THE ROUND spring 2016 : issue xiv
Rubbish, Carlos Franco-Ruiz oil on linen | 24” x 36”
LIT ER ARY ART 1 - Gifts from Trees Alex Walsh 2 - You Breathe Softly Erika Lewy 3 - Summer and On C. W. Emerson 7 - August 16th Along the Delaware Erika Lewy 8 - Notes on Wolves and Ruin Christine Hamm 20 - Going North Sarah Cooke 22 - Michigan Margaret (Maggie) Shea 23 - Apocalypto 2.0 Gladys Justin Carr 26 - The Widow in White Maggie Colvett 28 - Letter to the Cnidaria Elissa Blake 30 - A Vulture’s Supper Interrupted Lucia Iglesias 32 - Where did I put that skort Nina Perrotta 34 - Day Five of This Whole Mess Juan Tang Hon 35 - $48.00 Per Pound Juan Tang Hon 36 - Jeremy and June Sarah Van Cleave 43 - The Gray Word Jeremiah Prince 44 - Things that seem unlikely Nina Perrotta
T HE R OUN D 45 - Attention Jeremiah Prince 46 - Poem for Peeling an Orange Taite Puhala 48 - Indian Unknown Emily Sun 60 - The First Real Funeral Emma Crockford 62 - Impacts of Planetary Scale Isabelle Doyle 64 - On the Road Isabelle Doyle 66 - Maude Benjamin Harnett 69 - Dreaming of France #103 Kerry Tepperman Campbell 70 - Dreaming of France #108 Kerry Tepperman Campbell 72 - Daybroken Savvy Myles 75 - Quite a Lot of Being out of Your Mind Lucia Iglesias 77 - Sanctuary Doris Ferleger 78 - Nina Isabelle Doyle 80 - Mother in June Emily Sun 83 - Joe Sarah Cooke 84 - Untitled Simon Perchik 85 - Waiting on the Dock Sarah Cooke
V IS UAL ART cover - Rubbish Carlos Franco-Ruiz 6 - Waiting Carlos Franco-Ruiz 21 - Cecina Riley Ryan-Wood 29 - Re(born) Juan Tang Hon 33 - The Botanist Jungah Lee 42 - Jamaica Van Men Michael Shorris 48 - Indian Unknown Emily Sun
61 - Untitled Victor Alvarez 63 - VCPL Ruby Huh 68 - Orange Wash Erick Guzman 71 - Dancing with the Sun Archana Ravi 73-74 - Slip Stitch (I) & (II) Phoebe Shuman-Goodier 79 - One Look Yixuan Wang 82 - Shadowed Straphanger Michael Shorris
“Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?”
— Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
GIFTS FROM TREES Alex Walsh
Trees, they say, are like angels, but if you’ve ever spoken with bark then you know the story oscillates. Have you ever tried to water one in response to its winter groaning? It has enough room without you and does not need your love, each root carrying a hundred times the blood flow of your heart. Spending time with trees is mostly a one-way conversation in the direction of parasitism. Remember the years you spent watching saplings become queens? They are not beholden to you for your keen observation, their eyes only fixed on you for several months. Trees are not like parents or children, so good luck with your reckonings when only one of you is soft. 1
YOU BREATHE SOFTLY Erika Lewy
while I—in the next bed—paint thick layers of August across the tired ceilings. Our room is smaller than this morning, when I awoke to gnats buzzing above the sweet dairy haze of your ice cream exhales. Salt air wets these walls, wallpaper swells, the room shrinks. I sit up, plant my foot between beds, lean to you. I, a swinging pendulum affixed too tightly to the ground. Draped over you, thick air pushes heavy onto this hot cotton bed.
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SUMMER AND ON C.W. Emerson
Summer, a welter of disappointments— even red ink won’t flow, nothing new, only the absence of necessary things; everything burned away, down to the heart, its parched vessels— but a blessing in water: rivulets, torrents, even tenths of inches on measuring sticks. + Mid-September, and the blood rises— others gather woolens, take on weight; but I thin 3
Summer and On / C.W. Emerson
to the width of a maple leaf, turn umber, burnt-orange, go underground where new life begins. + Then the winter, its white depths— the women sit stiff-backed, watching the lake, waiting for light. Soon the ice slickens and thins; once it breaks, they breathe again. + Sloe-eyed, cautious as hunted game, the wood resurrects at its own pace; we hunger for the greening but can’t force the bud. The loden, soft as buckskin, cleaves one to the many.
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TH E R OUND
Toes and fingers crave the muck below willowed banks; we trawl the new-thawed sand for pebbled memories, spring craw. + Late-spring, its wing tilted toward summer. Scrape the copper from new blood moons. Pull the darkest juice from the bluest berries. Keep an open eye for the sea-green ice; it hides there in the slow-warming water.
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Waiting | Carlos Franco-Ruiz oil on linen | 24” x 36”
AUGUST 16 TH ALONG THE DELAWARE Erika Lewy
Three bruise-dark heads gaze across the far shore. Leftmost watches a stone (which Middle flung) Bleed blue into tide, scrape down the river floor. Righty’s chin rests on his knees. He watches, thinks of more than the thrown rock, wonders next summer will he be among the three bruise-dark heads gazing across the far shore. Bookend friends think fondly of nights of liquor, of small memories, hikes under the fading sun that bleeds blue into tide, scrapes down the river floor. Middle Man, Thrower of Stone, finds sitting here a bore. He stands. “I’m leaving. We’ve been here too long …” three bruise-dark heads gaze across the far shore. On the last real night of summer, we think of how we used to float, Bumping along assuredly, through that scene-swirling fog. Middle man bleeds blue into tide, scrapes down the river floor. Me and Righty, we turn to watch him open his car door, climb in, honk twice, and back out. We look away, stung. Two bruise-dark heads gaze across the far shore, fight the blue bleed into tide, hold fast to this near shore.
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NOTES ON WOLVES AND RUIN Christine Hamm
“Wolf tracks observed from the air by Mr. Butler on March 15 indicated that wolves were traveling from east to west using the road at times and also traveling through the openings in the vegetation. These observations suggest that Ms. Berner and the wolves were moving toward each other from opposite directions prior to the encounter.” —Findings related to the March 2010 fatal wolf attack near Chignik Lake, Alaska (the last fatal wolf attack in the United States) (&) When the small gray wolf sees me at night, she slips her ears back, lowers her chin onto the ground, then gets back up. She does this in a circle around me, a dance. I sit cross-legged in the weedy part of the garden as she kneels and pops. She licks my chin. She jumps up so her forelegs are on my shoulders: face to face. She turns her snout and looks at me with each eye. Her irises are bluish-white with navy edges. She whines and yips. A quick bite, a tiny piece of my eyebrow goes missing. Her breath smells like beer and squirrel. I wipe the blood from my eye and throw her down onto her back, loom above her. She wriggles and I bury my face into the gray and white ruff on her chest—into the fleas and mud. I use my teeth.
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TH E R OUND (&) “The wolf, cruel but cowardly and suspicious, seldom ventures out of the woods except pressed by hunger, but when this becomes extreme, he braves danger: and will attack men, horses, dogs, cattle of all kinds, even the graves of the dead are not proof against his rapacity.” —The New and Complete American Encyclopedia, 1802 (&) Insects outside my bedroom window: slow at night, but never stopping. A shrill wick, wick, wick. Or sick, sick. After sunset, the wolves groan as they settle and scratch. In the morning, the whole back lot filled with droppings, with tufts of long, harsh fur and cracked bird bones. Weeds flourish only along the edges—the rest is dust and pebbles, fractured concrete paving stones from aborted gardens. I wear a harness around my mouth when I sleep. Otherwise, I chew my tongue and my fingers. A mouthful of blood. My husband says he can’t sleep with the noise of my tearing in the dark, the grunting. The first joint on my left pinky, already gone. (&) “The wolf then dashed into a party of ladies and … bit [the] Private in two places … [T]he animal left the marks of his presence in every quarter of the garrison. He moved with great rapidity, snapping at everything within his reach, tearing tents, window curtains, bed clothing, etc.” —Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, 2012 9
Notes on Wolves and Ruin / Christine Hamm
(&) “Are we kissing yet?” I had said. “When is the rain going to let up?” My therapist droned, “There is no room for love in the therapeutic hour.” He had smelled like whiskey when I walked past him into the room. He let the patient before me bring her dog in with her. My new therapist shrieked, “I’m not at your beck and call,” as I ran from the room. Sometimes the doorman didn’t believe I was a patient. I can’t remember how I made it to her office those days. She refused to speak to the doorman about me, refused to let me look at her yellow pages to find a cat food store. She had a red couch like a red tongue. We talked about the couch for a while, how she ordered it from a catalog, how she picked the color. (&) “Congenital porphyria is … characterized by: 1) severe photosensitivity … 2) the urine is often reddish brown 3) skin lesions ulcerate and … attack cartilage and bones 4) hypertrichosis and pigmentation 5) the teeth may be red or reddish-brown.” —A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture by Charlotte F. Otten (&) 10
TH E R OUND
Leaf-shadows shimmer from the windows. The wolves at the pocked walls lean in towards something in the center. I trip over the dark carpet, but it’s not a carpet—it’s water. The wolves meet my eyes as I sink, scent of chlorine/coconut oil/animal urine. And here again, my dad is teaching me what happens when I try to rescue people. The wolves’ ears forward, nostrils stretched and expanded; my father with his hand on the top of my head. “This is what happens if you try to save the drowning,” and I, I, I, I, I am tasting the water as it burns the back of my throat. He is pushing down and I am five, in a navy and yellow striped two-piece. (&) “That a certain woman being in prison on suspicion of witchcraft, pretending to be able to turn herself into a wolf, the magistrate … promised her that she should not be put to death in case she would … thus transform herself, which she readily consented to, accordingly she anointed her head, neck and armpits, immediately upon which she fell into a most profound sleep for three hours, after which she suddenly rose up, declaring that she had been turned into a wolf, and had been at a place some miles distant, and there killed first a sheep and then a cow.” — Nathaniel Crouch, The Kingdom of Darkness, 1688 (&) Ash from a house fire in my hair. Heat rising from the cracks in the earth, gray and no sun. I had a test at the bottom of the garden. The wolves
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Notes on Wolves and Ruin / Christine Hamm
presented me with the corpse of a possum, and the corpse of a street cat. “A or B,” they said. “No, no, no, no, no,” I said. “Well.” I stroked the neck of the cat. He was yellow and white, with blue flesh sagging through his teeth. “This one,” I said. The police were already searching through my house, tossing my books into the air, banging pots and shoes together to see who could make the most noise. That night, we lay on the floor without clothes, and I was twenty years younger. “You ruined me,” I said, and felt the throb with my tongue. “You are the possum,” you whispered. You dissolved into the cracks of the floor, “Not the cat.” (&) “In the Louvre I saw a picture of Genevieve sitting with the wolves and the lambs … I had stopped making images of people for a couple of years; I just wanted to make animals … and then I made all these wolves …” —Interview, Kiki Smith (Art:21) about “Lying with the Wolf ” (&) She wouldn’t let me see you as you were dying. She said you were tired, or you were sleeping, or the doctors were doing tests. Afterwards, she said she was sorry things turned out that way. The passive voice. Like the Watergate Trials. Mistakes were made. I talk to the wolves about you, show them your picture on my phone—the one from the party where you look so ethereal and green, the one where you’re sick, but don’t know it yet. No one knew it yet. The circles under your eyes only added to your underwater charm. 12
TH E R OUND
(&) “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” —The Wolf Man (film) (1941) (&) I tell my therapist how, when I woke up this morning, I thought my husband’s sleeping body curled next to me was a wolf. I stroked its fur under the covers; it moaned and snorted. I tell her that I was not disappointed, not, when I pulled back the sheet and found my husband. My husband sleeps very quietly, his mouth open like a dead man. There is very little fur on his belly. (&) “The incubation period ranges from 2 to 8 weeks … The disease begins with a feeling of anxiety, cephalalgia, and slightly elevated body temperature … The excitation stage that follows is characterized by … enlarged pupils, extreme sensitivity to light and sound, and increased salivation. As the disease progresses … many experience spasms at the mere sight of a liquid, a phenomenon known as hydrophobia.” —Zoonoses and Communicable Diseases Common to Man and Animals: Chlamydioses … by Pedro N. Acha, Boris Szyfres
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Notes on Wolves and Ruin / Christine Hamm
(&) The first time I see a wolf, I am 14 and it is sometime after midnight. I haven’t eaten for two days. I am peering through the wall of windows in my best friend’s living room, trying to see the street. Striped five-fingered leaves crowd the glass. I am naked. My friend fell asleep in the bathroom hours ago. The street is empty then not. Despite the windless night, the trees rustle and crash. I see the others reflected behind me in the window glass. Later, I rinse myself off and pull on my t-shirt and running shorts, curl up on the edge of someone’s bed. The men come in and apologize. They tell me I’m good looking, and I will have to get used to it. In the morning, as I pick through my bowl of chocolate Cheerios with my fingers, my friend will ask if her brother made me come. No matter how much I smooth them down with my palm, my bangs feel extremely gross. My first kiss was years later, after I learned to drive. (&) “The currently available treatment methods include cosmetic procedures (bleaching, trimming, shaving, plucking, waxing, chemical depilatories, and electrosurgical epilation), and hair removal using light sources and lasers.” —American Journal of Clinical Dermatology. 2002;3(9):617-27. “Causes and Management of Hypertrichosis”
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TH E R OUND
(&) “Do you think you should continue?” my therapist asks. I found I can watch her face reflected in the window; I don’t have to twist and peek anymore. She is chewing her lower lip. “How many wolves will fit in your backyard?” she says. I tell her my backyard is about 20 by 20, but the porch gives 8 square feet of extra space. (&) “Until the end of the 17th century, the wolf … threatened populations to the south of the Île-de-France … A spate of attacks on humans: villages were struck by tragic deaths, including children (12 incidents) as ever, but also adolescents (7 girls aged 15 to 19) and, more unusually, adults (1 man and 17 women aged 20 to 60).” —The Last Man-Eating Wolves (1687-1699), no author (&) “Plot comes from motivation,” my friend tells me. The wolves are hungry, but they don’t eat. They feel queasy, uncertain about this meat. The dog food sprawled in concrete bowls is sour, handled. It smells of human sweat and machines. The wolves can’t drink water from buckets— it is spoiled by the leaves in it, by the dust clinging to the surface. Water needs to move to be wet. The brown female has lost weight. The black male with one white eye
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Notes on Wolves and Ruin / Christine Hamm
paws at her, drags her by the scruff of her neck. She sighs and snaps at him. The weather is sour, the moon has fled, the sparrows hover in another backyard. All the leaves are gray. The hair on my neck and shoulders grows dark, denser. I can’t sleep next to my husband—the bedroom’s too hot with just the fan, the comforter is stale, sticky. His skin has started to smell of wood polish. We fight, and I sleep on the bench in the garden. No stars, and smoke from an old engine two doors down. (&) “Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree.” —“The Wolfman, A Case History,” Sigmund Freud, 1942 (&) In the pantry, I am Princess Diana before the crash and the wolf is Bo Peep’s little lamb. We are five inches tall, made of ink-stained porcelain and cotton balls. Leaves with pink flowers like hypodermic needles push in where the wall disappears. Newspapers and mattresses, a snow drift of feathered rot. You would find this funny, me being so small. I hobble towards the dark puddle, now lake, below the empty window frame. The wolf follows. Both of us creak, so hard to move without joints or muscles. I chew at my thumb, and it tastes like rock candy. My legs apart, my delicate ruffle dragging, I shriek: “You haven’t kissed me yet today.” 16
TH E R OUND My voice has not shrunk with the rest of me. Just out of reach, the wolf/ lamb licks his lips nervously and kneels, then trips as he circles. His hooves sound like your electric typewriter; nights I couldn’t sleep for the pain in my cunt. Spirals of rust on the mattress. Violet tatters of wallpaper: absent floorboards. (&) “Wolf-madness, is a disease, in which men run barking and howling about graves and fields in the night, lying hid for the most part of the day, and will not be persuaded both that they are Wolves, or some such beasts.” —A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture by Charlotte F. Otten (&) I’m watching the nature channel. I’m taking off my mask so my skin can breathe. I’ve got a rash high up on my cheeks—I think it’s the rubber or fake fur in the mask. Last night, no one knew me at the party, so they were friendlier. Everyone was drunk, looming and falling, laughing and falling. I was getting a contact high. I haven’t been drunk for ten years, and that last time, I was alone. (&) “No permit from Fish and Game is necessary … A wolf that is annoying, disturbing or persecuting, especially … chasing, driving, flushing, worrying
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Notes on Wolves and Ruin / Christine Hamm
or stalking or lying in wait for, livestock or domestic animals may be disposed of by livestock owners.” —“Wolves in Idaho are no Longer Under the Protection of the Federal Endangered Species Act,” Idaho Fish and Game, 2015 (&) I float above my bed, looking down at my sleeping body. The wolves crowd until there is no carpet left—fur on top of fur. It should be dark, stale and humming from the air conditioner, but I can make out every claw, thread, page. When I turn, I see clouds instead of the cardboard ceiling. The sky glows blue gray. Breeze across my feet, the murmurs of sleeping doves in the fir at the garden’s edge. (&) “The convergence of the running tracks, the depression in the snow, and the presence of blood suggest the deceased was first knocked or fell to the ground at this location and was under attack.” —Findings related to the March 2010 fatal wolf attack near Chignik Lake, Alaska (the last fatal wolf attack in the United States) (&) In this part, I am the wolf and you are the middle-aged woman, your hair scraped into a bun. You watch me, your hand on my neck. I look 18
TH E R OUND ahead of us, feel your heavy touch. You stand over me, but I could easily fit your head into the cavity of my jaws. Your hips are too big in relation to your head—there’s a mismatch, a joke on the part of the creator. We are the same dull brass. You are telling me, I never said I loved you. I cannot move; you will never take your hand from me, never move closer or embrace me.
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GOING NORTH Sarah Cooke
Inspired by Li Tsung-Yuan, “Is There a God?” Just ten minutes north of the house, past the steeple of the Unitarian Universalist Church flipping off the sky, there is a cut in Georgia Avenue that, if taken, bleeds into another road that the government had the patience to name Interstate 95. The incision happened in the 1950s or 60s, or some eventual time long before this time, and it glides easily, quietly, into what you’re on the road for—the numb assurance of Exit 20, Five Miles. Weigh Station, Ten Miles. Your life, illuminated in emerald, paved in asphalt so omniscient—Do you know where your children were last night? I do—some might call it God. A two-for-one deal: get your kicks on Route 66, then confess your way back to the coast, hands clasped at ten and two on the wheel. At night, the walls of the Interstate stare, beige-tongued and horrified, at how you’ve let yourself slip. Cassiopeia prays for you. Inquiring minds want to know: who did you run over to get where you wanted to go?
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Cecina, Riley Ryan-Wood
black and white film photograph | 6” x 4”
MICHIGAN Margaret (Maggie) Shea
White, the fields spread and stretch on, Screens for shadows of wind-swayed wires, Which slender and tall, rise and fall. Across blanched blank pastures Winds whistling wind; Fast, driving past, I feel my mind unfurl —
a wire dance undoes a girl.
All this apparently strange space, fresh air Proves familiar, dull, used-up. Weary is the farmer in the quaint red barn. Here again is the snow. Soon, again, it will go. I have to believe — There are whines of the wind he has not heard, Surely, Even he has not touched Each lonely blade of grass. And surely he has not heard the full-bodied howls Of every deserted field, of all the covered, yellowed grass, Which I, too, will one day weary pass. 22
APOCALYPTO 2.0 Gladys Justin Carr
1. Welcome Prisoners it isn’t the place you thought it would be after the galactic pop piffle, wisp, spit & small fires nominal ice turds what once were cobblestones if this be meltdown where’s the bathtub gin—ask the phantoms eating charred potatoes in the fields of tides (they tell stories), shout down the drowners on Interstate 10 visit the coastlines that hang like shelves of continental drift 2.
row your boats to find missiles & monuments 23
Apocalypto 2.0 / Gladys Justin Carr
but do not go gently down that stream mercury is risen fueling a new sun here comes the avalanche of history dreamers, heroes, scamps, scalawags the carpetbaggers of knock-offs snake oil charmers the trickle-down gang from the tear in God’s eye 3. malachite hearts with your irregularities of pulse and pride listen look mountains are sprouting like broccoli clowns, applaud refugees, ride the Trojan Horse to a replay of Eve’s garden spin the loop called Fifties pop fly out of the field to another screen Brooklyn, say, in the time of our Lord Koufax
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TH E R OUND 4. there they go, the Tribe of Will, the wretched of the Earth, the Poets, note the lovely trajectory of their renewal, how riots are becalmed by their villanelles and a scruple or two Well done, Conscripts, this week’s menu features the passion of the fandango Keep dancing you who have survived
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THE WIDOW IN WHITE Maggie Colvett
So I made a house in the woods of light and water drawn and pressed in a billion panes, in a billion veined translucencies. Lovers, come and go blameless. We are numbered among the rhododendrons and resurrection ferns, bearing in summer the weight of its close-hanging gold, the frost and the draught O my shelter. I could take limbs as arbors for blackberries, clutches for roosting birds. Turkeytail fungus and two-minded lichen, what could they take from me, what could I hazard to take? O sons and daughters, go blameless from me. Spiderlings visit, night-sighted or -scented, crossing my skin with the minute marks I find in the morning. Let them pilot their silks, bright veils for the door, O my seamsters. Why should they know what they want? O surfeit of grace, that I was granted shelter enough for a lifetime, the warmth and the weight
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TH E R OUND I carry now alone. What now can touch me? What now can anything take? O my house in the woods, O lovers, O friends, O to my sons and my daughters. O I say O I inscribe, I encircle. O to it all, O my shelter.
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LETTER TO THE CNIDARIA Elissa Blake
Dear jellyfish: You will survive. Acid and ash will fill the seas and we will all choke and drown. You will drift past our floating, bloated bodies caress us as new toys and then lose interest when a potential lunch darts nearby. We bring plastic chairs, position them in the sand, prop up parasols. Shift hourly and lather up. We watch our past lap at the shore. We’ve done too much evolving. Dear jellyfish, I would not mind it so much if you poisoned me and pulled me down into your native aquarium, your black acid ocean of ash.
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Re(born), Juan Tang Hon illustration | 12” x 15”
A VULTURE’S SUPPER INTERRUPTED Lucia Iglesias
an excerpt from the novella Oneironaut: Dream Sailor Skeletal trees scratched the sky, scraping dark away, exposing yellow day. A palanquin of cloud carried the sun into the sky. She was paler than a bride. Frayed clouds shivered on the horizon. Sun peeped from behind her tattered veil, then hid her face again. A skin of shadows rippled over the bony trees. Crunch of bone. A vulture’s gulp. Gurgling from the ring of saplings on my right. With soft steps, I padded toward the saplings. In Oakhome we didn’t have as many ghosty-stories about vultures as we had for woods-wolves. If you wanted to bully a child into behaving, you threatened her with foxabogs, not birds. Vultures were too lazy to kill you. They preferred food that didn’t bite back. But they could tear your face off as easily as they tore the faces off corpses. Especially if you interrupted them in the middle of their supper. Beak scraping bone. Suck of marrow. A vulture is more alike to man than bird. He has a face like yours, no feathers, all skin. He feels the breeze on his cheeks just as you do. He doesn’t hunt. He shares scavengings, but only with kin. Quiet. The vulture had seen me. Looking up from his interrupted supper, he hissed. Naked and red, the vulture’s face. Clenched with wrinkles, all the way 30
TH E R OUND down the curve of the skull. We squinted at one another. His eyes were shiny as seeds spat from a watermelon. Those face-tearing talons were sunk deep in a mound of ragged meat. He picked at it with a beak the color of baby teeth, his seedy eyes never skipping from my face. Snapped bones stabbed through flesh where he had gone sucking for marrow. A skeleton askew, its internal architecture all unhinged, its meaning deranged. Was it a dapple-stag? No antlers. A moon-lion? No fur. Soft, soft, I circled the vulture’s supper. There, on the other side, a thin arm. A five-fingered hand. Who were you, thin one? The face was a heap of flesh-rags, blood-runny. The bird had hammered open the skull for a suck of brain. The sockets had been plucked of their eyes, such succulent morsels for a vulture. Now the twin hollows swarmed with maggots, swollen pink on tender flesh. The vulture squatted on the splayed ribcage, hammering it open to gulp the heart. I dropped down beside the arm for a closer look. Hissing, the vulture climbed the rungs of the ribcage toward me. I backed away on my knees. Nodding, he took a satisfied slurp from the brain-bowl. When the vulture climbed back down the ribcage for a peck of heart, I looked into the soup of brain-juice and skull-shards. Tendrils of hair tangled in the stringy meat. Hair pale and flossy as dandelion down. Blood flaked from the vulture’s beak as he hissed. His seedy eyes squinted into mine. In a storm of black feathers, he flurried skyward. Wings churning air above me, he blotted the pale sky black. In two blinks, he was gone.
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WHERE DID I PUT THAT SKORT Nina Perrotta
(after Lyn Hejinian) So I ate my favorite canned soup, the kind with the grayish meatballs. Order and progresso. Did you know Harding gambled away White House china. Somehow I gave my Barbies to the half-Nigerian boy next door. Mr. Judd said the computer’s not wrong, you’re wrong. At night when the snow was falling and the sky was dark and quiet, we were the first to leave our footprints at Pequossette Park, running our hands over the glimmering skin of the playground, cracking it, putting it in our mouths. When he still had a rattail, before he went away to summer camp, everyone thought we were twins. Reservoir, boudoir. My mom always insisted on calling it Woe-burn, even though the rest of the world said Woo-burn. Sometimes arrows flew over the fence into the graveyard, but we never saw them land. Coming home to this. For a long time I thought you could find sanctuary in a church. And if you celebrate Christmas, you’re probably Catholic. His coat was a dusty purple, mine a deep blue. Newspapers flapping on the floor. What if a brainstorm hits Braintree. In my dreams, robbers chased us through the house and we ended up trapped in the laundry room, huddled in the hamper. Don’t wake up the wolf. He held us up on the swings till our spines were parallel to the ground, suspended above the chalky pebbles. We didn’t understand leverage at the time. The house burned down and we watched it from across the street in our pajamas.
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The Botanist, Jungah Lee digital | 8.5” x 10”
DAY FIVE OF THIS WHOLE MESS Juan Tang Hon
Last week, the grass started growing. It’s Wednesday, and it still hasn’t stopped. I haven’t tried to do anything about it, but Fabián, my neighbor, has tried mowing his lawn over and over. My other neighbor Saúl even tried setting his grass on fire. Nevertheless, it just keeps growing. When it grows enough, I will step inside and never come back.
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$48.00 PER POUND Juan Tang Hon
For lunch today we had fried daydreams. They were crunchy, burnt on the sides, just how I like them. Andaluz went downstairs today to get them, the freshest she could find. We can afford to eat them when the season changes. The days get longer and the daydreams get cheaper, which is nice because we’ve been having nightmares every night.
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JEREMY AND JUNE Sarah Van Cleave
They were married. People threw rice. People joked and wished and hoped whispers into their ears. Every guest tried to touch a piece of the couple, radiant as superstars, caught effortlessly mid-laugh as if already the subjects of an old still. People continued to shout advice and throw rice until Mr. Jeremy Fisher and Mrs. June Fisher climbed into their car. They drove off into the sunset, or else, they drove off into the glaring afternoon sun towards the closest Holiday Inn. June twisted her body to watch their friends wave after them, pools of dry rice at their feet. She laughed and Jeremy watched, curious of the cause yet wholly satisfied with the result. ‘I just realized how stupid it is to throw rice at weddings,’ she said. ‘We just killed God knows how many birds.’ He questioned her, gently, unaware of the dangerous nature of rice. ‘Birds can’t eat rice. It cooks in their stomachs and expands till they explode. So they go on no-rice diets. No-carb diets. They’re Atkins birds.’ She laughed. Jeremy laughed, too. Because she was funny. But also because she was beautiful and because the light hit the crease above her upper lip just right and because he knew he would never be alone. He laughed at her laughter, the salvation of it all. She, too, felt saved. He made her feel funny and big, center stage and stellar. She watched him watch the road and wondered about their luck. She didn’t believe in luck, but what else could have happened? As they drove on, catching each other stealing glances, June suddenly felt 36
TH E R OUND as if she hardly knew her husband at all; in some moments, they were synchronous strangers and nothing more. Others, they were soul mates, with all the platitudes that brings. Either way, she felt lucky, and held his laughter like a four-leaf clover, a concentration of the best the world has to offer. + That was on Friday. Now, with the weekend behind them, they lay on the freshly cleaned cotton of their Holiday Inn sheets, half-closed eyes on the television. Jeremy fiddled with the remote, trying to choose one of hundreds of special-offer channels, and noticed that June blinked at every channel change. She seemed as if in a trance, not sad, not gone, just somewhere else. June sat up suddenly. ‘Jeremy and June, bored on their honeymoon,’ June rhymed, coquettishly eyeing her husband. An invite and a challenge. ‘Jeremy and June, driving home pretty soon,’ he retorted, also sitting up, taunting. ‘Jeremy and June, gonna to fly to the moon!’ ‘Jeremy and June said ‘please marry me soon!’’ ‘Jeremy and June carried me at noon’ ‘Jeremy and June ferry tea and swoon’ ‘Jeremy and June … parry sea with a spoon—’ June broke down, laughing. ‘That doesn’t even make sense!’ Jeremy laughed, and they fell back down onto the bed, enveloped in their beautiful nonsense. They laid there, full and smiling until they started to drift off to dreamland, or else, to a quiet night’s rest. June’s foot hung off the side
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Jeremy and June / Sarah Van Cleave
of the bed and her big toenail caught the fuzzy blue light of the TV still shining. Jeremy started to drool out of the corner of his mouth onto his pillow. June rolled over. ‘Jeremy Fisher leaned in and kissed her,’ she slurred, but they were both already asleep. + Soon after the honeymoon ended, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher went back to their jobs. When they arrived at their modest house at the end of the day, they checked their telephone messages. Their friends still called to share their wishes and hopes, and sometimes June would call them back to say thank you. If it was a Tuesday, June cleaned out their microwave. If it was a Thursday, Jeremy swept the pine needles off their driveway. If it was a Saturday, they watched whatever movie re-run was on television that night and drank beer. This Saturday, it was West Side Story. June passed her beer can to Jeremy and jumped off their couch to dance with the Sharks and the Jets. Her feet made no sound as they shuffled on their beige carpet, but her singing made up for it. She offered her hand to Jeremy, and when he took hold, she pulled him onto the dance floor. When he stepped towards her, she stepped back and vice versa. She stepped on his feet a few times, but he didn’t mind; instead of kicking her feet off of his, he simply took the opportunity for them to dance in complete tandem. ‘Jeremy Fisher, are you a Shark or a Jet?’ she asked, stomping along with the sung syllables. ‘I’m a Shark,’ he said, baring his teeth. ‘Then I’m a Jet!’ she exclaimed. She extended her arms like wings and circled the living room. 38
TH E R OUND He chased her round and round as she squealed, and scooped her up into his arms. He leaned in and kissed her smile. They didn’t know how long they stayed like that, picturesque. They embraced as if to spite all the other TV couples fighting in the background. They were not them. They were iconic. + On the next Sunday morning, they woke up late. Remembering their lunch commitment with a couple friends, they started off the couch and ran to get ready. They rushed to the car with half-brushed teeth and drove off towards their awaiting feast, or else, their 2-for-$20 lunch special at Applebee’s. When they arrived, their friends were waiting at a central table. Mrs. Brooke had buttoned her cardigan all the way up, and wore a fine gold chain around her wrist. Mr. Brooke had pleated and ironed his khakis. Jeremy and June sat down, spilled their apologies and ordered some grilled chicken dish without looking at the menu. ‘Oh it’s all right,’ Mr. Brooke insisted. ‘We’ve already run our errands for the day, so we’re in no rush.’ June chuckled, embarrassed. ‘Jeremy and June woke up at noon,’ she said with a smile and a wink to Jeremy. Mr. and Mrs. Brooke exchanged looks, disparaging together her use of the third-person. Jeremy caught sight of their looks and receded a little. He loved his wife very much, privately. He could not identify where exactly his shame sprung from. ‘So, June,’ Mrs. Brooke began, ‘how do you like being Mrs. Fisher?’ She raised her eyebrows at June as if this was a juicy, scandalous development.
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Jeremy and June / Sarah Van Cleave
‘It’s nice,’ June replied. She elaborated diplomatically, but the disembodied use of her name frightened her. With every Brookeapproved answer, something inside June squirmed. She looked again at the man across from her and shrunk. Why did he always look down? At the road, at his feet, at his plate … anything so as not to draw attention. When he made himself small, she couldn’t help but feel smaller, too, as a result. How could she not adapt to him? But this unexpected smallness made their future together all the bigger. She suddenly expected many stale years stretched out before her, wondered inarticulately about dirty microwaves and dusty driveways. She wanted to know how many channels their TV would offer, and if her husband would still dance to them. She looked around the restaurant for some reprieve, but found nothing. The picture frames on the walls hung crooked, the silverware had slight rusted spots. A television in the corner showed the football game, but June couldn’t quite make out the players. They were all just fuzzy spots in the distance, color and shape without substance. She could hear buzzing growing more and more prominent and she felt the oppressive heat wafting out of the kitchen, the stench of old fry grease and raw meat and— She snapped out of her imagination to find she was still rambling aloud. Jeremy was laughing but it didn’t feel familiar. She wanted to stand up with Jeremy and leave the restaurant as the Fishers. Eventually they did. + Months passed without consequence, much as June had expected when she still thought of herself as June. The Fishers cleaned and worked, and their conversations stopped rhyming. They watched movies every 40
TH E R OUND night. They tried to upgrade the beer to something mature like wine, but it never stuck. They erased the telephone messages and didn’t wash the sheets enough. One Friday after work, Mrs. Fisher went outside to tend to the garden. She unraveled the hose and stretched it to a patch of dry petunias. She stared at the sky while the hose sputtered. Inside the house, Mr. Fisher watched Mrs. Fisher watch the sky. It was grey, lightly misting, an endless expanse of white noise. Then, in the distance, a flock of birds emerged, flying in perfect formation. So sharp, so synchronized, so solid. They were dancing to the whistle of the wind, or else, migrating south for winter. Without warning, he began to laugh. At first, he didn’t know where exactly his laughter sprung from, but then he caught himself envisioning the birds spontaneously popping like they could in movies. He saw hundreds of feathers drifting down to the ground, encircling his wife in a whimsical whirlwind of color. And when the feathers fell, there stood June, a shining stranger. Jeremy Fisher had sorely missed her. He ran outside. ‘The birds exploded, just like you said.’ She looked at him, speechless. She scanned her husband for any signs of seriousness. ‘Jeremy and June popping birds like balloons,’ he said, stirring. And she laughed, just in time to continue the joke. June looked at Jeremy, and found a flash in his eyes that looked a lot like luck. ‘Jeremy and June, a clown and a loon,’ she retorted. It was the best one-liner she had ever delivered.
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Jamaica Van Men, Michael Shorris photograph | 12” x 8”
The Gray Word Jeremiah Prince
The difference between “weary” and “lazy” is the difference between cream and ivory, or the difference between flushed and freckled pale. I am trying to find the white word. The difference between a yawn and a snore is the difference between deep orange and bottomless purple. I am trying to find the mahogany word for the breaths in between. I am trying to find the difference between quitting and giving up. The difference between sleep and death is the difference between navy blue and jet black, or float and flight. I am trying to find the gray word.
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THINGS THAT SEEM UNLIKELY Nina Perrotta
Getting a job. Looking good in a beret. Meeting Paul McCartney at a beach house like you did that time in a dream. Your hipster friend’s yacht club membership. The inability of everyone you know to spell the word “peek” correctly. Your second cousin’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism, her subsequent move to Tel Aviv, and the marriage and five children that followed. Finding time to read for pleasure. Getting your brother to shut up about that time he did shrooms. The fact that your mother once spoke Portuguese fluently, although she doesn’t remember any of it now. Impressing people at your high school reunion. Finding ripe pomegranates on a tree near the bus stop, deep red seeds nearly bursting through the skin in the midst of city traffic.
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ATTENTION Jeremiah Prince
Probably an investment banker flares his eyes at playing children stepping on one another’s heads, dust rising to their nostrils as their blood runs and runs and their laughs and cries explode. In time, their nerves become flood plains. Cutting-edge satellites can’t see them playing with matches under the big, green canopy. A Boy’s magnifying glass can’t see the eggs and red city underground.
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POEM FOR PEELING AN ORANGE Taite Puhala
There is a special on oranges this week, and we buy a dozen. You explain to me the problem of mapping a sphere onto a flat plane. “You know how Greenland always looks way too big on world maps? It’s like that.” I watch your freshly painted bright blue nails work the pockmarked skin of the fruit. It looks like you are holding a tiny sun in your hands. My fruit is all pith and my pile is scraps; you sigh but do not say anything. Last winter we hung oranges studded with cloves all over our frost-bitten apartment, mixing in cheap string lights for the best holiday we could make. After a week they began to rot and drip their desiccated juices on the carpet we hated anyway, and I watched you dispose of them as gingerly as you peel the fresh ones now. I would watch you do anything.
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TH E R OUND
When you’re not looking (but of course you are) I steal a slice—perfectly formed— from your pile and suck, the acid stinging my chewed lips and bitten nails raw. You look at the mess I have made and you, you who used to tape perfectly unfolded candy wrappers to your notebooks, laugh, your laugh like a bird taking flight, and the leftover Christmas lights flicker in time, and eventually I laugh too, feeling something brighter and more buoyant than sickness or shame, and our laughter shakes the table, and our hands touch.
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INDIAN UNKNOWN Emily Sun
thank you, kristine mar + sierra edd
Indian Unknown / Emily Sun
the worker after a Chinese railroad worker buried in a small Oregon cemetery as an ‘Indian Unknown’ i. on the train we dreamed this was our last stop, the pale yellow sky an endless mirror capable of swallowing us whole. we tread carefully around desert flowers the color of boiled shrimp skins, bend down to breathe them in, detect no smell. you’re thinking about the bar of chocolate you brought for the way back, but it’s long melted by now. you make me promise to leave your eyes open when you die, so that you can still find your way around. ii. how steady the hand that drives an iron
spine into the color gold. how lonely a rail stripped from the roar of passengers hungering for lands more swollen with sunshine, for fuller bellies, for contracts they can burn. it’s in our blood, the threat of return. can the metal sleep at night, with nothing but wind moving over it, left to bear the knees of the world? iii. like the rocks are kissing him asleep, he’s buried under a shale overhang, christened indian unknown, one name given for thousands stolen. my eyes chase the wind down to where the blue mountains thin to creases, to threads, to glimmers, to white hairs faint enough to hide between our mother’s wilted breasts. you cannot have the same memory between your teeth, but your
Indian Unknown / Emily Sun
mind is working away like the heat at our damp clothes, like we were taught to do with bones to get to the golden marrow. is there a difference between distance and infinite proximity? when the rain comes, there will be nothing to hold the water back.
Indian Unknown / Emily Sun
THE FIRST REAL FUNERAL Emma Crockford
You grieved for the skin we found stuck to the sidewalk, not knowing the garden snakes were only molting, like boys running towards the water, their elbows popping out of T-shirt sleeves. At nine and a half, in dress-up clothes on basement steps, we held mass like Priests. Wearing Father’s ties, you wrote eulogies for everything that tasted like tragedy. We learned to mourn on Saturday mornings, in bare feet with dirty hands, planting tulip bulbs upside down in Mother’s garden. I am buttoning my coat to my chin, standing in the kitchen, feeling your silence on my skin. I am at the corner of your grief, and you are somewhere in the middle of its country, in the middle of his absence, small again. At night, I wake up and I am close enough for a minute to hear the boys, sixteen and calling to the shore. The night they raced to the water. I dig my feet into the cold sand and watch them spitting salt water from their cheeks. Children with sunburns peeling down their backs, fresh skin, scrubbed raw with salt water, underneath.
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Untitled, Victor Alvarez
photograph | 22” x 14.5”
IMPACTS OF PLANETARY SCALE Isabelle Doyle
The first is caking my fingernails with soap, pinking my skin raw as honey. The red door of your house clicking closed, snow burning in my hair, my heart sticky as a peach pit; My heart cracking like a dinosaur’s egg, the cooking pot of the body, blood soup, a Wednesday thin as a hairpin; Next, an old star circled by disks of dust, giving off light patterns muddied by matter; I saw impossible things: in January, the footprints of birds in deep snow, your chest rising and falling, your skin becoming a rhythm. I saw the goosebumps through the second-floor window, your insides shaken out like linen; Last, I can picture you with your arms outstretched, a pterodactyl in vertical flight, teeth bared, spinning, eyes black and shining, skin a kind of singing 62
VCPL, Ruby Huh painting | 30” x 42”
ON THE ROAD Isabelle Doyle
When we get our periods, what comes out are moths black as plums. They blot out the skyscrapers like watercolor droppers, eat all the fruits and vegetables, even overripe tomatoes and brown buttery avocados, slick pink strawberries and husky rutabagas. They fall like storms into the fields, tinny screeches, greedy: suck sap from the trees, crunch shiny cedar seeds. There are no fertilizers sweet enough to sicken them, no matches crisp enough to make them tender, soft as tinder, no kerosene. We have to keep changing cities, bumping in covered wagons across cobblestones overrun with moss, cream linen covers colored pink in the deep sun. Otherwise the moths start devouring the harvests. We hide paper money in bonnets, tuck coins into berthas, travel past beargardens and wiry spiderwebs hanging like canopies from magnolia trees. The moon, a cheesecake glinting in our bright teeth. We eat salted bread, suck stone flowers. We keep our spines straight as cherry trees. We wear white socks and watch the rain wash away the tracks of the wolves who hunt the moths we expel from us, the tracks of the dogs who sing and foam in the wake of our weightless bodies. We travel light. When we open our mouths, there are toads crouching on our tongues, pronouns falling like feathers from our lips. We drink stone water from stone pitchers with stone sips.
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TH E R OUND We’re all silver, sleeping in the street together. We are pulled by mules with baby’s breath. When we stop to rest, the fog crawls down. The moths fan out and scatter behind us, billowing like black rose petals, like an evening gown. We skin the pigs. There will never be enough stillness to sustain us. We will never reach our final destination. We will crawl on inelegant knees into an iron-free twilight, until we have released our final animals, until our hips exhale light, until we have shed enough stillness for our skins to quit quivering. For us to reach our bodies’ perfect moment. For us to feel right.
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MAUDE Benjamin Harnett
Maude taught that if you snapped a fist of milkweed stalks they’d bleed white, and, if you crushed the leather pods in your palm, silk crawled living from the tight slits of your hand. She taught, at five, that life’s unexpected, odd. Mom left me there, with this girl, this stranger, with jet-black hair. Maude led out, at once, to a hill out back,
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TH E R OUND
that winked with monarchs, like flecks of tiger seen through trees, and in that morning light we gathered two arms full of leaves— on which, she claimed, we could, like the black-and-yellow caterpillars, feed. Turning back with our sheaves, my shoulders twinged, as though preparing themselves for an unwrapping of secret things.
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Orange Wash, Erick Guzman watercolor on inkjet print | 22” x 22”
DREAMING OF FRANCE #103 Kerry Tepperman Campbell
She knows that anyone else seeing this lavender field in Provence would be haunted by the color of the flowers, purple really, more saturated than anything she would think of as lavender, becoming lavender only after a long time hung upside down in a dark, cool place to dry. But instead of the color, she is haunted by the shape of the bushes, each bush a rounded dome, the arch of an eyebrow now three-dimensional. This curved line reinvents itself in her imagination. She sees fields of halfmoons, half-melons, half-peaches, half-plums, purple again across the earth’s own arching surface.
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DREAMING OF FRANCE #108 Kerry Tepperman Campbell
She remembers pedaling, following her brother over the freshly paved roads of suburbia. When it was too hot to ride bikes, they’d spread a puzzle out between them on his bedroom floor. Their grandmother got them started with the big puzzles—not puzzles of ponies or dogs but of Degas’ dancers. The one where the white-haired ballet master stands to the side, hands resting on his shoulder-high staff. The ballerinas scattered around him stretch or rest or chew their nails. Their mothers wait at the far end of the room. That big puzzle, that was the one where her brother taught her how to find the corners first, then the edges, and fill in the center last. He said, “With this many pieces, you have to have a system.” He was right about that. The system was efficient. But after a few days of working on that puzzle, her sweaty legs every now and then sticking to the hardwood floor, she began to long for a different puzzle, one with a blank box top, no picture to convey the whole. She wanted the piece at the exact center of that puzzle to come in a little cellophane pouch. She wanted to start with that piece and build from the center out.
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Dancing with the Sun, Archana Ravi acrylic on paper | 9” x 11”
DAYBROKEN Savvy Myles
The night coughed up a couple stars and wheezed a wet, icy breeze. No one wanted to catch the chill and so they locked their doors and blew out all the candles. The wood beneath the family’s heels groans from its burden quietly, as to not disrupt the conversation around the empty dinner table. No bread, no water. Cooling black smoke rips itself away from the dying wick, releasing its spirit into the silent air. Its charred scent isn’t strong enough to fill the room, and it’s gone after a breath. The night rests like the family, tossing and turning constellations into being, until they breach and slip back under the earth. The night rubs its eyes until they’re pink. Until they’re so pink they well up and transform into a blue sky.
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Slip Stitch (I), Phoebe Shuman-Goodier
plexiglass, thread, a sewing needle, human hair | 3-dimensional installation
Slip Stitch (II), Phoebe Shuman-Goodier
plexiglass, thread, a sewing needle, human hair | 3-dimensional installation
QUITE A LOT OF BEING OUT OF YOUR MIND Lucia Iglesias
A translation of Dickinson’s “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” Quite a lot of being out of your mind verges on the closest there is to god’s mode of perception So it is for one particular ocular orb peculiarly capable of unraveling the threads of seeming Quite a lot of being in your mind verges on going most vigorously out of your mind The faction with more hands for now and ever pulls all our strings Your head nods that means you live at ease in your immaculate mind
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Quite a Lot of Being out of Your Mind / Lucia Iglesias
But you who dance from threads they can’t catch you are a shortcut to shipwreck, arson, and anthrax Consequently they keep you a wolf in fetters
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SANCTUARY Doris Ferleger
I seat myself at the altar beside the bowl and mallet, I seat myself on the black cushion raised above the rest, meant for the master. I ring the bowl. No one is there to bow or whisper. I listen to its bright tone fade. I listen to it stop. Still, I listen for you. Time is long inside the bowl of death. The sanctuary is filled with floor-to-ceiling windows. Wide-ringed trees, spindly saplings and a square of skylight hint of royal-blue tips of raven-black butterflies. The windows in the sanctuary remind me of the hospital window you looked out, how you said you saw ladders running into and out of endless light. Did you mean the harbor lights? I wanted you to fully kiss me good-bye. Instead, I felt only your breath released from the cage of your teeth. As if a kiss would end what had already ended. And when I touched your lips I knew all the words you had ever spoken were floating like green glass bottles along another shoreline. You remain my awakening bell, my night whisperer. I don’t like to leave you alone in the house though you are not here. Tell me where you are. 77
NINA Isabelle Doyle
There isn’t a secret to evening, but there are secrets to Nina: birch bark and glass pitchers, big cats in almond trees, heads swimming with moths, stone bodies wrapped in pond muck and scales, the fingers to touch with, the long, gleaming hair. There are secrets to thin stillnesses that sputter and tear, spines splintering like staircases, animals whispering songs into the earth. There are secrets to Nina and Nina’s worth: bright-furred caterpillars, perfect illnesses, strange organisms. Space junk colliding in dim channels between solar systems, light fixtures in chest cavities, the way ribs wrap like bright arms around bodies. There are secrets to backseats Nina sleeps in, brittle-fingered and big-eyed, knuckles with rings to prickle and touch, stars hanging in the streets. There are secrets to white teeth, secrets to going slowly, secrets to a slow rush, to Nina coming undone and becoming too much. There are secrets to Nina’s cheeks in the dark air, to the spiders in the soup, black and bare, to twisted ankles and iron thighs, soup cans and stuttering. There are secrets to Nina going on and on, secrets to Nina getting lost and staying gone. There are secrets to Nina: a name that keeps changing. A silence that breaks, and never stops breaking.
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One Look, Yixuan Wang digital | 4.25” x 5.5”
MOTHER IN JUNE Emily Sun
mornings starting to turn to water she tells us open all the windows just after the gnats & mosquitoes retire from their shifts just before the blue fades to acetone clear we do not remember the night before we do not think she was there we do not remember anything but music & her hand kissing the door her skin grows pearls of sweat we watch her peel off her soft caramel sweater grapefruit yellow dress green taffy bra underwear a small bird limp clipped of wings on the ground we move the couch by the widest window she lies there limbs glistening fan churning milky light floods her 80
TH E R OUND brown skin she sleeps all day & doesn’t wake until the day dries dark
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Shadowed Straphanger, Michael Shorris photograph | 7” x 5”
JOE Sarah Cooke
Inspired by Matthew Vollmer’s Inscriptions for Headstones And here lies the man with one lung, a point of diseased anatomy that he never much liked (it was a fact not a fate) but remained his nonetheless, “lung cancer” thriving on things like him, Joe, abandoned as a baby and a toddler and a child, each orphaning never not once a verb but always only ever a noun, the effect of abandonment being, at best, a type of emotional tinnitus, a sharp ringing once heard always heard; of course it was ordinary, he believed, being the one left behind, which is to say, the one who was a few shades shy of necessary, something he learned when he was signing up to volunteer for the Navy—it was sometime after 1940, there was a war, and he wanted to help, without knowing how—and had to cheat his way through the exam, asking the man in front of him what was the answer to the color test, and it was because of the examiner’s urgent bladder (he had left to use the bathroom) that Joe found himself, a few months later, perched in the crow’s nest of a ship, colorblind and shot through with saturated happiness, telling others down below what he was seeing, which was maybe how he came, more than a few decades later, to define a war as something that gets salt in your lungs, if you keep your mouth open long enough to welcome the storm.
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UNTITLED Simon Perchik
Barely marble yet these tents are pulled along the ground by rope that needs more rope not yet some high-wire act for acrobats just learning to wave while the crowd below listens for rain already overgrown with mold and longing, kept wet by your step by step holding on to the corners as if they no longer want to be unfolded and you could stop walking.
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WAITING ON THE DOCK Sarah Cooke
Inspired by Samuel Beckett, “Afar a Bird� Bare ocean, we have not sailed it yet, I refuse to learn, waiting on the edge of the dock, between the tide and the other boats, on the rotten wood, soft swaying sighs, no peace, lingering always and never, every tenth sigh we sway together, the bearded man tells us to keep waiting, I refuse to learn when I am five, the birds aim their mouths at our ears, still the wood is rotten, we inhale the salt in the air, still is rotting, I refuse to learn when I am of age, of age of course we are of an age, the bearded man tucks a smile in his pocket, the hands of the ocean clap together, somewhere a boat roars, every tenth sigh we sway together, no pieces left, the wood is rotten and is rotting, still we stay, I am of age not from it, I insist on this separation, the bearded man says time, on the dock the birds laugh a prayer to their god, we are four of us, the roles we play slump lead into our hearts, hard to hear the bearded man nods, the little crags and crannies, I refuse to learn out of fear, the water will not hurt you, the chlorine is for hygiene, laughter echoes uneasily against the walls we build, here it is quiet but not peaceful, the water churns in anger, we are waiting as father and mother and sister and daughter, as love turns against itself so do the birds, I refuse to learn how to survive, the bearded man turns our eyes towards the arrival, it is beautiful, full of our boots, full of time we have nothing left to say, still and always moving the wood rots, is past and is present, conjugate the time we let ourselves lose and love, here it is, the life jackets mark us as dying flames, because we are safe we are together, because we have not sailed it yet, be the cause says the bearded man be the cause, sway together in softness where still. 85
C o n t r ibutor s Victor Alvarez was born in Ecuador and has lived in Los Angeles, California for most of his life. At 14, he discovered what would become his life passion—the combat sport, Muay Thai. Since then, Victor has dedicated his free time to training, fighting, and has travelled to Thailand several times to immerse himself in the sport and culture. During his gap year before attending Brown University, Victor discovered an interest in photography and has since begun taking photos depicting the art of Muay Thai, both in and outside the ring. Elissa Blake is a senior at University Laboratory High School in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, where she has earned 180% of the required English credits. She has published several pieces in Moledro Magazine, as well as in the school’s literary magazine, Unique. She has also become an expert at justifying “solitary writing” as an extracurricular on college applications, and next year, she will be attending Washington University in St. Louis. Kerry Tepperman Campbell has lived most of her life in San Francisco, except for one glamorous year in Dublin. She attended Washington University and completed the coursework for an MA in poetics at New College. Now a full-time writer, she spent many years as an educator. Her first book will be published by Blue Light Press in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cloudbank, American Mustard, and Paterson Literary Review. Gladys Justin Carr is a former Nicholson Trustee Fellow at Smith College, University Fellow at Cornell, and publishing executive with McGraw-Hill and HarperCollins book publishers. Gladys’s work is widely published in literary magazines and journals throughout the United States and Canada. In the last seven years, Gladys has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.
C o n t r i butor s Maggie Colvett has had poems appear in Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Radar Poetry, among other places. She and her dog divide their time between Athens, Georgia and Piney Flats, Tennessee, where Maggie’s family keeps many dozens of chickens. Sarah Cooke is an undergraduate at Brown University, where she studies English Literature with a focus on nonfiction writing. Her nonfiction and poetry has appeared in The Vassar Review, The Round, and Clerestory, and her plays have received staged readings at The Wilbury Theatre Group (RI) and 59E59 Theaters in NYC. Emma Crockford is currently a sophomore at Rising Tide Charter School in Massachusetts, where she lives on a farm with her family and their many goats. In 2015, she was chosen to attend Grub Street’s Young Adult Writer’s Fellowship. Emma is the founder and editor of her school newspaper. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in The Round, Gravel, Liminality, The Noisy Island, Parallax, and Grub Street’s Fellowship Anthology. Her poems have won honorable mention and semi-finalist awards in two national high school poetry competitions. Currently, Emma’s only plan for the future is to live somewhere she can walk to the library all year round. Isabelle Doyle is a freshman studying writing at Brown University. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines such as Cargoes, Triangle, The Blue Pencil Online, Thin Noon, and Clerestory. She is a human teenage girl and a nice witch. C.W. Emerson is a poet and teacher in Los Angeles. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Atlanta Review, Poetry East, Mantis, G.W. Review and others.
C o n t r i butor s Doris Ferleger is the winner of the New Letters Poetry Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non Fiction Prize, among others. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, Big Silences in a Year of Rain, As the Moon Has Breath, When You Become Snow and Leavened. Ferleger’s work has been published in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, L.A. Review, and South Carolina Review. She holds an MFA in poetry and a Ph.D. in psychology and maintains a mindfulness based therapy practice in Wyncote, PA. Carlos Franco-Ruiz (°1987, Managua, Nicaragua) is an artist who mainly works with painting. In 1988, as the civil war was winding down his parents immigrated to Miami, FL. Carlos was raised in Miami, in the neighborhood of Little Havana. At the age of 14, he was accepted into the Commercial Art Magnet Program at South Miami Senior High School in 2002. After graduating, he would continue to pursue art as a career, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Miami in 2011. In 2013, he moved to Uruguay and continues to follow his passion for painting where he currently creates new work for a group show at the Tile Museum in Montevideo, Uruguay. He currently lives and works in Sauce, Uruguay. Erick Guzman is a student at Brown University. Christine Hamm has a PhD in American Poetics, and is a former poetry editor for Ping*Pong. Her work has been published in Orbis, Nat Brut, BODY, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, Dark Sky, and many others. She has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches English at Pace. Echo Park, her third book of poems, came out from Blazevox in the fall of 2011.The New Orleans Review published Christine’s latest chapbook, A is for Absence, in the fall of 2014, and nominated her work for a Pushcart. Benjamin Harnett was born 1981 in Cooperstown, NY, and works
C o n t r i b u tor s as a digital engineer for The New York Times. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Toni and their pets. He holds an MA in Classics from Columbia University. His poems, and short stories have appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Pithead Chapel, and Brooklyn Quarterly, but his best work can be found on Twitter @benharnett. He is a devotee of the Oxford comma. Juan Tang Hon draws from little experiences in his life, little moments that serve as a form of self-reflection, but he hopes he can keep it light-hearted. Keep it together, Juan. Ruby Huh was born in San Jose, California. She grew up in Singapore and spent most of her life in Korea before coming to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She is exploring various media such as ceramics and painting while concentrating on art history. Lucia Iglesias wants to be a Wordwitch when she grows up. She will live in a treehouse in the enchanted forest with cats named Flinch and Marlinspike. Jungah Lee is a freshman at Brown who likes money and food. Erika Lewy is a junior French and Arabic major at the University of North Carolina. She’s an occasional reporter for Philadelphia magazine, and a lifelong lover of New Jersey wilderness, and unexpected beauty. Savvy Myles is a junior at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Including several literary journal publishings, in 2015, she also published her first novel in a series, The Thirteenth Hour, ranking in the top 900 on Amazon’s top selling Young Adult/Science Fiction list. She aspires to be a bestselling author who can fulfill her passion of being a full-time writer.
C o n t r i butor s Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, including free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. Nina Perrotta is a writer and translator from Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently a senior at Brown University, where she studies Comparative Literature with a focus in Literary Translation. In her free time, she enjoys learning languages and practicing martial arts. Jeremiah Prince is a poetry enthusiast and Public Policy junior at Brown University. His other activities include writing for OBSIDIAN Magazine and recording a literature and music show for Brown Student Radio called 10,000 Words. Taite Puhala is a sophomore at Brown University. She intends to concentrate in Literary Arts and is bad at writing interesting bios. Archana Ravi is a sophomore at Greenwood High School, Bangalore, India. She uses acrylic paint and charcoal pencils on paper or canvas as her medium. The subject of her work draws inspiration from South Indian culture, which holds a special place in her heart. The painting featured in this issue is titled “Dancing with the sun” and depicts a Bharatanatyam dancer. Bharatanatyam is a dance form that expresses stories through facial expressions and numerous hand movements. Being a dancer as well, Archana wishes to tell her story through the hand movements used to make this painting. Riley Ryan-Wood is in her third year at Brown University. Her practice strives to investigate and intervene in the problematic and often
C o n t r i b u tor s sexist history of photography. Her work has been shown in Italy, Greece, and the USA. Margaret (Maggie) Shea is ​studying English and Philosophy at Brown University. Michael Shorris is a student at Brown University. Phoebe Shuman-Goodier is a multi-media artist based in Providence, Rhode Island. She is currently a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) earning a BFA in photography. She was the 2015 recipient of the John A. Chironna Scholarship and the Paul Krot Memorial Scholarship. Her practice employs a combination of photographic, sculpture, and video techniques to examine unique relationships between people, the spaces they inhabit, and the objects that manifest their reality. Emily Sun is a sophomore at Brown University. Sarah Van Cleave is a student at Brown University. Alex Walsh is a vegan who writes poetry about oranges. Yixuan Wang is a sophomore studying Health & Human Bio and (hopefully) Visual Art. Her hobbies include doodling, drinking tea, and petting cats at every available opportunity.
Ed i to r i a l S ta ff
MANAGING EDITORS Hanna Kostamaa Paige Morris
ASSOCIATE EDITORS Sarah Cooke Sally Hosokawa Anna Hundert
EDITORIAL STAFF Victor Bramble Isabelle Doyle Lucia Iglesias Jane Kim Alexander Larned Mari LeGagnoux Emily Martland Jeremiah Prince Margaret (Maggie) Shea
GUEST STAFF Amberly Lerner
We are grateful to Brown Graphic Services and the Undergraduate Finance Board at Brown University for their help and support.
N o t e f ro m the Editor s The Round is a literary and visual arts magazine based at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Our name is adopted from the musical “round,� a composition in which multiple voices form an overlapping conversation. Like past issues, this issue of The Round brings together writing and art from across the country and around the globe. We are so excited to present Issue XIV, and to open up another conversation with the stories contained in this issue. The Round welcomes submissions in all genres and media, and we publish students and professionals. Send your work, comments, or questions to: theroundmagazine@gmail.com View our submission guidelines, past issues of the magazine, and more information about us at: students.brown.edu/theroundmagazine As always, thank you for picking up The Round. We hope you enjoy the issue. Sincerely, The Editors