing mandolin, running with their rescue pups, or woodworking.

E.R. Donnelly ’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in publications including River and South Review, Broad River Review, and Great Lakes Review. She lives on the East Coast with her family.

Jaden Fong is a writer with a sweet tooth and a soft spot for the whimsical and the peculiar. A two time nominee for the Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award, he has won numerous contests and awards in fiction, poetry, and other forms of writing. His writing is most often inspired by the natural world, and in his free time, he likes to spend time in nature, where he frequently and confidently misidentifies every flower he comes across. You can find his work on the Academy of American Poets website at poets.org, Flora Fiction, The Owl, and Transcendence, among other places. To contact him as well as see his work on custom tea-stained paper, find him on Instagram at @jadenwriter.

Katie Goto-Švić is a queer writer from Australia, living in Japan. Her work has appeared in L’Esprit Literary Review, The Manifest-Station, and Grande Dame Literary, amongst others. She was a finalist for the 2021 and 2022 Page Turner Writing Awards. Instagram: @katiegs_writer

Irina Greciuhina (b. 1982) is a painter who lives and works in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. Throughout her career Irina has been experimenting with different art styles and techniques, and since 2019, she has been actively exhibiting her artworks and participating in international projects. In a short period of time, Irina has managed to participate in the International Biennial of Painting in Chisinau, exhibit her works in Italy, Spain and France and even have her first solo shows.

Susanna Herrmann is a designer and visual artist from Bloomington, Indiana. She teaches graphic design at Southern Utah University. Her work is based in theories of visual perception and is influenced by space and landscape. Her work has been exhibited in galleries including at Marshall University, Indiana University, and Racecar Factory in Indianapolis.

Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson) is an Oklahoma-based award-winning artist. He holds a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree in Painting from Abilene Christian University, a Master’s Degree in Native American Art History from the University of New Mexico, and a Ph.D. in Native Language Revitalization from the University of Oklahoma. He makes art in Ada, Oklahoma, where he works as Executive Officer of the division of Language Preservation Of the Imatapo (Their Lean-to People) house group and Kowishto’ (Panther) clan, he is an en-

rolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

Michael Hower is a photographer from Central Pennsylvania. His work focuses on historical themes, photographing places of abandonment with particular interest in industry, prisons and graffiti. Originally trained in painting and drawing, he rediscovered a passion for art after picking up a digital camera for the first time, switching permanently to the photography medium. His work has been featured in numerous galleries, museums, and publications across the country.

Daniel Johnson is a writer from New Jersey. He’s a graduate of the M.A. in Creative Writing at University College Cork, and he teaches at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in journals such as Southword, Literary Matters, TIMBER, and Have, Has, Had.

Jezzelle Kellam (b.1999) is a graphite artist from Kent, based in the Northeast of England. In her work, she represents the body, by making conscious decisions in removing heads and parts of a body this is where her practice has led her. She has used this compositional decision as a vehicle for her ongoing oeuvre that articulates her way of thinking: “By breaking down the form to how I see it, I attempt to encapsulate the physical, psychological, and physiological properties of what it is like to inhabit a form, a human body. By bridging a gap between the body and mind. My art and life are inextricably enmeshed. It is vital to portray a multitude of scars, body hair, cellulite, and so on. These abrasive textures have been viewed as imperfections, but I want to share how beautiful these attributes are.”

Megan Klco Kellner is a Michigan-based painter, poet, and educator interested in exploring the colors, textures and images that signal ‘home.’ She holds an MFA in Painting from Kendall College of Art & Design and a BFA from Truman State University. Her paintings have been exhibited regionally and nationally. Her poetry chapbook What Will You Teach Her? won the 2019 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press prize.

Nadine Koochou is an Assyrian writer and an English student at Santa Clara University. She believes the beauty of life is equal parts pain and hope. As such, she often writes normal people going through normal tribulations.

Jey Ley is a visual artist and (new) writer based in Central Ohio whose poetry appears or will appear in South Dakota Review, Hollins Critic, Lullwater Review, and elsewhere. Their artwork has exhibited at regional galleries, such as ROY and 934 Gallery. Jey has a Master’s Degree from the University of Delaware. Visit @jeyleyjey on Instagram.

José Enrique Medina earned his BA in English from Cornell University. He writes poems, flash fiction and short stories. His work has appeared in Best

Microfiction 2019 Anthology, The Los Angeles Review, Rattle, and many other publications. He is a Voices of Our Nation (VONA) fellow.

Armin Mell Armin Mell, born in 1994 in Munich, Germany, lives and works as a multi-disciplinary artist in Berlin. He graduated in Painting and Design from Akademie U5 München in 2017. His work is featured in private collections and was exhibited i.a. in Liuba Gallery in 2022. In order to continue to be open to new modes of expression, Mell does not abide by any one technique and instead explores many different painting and sculpting methods. This diversity in technique is visible in different series within his body of projects. Armin worked from 2014 to 2017 as studio assistant for German sculptor Klaus Vrieslander in Munich.

Elizabeth Jiménez Montelongo is a poet, visual artist, and facilitator. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and her bilingual poetry is published widely in print anthologies, as well as print and online journals including: Nos pasamos de la raya/We Crossed the Line, Azahares, and Harvard’s PALABRITAS, Caesura, Acid Verse, Red Wheelbarrow National Edition; as well as in online journals such as: Label Me Latina/o, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Somos en escrito. Elizabeth earned a BFA in Art in Pictorial Art and a BA in French from San José State University. She served as 2021 Creative Ambassador of the San José Office of Cultural Affairs and has facilitated generative poetry workshops for non-profit organizations and universities. She is a Board Member of Poetry Center San José, as well as Director & Editor of La Raíz Magazine. www.ejmontelongo.com/poetry

Marshall Moore is an American author, publisher, and academic based in Cornwall, England. He has written several novels and collections of short fiction, the most recent being Inhospitable (Camphor Press, 2018). He holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University, and he teaches creative writing and publishing at Falmouth University. His next books are a memoir titled I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing (Rebel Satori Press, 2022), a new short-story collection titled Love Is a Poisonous Color (Rebel Satori Press, 2023), and a co-edited academic collection on the subject of creative practice. For more information, please visit www.marshallmoore.com, or follow him on Twitter at @marshallsmoore.

Lindsay Morris writes lively, uncomfortable, and downright hilarious stories about life, relationships, and sex. Her characters channel an awkward fearlessness that makes for highly enjoyable reading. She currently performs in the East Village, getting her work out there to the delight and horror of her audiences. Instagram: @writeforthewhimsy.

Delta N.A. are a couple in life and art, working together by painting in unison. They learn from each other and share a creative flow poured into their artworks, a common language that makes each artwork realized by two pairs

of hands look like a single artist’s creation. In love and collaboration they find the key to face and accept differences, crumbling the boundaries separating human nature from freedom. The artworks signed by the duo are present in numerous public and private collections and have been exhibited in solo and group shows across Europe, U.S.A., and Asia.

Caleb A.P. Parker is a poet, cartoonist, and musician from the Texas Gulf Coast. He is currently a Creative Writing MFA student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Corey S. Pressman is an artist, writer, and teacher living in the Pacific Northwest. His art is shown around the country and has won several awards. He has published academic works as well as short stories and poetry in both journals and book collections including Gastronomica, the Clackamas Literary Review, Lucky Jefferson Magazine, and Arizona State University Press.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Ordinary Bodies (Word West Press, 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lips Press, 2021). His poems and reviews have appeared in New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, West Branch, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. He lives with his family in south Texas.

Cristina Sayers is a visually inspired intuitive collage artist. Origins of her collage work is from handmade, old-fashioned cut and paste collage. She makes this differentiation because so much collage work, on the internet, is composed digitally. Born and raised “among the waves” in Santa Cruz, CA, Cristina is a child of the 70’s, growing up in what is known historically as the Salad Days of High Stoke Surf Culture–which has a strong impact on the themes off her art work.

Natalie Schriefer is a bi/demi writer often grappling with sexuality, identity, and shame. A Best of the Net nominee, her work has appeared in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, jmww, Wired, and NBC, among others. Find her on Twitter @schriefern1.

Sarah Sheppard is a Michigan-based writer. She has been published in The Juggler, Chimes, The Avenue, Narrative Northeast, with a piece forthcoming in Sonora Review. She attended the Gullkistan Artist Residency in 2019 and the Good Hart Artist Residency in 2020. She is working on her first novel.

Mary Simmons is a queer poet from Cleveland, Ohio. She is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she serves as an Assistant Editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from Exist Otherwise, Anti-Heroin Chic, and The Shore.

Lucas Simone is a junior at Santa Clara University studying Theatre and Creative Writing. He uses his experience as a trans man and his love of history to write plays, poems, and short stories.

B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist focused on the intersection between language and the visual image. He is the author of two monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker, and Invited to Life: After the Holocaust with Neil Gaiman, Mayim Bialik, and Sabrina Orah Mark. His visual work has been featured in exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Center for Jewish History, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Los Angeles Center of Photography and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. He has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Travel Media Awards for feature writing, and the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography. He is a 2022 New York State Council on the Arts Fellow in Photography, a Prix de la Photographie Paris award-winner, and an Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medalist. A descendant of Jews expelled from Spain into North Africa and Italy, he is a founding member of Yetzirah and an enrolled member of the Sephardic Brotherhood.

Cass Waters is an artist based in Chicago, IL. She studied alla prima masters like John Sargent and draws inspiration from existentialist writing and natural science. Cass’s background in realism allows freedom in exploring abstraction in her work. Ranging from landscapes shattered with potato prints, portraits sliced with neon splatters, and figures broken by colorful webs, Cass’s work explores the fluidity of her perception.

Isabelle Ylo grew up and currently resides in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. She received a Bachelor’s in chemistry from Northern Illinois University, and a Master’s in chemistry from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has a pet bunny named Boe.

Tanya L. Young is a BIPOC writer and artist from Washington State. She is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at Western Washington University. Her work has been featured in publications such as New York Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, and Stonecoast Review, as well as others. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Bellingham Review and a Staff Reader at Maine Review.

Robin Young is based in Borrego Springs, California and works in mixed media focusing mostly on collage and contemporary art making. Using magazine clippings, masking tape, wallpaper, jewelry, etc. allows her to develop deep into the whimsical and intuitive. Repurposing a variety of materials into lighthearted and sometimes disquieting messages, Robin’s artistic universe is strange, funky, and sometimes perverse.

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CONTRIBUTORS:

EMILY ADAMS-AUCOIN

NATALIE AXTON

LORELEI BACHT

SABRINA BARRETO

WENDY BARRY

M ROBIM COOK

MINHEE CHUNG

EMILY DONALDSON

E.R. DONNELLY

JADEN FONG

KATIE GOTO-ŠVIC

IRINA GRECIUHINA

SUSANNA HERRMANN

LOKOSH (JOSHUA D. HINSON)

MICHAEL HOWER

DANIEL JOHNSON

JEZZELLE HR KELLAM

MEGAN KLCO KELLNER

NADINE KOOCHOU

JEY LEY

JOSÉ ENRIQUE MEDINA

ARMIN MELL

ELIZABETH JIMÉNEZ MONTELONGO

MARSHALL MOORE

LINDSAY MORRIS

DELTA N.A.

CALEB A.P. PARKER

COREY S. PRESSMAN

ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ

CRISTINA SAYERS

NATALIE SCHRIEFER

SARAH SHEPPARD

LUCAS SIMONE

B.A. VAN SISE

CASSIDY WATERS

ISABELLE YLO

TANYA L. YOUNG

ROBIN YOUNG