Issue No. 8, 2014-2015 by West 10th

new york university college of arts and science

2014â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2015

Contents Editor’s Note

A Poem by Cathy Park Hong, Guest Contributor

An Interview with Justin Taylor

Contributors’ Notes

Poetry Sara M. Evangelista

Fall Factor

Jordana Weiner

Forgive Me, Little Myth

Abby Kosisko

Sunday

Thomas Hartwell

Letters from Japan, Kyoto 1

Jordana Weiner

Brief History of Autumn

Danielle Bergere

Sake off West Crescent Boulevard

Henry Hsiao

Marijuana doesn’t cause cancer

Andrés González

Rhubarb Pie

Amy Moore

In the Well editors’ award winner in poetry

Susannah Perkins

this won’t fit on an appointment form

Camille Renaud

move to trash

Amy Moore

Altar

Sara M. Evangelista

Black Sun

CONTENTS

Prose Joey Bui

Black Beans and Wine

Margaret Saunders

From the Valley

Harry Hantel

God Knows What Else editors’ award winner in prose

Anna Kim

Lil’ Saint Francis

CONTENTS

Art Ursula Barker

Introspective

Caleb Savage

Cassette Tape Player

Ursula Barker

Pensive

Mimo Reynolds

Sense

Sonya Kozlova

Rodin

Sonya Kozlova

Wavy Lovers

Lawrence Wu

Hell in the Clouds

Caleb Savage

Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker, Mahanoy City, PA 54

Haley Weiss

Untitled

Haley Weiss

Untitled

Mimo Reynolds

Source

cover

CONTENTS

Editor’s Note Without a doubt, winter is the most exciting time of year for West 10th. Every year we set a deadline early in December, only to end up pushing it back to the last few days of the semester (although, to be honest, we considered poems and stories and art from well into the New Year). We received hundreds of submissions, an amount that seemed incredibly daunting at first. Still, the editorial board and I delved into the work of reading stories and poems by our fellow NYU students, and sifted through the pieces until we ended up with the issue you’re holding right now. To say that the pieces melded into a pretty conversation wouldn’t be entirely true, because each work has something utterly different to say. Some pieces are quiet, some loud. Some are abrasive, while some have their own mellow rhythm. Still, what each has in common is something that a former professor told me was the most telling indicator of good writing: They either make you want to start writing something new, or make you wish you had written them yourself. What you will find in the pages of this edition is not a simple conversation but an unpredictable one. You will stare down from a mountaintop, you will breathe a canary into your lungs, and you will hold a rifle in your hands. These are pieces that we argued about, laughed about, and fought hard for. The people who have made this issue possible deserve more thanks than I could possibly give on this page. Our managing editor Michelle Ling and layout editor Chuck Kuan managed to fix problems I didn’t know we had. The members of our editorial board lent much-needed energy to our conversations. I would like to thank Joanna Yas, for guiding me through my time as editor-in-chief, and I would also like to thank Maeve Nolan, our previous editor-in-chief, for giving me invaluable insight and responding to my panicked text messages when I found myself without the slightest idea of what to do. EDITOR’S NOTE

EDITOR’S NOTE

I would also like to thank Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss for selecting the Editors’ Award recipients. We are grateful to Justin Taylor for having an insightful conversation with us, and to Cathy Park Hong for graciously giving us one of her poems. Thank you to all of the writers, artists, and readers who made this issue—including the conversation and difficult choices surrounding it—possible. Like I said, this winter was an exciting one, but now it’s the spring and I’m delighted to share with your our 2014– 2015 issue of West 10th. Eric Stiefel

Fall Factor Sara M. Evangelista

In the morning we inhale rock candy and star dust I pinch the earth between my fingers wipe asteroids from my eyes Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dirt on your face can you taste it?

EVANGELISTA: FALL FACTOR

Forgive Me, Little Myth Jordana Weiner

I do not know what they ended up doing with my sweet little dog’s fragile body. I’d rather never ask. Imagine instead. Truth is an old tepid fishbowl. There is springtime now because she is still all honey. All sass. All bundled soft mother & careful tongue. Forgiveness from the things we take with us to sea, in what we bury there and let float and let soak among the peach white seashells, millions of them. The hunting hope in my body wants to know God now. Wants to taste the marshmallow frosting of knowing heaven. To have what they’re all having. Wants to not know anymore of wonder. Needs to. Need to squeeze lemon slices in my mouth with the confidence of a single comet, eternally whirling despite having nothing to hold onto. Despite having everything to hold onto happen to be hurtling at sixty five thousand miles an hour around the sun. Now holding peacefully to hands of worship. Hoping they will bring me a river bed. Muddy, warm & let me set her fragile body down again. This time more softly, with more hands. Dear this God: let her become air again, & rush to fill all of these empty spaces. 10

WEINER: FORGIVE ME, LITTLE MYTH

URSULA BARKER, INTROSPECTIVE

BARKER

Sunday Abby Kosisko

Little citron pearls strung around her neck, sulphur baby carrots enameled like rotten teeth.

KOSISKO: SUNDAY

Letters from Japan, Kyoto 1 Thomas Hartwell

It is raining in Kyoto too, less consistently than Osaka but it is colder and drier. My clothes are not sticking to my spine. There are no more falling drops at the steps leading up to Kiyomizu-dera. The ground still slicks beneath my feet so I climb slowly. The temple is large, built nail-less over the hillside. Haruna tells me if I survive the jump from its stage my wish will be granted. I would rather just pray. In the main hall I say a prayer for you. I strike the iron bowl and it bellows, shrieks against the mountains then settles over us and Kyoto. From the mountains a shatter of crows bursts from the woods. They swarm me and the bowl, cawing spells and pecking my hair. The bowl is vibrating still, it rumbles and cries, resonating a thousand mallet strikes at once. The temple reverberates with it. Four hundred years of wood fractures around me. I tumble down the hillside in an avalanche of pillars and support beams. H A R T W E L L : L E T T E R S F R O M JA PA N, KYOT O 1

H A R T W E L L : L E T T E R S F R O M JA PA N, KYOT O 1

I am not crushed by the rubble but buried. The only light shining directly into my eye, Otowa waterfall cascading into my mouth.

CALEB SAVAGE, CASSETTE TAPE PLAYER

SAVAG E

Black Beans and Wine Joey Bui

I was dating a new guy. That was on my mind as I stirred the saucepan-full of black beans and water. I had said something terrible to him. I looked down at the yellow eyes of the beans, magnified in water, and felt sudden paranoia. I was doing nothing wrong. I brought the water to a boil, turned down the heat and let the pot bubble gently. Our little Arlington kitchen was full of onion and garlic, covering the day-old smell of Payal’s spinach curry still crusting in the sink. I was frying zfor a dollar-fifty each. For our first date, Sean took me to an Italian restaurant in DC, where my vegetables were puréed and squeezed out into flowers around my plate. I couldn’t tell what they were, maybe a blend of squash, peas and brussel sprouts, whipped into a cool blue cream. What would he think if he saw me in my own kitchen, picking at a week-old rotisserie chicken or manhandling a jumbo-sized bag of frozen peas from Capitol Supermarket? He said that I smelt of madeleines when we first met. I was testing a new mix of essential oils: four parts orange zest, one part lemon, one part vanilla and a touch of nutmeg. Sean told me about a French patisserie on the way to high school that sold orange-peel madeleines in white boxes with gold lettering. He sent a box from Georgetown Bakery to my workplace the next day, of two golden discs nestled in blue tissue paper and an invitation to dinner. Payal and I ate them on the train home. It was the first time I’d cooked black beans. I bought them because I was constipated that week and read that black beans are full of fibre. Also, the 500g bag was on sale for a dollar. I was googling as I cooked, and found that the beans take a long time to tender and really I should have let them soak in cool water overnight. But never mind that. I had a lot to think about as I watched the pot bubble. Why was I look16

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ing for distractions even though Sean was so good to me? Also, did I have any tomatoes left? I had been thinking about tomatoes all day. Guillermo, the new law grad intern at work, showed me Neruda’s Oda al Tomate and in the evening I ran with gusto around the Arlington high school track, thinking about the tomato juices running in the poem, cold and fresh, la totalidad de su frescura, and lying down on the conference room floor with Guillermo where the watercooler bubbled like streams. Some basil would be perfect on top of the fresh tomatoes. When the beans were ready, I used a tea-towel to lift the lid—the handle had fallen off a week ago. They were overcooked, I could smell it right away in the smokiness that escaped the pot. But when I tasted the beans, I decided that the smokiness worked with the flavour, onion and garlic galore. And even that the crispy (burnt) edges were a nice touch for texture. I balanced the bean pot on the arm of our sofa, where the faux leather was already cracking and ripped. My plastic spoon had wilted a little bit from the heat and made me want to laugh. I wondered where Sean was sitting. Probably still at the same Dupont Circle bar since happy hour, with the remnants of buffalo wings before him—bright orange paste and chicken bones—and texting for more friends to come for dinner. I told him I was busy tonight, that I had promised to Skype my dad. “Send him my regards,” Sean had said, which was funny. I don’t know if anybody’s ever sent Dad regards before, and certainly not a Senator’s staff assistant. I shook out my hair from its bun and sniffed it, full of the smell of garlic (powder). My hair always used to smell of garlic (powder) when I worked part time at Dad’s shop, from the garlic-batter shrimp curry. It was funny because I started to talk about Dad’s business and Sean interrupted me. “Oh, he’s an entrepreneur,” said Sean. I laughed at that too. Dad had a notion of fanciness about his takeout shop. He took everything he could from grandma’s faithful kitchen and deep-fried it in beer and butter batter. Even the rice was tossed in oil, cloves and chicken salt. “You know what this is, Areej?” Dad said, pumping oil out of a plastic

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canister. “This is fusion Pakistani-American food. You should take notes.” His Urdu accent dragged down the u in ‘fusion,’ adding four more tones to the word, like a handful of garam masala mixed into baked beans. I laughed then too, and took very serious notes on how to avoid his accent. In DC, ‘fusion’ was pronounced with the curt, funnelled ‘u’ of a Japanese accent and the dishes were deconstructed on long rectangular plates, with slices of fresh ginger on the side. Sean only watched me, smiling. He used to ask me why I laugh, and at first I said, ‘at you, you knob,’ very nicely. Then he asked when we were in bed and he was eating me out: ‘why are you laughing?’ I was laughing because his hands were stroking my sides, where I was ticklish, and I screamed, ‘at you, you fuck.’ He stopped for a moment and looked at me. I didn’t know what to say, I just wanted to finish. He went back down and stroked the length of my thighs, to my calves where his hand fit all the way round. I wanted to thrash from the feeling of his cool tongue inside me but he had me pinned. I could feel the hard muscles of his arms clamped around my knees. He stroked the nook under my right knee, kneading deeper and deeper as I came, laughing and screaming. As he leaned up to kiss me, I tasted sourness on his lips and decided to be very kind to him. “You’re so beautiful,” said Sean. We were on the lawn of the National Monument after work, where the Navy Band Northeast was playing Prokofiev very badly. I’d forgotten what part of the conversation we’d gotten to and couldn’t place his mood. I was thinking about sex. He took my hand gently. I looked up and felt shocked by how unfamiliar his face was. His bright blue eyes, the colour of candy shell or club lights, were so concerned for me (what are you thinking? How do you feel? Are you having a good time?) that I couldn’t turn away. I lifted a hand to close his eyes, but stopped myself just in time. “What,” he said softly. I rested the hand on his cheek. I thought about telling him that he was a stranger to me, but realised that it didn’t sound nice, even if I said it nicely. I traced back our conversation and thought that maybe I should say, ‘not

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really, my dad owns a Pakistani-American fusion takeout shop in Georgia.’ But our conversation had already moved beyond that. “What,” he said again, even more softly. So I said: “I love you,” and laughed, and went home to cook black beans. I woke up with my face in the cracked leather and Payal swearing fluently in the next room. She was wrestling with a large bucket that had spilled thin red liquid all over the bathroom floor. I helped her pull it upright and the liquid sloshed loudly inside. “What the fuck is this, did you period into this thing,” said Payal. “No fuck you, this is the wine I said I was making, and it’s not supposed to be opened for another month,” I said. I squatted over the bucket, stuffing the thick lid back into its seal, but it was already too late. I couldn’t rack it now that the airlock had broken. “Well, I’m not cleaning it up,” said Payal. She had taken off her underwear and was stepping into the tub, muttering ‘fucking wine in the bathroom.’ I mopped it up with an old shirt, but most of the spill had already seeped into the exposed concrete where the tiles were missing, leaking down into the foundation of the house. I first started making wine when I was unemployed and staying in Aurora, Ohio with Aunt Laksha and her family after graduation, determined to get out of the south. They had a little house with dirty white walls sitting on a bed of weeds and I started making wine in the barns in between sending off resumes. The kids thought it was fantastic, my cousins Sara and Eric. They used to come visit me in the barn and I did a bit like I was a witch concocting potions to turn children into mushrooms. They ran screaming, ‘Areej is a witch! Areej is a witch!’ Aunt Laksha sat me down one night. “I’m worried about you. You are a very lucky girl, you know. You have good family and you are so beautiful. Look, what man would not want this?” she patted my boobs. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you.” “Nothing’s wrong with me.” “But you are so strange, Areej,” she said. “You are not normal.”

BUI: BLACK BEANS AND WINE

“That’s just because I’m drunk, auntie.” Her eyes instantly filled with tears. “How shall I answer to your father!” she wrung her gold bracelets hysterically. “Oh Allah help me.” I was drinking a lot because there was no one else to try my wine and nothing else to do in Aurora except scare the children and send off resumes. After the talk with Aunt Laksha, I took a long walk around the neighbourhood, picked up hibiscus everywhere I could and took it back to boil in the barn. After dissolving the flower water with sugar (and a touch of acid), I let it cool before plunging my hands in the bucket to squeeze the flowers for more flavour. It took me the whole day and my arms were tinged with hibiscus red up to my elbows. Sara and Eric came in before dinner. “Tell auntie that I’ve already eaten,” I said. “But she made kofta,” said Eric. “Hey, come here.” I dried my hands on my shirt and stuck a hibiscus flower behind each of their ears—I had saved two of the prettiest ones for them. “This is a very strong flower and if you wear it close to your head, it will grow beautiful thoughts inside of you,” I said. “You smell like a goddess,” said Sara. “I thought I was a witch,” I said, laughing. The whole barn smelt of flowers and sugar—that was before the yeast—and they stayed playing with the wet hibiscus mulch until bedtime. It was the last time I felt fully beautiful. Two weeks later, the wine was ready and I went to DC for an interview with two bottles in my suitcase. I rented an outhouse in the back of an old Filipino couple’s house with Payal. For half-off electricity, we mowed, weeded and watered the garden, where they had been trying to grow vegetables for a decade or so. It was a good deal. All I ever wanted was a tomato garden. “This is where you live?” I watched Sean crouched and squinting as he climbed down the stairs to our kitchen. It was the first time he’d seen my place. We were back from

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a ball in the Library of Congress, where Sean introduced me to his boss. “Ajeer, is that Arabic?” she asked. “I’m Pakistani.” “Oh yes, wonderful. Your people have such a rich and interesting culture,” she turned to Sean. “She’s so beautiful.” “She’s an Institutional Philanthropy and Partnerships Officer with the ROC,” he said. I took a passing hors d’oeuvre and bit into it: hard bread, chopped tomato and herb topping with black vinaigrette. The vinaigrette dribbled to the sides of my mouth and stung. I washed it down with champagne, which I had been doing all night. Sean leaned in to kiss me. I knew my mouth was dank from the vinaigrette and I said into his mouth: “If you don’t take me home right now, I’ll break up with you.” “What’s that smell?” He was wading to the couch, through the throws, cushions and footrests that Payal and I had collected from the Salvation Army over the years. I only looked at him. I was standing with my back to the sink. “What?” he said, frustrated. He had never spoken to me like that before. “It’s the wine I’m making.” “You make wine?” “Yeah.” “Well then I have to try some,” he said. I went to the bathroom to fill a pitcher with the thin red liquid and swilled it in Sean’s face. I drank my glass in one gulp. It was awful. The flowers were bitter and dry, so tart with the yeast that it made my mouth sore. I filled another glass and it sank hot and sour to my stomach. I hated the way Sean was looking at me. He drank his glass and didn’t say another word. I started undoing his belt and he gripped my arm suddenly as though in shock. I laughed into his face, my breath full of yeast, until his grip loosened and he let me pull down his pants. I turned around and we had sex against the kitchen sink, where the dishes were still crusted with spinach curry and everything was ugly. I woke up sometime at dawn, my head finally clear. Sean was still sleeping on the couch. I was horrified to find half of the bucket empty and wor-

BUI: BLACK BEANS AND WINE

ried that I had gotten him seriously sick, though I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know if I still hated him. I went out into the garden. All the plants were in a sheen of frost and I laid down on the grass to cool my skin against it. I noticed a bud of orange above my head and plucked out the first tomato of the year, raw and young, and ate it, crying for all the things that I had made and ruined.

URSULA BARKER, PENSIVE

BARKER

Brief History of Autumn Jordana Weiner

I am not an animal anymore because time is cream filling. I grow out of my paws. Learn to cook. strap an apron on my waist, chop, chop. Imagine: everything that has ever been or ever will be like a small gourd blooming in fast forward. It twisting off its vine, hitting dirt, bursting. Deer licking up its pieces their small and sinewy tongues. If one day we find out that all of the universe is busted orange fruit, well I think we will still keep philosophy. Like how the first man on the moon just wants to go back and wipe away his footprints.

W E I N E R : B R I E F H I S T O RY O F AU T U M N

Sake off West Crescent Boulevard Danielle Bergere

fat and coral, cut into slivers you were caught from the wild raised in the ocean I eat your soft, fleshy body lined with white tender streaks the citrus coldness of you, raw thinking of the silvery skin you lost to savage acts and your dead eye, gleaming

BERGERE: SAKE OFF WEST CRESCENT BOULEVARD

Marijuana doesn’t cause cancer Henry Hsiao

Miners sent a canary down my throat and into my chest. It did not survive.

H S I AO : M A R I J U A N A D O E S N ’ T C AU S E C A N C E R

MIMO REYNOLDS, SENSE

REYNOLDS

From the Valley Margaret Saunders

Your Father In the center of your parent’s bedroom dresser, next to collected ceramic knickknacks and jewelry boxes of saved movie tickets, there was a picture of your father as a shadow. It was all an effect—an underexposed, black and white yearbook photo set against a dark stage curtain. Your father, with his black skin and his black suit, faded seamlessly into the background of darkness. Your mother had always appreciated the artistry of the photo but by the time you were a teenager, she decided she would rather have the memory in sharper focus. Extensive restoration revealed your father as he was at age 16: lanky and long, with a face he hadn’t yet grown into and clumsily balled up hands that resembled yams. He was a high school sophomore about to compete in his first national debate. He had the type of smile that stretched off his face; he had the type of idealism that in ten years time he would never admit to having ever possessed. This was what you knew from the photo, and from your father’s salutatorian speech, you knew that he used to have the same tilting southern accents that his sisters had. And from these sisters, you knew that he was once a Black Panther, that he marched on Washington, that the walls of his Harvard dorm were covered in Malcolm X posters that compelled his roommate—he of the Greenwich, Connecticut legacy-stock—to request a room change. And from your mother you knew that he and his cousins once staged a sit-in at an ice cream shoppe in their hometown of Glendale, Ohio. But from him, you didn’t know much. If you wanted to learn about history, he said, fine, watch Roots. Go to a museum. Here’s a biography of Marcus 28

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Garvey. If you wanted to know about him, well, you knew him then. He was middle-aged, solid, handsome. He had the indecipherable accent of a primetime anchorman. He had a short salt and pepper beard and a shaved head and everyday he wore a suit and a baseball hat to the Harlem Parole Reentry Court, where he worked as a judge. He was usually funny. He was very loving. And, most markedly, he was always only a few paces ahead of some familiar sorrow. Early on, this rule was clear: It was not that your father would not talk about the past. Rather, he would skip over the things that never made a difference anyway. Emmett From the very first moment you became aware of him, he would visit you in your sleep. A boy, maybe, with no face, who cried with no mouth, who stood but was limp. Your mother said, Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s too young. Your father said, I had to learn it young too. He was a boy far from home, the color of a Tar Baby, fourteen and fourteen and fourteen, and never older. He was beaten with a pistol, shot through the right eye and tied to a fan because the men who killed him did not want his body to float to the top of the Tallahassee. You were eight when you saw him preserved in post-mortem photograph, swollen beyond recognition, face engorged with dusty river water. He was a boy a lot like other boys you know, just a regular boy, maybe with a quick smile and bright eyes and shoulders just beginning to broaden. But your Aunts called him a lesson and your male cousins learned him from a young age. The Boy This was what you thought love meant. You were sixteen and stupid and eager. His name was Luis, and he was an exchange student from Argentina, black hair and beauty marks with moss eyes, a soothing combination. After an overly long tussle with puberty that left you pimply and hairy and frizzy for four years, you were finally emerging from your cocoon, maybe not yet beautiful. But something on the cusp of it. You both played the trumpet in band class and would always sit next to each other, until

S AU N D E R S: F R O M T H E VA L L E Y

one day, your teacher moved you saying, I can’t have you two distracting each other like this. It hadn’t even occurred to either of you that you were engaging in anything tangible. He asked you to go for ice cream one day after school and you two sat in Central Park until you got kicked out at night. Unaccustomed to lying to your parents, you explained that you were home late because you’d been at the park with a boy. Your mother smiled. All your father said was, Mmf. Sean Bell He was from your neighborhood, twenty-three, engaged, a father. You know how the story goes. You were twelve in 2006, and that was the year that you bought your first bra and watched your hips fan out like the Delta. That was the year that the block got hot in the summertime, that there was a heatwave like no other in Jamaica, Queens. Someone busted up the fire hydrant in front of your apartment building and you all got soaked real good. The bus never came on time and the candy bars melted in their wrapping. 2006. That was the year on everyone’s tongue, fanning themselves in church, loitering on subway platforms, drinking Arizonas in front of the bodega. With bowed heads, they’d say, It’s 2006 and the cops still can’t tell the difference between a gun and a wallet. You know how the story goes. The court ruled that fifty bullet holes in an unarmed black body are accidents. And the Preacher Said “The justice system is a burst artery in the heart of New York City, in the heart of our country.” From your TV set at night, from your bedroom window, in your own head, you watched the black boys of America bleeding out into the streets. The Big Night It happened very fast. Everyone’s gossiping urged it along, because, after all, they had seen you both, exchanging looks in orchestra from your new,

S AU N D E R S: F R O M T H E VA L L E Y

distant seating positions, or maybe they spotted him carrying your books in the hallway, or maybe heard you teaching him English slang, dirty talk, curses in between giggles. You heard through the grapevine that people were saying you’d lost your virginity to him up on the catwalk of the big auditorium where you performed jazz shows for the school. It was, in reality, much more innocent than that. You two hadn’t even kissed yet. At the same time, you felt all the passions that the gossips had surmised you did. When Luis asked you to hang out on the weekend, making it the first time you two didn’t just meet up after school, you called half your friends, sweated through your turtleneck, and made the family cat scratch at you when you tried to hug him. It was a Saturday night and you wore your new pale ballet flats that ended up smudged with city smut by the end of the evening, though, at that point, you didn’t notice. You made the hour and half trip to the Upper East and waited for Luis in front of the apartment where he stayed with his wealthy aunt and uncle, who had moved to the States five years prior. It was a sweet night, puffed up clouds and the sky all deliciously pink and you, with unexplainable chattering teeth even though it was a warm winter, a frostless one, even though you were almost a woman and didn’t know why boys should scare you so much anymore. There was dinner, overpriced Italian, little shells in a light and tasteless pesto, which Luis used his uncle’s money to pay for. There was ice cream and coffee, and you two played at being adults in your pea coats and stiff scarves. Afterwards, you walked to the East River and the chill from the water was a good excuse to wrap yourselves into each other. Did you look up or did he tilt your head? Was the kiss fumbling and awkward the way they said first kisses were or romantic, the way fairy tales had informed you a kiss should always be? Later on, you didn’t remember the kiss itself anyway. What you did remember that night, what you always remembered was that you were mixed. Luis said that in his country they might call you milk and coffee. When people met you, when they learn your background, they would nod and say, Oh, you must take after your mother. These interactions left a bad aftertaste, the bitterness of them like old strange fruit. Because at the end of the day, it was just another way for

S AU N D E R S: F R O M T H E VA L L E Y

people to say, But you aren’t really black or But you aren’t like other black girls or But you don’t look it, so you can’t be it. People said these things like they were compliments. Like you were supposed to thank them. A moment after your very first kiss, Luis ran a hand through your hair, long and untextured, and twisted his finger around the bottom of a lock, looking at it in wonderment. Good thing, he said, already smiling at the clever comment he was about to make, that you don’t have Nigger Naps. The Cultural Exchange Four years after Luis, you were twenty and out to dinner in Buenos Aires, where you were studying abroad. Accompanying you was a boy named Agustin, a dead-ringer for Luis, his long lost amber-eyed twin perhaps. Agustin was your intercambio, an Argentinian student that the university had set you up with so that you could practice languages with each other. Your hangouts with Agustin went like this: 15 minutes of Spanish speaking, 45 minutes of English. Agustin controlled the dialogue and he liked to tell you long, roaming stories in his melodic English. The dinnertime story for the night detailed his time studying abroad in Idaho, of all places. He talked about his spring break, a trip to California with his friends. We wanted to get drugs, he explained, so we drove down the street looking for a Nigger. When he saw your face, he nodded his head back and forth reconsidering, and tapped his fingers gently on your upturned palm. You know what I mean, he said, there is a difference between a Black person and a Nigger. No, I don’t know what you mean, you told him pointedly. He looked at you with his prematurely wrinkled forehead and his little pink mouth hanging opened slightly. He appeared confused. Because, after all, wasn’t this something an American taught him? Wasn’t this something that all Americans knew? And the Preacher Said “The Real America, brothers and sisters, is land of peaks and valleys. And our people have been to the very pits of those valleys and some of us have

S AU N D E R S: F R O M T H E VA L L E Y

struggled to reach those mountainous peaks. But know, in the end, that we all have born the scars for it.” The Scars A 45-minute F train ride back to Queens and 30 more minutes on the bus. You only wanted to see your father, to tell him that now you understood what the world was like, what it would always be like, but he wasn’t home. He was in Harlem. They were having a gala for Black judges, your mother explained, and then smiling, asked, How was your date? You grumbled some inaudible response. Your mother maybe remarked about how fickle young love was. You looked at her, a small rosebud mouth and soft skin, almost paper pale after a sunless winter. She couldn’t understand the way your father could. You held your tongue and waited. Long after she went to bed, you were up with the TV on for background noise. You were waiting for your father; somehow the idea of going to bed without seeing him seemed unbearable. You flipped the channel to some entertainment news show so that your mind could mush. Donald Trump was saying that Obama was born in Kenya. You muted the TV and watched silent images, snapshots of an angry Trump while big bold quotes popped up: “Where is his birth certificate?” Where is your toupee’s birth certificate, you wanted to ask Trump. Just then, you heard the door. You and the dog both ran for it with the same urgency, but you stopped short when you saw your father. It was not so much the look in his face, his eyes faraway somewhere else and his mouth folded in resignation, but rather the fact that he didn’t even seem to notice you. Daddy, you called out to him and he came halfway out of the trance. It’s so late, Sweet Cake, was all he said. Go on to bed. *** The next day, he slept impossibly late, past 1, past 2, past 3, but your mother would not wake him. Over lunch meat sandwiches, she whisperingly told you what happened: He and his friend Dan were leaving the Gala, getting into Dan’s Mercedes, when two police officers stopped them to ask, Where are you boys going and what do you? Boys, you repeated.

S AU N D E R S: F R O M T H E VA L L E Y

Your mother advised you not to bring it up to him. The Mike Brown Grand Jury Decision Where were you that day? Your father was at home watching a football game because he said at least that outcome would be unpredictable. That same week, in Brooklyn, the police shot an unarmed Black man in the staircase of the Pink Houses and no one cared. That same week, the police shot a Black 12 year old with a BB gun and educated college friends of yours will defend this. People went to sociology classes and talked about white privilege and studied people like you and your neighbors in textbooks and threw around terms like culture of poverty and you wanted to get up and rip off your skin and say, Here. Do you want to see it? Do you really want to know? You could parcel out your flesh and bones and tissue in the name of social science. You could watch them offer up their austere, academic analyses without seeing the human heart of the matter. You saw yourself become a query. Your father, a statistic. Your life, a thesis paper abstract: I want to explore the reasons why the men I love, the men whose toes I danced on top of, the men who put wet clothes on my head when I was sick, the men who played stick ball with me and sang me to sleep, pose an absolute and undeniable threat to America. Maybe George Zimmerman sold a piece of artwork he made that week, an American flag with bullet holes where stars should be. Maybe Darryl Mounger woke up with the words “Rodney King was in control of the situation,” plastered across his forehead in brutal red ink. Maybe after Darren Wilson resigned from the police force, he took his donation money and moved to a tropical locale and fucked local Black women just to prove, hey, no hard feelings. Maybe for all your righteous anger and online social activism, you were a phony. It was a good friend’s birthday so you went out even though you didn’t feel up for it, because it seemed, for whatever reason, silly, to say, I want to stay in because I’m really upset about what happened. So protesters marched eastward down Houston and you went west-

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ward towards some shiny club in Meatpacking, where glossy haired girls in heels and backless dresses sang out, Nigga I ain’t worried about nothin’ in a chorus of off-key falsetto. In another time, it might have broken your heart, but instead you leaned coolly against the club’s exposed brick wall, sipping a vodka soda, ghostly in the harsh white strobe lights. At the Peak A day after your failed date with Luis and your father’s Stop and Frisk, the two of you sat silently in front of the TV. You both considered your Hungry Man frozen dinners and the possibility of light-hearted conversation with each other despite everything that was unspoken. There was a Sci-fi movie on, something about mutant spiders, but only two people were still alive, the unemotional male lead and his useless babe sidekick, so you knew the movie was almost over. Maybe they blew up the spiders in a mine, or drowned them with some sort of man-made tidal wave. Who cared? Your father changed the channel. Now CNN was on and Obama was speaking about something or other, three years into his first presidency and gray from his suit to his skin. Your father looked at the President and smiled, but not in a happy way. Did I ever tell you, he asked, about the sit in we did when I was about your age? You said no, and pretended you didn’t already know the story from your Aunts. It was me, Leland, and Tyler. We went down to Andy’s Ice Cream Shoppe, across the tracks. You know the place. It’s still there. I bet you’ve gone with Claudia and Malik and them, he said. Anyway, they only seated white customers at the counter. Blacks had to take their food to go. So one day the three of us just sat there. They ignored us for a while and then after a few hours, they sent this old Tom motherfucker they had to wipe the tables come by and ask why we wanted to go and start up trouble. Your father paused for a while, so you prompted him to go on, asking, What did you say? I said that we weren’t trying to start anything. That we just wanted to sit down and eat like human beings, your father began, but then, stopped

S AU N D E R S: F R O M T H E VA L L E Y

again, looking weary from the effort of telling the story. You realized that your aunts never told you how it ended. And what happened, you asked your father. Nothing, he said. We sat there all day and they didn’t serve us. At night, they closed up and we went home. You both continued to watch the rest of the President’s speech in silence, not really listening but not interrupting either until the end, when your father laughed out loud in a dry way, and said, almost to himself, No matter what you become in this world, you’ll always be a Nigger to them. God Bless the United States of America, Obama said, and your father changed the channel.

Rhubarb Pie Andrés González

She smiles. She reeks of eggplants and the Perfume type that don’t come cheap. She don’t sit across, Prefers aside, Thinks periphery’s more confessional. Thinks crying is “kitsch,” Holds quarantined lands under Crossed arms. Talks like a red onion Drowned in sugarcane. Wonders whether the next Brandy-hot shadow will choose to Peel layer by layer, Or swallow the whole of her, Forget to chew: Think how that would taste Going down.

GONZALEZ: RHUBARB PIE

A Poem by Guest Contributor Cathy Park Hong Cathy Park Hong is a Korean-American poet who currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. In the past dozen years or so, she has released an innovative body of work, often utilizing mixed or inventive language to take on the new age. Her poems have been collected in her books Translating Moâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;um (2002), Dance Dance Revolution (2007), and Engine Empire (2012). Cathy Park Hong graduated from Oberlin College, has an MFA from the Iowa Writerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Workshop, and is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Village Voice, and others.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: CATHY PARK HONG

Balsam Cathy Park Hong

Guardrails are erected around every roof, train platform and mountaintop, only soft-serrated knives allowed, and Uncles, trousers belted to their bellies, hike up and scream their warhorn voices and corpses flee for another day. A dog trots off with a wrist. Every day, they take my face away, they take my face away like it’s— an ashtray. Steaming bowl of yams skinned clean, my mind, a ruby thumb of coal.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: CATHY PARK HONG

SONYA KOZLOVA , RODIN

KOZLOVA

SONYA KOZLOVA , WAVY LOVERS

KOZLOVA

WINNER OF THE 2015 EDIT ORS’ AWARD IN PROSE

God Knows What Else Harry Hantel

Miles Harper walked under stringent darkness, barefoot on the dewy lawn. His family’s ranch, located just outside of Brenham, Texas was spread out before him in every direction as far as he could see, or rather where he might have seen, but his eyes failed to locate even his own body in the midnight setting. The only visibility was heavenward, where the stars clustered, sparkling raindrops on the violet feathers of a vast cosmic bird. Miles carried a gun, a Springfield model 87A semi-automatic .22 rifle; the present that had marked his 16th birthday three months prior. The rifle was slung over his shoulder by a brown leather strap and monogrammed with his initials MBH in black sans serif lettering. In his right hand he carried a beer bottle, which he intermittently swigged as he moved. He paused his walk to wiggle his toes and grope for himself in the darkness. The dew on the grass lightly contacted his feet, while the condensation on the beer ran down his hand. He appreciated the symmetry of the two moistures on his skin. The longhorn cows, of which his family kept seven, groaned distantly; beasts of burden sounding yoked even in their nocturnal freedom. Crickets screeched all around him. He heard the dogs in the relative warmth of the barn baying at the moon. All the while, Miles pursed his lips and resisted the urge to join the chorus. It was fall. Fifty-five degrees or so, unseasonably cold for September. He wore a red flannel shirt and blue jeans. School would begin in a few days. Miles had worked all summer and had barely seen or heard from any of his classmates. He didn’t mind. His father, Barrow Harper, was asleep back in the two-story house. Even as recently as two years prior, Miles’ insomniac wanderings would 42

HANTEL: GOD KNOWS WHAT ELSE

not have been sanctioned, but his father had relented. Various interrogations and two attempted whippings had convinced him sufficiently of the sincerity of his son’s affliction. He had been at once relieved and disappointed to know that his son was medically rather than motivationally incompetent. “You’re telling me the boy can’t sleep?” He had asked the doctor. “That’s right, sir.” “Can’t or won’t?” The doctor had frowned. Miles kept his eyes straight, looking above the doctor’s head at the clock. Miles stared at the hands, willing time to skip forward. “Sir, his brain is too active. His neurons are firing at times when they’re not supposed to, which causes him to jolt awake in the middle of the night.” Barrow glanced sideways at his son, sitting in an identical wooden chair. Miles looked almost exactly like Barrow had at the same age. “Well,” he rubbed his forehead, “what do we do about it?” “I don’t like to prescribe sleeping pills for someone so young, so we’ll keep that in our back pocket. For now, we’ll start out with some holistic solutions.” That’s how the conversation had ended. Holistic solutions meant things like vapo-rubs, white noise machines, dietary changes (less sugar, no caffeine), and more physical activity during the day. Although his insomnia had improved only marginally, there was no return to the doctor’s office for further treatment. Their ‘compromise’ was more like surrender on Barrow’s part. He had fought in Vietnam. He knew how to give up against an enemy who could not be defeated. “If sleep is the cousin of death, well, maybe you’ll just live forever,” he had said to Miles on the porch one bright afternoon coming back from cutting the grass. So his son was more often than not, awake, and when he was awake he was moving. At that moment, Miles was not thinking about his father. Instead as he glanced skyward he thought of Lyla. She worked at the local bowling alley,

HANTEL: GOD KNOWS WHAT ELSE

Strike Force Lanes. She had blonde brown hair, which she kept braided behind her head. She favored monochrome rompers in colors that Miles later placed as cobalt and burgundy. She was two years older than Miles, a dropout, unlikely to ever leave this part of Texas for more than a week at a time. Their interactions had been sparse and logistical. “How many games? Do you need to rent shoes? Nice weather we’re having” and other pleasantries that made Miles feel sick to his stomach with anxiety. He imagined asking her out to dinner, or to a movie. He imagined her laughing and obscuring her mouth with the back of her hand. He imagined the imprint that the fabric of the rolling chair behind the cashier’s desk always left on the back of her pale thighs, a pink net of interlocking ovals and lines. He imagined bringing her to the ranch and seeing her glisten in the Texas heat and then huddling together when the sun went down. He could give her a tour of the place. If Miles could just talk to her, he could stop imagining. He caught himself as he started to drift into more explicit and unrealistic reverie. He finished his beer. It was cheap and sour. He lobbed the brown bottle into the darkness, a silent grenade. He burped quietly to himself. A cracking split the silence. It was metallic, but full, a thunderous grinding that lasted only a second. There was another burst, but then silence. His vision of Lyla dissipated into the present darkness and Miles’ muscles tensed as he moved cautiously trying to locate the source of the sound. He heard his own choppy breathing. He waited. There was another groaning cow, but each groan was louder and more labored, tailing off into a whistling screech. He knew the sound of an animal in pain. His footsteps quickened and he made his way towards the perimeter of the property. It was emanating from the fence line, from the southwest corner. As his body carried towards the sound, he started to consider what he would do when he got there. Yes, he was familiar with guns. He hunted. He shot for sport, but those times were planned, accounted for. When he got up in the morning on the day of a hunting trip, he did so with the prior knowledge that he was going to be taking life and firing bullets. This was

HANTEL: GOD KNOWS WHAT ELSE

more improvisational. Chaotic. Besides, shooting doves was not the same as shooting coyotes or God Knows What Else. He approached the fence line and managed to make out the shape of a sprawled cow, lying against the fence, tangled in the barbed wire. One side of its face rested in the grass. The groaning was replaced by a gurgle. Miles knelt next to it and looked over its bulk. His feet squelched in a pool of blood. The blood ran slowly from a hole in its neck. He felt the flesh of its face scratched raw, soft and tender to the touch. It was male. One of its horns was snapped in half, but he could not locate the broken piece. There was a crunching past the fence line. Miles scanned the darkness, but saw nothing. There was no one. The cow shifted its weight slightly and whimpered a pitiful not-quite moo. He patted its head. He took deep breaths, fighting the urge to cry. He felt childish. He stood, wiggling his toes in the bloody grass. He removed the hunting knife from his pocket. The bone handle was smooth and cool in his hand. There was something more respectful about doing it that way, before even considering how the gun might attract his haggard fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention. The moonlight reflected off the cowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s one visible eye. It glimmered, a solitary jewel. He prayed. The vein gave way to the knife with little resistance. The jugular emptied out onto his hands and wrists. The cow did not make a sound. Miles thought there was supposed to be a sound. He looked out again past the fence line, searching. There were no eyes to meet, but he saw an outline against a tree. Rubbing his own eyes, he looked again. The outline was moving, changing. It was made of smoke or ink or tar. It was made of darkness. First it was a beast. Then it was a man. Then it was an idea. There it was. God Knows What Else. Miles took the rifle from his shoulder. He felt the tears run hot down his face. He felt the quickly drying blood on his hands and in between his toes. He pulled the bolt back. He took the safety off. He neglected to aim. He fired once, twice, three times, but there was no sound. He thought there was supposed to be a sound.

HANTEL: GOD KNOWS WHAT ELSE

The smell was unbearable. His nostrils were inundated with miasmic scents of burning flesh and boiling earth. He fell to his knees. Where was Lyla on a night like this? Was she sleeping calmly in her bed? Was she dreaming of Miles? Was she dreaming at all? Was she happy? Maybe she’d like to get dinner sometime. Miles was slipping off some great ledge. The gentle void opened to accommodate him. His eyelashes fluttered softly like palm leaves and then…and then. The next morning, Barrow Harper rose at 6 o’clock as he always did. He shaved and made himself black coffee for his walk around the property. He found Miles in the southwest corner of the ranch. He was shoeless, soaked in blood, lying on top of the corpse of a cow, cradling his rifle like a child. It looked like a sacrifice. The flies buzzed all around him, but Miles slept like a dead man, as soundly as he ever had in his entire life.

LAWRENCE WU, HELL IN THE CLOUDS

An Interview with Justin Taylor Justin Taylor is an author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy (2011) and the short story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (2010), which was a New York Times Book Review Editorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Choice. He edited the acclaimed short fiction anthology The Apocalypse Reader and his work has appeared in The Believer, The New York Tyrant, Flaunt, on NPR, and in many other publications. His most recent book is Flings: Stories (2014).

AN INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN TAYLOR

WEST 10TH: The Gospel of Anarchy has a very specific sense of place: Gainesville, Florida, in 1999. How does place figure in your prose, and what process do you go through to choose a particular setting? Are your stories all set in places you’re familiar with, or can you come to know a place though the act of writing about it? JUSTIN TAYLOR: You definitely get to know a place better by writing about it, but usually you have to be at least somewhat familiar with a place to know it’s something you want to write about. Writing a certain place at a certain time complicates things considerably, though in other ways it simplifies them. I wanted to write about Gainesville, where I lived during college and knew intimately, but the book is in part about the millennial fever and utopian urges of the late 90s, most of which I missed because I was in high school in those years. If the characters in Gospel really existed, they’d be a few years older than me—so in their mid- or even late-30s now, which itself is kind of a scary thought. WEST 10TH: A lot of your stories seem to be about young anarchists in Florida—does this come from personal experience or is it a product of some other kind of inspiration? TAYLOR: There are three “anarchist stories” that I can think of: two in my first collection and then the novel, which was written because I wanted to spend more time with them, and to create a world in which their concerns had self-evident value, rather than treat them as the butt of jokes, as I felt that the short stories had done to a certain degree. There’s a lot of personal experience in both the stories and the novel, little episodes and details borrowed from life, but I don’t think more than any of my other work, and in Gospel’s depiction of extreme faith and extreme punkrockitude, very little to do with my own lived experience. I wrote the book to try and imagine what that kind of mindset, that kind of life, might be like. WEST 10TH: Are you every afraid that too many of your characters

AN INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN TAYLOR

(mainly protagonists) begin to sound the same, or do you have any kind of process to try to make them distinct? TAYLOR: Sound the same? No, not really. Sometimes you do worry, especially with stories, that you’re striking the same chord once too often, but if a subject is demanding repeat attention then there’s probably something still unresolved about it, so the trick is to find the part that’s fresh, and write toward that. At the same time, some of my favorite writers have distinctive, immediately identifiable voices, as well as themes or obsessions. If the stories are good, it doesn’t matter what they’re about. And if they’re not good, it doesn’t matter either. WEST 10TH: You published your first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy, after the debut of your short story collection, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. Did your work with short stories in any way prepare you for novel writing, or are the two entirely different styles? How do you, as a prose writer, balance both styles? Do you inherently have to prefer one over the other? I’ve always imagined that the difference between writing novels and short stories is more subtle than the difference between poetry and fiction, but still just as large. TAYLOR: I think stories and novels are totally different beasts. The short story is much closer to the poem than the novel, in terms of structure and the way it engages its reader. Novels have to create a world and sustain it; the reader’s interest has to be able to survive all the times that life forces you to put the book down and do something else, like eat or sleep. You develop a relationship to a novel while you’re reading it: it has better and worse sections, favorite and least favorite characters or storylines, etc. A story or a poem, under ideal circumstances, is consumed in one sitting, goes about its business with maximum economy, and provides some kind of “total experience.” At the same time, it must raise at least as many questions as it answers, and invite repeat viewing, in a way that a novel can, and maybe even should, but doesn’t have to. People often ask why more short fiction doesn’t have happy endings. It’s because happy ending are

AN INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN TAYLOR

endings, and short fiction can never end. It can’t afford to. A novel can be forgiven its definitive ending only because the reader has had hundreds of pages to revel in the uncertain and unknown. To answer the other part of the question: Everything Here and Gospel were mostly written during the same period of time, so it wasn’t a question of preparing for one with the other as it was of going back and forth between them. There was very little in the way of balance in that process, and that’s still how it feels for me now. WEST 10TH: In that same vein, I know that you’ve published both poetry and fiction. Do you have a different process or mindset when writing in either genre? Does each type of work come from the same place or do you specifically sit down knowing that you’re going to write a poem or a story? TAYLOR: I don’t write or publish poems anymore. I believe strongly that young writers should read a lot of poetry, and write some if they feel so moved, but a lot of that early stuff I published I probably shouldn’t have, simply because I was eager to be published, which I always warn students against and they rarely listen, though why would they, since I was warned against it and didn’t listen. Anyway, I’ll pivot this a bit and say that I also used to write a lot of flash and experimental fiction and I don’t do that much anymore either. Some writers are true polymaths or interdisciplinarians, but the rest of us eventually specialize, or at any rate learn to conserve our strength. WEST 10TH: How does popular culture figure into your stories? Do you consider it integral to the identity of your stories (i.e. “Tetris”, “Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time”)? How do you think things like Twitter influence our generation of writers? TAYLOR: I don’t think popular culture figures all that prominently. “Tetris” makes a fetish object of the Nintendo game, sure, but the item in question is easily 25 or 30 years old. And “Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time” deals with the Abu Ghraib photos, but the narrator reads them

AN INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN TAYLOR

against Joseph Conrad and Georges Bataille, and the story was published a good six years after the scandal broke. I’m engaged with the world I see around me, and more likely to namecheck a brand name or a band name than do some kind of fictionalizing runaround (for what? decorum’s sake? faux-timelessness?) when anyone reading the thing will know I obviously meant X and not Y. I don’t think you can say that Twitter—or any web technology—“influences our generation” in a single way. For some writers it has opened up huge vistas in terms of stylistic innovation and in terms of exposure. Tao Lin was, in my view, the first major writer to engage deeply and powerfully with the internet as both medium and message, though he did most of that work before Twitter. Other writers have since continued that work or set out on their own paths. Teju Cole was doing truly innovate and compelling work with Twitter for a while. Mallory Ortberg, Patricia Lockwood, Michael Robbins, Elisa Gabbert, Zak Smith all come to mind. The whole “alt lit” thing, which I have to say I don’t like very much, as so-called “movements” go, but they’re doing their thing, and social media is utterly central to it. And also some magazine and book publishers: Melville House, Electric Literature, Harper Perennial, this new site called Real Pants. Each writer gets to decide for herself how the medium fits into her writing/ publishing life, which in a way is really saying into her life, period. Some people decide they don’t want any part of any of it, and some will be active for a while then suddenly disappear—they quit or just took a hiatus, which seems to be what Teju Cole has done. That’s okay, too. WEST 10TH: Reviews tend to use the word “millennial” to describe you, do you ever worry or think about being categorized as a writer, or is it something that you don’t really consider? TAYLOR: I used to think I was a very late Gen X-er, but lately I’ve been hearing that 1982 is the first year of the millennials, which means that I’m not the very youngest of the old guard but the very oldest of the new. Oh well. At least I never went in for that “Generation Y” shit. We all knew that wasn’t going to stick.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN TAYLOR

WEST 10TH: A lot of your writing has to do with the now, featuring specific references to bands or subcultures that I think only exist now. Does that affect the way that you write the stories? Do you worry that including specifics may alienate some readers, or is the usage of such specific references a nod to the “write what you know” mentality? TAYLOR: I swear I’m not trying to be difficult here, but what exactly is “the now”? The plot of Middlemarch is shaped by the expansion of the railway. The freeing of the serfs is a huge part of Anna Karenina. I’m not attempting anything like that degree of headline news. Punk has been around, as a form of music and a subculture, for at least forty years. The Grateful Dead were founded in 1965, which makes them just a shade younger than the Voting Rights Act and almost a decade older than Gravity’s Rainbow. Will Oldham, Stephen Malkmus, and David Berman—all musicians whose work has appeared in my work—are into the third decade of their careers. I know for a fact that some of this broadly contemporary period detail does alienate some readers, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. It’s as if they’re offended by the fact that they recognized something, like “Hey, I know exactly what you’re talking about and I also love it—SO FUCK YOU!” That’s a totally honest paraphrase of emails I’ve gotten. WEST 10TH: Slate recently listed one of the lines from Flings as one of the best lines of 2014. When you sit down and write a line like that, one of the longer prose-y ones, do you sit down and try to perfect it or do those kinds of lines just come with the rhythm of the story? TAYLOR: That was a cool accolade to get, but there are plenty of other lines—in that story, in that book—that I personally am prouder of having written. I don’t know why that line in particular struck such a deep chord with the person who read it. But that’s the luck of the draw and the fun of the enterprise—you put it out there and anyone who picks it up can make of it what they will. I try to make all the lines equally perfect, in the sense of being 1) necessary, 2) original, and 3) good. But sometimes you get lucky and come up with one that’s just a little bit more perfect. That’s okay too.

CALEB SAVAGE, SAINT NICHOLAS COAL BREAKER, MAHANOY CITY, PA

SAVAG E

WINNER OF THE 2015 EDIT ORSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; AWARD IN POETRY

In the Well Amy Moore

I have no idea what I am touching grief I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what that is. Extending my first finger towards my uncle who is holding his teacup like a boulder; who is sitting stiff on his chair. His daughter is resting her hand on her breast looking up, fish-eyed, thrumming with new knowledge. His wife stands behind him rests her thumb pad on his neck. His son stares at the potted fern. The wind chime flashes white over all of us. I stand up. Everyone, I say, last night I changed under my skin. Like a bright fish dressed. Every interstitial bubble every curve of my intestines, made precise. After I had sex with a new man, MOORE: IN THE WELL

MOORE: IN THE WELL

he lifted my leg onto his lap and slipped his sock over my foot slowly. I hold my hands out for my uncle and he cups his pile of brand new pennies, all pulsing orange breath. Eyes heavy at his feet heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pouring them into my palms each making the sound of a fish splashing in a wet, dark well.

this won’t fit on an appointment form Susannah Perkins

Callum calls me while trying to make it home. It’s frustrating he says our bodies aren’t even good at being bodies. I see a happy lesbian couple on the street and I am dazzled by their beauty; afterwards I realize one of them was a celebrity but that seems to me less remarkable than the fact of their bright-red happiness. Do you know I used to eat paper? Balled-up, tattooed in song lyrics, chewy and white. I have no future as someone with a usable body, a workable heart. Even when you’re kissing me I am thinking this is happening by mistake. Even when I’m happy I am not. My happiness isn’t even good at being happiness.

PERKINS: THIS WON’T FIT ON AN APPOINTMENT FORM

HALEY WEISS, UNTITLED

WEISS

Lil’ Saint Francis Anna Kim

He was our babe, our idiot, our thimbleful of blood balanced at the top of a white-capped mountain. Something warm and moving. When he was born I tried to put my fingers inside his mouth until our mother took him away. Our father had known about him before he had even been born, because our father was the smartest man I’ve ever known; he had bought out a very big and dilapidated billboard next to the gas station to read, THIS IS A PLACE OF SOME HOLY SPECTACLE!!! in script like curling pink ribbon, three exclamation points on the tail like a punchline delivered three times, three days before Kevin fell out of a hole in my mother. When I was nine and he was five our mother found Lil’ Saint Francis in our room. She rarely entered our room and I still don’t know how she came to find that story among the stacks. But that night, the two of us sat side by side holding each other as she sat across from us in her enormous dark pink armchair, the color of an inflamed liver or a pork chop and told us that we hated her and that she would be leaving us. I was confused because I didn’t hate her. I remembered her sitting in the dark at her tiny toy boudoir holding up her small yellow plastic hand mirror in her tiny toy chair where she sat, or rather balanced, pushing cold cream from the little pots into the skin on her face with her pinprick fingers, tits sagging and towel wrapped into a tiny turban at the top of her head, and I thought I loved her. “Another one,” she would announce triumphantly. “Another of these little lost sheep. Little lost Sheep From Nowhere,” she would say to no one, looking pleased with herself. But I didn’t say anything, because it was hot, and I was dizzy, and because my tongue could only move thick and sour and slow behind my teeth. When I moved my neck I could feel it creak dully in my ears. K I M: L I L’ S A I N T F R A N C I S

K I M: L I L’ S A I N T F R A N C I S

The summer before, Kevin had gone into the woods and sunk the tip of our father’s pen-knife into his palms by himself. I knew the tip didn’t sink immediately, and that there was a moment of resistance from his young flesh that didn’t let itself to opening immediately, but I also knew that it broke after a moment too and that his right hand positively blossomed into it. If I had been there I would have found him in the woods at the top of the hill where we had buried the bodies of countless animals that would appear at his bedside in the mornings and stay with him until they died in the evenings. I would have found him arms spread covered in blood and dirt with a light shining on his face through a space in the trees too bright, strange and unreal and gaudy and that would have made him furious if he had recognized it. But if I had seen his face I would have known that he hadn’t. But I hadn’t been there. And so it wasn’t him I took home, but his sleeping body, and so hours after the fact we crossed the field as the sun was setting, lighting the field on fire gold gold gold. My arms pulled and shook under the weight of his fat deer’s legs. Those legs shifted around now, nervous and lovely and moving in dumb, frantic circles. I picked him up again like I had then and carried him upstairs. When I lay him down on my bed in the dark, I heard from below her heel drop on the first step and the front door open, then the screen door, then both shudder and bang closed. I kissed him on the eyelids in the dark. His breath rose up warm and wet and metallic, like the smell of the room I had walked in to the first time I had found him pleasuring himself, when he had turned beaming at me standing in the doorway, laughing full and clear like a bell.

HALEY WEISS, UNTITLED

WEISS

move to trash Camille Renaud

when ur texting someone and midway thru typing a long message back you see that they’re typing so you start typing as fast as u can bc what u have to say pertains to that thing they said up there and not some new thing they’re gonna say and you’re spelling things wrong and autocorrect is fucking up so you have to go back and fix everything and then they send their message totally changing the topic so you have to reword your whole thing or just delete it and write haha instead so now it looks like you were typing haha for 10 years while really you were saying something poignant or insightful or revealing and instead they get this pithy mundane “haha” which makes you think how the hell are you ever going to make anything let alone ur magnum opus

R E N AU D : M OV E T O T R A S H

Altar Amy Moore

my pelvis on an old wood table in an empty room. each part labeledthe wings of ilia the sacroiliac joint the sacral promontory. come see. come test its weight in your palms tongue the hip socket nose the flared bones come drop it to the floor like a clerical collar sliced from a priestâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s neck.

MOORE: ALTAR

Black Sun Sara M. Evangelista

i who rule came into focus like a black sun quiet & broken broken & unsuitable for this bed on earth

a raw yell full of water through my lens i see a flap of hide off its cheek whale flesh dark & sour

the silence ended with groans painful groans

EVANGELISTA: BLACK SUN

Contributors’ Notes Danielle Bergere is a senior at NYU studying English, psychology, and creative writing. She is currently an editorial assistant at PUNCH magazine and Lalitamba. Aside from poetry, she enjoys traveling, kickboxing, and pizza. Joey Bui is a Vietnamese Australian writer. After disillusionments with pre-quantum chemistry and the rational actor model, she turned to fiction because it makes the most sense. She is currently studying at NYU Abu Dhabi. Sara M. Evangelista is an actor, a writer, and a devoted nerdfighter. She aspires to inspire before she expires. Andrés González is a performer, mover, writer, singer, and general strange Miami transplant living in NYC. The roots of his training lie in physical/ experimental theater with an emphasis on creating his own work. His work often seeks to explore the intersections between obsession, promises, violence, and the questioning of duties, both in English and Spanish. Harry Hantel is a writer of fiction who was born in Houston, Texas and resides in New York City. He graduated from NYU with a degree in English and creative writing in January 2015. Thomas Hartwell was born and raised in Wailupe Valley on the island of Oahu. He always wishes he is in the waves at Makapu’u Beach. Henry Hsiao has more than one favorite word: Alex, Louise, Adrian, Steph, Nikki, Chris, Ashley, Andy, Matt, Bo, Giselle, Fran, Ben, Will, Elyssa, Sara, Dan, Paul, Mama, and Baba. He considers them as verbs. CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Anna Kim was born in Detroit and grew up in Florida. She is 5'1" in twoinch heels and enjoys curling her hair and using her rock polisher. Her favorite writers are Carson McCullers, J. D. Salinger, and Ring Lardner. Abby Kosisko is a sophomore in the NYU Liberal Studies program. Originally from Houston, Texas, she has aspired to be a writer for as long as she can remember, and hopes to pursue a career in the field after she graduates. Sonya Kozlova is a twenty-two-year-old illustrator and designer. She was born in Moscow, brought up in Milwaukee, and is currently based in Manhattan. She is a senior at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a concentration in visual perception in art and design. She is a curatorial assistant at the Gallatin Galleries and this year’s graphic designer of the Gallatin Review. Kozlova’s illustration work primarily explores ambiguity in romantic relationships. Amy Moore is a junior in CAS studying English and creative writing. She’s also an intern at Bodega Magazine, where she reads a lot of fiction, and a tutor at the NYU Writing Center, where she learns folks how to write good. Susannah Perkins is a third-year drama student and former member of NYU’s spoken-word poetry team. She’s from Alaska and eats mostly potatoes. Camille Renaud is a junior at NYU studying politics. She grew up in Weston, Connecticut. Mimo Reynolds graduated from Gallatin this winter. His concentration was memory. He is not a photographer, but sometimes takes pictures. Margaret Saunders is a journalism and Spanish major in CAS. She hails from an exotic land of bodegas and hair salons (aka Jamaica, Queens) and is currently finishing up her last semester at NYU.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Caleb Savage (Tisch ’15) is a photographer specializing in traditional darkroom techniques. Jordana Weiner is a Gallatin junior from southern California studying creative writing, psychology, and the science of happiness. She likes tea and flowers and astrophysics, and hopes to one day live in the woods and teach high school English. Haley Weiss is a senior in Tisch’s Department of Photography & Imaging. You can find more of her work at haleyweiss.com. Lawrence Wu is a writer and photographer who loves print magazine designs and innovative storytelling forms. He hopes to publish a book, be a marketing chief, start a magazine with his best friend, and achieve many other pursuits. His only problem is where to even start.

Masthead editor-in-chief Eric Stiefel

COPY EDITOR Olivia Loving

Managing editor Michelle Ling

Executive editors Matthew Rohrer Darin Strauss Joanna Yas

poetry editors Rebecca Pecaut Joe Masco Assistant poetry editors Colin Drohan Brittany Siler prose editor Anzhe Zhang Assistant Prose Editor Alyssa Matesic arT EDITOR Chuck Kuan

MASTHEAD

staff advisor Joanna Yas

West 10th is a nonprofit literary journal publishing poetry, prose, and art by New York University’s undergraduate students. It is edited and produced annually by the NYU Creative Writing Program. The ideas expressed in West 10th do not necessarily reflect those of New York University or of the Creative Writing Program. The NYU Creative Writing Program faculty includes Anne Carson, E. L. Doctorow, Jonathan Safran Foer, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Matthew Rohrer, Charles Simic, Zadie Smith, Darin Strauss, and Chuck Wachtel. The director is Deborah Landau. The Creative Writing Program has distinguished itself for more than three decades as a leading national center for the study of literature and writing. West 10th nyu Creative Writing Program Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House 58 West 10th Street New York, Ny 10011 west10th.org Twitter.com/West10thLit Copyright: All rights revert to the author upon publication. Reprints must be authorized by the author. Design by Sam Potts inc. Layout Consultation by aaron petrovich Cover photograph by Mimo Reynolds Copyright © 2015 West 10th The Literary Journal of New York University’s Undergraduate Creative Writing Program ISSN: 1941-4374 Printed in The United States of america