The Anthologist, Fall 2016

The Anthologist est. 1927

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY LITERARY MAGAZINE

84

no.

fall 2016

the anthologist The Anthologist is a literary and arts magazine that has served in preserving and inspiring Rutgers’ creativity for nearly a century, publishing high-quality art and writing.

For copyright terms and more information visit: theantho.com RUSA Allocations Board, paid for by student fees.

Send us your art or writing to: antho.rutgers@gmail.com

Editor in Chief

Doron Darnov Senior Editor

Associate Editors

Daniel Levin Art Director

Alex Arbeitel Jasminy Martinez

Nodira Ibragimova

Managing Editor

Public Relations Directors

Jen Comerford

Rudy Ogawa Cristina Sanchez

Graphic Designer

Rachel Ferrante

cover image: jen comerford

Copy Editors

Delaney Alton Grace Chung Talyah Basit Mary Brasor H. Danjolli Brienne Flaherty Jen golobov Kristian Petillo Nick Simon Chad Stewart Meg Tsai

[A]

Contents

The Show//Stephen Poos 5 Madness is a Tightrope//Nik Oka 8 Oberon//Adar Darnov (art) 9 Escape Velocity//Arielle Terpstra 10 Hot Chocolate and the Sun Explodes//SuperQuivocal 11 Abstinence//Kristian Petillo 13 For the straight boy whose mom says she’ll love him anyway//Anonymous 14 Untitled//Peter Yoon (photography) 18 Untitled//Peter Yoon (photography) 19 NDE III//Gregg Bautista (art) 20 In Case You Forgot//Gregg Bautista (art) 21 Heroine//Christopher Yi 22 List//t.m. Egan 23 Home //Tasleenpal Akal 25 Asbury at Dawn//Justin Jajalla (photography) 27 Tracing//Talyah Basit 28 Meals//Chad Jamal 30 Meditation on Gertrude Stein//Alex Arbeitel 31 Floater//Rudy Ogawa 32 untitled//Jen Comerford (photography) 33 A Child Like the Weeds//Nick Buchinski 34

Fall 2016

The Show

Stephen Poos Waiting – Glancing down at the ridiculous costume they made me wear. The words, the time, they pass so slowly.

I stumble past the painted sky and artificial trees and suddenly – I’m on. The lights are on.

It’s two am and I am terrifyingly alive, in the superlative sense of every adjective. Everyone is asleep, I’d better recite my lines quietly, so I don’t wake them.

The scene is set: a classroom in which the acceleration due to gravity is nine point eight meters per second squared, the coefficient of friction is point three eight, and the final exam is in fifty years.

(Wait, what?) That’s right, come back in fifty years and tell me what you’ve learned. Foolish mortal, did you truly believe that learning ends with the semester?

5

The Anthologist The syllabus – blank.

The textbook – blank also.

(Barnes and Noble ripped me off again!)

The spotlights burn, the audience leans in, the pit band begins the overture.

I choke, I cough, I ask for a line – Is the script blank too? Give me that book!

The pages fly past my fingers – fifty pages of blank paper: one for each year.

Wait – what was that on the last page? An assignment? Some form of structure perhaps? Yes; the words, the time, they pass so quickly…

Fifty years, fifty revolutions around the sun, fifty cycles of three hundred and sixty-five point two five twenty-four hour gift-wrapped periods of time – beginning today! – to fill with knowledge and finding new homes and finding new ways home and sitting on the roof and rain and music and lasagna and things that only you will get to experience, in your own way.

6

Fall 2016 What a gift, truly.

So tell me, did the audience cheer as I lit the flames?

Did the music swell as I burned the artificial trees, the syllabi, the textbooks?

Did they rave fanatically as I tore down the painted sky?

Did the music from the orchestra reach a fever pitch as the flames surged and the pyrotechnics lit up the theater to show the patrons what they really were?

Oh good. I’ll put that in the script. Forty-nine pages to go.

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Madness is a Tightrope Nik Oka

“What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?�

-Theodore Roethke Walk, then balance, there is only forward, a way with no foreseeable end, or a fall into the disturbed; anticipating gravity, the rope is taut under my feet, and the better claim is where, Step by Step I am not aware of downward, beckoning with insidious cries to end this balancing act. my thoughts are like electrons swarming around a nucleus: obsessed, restless, beautifully helpless in their being, embittered by circumstance, the choice being resistance or acceptance.

Tangent to Tangent I tread impromptu, a finite light elucidates my narrow path, enough to see the next step, but I concentrate not on the rope, faithful in my inelegant balance, as one should not fear the eminent, for the fear of falling will not prevent the fall.

8

Fall 2016

Oberon Adar Darnov

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Escape Velocity

Arielle Terpstra Crystal studded darkness envelopes the outstretched highway “Please stand behind the white line while the bus is in motion�

Blurry scenery whizzes past blank windowpanes Dizzy, too fast, crunching metal on rain-slicked asphalt Please stand behind, the white chalk outlines, the bus in motion The yellow tape glistens like vomit on a tile floor Dizzy, too fast, crunching bones on rain-slicked asphalt Little rivers of rushing rain, red like bloodshot eyes Yellow tape glistening, vomit on the tile floor Shaking limbs, an insomniac stare Little rivers of rushing rain; red, bloodshot eyes No rest from these nightmares Shaking limbs, insomniac stare Blurry scenery whizzing past blank windowpane eyes No rest from this nightmare Crystal studded darkness envelopes the outstretched highway

10

Fall 2016

Hot CHocolate and the Sun Explodes SuperQuivocal

On average, how often do you think about killing yourself, the question read.

The doctor had already crossed it out with a single black sharpie line running through the words like stitching before handing me the ream of paper to fill out. I was apparently not supposed to answer this one, but I could still read it.

I did think about killing myself sometimes. Not all the time, but more often than I suspected most ten-year-olds should think about such things. It was exactly the type of thinking, I assumed, that had landed me in this square room with the rough gray carpet and the smooth white walls and the long beige sofa that faced the polished wooden desk and the black chair with wheels and the man sitting on it and the yellow pad of paper that always cut my view of his face in half as he peered over it and scribbled away on its surface.

I didn’t know how to tell him that I wanted to answer the question even though he had already drawn a line through it, so instead I looked up at him from my entrance exam to the University Of Blank White Walls and I laughed just enough to avoid giving myself away as I asked, in my best normal-ten-year-old-who-doesn’tthink-about-killing-themselves voice, “do people really fill this one out?” While I pointed to the question.

He looked at me gravely and said “I see all kinds of patients.”

I didn’t know how to tell him that I would always feel the presence of the long, slender chef’s knife in the kitchen like a ghost that would follow me around the house whenever nobody else was home.

11

The Anthologist I didn’t know how to tell him that I hated sunsets because they reminded me that one day even the sun will exhaust itself and, in a final exertion of its life energy, envelop the Earth and destroy every trace of human life that it had once held. There would be no more long stretches of New York highway where I would drink gas station hot chocolate while watching red and orange trees flash past the window as my dad drove me to school in the fall.

I didn’t know how to explain to him that I only thought about killing myself because I was so afraid of death that I could no longer imagine living.

12

Fall 2016

Abstinence

Kristian Petillo My lover and I get along so well it’s turned me slightly

back to God. My “logic” behind it is that, considering

everyone else is so unhappy in (or out) of love, and we are so singly

and simply happy in our relationship, clearly some eternal entity must be out there

to have made the cosmic clerical error that is our love life.

Sometimes I pray

to thank him (or her) for blessing me with this opportunity for our wholesome, unsullied, premarital sin.

At dinner, when the question rises from death again, at either of our separate catholic dinner tables, we will bow our baptized heads and promise we’re still pure, two virgins screwing twice a week

13

The Anthologist

for the straight boy whose mom says she’ll love him anyway Anonymous

for the one that had to learn how to be his own gay best friend the novelty, the ruse he learned masculinity and made it synonymous with survival instead of violence he learned how to turn a limp wrist into a fist and forgot the difference between his tears and the shower water for the one whose heart got shattered and has yet to find the broken shards for the one who found those shards and pieced them back together loosely hanging the flimsy fixture like a chandelier– unstrung he watches it fall again the shards get lost dislodged in every new lover thereafter– what is love supposed to feel like, mommy? is it supposed to hurt this much? i wonder when i will love you 14

Fall 2016 for you or if i will settle for merely loving the feeling of you of having you i wonder if what i love is only a memory and you were its consciousness born into reality or if i just forget what love feels like when pleasure and pain become so indistinguishable that they seem like the same thing anyway you see the best part about forgetting is that i never run out of things to say for the one who forgets whose poetry gets written in pencil written over in pen then etched in trauma his poetry is the only way he makes these feelings recognizable again you see forgetting is harder when the only thing left to remember is a tired voice he cannot scream loud enough for the world to hear him so he made his body into the world– can someone hear me now?

15

The Anthologist his poetry is as much a catharsis as it is a forgiveness– can i say sorry enough times to stop pretending that these poems are about someone else? for the one who has no more space left inside of himself for the sadness he yells for his mom to admit she doesn’t love her faggot son for the one who isn’t sure if he said it to get her to force it or forget it– mommy the only reason i tell you that you don’t love me is because i don’t want to be the one always finding in a game of hide-and-seek it’s easier to convince myself that the game ended she says that she won’t kill ‘her husband’ over this he wonders why she doesn’t say ‘his father’ how a body can become a secret– mommy, where’s daddy? i’m tired of knowing i’m his biggest disappointment before he does 16

Fall 2016

for the one whose lips are only soft like a child’s because of nerves he thinks he’ll keep his youth if he digs it up from under his skin– how quickly can i bite off the skin after kissing you, mommy? is love supposed to taste like blood rusting against my teeth? does it feel like never knowing when to stop biting? for the one who doesn’t know if he’s more anxious for a positive diagnosis or his mom finding out for the one whose tests read negative and it only means she’ll be anxious for having to wait longer to the ones that promised it gets better after coming out– when is that supposed to happen? is dying supposed to feel this impatient? is it supposed to feel like replacing what i’m dying for instead with for whom?– mommy, is love supposed to feel like dying?

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The Anthologist

Untitled Peter Yoon

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Fall 2016

Untitled Peter Yoon

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The Anthologist

NDE III Gregg Bautista

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Fall 2016

in case you forgot Gregg Bautista

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Heroine

Christopher Yi I still think of you, when I see myself Through littered fingerprints On my dusty computer screen.

A reminder that my heart beats A hundred-thousand times a day, Like those crimes of battery Etched into your fractured face.

I remember you hid your Xanax In your mouth, then crushed it fine.

Higher than heaven’s light.

I sensed it in your eyes.

You told me you were afraid Of what made you comfortably lazy.

Relapse rekindled you, Rewarded the rash and hasty.

Longevity was not your strong suit.

Wrecked by a needle so thin.

Fragile, like stems of flowers.

Self-destruction starts again.

Your mother never made it to forty.

You begged to outlive your maker.

But history repeats itself.

Jim and Janis were your traitors.

You didn’t make it past winter.

You were cold, bleating from hunger.

Maybe someday I’ll write about you And you’ll live eight years longer.

22

Fall 2016

List t.m. Egan The first, was that I didn’t appreciate things.

The second, I was jealous.

The third, was if my body was the way I saw it in the mirror everyday then how could I ever be loved?

The fourth, worthlessness, disguised by guilt, disguised by low self-esteem, disguised by hate.

The fifth, was that I needed glasses. I was blind to what was real; fake always looked prettier in the afternoon, airbrushing the doubt away with a smile.

Okay, the first was that I really didn’t appreciate things.

The second, was that low self-esteem was always a discussion that I had penciled in The third, was that anxiety also showed up to that appointment, just to check in, make sure things weren’t moving along too happily.

The fourth, was that those appointments always left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I kept telling myself long enough it was the coffee I just finished. I’d believe it sooner rather than later.

The fifth, was that I always felt I was on my last breath; I soon realized grasping for air doesn’t kill you as fast as you think it would.

The sixth, was that it was pretty easy to pretend you were okay; smile then laugh, but don’t laugh too hard because no one is really that happy and don’t smile too hard because you hate your smile but wait, smile again since you just laughed...

Don’t be a weirdo.

The seventh, was that everyone else seemed to have things to 23

The Anthologist count, things to appreciate; but if my life was as happy as I pretended it to be, then how come I didn’t have things to count on?

No, that was the first one, that I didn’t count enough.

Even if I was always the one being counted on.

The second, I was jealous.

How did I become so jealous?

The third, was that I didn’t seize every opportunity like a 20-something should.

I was made up of fragile bones and bubble wrap and I never got the chance to fall over.

The fourth, was that I was heavy; my shoulders carried bricks and my heart held too many secrets and I didn’t love the way my body looked--but who could with the amount of guilt they carried every day.

The fifth, was that I let him be my guilt. He had a way of being my guide line; the funny thing about guide lines is they always break you harder than what’s attached to them.

My sixth, was that I became too attached.

My anchor was stronger than I was, but anchors were meant to drown. Unlike me.

My seventh, was that how could I love and be loved if I couldn’t appreciate things? If I was jealous, if my fragile bones kept breaking and if anxiety combined with low self-esteem had me penciled in for the rest of the month, what could I appreciate?

Myself?

No, the first was that I didn’t love myself.

The first didn’t exist to me.

24

Fall 2016

Home

Tasleenpal Akal To the man who refused to help my dad because he wears a turban because he is a Sikh because he looked ‘threatening’.

Fuck you.

This beautiful country you call United States of America runs on immigrants.

Its identity is its immigrants.

You are nothing without its immigrants.

The last time I checked, your hands were too delicate to pour coffee, fill a car with gasoline, or too fragile to mow the damn lawn.

Then came people like my father, Whose hands once spent day and night, studying theory, designing, innovating, engineering.

Whose hands now make sure you can make it to work on time.

Whose hands now make sure you can pick up Tylenol for your baby 25

The Anthologist crying in pain from a fever.

Whose hands made sure I could dare to live the life you were so easily handed.

To the man who told me, to know my place in society.

That I am equivalent to his foot.

I can only pray for what’ll happen the day someone decides to chop it off.

To the man who believes in a White America.

There are two other colors on our flag.

Redthe color that knows no boundaries.

As it runs throughout my body and yours.

Bluethe color that runs above this very land we share.

Carrying April showers, pouring over graves.

Impartial.

To the man who told me to pack my bags and go home.

I 26

am home.

Fall 2016

Asbury at Dawn Justin Jajalla

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The Anthologist

Tracing

Talyah Basit You and I on an old wooden bench, late harvest time and you say, I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. I look up expectantly and you take off your sweater and hand it to me before clambering up the old crabapple tree. You’re waving from the top, dangling precariously, with only an arm wrapped around a flimsy branch. Light dapples my hands, and your skin, but I can’t see your face anymore.

I’m standing on the bench, trying to make out your expression, anxiously holding on to your sweater. It’s a faded maroon and is falling apart near the elbows.

The porch is littered with the carcasses of moths. I wasn’t going to fall, you say. I haven’t fallen from the tree since I was ten and that was only because the wasp bit me.

And your entire arm swelled up and they ran you to the clinic.

Well, I didn’t have to go to school for two weeks.

Who could guess it would cause so much trouble.

More bark than bite really. I was fine.

With the cicadas’ strumming surrounding our bedroom, I can’t sleep, so I make my way to the windows and open the curtains. The moon lends a ghostly light to our backyard and I can see that we’ve left several plates outside, which will surely attract every insect in the county before tomorrow. A feast in honor of these last warm days, a late night waltz in honor of its fecundity in tune to the tired melodies that murmur from the corners.

The window pane is surprisingly cool to touch, a harbinger of the stillness to come.

28

Fall 2016 You’re still sleeping, the sweater lying on the upholstered chair, watching over the pills, cups, and bottles on your night table. I take one of the glasses and carefully walk down the stairs, not wanting to disturb the house as it slumbers. Turning on the tap, I am startled by the cold water. I fill the glass to the brim. On the way back, some of the water splashes on the stairs. I return the glass to its original position before falling suit, aligning my body to fit yours, and watch the pale light dance across the floor.

A line from an old poem drifts through my dreams: mansions in the snow in which we will always be together.

When I awake, the glass is empty, as usual.

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The Anthologist

Meals

Chad Jamal If I ripped open your body on the kitchen table during breakfast I’d find my daily serving of wide eyes.

I’d find the clicking of the gas stove. It was our interplanetary mating call. That click reached across light years—across us. It was me, four feet away making coffee, you, stirring oatmeal.

I’d find a coat. The stitching gripped you more honest than I ever could.

I’d watch you stumble out the door, falling for the daily lie I put there.

If I ripped open your body on the kitchen table during lunch You wouldn’t be there. You never came home for lunch.

I’d find two cigarettes, half-baked nachos, and a store-brand orgasm.

Junk food from Tom. You were afraid of a real meal.

I’d find your voice. You speak so clearly when I’m not listening.

I’d find open textbooks. Chemistry books with loud paper and not enough answers. Textbooks open like you, not me. I’m more like a textbook than you think.

Hardcover.

I’d find empty water bottles. So thirsty. You need me, not water.

If I ripped open your body on the kitchen table during dinner I’d find receipts. You already had dinner with bodies that replaced mine.

I’d ask you to wash your hands. Say a clean prayer about how we were meant to be together.

I’d remember your kiss. Your skin smells like hunger now.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I’d say if you ever sat down with me.

30

Fall 2016

meditation on gertrude stein Alex Arbeitel

stein wrote object ways to same the name; nots object to name-says in the not-names, and you do read stein fine enough to note down names, but i spy games don’t make you sherlock: don’t knock it ’til you try it (i tried it i tried it) i spied the object games and lied and lied inside them, and tongue-tied tried to hide the unsteining, still trying couldn’t right me back to rhyming— if the finding’s where the fine is then the finder’s fee is free, and stein’s pulling tongues to timings and twisting sights from sees; if the sense is in the seeing, then the lost is found in found, and the key is in slip-sense to sense the sense to be unsound. if the finding’s where the fine is, then the finder’s fee is free; if the finding’s where the stein is, then it’s inner out of me.

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The Anthologist

Floater

Rudy Ogawa

The first time she walked by, I wasn’t sure if she was actually there, or just a wisp of smoke, caught in the ridges and corners of my cornea, her visage a strand of displaced matter, not meant to be seen.

As my eyelids shut and reopened, pupils circling aimlessly, I tried to catch a glimpse, a shred, of her silken black hair, through which nothing, but the rounded tips of her porcelain ears, could penetrate, only to reach for and grasp at nothingness, leaving me holding her apparition in the palms of my bare eyes.

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Fall 2016

Untitled Jen Comerford

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The Anthologist

A Child Like the Weeds Nick Buchinski Son and Father

They were three: son, father, and mother. They moved out past the town built above soot layered labyrinths and rock flumes hot with moisture and heavy with coal. They moved further into the wilderness. They moved close to the breathing earth, down a dirt road laid heavy on the backs of weather-worn hills and beneath old, saurian mountains waiting like dreams. They moved to a little sagging house on a bleak scar of property. Six years they had lived there. Six years before John had found his son to be a man.

The sun shone low in the receding sky, and John stood by the rusted lawnmower cursing and spitting. Weather had worn the machine of its green luster and yellow logo. Use had taken its power, but it had a torn leather seat for riding and to John this was a virtue.

A woman sat at the kitchen table listening to the radio hum with static and voices. The weather report claimed thunderheads were growing in the east; they would come by night.

The woman thought about the hard, dead grass and the futility of John’s cutting as she sipped on a chipped glass, tumbling with oblong shapes of ice and the anesthetic smell of cheap vodka.

It’s the fucking belt. I know it’s the piece of shit belt, John said to the lawnmower’s engine.

He reached with a greasy hand capped in dirt-stained fingernails. The engine was still warm, and it ticked and snapped as each part settled in its place. He groped through red wire and exposed copper, through the network of gears, pistons, pieces.

The rubber was loose and frayed. With the frustrated strength of a mechanical failure, John pulled the belt loose from the pulleys 34

Fall 2016 and held it out to the sunlight, his grime-thick fingers dripping lubricant on himself and the dying grass.

He shouted a curse at all things built by hands that were not his own.

The woman heard his yell and jumped with a visceral, animal fear. She shook the table and knocked the chipped glass to the floor. Staring at the glistening wreckage, she felt a cold sweat on her pale white skin.

When John came into the house he did not say that he had found the problem.

Sounded like you dropped something in here, he said. Sweat dripped off his forehead, the belt still tight in his hands. Above the table on the ceiling greened with mold, the ceiling fan hummed and creaked as it turned endlessly. Still, they bathed in the scent of vodka and the bitter odor of sweat.

As the woman went to move her lips, John stepped closer, bits of reflective glass crackling like fire beneath his rough boots.

She closed her eyes tightly.

Young David pulled the protesting, rattling, rusted gray pickup truck into the driveway, sending plumes of dust and dirt in great billowing clouds around the tires.

He stepped out of the truck with a deliberate jump. His jeans were bottomed in solid mud, and he wore a blue workshirt with the sleeves rolled lazily above his elbows. In his sinewy arms he carried a stiff brown bag with Saturday groceries.

A warm summer breeze blew over him and he felt a memory of childhood: sitting on the sun-warmed grass and watching ships pass with timeless movement over the crystal white waves of a bay. He could not remember if this was a dream or something equally truthful.

From the house he heard a sound like the snapping of buttons. His pace quickened, and he felt the loud throb of his heart deep in his ears.

His mother was laid on the ground in a heap; she wore an oversized white shirt with the image of a cartoon mouse, ripped by belt whipping. Her slender hands covered her face from the 35

The Anthologist blows, and down her arms and through her shirt he could see bleeding red welts and the sweat of someone injured. She was bare beneath the waist; he found the glow of her porcelain nakedness shameful and strange.

John, stinking with the rage of domestic isolation, sensed young David watching and turned to meet him. The fluorescent light flickered in hesitating stutters. The family was silent but for John’s seething breath and the quiet weeping of his wife.

Slowly, John raised his free arm and opened his fist to point at the door.

I think you oughta go boy, he said.

In the eastern sky, clusters of clouds, rain-black and roiling with sultry heat, driven by atmospheric winds and the turning of the earth, mirroring the coming night, gathered above the jagged oak and white ash wilderness. The wind sang through brush and branches to the wide, quiet dark. In the west, the sinking sun burned like a fever. Bands of burgundy light cut deep wounds through the waning blue, retreating from the promise of the storm and falling into cyclic sleep.

The woman leaned silhouetted in the crooked doorframe, the kitchen lights spilling onto the porch and into the thorned grass. She held a clean glass jangling with ice and nearly empty. Her face showed the signs of unknowable grief in the traces of its lines and in the doubt of her mouth. She wore no pants and her shirt was torn. She appeared a refugee and in some ways she was.

Out in the yard, John kneeled predatory over a motionless body, swinging his rock fists to a labored rhythm and connecting with young David’s head repeatedly, sending it recoiling like a pendulum: his shabby clump of hair slinging salt and blood around the yard. David’s fingers loosened their grip and fell to the ground, and John dismounted him with uneasy finality. Dark stains patterned his untucked shirt. Tendrils of steam rose from his red skin. The air was thick with the acridity of animal struggle. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and limped to the kitchen.

The woman set her slick glass down in a dead patch of 36

Fall 2016 grass by the porch steps and walked to young David. She squatted by his side. Her fingers were locked like in prayer, elbows resting on her thighs as her hands bobbed up and down. In dim memories she searched for a prayer or comfort but found only the remembrance of the boy and a mother’s pain. Softly she touched his hair and softly she stroked the palm-lines of his hand.

When his eyes opened she decided she could clean him in the kitchen. He leaned absurdly on her as they heaved themselves and each other towards white fluorescence and moldy linoleum. Above, the clouds mumbled warnings and approach.

In the narrow bathroom John washed his face in an imitation marble sink that swirled noiselessly with blood. He saw himself through the finger-stained mirror: the wild black crop of hair slippery on his head, the brow prehistoric and broad, the deep set eyes. He recalled that his father had said his eyes were judicious, bright. Again, he tried to clean his hands but they would not.

He spoke to the mirror: And who built this house? Who? His mouth made neat, slow syllables as he spoke, and he heard his whispers echoed from the tiles and in the round sink still bloody.

The first bout of thunder shook the house.

John appeared in the kitchen with hollow bootsteps.

Young David slouched against the rough cabinets as the woman nervously scrubbed him with rags. She was wet with the blood of her son.

Get off him, John said to the woman.

She gripped the rags with tight white knuckles and backed toward the corner of the kitchen where a telephone hung from its spiral cord moaning a staccato rhythm.

Now get out, he said, unhurried and plotting.

She shivered, paralyzed.

I said get out of this goddamn house. And when he said this he realized she could not move, and so he grabbed her with his grease-black and bloodied fingers and threw her weak body out of the kitchen door and into the sharp grass. A flash of blue 37

The Anthologist lightning broke the low light of fading dusk.

He stood for a long time at the sink. He stood washing his hands in cycles. The grease from the lawnmower engine and the blood it held would not clean. Young David’s breath was rapid and hunted, drowned by the sound of the his father’s hands sloshing in the sink. Again it thundered, rattling the dirty glasses on the cabinet shelves bowing with neglect. John creaked the faucet shut and wiped his hands on his jeans. He looked at young David, hunched over and leaning on the kitchen cabinets, wretched with the blood of them both. For a long time he thought.

The rain began its quick fall, tapping on the roof and spreading out on the yard with its dull descent. John had heard the woman shriek in the yard and left young David heaving breath into his chest, laying nearly still on the floor.

She howled with inconsolable grief and, when she saw John step out of the house like the horror he created, she mouthed a whisper no one could hear.

He lifted her like a lamb and carried her towards the wormy shed. She did not fight him. The rain was heavy and they both felt the weight of the water and the sky. Brilliant pulsating lights fractured the sky with infinite electric branches and the crackling of the heat they released. The thunder roared, following closely the false images of day.

He dropped her on the rough wet ground sheltered hardly by the shed’s roof. He felt in the darkness for the matchbook and lit one on the second attempt. In the flickering sulphur light he saw sharp pointed piles of stacked metal twisting with rust and hanging tools reflecting dancing shadows. The rain beat loud, tin patterings over his head. He lit a small dented gas lantern with a wide covering. He gripped a shovel. The wood handle was loose and shaking from the spade; it was oxidized red in the lantern light. He was caught in the madness of the plan he made. He closed the doors tightly and forced the shovel between the iron doorhandles.

Sopping with rain and deaf with thunder he entered the kitchen. Young David was propped up on an uneven kitchen 38

Fall 2016 stool, staring through swollen eyes at his father. In his hand he held a long butcher’s knife, reflective in the fluorescent light.

Boy, John said. Boy, you oughta just lay back down.

David spat thick blood on to the floor.

John gripped the wooden chair shoved beneath the halfmoon dining table and took three wide steps towards David. He lifted the chair above his head like an idol and smashed it down on David’s wounded body, splintering the weak wood around the room.

He lifted the knife from the linoleum and inspected the blade. He heard only the rain and the thunder.

Mother She dreamed:

dreamed she was swollen again with pregnancy. A wet hot heat on her back. Lying gently in a grove of trees singing with wind and sun. Grass stalks stretched around her, warming her close and safe. The sky shone reds and oranges and strips of blue or burgundy. She dreamed pain. Pains buried deep in herself that signaled the boy was coming. Dirt beneath the grass. Sagging branches hanging like scars against the daylight. She felt cloudy and heavy with rain. She tightened herself.

dreamed a great chasm stretching around her, loud with the churning of some great, broken machine. The noise burned in and through her. Crackling fire burning up within but on her skin still so soft and thin.

dreamed container ships laid like buildings on the shimmering sea-waves. Setting sun. Orange halos and the whiteness of a slipping sun on the water’s surface.

dreamed again the grove. The humming of a radio. The clatter of rain and the swishing of water running from leaves or flowers like: hibiscus or dandelion.

dreamed she birthed a great tangle of ragweed, covered in blood and placenta and roiling like snakes. she felt the hives and redness ruling her body.

she swelled with allergy and suffocated in the hot sun.

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