Folio Literary Magazine: 2017 Edition

folio

2017

[folio] A Journal of Arts and Letters

Contents Written Art Fall by Clara Moser A Kalashnikov’s Bargain by Anonymous A Divine Breakfast by Gill Hurtig Haiku by Daniele Hollander Pemaquid Point by Henry Coxe Confessions of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl by Emily Sater Baby Birds by Jeff Dingler Red-- by Henry Coxe Walk by Daniele Hollander The Popcorn Dialectric by Justin Gerard Tongue Tied by Daniele Hollander The Swallows by Clara Moser America, January 2017 by Chloe Kimberlin Island of the Lotus Eaters by Jack Schreuer Lejos by Zoe Coleman A Nondemoninational Dying by Jeff Dingler Olive Trees and Octopus by Sophie Hadjipateras Poschiavo, Switzerland by Henry Coxe Retro by Amy Milin Suki and the Shaman by Anastasia Momoh Cake by Eliza Mittelstead A Wake by Clara Moser OPTI by Paige Trevisani Epileptic by Eliza Mittelstead River of Smoke by Jeff Dingler From Water by Zoe Coleman Atman’s Tale by Emily Sater Faial da Terra by Jack Schreuer Change is Strange by Jeff Dingler Mad Red by Chloe Kimberlin Our Walks (Dear Hannah) by Amy Milin L’Origine du Monde: Origin of the World by Eliza Mittlestead Dis-inherit: for my brother by Clara Moser Mid-Autumn Moon translated by Kevin Wang The Fall by Rachel Goodkind Why They Burn by Jeff Dingler The Stockings Speak by Clara Moser Jazz by Amy Milin The Painter (Las Meninas) by Maria Llona Burn Away by Daniele Hollander

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Visual Art A Little Help by Miranda Holmes Untitled 2017 by Jacqueline Wolf Untitled by Kathryn Gorson “I Asked for an Olive� by Amy Milin Untitled by Thomas Kilian Beach Sunsets by Caroline Kutzin Untitled by Thomas Kilian Untitled by Elizabeth Sciales Emenate by Sophia Hadjipateras Antelope Canyon - Page, AZ 2017 by Jacqueline Wolf Red Fields by Caroline Kutzin 2016/1620 by Kathryn Gorson Untitled by Thomas Kilian Antelope Canyon - Page, AZ 2017 by Jacqueline Wolf

Cover Art

Madame X by Sophia Hadjipateras

Back Cover Art

Dancing Jonah by Jonah Joblins

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"Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of their own lines on paper."

--Milan Kundera

Submit art and writing to folio@skidmore.edu 6

The Staff Editors-in-Chief Jack Schreuer Chloe Kimberlin Treasurer Jeff Dingler Editorial Board Amy Milin Jeff Dingler Emma DiMaria Anastasia Momoh Graphic Design Damaris Chenoweth Faculty Advisor April Bernard

Submit art and writing to folio@skidmore.edu 7

Fall

Clara Moser I wanted to stay in the falling light of the sun that seemed to cackle in a coming blue; in the cold smell of smoke and frost that crept over brambles and hillsides.

I was small. I didn’t know what dying looked like except that this death with its golds and reds so much like fire felt the way beauty sounded.

She was holding me and we were talking in a language she had taught me.

Its sounds and rhythms I had trouble working

into a swell rising in my throat.

There were no more crickets, there was only the murmur of distant voices, heard in echoes over water as the sun hushed and the air became violet-blue.

As we fell into total darkness I asked to stay and see; although I was crying and could no longer

make out her face in the dark and the moon was out with his sharp sickle cleaving into the night sky.

8

A Kalashnikov’s Bargain Anonymous

I had always found beauty in thick white smoke until the 62-CS riot gases filled my lungs and almost choked me to death. The sound of sprayed bullets had always excited me, until the 39mm cartridge penetrated my best friend’s chest. I had always enjoyed running in public parks, until we secretly buried martyrs under swing sets, because the government did not allow the funeral to reach the cemetery.

The Syrian government had not only blocked the road to the cemetery, it had also blocked the road to life outside the boundaries that the secret police had drawn. The propaganda that the government had shoved into our brains since the 1970s had castrated our ability to dream about a society in which we could choose our own destiny. The brutality of the regime had painfully taught us that if we ever dared to dream, our visions would be soon covered by the white smoke of 62-CS gases and punctured by 39mm Kalashnikov bullets.

I was as familiar with a Kalashnikovs’ open fire as I was with the call for prayer that erupted out of the mosque five times a day. At my cousin’s wedding, I fired more than three magazines into the air in commemoration. I also witnessed fire exchanges between Fatah and Hamas on the streets of our camp. But on April 22, 2011, the sound of the Kalashnikov was different. Very different.

April 22, 2011. A Friday. Khaled Bakrawi, Ahmad Alkousa, Oday Tameem, and I were nervously waiting for the Imam to finish his Friday preaching. I always wanted the Imam to finish early, because I wanted to go back home and enjoy the big meal of the week. But on April 22, 2011, I was not thinking about food. I was waiting to break through the wall of fear that had surrounded me since birth. My friends and I were waiting to partake in one of the first protests against the Syrian government in Damascus.

We were not exactly sure how things would end up. But we knew pretty damn well that it would not go smoothly. The Imam finished his speech and started the prayer. We were a few words a way from the end of Friday’s rituals and a few seconds from the start of the protest. I was scared. I felt bile in my stomach, dizziness in my head, and unsteadiness in my knees.

“Alhamdullah.” The Imam ended the prayer. Khaled stood up and shouted, “The people want to topple the regime.” This was a cry that had already been used by protesters in other Arab Spring countries. I took a few more minutes to talk to Allah because I knew that there was a good chance that this Friday prayer could be my last. Nevertheless, I did not ask Allah for forgiveness, but I asked him to bless my family with patience if anything “went wrong.”

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The sound of protesters that surrounded Khaled in the mosque’s plaza became louder and louder. I finished my prayer. I stood up, knees shaking, joined the crowd, and shouted with my parched throat: “The people want to topple the regime.” I felt liberated from fear.

Yes, I was scared. But in Arabic, to be scared (‫ )بوعرم‬is not the same as to be afraid (‫)فئاخ‬. We were scared because we were taking action. We were not afraid of taking action.

My scared feeling turned out to be neither misplaced nor irrational.

A few minutes later, a queue of black armored trucks arrived. The first soldier who got out of the trucks started spraying bullets in the air from his Kalashnikov, while tear gas bombs filled the air, followed by angry riot officers armed with batons. The Kalashnikov sounded different than it had at my cousin’s wedding. It did not sound more terrifying, not exactly. The police were not targeting us, at least not yet. But the Kalashnikov sounded more threatening, not to our lives, but to our dreams and our future.

The Kalashnikov was telling us: if we wanted to walk in Damascus’ historic alleys without fearing snipers and check points, we had to accept that politics was not a topic of conversation. The Kalashnikov was telling us: if we wanted to enjoy the jasmine smelling air of Damascus, not choke to death from chemical weapons, we had to give up our right to rule ourselves. The Kalashnikov was telling us: if we wanted to wake up in the morning to the sound of birds, not to the explosion of barrels, we ought not ask questions. The Kalashnikov was giving us an ultimatum: either peace sponsored by authoritarianism or warfare for demanding freedom.

*** Saratoga Springs, NY, 2014. After a long night full of laughter (and drinking) with my new friends, I went back to my room. I was half-high, half-sober. It was 2a.m., and I was checking my Facebook feeds. The Syrian Revolution in Damascus page had posted a new album of photos of the dead whose identities were unknown. The pictures had been taken by a solider in the Syrian military and were leaked from a high security prison called 215.

Some of the faces in the pictures wore smiles. Some other faces were completely smashed from torture. All of them had a number on their forehead.

At first, I was sad. But soon enough, I started mindlessly clicking the arrow on the right side. There were hundreds and hundreds of pictures.

Wait. Who was in the photo I had just passed? Go back. I slowly moved the mouse to the arrow on the left side. I was afraid (‫ )فئاخ‬to press that button. Reluctantly clicked. It was Ahmad Alkousa. My hand left the mouse and quickly covered my mouth. Ahmad had been a handsome blue-eyed young man. In the photo, he had an incomplete, messy and long beard. His face, let me say, had looked better in real life than it did in that picture.

I was sad for Ahmad, but my first instinct was: who else?

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My right hand remained on my mouth. My left hand reached for the mouse.

Moved the mouse to the right arrow. Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Wait. That is Oday Tameem. Fuck.

Who else?

Click faster, and faster and faster…. Look for distorted familiar faces.

*** Albany’s International Airport, March 16, 2015, the fourth anniversary of the Syrian civil war.

Sitting by the large glass windows, I was reading a report titled “The Syrian Conflict in Numbers.” According to this report, 560,000 had died. 70% of Syrians were displaced. 80% of children were out of school. 75% of the population was living in poverty.

The boarding call interrupted my thoughts.

*** After me, Khaled, who is buried in a public park, was the luckiest of all of us. He was only shot in the chest and did not die under torture. Or maybe, I am the least lucky, because I had to see the rest of them die and my country burn.

11

A Divine Breakfast

Gill Hurtig

God peered at me on my breakfast plate today; His eyes were eggs, sunny-side-up.

We had a staring contest. I lost because eggs cannot blink, And because I am not God.

His mouth was a strip of bacon and I became jealous.

I wish my mouth were bacon, so that I could always taste its flavor.

But that would not happen because too much bacon is bad for me, And because I am not God.

His nose was a sausage link, which I did not understand; Why would God always want to smell sausage?

But I cannot say what God likes to smell because I am not God’s nose, And because I am not God.

Today my dog was hit by a car.

I think it is because I ate God this morning.

But what was I supposed to do?

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

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A Little Help

Miranda Holmes

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Haiku

Daniele Hollander I think it’s sexy when the internet goes down Erotic haiku

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Pemaquid Point Henry Coxe

We burst down the road— jubilant, that muggy black fly afternoon promising to melt away into a cool evening on the coast; reveling in our long due reunion while winding through cottage spotted towns to go to Pemaquid Point.

Chattering buoyantly as we drove over backroads, I tuned the radio to 102.9 to accompany your whirlwind jabber of topics like New England bogs and Joseph Heller and obscurities like “shapenotes” and warbler birds, which I interrupted to admire the clementine sunset as it washed over lances of trees.

At the town line— Damariscotta, we turned into Pemaquid Point.

Worn out, your summer days were drowned by 80 hour weeks catching luminous flies.

I noticed hints of delight, despite a few modest complaints. Exhaustion seemed far from your mind, although I’ve always known you to wear yourself thin.

At dusk, the dimming light cast the foaming coast grey and mussel shell blue and we sat with our backs to the lighthouse, unmoving on the rocks, like two snails discussing eternity.

We remembered another era, two years ago when we would talk on my dock with a box of pizza from Falmouth— 15

you were compulsively training to be a long distance runner then, and wore (to my exasperation) only abrasion resistant Salomon sneakers, and dri-fit jackets, abandoning a bygone love of tweed coats and t-shirts.

Our ventures then were local and unintimidating.

As schoolmates we drifted around the beaches and parks of the Maine coast, our souls moored in the Casco Bay. And now you range from Oaxaca to Birmingham.

You spearhead “power talks” in Providence and collegiate rallies in Seattle, unanchored and waving picket signs.

You’ve been in and out of a holding cell, you call peers your “comrades,” and you’ve given yourself a new name I can’t pronounce.

Still, you’re probably more you than you were in those early High School days when you walked the halls wearing bow-ties, expounding on Joyce and Aristotle, when I recognized a future friend.

But now I’m left with scant promises of “sorry” and “should’ and “soon” and not enough of Pemaquid Point anymore.

16

Confessions of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Emily Sater April

To be, or not to be… To exist or not to exist. To literally be.

To die, to sleep… to sleep, perchance to dream…To wake, to live?

Is sleep death and death sleep?

The absence of sleep feels more like heaven than my dreams. Pure exuberance. Pure ecstasy. Blood turning to gold. A final understanding with such certainty. True transcendence. I was the perfect microcosm; the perfect speck of dust or glitter in the macrocosm of the universe, the cosmos.

Perfect harmony and warmth. Another messiah born. A line of royalty? No, a line of angels, living on earth in the heavens.

January a motorcycle – winding as you POp your ears. Further up -- diagonally – he goes. You feel like you’re gonna fall backwards down the bench. I’m Alice, Falling – warmth in your hair – fingers in your hair – warmth in your fingers – your hair. but hush bright light as you’re sitting out in the night. Looking down to your room, you see an orb of warmth.

Your light. Candle fright. Don’t burn up room, you wish. Fuck look up man, you hiss. It burns to see technological light in the night. You see stars and you’re awed, you see stars and they’re flawed. Planes are not mars; you saw no stars. Warmth in your toes, your girlfriend’s pink socks on your toes. But her nose, that small nose… her blue, flowered cargoes. Alice – falling down the sand hill. Alice taking a hypnotic pill. As you swallow your cherry lolliPOp spit, you saw stars. oh, you wish.

February Deep, knowing, glassy eyes that remind me of my girlfriend’s eyes, well let me clarify, my ex-girlfriend’s eyes. Bitch.

Empty silences and empty brains. I’m more invested in his purple velvet couch than I am his words. I rub my hands against it. Back and forth feeling the change of grain. Sticky, sweaty palms. The sun is glaring at me. I furrow my brow and try to endure. No longer can I; I make a visor with my hand.

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He notices.

He says something and lowers the shades.

January Assaults shatter out of my mouth as I look down at you sitting on the floor in your underwear, like a child.

I look up and I see my face, painted and starring back at me. On each wall and even on the floor is my face.

I have no control over my mouth as it yells and shouts. All I want him to do is hear. To wake up and listen.

My glass house is shattering and a little girl in a blue dress runs out chasing a rabbit.

I am the girl. She is the rabbit. But I run circles around her and I cannot pause.

I come home to what I think is a game. I run around the house finding clues that have not been left for me.

My imagination leads me out back, up the stairs onto the outlook. They bring me soup and take me back downstairs.

They feed me bite after bite of chocolate pudding. I swallow the pill they hand me, close my eyes and grab each hand I can reach.

And soon‌ Alice fell back down.

August Remembering in an office chair, wooden and stiff Lines on a cotton bed sheet, tracing the outline of your leg.

Down into the well I fell – Into an existence of empty energy; A nothingness felt through vacancy of thought.

The bed became empty too All the lines disappeared and my place lost.

I am nothing and nothing am.

18

Baby Birds Jeff Dingler

Dec, 14, 2014

To the man who poisoned my heart,

This is not the letter I wanted to write. Firstly, let me say that Jacob is happy and taken care of. I told him we’re on vacation at Grandma’s cabin for the next few weeks. The snow is falling thick as sheets now; I fear I won’t make it back down the driveway. There’s so much going on I can’t even begin to sort through the mess of overstuffed boxes to find the right words, and there’s this noisy nest of baby birds chirp-chirp-chirping away in the attic… I wanted to write you to tell you exactly what I was thinking that day you caught me with Karlo and I came at you with the stone cutting board, how I could show up to your house after you got custody of our son and set fire to your Mercedes (and your mailbox)—and how last week I picked up Jacob from Shermer Elementary without letting you know, and drove off into the thawless future. I wanted to write all these things but, my dear, it’s so much to unpack. Life is too short for long letters, and the birds, my gosh, there must be at least half a dozen of them starving and singing their necks off because their mother brought them into this world without a shriveled berry on a branch… I’m sorry, my mind’s in a million places. My god, I’m trying to concentrate but Jacob is running around the cabin, making all kinds of noises, and I’m telling him to Shut up, shut up! but… he says there’s something slithering in the walls. Something big, he says. He quiets down and, sure enough, I hear some creature clawing its way through the many crevices and nooks of this hundred-year-old splinter of oak.

I hear it making its way up and up toward the attic, to the nest of baby birds too hungry and numb to pipe down. Jacob is crying and rotating around like a daft top, so I light a candle and pull down the attic hatch. Frosty shadows and the skulls of cobwebs in the darkness. Do something, do something! Jacob shouts. That’s when I hear it, the scratch of fang or claw against wood. There is only one strike, perhaps a struggling or gulping, and then the silencing of all but a couple of chirps that go trailing off in opposite directions like sad echoes. All this in the darkness, the scratch and fury of their sounds. Where is their mother, I ponder in the gloom—long abandoned the nest or made into some cold meal herself? I look down and Jacob is really spinning and sobbing now. You always complained I raised him too soft, didn’t you? Save the birds, he implores, save them! But peering through that dark space, not knowing what scaly or hairy thing had tasted the warmth of my cabin, sniffed it out and slipped itself in without my consent, I realized that the baby birds and I were not on the same plane; I could no more save them than I could fish them out of a thrashing nightmare. So I blew out the candle and closed the attic hatch to 19

let the monster finish its meal. And don’t worry. I’ll make sure Jacob doesn’t cry over any more baby birds.

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Untitled 2017 Jacqueline Wolf

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Red—

Henry Coxe eared slider covered in slime, at the bottom of the haunted tank.

Algae scums up the glass; a layer of ectoplasm

pollutes sea-green debris in a fog; Turtle in the thick of his ghost, which churns with worm ends feces and filth. I cry for a bit, feeling culpable.

It seems natural and right to show grief, to show I have the decency but it’s not honest.

At least, not completely.

Truthfully, I cope with relief—

that awful pond-bottom smell gone at last.

“Red” looks like a stone while I scrub away the shell-rot with a toothbrush. I can’t discern what is gone from this dead

turtle, posed stiff in my hand.

22

Walk

Daniele Hollander The leaves had been shed, promising a sense of vulnerability throughout the entire walk. She thought about contiguous states, and memories that had evaporated into the air, that left polluting, toxic stenches. One memory she could recall was a fever dream that had occurred in Vermont. While enveloped in the heat of declining health, she would fall asleep. Soon, she would find herself in white. A barren nothingness. Slowly, a buzz would start, that was quiet at first, but grew stronger with each moment. It would blossom, becoming a sharp pain. Suddenly, it would be too loud, overbearing, but she could do nothing. She would awake dripping, her ears ringing despite the false reality of the noise.

She looked around at the rusting, vibrating pipes that were broken and no longer used. The harsh wind whistled through their bodies, and she felt alike to them, her own body quivering in icy flutters. She thought of the time she stood high above the woods. When she did this, she could see far beyond the borders of her own home. She could imagine people drinking coffee and reading and cutting their fingernails. She had smiled and surmised about how this was a similar exercise to when she stood outside and looked up into apartment buildings; in places that had multiple floors, she could see into two lives at once, while the actual residents had no ideas or pictures of the people existing right around them. Right next to them. It was her own quiet voyeurism. Her own way of accepting that her demise was solitude, that she would always be closely acquainted with loneliness.

She wondered what misanthropy was to someone who believes in God. Was it the quiet fear that he didn’t exist? She didn’t know and she could question all she wanted, but what she did know is that she herself didn’t believe in the stark curvature of a God, but merely the faint speckle of some greater existence. All these thoughts were elicited when she walked in the woods. And she had no answers and no ways to filter the occasional dark reflections that sauntered through her own mind. But here she was, in a naked wood, allowed to think and think freely.

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Untitled

Kathryn Gorson

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The Popcorn Dielectric Justin Gerard

Olivia in the window mirror Stands next to the stoves.

Her red pajamas and bare feet Near the floor are actually Dish towels. I am alone.

I hold the poem in my mind, “The Popcorn Dielectric.” She Eats popcorn, though she was getting Ice water tonight.

Dielectric? The word rings true, But I don’t know what it means.

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Tongue Tied

Daniele Hollander The worst breakups are the ones where he’s wearing a tuxedo. Where his bow tie is slightly askew, and a sad bit of sweat drips from his hairline and on to the tip of his nose. When he looks so small in his oversized jacket and can’t look up from the floor. When he can’t seem to stomach the platitudes about love and commitment thrown at him, even though he had to have known that this was coming, that his choice to go to a function instead of sit in room and watch a movie would affirm the decision to cut all ties.

And there he was, dancing on a floor and drinking more than the two beers he had originally allotted himself. He clasped hands with contemporaries and guffawed with other brothers. He grew fatter as he took in whole pigs in a blanket.

He lost weight as he glided across the room from one corner to another. He looked down at his watch. He felt his phone vibrate.

The worst thing to have to say is “I fucked someone else.” Because it could have happened, but it very well could not have happened. It could be a lie, fabricated to push them far away. A lie, created to build a wall they could never jump.

A lie, made to do irreparable harm.

He scrambled to get to the house, to the room he decided to avoid before. He threw open the door, fearing another man would be in there, holding her. But there she was, cross-legged, petting her cat. “I fucked someone else.” He looked at the floor. He kneeled. He began to tap his fingers on his knee. He could feel one tear begin to form in his right eye, the only eye he had that didn’t have a prescription. He thought, “but I’m wearing a tuxedo.” He whimpered like the wounded, dressage horse he was. She pulled him up. She turned him around.

She pushed him out the door.

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The Swallows Clara Moser I. My mother’s voice was a swallow, her mother’s voice was a swallow.

Together they went ringing over the fields and into eaves, pestering the barn animals.

I asked my mother why her voice was a swallow’s but she could only Jug, and Jug, and Jug, her wings beating round my head.

I asked her mother why her voice was a swallow’s but she could only Jug, and Jug, and Jug, her wings beating round my head.

Why do you never speak, I asked, as we bathed in the river and the swans sliced over a still bank– my mother only twittered and trilled, twittered and trilled round my head.

II. There was the beating of wings, the shrill sound of bird call over a red sky and I knew he would try to make a bird of me– my mother’s voice a swallow, her mother’s voice a swallow. who can only twitter and trill, Jug and Jug and Jug– I had heard myself when speaking in the tongue my mother had before and my voice was not a bird’s, my tongue was not a bird’s.

So when he came down in the beating of wings I faced the God in his eyes and laughed with my head thrown back and the swallows swooping.

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“I Asked for an Olive” Amy Milin

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America, January 2017

Chloe Kimberlin Like choking on a hard candy from your grandma’s dish— that thick glass dish on the piano next to the elephant figurines.

The hard candy you avoided, wrapped in shiny veneers.

You knew it would taste sickly sweet; though its plastic wrapping made your fingers bend at the knuckles, tempted to grab all at once, feel the scrunching resistance, peel one delicately, untwist the sides, spread the thin plastic flat, run your fingertip along the creases.

Now you, greedy, swallowed the candy that you never really wanted.

You’re choking.

Your throat is too small.

You weren’t expecting this.

You feel the walls of your mouth tremble, your saliva glands tingling in resistance.

You’re staring at the ground, bent at a right angle, sight blurring, you’re choking.

Staring down at the carpet, crumbs and hairs wedged between the fibers, they look like soggy noodles, mold on a potato skin, sea anemones, clogged pores.

It’s not what you thought and you’re choking to death on your grandmother’s hard candy in your grandmother’s home.

The rug was not pulled out from under you.

The rug was always under you, ugly, uncouth, and waiting for you to collapse.

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The Island of the Lotus Eaters Jack Schreuer

A bird chimes to mark the viscous passage of time, in an eden of sand and sea, where no war must be waged against the setting sun, and the rising moon can be embraced without concern, for brittle bones or fumbling hands.

But now Odysseus you call your crew forth, from this new land of lotus and peace, back to tides that aim to swallow and cliffs to crush.

Have we not given enough sweat to the ropes, and blood to deck to please Poseidon?

On the seas we could hear the distance cries from Ithaca, the sadistic snarls of suitors reverberating across the waves, as they realize that no one stands in their way, from your throne they claim Ithaca for the Ithacans, and consider only those like themselves to be Ithacans, barring all others with an arbitrarily, deadly twitch of the hand.

But here on our island of lotus these calls are so faint, that just lightly hummed tune can drown them out.

Here we dance in the in the fire light, as the lotus shows us that which is not there, and brings a joy unfelt in the victory of war or the arms of a lover.

Here we forget that our fire’s blaze consumes planks from our beached ship, each day making it less seaworthy and reality more distant.

Oh Odysseus, I beg you let me stay, here safe from the horrors of the world, blind to the doom of Ithaca.

Oh Odysseus, I have followed you on your quest, witnessed the sack of Troy and mixed my tears with blood, as the Trojans and I watched the houses of the gods burn, and the children of the gods slaughtered.

Oh Odysseus, 30

I have watched Ajax’s body float listlessly, drowned for Achilles’ meaningless armor, and knew there could be no celebration in such a cursed victory.

Oh Odysseus, I sailed with you against the wrath of a god, and came to accept a grave at the bottom of the sea.

But Odysseus, you brought us to deliverance, to an island of pleasure and peace, a place we do not deserve after all we have done, but the lotus does not turn away the sinner.

Now Odysseus, you have given your order to assembly on the beach, so we wail and rend our hair, as if we ourselves were condemned to the pyre.

We embrace each stalk of grass and try to find the island's heart, to give ourselves to the lotus and find a peace that does not exist in our world.

But under your stern gaze of duty and principle we relent.

So here I stand with my feet once again in the lapping sea, and a last lotus bud on my lips, knowing that I could never redeem myself, for abandoning my country to tyrants, nor forgive myself for abandoning the eden for which I have dreamed.

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November

Thomas Kilian

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Lejos

Zoe Coleman I murmur buenos días to the new families as they enter the air-conditioned room. They peer hesitantly at me, noticing my blonde hair and pale skin that seem out of place amid their dark bodies. They are fleeing their homes in Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador, and to them I am just another American in a bright volunteer shirt, watching. The adults sip watery coffee while the children drink bright blue Gatorade from Styrofoam cups, crowding around the plastic tables of the comedor. I smile at their tired faces, trying to show sympathy, wanting to distinguish myself from the rough, burly Border Patrol officers who dropped them off here, at this small church in McAllen, Texas, on the border of Mexico.

A woman at the far table sits alone, hunched over, her swollen eyes staring vacantly at the fried potatoes, juevos con frijoles, and pan dulce on the plate in front of her. Her clothing hangs on her youthful body, the soiled fabric enveloping her small breasts and slim frame—she looks fragile. The woman’s nails are painted pretty pink, like mine, but I can see the ring on her finger when it catches the fluorescent light. I try not to notice the tears rolling quietly down her cheeks, or the fact that she looks my age. On the woman’s right, her small daughter holds her hand, tracing delicate circles around the knuckles over and over, like a paint brush on a dark canvas of skin.

The other families talk quietly around the girl and her mother. I catch fragments of these conversations, the Spanish words slipping smoothly over one another like water over rocks. A woman with a drawn face tells the teenaged boy next to her about the six days she and her son spent in a freezing cell, un congelador, after being detained at the border. Across from them a man gently holds his infant son, trying to feed the child pieces of mushed banana as he talks into a cell phone—maybe speaking to a doctor, maybe to his wife—his phrases short and choppy and urgent. In the corner a family huddles close together, their eyes closed, their hands folded over beaded rosaries, muttering in unison just loudly enough for me to hear the words gracias a Dios spoken in prayer. A boy in a Ronaldo jersey climbs clumsily onto the table in front of me, his tiny hands struggling to hold up his oversized jeans as he reaches for the plate of food yelling mis tortillas triumphantly in squeaky, perfect Spanish before erupting into giggles. A few of the adults smile approvingly.

But the small girl continues to draw circles on her mother’s hand, her bony knees drawn up to her chin, watching silently. She is quieter than the other children I have met, more timid than Adriana who vaulted onto my lap in her sparkly princess dress singing galletas quiero yo until I snuck her another cookie, winking dra33

matically at our shared our secret, or Samuel who made goofy faces at me, his tongue sticking out through his chapped lips. I want to ask this girl what her favorite color is, or just her name, to distract her from the weary faces of the immigrants who continue to shuffle in, their papers clutched tightly in their hands, their shoes missing laces, their steps monitored by the thick plastic GPS bands around their ankles, marking them as unwanted, ilegal. I wonder if the girl notices the one that encircles her mother’s ankle. I wonder if she knows what it means.

“Han terminado?” I ask them, gesturing at their untouched plates of food. The woman nods and stands, reaching for their faded green backpack.

The thick straps are worn from use, the fabric dusty and frayed from days and weeks of traveling across la frontera, away from home. I do not know how they got here, or if they are alone, but I cannot bring myself to ask. I am scared I will hear a story like the ones I have heard from the woman who held her son’s hand for three days as they walked through the scorched desert, or from little Pablito, who crossed with his sister, their two small bodies squeezed together in the dark bed of the coyotes truck, or from the pregnant 18-year-old who was beaten and kidnapped by sequestadores in Vera Cruz and arrived at the church bruised and alone.

I look down at the girl, admiring her small white sandals with ladybug buckles, her blue dress with pale butterflies fluttering around the hem, her thin beaded bracelet dangling on her wrist. Her black hair is dirty, pulled into a long braid, the way I wore my hair as a child. I used to watch my mother in the mirror, enjoying the feeling of her calloused fingers caressing my scalp as she separated my hair into three sections and carefully wove them back together every morning. I imagine the girl sitting with her mother at a train station, or riding some bus north, their blue tickets clutched in the girl’s hands, their green backpack at her feet, her mother braiding her hair, calmly, methodically.

I know it is a hopeful image—an unrealistic idea of their journey—but I hold on to this fragile connection as we walk together in silence.

The mother sets the bag down on the folding chair. A stuffed rabbit falls from the side pocket, landing lightly on the cement. The brown fur is matted and clumped, the ears hang limply, and the glass eyeballs are scratched and dull. Gently, I pick it up and offer it back to the girl, remembering the way I held my stuffed animals as a child, the soft fur familiar and comforting against my body. The girl cradles the rabbit in her spindly arms, rocking it slowly back and forth, cooing tenderly to it like a mother to a baby. The mother looks at me and smiles for the first time, inviting me to share this intimate moment.

I glance down at the cracked pavement to avoid her gaze, clenching my toes inside my shoes, stumbling through my Spanish as I explain that they must 34

throw everything they have brought with them away.

The mother unzips the bag, pulling out unmatched socks, a brown fleece, a blue shirt with a smiling flower on the front, a used tube of toothpaste, a bottle of perfume in the shape of a honeybee. She gives her daughter one last spray of the sugary scent, in the hollow pocket between her collarbones. The girl smiles at the familiar smell, the way I used to when I wore my mother’s scarves that always smelled like thick coffee and lavender. Every morning I would run down the carpeted steps, wrapping myself in the woven fabric before climbing onto her lap, burrowing between her arms, curling into her body like baby returned to the womb. She always made me feel safe. My mother who taught me to swim, holding my body in her hands on the surface of the water, who stroked my back when I could not stop coughing, patiently waiting for the asthma to subside, who sang me sweet lullabies every night before bed, teaching me to harmonize until we could sing them together. My mother who still hugs me against her lavender-coffee body when I come home, reminding me that I am young and safe and loved.

And suddenly I feel exposed, embarrassed, guilty. I look away as the mother places the glass honeybee in the deep black trashcan.

Contaminado. Contaminated. I say the word out loud in an attempt to explain myself, to justify the empty green backpack abandoned on the cement, but my voice sounds sharp and menacing. This is what the law calls these items, these memories people carry with them, these small fragments of home they must leave at the border. Every day I watch the black bags pile up in the rusty dumpster, until they are hauled away and forgotten.

Contaminado the mother repeats quietly, rolling the word around on her tongue like a pill she cannot swallow, trying to dull the sharp edges, to suck some hint of hope from the five small syllables. As her voice fades into the silence, I notice the brown belt she still clutches in her hand. The silver buckle is scratched, the leather supple and worn, stamped with three neat letters. JLM. Es de mi esposo, she explains softly, running her thin, calloused thumb over her husband’s initials. No sé donde está... She hands me the belt, looking away. It is not a gesture of trust, but a motion of defeat.

The girl grips her mother’s hand more tightly, then looks right at me for the first time, confused. She does not understand the rules of the church, the Texas law, la ley de inmigracion that requires her mother to throw away this last piece of their family. In her eyes I am merely a reinforcement of the fence that stretches across the barren Texas landscape, dividing her life, separating her from home. I wonder if she notices my young face and quavering voice, or if I seem 35

just like the men in dull green uniforms who took away her father. I remind myself that those men shoot people, they taze children, they apprehend and deport families with an authority I do not have, one that keeps us separate. But they are doing their job, just like me. Does she know we are trying to protect people?

And in that moment, in the small, sticky courtyard behind the brick church, I want to tell the girl that I am scared too. I want to describe the way I used to draw letters in the palm of my mother’s hands—simple, secret words only she could feel. I want to tell her about the stuffed horse I sleep with every night even though I am twenty— it still comforts me. I want to explain how I wear my dad’s oversized sweater in the winter, the blue fabric hanging to my knees—a reminder of him and of home.

The woman drapes her arm protectively around her daughter so that I am standing alone, facing them. The girl presses herself against her mother’s body, searching for safety in her familiar embrace, her eyes darting from my face to her mother’s to the belt in my hand. I think back to the crayon drawing little Carlitos made of me yesterday, my hands represented by large purple circles, my long fingers jutting out like spokes on a wheel, too large for my small stick body. Is this how the girl sees me now? Quickly, silently, I wrap the belt around the immigration papers and hand them back to the mother.

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A Nondenominational Dying Jeff Dingler

It was a nondenominational dying.

“Then again, aren’t they all?” Dad used to say.

In his last years he’d gone delusional, spent hours staring into a blank TV, seeing who’d blink first, himself or the great static unknowable that swallows us all.

Or perhaps he was trying to hear the nanoscopic humming of something more, some binary buried in the quantum knit-work, and always this cosmic silence as if god really is spying, silently, ferociously spying on the common dust of our lives.

And still in the middle of the night, we monologue to ourselves as if ghosts or concerned gods were listening.

You think by now these spirits would’ve slipped up and burped or passed some gas as they went traveling through this plasm of existence— a footprint, hand mark or skid-mark somewhere.

Maybe even a tooth or tongue spat back from this spasm of the past.

But after all these years, god’s humor has become a very wry thing.

Everyone gets mad about the wordless dying.

Even my father drew himself gravely to the floor and rose some mumbled, disfigured prayer.

With one hand we bury the dead and with the other we call up heaven to ask if she’s hiring.

All these fleshes of faith kept shivering about the lying in the dirt and the expiring.

They ask, pray, plead and re-ask the air: “All these years, money spent, love spent, what was it after?”

My dear child, if there were a god,

don’t you think we’d hear its laughter?

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Olive Trees and Octopus Sophie Hadjipateras

I come from a place where olive trees grow in dry dusty dirt old men stand in the sea by the port and beat octopuses against

the rocks, their pants rolled up and their beards speckled with salt Old ladies dressed in black sit outside white clay houses in rickety wooden chairs which don’t quite balance on the uneven cobblestone street And at the end of a cobblestone street Is a white house With a white gate and a sign reading ΠΡΟΣΟΧΗ ΣΚΥΛΟΣ The first time I opened that gate, I needed to stretch up on my tiptoes and slide my slim wrist through the bars to unlock it Greeted by a German shepherd pushing his weight into me, tail wagging and his dry pink tongue licking the salt off my little arms In the garden sitting on top of the beige dirt was a lime green swing set My grandmother used to sit there with me before her brain became dry and her eyes dusty Her legs didn’t reach the ground just like mine her plump body hunched over and the gaze from her brown eyes shifted between staring at the dirt and looking me in the eye I told her I loved her as we slowly rocked back and forth staring at the dirt below us “Why?” she replied And the conversation ended 38

Beach Sunsets Caroline Kutzin

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Poschiavo, Switzerland Henry Coxe

We painted watercolors, like children, while the sun peered over snow-skirted peaks and we were playful together in the grass, lying in the lively green to watch the valley sway.

In the evenings, we went back to our wood stove, drew a chuckling bath which splashed on the floor, and after all the bubbles had gone and we were dry, stepped out and absorbed the beryl-blue sky.

Everything we needed was there among the log piles and the crackers with honey and the jugs of green tea I would risk the ins and outs of any jagged roads to nest in our tidy knot of stone cottages once more.

It made the green hills laugh with relief that we arrived, and we, as we laughed in the alps, hoped they would always be our home.

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Retro

Amy Milin I want to seal my youth in a glass jar like a lightning bug, like jam preserves, place it at the nightstand for the night dark.

I want to meet with my old heart, learn what between this swirling blue to grasp to earn each wrinkle that adorns my dying days.

I want to see my final sunset, for the first time, attending in my long knee dress, red mouth with all its lines at the close of my first time around, closing skyward eyes I’ll lick the seam of my old jar, take my parting drink Gulp it like a mango, juicy, vivid at the bar and go - having done it all and grown, and do it all, and go.

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Untitled

Thomas Kilian

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Suki and the Shaman Anastasia Momoh

“You ungrateful girl.“ Mother yanks at Suki’s hair once more, prompting her to walk faster. But Suki’s pink, open-toe, lace sandal has come undone on her right foot, and it keeps getting caught beneath her left foot which is bare. Suki mumbles a prayer to herself, for her mother to let go. If she lets go, perhaps Suki can trip and fall.

Falling would be so much easier, she thinks. At least I won’t see their faces then.

But she sees them. Mr. W stands outside his little red brick house, much like the other red brick houses that decorate the estate. All with the same slanting roof and tipping chimney and windowless walls except for one that looks into the kitchens.

Suki can almost hear his tongue brushing the roof of his mouth in quick intervals, a series of ‘tsk tsk’s’. It only shows his disappointment and Suki wishes she were close enough to spit on him. But she is far away and her face is to the sky as her mother pulls her by the hair. She knows that if she spits, it can only dribble down the corners of her lips, and onto her blue party dress.

“How much have I done for you? How much?”

Penelope’s little boy is at the corner of the street, kicking stray paint cans. He stops to watch, and he reminds Suki of the man she has being dining with in the past hour.

A man her mother likes. Chubby cheeks, round eyes and a small nose. Who had kept smiling for no reason, with only one side of his lips lifting up. He had let his mouth open and close while he chewed. Suki remembers what food had looked like sitting on his tongue, soft yellow mush with one green pea squashed in the middle of it all.

Mother stops in front of a red brick house and lets go. Suki bends over, coughing into the crease of her elbow, her eyes water and perhaps she is crying.

The front door lays ajar, as though waiting. Mother grabs Suki’s wrist in order to stand her upright. but Suki pulls out of mother’s grip, a yelp escaping her lips.

It stings, it stings. Suki says. A burning sensation has washed over her skin, but she holds in her scream. It will fade away, it will fade away, Suki thinks.

She’s faking it, she’s faking it, mother thinks. Hallucinations, hallucinations, the doctors think.

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Mother walks in and Suki follows. The air in here is different than outside.

The shaman they’ve come to is different than other shamans. He isn’t old and hunched over and bearded. He doesn’t have bad breath or a sharp tongue or squinty eyes that judge Suki every time she shifts positions, while sitting on his scratchy mat.

Instead, he is sitting languidly on a pile of cushions, a lazy look in his wide eyes, no beard in sight. His face is smooth as if someone has taken a knife to it, carefully carving out every curve and dip.

He is a sight Suki loves to see. There is an ease about him.

Suki sits on the floor mat without prompt from mother, who is crying. Tears mix with mascara and run down mother’s cheeks. She looks like one of those women selling strawberry yogurt on the side streets. Waving white signs, calling out that she has what you want- breathless, and old and tired.

The shaman ignores mother’s crying and mother’s words: he was the only man left who would marry her. Even when mother screams at him before leaving: “Fix her. Fix her now. I’m sick of it!”

Sick of it? Suki is sick of it too.

Mother leaves and he asks the same questions all shamans like to ask: “How do you like where you are?” But his tongue is smooth, brushing expertly against the roof of his mouth. His words stay with her, floating in the air around her.

This is real magic, she thinks. Suki does not reply; she stares at him, at the white and blood red rags that drip from his arms and wrap around his legs.

Suki blinks and he is leaning towards her, pushing a small teacup in her hand.

He is too close, she tastes only cinnamon on her tongue.

“Drink,” he orders and she does.

It’s a herb of some sort and she feels her eyelids closing and springing open and closing again.

She starts to talk without any prompt: “He was horrible this time, mister. I’ve never seen someone so ugly in my life, and his breath was rotten, mister, it was rotten and now I feel rotten.”

She rubs her hands up her arms as though trying to get something off. “So you still call me mister, and how old do you believe I am?”

He enjoys doing this sort of thing, skipping over her words as if they have no meaning. It makes her sad to think that he does it on purpose, that he doesn’t want to hear.

He sits beside her now and pulls her by the sleeve towards him, a needle in 44

one hand. “Hold still,� he mumbles, flicking the tip of the needle with his thumb.

She turns her neck sideways to see his form. She likes how he sits cross legged, she likes the concentration showing on his face, the way his eyes relax when he dabs something harsh on her shoulder.

Why cant mother just pick someone like him, someone that I cannot understand right away, someone whose eyes look at me and see nothing special, Suki thinks.

Because all men want to see some special girl. Thats why they sit opposite Suki every week, in fine suits that appear painted with acrylic and vile smiles pretending to be real.

But not him. Not mister. She is only a patient to him, so he sits beside her, he does not touch her, and she can swear he will never own a suit.

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Cake

Eliza Mittlestead Frosted flower petals blooming fake sweetness top the dessert.

A garland crown of sugar and saccharine flowers.

Purple striped candles cast shadows long and blue.

Waxy lighthouse, whose fragile lights seek no boats glimmers soft golden.

Suspended phantoms of wishes huffed to smoke linger near by.

Whispering with fingers crossed, Please, please, they all say.

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A Wake

Clara Moser Sick as in unwell, once well, no longer well.

Well as in water, as in drink.

Tin bucket ricketing against stone in a lonely clamor towards a cold bottom.

Water as in drink, the drink, blue drink vast and bound-less reflecting sky’s petulant moods moving across in waves lapping against skin swallowed by drink, by ocean wading in the wake wake as in “abstinence from sleep, watching,” absent of sleep, absent but awake holding wake by a body inert and lost watching for what could come in the night to wake the quiet and drag you by the ankles in to the dark away from

sickness, back to well the body hung like a salted and dry woke fish

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Untitled

Elizabeth Sciales

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OPTI

Paige Trevisani Lynn couldn’t recall when she arrived there or anything before. She remembered being encased in a small dark room. She was confined there as a young adolescent—with only a wooden bench for a bed and a bolted door with no windows. The room was dark to the point where she could barely make out the tips of her fingers in that plunging, oppressive, seemingly everlasting darkness. Time was unknown. At one point she thought she had died, and was in some strange state of purgatory, yet her aching hunger pains and dry thirst told her she was alive in some way. The pangs became grueling; her stomach’s growls resonated through the infinite blackness. When her hunger grew ferocious she hugged her stomach praying for it to end.

At last, on what she realized was a screen before her, a ball of light appeared in the center, looking like a brain consisting of a blend of blurred colors and in the center was four letters: OPTI

—A plop and then a dull clang reverberated through the room and the smell of rare meat met her nostrils. The darkness lightened enough so that she could make out the shape of meat in front of her. It was on a metal plate with the same four letters carved onto its surface: OPTI. She could move her hands and reached out tentatively in front of her. She picked up the meat, appearing to be steak or beef. Her hunger became explosive, and she devoured the meat like a fiend. After a moment, another piece of meat materialized, plopping down from above and emitting another clang of a metal platter against the concrete floor. She couldn’t help herself. Like a beast she feasted; red juice from the succulent meat clung to her chin. More meat appeared and she continued to eat, hunching over the area to protect her meal.

In that room she had lived for days, being starved in utter darkness and then, occasionally fed—the glowing brain would disappear while she starved, and then reappeared on the screen along with more meat. The loneliness became unbearable to the point where she began talking to the glowing brain. In response, the OPTI brain provided her with entertainment. It showed her films. White uniformed figures were depicted entering homes to assassinate the inhabitants. On the lapel of their uniforms were the letters OPTI. Children screamed while the white uniformed figures aimed their high-powered firearms at their fathers, their mothers. In all of the live videos, the recorded shootings were done privately—in the homes of families, the apartments of single bachelors, and on the darkest back roads in the midst of twilight.

Lynn cowered in her austere room at each display, watching the weapons fire over and over, vanquishing the lives of its victims, and turning their lovely features into cold, lifeless wrinkled corpses, while their children, their partners, their friends moaned in broken despair. Lynn was left screaming 49

and crying at the sight—each time she did OPTI would speak to her, assuring her in a gentle lull that each death had been a necessity: to protect OPTI so it could provide for its humans. The screen showed her the videos on loop, adding new images of the corpses—blood squirting from their wounds. Each time she resisted crying and screaming OPTI rewarded her by dropping more meat onto the metal plate. The images continued to play, fear still surged in her throat. Until at last, her tears subsided, the gasps quieted, and her heart rate slowed to a steady pulse.

Lynn gazed down upon the pale body that lay crumpled at her feet.

Rich, thick blood had discharged from the shut down life form. The living female had been beautiful, yet shutting her down unfroze her face, revealed her wrinkles, faded her bleached blonde hair to a dull blonde with mop-colored gray lining her roots. She was now defective, monstrous. It had been easy to kill her. She had pulled the trigger in the same way one would flip a switch. It was necessary—the female had been a complication, a breach in the system.

Now OPTI was secure. No mutiny could occur.

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Epileptic

Eliza Mittlestead Confronted by the tableaux of a dinner scene in a gilded frame on a grand white wall, the boy beholding it experienced a change— from normality into filmy confusion—the change of a blue marble eye into muddled, unseeing things, rolling back and disappearing behind fallen lids, followed swiftly by the giving out of knees and a whomping thud of flesh onto floor, the sprawled limbs forming a capital X as they jerked, shuddering against the linoleum floor of a quiet, cold, shining gallery space.

Nearby I can only watch, imagining the twitching of a bug caught on its back.

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The River of Smoke Jeff Dingler

With gambled desires and days, Dezzie breathes the river of smoke through her nostrils, and passes the happy glass my way.

Resins of dreams and doubts disturb this street-lit night. In the endless alley below, there is the stench of another boy shot without a word.

And from this floating window there is no way to say how humanity squirms, except in the gathered steam that makes the center glow.

“We may be city, outta luck and broke,” Dezzie coughs dead fire, “but for the saints and sinners, we all swim in the river of smoke.”

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Emanate

Sophia Hadjipateras

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From Water Zoe Coleman

To be born has many meanings. How many times we leave a life and enter a new one. How it felt in preschool during the Bridging ceremony when I walked over the half circle of wood that symbolized my transition from preschool, a world of wooden blocks and flute music and cornstarch mixed with water and snaking hose-rivers through the playground, into kindergarten.

Mom braided my hair and I wore my purple velvet dress with lace trim and. I stepped carefully, deliberately, up, over, down as I crossed some invisible river that separated one stage of my life from the next. The crumpled picture of my mother that I had held every day when she dropped me off got hung up on the fridge in our house. A memory of childhood. I was old enough to be alone now.

Mom and I still bathed together. Submerged in the large bathtub I noticed the differences between our bodies—her figure was thicker, more wrinkled, with hair under her arms and between her legs, while mine was sleek and smooth and young. Sometimes I lay between her legs, pressing my small form into the c-shape of her body. Once I asked her if I could go back into her belly. Would I still fit? She told me I was too big now, even though my toes only reached the tops of her shins, my fingers barely spreading wider than her palms. She showed me how to slide down into the water to rinse the soapy bubbles out of my hair, but I liked when she did it for me, her calloused fingers massaging my scalp. Cupping the water in her hands, she poured it over my body in repeated, tiny baptisms and the drops slid down my skin onto hers until the water ran clear over us both and she kissed my cheek to say she was done. Sometimes we stayed in the water until the water began to cool and my mother showed me how our fingertips had turned into prunes, but these moments always ended with the abrupt shock of cold against my warm wet skin when I stepped out of the bathtub, away from my mother.

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Atman's Tale Emily Sater

And now, each night I count the stars, And each night I get the same number, And when they will not come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Amiri Baraka1 She birthed a boy, expecting a girl2. Disappointed3, she slept as they cleaned and placed him in the baby room. She awoke when the hunger settled.

Soon a baby in a blue swaddle she didn’t recognize was brought to her4. They taught her how to have him latch on, he did and she stared at his tiny fingers5.

As he finished eating and fell asleep against her breast, she remembered the stories her grandfather told her as a young girl6. A blue baby came to mind, young Krishna eating mud7. Her grandfather8 said that Krishna’s mother forced him to open his mouth and inside she saw the universe9. The blue boy cried against her and the nurses taught Rosa, the mother, how to change his diaper10. Rosa settled back down with her son in her arms, she looked at his small eyelids and saw him as a young man, forcing his way through life as it blew against him11. She thought to sing to him but could think of no songs. She hummed instead12. They lay like that together as if they knew one another13. Soon she fell asleep herself14.  LeRoi Jones, African American writer, member of the Black Arts Movement 2 Annabella Rosa was just three years old when her mother died. She was raised by her father and grandfather while the former was at work. She had always longed for a little baby girl, someone to love unconditionally and be loved back the same way. She would name her Grace and they would defy all odds by staying close even through Gracie’s teenage years.

3 It was not children Rosa craved, only her Grace.

4 Atman stopped reading. It happened suddenly and all at once. He put down his book, Crime and Punishment to never pick it up again. He told Rosa stories instead. It was Atman’s turn to tell the story of the two blue babies, of skin or swaddle.

5 For the first time her illness affected her for her perspective of the world mattered deeply to her daily life. Not being able to see Atman’s eyes and watch him grow strong and tall, into the man that he had become distressed Rosa. Atman took it upon himself to explain everything in detail to her. The color of the midday sky, the shade of pink of her roses in the garden, even the darkness of her afternoon tea.

6 She named him Atman for her grandfather. He grew as she watched, soon he was a toddler and blond ringlets framed his cherub face. She had learned a deep love for him, as he adored her. They lived alone on the outskirts of the city. Rosa worked at a pet store feeding crickets to the tarantulas.

But at home she made hand-painted condolence cards; she tried greetings once but had no talent for them.

7 Krishna, a Hindu god often represented as a child or young man 8 Victor Leigh, Rosa’s paternal grandfather was a scholar of Hinduism 9 Rosa regained her sight at the very end. She spent it starring into her universe, into the oceans

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and the moon, into the stars that mapped her very birth and end.

10 “One, two, three…”

Atman sits on the floor at the end of his bed counting stars. Atman does this every night.

They are glow in the dark ones for the ceiling, a birthday gift from Rosa. He keeps them in a tin box under his bed and each night lays them out, one by one, in front of him, counting.

Rosa wonders if this is possibly compulsive behavior but decides to let Atman be, as he is not harming himself in any way. Instead, she encourages him by buying him another package of them. Atman is so thrilled by this that he begins to save change that he finds under his bed and around the house. Over what feels like ages to young Atman, he finally saves five dollars. He walks to the cornerstore on the way home from school to buy something for Rosa. He is so disappointed to find how expensive the flowers are. He buys one pink rose and spends the rest of his money on a chocolate bar that they’ll share.

11 Years passed as mother and son grew. Atman entered high school and soon found his niche among those who sat on the steps to the library, eating lunch and discussing Vonnegut. He learnt of new authors from his friends, Kafka consumed him and Joyce broke his heart. He began to see his friends outside of school, hanging out in their basements, smoking pot and discussing existentialism. Atman continued to smoke and read, time passed and he graduated high school with honors.

His junior year of college Atman fell in love. His name was Robert and he had a girlfriend. Atman pined in silence. He wrote poetry and stopped eating. He lived off cigarettes and coffee. Drunk at a party, Atman resolved to tell Robert. He wrote him a letter, it took him all night and by morning he gave up. The next day Robert and his girlfriend, broke up. Atman was elated.

He decided he would inscribe his copy of Plato’s Symposium and give it to Robert.

Atman sits against the sticky red booth, jostling his knee nervously. He fingers the thin book in his lap.

Where is he? It’s 8:39, he’s not coming. Fuck, he’s not coming. Please, God, please let him show. Shit, there he is.

Atman nods to Robert, watching him walk over to his booth. He chews his lip, floundering for something to say.

“Hey, have you been here long? I’m so sorry, Mara brought over my stuff. It was such a disaster.”

“No, don’t worry, I just got here. What happened?”

“She had some of my books and clothes so she brought them over at like 4 today and then ended up being there up until 20 minutes ago just berating me for not wanting to keep trying to be together. But I mean, I just couldn’t. It just wasn’t working.”

“I’m sorry, that’s rough. Are you doing okay?”

“Thanks, yeah, I’m fine. It was over. We haven’t had sex in months--” “Hi there, what can I get you both?”

The waitress surprised them both. Atman choked on his own spit and coughed.

“Uhm, I’ll have a tea.”

“Coffee, please.”

Robert was readying to leave as Atman flicked the pages of his gift, hidden under the table. Atman placed the book on the booth next to him and stood, he smiled to Robert and left the diner. Robert, finding the book, called after his friend but Atman had already left.

Atman didn’t hear from Robert for a week. A week spent chain smoking and brooding.

On Sunday, Atman found a letter outside his door, it was on composition paper and titled “my dear soul.” Atman sat on the ground and read. Tears began to poor down his face. He put his head on his knees and rocked.

Atman was devastated, he took to bed and refused to open the door. He couldn’t write, he couldn’t eat. Atman began to waste away. Robert began to visit in the mornings but

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Atman refused to see him. Atman decided to take time off, wanting to escape Robert and his own embarrassment. He went back and lived in his childhood bedroom with his tin box of stars. Rosa was overjoyed to have her son back and took it as her duty to keep him well fed. Atman managed to stay out of bed in the day and snuck cigarettes in the small garden behind the house where Rosa had buried her hamster. Atman went back to school and took up classes with vigor. Robert had graduated and moved. Atman thought of him often. As the leaves began to change color Atman too felt a change, he stayed out later, drinking whiskey and dancing late into the night. He excelled in his classes and celebrated frequently. He lost touch with Rosa and soon with himself. He fell into a fit of despair, sought solitude but constantly felt lonely. He found salvation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He would read them in the tub, smoking cigarettes and letting the ash fall in the water.

12 Atman soon graduated and moved to France. He felt himself a young Camus. He read Balzac while smoking outside French cafes. Rosa and Atman kept in touch through letters, spilling their secrets and sharing their lives.

Atman is stocking books in the small, over packed room, humming.

“M…M.. MA…ah there it is, only one One Hundred Years of Solitude left” he thinks to himself as he continues to hum. There is little to it, a simple melody that he has forever hummed, unknowingly. His coworkers are simply sick of it, done with it, they will have no more. They’ve all requested separate shifts.

13 Atman sits on the hard wooden floor, with a worn, or well used as he would say, sketch book in his lap looking at Pierre sleeping on the bed. The mattress rests against the floor as they had little enough money to buy the bed let alone a headboard and box spring. He sketches Pierre’s face, almost from memory. He glances up frequently but simply to gaze at him. He spends a long time on Pierre’s eyelashes and lids. He begins to hum, it’s the made up tune from his childhood, filled with nostalgia and an ache for youthful oblivion. He finishes his sketch and slowly and quietly lays down next to Pierre. He turns his head towards Pierre and continues to look at his face, wondering about his dreams.

14 Rosa fell ill and moved to live with her sister, too weak to live on her own. Rosa waited to tell Atman, she knew he would come home and didn’t want to disrupt his life. Rosa decided it was finally time to tell him, Atman was devastated, he made immediate plans to travel to her. Atman arrived late at night and felt disoriented. He took the bus to his aunts, she quietly let him in and fed him as they discussed Rosa’s health. Atman wanted to know everything, his aunt answered what she could and sent him to bed. Atman dreamed of his childhood, trips to the park and stories before bed. Atman was woken up by Rosa’s humming in the kitchen. He rushed to her and jolted to a stop in the kitchen doorway. Rosa looked haggard, covered in blankets at the table, a steaming mug of tea before her.

Atman began to feel that he had lived his life already. He would become aware of the repeating nature of time at random moments and be awed at his own understanding and ability.

He believed that he unconsciously hid his skill from himself for his own sanity. Looking at the woman who raised him, who taught him love and care, Atman saw a hundred other times he walked into that same room. He knew then Rosa was dying, tears filled his eyes and he laid his head upon her lap. They comforted one another, utterly unable to process the inevitable. He felt a great loss but could still hear her hum, hold her hand.

57

Faial da Terra Jack Schreuer

Music wafts from the church whose door has no handle, so the boy knocks a giant’s knock, and glances over his shoulder to ensure the ancient, broken glass holds no more spirits.

Not until a village dog breaks the night’s soft choir of music and wave, is he torn from his reverence and dissipates into the tight winding streets, while the birds break into their sinister cooing to cover his retreat.

58

Antelope Canyon - Page, AZ 2017 Jacqueline Wolf

59

Change is Strange Jeff Dingler

Not long ago, when I was still drawn to that mysterious magnet known as the Mississippi, I uncovered a nautilus fossil not far from the Tennessee-Arkansas border, where the land churns like red butter into the infinity of those waters.

The South used to be the floor of some vast Jurassic swamp or sea, I forget which.

In the grooves of this fossil, nature keeps its history.

No stranger to change as the dust and mud reveal me.

Today, tomorrow and yesterday change is a hot-traded commodity, up in the Dow, down in the Nasdaq, two day super-shipping in the fast lane, change customizable, ordered up, hot and ready-to-go.

The hobo on the street asking me for some change, I told him to change his ways, get a better rate, exchange those rags for a business suit and some britches.

He just laughed and said: “We all know a range isn’t a sum.

This day and age a man can have twenty lives in a lifetime.

I’m just asking you for a little change.”

Every generation swallows the pit of its riches.

It’s been done to death and back a million times this age.

My friends are always telling me I need to roam and range, that all wise wordsters roam and range.

Rearrange some old teeth and get a new tongue.

“Change you can believe in!” But we change the channel.

Onto something new! Everything built for the times, none of it made to last. See how we age and distance so fast.

Two million years in the making, we’re living proof of the past.

And which end is the beginning nobody knows.

All our lying lives spent flying and when we finish everybody stops yet everybody goes.

Would you go back to before change existed?

Could you resist it? Or would the blackness then lead you back to now, wondering how it all got started?

That’s when a raindrop hits the shell-rock in my hand.

And looking down at the nautilus fossil I get a chill. For it tells me there are creatures 60

without words, without hearts, dreams or ears that have slithered through the dark untouched by change

for millions and millions of years.

61

Red Fields

Caroline Kutzin

62

Mad Red

Chloe Kimberlin The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally... She had been given something infinitely precious. —Virginia Woolf The memories are perverse, belonging to a past self; I am no rightful owner.

(A quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up…)

When every redhead makes me remember those fast, mad days, I feel perverse.

(A presentiment of something that was bound to part them...)

A sampling from my pirated treasure trove: your favorite song—Folsom Prison Blues; the peachy tint of your nipples; the way you hung clothing on your bed frame, how the long velvet dresses sometimes brushed our ankles; your bedside lamp with no shade; the number of drinks—red wine a bashful crescent above your lip— after which you’d sob, scream, hit the floor and wail like a wounded coyote; the sudden power that bloomed between us, frightening and enormous; the true feminine mystique: how I wanted to worship you, sacrificial and transcendent; the nightmares; the murmurs and thrashing; your mother’s knock on the door.

(In those days she was completely reckless…Absurd, she was—very absurd.)

I have no right to remember these coveted details, or feel any thrill at their intimacy.

They were given to someone I no longer recognize.

I have no right to nod, smile, to feel those memories shining a spotlight, releasing all those mad birds to flock around that mad love, a lightbulb, glaring and burning without a shade.

63

On Our Walks (Dear Hannah) Amy Milin

Don’t you love our walks? How we venture, always, from my house, how we drift, always, past yours (your mother’s), and peer up that street - we never mention it - to our old school, where we grew each other up. The bagel place still has a line out the door on mornings. A Japanese market has opened to its left. The triple-X video shop has dusty, breasty posters still, the same two decade-old mannequins in skimpy costumes. For ten years they wore nurse outfits, but today I’m surprised to see they’ve assumed new identities as sexy bumblebees. I point this out as an omen: isn’t that beautiful? I say. You can radically transform yourself at any time, after any number of years. I stay on the joke a bit too long. You give that indulgent smile you give - the one that’s like an apology.

The open sun assaults our humid heads, making stringy force fields of our hair, and I remember how I brushed yours through with dye. Sitting cradled by your bathroom floor, it drooped wet and heavy in my hands, and the spare toothbrush you keep for me gleamed orange on the shelf. I’ll see it again in a minute, when we get back to your house (your mother’s) to watch High School Musical again. I pretend to be as excited about our manufactured nostalgia, our dependence on our shared past, as I was when we first figured out that this was how to make our friendship work.

You speak in stilted tones, and I remember how we used to craft at school, how we’d coat our hands in Elmer’s glue, glowing white like ghouls.

We’d leave it on to dry looking like a fungus, like deadest skin, our fingers like some horror. And then we’d peel it off - a delightfully icky war on our own palms, yanking and stretching the translucent white, driving our nails under flaky film. But then the game was over, and we wanted our smooth, pink skin back, but that awful stuff just stayed right on. And we’d keep scratching it off and stripping it off and it became such a frustrating, tedious exercise.

You make some joke you’ve told before. I grudgingly offer a placid huff. I say something too conceptual, knowing you won’t get it, and I giggle, sticky shoulders shaking. You blink a moment too long, then your laugh shoots forth like a hairball from a cat.

The sun makes me sweat, and my embarrassment makes you awkward. It’s time to head home. The Rite Aid still stands dingy on the corner. The stationery store is having a supply sale. The hair salon’s got a fifth new owner, and a fifth new fancy French name. This walk’s a comfort, old and dear.

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2016/1620

Kathryn Gorson

65

L’Origine du Monde Origin of the World Eliza Mittlestead The sprawled tableaux of limbs and skin displays the origin of the world The tuft-crowned arch, the wooly gate, and entrance to the chamber of life.

Above the hairy diadem of the hip, dimpling the stomach: the navel.

Pool of air, in sea of skin, a memory of the cord and bond of blood.

Right breast and nipple rise, as tap and spout of life.

This Mary has no face, existing only as hips, legs, breasts, and the world-bringing womb.

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Dis-inherit for my brother.

Clara Moser

in dark waters where the universe sees its image distort my body became my brother’s body and then again, mine his breasts were my breasts we both bore the scars red and crude under our nipples.

I cried for loss of them, he loosened to become an endless pull away from the moon I drew so close to, whose image I tossed in and under he turned from and fell into the rift– So our body, his body, the body became a word un-coupled, a word with a memory whose root turned in dark braids of seaweed below us.

67

Untitled

Thomas Kilian

68

Mid-Autumn Moon

Translation by Kevin Wang Moon of my childhood, though you keep your distance, When did you begin to be?

What year is my dusk In the halls of heaven?

I would ride the wind and make my home there, but how I fear the cold!

Bound to this world, Moving in and out of your spell, I dance with shadows.

Circling round my chamber, Crouching behind the curtain, You listen to my sleeplessness.

Bearing no ill will, Why are you round when we are parted?

There is no end of vanities.

We have our sorrows and joys, our meetings and separations, The moon its waxing and waning.

May our lives be long.

May we share the moon’s beauty Though a thousand miles apart.

Su Dongpo

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The Fall

Rachel Goodkind Swaying in-sync with the rise and fall in the air around as if to say this is it, at last, this is it. With a small twist caused by dissenting winds and a nearly silent snap, free.

Away, at last, to a different place after months of this stagnant view. To get the chance to taste the air, untethered, like the others do.

To think that time spent up above was not the height of life. But this descent, falling to the ground, at last in death, alive.

70

Why They Burn for Ferguson Jeff Dingler

There’s that smell of smoke again,

my neighbor burning leaves across the lot, brown leaves worthy of being burned simply because they fell (and because they’ll rot his idea of a yard).

And it’s brown to black and then gray as all things rise.

And I hear the sound of smoke, too, wheezing over the TV and radio.

Smoke and sirens (both mythical and mechanical)

as if humanity’s a ribbon caught in a blaze.

Half the globe is burning to be free, waking to turn the light of the sun into the sugar of their lives.

And the other half is snoring through the haze.

Generations snoring for generations, fanning the flames as they wonder why they burn.

Looking up, I see this smoke that blinds the sky stings our lives.

“Maybe that’s why they burn,” the church ladies say.

To block out the sun, to make men crazy with a human eclipse,

with carbon, because the fire inside won’t let those blue eyes drift by without this scarification of smoke.

A gray river flowing to the sky, breathed of the live and let die.

And this smoke that fills my mouth, that grits its bitterness in me, does it blacken dreams as it blackens flesh—

will it boil the yolk of my yearnings?

We wonder whether dreams drivel or implode, or do they simply go up in a puff like a votive of a million burnings?

Do we smoke our dreams from two ends like a hapless fiend 71

or sip them with precious baby breaths?

When the smoke is all gone, do we see the hoax of hoaxes, or do we choke to death?

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Antelope Canyon - Page, AZ 2017 Jacqueline Wolf

73

The Stockings Speak

On Senga Nengudi’s “R.S.V.P. Reverie” (2015) Clara Moser we stretch without tear or run, we are living as much as the hands who made us are living.

We reach–– so we look like pressure coiled to spring. when making us, she took care to soften and spread our skin to all corners of the room to fill our hips with sands so we hung heavy not limp and could press our bosoms against a hard surface that would in turn press back then, from looking where you stood, you could hear the sound of blood rushing like sounds of blood rushing when two bodies lean into one another as the universe ticks.

74

Jazz

Amy Milin The Jazzers know them scoopin’ sighs fly high above the sleeper-eyes and shrink you down - them thick moans slip - yes, sound crawl down you back and licks dry lips (husky honeyflow drip) and whispers round them sour-tuned strings.

The bass sinks slow, that sad rhythm tips and tumbles, holds you home.

Yeah-huh, this Jazzer knows.

She hurts, she hums, her lonely blooms out from the lump in her throat, her glittering mouth has swallowed the night in lunatic howls, grotesquely divine.

And this she holds too in her heart, and this she sings too fine: She wants to be in love.

Somewhere there's walls and there's me.

My eyes are closed and things get gone they fade all to glistening, lonesome black.

This place is only melody.

The sound cuts off and air gets stale.

This room grows wider than an ache.

Suspended in that empty space, I wait like the saxophone wails.

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The Painter (Las Meninas) Maria Llona I.

I crack the door open slowly, quiet like a mouse. I know I shouldn’t be doing this, but that makes it better. I am Sherlock Homes, the world’s best detective. Solving the mystery of the Mystery Women. Just like I thought, there they are! From where I am, he covers everything except her head, but her face is pretty, like a girl from a magazine or a TV star. Which makes sense, since no one ugly is ever in a drawing. The drawing looks nothing like her though. Thick MagicMarker- black lines for her body, nothing for her face. His paintings don’t make any sense to me, and I’m sorry but there’s nothing pretty about them. There’s too many colours and shapes like unfinished monsters.

She’s too pretty for that. And there’s no way she’s comfortable, bent on the bed like the Egyptian sphinxes I’d learned about in class, facing the window.

She turns around and I gasp. This is it, I’ve been caught. But she doesn’t say anything, and her smile only gets bigger. He tuts at her and she looks back, but not before winking. I shut the door and fall against it, heart beating fast. Eight years old might still be little, but I know what a wink means: a secret! The thought of it makes my stomach turn, so I tell myself not all secrets are bad.

Mommy doesn’t tell Daddy when we get McDonalds after school.

And he didn’t tell her when we watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit, even though she said I wasn’t old enough. But who is this a secret from? Daddy’s right here. And Mommy has to know, there’s a reason she told me to stay away from their room. Of course she knows. Secrets are fun but families don’t keep secrets. The excitement dissapears.

I go to the kitchen to look for milk for my knotted tummy. When I walk past the bathroom the door is locked. I hear something underneath the sound of the shower, but I don’t stop to listen.

II.

Her sleeve is smeared bright red like the jam she’d put on my toast.

It’s weird, Mommy is the cleanest person I know. I point out the stain and she laughs, but it’s a nervous laugh, like it stings.

“I’ll be right back, honey,” and it’s quiet in the kitchen. I reach over the table to grab the sugar, only managing to knock it over. My eyes close against the smash, but it stays quiet. When I open them he’s standing in front of me, smiling, sugar in hand.

“Good morning, Daddy,”

“Easy there, minha Menina.” A nickname I don’t understand. Not pretty like Cupcake or Sweetheart. Just a word in a language I don’t speak. It 76

brings back memories of Madrid, standing in front of a painting the size of an elephant. Daddy saying “That’s you.”

“Which one?”

“All of them.” Which made about as much sense as the nickname itself.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Upstairs, she got jam on her shirt.” He frowns, which is also weird.

Daddy is the messiest person in the world, always covered in paint.

“Don’t worry, it comes off with dish soap. It happens to me all the time.” He smiles.

I like it when he looks at me like that, like I’m the only sunflower left in the world. After that look comes a big hug and words sweet like ice-cream.

“What is it, Daddy, is there something on my face?” Even though I know there’s not.

“Just your face, Aggie. Just the most beautiful face in the world.” Now I’m smiling. He picks me up and pulls me close. It’s warm and he only puts me down when Mommy walks back into the room. She’s wearing a different shirt but it has jam on it too, darker, almost like chocolate. Maybe we’re out of dish soap.

“Everything under control?” Daddy’s voice is always different when he talks to other people, more like Jafar than Aladdin.

“Yes Ricardo, everything is fine.”

III.

I sit on my balcony, watching the street. It’s almost midnight, far past my bedtime. I hear the door open and she walks onto the street, followed by Daddy. She’s even prettier in the moonlight. If I don’t breathe, I can hear their voices.

“Same time Wednesday?” he asks.

“Can’t we do this any earlier?” Is it past her bedtime too?

“You know I can’t.” He sounds tired. Maybe he needs a bedtime too.

She whispers something too quiet to hear but now she looks angry.

Not as pretty anymore.

IV.

“Do you miss them?”

“Miss who, baby?”

“Your mom, your dad”

“Oh. Of course I miss them, sweetheart. But sometimes you give up one thing to have another. I have you. And you’re all I’ve ever wanted.” She brushes through my hair slowly. It’s different from how Daddy does it. She starts at the top, trying to go through all the knots at once. But carefully, so it 77

doesn’t hurt.

“I don’t understand, don’t they miss you too?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure. It stopped mattering. I made a choice.”

“But why?”

“Someday you’ll get it, but you don’t have to worry about it now. All you have to know is how important you are. You’re the light of my life, Aggie.”

She tickles my neck and whispers into my ear. “You have eyes like nightfall and hair like sunshine. You’re the smell of fresh snow and the sound of the wind.

You’re the whole wide world.” I giggle.

She starts to braid. Whispering under her breath: over, under, over, repeat. “

You’re my whole world.”

V.

I keep my eyes shut tight, then relax them, biting the inside of my cheek to avoid smiling. Daddy shifts my weight in his arms, grunts.

“Shh, don’t wake her up. It’s late.”

“She’s too old for this, and too heavy.” His voice crackles around the words, his accent heavier when he’s tired.

I breathe like I’m whispering, counting to eight between each breath.

“She’s twelve, she gets to be carried to bed for a little longer.”

I smile and snuggle into him. If I was asleep, this would be a good dream.

“You know, I didn’t have anything like this growing up.”

He sounds like a sad smile.

“I didn’t either, really.”

“Of course you did. You couldn’t understand.” She sighs.

“Do you ever miss it.”

“Brazil?”

“Mhm.”

"There’s nothing there to miss.”

VI.

The laundry machine has gone from eating socks to eating shirts.

I find this out as I look for a top, blue and ruffly. Perfect for my first middle school Picture Day. But the dryer has eaten it for lunch. I crouch below it to search and in the corner of my eye I see a flash of sunshine. I reach between the machines to grab it. It’s a scrap of lacy fabric, pale like buttermilk. Underwear, if it can even be called that. With a little bow on the top, like a tiny present.

They look like the kind of panties Sarah would wear, but everyone knows how she is. I turn them around in my hand and over the tag is printed “Anna.” It’s written in sharpie, the handwriting curvier than my Mom’s on my sweaters.

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“Did you find it?” As she walks into the bathroom I shove them in my pocket. This isn’t something my Mom should have to look at.

“No, I think it’s gone for good.”

“Sorry, baby, we can go to the mall tomorrow to try to find something like it.”

“Awesome. Can we get some new underwear too? All of mine are getting old.”

VII.

“I saw your portrait, it’s good. You’re good.” It’s not and I’m not. Art has always been his thing. Something I understood in theory but couldn’t do in practice. When had he forgotten that about me? There was a time when everything he said was exactly right. At fourteen, that’s long gone. He can feel it too, the distance between us.

“Thanks, Dad.”

A woman walks past me into the room. A new model, I suppose.

“If you want to, maybe…” He’s nervous. It’s strange, he’s a confident speaker. “Maybe you could come watch. Watch me draw her.” It’s a weird request. Something I’ve always wanted to do but never thought I’d be allowed to. He can tell I think so, he thinks it too. Still, I miss him. So I say yes.

He introduces us: “Margarita, this is Jenny.” She has a unique face, with wide lips and eyes like raindrops.

She slides off the robe and saunters to the bed. Then lays down spread-eagle, on the side I know is my Mom’s. There’s an opulence in her nudity, in her marble-like skin. It’s the first body I’ve ever really looked at besides mine. There’s no point of comparison. I can’t see a hair on her. She’s more statue than human. I sit on the floor opposite her, where I can watch her, my dad and his hand on the paper.

His age shows, in his mottled skin and thinning hair. He’d had me too late. Last month he turned sixty-four. What does he look like to her? Like an old man, probably. He’s old enough to be her father. The thought settles in my stomach like lead. Then I can’t watch him and I can’t watch her, so I watch the drawing. I watch the arch of her foot connect to the curve of her calf, it climbs up her thigh and cinches at her hip. Time slows to a lull.

When I look up he’s looking at me. Looking at me while he draws, outlining the curve of her breast.

“What is it, Dad?”

“You’re beautiful, Aggie.”

VIII.

The crying pulls me to the bathroom. They’re not the freshman tears of late. This is different, desperate. The doorknob’s stiff but when I pull hard it 79

gives.

She’s sitting on the toilet, pants still around her waist, face hidden in her hands.

“Mom? Are you ok?”

When she looks up her eyes are bloodshot. I can’t remember the last time I saw her cry.

“Is it Dad? Is he ok?” She snorts. A confusing kind of sound, meant to mean many things at once. Her eyes are wild, like a hurt animal.

“Mommy?” My voice shivers, I haven’t called her that in years.

I drop to the floor and pull her to my chest. She cries harder. Loose, wet sobs that shake us both. She’s so small against me. I’m not sure when I grew bigger than her. It’s like holding a tiny bird, all thin bones and feathery hair.

I go to hold her hands but she flinches, so I cradle them against my chest. In fear of someone walking in, I reach out and lock the door behind us.

This doesn’t feel like something anyone else should see. The thought is followed by guilt. Was that my excuse every time I walked past the crying, separated only by the locked bathroom door?

“It’s all going to be okay?” But it comes out like a question.

IX.

I press my ear to their bedroom door.

What I hear is familiar. It sounds like a room in a house on Holland Drive, the night of Clara’s Sweet Sixteen party. Sean Baker on top of me, my eyes over his shoulder on the framed poster of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, which he’d told me his mom had bought for him before describing it as “inspiring.”

These are sounds I’ve heard before but didn’t understand. Whimpers and the slap of skin against skin.

I wish it was my mother in the room but I know it’s not. She’s back in the car. Neither of us should be here. We’re both meant to be at the hairdresser, but she forgot her phone and asked me to get it. Told me twice it was downstairs. The noise pulled me upstairs from the kitchen.

My chest aches, expanding with heat as things start to make sense.

Her crying and sadness. Her hatred for his art. Her insistence on leaving the house. As I move to leave I hear one last thing, a noise I’d never imagined I’d hear from his mouth. My knowledge of Portuguese now vast enough to understand when he groans out “Sim, minha Menina.” It’s been years since I’ve heard that word, about as long ago as it’s been since I stopped calling him Daddy.

Now even Dad makes me nauseous. Something like a cramp flowers low on my stomach. The nausea gets worse.

I walk back to the car and give her the phone. I don't say anything; she doesn’t need to hear what she already knows.

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X.

I hear them from my room. They’re so loud, I could have heard them from the street.

“Oh fuck you. I gave you everything, and it wasn’t enough. You still want more. Well shit, there’s nothing left! I gave up everything for you.”

“You can’t say that. You wanted it. You wanted to leave, to write. You hated them, and I was your way out. You don’t get to be such a child about this.”

“I was a child!” I can picture her rage, radiating from her like heat.

He towers over a foot taller than her. But it doesn’t matter. She’s titanic in her fury.

“You wanted to--”

“I had no idea what I wanted! And you didn’t care! You- You just used me and fucked me like one of those whores.”

“Look I’m- I’m trying here, but I can’t if you won't listen.”

“I’m tired of listening, I’m tired of your bullshit trying. I’m tired of you. I hate you. God I hate you so much. You’re the worst mistake I’ve ever made. And I regret it all.”

“What is wrong with you? How can you say that? We have a daughter.”

“Don’t talk to me about her. She’s my whole life. What’s wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with you. I see the way you look at her. She’s grown so pretty, don’t you think? It makes sense too, you always liked them young.” Her words drip with acid, they fall on the hardwood and sizzle.

I hear his hand slice through the air. “Fucking do it.”

But the slap never comes.

“You’re a coward. She knows it too.”

XI.

The silence pulls me to the bathroom. It’s a new type of silence, that tugs and leads. In my stomach I know something is wrong. Everything is too still. I pull hard at the door but it’s unlocked.

Relief blooms in my chest at the empty bathroom. But the bath in running, and when I take a step forward my toes feel wet. Dipped in reddish water. The pipe must be broken again, the rust spreading through the system.

It smells like rust, sharp and acrid. I walk towards the tub. The sound echoes when my knees hit the floor.

She’s staring back at me, unseeing. Her face is distorted underneath the water. She shifts with the ripples like a mirage. The dress she wore for my graduation spills around her, no longer white. I’m thirteen again, back at the Tate, looking at Everett’s Ophelia. I ask my mother why Ophelia smiled if she was drowning. I see the strange smile on her face in place of an answer.

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Where Ophelia’s arms were above the water, hers lie at her sides, palms facing up. Blood seeps from the cuts, creeps through the water like smoke.

When I reach into the bathtub it overflows further and the water laps at me, soaking through my pajamas, spilling into my mouth. It tastes like iron, like rare steak. The water is cold and she’s cold and I’ve never been this cold. I grip her chest and pull her close to mine in the hope of a heartbeat but it’s dead quiet. Her head hangs limp against my shoulder, teeth clicking with every gasp.

There’s too much air and I’m full of vomit. I hear screaming, but my mom’s mouth stays shut. ………………………………………………………………………………

What is it like to run out of blood? Do other things leak out with it?

It seems so slow and I don’t get where the line is, when you’ve suddenly lost too much too fast. Last spring I fell down the stairs and split my eyebrow. It bled for hours but I can’t remember the sensation of the bleeding, only the pain of the cut. So maybe it doesn’t hurt at all. Maybe it’s like exhaling, smooth and soothing. Maybe dying isn’t as bad as it seems. It has to be cold, but even a body full of blood isn’t enough to keep me warm today.

The fog is low, the wind vicious and I hate it all for making me wish the priest would hurry.

My mother never believed in God, this God who would condemn her for her choice, but no one seems to care.

The hole in the ground is chasmic, far too big for a woman her size.

She hadn’t wanted this either. She often joked about being frozen after death, like Walt Disney. She’d counter-quote Robert Frost and say that if her life couldn't end in ice, she wanted it to end in fire. She always hated the idea of worms getting at her body. That, as well, no one seemed to care about.

When it’s my turn to speak the speech dries in my mouth. I’ve been thinking about it for years. But it’s a speech for a warm day, meant to be spoken far in the future. A speech to be given with my father long in the ground.

When I try to start, I don’t remember it anymore.

I search my mind for the verses she’d recited to me in the place of nursery rhymes. Those come easily. When I open my mouth Emily Dickinson speaks.

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro…”

When I get to

“And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -”

my voice cracks, and the poem ends in a stutter. She’d always loved Emily Dickinson, truly believed she was the world’s greatest poet. I always found her works daunting, like things better left unsaid. Now I wished I’d listened.

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When I finish talking they start lowering the casket. I stand next to Ricardo. He pulls me close, and rests his head on mine. I feel his tears on my scalp. They do little to cool my anger, but I press closer. His hand on my waist moves to my hip, and lower. I don’t pull away until it’s time to toss a handful of dirt on the coffin.

The gravestone reads Virginia Wagner / Daughter, Mother, Wife / 1981-2017. Underneath it: “Do not go gentle into that good night,” a poem she’d always hated. ………………………………………………………………………………

When he walks into the room I follow him, unsure about where to go, not wanting to be alone.

It’s all set up, an empty canvas on the stand, paintbrushes next to it. It makes sense that he be with one of them while she died.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in this room. It used to be a place of mystery and wonder. An Ithaca, an unreachable goal. Now it’s just too warm, the air stale from lack of circulation. I touch the bed, it feels cold and foreign. Likely how it felt to my mother. I’m bloated with salty tears, like I’ve swallowed an ocean.

I look back at the canvas, then between it and Ricardo. In his eyes is a question. This is the longest time we’ve spent together in years. Maybe I’ve gone crazy too, as something unquestionably insane now feels unavoidable. I nod. He picks up a paintbrush. I move to take off all the black I’d worn to the funeral.

My coat falls to the ground like an oil spill, spreads around my feet like a grave. I shift my weight unto my heels and hope to sink. I shed my dress and stockings. They’re followed by everything else.

I lie on the bed. I curl my body tight, knees pressed to my chest, like I’m going to sleep. I look at my father. Neither of us are breathing. The air feels dirty. It thickens and congeals. He slices through it with the brush, dipping it in paint.

I see myself in the mirror across the room and I’m back in junior year AP Art History, studying Goya’s The Nude Maja. I argue with the teacher about the lack of importance of anything but the body in nude portraits, about the falsity of the faces. I claim they’re an expression the painter picks, brushing it over the model’s own discomfort. ………………………………………………………………………………

When the brush stops moving I get up. My body creaks from lack of use. The distance between the bed and Ricardo is vast. No more light is coming through the window. There’s no knowing the hour. I look at the painting.

It’s different from any of his other work. There are no bold strokes or excesses of colour. The skin looks like skin. Before it’d always been charcoal, but this is oil. I’ve been watching him paint my whole life and I never knew 83

he could do realism. Maybe he’s more like Velasquez than I ever believed. As though to punctuate my thoughts, written on the top right corner of the painting: “La Menina.”

(“That’s you.”

“Which one?”

“All of them.”)

And it makes sense. On the canvas I’m all of them. My namesake: Margarita Teresa, and all the girls around her. Anna, Jenny and the models whose names I never knew. I’m my mother, what’s left of her. If I look hard enough, I can see myself. My face feels wet and when the tears start falling they spread the paint, deforming a kneecap, concaving a wrist. I let them fall until we’re all gone, only a mess of colour left.

“Aggie.” But I can’t look anymore.

I walk out of the room and close the door behind me, quiet as a mouse.

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Burn Away

Daniele Hollander You always talk about erosion Setting things on fire But you don’t think of the way You corrode the bones of the ones who adore you Who still feel your hands running down their back Who shutter at the thought that they are merely shackled to their broken anatomy And the fissures created That linger like carbon half lives Long overstaying their welcome

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