The Kudzu Review: Issue No. 43

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The Kudzu Review Fall 2009

Copyright Š 2009 The Kudzu Review Florida State University

A Letter From the Editor This installment of The Kudzu Review was made possible by the efforts of Florida State University students under the guidance of members of FSU’s Creative Writing faculty. Special thanks are in order to the many people who made this magazine possible through contributions (both large and small) and to you, the reader, for your continued interest and support.

With this issue, as with every issue, our main concern was to showcase new work from FSU’s thriving undergraduate arts community.

In the pages that follow, you’ll find the collected voices of just some of FSU’s up-and-coming writers, poets and artists.

We hope you’ll enjoy. And on a final note, we are happy to announce that this publication is also available in digital format at http://www.english3.fsu.edu/kudzu.

For the Editors,

Allison Green, Editor-in-Chief

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creators Editor

Allison Green Fiction Editors

Managing Editor

Chad Sealey Ryan Fouche

Shane McFarlane Assistant Editor

Poetry Editor

Matthew Neal

Art Editor

Heidi Zito

Sarah Knox

Art Director

Jocine Velasco

Layout Editors

Consulting Editor

Ricky Di Williams Skyla Walker

Richard Beahm

Editorial Assistants

D’Vorah Jaan-Mitchell, Brittany Witters, Makenzie Smith, Isiaih Hornerman, Dayna Copeland Faculty Advisor

Erin Belieu

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contents R ach a e l Ac o sta Winning at Solitaire in Room 14 C,

No Smoking

Prelude to R eje ction by Another

Nearsig hte d Skinny Guy, with Spite

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S a r a h Kuh n

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7 Minutes

J e s s ie K in g

Icicle

Teeth

Ne stor Va r

for you Ja s o n ve g a

Never

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i come with river

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Left

David s o lom on

Like Morning ja r e d davi s

Beneath

Dew on Blades of Grass

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its Shadow (S’Agapo Thessaloniki)

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a n t h o n y g a it ro s

Ornitholog y

m i ch a e l l in g e n f e lt e r

Exit k e l ly s c he rwit zk i

I Met Death

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The Death of a Star

k e it h b r ink m a n n

I Have a Cold,

and a Few Things to Tell You

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t r avi s luet h

The Canary

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da nn y h a l ey

I step weary

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W.H. MULLALLY

The Man

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in the Low Castle

J ESSE DAMIANI

Fireside Dream

m i ch a e l s c a f idi

Remembering st e p he n kub i a k

Pistolero y we s b ro ck m a n

Autumn,

the Summer Child

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Pollo

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Regret

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R ac h a e l Ac o s ta

Winning at Solitaire in Room 14 C, No Smoking Your presence isn’t free sample perfume of the wind that follows a person when they pass. Don’t tell me God has such a wind. I sniff every little white card, fondle them when I get bored babysitting, leave them in pockets, and later when I find them again they all smell the same. Bewildered every time. Once I was high and wasted and floating face down in a swimming pool illuminated and I knew then that this was what it felt like to be a weather balloon—monotonous and sensational. I thought of the loneliness of astronauts suspended— baggies of dried ice cream, and enlightenment. I know neglect.

On the edge of the bed, my nerves, the tub, fingering all the travel-size soaps 10

and lotions lined up in the medicine cabinet.

Once everything was in a row. The little shampoo, stuffing my purse.

Does anyone ever write upon the notepad in the drawer?

Today my nail polish is called I’m not really a waitress.

What am I waiting for— there are those who glow on balconies in bathrobes that are not theirs.

You pass, and you don’t pass—Old Spice in the pillowcase.

I am a cheap woman, and my love is insane.

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Sar ah Kuhn

7 Minutes

I knew, while the bottle was spinning, that it would land on Henry Jenks. He is shorter than me with red hair and is always sliding notes through the slits in my locker at school.

I’m waiting for Henry in the basement closet and seven minutes after he finds me, everyone will expect us to walk out together my cheeks red and a stupid grin on Henry’s face. I wish Cindy were the one meeting me. She is my best friend and doesn’t know that I think this about her.

Last week I found a stack of Dad’s magazines in the corner of his closet while I was looking for hidden Christmas presents. I took the top three to my room and spent an hour paging through them, my hands slick with sweat and sticking to the pages. When Mom walked in, she looked at the magazines and looked at me before starting to cry. She was silent when she took them from me and left. Later that night, I saw her in the backyard, burning the stack of skin on our gas grill.

Henry is in the closet, and he can’t even reach the top shelf.

“Should we kiss?” he asks.

I wipe the back of my hand across my mouth, smearing the sticky pink gloss. “I don’t want to,” I say.

He puts his hands in his pockets and shrugs. “Can I at least touch your boobs?” he asks.

I back away and shake my head.

He’s looking over my shoulder at the stack of board games behind me. “Everyone will think you’re weird if you don’t play.”

I think of Mom crying and the gas grill and how she hasn’t looked at me since she found me in my room with the magazines. I sigh and say, “Okay.”

His hands slide under my sweater and he is kneading and pinching.

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I pull the string for the light and it is dark. The string is swaying, ticking down seven minutes against my shoulder. I think of Cindy sitting in the other room, waiting for me and how I will tell her about Henry’s sweaty hands later tonight in my room, and we will squeal and laugh until I’m crying and she’s holding her stomach as if it’s going to split open. I think of her long hair and the green sweater that she borrowed that looks better on her than on me. I think about how I will let her keep it.

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Je ssie K ing

Icicle Teeth The ash of January warmth still sits in the ink black stove months after your migration home.

This wasn’t home enough.

The curve of my neck to shoulder, my ear to your breath, our clinged skin like static in pitch night didn’t settle in you like shadow into night fading until one couldn’t be without the other.

Yesterday I tried to divine a why out of the grey, bone-bit ash.

A voodoo map to tell me if you’d waited until the cold broke like a summer fever then I wouldn’t have had to see you that last time as only dental records.

The secret of our tongues hiding in your teeth, your jaw lopped off from the rest, as if you were a dead branch at the end of winter hanging over our lake and I was the ice, cracked and twice forgotten, that took your breath at the first gasp.

Before the cold could even stop your heart.

Buttoned in with the fish and under the shacks, your limbs loose like a seam ill fit to this life.

But you’re not at the bottom of the lake and I wasn’t the ice to fold you in for the winter months.

You fell within our world, within the car that you left in 14

when you found that home wasn’t here.

Your blood written like ink, careless graffiti quick before it dried. A coat less and less thick each time I imagine the scene.

Each time I walk across the lake I wish at least you were beneath me in the calm of cold.

That I could lay down above you and hear you breathe.

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Nestor Var

for you i come with river for you i come with river and knight perched on my shoulder; a perfect gale last night –with caressing and soft lips of murmur and reclining chairs– for me and my sister’s boys of black hair and black lips and black eyes and black lips; ‘cause out of thee i have seen myself, as if in mirror or deluge and the water that ran through my feet’s fingers was pickled and stale, full in laughter and eye-grinned

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Jason vega

Never Left

Then there would be nothing to dream about, no rain-swept hills, or tilting at windmills.

Rocinante would be fed.

Or I couldn’t imagine her by my side, who I would rename Angelina, like that pretty girl at the pizzeria Louis Prima sings about.

Who would I make the first heroine?

Her name, like Antigone, but I wanna call her An-ge-li-na.

Even if Oedipus was her father, that wouldn’t bother me so much.

I’d still swing by the pizza shop and order up some antipasto two times a day.

Angelina– here’s a dollar, let me talk some more.

The kings don’t matter, and somebody always dies.

If I were you– I’d be honored that the village wants to carry the casket down the hill. Even if there was an old diesel with enough fuel– they would carry you.

Everyone liked you fine Angelina– even Tiresias with his one eye.

I think Will even wrote about you, with you as Maria in West Side Story.

Imagine if Odysseus never took that trip to Turkey.

And for whom?

Was that you Angelina?

If so, W.B. would never’ve had so much song.

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David solomon

Like Morning Dew on Blades of Grass When a driver had taken him as far as he could, Lorence would find the nearest bar and sit next to any woman who had empty stools on either side of her. The one from North Carolina had on tight faded jeans, a tucked in long sleeve shirt, and a face like a flower bent from heavy rain. She asked him what part of town he was from and Lorence told her he was just passing through. He avoided her questions about where from and where to because he was embarrassed to not know. Instead, they talked about things outside of themselves, like the hard rain that flushed the filth from the sewers, or the old man sitting alone at a booth whose unsteady hand dropped a cigarette into his scotch.

By the time it reached two and the bar was closing, the woman, Charley, asked Lorence to drive her home because she wasn’t feeling capable. Although, she maintained her balance perfectly as she stood and kissed Lorence on the cheek after he took her keys.

Her place was on a small street with a lot of trees and short driveways and houses without garages. In her bedroom, Charley unbuttoned Lorence’s shirt for him and pushed it off his arms, the way one of his foster mothers used to undress him for a bath. Charley guided him the whole way, placing his hands on her breasts and pulling him into her. Lorence wouldn’t have minded if they had never even kissed and she made him sleep on the couch, as long as he had a roof and four walls for the night. But he was willing to fill any void that her ex-husband or boyfriend or father might have left because it gave Lorence a purpose, like he was pulling her out from the rubble of her house after an earthquake and, just for a moment, she completely forgot about all the destruction at the sight of his head haloed by the moon.

Lorence slept with his arm around her, but she didn’t feel like the 18

young girl from Virginia, the nineteen-year-old who had snuck Lorence into the spare room in her parents’ basement. Charley was older than Lorence. She was bigger and her skin was looser.

Lorence could feel every man that ever touched her, every car she ever sat in, and every night she ever looked at the reflection of her still room in the window in each wrinkle, each scratch, and each weak muscle from her shoulders to her calloused feet.

In the morning, Charley made eggs for Lorence. After having seconds, he was still hungry but didn’t want to bother Charley any more than he already had. When she put the eggs back in the fridge, Lorence saw the shelves with nothing on them except for condiments, an uncorked bottle of wine, and a half-eaten store bought cake, things that should probably be thrown away.

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jared davis

Beneath its Shadow ( S ’A g a p o T h e s s a l o n i k i ) In its grainy splendor I still see shadows playing beneath your Roman arch

twisting maliciously against vows atoning for forgotten deeds and so in the space of a 3x5 we roll backwards along the winding tracks weave back along Roman walls

to Lion’s Tower blood holding fast in its yellowed cracks beneath weathered coats of off-white.

Our travels there still remain and in each picture I see it’s shadow

loom the Dark Tower, our estranged fellow hiding in the corners of your smile Agistri’s pines masked its scent like retsina burning through an open

throat and the tiny cell of one life’s rent bound like the leaves of dolmades.

You and I have slept in Istanbul adjacent to the mezzin’s cry while children

unfold mats and your camera shudders at us the fools mixing the Bosporus into our love’s swoon and there, there remains our Dark Tower, a scent of roses in a Turkish Bath scrubbing

violently at the shadows that still fall fleshing out older lusts and those lips we still mourn.

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anthony gaitros

Ornitholog y You, like a coffee black railway empty for miles, drive the cold steel foreman’s thunder down your finger roots.

Running your hands through smoky air, far too scared to be afraid of God, you make a God-damn kid want to breathe his coffee black or play a smoky horn like Miles who knows no roots but a bag of thunder.

I caught cold black electricity racing across my brow. This hard-bop God won’t die for wrong roots in coffee black keys. It’s running a hundred miles per half note for a room full of fire.

But you and they amble back in to smoke, life in the lines of the 16th note thunder.

I follow my mind for miles where I too could be a God instead of drinking my coffee black and missing all the roots.

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These roots in blues, they can’t live in black.

They run through steel that comes from God. A distance, you see, seeds itself in a Bird of pale gold smoke.

An electric albatross in black.

Miles ahead, I might too be found in smoke so steel roots can’t steal the thunder of my black Ornithology.

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michael lingenfelter

Ex it This is not working out. It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES. -David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

There’s this moment when you realize you’ve drank too much coffee. It’s this heady double-body feeling, like you’re moving along with yourself, inhabiting two spaces at once. One is so beyond awareness that a kind of meta-awareness almost emerges, like you’re ever so slightly in the future but it’s only like a couple milliseconds. That has to be it – Time – it’s the only way to explain this other you who is about to become you. From above, outside of oneself…

It’s the beginning of winter and everything outside has that wet Northern grit, like ice and salt against void black pavement. Mouths like exhaust pipes are bellowing that visible breath, and the smoker’s area at LaGuardia Airporti just happens to be the Departures dropoff area, so if you want a fresh breath of tobacco smoke you just have to suck it up and graze amongst the other carbon-monoxide fuming beasts. I barely notice the thin layer of exhaust forming on my skin, on top of the filth from working a meager seven hour half-shift, then driving with my boss and chain-smoking for an hour straight, speeding up from Grand Central Parkway in a mad dash, just in time to be seven hours early for my flight.ii This is why I’m overdosing on coffee – so that I won’t fall asleep and miss my boarding.

Standing outside as a few early morning travelers unload their belongings, my teeth sing the grinding melody of another half-assed cup of joe – either burnt, cheap or both. It’s too quiet here. It seems fairly innocuous for a big city airport, even taking into consideration that it is four in the morning. There are just not enough people for me to have that fear-of-a-big-city feeling that an outsider is supposed to have.iii I must also consider that this is not representative of The 24

City itself, but rather an enclave of people leaving and left.

My boss dropped me off about two-thirds of the way around the drop-off area at the Central Terminal, and gazing down the ceiling curving away from me I notice amongst the airline signage a smaller rectangular led sign that reads Welcome to LaGuardia Airport in fat-blocked letters lit a bright yellow. I step on my cigarette and my shoe’s sole makes a schrrrep sound on the wet sidewalk.

Inside, I check all my bags except my backpack, out of which I pull my Discman and headphones in order to drown out the aural nightmare that is the soundtrack of all airports. The sheer quantity of sources contributing to the ambient noise, combined with the large, open corridors creates an acoustical muck that no one should endure for any longer than necessary. Also, there is currently either a highfrequency sound emanating throughout the entire airport, or my tinnitus has flared up. I quickly decide to drown it all out with some snarling horns and the loose grooving of drums and bass.

I shuffle along, buy another coffee. Shop. Smoke – anything to keep me occupied.

So, that’s one hour down.

Time off. It sets in. Finally. Been coming to me, too.

I’m just about ready to pass out, anytime that I’m awake. Every muscle is strained, feels as dry as twine and dust packed tightly into a leather sack. Sometimes my bones hurt for no apparent reason. I have to take vitamins because my skin has gone a Caucasian-pale olive and because our crew only eats in shitty all-night diners and buffets. In some places, it is cracked and lightens around the edges it’s so dry.

Almost everything I touch rubs like light electricity dancing up my arm and sends shivers down my spine. Dry, because of all the dust I handle. I try to ignore knowing that every twenty-seven days, humans shed and replace their entire outer layer of skin. That dust is at least partially composed of other people’s shed skin. It covers you at the end of a shift, turning black shirts to grey, settling in thick lumps at the bottoms of the various pouches we use. I cannot begin to imagine how much of it winds up in my ears, nose and eyes, much less 25

my mouth.iv Whenever we are working near a restaurant or kitchen, the dust for some reason gets thick and oily, sticking to everything it comes in contact with (which is mostly our hands), just like how the stench of IHOP clings to you after eating there.

The shit that this company expects us to put up with. If it is something that is illegal or dangerous, we pseudo-electricians have been told to do it. Our official title is lighting technicianv, which sounds fairly formal, but anyone who could show up at the office at a specific time and get on a van could get paid to gut light fixtures in some far off place. Our training is mostly trial and error; we have nowhere near the amount of knowledge that a certified electrician has. When the company needs new technicians, they let the helpers stand nearby and watch them retrofit a few lights, and then they hand them a ladder and let them go at it. The best way to obtain training with this crew is to say that you can’t do something. If a light is too far away, they’ll tell you just how to contort yourself and wrap your legs around safety cages so that you can hang out backwards and shoot that last screw. If there is no apparent place to put the ladder, they’ll show you just where to wedge it so that it might not slip out from under you.

There are some jobs that we tear through, big chain superstores with row after row of fixtures, one identical with the next. We’ve learned to become machines on these jobs, we’ve gotten so fast. Hands slip over surfaces, the baked dust feeling of everything on the ceiling, rough and almost sticky it’s been baking for so long. We know where every little thing we need is located without looking, our hands fly around us, reaching for two different things in two different places. To save time. To get more lights done. The ladder and hydraulic lift become a freaktastic gymnastic stage, a world on which balance becomes no issue.vi The only body part that really does any holding-onto is the legs, leaving the arms free to grab and screw and wrench and pitch, &c. After enough time and repetition, even the hard lights are easy.

Thought blurs away as lights get done. It’s like driving a car, you don’t think about what you see as much as you react to stimuli.vii This zenlike stage lasts longer for some than others, but usually reverts back to 26

the normalcy stage after a few months.

One of us might fluctuate between these two stages the rest of the time we are in this line of work, but given enough time, even the most upbeat of us will hit a bad patch. One night, looking up into a fixture, I found myself not gutting the light, not able to pinpoint where to start. I looked at the thick wires, the smooth white paint, the shiny reflector, but not seeing them for what they were, I stepped down from my ladder and leaned out the office door to see if anyone else was nearby. I stared from the doorway at the unlit fixture, opened and barren of all meaning. The number of lights finished at the end of the night/week/month will dwindle. In this last stage, the plateau drops off; none of the signs make sense. You can’t hit for shit, as they say.

The sound to my Discman cuts off.

The bustle has set in around me. The suits and dresses are power walking through, checking their bags. People are blurring behind me, down escalators and stairs, into restaurants and duty-free shops.

Breakfast sandwich in one hand, paperback in the other. These are the types of people who have already read the morning paper. They still read paper newspapers. Early-to-risers. Nine-to-fivers. People who get the luxury of a two-day break between workweeks. Most of the time, I don’t get a weekend. We just work straight on until the job is done.viii At the newsstand, I heft the large package of batteries in spasmodic somersaults, resting, flipping, resting… perusing the paperback rack for an interesting time-killer proves frustrating, as the popular novels stocked at airport newsstands tend to be those that are easily digested when someone is doing something as interruptive and tiring as waiting on and taking a flight. I just can’t find the right kind of pulp that beckons my consumption here. I see a headline about how we’d just caught Saddam Hussein. I thought we were supposed to be focused on Afghanistan, that we were supposed to be looking for Osama, but I guess that our priorities have changed in the past few years. How can it be that I’ve not noticed this? Am I that out of touch? Does no one on the crew watch the news, read the paper? Or does no one 27

really care about each other’s opinions? I’m boggled and just pay the woman behind the counter, who is as friendly as six in the morning gets.

Strolling down the airport’s large hallways I notice how high the lights are, how dingy and dim they shine. They could use a retrofit or at least, a re-lamp. I stop myself when I realize that I’m assessing the difficulties that we would encounter working here. This is an obstacle that impairs our every moment inside a lit building, the potential that we will notice the lighting setup, assess whether they need a retrofit or not, and, if someone else is there, make comments about said setup. We live lights. We hear lights buzz, see them flicker. Our eyes eat lights. We eat their dust. We have to learn to shake the lights out of our idle thoughts, but still, they claw their way back in through the darkness.

We got bored and depressed with comparing Days Out on the Road, so we began counting the Days Since Last Shocked. Once we had hit a straight forty days out, we pretty much could care less to the point of not-giving-a-fuck who’s been out longest; and yes, we worked most of the lights “live,” as in fully-functioning, electrical load-carrying wires.ix On jobs in older buildings or with bad wiring, no one would be able to hold more than three or four consecutive days before getting zapped.

My first month on the job passed without a single shock, but two weeks into the second jobsite, I found myself on a twenty foot ladder for the first time, a hulking son-of-a-bitch that is more awkward than any piece of equipment I’d ever used.x I was standing with one foot on the top step and one on the next one down, and yes, these are the steps that are clearly marked with advice to not stand on them. This was our tallest ladder and the boss said to “just get up there and get this room done.” The room was where the majority of the mall’s electrical systems were held. It was dirty and there was no AC, and every fifteen minutes some kind of engine or machine would whir up and startle me from below. Both of my hands were up in this five inch wide crevice, trying to get the mess of wires to stay inside, when a stiff, heavy-gauge wire came loose in my right hand, sending a throbbing burst through me to my left hand and into the 28

fixture’s metal frame.

I jolt up above his slumped position at the table below. There are several coffee cups nested one inside the other, I can see that he has some kind of half-eaten breakfast sandwich and a mammoth paperback spread open under his resting head. He jolts up above his slumped position at the table and surveys his detritus lying before him. He blearily surveys the room for the time, relaxing when he realizes that he’s only lost fifteen minutes, an unexpected power nap. He gets up and buys another coffee, just to make sure.

What he really needs is a good night’s sleep, without the intermittent tossing and waking from dreams racked with wriggling wires like worms hungry for that sweet burning smell of ozone and skin crackling into an endless corridor of lights. He’d dreamt that his boss made him do a radioactive light in a hanger at Area 51, but instead of the gamma rays turning him into the Incredible Hulk or Spiderman, it did something realistic and burned twenty-seven days worth of flesh off, until he was a whole new person. Dazed, he wandered outside the hangar doors and when the breeze suddenly roared across his new pink skin, he woke up.

For a second, I was a circuit, albeit a crude one. It frenetically pulled through me, and then it was gone; I had released the wire without thinking. All I could focus on was maintaining my balance suspended twenty feet above the dingy brown floor below me. I just stood. I was the unwavering act of standing.

I then started to assess how I felt physically. It was like a reboot, my systems coming back online. There was a breath drawing in and the heart seemed to be beating. The two at-risk systems, cardiac and pulmonary, were functioning – a good sign.xi I looked down at my hands. They were dirty, as usual, and most important, they were intact. I figured I was still there. After a few moments, I worked my way down the ladder.

I stepped outside for a cigarette.

I don’t recall thinking so much as sensing and perceiving. Aside from that critical systems check, it was like my ram had been flushed; all the thought processes that had been running in my head all night 29

were gone. I stared. A lot. This was the most literal tunnel vision I’ve ever had, like the image of the loading dock outside the mall was wrapped around my sight, blurry and warped.

After I lit my second cigarette, this time with the intention of actually smoking it, my boss came out and he just knew looking at my expression.

“Not you too…”

I nodded at him.

“I can’t lose another after the other two.”

That previous week, one guy had crushed his hand and another guy had gotten tangled up doing lights on the main ceiling of this same mall. I was at the opposite end when I heard a shrill noise echo through the enormous empty corridor. It didn’t sound like a cry to me, it sounded like a ghost’s wail. It takes a good seven minutes to lower a hydraulic scissor-lift, remove all my gear and walk across the length of the mall. By the time I got there, everyone else was finishing their smokes and filing back into the building, while this poor guy sat slumped against a block wall, his hand holding a cigarette smoking itself.

Lighting up a cigarette I murmured, exhaling “What happened to him?”

My boss, in a hushed but not quite sympathetic tone replied, “Got his dumbass caught up in a bunch of loose wires while he was hooking up one of those hids. Couldn’t get out of ‘em.” He paused, hotboxing his cigarette, then shaking his head, “You’ve gotta be careful doing this shit.”

I looked at Greg staring out perpendicular to us, into his tunnel.

“Burnt a hole right through the back of his shirt. He’s got some tiny burns on his arms and back. I’m more worried that he’s not going to get back on that lift.”x11 Dick and I watched as thousands of dollars of profit (per week) stared slack-jawed and motionless. After he hadn’t moved for twenty minutes, they decided to take him back to the hotel. They sent him home the next day; I never saw him again.xiii The thing I remember 30

most was, as he walked past me to pack his toolbag, his eyes were still floating in fear.xiv I bet he could see clearer in that moment than he ever had in his life. I crushed my cigarette and brought myself back up the ladder to finish what I’d started. I wanted that paycheck.xv It was the only way I could get back on my feet, the only reason I’d stuck with this job for so long. It certainly wasn’t the glory of having little or no awareness of current events, no social life outside of a cell phone and the van ride to and from work, of losing girlfriends and friends. Relationships suffered, floundering in the back and forth. People come and go, couples break apart and reform. Girlfriends grow more distant with each mile, until their Ultimatum: It’s me or the job. Romance turned into hookups. Home is just another hotel room. I started to recognize just how nuanced the changes in my small hometown could be after too long away, too often. Everything I used to enjoy becomes a victim of the road.

Around eight, I notice more movement heading around a corner and decide to check it out. After having browsed at every newsstand near the entrance for something to read, I find a two story corridor packed with all kinds of specialty stores. I stop at a music store to browse through overpriced albums by internationally popular artists that I am either not interested in or have never heard of. I’ve always been a little picky about my musical tastes. The first lesson I learned listening to music, was that just because everyone is listening to and buying x, doesn’t mean that x is good; that top-selling albums are often two or three over-produced songs and eight mediocre ones, the former of which are remembered solely for their punchline potential.

I notice that they are selling these little cards that allow you to download entire albums of digitized music. I’d been wondering how long it would take the record companies to start rethinking their business model, and sometime in the past two years, someone has finally realized that you can’t really fight the public’s desires, but you sure can repackage them. Fifteen dollars for a paper card with a username and password.xvi Brilliant.

Just when I thought I’d encountered every bullshit situation that 31

these swine could throw at me, I realized that we were scabs.xvii It had just never occurred to me.xviii I think it was maybe the pissed-off union electricians storming off the job one day when we wandered across each other’s paths that tipped me off. Someone thought theywere sly enough to run a union crew and a scab crew on the same job, without them ever crossing paths. We went back to the hotel for the night, just in case something happened. Nothing came of it, but the threat would always be there as we worked our way up and down the East coast.xix I’d never imagine a bookstore could be so busy this early. Most bookstores aren’t even open at eight thirty, much less crawling with people looking to knock off a Grisham or a King, a Steele or Sparks on their way to wherever it is they’re going. I touch the books on the New Releases table, their smooth clean covers and let my eyes scan the reviews and synopses, looking for maybe a word or phrase that will reach out and grab me by my shirt and punch me in the gut.

Anything. Just wake me up.

Nothing at this table is selling itself to me, so I go to the racks of fiction spines and let titles tick past alphabetically by author left-toright, as I meander and sip coffee. I keep thinking if I canfind the right book, I’ll be able to keep myself occupied for the next hour and a half and then the flight and the bus ride home. I find a winner in a massive phonebook-esque tome with dreamy clouds on the cover and then stumble through another large coffee line, and chainsmoke two cigarettes before it is time to bore my way through the security line into Gate C. The book is heavy in my hand, too big for the already stuffed backpack. I wonder if they’ll count it as a second carryon. They take my lighter just like they always do, even though they’re never courteous enough to give me a replacement when I get to the other side. They take a corkscrew I carry around (just in case), but they leave the bottle of miscellaneous pills, so I call it even.

Staring down the long and wide corridor, I realize how much signage is employed throughout the entire facility. On the left men, help phone, women. In the center are the signs that indicate which airline departs from that particular gate number. More of those yellow-lit Welcome to LaGuardia Airport signs are inexplicably mount32

ed throughout the corridor.

Welcome to the place I’m leaving.

All the way down both sides of the wall are large yellow signs: C7, C8, &c. I keep on until I see C10 and find a nearby table to slump down at and await the boarding call. I open my book and read a handful of pages before I find myself thinking about going home and hanging out with people that I don’t work with. Infinite blue skies.

Less melancholia. Not killing lights. Not breaking: union laws, osha regulations, labor laws. Not breaking… up, deteriorating, running out of steam.

I jolt up from some absurd dream into a frantic search for the time, only to find that it is time to collect my things and get in the boarding line. As I exit, I keep telling myself, twenty-six days and seventeen hours to go.

NOTES LaGuardia is neighbors with Riker’s Island, a famous prison-island which has been used as such since 1884. There’s a distinct irony that two prominent landmarks in the heart of The City are a place that specializes in being a way out and another that specializes in having no way out. ii My boss could be one of those world-class jerk types, especially if you’re trying to get home for a few days of peace and quiet. He would have preferred that I got a cab or rented a car, but I lucked out that he decided that he needed a break and that driving while smoking and drinking coffee for two hours roundtrip would be a fine enough excuse, but it had to be in the middle of the shift, which meant that I had to not only be exhausted, but to sit there for seven hours waiting on my flight. iii Being in the heart of the only American city big enough to simply refer to as “The City,” I realize that it doesn’t really matter how often people make remarks about their amazing reduction of crime, it is still the quintessential American metropolis and people are still going to be a little apprehensive of how safe they really are. iv There are times that I gag, thinking about it. I could probably vomit an entire human body. v We mostly took existing light fixtures and replaced their electronics and florescent lamps in order to make them energy-efficient, thus saving the client i

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money on their power bill while maintaining similar levels of ambient light.

We called it “retrofitting” and sometimes referred to a job as “a retrofit.”

These new lamps are shorter, thinner and brighter, for a longer period. They also use less energy. We replaced the old ballast, usually an eight pound brick of electronics packed in some mysterious brownish material that presumably dissipates heat and sometimes had been so hot for so long that it had liquefied and leaked out in a thick oily goo that is impossible to remove from any surface. Any ballasts produced before the ‘70s have PCBs in this insulation material and have to be separated because they (the PCBs) basically don’t break down, ever. They also may or may not cause: cancer, rashes, strange skin lesions and various other mildly disturbing afflictions.

Further, all the wires and tombstones (the sockets that hold the lamps) within the fixture were usually replaced as well. Sometimes a new reflector was installed in order to scatter more light. The cheapest way to make a building energy-efficient is to just remove some lamps from the fixture and cope with less light, a solution common on most of the college campuses I’d worked on. vi Our three job stint in Missouri was the lowest morale ever got. Our employers claimed they had to underbid the job, meaning that: A) We got paid 40% less for work that was infinitely harder and slower, because, B) The company did not rent the hydraulic lifts that made navigation so much easier for us.

Because of B, we were taught how to walk sixteen foot ladders on the slick linoleum of these big chain stores. All night long customers could watch fifteen guys wriggling on top of their ladders, throwing their weight in just the right way to warp the ladder’s frame enough to shudder a few feet forward without having to get off and drag the ladder into place. Some guys would slide down the ladder’s legs to save time, burning the instep on their shoe’s soles all the way down.

On top of that we had to attach all of our materials to the ladder, which included an eight foot box to hold all the old lamps (which, as we walked the ladder, shattered into mercury-infused vapor and shards in the shuddering box), a four foot box of new lamps, various lengths of wires with tombstones already attached, and a shopping cart tethered to the second step of the ladder (which we used as a garbage can, [mostly] catching items tossed from the top of the ladder). Every once in a while, I would stop and watch one of the guys shuffling their ladder down an aisle and wonder when we would get busted.

There must’ve been at least one OSHA representative who desperately needed something at 2:00 in the morning. vii I.e. - You don’t stop to think “This guy in front of me, who doesn’t know where he’s going, is a douche because I have to adjust my speed by 5 mph.”

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You just know he’s a douche. viii Our crew worked anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours a day, every day of the week, usually for over a month. The first and last days of a job could push us to our breaking point, e.g. we’d spend 18-20 hours finishing off any leftover lights, and then sleep a few hours while being driven to the next town, check into a hotel and start the new job. ix Working them live is just plain faster, and faster equals more money. What it was exactly, that more money equated to, depended on the person. or me, it was the relief of my numerous debts and quasi-homelessness. For most of the crew, it was the bills, all the damned bills. x At that time. Later, I had to use a three-jointed articulating ladder to get to a fixture on a large spiral staircase at this old naval base’s police station.

My foreman was flat-out throwing a hissy-fit because I refused to “just shove the top of one ladder into the top of another” to get this light done. I told him if that is the way he wants that light done, then he can do it himself. So I ended up having to walk about a mile looking for the equipment shed, which is inside of a building that is condemned because it is made of asbestos, which is great, considering that I’d just spent a week in a building that had some kind of microbial bacteria quarantine, and someone had been kind enough to alleviate any potential fears by tearing down the notices and warning tape in all but the rear entrance, the one we had to use to bring out all the garbage at the end of the week. xi In getting shocked, the heart runs a slight risk of experiencing fibrillation, in which the cardiac muscles do not contract in coordination. If this happens to the ventricles for longer than a few seconds, it can cause the blood to stop circulating, leading to death. Most of the lighting fixtures we were handled had specifications that, at their upper range, where in the range of the median threshold shock. The average human’s range of fibrillation occurs at the maximum amperage levels of the ballasts we used and breathing isn’t affected until you begin to exceed them. Of course, we used many types of ballast that were much more powerful than average, and every situation has its own variable that could change these generalizations drastically. xii Burns from an electrical shock come from low-resistance points, usually where a conductive material is touching the skin. The electricity’s main job is to find a way out of your body, and it generally travels the path of lowest resistance. It doesn’t help that we were always sweaty, which lowered our body’s resistance incredibly. There was this one guy who I kept telling not to wear his watch while working. A few days before Greg got shocked, this guy burned his wrist up when he shocked himself while his watch was touching something else. Greg’s problem was that he was sloppy and hadn’t capped off all the wires around him, giving himself multiple paths of least resistance.

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If you’re shocked badly enough, you risk the chance of not coming back in one way or another. Hence, our mantra: “The quicker you get back on the ladder, the longer you’ll stay in the game.” xiv I am still not clear as to why it is that we didn’t die. I think it helps that we never worked with direct current, only alternating current. Most of our jobs had 120vac and 230vac lines, which are comparable to regular wall sockets and the three-pronged outlet that most dryers require, respectively.

We were only able to let go of the wire because of the alternating hertz waves; as they pass through the 0Hz range there is no charge clenching the muscles.

I’ve heard that direct current is like a monster; it just grabs you and doesn’t let go. xv With an 80-plus hour workweek, I could’ve easily made $1,700. xvi Instant gratification not included. xvii Scabs are actually non-union workers brought in to work during a strike.

For lack of a better term, I use scab, but we were really more like ante-scabs, coming in before the unionized workers. The main point is that our presence there was just as likely to piss them off as anything else that would cause a strike. xviii Being from a non-union state like Florida, the only thing I was told about unions is to not mention them to employers. xix Later on, an old friend told me that we were “[L]ucky. New York unions don’t play with kid gloves, man. There could’ve been a strike, or worse. They have this giant inflatable rat that they’ll put out front of a jobsite, so that everyone knows. Sometimes they break or steal your tools, ruin your equipment. Some of them get violent. Don’t fuck around with that shit, man. Get out of there if it ever looks like it’ll get dangerous.” xiii

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Jim graham

Eve ni ng Cup o i l on canva s 2 0 0 9

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K Thro ug h Tw elv e o il on canva s 2 0 0 9

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JEREMY HERMANN

Untitled 40

Untitled 41

betsy dale

Emerg ing #2 glass, porcelain, steel and motors 2009

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Emerg ing #2 (close-up shot)

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greg eberhardt

American Sportsman oil on collaged canvas 61� x 54� 2009

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The

Dividers

oil

on

canvas

57”

x

62”

2009

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Wisdom (Smart Ass) oil on collaged canvas 61” x 54” 2009

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Un t i t l e d

(oil

on

canvas)

54”

x

60”

2009

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ale x fogt

Ghost S ki n # 1 m ixe d me d ia 6 1 ” x 5 4 ” 2009

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Ghost S kin #2 m ixe d me d ia 6 1” x 54” 2009

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jessica gaitlin

Southern Sprawl acrylic on wood panel 61” x 72” 2009

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joHanna polk

The Chicken Lady black and white photograph 2009

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rachel rossin

The Allegory of Here and After: In heaven there will be quail at my feet. graphite, acrylic, and oil on canvas 50” x 58”, 2009

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Nothing comes After - those vultures wear laurel wreaths graphite, acrylic, and oil on canvas 54” x 58”, 2009

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amanda deleo

I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Yarn, fabric, felt, wire hangers, stuffing, clay, lace and spray paint 54

Close-up Shot

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laura tanner

White

Church

on

Hill

#1

acrylic on wood panel 61” x 72” 2009

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White

Church

on

Hill

#1

acrylic on wood panel 61” x 72” 2009

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heidi zito

Interference

oil

on

canvas

32”

x

64”

2009

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Pass

By oil on canvas 24” x 31” 2009

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kelly scherwitzki

I Met Death I was nine when a hunter haunted the garden of my tree house.

I watched him stuff tobacco and rabbit tails down his throat, noted his trail, his collection of knives, taut wires, steel teeth, the way he stretched out metal grins in my wildflowers and hung trip lines with my laundry lines.

Voodoo root, deer trap, lost shoe.

If only I could unriddle why the trees shifted from him or the grey hollow that followed the down-curl of his lip, and the stink of tears, of garden soil, and my virginal—my first fear my mouth was as unclean as a doe skull, but I could never ask him to leave.

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keith brinkmann

I Ha v e a C o l d , a n d a Fe w T h i n g s t o Te l l Yo u If my nose would stop running, I would write thick lines, with the conversational strength of one hundred men, about Hindu pilgrims killed in a stampede – someone yelled bomb in a temple filled with 12,000 people celebrating Navratra shoulder to shoulder in sweat.

The brown paper towel wad in my pocket is soaked with snot and smells like refrigerated chicken soup. This weekend, a short pregnant woman told me to press up on the pressure points under my eyelids, and Somali pirates denied reports of Clash concert on board hijacked ship.

Would St. Francis sleep in a hotel where bottled water is four dollars? I saw duck pairs swimming and egrets landing in the retention pond below my window on the sixth floor. Clouds tiered like wedding cake against a maybe-too-young-for-marriage horizon.

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Every five seconds a child dies from hunger, but relax! Now there’s laser dentistry, and your tall brown dog was found! Do you need to buy a gangster costume today? I see a lifetime of cheap wine and early mornings through open blinds, her sleeping chest breathing.

I wish I was on Abercorn St. in Savannah, Georgia, not here, where a squirrel corkscrews down the oak tree to a bush across the sidewalk.

There, the past was written with fingers wet in concrete.

I retrace my name. Terri loved this someone whose mother called to him with the same sound which my mother called me.

The black kitten had nothing to do with it.

Farewell to India, and the ants crawling in your homemade key lime pie, warm in an aluminum pan on beach sand. When I go schizophrenic I will rip out our fire alarm. Its static red light is a microphone recording my heresy.

There are no words that hold God in their meanings. YHWH is lost in the translated versions, and the ancient references are as forgotten as the verses of Shakespeare’s sister.

In my 21st birthday card, my grandma said life consists of all kinds of things we like or don’t like.

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Lady Poverty tells me to give Catholicism a try, and gives me a canned beer as I show her Psalm 22.

She asks me why God killed her brother and I don’t know, but her hand is gentler than a wind in summer when I pray for blessings and comfort.

We’re sitting at the picnic table where she sleeps.

In my dream, there were childhood living rooms and I saw one thing I can’t tell you about.

There was laughter of a divisive kind and I threw a plastic cup at my sister’s head and her blood was read, like tea leaves, on a napkin. My future was clear: judgment and her chores.

I was humiliated near the balance beam when I couldn’t do one pull up and the boy with the Cowboys hat did five. At the end of the line, there was no chocolate milk. The General was not pleased, and I lost my spot in the glorious social procession of The Mass Games.

The Hindus were all born again but my nose is as runny as it was.

I’m gonna make some earl grey with milk and honey, stir it around, and watch either Pierrot le fou, or Une Femme est Une Femme. So long as Anna Karina is there on the screen, singing to me in existential dreams.

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travis lueth

The Ca na r y Alone on this ship we toss promises around and over the side, anchoring us in ten foot waves, each one the toothless open mouth of an old man with an old white moustache.

We stand beneath clouds like coal miners’ hands occasionally lit by the sweep of other miners’ headlamps. And we can hear them pounding away and we can hear the rocks falling and the panicked silence before they realize they’re trapped and we can hear the scared waiting and the crying of wives and mothers and daughters and sons.

Those trapped miners, we can hear their hopes snapping loose, like bow lines in a fierce Neptunian blow.

Their anchors of calm and reason, rooted in 66

memories of kissing their wives while drinking whiskey and listening to Springsteen, have come loose, as anchors tend to do in stormy seas.

And we can hear their anguish crashing all around us, we can hear worry worn and tightened knuckles fighting stubborn walls the color of the worst rain clouds, we can hear the walls just taking it like a heavy weight champ, waiting to land the final blow.

Alone on this ship our anchors hold us in place just long enough for the old man’s mouth to open in a towering cry of anguish, swallowing us whole.

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Danny Haley

I step wea r y

footed down earthy alleys, shadowed in the canopy of eastern white pine.

I watch you tramp on ahead of me, dodging cylinders of Smokey Mountain sun.

The sustenance and safety I bear has begun to thicken; a deadweight taking its toll.

My shoulders howl sap and sweat overcome my exasperated soul.

Moments from fading, I look up at you standing in a cold mountain brook to quench my longing with a cool water sutra.

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W.H. MULLALLY

The Man in the Low Ca s tl e The town of Costa Rei, though inconveniently placed and frustrating for any normal man of ambition or stature, was decidedly better than execution. Though his fate seemed set on the latter through the will of Cassio, Iago, as always, found his way. It only took a few feigned seizures, some faux amnesia, and an amazing speech of repentance (complete with tears) to win over his Christian heart. But Venice could no longer be his home, and through exile- seemingly against his will he was sent to the town of Costa Rei in the province of Cagliari, on the Island of Sardinia off the coast of the Italian mainland.

He sat outside on his large porch, up from the soft, pale beach typical of the Mediterranean, taking turns between reading from a heavy leatherbound book marked “Dante” in large, gold foil print and staring out at the sea. Iago’s hair had gone white, but not much else had changed. Like a witch preserved by the spilt blood of innocents, his face was wrinkle free and his large, blue eyes still held their same power; that power to convey innocence, to seduce into trust, to will into the unknown. His facial hair was well trimmed and even. His hygiene, as always, was meticulous. His nails were always perfectly kempt, his clothes perennially stainless. He occasionally went to sip his Nebbiolo di Luras, which was locally grown. It was his favorite red, not of the highest rank by the experts but of its own subtle character that often far out did the more famous Sangiovese from Tuscany, or the more respected Montepulciano. When he did this, he looked past the trees and down to where the water comes in closest to the island, to where shade, cast down from a small rocky cliff with a large strawberry tree, cools a section of the beach.

It was from there that Daniella watched him. She had seen him only a few times walking through town, getting a few cases of wine, getting foods, picking up the occasional package from the mainland, picking fruits on his way home. She did not have to tend to 69

the grapes as her father made her brothers, but rather she was in charge of writing the calligraphy on the labels, always very careful when she wrote ‘Briguglio’ across the egg-shell white paper. But for the most of the time, she was free. She had often listened to her father’s friend who came over every few months from the mainland to bring back a few barrels and distribute them to Florence and Venice. With him, he always brought stories, none more exciting than of the Moorish general and his terrible fall. His story ended with the general’s death, and as she listened from the next room, she was left unsatisfied.

She found him after her father had retired for the night, asking outright what had become of the general’s account. And his explanation had led her on a few miles down the road.

This was the sixth day that she had found time to come down and view him, study him, scrutinize him. This, however, was also the first day he had made it clear that he noticed her. He took a sip of his wine, looked up at the cliff and winked at her quickly, before returning to Pergatorio.

Fear paralyzed her there on the cliff for a moment before he looked up again, smiled, and waved her down. She hesitated for a few moments, thinking it over, before making her way down the rocks.

He had moved to his doorway by the time she made it to him. He stood there, holding two glasses of wine, smiling. He handed her a glass.

“I haven’t had a guest in years.” He said.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you, Signore, I just. . .”

“Yes, of course, you saw a handsome man from the cliff and couldn’t avert your gaze. Who could blame you? Come in.” He handed her the wine glass. She took a sip, and the taste was familiar-familial.

“My name is Michael. And yours?”

“Daniella.”

“Well, what are you doing in these parts?”

“My father owns the vineyard a few miles away.”

“Ah, Briguglio. Wonderful Nebiollo.” He took another sip. He sucked air in as he sipped, and then gulped hard. He spun the glass in his hand, holding it up to the light as he sighed. The sigh was strange 70

and ambiguous about what sentiment it was referencing.

“I haven’t had a female visitor since I moved here.” He looked up at her.

“No wife?” she asked, though she already knew the answer to this.

He paused then smirked, still staring at his wine. “No, no wife.”

“How long have you lived here?” she asked.

“It’s been years. I’m frozen in time here, immortalized, so I never keep an accurate count. I have never found a reason to keep track of the years, or how old I might be I feel immortal, this way.”

There was a long silence. She looked all over the house; well furnished, well kept. The bookshelf was well stocked. She looked back at him as he gazed at the wine in his cup, twirling it. She knew what he had done; every terrible thing that had become legend to Venice and as far as the story could travel. She knew his ability for deceit, she knew the horrors he had provoked. And she had heard that there was not much rhyme or reason to it, there was no underlying motivation.

But this could not be, she thought to herself. Surely he must have been this man for some reason. Surely some devil had seduced him to wickedness and his heart had not blackened on its own. There was a fragile beauty to him, like watching light flicker off a broken mirror.

“I know who you are.”

Iago slowly looked up.

“You need to leave.” He stood up from his seat.

“I just came to talk.”

“And on the matters in question, where my reputation precedes me, I took a vow of silence long ago.”

He took her by the arm to bring her towards the door, but she resisted.

“I’m not here to talk about that. I’m just here to talk about you.”

He let go of his grip. She could still feel the echo of his fingers on her arm like a vice.

He went back to sit in his chair. He plopped down and picked up his wine once more. “You want to know about me?”

“More than anything. I heard everything . . . well . . . that you did.

Everything that happened. And they all talk about you like some sort 71

of. . .”

“Villain?” He smirked.

“Satan, even. The serpent on the tree.”

“Well my dear, what is so wrong with that? Let me be the villain.”

“But that can’t be it. I don’t want to accept that as who you are. You are more than that. And surely, if that is who you are, there has to be a reason for it.”

He smiled. “A reason?”

“You know what I mean. I had a cousin who killed his father.

Afterwards, before they hanged him, they asked him why he did it, if it was in the heat of the moment. He said he had been planning it ever since he saw what his father had done to his sister years before.

You see what I’m saying?”

“Well, I don’t think I can give you that sort of explanation.”

“I’m not asking you to. I just want to know you. Know about you, I mean.”

He sat back in his chair. “Well, ask away.”

“Well, what was your family like?”

He stared out the window. “My older brother . . . was a fool. Still, a lovable fool if there ever was one. He paired off with some local girl that was with child, then honorably held himself accountable for. He ended up taking a job with her father and the old bastard hated him, not that he’d ever know it. One day, his lady’s brothers took him out in the woods and impaled him with their swords before burying him right there where he fell. They said they’d sent him on a long business trip and he just never returned.”

“My God, did anyone know?”

“I knew. But it served him right for being so trusting.”

She felt semi-satisfied. But she knew what she had to ask next.

“What about your parents?” she inquired. His eyes shot to hers, and then back out the window. They started to slowly gloss over before he stood up and walked towards his bedroom down the hall.

As he left, he simply repeated, “not now.”

She followed him, touched by the sentimentality he had displayed.

She had finally pierced the heart.

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She opened the door to find him, with his head carefully placed in his hands, weeping. The sobs were long and hard and he weezed through his mouth as he sniffled.

“Please?”

He looked up at her, face tear stained, lip quivering, and then nodded.

“My mother. My mother was . . . a harlot. My father often suspected this of her, but at every turn, every turn, she would thwart him and he wouldn’t realize it. She had strings of men in her bedroom, their bedroom, whenever he went on business trips. He would come home and find things. A handkerchief, stained sheets. And before he could ask, she would convince him that he wronged her. That he hadn’t brought her back a gift, or something. He would become so flustered that he wouldn’t know what to do. And he was a man of high stature.

A smart man. An ex-general. But before he could think it, she would bother him that his collar smells like a woman from the road, and he would have to get so defensive. One day. . .” The tears started again.

She put her arm around him, and started to rub his back. “It’ll be okay, you don’t have to finish.”

“No, no . . . I can do it.” His hands shook as he continued. “One day, he came home earlier than she expected. Mother had a . . . new man in her bedroom. And Father came home, and Father went in and saw them. Mother and the . . . Moor. Father was furious, he started speaking in tongues, and he went over to attack my mother and the man.

As he went for the man, the moor, Mother went behind him and hit him in the back of the head with the candlestick from her dresser.

Father never got up. I went into the room, and saw the scene, and well . . . I ran. I never went back, I joined up with the army. I couldn’t go back, I just . . . I just . . .” He moved his head to her shoulder, drenching her shirt with excessive tears. She was crying now too. She put her arms around him and he did the same to her.

“You poor, poor man,” she repeated. “you poor, poor man.”

As they cried together, he started moving his hands up her back, until they were resting on her shoulders. He broke away from the embrace. She looked at his face. He was no longer in tears.

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He reached for her neck.

“A lovely story isn’t it?”

She let her hand fall to her side. Suddenly, she became cold.

The hands on her neck began to squeeze on either side of her esophagus. Her eyes started to go dark.

“They were all under my spell, you know. All of them. Even those watching from afar, even those listening to the tale. I took them all into account.”

Her legs started to move uncontrollably, but they did not affect him.

“We understand when people do the right thing, when they want to be good. We don’t ask, ‘why did he come to his senses, why did he rescue that damsel?’ But when someone wants to be the villain, all we want to ask is why?”

Her eyes got wide.

“I am not to be understood. There is nothing to understand. I just want to watch them all fall down, and I want to be the one who cut the strings.”

He squeezed tighter.

“And I don’t want to be asked why.”

Her feet stopped struggling.

“Is that so much to ask?”

She did not respond.

He carried her down the beach some before dropping her into the water. He put her in face down. Her eyes were still open, though they no longer functioned. Her hair waved beautifully as she sank.

Iago watched her drift for a while, then turned around and went back to his house. He winked, though it cannot be said if this was directed anywhere in particular.

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JESSE DAMIANI

Fireside Dream It starts with me at the wheel and you in shotty. The wind spits 1922 in our faces and the Model-T’s about to break into a million pieces of glass right in the middle of the snake stick mountainside road. I’m in pinstripe and you? you’re sitting there in bright neon smiling in some language I don’t understand but it doesn’t matter because we’re getting shot, so you grab your Tommy, eyes blazing in the burnt September afternoon and I realize this is Santa Barbara and I’m no crook but they’re still shooting and there you are knocking ‘em down one after the other until all their little propellers are chiseling waves into the Pacific in cameraflash splashes. And as we watch them send smoky prayers into the dulling glow I kiss fire into your skin and suddenly your language is my language.

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KELLY SCHERWITZKI

The D eath of a St a r When a star dies, I feel life at the white heat— I crouch within the doorframe (do I dare look?); the sky is a red ore blazing.

My quivering substance plays beneath the Giant turned Dwarf; the sky is without a color, white.

Black-hole renegades roam the street, I dare you to come. White lightning stranger— greet the purple crescent of my thigh.

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michael scafidi

R ememb ering the Summer Ch i l d Planted underneath the trees of exhausted coats and pants whose branches hang low to the floor, darkened by the shut door, only opened by her to remember, to trace the grayed laces, following the cursive name left by the sunken, soiled red shoes.

Moisture still grips onto the threads woven through the blackened soles.

It still paints the closet walls with familiar odors– cattail reeds, muddied grass, hibiscus and smooth, algae covered rocks, the sun-painted lake in summer.

Its face strewn with curling lips of the smiling waves, small scalloped blue mouths molded by wind and current, who hide jagged teeth behind their broken ladled cups.

The shoe tongues loop forward licking the stale air, laces dribble out on top of the empty basins.

The sodden boats found below the windswept glass surface, who once eagerly sailed their youthful pilot onto the wooden dock, his small arms brown from the sun, his blond curly hair tickling the sky.

77

stephen kubiak

Pistol ero y Pol l o

“Always pay for your whores in chicken.” That’s Master Sergeant Whiting’s first bit of advice when we land in Panama. His voice is hollow and dark through the radio static in my helmet. He’s smiling out the porthole-sized window. “You cant negotiate with poultry,” he continues. “The girls like greenbacks, but they rather have a whole chicken.”

The props feather out at engine stop and the electrical equipment hum slowly fades as we gather our deployment gear. The pilot comes down from the flight deck and grabs his red golf club caddy from the pile of olive-drab flight bags.

“Just like Grenada, sir?” Whiting smiles at the pilot.

“A few days of gun, sun, and fun,” the pilot replies. The clubs clank together as he throws the bag over his shoulder. “Just like Grenada.”

The back of the plane opens like a massive mouth, spitting us out into the tropics. Our boots hit the runway. A3 bags are slung over shoulders like Santa sacks as we carry everything we need for war, even golf clubs. I squint in the sunlight. It’s a blistering heat whipped together with humidity. Whiting licks his teeth and sucks the salt air through his teeth.

“A third world buffet ripe with possibilities for a young man like yourself.” The obligatory hand pat on the back came swiftly. I always flinch. Whiting smiles. “Only in Panama.”

I don’t even have chance to realize where I am before Whiting swaggers off the flight line towards the city. He moves like a man ready to 78

hang his hat just inside the door of anyplace he called home. I run to catch up with him because I won’t know what to do without him.

“You know I was stationed here at Albrook as a weapons mechanic after Vietnam,” Whiting says to the gunners in front of me. I can barely hear the exchange between Whiting and the other two gunners through the roar of jets over the airfield. I walk faster to catch up, trying not to look too obvious as I struggle with my heavy bags.

Whiting doesn’t stop, but cocks his head back towards me.

“Betty, get your ass up here!” he yells. “You’re so slow that we’ll capture Noriega before you finally catch up.”

“Sorry,” I say.

Nurse Betty, unfortunately, is my nickname because of my former job as an Air Force medical technician. That was before I cross-trained to the Aerial Gunner career field. I eventually tired of jamming enemas into retirees, so I transferred out of blood and mucus and got guns and bullets. I was done with excrement.

I hide the panting under my breath. They already think I’m a weakling so there’s no need to give them fresh ammo. I’m still behind the veteran gunners, slinking in the back like a spy in the open, but I can hear the conversation more clearly.

“Like I was saying, I know this country pretty well,” Whiting says. I see his cheeks rise from a smile. “But, I know it a little too well. I lost my first wife because of Panama.”

The gunners chuckle, but I don’t know what’s funny about the divorce.

“Apparently,” Whiting continues, “she didn’t care for her husband disappearing for two days, then stumbling back wide-eyed, smelling like rum and baby oil.”

The laughing gets louder.

“It could be the fact that I saw the clinic doctor more than my wife,” Whiting says as he readjusts the A3 strap.

Even I let a giggle slip out. I hope they didn’t hear that, because a gunner doesn’t giggle.

“A penicillin shot in, a handful of free condoms out. I won’t forget: they always kept them at the nurses’ station in one of those round 79

fishbowls.” Whiting tells the deepest secrets of his past without losing his grin. I don’t even need to see the smile; I can hear it in his voice, forced into his wrinkles. I have the time to study him as I’m left behind, but I enjoy just observing rather than exposing myself like he does. What I have to say I keep inside, mostly because I know the gunners will be ready to chastise me or bark out orders like, “Nurse Betty, go find more beer! New Guy, we need Pringles and cigarettes!”

That’s the life of the new gunner.

We’re walking towards the flight line gate at the edge of a chain-link fence. I see a nearby welcoming sign nailed to a post in the ground, “Welcome to Operation Just Cause, December 1989.” Our forces dropped bombs just a day ago and they already have a sign up. The paint is still fresh and stings my nose.

As the fence gets closer, I realize outside of the gate guard shack there’s a place I’ve never seen before, and therefore, an adventure. I want a Mai Tai on the beach, I want to buy cheap souvenirs, I want to eat food I would never otherwise eat, and I want to do it all between fire missions. This is everything I secretly want, but I know I will only get those things if Sergeant Whiting lets me. My eyes fall straight to the concrete as I daydream: a beach with only a handful of lone seagulls darting over the surf, a beach where the bikinis are just string and skin. I only look up when a voice breaks me out of my trance.

“Are you looking for mines down there?”

I look up and see the gate guard staring at me. “Um, no” is all I manage to get out. I’m tongue-tied because the guard surprises me, yes, but also because the guard is a woman. I notice her lips first; redhot against all the camouflage she’s wearing. Women aren’t allowed to wear makeup in uniform, and yet, those fiery lips are right next to my face. Her lips are so red the rest of her face seems pale, almost sad. Sweet, steaming breath, not the Panamanian humidity, brushes across my face. I shiver, but know I shouldn’t because the guys are watching now and gunners don’t shiver.

“Are you okay?” Female gate guard asks. A Kevlar helmet covers up her face and hair, and most of her body is clothed in body armor and camouflage, but she’s still beautiful. Her perfume is something 80

exotic and floral, just like I always imagined Panama to be.

“Suit up, Betty.” Whiting says, poking his head into my room.

“We’ve got a mission briefing in two hours. I look back and sigh as he disappears. Streams of red, setting sunlight cross over my face as I sit on the lower part of my rusted bunk bed in the door. I grab the black combat boots from the tile floor and start to lace them. One over the other, I take my time lacing up the boots in hope of slowing down time itself.

It may be two hours to our next flight, but we’ve been in this country for three weeks now. We do nothing but fly every night, looking for Noriega. I thought I would get to take in the sights by now, see the sun and beach, and be home already. It isn’t like that at all.

Two hours later I’m eleven thousand feet over Panama and shoveling twenty-millimeter brass away from the Vulcan cannons in the gunship. At one hundred rounds a second, I’m fighting a losing battle with my snow shovel, but I know if I stop the gun will jam. I can barely breathe as cordite and sweat sweep through the plane like a violent fog. I stop breathing through my nose and breathe through my mouth, but now the sour, metallic taste of gunpowder is on my lips. The red cargo lights are dim, only bright enough to shine off the brass piles like gilded coins. Over and over I feel the crunch of shells against my shovel in the darkness as if I’m working blind and lost.

In the back of the plane, there’s no time to look out the window and see what we’re shooting. The brass begins to rise over my boots, the heat like little dogs with lava tongues nipping at my legs. Whiting is knee-deep in shells next to me. He’s furiously tossing the brass over his shoulder like he’s digging for buried treasure.

“Keep shoveling, Betty!” Whiting yells.

The brass sounds like metallic rain as it trickles down the bulkheads.

The flames from the twin Vulcan cannons burst into the cargo area like a strobe; white-hot light, creating gigantic shadows of our bodies against the fuselage interior. The noise of the whirring motors and the deep, bellowing burp of the cannon are both terrifying and surreal. The thunderous symphony makes me cringe because I imagine what those thousands of bullets can do to the human body. I may be 81

three weeks deep into this conflict, but the thrill of combat never gets old. Combat is exciting every time, and yet, I have no idea what I’m shooting.

“Acquiring new target,” the pilot says over the radio. “Standby.”

The guns suddenly stop for a moment. I reach over, grab my oxygen mask, and breathe deeply. While I’m practically choking, Whiting lights a cigar and smiles through the smoke. He points to me with his shovel.

“That’s cordite you’re breathing in, boy. Real man cologne.” Whiting yells so loud I can hear him through my earplugs and helmet.

“Learn to love that smell, Betty. This old girl is the only one who’ll always love us sorry bastards!”

I smile, knowing the plane we’re flying on is named Wicked Wanda. Whiting calls her the momma bear, his first love.

“Guns, Pilot,” the pilot calls on the radio. “Switch to the number five gun.” The pilot obviously wants some bigger firepower.

“You’re on the guns, Betty,” Whiting says over on the radio. He’s never let me on the guns before, so now isn’t a time to screw up. I grab my oxygen hose and com-cord and head back to the forty-millimeter gun. Moving quickly, I’m careful not to trip over any loose brass strewn across the flooring like large chunks of gravel.

I can almost hear the revolutions of the engine propellers slowing down to the trickle of a pulsating heartbeat. The testosterone tingles in the tips of my gloved fingers as if some black magic surges through my nerves. I take my place next to the old, iron artillery piece poking out the left side of the fuselage. Whiting lowers his helmet visor down and the plastic shield distorts his face. Without his face there, I almost feel alone back here in the cold and in total control of the gun.

“Do me proud, Betty,” the faceless Whiting says cautiously. He’s waiting to hand me more ammunition. I press my body against the gun and run my gloved hand across the smooth, iron frame. The rounds are nine high in the feed rods and ready to fire. I flip up the ARM switch.

“Pilot, Guns,” I say. “Number five gun online.”

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“Copy that, Guns. Go rapid fire,” the pilot says.

“Copy that.” I flip the fire selector switch on the gun to rapid fire and look over to Whiting.

“Ready, Betty?” He asks. I nod and call up to the pilot.

“Number five gun armed; Rapid fire.”

“Cleared to engaged,” the FCO calls over the radio.

Ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk; the rounds fire off every half-second. I quickly grab the ammo clips from Whiting, a bundle of four rounds fanned-out side-by-side and connected by a metallic clip at the primer end. With each clip, I guide the rounds into the feed rods, which pull the rounds down with each shot fired like it’s feasting on the metal. I slap each new clip in, making sure to keep my fingers away from the spaces between the rounds. I don’t want the gun to feed my hand through. Each spent casing falls into a bright red, fifty-five gallon drum bolted to the flooring and soon we have quite the collection of smoking brass in the barrel. The cordite smell is more metallic than the twenty-millimeter produces and fills the lungs to the very tip of the ribs. I only have a moment to glance up at Whiting as he pulls the forty-millimeter clips from the ammo rack and hands them to me because the gun doesn’t stop. It’s my responsibility to keep its hunger satisfied. If I slow down, the gun will stop and jam.

“Damn it, Betty,” Whiting yells over the radio. “You’re getting low there, keep up with the gun!”

I look up at him and expect to find the answer in his face, but there’s only the dim red light gleaming across his visor in wavy lines.

“Don’t watch me, watch the damn gun!” he yells. I’m looking down long enough to watch my hand slip between the bullets.

“Ah, damn it!” I yell and yank my hand out. I grab my thumb and ball a protective fist around it. I howl for a moment, and then suck air through my teeth. My heartbeat immediately starts to throb in my thumb and each pulse hurts as the pressure builds against the nail. I dig the fist into my chest as if it will help the pain, but I only end up looking stupid in front of Whiting. He’s shaking his head.

“Cease fire!” Whiting yells over the radio.

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The gun goes quiet. For a moment, I can only hear the hum of the engines and the air rushing against the airframe. The plane seems silent with the gun firing. The silence, I realize as I look up from the balled-up fist I bury into my midsection, is because of me.

“Lead gun,” the pilot radios. “What’s going on back there?”

“The gun tried to eat Betty’s hand,” Whiting replies, frowning at me. I’m sure I look like a child cradling a flesh wound. “The gun fed his thumb down pretty far.”

“Do we need to RTB?” the pilot asks.

“I’m fine,” I say and lie. “Let’s finish the mission.” My hand is shaking violently now, but I can’t feel it any more. I know that’s bad, but I rather take the chances of losing a thumb than be labeled as an incompetent gunner. I carefully peel back the flight glove, the blood now an adhesive. I grit my teeth until they hurt just as much as my thumb. The digit is purple and gray, and part of the skin lies limp and pried off the edge of the nail. The nail is blue and black, looking sickenough to fall at any moment.

“Pilot, Lead Gun,” Whiting calls up. He looks at my wound.

“We need to head back.”

“Copy that, Lead Gun,” the pilot says. “Spectre flight returning to base.”

Whiting doesn’t say anything else to me as the plane drones back to Albrook. I sink into the seat and hang my head down so I don’t have to look at him. My eyes sometimes trail off to see if he’s staring at me, but they don’t catch much. His head is turned away, even though we are sitting on the same bench seat. Once we land, Whiting looks over to me and gives me a smile, though it’s smaller than his normal smile.

“Grab your shit,” Whiting says, “and go see the flight doc.” I nod, refusing to say anything in fear of making the moment worse. I can’t tell how angry he is, or if he’s angry at all, but I can see it under his baggy eyes; he’s disappointed.

I jump off the back of the plane ramp. The pilot keeps the engines running as the replacement gunner passes by me.

“Don’t put your hand in places it doesn’t belong, New Guy!” the 84

gunner yells before stepping up into the aircraft. That’s just what I needed.

The flight doctor and squadron commander meet me at the edge of the dark flight line. The doctor has a syringe sticking out of his flight suit breast pocket. I recognize a syringe of morphine in any light.

“The pilot didn’t say how bad it was,” the flight doc says. “I just thought I’d be safe.” He pats down the syringe in his pocket.

I suddenly wake up and immediately look at my thumb. The capillaries expand so much that every pulse feels like they will burst. My thumb is propped up with a metal splint that makes me look like I’m giving a thumbs-up sign. It feels better, but still looks like rotten meat and oozes more yellowish pus than blood. I turn back over in my bed.

“Betty,” Whiting says. He’s looking over me. “Get up.”

“What?” I rub my eyes. “What’s wrong?” I generally believe that Whiting would only come up to my dorm room if there was a fire or the base was under siege. He seems happier than last night, but also a little crazy. His eyes are wide open and his breath smells of stale beer.

“I’m going to cheer your gimp-ass up,” Whiting says. I look over at my cheap travel clock on the nightstand.

“It’s six in the morning,” I reply. “Have you gone to bed yet?

“Nope.” Whiting smiles. He never asks me to do anything, so I’ll go. Besides, I want to finally see what’s outside the base gate.

I sometimes hear explosions at night so close to the building that my bed frame creaks and shakes. Black smoke is always wafting over the base walls, and the salty, sea breeze brings with it the smell of burning diesel and aluminum. I can’t see much more than the tall, white government housing projects through the tattered newspapers covering the dorm room window. Right now, I only look at Panama like a peep show, hiding behind the comfort of cinderblock.

“I’ll let you get dressed,” Whiting says. “Meet me in the hootch when you’re done.” Whiting starts walking away before I can formally accept his offer. “Bring lots of cash too.”

85

An old, yeasty smell lingers in the hallway outside of my room, permeating through the freshly cut shag carpeting, a throwback to the golden years of Panama Canal protection in the 60’s. As I walk to the stairwell, I remember how the long strands of hunter green annoyed Whiting, so three days ago he dragged a lawnmower up to the second floor to trim it. His laughing echoed through the hallway, even over the sound of the motor, as he pushed the mower over beer bottles and cans.

Below the hallway is the dorm common room converted into a squadron hootch bar. Cases of Natty Light hug the walls like cardboard buttresses against the cinderblock, and liquor bottles replace books on the bookshelves. In the center of slab floor is a drain, like the room was once used for group showers. It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got.

I step out of the stairwell. The common room is empty because the crew is sleeping after the mission. I scan the room for Whiting. The only illumination comes from multicolored Christmas lights, stolen from base housing a few days before, haphazardly strewn around the tops of bookshelves, stacks of beer cases, and deer antlers on the wall.

I see Whiting staring at a cutout of Santa Claus taped to the wall.

Santa seems to be staring back at him with an eerie smile.

“I love this place,” Whiting says without turning around. He previously posed the cheap cutout Santa so that a beer bottle was over his head in one hand, and the other hand was holding onto his “flight controls.” Santa seems out of place in the tropics. A white beard, fluffy red suit, and a jolly smile, no, Santa would sweat to death here.

“It’s shit like this that keeps us getting billeted in condemned buildings. Our squadron is a red stain on a white carpet.” Of course I agree. In three weeks, the gunship crew manages to bust holes in the cinderblock, overflow the toilets with cigarette butts and beer bottles, and mow the carpet. “Always play hard, always party hard,” Whiting says. He turns to face me. “We’re the rock stars of the Air Force. Remember that, Betty.”

86

The other gunners really live what he preaches. Using an old cassette boom box, the gunners are led in a sing-a-long of Van Halen’s Panama at least three times a day.

“It’s our deployment song,” Whiting explains to me. “You’ve got to have a theme song to remember wars by.” Through the guitar riffs and cymbal crashes, the gunners all yell out in unison, “Pan-a-ma!” One of the first days we were in country, I yell over the music into Whiting’s ear as he sits and bobs his head.

“I hear this song is about a car,” I say. Whiting just smiles up at me.

“Now it’s about an invasion.”

Whiting takes a seat in a brown lounge chair patched with silver strips of duct tape. He cocks his head when he gets a good look at me.

“Is that what you’re wearing to go downtown?” he asks.

I’m wearing an issued brown tee shirt, running shorts, and my combat boots. My socks don’t even reach the tops of the boots. My web belt and M9 holster keep my running shorts up. Whiting never bothered to tell me to bring civilian clothes on the deployment and now he can only laugh.

“This is all I’ve got,” I say. I have my thumbs wrapped over the belt holster like a sheriff in an old cowboy movie.

“We’ll get you some proper Panamanian attire in town,” he replies.

He’s wearing an unbuttoned blue Hawaiian shirt, with a tank top underneath, and short khaki shorts. His legs look like they belong to a hairy ghost that’s never seen sunlight. I don’t think I want him picking out clothes for me. He pushes back his red mesh Spectre ball cap and puts on his Ray-Bans.

“Time to get some grub, Betty.”

Beyond my raised fork of greasy sausage I see her. I don’t care that her hair is bunched under a Kevlar helmet, or that a flak vest flattens her curves. Gate guard girl is a camouflaged princess with a M-16 scepter. I hope she comes closer; close enough that I can smell her perfume over my overcooked meat and the sweat of men hunching 87

over their food. I don’t want them seeing me looking at her. She’s mine. I glance over to Sergeant Whiting; his mouth is full of eggs.

His eyes are much too close to her, much too close for me to keep quiet.

“Who are you looking at over there?” Whiting asks. My jaw is left awkwardly hanging open. Nothing but dry air comes out.

“You were looking at that gate guard, weren’t you?”

I set my eyes back on the tray.

“Well, get that shit out of your head.”

“Why’s that?” I shoot back. The topic of gate guard girl dials up courage inside.

“Trust me, you don’t want anyone who enlists in the military, especially a woman,” he explains while taking out his flask and pouring whisky into his orange juice. “Everyone has a reason why they join. Everyone has a story. You should’ve learned that when you first joined up, Betty.”

Guys join the military for pride and duty, and women join to get away or to find love; that’s what Whiting’s trying to say. But then there is me, an oddity within Whiting’s enlistment logic. I don’t know why I joined.

“So, why are we going off-base?” I ask Whiting as we head to the base gate.

“I felt bad after last night,” Whiting says. “I figured you must be stressed out. All we’ve done since getting here are combat missions.

You need a break.” I don’t really believe his reasoning, but I’m not about to question him either.

It doesn’t take long to notice the differences between the base and downtown. Just passing the through the gates offers up new colors: red billboards for Coke, yellow street signs, lime-green and baby blue storefront signage, graffiti in Spanish, murals in purples and orange.

There’s so much color outside the walls, splashed around in no particular order, it feels like I’ve been living in a monochromatic bubble these last few weeks.

We walk down a narrow street where white apartment high-rises 88

stand on both sides. I watch a woman string her clothes overhead on a wire that crosses above the road. A few cars pass by, leaving in a cloud of dust as they disappear into the city. The laundry woman glances down at me for a moment. She has sad eyes and a half-smile for me, but nothing else. I feel like she pities the two of us walking by. She goes back to the clothesline as we pass through the shadow of the building. A couple of Army guys walk by in full combat gear, but they barely nod at us.

We make a turn and head down a narrow road into the nearby market. A burnt out armored transport is hunched over the curb like a dead pill bug. Whiting stops and points to the bullet holes in the transport door.

“It’s a PDF vehicle and it looks like a fifty cal killed it,” he says.

“Looks like those Army pukes can aim after all.”

El Mercado Norte Americano is like any area right outside of a military base, establishments that literally suck the dollars out of you. The scene is different though, more bombed out than I expected. Neon signs for Seiko and Sony along the corridor of merchant buildings are shattered. A single man is sweeping up the glass under the large Sony sign with an old, bristled push broom. The sound of glass scraping against concrete stops when we pass, The man looks up at me as if to place blame for the mess, but he remains silent and goes back to work.

The market is a mishmash of the old world and new. There are illuminated signs high above like Times Square but an old, outdoor market underneath, selling bootlegs of the products advertised above.

Tattered blue tarps hang from the wooden stalls like streamers from some carnival held long ago. Trash litters the edge of the streets, collecting along the curbs like an open-air filing cabinet for unwanted papers. It seems like a lot is unwanted. PSYOPS fliers are spread through the streets like thin, white housing tiles. No one bothers to pick up the propaganda that tells the Panamanians how good America is to come and save them. The wood stalls are not much bigger than bathrooms and line the street like games at a county fair. Raw meat is butchered in the open and gangs of flies take notice. People 89

gather around stalls selling bootleg watches and VHS tapes piled into unorganized stacks. Boys chase little dogs into the alleyways, yelps echoing through the high-rises and urban detritus.

“What do you think?” Whiting asks. We stand in the center of the street.

“It’s no Kmart.”

“Of course it isn’t. This is real shopping.” Whiting looks over the market like it’s a one-time, go-through buffet; everything must be gobbled up in one shot. He looks ready to pile everything on the plate. “No fixed prices, no rules, you haggle them down until they practically give you what you want,” he explains. “You have the almighty dollar, you have the power.” Surely he must be joking, butthe smile slips off his face.

I’m not just a bleached face among the brown faces, but a beacon, a target, one of those fishhooks that shine when you pull it through the water. All eyes are on the two of us, and my obvious, militaryissued clothing. The Panamanians wear loose, short sleeve button downs and sandals, simple hand-me-downs from the late 70’s. The teens wear tight ZZ Top and Mickey Mouse tee shirts; some lean against the market stalls and drink from Coke bottles clenched tightly in their fists. The less fortunate simply lean, digging their shoulder blades into the stalls as if to hold the entire weight of Panama on their backs. I’m on their turf now. The high-rises seem to lean over me, blocking out the sun. Through the blank faces and stares, I can see these people don’t want me here. They watch me too long to be just passing glances.

“These are some of the friendliest people you’ll meet, Betty.”

Whiting explains as we walk. “But just in case, you better flash those greenbacks.”

There was a raid in the market two days ago and I still smell the sulfur and cordite from the explosives used. I feel strangely safe because of the smell. A friendly gun is a powerful thing. Bullet holes are etched into the cinderblock buildings; rocket scorching is spread across walls like black graffiti. A few of the Army barricades are still up, and a Humvee passes down the street every now and then with a 90

man on the machine gun. The locals don’t seem to care.

“Do you think it was a big firefight?” I ask Whiting.

“It could have been,” he replies. “But enough people were killed.

Look around you.” He points to patches of straw along the street and sidewalk. Every twenty-five yards there’s the same pile of straw. I watch people avoid these spots without even looking down, causally walking around them and I don’t realize why until I get closer. The straw is covering something I don’t want to see.

“They quickly clear out the bodies, scrub up as much brain matter as they can, and then cover the spot up with straw,” Whiting says as i look down at a nearby patch. “That’s all you can do in a day.” He nudges me on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go buy some crap.”

Whiting walks into a store behind the market stalls. I follow close behind. The room is very plain, white walls with card tables set out with folded tee shirts, acid-washed jeans, and other trinkets. A slender man in a white, button-down and black tie appears from the back room. He smiles warmly when he sees Whiting.

“Hola, Señor Dwight. ¿Cómo estás?”

“Bien, Juan, bien.”

“What may I do for you?”

“Shirts and souvenirs, Juan. Shirts and souvenirs.”

“We have plenty of that.” Juan smiles. “Come, come.” He motions for us to look through his wares. He leads us to a table filled with tee shirts folded neatly into rectangles. I’m amazed at the collection he has. It’s less than a month since we first arrived and all the shirts have Operation Just Cause silk-screened on them. Some shirts have the universal “no” symbol across a picture of Manuel Noriega, others a picture of Panama with the American and Panamanian flags below.

It’s strange to have shirts for a war, but I still want one so people on the street know what I did. I’m excited, picking through the shirts and trinkets all with Operation Just Cause etched, sewn, and silkscreened on like a sports team logo. Juan smiles as he watches me.

“I told you they had some good shit to buy,” Whiting says. The tables are full of OJC merchandise: lighters, hats, painted coconuts, key chains, shot glasses, and even baby bibs. This is the Hard Rock 91

Café of war memorabilia. I make sure to grab the golf ball set for my dad. It doesn’t take me long to fill up a bag.

“Let’s get him a couple of shirts,” Whiting says. He smiles at Juan.

“He’s going to want to remember his first time.”

Juan picks out a bright yellow tee shirt with “We Came, We Saw, We Knocked Down His Wall,” above a picture of Noriega’s bombed out mansion. The back has an American flag with “December 1989” under it. Juan holds the shirt out at the shoulders and hands it to me.

“Try on, please.”

I reluctantly pull my head and arms through the shirt, and I put it on just to be polite. I take two steps back and examine my new shirt with heads cocked to the side. Whiting scratches the stubble under his chin and laughs.

“You look like a damn banana.” Juan isn’t quite sure what Whiting says, but he politely smiles anyway. I frown.

“He’ll take it,” Whiting says. I continue looking over the merchandise and notice something different among the piles of cheap junk: a snow globe. My mom loves snow globes.

“Does it even snow in this country?” I ask, holding up the mugsized globe to Whiting.

“No,” he replies, “but that makes for a great paperweight.” The globe is simple inside, consisting of a tan beach with “Panama” written in the fake sand, a couple of generic palm trees, a beach chair, and a large, rectangular Panamanian flag. The snow consists of little square flecks of plastic, which look nothing like snow. I shake up the globe and watch the plastic flakes swirl around the beach as I debate buying it. It’s a cheap snow globe, but I know mom will love anything I get her.

“I’ll take this too.”

We leave and Whiting sniffs out a stall selling beer.

“I haven’t had a drink in two hours,” Whiting says as he approaches the counter. A mustached Panamanian slowly looks up from a tiny TV screen.

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“Dos cervezas, por favor.” Whiting says. He leaves a dollar on the table, and the man plops down two longnecks of Sobrerana. The beers are barely cold, but nothing stays cold in this country for very long.

George Bush is on the TV; his voice is dubbed. He’s probably talking about us in Panama, but then again, maybe he isn’t at all. His voice might as well be muted here.

“Now we’re going to someplace special,” Whiting says. His yellowing teeth gleam. We walk up to a small stall just at the head of a narrow alley. The entire stall seems to cluck with all the white chick-ens stuffed into cages. Whiting smiles and puts down two dollars for a live chicken. The feathers spring off the flapping bird as the owner pulls the creature from the cage. The bits of white lazily float in the air, hanging like the snow globe flakes. I know where we’re heading next. He picks up the chicken by the feet and holds it upside down.

The owner quickly ties a string around the entire width of the bird, presumably to keep it from escaping.

“Do you want a chicken, Betty?” Whiting asks. “I’m buying.” I look at the bird hanging there, which surprisingly starts to calm down. I wonder if the chicken knows what it’s being traded for.

“No thanks,” I say.

“Suit yourself,” he replies, “but I promise you, there’s not a better deal in this city.”

We head down the narrow alleyway until we come to an unmarked doorway. I look up at the massive crisscrossing of clotheslines above; they seem like Tibetan prayer flags gently fluttering over the alley.

Water pools along the ground as the sun barely reaches through the narrow passage. The hidden sprawl is an urban canyon for the darkest part of Panama. I prefer walls of bullet holes to this claustrophobic space.

“You know where we’re going?” I ask.

“Yep,” Whiting replies. “This is it.” He looks up at the second story balcony. Two bored-looking women look down at us from the railing. “They give the best massages here.” He winks and looks towards 93

the entrance.

A young woman, maybe twenty, is leaning against the wall near the door. She’s got a lit cigarette in her hand but it remains unsmoked.

She hangs in the spot, lurched forward, just like the long ash on her cigarette. She has very light skin for a Panamanian woman and her eyes are brilliant, shimmering green. She’s focused on something far away from the alley. I’ve only seen brown eyes on the women here, but hers are a green you can’t forget. Whiting heads toward the woman and door, but turns when he doesn’t see me follow. “Are you coming?” he asks. I’m not ready for what’s behind the door.

“No, I’ll just wait out here for you,” I reply.

“Are you sure?” He smiles. “I could be a while.”

“Yea, I’m sure.”

Whiting heads back towards the door and pauses to look over the young woman. She doesn’t move. He reaches for her chin and gently rubs his thumb over it. She looks up with a weak smile. Whiting stands there for a moment, probably debating whether to pick her or not. I expect him to hand her the chicken right there on the spot, but I can tell she won’t budge for anything less than three chickens. Good for her. Whiting goes on inside.

I’m happy he doesn’t choose her. She’s so beautiful, but I can’t work up the courage to pay her because after six months of working at a basic clinic, I know what an STD can do to you. I only know I don’t want Whiting to have her. I don’t want the girl either; I want to save her. I shift my weight a few times as I lean against the wall across from her.

“Your name?” the woman suddenly asks. I don’t want to tell her my real name.

“I’m just the New Guy.” “Maritza,” she replies without me asking.

“Hello.” I nervously nod.

Maritza smiles at me. It’s just a weak, friendly obligatory smile for the rich American, I’m guessing, but I still look away when my eyes catch hers. Even her smiles probably cost, and I’m not going to pay for love.

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“You do not want in?” Maritza asks. She points to the door, but I just shake my head.

“Not today, thank you,” I smile politely back. I dig my fingers into the mortar; I’m ready to leave. She suddenly points to my feet.

“Nice boots,” she says. I look down at my ugly boots, and then look up at her. She’s smiling at me, this time with a genuine smile. I blush.

I don’t like waiting here, even though Maritza is right there across from me. Panamanians come splashing through the puddles towards me, trying to sell me everything from gum to heroin, and I instinctively rest my hand on my pistol. My finger fidgets with the safety as they speak in a rapid babble. I’m not just protecting myself now, but Maritza, too.

Whiting, thirty minutes later, comes out smiling and without the chicken. He’s whistling Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire.

“You really missed out, Betty. None of my old ladies were there, but now all of their kids run the place! Can you believe that?” He walks up to me and clasps his hand firmly around my shoulder, which grosses me out. “Time to get out of here.”

I look back to Maritza but she’s already staring off into space with another cigarette in hand. Maybe I’ll come see her tomorrow. Whiting grabs the back of my neck as we walk out of the alley.

“One last stop.”

“I’m ready for another drink, maybe a Mai Tai.” I say. The single beer earlier and that alleyway made me thirsty. Whiting points towards the Pacific, which we’re now walking towards.

“We’ll find you a drink there,” he says. When we reach the beach, I find it to be nothing like I imagined. We’re the only ones at the edge of the sand, and we don’t walk any farther. The beach is dead; there’s not even the wail of a single seagull in the air. Before the Marines’ LAV-25 division came rolling up the beach, I’m betting you could hear the waves lapping over the sand, radios filled with warbling sopranos in slow Spanish love songs. Beaches crowded with people under umbrellas, on towels, sunning themselves under sun and sky Palm trees offering the only shade between the sand and highway.

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The air would taste like salt and cinnamon. Churro vendors parked in the sea oats under the palms. The smell would be enough to slow passing cars.

That beach doesn’t exist anymore, maybe it never did. Barbwire is strung through the palm trees and sea oats, forming a crude barrier between the road and beach. On those beautiful palms, metal signs are nailed into the bark warning the locals of the mines planted in the sand. Skull and crossbones offer a warning that can be understood in any language. The skull smiles and stares back with empty eyes. The mine triggers stick up from the sand like sprinkler heads, but they’re not so easy to notice.

On base, I heard a group of Navy Seabee’s talking about how two boys had cross over the barbwire. The boys couldn’t read. One made it back without a leg, but the other ended up a fine, red mist all over the shoreline.

I can’t tell where the boy died. The water must have washed him away.

I see El Chorrillo, the neighborhood we attacked on the first morning of the invasion, from the beach. We winchestered the guns that night, meaning we shot every round we carried on the gunship. Now, the black silhouettes of Apache helicopters patrol the red skyline like vultures. The government housing buildings stand like white dominoes, scarred by black scorch marks. I can smell the wood-framed buildings still burning in the salt air, something like the scent of a fireplace in the dead of winter.

“I envy you,” Whiting suddenly says. He’s looking out over the Pacific. I’m surprised.

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“You have your whole career ahead of you. This is my last deployment before retirement, and this is your first of many. You’ll see and do things no one else can know about.” For a moment, I’m not sure if he’s talking about the hookers or being a gunner.

The sun is dipping into the sea while the sky is on fire with reds and oranges.

“All the time I was stationed here I don’t think I ever stopped to watch a sunset,” Whiting says. I want Whiting to say something profound to me at this very moment, like passing the torch on, but instead 96

he looks down at his watch. “Mission briefing in two hours. We need to get back.” He turns away from the sunset, takes a few steps, and then looks right at me. “When the sun goes down, the fangs come out. We’re werewolves, Betty. Remember that.”

I’m pleasantly surprised to see her guarding the base gate when we show up. It’s hard to make out her features against the murky, gray twilight, but she’s noticeably smaller than her male Security Police counterparts. She’s only a shadow at first until she steps down into the streetlamp light.

“Looks like you guys did a little shopping in town,” she says.

“Among other things,” Whiting smiles. Suddenly, Whiting is my annoying dad teasing me in front of my date. “I had to bring this one home though.” He pats my back. “It’s past his bedtime.” She laughs, but smiles at me so it’s a little better. I cringe when she looks down at my feet.

“Nice boots.”

I force a smile as I hand her my ID. I’m about ready to plant my fist in the back of Whiting’s head. He knows how I feel about her; he doesn’t need to be an ass. That’s all he knows how to be.

I’m the only one left as the crew flies a combat mission tonight. The dorm is so quiet that the florescent bulbs in the hallway sound like bees buzzing. The moonlight comes through the torn parts of the newspaper, falls on the nightstand, and illuminates the hoard of trinkets I bought earlier today. I prop myself up on my elbows and begin to arrange the souvenirs because I just have that kind of time. I place the commemorative Operation Just Cause keychain, shot glass, and painted coconut in a perfectly straight row. I then reach for the snow globe. I turn the globe in the dim, yellow light so the beach is bathed in cool moonlight. It’s the beach I wanted to see today. The plastic snowflakes glow yellow, like embers rising from the sand.

I look up with wide-open eyes as I listen to the hail of explosive shells and gunfire inch closer. The fighting is so near that every explosive concussion reverberates through my stomach like deep base chord, but there’s no order to this music. Suddenly, a deafening 97

explosion rips through my eardrums and I fall from the bed. My face smacks against the concrete floor, and I close my eyes as the pain surges through my cheekbone. The sound of the Vulcan cannons ripping up the sky is close, and the crack of glass and concrete is so loud that the base might be under attack. Screams, shrill and human, cry out from the government housing near the gate. I grab my cheek as I sit up. The newspaper sporadically flashes from the gunfire outside.

My heart beats furiously in my thumb and chest. The fighting is all around and I can only hear it happen: the gunship engines humming, the helicopter thump just above the skyline, the pig-like squeal of Apache rockets leaving the retainer tubes, the fighter jet roaring in the atmosphere high above. The building feels like it will shake apart at any minute. The snowflakes shake with the building. I quickly slide away from the window and press my back against the cinderblock wall. I sit up from the floor and look at the newspaper covering the window. All I have to do is rip it off and see what’s going on outside instead of imagining it; I need to see it for myself. I manage to grab a bottle of Abuelo Rum from underneath my bed. It burns like battery acid but I hope it muffles the screams. I look at that paper for over an hour, finishing off most of the rum before getting up and peeking through a tear. I can’t see anything through the small hole but darkness. I step back and touch the newspaper with the tips of my outstretched fingers, ready to rip it down. My hand trembles, but I can’t bear to do it. I’m not ready for what’s behind the window. I sit back on the ground, grab my bed sheet, and crawl back to the wall.

I curled up under the sheet and lean my head against the wall, away from the window. I shut my eyelids and make them vices that won’t open until morning.

Slivers of light pierce through the tears in the newspaper and fall on my face. I let my eyes open and I see the sun illuminating the newspaper in a bright yellow. I didn’t bother changing last night, not after a night like that. I stand up from my crumpled sheets on the floor. I slip into the yellow tee shirt I bought yesterday and my pair of shower sandals. My arm suddenly shoots away from my body to grab the bed frame. I accidentally kick the rum bottle under my bed as I brace 98

myself. My insides feel like a rag doll, nothing holding me together but stuffing.

The haze of smoke is stagnant in the hootch when I enter, hanging in the humid air ages after the last cigarette was put out the night before. At first, I don’t see anyone, but soon I see one cigarette, a faint orange glow, radiating from the corner shadows.

“They found out where Noriega is holed up last night,” Whiting says. His face is a smoking jack-o’-lantern, glowing eyes and teeth with white-hot smoke billowing from his mouth. “That is, they found out after we blew up the city.”

He doesn’t move when I approach, but his eyes are wide open and fixated on me. The beer in his hand is wrapped in a “World’s Greatest Dad” cozy. There’s a pile of vomit in front of him on the ground.

It doesn’t smell like shit, but it’s black and brown like motor oil and eggs whipped together. It’s fecal vomit, medically known as coffee ground emesis. I’ve only seen it once before, back at my old job at the hospital. It’s not good, but you won’t die from it. Whiting notices my face change when I see the black vomit.

“You’re not squeamish over a little puke, are you, Betty?”

“No,” I reply. I straighten my body up. “You do know that’s shit, right?”

“I’ve seen every kind of puke.” He smiles. “I’m a drunk.” His voice is almost monotone, quieter than I’ve ever heard him before. He just looks at me with those haunting, green eyes. When the morning light hits his face, the eyes glow like a pair of emeralds, something feral within the translucent irises. The shadows accentuate the deep crags of his flesh, the claws of time and age ripping his skin apart, leaving an old, gray man with wet strands of limp hair brushed to the side. He’s probably only forty, but he looks sixty.

“What happened last night,” I ask. “The fight sounded pretty close.”

“We followed a PDF convoy that ambushed an Army blockade in Balboa. We took out two trucks right there, but the rest managed to sneak into the market.” He looks down at his beer, the condensation like sweat on the bottle. “They were the last remnants of Noriega’s 99

personal guard, and JSOC wasn’t going to give up on taking them down.” He looks straight up at me. “We winchestered the guns last night. We didn’t have a single bullet on the bird when we landed. We bombed the hell out of that market.”

The morning sun is hell. I step down from the dorm steps and Panama’s hot breath snaps across my face. Sirens and klaxons blare as vehicles outside the base zip towards emergencies around the city. The government housing just outside the gate has been peppered with artillery fire, large chunks of the building missing from the outer walls.

I need to see it for myself, see what happened last night.

The cars are still on fire in the market and the flames reach up to meet black columns of smoke. The fire trucks seem to avoid the cars, letting the flames die out on their own. The colors from yesterday are missing from the streets. The yellow street signs are cut into metallic wafers, the graffiti is burnt off by incendiary rockets. Chunks of loose concrete lie in the streets like mysterious white tumors growing out of the asphalt. An overturned tricycle sits in the streets, the red paint charred away. There’s no patch of straw nearby.

Somehow the laundry strung above is untouched and quietly waves in the breeze. There’s only a few people left on the streets, some clearing out the bodies while others walk aimlessly about. No one pays attention to me today; there are more important things to do than stare at the American.

I head down the narrow passage to see Maritza. The sliver of space between the buildings couldn’t be touched; I know that from seeing it yesterday. I soon notice the hundreds of bullet holes in the cinderblock though, like a flock of giant black woodpeckers came down and had a feast on the building. The markings look like twenty-millimeter rounds, but I can’t be sure. The wind is sucked out of the alley as I slowly creep forward, not wanting to see the rest of the damage. I hope to see her one last time. I’ll pay her, just to get coffee somewhere and talk about her childhood or what the beach was like before the landmines.

The alley is empty and no one stands by the brothel door. I swallow 100

the spit pooling in my throat. Straw is lying next to the door and I know what it’s covering. I start to bend down to touch the spot, just to see if it’s real, but my knees won’t work. She never moved the entire time. I stand there listening to the sirens and not really sure what to do next. I notice a crumpled blue paper half submerged in a puddle. I flatten the paper down on the cement and realize it’s a PSYOPS flier.

The blue paper has something written in Spanish with a cartoon soldier and Santa Claus handing presents to a generic look-ing Panamanian boy and girl. I look at the picture of the soldier, so lifeless with his cheery smile, outstretched hands, and simple, generic features. The soldier could be anyone, even me. I’m guessing the text reads something like, we’re here to help and bring many gifts to you; we’ve come to give aid, we’ve come to rescue you.

I walk back up to the base gate and hope to see gate guard girl.

She’s the only girl left now, but instead of her, some guy is manning the gate. She’s nowhere to be seen. I hope she’s just running late, but my mind goes into the bunk of some Special Forces grunt that she’s probably shacking up with. Sleeping together, on his gun and rucksack, not even caring about the guys watching from the shadows of their bunks like thin wolves. I take a few steps into Albrook before turning to the guard.

“Where’s the girl that guards with you guys?” I ask.

“Oh, Airman Daughtry?” The guard turns to face me. “She went back home. Her kid’s sick.”

“She’s married?” I’m sure I look surprised.

“Oh yea,” he replies. The gate guard smiles and shakes his head. “It’s a dear shame, isn’t it?” I turn back around, but the guard suddenly stops me. “Hey!” I look over to him. His head is cocked to the side.

“Do you hear that?” he asks.

“No,” I reply and pause. “What is it?”

“Listen.”

I sigh and pause, waiting for sound through the palm trees, the 101

racquetball court, a passed out gunner or two, but I don’t hear anything odd. After a few second I finally hear it: there’s a faint melody riding on the Pacific salt air, a distant reverberation of rock and roll against wailing sirens.

I can barely see the road from the heat comin’ off It’s Van Halen’s Panama. The guard smiles at me.

“I’m guessing the PSYOP guys surrounding the Vatican Embassy started taking requests,” he says. “You know that’s where they found Noriega, hiding with the priests. Rock and roll all day and night to drive a dictator crazy; who would think of that?”

Know what I’m sayin’ “I know,” I say. “Who came up with the idea to use the song to force him out?”

“I heard that the song is about a car,” the gate guard says.

I look back at smoldering market outside the gate. The music is much clearer in my ears.

She’s runnin’, I’m flyin’ “Now it’s about an invasion,” I say.

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wes brockman

Autumn , R egret The leaves have gone, “for good this time,” gone to Argentina or some country that’ll treat them right.

I think they may be serious.

I tried a walk in the park by myself to clear my head, but the trees are everywhere, and they’re as empty as scarecrows.

I can’t pick up a book without finding another of their crushed mementos.

I want to just lie here, listening to the hiss of the needle before the music switches on.

Ah, Leaves, I still remember those first few giddy weeks of Spring: waking up in your bed, twigs in my hair–– Why am I wearing women’s underwear?

The sound of you, stirring in the kitchen, your scent everywhere, and me with my eyes closed, waiting for your return.

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rachael acosta

Prelude to R ejection by Another Nearsig hted Skinny Guy, with Spite It was not because of my fair Barbie eyes, but because you, Andy dear, are so fucking fair. You never show partiality like the English plague, or chicken pox, or God. You screw everyone the same.

I remember the haunting imperialism of a thousand bright pink hickeys itching, itching. To the red racehorses I fell. The same stars that flagged me like capital cities, when I was five and I didn’t have to lie about how I got them.

You mapped my skin. An old pockmark on my cheek, darling, I want the sweet scepter of your jealousy,

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the loose teeth of your lies in my hand. Your hands in pockets cannot be trusted—another dream about the girl I pull down the stairs by her sour yellow hair. Her love, the peroxide to my stinging.

She could not live while I lived, she could not. That I might know how to untrust you again—my wobbly subconscious is having second thoughts.

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end.

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