Sprung Formal Issue 14

2019 Staff Sydney Sanders Sade Coffman Chloe Thompson Megan Videmschek Coral Rose Suzanna Haydt Holly Nowak Quinn Doll Jade Jarzombek Evan Williams Paul Passafiume

Faculty Editor Jordan Stempleman

SPRUNG FORMAL WOULD LIKE TO THANK: KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice Malynda Eshleman Phyllis Moore KCAI Print Center: Casey Holden Marie Langdon

To view past issues please visit: SPRUNGFORMALKCAI.WIXSITE.COM/MYSITE

Sprung Formal is a literary arts journal published annually in association with the Liberal Arts Department at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Established in 2005, Sprung Formal is a literary magazine edited and produced by students who pride themselves on combining professional content with professional-grade student work.

Poems from Peter Mishler are reprinted from the full-length collection Fludde (Sarabande Books, 2018).

A very special thanks to Midland Paper for their generous support.

Contact information: 866.204.9700.

Table of Contents Peter Mishler

David Welch

Blind Minotaur Led by a Child p.1

Frog p. 16

Little Lord Fauntelroy p.2

Robert Creeley Watching the

Central Casting p.3

Polls p. 17 Passages p. 18

From The Overflow Hotel p.4

Candice Wuehle

Cameron Morse

Twin Studies p. 19

Lightening p.5

Katharine Suchan

Chloe Thompson Dammit Bobby p.6 Cameron Morse The Dinner Bell CafĂŠ p.7

Journey of a Juiced Junior p.20 Kristi Maxwell In Memory of the Sound of a Silent Letter p.21

He Said, She Said p.8

A Whole Globe p. 22

The Oneironaut p. 9

Michigan p. 23

Blessing For An Old Dog p.10

Kylie McConnell

Jonathan Bennett

Bollards Study p.24

07 p.11 David Welch At the Welcome March p. 12 Body Applications p. 13 Parable of the Volta p. 14 Nathan Lewis Running With The Blue p. 15

Jermaine Thompson A Broken Shovel in which Michael Jackson Channels Gil Scott-Heron & Moonwalks the Sun p. 25 Self Portrait With No Flag p. 26 Arianna Bonner UNTITLED p.27

Megan Videmschek

Brett Salsbury

3/2018 p. 28

Thank Mom For Choosing life p. 43

1/2018 p. 29 Jonathan Bennett Scout Dearth

012 p.44

Average Midtown p. 32 Jermaine Thompson Susana Cardenas-Soto

After His letter to Lydia Parker John p. 33

Bixby, Abraham Lincoln Writes to the Mothers of the Un-Armed,

Katharine Suchan

Dead p.45

Twilight in the Viable Village p.34

A Golden Shovel to the Gods of Yesterdays p.46

Bobby Haulotte Socks p.35

Chloe Thompson Lincoln Nubrasky p. 47

Charlotte Seley Crazy Beautiful Life p.36 Betsy Eats Bling p. 37

Paige Edson Excerpts from Pavement to Iron p. 48

Paige Nicole Gordon I Just Ride p. 38 Bring me to life p.39 Danny Caine

Scout Dearth Teeth p. 49 Brad Volger

Dillons p. 40 Kara Lewis

from Works & Days p.56 Jacob Ford

Bringing My Breakup Texts to Workshop p. 41

Window Shopping p. 60

Natalie Stein

Brett Salsbury

Rory Gilmore and Lindsay Lohan

If You Die Today, Where Will You

Trapped in the Belly of a Sperm

Spend Eternity? p. 71

Whale p. 61

Surrender Dorothy p. 72

Untitled p. 62

The Caspian Sea p. 73

Rachel Abramowitz The Dream of Happiness p. 63

Danny Caine The Flavortown Citizenship Test, with One Trick Question p. 74

Ronald Dzerigian We Watch Our Dog Eat Flowers

The Wienermobile Sonnets: The Hotdogger’s Wish p. 75

p. 64 Robbin Bates Suzanna Haydt

Cool Side of the Pillow p. 76

Home under an Atrium for Dodo Birds p. 65

JoAnna Novak Nucleus p. 77

Bobby Haulotte Coffee table p. 66 Alicia Mountain Directions Illustrated for

Itemized Pastoral p. 79 The Field p. 80 Chloe Thompson Phone Quotes p. 81

Global Retail p. 67 Cephalopod Shallow Water Secret p. 68

Ruth Williams Ordinary Portraits p.82 Breakfast At Tiffany’s p.83

Nathan Hoks Ode on Body p. 69

Julia Monté $399 Divorce p.84

Lisa J. Maione A Living Room p. 70

BLIND MINOTAUR LED BY A CHILD To her I must seem vulnerable because I cannot die.

I let her guide me up the staircase, and we do not touch a single wall.

She moves my hands over the drawings in her notebook and I cannot see, but graze the words on the opposing page: aurora borealis written backwards, and a box which she has checked off in reverse.

Peter Mishler

My eyes are the husks of stars and as blank as the javelin thrower’s mind.

It dwarfs me now: the chime of horseshoe players in a field, an oven door half-opening in the woods behind the school.

A pinecone sinks into the mire beside the village, a delivery boy balances two quarts of steaming broth between his hands.

All these have withstood my unlooking.

Dog-faced leviathan, to have languished in my dingy, vaulted penitence, I long to reemerge like the figurehead of a ship into the blue of the fire’s spectrum, into the perfect sight of the bird.

1

I failed to memorize the giant’s face.

I failed to return with a flake from his mask.

I dropped a bottle of cinnamon Glade down the well at the mountain’s side.

In a shower stall of my old dormitory, I slaked my thirst against the dripping wall.

I did my coursework before I was ready.

I came to, spitting up tricolored foam.

Please have a little modesty, dangling sword on its string above me: stop giving me that cosmologicaltea-cake-in-the-throat sensation!

Little Lord Fauntleroy’s the name: loyal customer, rewards cardholder, and rest assured, when I’m in my tomb, my collar will still be starched with the smoke of the pheasant breasts served peasant-style in our family jet scraping over the sea.

Yet I do doff my cap to the factories’ runoff.

I’m on a new medication now.

I kiss all babies and persons of interest like a feather touching the lion’s singed mouth.

Excuse me while I adjust my crotch on this off-white vinyl triclinium couch before the first piped notes of my eclogue resound and I am raised up high on a weightless cloud to my second life on the good side of midtown at Child of the Hushed Eraser school.

In its glass-display-case-lined hallowed halls, a great American debate has begun– whether or not one should lie about the U-Haul mileage (how quaint, what fun!)– and poor Calpurnia, freshman, sulking alone in the school’s herbarium: for each of my former life’s crimes, we split a ring of cocktail shrimp in the sun.

Peter Mishler

LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY

2

CENTRAL CASTING He answered the call for Pale Christ With A Nordic Touch.

I was reading for His Jailor With The Hundred Eyes.

In the emptied banquet hall, I opened the accused’s mouth wide.

Released his frozen burst of flavor crystals to the air.

Seawater dampened the inner lining of his diadem.

How did he find his way to central casting hauling his triple-glass cross atop his shoulders, scanning the road for traffic before the overflow hotel?

Peter Mishler

Born as he was in his mother’s esophagus, chewing shards of her childhood’s globe in its dark while she waited in line at the adult-sized chessboard, a young, green corn husk like a garland in her hair.

Or a flower on a distant wave.

A boatsman ferrying the jailor toward it.

He who would hunt them, mother and child.

He who would eat them beneath his curtain of blood.

The prow of the boat as it reached her body: the shape of a pyramid mounting Snow White.

3

To purchase a little land, to take a little shut-eye beneath the friezes of the state, to learn the position of the heavens inlaid on the ceilings of our country’s Westins, yes, it is a substantial day for toweling off a courtyard statue in the sun.

At quitting time, I press my forehead to the hallway’s ice machine, and see a blood-red curtain draped across a field, and the vast epidemic of the soldiery overstepping what an ugly year it was for marching us out to the bluffs to face their god, though we did look preternaturally beautiful in our uniforms like a somnolent hand holding a violet to its nose.

And each morning woken by the pole of the super, each morning sprung at the drill of the whistle out of my hibernaculum, indelibly bound to my mission to swiff the garbage from the fountains, to reset the scoreboards, to polish the skywalk, to shoo the R&D children away from pissing out over the tremulous vistas, and each night in my sleep mask atop the bedspread’s flowered maze, I wait to hear the rippling of the elk in the ravine below.

He is carefully rinsing off his family’s pyrex in the flood, his song as old as woe.

Peter Mishler

FROM THE OVERFLOW HOTEL

4

LIGHTENING Western sky still gunmetal, a tail pipe smoking in Walmart parking lot, its long white exhale rolls out like an albino dragon. American crows descend to inspect a Happy Meal, its limp fries and burger flung out the car window, crescent bites in the shape of a mouth. East and west, now and then, I walk home with my groceries.

Cameron Morse

Sun rising over the golf course, I walk home. The lightening sky is cerulean, I say, and salmon, the color of its clouds.

But don’t listen to me. Take care not to step on the squirrels. Where once you slid the shovel’s head under their bodies and carried them home, where once you held the dead in the cradle of your mind, now take care, take care.

5

Chloe Thompson DAMMIT BOBBY

6

THE DINNER BELL CAFÉ In Eagleville, Missouri where my parents split cinnamon rolls as Graceland undergrads, I order a veggie omelet with cottage cheese.

Upstairs Lili breastfeeds in the Chapel, a lamplit broom closet complete with an altar rail and Holy Bible splayed among sermons on cassette CD, a stand of tracts FREE FOR OUR TRUCKER FRIENDS. Beside the door, slot machines sport manga girls in string bikinis, coinless plastic buckets tossed

Cameron Morse

at their cartoon feet, empty cups, empty hours, showers behind locked doors. The lounge coffee table holds an empty ashtray and TV remote. My son suckles like a leech in the blood light of the chapel. Semis idle at the pump, stalled, waiting for drivers.

When the pigtailed waitress comes back, I imagine her a trucker’s wife, her life flipped into a ditch like her husband’s livelihood in the blizzard I weathered to arrive at my father’s sperm, my mother’s egg.

7

HE SAID, SHE SAID The sound of wind hurrying dry leaves across the cul-de-sac could be mistaken for the patter of rain the way we sometimes say the opposite of what we mean.

When you said, I am so glad you are my friend in the middle of an intersection, what you meant was I’m not capable of being by myself, the sound of the wind raking oak leaves is too much for me. Let me slip my hand into your pocket.

When you said, you’re going to be fine, you’re so talented, you’ll meet other people, what you meant was I’m afraid.

I’ve never loved anyone the way you love me, I don’t even love myself particularly, I don’t deserve to be loved.

Cameron Morse

When I said I couldn’t come, what I meant was if I came, I would never be allowed to leave.

The sound of a wood pecker headbanging in the orchard could be mistaken for the downspout. That said, I don’t know why I read so much in Yantai, why I got so upset when you all ganged up on me in Risk.

8

THE ONEIRONAUT I try to recall my dreams to my year-old son.

How I led you, or so it seemed, with a stalk of stir-fried, leafy vegetable, arugula, perhaps, God knows how you love that, toward the parking garage. SuďŹƒce to say he lacked a genuine interest and the manners to feign it. At some point, he brought down the fruit cart, scattering yellow pears,

Cameron Morse

plums and avocados all over the carpet. Last night, when at last you came to bed, I pretended to be asleep even as your toes iced my calf and you basked in the warmth of my body.

9

BLESSING FOR AN OLD DOG Ever watchful, black-eyed and black jowled, and black jowls dangling, have you gone blind looking for me at the gate or resigned yourself to solitude? Will you see me on a spring morning and rather stay in the shade than mosey over to meet my hand? I would lower my hand over the twisted rusty wires to smooth the patch of white fur on your forehead. We are connected.

Can’t be bothered to bark or get into

Cameron Morse

arguments. Abandoned, each to his own, with only the other for company, we grow old. Let the yard go to the birds.

10

Jonathan Bennett 07

11

AT THE WELCOME MARCH

after Hopkins Goddess with hooker hangman your headboard, Group, and graft you, bridle, your bedroll With lissome scoundrels, swindle scoundrels, Out of hallowed boilers bred.

Each be other’s commandant kink: Déep, déeper than divined, Divorcee charm, debacle charm, fate you ever, fate bind.

David Welch

Then let the March tread our yearnings: I to him turn with teases Who to wedlock, his wooer wedlock, Déals tríumph and imperfection yelps.

12

BODY APPLICATIONS

a translation for Jack Spicer The stars dam our shadows in your heart which is where babies come from one hundred golden

David Welch

crickets chirr their choir the moats of their mouths darkening in rivers of light

13

PARABLE OF THE VOLTA after Ben Lerner Snow, real or otherwise, blankets the end of the year. That’s what we’ve been waiting for, anyway, something to ingratiate our colder constitutions. Suffering seems more the more you expect not to suffer it. Or whatever. I could go on, etc. (Such is the nature of going on.)

And then, when the sun appears again we all think we’re all the better for it.

We pick up another bucket and turn the wheel, steer clear for each other. Or, we’re sure our stomachs will turn again. That said,

David Welch

we drive ourselves through such dreadful lulls.

This chicken is awful and/or I think I love you.

14

Nathan Lewis RUNNING WITH THE BLUE

15

FROG

a translation for Jack Spicer I like the novels that make me come like a frog into poolwater or the particular green leaf that heaven remembers of happiness.

You can still breathe in through your own nose though your heart is full of water.

You can smell the single black smoke of a pinefire.

David Welch

The black forest above a bed of single green needles.

16

ROBERT CREELEY WATCHING THE POLLS He thinks these days what isn’t a religion? Why is this question different from all other questions? A referendum If I were looking for work

David Welch

now I would be a process server It’s going to be a long night for months

17

PASSAGES

a translation for Jack Spicer with the letters of the alphabet spell what you are hearing at the moment of your death the words are correctly spelled

David Welch

as if your heart will ever let you hear the moment it breaks

18

TWIN STUDIES A doctor who did not expect the second Head. No time, even, to know what to name It. One twin Sometimes absorbs the other; an ancient osmosis Or, the craft of poverty. You’ve caught

Candice Wuehle

Me at the very moment I am in the middle Of changing masks, Obsessed with my own skin. It turns out There is something pink in-between false face And false face. I’ve thought a lot about If the difference between a monster and a monster-mask is anything Other than the outfitting; if it was the orchard Grew the fruit or the mother made The pie of it. Expectational error; folk Tale. Of my own aspirational Witchcraft, the last gift I would give myself Is not to flinch. Everyone enjoys an odd image.

I look at the holdings of the Victorian Zoo. Hippo on a leatherette leash; white rabbit freaked with silver ink; an elderly boa slung not like, but as, an Accessory to a wealthy man. Everything Comes from somewhere and I don’t think it goes Back. In these ways, authority breeds Problems. The best would be to only gauge Myself against myself except I inhaled All the words to describe me; the measuring tape To tell the tailor how poor to make me is within So I eat my hunger to Grow fat and rich. Boss artist Slurping history, with ease Becomes the body’s fascist; can watch the old Other starve on command all day After the camouflage of the audience is affixed. Will I walk through the world with a mirror, Then, and assure myself I see myself? I will Walk through the world with a mirror.

19

Katharine Suchan JOURNEY OF A JUICED JUNIOR

20

Kristi Maxwell

IN MEMORY OF THE SOUND OF A SILENT LETTER You have your Zen moment I’ll have my brazen one A ghost’s ghost is its ‘h’ Teaching me To be my own ghost Teaching you It is our own death That haunts us Do haunt and hunt share The same root Or just the same feeling?

Does grass ever tire Of being armed With its blade or of metaphor Which armed it— It could have been legs Of grass Doing a synchronized Swim routine In the pool of earth Into which it dove

21

A WHOLE GLOBE

Kristi Maxwell

I hit the wrong heart Three times I flew the wrong paper plane The word was waste The work, too Because disposable Packaged to be so Which brand of existence Should we sample This time Without forgetting To cancel Before we’re charged O bull of commerce O Capital Bully O fashionless comma Not an earring after all Though you sit in my lobe I hear you In the pause I make a whole globe of you And move myself A mountaintop More vulnerable than Than an excessive word In an editorial eye It wasn’t my imagination It wasn’t yours O fashionable coma From which we’re expected To wake up

22

Kristi Maxwell

MICHIGAN What fool am I? Whose foil?

With a tin ear I hear the flower’s flatline winter has resuscitated.

On cue I was rescued. Uncool I was destroyed.

My own ravaged Troy I horsed around with.

Suspended within a school of frozen fish.

Whose map may I Michigan? Whose mission may I give a saintly name and thwart? War is no fever so does not leave.

We reckon with its rawness, clean up like children unused to chores.

23

Kylie McConnell BOLLARDS STUDY

24

Jermaine Thompson

A BROKEN SHOVEL IN WHICH MICHAEL JACKSON CHANNELS GIL SCOTT-HERON & MOONWALKS THE SUN Remember how in ’95, I screamed & hissed & held up my fist to the Brazilian sun. Remember us knifing each other in subways, us hooping on tire-rim dream-catchers, us living drumhead tight in cement houses, painted with flecks of rusted rainbow as thin as my Oludum t-shirt—remember us needing proof that a favela in Dona Marta was the projects in Gary, USA. Though it was a ways from “We Are the World,” a ways from my jheri-curl skin graft Spike and me eased us on down that road to say the police is the police is the police.

You don’t think them jivin’ crows pecked off my nose only to see me pop & lock, do you? My whip-kick has long been upside the head of prison pipelines. That mash-mash-mash of a phantom Kool down into the face of the cobble-stone street ain’t just the preamble to the grab myself here, swagger across there, swiggle and hee-hee-hee. I dance victory for the shook and the shambled, the bodies that be most victim: The Save Our Water Sioux be Women hash-tagging me-too be Migrant Workers fleeing Alabama be Queerfolk warring with Kentucky zealots for the right to wed be all us conscribed under the same new marching order now. Time is the sun, too huge & orange for the sky now. Today, the word to have is resistance. Welcome how it whitens our teeth, adds bounce to our curls, bends skin to our names yearning to be the same breath stroke as free as patriot as people. I don’t have to tell you ghetto brother-sister-honey-child what I’m saying. What I’m saying is for them who now write the letters to congressmen who now jam the phone lines at the local office who now shout down the sun when the sun ain’t too afraid to peek his head in his own town-hall & admit we got no rights to his privileges.

To them I’m saying welcome, welcome, welcome to the revolution. ¹

¹ “Us living as we do upside down / And the new word to have is revolution”— end words taken from “Comment #1” by Gil Scott-Heron.

25

SELF PORTRAIT WITH NO FLAG after Safia Elhillo I pledge allegiance to my Momma’s hamburger casserole to Route 2 Box 262 B, to fried bologna with the burnt edges sandwiched ‘tween light bread, to chitlin’ funk on New Years, to Blackburn Syrup & salmon croquettes, to Wesson oil on Friday nights gurgling to “Green Onions” & “Wang Dang Doodle.”

Jermaine Thompson

I pledge allegiance to spades hands, to four & a possible, to running Bostons, to getting set, to Aunt Tootie’s red velvet cake.

I pledge allegiance to St. James Presbyterian to the blue hymn book & The Songs of Zion.

I pledge allegiance to my Daddy’s ’92 Mazda twenty two hundred, to the cassette of Rick James’ Greatest Hits he kept in the tape deck, to T. T. Jack loud talking the thrill out the Devil.

To be honest, yes, I am feeling some type of way.

Like we got static. The way “black” is being deployed in the national narrative, is too often at the margins, too often lined in chalk, too often preceded by viewer discretion advised.

Nah, I choose to play that’s my car through the school bus window. I choose aunties named Lucille & Opaline, Oddessa & Johnnie Pearl. Unshakable nicknames like Putt, Frog, Tay Tay, Coon Foot, Moochie I choose not knowing government names until they are printed on the obituary. I choose summers catching purple winged butterflies, the practical science of feeding grasshoppers into anthills. I choose the Milky Way smeared across the forehead of Black heaven over the red clay hill down Highway 25 Because that’s the country where I was born.

26

Arianna Bonner UNTITLED

27

3/2018

Megan Videmschek

PENCHANT RAW THUMBS MEASURING SENTIMENT AS LONG AS IT LASTS TOOL OF CHOICE THE INIMITABLE RHYTHM WHAT IS GONE IN THE MIDST OF A POWERFUL HEAT IN THE FRESH SCENT OF GASOLINE ANOTHER SKIN IN A GLOSSARY A SHOTGUN TONGUING THE TABLE A FAMILIAR ROOM PEARL ETERNITY

28

1/2018

Megan Videmschek

SANCTUARY THE SIGHT OF SHIVERING A CATHEDRAL BELL DRINKING FROM THE TAP FAITH LIKE MILK THE SMELL OF HOT METAL OF CANDY OF LOST SPACE OF ALL THAT WENT BEFORE. THE SKY AT ALL TIMES ROLLED INTO A BED OF TAR WET KNUCKLES A BLANKETED WINDSHIELD NOSE SNOW STIFF TEN THOUSAND LIGHTYEARS AND MORNING AGAIN

29

30

32

SECTION II

33

34

35

33

36

Scout Dearth AVERAGE MIDTOWN

Here we are, talking about you, surrounded by alive things. You know what Abby’s apartment looks like: the wide windows, the endless plants. Your art is everywhere. On the walls, the refrigerator, the bathroom.

Ali’s cat, Toadi, scampers around the living room, chasing the invisible, while Abby’s cat, Johnny, rests on a nest of blankets. Johnny is a black kitten, with sharp triangle ears and small streaks of gray in his fur. Abby tells me he has to be put down next week, names some acronym for a rare disease I cannot remember. Johnny lifts his head in recognition of his genetic vulnerability. He can barely open his eyes, breath ragged, his spine curling out of his back like a bridge. I pet him, remembering he is named after you.

It is freezing outside. For this reason, we sit in your favorite seat and smoke cigarettes next to the open window. Out on the roof, your pile of butts from over the summer shudders in the snow.

For the first time, I think of you in the past tense.

Abby tells me stories about you. She tells me of blackouts and eating burgers on your kitchen floor, and I remember you, your big brown eyes, your countenance like a tender animal lifting its head to say hello.

We hold an involuntary silence. We are a small part of the constellation of people who love you.

Susana Cardenas-Soto

JANUARY 25TH, 2019

37

38

Katharine Suchan TWILIGHT IN THE VIABLE VILLAGE

39

Bobby Haulotte SOCKS

For someone who is self-proclaimed crazy, you are so well-adjusted. You carry your crazy like it’s a badge of decency, a real honor. I struggle to find beauty, in myself and in this life. I take child’s pose at yoga even when I don’t need to, because sometimes I just don’t feel like it.

What is this love you speak of? I’m in love with the downtrodden, the punishment for breathing into a life unhappy despite the abundance of things I am grateful for. Depression is weird like that. One of the first questions they’ll ask you is if this is hereditary, and I always say, It went likely undiagnosed. When I think about the women who share my genes, I don’t think of sanity, or rather there’s a spectrum of sanity and we drag to different levels. I’m a woman in drag as a woman who knows for sure this life is beautiful. I see the shiny guts of it and want to forage for them all. There’s a lot of mud to dig through, and pulling past fields of useless weeds. Life can be incredibly funny, like the ice cream commercial that inquires Are you scoopin’? and how I thought they were saying Are you stupid? Or how we whine all winter for summer then melt into sadness over the extreme heat. My friend and I mispronounce words on purpose based on how they are spelled. Try it. You can’t not laugh. It’s truly a beautiful trick to employ.

Charlotte Seley

CRAZY BEAUTIFUL LIFE

40

I don’t remember his name but I remember his car’s name: Betsy. I lost a rhinestone earring inside. He texted, Betsy eats bling. I saved him in my phone as “Lost Earring.” What the hell was his name? Who cares. Not me. He’s one of plenty. There’s the sleeping with me while I’m sleeping, the rockstar rides cocaine sprinting in my periphery, a calculated catastrophe, and a bored game I liked to play called lowest common denominator. I don’t feel bad about my behavior. If I had fun tattooed on me, then you should know better. If I had all the names tattooed on me, I’d be black ink. I’d be covered in the stories these men make about me. I would be no different than I am right now. I forgot how to spin a web, about the brown recluse I really am when I’m alone with my thoughts. Sometimes I look in the mirror and have no idea who the ghost is staring back at me. I say, You are fun into her face. Her mascara is a black blushed bruise, a drippy dahlia of whatever. I want to be whatever forever. I want you to see the dahlia and not the disaster.

I’m running cold water over my wrists. Please don’t watch me break down in a public bathroom. Go to the bar and pretend you don’t know my name. Pretend my earrings are real diamonds. That there’s two and that I never danced, never said, never looked like I wanted anything other than one completely stringless night to myself. I’ve covered my tracks, buried my prints. Here’s my alibi: I was a leopard then. A leopard with impermanent spots. Only then did I know I was searching for a missing gem.

Charlotte Seley

BETSY EATS BLING

41

42

Paige Nicole Gordon I JUST RIDE

43

Paige Nicole Gordon BRING ME TO LIFE

DILLONS ยน

Dirty Dillons Fancy Dillons Regular Dillons Dapper Dillons Diaper Dillons Dino Dillons Druggy Dillons Silly Dillons SciFi Dillons Sexy Dillons Grocery Dillons Disco Dillons Tee-Shirt Dillons Jesus Dillons Saucy Dillons Boujee Dillons Dixie Dillions Tiki Dillons TV Dillons Chunky Dillons Super Chunky Dillons Baby Dillons Bad Dillons Rabbit Dillons Murder Dillons New Dillons Far Dillons The Dillons Where Nobody Gives a Shit Oprah Dillons Fruit Fly Dillons Starbucks Dillons Redneck Dillons Soulpatch Dillons Pothole Dillons Democrat Dillons Walmart Dillons Empty Dillons Turnpike Dillons Impulse Dillons Dimple Dillons Viper Dillons Biker Dillons Busy Dillons Best Dillons First Dillons Thirsty Dillons Turkey Dillons Sketchy Dillons All Night Dillons Donut Dillons Country Dillons Spring Break Dillons Fake Dillons Road Rage Dillons Dairy Dillons Scary Dillons Mr. Dillons Taco Dillons Bizarro Dillons Indoor Dillons Mini Dillons USA Dillons Kroger Dillons Dillons Dillons

ยน Dillions is a Kansas supermarket chain with 64 stores. It is a division of Kroger.

Danny Caine

@chancedibben: Dirty Dillons is a phenomenon and a concept. Every town with multiple Dillons has one. Inevitably, they are the best for reasons that are hard to articulate.

-1:35 PM, 10 Dec 2017

44

BRINGING MY BREAKUP TEXTS TO WORKSHOP Hi. Heyyy. Hello! (Decide on tone, what you connote with three y’s is that you want to have sex with him again.) (You shouldn’t assume the author is the speaker of the poem.) (But I wonder as I read… is this about me? Do you want to have sex again? Just as friends?) I know this is soooo random, but I forgot my earring, the dangly one, in the carpet of your blue shag rug. I hope she steps on it.

I hope you tell her how it fell out. (How?) (Who is “her?”) return it to me, in the bag where your mother kept your baby teeth. Or, leave it on my doorstep where you know I hide the key. Come in.

Kara Lewis

(I feel like it’s reductive to blame your relationship problems on another woman.) Or, please

Or don’t. (Is this line doing enough on its own?)

If you do, you will find a room that looks almost the same. You might trip on the skirt I haven’t hung up since you slid your hands underneath it. (Is this relationship only about the sex?)

You might see a calendar unturned from October. What I mean is I can’t look ahead at Christmas with our string lights still unraveled. What I’m saying is I picture you in my bed all the time (too direct). When the fitted sheet slips you are there to put it back on. You are there to say, Let’s wait until morning and we wake up and there is one

45

with muffins and bedhead and my earrings somewhere on the floor. (I’m not sure I understand anymore.) (Duh, heartbreak is supposed to be complicated.)

Read: 7:31 a.m. Fuck.

I’m sorry for sending that. I was drunk.

But, do you like this new bra? They put a tape measure around me and I thought of the last time we hugged. You said, I thought I would never be able to touch your hair again.

I’ve gotten it cut. I’ve switched shampoos. You wouldn’t be able to recognize me without my scent.

I was born without a sense of smell, so I always describe your neck with words men like to hear: Rustic. Mountain air. Sandalwood. Wood cabin where I puked from the altitude and you held me and said, I wish my nose didn’t work either.

I said, I guess I am lucky.

(Too much exposition.)

(Trust the reader. You don’t need to explain everything.) (Have you thought about taking a dialogue class?)

We know what we said. (I feel like this is taking me out of the poem.)

I want to take everyone else out of our poem.

Didn’t I tell you I feel naked without any earrings on?

46

Crickets try to sing me to sleep but it’s something more like white noise, or pure noise; a chorus of angels. Radiation from our nearby star.

Chemical signals that the local Oak trees are curious about the new neighbors.

Common Grass exuding a scent condensed into candles. Yelling for their dear lives.

Growth spurts to make up for the recent cuts. Roots share resources.

Dark matter changing our orbit ‘round the star. Coffee only thriving in the tropics. Sweet cedar, held by gravity. Sweet watershed, eroding this way. I drink from Clinton Lake and it tastes of paramecia. I drink from the faucet and it reminds me of sticky summers; cicadas, sticky cream.

All this movement and I can’t fall asleep. All this gravity, all this weight.

I sign a lease on the 3rd floor to get as far away from this as I can.

I grow a beansprout to climb higher. The sky is falling. But so am I. I’m quick to pull the radishes and carrots from the raised bed garden.

The vegetables aren’t done growing. I eat them to sprout, to become organic, to regrow from prairie fire and fertilize with my love. I submit myself to the hunting of coyotes. But the predators are not omnivores.

I sit on the deck to listen and there are flutters of angel wings, of feathers.

Knitting, my hands remember the patterns. So this is the quilt work.

Award-winning, too. I cover my head with the blanket and I wait. I will be fine.

Ever so gently, my hairs become patches of grass and my knees and elbows small hills. My hunched back, an outlier holler. My veins, rivers, canyons.

My chest, a small valley, alluvial plain. Please, give me to scorched Earth.

Please, wash this blanket by hand. There isn’t much more for us to do than to let our bones become soil.

Brett Salsbury

THANK MOM FOR CHOOSING LIFE

47

48

Jonathan Bennett 012

AFTER HIS LETTER TO LYDIA PARKER BIXBY, ABRAHAM LINCOLN WRITES TO THE MOTHERS OF THE UN-ARMED, DEAD 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, D.C [Date imminent]

I have seen the [body camera / Facebook live / surveillance / news-copter / witness-filmed] reports, and I have seen it vulgarly retold irrespective of your sorrow and anguish as the mother of a child who was insensibly [gunned-down / choked-out / rough-ridden] on [the street / in his car / at the service station / in the wet dark of his neighborhood] while [sitting in Algebra / listening to a reading of The Ugly Duckling / cos-playing the Dark Knight / boot-scootin’ to Jason Aldean, wicking dub-step sweat from their glow-stick pulses] in [Colorado / Virginia / Florida / Connecticut / Kentucky / California / Nevada].

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the acknowledgment of the [Republic / the systems / the history / the debate / the spin] they have died to [save / unearth / condemn / eradicate].

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the [vengeance / protest / anger / anger] in your bereavement, leave you the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn resolve that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of [of fear / of freedom / of fear / of fear].

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully, A. Lincoln

Jermaine Thompson

Dear [insert name],

49

God of culmination / God of placenta and phase / God of where did all the time go / I don’t recall when / trusting in you / more than Tomorrow / more than Now / began / but I worry / praying / more light / is cymbal clang / is gong rattle / is shovel / dirt / thump // Who can nurse nap to sleep / can click-bait rabbit-hole to bottom / can yes I am still watching / while there’s laundry birthing laundry on his bedroom floor / while syrup solders plates to silverware / while a mala adds 12, 874 / 75 / 76 blue diurns / but me // God / of gritted teeth / of caliber & soot / God of if I knew then what I / now am / I am fetal at your feet / on my couch / The day / slunk behind a slope of wilting vineyards / turned by hands / wishing for heyday & hum // Your liturgy is / all joy / count it / all joy / O God / of aching quiet / are you still watching me / ripen to ruin like this ²

² “Don’t worry, nurse. There is a god / Behind all this.”—end-words taken from The Odyssey, Book II, ln 396-397, translated by Stanley Lombardo, Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2000.

Jermaine Thompson

A GOLDEN SHOVEL TO THE GOD OF YESTERDAYS

50

51

Chloe Thompson LINCOLN NUBRASKY

from PAVEMENT TO IRON Division: The newest rock in the museum’s collection was separated from all the other rocks notborn in its era. They separated it from all the gems and mussels that experienced differentpressures. The rock’s department gets to decide how best to magnify it, what its best features are, and what frame it will sit in until the rock becomes new somewhere else.

All the similar sounding words would flock together to compare roots. Done sits next to Deny wondering how they came to speak in a similar manner. But Done also sits next to Dawn and Down, understanding they all have an end goal even if they also sit far away from Complete. But when pushed down and together they will arrive at sentences such as “Data findings sell Future manufacture surrounding burning fossil scaremongering” and “Knotweed tastes compass space about banality.”

They are waiting for the books to produce scenes they can press their paws into.

Their ears hold the gates open for the circling hum that tethers the brain’s muddy goo together. She could try to untangle the puddle’s thin membrane. She could “place it” by detailing images of its reflectivity and containment, or she could try to talk with it, to rub its belly and listen to the growing pool that could diminish within hours. A carrier pigeon wouldn’t necessarily open up your mail. The rubber duck would not speak in the same way as a mallard, but to converse one must be led by the water’s push.

The heavy weight that definition ties to an ankle brings analogy down with it. If the weight is broken in two, one finds plenty of eggs in the basket to string in the air for goo to walk across. Inside each are the ways in which they can be applied to speech: “You had me square vertical in advance of the deadline”, “Hammer on lumber”, and “I have circled the cul-de-sac several seasons.”

Paige Edson

They pushed down, down, down with their palms and soles inches apart, jumping and pounding on piles of books, waiting for the pages to become pulp.

52

53

Scout Dearth TEETH

54

SECTION III

54

55

55

WORKS & DAYS 4.5/9.15 approach unsee(n) in night pines letters

left a landscape

shadow shadow(s) your hands – hold passage still early sky

Brad Vogler

waking

56

9.3/4/5.14 swift wash of river sung & o

Brad Vogler

whirl of leaf lit stitched this this now shallow

57

7.29.14 a pause but mostly rain to come back to branchings reach in early in mind & back

Brad Vogler

to find a tangle getting to one one thing at a time

58

10.19/21/24/27/31.14 like any day approached to feel you’re in correspondence withwriting the same poem forever what you know against the lessening days a measurement of with/out or between belonging won’t keep you against this storm

Brad Vogler

you go at it blindly & beautifully music comes a distance stilled – but briefly

59

Jacob Ford WINDOW SHOPPING

60

Natalie Stein

RORY GILMORE AND LINDSAY LOHAN TRAPPED IN THE BELLY OF A SPERM WHALE At that point their teeth began to be felled out long and silvery. Rory crushed them up for the calcium, sprinkled handfuls of molar onto their shallots, their salt, there was always salt on account of the sea and the sweat that sprung from almost everywhere. There were two lights: at the top for the blow hole and a fire made from the exhausting cigarette lighter Rory had engraved in Nam. It said piss on. It said convince me I’m crying. It said Linsay my little Ishmael I love you tenderly. Eat up or you’ll catch scurvy! (there was a lemon seed found in the last diet pepsi, planted under the spout light in the first rotation of teeth) They measured their time by that. How many teeth ago? Their new teeth were growing into their gums like a ships tender filled with cannon balls and Rory cried and Lindsay Lohan passed her a fish to chew for the long haul. Oh your coat is small and drizzled, oh you are faint. Rory nursed and nursed. She was the best nurse in the world. She nursed Lindsay Lohan. Lindsay Lohan’s penis was tired out, puffing like a whale and with tongue hanging. The acoustics proved to be excellent. There was only one apron so they shared and would sled down planktons in long schemes of sleeting salt rocks. It was there Lindsay found the coat. The coat was small and drizzled. It had two birds in it that were made for dinner over the cigarette lighter. This was before miracles.

Lindsay Lohan wrapped Rory in the coat. Lindsay Lohan nursed and nursed. Lindsay Lohan was the best Nurse in the world. Lindsay Lohan nursed Rory into her candle. They played seven minutes in heaven in the gallbladder, or what they assumed was thegallbladder. At night they could see stars through the blowhole: “I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health.”

“Tell me about the war, please?”

“I’m sorry my love. My teeth hurt like new babies.”

Rory’s hair, once plummy, had settled to a plumsome candle color.

Lindsay Lohan’s had always been curly and tight as numbers. Eely black.

It remained so, even thousands of years later when they were discovered fossilized in the summer of 1823 on the shores of Dorset by Mary Anning– the rocks holding onto the whale, the whale holding onto them and their bodies holding on to each other. Everyone was shocked by the piles and piles of tooth dust. Mary Anning displayed them in her shop Anning’s Fossil Depot with a plaque and sold off their teeth to museums, and then, after a fall in the economy, to wealthy tourists.

61

UNTITLED

Natalie Stein

To make grand soups. We conjure them into being from mandarin peels and water and the desperation of girls bedrooms in 1970’s period pieces.

There is a need for the oerings of lambs which can be attained by trading lumps of sugar and clay that we hoard in our bonnets. Our soups are the recipes of us and they know us by heart and we are handed down to them. Penicillin, muscle shells, the energies trapped in used hair brushes. Hard boiled eggs for clairvoyance. Bobby Pins for the politics of being inactive, of dawdling and of picking your nose. There is the glamour of cleaving our jawbreakers from the covers of our memoirs.

There is the smell of cooking onions. Our soups stirred to a frenzy are poured down ant nests and we watch as the ants clamor gaudily through steam and bite the skin above our socks into red anklets. This is our best forgotten inheritance which is to pour out into buckets, mugs, wooden clogs, shells, holes, handbags and small blue bowls.

62

THE DREAM OF HAPPINESS So this is happiness: Dreaming you live in a barn. All the rooms are blue, the tiger stands out in his orange suit, you settle into a detente that can only be described as predator-predator.

There is no butter

Rachel Abramowitz

in the house and when you are in the living room and he in the bedroom there is nothing to do except weep at the lack.

It doesn’t matter now I am dying and you are dead. You are dead in the dream and I am dead in the dream.

63

WE WATCH OUR DOG EAT FLOWERS

Ronald Dzerigian

out of sheer loneliness. He eats daisies from the unkempt lawn; he eats rose petals; he licks the thorns. He’s hungrier than I will ever be & I name his hunger. He is a beast in need & I pin him down when he cannot stop barking. I pull his favorite blanket from the yard to remove the hitchhiking burclover; I take away the dead things. He piles sticks, in typical fashion—haphazardly—he makes love to the blanket. I tether him to an old tire. I am as cruel as any man. We tell our daughters he’s digging for fire—as in the song—& they’ll see him, when they hear the lyric, as he unearths all buried things.

64

HOME UNDER AN ATRIUM FOR DODO BIRDS

Suzanna Hydt

Where you can access wifi state trained to use to tear at to use aces lids ruddy run dens another pair of empties another laser-disc player found smashed by a pain of talons

65

Bobby Haulotte COFFEE TABLE

66

DIRECTIONS ILLUSTRATED FOR GLOBAL RETAIL Use astroturf and astroglide to make a smutty slip n slide. One tends to fling one’s body where it simply shouldn’t go.

A candy-coated asprin is still best when swallowed and not chewed.

Esophageal warning, and tastes bad.

The humbled mumble, bumbling through teeth, is mask for quietude exhaust. Enough with hand over heart, the flag’s brass pulley.

Alicia Mountain

Bait fishing as sport, a stretch. The plastic arcade guns tethered to their screen machines make all the hunt umbilical and play.

67

CEPHALOPOD SHALLOW WATER SECRET There’s no kissing when it comes to beaks.

And the light bulb broke before burning out.

Wrap the sharp part in a towel or a tentacle.

What of him broke off and lodged inside her body?

Deep down it helps to be see-through.

Algae filtering the light—green as a ground you swim through.

Some cities keep their glass in the trash.

Alicia Mountain

Some homes are built of our own secretions.

68

Nathan Hoks

ODE ON BODY So what if the heart is polluted with love And verbiage—so what if it’s basically A soccer match between here and hereafter— Its sugary juice is indifferent, an orange Flower that distracts us from the electric Liquid dissolving our cash and mental honey To move it elsewhere so when it exits the body The body can be filled with the body For a body needs a body, and not just anybody Since it’s a kind of sponge, and even The unabsorbed elements are at least attached To the engorging mechanism, my heart, My whole body, this blood, this bath of selfhood Flowing (this liquid flower) elsewhere, written into The film script and disguised as a “to do” list: 1.

Expunge the mind-brain of thesis statements 2.

Re-install the stars deep in the soil 3.

So we can feel the stars’ warmth, tear up The tomato garden and the hedge of laurel 4.

Please pass the bill granting free thermal Underpants to the electoral body—the poem Takes shape later, as we are shoveling snow The morning after the storm.

69

Lisa J. Maione A LIVING ROOM, 2018

70

IF YOU DIE TODAY, WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY? On account of my sister we brought each other to the river to drink.

The dirty water tasted like thin mud. Like the remains of a 19th-century Oregon Trail traveler. We were wrong about where to begin and this took history by no surprise. Our drinks were downstream from something dead. At this point, it was something rotten.

There are markings to illustrate the dead on crude stones.

The family could not wait, or they would die too. So they left after so little time. We leave after so little time. I think about that tombstone.

Brett Salsbury

Deer hunting, illness, ravines, oxen, cholera. To migrate and find land.

Cousins who leave the state. To migrate and find land.

I come across another grave in a history book. The photo is pixelated.

If I could do it any dierent, I’d tell my sister to drink first.

71

SURRENDER DOROTHY Lately my mother has tied her whole self to the grass. Each petal made in patchwork. God thatching together pollen. Bees needing more than honey.

My sweet mother; my delicate prairie.

We live now near the interstate. Zippers doing and undoing the median. Trucks ignoring the pleas of children. Some acquiesce.

Waiting for lightning. Privileged folk that we are. Crying over spilt, glass milk. Snails, locusts, fireflies. Left out in the rain.

Mother, corn across the way, soybeans. Wheat. Squash.

Pumpkins rotting from within. Fusarium wilt. Tasty cream of wheat. My sweet mother—her sweet mother.

Making chlorophyll. And all those pretty colors. Open the windows as a storm draws close.

Brett Salsbury

She’s already here. Mother tied to the tallgrass in intricate knots.

Not a thing I can do to stop it.

72

THE CASPIAN SEA

Brett Salsbury

I wonder which one of my ancestors died of drowning in the Caspian Sea. I wonder which one of my descendants will die of Hillbilly Heroin.

I don’t wonder how I will die because I won’t.

Under the topsoil where the ground hardens I’ll preserve my piece of the prairie. Around it signs saying Do Not Walk On The Grass.

On top of it, a no-fly zone. Next to me, my mother, a sacred burial ground. Ceremony. In the next millennia we might lose the Earth, or its magnetic field could disperse. When the Sun expands burning the planet my prairie will come back to life as it does every year. The world nothing but a crisp. My body loosed to the heavens. Near the Caspian Sea where the fish don’t bite. I teach my ancestor how to swim.

73

What is the difference between a diner, a drive-in, and a dive? How much bacon is appropriate to put on a burger? Name three foods that require a stick when deep fried. On a fourth down in a game his team would ultimately win, Eagles backup quarterback Nick Foles becomes the first QB to make a touchdown reception in Super Bowl history. As you watch, do you dip your wings in Ranch or Bleu Cheese?

What is the difference between comfort food and home cookin? Write out the lyrics to “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” the Flavortown National Anthem. What does it mean when a server calls you sweetie? What does it mean when a server calls you hon? Which crime carries the longest sentence: A. boiling ribs.

B. Charging for chips and salsa. C. Making your own ketchup in-house or D. Brunch.

Name three dishes that do NOT benefit from the addition of pulled pork. That was the trick question.

Danny Caine

THE FLAVORTOWN CITIZENSHIP TEST, WITH ONE TRICK QUESTION

74

THE WEINERMOBILE SONNETS: THE HOTDOGGER’S WISH

Danny Caine

Oh I wish that I could drive through at McDonald’s or Wendy’s or Arby’s or pull into any old car wash or park in a garage or a ramp if we’re in Minnesota.

Oh I wish that I could see out my back window, that I had a back window at all, that I didn’t have to overthink every right turn. That I could wear whatever shirt I wanted to. That I could call a full size box of cereal “mine.” That I could sleep in the same bed for more than two nights in a row. That I could pull into any parking spot and know I’ll fit. That a stranger could approach me without asking me for something. That a stranger could approach me and ask me for something other than a Weenie Whistle. That I could drive somewhere in a Civic or Camry. That I could drive anywhere without being so seen.

75

Robbin Bates COOL SIDE OF THE PILLOW

76

NUCLEUS You’re aiming to become another person, but you’re starting with yourself.

You’re eating food from a box before need takes off. Did you say pleasure, you meant plane. If the runway is live in your feet, the distillery is still three days away, a place you count on, a warehouse off Santa Fe. You might drink, but you’ll be wading through art, seeing just doors when the windows

JoAnna Novak

are all walls. Eat quick when he’s watching, so watch. You have done it under sheets, streetlights, tender minutes of recline. You like: he folds his glasses, shows his neck. The body you’re given gives one pleasure, or a glove box. Suspicion is a bridge over a lawn of pauses, love a daydream in the tub out back. You want it to be better, the mostest, best.

Get hectic, the hackles–your ribs– and that is not an excuse. You bad.

You good. You kind. You, commonly,

77

against toasted sandwiches. They’re called cold cuts for a reason. The wet cheese could seep. The way you say Mimolette wrongs inherently, well, c’est bon. You see a wing and call it a bridge, a need.

Needful pleasure in murdered out Prius. Even you can get your own ride.

Even a pack of peanuts is a present.

Did you think to bring your own fare?

Did you have anything to show, bad but so good? These days, even coffee has its detractors. The liver pickles, your heart shrinks before June. This Friendship Room has brocade on the windows, but it’s so quiet–milk dripping off a wrist. Trust or not, life will cream you. There is a code of gold ribbons on suitcase handles and a spree of questions that mean me-me!, preemptive forgiveness, too soon for overhead storage. Take off your coat, inside you’re needy.

78

JoAnna Novak

ITEMIZED PASTORAL

No need to show me the list– I know my name is all over it, like pink hearts in the dead

phone booths at the Hoover Rec Center, where corgis breathe Takis and blow at 8 am, sun

slow color of smoked orange.

I used to call you animal, all the names, pets

I made your pecs, guns, I used to say, and use them, bruise them with teeth.

Bite habits long enough they become bad-bit, every household has hers, duels, doses,

wrongdoing, walnuts, some call it workaday, I curved: wedding. I go fast, miss

most of the track. I would touch your hand if to be alive signals a privilege not a chore and this is the sum of it, all of it, the sink, I could give you, a pose, a choice, 200 crunches over speaker phone, another countdown in Los Angeles county chiding, every day, amygdala, amygdala.

79

THE FIELD

JoAnna Novak

My older friend who does not look old tells me about the field.

It’s playable. Wolfish photographers, princes in white pants, biceps of irreproachable tone. The field wins corner booth at Kismet every night. And every night, the field gets flaky bread even when it’s off the menu. Of course: vodka cucumbers and gin gingers and seltzer with rose. My apartment abuts a field, I say. There are boulders, a stone outhouse, and a path divided by a smaller field of coneflowers, purple-tipped, popular with hummingbirds and honeybees. Not only have I seen this field, I enter it, I tell my friend, every day. The field shares a fence with a grammar school for students with aides and special buses. Their wheelchairs slide around a running track–I see them from the field. I had lunch with him and didn’t tell my fiancee, my friend says. No scolding, no scorn.

She scrolls her phone, searching for a picture. She looks odd to me, too. My friend has hardly known the field. She lives in East Hollywood and she moved here for a man after only one night of not quite fucking. There is always music playing for the schoolchildren on the track and the music floods the field.

Today Ariana Grande sings, “If you want it, take it,” and we see my throat is empty, that I will swallow anything. Then “Friday I’m in Love.” The Cure plays its part in the field, every day of the week the bees remember and the birds know Ari only wants to die alive, and me I’m running my dog. She tears around the perimeter and I repeat a script–around the rock, around the rock, around the tree, around the tree–while a guy in a CALL OF DUTY cap watches us, arms folded, frown folded.

Maybe I’m so happy he can’t stand it, how I whip around the field. Too bad. My dog and I run past yogis and a man who uses the drinking fountain to suds a Chihuahua he carries in a Target bag. The field can never be just Kismet, black jeans, charred cauliflower, capers, harissa olives, orange wine and freekeh with green sauce, avocado sunk in coconut. Forget those men, how stupidly they eat. All I do in the field is fast. I hold water in my palm and give it to my dog. I hold my mouth under a tap and drink until I choke. I hold a field between my lips for good luck.

I look at planes flying north, breaking up clouds. All around the field is a road. It is the most popular place to get high and hold a girl’s head in your lap.

80

Chloe Thompson PHONE QUOTES

81

ORDINARY PORTRAITS I wished often to be braver, a bare branch on the skyline. That kind of empty promise in being slight.

There was a time when I was a child, I thought I could feel my own echo like I was the marble flooring in the capital’s rotunda. All sheer latitudes of sound, glancing off. I know now I can’t keep my own company. Finger the phone when wanting to look busy. Here be the TV and an old set of plates with chips from my teeth.

Finger a porcelain divot like the graceless way we read age in rocks.

You knew me then, you know me now, I say to the face in the glass. But, no one wants solace, only truth. I can’t stop getting heavy with myself, drawing out Ruth Williams

the gap between here and the sky, looking self-serious for my portrait.

82

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S Portuguese – a very complicated language.

4,000 irregular verbs.

Away from home, it was easy to smoke a cigarette with an upturned chin. To pretend a New York in which I was never tired and it was always unfortunate to close the weekend, leaving the bar’s rumble behind.

Ruth Williams

What unravels in a foreign language?

A Japanese cassette he played in the bathroom like a loud party where all the people are talking at once. He and I held hands just to thread through it.

The cacophony, no conspiracy meant to confuse, but a glimpse of the underbelly.

Our thin translucence revealed in the echo, the recorded mouth biting, hanging on to our softest parts.

83

Julia Monté $399 DIVORCE

84

85

ARTIST BIOS

Rachel Abramowitz Rachel Abramowitz‘s poems and reviews have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, jubilat, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Oxford, and is currently based in New Hampshire.

Robbin Bates Robbin Lou Bates is originally from Tucson, AZ. She received her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha, WI. She currently lives in Albuquerque, NM with her spouse and three cats and is earning her MFA from the University of New Mexico.

Jonathan Bennett Johnathan Bennett is a graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute residing in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As an interdisciplinary artist, his work deals with subjects such as appropriation of perversely commonplace imagery, temporality, and consumer-culture.

Arianna Bonner Arianna is a fiber artist & designer from South Mississippi, currently living in Kansas City, MO. She has two Instagrams: @selfctrl_ & @ari.bonner Danny Caine Danny Caine is the author of Continental Breakfast (Mason Jar Press, 2019), El Dorado Freddy’s (collaboration with Tara Wray, Belt Publishing, 2020), and the chapbook Uncle Harold’s Maxwell House Haggadah. His poetry has appeared in DIAGRAM, Barrelhouse, Hobart, and Minnesota Review. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas where he owns The Raven Book Store. More at dannycaine.com.

Susana Cardenas-Soto Susana Cardenas-Soto, they/them, Chicagoan, Mexican, Cuban, writer, lover, friend.

Scout Dearth Scout Dearth is a photography major at the Kansas City Art Institute, interested in location based documentary-style imagery as means to access heterotopic spaces, experiences in between joy and grief, and fluctuating states of purgatory.

Ronald Dzerigian Ronald Dzerigian is the author of Rough Fire (2018). His poems have appeared in the Australian Book Review, Comstock Review, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, Salamander, and others. He resides in a small farming community, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, with his wife and two daughters.

Paige Edson Paige Edson is a writer and artist from Kansas City, Missouri. She is frequently looking for tightropes to walk and swings that fly overhead. However, she welcomes sitting because sitting involves a lot of looking.

Jacob Ford Visual meddler, archeologist, with a focus in collage. A student of linguistics, single-malt whiskey and silent films.

Paige Nicole Gordon Paige Nicole Gordon has a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute with a focus in Filmmaking. Her work explores the ideas of personal and feminine identity through the lens of post feminism, pop culture, sexuality, fetish culture and performance.

Bobby Haulotte Bobby Haulotte is an artist working in painting and installation. His work explores abstract and representational space through imagery, illusion, and color. Bobby lives and works in Kansas City, MO.

Kristi Maxwell Kristi Maxwell is the author of six books of poems, including Bright and Hurtless (Ahsahta Press, 2018) and PLAN/K (Horse Less Press, 2015). She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville.

Suzanna Haydt Suzanna Haydt is an artist making desks in Kansas City.

Kylie McConnell Kylie McConnell is a visual artist currently living and working in Kansas City, MO. Her practice is rooted in experimentation within the expanded field of painting, with a focus on collage based work

Nathan Hoks NATHAN HOKS is the author of Reveilles, The Narrow Circle, and the chapbook Moony Days of Being. He directs Convulsive Editions, a poetry micro-press that publishes handmade chapbooks, and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.

Kara Lewis Kara Lewis is a Kansas City based poet, writer, and editor. Her poems have appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Plainsongs Poetry Journal, and Number One Magazine. In addition, she is a weekly contributor to the Read Poetry blog and a past recipient of the John Mark Eberhart Memorial Award for a collection of poetry.

Nathan Lewis sophomore printmaker at KCAI, experimental typographer, cyclist Lisa J. Maione Lisa J. Maione is an artist and designer interested in typography and language.

She holds an MFA and BFA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design and a post-graduate certificate in Typeface Design from Type@ Cooper. She is a full-time Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Kansas City Art Institute.

Peter Mishler Peter Mishler’s debut poetry collection is Fludde, winner of Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books, and an official selection of The Rumpus poetry book club. As an editor, he curates a poetry feature for Literary Hub. Julia Monte Julia Monté is an arts writer and maker based in Kansas City, MO, the Chief Editor of local arts and culture blog, Informality Blog. Much of her work reflects on transportation, making drawings and sculptures that depict auto-mobiles from planes to roller coasters, being in motion, and other catalysts for transition. She has recently revived her twitter account; you can find her @im_choppedliver.

Cameron Morse Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. He was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City

and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A. His poems have been published in over 100 different magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, and South Dakota Review. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His second, Father Me Again, is available from Spartan Press.

Alicia Mountain ALICIA MOUNTAIN is the author of the collection High Ground Coward (Iowa 2018), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Thin Fire (BOAAT Press 2018). She is a lesbian poet, a PhD candidate, and an assistant editor of the Denver Quarterly. Keep up with her at aliciamountain.com and @ HiGroundCoward.

JoAnna Novak JoAnna Novak is the author of the novel I Must Have You and the booklength poem Noirmania. Her work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New York Times, BOMB, Guernica, Slate, and Salon. She is a founding editor of Tammy, a literary journal and chapbook press.

Brett Salsbury Brett Salsbury is a native Kansan who currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

His creative work has most recently appeared in Gasher, Causeway Lit, The Poet’s Billow, and Posit, among other journals. A graduate of the MFA program at UNLV, he has also served as a writer-in-residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Kansas and a reader for LandLocked Magazine.

Charlotte Seley Originally from New York, Charlotte Seley is a poet, editor, and writer currently living in Kansas City with her cat, Lord Byron. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection The World is My Rival (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and the poetry chapbook Die Young: Letters to Ke$ha (dancing girl press, 2019).

Natalie Stein Natalie Stein was born in Portland, Oregon.

Katharine Suchan Katharine Suchan is a junior in the Painting Department. Her work uses a site as a vehicle which allows her to convey both visceral and sensual aspects of experience. She questions how people inhabit places physically and psychologically and how states of being overlap within a place.

Chloe Thompson Chloe Thompson is a visual artist and writer based out of Kansas City, Missouri. A majority of her work is based on the experiences of living in the Midwest.

Jermaine Thompson Jermaine Thompson was born in Louisville, Mississippi. He learned language from big-armed women who greased their pans with gossip and from full-bellied men who cursed and prayed with the same fervor. Jermaine has an M.F.A. in poetry and currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

Megan Videmschek Megan Videmschek (b. 1997) lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri.

Brad Vogler Brad Vogler is the author of my radius, a small stone (Spuyten Duyvil), i know that this ritual (Lute & Cleat), and three chapbooks: errand : a version of (Meekling Press), Amid the Waves Which (Beard of Bees), and Fascicle 30 (Little Red Leaves Textile Series).

His work has appeared in numerous journals including: 1110, Cutbank, Free Verse, Small Po[r]tions, Versal and Volt. He works with Delete Press, Posit, and is the editor/web designer of Opon. Find out more about him at https://bradvogler.com.

David Welch David Welch is the author of a collection of poems, Everyone Who Is Dead, and has published work in journals including AGNI, Boston Review, and Pleiades. Visit him virtually at www. davidwelch.me.

Ruth Williams Ruth Williams is the author of Flatlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) and Conveyance (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College and an Editor for Bear Review.

Candice Wuehle Candice Wuehle is the author of the full-length collection BOUND (Inside the Castle Press, August 2018) and the chapbooks VIBE CHECK (Garden-door Press, 2017), EARTH*AIR*FIRE*WATER*ÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015) and curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs, (Dancing Girl

Press, 2014). Poems from her recently completed collection, DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, have or will appear in Black Warrior Review, The Bennington Review, The New Delta Review, and Fugue. She is originally from Iowa City, Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Candice currently resides in Lawrence, Kansas where she is a Chancellor’s Fellow at The University of Kansas.