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Noon is a time that anticipates shadow, a time when light falls straight on necks and sundials. The light at noon offers analytical clarity; it also begins a heat through which the afternoon radiates. Noon is a dense, spare border that looks into the heart without abandoning the mind. We attempt to do the same by gathering cross-sections of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art.

a note from the editors issue no. 3

It is cold, our lips are chapped, and the morning weight of blankets on shoulders and hips becomes increasingly difficult to leave. We are inspired this winter to consider the pleasures and ambiguities of embodiment: what it is to have a perceiving, feeling body, and how this body engages with others, both animate and inanimate, in the world around it.

“Sawfish,” this issue’s sampling of poetry, constructs an embodiment of grief by joining teeth, eyes, toes, and lips into verbal sculptures that represent the jarring scatter of loss.

It demonstrates how the grieving body is subject to chaos while calling attention to the power of orality, of sensations “on the teeth and under the tongue,” as a site of expression and definition. The poem’s fragment-sculptures create new, vitalized forms that reflect and sublimate the grieving body through the fact of sensing.

The fiction in this issue explores the way relationships are embodied. A family legacy is embodied by the hands needed to make taffy, a brother’s laugh is felt like a phantom limb in his absence, a family’s home is enveloped by a tree that births “a yellow Tulare peach

pumping like a heart.” The pieces at turns examine the difficulty of representing a body, struggling with capturing a lover and oneself through painting, and commemorating bodies in glimpses. Through these attempts, the stories themselves grow corporeal: they are, as “A Natural History” notes, “warm and breathing.”

The nonfiction writing in this magazine toys with the ways in which our bodies learn: in “stage / kiss / death,” Jake Kuhn interrogates how a body can teach and be taught, can manifest its lessons, can contain fluid multitudes or confine itself within strict limits.

“The In-Between” by Dominique Pariso explores the delicate space between childhood and adolescence, and the relationship between the fluid human self and the bodily states it inhabits. In an interview, filmmaker Ela Alpi shares her thoughts on the liberty, power and divinity in “the true nudity of body and soul,” celebrating embodiment as the means through which one’s external and internal realities converge.

Thank you for picking up Issue No. 3 of Thin Noon. We hope that you enjoy the body of writing we’ve gathered.

Hadley Sorsby-Jones & Stella Mensah, Poetry Naïma Msechu, Raphaela Posner & Georgia Wright, Fiction Chelsea Fernando & Lucie Fleming, Nonfiction Sara Dunn & Kathy Ng, Visual Art Editors Thin Noon Providence, RI December 2016 3

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letter from editors

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Editor-in-Chief

contents

Hadley Sorsby-Jones Poetry Editors Stella Mensah & Hadley Sorsby-Jones Fiction Editors NaĂŻma Msechu, Raphaela Posner & Georgia Wright Nonfiction Editors Chelsea Fernando & Lucie Fleming Arts Editors Sara Dunn & Kathy Ng Illustrator Sara Dunn Graphic Designer Laura Lin

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stage/kiss/death Jake Kuhn

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tried to draw lungs but they collapsed Raphaela Posner

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The In-Between Dominique Pariso

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Taffy Paige Morris

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Sawfish Kearney McDonnell

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Natural History Natasha Rao

43 for more please visit

Ela Alpi: Interview Hadley Sorsby-Jones

thinnoon.com 46

doorway of blossoms Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

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stage / kiss / death

or notes on the theatre

an essay by jake kuhn My first kiss was with a girl during rehearsal for an abridged version of Hairspray at sleepaway camp. Dusty stage under a roof like an abandoned hangar, muggy with mosquitoes in the Maine summer heat. Lilia was fifteen, and I was twelve, and sweat was pooling in all the worst places. Underneath our shorts, our bodies clamored for relief. I was that boy, and she was that girl, and in the play we made each other swoon. I didn’t tell her I had never done the real thing in real life before because I figured the rehearsal would be enough practice before audiences would see the kiss and evaluate my prowess. This time we’ll try the scene with the kiss, the director said. When the moment came, I stood on my tiptoes and pressed my mouth to hers, eyes open to make sure it was really happening. I felt a rush, not in the place where you’re supposed to feel a rush when you kiss someone, but more at the back of my neck where the skin tingles when I perform well. I did my job—make the audience root for me, make them feel for me when I kissed the girl of my dreams. What a relief, to pocket my first kiss and leave the emotional investment to some third-party strangers. A milestone for my persona, the me on stage, in public, while the me on the inside could forget about such arbitrary milestones and instead wait in peace for the kiss that would make me feel things where it felt right, off stage and in some nether region.

You hear actors talk all the time about the thrill of living in the moment on stage, those times when they stop the clock and hold the breaths of five thousand spectators captive in their hands. The ecstatic state of pure focus on what’s at stake and effortless response to the actors sharing the space with you, a cast of bodies in perfect sync. They’re not wrong 6

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about the joy of playing pretend. But there are things that actors don’t talk about: how under the pleasure, even under the frustration of trying to “get it right,” there are aspects of acting that are deeply troubling. My life is good—so why am I drawn so magnetically to pretending myself into another? Why do I love the moment when I die and the character takes over, no thinking on my part, no judging, just listening to my body and the circumstances of the story? Why do I find a stage kiss so intimate, even when it’s with a girl and I’d rather lock lips with a boy, even though it’s in front of a crowd of onlookers? I want to dive into these tensions and tear them apart, surrounding myself in the debris of an art worth making.

In every show I’ve been part of, we start each rehearsal with ten minutes of warm-ups, stupid games to energize our bodies and focus our brains. There’s the one where we pass the clap around the circle, never breaking the rhythm, and if anyone drops it we all have to melt into the sea of lava that is the floor.

There’s the one where we look across the circle at another person, waiting for them to give you permission to “go,” and then you run at them to take their space while they seek another spot to take. The goal is to pay attention so that you don’t leave anyone stuck in their spot with someone charging them. There’s the one where we send a nonsense sound and a wacky whole-body gesture around the circle, switching it until everyone has created one. There is no discernible goal for this one, except it’s stupid and goofy and you forget the bullshit weighing on your mind from the real world.

Then there’s the one we finish with, where we huddle with our arms around each other, eyes closed, breathing in sync, and count to twenty, one number at a time, starting over if two people speak at the same time. After twenty, we sing a free-form sound symphony, coming in and out of harmony with one

another, underscoring the tune with pops and scratches and snares and drips and whistles.

I imagine us ascending to heaven, climbing through golden clouds towards the heat, and then easing away just before the pinnacle, landing softly on our feet, together in the rehearsal room, present and ready to act.

In rehearsals, I spend hours working myself into a lather so I can release the muck of the day and become subsumed by the imaginary world. People think it’s easy work to play pretend: they hear kids say “Let’s play!” and the walls melt into fantasy landscapes. Pretend is the fodder of children, they think. But when kids hit middle school, inhibition raises their walls—they stop following their instinct to play, they notice one another, they wait to see what the others will do first. They are hopeful that another knows the way through the rapids of youth. No one does. Play lies hidden in some dark cranny like a pill that would give the brain the shock it needs to remember how to unlock, unleash. So we stand in circles and play stupid games and scream gibberish at each other to try to jolt ourselves awake.

And, like a traitor to the name of God, Didst break that vow, and with thy treacherous blade Unripped’st the bowels of thy sovereign son.

The First Murderer wants to kill me, the Duke of Clarence, because my brother, Richard III, turned on me in order to secure the throne for himself. The stuff of royal intrigue is soaked in blood—gore and betrayal, the tenuous bonds between men. Murderer 1 draws his dagger and throws me backward onto the bed. He straddles me and lifts his dagger. I cower as Clarence, but suddenly the scene of murder goes off-script and becomes one of sex, and the lust is as palpable as the blade on my neck. The two of us, no longer our characters but just actors in rehearsal, burst into laughter at the absurdity of where impulse led us, or maybe it was the eerie ease

of the discovery: Why kill another man when fucking him would feel the same, even better?

O, if thine eye be not a flatterer, Come thou on my side and entreat for me.

Just as Murderer 2 shows mercy and I bless her for saving my life, Murderer 1 stabs me twice in the back. I fall onto Murderer 2 and drench her in my blood, then fall onto the ground. Murderer 1 hoists me by my ankles and drags me offstage, except my head and chest are still visible from behind the curtain.

Half off-stage, relaxed, shed of my character’s life from the waist-down; half on-stage, living voraciously in the semblance of death. Maybe this is the ecstasy of death: to feel my stomach rise and fall with the tides of my breath, freed from the responsibility to perform my life and instead just be, just be, just be.

Yet while I revel in this staged death with the security of knowing I will hear applause and stand up to take my bow, I can’t help but think of the actors who have fallen before me. The performers notorious not for the life they brought to the stage but rather for their deaths mid-performance. Seventeenth-century, France: Moliére had tuberculosis when he wrote and performed in his final comedy, Le malade imaginaire, or The Imaginary Invalid.

He played Monsiuer Argan, a hypochondriac who medicated his perfectly healthy body, and in an ironic twist of fate, Moliére was struck by a coughing fit, spewing blood onto the stage. Actors at the time were paid wages by the King, servants of the state, and excommunicated by the Church, which condemned the theatre as a school for scandal. If they didn’t perform every night, they would be thrown in jail; if they did perform, upon death they were banned from burial in the cemetery and often thrown in the gutter. It seems barbaric today to treat actors in this way, but I understand how a society could find itself entangled in such a paradox: to demand the liveness of entertainers and to fear how their spirits might 7

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stage/kiss/death by sara dunn

live on in mysterious ways after death. Maybe actors are always on the cusp of popularity and infamy, sexy and deadly. Moliére’s wife sweet-talked the King into letting the favored playwright be buried among unbaptized infants in the far corner of the graveyard.

Mid-twentieth century, Wales: Gareth Jones appeared in a live television broadcast of the play Underground when he suffered a massive heart attack while off-camera between two of his scenes, visible to the actors on set who were awaiting his arrival. His character was meant to have a heart attack during the course of the play. I see no other possibility for his death than role preparation gone wrong. I wonder when he crossed the barrier between play and real, if he recognized his misstep, if he left any warnings for the rest of us before he went. Late-twentieth century, London: magician Tommy Cooper, famous for his red fez, turned to an assistant hidden behind a curtain to fetch an object which he would appear to pull from within his cloak, and then he collapsed. The event was being televised live, and the studio audience roared with laughter, believing his fall to be part of the act. Cooper was pulled offstage while the following acts continued the show, and the audience didn’t find out until afterward what happened. If the spectators believed his death to be the punchline to his routine, who’s to say his very real death wasn’t a performance after all? I see here how the magic of theatre has everything to do with the audience’s willingness to believe in something imagined, to delight in something morbid and grotesque because they believe it is not real.

Even though I know that what happens on stage is fiction, I carry the experience with me when I take off my costume and leave the theatre. Some actors find themselves in ruin because of fame; I think it’s because they can get lost in the baggage of the roles they play, night after night pushing their bodies to extremes. Vivian Leigh was known to mutter

Blanche Dubois’ lines to herself backstage, even when playing other roles. I worry when my roles are villains or even harsh people; I search for the humanity in all of them, hoping to take with me an ounce of light.

A memo to the director before the first rehearsal:

Make me feel pretty. Make me feel lovely. Make me feel like this world we’re creating is a glacier about to slide into the sea of me at any moment, silently and making not a single ripple.

Make me feel like the things you only bring your stars to feel, make me your star. Make me feel the magic.

Break the magic, and make me feel the scum of reality, the scaffolding.

Make me feel dirty. No, make me feel filthy. No, make me feel clean, but in a dirty kind of way that disgusts the spectators. Make me feel so ugly I feel beautiful, my blood and tears splattered across the stage like constellations blanketing the universe.

Make me feel like I can do anything as long as I’m not me. Make me feel so not-me I’m really, gutturally, shudderingly me.

Why do I want this so bad, to reach such release only to be told it’s not mine, it’s someone else’s pleasure? Why do I want to feel for others but not for myself ? I steal tiny slivers of these emotions I find on stage, I pick them and I store them in an invisible chest I can open much later, when the lights are off and the only person watching me is myself in the mirror.

Smoke a cigarette now and have another for mawnin’. You’re not managing right. Need advice and … company in this sad ole house.

I’m happy to give both if accepted.

Seduction is a game, one that I fumble at in real life—my brain follows ten strategies at 9

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once; I get subsumed by the mud of unfinished thoughts. On stage, though, I slip into Nightingale’s slick skin and slink around The Writer’s bedroom like a pro, guided by the ebb and flow of Tennessee William’s lilting lyrics. His plays are like albums, each scene a song decrying his characters’ fragile hearts and broken spirits, their need to make their ugly worlds beautiful. In the dark of this dilapidated boarding house in the French Quarter, I offer The Writer the two things any closeted young man yearns for the most—a bit of advice and companionship. Even though Nightingale is verbose and overbearing to the point of being creepy, I imagine how my life would have played out if I’d had the chance to play a gay character earlier in my life—how it might have freed me from playing straight for all those years. How the fiction on stage might have bled into my personal life, easing the unmasking of my reality. Or maybe I would have said what so many straight actors who play queer characters tell the media: that an actor’s personal life and sexuality don’t matter for casting decisions, that any good actor can play anyone, that it’s all pretend.

Isn’t that the measure of success—how well you can transform into someone else, without letting go of those impulses at the core of you, the real you? Perhaps, but I can’t help but feel that all of those times I’ve had to play straight in strange cities for my safety, to ensure I don’t die, warrants the privilege to play on stage not only my character’s truth, but my own too.

You are alone in the world, and I am too.

Listen! Rain.

I lock The Writer in my arms and touch my lips to the tender skin of his neck, once on each side, catch his watery eyes and feel him melt into me ever so slightly. I kiss his mouth, soft at first then firm, inhaling the scent of his wanting. My lips remember the taste of his, the texture of his skin and his fingers gentle on my waist, and for a second this moment 10

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in the present collapses with my memory of a night in the past. Eight months ago we spent the night together in my dorm room, and my body can’t help but ignite the same rumblings deep beneath my belly. For every stage kiss I share with a woman, I figure out the choreography of my body by imagining what it’s like to kiss the boy I like most. But now I don’t need a substitution, my body knows what to do, and I find that ecstatic release: forgetting this is acting and succumbing to the tug of this boy in front of me, of this writer in front of Nightingale. And then, blackout, applause, and I realize this is the first time I have kissed a boy in front of other people.

Sex—and homosexuality—have been inextricably linked with the theatre for centuries. Take the seventeenth century in London. Making ends meet: the actors labored in a profession with so little respect, they took money from where they could find it, prostituting themselves to patrons after the shows. At least that’s how some accounts would wright the narrative—a starving artist driven to sodomy to survive. The London playhouses of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period were condemned as the haunts of the sodomite, as poet Michael Drayton wrote in his volume The Moone-Calfe in 1627. Another poet described the sodomite as a passionate theatre-goer “who is at every play and every night sups with his ingles.” Ingles being young male prostitutes. But there’s no evidence that money exchanged hands—no “prostitutes,” per se, just actors meeting up with their fans in the bawdy tavern beside the theatre, accepting a beer and the company of those who appreciated their work. Or maybe the exertion of performing riled them up and made them insatiably horny. Trial records indicate that the actors engaged in homosexual sex for pleasure, not profit. I see how the Puritans would paint the theatre district as a hotbed of debauchery and immorality—how the theatre unleashes pent up energies, urging these men

to do away with divinity and find God in each other.

The stuff was beautiful and it was deadly. It was called oshiroi, and it was a powder makeup that produced a gorgeous semigloss white for geisha and for onnagata, and it contained a white lead carbonate imported from China.

The book I read for class said that some suffered partial paralysis due to lead poisoning; some died. The stuff was used for decades in seventeenth-century Japan in kabuki theater to turn the young men and boys who had the honor of being onnagata into their female stage characters. Layers: after the oshiroi was applied, the eyes were painted with red circles to render them sad and gentle; the neck was painted with dots to highlight the eroticism of that fleshy, vulnerable isthmus connecting brain and body. The onnagata were never allowed to appear otherwise in public because their femininity was the object of desire for all: women wanted to imitate them, and men wanted to sleep with them. Offstage the onnagata were courtesans, highly sought after by wealthy patrons who would vie for their affections and services. Men sent the onnagata letters elucidating their homosexual love, or was it lust, a lust for celebrity? They would prove their devotion by slashing their arms or slicing off the tip of a finger and throwing it on stage, like a bouquet of roses. Homosexual desire, flourishing, elegant: the kabuki onnagata actors prayed to their patron saint Aizen Myo-o in the Great Temple in Naniwa, hanging their love letters on the cherry tree, sometimes sealed, sometimes open for all to read, praying to be united with their lovers.

A revision to the memo to the director: Take my requests with a grain of salt.

Please ignore my irreverence, for I would not want you to get the wrong impression that I am unprofessional. I know what you and all of my instructors have drilled into my brain day after day in the studio. I know

that you say it is not an actor’s job to feel these things, that an actor’s job is to render this imaginary playscape so truthfully it brings the audience to its knees. I know that you say we must work to inhabit the play’s given circumstances so that the audience can feel, not indulge in feeling for ourselves. I know that I must not relish in the joy of straining emotions through the porous grit of life—save that for my private rehearsals in the darkness of my home. I know what the rules are. I know how dangerous it is to play with such dynamite—how feelings can explode and derail a performance. I know that it is my focus and my ability to play the character’s objectives that will take me through to the finale, smooth as ice. Those are the tools that lend us the appearance of a visceral emotional life on stage, but really, underneath it all, we must be technical and precise as we navigate the map of the play. Theatre is poetry at the surface but cold mathematics at its core. So ignore what I said about wanting you to bring me to the edge of myself. I won’t hold you liable for my own self-destruction, even as I am drawn down this slippery slide.

My own death plays out in front of me about a dozen times every day: when I cross the street, I feel a semi slam into me and crush my spine; in the elevator, the cable breaks and I fall, a boy suspended in a box for three weightless seconds; I choke on water down the wrong pipe, my brain gets fried by staring into the microwave from too close, my seatbelt prevents me from being thrown from the car but it breaks my ribs which puncture an artery. Sometimes it’s less of an accident: strangling myself with my laptop charger, slipping out a high window like a whisper, swallowing so many vitamin D supplements I explode. If you never do anything, if you just imagine the staging of your own death without fulfilling it, it doesn’t count as suicidal thoughts.

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tried to draw lungs but they collapsed

The play in my head isn’t real, so neither is my death wish; I’m just sad and have a fascination with the thought of my blood pouring out into the world, proof that life is in me and I’m not just some puppet on a stage. It helps to know that some day I’ll get to die on stage again, and for a moment the world will forget I’m alive and feel the brutal weight of my loss, only to remember with relief that their imaginations have suspended reality and I’m still here, I’m still here.

after lyn hejinian

by raphaela posner I painted the same flowers. We had wandered through the wetlands searching for names that would “fit us,” hoping there was something beyond those we already had. Sometimes I let my face go limp with thought. We drew in deep breaths of summer air left soggy from the rain. I got blood drawn three times in three days, my arm resembling that of someone who had found something they couldn’t quit. I tried to let you walk away. My family and I each have a set of the same watercolors that we bought on sale at Meininger’s when the rain made it hard to enjoy the pool. I took a shower outside and wished that you could be there to watch as I jumped at the spiders.

We learned science together. Some of the time I think you loved me but most of the time I think you had never spent time with a girl before and that was weird because you aren’t anti-social. I tried to draw lungs with my brush but they collapsed with each stroke. I opened

Jake Kuhn is a senior at Brown University concentrating in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies.

He has a penchant for apocalyptic love stories.

a map on my phone in the car, unfamiliar with the feeling of needing directions. You were searching for words that didn’t work without their prefix attached. The flowers didn’t look like any I’d seen before, nothing I could identify in a book of plants. I planned out a weekend we’d never go on in my head, complete with mountain town bed and breakfasts and a covered wagon that had been converted into a room nestled next to the hot springs.

You went to yoga and tried to learn how to bend your knees and breathe in a relaxing way while I tried not to laugh. I thought of the way your eyes wrinkled when I told you I was scared of something crawling upon my skin.

You wore purple shirts painted with dinosaurs and I tried to capture you in the paint but I never was able to articulate you in the way you did words. I breathed in the scent of flowers and someone I’d never know.

Raphaela Posner is a junior at Brown University, where she studies English with a focus on nonfiction writing. She is also interested in exploring the world of medical humanities and is a part of Brown's Program in Liberal Medical Education. Raphaela is from Denver, Colorado.

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the in-between an essay by dominique pariso A brief list of things to be found in this particular house: three bedrooms, two and a half baths, five children (two principle, three picked up along the way), three mattresses, a pissedstained rug, whipped cream, and one small dog responsible for most of the pissing.

Gather together the murmurs, the creaks, the memory and hold it together with silver thread. +++ Has anyone ever managed to describe the moment right before we fall asleep with any accuracy? Poe wrote on the “fancies” he experienced on this brink “with consciousness that I am so.” Oliver Twist contains elaborate page-long descriptions of this state (but hey, Dickens was paid by the word). I can’t quite find the words, so I rely on comparisons to a drowsy car ride or childhood. A sense of sliding through from one place to another, arriving, blinking dumbly, not quite sure as to how you made it here from there.

See also: daydreaming, lucid-dreaming, sleep paralysis, and sleepwalking. Sleep paralysis is what happens when your brain and mind decide to stop speaking to each other. In other words: a disconnect. On the other hand, sleepwalking is what happens when your dreaming mind and your legs are whispering in each others’ ears, mischievous, collaborating. Daydreaming and lucid-dreaming are inversions of each other, but both take up the right space in wrong ways.

So I can take it that sleeping is more a bleeding edge than a border zone. +++ I am lying on the bed, not sleeping, too hot to wear anything but underwear, not unlike

a beached whale. I too long to be underwater right now. You very carefully pluck the ingrown hairs around my bikini line with a pair of tweezers. Later, I’ll squeeze the zits on your back, just as careful. This is not voyeuristic. This is not even intimate. I have a right to be here because I bore witness to its becoming, same as you to me. We groomed and preened, side by side. There is a striking resemblance, we could be mistaken for sisters. Laying on my back, I count the birds I stuck to the wall, there are nineteen in all, sitting on a line, adhesive backed. What if one unstuck itself and circled the fan?

There is a type of cuckoo bird, cousin to the roadrunner, that carefully plants their eggs in the nests of other species. They do this by tossing one of the brood's real eggs out, and slipping their own in unnoticed. A changeling.

But the cuckoo chick can never get enough food from their host family. It pines, outgrows the nest that’s not big enough to sustain it.

A wet towel yet again lies innocently on the carpet which I’ve told you a million times not to do.

I feel my breath gently raise my curves and my hills on the bed. You are taut skin stretched over hallow bones, woodland creatures could sip water out of your collarbone.

Whoever designed our family had a real eye for balance.

Three a.m.: you sit, cross-legged, gleefully picking fights on the Internet, delicately eating from an industrial size bag of Doritos and sipping on ice water.

Two years ago I gave impassioned sermons on the virtues of safe sex. You are now 14, and tell me what it feels like to impale yourself on a boy, not impassioned at all; I am 17, hymen still intact. This fact makes you vaguely pleased. There are somehow no barriers here, no borders to separate us. Our words travel freely across the bed, like little paper boats in a gentle current. I pick one up, unfold it, and

the in-between by sara dunn

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read the shorthand clearly written upon it.

You treat sex like it’s a dare. Like its something to do to pass the time. I do not worry though; you are far too fast to get crushed by anything as common as a boy-sized anvil.

Beware of motherless chicks: they will eat you alive. +++ In this no man’s land, there are also ghosts.

But that was the thing about M., (the “you” previously mentioned) she was a very different creature. When she found her ghosts outside our house in a brown box marked FREE she gave each a name, so she could never give them away. She spoon fed them cream, watched them grow, and wrapped herself in them to keep warm. They sleep nestled under her eyelids and hang on that little drop of skin at the back of her throat.

But I guess I’m not all that better, am I? I stuck out my tongue, placed it in the center like a host, and felt mine begin to dissolve like a sugar cube. Rolled it around in my mouth like a marble, or maybe a piece of hard candy, and then swallowed it whole.

As it turns out it is very possible to consume sadness.

And there are all different kinds—lemon bar sadness, jam and mayonnaise sadness, wilted lettuce sadness. And there’s a sadness in letting all of that slide down your throat so the original sadness has friends and can feel full for a little while.

There is a way to be a body paleontologist: keep digging until you hit old bones. When the first rib emerges, pluck it out, plant it in fertile soil, it will be the seed you need to grow your new outline. +++ Later, we are asleep in the bed that M. and I share. She flings her leg over my body, hits me in the face with her arm. We engage in a silent 16

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tug of war over the sheet. She mumbles something. I lean closer. These are sounds coming up from the bottom of the ocean floor.

Down the hall, I hear my brother thrashing against sheets that are moonlighting (for one night only!) as a roiling sea, calling out from down the hall. He is stuck, once more, in the inbetween.

We are all being evicted from childhood, forced to inhabit bodies we have not yet grown into. So if there is a disconnect between the body and the interior, is sleep the bridge? Or is it more of a gap?

I read the concave indent you’ve made on the bed like it’s a code only I can decipher.

a box, then placed that box on the fire pit.

A funeral pyre felt more appropriate than a burial. I lit the flame because I’m the oldest.

Heads bowed, we chanted goodbyes over wood crackling, I peered up and saw their faces through a smoke screen. +++ What I mean to say is this: back then we were still trying to build our shape, this shape would be the one our fluid selves would figure out how to fill, with things we picked up along the way from point A to point B. And we built it with twigs and with spit.

+++ Here are three, short, true stories: 1. When he was ten I caught my brother in a valiant attempt to climb into the toilet proclaiming “I AM TOILETMAN”, a subterranean superhero of the septic tank. I’m not sure exactly what he thought he’d find.

Mutant turtles? The center of the Earth?

His kingdom?

2. I once had a dream that I was running away from home, I woke up halfway across the yard, pajama legs dew soaked, my bid for freedom stopped short by a waking brain.

3. I am pinned down, there is a shadowy man standing over me. I open my mouth to scream but I can’t. Try to at least turn my head, but I can’t. I lie there in wait. +++ A bird flew into the window, there was a flurry, a sickening thud! then nothing. It thought it saw an opening where there wasn’t one. That thud where flight became weightfulness, the space in between a heartbeat. M. and I leaned out the window slowly, Saturday cartoon slow, somber.

We wrapped it in a towel, then put it in

Dominique Pariso studies English Literature at Brown University and is a Features Editor for the College Hill Independent.

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taffy by paige morris Between the two of us, it was my sister who got the blessed hands. Just like how she gets all the things I haven’t earned—the adoration of island boys, love and kisses from Mum and Daddy, praise from all the folks in our small, coastal town.

She’ll even get the shop one day, I bet. I’m not ashamed to say the family business will be her inheritance and not mine. Even though I was crawlin’ and waddlin’ and runnin’ up and down the aisles in the shop before she could even sit up straight, I know that now, in the summers, it is Gracie the tourists press their faces up against the window to see.

Gracie, her skin like buttercream, pipin’ neat rows of frosted flowers onto cupcakes, sculptin’ the petals with quick, certain squeezes of the pipin’ bag. Young kids come barrelin’ into the shop, laughin’ and trackin’ sand in with their bare feet, but they’d hush up right away when they saw her. Like their lungs had been zipped up, the breath caught in their throats.

Kids who ran wild all day would all of a sudden stop runnin’, all the sand seemin’ to sweep itself up and out of the doorway when they came in. They would watch my sister, tongue between her teeth in concentration, pin the last of the sugar pearls onto a weddin’ cake.

Everyone comes to the coast to marry in late summer. These are the months we make our livin’, my father and sister and me, sellin’ souvenirs and sweets on the boardwalk. The rest of the year, we live in the marshlands, but come summers, we return to the shop our father loves like a third daughter, a fresh coat of teal paint on its face each time we see it so that it never seems to age.

This summer, Gracie’s been handlin’ the cakes and customers, while Daddy gives me 18

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what he believes to be the easy tasks. So I sweep the floors, take inventory at the end of each afternoon, and spend most of my days in the kitchen makin’ the saltwater taffy.

Our shop is a favorite spot to get taffy on the shore. Tourists snatch them up in fistfuls, Daddy tells me all the time, scoopin’ up a palm of candies twist-tied in frosty wax paper.

Near-collectibles, with their pastel hues and sweet flavors. We sell ’em boxed, so they never have to look as pretty as anythin’ Gracie makes to show off in the glass display. But I still try. I play with the colors, make them in all sorts of sea glass shades.

It is solitary work, just me and this taffy. I stand in the kitchen over a saucepot bubblin’ with sugar. I hum songs to pass the time while I wait for the caramel to almost-burn, for the pink colorin’ to take.

The taffy is comin’ slow today. All mornin’, the local boys on the summer staff—hired only to lift heavy boxes—move back and forth through the doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Conversations from the shop float into the kitchen between door swings. At one point, I hear a man with a voice gritty like sand tellin’ my sister she is beautiful. Eyes, green like jellyfish. Translucent.

Gracie is used to men flirtin’ with her from the other side of the counter, buyin’ a keychain or a postcard, even if they’re from the island, just for an excuse to brush her hand as she gives them a handwritten receipt and change.

The latest man asks Gracie, playfully, whether her heart already belongs to some island boy or other, and won’t she come away with him when he returns to the States at the end of the summer?

She laughs. The doors swing shut before I can catch her reply.

When the caramel is done, I pour it into a glass pan to cool. I’m wipin’ my hands clean on my pants when Daddy breezes into the kitchen. He comes by the counter and peers

over my shoulder at the candy.

“I made a new batch,” I say, steppin’ back so he can see. “Look. It’s pink, like the inside of a shell.”

He reaches in. Pulls up a small piece to taste.

He clicks his teeth at me and says, “Only thing about this that’s like a shell is this texture.

There’s no flavor, Genoveve. No taste.”

I pinch a bit of taffy from the pan and try it. My eyes burn, angry that he’s right.

“Not everybody got the hands for confection,” Daddy says, and I know he is thinkin’ of Gracie, her sugar pearls and frosted roses, and of my taffy, which is hard on the teeth. + I guess I’ve always known Gracie would excel in the business of sweetness. Of smilin’ and noddin’ and sayin’ thank you, please visit the beautiful Bermuda Islands again. Even though we both are island girls, raised on precipices, my sister’s always been the kind of wild that tourists love, and me—I’ve always been clumsy hands, too much sea salt and trouble.

I began to hate her for it early on, the way she could resolve any disagreements with a laugh, a soft kiss on the cheek. She had always been this way with our father, and even with Mum, but when Gracie started senior school at the academy on the island’s northern tip— once her hips had rounded and her dimples had deepened and her skin had browned the tiniest bit from a summer of workin’ on the shore—that was when my teeth started hurtin’ at the sight of her.

I would hear that laugh of hers through the walls each afternoon, in the hours we were home alone while Daddy drove tourists in cabs around the island and our mother washed linens for the hotels on the coast.

I came home right after school most days, lyin’ in bed and readin’ old romance novels to forget the day I’d had. Gracie would always come home an hour or so later, her voice and

some stranger’s carryin’ through the whole house and disappearin’ without really disappearin’ into her room.

If I held my breath and focused, I could make the world soundless when she was close by. I could fill my head with an ocean if I wanted.

When Gracie brought home boys, I would call in the tide, inhale and hold the breath as long as I could before my chest started burnin’, all my thoughts floatin’, cloudy, in my head.

But without fail, Gracie’s soft chime of a laugh would snatch the breath out of me, and then I could hear all sorts of things happenin’ in the room next door through the walls, thin as wafers.

I heard Gracie whisperin’, Shh. And laughin’, Keep your voice down. And then there was the quiet. The kind of quiet anythin’ could be happenin’ in.

Boys loved my sister. And I don’t mean that they loved to kiss on her and touch on her, though I know they loved those things, too. I mean, the way boys looked at Gracie reminded me of how tourists looked out at the sea. Like it was the most beautiful thing they would ever stand in front of, and they were already mournin’ the loss of it when their vacations ended and they returned home to their duller shores.

I heard soft, clumsy noises through the wall and knew whatever the boy was doin’ to my sister, he was doin’ it in the same desperate way I made taffy, or did anythin’. It hurt to listen to.

I shut my eyes, tight. Callin’ in the tide.

When I opened them, sound burst everywhere.

Lightnin’ flashed, bright like a camera’s pop, and the whole house shook with the thunder that rolled out. I heard Gracie shriek and somethin’ thud against the floor before the downpour of rain started up outside, scrapin’ at the windows and floodin’ out all other noise.

I was happy, then. To be swallowed up in the sound of a storm. And I knew Gracie 19

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taffy by sara dunn

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would be in a bad mood later on, once the boy left and the rain stopped and our parents came home for dinner. But right then, I felt comfortable inside that chaos. Wasn’t bothered at all by the thought of what would come after.

That night, Gracie came by my room and climbed into bed, curlin’ herself up like a cat near my feet. I was readin’ a book about time travel, imaginin’ all kinds of ways I could leap into a future somewhere far away from the coast.

“Gen.” When Gracie whispered, her voice reminded me of flour siftin’. “Have you … done it yet?”

I tried to imagine what it was that I might have forgotten to do. And then I remembered Gracie’s laugh. The awful quiet in her room.

The boy from earlier. “No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

“You ever thought about it? What it might be like?”

I brought the book up to my face, so close the words crossed into one another and I couldn’t tell what was happenin’ in the story anymore.

“You’ve never had a boyfriend, have you?”

I considered lyin’, but she gave me a knowin’ look. I shook my head.

“Oh, island boys are fun. They’ll give anythin’ for you to pay them some attention. If you learn one of ’em by name, he’ll sneak the keys to his daddy’s car and drive you around the island in it with the windows down so everyone can see you in it, if you ask. Island boys will sneak you into their house even when their parents at home, they’re so needy.” Gracie rolled onto her side to look up at me. “You never been inside a boy’s house either, huh?”

I didn’t say a word.

Gracie sucked her teeth, hard. “It’s no fun talkin’ to you about any of this,” she sighed.

“What’s the point of havin’ a big sister when she just acts like a child?”

My chest stung, like my lungs were flooded with saltwater. My throat all dried out, too. It

hurt to swallow.

Gracie stood up. I felt her weight disappear from the bed. She said goodnight and slipped out into the hallway. The door shut behind her with a click.

I saw my hands, then, shakin’ at the margins of the book. I set the novel aside, clenchin’ and unclenchin’ my fists to stop the trembles.

Outside the window, I could just make out the soft patter of new rain startin’ up. I shut my eyes. Inhaled, slow, in and out and in again until I fell asleep.

By mornin’, the wind had felled a half-dozen cedars on our street. Split power lines dangled and swayed back and forth like jump ropes, sparks of light spittin’ from their frayed tips.

At breakfast, Gracie shrieked and covered her ears each time the wind ripped through the air in a whistle. Mum consoled her baby girl, pattin’ her on the back. I tried not to laugh each time the thunder pealed and Gracie winced.

Sometimes I pitied her more than I envied her. And other times, I felt like a hurricane tearin’ through my own house. My sister, in her usual way, was just a peaceful island. A still shoreline undeservin’ of the havoc I swept through and wreaked on her. + Late in the month, we get a new wave of tourists.

This is unusual for us. The end of August has always meant the quiet comin’ back to the coast, the beach umbrellas foldin’ in and the rusted gates rollin’ down over the shop doors and windows.

But as of this mornin’, a new cruise ship has arrived at the port and the rental houses have filled up again. I know this because Daddy is shoutin’ at the back of my head and we got all four saucepots goin’ on the stove at once.

“Finish this up, Genoveve! We needed 21

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more taffy yesterday!”

“I made an extra batch last night—the papaya ones, don’t you remember?”

I ask even though I know he can’t keep track of his own name most days, let alone of me.

One afternoon earlier in the summer when the shop wasn’t so busy, he got around to lookin’ at me as I swept the store aisles.

He frowned. “What’s that there?” he said, waggin’ his finger at my face. “That nasty little scar?”

I gripped the broom in one hand and touched my forehead with the other. I knew he was pointin’ at the puckered kiss of skin where my head had cracked against a rock underwater when I was twelve.

The day it happened, five years before, he’d been the one to pull me out, screamin’, from the sea. He was the one who pressed a towel to the wound, who muttered under his breath about how I was bleedin’ all over the clean floor tiles as I sobbed. But when he saw the scar that afternoon in the shop, he squinted like it was a face he didn’t recognize.

Now, he moves around me, pullin’ down ingredients from the shelf. Sacks hit the ground in succession, like pistons firin’, all the smoke of cornstarch dust risin’ and settlin’ over everythin’. Granules of sugar roll out like tiny marbles across the floor.

“Five hundred pieces of taffy, wrapped and boxed by noon,” Daddy barks at the stove, as though the taffy will cook and cool and stretch itself at his command, without me.

I look up at the tiny clock we keep above the stove, its fogged-up face. It’s slightly past eight in the mornin’. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I start to say, but Daddy’s already movin’ through the doors, and the candy in the saucepots is already comin’ to a boil.

I work through the mornin’. The blisters on my hands burst, skin flowerin’ out on my palms. The taffy comes out hard. I pull on it. The flavor is weak and won’t stay on my 22

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tongue. I sugar and salt it, but it won’t give.

Gracie comes by the kitchen later and I’m standin’ over the saucepot, steam makin’ my whole face wet.

Without a word, my sister grabs a pair of oven mitts from one of the drawers, adjusts the heat on the stove and pulls down one of the wooden spoons from the collection of utensils danglin’ like ornaments over our heads. I stand beside her, quiet, while she stirs things back into place. + It’s been six summers now that I’ve worked in Daddy’s shop. I remember some of the sweets recipes better than I remember my own face some days. It isn’t difficult to make taffy—it’s almost all sugar, all heat. The difficult thing is Daddy, his mouth that never smiles at me or at the taste of the taffy I make.

At the end of each tourist season, we all return home with tans and one or two of Gracie’s cakes from the display window to share with Mum. We don’t bring back any of my taffy. Sometimes Daddy tosses handfuls of it to the gulls before we leave the shore. We return home, and each summer I vow that the next summer will be when I discover my confectioner’s hands.

I practice in our kitchen durin’ the year, with the ingredients I sneak back in my suitcase from the shop and special flavors I collect as the summer goes on. Once, I tried to make taffy that tasted like a day at the shore, crushed seaweed and shards of shell I had plucked right out of the sand rolled into the candy, to taste. I tried to make taffy that reminded me of the sky over the beach at the end of August, a candy as gray as a thundercloud and the flavor dark as rain, so I used rainwater instead of tap, but the taste always came out different than I’d hoped. I think this is where I went wrong with the taffy, tryin’ so hard to capture somethin’ in the small,

wrapped candies that just wasn’t meant to be contained.

And in the end, all of the taffy I tried to make seized up or fell bland, like the thing I’d tried to capture had evaporated, leavin’ not a single trace of flavor behind. + The tourists are havin’ a bonfire on the beach.

Daddy closes the shop early for the evenin’ so that he and Gracie can join them, laugh their big laughs and roast marshmallows on skewers with the families here on their holidays. The laughter and bonfire smoke finds me all the way in the shop’s kitchen, where I am workin’ on a batch of taffy the color of the sea. I stir and scrape and stretch the taffy, hopin’ that it gives.

The kitchen is still choked with steam from earlier, so I take the taffy outside to chill. The sun has set and everythin’ on the shore is bluegray like an old bruise. Like the scar on my forehead—a reminder that I, too, can break open like a sky.

I hold a bundle of taffy in my hands. I’m so blistered I can’t even feel my skin anymore.

I see Gracie down by the bonfire, her curls swayin’ like cattails in the breeze. I carry the taffy down the boardwalk, onto the beach, followin’ the sound of her laughter all the way down.

“Gracie.”

One of the tourist girls sittin’ beside her stops mid-word and looks up, wide-eyed.

Gracie turns to me, too. Her smile is hard as rock candy.

“I need help,” I say.

Gracie leans in and whispers somethin’ to her new friends, thin girls in patterned bikinis who throw their heads back when they laugh.

My sister stands, brushin’ sand off her shorts. I follow her down the shore, away from everyone.

When we get far enough out that I can’t

even see the light from the fire, she says, “Okay. What is it?”

“It’s the taffy.”

“What about the taffy?”

“I can’t get it perfect like you do. Daddy says I make it too hard.” I remember his word for it, heavy in my mouth. “Inedible.”

“It’s hard because you don’t stretch it, Gen.” “I do stretch it,” I insist. I pull it out between my hands like an accordion as proof.

“Taffy needs to be stretched farther than that, and for a longer time.”

The taffy droops between my hands. “My arms only open so wide.”

Gracie sighs. She grabs some taffy in her two fists, diggin’ her nails into the gum of it, and she starts to pull. I grip what’s left in my hands as she takes more and more of it down the shoreline with her.

Two long highway lanes of the stuff hang taut as tightropes between us. The cords, thick and strainin’. A soft sky blue.

Gracie is about ten or fifteen houses down now and still pullin’. Her feet sink into the sand with every step backward. She drags her fistfuls down the shore, testin’ the strength of the strings like she’s fixin’ up a flimsy kite to fly.

A drop of water lands on my nose. The air has some of the same stick and taste as the taffy. Behind my sister, a flash of light cuts the sky in half.

“Keep goin’,” I shout. I don’t know if she can hear me. All the shutters on the beach houses rattle in the storm winds.

Thunder claps.

This time, when the sky flashes, I can’t even see her, she’s so far out. I only know she’s still movin’ from the tug I feel on my hands.

I can’t make her out at all. Can’t hear a word over the wind. So I close my eyes and I hope she keeps on walkin’. Away. Far from me. Down the shore. Past more rental houses.

Alongside the wind. Keep goin’ and goin’ and goin’. Walk right into a slice of lightnin’.

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sawfish by kearney mcdonnel

entreat the furniture

I wrap the living room in string around armchairs doorknobs lampposts around iron goat leaping

Paige Morris is an English language teacher with Fulbright Korea. She is a Brown graduate who is passionate about fiction, spoken word poetry, teaching, and, most importantly, the power of these disciplines in working towards a socially equitable world.

She is the recipient of the 2016 Feldman Prize in Fiction from the Brown University Department of Literary Arts and Casey Shearer Memorial Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction from the Brown University Department of English.

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burial at sea they toss his ashes into the ocean the wind blows so that they are on my teeth under my tongue

mom winds her way around the edge of a beach her father an iron hip sculpts goats from used car chrome

red installation hold wooden boards to floor builds stilts from discarded floor boards I fall from their height cracking my tooth on slate the remnants turn to chalk impossible to preserve in a glass of milk

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I bargain with furniture mom takes a skein of red string wraps it around my arms wrists ankles

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dad sinks into himself dark and quiet ocean lip droops left neglect eyes closed prunes pear trees silently

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mom combs for pipe-stems amidst fish-ribs and rocks fills her fist strings a necklace her jaw like a sawfish iron of replaced hip fused like bumper chrome

you drive me to the cape the coldest day of the year the beach is frozen over rocks coated in ice inches deep white shining brutally cold wearing blankets striped blue and pink walk to the lighthouse reach the top it is bright we are just a hair too alone

I build structures on sand from washed up floor boards pipestems sawfish bones my own teeth

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I stack my teeth like bricks enamel cracking like mortar

beachcomber’s marrow watching for cheekbones on wooden planks hedged into bulwark rotting from the tide building row boats thrones bedrooms on wet sand like cement I sit on the furniture

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mom binds me in enamel bathes me in goat’s milk washes my face dips her toe in a pool of it

I soak in it at night rinsing salt from my skin

Kearney McDonnell grew up in Pipersville, PA. She is studying Visual Arts at Brown and is interested in therapy, puppetry, and creative writing.

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a natural history

“May I sit here?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What are you writing?”

“A poem.”

by natasha rao ORIGIN

It began brightly, 4.5 billion years ago. Every day since has been growing brighter.

THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

Modern human beings emerged from a lineage of upright-walking apes.

It was an elegant progression. This part of our history is not something that you can easily remember, but it is possible, sometimes, to experience a fleeting recollection. (Much in the same way my mother says the redblack we see when we close our eyes is a memory of the womb.) Perhaps for a moment you are reminded of where you came from when standing in a dense area of trees, while light is falling softly, and you take a deep breath that smells like worms and ancient history. Or when you look up at the sky changing colors and the earth feels round and full, and suddenly you get the sense that you have been part of it all since the very beginning.

Our past can be felt in the joy of sweat, of milk, of hair, in this deepseated warmth that we still remember in our bones.

PHYLOGENETIC TREES

In my veins I see a map.

SELECTION

When tracing a phylogenetic tree, one arrives at a question: Why do these two branches meet? I don’t mean because habilis led to erectus led to sapiens neanderthalensis led to sapiens sapiens. I mean how did any of us end up here at this very moment? How did I? Lines in a family tree are lines of a story. Look closely and you can see these tales in fading ink; the dash between my great grandmother and my great grandfather is not a dash at all.

1921

1921

Leela walked-into-a-paper-shop-saw-a-man-with-white-pulp-under-his-fingernailsLeela walked-into-a-paper-shop-saw-a-man-with-white-pulp-under-his-fingernails-thought-this-will-be-the-man-that-I-marry Raj thought-this-will-be-the-man-that-I-marry Raj Between Between my my grandmother grandmother and and grandfather grandfather is is aa railroad railroad line. line.

1940

1940

Savitri Henry SavitriBombay-Dadar-Kurla-Thane-Diva-Kalyan-Kasara-Manmad-Jalgaon-Bhusawal-Akola-Wardha-Nagpur Bombay-Dadar-Kurla-Thane-Diva-Kalyan-Kasara-Manmad-Jalgaon-BhusawalAkola-Wardha-Nagpur Henry

Then red earth in blurs outside the window, boiled milk poured from a thermos and shared, an easiness of conversation that neither had imagined.

Wet heat clung to their bodies and he told her about the cold of his country, fat white flakes of snow in winter, the way breath spills out of mouths like teacup steam. She told him of her father the paper-maker, the way he let her press loops and patterns onto envelopes. Not long after, they sent out handmade wedding invitations.

And then:

1989

1989

Ninaand-the-boy-from-geography-class-got-lunch-got-movie-tickets-got-dinner-got-married and-the-boy-from-geography-class-got-lunch-got-movie-ticketsNina Ravi got-dinner-got-married Ravi

Follow other branches and you will find similar stories, of nighttime walks and lateother evening swims,and of daiquiris summer Vespaofrides and jacaranda Follow branches you will in find similarand stories, nighttime walks flowers.

Where the two nodes join is a red burst of wedding and and late evening swims, of daiquiris in summer and Vespa rides andsong. jacaranda flowers. Where the two nodes join is a red burst of wedding and song.

COOPERATION

In Blue Manakins, two males cooperatively dance with each other to induce COOPERATION aInfemale to mate. They cannotcooperatively display on their own, and they must Blue Manakins, two males dance with each other tohave induce aa partner.

Imagine a two-person show.

Afterwards, only one will mate female to mate. They cannot display on their own, and they must have with the female.

Mya two-person grandfather’sshow. brother went to aonly ball one oncewill with his best a partner.

Imagine Afterwards, mate friend, simply to keep him company.

When he was introduced to the with the female. My grandfather’s brother went to a ball once with hisbest best friend’s fiancée,tosomething inside himWhen stirredheand night he danced friend, simply keep him company. wasallintroduced to the best as he never had before, his legs andhim his stirred arms slick moonlight, making friend’s fiancée, something inside andwith all night he danced him to bebefore, underwater. laterslick the with best moonlight, friend’s wedding as heappear never had his legsOne and week his arms making was andunderwater. my grandfather’s brother to hiswedding muse in him called appearoff, to be One week laterwas themarried best friend’s awas month. called off, and my grandfather’s brother was married to his muse in a month.

FEMALE DESERTION

Desertion can occur if there is a likely chance for a parent to gain another FEMALE DESERTION mate.

In some female largerchance and more colored than Desertion can birds, occur the if there is aislikely for abrightly parent to gain another the male and thus leaves the family to compete forbrightly another colored mate. Little mate.

In some birds, the female is larger and more than is about myleaves father’s than thefor rumors.

They called her theknown male and thus thesister, familyother to compete another mate.

Little Red, though nobody can remember why. is known about my father’s sister, other than the rumors. They called her

“It’s soul was on fire, as though she spent her life swallowing Red,because thoughher nobody canset remember why. matchsticks.”

“It’s because her soul was set on fire, as though she spent her life swallowing “Red for its loudness. Its explosiveness.” matchsticks.”

“No, I think all realized that, as much as we disliked her or “Red it’s for because its loudness.

Itswe explosiveness.” didn’t her, she the onlythat, one as outmuch of allasofwe usdisliked who washer truly “No, it’sunderstand because I think we was all realized or alive.

Red like blood.” didn’t understand her, she was the only one out of all of us who was truly alive. Red like blood.”

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She drank gin in the afternoons and grew flushed in the face until she would begin to sing and play the piano, at which she was immensely talented. She went everywhere barefoot and wore a thin string of bells around her ankle. She was married to a soft-spoken man who seemed to be her complete opposite, and with him she had three children.

And then one day she was gone, without a word to anyone she kissed her three sleeping children on their foreheads and disappeared into the world, leaving my family several shades duller.

MIGRATION

Years ago, my mother gave me a pair of leather shoes—the shoes that she wore when she moved to America, seeing the country for the first time.

Her name is etched onto the bottom sole, Nina in thin cursive.

“Were you scared when you came?”

“No. Birds and insects just feel it inside when it’s time to leave. It was like that for me.”

That was all my mother ever said about moving.

There is a circular scar on her thigh from an injection she got when she was young, a pale little planet my finger used to orbit around. “I hated getting shots, rosebud,” she told me, pulling me up onto her lap. I picture her at five years old hiding behind yellow curtains in a hot dusty country, and I want to hug that girl and tell her that it’s going to be okay. I once found a photograph of her in a teal dress eating a sandwich on the beach as a teenager. She looks so happy. I think about the way she squeezes oranges one by one for Robin and me in the morning and I wonder if she ever imagined this life.

ALTRUISM

In Ground Squirrels, some individuals warn others about predators through a shrill alarm call. In doing so, they alert the others of danger but draw attention to themselves, and increase their own probability of being the one that is taken by the predator.

As I grew up I became almost embarrassed of how thoughtful my mother and father were, and how selfish I was in comparison. It seemed like every day they were thinking of sacrifices they could make for me. a natural history by sara dunn

My mother spent two hundred dollars on ice skates that sleep under a blanket of dust. Also, a violin. Also, a saddle. I complained about the heat at the Colosseum. Also, at the Taj Mahal. I had pink eye at the Leaning Tower of Pisa and frowned in all of the photos, wearing my brother’s sunglasses.

HEREDITY

A letter to my future child, written in advance: I am sorry for giving you trembling hands and a crooked spine, sorry that 38

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your sneeze is loud and that too much sugar makes you dizzy.

Female finches prefer males who sing like their fathers. (Big beaks sing slowly, small beaks sing quickly).

I only ever have one recurring dream. It starts like that scene in the Titanic where the violinists are playing Nearer, My God to Thee until the ship sinks.

In the dream, the apocalypse comes and somehow I find myself humming the song my father sings most often, Simon and Garfunkel’s American Tune. Amidst the fire/dust/rubble, I think of him. (My father, in his pajamas, singing with his low voice and staring at his laptop while I looked over from across the kitchen table. My father, tapping out the rhythm onto the steering wheel with his capable hands, driving us through the dark.)

I suppose it must have meant something to him—when you play a song over and over, it’s for a reason. What does he feel, I wonder, when he sings it? And how would he feel knowing that, dream or not, I would choose to echo him if everything came to an end?

KIN SELECTION

The night before Robin left for boarding school, I knocked on his door once we had said goodnight to everyone else. He shifted over to the right side of the bed, making room for me.

“Hey.” “Hey.” We lay there for 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 seconds, one for every year he’s been alive.

Then, quietly, “Rosie—you’re just the best person. Really, you’re the person I like the most.”

I wanted to cry. I did, a little.

“Me too,” I said. “I mean, I feel that way about you too.”

I thought about our family tree and the way Rosie and Robin were connected by the thickest line of them all, that sister brother no-one-else-inthe-world-with-whom-I-can-be-this-comfortable.

We lay there for almost an hour, no sound or movement except for the updown of our breathing stomachs.

I knew from movies and books and friends that I, as a teenage girl, was supposed to want so many other things—parties and rum and cokes and car rides—but really the only thing I wanted was for it to be Robin and me next to each other, like this, always.

ECDYSIS

My skin always begins to peel around this time of year, from days battling the wind. Still, year after year, I molt into the same sad girl.

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ADAPTATION

I went to school with boys and girls who all looked alike until in fourth grade, Ash moved into my neighborhood.

“We look like twins!” she said on the bus.

“No, we don’t.”

“What’s your name?”

“I told you, it’s Rosie.”

“No I mean your real name? Like how my real name is Aishwarya.”

“Rosie,” I said, letting the word hang in the air like a trophy. “My real name is Rosie and I was born here and we are not twins.”

Her parents soon traded in traditional clothing for jeans and sweatshirts, and her accent faded away. It took me years to stop straightening my hair, to learn to love my natural history, and theirs, to realize how cruel I had been, how this world had turned such colorful people into gray, had turned the dazzling flame that was Aishwarya into ash.

COMPETITION

There is a certain kind of happy that I can only feel when I hear my grandfather’s voice. I feel bad, because my grandmother knows this.

HABITUATION

Sometimes you think a memory has left you forever, then suddenly it appears in your palm as you are cracking the shells of pistachios.

A girlhood ago My mother kissing my scraped knee lips like breadcrumbs.

Dirt clinging to her

And sitting across the table from my friend who is wearing dark lipstick, our waitress asks hihowareyou then whatcanigetyou then howiseverything then teacoffeedessert? At the table next to us is a family of three celebrating the daughter’s eighth birthday. I search the parents’ faces. Are they thinking about how this will all have to end? Have they felt the throbbing countdown? All of a sudden I am excusing myself to go to the bathroom because I can’t breathe, because suddenly it is 2002 and I am blowing out my candles and my mother is kissing my cheek and I am rolling my eyes and laughing as she says “please stop getting older so fast, I love you, I love you—” COEVOLUTION

If there is a physical connection between host and associate, the relationship is called symbiosis. When we aren’t together, I carry Robin’s laughter like a phantom limb.

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REINTRODUCTION

You go to a place and become the place. Ten days in a foreign town and my skin smells like coriander leaves. Twenty-three mosquito bites. A jasmine flower in my hair. I stand barefoot on the terrace and absorb the loudness, brightness, color of this country.

“This is where we rode around on your father’s motorcycle.”

“This is the restaurant where we used to come on our lunch breaks.” “No— it’s down the road.”

“Have you ever seen the way that paper is made?”

“The coconut tree is still here! And look at all these new branches.”

I let out a laugh, and it sounds like brass bells.

EXTINCTION

More than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct.

How many stories have been lost?

There are museums dedicated to natural history—bones and fossils behind glass, velvet ropes with signs that say Do Not Go Beyond This Point, groups of students chewing gum and making notes, families taking pictures.

But it all deserves to be preserved. Raj’s silkscreen. Savitri’s ring. Savitri’s poetry book. All history should be dried and pressed between pages.

Disappearing is one thing, but is there anything worse than forgetting?

LIVING SPECIMEN

This story, like all stories, began 4 and a half billion years ago. It traveled through mud and rain. It rode on the delicate wing of an insect, ate in a forest, purchased a train ticket. It lit cigarettes, danced in a backyard, dreamt in someone’s arms. It started softly and became louder, larger, intersecting with all kinds of other stories until at last it led here to this very moment.

It stares at me from across the page, then blinks once. This warm and breathing history.

Natasha Rao is a Brown graduate who loves words and trees. She is the recipient of the 2015 Feldman Prize for Fiction and the 2016 Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in Poetry.

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ela alpi interviewed by hadley sorsby-jones "Music goes straight to the soul, opens the canal, and then the images dive in."

Interviewer: It seems to me that explorations of magical realism and of feminine sexual power are a big part of your films, and especially of “Henûa,” your most recent film. Why is that?

Ela Alpi: For me, magic is reality, it’s just a matter of seeing it all around you. Trying to talk about magical states through reason is many times misunderstood, and in my experience it’s not very effective.

So I choose to talk through symbols with a beautiful aesthetic. People usually say, “Oh, I like that! I don’t know what it means, but I like it.” And I establish a dialogue with their subconscious, using symbols, archetypes and metaphors that resonate in the viewer.

For me being 100% nude is the ultimate celebration of freedom. Have you ever been nude with other people for an extended period of time, doing something that is not sexual? It is extremely freeing, and this is why Spencer Tunick’s work has had such an impact in the whole world, I believe. What is harder to undress is our soul, to find the thread that connects you with your essence. The essence of everything is a path that needs courage to be walked, especially nowadays. So maybe what you interpret as sexual power is just the true nudity of body and soul. As the Latin American poet Rubén Darío says: That's why to be sincere is to be potent: her own nakedness makes the star shine; water is speaking the fountain's soul in the crystal voice flowing through her.

Sexual power is creative power, is acknowledging your divinity, beyond gender and what society conceives as sexual or sexuality. Just assuming the power we all have in creating reality.

Interviewer: Do you feel like many people are in touch with this sort of freedom?

Ela: As spirituality (beyond religion) becomes more integrated in everyday life, I believe we walk towards freedom.

I look around and see strong changes, the growing cultivation of freedom through being responsible for ourselves. This concept of being self-sustainable, I believe it’s the key in the path towards living in harmony with our planet and all the beings that inhabit it.

We get in touch as we free ourselves from preconceived ideas of how we are supposed to love, feel, relate. Interaction is easier, because it can be spontaneous and flow naturally, without anyone trying to force relationships into preconceived molds.

The more I clean my own conditioning, the easier I connect with others. My head gets less in the way, and my arms (extension of heart chakra) open naturally in a warm embrace.

In a world where sexuality is so repressed that it becomes something separated from all the other aspects of our lives, physical contact is cooled down with the fear of being associated with a inappropriate sexual behavior or just misunderstood in general.

Interviewer: And this cold way of relating, it’s not literally about sex, yeah? More about being able to connect as human beings, as a basic groundwork that would make healthy sexuality possible?

Ela: In the early 20th century, there was a phenom43

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enon observed by René Spitz (a disciple of Freud). Orphan babies, who had all their basic needs met (food, hygiene, etc.), but almost no physical contact, would die. This proves that physical contact is a basic human health NEED. A sustained lack of physical contact is called “skin hunger.”

I believe sexuality is a part of this, a basic function, which enables us to activate our energy and make love with the universe. As I open doors of the hidden power of sexuality I discover that sexual practice has more to do with energy and spirit that anything else.

In societies like yours, in the US, touch is very controlled and diminished, in my eyes in a less than healthy way… I believe this is one of the main reasons of depression and disconnection in your country.

Interviewer: I can definitely see that, yeah. Hm. Touch is so quickly sexualized in the U.S. Ela: For me it was very oppressive and sad to be told that I couldn’t touch a child because I could be thought of as molesting the kid. I was like, “Wow, you’re telling me that these kids grow up with no affectionate touch from other people beside their parents?.” I thought: So that’s why North Americans create these thick walls.

Pretty often, I met people and as I looked in their eyes I found this thick ice block. It’s like there’s no access to the soul of that human being. This is my personal feeling, and why I felt I couldn´t live there for extended periods of time.

I haven’t seen anywhere else so many people sad and depressed like in America. All countries have their issues, this is just one that really shocked me as I traveled your country.

Interviewer: Maybe we should have more public touch, or non-sexual, warm, affectionate touch.

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Ela: It’s so important. As I mentioned before, the research of René Spitz.

I learned about his work in workshop in the states, It blew my mind that we can skinstarve to death.

What if we were more conscious of these things? Do you think some social politics could change?

We would probably become more liberated in every way if we regained touch as something natural and healthy. I am sure that sexuality would consequently become healthier.

Interviewer: I agree.

Ela: It is amazing the little knowledge we have on sexuality. We are barely taught about the physical aspects of a sexual encounter and in our Western society, at least, only a few people know and enjoy an integral sexuality, where the energetic interaction is as important as the physical.

There is some information rescued about ancient societies where priestesses practiced sacred sex, and the structures of couples and the concept of fidelity where different than what we live by now.

Priestesses would make love with as many men as they decided to, and this practice was seen as sacred. So the more you would practice, the closer you were to the divine.

The end of practices like this, added to menstruation becoming a garbage and a shame, are the two things I believe took the power away from women.

When we spend time with another women, we all start synchronizing and bleeding at the same time. This, anciently, in nomadic societies, was done in the red tents, where women would rest and share during these special days of the month.

When you find a woman who is sexually

empowered it is very rare and many times feels like a threat to what we have learned over centuries. But I believe it makes us be more at peace, and connected with our true selves. Maybe not everyone has the calling to be a priestess, but I do believe we all have the potential to be one.

It is such a powerful experience to feel free, owning your energy and working consciously with it.

Interviewer: Why film? Why did you choose film as the medium to explore topics like freedom, sexuality, and power?

Ela: I was sixteen the first time I went into a film set, and I just knew that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I always explored all arts, and film just blends them all in a very potent way, so for me it’s the best medium to communicate.

Music goes straight to the soul, opens the canal, and then the images dive in.

Now I am writing my first feature film, and feels like knitting a net where all these strings become part of a whole.

All the narrative lines: characters, sound, the narrator, images, locations, etc.

So many layers… it feels a very complete experience of creation.

Interviewer: You are very detailed in your work.

Ela: Details make the whole difference for me. I remember I had this boyfriend who gave me these tiny flowers, which you can barely recognize as flowers. Micro-beauty is sublime.

And I believe that love is shown through things like, every-day details. People can like my work or not, but nobody can say it isn’t done with dedication and care. I feel a strong respect for the viewer and their time. Doing

things with care is my way of showing appreciation for them and respect for their time.

Interviewer: What is your definition of a meaningful life?

Ela: The moments when my life seems most worthwhile are when I make someone laugh, when I make someone smile. That makes my day.

Just being a happy and kind human is a revolutionary act.

Ela Alpi is a Latin-American filmmaker and creative producer. Dedicating herself to art for the past 15 years, Ela has developed her own language that mixes Surrealism with humor and a potent Latin-American aesthetic.

She is an adventurer-nomad who has studied and worked in Chile, Spain, Cuba, Mexico, the USA, and most recently Buenos Aires. This year she won a grant to write the script of her first film, which will be shot in Chile, Cuba, and Mexico. More of her work, including "Henûa," can be found on her website: http://www.elaalpi.com/.

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doorway of blossoms by kiik araki-kawaguchi The pieces featured here are dedicated to Corinne A.K. and Michael A.K. doorway of blossoms

doorway of blossoms by sara dunn

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Margaret Morri was a rugrat when she carried to Gila River a single clingstone, pried from a yellow Tulare peach, stone she held like an amulet in her sleep, stone to be activated in the center of her fist, in her dreams Margaret watched the stone grow flesh, flesh that orbited her skull, flesh that crawled through the skull’s electricity and caught fire, bubbled over with sugar, hissed sweetness from its nearby flowers, a whiskered peel becoming flush in the desert sun, Margaret waking one morning to discover the stone lodged in the barrack floorboards beside her, fractured hull giving way to radicle and plumule, shoot splitting from axil, sapling spreading into new fluttering leaves, and upon a subsequent morning, a yellow Tulare peach pumping like a heart in Margaret’s palm, hot to the touch, ambrosial, and over the next three years in camp, the Morri family barrack gradually inhabited by the marriage of stone and dream, Margaret’s parents, Masahiro and Mariko Morri, having to step over or kick away clumps of flocculent roots, having to stoop to the nearly-snapping branches descending from the barrack’s roof beams, and though relatives warned of tiger beetles and red harvester ants, though Margaret’s brothers complained of the yellow peach tree’s debris littering their hair, the tree sap staining their shirts, the Morris never allowed so much as a penknife to be raised in the direction of the spreading branches, and every night continued to be drawn into campaigns of flicking earwigs out of the doorway of blossoms.

a transcription In the records of the reverend Kashi Uchihama, it is written that Margaret Morri and Yoshikane Araki were married on September 20, 1943 in Canal Camp at the Gila River Methodist Chapel. Although they had not discussed the matter with her explicitly, Uchihama's notes suggest suspicion she was conducting the Araki-Morri ceremony in secret.

The ceremony was held at dusk on a Monday evening, and not a single Araki or Morri family member was in attendance. Teenage friends of the couple, Mary Moriguchi and Pete Yamamoto, served as witnesses.

Before taking their vows, the couple asked if they could read a few words they had prepared for each other. As Moriguchi and Yamamoto drew nearer, Kane explained that their statements would actually only be for Margaret and himself. They would whisper their first set of vows, their shadow-vows, lips pressed into the pink coral of each other’s ears and then take their traditional vows aloud.

The couple seized every opportunity for secrecy, it read in Uchihama's notes.

The couple did not know Kashi Uchihama had been born with ears sensitive and discerning as any who lived. The couple knew little of Uchihama at the time. She had been chosen to perform the service because she was young, because the couple had rightly-assumed her services would be cheap, and also she and Margaret had participated in the same bowling league in Santa Maria. But the Uchihama siblings, six sisters and three brothers, claimed Kashi could hear the flight of a wax moth diving toward the candle on her writing desk, so that she would extinguish the candle a second before the moth arrived for immolation, still some of its dust striking the ghost-heat of the flame and flaring into a small plume of mothgold.

Uchihama was therefore able to hear and later transcribe much of what Margaret and 47

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Kane shared with each other. What Kane whispered had been unwritten and brief.

"I want us to live happily," he whispered. "I want to take care of you. We will have three children. When I die, they will take care of you."

Margaret’s statement had been neatly written upon ruled paper and then folded to resemble a pointed frog. Her fingers shook nervously as she disassembled the crisp, white frog and read into Kane’s ear.

Her words were, "My love for you is actually all about death. Or it may be division.

Because we say this part of us outlives the rest.

It is my way of saying this thing will kill us. It is my way of saying somewhere in the field ahead, I see myself already dead. And in the greater distance still, where there are no such things as possessions, whatever molecules fall upon the distance, I will love you with whatever I call myself then. With all my strange and unknowable hands.”

At the end of their ceremony, Kane and Margaret paid Uchihama from a shared coin purse and never again returned to her church.

Not even for a Christmas service, it read in Uchihama's notes. Not even after the birth of their first daughter.

Kane Araki was killed in an accident at a dehydration plant just months after leaving Canal Camp. After his death, Margaret Morri relocated from Chicago to Detroit, and eventually back to California. It was there she remarried and had two more daughters.

It was decades later, after the death of Margaret's second husband, as Kashi Uchihama was walking home from his service, that she wondered if she had somehow cursed that first couple when she intercepted the private message between them.

Should I have excused myself ? she wrote.

Should I have covered my ears? Should I have forced a competing thought through my mind?

Should I have made myself forget? What did 48

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I change when I pressed their secrets upon my paper? an october Yoshikane Araki passed away in October 1944, stretched upon a military cot, at the age of sixty-four, and in the presence of his wife, Margaret, his three exquisite daughters, their husbands, and with the sounds of his grandchildren laughing and chasing one another just outside the wooden frame of the Araki family barracks.

Kane’s final perplexing words to his family were, “I don’t want you to worry. You take it off when you need to take it off.”

Then Kane smiled and used the last of his strength to push himself onto his side. And when he was facing the Western wall, he went free.

At the instant of his death, his youngest, prettiest daughter, Hanna Kawafuchi, pulled the wedding ring from her finger and gripped it against her palm. Only weeks prior, Hanna had come to Kane to discuss the possibilities of her divorce. Hanna was married to Edward Kawafuchi, a serious but loving man, and though she recognized in him all the qualities she wanted in a father for her children, relocation to Gila River had given Hanna the opportunity to reconcile with her High School lover, Ken Fukuhara.

Kane had always been very kind and generous with Edward. He’d taken him to a tailor to buy his first suit. He’d helped the Kawafuchi family to secure loans and farmland. He’d paid for and nailed together the planks that would become the Kawafuchi Farms fruit and vegetable stand.

Hanna felt certain her father would admonish her for reconnecting with Ken. The Fukuharas were known for being a loud and intemperate bunch. Back in Santa Maria, Ken’s father and brothers were either banned or avoiding debts throughout most of Tiger

Town, the small strip of Japanese-owned bars and restaurants. In High School, Hanna had often found Ken with his shirts torn away at the collar, his teeth stained red following a brawl, defending the reputation of his family.

“What I admire of Edward,” Kane had said to Hanna, “is I know he sacrifices his time and strength to make you happy. You wanted to own your home instead of leasing one. You wanted a car and a radio. I watched him kneel in the dirt and work those extra hours on another family’s farm to give those things to you.

I watched him thin handfuls of carrots until he fell asleep into them. And when Edward sees you happy he has amnesia for those hours in the fields. He can just live in that moment.

That is his gift. Lots of men can do the work, but very few can forget what they need to forget. They become resentful of their families.

Edward’s great joy in life is to make you and his children happy. You’ve made sacrifices for Edward too, obviously. Does seeing him happy give you any satisfaction?”

“I want Edward to be happy,” Hanna had said. “But making him happy isn’t my joy or my mission. When I see my children with their father, I feel happy. But after that, my happiness, his happiness, they never are aligned.”

“Will Ken make sacrifices for your happiness?” Kane asked.

“I think he will,” Hanna said.

“How does he prove to you that he will?”

“He promises me he will never be with another woman. He says he will just live to wait for me. And if I leave Edward, if I want him then, only at that time will he be allowed to love someone. Only then does he want his own children.”

“Then there are a lot of lives at stake besides yours, Edward’s and Ken’s,” Kane said. “There is the happiness of the children you have.

Then there are the children you may have if you remarry.”

“Those children don’t exist,” Hanna said.

“It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider them,” Kane said.

“If I divorced Edward, would you feel ashamed of me?” she asked.

“For the early years of my life I was a gambler and a thief. All the shame that touches our family is for me. There is nothing left for you.”

“What do I need to do?”

“I won’t give you an answer for that,” Kane said. “The decision doesn’t belong to me.

Don’t trust a person who says they will give that to you.”

“Mom says I shouldn’t even think of straying from Edward.”

“She says it out of love for your children.

She doesn’t want to upset them.”

“I feel afraid. I’m afraid of both choices.”

“Of course,” Kane said. “You can’t ask for simple answers. Back and forth you are pushing around very complicated problems. You should struggle to find your way. Don’t expect the right one to bring you any peace.”

“He is going to hate me,” Hanna said. “Edward is going to despise me so much. He may even try to kill me.”

“You don’t have to feel afraid,” Kane said.

Kane cleared his throat. Then he said, “Of course you know, your mother was involved with another man when I met her.”

“Yes,” Hanna said.

“You understand I almost wasn’t your father.

If I had met your mother a month later – if she had never agreed to take a walk with me – do you understand?”

“She made the right decision.”

“She chose me because she could hear you calling to her. It was very faint, but she told me when I was near, she could hear your voice.

She could hear the voice of our daughters.

Your mother loves me, and I’m so undeserving of it. She would’ve been happier with the man she loved before me. I wasn’t good to her.

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I left her alone too often. I drank too much.

But she dreamt of your voice. It was saying to choose me. When you dream, what can you The Final Show and Tell hear?”

by Jeffrey MacLachlan “I don’t remember any of my dreams,” Hanna said.

The teacher saidare that small pets near us. Ghost “There ghost families were allowed, so I brought families that could never exist because your my dad’s tombstone. It was modest mother and I stayed together. We are all in size, and surprisingly light. I taught haunted because of it.”out it some tricks after checking wantIfchildren a library“Itape.

I double-with Ken,” Hanna said.

“I believe the thing I want most.” tapped the top, it’s it made a revving engine sound.

Dad you scattered his we brains “We loved the best could so you like jacks in aknow motorcycle would how tocrash be loved,” Kane said. down“ISeminary.

My mom couldn’t can tell Edward loves you so much. If you make it. I wanted to show her the turntable say you know you will be loved again, I can trick (the cheap stone really sounds vinyl trust you.” and I could even get his name to scratch “How can I do this? ThisLeft terrible Timo-jigga-thy, Cr-reeeear-umb! us thing.” it spends soon,” Kane do it alone in“You’ll 91!) butdo she most said. of her“You’ll days off after I’m gone. Edward will know he can’t with her face steaming in the dishwasher because “that’s filthyAnd tears hurt you where after that. he won’t try. And in go, hon.”

The next week white Mikey a few months, you’ll make plans to leave camp brought his mother’s urn and trained with your children. You’ll go to Chicago or it to levitate by impersonating Saint to Detroit. Your mother’s sister is there.

Peter and jangling keys. Someone said And Ken will follow you. Edward won’t be an abyss boiling with volcano soup able to leave hisafamily in Gila River. His sister opened in the caf and lunch lady is as sick as me.

Edward will stay&inTell Gila until was yanked down by her hairnet.

Show Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi is canceled until theyHe’ll find amove replacement. the war ends. back to California earned an MA from UC Davis, to run his family’s farm. And by that time, you where his poetics thesis was and Ken will be settled somewhere else.” titled THE JOY OF HUMAN Kane looked down at himself and said, Swim SACRIFICE, and an MFA by Theodore Worozbyt “I’ve worn this shirt three days in a row now. from UC San Diego, where Do I look nice in it? Your mother seems to his collection of counter-inlike me better when I wear it. But when I ask Nico is four, his father is teaching him to swim. An island of ternment narratives was titled her why all she tells me is that I sometimes pines rides high above the grass, hulled by a wall of mortared EVERYDAY COLONIALgranite, and the tall thin trunks point toward cirrus clouds miss a button.”

ISM. He is currently at work like the masts of a ship getting ready to sail under good Hanna checked his shirt and patted him on on a novel BOOK to weather. Nico has a ship book in hiscalled room.THE It is impolite the chest.

OF KANE AND MARGApoint, even at yourself. Ice-water from an orange plastic cup “You look good, Dad,” she said. made to look like an orange with itswork hat cut and stamped RET. His hasoff appeared “Handsome? Good.” with a design of dimples and vines makes a thick thunkle or isleafy forthcoming in Pleiades, And then Kane said, “It really must be the when he jiggles it back and forth; sweat beads of condensation The Southeast Review, Okeyshadow crosses over fall. In my dreams I can see what is nearly drip on his thighs. His father’s Panky, Covered w/ Fur andhis hornup. Nico is smiling in the shadow ready in California. I’m starting to see figs, rimmed glasses. He looksElectric Literature’s Recomhis father casts. He is looking up at his father. His father is kabocha and persimmons.” mended Reading.

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darkly tanned, his hair is black, the hair on his chest is very black and tightly curled, his eyes are clear and green as chips of Coke glass, his teeth are brilliant. He scoops Nico up in a smooth motion. The pool is the color of the August sky, and the waving water throws a net of light onto the bottom. When the water rises whash around him a ringing darkens his ears.

He sinks through the deep end, curiously.

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