Parlor Tricks Issue 4

ISSUE NO. 4

SPRING 2018

PARLOR TRICKS 1

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Parlor Tricks Editors-in-Chief Brianna Rettig Story Ponvert Managing Editors Emily McDonald Charles Harrison Art Editor Eva Henderson Creative Director Krista Gelev Prose Editors Emily McDonald Eric Muscosky Poetry Editors Trevin Corsiglia Jordan Jace Assistant Editors Bryan Bailey David Burgess Erin Courville Arslay Joseph Alan Louis Afoma Maduegbuna Eily Mixson Mack Rush Emily Sun Sarah Tan Nicole Tanna Assistant Designers Lester Lee Jenna Yoo 3

Table of Contents 4 Two Poems jordan jace

6 Some Sun Has Got to Rise: The Photography of Hudson Bohr brianna rettig

18 Gay/Gaiety joseph messer

20 Family Dinner

mia herring-sampong

31 torpid smoke eva henderson

44 The Summer You Turned Eighteen gillian goodman

45 The Wolf story ponvert

47 Poppets

sarah tan

wylie thornquist

23 Peru

48 Don’t Use My Face: An Interview with Erin Hanson

jessica munoz

24 Red Light Green Light Blue Light The Light breidy cueto

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26 Other

brianna rettig

59 Two Pieces young cho

60 Two Poems sara hetherington

62 Concerning the Cross Burning Incident justin sardo

81 What I Think About When I Can't Sleep leonel martinez

86 Recent Paintings jordan jones

64 Night Thoughts 92 Railroad Sunset carmen bango

eileen russell

74 The Madwoman 94 Contributors caitlin ubl cover: krista gelev, featuring no

76 The End alex krstic

78 Two Pieces justin sardo

space II by jordan jones, with the permission of the artist inset illustrations: lester lee photo credits:

6,86 - hudson bohr 49,56 - erin hanson 50 - brianna rettig

80 God Bless a Good Morning Heartache trevin corsiglia

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two poems by jordan jace

Epistle I see a father grazing his son on the cheek, the chin, as if he might next prop up the lip to look in on the teeth, already attuned to the tendency of love to take itself too far. I remember my father’s shadow askew under the door, the way it threatened to enter my breathing, as if all space yearns to be filled.

But time has a habit of emptying, slow days and the hours within them, the minutes as fire ants racing across the invisible silk of their language.

How about my left foot? I am graceless on that side, so how to reach you, the letter yet unwritten, and the longer I wait the less likely you are to answer.

I walk as you walked, and when the wind touches my face I no longer feel the need for you. I have nothing to say.

Light falls from street lamps, swimming over the icy ground as the wind rides in and out of me like a habit of heavy dreaming. And in the dream, atlases piled on the floor to tell us where we are, but who can navigate these coordinates of feeling, that here always it’s morning—

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Prayer You taught me to spit is to believe in plenty the ship doesn’t know it makes its men sick silvered with waiting you are what the wound lost grown whole are what the moon lost the sum of all this turning

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Hudson Portfolio

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Some Sun Has Got to Rise: The Photography of Hudson Bohr

I

’m standing in Hudson Bohr’s studio the day after Valentine’s Day, surrounded by hundreds of small black and white photographs pinned meticulously to the walls. It’s a collection of images taken over the course of two years in New York City. From a distance, it’s easy to see that they’re mostly portraits, mostly nudes, mostly men. Their bodies form a crowd on the wall. But closer inspection rewards the viewer with the perverse details that make Bohr’s photos endlessly intriguing—a leather harness in the corner, an elbow-length latex glove cropped partially out of the frame, a foot in a bathtub, the gaze of an eye meeting your own. His photos refuse easy or obvious narratives.

After completing his sophomore year at Williams, Hudson transferred to Columbia to find respite from the Purple Valley bubble, experiment with a sense of self in flux, and work on his photography. Now, completing his

hudson bohr , untitled

f

(self-portrait)

senior year at Williams, he’s surrounded by photos of his friends, most of whom are still in New York. He plans on returning to the city after graduation.

But until then, he’s here contemplating how these hundreds of images should be curated—which images feel posed, which feel candid, and can they mingle together? It’s a necessary moment of focused self-reflection without the noise of New York.

The photographer Nan Goldin, one of Hudson’s influences, said, “I want the people in my pictures to stare back.” Looking at Hudson’s work, I think of this quote, and I suddenly feel like he and I are not the only people present in the empty art building tonight. We sit and talk for a couple of hours about his work, the allure of New York, and how we define intimacy when life is often riddled with isolation.

-brianna

rettig, february 2018

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interviewer

What made you decide to study at Columbia for a year? hudson

Initially Williams was pretty good. I liked it a lot. But the gay community here sucked. I never had an awakening, like a gay awakening, in high school because I was so focused on studying.

So when I came to college, I was like, I’m gonna be my gay self and suck dick everyday. But that never happened, because all the gays here hate each other for some reason. So that was where my dislike for Williams started. I just felt very frustrated with my gay life.

I had visited New York multiple times because I lived in New Jersey, and I fantasized about New York City a lot.

But New York is extremely hard in the beginning.

ly interact with someone in a meaningful way. hudson

That was very interesting for me in the beginning—how I was surrounded by people but I wasn’t really interacting with them. I actually really enjoyed that. At Williams, I felt like I was always watched. Everywhere you go, you see someone that you know. So you can’t really experiment with yourself.

But in New York City, you can constantly reinvent yourself. I felt like I was finally able to experiment and find myself. Here at Williams I was always trying to shape myself into how people view me. interviewer

Your photos from New York feature a pretty eclectic mix of people. It’s an impressive social group for just one year in the city. How did that happen?

interviewer

I like that difficulty of it. hudson

I do too. Because then your relationships become more meaningful. Once you do make a relationship, you find a good friend. Whereas here, I feel like you become friends with people, you become acquaintances very easily, because spatially you’re very confined. So a lot of interactions are forced.

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hudson

Basically, my very first summer there I met my friend Anaury through Tinder.

It was weird because we agreed to not say a word—he’s really weird in terms of a human—we agreed to not say a single word and just make out the first time we saw each other. And so we met in Central Park, there were all these kids playing nearby. After we made out, we started talking

interviewer

interviewer

You also don’t have to put too much effort into seeing people here. In New York, you really have to put yourself out there in a lot of ways, even though you’re constantly surrounded, to actual-

Wait, you guys met up in Central Park?

And kids are running all around? You just walk up to this guy and start making out?

hudson

Yes. He’s always looking for experiences, I guess. That’s another philosophy in my life—I try everything at least once.

If someone asks me to do something I haven’t done, I’m very likely to do it.

Why not?

So we made out. But then we just hung out, and we became really good friends. Things never got sexual after that. interviewer

So this is your introduction to New York. hudson

Yeah. It was good. It was literally everything I wanted. He also grew up in New York City, and he’s a model, so he was kind of in the scene. He’s relevant. I feel like every relevant person in New York City knows of him. He dragged me along, and that’s how I made a friend group, it was initiated by the two of us.

the camera. And that’s what I try to do.

For the most part, the way I set up my photoshoots is, Hi, let me photograph you, but let’s hang out. And my friends are weird. Somehow, people hate clothes in my group. So we all get in our underwear, or completely naked.

There’s something inherently intimate about underwear or nudity. And they allow me to do that, which is really fun and interesting. We’ll be talking, and as I’m talking, I will just take the camera and take a photo. Then I will put it down, and we’ll continue talking and having a conversation.

Sometimes I say, Oh, hold on.

That’s when the photos become more posed. So, to some extent, I feel like there are two bodies of work.

interviewer

Let’s talk about your work. I love this photograph of your boyfriend, Mehow, in a bathtub with your leg coming into the frame. This kind of photography requires a lot of trust. What is it like when you’re standing taking these pictures? hudson

I try to get that intimate feeling that I love so much in Nan Goldin’s work.

She’s one of my gods. I love that in her photos you feel like you’re part of what is happening. And I feel like that comes with her camera becoming a part of her subjects’ lives. They stop caring about

untitled

(mehow and me)

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interviewer

The candid and the softer candid. hudson

Lately, I’ve been really conflicted between the two of them. I like both, but I don’t necessarily think they go well together. interviewer

It almost gives the lie to one over the other. The candid makes the posed feel false.

one of my female subjects, a lot of people thought that she was a gay man. interviewer

What are you attempting to figure out when you’re taking these photos? hudson

I’m trying to record and document culture. My friends are weird as fuck. There’s something in the way that we lead our lives that you wouldn’t find elsewhere.

I want to gather intimacy— being exposed to Do you think it’s para world I wouldn’t ticular to this moment in time? This moment otherwise be in history? exposed to. interviewer

hudson

Exactly. interviewer

I heard that at your last critique, one of your professors said your stuff feels really commercial, like a Calvin Klein ad. hudson

hudson

I don’t know. But I am curious to see how we will read the photos in a few years. I wonder if we’ll be like, this was really weird that we were doing that.

Yes. Which I thought was funny. interviewer interviewer

So if these are commercial images, what are you selling?

What do you want people to think about when they see your work? hudson

hudson

Homosexuality.

But I guess more seriously, I’ve been trying to think about what my work captures. Two days ago, I had a critique with a few other students, and they said that I’m exploring masculinity and the gender spectrum. Even Nakita,

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After New York, I’ve been thinking a lot about gender and gender fluidity.

There’s a lot of transgender men in my friend group. It made me realize the concept of gender is pretty stupid.

Before, I was more focused just on sexuality.

interviewer

Do you think your work has changed how you look at the world? Has it changed how you walk through the world? hudson

It has definitely made me pay more attention to intimate moments and to tenderness. It’s not something I do by default. I think it has made my relationships more meaningful. I like what Professor Mike Glier said to me in one of my critiques: “You are giving us a privileged entrance into their lives.” That’s what I want. I want to gather intimacy—being exposed to a world I wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to. interviewer

untitled

(lucky owl)

We’ve known each other peripherally for a while, but I really have no idea about your life before Williams. What’s the world you’ve come from? hudson

I have a weird, long life story. I was born and raised in the middle of nowhere Brazil. I grew up and lived on a farm, fifteen minutes away from a town of 7,000 people. It was a dairy farm. I grew up around cows and pigs and all that. It was super isolating. And when

I was five, my parents got divorced.

My mom ended up moving to the U.S., and I didn’t see her for ten years. I lived with my dad and my two brothers on the farm in the middle of nowhere. It was tough, but it forced me to become very comfortable in my own thought. interviewer

You weren’t very influenced by other kids. hudson

No. I didn’t have anyone but myself to have conversations with. So, I created worlds in my mind. And I would analyze things a lot.

Brazil is extremely Roman Catholic.

But at the age of eleven, I became an atheist, even though I had never been exposed to anyone who was an atheist. Now, I think that’s pretty impressive.

I moved away from Brazil when I was fifteen, and I went to Jersey to live with my mom. I haven’t really talked with my father in like, three years.

Sometimes I feel guilty about it, but having my mother move away when I was five made it easier to get detached from people. I think ever since then, I don’t remember getting attached to anyone.

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between platonic and romantic love or lust. But you’re claiming you don’t think you’ve ever felt love. hudson

I don’t think I’ve ever felt love, but I think I’ve constantly searched for it.

I’m constantly searching for intimacy.

I think that that’s why I like Goldin’s work so much. She seems to have such a strong connection with people. With my art, my goal is to find an intimate moment. I do feel that I have intimate connections with people.

When I moved to New York City, it felt like I had a family for the first time. l

untitled

(dancing)

interviewer

Is that true of relationships outside your family? hudson

Yeah. That’s actually something I was just talking about with my boyfriend. I was like, “I don’t know if I love you. It is close to that, but I can’t really tell you with certainty.” I also dated someone at Columbia, and once we broke up, I was completely fine within twenty minutes.

I’m kind of happy that I’m fucked up like that, but I also wish I could feel attachment to people. interviewer

But your photography is all about intimacy. It’s so loving and tender. I came in wanting to ask, what’s the difference

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untitled

(queers)

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untitled

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(teddy)

untitled

(teddy’s dead dog)

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untitled

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(air conditioned)

untitled

(mekia)

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joseph messer

Gay/Gaiety I. His smile puts me in mind of the term gaiety, meaning a state of happiness, whose condition for me is someone capable of helping me forget everything outside the bed I’d break down into, not for ecstasy but to sit and cry into his chest and touch an anatomy like my own, though unlike my own as I’d never imagined being unprotected. While somehow the heaving softens, but contentedness maybe is not enough for a person trying to cut to the heart of it somewhere above his naval or the door of the cell locked inside his chest crashed open when I banged into bed and my boyhood came back, when I’d imagine a friend curving his back against my stomach until I was close enough to smell the whiskey we used to sneak from his father’s cabinet while also remembering how we used to call each other gay before beating into each other in the locker room though the truth is hitting each other made me gay, meaning happy, for at least I was being touched.

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II. Motherfucker, I love gaying it!

There’s a gay in me who if it came out, I’d smear across his chest, the same place I’d place my head to rest while my hand searched inside his Adidas shorts for whatever shame I’d learned was kept hidden down there.

And if the gay in me finds what’s becoming increasingly hard, I don’t know what he will say or whether it’d be easier if gay still meant carefree, like in the 17th century, denoting someone like me, a man who fucked freely.

I still love to struggle with the ambiguity of language as if he could be saying “Love” either in affirmation or in expectance because I love it even when gay boys won’t come back to me after coming once, fearing repetition might make the feelings too comfortable, and when the gay boys won’t see me, I want to set them straight.

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Family Dinner sarah tan

I

see the lime green car creeping through the city, edging onto the crooked Chinatown streets, fifteen miles under the speed limit. Or I see it in my imagination. The sidewalks are a cheap gray concrete, different from the white paved section of the city where my grandfather practices law.

The crowds are punctuated by red and yellow, an intravenous drip of neon. Everyone is talking, but no one is speaking English, except for a small group of students smoking on the corner. My grandfather can’t help but check that the doors are locked. He parks at an angle, two feet from the curb.

My grandmother is wearing the oyster shell necklace that loops down to her stomach. To this day, she still wears it on special occasions. My grandfather has a new suit. He likes to do that, wear new clothes as if still compensating for being the first Jewish partner in Boston.

In my imagination his shirt is a little too starched. Both my grandparents have new long wool coats, the classy kind with black buttons sewn on with the thick, unbreakable thread.

They head down the street, stepping over the flapping yellow newspaper stuck to the ground with gum. Their daughter, my mother, is waving outside the restaurant, her fiancé inside with his parents. My grandparents have never met him. My grandmother straightens my grandfather’s bow tie as he tugs at

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his cuffs and my mother says, “Dad, you look fine.”

My other grandparents, my NaiNai and YeYe, wait inside, watching through the stacked fish tanks that fill the restaurant’s front window, amused.

The inside is the inside of all the Chinese restaurants of my childhood.

It’s small and crowded, with textured red walls and mirrors, and YeYe knows the owners, or at least the chefs. They call out, “Minister Li!” when he walks in, and ask about his health. My NaiNai gets the chair pulled out for her as always, and she inspects the plastic chopsticks with the soft pads of her fingers, never wanting to insult but always vigilant. She pours the tea.

This is the best they’ve been treated in the three countries they’ve lived.

Occupied China wasn’t great for the Chinese, nor Communist China for the Christians, and fleeing to Japan was uncomfortable for everyone. America was supposed to provide the future they always wanted for their children. At least that’s what they preached every Sunday. And then their son grew up to refuse his baptism, declare himself an agnostic, fail his engineering program, drop out of college, and join the theater.

And get engaged to a Jewish girl from Brookline.

In my imagination, they are happy that he still has his good health.

My mother’s parents enter the

restaurant and everyone shakes hands.

My father is designated translator, which means he can’t get away with his usual passivity. He greets all the waiters and they ask him about school. He lies and responds that school is going well, but they know that school is not going well, that he dropped out over eight years ago, that he has been building a career in the theater, and that his parents would never admit to any of these facts. So they say their almost thirty-year-old son is still in school and everyone goes along with it. Before dinner my father briefed my mother. She wears a smile that shows a lot of teeth.

NaiNai tells my father to ask my mother to pour the tea for her parents, and my mother knows this is a test. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom, refusing to play that game, as if culture and tradition can be negotiated. My father pours the tea.

In my imagination, there are no fights that night.

When my mother returns, my father doesn’t talk to her for a full twenty minutes, but it is hardly noticeable because he is translating questions between sets of parents. They have very little in common, but no one expected otherwise. When the egg drop soup finally comes out, he takes my mother’s hand, and tonight she lets him.

When the main course arrives my mother scrambles to remove the chicken head from the platter before her mother sees. YeYe laughs, but NaiNai doesn’t, and my other grandmother laughs along to be polite. My granddad asks for a fork, and, in solidarity, my mother does

too. My father looks at her, but shrugs when his parents raise their brows.

Granddad puts soy sauce on his rice, and, when the meal’s over, NaiNai picks her teeth at the table.

My mother talks a lot, mostly because it’s habit, and my father doesn’t.

In my imagination, my father puts his arm around my mother, because he doesn’t yet have a reason not to.

— Sometimes I ask granddad about that night, and he says there were more things to get wrong than right. It wasn’t the match he wanted for his daughter, it wasn’t the community he expected, but that’s what happens when you let your daughter join the theater.

But in my imagination, it wasn’t all that bad. It was before my mother moved us halfway across the country, back to her parents, back to Boston, without telling her husband, after he had been away at a job for a month.

Piling us into the car and driving for three days, leaving an empty set of bureaus and a note to mail the rest later.

Before she started ripping bookcases out of the walls, throwing glasses and plates at our heads, as if overreacting would make him act at all.

It was before either of them made the mistake of growing up and having children.

— My father asks my mother to pass the tea, and when she spills some onto

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the tablecloth, my NaiNai glowers. I see my granddad frown when the dessert soup comes out, turning to ask my mother if there’s any chocolate cake.

Dropping spoonfuls of tapioca back into his bowl when she tells him no, splattering sweet coconut milk onto the napkin tucked into his shirt.

My grandmother asking my NaiNai if she has any ideas for the wedding, and my NaiNai responding with something my father won’t translate, even at my mother’s insistence. My grandmother blinking and saying, “Well I was thinking of wearing pink.”

My granddad reaching for the bill when it comes, his stubbornness almost as unwavering as my YeYe’s, who wins out in the end because he knows the wait staff and they take his money, smiling.

My mother putting her hand inside my father’s as they stand to get the coats. My granddad shaking my YeYe’s hand, and my grandmother shaking my NaiNai’s. The waiter stacking the teacups, the chopsticks, the dessert soup bowls, and carrying them away. l

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jessica munoz , peru

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breidy

cueto

Red Light Green Light Blue Light The Light Siddhartha catharsis, “yeah right” enlightenment.

Contra-spiritual chemical miracle, “woah, slow down” spiral.

Higher plain by plane, “sure okay” it helps to get away.

Romance slow dance, “as if” passive or active.

The other day I woke up to a screwdriver and Illinois, it finally felt like I was glad to wake up until everyone I know told me I was living the wrong way driving breathalyzer failure Google Maps cars.

Singular earth revolution recap: rectify not giving a fuck in Europe check, Atlantic Vox Times Week and coffee check, listen to the burdens of blood through faulty bars check, method act in my Oscar-winning role as a hamster check, find the words to “Letters and Packages” in “For Esme” check, pretend I’m Paul Simonon on the cover of London Calling check, live for the people I love instead of telling them I’d die for them check, go an hour without thinking about—maybe I’ll check that one tomorrow.

And maybe I’ll try SoulCycle, and quit smoking, and knit myself a wool mask, and join a committee or a club, and start studying landmark cases, and let my daffodil wither, and put my drug-damaged teeth to good use, and bite through my fucking tongue because you can’t hate me if you can’t hear me.

Last night I dreamt about everything that’s always on my mind, finally betrayed by my last refuge of sleep.

Time to wake up and start watching.

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Besides, this morning I awoke and I haven’t shut the fuck up since— “green light” feels right, “they care” stay there, but “stop gawking” and start walking.

And get over yourself—SoulCycle might do you some good, you daffodil dummy.

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Other an essay by mia herring - sampong

Yes and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.

I

1

“The body has memory.” This is the line from Citizen that will not escape your mind. Perhaps the words cling to you, but maybe you simply won’t let go of them. You cannot escape the pain that you went through to get to Williams. Because this very pain is the reason you are here. It’s the reason schools like this want to accept students like you. Not because of your intelligence, not because of your spirit, not because of your creativity, but because of your trauma. Because somehow you rose above the circumstances of your birth and became something—or rather, you created something. Out of nothing.

They want to take credit for who you have become, but how can they do that without understanding where you’ve been? Or where you still are? You are a dark beauty, perpetually twinkling against a sharp white background.

II Each word you write is in defiance of something. You inhale each breath despite the sigh that constricts your heart. Each step you take is one step further down a road that was not carved for you, but you carved it even still. “The body has memory,” you 2 think. You remember each step you’ve

walked, each turn you’ve made, each time you almost gave up. Each moment that led up to this one.

III You are sitting at a computer in the research commons of Sawyer library, proofreading a paper before you print it out and bring it to class. A classmate sits next to you and asks if you’ve read the opinion piece in this week’s Record.

You say no and ask him what it was about. He tells you that an alumnus of Williams wrote an article about the declining quality of your school due to the acceptance of “others.”

“In order to create a Williams with students as smart as those at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford (HYPS), we need to replace about 100 of these 3 ‘other’ admits with ‘academic’ admits.”

The word other clings to your clothes, the smell of other lingers in your nostrils. You are the other, the most other of the others. A black woman. This man that you have never met, never seen, never heard, says that you are devaluing his alma mater. How can a human be worth something? You aren’t a slave to labor, but you are a slave to the school. Not a student, but a price tag. A possession that Williams invests in and spends money on (about $60,000 per year). More than Three-Fifths of a person, but less than a deserving student.

You are the “other,” the reason why

1 rankine, claudia. citizen: an american lyric: penguin books, 2015.

2 ibid., 28.

3 kane, david.

“what

does it mean to be the best? an alum considers the relative importance of admission criteria.” williams record, september 2017.

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Williams is not the best.

You wonder if he understands the weight of his words. You wonder if the Record understands the evil of the article they have printed. The editor-in-chief defends her choice to publish the piece under the guise of free 4 speech, but “context is not meaning.”

You wonder why this classmate even decided to mention the article to you. Is your pain his entertainment?

IV But, aren’t you the reason why Williams is better than the best? Aren’t you the reason why Williams is the only? The only school you could imagine yourself attending, the only school where you would want to spend the next three years of your life? You sigh and shake your head, because this man has no idea who you are or how you got to this school. But as you release your breath you also let go of your frustrations, because “still you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is 5 always the guy fitting the description.”

To this man and to many, you are simply an other. Nothing more, nothing less.

V At the beginning of your twelvehour drive from Cincinnati to Williamstown, you make a pit stop at the nursing home. Before you even walk through the front doors, you see your cousin sobbing on the phone. You try to prepare yourself for what lies ahead, try not to cry and ruin your mascara.

But the tears come anyway, and so does 4 rankine, 30.

5 ibid., 105.

the pain that you ran from for so long.

You see your grandmother in bed, eyes closed, unable to speak or even move.

You think back to five months earlier, when she took care of you after your wisdom teeth surgery. You wish you could comfort her in the same way she always comforted you, but you don’t have much time. “She would be so proud of you,” they say. “She would want you to be there.” But what about what you want, what you need? You wish you could lie there next to your dying grandma and hold her hand until she is ready to leave. But you leave her in bed instead—Williams is calling.

VI Other. The word echoes around campus, capturing your attention when you don’t want anything to do with it.

You think back to the first time someone called you an other. You were fourteen years old, standing outside your boarding school’s dining hall. It was night and you were lingering on the patio, talking to a friend when a car sped by. The driver rolled down his window and screamed “Nigger!” before his car screeched around the corner. You feel as if someone has poured a gallon of ice water over your head, drenching you in shock and realization. “Language that is hurtful is intended to exploit all 6 the ways that you are present.” You suppose “other” has done its job. Even your own skin rejects you.

VII Every day is a battle. In your head you try to come up with reasons why you deserve to be at Williams. Your

6 ibid., 49.

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very presence in this space needs justification, not just for your classmates to accept you, but for you to accept yourself. Because you are only here to supplement the experience of the students who really deserve to be at Williams, right? You no longer belong to yourself, you belong to an institution. “The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so 7 much to you.” You can’t seem to shake the feeling that this institution is a modern-day plantation. You work all day and all night, but people take credit for your labor. The part that scares you the most is that you sold yourself to this institution. It was your own ambition that led you to this place of no return. The funny thing is, the school wants to claim only the blackness of your body, not the diamonds that compose it. They censor you and generalize you, only to claim that they’ve made you. Yes and this is how you are an other: Come on. Let it go. Move on.

But you won’t let go—you can’t. Even if they won’t acknowledge you or accept you, they will see you. You make sure of it.

VIII Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Billie Holiday’s voice haunts your thoughts and so does the scene she describes.

She is singing about the photograph from August 7, 1930. The image that Claudia Rankine uses in her book, Citizen, that you just read. But you realize that Rankine crops the photograph just below the two black bodies hanging from the tree. She censors this image, the image that sparks your rage and triggers your trauma. She lets readers escape her poetry unscathed. No nightmares 7 ibid., 146.

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flood the readers’ dreams when they think about Citizen. They wouldn’t be able to handle it, you think. They wouldn’t be able to see the whole picture. “The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” would never leave their minds, would never leave their bodies.

You decide that this time, you’ll make them see the whole picture. They might not feel, like you do, the weight of swinging bodies constricting their necks, but they will see them. You will finally be seen. l

beitler, lawrence. photograph of the lynching of thomas shipp and abram smith. npr, 6 august 2010.

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eva henderson , torpid smoke

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gillian goodman

The Summer You Turned Eighteen We found ourselves in a place where the crickets go all day without stopping once their leggy insistence, that jubilant hum.

The sun came down easy on our bodies and we wrote letters to our parents back home out of a sense of duty. We sang the same song all day, Aud Lang Syne with words I made up because we had forgotten them all, lying there on the park bench, in the grass, by the water throwing light, near the broken fountain, in the greenhouse. Later, I fed you green olives which we bought by the pound and held shining in our hands. At night we found three sweet peppers arranged in a row on the concrete steps leading up to a public statue and you wanted to hold them, take them home.

That night I fed you cool water and placed them beside you while you slept, the peppers nestled red, yellow, and orange along the curve of your back. Outside, the crickets sounded like some small eternity and I listened while you slept, and I matched your breath, and I held your hair, and I sang to you over and over again

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The Wolf story ponvert

T

he community theater production of Into the Woods was going well, said my wife.

She said the director had said today that they were the best group of actors he’d had in six years of directing in our town. She was playing the wolf, a role not usually given to a woman, apparently. In fact the entire thing had been cast gender neutrally. I said that’s good the director could be so progressive. She said in order to really embody her role, she liked to think of every predator she’d ever known.

“Like those deer,” I said from my stool at the kitchen counter. “Always coming and preying on the garden.”

Lately I’d been trying to grow sweet potatoes, something new for us, and they seemed to like those especially. Besides the deer, I enjoyed gardening, and cooking with things I could grow myself.

“Not like the silly deer,” she said.

“The human predators, I mean. The wolf, he’s more human than animal.

That’s the point.”

I knew what she was talking about.

She meant her ex-boyfriends, who’d taken advantage of her in every way one can. That was all before we even met. We’d each been through a lot before we came together, which I think made us value what we had between us even more.

These kinds of conversations could be hard, but I went for it. “You mean like Max,” I said, and I made it sound a

little like a question, to signal that if she didn’t want to talk about him now, she didn’t have to. We’d been over all this before, of course.

“I mean all of them,” she said.

“The director, he said anything we can bring from our own lives, our pasts, to our role is going to help. But it can be confusing too. Sometimes, the flaws in our acting might be the flaws in how we understand our own soul.”

I didn’t know this director, didn’t even know his name, actually. My wife and I were both from around here, but somehow it didn’t seem likely that he was. Not that we would have run in the same circles, anyway.

“Isn’t Into the Woods a musical?” I said. “You’re really saying all this goes into singing some songs?”

She just ignored me. I was pushing her buttons. We did this sometimes, but we both knew I’d be there opening night.

I took a sip from my beer and thought about the stability we had together. There were those dark moments when I wondered if stability didn’t mean sacrificing something else, something like excitement. But we had our ways of getting away from each other, keeping things fresh. She had her theater, I had my garden and those aggravating deer.

The other night, when she was at rehearsal, I’d spotted another one sneaking into the yard from the woods

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behind our house. This one was the last straw, I decided. I crept out to our shed, the deer nibbling away at the sweet potatoes, found our .22, came up behind the animal and put three bullets in it. I got it in the leg and the rump, but it was still making noises on the ground, so I had to put one more in the head at close range to finish it. By the time my wife returned home from rehearsal, I’d driven the body far away and dumped it.

“These beets you grew look delicious,” she said opening the fridge, as if she’d been reading my thoughts.

“Promise me you’ll make a salad with them tomorrow.”

“Hell,” I said, pleased. “I’ll make a salad right now. Why not?”

“I’m not hungry right now,” she said. “I’m tired. I think I’m going to bed, actually.”

I glanced at the clock. It was past ten at night. The director kept them late at these rehearsals.

“Goodnight,” I said, standing up, and I went up behind her, wrapped my arms around her, and gave her a big kiss on the top of the head. Then I went for one on the neck, for good measure.

“Eek!” she said, wriggling. “That tickles.” I let go, and she turned around and pecked me on the cheek. “Goodnight, Patrick,” she said, and went upstairs. I leaned against the counter and wondered if a salad would keep well for tomorrow night. It wouldn’t be so fresh, but I couldn’t be sure I’d have the mood to make it the next day. I started getting out the ingredients. Sometimes I liked being alone at night, and this gave me something to do. l

wylie thornquist, poppets

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Don’t Use My Face an

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interview with erin hanson

f you were a Williams student in October 2016, you probably saw a petition pop up on your Facebook feed titled, “Williams College: Sell 4-5 marble slabs to pay for new therapist at the health center.” Out of context, this petition feels like a surreal joke, hilarious yet sad.

I wondered at the time what it must have looked like to my friends outside Williams when I shared it on my timeline. What kind of institution has marble slabs to sell? What acropolis are the students picking over to provide for basic psychological care?

How do you protest in a place of immense privilege?

These are the sorts of questions that the petition’s creator, Erin Hanson, asks through her multifarious interruptions of the culture of normality on campus.

It’d be difficult to pin down Erin to any one description—sharp academic, cheeky performance artist, self-deprecating comedian, activist, or, in her own words, pretentious lesbian? To rely on any of these labels would be to miss the point of her work entirely. Ultimately, she’s someone

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who realized pain and loneliness could be used to create something larger than any single person.

Her sophomore year, Erin, who has diabetes and celiac disease, developed a set of new symptoms from a gluten contamination in the dining halls. Her mental health degraded to dangerous levels amidst the pain of being constantly and totally physically exhausted. Feeling isolated and despondent, Erin created a t-shirt in Williams purple and gold that read, “Williams Depression.”

The shirt struck a chord on campus and became a movement that resulted in her printing over 150 copies to distribute to students. Through their resemblance to the ubiquitous sports uniforms on campus, the t-shirts subvert the optics of Williams from the inside. Like the slab petition, the shirts ask, Why not protest a failed system with snarky humor?

I met with Erin, now in her fourth year at Williams, to discuss how she finds meaning in pain and protest.

-brianna

rettig, february 2018

not gay as in happy, queer as in this is the least mentally ill ive been in years

take your profound insecurity-induced work addiction and turn it into art

throw a shrine for the new additions — come, join us, we have been waiting for you

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interviewer

What’s the backstory of the Williams Depression t-shirts? erin

I had the idea in the middle of my sophomore year. Peak sickness for me. I had dropped out of all my things. It literally may have been that a group I had been in, like Combo Za, was getting t-shirts and I thought, Damn, I wish I could have a t-shirt for my extracurricular, but I don’t have any extracurriculars and I’m lying in the fetal position in my bed right now.

As a sports liberal arts culture, Williams is constantly self-advertising by way of its student aesthetic. And that became super weird to me when I got very sick. I could not relate unproblematically to the “fun community” and entries and the mountains the way that I used to, and the way this place is sold.

So much of being a Williams student is having an active investment in the image of the school, and that carries an aesthetics and a politics. And that had just completely fallen apart for me. interviewer

What politics do you mean? erin

Well, I think there’s a politics of happiness here that is closely tethered to a version of this place as a finishing school for rich people. It’s a nice comfortable place where you come and then you go and get a job on Wall Street. And it’s nice. And there’s mountains. And either your white dad went here and you’re already set, or you’re

“diverse” and there’s upward mobility aplenty. Which is just a way of saying that, like so much else, depression is intertwined with systems of power: race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, so forth.

And the image, the promise, of an individual achieving happiness at Williams is no neutral thing, but is a subtle tool of power. interviewer

What’s that version of happiness, then? erin

Feeling like this is a place for you. The scholar Sarah Ahmed, who wrote The Promise of Happiness, always tweets, “To point out a problem is to become the problem.” I think that there are tons of problems here, but the tour-guide triumphalism milieu makes it really difficult to point them out. So happiness is to not feel disgruntled by the school’s history or all of the ways Williams is pretty much a corporation that is providing an experience for rich people.

But I think I was mostly interested in creating the shirts because it was a sneaky confession: I’m not happy here.

Just saying that felt discouraged because of this army of purple and yellow. The joke of the shirt is that it looks like a varsity shirt from the football team, like depression is something Williams sponsors and curates like its beloved teams. interviewer

I was wearing mine a lot over the summer and it was funny how long it took for people to notice that it said “Depression.” There’s something interesting about that, how easily we

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are able to ignore details if they’re saturated in purple and yellow. erin

Many take the cohesion of this place for granted. Aesthetically, but also, say, racially or affectively. That’s sort of what it feels like to be an immensely ill person here, or a marginalized person. Later that year a group of activist JA’s bleached their shirts, as if to say, “Purple and yellow equals whiteness.”

Williams wants to frame “diverse” or “inspiring” people as thriving members of the Williams community, but at the same time, in insidious ways, they won’t actually show up for you. This is a white supremacist capitalist institution. It’s depressing. interviewer

What was the process of getting the shirts produced?

that it cares about its marginalized students. There are some meaningful things that happen on Claiming Williams. But it doesn’t cause any systemic changes in how things actually go on.

It is a wonderful photo-op of marginalized visitors and students coming together and being part of a community. But Williams qua the purple and yellow profit machine is very capable of having Claiming Williams and having a lot of rhetoric about how meaningful it is while at the same time, for just one example, not funding a meaningfully diverse therapy staff. It’s actually really hard for a lot of us to survive and get by here, because of our own traumas paired with institutional policies and indifference.

So our thing was, Bitch, don’t use our faces and our presence. interviewer

So you wanted the t-shirts by that day.

erin

We ordered 150 shirts on CustomInk after getting funding from the Dively Committee and Feminist Collective. We wanted to have a launch event before Claiming Williams day. The Office of Communications initially blocked them for copyright reasons, which didn’t hold because it was a protest, a parody, and there are different laws for parody. But we had to go in and fight them for it.

erin

We wanted the shirts by that day. What would it mean if hiding in photos of this big inclusive “Yay Williams” day, there were a bunch of people being like, “Ahem, Williams is not what it seems?” interviewer

This started as a single shirt you designed for yourself. Why did you decide to mass produce them?

interviewer

Why Claiming Williams? erin

Claiming Williams is a yearly performance that Williams puts on to prove

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erin

I liked the idea that even though not everyone who got a shirt will know every other person who did, you would be able to see each other on campus

There’s a fantasy that it’s possible to reach a kernel of unimpeachable, unassailable truth about yourself.

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and realize that you’re not alone. When I was sick, I was like, Oh my god, I’m the only person at Williams not in an extracurricular. I’m the only person struggling so much. It’s my fault. That fantasy, or that myth, doesn’t have as much force if you can identify other people who are feeling similarly.

interviewer

Two people. erin

I was two people. Looking in the mirror like, “Whose face is that?” interviewer

What role did image creation play during this time period?

interviewer

You’re very open with people about your sickness and struggles. What is your relationship to your own body? erin

When I got sick two years ago, I couldn’t rely on my body to do certain simple tasks for me, like sitting up in class, or getting to places, or staying awake and not passing out. I dropped out of Frosh Revue, and I dropped out of Combo Za and the theater I was doing. It was a dissolution of all the markers of personhood that I had accumulated. I would wake up in the morning and be unable to answer the question, Who am I? What’s happening, why am I doing anything? On top of this, my brain was affected by the gluten contamination, and I became extremely mentally ill.

I found myself doing things that only crazy people would do, like running full speed into walls, or lying on the floor face-down for hours, or sprinting out of class when I decided I couldn’t be there. I was living in a pure present of trying to get by. My first response was, This isn’t me, who the fuck is this? I was really…

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erin

You know the Frida Kahlo quote? “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” Well, I’m like a bad version of her.

One of the things I did, while I was spending hours and weeks alone, was take pictures of myself. Partly it was a grounding activity, when I was confused or panicking, to put my phone down, press buttons on it, pose, look at it, recognize myself, and post it on social media. I could do this while I was dissociating because it was grounding and physical, easy tasks. So at first there was this sheer material aspect of my relationship to images, images of myself.

Because I had lost so many of the markers of personhood, I was feeling immanent in my own body. I was so much just my flesh, so much my fucked brain. The act of taking pictures allowed me to exteriorize something that otherwise I couldn’t get outside of, that I was trapped in. interviewer

Your activism on campus, like the slab petition and the Williams Depression shirts, uses satire and irony, and you also use your image-making on social

media to satirize your life. Can you say more about the idea of turning painful experiences into something accessible through irony?

interviewer

Or too emotional?

erin erin

First of all, there’s a huge movement on Twitter of over-disclosing and over-sharing. People, especially teenage girls and young femmes, post personal, sad, sort of disgusting, depressing tidbits of their lives. It’s a genre in the Twitter spheres I’m in.

The internet offers versions of cyber-publicity and community that are possible to participate in alone or in private. It’s possible to tweet upside down in your bed. It upsets, or loosens, the traditional division of public and private. And the private has always been feminine. It’s always been embodied. It’s always been perverse. It’s always been that which is too unseemly or too gross or too much. interviewer

And on the internet it’s on full display. erin

Yeah. I don’t think everything about what, at moments, has been my survival strategy of just disclosing a ton of gross shit to the internet should be celebrated or is for the greater good. It might just be a survival strategy for one bitch. But the internet is complicating the optics of public and private. What is too gross to be seen? What is too bodily to be seen? What is too feminine? These are political questions.

Or too emotional. And I think these internet communities, by bringing stuff that has been disavowed in the public sphere out into the open, mean that for us perverse communities, everything doesn’t have to happen in a bar. It’s possible for gay people to find each other on the internet. I think there’s a reason why twenty percent of millennials now identify as queer. Because we’re able to find versions of perversity not degraded or hidden or closeted. interviewer

Is there a downside to internet communities? erin

The danger of over-disclosing can come when it pairs with a version of identity politics, which is another millennial characteristic. There’s a fantasy that it’s possible to reach a kernel of unimpeachable, unassailable truth about yourself. That there’s a complete transparency or unmediatedness that can be arrived at through the internet, or through disclosure more generally.

So if I put my sadness on the internet, it carries a kind of moral or emotional truth that means it can’t be debated. It means my subject position is shored up around that sadness that I’m displaying.

It means whatever politics I have that derive from this sadness are just correct.

You can’t be questioned.

It can result in commodifying

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woundedness. I think injury and vulner- ways I had come to understand myself ability ought to be important consideras a self in relation to other people. ations in politics or ethics. But in this That transitioned into literary theory. version, woundedness, instead of being To be schematic: Questions of something that brings our attention to ethics as traditionally conceived in the general conditions of West, questions of precarity of vulnerwhat it is to live a ability, shores life, or to have up our sense a self, or what of identity it means to act as final and well in a comfixed. plicated world, I’ve been usually have a off Twitter for stable starting a little while, point. You because I was have a self that too invested you can fully in portraying know, and to a vision of act ethically is sadness and to make a set I wasn’t able of choices or to understand decisions, or to myself except act willfully in as a victim. different conWhen I was texts, such that sad, instead the actions you cried in an hour long professor of trying to produce in the confrontation today but didn't let it ruin my look heck no get un-sad, I’d world, emanatjust stay there ing from your and tweet single individabout it. ual self, have good effects, say, producing interviewer happiness for yourself without impedI want to talk about how all this relates to your academic work. What drew you ing the happiness of others.

But more recent movements in to study literature and literary theory literary studies call into question these specifically? very basic assumptions about what a self is. Is there even a self? Can we erin think of people as self-sufficient entities, When I got sick, I experienced a dissoor is that the wrong way of framing the lution of the markers of personhood, world? the disappearance or the failure of the

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The answer is basically, yes, surprise! That is the wrong way. We’re always thrown into sets of relations, we’re in rotating environments. The self is not self-sufficient, it’s fundamentally relational, it’s fundamentally elastic, it’s fundamentally outside of itself.

This means that the ethical questions that arose from the idea of the self as a monadic individual can’t give the right answers. That’s all bunk now. We need to think differently.

So, literary studies became meaningful to me as I was groping in the dark for a new sense of self and a new sense of purpose. At first I wanted to sort of glue the pieces of my fragmented self back together. But in fact, the ungrounding or boundlessness or disruption that I had experienced was a moment of possibility for a different kind of self that wouldn’t mean getting back to total certainty, or being able to recognize myself as the same at every moment.

This whole self-help ass journey that I’ve been on with literature… interviewer

I like that you’re reading Derrida for self-help. erin

Yeah, well I am. If you read Heidegger, some of the major terms in Being and Time are anxiety, care, being towards death, fallenness, all of these terms that I use in therapy if I’m being histrionic and insufferable. I don’t think Being and Time is a self-help book... but I kind of do. Too bad Heidegger is a Nazi from hell.

I don’t read and write and think about literature expecting a particular set of answers anymore. Disruption is now folded in. This is also what it is to be a sick person: I don’t take for granted how or even whether I’ll be looking at things tomorrow. interviewer

Where do you stand with Williams now? Would you choose to come here again? erin

That’s such a hard question, because in a way you’re asking, was it worth it getting sick? Obviously, I would never choose that. I would never choose to come to Williams in the set of circumstances that led to me being as sick as I was and for as long as I was. But that’s the conceit of your question. And, partially, what feels important about my time at Williams is this experience of “thrownness.” Being in a situation that I didn’t choose, being forced to confront vulnerabilities without recourse to something like “agency.”

So, is it worth it?

Yes. As lonely and terrifying as being sick was, it was also an experience of not being an individual. By which I mean, it was an experience of wrenching aloneness, but it did not ratify me as a solitary self, because it thrust me into all sorts of new dependencies and loves and debts with the people around me. It forced me to think about relation and dependence and to care in ways that feel absolutely vital to how I ought to be in the world. It feels so crucial to

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how I can be a friend and how I can be a person on this fucked up planet.

You ask about Williams. I can and do hate so much of this place, its relentlessness, the way it asks me to live. But it also pushed me to a breaking point and forced me to figure out other ways of living, something I did partly with thinking and writing, but mostly with my loved ones. The friends, family, lovers, and teachers who have moved with me or (sometimes literally) held me up in this stupid valley are a part of me, the best of me. They made me possible.

Part of what I’ve been forced to reconcile with, part of what Williams Depression and a lot of my other work reflects, is that happiness is the wrong goal, the wrong question. More important are the always messy, always complicated, always disintegrating as they are forming, ways of being a person that I could have just disavowed or ignored if I hadn’t come to Williams, a place that made me almost die. l

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young cho, vase and mirror

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two poems by sara hetherington

LAX—SLC. Just Landed. i wanna move you impolitically but your yellow signs here say MERGE RIGHT “jam your eye into my kaleidoscope, we’re watching star spangled skies tonight.”

You’re a cop, I’m lampless LA traffic, the whoricopter’s horny racket— tongue a tarmac, mind a Boeing MAX 8— You, orange glow-stick marshal-man, shake me awake. disappointment (noun) is when the hot airport preacher says thank you for following noise abatement procedures .

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trophy wife the pressed and hemmed white Easter dress upon her darling’s newborn chest— It doesn’t look like magazines: It feels profane. the supple baby skin, once red, ’s now pink against the infant bed.

The blanket’s new (and Baby, too, was carried home all snugly wrapped.)

But one was bought, the other made...

What this portends is stifling, staid It isn’t Vogue and feels profane.

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Concerning the Cross Burning Incident

I installed this work on Perry Lawn this winter as a response to a 1980 cross burning at the same location by two unidentified men dressed in white sheets.

The plaque displays a quote from an article written by three students enrolled at the time: “We cannot forget, we must remember… a cross is burning at Williams College. It is up to us to put it out.”

-justin

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sardo

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Night Thoughts carmen

bango

I

t was the day I watched Mr. Grindle’s cat get run over by a Hummer that I realized I was profoundly depressed. I could see the whole thing from our bedroom window: a speeding car, a yellow flash, and with a hearty thud it was goodbye Mittens. I stared with my nose to the glass as Mr. Grindle hobbled out from his home across the street. I could make out his hunched shoulders shaking as he knelt down to peel the yellow fur from the tar. And when he stood, cradling the crumpled cat, I listened to him sing in his old, aching voice a broken rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”

I mean it sounded something like that, although I guess I couldn’t be sure from my side.

That whole time, I felt nothing.

Except, of course, for this one, fuzzy thought: “Shit. I might be profoundly depressed?”

At night, the thoughts are not so fuzzy. The night thoughts gnash their teeth and drag their fingernails down the sides of my skull. I’ve been feeling this way for months now: la-la-land by day, fucking turmoil by night. But it wasn’t until the whole car-hits-cat thing that I decided to talk to Kevin about it.

— One of the first things you need to know about Kevin is that he’s a real

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go-getter. Every night, he sets his iPhone alarm for 7 A.M. to “Shiri Guru Charanam.” And every morning when the sweet flute sounds, my mind fumbles for its fading dreams as Kevin rises from the sheets to begin his naked sun salutations.

— “Hey, so, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been feeling kind of off lately.” We are in the kitchen. I’m drinking black coffee with my back against the sink. Kevin’s making a veggie egg-white omelet.

He looks up from his cutting board, knife still moving swiftly across a stalk of broccoli. “Babe?” His eyebrows furrow, and for a moment I think: Wow. He’s known all along.

“Wait… you aren't getting sick, are you?”

I feel a long breath whoosh out of me. Kevin takes this as a confessional sigh. He begins chopping the mushrooms triumphantly.

“Aww, babe, I knew I heard you coughing the other night!”

I shrug and take a sip. Bitter as hell.

Kevin makes veggie egg-white omelets every Wednesday morning.

This is because Wednesday is Workout Wednesday. Watching him do the egg whites is always my favorite part. It’s a pretty tricky step, but he’s gotten it

down to a science. First, he cracks the egg with confidence. Then, he cradles the yolk from one broken shell to the other and lets the whites ooze down into the mixing bowl. He won’t stop until he’s gotten every last drop. Then, he chucks the yolk and shells and begins again.

Now, amidst the rising steam of sautéing spinach, he says, “Hey, maybe you should sleep on the downstairs couch, you know, just until my marathon?”

— At work I stare into the computer screen until the numbers merge into a shimmering glare. I work for Renewable Energy Idaho (REID), a non-profit that provides clean energy for businesses all over the state. I’ve been in the finance sector for six months now, and I still haven’t mastered Excel. The good news is that I may never have to: Head Honcho Brad promised this computer stuff was just temporary, and pretty soon I’ll be doing the real, hands-on work for the company. But lately it’s just been me, slumped in a chair and plugging in data, and the real battle is keeping my eyes open. I check my email, notice I’ve gotten some nice new spam. Then I start googling.

How to fall asleep at night I find a link I haven’t looked at yet: 10 Sleeping Tricks that will blow an Insomniac’s Mind!!!

For the next hour I practice some new breathing techniques in my cubicle, but softly, so Dan of the next-door cubicle won’t think I’m having a panic attack.

— When I get back from work, a business card is sitting on the kitchen counter.

Dr. Michael Goodheart Chiropractic Care Rejuvenation of the Mind, Body and Spirit 180 Main Street Jaxonburrow, ID 05472 And below this description is a photo of one very attractive and intelligent-looking man. I think he might be of Middle-Eastern descent, and that maybe he bleaches his teeth. He’s wearing these grandfatherly glasses that say, “Hey there, I really know how to crack backs.”

— That evening, Kevin comes back from Workout Wednesday basking in sweat. His tank top sticks to his chest, six-pack swelling beneath the neon fabric. He meets my attempt to kiss his cheek with a quick side-step and a wink. “How about an air-hug?”

Through the space between us, I get the familiar musty whiff of his red short-shorts. I remember washing them yesterday, but I guess some scents are forever.

Then Kevin declares he is making steamed beets and quinoa for dinner, and I have a flashback to the night before. My night thoughts had been just beginning to melt into nonsensical darkness, when his voice detonated be-

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side me. “Hey babe, did you know that beets can naturally boost your nitrate levels? It’s like blood doping, except it’s totally legal.”

I attempted to turn over and respond, but found I was experiencing temporary sleep paralysis. I lay there listening to his murmured awe for what felt like hours, silently willing my neck to move, the light from his iPad streaming under my closed eyelids.

— At dinner over a chunky purple mouthful, I ask, “Babe, who’s Dr. Goodheart?”

Kevin is all showered up and has this fresh boyish glow. His iPad is propped beside his dinner plate; he’s scrolling through the results of last year’s Mighty Mick’s Marathon.

“Hmm?” he says, with a blank stare.

“I just noticed his card on the kitchen table earlier.”

“Ohh, Dr. Goodheart! He’s this new chiropractor guy in town, Steve told me to check him out. By the way, you should know I whipped Steve’s ass during our mile repeats today...”

While listening to Kevin explain his pacing (“I was thinking, just keep your stride smooth and let Steve do all the work for the first set…”) I google Dr. Goodheart on my phone.

His website is minimalist, sleek black lettering across a blue-sky background. seeking physical, emotional, or existential relief? let us help you realign your life.

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More photos of Dr. Goodheart.

Dr. Goodheart in a white coat, smiling knowingly with arms crossed. Dr. Goodheart laughing atop a mountain with a woman and two kids. Dr. Goodheart treating a patient, who lies with a sleepy smile on a padded table. Dr. Goodheart above the patient, his tensed hands about to come down on the middle of her lumpy white back.

“Then for the last four hundred I told myself, well, it’s now or never, and I just ruined Steve on the last straightaway…”

I scroll through the patient testimonials: After only one appointment with Dr. Goodheart, my back pain had all but disappeared and I felt like a new person!

Through Dr. Goodheart’s incredible care, I now feel truly happy in my body for the first time. Not only did Dr. Goodheart cure my whiplash, he cured my mind.

I can honestly say that Dr. Goodheart SAVED my life. Truly an expert in the field, and so kind and understanding…

At the top of the website I see the button to make an appointment. What the hell, I think, and click it.

— Our couch is a hand-me-down from Kevin’s parents, and reminds me of them every time I sit on it for too long, the smell of urine and mothballs creeping up from its crevices. I let my body sink into its green plush and wait for the night thoughts to unfold.

They’re loud tonight, electric buzz like television static.

“Racing mind stop racing,” I whisper to myself. But the night thoughts just move faster. There’s nothing I want more than to slip out of my own, frozen body and become something that doesn’t take up mass.

— The next morning I wake to the taste of warm rust and ripped skin. I feel a new raw spot on the side of my tongue; I must have bitten it in my sleep again. With a giant head rush, I get off the couch and lurch to the bathroom.

“This isn’t your normal face,” I tell my reflection. “You don’t actually look this shitty in real life.” A pair of swollen dark eyes stares back at me. I feel a dull ache rising in my throat, and watch as my chin begins to tremble. “This is good. You should cry now.”

Except the tears won’t come and the choking feeling stays. I check my watch. 6:59 A.M. Moments later “Shiri Guru Charanam” starts playing upstairs.

— At work, Brad checks in to see how I’m doing.

“It’s all coming along,” I tell him, hoping my smile looks tired in a “Wow, numbers are hard, but also mysteriously fascinating” type of way.

“Think you and Monica could present a financial report at next week’s meeting?” Brad says, eyebrows wriggling.

I glance over at Monica, two cubicles across, and we exchange nods.

“Yeah, sounds like a plan!” I tell

him.

“That’s what I like to hear, girls!”

Brad gives me a hard high five.

After he’s walked off Monica makes a weird coughing noise, and I turn to find her staring me down.

I raise my eyebrows like “What?” except I know what, because it all is not coming along, and Monica has caught me sleeping at my desk too many times lately to fall for my shit.

At 5:30 P.M. I am in Dr. Goodheart’s office. The waiting room is lit by a soft yellow light, and I fill out the paperwork to the twinkle of harp music. Name, date of birth, weight, height, and then: On a scale of 1-10, what is the level of pain you are experiencing today?

I scrape teeth against raw tongue.

“6” seems like a safe bet.

What symptoms are you experiencing today?

Exhaustion, headaches, body aches, I write. Difficulty sleeping, concentrating, and connecting with emotions.

“Olivia?”

“That’s me.”

“Dr. Goodheart is ready to see you.”

And when I walk into the room I realize his business card didn’t lie: Dr. Goodheart really does have a dazzling smile.

— On the drive back home, “Dancing in the Moonlight” comes on the radio. The sun is setting, a hazy pink glow seeping into the valley. I roll my windows down and let the colors wash over me. We get it almost every night...

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when that moon gets big and bright…

It’s a feeling I haven’t felt in a while, this feeling. It’s a glimpse of clarity, of connection, being straightened out from head to toe. And when the chorus begins, I realize I know all the words.

— At home I find Kevin in the living room, doing sit-ups to an episode of Game of Thrones. I sit down on the couch. Daenerys and her dragons are fighting the White Walkers. As I watch the screen fade from scenes of icy landscapes to spreading red flames, a warm calm reverberates through me, and I can’t get Dr. Goodheart's voice out of my head.

Kevin, neck craned and stomach crunching, grunts, “Babe, have you seen this one yet?”

“Not yet, I know what happens though.”

“Wow! -hungh- you sound a lot -hungh- better hon! -hungh- How are you -hungh- feeling?”

“I feel good.”

And I do. I look good too; when I brush my teeth I can tell something is different in the bathroom mirror. My skin looks smoother, brighter. I look like I’ve grown two inches. I roll my shoulders back, and then my neck. I even smell good, from Dr. Goodheart’s collection of tester essential oils at the front desk. I chose the Lavender Vanilla.

Behind me I hear the buzz of Kevin’s electric toothbrush, and then a garbled “Are you sure you’re good with sleeping on the couch again tonight?”

His lanky frame is now next to me in

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the mirror.

“Yeah, better safe than sorry, right?”

Kevin hovers over me, resting his hands on either side of the sink. He leans past my shoulder to spit; close, but not too close.

“Phew, thanks babe, that means a lot to me. You know Mighty Mick’s is only a week away.”

I know he still has his flossing and fluoride routine to attend to, so I blow him a kiss goodnight and return to the living room. There, I relax back onto the couch, stretching my newly aligned body against the crumb-covered cushions. When I close my eyes, Dr. Goodheart’s voice plays in my head. I want you to take a deep breath…

I fall asleep faster than I have in months.

—

On Monday afternoon I am sitting on the edge of Dr. Goodheart’s padded table. He stands above me, taking notes. As he writes, his jaw clenches in concentration, and I admire his five o’clock shadow.

After a moment of staring into his dark, inquisitive eyes, I remember his question. “Oh. Much, much better.”

“Good. That’s what I like to hear.”

He flashes me those astonishingly white teeth.

Then he asks me to stick out my tongue. I do, hoping I still look somewhat attractive as he peers at it and takes notes. “Your tongue tells me you might be experiencing some digestive issues and vitamin deficiencies.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“It also tells me that you worry too much.” He winks at me and my stomach jolts. “We can take care of all that today. Ready to lie down?”

“Yes.” His hands feel cold and precise as he traces the contours of my spine. I shiver in anticipation. “I want you to breath in…” And there it is, the sweet release.

I drive back home in a renewed sedated bliss. I wonder to myself if this is what an exorcism feels like. I make another appointment for Wednesday, and then another for Friday.

— On Thursday night, I’m at the kitchen table with my laptop, surrounded by papers for a draft of the financial report. Kevin sits across from me, drinking immune-boosting herbal tea and working on his blog.

“Hey babe, think you could take some pictures of the race this weekend?

I’m closing in on two thousand subscribers,” he says.

“Of course,” I tell him, not looking up from the screen.

“You’re the best, babe. By the way, still feeling under the weather?”

My fingers pause on the keyboard.

“Yeah, I mean, I’m still not feeling

so hot,” I say and resume typing.

“No?” “Yeah, I think it might have to do with my Qi.” “Your Qi?” “Yeah, I think I have a rebellious Qi. Like my energy is all out of whack.

At least that’s what Dr. Goodheart says.”

I can feel Kevin’s eyes on me as I flip through the latest energy consumption data.

“You’ve been seeing Dr. Goodheart? The chiropractor?”

“Yep, just for the last week or so.

He’s the best,” I say.

“Wow.” “What?”

“Oh… I just didn’t know you were having back pain, hon.”

“Yeah, I mean, they say it helps other stuff too, like a whole mind-body connection.” I don’t look up from trying to pick out the best chart for the data. A pie chart? Or perhaps a clustered pyramid?

“I mean, I don’t know babe, I never pegged you for an alternative medicine type, I guess,” Kevin says with a shrug.

“Hmm, yeah... it feels very new, you know?” I say breezily.

“Yeah, I mean if you feel like it’s helping your cold…” I catch him looking at me quizzically.

“Oh yeah, I mean I’m definitely learning a lot about myself.”

Kevin laughs uneasily. “Wow, okay, that’s great.”

I nod. “Hey, do you think this layout looks okay? Or is the orange too much?” I turn my computer towards him.

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— On Friday, Dr. Goodheart nods in approval at my tongue.

“I can tell there have been some big improvements in your stress levels since your last treatments.”

“Really?”

“Yes, the mind-body connection really is remarkable, isn’t it?”

I nod and smile. “Mmhmm.”

— It’s the night before Mighty Mick’s Marathon. I sit on the bed and watch as Kevin spreads out his race gear on our bedroom floor, part of his pre-race regimen. As he sorts through clothes and sneakers and energy gels, he outlines his race strategy for me. “I’m thinking like 6:15 pace to start, nice and smooth.”

When he tenderly lays out his red shortshorts on the floor, I hold my breath, trying not to imagine their stench after 26.2 miles.

That night I dream that Dr. Goodheart brings me to a dock on a lake and tells me he wants to watch me swim. I dive in, a graceful swan dive, only to realize that I don’t know how to swim.

He’s forced to drag me out and give me CPR. I lie on the dock and gasp as he presses his palms against my chest, stopping only to whisper my name: Olivia? Olivia?

“Dr. Goodheart?” I try to say back, but then I’m awake and it’s Kevin’s face looking down at me.

“Olivia, I can’t sleep.” He’s sitting on the edge of the couch and his face looks ashen, wobbling with a pale uncertainty I’ve never really seen be-

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fore. I wonder for a moment if I’m still dreaming.

“Oh no, I’m sorry, babe.”

“Do you think I could fit on the couch too?” he asks after a pause.

“You aren’t worried you’ll get sick?”

“Well, I figure it can’t really hit me in the next six hours, you know? Plus, I really miss you, babe.”

We remember Kevin’s parents’ couch is really a pull-out. He brings some more blankets down and together we settle onto its grimy surface. Somehow our bodies fit together like they used to, and I realize I’ve missed him too. I close my eyes, trying to align my breathing with his.

“Liv, what do you do when you can’t sleep?” he asks suddenly.

For a moment his question just stays there, hanging in the dark.

“Well, I try to tell myself it’ll all be alright,” I finally say back.

I lie with my head in the crook of his shoulder, feeling his chest rise and fall against my cheek. It’s not too long before I feel his whistling snores, each one a light tickle on my neck. Although I’m wide awake, my mind somehow stays calm. At one point I think I might have reached a meditative state.

In the morning, it’s pouring rain, and Kevin’s dread is palpable. He stares despondently out the kitchen window, spooning lumps of oatmeal into his mouth. I ask him where he wants me to cheer. He says the best places would be at Mile 10 and then Mile 23. “If you could give me splits off the top guys at Mile 10 that would be great. And you got to tell me to really push it at 23.

There’s only about 5k after that, and

it’s a real make-it-or-break-it moment of the race,” he explains, and I can hear the jitters in his voice.

“Okay,” I say, and squeeze his hand.

— An hour later I’m at mile 10 of Mighty Mick’s Marathon. I huddle behind other spectators on the sidewalk, where we’re waiting in wet and shivering anticipation for the first runners to appear. Springsteen's “Born to Run” is blaring from someone’s speakers. Soon I hear a shout that the first runners are coming, and I try to move up to see the road. When the first person passes us, I start timing. Kevin’s right in the front, within the top ten. He’s looking pale but determined, his skinny arms moving rapidly in the rain.

“Go Kevin!! Forty-five seconds off from the leaders! You got this, babe!” I hope he hears me. His red shorts have already disappeared into the distance when I realize I forgot to take pictures.

— Mile marker 23 is packed, a mess of spiked umbrellas and drenched raincoats. The cheering grows wild as the first few runners pass. They are soaked, but still moving at a miraculously brisk pace after 23 miles of pavement and puddles. I try to guess how many have gone by; I know Kevin will want me to give him a place estimate. Nine… ten… but I stop breathing at number eleven.

It’s Dr. Goodheart. He’s running shirtless, and the rain glistens on his skin like oil. He’s got perfect form, like

he could be on the cover of Runner’s World. I remember how to formulate words just in time to shout wildly, “Go! Doctor Goodheart!” And then, as if possessed, I lift my camera and take a picture.

He must recognize me as he passes, because he flashes me his blinding smile.

I slowly emerge from my dazzled state and realize I still haven’t seen Kevin.

For the next few minutes I peer into the stream of incoming runners, wondering if maybe I missed him. But then I make out those red shorts moving in the distance.

I remember Kevin once explained to me the concept of hitting the wall.

“It’s like running out of gas in a car with a broken barometer,” he told me.

“Suddenly your body is just all out of stored glycogen and you don’t even see it coming…”

For Kevin right now, this is hardly a metaphor; he looks as if he has literally run into a wall, perhaps a sturdy brick one, repeatedly. Every lift of his wet skinny legs looks strained, and his neck is kind of keeled over to one side.

As he gets closer I notice his fingers are splayed, too tired to hold a fist, and the skin on his face bounces up and down with every pounding step. I slowly put my camera down, and wonder if he needs medical attention. He is still moving, though, and as he grows nearer I know I need to say something, anything…

“Stay strong, babe!”

Then we make eye contact. Mouth foaming and eyes kind of rolling back, Kevin gives me this look. It’s the look of a wounded animal from a Planet Earth episode, but wounded by pain or pride I

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really can't tell.

— On my drive to the Marathon finish the rain peters out to a light drizzle, and I’m thinking good thoughts. The words of congratulations I will say to Dr. Goodheart at my next appointment.

How I will give myself a pep-talk in the bathroom before my financial report on Monday. How maybe I could buy a kitten for Mr. Grindle, and leave it in a basket on his doorstep in the middle of the night. How maybe the next morning I could watch from my window to see his old face crinkle with joy.

I find Kevin in a crumpled heap, a couple yards past the finish line chute.

“Hey. I love you,” I tell him as I bend down to kiss his clammy cheek.

“Love you too, babe,” he croaks, attempting to rise on tottering limbs.

And when he shudders over to vomit up purple chunks, I pat his back and smile affectionately.

We watch the awards from the medical tent. Kevin is laid out on a gurney with a hot towel on his forehead. I sit beside him and occasionally refill his paper cup with Gatorade. When they announce Michael Goodheart on the loudspeaker, I give Kevin’s shoulder a little shake. “Hey, that’s him,” I find myself saying excitedly.

Kevin opens his eyes and cranes his neck.

“Who?” he croaks.

“Dr. Goodheart.”

Together we watch Dr. Goodheart walk up to collect his Mighty Mick’s medal. He stands in front for a moment, teeth gleaming for the pictures.

“Oh, he’s the guy that smoked past

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everyone at mile fifteen…” Kevin mutters. My eyes follow Dr. Goodheart back into the crowd where he rejoins a blonde woman and two small kids. I feel my chest tighten as the woman embraces him with a kiss.

I look down to find Kevin on the gurney, staring at me. It’s hard to read his expression.

But then he’s overcome by a severe coughing fit, and the moment is gone.

— On the drive back home, Kevin slumps in the passenger seat, wrapped in blankets. He stares out the window, mumbling disheartened musings about the race. “You should have seen me at mile eighteen, I was still running like 6:05 pace… Jeez, I felt so good then….”

I listen as I drive, and wonder if the storm is starting up again. I can make out these clouds moving in dark masses up ahead, surrounding the distant mountains. Dancing in the moonlight, everybody feeling warm and right, I hum softly, but then I stop, because those are the only words I can remember right now. The first raindrop splatters on the windshield, followed by a second. Another familiar hum begins in the back of my mind.

“You know, babe, I would be careful with that chiropractic stuff,” Kevin says suddenly.

“Hmm?” I say, still staring at the road.

“Well, I’m not sure I buy into the whole thing. Might be a scam is all I’m saying.”

I focus on the rhythm of the raindrops and take a deep breath. “Have you

ever been?” I ask.

“Me? Nope. I have not. But they say once you start going, you just have to keep going back.”

“Wow, it’s really starting to pour again,” I say.

“Babe, are we doing okay?” he asks.

“What? I mean, yeah, maybe we need to figure out some things…” I start, leaning over the wheel. “Babe can we talk about this later? It’s just so hard to see the road right now.” I crank the windshield wipers up to full speed.

With each robotic swish the glass clears for a moment, and then returns to blurry, fragmented light.

Kevin reaches over for my right hand. “Okay,” he says.

We hold hands for the rest of the drive, but neither of us says a word.

It’s the kind of silence that settles after witnessing a bad car accident, when everyone’s wondering the same thing. l

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caitlin ubl

The Madwoman At some point this autumn, I extended my hand, and the front walk turned into water. In that cream colored hour, the moat surrounded the terra cotta roofed house, widening so that I could not throw a stone across it. It was in the days just before leaves begin to fall, and the pool glowed yellow, rippled orange. I live so far inland that there is no need for boats, and no one cared enough about a young woman living alone on an island to make one from the precious, gold-clad trees. So in my front garden I remained, hanging laundry to dry in the crisp breeze and watching the whitest geese I have ever seen float across the swelling surface.

At night, I would lay my clothes to rest on the patio, standing bare in full view of the trees and the water and the stars and wade into the pool until my hair spread around me like a quiet bronze current, darkening with wetness. I would stand, not swim but stay, naked feet rooted into the globby clay. Wind caressed

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my eyelashes with water, and I did not blink it away, did not turn my cheek from

its icy

touch or the touch of the soft weeds in my front garden, the fuzzy heads of molting dandelions wreathing my soles. In winter, the moat froze over, an eager search party of men scrambling to collect my corpse slid across the ice in their socks.

They found me eating cherry marmalade from the jar with a spoon, sitting crosslegged on the formica countertop

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alex krstic

The End At the Sunoco on Hurstbourne, I watched an angel steal gas. Filled up, peeled off quick like May Louisiana rains. I told you I’d seen her and you said did she have a halo and I said mhm and you said let’s follow.

You had me drive. Some ways down 61, I asked is stalking an angel down route 61 a sin? and you said no but maybe down 52 it is. And you weren’t joking because you never did.

Sorghum fields turned to gray hills. We stayed stuck on the bumper of her rusted Monte Carlo until the sky was orange and backlit, like Whatever’s Beyond had come home and turned on the light.

The radio said: According to new research, a third of the world lies in bed at night praying

God, won’t you give me some fancy things?

At a narrow point between two hills, something flew out the angel’s window and you screamed shit oh shit pull over.

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The angel sped on. We trudged off-road towards whatever we’d seen. The soil here was gummy and wet. It was almost night now.

Everywhere in the muck: discarded halos.

You prodded them around with the toe of your Chucks.

The way home, we fought. I said they must get rid of them there once they’ve done a bad thing.

No, you said.

Only when they’ve gotten caught.

Your cheeks wet and red—with shame, I’d learn—you massaged the nape of my neck and asked me to take you back to the Sunoco for a slushie.

And that was the last day. All I have left of you is this memory now: of how this all ended in shit-stained shoes and sugar-water, when all we’d ever wanted was one good day, just the two of us, hunting after awe.

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justin sardo up here, down there survival

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g

h

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trevin

corsiglia

God Bless a Good Morning Heartache What’s new? Still a heartache for reference obsessed broken records, cheerful responders. Anxious thoughts before a boring dream. Tobacco stains the troubled sleeper, I can only go away with the kick I didn’t see happen.

I’ve been coming to nothing lately.

Indoors and down beneath catching up with what’s outdoorsy, he carried on, that’s disappointment. Say good morning and be polite, but I’ll point anyway, noting nothing as a stranger.

Trouble finding sleep is trouble finding someone to say I’m tired to.

Them going their way is them that’s got their own. I’ve wanted one sleepy weep, not too trite or too tired to try, no harsh news to me.

I’ll learn to be tired in this city.

Then I can touch the ground and it won’t feel so heavy. I’ll learn to be tired with others. Then I can move a word, or say nothing at all, always god blessing a good morning heartache.

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What I Think About When I Can't Sleep leonel

martinez

W

hen I can’t sleep, I think about the time my older brother, Frankie, took me and our cousin to watch his porn. Me and Claudio were both eight or seven. It was the first time I saw sex. And it was the first and last time I saw porn with my brother, before he got busy.

I close my eyes, and I see Frankie, sitting at the almost broken desk that Momi found at a thrift store in West New York. He takes a plain white CD out of its case and drops it on the drive of his laptop. It says on the case in black sharpie: “GIRL’S SOCCER CAMP 8: THE RETURN OF MR. BLACK BALLS.” I don’t know who or what Mr. Black Balls is. I have this feeling in my muscles that I need to ask Frankie about it, but I’m not sure if I ever did.

I’m sitting on Frankie’s bed. There’s no sheet covering it; it has brown stains that look like thin summer clouds. I don’t want to sit on my bed cause it’s on the floor and Frankie likes to tell me there are roaches inside. Also, he never lets me sit on his bed. This time, I sit without asking, and he doesn’t give me shit for it.

The window is covered with a black blanket. Frankie hates the sun, and after living with him for so long, I’ve learned to hate it too. Sunshine

from a small gap falls on Claudio’s face.

I don’t know why he wants to sit on the floor, but he’s always been weird like that. It’s funny that our moms gave birth to us around the same time, but we grew up to be so different. I look over to him. He smiles and then looks down at the floor.

At this point of remembering, I usually feel this pain pushing down on my chest cause I know that I’m going to leave the room to get some juice, leaving Claudio alone with Frankie.

— Listen, Alexis, I really appreciate that you want to know why I’m not sleeping. But I don’t know; I can’t give you one answer. It’s just a lot.

You know, it was after Yomaira, Frankie’s girl, gave birth to his son, my nephew, Raulin, that I started to have this trouble.

Frankie finally moved out a couple of days ago to go to Crown Heights.

It was the only place he and Yomaira could afford. And he gave me his old queen-size mattress cause he bought a new one. It was Momi’s mattress at first, but she bought a king-size and gave the old one to Frankie. It’s the same bed I sat on to watch the porno.

Now it’s mine.

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—

—

Sometimes, I try hard to remember, but I don’t know how Frankie got me and Claudio to watch it or why he wanted to show it to a couple of kids in the first place.

It had to be summer cause the sun was warming the living room. Me and Claudio were pretending to be Pokémon battling each other. I was the Squirtle with the black sunglasses, and Claudio was Jiggly Puff; I’m telling you he was weird. Claudio’s mom had to work during the day, so she dropped him off at our place when Frankie was watching me while Momi worked. I mean, Frankie was supposed to, but he usually locked himself in our room. We could never play there, so we stayed in the living room watching Jerry Springer and fighting.

I know for sure I was about to use water blast to kill Claudio. Then the bedroom door opened, and Frankie walked into the living room. He had no shirt on. There was a slim patch of hair below his belly button. And he was wearing black shorts and dirty-black white socks.

And then the memory skips to being in our room, waiting for the movie Frankie just put in to load. Papi got Frankie a MacBook for his sixteenth birthday. Frankie gave him a big hug, something that almost never happens.

We later learned that the laptop was stolen from some woman named Margaret. Frankie kept it, saying he needed it for school. That’s funny, cause if it wasn’t for his teachers feeling bad for Momi, he wouldn’t have graduated high school on time.

Sometimes, Alexis, when I do eventually fall asleep, I dream that before he starts the movie he looks back at me and Claudio.

He says, “You ready?”

I stare at his braces, the ones that Momi was still paying off.

I say, “Play the fucking movie.”

Claudio stays quiet like I answered for him.

But I don’t know if I imagined that.

It’s hard to tell.

— The first thing I see is a bright green field with two white goal posts. There are blonde white girls in black jerseys playing a game.

One of the white girls, the one with these big boobs that keep bouncing, falls. She says that she’s fine, but the coach sends her to the infirmary and leaves her with a black nurse.

The nurse stares at her ass and rubs the bulge in his pants. He gives her a gown to change into and stands behind the curtain, peeping through a gap. The white girl changes. He takes his dick out and starts stroking it. She lies on the hospital bed and goes to sleep just like that. The nurse goes up and jerks off in front of her face. He makes loud moans, but she doesn’t wake up.

— Isn’t it funny, the things you remember thinking at specific moments?

For me, it’s when I saw the nurse’s dick.

I remember telling myself I’m going to

get a big dick like his.

You see, I’d seen Frankie’s dick by accident cause we slept in the same room. And he never tried to hide it, even in front of Momi. She always got pissed and called him a sucio during their fights. It was like he was proud of it. Of course, Frankie’s was bigger than mine, and I hated that. Sitting on the toilet, I used to stretch mine like PlayDoh until it hurt.

This one time, Frankie was getting ready for his first date with Yomaira. His boys, Erick and Jordi, were there too, talking about her fat ass. I was coloring in one of Frankie’s textbooks. I looked up and saw Frankie sticking his hands down his pants to move his dick, and I yelled, “SO YOU GONNA FUCK HER NICE?” I think I got what I said from a novela that Momi watched to destress. Frankie rolled his eyes, said, “Stop yelling, faggot,” and kicked me out. I cried to Momi about what happened, but he’d already left.

But the nurse’s dick was even bigger than Frankie’s. I felt so weird staring at it for so long that I looked over to Claudio. He was staring at it like he was watching Elmo. He’s always been the quiet type. At family parties back in the day, the ones that went on until sunrise, he would sit on the couch, all quiet and shit, watching the adults dance and drink. If a tia pinched him, he would cry for his mom. I hated playing with him. It took him too long to act normal and yell.

—

So the white girl wakes up to a dick in front of her face. She says “OH” like she’s glad to see a big black dick from nowhere.

This other time I was hiding with Jennyfer under the Jungle Gym during a game of hide and seek. I had this huge crush on her. So, I flashed her my dick like I saw the guys on TV did sometimes. She cried to Mrs. Unamuno about it, and I was suspended for a week. Momi had to beg and pay the neighbors to watch me until Frankie came home from school. Every night that week, he punched me hard cause he couldn’t see Yomaira and had to take care of my ass.

She looks up at the nurse with a small smile. He says, “Suck my dick.” She wraps her thin lips around the head and moves her head back and forth. She has to open her mouth wide, but it isn’t enough.

She’s almost crying. But he likes that.

He grabs her hair with one hand and her face with another to force his dick down her throat. After a while of her choking on it, he takes it out of her mouth; it’s shiny and slimy from her spit. The girl can’t breathe. The nurse slaps her face with his dick and says, “You like that, huh?” She nods. I didn’t believe her though.

— And then the memory skips to the white girl lying on her stomach. The nurse is fucking her in the ass with no lube. He has to put his hands over her mouth to stop her screams. Hearing the nurse’s groans reminds me of when I

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heard the same thing coming from Momi’s bed. Before me and Frankie shared a room, I slept in Momi’s room. My twin mattress was on the floor cause there wasn’t any space or money for a bed frame.

One night I was sleeping there in my bed. Randy, her boyfriend at the time, the guy who worked at the seafood place down the block and brought crabs every time he came to the house, he was sleeping there too. And I woke up and heard heavy panting and grunting from the bed. Fully awake, I felt so tense. I didn’t know what was going on but I couldn’t move.

When it finished, I walked quietly out of the room and went to Frankie’s room. I touched his face until he woke up and told him what happened. I asked if I could sleep in his bed. There was a pause, but he mumbled yes. I got under his blanket. I went to sleep just like that. It was the first time I remember sleeping with Frankie in the same bed.

The next day, I moved my mattress into Frankie’s room.

— At the end of the movie, when the nurse was about to cum on the white girl’s face, I wanted to leave. I felt lightheaded or something. Frankie was making the same noises that the nurse was making, the same ones that Randy and Momi made that night. Claudio was still so quiet, and that annoyed me.

It annoyed me like how he always used to follow me or how he cried if I hit him.

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I jumped off Frankie’s bed and said, “I’m thirsty.” Frankie didn’t turn around. He said, “Go, pussy.” My chest felt heavy. But I couldn’t stay there.

Claudio stood up too. He said, “I want to go too,” and I felt glad when he said that. I was about to open the door, and Frankie jumped up from the chair.

He put his hands on Claudio’s shoulders. He said, “Claudio, I need you to stay for a minute.” Claudio looked at me like he wanted me to answer for him.

Of course, I didn’t know what was going to happen after I left. Claudio wouldn’t tell me until years later.

— We were smoking near the playground we played in as kids. The quiet Claudio got bigger, took up more space, and didn’t give a fuck about it. He dropped out of school his junior year for starting too many fights and not going to class. His mom kicked him out cause she said she wasn’t going to raise a bum. So he went to Momi and begged her to let him stay. She was always the understanding type. She would let him stay if he got a real job.

Yomaira was pregnant, and Frankie was crashing at her mom’s place near Kingsbridge and Fordham.

Claudio passed me the blunt. I brought up the fact that Frankie used to hate taking us to the park cause we always wanted him to play with us.

Claudio started to laugh that turned into coughing. I laughed too.

He said, “You know, I’m happy for Frankie with his new kid and shit.”

“Yeah, I’m happy too. It’s been rough for him.” I coughed again.

There was a long pause before he said something else. The way he breathed the smoke out his nose was so aggressive that I knew he had something on his chest.

He was like, “Yo, I gotta tell you something.”

“You?” I laughed again. He gave me a small smile and then looked down at the floor. Sometimes I think that the quiet kid is still in him.

He told me that after I left the room that day, Frankie made him suck his dick. After it happened, Frankie told him not to tell anyone or he would chop off his balls and throw them out the window. That was the first time; it happened two more times after that.

The only reason it stopped was cause Frankie tried to fuck him, but Claudio wouldn’t stop crying, so Frankie threw him out.

I was quiet. He passed the blunt back to me, and I filled my lungs with smoke. The sun was setting. We both stared at the orange and pink skyline.

In the middle, there was a little gap of black purple.

He said, “So you’re not gonna say something?”

I shrugged. “What I’m supposed to do about it. I never knew.” What I really wanted to know was why he decided to tell me in that moment. I had so many questions, but they all got stuck and tightened my throat. To be honest, Alexis, I wanted to call him a liar.

He put out the clip on the slides.

He said he was going take the 4 to see Mercedes and walked away. I stayed

there until it turned dark.

— When Frankie first brought Raulin to the house, he looked so relaxed and happy. Yomaira needed to catch up on some sleep, so he wanted to show Raulin to his abuela and tio. Claudio wasn’t there. After what he told me, I was suspicious. But he was probably out working or at Mercedes’ place.

I wanted to ask Frankie about what Claudio had told me. But seeing him cradling his baby, trying to make him smile, I stayed quiet and watched while Momi cooked sancocho and rice for Frankie to take home to Yomaira.

They left before it got too dark, and Momi said, “Gracias a Dios por mi nieto.”

— So that’s why, when I can’t sleep, I think about that time.

Damn, I didn’t really mean to tell you all that, but it just came out.

Nah, I’m not going talk to about it with Frankie.

Cause it’s none of my business, and I don’t want to think about it anymore.

Alexis, you know what’s funny?

You’re the first person I ever told all this. Funny, right? l

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Jordan Jones: Recent Paintings

M

y work deals with the form of the crowd and the bodies that compose it. I am interested in the very particular kinds of relationships that can form in the space of a crowd, vacillating between intimacy, violence, and indifference. From this arises a number of different questions: What does this mean for the individual and individuality? Where is agency in this process? How are these relationships perceived by those within and outside of a particular crowd? I am also interested in the things that can hide in a crowd, and in my work I seek to unveil the covert structures acting within crowds. In this vein, I have also been using the form of the crowd as a way of understanding whiteness, the relations inside it, and the structures of power created by it. For me the project is an attempt, through image making and diagramming, to gain understanding and to exercise a certain amount of power over things outside of my control.

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sending them away

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and one day there was a meeting

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where's...

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eileen russell

Railroad Sunset Railroad sunset marks significant the place that must be passed through and the sky descends into warm inner pink and green hills and a black line that sets the horizon at the point beyond seeing which is neither land nor sky nor space. Only clouds ask to be counted but we count hillsides and rails anyways from the road and shout when we pass a field that we’d like to run through. To drive with you is to finally notice the three birds crossing the windshield at intervals and to notice that it is the same birds each time and the same craving for joyful quiet and the tension in the act of looking. The car hums under the smell of wet rocks and in the dark you remind me that I once drove by these hills for the first time and that road was just as cracked then with possibility, direction, and sense,

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huge and blue. I want to ask what it is like to see so much in one glance but instead I ask you to explain why you cup your hands to collect rainwater and whether rocks in streams draw you out of your head or back into your body and how long it takes for a cairn to fall or to mark something.

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Contributors CARMEN BANGO

EVA HENDERSON

Preheat oven to 35 degrees and windy. Add two teaspoons of Sriracha, then pour in whole bottle. Broil and enjoy.

has been known to deviate.

MIA HERRING-SAMPONG HUDSON BOHR If Hudson wanted a sugar daddy, yes, he probably can go out and get one, because he is what? Sickening. (Thank you, Shangela).

YOUNG CHO

Mia’s favorite things are sunlight and sweet tea.

SARA HETHERINGTON declined to comment.

spent a semester at sea sailing down the L.A. River in a life preserver.

JORDAN JACE

TREVIN CORSIGLIA

JORDAN JONES

got into things once and hasn’t stopped since. Asked what references he had, he replied his gut.

is slightly less concerned.

is from Los Angeles.

ALEX KRSTIC BREIDY CUETO has a 180 sq. ft. single with a private bathroom in Hubbell House, but sleeps abroad most nights on a couch in Carter 0 where his two besties live. He apologizes for treating readers like Psych Services.

GILLIAN GOODMAN is just trying to do her thing.

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is a junior. She likes postcards and lipstick and RnB. She aspires to one day get a clue.

LESTER LEE likes lines.

LEONEL MARTINEZ is from Harlem.

JOSEPH MESSER

CAITLIN UBL

is from Mississippi.

likes languages and running. Her favorite book is All the King’s Men.

JESSICA MUNOZ likes to pretend she can take good photos.

Meow.

STORY PONVERT is from the Elm City, CT.

BRIANNA RETTIG studies people and what they leave behind.

EILEEN RUSSELL has never met a knot she couldn't untie.

JUSTIN SARDO makes things.

SARAH TAN is a writer. Her work, much like her life, needs heavy revision

WYLIE THORNQUIST hails from Manitou, on the Hudson line.

His favorite week is when the magnolias are blooming.

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