Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 3:1

SLJ y n e s t h e s i a

i t e r a r y

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Synesthesia Literary Journal 3:1 Š Christopher H. Gorrie and Seretta Martin 2015 Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Patent-Paradigm Publications All inquiries or other correspondences should be directed to: patentparadigmpublications@gmail.com Front and back cover art by Anjeanette Illustration

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Table of Contents Conversation, with Soul

4

Alchemy

5

Haunting

6

Distant Destiny

8

Modern Author

9

Emblem of Silence

11

My Re-edification

12

Dimes

13

Abandoning Human: The Proliferation of Indifference in Kafka’s The Trial

15

still missing

20

our love

21

one

22

two

24

Skeletons of Sound

25

Sea Urchin

27

Inchoate

28

The Wrong End of I-35

29

Regrets

30

Becoming Tess

32

Optical Illusion

35

Orbiting the Waist of Melancholy

36

Picasso’s Loaves

38

Bride Bared By Bird Bachelors

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Contributor Biographies Notes & Acknowledgements

41 50

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Conversation, with Soul

by Una Nichols Hynum Little soul, charismatic vagabond, Honored guest, comrade of the body‌ Here your laughter served you well. —Hadrian, "Animula"

I. Last night my soul caught in a willow flirtatious, a sassy snippet.

It knows I question its place in my life.

Who are you? What are you?

Are you the echo slapping syllables against the mountain, a phantom part of me.

Are you a coward soul, a pilgrim soul?

When a heart breaks, does the soul break, too?

Something swelled like a ninth wave, broke on the shore of my perception.

Here I am, it said, and I heard laughter.

II. Soul, I have concluded you live in the breath. You are the renaissance that comes with every inhalation. You are not battered or baffled, lost or any of the ten thousand things poets have named you. You come and go freely, the closest tie I have with god, a gift that leaves only when all else does, taking laughter with you.

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Alchemy

by Una Nichols Hynum A woman walks breast-high through wild flowers, thin dress trembling like insect wings. The wind of her hands caresses the blossoms, sending pollen aloft in a waft of fecundity. The sky darkens, rain outlines her body. She lifts her face to the storm.

Lightning dances around her, a tree explodes in flame followed by an afterthought of thunder.

Out of this rib of an afternoon a poem is born.

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Haunting

by Una Nichols Hynum The cemetery sits on a hill, crosses stamped on the sky, round shouldered clouds shuddering in the chill Santa Ana wind.

I lean against the harsh pillow of your headstone wondering if you know your son is back on drugs.

You’re beating your wings against the cage of heaven, though I doubt you can die another death. I pray you are in happy ignorance of what’s happening here on earth. Hell would be knowing, or living through something again you cannot live through or die from.

As I rise, the willow combs a few dead leaves from my hair and the ducks in the pond, quaking softly, swim in tight circles.

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Distant Destiny

by Rich Murphy The foreground distracts from the dark recesses swallowing. The spotlight strips tools from the actor.

No peep show exposes the naked belly in the beast.

(A genuine smile hangs in a wardrobe for play:) The bully-mammoth overwhelms any teeth baring by hambone or audience. A swinging watch chain creates a fuss, so a monkey crawls into the blank stare and takes over behavior: Drags knuckles, drops a jaw, and drools.

Paint splashed onto props, extras mobbing the set rescue the protagonist when a scene materializes.

A moment later not even a gulp rolls under foot.

Only a hodgepodge called memory clears the esophagus for a tongue.

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Modern Author

by Rich Murphy Embedded in the air-conditioned nightmare, the autobiography presents a hero who freezes awaiting the back cover.

Ancestors built houses using symbols available from the dead.

Today, the box owner maintains the windowless prison cell when so much emptiness invites creativity. While alternative noons pass outside the metaphor regime, the comfort convict celebrates with nightlights and police patrols.

The ghost prompts Panic Stricken in the vibrating electric chair each morning and the evening constructs an abominable snowman that digs a grave in the front yard.

For the reader in lockdown any wooing sends a mate through thin ice before the epilogue.

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Emblem of Silence

by J. L. Harlow Solace in silence, speech is an unwounded heart.

Silence is a statement, a butterfly’s scar.

A flag, an emblem, a wound from war.

Solace in silence, I am an Olympian.

I have earned my badge of quietness.

I have earned my medal of this hush: A calming storm to lull me away.

Solace in silence, I am a militant.

Not so much so, though I have fought Growling gargoyles.

They turn to stone when no one is looking.

Flesh, and bone, and blood when I am alone.

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My Re-edification

by Stephen Page here they do not honor absent-mindedness, forgive forgetfulness, admire the deep-in-thought academic. here, there is no Professor of Ranch no Dean of Land. my degrees hang up on an unviewed wall. here, there is only the count and how much the workers can uncount without notice.

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Dimes

by Joan Mazza The pleasure of these small thin coins’ surprises, long after their value has diminished. I can’t make a call, can’t buy a paper or a cup of coffee with one. Brother, can you spare a dime?

It won’t take me far, but I still collect them, a dozen in my palm to feel the tactile delight in how they shift and cling— silver caterpillar, shiny worm, living metal, hold memories of hands they’ve touched.

I stack them up, play Midas like a child, when dimes could buy what I’d want to keep.

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Abandoning Human: The Proliferation of Indifference in Kafka’s The Trial

by Jennifer Clarke Abstract While this unfinished novel has been studied from several perspectives including religious and bureaucratic, a running thematic element throughout the novel is indifference. Kafka creates a world, through setting and his use of characterization that is murky and surreal. K. is arrested, condemned, and never truly heard, but then again, no indication of what he should be saying is clarified because his charges are never explained. K. stumbles through a labyrinth of confusing and debilitating processes and never gains insight into his own situation. Through the character of Joseph K., paralleled by a court system that is void of compassion, Kafka reveals that apathy infects humanity, and failure to actively reject indifference can bring about devastation. The author portrays the inhuman through images of disfigured characters, filth, and dehumanizing circumstances revealing the true nature of a failing humanity. Self-preservation and self-interest are the top priorities for many of the characters, and there are no qualms about using and even destroying others to secure the self; however the characters lack the most important aspect of selfpreservation—self-reflection, and so no progress can truly be made. This aspect of human nature is not new, and has not changed. Kafka’s insights into the world around him during a very dark time in human history are perhaps depicted in this novel and are no less relevant today.

Indifference poses a significant hazard to the human condition. Elie Weisel, author, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, suggests that indifference is a danger to humanity because it is a “trap” wherein mankind will remain unless “shaken up” (qtd. in Chu 8). Franz Kafka presents a world plagued by the failure of a social structure that abandons humanity in his novel The Trial. The question of Joseph K.’s guilt or innocence perplexes scholars and critics, and K.’s culpability in relation to his arrest remains ambiguous at the close of this unfinished work. Critics have explored The Trial as an allegory for original sin, bureaucracy, and social hierarchies. But more fundamentally and explicitly in the novel, Joseph K. is infected by apathy. The Trial, originally published in 1925, has been considered a prophetic account of the spread of fascism throughout Europe.

Kafka’s recognition of indifference as a precursor to the experience during the Nazi invasions and work camps in World War II is astounding. Perhaps this work is Kafka’s warning about the dangers of passivity resulting from indifference. Joseph K. wakes on his thirtieth birthday to discover he is being arrested though no specific infraction is outlined for him. K. unsuccessfully seeks answers through the court system to determine the crime of which he is accused, and on the evening before his thirty-first birthday, K., clearly a disconnected man in a disconnected society, is led to his death. Kafka portrays several images depicting the perversion of humanity providing the undercurrent of indifference in the novel. Through the character of Joseph K., paralleled by the court system that is void of compassion, Kafka reveals that apathy infects humanity and failure to actively reject indifference can bring about devastation.

Kafka utilizes distorted human images creating an ominous background and prefiguring the result of K.’s experience. After his arrest, K.’s life becomes immersed in episodes that affront human sensibilities. On his way to the Court district, located in an 15

impoverished area, K. comes upon a “gaping hole” dispensing “a disgusting yellow fluid . . . [and] an infant . . . face down on the ground bawling,” as well as other atrocities that are part of a dehumanizing existence (Kafka 141). The members of the Court offer only a “general growl of disapproval” upon K.’s arrival for his hearing and have a malevolent, inhuman appearance with “little black eyes [that] darted furtively from side to side” and beards like “bunches of claws” (Kafka 38 and 47). In addition to the inhuman images of the Court, his experience in the buildings of the Court is often physically debilitating, and K. is further exposed to physical abnormality in Leni, his newfound “freak of nature” with a “pretty little paw” (Kafka 110). K.’s behavior is not limited to exposure to menacing images, he adopts a similar identity. Despite Fraulein Burstner’s repeated request that K. leave her room, he seizes her and kisses her “all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily” (Kafka 29). K. appears inhuman, and the young woman with the hunchback peers through the “cracks between the planks” of Titorelli’s apartment as if she is looking at K. through an animal’s cage (Kafka 150). Through his exposure to the Court system, it becomes clear that a client must submit and become “the lawyer’s dog” (Kafka 193), and Block, distorted and degraded to the role of a canine, is “fetched” to the room of Huld and ordered to “stay” (Kafka 189-90). K., too, eventually submits and “having forfeited his humanity to the bitter end, he is stabbed . . . appropriately enough ‘like a dog’” (Carter 40).

These images are representative of the ills of society and manifest in K. on his way to abandoning human.

Joseph K. is guilty of indifference. He should be “shaken up” when he is arrested because “his arrest is literally the awakening of a new consciousness . . . of himself as a man” (Mailloux 355). K., though free to live his life even after arrest, is oblivious to his own culpability because he fails to engage and interact; his “life is indeed banal, depleted, and uncourageous: full of bank vouchers and superficial relationships” (Weiskel 89). It is obvious that his professional life is equally infected with veins of indifference, and as Chief Officer of the bank, he has no true concern for building relationships with clients who are “eager to seize the first chance of attracting K.’s attention” (Kafka 138-9). He is surrounded by people equally superficial, but by not actively engaging in his job, he allows the Assistant Manager an opportunity to usurp his position. K. also neglects familial relationships. His uncle, “a ghost from the past,” appears in order to try to save the family name, but K. is disengaged, and he “resigned himself . . . to a pleasant sense of indolence” rather than invest in his uncle’s advice (Kafka 92). He also pays no attention to his cousin or his mother’s attempts to secure a visit with him. K.’s interactions with people are vague and disconnected, and Sussman explores K.’s inclinations of contempt and shame and suggests that his disregard for connection excludes him from human relationships (113-121). The young washer woman is a pawn in the internal struggle for power, and K.’s concern is only for the power he thinks he can gain by potentially taking “her for himself” (Kafka 56). He is connected to Elsa for physical interaction, but he denies her “existence” to Leni because, as he suggests, Elsa would not “be capable of sacrificing herself” for him (Kafka 109).

Mailloux asserts that K.’s behavior in his obtuse relationships with women, blatant sexual misconduct, and inherent lack of empathy not only leads to, but is evidence of his guilt even after his arrest (354-5). Reflection on any one of his relationships would likely have prompted any human to acts of compassion, but K. is ambivalent about the condition and suffering of others.

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Moreover, K. is unable to accept responsibility for his own part in the human condition. He places blame on the external forces of the Court and remains unmoved about his own issues of guilt or innocence. He is “too dissociated from ordinary life, too wrapped up in his own interests, not sufficiently interested in—or responsive to—the lives of those around him” (Mailloux 354). Critics sugget that K.’s guilt lies in refusing to acknowledge the working class and that if he had claimed “membership” by accepting the title of painter, “the outcome of his hearing would have been very different” (Brown 27). True, K. refutes the Court’s only question to him: “Well, then, . . . you are a house painter?” by asserting his prominent position as Chief Officer of the bank (Kafka 40), but this argument presupposes that the entirety of K.’s fate rests on his socio-economic position. More deeply than his class association, K. is disinterested in regard to the poverty-stricken working class. He does not just reject their membership in the same class as him—he thinks of them as sub-human. K.’s actions, or lack thereof, are further proof of his disinterest in others. When he sees the warders being punished by the Whipper, he asserts that if he had wanted to see them punished he “could simply leave, [and] shut this door” (Kafka 86). K. does shut the door and justifies his inaction by blaming Franz who shrieks in pain (Kafka 87-8). K., aware that his comments about the warders are the reason for their punishment, rejects participation and decides that “no one could really demand a sacrifice from him” (Kafka 88). When directly faced with oppressive conditions, K. avoids confronting the dehumanizing and degrading ills of society by freeing himself of culpability.

K. not only is removed from the suffering of others, but disconnects himself even from those who could potentially help him. He assumes that he is above the lower officials of the Court just as he is above the dejected portions of society. K. is frustrated by the “stupidity” of the Inspector and believes that “a few words with a man on my own level of intelligence” would benefit his situation (Kafka 7). K. also decides his attorney is ineffective and will write his own defense because he cannot accept that the outcome “should be thwarted by moves . . . originating [from] . . . his own representative” (Kafka 127). But K., characteristically unresponsive, fails to ever follow through; he has done “the most senseless thing, and stopped 'halfway’” (Kafka 128). He has time and opportunity after his arrest to refocus his life and take action, but he obsesses over the apparent failure of functionaries of the Court, a system equally indifferent to the suffering of man, and is paralyzed.

Joseph K. is a victim of indifference because even if K. acts in an effort to change his fate, his action would be in vain. By acknowledging and participating in the Court “—to say ‘here I am’—is to assent to annihilation” (Weinstein 171). K., aware of the Court system’s lack of concern through his lawyer and Titorelli, fails to accept that he can fall victim to the threads of indifference. The “charge-sheets” are not available to “the accused and his counsel” (Kafka 115), and the Court’s decisions “are never recorded” (Kafka 154). K. is face to face with a bureaucratic collective. He “is merely one element in a network that is whole, and . . . the individual has no choice but to play his role . . . insuring the equilibrium” (McGowan 3). The Court, compelled by moods rather than a sense of duty, is an entity existing in communal ambivalence and prevents justice. Titorelli provides K. the three options of the Court: “definite acquittal, ostensible acquittal, and indefinite postponement” (Kafka 152). In this regard, McGowan asserts that human understanding is equally limited.

An individual can engage in a terminable quest, attempt to change the structure of the opposition, or decide to be independent of the oppressive entity, all of which are inevitably doomed to fail (4). All verdicts have the same result and the “accused is never free . . . in 17

any real sense” (Kafka 161). Even the lawyers succumb because “the only sensible thing was to adapt oneself to existing conditions” (Kafka 121). Once the court arrests an individual, it is evident that guilt has been assumed, and inevitably, fate lies in condemnation. In a society plagued by indifference, guilt and innocence are longer important. Apathy proliferates the whole extending beyond the members of the Court and the lawyers to the accused. As individuals become infected by the indifference of a collective, each will perpetuate contamination.

K. is initiated into the collective and attaches “himself to the network of the law in order to escape personal destruction” (McGowan 11). K. identifies with the man from the country in the Parable of the Doorkeeper, but the man has a choice, and he imprisons the doorkeeper by abandoning his life to remain at the door. K. also abandons his life in the hopes of gaining reprieve from the Court, but as Sussman notes: What can a fictive surrogate who progressively loses his associates, his sexual appetite, and his capacity to work be said to gain? The answer . . . must remain very close to the Court . . . operating according to principles of association, opposition, displacement, derangement, and paradox . . . [And this] is precisely what K. gains . . . . (122)

K. is the man and the door keeper; he awaits permission to act on his own behalf, refuses to act in spite of it, and bars anyone else from acting for him. Ward comments on the indifference the Court displays toward K. as it mirrors the indifference K. displays toward life (66). Even though K. continually considers himself the victim without choice, he “let himself be led” into the Court [emphasis added] (Kafka 38). K. is simply apathetic and succumbs to “the trap,” and by not fighting the contagion of collective indifference, K. becomes a threat to the human condition.

K. feels a “unity” unlike anything he had ever “before experienced” when the men in frock coats come for him on the eve of his thirty-first birthday (Kafka 224). Two major events should have roused K.’s consciousness; his arrest and his parade to death. He should have been “shaken up.” In the year of his arrest, nothing changes because without recognition, acceptance, and action, nothing can change. At the moment of death, when he “perceived clearly that he was supposed to seize the knife himself . . . and plunge it into his own breast . . . he merely turned his head . . . and gazed around him” (Kafka 228). Literally, K. dies, but more importantly, K. takes no action in his life or his death, and he is “incapable of acting otherwise [because] . . . he was not quite up to being human” (Gavin 57). In his final moments, he is aware of his culpability, and wants his case to begin again, but it is too late. As evidenced in the episode of his death, K. forfeits his own humanness.

He dies “like a dog” with “the shame” that “must outlive him” (Kafka 229). He hopes for a reprieve from “someone who wanted to help . . . one person . . . or . . . mankind” (Kafka 228), but there is no one to rescue him. Humanity, also infected by apathy, has become indifferent to the suffering of man.

Individual life is a cycle, man is born and man will die, but mankind is affected by the nature of the individual. It is important for a person to be aware of the suffering of others and of the part he or she plays in the whole. For Kafka, the individual is ineffectual against the collective, but struggle against the debilitating effects of indifference is necessary in order to perpetuate humanity. Kafka’s account of the potential for devastation resulting from mankind’s apathy proved accurate during the dark times of World War II when 18

members of his own family perished in concentration camps. A person cannot lie down and die like a dog, but equally important, a person cannot stand idly by while others are extinguished like vermin. In order for mankind to be civilized, evolved, conscious— human—an individual has an obligation to act against the forces of oppression, even those existing within himself.

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still missing

by Nuța Istrate Gangan some day you will forget me, while I will always remain a vague uneasiness. some day you will turn me into a memory; you will be startled by the thought that I still exist.

I know you will sense me the rest of your life like a soldier returning from the front who feels his lost arm present always— alive, pulsing, but still missing.

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our love

by Nuța Istrate Gangan our love of daily love lies in the town square naked and bloody torn by stones thrown by random passers-by. our love of daily life was never understood by anyone, ever, not even you. today you wait undecided, a stone in your hand.

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one

by Kristopher D. Taylor prescient truths of tomorrow, —mad cap insights— his bold overbearing swimming in an ocean of foreshadow. the professional dead man’s absurd theatrics have gone unnoticed, leave his lies unturned, for who knows what lurks there? (centipedes/worms) for who knows what socks really go with that tie? what blind truths consume you now, and in how many bites?

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two

by Kristopher D. Taylor always remember our regressive nature, as I recollect we falsified a few memories.

I promised you a story of [GRANDEUR] —something about an innocent peck on the lips, a barracuda, a hurricane, and a fireman in the ocean. [the beautiful things said through a payphone]

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Skeletons of Sound

by C. C. Russell One slight wind-stuttered echo crying back across the rocks; the music of air through needles of pine.

Each tree lopsided and wanting of water.

You stand picturesque among our histories.

I throw another syllable to the canyon.

Our languages, twisted and lost.

The wind has nothing and everything to do with this.

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Sea Urchin

by Terese Coe The sea urchin lives without benefit of legs, a brain, and, it was formerly thought, eyes.

The sea urchin’s brain has been overhyped but his true and original splendor is the dioecious foraging of his magic retractable gender.

Only he can breathe through adhesive tubes that double as his feet, and these may be found at the ends of spines through which his toes can eat.

His mouth is on his bottom, thus his bottom is up on top.

When the spinedresser comes, she spikes his spines or else they look like a mop.

He may be unable to breathe and have sex at the same time, as humans do, but his life is already too complex for him, never mind for you.

Content with a taste of seaweed and brine, he needs an amanuensis.

His lovers complain he is all one eye, and he wants to come back to his senses.

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Inchoate

by Terese Coe That we’re the ones confounded by the succinct makes man and fauna that much more distinct.

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The Wrong End of I-35

by R. W. Haynes A Poem for Bob Dylan

I asked the writing teacher who can’t write To write me a reference to eternal doom And send it to the living from the tomb, But she just waved her checkbook in the light And laughed, and ran toward the evil sea Where bloody-beaked gulls swirl ferociously.

I turned then to the man in beard and cloak, Who shook a bowl, and asked him to explain Why wisdom leaks away like dirty rain, And he asked me, “Is this some kind of joke?

Don’t you know that real philosophy Didn’t begin until my mother had me?”

Elusive answers? Yet these do suffice, For explanations melt down here like ice.

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Regrets

by J. M. Scoville No stopping? she asked, situated close to shoreline with trembling reeds up to her bruised, bare knees Never stopping, I insisted, knowing if I was to use mower to cut those high stems, it would be a silly reaction No regrets? she wondered, stepping out from vegetation onto muddy bank, pausing at edge – bubbles collecting where liquid and solid comingle I always regret, that’s being human, I said, regretting my confession, giving her a measure of knowledge usually dispensed for me alone Regret, she decided thoughtfully with a gaining smile as she walked barefooted out into the rushing flow, never glancing back at me

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Becoming Tess

by Jacqueline Sheehan (An excerpt from her novel, Lost & Found, published by Harper Collins.)

Tess did not regret for one minute the uniqueness of synesthesia, only that it took her so long to know its name and that she was not alone, that there were others. There were a few kindred spirits out in the world who were touched by the cross firing of senses, touched by the same tweak in genetics as Tess, and finding them had changed her life. As a child, she was driven to silence when she discovered that none of the other children saw numbers as colors. She would say, “The answer is number four, right next to the red three.” The second grade teacher tilted her head as if to hear her better and squinted her eyes trying to see her better. “No, Tess. We’re only doing the numbers now, not the colors.” In one horrible moment, built up from a few months of clues, Tess understood that her teacher and her classmates lived in a monochrome world where numbers were only black lines, sad lonely things. Piano notes did not brush against their cheeks and smell like cinnamon, and most odd of all, when they fell and scraped their knees, they did not shout, “It’s too orange, now red!” They cried of course, as she did but they could not see the pulse of the pain in great orange splats with a deep red core.

Tess was a freak and she knew it, hid it from everyone except her mother who said, “You can say it to me, but don’t let anyone else hear you. They’ll say you’re crazy.” Tess did not know until much later that synesthesia is an inherited trait, and that her mother probably struggled with and then hid her own multi-sensory world. But her mother’s appendix burst when Tess was eight and things got bungled up at the hospital and before Tess knew it, she was staring straight at the colorless body of her mother laid out in the coffin. She had never seen her mother without color before. She had always loved the apricot glow of her mother’s laugh and her warm, smooth touch. A body without color was the most terrifying sight of her life and she had nightmares for years of a monochrome body.

Synesthesia didn’t stop for Tess when she buried her mother, but she didn’t speak of it again for over fifty years.

When she graduated from high school, the war in Europe and Japan had ended, and she begged her father to send her to college. Tess had a huge capacity for memorizing anything and she graduated at the top of her small Nebraska high school. When teachers marveled at her academic abilities, she failed to mention to them that she had a different way of remembering facts and ideas. When numbers and letters each have their own color, shape, and size, subjects like history and math fit into neat packets that Tess could pull out at will; she had constant access to a color coded file system in her brain. Math was particularly easy for her. She was most fond of the number five, which was a metallic shade of turquoise and had a commanding sound.

Her father sent her to a teacher’s college, where, in the midst of taking as many math classes as seemed logical for an aspiring teacher, she moved on to biology. When she took a class in anatomy, she was in heaven, at last picturing the heart, the blood vessels, the hard working liver, all the interiors of the body opened up to her in a splendor that she had not known existed. Other students agonized over the nervous system, forcing their monochrome brains to memorize an unseen world. For Tess, optics nerves were bright yellow and looked 32

exactly like clothes line rope. The nerves that ran down the arms and spread out across the hands were sky blue and smelled like lilacs. Who could not remember them or what they did? Her anatomy professor said, “If you were a young man, I’d say you had all the makings of a fine doctor. But you’ll be married before graduation.”

Tess, for all her fine multi-sensed brain work, had not noticed what her professor had seen from the first day of class; a sandy haired boy in the back of the room who stared at Tess every day. By finals, they were spending evenings in nearby cornfields, sipping beer, and gazing at the stars from their entwined position on a sturdy wool blanket that Len had stashed in his return luggage from the war. By their final semester of college, Tess was pregnant and uncomfortable in her simple wedding dress. Len had promised the most exciting thing of her life; they would marry and go to Boston where he would start medical school in the fall.

Tess often told people that alcoholism is a thief of the worst sort, and it is the camouflage of the monster that throws even the most observant person off guard. By the time Len’s drinking had resulted in the despair of vomit, broken glass, one fractured wrist, two car accidents, and a serious threat to his job security at the hospital, Tess took the two children, by then in junior high, and divorced the man who no longer resembled the sandy haired boy she met in college. After some urging by a friend of Len’s, she applied to a school to study physical therapy and excelled as if she had never paused from her years at college.

She had been almost sixty years old when she heard a program on National Public Radio about synesthesia. She stopped what she was doing when she heard about people who see sounds as color, or taste their roast beef as rich blue. She nearly killed herself tripping over the pile of recycled papers to grab a pen and paper to write down everything she could, which wasn’t much because her hand shook and her heart beat a lovely cherry flavor. She rang up the radio station immediately after the show and hounded them until she got the name of the researcher. She called him in Cambridge, England, woke him up and begged to be given the name of even one other person with the disorder. She wept when she spoke to a woman in Iowa who said her fried catfish produced an aroma of bright yellow foam about four feet directly in front of her.

That was ten years ago and she counted most of her time before that as painful and ill spent. She made friends with her ex-husband again and let him get to know her. He had remarried in an alcoholic whirlwind and when he finally sobered up, discovered he had married someone far more addicted to alcohol than even he had been. After losing his medical license Len attended AA five times a week. When Len sobered up, his second wife left him. He summed up his life.

“My first wife left me because I was a drunk. The second one left me because I got sober.”

Tess came out to her grown children. Her two little grandchildren were born knowing that their Grannie heard motorcycles as jagged brown, streaked with battleship gray. If they spotted motorcycles, they cried, “Grannie cover your ears, the brown and silver are coming by!”

She knew that synesthesia had skipped her own children, but her grandchildren had a filtered down version and Tess gloried in it.

And now the new woman on the island, the animal control warden, was keeping Tess busier than she had been in years. Tess was drawn to things that didn’t fit; shoulders 33

that had popped out of their sockets, vertebrae that had squiggled to one side, muscles that had tightened so much that they were unrecognizable, and people who didn’t fit, either in their own skin or because they were in the wrong place in the wrong time. She didn’t know if synesthesia accounted for it; she’d seen no evidence of that in on-line chatter from the synesthetes. But she was sure that Rocky did not fit.

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Optical Illusion

by Alan Britt Chipped droplets ♥ ♠ ♦ ♣ . .

. . . .

Open . . your . . . hymn books to page 198, verse one of "Sheep May Safely Graze."

Notice the innocence of the pipe organ that later brutalized Baroque concertos.

Notice the soft horns of the organ rise & fall as if the earth no longer required sustenance, no longer required bubbling wild monkey over hot stones, or reindeer hides for ceremonial hats, hats with their own rain gear to protect them from soiling rainwater, rancid drippings from rooftops & overhangs, laundry strung between tenements (you're so close I could cry) but droplets chipped by the shrapnel of broken hearts, droplets buried past their necks in remorse, droplets carved to perfection beneath a microscopic eye, droplets getting by the only way they know how.

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Orbiting the Waist of Melancholy

by Alan Britt My best guess vaporizes in the apex of black air s n a p p i n g the whip of melancholy.

Look into your future, look inside the razor white teeth of a coconut. Look again and again. Look until you go blind from looking, just like Miguel said we would.

Best guess vaporizes in a tsunami of smoke from a cigarette, hand rolled tobacco imported from the Netherlands, as far as the eye can see.

Look directly into the muscular ribs of the chestnut cello rippling as only ribs are wont . . . despite young mothers with cradled infants jumping one by one from the bridge overlooking impossible existence.

Think symbolically for that is the only way, Piazzolla says, to survive.

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Tangos are not songs rented by the hour at tourist dancehalls; tangos are a primary source of survival, our most cherished export— still, it’d be nice to know who protects all those primordial survivors, those ordinary lives orbiting the solitary waist of melancholy.

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Picasso’s Loaves

by Diane Gage from a photo portrait by Robert Doisneau

Pablo as a kind of imp, a Spanish leprechaun in a striped French shirt, poses with rolls of bread positioned to look like big goofy fingers.

His dark eyes focus out the window, looking toward the light source, corners of his mouth lifting slightly—maybe a whisper of Giaconda in the lips?

Thus he is caught poking fun at hands that have consented to the fermentations of passion and time, hands that embrace so much of fracture and swerve and repair.

With them he feeds us visions of how else we might perceive this bright, torn world.

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Bride Bared By Bird Bachelors

by Diane Gage Foolish, clever creatures, batting tree fringes.

When she lilts, they flock to her twittering, ribbon her up in gossamer embroidery, prize pre-shoe Cinderella, hope and hymen intact.

When she frowns, fidgets, they strike screeching, each hair a thread urgently needed in some other forest, expend her.

Tipi knows what to do. Alfred shouts it: RUN! Small but mighty birds rake rattles across slates, making like raccoons, doing the hailstorm boogie letting everyone know their way is not the stairway and stars twinkle firmly in their air highway.

Destiny’s dove bends a broke wing, beckoning Cindy sighs, closes her eyes. Tipi starts shrieking.

The black drop of another bird’s eye holds steady in its black burglar mask stripe: hook-beak shrike.

In the throat of a buff-colored bird with black head: bird notes, its own specificity. The bird is simply a bird, not a small feathered fiend, says Cindy, despite descending from dinosaurs.

But sometimes swans, needle-neck birds black and white, line the aisle, says Tipi to Cindy. Sashay there someday, sister, I double-dog dare you. But the dogs in this story have been inbred past sanity.

Plumage relieved from a pheasant, a shoo of feathers, helps slip the canary back into its cage.

She sings a small song, all her short life long, tailoring downsized dreams to a parlor corner while ravens in England, deprived of carcasses by new EU rules, attack livestock in the fields, tearing out eyes, tongues, soft underbellies, leaving the rest to insects and disgusted farmers.

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A glance holds a jay in its hand, in a looking glass otherwise empty. It’s bright blue, one of the critic clan, squawking his complaints, scrounging edible tidbits.

Those birds will eat anything, swim like skylarks away.

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Contributor Biographies Anjeanette knew since about 5 years old that she wanted to be an artist. She grew up traveling the USA, and decided to never grow up and keep traveling. She is now primarily a portrait, book illustration, and fantasy artist who explores relationships and expression.

Her preferred mediums are charcoal, oil and acrylic paints, and digital paintings and photography. She was educated at the Savannah College of Art and Design, graduating in 1999 with a BFA in Illustration, Magna Cum Laude. A lifetime learner, Anjeanette is constantly studying and working on her craft, as well as continuing to train at the Oatley Academy and Concept Cookie. She has shown in several solo and group fine art gallery exhibitions in Houston, Texas, Detroit and Lansing, Michigan and all over Tennessee. She was featured in a 6 page interview in Corel Painter Magazine, as well as several other small features in various publications.

Anjeanette’s website: http://www.anjeanetteillustration.com/

Tom Darin Liskey spent nearly a decade working as a journalist in Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil.

He is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi. His first collection of stories, This Side of The River, was released in 2014. His photographs have been published in Roadside Fiction, Blue Hour Magazine, and Midwestern Gothic. He lives in Texas.

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Ruth Ann Reynolds is a Northern California Native who takes the words “Girl Scout” to a deeper level.

Trained in Emergency Medicine, she knows how to “seize the moment” and capture images that are typically lost due to over thinking the shot.

Her style is quite simple, “Never think too much about the shot, especially with digital, because you’ll lose the moment, like living on the mountain, the sky and light will change…”

She’s lived in the Pacific Northwest for the past 20 years and has captured its beauty and beloved followers on Instagram Worldwide. Recently, she was a finalist (with her iPhone 4S) in Oregon ArtBeats #OregonMoment contest whose image was shown at the Prestigious BlueSky Photography Gallery in Portland 2014.

She’s relocating to Houston TX (with her new Nikon SLR) where she will be pursuing her lifelong dream in Cardiac ultrasound where she will use her gifts as a photographer and experience in medicine to capture the hearts of many.

Follow her @rarpdx Twitter, Instagram, Gmail, Facebook, Flickr, Ink361

Una Nichols Hynum was born in Providence, RI. A graduate of San Diego State University and a finalist for James Hearst Poetry Prize, she has been published in Rattle, an island of egrets, A Year in Ink, San Diego Poetry Annual, Magee Park Anthology, and many other anthologies. She has been nominated for the Pushcart and is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Una has self-publishes books of poems every year or two. She is most proud of praise from Poet Laureate Billy Collins who inscribed on one of her books "to the poet who made me wake up."

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Rich Murphy has taught writing and literature at several colleges and universities. His credits include books, Americana, Prize Americana 2013 winner his third book

by The Institute for American Studies and Popular Culture, an institute committed to creative writers as creators of culture and recorders of crucial ideas and important cultural moments. Voyeur 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award (Gival Press), and The Apple in the Monkey Tree 2007 (Codhill Press); chapbooks, Great Grandfather (Pudding House Press), Family Secret (Finishing Line Press), Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Books), Rescue Lines (Right Hand Pointing), Phoems for Mobile Vices (BlazeVox) and Paideia(Aldrich Press). His critical essays have been published in The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of Ecocriticism, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, among others. Rich lives in Marblehead, MA.

Author of the poetry collections, Dragonfly Island and Mosaic of Ashes, J. L. Harlow has now had eight poems published both in print and online literary magazines such as White Ash, Fat City Review, Surrounded Magazine, Riveter Review, and others. In her spare time she enjoys creating art work, drinking coffee, reading and learning about cultures of all kinds, and searching the world for inspiration.

Harlow is currently working on a novel; she hopes to inspire and be inspired throughout her future work.

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Stephen Page is from Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of The Timbre of Sand and Still Dandelions.

He holds two AA’s from Palomar College, a BA from Columbia University, and an MFA from Bennington College. His critical essays have appeared regularly in the Buenos Aires Herald and the Fox Chase Review. He is the recipient of The Jess Cloud Memorial Prize, a Writer-in-Residence from the Montana Artists Refuge, a Full Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, an Imagination Grant from Cleveland State University, and an Arvon Foundation Ltd. Grant.

He loves his wife, travel, family, and friends.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize nominee. Author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Buddhist Poetry Review, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.

Joan’s website: www.JoanMazza.com

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Raised in Orange, Jennifer Clarke spent her childhood on the varied landscapes of Southeast Texas. The performing and fine arts became her focus in youth and remain so today. She has worked as a researcher and writer in the legal field for more than a decade until dedicating herself to education. Being a classroom teacher was one of the most rewarding and difficult positions she ever had, and it lead her to support education, justice, and community activism..

Nuța Istrate Gangan is a RomanianAmerican author. She lives in Davie, Florida, and has published books in both Romanian and English. Her books are available online here: Nuța Istrate Gangan Her poetry is translated into English by Adrian George Sahlean.

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Kristopher D. Taylor is a poet from Florida. He started Dink Press in 2014. His poetry has been featured in a number of magazines including The Bitchin’ Kitsch, The Show Me Doctrine and Haiku Journal Issue # 29. His chapbook A Sleep/less Night: A-Z is set to be released by Fowlpox Press. He is in love and can be reached at kristopherdtaylor@yahoo.com or at kdtaylorisstillhere.wordpress.com, where he posts regularly.

C. C. Russell currently lives in Casper Wyoming with his wife, daughter, and two cats. His poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Rattle, Hazmat Review, and Pearl among others. His short fiction has appeared in The Meadow as well as on Kysoflash.com and MicrofictionMondayMagazine.com. He holds a BA in English from the University of Wyoming and has held jobs in a wide range of vocations – everything from graveyard shift convenience store clerk to retail management with stops along the way as dive bar DJ and swimming pool maintenance. He has also lived in New York and Ohio. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for The Best Small Fictions.

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Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Poetry, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Huffington Post, Poetry Review, the TLS, Agenda, New Walk Magazine, Warwick Review, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications, including anthologies. One of my poems was heli-dropped across London in the 2012 London Olympics Rain of Poems, and I have a new collection of poems coming out in March 2015. I have received two grants from Giorno Poetry Systems, and I teach college English in Manhattan.

R. W. Haynes writes in South Texas, where he is frequently reminded of William Blake’s assertion: “Without Contraries is no progression.” He recently completed a novel and hopes that soon the Muses will help him finish his second book on the playwright Horton Foote.

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Raised on the southern coast of Oregon, now residing in the backwoods of southern Louisiana, J. M. Scoville’s work has more recently appeared in storySouth, Ululations, Starfish Poetry, Edit Red, and Ditch Poetry. In 2002, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Presently, one of his poems is appearing inside a poetry box in downtown Covington, LA.

Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is also a psychologist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.

Her first novel, Truth, was published in 2003 by Free Press of Simon and Schuster. Her second novel, Lost & Found, was published 2007 by Avon, Harper Collins. Lost & Found has been on the New York Times Bestseller List and has been optioned for film by Katherine Heigl, star of Grey’s Anatomy. Her third novel, Now & Then, was published in July 2009 by Avon, Harper Collins. She has published travel articles (Winter in Soviet Georgia), short stories (most recently in the Berkshire Review), and numerous essays and radio pieces.

Jacqueline's newest book Picture This is now available in stores and online.

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Alan Britt served as judge for the 2013 The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award.

He read poetry and presented the “Modern Trends in U.S. Poetry” at the VII International Writers’ Festival in Val-David, Canada, May 2013. He read poetry for the 6x3 Exhibition at the Jadite Gallery in Hell’s Kitchen/Manhattan in December 2014. Also, sponsored by LaRuche Arts Contemporary Consortium (LRACC) he read poetry at the Union City Museum of Art/William V. Musto Cultural Center in Union City, NJ in May, 2014. His interview at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem aired on Pacifica Radio, January 2013. A new interview for Lake City Lights is available at http://lakecitypoets.com/AlanBritt.html. His latest books are Lost Among the Hours: 2015, Parabola Dreams (with Silvia Scheibli): 2013 and Alone with the Terrible Universe: 2011. He teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.

San Diego poet and artist Diane Gage's work appeared recently in Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming, Torrey House Press, 2013. A selection of her Moon Haiku will appear later this year in a series of artist books by members of San Diego Book Arts. Her poems have been published in journals such as Chattahoochee Review, Puerto del Sol and Rattapallax, as well as anthologies Letters to the World, Prayers To Protest, and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes. Gage was recently featured and interviewed at Blue Vortext Publishers.

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Notes and Acknowledgements — Front and back cover art, “Luce” and Page 26, “Bee Capet” by Anjeanette Illustration — Page 7, “Anjo,” page 19, “Gotitas,” and page 28, “Desert Sediments” by Tom Darin Liskey — Photography on pages 3, 10, 14, and 31 by Ruth Ann Reynolds — Page 38, “Picasso Portrait” by Robert Doisneau (http://content.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/picasso.jpg) — Page 40, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” by Marcel Duchamps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bride_Stripped_Bare_by_Her_Bachelors,_Even#/med ia/File:Duchamp_LargeGlass.jpg) — Page 15, “Abandoning Human: The Proliferation of Indifference in Kafka’s The Trial” by Jennifer Clarke Works Cited Brown, Russell E. “Kafka’s The Trial.” Explicator 46.4 (1988): 26-30. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Lamar Univ. Lib. Beaumont, TX. 13 Mar. 2008.

Carter, Steven. “Kafka’s The Trial.” Explicator 61.1 (2002): 39-41. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Lamar Univ. Lib. Beaumont, TX. 13 Mar. 2008.

Chu, Jeff. “10 Questions for Elie Weisel.” Time 30 Jan. 2006: 8. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Lamar Univ. Lib. Beaumont, TX. 14 Apr. 2008.

Gavin, William J. “How Things Go Wrong in Our Experience: John Dewey vs. Franz Kafka vs. William Carlos Williams.” Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society 35.1 (1999): 39-69. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Lamar Univ. Lib. Beaumont, TX. 13 Mar. 2008.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Mailloux, Peter. A Hesitation before Birth: The Life of Franz Kafka. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1989.

McGowan, John. “The Trial: Terminable/Interminable.” Twentieth Century Literature 50

26.1 (1980): 1-14. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Lamar Univ. Lib. Beaumont, TX. 13 Mar. 2008.

Sussman, Henry. The Trial: Kafka’s Unholy Trinity. New York: Twayne, 1993.

Ward, Bruce K. “Giving Voice to Isaac: The Sacrificial Victim in Kafka’s The Trial.”

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22.2 (2004): 64-84. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Lamar Univ. Lib. Beaumont, TX. 13 Mar. 2008.

Weinstein, Philip. Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction. New York: Cornell UP, 2005.

Weiskel, Portia Williams. “On the Works of Franz Kafka.” Bloom’s BioCritiques: Franz Kafka. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 2005. 61-94.

— Page 25, “Skeletons of Sound” by C. C. Russell Previously published in Grasslimb Vol. 3, No. 1 (Print only – not available online) — Page 32, “Becoming Tess” by Jacqueline Sheehan An excerpt from her novel, Lost & Found, published by Harper Collins A very, very big thank you to Mary Brower, senior manager of domestic subsidiary rights at Harper Collins, for her efforts in republishing Sheehan’s excerpt.

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