The William & Mary Review Vol. 55 by William and Mary Review

The William & Mary Review Volume 55 2017

Masthead Editor-in-Chief Aidan Selmer Assistant Editor Bezi Yohannes Poetry Editor Frank Fucile Poetry Staff Emily Wynn, Kayla Meyers, Makeda Jackson, Zoe Le Menestrel, Brianna Little Prose Editors Cam Menchel, Ali Romig Prose Staff Bezi Yohannes, Elijah Levine, Anna Kelly, Colin Weinshenker, James Kaplan, Gwen Sachs, Aidan Selmer Art Editor Aidan Selmer Art Staff Megan Bland Marketing and Social Media Editor Olivia Vandewoude Layout Staff Silvana Smith

The William & Mary Review (ISSN: 0043-5600) is published by The College of William and Mary in Virginia (est. 1693) once each academic year. A single, post-paid issue is $5.50. A surcharge of $1.50 applies for subscriptions mailed outside of the United States of America. The William & Mary Review publishes poetry, prose, and visual art. Please find submission guidelines on our website: www.wmreview.org. This issue of The William & Mary Review was typeset in Minion Pro, Mistral, and Georgia and was printed by Fidelity Printing. COPYRIGHT 2017

Editor’s Note What a year it’s been. When I stepped into the shoes of our former Editor-in-Chief of two years, Claire Gillespie, I felt a deep sense of what she had accomplished during her tenure, which ranged from the overhaul of our website and blog system, to the adoption of an online submission system that has brought us more submissions from talented writers and artists that we had ever seen before. The thoughts that came to mind were, “Wow, what a great foundation we have to work upon;” which was immediately followed by, “Shoot, where on earth do we go from here?” Luckily, not only have I had an amazing staff behind me that has dedicated their time each week to reading and reviewing our submissions, but I’ve had the remarkable fortune of seeing some truly talented visual and literary artists send us their work this year. I want to thank each and every one of them for their efforts in putting together this laudable volume. We should all feel incredibly proud. In a number of ways, this year saw The William & Mary Review holding true to aspects of our journal that have worked for us in past years. We still hold our round-table readings and discussions every week, which not only exposes our student-comprised staff to cutting-edge contemporary literature and art, but also allows each staff member to grow in an environment that encourages respectful and articulate critical thought. We also continue to emphasize the production of original scholarship among our staff members, with several individuals contributing thought-provoking blog posts to our website over the course of the year. Furthermore, at the Review, we believe that all small publications like ourselves stand to benefit from close connections with each other. In recognition of this value, we attended AWP 2017 in Washington D.C. so that we could meet with our peers and trade ideas (as well as more than a few issues!).

For all that we have held over from previous years, however, we have also recognized that change can be beneficial; and for a magazine that is now entering its fifty-sixth year, indulging our maverick spirits keeps this whole operation flexible and fun. To that end, we have proudly published flash fiction pieces in our journal for the first time ever, and have laid the foundation to continue exploring new and developing literary genres in the coming years. Additionally, our executive staff introduced a committed Social Media and Marketing Editor position, which promises to expand our online presence in profound and exciting ways. And perhaps most significantly, The Review has begun the process of switching our format from an annual to a bi-annual publication in order to better serve our subscribers and our submitters. All things considered, we’ll have a lot of work to do, but just as much to look forward to! If this year’s (first!) edition of The William & Mary Review can attest to anything, I believe that it’s the rather clear answer to that tricky question, “Where on earth do we go from here?” The poems, short fiction, and visual art collected here speak volumes. The labour and the love that has gone into the production of this journal indicates that The Review has nothing if not boundless potential to drive further onward in the coming years.

I wish it all the success it deserves.

Aidan Selmer Editor-in-Chief

Table of Contents Arrival cover art ALEX DUENSING Traffic Writes Our Biographies ACE BOGGESS

poem

Germany Central Station 9 art MICHAEL BURGHOLZER Invitation to a Picnic 10 poem LILLO WAY Out of Office Reply 11 poem JASON GEBHARDT Lemon 12 art PAOLA PAGANO Last Night in Rio 13 poem CORNELIUS ROSEWATER Collage of Angles 14 prose EMILY HOWELL Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Title 18 prose MOLLY HORAN Out of this Forest 20 art RYAN KOENIG All This Useless Knowledge BILL GLOSE

poem

Granted Dominion 24 poem ANDY FOGLE

The Divided Line 29 prose EMMA BOLDEN Thinkings Of You 30 prose MOLLY HORAN Bike Racks 31 art MICHAEL BURGHOLZER Visit the Iniquities 32 prose EMMA BOLDEN The More We Ponder Aunt Mertâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dementia KARI GUNTER-SEYMOUR

poem

Winnowing and Bird Song EMMA BOLDEN

prose

Lamp Posts 37 art JOHN CHAVERS Lacunal Falsities 38 poem CAMERON HIRSCH Infirmary 40 poem LILLO WAY Dear Rake, 41 poem JASON GEBHARDT Into the Very Thistle 42 art MICHAEL BURGHOLZER Bread for Sea Gulls 43 poem RAYMOND PHILIP ASAPH

Traffic Writes Our Biographies BY ACE BOGGESS We are like this, you & I: sitting in a car, waiting on something to wait for. Look. Two dragonflies perform their mating dance in front of our windshield like a movie screen. We remain the ones not moving. Our biographies would run long with pages on which nothing happens, interspersed with chapters of mayhem. There’s a jumper on the Southside Bridge, an army of cops trying to talk her down (which might be the wrong choice of words). We’ve paused until it’s back to work for you, or Netflix, more poetry for me, more silence that speaks loudest in my head. I’ve spent so much of my life wanting the new & unusual, the inspirational even when it’s cruel. I’d like to think I’ve answered all the questions. Have I? Tell me how to move forward. Tell me how to sing the coming verse.

Germany Central Station BY MICHAEL BURGHOLZER

Invitation to a Picnic BY LILLO WAY Rest with me here under the square, jet-made cloud, my backpack under your head, your hat over my face, we’ll pretend the browning sedge isn’t jabbing our ankles, pretend for this instant we haven’t a care in the world, we haven’t cared for this world when you come right down to it, here at ground level with the ants to whom we bequeath the once good earth. I have no army blanket with bullet holes to offer you to lie on, nothing between our asses and the grass except a few microfibers woven in China. Stay with me, we’ll grow hungry, pick at a picnic, donate it to the yellow jackets looking for a little something insecticide-free. You, who can nap under any condition, come snore me a love song about long summer days in the harmless shade. Wake-filled I’ll do the listening for both of us – birdsong drowning in a jet engine.

Out of Office Reply BY JASON GEBHARDT

Someday I’ll go on official business to Omaha say, or Cheyenne, somewhere distant as where my twenties lay, she on top, rocking, lips parted that way they used to in the narrowest stairway to the converted attic and the ecstasies of rented light, far from an ocean’s edge that might have inspired me to guess how many rings the waves have swallowed, the beach where a gull’s shadow haloes a headphoned woman, bent, sweeping her metal detector in fine tacks as if stitching a sacramental garment, the dings in her ears, the tiny bell between an altar boy’s fingers.

Lemon

BY PAOLA PAGANO

Last Night in Rio

BY CORNELIUS ROSEWATER

She said she was from Venus. Here on Earth they force-fed her cocaine and alcohol. All she really wanted was a drink of water but they wouldn’t serve that to me, either. She wanted to know if I could see the Southern Cross in my country, mistakenly believed to be Spain. I said, “No, The Crux is not in my night sky.” She demanded to know if I believed in God. I said, “No, but I really would like to. I really would.” She asked me if I would talk to God for her. I told her I was going to be on a plane in a few hours, and I could holler her message out the window as I went soaring past the moon. She said, “Please ask him to send more gentle and interesting people here from Spain. It’s so awful here, I will be going back to Venus soon.”

Collage of Angles BY EMILY HOWELL The first time he had the surgery done I was much younger. Most of the memories I have of that time in my life have been blotted and smudged, but this stands out. I was so intrigued by the process, doing research and watching surgical videos, so when my mom brought him home from the procedure, I was able to envision every step of the process as she recounted watching it on the monitor – the metal prongs hooked onto his eyelids, the red laser of light cutting a circular flap in my Dad’s cornea, a thin, flat metal hook almost like the bent end of a paper clip sliding under the edges of the cut and pulling the thin layer of collagen fibers until it flopped, wrinkled and hanging over his bottom lid like the plastic covering on a half-heated TV dinner. I started by studying faces. In high school I photographed headshots for the school plays. I watched the way people I knew changed in front of my lens, becoming eyes, noses, cheek bones, jawlines – each one a collage of angles. During the first weeks of his recovery, I’d wake up during the silent suburban nights and tiptoe down the carpeted hallway with my parents’ bedroom door at the end. Cautiously, I’d open it only wide enough for half of my face to peek past the bedside lamp and examine my dad’s face, illuminated by the glow of the numbers on his alarm clock. Glares of red reflected off the clear plastic domes he had taped over each eye while he slept. Seeing they were still intact, I’d release a sigh. Next, I studied strangers. Captured them on film through windows,

from behind clothing racks, through vacant spaces in a bookshelf. A sort of non-sexual voyeurism. Eventually, I mustered the courage to come out of hiding. I stopped people on the streets, took their portrait and then let them vanish back into the masses. My sister and I would giggle and make fun of the ‘alien eyes’ my dad had to put on before bed. To quiet our teasing, he’d explain very solemnly how serious it all was, that the plastic domes were to protect him from rubbing his eyes in his sleep. Otherwise, he could dislodge the healing flaps of cornea. Neither of us registered his own teasing tone as our eyes widened in concern. Then, there was the body. I set up a gray backdrop and eight continuous hot lights, hung fill cards, and set up fake walls in the large fifth-floor studio on Michigan Avenue. While the other people shooting arranged food and posed fashion models until they were in exactly the right position for the shot, I recruited dancers to leap and pose in front of my lens so I could freeze their motion mid-air. The lines of their bodies contorted, unnatural, phenomenal. Converted to black and white, they looked like charcoal drawings – a blend of line and light and shadow. In my sleep, an imaginary scene haunted me. My mom would shake us awake in the middle of the night and tell us we needed to rush my dad to the hospital. As we piled into the car I could see the space between his eyelids exposed a protruding clear crease. The folded flap would be squeezed between every blink. All the while, droplets of blood slid down his paling cheeks. These nightmarish images would wake me multiple times and force the twilight trips to his room to make sure the globes were still secure. Then – the world. Endless landscapes that melted off the edge of the frame, mountains too large for my lens, the crumbling texture of century old buildings, streets paved with porcelain tiles, crashing waves, a spray of mist, droplets casting a rainbow into the air, and a red-roofed city sliced apart by thin streets bathed in a golden warmth until the sun

dipped below the crest of a hill. When I was in my early twenties, my dad underwent yet another eye surgery – PRK. In the weeks leading up to the procedure I was filled with a new fear I hadn’t considered when I was young: that some terrible medical catastrophe would take place leaving him blind. He came through, once again, with crystal clear vision, but constantly complaining about the length of his recovery and his constant need for Restasis to moisten his dry eyes. I brimmed with annoyance, as well as envy. Not of the surgery per se, but of how easy it was for him to willingly have layers of his cornea removed without batting an eyelash. I have my own business now. People pay me to take pictures of the moments they want permanently captured to frame and scrapbook and send out to everyone they’ve ever known. I shoot engagements, weddings, maternities, newborns, families, portraits, and events. I shoot people’s lives. His vision wasn’t even that bad before the second surgery. He was just annoyed that he couldn’t see the golf ball as crisply as he had been able to in the preceding years. Meanwhile, here I am, unable to distinguish my own fingers from one another unless I hold them within a few inches of my face. Daily, I place contact lenses in my eyes and watch as the mittens of flesh morph into five individual appendages. Being a photographer – spending so much time watching the world, making images – has altered the way I live. I feel like I’m constantly moving toward moments I’ve already photographed – a glittering diamond ring, walking down the aisle, a swelling stomach, newborn child, and a family of five with two dogs to print on the cover of a Christmas card. It’s hard, sometimes. It makes me feel behind, like I’ve done something wrong because I don’t have those moments, yet. I have different images – arm in arm with friends outside the Chicago Theater draped in graduation gowns, sitting on the grass with the Swiss Alps behind me, drink in hand in the streets of the French Quarter, Times Square on New Year’s Eve, a small, sparsely furnished apartment in Dublin,

photobombs of strangers at a festival in Porto, a first day of graduate school selfie, skylines and landscapes and countless group photos in bars celebrating promotions, acceptances, marathon finishes, moments. I have to constantly remind myself that these images are just as valid as the ones I don’t have, just as important; the others can wait. I got my first pair of wire-rimmed glasses in fourth grade, and I remember being amazed that I could pick out the individual leaves on trees without being underneath the shade of their branches. Since then my vision has steadily declined, and I’ve gotten used to massive eye doctor bills and the dull pain my frames leave behind my ears. A few months ago I got conjunctivitis a few days before I was scheduled to shoot a wedding. I had to do the whole thing while wearing glasses, and by the end of the day I had a pounding headache from the number of times I’d forgotten and tried to press the viewfinder to my eye. By the end of the day, I swore I’d look into Lasik. After all, all it took for my dad was a blurry golf ball. We had a swing set in my backyard when I was a kid. I would kick off my shoes, pump myself high into the air and stare, through closed eyelids at the sun. Red. That’s all I could see, blood spinning inside thin pieces of skin. Now, when I think back to the nightmares I’d had about my dad’s surgery, I think about my own eyes, the blood spinning in small veins. I know I’ll never be able to risk my sight. Not being able to see the places I want to go, the faces of people I love, the scenes in the viewfinder of my camera, or the way that, at this moment, the light shining through the window in my living room catches on the fuzzy side of the houseplant’s leaf and makes the short fibers appear white like peach fuzz on a young boy’s chin.

Today’s Title BY MOLLY HORAN

It was easier to get from one side of the day to the other, Erin had decided, if you gave it a colon, or specifically, something after the colon. Monday: The Day Erin Would Go Grocery Shopping and Finally Tell Brian Things Were Not Working Out. Things after the colon were more than a to-do list, they were cue cards, important directives held at a slight distance. She gave herself notes as she went through the motions, instant feedback one of the benefits of being the actress and the director. Maybe a half-smile when bending to tie your shoes, like you have a secret, but the fun kind, a tattoo you don’t think your mother would approve of. Pause before reaching for the Captain Crunch, like you’re considering a healthier option. Like this is a crossroads and the right decision could move you towards something brighter, a shinier life. She gave herself the notes in the car on the ten-minute trip to the supermarket, listening to the CD she had found in the player when she’d bought the mini-van last year, a collection of instrumental lullabies. Brian had wanted to throw it out, saying it was dangerous to play something designed to put you to sleep while driving 4,000 pounds of metal. The constant argument would feature prominently in the second half of the day’s title. Erin had kind of a thing with the rotisserie chicken guy. And the fish guy. And the woman who offered her a slice of American

cheese while she considered just how much potato salad she might use that week. Not all the things were good, only one was sexual, and sometimes she considered ending them all completely by going to the supermarket down the street. She smiled at the rotisserie chicken guy when he said they’d be taking the lemon pepper birds off the spit in five minutes. As she smiled, she tried not to think about how unappetizing it was to remember her dinner was cooked on something called a spit, and that it had once been just as alive as the seagull she had nearly run over in the parking lot. “Is it a nice day?” he asked, scratching his arm through his rubber glove, which seemed so glaringly unhygienic Erin considered abandoning the pursuit of chicken all together. “It is a nice day out,” she said, hoping her addition of the word he had obviously forgotten didn’t come off as too pointed. His mistake had made the sentence more stressful than any sentence shared between two people who had never truly been introduced should be. “Wish I could see it. Working ‘till 10,” he said with such pained wistfulness she was tempted to draw out the conversation further, to point out surely he could have someone cover him, if only for a moment, so he could stand in front of the store and enjoy the sun.

BY SPARROW

Out of this Forest 20

BY RYAN KOENIG

All This Useless Knowledge BY BILL GLOSE He knows it’s probably wise to skip the application box titled “other skills.” No one cares that he can cradle someone’s neck in the crook of his elbow and drop so the skull snaps free from the spine. On Fort Bragg’s ranges, his squad invaded mock cities, shot holes in heads and torsos of plastic targets shaped like men, raced through doorways as if chasing the concussion of their flash-bangs. Skills so dire in the desert as worthless here as mantras about fitting in, going along to get along.

The Army taught him well, trained him through endless repetition like Pavlovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dog: Every locked door must be kicked down, every grave filled in. And so, he pours into this empty box the blood-spattered knowledge passed from warring father to warring son, all those razored lessons gained from centuries of grief. When the interviewer opens the lid to peer inside, he waits for eyes to widen and her tongue to spell out a response that lets him know whether his skills have any application here or not.

Granted Dominion BY ANDY FOGLE

A four-loon trapezoid just off the lake beach. We don’t notice the heron in the swash until it takes flight, and crosses from the southern to the northern shore, all the way a foot above the surface. Low and low, its wings writhe down. Scared away— fragments of acorn shells, tooth grooves in the nut—

How many leaves are making that sound of the black squirrel among all these leaves.

...much disfigured—deeply scarred and scarred across and across November maidengrass is not picturesque. * Hillside country of the great river, place of the swift water, place where the track of the heel may be seen—

In Back Pond, I see twelve loons off the beaver lodge, but my son sees nine. Smaller than this comma, spanning a raindrop caught between the branch and a branch-nub: millimeter webstrand. *

To know the names of thingsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as Adam is granted dominion, he makes it up as he goes along.

Algae is aquatic, and cannot live in darkness; fungi are terrestrial, and live in both light and dark. Lichen is fungus and algae growing together, and the light green leafy kind is called caribou shield. What you recognize are short horizontal slashes (any birch will let you know), and that nameâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;lenticelsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; grants dominion.

Decades ago, two boys dry-humped, were not found out, and never did so again.

Silver birch, silver birth— peeling. A cattail’s straplike leaves, a cattail’s flowering spike— If you pull a tuft, it expands to a handful of downy seeds. Only now, as November strips the down from cattails, the last seeds deep on the damp stalk. * I have crossed from Virginia Tidewater to Adirondacks, low and low, my blurred double slashing surfaces. Carry me back, the Carter Family sings. To whom, to what? The family cannot carry itself, so it sings to the man who has carried himself away: My mother’s old and feeble, my father’s getting gray. I’m going back to Virginia and I expect to stay. It’s ok anyway— we never spot the growing louder geese.

Ma hurled the football down at Dad, lying on the couch, but he caught it just fine.

Each one bigger than both my hands— four gashes in the white pine.

He said things like “this, that, and the other” “the whole nine yards” “and what have you”

With these in mind, the wind carries seeds farther away from the parent tree: samara, wingnut, polynose, whirligig, whirlibird, helicopter, spinning jenny, and key. The first and the last: samara, key. The first and the last, the first and the last: samara, key, samara, key.

This leaves that, the other leaves this.

(That just leaves the other.) *

The “Old Dominion”— the first colonial possession— the power expressed via naming— to slide and touch and fall like dominos—

There would not be another Paul Woolley in this family; there will be a fourth Paul, but his middle name will mean masculine or simply man, not wood, clearing, or wolves den. The pitch pine gnarls as it ages— you must know what it’s like. The white oak’s secret of living up to 400 years? It grows so fucking slow.

Shagbark hickory’s long strips are attached at the middle, and free at both ends, like the flapped-down wings of a heron before recoil.

The Divided Line BY EMMA BOLDEN I saw Jessica’s back-lit back. The afternoon sun haloed her hair, dyed the henna-red shared by our entire floor of freshman girls. She was sitting at her desk to watch the tree that rustled with squirrels who sometimes tossed acorns through our opened windows. Sometimes we decided the acorns were bugged, that the squirrels had us under surveillance: they seemed too busy to know so much. I said “hey,” and Jessica said “hey,” her voice flat as pills and whiskey. “What are you doing?” I sat down on the bed and looked at my sandals, at the grass green between my toes. “Looking out the window.” “I know, but what are you doing?” She turned and her face was as flat as her voice, except for her eyes, which doll-closed then dollopened, like she was trying to focus or to make sure she still had eyelids. I decided this was a question, a request for clarification. “I mean, what are you thinking?” Her eyes doll-closed, doll-opened to watch my toes move away from and then towards each other. “I’m not.” “Not what?” She didn’t even sigh. She just turned to the window again and the light did what it did to her hair again, lighting the baby hairs at her hairline, where they stood up, electric. “I’m not,” she said. “I’m just looking.” Her head tilted a little to the right and stayed there. My head followed. There were leafless limbs and light, small gatherings of sky. “Is that weird,” she said-asked, “not to be thinking? I mean, like at all?” There were no squirrels or beaks or winds. There were the blacks of branches and the greens they held, so calmly. I shook my head behind her. She didn’t turn to see.

Thinkings Of You BY MOLLY HORAN

Ben didn’t sign the letter. He stood over the sink, tentatively tilting his mother’s Sunset Breeze candle over the back of the envelope, hoping a wax seal would give it an air of gravity he doubted the actual words did. The pale yellow liquid splattered in a decidedly not-circular manner at the tip of the flap. But it smelled like what he thought the hope of a first date might smell like. Ben didn’t address it right away. He considered offering to pay his sister to use the calligraphy pen she had gotten two Christmases ago, but decided that might be overkill. He took almost forty-five minutes creating neat, straight printed letters, handwriting no one would associate with his crumpled English worksheets. The next day, he set the envelope on the desk ten minutes before the bell. He stood by the back, watching the desk, waiting to see who might sit down.

Bike Racks

BY MICHAEL BURGHOLZER

Visit the Iniquities BY EMMA BOLDEN John had a face like God. All of us, all parlor room of us, all pulpit and pew, all family funeral plot and flower garden of us, said John had a face like God. We were right and righteous in so saying. John had the face of God. Had the jawbone of God. Had the cheeks of God, the beard of God, the temples of God, and the fair baby-hairs curled over the temples of God. John had the nostrils of God, and John breathed the air of God, and when John walked into the river, John held inside of him the breath of God. When John walked into the river, John became the river. And we feared, all of us, all riverside and shore and watching of us, that from that river John would not, not ever, rise. We held our breaths inside of our breasts and we were sick with the waiting of it, and the wanting all of us felt made us feel. Through our want John taught us. Through our want John taught us that God had given us lives like breath, had built our bodies in His righteousness like breath. We would make use of our will. We would die to live inside the body God had given us for living. And John, still under the river, did not rise, and we kept our breaths inside. We felt our dying. We never once felt so alive. When enough time for a miracle had passed, Halleluiah, John rose from the waters blessed and reborn. We praised Him Halleluiah. We cried to Him Halleluiah Amen. We cried out with the blood of the lamb to the shepherd. And it was for the judgment of no man to declare if the river had consecrated John or John had consecrated the river. We were now holy. We were consecrated. We had seen the zero centered inside each of our eyes and we praised Him for plucking them out. We praised Him, blind in His glory. With tongues afire we praised Him. With silence afire we praised Him for cutting out our tongues. We praised Him with hands palm up and pleading. We praised the hands after He cut them from our arms. Through pain we became righteous. We praised Him when He cut the feet from our legs, for our legs had

stumbled. And when we flocked to Him again by the river, Halleluiah, Amen, we saw His hand upon the childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s neck. We saw the hand of God come to call us all to righteousness. To visit upon our children the sins of each blind and mute and stumbling father. And there in the glory Halleluiah, there on the banks we praised Him, praised Him, until the last of our children washed us clean by drowning, Halleluiah, Amen, under the blood of the lamb.

The More We Ponder Aunt Mert’s Dementia BY KARI GUNTER-SEYMOUR it is not unlike opening an attic door, memories packed and stacked, bound by odd bits of string, cobweb and scraps of tinsel. Today that old white wicker headboard, a yard-sale treasure, her first born conceived beneath its loops and vines. An ironing board, covered in calico, liberated, you bet your ass, at the onset of polyester. That old Westinghouse “Big Twin” window fan, whose oscillations to her recollection, gave no ease, only recycled that God awful Ohio humidity. A giant plastic Santa, its mate gone missing–that’s a whole other story– lit up the front stoop for twenty-some Eves, even after they all left home. Which one of her kids had begged for that lava lamp?

Her trusty wooden ladder, paint-dripped, periwinkle, her favorite, used as a newlywed for kitchen walls, knowing her mother-in-law would throw a shit-fit. The smell of sweaty boy socks, a red rusted kick scooter and tired Barbie, whose wee waist and taut tits cannot save her now. Her youngest’s hot pink prom dress, hand-stitched layers of chiffon and netting, tiny sequins sewn one-by-one, late nights, after cows were milked, the chickens put away. Meanwhile, her split oak egg basket is worn clean through, and Jesus Christopher Christ, those sweet Banty hens run wild, room to room, one a dancing logroller, atop a worn basketball. Where in the Sam hell is that green plaid suitcase she’d threatened to use, the third time she miscarried, and he had taken to drink the day she said, Albert, I don’t want any more babies. And there she goes, hanging from the rafters again. Somewhere a fluorescent light is dying, suspension a terrible trick of the mind.

Winnowing and Bird Song BY EMMA BOLDEN

Of course, they met.

Before they met, they were the people they were before they met. She left brooms behind every time she moved, careful to keep old dirt off of the new floor. He had a job screen-printing t-shirts. There was that summer. Everyone asked him for palm trees. No one was named Amanda. ________________ Together, they drank coffee. He took two sugars and no cream. She took two sugars and two gulps of cream. Neither of them burned their hands. ________________ Later: the moment she saw the slope of his nose in the photograph of his motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nose. ________________ They let the waitress top off their mugs. They watched the steam. They burned their tongues. They ordered eggs over easy. There were too few or too many napkins. ________________ The week after he left, she sat on the side porch of her new condominium. She watched. A funny little blur of a bird chirped through the notes of its funny little song. She hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t met any of her neighbors, but she had met all of their petunias, all of their always-dying azaleas, all of their marigolds circling all of their tomato plants. There was nothing in her linen closet. No sheets, no pillows, no blankets folded and put up to quiet their impatience for winter, no new and no old brooms.

Lamp Posts BY JOHN CHAVERS

Lacunal Falsities

BY CAMERON HIRSCH

Something about the stories being fictional. The mermaids not being mermaids at all but legs stapled together. And how if you close your eyes and keep them shut the chromatography fades into dull shades of asphalt. That each long-winded story is just a single uttered word, retold with each agonizing breath. About how the crippling fear we experience is not a result of the emotional rawness of caring. It is the bracing for impact after we fall. Something about our nightmares being emaciated puppeteers And our shame being a feast. And in theory we arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t starving. But souls can be hungry too. These surgeon hands arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t precise, they are rattling with every pulse of my wrist, they are seizing with each inhalation, they are skittering between a glide and a glitch.

Cheers. To when sweet nothings became sour everything’s And bath bombs explosive weaponry If you wrinkle your forehead enough, The imprint will look like regrets and those regrets can go fold in on themselves… Fingers pressing against the temples that fell after decades of friction. Something about the kindest act being betrayal Because then expectations are low This fiction wasn’t meant to quell us into solitude, It destroyed us. Then rebuilt us.

Infirmary BY LILLO WAY The childhood of this morningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s memory, is filled with bees. Bees air-kissing the arbutus, bees rolled tight inside rose petals, bees on plants named for butterflies, bees bouncing around blades of grass, striping yellow and black across their green. When the lawnmowers choked, when the boat motors cut out, when the cicadas quit rattling, the chant of a hundred saffron-robed bees droned through the heat-waves and into the star-shaped shadows of the sugar gum trees. These bees were all sound and sting. Except, that is, for the maimed ones. How carefully I cultivated a precise technique by which I pressed the sole of my shoe, just so, against the furry body of each bee, injuring the creature without killing it, that it might be sent, in a screaming matchbox ambulance, to the emergency room of Insect Memorial Hospital, where I, as attending doctor, would nurse it, and those who had suffered similar accidents, back to health with the caring and indulgent attention that only the pure of heart can deliver to patients in their time of need. And while morbidity and mortality were, of course, inevitable, many in my charge recovered fully enough to fly away from the rehabilitation pavilion of my front yard and resume their lives as highly-functioning members of the universal hum.

Dear Rake, BY JASON GEBHARDT I’d always regarded you as the work of a Dadaist. Hanging from a nail in someone else’s garage, your slender fingers reaching down for the oil-stained concrete, but never touching—from there, you had so much to say. You were not just neighbor to the shovel, the weed whacker, the coil of green hose, but also a word bearing a swell of disparate meanings: to drag through, to sweep (as if with bullets), to be thin as, to scratch or scrape, to gather, and (my favorite) the wealthy man of dissolute habits. Now, cocked against the stone façade of the house I’ve acquired, you’re eager to run your teeth through the grass, to collect the sloughed off, the dead, to make a fool of autumn, bleed it of its purple, its burn. But I like you idle as a urinal on a pedestal, leaves pissing across the grass before you, lodging themselves between prickles of holly, installing themselves wherever they please.

Into the Very Thistle BY MICHAEL BURGHOLZER

Bread for Sea Gulls BY RAYMOND PHILIP ASAPH

The moon between branches gleaming in the dark, the incense of crushed wet leaves, the pavement, winding round the hill tight as tape under the pearls of streetlights and the paling starsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;why does a place seem loveliest at the moment of leaving? Tightening her scarf, she steps over the guardrail. Crunching bits of broken shells, she walks along the jagged shore where the gulls face the wind as the waves swipe in. At the waterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge, she takes bread from her pocket, tears it and tosses it in the air. Her jacket flares like a sail, screeches rip the mist, and her hands feel filled with emptiness, as if leaving a place was grieving, and death something more than a change of address.

Contributors Ace Boggess: Ace Boggess is author of the novel A Song Without a

Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016) and two books of poetry, most recently, The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2014). Forthcoming is a third poetry collection: Ultra-Deep Field (Brick Road). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Emma Bolden: Emma Bolden is the author of medi(t)ations (Noc-

tuary Press, 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry and The Best Small Fictions. She received a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and serves as the Senior Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Michael Burgholzer: Michael Burgholzer, a programmer, lives near

Salzburg and has published poems and photographs in German language and American literary journals. He has won several local literary awards. John Chavers: John Chavers enjoys working as a writer, artist, pho-

tographer, and general creator. Most recently, his writing and artwork have been accepted at The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library - So It Goes 2016 Literary Journal, 3Elements Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Ascent, The Roaring Muse, Birch Gang Review, Four Ties Lit Review, Ground Fresh Thursday, Kudzu House, Gravel Magazine, Silver Apples, Meat for Tea - The Valley Review, THAT Literary Review, The Ogham Stone, and Verity La, among others. He has a fascination for the diminutive, works of art on paper, and the desert. This September he will be the artist in residence at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas.

Alex Duensing: According to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of

Quantum Physics, the version of Alex Duensing that you meet may have successfully utilized a combination of politics, theater, and poetry to create anti-time, bodily free-energy, and a Gordian Knot-Type solution to all Zen koans. You may also encounter him as pure money or as a recent thought. Andy Fogle: Andy Fogle has five chapbooks of poetry, with poems,

translations, and a variety of non-fiction recently published or forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Pedagogies (South Korea), and Los Angeles Review. He grew up in Virginia Beach, lived in the DC area for 13 years, and now lives in upstate NY, teaching high school and working on a PhD in Education. Jason Gebhardt: Jason Gebhardt’s poems have appeared in the Iron

Horse Literary Review, Poet Lore, and The Southern Review. He is a 2016 and 2017 recipient of an Artist Fellowship awarded by the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities. His chapbook was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition and winner of Main Street Rag Publishing’s 2016 Cathy Smith Bowers Contest. The collection is forthcoming. Bill Glose: Bill Glose is the author of three poetry collections, includ-

ing Half a Man, whose poems arise from his experiences as a combat platoon leader. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Missouri Review, The Sun, Narrative Magazine, and The Writer. His honors include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Award and the Missouri Humanities Council Award for Veteran’s Poetry.

Kari Gunter-Seymour: Kari Gunter-Seymour blames her method

of writing on the rich Ohio soil, her wildly eclectic family and neighbors and her upbringing. Twice a pushcart nominee, her chapbook Serving was chosen runner up in the 2016 Yellow Chair Review Annual Chapbook Contest. Her poems can be found in numerous literary journals including Rattle, Crab Orchard Review, Stirring, and on her website: www.karigunterseymourpoet.com. Cameron Hirsch: Cameron Hirsch’s publications of poetry and

short fiction appeared in the Spring 2015 edition of Canyon Voices Literary Magazine. Hirsch is a full time student at Lake Forest College majoring in sociology. Molly Horan: Molly has received an MFA in writing for children and

young adults and went on to teach at Fordham and NYU. Her writing has been published by Refinery29, Flavorwire, Teen Vogue, and many other sites.

Emily Howell: Emily Howell is an MFA candidate at Old Dominion

University in creative nonfiction. She received her BA in Photography and Teaching Artistry from Columbia College Chicago. She is the Managing Editor of Barely South Review, the literary journal published out of Old Dominion’s MFA program and teaches memoir and journaling classes at The Muse Writer’s Center. Currently, she is working on a hybrid manuscript of nonfiction lyrical essays and prose poems entitled With Light. Ryan Koenig: Being a Bay Area artist, Ryan is often inspired by how

nature and cityscapes interact. The majority of his work deals with capturing the intersectionalities of contrasting ideas and spaces. Ryan is currently working on a long term project capturing the intersectionalities or clear examples of Jack Kerouac’s romanticized view of San Francisco, The Summer of Love, and bringing to light that San Francisco is actually a metropolitan city that has problems such as homelessness, high levels of litter, etc. The focus of his body of work is to present San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area in both the subjective and

objective representations. This Summer, Ryan will be moving to London and hopes to expand this project there. Paola Pagano: Paola earned a degree in Graphics and Multimedia

Design at Università di Roma La Sapienza in 2010. In the summer of 2013 she completed a Residency in Illustration and Visual Storytelling at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She currently lives and works between New York and Milan as an illustrator and designer. Her eclectic style ranges from watercolors, to digital drawing and photography, to pattern design and small animations. A bittersweet irony is the common thread of all her work. Her visual research is centered on engaging the mind and stimulating critical thinking, but also on creating images that connect with the more instinctual side of ourselves. Cornelius Rosewater: Originally a common laborer from southern

New Jersey, Cornelius Rosewater currently resides in South Dakota, where he masquerades as a competent employee of the National Park Service. He can often be found, planted like a skinny, ugly flag, at the North American pole of inaccessibility. Lillo Way: Lillo Way’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in

New Orleans Review, Poet Lore, Tampa Review, Tar River Poetry, Madison Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Poetry East, Roanoke Review, The Meadow and Santa Fe Literary Review, among others. Eight of Way’s poems are included in anthologies. Her full-length manuscript, “Wingbone,” was a finalist for the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press.