Inkstone: Spring 2015 by UNW Department of English and Literature

Spring 2015

Inkstone Volume 18 Issue 2 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Spring 2015

Inkstone Creative Staff Editors Brienna Rossiter Hannah Swanson Associate Editors Aubree Else Celina McManus Bethany Pearson Ceciley Pund Abby Sorensen Advisor Judith Hougen Graphic Designer Andy Waller Art Editor Hailee Becher

Cover Art: Hailee Becher, Up in Air, photograph Inkstone is the literary journal of the English Department of the University of Northwesternâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;St. Paul St. Paul, Minnesota

Editor’s Note When I was young, my family and I drove five hours to Duluth, leaving early in the morning. It was then that I fell in love with songs in the car. Morning came, lemonade rays pricked the sky, radio rolling in my ears as we set off. Clouds and light splashed through the pine trees out my window as we moved toward Northern Minnesota. Songs sounded better in the car. I found stories inside the melodies as I listened further. I had a portable CD player, then an iPod, and even the occasional songs of outside chirps, wind thwaps, and spitting gravel under tires when Mom allowed us to open the windows of our 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee. I paused over each lyric sung, each silence echoed to understand secrets hidden there. Writing, too, is an act of listening. Through hearing the pulse behind art, poems, and stories, we go on our own journey of creation. In the car, my sixth grade self put “How I Go” by Yellowcard on repeat to enter into the world of the song. The start was slow, almost unsure of itself, begging you to hear what the one filling space with vibrations, bells, light had to say. The middle picked up and was a plea to feel something new. The end was an explosion, almost dangerous as sparks and smoke snaked the air with notes pulling you further into a process that takes time and stillness. On the curl of empty road, I learned about the weight of coming into answers. We must dig into the sun, stars, waves, music, the blood of humanity in the possibilities that lie in the blank page before us. The sounds of the world around us are our natural heartbeat. We receive words the world breathes, letting truths sink into us then flow out through ink’s slice to a page. We exhale stories like breath. So I invite you to enter into the writers’ own stories spun off lips in this issue of Inkstone. Hear their journeys, breathe out your own. Hannah Swanson

Table of Contents Poetry Us, Heavy, Gone........................................................ 1 Bethany Pearson Melisma................................................................... 2 Abby Thompson The Richest Man Alive........................................... 5 Jesse Fleming

Hitchcockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Final Scene....................................... 29 Aubree Else Antichrist: Antiochus Epiphanies.................... 35 Ceciley Pund The Old Man and the Typewriter...................... 37 Marc Strom Personal Essay

Kiln............................................................................7 Brienna Rossiter

A is for Attitude....................................................... 3 Hunter Smith

Doubts......................................................................12 Lucas Hunt

Fiction

Waste Places...........................................................13 Aubree Else We Are Made of Stars........................................... 14 Celina McManus Two Definitions......................................................17 Marc Strom Rasasvada...............................................................18 Hunter Smith Aubade....................................................................19 Brianna Klassen Madonnas.............................................................. 20 Bethany Pearson faux pas...................................................................21 Abby Sorensen Theseus Slaying a Centaur................................. 27 Ari Schwieters what is free............................................................. 28 Hannah Swanson

In Dependence........................................................ 8 Abby Sorensen Blood Orange..........................................................15 Ceciley Pund Potty Art................................................................. 22 Celina McManus Between the Lightning and the Thunder is Svaha....................................................................31 Jesse Fleming Visual Art Contrast...................................................................iii Rosemary Grant Gnostic Devices...................................................... vi Reid Oyen Faces of Northwestern......................................... 30 Jenna Hubin

Gnostic Devices Reid Oyen Etching

Us, Heavy, Gone Bethany Pearson In the methane ice-fields of Pluto, a child as heavy as a star dented the dust. So few took notice: neither the child nor its unusual weight made so much as a sound byte of news-talk. When cadets new to the trade walked the field, exploring, crunching hot pasta-pops, the entire civitatis was bored at its leisure; Indifference was an ark of sorts. We couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t smell anythingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but if we could, the fires might have been extinguished quicker. Here, what is humanity? What is the weight in the child? The soft shells you smother yourself with still carry the joint smoke.

Melisma

Abby Thompson and as if more would make a difference, many notes spill out, dressing up dust in tiny frills, lace, evening gown, stole. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s still dust, just fancy nowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; hoity-toity motesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; more acceptable? Not really but sometimes the best you have to give is infinitesimal.

A is for Attitude Hunter Smith

The first day of homeschooling ended with everyone in tears. Books stacked high in our kitchen, each one brimming with letters, pictures, and songs about learning set over a background of bright colors and dancing bugs. Browning leaves peeled away outside as September carved out its mark on nature, cluttering our deck with dried-out ghosts. The sun dropped outside, a curtain of orange the shade of exasperation through closed eyelids, though the day was less burned out than us. My mother sat next to me at the table, wrapping me up in a hug that drew increasingly close to a wrestling pin, trying in vain to make me hold my pencil right. Fingers balanced just so, pressing tight to the thumb. I wanted to grip it like a lit match, clumsily scourging my way across the paper as we failed to learn the letter A. With a scream I attempted to toss away the wicked pencil, lined in cartoons of grinning jack-o’-lanterns and topped with a weighty eraser cut in the same visage. But my mother caught my wrist, held it tight, and set the tip back to paper. Six-year-old me threw a fit, lashing, swinging, pushing back against her soft body. No one tells me what to do. That was my first thought about writing, and it echoes in me still, over a decade later. In each phase of my learning, I’ve encountered it, though it is often well disguised or backed by a dry, elitist attitude. I just want to write creative fiction. Poetry isn’t my thing. Six hundred words is a lot. Short stories are depressing. My passions lie in only fantasy. I won’t put my feelings in my writing. It reached a point where it was hard to set pen to paper without feeling, without thinking about that first time and how I wouldn’t. That same six-year-old revisits, sits in my lap and cries, begging for any reason to put down all prompts, all suggestions, all creative calls. He makes his own timetable, set to some raw nugget of stubbornness I don’t fully understand yet can’t quiet. Can’t or won’t. It scares me that I can’t tell the difference. My mother couldn’t quiet it either, and though she made me finish the lesson, it wasn’t any more than smeared graphite guts where the alphabet was supposed to be. She let me go, and at that point I’m not sure whose tears were whose, but I’m slimy in them, and the memory slips away. She told me ten years later that she almost quit homeschooling after that. The prospect of twelve more years of that first day was a shadow that loomed long and dark for her, and, there

in the kitchen, to get out of her own thoughts, she turned on the radio. In between bouts of hymn music and the ramblings of an underpaid disc jockey, they read Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Now I’m in my third year of majoring in English, specializing in writing. The six-yearold still emerges, throwing pencils and shedding crocodile tears at every compromise I have to make. But pen still meets parchment, my fingers press just so, and I make the letter A.

The Richest Man Alive Jesse Fleming J.J. Astor, the richest man on board and a pariah in American polite society, was redeemed by his self-sacrificing behavior as the leviathan went down. —Brown, McDonagh, & Shultz His effects sheened fine. Maybe that’s why they found him so fast. John Jacob Astor IV dreamed of future centuries, purchased wind and sailed the Unsinkable Ship, that mammoth, gold filigree coating her steely intestines. Four months later, little J.J. became his father’s only legacy. I wonder if his own name ever bothered him. Moneybags would cop a tag— NO. 124—gold watch, cuff links, gold with diamond, diamond ring with three stones, £5 in gold, $2,440 in notes, gold pencil, pocketbook. His mustachios glinting blue, barbed ice from his morning gel. We had seen him look straight ahead as whispers of First-class jackass rose to him from lower decks. Illusions like wicker, or Atlas’s groans, creaked— like knuckles, cracked with gripping. Perhaps Kitty, the Astor Airedale, nestled in swathes of Madeleine’s broad brims and slipped down into release.

His New York minute had whiffed of Midas: he breveted colonelcy, braked the world’s bicycles, popped out little miracles on Park Avenue, unplugged daughter of William H. Force, gilded her in the family way, short-circuited the 20th century in blue serge suits. He only changed his mind once, maybe, giving way to wistful doubt by Lifeboat No. 4. That soft spot for his second wife. But we watched him stand aside, all chivalry— retiring to the starboard bridge, smoking with Futrelle, like gentlemen. Their exhale met God’s air

in trembling puffs.

Kiln Brienna Rossiter A studio littered with shards and fragments flung against sheetrock, floorboards strewn with shrapnel and slag, my own edges pressed then crushed and ground into glass, a piano with snapped strings, hammers pounding upward like felt fists. If this is peace, it is an uneasy truce lived out of gypsum bits, my ears ringing with the blasts of old shells. You who smote thousands, cast me in wreckage and rubble, a city scorched and shattered by bullet and boot stampâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; faced with your fire, I dug deeper trenches. Now I am raising clenched hands. If you will not stop this battering, make me flint that sparks when struck.

In Dependence Abby Sorensen We all smell like campfire smoke as we drive back to Cumberland from Finn’s house. The deep green Chevy Malibu that Finn is driving fits the five of us just fine, but Archer’s seatbelt isn’t working. Every time we ride with Finn, we jokingly fight over who has to ride in the seat with the faulty belt, who wants to die most. The smell of the cigarette slung loosely between Cass’s deep burgundy lips infiltrates the late October scent we all carry in our hair and on our clothing, the mingling of the urban and the earthy, the foul and the dustily clean. I make brief eye contact with Archer every time I twist around in the passenger seat to glare at Cass for secondhand subjecting us all to her “I don’t give a shit” attitude. Archer doesn’t give a shit either, but he throws me a smirk tinged with sweetness. Finn glances at me sideways, my unspoken exchanges with Archer in no way going unnoticed by him. He reminds me with his eyes that Archer is a mistake and a sin, but I don’t give a shit. Finn might be the only one among us who does, so it’s probably good that he’s driving. Owen, Cass’s boyfriend, doesn’t smoke like Cass does. Owen makes vegetarian pasta dishes and spends time in saunas, but he kisses my sister like her mouth doesn’t taste like cigarettes and expensive lipstick. Last night, after the campfire and the frozen fingers and the staring contests with Orion and Cassiopeia, Owen and Cass slept on the same couch. I’m not going to tell Mama. I’m trying to think nothing of it myself, because I know that nothing happened. Finn’s house isn’t huge, and we all ended up crashing in the basement together, my head beside his on the dense carpet. He’ll do anything so I’m not next to Archer, ever since I told him about the direct correlation between the number of days Archer skips his happy pills and the way he treats me. It’s hard for Finn to keep such constant tabs on me when he is at school in North Carolina with Cass and Owen, and Archer is in Cumberland with me, but the kid makes a valiant effort. I look over at Finn now, at the comfortable way his freckled arm spans the distance between steering wheel and chest, his hand dangling over the top of the wheel like a scope reminding him to keep his eyes on the miles of asphalt splayed out before us. I like it when he doesn’t know that I’m watching him. Finn and Cass are the only ones who know I failed my first driver’s test. Finn says it’s not a big deal, and Cass is just glad because I finally failed something. Truth is, it’s the only test I’ve ever failed, but certainly not the only thing. Cass took me to take the test a second time last month, and I think she secretly hoped I would fail it again, but I don’t make the same mistakes twice. I wanted to get my license as soon as I turned sixteen so I could take myself to my appointments with Dr. Austin, but these days I usually just let Archer drive me (having to see a doctor because I’m certifiably crazy and in denial about it is a lot easier to stomach when I’ve got someone with me). Archer knows when all my appointments are, and he has taken to showing up at my house

thirty minutes before I even need to leave, just to ensure that he will get to drive me. Since I am nearly always home alone, I let him in and remove my headphones so that we can talk while he watches me put on my mascara. You may find it surprising that a girl who reads Hemingway as her daily bread and swims every afternoon cares to look pretty for her psychiatrist, but I don’t do it for Dr. Austin. I don’t even do it because Archer goes with me—with our history, we are far beyond the point where I care if he thinks I look pretty. If I’m honest, I make up my face and carefully craft my outfits for my appointments because of the magazines. We nearly always arrive fifteen minutes early, and how curious and ironic that the very thing I need to see Dr. Austin for tempts me from the plexiglass shelves hanging on the walls beside the ugly, uncomfortable waiting-room chairs. I told Mama that Dr. Austin is the most insensitive psychologist, and she said, “He’s got all the credentials,” like another sheet of paper is going to fix me. Archer doesn’t know why I see Dr. Austin—he just drives, doesn’t ask questions—so he would never know to steer me away from the fashion magazines. I know that I would still have to go to my appointments even if I had never seen an edition of Vogue in my life, so I can somewhat justify taking a peek every time I’m there, waiting. The first time Archer drove me to my appointment happened kind of by accident. I still hadn’t gotten my license, and Cass was sleeping off a hangover (this was the summer before she left for college), and I didn’t know who else to call. He didn’t pry, but he stopped at a drugstore and bought me a stuffed wolf afterwards. I named it Alaska because I’ve always wanted to go there. He said we could make a roadtrip of it sometime, and I think he was only half joking. Wisconsin is made up of tall pines and indie music, and we are living proof of this as the five of us travel down the highway in an automotive metal pod which could end any one of our lives simply by moving a few feet to the left. I know Mama and Daddy and Dr. Austin and the prim-faced receptionist I try to be friendly toward when I go in for my appointments think that I want to die, but I don’t. What I want is to be able to swim with the confidence that I look good doing it and to spend every day the way I am spending this one, sitting stationary in a vehicle that has the power to move me anywhere the hands of a boy I trust choose to take me. I will admit, however, that if such a place just happens to be a few feet to the left and, consequently, death, I would not exactly mind it. Hunger gnaws its presence from my stomach; I can feel it in the lowest part of my midsection, the area from which they say it is hardest to get rid of fat, but I know I probably won’t eat supper tonight. The way my thighs spread out with what seems like the enormity of continents when I sit down doesn’t bother me so much when I’ve got my coat spread across my knees and I am listening to the laughter. People always made fun of Cass’s laugh growing up, but I have a hard time finding anything but pleasure in the sound of my sister’s happiness. She is curled up against Owen in the backseat, the red of her shirt peeking out from underneath her jacket. Two years earlier, she heard that men are more attracted to a woman wearing red, and she started wearing red nearly every day. I told Finn about this, and he said it’s stupid. He told me I look better than Cass even if I

don’t wear red, which makes me want to wear red just to show him that I’ll do what I want, thank you very much. Cass, Owen, and Finn will be driving back to school tomorrow night. It seems unfair that I only get them for a weekend, but I have to admit, I’m looking forward to it being just Archer and me. Finn makes everything dramatic by trying to look out for me when it comes to Archer, which I hate not because he is wrong (he’s right, Arch is trouble) but because Finn thinks he knows best for me when, in reality, he doesn’t know the half of it. He wants me to be noble and independent and to not need people. I want this too, but instead I am noble yet dependent, and I need Archer. I need him because he drives me to my appointments every other week without asking why and doesn’t assume I want to kill myself. The car ride is quiet except for the music and the wind making its way around closed doors and windows, playing the Chevy like an aeolian harp. My phone stays quiet—everyone who would be texting me is in the car. I’m not contributing much to the conversation, just picking at my fingernails and not trying to hold back my smile when the perfection of the late afternoon sun and assortment of people I am with hits me. Cass threw out her cigarette miles ago, rolling the window up after it, finally allowing us to take off our coats. I don’t mind the cold, the way it keeps my thoughts clear, nor do I mind the wrapped-up feeling of being in a car with three of my favorite humans (I have to accept Owen because my sister is planning on having his children or something like that). It is a feeling of enclosure. Safe but not contained. It takes a little under two hours, the drive back from Finn’s family’s house. This had been my first time there, and his mother made me tea at night when I asked where they kept their mugs. I didn’t intend for her to do it all for me, but Finn asked her to. Archer almost said something—he knows how I like to make it myself—before I stopped him. Anyway, she did a nice job. You probably don’t think it would be that hard to make tea well, but let me tell you, steep time matters. Cass is talking about the cat we used to have when we pull into our driveway. “What color would you call him?” she asks me. “Brindle, I guess.” The car quiets as Finn turns the key. “What’s brindle?” “It’s kind of a black on brown.” I smile at him as I gather up my coat and cell phone and open the car door to get out. “So why not just say black and brown?” “Why say black and brown when you could say brindle?” Archer defends. Archer understands the need for making one’s own tea and using words like brindle. He comes inside with us, Cass insisting that he stay for supper. She whips up some grilled cheese sandwiches, but I say I’m not hungry. Finn hands me a plate anyway. “Dude, she said she doesn’t want it.” Archer feels the need to defend me, which is both irritating and sweet.

“She hasn’t eaten all day,” Finn lashes back. “Leave her alone, she isn’t hungry.” “I can tell him myself,” I snap at Archer, then turn on Finn. “I said I don’t want it.” Archer doesn’t stay to eat. I give him a hug before he gets in his car to drive home. I have an appointment in the morning, so I remind him, nine o’clock, and Finn will want to drive me because he’s in town. Arch promises to get here early. I can always see his car coming because the red stands out amidst the deep green of the pine trees that edge the road up to our house. I picture the scene playing out the way it would if I tell Finn that Archer is driving me in the morning. He’ll clench his jaw as he makes my breakfast along with his (he’s always trying to serve me); he’ll tell me that I need to stop making stupid decisions. At least the stupid decisions are my own. I promise Archer that I’ll ride with him and turn to look at the lake as soon as he’s out of the driveway. If I stand in the right spot, I can see beyond the tip of the peninsula that partially blocks the view of the water. Cass, Finn, and Owen are trying to decide on a movie to watch when I emerge from my room after having changed into my swimsuit. I see Sabrina, my favorite, is in the running, but I haven’t swum in three days, and for me, the strongest force of nature is the pull of Beaver Dam Lake. I converse with Finn, telling him that I have an appointment in the morning, and of course he offers to take me. I tell him that Archer always drives, thanks for offering, and his freckled jaw sets the way I’ve grown so familiar to it doing. “Well, let’s just hope he remembers to take his dose, then.” He’s bitter, disapproving of me. His insensitive comment rouses defensive feelings, but I can’t deny its validity. I tell Finn that I’ll text Archer to remind him, which shuts him up. The look in his eyes says, you’re always going to choose Archer over me, and I hope the look in mine tells him he’s right. For me, this conversation is just killing time—if I wait long enough, Archer will be playing his guitar on his dock when I swim by. I hate missing small encounters with him. It’s mid-October, and this may be the last time I swim all year.

Doubts Lucas Hunt In the spring, he used to say the ice was talking, “The lake wants to tell us something,” And he’d wink and take another step Just like a game He never faltered till he went through I’m on the verge But if I go over I won’t break like he did Ice in a thaw Thundering and chattering, shearing six feet deep Tolling out in perfect, hollow tones The ring of truth In a shattered faith Still, sometimes it seems beautiful out here Far from safety I feel radical or brave Walking on the water With only blue-black fear beneath my feet While the thundering murmur Of my questions unanswered Echoes across the lake And starry skies Crystallize in the brittle air above me Glinting on the fractal seams Groping outward to the shore There is a twisted peace in realizing Nothing is okay So every night While fractures spread deeper through the barrier between us I’ll fill my lungs To brace for the plunge

Waste Places Aubree Else A brushfire smoldering within the ribcage of a priest leaves no remnants of sacrifice. Withered in the flames of Zion’s temple altar he is overcome with a new barrenness— one unquenched by the perfect ram. A sooty blessing will not reconcile the transgressions and transgressors. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. But I’ve anointed his head with holy gasoline, for it now swells the skull mindlessly. The people rue a wretched city seeping foreign blood out of its once-holy gates. A cry—guttural and dry—rises from the crumbling temple arch. Pray though your fields lay empty. Praise Him for the living and the dead. For the LORD comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places For we are but vainly burned rams.

We Are Made of Stars Celina McManus 1 The hummingbird’s heart beats at 250 breaths per minute and I am her hollowed wings. Her blue-throated glory cries for justice as blood sits clotted on a limb like a lollipop. ‘The highest metabolism of any homoeothermic animal’ swings to the left and falls into the palms of a three-year-old child. 2 We are all celestial beings and the hummingbird is an angel sent to scurry. She dies into a cosmic karma we call car door. She is a workaholic ‘phenomena that originates outside the atmosphere of Earth’ and then into zero gravity she zooms toward an oblivion full of black tar night. 3 Blood sits clotted on a limb like a lollipop and she and I are both reduced to hallowed wings. 14

Blood Orange Ceciley Pund The husk peeled back beneath my fingernail, and the red bits were trapped underneath. I thought of how my fingers would smell like citrus for hours, even after washing and showering. The color must give it staying power. White stared up at me beneath the oranges and reds, and I knew the color wasn’t the important part because it was the white that protected. Then I stuck the cotton layer, and juice bubbled like magma in a snowy crater. As I dug under the opening, I heard him cough in the bedroom, and I knew it was time to go back and give him kisses. But I licked the juice on my finger instead. Wide and sneering, the slit in the peel looked like lips, and I raised it to my own and tasted the rich fruit blood. Adam coughed again, and I almost chucked the little fruit at the door like I was the pitcher and he was the catcher, always catching when I was foul. In my extended arm, the broken orange was too small to throw, and it wouldn’t be fair. Only if it dragged me with it, across the room, smeared on the wall over the bloody skin and seeds. In September, I read a book about bloodstains and how to interpret them if you were investigating the kind of person that blows their own brains out or who had someone else do it from a fair distance. I’m not an investigator or much of anything, but I saw it at the library and thought I could be an investigator because the pictures didn’t bother me. None of those pictures looked much like my orange—some stains went from floor to ceiling, sawing like knives through the white walls, no gradual, grainy spread, blooming in a pool of deep red, sipping on the orange around it that doesn’t know it’s being eaten. Bigger chunks came easier now, though there was a crummy buildup under my nails, and my thumbs were redder than normal. I liked when I could get all of it at once, a spiral husk lying like shed skin on the table, the rare meat perfectly whole and unmarked by frustrated keratin. Right now the husk came off like I peeled off dead skin, mostly small pieces, and the rest resisted. Bedsheets started whining as the figure on top of them moved, and I rolled my eyes, zapping laser holes at the fruit in my hand. Five years and four months ago, I stopped sleeping because I didn’t want to keep missing my dreams—my subconscious had all the fun. Since I stopped sleeping, I fly when I’m awake and remember all the cloud-shaped gummy bears and strawberry fields. Adam doesn’t believe in dreaming or Freud, and I said he must not believe in teleportation either, and he didn’t answer, so I assumed not. That was around the same time I stopped making breakfast. He took it personally, even though I made it for me before, and why couldn’t he make it? He said my pancakes were better, and I took that personally and stormed to the bedroom where I didn’t sleep. It was 6 a.m., and I dreamed into the orange peels on the fake marble counters that they were kites on a polluted sky. Beneath them were two small girls holding the coils of the kite string

around their knuckles even though the wind pulled so hard that they lost blood circulation. Maybe the kites took all the blood with them through the white, white string. They were sisters, and they held hands, walking to the gray sea as the kites didn’t tangle but the clouds did in a brown, solid surface sky, mixing with the bread crumbs that fell from Adam’s toast the day before. He opened the door and came out looking for his keys like he does each morning, and I looked with him but only in spirit because I was still staring at the counter’s sky. In the end he gave up looking, and I suspected they were under the couch cushions or by the TV remote or wherever else lost things go. There was a coffee cup in his hand when I looked at him next, and he had a sport coat over his blue pajamas. I could tell he was asking me to leave in his way, and I was telling him no in my way. Most of the orange was exposed now, and it looked like the way I eat my steak. One last piece of the dying skin wouldn’t give, and little bloody pockets opened up where my fingernails were sinking as I pulled harder on the orange. This part had too much white, too much protection, and it wouldn’t let the color go. After that, he finished his coffee and walked out the door in his slippers so as not to disturb me, his keys still in the lost place. He would come back tonight and sleep by my empty form that didn’t have enough body to lie down. The meat was in my hand with lesions dripping out the best part of the fruit. It was bigger than my palm and crept uneasily toward my fingers when I held my hand up flat. I brought it closer, seeing how the seeds lined up together in pockets of red and orange cells, bursting in full, unopened juice. The edge of my palm tipped down, and it rolled. Soon it would be in the compost with the other rotten oranges.

Two Definitions Marc Strom Mince: /mins/, verb 1. The city cranked open its jaws of life and I crawled right in. This is what it means to become wild. I shoulder through the slough of bodies, slipping in and out of myself. From here, I can see the lights in windows freckling the night. The theme? Man vs. The Universe. Man vs. Sushi Bar. When hunger sets in, the pace quickens. Feet do less stepping and begin to shuffle— no, churn, and eyes get a dim, sweaty red. I eat only what doesn’t fall from the sky. Metal is my literature, my skeleton. I sometimes wonder what it’s like to think words like raspberry or waterfall. But I can’t. It means I have to bleed. Pore: /por/, noun 1. The woods are where I go to see if the earth knows who I am. I go at the right time of year, when trees cough their leaves and I catch their breath. The sunlight only trickles down the forest floor, leaving shapes of light that dance in the grass. I walk through the woods, on the earth’s black flesh and mushrooms. Trying not to be seen is the only way to be noticed. I plant my knees among the fern, pressing my palms to the dirt. The earth feels me, knows me. A wet pink worm, digging in the mud.

Rasasvada Hunter Smith

Definition: The taste of bliss in the absence of all thought.

Silence should be bottled, poured and swallowed, served on the rocks until a careless reach spills it all across the dark grain of the bar Reality, loud, burns going down but living in the land of 10,000 lakes I’ve learned that if you can’t drink it Swim It’s hard to find beauty under oaks, grass, wave-washed rocks are not the monastery Thoreau promised I’m picky I come from a long line of nothing dying to get back Ex Nihilo Where is peace when even empty echoes

Aubade Brianna Klassen We know that our muscles are fortified: Those words that shush into our grasp Could be fresh air to the nose at the next desk. We need not fear the engulfment as we Stretch bruised fingers to the sun. Why are our hands clenched? Maybe it’s the corner of the couch expecting you to die, Even at five a.m. Who are you to enter God’s presence? You’ll have to surrender, Spilling two-bag tea in the Holy of Holies.

Madonnas Bethany Pearson I come from a line of women whose faces graced magazines. We swung fleshy hips as we strode down Main, spoke only in verse. Our lipstick of whale’s fat, our binding corsets inflated what could have been a decent sense of self— generations grew up sick, trying to outdo your ideas of us. The women in my family are shriveling into a mold of featherweight opinions and silent rules with every christening gawk. My mother, in fact, started dying in a garden, several years ago now—that garden where flesh and spirit are one. She called it matrimony, and prayed her daughters find a man to love or wound them into themselves, to love

their weightiness.

faux pas Abby Sorensen It is in omission, when you spend $3.75 on postage, lick the envelope, slice your tongue, sit down and bleed. You warm his chin, but chill your forehead. He’s cold, forfeit your heat. You’ll be paid in jazz music, bramble-scratches on your face, your fingers, blue cathedrals at your feet. He won’t remember naming lacerations to your skin. He won’t ripen to your loss.

Potty Art Celina McManus I knew there was a problem when she started smearing her poop on the wall and calling it “art.” She’d just reach in there after she did her business, forget the germs or the oddness of it all— the bacterial waste was part of her creation. The kitchen window beamed lines of yellow light from outside, and the author Chuck Palahniuk splattered blood all over the back of the wall with someone’s brain while I warmed my hands with a nutty roast. Then, I smelled it. She wasn’t supposed to be awake yet—she wakes up when her ponies start neighing from her purple analog clock. I walked into the bathroom and saw her hands painted brown, rubbing her now-disgusting palms all over the tiles. She smiled at me, and then her eyes widened because I started to cry. “Mommy, don’t cry! I had a dream that Daddy came back, and I wanted to show him I can paint, too.” She wanted to hug me, so I told her to wash her hands and then we can hug each other. I told her I miss Daddy, too, even though she never said she missed him. I didn’t even watch her wash her hands—she’s six years old now, she can do it. I carried my weight into the kitchen and went back to the world of Fight Club, a beautifully written, horrifically bloody mess. I was eighteen, and Daniel sat on the floor of his room painting a self-portrait with mud as Sonic Youth quietly breathed into the background. I was lying on his bed, staring at the crusty, white bumps on his ceiling. I poked at them with his special art ruler and let the snow fall on top of my mountainous belly. Daniel scooped the mud from a plastic Solo cup and smeared a chin on his canvas. He dug a giant hole in his front yard, and when his landlord asked, “What the hell are you doing?” he just told him it was a school project. “So your school told you to put a crater in my lawn?” Daniel looked at the plump man steaming in front of him and said a simple and emphatic “Yes.” His portrait was almost done, but before he placed it against the wall to sit until his class in the morning, he signed the bottom right corner, For Felicity. I rolled my pregnant self over and off the bed and crawled across the floor to hug him. His mudsplattered face, broken in some places due to the hardening on the canvas, was a vision of my future. I had a parent-teacher meeting with Felicity’s first grade teacher. “Felicity is a beautiful soul,” she said, deflecting from the real issue. Felicity gave magic marker tattoos in class one day. She ran up to someone while Ms. Swisher was in the middle of teaching math and said, “I think you need a rainbow on your face.” We recently went to the circus, and she got a rainbow on her face, and now she wants everyone else to have one, too. 22

We went to the circus with Mom on a Saturday morning. I got the tickets at work from one of the men who comes in all the time. Every time he walks in the bank, he gives me one of those smolder half-grins, and a gust of cologne knocks us all out. My co-worker Kelly rolled around in her chair and acted like she was counting money behind me. She’s been trying to set us up for months now even though I told her Daniel and I aren’t technically separated. She thinks I’m in denial. I think she’s a bitch. Mr. Hotshot walked up to the counter, and I glanced at him through the streaky glass. I needed to Windex it. “So, you got a kid, right?” I picked up the picture frame on my desk. It’s of Felicity, Daniel, and me at the park. We’re sitting on a purple quilt eating peanut butter sandwiches. I’m holding Felicity in my lap, and Daniel gives us both bunny ears. Mom took that picture, and she told Daniel to stop being silly, but he wouldn’t. “Yeah, that’s right. So, I have three tickets to a circus. I thought that would be a nice time. . . .” I took the tickets from him through the tiny window that usually exchanges wads of cash that are never mine. I told him, thanks and acted like I would genuinely call him this time. I called Mom on my lunch break and told her that I’ve got a nice birthday surprise for her. After the circus, we went back to her place and ate rich, warm cake. We stared at each other from across the table, and having our mouths full was an excuse not to talk. She asked where I really got the tickets, and so I told her the truth. The Ringling Bros. is not cheap. Mom likes to tell me with her eyes that it’s my fault I’m still working as a bank teller, that I should have been more careful with that boy. Felicity stuffed cake in her mouth by grabbing it with her fists. I started to wonder if she just likes to be hands-on. As Mom stared at her and slightly winced, she turned to me and asked, “When’s the last time you’ve talked to Daniel?” I didn’t respond. I grabbed the red velvet cake in my fists and stuffed it in my mouth, the creamy icing left on my palm like a brand. We met at a party my freshman year of college, and Daniel had long hair that made him look interesting. He was showing everyone his sketch. It was a beautiful portrait of him, it was obvious, and he was holding a little girl. The party was for my friend’s birthday, and she had her art major friends exhibit their pieces. He held a clear, plastic glass of wine and smiled as he shook hands with those who approached him. My friend noticed me watching, and she introduced us. I asked him who he was holding. “That’s my little sister, Felicity.” He glanced into the burgundy liquid in the cup and gulped the rest of it down. Now that I was closer, I could see two dates on the bottom of the sketch. One was five years ago, and the last one was last year. His sister was dead. I noticed all of us were silent, and I told him his portrait was one of the most beautiful sketches I’d ever seen. That night I stayed at his apartment, and I never left. 23

.When Daniel left, Felicity asked where he was going. I didn’t want to worry her, so I told her that her daddy’s looking real hard for something. She asked what, so I told her that it’s a special secret. Ms. Swisher suggested that Felicity take an after-school art class, so now I wait on Thursday afternoons and stand against a brick wall with my daughter’s snack in my hands—a twenty-fiveyear-old woman with a juice box. Felicity ran outside with a colorful piece of paper in her left hand. She’s still so little and wears pink overalls and hurries fast to see me. I can pick her up and embrace her and have her love me so hard that even my arms feel it. I squeezed harder than a mother should, and I started to wonder when she’d stop running to me. “Mommy, let me down, I wanna show you what I made!” She hopped down, and her pigtails bounced a little. It was a drawing of a scruffy-faced man in a pirate ship out at sea. The pirate ship was full of what looked like gold doubloons, and on top of the pile sat a small girl with warm auburn hair like Felicity. “Daddy found what he was looking for.” It was the third day after the art show where I met Daniel, and I had missed most of my classes because my major, “Undecided,” didn’t appeal to me enough to go. My roommates had called three times, and I told them I’d probably move out soon because I had no reason to stay. Daniel didn’t like it—he thought I needed to go back, but I never did, and my parents didn’t believe him when they blamed the boy with the messy hair and impractical dreams for my dropping out. He told me the night we first met, as we walked along the riverfront, that he was going to get away from the East Coast as fast as he could, and he did. He first left when Felicity was three years old, and it was only for a week. He went to California to look into the college CalArts. All the money he made bar tending went to this trip, and all my money as a temporary sales representative went to our one-bedroom apartment, my and Felicity’s tummies, and Harold the Turtle’s upkeep. This was the Daniel that gave me fake roses because they were “infinite,” but I knew he really didn’t want to keep buying me flowers. Mom liked to tell me it was my fault with her empty words when I told her to watch Felicity that week while I had to pick up more shifts. All the while, I drove to work, and I tried to guess what each driver did for a living as they whipped by me on the interstate into their own furious monotony. When Daniel got back, he bought Felicity a pint of cookie dough ice cream. She hadn’t eaten dinner, but it’s ice cream, she kept whining. My fifty-hour work week said, okay. Mom called and put Dad on three-way because she doesn’t know how to talk without her better half. I had to tell them about the “potty art.” I guess I didn’t have to, but I did have to. They’re Felicity’s grandparents. When my mom first met Daniel, he was standing in front of the doorway like a frozen teenage statue. A pearly white bracelet jiggled on her wrist when she held out her

hand to shake his. She shouldn’t have liked him when she first met him, but she did. We ate green beans in our sterile white living room, and Daniel said he was going to do great things. We left after dinner, and in his car, I rolled the window down to cut my arm in half with the wind. Cars sped past on the highway as red and white blurs of metal. Daniel told me to put my arm back in, but I didn’t. I liked to feel the air that we caused all on our own with our own blur of metal. “Do you think I’ll do great things, too?” He grinned at the road in front of him because he was careful about our mortality. “Of course.” He lied. There was a pause, and Dad finally spoke and said, “Why don’t we go to the art museum, all of us, so she could have something a little more . . . er . . . polished to imitate.” The art museum in town isn’t exactly great. It has a section specifically dedicated to the grand frontier and our small-town heritage. It’s full of broken, Southern drawl dialogue playing from some audio in the corner while the room is full with pictures of wagons. There’s a reason Daniel left for L.A. or Chicago or something. The last time he left, he said sorry and didn’t put a place to it. But when we walked into the museum, things were painted differently than the last time I went with Daniel and our little girl. The receptionist’s desk was on the left instead of the right, and the white on the walls was a much more velvety albescent. I told the welcome lady that I liked what they did with the place. “Honey, we haven’t changed things in here for the past forty years.” Felicity ran to the life-sized dollhouse. The last time we were here, she spent some two hours petting grimy, old dolls with sandpaper hair, calling them her babies. She made them breakfast in the “kitchen” and sang them to sleep in the rocking chair in the “foyer.” I believe Daniel slept in the tiny bed, pretending to be one of her babies while she laughed, and I watched the door for the museum employees so we wouldn’t get kicked out. The whole backside is opened up and parents can sit on a bench, watching their children pretend to be homemakers without having a clue. The front is what you see when you walk into the exhibit. It’s a beautifully painted house, yellow, with fake potted plants hanging from the windowsill. You can’t know that it’s sliced open on one side unless you investigate. As she rocked her strange little baby, she hushed and burped it with a giant slap that made Mom and me giggle from our bench. We were watching the Felicity Show. She then started singing and told her baby that her daddy would be back soon with his treasure just for her. I felt Mom shift in her seat beside me. The Felicity Show was coming to a close, and I told her that we should go look at some paintings since this was an art museum after all. We skipped the frontier-land crap and headed straight to an exhibit about birds. Every single damn painting was a bird. I’m not too crazy about them because birds wake me up in the morning

from a deep slumber full of dreams where there are no noises, just an empty canvas of anything I want, and there are no birds. Felicity ran around elated and stopped at a fuzzy poof of a bird, laughed and pointed and asked what it was. The painting was called “The Bushtit,” so I told her I didn’t know. Birds have unfortunate names, I learned. There was “anis,” “dickcissel,” and the “woodcock,” which is unfortunate in name and appearance. But Felicity flocked toward the framed picture in the middle of the room—the mockingbird, our state bird. The Tri-Star flag hung right next to it oh-so-conveniently. “We learn about this bird in class! They like to sing.” Felicity then began to scream. She was actually screaming, but I think she believed she was singing. I stood there staring at the mockingbird and then looked to Felicity as she waved her hands back and forth like a conductor at a symphony, and I hummed. Mom ran over to her, bent down, and told her that she should sing softer. “But mockingbirds don’t sing softer.” I laughed, and I received the look again. Mom told her that we should go buy some watercolors so we could paint the mockingbird like the watercolor hanging up. I didn’t notice, but all the art pieces in this room were watercolor. They were beautiful actually, the soft mix of simple and meticulous brushstrokes into white frames on a blank wall, like a splash of color in the midst of a drowning sea of somber. The only problem with my mom’s mockingbird-painting idea is that mockingbirds don’t have color. They are gray and white and are tricky little things that hop around in the mud. They copy the sounds of other birds—they aren’t original. I stared at the mockingbird in front of me. While it mocked everyone else, the bird and I, we sung together our own song that no one else could hear. The gray bled into the white with purpose and ease, the lines blurred, and though one could say there was only black and white, this wasn’t true at all. This painting, in the midst of all the color, was the most striking painting in the room. “I think that’s a great idea. Let’s go paint gray.” Mom was confused, but Felicity, when we got home from the store after buying four canisters of watercolor paint, couldn’t stop painting mockingbirds. The floor was covered in what looked like gray and black blobs of little round things on sticks. I couldn’t have been more proud. I decided to paint with her, and she was confused but let me join her anyways. When I was done she turned to me and said, “Mommy, you’re good at drawing!” I told her, no I’m not, Sweetie. A couple hours later, while I was fixing chicken nuggets for dinner, she ran up to me, her black painting hanging in her left hand, and said, “Look, Mommy! I’m a real artist now.” We hung her black blob behind the toilet. She signed it, For Mommy. I asked her, why me—why not Daddy, but I don’t think she understood the question.

Theseus Slaying a Centaur Ari Schwieters Theseus, a hero well known for both killing the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of Crete and preventing an invasion of Athens by the Amazons, decided to flex his heroic muscles yet again after his half-friend Pirithoüs’s wife got abducted by drunken centaurs.

The last thing you saw was his hair, like Justin Timberlake’s in the ’90s. And you pulled it, undoing the curl. And all four of your arms couldn’t stop his two or that little white bone. At least, not yet.

Your dad used to sing to you, “Squirley-anna Going Down To Beatville” But you never imagined death With Theseus on your back, with Minotaur blood on his headband, And ladies’ hair wrapped around his wrist.

You wonder what they’ll write about you in your obituary. Will they say, “He was half a man.” For sure when Hades would catch Theseus by the toe, he’d be “A man.”

But for you, forgiveness is hard because he is “Half a centaur.” But the MLK Jrs of Little Greece didn’t stand up in the Parthenon, and didn’t spew of their dreams, and didn’t boycott riding bareback on the back of this pony express, At least, not yet.

So all you can do is gurgle “we shall overcome” After he overcame you through the jaw, And hopped off to ham-string you just because he could.

what is free Hannah Swanson 1. it’s funny the vegetative way a zoo lion searches for a way not to pummel life out of its captivity freezer meat how eyes hollow out like graves when they don’t want to see 2. fear is the t-shirt you’ve been wearing inside out all day your mind opens with a can opener, beans and juice tumble out 3. you figure it’s not about what you see but how you took the risk, played with your shadow then wondered if it could come to life

Hitchcock’s Final Scene Aubree Else Imagine him walking down Leytonstone side streets—north toward Cromwell’s brick estates, shoes squeaking from fresh spring rain. A thin woman in a tea-length skirt glances at his tipped hat. The peach kerchief tied tightly under her taut jawline hugs her dewy skin. Leading lady pursued by charming but desperate lover. He breathes deeply of her perfume—lilac. A woman is only as elusive as her lingering scent. Memories of Mother’s room trigger summer afternoons spent at the foot of her bed. Her nagging is why he left England—loneliness is better when you’re not forcibly alone. Leading lady resists lover’s advances; lover relentlessly follows her. Alma has the same eyes as the kerchiefed woman, he thinks. Both captivate with mere presence—a flit of the eye swinging lust at any man. Her blonde hair too inviting to featureless lovers. Loneliness is better when you’re obviously alone. Lover spies leading lady in another man’s flat. California was the land of plenty. Routine settles over a household quicker than the money is thrust into chubby hands. Lilacs cloud his thoughts as he arrives at the iron gate. A tug of the cold metal reminds him of Alma’s desperate grip on his neck, her ring branding him. Lover stands over leading lady’s body. “We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”

Faces of Northwestern Jenna Hubin Drawing

Between the Lightning and the Thunder is Svaha Jesse Fleming You were six years old when I found you in the fir needles, foaming and writhing in the tremors. I could not make it stop, I could only turn you on your side and wait for it to pass. That night you came to me and told me you had a nightmare, and I asked you what you saw, and you said fire in the closet, and we looked and looked, but there were no fires anywhere. It was the summer, and we went out on the porch to watch the sunset. My father told me once to pay attention to nightmares, but I never learned to interpret, so I called you Onawa, and you never told me about your nightmares again. My grandfather sings words I do not understand. I talk to the hickory trees and sit on the precipice of the eastern ridge. He plays the notes of his youth through the mouthpiece of a cedar flute. For the record, I have never been able to play music for him. He has tried to teach me to cover the holes with my fingertips, but what comes out is not music. It is more like a shriek or a whisper. And the noise terrifies me. I would look to him, panicked, unnerved. It is like you are all eyes and no sound, he would tell me. I resented it, not because I thought he wouldn’t listen to me if I made noise, but because I was trying so hard to see what he was actually saying, if he was actually saying it to me. My grandfather has niceties—his leathery arms, his eyes like laughing ink—but I am not nice. I know this because I dream about fire, and I always want to be alone. We live at the crossing of a ridge and the slope of Mount Unaduti in a cabin he cut fortyseven years ago out of the surrounding Fraser firs. He later built the resort at the foot of the hill, seven tight, square cabins that he rents out as places of retreat. He spends his days maintaining them in his placid fashion, usually setting out early in the morning and then returning on one of the dappled Quarabs, clicking them to a stop in front of the house where he files paperwork, calls up his town friends and real estate agents, delivers eggs to the farmers market. In the afternoons, he frets over wild ginger, quinoa, and muscadine. He has never gone back to the reservation, but he tells me stories of dust and mange after dinner, pulling out his great-grandfather’s beaded mantle and letting me dance on the warped rug in my grandmother’s moccasins. Eduda, I say, why do I have no mother? He tells me it is because my mother ran off to the city with my father, and they visited my grandfather on the mountain, just once. They left me before I even had a name. I only know this because my grandfather sits me on his knee when thunder scratches the valley and licks the pine tips, and he whispers that I am Onawa, wide awake, with him, Gawonii, the one who is speaking. His red cedar flute shimmers in his hand, and I sink into his chest so that he can send the notes soaring with the hawk into the storm. If I look hard enough, I begin to see that the hawk and the song are the same, falling and rising with the wind, drifting further away to the place that I cannot go, the other that I feel I will never know. In the song, Eduda

tells the storm that we are not afraid because we are on the side of the water and the rain; we can only receive the flash of the lightning and conduct its fire when it comes to us. It is mid-May when Festival Week comes, and all of Onacona is drunk with a kind of apathy that lures everyone from artist-types and musicians to lumberjacks from further up the Smokies. Eduda is playing down at the tavern with his friend Hank, the owner, who keeps a set of shiny Gibsons in his back room that emerge for these sorts of occasions. I have been out of school for one year, and I work at the tavern. It is only on the weekends because my grandfather wants to keep me where he can see me. It seems to serve its function, except he cannot really see me when more than two hundred vague and sweaty bodies cram the tavern to overfill. He also could not see me when I was training for the job, which had mostly just meant a tour with Hank of his back room collection, during which his long yellow nails slid up and down my back. The regulars at the tavern had to teach me their drinks eventually. They have a patience for me they do not have for the other bartender, a newcomer from West Virginia with a deeply ruddy neck who plunks the drinks down with especial aplomb. Tonight the bar assembles a gushing old woman with her battery of biddies, a caustic pair of farmers, harmless town drunks, one of the Lowrys’ ranch hands and his giggling sweetheart. Before the music starts up, my grandfather lays a hand on my arm. Mind yourself, Onawa, he says, be careful, because there is trouble afoot. He always catches these tidbits from Hank. Hank who marinades those fingernails in every town happening, who presses his ear to its heartbeat. I tried to tell Eduda once how Hank made me uncomfortable, scared even, but Hank was the first man to welcome Eduda to Onacona when he came, before me, and they have been the closest of friends ever since. So my revelation to Eduda was only so much wind in his ears—he turned his head away. He said he would talk to Hank about it. That was the first time I had any reason to doubt his word. His silence was settled from that moment on because no one talks to Hank about anything that might provoke him. Not even Eduda— he has always loved preserving over provoking. Some of the out-of-towners have found their way to the mountain for the festival, and they will not stop pestering each other with loud jibes, shifting their weight, crowding around the bar. One of them winks at me. He takes a Jamison, sips it with relish. When the rest jostle their way to a table and lay out a game of euchre, he shakes back red curls, sets his glass down, thanks me. A battered violin case emerges as if out of his back pocket, its thick strains joining the loops of my grandfather’s river cane flute and the purr of Hank’s vermilion Ovation. The rafters are dusky with nicotine exhale. Nightshade’s smoky descendants. Eduda swings himself up from his stool, smiles at the applause, sets his flute on the curve of the stand. I see gray glistening in the strands of his hair under the iridescents, but he is coming

straight to the bar, and I set his whiskey and gin on a coaster. He smiles with approval. Some firewater for the Indian, one of the drunks snorts, and then all of them are guffawing, uproarious, repeating the phrase. Some firewater. Some Indian. Eduda pretends he has not heard, but I see the dimples in his nose, the small lines deepen at his mouth’s corners. One of the card-whipping bastards has come back for some ice. He peers Eduda in the face, eyes narrowed. Hey, this Indian has a beard! he shouts. What kind of Indian are you? My grandfather sips his drink. The Les Paul warps the airwaves, snapping at the downbeats. The bastard tugs on my grandfather’s beard—hey, you deaf, Indian?—and my grandfather levels him with a slug to the face. The room bubbles over, and I reach for him because I must stand between them; he must not do this thing or be this person. To my right, the redhead is coming for his friend, bending down to grip him under his rounded shoulders. Stomps of a booted man from behind me. I barely notice the music grind to a halt, but Hank marches up to the redhead, gets in his face, sputters tobacco all over the unconscious hustler. The redhead reaches a hand out to keep the distance, a few words coming from his full mouth. Hank flips back the man’s arm and pushes him into a table, hollering insults against the unconscious hustler, against his friends and family. I see my grandfather stir off the stool, his mouth still tight, moving toward Hank. The other men have backed off, huddling over their cards, swaying their eyes cautiously to the four men but remaining aloof finally. I think that they will kill this man with the curls. I think I could not bear it if they did. My hands reach out to the surface of the bar, and I am across and amid them, yelling words I do not hear, and I do not care if Hank hits me. For one pregnant moment, he might. I might hit back. But then I smell petrichor, and the lightning is before my eyes, I cannot stop the lightning— __________ All is black before I finally see real colors pool into my head again. The black narrows into eyes, not my grandfather’s eyes; no, these are slate, crisscrossed with gray, and they belong to a man with ruddy curls atop his head. He moves out of sight, and I have to lift my head to look for him. It is crisp air on my tongue, the tavern is just a wall behind us, and my grandfather sits against it with a bag of frozen peas at his jaw. My episode saved me from Hank’s fist, at the cost of the eyes of the whole town this time. Eduda does not look at me, which means that I am no longer the lightning, I am not even Onawa—I am the river running down the mountain and shoving aside the broken birch twigs. My grandfather does not know that I will leave with this fiddler, but it is already done because he has begun walking up the mountain out of Onacona, leaving the horse for me. The dirt road behind the tavern leads southwest of the town, and behind the peeling panels of the empty church, a melody rings out, tinted by gold embers. I am still a well, breaking down

caverns of limestone, but I reach the fire and find the grass with my hands. The rest of me follows. His fingers ripple along the curve of the violin, I am asleep. Fire running liquid down the streets and up the mountain fire catching the firs tine by tine and choking chickadees to the sky I am the air below the dirt below the shrieking grass and the pockets of air in the shadowed eaves We are more or less blown south. I come to believe that this man has seen in me the world, and I learn that he is the music in the mist above the waterfall, suspended, filtering air. When icy green blossoms crack open the dogwood trees, there is nothing else for me to do but have his baby. Fourteen hours of labor in a poster bed in the middle of a cold white room in a town with a name I do not know. The nurses take turns swabbing and mopping and wrapping. They bring in the little thing I have unearthed, and he is not red and squalling like I imagined. His little pea face is shut tight with sleep. There are soft steps in the hallway, a pause in front of the door. It clicks open to reveal the man I have come to call Lowe, with the red curls in his face and the blackened slate in his eyes. He resumes breathing, but he does not sit on the bed. My babyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mouth is a berry. Downy head, long damp lashes, he is a lamb in my arms. No, he is not a lamb. He is puce and grizzle, his skin curdles to clumps of patchy fur, his eyes are scotched with flame, he claws at my chin and mouth and he is a devil and I am his mother I cannot hold this devil I loathe there has been a mistake so the mouth screams with horror and the arms shove this thing away and I flee all the way back to Unaduti up the molten tarmac up the rolling stairs to the closet and I hide I am a girl with nothing but this cotton dress and I hide in the dark but there is a gleam even in the dark and I tug on the light and the glassy eye is the size of a buffalo and it stares unblinking and twitching at me and there is no point in running for I am always in the dark but the door is locked the smoke seeps through the doorjamb I am not air or water or fire I am dust I am nothing but dry dust __________ I have seen an end and its means. Eduda will name him Chea Sequah, red bird, and I will run to the ocean.

Antichrist: Antiochus Epiphanies Ceciley Pund 1. We are told the next will come like him—quiet under muslin market canopies, his foot- fall a muffled promise to crush and scatter like dust clouds. But the Jews don’t know it’s him until they smell pig flesh on the altar and see the olive wood crack under Apollonius’s thousand men. A phalanx of linnets hook around sharav winds, the weight of prayer in a sky not yet red. Their fathers piked onto sarissas, screaming white lips between the seven gates, budding through ground alongside lilies of the field. Jordan hears the knife come out and sees the watershed dismembered, soil red from cut veins in the holy of holies. 2. We find heads fathered to telephone poles, a hand and foot swing— an electric pendulum. ‘But it shall not be this time as it was before.’ Trust the two-headed gods, marble shrines rising in our empty houses.

Wait for watch towers to go up, gallow the olive tree before he cracks. ‘He shall pay attention he shall make desolate.’ Not a warning, but an oath without a name. I saw the multitudes leave on their knees “Yahweh”

in their mouths.

The Old Man and the Typewriter Marc Strom Somewhere in New York City, in an apartment filled with the scent of dry wood, there is an old man who sits at a typewriter. He wakes up each morning, before the squawk of cars below him start, slopes over his desk, and closes his eyes. He thinks of all the things in the world that remind him of life. Big things like stars, the great story of the ocean. And small things like seeing his name in cursive, or remembering the smell of his fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aftershave. Thinking of these things makes the man release a low sigh, mumbling thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s right. He rests his twisted fingers on the black ovals of the keys and types these words: Living in this world to what can it be compared? A chestnut and its shell a slick nut trapped in spines.

Contributors’ Notes Hailee Becher is a senior Studio Art major. She works with a multitude of mediums, but her favorites are painting and woodshop.

Bethany Pearson is a junior English Literature and Writing major. She drinks her coffee straight and tries to write similarly. She does not understand most things and is learning to be okay with that. When you see her, give her a hug.

Aubree Else is a senior English Writing major. She was in a bluegrass band once.

Ceciley Pund is a junior English Literature and Writing major. She is not an island in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Jesse Fleming is a senior English Writing major. When she was seven, she stole her friend David’s prize rock for her rock collection and won Kid of the Month at Olan Mills.

Brienna Rossiter is a senior English Writing and General Music double major. Her favorite book in the whole world is Things That Are by Amy Leach. You should go read it.

Rosemary Grant is a PSEO student in her first year at Northwestern. She’s leaning toward a biology-related degree but is reluctant to leave art and English behind. She has five siblings who fill her life with adventure and baseball.

Ari Schwieters is a junior English Writing major who has recently found her niche: Spoken Word in the Kitchen. Here, even fried eggs and rice milk can sound classy. She also enjoys 1950s dresses and spending time with Jesus.

Jenna Hubin is a junior Digital Media Arts major who, when not drawing her professors and classmates, tends to drink tea and pet every animal within reach. She hopes to tell stories about reconciliation and worthiness through her art.

Hunter Smith is a senior English Writing major and has served the role of both token white guy and token male in his respective friend groups. His goal is to make a living doing creative writing, and he’s not picky.

Lucas Hunt is a freshman Mechanical Engineering major. He enjoys art, chocolate, ice skating, and fire. He is also passionate about philosophy and expensive food. Brianna Klassen is a junior Elementary Education major. She has a Pillow Pet named Charles Wallace, and her day is not complete without peanut butter. Celina McManus is a senior English Writing major. The universe she imagined at six years old included a planet made entirely of chocolate. She is a mermaid. Reid Oyen is a senior Studio Art major with a minor in Graphic Design and plans to graduate in the fall of 2015. With a particular emphasis on printmaking and sculpture, he can be found working through ideas drawn from ritual, geometry, the supernatural, and mathematics throughout a variety of media.

Abby Sorensen is a junior English Literature and Writing major. At any given time, she can be found looking for the best in people and most likely wearing pearls. No one is surprised when she says she likes cats. Marc Strom is a senior English Literature and Writing major. If he were a vacation, he’d be a camper in the desert. If he were a hobby, he’d be map collecting. If he were a drink, he’d be sarsaparilla. Hannah Swanson is a senior English Writing major. She can usually be found laughing, staring off into the distance at nothing, or thinking about flamingos, the most majestic of all birds. Abby Thompson is a junior Vocal Performance major. She is passionate about Marvel comics, Dostoevsky, Nora Ephron movies, and dresses from the LOFT. Her deepest dreams include becoming a Disney princess and contributing to Asphalt Toilet Paper.

Hailee Becher Aubree Else Jesse Fleming Rosemary Grant Jenna Hubin Lucas Hunt Brianna Klassen Celina McManus Reid Oyen Bethany Pearson Ceciley Pund Brienna Rossiter Ari Schwieters Hunter Smith Abby Sorensen Marc Strom Hannah Swanson Abby Thompson