The Ana: Issue #13

PRONOUNCED: AH-NUH (NOUN)

1. A collection of miscellaneous information about a particular subject, person, place, or thing.

2. The Ana is a quarterly arts magazine that celebrates humanity. We act and publish in line with the notion that everyone’s life is literature and everyone deserves access to art. While all rights revert to contributors, The Ana would like to be noted as the first place of publication.

The Ana acknowledges that this magazine was founded on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula.

We acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced occupation of their territory, and we actively seek to honor and respect the many diverse indigenous people connected to this land on which the magazine was founded.

And we honor the fact that they are still existing on this land, and deserve to thrive. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, we encourage you to pay an annual Shummi Land Tax (via the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust) or to find a way to aid in the redistribution of land sovereignty to Indigenous folks.

Cover design by Minhee Kim & London Pinkney

Cover texture by JZ Creative Space.

Typesetting and design by Carlos Quinteros III & London Pinkney

Set in Georgia (Matthew Carter, 1993), Futura (Paul Renner, 1927), Krungthep (Susan Care, 1984)

THE ANA presents

ISSUE #13

Fall 2023

As I lay in bed writing this note, I am tired.

And I know I’m not the only one; often we are rushing, stretching, and scrambled. Capitalism has a soul crushing grip on all of our time, our struggles interconnected yet estranged by perception. Yet the greatest connection to one self and to others is art, for art is as fluid and vast as life itself. Art cannot be confined by definition, it is amorphous and reflective. It has a particular way of pausing, slowing life into visceral frames felt through body and soul with refreshing perspective. When we are unabashedly present, we have the ability to recognize all the joy alongside the fear.

So I implore to close your eyes, take four deep breaths and slow down.

Oli Villescas POETRY EDITOR

CROSS GENRE LITERATURE

64 Alles, or Everything by D. Beveridge

FICTION

2 John Dall in “Gun Crazy” by Marley Townsend

9 Cute Things by Tyler U.R. Wong

15 “youre very pretty btw !!” by Tyler U.R. Wong

46 The Grey Witch of Yga by Radus Mareto

82 Winter in August by Marley Townsend

96 On Being Stupid by D. Beveridge

104 Boston by Lillian Lippold

117 Some Body Else by Marley Townsend

NONFICTION

34 A Tale of Two Days in May by Aphra Maria Sophia Karaya

POETRY

7 hand in the current by Asher Marron

11 Mutually Assured by Jade Zora Dean

12 My Hands Are Like My Father’s by Jennifer Baptise

13 time machine don’t exist by Josh Godwin

16 Driving past a washed-up black lives matter sign by Karla Tiffany

18 estradiol by Alexiz Romero

19

From: Pandora and the Uterus by Sarah Anne Cox

33 Body Awake by Melina Juárez Pérez

38 ode to the beating heart by Alexiz Romero

40 Cupid’s Unhinged, even & so much for the better by Dana DeFranco

41 How Time Flies by Dana DeFranco

44 Concentrics by Elodie Townsend

60 House of Bee by Yuly Mireles

62 Daughter by Grace McGuire

80 panic by Josh Godwin

93 T50.901A by Alexiz Romero

95 Emerald Reunion by Denise Maisel

103 False Dualities by Jade Zora Dean

VISUAL ART

1 Agoraphobia by Jay Han

6 Marked by Felix Jensen

28 Agoraphobia by Jay Han

32 Agoraphobia by Jay Han

39 Ocean Daydream by Catherine Salisbury

42 midsummer rose by cylo

43 coast to coast by cylo

63 A Mother’s Embrace by Anthony Duran

79 Agoraphobia by Jay Han

81 Loving touch by Mackenzie Goffe

94 through the looking glass by Josh Godwin

102 the one by Josh Godwin

116 Closer Still by Felix Jensen

29 a book review of the delicacy of embracing sprials by mimi tempestt

120 Contributors

Agoraphobia, Jay Han

John Dall in “Gun Crazy”

fiction by Marley Townsend

I lived next door to a poet once, and before he died, he wrote: "Many will find you in the absence of themselves, as if you are the missing boards in the scaffolding of their lives." He wrote it on the back of a pharmacy receipt kept pinned to his fridge, and for years after his death I kept it in the fold of my wallet. This was, as far as I know, his one publication. I never claimed he was a great poet.

I used to catch him coming home from work. Our building was a big stucco rectangle with a short cement stoop that extended past each apartment door, and our doors shared a few feet of it. He would sit there and smoke handfuls of cigarettes in his house slippers. His were a very clean blue, with two minute filth halos around the soles.

I never saw him wear shoes.

He stopped me once with an arm in front of my shins, as if we were coming up on a red light and my legs had no air bag.

"I lost my keys and locked myself out," he said, uncomfortably. Then, correcting himself: "Beautiful day for it."

He pointed up to his window, which I’d never seen closed.

"Could you get me up there?"

"Sure,” I answered. “With a ladder, maybe. There’s one in the back." I held up my own keyring. “I could grab it, if you wanted.”

He assessed the situation seriously, near chewing on his cigarette. The poet didn’t seem to inhale or exhale, even while talking. He patted his knees. Each just once.

"If you have one,” he said, “then let's do it."

Afterwards, he invited me upstairs for a glass of water. The poet believed in clean water as a source of serenity. This was unconnected to any religion. He sat me down on his couch, brought a porcelain pitcher from the kitchen and two highball glasses, and explained that this was because of how the clarity of the taste of clean water was the one immutable fact of the Universe that he could locate and guarantee. Everything else was in constant flux. It was this flux that bothered him, and drove him to smoke on the

stoop. It also caused him to stop working and lose his keys, and for that, it was the Devil. Every now and then, he would stop and say "did you get that, David?" as if forgetting who he was talking to. I never bothered to correct him. I accepted that he was with someone else, not me. Even so, I got swept up in the talk. So swept up that when he asked, hands working the air furiously, "did you get that, David?" I answered "yes! Yes, I did". . . . . . .

I knew David was dead, or at least inaccessible, whatever that could mean. David was not here. There was no evidence of anyone else in the poet’s apartment. He had no photos, no letters, no sweatshirts not-in-his-size. He had barely any furniture at all. David might as well have been in a book. He was a character to me. At home later, I found myself speaking to him in almost the same way. Can you come here, David? I need your help with this box, David. Can you hold the spoon while I move the pot?

David, did you forget to sweep the bathroom again? David took notes for me. He cleaned the apartment. He remembered to water the ferns. He found my favorite socks under the couch and he knew I had put the grocery list in my jacket pocket while I fumbled with the keys in the lock coming home from the store. . . . . . .

“With the world in flux, everything loses balance. Nothing’s maintained like that. Nothing has sense.”

He graduated to a deep silence.

After a minute, the poet took another drink. He shifted in his seat.

“Well, this got me thinking about Gun Crazy”, the poet said. How that was a good movie, a real good movie, but it moved too fast and too sexual for people back then.

“The problem, I think, is that the object has lost its sex appeal. The object has become, well, un-objectified. It’s animate and inanimate. Undead. It’s in flux. Looking around his strange, empty apartment, holding his glass, I realized that I wanted the poet to like me. It was a desperate want.

“That’s real,” I said. “I loved Gun Crazy. I love John Dall in Gun Crazy”. I told him that once after a midnight run of middling noirs at the theater, I'd looked John Dall

up and saw how he died. The poet observed me lengthwise, deciding whether to let me have it or spare me the lecture. Having it, always.

“David,” he said, “I’m not talking about how he died. I’m talking about how a gun is never really just a gun.” . . . . . .

I went home after our talk, and that was it. I felt I had let him impossibly down, and would never make it up to him. We were back to nods on the stoop. Occasionally, a question. How was I? Had I seen anything good lately? Sometimes, an observation. The tap water had changed: a hawk must have died in the reservoir, because it now had a distinctive musky after-scent, like a big bird after a kill. He knew these things, and I should trust him.

When the poet died, he fell six feet down from his window. He'd been looking at something in the sky. Only me in the courtyard below, wasting time outside. I hadn’t wanted to go home yet. There was a possibility I might see him, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“David!” He shouted. “David, look up! Can you see that?”

My head pulling up from the ground, where I'd been watching a line of ants advance on an injured cockroach. The poet, his head large and oblong and charming, protruding from the open window. I could see from there his rings of Saturn—taupe hair rising from scalp, his glasses rising from his heavyset bridge, a gold chain rising from his thin neck—and I could see the crooked arm coming out to gesture up, one finger outstretched. I could see a mustard stain on his left collar, fresh, and a bleach stain on his right, old.

I could see the white edges of the sill formed a cell around him as if it was a single frame of film. 1/24th of the movement at large. Blink, and you miss it. I was stuck in the blink. I did not notice he had left the window, and I was with him next on the ground, dizzyingly unsure of how he had gotten there. I didn’t know what to say. I never did. The poet had that effect. Everything that came from me was something he would have hated. Disorganized, upset, lacking serenity. Personal and messy. Obvious and trite. Can I help you, I said. Can I help you? I can stay with you. I can wait with you until help arrives. I can hold your head up off the sidewalk. Can I call someone for you? Your dumb old

phone, a couple feet away. Your leg at an odd angle beside it, casting a purple shadow over it. Can you hear me? Keep talking. How long have you lived here? Tell me how your day has been. Or I’ll talk now, I’ll keep going. I’ll read from Wikipedia. All of John Dall’s movies. I’ll list all the zip-codes in this county, all the numbers on the building doors, all the ants I can see. Keep listening. Tell me your name. What was your name? It's me. Can you tell me your name? It's your neighbor. It's David. It's me. . . . . . .

I was the one who let the police into the poet’s apartment. His key was in the lock. I suppose he’d decided to trust in the Universe and leave it there. Upstairs, while they wandered lazily through his life, I floated in and out of his other rooms. Their structure and layout was the same as mine: I knew exactly where to walk, what corners to skirt, and what doors to open. I pictured my own apartment, crowded with undead objects downstairs. The receipt was fixed to his fridge with a single browning magnet. That’s all I found. I’m still not sure what else I was looking for. Something in flux, maybe. Anything that would tell me something I didn’t already know. But this was impossible, because I didn’t even really know the poet. I just lived next door.

Marked, Felix Jensen

hand in the current

poetry by Asher Marron

it is possible to behold the long story of the river & be buried beneath it

1. this moment is a current & i toss inside of it suspended plain of industrial carpet ossifies beneath my spine, having fallen there & now waiting for red ambulance: sirens outside in the city streets come for me this time, announcing my need to a confluence of cars that pull over & allow my need to pass thru changing lights

2.

i render my disability in the shape of a stone, the weight of it slips, cradled in riverbed at times a boulder, at times a small broken thing which moves easily, without choice & does not see sky.

3.

a friend kneels down near my eyeline she holds me within her sight: this is what i know to be love, freely given without eros waiting

as a body like my body like all bodies bodies bodies her hand, a landscape shakes as i seize & try to keep awake; the holding is firm.

4. EMTs arrive, i am heavy, flightless as they lift me thrusting my body onto metal beds & into metal vans & thru metal doors everything a noise & a hard hard feeling.

5. what i know to be most human is waiting in a hospital lobby with strangers whose hurt is pre-language—intimate gestures of lament i am wheeled next to a man clutching his ribcage, chanting a litany fuck fuck fuck we wait beside each other & do not look into each other’s eyes. i think this is the most honest prayer i’ve ever heard

i descend further down in the wheelchair, there is no leaving, only

anticipation of my name being called we all want to hear our names aloud

Cute Things

fiction by Tyler U.R. Wong

Through my doorway, around my wardrobe, under my desk, and behind the cabinet door, three baby blue postcard boxes sit in a stack. My father’s family, the Josephs—these tall, lumbering men who dress like stockbrokers and sigh before smiling at me on Christmas Eve—have committed this past decade to sending each other celebratory greeting and thank you cards: inside, nobody writes anything but their names and, on a check, their signature.

One card has a photo of a German shepherd with a party hat: somebody’s dog, somebody’s reason for closing the back gate and locking the kitchen counter pie in its plastic shell. Another card shows a hug between two foxes, one wrinkled and lean with a puffy storm cloud of gray hair and a blue cardigan, the other one small and wearing a backwards baseball cap. They have each other. They have each other and you don’t. Another card is shaped like a fuzzy caterpillar, his eyes large and his smile beaming, with a brow of frizzy red hairs sticking out of his forehead, a little leg holding a set of balloons, and a lower pair of legs carrying a wrapped box. A bow on top. He’s just so excited for me to open his gift, so happy to see me. Who else is?

I see these tiny faces and am reminded that we will all die one day. That smirking grilled cheese on the wrapping paper from my lunch in third grade; that marble-eyed, bean-stuffed bear adorning the carousel rack at the front of a highway gift shop; that photo of a chihuahua terrier on the small breed tin of wet beef; scraps for a pile of rotten waste. Scraps for a fire to disintegrate. The innocence of these creatures. The indignity of their return to the earth. I have to do something. Who else will?

My parents tell me to toss my cards and I can’t. I can’t do it knowing what happens to them even after they’re thrown away, tossed to the side, left on the curb, discarded. The boxes get to keep their dust coats because the swelling in my chest at my cards’ crumpling in the crunching steel jaws of a garbage truck would make it too hard for me to live with myself. So I just don’t tell them. I don’t tell anyone. The Josephs who call themselves my aunts, uncles, and grandparents don’t know. I can feel the

uppermost box clacking less and less—becoming more compact, less spacious—every time I have to open it. I am afraid of what will happen when I’ve filled it. The lid touches the cabinet ceiling.

You may look at me and you may frown. When my wobbling voice, braced teeth, and open-mouthed bickering betray the adult veneer of my sunken eyes and limp beard; and you notice the blackberry jam stains or maple syrup residue near my lips; and you realize just how small I look slouched in an armchair with my chin to my chest as I text and text and text while you’re trying to ask me how I am; and you hear Mom remind me to floss my teeth before I go to bed; you will stand in my doorway, gripping my gaze, waiting for me to say something like Yeah, Dad, I’ll clean it out today, and you will see that I am merely looking and frowning back at you.

Mutually Assured

poetry by Jade Zora Dean

Regards/ Secretary of Death, Glowing green mean/ like radioactive cats/ flying fantasy/

dying/ A Fukushima fallacy/ like Chernobyl shrooms/ four mile/ my mutated urethral uranium/ for the love/ lead isles, voice/ echoes, a decay/ as energy/ lost/ transformed/ nauseating nuclei/ kinetic chaos/ in collisions / creating cell-splitting/ in a prayer/ of precedent- reminiscent remnants /a primordial boom/

faded for fearing symbols/ wasteing time/ crying tears of coolant/ contaminated spilling creations/ transmutations and/ animated toxicity/ burry me in beryllium/ deserts and depths/ projected Manhattan power/ alamos planted- seeding, seeping, spillage/ monumental messages/ sending stratospheric death/ clouded pictures todescendants blinded/ by bright bubbling/ scorched light lining/

like living lightning/ broken beneath/ feet of concrete, rocky flat sleet/ in all knowing/ projectile symbology/ and inevitable extinction/ I prey to the Fat Man/ and the opposite-of-himer/ that/ perhaps/ in faded histories/ and stories spoken/ we can/

slow, an Eventual, Inevitable

D-e-c-a-y

My Hands Are Like My Father’s

poetry by Jennifer Baptise

My hands are like my father’s. With creases that run deep brown into black, over beige palms telling the story of my fortune. My past and my future.

A palmistry, the tapestry of my DNA. A swirling double helix of Hispaniola, West Africa, and Scotland. My hands are like my father’s.

With joints meeting in similar places carrying fingerprints unique to me, Displaying thinner veins filled with blood and emotions running deep, flowing under calluses similar to his.

time machines don’t exist

poetry by Josh Godwin

Face down. Watching each step.

Landmarks. Pulling on arm hairs.

Sounds. Jumping on ear drums.

Smells. Looking for their home.

A flood. Waiting for the green light.

Look up. At what once was.

Overlayed. On what is.

Each tear. A slide. In a view master.

Each step. Another flick through time.

Stepping through the present. A wet smile.

Directed at the past. Time machines don’t exist.

A Hollywood backdrop. Hanging from my eyelashes.

Covering now.

Building from memories. Doesn’t make reality.

Locked. In a permanently lit room.

Rehearsing the moment. With props from the past.

fiction by Tyler U.R. Wong

The corners of Samira’s lips form symmetrical dimples that curl upwards like the spiral of a fishcake when she smiles. I’ve only ever seen her smile. Black ripples stream from her scalp in little twirls, nestling together, hiding her ears down to their lobes. Stained-glass honeycomb earrings. Brilliant bronze skin, light shadow contour of her collar bones. She probably took this one at around 6:00 PM in a park or an orchard. Maybe she knows an orchard of apple trees nearby. Red shoulder straps of a sundress. Maybe they belong to a tank top. Maybe a sports bra. She might have been going on one of her runs. No sweat under her bangs. There’s a drowsiness to her eyes; her gaze strays a bit to the right of her camera. Four photos to her profile. There’s no voice to her words in my head. When she speaks, I hear myself. When I speak, I don’t see her watching me. Our eyes can’t meet. When I imagine her arm draping over my shoulder, her skin sticking to my nape, her thumb resting on my shirt, my hands restless in my lap, trying not to hold her, I have to remind myself that people are warm: they carry scents and temperatures and conjure gentle faces in the bile vinyl cushions sitting across from them and in the murky passenger-side windows and in the strangers sighing through the automatic doors.

On her Story is a vertical video of hemlock billets lying across a frozen river, cracks in the ice splaying out from where each log landed when the nearby pallet must have broken and freed them to tumble. She muted the post, so when her phone sways with each step she takes towards the bank, I can’t hear her boots crunching the snow. I google “where is it snowing right now,” expecting an exact number of miles. A map on a webpage shows a shapeless mass looming over Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois. From San Francisco, that puts about 2,000 miles between us. The rail squeal rips through the train car and my body heaves forward in my seat. I wish you told me you were leaving. There’s no way for me to know if you are ever coming back. How will I know if I’m still pretty?

“youre very pretty btw !!”

Driving past a washed-up black lives matter sign

poetry by Karla Tiffany

you get caught up with the souls of black folks trapped in windows and front lawns and fence slats but it’s okay

because

you’re uncle’s on the grill and marvin’s on the speaker and the inner city blues are on ice because today we say you matter in this house

because science is a human right and love is real or whatever MLK said at Gettysburg about filling cells for the sake of politeness over a cold one

because this city’s full of welcome mats but we don’t really mean for you to stop

here remember?

we’re flooding your streets with black squares

because solidarity lies at the bottom of a whiskey sour calling for a wellness check in protest because Jake from upstate says that’s what good neighbors do and like a good neighbor we’re always there or whatever that twitter infographic said that you retweeted during [CLAP emoji] your [CLAP emoji] morn [CLAP emoji] ing [CLAP emoji] commute [100 emoji] yassss get it but ya’ll not ready for that conversation so we left you out front for your own good

because you can’t afford to breath here and there is no there there or there or there for you

because we want you in exact change

because what good is a pocket full of loosies at the laundromat because who wants a laundromat when you’ve got a liquor store because who needs a liquor store when we’ve got a beer garden because you should’ve been smarter with your investments

now we hang your collected souls on coat racks and bathroom walls so when Stacey’s done painting the porcelain she can steal a moment of reflection in a selfie

because you took over for the 99 and the 2000 because that was enough because backing that azz up is all that matters to a tribute band or whatever that juvenile fellow yelled from the back of the bus as we lit up the encampment

because extinguish the school-to-prison pipeline because abolish the police because we are the police because this is community policing because this is harm reduction because this is what you mean because isn’t this what you mean? because because I mean because we need to clean up these streets because somehow you matter again

estradiol

poetry by Alexiz Romero

Fuck my pretty little boy pussy until I make you cum onto your own sorry little face

And release you of your tension of upholding your manhood

Oh how much pain it bears to be on the edge

Full and girthy

But never climaxing

Because you're so macho

and you can’t release! Oh no no no you cannot!

You can’t be the bro who only lasted five minutes fucking me and being the first to finish

EMOTIONAL!

Men are too emotional when it comes to showing off their cocks to one another

Another dick competition on whose cock is bigger than the other and someone is always having to compensate men always have to be anal about it to a point where they build skyscrapers

Of their own cocks downtown, where the shadows projected from them cover the people in eternal darkness

Yet when you fuck me, and I make you forget for a moment all that stresswhat the fuck was all that for?

Why the need to think and circulate and formulate your entire life, your entire existence, Your personality, your struggle

Around the fact of you having to uphold being a man with your cock When this pussy has shown you how much it feels to be free

From: Pandora and the Uterus

poetry by Sarah Anne Cox

Hope is in a jar, pithos not pyxis to last for centuries, cover paintings

greeting cards, children’s tales

the weight of a mistranslation

The height of a man

a pithos is womb shaped

A wine jar

A store of grain can hold a body for burial

She opened the pithos and closed it again

Emesato resolved

How a woman opens a jar

Hinting at Adam’s rib

All that is left in a womb is hope

Pandora Ge

Pandora all giver rather than all receiver

Pandora was giving- Pandora had been- given gifts- by other gods

some effort on Hesiod’s part to consolidate religion

electrical measurement

the anti vaccine

carbon losses

experimental system

ethnographic account

Hope remains on account of narrative

C kills A

because bad things happened to all men who went to troy

Mythological timeframes

sequence in history

Bad things happened to Prometheus

Page four in the book of sorrows

Find the right line

The wack-a-mole

You are weeping for the weeper on the street

And her children

The many children

We try to be etiologic

Prometheus, the birds, the liver, the fire

But also the bone wrapped in fat

Why bad things happen

Pandora

A pithos rests on the earth or in the earth

For stability

Pandora brought the keres with her

Evil, a little black creature with wings

A pithos half buried containing the dead

Anthesteria

The dead come from the earth

Containing the mute

All souls can harm

Chew pitch

Spit on the earth

The earth takes shape as a woman, she is the first woman

Theogony’s Pandora

A terracotta statue and gods put things in it she is moved to earth is earth is unlegged, a pithos herself spills out bad things onto the floor spills struggle, sickness and toil The farmer’s lot of meager

Pandora cannot go to bed angry

She cannot go unresolved

She has eaten the stores of grain

The pithos that could last a winter wedded to Prometheus’ brother or simply sent, as a jar to a land of thieves because ownership and the gods

Catalog of Women in fragments

Pandora and Zeus

Perhaps she tired of Epimetheus

Loosening the belt

She measured her worth

And gave birth to all the Greeks

Your welcome

For these gifts

She said

Pandora has been hanging around a long time she flicks her cigarette in the air, tired of waiting ash lands on the decorative brick lining the side walk Pandora occupies the corner at 19th and Valencia she did not deliver the bad news it delivered itself

Agoraphobia, Jay Han

the delicacy of embracing spirals, City Lights Publishers (2023)

a book review

of the delicacy of embracing spirals

poetry by mimi tempestt

Unabashedly earthly and raw, one feels as if they are falling in and out of each poem mimi tempestt sets forth in the delicacy of embracing spirals.

From ancestors to absinthe, tempestt seamlessly swirls through an uneven balance of pleasure and perception. She not only reflects but indulges the reader to reflect, deflect, and analyze dynamics within family and, by extension, within one’s self.

She covers the fluidity of existence and the noticeable yet fleeting changes of our past, present and future selves converging. While reading I found myself laughing hysterically, crying, and confounded by the indignation I share about my own existence. The stagnation and pacing is a whirlwind of exhaustion and ecstasy; if life is but a moment, it is certainly captured in her imagery. the delicacy of embracing spirals does just that, nudging the audience to accept the ashamed and feared parts of ourselves with intimate and intricate snippets of life in poetic melancholy.

I have yet to read a more captivating presentation on the performance of being a poet and by virtue, always seemingly being on stage. But make no mistake, the stage and everyone on it is a pointed critique of roles often projected as a misconstrued yet ignorant attempt to make a monolith of being Black and a woman. tempestt refuses to be bound or defined by any singularities and is not afraid to show all the ugly and unpleasant aspects of healing. The fluidity and sharpness of tempestt’s voice immerses the reader in every intentional, crude, and honest image she creates.

Oli Villescas POETRY EDITOR

eve n a r r ived? mimi tempestt

Isn ’tthis shit all a farce?How can I t e l l y uo

Agoraphobia, Jay Han

Body Awake

poetry by Melina Juárez Pérez

I love you, body. Vessel. Heavenly desire.

From the crooked knees to the missing teeth. Almond shaped eyes stamped in a hurry not quite level. Bumpy, rough skin mapping our journey home. I wrapped you in melancholy. Sorrow tainted our palate and chained our wild tongue.

Inhale scar tissue, exhale whole galaxies.

I didn’t know we are Coyolxauhqui in the flesh. Hips swaying in lunatic waters, heart beating across mountains and valleys, womb fertile and home to the cosmos.

Dismembered & re-membered, over and over.

A Tale of Two Days in May

nonfiction by Aphra Maria Sophia Karaya

Trigger Warning: Mentions and descriptions of violence, death, and sexual assault.

This column was written as a direct response to the May 1st lynching of Jordan Neely, a Black man killed on a crowded New York Train after being choked for over 15 minutes by three white men. Neely was loudly complaining about how hungry he was before this altercation.

Friday, May 26th—I took the bus to my laser appointment. It was lively, one’s perception could be filled with soups of senses—scents, sounds and sights. Conversations and cackling created chaotic waves in the air we shared. Mostly Black and Latina people, I can only assume everyone present was somewhere in the same area of poverty as me. Maybe not. Maybe everyone on that bus was a thrifty secret millionaire…? I doubt it.

But you see my point, don’t you? It was a scene of camaraderie among relative strangers and bus stop acquaintances. There’s a beauty here—Spike Lee couldn’t paint a better picture—lives, dramas, triumphs, and tragedies mingle in this limo of poverty, taking us all downtown, into the capitalist heart of city built as the refueling station of Westward colonization.

Not all KCK bus rides are like this, of course, filled with such a pleasant (if a bit loud) energy, but... there is always an energy. That's just the bus, public transit, really— the conditions of cramped poverty, honestly—you know? Energy. A crackle. Sparks with tiny cores of pure white fire. Fire of fires. The right atoms get hit with the right heat… fluctuation... ignition. And suddenly you've got transformation. You've got change. You've got the right conditions for a searing blaze of creation and destruction. In some circumstances, you could have a whole social movement.

The right push on public transit, and you have a civil rights rallying point, you have people arguing, riding to freedom, beating their chests, falling in love, fighting, laughing, shooting, maybe—screaming that it's alright to kill a man, perhaps—it comes to the surface, not just to those swept in whatever energy sparked and flared in the

cramped public transit, but to those who only read about the blaze in post, that Blackness is a quality of the expendable person. It comes to the surface that there is “true, objective justice” to this world, and that this an order of the world that some can know, that we should listen to them, and that their “justice” should be enforced. That objective order includes the deaths of… among others, Black people. Senselessly. People of Color, especially poor People of Color, really anyone who doesn't think or behave like you — are like the chickens we've trapped in an eternal hell of suffering in the dark, their bodies are ours to rape, to brutalize, to kill-- bodies to use, meat to over consume and to let rot. A system of socialized violent hierarchies. Those deserving of life, and those undeserving. Penal. Patriarchal. “Radical “””Feminist”””” (Fuck TERFs). Colonialist. Capitalist. Cisgender. Heterosexual. Christian. White supremacist. Law abiding. We all know what I'm getting at—The occupation of Turtle Island more commonly known as The United States of America. Estados Unidos. The biggest Latin American dictatorship by far. The vibe killer, the landlord, the rapist, the slaver, the cop, the pig, the filth, the abuser, the conservative, the democrat, the politician, the eagle, God. The white man. The Man. Ugh. Men... The most abusive partner, a sugar daddy who doesn't know what consent is, and your well-meaning father, all rolled up into one.

For the purposes of brevity, I will now exclusively refer to whatever it is we all think of, when we think of the entity that is "Estados Unidos" as "Papi.*"

*It’s also kind of a metaphor for the church, and the general toxic culture of consumerist WEIRD countries. You can really apply this to any post-colonial power, I’m just focusing on Estados Unidos because I live here. . . . . . .

Papi wants you to think that it's okay to kill poor Black people. Papi wants you so fearful, annoyed, frustrated, indoctrinated, disconnected and distrustful that you think killing poor Black people is okay. That it should be accepted, encouraged, congratulated, and rewarded.

Should you choose to listen to Papi—you'll be rich, he says. You'll be popular and well-liked. Respected, Papi says. Feared, if that's what you like, he tacks on. I say

there is good and bad, Papi says—and if you listen to me, you be a good soldier boy, or Barbie girl—you'll bring in nothing but the goodness, and you will violently destroy all the bad and evil. Your empathy is a weakness, Papi whispers, especially if it makes you think or act as anything other than what I would for want you—he's hissing it.

You want to be Papi's special good little child, don't you? You want dopamine, you want heaven, right? He's cooing, breathing on your cheek as his silent voice fills your ear. Is that what you want? He preens like a pusher. You never know where you end, and he begins—but you know.... you think? Feel? You don't know where it came from...

Is that you or Papi...?

"Good is Good, bad is Bad. Happiness, niceness—is goodness, and all that is bad is to be avoided and destroyed."

Papi will tell you what to think, thinking is so hard.... and instead, you can just feel the feelings that you like. The good feelings. Endless bliss. You can get closer to that. Just listen to Papi. Open yourself up to Papi.

Take him inside. Take it and be good. Let Papi inside, it only hurts a little, then goodness. Nothing but good feelings, good thoughts, good girl. And... if Papi sees a spark-- if you let him in deep enough... he can stoke those sparks into a blaze, burning away all the bad.

And you'll never feel anything but good, ever again. . . . . . .

Sometimes, the right conditions on public transit, on a bus, maybe a train-- can become a searing blaze. Sometimes a woman gets turned into symbol. Sometimes a person will be killed, lynched, for being annoying. For complaining about being hungry, for taking up the wrong space, doing it in a way that inconveniences Papi. For being wrong.

For being bad.

Sometimes, you see all that.... The person gets lynched. The fires burn. The flame is defended, it's worshiped. The spark became something that ended the bad. The diseased. The impoverished. The bad. A "life" of the non-good extinguished, for the contentment of the many. Most didn't have to do anything but watch. A gift from Papi.

Sometimes, a spark on public transit becomes an entire social movement. And sometimes—nothing happens.

On my bus ride. Approximately 1:15 pm on the 101 to downtown KCMO—the mostly Black and Latina riders of the bus were held up for nearly 30 full minutes while a work-incapable, physically disabled, mentally erratic, housing insecure, verbally abrasive, annoying, entitled, all around unpleasant white man fumbled with his mobility scooter, cursed and slurred at the bus driver, and yelled at the bus in general. He seemed a bit racist, honestly, but I know how sensitive yall crackers get about being called that without having a full team of lawyers ready to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. We’ll just say he was disturbed.

Here is an unpleasant homeless man being a total nuisance on public transit, surrounded by people with a different skin color than him. Surrounded by different perspectives, different cultural beliefs, different rituals, traditions-- people visibly and in many ways emotionally and spiritually different from him. He held us up at that stop for almost half an hour. He wasn't fully off until about 1:40. There were other passengers standing outside in the relative heat of an early Kansas summer (it was about 80° or so, I don’t find that to be unpleasant, but I have talked to a great many people about temperature preferences and have concluded that I am simply Built Different). Looking back, he kind of made me late for my hair removal appointment, actually... What an ass. This man… different than all of us, likely poorer than most of us, behaving like a total nuisance… he totally took a good 30 minutes from us all, from the driver on her route, even. How many people waiting for the bus did he fuck over?

Annoying and difficult and different, on the public transit powder keg... and yet, he wasn't hurt.

He got kicked out of the bus. And he took his time with that... the bus driver looked like she wanted to strangle him, especially when he called her out of her name. A bunch. With insults I’d rather not repeat… But she went back to her seat, to cool off and wait for nature to take its course. A nearly 30-minute course. Of yelling, and slurs, and mobility scooter inches and care from occasional bus riders to not jiggle his cracker corpulence in anything resembling assault.

Nearly 30 minutes.

But then he was off. To go drunkenly (I think he was drunk, but he also just could have been Like That)—ramble at the next nearest bus stop about how honkeys are people too. Or some such shit.

And he was completely alive to do it.

As much of an ass as he was, I’m glad he was left unstrangled. Unlynched. I’m glad none of us listened to Papi. Going forward… I hope fewer men like him are unlynched—white and genuinely a nuisance or Black and hungry, poor. Those of us who fall into these groups are left to wonder if it is us that is bad… when so many scenes reversed end in murder. I pray fewer people are left gasping and dead, dying hungry and alone surrounded by video cameras and no helping hands… and that more people like Papi are.

ode to the beating heart

poetry by Alexiz Romero for Larry “Bucket Man” Hunt

Market street will never be the same

Without the sound of your beating heart

The rhythm you provided in your vibrant

Drumming of buckets and cowbells

Filling the gaps between the conundrum of Automobiles & pedestrians

Hustling and bustling

In the nuances of their nine-to-five job

When the tourists come, your bangin’ is the first thing they see

Your pulse is the first thing they hear

And along with the smell of the city dogs cooking on the sides of the street

You smile a big smile

Cuz inside you may be hurtin’, hurtin’, hurtin’

But outside you’re happy

Cuz you make us happy

That smile is infectious

Like the grooves that make us move

You put a smile on our faces

To make us happy till we see another day

And letting us know to be strong

The city will never be the same

Without the sound of your beating heart

Cupid’s Unhinged, even so & much for the better

poetry by Dana DeFranco

let’s render ourselves to the backdrop saws and claws: catalytic converters captured, bold and furious when we are simply stars culled quietly along the insides of our teeth such is the nature of cold cash collusions: platinum, palladium, and rhodium & it’s not a joking matter because this could happen to you true that even a marksman still shakes with wings perilousthe elongation of his shoes mangled in prepositions and the lure of transactional charm; tactical solutions muddle the pings of what used to be called loneliness because lightning strikes not just once and definitely twice that we are so much more. that we long for more. that we unearth the visceral tides. in search. the destruction. the consumption. in search. of what floats past. of meaning lost. in search. of what hides is simply. the search. from inside.

How Time Flies

poetry by Dana DeFranco

what if we stopped wondering what if we stopped asking: why what if the ordinary became extraordinary what if things were – what if things were what if the scarcity dance stopped dancing and water pooled in the palms of our hands

what if. traces of faces. masks. that sing. a song with a veil in its heart. because we’re real and not really. because we are. a facade. a voice of a face we wouldn’t recognize. otherwise.

we don’t know, yet we know so well. intimate at times. both tender and kind. this inhabitance. the voice of a face has not one voice. each face isn’t. what we seem. because sometimes a face is not its voice.

because sometimes we don’t hear. because sometimes we don’t. how often do we not. listen. that we follow faces whose voices are not. sometimes we can’t see our own face. we know watery skies can lure the most languid of lovers.

gills and lungs, the sun sinks through skin, alive and breathing. many are the watershed moments. because of the sparkly things. but stars in the sky are not the issue.

& then the watershed said you are beautiful. all that you should be. and so are we. all that you are, are we. beautiful as we hold. as we let on and hold. to songs. music. symphonies. gatherings. impromptu. concerts. jam sessions. orchestral bands. bloated throats drink wetland silk: their lesions sticky with lurid lessons. amphibious migration and the textures of love calls, nocturnal warriors drunk on the trill of desire. elastic chambers and sound pitched eyes. dragonflies muse through the night. bubbled sacs push panic buttons. sometimes it is the shrill to release me. when stress eases into silence. danger and love come close sometimes. maybe often. and i’m under your spell. the lovers, the dreamers, and i’m under your spell; the lovers, the dreamers

this must be magic. i know that this might just be

midsummer

rose, cylo

Concentrics

poetry by Elodie Townsend

In the exhibition gallery of the fine art museum

I wanted to tell you something.

I wanted to say that all things start from the center and grow out, into spider webs, into traffic patterns, into forearm scars.

I wanted to tell you that I think the spiral is grounding in its uncanny—

A cycle of clarity, and a circle of obsession.

The child’s myth of making something from nothing.

But you stood with your head cocked, eyes straight ahead, and instead

I told you that everything is art, except ideas aren’t art—

I told you that ideas are phlegmatic, and they crawl on soft bellies to form a mass, or a catalyst,

and when struck and beaten to the point of bruising, all the little bits fly out and hit the walls and furniture.

And that is art. But, I didn’t say that, actually.

I’ve lied.

I said nothing, and you did nothing but take a burdened sip of your smuggled-in Coke Zero and tilt your head the other direction.

Did the can’s cold lip taste mercifully thin?

The Grey Witch of Yga

fiction by Radus Mareto

The mystery cycle of Ygamagha (based on confidential records in the Almanac of the Order of Mages)

Sometimes, Yga was visible on the horizon. Pale, distant and sad, it lingered behind wisps of poisonous vapour from the marshes, casting its cold light over the ravaged body of Ygamagha. Battles on the surface of the planet had ceased long ago but the scars would remain forever. The air was toxic, radiation levels ran high, several continents were consumed by smouldering fires. Life had gone all but extinct.

Ygamagha has always been a war zone contested by the witches, the mages and the military.

Then the Great Cosmic Discoveries were made. Magha, it seemed, was boundless and mostly hostile. Threats from above and beyond forced the warring cliques on Ygamagha into an alliance and gave the war industry a boost.

The construction of the Conquest corps Defender of Magha began.

This incredible weapon was the size of a planet. According to schematics, once the Battle pulsar was complete, it would be bigger than Ygamagha itself. The first of this size, it was codenamed “Death March Horizon” in an altogether new battle class. Its construction lasted many generations and ultimately claimed their lives.

As time wore on, the skies above Ygamagha were gradually plunged into darkness by the monstrous structure. Daylight responsibilities were taken over by the battle satellite stars which orbited the Defender of Magha as its first line of defense. Each satellite shone in a different colour of the spectrum.

But Agonia yearned for the pale light of Yga. On those rare occasions when the feeble light appeared far, far away, the young witch climbed on top of one of the lonely spires of the Witch hive and gazed with longing at it.

She was a Daughter of changes and her name was Agonia Midogue.

Hierarchy among the witches was straightforward and clear. There were Daughters, Mothers and Grandmothers. Within these three communities they were trained in the mystical arts and then joined the respective army forces. Three Grandmothers ruled over the witches: The Black Grandmother of the past, the Grey Grandmother of the Present and the White Grandmother of the future. Grandmother of the past at the time was Sentesia Delpot. Codra Bogeldere held the moniker Grey Grandmother of the Present and Joanna Liezerdoug - White Grandmother of the future. This ruling trinity

was most strict and demanding on matters of discipline within the Hive and the witches’ involvement in the never-ending military operations against the enemies from the stars. Each Grandmother ruled her Veils of the Hive with an iron fist.

Agonia did not like the Grandmothers.

She did not like the Defender of Magha either because it blocked Yga. She hated the military and despised the mages.

She kept these secrets to herself. She never shared with anyone. Agonia Midogue never spoke. Not because she had taken the vow of silence or because she could not. No. The reasons remained a mystery. This is how she had been found in the marshes by the Hive - naked and silent.

The rules say Daughters must never cover their bodies. Their education requires it for they need to learn to be free of prejudice and obey their seniors. Besides, they learn they are not defenseless and should rely only on themselves.

However, Daughters are never forbidden to speak.

It may be that Agonia was silent due the strange circumstances in which she was found. It happened during a giant flare on Yga, when the whole planet of Ygamagha and the almost complete Defender of Magha lit up in a flash of blinding light which lasted several seconds. This was no regular eruption or ordinary light. The eruption had released a burst of magical energy and occult light from its star. It coincided with an extremely rare alignment of constellations and at that moment, Agonia was found in the marshes by the Witch Hive.

Naked and silent.

It was obvious she understood what was being said. They took her in and she turned out a most capable student. They knew not what to call her at first. A name she needed nonetheless and since she had appeared after the flare, they took to calling “The witch of Yga”. But she had not fallen from the star. She was just a peasant girl from beyond the marshes. She had been abandoned because she was the twelfth child to parents who simply could not afford another mouth to feed. The father seemed to believe Agonia was not his daughter anyway. So, they had given her that ugly name, put her in a basket and left her in the foggy wetland. The child was saved by an old widow who lived on a boat in the marshes. Not the typical houseboat but more like a shed on a

raft. This shed looked downright macabre and had quite a temper. Their paint cracked and peeling, the old shutters sat on dirty crooked windows and were rarely, if ever, open. The light that trickled in was dim on account of the fog which covered the marshes in gloom. The houseboat drifted wherever fancy took it. When it hit shallows, it lifted ponderously on its four fat scaly feet and trudged along till it found deeper water where it rested again. Nobody knew what it ate with any certainty.

For what it’s worth, the witch was a dried-up shell of a woman with a penchant for tobacco and crosswords. The old quantum console, which the widow used to download endless crosswords each cycle was connected to the total web on Ygamagha. Agonia was 1 always curious and learned a lot from them. And, it was boring out there in the marshes. She used to talk to herself a lot, just like all children do, and asked the widow all kinds of questions. Answers were hard to come by, but this did little to discourage the girl. Sometimes, the widow would teach Agonia a simple spell or an innocent curse. The girl had a knack for magic and put her heart and soul in learning the craft. She quickly grew to hate all mages, which the old hag despised for reasons of her own. She thought poorly of the military thanks to snippets of the news bulletin she picked up from the console. Agonia could not get her hands on the ancient device very often because the widow held on to it most of the time.

Time passed.

The widow died.

It happened during the flare from Yga.

And Agonia went silent. She remembered the blinding light but not much else. She came round, far from the houseboat that was her home and without clothes, desire to scream or make any sound at all. Back in the marshes, the orphaned houseboat went rogue and was lost for a long time.

And yet, it was as if luck had shined on the lonely child of the marshes. She received a warm welcome in the Witch Hive where no one seemed to notice she never spoke. She grew slender and soon her body was covered with tattoos that added power to sign spells and silent curses, as was only proper.

On different worlds (maghas) across the Boundless Magha, different units are used to measure time: 1 days, months, years, standard cycles, cycles of various length, phases etc.

Young Agonia Midogue was the quietest Daughter of changes the Witch Hive had ever had. The witch of Yga somehow communed with her sisters without saying a word. Little by little she gained the respect of her peers, set trends in fashion and let her ideas take root in other people’s minds. Sometimes these ideas were far from innocent. Like her theory that if the Hive let men in, it would undermine the Mage order and bring power back into balance.

There hardly is a boy who wouldn’t wish to study magic surrounded by a horde of naked girls! The numbers of basic spell-casters of the Mage order or Archivers as they were accustomed to calling themselves would soon be reduced to little more than a harmless assortment of artistic designers with an eye for color.

Or her idea that the Veils of the Hive had to merge. As there was no such thing as the Past or the Present, the veils and Grandmothers that represented them just had to go.

However silent she may have been, her exotic ideas could not have passed unnoticed. And it was hardly a surprise that the young witch of Yga got herself noticed. Who first paid attention to the wild theories of the Daughter of changes is still not clear but she made her debut in a mother’s boudoir with the Mother of elements, Loma Lina Margalo.

Mother Margalo was standing by the window in her boudoir gazing at the distant marshes when the silent Agonia appeared on her doorstep.

“Don’t just stand there girl as though you are gated. Come in!” softly said Loma Lina still looking out of the window, her back to the hall.

The young witch of Yga took a step forward but remained close to the curtain that covered the entrance. She quickly looked around the boudoir and let her eyes rest on Mother Margallo.

“We found you there,” Loma Lina pointed at the fog-draped marshes, where the rotting trunk of a large tree was lying on one side on the soggy earth.

Agonia kept watching the mother. Back straight, dark violet veils hugging a fit body and silver hair worn short.

Mother Margallo turned around and her eyes bore into the girl making her flinch. Loma Lina’s eyes were surprisingly big and eerily violet and Agonia found herself gawping as if she had seen something improper.

“I see you are impressed by the Eye of elements,” said Loma and then Agonia noticed the mother holding a violet crystal globe.

The color shifted nervously under Agonia’s gaze.

Mother Margallo went over to the tea table and sat in a fine chair. She placed the globe in front of her then turned her huge eyes to the witch of Yga and ordered:

“Sit down, daughter!”

Agonia sat on the other chair by the table and glanced at the Mother of Elements trying to guess her age and failing. Her violet eyes were too distracting. The Daughter of changes peered into the globe again.

“Do not be alarmed,” Loma Lina almost smiled. “I know you commune with your friends through the crystal. Now we will use mine.”

Mother Margallo put her forefinger on the globe and adjusted it in front of the girl.

“How did you come up with such nonsense!?” the Mother of Elements was not one to mince words.

The globe responded with a wild display of colors which suggested distrust, protest, resolution, anger, and a slightly dry throat all at the same time.

“I beg your forgiveness, let me offer you some tea,” a dainty porcelain cup popped up right in front of Agonia but the sudden change in Mother Lima’s tone was confusing and rather annoying.

These emotions showed up on the globe as glowing cinders covered in smoke.

“Feisty, yes! You hide none of your thoughts and emotions but that I will take care of,” said Margallo, thinking to herself and then continued: “The rules in our world demand absolute obedience. Small digressions pose no threat and we even encourage them because they build a strong character.

The globe turned a deep grey.

“There, you can learn,” the smile only touched the corner of Loma Lina’s mouth.” You are here not only because you go beyond the limits,” her tone got harsher “but most of all because you can channel the force of your will. Girls like you are hard to come by

and must receive proper care and guidance. Only one or perhaps two other girls share the same modalities as you.”

Suspicion filled the globe again.

“From now on, you will be under my direct supervision!” Mother Margallo’s voice was so cold and firm that the globe iced over.

She rubbed with some satisfaction the Eye of Elements and without looking at Agonia added:

“Go now but stay close!”

The girl obeyed in a kind of trance. She straightened up like an android, turned around stiffly and headed for the boudoir’s entrance. Before leaving, Agonia overheard the mother of Elements say:

“M-mm, yes. The globe pointed you out for a reason.”

It was as if Lima had seen something in the witch of Yga that remained hidden even to Agonia. The ire she felt quickly drove these thoughts out of her head and settled triumphantly behind the girl’s glowering eyes. Her willful nature would be at odds with Mother Margallo’s desire to keep her on a tight leash. The witch of Yga would have liked to follow her own rules instead of those of her narrow-minded superiors. She was aware the time would soon come when she would be sent to the frontline to join the fray on one of the outer rings, where Ygamagha waged its wars for justice. But she saw herself as the commander of a witch squad, not some adjutant to a Mother. Neither was she happy with the role witches played in battle. All they ever did was put up spells to protect the military and tend to the wounded. Her pretty little head entertained grand ideas about the witches replacing the mages from positions of privilege at the head of the army and overwhelming the enemy with attacking curses and spells. The world existed for War and Agonia dreamed of spearheading the attack.

How could she see her dreams fulfilled if she waned in the shadow of the hateful Margallo!?

Such painful thoughts were tearing her apart and she hadn’t noticed leaving the Witch Hive far behind, coming to her senses only once she waded in the stinking waters of the marshes. She looked around with a heavy heart. Instead of clear skies, all she could see was the hateful Defender of Magha hanging above her, whose construction

had drained the resources of a thousand worlds and claimed so many lives. The huge building of the Hive loomed behind her while the endless marshes draped in fog sprawled ahead as far as the eye could see. Still further, veiled in the poisonous atmospheric gases and smothered by the ominous silhouette of the Defender, Yga shined coy, distant and elusive like a child’s dream.

The young witch of Yga went after her star.

She was not planning on going back to the Hive. She would find her way beyond the marshes, find shelter in a disused military base, steal a comet or a small Interstellar. She would fly away to a planet and set up her own Hive. And when the time was right, she would come back the leader of her own army of witches, tear the Defender of Magha down from the sky and let Yga reign again.

Her childish dreams were rudely interrupted by a treacherous muddy sinkhole which trapped her and started swallowing her young body greedily. She was no stranger to bogs and keeping her cool she wove a silent spell for just such a case. To her surprise, the magic words which sprang in her mind did not produce the desired effect other than churning the muddy water. She tried a different spell but just managed to give the foam a golden shine. Panic was already setting in when the mud in which she was fast sinking came up to her shoulders. She dared not move lest it made matters worse and delivered her faster to the depths. In her desperation she gave a piercing whistle but the sound drowned in the stink of the marshes. Besides, she thought, the noise could draw an unwelcome beast to her. Too late now as Agonia saw a dark shadow pushing through the fog and closing in. The girl’s eyes widened with horror when the enormous swamp panther leaped in the air and landed with disturbing grace on a rotten tree trunk nearby. All kind of thoughts were running in the girl’s head but none offered escape. No spell could make the beast cooperate. Such monsters were notoriously difficult to break, let alone by a daughter. The beast was facing a challenge of sorts too as clearly it knew the area well and was currently trying to figure out a way to free his prey from the grip of the sinkhole. The mud reached Agonia’s chin and the swamp panther got ready to jump hoping against hope to fly over the victim and at least snatch its head.

But quite suddenly the fearsome beast jolted and melted away into the fog without making a sound. A more experienced mother would have found this rather unusual but

hardly a reason to worry. However, the young enchantress’s thoughts ran wild with panic as she tried to imagine the kind of monster that could make a beast like the swamp panther run away, tail between its legs.

Just then, she felt something touch her leg.

The Something crawled upward and a silent wail of utter terror came from the girl’s mouth.

The witch of Yga tried to fight the faceless enemy charging from the depths but she could barely move in the mud and the attacker was strong and methodical. Eventually, it tightened its grip on her and pulled her to the tree trunk. Though Agonia could not fight back she released a barrage of silent deadly curses garnered with spit. The monster shrugged it all off sending bright electrical arches in a wild dance around the two of them caught in a deadly embrace.

“Enough!” the girl felt the voice of steel like a blow to her head.

Her entire will left her and she slumped helpless in the hands of the monster.

It all grew quiet as the electricity sank in the mud while the boiling water of the marshes settled in under a blanket of fog. Two ghastly bodies rose from the mud. The shapeless silhouette of the monster climbed with its prey on the huge tree trunk without much difficulty. It rose to full height and cast the stricken witch on it. She had no strength left in her to look at it and lay listless just as she had fallen.

“Rise!” the voice boomed in her mind and her body obeyed without question.

Agonia stood rigid straight and opening her eyes made her feel dizzy. It was all a blur at first but gradually shapes started coming back into focus. She looked in abject horror at the fiend looming above her. It was a sight of dread mostly because lumps of mud and slime slid off this monster which her imagination claimed was the worst demon in the whole Boundless Magha.

Taking great care, the demon started rubbing itself clean using two of its limbs until a distinctly human body emerged from underneath all the sticky mud from the marshes. He was tall and was wearing the heavy-duty battle-suit of the Pacifist commandos. The helmet’s visor was broken and thick sludge from the marshes kept pouring out. It stank horribly just like everything else around. Agonia stood nailed to the ground before the filthy giant and watched in disgust as he thrust a hand inside his helmet and began

scooping out mud through the broken visor. Once he finished grooming, the armored giant let his hands fall to his sides and stood still. His battle-suit was done for judging by the multiple cuts and the wires sticking out as well as some ruptured tubes that kept leaking waste matter. What made Agonia’s mind wail in agony, however, was the pacifist whose rotten head inside the battered helmet was giving her a toothy grin.

Two dim lights flared inside the empty eye sockets and the huge figure leaned over her.

“I find you here where I left you,” the dead pacifist did not move his lips but his voice forced its way inside the witch’s head nonetheless.

It was repulsive but overwhelming. It was like Death personified was talking.

“I am Andesaloth,” the voice filled Agonia’s mind and went on to explain: “The Lord of Death Himself!”

An eerie silence followed as the monster was clearly expecting the shock of recognition but the young girl was so paralyzed that she could not give the macabre helmet its due.

The corpse quickly figured this out and added irritably:

“Just listening will do for now!’

More silence. Apparently, the corpse was used to getting fawned over whenever he made a statement. Remembering his audience was helpless, the dead pacifist rose to his feet and walked around the witch of Yga taking his time.

“You are special to me,” Andesaloth said it as if he was speaking on behalf of the whole world. ”I chose you carefully. There are two others like you but I chose you to be the vessel of my will and spread it among your sisters. I intend to give you a very difficult task but I will assist you.”

The helmet stopped in front of the girl and leaned closer. The empty sockets searched her wild eyes and she knew she could hide nothing from him.

“You have many questions,” Andesaloth sounded intrigued. “Curious, willful, perceptive but arrogant and impatient. I like you, kid!”

The corpse straightened up authoritatively and slowly made his way to a thicket of branches in the shape of an armchair. The pacifist sat on the improvised throne and motioned to Agonia:

“Come here!” his command made the body of the girl move against her will to its master.

Another small movement of his hand and the witch of Yga regained control of her own body. He released his grip on her so suddenly that she collapsed in his feet. The corpse stood still as is only right for a corpse and radiated indifference.

“You are full of doubt and suspicion,” the statement weighed on her like a verdict. “You want to ask, so go ahead and ask!” the Daughter of changes felt both the irony and the return of her voice.

“What…are…you?” muttered Agonia for the first time after an eternity of silence.

“Ah, you mean this?” the corpse feigned surprise while the forefinger on his right hand, in contrast with the utter stillness of his dead body, completed a full circle to indicate its owner. “That’s not Me!” he sounded peeved and added: “There were no other suitable donors around so I had to possess the body of this loser. My illustrious self is beyond the stars, on Necromagha. You should not be surprised a Grand Lord like me can possess bodies from such a distance,” the tone was smug unlike the distinctly passive and terminally dead pacifist.

“But why…” Agonia was too exhausted to finish the question.

Dead men are never in a hurry.

Unliving are not either.

“Why I took your voice away?” prompted the helmet eventually because patience has its limits after all. “An inextricable part of your education.”

“Huh?” Agonia tried to keep up.

“Is it not obvious?” it was the dead man’s turn to be surprised. “You mastered the silent curses to perfection, developed your sixth sense and got attuned and no one can hold a light against you in the magic of signs…Besides, now you know I can take it all away from you.”

“What is it…you… want of me?” the girl was beginning to find her feet.

“As a rule, I demand and get total obedience,” for a corpse that had stayed in the mud for so long, the pacifist was unusually chatty. “Things will be different with you. I intend to let you in on my plans and not merely command you. Of course, you have been taught that I am the enemy. One of the many. But in time you will learn that I am the

good enemy who has no interest in causing you harm. You are quite simply of little consequence to me.”

A meaningful pause.

“Except for the three of you,” finished Andesaloth in a flat monotone as if telling a future that was inevitable.

Agonia pushed herself up and looked at the recumbent figure among the branches. The rotten head inside the helmet was set at an angle rather comically but the dim lights in the empty sockets were focused on the girl.

“Who are the other two?... What do you need us for?... Why doesn’t magic work on you? How…Why…” halting questions poured out of Agonia, signaling a return to reason. The helmet interrupted her with a movement of his index finger.

The corpse settled more comfortably among the branches and seemed to smile.

“You will learn everything you need to know when the time is right,” the voice in Agonia’s head was peremptory. “Look over there, girl!” Andesaloth pointed at the glowing sphere that was Yga. “Making the star release such a burst of magical energy to send a pulse to the furthest reaches of the Boundless Magha – that is what I call Magic! Your little curses are just a tremor in the hurricane of mysteries and you owe your talents entirely to my good will, which I will continue to lavish upon you.”

The corpse fell silent and for a while it seemed as if he was lost. The witch of Yga thought it as good a time as any to say something.

“I’d rather die than serve!” Agonia blurted and shot a deadly curse at the pacifist.

The dead man remained still as stone.

The curse, on the other hand, left a trail of white-hot flame which sputtered and crackled from its contact with the poisonous air. Halfway across to its aim, the curse visibly slowed as if it had hit a barrier. Then, violating every law of the occult, the curse banked and turned laboriously heading back to its source - the stunned witch of Yga. Still very much with a mind of its own, the deadly magic slowly but surely kept advancing at the girl.

Agonia tried to get out of the way but could not move. The malignant curse came within a hair’s breadth of the chest of the Daughter of changes and halted, spitting and sizzling.

The girl dared not move.

“Would you care to learn what it means to be Unliving?” the voice in Agonia’s mind affected indifference but she sensed the gloating with every part of her body.

The curse quivered and then slowly engulfed the body of the young witch. Blades of ice tore into her and a bolt of lightning lit up her mind. She sensed she was drifting in nothingness and the world seemed a weak sigh stifled by the silence of infinity. Her body and mind faded along with all sense and feeling.

All that was left was endless agony.

Suddenly, she was summoned back and she returned to her body once more to slump in the feet of her master. Again.

“Like what you saw?” asked the helmet conversationally.

“I want you dead!” gasped the witch of Yga feebly.

“That is not possible and you know it!” he reprimanded her. “Now you have one foot in the door of the kingdom of death which means you are half mine,” the dead man was grinning as was his right but the derision in Andesaloth’s voice gave the man’s happy face inside the broken helmet a more complete look.

The glowing emptiness in the dead man’s eyes got darker and Andesaloth added:

“Those who return from the kingdom of death bear the mark. Not only on their flesh,” Andesaloth emphasized what he meant by pointing a mortal finger at her, “but on their souls as well. You are still in the dark and know nothing of souls but there will come a time when I will share some of the secrets of true wisdom with you. It will do for now to know that appearances reflect our true nature. Not always directly as it is with you now but if you know where to look you will see beyond mere appearances.”

The girl did not understand.

The hollow wail of the witch siren came from somewhere beyond the marshes. The dead man turned to look in the direction of the sound and attempted a sigh but since his chest was full of slime and mud, all that came out of his mouth was dark sticky gunk. The pacifist drew himself up from his throne in the thicket.

“There’s always a tomorrow,” Andesaloth laid out the cliché in Agonia’s mind the way a wise man reveals the great mysteries to his pupil and gave a warning. “Hear my word and hear it well! This meeting stays between you and me. You will make your

return to the Hive and become the witch you are supposed to be. It’s a long road ahead but I am sure you will not disappoint. Meanwhile, you will find the other two of your sisters who will play a part in this little game of ours,” the voice of Destiny sounded jocular and somewhat sneaky.

The dead man made a gesture with one hand and the witch of Yga found herself standing on her legs, looking up at the helmet and its disgusting contents.

“You must find the other two alone,” his command filled her mind again. “Without my help,” added Andesaloth emphatically and then his tone visibly hardened: “You must not reveal your secret mission! The only thing you must do is find who they are and then report to me. I already told you everything you need to know to recognize them. Follow your instinct.”

They heard noise from the direction of the nearby misty ponds drawing closer. Andesaloth paid it no mind and said:

“I will be watching you! You will meet me here only when I summon you.”

Then, with all the easy grace of a robot, the helmet swiveled around and waded in the marshes. A few long strides and the ghastly figure disappeared in the somber depths from whence it came.

In that moment, the Lord of Death released Agonia from his bondage. Instead of collapsing in a heap on the tree trunk, this time she remained on her feet. Soon, she was surrounded by her worried sisters led by mother Loma Lina Margallo.

“What happened to you?” asked mother Margallo with concern, not expecting an answer from the mute daughter.

When the words came, they caught everyone by surprise.

“I paid Death a visit.”

The sisters fussing around Agonia froze in shock and the witch of Yga went on:

“My voice is back.”

Mother Margallo’s violet eyes locked in on Agonia’s. The elder witch grew pensive and said:

“You have gone grey.”

House of Bee

poetry by Yuly Mireles

abuelita’s voice cut through a waxing gibbous lit moon as I tried to sit in silence

have you ever sat in mediation wanting to rip out of your skin

the tension around the neck around the chest around the stomach voices wailing in my head “why”

fuck stillness

rock baby, rock sway with the ocean tide

i harden’t allowed myself to wail that deep since Susan Ateh’s “Come Back to Self” breath work finally started to kick in, but the pathway to the nasal cavity to the pharynx to the trachea to the bronchi to the bronchiole to the alveoli did not connect

so I purged instead along jagged rocks between heaven & hell abuelita held my hand & I wailed “porque”

as she whispered

“no preguntes purga mija, purga instead” i hadn’t allowed myself to wail that deep since The House of the Bee honey dripping out of my womb sparking the torus of my life

I forgive myself In all Dimensions & Timelines, PAST PRESENT FUTURE.

Daughter

poetry by Grace McGuire

There is no good time to tell you that you are nothing but the aggregation of hands going places they never belonged Flesh freckled and bruised Eggs shattered against soft walls in bursts of raw desperation

Every poem I ever wrote is braided in gently with strands of your hair None of the words were wanted or planned but they bled from me anyway

I never once dreamed about those glimpses of you the way other little girls did In diaries and scrapbooks and proudly, to their own mothers: She’ll look just like you Carrying the promise of legacy in their mind’s eye

I’ve liberated some two thousand pills from their plastic shells Scarfing them down each day with dedication and whatever liquid was closest to me Feeble attempts at consecration

I’ve cradled copper inside the walls of my womb Strangling the pearls of lust to death

Though you may not believe me, I must assure you that everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve done it for you

Out of love

Just to spare you the theatrics of having to be alive at the same time as me

A Mother’s Embrace, Anthony Duran

Alles, Or Everything

cross-genre literature by D. Beveridge I.

This is my serious voice. Swirling.

The following concurrent texts are the initial conditions (remember that a chaotic system, the technical kind, is characterized by a supreme sensitivity to initial conditions, meaning a slight alteration at the outset has far ranging consequences further along the line):

Concurrent only in my reading of them, not in any historical sense (or is that incorrect?):

1. A galley copy of Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman that I am supposed to be writing a review of, the title of which evokes a combination of A Thousand Plateaus and I’ll Be Your Mirror. The spine displays an erroneous publication date of April 4, 2022. It’s supposed to be 2023, unless I’ve been displaced in the continuum.

2. The Decline of the West, Vol. 1 Form & Actuality, the first half of Oswald Spengler’s magnum opus, in which the author declares the time of death of Arts and Letters in Western European-American Civilization already past by its publication in 1918. Having survived all that, we must now be wandering around soullessly in a doleful, zombie-ish afterlife. (It may be fair to say that Fukuyama’s book was merely an abbreviated repetition of this prophecy in political terms nearly a century later. Both seem to have been utterly mistaken from one angle, yet entirely correct from another.)

3. The Claw of the Conciliator (Vol. 2 in The Book of the New Sun), Gene Wolfe— included in a syllabus of an upper level Humanities course I did not take in college.

Worth providing a passage of dialogue that takes place at a prodigious feast between the arch-antagonist and the hero regarding Ancient History and the progress of humanity:

“Though it does not explain why Urth is called as she is, my dear Chatelaine’s tale makes the vital point well, which is that in those times mankind [sic] traveled by his own ships from world to world, and mastered each, and built on them cities of Man. Those were the great days of our race, when our fathers’ fathers’ fathers strove for the mastery of the universe.”

He paused, and because he seemed to expect some comment from me, I said, “Sieur, we are much diminished in wisdom from that age.”

“Ah, now you strike to the heart. Yet with all your perspicacity, you mistake it. No, we are not diminished in wisdom. We are diminished in power. Study has advanced without letup, but even as men have learned all that is needful for mastery, the strength of the world has been exhausted. We exist now, and precariously, upon the ruin of those who preceded us.”

In addition to the following visual works:

4. The Netflix Original, Dark. A German, time-travel, quasi-apocalyptic mystery-drama I’m binging with my roommates. At the core of the plot is an actual reactor core, which I’ll always have a sweet spot for, having studied nuclear power in another life. It’s all classified, but you can pretty much find whatever you want to know online.

5. Juliana Halpert’s show of photographs titled Civilization on display at Larder until the 16th of April. I pitched a column review of the opening to a friend of a friend at an LA-based art magazine. Yet to hear back.

Swirling because probably having all these things going on at once is too much. “Admitted to ourselves that we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable.” And that I’m in the middle of each of them, apart from Julie’s show, which makes sense in terms of completion only by noting the dates of opening and closing receptions.

You’ll have to remind me throughout that this really is serious business.

II.

Is there one, or more entry points into this labyrinthine idea?

III.

To wrangle in these various threads one needs a hard-nosed hermeneutic. The exegesis of integrity one would apply to Scripture.

(I regularly sit under such preaching that makes a point of diminishing the Self in the approach to the Text. The result is faith, confidence, and trust, while one must always pray to receive the chief graces of love, joy, and peace. And I cannot speak to the problem of evil, only that a certain mid-rate theologian, whom my brother studies, condemns nearly all historical, systematic theology by calling it “theodicy.” It doesn’t make much sense until he—the mid-rate theologian—insists that his work is meant to be read aloud, not studied in private. A feeble impersonation of a lesser James Joyce in a mismatched form. It has to do with a particular—and I would say, mistakenly fantastical —doctrine of absolution.)

This hermeneutic may be compared to the exercise of a mathematical operation a student of the subject is exposed to in the first chapters of a linear algebra text book. Gaussian elimination is a process of elimination, of sorts, by which simple, arithmetic line operations are applied to the coefficients of the terms in a system of polynomial

functions in order to find a single solution, a set of solutions, or determine that there is no solution at all. It takes place on an augmented matrix—not to be confused with Keanu Reeves. (Here, the reader is directed to Bruce Hainley’s poem about multiple Keanus, and the prurient details of Key anus.)

So the goal would be to reduce each of the five works listed above, not to reduce them to something like an essence, which implies transcendence, but rather to their own immanent hinge, by which I do not intend a metaphor, but truly the points or lines where each of them intersect and swing.

Likely because The Claw is the ‘lowest’ work above, appropriately categorized as genrefiction, albeit quite good genre-fiction, the ‘Gaussian operation’ is already complete for that text in the excerpt above.

Immediately one is confronted with the problem of measurement. No standard unit for value—though perhaps the class of superlatives offers a limited solution, which would be only as granular as minima and maxima. Not good enough for everything in between. And what of points of inflection, the highest and lowest values in the function of the first derivative, yes, but that requires a certain amount of unmasking to see, so to speak. So again, how can one measure, and therefore locate the critical points? The ‘hinges’.

I am aware that The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque contains passages on inflection points, but have yet, over the course of several years, come to any understanding of what the author is trying to communicate.

Does an inflection point reflect a moment of maximum tension, or no tension at all?

There is really no valid way to answer this question.

Julie and I spoke in fragments at the opening reception of her show at Larder.

Me: “Are you familiar with—have you heard of a distinction being made between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’?”

She: “No — but I’m intrigued.”

Me: “I don’t remember who the theorist is—I’m also going to have to find something I came across in the last year of one anthropologist’s opinion as to what is the indicator in a culture of the first signs of civilization.”

She: “I’d be interested to know.”

Me: “Do you know what the beast in the portrait is? It looks like a condor or something like.”

She: “I think it is a wolf.”

Me: “It has a beak. And talons.”

She: “Let’s go look—it’s too cold out here.”

In the show, Julie impersonates the 18th century Habsburg ruler Queen Maria Theresa. In the central portrait, the aforementioned unidentified bird bears a sword, which it seems to be offering to the Queen in lavish royal regalia. The word CLEMENTIA appears above the scene, superimposed on cumulus clouds beneath the sun.

I’m fuzzy on Austrian history, but I know they are German speakers, which may be enough to make a claim that Julie is doing something quite strategic here by reversing the so-called ‘master-slave dialectic’ in a performative swap between Germanic autocrat and common Jew.

This is when I am compelled to express my near absolute insecurity and hesitancy about this whole thing. Wikipedia even tells me that Spengler voted for Hitler. Fuck.

Would it be appropriate to ask Julie about her family history associated with the Holocaust? She and Chris Kraus are close. Where online can I find Kraus’ chapter titled Kike Art? How does this axis of a specific personal identity register in the work? Especially the piece minimally titled Silver, which begs the question of the original owner of the silver powder-box and other antiques in the photograph. I could reach out to Julie, but the very asking could be misinterpreted.

I named my son Clemency. The goal was to prophesy his character.

Sabbath Day: supposed to be remembered as a day of rest, specifically the remembering because it’s easy to forget. So this is for myself, likely to be revised out later. Sabbath Day’s journey: an ancient measure of distance foreshadowing modern measures of velocity, ie. mph, m/s.

I have to stay active because if I close my eyes the spirit retracts to a point, located somewhere inside my hollow body, yet without extension—the angels on the head of a pin. I close my eyes and my mouth becomes the entrance to “the man-eating cave” in Dark. The body becomes a geometric loaf, dead weight, the mere object of an annihilating force of progression. The cut of time. It’s happening now as I disassociate in my bed.

A pendant of St. Christopher appears in the second season of Dark. Found in the hand of the protagonist sifting beach sand. He sits with his lover. They say the pendant looks old. I felt smart [haha] because I knew what it was before the characters identified it.

I take the pendant as a token of the companionship, or fellowship, of our traveling, the absence of which there is an underlying subtext in the show—the alienation because of

VI.

VII.

their secrets experienced within the cast’s close familial and romantic relationships. Or said another way by Spengler: “As soon as the primitive’s astonished eye perceives the dawning world of ordered extension, and the significant emerges in great outlines from the welter of mere impressions, and the irrevocable parting of the outer world from his proper, his inner, world gives form and direction to his waking life, there arises in the soul—instantly conscious of its loneliness — the root-feeling of longing.” [Emphasis original; underline added.]

Here the opportunity arises to describe the population of our post-analytic thoughtmilieu exemplified by authors such as Peter Sloterdijk, Paul Preciado, or Fred Moten; anticipated (methodology-wise) by the American pragmatists, William James, Charles S. Peirce to a lesser degree only because he retains much of the style of the older type of analysis, and Richard Rorty more recently. These and many others are taking the trip, fellow travelers, rotating at the wheel to drive the bus.

At a certain point, mentally, one begins to wonder about the actual power of such people to make, or do anything real. Why, for example, in my mid-twenties did I believe that Sloterdijk was my only real friend in the entire world? His mission, declared at the outset of the Spheres trilogy, to “refute loneliness.” True to any remaining Romanticism, that mood that is coming back with a vengeance in a dramatic historical reprise, one has to exclaim a desperate kind of love. The trick is you can’t want it to make any sense.

VIII.

The night hours belong to my owl spirit-animal, which I have been ashamed of in the past, wanting to keep ‘normal’ hours like the rest of us. But night is when one can be most alone, and my psychiatrist recently excused me of the need to conform citing the oft repeated trope about ‘creatives’ and the night time hours.

Something more to be said about the loneliness mentioned above: Penman in the opening pages of Mirrors writes of Fassbinder’s “one-man revolution”. The kind of thing

that keeps me up at night—working, or would it be better to say “gesturing towards” work. (That was tongue in cheek.)

The horror at the expense of such operations. One wonders what kind of revolution takes place in the intimate space of a singular heart? And at what point in time, or what circumstances? Surely this would be a prerequisite for political revolution writ large. Still, the Situationist maxim feels like the most complete statement of revolutionary hope: ne travail jamais. To internalize it, the subject is in imminent danger of poisoning if a mistake is made in the dosage.

That Debord died alone with his boardgame. That Semiotext(e), in 2008, (nearly half a century out) reprinted Michele Bernstein’s All the King’s Horses, which she originally wrote only to earn a little extra cash for the ‘real’ revolutionary activities. That Preciado is making a film of Orlando!

IX.

The hero in The Claw, Severian, upon imprisonment and introduction to his fellow prisoners who because of the length of their confinement and ignorance of the free world immediately ask him a multitude of questions:

As may be imagined, in such a welter of inquires I was able to answer almost none.

It is clear now that we are well on the way of discovering the critical portion of these works’ “final vocabulary”, which may be another way of understanding the form one achieves with Gauss whereby one has the answer to the system.

I was careful to make no promises at the outset of this essay. Again, I only named the initial conditions. If the reader expected a certain level of depth of analysis of each of the works, I am not obligated to meet it. I’d like to call this a work of anarcho-criticism, not answerable to any authority. Where other (better) critiques might have sought understanding, or appreciation, or taste, I have set myself toward entertainment. A style the bullies in middle school might now affirm and stop calling me faggot. The gays and the Jews, according to Sontag, have a justifiable monopoly on cultural production because of the phenomenon of frisson common to the former, and the grief, which qualifies a particular sobriety, that defines the latter. I don’t know if she would say it differently now compared to when she wrote it in the 60’s.

So this is the midpoint. (x , y)

Meanwhile—

In Mirrors, Penman also writes in a chopped up numerated sequence. It’s a method of construction fitting to our day and Instagram perception. They may be understood as theses: 13.

What is it to attempt a biography or overview or memorial or accounting in this era of Wikipedia and Twitter and all the other just-a-click-away info blocs and image banks? Exegesis become a game of hop, skip, and jump. Information a matter of rhizomes and rabbit holes and riverbank drifts.

Again, measurement.

Somewhere here belongs a comment on ‘the bunker’, as such. Connecting an architectural theme in Dark, in which critical plot points take place in an actual bunker, and the bunker-like theaters in which Fassbinder sits out the Cold War as a child, occasionally sitting through double or even triple headers in a single day. Shelter—but in both cases the boundaries of the structure turn out to be more permeable than expected or intended. More than once the cast in Dark finds mutilated bodies dumped in the bunker, manifesting out of nowhere through a mysterious wormhole from other timespaces. Fassbinder’s theaters, of course, had no power to stop the Marshal Plan culturewar. One suspects they were compelled to screen a certain set of movies, and in this case the permeability is registered not only in the light projected onto the screen, but the influence these had on the hearts of the viewers.

I had wanted to stretch this thought to the limit of something like a theology of the bunker. That God is the central object of the bunker experience. Desperation in the dark. Consider the so-called ‘foxhole prayer’.

I had yet to marry and start a family when I read Elaine Tyler May’s classic Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. But I knew instantly that the phenomenon she takes as her subject would have a kind of trickle down effect from my ancestors. My nuclear family would end up destroying itself from the inside. Had we developed a stronger sense of an enemy maybe there would have been a more trustworthy bond between us—like brothers and sisters in arms. I was far from performing the leader that we needed. As it was, the miasma in the post-Cold War atmosphere (I was born the year the Wall came down) didn’t turn out to be radioactive, but saturated with an equally noxious narcissism—part of the reason I can only ever write about myself, and why my ex’s work also always revolves around self-portraiture, maybe even especially in her work about motherhood, which only appears to be about our children.

“Exegesis”: the crazy person’s search for proof that they’re not crazy. —Kraus

XIV.

Fassbinder in his own voice explaining the dedication of the film Despair: “The film is dedicated to Artaud, Van Gogh and Zurn because all three were people who could be happy in their madness, until they killed themselves. I don’t really know, but I think that they lived a very private utopia in their madness. My Hermann Hermann is free. He chooses. Did Artaud and Van Gogh choose? I don’t know, and there’s no way I can know for sure. I can only guess. It’s a hypothesis.”

I have my own list of bonafides to qualify my dance with madness (to list them without sounding self-important is impossible). Therefore I was relieved to see Penman’s follow up: “Madness as a choice? Maybe. But this hypothesis risks erasing a lot of unchosen and unbearable and inconsolable pain [. . .].”

There are hypotheses, and there are hypotheses. One set is real, the one that can be verified and leads to experiments. The other is poetic—though this is setting up a false dichotomy — that lends itself to a philosophy of science that would be found in, say, a Fine Art department. (The critique of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions that, “Here the author says everything about science that an English major would want to hear.” Brutal, but also funny, and possibly true.)

I remember a mentor of mine in college suggesting that unrestricted reading of any author at any time was perhaps not the best approach for the life of the mind. I idolized him for introducing me to a cadre of positive anarchist writers. My partner and I were out with him and his wife at a cafe in Old Town Pasadena:

“So which is it,” his wife replied contentiously.

“I’m just saying that it might be more harm than good at this time,” he replied.

“Well that’s never been your approach,” she said.

“Come on,” he replied. “He’s talking about Nietzsche, of all the stupid people you could be talking about, I guess you might have to at some point, but it could be worthless, or worse.”

“Mister Contradiction,” she said waving her hand in his face.

I had no idea what my partner sitting next to me was thinking—and for that matter, in retrospect, I hardly know what she was thinking at any point in our relationship—I was so wrapped up in this vision of my mentor’s discordant marriage. He felt like a superior, and I could only think about how I might win him over. Both marriages, his and mine, have since ended in divorce. My own best thinking— and his.

XV.

Seventeen is the next prime in this series, so that will mark a final termination. It’s good to know ahead of time so I can prepare. Get the last things said.

By the third season of Dark me and my roommates were nearly begging for it to be over. Way too much repetition of the central thematic angst, for example there must have been a dozen almost identical shots of the protagonist jolting awake from a dream with his lover. After the third or fourth of that kind of repetition, and the introduction of a parallel world where the plot from the first two seasons was repeated with the twist that the characters were cast in alternative roles (ie. in the first two seasons Ulrich was married to Katherine and having an affair with Hannah, now in the third season he was married to Hannah and having an affair with Charlotte, but scrambling up the roles made no actual difference in the end), after all that, it was hard to resist the thought that it was all meaningless. Me, PJ, and Michael were split as to if the creators had intended it that way.

That, and in the big picture having German time travelers do nothing to fight the Third Reich, but rather having the existence of the entire multiverse revolve around a teenage romance seems indulgent. And it’s not because they couldn’t go that far back, some of the plot taking place in the 1880’s. Maybe it’s an unfair expectation, but then again my feeling was confirmed by PJ: “I mean that’s almost racist.”

In the final analysis, the show could have been fine if it had been half as many episodes long, but ouch. . . I hope no one ever says that about me.

XVI.

Julie’s photographs always hit my button, but also prove to be elusive and resistant to my critical capacity. I love their ‘meta’ quality, often composed of already extant images from other contexts that the viewer would have a difficult time finding on their own. As if she’s playing the archivist. This particular quality, at first glance, seems affectless, liberating the work from the sad details of daily life. But the longer one spends with the work, a salient passion—especially a passion for sharpness—becomes more and more relevant.

Anxiety is not the right word. Neither, longing. Perhaps, striving, in the most determined sense. It is present in Civilization in a text, which links a central subset of the works and suggests a throughline for the space of the gallery, superimposed over images of imperialist artifacts, settings, and scenery. It is a narrative of the Queen’s conquest of an alternative, anti-historical reality in which she competes against other great rulers who may or may not have been contemporaries and neighbors in our world history. For example, at one point she’s plotting how to defend a particular salt works near Graz against Hiawatha’s musketmen. The great achievement of Civilization is that bizarre experience of defamiliarization, which I take on Sloterdijk’s authority to be the most important aesthetic experience contemporary art can offer, in which a viewer progresses through stages of curiosity to wonder. Responding first with “Huh?” then

“Woah!” Julie does this with hard-earned poise and patience that pays the viewer a generous dividend.

I am grateful that I looked at all the work before I read the gallery handout, which would be the object of a minor critique—that it says too much about the meaning of the text in the photographs. I think if I had read the handout before making my way through the gallery I would not have been sufficiently disoriented by the bizarre narrative. I suppose saying so is merely a tip for the next viewer.

XVII.

Spengler calls his work a “philosophy of the future.” He sees in history a necessary progression of the organic life and death of civilizations. At least from this angle, the distinction between culture and civilization could be understood analogically as the distinction between a girl and the same girl who has grown into womanhood. To follow up on the dialogue with Julie, I have yet to rediscover what I had read about the first sign of civilization, what would be, to extend the analogy, like the first appearance of pubic hair.

There will be some pain that you simply cannot forget. Growing pains.

CODA.

For several years in my twenties I made an avocation of posing nude for artists. At times the work was lucrative, and enough to fuel my whiskey habit. (This was before I had shoplifted.)

There was an elderly man, a painter at the arts complex that had taken over the defunct high school in Jerome, AZ, who hired me for a private sitting. I thought only of the cash when he came across the hall from his studio to where I was posing for a larger group. He offered me $300 for a two hour session the following weekend.

The portraits he did of me, relatively small and quick works in oil, were decidedly different than what was on display in the rest of his studio. He and I were clearly in a more intimate situation than I had previously understood.

“You’ve got a PhD. there son. Do you know Dorothy,” he asked looking up from his easel with sorrow heavy on his brow.

That day I learned that each of us, all of us that walk the face of the earth, are responsible, in the most profound sense of the word, for our own individual relationship to the God of Creation, or however you want to describe “the power greater than yourself.” Ultimately, in the final scene, I have nothing to do with the relationship you have, and you have nothing to do with the relationship that I have, though there is plenty of opportunity for collaboration on the way there.

I, myself, will evangelize in action. That is what literature means. Or for a final gloss: Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.

Agoraphobia, Jay Han

panic

poetry by Josh Godwin

Gravitational pull. Whiplash.

Abrupt channel change.

Evicted. Emotional hijacking.

Puts you on hold.

Everything spins. In a VR microcosm.

Eject.

Motionless vibrations. A shaking spine.

Locomotive silhouette. Static flesh.

Feature-length film. 0:00 runtime.

0:01.

Eject.

Loving touch, 2022, Mackenzie Goffe

acrylic paint on stretched canvas

Winter in August

fiction by Marley Townsend

I was sick in bed as usual when all those men died downtown and they killed the last coyote in the county. It was a bad summer for me: the city was thick with new smog, and on every corner, asphalt dust and heat mixed into deadly clouds. Walking anywhere was a nightmare. There were some trains and cable cars, but most days they were packed with bodies. People I didn’t recognize, their faces and backs standing starkly out from the usual crowd. Many things changing. Always now, always. I did what the doctor told me and disappeared from all of it. My family still had a cottage about an hour to the west, where the air was a bit clearer and green, supple grass carried the constant scent of bounty. So I spent that summer there in bed. I read about it in the newspaper. THREE MEN SHOT, and a little black and white grid of the culprits. My brother there, his face blurred and frozen at the same time. Underneath it, in smaller print: Last Coyote Killed In West County.

Do I need to say what I felt? My brother. My brother the wannabe racketeer. My brother the gambler, who spent most evenings in the Blue Room with the background actors. My brother the murderer. I remember when he was born, though I wasn’t alive yet. We were always like that, neck and neck.

I called Mama from the post office. Some guy answered the phone and said she was at St. Lawrence.

“St. Lawrence?” I said, with difficulty. “Mama hates St. Lawrence. She always preferred St. Anne’s.”

“I’m just relaying, miss.” said the guy. I could hear him chewing something on the other end. Gum or tobacco? On my free hand, I held out two fingers. Gum was the leftmost finger. Tobacco was the right.

“Alright, so who’s answering?”

“William,” said William. “Bill. Your mother’s friend. And Paul’s friend, too.”

My brother Paul. Without looking, I flicked my fingers in and out to the tone of my heartbeat. Eeny, meeny, miney, moe. Gum.

“Alright, William. You’ll have her call me when she comes back?”

“Sure, miss. I can do that.”

“There’s no phone at my house. Can you have her call here? I’ll be nearby.”

“Sure, miss. That’ll be alright.” Bill popped his gum. I had to ask him something, so the popping noise wasn’t the last thing he said to me.

“Did you hear about the coyotes, Bill?”

“Coyotes?”

“Not anymore. Someone killed the last one.” I didn’t think of my word choice. On the other end, Bill let out a metered cough, then what sounded like a small sniff. Then he was crying, and though I felt like I should do the same, I couldn’t make myself do it, so I hung up.

...

I stayed in town the whole day. There wasn’t much to do. I bought a sandwich at the little pharmacy and two bags of dusty candy, but both of them tasted medicinal and strange, and my head was full of sawdust. Walking was difficult, but it was a mild day, light clouds and some humidity, so I told the clerk I’d be nearby and eased my way towards the murky pond just off B Street to catch my breath and wait. The pond was called Great Dell, but at only about twenty feet wide and long, it was more of a hazy puddle, with a surrounding of scrubby, speckled plants and a few iron benches. Downwind of it to the west, the dairy farms wafted scents of hay and feed. I didn’t like the west county. I missed exhaust and coffee smells, rubber and the intoxicating sheen of sweat on every man-made surface.

My brother and I are from here. In some senses, at least. We were born in the city, but for the first few years of our life, we lived here, with our father. I took a seat on one of the iron benches, my hot sandwich on my lap. I felt a good warmth around me, like the world had taken note of my morning and decided to make it easier. Bill would call soon. I’d get my mother on the line, and we’d sort things out. Paul would have a good defense. He was many things, but he was not unpopular. I used to go to clubs and say I was his sister, and all night I’d have strange men in hats buying me drinks and women in nice clothes petting my coats and commenting on my hairdo. I had never seen him with these people, but everyone knew him and loved him. It has always been like

this: Paul one step forward and me stumbling behind in his shadow. Little Agnes, sick and blunt.

I tried to picture Paul downtown. Was he alone? Did he mean to fire? He was not the only killer. Was he even really involved, or had some set of circumstances placed him on the same stretch of sidewalk with the same kind of fragile nerves? I wasn’t aware he even had a gun, but that didn’t necessarily shock me. The last time I saw Paul, he was standing outside the Blue Room, and my train was crawling by. I tried to wave, but I couldn’t—the cloak of people around me breathed in and out and compressed my arms by my side. His face was pale and distant, and he scanned the street slowly before rustling in his pocket. He didn’t find what he was looking for. The bus drew further and further away, and my brother’s thin frame was lost around a corner.

A heron began a careful stalk around the edge of Great Dell. Behind it, the heads of two daytrippers emerged.

One of them was miming something towards me. He swung his hand around his partner’s head, finger pointed. Look! Share with us this moment! The heron loped further into the Dell, thin legs sliding elegantly in and out of the dark muck. The second daytripper smiled. She leaned forward hungrily. Are you seeing this?

I don’t know what made me do it. I couldn’t help myself. Drawing a candy from the bag, I reeled my arm back and tossed it towards the heron. It balked, heavy prehistoric wings dragging from its body, and lifted into the sky. In the Dell beneath it, the disturbed mud bubbled indignantly before settling back down into a smooth blanket. “Hey!” The second daytripper shouted. “Hey!” I could barely hear her, as if the Dell was a lake.

Paul and I were close before adulthood, but we’d already begun to drift apart. Whatever my problems were, his always had to be worse. Like it wasn’t enough to be taller and stronger and more beautiful. Like he had to be sick like me, too. These were the first signs of structural damage before the scaffolding of our relationship collapsed. Mama always took his side. Wouldn’t you? When Paul was first arrested, she had found out from a neighbor. Stealing from a shop. We both still lived at home then. Nobody pressed charges, but something had changed, and the old Paul shed away to make room

for the new.

From my doorway after dark, I watched him go back to his room.

“What did you take?” I whispered.

He stopped. At least, I think he did. I could still feel his presence, taking up space at the end of the hall.

It seemed for a moment like he was going to reply, but nothing came out. The floorboards shifted once or twice beneath him, like he was pitching forward and back, indecisive to the point of rocking in an out of his door frame. But soon after his presence was gone, and my brother Paul closed the door behind him.

I spent about a half hour more at the Dell, but it was starting annoy me. The daytrippers were crouched now by the water, gleefully watching a bank of frogs menace the pond skippers and flies that were summer feasting there. Those kind of people made me angry. What right did they have?

Wandering back towards town. My head hurt. Had it always been this bright out here? Past the theater, which was a bar now that the county was wet again, and the bar, which was a flower shop. My father worked for the mail service. Once or twice, he’d let me and Paul ride with him in his truck. Rumbling out past here, past the marshes, too, and the outskirts where our house was. To the lighthouse and the dairy farms, the last stops on his route before the noon sun got stronger. Maybe it had always been like this. I’d just never been out long enough to see it.

The county was not the only one to call for the culling of the coyotes. This was common. They had become a populous nuisance, and the county officials were planning on building golf courses and public parks and wide, gray avenues for cars, which could accommodate an occasional fox or owl but drew the line at anything larger. Expansion was the name of the game, and all open space was the new gold. I didn’t see any problem with this. I liked cars. They smelled good, like leather belts and new construction, and the shine of the hoods was alluring and beetle-like, bony exoskeletons-turnedpheromones. My friend Judy had a car. she’d take me and our girlfriends for rides sometimes on the weekend. Judy was a secretary at the county hall, which afforded her nice clothes and freedom, though she still had to share a room with a smoker in a

women’s hotel. I wondered if she’d typed this new ordinance. A folkloric price for success.

I checked with the clerk, but no new messages. By now, my feet had started to hurt, too.

“Have you heard about the coyotes?” I asked her. She looked at me sideways, like she didn’t want to pull her full attention away from the milky glass counter, where little swirls of color danced rhythmically in the off-white if you didn’t blink for long enough.

“Yeah,” she said. “They got rid of them.”

“That’s good?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess. I heard they were killing all the deer.” Not so.

I said, “What if the deer needed killing?”

“Sorry?”

I leaned forward, as if to tell a secret. It worked. She leaned forward, too, and suddenly I could tell which freckles were real and which were faded acne scars left a little too long in the sun.

“The deer. They go everywhere. Real menaces. They eat all the native grasses. That means grasses that are supposed to be growing here rather than ones that aren’t. Don’t you care about that, too? And the native bugs. Monarchs, crickets, potato bugs. Don’t they matter, too? Don’t you care about them?”

The clerk pulled back nervously.

“Sorry,” she mumbled again. “Sorry, I didn’t know.”

Bill called then, and the clerk looked relieved to get the receiver back to me and go back to her counter. My mother was home. Could you wait another hour? Bill asked. She wanted to sit down and have something to eat. Could you let her do that?

“Sure, William,” I said, chewing my lip loud enough to be heard. “That’ll be alright.”

He didn’t notice what I was doing, only thanked me. That made me feel worse. I dialed up Judy’s hotel afterwards. She answered slightly out of breath with a polite “hello, this is Judy.”

“Were you the one who typed up that awful ordinance?” I asked, without saying hello back.

“Hi, Agnes. Which one?”

“The coyotes.”

“Oh,” she said, and the air expelled made a pillow of static in the phone. “No, that wasn’t me. Say, are you alright? I heard about--”

“Have a nice afternoon, Judy. Let’s meet up when I get back.”

I hung up, and went out. Not knowing where else to go, I wandered back to the Great Dell, but the daytrippers were gone. As were the frogs. I stood there a moment, catching my breath. I saw the heron was back, beak raised even and high above its gray breast. I saw the gentle breeze stir its feathers, and the musical movement of the water around its leathery legs.

I watched it for a long time.

The second arrest was assault. Paul was never angry before then. If anything, he was too placid. He let things slide for too long. He was “easy-going” before he started this part of his life. When we were kids, he always let me do things first. Go up to bat in stick ball, run out to get the mail, that sort of thing. When I’d come back defeated, unable to finish the task, he’d come in and save the situation. Hit a double. Chase the mailman, who’d forgotten our mailbox. I thought he was doing this on purpose, like he knew I would fail and his succeeding would look even better in the wake of it. Now, I’m not so sure.

The guy he assaulted was some loser named Jimmy Campbell or Joey Campbell or something. A dope head. I don’t know how they met. By then I’d moved out. I got a job at a cannery that hired women to do secretary work in the office and I rented out a little room above a dry cleaner. It wasn’t much, but it was about as good as I could do, and all the steam from downstairs seemed to help a bit with my illness. I visited home as little as possible. What could I do there, in Mama’s dull gray apartment? Arrange dishware? Categorize books of pastoral poetry, brush dust from the tops of the unused radio? Paul still lived with her, besides. I hadn’t seen him since the first bit of time he’d spent in jail.

He and Campbell were out front of that apartment when it happened. They were sharing a cigarette and talking in the low hours of the day, leaning on the hood of Campbell’s cream Oldsmobile. Campbell must have said something Paul didn’t like, because the next thing that happened was Campbell’s nose breaking over that cream hood and blood running pink down it all the way to the murky sidewalk. A witness said he hit him six or seven more times, until he wasn’t moving. Campbell lived, of course. He told all of this to an eager young newspaper man while getting stitches in the hospital. I don’t know how much was exaggeration and how much was real. The Paul I had known might not have had it in him, but I wasn’t so sure of the presence in the dark hallway. Maybe he could’ve done it. Maybe. In the same vein as when we were kids, I could not be certain of anything.

I came back just in time. The clerk showed me to the phone again, and I nearly wrenched it from her.

“Mama, where have you been?” I tried not to whine, but it happened anyway. My mother sighed.

“With Father Moran,” she said. She still had the dregs of a rural accent, but she’d never told us where she’d come from. “This church is beautiful. Paul likes it.”

“Paul’s in prison, Mama. He doesn’t care.”

“Agnes, don’t speak like that. I know.’ She paused. “I know.”

The clerk was looking at me under her wispy bangs. She had low, round cheekbones with a spray of freckles. I tried not to stare at them, turning sideways and adjusting the receiver. What did she care?

“Are you alright? Should I come home?”

“No, stay away. You need to get better.”

“I’m better,” I lied. “I’m much better.”

My mother went silent on the other end. I thought about her dark, thin hair in its orderly bundles. She pulled on the ends when she was anxious. I did the same. When my pet fish contracted some aquatic disease, I littered the floor of my bedroom with long black strands. Wordlessly, my mother had brushed them up into a dustpan. Before

leaving my room she clasped my head with one hand and planted a kiss on my hairline. Oh. baby, she whispered, you’re just the same as me.

“Did he do it, Agnes?”

I frowned, juggling the receiver to my other ear.

“You know more than me, Mama. I haven’t seen him in awhile. Wasn’t he holed up with some girl?” That was a lie. Paul saw a couple of girls, but being tied down never interested him. I didn’t know what else to say. It felt like something people said.

“Paul was a good boy,” she was almost whispering now. I could barely hear her. “He was a nice boy. He wouldn’t kill anyone, Agnes. He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t. He was a good boy.”

She was crying now, too. I sat there dumb. The clerk must have heard some part of it, because now she was still as a board, her eyes grazing me curiously. I angled away from her. My feet were killing me.

“He’s not dead, Mama. Does he have a lawyer?” If I had felt better, I might have laughed at myself. But I wanted nothing more in that instant than for my mother to stop crying.

“He is dead, he is. He is. He’s dead, he is. I wish he was. I wish he was. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

For the rest of the call, all she did was apologize. Over and over. My hands grasped at the receiver, like I could reach through it and feel her warm head, her thin, aging shoulders. I kept saying things like, “is Bill there? Can you have Bill come on, please?” and “can Father Moran come, too?” but I knew none of it made any difference. I was here, in the west county pharmacy, and she was there. After a while, she slowed down enough to say she loved me, but she thought it would be best if I stayed away. When she hung up, I couldn’t help myself. I turned to the clerk, feeling a kind of coldness come over me.

“My brother killed someone,” I said. “He and some other men, downtown. Shot someone. Maybe a few.”

She blinked. “I’m--”

“Don’t say sorry. Whatever you say, don’t say that.”

The clerk said nothing. She turned a quarter inch away from me, then back. Moved her hands indecisively up and down.

The coldness left me, and then it was just me and my ugly illness and this freckled girl in an empty store before closing.

“He got me a job, though. He’s not all that bad. He got me a job at a cannery. I have an apartment. Do you like the city?”

She shook her head slowly, once.

“Why not?”

She looked around for a minute before her eyes settled back on mine. I could almost feel them physically. I tried very hard not to look away. My head hurt. My feet hurt. My chest was burning.

“I think it’s just not for me,” she said finally, dully.

“Thanks, anyway,” I said, getting ready to leave. As I reached the door, the clerk called out.

“I do care,” she said. “About the monarchs. I used to catch them as caterpillars when I was a kid. I liked watching them grow up and become beautiful. I want them to stay.”

I turned back to look at her. She was both too big and too small for the counter, surrounded by things in white boxes and rows of glass shelves. There was a stain on her uniform, just below the collar. A ring of pale magenta, almost purple. She had a necklace on, but there was no pendant, only a chain, like whatever had hung there had fallen off long ago, and she’d never noticed.

“Have a good night,” I said, unsure of what else to do.

I exited the pharmacy.

Dusk now. The pain radiated up my legs, and my chest felt tight as an ice skater’s lace. Behind me, the clerk drew the thick front window curtains with a decisive thump! and I was alone again on B Street. I dragged myself forward.

I walked slowly, my chest tight and aching, even though I had barely a quarter mile to go. My house was only just out of town and the way was flat as a board. Even so, every step took all my energy. Barely ten steps out the pharmacy door, I buckled to my knees, gasping.

In the west county, the world closes at six PM. There was no one outside. It was August, but it might as well have been the dead of winter: darkness in the shop windows, a stiff, formal breeze that pushed impatiently on my sweaty forehead until it stung with cold. It was easy, then, to see the coyote at the end of B Street, just where the asphalt road turned back to patted dirt.

He stood still as a stone, watching me. His fur was neat and dark, mottled with some streaks of distinguished gray, and his triangle ears rotated towards me with confidence. From here, his eyes were hardly visible: inverse stars, two circles of black, unblinking. One paw was raised, mid-trot, tail low and dynamic.

He did not stay long. After a minute, he pivoted his head towards the dirt road and the Great Dell, where night seemed to be gathering faster and faster. And then he was off, his brown paws silent. And then he was gone.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, but it must have been awhile. By the time I’d made it out of town and back towards the sparse residential streets, the sky had turned a dark, unrelenting indigo. Out here, some stars could be seen early in the evening, pale balls of white reduced to motes by the distance between here and there, Heaven and Earth. When I pushed open my unlocked door, the county was all dark and stars. I shrugged off my coat and slid off my shoes and pulled the two unfinished bags of candy out of my pockets to lay on the tile counter. In my little cottage, everything was made of right angles, and the sharp corners seemed large and invasive after the organic outside. Have I always lived like this? I pictured Paul, mauling himself in the back of the Blue Room with no one around to see him do it. His face a fraction away from mine, obscured by the smudged windows of the train. Our mother at St. Lawrence in that unfamiliar foyer, making small words with the priest about the price of fruit. I pictured Bill sitting in her apartment like a dog waiting to be fed. He would be holding his hat in his hands, too rough to hang it in the closet and too polite to wear it, even when alone. He would be there until it ended and after, unlike me.

It took me a long while to close the door. I’m not sure I ever did, but at some point the cold stopped coming in, so someone must have done it eventually.

T50.901A

poetry by Alexiz Romero

cracked and blistering feet twisted spine, endless hunger

the nights where tonight could be the final night

pavement, hot. pavement, cold. pavement, lying. pavement, dead.

death cruising in a crown victoria

oh god oh god please help me they are gutting my corpse and stuffing it with fentanyl

sell and distribute resell and redistribute repeat

and business is booming

there is only red and blue at the end of the tunnel

through the looking glass, Josh Godwin

Emerald Reunion

poetry by Denise Masiel

My lips trace across your skin

Mapping out old familiarities and new developments

I count the freckles that constellate your back

Caress your locks that swirl infinitely

Your arms wrap around me

As you ask me if I’d like a glass of water before bed

that’s alright, thank you, a kiss on my forehead will do just fine

On Being Stupid

fiction by D. Beveridge

He fell in love with Lorrie Moore with a millstone around his neck, and not in the metonymic sense in which an author’s name stands in for their writing. He loved her — her person. Or at least the composite of her personality, which he pieced together from her protagonists, taking for granted that an author like her is always only writing stories about versions of themself. The composite of those cool, detached women combined with the photograph on the back cover of her book. A wistful black and white that must have been shot at some point in the 1980’s. He still would have been a twinkle in his parents’ eyes.

He was quite sure he loved her, as in load bearing theses like, “Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself. . .”

Lorrie Moore—the name—had planted itself in his mind years prior after he read a review of her collected stories in BookForum. The magazine that just last week announced its final issue, leaving an unfillable vacancy in the literary world he camps at the outskirts of. After reading the review, he had borrowed Bark from a local branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, reading one or two stories that night after the children went to sleep. His wife getting into bed had quipped that he would do better to get a real job instead of pretending that reading was work. And, Turn off the light, without even hinting at, Please. At the time the failed romances in Lorrie’s stories struck too close to home — that old chestnut. Disappointed, he returned the book without reading further. The wife’s contempt for him, having grown complete as it did, screamed backwards from the present into his memory (both mental and physical) of the relationship. Nothing of their once vibrant attraction towards each other escaped its shadow. Both sides had had their tragic infidelities. About a year ago she finally made the decisive move of accusing him of ‘non-verbal, non-physical, sexual abuse’, which, as far as unverifiable accusations go, had its substance in an ill-timed erection that she

took issue with. Had he stayed to stand up for himself she may even have filed a restraining order. So he packed a few critical possessions and retreated to the Great Plains to gather his strength.

On the phone, his close friend and confidante back in LA said, “I’m sorry man, but it’s been a slow motion break up for as long as we’ve known you. Seven years is a long time to suffer that way.” He was speaking for himself and his wife who added, “It’s for the best. You’ll remarry eventually — plenty of people do it. But you need to get back here for your kids.”

At the bookstore in Sioux Falls, where he planned to stay until the courts finalized the divorce, the short story shelf was located at the far end of the second floor. In fact it was a classic Midwestern split level. “Vinyl’s downstairs,” the cashier said. His brother — the medical student — had asked him to put together a reading list of singlesitting reads for the new year. 2023. His other brother — the pastor — had little patience for bookstores, so by the time the protagonist found the short story shelf the pastor was haranguing him about their need to leave, to get back to the house where the pastor’s in-laws were waiting to do a Christmas gift exchange.

“You know what,” the protagonist said, “I don’t care about the fucking gift exchange.”

“Don’t be a prick,” the pastor replied.

“Did you know that giving gifts at Christmas was frowned upon in the early days in New England. It was considered, I don’t know — worldly — the practice of slave holders in the South to keep their slaves docile.”

“Doesn’t Frederick Douglass write about that.”

“Yes, I think you’re right. At any rate,” the protagonist said without looking away from the bookshelf, “I told Eric that I would up my short story game to improve his reading list for next-next year.”

That was when he saw Lorrie’s name in red on the pale spine of Birds of America.

At this point in his life the idea of love was sufficiently weird. In college he had taken an upper level philosophy course on the subject and earned high marks. There was, of course, the fourfold distinction of love from antiquity. Or was it medieval. They read the Lysis, and Aelred of Rievaulx, among others. Any love, on the spectrum from erotic to brotherly, was a three party affair. There was the Self, the Other, and Christ, who functioned as both the bond and the source of nutrition for the relationship. None of the theory mattered now, if it ever had — he was on a collision course with a solitary middle age.

Since Christmas at the pastor’s in-laws’, his flight to Montana (through Denver) had been canceled so many times due to the weather that he decided to scrap the trip all together. That meant he would not see his children who were visiting his parents up there in the northwest corner of the state where they had recently retired to a large log cabin in the woods. It also meant, now that he had no plans for New Year’s, that the pastor’s in-laws would extend to him an official invitation to their annual family reunion at Lake Shetek, Minnesota. There seemed to be no limit to their hospitality towards him. Thank you!

The drive from the pastor’s house would be uneventful, even entertaining, chatting with his nephews in the back row of the retro Chevy van that had been passed down in the family since the 1970’s. It was a remarkable piece of machinery. At noon, they were some of the first to arrive at the lodge, and the protagonist secured a room for himself at the far north end of the long hallway extending out from the entrance. Next to his room there was an exit that he would sneak in and out of to smoke his clandestine cigarettes. Over the course of the next several hours forty or fifty people arrived from all over the Midwest, all descendants (and their spouses) of Grandpa and Grandma Olsen who were alive and well in their nineties currently bouncing children of a variety of ages on their knees in the large fireside room adjacent the foyer.

He had not expected to see Charlotte, a distant relative of a different branch of great-grandfather Alfred’s children. (The generations were all mixed up age-wise given that the eleven children Alfred’s wife bore him came into the world over the course of two decades around the turn of the 20th century.) So when Charlotte appeared in the dining room after diner wearing a chocolate-colored scarf like an expensive fur he was

paralyzed by a hyper sense of self-awareness, not least of all because he loved her, too, in addition to Lorrie Moore.

He had met her briefly two or three months ago over a meal at the old Olsen homestead that dated from the territorial period, where the pastor-brother and his Olsen wife had taken up occupancy, rent free, in exchange for home improvements — the protagonist and Charlotte sat across from each other at the crowded antique kitchen table and she smiled a lot and asked him personal questions that seemed to the protagonist to indicate that she was interested. “What are you listening to? Are you enjoying South Dakota? I bet it’s a big change from the city, no?” Her mother, supervising from the other end of the table gave no indication of disapproving. After eating, when the others went back to the business of the afternoon, he and she had lingered at the table, a pale pin-sized fleck of something — was it cheddar? — suspended at the margin of her achingly fresh upper lip. It was, he decided after a brief internal dialogue, supremely charming. In a different kind of world he could have stood up, confident, walked deliberately around to her side of the table, taken hold of her by the nape of her neck, gentle but firm, and licked it up straight off of her open mouth. That was the world of romance genre fiction, good for a daydream or fantasy, but incommensurate with the profound ambivalence of his painfully dispassionate — what to call it? — lifeworld.

Against the initial impression, he would learn at Lake Shetek that despite her affability, she was, in fact, a bit of a brat. Hard to think otherwise of an attractive seventeen year old girl who knows she’s attractive, especially once he learned that she had a boyfriend. Some teen named Ron. He would be willing to overlook such an offense for the sake of their love, but it would be a long shot for him to convince the extended family that he and Charlotte belonged together, especially in light of his divorce, and the sixteen year age gap. More so problematic, he would not be free to make any advancements until he settled the divorce. Or it settled him — however that works. And what if the horny boyfriend lasted that long, and what if he made a move to lock her down, now that she was leaving home for college. He was sure of his experience compared to Ron, but then again, on her end, choosing the protagonist would be like adopting an arthritic white-faced labrador, easily confused in a new environment,

instead of an eager and enthusiastic pup attentive to her commands. In dog years, of course. He would fare better in a feline comparison, though he guessed she was not a cat person considering her prolix tendency on seemingly any subject. Why was he wasting even a thought on her. The stupidity of a bark, according to Deleuze.

There were dozens of people now in the lodge congregating in little cliques in the library, the kitchen, the dining area, the fireside room, etc., but somehow she kept showing up at his side. Now he loved her and hated her at the same time, perhaps similar to the way ‘white pill’ ‘involuntary celibates’ love to hate the women they can’t get with. He was going to entertain the thought of these pathetic internet groups, wanting to compress an essence out of the form of his body and hers, like squeezing the halves of a thick-rind grapefruit. What was the chance of this reunion ending like American Pastoral, with a fork in someone’s eye. It wasn’t impossible given the setting and the number of couples involved.

Lorrie on the landscape: “There was silence again between them now as the countryside once more unfolded its quilt of greens, the old roads triggering memories as if it were a land she had traveled long ago, its mix of luck and unluck like her own past; it seemed stuck in time, like a daydream or a book.”

He would have liked to impress Charlotte, or Lorrie, or anyone at all who would listen, with the sea-stories he had lived through in the Navy. Like the time he ______ the ______. Or when _______ broke the _______. But he had forgotten how to effectively deliver the punch lines, and he was far more wary than he used to be of sharing potentially confidential information about submarine operations. It was hard enough living through the humiliation he endured in the aftermath of his discharge, relegated to the margins as a ‘disabled vet’, always at a loss trying to explain himself. The last thing he needed was more time in a carceral social structure. CLINK! Probably federal prison was even worse than being locked up at the bottom of the ocean.

On the way home from the Shetek reunion, in the back seat of the van, at his prompting his oldest nephew (age 6) promised that if, when he grew up, he decided to join the military that he would go to college first to receive a commission as an officer.

“Don’t do it the way I did.” The protagonist thought that was a pretty smart thing to get a young boy to promise to.

“But I might change my mind,” the nephew said raising his eyebrows, and nodding a self-assuring nod, “that I don’t want to go to the military.”

A boy testing his new vocabulary.

“Right,” replied the protagonist, “but if.”

the one, Josh Godwin

A dichotomous Broken down Phalacy

Faking womanly

False Dualities

poetry by Jade Zora Dean

Like lightning (1)

Every setting sunset (4)

this water of the world. (7)

Like learning the sound of love (10) a silent song of life unsung. (13)

Before orgasmic death (16)

every moment (2)

beckoning on towards a mind- (5)

Voided, barren, (8) like fire vs flame— (11)

But interwoven in between (14) binding tight, and leather-like. (17)

emergent, stronger— still. (3)

-sucked dry— to go forth upon (6) broken bodies. (9) of forces united so long (12) split the mind and the sea! (15)

Ignore untrue realities... +_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_

Twisting fake inside

Bounded by insanity

Life, Lain, long for Rest

Boston

fiction by Lillian Lippold

She spends her 60th floating around an airport. The Salt Lake City airport, ultimate middle ground of connecting flights and tired travelers. She buys a new phone charger the first moment she can. Hers was left behind, forgotten back in a Logan Airport Starbucks by no intention of hers. Surely, had her son been there, he would’ve remembered for her. He always caught those sorts of details.

Perhaps she would have remembered herself if she hadn’t been in such a rush. The PST to EST time difference from Boston to home makes perfect sense on normal days, but with last night being Daylight Savings, the final time change the US will ever celebrate, she’d messed up when setting her alarm. Missing her flight would be brutal, especially today when she’s newly 60 and on her way to her birthday dinner back home, organized by her wife in their misty backyard covered by slatted oak planks.

It’s her mother’s birthday today too, her 100th, though Deidre – rest her soul –is long dead and has definitely played out the jokes about getting a baby girl as a birthday gift. Deidre took her to school every birthday when she was growing up, and they’d bought sweet coffee from the best donut shop in Eugene. Now, in the SLC airport, thinking about Boston and her son’s life there, rolling her baby-blue suitcase over the carpeted floors of the airport hallways, she feels quite content.

The best part of being 60 is the space for sentimentality, she decides.

Wonderful to have a birthday on a Sunday this year, both hers and Deidre’s. Wonderful for them to share a day of rest together, her mother always restless and her an eternal Sabbath-seeker. Her son’s birthday isn’t till fall, thank goodness for her bank account. He’s a good kid, her son, she realizes again.

Now, with her phone charging in the seat port of a random gate, she’s bored. She isn’t set to take off for more hours. She can’t really remember how many, but surely, if she loses track for long enough, she’ll worry herself on over to where she’s supposed to be.

Having a son is like that too, a reason to worry from one place to another. Her phone comes back, and there are some texts.

From her son: “Thanks for making the trip.”

From her wife, her fourth, a tall, slender, sharp woman: “Are you on your way home?”

From her son: “It was nice to spend that time together.”

“I love you, sweetie,” she types and sends, following it with a superfluous set of eclectic emoticons. She pastes the same message in the message to her wife, removes the emotions, replaces “sweetie” with “baby,” and presses send again.

She looks up and scans the airport. What a place. Like a theme park for travelers, whether they be large families or solitary businessmen. There’s even a Panera. She considers getting up again for a meal, but then she remembers her phone and how it has to charge, tying her to this one spot. She looks to the gate next to her, spots a little yippy pomeranian, and grins.

She saw a lot of dogs when she was in Boston, and they all wore little booties and sweaters to keep out the early spring chill. The cold of the East Coast is much different than the Pacific Northwest where she was raised, where she raised her son. The winter is more windy and dry in the East, whereas the Western cold is damp, a bit moldy, but unobtrusive even as it seeps into your joints. Boston felt surprisingly busy, bright, alive, completely uninterested in hibernating until it got warm again. She understands why her son enjoys it, though he definitely didn’t get his propensity for challenge from her.

She turns her phone on again and opens Facebook. She wishes she brought her iPad on her trip. The print on her phone is too small, no matter how much she messes with the font size in her settings. Her son probably won’t post any of their pictures from the trip. He isn’t one for Facebook. He tried to explain, while she was in Boston, that this is because Facebook has a harmful algorithm, but she doesn’t think her Facebook has that. Whatever it is. She likes Facebook, the little time capsule of her life that it provides her.

Now, when she opens the app, there isn’t much going on. She’s been on Facebook a lot these past couple of days while she’s been waiting in line or in her seat at her son’s performances. She’s up to date on everything. Miss Taylor got her surgery and is recovering. Marla posted another photo of her dogs at sunset which is fine because they’re quite adorable. Savannah’s kid turned fifteen. Her friends are getting older, but their Facebook posts are just as interesting to her now as they were back then when the

platform started up.

She goes to create a post, one to celebrate both her birthday and her trip, and the app takes her to her photo roll. The squares are so small that she has to squint to see them, and she considers taking out her reading glasses though she can’t really remember where they are. She scrolls back a couple of days. The photos of his new house are a must. It’s the first time her son has really lived in a place of his own, and this was the stated celebratory cause of her trip out to see him: he could host her in his own home.

And what a home it is. High ceilings and a big bay window in the living room. Nice, dark blue paint on the walls and hand towels to match. Shiny silver Cuisinart pots and pans, a complete set. A dutch oven. A couch with a matching loveseat and a flatscreen larger than she herself owns. The punk band posters that he used to have hanging in his college bedroom – Blink-182, Bad Religion, Descendants – are framed in the bathroom, which of course she snapped some pictures of also. His kitchen island, granite and shiny with a knife block that holds eight different sizes of blade.

He even has one of those hanging fruit baskets that she bought for their home when he was growing up. She took photos of it from all angles, each snap making her feel as though time were collapsing in on itself. Her upbringing, his, and his new life, the way families pass down feelings. She’s always believed in that, the idea that you can see a family’s past in one individual. As she’d continued to walk through his house, she’d spotted the framed photo from their trip to Kansas City back in 2005, his RISD grad cap and all its glitter, the green painted handprints she and him had made when he was in kindergarten. Her chest ached with pride.

He was a good kid, she realized again. She’d done a good job with him, though perhaps never good enough. She’d surely made her fair share of mistakes.

She selects a fair amount of these household photos, only about eight, and then keeps scrolling through. The ones of their duck tour are crucial, and she even chooses a silly video of her son blowing his duck whistle out over the river. It makes her smile.

She picks some from the Museum of Fine Arts too, even though her son didn’t quite make it there with her. It was a nice museum, not the best she’s ever been to but sweet for a city like Boston. In another life, if she hadn’t have been a single mom, she probably would’ve been a fine artist like that. Oil paints and huge canvases that take up entire rooms like the woman version of Matisse or Pollock. She remembers loving the

smell of the art room at her Eugene, Oregon high school, the mugginess of wet claysmell, the sawdust floating in the air.

She thinks of those trips for sweet coffee and pastries with Deidre again. That was a long time ago. Before this whole life of hers. Some memories get stuck in your brain like that, she’s learned. She feels a twinge of something she can quickly identify as regret, but she calms it.

Everything happens for a reason. Her life is hers alone.

She keeps on scrolling through, all the way to the bottom, until she’s faced with the existential question of this whole posting ordeal. The question she didn’t want to ask her son before she left, that she’d probably never ask if she could help herself, no matter how open the dialogue between the two of them becomes.

Could she post pictures of her son in drag?

Over her one week in Boston, he’d had three performances: a Sunday night, a Thursday night, and a raucous Friday night show. She knows she’ll have to look into the whole “they/he” thing when she gets home. She’ll probably ask her wife. Jada is more up-to-date on the political stuff than she is. Younger women have the brain space to do that. The mother doesn’t really anymore. She’s getting to that stage.

Yet, as confusing as the whole thing is – her son getting up on the stage in his heels and his gown, his wig and his lipliner – the pictures show something more than oddity. Throughout her trip, his character kept reminding her of Ella Fitzgerald or Doris Day, those singers she remembers from her mother, those women whose hands gently traced the stand of the microphone while they sang. His voice, like theirs, was soft and gentle, prodding the audience along with crystal tones and a slow sway of the hips. Watching him was like time travel to both the past and the future at once, a brilliant crisis of selves.

His face was caked with makeup too, which surprised her, a bright foundation and strong contour that exaggerated his cheekbones and jaw. It made him look womanlike, really, and she wondered where he’d learned to do it. Something prevented her from asking. She wrote it off as not knowing how to talk to her son about makeup then and did the same now. When she looked at her phone again, zooming closely into one blurry photograph in which his eyes are mid-blink, lashes fluttering down to the crimson blush of his cheeks, she could feel weight in her own eyelids, as though she still felt his body as her own. Exhaustion surely, she thought. Travel always did that to her.

Miss Terri, he called himself when he was up there. He explained to her that it was a play on his name, Terrence, and on the word “mystery.” Clever, she remembers thinking, but still entirely unclear to her – a mystery in itself, even.

To be entirely honest, it scared her, this whole performance lifestyle he had. The world was cruel about these sorts of things. Yet, at his invitation, she’d sat in the club surrounded by all these scantily clad men in glitter and lace who smelled of sweat and cologne. The wait staff were kind but confusing too; she never knew whether to address them as “sir” or “ma’am” or something else altogether. The club was in a basement, but it had been repurposed to look like a dance hall, one of those she remembered from the 90s. She’d visited halls like this with her third wife, both of them bare-faced, superior to lipstick lesbians and queens because they didn’t need body modifications to make them feel confident.

What a time, she’d thought, as she’d looked up at the silver disco ball at the room’s center, the twirling lights of green and blue. The stage was small, no taller than two feet and no wider than eight, with heavy red curtains drawn across it. The line for the bathroom was so long it reached the very front bar table, house left, next to the raised platform upon which the DJ worked – a young woman of about 30 with a buzzcut and an open button down, revealing a large moth tattoo that emblazoned her chest.

And when Terrence came out to perform, moving the curtains aside gently with the bend of his wrists, she was almost at the bottom of her martini glass. The whole room seemed to go silent listening to her drink from it. Really, they were just listening to her son’s breath, the way he didn’t even say his name before he started to sing. Mystery, she’d smiled.

She took videos and pictures all three nights. The ones from Thursday have the best audio quality, but the Friday videos have a different energy about them. Perhaps it had to do with the impending weekend, the release of the constraints of the work week. The room was far more packed. A table of young lesbians nearby her took shots of what looked like liquid gold and then began to share giggly secrets across their own small table. She just barely got a seat, across the table from an old man who later explained to her that he was what they call a “bear.” She didn’t really get that. But she didn’t have to because then her son came out from behind the curtain in a dress like hers from her first wedding and began a lilting ballad she’d never heard before, taking the attention of the entire room.

It was slow and sensual, a song that definitely belonged on a record. She thought of her third wedding, her wife’s fingers lacing into her hair. They’d decided on a record player rather than a classic band for that vintage feel, and their friend, Mari, had played disc jockey, switching records in between songs. That moment of silence as the records switched was what Terrence’s song had reminded her of, the breathing of hundreds of familiar people in one large tent in West Seattle, the air damp and earthy. When he sang, he closed his eyes. She felt as though she were intruding. She felt as though the world would cease to exist once he’d finished.

It isn’t until she watches the Friday night video for the third time that she realizes how tired she is. Exhaustion indeed. Music like this has always made her sleepy. She blames her own mother, her third wife, and now her son. Such beautiful music. She checks the time, though she still doesn’t remember when her flight is. All she does know is that not long has passed and her layover is a lengthy one.

No one would bother her if she were to just nap, surely. She grabs her neck pillow from her suitcase, leans back, and watches the video again as a nightcap, music playing out loud.

The performers that night, held together by hairspray and chance, their dresses whipping against your legs underneath the bar table. Your stockings, black like theirs.

Old, good music. Cyndi Lauper on the way to school. Billie Holiday in your bedroom. Amy Winehouse when your parents weren’t looking. Buying Camden lipstick just like hers.

A morning, probably a real one, stirring polenta on your stove. Your arms tiring quickly as they always do. Raspberries in a blue ceramic bowl nearby.

A man, praying to the stone roof of an abandoned building like he’s praying to the sky, like he’s done so in other places, warmer places, holy places, but in this place, you can wish nothing more divine than for the roof that shelters you to hold.

“Don’t tell Grandma.” “Right, like she needs another thing to blame you for.”

Your second wife. A better woman than you. A ceramicist with a pinky that was always breaking at the wheel.

His birth certificate in the safe in your closet still. Untraveled, untouched.

The SLC airport 34 years ago. Before it was beautiful. Before you had your son on your hip.

The first winter you lived alone when your apartment lost its heat for the coldest week of the year. You and your lover, your first one, your first wife, pressed together on the floor in the farthest corner from the broken windowpane. When desire isn’t even enough to keep out the chill.

Short phone calls that cut in and out. When your mother died, you were in an airport too.

“E. Romano. E. Romano. Paging E. Romano to Gate A13 immediately.” She stands, her name drawing her out of sleep like a spell. She rapidly blinks the sleep out of her eyes, all of a sudden urgent, and gathers her new phone cord, winds it around her finger quickly, and stuffs it in the front pocket of her bag. She zips her jacket and scans the nearby gate numbers for hers. A2 is directly across from her. A13 seems to be further down to her left. She nods to herself, as though confirming this, and begins to walk in that direction as briskly as possible. She can’t believe she slept that long and is still so tired.

60 is strange, she thinks as she walks. She’s never really been one to make a big deal out of her birthday, but something about seeing her son this week had made it more meaningful to her. He’s really grown, making choices and living his life in a way that’s completely foreign to her, exactly as kids are supposed to do. And he seems happy. He seems like he’s figuring out how to make the mechanics of this strange world work for him which, she’s realized, is all that adulthood is about anyway.

She thinks of her son sitting in front of the mirror in his bedroom. He didn’t let her into his room the first few days she was in town, but Friday, while he was at the grocery store, she crept in to see what he was hiding. And there, wide and lined in bright stage lights, was a mirror, set atop a vanity painted soft lavender. The table face showed no signs of wear, as though he cleaned it with reverence after every use, and the chrome makeup compacts were perfectly stacked in their little plastic organizers. So much money and care gone into this little station, this place where he could ready himself, where he could become this other version of Terrence.

She wonders if he didn’t tell her he was doing drag because he was afraid of this, her finding out that he had to modify parts of himself in order to be another version. Of course, she’d been raised by Deidre, a single mom, an early feminist who thought that makeup was oppression and that the only children who deserved good mothers were daughters, never sons. Deidre had taught her daughter this quickly, a doctrine later enforced by the strong women of the world. She’d never betray the comradery of womanhood for the sake of painting her face.

Lost in thought, she’d reached down for a makeup compact, one she recognized: Tarte blush, their deep magenta. With one finger, she swabbed some of the powder onto her finger pad and then rubbed it lightly into her left cheek, swirling it in just behind the apple of her bone. What a way to become someone else. She wondered where he’d learned to do his makeup like that, so thick and precise. Once she’d stopped wearing her blush, with her third wife, just as Terrence was born, she’d developed shaky hands. Surely it was unrelated, but she couldn’t keep the brushes steady anymore.

“Sorry I didn’t tell you before,” her son had said, appearing behind her, keys in hand. She could feel the hesitance in his voice, and she knew her eyes looked sad, though she couldn’t articulate why.

“When did it start?”

“The drag? Or the makeup?”

“Both,” she said, voice calm, motherly.

“The drag, three years ago. When I moved to Boston.” He walked over to her, and she thought for a moment that he was going to hug her. Instead, he crouched down, reached for the outlet below the vanity, and plugged in the lights. They glowed, bright and startling. She felt herself choking up, God knows why. “The makeup, I can’t remember. Probably college.”

She nodded, silent.

“Did you like the show last night?” he asked, not even looking at her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I performed as a woman. I didn’t know how to say it. I figured I’d just show you.”

She felt her lungs constrict. She wondered whose fault it was that this wall had gone up between her and her son. Surely hers, but when? When did it start? “You were beautiful,” she said instead.

He looked at her then, questioning, eyes narrowed, and she just nodded, meeting his eyes even as she felt a tear slide down her left cheek. He watched it go, his gaze following. She’d been thinking of his performance, that slow, slow ballad, ever since they’d left the club late last night, but she hadn’t been able to find any words since. Now, him before her, she felt silly. Here was her son, braver than she’d ever been, and she had no words to offer him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he repeated again, as though she hadn’t heard, as though he wasn’t content with her response.

“Honey, I’m not surprised.” She heard herself say it, and as soon as she did, the memories flashed through her. Terrence at eight years old, singing “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” onstage at the elementary school talent show, bouncing left and right. Terrence, holding her after her divorce from her third wife, his arms thin, his face that of a teenager, wordless. Terrence and his vibrance; on his eighteenth birthday, he’d given her a call from Providence just to say, “Mamma, I don’t want gifts for my birthday. I want you to paint something.” And now, here he was, nearly a decade later, and she still hadn’t finished one painting since he was born. The blush on her left cheek now was the closest she’d come.

Was it fear that stopped her? That regret from before? The ghost of her mother, her wives?

Before he could say another thing, she wrapped him in her arms. He was silent, and so was she, except for her heavy breathing and the runny nose activated by her emotions.

“You’ve done it,” she whispered to him, completely unsure of what “it” was but knowing that he had, indeed, done it, exactly it, the thing she’d always been trying to do, the thing she’d spent her whole life chasing.

If he heard her, he didn’t say a thing.

Out of breath but arrived now, she hands the man at the counter her boarding pass, and as he scans it, she wonders if he’s ever performed in drag before. How would she know? How would she know he wasn’t doing it right now? How can you tell which version of yourself is the real self and which version is the also very real self but the one that needs the costume and the makeup? And what about her? Was her teenage obsession with makeup an act of rebellion that she’d grown out of? Or was that a different self too, one that had tragically been missing for a long, long time?

She boards down the long hallway, her suitcase rolling behind her. Once onboard, a nice flight attendant helps her lift up her bag into the overhead.

“It’s my birthday,” she says to him with a winning grin.

He returns her smile and nods.

The flight is quite empty, so she’s got the whole row to stretch out in. As she situates her purse under the seat in front of her, she thinks of the flight attendant. He had such a petite nose, which isn’t something she usually noticed on people. The only other time she had was when her son’s friend had come over to get ready before the Friday night show. They’d had long platinum gray hair which she’d found really quite cool, and their fingernails were long, pointy, and magenta. When she’d asked them how they knew her son while he was in the bathroom, their face had gotten all dreamy. Their eyes had gone to the bay window, out into the ever-darkening dusk.

“He brings me somewhere else. Somewhere that isn’t here,” they’d said.

She hopes her wife thinks of her like this. She hopes her wife weeps and sings, “Vineyards and vineyards, and bridges to nowhere, and no one but my lover and I” like an old blues song. But she doesn’t, probably, Jada isn’t that type. In fact, no woman has been, none that she’s found or loved or known. Perhaps that’s her own fault. Perhaps she’s been burying parts of herself so deep that no one could see them, let alone love them in that all-consuming way.

She is still waiting for the love of her life. In fact, she’s still waiting by her own design, she realizes. She has beautiful things that she loves, but not enough to sustain her fully. She has her Facebook friends and their kids, growing older. She’s 60 today. She can still travel, can still make it through security without any metal hips or pacemakers to flag. But what really sustains her is that she has her son, playing professional dress-up on a coast far, far away from her. He’ll always pick up when she calls.

She opens her purse to find her melatonin, but instead, a familiar color shines through, the silver metallic of the Tarte palette, similar to the one she’d owned when she was in college, the one from her son’s vanity table. She places it gently in her hand, her reverence for it preventing her from opening it to see her own face in its mirror. She smiles, small and fragile.

She looks down to text her son again, but she’s already lost service. She’s already no longer in Salt Lake.

With the rumbling of the plane resonating through the cabin, she leans against the seats to her right. How much hiding has she done, she wonders, from herself and her wives and her mother, that lineage of judgment and feigned self-assurance? What would her mother say if her son is a better woman than she’ll ever become, even now, after 60 years of life? What is it to be a “better” woman? Is it about womanhood at all? Or is it just about that ballad-feeling, that silence between songs, the peace she can create for herself, within herself, where she can be whoever she dreams up as her own?

The questions are large, but she feels as though something has shifted. Her mind drifts into sleep again, grateful to be horizontal this time. Unbeknownst to her, the minutes tick past midnight. Her birthday ends.

A quiet expanse. Timing one’s silence with a stopwatch. Sunday nights like the ones you had in elementary school where your mother would force you to take a shower, and you’d eat a big dinner, organize your homework in your folder, lay out your outfit for the morning, fill up your canteen, go to bed on time because you’d never question a routine like this. One so brightly made and constantly enforced. You wouldn’t dare to do anything but this, this that propels you through Monday afternoon without any thought required.

“Could’ve been a fine artist,” Mother says, paintbrush in her hand, oil paints pooling around her feet, staining her pant legs. “Instead, you’re his mom.”

That man from the bar, the bear, actually turning into a bear, a cuddly black bear that’s never met a human before. A bear who tumbles about with his little bear friends and thinks nothing else of life but that.

A burner left on for the whole night. Gas in your bedroom. Your third wife who threw out all of your makeup to prove that she loved you. You, collecting it from the garbage cans on the curb late one night when she was sleeping.

Wearing your blazer to the grocery store after leaving the office. Seeing the other moms, how slowly they moved. How much time they had.

Love. And its opposite, enough time. Goodness. Distraction. Someone who wants to take away all your burdens.

“Vineyards and vineyards, and bridges to nowhere, and no one but my lover and I.”

But what then?

Your son, heeled boots and womanvoice, eyes trained just above your head.

Closer Still, Felix Jensen

Some Body Else

fiction by Marley Townsend

Georgie was a rubble pile. Sieve and Frieda were too. Peach Tree said it was like a snuff film, lurid trash. And she said nonetheless I kinda love it because it's never ending. But I hate it. Peach Tree and Georgie knew each other since they were six. I knew Sieve but Frieda knew Sieve longer, and Peach Tree knew Frieda before any body else. I guess you know every body, I said to her. Well, I guess. And we sat on the tire swing by the park. They never took that park down by the way. You know I thought they would. Sieve and Frieda were supposed to be put back into the earthdirt. Why weren't they? Peach Tree says it's like (and she takes a drag) it's like condensation wiped off a glass. It's like making recycling in a town with no recycling plant. You can kill them, you can mold them, you can make them useful waste, but no one ever used them the right way. No body else. So they're gonna sit there. Out there forever in a waste pile. Our Georgie, our Sieve, our Frieda. Every body somewhere.

There was a man who came around in the springtime said Peach Tree. And he was goodlooking, but not too goodlooking. Every body understood him for this. He was from here but before the springtime he had been away working. I swung my feet from the tire. It was getting to be an old day already, with the big pink sun shaking in the clouds until every thing was too big to see. I remember, I said. Truth was I didn't very well. I didn't see the man at first. Sieve went to my house that week with a roly poly in a glass bottle. We sat on the steps in mom's rosemary bushes and the roly poly beside us.

Quintessential as he was in his gray finery. He said quintessentially that we had the Universe down in the earthdirt under the rosemary, where everything was baby soft and dark. Didn't we know it. Womb-like? asked Sieve, who wanted him to think she was smart. The roly poly said no, tomb-like. And it was all afternoon we sat there with him, feeding him questions about the future. This held us for the time being, so we didn't know the man had come back to town. Georgie was seeing the man though. In a parking lot away from us, where the green marsh came waddling up to the sidewalk. And when

the man said you are a good person to Georgie he was referring to the postule the size of a dime on the back of her neck. . . . . . .

Peach Tree confirmed this with a drag. It smelled kerosenie and sour. Reminded me of Frieda too, who Peach Tree once kissed underneath the bicycle bridge drag and everything around her in a halo. This I saw from the rail of the bridge, even though they never saw me back. Them before anybody else. Anyway— Yeah it's like that. It was. Peach Tree observed me halfway. Georgie and the man and the postule. He told her that was a special port of sort. He held up his hand—Peach Tree showed me—in a circle. He said those of us who are lucky are born with a circle or a portal where every thing can go through. He had one too—Peach Tree showed me this as well—a bandage over his neck. He closed his up. Every thing had begun to be too much. I knew Georgie well enough to know she would have comforted the man for this.

The man was working. He was there to show you how to fill the portal in the back of your neck, and he started with the kids because they were all on the sidewalk during the summer. At least, the ones like us usually are. Georgie showed us in her hand how he had done it. You hold your palm up like this, she said, and you hit the back of your head softly twice. And you listen, said Georgie. And you wait for the Universe to fill you up.

I had to ask Peach Tree what she meant when she said Georgie had left, but Peach Tree didn’t answer so I asked Sieve instead. Sieve said she wasn’t sure but that the man had been outside her window last week. The roly poly lived in a jar on her windowsill and he told her not to look. By the time he said to open her eyes it was past morning and she took the jar to Georgie’s house to ask her what to do. And what happened? I asked. Nothing, said Sieve. No body was there. And she handed me the jar and told me to watch over the roly poly for her.

Sieve was gone next week with her mom and dad too. So Frieda and Peach Tree and me. Other people were gone too but I didn’t care about them. How should I care? None of them ever held my head when I had a tooth taken out or walked with me down to the marsh to find bag jellies. It was like that forever with us. It was always like that sort of thing. And when Frieda went next, Peach Tree wouldn’t tell me how. She just

grabbed onto me and stayed like that for hours. I said I won’t go. I said it but Peach Tree asked me to tell her again and again, so I did. So I do.

The man came around a couple more times before he went back to work and by then every body knew what to think and say around him. And I knew what he’d done but nevertheless I couldn’t get myself to do anything to him. I would say I was scared but I haven’t been scared before, so I don’t know how to make that true. I brought the roly poly out to ask him why he hadn’t told us about the man before and the roly poly said I can’t see everything. I’m too small. You can fit me in a jar. But he did know that Georgie was a rubble pile. I can show you, he told me. I know they need to fill the marsh out. I know how it’s done.

No thank you, I said. And I let the roly poly go. I peeled off the lid and tipped it out the window, and his gray coat wrapped on him until he was nothing but a pebble, and he went tumbling out into the rosemary where I never saw him again.

Peach Tree and I smoked another two and watched every thing get low and beautiful. I’m gonna kill him, said Peach Tree. Whenever he comes back around. She looked at me without smiling and I knew she meant it. When it was true dark she put a hand around the chain of the tire swing and pushed us around, our hair getting in each other's mouths and our clothes getting sticky with bug squash. I could see in the whirlwind just Peach Tree's round face, and all her faint pimples blue and purple like thumbtacks on an empty board. The movement made high whistling noises like under a bridge when it rained (and it used to). Like the park was singing with us.

Contributors

Jennifer “Miss B” Baptiste is a writer, actress, librarian, and half Haitian American from Texas. She loves creating lyrical introspective pieces that resonate with the heart and mind to promote healing, empowerment, and curiosity.

You can explore more of her poetry writing through local open mic events in the Los Angeles area, Altadena Poetry Review, Drifter Zine, Poem-A-Week with Sims Poetry Library, Los Angeles Poet Society Press, and/or Spectrum Publishing. Her favorite color is pink, she loves vegan food, and enjoys day trip adventures with loved ones.

Feel free to connect with her at @WheresMsB on all social media platforms to learn more about her day to day creative life in southern California.

D. Beveridge writes in Los Angeles where everything is concrete. In the Global War on Terrorism he served aboard a fast-attack submarine in the Pacific Fleet. His work has appeared in Local Knowledge, Full Stop, First Literary Review-East, and various art galleries around the city.

San Francisco poet, Sarah Anne Cox is the author of Arrival (Krupsaya 2002), Parcel (O Books 2006), and Super Undone Blue (Dusie 2016). Her work has appeared in the American anthologies Bay Poetics, Technologies of Measure, The Beautiful, and Kindergarde, which won the Johns Hopkins University Press Lion & Unicorn Award. In 2014, her poems were translated into Swedish by Kristian Carlsson and “her poem/image/sound installations” showed at galleries in Melbourne, Australia (2018) and Athens, Greece (2023). She teaches writing at SFSU, Studies Classics at the University of Edinburgh, and snowboards with her family.

cylo is all of the above (and likes the color pink).

Jade Zora Dean (she/they)

This here, appears a queer, transfeme poet, a visual artist, and cool person. Jade was transplanted from the Rocky Mountains and has found home in the beautiful Bay Area. She loves to create and to use art to hack the consciousness and tap into empathy of those who submit to aesthetic experience. She questions not the substance of reality, rather appreciating time within the sublime and the beautiful- she occasionally captures these snapshots like bugs in a jar, to be shared and appreciated. Her work often draws upon themes such as existence, pain, hope, power, technology, queerness, reality, nature, society, and more!

Dana DeFranco is a writer and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally from New Jersey, Dana was born in Paterson and grew up in Passaic County. Her work explores positionality, particularly the ways in which our humanity is both fragmented and healed within the everyday. Dana’s poetry has been published in Northridge Review, The Raven’s Perch, 2River View as well as other literary journals. She was featured on the radio program Bay Poets on KALW San Francisco this past year. Her chapbook, Blends and Bends, was published recently by Bottlecap Press. Dana holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Poetry from Mills College in Oakland.

Anthony Duran is a Photographer/ Writer originating from Los Angeles, California. Anthony Duran has also been published within San Francisco State University Transfer Magazine Issue #124. Anthony Duran is an avid Traveler and Explorer bringing forth an essence of Human life

from different cultures around the world through a unique perspective of writings and photography. Instagram: @Anthonycapturesall

Josh Godwin works as a copywriter and he’s always looking for an excuse to be creative. Poetry, scripts, rambling essays, photography — Josh tries to give each significant feeling, emotion, or event the artistic medium it deserves.

Josh lives with his partner, Monica, and two cats, Mika and Mabel. As your read this, he’s probably writing something down with a cat on his lap.

Mackenzie Goffe is a self-taught multi-media artist based out of Orange County, California. She can be found participating in local art markets—both displaying and selling original pieces. Her traditional and wearable pieces display surrealist elements, original characters, and exaggerated features; illustrating qualities of outside art.

Jeonghwan (Jay) Han is a self-taught photographer and night-shift trauma-nurse, based in the East Bay, California. Jay was born in Busan, South Korea, and he immigrated to New York City in the early-2010s, where he first worked as a trauma center nurse and encountered a widerange of human experiences. Jay became drawn to film photography as a medium of visual “active listening” and human connection, and was further inspired by his admiration for the mechanical precision of Leica cameras and the nostalgia of Kodak Portra, which he developed by hand, in the warm air of his Bronx apartment. Common themes explored in his New York City street photography (primarily black and white 35mm) include agoraphobia of the newfound city landscapes as an immigrant. He also explores seeking refuge as a member of the working class— reflected in his portraiture of subjects at Coney Island as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Now in the Bay Area, Jay has expanded his work beyond street photography and portraiture to documenting the many peaceful protest movements and PRIDE events of the Bay Area. More so, Jay is inspired to capture fleeting moments of beauty in Northern California’s natural environment and landscapes. By closely observing his surroundings, Jay increasingly finds refuge in the quiet and gentle moments he observes in the Bay Area, which often exist in stark contrast to the moral injury and constant triage of modern life.

Felix Jensen is a New York City based visual artist. They primarily work with oils and bold colors. Their work focuses on trans intimacy, the line between pleasure and pain, and what it means to hold one another. Their paintings have been displayed at the Brooklyn Art Cave and they have also helped put on art exhibitions at Interference Archive. Outside of fine art, you'll find them producing documentaries and writing about music.

Aphra Maria Sophia Karaya is a freelance journalist, apprentice mortician, bruja, and mother to 4 asshole cats and a balcony, closet and windowsill full of weird horticulture that she loves as much as Mama Muerte herself. She has no social media presence and secretly hopes for an apocalypse because she wants print journalism to make a comeback. She'd also like to remind you to drink some water, be kind to yourself, and, if you get a chance today, find some time to spend with the Moon.

Lillian G Lippold (they/them) is an interdisciplinary writer obsessed with Place and queer utopia. Minnesota-born and SoCal grown, they've been published in some university pubs and other mags. They definitely love you, too. @lillianglippold everywhere.

Radus Mareto—also known as Radoslav Radushev-Radus & George Petkov-Mareto—come from Bulgaria and have been friends and co-authors for a long time.By education, one is a lawyer, currently an attorney-at-law, and the other is an English teacher.

Asher Marron is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Cincinnati. They hold an MFA from San Francisco State, where they were a William S. Dickey Fellow. Asher’s chapbook, We were alone together. I forget the rest., was the winner of the 2020 San Francisco Pandemic Chapbook Contest. Their book, Unbind(ing), was published in 2018 through Conviction 2 Change Press. Their poems appear in journals including 14 Hills and Transfer Magazine, and the Enfleshed anthology, Held: Blessings for the Depths.

Denise Masiel is a Caribbean-American poet, essayist, and lover from Texas living in the Bay Area. Her work expresses cultural criticisms, analyses of interpersonal relationships, and explorations of the self. She publishes weekly on her Substack through another lens and highlights her poetry and prose on her instagram @denise.masiel. Denise spends a majority of her days in the west coast participating in the San Francisco arts community and drinking warm cups of homemade tea.

Grace McGuire is a nonbinary poet, editor, and essayist born and raised in San Diego, California. They began performing spoken word poetry at age sixteen and carried their passion for the English language into adulthood, focusing their work on the exploration of gender identity and the trials growing up in the digital age. Their Substack, Dog-Fearing Man, features bi-weekly essays about the ways that online subcultures impact our real-life relationships.

Yuly Mireles (she/they) Is a bi-cultural Bay Area artist who explores their identity through all forms of life. Taking her Mexican roots and bridging the loss of identity with poetry, and art. A recipient of the Richard Scott Handley Memorial Award at Pasadena City College for the poem, “¿Pero Quien Soy Yo?”

Melina Juárez Pérez is a scholar, poet, and artist currently living in Coast Salish Territories (aka Bellingham, Washington). She was born and raised in a farmworker community in the Central Valley, California. Her work is inspired by the vibrant complexities of life as a queer displaced Mexican in the northern borderlands.

Alexiz Angel Romero (they/she) is a glorious brown bitch who transcribes the prayers of serving cunt and what it means to be a hustler. Unknowingly there, she inhabits the shadows of every corner, street, room, and personhood— for she is omnipresent. They are a STEM baddie, pursuing knowledge in the manuscripts and teachings of the arcane from San Pancho State.

Catherine Salisbury is a sequential artist from NC, currently living in sunny Los Angeles! They love comics, storyboards, and figure drawing and outside the arts they enjoy bouldering, dancing, and laughing with friends. Catherine's medium of choice is a small sketchbook and pen, or their ipad for any digital work; when it's plenair their go-to is markers or watercolor. You can find more of their work and portfolio on their instagram @cathywhut!

Karla Tiffany is a Black poet and fiction writer from Oakland, CA. She holds a BA in Writing and Literature from California College of the Arts. She is a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award for Poetry (2021). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the San Francisco Public Library’s Poem of the Day series, Second Stutter, Gulf Coast Journal, Augur Magazine, When We Exhale (Black Freighter Press), and midnight & indigo.

Elodie Townsend (she/her) earned her B.A. in English Literature from U.C. Berkeley, and is set to receive her M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University in spring 2024. Her poetry and prose has been featured in The Berkeley Fiction Review and The Ana. Born in San Francisco, she currently lives in San Rafael with her chihuahua, Tilly.

Marley Townsend is a San Francisco-based filmmaker and writer who deals in malaise and surreal mundanity.

Tyler U.R. Wong is a Filipino-American stage actor, cinéaste, and author of short fiction and short plays from the Bay Area. His work in drama was produced by San Francisco State University’s College of Theatre & Dance as a part of their 2023 Fringe Festival of student-written plays. His stories concern human connection and neuroses through the everyday experiences and inner monologues of young adults. He loves tiny dogs, praying mantises, and watching movies. You can contact him at Tyler.wong@comcast.net or follow him on Instagram at @ProjectileComet.