Issue No. 10, 2016-2017 by West 10th

NYU CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCE

2016â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2017

West 10th publishes poetry, prose, and art by New York University’s undergraduate students. It is edited and produced annually by a studentrun editorial board and the NYU Creative Writing Program. The ideas expressed in West 10th do not necessarily reflect those of NYU. The NYU Creative Writing Program faculty includes Martin Amis, Anne Carson, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, and Zadie Smith. The program 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 Copyright © 2017 West 10th NYU Creative Writing Program’s Undergraduate Literary Journal ISSN: 1941-4374 Printed in the United States of America

Editor-in-Chief

Alyssa Matesic

Managing Editor

Juliette MaignĂŠ

Prose Editor

Su Young Lee

Assistant Prose Editors

Anetxy Barnes Charisa Gunasekera Rosalyn Lin Benjamin Mok

Poetry Editors

Justin Hong Shannagh Rowland

Assistant Poetry Editors

E Yeon Chang Jae Lee Adam Young Adnan Zarif

Art Editors

Ondine Charlesworth David Stapleton

Web Editor

Amira Dhanoa

Copy Editor

Audrey Deng

Executive Editors

Matthew Rohrer Darin Strauss Joanna Yas

Staff Advisor

Joanna Yas

TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor’s Note 7 An Interview with Leslie Jamison 18 Poems by Jenny Zhang, Guest Contributor 42 An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman 52 Contributors’ Notes 83

Poetry Tashiana Seebeck 10 Editors’ Award Winner

newport mall

Serena Devi

body transected

Carilann Rittman

Graft Survival

Caroline Weeks

Claudine, Unsleeping

Nathan Mierski

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter but that Is OK Because the Burden of Proof Is on the Person Making the Claim

Nathan Mierski

Play “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins at My Funeral. HAHA Not Really. You Can Play Whatever You Want. I Do Not Care.

Kit Zauhar

Mechanical Reproduction

James Kelly Quigley

My Father Eats a Bed of Oysters, 2001

Tashiana Seebeck

mom i have something to tell you i should have told you

Prose Carly Storm Bortman Editors’ Award Winner

Yellow Grass

Emily Roese

On Listening

Art Lawrence Wu

s sleeps

Arthur Cooke

Untitled

Claire Dorfman

Árbol solo, Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

Claire Dorfman

Cerro Alegre, Valparaíso, Chile

Elena Cabot Rodríguez

Plymouth

Arthur Cooke

Untitled

Brendan Rosenthal

A Great Divide

Joey Solomon

Untitled

Alex Bollington

Lost in Thought

Lawrence Wu

d train

Claire Dorfman

Peluquería, Barrio Chino, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Claire Dorfman

Abandonado, Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

Monica Albornoz

Water

Lawrence Wu

t drives

Arthur Cooke

Untitled

Jean-Luc Marsh

Cover

(Dusk) Girgaon Chowpatty, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India (2016)

Editor’s Note

urating this issue of West 10th has been a bittersweet experience for me. I’ve been on the editorial board of West 10th for threefourths of my undergraduate career, and it is this year that I step away from both the journal and my time at NYU. Of all the things I must say goodbye to come May—my library privileges, my days spent reading and writing, my student discounts—saying goodbye to West 10th gives me the most heartache. Being involved with this journal offers the rare and extraordinary opportunity to make a beautiful physical home for the university’s best creative writing and art. I consider the two issues I’ve ushered through publication as Editor-in-Chief as the greatest treasures from my years at NYU. All of my personal investment aside, West 10th is and always has been a collaborative effort, and that collaboration is an enormous part of what makes it so extraordinary. This year, we expanded our editorial board, adding more prose, poetry, and art editors than we’d had in the past few years. A number of those editors were past contributors, proving that our team attracts individuals who are not only great readers but strong writers. I’m grateful for their expertise and insight, but especially for their passion. This issue includes pieces we unanimously accepted, and others that editors debated over and fought for. The stories they tell differ in tone, purpose, and perspective—but all, we thought, were worth hearing. We are only able to share these stories thanks to the unyielding support of the Creative Writing Program faculty. Joanna Yas is the pillar without which West 10th would crumble; I am so thankful for her enthusiasm, guidance, and willingness to embrace ideas. Our executive editors Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss took on the task 7

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of selecting our Editors’ Award recipients, and have always acted as amazing West 10th advocates. Aaron Petrovich is responsible for the beautiful design of these pages and deserves a huge acknowledgment for the amount of time and care that he put into them. I’m indebted to Leslie Jamison for inviting me into her home to discuss writing, and especially for showing me the issue of the Harvard literary journal where she was first published as an undergraduate student. She answered my endless questions so elegantly, and I’m certain that any aspiring writer will appreciate and be inspired by her notes on craft. I’m also beholden to Alexandra Kleeman for sitting down with me in a busy Tribeca café to have one of the most lively conversations on fiction I’ve ever had. She articulated her outlook on her work with brilliance and humor (though readers won’t be able to see my enthusiastic nodding or hear my laughs in the interview transcription). I must give a resounding thank you to Jenny Zhang, who allowed us to publish two unbelievable poems, and who the editorial board was absolutely thrilled to include in this issue. This edition of West 10th marks ten years since the journal’s founding. In the past decade, we’ve published student writers and artists—some of whom had never had bylines before—who go on to produce outstanding work in New York City and beyond. The 20162017 issue is no different. Whether you are encountering West 10th for the first time or tenth, I urge you to soak in these pages, and all the beauty, intrigue, and wisdom enclosed in them. Alyssa Matesic

Lawrence Wu, s sleeps

Tashiana Seebeck

newport mall

i wonder if i will ever think of someone else in jersey city the skyline the wind tunnel how it froze my eyes to glass they toppled out of my skull and rolled collecting powdered remnants of snow hot thai tea the sunflower orange in jersey city the skyline steam he plucked an alpaca from the glass figurine bowl and sucked the chill away with three petals of casual laughter i wonder if i will ever taste orange on someone else

Arthur Cooke, Untitled

Serena Devi

body transected

a body falling past your window while you fry eggs think about body the floating and the impact what makes skin split from bone about color on pavement how red looks almost purple from nine stories up and the hands that scrub and the nail beds that trap gristle and brain what bursts, what stains what majesty intact 12

Serena Devi

when you finish poring over this we will move to the vertebral column: how it might bend and splinter how god herself ossified a crosspiece pliant enough to contort through spaces in the window frame but rigid enough to shatter cruel and perfect tibias: ropes unfurling an unbelievable white from the body brilliant knives licked clean from impact hands: naked birds grabbing for purchase surrendering then seizing mid-clench as the spinal cord denatures 13

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half fists blue like storm clouds pelvis: a spade that broke without making a dent there is nothing more to say here legs: stressed like artemisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bow or something you find meaningful in the classical sense at last, feet: you know they kissed the precipice like a father and stood against sky alone at the corner of a tremendous breaking they stood rigid

Carliann Rittman

Graft Survival

my mother would never be an organ donor. when I was five, everyday, swallowed like Jonah in her whaleblack sweatshirt, she would pick apart the skin at her fingers until they bled red. when I was ten, I did the same. when the blood caught her eye she ran to me with a box of bandaids, plastered and wrapped each finger as if in her own skin. i know that experts say the organs from one donor can save as many as 50 people or at least change the lives of that many. iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been told. but my mother would never be an organ donor. she already measures her life in terms of graft survival rate: how long will my heart last in my daughter how long will my eyes work for my son how long will those fingers bleed. that is what matters, and so we are her little vessels of lives changed. i saw her face in my brain when I read that in 1905, the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first corneal transplant took place. doctors gave a 45 year old man the corneas of an 11 year old boy who had his eyes pierced with metal 15

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the eyes themselves couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be saved for his own use but the corneas could be isolated and given to someone else and so suddenly because of the wounded eyes of an unscathed youth, a middle-aged farmer from a small town in the Czech Republic could see again. but my mother would never be an organ donor. she would say i have held myself together for far too long for someone to pull me apart again.

Claire Dorfman, Ă rbol solo, Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

Claire Dorfman, Cerro Alegre, ValparaĂso, Chile

An Interview with Leslie Jamison Leslie Jamison was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Los Angeles. Since then, she’s lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and New York. She’s worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. She’s written a novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. Her work has appeared or will appear in places like Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review and an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

An Interview with Leslie Jamison

WEST 10TH: You started as a fiction writer, and you published a novel. What brought you to nonfiction? JAMISON: There are a couple of different ways to answer that. One very concrete way is that I decided to take a nonfiction class while I was getting my MFA at Iowa. I had a friend—who is still one of my best friends—who was in the nonfiction program, and I was excited by what she was doing, so I took a class. I still remember the three pieces I wrote for that class. The first two were straight-out personal essays, and I think I was engaged by that work, but it was really the third essay I wrote for that class that made me aware that nonfiction was a realm that I was deeply drawn to and had a lot of unfinished business with. What felt so exciting about working on that essay was that it was the first time I said an essay could basically be whatever I want it to be—it doesn’t have to just be personal experience, it doesn’t have to be just criticism, it doesn’t have to be just cultural history. I liked how capacious the essay was, I liked that it felt like this chamber that a lot of different things could be held inside of. It was the experience of working on that essay and getting excited by the genre that planted a seed. There was some kind of spark there. Then, when I was working on my second novel—which wasn’t going well and was a huge source of frustration for me for years and years—I started really writing essays again, almost as an escape from that project. It felt like they brought an enchantment back to writing that I was having trouble accessing at that point with fiction. It gave me a way to be inside my life and outside my life at once in a way that was harder for me to manage in fiction. WEST 10TH: As much as your nonfiction writing in The Empathy Exams is “personal,” it’s also highly analytical. It engages with sociological inquiries, journalism and criticism. I’m wondering how you manage to balance this hybrid form formally, incorporating both memoir-like narratives and larger, more abstract conclusions about the human condition. How do you integrate these differing forms into coherent prose? 19

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JAMISON: It’s such a great question, and I’m really glad that you asked it—partially because sometimes I get frustrated when the work is just categorized as personal narrative or memoiristic narrative. Not because I think there should be any shame attached to personal narrative, but because I think there’s a kind of constricting gaze that wants to see personal narrative as very limited and unambitious, especially when it’s women writing it, that doesn’t see the ways that lots of people who write personal narratives are also looking outwards in great ways. The question about form is good, though, because for me, every essay is a different formal and structural proposition. So the structural weave looks a different way in each piece. The title essay in the collection is one where early on that essay was much less personal. It was much more abstract in its texture. I gave a draft to a mentor of mine and he basically said, “It feels like you’re walking up to the edge of certain personal experiences but not allowing yourself to fully engage them.” He said that my tone had a coldness to it, something almost clinical, when describing my personal experiences as a medical actor, and it gave me this idea to choose some of my own experiences and tell them in the form of one of the scripts. And that became an exciting, interesting, engaging formal proposition. I almost tricked myself or coaxed myself into bringing more personal narrative into the piece. In that case, employing a form allowed me to bring myself into an essay where I was having trouble. And then there are other cases where form has allowed me to bring in something outside of personal experience. A good example of that would be the essay “Morphology of the Hit,” where I talk about getting hit on the street in Nicaragua, which is something I was interested in writing about but something I had zero interest in writing a straight personal narrative about. It felt so flat and pointless—lots of people have been hit in the face, why am I telling this story? At that point I had been starting my PhD program and I thought, “What if I used Vladimir Propp’s building blocks of traditional Russian fairytales to see if I could tell my story with his parts?” Again, it was something about the structural experiment that allowed me to go back into my own life with some kind of organizing 20

An Interview with Leslie Jamison

principle and bring in another voice that got me thinking about how narrative works. For me, structure is always an incredibly vital part about how the personal narrative and other strands are working together. Part of what’s fun is figuring out a different structural answer for every project. WEST 10TH: You said this style of writing that we’re labeling as personal or confessional can come up against a certain amount of criticism, especially when written by a woman. What is your approach to combating these biased dismissals of confessional-type women’s writing? JAMISON: The bottom line for me is just trying to do work that I’m proud of. I had to confront a while back the reality that I wasn’t going to be able to control the ways everybody responded to it. I was on such an amazing journey with that essay collection and it reached so many readers and was so gratifying and kind of unreal to me, but I was really interested in what felt like a very strong animosity towards the book from a small but vocal minority of online reviewers. People can get very angry at the idea of a writer who wants to talk about herself. That anger and that resistance, I think, holds something worth examining. It seems like the idea is that if you talk about yourself or talk about difficult experience, that means you think your experience is extraordinary or that you’ve suffered extraordinarily. I’m really interested in pushing back against the notion that telling your story implies that you think your story is extraordinary or better than other people’s or more important than other people’s, because I really believe that every single person who’s alive has a thousand stories worth telling. For me to tell mine is, for me internally, participating in what I think is interesting about humanity rather than saying, “Oh I think my story is more interesting than yours or yours or yours.” I find this really interesting to teach about. The first course I taught at Columbia’s MFA program was called “Confession and Shame” and was all about the connection between those two concepts in multiple 21

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senses—how sometimes the material that holds the most heat to write about is the material that connects somehow to a feeling of shame, and also, what is the shame attached to the word confessional? I don’t think confessional is the best word, partially because of its connection to a religious tradition and idea that you go to confession because you’ve done something wrong. That framework doesn’t really apply to what I think happens in a lot of nonfiction—it’s not about seeking absolution or confessing a sin or wrongdoing. But I’m definitely interested in pushing back against the sorts of criticism that are leveled against confessional work because I very much believe in the power of personal narrative. Also, as a craft practitioner, I’m really interested in pushing back against the idea that personal narrative is somehow less work or less sculpted than other kinds of narrative. For me, as a writer, often it’s personal essays that I work on the longest, and often, the personal material is where it’s hardest to find the shape, the sculpture within the marble. WEST 10TH: This question of shame is something you seem to return to and often grapple with in your work. I’m wondering if, for a writer, is experiencing shame crippling or productive? Does the “I” behind the personal essay necessarily feel some kind of shame? JAMISON: I will just say anecdotally that I’m writing a book about addiction and recovery that I’ve been working on for seven years. It has twelve parts, and the fourth part is called “Shame.” At a certain point I did the math because I wanted to see, vaguely, how long the sections were in relation to each other, and the “Shame” section was twice as long as any other section. So, obviously, I’m still interested in shame. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that the “I” behind a personal essay inevitably has some kind of shame attached to it. I do think shame can be a really rich signaling emotion insofar as it directs me towards experiences or aspects of my life that I have unresolved or often fraught or vexed feelings about. It’s almost always those kinds of experiences or memories that end up feeling meaningful to write 22

An Interview with Leslie Jamison

about and that hold complexity. I was talking about it once with a friend of mine who’s a writer and we came up with this visual analogy for how a certain kind of shame works. If you imagine a thermal landscape, like Yellowstone, where there’s geothermal activity, there will be little wisps of steam coming out from the ground, and sometimes shame feels like that. It’s those little wisps of steam that come up and I don’t necessarily know what’s producing them when I set out to write about something, but I’m following those signal flares in a way. It’s no accident that it’s a geothermal metaphor because heat is a way that I talk about energy in my writing, and definitely when I teach I talk about following material that seems to have heat in your first draft. So often the truth is that shame is produced by cultural forces and narratives and expectations that make people feel ashamed about things they shouldn’t, so I think in investigating what shame attaches to there can be good work that can get done. WEST 10TH: Going back to the idea of how you deliver your message in The Empathy Exams—when writing in a first-person situation, are you mindful of how you’re representing the “Leslie” in the work? Are you actively trying to represent yourself as someone who’s likeable? How are you supposed to represent yourself in order to deliver a message? JAMISON: One of the trickiest things about nonfiction or personal narrative is that you are constructing yourself as a character on the page, but you, moment by moment, inhabit your identity. I’m inhabiting myself constantly. I can’t see myself and I also see everything; I’m aware of everything I’ve ever lived even if I’m not consciously thinking about it all at once. And I know so much about myself that I have to kind of constantly forget myself in a way in order to see what self I have constructed on the page. I don’t do a lot of thinking, especially when I’m drafting, about how my character is emerging. I’m much more interested, usually, in the motivating questions behind my deployment of personal narrative. I think sometimes that comes 23

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in much more in the editing process, where I’m trying to be aware of every character I’ve constructed on the page in the same way I would be with fiction, and wanting for every character not necessarily likeability but always complexity. Have I allowed myself to be complex or have I reduced myself to a set of thesis statements wrapped up in twine and made to be a person on the page? I think complexity is definitely a more guiding aspiration for me than likeability. I think, if anything, my tendencies as a writer probably move in the opposite direction. I’m more prone to making myself deeply unlikeable on the page and being very self-critical or extremely self-flagellating rather than self-promotional. I got a really interesting piece of feedback on a draft of this book I’ve been working on where he talked about how self-deprecation or self-laceration can feel like its own kind of controlling device—almost like, I’m going to judge myself on the page before you, reader, can judge me, or I’m going to judge myself so harshly that you can’t judge me. That was a really useful piece of feedback for me because it made me think about the ways in which things that feel like self-deprecation actually sometimes can operate as a kind of self-promotion or not leaving the reader enough space. And I think what I want in fiction and nonfiction, as a reader and a writer, is a work that can create room for complexity and multiplicity and ambiguity rather than pinning any character as too claustrophobically either good or bad or simple. WEST 10TH: That relates to a question I had about representing others in nonfiction and the ethical implications of that. Does it ever feel exploitative to represent someone you’ve met in your life in a piece of writing? JAMISON: That danger of exploitation or doing wrong by somebody— there’s never a moment when it’s not present. It’s always part of the process of writing nonfiction. And I really do think of it as a process rather than a choice. It’s not so much “Will you write about other people or not?” If you’re going to write nonfiction that’s not completely 24

An Interview with Leslie Jamison

solipsistic, other people will be a part of your story. We live our stories in relation to other and we have essentially joint custody over a lot of our experiences. So I try to engage a process that does right by people, and that process looks different ways in relation to different kinds of people. If I’m working with someone as a journalist, the process looks like being as completely transparent and upfront as I can be from the outset. In this current book project, I did extensive interviews with four people in recovery who had all gone through a particular center in Maryland, and it was very important to me to include their stories precisely because I didn’t want to go really deep into stories of people I met in recovery because that would feel exploitative since we had met as people in recovery, not under the relationship of writer and subject. So I wanted to seek people out where I was being very clear: “I am a writer, I would like to include your story in my book, would you be comfortable with that? Under what terms would you feel comfortable with that?” In terms of people who are a part of my life who then show up in the work, the process looks a bit different because obviously it’s not that I go inside every moment thinking I’m going to write about it. But I really do try, wherever possible, to show people the work well in advance of it coming out into the world so that we can have a dialogue about it. It’s not necessarily that I give people unilateral veto power, like they can strike whatever they want, it’s more that I try to go through the work of offering people the chance to read and be in conversation about it. Those conversations go all kinds of different ways. Sometimes they’re quite hard, sometimes they open up relationships in really wonderful ways. It’s not always that they’re a corrosive or destructive thing. This book includes a lot of narrative about a four-year relationship that I am not in any longer, and that former partner read a seven-hundred-page manuscript and we had a series of really long conversations about it. There are a bunch of different ways to do it—if you just write about somebody and put something out in the world and say look, there it is, to me that is very different ethically than approaching someone with the opportunity to be in dialogue about it. It’s just a lot of work, there’s a lot of leg work 25

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to it. You have to make sure you get the timing right so there’s space to have a conversation and space to edit based on that conversation, and being willing to engage in those conversations in the first place is a different kind of labor. Often, I think, it makes the work better rather than crippling the work because the narrative almost always becomes more complicated based on the feedback that the other person gives me about it. WEST 10TH: I’m thinking about things I’ve written about my family, and showing them seems terrifying. JAMISON: It is. But it’s almost like, the more I’m terrified, the more that is a signal to me that the last thing I should be doing is putting it out there without talking to them about it. I’m sure there are people who do it a different way, and I don’t mean to implicitly judge their process. And the truth is that you can’t always get somebody’s sanction, and that’s the flip side of doing it the way I do it. I’ve had people say, “I just don’t want you to write about me.” And if you’ve asked them, you have to deal with the fact that if you go forward with it you can’t kid yourself that you’re doing it against their wishes. But I still think there’s something more honest about knowing where the person is at and then choosing to take them out of the story or knowing that you’re doing something against their preferences. WEST 10TH: I know you’ve been alluding to it—I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit more about what you’re working on now. JAMISON: I’m feeling in such an excited space about it. It’s called The Recovering and it’s coming out next fall and it’s about addiction and recovery and how we turn both of those into stories. My story is part of it, the stories of various other authors who have been in recovery are also a part of it, and I spent a lot of time in different authors’ archives looking both at how they wrote about their addictions and 26

An Interview with Leslie Jamison

also about how their recovery changed how they wanted their writing life to work and what they wanted their writing to be. I wanted to write a book that worked like a meeting in that my story was coming into contact with the stories of others, and I had to create a structural braid that would allow that to happen over the course of five hundred pages. But there’s another layer that’s a cultural history and thinking about how the story of addiction has been told in different ways in the last one hundred years in America. And it has been told in incredibly different ways—sometimes addiction is a disease someone needs to recover from, sometimes it’s a crime someone needs to be put in prison for ten years for doing—and so much of that is reflective of a systemic racism that has shown up in a thousand ways in American culture. The drug wars in the eighties are a huge example of that. I also look at how I’ve been able to tell the story of my addiction in certain ways that are very unavailable to other people, and what are the cultural scripts that surround how I relate to my own pain or how I relate to my addiction as an expression of pain. So there’s a personal thread, a literary thread, a cultural thread, and then this reported thread that is a series of stories that all cluster around one particular rehab center in Maryland that opened the same year Nixon launched his war on drugs in 1971. It was an example of the recovery model coming up against the punishment model. I’m really excited about it, but it also took me so long to write it and wrestle with it because there was endless research, and the structural question of how to bring the strands together also felt really endless. It feels good to finally have reached a shape for it.

Elena Cabot RodrĂguez, Plymouth

Caroline Weeks

Claudine, Unsleeping

You mowed the lawn, filled the bathtub, poured buttermilk. Once, I said I wanted just a handful of snow. I relive you in a hat box of fingertip pearls. Once, you gave me snowings. Then, I only dreamt of a full crush of snow. How much smoke is enough to call you home? Please. You gave me snowings. You let the low moon wax your heirlooms. How much smoke is enough to call you home? Will you see my fairy ring of train tickets? In low moon you heirloomed your belongings to me when the pacemaker rendered your flesh hymn-thin. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve given you a fairy ring of train tickets. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve watched ultrasound snow swarm in your chest. Pacemaker rending your hymn-thin flesh. Unsleeping you: ignoring a swelling knot in the freezing garden hose.

Arthur Cooke, Untitled

Carly Storm Bortman

Yellow Grass

e was the kind of man who was always moist. It was summer now, and therefore socially acceptable to sweat, but there were always two dark rings under his armpits, even in the coldest part of winter. His wife forced him to avoid wearing pastels; gray, of course, was also strictly forbidden. She was embarrassed to be seen with him at the grocery store because his sweat dripped on the produce; it would spoil the tomatoes, and the carrots, and sometimes even an apple or two. She made her husband wait outside while she paid. She always paid for the wet produce and Steven, the kid at the register, always pretended not to notice. Today, he seemed particularly bashful and pubescent. “Good morning,” he said nervously, his hand reaching shakily for an apple. It was too sweaty for him to get a grip. Steven apologized profusely, eyes bouncing around, lanky body hunched over the conveyor belt. “Mornin’, Mister Steve,” she said, pulling a tissue out of her purse. She wiped the apple like a baby’s bottom, giving it a good smack on the ass before setting it down on the scale in front of him. “You mind throwing this here tissue out, hon?” “Oh, of course not,” he stammered, gently plucking the sopping tissue from her hand. He managed to ring up the rest of the produce without dropping any more fruit. “How’s your husband these days?” he asked, handing her a thin receipt. The question squirted out of him like lemon juice. His wife smiled. “He’s doin’ just fine, Mister Steve. Some days are, of course, better than some others, you know how that goes. We’re all just shufflin’ long til we die, ain’t we?” She cackled. 31

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Steven nodded solemnly. “Of course,” he said, and they exchanged goodbyes. He promised to say hi to his mother for her. Meanwhile, her husband was waiting, a puddle collecting on the sidewalk beneath him. He was watching people park their cars in front of the market and thinking about his daughter, who was trying to be an actress in New York City. His wife said people didn’t even need cars in New York City because they just took trains or taxis everywhere. He hadn’t asked his daughter to confirm. They hadn’t talked in a while. His wife came out of the market and smiled again, all sweet and close-lipped. “Well, we best be gettin’ on home,” she said, taking his moist hand. They began to walk towards the trailer park when she stopped to look at what he was wearing. She scolded him, gently, but also firmly, like that slap on a baby’s ass. “Hon, what have I told you about wearing gray?” He shrugged, thinking about how long it would take them to get from here to New York City. Later that day, while he was out buying cigarettes, his wife snuck into their bedroom and opened his dresser. She chewed her bubblegum very, very quietly, like a spy. Carefully, she removed all of the gray from his T-shirt drawer. She put it in a trash bag and buried it in the backyard, which wasn’t really a backyard but rather a little patch of yellow grass between their trailer park and the McDonald’s off I-93. He came home later that afternoon with three packs of cigarettes. The apple from the market sat with the other produce in a big wooden bowl on the kitchen table. She was making a casserole, which was difficult because she had gotten her nails done the day before. The nails kept falling into the bowl and mixing with the mushroom soup and the green beans and the little crispy things. She was angry because the Korean woman at the salon had assured her that these were acrylics of “very, very good quality.” “And they’re not!” she spat, sifting through the casserole with her pinky finger. “They’re cheap as hell, I tell ya, I’m never going to those 32

Carly Storm Bortman

damn Orientals again, they probably can’t even see through their eyes when they glue on the nail! Hon, you listenin’?” He was listening. He was also sweating, sitting on a lawn chair at the kitchen table. His forehead glistened and he was breathing heavily, staring at a picture of his friend Pete on the refrigerator. Pete died a few years ago from a heart attack; their daughter had left a few months after that. She used to plead with him as he lie in bed, sweating. “Dad,” she would say, “Dad, it’s been months since the funeral, please, it’s beautiful out, Dad, please you have to get up, you’re going to drown in your own goddamn sweat.” He wouldn’t answer her. Instead he would stare at the wall, thinking about nothing in particular. He had ruined all of his sheets by just lying there, perspiring. “I think I need to change my shirt,” he said suddenly to his wife, fanning himself with a magazine. “Well then, change it yourself, I’m makin’ casserole, you know I got gravy hands.” He looked at the picture, again thinking about nothing in particular. “But not gravy fingers?” She chuckled. “Well, I s’pose I got gravy fingers, but I don’t got gravy nails, they’re in this here casserole.” “Right, of course.” When he got up he left another puddle on the chair. His wife sighed, sliding the casserole dish into the oven. She looked at the picture of Pete on the refrigerator, then popped a piece of gum in her mouth. “Babe?” he called from the bedroom, which was actually just an extension of their kitchen. They had traded their big trailer for a smaller, more humble one after their daughter had left home. She couldn’t answer because she was blowing a very big bubble with her bubble gum. When it popped she smacked her lips together. The casserole clock chugged away. “Yeah?” She decided to cover the picture with a takeout menu (Chinese food, mostly sweaty lo-mein). “I can’t seem to find that T-shirt Pete gave me.” 33

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“Hon, just wear a different shirt then, whaddya even talking about, this thing with Pete and the shirt?” “He gave me a gray T-shirt for my birthday a while ago and I want to wear it cuz it’s lucky.” She threw her bubble gum out the window. “Lucky my ass!” she screeched. “You, sir, ain’t ever gonna get lucky if you don’t stop drippin’ sweat all over my mother’s carpet.” She started to feel nervous that he was catching on to the fact that she had buried all of his gray. She got another piece of gum from her purse and popped it in her mouth. “Babe . . .” “Hon,” she begged, “please go change already, I gotta put my nails back on.” “If I don’t wear Pete’s shirt . . .” “Yeah? What’ll happen, huh? What’ll happen if you don’t wear Pete’s shirt?” He didn’t answer. She slammed the oven door shut, put her hands on her hips, and looked at him. “I buried it, aight?” She smacked her lips again. “I buried all of your gray in the backyard, under the yellow grass in the back by Margie and Tom’s place. You sweat so damn much and it’s embarrassing for me, it’s embarrassing, when we go to the market and things, and people notice it more when you’re wearing gray, and if we’re ever going to go visit goddamn New York City to see our goddamn daughter then you need to throw it all away now! You’ve had it for too long.” He looked at her, his forehead glistening. The trailer was silent except for the slow tick of the casserole clock. “How could you do this to me?” he whispered. “Do what, I did nothin’, I did ya a favor.” She had the glue out and was carefully re-attaching a thumbnail. She paused and looked at him. “Hon, don’t be mad,” she said, softer now (soft, apple-flesh-andbaby’s-butt soft). “It’s casserole night, you can’t be mad on casserole night.” “I am,” he said, “dammit I am mad, I am mad on casserole night!” 34

Carly Storm Bortman

“I did it for your own good.” He didn’t answer. Instead, he ripped off his soaked T-shirt, threw it to the ground, and marched over to the nightstand. He picked up a pill bottle and studied the label. “These are old,” he declared angrily, his sweaty brow furrowed. “I know, they were for the cat before it got hit by that delivery man. Throw ’em away if you want.” “How many years ago was that?” “I don’t know, hon, it was a long time ago.” He didn’t answer again. The casserole clock was steadily approaching completion. She noticed his stomach had gotten fatter since she had last seen him naked, which was about six months ago. She demanded that he be fully clothed whenever they had sex, which was also about six months ago. He finally put the pill bottle down and looked up at her. “I’m getting my gray.” “Hon, please, it’s buried in the backyard, for Christ’s sake just let it be!” “Pete’s shirt is lucky and I have to dig it up.” The casserole clock chimed, exasperated. “Look hon, I—I’m very busy right now, and frankly I don’t give a damn no more what you do. I tried to help you but if you need gray, if you want that gray in your life so bad, then go dig it up from the damn backyard, I don’t give a shit.” He walked to the trailer door. “I’ll be back for dinner,” he muttered, putting a cigarette between his lips, and left. The fruit in the bowl shook as the door slammed. He grabbed the rusty shovel on the ground by the grill. They used to make cheeseburgers on that grill for family dinner every Wednesday night until one time, when she was on the phone, the whole damn thing caught fire. He lit his cigarette, staring at the charred mess, then marched over to the patch of yellow grass. It was excruciatingly humid despite the fact that the sun would be setting soon. He was sweating, his entire body drenched in perspira35

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tion, as he slowly and painfully dug up the gray. It took longer than he thought it would—many times he questioned why he was doing it at all—but then he would remember Pete’s shirt, and how lucky it was, and how much he wanted to feel it again on his body as a part of him, again. A few years ago all he ever wore was gray and for that reason alone he couldn’t stand to keep it all buried under a patch of yellow grass. Fuck his daughter and his wife and Steven from the supermarket for being so goddamn concerned. The sun began to set and the planet began to cool. He kept digging. He could hear his neighbors in their homes; some were cooking dinner, others had already turned on Jeopardy. Margie and Tom were making love on the checkered sofa. He could hear her wailing as he plowed into her, and then the aching silence. They always read the paper after sex; it comforted him to see her bedside lamp flick on through the trailer window. The air smelled of cigarettes and apple pie and nakedness. Finally, he saw the plastic. The trash bag was lodged deep in the earth, a cadaver covered in soil. He looked at it for a long time, thinking about how his gray was sitting, waiting, so far beneath the surface. If he really wanted to, he could probably ask Tom for his really big shovel—the one he used for his fancy new construction job—and with that, sure, he could very easily retrieve his gray and bring it home. But that was so much effort, and he didn’t want to burden Tom, and he was so tired. He was the kind of tired that made living seem impossibly distant, like the faraway land of New York City. He didn’t want to carry that heavy trash bag all the way home. He had no idea how his wife had managed. He decided that, for tonight, it was best to leave the gray in the ground; he could get Pete’s shirt another time. He walked back to the trailer. She was sitting at the kitchen table, chewing her bubble gum and reading the magazine that was previously a fan. “Hon,” she said, surprised he had come back empty-handed. “Where is it, where’s all the gray?” He shrugged. “I decided I didn’t want to carry it home.” 36

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She nodded slowly. A pause. “Do you want some casserole?” she offered, twirling a strand of hair. “Sure.” She went to the refrigerator and poured two glasses of lemonade. Then she cut a piece of casserole for him, dropped it on a plate, and put it on the table. She served herself before sitting down across from him. She raised her glass of lemonade in the air. “To casserole night, right, hon?” He clinked glasses with her. “To casserole night.” They ate their dinner in silence. A picture of lo-mein eclipsed their dead friend Pete on the refrigerator. Their daughter was living in New York City. They drank lemonade.

Nathan Mierski

I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER BUT THAT IS OK BECAUSE THE BURDEN OF PROOF IS ON THE PERSON MAKING THE CLAIM this is the greatest poem ever. this poem has won the nobel prize in literature. it has won the other popular poetry award. roger ebert came back to life and gave this poem two petrified thumbs up. this poem has the maximum amount of michelin stars. i did not know poems could even win those awards. i am very honored.

Nathan Mierski

PLAY “IN THE AIR TONIGHT” BY PHIL COLLINS AT MY FUNERAL. HAHA NOT REALLY. YOU CAN PLAY WHATEVER YOU WANT. I DO NOT CARE. thank you for reading this poem. i worked very hard on it. all of the words and syllables are carefully placed. no letter is placed thoughtlessly.

Brendan Rosenthal, A Great Divide

Joey Solomon, Untitled

Poems by Jenny Zhang, Guest Contributor Jenny Zhang is an American writer and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. She has two published collections of poetry, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and HAGS. Her collection of short stories, Sour Heart, is forthcoming from Random House in 2017.

Jenny Zhang

we were lonelier in there

my father loved a thick thigh my mother smashed both of hers through a really pretty window in the old meatpacking district when there were squiggles of raw meat vacuum sealed I swear to god I squealed when someone with my eyes triple lutzed in the air that beautiful leg I swear I noticed that leg they smeared the same glittery lotion I had the main thing is: stealing from bath and body works is truly an art if yr a white girl if yr a white girl anything goes I noticed Kristy Yamaguchi was considered acceptable Tonya Harding was not Nancy Kerrigan was actually working class but they suited her up in a Disney princess thingie she drank Campbellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chicken noodle soup with a very shallow spoon that too is a white girl thing the utter loneliness of the whole world as expressed 43

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in the endless infinity of whatever is just a girl thing I think I haven’t met someone who was pro Betty anti Veronica or someone who thought Archie was actually fuckable I guess I knew you were an all lowercase kind of guy someone who isn’t really into the spotlight and by being against it you know they gonna praise you me too I’ll have nothing but good things to say about you on the ice and in the thin cold air I keep giving good leg imitating my heroes and liking them more and more the older I get the more I’m never sad I don’t think it’s just because I had a childhood or because there was always someone around to love me what I couldn’t get away from was a face that wasn’t loving they said no to ice rinks we watched lifetime movies that started with blood “do you see who loved her? do you see who stopped her?” what was there to see anyway little girls waving hello and all the flags of all my countries waving back all of who live with heat beaming, just beaming you were supposed to reign not rain now the thing is over we have got to kill her that’s us, not her “She was a semi-celebrity who, if she couldn’t skate, probably would have been saying, 44

Jenny Zhang

‘That’s $11.50 please. Pull up to the window for your burger and fries.’” well anyway I honestly didn’t know any white girls who hated each other more than they hated me that was how little I knew stealing from bath and body works is an art if you’re a white girl most interesting people are anti Betty pro Veronica usually the ones on instagram who say #squad need to the gangster we’re all looking for— lay tay dm tway try to move your tongue as long as your leg: lay tee yim twee

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leetle

in some old world I- I- I- I always got my finger stuck in the tiny one person pots it was goopy and calming and obviously flirtatious not that ancient pain doesn’t have its own erotica come here baby, you say and stick yours in my wet mouth and we are truly making it not that it stopped hurting bc of it

if nothing is insignificant why doesn’t anyone do anything and the best people still don’t dance cuter than when they were kids there’s a way of moving that indicates no one has ever hurt you and there’s a way of moving that just reeks well if you are going to love me you are going to have to write me 46

Jenny Zhang

in my baby language my other tongue did not just develop spontaneouslyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; it had to be nurtured you know that and anyway you might be some kind of big baby and yr goo goo is probably gonna hurt me still thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no question I want this & I want you why meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee we moaned like a couple of patients in the dead of the night it is true we both lost respect still it is best to know you best to not go back best if you take off yr shirt and show me yr chest and I go wowowowowow and you go wowowowowowow? and I go ya wowowowowowowwww! and we go crystal clear falling crazily through

Alex Bollington, Lost in Thought

Kit Zauhar

Mechanical Reproduction

A computer will be the best lover I’ve ever had. We’ll meet at a Turing test disguised as speed dating. I am a big fan of the sharing economy. I believe in streamlining pleasure. I want to rent my body to Über, make my nipples totems of the neo-liberal agenda. I don’t understand when a friend gets mad when I have sex with her “crush.” Doesn’t she want to know beforehand whether or not he could find the clit? I rated him on Yelp and gave him a pity star for trying.

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I have seen the future of my vagina and it’s going to be an app that lets me seamless an orgasm. But in 20 years we’ll focus on sex not love. And you’ll still be my screensaver, an unmoving smile, still pixels of tan and off-tans. And with you I’ll keep going analog, till I have to marry the robot who learned the binary code that makes me feel only good things for the rest of my life.

Lawrence Wu, d train

An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman

Alexandra Kleeman is a Staten Island-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and the winner of the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in Harperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Tin House, n+1, and the Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtFarm Nebraska. She is the author of the debut novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine (Harper, 2015) and Intimations (Harper, 2016), a short story collection.

An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman

WEST 10TH: In an interview with Vogue, you said the impetus for writing your novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine was the desire to tell a big, American story. Why was it important for you to write that story? KLEEMAN: All through my college career and through grad school, it seemed like one genre of book that really did impress me was the big, impressive American novel. And those were always written by men, as far as I could tell. When you ask people more widely they say Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, things like that, but in America at least, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, those guys— Franzen too—seem to dominate the tone that captures our time and our country. But all of those books are very strongly gendered, I feel. They’re written by men, they usually have male protagonists, and a scattershot of female characters who make the world seem accurate, I guess. I wanted to go for that same meat—a story that explicitly wants to be about something in the world that surrounds you—but I also wanted to move the lens over a few inches and make it about the female world of today. WEST 10TH: Vogue also called your novel a “female Fight Club.” Do you think that’s a fair comparison? Why do you think some people are inclined to interpret the book as a female version of a male narrative? Is that problematic? KLEEMAN: I wouldn’t have thought of it as a female Fight Club while writing it, but the person who wrote that article has become a good friend of mine, and I really like what she said. I think what it gets at is that there’s some emotional texture that’s particular to living a gendered life. You have to deal with this whole landscape that’s hard to communicate to people who aren’t living there as well. Fight Club sets into allegorical motion some of those raw feelings, and some of those irrational urges that stem not precisely from you but from who you’re supposed to be in the world. I think that there’s some of that in 53

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You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Not so much fighting to get out some innate aggressive urges that are laid in your gender identity, but that transformation is oddly at the core of being female. When you look at teen movies, I feel like female puberty is portrayed as something so much more transformative and so much more unsettling than male puberty. We’re built from the start of our infancy as creatures who have to go through major transformations in order to achieve our fundamental functional state. So that’s built into how we think about our bodies. But then there’s also the whole culture of how we cultivate and tend to and tweak elements of our bodies to bring out different parts of our personalities or to change our identity. It seems much more possible to change as a woman, I think, but that’s a kind of pressure in and of itself. It really puts pressure upon you, as the body, to decide what you want to do with yourself. WEST 10TH: You touched on the idea that certain great American novels are centered around this depiction—and maybe this is gendered, too—of a reality that’s very close to realism, versus the experimental, sci-fi worlds that your characters inhabit. I’m wondering about this “strangeness” that critics have cited in your work—Intimations and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine—and how you manage to make the surreal or absurdist elements of your fiction reflect actual circumstances of society. KLEEMAN: I think that the relationship between the strange and the realistic is a lot blurrier than people think it is. I think that what’s realistic and what’s normal is what’s been normalized. There’s old versions of normal that seem bizarre now and there’s future versions of normal that we can’t even wrap our heads around. The potential fake news world of the future—I would have never expected that. And so in that way I think that the strange isn’t really a separate thing. It’s just the underrepresented normal. But then there are some things that happen in my stories that are genuinely and truly strange. For me, these still have a close connection to life because I think of how the 54

An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman

dream world is flush up against our real world. It makes use of our same emotional machinery, it takes the elements of the things we see every day and realigns them. In my experience or in my interpretation, genuine, 100% creativity is impossible because it’s always adapted— pulling from what is known or what is common and transforming it. But to invent something that has no basis in any experience would be impossible or really incomprehensible. WEST 10TH: I’m thinking about how if an alien came down and looked at our world, they’d see us going through these marriage ceremonies and be like, “What is this?” I really like what you said about the line between strangeness and normalcy being blurry. Do you see the worlds in your writing as closer to our reality or further, as alternate universes? KLEEMAN: I see it maybe as an off-brand universe. You know how we have all the familiar brands and stores that we’re used to, and then you have the brands that sit right next to them that are not familiar but maybe even come from the same place, but have some other name on them? You feel more comforted by the one that you recognize, but I wondered what would it be like to write a world that’s made up of all of these products that are just a little bit to the side of the ones we know. WEST 10TH: I’m wondering about the implications of the kind of social commentary that may or may not be operating in your work. Are you conscious of taking particular stances or making particular conclusions about society or pointing out certain things about society in your fiction? As a writer, how do you navigate making cultural criticisms? KLEEMAN: I think that in a lot of ways, writing something with an argument to make is an easy way to make your book no wider than a single point. I also wouldn’t really think of my book as having an 55

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argument it’s trying to make about society at large because I’m not entirely sure what should be done about society at large. I think that the most important thing, for me, was to point out what I feel are some new processes that are really surreal and really wild if you think about them. Like the fact that we’re now asked to join our identity to specific products and ways of caring for yourself that can also be bought by anybody else. So your identity hinges on this thing that is, by definition, for mass consumption. How do you want to think about that? Do you want to think that it’s something that brings you closer to other people, makes your identity less of a lonely sad island floating alone and more something that has the potential to join, blend, and make stronger? Or is it a threat to having self-determined properties and having intrinsic properties? I don’t know what side I fall on. I sort of think that it’s amazing to live in late-stage capitalism. A lot of strange things happen. We are so far from nature in some ways and yet nature still exists in all the spaces in between and it persists and we can ignore it or pay attention to it. There are a lot of interesting places to go living now. But I think that we can’t decide what position we’re going to take on it or what we’re going to do about it until we see the processes that are happening. WEST 10TH: None of this sounds good, right? That we’re dependent on these strange products, that we’re a part of this huge system that seems to be pigeonholing us. It all seems dystopic to me. But I was wondering if you could talk more about why you think that this is also a world full of possibilities. KLEEMAN: What has our insistence on individualism and the isolated and unique individual really done for us psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally? I think that even though it’s maybe a horrifying prospect, there’s something to think about there. Whether allowing some of those long-held values to change would actually relax a sort of hold you can have on your happiness. If there’s a way that you can blend together and find fulfillment there. Basically there’s a contra56

An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman

diction between the way that mass consumerism works and the way that individualism’s value works. I went to school in Providence, and there’s one of everything in Providence. One capitol building. One masonic temple. One big mall. And in the mall, there was a group of kids, including a couple of people who I knew, living in a room in the outskirts of the mall, living unseen. They would just come into the mall, walk through the hallways. They hauled in a couch, they hauled in all this stuff, and no one working at the mall or in mall security knew that they were there. So they were living in the center of consumerism and the capitol of buying, but doing it all for free. That seems incredible. I’ve been watching the beauty industry since I was thirteen, and I think there’s an anxiety now about how to get the feeling in consumers that there’s something new happening. How much further can this process of trying to reinvigorate their products go? Maybe the industry will exhaust itself to some degree and there will be some new industry that people will put their money into and it won’t be so superficial. WEST 10TH: What sparked your fascination in the beauty industry and consumerist culture? KLEEMAN: I was interested in it because it really is something I engage with every single day and it’s never depicted in literature, especially the processes of doing it. I’m really fascinated by things that exist in people’s lives but don’t have enough literary heft to be used in literature. For one thing, it’s strange that we spend so much time on our phones now, and plot-driving information comes through our phones, and yet phones are totally suppressed in literature. I understand why—there’s something so arbitrary about these portals where anything can happen at any time. There’s nothing constraining it, so it doesn’t feel meaningful or special when something happens through a phone. But I think that people are going to have to push themselves to do that because I think we’re behind ourselves in our understanding of how the way we communicate and the way we use media has shaped 57

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us. We still think of it as a world of newspapers, and it’s not a world of newspapers anymore. WEST 10TH: Moving into less thematic discussions and more about your actual process, I’m wondering how you build your worlds, and how you know whether that world belongs in a short story or a novel? KLEEMAN: It’s really difficult to write a novel without building society into it. A lot of times I’m interested in these really unrealistic, untenable situations, but if I’m only interested in how they affect one individual entity, it doesn’t make sense for me to write it as a novel, because I’d have to artificially make it about the whole world. I love reading dystopian fiction. All of the books I have vivid memories of reading as a kid were dystopian, because they scared me and got under my skin. One thing that I always miss from a lot of them was seeing into how people would adjust psychologically or make sense of mentally a very untenable situation that became the new reality. That’s why I think a lot of my dystopian stories are short stories. When I work on a novel that has some of those qualities, I always feel the urge to keep it as close to experience as possible, which makes it hard to see the entirety of the problematic system that’s taken over, so it loses some of the satisfaction that’s usually there in the genre. I never understand someone who tells me “I started writing a short story and halfway through realized it was a novel.” For better or for worse, when I start a project, I always have a sense of where it begins and where it has to end, and a rough idea of the distance between those things. Even if I don’t see a clear scene or plot outcome, I know what feeling it’s supposed to end on and what is supposed to have happened emotionally by that point. It’s just the job of filling in the middle and populating it and making the people who populate it arrive at the end—which is actually a lot. WEST 10TH: You feel like there’s more structure. 58

An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman

KLEEMAN: There’s at least some place to start and some place to go. I can never start writing until I have a place to go, even if I don’t know how I’m going to get there or what’s going to exist between point A and point B. It’s really intuitive, which is satisfying when it happens and a problem when it doesn’t happen, because there’s nothing like trying to force an intuitive insight into what the right ending of a story is going to be to really frustrate you. So I have a bunch of things I do to try to get me through my work process, which is a lot of times contingent and hazy. When I’m stuck when I’m writing, I often watch five minutes of a movie. Just long enough to get your mind out of the world it was in and someplace else, even if that other place is irrelevant. I watch a lot of bad rom coms and things, because they have an extremely clear sense of themselves and extremely clear sense of what their tone is and what they’re about, and then once I’m not looking at the same problem, I go back to it and see if I see it any differently. I’ll repeat that as many times as I need to to think of something. Or I’ll do the same thing but write down five possibilities of what could happen next and then I’ll leave them and then I’ll come back and see if anything stands out, and if not, I’ll write five more. Do you know the phrase “brute forcing”? It’s one of the early ways of cracking a password, just try every permutation until it finds the right one. It takes a ton of time, but it’s also a simple, multi-use strategy, instead of writing something that’s tailored to the specific system you’re trying to get into. WEST 10TH: How does your academic work inform your creative work, especially considering your scientific background and PhD in critical theory? KLEEMAN: I always expected my academic work to inform my fiction more than I feel it has. I feel like there’s a reason many theorists aren’t writing novels, and it’s that when you translate a piece of excellent theory into narrative, you lose a lot of the nuances that the theorist would want to keep in place. You bring other dimensions to it 59

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and, in the world of theory and philosophy, so much of what’s important is tending your patch of garden and keeping it separate from others so that people understand what your theory and thought is and is not. That’s always something that was dissatisfying for me to do. I’m a blurry thinker, and the more time I spend with two things, the more similarities I find between them. It takes a lot of work for me to keep things within the boundaries that they should be kept in. But I think that what really affected my writing was some base-level worldview of mine. I was in biology for a while, I did my undergrad in cognitive science, and I worked in a cognitive linguistics lab. I have a really sincere belief in every entity existing at the level of being a motivated, conscious being, but also seeing it at the level as being made up of parts that have their own evolutionary history and their own impetus to maintain themselves and maintain their difference from the things around them. I would read my AP Biology textbook in high school and it would bring me to tears sometimes. I remember one thing that did it was the story of the mitochondria being absorbed into the cell and how they had their own life beforehand as energy-converting microorganisms and suddenly they’re trapped and can reproduce, but they can no longer see what their energy conversion is working for. Everything has its own individuality and its own collective relation, and that is really important to me. WEST 10TH: What have you been working on now? KLEEMAN: I’m working on another novel, set in Los Angeles thirty years in the future. The water crisis has become much more extreme and people are drinking synthetic water. There might be a faster way to do this, but the research I have to do is read about the chemistry of water and see if I can conjure an explanation that can hold for someone who knows something about it. I don’t want to invent the properties or fudge how it works—I want the properties derived from how it could work.

An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman

WEST 10TH: What would you advise for young writers who want to publish a novel? Are there any consequences or pitfalls you didn’t expect? KLEEMAN: One thing I’m really glad for is that in college I didn’t really think I would ever publish a book that would be read by more than a handful of people. My college experience was with a small press, and so many of my favorite books were written for small presses, and they felt like they were written for a person like me to find. I had a really direct and personal relationship to those books. I think that it’s important to dwell in that understanding of publishing for as long as possible because you don’t write to get some abstract recognition that even the achievement will not feel like you imagined it would; you write to communicate something to someone like me, to send out a signal and see who responds or what happens as a result of it. So I think that it’s important as much as possible to not worry about the future but to enjoy the fact that you can write a book, you can figure out what you’re interested in without worrying if anyone else is interested in it. It’s the period of time when you get to totally self-motivate your own growth as a writer, and then when you’re ready, it’ll enter the world.

Claire Dorfman, PeluquerĂa, Barrio Chino, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Claire Dorfman, Abandonado, Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

James Kelly Quigley

My Father Eats a Bed of Oysters, 2001

monochrome ballerinas so delicate in pinstripes and white wine, twelve sleek arabesques on a glacier with lemon wedges. tossing back the finless gloss like rose sugar, the shucked debris a nude and vinegary conglomerate. the quiet shrine beneath

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the emergency exit and its neon vigil disturbed by my inconclusive autopsy.

Monica Albornoz, Water

Tashiana Seebeck

mom i have something to tell you i should have told you

orange thai tea is not my favorite i don’t even like it but the bubbles matched your MAC lipstick so it was “our thing” the senior showcase wasn’t cancelled just postponed to a cloudy Saturday morning the week you accidentally swiped a santoku knife against your palm once and then again on purpose to match but i won a shiny second place medal sorry i never told you. sorry that your dog is fat because of me sorry i let the green leash dangle above cecilia’s blanket for so long it must be some sort of torture to see salvation and she still couldn’t save herself i am really sorry cecilia she has diabetes now mom, if you remembered prozac much i am sorry i switched your pills for sugar it felt like a malicious summer for once i owned a striped one-piece with ruffles and you promised we could ride bicycles to the beach. the sun set and set and set we counted together at the windowsill waiting for an even date or an odd date or a date that felt right it wasn’t your fault mom i didn’t understand at ten i wanted sunburn but your hands trembled on the glass pane trying to smooth down each singular gray blue strand of hair that summer i never saw a dolphin break the waves but our house was so fucking clean.

Tashiana Seebeck

cecilia eats too much when you aren’t here to count her kibble square by square and MAC discontinued the lipstick. i don’t remember when i’m sorry for that too mom i should have told you it’s okay to break things my second grade christmas ornament photo with the gaping bottom jaw smile belonged on whichever glossy plastic branch you wanted no matter if the tree stayed otherwise barren. it’s okay you couldn’t handle the smell of pine it’s okay we never made it to disneyland’s 60th anniversary diamond celebration like you wanted because the grainy youtube video from a jerking stranger was just as good. the fireworks are not your smile mom i should have told you that at least.

Lawrence Wu, t drives

Emily Roese

On Listening

e tells us his name is Johnny. He tells us he lives in the desert and that the Arizona sun is white, not yellow. White, not yellow, he says maybe once or a hundred times. Johnny has a shrewd sense for ordinary details. About driving his kid across the desert under that blister of white, the dead coyotes in the road, dropping his kid home with his ex, the smoke that fills his car, the substance he doesn’t want to hit but can’t not hit once the kid’s gone. When Johnny speaks you sometimes want to close your eyes, cull the senses to listen, listen so hard you hear the creak of language, words into syllables, syllables into sound distilled. He has vocal chords that bunker low in his body, that make a rusty clamor, collide with discord then smooth at the fulcrum fold of the throat. That first gruff hello can be followed to this grace, beginning to end, start to finish. I close my eyes and listen because I have to listen. I always listen. We call him Johnny Chronic. He’s a regular. When Johnny Chronic calls on Tuesday, I’ve been sitting at my desk for maybe an hour. Sarah is on the sofa, eating pretzel sticks and trying to hang her hair over the arm of the couch so that it touches the floor below. She arches with a pretzel steady between barred teeth until she feels ground, touch down. What are you doing? “It’s Tuesday today,” Johnny roughs out. “I just dropped the kid off at his mother’s. I’m waiting until she opens the door. Saint of a woman she is, keeping him waiting in this heat.” I close my eyes and listen. Johnny Chronic doesn’t usually take long. We cut everyone off at twenty minutes, unless of course you want to go on with the caller. But Johnny Chronic isn’t bad, just a 69

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little off. Minor substance abuse, minor dissociative tendencies, minor schizophrenia. There are other regulars and their names are all written on the white board that hangs on the wall above Sarah. Agoraphobic Anne has already called twice today. King Kush has been on the clock. There have been a handful of newbies, someone writes on the board below the week’s frequent callers, it’s that time of year. The green writing is signed with a Christmas tree and a Jewish star. “Today,” Johnny Chronic tells me, “is also Zack’s birthday. I had to get the kid something, hell he goes through. You know.” The treat was a surprise, he tells me. Something he bought on his way to pick Zack up from school. It was one of those sugar cookies where they pile high the white frosting with the blue trim, dot two eyes and call it a boy. “They’re Zack’s favorite.” I hear the metal flick of Johnny Chronic’s lighter. He breaks off when he lights it and only continues talking once the joint’s been lit. The sounds are different when he inhales. The muscles and the singing strings dive deeper, the voice moves elsewhere in his body, far from me. “He’ll go to bed with these blue stains all over his face, no matter how much Lorraine scrubs. She worries the teachers will think bruises but I think he’ll look like a Turner watercolor. My boy, the Blue Rigi, a masterpiece.” He laughs as he exhales and the chords resurface. He’s close to me again. I listen as he goes on about Turner, the ex named Lorraine, and the cookie with the white frosting, blue trim and eyes. Sugarcane eyes, he reminds me, not chocolate. When I put the phone down it’s just Sarah and me. It’s always just Sarah and me. When we started volunteering they told us to slot our names in the calendar, our time by extension. We were last to sign but there were still plenty of empty boxes. We picked several blank slots, the ones that assured no postured weather-talk and, to Sarah’s delight, no slap on the wrist for eating of70

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fice snacks straight from the container. More than anything we didn’t want our names slotted near senior members. The ones that stuck around too long seemed off, like they were flocking to the program— the phones, the callers—to bag something rabid, to hold something at arms length. “I don’t want to get it,” Sarah says when her line rings. “I won’t. Stop. Stop looking at me like that.” Last week Sarah got her first. The woman, who called herself Aina, answered the line already with a belly’s worth of Demerol. She just wanted to talk. Sarah told me she stayed on until the end. We’re taught in training how to take these kinds of calls. We learn how to talk a caller down, how to get an address, how to send a paramedic. They want us to hear it before they say it, to stay on the scent of that devotion to life they say we all share, if it’s not already too late. It’s a sterile business, these calls. It’s listening and it’s not. They say it is but I don’t really know. Listen, from the Old English hlysnan, “obey.” The Old Irish, clunim, “I hear.” The message the training begins with, about compassion and support and refrain from suggestion, all that begins to fall away in these calls. Every pleasantry and pause is shorn off and at the center of it all is force, obedience. Force to make living things live, listening to prove agency. No one wants this call. Every volunteer wants the diagnosed and the medicated and the isolated, not Sarah’s call. Eventually she answers, because she has to answer. It’s Johnny Chronic again, she mouths. I reach for a pretzel. Sarah’s voice is perfect for the job. I want to bottle it. Rich and smooth, not a fleck of indecision in it. It’s the kind I trust, the kind I want to posit theories of humanity and goodness in. She gives all the appropriate “ahs” and rhythmic pauses, tracing the outline of a fallen pretzel on the notebook in front of her. Sometimes he calls more than once, like today. Sometimes he calls several times an hour, speaking about Lorraine and Zack, all the while puckering on a joint with you, pausing here and there to suck at it. From Sarah’s voice I know he’s okay today. He’s never suicidal but 71

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he toys with ideas. This is fine. This is okay. We all indulge in this sometimes. When we leave the hotline office the sun is already down. Except it’s not really an office and there’s still a rim of red yolk at the horizon. The hotline is located at one of the inland schools, where they padlock the gates and bathrooms after six. Sarah drives tonight. Last week, after Sarah got her first, we went out for ice cream. But the ice cream parlor was closed and we had to go to the burger joint instead. Bent over a bloody mess of onions and cheese Sarah talked about grief as the inception of growth, the kick off to the great, great soul cleanse, scrubbing the cerebral floor, finding the inner peace! “It’s not a two step.” I watched her flag down the waitress and ask to see the menu again. “And I know what you’re doing,” I said, nodding to her half eaten burger. She licked her fingers and wiped her mouth. “You can feel it, you know.” “You’re supposed to feel it, a something after a call like that.” “No, not…no,” she said, waving it off. “I mean you can feel it, on the phone.” “It?” “When the line goes quiet. There’s a hum, a vibration. Several seconds at least. You can feel the life I mean. And then it gets stronger. And then it disappears.” I looked at her for several seconds. She had a line of mustard on her cheek. “And anyway, I am reeling. Hurting, grieving, distraught. Feeling I mean. Look. Watch me reel.” She winced, shoving the rest of the burger in her mouth. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Johnny Chronic says next time I’m back at the hotline. “That’s what I keep telling myself. I’ll get him back. Once I kick it I’ll get him back.” His son has been gone a week now, but Johnny Chronic still drives 72

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by everyday, parking behind the ocotillos and high stepping over the fallen red cacti bulbs to get a closer look. “I bring it just in case. I would never use it. But what if I come across another coyote?” I close my eyes and try to picture my version of Johnny Chronic crouched behind the cacti, watching his ex-wife and son. No, not picture, visualize, smell, feel. There’s a white sun above. The ex in the kitchen. The son at the dining room table. Working on homework. Math problems. “They aren’t there. They left. I don’t know where to. I’m still sitting in the car.” I scrap the visual and start over. I ask Johnny why he thinks they left. I ask him to describe his setting. It’s a calming technique for him, but it’s also for me. “I’m sitting in my car,” he breathes, pausing to light up. “Brown below, blue above. Sky’s tired, looks like it can’t wait for the day’s end. It’s afterschool time, clock says 3:09.” I pry the soft vowels from his words, noon, school. “Tired is too simple. Maybe I’m just tired. But the sky does look full. A little too ripe. Like it could rot and sour at any minute. Like the moon might have to rush up to hide the body, cover up the mess when dark breaks in.” The vowels arrive in small exhales. Maybe he is tired. Maybe the sky is ripe. Every syllable sounds ready. The consonants too sharp, the vowels too round. I close my eyes and move my lips over the soft sounds again, blue, moon. He fills in the rest of the details. Johnny Chronic is leaning back in the driver’s seat of his pickup, rifle across his lap, dry earth below, holes in the brush that give way to nothing now, a view of an empty house. He says that from his car he can make them there. If he focuses hard enough he can picture Lorraine in the kitchen and Zack at the dining room table, talking, eating, he says. Homework, math problems, I think. When he looks up again, the image won’t stick, he knows that, but there’s a moment where he can convince himself. A split-second, really, where by some 73

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trick of shadow or wind-blown curtain he can believe they’re there. He takes another long inhale. “It’s a fault in my eyes,” his voice says from somewhere deep, “but I don’t deny it, don’t deny the split-second glitch its due presence. It’s a nasty trick I play with myself.” His voice levels out again on the exhale. “But the trick keeps them close.” The joint is out. He pauses to light up again and I wonder if he looks in the rearview mirror when he smokes, if he watches his mouth shape around the joint, press tight when he lights it, the first nascent plumes rolling out from the corners of his mouth. I wonder if he watches himself pronounce the world, all its loops and tricks. “I just want my son,” he says. I peel away from my own images, trying to push this picture of absence instead. Hard as I try I can’t not picture the boy. I can’t not picture Zack at the kitchen table, or better yet, sitting shotgun with blue stains all over his face. Like an opening sore every gone image returns. Lorraine and Zack and the sky that is probably no longer blue, the sky that has probably already been replaced by the moon, crawl back from the recess of their own expulsion. Back into the scene I’m trying not to picture. All around Johnny Chronic are the absences, the vacancies, and he in the middle of it all, with a gun across his lap. Later that week Sarah asks if I can cover for her at a sitting job. I’m a full-grown woman with a full time job, one that puts me in pantyhose and an office and a subordinating role from nine to five, but I call in sick. I don’t know why. “Sure,” I tell her. “I’ll cover. What’s the address?” When I get to the house I’m told to pick up the children. The school mistakes me for their mother. I eye them through the rearview mirror. The younger of the two has dirt across his face, baseball practice today, and the older, the girl, is telling me about the test she has in class later this week. History of Religion. She asks me to quiz her and I do. 74

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“Who, what, when, where and why—for every term,” she says, “this week is just Judaism.” I ask her about Abraham and Moses and the Torah. The where always seems to be Canaan. Dates are thrown out and she reminds me BCE, not BC. No one uses BC anymore. Around 1800 is the birth of Abraham and monotheism. In 1250 Moses crosses the Red Sea. In 1220 Saul rises to power and unites the twelve tribes. She tells me how Abraham was supposed to kill his son, an offering to God in the white sky above, but how God nixed that one last minute. Something else happens in 920 but I can’t remember the What. By the time we arrive at their place I know a great deal about Judaism. Conceptually, very little, but the dates are of the utmost priority, the girl reminds me, sucking on a pigtail. “It’s all about the When.” Once they’ve had their snacks, I help the younger with his homework. He has a spelling test next week. This I can handle. Fourthgrade spelling, I know all about it. “Organic,” I say. “Organic,” he pauses. “O-R-G-A-N-I-C. Organic. Meaning related to the body, meaning related to life. Meaning ‘this salad is organic.’ And the synonym . . . fresh. Fresh and organic are synonyms.” “Okay,” I tell him. “Neutral.” “Neutral. N-U-E-T-R-A-L. Nuetral. Meaning not picking a side, as in a war. Meaning ‘there were no nuetral countries in the war.’ A synonym for nuetral is indifferent.” I make the necessary corrections and move onto the rest of the words. They pay me one hundred for the day with an extra twenty “for the hassle.” It’s more than I’d make at my office job. On the way home I think about all the business deals made with God. Prayers and handshakes. I think about the Red Sea cracking and splitting into slabs and what a relief it must be to step into the sea. 75

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What a burden to emerge again. Stopped at the light I watch an old man cross the street, an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear. The next time Johnny Chronic calls, Lorraine and Zack are back in the house. At first he thought it was the glitch again, the split second delay when the eyes are still reeling from daydream. But then he saw movement, color, a body, Lorraine, Zack at the kitchen table. He puts down the phone to step out of the car and watch them through the openings in the brush. I wait for his return and listen to nothing, my own breath returning as static. When he picks up the receiver again he tells me not what he saw, but what he sees, held in his hands in the driver’s seat of the pickup. “They were ruby last time they were home, the bulbs on the ground are jam red now. The bloom season should have ended months ago, these shouldn’t even be here—Have you ever seen ocotillo flowers?” I tell him no and he begins to tell me about the inch long flowers, long lean petals curled into the shape of a bullet. When they begin to bloom, he tells me, the petals peel back, the spat of yellow pollen comes up and the hummingbirds and carpenter bees sniff them out. He sometimes takes a handful and scatters them on a salad. The bulbs are tangy. Supposedly they can be placed on fresh wounds too, to slow the body’s escape. He remembers vases of the blooms all over his old place with Lorraine, jars of dried flowers on the bedside table. He remembers throwing the jars to the ground and watching the glass break before the blubs scattered, always spreading quieter than he had hoped, rolling submissively across the wood floor. One year, after a big bloom, after Lorraine put all the fresh flowers in vases and all the dead ones in jars, Johnny Chronic went through every room and smashed them, every one of them. The house was littered with the flowers until Lorraine and Zack returned from her mother’s and Johnny Chronic had to leave his narcotic stupor to sweep them up. By that point all the bulbs, even the freshest, were as dark and dried as raisins. Yes, I’m still here, I tell him. I’m still listening. Listening and re76

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membering the early calls between us. I know Johnny Chronic has a history of violence, that’s why he can’t see Zack. His meds make him subdued. They make discrimination and discernment difficult. The drugs don’t help either, they only make him angry. In a Thorazine daze he’s lashed out at Lorraine, thrown vases and jars and bruised his knuckles on the walls. He never wanted to hit her. He never meant to strike him. Johnny Chronic is still on the meds. His still gets angry, has thoughts about breaking things or hurting Lorraine. But he doesn’t really want to. In one of our first calls he told me about the thoughts he had as a boy. The thoughts he sometimes still thinks on, joint smoke hovering around them. He went on once for an hour about the dreams, nightmarish ecstasies where horror film actresses ran around in skimpy underwear, masked figures chasing them with machetes and chainsaws, weapons of various forms. He was particular when he talked about these childhood dreams, detailed. He didn’t really want to hurt women, he told me, especially in the dreams about Lorraine. But the idea had fascinated him as a boy. It fascinated him as a man. He always broke things after the dreams because he felt guilty about the obsession, guilty and scared. Powerless? I had wanted to ask when he first told me, but I held back. There was an unbridled and naked power in the simple question, a cutting away to an understanding I had about Johnny, an understanding of helplessness that the hotline didn’t teach us. Helplessness under the weight of our bodies. Bodies that ingested medicine and spat out side effects. Bodies with minds and fascinations. Disobedient bodies. On the phone now he’s telling me about collecting the jam red flowers for the jar on his bedside, cupping them in his hands and pocketing them for later. After we say our goodbyes the line goes dead. Sarah is packing up to go. The call log goes in the top drawer, the pens in the mason jar. She’s babysitting again tonight. “Duty calls,” she says. 77

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I ask her about them. How are the spelling words going, are Abraham and the gang still stuck in Canaan? “That’s a good and an affirmative,” she says, “highest reviews from Mom and Dad by the way. I usually just take them to the park to wear them out. Kudos to you, getting the homework done and all that.” On the way to the car a group of older women arriving for the school’s senior art class walk past. One of them throws her head back laughing, swinging a long red bag over her shoulder. Left shoulder. “Hey!” Sarah says from a few steps ahead, turning back to me. “Why don’t you come along, just to pick them up, just to say hi? I can drop you off after I grab the kids.” Okay, I tell her. I have nothing better to do. I’ve been calling in sick to work a lot lately, too distracted with everything. Last week my boss caught me staring into the coffee pot. When we pick them up the kids shuffle into the back. From the passenger seat I turn around to look at them. The boy has another streak of dirt on his face, the girl two pigtails limp at her shoulders. I don’t say anything. They don’t see me. They’re looking out the window where a man is selling oranges, two for one, by the freeway entrance. “Who wants an orange from some smelly old homeless man?” the younger poses to no one in particular. The older girl looks over, twists her mouth into the shape of concern and looks away. She turns her focus instead to getting a pigtail into her mouth, hands free, rolling her shoulders and bobbing after it with her mouth agape. Sarah nudges me. “Stop staring, will you?” I draw my eyes to the road ahead, fat gray lanes and trees on both sides. I can just barely hold each scene as we drive along before the next patch of road unfolds. It’s all green and gray but there’s no consistency. I feel something slide up beside me on the center console. “Mom said someone needs to quiz him,” the girl whispers. The confession is followed by a swift kick to her rear and a hushed “shut 78

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up” from behind her. Sarah looks over at me to mouth that word, please. The boy rolls his head back and gives a grunt of submission, handing me the flash cards without even looking at me. “Okay,” I tell him. “Neutral.” “Neutral. N-E-U-T-R-A-L. Neutral. Meaning not picking a side, as in an argument. Meaning ‘he was neutral to their fighting.’ A synonym for neutral is indifferent.” “Okay,” I tell him. “Empathy.” “Empathy. E-M-P-A-T-H-Y. Meaning to understand feelings. Meaning ‘she felt empathy for the boy.’ And a synonym is pity.” I look the boy over, warily. “Understand someone’s feelings?” “I don’t know,” he says. “But I don’t think the test will ask me that. The other words in the sentence don’t need to be spelled right, just the one.” “Okay. Pity?” “Pity.” Sarah drops me off at home. Standing on the curb to watch them leave I see the girl finally got the pigtail into her mouth and the boy is staring at me. The window casts a blue tint on his face, the dirt a straight line of cobalt across his forehead. I feel caught on the curb, transfixed, until a knife of white severs the glance and I have to bring my hand to my eyes to block the sun, see again, meet his eyes. But by this time they’ve already driven off, they’re far down the road, and I’m left only with an after image of inky blues and watery shapes. Johnny is worse today. There are no bulbs on the ground, no scarlet flecks to wonder at. “How am I supposed to? How am I supposed to? I don’t know.” He’s not smoking today but his voice rises and falls out of habit. Maybe I imagine it. His breath picks up and mine leaps to match it. 79

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We need to calm down. I ask him to tell me what he’s doing and he tells me. I feel the chill of night, the white sky nowhere in sight this hour of the evening. I hear the crickets, see the light on in the kitchen. See the dots of light that run down the desert strip and up the lip of a ridge beyond Lorraine’s house. I wait for the flick of the lighter that doesn’t come. “What are you doing?” “I’m here,” I tell him. “It’s Thursday. I’m on the phone with you.” “Are you alone?” he asks. Sarah is off the clock tonight, babysitting again. “But are you alone?” he presses, after I’ve already answered. It takes me a minute. “Yes,” I say. I don’t know why I say it or if I mean it, but it barrels out from my throat with level certainty. It sounds like a prayer. The long pause is filled with the sound of crickets and every once in a while Johnny strums on the silver of his rifle. Tinny music. “Nasty trick we play to pretend we’re not. Nastier still to say we may be.” The tinny chorus plays. I think of Lorraine and Zack but I don’t see them in the car. Their lack sits there instead. “I think you’re here,” he says, “in the passenger seat.” I will the image. I can pull the lever on the right side of the seat to recline another inch, roll down the windows to feel the heat. I look through the windshield at the night sky. There are more stars here, millions of them. The crickets are louder and the sound is more piercing with the window down. Their songs repeat and I lose track of where one ends and the next begins. Each new cry insists on the prior. I don’t respond because I don’t know if he’s right. But I think I’m not here. I think I’m in another place, burrowed under the wall and waving back at myself from the other side. Eventually one of us puts the phone down. Eventually it all stops. There are questions. Wheres and whys, maybe even a when. I haven’t heard from Johnny in a few weeks. 80

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The tough part is you don’t know the reasons, the why someone stops calling. I don’t know where Johnny is, or if he quit his substance, or if he got his kid back. My gut tells me no, but I don’t know why or if I should trust it. A part of me thinks maybe. Maybe he’s still sitting in his pickup, gun across his lap, the ocotillo trees peppering the ground with red bulbs again. Maybe another coyote did come by, and maybe he did shoot it with his rifle, or something worse. Maybe the kid and the ex are home this time, light on in the kitchen. Maybe divine intervention did as advertised, intervened. There are still questions. Every time the line rings I think of the sun, pale, not the seductive yellow a kid might paint with his fingers. Everything a shade of white and red, yellow nowhere on the spectrum.

Arthur Cooke, Untitled

Contributors’ Notes MONICA ALBORNOZ is a junior majoring in Studio Art and minoring in Psychology. She is mostly interested in the concepts of memory, trauma, and alienation, and is exploring ways to incorporate them into her art. Monica grew up in Bogota, Colombia, and is currently studying abroad at NYU Berlin. ALEX BOLLINGTON is a sophomore at Gallatin who is currently concentrating in environmental science and activist photography. He hails from England but has spent time moving around the world living in places like New Jersey, Hong Kong, and South Carolina. Alex hopes to one day work for National Geographic, but until then you can find him running around the city with his camera trying to find the coolest spots to shoot. CARLY STORM BORTMAN is a senior in the Comparative Literature department. Her focus is on Creative Writing with a minor in French. She is enrolled in the BA/MA program and will complete her Master’s degree in Comp Lit following completion of her undergraduate degree this May. Previous publications include her short story “The Author” and poem “A + B” in the Fall 2016 issue of Brio, NYU’s Undergraduate Comparative Literature Journal. Carly is from Natick, Massachusetts. ARTHUR COOKE is a Los Angeles-born image-maker interested in conflicting sentimentalities. He is currently going to school in New York and makes and takes pictures as a way of remembering as well as constructing alternative ways of looking at the world through photographs.

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SERENA DEVI is a Journalism and Social and Cultural Analysis student at NYU. She is originally from Lexington, Kentucky. CLAIRE DORFMAN is a junior in the Photography and Imaging Department at the Tisch School of the Arts. An interest in pursuing a Spanish language degree led her to South America last year, where she spent several months documenting the architectural landscapes of the different cultures she encountered. After graduation, Claire intends to return to Latin America to continue her work with photographic education and conservation. JEAN-LUC MARSH is a senior at New York University (CAS ’17) pursuing a major in International Relations and minors in Environmental Biology and Middle Eastern Studies. He is an avid backpacker, amateur photographer, and ceviche aficionado. NATHAN MIERSKI can do more push-ups than anybody. JAMES KELLY QUIGLEY was born and raised in New York. CARLIANN RITTMAN is a junior majoring in Media, Culture, and Communications and minoring in Creative Writing who refuses to brush her hair and likes to dance around in oversized hoodies pretending that Prince wrote his songs about her. ELENA CABOT RODRÍGUEZ is an NYU student from Boston, Massachusetts. She’s currently a sophomore at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study where she is studying English Literature and Creative Writing. She’s recently become interested in photography. EMILY ROESE is a senior at Gallatin studying psycholinguistics and literature. She values storytelling as a generative tool for change, and has written for Milk Media and Huffington Post among other news outlets. As a graduating senior she hopes to one day have a job. 84

Contributors’ Notes

BRENDAN ROSENTHAL is an artist interested in creating a greater understanding between different cultures. His interest in cross-cultural communication began during his travels to Israel. Seeing part of the climate in the Middle East, he became curious how art could serve to dissolve opposition. Brendan continued his interest in cross-cultural communication, studying at the Shanghai Theatre Academy’s Winter Institute in Shanghai with plans to study at Tisch’s International Theatre Wing in Amsterdam. TASHIANA SEEBECK is a sophomore Linguistics major from Buena Park, California. She would like to thank her parents and Tim Kim. Much of JOEY SOLOMON’s work centers around false senses of belonging and beauty, and the quiet detriments of mankind’s influence on Earth. Now twenty years old, he has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. The image shown in this volume is from his collective series titled “The Remarkable Stretching House,” a personal narrative based on the acceptance of letting go and the delicate convergence of past and present. Joey Solomon is a current student at NYU’s undergraduate Photography & Imaging department, minoring in Creative Writing. See more of his work at www.joeysolomonphoto.com. CAROLINE WEEKS is a senior in CAS studying English and Creative Writing originally from south Georgia. She began writing poems and her first novel around age nine and aspires to become a professor of Creative Writing. She is a feminist, mental health advocate, and lover of language. LAWRENCE WU is a senior at NYU studying Social and Cultural Analysis. He loves dollar pizza, new forms of digital storytelling, and Russell Westbrook. He was also featured on a “This American Life” episode that destroyed and rebuilt him (in a good way). Follow him for more work @lawrencioguapo.

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KIT ZAUHAR is a senior at Tisch majoring in Film & TV Production with a minor in Creative Writing. In her spare time she enjoys knitting, eating tacos, and karaoke. As of now her writing and film explore the intersection of sex, love, and technology. You can find out more about her work and life at www.kitzauhar.com.