Folio Literary Magazine: 2012 Edition by Folio Literary Magazine

lFoliol

FOLIO

2011-2012

Editors-in-Chief: Nikkitha Bakshani Emily Cohen Treasurer: Sonja Chai Editors: Emily DiFiore Jon Lemay Bree Loethen Jenna Postler Andrew Shi Faculty Advisor: April Bernard

Folio is glad to be a part of the thriving literary scene on our campus. We would like to acknowledge other purveyors of campus creativity: Palimpsest, Bare, Scribe, Skidmore Literary Society, Line, and the English Department. ~~~ We would like to thank everybody who submitted to Folio. It was a pleasure reading the work of such talented writers and artists.

Fiction Inpatient, Joe Byrne (42) Shoes, Taylor Dafoe (4) Teddy, Katie Humphreys (17) The Elephant in the Living Room, Nathaniel Moore (32) Poetry “Jenny”, Kelsey Amentt (35) There’s Nothin More Thug than Real Love, Kali Block-Steele (27) Ringside Specters, Emily Cohen (20) Summer’s Zenith, Elizabeth Hopkins (44) II. In Dreams, Jon Lemay (31) Half Eight on Grafton Street, Anna Linscott-Zask (7) To the Room Where You Grew Up, Anna Linscott-Zask (36) Paleontology, John Maher (8) Poem Ending with a Line from Westron Wynde. John Maher (13) Coffee and Jazz, Liz McCrorey (46) Mi Cuchi, Ayelen Pagnanelli (9) Unscathed, Jolene Paternoster (16) How I Became Me, Jamie Thomson (25) The Soprano, Jamie Thomson (11) Nonfiction Like Caves, Nikkitha Bakshani (30) Seabolt, Anne Louise Korallus-Shapiro (14) Knickknacks, Kristin Travagline (21) Survival Instincts, Kristin Travagline (22) Images/Compositions Bubblegum Girl, Lindsay Johnson (12) Untitled, Lindsay Johnson (45) Good Night, Nicole Newell (37) Photographs of Guatemala, Lauren Reilly (47) Translucent Butterflies, Lauren Reilly (26)

Taylor Dafoe

SHOES She told me if she ever got a tattoo, it would be the lyrics to “Thunder Road,” and it would probably be somewhere on her leg. We were sitting on her kitchen counter some Sunday morning, sipping hot coffee, cupping cold mugs. I asked her what was stopping her and she said she didn’t know, she just hadn’t gotten to it yet. She stared at her ankles and ran her hands through her hair, still messy from sleep, still warm. She was wearing my t-shirt. She told me she hated football because she hated going to church and that the two would be forever linked. She said her dad always complained that he was missing the Patriots’ game. She told me she went to Catholic school. She said all her uniforms were stained with chocolate milk or playground gravel. She showed me her 3rd grade school picture. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She told me she used to open her eyes under water because it felt damaging and she thought glasses were distinctive. She said she only pretended to hate her braces. She told me once that love is like a good pair of shoes. They’re always so fucking expensive and they hurt like hell when you first wear them, but after a while they form to your feet and it feels like you’re not wearing anything at all. We were sitting on that bench by the lake, the one with the John Darnielle lyrics carved into it. Her head was in my lap. “It doesn’t have to be that dire, you know.” “Love?” “No, buying shoes.”

She said she refused to wear anything but Mary Jane’s until she was in eighth grade. She wouldn’t go bowling because of it. She said she missed so many birthday parties. She told me that all guys are bad at pushing girls’ hair back. They think they’re smooth or that they’re sensitive or some shit like that, but they all use too much finger, too much force. She always thought her forehead was too oily. I told her that no one noticed. She said Thanks. She told me that I got horny at all the wrong times. She told me she secretly wanted main characters to die in the end, that just once she wanted to be surprised about being surprised by a movie. We were curled up on the couch, our legs leaning on the coffee table. “What’s wrong with a happy ending?” I asked. She didn’t answer. She said she hated girls that were obsessed with Audrey Hepburn because she was one of them. She made me watch “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” three times, once for each joke I made about it. She had a picture of Audrey Hepburn taped to the upper-right hand corner of her mirror, next to the one of her dad holding her on his shoulders. She told me funerals weren’t that bad, that she thought she looked good in black. I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. She said she only cried when she was happy, but I know that’s a lie. She said she read somewhere that disappointment is like a metaphor that fell short, but that heartbreak is like a million metaphors that made too much sense. She wrote it in ink on her inner-arm, and it stayed there for almost a week. She told me winter break wasn’t that long, that we’d make it work, that it was one of those things that

everyone had to go through. She told me I drank too much at parties. She said she knew I was drunk because one of my eyes looked larger than the other, and I put all my weight on one foot. She said she hated the taste of beer, that wine’s much classier anyway. She said the guy in the corner doing a keg stand was an idiot. She told me she hated that I cracked my knuckles and neck. She said I chewed my nails too much, that I ran my hands through my hair too often, that I needed to stop shaking my feet. She told me I talked too much for not having anything to say. But I think she got that from a song. She told me the last thing she said to him was “The dog got out again.” I put my arms around her, touched fingers by her back. I kissed the top of her head where her bangs began. She was so small then. She told me she wasn’t unhappy being unhappy, she was just sick of wishing. She said good moments live only in retrospection. She said we’re too aware that happiness is fleeting. She told me she didn’t know what to say, that she’d never really done “this” before. She told me she was tired, tired and confused and something else, but I stopped listening. She told me we would stay in touch, that she’d call me and text me until she didn’t. And she did. And then she didn’t. And I checked my phone so many times that week. She told me that there was a process, that anger followed denial and acceptance followed depression and good things always came out of the bad. She told me pessimists were only pretending. She told me about a dream she had where we were in a car, turning onto a highway, and I was kissing her wrist. She said there was someone in the back but she didn’t know who it was.

Anna Linscott-Zask

HALF EIGHT ON GRAFTON STREET Couples meet under the watchful bronze breasts of Molly Malone and I hold my breath as the 46A bus stops in front of me, but I realize it’s not yours, it’s the one from Dun Laoghaire and I think of that morning when you taught me to pronounce it and said we should go there some day. I look at my watch and lean against a closed storefront when a group of rosy-faced boys in tuxedos offer me a swig from their bottle and I forget everything my mother ever taught me and say yes, hearing them cheer as I throw back my head and let the cheap bubbles burn my throat.

John Maher

PALEONTOLOGY She dusted what once was and taking it pushed piece after piece into each other until it was again something that is not life but neither art.

Ayelen Pagnanelli

MI CUCHI Será extraño decirlo, pero no extraño tus ojos verdes que no me queman con la mirada, ni tu risa de pendejo ni que bailes como si tuvieses tres años que me muestres como una muñeca nueva frente a todos tus amigos que no me dejes dormir del lado de la pared, que me recuerdes lo especial que soy, que ames todo de mí. Será extraño decirlo, pero lo único que extraño de vos es que me saques las horquillas del pelo antes de dormir.

Ayelen Pagnanelli

MI CUCHI (translated) It may be strange to say this, but I don’t miss your green eyes that don’t burn me when they stare at me, or your teenage laughter, or that you dance as if you were three years old, that you show me, as if I were a new doll, in front of all your friends that you don’t let me sleep on the side of the wall, that you remind me how special I am for you, or that you love of all me. It may be strange to say this, but the only thing that I do miss about you is when you take my hair clips off my head before going to bed.

Jamie Thomson

THE SOPRANO By the time I escape the vacuum of my bed, it’s past noon, people racing by my window to go to court, and to pick up groceries and nonsense like that, and I can hear the man upstairs playing the piano while a woman sings. I imagine her to be large plump, stuffed with feathers, in other words, I imagine sleeping on her stomach to be quite pleasant. Her dress is red, and when she inhales, she swallows the room and the poor man hunches in the emptiness, holding his chord on the piano, holding his breath, mouth clamped shut for fear of her sucking out his organs and the things that only he knows. I pause by the toaster, margarine in hand, knife in hand, noting the audible silence above the moment preceding the moment when an earthquake of syllables will come crashing down above my head and the man will change chords.

Bubblegum Girl By Lindsay Johnson

John Maher

POEM ENDING WITH A LINE FROM WESTRON WYNDE On reading Lamentations she thought The worst that can be is to think always of the worst that can be. Dolorous the sound of stovetop crackle, pallid the town beyond the window. Brittle her half-smile: The small rain down can rain, can rain.

Anne Louise Korallus-Shapiro

SEABOLT My father told me that knew a man named Seabolt in college. They met in London in the sixties. Seabolt was on the rugby team because he was enormous. A few English guys picked him out from across the pub on one of their first nights and told him to join the team. My father said Seabolt was much smarter than he was, much more capable. While my father hung out with the Americans, Seabolt was at wild parties with the English in warehouses in Notting Hill. Seabolt had dark, wiry hair and thick eyebrows, the kind of face that was slightly crooked, but consistently handsome. He had this ability to casually touch a new friend on the arm. Not in a strange way, but in a sociable way, a warm way, a simple squeeze on the shoulder when he first met someone to punctuate a point one of them had just made. This always put people at ease, made them feel like they suddenly really knew him. When Seabolt left London, years later, he started working for a law firm, one of the best in New York City. At twenty-seven there was already talk that Seabolt would be made partner within the first few months of him working there. One night, around seven o’clock, he crawled underneath his desk and refused to come out. He kept yelling that there was a machine on his head that was telling him to stay there. He held onto the inner walls of his desk. Security guards had to drag him out in his Brooks Brothers suit. On his way out, he bulldozed most of the cubicles with his shoulders, clearing a path of toppled desks.

After he was fired, he moved from his Park Avenue home to a studio in Brooklyn. The apartment only had one king sized mattress on the floor, a gigantic photograph of a monkey that fit one wall, an equally sized world map for the other wall, one window and a string that had a red ball on the end of it, which hung from the ceiling. The monkey looked as though he had just screamed and was terrified by the sound he had just made. Seabolt spent his days whacking the red ball against the map with the vigor and speed of a middle schooler on a playground. He would spin it around with all his might, huffing and spitting as if he were playing a sizeable opponent. When he got tired, he stuck his foot out the window because he liked the feeling of his foot warming up after he pulled it back inside. Seabolt moved to the woods in Wisconsin. He now only exists as how my mother proudly likes to refer to him, as my father’s best friend who thinks there is a typewriter on his head.

Jolene Paternoster

UNSCATHED I’ve seen this all before. I’ve watched you look into the mirror at the wrinkles in your cheeks, around your eyes, I’ve seen you hang your head to breathe in deep the scent of privilege, the only dish that has ever been cooked for you, breathe deep because—because the world is sharp. I know you need to pad the corners of your mind against the needling disappointments. But when you sleep, I will wrap myself around your chest, dig my nails into your skin, to make you feel what it is like to live punctured, as I do.

Katie Humphreys

TEDDY Number five. Yo, number five. The goddamn workers at these fuckin' fast food shitholes. The guy behind the counter swings the bag around in the air as if he wants all my fries to fall on the floor. I grab the bag and mutter thanks, fuckin' asshole under my breath. He doesn't hear. The tabletop is greasy. Always greasy. It's like if the tabletops aren't greasy they aren't doing their jobs, or else its fuckin' summer. You can't even sleep in the summer in Florida, it's like tryin' to sleep on the bottom of a pool. Greasy air. Greasy streets. Greasy fuckin’ underpasses. I slide my finger across the grease. I guess no one else might notice it. Conditioned. This guy walks up to my table and sits down. Did I ask for company? Get the fuck away. He turns his head a bit away from the table looking around the McDonalds. Like there is something to fuckin' look at, didja hear me, do I look like I want company? A piece of green lettuce drops from my Big Mac. I didn't even realize I picked it up. This guy is dirty. I mean, I'm dirty too, but he is way more dirty. I mean its hard not to be dirty these days. Sometimes I look at my fingers and I can’t tell where my nails end and the skin starts. But this dude, well, he's got these staples in his shaved hair. In his scalp. There is a

little bit of dark blood around them and I like, want to touch it, or maybe not because I feel like I already know what it would feel like. This friend of mine, Speedo the kid, got his head bashed in once. Had to have all these staples holdin’ his brains shut. When I lived in Miami. Speedo was drunk and breakin' into this other asshole's apartment. I always imagine that the guy who fucked him up didn't know him. That's pretty thinkin' because he did know Speedo. Tommy. I always think maybe Tommy didn't recognize him cause it was night, maybe when he started beatin’ him, on the balcony, he didn’t see his face howlin’. Well, anyways, none of us didn't recognize him once his head was beat in. The guy turns back and looks at me. He's got more than one scar on his face. One runs brokenly up and down from the top to the bottom, it could be just a weird crease or light trick but it’s a scar. I only have one scar, even though no one would guess it. Not even a tattoo besides. Ma would've cried if I got one when I was a kid, what with all the tattoos symbolism and gangs and shit, and I guess the feelin' stuck. His eyes are all wore out. He just looks at me like he’s all fried up inside. I'm Teddy. He pauses. Can I have some of your fries? I could cuss him out more. I could fuckin' throw the fries in his face. I slide the fries in the grease across to him. This goofy white man with this stupid ugly hat comes into the McDonalds. I see him around here now and then. He has this real goofy look, but one time, when I was real hard up, my stomach all dirty and groanin’, he bought me a burger. When I talked to him he didn't seem stupid or nothin', nah, he was just his kinda goofy man. Said he had a daughter and shit, and she hated these places, all around

here in the goddamn ghetto, but she loved organic food. She's gone to Europe he said. I guess, to myself, that’s why he’s stuck eatin’ at this fuckin’ McDonalds. Teddy picks one up and when he does I realize that this man, this guy, he’s cryin'. He's cryin' like some secret little baby, real little tears like they aren’t even there. I wonder if babies ever cry in secret like real humans do. Like I seen this girl cryin' once, just walkin' down the street, the air all swarmin' hot around her. Just cryin' away. Teddy looks me in the eyes again when he’s done eatin’ some of the fries. You can’t really tell he was cryin’ to be honest. His eyes just look a little moist. Only three species cry mysteriously, he says. His scar is kinda wigglin’ around on his face like a bent-up hanger. I’m pickin’ up the last pieces of green lettuce from the wrapper. Oh yeah? What three species you talkin’ about? He looks down and I see his fingers tighten a bit. He looks at me again. Beavers, monkeys, and humans. Those three species. I read that once. I leave the rest of the fries. I crunch up the paper wrapper from the big mac and leave. Walk out in the Florida sun, bright as the golden arches.

Emily Cohen

RINGSIDE SPECTERS Start with the ringmaster, touching the sky, And listen as he calls you to him: Come one, come all. Clamber across fields and roadways, offices and classrooms, Form a swarm and sweep toward the crier, Expectantly gesturing before his colored stripes, as they expand -Your balloon eyes affix, unblinking, Release them from their sockets and let them float; There is much to ogle, and they should be free. Quiver blindly as they dart about and stare, Entranced by beards, warts, tails, Framed and exhibited and hung up on walls-Bright lights turn inky, the sun sets, as the chain Chants you...are...getting...very...sleepy And she was, lids kissing as the crowd draws near Chanting you are...sleepy, so very sleepy Watch them watch you and let them see Re-memories of sensation, rendered concrete.

Kristin Travagline

I. Knickknacks I sat at the bank of the shallow pond on my family’s farm. A middle school student wearing baggy corduroys, a black hooded sweatshirt, and converse sneakers, surrounded by long, tan grass and the tall, twisted tree that used to hold a deer stand in its branches. The floorboards and walls lay at the base of the trunk in a crumpled pile that the grass slowly devoured. I looked into the still, brown, green water. Bare trees, silver foliage, my face presented a demented, glittering version of their selves to my gaze. I walked across the field, up the hill, and climbed over the tall, wooden fence that kept the sheep in their pasture. I steadied myself, balancing on the thick wire of the fence, lest I lose my balance. The back storage room of the barn stood next to the gate. I peered into the darkness where flecks of dust sparkled and danced when light struck them. The tall, red tractor I used to ride on with my Pop-pop filled the small space. Forgotten knickknacks cluttered the walls, a metal cage used to dry hickory nuts, hoes, watering cans. One thick bristled rope hung at the top of the ceiling. I turned my eyes on it for a while then ran my hands over the rough ends dangling near the ground. I turned toward the dirt path leading down the hill, home. A bright orange sunset burned above the tree line as I passed through sloping fields and reached the blue and white tin door of the house where my parents voices pierced the still evening air. The summer before my senior year of college I sat on the carpeted floor of my purple bedroom on the farm. I

had ventured into my musty closet and cracked open the hidden crawl space where my older sister used to hide empty liquor bottles during high school. Bumping my head on the low hanging, hot light bulb, rubbing my hands accidentally against fiberglass insulation, I retrieved boxes and pick suitcases filled with Barbie dolls and their accessories. They lay in front of me with mouse feces entangled in their silken hair. The dark green velvet ball gown of the Christmas Barbie hung off of her body in tatters. Mice had nibbled pieces of her waxy face. Carefully, I took each Barbie out of the boxes, brushed her hair, and changed her clothes. Soon, Veterinarian Barbie, Mermaid Barbie, and Scuba Barbie, along with their peers, nested in a group. I packed them with my old dance shoes, photo albums, high school academic medals, Irish dance trophies, stuffed animals, and jewelry boxes. And books. Latin books, art books, Harry Potter books. Sweating in the August heat I carried the boxes down a flight of stairs, through the kitchen, out the back door and piled them into my car. I climbed the steps of the house steps one more time, for one last look. Dust and dead bugs littered my room, uninhabited for so long, which I used to take such pains in cleaning, keeping tidy. What did I care now? I wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. I closed my car trunk and drove away.

II. Survival Instincts Memorial Day weekend 2010, I returned home to central New Jersey for the summer and my boyfriend John was visiting from his father’s house in a suburb of Newark. During the previous spring semester, John took a leave of absence from the Rhode Island School of Design where he was studying painting. A whirlwind of anti-

depressants, marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol led him to the psych ward of a hospital where he believed his lighter to be a cell phone and hallucinated his pet rabbit hopping about the exam room. On this particular summer night at my house, John invited his manic-depressive bi-polar mother, Mary Anne, to visit my family’s farm. She did not live far away, and at times they would act as though they sustained a “normal” parent-child relationship. As light streamed through the barn rafters into the twilight, the scent of hay overwhelmed us, and the plaintive cry of the alpacas broke the silence. John’s eyes shined, round and bright. Upon returning to the car, he couldn’t remember whether Mary Anne or myself had driven us to the barn. Later, Mary Anne having left, we lay next to each other in bed and he asked me questions, uncomfortable and unexpected. “When was the first time you thought about giving someone oral sex? You don’t have to tell me who you imagined,” John said to me in the dark. I awoke at four in the morning to the smell of eggs frying. John was making me breakfast in bed. He left the stovetop on, but the noise had woken my mom, who concernedly turned the burner off. When John brought me the tray of food, he slurred his words in a string of confusion. My heart raced. I stole away to the bathroom with my cell phone and called his dad. Leaving the over-easy eggs and burned toast sitting on my bedspread, I coaxed John into my car, and headed to his dad’s home an hour away. On the way, I stopped John from drinking a week-old soda that sat in my cup holder. In moments of crisis my emotional, thoughtoriented self shuts down and I simply react. I experience a shortsighted clarity, in that I only focus on what needs to be done in the immediate moment. Having a family that

suffers largely from addiction and mental illness, I experienced such crises often during my adolescence and still occasionally. Unconsciously, I deny myself the ability to process events taking place and my resulting feelings. Once the crisis has passed, a haze settles in my mind. I like to think of this as a survival instinct. Arriving at John’s dad’s house, I imagined that he must have a plan. But he didn’t. John’s dad was too afraid to take him to a hospital, not wanting to see him at the mercy of “the system.” I said hehad to take him to the hospital. Instead, John’s dad proceeded with holiday festivities, sending his younger children to the parade and such. I sat on the bunk bed in John’s room, reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey. John sat across from me drawing in his sketchpad, a mess of spirals and colors. To relieve some of his anxiety, we took a walk around the block. He stumbled like a drunk, his shirt stained, his face unshaven, while families sat on their front lawns enjoying the summer weather. We fell asleep in the basement: John on the couch, myself on the floor. Slowly, he emerged from his dazed confusion. When I returned home, I found a small orange pill lying on my bedroom carpet.

Jamie Thomson

HOW I BECAME ME I took off my pants, and rolled in fields and hay and the highway contemplated life as a beetle disconnected from connection. Wandered in euphoric awe the shutter left open, collecting light and moons and visions, only to be washed clean by a mighty river left with nothing but notions and guts and driftwood.

Translucent Butterflies (Painted in Acrylic) By Lauren Reilly

Kali Block-Steele

THERE’S NOTHIN MORE THUG THAN REAL LOVE My Brother, where have you gone from me? Off living locked in some fantasy thinkin there is some right way you are supposed to be not realising the strength you hold in your heart, the power you hold in your soul. My Man you should have no one else to control but you. For within you you have all that you need, and the first person you should please is yourself. Trust in the man that you are from sun up to day dark you are my ark to pull me from the crushing currents,

the support to my dreams, you are my man. What do you not understand? You have nothing to prove to me. For to me a man you always will be. And if your heart aches and you feel close to break you can shatter to pieces on me and together we can work carefully to piece you back and you don’t have to feel ashamed of those cracks. You are the Man I Love because you lift me up and send my heart soaring. Just remember, there is nothing to prove no need for games that remove the truth in your heart. Let’s live light in the Love and drop down all our facades spray sun in our souls and bask in the glory of being we, with cast off chains, of being free.

My Brother man, let’s just be, you and me. 0:32 4 November 2011 234 Maple Room Inspired by Raheem DeVaughn Freedom Fighter Mixtape

Nikkitha Bakshani

LIKE CAVES Iron window bars adorn the exteriors of my father’s offices and factories in Madras, India—vertical bars perpendicular to a sequence of scribble-like paisley. Through some windows, I saw women (maids) drying laundry on terraces. They usually tuck the ends of their floor length budget davanis (half-saris) into the waists. The sun is always too generous in Madras, not unlike the people who invite my family to their homes. Do you like this coffee? Take the coffee maker. I insist. I think this salwar kameez will fit you. Try it on. Do it now. Eat more jalebi; it’s not the same in America. My father is generous; three thousand people attended his wedding. “He invited all the workers, and their families,” my mother said. His offices and factories are architecturally generous, with lots of windows dotting the walls of spacious rooms, slicing daylight with their iron crosspieces. Almost a hundred Singers simultaneously buzz and the ceiling fans swoosh furiously. Loose threads border scrap pieces of fabric like cilia on paramecium. Squares of cloth are trapped, unnoticed, under the legs of tables. Samples of seersucker are light enough to fly across the room. Mustardy yellows, grasshopper greens, seductive reds, ballerina pinks, conservative beiges, the purple of bruises, all operated on by men and women in equally diverse colors. In other factories—the ones closed due to bankruptcy—all that’s left are the windows and their obsidian light filters. If I close my eyes and think, I can hear the sewing machines, but honking cars and the voices of men in bicycleoperated carts selling newspapers or spiced peanuts (onions, lime juice, coriander) drown out aural memory. The closed factories may be the only places in tropical Madras that are damp, like caves.

Jon Lemay

II. IN DREAMS in dreams you live in an egg. o whole, speckled egg in your nest: bowl of oncescattered sticks and here I'm a bird trying to cover the nest. trying to cover before wind brings leaves, before leaves bring autumn breeze, but twigs are getting caught in my wings.

Nathaniel Moore

THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM He hadn’t seen the elephant until one day as he was walking through the living room it shifted and the sheet it was hiding under moved to expose a foot. Just as John caught something out of the corner of his eye, the elephant shifted back and his big grey foot disappeared. It occurred to John later, when he’d been exposed to the elephant and it had become a part of his life, his surprise and annoyance giving way to the eventual bits of caring and concern to the point where he left the television on during the day, that to him the elephant had pretty clean and manicured feet. It would be like Carol, that if she were to bring an elephant into the house, to at least hose its feet down if not something more. She was so anal. So specific. Her thing would have been to talk at him, and then, when she felt she’d reached her limit, do something impulsive and passive aggressive. He had no way of knowing how long the elephant had been there. He assumed it had been Carol that brought it in and outfitted it with its clever disguise. He hadn’t noticed it somehow with the sheet over it. It wasn’t until, while he was passing it on the way from the bedroom to the kitchen one morning, it had a coughing fit and he’d discovered it. John had been upset, and he felt rightly so, but couldn’t talk about it with Carol at that moment unless he wanted to be late for work. He could put off this confrontation. He would talk to her when he got home he decided. John had worked late and then gotten dinner with some guys from work who he didn’t particularly like or

know but felt he should get in with if he wanted a promotion in the future. When he finally did get home it was dark and, as he opened the front door, he saw the front of the elephant’s head sticking into the hallway from the doorway to the living room. Its trunk lying on the floor, one big eye peering mournfully down the hallway at him in the dark, pupil huge. He went straight to their bedroom where he found it empty with the bed made. After changing into his house clothes, he went downstairs to the kitchen and after a short moment realized how quiet it was. He was looking at the elephant through the double French doors that led into the living room. It was standing in the middle of the room listlessly. As he watched the tail flip back and forth, he tried to figure out what was missing. So quiet. Where was Carol? John walked to the driveway through the side door and noticed her car wasn’t there. He walked into the garage… empty. Sitting at the island in the kitchen drinking a beer, John considered this. Eventually, he called her sister and asked vague questions, not wanting to alarm her before finally going up to bed. In the months that followed, he became very accustomed to the elephant. Its stillness. It was stoic and slow moving. It kept to itself for the most part, but was ever present. The elephant seemed to be relatively selfsufficient and though John never left food out for it, it wavered in neither size nor general muted detachment. Only once did it approach him. He was sitting down to dinner alone in the dining room and turned around to find the elephant standing in the doorway looking at him. It wasn’t judgmental, but it wasn’t friendly either. They lived together but alone. When he brought women back, he always felt as though he should let them know. As if it was something

that was only fair to tell them before they got involved. One nodded understandingly and made an excuse to leave early. Another didn’t seem to mind, and they had sex, although she wasn’t the kind of woman he wanted to get involved with and never saw her again. Overtime, John found that some women seemed to feel almost sorry for him. He wasn’t going to get rid of the elephant. Where would he put it? Or rather, where would it go? It had become a nuisance at some points, like the few times when his buddies came or when he didn’t want to explain his elephant to women he brought home from the bar. One night, he put the sheet back over the elephant as a woman freshened up in the bathroom. It went well, the night with the woman. They hit it off and she spent the night instead of leaving like the others before the morning. At some point during the night, as his partner breathed softly, lying in his wife’s spot on the bed, he lay awake and thought about the elephant. Standing still in the corner of the dark living room with a sheet draped over his back. John got up and went downstairs and removed the sheet and tossed it on the floor. He patted the elephant’s side and went back up to sleep, deciding he would introduce the woman in the morning. When he walked downstairs the next morning and into the living room, he found it empty, vacant and hollow. The elephant was gone, the sheet nicely folded on the couch.

Kelsey Amentt

“JENNY” 8 Above the hieroglyphic urinal and left of the tribal markings, 6 They wrote your name and number in black Sharpie ink. 7 The scribbled “J” hooked into the grout tiled walls 5 Catches to my clothing with lustful claws 3 And urges me to call 0 You; I 9 Do, and it rings until I hear, “For a good time, Make you mine” and beeps.

Anna Linscott-Zask TO THE ROOM WHERE YOU GREW UP Your own room that I slept in on countless visits to that second-floor apartment in Brooklyn where Grandma and Grandpa lived until you made them move to Florida. That tiny room: twin bed in the corner, with a trundle stored below. I could never really sleep in that bed, with its strangely sweet-smelling sheets, too close to the city window, too far from my own twin bed in Connecticut. You told me once that you used to trap your little brother between the bed and trundle for fun and I was so glad to be an only child. Your room where the past was too close, where the photographs on the wall bore no resemblance to the man I knew you as. At night I could hear your brother screaming for you to let him out, that it wasn’t funny anymore.

Joe Byrne 41

INPATIENT My older brother holds his head in his hands. He regrets coming here, but now they won’t let him go. One morning began at a cash machine in Vegas. He remembers drinking, taking a few Xanax, and walking around on the casino floor with no shoes on. He remembers hiring a publisher from the Bay area to run his business, freeing himself up for something. He doesn’t remember slipping twenties into the shirt-pocket of his brother’s friend, trying to get the boy to come home with him. Hours disappeared, the convention probably ended, and then he remembers standing in front of an ATM. A transvestite in fishnets and spiked heels was speaking to him through filed teeth, saying, “What’s your pin, enter your pin number.” He remembers pretending to still be in a drunken trance, wobbling on his feet, and he remembers saying that he couldn’t remember. The man clicked away into the dawn and he drove home in bare feet. The benzos were cut out of his life by the drug dealer’s suicide attempt; so now my older brother couldn’t sleep, and he didn’t have work to keep him busy. He bought an Audi with cash. He moved from downtown Miami to South Beach because he got a DUI on the causeway driving home. The last owner of the new $4500 apartment was a Gulf Stream executive. However, the Jacuzzi bathtub wasn’t big enough, so my older brother moved back to the condo-building downtown and rented a unit, nine floors up from the one he had a mortgage on. We stopped hearing from him, and later we learned that he had thrown his iPhone into the sea to avoid being tracked. I try to rally his courage, remind him what he is doing here. This is a top-tier psychiatric hospital.

Treatments like these cost between five and ten grand, and his insurance is covering almost all of it. At the very least, they will keep him busy with various therapies, eight hours a day, seven days a week. I lose my steam when our eyes meet. He sent me an e-mail of his flight itinerary, so I knew that he was coming back to Boston for Christmas. Mike and I picked him up at the airport but he couldn’t talk to us. Being around our father’s family brought him back to life a little bit, but once Christmas was over, he spent whole days lying in front of the gas fireplace, getting up only to get more beer. Then he moved the thirty-rack next to him and stopped getting up. His Christmas gift to me was a plane ticket to return to Miami with him on New Year’s Eve. Instead of flying out, he checked himself in to a psychiatric hospital. So, I went to visit him there. “They leave the light in the hallway on, all night. The door has to stay open. They check on you every fifteen minutes, around the clock; they shine the flashlight in your face.” The veins on his temple throbbed. “They took away my new phone, my laptop, because they’ve got cameras on them. My roommate is nice, I guess, but it’s so fucking sad.” And he starts crying again. I sit with him for a miserable two hours. I tell him I’ll get him a phone without a camera, and some of my books, and come back tomorrow. “Are you leaving?” I’m just the little brother; he’s the big success.

Elizabeth Hopkins

SUMMER’S ZENITH Thoughts cascaded like rain, pounding on a shuttered window sometime in the dawn of June. My heart was then still tumbling over the falls of lifeless love, until the rain came and went, and the skies tore open for sunshine. So bright that I felt the fire of its beauty and savored it— But it burned into me with the crisp smoldering of a cigarette, a fire in the sky balled tight like a fist. My fists clench at the thought that I spun myself into oblivion before I realized just how much I didn’t love you. Those times when the rains of June filled me with cold symphonies have burned away now with the ignition of a new star, realization as clear as the sun of summer’s zenith.

Untitled By Lindsay Johnson

Liz McCrorey

COFFEE AND JAZZ It ended over coffee. Decaf, please. You must have known it as we walked to town. I talked about dark comedies and you were chiding me for slighting gaudy homes. (But really, fountains in the yard?) Before, we pondered what to do. You said it was a date. I guess your sense of humor is as strange as mine. (But could it really end if after all we never quite began?) And as we chose the place to go I thought about the weekend. Thinking how I let myself identify the truth I’d known since long before that time. I’d never been simply the girl with haircuts you admired. You hadn’t just re-taught me how to play guitar songs as an act of charity. You introduced yourself four months before. I’d no idea who you were, though you had noticed me. I wonder, do you still listen to Miles? It all began with jazz.

Street Market in Guatemala

Kids Shake Their Hands Dry Photographs by Lauren Reilly