The Round, Fall 2014: Issue XI by The Round

The Round Fa l l

2014:

ISSUE

Hand Mess, Olivia Watson Acrylic, Paper Collage

Tab l e o f Lit e rary Ar t

Dear Applicant by Nikki Roulo .................................................. 1 The Last Tour at Franklin Museum by Jen Frantz ......................... 3 Silence, Writing, and Repair of the World by Donna Baier Stein .... 6 Confessions of Malta by Emily Zhang ........................................ 13 Unfinished Murder Ballads by Darren C. Demaree .................... 14 Humidity by Marc Tretin .......................................................... 18 A Mother Knows Her Last Child Will Be Taken by Marc Tretin .... 19 Main Street Is Not on Main Street Anymore by Marc Tretin ......... 20 Sweatpants and Pea Coat Like a Rich Mothafucka by Will Berry ........................................................................... 21 The Ritualistic Me by Andy Li ................................................... 28 1959 With My Grandmother by Lee Varon ................................ 30 We Laid in Those Same Fields by Andrew Alexander Mobbs ....... 32 Ready to Cross by Jed Myers ....................................................... 35 Confessions of Malta by Emily Zhang ........................................ 37 Piano Lessons by Tobenna Nwosu ............................................. 39 Rolling Stones in Tel Aviv by Cara Dorris ................................... 54

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Confessions of Malta by Emily Zhang ........................................ 58 Fire Island Affair by Saudamini Siegrist .................................... 59 Lips of the Inanimate by Liv Lansdale ........................................ 60 Parasitic by Sally Hosokawa ...................................................... 62 A Comedy of Errors by Zachary Smolar ..................................... 66 Virgen by Andrew Alexander Mobbs ......................................... 79 Habitat by Evan Silver .............................................................. 81 Tea Ceremony by Saudamini Siegrist .......................................... 82 What a Find by Victor Bramble ................................................ 85 Mermen by Na誰ma Msechu ...................................................... 86 Confessions of Malta by Emily Zhang ........................................ 92 The Ami Expert by Quinn Bornstein ......................................... 93 Juggling Childhood by Quinn Bornstein .................................. 102 Confessions of Malta by Emily Zhang ....................................... 105 [Gershwin] by Matthew D. Lee ............................................... 106 The Visits by Amberly Lerner ................................................... 108

Tab le o f Vi sual Art

Metamorphic State by Dora Mugerwa ..................................... 4-5 Green Untitled by Olivia Watson ............................................. 12 Strangefruit by Yelitsa Jean-Charles .................................... 16-17 Melt (Lungs) by Mack Budd .................................................... 25 Liquid Light Show by Mack Budd ........................................... 26 Crystallization by Mack Budd ................................................. 27 Glowing With Life by Mandi Cai ............................................. 31 Smoky Mountains by Sohum Chokshi ..................................... 34 Paris by Sohum Chokshi ......................................................... 38 First Contact by Ernesto Renda ............................................... 57 Genesis IV by Rosaline Zhang .................................................. 64 Genesis I by Rosaline Zhang .................................................... 65 El Teatro Real by Quinn Bornstein .......................................... 78 Meshes and Mirrors by Olivia Watson ...................................... 80 Untitled by Rosaline Zhang .................................................... 84 Knitting by Sohum Chokshi ................................................... 91 Re-Orienting by Hilary Wang ................................................ 104 Threshold Composition No. 20 by Emmy Mikelson ................ 107

“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it.”

—Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Nikki Roulo

Dear Applicant We have reviewed your portfolio. We peeled the skin from your statements and stripped the moth wings of self, leaving your fear. The desk rocks you to sleep, and your pen slices off the days, determining that our program. Icicles are hourglasses, dripping each second that you window-watch for the red flag falling, so few manuscripts… so many fine submissions— for red axe slamming into plastic. We regret we have to disappoint many bright talented students. Clock clicks its fingers when you sleep—Our decision is meant to negate neither your talent or the church sign blinking at night through foreign blinds. Ice storm beats the roof with a whisper glazing deck slats you skate across, 1

Dear A p p li c an t , N ikki R oul o

and glues mailbox shut in the programâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history Please accept this envelope in class-exam quiet. Envelope shivers; your thumb pries its mouth open. This was among wind plucks chords on needles of winter flayed trees along the path you tread. Most impressive group of applicants and also the most numerous.

Jen Frantz

The Last Tour at Franklin Museum A broken monocle a child’s shoe covered in dirt a three of hearts ripped at the corners. All inside a glass case with a placard reading “found in the attic.” We are the last tour group in a house filled with the silence of misplaced footsteps. The tour guide shows us furniture we can’t sit on and plastic food for teething tourists “it’s all period-appropriate, even the wallpaper” The last exhibit is a stain on the floor not a wine stain not Koolaid not raspberry jam nor beet juice a bloodstain on the floorboards and we are the last group to huddle around and gaze into the puddle of AB positive as if looking for a dried reflection of the surgeon and the saw the amputated limb the bullet holes the tour guide almost told the four of us in the last tour group that it was really fruit punch her manager spilled on accident. Almost.

Metamorphic State, Dora Mugerwa 3D Sculpture, plaster, fabric, wire, charcoal powder

Donna Baier Stein

Silence, Writing, and Repair of the World “Silence is like fertile soil, which, as it were, awaits our creative act, our seed.” -Arvo Pärt Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is talking about how to approach silence in music, but this rich and worthwhile state is vital to all creative artists and certainly to us as writers. While our words, spoken or written, disturb the pristine circumstance of silence, they also arrive from it. Our challenge is that today’s social culture abhors a vacuum and does everything it can to fill our lives with various strains of verbal noise. Journalist and author Nick Bilton reported on a 2009 University of California at San Diego study that revealed, in Bilton’s words, “the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day. (Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is only 460,000 words long.)”1 According to Bilton’s book I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works, the average American takes in thirty-six million words a year, and the amount of information we’re subjected to is growing at about 6 percent a year.2 1 Nick Bilton, “The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day.” The New York Times. December 9, 2009. 2 Stephen Northcutt, “Book Review: I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works, by Nick Bilton.” <http://www.sans.edu/research/book-reviews/ article/bilton-future-book>

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Whew. That’s an astonishing number of words we’re exposed to … through TV, radio, and telephone; websites, e-books, print; movies, music, games. Even if we don’t actually read all those words in a day, our brain has to notice their presence. Their noise. In fact, I’ve been inundated by words just researching this essay. A Google search of “studies on silence” brought up 54,800,000 results. These included a music video clip called “Field Studies About Silence” from NOTsoNOISY Guillaume Reymond, an interview with the author of “John Cage and the Poetics of Silence,” and an exhibit on silence at the Berkeley Art Museum. Before I buried myself in research and my reader in quotes and statistics, I decided to pause, get quiet, and think what I wanted to say. For me as a writer, silence is essential, and the source of all that streams from me. I recently participated in a Washington, D.C., panel at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival on “Silence as an Agent of Change.” Four women poets—Alison Hicks, Therése Halscheid, Kim Roberts, and I—spoke about the pivotal and fertile point of silence for writers. Yes, there was irony in a panel of four talking heads daring to approach this subject. Nevertheless, our goal was to highlight the importance of finding and appreciating silence in nature, in writing, in life. And our hope was that some of what we shared would prompt others to cultivate their own sanctuaries of silence at the end of that festival. Shortly before attending Split This Rock, I had been at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Seattle, where I had found myself periodically retreating to my hotel room.

Silence, Writing, and Repair, Donna Baier Stein

Why? Because I needed silence. As a writer, as an introvert, I thrive on silence. I must have it. When I was young, I considered this a psychological flaw. Everyone around me was talking, not seeming to need to periodically retreat to renew. Today, I honor, understand, and yes, cultivate this need. I meditate. I live alone with a non-barking Boston terrier. And finally, at my current crone stage of life, I have enough of the silent cocoon around me to write. I believe that as a creative practice, writing, for most of us, must stem from silence. Adam Jaworski, in his book The Power of Silence, asks, “Is silence just the absence of noise, or is there something deeper that defines silence—something we’d do well to understand, contemplate and invite into our lives?”3 I don’t think this is a new question, but it may well be an increasingly pressing one as we wade through the onslaught of words contemporary culture thrusts upon us. Silent retreats have become an increasingly popular travel destination for people inundated with Facebook posts, Tweets, emails, and more.4 Whether a Jesuit-run center in Massachusetts or a Zen monastery in California, a mindfulness class at Omega Institute or a yogic breathing and asana getaway at Kripalu, such retreats can be welcome times of rejuvenation, of re-creation. Just eating a meal or taking a walk in silence can prime the creative pump. Even historically, before humans were inundated by thousands of words a day, there was a deep need and respect 3 Adam Jaworski, The Power of Silence. Sage Publications, 1992. p.115. 4 Michelle, Tuzee, “Silent Retreats Becoming Huge Travel Trend.” ABC7 News. February 2013.

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for silence-the pagan rite of silent supper. The vow of silence practiced by the Vestal Virgins, Benedictine monks, and the disciples of Pythagoras. And hesychasm, the ancient Desert Fathers’ and Mothers’ practices of silence and contemplative prayer. Abba Poemen, an early Desert Father from the fifth century AD, taught his disciples, “If you are silent, you will have peace wherever you live.”5 You will also move into a deep creative practice that is an extraordinary tool, an impetus to express the self. In fact, your true voice as an artist can only emerge through silence. I think it’s easy to see that this is a basic human need. And yet, our culture avoids it assiduously. Why? Because silence can be scary. Poet David Whyte writes: Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities. Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond this well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable reality about to break in upon our lives. Silence does not end skepticism but makes it irrelevant. Belief or unbelief or any previously rehearsed story meets the wind in the trees, the distant horn in the busy harbor, or the watching eye and listening ear of a loved one.6 “Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world,” Whyte writes … … a presence which seems to demand a moving internal symmetry to its own powers. To become deeply silent is 5 “Saint Poemen,” Saints.SQPN.com. July 1, 2014. 6 David Whyte, The Readers’ Circle Essay Series. 2013.

Silence, Writing, and Repair, Donna Baier Stein

not to become still, but to become tidal and seasonal, a coming and going that has its own inimitable, essential character, a story not fully told, like the background of the sea, or the rain falling or the river going on, out of sight, out of our lives; reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence and absolute giving away, something only fleetingly possible, but invitational to a different form of discipline, a full bodily appearance and disappearance, a brave giving in and giving up; another identity than the one always ready for the easy, unearned answer.7 Let me repeat that one sentence: “Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world.” What Whyte is hinting at here is that sinking into silence may apply, in spiritual terms, to the way the world was/is created. I am by no means an expert on Jewish mysticism, but in September 2001, I began studying a practice called Integrated Kabbalistic Healing with a group called A Society of Souls. Here’s a quick glimpse at what kabbalah says about the act of creation. The Hebrew word ayin can be translated as “nothingness.” According to Judaism, before the universe was created, there was only ayin. Ayin is related to ein sof, or the light of infinity. When God, or divine presence, or whatever we personally want to call this unnamable concept, created the world, He/She/It made yesh, or some thing. God “emptied” himself, herself, or itself, by contracting its infinite light to form a space for creation. This idea of creation from nothing is mirrored in Christianity, Islam, Egyptian mythology, and many other traditions. Many of these creation myths then go a step forward and say that the first yesh, or thing, created from nothing was “the word.” 7 Ibid.

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In Judaism, the Hebrew letters themselves have special powers; there is a divine mystery behind the drawing and placement of each letter. Even the meaning of the letters in the Hebrew word for silence is potent: Shin = “Divine Power” Tav = “Perfection” Yud = “Metaphysical Creation” Kaf = “Holiness” Heh = “The Holy Spirit” In John, we read, “In the beginning was the Word.” And the first sermon in Islam begins with the word “Recite!” Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi said, “The Koran swears by the pen and what it writes. Such a sermon and message cannot be in conflict with awareness, knowledge, wisdom, freedom of opinion and expression and cultural pluralism.”8 Those who practice Siddha Yoga worship matrika, the sacred power behind every sound and every letter—a power we simply can’t reach without silence. So silence, at its deepest meaning in many cultures, begins and ends with a concept of the divine or sacred, however we personally recognize that in our personal traditions. By transforming this sacred nothingness first through our silence, and then through our writing, we participate in the re-creation of the world. 8 Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture. December 10, 2003.

Green Untitled, Olivia Watson acrylic painting

Emily Zhang

Confessions of Malta In a night with the same weight of fog a man goes fishing. He draws down the gossamer string now and thinks of his friend who is not away fighting in a war. The sky is quiet and the man is a part of the sky. The world is an eyeball. The night is the inside and the man is trying to see something. The line tugs at the manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grip and he looks down before pulling the weight up, before rolling the film reel. The fish peers at the man with substantial presence. It must be wondering what a man is. The fisherman slips it silently back into the sea and the god has missed his chance. Far from the man, soldiers march usefully in dark fields.

Darren C. Demaree

Unfinished Murder Ballads THE FACE AMIDST THE FLOWERS It didn’t blink. That was the point of the garden, to hide the toil and the lack of toil among great color. It is beauty that led us away from the sting or peck of the protectorate of the garden. When these small patches were wild, there was nothing we needed to do with the bodies that fell on the edge of our land. I suppose we still don’t know what to do with our sunken flesh … SECRET THING Early chant, fire and the white stem left by fire, the whole of the thing reclines so much that it would take the beast of the celestial to accommodate it. That turning has us transfixed on a picture that was never bigger than the first words and the first fire …

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THE LONELY NICHE Let’s flood the rain with our good shoulder rotation; take the jury of the sky off guard, and maybe this one time remove a myth from the grips of the bully. We don’t really care about the stars. Do we care about human life being profound enough to rely on questions without answers? No. We revolve around the burial of each self we conjure … DEFT TOUCH, POOR STRANGER He knew the man’s flanks would simply rust if he didn’t apply such tremendous pressure to both sides of his neck. Sometimes the cradling of the body is an awful thing …

Strangefruit (A Part of a Series), Yelitsa Jean-Charles graphite illustrations

Marc Tretin

Humidity This heat brought armadillos to Arkansas and Spring was early coming down the mountain. The kudzu got so thick we used a chainsaw to clear it from the stones around the cistern. We mucked the bottom of the catfish ponds, but that didn’t stop the stink of their die-off. We pulled more dead fish out than lily fronds or willow shoots that every which-way threw off roots that embraced each other and smelled of old meat. Even the barnyard cats kittened sooner. The rains, each noon, come at us in black sheets. Whether it’s a least-heat or gibbous moon, this moon’s shimmery over the river basin. This heat just breathes itself into a person.

Marc Tretin

A Mother Knows Her Last Child Will Be Taken “The two autistic ones, I let the state take but please, not this one, not Tara, my last one. I’ve been clean for Tara three months. At any rate Child Welfare didn’t do what it should’ve done like take my urines, get me Medicaid, and talk to my pastor, who’d say I’m different from a year ago. I used powder, not crack cocaine, and now I’m through with that and kicked it on my own: though I know I need a program letter. The caseworker testified there’s no imminent risk to Tara. I would get her back, if you were really on my side. Yes, I told the judge that foster care turns good kids crazy. I couldn’t watch my kids become a mess. I had no money for the bus to their address.”

Marc Tretin

Main Street Is Not on Main Street Anymore Seeing South Dakota from my car window, the sky is drowning the telephone lines, even barns and cattle are caught in its undertow of a horizon that washes past this stop sign. There’s no drilling here, but smudges fill the air. A flatness is always about to fall away. Al’s Hardware store and Frieda’s HairCare are boarded up. A package store sells alcohol to men who wipe their hands on their jeans before taking the brown bag and locking it in their truck. The sky is always to their backs. It’s about to pour or pouring. The winds do not blow, but suck the color from their eyes, leaving a thousand-yard stare. Watch their hands. So uncomfortable, so hard.

Will Berry

Sweatpants and Pea Coat Like a Rich Mothafucka That single line ran through my head as I donned said clothing. I had caught my body shivering at a toilet bowl no more than twenty minutes earlier. That gave me about three hours and forty minutes until I could begin to hydrate without upsetting my intestines. The clothes were warm, but I was cold, but it was hot. Early summer-what some would call spring if all the blossoms hadn’t died in the mid-April frost. All my summer clothes, neon shorts and such, were in the wash awaiting laundry soap. 7AM Sunday morning. All the stores were closed. Why was I even up? I got no sleep, yet deep sleep, after creeping in at 3:30, and letting her creep out at 4:30-Shit. There was a her-The CVS at the corner would open in 42 minutes. So I wandered in the meantime, pondering verses: Catch me striding, my swag as smooth as my Lambo riding I liked rap. Can’t you tell? Any beat that made it to the top 40 was soon in my iPod. Exclusive. There was no other philosophy more prevalent in prep school: elitism, material status symbols, drugs, sex, authoritative figures always at your tail. Everything a preppy boy needs to feel like he’s a man in the real world. Perhaps I’m too cynical. In those halcyon years, I reveled in these mainstream jams, but I always recited verses of my favorite artist: 21

Sweatp an t s an d Pe a C oat , W i l l Be r r y

myself. Smacking hands on the gunwale / Go and grab my funnel Dafuq did that mean? I didn’t care to imagine. That line was a vestige of my days rowing crew. Oh, I remember. Connecticut boy, Connecticut school, Connecticut crew. My flow was impeccable. These days-be it only a few years later-I liked to recite the verse in my head, just so I could utter dafuq, my new favorite interrogative. No more W’s: who, what, where, why. The H in How was no longer the odd one out. U before Q now existed. Dafuq? Dafuq did I have? I didn’t laugh this time as I questioned myself. A German exchange student once taught me about Existentialism. The subject is usually depressing, but it excited her. I don’t blame her. It made my life happier because I could blame philosophy instead of myself. My brain’s full of incisions from former decisions My head’s gonna split like nuclear fission She said her name was Ronnie D-, or was that who introduced me? This is the kind of joke your friend invents as he drops some drip to you, his other hand always down his basketball shorts. Never mind my acceptance and rebuttal. CENSOR BLOCK CENSOR BLOCK Blame it on depression A German exchange student once invited me to Oktoberfest in Munich, but said she couldn’t go because of a funeral. I don’t

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blame her. At funerals the booze is free. something, something, something …Recompense I’m like a mint without copper I just don’t make cents She told me to meet her at Clayton’s. Clay. Of course it was the only café in the area to have it’s own pottery. Mugs, tea plates, glazed in azure, yellow. From dust to childhood to stone-faced adults to dust. From clay to wheel to kiln to clay. Broken shards of pottery are cast into a terracotta ditch. Is the clay bed mortified? Do its bowels wrench like a human’s when a pre-rigor-mortis corpse is cast aside him? Or her. And there she entered. I needn’t have stood. My peripheries caught her red top step in from the summer blaze. She soon sat across from me and I was spared from a readjustment of head crystals. She spoke to me, and I listened. Her explanations of the night and her feelings touched me, but it was nothing I considered atypical-“You were racist to my nipples.” Until then. “Excuse me?” I gazed up, dazed up by her shift in tone. Perhaps I seemed like a space cadet. I was hoping she’d elaborate, but she confronted me with widened, expectant sclera. “I believe my phraseology was ‘your nipples are beautifully dark.’” Her left eyebrow popped up. It was cute, but it conveyed disapproval. My fingers caressed the rim of my sunglasses in lieu of

Sweatp an t s an d Pe a C oat , W i l l Be r r y

directly massaging my temple. GOD. Just another 30 minutes. I could drink water again. “Is there anything else?” I hated how my syntax indicated impatience. But she received it unoffended, being the more eager one to leave. She stood with a soft smile. “You have my number.” And she exited into the retina-burning sunlight. I didn’t have her number. A German exchange student once told me her word for bright is hell. I don’t blame her.

Melt (Lungs), Mack Budd Glass, Projection

Liquid Light Show, Mack Budd Glass, Projection, Dance

Crystallize, Mack Budd Cellophane Glass, projection, Instruments

Andy Li

The Ritualistic Me Dear New DiaryThe Ritualistic Me, I’ve discovered, has symmetrical wounds, strictly along a vertical axis. Cut like an overachieving sixthgrader’s dissection at my flattened, probably-crooked nose. The roasted risen hills on the floors of my left and right ears. Puscalloused yellow-red chocolate. A vise that circulates around my head, punctulating my liquid temples. Unfortunately, I don’t understand any of the phrases that my mother jostles softly at me because my ears are always half-bleeding, no education can beget even an embryonic brain within me. When I eat cold things, my teeth unravel into shaky oatmeal. I don’t know the memories of my golden. But I like the new cavernous. I do like the pithy details imprinted on undulating walls. Corn rubbing against my tophead, my irises pile on the above hook of my lids, veins sink underneath catching. And in a hugging ecstasy, I feel my melted circulation. My casts chasten like malted mirth. I look at my mother, and she doesn’t acknowledge my new cavernous. I smile, I wrinkle my edges of face, and I bite into the beefy broccoli chunk. She doesn’t know what it’s like to lick like a goosebumped milkjug. That’s when every emotion trusses along gert, like a true new cavernous. I’m doing my chores when I start to feel the cast of the mop, my new cavernous is electric beside my knucklewrinkles, and I 28

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bring it down first fast then slow … and I galvanize the fraught air afront my perforated pelvis. My boy stares straight into me, doorlike. I understand. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know that he will fall down into the carpet at waistlength and furtively cover his juices, the moment I open my mouth at three millimeters a February. But I have my beliefs made in turn at systematic, corklike. At the same time, his numbers pull me down and I drag the rifts in carpet in front of me, I take a hold like grapplehook, and my swampy core carries over into my upperthroat. Gorge as but tempered aggression, pink heaviness, huffing onto the interstices of my lungbranches. I hiss like it’s chapstick, a softing new waters. And whitehot is the veined skin of cottonfilled leaves within my bones, my fingers wrestle the cordial thickness. Bleached in wavelength, my mother stares at me and gasps, but discordantly chiseled. She is at an alarming new distance in the grey. And my boy walks undisintegrated at the grain, sipping resolute. With pigtail fingers he runs along a new jawline of mine. Draped under the sinking, I’ve tripped into a caramel mattress, the velvet alongside is an indigo rustling, my quarry is succulently burdened. And I rest, islandlike, knuckles licking red, and my oblique muscles grapevine my steadying pulse.

Lee Varon

1959 With My Grandmother A black woman sits across from us at the Petersburg station. You know the stationmaster smoking behind his ticket window. You take out your worn pocketbook unwind the rubber band count money for our tickets. We wait. You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know the woman across from us. You lean over: Honey every day I thank God I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t born a colored person. I try to fold my ticket into a schoolyard fortune-teller to lean against the blond oak bench become invisible.

Glowing with Life, Mandi Cai Soft Pastel

Andrew Alexander Mobbs

We Laid in Those Same Fields There was something about the position of the sun, like someone tossed it skyward and it got stuck in the oak branches, dripped fire on our clothes below, like someone had that kind of power. Did you have that kind of power? Your daddy bush-hogging in the distance, we laid in those same fields, learned to make small talk, to feign interest in the shapes of clouds and how to flick invisible mosquitoes off of each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hands. I had so many questions then, so I asked one: why do you pluck the honeysuckle petals and arrange them on your dress but never taste them? Later on, we laughed as the tractor stalled and your daddy cursed in the heat. That is when I wanted you mostâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;when everything was torrid, when calm and chaos existed together in those few quiet seconds. There was something about how we laid there, the history of the grass 32

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underneath your slender back. How people whose names we would never know probably bled on it, cut it down and watched it grow back again like nothing ever happened.

Smoky Mountains, Sohum Chokshi Oil on Canvas

Jed Myers

Ready to Cross This day, heart of the summer, under the heavens’ intense blue lamp, seems we’re held in the immense hand of a glaring god—he must be sorting our fates by this incandescence. Where there’s wind off the water we’re blessed. Where the hot air’s still, we’re damned. Some are thirsty and some are quenched. My daughter and I, on the lakeshore, stand in a maple’s shade that’s kept the grass green under our feet. There are blackberry vines—she reaches between thorns for the small clumps already shining dark. Some are in desert camps. There are screams in the air as kids leap into the water and thrash for joy, there by the bridge, and a young couple I think might never be parted by either’s will on a wide low ledge, under which ducks and gulls enter and leave

Ready t o C r oss, J e d M y e r s

the shadows. The ripples of breeze and boat wakes fray those shadows’ edges. My child shows me a scratch on her wrist. And a berry— how tart, how sweet will it be— rests on her palm’s tender lined flesh, apart from its source, ready to cross between fortunate lips, into the past.

Emily Zhang

Confessions of Malta One day people built archways under the Kingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s castle to hang bells. One day people invented bells and it was like tossing a ball of string down a dark hill. The King enjoyed hearing his bells repeat in the neighboring mountains because this was a port town and its jaw jutted out asymmetrically into the sea. The people listened for the bells each day and they stopped moving to allow the sounds to respond properly in their heads and the archways hung over them like bumpers. One day everything but time stopped moving. One day people invented time.

Paris, Sohum Chokshi Oil on Canvas

Tobenna Nwosu

Piano Lessons The music teacher arrived a week after Evan ascended into heaven. She wore damp extensions, Salvation Army clothes, said her name was Hadiza, and twirled in a corner of the grand hall upstairs, halting at an angle that attached her shadow to her frayed toenails. Emmanuelle asked whether she was hungry or thirsty. “Oh, no,” she said. She smiled. “The truth about sound is that it travels up. This fact may seem irrelevant, until you consider that what doesn’t go up goes down. Nothing hovers anymore.” A latticed beam sloshed to the piano while she played a bit of Chopin at noon. “Eight keys form an octave,” she said. “The first key in the normal octave is C. The last key is also C. The black keys are sharp in ascent and flat in descent.” Her fingers leaped with desperation across two octaves. Her pupils were streaked. “Get it?” Emmanuelle said, “I do.” “Great.” She relaxed. “Your turn. Be free with the keys.” Emmanuelle played a haphazard tune. The deeper keys drowned the light and softened the silence, and she kept to them. “Not bad,” said Hadiza, when she had done playing. “Not bad at all.” “I’m a decent baker, too,” Emmanuelle said. Hadiza made a face, of polite surprise. “What do you bake?” “Scones. Cookies.” Emmanuelle shrugged. “Stuff.” “You know what else gets baked?” 39

Pi an o L e s s on s , To be n n a Nw osu

“What?” “Human beings.” Hadiza pinched a fluty key, let it linger. +++ Emmanuelle refused to discuss Evan’s ascension until the sixth day, when the sky, a pierced hammock, slipped at one end and unleashed an unworldly torrent. The smashing and tumbling outside precluded their meddling at the piano, so that they rested, Hadiza on the bench, Emmanuelle on the floor, facing each other, sipping tea, their legs crossed. Hadiza wore the same Salvation Army clothes. “How did it happen?” she said. “How did what happen?” “Evan.” Emmanuelle lowered her cup. Her mother had warned her against retelling the episode, but the static outside, the panes shifting with rainwater, offered escape that she knew would vanish when the storm ceased. She brushed hair from her temples and cleared her throat. “He was ill.” “What with?” “We tried to, but could not find it out. Mom claimed he had chicken pox; ulcers covered his arms. A light bit through his chest, where his heart should have been.” “If he had the ulcers in a dream,” said Hadiza, “he would have woken to great riches.” “One night he shuffled to the backyard. We rushed downstairs after him. We grappled one another at the threshold when a wind seized him and whirled him to the clouds.” “How did his leaving make you feel?”

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“Not sad, I can tell you.” Emmanuelle laughed. “Why not?” She wanted to say that he had touched her. They were stepsiblings, after all. He had lumbered into her room and she had awaited him, her neck hot, on the mattress. She retrieved her cup and sipped, remembered the striated curve of his erection; his pale steps; his discarded clothes that seemed to slink, whispering, through the dark, and how nobody had suspected them or asked questions except the one time her mother entered the kitchen while he snuggled her neck and, piercing him with her gaze, said she had not rinsed the cups properly. In the third month of their liaison she became pregnant, had worn the secret at her breast, on a silk ribbon that she removed when she lost the fetus, so small she could not differentiate it from the other clots in the sink. If it were larger, a breathing child, and had died, she would have buried it to its shoulders and left its head for the collector. After her loss she spread the ribbon on the clothesline and monitored its flapping over grass strummed by the brittle guava leaves that reproduced his smell. “He had blonde lashes,” she said. “He liked rap music.” The rain faltered and a pin drop silence filled the room. “What time is it?” Hadiza said. Emmanuelle looked up. “It’s four o’ clock, an hour past your usual time of exit. You had better get going.” “You’ve told me a story,” Hadiza said. “Let me tell you mine.” “What’s it about?” “The resurrection of the Three Wise Poets.” +++

Pi an o L e s s on s , To be n n a Nw osu

The tallest poet was called Quaqim, which in the Cantra dialect meant “Giant.” The children loved him for having proved that tall men could be artists. The shortest poet they called Philliam, for he was ordinary. The poet who stood between these two had no name, though the democrats had christened him Amad because he had the limbs of a leopard and a tail that trembled over the poets’ melodies. The poets had not performed in over a decade before their appearance at the garden. People had spread rumors about how Gannardez, the demon guardian of the arts, had captured their voices and condemned them to sounding worse than broken dulcimers. But that night, as they spun and gestured and wailed, the clouds reddened and a million spirits rose from the nearby sea. Many listeners floated with their coherent voices, and the poets were cautioned not to end their performances abruptly lest a man of the one thousand suspended should flail to the sand. While in that trance some of the men brightened and passed into the next world. Gayel, the dictator responsible for the extermination of over six million Catholics, reached paradise during the concert. His seamless passage caused a stir among the crowds; the women in the crowd bowed to the poets and worshipped them, saying, “The only god is that of music, and I will have him bless me with a child.” The nameless poet summoned an aria about a British soldier stationed in Nepal in the 1800s. The soldier loved a Brahman girl but race wars, and the insoluble edicts of colonialism, forbade their union. Distracted by such ill-fate, he entered the path of a drifting train. The girl spent the rest of her life flourishing black veils, roaming the streets while other creatures slept or copulated.

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The poet’s voice rose into a scale so haunting—of the kind that suspended water in dreams—that the soil cracked and the stars snapped from their moorings. No one had told Hadiza that the stars were more than tiny pockets in the sky, that they were gaseous rocks much older than the earth. By the time the stars had done falling, all three poets were dead and so was Hadiza’s mother. They never found the body. +++ A jackdaw tottered on the branch beside the window. Its feathers were sparse, almost metallic. They watched its ungainly progress down the branch. Emmanuelle drained her cup of tea. “I should go.” Hadiza lunged from the bench. “Study the pentatonic scale before our next lesson.” Before she shut the door she jerked around, squinting, and asked whether Evan had been a History buff. Emmanuelle frowned. “Nothing major. The Easter Rebellion. The Kashmir Crisis. He rooted for the lesser causes.” His eyes had sparked, and his lips brightened, when he spoke of them. Hadiza said, “My husband was something of an activist.” “What was his name?” “Mark al-Hamid.” “The Tunisian rebel?” Hadiza’s gaze softened. “I like that you say ‘rebel’ like it’s a rotten thing to be. I thought it was.” “I heard he died in incarceration.” “The police tortured him.” “I’m sorry.” “Don’t be. He deserved it.” +++

Pi an o L e s s on s , To be n n a Nw osu

They had to fling the windows open on the following day, to abate the heat indoors. They were fanning themselves with folded newspapers and brandishing chill water that Hadiza said they really must not drink, but that they did drink, when a grasshopper flashed onto the pate of the piano and spread its suede wings. “Will you look at that?” Hadiza cooed. She cradled the pliant grasshopper and placed it on her brown palm. She had removed the soggy extensions and worn a cross patterned scarf that Emmanuelle imagined dangled from the tourist stalls in Bangkok or Karachi. “I used to have a brother,” she said. “Sahir. He was more beautiful than our mother. His extreme beauty led him to sin.” Emmanuelle smiled. “What sin did he commit?” “He loved another man, a much older man.” Hadiza released the grasshopper. “I caught them once.” In the glade behind her father’s bungalow, amid bursts of tulips and persimmons. The intensity of their movements spurred midges into flight. The man pulled out and his semen spattered Sahir’s thighs. Their groans, from the distance at which she’d paled, were muted, a quivering along the leaves, and she had had to clench her teeth to hold her heart in. She spun, her feet cracking twigs, and stumbled home and told her father. Confusion seized her when he blamed Sahir for the intercourse and struck at him with a crusted machete that split his kneecap, when Sahir slung a backpack over his shoulder and never returned. Her quest for him brought her to Susah, with its smoke-blue air and its pleated minarets. She traced Abdul, the fucker, to a sloped tenement, boats taut with maize and sardines colliding behind it, greasy egrets basking on its charred lawns. An old lady guided her in, explaining that

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Abdul required bed rest. Poised at the core of the windowless living room, she pointed to a rumpled heap and said, “There’s your lecher.” “Where’s Sahir?” Hadiza loosened her scarf and gazed into the dim, made out a prayer mat and a pair of plastic kettles arranged by size on a rack shortened with its decay. She swung on Abdul. “Where’s my brother?” He coughed and muttered that he did not know. Her voice wobbled before she was able to ask him what was meant by his ignorance. When it steadied, she asked about the illness that had reduced him to a sackcloth. He curled into a sob. “Blood disease,” said the old lady. “He has two months.” She showed Hadiza the sores, the fungi ridden chinks in his teeth and said that he liked to drink milk and looked at Hadiza’s purse. Hadiza dropped some change and took the ferry to Tunis. At night, while echoes of the city’s wheezing ruffled the sea, her forehead settled on the fogged glass and she flashed on Sahir’s face, on his irises that became a confused brown when he entered sunlight. For once in seven years she was sure she’d erred in relating the episode to her father. “The house is steeped in a summery glow on my arrival. I meet my father in the library and tell him that the city has taken Sahir. He flips a cigarette, inhales the fumes and says Sahir, Sahir who? And he laughs.” “What did you do?” She had stood, her chest cold, her heels caked with dust, on the hearth that smelled of centuries-old manuscripts. They had studied each other before she flounced to the other side of the desk, gripped his collar, and slammed the ashtray in his face. He

Pi an o L e s s on s , To be n n a Nw osu

rumbled from his seat, bracing her for support, and shuffled to his room, the sanctity of which no one but he and her mother had breached. There he plunged into an eternal sleep. Emmanuelle shifted. Hadiza nodded. “Just like that.” After his burial she went into the sacred room, folded the curtains, and wavered at the center of his sooty treasures: spavined brass lanterns and wood sculpting from Hyderabad; novels by Khalil Gibran and Naguib Mahfouz, their spines pristine; golf balls and stacked copies of TIME; cassettes embossed with the name Sayyid Darwish. She extracted her mother’s talcum powder and jade bracelets. Her fingers nudged a glossy ridge that she flipped—a Polaroid of the baby Sahir, floppy in her father’s embrace. At the oddest moments, she wondered where he might be. She thought she saw him in the construction sites, in the horde of polio-whittled beggars that swamped traffic during her trips from the derelict primary school she supervised before her marriage. When she read about the young men who’d been tied to a Caterpillar and dragged along tar until their joints came off because they were found fondling each other, her pelvis contracted and she covered her ears and struggled not to refute the obituary. “Which key,” said Emmanuelle, “expresses your sense of loss best?” Hadiza set her glass of water aside and prodded G sharp in the second octave. “Always,” she said. She was shivering. +++ A snail inched along the ledge. Evening had dropped in

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acrylic strokes. Alternate winds melded in the backyard, where a fence of junipers heaved. “Where did you learn to play the piano so well?” “In Fiji. I met my husband in Fiji.” “Mm-hmm.” Emmanuelle wriggled a brow. “Swept you right off your feet, didn’t he?” Hadiza gave her saucer eyes. “I wouldn’t put it that way.” Their courtship began at a grocery store in Suva. He’d upset her cart and stooped to retrieve the wares. She waved: “No, no.” and stooped, too, so that their heads bumped. His smile knotted a vein over her heart. “I’m Mark.” He lacked a middle finger. She noticed its absence while they glided to the counter. “The Carthage Festival holds about now.” He said, “Honest to God, home is like nowhere else.” She almost said that if they were back home they would not be having a conversation, that she would be seated in a dingy kitchen, rinsing herbs, that her casual attire and uncovered hair tested the conventions her father had upheld. They tracked across greenery and she contained a familiar rage with the men that jogged, chest bare, across the pitch. He paused at the beginning of a dozen riotous temples. “Surely,” he said, “two Tunisians meeting in Fiji is more than coincidence.” He uncapped a pack of cigarettes and she withdrew a stick. He lit it for her; she watched him light it and guessed at how many young Indian women lining the shadier streets accompanied him home each night. Most men who left were escapists, and would return shrouded in white linen, dead. “Thank you for assuming I smoked,” she said, and he bowed and said, “You’re welcome. We should go out sometime.” She leaned her head back and laughed, but by the next night he’d rowed her through waves of pleasure

Pi an o L e s s on s , To be n n a Nw osu

that rendered her catatonic, and when she said she hated children and suspected all religions he knelt on the mattress and asked her to marry him. The real trouble did not surface until they had moved into a bungalow near the University of the South Pacific and he began to stain their walls with the theories of his western education. “What Tunisians need,” he would mutter of an evening, “is Ben Ali’s severed head.” “How can you know what Tunisians need?” she would whisper, and he would spit and snarl. “The African press has shut its eyes. May democracy devour us.” She’d perceived democracy to be gentle, formless, like a breeze or a bout of cough. His bold speeches roused in her a trace of betrayal and the urge to guard her interests, a duty she must have botched since his extremism seeped into the press and tore him from her willing embrace and nailed him to a cross. A relative who patrolled the prisons told her he passed away in a pool of his feces; that the soldiers cut him after he’d stopped breathing and branded his corpse with cigarettes to ease their boredom, and that they might come for her. “Where did you go?” “I had some connections in the United States.” She’d zipped her luggage and stacked her travel documents when the fall of the Twin Towers restored humanity to its first form. “I could not go.” Her cousin, a dentist in Florida, had told her of the teenagers that smashed their windows using Molotov cocktails, screaming, “No crazies allowed in America. Go bitch, go!” and so she fled to New York, where the hatred was subdued, respectable, but the paranoia murderous, and kept her head down, took a job mopping hallways, and hoped no one would call her out on her

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identity. “Try explaining to Europe—let alone to America—that Tunisia is an African republic. She wasn’t even religious.” “Has she contacted you since?” “She called me last Christmas. A Swedish widower had taken her in. They live in Brentwood.” “Have you tried visiting?” “Not yet, but I will soon.” “So you came to London.” “Scotland. Saint Andrews, to be precise.” Her idea of Scotland as forlorn, with its grey towers and brick skies, would change when she met Johannes, a Slavic art dealer who accosted her at the bus stop where she passed the nights and offered her shelter in a town house at the end of the tangled streets, in a region gripped by domesticity. In his pinkfleshed cuddle she would be acquainted with the vivid loneliness of great painters: Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Van Gogh and Rodin, Gauguin and Braque, and would sift Asiatic influences on modern architecture from a plaid shelled album. Johannes limited his zeal to fine arts, a less dangerous topic than politics. Stretched on an elastic rest in the patio, counting the wheat strands that had succumbed to sparkling streams, she decided their marriage would bountiful. She was ready. She had painted fantasies, paying no mind to their psychotic gleam, when his children—twin girls—flew home for Easter and shredded the canvas. “You never told me you had children,” she hissed, having yanked him into the kitchen and shut the door. “No worries, darling,” he drawled. “They’re lovely.” The next day she was gone. “Mommy-phobia.”

Pi an o L e s s on s , To be n n a Nw osu

“I beg your pardon?” “The fear of having children.” Emmanuelle sneered. “Since you’ve broach the subject of fear,” Hadiza said, “why not tell me your birth name, the name you had before these foreigners welcomed you?” “It’s Nigerian.” “Well?” “Chiamaka.” “What does it mean?” “God is wonderful.” “Indeed,” said Hadiza. Her smile was flat. +++ Hadiza caressed the piano top. Flesh sagged under her eyes. “What are the keys made of?” Emmanuelle surveyed the keyboard, which was like a mammoth spine and whiter than vellum. She sighed. “Ivory?” “An educated guess. You’re correct.” “You should get some sleep.” “No. Play me a tune.” “Can you be specific?” “Any one that displays a level of coordination will do.” Emmanuelle put her palms to the ridges. Hadiza nudged her elbows “Arc them a little further.” She gauged the symmetry. “Go ahead.” The hall lessened and a few notes blossomed, their petals colliding. Hadiza raised a hand. “What’s wrong?”

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“Don’t try to impress me. Go again.” Emmanuelle’s fingers traipsed up the spine. She pressed B-C-D-F, paused, pressed E, pressed C-D. Three times. Inhaled. B-C-B-A-G-G. She felt her fingers had dispersed, but they repeated B-A-G-F-E-D before tripping off the board. “Thoughts?” “A friend of mine has a daughter to be wedded at the weekend,” Hadiza said. “You’re invited.” +++ The gathering—a perfumed Styx of pink, orange and turquoise turbans—chatted under clipped clouds. Lutes wailed tremulously. Fire jerked before the bride, whose slanted nose and rosebud lips might have inspired a Nazarene if she lived centuries ago. Aunties, chirruping, referred to her as Sonja, but the youth called her Sonny. The jewels embedded in her sari cast prisms on nearby motions, against stretched necks. Before she stood, her veil tethered to the groom’s sash, and circled Agni, the hallowed fire, Hadiza remarked on the influx of foreigners to the United Kingdom. “I can hardly turn a corner and not collide with Chinese students or a Qatari businessman waddling on the curb, awaiting his chauffeur. It’s exhausting.” Emmanuelle gaped at her. “You’re hardly British.” Hadiza spluttered: “That’s unfair”, and was silent until the couple finished circling the fire and Emmanuelle asked her whether she’d ever return to Tunisia. “You know my answer,” Hadiza said, and, as if the marquee were a miniature Tunisia, she spun and fled from it. Emmanuelle skipped after her. Behind them, the marquee

Pi an o L e s s on s , To be n n a Nw osu

sprang with cheers. A guest had stumbled out and hugged the trunk of a mangrove, and retched spume on a beat. A sitar glittered at his feet; Hadiza snorted at the sight of it. “These Ravi Shankar imitators,” she said in her witch voice. Emmanuelle frowned, as much as to ask, “Ravi who?” They’d strolled far enough from the merriment to be enveloped in an Edenic garden, and neared the pond that fluted from it, watched a profusion of geese glide along its margin, their feathers knurled. The geese moved without a sound. “Over there,” Hadiza said. She pointed to the gold dome of the London Central Mosque, notched at its bottom by the fir trees behind the pond. Emmanuelle nodded. “It’s grand. Have you been in it?” Hadiza said, “I’ve seen much and felt nothing. The tales I told you might have happened to someone else, but with the relevant scents. I’d hate to see you live a similar life.” She said, “Chiamaka, go somewhere calm, rest among your people. Go home.” “But how—” Emmanuelle began. Hadiza laughed. “London can be addictive. Return to it if you must.” A goose honked and the flock honked along, quieted. Emmanuelle started at a rhythm, piercing in spite of their seclusion. Solemn notes jangled onto a chord. “Oh, it’s just the piano,” Hadiza said. “You hear it, too?” “Of course. We’re one with it now.” A plume had come undone and the dry half of it shuddered

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in counterpoint to the rhythm. The other half, submerged, had turned brown.

Cara Dorris

Rolling Stones in Tel Aviv You’d be glad to know that my Israeli cousin approves of you, my “Palestinian boyfriend.” She says our fathers are both Semites, after all. They both don’t know the taste of pork, circumcised fifty years ago, born into the land of Not Enough, taught to feel shame, hard-wired to like guilt. On Yom Kippur I get to feel guilty for a whole day. Like the time I thought my dog had slowed with diabetes when really it was just dying. Or the fact that even men fake orgasms. Or when I watched you watch me hide the Afikoman and still took all the money for myself. Or last Ramadan in Ramallah, when I told you I’ve never touched a woman like that. Or even now, on this blanket in the dirt, the fact that I don’t even know which one is 54

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Mick Jagger, or that I’ll only lean forward into the blue lights for so long. Only until the glass volleys from this girl’s mouth just miss my neck, catching me in the sun, grazing my arm, the tongue like burnt sugar or guilt. “May you live to see your children’s children,” as I drop three shekels into a beggar’s palm, as your aunts argue in Arabic over fresh or frozen peas, as I wonder if you can shrink-wrap sperm and stow it away or do you have to freeze it and face it every morning? Because my cousin refuses to die childless. Even with those tubes coming out of her, her mouth frozen in the shape of an O, like Adonoy, like “marry me,” like the Ramallah girl’s mark on my neck, darkened like an olive tree, like the Mi Sheberach that’s never answered but never stops, sometimes when you drive away I cry so gracelessly, gratefully, like a refugee returning home, like

Ro lli n g S t on e s, C ara D o r r i s

tonight Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll bring her to my room, like even sailors, we are told, refuse to learn to swim. For when a ship goes down, the swimmers will just keep swimming, only to suffer the longest. So tell me. Do you amuse them when you go away, these Jewish girls, with little tales of exile? Because if you saw me like this, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never leave. How I torture her in bed. How I make her beg and beg and then refuse her.

First Contact, Ernesto Renda illustration

Emily Zhang

Confessions of Malta Robert I ask you to slowly drown yourself in this holy water and leave the way you’ve always wanted to come the blackberries they hatch like ghastly windows and I don’t want the same film to reach over your face the church pedestals lit up and then you lit up the matches and a deer prayed to its own leg and yesterday a prophet fucked you in your sleep and I don’t know where birth belongs but this is not a cycle Robert there is something pure about bleeding but not death.

Saudamini Siegrist

Fire Island Affair On Fire Island, when the sunset smolders offshore, a tiger walks among the deer. The tigerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paw prints are everywhere, sunbaked and moonlit, raked on the wind, stock-still overlooking the sea. The tigerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gaze, locked in an unblinking stare, is the scare tactic of a Fire Island affair, the deer are half in love with the tiger, the tiger is half in love with the deer. Both are not afraid, they know each other too well, their mutual whereabouts in narrowest company. They inhabit a tightrope of sand, between coastlines of salt water and hellfire, drenched in the searchlight of a full moon, the rippling reflection, orange stripe, smoke and flame. Concentric circles close around the musk and luster of the island deer, trapped in an inferno, keeping step with the movements of a fatal tango. At sunrise when the waves wash up on shore, there is no blood or hide or hoof of deer, only petal-like prints erased between paws hugging the bare sandbar.

Liv Lansdale

Lips of the Inanimate 1 Kissing you was the uptown approach to romance: walking on the cold tracks of never and could. Not all lines end underground. I once streaked like a Chinese brushstroke but with more blots, less grace. I still cannot collect myself, I know the verb form of intimacy is my own name under your hands. 2 I would ask you to thematize me with your mouth but little air moves when you speak. Instead I ask myself not to

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think of how Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve misplaced your rings in the eye of every sink in Hangzhou, among the coins in every fountain, of how you once interrupted the staring contest between the statues outside the silk museum: the greats too great to find release.

Sally Hosokawa

Parasitic she had thrown me out of the house sunday morning but when my starved eyes laid watch on your succulently curved hips, the raw meat on your bones under your collagen-rich flesh, i couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stay satiated just by licking your luscious lips with a faraway gaze, so my microscopic larval body crept closer to your unbitten skin until on tuesdays i was lingering outside your gym waiting for your car to depart before rushing to the basket of juicy towels to bring your moist terry cloth to my nostrils and inhale the saline scent of your heavenly sweat. thursdays i would wait behind your house, giddy for nightfall when i could open the treasure chest of your garbage, snotty tissue by snotty tissue, cradling lollipop wrappers that you lovingly fingered open and sucking on the peels of your half-consumed oranges. if i got lucky i excavated the golden nut of your pussy band-aid, fortune of dna. you noticed finally your loving admirer at your favorite bar asked me my name but got up to urinate before i uttered a word, you clearly too intoxicated to converse.

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in a moment of sober lucidity i prepared for the pounce. when you swallowed My saliva, the tongue hooked on your throat, slowly lowering until My mouth reached the acids of your intestines where My teeth could make tiny incisions and leech on the nutrients that bled out, My lips travelling through the bloodstream to find a feast for My packets of reproductive organs to devour

Genesis IV, Rosaline Zhang Watercolor

Genesis I, Rosaline Zhang Watercolor

Zachary Smolar

A Comedy of Errors “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, rounded with a little sleep.” -William Shakespeare On the first day of senior year English class, we filled out these note cards with facts about ourselves. This was standard in high school—a way for the teachers to get some cursory information about each student. The questions were never different, and my favorite was always to pick a famous dinner date. It could be anyone: dead or living. I never put the same answer twice. I’ve gone through all of the Beatles, Genghis Khan, Franklin Pierce, Napoleon, Martin Scorsese, and John Irving, to name a few. I was going to put Neil Armstrong this time, or Einstein. But, as we filled out the cards just minutes after receiving the course syllabus, I was beginning to lose my cool. I stared at the library of bland literature that I would be required to read over just a few months, and I panicked. So, in an ill-advised effort to impress Mrs. Robinson, the teacher, I wrote: William Shakespeare. Those few months of class passed without incident. Mrs. Robinson wasn’t noticeably impressed by my apparently deep love of old Will Shakespeare, and I forgot about that note card shortly after I turned it in. I read the books on that syllabus. Okay, fine, I read about half. It was funny—I didn’t really read the Shakespeare ones. Well, 66

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I read part of that one with the guy who dies, and the other guy who goes crazy and kills that woman, and then that other guy. I think it begins with an “O,” or maybe a “T.” Whatever. And I did perfectly fine in that class. For a senior. Who read half the syllabus. Maybe a little less than half the syllabus. Mrs. Robinson neither liked nor disliked me. Well, maybe she liked me a little. I don’t really know. I was always able to be fairly insightful despite my limited actual knowledge. I would speak gibberish in the class discussions, and Mrs. Robinson would close her eyes and nod in agreement, and the other students would obediently follow her lead. Anyway, on the Wednesday of the last week of school, Mrs. Robinson surprised us. She said that we had some guest speakers, whom we’d be spending the evening with. Well that’s nice, everyone in the class was thinking, but what are we actually doing? Mrs. Robinson was known in our high school for her unusual practices: she liked to hold her leg in the same position as her namesake in The Graduate, and frequently employed vivid sexual innuendos and references in order to more brightly color a discussion of, say, Aristotle’s Poetics (I don’t think there’s a whole lot of sex in that, but I only made it thirteen pages, so who knows). So, we sat in anticipation as Mrs. Robinson walked to the door of the classroom, knowing that whatever was behind it was impossible to expect. And then came the parade from Bill and Ted’s telephone booth. We had fourteen students in the class, and fourteen figures wandering, dazed and confused, into our cramped space. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Genghis Khan, George Carlin, John Lennon (whom Mrs. Robinson gave a hug and said, “It’s so nice to

A Co medy of E r r or s, Zac h ar y S m ol a r

see you again”), Thomas Jefferson, Marlon Brando, Jane Goodall, Plato, Eminem, LeBron James, Moses, Jesus, and goddamn William Shakespeare, dressed to the nines in frills and pantaloons, and all that Elizabethan shit, were there, in room 176, with us. Mrs. Robinson explained what was going on, but I already knew. The notecards. I had to have dinner with Shakespeare. She had made us reservations at places that were appropriate for the characters with whom we would dine. So Jesus and Moses got middle-eastern food, George Carlin went to a comedy club, and Shakespeare and I went to a really upscale restaurant that I’d never heard of, where I had to wear a tie, and where the waiters talked in these quasi-British accents and said things like premiere choice, sir, when I ordered a Caesar Salad. And somewhere, John Lennon was doing LSD with Amogha. I was pissed. “So, uh, Mr. Shakespeare,” I said, cautiously, “what’s your writing process like?” This was one of the questions I came up with on the cab ride to the restaurant. He started, “Shall I compare it to a summer’s day? It is more lovely and more temperate.” So, I started nodding along. I wasn’t picking up anything, although the summer’s day thing sounded sort of familiar. Eventually I realized that he was done talking, and was looking at me. “Awesome,” I said. “That totally answered my question. Um. How does it feel to perform something on a stage like The Globe?” “Well,” he said, “all the world’s a stage.” “Oh Jesus,” I said under my breath, “here he goes.” A couple minutes into that soliloquy, Jesus walked in with

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his dinner date, Emily, who was the high school’s resident crazy Christian. He said he thought he’d heard his name coming from here. “Oh, that was me, but I wasn’t ... never mind. Not worth it,” I mumbled. Jesus shrugged, turned on his heel, and left quickly with Emily in tow. After a few questions, I was sort of getting the hang of it. I’d heard some of his sayings before, and I was starting to think that this Shakespeare guy was interesting. So, I started speaking his language. “Well, you know,” I said, “Thou hath to be or not to be, and with the two hours traffic of our stage, the Justice is in fair round belly with good capon lin’d.” His eyes narrowed. He frowned and gave a deep sigh. The confident smile on my face disappeared as he pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, lit it, and took a long drag. And then suddenly, he decided to stop speaking in Elizabethan English. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Have you read any of my work?” A concerned waiter, whose bow tie seemed to be on a just a little too tight and whose arms seemed glued to his sides, rushed over. “Excuse me, this is a non-smoking establishment. I’m going to have to ask you to put that out.” Shakespeare distractedly dropped the thing in his clam chowder. A mixture of steam from the soup and smoke from the cigarette steadily drifted upward and slightly shrouded his face, his five hundred year-old eyes not straying from mine. “Well?” he said. “So, what is this?” I said. “You’re, like, an impersonator, right?” “Impersonator? Fuck you. Do I look like an impersonator?

A Co medy of E r r or s, Zac h ar y S m ol a r

You didn’t think I would know the same English as you? I invented slang in my own time. Is it so absurd that I kept up with the language in the afterlife?” “Wait, afterlife?” “I don’t want to talk about that now. I just want to know if you’ve read any of my plays.” “Well,” I was stuttering, “somewhat?” He threw his napkin on the table and swallowed the rest of his wine. “This is bullshit. It’s not every day that I get to come back from the dead, and I have to spend it with some asshole kid, who doesn’t even know what Othello’s tragic flaw is? Unacceptable. What did you do, just write my name down to impress the teacher?” I didn’t say anything, but I could feel my head nodding ashamedly. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Well, I don’t want to just sit here either, you know. You’re a lot more uninteresting to me than I am to you. I want to do something, something, tonight. And I’m wasting it at some shit restaurant with a philistine for company, wasting it.” “I’m sorry,” I said, lamely. “Well, fuck it,” Shakespeare said. “Let’s get out of here. You like to party?” He’d already gotten up, and was walking towards the door. I’d thrown some money on the table and had to run to catch up to him. “I write all my best stuff stoned,” he was saying. “All of those complicated plot lines-he’s in love with her who’s in love with another guy who’s in love with another girl who’s in love with the first guy, and there’s a war and poison and swords and blah blah blah...it’s impossible to keep up with it when I’m

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writing sober. You know?” “Well, I never really read any-” But he kept going. “So yeah, I was baked for most of those. Except for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Did you read that?” “Actually, I did a little. That was back in-” “Yeah, for that one I got these unbelievable medieval shrooms from—actually, it was from the guy who I ended up casting as the original Hermia. You know, we didn’t cast women.” “Really, that’s interes-” I’m not sure why I was even bothering at that point. “So yeah, I had this crazy trip and dreamt up these fairies and Puck and the guy with the ass’s head. Aw man, the summer of ‘92.” “Like, 1592?” “You bet your ass, you little bitch. Those were the best days of my life.” Shakespeare pulled out a cell phone—iPhone 6 Plus, of course—and called “Johnny-boy,” who led us to the park within walking distance. It was late by then, maybe ten-thirty, and I was concerned that we would be mugged. This was a legitimate fear, as Shakespeare hadn’t changed out of his Elizabethan-douche costume, despite his shift in diction. We were walking targets, but somehow we made it to our destination safely. Under a large Oak tree we found John Lennon, looking like he did for the White Album, wearing his trademark glasses, and jeans. No shoes or shirt. He was strumming an acoustic guitar— the chords of “Across the Universe.” “Hey Willy,” he said, and then started lazily singing, “Words are pouring out like endless rain into a paper cup…”

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“Jesus Christ,” I muttered under my breath, and pinched myself discreetly on my thigh. After all, I was watching John Lennon sing a Beatles song live. And I was just standing there like an idiot, saying nothing. When he finished, Shakespeare clapped his hands a few times, whistled in awe, and said to me, “Damn. The guy’s an artist.” Not much to say to that. Then Jesus came over again, running with Emily. She was totally out of breath and was doubled over with her hands on her knees, but Jesus was light on his feet and all smiles. “I definitely heard my name that time.” Presumably, Jesus and Emily had spent the whole night running around answering people’s prayers. Just then, Amogha-I’m still not sure why she put John Lennon on the notecard in the first place, she didn’t seem the type-came twirling out of the woods, her long and colorful summer dress spinning with her. “You can’t believe the experience I’m having,” she said to me with her faint Indian accent. “It’s life-changing.” And for Amogha, it really was. The next day, she would join the Peace Corps, throwing her deposit away at the Cornell University College of Engineering, and spend the rest of her days in Papua New Guinea. Jesus then noticed Lennon under the tree, and sniffed the air. “You got bud?” he asked. Emily looked as though she might cry. Lennon nodded. “That, and some harder stuff, if you’re feeling it. Just don’t go all Peter Fonda on me.” He then started slowly singing the lyrics to “She Said, She Said.” Shakespeare took a step forward. “I’ll take some of the hard

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stuff. I want to write another comedy.” Lennon placed what looked like a square of colored paper on Shakespeare’s extended tongue, and said with a wink, “By the way, I don’t think I’ve ever told you, I really love your work.” Shakespeare turned back to me and said, “See, he fucking read my plays.” He went on talking to Lennon, shooting the breeze for a few minutes. Then, out of nowhere, he grabbed his head, his eyes widened, and said, “Everything’s golden.” He collapsed in a heap in the grass, looking perplexed and thrilled by his own confusion. “It’s so obvious that nothing is real, yet I feel it all more acutely than ever before.” As hard as it was to detach myself from that development, I noticed that there was movement in another set of bushes. Genghis Khan walked out of the brush with his arm around Sarah-by far the most attractive girl in our class, possibly in the whole school. He threw up his hands and said, “Well, as Balzac said, ‘there goes another novel.’” He laughed heartily, and everyone else did too. Even Sarah, who was blushing slightly. The two of them sat next to Jesus, who passed a joint to them, and patted Genghis on the back. The two of them made eye contact and shared a laugh, clearly old pals. I joined them with dazed, “Hey.” Shakespeare crawled from his position over to our small circle and said, “Man, you just really need to loosen up. You seem so uptight, and your skin is giving off this weird purple sound. That can’t be good, you know?” Jesus had the joint back; he took a huge, godly hit and said, “For sure, my man. You have to take it easy. Just let it all come to you. One day at a time, my friend. I feel like I definitely could have had some really dynamite advice for you back in the

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old days. Like some wise words. But, fuck, that was, like...two thousand years ago!” He laughed and coughed and passed the joint to Lennon. “Hey!” a voice in the distance yelled, “aren’t you going to save some of that for us?” Ginsberg and Kerouac were sauntering towards us with their dinner dates, Julie and Patrick, who were barely keeping up. “There’s plenty to go around,” Lennon yelled back. “Welcome, welcome.” “I’ve got it!” Shakespeare screamed out of nowhere. We all turned to him, and he started crawling our way. “I’ve got the idea for my next play! What if I have a Prologue that introduces the plot and gives the back-story, before the play even starts? And I can say something like, ‘So this is what we’ll be talking about for, like, the next two hours, so be patient and I’ll tell you the whole story on the stage.’ That sounds good, right?” “You already did that, Bill,” Kerouac said. “In Romeo and Juliet.” “Are you sure?” asked Shakespeare. “It was literally exactly what you just said.” “Albeit, a little more eloquently in the play,” Ginsberg added. “Shit.” Shakespeare seemed exhausted, and settled in for a nap. “Ey! Man down!” said Genghis, and threw a beer bottle against the tree, like we were at a frat party. The man behaved like a thirteenth century John Belushi. Ginsberg and Kerouac joined our circle and I shook their hands. “Damn happy to meet you,” they both said. They told us about their dinner, and their night leading up to finding us in the

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park. Apparently Julie and Patrick weren’t quite up to the evening of binge drinking and flirting with death that they’d had in mind. The two lively beat poets gestured to the two passed-out teenagers next to Shakespeare, and shook their heads with disappointment. “Damn shame,” they said, in unison. At one point, Kerouac put his arm around me, laughing, and said, “I have got to tell you about my friend Dean. I first met him not long after my wife and I split up.” Then he told me the whole novel, On the Road. Over the next couple of hours, some more famous figures and their high school companions stumbled upon us. I fell asleep at around two in the morning after hearing the end of Kerouac’s story. But it was a restless sleep and I spent most of the time being woken up by all the conversations around me. At a certain point, there was a fight between Genghis and Eminem, who showed up late with our English class’s hip hop freak—whose real name was Gavin but whose rap name was MC Young something or other. I think the conflict was resolved when Genghis pulled out his sword and Eminem backed off, but I was really only half-awake and don’t really know. All I do know is that by four in the morning, they were arm in arm, sharing a beer, and rocking back and forth and singing the chorus from “Stan” like a Mongolian war cry. Ginsberg kept yelling lines from Howl in his sleep, mostly the ones about sex or suicide, which I guess is almost all of them. At about 5:45, as the sun was beginning to rise, Shakespeare crawled over to me and shook me awake. “It’s time for us to leave, and I’m not supposed to say goodbye, but I wanted to. I know you didn’t really give a shit about me before any of this, and you

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may not still, but I hope you do. I hope you enjoyed yourself a bit, after getting over the initial shock.” “I did, Will,” I said, and held out my hand. He shook it with a smile and sighed. “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a small book. Dropping it next to me, he put his finger to his lips: “Don’t tell anyone.” The others were waiting for Shakespeare as he walked over to the tree. All fourteen of them were congregated there. It was time to go. They picked up their bags, their weapons, their drugs, and walked off, leaving the whole AP English class asleep on the grass in the middle of the park. I watched them walk away until I couldn’t see them anymore, and then fell asleep again. A couple of hours later, Mrs. Robinson found us there. She was accompanied by four policemen, who had been out looking for us all night. None of us had been to our houses in a day, and an Amber Alert had been called. “I could lose my job for this,” Mrs. Robinson told us. “This is ridiculously irresponsible. I have no idea what to think you were even doing out here. Do you know how bad this makes me look?” She never mentioned the dinner dates. Not once. And when we asked about them, she ignored us as though we hadn’t even spoken. We all started to wonder if it had really happened. Our memories were all sort of different—foggy from all the substances. Sarah, for instance, was convinced that she didn’t have sex with Genghis Khan. I was convinced of the contrary. Amogha was the only one who was positive that it was real. Her joining the Peace Corps was evidence enough of that.

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And I was sure, of course, that the evening had really happened, that I hadn’t dreamt any of it. I was sure because of Shakespeare’s book, the one he’d given to me before leaving: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I looked through it that morning, once I’d gotten back home, and flipped through the pages to the Epilogue. If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles do not reprehend. If you pardon, we will mend. And at the bottom, written in the most eloquent calligraphy: “Read my fucking plays! Sincerely, Will.” And I did.

El Teatro Real, Quinn Bornstein photography

Andrew Alexander Mobbs

Virgen We have few things here窶馬o long Indian summers, no window-toothed skyscrapers, no lights, almost. There is one string of lights between the moon and the ground coiled around la Virgen de Guadalupe, her holiness boxed in glass to protect her hands, to keep them soft, white, clasped in prayer through the black November nights. She catches you strolling by her street, beckons you, and suddenly you are standing in front of her with your hands in your pockets. You think of all the drifters here in town and recall those childhood stories of saints clad in tattered clothes and panhandling angels. Through the glass, she tells you to not be fooled窶馬one are like that, all of them are very much men, most of them godless. You remember then how her heart was broken the hardest. Turn around, continue into the dark.

Meshes and Mirrors (Tribute to Maya Derenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Meshes of the Afternoon), Olivia Watson digital collage

Evan Silver

Habitat The bedroom is mostly lived-in. The queen-sized bed has creases on the side furthest from the door; the pillows on the other end are robust and untouched. The walls are lined with photos of a woman with jet-black hair atop a mountain or in the rainforest or posing with a Bengal tiger or pulling weeds. A pair of raggedy moccasin slippers lies at the foot of the bed. Daylight pours in through the double-hung window, exposing the grime caked onto a chunky DSLR camera on the shabby wooden bedside table. The books are lined up on the shelf, the black cocktail dresses and safari jackets hung in the open closet, the toothed skyline of the city visible through the tenth-story window. A cat lies dormant at the foot of the bed. The bedroom is fully lived-in. The bed is made, though the deeply creased sheets are covered by the medallion-patterned blue comforter. A pair of size thirteen tennis shoes lies next to the raggedy moccasin slippers. There is a fancy bottle of bourbon on the desk. The camera is set up on a tripod facing the bed. The bedroom is not lived-in. There is some jet-black hair on the pale red shag carpet underneath the bed. The now-empty bottle of bourbon sits on the window ledge next to the cat. The window is open to the night skyline, and the ambulance sirens are audible from ten stories below. A safari hat, silky lingerie, hiking boots, and a black sheer dress are strewn across the shag carpet. The camera is still running. 81

Saudamini Siegrist

Tea Ceremony On Monday

I serve you homemade tea, steeped in a china pot and sweet as the flower blossoms of a purple thistle. I pick thistles barehanded along the roadside where bumblebees feed. My mantra on Monday is a buzzing noise.

On Tuesday

The tea is pure as tea was long ago before the flood, before ceremony was invented. A slightly salty, sun-dried sip of the green Japan ocean. I serve it in a seashell. My mantra on Tuesday is the sound inside the shell.

On Wednesday

Scalding tea, too hot to drink. There’s a flame inside, molten liquid brewed and poured like lava. I can’t drink this tea myself; it’s only for the gods. My mantra on Wednesday is the roar of fire.

On Thursday

The tea water today I carried from my home in Montana. Near Boulder Point I drank with a herd of elk, from a spring at dusk, lying facedown in bear grass; too deep to cup my hand under the flow of water, I had to press my mouth 82

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against the earth. With that water I will make your tea. My mantra on Thursday is the bugling of elk.

On Friday

Tea is served in a spoon, one drop. This small amount is enough to refresh and restore the atmosphere. It will relieve your pain. You wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to drink again all day. This tea is the color of your aura. My mantra on Friday is silence.

Untitled, Rosaline Zhang clay installation

Victor Bramble

What a Find come on down to the antique boutique, you never know what you’ll find loose buttons and loose photos and a history you’d rather lose find a manual to lay bricks and bake slick meals, learn the secrets they hid in the stacks buy a genuine Negro record cooning and crooning, but it’s buried deep in a pile of assorted tragedy collect the sounds of the tropics, black and brown and green, ethnic lps dripping red only 400 bucks for a mercator map with proportion distortion to match your euro ego find a box that soils your senses with a touch of a dusky past Jesus Christ trading cards for a dollar apiece, come sell your soul at the antique boutique

Naïma Msechu

Mermen They said they were mermen, but to me they just looked like old geezers. I’d seen them from the road forty-five miles into my delivery route and would have called someone right then, but my phone was dead, so I walked over to investigate. The men were lying on the beach, all three flat on their backs in the semidry area between sea and land, their toes unfurled and pointed toward the water. They smiled as the waves lapped at their naked bodies and sighed when they left, sinking further into the sand each time. My car chirped when I locked it with my remote. The delivery could wait. “You’re what?” I asked. The man closest to me rolled onto his stomach to face me, leaving behind a crater that began to soften at the edges as the water drew in. “Mermen,” he repeated. I laughed. “Where are your tails?” The second man opened his eyes and sat up. “Lisa?” He turned his head back and forth, making his gray ringlets quiver like beached jellyfish. “Lisa’s dead,” the first man said. He gave the man’s arm a little nudge so that he turned to him. “She died in the Cave of Eels, remember?” The second man nodded slowly and looked up at me. His whole body was covered in freckles and age spots, some of them clustered like tiny galaxies. The one on his cheek rippled when he 86

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opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. “I’m Karen,” I supplied. “And you are?” “George.” His reply was immediate, the galaxy moving too quickly for me to track it. I turned to the first man. The crater beside him was now partially filled with water. “And you? What’s your name?” George chuckled. “He doesn’t know it.” The first man furrowed his brow and the shift of his bald scalp sent a wink of sunlight in my direction. “That’s right, I don’t.” He pointed to the third man. “He knows his, though. Wake him up, George.” The man barely twitched when George tapped his shoulder. “Starfish!” George hissed. “Wake up.” Starfish’s groan sounded like a zipper unzipping. “I wasn’t sleeping.” “Like hell you weren’t,” the first man said. “Sit up. We have company.” Starfish obeyed, pulling his hands with exaggerated slowness from the sandy hills that covered them. He turned to me. “Who are you?” “I’m Karen,” I repeated. “I make deliveries for Stacy’s Seafood over in Rehoboth. What’s your real name?” “Starfish.” He leaned back on his hands, which were already starting to sink into the sand like snails retreating into their shells. “He’s called that because he likes to kiss starfish,” George said. “See how his beard’s yellow?” I glanced down at Starfish. George was right: his white mustache and beard were yellow at the edges of his mouth, as though some of the starfish’s color had rubbed off and stained

Me r me n , N aïma M s e c h u

him. Starfish shrugged. “It’s true, I think. Starfish are good kissers.” I looked out at the ocean, unsure how to respond. The sun was starting to set and the water was calm, the little ripples soft as cellulite. “So, where are your tails?” I tried again. “We lost them,” the first man said. “One minute they were there and the next they weren’t. We almost didn’t make it out of the ocean.” “Lisa didn’t make it out of the ocean,” George murmured. “Yeah, but that was before. She still had her tail when she died,” said the first man. “The Cave of Eels, remember?” George shuddered and flecks of water flew from his curls. I stepped backward to avoid them. “I’m hungry,” said Starfish, whose hands had sunk up to his wrists. “Did you say something about seafood?” “Seafood is just what you need to cheer you up,” the first man said to George. He looked at me with his eyebrows raised. “Um, sure,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I turned and walked up the beach to my car. When I stuck the key in the ignition to open the trunk, Oldies But Goldies 97.1 FM streamed from the speakers. I wonder. I wah-wah-wah-wah wonder, Del Shannon crooned. I left it on and walked to the trunk. Inside were two coolers filled with boxes of frozen seafood. I had planned my trip so that there was plenty of time to make the delivery before it started to thaw, but I’d spent at least twenty minutes parked here and driven pretty slowly before that. Why why why why why she ran away, sang Del Shannon, and I whistled along. During the drive, the oldies had been interrupted several times by Silver Alerts. My friend Tanja’s grandma had Alzheimer’s

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and escaped from the house almost every week in just her bathrobe and hairnet. I had made it a habit to keep a lookout for her and any of the other lost senior citizens the radio mentioned when I wasn’t on the Interstate. I’d never found anyone before, but this group of nude, disoriented men, this herd of weathered septuagenarian manatees, was not what I’d expected. I grabbed three boxes and headed back to the water. “Here.” I placed the boxes on the sand in front of the men and cut open the sealed lids. The first one was full of shrimp, their small gray bodies like plump crescent moons. There were mussels in the next box: one shell piled on top of another in a shiny black heap. Inside the third were lobsters, greenish-brown, chilled, and glittering with condensation but still— “Alive?” Starfish asked, the hesitant word so quiet it barely escaped his beard. I tapped the box with my foot. “Yes. They’re better when they’re boiled that way.” “The others are dead, though,” the first man said. It was more of a demand than a question. “Of course,” I said. “Listen, I’m going to be right back. Just stay here, okay?” “Where are you going?” George pulled his hands out of the sand with a squelching sound and started to stand. “No no, wait here,” I waved him down. “I’m just going to get some more food for you.” I ran to the car, sand spraying in small arcs behind me. There was a gas station less than five miles down the road where I sometimes stopped for coffee if I didn’t think I could finish the delivery without a caffeine boost. The cashier’s name was Darla;

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she had a dog, two cats, four grandchildren she was very proud of, and a phone by the cash register that I could use if she stopped talking long enough for me to ask her to use it. I looked back as I pulled off the sandy shoulder and onto the road, and was barely able to make out the three men. When I returned, having both made the phone call and heard all about Darla’s recent trip to her grandson’s soccer tournament, they were gone. Faint footsteps led away from the boxes in the direction of the water, but they were already starting to fade. The men had made a real mess: shrimp and mussels littered the sand and reminded me of the aftermath of a lunchroom food fight. The waves had started tugging some of them into the water, and the tracks they left looked like arrows tattling on the men’s escape. I picked up an empty box and began collecting the tiny bodies. The third box was untouched. In it, one of the frozen lobsters began to stir.

Knitting, Sohum Chokshi Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

Emily Zhang

Confessions of Malta I would like to go swimming but the ships have held their arms together and jammed the shore. The sandstone of these buildings look like prisons. The slabs of their backs shake and the ships whistle songs that travel through their shelled legs. On the docks, muslin is given for tea. I know that ships are vessels but these men deconstruct crates one at a time and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like watching a hung jury untie their strings. The ships lose their shadows. The ships are their shadows and they will never know what it feels like to submerge their cores in another moving thing.

Quinn Bornstein

The Ami Expert I have only been to fourteen states, most of which are on the East Coast. I have never eaten at In-N-Out Burger, or driven on Route 66, or been to Disneyland. I have never shot a gun or drank beer out of a red Solo cup. I don’t like hamburgers; I don’t like football. I have never visited the so-called “flyover states” and therefore have only seen the horizon where the sky touches the ocean, and not the land. Yet, here in Gijón, I am considered an expert on all things American. I am not sure if I would have this same reputation if I had come to another part of Spain. Tourists who are drawn to the warmth of Madrid to the south or to the art and culture of Bilbao to the east often overlook Gijón. Those of us in our studyabroad group of thirty students are perhaps the only Americans, and definitely some of the few fluent English speakers, among the 300,000 inhabitants of this secluded city trapped between the mountains and the ocean. My first weekend in Gijón, I accompany my host-family to the playa de San Lorenzo, a crescent-shaped beach where the white sand hugs the Atlantic along the mile-long shoreline. A few minutes after arriving, my host-sister Inés and her friend Carlota are already asleep stomach-down on their towels. Although all I really want to do is run into the ocean and jump in the salty waves, I can sense that this is an activity only suitable for my younger host-sister, twelve year-old Gema, and her friends. So 93

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after applying a heavy coat of SPF 50 + Sport, I lie down on my stomach and embark on a futile attempt to become as tan as Inés. But just as I am getting comfortable, assuring myself that the slight prickling sensation on the small of my back is just some rough sand and not the first signs of melanoma, I hear Carlota’s grandmother, her abuela, whisper to my host-mother. “Carmen,” she says, her voice croaky from decades of cigarettes, “la blanca needs more crema. Look how her back is getting red.” Of course, la blanca means me. In the United States I have never been called pale. I even receive compliments for how tan I become in the summer, though I have blue eyes and white skin. But here in Spain, I am pale and blonde with hair that is “definitely yellow” according to Inés’s friend Paula. I quickly get up and apply another coat of lotion until my skin is heavily frosted in a white oily sheen. Then I lie back down again, my closed eyes prickling as the sun’s carcinogenic rays penetrate my flimsy plastic sunglasses. “You know what I think of whenever I think of los Estados Unidos?” Carlota’s abuela asks Carmen. “This movie I saw once about these people in America, I can’t seem to remember their name…” She is speaking in a stage whisper; it is as though she wants me to hear and help her out, but doesn’t want the embarrassment of sounding uncultured in front of the worldly American burning in vain at her feet. “These people live all by themselves,” she continues. “I watched a movie about it once. Ay, yo recuerdo, they’re called the Am-, the Ami, something like that.” “The Ami,” Carmen repeats musingly. I can hear the squeak

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of her folding chair as she leans over to shake some ash from her cigarette into the plastic pointed ashtray that she has stuck in the sand like a golf tee. I am curious now, too, about the Ami. How can a Spanish grandmother know an American icon that I do not? I sit up and squint at Carlota’s grandmother, my head foggy from the sun. Carlota’s grandmother is not what you think of when you think of an abuela. She is definitely different from Inés’s grandmother, who has short grey hair and won’t let us leave her apartment without taking a package of Principe cookies. It’s hard to tell the age of Carlota’s grandmother. The years of smoking have given her a necklace of wrinkles that sag around her collarbone. The years of summer’s rays have painted her skin a perpetual mahogany, but they have failed to leave a smooth canvas, and her skin is specked with a topcoat of black and auburn freckles that darkens her complexion by yet another shade. Her dyed-brown hair is the same tone as her skin, and the front pieces frame her forehead in an attempt at youthful bangs. Not much of her face is visible beneath her dominating black sunglasses. These glasses match her bathing suit, which is a one-piece with a gold ring at the center of the chest that connects the two sagging cups. Carlota’s abuela sees me rise. “Ah, Queen, you’re awake!” she exclaims—as if I had not been her original audience all along. She draws out the “I” in my name, making me sound like royalty. “Do you know this, this Ami?” “Ami?” I shake my head, and a hundred miniature red suns flash across my vision. “I saw a movie about it once,” she repeats, trying to prove that these people are not a figment of her imagination. “They are

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farmers. They have horses. Um, they wear a lot of black.” I am unsure if she is speaking slowly to ensure that I understand, or because she is trying her hardest to remember every scrap of information she can about this elusive people. “The men wear these big tall hats,” she continues, “and black corbatas,” she mimes tying a bow tie at her throat. “Oh, the Amish!” I smile, simultaneously pleased at making the connection, and embarrassed that I had not come to it sooner. “The what?” Carmen asks. “A-mees?” No matter how many times I repeat the word, the women are unable to pronounce the “sh” sound. I smile to myself, secretly glad that there are sounds as unsuitable to the Spanish tongue as the rolled “r” is to mine. “I’ve seen the Amish,” I add proudly. “I visited the state of Pennsylvania, where they live.” “¿De verdad?” Carlota’s abuela asks in awe. “Really? I would love to see the Ami. I find them fascinating.” “Well, maybe someday you will,” I say. “Oh no,” she replies gravely, and the women around her shake their heads in unison. “I am too old. If I have not done it by now, it is too late.” I shrug, not wanting to risk a disagreement with a group of women who seem so convinced on the subject of their remaining here, their bare feet sunk deep in the sands of Gijón. “Where are you from in los Estados Unidos? Are you from this same place as the Ami?” Carlota’s grandmother asks me. The women have taken a great interest in me, pulling their folding chairs closer to hear my words. Carlota and Inés have woken up from their sun-induced stupor, and look up at me as

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well, their chins resting on their folded arms. I am the American prophet, sitting cross-legged like Siddartha on the beach towel. I have traveled from far across the Atlantic to impart my experiences to this captive audience. It is very rare for a study-abroad student to be in a position of power. For once, I am a teacher. My message is didactic, even if my diction is that of a fifth grader. “I’m from the state of Vermont,” I inform my disciples. Upon hearing this, my authority plunges. The collection of mothers and grandmothers push their sunglasses up on their brows to get a better look at me. The women frown, as if they are questioning my citizenship because I did not say I was from someplace recognizable, like Los Angeles or Miami. “It’s on the border with the state of New York,” I proffer, trying to enhance my case. “¡Nueva York!” Carlota’s abuela exclaims. The other women settle back into their chairs and let their sunglasses fall back over their eyes, assured that I am not a phony. I breathe again. “I went on a cruise once to Nueva York,” the abuela continues. “We saw the, the green statue of the lady…” she frowns, searching for the evasive name. She picks up the bottle of sunscreen and raises it in the air like the Statue of Liberty’s torch. “Madre mia, I would love to live in Nueva York.” The truth is, where I live on a dirt road in rural Vermont seems farther away from New York City than any other area of the country, perhaps with the exception of somewhere in the deep South or in the Yukon of Alaska. What these women, gathered around me like apostles, don’t realize is that the way that they live in northern Spain is actually much closer to the New York lifestyle. They dine at nine in the evening, and can access almost

Th e A mi Ex p e r t , Q u in n B o r n st e i n

any location on foot or by public transportation. When these first two options are not viable, they weave through the congested traffic on tiny motorcycles. Just add a subway and stretch the buildings up a bit and Gijón is halfway there. At least their streets are paved, and they have a grocery store, which is more than can be said for my hometown of Peacham. For the first week of my stay in Gijón, whenever I tell someone I am from the United States, Carmen or Inés proudly interjects, “Queen lives near Nueva York.” And, if Carlota’s grandmother is around, she adds, “You know the movie about the Ami? Queen actually saw them.” The eyes of whomever I am meeting immediately fill with awe. Apparently the Amish movie was a big hit in Spain. +++ But while I love the respect I have gained, my new metropolitan identity does not last. One day while shopping in El Centro with Inés and her friends, we turn the corner and come across another American girl from my group and her host-sister. Practically all of the host-siblings know each other; their families all belong to the Grupo Covadonga sports club and many of them are in the same grade at el Colegio de la Asuncion. But no matter if an acquaintance was last seen two days ago, they must be greeted the same as if you had last seen them two years ago, with the customary dos besos, a kiss on each cheek. This is how I am introduced to Marta, a teenage girl whose skin, eyes, and long straight hair are the same shade of sandy brown. “¿Como te llamas?” Marta asks. And when I give her my name, Inés interjects “Queen lives near Nueva York.”

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“Marisa lives near Nueva York, too!” Marta says, beckoning her American host-sister forward. Marisa, who of course I already know, looks skeptically at me. Marisa is from a wealthy suburban family, like most of the other American students in my group. For them, living in Spain is not a chance to learn the language, but rather an opportunity to take advantage of the low drinking age and to storm the designer stores for clothes that are marked down because of Spain’s flailing economy. Also, I suspect, this trip is a chance for their parents— back home in reputable neighborhoods outside of recognizable cities like Dallas or Chicago—to reinforce their already lofty social reputations. “And how is Francesca spending her summer?” WASP Mother #1 would ask at the country-club bar. “Oh, she’s away in Spain with a language program. It’s run by Dartmouth College,” WASP Mother #2 would reply, sipping her gin and tonic as she name-drops. “Did I tell you that my eldest is entering his third year at Dartmouth this fall? Pre-med,” she would add, as if it were an afterthought. On the tour bus from Madrid to Gijón the group leader reads a list of the different states the thirty students were from. I suppose this is supposed to demonstrate how diverse our group was. The list includes a few states you wouldn’t expect, like Colorado and Georgia, as well as the givens: California, Massachusetts, and New York. And, last on the list both alphabetically and in standing, is Vermont. “Who’s from Vermont?” Isabel from San Francisco asks. From

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her horrified tone, she just as easily could have said, “Who’s from the South Sudan?” Or, “Who’s from the slums of Appalachia?” I slowly raise my hand. “Um, I am,” I say quietly. She doesn’t hear me. “Who?” She asks looking around. “I am,” I say, a little more loudly. I lean out of my seat and look to where she is reclining in one of the four upholstered seats that fit together like a love seat against the back wall of the bus. Interesting how the most popular kids always gravitate toward the back of the bus, no matter if they are the sixth graders on the yellow Peacham Elementary School bus or the North Shore and Westchester County gang on a Spanish luxury coach. “Quinn is,” one of Isabel’s friends says, pointing at me. Under her mascara-lashed stare, my jean shorts and yellow and white striped t-shirt feel as drab as the Amish smocks that Carlota’s abuela find so intriguing. “Oh,” Isabel replies curtly. Then she turns to the boy at her side, who, if the rumors are true, she will end up kissing after a heated game of beer-pong at the 4th of July barbeque. So, after this incident, everyone in our tour group, including Marisa, knows that I am from Vermont. “Actually,” I say, catching Marisa’s disgusted expression. “I actually live six hours away from New York. I’m closer to Canada.” “¡Canadá!” Inés and Marta exclaim, putting the accent on the last a. “Que increíble.” Marta frowns at me, then beams at the Spanish girls. “Estoy de New Jersey,” Marisa says in her over-annunciated American accent. I smile inwardly at her misuse of the verb “to be.”

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“En el norte,” Marisa adds as she looks around quickly, unsure which way is northward. She points toward the sky, as if northern New Jersey were on the border with heaven. The Spanish girls smile and nod and kiss her on both cheeks in greeting. I wonder why Inés does not think it strange that at first I said I lived near the border with New York, and now I say I live near Canada. But then I realize what Marisa, futilely pointing upward, does not. The names Vermont and New Jersey signify nothing to Inés and her friends. Both Marisa and I come from the northeast corner of what, to them, is the most prosperous and tantalizing country on earth. Here, in Gijón, Marisa and I are equal in a way we could never be on the tour bus, or back in the States. In fact, in the eyes of my host-family and their friends, I am perhaps more exotic. While Marisa may live near New York, my home is on the border with a completely different country. And I bet that Marisa has never even seen the Ami.

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Quinn Bornstein

Juggling Childhood a translation from the Spanish of the poem â&#x20AC;&#x153;Infantiles malabarismosâ&#x20AC;? by Carmen Ana Pont It is Sunday, one of the most distant and yet most intimate Sundays. I am minuscule, still unspeaking. My parents take me in their arms. They are together, playing with me at the beach. They toss me in the air. I draw an arc of water and flesh between the four arms that welcome my return. I sink. I splash among thighs, knees, bubbles. Soaked, I float to the surface, I gasp. I open my mouth to the world, to the brightness, and a watery laugh escapes from my lips. They are happy. They release me again, offering my body to the sun, to the wind. I travel this same path between their chests again and again. I hypnotize them with my innocent presence. I fly so high I can barely hear their laughter below. I am an acrobat. My tiny limbs are a mirror where they recognize each other and reminisce. In it they watch me, I watch them, they watch each other as I submerge, die, and am reborn with their deliverance. They are connected by my dangerous winged crossing. I tie them together in the air, knowing perfectly well that on the ground they will remain forever unbound. I like to see them like this, remotely happy.

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Infantiles malabarismos Domingo, de los domingos más remotos, de aquéllos más cercanos al útero. Soy minúscula, todavía no hablo. Me toman en los brazos de mis padres. Están juntos, juegan conmigo en la playa. Me lanzan por el aire. Dibujo un arco de agua y carne entre los cuatro brazos que me acogen. Me hundo entre muslos, rodillas y burbujas. Empapada, salgo a flote y respiro. Abro la boca al mundo, a la claridad y una risa aguada me entra por la boca. Son felices y se desprenden de mí, lanzándome al sol y al viento. Recorro repetidas veces la misma distancia entre sus pechos. Los hipnotizo con mi pueril presencia y como vuelo tan alto, apenas oigo sus carcajadas. Soy un saltimbanqui. Les muestro un espejo hecho de mis pequeños miembros. En él se reconocen y recuerdan. Se miran, me miran, los miro y me sumerjo, muero, me rescatan y vuelvo a nacer. Los uno con mi peligrosa travesía alada. Trazo nudos y lazos aquí en el aire, porque ya sé que en otras partes no existen. Me gusta verlos así, remotamente felices.

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Re-Orienting, Hilary Wang Glass

Emily Zhang

Confessions of Malta There is a dome the color of wine and your eyes now believe in consumption. You stagger, reach for it, but this desert toned city weaves into itself like cloth. You take everything for navigation, this harbored city and its unblinking complexion.

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Matthew D. Lee

[Gershwin] Round this hour night loosens her grip and the moonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes sigh heavy as sleepâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s threat to snap my neck that postprandial afternoon-the second in a day. Now every leaf is backlit and pandurate. Grief is no longer howled by dogs buffeted sailors or lonely sirens. Somnus has given their bodies respite from obscurity obfuscation layers of haze-the gifts of consciousness. Deadened reddened vision imparts only fractions of reality yet elucidates the meshwork behind the tapestry. Round this hour the sock elves come out. There is an infestation in the city that never sleeps.

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Threshold Composition No. 20, Emmy Mikelson Gouache, oil and ink on panel

Amberly Lerner

The Visits There is a knock on the door. Maggie is reading the newest edition of Cosmopolitan, but she folds it up before her swollen feet lead her to the door. Her red hair is messily collected in a bun and she’s wearing Austin’s sweatpants, but it’s Wednesday morning. Nothing important ever happens on a Wednesday morning. “Hello?” There are two men at the door in camouflage uniforms. Maggie’s hand falls down to clutch her swollen stomach. Her bottom lip trembles. “Please,” she pleads, as if by saying the magic word, the soldiers will go away. “Miss-” “No!” Her shrill scream pierces throughout the entire neighborhood. Mrs. Heckler looks up from her garden next door. The swallow in the backyard stops singing. “Noooo! Nonononono!” +++ There is a knock on the door. At first nobody answers, because nobody is home. Snow is falling. There is a thin layer of white powder that starts to coat the top of the two soldier’s caps before Maria pulls up into the driveway. She’s humming “Feliz Navidad” to herself as she takes out a bag of newly purchased glass plates from the car. All six had cost her close to one hundred dollars. Maria drops the bag when she sees the two soldiers at the 108

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door. The glass plates inside of it fall for one, two, three, four, five seconds. Then they smash and shatter against the asphalt, making a noise that almost sounds like a symphony. +++ There is a knock on the door. Noah’s too busy watching an episode of Spongebob to notice. He’s laughing hysterically into the couch pillow, enjoying the last afternoon of what little control over the TV he has before his brother comes home. In just a day, soccer will become the only thing playing on the television screen. “Noah, can you go get the door for me, please?” As his feet dash across the tiles, Noah shivers at how cold they are. Colder than usual. “Eli?” he asks as he opens the door. His eyes dart around wildly for any sight of his brother. Noah sees two people in army uniforms, their faces softened with sadness, but no Eli. Is he playing hide-and-go-seek? “Where’s my brother?” +++ There is a knock on the door. The sound jars Elliot from his dream and rattles the walls of his crumbling house. “Little fuckers,” he says, lips curling, as if he’s smelled something rotten. “Better not be that Bennett kid again.” The shriveled man grabs his cane before inching his way to the door. “Why did I put these stairs here?” Elliot grumbles to himself, before looking up. There are two officers beyond the broken screen door. His cane drops. “Go away!” Elliot chucks the nearest object at one of the men’s heads. It’s a book. “I don’t know you!” Yet when he swipes at his cheeks, his fingers find tears. It must be an illusion. The only time he’s ever cried was when the Broncos lost the

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Th e V i si t s, Ambe rly Le r n e r

Superbowl to the Seahawks. “I don’t know you! Go away!” +++ There is a knock on the door. Basco lets out a howl. Basco always howls, whether it’s at a fleeing squirrel or a passing car or a neighboring dog. Yet as he watches his owner collapse, sobbing, into the arms of a soldier, even Basco can tell that this is not an occasion to be happy. So when he howls again, it is almost like Basco is mourning as well. Like he’s saying goodbye too, even if he doesn’t know why. +++ It’s a regular screening patrol in the Sandbox, same as always. “Been forever since I’ve talked to Daisy,” Troy rambles, being the one to drive us to the next outpost. I’m not really listening, if I’ll be honest. Ajax isn’t really listening, either. His eyes are too busy scanning the desert. Not that there’s anything to see really, other than sand, sky, and more sand. “Never have enough time to Skype her too, or write a letter, what with all the patrols we’ve been doing lately.” I’m not quite sure what’s worse; Troy blathering on and on about Daisy, or the desert remaining unchanged no matter how far we drive. “There’s this little drive-in theater near where I used to live. They’d have old movie nights on Thursday, and we’d used to go all the time-” “Yeah, man, we get it. You really miss this Daisy chick,” Ajax says with a tight-lipped smile. We both probably would’ve felt more endeared by Troy’s story, had this not been the millionth time he’s told it. “I’m sure she’s a great girl, and that you’ll get

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to see her soon. How much longer do you have to spend in this hellhole?” “Ten months.” I haven’t lost all of my patience with Troy just yet, so I make a sympathetic sound. Then again, I’ve already spent twelve months in the Sandbox. My eyes tear away from the desert terrain to land on one of the many jeeps in front of us. There’s something funny about it, something odd that I can’t explain. “Guys…” I say, before I get a proper look at the jeep. I’m no longer slouching. “Troy, Ajax. Look.” The dog tags that I’ve tied around my ankle start to burn. Nausea churns my stomach. I want to do something, maybe disarm the thing, like I’ve seen Kelly do a thousand times before with ease, but I don’t know how. Everything bursts into a world of smoke and sound. The jeep in front of us is black fumes. The other soldiers are probably ash and pink mist now. Maybe their feet will be left over in the rubble. If they’re lucky. “Holly! Aiden!” I cry out, forgetting that I’m still in the truck. They wouldn’t have been able to hear me anyway. Ajax races out into the desert, and the sight snaps me back to my senses. Holly and Aiden’s jeep might not be the only one with an IED attached to it. My jeep could also be one as well. At the thought, I twist the handle and push the door open, going past the boundary between hell and more hell. The first mistake I make is to go near the blown-up jeep. By accident, I breathe in not just the desert sand. I breathe

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in the smoke, too. My lungs tries to hack themselves up, and I’m left dizzy by a coughing fit. It’s then when I truly accept it, that it’s too late to save Holly or Aiden. When I remind myself that they weren’t the only ones patrolling with us today, that there are other people left that are still breathing. And we all need to get out of here. I rush forward, staggering a little thanks to my cough. Yet somehow, my gun is still raised. I search for Taliban to mow down. When there are none, my feet dash forward again. I scan the scene with wide eyes, before locking onto another jeep. That’s when I see it. Another IED that shouldn’t be there. Fear creeps up my spine, just like the cold air always does in the middle of winter. I’ve come too close. The jeep is mere inches away. It’s too late now to take a few steps back. I close my eyes. When an IED blows, it’s not like how it is in the movies. There’s no beep, beep, beep. It just doesn’t make a sound.

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C o n t rib u t o rs Will Berry is a junior at Brown University concentrating in Modern Culture & Media Production and Literary Arts. He enjoys cinematography, weightlifting, and scribbling whenever he is struck with an obsessive need to. He considers himself a gym rat, a cool cat, a lone wolf, a dark horse, a party animal, and, all the while, a dog-faced liar. He has previously had poetry and short stories published in Issues and The Round. Quinn Bornstein is a freshman at Brown University interested in concentrating in English or Political Science. She was a home-stay student in GijĂłn, Spain, the summer before her senior year of high school, which has influenced much of her photography and nonfiction writing. Quinn is a member of the Brown cross-country and track teams, and a member of The Round. Victor Bramble is that person. You know the type. Mack Budd is an artist who moves between the mediums of live performance, video, sound, and installation in an attempt to raise her viewersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; vibrations, as well as her own. Her work references the mystical experience and uses the ephemerality of light to create surprising and transformative works. Mack recently graduated with a BFA from the glass department at RISD. Mandi Cai is a sophomore at Brown University trying to combine her interests in biology, computer science, and visual arts into one concentration. The only way she can stay awake in class is doodling caricatures of the professor. She enjoys a good zombie apocalypse movie. Sohum Chokshi is a freshman at Brown planning to concentrate in Environmental Sciences, Visual Arts, and/or Ethnic Studies. He lives in Roselle, a suburb of Chicago, and is a member of The Round. Darren C. Demaree is a writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Round, The South Dakota Review, Meridian, The Louisville Review, Grist, and Whiskey Island. He is the author of As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art Nor Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and children.

C o n t rib u t o rs

Cara Dorris is a senior at Brown University. Her other work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Jerusalem Post, and Business Insider. Jen Frantz is a high school senior from Hudson, Ohio, where she works at an independent bookstore and does Civil War re-enacting. Outside of Hudson, Jen is also a Poetry Reader for Blueshift Journal, an up-andcoming national literary magazine. Some of her life goals include: owning a claw-foot bathtub, tasting a golden raspberry, and opening a gourmet PB&J shop. She prefers her toast burnt, thanks. Sally Hosokawa is a sophomore at Brown University concentrating in Comparative Literature. When she is not writing poetry, she enjoys playing the violin and the koto, or Japanese harp. She is a member of The Round. Yelitsa Jean-Charles is a junior at the Rhode Island School of Design studying Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design with a liberal arts concentrations in Race, Gender and Sexuality. She identifies as a visual activist and uses her art to not only create beautiful imagery, but to address social issues in a variety of media that engages the viewer and opens the door to dialogue and discussion. Liv Lansdale lives with her cat and a few ferns. Her fiction is slowly improving. Matthew D. Lee is a Brown University senior from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, concentrating in Neuroscience. He likes looking at trees and often feels compelled to touch them when they aren’t looking. Amberly Lerner is currently a high school junior who attended Brown’s pre-college program over the summer. She dabbles in creative writing, particularly fiction and short stories, and has edited for her high school’s literary magazine. This is her first publication in The Round. Andy Li is a Brown University sophomore from Chicago, concentrating in Literary Arts and Ethnic Studies. Right now, he’s interested in using good food and 2000s pop music to turn sweat into words.

C o n t rib u t o rs Emmy Mikelson is an artist and writer residing in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Hunter College, CUNY. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has appeared in Direct Art and the architecture journals Nova Organa, KTISMA, and Ampersand. She currently teaches in the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Baruch College, CUNY. Andrew Alexander Mobbs has been writing poetry for nearly a decade, primarily as an undergraduate student at the University of Central Arkansas and as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mongolia (2010-12). He released his debut poetry collection, Strangers and Pilgrims (Six Gallery Press) in 2013, and his work has appeared in Deep South Magazine, New Plains Review, and Calliope. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and cofounder of Nude Bruce Review, a nonprofit online literary magazine. Naima Msechu is a sophomore at Brown University, where she plans to concentrate in Literary Arts. She heads the fiction department of Brownâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Synecdoche magazine, and calls Rhode Island, Missouri, and her native Germany home. Her biggest regret is not yet having learned to yodel. Dora Mugerwa studies Furniture Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and Environmental Science at Brown University. She currently resides in the United States but was born and raised in Gothenburg, Sweden and is of Ugandan decent. These multicultural experiences and a deep interest in understanding the state of the human mind and body in various environments draw her to a variety of cultures in other parts of the world and motivate her conceptual work. Jed Myers is a Philadelphian living in Seattle. His poetry collections The Nameless (Finishing Line Press) and Watching the Perseids (winner of the 2013 Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award) are to be released in 2014. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and more. Larry Narron worked as a window cleaner in Southern California before studying English and creative writing at Berkeley, where he attended Joyce Carol Oatesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s short fiction workshop and was awarded the Rosenberg Prize in Lyric Poetry. His work has appeared previously in The Round, and is forthcoming in Whiskey Island, Phoebe, Coe Review, and other

C o n t rib u t o rs journals. A poetry student in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program, Larry now works as an English tutor at Portland Community College in Oregon. Tobenna Nwosu, from Lagos, Nigeria, writes fiction about migration, familial disintegration, and racial and sexual minorities. “Piano Lessons,” the first story in his collection, received a recommendation for the Rockefeller-Bellagio Residency in Northern Italy. “No War is Worth Debating,” a magic realist account of the Biafran war, appeared on the short list for the 2013 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Two stories more will be published in November: “Juden,” in The Jewish Literary Journal, and “A Toss on the Great Plains,” in The Kalahari Review. Ernesto Renda is a sophomore Brown/RISD dual-degree student from Somerset, New Jersey, studying Painting and Urban Studies. He has been working on maps for a few years, trying to find the poetics of picturing the extreme of realistic representation in a mimicry of satellite imaging. Recently he has ventured into pictorial imagery dealing with the description of geo-political space and the colonial narrative in painting. He uses maps as a framework for his compositions. Nikki Roulo is a poet applying to graduate school to study poetry and Early Modern literature. Her poems have appeared in several student literary and arts magazines, and she is currently working as a writer and a research assistant at the University of Michigan. Saudamini Siegrist earned a doctorate in English literature at NYU and a master’s in poetry at Columbia, and also taught at St. John’s University and at Fordham University. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she coedited Truth-Telling, Accountability and Reconciliation, a book on transitional justice, with the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Forge, Free State Review, The North Stone Review, and Al-Raida Journal. Currently she lives in New York City, where she works for UNICEF on issues related to humanitarian response. Evan Silver is a junior at Brown University concentrating in Literary Arts and Theatre Arts. He was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where he teaches clay, multimedia, film, and puppetmaking to eight-year-olds. He is a board member of the Production Workshop, Brown’s only completely

C o n t rib u t o rs student-run theater, and has directed a number of Brown productions. His theatre and film credits include The Snow Queen, and People Moving. Zachary Smolar is a first-year student at Brown University. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Donna Baier Stein is the author of the story collection Sympathetic People (Serving House). Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. She was a founding poetry editor at Bellevue Literary Review and now publishes Tiferet Journal. Marc Tretin is a retired attorney who specialized in Family Law and Negligence. At home with his wife, two adult children, three bunnies, three cats and a 17-year-old yellow mutt, he is happiest hiding in the basement communing with his muse or forgetting to do his chores. He has works in New York Quarterly, Bayou, CloudBank, and Willow Review. Lee Varon is a writer and social worker. Her poetry and short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in various places including: Artful Dodge, Blue Mesa Review, Euphony, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Willow Review. Hilary Wang is a visual artist and glassblower by training. She grew up in the mountainous ranges of Taiwan and moved to the United States to attend the Rhode Island School of Design where she received a BFAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;14 in Glass. She also has developed a love for liquorice. Olivia Watson is a Modern Culture & Media and Visual Art concentrator from Oklahoma whose future hopefully lies somewhere between illustration and filmmaking. Current interests include birds, women in film, the movement of water, and cities. Emily Zhang is a student from Maryland. Her poetry can be found in Burningword Literary Journal, Word Riot and theNewerYork, among others. She likes cheese and reality television. Rosaline Zhang recently graduated from the Painting department at RISD. She works with a combination of many materials and is interested in clay, bodies, the ocean, ritual, and romance.

Edit o rial St af f

Managing Editor Paige Morris Associate Editors Sienna Bates Hanna Kostamaa Staff Quinn Bornstein Linde Chen Sohum Chokshi Sarah Cooke Stefania Gomez Sally Hosokawa Anna Hundert Alexander Larned Nicole Martinez Blake Planty Emily Sun Guest Staff Amberly Lerner

We thank Brown University and Brown Graphic Services for their help and support.

No t e f ro m t h e Edit or s

The Round is a literary and visual arts magazine based at Brown University. This fall, we are incredibly proud to release Issue XI. Our name is adopted from the musical â&#x20AC;&#x153;round,â&#x20AC;? a composition in which multiple voices form an overlapping conversation. It is our mission to extend and enrich the dialogue surrounding literary and visual arts at Brown by creating a community of artists across the country and around the globe. We are excited to work on a magazine which brings together contributors with a wide variety of backgrounds, ages, and places they call home. We welcome submissions in any genre or medium and publish both students and professionals. Send your work, comments, or questions to: TheRoundMagazine@Gmail.com

Check out past issues of the magazine, view submission guidelines, and learn more about us by visiting: http://students.brown.edu/theroundmagazine

Thank you for picking up The Round. We hope you enjoy it! Sincerely, The Editors