Inkstone: Fall 2014

IN KSTONE Fall 2014

IN KSTONE Volume 18 Issue 1 – Fall 2014

Inkstone Creative Staff Editors Jesse Fleming Brienna Rossiter Associate Editors Aubree Else Celina McManus Ceciley Pund Kayla Roper Hannah Swanson Advisor Judith Hougen Graphic Designer Andy Waller

Cover Art: Anna Joustra, Amalgam, screenprint Inkstone is the literary journal of the English Department of the University of Northwestern—St. Paul St. Paul, Minnesota

Creative Writing Contest Inkstone would like to congratulate the winners of the 2013-2014 creative writing competition. All pieces published in the fall and spring issues of Inkstone were eligible for the contest. Winners received gift certificates to Barnes & Noble. The competition was judged by Brianna Flavin, an alumnus writing major who graduated with her MFA from the University of Virginia last spring.

Poetry 1st Place: Matt Smith, “Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites” 2nd Place: Marc Strom, “What’s Inside” 3rd Place: Jesse Fleming, “Attrition: An Aubade” Prose 1st Place: Marie Pearson, “Hellbender” 2nd Place: Eliza Elkjer, “Country Matters” 3rd Place: Alyssa Smith, “Amintini Din Adolescenţă (Memories from Adolescence)”

Editor’s Note

Out my airplane window, Michigan is spread with bumpy hills and bare trees, a sheet someone forgot to smooth after shaking off the dust. I’m expecting to lift into a world of white, hovering out of time and cell phone service, but instead we slip through a thin film of clouds right back to this brown stretch with its few pools punched into dirt.

The engine’s grind hums in the background as I watch tiny cars zipping along freeways, train tracks laid out like toys. As we hang lower, I can read billboards, names and numbers on freeway exits. We skim street signs as we grind onto the runway, jolted back down to solid ground.

Instead of escaping the world, I am returned to it.

Art can be similar—we see a poem or story as a way to trade our splintered reality for something brighter with fewer cracks, as if we could erase the canyons by floating above them.

But art is not as much about sending us off to spinning suns as it is about seeing our own withered fields from a new angle. Sometimes you see that the ground is really one deep stream, bits of land spattered across our state with the flick of a brush. Sometimes you just see miles of shrubs. The real world isn’t divided into clean lines on a map—it is harsh and complicated and messy. Sometimes the borders run together, rivers spilling over their banks. Even from up here, you are wrapped in the same air.

I hope you will let the poems, stories, and essays in this issue of Inkstone peel back the clouds, give you a glimpse down into the writers’ inner landscapes, fields dotted with clover and aspens, cities jammed with smog and exhaust.

Brienna Rossiter

Table of Contents Poetry 1

The Barrel Aubree Else 2 Descending Theology: The Temple Brienna Rossiter 3 The Blind Man Kayla Roper 7 Irradiate Not Hannah Petersen 8 N贸im茅ad Jesse Fleming

30 Photographs of Intact, WI Ceciley Pund 31 The Burning Kayla Roper 32 Memoir Marc Strom 36 The return Hannah Swanson 37 Before You Left for Afghanistan Jesse Fleming Personal Essay

9 avant-garden Celina McManus

4 Hello, My Name Is . . .

Marc Strom

16 O Happiness Hannah Petersen

10 Praying with John Lennon Zoey Cole

17 DisHeartened Bethany Pearson

Fiction

18 North Carolina Locals Call It Rufton Ceciley Pund 19 In the Light of a Dim Bulb Aubree Else 21 Little Gasparilla Hannah Swanson 29 North Shore Prayer Brienna Rossiter

22 Teacher Celina McManus 33 Cumberland Abby Sorensen Visual Art vi Survey of Science Rachel Hastings 20 Soft Hands Rachel Monson

Survey of Science Rachel Hastings Acrylic on book pages

The Barrel Aubree Else of a gun exudes two things: power and powder.

Both are visible, volatile enough to take the breath of those who dare to stare into its pupil.

Wait for the jolt to penetrate deeply, from powder, to lead through the head that’s about to crumble.

1

Descending Theology: The Temple Brienna Rossiter after Mary Karr We know he was lonely because, at twelve,

he tried to run home. See him crouched in the dust of the courtyard,

the rabbis marveling as he read laws he had written

when he still blazed.

No one could answer his questions.

Their stares ached like a bruised heel.

Earlier, when they slaughtered the lamb,

the boy felt the burn of his old self through pubescent ribs, fled from the knife

on its neck to these pages.

His parents arrived in a flurry

of relatives, three days frantic, clutched him to their chests. “Didn’t you know

I would be in my father’s house?” he asked, and their shoulders buckled.

Their silence cut a new wound.

On the road back to Nazareth,

voices hushed when he approached.

In the morning, Jesus watched the shadows

of his parents, hazy with dust, fold like a scroll in the sun’s blaze.

The temple walls blurred into sand and grit. Here was the first taste of the rift

between father and son.

2

The Blind Man Kayla Roper “He sees many things, but does not observe them;

his ears are open, but he does not hear.” —Isaiah 42:20 Snow layers the sidewalk like an echo as I watch him from across the street.

Stuck in the wind like gum on the sidewalk and a cardboard box for protection he hunches like a bag of grain.

A quickly scribbled sign rests against the box: a prayer without expectation.

I set a bag of nonperishables and a new blanket at his feet but he continues to shiver.

So I sit beside him and shiver too.

3

Hello, My Name Is . . .

Marc Strom

I was at a jazz club in Thailand when an American with blond stubble covering his face and neck leaned over to ask what my name was. Whenever somebody asks me this question, I always feel a tiny rush of anticipation, almost like whoever is asking me has been my crush for the past two semesters but is way too out of my league for me to approach her. The reason I get this way is because ever since my freshman year of high school, I’ve had a fascination with pretending to be someone I’m not. Perhaps it’s the one-too-many movies out there about con artists or just a general boredom with waking up every day and repeating, “Yes, I’m Marc Strom, and no, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”

It started small. When I was sixteen, I sometimes sat in the visitor section during basketball games, getting to know moms and grandparents from distant schools, always giving a last name like Johnson or Anderson—common among that part of Minnesota.

“Eric Anderson, you say. Are you related to Denny Anderson from the Methodist church by chance?” they’d ask.

“Sure, that’s my father’s cousin.”

Soon enough I started practicing different backstories at the barber, going to strangers’ graduation open houses, sneaking into a few weddings. When someone wants to know who you are, the real you, I mean, it’s hard to articulate, exactly, the important details of your life. For some reason the only interesting conversation point I can come up with is that I play banjo—and I don’t even play that often. Also, it isn’t exactly easy to organically integrate your banjo-playing ability into conversation. That’s why sometimes it’s just easier to lay out a premeditated, fictional identity. Instead of conjuring up facts about myself like “I often like to sit in a lawn chair and read in my backyard,” I get to say, “Hello, my name is Wesley Martin. I’ve been the events coordinator at the Radisson Hotel for about a year now. It’s hell dealing with wedding after wedding, but hopefully someday I’ll make GM.” Good ole Wesley. So driven.

I don’t normally consider myself the most charismatic person. If a middle-aged person starts chatting with me, I immediately forget that I, too, am a legal adult, and I revert to staring at my shoes like a fourth-grader. However, tack a pseudonym on me, and it’s scary how empowering it feels.

Maybe it’s the enhanced sense of danger, but as soon as I give a fake name and background, I’m as cool as a cucumber, the cat’s meow. I can walk up to a candidate for governor, wrap an arm around his shoulder, and say, “You know, there’s been something I’ve been meaning to tell you . . .” Some call this being a pathological liar. I call it, I don’t know, freedom of speech?

All this lying and pretending I’m a hotshot landed me in the only logical place for a wannabe Forbes icon—the casino. I was drawn by the lights, the exchange of high amounts of currency, and 4

the opportunity to act like money isn’t an object. It was also perfect for testing out a new identity, one that’s full of himself because his dad owns a bank or something. Because the legal age to enter a casino in Minnesota is eighteen, by the time my birthday rolled around, I started occasionally joining a group of my friends at the nearest casino, first just to watch. At the time, I didn’t know a thing about cards. I couldn’t participate in a game of slapjack, let alone poker or blackjack. So I stood behind my friends at the table, watching them send little hand gestures to the dealer, determined I would return one night, ready.

After about a month of studying blackjack in my bedroom, I called my buddy Ben and asked him if he wanted to go to the casino with me. Ben’s the guy I always called when I was looking for trouble. It’s not that he was a deviant or anything, he just had this attitude that was like he wanted to suck life’s juice by its teat. He’d jump at the chance to do anything out of the ordinary. So, while on the drive to the casino when I told him I was going to pretend to be Peter Hamilton, heir to the Red Wing Shoe company, and that he had to come up with a new identity as well, he paused to think.

“Regis Macready. From Missouri,” was his answer.

“Regis? What kind of a name is Regis?” I responded. “Think of something else.” I forgot to mention he was an idiot.

“What, you don’t think I look like a Regis?” he snapped.

“Whatever.”

When Regis and I got to the casino, we started planning our night. We had to keep each other accountable so that neither of us would lose our cool in the heat of the moment, forfeiting our earnings. We decided we’d go in increments—make fifty dollars at the blackjack table, then step back to cool off for a while. If ever we got in a cold streak, the plan was to walk away immediately, no second thoughts, no waiting for a turnaround. It all sounded glamorous, but the truth was that we were at Jackpot Junction, the only casino in southwest Minnesota. It’s a place full of retired farmers and community college students. But in my head, it was Vegas.

“Hi, boys, my name’s Jen,” greeted the sweet-faced dealer with short black hair as we sat down.

“What’s your names?” she asked.

This was it. “Hey, good evening, Jen. My name’s Peter and this is Reggie.”

“Regis,” Ben corrected, giving a slight nod.

“Well, I hope you’re ready to play some blackjack, Peter and Regis,” she responded while swiftly handing out a round of cards. We sat at the table alone—apparently eight thirty is early by casino standards. Yet, the fear of being exposed as a complete novice at gambling had me bubbling with fear.

Fortunately, Ben at my side helped ease my nerves as he truly looked at home fingering the red chips.

A jack and a king lay in front of me. “What’s it gonna be, hit or stay?” Jen questioned. I waved my hand horizontally, signaling to stay. She flipped her cards until revealing a bust. “There you go, boys,” our dealer smiled and placed two additional chips in Ben’s and my stack.

5

Perhaps the devil knew that was my first time gambling and was trying to reel me in, but we could not lose. I eventually revealed to Jen the interesting facts about my father’s company—how hard it was to produce the last American-made shoe, how one day I’d have to take the responsibility of ownership. Hook, line, and sinker.

It was like being in a dream. The bright, blinking lights, the ever growing pile of chips in my lap. Everything was perfect, that is, until one fateful phone call I received from a friend while in the middle of a round. I told Ben and the rest of the crowd at the table I had to get up for a bit, but to leave some money for me. I don’t remember the conversation, but halfway through it I heard the loudest f-bomb ever dropped west of the Mississippi. I turned around to see Ben, face buried in his hands and muttering to himself.

“We’re leaving,” he declared, getting up and heading toward the door.

“Regis, what happened?”

“Nothing. I hate casinos. I’m not Regis Macready, and you’re not Peter Hamilton. Now let’s go, Marc!”

I realized the worst had happened, that Ben had put all five hundred dollars of his earnings in the pot and lost everything. To this day I don’t know what he was thinking. I guess having all that money while pretending to be someone you’re not, you really do feel invincible. So, a few years later at the jazz club, when the young man asked what my name was, I remembered my time with Ben. I remembered how free I felt. But most of all, what I remember is Ben storming out of the casino, exposing to the whole building that we were just two high-schoolers, two liars.

“Marc Strom,” I told the man. “Nice to meet you.”

6

Irradiate Not Hannah Petersen Nothing escapes his meticulous glare—slapping, swarming, stinking, staccatoing through every part of his seven-day creation.

Even his amour descends into Hell, evangelizing to the deaf bats and black kittens, begging for their bitterness, ugliness, sickness.

I tolerate the nipping eels, the muddy tears, the lead rain, but I always anticipate the exhale of ash while songless birds croak through my being.

His imaginations are a potpourri, nothing but a salmagundi of ticks and bits of exhaustive inklings.

When will he minister to me?

I can allow sun and moon to be, and pretend their rays come from yen.

To agree they are would mean faith in the impossible, a formidable coming to.

I wish he’d take my grotesque.

Which is better: the gold of abstraction or the black of consistency?

7

N贸im茅ad Jesse Fleming

after Robert Bly

I A wispy drive broken by ferry over the Shannon, Its stilted winds sifting Through jacket threads and tumbled hair, Now, on cliffs We stack our feet on dripping black stones And leg through fog, the rasping grass Like sundials, defined by shadow.

II Inside me there is a conflict of winds, Clouds sinking through petals, sky clocking dirt, And a ruddy sun staring at a tree of black.

III Yet, we seize memory in fistfuls, Handed down by blanket and windcrest, Striking out from the Moher hills as if from the womb, Or out of the stone into liquid gold.

8

avant-garden Celina McManus it’s driving with your lights on some Sunday afternoon, right after the preacher said Hell no and the girls with cigarettes in their braided, blonde hair smear mud on some stranger’s brown face who knew watches could turn into stars from lighters where the bass and electric guitars make the hairs on your skin feel like another layer— a sweater in the summer oxymorons become last names and the patterns on your shirt look like waves under the ocean—where the hip-hop kids run and play, with their dope and straight faces we’re ready, and the moon still isn’t food— a good pizza pie with an ice cream float full of yesterday’s leftovers we’ll give it to the dogs, they say, cause the dog days are over and we’ve got to plant a garden no one will ever see, but will grow into the movement that’ll give you the right to smoke cigars with your lover in the dead of night’s sweaty palms

9

Praying with John Lennon Zoey Cole March, 2007, Minnesota

When I was in high school, my family watched Season 7 of American Idol with more fervor than we attended church. My favorite contestant was sixteen-year-old David Archuleta, a nervous kid with a puppy-dog smile and a voice that made the little blonde hairs on my arms stand straight up. One Wednesday night, we rushed home and crowded into the crisscrossed-tan-patterned sofa in the family room, the warmth of the fireplace, the draw of the TV. The show’s host introduced David, saying he would be performing a song by John Lennon.

The camera panned out to a darkened stage, with one spotlight trained on David standing alone in the center. For the next three minutes, David Archuleta sang about a world with no religion, nothing to kill or die for, a brotherhood of man. His eyes gripped you with sincerity, a performer’s tears held back. The audience sat quietly, and afterwards, the judges ran out of synonyms for stellar.

He had taken a risk, they said, and he nailed it.

My fourteen-year-old self was convinced that I had never seen nor heard anything so beautifully honest. I curled up in the elbow of our sofa, holding my head in my hands, feeling a connection with David, the audience, the song. The fireplace sucked in the oxygen of the room and breathed out heat, and the TV showed the last six contestants perform as I played the memory of David on stage in my mind, remembering his eyes and the tears of the crowd.

My mom watched the performance too, and when the show was over, she turned to me, saying something about “Imagine” not being a very Christian song, even if it had nice ideas.

Disconnect. The same song that Rolling Stone described as “22 lines of graceful, plain-spoken faith in the power of a world, united in purpose, to repair and change itself,” was dismissed as “not Christian enough” by my well-meaning mother. From where we were peering out of conservative evangelicalism, Lennon was attacking religion—he was a drug addict, a man with few morals and foggy ideals.

In the conservative community where I grew up—where my sister’s and my modesty was measured by the length of our hemlines, and I didn’t discover profanity until I stumbled across shit in my grandmother’s bathroom reader—“music” was restricted to Michael W. Smith, BarlowGirl, a handful of secret country songs with my dad when we drove out to the grocery store, windows down.

But John Lennon’s “Imagine” felt raw. It connected me to something outside of my little world. I would find out that it was also universal.

10

Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today September, 2013, Madrid, Spain

My friends and I were studying abroad in Seville for a semester, and Madrid was our adventure for the weekend. In Madrid, the jiving African languages, waltzing French, and comfortable English drew in my ears, and I didn’t feel like I was swimming in a pool of misunderstanding and bad verb conjugations as I stumbled through Spanish. This city drew people from everywhere, it seemed, and I was one of them.

On Friday night, in the gleam of streetlight, Madrid was a postcard. A mill of people churned out laughter, dance, music. The plaza of the Puerta del Sol lived and breathed at night, even its gray-slabbed ground tossing back the reflection to the ornate streetlights. The fountain in the middle hosted street musicians. A group of rollerbladers zigzagged around tiny orange cones, leapt over cardboard boxes, fell occasionally. A dance group begged for money in cheap black fedoras on the marble backside of the fountain. When one African came too close, I backed away. His art was cheap and made for the money.

Pulling ourselves away from the Puerta del Sol, my friends and I wandered down a side street festooned with H&M posters and long glass windows. It was starting to get cold.

We heard them before we saw them. English fell on my ears again, this time in song. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and many of their friends had snagged the repertoire of a group of four young Spanish musicians who played for a growing audience. The listeners sat on the hard stone ground or stood with their arms folded against the cold that no longer mattered. We were here for the music.

Their sweet Spanish accents lilted into American pop hits, changed the tune for the accent, birthing something their own. “Billie Jean” haunted the crowd. “Greased Lightning” teased our ears.

We swayed and sang along. The moment felt like illogical solidarity, so we soaked the music in— holding onto the common like bread in a city of divergent threads and alleys.

At 11:31 pm, the foursome began playing “Imagine.” And they all changed. The lanky bass player tore his moppy gray head away from his guitar, opening his eyes and looking with intentionality at the audience. His content smile moved into a surprised gasp for one moment. The frontman’s voice, bluesy with the husk of a few too many beers on tender vocal cords, threw itself into lyrics hard. You could hear the difference. The young female singer, nervous and beautiful, dared to 11

close her long, dark lashes for seconds on end, confident in the moment.

A harmonica suspended from a leather concoction around his neck, the last musician strummed his guitar, keeping beat with tambourine bells strapped to his left foot. His shaggy brown hair and thin, angular face reminded me of black-and-white photos I’d seen of John Lennon in his prime.

When they started to play “Imagine,” this musician sank in deeper. Lanky body wrapped more tightly around his guitar to protect his vitals, he shut his eyes for the entire song—breathing in the music.

Around me, the crowd swayed in accidental choreography, smiles of recognition, and I was swaying and smiling with them. I think that the next few moments were exactly what Lennon wanted when he wrote that song.

Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kiss or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace

Chinese, Arabic, English, Spanish, American, faces whose origins I couldn’t identify were humming along under Madrid’s gentle streetlights and flashy advertisements. The song swelled— we started singing outright. We felt like we weren’t the only dreamers out there. More were sitting, singing right next to us—fellowship of a moment.

The Spanish say de repente when a moment comes and goes unexpectedly. The next morning, on the train to Seville, the deep green hills of southern Spain blurred by, and I shook myself to remember the unity I had held with those strangers, a unity created by a simple song. The moment had been perfect, and I felt alive because for a space of time, I wasn’t thinking so hard about the rightness or wrongness of the lyrics. I was inside the music with others, and we all believed in it together.

Sitting in the gray, sterile train seat, I wondered how to reconcile what I had been taught to believe about that song with what I had experienced. If I could redeem “Imagine,” then maybe I would fix something inside me that kept pushing up against real experiences and stripping them down to cold categories of “good” or “bad.”

March, 2014, Central Park, New York City

I looked up, scoping for a perfect picture of the circle of skyscrapers that seemed to lean into the clear blue sky, making a globe over us that was only interrupted by clouds wisping through. In my mind, Central Park was a perfect square—one I would realize I was in because it was flat enough. But 12

Central Park is crannies holding street musicians, stone bridges scarred with lovers’ names, a ballpark, a rude Zamboni smoothing out a hockey rink under gray skyscrapers, a spectrum of countries and cultures represented in faces and clothing. John Lennon used to wander around this place.

Searching for Strawberry Fields, John Lennon’s memorial, my friends and I were accompanied by a symphony of birds and a pondering saxophonist who swayed under the dome of the bridge ahead of us. I could see his back, slouching into his saxophone as if cradling a lover or caressing a distraught child. He was brave, I thought, presenting himself to a fluid audience who had no investment to care.

Resisting the urge to become his only audience member, swaying alone, I moved on with my friends. We walked to Strawberry Fields, where John Lennon died at 10:50 pm on a cold night in December 1980. John Chapman shot five bullets at John Lennon’s back. One of them missed, breaking a window above his head. The other four tore into his flesh, killing him in minutes. But we wanted to find out what was left. How people remember him.

The memorial itself is an unimpressive mosaic of black, white, and gray marble with the word “Imagine” inscribed in an important font in the center. The impressive part of this ground—where John was shot just down the road from his apartment—is how much it feels like a place where his spirit would wander, if spirits do that sort of thing.

Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world

Carnations, roses, daisies graced “Imagine” and the entire mosaic, and people stood and swayed.

My married friends, James and Katie, cooed to each other, hand-in-hand in the sweet reality of the weeks-old baby growing inside her. A gap-toothed musician played his guitar, battered and with as many strings as he had teeth. The song was “Imagine,” and after the third run, I decided that was probably the only song he knew.

Behind me, I smelled the sharp, burnt-hair scent of marijuana. I turned to see a bleached blonde afro over dark, wrinkled cheeks and distant, happy eyes. Her worldly possessions sat on the black metal bench behind her, contained in a frayed green duffel bag. She looked to be fifty years old and nodded and spoke into the music as if it were John himself, her cigarette balancing like a baton between her fingers and between puffs. Her drug-cracked voice fumbled over the lyrics, almost shouting a few words, then curbing to confused mumbling. In this place, she stayed, and I like to 13

think she was waiting for John to come up to her, take her hands, dance with her. Beneath steel skyscrapers in a city of imagination.

In her drug-induced haze, this woman seemed to understand something about this moment that my rigid morals had never explained to me. I should have been sad for her, offered my pity like a stale bologna sandwich. To help her see how much she had wasted in her life. To make her better. But I only wanted to leave her there with John. She belonged to that moment and to that place, and the strict steps of religion that I knew could do nothing to change that and little to explain it.

May, 2014, Minnesota

Recently, I watched the music video that John Lennon made in the 1970s for “Imagine.” It begins with two people, a man in black and a woman in white, walking with their backs to you—you can’t see their faces, but you can guess it’s probably John Lennon and Yoko Ono, his on-again, offagain wife and muse.

They enter a house, and he sits down to play a piano while she opens each long white window, illuminating the darkened room so you can see that everything is white: the couches, the piano, the carpet, the walls. Yoko sits next to John on the piano bench, and when he’s finished, they stare at each other for a long moment. John’s crooked teeth break into a grin that reflects onto Yoko’s face as he leans in to kiss her. Her quip of giggle is cut off, and the video is over.

After I watched that, I started to think that maybe Lennon didn’t take himself as seriously as we all do. I remembered the lady with the tricked-out afro in Central Park, smoking a joint and swaying.

I remembered the crowd of rapt faces in Madrid. I thought back to the quiet girl I was, watching David Archuleta dump out his heart on national television, the beautiful emotions that rose in my throat, the thrilled goose bumps that rose on my arms.

I was reading about John Lennon’s personal life the other day. He didn’t really have a moral framework or go to church. He damaged a lot of women, left his band mates. He was a Rock god, and he knew it. I would have liked to see him when he was writing “Imagine.” I’ve assumed he was probably strung out in his flat in New York, rolling around on the floor between lyrics, between shots of cocaine, unable to tell night from day.

But then I read an interview Lennon had with Playboy magazine, right after he wrote and released “Imagine.” A Christian prayer book, he said, was what inspired him.

The concept of positive prayer . . . If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion—not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-thanyour-God thing—then it can be true . . . the World Church called me once and asked, “Can we use the lyrics to Imagine and just change it to Imagine one religion?” That showed 14

[me] they didn’t understand it at all. It would defeat the whole purpose of the song, the whole idea.

That bit about religion bothers my mom and most Christian people. But what if John Lennon was onto something?

In those three minutes and three seconds of a song, I believe that John Lennon is trying to pray.

He’s trying to pray to a God that he doesn’t actually believe in, but God still hears him. Now, when I think of Lennon writing that song, I wonder if he was walking through a beautiful place. A path with orange leaves rimmed by sharp points, pebbles underfoot that pushed up green plants. I wonder if he was trying to understand something beautiful, something bigger than himself. He just didn’t have the capacity to.

You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will live as one

I may never understand exactly how to mesh John Lennon into the absolute truth of doctrine.

But I can understand that God speaks to humans through moments, words, songs, other people. And I can believe that God hears prayers, no matter who is singing them.

15

O Happiness Hannah Petersen Muffled heart and seized throat. Saliva receded.

Breath unable to escape past lips.

Ribs turned inward with hostility.

That which attempts to speak, quivers.

Teeth sink into tongue— The taste of rust and steam.

Dead of soul or death of heart?

Both suffocate. Both enclosed.

Unblinking eyes stare. Silent.

Pillows moist with streaked Cheeks. Thin linen protects.

Into the unspoken morning, Earth discards the searching being.

Concaved and swollen, that spirit Which disrupts one’s very being, Gone.

16

DisHeartened Bethany Pearson after Mary Karr I spit out a few scathed words and they

burrowed when they hit, far-fetched from cold cryptic well walls of my heart, lonely. I had poems waiting there, unsung and

unholy. Even in the public schools they didn’t like third-graders cussing out their playmates.

Finally scratches screwed themselves onto

paper under candlelight, at night only, structured with the grace of deliberate

ingratitude, hoping for somebody’s death. Masks, yes, and black lace,

turning off a God I couldn’t bring myself to not believe in.

Played it safe with barbed-wire

smiles, because No I don’t love you meant I love you

but pure, via martyrdom. Hold it back, hold it back, it’s your job to be set apart. Shut off your imagination or

imagine only freedom you can’t have. For freedom Christ has set us free—can’t be a Bible verse.

But flesh couldn’t bear the barren altar—

Accepted as you are they said, praying, and that burrowed, that hit. First tears then affection then

poetry sputtered out, hot, rusted spitting from my heart and teeth and pen. What’s inside of me finally

offered, mind and spirit seething with cooperation, stretching elastic walls of this dry well soul, creating white space by satisfying it with words—

Okay, I said.

17

North Carolina Locals Call It Rufton Ceciley Pund I. Rain was an event, breaking through our compound, working the amaranth brick buildings to auburn, raspberry garlands in grass hair— dyed blue with Rutherfordton’s Carolina music.

No swimming in a heat storm.

We only balance on the window frame, listen to the clouds groan over air conditioning.

II. I want friction in this idle engine— jumping a 200 horsepower, just to go somewhere.

These empty roads are too long to watch— but blame the rain, say the tires will slip.

Apathy is easy when the mountains are stooped by oppressive perspiration.

III. Our pool is 50 miles from anywhere, the chain-links the apartments—we’re neighbors in an isolation.

We lay tar and stripes over the “where-to,” white lines floating like ribs.

Distance seems sweeter as we drink from the milky horizon.

Soon we’ll be north—I never saw the mountains.

18

In the Light of a Dim Bulb Aubree Else

You are everywhere partial and entire.

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside.

Blow out the dust of dry lungs.

Desires create caverns— can we cry out?

You are not absent from the tiger’s fur, or the carrot’s root.

You catch the dust.

Store it in a mason jar that leaves an impression on the pantry shelf for me.

A searing fire, brazen and steady; you are like a brick wall guiding its vines up to your resting place.

19

Soft Hands Rachel Monson Photograph

20

Little Gasparilla Hannah Swanson

after Louise Glück

In all pulses, are a few flashes.

In all pulses, wherever a door, locked from outside of the river or a dirt hill.

Over my kitchen sink, mugs filled with sour tea. Hibiscus fermented in the sun.

Every blink carried a dotted line: a shadow encasing the tip of your nose, packaged black covers all corners of your masterpiece.

The ground is a galaxy again, yellow, auburn wood folding into the earth.

The bench, in the attic lingers, carried on by the yearly sweep.

And maybe those ten dolls and three red polka-dotted tops will spin, and spin out of existence.

Cut back the whispering sea foam and dried eyes of salt.

In Hank’s Mini Mart at 5 am, carts of whistles, tangerines, and disillusionment, get ready to ring to life—resurrected off the bottom shelf.

Kind of like your curved lips, gulps sloshing in your throat, vibrations.

Tar, sandpaper night. Crammed drawers of orange carnations.

21

Teacher Celina McManus I

Everything is meaningless. Meaningless is the woman who fell in love with a man at seventeen, leaving me with her parents like a whimpering puppy. Meaningless is my grandfather telling me at age nine that I’ve got a mom somewhere up north “finding herself ” and a dad that’s finding himself another woman. There was a time I fell asleep on the job I had to get when I was fifteen, mowing lawns in the middle of summer’s meanest months, my grandma finding me as she held an ice-cold cup of tea. No one will remember her calloused hands or the old man who talked with hot whiskey breath about heaven like it lay among the constellations. Meaningless is this journal I keep, bound together by a tree that grew to life just to be cut down, turned into this page that will one day disintegrate. I will never know you, and we are both meaningless.

II

My grandfather was holding me in his lanky arms, his shirt stained by the summer’s hidden sun. His hand pointed up into the sky littered with stars as he told me about Orion’s belt and the Big Dipper, just like Grandma’s soup ladle.

“There’s a story in those stars, ya know, son. Some of the wisest men in history sit up there starin’ down at us.”

“What’s wise?” I asked him, looking up into his wrinkles. I touched them and thought of the sandpaper he used on the walls. He told me that wisdom was the greatest gift a man could have. I looked up into the sky, past our little wooden porch, and prayed to the heavens for wisdom.

III

It was the first day of autumn. I drove to work and watched the way the clouds skirted around the mountains. My wife and I bought a nice piece of land right outside the city, two acres, flat where our house sat and a hill for a backyard. On that land, I built a house of cedars with rafters of firs. I left space for a garden right in front, where the porch looks, for everyone to see. Suzanne loves daffodils.

The school I teach at is on the outskirts of the city, the same university both Suzanne and I went to.

When we built our house, we made a pact to have people over every now and then, filling the house with music and dancing right on our front porch, just the way my family would have done it.

We didn’t have much back then, so we decorated the house with people instead.

We haven’t had a get-together in over a year now.

22

IV

During my lunch break, I had an egg sandwich from home and watched from my window the way the leaves fell off the trees. They rustled with the wind, moving about in circles, but never going anywhere of great importance. I thought about my mom, never finding her place like she said she would in the great tundra. She called me a few months ago, like she does about once a year, to tell me she’s looking at a little town like ours. Instead, hers sits on the cold beaches of Maine. She talked with a low, longing drawl that she can’t get rid of, no matter how hard she tries.

I patted down my shaggy brown hair and smoothed my khakis, getting ready to start my next class. Staring down at my tie, I looked into the swirls of the Starry Night, tracing each curve with my eyes until I reached the coffee stain from yesterday morning. I thought about tonight, and I wondered if Suzanne would like her gift, and was it nine years or eleven now?

A picture of a woman in Maine, curled up in a ball next to a cold ocean, popped into my head.

Who would I be if I really were my mom’s son, raised in her home—if I let myself wander like a fool?

And then the worst hit me. Both my mom and I will die. We have the same fate. We both wake at dawn and must eat and drink to stay alive. Neither of us will be remembered—we both will become dust. I stuffed the rest of my sandwich down my throat and let it sink to my stomach like a rock.

V

Pulling into the driveway, the car churned gravel like always. My wife was outside, pulling weeds. I asked her how her day was at the office, and she shrugged. I sent her a quick smile and received a small grin back. Her dirty sleeves were rolled up, but I could still smell the hairspray in her hair. I walked inside and heard the teapot crying.

We were having roast beef. My wife isn’t a wonderful cook, but I chewed with the satisfaction of survival. She stabbed her green beans without mercy.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

She looked up from her plate, fork still penetrating the beans. I noticed in her quick stare that she was wearing the new necklace I had bought for her. It was a small chain with a small, diamondstudded heart that hung placidly. She looked back down and stuffed the food in her mouth.

“One of the patients at work died today.”

My son, Mackenzie, sat on the edge of his seat. I noticed that he was staring off across the table to the picture frame of our little baby girl and then to his mom.

I looked down at my plate. “I’m really sorry to hear that . . .”

Suzanne looked up from her plate and stared at me, as if to silence me with her sad, milky eyes, and a flashback sent me shooting up from my chair to find the safety of the porch.

23

VI

The middle of campus had a circle surrounded by trees. I found a spot underneath the shade, trying to absorb wisdom from my surroundings, as the old bark sat against me like the wrinkles of age.

A shadow appeared in my line of vision, which turned into Suzanne, my girlfriend. She plopped down next to me. Looking up, I saw her maroon lips and smelled her sweet lavender perfume.

Suzanne looked up at me, and I met those sad, milky eyes for the first time since we’d been together.

They were large and white, in a liquid state.

“I heard you got drunk again.”

It was a Sunday, and she had on a nice, short blue dress decorated with polka dots. I had missed church. I looked out across the empty lawn and felt a wind that must have been just for me. It cut me in two.

Suzanne put her hand on top of mine. Looking up into those eyes, I saw a love in them that I didn’t know how to duplicate. I decided a good thing to do would be to put my hand on top of hers, and maybe she would know I loved her, too.

I don’t know if it was that wind or the fact that she smelled like pureness, but I looked up to that girl and said, “I’m going to marry you, you know that?”

She rolled her eyes and gave me a snarky smile. “You know I’m not marrying you,” the smile lingering in her sarcasm.

Her eyes met mine again, and this time I noticed they had widened. She looked back down and patted her hair, shifting into a comfortable position of pressured self-confidence. She rustled in her bag and took out a bag of M&M’s and handed them to me. “Open them.”

I looked inside, not surprised to find something in the midst of the chocolate. There sat a small letter in response to mine. My lover is mine and I am his; he browses among the lilies . . .

I looked into her green eyes and recited the words I had previously written for her: “You’re beautiful, my darling. Your eyes are doves.” I folded the note in my hand, taking note of the word lilies. I closed my eyes and pretended I was wiser than the oak tree I lay against, and my youth mocked me.

VII

I had a dream of our little girl dancing. She was wearing a yellow dress, twirling around with a basket in her hands, and I was looking through the lens of a video camera. My son was in the yard, too, dancing with her, and in the background I heard a woman laughing. Our girl fell to the ground and giggled, barely able to speak a word. The dream was faint, like watching a recovered reel from a century past. I thought I almost heard her say, “Dada,” but I woke up, and it was just dawn.

I heard my wife in the bathroom brushing her teeth, and I was older than I wished.

24

VIII

It was the second day of autumn, and I drove to work in a morning fog. We were discussing Plato in class, and I drew a cave with three figures inside. At the top was an unrealistic, shining sun with flowers on the ground. Only a few people responded to the question, “What does this mean?” I can’t make my class speak for themselves or force wisdom into their hearts. I left class, fiddling with my keys, trying to rest my mind on tonight’s game or something else trivial.

The teacher is to put on the presence of respectable appearance for his students. He must present himself as worthy of teaching the subject, raw of all misunderstanding and presuppositions. But aren’t all teachers of the human race? I am no more worthy of this position than an animal. I will find my grave just as the dove does and disintegrate amongst the fertilized seeds. But I am grateful to have my position, no matter how meaningless it may seem, no matter who comes after me. My grandfather would have been very proud of what I’ve accomplished, I believe.

I sat on the porch swing and watched the stars almost every night. I used to point out the constellations to my children and tell them stories about their grandfather and Greek gods, sending them off to bed with thoughts stirring in their heads. I taught my son about wisdom as best I could, and my baby girl, she just cooed at the cosmos. Mackenzie had lost interest, just as we all had in the past year, since our little girl left us.

When everyone went to sleep, I looked at the sky and thought beyond my house, our garden, and the ghosts of every man, woman, and child who felt love on this porch. Lately, there’d only been one ghost among us. In a sense, we’d all become ghosts, and our girl was more alive than we were.

Gazing up into the sky, I remembered I had to go to work the next day, drank a glass of bourbon, and tried to fall asleep before three.

Sitting on the porch gets me through my night, just like the liquor does, stinging my throat.

IX

Time is always moving, and time exists to allow us life.

Time gives us birth at 12:22 and death at 4:01.

We plant tomatoes in the summer and uproot weeds in the winter.

War murders men for months, but doctors bring life back to casualties for days.

One can cry at night when remembering a lost child but laugh at dinner discussing that time when she was two when she took a step and couldn’t take another.

We keep and give away; we love and we hate.

There’s a place and a time to speak up, and sometimes, we must keep quiet.

25

X

All I heard were crickets and the porch light buzzing. The fluorescent light was unnecessary because of the stars, but I didn’t have the energy to stand up and turn it off.

The screen door opened, and Mackenzie’s head peeked out around the corner.

“You can come out here, son.”

He slowly opened the door and sat down next to me on the swing. His reluctance stung the air harder than the humidity.

We sat in silence for a few minutes.

“Are you and Mom okay?”

I looked to my son and saw myself in his ragged brown hair and round nose. He even held his hands in his lap just like me, crossing his small arms ever so lightly.

“Have I ever told you the story about—”

“Mom says you talk wise when you don’t want to feel.”

My son loosened his hands and sat on them, face looking down into his lap. I felt as if the stars had all brightened and blinded me, forcing me to close my eyes, waiting for them to dim and find their correct proportions. I looked out past our porch and glared at the neighbor’s house, covered by the evergreens shading their home. I had never seen that house completely. I looked down at my watch and realized it was way past my son’s bedtime. Since I hadn’t said anything yet to him, he started to get up.

“She’s right, you know.” I kept staring at the house, trying harder and harder to see through the limbs of the tree.

He stood up, and for the first time, I realized he wasn’t going to be a boy much longer. He stood with fortitude, a boy with fierceness stronger than some men. I remembered just last year when I took him to the zoo, and we ate ice cream cones, unaware of the people we were soon to become. There’s something about the way a tragedy breeds one’s personality.

He said, like a father speaking to his own son, “I know this is about Lily.” I saw his eyes this time, and there was that green, just like Suzanne’s. His pupils were suffocated by the white doves, gracefully taking over in unsustainable peace.

I watched the house across the street again, and it looked smaller. The swing door slammed. I was now alone, and the stars and the house swallowed me.

XI

They say, glory to the Father on high or something like that, and I ask why. Don’t get me wrong, the Lord is my shepherd, but Father’s no friend of mine.

He showed up in a Chevy, faded blue, with a rebel flag car freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. I stood there, Grandma’s hands on my shoulders. She held them tight. I held a bag packed 26

with my grandfather’s favorite astrology book, a few pairs of good jeans Grandma picked up at the store, and my homework due next week.

He got out of the truck and smiled at me and said, “Howdy!” That was the first word I ever heard my father say. I stared at him and his blue eyes and thought, I’ve got blue eyes. He walked toward the porch where we were standing, and he squatted right in front of me.

The woman behind me said, “His bag’s all packed. He’s very excited.”

He looked up at my grandma like they had some sort of secret code. He then turned to me with a smile that was kind of crooked on the ends as if it wasn’t completely full. He didn’t say anything to me, just stared, and then stood up and said to the woman still holding me tight, “I’m sorry for your loss. He was a great man.”

She squeezed my shoulders a little and then let go. “Y’all better get going.”

The man in front of me, tall and skinny, wiggled in his steps and backed up. “Yeah, I’m awfully sorry, but I just came to say I don’t know if this weekend will work.” He called when he found out the news, and I guess he thought now was as good a time as any to meet his son. I guess he wasn’t ready yet.

I peered up to him, letting him look at my face real hard. Look at me, I thought.

Tears that sat fresh inside from last week’s funeral started to come up again. I ran inside so that he wouldn’t see and threw my bag on the table. I would let him see my face but not my crying—he needed to know I didn’t need him. I noticed the roses sitting in the window sill, planted into her tiny potted garden where Grandma kept her cooking herbs. They were the last three my grandfather was able to pick for his wife, and they were starting to wilt. He always loved her, but I wondered how he kept doing it for so long.

I looked out the window to the man getting back in his truck, his face blinded by the sun. I closed my eyes and tried to forget what his face looked like.

I heard the front door shut, and Grandma walked inside. “He’ll come back next weekend, he says. You know, this is hard for him, too. After all these years . . .”

She fiddled with her apron, stuck around her large, rounded body. I went over and patted her on the arm, my way of saying that I know you’re trying, but you don’t always have to hold it together.

XII

It was the third day of autumn, and my wife was making dinner in the kitchen around two hours after we had all been home. I took to my room, reading notes for class the next day and grading papers. I had to stop grading because the anticipation was making my hand shaky and my grading sloppy. I couldn’t stand it much longer.

Yesterday was our anniversary. I went to bed last night, but I couldn’t sleep. I started to flip through old books and photo albums that sat in our closet. There were Polaroids of our whole family 27

of four in our Easter attire, me as a child in a red wagon, and a giant green ocean behind my mom in a swimsuit with her hand on her hip, laughing. I went back to bed and noticed the necklace was lying next to her nightstand. Does she even like necklaces? I got into bed and lay on my back, eyes peeled open. What does she like, I meditated, what will make her see?

I walked up to her as she cut tomatoes for the soup she was making. I stood by the counter, waiting for her to acknowledge my presence.

“What do you want?” she spoke into the tomatoes.

I slipped a small piece of paper toward her, something I had failed to do in years. It sat there, folded like a fortune. She stopped chopping and slid her hand across the counter, her skinny fingers gripping the note. She picked it up and read the words, Like a lily among thorns is my darling. Go look inside the garden. She put down the knife and left the kitchen, and I followed her out. She walked slowly, confused, looking back at me every other step, but I smiled and shook my head in confirmation. I stopped and stood by the doorway, waiting for her to notice, not wanting to be there right away.

“Alden . . .” I knew she had found it.

I walked outside to her garden. Right in the midst of her daffodils, basil, tomatoes, and weeds was one planted lily. I watched her kneel down and look at it—her hands fell limp. She sat so still, as if she was rooted into the ground. I saw her begin to cry. I could see her thoughts turning to a little girl in a white dress, twirling to dizziness, falling to the ground as if gravity itself was her cradle.

Mackenzie rushed outside, hearing his mom crying, noticing the flower in the midst of her garden.

My son slowly walked toward her, bent down into the mulch and sat with her, crying onto his mom’s shoulder like any boy would do. I stood behind them, watching—wishing I could cry, too.

XIII

It is a burden to toil each day, but it is a beautiful burden. Suzanne waters her plants with the joy of dirtied nails, and Mackenzie has wisdom in words that I could hardly speak. Our girl lives among the frames that litter our home as we each carry around eternity in our hearts.

I decided to go to the porch before sunset that evening. The sky was orange, a forgotten color.

It blended in with the trees, the mixing of a warm palette. I watched the evergreens and envied their lack of jealousy, knowing they will never be anything but green. But in fact the evergreen knows nothing at all, and neither do I. The tree by our porch held a new, healthy leaf, still holding on tightly. But I believe that because of what the new leaf sees in the past leaf, he will fall without fear to the ground.

A gust of wind hushed my thoughts, and everything breathed, almost as one. I held my glass of bourbon and stared into the very real sun.

28

North Shore Prayer Brienna Rossiter after Tom Andrews To tear cloth strips and bind the wind that slips through our hearts’ gears . . .

The highway’s yellow lines a Morse code that runs like watercolors, blurring off asphalt to a tangle of weeds and leaves.

Black glyphs of cargo ships a seam in the horizon. A language of foghorn and gull-screech rocks the harbor, only its echoes ripple to shore.

We drag our splintered chairs to the rocky beach. Lichen clutches smoothest shale. Our fire’s smoke surges like lake spray.

The cloud of my breath and the mist that engulfs it . . .

Is this an echo of that first reach for ripe fruit, or the gouge of a tide pool, a round rock rubbing the wound’s curve until it forms a bowl, catches rain?

Lord, I am caught in the branches of these moss-swallowed trunks.

Your air is filled with songs of unseen birds . . .

29

Photographs of Intact, WI Ceciley Pund Proof 1.

Dad knotted rope to a branch— called it a swing not a noose.

Size five loop beneath a taut cord.

When my age matched my shoe I let it carry me.

There’s a thorn bush below— he caught our giggles before they fell in.

Proof 2.

He built a treehouse, made stability in standing twigs.

Unsanded spots gave me splinters, but kept dirt off my too-small jeans.

My ankle only twisted when I jumped.

Proof 3.

Antennae poke from the TV, straight like his spine when I climbed on his shoulders.

In the photograph we are not falling.

30

The Burning Kayla Roper We heard it before we saw it.

Sharp cries peaked from piglets caged inside charred bales curling like claws.

Black steers moaned crushing against fences to escape the creeping inferno.

Flames feasted on groaning walls, every board black between cracks of light as smoke hovered like a storm.

Water cannot heal the scars scorched into the ground.

Vets cannot heal pig skin melted off like candle wax.

But don’t worry, they said, we can replace the barn.

31

Memoir Marc Strom This is how I remember three a.m. the streets were dark with thoughts of age childhood memories clasped wires like crows pavement slowly turning to ice as semis shuttled across the interstate five miles away.

Rows of windows opened, letting warmth seep into our world and the people, swaddled in blankets, kicked restlessly as their insides grew.

I found myself doing everything that’s been done in the intersection of Emily Street and Main. I was the motor oil pumping life into this ghost city. I was a satellite for God.

32

Cumberland Abby Sorensen

Fiona’s suicide was not my first sampling of sorrow. High school, junior year, she swallowed bleach, and then she didn’t stand a chance. Whatever happens when you poison your own body— organs collapsing onto themselves, tubes tangling, lungs shriveling—happened, and Fiona died. She was thin enough to look good in a bikini, and she only ever went to the doctor for routine physicals, and she killed herself.

I am not thin enough to look good in a bikini. I swim from mid-April all the way through to Halloween, and when I was twelve, Aunt Ginger said that I can stand the cold because I have a little extra insulation. That comment has stuck with me, so I wear a one-piece, and true as it may be, I know that’s not why I swim in the cold. The real reason is that other people don’t, and I have a fire in my blood, and my mind stays snappy and clear in the lower temperatures and so remains in me a semblance of control.

I exercise my mind more than my body. I read Tennyson before eating my toast with strawberry cream cheese in the morning, the Brontës in the sliver of time between finishing the dinner dishes and when the lake glints red at sunset, and Hemingway on the weekends. Admittedly though, I’ll read him any time. I don’t swim to exercise, and I would never consider joining the Cumberland swim and dive team. Chlorine doesn’t do it for me, but having my thighs tickled by surface-level seaweed does. The fish don’t nibble my toes unless I stop treading, in which case I sink, and so fish bites are the least of my concerns. I will open my eyes underwater, but I won’t wear goggles because they leave red raccoon-rings, and sometimes hot boys are on the lake in the evening when I swim, and the fact that I can’t wear a bikini puts me low enough on their list as it is.

I don’t swim to see the hot boys either, but there is one boy that plays his guitar sitting on the end of his dock. The notes travel from his fingers through the yellow wood of his instrument, into his perfect stomach, down his legs, and disperse when they hit the water. If I’m near enough while he plays, I try to stay under as long as I can, and I swear I can feel the water aching with the vibrations he creates. He is like a siren, but I don’t know his name.

I have lived here my entire life, and my only real friend is my sister, Cass. I have friends at school, of course, but I said my only real friend. I may not have considered Fiona a real friend before, but now that she is dead I have to, if anyone asks. Fiona had a brother, too—Connor. I kissed him once in their laundry room during his family’s annual Christmas party. He was not a real friend. His lips were real, and his hand toying with the bottom hem of my itchy sweater was real, and the bruise that discolored my skin for weeks after he pushed me against the door hinge was real, but sometimes I don’t think he was real at all.

Once we went down south for nearly the entire summer, and when we came back there were 33

two dead mice floating in the toilet. I scooped them out with the net we keep for when we clean the goldfish bowl, and I flung them into the woods behind the toolshed. Mama disapproved, but I wasn’t angry because of the mice; I was angry because I had spent two months in North Carolina instead of here and because I had been forced to go. We stayed right on the beach with Aunt Ginger’s family, and although you can swim in the ocean, you can’t go anywhere. The waves here have your best interests at heart, but the Atlantic’s do not—they shove you around until shells cut crisscrosses on your feet, and you have to stumble blind to your towel and pour fresh water into your eyes because the salt has made them raw and vulnerable. It is like swimming on cruise control, not out of confidence but because you have no other choice. We have always had mice, and I have found their droppings on my comforter, so finding them drowned in the toilet water was no big surprise, and Mama yelled at Daddy for leaving the toilet seat up all summer.

Stretch marks form lightning strikes on my hips, but no matter how high my swimsuit rides, you cannot see them when I am in the lake. Mama’s demands diminish behind me as I propel myself through murky, bacterial water. I have power here. Our cabin sits on the deepest edge of a cul-desac-like inlet, and if I stay in our little piece of lake, I won’t see anyone, but I don’t stay there. I swim around the peninsula of forest with its erected evergreen walls, and I can practically hear the drug deals going on. Mama denies that they happen, and I don’t argue with her anymore because if she realizes I’m right, she will forbid me from going there. It’s nothing very bad, just marijuana, which Dr. Austin says might help me, and which does grow in Wisconsin, by the way. I looked it up.

It is about a mile swim to Connor’s house, but of course they don’t live there anymore. I reach it, the sun is setting, and I know Mama will be angry with me for swimming in the dark when I head back. I tread the familiar five-foot depths, and I look at the house. Red curtains are still visible through the lake-facing window that I know belongs to the laundry room. Beyond the curtains there used to be a yellowing washer and dryer set, which looked clean until you were leaning against them with Connor’s mouth too forcefully pressed against yours, in which case your fingers would find the cracks between the washer and the dryer, and in the cracks you would find lint and something damp and the desperate realization that you don’t want him kissing you anymore, but you are powerless to stop him now. I assume the bleach was kept in the cabinet above the washing machine. Connor hit his head on this cabinet when he was kissing me, and he laughed into my lips, and his laughter tasted embittered and alarming. His laughter was the scariest part.

Watching the laughter-less house now, I wonder if Fiona drank the bleach there in the laundry room with the old appliances and the ghosts of that Christmas-party-past, or if she took it back to her bedroom, poured it into her favorite mug or maybe one of her mother’s best wine glasses, and offed herself in the comfort of her private prison. I don’t know why she took her life. At her funeral, Connor cried and called her a good person, and I told him that he didn’t know what a good person was. He told me to grow up, and the next day I threw the sweater I had worn to the Christmas party, 34

the one with the reindeer on it, into a fire that I built on the drug-deal peninsula. When I burned it, the wool smelled awful and released small amounts of cyanide, and the flames made sure that I never had to feel Connor’s fingerprints on the inside of my sweater again.

The water laps around me as I watch the house, a liquid golden retriever so faithful I can hardly pull myself away, but then Cass calls me from the shore. I don’t realize how cold I am until she hands me a towel and tells me to get my ass in the car. “You need to get a better handle on your life,” she urges, but she doesn’t know about the swims, and she’s probably forgotten about Fiona and the bleach. She’s been gone three months at college, but she still remembers all the turns in the road to get home and the way to unlock the door so Mama doesn’t realize how late it is when we slip in. She remembers the way I like my tea before bed, but she lets me make it myself. This is why she is a real friend.

35

The return Hannah Swanson Life winds me back to tattered Keds stomping too hard on ink rivers, like Goliath I declare war on the ground, smash the stone out to get me.

I don’t want to meet my Maker yet.

Still it stings to think hearts do come to a close, their pages whirring gently to an end.

Yet every day the sun folds over the sky, leaves flake from limbs until at my feet rests the shedding of skin.

He has been unwinding me to rebuild me, and sometimes, I only see as if inside a kaleidoscope transformed into its geometry, transformed into my geometry.

Until standing at the brink of light, my eyes press together until they wrinkle like paper to hold thoughts and watch them crumple in my hand and sprout like a fountain out of my fingers, to distill what falls from my eyes.

I come back again and again.

36

Before You Left for Afghanistan Jesse Fleming I thought nothing inside could interest you, assumed the worst, and steered you straight out.

In snow banks churned to clumps and dips we plodded a boot-carved path to the lake, the drifts angling our climb to acute shivers.

Memory cracked, slick as ice, the bridge’s iron rails rubbed brittle.

A scope through sundered oaks and we tucked back into volleying questions, peeling distraction from wind blasts and nothing.

Squinting, I apologized for thirteen years ago— unearthed roaches in Andes foothills chewing sidewalk clovers, mocking your boy soprano tones, blistering tall tales.

The cold solidified to headache and in flat evening, you left.

Trick me out of brittle words.

Goodnight, stay warm.

37

Contributors’ Notes Zoey Cole is a senior Spanish and Professional Writing double major who is stoked to graduate in December. Her birthday is four days before graduation. On a Monday. Also, she hugged Olan Rogers two summers ago.

Bethany Pearson is a junior English Writing major.

She enjoys long, mindless walks at night, cuddling, smoky-tasting tea, and corny jokes. She finds writing more frustrating than fun, but can’t deny the satisfaction of revising and re-revising poems and essays.

Aubree Else is a senior English Writing major. Her Iowa upbringing did not lead to farm knowledge but love for the South. She loves warm blankets, upholstered furniture, and exploring coffee shops in the Twin Cities.

Hannah Petersen is a junior English Literature and Writing major. She travels internationally, immersing herself in cultures and hopes to live overseas and teach at an international school. She believes all of life is learning and thoroughly enjoys eating escargot.

Jesse Fleming is a senior English Writing major. She has a constant stream of music running through her head, usually triggered by snatches of conversation and/or noises. It only gets annoying when she doesn’t know all the words.

Ceciley Pund is a junior English Literature and Writing major with a History minor. Since she studies literature, her obvious hobby is reading Jane Eyre on a picnic blanket in a field of daisies. When she’s not doing this, she’s usually trying to choose whether or not the long dash really is better than the semi-colon.

Rachel Hastings is a senior who migrated through several majors before inventing one of her own: Visual Narrative. She still plays with Beanie Babies, climbs trees, and runs around in a cloak. And she can lick her elbow.

Kayla Roper is a senior English Writing major who adores 90s country music and will teach any willing participant several line dances.

Anna Joustra is a senior Graphic Design major with an emphasis in Print. You can usually find her drinking coffee, riding her bike, or laughing her head off because of a dumb pun she came up with.

Brienna Rossiter is a senior English Writing and General Music double major. On the weekends, she has a job playing the piano at Menards near the sink displays.

Celina McManus is a senior English Writing major.

She currently has one tattoo, zero pairs of jeans, and an aspiration to be published in the soon-to-behighly-esteemed student literary journal, Asphalt Toilet Paper.

Abby Sorensen is a junior English Literature and Writing major. She gets a little too excited about adoption, joy, autumn leaves, and Jesus.

Marc Strom is a senior English Literature and Writing major. Everything there is to know about Marc can be found in the lyrics of “It Was a Good Day” by Ice Cube.

Rachel Monson is a junior Psychology major. She enjoys pizza, denim, and comic book collecting. She has an irrational fear of glitter and hopes to travel the world someday. Seriously. Also, she does an excellent impersonation of a flounder.

Hannah Swanson is a junior English Writing major.

She is passionate about almonds, Spiderman, and music with soul.

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Zoey Cole Aubree Else Jesse Fleming Rachel Hastings Anna Joustra Celina McManus Rachel Monson Bethany Pearson Hannah Petersen Ceciley Pund Kayla Roper Brienna Rossiter Abby Sorensen Marc Strom Hannah Swanson