Folio Literary Magazine: 2015 Edition

[folio] A Journal of Arts & Letters

Contents POETRY

Halley Furlong-Mitchell // Post-Apocalyptic Manifesto Jon Lemay // The Uncredited Teddy Bear in Breathless

Zachary Cohn // ride home with plate of fish guts Lucia Akard Claimed Ben Profenius Gala Jenn Florence Felix the Cat Can’t Make Coffee; Felix the Cat Gets Existential

Felix the Cat Cleans Up His Act Halley Furlong-Mitchell Ariadne’s Ambivalence Mollie Weisenfeld Time Lapse Emma Foley Domesticated Matt Gellman Homecoming Jon Lemay Grief Clara Moser Gutted Chloe Kimberlin Hymnal for the Decayed Arman Avasia Boulevard Halley Furlong-Mitchell Halcyon Dream

1 2 17 18 20 21 41 42 43 49 50 55 61 70 76

FICTION

Sam Brown // Cock Fighting Ben Profenius // Vignette #2 Adam Berg // Mayonnaise Adam Berg // Shit Diamonds Spencer Brooks // Excerpt from A Good Year Bryan Perley // He Fractures Ben Profenius // The Blind Drunk NONFICTION

Quinn Martin // Write About Your Mother Ryan Davis // The Resting Place of Halcyons Abby Erchak // Selected Words Emily Benoff // “On Keeping a Notebook” Revisited Claire Foster // Times I Thought (Think) of You Olivia Anderson // Can I Count Your Flaws?

Ryan Davis // Ode to Steadman Jake Musich // Excerpts from Fragments Eliza Dumais // Card Stock

5 8 26 35 44 63 71 9 15 27 32 38 51 58 15 77

ART

Catherine Headrick // A Movie We’d All Like to See Jonathan Stricken // Untitled Lizzie Dean // Untitled Julian Klein // Untitled Catherine Headrick // America’s Sweetheart Jonathan Stricken // Self-Portrait in Super 88 Katie Biel // Untitled Olivia Anderson // Untitled Allison Gretchko // Untitled Emma Foley // Sacsayhuaman, Peru Katie Biel // Untitled Catherine Headrick // Boots for the Winter Bryan Perley // River-Chalk on Metamorphic Stone—Conway, MA Madeleine Burkhart // Solve et Coagula Jonathan Stricker // Untitled Cover Photograph: Julian Klein // Untitled

3 4 12 13 24 25 29 30 31 60 62 68 69 74 75

Staff Editor-in-Chief Jon Lemay Editorial Board Molly Breitbart Ryan Davis Emily Defiore Rebecca Fawcett Chloe Kimberlin Doug Patrick Ben Profenius Merritt Rosen Jack Schreur Will Scott Treasurer Emily Defiore Faculty Advisor April Bernard

Editor’s Note We are incredibly proud to present the 2015 edition of Folio, Skidmore College’s oldest student-run literary magazine. As always, we at the editorial board strive to present the strongest student art, photography, poetry and creative prose being created by Skidmore students, and we are excited to present the work of 31 artists and writers from the student community.

2015 also marks the second year in Folio’s venture into the viral literary community. In addition to maintaining a website on which we publish work as we accept it on a rolling basis, we’ve also created a new Facebook page (facebook.com/skidmorefolio), which we hope to continue to use in order to expand our web presence and keep our readers plugged in to any and all developments. We’ve also laid the foundation for a video reading series—the first installment of which can be viewed on our website (skidmorefolio.tumblr.com)—that we hope will continue. Our thanks to everyone who helped make these exciting developments possible.

Folio is glad to be a part of the thriving literary scene on campus, and we wish to acknowledge and thank our fellow purveyors of campus creativity that continue to stand the ever merciless test of time, including LINE and BARE. Special thanks to The Skidmore News, Office Services, and the Skidmore English department.

As with previous issues, the sheer number of submissions received has made this year-long process both challenging and exciting. The most difficult job of our editors has been selecting from such wonderful and varied voices on campus, and we sincerely thank each and every student who submitted to Folio this year. Regardless of whether or not you find your name in these pages, we appreciate the work you’re creating. This publication would be nothing without you, and we look forward to even more excellent submissions in the future.

Jon Lemay // Editor-in-Chief

Halley Furlong-Mitchell

Post-Apocalyptic Manifesto At the end of the world, nothing but anecdotes.

Please don’t try to convince me any differently, for I could tell tales worse than Daniel.

Postcards from the center of earth.

Keychains made of lava. Locusts for breakfast.

I’ll take a bath if it floods.

To want is to wane and here I choose to be your crescent moon no longer.

Learn to love nocturnally. I eclipse.

[1]

Jon Lemay

The Uncredited Teddy Bear in Breathless She holds me tighter to her chest than she held him when they fucked.

He tells her if she hasn’t smiled by the time he counts to eight, he’ll strangle her.

She seems to like him. And with a nose like that.

She asks him about death. All this while they marinate each other in smoke.

After they leave the apartment, I make the bed and re-light a half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray.

It’s hard to do with plush paws. He left his hat on the floor this time. I put it on, look in the mirror, stroke the seam of my mouth as I exhale a wisp of smoke, and whisper Baby, I can’t live without you.

[2]

Catherine Headrick // A Movie We’d All Like to See

[3]

Jonathan Stricker // Untitled

[4]

Sam Brown

Cock Fighting Jamail had spent the past two hours writhing over his uneven mattress.

His eyes, well adjusted to the dark, followed the cracks splintering across his ceiling. He sat up, running a hand through his hair, and stared longingly at the door.

Down the narrow hallway of his brick house, Jamail passed his daughter’s room. After exiting the back door he walked over to an old makeshift shed. Inside were three chickens, each in separate cages. He crouched before the cage to the far right and lit a lantern.

As the flame started to catch, Jamail saw that the chicken’s eyes were wide open and fully awake. He examined its shiny black feathers and brawny beak. It seemed to stare back, examining Jamail with the same curious intensity. The chicken’s eyes were wide and its pupils dilated as if beholding some strange and horrible creature. Jamail delicately stood up and opened the metal latches to its cage.

The next morning, Jamail drove his broken sedan as his daughter sat in the backseat next to his chicken in its cage. Jamail’s daughter gazed passively out the window towards the brick houses reminiscent of her own. She turned to the chicken whose head was straight up and fixated on the front windshield. She didn’t try to pet the bird or call any attention to the fact that she was looking at it. However, the chicken’s eye was placed in a strange fashion on the side of its head.

Even though it was facing forward, the bird stared directly at Jamail’s daughter.

Jamail parked his car in a back alley and gently extracted the cage. He entered an unmarked door followed by his daughter. Inside was a dim hallway lit by flood lights lining the ceiling. The girl remained behind her father’s shadow peering at the chicken who stood up and began shaking its feathers. There was a subtle uproar coming from the end of the hallway as her father opened a door to a room full of sweaty men and women circled in tiered seating around a makeshift ring.

[5]

Jamail looked down at his daughter and instructed her to find a seat.

Without nodding, she walked towards a group of women.

Jamail watched her for a brief moment until he turned his attention to the chicken. The bird was lively and roaming around its cage. He set it down at the edge of the ring next to a large man with a bushy mustache. The man looked Jamail over and inquired about the bird.

Jamail, at first unaware that the man was addressing him, replied that he had spent a lot of money to acquire it and he hopes that the gamble will be worth it. The large man chuckled and told Jamail that it looks like a strong bird. The two stared off into the center of the small ring before Jamail asked the man if he put any money down on the fight yet. The man grinned and told Jamail that he doesn’t gamble and that he came here simply to watch.

Jamail’s daughter sat quietly with the other women as they conversed in adult tones. She fidgeted away at the dirt floor with her hand, drawing little circles and blowing them away. One of the women pinched her shoulder and told her not to make a mess of herself.

She watched her father and another skinny man pull their chickens out by the neck. The man’s chicken writhed in his grip, but her father’s bird was complacent. The two men jabbed the birds together in an effort to instigate them as their feathers rose. They placed the birds at opposite ends of the ring and the crowd’s excitement began to grow.

The chickens did not immediately confront each other. Instead, they aimlessly milled around the ring while the group of people cheered them on. Jamail’s daughter did not say a word. She could not see past the adults rising to their feet, yet she could hear the crying clucks of the chickens.

After several minutes the crowd erupted and sat down with relief.

Jamail’s daughter was able to see her father holding his unscathed chicken in his arms with a wide grin. In the center of the ring was the other bird, its body limp on the floor, buried beneath a blanket of feathers as a cloud of dirt began to settle. She could just make out its beak; it was splintered off of its face and leaking out a puddle of blood.

Her father raised his chicken in the air. It seemed as if its eye was staring directly at her.

[6]

That night, Jamail found himself staring back at his ceiling. He got out of bed and stepped into the kitchen where he drank a glass of milk. He sat at the table staring into the empty cup for a few moments before deciding to head back to bed. As he stood up, he glanced out the window to his rickety shed.

In the shed, Jamail lit a lantern. Once again he found his prized bird awake. Its glossy feathers glimmered in the candle light as its pupil stiffened at the sight of the weary man. Jamail crouched over the bird and opened its cage.

[7]

Ben Profenius

Vignette #2 I jostled the covers and puffed out air of our smells a long time coming and longer time going, and I noticed that they had been. It was very quiet and we were between the last moment and the next one, staring at the ceiling because it was there instead of something else.

In the quiet they always ask what you are thinking, which, if you are an honest person or of certain dispositions, can be a very difficult question.

“What are you thinking?” she asked me.

I let the last of the quiet out and go and said, “I’m probing this funny little melancholy swimming around in my abdomen and prickling in my chest. It feels as though it’s washing over my mind under my scalp. It’s something.”

I stopped talking and had not trailed off. She turned on her side and remained quiet and was listening tensely.

I felt then with uncanny certainty the feeling that, far away somewhere at sometime not now, I wanted a group of people I did not know and never would know, perhaps a dozen or so, to die unnecessarily. I did not tell her after I thought it.

[8]

Quinn Martin

Write About Your Mother Write about your mother. Write about how she still has beautiful hair.

How coarse the silver feels compared to the black of the night when you spin it around your fingers at four in the morning, like you’re trying to make a garment you can step into. Is that what it feels like, those words you’ve read so many times? “Getting old”? Your mother tells you the story of her grandmother, who died when she was more than a century old, who also used to play with her hair until she fell asleep. Your great-grandmother, who had lovely tapering fingers and a mind like an atlas, a mind like a phone-book. That is to say that it held everything a mind could hold. All of her own life, and the lives of her children and grand-children and great-grandchildren. A mind that made you feel like looking at the diamond lights of planes flying overhead in the dirty orange night sky. The strange, detached sadness of something beautiful with more important things to worry about than you. A mind that started to peel away from the world just about when you entered it.

In the night, your mother recounts stories of your greatgrandmother when she was dying. Hers was a particular dying: the kind where you have a body left and nothing else. Your mother says your great-grandmother was brave. Write about how you think your grandmother appeared peaceful because at the end, in the last days, in between forgetting the name of her husband and how to use a fork and complaining about the speed of modern American syndicated television shows, she forgot who she was—the decades of her life were compressed into accordion weeks, accordion years. Her stories were slipped into the pockets of nurses, and, having no one to remind her of who she once was, she stepped out of her body with equal measures of grace and loneliness. But you say nothing, because these stories do not belong to you. You do not understand them, or the sudden heaviness of your mother’s voice when she tells them. They belong to your mother, and the silence, and the nighttime that surrounds you both and softens the blow.

[9]

Write about how you are twenty and you still find solace in aligning your body next to your mother’s in the molten center of the night. Four in the morning. How it feels darker and quieter than any other darkness or quiet. But you feel safe here. This is still home. Her familiar face and her familiar body that have all too often enveloped you when you forgotten how to envelope yourself. How you see more of yourself in her than you do in yourself, now. This makes sense. You can measure the love she has for you in meters. She has seen glasses of blood spill out of you, and six-packs of tears, and has walked through the miles and miles of the adolescent mists of melancholy that rose out of you once and arrived at the other end unscathed. You want to grab her by the shoulders, shake her, make her tell you that because she’s survived you, you’ll survive you too. You aren’t too concentrated, too bitter, too poisonous to swallow (after all, you’ve taken much more than the highest recommended dose). And so you do. And, of course, she does. Write about how sad it makes you that you haven’t seen her in months and you should miss her, and you do, but you worry you’ve closed your door too often, and watched too much modern American fast-paced syndicated television, and you’ve forgotten how.

Write about getting older. Write about growing up. How it is the first time you’ve felt old, but you still feel the mantle of youth in the freckles on your shoulders? Why does it feel so heavy? Write about how scared you are, and how all you want to see is (selfishly) that fear in the eyes of others. Try to write about what loving is until you believe what you’re saying. Try to write about what caring is, even though you try not to. Try to be honest, even though irony goes down smoother. Try to write about things you hope to understand one day, and you fear that you already understand too well. Is this it? Write about looking for a feeling that names itself. Write about how you don’t know what that means, but how you like the way it sounds. This is the same with most things you say. Write about picking up the phone, and calling your mother, and trying to tell her these things, and for the first time struggling to find the words. You can’t find something worthy of travelling across state lines and straight into her ears (you have her ears). Is this what growing up is? We are capable of too much love. If we inflict it upon ourselves, we may snuff out.

You want to ask her to tell you stories about yourself when you were little. The same stories you’ve heard dozens of times. The time

[10]

you went to the National Zoo and—the way you used to tie your shoelaces in kindergarten and—the way her hair used to look before she started “getting old.” The comfort isn’t seeing yourself at a time when you weren’t you yet, it’s in seeing her capture you so perfectly and completely that you finally make sense to yourself. “This is the way you were,” she says. “This is the way you were.” She is so correct, and you steal yourself back from her. You wish you could fast forward ten years and be curled like a question mark against the cradle of her back. In the middle of the night she will tell you who you are right now. August 4th, 2014. Why. How. The time you dropped out of college and—the time you moved away from home and—the time you stopped calling me so often, because you thought that that was “growing up.” And you’ll nod sagely. That’s what you think about those nights when you can’t walk the broad, Novocain shoulders of sleep.

How one day, you’ll crack open the atlas of your mother’s mind and walk down a road and meet yourself.

Write about how you wish you could return the favor, and tell your mother stories about the way that she once was in order to return her to herself again. To make her, for a single heavy moment, full with herself and not with other people. Write about how you cannot make yourself grow old with her, no matter how much you may want to.

No matter how much she deserves it. How you cannot skip ahead a few chapters to tell her how her story will end, or why she felt the way she felt when your father became distant, or why, when her children moved away, the phone became deathly silent in the evenings when the night came. But in the silver of her hair there is a greater love. One that once played concertos on her scalp with tapering fingers in the depths of an almost forgotten night. One that belongs only to her, and her grandmother, and the skimming silence of the night that is not yours that you will swallow one day, when you “get old” and your hair becomes silver like kissing the moon. Your mother is contained in an enduring atlas. In a love written like a phonebook. A memory that is not yours that she walks towards, that tells her who she is.

[11]

Lizzie Dean // Untitled

[12]

Julian Klein // Untitled

[13]

Ryan Davis

The Resting Place of Halcyons Take to your holds, your windswept hovels and your ships quarters.

Below deck, down the old oak folding ladder with speed, and nearly run right into the center table where we ate dinner, built by my grandfather, suspended on a clever balance, like the stove, and the lanterns dry of oil.

Take to your headaches and your rage that casts light onto the water from the salt crusted windows. Tarnish grows on the metal casting around the glass with each voyage from waters rushing with speed.

Motion in life personified by the act of sailing for those who can no longer stand on the mainland.

Help the old man into the small boat and haul him up to the deck, his legs at this point in his life, have failed him.

Yet even in skiffs do we lose our minds— I remember breakfasts in the morning on the ancient dining room table. I don’t know who in my family squirreled it away or sold it.

My grandmother says she’ll never go back to that ruined house now. Empty bedroom, apparitions in the stovepipe—the windows overlooking Pocha Pond.

I would take to that place were it still ours, were it not sold but were instead rotting— The greenhouse was filled with mildew and dead birds last I visited, and a harmonica echoed in the empty rooms that once held furniture.

The old man struggled to breathe through the reeds in his age, no longer able to die in the house he himself built.

[14]

I would like to sit cross legged on the well loved floorboards, and look out over the collapsing deck. Perhaps the osprey pole is still standing in the marsh. You told me once in a bout of chemically induced adolescence, that you and your friends got drunk and carried the pole there years ago, and in the mud you found deer bones. The sun still shines on that place as it did before. The light taken to our holds when our bodies fail us. When we are angry. When we are powerless and we break the walls in retaliation, and still refuse amputation.

These days, I find myself digging through storerooms.

Dust covered sewing supplies, old outdoorsman clothes, and cracked VHS tapes with TV recorded movies.

Could such relics be found, I’d sit and smoke the pipe that nearly gave you cancer though the collecting fluid in its place damn well finished the job.

The fog of smoke would rise as it did from the office when you practiced law amongst empty bookshelves and a light spot on the floor in the corner that the grand piano once occupied. I stood in its usual place, and felt I was trespassing. The rooms where we stayed are still painted morning yellow and a gentile blue- though the corners now grey with webs, and the bodies of spiders.

You called it Avalon, the island where everybody knew your name, and it passes from us now like storm clouds over the marsh.

Near the end we took to rocking waters sinking ships across the harbor. The deck of your vessel has rotted through. You motioned to me to sit up front in the old skiff as we left the mainland for the last time- away from ruined kingdoms and legends of deer bones.

In those final days you refused the amputation of your legs, though you were no longer able to stand on them.

You called me “my boy” back then.

[15]

When my life feels like a gale—I think of you. I think of avalon and the sails of little ships making their way out from the beach head. I think of sunscreen, and I think of the way my hair felt filled with salt.

I want to make the trip again to the land just beyond the marsh, and see who lives there now. I don’t know if they’ve done away with the house.

Still, I will tell them of you, And from such stories of Avalon, I will make them know they are trespassing on the graveyard of Arthur.

[16]

Zachary Cohn

ride home with plate of fish guts The river Hudson, like a poison fish gleams from the window of my speeding train, and muddy oils exuded from the slain carbons make rainbow puddles on the dish.

Is it a folly to pursue my wish?

Reading the entrails (pudding-pile of brain, small liver, spleen) predicts not pride nor pain but flatly tones a brown-red gibberish.

Or else, lined up like bloody railroad tracks, they signify the passing-on of wanting, and he-who-conjures-up-my-deepest-haunting speeds fast the other way, until the distance between two trains is visual resistance converting parallel to parallax.

[17]

Lucia Akard

Claimed When you fell from Mount Olympus, I was the first thing you found.

You saw me in a field, in a white dress, with my white skin, my hair undone like a cumulus cloud floating down my back.

When our eyes locked, I saw you like Hades unburnt by Hell’s flame, with your white heart, and your white teeth, and your white eyes like tidal pools fixed in your face.

We saw each other white, and claimed each other red.

I seduced you with innocence that you didn’t want, didn’t ask for, thought you didn’t need.

I was ready, waiting, a Persephone, in a field, in a white dress, my hands not yet stained with red.

I didn’t try to tame you, I didn’t have to try very hard to make you mine.

You seduced me with acute honesty, your white heart and your white tongue sucked the lies straight from my teeth.

You seduced me, dear Hades, with a white hand on the small of my white back, and one in between my white legs.

With mouths waiting to turn red and sun burnt lily skin, we embraced, navel to navel, and I knew then that I would make your insides bleed cherry juice red with desire long after I had left.

[18]

Your breath caught in your throat so many times after that, every time, after that, like inhaling a pomegranate seed and having it get stuck in your lungs, but I know you failed to cough me up.

Sometimes, I lie in wait, and forget to slip you pomegranate wine— but you stay, you always stay.

Sometimes, the captor becomes the captive, so often are we seduced by things we didn’t plan to need.

We’ve tattooed each other in red in every place we touched, my hands are soaked, but so are yours.

Our lips drip perpetually red when we are together, we suck the fruit of the underworld between our teeth and bite until we bleed.

When I first put my lips on yours I thought to taste ash on them like rotted fruit.

I never expected your skin to taste so sweet, O Pluto, King of all dead things.

You didn’t expect me to go ahead and pick the largest, roundest, reddest fruit from the tallest of trees— and you came away in disbelief when I asked for your help in dissecting out its seeds.

That’s the thing about eating pomegranates, there is a certain amount of slowness needed, patience, faith.

Neither one of us will ever ask the other to stay, but still, we will march into Hell, holding hands, together, to claim it for ourselves.

[19]

Ben Profenius

Gala Last night I took a tumble down red carpeted stairs in a golden gala room, holding a pee-wee rifle and entangled up with a dumpy girl who said in rapid succession three times, “I love you.”

She was the drunken progeny of the gala collective, generals who all wore uniforms dated to the turn of the century, all stood eight feet tall, soft, bald, and shaped like eggs.

They pulled her tongue from my mouth, and put it in their pockets, sewed the slit in her dress so she was trapped in a velvet cocoon, then escorting me down a grand hall filled with doors with lion’s paws for knobs, I heard sounds of hell, burst shells, screams and propellers.

The door that hid these sounds opened up, and together in unison the generals asked me, “Does this war suit you well?

If not, we have others.”

[20]

Jenn Florence

Felix the Cat Can’t Make Coffee Felix usually wakes just before his alarm To scratch himself absentmindedly and Strut to the kitchen for his morning cup of coffee.

But this morning the alarm doesn’t sound.

He wakes to terror, Felix is late but is positive He set an alarm last night.

He tries to roll over. His body refuses to move.

Felix has never experienced sleep paralysis before.

His animator’s name is Andrew.

Andrew is late for work (one subway behind normal) and sketching Felix to fill the dead space.

Andrew doesn’t know Felix is still asleep.

Andrew doesn’t know Felix is even conscious, actually.

He’s new to the studio.

And so he continues to draw,

The repeated invocation A crudely drawn finger prodding Felix as he continues to dwell within his body, Waiting for Andrew to raise him From more than just single frame stillness.

[21]

Jenn Florence

Felix the Cat Gets Existential Felix finds himself in a Poughkeepsie thrift store, positioned adjacent to a hanging clock.

But this is not just any clock; it’s fashioned after Felix.

The shop owner approaches the pair cautiously unsure. Felix stares at the clock but it refuses to see though its blind metronome eyes and outdated heart tick and whirr ceaselessly: Felix the automaton condemned to hang but not to die. Just stop.

In Poughkeepsie, Felix buys a clock for 10 dollars, stands on the sidewalk and smashes himself to fragments in the midday sun.

[22]

Jenn Florence

Felix the Cat Cleans Up His Act He likes everything, but cocaine is his favorite.

So Felix the Cat goes to rehab and emerges From treatment with pupils in his eyes, outline Clean and defined. Slim but healthy.

He learns to live again, even though His attending nurse commits suicide mid-treatment.

Now Felix tears up at the smell of lilacs.

Now he socializes with nothing to say.

His mother worries, bakes him cookies and Reminds him to go to therapy, but while She’s at bridge with her friends— Felix used to laugh, she says, but now he just talks.

[23]

Catherine Headrick // America’s Sweetheart

[24]

Jonathan Stricken // Self-Portrait in Super 88

[25]

Adam Berg

Mayonnaise The alarm wakes me to the snowstorm outside. I heave myself out of bed while rolling over with the blankets, and we all fall on the floor. “Jesus Christ,” I say as I push myself onto my knees. I grab the bed to stand and shake the blankets—three: two throw and one comforter—off. The mirror next to the bed shows me my clownish, bruised, and battered face.

I get into the bathroom and splash water in my face, which hurts, and use a rough towel to dry my face, which also hurts. I strip off my pajamas, a one-piece underwear for skiers that covers my feet. I step into the shower and turn it on. The water isn’t warm yet. I rub my body with my callused hands and examine the welts and bruises on my skin. Who did it to me? Where was I last night? I don’t know the answers, and I don’t know where I am. It doesn’t matter, though.

That’s not why I’m telling you this sad story.

Once the water warms up, I take the jar of mayonnaise off its shelf by the spout. Twist off the cap, its greasy, lemony smell invigorates me. I scoop out a handful and splat it against my chest. Another handful with my other hand, and I rub mayonnaise across my entire upper body. I need another two handfuls for my legs as I knead the muscles. A last scoop washes my face and hair. I grate my fingers against my scalp.

Washing everything away, the water steams now, and the vapor pores into my nostrils and relieves me with its creamy-sweet-egg scent. I step out of the shower and use the same towel I used on my face to dry myself off. I don’t have any bruise or welts anymore, but I still look rather clownish.

[26]

Abby Erchak

Selected Words the poems are in a little yellow book, with a green design on the cover(leaves i think, and maybe a bird in there,somewhere), called E. E. Cummings “Selected Poems”(nothing more,nothing less). that’s it. no grandiose title, or one meaningful quote to sum up all his work (“I Carry Your Heart: The E. E. Cummings Portable Reader” comes to mind), just “Selected Poems” (it’s simple.) pages and pages on lovers, love, loving(although that’s not all he wrote about, it’s the section of the book i paid the most attention to). not sappy not doting, not (in any sense of the word) traditional “love poems” (would a traditional love poem use the phrase “electric fur”?), but romantic, nonetheless. wouldn’t it be nice to receive this little yellow book as a gift from a lover?(wouldn’t it be nice to have a lover?) but that’s not what happened (what happened)was my teacher read an e. e. cummings poem one day in high school (and i liked it). the other students in my class looked at the handout where the poem was printed and they asked, “what is this?” and they asked, “why is it typed so weird?” and they said, “I don’t get it” but i liked it and i wanted it i wanted more i wanted so much more (i wanted(all of it)) and christmas was coming up and my brother didn’t know what to [27]

get me so i told him “I like E. E. Cummings.” (and on christmas i unwrapped the little yellow book with the green leaves(and maybe the bird) on the cover.) it filled me with wonder that a man so famous(so known, so,cele brated)could ignore everything we think we need to understand(a piece of writing),to understand (anything). he ignored the rules(“The Rules”) of punctuation of capitalization of pronouns of line breaks and all of that stuff we think we need to understand(but we really don’t need it). he jumbled it all up: jumbled sentences, interspersed,randomly,with commas (and parentheses that seemed to come out of nowhere) and my eyes skimmed back and forth across the pages of this little yellow book, i read backwards and forwards and over and over and it messed with me at first but then i got it. i got that to understand (love,beauty,nature (anything)(everything)) you have to read backwards and forwards, eyes frantically skipping around, you have to be jumbled and messed with (and it all seems so complicated) but really (it’s all so simple.)

[28]

Katie Biel // Untitled

[29]

Olivia Anderson // Untitled

[30]

Allison Gretchko // Untitled

[31]

Emily Benoff

“On Keeping a Notebook” Revisited I feel an overpowering, all-pervasive lust to write. I can see it in the quivering grooves of my tiny hands, shaking with anticipation. My fingers are desperately slamming on the keyboard, not necessarily even creating coherent words, but sometimes—for the sake of false pretenses and false progress and deceitful overcompensation— forming ambiguous slurs of letters lsdjfofrjwoejfkf or frustratingly cursing their own futility fuckshitfuckshitfuck. I’m not quite sure what I intend to write, but it is too late…these letters, however meaningless or dispassionate, mysteriously appear on the paper almost as a tangible extensions of something in my subconscious, something that has yet to be cultivated: my undiscovered will to live.

Her hands, I imagine, are infinitely expansive. My hands are tiny moorings for despondent disappointment, but her hands type away in fluid motions of lyrical expression: she successfully keeps a notebook, a 1085 page anthology of “stories we tell ourselves in order to live.” My hands fail to speak passionately and affectingly through language; her hands write and write and write with the enviable capacity to make others (me) laugh or make others (me) cry. In her esoteric company, I am paralyzed.

During the summer of my twentieth year, I—almost unintentionally, almost cosmically—entered into a pact with Joan Didion, the big-handed woman. I discovered one of her anthologies abandoned on a table in an empty hallway and picked it up. Soon after, she became my makeshift mother. I constantly heard her voice in the depths of my mind. I had not physically met her, but we existed together on some mystical cloud in my consciousness, united by brainwaves and identities. I have always identified myself as a writer, whatever the title “writer” even means. I never cared for math or science or really anything at all except for the therapeutic, unabashed release of long kept woefulness as allowed through writing (although, more recently, Didion helped me to discover the [32]

frivolousness of my idealized “writer’s” identity). My mother was in medicine, my father was in business. Joan—yes, I have the selfproclaimed authority to call her Joan, not Didion or Ms. Didion or something else of the impersonal sort—became my muse, at least for a short time during my twentieth summer. She offered me some ostensible encouragement: See enough and write it down…and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write—on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest.

That’s an overwhelmingly large task, isn’t it Joan? No, she replied in my mind’s eye as she sat at a desk in some unidentified room in my mind, typing and typing her life into meaningfulness. I try so hard to engender “accumulated interest” in my writing, but all I accumulate is a string of shitfucks and fadfgghhjs.

Joan’s seemingly admirable definition of the writer’s purpose immobilizes my own identity, because I know that I can never fully emulate her brilliant course of writing. Record everything and save it for a rainy day. I try to sound like Joan, but I fail because her words transcend my mental capabilities. Notebooks, or, as Joan calls them, private journals are supposed to exist as the epitome of genuine “intimacy” and “privacy”…the bridge between one’s many selves. They are composed by the self, under the supervision of the self, to be employed by the self—completely personal, tailored to the individual. Though my private journal is meant to arouse selfdiscovery and self-induced comfort when the perfunctory begins to undermine the visceral, I now find myself writing only for Joan. I want to impress her with my ability to “accumulate interest” and, my identity has become a chronically frenzied endeavor to do so.

I often embarrass myself with the woeful desperation reflected in my writing—all for Joan. For me, there is no private journal. I feel ashamed by my egotistic prose; I often begin sentences with [33]

“I,” addressing a mysteriously distant self. I should really begin my sentences with “Joan,” because my writing identity as independent from her wisely judging eye is no longer. As Joan points out: in an essay the self exists as both the force who experiences sentiments viscerally and the master of literary composition. But, in her engrossing endeavors (paralysis) to compose fruitful prose—for Joan—my master of composition detaches herself from my experiencing self.

When my master writes (and, I suppose, my master is truly Joan herself) it infixes a myriad of inexplicable emotions on the page, burying them deep, deep into the lines of prose, reducing them into nothing but my tiny hands slamming nonsense on the keyboard. My feelings—my experiencing self—disappear in my attempts to please Joan. I cry because my writing is meaningless in the face of Joan’s big hands. How can I project my inner workings, my unrefined, uninfluenced “accumulated interests” onto a page of prose? For now, it’s impossible…

[34]

Adam Berg

Shit Diamonds With her plastic purple sanitation glove, Romina uncovers the toilet seat of the handicap stall. Defecation, the likes of which she’s never seen, pervading the water and sticking to the inner bowl, revolts Romina, who covers her mouth with her sanitation glove in a reflex but instantly realizes her glove isn’t sanitary and removes it from lips, extending it as far away from herself as possible to the point that she feels her arm stretch, and she exhales, “Uh.” Embarrassed by her volume, Romina peeks out of the handicap stall and confirms what she already knows: she’s alone. She closes the stall’s door and allows her eyes to look into the toilet again, one more time before the flush. Diamonds, a necklace of diamonds, unless they’re faux, glimmer among feces.

Staring, defecation’s smell becomes more prominent as she lingers.

In fifth grade, her teacher taught her that when she smells cookies in her bedroom upstairs even though the kitchen’s downstairs, it’s because minuscule particles of cookie have flown through the air all the way into her nose. He taught this to the class, and she remembers thinking how lucky she is having no upstairs; the cookies travel less distance for her.

Did someone leave this necklace in the toilet? Romina will need her yellow forearm protecting sanitation gloves. Hoping no one sets foot in the bathroom, she leaves the stall and goes to her four-wheel maintenance cart. The fourth drawer, like all the drawers, needs wiggling because it’s old and inflated from the moisture it contracts.

Plastic gloves don’t slip up Romina’s arms easily.

When she’s opening the handicap stall, a little piece of her worries the necklace won’t be in the toilet, and all her struggle and the chafing of her forearms will be for nothing. But the necklace is in the toilet, vanishing here and there from masking feces. Chortling, Romina extends her right hand for the toilet’s wealth.

In spite of the plastic gloving her hand, Romina feels moistness as [35]

she reaches around defecation’s water. Moistness is bitterly cold, but when her fingers squeeze around for the necklace, squishing feces are warm. Romina moves her arm to the side, looking at the necklace between her fingers, and her gloved forearm touches the dry feces on the side of the bowl. In her nasal cavity, minuscule feces particles tell her body to get the fuck out of the handicap stall.

A successful aha on her tongue and breath, Romina removes her grasping hand from the toilet. All she removes is feces, and they drip from her fist she shakes open, and feces plop into the water and splatter around the bowl and tile floor.

Diamond necklace rests in the water surrounded by and inside feces, and because of Romina’s movements in the defecation, a silver emblem with a faint yellow diamond at its center exposes itself.

Romina can see the inscription on the bottom of the emblem, not enough to read.

She reaches her right hand for wealth again, squishing around in feces without feeling concrete. Defecation sloshes around the toilet.

“It’s there.” The necklace is in Romina’s sight indefinitely, and she keeps it there while she grabs at it now with both her hands and feels nothing but different temperatures of moistness. “It’s there.”

Defecation sloshes around the bowl with the whirl of her arms and splashes above her sanitation gloves. “I see it, Jesus Christ!”

She adjusts her tired back, touching her uniform, and breathes heavily, while gazing at the light above. The smell is unbearable. She’s dizzy with questions. Both her hands grasp the sordid bowl, the first concrete object Romina’s grasped, truly grasped, all day. She drops to her knees and can’t see the necklace because her stomach purges and forces her eyes shut.

Her stomach done purging, teardrops mingle with the other human fluids in the toilet. Again reaching for diamonds, Romina collapses: her legs straighten out on each side of the bowl, and her face is close to the bowl. Her bent arms, whose bare skin rubs against the top of the warmly speckled bowl, whirls the defecation and forces the diamond necklace into a dance. Inside her, particles of chaos scream at her body to get up, to get up and leave this handicap stall and its diamond necklace behind.

The clunk of the stall door next to her shutting freezes Romina, [36]

who didn’t hear the customer’s Prada heels clicking against bathroom tiles A little over a minute later, a knocking on the other side of the wall, Romina continues staring at the all too human fluids before her eyes and the dancing necklace she can’t grasp. Another minute or two, and the knocking again asks if everything’s ok.

“No,” Romina says into the toilet. “I am not.”

[37]

Claire Foster

Times I Thought (Think) of You When I heard the word love. When I heard the word violence.

When I saw the color purple.

When a flash of purple invaded my vision—that particular shade of shirt you always wore.

When purple stopped being simple—no longer a color, but a connotation: purple was a contusion; purple was pain; purple was you.

(You rolled down purple sleeves to conceal purple arms.)

I thought of you— When the purple I glimpsed was lighter than plum and darker than lavender: a kind of periwinkle (though that sparkly word trivializes the gravity of hue I’ve come to associate with you).

When I tried to pen you onto paper but all words looked thin and wrong.

(It became impossible to write the words “tragic” or “lovely” too many times.)

I thought of you— When I tried to describe you in speech but all words sounded hollow and sad; the only sound equipped to embrace you in language was the careful pronunciation of your name: Silas, Silas, Silas.

(I treated you like glass, worried that if I held your hand too tightly it would shatter; convinced that if I loved too much you would break.

I avoided your left ribs. I ignored your pills and gave you my water bottle. I wanted to hold you in deeper ways than words.)

I thought of you— When a silver sedan drove past and I imagined it was yours because it comforted me to pretend that we were part of a similar moment.

(A similar moment meant that you were safe; you were near; you were here.)

I thought of you— [38]

When the driver was always an other and never a you.

When I realized that, within the realm of you, there would never be a past tense; I am always thinking of you; I will always think of you; I will always have been thinking of you.

I think of you— When I hear Brahms’s Quartet No. 3, Poco allegretto con variazoni - Doppio movimento, played by other musicians. When the octaves traded between the first and second violins do not resonate in the way ours did—with secrets shared in practice rooms, with tenderness shared in sound.

When I play The Lark Ascending with another violinist. When she does not pull from the music all that you did—you wrote poems with bow strokes, painted tragedies and raptures, and poured yourself into phrases—music is safer than love.

(You treat music with more empathy than you do people.)

I think of you— When I am reminded, during every orchestra rehearsal, that I will never again have a stand partner that turns the pages as deftly, intuitively, beautifully, as you.

(You treat paper with a tenderness reserved for bruises and flowers.)

I think of you— When my new stand partner turns our music with an aggression that scares me. When he rips a page and I feel a twang of physical pain—I associate you with this sheet music; I dislike seeing you harmed by violent hands.

When your handwriting appears from another’s pen; when their l’s loop and dance as yours did. When their left hand is naked without your birthmarks and callouses. When their pen isn’t the same as yours (Hybrid Technica .3) and I burn with empty spaces: words unsaid, sentences unwritten, emails unsent.

When someone says silence and I hear Silas.

When another person calls me Clur with your sweeping cadence, abusing my once-favorite sound.

When I read through our old emails. When I reach your closing lines and see that you eventually came to refer to yourself as Slur, without irony or affectation. Just “with love.”

(You write “your” when you mean “you’re” and I do not want to [39]

correct you.)

I think of you— When I utter the word slur and am haunted by its shadow—its life beyond musical language, its ghostly connection to you.

(Our emails echo with phantom love.)

I think of you— When I look up a definition of the word:

slur /slər/ verb to pass over a fact or aspect so as to conceal or minimize it; to utter with reduction or substitution noun an act of speaking indistinctly so that sounds or words run into one another; a blurred spot in printed matter; an offensive phrase; a curved line used to show that a group of two or more notes is to be sung to one syllable or played or sung legato

(You are the final note of Brahms’ final string quartet played slightly sharp. You should have been practiced with more dedication; you should have been touched with more vibrato; you should have been rehearsed with more love. You are the note I will always wish I had played in tune.)

I think of you— When I ache with the harmonies between connotations and definitions.

[40]

Halley Furlong-Mitchell

Ariadne’s Ambivalence I warned you: I would snore.

You could have just rolled me over in the night.

No need for abandonment.

Now I am haunted by Meadowlands, gray Subarus, black hair—

A god has come. I am to be his wife.

He knows nothing of half-lives or untangling.

I fuck him but I still feel the imprint of your palm on my back.

Tell me: is it just the rain outside or did I hear you breathe there just now, my old shadow—

[41]

Mollie Weisenfeld

Time Lapse There was a girl buried in the snow this morning like some Neolithic creature.

I dusted off her fleecy blanket, and she snorted and shivered as if the ice water in its millennia-cycle had washed away her time-hewn progressions like talking and singing leaving her only with what would keep her alive when it’s 16 below.

As she staggered to her feet, I wondered how much she could feel how much she could understand of this old new world.

A gust of wind lifted thousands of ice crystals into the air and to her the powder was a drug.

She drew it in and began to dance, the sinuous twist of her body so like my own generations ago.

[42]

Emma Foley

Domesticated Between garbage pickup and morning news, She started to peel all her skin away.

And in each of her fingers blew a fuse, Through mirrors I could see her edges fray.

I picked her dirty clothes up off the floor, And stripped the sheets where she had stripped her skin.

A birthmark stained the cabinet before Her brain was finished cooking in the oven.

But sitting down to eat our meal was cold, So I wrapped her guts and placed them in the fridge And traced her footsteps just to see the mold Grown from the feet of a life now abridged.

I sank a scotch as she sank in her chair.

She drowned in re-runs. I drowned in her despair.

[43]

Spencer Brooks

Excerpt from A Good Year Gianni rose with the animals. He pushed the window out and felt the air. A chill clung to his hand. The seasons were changing. He relieved himself, washed, and dressed in the dark, choosing one of the roughspun shirts that the tailor had made for him.

He went to the pantry. He set water on the stove, took out the sack of coffee, and filled his mortar with the dark, whole beans. They glistened in the muted light of the stove, oily against the marble.

Gianni ground them by hand. The rich smell woke him.

On the porch he sat in the chill with his coffee, looking over his grapes, waiting for the sun. When it was light enough he got to work.

His grapes. He walked among them, cupping them, shaking off the globes of water that clung to their skin. They were velvet, a deep purple-black, clustered in bunches and hanging low from the arbor he had built for them so many years ago. Their leaves were green and fresh and unmottled. Gianni smiled. He would give them two more days, or three.

The sun was overhead. Its warmth filled his grapes and his bones. The chill was gone. He was sweating. He took off his warmer shirt, and then his undershirt, and he was bare-chested in the heat, suntanned to a lush brown. The white hair on his arms stood stark against his skin. He stretched and took stock of himself. He was wrinkled, thin but for his belly. His belly. He felt it. It was full and firm; it had stayed with him through the season. He ached in places and he moved slowly, giving himself time to warm. He fed off the heat, moving through the grapes with patience, losing himself, pruning, checking, alive.

When he finished with the grapes he went to the pasture. He let out the two hens and the rooster and the two goats. He checked for eggs, though he found none. His hens would lay later.

He oiled his bicycle, as he did every week, and wiped away the excess. He left it smooth and white, the seat a burnished tan, the [44]

handles wrapped. It was Thursday, and he would go to town. He walked his bicycle to the gate, closed the latch behind him, and rode along the dirt road. The mountains rose to his right, capped with snow, and the shallow hills sloped to his left, green and purple as far as he could see. He pedaled with care past the other wineries, up the hills and down them, until the town came into sight. It was small but busy. He passed the simple white houses and the little cafés.

He passed the red panifici, their wooden signs depicting steaming bread, the smell of pastries drifting out of their entrances and into the cobbled streets.

He stopped outside the bar. The front was open to the air, the inside bright and clean. Anselmo was setting up for the day, bringing the white wrought-iron tables and chairs into the street, moving slowly in his old age. Gianni stepped carefully off the bicycle and walked it to the entrance. Anselmo looked up at him and smiled, wiping his brow with a cloth. They embraced. Anselmo beckoned him to the bar; he made them both cappuccini, and they took them to the sidewalk, with its tables and chairs. They sat in the sun.

“You’re too thin,” Anselmo said.

Gianni stirred his drink. He tapped the spoon on the side and set it on the saucer. “The grapes will be ready soon,” he said. “They are dark and full. You and Venna must both come see them.”

“She worries about you,” Anselmo said. “You look old.” He sipped his cappuccino. “You’ll come for dinner with us. She insists, and so do I.” “Soon,” Gianni said.

They sipped and watched the street.

“And what about last season’s wine?” Anselmo said.

“Soon,” Gianni said again. “I check the casks in a week. You’ll be the first to have a case.”

“I’ll have to be,” Anselmo said. “The turisti are coming.”

Gianni understood him. The town was getting busier. The Americani would arrive soon, on holiday to the wine country, with their cameras and their appetites and their money. They would want to watch the harvests. Even help with them. They would pay. Gianni thought of the other produttori di vino, letting tourists photograph and touch their grapes, leading tours in their silk and linen suits, [45]

leaving their wine to suffer while they stayed in houses by the sea. He finished his cappuccino.

“The man with the briefcase came again last week,” he said.

“The Chinaman?” Anselmo took out papers and a tin of tobacco.

Gianni watched him.

“He made me another offer,” Gianni said. “He wastes his time.”

Anselmo pressed the tobacco into the paper and rolled it tight.

He took matches out of his jacket, struck one, and lit his cigarette.

It crackled and glowed. He let the smoke go and tapped the ash into his saucer.

“The world is changing,” he said. “Your wine, it still sells? You still have enough of last season’s earnings?”

Gianni fingered the china cup. “I do fine,” he said. “In a week I’ll bottle, and then I’ll do fine.”

They sat for a while more, watching people pass, and then Gianni got up.

“I should go,” he said.

“To get groceries?” Anselmo stood up with him.

“No,” Gianni said. “I have the goats at home, and eggs from the chickens.”

“Jesu,” Anselmo said. “Sederti. Sit down. I’ll be back in a moment.”

He gathered up the china and went inside.

Anselmo rinsed the cups and saucers and looked out at the street while he washed. Gianni was sitting, his shirt open in the heat. He was proud, and old. He was thin, and his age showed; he was too old to work. They both were. Anselmo wiped his hands on his apron and took a paper bag. He selected good pastries and breads. He took cheeses and meats and wrapped them in butcher’s paper. He filled the bag and he brought it out to Gianni.

“Take it,” he said.

“No.” Gianni stood up and began buttoning his shirt.

“You need to eat,” Anselmo said. “You’ll take it.”

“I won’t,” Gianni said.

“You can pay me with a case of your wine, when it’s ready.” And when Gianni still hesitated: “Take it. How long have we been here together? In this town? This is not charity. Your wine is the best. It is better than currency.”

[46]

Gianni stood for several moments before he took the bag. He put it between the handlebars of his bicycle.

“Grazie,” he said. “You will come soon, to see the grapes.”

“And you will come to dinner, or Venna will put me on the street.” Anselmo embraced the man and watched him ride off. Then he returned to the bar and straightened the liquors. He thought about his children, and his children’s children. He loved them all. He thought about Venna. They would argue that night, in good nature, and then go to bed together, as they had for as long as Anselmo could remember. He was a lucky man. He thought, as he held and twisted his rag, that if the season went well he could close his bar. He was tired. He could feel his age greeting him, offering him warmth and friendship and the promise of long, peaceful days with his wife.

Two Americani came in. Anselmo put down his mug and cloth and stepped out from behind the bar.

“Welcome,” he said to them. “Sit wherever you’d like.”

Afternoon passed into evening. The sun waned. Gianni collected eggs from the hens and shut them in their coop for the evening. He milked the goats, falling into a rhythm as the bucket filled. He took the milk to the kitchen, where he poured it into bottles and skimmed off the cream. He would make butter in the morning. He put the bottles on ice and went downstairs.

The cellar. Worn barrels of wine lined the walls. Gianni bent down and felt the wooden floor. It was aged pine he’d cut in Toscana, and it hadn’t given under the weight of the wine. He remembered felling the trees, many years before. Stripping them, aging the boards.

Gianni stood up and felt the barrel corks. One season his father, still a young winemaker, had opened the barrels early. He checked the wine two weeks before it was ready, and he brought malfortuna, bad luck, on his vineyard. That evening, as his father watched, the skies darkened. They gave rain and the cellar flooded. The water seeped through the barrels and into the wine, leaving it cloudy and spoiled.

His father was furious with himself. He grew and harvested the next season’s grapes with angry passion, and when it was time to ferment he sealed the corks with wax, to prevent the impulse to [47]

check early from ever taking him again.

Years later, after his father had died, Gianni’s first harvest came, and he did the same. He took beeswax to his corks, as his father had shown him, melting it and forming it tightly so no air got through.

He did so every year.

He stood in the cellar and felt the corks now. They were damp, carefully sealed with the wax. He would leave them alone until they were ready. There would be no malfortuna, no flooding.

He took a bottle of grappa back up with him, got a glass from the kitchen, and sat on the porch. He poured the grappa and sipped it.

It was strong. He watched the last of the sunlight filter through the grapevines, and when it died he sat in the darkness, listening to the insects.

The winery across the hill glowed in the twilight. Garlands of lights hung from the vineyard lattice and the unmelodic tilt of American English traveled to Gianni’s ear across the smooth, sloping land. The vineyard was owned by Simone Bruzzio, who dyed his hair black and held tastings for the turisti. He used steel vats and machine presses and his wine was loveless. It sold nonetheless, and his parties went on until the Americani left the town. Gianni corked the grappa and went inside.

At his bedside he knelt and lit a candle. He prayed, first for his wife, that she might be in God’s hands for eternity, and then for his own sins, that they might be forgiven, and then for his wine. Always, that God might bless his wine. When he finished he left the candle and got into bed. He fell asleep as the candle burned, its light dancing on his aged face.

[48]

Matt Gellman

Homecoming A brightness in the kitchen is what I remember, a willow holding sunset in the hoop of its dress as my father’s car sputtered off in the garage where his power tools sat cold and quiet, and my mother, paused from setting the table, looking at me as if I had cracked her fresh-tuliped vase while I spun around in my Cinderella gown, red-cheeked and giggling with animated secrets before my father saw me dancing and turned away, holding his head in both of his hands, knowing I wanted a kiss before midnight from some other man, or perhaps even him, it’s impossible now for me to tell which.

[49]

Jon Lemay

Grief It never stops rattling inside your chest at night— a cartoon Tasmanian Devil, reeling and muttering, caged in your ribs instead of the Saturday morning television, keeping you from sleep for the fifth night in a row— lethal in its frantic absurdity as it tornadoes around your mind.

[50]

Olivia Anderson

Can I Count Your Flaws?

“Now, your father has sent me a list of all the things he thought you’d want to talk about…” I am thirteen, and with eight years of perspective, a total shit. My mouth drops and my eyebrows shoot up and I gape at the therapist in shock. It is a bad movie, me cross-legged on a couch and her in thick purple glasses, glancing over a notepad from a stiff chair. I am here, in this moment, because even at thirteen I am a people pleaser. My father told me I needed therapy, and ever so dutifully, I am sitting on the couch and acting out sometWWhing so quintessentially Freud.

“He says you’re insecure about your weight.” I glance down at my stomach. Are all girls insecure about their weight? I read once you were fine as long as you could see your toes, and I can definitely see my toes. All we talk about in my house is weight, the weight, my weight. He had hired a personal trainer to come over and I, the pleaser, trained three times a week and then walked into town to buy Reese’s by the dozen. He is proud of my initiative to take walks: I am proud of satisfying my chocolate craving. Years later, I will have the same conversations with my family, the grey area between concern and control, and I will continue look down and make sure I can still see my toes (and, in all fairness, continue to eat Reese’s after these conversations).

“Oh, and you seem to be having trouble with your identity.” This is true. I am torn between my desperation to keep the people in my life happy and the newfound craving to rebel. I have no idea who I am or who I want to be, a habit that will never go away, so I try on hat after hat. I will test drive fourteen cars before I pick one, visit twentyone schools before I flip a coin to decide, and spend nearly every night of my junior year of college compulsively making lists about future careers and graduate schools. I am somewhere between highstrung and free-spirited, feet glued to the ground and head spinning in the clouds.

[51]

I promise that there was, truly, a good deal of growth between thirteen and twenty-one, and a capacity for endless future growth.

Yet that therapy session, with the adolescent-psychologist who read off a list of my failings like the rubric for a history paper, will forever mark a turning point in my life. Weight and identity were followed in quick succession with my lack of friendships, boy trouble, social media issues, family drama, and resentment. All of which were probably, maybe, definitely true, but not in a way that I ever wanted to be listed out, called out.

There is a point in your life where you realize you have two sets of problems: what you inherently are bothered by in yourself and what other people are bothered by in you. My father is a wonderful man and an incredible father, but I’ve had therapy sessions about that therapy session. The moment in time where I realized that there was infinitely more to be insecure about than had ever occurred to me. Just like in fifth grade when Mary Elizabeth walked up to me, pointed to my first bump, and wondered if my acne was contagious or when Jenny and Ruth cornered me after school to tell me they knew, absolutely knew, I wore a bra. Adolescent behavior that follows you into adulthood with “concerned” comments about looking tired or not-so-subtle-ly mentioning your holiday weight gain.

For a long time, I filed it under catty girl talk, until I sat at a family Thanksgiving and noticed the snide remarks about my uncle’s stomach having grown rounder than usual, or the underhanded teasing a friend about a “stupid” comment in class. The cycle of policing the people in our lives exists not to keep them in line, but to channel Mean Girls’s Mirror Scene, where the three girls stand in front of the mirror and pick out their flaws then look expectantly at Lindsay Lohan, begging to know what is wrong with her, too.

What is wrong with me? I am overweight, with a dust of clinging teenage acne (Oh, Mary Elizabeth, it is contagious!) and a tendency to laugh inappropriately and too loudly. I cry at the end of nearly every movie, enjoy reading Harry Potter fan-fiction in my spare time, and have a tendency to be a slightly passive aggressive. I could list my flaws just as easily as the therapist once did, explaining to you what they are and how, exactly, I feel about them. My roommate would pick different flaws, complaining that I am ridiculously disorganized [52]

and my country music plays a little too loudly a little too late. My brother hates that I’m such a feminist and my older sister would love to change my shaky relationship with religion. One of my teachers once told me, in the clearest way possible, that she hated my writing style and a girl in my sixth grade English class simply hated my speaking voice. I have spent time trying to clean up my messes, turn down my music and read things more legitimate than Harry Potter fan-fiction, prioritize my health and tone down my opinions, and in the sixth grade I avoided speaking in class, because I am a pleaser in a world that is constantly policing under the guise of concern.

I also spend much, much more time with myself than you spend with me. I go to sleep with myself every night, drooling lightly and curled up around Bekah, my trusty stuffed cow. I wake up to my alarm every morning, grouchy and giving myself thirty more minutes that I really can’t afford. I eat every meal with myself, I shower with myself, I am even willing to go to the bathroom in front of myself.

I hear myself talk and can read every thought, every feeling, like I am an open book. Some people would look at my relationship and recognize that I am, in fact, dating myself.

The purpose of dating is either to fall in love or break up. Some might disagree, but at its core, we date to dig deeper or we date and part ways. In this committed relationship I am in, it is twenty-one years tumultuous and fierce. We have learned all of the things that people look forward to, how to sit comfortably in silence and how to grow with each other: we dress up and have frequent date nights but we are also happy to stay in and marathon The Mindy Project. In fact, some people would look in on our relationship and guess that we had fallen in love.

We have. I could list off my flaws and fill the pages, just as I could list my strengths and fill up the same. The reality is harsh and might make you uncomfortable but, my greatest (and, by default, yours) love story will always be the love story between me, myself, and I. Like Romeo and Juliet, people will try to keep us apart because they are uncomfortable seeing us so happily together. There will be times when we examine our relationship and realize that there are things that need to improve, that need to be changed and watered in order to grow. The foundation for our relationship no longer lies in [53]

other people’s permission or objection, there now exists a dissonance between me and opinions of me.

I never went back to see that therapist. I have often wondered what she thought of me, this thirteen-year-old girl with such a long list of flaws. Now, as I begin to grow up, I often wonder what she thinks of herself. Everyone around us is taking notes, patrolling, criticizing, and there will not ever be enough pleasing to make them all happy. Learning to love yourself, to live with yourself, to be kind to yourself—this is the most radical and the most simple of love stories.

[54]

Clara Moser 1.

Gutted

Gutted under a florescent moon that yellowed white tissue spilling viscous as glue blood stained the cutting board gills shivered then hushed cornea went hazy the room swirled blue to black as I left my body on the cutting board watched the children dislodge my eyeballs pelt them against cupboards squeeze them between thumb and forefinger I tried to remember the blade [55]

it had been so swift it was imperceptible the hook that brought me swinging, lip first into the airstream water trickling down my scales their hands found me at the bottom of the bucket circling and circling terrified of still water.

2.

Caught him in a rainstorm.

That’s when Dad said’s the best time for fishing.

Out on the front dock in my purple rain boots with the flowers.

The rod arched like my cat’s back when she’s scared.

He swung into my bucket hook in mouth [56]

and something glad glimmered in my chest.

Cutting him open on the wood board he twitched his tail then was the stillest still I’ve ever seen.

I wondered where he’d left to.

[57]

Ryan Davis

Ode to Steadman In beeswax leather, and in morning frost, I can find you still. Here, in the garden, beside the snow drifts that look like the sight of some ancient avalanche, where we lost three skiers last winter. I am waiting with a steaming mug of something alcoholic.

In Woods Hole, by the bakery that my grandmother used to frequent when she lived on island, I am watching with a puzzled look and a borrowed cap. I am watching a man smoking a long cigarette and dressed in overalls shovel snow away from the door. The smell drifted in over the thin air, and it reminded me of bonfires. There was a blizzard bearing down, and it was an hour and a half before the driving ban was to be imposed. I’d made that venture to see a friend I no longer see any more. Casual sex will do that to you.

Like my hands on your skin, my writing these days is often lost and aimless, as if I were looking through the dark for something. As if I were stumbling over forgotten affects, looking for the path that leads down to the water’s edge, and the pond where we used to sit in pine trees and smoke cigarettes.

Feels more and more like I’m wandering the projector nightcalling out a rainstorm of idioms and eccentricities, having taken in herbal entropy. More and more I feel we’re losing touch with the selves we were beginning to know, back when growing up only went in one direction. Feels more and more like seeing from the eyes of some brilliant madman in sneakers, armed with an IBM Selectric and a train ticket to the campaign trail in the 70’s.

Maybe I’ll see you around sometime, though I can’t remember the historical precedent. You’re standing near an infinity of shorelineslighthouses are a common thing in a land of bonfires. I aimed a twin lens reflex I had in my bag and you smiled. But I can’t be sure of who you are. I have too many friends I don’t see any more.This is not necessarily because of causal sex.

Cape Cod is a maelstrom of everything I used to be—a landfill [58]

of old tapes and old manuscripts. Antiquated selves are collecting like nets on the docks, left to dry by fishermen with heroin problems with cracked hands that have felt more than their fare share.

I want to ask their story. We’re sitting in the air that smells sweetly of diesel with a puzzled look and borrowed beeswax boots.

So I’ve begun to evoke the madman himself, to find some answer as to how to continue. I can’t see out the windows, but I know that the train is still moving, the carriage shudders along with the keys, lurching forward and back— Don’t I know I want to be home? Don’t I know a little corner in the garden, where we christened a place of bonfires, drinking Rosé with poison ivy grafted to my forearm, left from the time Brendan pushed me into the brambles, running to the rhythm of crickets, and laughing through fields of gnat flies.

[59]

Emma Foley // Sacsayhuaman, Peru

[60]

Chloe Kimberlin

Hymnal for the Decayed Vultures are monogamous.

Cragged necks looped, it takes them years to forget.

Wing and wing in a nest of rot, together they pick at sinew.

Fierce devotion in a hollow church and no organs remained.

She will consume her dead lover, spanned on an opalescent log; regurgitate his remains into a baby’s mouth.

Born into the leftovers, we become remains.

[61]

Katie Biel // Esoterica

[62]

Bryan Perley

He Fractures Right… Friday… I did a lot of thinking after last Friday. We had this client, famous soccer player, doing this indoor charity thing for sick kids over in the Barclay’s Center. The guy above me and his friends all want autographs so I have these two interns each run down to the place with bags of soccer balls, I shit you not, they were hauling these bags with around eight balls each on and off the subway and everything. Now these are two very different interns. This one kid, Will, he’s a smart kid, but sort of lazy. Goes to Brown, his old man’s the CFO of Motorola. And then there’s Meaghan and she’s about to get out of grad school at NYU for business. Now Will’s been turning in better reports but Meaghan is right up there next to him. So it comes time to get the balls signed and it turns out our interns weren’t the only ones who were going to Barclay’s to get autographs. I heard there were around two or three dozen people there trying to get their shit signed. This soccer player only signs three balls that day, not including the stuff for the sick kids, and two of them were Meaghan’s.

So the rest of the day everybody was talking about how Meaghan has some balls, and how lazy Will has no balls. It just got me thinking.

This one trivial assignment and he fucks it up and she nails it and this dude loses all credibility. I mean the kid was totally emasculated.

It’s shit like that that really shows character. Getting those balls signed was probably the most high profile thing either of those interns had to do in terms of their reputation around the office.

You see it’s things like that which people remember, and Meaghan realized that and Will should have known better. But it’s not like Will really gave a shit anyways. It just made me realize how insane it all is over there. It’s like every day is a game and you can earn more points by sharing vacation photos or wearing a killer tie then by increasing the bottom line.

I mean there was plenty of bullshit back where I came from, but at the end of the day the bullshitters were the bullshitters you know?

[63]

It didn’t impact the work as much. Of course work was different.

You know I haven’t really been feeling as much of the stress recently. I think it has to do with this weekend… In a weird sort of way… I was visiting my buddy Mikey up in Inwood Park to have a catch and ended up over his place for dinner with his family in the West Bronx. It was a real full house. His cousins just had their second child and are staying in a room there and his mom’s got a tenant on the first floor and her sister on the third floor. You would have loved his cousin’s little girl. She had me in stitches the whole night. And the food—fantastic. His mama was making all sorts of things I’ve never even heard of. But things haven’t been so great over there. My buddy Mikey has enough problems of his own, he’s got epilepsy real bad, has a massive scar on the side of his head from where they cut in.

But honestly, he’s one of the best people I have ever met. The family he has there… well the ones that are there are really great people. His cousin has some issues, but who doesn’t right… That’s how you get your bucks…

Anyways, this tenant on their bottom floor… He’s been delinquent on his rent for months and it’s really starting to put pressure on the rest of the family. The cousins don’t pay anything and money’s getting tighter. Mikey’s been talking about his Mom having to force the cousins out soon if this scumbag doesn’t pay her the rent… This asshole even has a legit job, as a manager at some store… Could I have some water?

So this guy comes back to his place with someone and there’s all this noise downstairs like an argument or something. And it’s starting to freak the kids out, and Mikey’s getting anxious, so his mama goes downstairs to tell him to lower his noise. It gets louder though and his cousin’s little girl starts crying and that gets the baby all worked up and that’s one thing I just can’t stand. So I get the bat…

And I grab Mikey and go downstairs. I’m seeing it all… It felt… feels like a movie… Like someone else’s feet going down the stairs.

This baseball bat in numb hands. My head it was like a camera, if you understand what I mean. Like I wasn’t seeing out of my own head… I don’t remember what I even said to that piece of shit tenant downstairs. I just remember feeling my heartbeat like it was in my brain, and this guy’s cussing everyone out and threatening me and [64]

then his girlfriend’s screaming because I’m just wailing him, first his arm then his shoulder and head a little bit and I come to and back off and Mikey’s mama saw the whole thing and there’s blood all over this guy but he crawls to this little lock box by the sofa and pulls out some money and holds it up. This quivering mess with a wad of bills in his hand. And I take it and give it to Mikey who’s frozen, he’s terrified.

Poor fella. So I just get the fuck out of there and get plastered back in SoHo with my bud. The weird thing was I woke up the next day and my head just felt like someone hit the reset button.

[65]

Jake Musich

Excerpts from “Fragments” The hollow bones of the city laid open. Wisteria blistered beneath severe steel arbors. Helios arced west to the sea with steady conscience as slow stalwart bells pealed in their tower, muddying the pilgrim din below.

Repent. Repent. Repent. ∆ This studio is our tabula rasa. White page white sink white walls.

And one cheap mirror haloed with ink and paint. The old model bends and the charcoal bends with her. Sweeping arcs join shoulder to thigh, hip to foot, in a pure unfettered dance. Olive skin clarifies firm muscles below. She is verse rippling with sinew, flesh, and bone.

Gestures fall like leaves. I pass the briar of her womanhood; dark and furrowed like vineyard soil. The scalloped dimples of her back.

Those proud, enduring eyes. I have forgotten myself. I am her skin, the charcoal, and the mirror on the wall.

“Basta!”

I wash my hands in the sink. Black eddies down the drain.

The model strides past, her paisley gown alights behind her. She disappears into the courtyard. I kneel over the drawings on the floor, a levy of marks and stains and streaks—a false mimicry. I cannot create her vitality. The subtleties of the ribs, the strength of her neck, are represented but inertly. Drawn, but without life.

That night I see the old model on the street, clothed in the normalcy of the crowd. Her face is old but smooth. We exchange smiles like secret confessions, but as we pass one another, I realize I’ll never truly see her. ∆ Hips of stone rise before the sea—a beckoning corpse—one cloven [66]

peak that swells patiently beneath a cloud of white silt. We ribbon skyward through a wound in the mountain, passing bearded ascetics and cavalcades of men, their faces upturned to the dim blue. The leather scent of their work lies low in shadowy gashes beside the road, the sun browning nose and brow and earth as we bow and wobble over the cleaving heaps of stone.

A sign, Il Limite, stops us. We start on foot. Our path, a mess of rocks and grit, shifts beneath us. The dull rumble of heavy machinery fills our footsteps. After an hour, a final switchback brings into view a great cavern cut into the mountain. Smooth and rectilinear, the tunnel extends in to utter blackness—I imagine the heart of the mountain, a great cold thing that beats once in a human lifetime.

I shudder despite the heat. Men and massive trucks pour out of the tunnel, wet with cutting fluid, with drills, levers, and cutting wheels lurching behind them. Trucks pass us laden with white flesh—the infamous marmo—the drivers steady despite the precipice beckoning on either side of the narrow path. I’m an ant beside the trucks and mote of dust beside the mountain. We climb further to the mouth of the tunnel.

Born to the woods and the open air, I do not venture under the mountain. Others do, but I’m cowardly, I only stand at the portal and peer down the vast corridor. Figures approaching from the other end, emptiness itself, grow from shadows into men. I meet gazes with a few, but their eyes are as deep and unshaped as the void from which they emerged. They have the same face and reticence as my father—I find myself thanking them as I turn to leave. Grazie mille.

A field of forgotten stone crowns the mouth of the mine. Jagged blocks of every shape and color, many low and dejected sit beside the road; travertine reds nestle with sulfuric yellows, copper greens, and every tint of white. Cappella dei Principi in the raw. A lost sexual rite, marble flesh left in the sun.

I slip a leather throng under a piece of pure white stone, three by three, oblong and thick in the middle with no obvious cracks. I drape it over my back, bending beneath its weight. Its rough corners dig into me. The tether bites my shoulders with each footstep and a thin, bloody line opens on my shirtfront. The path, now a wave of rolling stones, unsteadies me. My stone fights in final protest. I’m stealing [67]

from the mountain (I’m stealing the mountain) and it’s punishing me. But Michelangelo and the Florentines built their city from the flesh of this very mountain! Am I unfit? Unworthy? I’ve yet to try.

My lungs are airless dust. “But,” I whisper more to myself than spirit of the valley, “I will make something beautiful out of you.” The trucks and men wind past, their mute thoughts echoing throughout the valley, my promise sealed but unsure. ∆ White flesh cracks under my hands. The hammer is unconscious breath, blow after blow. The legato ritual empties me. The hammer is ceaseless. My back is sturdy. The midday heat covers me with sweat.

The unending hammer, the unyielding chisel. The figure suffers within the stone. I will free you. San Lorenzo sings.

Chnkk.

Chnkk.

A marble city. Marble men, women, warriors, priests, kings, boars, stags, trees, roses, and palaces. The marble dead sleep on their cenotaphs. Eyes frozen in dreamless sleep. This pale stone, born in the sea and purified by the earth, is Italian memory. Bitter, it tastes of countless years and countless deaths. Omnipotent like the duende, it mocks us foolish enough to think we can tame it. To be certain, we will become it. Imagine, a thousand civilizations, beliefs, and races forged into stone. A patient reliquary of mankind.

Yet, it crumbles so easily beneath my hands. ∆ The studio floor is harder and colder tonight. Ringed with rasps, flat chisels, and dust, I sit in a pentangle of finishing tools like a crude magician. Smoke wallows like incense. My fingers ache and my back is tight but the work is not done. The Danaid looks down on me with mournful incomplete eyes, her sallow latticework skin reflecting my lamp. She is waiting. Yearning. Countless hours have become the crease of an elbow, a collarbone, and an eyelid; but stone still holds her. My pace has slowed. Each strike is less fierce, less certain.

[65]

San Lorenzo sings the day’s last song. Repent, it says.

Long sleep beckons. The long way down, where dreams dwell. I try to press it back, drawing the smoke deep. My head spins. These days I dream only of her, of those unfinished eyes and the overflowing jug. Each night her slender lips become real and opens, she whispers, “You’ve tried. Go, this is my burden.” I try to speak, but my mouth is a spring of brackish water. The more I try—if only to utter an iron “no”—the more she drowns.

I gather a handful of dust and let it fall between my fingers. It spreads and settles on the tiles. Part of me wants to shave her down to a fine snowy powder, carry her to the sea in my pocket and wade in till the water covers us. We could sleep there on the ocean floor till we become the mountain once more. Maybe, a thousand years from now, a son or daughter might come along and purify us, acquit me. No, no I must burn myself on this pyre of art and leave fertile ash behind. Youth who undertake this journey will need pain and memory as nourishment and footprints in dust to know the path. ∆ If you look east before dusk, you can almost see the river rising from the sandstone slopes of Monte Falterona. It flows from the high vertebrae of the Apennines down into Tuscany, gathering tributaries and strength as it moves; fertile, life-giving force.

But here, at the narrowest shore, the Arno is a tame band of green water, a serpent ribbed by bridges. Bright laughter fills the banks and jetties; skiffs pierce the current; the city sparkles. The river trudges on unawares like a shimmering smudge, lapping and folding on the stone piers, burrowing ever deeper into the valley. The current is patient, resolute, a pilgrim on the path.

I am still, despite it all. Quiet inside. Far away, and yet near at hand, rosy light floods the cypresses and the gnarled olive trees squatting on the hillsides and burns the churches’ golden domes.

In a mere moment, the last shards disappear behind the hills. The city darkens. The river exhales its endless breath, a sound that fills and carries me into the night. I head for the sea, buoyed by silt and dreams.

[65]

Catherine Headrick // Boots for the Winter. Charcoal.

[68]

Bryan Perley // River-Chalk on Metamorphic Stone—Conway, MA

[69]

Arman Avasia

Boulevard We plan to meet on the boulevard the next day but I stay the night and we don’t leave the house, we barely leave the bed, so it’s the day after you take me there, the part under the bridge.

You tell me it’s your secret spot so I don’t tell you we all played here as kids, that this is a place where hearts broke, or wanted to. And when we lie down in the sand and turn our bodies towards each other, I’m not even worried about who will see, or how young, because I remember what I saw, I remember the bodies and the shadow of the bodies, the smell and taste of salt, but most of all I remember the skin, slapping itself against skin, and flesh, finding itself in flesh.

I remember I went back down everyday for a year, looking for what I had already found.

[70]

Ben Profenius

The Blind Drunk The evening had winded down. There were a few regulars left but the place felt emptier than that. The loners drifted to their respective corners and sat stone-faced becoming statues fixed to the walls and booths. In this setting time slows to a crawl, and he found himself drying the same glass for a lengthy, unknown amount of time beneath red and orange lights. The song playing through the speakers was a slow ballad sung by the late Freddy Ortiz. He wished to God not to hear another Freddy Ortiz song, so he turned and began to adjust the selection.

“Don’t touch a knob on that box, Parker,” growled a grizzled pear of a man wearing black tinted glasses despite being indoors, hunched on his elbows jutting his chin across the opposite side of the bar.

He was fat and tired looking, grey whiskers poking out between the wrinkled folds of his face in patches with no uniformity, a raspberry nose purple and pocked. “No schmo silences Freddy just on his say so.”

“My name ain’t Parker.”

“Then where the hell’s Parker? Parker never cuts off Freddy!” bellowed the grizzled pear.

The man whose name was not Parker changed the song to something he did not recognize, yet it still quieted his disaffection for the late Freddy Ortiz. It was an old jazz number played slowly with a lazy low end.

“Such a malefaction, a misplacement of name and personage, that calls for such spite,” said the grizzled pear, limply whacking his fist on the bar in cadence with the declarative iambs. “What’s it you got against my good Freddy, hm?” The grizzled pear lowered his glasses and gave him a look that, if it had actually been on target and had not missed, would have been referred to by bar patrons everywhere as ‘the stink eye’. It stunk like the bastard himself.

He who was not Parker kept himself silent. Though he wished [71]

he didn’t have to take any shit from any old slime, the security of the daily bread would be put in jeopardy if he didn’t. It was a part of the paper he signed to get the job of pouring drinks and to watch them be drunk that he do so, if not politely then at least stoically.

“You’re too young to know about Freddy. Yeah, you know him, but you don’t know him. You never got to feel him when he did what he did. Do you know what Freddy was? I’ll tell you what he was. He was a true performer. He was true genius. He was the best in the world!” The grizzled pear threw up his arms and shook the vibes in the room, misaligning the shades on his face. He held them up there until he who was not Parker took him up on his shit. The pear needed some kind of recognition, it seemed.

“You don’t say,” he said apathetically.

“I do say! Don’t you have ears?” accused the pear.

He who was not Parker knew very well that he had ears. He had two of the goddamn things, and he felt as though they were being bloodied and abused. The inquiry regarding his possession of ears was left unanswered.

“Freddy, oh Freddy... Alas, poor Freddy! I knew him...” rambled the pear, perhaps having achieved a level of drunkenness ignorant of even the most vile clichés. “It’s true, too, that I knew him. Back when he was big, when he was the giant. Maybe not the giant, but he should have been! He had ten times the gusto of hacks like Dylan or Cash. He had style, performed like his soul was in it all the time, and still hacks robbed him of being the giant like he deserved.”

From a dark corner someone called out, “Wa’n’t Freddy Ortiz some kinda body builder or muscle man or somethin’?”

He swiveled around his stool on his ass having taken personal offense to the confusion of identity, puffing his chest in the general direction of the holler. He who was not Parker watched the pear trample his way through five stages of grief in microcosm, his face contorting in confusion, betrayal, and agony, then resting to a tame somber state. “No,” the pear said finally. “No he wasn’t.”

“Just like how my name ain’t Parker,” he said.

The pear swiveled back around and silenced himself for the moment, simmering. He who was not Parker knew what men like the pear were made of, which was piss and vinegar. They had no [72]

family, no work to speak of, no friends outside drink and drinking associates, but they had their piss and vinegar. The pear didn’t seem to have any of those things either, but goddamn if he didn’t have the late Freddy Ortiz. And he who was not Parker did not have Parker, or those with names. Instead, he seemed to have the pear.

“I knew Freddy, I knew his secrets too. I kept ’em for his sake, but he no longer has such worries.” The pear glanced upwards momentarily in reverence. “These glasses of mine, they belonged to the great Freddy Ortiz himself, given to me out of thanks of friendship. He never performed without ‘em. He needed ‘em, and I know why.

“You see it’s this assumption that performing to the greatest performers is natural, being in front of people is easy. I can assure you it ain’t. Freddy told me the best piece of advice anybody ever gave him was to learn to perform like nobody’s watching. The problem being that that’s impossible once people are watching, and that problem nearly ruined Freddy before he got started. Horrible stage fright, that’s what he had.”

The pear laughed and tapped his fingers next to his eyes, “I told him I never had to face the eyes of an audience ever in my life, on account of my missing faculties. He made a strange face and the next night went on stage with these black glasses. That performance got him noticed, then he got big. Here, take a look see at what made Freddy Ortiz the giant that he should have been,” handing him the glasses.

Reluctantly he took them, slowly wrapped them around his face.

For a moment he lost his balance, expecting to see the world through the eyes of a dead singer, but instead seeing sheer total blindness.

Freddy never had to look at any audience, keeping his performances all to himself in his head. He laughed to himself, something about the blind leading the deaf, but then realized everybody involved could hear just fine; then again perhaps not, if they truly enjoyed what Freddy Ortiz sounded like. And the blind leading the tasteless did not sound with the same feeling.

[73]

Madeleine Burkhart // Solve et Coagula

[74]

Jonathan Stricker // Untitled

[75]

Halley Furlong-Mitchell

Halcyon Dream There’s a town in the window. It’s not lighter or darker. It doesn’t smell sinister. But the town is not made for anyone else. Above: skies blank and blanched as kaolin. Here we know nothing but that distant throb of solitude, like how we ache when it rains or speak softly to ourselves in the shower. I hear myself mumble, Are you here too?

[76]

Eliza Dumais

Card Stock I wanted to tell you about home here with Holi-dyed nail beds so you could see the shape of my fingers in honey-yellow on the backs of postcards.

I wanted to tell you about the desert dust my heels have been collecting and the half moon trims on Rajasthani sarees.

I wanted to write about the cardamom clouds that breathe themselves through rickshaw traffic in Malviya Nagar and about reading maps in Devanagari script.

I wanted to spell out recipes in masala and degrees celsius and to tell you that my kitchen floor is a painted, tired mosaic of basil leaves and bare feet.

I did not want you to undress my India so I have photographed her for you fully clothed. I am writing from saffron sunshine with copper wired bracelets on my wrists: this is where I would like you to picture me.

[77]