The William & Mary Review Vol. 52

T h e W i l l i a m a n d M a r y R e v iew

The William and Mary Review

Volume 52

2014

Volume 52 / 2014

The William and Mary Review

staff Editor-in-Chief Sarah Schuster Poetry Editors Nicholas Gupta, Sarah Schuster Prose Editor Claire Gillespie Poetry Staff Paige Bermudez, Frank Fucile, Max Miroff, Mary-Grace Rusnak, Amanda Schiano di Cola Prose Staff Madeleine Delurey, James Kaplan, Tyler Kennedy, Cameron Menchel, Colin Weinshenker Webmaster Kalyn Horn front cover by Hannah Elliott Higgins back cover by Michelle Repper The William and 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 $5.40. A surcharge of $1.50 applies for subscriptions mailed outside of the United States of America. The William and Mary Review publishes poetry, prose, and visual art. Submissions should be mailed to the appropriate editor at The William and Mary Review, P.O. Box 8795, The College of William and Mary in Virginia, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795.

Mailed submissions should be accompanied by a SASE with either US stamps or International Reply Coupons. Submissions can also be emailed to The William and Mary Review at review@email.wm.edu. We ask that email submissions include work as an attachment. Please include one attachment per piece and label the writer’s name on each attachment. Please direct questions to review@email.wm.edu. Further submission guidelines are available at www. wmreview.org.

This issue of The William and Mary Review was typeset in Minion Pro, Garamond, and Book Antiqua and was printed by Fidelity Printing.

Copyright 2014

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All Rights Reserved

editor’snote

It has been another wonderful year with The William and Mary Review, and I, along with my fellow editors and staff members, am pleased to present you with our 52nd edition. It has been a time of transition for the magazine, as we begin to explore new avenues of submission and publication with our upcoming website, and, in the near future, an online edition of the Review.

As we make the move from physical to virtual, I find myself reflecting on the Review’s rich history. From the 1921 Review, to the Review that published William and Mary Chancellor Robert Gates, to the Review of recent years, we have grown and transitioned into various different forms over our long history, but we have never wavered in our commitment to literary excellence. The Review has stood as a reflection of our College’s championing of the liberal arts, and through our dedicated contributors, both authors and staff alike, we have achieved this goal tenfold. It is our responsibility to continue this rich tradition, and it is my belief that our continued growth and change has only better situated us to carry this tradition for many more years to come.

To my fellow staff members and friends of the Review, I thank you for your stalwart dedication and love for this magazine. It would not be possible without your consistent and enthusiastic efforts. Equally, to our authors and readers, I thank you for your talent and your support.

It has been wonderful to see the shape of this issue enfold, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as our staff enjoyed assembling it.

To our new readers, I simply say—Enjoy.

Sincerely, Sarah Schuster

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tableof contents “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.�

- Virginia Woolf

poetry

Conversations Mika Applebaum 7 Last Thoughts Darrell Dela Cruz 24 From a Story She Told Me Linda Taylor 25 Office Positions Jonathan Greenhause 26 The Shirt R. A. Allen 36 Chicken Pox Phillip Egelston 37 The Hard Truth

Jamie Donohoe 38 Spissitude Richard King Perkins II 45

prose

Notes from the Penumbra Shane Ryan 8 Waiting in Line Elizabeth Stainton Walker 28 Emerge Eric Sasson 39

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Conversations Mika Applebaum My mother talked to her god.

She addressed him in her moments of anger and in her moments of joy.

He was real and tangible like the gods of her Greek ancestors who manifested themselves in the everyday life of their people.

She talked to him and argued with him about the sickness and the feasts, about the death in the family, about the letter that never came.

In his divine perfection, he had to explain the happenings of life which transcended the fair and the logical, so she could come to terms with them.

It was a one to one exchange, a giving and a taking, with that important presence she shared with her people, her house and her heart.

Her children who loved her moved away, her husband died before her. But my passionate mother had her god.

To approve and disapprove, to negate and affirm, and to have with him one final argument.

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Notes from the Penumbra Shane Ryan To Declan’s English teacher (Please read first!) – Pleasantries seem inappropriate at this juncture, so forgive me if I adjourn straight to the critical matter. I am Declan’s ‘half’ brother, to use the pedantic definition, but have assumed full responsibility for this assignment. You will find the text below. It comprises approximately five thousand words in nine discrete segments. Italicized notes precede each. These asides will be easy to identify, as I have not resorted to italics elsewhere. Their purpose is to give the presenter – whoever should assume that role, be it you, Declan, or a random student (not recommended) – a sense of the tone and dramatic rhythm.

Let me state unequivocally that the reading of this particular piece will require at least one full class period, assuming thirty-eight minutes is still the rule. If that exceeds the typical allotment, please accept my regrets, but on this matter I am utterly resolute. It may prove wise to reserve two days for the reading, and provide refreshments and short intermissions throughout. I’m not a teacher; I leave the details to you.

You’ll discover several words in the text that hover beyond a typical eighth grade vocabulary. Solipsism, promiscuity, ephemeral, lacuna, necromancy, etc. You may be tempted to translate these terms into something more palatable, but I insist they be retained. The overall atmospheric impression will not cohere if certain esoteric but crucial cogs are deformed by concessions to the lowest common denominator.

Additionally, please don’t take offense at suppositions I’ve made in Section One regarding your character. Understand them as the perambulations of an active mind, in no way connected with ‘judgment.’

As a show of respect, I’ve used the rather saccharine title of your assignment as a heading. I assume it’s required. If I’m wrong – and here I address myself to any extant intercessor – please revert to my preferred choice: “Notes from the Penumbra.”

-GT

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A Million Words or Less

Section One: Avoid rendering this preamble with excessive condemnation. Instead, let facts condemn, and adopt a neutral tone. Your audience will be more sympathetic. Toward the end, two passages refer to the speech itself. I have indicated each with an asterisk. It is permissible, and indeed desirable, to adopt a slight grin at this knowing break of the fourth wall.

Declan. I hope this reaches you in time.

When your mother phoned on Friday evening, soliciting my help with the English assignment, I denounced her as a fool.

Not in so many words, mind you, but with a definite measure of contempt. Though I’m a full decade your senior, you’ve been around long enough to recognize such behavior; it’s a recurring fault. I don’t deserve or seek forgiveness, but pray instead that you’ll hear my defense.

First and foremost, the immediate refusal stemmed from enduring discord between myself and the caller. She is your mother, and I admire that you’ve kept her in your affections. To me, she’s only a stepmother, but one who has doggedly earned all the connotations of the title. Like the poor beleaguered children of fairytales, my childhood teemed with terrors wrought by a usurping matron. Subterfuge, slander, injurious implication; these were the hallmarks of her reign, and each was carried out with the frenzied malice of a succubus driven to jealous hysterics. The goal, of course, was to sabotage the object of envy and destroy my relationship with our father. And how hideous, considering the tragedies I’d already suffered!

Her efforts, in hindsight, seem comically absurd and damned to failure. But I never forget a villain’s intent. If not for my precocious intelligence and certain preemptive tactics which hindered her credibility, the odious stratagems may not have failed so

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completely. And on that regrettable day in my seventeenth year, when I unburdened myself before father and foe, she raged with joy as two damning words from my own lips accomplished what she’d coveted all those years: a permanent rift. I’m sorry to say, my brother, that when the tectonic shifts had ground to their grudging halt, her laugh echoed loudest. But what irony, what justice, when in the midst of her campaign to sever my last connection, she gave life to my best friend!

Pardon the digression. I don’t mean to trot out the litany of grudges I bear against your mother. I only want to justify my reluctance to accept any edict issuing from that icy abyss, even if the task in question related to someone I hold in high esteem: you.

And that wasn’t the whole tale. The assignment also presented certain discomforts. Your eighth grade English teacher, I was told, sent her students home with an undertaking for parent, sibling, or guardian: “In a million words or less, tell me about your student.

The response will be read aloud in class.” How well-intentioned.

How quaint. I envision her as a young woman of liberal-idealist upbringing, hailing from more urbane surroundings than our benighted forests, and just beginning her first year as a real teacher.

That she misread her audience so completely is unfortunate, but I do hope her spirit survives the humiliation.

With a humble effort at perspicacity, I now conjure the aftermath: my inner cinema teems with flickering images of our mountains’ gruffest men – prison guards, paper factory workers, and perhaps, a trucker employed under the aegis of Norman’s Poultry – blushing at the idea of putting pen to paper and translating their stoic viewpoints into something cogent. I see false starts, frustration, and a final deferral to irritated wives. *And what of my own efforts? Even if the words contained a relative modicum of elegance, wouldn’t that damn you doubly when the time came for reading the missive aloud? What horror as you stood before the class, forced to stutter a series of my gushing locutions, trying

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desperately to ignore the titters of the meaner boys at the back, and sensing your own social opportunities diminishing by the syllable!

No. Good God, no. I bridled at the idiocy! I refused your mother outright and snapped my phone with righteous disgust.

She wanted it completed by Sunday, and instead I returned to the rooftop gathering I’d left, here in the city of my sojourn, my exile, where a pair of swimming blue eyes and fragile hands held so much promise. (The remainder of the evening passed in choreographed moments. Together we leaned against a brick parapet, beneath the starless sky, while in hushed tones I revealed some rather apocryphal but romantic trivia about the skyscrapers across the river. These beacons glowed in the aura of golden light emanating through fixed windows, topped by reaching, blinking spires – seductive fodder, my brother, hearkening ephemeral joys.)

But declining to serve as your biographer has left me beset by guilt. It’s a burden you can only imagine. My feeling for you surpasses what I could ever set to the page, it’s true, but at the very least I owe the attempt. *And since your teacher puts no stock in word count, consider this lengthy disclaimer the mere beginning of my contrition act: repentance for an abominably selfish choice.

So, in a million words or less, for the consumption of the eighth grade English class at K.J. Gardner Middle School, and shaded by the dubious outlook of a black sheep – this, Declan Taylor, is you.

Section two requires the least instruction, as it consists of biography.

It should not be read quickly, but not with cloying nostalgia, either, lest the audience accuse you of undue self-absorption. Try to adopt the gently amused tone of some of the great radio storytellers of the last century. I’m thinking of Paul Harvey, or Garrison Keillor, but a bit les anodyne, if you please. We are, after all, in the era of teen promiscuity and other such worldly phenomenon.

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In 1994, you were born in the middle of a November rainstorm.

Like so many white Americans, your mother fetishized Ireland, and you became Declan. As the doctor (whose own son recently garnered local infamy by slaughtering neighborhood cats with a replica Civil War bayonet) brought you into the world, I watched gray rivulets on the waiting room’s hopper windows, following certain lonely raindrops as they caught the trail of their ancestors and cascaded to the sill.

Our father finally emerged in borrowed scrubs, tired and smiling.

He pronounced your name for the first time. On our way through the maze of corridors, he recited the vital health statistics. Rows of mewling newborns spread out in the nursery, and dad pointed to your wispy mat of brown hair, half hidden by white linens. I beheld the nascent life; a lump of hills and valleys, imbued with unknowing grace. Then you stirred, the sheet fell to your neck, and two tiny blue eyes opened from their sleep. The curious glance fell to the side, and in that lacuna between slumbers, your fat lips puckered and opened, forming a speculative bubble. It stretched, swelled, and vanished. I felt dad’s arm on my shoulder, and for the first time in recorded history, I didn’t find your mother so grotesque.

Two days later, the rain turned to ice, and you lay supine in an oaken crib, reaching toward the airplane mobile twirling overhead. I hadn’t yet turned ten, and life in the house took a turn toward peace. Your mother had less time for the usual intrigue, and my own thoughts became pregnant with the urges and shame of my future alienation.

But though my psyche suffered in those pre-pubescent days, I found solace in your innocent growth. I remember the first precocious steps, amazingly early at seven months. I remember the morning you went missing, and we found you twenty minutes later in a hidden nook of the garage, petting a strange cat. Most remarkable of all, I remember the first birthday, when we discovered that despite your worrisome lack of speech (unaffected by the steady stream of charlatans calling themselves ‘therapists’), you understood everything.

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It happened quite by accident; your mother brought a birthday cake into the dining room, where you sat before a smattering of presents. She lamented the forgotten plates. Cued by the word, you stood with purpose and toddled to the china cabinet. We watched in shock as you pulled the ornate door with such gusto that you toppled backward. Undeterred, you collected four garish plates – the FrenchCanadian ‘heirlooms’ of questionable provenance, bespattered with maroon fleurs-de-lis – and dipped yours into the middle of the white frosting. A contemplative moment ensued. Then, brow furrowed, you tried a sudden, ambitious scoop, and the entire cake fell to the carpet.

The rest of the evening, we tested your comprehension with a game of fetch. “Bring me a chair,” dad might say, and you’d disappear into the kitchen, returning moments later dragging a wooden chair on its back. It soon became clear that you knew every major article and appliance in the house. You also understood that the game was less trial than parade. Our praise made you glow; the silence had been broken.

I remember my final request with great clarity. “Declan,” I said, “bring me the couch.” Your eyes and mouth went agape, and you turned to stare across the living room at the sofa’s immovable bulk. I felt a hollowness breach my stomach. It was the sort of trickery that threatened the whole evening, for which I might never atone. Guilt hovered like the storm clouds that loom over our lake, awaiting the reaction. You took two speculative steps forward, convulsed in a fit of giggles, and charged into my arms.

This section is perhaps the most vital. It must be read in crescendo, finally reaching a moment of fervor. Personality, which has hitherto crept by increments into the reading, should now emerge fully, like a turtle from the shell or, better, a moth from the chrysalis. Take care not to let bulky ideas like foreshadowing seduce you into inflecting certain words or sentences. The story must be a lonely survivor.

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By age two, you spoke fluently, with a slight lisp that would disappear in another year. You loved the outdoors, pointing and shouting from your perch on dad’s shoulders as we hiked through Adirondack trails. Near the old property, you especially coveted a defunct logging road called the Maple Grove. “Blackberry?” you’d ask each time we came to the clearing, recalling the sour, pungent taste.

We pointed to the naked bushes. “Not yet. In the summer.” When the berries returned in August, you gorged each weekend, navigating the thorns, and a wide circle around your mouth would bloom in dark purple. Dad, as he’d once done for me, collected handfuls of the fruit so that you could eat from his palm.

And then came the seminal day when curiosity took you on a foray to the north side of the clearing. At the forest’s edge, you dawdled in the shade of the sugar maples. A rustling drew your attention. When the brown bear emerged from the undergrowth, it fixed you in its dark gaze, harnessing the world’s stillness even as it lumbered ahead.

Your frantic shout from the northern edge sent us racing over the crest in the road. No sooner had we spotted the danger than dad raised his arms and began shouting. I quickly understood, recalling the same bit of country wisdom, and together we charged with noisy abandon. You, poor thing, stood petrified, caught in a battleground between a hulking beast and two lunatics.

What idiocy, to storm a grizzly! But you inspired our rush. In the moment of first vision, before confronting the animal, we became horrified by possibility. The brief auguring revealed the sort of future that leads men to make demands of God, to engage in necromancy, and generally put their faltering faith in conclusions nobody can know until life is spent. And so we made ourselves two roaring, lumbering figures, furiously comic and deeply afraid, stretched to the limits of our size. The bear tensed. Fur rippled over the ursine muscles like blades of grass blown in a sweeping wind. The sheer power made me shrink. But if the annoyed creature, his afternoon meal quite ruined, hadn’t risen on narrow haunches, bellowed, and

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fled, I would have braved the swiping paws.

Section four stands alone, and will capture the classroom’s attention whether it is read by a chorus of monotones or Daniel Webster reincarnate.

Some people are gifted with universal understanding. Early, very early, I realized this blessing had eluded me. I know my flaws, and could enumerate them on request. I stand guilty of verbal extremism, for example, and some otherwise reliable intellects have even accused me of pretension (though I insist they are misusing the word). My book is written, and I have perused the pages. Yet the awareness does nothing to curb my disinterest in large segments of humanity, nor does it enervate my compulsive solipsism. Such is my lot. I excel where I excel; my weaknesses are absolute.

Nevertheless, I understand that grace and empathy are two of the most beautiful traits conferred on any soul. You, Declan, had both.

In the earliest days, children flocked to you, and the ones who stayed longest were the perennial outcasts. You led them around the wild neighborhood, a kindly pied piper, not so much reserving judgment as freeing those children from meanness itself. I don’t intend to paint you as a martyr, much less a Christ figure. Still, even if one can’t possess a sympathetic nature, it is impossible to miss it in others. The bounty was yours.

Capricious memory now ushers me to ninth grade, and a survey assigned as part of the school census. One malicious box asked for “number of siblings.” Plagued by teenage neuroses, hatching from the cocoon of obsessive-compulsive disorder, I agonized. You were not a full-blood sibling, true, but if I put “none,” would that be disloyal? Weren’t we closer than most brothers? Still, considering the stringent leanings of the administration (the same covey of buffoons who would later reject my proposal for a school-wide Bloomsday festival), I decided to obey the letter of the law rather than the spirit.

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I completed the worksheet at home, and your prying mother discovered the paper, with its glaring zero, on the kitchen counter. She wasted no time in commencing the predatory confrontation. One room away, you sat at the dining room table, scribbling in a picture book.

Don’t mistake me: your mother’s opinions have no influence on my emotional barometer. But I couldn’t bear to think I’d betrayed you indelibly, like some St. Peter of lesser consequence. I’m ashamed to admit I broke down in tears. One of a child’s most delicate traits is an ability to convince himself of guilt, even when the guilt is not his to bear.

I hadn’t shed this weakness, and your mother exploited it with surgical precision. When the inquisitor finished her absurd lecture, I sat with you and attempted to explain. Through my mutterings and desperate apologies, couched in the simple language and transparent moralizing used to rationalize a complex world to children, you maintained a serenity belying your five years. I came to a frail, stumbling end. “It’s okay,” you said, “I know you’re my brother. Should the head be blue?”

I bowed my head and hid the tears. My eyes lit on the open page.

Beneath a collection of scattered crayons, a coiled, grinning snake had been colored to the neck in rainbow stripes.

Section five begins, to the untrained eye, with excessive focus on my own background. It is essential to infuse these details with life, because, as you will see, they segue effortlessly into the climactic revelation (which the most astute students will already have guessed). Do NOT lose the audience in the opening paragraphs. Resort to gesticulations or shouting if you deem it necessary.

Declan, when I try to make you understand my loneliness, please know that it’s not for the sake of self-pity. My intentions are naked.

I have never found it easy to make friends. It would be expedient to blame that shortcoming on intolerance, but the fault is mine alone. Long before the truth of my longings became widespread, I fit in poorly as a gifted student who couldn’t bear to admit futility in the difficult social

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realm. Too arrogant for the smart set, too erudite and awkward for the popular. On those rare occasions when I found a likely companion, a moment of base envy or egregious competition would sunder the foundation. I am a jealous friend and lover, and jealousy, as the proverb goes, must finally consume its owner.

And yes, even in the confines of the city, where I supposedly reside among “my people,” life is a lonesome affair. My masculinity, which I don’t think I exaggerate (who didn’t express shock at the news, that year?), makes me somewhat attractive as a partner but almost totally unsuitable as a social piece. I remember with amusement and regret, for example, an outdoor party on the island, and joining a game of croquet (the lawn would have infuriated you – ridiculously overgrown, a dandelion in front of every wicket) where I knocked a rival’s ball into a nearby pond. The coup, quite legal, sent the dainty competitor into a sobbing conniption and totally alienated the sensitive revelers, aside from a few pathetic masochists.

I can’t abide the culture, and without going into boring details, suffice it to say I have also damaged my reputation and estranged a good number of prominent ingénues with encounters I had no interest in sustaining beyond a certain point. You can see the predicament. That is why you, Declan, are so integral. I will be lucky to forge one or two strong bonds between now and my death, but you were the gift.

Enough digression. We arrive ineluctably at the place in history where revelation burns its path. The scene is nearly set. I am perched at the edge of a beige fauteuil chair in a small den our father has just finished building. The piled carpet is a drab olive, and dark wainscoting sets off the egg-white walls. The room itself extends from the house toward the cedar shrubs, bolstered outside by two pillars of stacked stone. March has brought a false harbinger of spring, flaunting itself in advance of snowfalls that will snuff the re-birth in April. The windows are open. Plashing water can be heard from the lake’s shore. You aren’t present – just my father and the loathsome woman he’s chosen to marry (who, I must clarify, has come uninvited). On the smudged white couch

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with collapsible arms, they sit in judgment. I am seventeen. After days and months and years of consideration, in stunning anticlimax, the secret is out.

She gasps and executes a hand-to-mouth cliché. “Oh no,” strike the whispered words, their frothing schandenfreude thrashing like a manacled beast. Dad turns star-white and examines his old sneakers, unlaced, with their soiled tongues. He had planned to go for a job.

His gruff voice is laced with confusion. “That’s very serious.”

“It’s all a joke!” I’d like to yell.

But that ship, as they say, had sailed. Though dad later approached in pure discomfort to intone support for “my choice,” his body spoke a different language. He could never open himself to old affections.

Not in the new context. He made me a stranger instead. Believe me, Declan, I don’t blame him. I know he was never capable of more.

As to your mother, she had only days or hours to celebrate her victory before she realized the awful caveat – because dad couldn’t forgive himself for his great failure, and was cursed by the paternal love now incarcerated in his chest, he turned the stifled shame into fury at your mother, who had conspired against me from the beginning. Her foolish machinations, long ignored, finally earned punishment for a crime they did not commit; a gay stepson ruined her marriage.

The most touching portion of the piece, by any account, comes in section six. This is what the students will be discussing long after the reading is finished. There is no cause for embellishment.

May I broach the subject of suicide? Yet again, I beg you to acquit me of lugubrious theatrics. At the time of writing, I’m well beyond such considerations. If someone posed the concept now, I would assume a stoic tone and quote the late filmmaker Robert Altman: “Suicide? I don’t believe in it.”

But this was not always the case. For days after my oratory in the

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den, I wandered in a state of dread. If you ever despair at loneliness, Declan, let me assure you – it’s much easier to bear with age. I couldn’t see any kind of future in those days, nor happiness, and with the passion only a teenager can muster, I brainwashed myself into the cult of romantic annihilation. How embarrassing to admit that I researched the particulars, tested the wooden beam in my bedroom for reliability, and stole one of our father’s thick ropes from the garage! I prepared, and then delayed, hoping for a last, brotherly intervention. But I thought the secret had been kept.

I should have known better. One night, in a hateful maneuvering disguised as a “serious chat,” your mother made you privy. A weaker child would have succumbed to propaganda and let fear destroy his love. But just as in your mute first year, when a stationary couch sent you into hysterics, you understood. On the same day I’d made up my mind and set a tenuous date to hang from the rafter, you approached while I sat by the lake.

“What does it mean to be gay?” you asked. My chest heaved.

I released a blade of grass I’d been using as a whistle, and a brisk wind bore it over the sea wall and into the waves. We watched it become invisible. The enormity of the question almost induced an escape. Then I spoke, and everything lifted. I told you I didn’t expect full understanding. I indulged your incisive questions. Yes, my attractions lie in that direction. No, children are not included (how could I take offense at this diligence, eliminating one awful reality after another until we were brothers again?). Yes, I may get married but not to a woman and no, barring a cosmic accident, I will never sire children by the usual method.

When we finished, you approached cautiously and hugged your arms around my waist. A light breeze lifted your fine hair, and April snows had yet to prolong true winter. I felt a saving energy on the wind. The sound of distant cars reached from the highway, and as the sky succumbed to twilight, it claimed all my darkness for its own.

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Section seven deals primarily with the father, and should be jettisoned if it interferes with the timely completion of the reading. If this eventuality becomes necessary, take care to preserve, in some other section, the gorgeous tableaux of the concluding paragraph.

And that life went on. In the next two years, before college, you saw me through the worst troubles.

How can I forget the summer afternoon when you convinced our father to play basketball again? Our games had been common enough before, but the jealous new order had many victims. At your persistent behest, though, he trudged onto the blacktop – a looming, bulky man wearing a grease-stained t-shirt and small gym shorts thirty years out of fashion. Watching his massive form, I remembered Sunday mornings, and how I once relished climbing the blue couch, hovering like a bird of prey, and jumping on his broad back while he read the newspaper. He’d bite his lip, grimace in mock anger, and wrestle me to the floor with a taut smile, twisting his fist into my squirming torso.

But that day, when you passed me the ball, I was never touched.

The misguided old man avoided me as one avoids a leper. I’d turn my back to the basket, expecting his forearm to fall heavy on my spine.

Instead, we were like two similar poles of different magnets, and my mere presence repelled him. Each time I turned to shoot, he skittered away and flailed an ineffectual limb. On his offensive turns, my hands landed like tongues of flame, causing him to lurch spasmodically in the opposite direction. Did he think his own sexuality was at stake, that I might infect him? I don’t know. After a final uncontested shot, I turned and walked down our street without a word. He didn’t follow, and I never turned back.

But you followed. The return to better days had been exposed as a translucent mirage projected on wefts of fog, but you followed. We walked the long road to the marina, and sat on the deck of a sailboat by the docks. The sun had begun to set at our backs. The bobbing

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white masts of the other craft sealed us from view, and we stared across the lake, past the coruscating water, to the green mountains silhouetted on the horizon.

The original opening paragraph of section eight, discussing the inane suspicious habits of the mother, has been deleted. Unlike other famous cretins, she has somehow managed the feat of being equally intolerable on the page as in life. The fight scene that supplants it is absolutely crucial. Here, the reader should attempt to narrate the action with rising energy, peaking at the word “sand.” A pregnant pause may be utilized before the final sentence.

My day of rejoicing came in the violent spring before I left for college. You must remember: we had set out on a long walk, with the vague goal of the 1812 monument, when a car slowed to a halt on our left. Two heads leered from the near windows, and I recognized the ugly features from school. Predictable slurs were hurled. I found them all quite irrelevant, especially considering my imminent departure.

But you, angry and resolved, plucked the largest available rock and launched it toward the enemy. Their car had drifted ahead, and the projectile struck the rear window, causing a reticulate web of broken glass to spread from the point of impact. “Bravo!” I thought. In the next instant, four ill-bred boys, brimming with native hatred, closed in.

I considered fighting, but the thought was put to rest by a punch that landed with neat accuracy in my solar plexus. I fell. My desperate gasps for oxygen set a sort of percussive rhythm for the rest of the encounter. You swung wildly, hitting one of the attackers in the jaw – a miracle blow from your furious eight year-old fist.

Soon the fattest member of the gang wrapped you in a bear hug and locked his fingers. How fervently I wished to rise and answer this insult! Thankfully, some atavistic modicum of decency kept them from harming you. But I bore the brunt of further kicks, one

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of which shattered my nose and produced the identifying bump I’m still apt to stroke with an aimless finger. When enough hurt had been committed, they drove off in cloudlets of dry dust. You knelt to my side, ears burning red from the struggle, panting, while my lungs recovered in hard contractions and blood dripped on the sand.

Is it ridiculous, Declan, that I still think of that fight as great victory?

Section nine and all that follow are denouement. I find myself unable to reach a satisfactory ending, and therefore my notes become useless.

I am very much intent on a circular, meaningful conclusion. I ask for your collaboration. Should I wait for a sign?

But I must have been a great stress. How little did I consider the obvious burden on a young boy. Every pariah dreams of an accomplice, and some dreams make us blind.

I left for college, and you continued to thrive. Fulfilling the promise of the early first steps, you excelled in athletics. Friends came naturally, and, I suspect, drawn by a confessional need, like waves releasing their burden to the shore.

When I returned for a game during my final year at college, you had just turned twelve. You scored twenty-two points. After, in the cold winter outside the gymnasium, I remember with acute amusement the pretty young chanteuse who called from the parking lot. “Nice game, Declan.” Her lilting cadence made you blush, and the nervous reply told a story. All the fears of your parents it seemed, could be put to pasture: your flight would be straight.

And now this letter’s conceit begins to rust away, like an iron statue whose purpose even the sculptor can’t explain. No teacher, no class.

The Sunday deadline came and went. Declan, if you can…

For obvious reasons, I also remember the bike. These memories come in flashing stills, like an old photo reel; too powerful, too glaring

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to flow. Pure grace haunts each frame. In one lucid recollection, I’m standing at the end of a road course, at a youth cycling race in the grinding heat of summer. You ride well ahead of the blurred peloton, who have just rounded a bend some fifty feet behind. A small gathering of families pause in mid-clap. You lean back, seconds from the finish, arms hanging free of the handlebars. The posture is victorious and fatigued, and your face is open to the sun. …I write from the small apartment you once visited, in a windowless bedroom dim with the light of a stained-glass lamp. I may burn these papers. They are an act of desperation, of insanity, of impossible absolution. Faith is continual devastation. I never called. ...I watched you confront death by the maples, and I chased it away. How could I know you’d return the favor? And again, and again, and again. ...I can’t forget how you cried on the long drive home, young and fated and in tune, remembering the bear.

I have no title to this grief. The last words must always be mine, but I hope with everything that the first will be yours.

Eight days after her call, after my betrayal, and you atop that same bike, riding home from football practice on the stretch of highway bridging our country roads. A light rain fell, because they say the beginning is made from the end. I’m cursed to see it all: the withered corn husks of the fields, the coasting geese preparing for southern flight, and the gambrel roof of each faded barn you pass. Closing fast on this paradise, a tired, ludicrous man with a bulging stomach (how that weeping devil would grip my hand and beg forgiveness) sits at the wheel of a transport truck bearing the emblem of Norman’s Poultry. He loses focus. The haunting word is “hydroplane.” The cab skids to the elbow and over the rumble strips. Before he can save himself from the ditch, you are killed and dad was the one who called, if nobody told you, his voice cracked and collapsing with the frail, stumbling end.

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Last Thoughts Darrell Dela Cruz

Cellophane wraps around the mind, so synapses can disperse all at once.

Endorphins release like the now existent man falling. With his flailing arms can the wind glide him to a smooth transition.

Air to snow.

With all that flapping, will he be an automatic snow angel when he lands?

When his body freezes will he become a clear form antiquity?

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From a Story She Told Me Linda Taylor

Fifty years of children, or anything that sings with the stone of a bird, gets cuddled to a crime spotless as a rub.

They didn’t know whether it would kill them.

They merely felt ashamed: The sun was oiled with blood, Grandfather in the barn or under the stairs.

Then, all his daughters and their sons lying under their sleep, his hands opening in them like crows.

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Office Positions Jonathan Greenhause

At the office, we divide up our roles for more efficiency

making one of us the official gossiper & another the guy who tells the racist & sexist jokes, while another of us calls out sick every single day, always the same excuse,

always in grieving for a beloved great-aunt, & another’s taking a brief vacation in the Caribbean & is expected back

just in time for her retirement.

One of us is always passed over for promotion & another constantly moving up into the same position, While the woman in the corner has a doctor’s appointment at ten & will be back

right before tomorrow’s doctor’s appointment at ten, & the guy next to her is always in the bathroom & will be out in 5 minutes, & in 5 minutes,

he’ll say he’ll be out in 5 minutes.

The new hire owes $20 to everyone in the office

& swears she’ll pay it back next week, & the technology maven comes in with a new laptop every day, each one getting progressively smaller ‘til they fit beneath his fingernail.

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The office slut’s constantly having one-night-stands with herself,

& our OCD coworker has set up a waterfall of cleaning solution cascading all around him.

The one normal guy was fired but will be back tomorrow so we can fire him again, all of us secretly appeased by expelling this reminder of our inadequacies,

all of them shared

despite our attempts to divide them.

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Waiting in Line Elizabeth Stainton Walker On days when it rains, Casey Anthony1 drives instead of walks the mile and a half to the nearest Starbucks. She always goes inside, never uses the drive-thru window. It is not quite human interaction, more like a photocopy thereof. While the other customers in line fidget and check their iPhones until time to order their lattes, Casey Anthony waits patiently, staring straight ahead. She has nowhere to be.

She orders the same drink each day, a venti caramel mocha with an extra shot. When she first moved here nine months ago, she would tell the barista her name was Sarah to avoid being recognized. Recently, she has begun using the name Casey again, even paying with the debit card that bears her name. Once, the cashier, a short, biracial girl with glistening white teeth, said to her, “You have a very famous name.”2 She handed Casey’s card back, staring straight at her, but never acted like she recognized her face. Aside from that one time, no one at the café has ever said anything.

When her coffee is ready, she gets back in her vehicle, a white 1997 Jeep Cherokee, and begins her driving circuit around the town. Each day she makes the same loop, heading out to the mall, then circling back towards downtown, all the while drinking her six-dollar coffee.

She listens to NPR, particularly the headlines at the top of the hour.

The eight minutes’ worth of news briefs gives her a sense of what is happening in the world, without forcing her to concentrate on lengthy explanations of events. During the longer stories, about the Middle East or the budget crisis or the use of child labor in wherever, she changes the radio to the DJ on the local pop station. The caffeine 1 Woman accused of murdering her two-year old daughter, Caylee Marie

Anthony. Tried and acquitted of murder July 5, 2011.

2 A neighbor also said this to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., in Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Casey Anthony does not know who Kurt Vonnegut is.

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kicks in, making her feel a bit jumpy, and she finds it harder to focus.

Halfway down University Drive, she pulls into the parking lot across the street from an elementary school. She leaves the radio on while she watches the children get off the school bus. The kindergarteners wear puffy, brightly colored coats, and most carry lunchboxes with cartoon characters on them. They hurry inside through the rain, their teachers often meeting them with umbrellas to keep them dry.

In the scramble to get the children into the building, no one notices the sport utility vehicle, daytime running lamps gleaming through the mist.

When the buses have emptied, and the parents have unloaded their progeny from their sedans and headed off to work, Casey Anthony turns the key of the Cherokee and leaves the parking lot.

Having finished her coffee, sucking down even the syrupy sludge at the bottom of the disposable cup, she heads to the nearby Target to buy a Dr. Pepper. At eight o’clock, the store is just opening, and she enjoys seeing the products neatly lined up on the shelves, under the hopeful buzz of the fluorescent lighting. In moving from town to Florida town, she has discovered she likes the reproducible experience of chain stores. It is why she goes to Starbucks instead of the local, organic, hippie-type coffee shops she used to frequent as a teenager.

She goes up and down the cosmetics aisles, testing out lipsticks and eye shadows on the back of her hand but selecting none of them.

She reads the labels of conditioner bottles until she finally decides on a hair masque made with avocado and olive oil. She has recently dyed her hair blonde, and it is important to keep it healthy.

She walks to the magazine aisle, and begins flipping through the articles on “How to Dress Up Your Ponytail for a Party” and “Date Night Makeup.” It has been almost a year since she has been on a date, and that one was a disaster. She had met the guy at the hardware store in the town where her parents live. His name was Casey, too, and she had thought that might be a sign: Casey and Casey. Happily

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Ever After.

When he asked her out, he did not seem to know who she was, but she was still careful, meeting him at the Applebee’s instead of letting him pick her up at home. Inside, they had divided the spinach artichoke dip. She drank a skinny margarita. He had a Michelob Ultra. They had talked about her job working at Universal Studios.3 When he asked if she had children, she smiled dreamily. “No,” she said. “But someday.”

Back at his apartment, when he was inside her, he whispered in her ear, “Tell me about your little girl.” She grabbed her purse and her clothes and dashed, naked and stumbling, to her vehicle.

At Target, she purchases the hair conditioner, the issue of Glamour, and two twenty-ounce Dr. Peppers. When she swipes her Visa, the cashier smiles at her, asks if she would like to apply for a Target card.

It is still raining outside, and folks are ducking in and heading to the umbrella section. The women all have frizzy hair and boxy raincoats; the men wear business suits with darkened shoulders, wet from the rain.

Casey Anthony has no umbrella, but it does not matter. She is wearing an oversize sweatshirt and sweatpants, and her short ponytail looks the same wet or dry. She starts the Jeep and drives a few blocks down the road, to the tanning salon.

She knows she does not really have the money to spend on tanning, but she feels it is important to keep up her personal brand. She has When she was questioned by police on July 16, 2008, Casey Anthony claimed to work as an event planner at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. Multiple open-source media outlets assert that after being questioned by police about her office location, Anthony allowed herself to be escorted by deputies into a building on the grounds of Universal Studios before finally admitting to the officers that she did not, in fact, work there. Anthony had been fired from her job at Universal in 2006.

3

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been reading books on branding and sales and thinks maybe in the future she could do endorsements or something. She has done a few short video blogs,4 just to keep her name out there, just to stay relevant.

Jose has certainly perfected his personal brand. Thanks to her, Jose Baez5 has gone from being just a spic lawyer to The Attorney Who Successfully Defended Casey Anthony. He has recently released a book about her case.6 She read online that he is defending the guy who shot that kid for wearing a hoodie. Jose still sends her a little cash now and then – as well he should, in her opinion. He would be nothing without her.

Casey Anthony has decided to write a book, too. The idea has been floating around in the media for a while, the idea of her autobiography. Casey Anthony: My Side of the Story. Or, Acquitted!: The Casey Anthony Story. Ghostwritten, it went without saying. Even before she was released from prison, Headline News was asking viewers if they would buy a Casey Anthony tell-all. It was decided – she was not sure by whom, exactly – that the project would be delayed indefinitely. Publishers were too afraid attach their name to hers, Jose explained.

Casey Anthony still believes that her story needs to be told, on her terms. She has decided that if she wrote it herself and sent the manuscript, completed, to an editor, the publishing house would be so enthralled by her memoir that they would be unable to turn it down. After this happens, she will do the talk-show circuit. The hosts will introduce her as “Best-Selling Author Casey Anthony.” This will be her big comeback.

Casey Anthony has spent many hours at Barnes and Noble, walking up and down the aisles, reading titles and looking at cover art. She has Search “Casey Anthony Video Blog” on YouTube.

5 Lead attorney in the Casey Anthony trial. J. Cheney Mason acted as co-counsel.

6 Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story 4

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noticed that a popular title is “The Something-Something’s Daughter.”

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. The Kingmaker’s Daughter. The Land Surveyor’s Daughter.7 Casey Anthony thinks her book could be titled, The Detective’s Daughter. This will help her get her foot in the door with the literary crowd, help her to be taken seriously as an author.

The Detective’s Daughter will tell things as they really happened.

It will not just be about Caylee, or the trial, but about everything that has ever happened to Casey Anthony. Her childhood, her family, her romantic life. She has already thought of the description on the back of the dust jacket: “Part A Million Little Pieces, Part Fifty Shades of Grey, One Hundred Percent Truth.”

Casey Anthony thinks of this as she lies in the Level II tanning bed for ten minutes. She enjoys the baking sensation, the prickle of the chemicals in the tanning lotion reacting with the UV rays on her bare skin. She thinks this must be what it feels like to die and go to heaven, just a tingling abyss of radiation. Perhaps she will say something about that in her next video blog.

Casey Anthony returns to her vehicle and, for no particular reason, begins driving in the direction of the University. The rain is starting to taper off, just misting now, and as she approaches the campus, she has to slow down for groups of girls wearing bright pastel tee shirts and nylon shorts. They walk in bands of four or five, laughing and expecting all the cars to stop for them as they cross the street. Some wear fleece jackets. All have long hair. The damp does not seem to touch them.

Casey Anthony figures she is at least as pretty as any of these girls. She drives on, past the sorority houses and the student union, watching the college kids unwrap granola bars or slurp down dollOther such titles include, but are not limited to, the following: The Hangman’s Daughter, The Witch’s Daughter, The Frontiersman’s Daughter, The Baker’s Daughter, The Murderer’s Daughter, and The Merchant’s Daughter.

7

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sized bottles containing energy drinks. She always figured she would be a college student one day, even when she realized she would not graduate from high school on time with all her friends. She thinks she could still, even now, earn her GED and enroll in one of those online colleges. Maybe get an MBA, too. Just to have it.

Among the flow of students, she half-heartedly looks for her child’s father, or the man she thinks is her child’s father.8 The last time they spoke – for real spoke, not texted or instant messaged – he mentioned maybe going back to school. “Engineering,” he said. “Or communications. Maybe journalism.” When he said this, they were smoking cigarettes on his parents’ back porch. She had her feet in his lap. He was raking his thumbnail across her ankle. She had brought up the future. She had meant their future, together, though they were never technically boyfriend-girlfriend. He had assumed she meant their individual futures – careers, plans – and launched into an explanation of his small-business ventures and scholastic ambition.

She looks for his dark curly hair among the hundreds of heads moving in a stream down the sidewalk, but all she sees are kids staring down at their cell phones.

She checks her own cell phone and sees she has missed a call from her mother. Cindy Anthony calls most days, either on her way to work or her way home. “Just to check in,” she says.

Usually, Casey Anthony humors her mother, allowing her to run on about her workday, about Lee, about Casey’s father. Casey Anthony knows she does not have a lot of allies but that her mother is one of them, and the two women act as though they have always been on the same side.

Cindy Anthony does not allow her daughter to pretend it never 8 Casey Anthony has never publicly identified Caylee’s father, but pa-

ternity testing has eliminated both Casey’s father, George Anthony, and Casey’s brother, Lee Anthony, from the list of possible candidates.

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happened. Every conversation, she mentions her granddaughter. “I saw a girl about Caylee’s age at the grocery store,” she’ll say. Or, “We’re organizing a balloon release in honor of Caylee’s sixth birthday.” Or simply, “I sure missed Caylee today.”9 When Cindy starts down this melancholy path, Casey Anthony wants to tell her mother that she did not kill Caylee. She thinks that is what her mother is looking for, some reassurance that they are all victims in this thing, not villains. Cindy wants to know that her daughter is grieving, too.10 For now, Casey Anthony decides to ignore her mother’s phone call. She turns right, away from the campus, then right again, heading down Knight Street. It’s the city’s main bar and club district, making it ripe for slogans like, “Go Out 2 Knight” and “Enjoy the Knightlife.” If she had lived in this town a few years ago, she would have been down here every evening. She would have gone to the piano bar to drink dollar beers and sing along to “Sweet Caroline.”

She would have flirted with the fraternity boys in ratty ball caps, let their hands linger on the small of her back, rubbed against them on the dance floor, ended the night in their apartments. These days, she is too afraid to leave the house after dark. She screws around online and watches CNN or reality shows until the wee hours of the morning. Though she has a queen bed, she sleeps on the couch in her living room for just a few hours each night, usually with the television on. The sofa feels safer, more contained. Less lonely.

As she approaches the traffic light, Casey Anthony stops outside 9 What can Casey Anthony say to that? What, other than “Oh, yeah?”

or “That’s nice” or “Me, too”?

10 But how can Casey grieve when Caylee is still with her? Through the miracle of the internet, the two of them have been made inseparable. They are closer even than when Casey was pregnant.

No one will ever think of Casey Anthony without thinking of Caylee Anthony, and vice versa. They are defined in terms of one another.

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of the Slater Arts Center to let a girl and her mother cross the street.

The little girl wears a red cotton dress, short-sleeved despite the chill.

Her mother is elegant in a beige shift, a navy cardigan, and flats. They have been to see an art exhibit, maybe, or a children’s play. Probably it was raining when they went in, but now things are clearing up.

Maybe it will turn out to be a sunny day, after all.

The mother waves as they step into the crosswalk, and the child runs on ahead of her. The driver of the car in the oncoming lane does not see the girl until she is just in front of him. He throws on his brakes but is unable to stop in time because of the still-wet pavement.

Casey Anthony can see this unfolding, and she cries out – to the girl, the car, the universe – but the windows of the Jeep are rolled up and no one hears her scream.

The child lays on the sidewalk, motionless, as a Rorschach of blood forms under her head. The driver of the car, a young Asian man with Buddy Holly glasses and spiky hair, is on his cell phone, presumably with emergency services. The mother is beside her child, crying. Casey Anthony cannot hear her, but she knows what she is saying.

Casey Anthony’s hands are shaking. Her bowels feel loose. She feels for the mother, for the driver. She wants to help the situation, somehow. She wants to pull into the next parking lot, tell the people she saw it all. But in a few minutes, there will be police, firemen, maybe reporters. If she remains here, they will ask her name. She will be in their notes as a witness. She might have to appear in court.

Casey Anthony knows this cannot happen. Her name cannot be tied to a dead child, not again, not without making her the punch-line of every joke in the Tonight Show monologue. She can do nothing for the hysterical mother, for the panicked driver. Slowly, deliberately, she returns her quivering foot to the gas pedal. She drives up the street, through the intersection, towards home.

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The Shirt R. A. Allen

His shirt could be

an adjective for itself:

tailored in Hong Kong,

biblical yet space-age,

an ersatz silk-soybean blend

of irradiated emu hide, anti-bacterial, bullet-proof,

imbued with artificial intelligence,

boardroom bizwear

for a mover cum shaker.

My shirt came from China (Wal-mart).

Your shirt came from China (Target).

Over the years

cotton pickers

have made great strides,

from slavery to serfdom

to indentured servitude

to political correctness

and back again.

Ah, shirts—

each a metaphor for the

calico tapestry of our species.

Yes, we all need a shirt.

Well, maybe not those cotton pickers.

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Chicken Pox Phillip Egelston Chicken: Tail-teasing, freezer-lying.

White. Some Upright: Chest Out, Best Breast Forward.

Wrapped in morrocan skin-wrap Under wraps: see-through, price-tagged.

Price? I pay the price.

(Pine for chicken paucity.)

I’m falling into General chicken declension Descending to a fried Or finger-lickin’ denouement.

Words stick - sticky, itchy.

Internal ichthy- Ichthyosis? No. Can’t scratch. Scratch?

Scratch out living. Living?

Poultry, paltry living: Lean. Fevered.

Pox! Threat. Curse or Worse!

Must sort it out.

Beginning? Where begin?

Ovum. Egg. Chicken?

(Sunny-side or Coq d’Or?) Tired and Scrambled!

Chicken Little, sky falling... Is this THE END? Onward! Into the valley... Oh no!

Cock calls. Blasted rooster!

Must be quiet: Sleep. Perchance to...

Paawk, Paawk, Paawk, Paaawk!!

The brood: Up at the crack.

That’s it! Had enough!! “Squaaawk!!!”

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The Hard Truth Jamie Donohoe

The camaraderie of pillows on the couch, swollen puddles of fluff; they remind you: it’s so lonely being hard, cocooned in a body of nails, whiskers and skin that itches to be touched by something unbiased and unboned, a colluding friend to lay your head upon and snooze.

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Emerge Eric Sasson You call my mother daily and gab with her about your boyfriend. He likes it when I bite his stomach, you tell her. She laughs and I imagine her blushing on the other end of the line, recalling a few bites of her own, on a brisk October evening in a park inside the Quartier Latin, circa 1959, after a rooftop social at the Jewish community center when my father took her hand and detoured her through the streets of Paris and his longing. You ask her for advice when things get patchy, and she talks you through it, patiently. If she’s envisioning the daughter she might have given such advice to, the kindness of her words betrays no hint of it; she has moved past this pointless remorse to fully share in your moments with you.

When she’s through she puts my father on the line and he asks if you want him to speak to Owen directly. Let me get to the bottom of this, my father says, because he and your boyfriend are thick as thieves, buddies who play Racquetball without you on Sunday mornings while you sleep in with the Times. Dad took to Owen from day one when Owen pushed aside his hand at the Malaysian restaurant in Tribeca and offered him a meaty hug instead. Dad doesn’t stand on ceremony.

You came out to them at age fourteen and they were nonplussed. We had a feeling, they said, smiling without regret or pain. Your dad took your hand and told you not to cry; you don’t know why the tears even came. There was no sense of disappointment, barely even a sense of relief, and maybe that’s why. Maybe they were tears of joy that things went so easily that afternoon, far easier than you expected them to.

You bring Owen to family functions, fulsome picnics in Prospect Park where Frisbees are tossed and hackeys are sacked and Cousins John and Amy ask if you’ve seen the revival of West Side Story yet, because they want to go on a double date. Owen is invited everywhere—to bowling nights, to Aunt Linda’s seventieth, to baby showers in the Five Towns.

He brings homemade Pad See Ew and everyone wants in on the secret

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ingredient. They ask him about growing up in Thailand but not in a patronizing way, in a way that only highlights their curiosity.

Your brother turns to you with his problems. He asks you for advice about the money he’s sunk into a fledgling liquor company that wanted to exploit the whole pomegranate fad and make the next Alize. You send emails back and forth every day, links to jokes and YouTube videos like Sad Kermit and even some risqué sites, because he likes to tease you about the gay thing, he feels comfortable enough to crack jokes around you that are wicked and clever but never meanspirited.

He’s never been awkward because you were never awkward yourself. He respected that about you, how coming out was like drinking a glass of water, how you weren’t going to let him make an issue of it by not making one yourself. You’ve introduced him to several of your boyfriends, even the ones that didn’t stick around very long, because you know he enjoys thinking that you’re seeking his approval.

He’s grilled you about the mechanics and you’ve been forthright yet prudent with the details, giving him the thread and waiting to see how much he chose to pull. Even when he was patronizing you were patient with him—you forgave him the who’s the woman comment early on, you’ve reminded him that he has a prostrate too and that he might want to think about having his wife explore it, and he laughed and said, who told you I haven’t already and then you ooohed and he ooohed back and you both laughed.

You discuss politics with them at dinner. Opinions are expressed robustly and while you do not agree on everything, you find the sacred lake of compromise where all views can swim together.

They watch FOX news but only to laugh at the hysteria. They watch Rachel Maddow and not just because she’s a lesbian. Sometimes they flip through channels and pause when a gay character is on, and sometimes they watch the show even if it’s not really their thing, but you know they’re not patronizing you; they just want to know more

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about you. They want to like the things you like because it will help them understand you even more.

You’ve never been asked to become a lawyer or a doctor. Even when you played harpsichord in a klezmer revival band, even when you were a social worker in Bushwick handing out condoms to drug addicts, you were respected for what you did, because you believed in it enough to make them believe. You are not the artist inspiring bewilderment in the faces of your kin. They do not ask you a question and then say, “Gosh that’s interesting” as they bob their heads, silently praying you change the subject. No one wonders about the tenuous paths you’ve chosen, no one begrudges you your weeks at writers residencies where you sit all day, and do what exactly? You are celebrated for your individuality and resolve. You are a source of pride.

Whatever situation you’re in, you are an equal. Not invisible.

Not someone consigned to grease the wheels of everybody else’s machines, not just the patient listener to the tics and tallies of other, more important dramas, dramas involving kids and backaches and disrespectful neighbors and dysfunctional lawnmowers and parking tickets and jury duty summonses.

When you say you want to have kids one day yourself, no one stutters. You’d make a great dad, they say, and you know they’re right, because you’re grounded and compassionate and easy going but strict in a good way, and you know you’ll have a whole network of family and friends to be your village, to babysit and take junior to the park or Great Adventure or pick up from school when your meetings run long. You are humble and often selfless. You understand working hard and playing hard and you have no fears of imparting dubious lessons onto your kids because the wounds of your past are trivial and wouldn’t scar anyone.

You do not fixate on younger men. You are not stuck in a selfperpetuating cycle of risk, regret and repeat. You scratched that itch a long time ago. When you were twelve a Ryan —wispy, tongue-tied

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and dreamy—wrote you goofy poems on the backs of lunch bags and once even held your hand at the movies. You were unfazed by the taunts at school; they were rare and your friendships were not.

You were consoled by teachers who stood up for you and explained that these comments were simply the crutches of the insecure, the last bastion of the desperate. No one laid a hand on you.

Between your three long term relationships, the ones you had before you met Owen, you sampled one night stands much as you sample cheeses at a gourmet provisions shop; even when tasty, you never felt obliged to commit to more than a bite.

Owen understands you. You have sat with him and watched Montgomery Clift movies in rented cabins in Rhinebeck, NY, with fires in fireplaces and Riojas in each of your hands. You have conversations about Alice Munro and Glen Gould and the effects of hydrofracking, but also about Dynasty and deep-fried Snickers and David Hasselhoff, and sometimes you needn’t speak at all, because you communicate well in silence. You feel deeply at ease with yourself around him. You aren’t afraid he will see through your clever sham of normalcy because you don’t have one. Of course you bicker. You’ve even had a row or two but it never lasts, because he’s the one. People pooh-pooh talk like that but you’ve never doubted your destiny, you never saw yourself as always being alone, always bouncing from one man to the next in search of a hero that didn’t exist.

You never find yourself lingering in musty locker rooms, watching unsuspecting jocks shuck their clothes and then pilfering their moist underwear with you to a stall where you stifle your moans as your cock spits onto the tiled floor. This would not be the apex of your sexual satisfaction, not what you dream about when the lights are off, not better for you than the sex you have with your generous, strapping, creative partner of eleven years.

You do not want to be beaten up, spat upon, humiliated. You do not see any sexual thrill in being called “queer” or “fag” by a gaggle of ruddy-cheeked lacrosse players half your age. Your fantasies are

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mature and perfectly healthy. You have a great chest and nice legs and you dream of men with great chests and nice legs. Large penises attract but do not obsess you. You have not trolled bathhouses or steam rooms or the back rooms of bars. You have not wandered under the rafters of a beachfront hotel at 2am after a drunken night at a bar in Provincetown, ocean waves crashing, punishing and rewarding yourself for your timidity, afraid to strike up a conversation at a bar but not to put your mouth onto the cock of a man blurred by the darkness of the night, a darkness stretching beyond the horizon and deep into your soul. You haven’t had sex with men whose names you not only didn’t know but weren’t even curious enough to ask. You haven’t shown up at the home of a random trick twenty miles from your apartment, in the dubious hills of Staten Island, in the rain, only to see window curtains flutter and the doorbell go unanswered.

You have the kind of job people admire but still manages to pay well. You are a successful architect, or else an urban planner, or the director of a NGO that supports after-school arts programs. You don’t judge your friends. You are generous and supportive and keep bitchy comments to a minimum and always in the right spirit. You are not obsessed with how people perceive you. You don’t really care.

You are even tempered and resilient. You do not seek revenge on the world because the world doesn’t owe you anything, and even if it did, you’ve long accepted that no one will ever pay that debt. You have come to terms with your weaknesses and limitations and accept that others may not have come to terms with theirs.

You took up the guitar when you were eleven and you’ve stuck with it. You have an easy way of expressing emotions around others.

When you strum the Beatles (whom you love) or Neil Young (even more) or even Bob Marley, there is an authenticity that captivates, a spark that transmits in the pauses between notes, a grace that is palpable and shared. You play better than you claim to, and have little reason to be proud or modest. You do what you do, are who you are, without pointless second guessing or crushing analysis.

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You are everything that I am not. Because you are a fiction. You are an idealized me, and I shouldn’t be ideal. Maybe if I were you I’d no longer be me. Maybe the hurt and shame and self-doubt, the repression and the tears and the anger, so much anger, so much trying to fit in, maybe that’s what’s made me who I am. Maybe I would have lost something of myself if I were you, maybe I wouldn’t have the capacities that I have now, maybe life threw me curveballs but I knew how to catch them. Maybe you can’t catch curveballs.

Maybe I should let go of you. Make an effigy of you, a perfect likeness of the me I’ve yearned to be, and send you off on a wee kayak into a rabid river where a mighty waterfall will wash you away.

Maybe I can banish you to the world of others like you, where you can all frolic among the sacred absence of struggle.

Or maybe, maybe, in that corner of my brain where you’re squatting, you have dreams of being me. Maybe there’s something about having it so easy that makes you feel hollow, maybe your selfpossession haunts you, makes you feel like you inhabit a world of marshmallow lakes and gingerbread houses, maybe you know that if you scratch the surface of your reality the veneer will peel and you’ll fall into limbo. Maybe you need to hate yourself for even one moment to find true purpose to your life. Maybe we have to move on from something to move forward, maybe mistakes are what make life bearable.

Maybe you are not the man that I am not, but more the man I think I ought to have been. Maybe once I recognize this then your power will shrink and begin to fade, and, in due time—longer than it takes a teardrop to dissolve on sand, perhaps as long as the rotation of an orphan planet around its distant, needy sun—but before twilight arrives, before my soul capitulates to the asphyxiating grip of despair, you will dissolve and I will emerge.

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Spissitude Richard King Perkins II

I resist my corrugated aluminum soul from being recycled into sheet metal remembering the sensual crests and troughs of my first being.

A paper bird has withdrawn into undulating clouds and manifest fatalism a supple wing laughs then my feathers molt and I nosedive homeward eating pumice breathing abyss the bellwether of my own damnation

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contributor’s notes R. A. Allen’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, The Recusant (UK), Mantis, RHINO, Gargoyle, JAMA, and elsewhere and was recently nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize. He lives in Memphis.

Mika Applebaum is the author of a small anthology of poetry entitled Growing Up Greek. She has published her work in various magazines – including The William and Mary Review – and holds a MA in French literature from the University of Montana and a PhD in American literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Born in Athens, Greece, she now live sin Larkspur where she is a regular at Rulli’s and at the Larkspur Public Library.

Darrell Dela Cruz graduated from San Joe State’s MFA Program for Poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Columbia College Literary Review, The Mayo Review, CAIRN, Euphony, Permafrost, Red Earth Review, The Fieldstone Review, and Flights. He tries to analyze a poem each day – or acknowledge his misinterpretations of poems – on the blog retailmfa.blogspot.com.

Jamie Donohoe is a teacher, actor, father and husband who writes poetry instead of folding laundry. “It’s a political thing,” he often says to his wife. His poetry has been seen most recently in The Cape Rock and Freefall.

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Phillip Egelston’s poems have appeared in Folio, RiverSedge, The Cresset, Homewood Review, Limestone, Paris/Atlantic, and other magazines. New poems will appear in Plainsongs and The Anglican Theological Review. Phillip Egelston was a finalist in the 2013 Passager Poetry Contest, a semifinalist in the 2013 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Competition, and the first place winner of the New Vintage Northwest prize for poetry. He is advisor on creative writing and visual arts to the Shawnee Hills Arts Council in Southern Illinois.

Jonathan Greenhause is the winner of Prism Review’s 2012-13 poetry prize and is a finalist in the 2013 Gearhart Poetry Contest from The Southeast Review. He has received two Pushcart nominations and is the author of the chapbook Sebastian’s Relativity (Anobium Books, 2011). His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Artful Dodge, The Dalhousie Review (CAN), December, The Great American Poetry Show, Hiram Poetry Review, The Malahat Review (CAN), and Willow Review. He and his wife are being raised by their eleven-monthold, Benjamin Seneca.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He has a wife, Vickie, and a daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared in hundreds of publications including Poetry Salzburg Review, Bluestem, Sheepshead Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Two Thirds North, The Red Cedar Review and The William and Mary Review. He has poems forthcoming in Broad River Review, Emrys Journal, December Magazine and The Louisiana Review.

Eric Sasson writes “Ctrl-Alt,” a column on alternative culture for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of the short story collection “Margins of Tolerance” as well as the novel “Admissions,” forthcoming from Foxhead Books in June 2015. His stories have been nominated for the Robert Olen Butler Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and one is in

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The Best Gay Stories 2013. He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic and Salon. Other publication credits include pieces in Five Points, The Papercut Press Anthology, Independent Ink, BLOOM and The Nashville Review, among others. He received his MA in Creative Writing from NYU and has taught fiction writing in Brooklyn, where he was born, bred, and still resides.

Shane Ryan writes for Grantland.com and Paste Magazine, and has been published in McSweeney’s, The Charlotte Observer, and various other web and print outlets. He lives with his wife Emily in Durham, NC, and is working on a book about the PGA Tour.

Elizabeth Stainton Walker recently received her MA in English from the University of Arkansas. Her work has appeared in The Tulane Review and The Louisville Review, among other places. She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with her family.

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Poetry R. A. Allen, Mika Applebaum, Darrell Dela Cruz, Jamie Donohoe,

Phillip Egelston, Jonathan Greenhause, Richard King Perkins II, Linda Taylor

Prose Shane Ryan, Eric Sasson, Elizabeth Stainton Walker