an online journal of voice

Fall 2016

GH
BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York

BlazeVOX 16 | an online journal of voice

Copyright 2016
Published by BlazeVOX [books]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
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Fall 2016
Table of Contents
Poetry
Amanda Gomez

Amie Sharp

Cara J. Okun

Dilip Mohapatra

Donald Wellman

Elena Botts

George McKim

Greg Autry Wallace

Haley Guariglia

Hannah Fradkin

Ian McPhail

Inez Walls

jacklyn janeksela

Jake Tringali

Jenna Cornell

John Martin Petriccione

Kurt Cline

Linda King

KD Rose

Lambert Common

Marcia Arrieta

Marjorie Sadin

Mark Cunningham

Mark Young

Michael J Pagan

Michal Broussard

Naomi Buck Palagi

Nikki Ketteringham

Raymond Luczak

Rebecca Weigold

Roger Craik

Sandra Kolankiewicz

Sarah Warren

Scott Thomas Outlar

Simon Perchik

Suzie Baker

Fiction
Brandon Boudreaux The Ninja Brigade of Jefferson Street
Christien Gholson Selling Magazines to the Joneses
Christine Andrada Henley dry rubbing against
Dan Frazier Flash
Patrick Chapman The Rocket Curator
Sarah Estime The Co.
Bridget McFadden Bedtime Routine
August Evans For Lorne
Skylar Abdeljalil The Wing Collector
Whe Foedisch Wooster
Frances Wiese A Beautiful Joke

Text Art
hiromi suzuki Fugue
David Felix Three Works

Creative Non-Fiction
Jake McCulley Apophenia
Virs Rana A PICTURE'S WORTH

Acta Biographia Author Biographies

Fall 2016
IntroductionIntroduction
Hello and welcome to the Fall issue of BlazeVOX
16. Presenting fine works of poetry, fiction, text art,
visual poetry and arresting works of creative nonfiction written by authors from around world. Do
have a look through the links below or browse
through the whole issue in our Scribd embedded
PDF, which you can download for free and take it
with you anywhere on any device. Hurray!
In this issue we seek to avoid answers but rather to
ask questions. With a subtle minimalistic
approach, this issue of BlazeVOX focuses on the
idea of public space and more specifically on
spaces where anyone can do anything at any given
moment: the non-private space, the non-privately
owned space, space that is economically
uninteresting. The works collected feature
coincidental, accidental and unexpected
connections which make it possible to revise
literary history and, even better, to complement it.
Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies these piece appear as dreamlike images in which
fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory
always play a key role. In a search for new methods to read the city, the texts reference post-colonial theory
as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of
resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Many of the works are about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water),
space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd ways. By
creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, he tries to develop forms that do not follow

logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to
make new personal associations. These pieces demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits
and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth
century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own
cannibal and civilized selves. Enjoy!
Rockets, Geoffrey

an online journal of voice

Fall 2016

GH

Fall 2016
Cara J. Okun

sleeve rolled up
scrawled notes on backsides of receipts
counted hours with rectangles from fortune cookies
highlighted roads on outdated maps
this poem still does not exist
the moon is

un lit and there

its charred
that space on the horizon where a fireball used to rise
I fell into the mirror. I am
the reflection. I beat Narcissus on my way to bottom of the well and
that white rabbit
has nothing to offer.
I have cathartic recognition
trading limb for limb
is not what is
call this choice
call this sustenance
call
do not
dial I
too, am
unlearning
the art of this thing called love

1 am
arrival time: late.
Is this what they call
poetry ?i wasted
one sun
she
painted, re-painted my face.
Flesh flakes fall
from skin
a-raw
over-scrubbed, i suppose. i am
out of soap.

Each day grey silk nestles

sinks her lower lashes in
a prison of butane
no ignition

solve for x

The milkmans empty grin haunts

the eyes in my ears and the key
to my pocketbook is on hold at a grocery store;
electricity
out for monthsx

bought a box of matches

an unspecified date on the Gregorian calendar at an unspecified time after sunset

here in heaven
the living write
about photography
that rip hearts from the ribcage
or

no one cares to reproduce; fireballs

atmospheric locations of recently discovered planets; why do I wonder

why I am wondering
when I read this headline last
that
might be
me. In descent.
She is not deaf;
but for
these damn serpents
whispers
echo cackle .
They wrap
their vertebrate
click click clack
around my ankles
pin my limbs
against the kitchen window.
I wipe its glass
of streaks

my mess.

I can not hear

Fall 2016
Brandon Boudreaux

THE NINJA BRIGADE OF JEFFERSON STREET

Authors Note: I visited my hometown in Louisiana for the holidays. While hanging out at one of my old haunts, the
McKinley St. Pub, my friend and the proprietor, Remi, told me about the journalist C. Arthur Davis, who had come
down from Cleveland in early 2006 to write a book about local crime. Remi led me to a storeroom where I found a box
containing the following materials. Davis was a widower, Remi said, and wouldnt hesitate to talk to anyone at length
about it at the bar. I asked where he was, only to be met with a shrug from Remi. He was kind of losing it towards the
end. Havent seen him for months.
VII. Prologue The Travel Journal of Carson Davis
Arrived in Louisiana early this morning after twenty or so hours of driving; should have left my coat
at home. Reached Lafayette a little before noon with no traffic problems. Got a hotel by the interstate. A
cheap dig, but itll do. Didnt have much to unpack, just notebooks, laptop, etc. Everyone in the hotel bears
the marks of hasty relocation large families in small rooms, people hanging around the hotel all day
without going anywhere, unshaven faces and mismatched clothes indicating they are not simple tourists.
Find myself trying to speak with some of them, but all have the same story they dont want told. A young
man approached me in the lobby. My brother. Whats your story? Im not a refugee, I said. Neither was he,
he let me know. Told him about my work. He seemed disappointed, and when he called me a tourist, it
sounded like profanity. Drove around the city and easily found the landmarks: McKinley St. Pub, Jefferson
St., the Parish Courthouse. With a population of a quarter-million, this town isnt Metropolis. Thought Id
have trouble finding all the neighborhoods, but when downtown is three blocks, theres not much to have to

get to know. Snapped a few photographs of Jefferson Street and the benches decorated with fleur-de-lis
decor. Turned a one-eighty and walked a block, then photographed an open field. Dont look for anything
like a Chinatown here. Or an Irish part of town, or an Italian part. Joe said that he wanted to see something
in a couple of weeks. Started taking notes on what I did today, but decided to leave myself out. Standard
journalism has been done, objectivity preventing any real investigation. It wont work here anymore. Told
Joe to expect something like a novel, third-person scenes and all. Besides, crime novels sell. Will start at the
Pub tonight. Apparently these guys were regulars there. Maybe a bartender might remember something.
Have no idea how to put this together, but am excited for the opportunity. Will leave for the Pub as soon as I
finish this
*

The Daily Advertiser, September 16, 2005: Citizens are concerned that criminal activity is on the rise in the
Hub City. Lafayette Parish Chief of Police Tom Richard went on the record saying, The police force is on
alert for any rise in crime. We dont think there will be any significant problems, but our main concern is the
safety of our citizens. When asked if the influx of people to the area will affect crime rates, Richard
responded with confidence. Not if we do our jobs.

I. Wingman, Anytime
So like, this guy comes up to me at the Pub last night asking about the Ninja Brigade. Remi carded
him and said hes from Ohio so I asked him how he knows about the Ninjas. Says he read it in a newspaper
but I dont know how they got our papers way up there. I say I was working that night JP got jumped and
thats probably what started it Ohio Man looked real excited so I started telling him how it went down.
Here, he says, and hands me a notebook. Just write it down.
He told me to describe everyone first so here that is;
Ike (me) The second coolest motherfucker you will ever meet! I work here.

JP Everyones best friend. He moved to Boston to use his music degree. Tall, lanky guy. Used to play
bass for Whiskey Avenger, who played here every Thursday night for like years.
Drew Romero Singer/guitarist. Had his own business selling decals to convenience stores and
people. Always dressed nice polo shirts and all. No beard. If you met him, hell try to give you a business
card.
Jack Gautreaux Used to live in Texas for school. Dropped out then worked at the library in town.
Really smart guy. Knows why days are longer in the summer and shit like that. Has a really long beard that
looked pretty cool when Sal braided it.
Poirier What can I say? Big fat drummer. Long pony tail. Chops. Youd like him.
Sal Makes the best bacon cheese ham onion jalapeno mushroom omelet with ketchup youll ever
have. The only girl in the Pub who never dresses like a skank. Graduated college. Cute. Also, was Poiriers
girl.
Erin This little blonde chick that started hanging around the pub. She was weird at first, but shes
cool now. She turned into everybodys little sister.
Mr. Remi Roberts Owner of the Pub. Hes got all our backs. Youll never see him without either his
Pub shirt or his Whiskey Avenger shirt.
What happened was it was JPs last week in town and now that he left, Lafayette wont see another
bass player like that for a while. It was a Thursday so Whiskey Avenger was playing but JP had the night off.
Remi gave him free beers just the same.
Also a bunch of us knew that Poiriers couches were waiting down the road for anyone who couldnt
drive home. Whoever wanted to crash there had to toss their car keys in a pitcher behind the bar, and Remi
kept an eye on them and gave us a freebee once in a while. There were a bunch of keys in there man. JP was
leaving, we all wanted to live it up you know?
Anyway what Im getting at is at two-thirty Whiskey Avenger ended the show with fifteen minutes of
Youve Lost that Loving Feeling. JP always had a soft spot for that dumb song and nobody knows why. He
jumped on stage and grabbed a spare guitar for the last ten minutes. When they quit playing nobody could
see straight. We were too drunk to even pack up their stuff. After stashing just one speaker in the cab of
Poiriers truck, we said wed finish breaking down the stuff the next morning when Remi opened the place

back up. Most of the crowd had split, hugging the hell out of JP and telling him to buy coats and hope his
plans fall through so he has to move back down here you know, the usual goodbye shit. At about three,
there were only a few of us around. Jack and Poirier were shooting dice at the end of the bar. Sal was making
them play for quarters instead of dollars. Drew said his throat hurt from singing all night, and split with his
guitar saying hed see JP the next day at Poiriers bar-be-que.
JP had been walking around, then stopped. Wheres Erin?
We all kind of looked around the bar but she wasnt anywhere. Id only met the little blonde that
night. Shes young, that was probably her first night really drinking. JP went looking for her, and I followed
him out the back of the Pub. Our little friend was on the pavement leaning on Poiriers front tire. She was
hammered and too young to take it. JP says some stuff, but the girl is way way out of it. He was all, If you
need to puke, just go, man. We wont watch. Seriously, youll feel better. She didnt hear. Or if she did, she
didnt move. I was kind of chuckling at the tire marks on her arms and JP looked at me and said hell see if he
can get her to Poiriers house. Ill set her up on a couch, make sure shes okay then be right back. It
sounded pretty smart to me. He tried to help her up, but she was already on her feet, and sort of walking. Just
mentioning a place to crash was enough to get her up. JP was a step behind her going to Poiriers. I lit a joe
and leaned against the back door of the Pub watching them make their way down the road. As they were
stumbling and goofing off, this old old Caddy pulls up next to them and this fucking bastard with towel
around his face (a friggin towel!) and dreadlocks poking out of his cap (just my opinion white guys
shouldnt have dreadlocks) jumps out the passenger door and pulls a gun and points it in JPs face.
And this is why I think JP is the coolest motherfucker on the planet he just starts cracking up at the
guy.
Hes frigging laughing his ass off while the guys trying to be all serious. I couldnt move. Dont tell
anyone, but I was scared as shit. The towel guy was into the getting-it-over-quick thing, so he takes a step
and cracks JP on the side of his head with the gun. Now, JP aint a big guy, plus that night he was blitzed, so
he just goes right down. His glasses go flying into the air and land a few feet away. Erin freezes. Before the
mugger gets any ideas, I yell at him and throw him my wallet. He kind of points his gun at me, but goes for
my wallet on the street, then gets back into that shitty Caddy and they drive the fuck off.

Me, Im calling Remi from my cell as I go over to JP and wait for everybody to come out the pub. Im
trying to talk to Erin standing on the sidewalk and still wont move, and my podnas out cold, glasses in
pieces on the ground. This is fucked up. Right outside the Pub this shit has to happen. I could see if we were
downtown or something but fuck, were on McKinley St. Who the fuck gets mugged on McKinley? Everyone
comes outside, and it takes about ten minutes, but JP comes around. Were all staggering back to the bar, JP
is still laughing a little and asking, Why are all of you guys so serious all of a sudden?
IV. The First Vengeance
(Transcription of an audio recording that can be found in the archives of The McKinley St. Pub,
which catalogues many of the musical acts that perform there. The jewel case lists the artists as Whiskey
Avenger (After JP left). It is little more than a drunken rant from a regular, with unsteady drums and pseudojazzy bass lines in the background. C. A. D.)
The power of the Holy Ghost brought to town! Standing, were free as gods of old, ruling with
Thunder! We Three, your silent warriors, kept to the dark of our fair city, in wait for the pestilence to show
its cowardly self and demonstrate just what justice awaits.
Our hunting ground Downtown. Jefferson St., the vein, protected that night. Our most noble decoy,
drummist Poirier, walked the lonely hazard-path dressed in most feminine of fabrics. Trap primed mark
set.
The Demons zero in and spring free the vigilante shadows of the night! Your impromptu basser,
charging car and extracting Sword of Justice edge thrust to face of Maniac Driver. No one moves when
ninja has drawn blade to face.
I scream the Battle Cry YOU NO MUG!... and Nun Chucks of Retribution go aswinging at the poor
soul exiting the Vehicle of Larceny, set only on our decoy, blind to his own preyness. From doubt to faith by
chucks and blade we avenge. No crime will be committed this night, no sir. Assailants, bruised and
confused, by the collars were grabbed, writhing to the tune of my vengeance. Our Swordsman kindly opened
the rear door of the car as I threw the fucker in!

The Thieves speed off into the night with marks of their transgressions to teach others what it means
to fuck with the Brigade; surely they spread the word that any future attempts on the security of our citizens
will be met with the Resistance!
III. Articulate Persuasion
(Note to self: Think about order, but place this part early on in the novel. Probably right after the song
about the Ninjas first attack. C. A. D.)
Andrew bought the first pitcher, and therefore was obligated to open the debate as he poured the
drinks. Were standing up to those fuckers.
Jack took the pitcher and filled his plastic cup. Yeah. Sure, he said, and passed the pitcher to Poirier.
The three sat at the bar of the mostly deserted Pub. JP had left for Boston earlier that afternoon, and Andrew
invited the remaining band to commiserate.
Im serious, he said. This is our town. We went to high school here. We barely made it through
college here. Man, we popped our cherries here.
Jack took a drink. I know where youre going with this. And youre full of shit. He tugged at his
beard, which was reaching a manageable length.
Man, go play. Whats the big deal?
Well, its illegal. Impractical. Its full of holes. And its fucking dangerous.
Not as much as you think. Look, man, well be prepared. We can plan. Every detail. The suits, the
weapons, no stone unturned. We, my friend, are many.
We, my friend, Poirier said, are out of our minds. But hey, me, Im up for whatever. He
simultaneously scratched at his protruding midsection and tugged at his dark sideburns.
Dude, Andrew turned to Jack, If we get prepared, well get the drop on em. We owe it to JP. We
wont get another bass player like that.
Jack frowned at his drink.

Remi walked over to the trio, having run out of customers to tend to. Why are you guys so glum?
Youre killing business.
It was Poirier who spoke up. No offense, pal, but I dont think you should know.
Right, Andrew said. We love ya bro, but you cant know about this.
Fine, assholes. Youre paying full price. Remi took a few steps to the stereo controls behind the bar
and turned up the volume, and then walked over to the other side of the bar to converse with Ike.
Jack stared at a sticker behind the bar, posted on the paneling below the Ol Dog sticker that
separated the register from the whisky selection. It depicted a stop sign; beneath were the words BED
WETTING. He lit a cigarette and tapped his fingers to the music.

Anyway, Andrew said. I already ordered the suits from on-line. They should be in next week.
I still think youre crazy.
Dude, look. This is one of those times in a mans life that he has a choice. Ten years from now, say,
youll look back here. Andrew stared blankly into the mirrors behind the bar, insinuating great wisdom in
his words. If you dont do anything, youll wish you did.
Jack grunted. Thats not my style.
Andrew smirked. Youre telling me you wouldnt go back and follow Stephanie to Cali if you could?
Thats low, man.
Poirier poured another round from a fresh pitcher, and drank a while in silence. He attempted to end
the awkwardness. Another storms coming, he said, nodding to the television screen displaying the
weather forecast.
Thats exactly why Im making this proposal.
You know, I have no idea how to use nun chucks, offered Poirier.
Okay, Andrew said, slamming an open palm on the sticky bar. You just volunteered to be the bait.
No ones gonna see this storm coming.
*

Jack drove home that night, careful to stay five miles-per-hour below the speed limit. The local radio
was on auto-pilot at that hour, and generally played the less popular bands in line with his preference. When
an older song that had been lost in the obscurity of newer trends began to play, Stephanie came to mind. It

was something Drew said. The song took him back to Stephanie. He had driven her to the airport the day
she left, the flowers remaining beneath his car seat he decided not to give them to her at the last minute. It
was something Drew said that night. He reached a decision.
V. Equal and Opposite
Jack and Andrew crouched behind a parked car, adjusting their costumes. After months of setting
ambushes, the ritual had taken on more significance with each outing. Pointing to the red Japanese
character on Andrews head band, Jack asked, What does that mean, anyway?
Its supposed to mean Sword. But it probably means something like White People Will Buy
Anything Asian.
Jack chuckled, running his fingers together to tighten his gloves. He looked into the deserted street
for any signs of movement. The weather had turned overcast. A street lamp blinked in the distance, and the
parked cars that lined the street oscillated in and out of visibility.
Its goddamn freezing out here, Jack said, handing Andrew his pouch of throwing stars. Well see if
anything goes down tonight, then well take off for a month or two if nothing happens.
For true? Well, we havent seen anybody in weeks.
I guess that means its working. These punks are learning, Jack said, extending an arm across his
torso, an exercise Poirier had taught him in little league.
See? And you thought it was a bad idea.
It is a bad idea. But, we-- His voice was cut off by a high pitched whistle coming from the street.
Its Poirier, Andrew said. Hes in position.
Jesus, he looks like a fruit in that shirt. Whyd he go with pink this time? The yellow one in the
wash?
Thats my shirt.
Jack pulled the hood over his head and stood up. Your shirt is fruity.
Very funny, jerk. Pick a bush to hide in and shut up.

The three waited in ambush for two hours. At four a.m., Poirier casually walked to a deserted park
bench and sat down. He spoke to the crouched figure behind it.
No ones around, lets get the hell out of here. I got work tomorrow.
The crouching shadow mumbled in acquiescence, and told Poirier he should just walk home. As he
stood up to head home, a BMW with running lights pulled next to him. A pale arm holding a pistol emerged
from inside. The gun was pointed directly at Poiriers large midsection.
Christ, man. Heres my money. He quickly fumbled with the objects in his pockets, and dropped the
empty wallet.
As planned, Jack and Andrew approached the rear of the car from their respective hiding points on
either side of the street. Jack unsheathed his katana and headed for the driver. Andrew, approaching from
the passenger side, could see unusual alarm in Poiriers face and quickened his step, running to the car with
less theatrical movement and more with genuine protection. Jack noticed the absence of flamboyant
movements, and before he could make anything of it, an unseen shooter opened fire in the darkness of the
street behind them.
Andrew looked behind him and saw flashes of muzzle flare and heard the occasional bullet ricochet
off the pavement. He ran to the sidewalk for cover.
Jack had an easier time making his way back to the curb; he ran in a crouch as quickly as he could,
sandwiched between the sounds of gunshots. He reached the bench on the sidewalk, out of view for the car
at least, and held his breath. His grip on the katana tightened, and the sword wavered in his grip. After a few
seconds, the gunshots became less and less frequent until they stopped completely. He looked over the back
of the bench. The car had sped off and the street was silent. He waited, afraid that any noise or motion would
set off another bout of violence.
Guys? he called out after the silence became unbearable. Hey!
A shadow stood up across the street. I called the ambulance, it called. Jack cautiously ran across the
street, disrobing as he went. When he reached Andrew, he used his shirt to wrap the bullet wound in his
friends right shoulder. Wheres our boy?
In the middle of the street, in a growing pool of blood, Poirier lay motionless.

VI. Counterpoint
The Teche News, October 17, 2005: Gerald Baptiste of St. Martinville was released from Lafayette
General Hospital today at noon. Baptiste was hospitalized after a robbery in downtown Lafayette last Friday
night. He was admitted with bruises from blows to the head from a blunt object. According to Baptiste, his
assailants attacked without warning. Most startling was the fact that they appeared to be wearing ninja
costumes.
When asked, Chief of Police Tom Richard responded, Were looking into exactly what Mr. Baptiste
was doing earlier that night.
*

(Transcript of the Lafayette Parish Police interview with James Gautreaux, December 9, 2005)
Q. Like ninjas? Has this been going on for a while?
A. A couple of months.
Q. A couple of months?
A. Well, its not like this is every day. This was only about the fourth time.
Q. So you were the ones responsible for what happened to-- [papers rustling] --Gerald Baptiste?
A. Im not sure. We werent in the habit of taking roll.
Q. How did you boys start all of this? What kicked it off?
A. One of our friends, Jean Paul, got held up at gun point one night. The mugger knocked him out
with a gun.
Q. So you go after them yourselves?
A. The decision wasnt reached so quickly, but essentially, yes, thats how it happened.
Q. You didnt think we could handle it?
A. Are you kidding? I dont recall JPs assailant ever being caught.
Q. Thats no reason to take the law into your own hands.
A. The dead can do nothing easy.
Q. You come up with that yourself?

A. Ben Franklin.
Q. If you say so. Where is Jean Paul now?
A. Boston.
Q. Thats a pretty good distance away. Whats he doing up there?
A. Working as a sound engineer. The week before he left, it happened.
Q. Does he know anything about this?
A. No.
Q. Says here you lived in Houston for a time.
A. Graduate school. UT. History, before you ask.
Q. Why did you move back here?
A. I dropped out.
Q. Why?
A. Personal reasons.
Q. [Laughter] That usually means a woman.
A.
Q. You know, your friend might not pull through.
A. Im aware of that.
VIII. Connect/Disconnect. From the Journal of Carson Davis
I met JP in person after living in a hotel for months. He was in town visiting family for the Fourth. We
had exchanged a few letters, but equivocal responses didnt sit right with me. The more I learned, the less
sense the actions of his friends made. I figured I could get something more out of him if we spoke face to
face.
Honestly, I was stuck with the book. A single mugging doesnt warrant dressing up like clowns and
hitting back. There had to be something they knew that I didnt, and that would make everything click. The
more I thought about it, though, the more I feared the justification simply wasnt there or, worse, it was

something mundane, another insignificant action that wasnt quite enough to make a sane person become a
vigilante, costumed or not.
At the Pub, I was watching the Astros get embarrassed. Remi asked how the book was going, and I
shrugged my shoulders and told him that a shot of Bourbon said that Biggio would strike out.
After I paid for Remis shot, he walked over to the other end of the bar. I was staring at this sticker on
the wall between the register and the liquor selection. It was a crude illustration of an old dog: mangy fur,
thin as a rail, hunched over like it just got the shit kicked out of it, tail tucked awkwardly between its legs.
Beneath it: its been a good year.
Thats when Jean Paul came in and sat down at the bar, two stools away from me. Astros are having
a shit year, he said to the screen.
Arent we all? I said.
Jesus, man. I just meant baseball. He lit a cigarette and Remi brought him a Budweiser. A spiky
tattoo poked out his shirt sleeves. The television reflected off his glasses, so it was hard to tell if he was
looking at me or behind me to the rest of the bar.
Dude, Remi said to me, waving a thumb. This is JP.
JPs eyes widened. Carson?
I raised my bottle in a salute.
I thought Id run into you here.
Hows Boston? I asked.
Busy. Pretty bid adjustment.
I wasnt sure where I stood with him. I didnt know if I should press the situation right off or ease into
it somehow.
I used to play here, you know, he said after the first sip of his next beer. Whiskey Avenger. We
mostly made it up as we went along. He grinned to himself, looking around the pub.
I heard that, yeah. Heard youre quite the bassist.
No. I just look good doing it. He smirked and looked at the stage. There was an old billiard table
that these kids renovated to play something called beer pong. You mightve dug it.
I didnt think so, but I didnt tell him. Have you spoken with any of them lately? I asked.

The grin disappeared. He turned back to the screen and started drumming on the sticky bar with his
fingertips. He opened his mouth to answer, and then stopped himself. He took a long drag of his cigarette in
capitulation. Dude, what the hell do you know? You werent around when it happened. Whatve you got to
do with anything?
Nothing, I said. Probably nothing. I looked around the bar and knew that I was out of place.
Christ, I was the only guy in that place who knew what a Windsor knot was. As friendly as these guys had
been (I didnt expect anyone to talk to me, let alone conduct interviews; that kid bartender even wrote out
what happened to JP; Remi let me transcribe the recording of Andrew ranting, etc.), I was an outsider. Some
things you dont talk to outsiders about.
I saw Sal today, Jean Paul said as I was about to leave.
Sal?
Poiriers girl.
Hows she doing?
Shes in pieces. She wouldnt stop smiling. She wouldnt stop moving for anything, either. First it
was to get drinks. Then adjusting the thermostat. Then she stood next to her entertainment center messing
with the dragons.
Dragons?
These little porcelain things. Shes got a shit load of them around.
Shes been collecting for a while?
I never saw any of them before. Its weird. Her place was sort of in a mess. Dirty dishes, floor needed
sweeping, shit like that. But the dragons didnt have a speck of dust on them.
JP scratched his facial stubble. Remi had brought him another beer and quickly disappeared in the
back of the bar. I had considered abandoning the project. There was a stack of interviews and stories in my
hotel room, arranged into a few chapters that I numbered in chronological order with titles and everything,
and I didnt care anymore. It didnt seem complete. Something had to be missing, so I had been pumping
these guys for more information. The situation was just too simple. Maybe I was too close. Maybe it was
something else.
Yeah, I said. Weird.

(Letter from JP to Carson, dated May 2006)

Mr. Davis,
Id suppose the worst part about that night is I dont remember it. Ive reconstructed what happened
from listening to everyone else talk about it, but I cant honestly tell you anything. What I do remember is
being on stage with Drew and Poirier, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting in the parking lot with Jack
holding a bag of ice to my face and lighting a cigarette someone had given me.
You asked me if I learned anything from the experience. The closest thing to an answer is a story. The
night after the Pub incident, Erin bought me diner/breakfast at IHOP. She didnt say it, but I think she felt
responsible for what happened. It was late, about four a.m., and we were the only ones in the place. At some
point, she had gone to the can and I was sitting by myself at the table, sipping my coffee. I hadnt finished my
eggs because it hurt too much to chew, so I tried to avoid remembering it by gazing out the window. But the
night had turned the glass into a mirror, and I saw the bruises. For most of the day, I would do my best to
forget what was clear to anyone who saw my face. I learned quickly to avoid my reflection in restrooms and
car mirrors, but there in the restaurant, it snuck on me and I couldnt avoid it.
I could have died last night, I thought. I could have died and I wouldnt have even remembered it.
Dying in an alcoholic blackout. Sometimes, I think that I did die. Like that story (you probably know it) we
read in high school where the guy gets hanged in the Civil War, but he thinks he escapes and lives on for
years and years, but it turns out he did die and he just imagined it all while he was in the noose. Its like that.
Like I said, I try not to think about it too much. That night at IHOP, staring at my reflection in the
window, I was thinking about what it would mean to remember your own death. When Erin came back, we
paid the bill and left.
I dont really think about the guys who did it. They had their reasons and it probably didnt have
anything to do with me personally. I dont know their story and I dont care. These things happen. Maybe
you can find one of them wholl fess up and let you interview them. But to answer your question No, I dont
hate them. I would have to care first.
As for Jack and them, what can I say? They took it more seriously than I let myself do.
- JP

IX. Its Been a Good Year

i guess if someone reads this it probably means that i forgot my notebook at the pub. who knows where i am
now (?) let Remi know that he can keep all my notes and stuff. ive given up, i think. there is nothing to do
about it. murder is as old as the human condition. weve created religion to punish transgressors where
mans justice has failed. either that or we dress up as ninjas, i guess. is there really anyone to blame? we all
act in our own self interest, more or less. can understanding change any of that? we dont solve it we cope
with it. then we finish off our days collecting dragons. when i was writing today, i slipped up. i wrote my
wifes name instead of sals. it was the bit about the cookout after jps mugging. when i looked back at the
page, her name was there and i didnt remember writing it. how do we deal with a situation that we have no
control over? sometimes, sticking your head in the sand makes as much sense. yet we call those that so make
a stand heroes even if they are foolish. ive spent a year here looking for an ending. its not here. i drove
one thousand one hundred sixty four miles to get to this place, and her ghost followed every one of them.
only i cant bring myself to start gathering dragons for her. theres a web of no sense here. pick out a few
strands to highlight and you can approach something called meaning. but what if you highlight, there is no
meaning? but grow up, man. youre too old for that. right now, somewhere on the 196,937,400 square miles of
the planet, there is a good thing thats so goddamn profound that itll make you feel like an asshole to think,
even for a second, that dragons are silly. i guess i have to look for mine now. heroes. our greatest ones are the
ones who fail.
there was that one guy who is in the same boat. its just that his woman left him. they call him the smart one,
with the long damn beard. when i was interviewing him in the visitors area, he spotted my wedding ring.
youve been here for a while. you miss her? he asked.
sure, kid. i miss her
II. Ramification

The day after JP was mugged, Poirier bar-be-qued all afternoon; it was his goodbye to his friend. The
present group, however, was much more intimate than planned. It was a sunny, hot day as Poirier stood over
his pit in his backyard with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, can of beer in one hand and spatula in the
other.
Wont get the Creole cooking in Massachusetts, he called to JP over the small radio next to him on
his back porch. He began murmuring to the song.
Baby, Sal said standing next to him, youre killing the song. Just cook. She grabbed a link of
sausage off the pit. JP and Erin were reclined on the porch swing, she holding ice wrapped in a towel to his
left eye.
I dontthink itll swell up too much, she said.
Hooray. He knew the ice was a useless gesture twelve hours after the incident but wanted her to feel
as if she were helping.
I cant believe this. Of all people.
Yeah.
I mean, youve got, what, three days left here? I cant believe it.
Two days.
You know, I feel bad. It was sort of, kind of my fault.
It was your fault, Poirier called out, and then Sal punched him in the arm.
You, you stay out of this, she told Poirier.
It was your fault, JP said.
God, okay, okay. Im sorry. She held JPs head in both hands and looked directly at him, an inch
away from his face. Im sorry. She let his head fall back on his shoulders. Now, do you feel better?
Ow.
The small radio filled in the silence of the next few minutes. Poirier placed the freshly cooked
burgers on a plate and covered them with aluminum foil; Sal placed a few more on the grill, and put an
unannounced arm around Poirier.
Andrew walked through the back door, six-pack in hand. Get your booze here, ladies and
gentlemen. What, are you two cuddling? He nodded at the pair on the swing.

Poirier called out again through teeth gently clenched around the cigar. JP got pistol-whipped last
night.
God, Sal said, You can say it a little nicer.
For true? Beer, man? JP groaned and took the can. Andrew examined his bruised face. Christ, they
did a number on ya.
They hit him with a gun, Erin said. Really scary.
A goddamn gun? Andrew placed the remainder of the six-pack on the porch beside the pair. This
is fucked up. Hey, you remember that guy Squeaks?
Squeaks? The guitar guy? Sal asked.
Two weeks ago, he got mugged downtown. He was just walking back to his car. Got jumped by like,
four guys.
Erin stroked JPs hair. Looks like youre leaving just in time.
Thats it, Andrew said. You guys know where we can get some nun chucks?
THE END

Fall 2016
Christine Andrada Henley
dry rubbing against

we learn cursive and i love the sweeping tails of symbols, their tight loops.
from the start.
we all learn from the same long flat book with butcher paper paper and pale blue lines i often
confuse, and thisthe middle line: broken.
i get chills the way my pencil either slides over a page or tears it up, bunches beneath graphite; i look
out of windows. you see palm fronds, a little sunlight and snatches of sky but no glimpse of life on the
ground.1
some days the sky: white. hazy or smoggy or cloudy.
white grass and white builds, white shoes (my shoes white once). white hair won't curl or lie flat, wild
white. and white space and white flight. my white shirt ironed stiff, my white knee socks to cover the
burgeoning black hair on my legs. white ice cream studded with white raspberries and theremuddy
rivers of balsamic vinegar. and white cars travel in packs. towels white.
teeth white. 2
white white sky white with memory, pray white beads to bloody and no longer white.
blue skies arent meant for gazing from neat rows, from behind windows, but for hearing the palm fronds,
contemplating their scary, stabby bark. breezy and goose-bump arms. the squeak of pigeon wings as they
fly from one wire to another, congregating on rain gutters of the school building, their coos.
fragment: walking to a bus stop, a route which takes me beneath an interstate 10 freeway overpass.
many pigeons nest under. i fear being shit on (beware the pigeon butts).
cars and cars and cars so many of them, and a truckstriking a pigeon midair.
a burst of feathers; i watch its mate flutter about the bloody remains.
how do we hate whats capable of this kind of loss. 3
1

Education is the second phase of interpellation via desk rows, hand-raising to speak, public praise/humiliation and attempting to
homogenize script (which is impossible, except fonts), as well as acclimating children to hours spent producing product. The first
phase is being born.
2
White is typically associated with cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness.
3
Pigeons are reluctant to leave the nest, and do not depart unless forced out, typically during adolescence. People hate pigeons
due to their ugly appearance and their feces everywhere.

i miss penmanship. now its fonts(please see footnote 1). garamond uses less ink but keeps it classy i hear. i
love times new roman but it seems decadent. if i use garamond i save the world (sad face).
i type with my middle fingers. 4
maybe my thumbs too, if im feeling jazzy.
heat smothering oceanside when you arent caring about anything but sea shells.
and moist movement underfoot erases time and space and distance called shore.5
and how after digging up too many sand crabs you look for your family and theyre not where you
left them.
its not about anything. and i am pure in this place salty and covered in sand.
i shine like amber sea glass.
there is this story about how i get a baby blue skirt/sweater set for my birthday.
i wear it to school.
i wear it with white tights and black shoes i wear to churchall shiny.
black shoes with a strap and buckle.
at recess we play kickball and im up.
-bring it in!
classmates bring it in and i hate them.
the soccer ball rolls toward me and i kick with a whole soul, every muscle, a total focus, a big dumb
heart.
i kick, and it goes and goes and i get to run somewhere.
but i slip.
but i fall.
tights filthy where untorn. shoes scuffed. skirt hiked above waist. i hear laughing and laughing, hard
and aching as the asphalt i cry into.
pebbles embed themselves in skin around my elbow. scar.6
we copy and copy and still our letters look different from the booklet and from those of one another. like
finger prints, like laughs. like the way i grip my pencil tight and engrave paper with letters, their ghosts
haunt 4 pages underneath.
classmates write fat letters, curly letters, pointed letters, letters squished together, tiny letters, straight
up-and-down letters.
all different.7
10, sitting in a hard chair in sister ____s office.
-why is this writing so tiny.
4

This reflects a lack of hand/eye coordination, or confidence, and both.

Perhaps volume, though I couldnt explain why, and weight, and infinite directions and meaningless other measures as well.
6
It tells the story in braille. It tells the story of public humiliation. I have many scars. Each tell stories by braille. Each, a story of
humiliation.
7
Tiny yet innate propensity for human rebellion.
5

i move beyond the large-learning-ruled paper and use college ruled grown-up paper and my capital
letters do not reach anywhere near the top line. But the penmanship is neat.
-i dont know, sister ____.
-you have low self-esteem.
id never thought of this.
now its all i think about.8
i walk places. quickly without thinking except for how much longer.
one day, i grow up. everything thick and thicker with smoke. its fire season.9
mother is over there at the sink, the dish water cold.
grandmother is in her room being sick.10
head.

i press my forehead against the cool living room window, close my eyes, listen to the angels in my
they sing and talk amongst themselves.
my entire life: murmurs.
i strain to hear anything. a name. an answer. i don't ever.
it's not continuous or roaring (or maybe after a lifetime its white noise) but fragments like feeling
sorry for the kids renting roller skates because i have my own pair: a cherished gift at 7 years old.11
or wishing the funeral was over because its hot and we wear black clothes. grandmother has a
breakdown i don't believe. she slides from her chair and presses her head to the casket.12
-no no no no no!13
who am i to do that.14
when its over i get situated on the scratchy plaid couch (brown/tan/gold/orange) next to my sisters
who fidget and kick the couch with the heels of their mary janes and want to play outside.
so do ikick the couch with the heels of my mary janes bought special.
8

When I am in fourth grade, Im sent to Sister ____s office because my penmanship, though neat, is considered illegible. She asks
if I am feeling good about myself. My mother is in the office with us. I say Im fine.
9
Fire is a season Southern California, and elsewhere with similar climate and drought. The Santa Anas rub the valley raw to
aching, then finally aflame. Fire is greedy and indiscriminate, a judgement.
10
A fiction.
11
Black middle class: Father a deputy sheriff, mother a social worker. We children attend Catholic school. We attend mass every
Sunday. Father sings in the choir. Mother bakes for the churchs Christmas bizarre. We go to Christmas parties held at the
homes of judges and lawyers. We wear good shoes and crisp plaid uniform skirts. We are clean and neat. We have manners, and
father tells us at dinner to always speak properly, to always be clean and neat.
12
I am a deist, but also sometimes atheist.
13
Before her illness, Grandmother made a chocolate cake from scratch but forgot the sugar. She made me eat two pieces.
14
No one special. Just an asshole, or an impressionable child, but what is the difference when you deeply consider it, for are we all
not assholes, some more continuously than others. Moreover, I hate herthat is who I am.

every time the door opens i expect to see him.

it opens and opens and opens and opens and opens. he never shows. 15
one day i grow up and cry in the darka thing i do the rest of my life.16
fragment: swimming lessons in the heavily chlorinated pool at the y, dairy queen after. fingers sticky from
melting cones. chocolate dip cones: our favorite these summer days before smog alerts and their stages.
unable to play outside a travesty. for days on end (indescribable). tip-toeing because grandmother is
in her room being sick, mother at the sink filled with cold water, and quiet, quiet, quiet.
an unnatural state of affairs: whisper whisper.
and quiet crushes (impending doom sounds heavier than it is).17
first i sweep the patio with the big brush broom.18
im afraid of it because it looks like a big mustache.19
next fill the bucket with soapy water, get down on my hands and knees, scrub it all with a wire scrub
brush.20
rinse with the water hose and push excess water and suds into grass with the scary broom. air dry.
skate.
quiet is white too. like snow. like smoke.
mother cant play her lady sings the blues album. nor mariam makeba. nor barbara streisand. al
green. fleetwood mac.21
aretha.
and no, i may not roller skate out on the back patio.
-we have to be quiet. grandmother isnt well today.
-but mama, i feel fine.
-im sorry but no.
-shes never doing well.
(sad face).
smog alert stage 3: we cant see the mountains surrounding us.
15

He is dead.
Memory is torture because of Love. Love is torture because of memory. Someone leaves and you cry over the memories
entangled with that one. Moreover, memory wants to embellish, so the love is even more loving than it actually was, the loss
greater.
17
Growing up in a home which imposes constant quietude on its inhabitants results in children growing into passive aggressive
adults, or those who cannot speak up, or the opposite. Sometimes, upon exiting the quiet, a person may exhibit
loud/impulsive/brash behavior. The reason for the quiet, despised.
18
When roller skating on surfaces other than the shining hardwood floors of roller rinks, you must be sure to clear the space of any
debris.
19
I feared strange things, and still do, and I believe we all do: moths, falling backward, white boys in cargo shorts and a snap-back,
middle-aged white women in visors, especially when travelling in packs, spiders, men in general, my own god damn self, etcetera.
20
Dying when anyone enters the living room just cleaned, uses a toilet just scrubbed to gleam, and feel it in my stomach. I hold
grudges.
21
Mother: her heart through the albums she played while scouring. Al Green was mother on an old desire. Fleetwood Mac, youth.
Mariam Makeba, open. Lady Sings the Blues Soundtrack meant I would hug her a lot, she was sad, and I didnt want her to go.
16

before kindergarten i visit a doctor who asks me about colors.

-what color is the sky.
-brown.
-its not brown, its blue.
-but theres a smog alert.
and brown has its own kind of beauty but i dont know until soon, when surrounded by blue.
blue is painful because its dense when it is sky.
fragment: i look at a painting in the l.a. county museum of art.
it is a diego rivera painting.
of calla lilies.
dusty yellows, billowing brown braids of a girl.
i watch her carry the long-stalked burdens of beauty, of her head tilted downward, of something near
me but not quiteand her brown skin.
the sisters and i drink but not how you're thinking. we sit around and drink and laugh.
and loud as fuck.
and we drink away from one another, much quieter.
(its better together).
we drink wine. we drink liquor. we drink beer.
some of us better than others.
we are craftsmen. we are a process of red deepening. we curl. we bend. we break.. we like it and so
do you.22
queer, but not how you think and exactly what you think.23
when we drink its art. the hand holding a cup holds a cigarette and our laughing holds smoke. our
hearts hold roadmaps of missing men and women, fear of dire consequences. wash this fear with clear and
amber liquids. sometimes, adorned with a pimento olive. other times a slice of lemon, a sprig of mint
on my breath gin secrets, and unending.
-have you been drinking.24
can i give my life to someone elseone who appreciates the many good things i find claustrophobic.
one day i grow up.
i make fun of a man once. his head hangs to the side. i drop my head. 25
22

Something about being broken or bent appears to be attractive to some others who look for nothing in particular in regard to
intimacy, camaraderienot love but maybe just fucking. Sometimes we want more, but never need. We laugh when men believe
theyve hurt us by not feeling in love. We love one another everlastingbetter than gods.
23
This is my moment.
24
Why do people ask this?
25
The condition is called Torticollis, or wry neck. It can be temporary, or fixed. It can be painful, or painful.

-mom.
-thats wrong.
-thats how he looks.26
-you were born with your head just like that.
mother is over there at the kitchen sink and i am here with my head against a cool pane of glass: a window.
i'm listening to (angels).27
they don't have wings but drift on air currents. they're fuzzy and teeny-teeny tiny, only seen when
they catch light. always whispering and infinite. mom knows about angels. and i learn about them in
school.28
the school is private because its catholic.
angels watch over. angels never sleep. big white angels with white wings and brass clothes and brass
sandals and brass shields and brass swords and ringlets for hair. halos and violent, but benevolently,
benevolently violent on our behalf.29
6, i watch a group (of boys) pour salt on a slug and dont look away. neither do they. the angels do
not eitherlook away.30
we all watch the frothing mess.
i know not to mention the angels ever. everyone says theyre real but not the way i know.
youre not supposed to hear them.
anyone who told me about angels and how they protect people and fight for god and fight the devil
would tell me, no.
-those are not angels.31
why your/youre/(yore, and who the hell uses yore ever anymore).
we know exactly which with context but use anything at our disposal.32
its arbitrary but spider web too.
it cant help itssf.33
the guilt of this instead of the breeze on my sweaty neck and how dry its been because its fire season creates
gritty film on the skin.
26

Only my ears are so hot, jaw burning, the wind in my stomach.

Present but not, hence the parenthetical erasure.
28
Or dust motes.
29
I often heard a thousand angels fit on the head of a pin. What can they do at that level of infinite smallness?
30
I am not supposed to mention boys, next men, then men and boys, will be the most hurtful things to happen. I loathe them and
love them fiercely. I consume them by the bagful, even though they are high in cholesterol, and slug is a symbol.
31
Then what are they?
32
I/you/we have been conditioned to judge character and credibility based on spelling among other things like grades, skin color,
condition of shoes, teeth, fingernails, region, accent, car driven, colors worn, weight, scent, shape, handshake, set of eyes, etcetera,
etcetera.
33
Purposeful misspelling of itself, but you read the word as itself still.
27

september and october after dry august they come: the santa ana winds.
the sainted gusts sift us.
there is a culture of fire, a smog culture and that of cleansing winds in southern california. a
judgement on hilltop/hillside living.
californians: watch shit burn on the news. they donate blankets and clothes and lament the loss of
other peoples photos.34
californians: levels of pyromania ranging from devastation porn to finding dry places to set ablaze.
fires start from some assholes cigarette butt tossed from a car window sometimes. and the mountains burn,
sky raining ash. for days. schools close and force us indoors.35
mostly its dry things rubbing against themselves and one another.
it begins with gusting warm air, the santa ana winds. and you smell every blade of grass, all the tree
limbs, leaves, leaves, asphalt, and its beautiful hot. the sky white.
chimera.
eyes go wild and violent and we want to barbeque and drink beers and argue and fight. big rigs turn
on their sides in the cajon pass. we want to fuck in air-conditioned bedrooms.
impending doom sounds heavier than it is, and is instead warmth upon the face, salty skin, enigmatic
attractions, and we drive wild. 36
then mid-morning/early afternoon a tower of smoke billows gray/black in the distance. or white if
the trees are damp or fresh but this is rare.
wind picks up.
a roaring fire.
its never simple.37
i watch fire spill down a mountainside like liquid more hypnotic than the sound of ocean waves or
angel-song or gin. i watch for hours with this desire to discern its properties, describe its color to myself, yet
cannot.
(maybe you can help me. what is the color of fire.)
but you feel it all in your chest.38
soon the sky is dark with the ghosts of trees and deer and stupid birds, running bears who (sadly) do
not run faster than fire runs, and youre outside smoking a cigarette under the porch awning watching the
ash of trees and deer and stupid birds, running bears who sadly do not outrun the fire, coat the windshield of
your car.
the conversations had, the live reports, firestorm (insert year here): it comes for all, whether 60 miles
east or 7 miles north or youre hosing down your house while the rest gather together treasures like social
security cards and favorite toys.39
34

Swooooooop.
Watch others lose everything and, as a result. Fill with a self-congratulatory tinged relief (as if character saved you), or false
gratitude, for all that you still possess. Or perhaps the gratitude is genuine, but who can know for sure?
36
I once let a pizza delivery guy finger-bang me in the back seat of his tricked-out red Mazda. He had gold fronts. I didnt know
his name. He kissed me so hard my teeth sliced my lips. Deep. I was sixteen and sweating and coming while the San Bernardino
Mountains burned.
37
Moist, Moist: stigmatized and loathed for its feminization. Such a round, Pussy-word.
38
Riverside County maintains a high infant mortality rate due to air pollution. Smoke/smog/all debris collects itself there. An
external oppression creates a worldview.
35

it feels like were all in it together but are not.

it feels like it though.
it feels like it.
feels like it though dont you think.
so where are the angels.
just here in my head.
one day i grow up and know how quiet works.
the strangest quiet is when the sky is empty of planes, when its so hot outside, when the world sleeps
and the crickets with their songs of aggression/their songs of loneliness and inexplicable need for action
(because do they feel lonesome or just switched on to procreate when the sun sits a certain place in the sky),
when you smell coffee in the 2 am air.40
in the shower fat and tender, a fat and tender stalk of something, of asparagus, of a tulip, or fat and
tender as a pollen-laden leg of a bee, a pretty-ish girl once with watery hair and brown eyes.41
(i listen to blur).
i love a lot of people, and love is a devouring.
i can pour myself into anything just enough.42
some get gin. others, a smoky tongue. also anything blue. maybe high.
but i am a sun.
the sun devours.
we need it to live but it eats us back.
and we live as long as the sun(please see footnote 42).
in the kitchen: apples, oranges, tortilla chips, coffee.
alfredo sauce.
when a jar is empty, i wash it.
39

I love watching high speed chases on the news with the surprise endings.
Stop disparaging the run-on.
41
A fat adolescence never departs from me. When I weigh 120 pounds for a period, I am fat. When I weigh 160 pounds, I am fat. I
am fat while sleeping, especially fat when dressing each morning. Fat is inescapable. Fattest when I eat, regardless. Always
regardless.
42
Lovers romanticized. Not mine but everyones idea of Lover. (A Type of Person): die young or live old and vibrant called a zest
for life. But the disciplined love of Another Type of Person, who loves selectively but wholly, in those moments, with those people,
live longer. Lovers good. /Haters Bad/. So much time wasted defending beliefs and life and we all go to dirt. Some of us greedy
though, consuming always. Were all Loverslovers of booze and porn and nature and shopping and feet and each other or one
another and skiing and the slick cool of slipping fingers into bags of raw rice or beans in the bulk bins at health food stores when
Im five and that is in 1977. At the time, overalls were all the rage and denim overalls over clingy polyester shirts was not conducive
living in burning Southern California and everyone and everything was always shiny. Foreheads and upper lips, chimera on
sidewalks, off mailboxes and cars, and still everybody out in a version of this pairing in 90+ heat, long lines at gas stations,
running into Crowns with a note. The store: cool and weird feeling, coming out with cigarettes for Dad and a Nehi grape soda
warming in your salt-grimed hands.
I once stole a pack of Fruit Stripes from this store.
40

i store the jars in a cupboard for jars. it is not made for jars but becomes so thoughtlessly. i simply
place jar after jar in this cupboard.43
i listen to madvillain because im angry about nothing in particular.
i look at the jars in the cupboard. tightly packed glass paraphernalia which over time, form tiny
cracks at their lips and their dust, their pretty little star dust, glitters on the shelves.
nothing i want is in the refrigerator.
i dont eat because i dont feel like washing dishes after.
(i listen to georgia anne muldrow).
(i listen to the refrigerator).
i listen to the heartbeat in my ears and have nightmares. walls are everywhere and i face them with
my eyes closed.
my heartbeat in my ears, and angelsaloof and continuous.44
a nightmare, its something else-ness or its pituitary gland or the chemicals and codes, strings of dna,
shining red and blue and green with it, and the ability to create hurt manifests a mosquito bite.
a nightmare i sleep clean through.45
i havent many mosquito bites year after year. maybe one on my foot. maybe two. each summer all
these summers.46
the unbearable itch. terrible and everlasting until it heals or a new one swells.
just enough.47
one day i grow up merciless in regard to lost objects of mine (and others).
i cant help you except the last place i see it may be on top of the microwave or sitting in the
dishwasher or hanging there or there, or folded in sweet/yellowed linen, placed in a small cardboard box,
tucked in the corner of a closet either here or upstairs or left behind in a place we live years ago.
i still love you.48
im no use after that.49

43

Ive collected TV Guides and Elle magazines, white lighters and white men, cards for occasions like bat-mitzvahs or
Wednesdays, eyes of the moribund and Virgen De Guadalupe candles I never burn but regard with the expectation of magic,
books and different types of tea (loose leaf and bagged).
44
Precursor to nightmares of being lost, chased. Lately, its corridors. Previously it was just a bad feeling of grinding my teeth and
waking with bleeding gums.
45
I make these small paragraphs. And these paragraphs make me small. And small paragraphs are frightening, with how small I
am, making them.
46
Like California quakes. (See footnote 45)
47
A pretty evening rain after warm weather, and we like the smell because it smells and tastes and feels like cool pennies that
smell like copper that smells like blood.
48
Tightly packed adverbs and their tarnished reputations.
49
Maybe this is forward, my scars, my ugly feet, my scars deepening, darkening in different, connoted, spaces. My ugly feet.

i walk great lengths and feel it roiling in hip joints. stiff platelets collect themselves in the shallows of this
haunted sacrumsoftened after years of wear and tear(s).
i drink coffee across from a man with his latte, his beard, some dot of foam quivering on his bottom
lip.50
fragment: a wafer placed on my tongue because it is time. other girls in white dresses and veils, white tights
or little white anklets with little white lace, their white shoes patent leather with little heels. i press the wafer
to the roof of my mouth.51
i press the wafer to the roof of my mouth and stinging wine doesnt wash it away.
i press the wafer to the roof of my mouth, where it remains.
we go to breakfast at dennys, me all ugly famished even after the body and blood of christ.
the symbology lost on me.52
i clean the char of yesterdays soul from the rim of the bowl.
i remember burnt things, smell traces of you on my fingertips after. pack it fresh. burn it again.53
i dont remember 5 minutes ago. maybe yesterday never happens. or this. or touching wet hairmy
teeth grit.
one day i grow up and more is accumulated.
more to remember and/or forget.
i do.
faithfully.
now, walking in a different place. i walk in an abundance of trees: confiers, cottonwood, japanese maple,
cherry trees, silver birch with their fixed gaze, but the pear trees are fenced and inaccessible, and here are
orchards left to die.54
i walk in abundance around me but no industry unrelated to retirees or cannabis or catering to those
above the boulevard.55
fire is not here(please see footnote 9).
what is here is smoke from happy camp. dead skied summers every other summer.56
50

While not hotly debated, rarely pointed out due to the collective idea that these are interchangeable, nauseous and nauseated
each work here, but it is a fluke of the experience.
51
But no, my face bare and open to the priest. I do not wear white but a dress pleated and peachy colors, my shoes brown. I call
them boy-shoes. It looks like I dont love Jesus at all.
52
Eat me to marrow-suck five minutes after the apocalypse begins.
53
Ricki Lee Fowler awaits the death penalty for starting The Old Fire in San Bernardino in 2003, as well as five counts of murder
all heart attacks induced by the physical and emotional doom of the blaze, all men. Jeremiah Hope went off-roading with some
buddies and his vehicle started The Playground Fire, which merged with The Old Fire. Estimated total of acres burned: 91,281.
54
Pyrus communis, or pear, is the state fruit of Oregon. Pear production in the states Rogue River Valley has been greatly
reduced, with current acreage roughly half of what it was during its prime. The Great Spring Frost of 2010 had a huge impact on
growers and now orchards unkempt, damaged, dying, or dead, abound.
55
A saying meaning I am rich, but dont want to be rude, yet need you to know. Please note: below the boulevard requires wealth but
exists at a lower elevation creating a level view, as opposed to abovewhere one has a view of those below.

what is here is rain.

rain.
rain.
r
a
i
n often enough and i contemplate slicing my arms at the elbow after two days
and weeks and gray wet nothing sopping.
i sleep instead.57
i stand at the sink. the children do not make it.
i am alone with the jars.
fragment: i walk the side of a tall and natural structure.
i sweat sweet smells profuselya dead saint.
sunlight exceptionally direct and heavy on my person, on the twist of a green snake.
i am scream.58
i scream and am screaming and no one stops or no one looks.
i am here at the kitchen sink looking out the window.
cool water runs over my wrists. the sky out there is white.
out there without depth: white.
the white is flat and keeping heat.
(i listen to nothing).
(i listen to the gentle roar of angels in my head).
hear the cool water hiss over my skin.
when i am pretty i am high.
or you are.
hooded eyes and ease of forgetting deepen a plum of my lip, pupils of the eyes stuck in my head.
so deep you could rummage there.59
i am laughing.

56

Unlike Southern Californias fires, this is not considered judgement. This is something from over there, not ours, a prevalent
attitude held by Oregon residents.
57
Rain pelts windows, its beat without rhythm but constant, reminding me of something within myself which comforts or protects.
What is it, I search.
58
I have forgotten quiet.
59
You could find any type of treasure here: smiles, desire, candids of butterflies and worms, rainbows, and all manner of food
considered bad for you, words and words, words, words, an infinity of words. Also looks of suspicion and surprise. Calla lilies.

Fall 2016
Hannah Fradkin

Hexadecimal
Infatuation.
Strawberries on a hillside.
Naive resentment.
Autumn: all has changed.
You are always welcome here.
You dont have to call.
There is life in you.
You are bathing in her light.
Do you understand?
You are young again.
You dont wear your shoes outside.
All is tender now.
Heartbreak, heartache, woe,
it has been cloudy for days.
Your body craves warmth.
Everything is noise.
The bath is overflowing.
Close your eyes again.

There Are No Carousels In The Future (What Purpose Would They Serve?)
The water ends where
the land begins.
Teach me continuum.
I will answer you
with honey-spread toast and
shea butter moonlight.
My curiosity knows no bounds!
Does the sky face the earth
or does the earth face the sky?
What will you say when
I am facing you with my
cheeks tear-stained
and my heart broken
again. And you are
facing me with
nothing left
but open
arms.
Hear no evil!
There are hummingbirds
in these meadows.
All they know is
forgiveness and flight.
There are goldfish
in these lakes.
The only thing
theyll ever know,
theyve already forgotten.
I have been counting
the cycles of the moon
since I met you. And what
more are these than words
on a page? What more
are the creases on your face
than lines drawn with a heavy
hand? Everything I remember

is tinted yellow. Everything

I remember is sparkling
and changing and I dont know
where I put my keys.
Look for the future
in the past. The world
is round! Life is round!
And what good is a circle
but for its repetition?
You can translate the graph
but the points are still the same points.
Still the same pockmarked pen marks
on the same piece of graph paper.
Rearranging is not changing.
The sun cries more than the moon
but the moon feels deeper,
feels stronger.

Fall 2016
Ian McPhail

thickened mug fingers

hairy with folding around
your neck is limps
you see it cannot possibly keep up
keep
keep

the ole you betcha

down the back like a shirt thats
inside out
its your own face that
smiled in a cold caught
flu fabric green a an eye tooth
winked as an nail
chum!

humps hills apart

yo he apart is hilly
he humps hills apart, hilly
you know it to be just
like the attitude to be
the attitude to be is you hump
the hills apart
hilly to be
is you

fermented loaves in the corner

of wrong mouths
play your lips over the wedge of
cheese that is your being
play your teeth over the vast quantities
of electric charge
that mull in the corners of hidden flesh
the flesh mouths the flesh
the fleshy teeth mouth
the teeth lips
the teeth lip
bite the dark

cow eyed festered mump

under the arm pit
yes pit
it is older
gravity varnished tongue louse
scabbed like a morning meal
scalds the butter of boil
aluminum until
until

Fall 2016
Jake McCulley

Apophenia

Do you have friends?

These questions have been coming for hours. Theres been blood drawn, bones scanned, cold
hospital pancakes eaten, and all these brutal questions asked.
I mean, I croak, unable to accept what my brain is thinking, I...yes. I have friends. To say the no
that I instinctively felt would be, ironically, to betray my friends, who, it seems, truly care about me in some
capacity outside my understanding. Besides, I think no is the true lie, but its a lie I tell myself each day,
and so I really cant tell what the correct honest answer would be. Hopefully the hesitation and selfquestioning in the answer I gave will be nuanced enough for the questionnaires yes/no checkbox.
The questions hurt, but my face is expressionless. Answering them has me confused, and my voice
sounds weak. It falls away just before the words finish. I feel faint, need a cigarette and a strong drink. Nicole,
the asker, is a graduate student in the school of psychiatry, and Im a part of her two-year experiment on the
effects of antidepressants on bone density. The questions are designed to account for any possible
psychological variables which also affect bone density. As in, is my depression such a stressor that its

weakening my bones?
It is difficult for me to stay honest, because Nicole is so beautiful. I like looking at her eyes, or,
perhaps, making eye contact with her. I know I must look pitiful to her. She stays professionally reserved, no
judgment in her opaline eyes, but I know she is a human and the person in her thinks something of me, and
considering what Ive told her, pity is most positive response she could likely have. I expect a mixture of
revulsion, pity, and scientific curiosity, like a forensic pathologist confronted with an especially mutilated
corpse.
But even that's being optimistic; a corpse takes the shape of a human. A corpse is sympathetic. I'm
SB088, one of 200 subjects in this richly funded experiment. They call me a subject, but of course I'm
actually an object. It isn't me Nicole is interested in, but my belongings: memories, feelings, ambitions, habits,
none of which quite add up to me. And even if those belongings are important to me, after so many extensive
interviews there's simply no way anything I'm saying is of more than bare statistical interest to her. I'm as
interesting as any random point on a line graph. I'm not even a standout datum; I have what they call
moderate major depressive disorder, as opposed to mild or severe.
Knowing all of that doesn't change how I feel about Nicole. She's spent the last three hours
penetrating to my most carefully guarded personal issues, and I've been letting her. And I've been wanting
her to penetrate further. I want her to reach out and grab my hand, if only for a second, but I know she won't,
so I tell myself I don't care. I've been staying honest, and I've been proud of that honesty, and so I've felt as if
we're actually connecting in some sterile way.
Do you often worry that you will do something socially unacceptable in public, despite your best
efforts not to?

Yes.
Does that worry often prevent you from going places with your family?
No.
Does that worry often prevent you from going places with your friends or peers?
Yes.
How often does that worry prevent you from going places with your friends or peers? Almost all of
the time, some of the time, or not very much of the time?
Almost all of the time.
Do you get upset with yourself for that worry?
Yes.
How upset with yourself do you get? Very upset, somewhat upset, or not very upset?
Very upset.
What do you worry that you might do that is socially unacceptable?
I have no idea. Nothing.
I don't know what it would be. But I do have this constant paranoia that I'm about to black out or lose
control of my mouth or my body, and I feel like if I don't exert constant self-control, if I am not constantly
present to say no to a bunch of unconscious requests being sent to my prefrontal cortex, then I'd, like...go
feral, I guess. Like I'd just rip off my clothes, crash through the caf window, and either start humping every
shapely leg I see or lope away into the forest, never to be seen again. That's assuming I wasn't captured and
institutionalized, which would really be the worst possibility. The fear of being institutionalized is, as any
civilized person knows, paradoxical, because civilization itself is an institution. But when that worry

becomes prevalent, which is often, I become very preoccupied with my body, just focusing on the constant
fact that nothing has gone wrong yet, and I lose my ability to be really present in whatever social setting I'm
supposedly in. In fact I desperately wish that I would lose control, that I would do something socially
unacceptable, just so I can see it's not the end of the world like I Know in my Intellectual Brain it wouldn't be.
But no, I am always careful not to do anything, especially not in public.
And see, as a Sensitive and Intelligent Young Man, I like to think of my social anxiety as almost like a
badge of unique Sensitivity and Intelligence. I kind of hate that these questions are even on Nicole's list, not
so much because I hate answering them, but because their presence suggests that I'm not special for having
this problem, that if I'm going to be a Tortured Artist I'm going to have to find a much more unique and
interesting way to suffer. What I really need is a chance to explain why I'm so socially anxious, so that I could
show Nicole how deep that particular rabbit hole goes.
Do you often believe that there is a conspiracy to poison you, arrest you, or in some other way to
ruin your life?
No. I actually laugh a bit, but the laugh is cut short as I recognize how much similarity those sorts of
delusions have to my own. I have a feeling I know where this is going.
Do you often believe that a song, tv show, or public event was created just for you?
Yes. Deep shame. And probably not a lot of relevance to Nicole's study. But as much as she needs to
hear this information, I need to hear it more. How was it that a few seconds ago I thought I was proud of my
rabbit hole? I am not proud, I'm ashamed. But in this setting, with the hospital gown already on, the voice
recorder already running, the ugly stainless steel and fluorescent box already containing me, I may as well
make my confession.

Her eyebrows raise almost imperceptibly. Can you think of an example?

Sure, that's easy, I say, knowing full well the example I'm going to provide isn't what she's asking
for. Do you know 'The Times, They are A-Changin,' by Bob Dylan? It's so odd that I would bring that up. I
don't even like that song that much. I guess I'm stalling. I'm starting to sweat.
I've heard it. What is it about that song?
Well, the lyrics are crafted to exceed time and space. Anyone who speaks English and has a
progressive heart will recognize them as being about their own moment. It's not a fact, exactly, that the times
are a-changin'. It's more like a hope, or a promise. Maybe when Bob Dylan wrote it, it was literally true, but
the historical facts are less important than the feeling being described. The song knows my hopes, almost as
if Bob Dylan reached into my brain to find them.
But you don't believe he was literally thinking of you when he wrote it?
No. Her expression relaxes minutely. I think she looks...relieved. Or maybe disappointed. Do
psychologists dream of that one case study, the real aberration, the disclosure of whom will make their
career? At any rate, she thinks I misunderstood the question. I was stalling. She's going to ask again.
Okay. But so, can you think of any examples where you did think it was for you specifically?
Shit. I've been honest this far. I wonder if she realizes I'm using this interview as a chance for selfexploration. I wonder how many of her subjects do the same. If we are all lonely, then conversations like this
are rare opportunities.
Yes I can. And it's going to be what the question was asking for. I don't why I said that thing about
Bob Dylan, that was just a waste of time. Sorry. The most recent time it happened was on Monday night. We
had a staff meeting at the college newspaper, to talk about our individual plans for the next semester. I was

feeling particularly depressed and antisocial that day, and I wasn't allowing myself to make eye contact or
smile. All I wanted was to leave.
She will understand this as something of a confession in itself. This is not ordinary conversation; it
has taken on a profound significance for precisely one half of its participants.
Anyway, two of my coworkers, Gabby and Meagan, were discussing whether we should order pizza
or some such triviality, which I immediately forgot under the weight of the experience that followed. Gabby,
it's important to say, is significantly more attractive than Meagan. Not only physically, although she is
attractive, but she's also a persistent and effective journalist. She's good at her job, and passionate. She's
professional. She belongs. If I ever spoke to Gabby, I might be able to develop a crush on her. Not so with
Meagan, who for me vanishes into the background.
So they were talking about, let's say, ordering pizza, and this was early on into the meeting but
already I just wanted to run away and crawl into bed, but then Gabby and Meagan both turned
questioningly toward me. I don't know why, I think maybe the staff had all voted and I was the only one who
hadn't expressed an opinion, but I don't know for sure that that's what was going on. And so Gabby and
Meagan are both looking at me expecting something, and rudely, cruelly, I don't acknowledge Meagan at all,
but I look toward Gabby with this feeble smile, the closest I can come to flirtation at this stage in my life.
Shortly after that interaction I realized what I had done, how I had in my passive way dehumanized
Meagan. I have nothing against her, and didn't mean to slight her, so I hoped that it had passed unnoticed
and resolved to interact even less, if possible.
And you can tell I've been thinking about this a lot, can't you? I've been thinking about it and
thinking about it, which I'm sure you expect anyway, as a psychologist dealing with a depressed person. I

ruminate.
So anyway, after I've made my clumsy, sheepish, and brief eye contact with Gabby, I'm thinking
about how I was just rude to Meagan but I'm also thinking about how pathetic it is that I think of my eye
contact and my ugly little smile as flirting, how there's absolutely no chance she understood what had just
passed between us as flirting. And I'm wondering how does she see me? Does she see me at all? I'm on high
alert for any kind of clue. And some short time later, or I don't really know how long it was, because that
whole meeting felt interminable, Gabby says See, the street goes both ways for that one. I'm not sure who
she was talking to, or what the context was, but I know she said The street goes both ways for that one.
Which, you probably hear that and you're wondering how I could possibly draw any kind of parallel
between that sentence and my non-relationship with Gabby, and you get that she wasn't talking to me or
about me, and in fact now I can't even remember the exact instance at which Gabby and Meagan turned to
me, like maybe it just didn't happen at all. But I know she said The street goes both ways for that one, and
because I'm extraordinarily self-centered, as depressed people are, I began to suspect that there was some
Freudian subtext I was meant to pick up on. As in, her sentence The street goes both ways for that one was
her implausibly subtle way of pointing out that she had recognized my interest in her, as in, I was that one,
and the street was her metaphor for the line which had been briefly sketched between our eyes.
It's probably amazing to you that I could interpret Gabby's sentence that way. Not amazing, like
you think it's brilliant or intuitive, but just, like, crazy that a person could be thinking that way. Like I
somehow thought she was flirting even more subtly and weirdly than me. I can't say for sure whether I really
believed that. I guess I wanted to believe it bad enough that what I really believed didn't matter. At this
point, although I knew deep down that I was overthinking to a degree which literally caused me physical

distress, I couldn't help but focus with laser precision on parsing all the possible social and sexual subtexts
within the conversation in the room, in a vain attempt to discover whether they might have been about me. I
was also conscious that this is probably symptomatic of a serious mental disorder.
Anyway, the meeting went on for maybe five more minutes, with my brain doing arbitrary analytical
somersaults to the point of exhausting itself, when the managing editor told a story. Jordan. That's the
managing editor.
She told us a story about one of her sports reporters. She was using it as an example of how we
should pursue our sources. This reporter, she told us, went to weekly press conferences for some
unpopular sport, women's lacrosse I think, and at these conferences she was always the only journalist
present. It was only her and the coach, but the coach would walk up to the podium and give her speech and
then field questions as if there was a full crowd, and the reporter would take notes and raise her hand and
wait to be called on to ask questions, as if it was a real conference.
I laugh as I summarize Jordan's story. Nicole laughs too, but it might just be an intentional reciprocal
thing she's doing to make me feel at ease and continue my story. She is unblinkingly professional. If she
weren't, I would surely fall in love with her, as easily as I would fall in love with Gabby if I'd ever confessed to
her for this long. I would like to fall in love with Nicole, to fall in love with that playful spray of freckles
across her nose and cheeks, that parallel spray disappearing beneath her blouse. I couldn't be slaked by
merely fucking her, though merely is a hilarious word to use since we aren't even on the same plane of
existence. I haven't been in love in a long time, and sustained, honest interactions like this are a rare treat for
me. If I weren't depressed, the experience would make me smile. I might even become charming. But in fact,
I do laugh at my story.

I think it is kind of funny, right? This coach and this reporter just going through the professional
motions, unable or unwilling to act like normal people? Trapped in the narrow, societally defined roles
they've chosen for themselves? Actually, when you analyze it, it starts to get pathetic instead of funny. And
Jordan told us this story as an example of the right way to behave. Professional and right in this case
being identical. It's the sort of thing that makes me think I should go feral.
So she tells us this story, and keep in mind that I'm already feeling completely isolated from
everyone else in the conference room, who all joke with each other and smile and make eye contact and just
interact in a normal way, but I'm totally excluded from that. I exclude myself. I'm separate, lonely, other.
Like an alien observer. I think I've already explained the alien thing, right? Plus, due to the events earlier in
the conference I'm temporarily obsessed with the notion that everyone might be talking, consciously or not,
in code about me, plus I'm keenly aware that I'm thinking in an insane way. But anyway, she tells us this
story about the sports reporter and the coach going through the motions of a press conference, and for a
brief moment I'm actually interested in what other people think of something besides me. I wonder if they're
hearing the same thing as me, if this story also strikes them as humorously off-base. So I look around with
my eyes and my face, but it seems like I'm the only one who thinks that story is bizarre and the opposite of
inspiring. I think I even let out a laugh, but I was the only one who laughed, which of course made me feel
even more alien, because of course laughter is meant to be a social behavior.
But it was how she summarized the story that really threw me for a loop. She ended with the
following sentence, which I remember verbatim because it fucked with my head so bad, she summarized it
by saying So the whole conference is fake, and it's only for one person, but they're having it anyway to try to
help that one person. She said it in the present tense like that. Go ahead and hear that properly in your

brain, as if you're sitting there and someone says to you, in the middle of a conference, The whole
conference is fake, and it's only for one person, but they're having it anyway to try to help that one person,
and maybe, hopefully, I pray you'll understand the way my brain heard that sentence. My brain heard the
sentence The whole conference is fake, and it's only for one person, but they're having it anyway to try to
help that one person, and started to think she was talking about this current conference we are in right now,
and that I am the one person she's been talking about, and that they're trying to help me. And so that's why I
feel so alien, that's why everything seems absurd and only provisionally real, because in fact this whole event
isn't real and everyone is just acting and they're about to pull back the curtains and reveal that I've been a
part of some grand social experiment. And then everyone will admit that the story about the sports reporter
was a weird one, and explain that they had to do it to make me realize what was going on, and there's a
whole team of sociologists and psychoanalysts on the other side of the door just waiting to tell me that I'm
not insane, and they'll be able to explain to me why everything feels so wrong and this fake world I'm living
in will give way to the real one I suspect, and my whole history will tumble together like dominoes. Like The
Truman Show, basically.
I've never told anyone about these delusions. Not in detail, at least. Nicole is the first. I'm so ashamed,
for reasons I don't fully understand, but basically which come down to a stigma (at least my perception of a
stigma) around that sort of truly insane mental issue, and how I've felt that my intelligence is the only
unassailably good quality about me. I am a precocious individual. It is precious to me, as it has been since I
first carved myself a niche in elementary school. I don't ever want anyone to question that I'm smart, so I
keep a tight lid on things that might be construed as stupid, a habit which is itself stupid. I can't help it, my
self-image is too delicate and too tied up in my own intelligence.

But there's a little more to it than that, I think. I think, secretly even from myself, I enjoy being
deluded. I think my life is fucking boring, and since I'm too scared to even make proper eye contact with a
pretty girl, I distract myself with these stories. Some part of me, maybe the most real part of all, knows it's all
bullshit. And so they're not even really delusions, they're more like immensely stressful and useless
imagination games. Well, and it's a completely self-aggrandizing story, isn't it? I'm Odysseus, and this is my
odyssey. The world conspires against me in my quest for truth, but not even sirens like Gabby or Nicole will
detain me for long. I'm free to imagine that maybe they do want to seduce me, which plunges me into these
strange translation games whereby any sentence might be a coded confession of desire. But regardless of the
actual truth of what's going on in my brain, it's is a huge obstacle to my clearer thinking. Just because it may
be rooted in narcissism doesn't mean it's not a problem.
How do you react then, when you believe you're part of a giant experiment? Nicole asks. I'm a little
disappointed that my story doesn't elicit from her any sort of outwardly visible personal judgment or feeling.
This is as interesting as I'm capable of being, and I'm only this interesting for her. If anyone was going to find
me fascinating, it would be Nicole, right now. But no, just the same neutral, professional, next-question-onthe-survey tone.
I don't react. If I did, then that's when I would do the socially unacceptable things I'm afraid of doing.
By reacting, I'd be letting the wrong part of me take control. Because I know, I mean I know, that's just crazy. I
mean that's crazy! Right? So I don't react, and I'm able to very slowly rationalize my way back out of it. But
whenever it happens, whenever a certain phrase or look or interaction falls the wrong way across my mind, I
become very uncomfortable until I'm able to leave the setting. My ears and cheeks get really hot, and I can
tell they're red, which makes them get more red, until I start to sweat. My ears ring, and my hands and feet

tingle like I might faint. And my teeth, the nerves in my teeth sting and burn, like they might explode out of
my jaw if I were to unclench it. Sometimes, if it's bad enough, my whole face goes numb. And all of these
physical sensations, some of which are outwardly manifest, only embarrass me more. Then, even when
people talk directly to me, which is rare because my horrible body language and facial expression forbid
interaction, like people can tell there's something really wrong, but when they do talk directly to me, I can
barely respond, which is one more turn of the screw. After a bad one like that, the next few days are ruined
for me, as I attempt to analyze my way back to solid ground.
Does that worry often prevent you from going places with your family?
No.
Does that worry often prevent you from going places with your friends or peers?
Yes.
How often does that worry prevent you from going places with your friends or peers? Almost all of
the time, some of the time, or not very much of the time?
Almost all of the time.
Do you get upset with yourself for that worry?
Yes.
How upset with yourself do you get? Very upset, somewhat upset, or not very upset?
Very upset. I pause. I should probably talk about this with my regular psychologist, huh?
I would recommend it, yes.

Fall 2016
Jenna Cornell

She
All she ever wanted
was to be
Free
from the nicely
decorated box
with linen curtains
and pink stereotypes
society put her in.
To explore the wilderness
of the world
balancing on two wheels
while holding a delicate tea cup
filled with silly imaginary swill
going ninety miles per hour.
Free
to adventure
into the vastness
of her femininity;
abandoning expectations
of dresses and lacquer
of uptight notions
of false pretensions.
Adventure into the expansiveness
of eroticism
of sheer, powerful

raw emotion
catapulted
into heightened ecstasy
while still
maintaining
the nine to five
appearance.
Free
from the confines
from the chains
binding her to that damn box
with its white sofa dressed
in pillows of pastel
sitting on hardwood
romancing the uptight
pleasing the conventional
seducing people into submission.
Free
to escape
through the upstairs window
tearing the linens off their rods
into the clear wide blue
with pinion and plume
updrafts and downdrafts
breaking through the
dusty dank atmosphere
shimmering
in the glorious light
of the sun.
Free
to leave behind
disposable, earthly things
which serve no purpose
only to appease human creation.
Race into the nether land

of the liberated
society is so frightened of.
To travel
into the regions of creativity
locked within her mind
bound through societal demands
that put Suzy Homemaker clothing
on her paper doll form
leading her into the kitchen
for pot roast and gravy
mounds of dishes
littered with leftover
splatters of a meal
never appreciated
but always expected.
Free
from squeezing
into that Good Housekeeping box
with its artificial sweetness
dainty disposition
wrapped in apron
expected kind of life.
Open to nuances
and creations
and fantastic sensations
evading the norm
sailing to uncharted places
seeing brand new faces
away into the freedom
society is terrified of.
Free to be
SHE

Fall 2016
Kurt Cline

CITY OF SLIDING GLASS DOORS

I was the one who saw the walls tumble
before the earthquake occurred
playful as a poltergeist
interrupting a midnight kiss
I saw you tomorrowflames in your hair
vanishing point drifting beyond
parkinglot & public housing
the view opens out onto other windows
subconscious going up like a house on fire
have you noticed the wailing
of more ambulances recently?
Its a city blooming with crime
how do you want to get took?
Middle of ghost month might as well take yr choice:
rent a room in a house owned by ones former spouse
or work as a tutor for a precocious adolescent Andr Breton
Theres a knock on the doorthe police! The mermaid
w/the star on her Crowns absolutely pinkie about the gills

she who can turn a seagull into a musketball

sets her halo down next to her umbrella
it gets mighty rainy in heaven
out where the blue rose blooms
the smell of the sea
handwriting too indecipherable
to remain undecoded for long

METAL GHOSTS
Sky seems laboring up
a long flight of stairs
a car horn honks my name
its true I had a dreadful dramful
One must protect oneself from evil ghosts
by learning to laugh into the depths
of an impenetrable black mirror
dont ever try to possess it
Reader can you suggest
where the story begins? Worlds swirl
the secret heartbreak
of the Glass Bead Game
indestructible cars pass by
each made up of tiny filaments
organized into dreams
above the burning Wheel
river of telling time where to go
how is this plasmoid mannequin
continues to pinch itself?
Ferris Wheel loaded w/
colorful flags, miniature
explosive charges
brass bands Buddhas
rotating in opposite directions
neighing horses to mournful verses
its that ebony glint gives away
the meaning of the silence
BRAINWASHED

asles of idols eggshells

in the control room
subliminal saboteur--those
rose petals are razor sharp!
All those monkeys at all those typewriters!
As for memy head is singingserene as if
a bow being pulled in both directions at once.
I guess somebody had to get hurt

COBBLESTONE SOUP (for Diana)

I was liquid fire, enraged
by objectless desire. I figured
I might as well start in anywhere
& continue on until the end of the night
words looping in blue ink smudge pots
elongated on the sidewalk. Full moon
on the wane again, the mystery
of the alabaster statues wld have to wait.
All there is to write home about
falling off the edge of the planet
a new hairdo by a pillar
in the subway station the traffic outside
grown more intermittent a pigeon
lands on the skylight. A gay junky
tosses one last slender consideration
my way. In my dream, Im asleep.
A womans voice screams Help! Help!
I try to rouse myself but fall back into the dream
I was having before being awakened dream
previous to all dreams & window-collages
words before they are spoken
chirruping of frogs among closed lotus petals
dawn and dusk & the burgeoning between
which is not to consider it otherwise
a marginal account thoughts bleeding
in a blue blur the higgledy-piggledy
waterspout & characters
hammered out of daisies
can only be a metaphor
which is poetry, aching
like a windlass in a hurricane
tumbling unexpectedly into the clearing
so that I almost forgot what I was saying.
This was back in the days, you understand
houses cld be repainted & families restored.
O the light-heartedness of fortune! Even to say
I was a criminal lends me too much credence!
This being alone again going within blue

loops interlocutory curly-cues. No echo

in my skull can wing it. Its still dark
over the pond & the roosters crowing.
Now if only the morning will wake itself up.
Its a different world we live in today.
South of the mtn, north of the river
a childs face in the window
looks out at the rain.

THE DIVERS BALL

Assignment: hes looking, a man
who wants to buy. When you ask
the quantity he says it depends on
the quality. This diver was not
your ordinary diver. Hed taken sapphires
out of the Red Sea. You had to have nothing.
Be a person passing in the street. Just before dawn
the diver went down to the tide. A face
no longer out at sea. A new window opens.
The best actors, the best parts!
Brown Nile.
Your indigo scales.
People dont dream of death anymore
but shoot it out over cemetery plots nevertheless.
All forms of human thought have been inhabited.
His sister owned an aquarium shop in Santa Monica
Maybe not a bad idea, just step away for awhile.
Thinking of another life, the traveller leaves,
a shy man: time in his mind;
bright as the sea, he knows to have her.
Some were dancing with beerbottles
in their hands; others were playing bongos
around a bonfire made of driftwood.
He was standing, staring
at the elephantine steel sculpture
between beach & sea. Along
the ocean-side, a trafficjam of off-road vehicles,
mariachis strolling past, making one
lose ones line of thought entirely.
The California lifestyle isnt for everyone.
If you looked into his eyes you could see
he was totally cool. No cocktails this evening.
Emerald bisque symphony over the night.
When time is left alone, people understand,
just how it is. The world loves itself
in a special way. Shes on his mind,
a flamboyant time. He loved her. He had to be
strong to let her go that night. A kid looked at him

passing on the shore. Someday that kid

would be him. Places in the world.
People like thatthey could go anywhere.
Red the reef. Hilltop roads behind
a Mustang GT 390. He wanted to get
back to Sydney, Australia. Those rock pools
were the life. He was thinking of Willie Greens
sax in the air as smooth as the breeze among the palms.
Everyone talksbut what? Sign language! A private jet.
A car pool around the nation. The world
isnt a lover; its a friend. When of necessity
we were forced to part I asked him to sit for tea.
Off the reef the kids swam well. A lawyer
had mentioned an inheritance to him. When
are you coming back, everyone was asking.
He didnt need it anymore, yet felt
a little reminiscent. The world is long.
You can see how it looks at itself.
Can you hear the waves? In a week
or so seagulls in the wind. Ducks in the pond light.
Away out in life, hes starting to feel better.
It wasnt easy to leave. Thinking of her.
The sunlight in the sky. Conflict between
Love & Time. Chocolate dipped in melted cheese.
A chauffer in a car. The world goes away,
comes back again next morning. Under the sea
where the sun-fire filters green, stone floral mosaics
proliferate. Ours is a one-way journey
off the edge of the map. The road
is a sense of travel. Such a smile
has yet to leave his face.

Fall 2016
Linda King

ongoing repairs to something significant

all good words over and under in-between

something with roots outside the syllables
breaking code hold your breath wordmirrors
light swallows light in primary colours
memory sips a dark persuasion
two parts red wine philosophy

pick-axing for words lodged between perception and reality

all that list-making of needs just grand gestures without alphabet

a strict pattern of translation that refuses instruction

those songs about the world ending

you listened to over and over again
no hesitation in the abandonment

a winter gone
a road burning
a fragile fortress

whatever comes next

you recognize your pen-and-ink encore losses

sentences like fields of dark flowers
the transferred necessary
magic of adjectives

stay still

wear all the red lipsticks

like a sucker-punch
of verbs

maintain the charts

throw things to the weather

deleting scenes in reverse order like jigsaw stars

electronic thrift-store exchange rate
fake confession knife to pulse
the agreed upon version
full tilt bad news

when the consolation of philosophy becomes unfamiliar territory

sewing silence into the undertow

the way the faintest light will start the day

spider spun feather plucked a thing to thing haphazard shelter
refracted grievances questionable innocence
what goes missing
when the tides win the perfect argument
no ordinary task this shockwave ritual

no language is yours to long for

like mother-love-debris

or the myth of twin rivers

still empty handed your nets gather speech

words show themselves to you
for translation

Fall 2016
Marcia Arrieta
to begin
to begin in sun translation embarking tundra. frozen epitaphs & footprints.
small child shadows. we try to climb the tree. attempt sky.
rays. prayers. fragments. ice branches float crashing decimals.
we ask for cohesion.
on a faraway island there lives Time. like a ribbon or rope he tangles
moments into memory or absence of.
dandelion & fate.
one hundred seeds into wind.

we are
we are the lost wanders of abstraction
sleeping in oaks
notebooks through the 3 am streets
flutes & children held in arms
long walks in rain

profligate
*
hummingbird, snowflake
wooden desk/typewriter
upholster the couch
read Thoreau
*
recede into the canyon
stars through oak branches
always the inquiry
the shadow of art or maybe time

blue ladder
against
lemon tree
structure
image
thought
brief wires cross
an apostrophe
or boat
representational years
accelerate
formal
algorithms
confront
dependence

to those who feel deeply

Basquiats art, Cornells boxes

the forts on the Aran Islands
snowflakes/rain
*
we sleep in hidden cities
we sew invisible threads
through forests & sand
*
we collage
light with words
add paint

one day
you find yourself
in a coffee cup
or maybe
a flower pot
or maybe a
typhoon
undercurrent
the encyclopedia
all volumes

we choose love over fear

U2 concert
Paris 12/7/15
blue
within
blue
trace
star
sky
flower
streets with no names

Fall 2016
Mark Cunningham

[sort]
I said her left hand looked smaller than usual, and she said it was just a sleight of hand. They said they didnt
care if it was spelled telephony, it was still a science. Our model is for educational purposes, so its OK if its
shoddy. The study found that the central nervous system is an exception. She said, everything is the result
of contingent perception and the truth is an invention, and when we seemed skeptical, she said, Im not
making this up. They tried to teach him to spell gestalt phonetically, so he started out, j . . . .

[sort]
Thank goodness for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions: goatees have finally gone out of style. He said we
needed some common ground, so she pushed him out of the way and stood where hed been standing. If I
controlled myself, what would happen to shareholders in privatized prisons? Whos thinking of only himself
now? Before I left the room, I gave the sociopath a gun and reminded him of Rimbauds claim that I is an
other. Dear Ronald Reagan: missiles, okay, but theres still no defense against George Lucas.

[sort]
She accused us of being a standing wave, as if wed get out of our chairs for something like that. While she
sat around doing nothing, the photographs developed. Dear Doc and Sneezy: I cant sleep if my nostrils are
going to whistle when I breathe. He said that since fabrics retain DNA indefinitely, they could chill out about
all that dust to dust stuff. Dear Indian-Giver: Hah! We didnt really want the Indian, anyway.

[sort]
She said she knew a lot of Kaitlyns, too, but the sociologist insisted she came from the Age of Brittanys.
Information theory, lesson two: if you stare at anything long enough, it will disappear. To try suicide and
failwhat a blow to your self-esteem. One is less than never. Dear Universe: blogger not impressed.

Fall 2016
Mark Young

But the petunias look nice

Miss Petunia, a fishmonger in the most malodorous quarter of 18th-century Paris, could sniff out the subtlest
smells, distinguishing that emitted by an obese ghost residing in one of the bathrooms in Luigi's Mansion
from that of rodent or maggot or peach.
She would often say "It must be awful to marry one of those nubile cuties knowing that there is a time bomb
ticking away in her that will at some unknown date make her bloat out into something huge & grotesque,
presumably all of a sudden & without much notice."
She preferred elegant petunia & lesbian flower designs in royal blue, where the plants grew to grotesque
proportions, then folded up & died before setting seeds.
When she peered into the rearviewoh the grotesque faces! Each petunia had drawn up on its stem & each
was turned to face her. A small LED floodlight with rotating colors shone on them & it made the somewhat
grotesque things even strangernow a blue face, then red, & green, & yellow, & . . . & magenta. It always kept
coming back to magenta.
Now, a word from our sponsor. For those rare occurrences where you may need petunias last minute, XXX
Cash Loan can work to transfer urgent funds in as little as two hours.

a / kaleidoscope gifted / with consciousness

The phrase was du lait. It
became boire du lait in the
mid-19th century. This retreat of art from everyday
life became a birthmark
that is of a light-brown
color. Once in Paris, Charles
Baudelaire's flneur turned
into a citizen of the world.

she reads clocks in longhand

She did everything she could
to deny the truth, likened it
to learning cursive. Then
other things aligned, & she
accepted her son was destined
to become her daughter.

a small Fibonacci sequence

oneness
oneness
twyer threnody
fixature ekka thorpe
tylopod throttle finnan embrocation ideology
variety transubstantiation umlaut periwig hyalite beard outback creamery

A line from John Cage

Sketches of Asparagus
The
back cover
of Live at
Montreux
has an Annie
Liebowitz
photo of
Miles with
his fingers
pursed together
like stalks
of asparagus.

Muddle Earth
bright purple ajuga blooming after rain
17 years old & already has a tattoo
it says "Just Breathe"
he is especially fond of Botticelli
tattooed historical figures
debating tobacco addiction
unless we radically change current ideas
about the German popular film
a war with Syria will follow
motives & theories abound on this
it's still a fun game either way
deserves to be on every shelf

Fall 2016
Naomi Buck Palagi

prayer
Let me not be driven by fear. Yay though I walk through the valley of darkness, let me use my eyes to see the
glint of water-swept rocks. Let me use my cheek to feel the whip of animated wind. In my hand I clutch a
stick of smooth-carved wood, and should I lose this stick let me not forget the knife in my pocket, to cut
another.
Let me not be driven by fear. Though the path meander through tallest trees, let me look upon the panther
with awe and care, and let me not panic, and give it fright. Though I be alone, let me not abandon the voices
in my head, who speak to me, and give me comfort, the living and the dead, those who speak in the world
and those who have never been.
When I tire, let me sit, and rest. Let me drink from my skein, and let me eat from my pack. Let me not be
driven by fear of famine, for if I have never hunted, I can learn. If I have never cultivated, I can stay, and
cultivate, and fill my pack. If I am unpleasant to myself, I can bathe in cold streams and be refreshed.
Let me not be driven by fear. If I take fright, let me run, and build my energy and strengthen my muscles.
Let me take a side path, to find a vista. Let me gasp. Let me notice the difference between near and far,
between cliff and sky, between an oak leaf, and a pokeberry. Let me smash a pokeberry onto my skin, to see
the bloom of purple. Let me rub bare feet on moss, then re-lace my shoes and send breath to the legs that
that will carry me forward.
Yay though I walk through the valley of darkness, let me not be driven by fear. Let me consider myself, and
the many lives that have made me.
If I am harmed, let me wash the wound. Let me tend it, with care and curiosity, so I do not fear it. Let me
raise it, like a child, til it grow and leave me, or til it learn community within me. Let me know the world. Let
me know myself, and let me remember the space between my molecules, between all molecules.
There is much mystery here. Let me be alive and wonder.

Fall 2016
Nikki Ketteringham

Balloons on the Floor

Balloons on the floor
Deflate me.
Was that your intention?

Money is Good
Money is good.
You can't have a
Martini
Without it.

I Say We Have Fun

I say we have fun,
Dammit.
Like maybe
Chase the cat
Into a corner.
There's three of us
And only one of him.

Let's Talk
Let's talk
About perfume bottles.
Aren't they
Fucking amazing?

Fall 2016
Patrick Chapman

The Rocket Curator

At night I dream of Air Force One. Each time it appears in my back garden a
different president steps out and pisses on my roses. Pierce, van Buren, Polk
all from an age before the jet. I wonder why not Carter or Eisenhower, Reagan or
Ford, Clinton or Kennedy.
Why my roses? It makes no sense.
There is a waking dream too. I see an envelope on the mat in the hall. I stand
over it in my dressing gown, the silver teapot in my hand, its heaviness testing
my willingness to remain. I bend and pick up the windowed envelope. I take it
into the kitchen and open it with a butter knife. I read the letter inside.
you have been selected by the Ministry to benefit from the peace dividend
What does he want, the writer of this letter? I worked all my life in an
armaments factory and was laid off because of the peace. Now in my retirement I
appear to be taking my job home.
...your remuneration to be made in the form of a missile that will be
delivered to your home. You are required to arrange for a concrete pad to be laid
in your garden. You shall maintain the projectile in pristine condition. The type
of missile is to be confirmed at a later date. We look forward to your full cooperation.
Yours etc.
The signature is an obvious photocopy under the stamp of the Ministry of War

but the letter itself is genuine. All I have to do was to wait for the missile to
arrive. Will it be an SS-20?
Between these dreams I sleep and wait.
Recently I have taken to writing my memoirs. My L.C. Smith Bros typewriter dates
from 1917. Its n makes no impression. On this machine, stacked like a cage of
teeth on a heavy black jaw I have been typing the story of my life. This document
is what you are reading now. I suppose I should tell you how my marriage ended.
On many a morning, when the children were at school and Charlotte was out meeting
friends, I would slip into the bathroom and lock the door. Staring at my own face
in the mirror, I would conjure a vision from my memory bank; usually it was that
young Arab college student I observed almost daily, years ago. She would sit on
the floor at her street-facing window, her golden body obscured by the wall,
except to those who might look down from a higher floor across the street.
Finishing her ablutions, she would moisturise her skin, knowing herself to be
observed. She would part her dressing gown and take out one heavy breast. Slowly
she would rub cream on it and replace it. Then she would do the same with the
other. Having finished on her breasts she would roll down her knickers and take
time over moisturising her hairless vagina. Sometimes she would glance up. I
never responded at the time but now in memory, in my middle-aged furtiveness, I
would keep her in mind as I unbuttoned my trousers andwell. There was never much
pleasure in it, lets just say that. I was getting slower all the time. My
emissions were weak as potato water but I had to continue. If I spent what little
I had, that might prevent my further impregnating Charlotte, who refused to use
contraception or allow me to slip on a prophylactic. I couldnt stand to have
more children. Charlotte didnt know that I knew, but I did: she had been having
an affair with a stranger in the supermarket; screaming sex in the aisles, as
they lubricated each other with blood from the meat counter. Charlotte had taken
home a social disease that had found its way into our childrens bodies. The day
before the first instance of my waking dream, I decided to address the problem.

By staying awake I had forgone my usual appointment with Air Force One. Charlotte
was asleep on her back, the sheet wrapped around her waist. I watched her for
several minutes then backed away, and traversed the landing to the childrens
room. My daughter Rain slept in her cot. Such an innocent angel. I kissed her on
the forehead then took the pillow from under her head and placed it across her
face. Her body struggled then was still. I removed the pillow and put the back of
my hand to her breathless lips. My son Melvin, awake now, started to bawl. I went
over to him, pushed him down. I got the pillow and he stopped crying. Returning
to the marital bedroom, I found Charlotte rising, confused, mouthing my name. I
grabbed her by the shoulders then pinned her down with the weight of my own body.
I pressed the pillow over her mouth. It took longer with her than it had with the
children. After quite a struggle, she too was still. There would be no more
envelope daydreams.
I ordered cement. Twenty sacks of it. Then I started to dig a grave for my wife
and children; it would begin the foundation of the missile pad. The ground seemed
harder than it needed to be. Potter from next door was out digging too. He had a
vegetable patch, though why he chose nights to work it, who knew? Were things not
well at home?
Nice evening for it, he commented in passing, across the fence.
I wouldnt go as far as that, I said.
Potters wife called him in for tea. He hated that womans voice.
Digging was exhausting, but the moon was not yet up. Should I call it a night
and finish the job later? It seemed a shame not to wait for the moon.
Potter came back after an hour.
What you planting, then? he asked, upon seeing my plot, now quite deep
enough.
A conservatory.
A very thin conservatory, eh? I should add a bit of legroom.
He shuffled away to his shed and as I watched him a feeling came over me.

Something I was missing a crucial fact.

And there it was. If I were to carry on digging, to prepare the foundation for
the missile pad, there were decisions to be made. How broad should the base be?
How deep the trench for the concrete?
By the early hours, I had made a square hole ten feet by ten feet by three
feet deep with a six-foot depression at the centre. I went inside to rest then
found myself upstairs. I lay beside my wife, whose stench reminded me of illicit
sex in a supermarket aisle.
I heard the sound of landing gear. Hail to the Chief.
After my wife and children died, I wrote a poem on my LC Smith Bros typewriter.
While I go to meet the President I think it will be John Q. Adams you might
like to read it.
The Car I Do Not Drive
I do not have a car, but if I did, I would drive it until
it could take no more. I would bring it out into
the desert. There are no deserts in England, but
I would scorch the earth and make one. I would force
the car as though it were a racehorse.
I would listen to the secret language of its engine.
I would sniff the coded scents all mingled
in its paintwork. I would bathe in the oil
that sputters from the sump when the car is ill,
then wash in the water from the radiator.
I would play bondage with the seat belt
and a hitchhiker. I would tie a soldier
in the boot before blowing his brains out
with his own service pistol. I would polish
the leather of the back seat with my spit.

I would cut the brakes with a hair comb.

I would melt the headlight glass with a match
and the indicator plastic with the steam
from a boiling kettle. I would snap the aerial
in a pre-emptive strike against format radio.
I would turn the clock back to minus figures.
I would re-tread the tyres with my teeth.
I would fall on the handbrake like a Roman
nobleman dropping on his sword. I would put
the gears in neutral and attempt to reverse.
I would crawl inside the glove compartment.
I would open the sunroof with a tin-opener.
I would smoke the exhaust pipe like a cigarette.

As for the dream? It turned out to be his father, John Adams. You cant be right
all the time, I suppose. The doorbell woke me up while I watched the Commander in
Chief pissing into the hole where my roses had been. Still wearing yesterdays
clothing, I hurried downstairs and opened the door to a man in blue overalls,
with a clipboard in his hand. He looked like Lech Walesa, the Gdansk version.
Cement?
This afternoon, I took Melvin from his cot and lowered him into the six-foot
depression. I blessed him with a few handfuls of clay. Checking to see if the
Potters were looking, I went back to the house and got Rain. I carried her into
the yard: she fitted snugly over Melvin as though they had been meant for this. I
shovelled dirt in over my children and threw down the spade.
Charlotte too would soon be buried forever under the thrusters of a nuclear
missile. I carried her out into the garden. It was not easy.
That afternoon I filled the hole in with clay and patted it smooth with the
shovel. Tomorrow the men would come to help me to mix the cement for the rocket

pad.
I resolved that if the Ministry did not send someone soon, I would wait no more
but telephone Merrick & Son Patioes n Yards Ltd. At one oclock that same day, a
van arrived, trailing a cement mixer on wheels. Had I called them? I could not
remember.
A man came to the front door. He was the man from before, the one who looked
like Walesa. He stuck a hand out to shake. Here about the yard. Names Jimmy.
Indeed. I took his hand without enthusiasm then let it go.
Can we use your water?
Of course.
I stepped aside to let him in.
That afternoon, I watched Jimmy and two colleagues mix the cement and lay the
yard. They complained about the smell. I reassured them that it was only dead
animals. Some pets from years ago. I gave them tea and corned-beef sandwiches and
they asked questions.
Yes I live alone. I am a memoirist, but I used to work at the Ministry.
Retired Colonel. In fact, my old adversary Grashenko is shipping over a souvenir
SS-20 to say no hard feelings.
Christ, I thought I heard Jimmy mutter.
By evening, they had completed their work. It would take time for the concrete
to set, one of the men said. Dont go putting anything heavy on it, like a
missile. Not for a while. I dont remember when the men left, or when I shut the
door on them.

I slept in Charlottes bed that night, dreamlessly. In the morning I rose and
peered out the window. The concrete had set.
I heard a fighter jet thunder overhead. I conjured the engine howls of nuclear
attack. Already the vapour trails of strike and counterstrike arced through the
skies, helicopter gunships swooped in over Piccadilly Square, a tank division

circled at Horse Guards Parade, and troops deployed in Oxford Street, their
teargas projectiles subduing the desperate mob. I heard a firestorm; a chain of
inferno whose jewels were entire cities: Dresden, Hiroshima, Chernobyl, London.
I stood alone in my pyjamas, and all was quiet.
Then came a knock at the front door three heavy crashes on the wood.
I walked calmly through to the childrens bedroom. I looked down to see who
was outside.
It was a policeman. Behind him my imbecile neighbour, Potter, peered up.
The policeman looked up too and caught my attention. Sir!
Then came the glorious thunder.
While the policeman continued to bang on the door I listened not to that but
to the slow shriek of engines behind me.
I ran into my bedroom and almost fell out of the window but managed to steady
myself.
Down in the yard was an aircraft. But it was not the SS-20 I had been hoping
for. It was Air Force One, for real this time. Too big for the landing pad I had
made, the aircraft somehow fit. In front of the plane, like a steward, stood
Richard Nixon a modern president! His left hand zipping up his crotch as though
he had already relieved himself on the spot where my roses had been, Nixon raised
his right hand to beckon me down.
And I jumped.
The policeman at the door called out again, threatening to knock it down.
Potter in the car, shouted up, accusing me of atrocities. The voices of my wife
and children moaned through the concrete towards which I now flew.
I landed softly on my feet like a dancer.
I looked the president in the eye, and he smiled a welcome.
Your aircraft is ready, its engines warm, he said. Above us, the sky is
clear, blue and free. Come aboard, my friend.
In the cockpit, I knew, the pilot was preparing to take off.
President Nixon took my hand and led me up the steps into Air Force One.

Fall 2016
Sandra Kolankiewicz

Snapshot
First the sense of urgency to go, go, go till
panic turns down a notch to become calm
determination. You dont have to do
everything at once, or even any
thing at all, yet youre here after riding
the back of a dragon, feeling even
now on the ground as if youre hurtling through
space. I keep turning to the distractions
in my pocket while youre thinner than youve
ever been and so much more open to
what failure can teach us. I dont know how
to tell if this is a path or reflection.
I cant explain why on a sphere every
movement leads back to the beginning, no
matter where you start or which direction
you go. Instead, I insist that going
is equal to arriving, staying still
might as well be the same as moving on.

For a Neglectful Son

Jesus is my best example, so if
you are not ready to give up something,
we are all lost. How many more times is
he expected to die before you do
something? How often can the women run
to the tomb in the morning to prepare
the body before a man appears? We
cant ignore the stone; like you, disciples
in the Upper Room arent just waiting for
a messagetheyre getting their oil changed or
checking their email without a pass word,
finding some girl to fix a hole in their
robes between prayers and lamentations, caught
up in rendered garments and girded loins.

Stillpoint, Nevada
I promised myself to sit here and wait,
deferring by holding one place, like the
world were revolving around me as the
heavier mass, circling as well something
more gravitas rotating around a
body even denser. Nothing can be
stationary, our desire for
postponement explained by the perception
that we are stuck, unable to prosper.
Life needs movement, we say when already
we are hurtling, failing to orient
to the trajectory while inside our
lives, where all distracting forms of motion
are available, our favorites yet
and again, our limited notion of
stasis whether in the dock or enthroned.

Stirring Countries Like Ashes

By the time I woke, she was gone. I rolled
the sheets up, sealed them in plastic, thinking
someday I might hold them to my nose and
breathe her in. Never mind the books and the
display shelves of handmade boxes. She once
collected dirt from each strange country she
knew, then learned the most important part of
soil, the bacteria, dies when kept from
air, rain, light, and the ground. I spilled her jars
out one by one, mixing their contents in
the beds around the pool, hoping something
good might still be there to germinate, that
no fungus nor bug had outlived its years
of isolation to turn invasive,
stirring countries together like ashes
in the common bone pile, intermingled
and permanently indistinguishable.

Fall 2016
Scott Thomas Outlar

Enter the Void/Embrace the Vision

You are the edge of oblivion,
and I am a lemming
that marches in lockstep
to jump off the cliff
along with everyone else
in search of your fathomless depths.
You are the point of departure,
and I am the future tense
that leaves the past behind
while searching ever onward
toward the portal
that delivers my spirit closer to yours.
You are the critical mass of a black hole,
and I am a lit-up nebula
that pulses bright in flashing neon
as the void of space
begins to rupture
in affirmations of cosmic expansion.
You are a sight that sore eyes crave,
and I am crazed
beyond the state of fervor
with three visions of frenzy
that coalesce into one
to birth the apocalyptic truth of love.

Road to Damascus
When youre walking
down a dark hallway
carrying a huge bowl
of cake and ice cream
in the early a.m. hours
while contemplating
the archetype of Jesus
and whether religion
is sane or not,
be careful not
to
run into the door
and spill the sugary spoils
or sprain your neck
or have a wreck
that turns into
a breakdown
through the night.

Chew and Chew

I remember
those early mornings
at 3, 4, 5 oclock
after 20, 25, 30 hours
awake
living off high dosages
of pills
and marijuana
exhaustion in a loopy
yet somehow coherent state
setting in
laid out
on the couch
with the boob tube on
as the peepers
close/droop/fade
the spoon
of peanut butter
still in my mouth
waking up
hours later
mid-bite
only to swallow
the mouthful
and stumble
to the bedroom
for a perfect collapse
into dreams
that may
or may not
actually
already be reality

A Moment to Mourn
I want to weep
for the species
of humanity,
and I would
if I truly believed
the tears would help
reverse the process
of regression
that has debilitated
so many people
with diseases of
mind, body, and soul.
I want to weep
for the children
who are pumped
full of poisons
from the moment
they pop out of the womb.
I want to weep
for the adults
whose brains
have been damaged
beyond repair
because they bought in
to the propaganda
of a Satanic system
that wants to keep them
stupid, sick, and poor.
I want to weep,
but I wont,
because the time has come
to push ahead
and walk the path
only with those
who still have
a sturdy head on their shoulders.

Pants on Fire
Hypocrites and Pharisees
and fake plastic people
Kingdom of the Wretched
with a wound
the size of Atlantis
Toppling towers/leaky bridges/lead
to Nowhere Incorporated
The best sex
ever served
on a silver platter/
punctured the pipelines
ruptured the fallout syndrome
stockpiled the nuclear reaction
Watch the top blow
when she screams, Scorned!
Watch the violence spew
from a filthy mouth
Witness the Black Wave crash
remorse is not akin to blind adoration

Fall 2016
Simon Perchik

*
You bang the rim the way skies
loosen and this jar at last
starts to open, becomes a second sky
though under the lid her shoulders
wait for air, for the knock
with no horizon curling up on itself
as sunlight, half far off, half
circling down from her arms
end over end, reaching around
making room by holding your hand
its a harmless maneuver
counter clockwise so you never forget
exactly where the dirt was shattered
hid its fragrance and stars
one at a time taking forever.

*
You kneel the way this sky never learned
those chancy turns the dirt throws back
as breezes, still warm, scented
with whats left from when the Earth
had two centers, one blue, the other
footsteps, half random, half gathered in
for stones no longer moving
you begin each descent
unsure, around and around, entangled
as if roots would nudge the dead closer
again into your arm over arm waving goodbye
with one more than the other
its how you dig, folded over
and your shadow deeper and deeper
already reeks from far off and wings.

*
You have to let them fall
though once the ground cools
this toaster is used to it
sure each slice will climb
side by side and even alone
you wear a fleece-lined jacket
set the timer left to right
the way the first sunrise
turned from what was left
its still warm inside
and each hillside you expect them
to burn, to break apart midair
making the room the dead
no longer need
though theres no forgetting
why this crust just through
two graves, yours
and alongside in the dirt
brought to the surface
as the cold bread
that no longer hopes for anything.

*
Although the stove never moves
you add on the way roots
have learned to sleep
where its warm this kitchen
is still expanding, the pots
further apart with no end to it
can already set your hands
on fire what you touch
are the stars pulling one wall
from the others, boiling
in a darkness that is not water
and slowly they reach the floor
the way light will lower its speed
pace itself so when it finally arrives
you hear nothing but its soft cry
no longer distances what you extend
is the same heat your arms
are made from, wider and wider
held in place as if the sun
has forgotten how and withers
side by side, too cold, too small.

*
Holding on to the others this hillside
knows what it is to live alone
all these years falling off-center
though you no longer follow
still back away till your hands
and the dirt once its empty
both weigh the same a small stone
can even things out
the way this casket on each end
leans toward shoreline, smells
from a sky unable to take root
or balance the Earth, half
with no one to talk to, half
just by moving closer what you trim
floats off as that embrace all stone
is born with, covered
till nothing moves inside
except the lowering that drains forever.

Fall 2016
Sarah Estime

THE CO.

Jamie put the truck in park and sat tensely for a moment as it kicked back. He turned the engine off
and relaxed in the puff of his forest green bubble jacket. The electronic sign suspended over the bank a few
miles back blinked "seven degrees." He cursed to himself.
"Get your vest," Perry said.
He thought for a moment before letting himself strain behind the chair and wriggle for the neon
yellow traffic wear that did his job for him. He snatched it and sat it on his lap, his breath huffing and puffing
vapor that was illuminated by the street light above him. It was already five o'clock, which meant the sun
would rise soon. Vibrant red letters reading "Holly Brooks Brothers & Co. Parking Only" were becoming
legible. He caught his breath and started to slip the thing on.
"Get out," Perry said, tapping on the door. "Let's go."
Suppressed dread came over him. Jamie opened the door, the rust making it screech, and followed
Perrys coffee-induced motivation.
"You got the cones?" Perry asked.
"Yes, sir," Jamie said.

He unloaded the back of the truck, allowing his head to reach a place so deep he didn't know where
he was. Lou hopped out of another Toyota painted with the same loud logo. He joined them, his smile
brighter than the moon. Jamie anticipated some lame idiom he thought he left behind floating around his
high school hallways.
"Morning!" Lou shouted. "Another day in paradise!"
Jamie cringed.
The happiest place on earth!
Living the dream, right?
Don't you just love it here?
The corniness never ended, he learned.
Lou unloaded his own truck bed while whistling something most likely from a Top Forty playlist
pop music was one of three receptive stations in the town. By his third day on his way to work, Jamie quit
searching for a whisper of classic rock amongst the static Ketchum called radio broadcasting.
The cones were lined up where they were supposed to be. The traffic was already complying. Lou
had a Boise State ski mask on and he kept pulling it up with his bulky snow gloves to yap about the games
and the government and whatever else. Perry halfway listened while adjusting caution tapes and moving
around construction tools. He held his clipboard close to his chest concentrating on his surroundings. Lou
leaned into him despite Perrys body language.
Jamie considered pretending he forgot something in the truck so he could sit down and check his
phone but the walk was much too far. And the church across the construction site was very specific about
the contractors not using their parking lot so Jamie was confined to standing in the middle of the street until

lunchtime unless he wanted to brave the cold for only a moment of relaxation. He brewed in the frustration
of feeling stuck and controlled and degraded before retreating back to his distractionsmaking money, only
two increments of four hours a day, better than sitting in a classroom listening to the life and times of
Langston Hughes. Jamie was also satisfied with how much power he had over the morning commute. He
had the authority to make cars slow down and drive in zig-zags, the drivers making eye contact with him for
approval that they were driving correctly. He saw twenty-somethings with their hair disheveled most likely
late for class, men in suits using the Slow sign as an opportunity to peer into their glove compartments,
soccer moms with pixie cuts wringing their wet hair with their fists. Granted, he didn't have a ticket book
he couldn't even call the police should the need arisebut he possessed some power over mourning,
rushing goers.
He wondered what he'd do if a car zipped through the infrastructure or, worse, through him. He
wasn't even allowed to touch the tools.
He was a pointless, standing figure.
No, he was purposeful. He had a sign that belonged to a legitimate company and he had a job title
Traffic Control Operator.
His cross guard was paramount to his childhood. His cross guard put a smile on his face and Jamie
knew that he made the seventy-year-old's day each afternoon he allowed him to do his job. He wondered if
cross guards volunteered or if they were paid. He wondered if they volunteered because their lives were
somber and lonely. He wondered if their lives were even somber and lonely. The cross guard he knew
growing up probably had a wife and a pool and a fancy grill his friends were impressed by. He wondered
how much cross guards were paid.

Jamie was purposefulhe was making money, he had a thirty-minute lunch break, and he wasn't
sitting in a classroom listening to the life and times of Langston Hughes.
"I know some of ya'll have school or whatever you have going on. It's a simple job. Stand in the
middle of the street, hold signs, direct cars. It shouldn't be that complicated," Perry told the group when they
were hired. "It's quick money. If you come across any problems, get with me and I'll take care of it."
"Are we allowed to take tips?" said an older woman cosmetically adamant about looking younger.
"You probably shouldn't. You're not actually servicing anyone. You're here to stand and look pretty
while the construction workers do their thing," Perry said. "See, stuff like thatthe shit that wasn't in my job
descriptionif you run into a sticky sitch like receiving money from someone from their car, get with me
and I'll be more than happy to handle it."
The woman sucked her teeth. Perry didnt acknowledge it.
He pointed to a petite girl with his clipboard, "You all look pretty tightly bundled. I can't tell if you're a
boy or a girl and, anyway, you look twelve. But if anyone is stopping and harassing you for any reason, you
can grab me. If Im not out and about, Im in the truck."
Jamie didn't have to get with him just yet. As Perry mentioned, it was an easy job. Quick money,
temporary, lunch break, not school, hopefully an opportunity at the end of it. Again, he remembered the
meager nature of the job.
Lunch came and went. The sun shone through the windshield of the truck so his turkey and cheese
sandwich was moist and melted. Jamie was tired of turkey and cheese but, as he walked back to his position,
he was glad that he was satiated at an inexpensive price. Still, he felt he was better than turkey and cheese.
He was a gourmet burger and gruyere kind of guy. The woman with the chalky mascara, Lou's loud mouth,

the petite woman whose age everyone questionedhe was better than all of them. He was working toward a
real life, not season tickets or industrial orders of concealer.
No, he was just like them. No, he wasnt like them at all.
The construction workers were making progress in the hole they were digging although they
appeared to not be causing a commotion. Jamie felt time sloth by standing in one spot all day. He was so
busy being bored he didnt notice his surroundings. As humdrum as the hours felt, he doubted he'd have
time to make as much progress as the construction workers did drilling a hole into the street. He couldnt dig
a hole into the granite and complete whatever the construction team was working on let alone stand there
and watch.
"Hey, man!" Lou shouted behind him. "How you doing, man? How come we never see you eating with
us inside? You know you could come inside right?"
He didn't have the ridiculous blue mask on and Jamie could see in his eyes that he was genuinely
concerned. His thumb was unofficially pointing to over there where everyone else ate lunch.
"No, I'm alright. Thanks, though, Jamie said puzzled.
"Suit yourself. What are you doing here, anyway? Behind on child support?"
He nudged him the way two men drinking beers together did but Jamie didn't know him at all.
"No.. not that."
"Well, I'll tell you what I'm here for. Totally tanked on a poker game last weekend. When I saw the ad
at that Jacksonsyou know the one on Northwoodit was like" he cupped his hands mocking an angelic
hum.

Lou smiled with his big mouth, watching Jamie to smile back. Jamie looked over at where Lou was
supposed to be positioned. His Slow sign leaned against a telephone pole. Havoc wasn't wreaking but
Jamie was slightly nervous for him. He feared mass punishment. His football coach thrived off of drilling his
point in. He told the team it built character and enforced teamwork. Jamie never really understood
teamwork when the team worked to carry one star player. In this instance, they were carrying Perry or
Perrys boss or whosever idea it was in which Jamie ended up there. He advised Lou get back to work. Perry
was nearby. He had taken his coat off and was directing a bulky black guy to move positions.
"Its fine, Lou dismissed. What else are we getting out of this? A career? He lowered his voice and
leaned forward, Perry, man? He's set. He does a good job on this, the opportunities are endless. I come here
happy to do my job because that's just the kind of person I am. But do I see myself walking around with a
corny clipboard and a nametag in two weeks?" Lou laughed, breathing into his hands and stuffing them into
his pockets. He looked around casually. "Nah, I have something set up for me. The car wash over on Lewis
Street really likes me. I'm working on something at least part time.. that way my girlll stop bitching." He
chuckled. "So what are you here for, for real, man?"
Jamie thought to himself as Lou talked. He suddenly didn't know what he was doing there. He took
school and football seriously only to come to the realization that he couldn't compete. So then he joined the
theoretical working world only he wasn't working at all. He wasn't going anywhere standing there. His
expectation of quitting to start fresh and seizing his destiny as a leader or an entrepreneur or simply a
likeable guy was irrational.
"Just getting my girl something nice for Valentine's Day," he lied.
"Aw, man," Lou said, and then went on to describe his own holiday dilemmas.

Perhaps Lou had a better chance at advancing because he was outgoing. Standing next to him, Jamie
knew for sure that he stood no chance at all.
Anyway, you coming with us to Leftys tonight?
Jamie told him he would. Knowing he was only seventeen, however, he walked home alone, listened
to his parents carping, which was gradually turning into casual, snide remarks, and unwound in his
bedroom while waiting for them to leave. He felt both accomplished yet incomplete. The feeling crept over
him in the cold as he traversed his hometown, realizing a corporate career was unrealistic and internet fame
was difficult to achieve without a computer. He passed a homeless man with one boot and a tank top on and
wondered how he ended up there. He recalled McDonalds new policy about prospective employees
requiring a high school diploma or a GED. The homeless man was probably where he belongedthe dry,
snow-streaked concrete was the only place he was qualified to be. Jamie was also qualified for quick gigs
paid under the counter and maybe sex work. His youthful strong physique was the best it was going to be.
Dread slunk over him for a moment. He didnt want to obtain his GED. If he was going to be a
dropout, he was going to produce something out of his defeat. He felt encouraged knowing that Jim Carey
and John Travolta made it work; but they were sure-shot talented or firm to the idea of being a figure whose
success arose despite their so-called embarrassing circumstances. Jamie knew he was perfectly capable of
obtaining a GED but, like a high school diploma, he simply didnt want one. He forfeited all of his
opportunities hoping the low-down nature of his situation would motivate him. The only ones who made it
were those persistent enough to not give themselves a Plan B; they were confident that they were of value.
Jamie had to either be desirable or extremely buoyant in order to prevail. He was neither, leaving him at
square one again.

He tossed around in his head for a moment until he heard car keys jinglethe sweet sound of
imminent solitude. He heard the front door shut and his mothers gentle, groaning voice become muffled.
He went into the kitchen and looked at his schedule posted on the fridge. It wasnt even a real scheduleit
was the job posting. Make close to 600$ a week with Klipspringers Control Company. Contact Perry
Moore. He cringed reminiscing on the belief that the job was something to be proud of. He drew an
unrealistically impressive notion with crayon and drool, telling his parents he was going to be alright
because he was getting into the construction business. He wasnt even being paid six hundred dollars. After
lunch breaks and taxes were accounted for, he may as well have been working eight hours on a five hour
time clock. The pay was not worth the labor. He resented the power of big letters and construction paper. He
also resented the dollar sign being placed after the number six hundred.
He made himself a Celeste frozen pizza and sat on the couch knowing, eventually, theyd all be able
to sit together in silent disappointment.

Fall 2016
Dilip Mohapatra

STRINGLESS KITE
I dive deep into your dovish eyes
and get swept away
with the tidal waves that surge within
pent up in captivity looking desperately
for an outlet that may release
them to their quietude.
I resonate with your pulsating breath
and get sucked into a raging storm
that blows within
and I feel like a straw in a wind tunnel
being tossed around helplessly
till you exhale me out.
I sheepishly enter your veins
and flow with the rhythm of your heart
and then I feel the fire in your blood
that scalds my ins and outs
that burns through my bones
till I escape into the cool arms of a placid sea.
I search for serenity across
the contours of your valleys and hills
but it feels like a roller coaster ride
and then I sever all my links
that connect you with me
and I sail the skies like a stringless kite.

DISCONTINUITIES
We delve deep into the abyss
of the depthless dovish eyes
and decipher their declarations
but ignore what is unsaid
when they are closed and shut.
We gaze at the dark canvas
of a moonless night on which
the stars glitter in their glory
but ignore the apparent nothingness
that separates them into dots.
We read the couplets and lines
and let ourselves flow with the current
absorbing every bit of what they pronounce
but ignore what they don't and that are
embedded in the spaces between.

GRANDMA'S SMILES
As I enter her dimly lit room
where she lies supine
her salt pepper hair making
a halo on the pillow
her pain laden eyes split open
and her lips purse into
her trademark sublime smile.
Her smile spreads its arms
to clasp me in a tight warm hug
wrapping around me
like a soft protective quilt
making me always feel safe and cozy
like the new born baby bundled in
the white hospital flannel.
Her smile that traps thousand stars
always dazzles me like the
fizz in a glass of champagne
and cheers me up
with tiny sparkles of glee
running in my veins igniting
the embers in slumber within.
Her smile that exudes
fountains of unadulterated
and distilled unconditional love
engulfs me with the coolness
of million moons
and I float endlessly on the tides
always in springs never in neaps.
Now that her heart beats no more
and she is somewhere in the galaxy
twinkling in her divine glory
her smiles on her lips and in her eyes
though frozen still gravitate
and shower on me and I continue
to thaw them till perpetuity.

RIGHTS OF THE WRONGED

The night has its very own domain
so does the day
but the twilights fight
for their right
in both their avatars
of dusk and dawn
and claim their boundaries drawn.
They wield the labrys to cut both ways
and get branded with
pink triangles
and convert their half lives
into doubling time
and flutter their pride flag
over the rainbow.
The sun continues to ride the horizons
and cross the meridians
to define the day
and goes below to carry forward
the day to the other half
leaving one half to the night
while etching the purple Lambdas
in the space between the two.
As natural and as real
as they are.

Fall 2016
Elena Botts

noon wakeup
every morning im inconsolable, googling flights to nowhere. listening to your old voicemails. contextualizing the
moldy toblerone in the top drawer. making and unmaking the bed and sitting still until the housecat nips. i don't think
im real anymore. i have this constant feeling like there are many ways that reality might go or might've gone and since
reality doesn't feel any more real than these alternatives, there's just an endless palimpsest of temporal and spatial
possibilities which get trippier when one considers things like death. in the next life, i'll be a herding dog, spinning in
circles, biting at sheep, and feeling immensely the rich earth. i have little poetry for you today. i've put a few things
together with the result that nothing makes sense- thinking about jesus- nothing like someone tortured, naked, and
emaciated to reflect the sufferings of the sweet earth. still, the acridity of cynicism is about as useful as drinking paint
thinner at a party to get a few laughs- belief is a strange little apparatus to keep us breathing and eating every day.
and actually i have no idea where i am, i cant believe im alive, what i've been doing for the past few weeks (lying here
listening to nighttime sounds and thinking about how meaning happens between people or doesn't, that is, i miss
everything, the whole dreaming earth is one long sorrow, goodbye, i mean good night, good morning, so long, i'll sail
my ghost ships to the moon and never come home at all and where is my love? (would it be the sad background music
to the silent film of my life, a house that i pass every day left empty? this is a strange wordless peace (a buried moon)),
haven't been making anything with my hands or seeing anybody real, i should hitch a freight to nowhere, delete all
contacts, get out of the countryno use,
still got to find a place to sleep.
the body was just a brief history of the soul (i am light).

(hey little bird i miss you little bird won't you let me go someday?)
you're a joke and i'm a joke and none of it matters anyway, love, it was just a laugh-and this has something to with lostness, with being strange and wild in eye and too livid pale for the world.
or just sitting stolen out of clouds and errantly wishing
or to be real for a minute or two and then forget the universe,
or the universe, now lost, is forgotten and cannot be made to move and the stars shift in a sullen darkness as the hills in
an echoing wretchedness bend and bend and bend into nothing
except that which is us as we hold the sky up,
expiring of ourselves into it,
and the meanings are caught in the crux
of the heavens which rest solely upon my shoulder or yours, which though briefly laid immobile is made into a feeling,
a madness that makes us, love could mean anything now.

I'm missing your moon.

By then, of course, we werent speaking again, which was alright but for my silent distractedness late at night when I
became convinced that myself was just another storm to be weathered and the trees sighed all through the early
morning hours and I turned and I turned and there was no one there so I was borne aloft in dead ocean of dreaming
that filled the vacant spaces of the empty house and I knew all at once that I was nothing as could be held by the wide
earth.
But you can hold the sun in your hand at this hour, look, and he looks and raises his wrist and cups the sun and he says
to me, you know youre all I got, and I said, no, theres this everlasting light, see, just beyond the window and so
infinite, and youre holding onto it, youre holding onto infinity, like, I don't know.

i didn't mean to write any of this:

you were alabaster in the bathtub, pouring water over yourself and crying out. i bathed you in the early morning light
and you fell into me like an angel. later, all of this was forgotten. child as you are, you received me, then left me,
pretended as though you'd dreamed me. i forgive you for all you've done
though i doubt ill forget you or the cruelties and kindnesses, the greatest cruelty likely just being the way you cannot
even acknowledge my being- as of now, for instancethe most terrible kindness being love, true or not- or is that the cruelty?but your cruel things seem borne of fear so my only feeling towards them is a universe of compassion, while my only
feeling towards you is love.

i feel distant in that i am living,

and it was raining, rain everywhere, deep translucent shards of heaven spearheaded into the freaking grass, like the
grass was really freaking out what with the soil all up and inundated and we were swimming in it with our minds, even
those of us inside, we were in deep, deep into heaven and there was no surround except the thunderous sound of us all
drenched and drowned in this liquid that would spring us, bring us all full color back into the world of living or
something like that because i was searching for reality i mean in the tall grass and i couldn't find it anywhere but i
gotten bitten by some kind of wonder that keeps me breathing and up at night or sleeping at night or whatever i can't
tell the difference between anything it's all encompassed in a feeling that i can't describe maybe if i write about it, i'll
write myself out of being alive.
what it would mean to be alive and arrived at a grocery store at eleven nighttime a family was in line and all of them
stared at nothing except the little girl stared at me. or to be alone on country roads at night illuminating the dim little
worlds in headlights hardly thinking of the vast outer space and summer nights are too easy, nearly crying at the cold
music of your thoughts but it's all in the silences now.
oh i can't believe the world, us all sitting, him with half sky, half ocean eyes. the dog follows him around. the dog
follows us around. a break in the conversation because there's an ambulance. averting one's eyes around the empty
bedrooms (someone was in your house). we like to talk about how it's hard to believe anything. i like to tell them how
much i want my love to kill me so that i don't hurt him anymore or make such a useless fool of myself all the time.
a boy and a girl curled up like two strange animals in the upper new york city sky in an apartment abandoned by a
family of weekenders, she was out like her name means light it was the best platonic night her and him walked
riverside as she who is as real as somebody made up can be because she leans into it, the moon, and so he spent a
moment tracing the waves. they named the bridge and walked on amid a flurry of cyclists, whose velocities were
electric, the way they lit up the night. she fell asleep knowing she hadn't been home in a while.
under the bridge where it didn't matter except to the woman sleeping midway through the day her jeans popped out of
the mattress so rudely the world stopped except for human of us all to keep the feeling he held up in his hands and
said look, it's the mind of the earth. so they went to the river. and she wondered is this what you in your lonesome soul
were wanting? to be lying adrift by the wild sky as the universe goes by in the fire ache of being. the story is always to
find something beautiful and so lose forever.
surely there is a reason for descending water of cloud being so nebulous but then to solidly color us darker and colder
and then to forget our heat, warm bodies glowing through an outer earth that speaks in syllables low and harsh and
this is the rain and it comes mostly when i think of you or do not dream of you which is like remembering something
sadder and greater than i this being a feeling to live and afterwards die for or to say nothing at all and do nothing but
sit in a parked car, lean into a wheel nearly dropping of sleep and the weather to envelope this little mechanical soul
and do nothing, leave nothing but a thunder that may be called a storm in conversation but otherwise not remarked

upon and to not even consider it or anything- in short, to know nothing and give up believing because believing seems
so or doesn't seem so absently conjured against the clouded sky or even written into those everlasting stars should they
beam bright again sometime in the midnight when the tempest has passed and the people lie but no, the feeling was
not wrested easy it lay in the core of what it is the heart- and so we were.
the house is talking. i made up the boy. those were my stars. windows are for summer to be opened. and then the
autumn. beds were made for lying awake and speaking, hardly keeping. thoughts to oneself. i won't forget you but
you're just another universe of dreaming. so am i.
my soul is so quiet.

Fall 2016
August Evans

FOR LORNE
You, Lorne: draped in the haze of the workaday, yet still glamorous with your perpetually magenta
lips and nails. You, Lorne: far younger than my decrepit 43, yet humming with the mystery of an ancient yew
tree. How can one appear at once wrinkleless and wise? Oh, Lorne, you who iron your lustrous black hair
close to your head like a sleek European, just for the steam of the warming hood to puff it in frizz. You wear a
sudden black helmet as I ladle beef stroganoff and lemon meringue onto your plate. Oh, Lorne, this is how I
love you best, when your veneer begins to crack.
Tonight, Lorne, like every weekday night, only two cars remain in the parking lot of the Pinkus
Institute. One is a bright blue Porsche, belonging to Mr. Pinkus himself, Dr. Top-of-the-Stack. Youve just
emerged from this lewd vehicle, and are now settling inside your peeling auburn Honda four-door, decayed
by a decade of Texan dust. The Porsche revs, reverses, tracks up white dust as it fades down the oak-lined
drive. Pinkuss iron gates part, allow the rumbling car through before they slide slowly back to closed. Now
theres only silence, Lorne. Now theres only me and you.
I spy from my usual spot, squatting deep inside one of the numerous rosebushes planted alongside
the metallic bulk of Pinkus. Within the womb of the rosebush, your world is small, navigable, a network of
potent pinpricks and razor-sharp brambles.
My presence in the rosebush is as hidden and inconsequential as my tongs of sustenance pawing
your plate through the Pinkus food line steam. Though I always say hello, Lorne, you rarely meet my eyes,
just keep your head low and mutter a barely audible Thanks. Sometimes your mouth just moves to make
the word, and I hear nothing.
Lorne, have you ever even read my nametag?
Oh Lorne, you know nothing of my life beyond Pinkus. You dont know I read a lot. You dont know
how little my identity has to do with ladling desiccated meat and vegetables onto your plate in our shared
place of employ, our radical institute of shaky ethics. Oh, Lorne, what intense pleasure and purpose it gives
me each morning to think of you as I pull on my cardboard-feeling uniform after the 4:30 alarm zap. Silent in
my dark kitchen, coating my teeth in Folgers, I smile softly to myself at the mere thought of seeing you at
approximately 12:32. The knowledge that your willowy form will breeze into the drab-lit, pea-green

lunchroom brings a plaster-cast smile to my face. And so, dear Lorne, you sustain me more than these mere
words can show.
But Lorne, feelings are tawdry, arent they? Accessible to everyone. We have one word, and we
agree together on what it means. How often in trying to praise you do I curse the vehicle by which I express
my love.
But not as often as I curse Mr. Pinkus.
Does Mr. Pinkus love you, Lorne? How could he possibly understand you the way I do? How could he
dip inside the pristine hills of your thighs and return home to join a family of five? How I curse the man.
I see you, Lorne, each and every weekday night, through my binoculars ovular gaze. I see who you
have chosen instead of the actually attainable Pinkus cardiologists. I see where your desires really lie: you
dont want the doctors, the peons, but the father of the whole grotesque Pinkus enterprise, a very married
father of three.
I zoom in on your magenta fingernails dripping down the Porsches fogged windows. I capture the
occasional raven bursts of your shaking hair. Once, even, I caught, in the very center of my view, your
pristine, porcelain face, contorted in a grimace. But that was my limit; that was when I turned the binoculars
away.
How could I ever, Lorne, witness you in pleasure with origins outside of me?
Oh, Lorne, if Mr. Pinkus wasnt paying you enough before, hes certainly not going to start now.
But something seems to be up tonight, Lorne. Youre lingering longer than usual, your engine
running. Usually you only wait five minutes after the departure of the Porsche and then hightail it out of
there, likely to prevent anyone associating the two vehicles.
But tonight youre rolling down your window, reaching out your long porcelain arm to open the door
from the outside (some vital inner latch must be broken), a mass of your dark coral hair flowing out into the
night.
Oh Lorne, I could fix that latch for you in a second. Mr. Pinkuss paycheck sure doesnt let you fix
everything, does it?
Once out of the Honda, you stretch your willowy arms yogic-high above your head, your black hair
snaking luminously down your thin back. I close my eyes and whisper silently, Purify that Pinkus.

My heart is rattling, Lorne, at the sight of this, a fervent staccato that stuns my binoculars from my
face, sends them crashing into my chest. I feel my head rumble the rosebush as I wobble and tip from my
squat, plunging into the dirt of my cave. A petal floats down, lands in my mouth. It tastes like wet paper, and
you, maybe. I hold it between my silent lips, laughing, still watching.
But you get back into your car, quicker than I would like. I guess the stretching session is over. Too
bad. But it was nice for a second, Lorne, wasnt it? I wish I could knead your sore shoulders, bring luxury to
your aching limbs.
Oh, Lorne, do you remember the hell of last winter, those several months when you brought your
own lunch? You sat alone at a corner table, unpacking Tupperware sullenly from a thick plastic bag
someones idea of an adult lunch sackprobably a free gift at a mall makeup outlet. Maybe you were trying
to lose some weight (Pinkus food isnt exactly lo-cal), or maybe you were going through a breakup (your
romps with Mr. Pinkus are fairly recent); possibly it was the weather. Either way, you stopped interacting in
zero way with the food line, and therefore me (from my long-viewed squint, I even saw youd brought your
own napkins).
But youre back to eating hot food now. And your suitors are back, too, stronger than ever. You,
Lorne, so impenetrable that you deny even the most handsome Pinkus cardiologists, who frequently
approach you at your table, hovering awkwardly, hands clasped and wriggling behind their backs. Though
these are some of the most eligible men in the world, Lorne, never once do you invite these potential wooers
to join you. Many are fresh from various countries, permanently in the Texan pit where Pinkus is housed,
seeking a real wife. With your looks, you could have any of them, Lorne. All you would have had to do is
point your finger at one and he would buy you a house, make you pregnant, eliminate entirely your need to
work in your secretarial (albeit, high) position for the Mr. Pinkus, CEO.
And yet, oh Lorne, how I love you as you keep your gaze low and withdrawn, rarely give them both of
your eyes, all in the same spirit with which you handle me at the food line. Believe it or not, Lorne, I take
some solace in this, knowing that I, a lowly food worker, receive equal treatment of the Pinkus superheroes.
Suddenly, in the distance, I hear the rumble of the Pinkus gates, spreading wide.
Two headlights, brazen and obscene as a semis, barrel down the gravel drive. Never have I seen the
Porsche from this direct view.

Why, Lorne, would the blue Porsche need to return? What more could Mr. Pinkus possibly need
from you tonight?
Mr. Pinkuss Porsche squeals up next to yours, so your two cars are facing opposite directions. He cuts
the engine and gets out, revealing an anonymous, doughy face, perfect for corporate work. A cigar is going in
his hand. He exhales a hard line of smoke. His cough sounds like an egg landing in oil.
Oh, dear Lorne, that you would have to taste such a mouth.
Your car is still going, Lorne. You do not roll down your window to open your door.
The color rushes woozily to my cheeks. I tug the bramble guts of the rosebush, bloodying my hands,
grasping for a few decadent seconds, the universe I sense will not be mine for long.
Because youre not getting out of your car, Lorne, and Mr. Pinkus is walking in my direction.
I plead internally, in these final moments of hidden interlude, that if there is a god I will be granted a
break. I swear solemnly to end my innocent spying, to take the simple human route of courtly affection in
wooing you. I vow to never return to the rosebush. Places seal themselves in my memory if I visit them more
than once. I will always have the decadent aroma of this rosebush. I will revisit it frequently in my fantasies,
but, I swear, I will never return here, if only god will bring me you.
But Mr. Pinkus is leaning down and in, his sack of a face interrogating my special space. Its not fair, I
think, and scream, You jerk, as his doughy hands reach into my private jungle and fumble for my
shoulders, my face. I stay absolutely and completely put, laughing as I hear him swear at the pain of the
thorns plunging into his skin.
Him or me! I hear myself scream, my tone acrid, nothing like the voice I know myself to have. This
is more goats bleat than human call as Mr. Pinkus gets a firm grip, and heaves me out of the rosebush by the
shoulders.
As I emerge from the rosebush, I glimpse the meticulous lawn bordering the entry path leading up to
Pinkuss front door. Plant life blooms in profusion, of colors misplaced in this Texan drab: bright purples,
reds, magentasplants of huge cups and leaves. In just small tracts of grass are a stunning array of discshaped flowers, flown in from Japan.
Soldering my eyes on your car, I will you to reach out your porcelain arm and unlatch your door. I
will you to stop seeing me as invisible, to affirm my yearning, to choose pure love over Pinkus power.

I beat the coarse fabric of Mr. Pinkuss finely tailored suit as his grip on me firms. Through Lornes
blurry windshield, I see a vague image, an object close to her head. A phone.
Its funny where your mind goes in moments of disbelief and horror. Looking at Mr. Pinkuss
muscled, expensively tailored chest, I understand he does not possess a human heart. How else could he
have birthed the idea of this horrendous institute, where there is no hint of red, raw, pumping humanity?
The sprawling from the concaves and the apertures of the earth is the source of being itself, and no man
should engage in the kind of science that involves morphing animal hearts into human ones.
Mr. Pinkuss molasses-hued heart surely seeped out from his suit long ago, replaced by a porous,
clotted ball of madness.
Hawkish eyes low, mouth a hard, tight line, Mr. Pinkus is no man at war, but a dictator scrutinizing a
spontaneously out-of-control landscape. He is taller than I am, his right shoulder nearly grazing my left
temple.
The right thing to do would be to use all my human power and run up and pull my dear Lorne from
her derelict Honda. But my legs are stolid and frozen, in involuntary protest.
But in this failed contact, I see Lorne remove her phone from her alabaster ear. She grows taller in
her car, stacking her shoulders in an act of self-defiance that reminds me of my own hesitation. I feel we are
the same person, ruled by identical radar.
Come, red razor blades, police sirens. Seal shut my eyes. Blare your hot red staccatos because I will
never belong to you, you who will never take Lorne from me.
Mr. Pinkuss hands move down to grip me by the waist, like hes about to conduct the Heimlich.
Heaving for air, I see drool at the edges of his mouth, and smell his oniony huffs.
I stay still.
Oh, Lorne, how you become with every new glimpse even more a fellow of my heart. How similar
you are to me, craving only the unattainable, the eternal rosebush, in perpetual bloom.

Fall 2016
Skylar Abdeljalil

The Wing Collector

Hello, Angie. I greeted the girl who settled in across from me with a smile that she did not return. Even
though it was our third session, she was still about as open and talkative as a dead pigeon.
Hello, Doctor Veres-Torres. My name came out flat, almost machine-like. I didnt know why she
wouldnt call me Dr. Kate like the other patients did. She absently fiddled with a rubber band around her
wrist, snapping it against the bone like she was trying to block out bad memories. For a moment, that was
the only sound in the room. Snap. Snap. Snap.
I couldnt take another second of it.
Angie, what do you think we should talk about today?
She regarded me with her flat stare, her eyes shining dully through her long platinum bangs.
Are you asking me what I want to talk about or what you want me to talk about?
I guess I wasnt surprised by that reaction, given our previous sessions.
Well, I suppose that this session is about you. So, what would you like to talk about?
Her gaze moved to slightly behind me, where the light on my laptops camera blinked lazily,
recording the whole scene. Her eyes were granite hard.

Anything but Dad.

I blew a clot of frustration slowly out of my nose. I was a psychiatrist, not a trained interrogator.
Ok. Can we talk about your wings then? I asked.
The last person that I had consulted on this case said that I had to lay a trail for her, lead her into
talking about her dad through other means. In this case, it was the wings. Her eyes slipped from my face to
behind my left shoulder, where one of my wings lay draped against the back of the chair. She seemed to
dissect it with her gaze, running over my bone structure. A glance at the carpet led her to one of my feathers,
resting near her feet. Taking it in between two fingers, she twirled it, watching it joylessly but with a certain
measure of satisfaction. I couldnt help but stare at the soft white and speckled gray as it fluttered in her
hand.
I always thought that I would grow feathered wings. She said, her shoulders pressed near her ears.
I turned my clipboard face down on my knees and assume the position; leaning towards her like a
child waiting to be told a story. Angie shifted, and I could hear bandages softly rustling against the back of
her shirt.
I mean, everybody has this dream when theyre growing up, you know? Of what your wings are
going to look like. I used to draw them all the time. I would draw myself, and then draw a pair of wings on. It
was like playing dress up. I nodded encouragingly as she continued.
I grew them really late, you know. Most girls get them around twelve, fourteen, maybe. I didnt get
them until I was sixteen. I was always getting made fun of, told that I just wasnt going to grow them. That
terrified me, never having wings.

It wasnt an uncommon fear; there was, after all, a small percentage of the population that never grew
wings. That percentage included her father.
How did your dad feel about that? I asked.
For a moment, I thought shed shut down, but surprisingly, she answered my question.
It upset him. But he always told me that I didnt need wings to be beautiful.
XXX
I cant believe she hasnt said anything yet. Detective Archer Lane vibrated behind his desk, his
fingers tapping out arpeggios on his bouncing knees.
I shrugged, and he scowled at me. Its been three sessions already, Kate.
I returned his scowl.
What do you want me to do, put on the thumbscrews? I cant make her say anything she doesnt
want to say.
His wings, oblong and diaphanous like a dragonflys, fluttered restlessly against his back. They
hummed against each other, punctuating his sentences.
Does she at least talk about her father? What her home life was like with him? he asked. Now he
was grasping at straws as if the only thing that proved his case was my patient. Not like the trophy room full
of preserved human wings wasnt proof enough.
She talks about him sometimes. But never in a bad light. That girl idolizes him. I said. A shudder
slithered between my vertebrae, and I felt my wings against my back more than I ever had.

He took her wings, Kate! Daddy Dearest came home one day, hugged his daughter, and then cut off
her wings, the wings she had only had for about a year. You know we still havent found them? God knows
what he did with them! the detective slumped back in his chair, hands still fiddling relentlessly.
I know, and its awful, but you can only charge him with things you can prove. She wont talk about
it. Lane sprang from the confines of his chair like a pissed off Jack-in-the-box and hurled the case file across
my desk. Crime scene photos splash out. I forced myself to look at them; the bodies, his saints, laid in
churchyards with their hands clasped over their bloodied hearts. The wings carefully preserved and
mounted like the antlers of conquered deer. The photo of his wife and daughter, behind which he stashed
the drivers license of each and every victim. Except for one. Lying across from the photos was a small shot of
Angie, clipped to the folder over her initial report. The one that said she didnt remember anything. The one
I wish they would have just accepted.
We need to get him for all of them. Not just the ones in the churchyards. Not just the ones who we
can match to their wings. All of them. We need to nail that bastard for every single one of them, all thirtyfour of them! the detective slammed his fists against my desk, and I saw the haunted look hed gotten in his
eyes.
For her especially, we have to get him.
XXX
Angie sat across from me again, playing with an unlit cigarette in between her fingers. I wondered
how long shed been smoking. Shed relaxed with me somewhat, but not enough to say anything.

I want to talk about your mother, I said, shuffling the papers in my lap. She stiffened, her eyes
narrowing and her mouth becoming a small, pale line. Shed never mentioned her mother before; I guess
because it must have upset her father.
She died when I was little. She said bluntly. The side of me that worked for the police said not to let
her get away from this that easy.
How little? I asked. It must have been in the file, but I didnt really take the time to look it over all
that carefully. I wanted Angie to tell me herself.
I was seven. At least she gave me straight answers when I asked for them.
Were you there when it happened? I asked. She threw herself back against the chair.
You have the file. You know. She said. Ok, so she didnt like talking about Mom. Then again, she
didnt like talking about anything. We sat in silence for a second, then she spoke again.
Theyre going to lock up my dad, arent they? Her tone is dignified and resigned; she knows the
answer.
Yes. For a long time. I said. She flicked her cigarette, still unlit, into the wastebasket.
Why do you think he did it? she asked. I couldnt place the look in her eyes when she asked, but it
made the air in the room feel cold.
I dont know.
XXX
I need you to go and see him. Detective Lane cornered me as I leave my office. I nearly spilled my
coffee all over my briefcase.

Why me? Youre the detective! I protested. I admitted to myself, but only to myself, that I was really
uncomfortable with the idea of sitting across from the man who chopped off his own daughters wings.
Exactly. Im a cop. The enemy. No way hes going to talk to me. But you are a civilian psychiatrist
who is treating his daughter. I silently put quotation marks around the word treating.
What do you want me to grill him for?
The bouncing detective deflated at my obstinate response to his request.
I think he has information about the mother that might get the girl to talk. He said. Of course. It was
all about getting Angie to talk like she was a prisoner of war from a hostile country instead of the victim of
her own fathers madness. I squared my shoulders, trying to reassure myself about the measures taken in
prison to keep visitors safe from the inmates.
Ill go. But only because Angie wants to know how hes doing.
XXX
I was admitted into the prison the next day, placed in front of a dingy Plexiglas window, and told to
wait. A few minutes later, they brought a diminutive man in an orange jumpsuit to the other side. I picked
up the phone, and he mirrored me.
Hello, Mr. Grayes, I said. He regarded me with blue eyes, pale and benevolent.
Im sorry, I dont think weve met. Who are you? he asked in a soft, lilting voice. It unnerved me that
the Wing Collector looked like a sweet man who taught third grade, not a crazed serial killer.
My name is Doctor Kate Veres-Torres. Im the psychiatrist whos treating your daughter. His eyes
brightened at the mention of her. How could this man have taken his daughters wings?

Angie? How is she? Oh, god, she must think that Im a monster he hung his head, revealing a
shiny bald spot.
Shes doing well physically, but emotionally well, none of us are really sure. Thats actually why
Im here. He cocked his head as I continued.
Angie refuses to talk about how she lost her wings. I think that keeping that bottled up is doing
more mental damage than we could ever realize. He stared at me for a second longer, and then realization
bloomed on his face.
Oh, no, you think I took them from her, dont you? No, no, I could never lay a finger on Angie! I
mean, sometimes, maybe I wanted to take them off of her, free her from them, but no! I could never hurt
her. His eyes filled with tears and I felt my own grow damp.
Why did you do it, Mr. Grayes? I asked. His eyes glowed when he spoke.
She died without her wings. He said, so softly that I could barely hear him over the phone.
You mean your wife? I asked. His face crumpled, limp as a popped balloon.
Yes. They didnt even find them in the wreckage. It was like they were torn from her and sucked into
another dimension. I nodded. The file said that Lilith Grayes died in a car accident that had left her in bad
shape.
Soyou tried to find her some wings, Mr. Grayes? he nodded, hiccupping softly and pulling a
crumpled handkerchief from somewhere in his jumpsuit to dab at his face with.
There were none that really matched, but I thought if I searched hard enough, I would find the
perfect pair for her. But she didnt like any of them. They werent HER wings. I felt a pang of twisted
sympathy for this man, who had killed and mutilated so many people, all for the woman he loved.

Did you ever find her some wings that she liked? I asked. When he looked back at me, Thomas
Grayes had been replaced by the obsessive persona of the Wing Collector.
No. I failed her. I tried everything, made sure that they were perfect. But she wanted her own. I
understand, I suppose. If you lose an arm, how could you replace it with anyone elses? he mused. A
thought struck me that sent a worm of horror slithering down my spine.
Did Angies wings look anything like her mothers? I asked as a fist sized knot developed in my
stomach.
Somewhat, yes. They had the same coloring; black and white with blue undertones, like a magpie.
But Lilith had more white, and Angies were more speckled. He said immediately. How long must he have
spent, just admiring his familys wings?
Did Lilith like Angies wings? He clapped a hand over his mouth, instantly that gentle third-grade
teacher again.
Absolutely not! Lilith adored Angie, she could NEVER ask anybody to hurt her like that His eyes
scanned the visiting area furtively before he continued. People were jealous of my Angie, you know. Her
wings were so beautiful. Maybe, maybe someone found out about what I was doing and he buried his face
in his hands, taking long, shuddering breaths that fogged up the glass that separated us.
You think a copycat did this to Angie? I asked. Part of me wished that that were the case, but it all
seemed too neat and tidy to be truth.
Well, I didnt do it. If I had I certainly wouldnt have done it the way it was done. He sniffed,
blowing his nose into the handkerchief. That information took a second to wind its way around my brain.
The doctors had said that Angies wings had been dislocated and partially torn off before they were cut to

finish the job. Every pair of wings that Thomas Grayes had taken were carefully removed and preserved;
damage like what had been done to Angies wings would have been an insult to his art.
Thank you for your time, Mr. Grayes. Would you like to send any messages to Angie? I asked softly.
He looked up, using his sleeve to wipe away the thin fog on the glass.
Just tell her tell her that Im sorry. And that shes beautiful, with or without the wings. Make sure
she knows that, please, Doctor? I swallowed the lump in my throat and nodded. As they led him back to his
cell, I could hear him mumbling to himself.
Oh, my Lilith And now my Angie too they clipped my angels wings
XXX
Well, of course, hes lying. Detective Lane said, craning his neck as he fixed his tie in the reflection
off the window.
That man isnt capable of hugging his daughter too hard, let alone tearing off her wings, I said. I did
not go through six years for a masters degree just to let Archer Lane brush me off.
Kate, that man in there, he abducted 34 people, cut off their wings and stabbed them through their
hearts. You dont think he could do it one more time? He looked at me like hed scored a point. I hated that
look.
But the method in which he removed the wings was different with Angie! They were ripped from
their sockets and then cut off. Hes never tortured any of the rest! What do you always say about serial
killers? he glared at me; it wasnt often that people used his own words against him.
They dont break their pattern. His shoulders slumped, then squared again.

 Its always different when they kill someone close to them. He rubbed his hands over his face like
he had just gotten out of bed. Thomas Grayes killed 34 people and tore off his daughters wings. With or
without her testimony, hes getting the needle, no question. Its your choice whether you help us along or
hinder us and drag this out for Angie. He left the room. I was left to stalk back to my office to prepare for the
trial.
XXX
I want to see him. Angie sat on one of the hard chairs outside the courtroom, balling the hem of her
black dress into her fist.
I dont know if thats possible, I said. Her forehead set determinedly and her chin jutted out; she
wasnt taking no for an answer.
Hes my dad. And I want to see him. She said just as Detective Lane came around the corner. She
turned her head so her request would reach him as well.
I think we can arrange that. But youll only have a couple of minutes. He said, shifting in his
sneakers. Angie nodded curtly to him, then turned back to me.
Will you come with me? my stomach thrashed and twisted, but I agreed.
We walked into a small office next to the courtroom, and a moment later, Mr. Grayes was escorted in.
his hands and feet were still chained like he was in prison, but he was dressed in a threadbare gray suit with
a black tie covered with roses. I saw Angie smile; I think for the first time.
Youre wearing my favorite tie! before the bailiff could stop her she threw her arms around her
fathers neck. He pressed his face into her hair and closed his eyes. Once we were seated, he started asking
her questions.

Angie, my girl, how are you? Whos been taking care of you? he asked, concern furrowing his brow.
Aunt Mae and Uncle Orin, Dad. Theyre doing pretty well, even though Aunt Mae cries whenever
she looks at my back. The man across the table looked like hed never be happy again.
What happened to your wings, Angie? Who took them from you? he asked, reaching over the clasp
her hands in his own. Her brow knit with confusion.
Dad, nobody took them from me. Behind the one-way glass, I could sense that Detective Lane was
now holding his breath.
What happened then, sweetheart? This lovely psychiatrist says you wont talk about it. He gestured
to me. She looked over at me, then back at him.
Yeah. I wanted to tell you first. Dread wrapped its cold fingers around the room and stopped
everyones breath. She smiled at him, the smile of a proud daughter.
I gave them to Mom.
XXX
They exhumed Lilith Grayes just after the first snowfall. I walked across the peaceful churchyard, my
boots crunching against the fresh powder, my hands shoved into my pockets. It couldnt be true, I told
myself.
She said she had crushed them underneath the garage door at their house, then used a kitchen knife
to hack off the rest.
I approached the hole where a coffin had once rested, looking black and forbidding against the white
ground, and the undertakers stood by, leaning on their shovels and blowing into their hands to warm them.

Detective Lane was standing next to them, looking down at the silver coffin that theyd pulled from the
earth.
She had wanted to be one of his saints, she had said. Saint Angie. She had wanted to impress him.
I put a hand over my mouth to prevent myself from vomiting as they levered the lid off of the coffin.
As the scene inside was revealed, one of the undertakers did a lopsided pirouette and lost his lunch onto the
frozen ground.
On either side of the husk of Lilith Grayes were two black and white wings, folded neatly as if they
belonged to her. The torn, bloody ends stained the white velvet underneath the corpse a deep red. The
entire thing smelled of wet feathers and frozen dirt. Detective Lane looked down at the coffin, his face
pinched in like he was trying not to cry, scream, or puke.
Oh, my god she actually oh my god he said, his wings folded tight against his back as though
he were protecting them.
She finished it for him, I said, looking down at the desecration that lay before us. I noticed one
more detail before I walked away, one detail that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Lilith Grayes looked so peaceful wearing her daughters wings.

Fall 2016
Frances Wiese

A Beautiful Joke

I remember the night it all changed. The night Hannah and Zoe pulled me aboard the bar, out of the
sea that was everyone else. I admit I may have looked a little lost at the moment. My native Prague
roommate was chasing an old flame working the coat check, while the Christians were assisting each other
in examining the bathroom mirror. Hannah and Zoe worked their humble stage, swaying from the ceiling
fixtures more for balance than sex appeal, sending me the same playful wink as the nearby 7-foot Russian. I
thought that wink was a mutual understanding a polite acknowledgement to be gotten over with when
they grabbed my hand and hoisted me onto the bar. It made my skin tense, the way they moved around my
body, sliding their hands down my hips and pressing their pelvises to me. They were Sirens; alluring
Harleys crowd of ruddy, old men with their rolling bodies and seductive stares. Then there was me,
fumbling between them, already trapped.
Im not sure why I stayed up there. It was easier just to give in to it all: the music, the booze, the eyes
and the twirling. I performed under Hannah and Zoe, watching the mingling drool of Slovakian, Bosnian,
and Czech men accumulate at our heels.
How much? He had asked. Grey hair, boyish-face, and French accent. Zoe bent over and pulled his
silk pocket square from his jacket, dangling it in front of his nose.
You tell me. Hannah said, popping her hip out, pursing her lips. She had it down to a practice.
I mean her. He looked at me. 8,000 crowns?
Hannah and Zoe watched in wait, faces of wry amusement.

8,000 crowns? Thats insulting, I said, waving him off with a wrist flick, not recognizing the
contemptuous laugh as mine.
We knew wed like you, Hannah said. And I drank it all in. An elixir of shame, promiscuity, and
confidence: bittersweet and intoxicating.
We danced until sunrise.
I had wanted to know no one.
Why Prague? everyone asked and occasionally -- Where is Prague? Depending on my audience, I
had told people the city was beautiful or the beer was cheap. Both true. But mostly because everyone I knew
had a gone to Florence or London or Madrid, or stayed comfortably playing beer die under the California
sun. They all took the easy way out. I wanted the unknown and I wanted excitement. Prague was the only
study abroad program where I could follow no one and nothing I did could follow me.
Before that night at Harleys, I had been hanging around with two girls from a Christian college I
always forgot the name of in Philadelphia. I had a Czech roommate too, but shed take me out and just
dump me at the first sight of someone she knew, not so eager to play translator. The Christians werent
much better, posting things on Facebook like Ring By Spring and telling me about the times they had
touched their boyfriends hard-on over jeans.
I only knew of Hannah and Zoe from Czech class at Charles University or occasional run-ins in our
apartment building. Hannah had pouty lips, blonde hair, and a resting bitch face that wasnt always
unintentional like mine. She was from South Carolina and liked to remind everyone. Once when the
teacher had asked her to name the Czech president, she responded, how should I know women cant vote
where Im from, only to follow up with his name along with the two presidents before that. I remember
being impressed by the ferocious way she wielded her intelligence. Zoe on the other hand was more
reserved, with long brown hair and a beautifully defined jaw. She would just look around the room
dispassionately, her mouth a thin line, relishing in her own mysteriousness. But underneath her shy girl
faade she was a fucking vixen; stacked men up like baseball cards; lady on the streets, freak in the sheets.
Now I hadnt considered myself a saint in the first couple weeks of abroad. I had been mildly
successful at dragging the Christians into the world of Pragues club scene. But Hannah and Zoe were a

different strain of crazy and they didnt go out of their way to hide it. All I first knew about them came in the
form of loud whispers during class, where theyd brag to each other about rendezvous with Czech
policemen, Portuguese bankers, and Slovakian DJs. Some days theyd shamelessly show up in the outfit
they wore out the night before. They had found it all funny, scandalizing the most innocent subjects. When
weekend trips were announced, Hannah and Zoe said they couldnt afford to travel like the rest of us abroad.
So we just sleep with men from different countries, Hannah would say laughing. I had thought it all
audaciously off-putting.
No one craves heroine before they taste it.
That night at Harleys sparked an unlikely allegiance between me to them, where my wariness of Hannah
and Zoe had morphed into a growing intoxication.
Sedonaaa, Hannah had sung my name out when I entered class the next morning. Zoe just sat next
to her smirking. Sounds like a stripper name, she said as I sat next to them. I was relieved that they hadnt
written off the night before as a meaningless drunken encounter.
Are you named after the girl in the song? Zoe asked.
No, the town, I said.
Oh, theres a song you know.
Yeah, about the town, Sedona. Zoe looked at me thoughtfully, but not embarrassed like most
people who make that mistake.
So youre saying Little Hollywood is a town and not a girl?
Unfortunately.
You look like a Hollywood, Hannah responded. Blonde and tan and shit.
Across the room the Christians stared gaping at us. Zoe looked over, giggled and turned back to me.
We thought you might need some saving. She was right. I had found those girls exhaustingly safe,
unwilling to dance the night away like my friends at home.
Yeah, everyone heres a fucking narc, Hannah said, unconcerned by who heard. So, we getting
fucked up tonight?

I looked at the Christians across the room and then thought about the shameless liberation I had felt
standing up on that bar. When in Rome, I thought.
I wasnt really sure what I had sold myself into. As a bystanding eavesdropper, their stories had scandalized
me. But my tastes matured upon our new friendship. I ate every detail they dished onto my plate, satisfying
my hunger for the new and exotic satisfying their hunger for an audience.
Ive already hooked up with two Czech men, Zoe bragged to me over our first meal together, One
was married. Nearly choking on my vodka Fanta, I managed to ask where she did it. In his office
building she laughed, Hes so hot though, I want to do it again. At the time, I probably hadnt spoken to
a bonafide Czech yet and she had already fucked two men and corrupted an entire family.
Even more impressively, that same night Zoe explored another mans cubicle, Hannah slept on our
dog shit ridden steps, having returned to the apartment without her keys. It was so fucking cold, she
complained in the tone one might use to complain about a too firm pillow.
They would take breaks in between reminiscing to look at each other and laugh. Dignity preserved in
the deliberateness of it all. Id watch in admiration, thinking about the time I was found behind the frat
house with Johnny, how I allowed the slut shaming to follow me around like a ghost. It all would have been
nothing to them another scratch on the scorecard.
One morning I caught Hannah walking in the door as I was walking out for class. Her blonde hair
was dreaded and eye make up everywhere except her eyes.
Met this 50-year-old cocaine dealer at Roxy last night, she said. We did a shit ton of coke in his car
and drove all over Prague looking for a hotel room. They all thought I was a hooker though, so we couldnt
get a room. She opened her purple clutch and started shuffling through it. At least I think thats why he
didnt speak English.
Fuck, she had said. Lost his number. She snapped her clutch closed and walked past me. There
goes my sugar daddy.
I turned to watch in awe as she climbed all the way up the first staircase, swinging each hip to the
click of her red heels. A few minutes later down the street, I caught Zoe hopping off bus 51. She was subtler,
just curling up one side of her mouth, letting her eyes linger in my direction before walking on.

They were unstoppable the sexiest rabbit hole Id ever fallen into.
And still, amidst all this craziness, they rarely missed a class. That was part of their allure their confidence
that they could do it all. People are all like time is money, Hannah said, but I got a lot more time than
money, so fuck me if I dont spend it right.
The three of us would walk for hours. Through Zizkov, into Namesti Miru, past Charles University
all the way to Vhinorady, wed walk and walk until we were lost and then walk more until we werent lost.
Hannah and Zoe had it already mapped out by the time I entered the picture. They showed me which
Lkrna sold Plan B on Sunday, where to find a Bloody Mary, and which bars sold weed in Zizkov.
You know, Zizkov used to be its own town before the 1920s, Hannah said as we traversed the
cobblestone alleyways of our beautiful, worn-down neighborhood. This guy told me it was all vineyards
and mostly owned by the Proletariat. Hannah reminded me of a Native American the way she used every
part of a man: his body, his money, and his brain. Lying naked in bed, shed probe strangers over the Soviet
empire, the fall of communism, the work of Haek and Kafka.
And now its a Gypsy ghetto, Zoe replied. She had learned that after telling a Prague native she was
a Gypsy. While Gypsies to her meant Free People and Coachella, to every European it meant the dirty
Romani: drunks, beggars and thieves.
Most walks we spent hopping into every antique store and marveling at all the junk: dishes, children
toys, propaganda posters, vases, furniture, jewelry. Each shop was like an over-crammed graveyard of
forgotten lives; taken from homes and thrown into piles just like the Jews filling the lumpy stacks of the
Jewish cemetery.
My dad would like this, Hannah said one day, holding up a copper medallion from World War II.
My dads a history buff like me knows like every answer on jeopardy. I even convinced him to go out for
the show once. She was polishing Stalins face with the oil of her thumb. He got real nervous and did
horrible. I felt real bad after. I think it really damaged his confidence. She paid the cashier 20 crowns, the
equivalence of a dollar, and we walked out into the wet fog. Still, hes the smartest man I know.
My dads the stupidest man I know, Zoe said, adjusting the long, bohemian earrings she had just
bought.

Is he Gypsy too? I responded. Hannah laughed, but Zoe just stared at me long enough to make me
fake a cough.
I bet Hollywoods daddys probably smoking a cigar somewhere in a Tommy Bahamas shirt right
now, Hannah said.
I laughed and said Fuck you, wondering if it was that obvious.
Dont worry, Hollywood. Hannah cooed, nudging my elbow. If we actually thought you were a
prissy bitch we wouldnt have kidnapped you to be our friend.
I turned my face to hide my strange satisfaction. I thought about the night ahead, how one or both of
them would stray into the dark like the dazzling cheap dates they so hungrily set out to be.
Id like to say that I played the innocent bystander, more loftily amused by their lifestyle than swayed by it.
But they were convincing in their scandal convincing that there was no scandal.
I had woken up one morning to Zoe knocking on my apartment door at 10 am. Her hair was wet and
her clothes, the night befores. She crawled into my twin bed that smelt of sex.
Three hours before a 30-year-old Belgian man had been lying there. Olympic rings tattooed on his
chest as evidence of his bronze medal for field hockey, although my drunken selective hearing had me
convinced it was just hockey. He had told me I was the first girl he ever felt so immediately connected to,
that he had only done this with two other girls in the Olympic village. I had asked if he meant sex but he
said, No, one-night stands. I wondered what the point of it all was, why we needed to dress up some lie.
Everything casual had faltered in his lie it was an acknowledgement of guilt, a thirst for justification. I
remember hardly listening as I traced his tattoo with my finger, trying to focus on the story it gave me
instead of his pointy nose and crooked chin. I thought about that night with Johnny, how the story had
circulated among my friends, dragged along my dignity. In Prague, in front of Hannah and Zoe, I was taught
to brag over such things. I wondered how they could do this every night, whether they believed what they
preached.
An Italian man is in my bed, Zoe said. Fucking Hannah brought him home and hes sleeping in my
fucking bed. She had been gone hooking up with two firefighters that night.

At the same time? I asked. She nodded and I laughed and she laughed too. It was sort of fucked up
the way her presence that morning comforted me. I thought, no matter what I did, I could be worse. When
we stopped laughing, she stared up at the ceiling in silence. Black makeup dribbled down her eye crease
onto my pillow.
Im so tired, she said. Fucking Hannah I just want my bed.
Hannah didnt enter my room until 2 pm. Walking in with her typical pride and a slight hint of guilt,
she looked at Zoe with clenched teeth and red cheeks. Zoe stared back with her signature death glare.
I woke up and saw him in there and was like Oh, fuck. Zoes gonna kill me. That was Hannahs
idea of an apology.
I made out with him before you took him home, was Zoes response. The comment took the form of
amusement but lingered in the air with an indignant aftertaste.
Hannah shrugged. Hollywood, she said to me, looks like you got laid last night. I remembered in a
blurred haze standing at the bar with the Belgian, watching Hannah and Zoe both leave separately without
looking back at me, without wondering where I was going or how I was getting there. Perhaps, if they had
stayed I would never have taken him home wouldnt have craved the company.
Yeah, I said, an Olympian. I blew on my fingernails and performed a hair flip. Hannah highfived me. Zoe smirked and stared out the window.
The three of us sat in the dimmed room for the majority of the day, smoking weed and laughing
about our wild night until the smoke felt claustrophobic and the humor in it all staled.
When I suggested we go to Nmst Republiky because it had the only Lkrna open on a Sunday
and because I needed Plan B, everyone complied. It was freezing walking through the city. The eerie fog had
settled over the castle like a haunted Disneyland, like a beautiful joke. I remember feeling the gothic
buildings stare, taunting me through the cyclic twist and turns of the cobblestone streets.
Wait I just realized we just walked through hell for you, Hannah said. We were huddled up
outside of a Costa Coffee so I could swallow a little pill. What you did last night is not Zoe or my problem.
I didnt say anything, wondering if she was right.
Later I would find out on Facebook that the Belgian had a wife and two kids waiting for him at home.
Hannah applauded me for it. Zoe laughed. I laughed until I numbed.

In the midst of it all, Hannah found a boy not a love (she was not one of those) just a boy. He meant more
to her than the 50-year-old cocaine dealer or greasy Portuguese though, and that was enough to surprise me,
the fact that she would let someone mean something to her at all. His name was Lukas and they met as
organically as the American- Czech divide permits: at a bar in Narodni Trida, after matching up on Tinder.
Lukas had whitish-blonde hair, a square face, and a Czech belly. But most importantly, he had the one way
to Hannahs heart: money.
At first Lukas was just a fuck. That is, until he drove her back to Zizkov the next morning in a
Maserati convertible. Rolling up to our apartment building, Hannah relished in the image of it all, proudly
exiting her carriage in true Cinderella fashion: tattered dress and missing high heel.
A week later, Zoe met a boy and a girl. Well, the girl came first. We went to a show at Club Roxy one
night. Hannah brought Lukas, who Zoe, bitter over her lost wing, openly shunned. I hardly noticed her
disappear into the crowd since I was dancing so hard my eyes were closed. As typical as it was for Zoe to
have already found a man, we were quite intrigued to find her holding hands with pink pigtails at the end of
the night. The girls name was Petra. Zoe didnt introduce us.
They went on a second date though. Petra invited Zoe for drinks at Nebe, this time bringing along her
ex-boyfriend, Simon. It must have gone well since all three of them slept in Zoes twin bed that night, and
for many more nights after that.
They told me theyve never met an American as intriguing as me, shed say beaming beneath her
smoky eyes and sumptuous eyelashes.
Something about it was endearing.
Beyond the girl working graveyard shifts at the potraviny down our block, Lukas, Petra, and Simon were the
only Czech friends I made. Once the early a.m.s of a Saturday found all 6 of us around the same kitchen
table: a result of coincidence, post-club sex, and boredom. It was an odd group. Lukas in his Lacoste button
up with his hair combed to the side sat stiffly next to Hannah, hardly saying a word when he usually said too
many. Simon and Petra, in contrast, were dressed in all black, Petra in overalls and Simon in some sort of
profane t-shirt. While all three of them actively joined in Cards Against Humanity, matching cards like

What are my parents hiding from me? with all-you-can-eat shrimp or Dick Cheney, Lukas hardly acknowledged
Simon and Petra beyond low glances. They hardly seemed to care. And it was when Simon and Petra were
discussing plans of Gypsy genocide with us that Lukas left the table impulsively, thumping down the stairs
for Hannah to follow. I strained to catch the conversation floating up through the floorboards.
Whats wrong with you? Hannah asked.
Why are they here? They are no good people!
What?
They are different from me. Why must we hang out with them? He asked in a fit of frustration. I
do not spend time with people like them. They are trash. He yelled with the strain in the back of his throat
that signaled a verge of crying. I want to go.
Okay then leave. Hannah said.
The door slammed and Hannah walked back upstairs, slightly pinker than usual, but collected and
emotionless nonetheless. She sat back down at the table and picked up her cards.
Lukas doesnt feel good, she said.
That night had sat with Hannah though, enough for her to bring it up a week later. I followed her and Zoe
through the underground tunnels of U-Sudu to the last room where Jan bartended, mounting the corner
stool, wordless, like they did. Within a half hour tequila was being poured down our throats and joints
wedged between our lips. This would never happen without Hannah and Zoe. I admired the way they could
regally sit up on that bar stool and command the entire room with only their fingers and their eyes.
We had been sipping mojitos at 3 am when Zoe excused herself to the bathroom.
I dont know what was up with Lukas that night, Hannah said with nonchalant dryness. Her boobs
were practically protruding out of her tight red dress. He called and apologized.
Just dont tell Zoe you heard him say those things about Simon and Petra I already know she
doesnt like him And shes like obsessed with Simon and Petra, she said with an eye roll.
Sounds like youre starting to give a fuck about who you fuck, I said, wondering if my two friends
were more capable of monogamy than I gave them credit for. Polyamory in Zoes case.

I nodded and smiled at the girl bartending. She was as beautiful as she was grungy with dark silky
hair, in slight need of washing, and maroon stained lips. Once she had worn a West Coast crop top with a
palm tree on it and I made the mistake of telling her I was from California. Actually that wasnt the mistake
the mistake was saying she could come stay at my house there. She handed Hannah and I each a shot that I
knew would put me over the edge. Shit, I said, smiling through my teeth.
Well here it goes, Hannah said. We clinked glasses and right as I swallowed it down, Hannah
discreetly threw it over her shoulder never one for formalities.
What the fuck.
She shrugged.
I told her I was going to vomit when it hit me.
Dont let it hit you then, she said, pointing two fingers into her mouth.
Following her sage advice, I headed through the narrow brick hallways and clouds of tobacco smoke
to the wooden door with the skirt painted on it. It was perfect timing. Before I had a chance to grab the
handle, it swung open to Zoe walking out. I smiled at her but she had just stared at me coolly, jaw held high,
and walked past me. My confusion subsided when our usual bartender Jan exited shortly behind her.
It might have been worth mentioning that Zoe had a thing with Jan, and not worth mentioning that
Jan had a girlfriend. So much for slowing down. The next morning we would laugh about their bathroom
sexcapade, not daring to cast it as anything but funny.
Hannah and Zoe both had skeletons that I couldnt help but learn about no matter how well they masked
themselves. It was the reason there was a them and me. One night when Jan was bartending again, Hannah
and I stumbled into the bathroom at U-Sudu. I remember being bothered by a girl that left the stall without
washing her hands. She didnt care who saw just walked out without even looking at the sink.
Zoes been so weird for the last week, Hannah said. Like not talking to me at all, until finally she
apologizes to me today, saying her brother gotta go back to rehab or some shit.
Im like, Ok, so you got family shit, Hannah said over the sound of her pee stream. Well guess
what, my mom just got diagnosed with breast cancer and my parents just found out they might lose their
fucking house. Doesnt mean Im gonna be a bitch.

The way she looked and said it was so matter-of-fact, as if she was complaining about uncomfortable
heels. I didnt know what to say other than sorry. She looked in the mirror and scooped her boobs up in that
same red dress. Howd you do on Bernies test?
The next thing I remember is dancing on the stage at Retro an hour later, holding hands with a young
woman in a wedding dress, screaming Madonna. Hannah went home with the coke dealer that night the
same 50-year-old Slovakian that didnt speak English. Somehow they had ended up at the shopping mall at
8am. She said she had wanted new shoes, then complained about being too tired to make him buy her
things. I searched her swollen face for emotion that wasnt there.
It was easier to see it in Zoe. Some days she would spend all morning lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and
complaining about period cramps. She would never confess to regret that would mean defeat.
Once the three of us were eating lunch at Caf Louvre, neither Hannah nor Zoe had slept. Hannah
had ended the night with Lukas, and Zoe with some blonde Swiss. Zoe had spent the meal prodding her
dumplings like a science experiment. She needed to be at dinner with Simon and Petra in an hour, which
meant another night with no sleep. When she excused herself to the bathroom, Hannah rolled her eyes.
I feel bad, I told Hannah.
Why? For her getting too much dick?
When Zoe returned to the table, her eyes were puffy from crying.
I had gotten so tired by the end of it, tired for us, tired for them. It all had lost its luster, but it didnt stop
them from going for more. Always pursuing those drunken nights and shallow mornings, while I tagged
along, having alienated myself from the friends that slept before sunrise. That feeling of freedom dissipated
with a routine I no longer wanted but couldnt give up.
A week before returning home, I sat on the apartment balcony smoking a cigarette. I had been
thinking about home, wanting to return to normalcy while fearing it in the same way I feared returning my
moms phone calls. Hannah walked out drinking red wine in a white robe and sat next to me. We could see
all of Prague from the balcony. It was one of the stillest spots I had ever known, juxtaposed between the
surreal and real.

I cant believe I have to go back to working, Hannah said. Her entire schooling, including abroad,
had been paid off waitressing double shifts. Maybe Ill just marry Dennis. I dont like him. But hes older
and Ill probably just marry him.
Really? I said.
Im graduating and I dont own shit. At least he treats me well. Buys me things.
I told her she wasnt going to marry him.
Maybe not. She took a sip of her wine glass. Shit - havent gotten my period for two weeks, she
said with a laugh.
I looked out over the balcony, the splattering of red and yellow roofs outstretching like a fairytale. It
was amazing how such a place could be so whimsical and haunting at the same time. I thought about the
night on Harleys bar, when Hannah and Zoe first reeled me out of the sea of everyone else. That night I had
been saved from drowning only to board a sinking ship.
I turned back to Hannah, but she just stared ahead. There had always only been enough room for the
two of them. We all had known I was just a temporary boarder, about to return to the same harbor I had
come while they sailed on. It was necessary. I was the extra body whose weight the ship couldnt hold. I
looked away again, toward a sunset that was sickeningly beautiful, that dared something extraordinary,
different, to happen.
Well, Hannah said, chugging her wine and standing up, you got 30 minutes to get your face ready,
Hollywood.

Fall 2016
Virs Rana

A PICTURE'S WORTH
Words and symbols are ghosts, wispy fogs of probability, falling for trendy formulae to fit the abstraction. So we
must paint the picture, to procure the proverb. And once we draw the proverb, we must deem it worthy of being one,
else we risk deception by a deviant puzzle maker, who may be us Van Arris
I found it while shuffling through the mail, before Kippy couldnt restrain herself any longer. She
grabbed me from behind, ripped open my silk, front-button, collared shirt in dramatic fashion, clutched my
shoulder-length hair, and jerked my head back to open my nape to her vampiric proclivities. Her purple
black lips and gleaming ivories caught their mark, about three inches below my right ear lobe, while I
studied what appeared to be an out-dated correspondence to my address, but without a return
Youre not reading your mail! she quipped, seeing my apparent indifference to her advances.
Its a very unusual piece of mail, I shared.
Really? And can it get you off? She trifled.
My eyes shifted from the brown crinkled envelope to her dilating pupils, overtaking her sharp indigo
color with vacuous black. I dont know; I havent read it yet, I challenged.
Do you realize I am a Tantric master, intensively trained, highly desired?
Perhaps you take the master part too seriously. Sex should be a conversation, not a lecture.
Have you ever had a more excruciatingly pleasurable experience? She pointed.
Yes, the techniques are very effectivebut
Excuse me? Youre introducing a but into our relationship!
Come now, I gathered, all relationships have a conditional clause or two. Besides, it was you who said
we needed more tests. Thats a but.

You are correct, she affirmed.

And it sounds like your but is bigger than mine, I pressed.
Perhaps, she said dryly, reconsidering the level at which we had been performing lately, Very well, she
continued, I will schedule the test. Now, I will transmute my energy body, and you will do the same, then
you can read your mail.
You sound upset.
I have too many orgasms to be upset, she pronounced, as she prissed out the door.
There it is, I thought, that persistent insistent I called it; but Shakespeare said it best, The lady doth
protest too much, methinks.
Like when she advised me last week, Most men are like confused hitchhikers, sticking out their glory
thumbs, hoping to hitch a ride in a womans cab; and when they get one, they cant remember where they
wanted to go, until they limp away, and stand erect again.
Maybe a woman should choose her fare more carefully, I responded.
Are you suggesting what I think youre suggesting?
Only if youre thinking it.
Cute, but not very clever. she admonished.
How can a man be clever around such a lady?
She looked at me askant, as I stood with a poised and peaceful gaze that might mystify the most intuitive
of vipers.
You play well, she said.
My desk light afforded a clearer look at the envelope, confirming the postmark as June 1882, though
barely legible; some mock-up as a practical joke, dropped in my mail, was my first thought. But the elegant
cursive writing and aged look and texture of the paper gave me pause, and my name was boldly written as
the addressee
Next day I called the post office. and they said it was probably from their dead letter office, and slipped
through the cracks, while they were preparing to send them to one of the mail recovery centers. A hundred
and thirty year old piece of mail? I exclaimed.

Yeah, rare, but happens, was the response.

But my house was built in the 1920s.
Yeah, well, began the droneThese guys had really heard it all, and their perfunctory behavior made
me recall the conflict between getting flocked and going whacko for lack of deep penetration; pcitis was the
disease, with rants and raves being the gateway drugs, because subcutaneous assimilation was avoided like
the affliction they didnt know they had, first house was probably moved or torn down. Plus you live in an
area that still has the old numbering system.
Yes, well, it was all so clear, nothing to get wrapped about, have yourself a glass of Merlot, unwind, call
Kippy, even though she couldnt draw that thing more precious than blood. So I played my day, threw hints
at friends and acquaintances about receiving their merry jest, but no fessers, and I was left with this looming
possibility, which my imagination was only too willing to accommodate.
Kippy called back. She had demanded we get tested, after seeing a purple aura around me in the online
dating picture I exchanged, with her, of me sitting on a bench in a train station next to a black cat she
claimed was the reincarnation of Cleopatra. Kippy Suivus was a woman of considerable taunt and quirky
circumstance, the most notable of which was her cultish allegiance to her psychotherapist, Winny the Boo,
they called him, a Freudulent doctor, with yet another method for madness: Re-establish your vibrational
modality by chanting your given affirmation in the performance of your yab yum yoga pose, a baptism of
desire streaming into your pores, arcane words to frill your pysche, an enchantment for the impoverished
spirit, and so we worshiped in the bodys witness to Divine presence.
Based on Resonant Frequency Imaging and Kirlian photography, the test would reveal the compatibility
of our auric eggs, thereby dispelling any doubts regarding the mesh and mash of our meta-relationship. But
that, alone, would not do, for the ritual only carries the message, in which, most mistakenly seek their
salvation, and Kippy was no exception. It was like belonging to the flavor-of-the-month club, and there, I
staggered. You must commit to something, she chided.
How about a healthy relationship? I ejaculated.
Whats that supposed to mean?

I dont know. I never had one. It was there I lost her. I had never liked packaged relationships, regardless
of whose god was the attested creator, and I wouldn't wear a black beret with a purple ribbon hanging from
the back.
"Why purple?" I asked.
"If you have to ask, you'll never know," she replied.
And there it was, my Sphinxian riddle. She was foiling to abdicate the alliance. No matter that my keen
powers of observation and seduction rivaled those of Sherlock and Don Juan; she had found that chink
through which to pierce our trothless keep.
After the test revealed she was a cool blue left and a hot red right, she had called me a changeling, a cool
yellow left and a hot blue right. She cried, Flux, and was no longer impressed; and in the throes of our last
somatic interlude, she wailed, "Green and purple do not mix. Oh, we're in an awful fix!" Her final sigh was
vanity, no high-amp angst or sappy hint of piercing-the-veil, just a cool draft of void, groundless, formless, a
menu of synthetic hot, goddess echoes, and the shameless quiver of a romantic chill. So she would change
her name to Penelope and await the return of her Odysseus
A week had passed. And like any grinding gauntlet where lust betrays reason, there was a price, a need to
re-obsessHow far am I going to drop into this through-the-cracks chase, I ventured. Any ripple in the dead
calm, I cheered. I started tearing open the envelope on my desk, and stopped...EasyIf nothing else, the
postmark and stamp might be worth something So I caressed it, lifted the flap, and carefully slid out the
piece of note paper. It was dappled with brown water spots. I slowly unfolded it and read the voluptuous
scribing:
My Dear Sir, The pleasure of your company is most anticipated, at our humble home, on 12th June, at 8 oclock pm,
for an evening of reading and discussing the poetry of Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelly and Mr. John Keats. Hope this finds
you in good spirits. Sincerely, E.
And there, below, was the address, not more than four blocks away, and further, like off the charts, as a
matter of synchronous happenstance, June twelfth was tonightOk, fella, how about a little weed with that
MerlotWhen what began playing on my app rotation was the popular ballad, Time After Time. Cmon, I

rallied, there had to be hundreds, if not thousands of coincidences in the evolutionary process, so whats a
few more in the life of a protoplasmic accident
It was a Queen Anne style house, surrounded by a pulsating mist, which refracted light into patches of
spectral luminescence, with gables, and towers, and cupolas, fitted with gargoyle finialsAnd I stood before
it, flashing on a school boy, about to give his first bouquet of flowers to his mysterious MadonnaThis
rapturous wonder spilled into the void of transaction, where image seeps shallow, when the ground lies
fallow. Delusional, indeed, hybridized myths and fairy tales wrought by boredom and dogmatic
programmingIts not just knowing the emptiness, but where it liesI moved forward, passed the sign that
read, Property Condemned, onto the threshold, and to the door. It was padlocked; I rattled it in frustration.
I stepped back and looked at the windowsPerhapsI turned to see if I might be observed by any passersby
or neighbors. I looked at my watch, 8:00 PM. Rude to be late, I thoughtThen, a click at the door. I whirled
with manic anticipation, undignified for one wrought by so many grotesque affaires de coeur. Yet, one more
roll of the dice, spin of the wheel, turn of the card was worth it. The lock had fallen openI leapt onto the
porch, paused to take a breath, and adjust my spectacles, ready to feast my eyes on the sweet delicacies of her
ambrosia lips, her gently sloping glabella, accented by languishing eyelids, waiting to be flung open by my
titillating lingual resuscitation, as she would burst into a Verdi ariaO yes, there is a goddess
The interior was dank and musty, as the mist had invaded with its translucent shrouding of recesses and
protrusions, animated by its shifting density. I wandered aimlessly, on creaking floors, through vacant
rooms, conjuring forms I thought were real, my cell phone flashlight, the only illuminationAs I rounded
my way back to the entry, at the foot of the staircase, I heard the merriment and gaiety of distant voices, and
one that rose above the rest, and though I couldnt make out the words, there was a cadence and timbre of
eloquence I had often imagined. I looked up; too dark to see the top. My right foot rose and planted on the
first tread. I hesitated, another clash with reason, what are you doing tilting at windmills? Then I
remembered a retort from the Don, too much sanity may be madness. I ascended the stairs

When I reached the top, there were three rooms behind closed doors. I glanced at them, one by one, and
at the third, a light glowing and fading, in the crack at the foot of this portentous portal; a vagrant seeking
shelter from the elements, of courseI moved to the door and knocked,
Hello, anybody It clicked openI was either being guided to my destiny, or led to my doom. Slightly ajar,
I slowly coaxed it, wider and wider, waiting for a light to flash on, and a hearty, Surprise! to shatter this
foregone delusion; it was, after all, my astrological sun rising today, but naught, but the warm breath of a
breeze. It was, I felt, a very special room on the second floor. There was a different scent here than the musty
odors which permeated the rest of the house, a floral wafting, like the trail of an Elysian sigh across a
meadow, as if someone kept passing through, in and out of reach.
An old antique had survived in excellent condition, a writing desk from its design, and the number of
suggestive ink stains only added to its character. What secrets it held, I could not imagine, this classic oak
escritoire, decorated with aesthetic scars, and wearing the oils and sighs of eight generations. The dust had
been priming to be recognized for years, so I traced the outline of a heart into its drifting unconsciousI
bristled to know why. Something I saw or heard before I arrived? That couple kissing goodbye on the
doorstep? That song on my music app? Or maybe I was on the verge of a lucid dream
I bent down to pull out the top right hand drawer. And, therein, was an old black and white photograph,
in a burnished black and gold frame, covered by a thin layer of glass, and a dusting of dust. I picked it up,
and She looked back at me, with an immortal gaze, torching my soul, this woman, this bewitching Muse, this
posing paragon posturing precise preludes punctuating predatory predilections presaging presumptive
provocations toward perhaps, who was seductively demure.
The attraction was undeniable. She was poised on a period Savonarola, her right forearm resting on a
sitting table covered by a silk embroidered cloth. She wore a Bristol taffeta suit. Her left arm was akimbo,
with her hand resting in her lap, as it cradled a wildflower. Her look was slightly tilted to her right, which
demanded she reset her focus to center, and her full lips betrayed the hint of a smile, her Mona Lisa smile,
that unfinished resolution of a single note about to rise or fall, and I coveted the torment of this moment, her
waiting patiently to be touched where she had never been touched before, and, in my hubris, I chose me to
effect that intimacy. Her hair was pulled back across her ears and bundled at the back. There was no depth

of field from which to construct a familiar environment, only the glint of recognition in her piercing dark
eyes.
My imagination grasped for some sacred geometry in the sculptured space carved by her hungry
innocence: Alabaster skin with slight traces of bluish veins in her hands, her neck, and her pointed breasts,
fevered by that forbidden rite of freedom, and I wanted to whisper in her ear, to shatter the stark pretense of
propriety, You drag me into dark and blind me with light!
Enraptured, like emerging from Plato's cave and seeing the world for the first time, I wanted to hear her
voice, her laugh, feel the torsioned grip of her arms and legs, taste the fired wetness of her skin, make her
gasp for breath against the envy of death.
Who was she? I turned over the picture frame, maybe a note, a name written on the back of the
photograph. I jerkily removed the leather backing, and a slip of paper wobbled to the floor. I ignored it, at
first, and scanned the back of the photo, nothing. Fixated, I held it up to the light; I rubbed my thumb across
it, searching for any indentation or scribingThe piece of paperI put the frame down on the desktop and
dropped to the floor. It was a brittle sepia. I quickened and surrendered. Do I really want to know? What?
Anything? Just receive the gift of now, without trying to cause-and-effect it, I redressed. But I wanted to
know everything. It was of a laid weight and texture, torn and folded over on itself. I opened the two sheets.
It measured about 8'x5', ink written and faded, it was cursive, bold and sweeping in its execution. My
goddess, she was on the page, as well.
It was a poem. I read it over and over, searching for some message, some clue. But I know so little about
poetry, and why did I find this, here, now, in a piece of furniture, in a broken down house about to be razed?
I wrangled to believe in synchronicity, destiny, kismet, but I knew better. Coincidence, of course, besides,
where else would one find an old photograph with an obscure writing? But arent coincidence and
synchronicity arbitrary references to the same phenomenon? I have no idea of its value, as a poem, or a
historical artifact. I only know it brought me closer to her than to anyone I've ever known, this woman lost in
time. I share it now in the hope that it may elicit some substance, some shadow of how I felt

COME SPRING
She wore a ribbon white,
Around her ankle fair
She said it was a promise
Her soul was bound to bear
She wore a ribbon yellow,
To catch her flaxen hair
She said it was to complement
The boldness of her stare
She wore a ribbon red
That set her heart aflare,
And thereby offer labyrinth
To any man who dare
She wears a ribbon light,
To weave her Love so rare,
And cast his world adrift,
With kiss unbowed to share

It was dated, April, 1872, and signed 'E of A'. As I said, I judge her poetry by how it spoke to me. I leave it to
more educated minds to assess its artistic value.
I tried tracing the ownership of the desk to see if that would lead to a clue about her identity, but to no
avail. I started making copies of her picture to send to selected libraries, museums, and literature professors.
But I now stand in the light of day, and I will not move beyond this self- indulgent account. I can only
speculate among common narratives as to the meaning of such an encounter
It was a fleeting suspension of identity due to the re-synchronization of

scalar vector points along

earth's meridians, a dj vu. When Kippy Suivus had explained this to me before, I asked from which wingnut cult leader had she heard it? It was based on scientific evidence, she scolded. I wanted to do more
research on the subject. So the next time I was emboldened by that grappling force of desperado justice, I

gave her a call. Maybe she'd see my re-calibrated interest as further proof of my changeling vibrational
persona.
"I was just about to call you," she said. "That whole Kirlian frequency thing was a scam. It's our stars that
count, after all."
You mean astrology? I twinkled.
Esoteric Astrology! She eclipsed.
It was then I knew I had her. "GreatYou know I've been thinking about that role playing dynamic you
like so much."
"Really?" she cooed. "What did you have in mind?"
"I was wondering if youd be open to wearing some nineteenth century clothes, pinning up your hair, and
changing your name to something that begins with an E."
"Wow," she said, "I'm into it. What name would you like?"
"If you have to ask, you'll never know," I replied. And I dropped the call
In truth, I have not been as cavalier about this experience as it seems. The older Chinese proverb said, A
picture is worth ten thousand words. no doubt diminished, along with our powers of observation. Some
pictures are worth more, some less, some are worth no words, and some are beyond words. So I would say
its a relatively valid proverb, and relativity is currently the wave and point of things. I have grown more
comfortable believing I have a fateful rendezvous with this mysterious lady, to the extent of projecting that
Ive seen her before, recently, in fact, the checkout counter at the patisserie, striding passed each other at the
airport, crossing the street in front of my stopped car, watching her walk by outside the restaurant where I
was having lunch, and, oh yes, that elegant pair of hands, I admired, pulling a book from the library
stacksIve heard, if you dont act on your impulse in the first five seconds, youll forfeit the opportunity,
and I have vowed never to do so again. I have begun writing poetry to her, as it is. Every day, I take out that
photograph and contemplate Es eternal gaze, and that my words can actually move her, as hers have moved
me.
Then I remembered, stories like this have been told before, as if they were an attractive cipher to satisfy
ones desire, which in the context of reality means: Youre looking for what you want, because you dont see

what you have. Such clever sayings, we fashion, to diffuse our dreams. But its not so much that our dreams
are unattainable, as that we are too ready to dismiss them for their irrational structure. As science tells us,
eventually everything will be measured with the proper instrument. That may beAs it may be that the
proper instrument is not for measuring

Fall 2016
Amanda Gomez

Traveling Fathers
Their daughters are postboxes
they accumulate heartbreak
like junk-mail.
Theyre always open
packed with department store flyers, weekly
circulars, and doctors ads for cosmetic surgeries.
They smell
like plastic, damp paper, and the saccharine scent
of that lick and stick envelope glue.
Their arms are always reaching
red flags grasping towards the sky
where their traveling fathers
are seated. Chairs back and trays down
in a plane high up
checking their e-mail.

Shopping Spree: An Elegy

Laughing at a joke,
something most people do
a co-worker tells me:
You sound like a cheerleader.
Excuse me? I ask.
You know. Youre just all bubbly and peppy, she says.
And its not that shes calling me a cheerleader
but cheerleader
in that something in my laugh says
superficiality, shallowness, the fake
bitch that talks behind your back.
Some trope fashioned
from airbrushed movie actresses,
Playboy pics,
fucking teen girl trends in Abercrombie & Fitch ads,
or watching Jennifer Love Hewitt
being interviewed by Conan
encouraging women
to vajazzle their pussies.
Its like a sparkly secret in your pants, she says.
Her skin all clear and glittering
under studio lights.
Shes all bronzer and waist
expanding the distance
between feminine expectancy
and reality.
So thinking of my co-workers reaction
the joke pandering insult,
shes not the only one, Im sure, thinking:
Do I always need to worry about my looks
Will it always be like this?
Will I always have to _______?
I can relate.
Once I maxxed out Mastercard

with every shirt I tried on I thought: Damn!

I look really good.
When my parents asked
about the excess shopping bags
Come on, I said. Havent you ever felt the need to be liked?
Like most parents they responded
with that cliff proverb:
If your friends jumped off a cliff,
would you do the same?
And if you were honest
youd answer yes too
like I did.

Fall 2016
Haley Guariglia

Reservoir in the shallows

On days my hair stood end to end
crisp like falls gallant leaving
stringy pumpkin innards
halt blue expanse
longing, this feeling, for tempered shadows
and the big brass balloon
I wash in a tin tub
waiting for warmth
to inhale me, calm
keeper of the insidious
night I crawl beneath
every wrong move made
silence reverberates between clouds
nothing stares at me
I dry off with cattails
time does not wait or mind
there is much to fear
unprocessed weakness drowns

Death dreams under the cerulean sky, poolside

sun never sets on skin
skin settles for the sun
sunscreen caught in the cracks
carvings etched in blood
pool, palms, the widespread sky
sometimes paradise withholds
hatches spare stumps and limbs
lost my mind when I took a dip
a lifetime of ideations tow
a body unrecognizable
knives and nooses cloud
a mark of madness
on this exquisite perfection without
weights no way to explore the deep
new neurosis, symptoms who counts
three palms are erect and waving
wave back to ensure my limbs are still
attached by coarse black stitches
turn on my stomach, eye-level
the water a deep, velvet, maroon
my name is called by no one
I scribble to tether me to time
pains denouement; a cloud arrives
past selves carry present self to old

wounds, re open them and gouge

when death seems the only way out
of the gate I walk home
under the quintessential California sky

Pyrrhic
as we skipped down the chute my nightmare spat out
chain link destitution circled for group
layers cut like hair, that blunt
bob you see in the movies
have I ever been more famous
than to star in this roiling spectacle
we eat blue fish on pound cake
dithers of coffee grounds licked
clean off the dirt floor
is there time
to stay and say something
breath taking languorous cigarette breaks under the red roofed room
smoke curls a finger at the mental
a gold tooth for a 6 week stay
it may or may not be likely
men will use all they have to restrain
our hearts in thick slices
the last thing you'll hear from the matter on me is
volunteer

We group from noon til three

morsels & molehills bitter
black coffee but there were lids
to cover each others
boiling & slow to simmer
we watched each other weep
into years pulled
from pockets, offered behind earlobes
Pain! We shouted, unfair deity
whiplash truth. A succumbing
crawled the room & we
permitted intermittent attention
or held nothing
back and peeled raw
intensive, sensitive we punctured
holes in wounds, made banner
our hells. No & everyone wanted
more eulogies & elegies
it was a scarred scene
complicated by need & want
hearts were emptied, one by
one more than the few. Fear!
we stamped. Help fell around
like leaves arthritic
hands fail to grasp
we group from noon til three
a graduation is expected
neither grand nor soon

Fall 2016
Jaden Farris

We Had The Power To Choose

ILL BE HONEST WITH you I was really shocked.

There you were lying, as if you just fell asleep.

Lifeless.
I looked at you
and I thought,
I thought we had made a mistake
But no, you were no longer there.
Here. And
In the two weeks since you died
I still call out to you, come home.
I spend sleepless nights lying on our bed
Alone wondering about death and dreams.
I am
tired
Life is
exhausting
without you

The towels
are still
under your
pillow.
I smell
them
and
wince, I
imagine
you
are
still
here.
No area
of our lives
are unaffected
by
your
death.
I still remember when I saw you lying there
on the floor
dead
and then in the morgue,
I remembered thinking
that you would be cold
and that I should take you
some warm clothes and a blanket.
When your remains were ready, they called up to schedule an appointment
for collection. I took a bus to the crematorium to retrieve your ashes,
and planned to walk home because the whole bus was very busy and I know
how you were about crowds. When I got there, I was really surprised by how dull,
white and corporate the whole place was. Not that I was expecting a church
or anything, but I had hoped for more wood, or a plant, or a flower.
The desk attendant checked her computer for your record
Silently got up, making sure to not make eye contact and
She opened the white linoleum desk drawer
And pulled you out.

The ashes were placed

Inside a pine box, which was placed inside
A neatly folded and stapled white paper bag.
I placed the bundle into my backpack and walked home.
When I can manage to gaze
upon our many now disused
cigarette trays and empty home
I cry
for all
of our
yesterdays
Oddly enough, I kept your bagged lunch I prepared that day.
I froze it
it is still in the freezer,
waiting
for something
for someone
for something
that even I am not sure of
to happen
to forget
waiting
to undo the horror
the precariousness
of life, almost instantly
death
caused

Fall 2016
John Martin Petriccione

Moments at the Park

An elderly man with an umbrella
took a stroll in the towns park mid-day
watching, he sat solemn on an oaken bench made for four.
He saw grass and trees leaves shimmying to the rhythm
of the winds breeze and clouds in the sky
mirrored by the still calm of a small pond.
He stares at his feet as they sift through layers of gravel
making up the parks pathways, and at the bugs and the dirt.
The man admits to himself, he knows very little about what he observes.
He accepts the beauty with which the world presents itself
in these quiet moments, but not even an old man understands why.
Moments, precious moments
going by passing constantly away forever as he looks upon the landscape darkening.
A pitter-patter of rain drops begin,
increasing exponentially as time drifts, and in and instant it was pouring rain,
but the man did not move.
Tilting his head toward the crying heavens he smiles.
I got something right, he says to himself in a whisper.
He sits no longer and stands with the weight of his soaked clothes.
Walking along path he marches peacefully to the parks front gates.
I got something right, he says again as he tosses his umbrella in a trash receptacle.
With both hands in his waterlogged coat pockets he begins walking toward his home, miles away.

From Behind the Falls

From behind the falls
nobody sees the man who lies.
When the breeze ruffles the leaves
you know the rain is coming,
clashing in to eyes in anguish.
Look alright with your hands clasped together.
Pray for the grey, not a saint of a sinner.
Gods are great while sitting in the center of intertwined lovers.
Bow to them, you owe them a mother.
Closing fast the winds against red cheeks.
Smoke ahead, coming from abandoned chimney stacks.

Fall 2016
Marjorie Sadin

Pigeons in Union Station

Inside the railroad terminal, pigeons bob their heads.
You and I have hot pretzels and coke in the food court.
Over twenty years, weve been friends.
I met you when we were both on Thorazine
Overweight and spaced out.
When I told you my diagnoses you were bowled over
It was the same as yours!
When I ODd on Klonopin you visited me every day in the psych ward.
And brought flowers and food.
You and I are now different people.
We love to watch the pigeons strut and bob
Even though they are trapped in Union Station
The way we were.

What Happened at Vedauwoo

A visit to Laramie, summer 2014.
Scaling Vedauwoo,
I kept saying, I cant do this, still climbing.
Got on a sheer cliff and lost my balance.
My hands were slipping, couldnt find my footing.
My sister was beneath me, held me up from falling.
She got a bulging disc.
Blamed it on me.
Said I was acting helplessit was an act.
Said Vedauwoo was a metaphor for our relationship.
Now she wont speak to me.
Wont ever believe me again.
I should never have climbed Vedauwoo.
I lost my balance.
Now Ive lost a sister.

Kettering Hall
Apple blossom petals covering the sidewalks.
Kettering Hall at 6 AM in the morning-early for my Calculus class. It is still dark.
I am in love with a male dancer named Eli.
I do Tai Chi and hope to see him between classes.
I take creative writing classes and write one poem about Eli.
I take long walks in the woods alone. I miss home,
eat in the Natural Foods dining room next to a boy
with long blond hair who gets ten page letters from his girlfriend.
He slits his wrists.
Eli has many girlfriends. I am just one.
He has dark curly hair and a slender physic.
I play old Joni Mitchel records
and sing along with them. For my birthday, I imagine
a surprise party. I go home instead, smitten with Eli.
When I get home, I do Tai Chi in the living room, and I talk
incessantly about Eli.
I start smoking Marlboro cigarettes.
I write three letters to Eli and he returns one at the end of the summerA letter to a letter from. Maybe I needed some kind of help? He signs it
L, Eli.
But now I wake early to apple blossoms on my walk
and I wait for you to wake up.
We hold hands on the couch and make love
in the afternoons and love is something very different
from what I imagined those mornings in Kettering Hall.
Now it is just you and I and I dont have to be drunk or unhinged
to say I love you And I dont do Tai Chi anymore,
but you are in my life, and petals still cover the sidewalks.

The Ascension of the Sun

Fir trees lift their arms in Hosannas.
Mountains and valleys misty eyed break
into dawn.
I take for granted the flowers and the leaves.
I trample on dreams.
Still the dawn eyes me.
What am I here for?
A movie screen encounter?
A kiss or a shrug?
When I awaken, the sun rubs its eyes.
The wind sweeps the grasses.
I am alone.
Morning is a dress rehearsal.
I forget my lines.
Evergreens rise.
The sun begins its long ascent.
I am an afterthought.

My Blustering Father
My father is ninety-one.
A whalebig, blustering.
My mother passed away six years ago.
She was his Ahab.
She hid in a closet with a bottle of Jack Daniels
till Father came home.
And then he really got mad.
He would blow like the whale.
I dont love you, she would tell Dad.
It stuck like a harpoon.
Now that he is free of her,
he takes it out on me.
I am not his wife.
I am his child.
Ninety-one leaves little time.
He can only frighten me awhile longer.

Fall 2016
Michael J Pagan

hunger \
At first, we were just fragments chewing away
at each other hoping to leave behind the shapes
of our bodies. We must transform what we are
into our hungers, you said. Into shapes,
like how we used to point out atmosphere, days,
imagination; a sturdy object, Love, we said
to each other, even though all we did was create
conundrums, hoping to sympathize shapes
of ourselves into selves bare of moments,
bare of mercies, of the problem horizons
caused by endings like impassable boulders;
we collided: atmosphered into shapes
of steaming rubble, burning & glorious thats
what gave us our power, our tendencies
to burglarize each others bodies, our questions
like, Why does the world hold onto these shapes
& colors so tightly? When colors always run away
for tomorrow, weary of looking any further than
the further they speak so much about?
Our souls? I ask. Why do they only leave shapes
behind? Why wont they just leave? Or at least
let me be in you now? Then I can come back
as the one I was before? The one who loved to write
on walls what I didnt dare say aloud? In shapes
that didnt dare say aloud? Because you know

people: you tell them something, & then they

like to talk. But they had to mean something if
they were up on the walls? Those shapes
spelling out sentences, why else would they be
there? We still have to believe in the musical
instruments of our voices, just like the water
inside our heads, sweet & sentimental shapes,
like when I first saw you amongst the old oranges
of the sky, dislocated like a weed, & you said, Michael,
its beautiful here, even though heres where everyone
goes to die & memory into molded shapes.

what songbirds have you see today? \

We sit inside an abandoned tow truck
& just talk. Lean on each other. Lay heads
on each others laps, listening to the scattered
gun shots outside, making up stories about who
shot who. Play with each others hair.
Whisper things. Things like: Wait for me.
Things like: Just wait for me. Things like:
Is that a boy or a girl inside that belly of yours?
& how histories are only made at night,
amongst other things. Other things not meant
to be heard except by us.
Only then could I see the near future: eyeing
her neck bent, neck bone fault-lining her skin;
the earth-winds of her bodys scent, a tribute
to all our mistakes, like a collapsing roof, asking:
What songbirds have you seen today?
& only then could I see the near future: see
your large belly. See you lying on your back across
the carpet, feet raised onto the bed, watching your nose
breathe. Watching your belly rise & fall.
There was a time when baby fat
used to turn my stomach with its lazy
breath, before you taught me Humanity
is in the places. That place to reanimate words,
freeing the dead souls inside them.
That was our summer in water,
that orange beam bridge, the sun.
That was our summer.
The sun like orange cheese, cars parked
illegally like lost cats & dogs & we brightly
seated like foil, like shiny bags, like
floating particles of voice: our curses, our spells

floating across telephone poles, the closest

we would ever come to approaching God.
Then a second became quiet. Strange, you said.
That minute before people actually existed.
Strange, you said again. That minute just
before people arrived.
Had there really ever existed a mankind? I asked.
How it mustve been strange for a god, you said.

inches per sound \

Sometimes her skin feels sharp
like the edges of a large sewer
drainage pipe.
& sometimes it becomes this incredible
space, this beautiful room where youre glad
to take off your shoes an absolutely wonderful
custom & then you sit on a couch & look
up at the ceiling where clouds were painted;
where they can see their own breath,
& sometimes my head is leaning
against the window while I pretend
to sleep-listen to you the way strangers
do on city trains, surrounded
by others who theyd like to hear, but
not see, & I think its fine, just fine,
only this format has no name the way
skin cant be measured in Inches Per
Sound: you, your skin calling out
to me on my way out the door; my body
moving too quickly for your sounds when
all you ever wanted from me was wait
to open this door tomorrow.

Fall 2016
Suzie Baker

Of the Skin

Flushed skin
Slick from the air.
Spinning head,
Chest heaving
Gasping through the moisture.
Curled up,
In the heat.
Clinging,
Grasping,
Holding on to anything.
Deep void spreading,
Swelling inside.
Craving the eternal
Oblivion.

Make a Point
Endless noise,
Buzzing and whining.
Just stop!
Circling and circling
With no end point.
Just be brief!
Droning on,
Wasting time.
Shut up!

Fall 2016
Jake Tringali

Psalm for Humanity

I stopped to watch, but they did not notice. I was plucking time like a leaf in my hand, and moved it
about, but they will not notice. They rushed, are rushing, and will have rushed about their mother planet.
They held opposing thoughts and thumped them together like ogres. Conversely, fire would burn the
doubters. A burnt child dreads the fire. Yet they progressed.
And before the mother can react, they will twist poison and fire. Within a turn of my eyes, they reach
out, jump off, in shuttles and arks. They die by the billions. They think nothing of their husk. Discard the
dead, discard the lesson.
My mind becomes occupied as I craft an opinion. An oddity here. They move like butterflies
blowing around the solar wind, flitting from notion to belief to religion to null. Off-time, they hearth and
then stretch. Expand, contract. Expand, trillions dead. Expand, quintillions dead. No memory, no vision
but hunger. Only I may witness.
Swarming. Thoughtless. Worthless. I saw, and see, and will have seen, in the space of a suns wink, a
voiding. It is thus catalogued.
Los Angeles, CA
June 2016

valentines day at zzyzx bar

theres an old cowboy making cheese
with a portuguese queen hiding the candy
deciding whether to rain down on his ass later
the mexi roid bouncer flits a lit ciggy down
and removes the dwanky tipper from libations
flexing to mangy him down the midnight gutter
combat zone vet ingests a hellwater fix
high bootstomping and ranting the dance floor
cursing a phantom moving atwixt mirrored walls
a blood goth leashes her twinnies collar
pale limbs leathered and lacquered in a hidden snug
four fuck-me-boots and four crimson knees
kid capri rocks a zef pose in the bathroom line
so a groupie genuflects and accepts the nod
they share gold trash, silver hells, and ruby welfare
two technoheartbeat lovers mollywacked
back alleyway lips and tongues under sodium lamps
lurid underwear wet against a mandarin vette
a slinky betty finishes her go-go genderjam
she jitters a vial backstage with a lit gaffer
dual thrillerkillers stroll the streets on megaton fuel
the bar boss peels off the last guest before flight
singing stooge poetry to this fool muse
they trip hop drunkenly to his crude quarters
the moon, an alabaster witch, sinks with yearning
to touch glitter city, gay with rage, catching lunacy
lil cupid does its sick voyeur thing from the moonshadows
Los Angeles, CA
June 2016

Fall 2016
Raymond Luczak

The Orange-Haired Girl

Everyone keeps saying how beautiful Autumn looks
even though shes still struggling to smile in her bed.
After one false alarm of death after another,
the doctors keep changing her prognosis.
They marvel at the colors of her hair changing.
No one says anything about the red-orange strands
of her hair fallen to the floor in her hospital room.
Their feet rustle rattlesnakes among the crispy leaves
as they pretend she is still fire and glory.
Having your days numbered is punishment enough.
Soon there is no recourse but to pull the plug.
The ground, stiff with rage, splinters shovels.
Trees grieve into concentration camp survivors.
Stoic bitterness becomes an art form.
Tears hurt so much that even they seep into bone.

ISLAND BABY
Nails half-covered pearls.
Nose a tender snout, a fin.
Toes squiggly agates.
Head a smoothed coconut.
Arms luminescent sponges.
Hair a bare stream among reefs.
Eyes undulant octopuses.
Neck a tortoises lengthening.
Legs dangling branches: here
the happiest dolphin will grow.

Fall 2016
Amie Sharp

S PIDER R EMEMBERS
The catmint shrub with its furred
blue spikes, my shade in the panting
summer heat. The white tendrils
I'd place, silk methods perfected
by my ancestors. Everyday sun
in the soft globes of my eyes
as I waited for the fly. Its jerks
of struggle, its rattling breath
I sensed in pleasure. And always
a deeper hunger radiating
into my belly. Survive, and then create.
I'd spotted the human,
but how could I know the thing
would make for the very blooms
I lived in? Cutting into the stems
and bringing me along with a slash
before I could drop to mulch
or launch into the bush's dense core.
The sunrays whirling a kaleidoscope
in the octave of my pupils.
Then water harder than pelting rain,
ripping my legs from the leaves
and spiraling me into a maw.
A sinking through metal funnels
into endless caves.
Theres no light now, here
where my pincers still snatch
at any smaller creature
skittering in the dark.

P ROCESSIONAL
The spattering of hail sounds the soft places on the roof.
In sunlight, a chipped jar. This painted sunflower juts
off the canvas; on the screen the frozen king
raises his arms and conjures a new army of the dead.
In the moment before a daylily opens the hushed air gleams.
A lion follows the child on the other side of the glass with his eyes.
I clamber the last rock spire to see the mountains settle
under mid-morning clouds, but after dusk, a woman
walks her dog under streetlights that will shine
even until morning. The forklift operator knows
the rumble of each gear, which frequency it rides,
and the water fountain clinks the shrills of traffic
and playing children. My grandfather cracked open
the door swollen to the jamb with spring humidity.
After rain, the smell of a meadow hangs full
in the rainbow air. How can the man who mutters
to the poster on the brick building stand
in the soup line at precisely the same moment
every day? Start at the edge of the garden bed
and note the way earth-grains tumble under the trowel;
a womans face lies half in shadow.
We would love to discover something written
on the faded paper sticking out of the book,
but it was only ever marking a page.

A STRONOMY
Once the albatross collided
with the sparrow above the dairy.
And above that, crushed rainbow
powder. Suddenly the fire coal
horizon unlocked, the black hole
in the center of our galaxy
revving its celestial spider embrace.
A meteor flaming purple over skyscrapers
purring in their loneliness. And always,
your eyes flickering upward and down
across the words, a nexus of color
and cosmos, then the slow fade.

Fall 2016
Sarah Warren

Crossing
At thirteen the dark river let her cross
a second and third, then a final time.
Bullets, headlights, and her mother awash
with fear of fists and Border Patrol crimes:
that their brown, illegal bodies would slam
concrete floors, faces down and pants unzipped
those harder memories of the Rio Grande.
Anayeli remembered his harelip,
her mothers prayers, the weeping. And she swore
to God she would kill that pinche madre.
That he would eat his own dick and his whore
mouth tremble and rot, black with meth decay.
They pray to the saints and listen for trucks,
wondering when to be seen. When to duck.

Diamond
after Pablo Picassos Guernica

No colors can translate chaos

into language & here I witness you,
a colossus spread on a wall in Madrid.
War transfigured & heavily guarded.
You tell me a story: there are
swords, horses & men, tangled in gray rage.
A bull has turned to white flame. A woman,
breasts exposed to her child, broken
underfoot. Here, a human head wafts through
the window. Suspended, buoyant, alone.
A rogue arm follows, fingers cling to dim
slate light of a candle softly burning.
A shoed, stubbled body extends his hoof
near one of many decapitations.
What kind of king would kill his own people.
Leave such a wound, a diamond in the horses
side. Broken arrow & line-drawn flower
alone in that last facet of time.
Thick coal of night smokes through the village,
cuts open every silver, bubbling heart.

Fall 2016
Roger Craik

Brexit
The belltower tolls the quarters,
not the hour.
The sun is reddening
behind the graveyard wall.

" The usual . . . English who are so hopeless abroad" (D. H. Lawrence)
Grown men dressed up
as footballers dressed up
as little boys

Fall 2016
Dan Frazier
Flash

She sucks in her sunburnt belly as acid burns her throat and bile oozes between her teeth. With
gravel digging in her knees, she looks up from the gutter; yellow dribble hangs off her lower lip.
Our eyes lock and I want to tell her, Dont worry sweetheart, at least youre sober enough to hold
your own curls up. On my fateful night, my extensions were dried spaghetti and my camisole was a toddlers
bib.
Her friends are standing close enough to hear her but not close enough to touch her. As her mascara
smears, I want to bend over and say, Darling, you have no reason to cry. You havent been ditched yet like I
was.
Tonight, Im in another seasonless city, following another meandering mob down blocked-off streets
with rows of bars. The sun is gone and the air is sticky. And for those who travel here, this is their vacation or
break, an excuse to stay drunk and go wild:
Drink.
Wander.
Flirt.
Screw.
Repeat.
But for me, this is just another notch. Getting around, Ive learned that tourists wear those flowered
shirts because vomit blends in with the patterns. And now my nose is immune to the mix of alcohol, urine,
and spew.

Every night this time of year, they all act the same. College kids. Trailer park couples. Biker gangs.
Middle-aged divorcees. They all come together without any goals, obligations, or morals. Everything is put
on hold: jobs, school, life. No time for second thoughts. Just sayin, that much I do remember.
A crowd gathers ahead and blocks the foot traffic.
Oh, come on! says a dude with a popped collar and chiseled jaw.
Do it! Do it! says another guy in a white visor and seersucker shorts. His companions, covered in
Greek letters, support his plea by chanting, Show us more! Show us more!
Sorry, I dont think so, snaps the brunette who doesnt look old enough to vote.
With arms held high, these dudes showcase the girl a collection of plastic trinkets. Pushing each
other out of the way, they bid by shaking and twirling the currency for tonights lewd barter system. This
works because silly girls always want what they dont have, and will trade anything for it, just like I did.
These plastic beads that dangle from the bros fingers, some are green and gold with charms. Some
large as Christmas tree bulbs, others small as marbles or pearls. Some shaped as disco balls, others seashells
or red hearts.
But unlike these douchebags here, the professional pervs go online and buy beads in bulk. And they
know the more different, the better. A rare color or unique shape means higher stakes to obtain, make the
girls go crazy, more outrageous acts performedbut only for the right treasure.
The super pervs, they know if you hold the only string of beads with a mermaid pendant or plastic
shot glass, then you control the party streets. Ruler of Sluts. King of Deviants. All shall submit to your will or
awe at your power.
The beads that arent gifted tonight, leftovers of putrid propositions, the real pervs will box them up
in attics, garages, and storage units. Buried away behind dusty comic books, sci-fi DVDs, and Magic: The
Gathering cards. But unlike everything theyre surrounded by, these beads are never forgotten. Theyre lying
and waiting to be used again.
These plastic beads mean so much tonight, but tomorrow theyll be worthless, disposable. Hotel trash
cans will overflow. Yet this is now and this girl gazes at them, needs them. Souvenirs for her grit, or tokens of
her regret.

The circle of dudes stands before the girl in hopes of a flash. During her spotlight, for two whole
seconds, shell be the center of the world. Just sayin, thats how it was for me, before I became every daddys
worst nightmare.
And you really cant blame her, cause every girl wants to be famous. Every girl has dreamt about
walking down a red carpet in a Gucci gown with perfect makeup and bleached teeth. Interviewed by E!,
featured in US Weekly. But no one ever thinks about having fame for the wrong reason. Or at least, just
sayin, I never did.
The beads swing back and forth, glistening in the streetlights. The poor thing reaches out but the
hands with the prizes pull back. The barbarians start grunting, Take it off! Take it off!
They make a wall on every side of her, shoulder to shoulder. All escapes blocked.
Maybe I should warn this one. Protect this one. Stop her. But no, this girl is my bait tonight. Bless her
heart.
Her own stupidity may prevent the humiliation of so many more just like her. She must learn from
her mistakes, just like I did.
Hiding half a smile with her tongue, she lifts her tank top and lacey bra high above her shoulders.
Digital snaps and bright strikes attack from all sides. These strobe lights of narcissism and debauchery make
her spin, jump, and dance as a candy raver. Then her top comes back down and now theres a fresh
collection of pride around her neck.
This sort of attention will give a rousing rush to the head. A flashing moment of fame. Just sayin,
thats what I remember, before I was worldly renown.
Shouts and howls morph into sequel chants of Show your bush! Show your bush!
The girl unbuttons her jean shorts and pulls down the zipper, but her friends grab her arms and pull
away. If only Id had friends like her, I wouldnt be here.
The dudes groan and take their harassment further down the strip:
Approach.
Chant.
Gawk.
Cheer.

Repeat.
And as they move on, I see one trailing the pack.
Now we begin by removing my petite bowler and gauzy shawl. But my masquerade mask stays on,
purple feathers and all.
They always carry a camcorder and a thirst for flesh. Various beads choke their necks and bend their
backs. Their entire lives revolve around these so-called festivals, breaks, and holidays where revelry is
mandatory. They countdown the days on a Playboy calendar and cross time zones to attend.
They chase the crowds, waiting for the opportunity to witness simultaneous sin: someones vanity
and everyone elses lechery. Never initiating but always lurking. Leering. An optical scavenger. A genuine
voyeur.
Maybe at one time, binge-watching Netflix or gaming on Xbox consumed their lives. But broadband
just made porn more accessible, and long nights of staring at a bright screen turned a bad habit into an
addiction.
So now on the street, I approach him. Come on too strong and theyll cower in confusion.
Begin with eye contact, no blinking.
Follow up with a slow walk, one heel in front of the other.
Then tease with a little skin
Tonight, this one twists his neck sideways, then right back at me. My polished fingertips grab the
bottom of my cropped top and he freezes.
You wanna see something? I say and flick my navel chain. He hides behind his display screen. His
beads shake.
Well, youll have to follow me, I say. Somewhere private. Just for you.
They never question their ultimate wet dream coming true. And this one is lured into an unlit alley,
empty except hunter and prey.
You ready? I smile. Your eyes will soon be mine.
His beads sway as he rubs his fly. Spinning on my stilettos, I bend over and pull up my mini skirt. His
camera beams a light over my thong, shining it up and down my crack. My spray tan and spin classes have
paid off.

After I cover up, he pulls out a string of beads that blink with lights. Seeing him do this, offering his
top prize, now we know hes hooked.
You wanna see more? I nod and cup my hands over my chest. You will. But not here.
Their motel rooms are always within walking distance, even for high heels. Booked a year in advance,
the rooms can see the action by overlooking the festivities, costing extra for party proximity and views of
vulgarity.
After a few flights of stairs, his key card makes the door handle flash green. As it opens, Im expecting
a laptop, external hard drives, and a wastebasket overflowing with moist tissues. As I strut inside, the only
light is from a computer screen. Hidden in the dark are dead bugs and scuffed furniture.
He stands stillthey all dountil I tell him what to do.
Turn the camera on night mode, I say while closing the door behind us. And put it on that table
facing the bed. Im gonna need your fingers somewhere else real soon.
He drops it before setting it in place. And after the record button is pushed, there is no turning back.
Through the lens, my skin turns green, my pupils go whitetransformed.
His beads jingle.
You know, I say while pulling off my top and letting my freckled breasts bounce. Youre gonna be
part of this too.
Gasping, he squeaks, and tosses the string of blinking beads around my neck. After I slide open the
balcony door, a cool breeze hardens my tits. The gust blows past the wastebasket and now the room reeks of
dogwoods in bloom.
Lie down on the bed, I hush. Face up.
Outside, the party cheers roar from the streets.
These crazy creeps, they always smile when I pull out the handcuffs and rope from my satchel. They
watch so much BDSM, they must expect it.
His wrists are now locked to the bedpost, legs tied to the railing. He lies there, beads still, as his
heartbeat syncs with the blinks of my new necklace and the cameras red light.
Pulsing.
Flashing.

Recording.
See how easy that was? I say into the camera. Theyre always so fucking desperate.
Now were halfway through as Im saving the dreams of countless debutantes and pageant queens.
Beside the bed, I drop my skirt and slip off my heels. Standing on the rough carpet, I stretch the
straps of my thongpulling out and letting go, snapping as his breaths pollute the air.
I hope you know what youre in for, I always hush into their ears as I lean over, brush back their
comb over, and kiss their forehead.
Youre never going to forget this night, I say.
His beads jangle.
In Coventry, England during the 11th century, I tell him. A bold noblewoman known as Lady Godiva
once complained to her husband about his oppressive taxes over their people. He told her he would only
revoke them if she rode a horse nude throughout the town at night.
Taking off my blonde wig, but keeping on the mask, I let my natural red hair fall past my shoulders.
Leaving one hand covering the skin right above my crotch, I peel my panties down to my feet.
I hope you like what youre gonna see, I wink.
My hand moves. His beads are still. He stares. But hes not checking if the trimmed carpet matches
the long drapes. Instead, hes transfixed by my tattoo; a tiny green shamrock followed by a rainbow.
I know what you might be thinking, I always say. Pretty basic right?
Just like all the others before him, his forehead scrunches. Hes seen it before. Everyones seen it
before. He figures it out, they always do.
You have to understand I was not very sober when I decided to get it, I say and laugh. I was far
from home or anyone who could tell me what to do.
Or help me.
Save me.
Prevent all of this.
I thought I was having fun, I say as his eyes follow my hands into my satchel. But to tell you the
truth I really dont remember much of that night at all.
My hands now hold a pair of pruners and a few strips of duct tape. His beads clatter.

Dont forget this step, I say into the camera. No one likes to hear a squealing pig. Such a buzzkill.
He twists his wrists in the handcuffs. The sunken mattress squeaks. I tape his mouth.
No protesting.
No pleas.
No screams.
But his beads keep clanging.
My friends and I drove all night to get here. Then we hit the strip with fake IDs. At the first bar, we
were doing body shots off each other when some hot guys offered us some beadsbut only if we showed
our boobs. Then some other fine fellas offered us more if we did it again. We loved showing off our
graduation presents so much we turned it into a contest: Whoever collects the most beads before sunrise
wins. And there was no way I was going to lose.
My hand pumps the pruners handles in and out. The recoil spring squeaks with each slow squeeze.
The last thing I remember was my bestie screaming at me. I had so many beads, they covered my
chest without a shirt. My friends were so jealous, they just left me. And after I puked on myself, it all went
black. Wasted and abandoned, I must have kept trying to win, outdo myself. I was very nave back then. This
was before I learned how disgusting and cruel men can be.
Leaning forward, I part my lips and say, Men like you.
After peeling off my mask, I stare at its facade.
Never forget, it says with hollow eyes. What were about to do is just.
I slide it over his face. His pupils bulge behind the slits, gazing at me beneath the gold trim. He
wiggles on the stained duvet. His beads jolt.
Now he knows for sure who I am, I say into the camera. Or what I am now. Our reputation is starting
to precede us. He knows its true. Were real.
He looks at me, to the camera, and back. His beads jump.
I never thought I would really know what happened that night, I say and sigh. But I was wrong.
Someone was following me. Documenting every move.
A few weeks later my Dad asked his coworkers why they kept snickering behind his back. Soon after,
my boyfriend dumped me saying he didnt want to catch some STD. My sorority sisters voted for my

expulsion. My college revoked my scholarship. My crown was stripped. Then my mom took down all my
pictures: dance recitals, cheerleading camp, prom.
Life just isnt the same when every stranger gives you a long hard stare and asks why you look so
familiar. Ironic how something that takes a few minutes to stream can scar an entire life. Call it mass viral
disgrace. Call it a smear campaign against the girl next door. Couldve been anyone, I try to tell myself.
Stepping onto the bed, I straddle his hump of a stomach. His shirt is stuck to his skin and it makes me
wetter.
Now tell me, I say and clench my teeth. Who filmed me and put me on the Internet for everyone to
see? Leaning into his masked face, I say, Do you know how many times my clit clip has been viewed and
liked? Do you know how many times my viral vagina has been shared?
Too many.
Soon, youll be just as famous as me, I always whisper in their ears.
He shakes his head. Drops of sweat sprinkle the room. His beads clink.
Dont ever hesitate, I tell the camera.
A jab with the pruners and a double-handed grip:
My elbows lock.
My shoulders pinch.
My knuckles turn white.
Is this how you like it? I ask. No? Well, dont worry. Itll be a quickie.
His thumb drops to the floor. A fountain of warm liquid sprays. Housekeeping will never get rid of
these stains.
Coming from outside on the streets, drowning out his pain, we hear collective chants of Do it again!
Do it again!
TVs, laptops, smart phones, tablets. It doesnt matter. If it has a screen, Ive been on itcant wait for
Apple to unveil what Ill be on next. And the worst part is, as they keep finding better ways for resolution, my
cellulite becomes clearer. And as definition advances, the more my acne breaks out.
I know how all you sick fucks work as a ring, I bark.

Theyre part of this network of shooting, trading, and selling reality-porn. But Im part of this new
counter group. Were in their deep web chat rooms. Weve breached their private torrents, personal FTPs,
and protected websites. We know how they operate. Making fake profiles to facejerk. Hacking tweens
webcams for bedroom strips. Phishing cloud storage for naked selfies. They were behind The Fappening.
And theyre the reason the amateur sites just keep growing.
So tell me, I say. How many micro cameras have you hidden in womens locker rooms, tanning
salons, and toilet seats?
His eyes widen with guilt.
We find them all the time. Soon, well find them all. And everyone who views them.
Film.
Upload.
Stream.
Jerk.
Repeat.
These mega pervs, theyre overexposed to the usual studio porn. The type made with actors and sets.
Boom mics and stage lights. Theyve seen every posed position, penetration, and scenario so much that now
theyre immune. Cant get a hard-on to get off.
These ultra pervs, now they only crave footage of real sultry situations and authentic assaults.
Impromptu intercourse featuring natural nipples, public pussy, and candid clits.
Do you think, I screech, I can ever get back to having a normal life after what yall did to me?
Every person I know stares at me with disgust or lust. Any form of achievement will always be
overshadowed. I was on track to graduate in the top of my class. Get a masters in Education. Become Miss
Georgia. But now, my reputation will never be more than a silly girl tricked into being a whore.
His beads rustle.
Thanks to pervs like you, at least Im not alone, I say and smile. And just like yall found each
other, we found each other. I say, And as long as yall keep doing what you do best, Ill keep getting new
recruits. More to train. More to help avenge.

Mardi Gras, Fantasy Fest, St. Patricks Day, Memorial Day. Theyre all the same. New Orleans, Key
West, South Padre Island, Savannah, Lake Havasu. Were everywhere. Cancun: spring break. Rio de Janeiro:
Carnival. Were going international.
With another prod of the pruners, another tight pinch, I demand. Whats your screen name? Your
username? Your password? Which one are you? HungDaddy12? MeatBeater45?
His lips fight to open, his voice is muffled, but all I hear is his beads clanking.
Well figure it out by process of elimination, I tell the camera. See who doesnt log in anymore.
A snap as thick as celery breaking echoes off the faded walls. His other thumb drops. No longer a
primate, his dexterity is gone. Masturbating, fapping, itll never be quite the same.
Coming from outside on the streets, answering his agony, we hear We want more! We want more!
While wiping the pruners on the sheets, I take out two sterling silver letter openers and grind the
stained blades against each other.
This is the last step, I tell the camera. And the most important.
Heavy breaths move his ribs up and down. Back on his belly, I ride him as a mechanical bull set on
low. My faint nipples align with his eyes. Tears are streaming down his cheeks. They collect and drip into a
pool beneath the folds of skin around his chin.
His beads are static. In them, strange reflections stare back at me in all sorts of angles, sizes, and
colors. The faces stretched, the bodies warped, all beyond recognition.
Never forget, they say. What were about to do is just.
I poke the tips of the letter openers into his Adams apple. Dragging the blades down, I leave red
creases as the strings around his neck are cut. The beads fall off the bed and crash as hail, bounce as rubber,
and roll in circles around my stripped clothes, both unstrung.
Before Lady Godiva rode naked that night, I continue to tell him. She asked all the townspeople to
close their windows and doors out of respect. But this old creeper named Tom, he just couldnt resist. He
bore a small hole through his shutters and sat there, waiting for her to come by. And when he finally saw
her, her breasts bouncing with each step of the horse, he was struck blind.

After that, the townsfolk called him Peeping Tom. But the saddest part of this fable is that he would
have gotten away with it, if he just had a camera. And by using technology, modern pervs have found a
loophole in the curse. Which is why Im here: to carry out Godivas will, manually.
He bucks as if cranked to high.
My thighs pinch his torso.
His eyelids clasp.
I point the blades down
Imagine shucking an oyster from a shell made of skin. And dont even try, if you think cutting
grapefruit is just too messy.
His hands and feet keep shaking, but the beads stop bouncing.
Sliding off the bed, I kick two beads the size of ping-pong balls. Rolling around on the floor, theyre
caked with blood and dust. I grab them, push them through the masks holes and into his sockets.
Looking into the camera, I say, Mission accomplished.
Coming from outside on the streets, breaking the silence, we hear Whew! Yeah! Fuck yeah!
Now were almost done. I pull the memory card from the camera and put it in an envelope. Make
sure to always label it with the tally number, location, and date. And just for fun, feel free to slip in that
special string of beads you earnedlike my flickering trophy here.
In the bathroom, I twist the shower handle on hot and place his computer, hardware, and video
camera underneathpornfolio drowned. Blinded by the mist, I step in. But no matter how much I wash, Ill
never be clean.
After drying off, I re-dress and look at the giant mirror above the sink. Using my finger to cut through
the fog, I write Atonement was here.
Never again can I be my parents precious little girl. My stature will always be tainted, no matter how
much I cry. Always unforgettable, no matter how much I hide. Never forgiven, no matter how much I pray.
My celebrity cunt and me, were infamous for infinity.
Before closing the outside door with a Do Not Disturb sign, I pause to tell him to make sure to warn
all the others. That the message boards, the forums, theyre all wrong. Were not some cyber urban legend.

The evidence will soon be posted and they better find a new hobby before a former victim finds them. Now a
Frankensteins monster. A disciple of Godiva.
Hunt.
Seduce.
Torture.
Warn.
Repeat.

Fall 2016
K. D. Rose

Immovable Pieces
Poets don't die,
they are murdered in their sleep,
running with their glass of grief,
foaming at the mouth.
Their voices speak directly to God,
like Longfellow's arrow,
quivering in a tree,
expanding to every
body,
unfettered,
Whitman's electric dance,
wheels rolling away from our self,
to all our selves.

Just Shy of Eighty

Two months shy of eighty,
already attached to a walker,
my father fell and broke his hip.
Broke his elbow too,
reaching for the phone.
While he was in the hospital
so doped up on morphine the family couldn't wake him,
I dreamt I found him in the dark of the woods,
within a deep pit.
I was only with him a minute.
In the dream, a nurse called his name on a cell phone.
We both heard it and I popped awake.
I think dad decided not to give up.
Lucky in many ways, I have a porch to sit on,
watch the birds my husband and I encourage
with oiled seed and by waving squirrels away.
We adopted the Cardinals.
They built a nest and hatched their young in our tree.
After that we felt paternal.
The Cardinals are cautious.
They lilt above the tree midline,
one feeding, while the others watch from nearby limbs.
I can hear their tweets.
It's the small things.
Things my dad hasn't had for a while.
He was always one for the squirrels.
Going out for a smoke makes my father happy.
He sits and thinks. Like a meditation.
I know, because my husband does this.
A preacher with a Ph.D. in Psychology,
helping others still makes dad feel good.
He gets confused now sometimes.
Gets taken advantage of.
Then fights back.

Right now he's fighting for the care of doctors

in a rehabilitation center as understaffed,
dreary, and pricey as you would imagine.
We're not the 1% .
We're in the "social worker finds you a place
social security and medicare can afford" group.
The Blue Jays are more militarized than the Cardinals.
They come and execute alternating drops in tight formation.
We are a short show for the Blue Jays but the Cardinals have made us their home.
The Crowsthey come in armies. Consider the entire neighborhood their territory.
Call to each other from the tip-top of trees. Take care of each other.
Have to. No neighborhood wants them.
I stop all this at the sound of a plane overhead.
We lie direct under its flight path. The Cardinals,
Blue Jays, squirrels, even the Crows.
Jagged. We all live jagged lives.
Overshadowed without notice.
My age was my father in his prime. Still
moving worlds, juggling people,
feeling aliveness in his orchestration.
I went from my prime to something very much else.
Real fucking fast. That's how it happens sometimes.
I have pieces of paper too. Just like my father.
Cardinals can live up to fifteen years.
My husband says soon we'll start naming them.
I don't know if we can afford that luxury.
Though on my porch I sit and reach for the sky,
what if Cardinal Bob didn't show up one day?
Dad has alarms on his wheelchair now.
He tried to sneak out and smoke.
I think, at eighty, you should be able to go have a smoke if you want.
I think, at fifty, life shouldn't feel like it's going downhill.
I tell dad to get strong, get out of there. What he wants most.

Back in his apartment where he can still orchestrate

a small string of people to help him do what he needs.
Not enough.
Just enough.
He is indelible.
I still hear tweets of Cardinals.
The bird overhead, the steel one, flies so much higher.
I think my desire for flight was murdered.
I think there is degeneration and there is eradication.
Neither is preferable.
Like a flower in the shade,
I am to be content now with only wind.
Long ago, I had a dream that my father drove all of us,
his group of related and unrelated children, in a large
Humvee through rough terrain, dense forests, and wildness,
still getting us all back safe.
I praise him for fighting with his doctors.
I will give my bits of sinew strength to keep that Humvee in drive.
Soon the frogs of summer will roll in.
I will listen for their throaty hum.

Fall 2016
hiromi suzuki

Fugue

trees,
flowers,
and robins
die to breaths
in a rusty tin can.
we can't get in touch with sky.
i wonder where i will be.
altered memory,
melted candy,
melody.
harp on the same string,
there's no place to go back.

Fall 2016
Bridget McFadden

Bedtime Routine
Every woman should have a bedtime routine. Putting yourself to bed is necessary. It prepares you for
your transition from one conscious state to another. Plus, it drives men wild.
They dont make em like you anymore, Mox, he says as I pull closed not one but two drapes one a
thin white curtain, close to the pane, and on top of that a heavier bronze brocade on a sturdy bracket that
blocks out the light. Sometimes, if we go to bed during the day, I just pull the white one. It filters the
afternoon sunlight in a way that is flattering. Hes taken to interpret this as a signal: I walk across the room in
the afternoon, pull the white shade, and he knows what it means in the way a St. Bernard knows where to
find you in the avalanche.
The second part of the bedtime routine is to drape a sheet over the bedspread. Or, if youre between
the sheets, to smooth out a soft, clean towel. This is not just practical (we cant spend our lives scrubbing
semen from sheets!), it too can provoke an excited reaction. Pull the sheet from behind your pillow where
you stash it during the day, roll it up the length of the bed, unwinding it from the foot of the bed to the head
and hell say: its always such a nice sheet.
The next step in your bedtime routine is a story. The stories we tell ourselves at the close of the day,
and always have, and always must, to make sense of what happened when we were out there in the world,

talking about the weather. And if a day should pass that leaves us depleted, a story will help. It will help us
inhabit a different spirit, infuse our lives with legend. His extra cocktails at dinner are elevated by every
boozy hero. Your childless state harkens the freedoms fought for by bobbed bohemians. It allows for the
expanse of your imagination. You have spare hours to study the wing span of a dragonfly.
At the very least, when you are feeling your most disenchanted and disillusioned, pull the drape, roll
out the sheet, entwine, spin fantasies of what you might be based just on the Bach on the stereo, based just
on the article about a roadtrip along the Amalfi Coast splashed gloriously across the travel section of the
paper this morning, which he made you stash in your purse after brunch at the French place.
This is how you get ahead in the world, Mox. When are you going to learn? No one is going to hand
you inspiration, you have to steal it.
Perform these simple rituals at bedtime and you will see.
And, you will have the chance to reverse the cycle.
When the sun breaks, reverse it.
Open the drapes and emerge: re-enchanted
and brimming with fresh illusion.

Fall 2016
Christien Gholson

Selling Magazines to the Joneses

1.
I saw a flyer posted on a streetlight pole: Earn, earntravel, travel. I knew it was a con but Id just been
kicked out of the house and it seemed like something that would keep a roof over my head for a while. I
called the number on the flyer. The voice on the other end gave me a room number at the Motel 6 out by the
airport.
I was ushered into a tiny room on the motels second floor by a guy in a rumpled suit. There were two
others who wanted to earn and travel in the room with me, a girl and a guy, both around my age. Rumpled
Suit launched into a little speech about the exciting career of selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door.
He seemed genuinely excited.

2.
That night I was sitting in a white van with the other new recruits, heading north toward Oakland. We ended
up at another Motel 6, located in a used-to-be kind of place, near a row of ancient warehouses and a
crumbling off-ramp truck stop where no trucks stopped anymore. There was a pool hall next door.

Two middle-aged guys one thin, one fat ran the sales-game freak show. Bob and Terry. They gave
us a short, stupid speech about how they would pay for our room and board for the first week but after that
we had to score enough magazine subscriptions to earn our own keep. Hopefully, wed earn far more than
that, they said.
We are giving you an opportunity to grow into wealth, Bob said. Its up to you to grab at the chance
were giving you. This is your chance to make money and become somebody.

3.
After breakfast we were required to gather at the back of the pool hall for the morning pep talk. Bob stood
up, talked about the sell. Selling is about you, he said. Its about how you feel about yourself.
Withered old drunks played pool behind him. Their gaunt, hopeless faces sipped at cans of Coors at
seven thirty in the morning; ancient shaking hands held cigarettes. It was exactly the place where my father
would have ended up if he had not gotten right with Jesus. I imagined him, unsaved, staring out the pool hall
window with bloodshot eyes, watching the dust pass down the street, brains too pickled to think clearly, his
pants stinking of pee

4.
My training partner that first day was Darwin a chain-smoking, balding, redhead. The con: we were
supposed to tell The Joneses that we were selling magazine subscriptions for school in order to win a trip to
Europe. The more subscriptions, the more contest points. He pulled out a clipboard with an official looking
sheet attached to it, said we needed to get someone in each household to sign it. Then we show it to the next
door neighbor. It makes The Joneses feel safer, you know? he said. If my friend Mrs. Smith next door
signed something, then probably its on the up-and-up, right? It sounded like a pretty lame con to me. Most
of the people in those neighborhoods probably didnt even know who the fuck lived next door.

5.
That first morning, Darwin didnt do very well. He blamed it on me. Darwin explained the Joneses to me: "If
you believe in yourself, man, then theyll believe in you, buy whatever youre selling. He lit a cigarette,
squinted at me through the smoke. Do you believe in yourself? Uh, sure, I said. Whatever...."
6.
A tiny woman opened the door. A two-month old baby wriggled on the couch behind her. She listened
politely while Darwin talked, nodding and nodding. She looked totally confused. Couldnt Darwin see that
she could barely speak English? She reminded me of my mom. Darwin babbled on.
The baby cried and the woman turned, went to pick it up. Darwin quickly stepped into the house.
We can come in, he said, following her to the couch, if you need to attend to the baby. She sat down next
to the child, lifted her shirt, put the baby to her breast. Darwin looked away while he kept up his banter: Ive
got a list of signatures from your neighbors attesting to their satisfaction...

7.
Back in the street, I laughed. Shed bought subscriptions for Good Housekeeping and Sports Illustrated that was
almost twice the regular price. Darwin said: I believe in myself, thats how I sell shit. Its what Im trying to
tell you. You got to believe in yourself, otherwise youre not gonna sell shit and youll end up in hock to Bob
and Terry and you know as well as I do what happens then you end up on your knees in their motel room
doing shit you never thought youd ever do. You dont want that, do you?
I stared at him, unblinking. Thats when it hit me I had no idea where I was, what Id gotten into.

You dont want that, Darwin said, smug, his eyes roaming freely over my body, knowing hed finally
gotten through to me. Youre with the best. Ill take care of you.

Fall 2016
David Felix

From A to B

Keepsake

Stand quiet

Fall 2016
Donald Wellman

Prolog: Songs
My conversations often take the form of interior monologs. And these go on and on and on, as in a dream of which
you are aware although you are sleeping, and it continues gnawing at your mind. As I am your guest, I want to say
what I have to say and I will try not to break stride or lose my composure.

Songs
He hews to a faith in absolute rhythm. He decided
each line must be as long or as short as it is.
For recreation he follows a site that provides
Bollywood commentary, Absolute_Rhythm.com, se dice.
His life once took him to a room in Vedado.
where his thought unwinds. He is writing an elegy
on the death of his uncle, cleft palate and wandering eye,
who dragged one foot in the roadside gutter, looking for coins.
After prison and exile, he succumbed to AIDS. Spring arrived early
that winter that was not a winter. His Cuba, a fantasy of escape
to a warm place. He was unable to return
despite climate change. This is an elegy for Reinaldo Arenas.
A view to the sea at the foot of the street, a torn curtain,

lace balloons on the wind, the surf races over open water
before it crashes against the Malecn.
The room holds the existential loneliness
familiar from paintings by Hopper.
Walker Evans photographed Maine interiors
after returning from Havana,
the sooty face of a dockworker
who refused to submit because an American President had chosen to visit.
His childhood girlfriends stepfather owned a sugar refinery
now the fields are overgrown, production has ceased, children eat mealy worms.
Large-scale cultivation of algae is planned. Seething mats
of biological matter decay in lagoons, words and breath,
assemble the inaugural rhythm. A prenatal island
theorized by Lezama-Lima and Maria Zambrano.
The wind brisk, on the north shore.
This is for poets who drift into allegory.
Its a jumble of personae.
This is for Michael Thompson whose uncut dick haunts my work.
Music is not photographs.
This is for girls with dicks who love girls with dicks.
Men go by. Go, bye!

&&&&&
On the road to the precipice, his feet drag, catching on the twiggy brown stuff.
He remembers the contagious hospital. Gulls float above the distant lake,
the sky empyrean blue. In youth his head
had hung over the edge of a cliff in Kentucky,
sandy hair floated on the updraft
from furnaces below. Other boys
had chased him under the schoolyard fence
and out onto a sandy plain where turtles bred.
His own adenoidal voice haunted him. Clarissa had been
surprised at how well he knew his times tables.
In the limestone caves he felt her tresses on his hairless chest.
He counted holding his breath until he found relief.
They lived in Goldville. His mother refused his fathers advances.
Red mud washes in under the front door and out the back.
His oedipal fantasies center on his fathers dick.
The radio of a 52 Ford Fairlane brayed Love me Tender. Do Be gentle
he prayed. My name is Pam.

&&&&&
Born for redemption, his grandmother combs his hair,
her fingers, polished ivory. She pours molten nickel on his eyelids.
Her sister owned utensils of gleaming gold:
nut pickers, tweezers. The dog slept on the deeply piled
Persian carpet. The spiral stairs
serve no purpose. A recursive ritual keeps turning him back
to the uninitiated swamp. On a winters night near the spring equinox,
Jupiter rides on the rim of a nearly full moon.
Looking upwards he loses his balance. No lawn, no dog
to secure salvific rescue. He lay there.
Icy cold snakes nibble his feet.
His dick got hard. His daughters friends
are having their first babies.
The vision transports him as if he were the Virgin Mary.
Ascending among the clouds, he promises redemption to those who sought. Genet
wrote, they were winged and puffy and big,
sober as cherubs, splendid dicks,
made of barleysugar.

&&&&&
Some towns have no sky, daylight harsh like acid,
lichen in groomed symbiosis. He taught the pupils
to cry and express love. He was mocked. Their parents,
they knew, had lung cancer and bowel cancer. It was
the hand of God. Theyd blink, afraid of being swatted.
These were Gods people, resistant to change,
mistrusting, those who promoted tolerance.
The boys aspired to serve in the fire brigade or with
the nigger-hating cops. The flags with red fields, boots laced
with horizontal red bars in KKK memoriam promise extermination to those
who opposed their will. His heart glowed
with neon rage as Dylann Roof plotted revenge
for the poverty his parents extolled.
The teacher knew the hatred and scorn
in which the lves held his values. He died
a poet and Oscar Wilde scholar, recipient
of degrading evaluations, valiant in hypocrisy,
exhausted when his lungs too gave out, crooning
Sanskrit mantras and bowing his head with a private
fatalism, his prostrate oozing blood,
his dick limp, a soggy rope.

&&&&&
How detach a soul from its reality? A form of sufferance,
he found in reading Gogol. Souls need not
be understood as transcendental objects, packed
in crates of celestial milk. Flesh
speaks to callouses, sweat, and urine. Wisdom
causes bones to ache. The poet imagines children at the backdoor
or their shadows. Breakfast, always granola, toast, and coffee.
Then he tended to his messages. Deleted most.
He had no sense of an audience to whom
his words might have better been addressed.
He honed his sentences and hoped they would read well
after his death. He no longer smokes. Restlessness
each afternoon took him to a gym where he ran and pushed
his limbs against selected weights. He meditates
upon the rationalized body, a diagram of different
cuts of meat. At times he learns from television
of suffering, hunger, fear or drowning amid
the obstinate Greek Isles. He understood the agony
of border crossings over frozen beet fields,
his reality in the days of feeling a thigh
pressed against his, in a clubroom in Schwbisch Gemund.
His dick grew hard gazing upon a pockmarked face,
solicitous eyes, mascara, the boys sour breath
repellant to his priggish sense of self-worth.
A woman hed met in Aachen studied like him
the poetry of West Indies, Ltd. Both dreamed

of African dick. At dawn they saw the Eta Aquarids,

fragments of Halleys comet, spermatic droplets.
5 May 2000. Dead souls! ha! He nodded off again.

&&&&&
And the swallows obeyed his voice, one tract records.
The brothers who followed him dispersed
to the four corners of the world. On my patio,
the preferred nesting ground is the cover
of the porch light, a sheltered nook. The sun
turns the breasts of the little birds orange.
Lime drenched stalactites adhere to the walls.
St. Minna gave his cloak to a mendicant.
A quail once mistook the glass of a sliding door
for a passageway to a parallel world.
Mishas dad, after he had converted to Judaism
contemplated circumcision for his adolescent son.
His flesh most tender when baked with pepper
and butter. When Joel died, a white dove
entered the church and sat upon a rafter
above the coffin as the shofar played. A man
who loved women was the theme of the eulogy.
Even in old age his dick was firm and luminescent.
[Misha was 13 on 2 March 2008].

&&&&&
Not the first to write about dicks and not a profligate,
he likened the penis to a moldy wad of stock certificates,
tightly wound with red rubber bands. A cross section
made with a surgical saw revealed layers of filaments,
some of spongey tissue, others, a thin mesh. Erection
results when different layers slide over one another, interior frottage,
and fill with blood. The ejection of little homunculi, each
with a perfect little dick serves purposes of propagation.
Females apparently have reproduced by sybaritic stimulation,
unless an angel intervene as was the case with Mother Mary.
Sister Victorine discharged her duties by striking his bare bum
with her ferule. All the children shrieked when they saw
the pink worm of his shriveled dick. Ive been continent evermore.
It helped me contemplate when serving mass, caught
between going and not going, my eyes watered in prayer.

&&&&&
With Mephistophelean bushy brows,
the thrush swore all
women were vile. The swallow replied,
the male betrayed our lord.
Peter slept in fated sorrow.
Three times the cock had crown
without awakening the disciple.
On a cherubs lower lip,
a dollop of blood appeared.
A child in a white tuxedo
played a white violin. In what sense
is this a poem? Philomela protests,
It reeks of senseless allegory.
You claim to defend the weaker sex.
The moral, as Mary is my witness,
is that women will themselves defend
their honor from the charms
of deceitful men. From the mantel
where it stood, in the poets chamber,
a cock of phallic jade swore to the assembled guests,
Bi his holi name,
Ne shal I neuere suggen shame
Bi maidnes ne bi wiue.
Not every cocks a dick.

&&&&&
The rhythmical creation of beauty is deadpan,
mathematicians agreed, citing the evolution
of complex constructions capable of reproduction.
Voices outside compared dogs that had been
entered into the race. Pure possession exalts
rivalry. The butter left out turned rancid
but he used it in any case to prepare
pancakes for Easter breakfast. As a child
the day celebrated duties he had to pay.
Now everyone thinks about the marathon
and the violence of two years ago. He considers
how hes been able to adapt to his own
prosthetic devices, upper and lower plates
for mastication. When sucking a dick, its best
to remove these although some souls prefer
the excitation of dental drag. Languorous,
his preferred style, a precursor poet of language,
he mixed roles and orientations by whim.

&&&&&
Had I known this music, Song of the Bees,
I would have presented my Roman Exercises differently,
Amhrn na mBeach. I turn back often
to what I might have said. From the outset,
I had no desire to make an exhaustive
compendium. My method like that here
was to work with what comes to hand, observing
the order with which insight obtrudes
upon sense. The purpose, barring any planning
or premeditation, led me on from page to page.
Within any passage, aporias of attention
embed themselves. Concatenation
is marked at every level of the whole
as it emerges, sloughing its skin, much like a snake
or a penis after ejaculation. Rules entail
mobilizing anticipatory surprise. Satisfaction
requires an unexpected allusion as when
beestings raise welts on an engorged dick.
Exquisite tomes of melancholy surround me
in a world where poets carry on their backs
their grandfathers cocks.

&&&&&
Mars prepares to enter retrograde. Another bomb
explodes. The beaches of Israel are bleak in winter.
Bombs in Lahore, Brussels, Cte dIvoire. In Zandvort
the young couple found shelter that Easter of homeless
travel, their private diaspora. Tension with her father
did not allow redress. He served nonetheless
as a specialist in helicopter repair parts. His mates
called him pussy. In the Hitler years his wife fretted
while her Marxist husband, to avoid capture, slept in vineyards.
Hed been a carpenter who roamed with gangs
in his Wanderjahr, hat und stock, aber mutter
weint so schwer. His parents cried for him.
The soldiers brother sought the mysterious Mine Falls
where salmon gleamed. Thoreau inventoried
that island observed the bittern probe the mud for its food.
Brothers in their bed wrestled with desire, the dick
of one impaled the other. Deaths unremitting
melancholy sapped the strength of the victor.

&&&&&
Certain feelings began to inhabit him. Rescue gave way to love.
Multiple and varied though emotions were, a core identity withstood the flood.
Or conversely, the center did not hold, but slipped away. Rescue imposed
an obligation to return the affection that triggered sorrow. An impulse to action
sings of a semblance of things related as equated. What is a self-identical
idea?. Does it impute to essence the ability to recognize itself. The sensitive
subject is also the sensitive object of desire. I am me, as it were.
I is not I ever. Does editing for precision turn words into poetry?
Or does essence reside in the perception of form, no matter if ungainly or cluttered.
The arrangement of lines upon the page may be instructive in this
less musical age. He began to wonder if he had read Husserl in his youth.
His brother insisted otherwise. In Freiberg and in Davos
he lay long in bed writing to his soulmate with gratitude for self-discovery,
the friend whom he desired. Adolescent woe
does not understand the object of its lust. Emilio punished
his dick, relieved to unburden himself so.

&&&&&
Of his tortured soul Georg wrote, magnetic whips of light
lacerate the walls. Unnerved by his sisters comeliness,
he fell to his knees. A purple flame drowned in his mouth.
Its unspeakable, God, that man be so humbled in his prime.
The formation of something that we call a simulacrum,
or image, a conversion of forces from whence the soul
springs, a singularized immanence that inspires and
resolves. In The Virgin Mountain, the translator found
an embedded reference to Giles Deleuze, a philosopher
who had imposed a masturbatorium on the schematic
of the house that is an image of the world where children
grow into maturity without inhibition. A principle
like this may have resolved a brothers love for his sister.
Would Trakls dark flutes of autumn still follow
their path toward extermination in death camps
where devout Jews feared contamination
but were unable to refrain from fondling their dicks
before clouds of Zyklon B made poetry impossible.
[Writing this poem I cried.]

&&&&&
Amid sparks from the whirlwind, the Japanese warrior asks for silence, wrote
Lezama Lima. They respond to him, during the descent into the inferno,
bones pissed on with blood by the enraged Mexican god.
The writer explores beastliness by incorporating it. The poem
does away with language. Indeed, poets of both sexes
can use their dicks to douse a fire. Paris 1964,
Carolee Schneemann produced Meat Joy.
Birds and fish and sausages instead of dicks.
The troupe revels in erotic play: red ink and a chalky resin,
yards of cotton swaddling and tissue transform the scene into a lunar meadow of floating
[forms.
Are sex and play convertible joys? Coins copulate,
Rilke imagined in his night terrors. Roger Caillois defines play
as free, separate, uncertain, and unproductive, yet regulated and make-believe.
Our video games exact their toll, transforming meat joy into war.
The dick itself, a substitute or simulacrum for the phantom body
that is spawned in Hollywoodhaunted dreams. If it error be
to speak of woman as I have done, put me down as a misogynist
who reverences the female dick (theorized by Judith Butler).
In any case, I have called a dick a dick. Its a game
of fort-da that compels me to continue on and on and on.

Conclusion
Is this work a forgery? In one of her works, Pam Dick equates transcription with commentary. And then claims,
But also trans lit could be expanded beyond intertextual adventures. My thought occupies the bodies of those
who appear between the lines. As often as I use the word dick in this poem, if it is a poem, I refer to personages
who have dominated my phenomenological life.
See: Traver Pam Dick, Eoagh, Oct. 15, 2011, http://eoagh.com/?p=843.

Fall 2016
George McKim

Blackbird
I drew a picture of blackbird with black crayon on asphalt. The entire forest weeps inside blackbird. I drew a
map with disappearing ink. I painted blackbird (roofing tar on tar paper). Blackbirds are invisible at night.
Ask the forest. Ask the earthworms. Ask the clouds. Ask Mother Theresa. Ask Frank Sinatra. I sing its song.
Oil slick of plumage. A piano throughout the forest the moan of any sea of any blackbird heart. The Somali
blackbird, often referred to as the Pirate or El Presidente. As seen on QVC. Im not blackbird. Van Gogh
painted blackbirds, most of which committed suicide. A rare breed. Chink-chink calls in the evening. Except
for a yellow eye-ring. Two chicks in their, a nest of July. I & I learned to fly in the particle accelerator.
Blackbird of Hiroshima, take these broken wings and learn to cry. Im on top of blackout mountain with
friendship pony. A book of blackbird blooms in the forest. A galaxy of blackbirds night skin. Plumes of it.
Color the forest with telephone. A requiem. Thelonious blackbird. Lunatic angel of the forest.

Zipf's law
Remember when Barb Dylan combed open the sky and we could see all the wires and the birds were
weeping? !For example; a lamp of remote happiness (in the Brown Corpus of American English text) the
word "the", the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences
(69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). The most popular words are "the", "of" and "and", as expected. In the
parabolic fractal distribution, one tear of light limping across the field, the logarithm of the frequency is a
quadratic polynomial of the logarithm of the rank. And, this morning, the rain is wearing Barb Dylans
beard. Expressed by the probability mass function. The plot of the Zipf PMF for N = 10 on a loglog scale.
The Cumulative distribution function. These mathematical utterances, this harmonic series, and these cities
that neither speakers nor hearers inhabit. Also see: Bradford's law, Benford's law, Gibrat's law, Heaps' law,
Lotka's law and Stigler's law of eponymy. Principle of least effort. a.k.a. the "8020 rule". Expressed by the
inverse relation of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Vodka test. SHAZAAAM! A right angle bend in the flux of
space. Darkness with an artificial grin. #13 lamp of house. One yellow, one blue.

Tardigrade (Redirected from Water bear)

Waterbear.jpg. Osmobiosis. [23] Living without organs isnt easy. true, that. [False start] Tardigrades are
eutelic, meaning all species have the same number of mountains, rainy days, the Antarctic. [as many as
40,000. enter this state via anhydrobiosis, or anoxybiosis. [22] Echiniscus testudo. Yikes! because true poetry
can only be found in the gonad temporal range: CambrianRecent [1]. There are no respiratory organs. In
the body of their poem titled Cryobiosis. No breathing. No poignancy. No tumors. Tardigrades exist in the
violin of space. The Malpighian arthropods, the moss piglets are homelessly. [24] They have been sighted in
the numerous. [the way they pour themselves into other organisms, including fungi, bacteria and viruses],
the free encyclopedia of rain. Altoid sunset. Ubu Roi. Murika. NWA. NLOL.

Wave Theory 101

There is/is not a net propagation of psychic energy over time. Duh. [common knowledge]. The following are
real: Standing Wave count, Acoustic Resonance, Helmholtz Resonator, Organ pipes blasting Gregorian
Chants. Standing Wave in the deep end. [Surfing 101] For example: when a violins anti-nodal loss. Hello
from Planet Fur. This is some Ave Maria level shit. Moth boats. Kerosene lanterns. Tingsha bells. Hyperbole.
Count Chockula. This phenomenon is often reeferd to as the Poetic Surf Amplitude Propagation Principle.
Black moon. Glitter. Waves crashing in the forest. Units of amplitude depend on the type of wave. Tubular
Bell Curve wave. The Sine Wave or Sinusoid Wave has a wavelength in space and a period in time. [21]
Period. [22] Space-Time Continuum Hypothesis and shit. The Square Wave, also known as The Poets Wave
or The Saran Wrap Wave. Stars dredged in fine sugar. [sic]. Flux Capacitor. The Angular Frequency of
Aluminum Foil sometimes referred to as Tap Dancing. Endless Summer Wave. And me. Shredding this
Wave, i.e. the Wave Im riding. The Wave I weave into and out of. Sine function. Phase shifter. Nonlinear
Superposition Principle. [Wave Theory 101 and shit]

Cento - Lights fey cartilage

early September early light. crepuscule. moon bright through open hall
Thelonious Monk. Light inside a white key. A zoo of it.
light corpuscular
Rubbed light
light and limb
light. A cage.
trying to pour out light
some eyes are ashes and some are alight
it wasnt, lights own Eleventh Light
It was lights dilated cry and then
adumbrating lights eventual ambit,
dealt in light, lights audiotactile
work
the lights cusp
Lunch scene in soap-opera light,
off lights hips. The you wants the words. It wants to.
Rimbaud has a halo. A textbook of light. We edit into
This light: not a covering
It a room with no number no lights no shutters
too close. A motorcade of light. In the home movie, you
a moon house. Light

Cento This light: not a covering

This is what is already here?
This blue world.
This blue world,
This light: not a covering
This all started so long ago,
This soulful little sovereigns song.
this is what a river will do, carve and swell
this breakdown in remote machineries
This absent logic, inductive and malicious
this endless loop, cringing eternity, fucking forever in the poor
This rain you never touched before
this one: my hand
This quote is a sentence fragment is
this
[this]

Acknowledgments
Cento - Lights fey cartilage
Source text:
cartas borradas, Edward Smallfield
Jericho, Sara Uribe
The Transfiguration, David Mutschlechner
Anacoluthic Light, Nathaniel MacKey
I Dreamed You, Husein Barguthi
THE WATERS XXXV, Sampson Starkweather
The Photograph, Sampson Starkweather
Dragon Butterfly Seal, Rebecca Lilly
Helium, Deborah Bernhardt
Chambers (for U. L.), Mariela Griffor
Wives and Children, Katy Chrisler

Cento This light: not a covering

Source text:
The Transfiguration, David Mutschlecner
Too, Ben Ramke
Jericho, Dara Uribe
Dialogue III, John High
Sonnet: Of Ahmed and His Barricades, Steve Wilson
Clearly, Bleakly a Punch Line, Jon Paul Fiorentino
from This, Andy Weaver
GIFT HORSE, Paige Taggart
LEAVE ME HIDDEN, Franz Wright
RAIN IN WALTHAM, Franz Wright
ENTRIES OF THE CELL, Franz Wright
MING, Jill McDonough
TALLAHATCHIE, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett
The Emptiness Between My Hands, Simon Perchik

Fall 2016
Greg Autry Wallace

Harsh Granular Cluster

heavily misted
space of flags
deep green boxes
thunder in the hills
opened my buzzer
folded it
two or three times
flash of hard white light
folded back over it
naked girls
crazy scream
just bubbled
in ghostly
steamed glass
loud fish smell
rubbing deputy
in green
dull gleam under
radiator shell
one hand went
slowly up

Black Easter
Blood lake poured out
its message tree
gravity polarization
blundered into the city
like a whirling cloud
the top of the world
strumming warm
harps of water
this tiny jungle
provided a pleasant
contrast to the
hazy, formless
curtains of pink
atoms resumed
their chemical identity
there was something
of Kierkegaard in them
At first it was disconnected
and random,
they found gaps
in the glass
the trip to the moon
was sometimes lonely
his voice changed color
an error in equation 16
like a balloon in the
swimming darkness,
they sat blinded and stunned

The Space Destructors

He opened the door
that led into the great trees
flowers as big as the sun
radar searchlights
transported them
to drugstore
two dim globes cast
soft light
fairy tale garden
drifted through
astonishing press releases
Hot electric eye dazzled him
the new brain vanished
into the brush behind
his parents farm
part of his face was intact
a solid core of brightness
There were many brilliant
planetary lights in earths
new super sun system}
he has a fleeting impression
of small, fury animals.
Soft lights shone down
he forced himself
to look away
from the jeweled thing.
He saw the golden tree
Circle of white fire
filled the entire sky
now visible
on one of the neural screens
inside his semi-plastic body

The Teleported Man

The poles were free of radiation
{power of illumination
emanating from the blood
that shone with dazzling flame,
once more drifting dimly
behind breathing color}
Formless blur of heated metal
might help him locate himself
{spectrum of equally real
alternative presents}
thick, pointed object
with a pink glow,
planets so close to him
that they looked like moons.
Part of the planetoid lifted,
it was bright pink
The outer planets drew him
and he fell toward special ship
he had not presented
the contents of their minds
{The inner face
folded up within itself,
blood faded}
The super colossal pink
giant was not much smaller
than normal
inverted pyramidal
projection glimmered
with flickering energy pulses
he had his own neural transformers
strange time delay patterns
he entered the path of the energy beam
and was carried into the anti-matter world

The Ghost of Plato

His brain, a composite of ears
trickle of impulse patterns
he remembered X
the ice meteorites
transported extra brain
What star are you calling?
the robot muttered
distorter is still
inside moon machine
green haze jerked
and winked out
galactic technicians
walked toward the
elevators despite
absorber tubes)
small metal ball
bristling with electronic
tubes floated
palace was a
shattered, empty husk
fireball floated from the
ceiling engulfing the
circular vibrator
occasional blur
came off easily
his earlier rejection of X
so complete,
the face was his own

Fall 2016
Inez Walls

Prevail
All things are working.
All things are growing.
All things are progressing.
All things are hoping,
Never failing.
Never ceasing,
Never dying,
Because He never fails.
His grace never ceases.
His love never dies.
So what is my ailment?
What is my issue or weakness?
What is my trial
To a God who knows all,
Keeps all,
Prevails over all?
Nothing.
Peace and joy come in knowing
Its working for my good.
Im growing, Im progressing,
In all things
Trusting and hoping.
I am victorious.
He never fails
And I wont fail Him.

Our Daughter
She was conceived in mamas womb
And planted in the earth.
A round face, brown eyes filled with grace
With her soles in the dirt
And her soul flaming.
Hope and balance, she was, with every stride.
Trailing her was strength.
Oblivious
She left it behind.
She was conceived in mamas womb
And birthed into the earth.
Full lips, a steady beat in her hips,
With her sun lit skin,
And light filled melanin,
Her soul flaming.
Purity and royalty, she was
With milky dark coating.
Exuding her was excellence
Without the elation of her knowing.
Because her nation, our nation,
Stripped her of her pride,
And of the torch of hope she carried in this race for her race
And people.
For this perfidious land mocks her,
Her curls, her kinks,
Her tribe mocks her sanctity, her balance, her skin,
And the honor that rests within,
Her flaming soul.
She was unrecognized promise and systematic revenge on a people.
She was fortitude and helplessness;

She was righteousness and degradation

Since the accouchement of her generation
Since the day of her conception in mamas womb.
But in her curly perfection, in her dark royalty,
And in her sun kissed paradox,
There rested upon her hear a crown that no being could disturb.

I Am
We confuse who we are with where we are.
Being down does not make me a failure.
Having no money in my pocket does not make me poor.
Being angry does not make me bitter
And success does not make you better.
We are all flawed.
Flawed beautifully.
But we all must be strong,
Mentally.
I may have played the fool but Im no idiot.
The secret is understanding who you are no matter the situation,
Believing in your growth no matter the allegation.
People cannot hurt you,
They can only attempt.
You decide.
And today I decided that I am prosperous,
Even though this economy isnt built for us.
I am rich,
In grace, in laughter,
In knowledge and faith ever after.
I am woman. I am strong. I am black.
I am the manifestation of every dream you let die.
Every dream you gave up on that shriveled and never grew wings to grace the sky.
I am power. I am light.
I am the sweet, still song of the universe at night.
I am.
Because He is.
And He is not the author of confusion.
So Im convinced your idea of me is just an allusion.
I am.
Because He is.
And that is eternal.

Fall 2016
Lambert Common

Colored Water

Ear Lobes

Charity Football

Poems Require Effort

Kick the Balls

Strip Mall Shower

Just so Good

Fall 2016
Michal Broussard

Happiness is New Orleans

Happiness exists
On the street and on the corner
in the lobby, oh, and definitely
during breaks.
Ready to shoot, chug, and cheers,
which leads to: Encore! Merci!
Sant, mon mimi!
The band leader yells:
Applause is nice but she dont pay my bills...
(or for booze, or cigarettes.)
Life is short, Miss.
This I know, yet Ive spent
my whole life trying
to shorten it.
How much longer can my
body handle my soul?
And I just sing, much too loud,
in the street, on the corner.
There is no other happiness.
She exists, fleets,
hides, surprises.
She is all that is good in this town.

After Tukamukaru, Tucumcari

Cruising next to a cargo train
set-after-set of boxes
carrying items of mass consumption
closer to a town near you.
Curving a corner, we can see
the sun peek through clouds
kind of colored cobalt blue,
and I can see, shining over everything,
the very reason The West was explored.
This magic hour
before the sun retreats
keeps us chasing this heavenly hallway.
Rivers rushed to create canyons.
Mans restless tendencies rushed
to pave the path for others to travel,
to teach themselves peace.
We still wait for that to arrive, but its approaching.

(Title pronunciation: TOO-kah-MOO-kah-roo.

Comanche Verb: to lie in wait for someone or something to approach)

No Room for Blue Skies

Reaching heights topping ten thousand feet
and Im still managing to breathe.
I still manage to climb ten feet higher,
chasing the horizon with my eyes.
Give thanks; step forwardreach for my peach
as long as I stop first to breathe.
Cloudy skies peek past rocky peaks
causing me to kneel in wonderment.
Those clouds add layers of white
to endless snow-kissed tips.
Triple the stars in the sky
to equal the pines in my eye.
Double the allotted time to travel
and make this place mine.
Relish the rolling hills.
Soak the mountains into my marrow.
At this elevation, theres no room for blue skies,
and there are no tears to cry.

Uitwaaien
These here bubbling waters kept her ship docked.
Once the Captain reaches down to release the ropes,
shes free to maneuver through the waters
dodging some waves, cutting through others, always
propelling her ship, herself, to unknown places,
to adventures waiting to raise her to higher elevations,
to define herself, separate from this sea of misery,
as others have defined it.
Her blue eyes reflect a mostly manageable misery.
Mostly maintained by the wheel which is oiled
by the hands of those before her,
by the mast tall enough to peek through the clouds,
by the deck which is sealed to prevent leaks from below
and by her mates voices which rise when she has lost her own.
Yes, in the middle of this sea she sees
no land, no misery. Only
ups and downs, waves of contentment, joy,
and gratitude that she hasnt sunk her ship yet,
paired with respect from her peers because
shetheir Captain only in title
still smiles at the sea.

(Title pronunciation: OUT-vy-ehn.

Dutch Verb: to take a break to clear ones head
Literal translation: to walk in the wind)

Portland Begins with a B

Behind unyielding clouds,
five mountains hide, feigning modesty,
simultaneously claiming their solitude.
These same blanketed clouds
block out the sun, begetting time meaningless.
Bridgetown, with moderately busy streets,
breaks for pedestrians.
Below the balcony in the Pearl District,
busses on eighteen wheels are filled with mailable bundles
waiting for Monday
to brighten someones mailbox.
The coffee brewed isnt bruised,
and the baconbountiful.
Bourbon blended with blood orange blurs lines.
Baked prosciutto joins every party,
and burgers have a ball with biscuits as buns.
Bridgetowns newest pup, Bridget, bounds
through puddles, over and under bridges,
blushing away from strangers,
barking in the morning.
Breathing is easy between numberless trees.
Bubbles from beer spark bonding with your best friend
and banter between lovers quick to fall into each others kiss.
Blueprints of the blocks and byways memorized pull me,
beg to bring me back to Portland.

Fall 2016
Rebecca Weigold

Message in a bottle
New York City sidewalks swell in summer a torrent of people
who pay the street vendors to pull Pure Life from their icy coolers.
Men and women swill bottled chemicals unaware their
reproductive systems will dry up within years and they will flood
the fertility clinics. In Brooklyn, blue and white caps spring open,
acorns sprouting bottles into plastic heaps the size of a fifty year
Ailanthus. There's Deet and Primadone in the tap water.
The carp and sunfish in the Passaic are tainted with Agent Orange.
Worn-out washing machines, obsolete computers, and used tires
flank the banks of the Ohio. Empty Sherwin-Williams cans
cover the earth. Lake Michigan is a dirty sponge of e.coli and
the microfibers of laundered fleece.
In Atlanta, groves of broken-down buses, Datsuns
and Desotos rust away in mangled tree limbs.
Aluminum is the kudzu consuming the southern landscape.
Kansas farmers roll up their fields into styrofoam bales.
Migratory birds halt their flights to feast on the landfills.
Texans dump their ashtrays into the roadside wildflowers: the
bluebonnets and Indian Blankets. Lady Bird weeps.
Though California traffic lurches forward by inches LA sits
miles away shrouded in its fumes and guttural noise. The beaches
are scrapyards of oiled and burnt flesh. Cigarette butts and urban runoff
churn in the sand. Empty bottles tumble ashore on the Pacific's blue
and white swells, announcing the beginning of a thousand-year anarchy.

The wine we make with which we're made drunk

We harvest our differences like zinfandel grapes,
plucking ripe clusters of opinion
preparing for crushing.
We examine their skins. For this wine
the mold is what we want, the sour taste,
the bite of disagreement.
Changing a mind makes a good batch.
One can muster accolades, win awards.
Though grapes are not what we press
its juices flow the same depth of red
as our angry cheeks and bitter tongues.
Every topic is a bottle to be retrieved
from the cellar, opened and poured:
Climate change. Same-sex marriage. Abortion.
Democrat or Republican? Left or Right?
Foreign or Domestic? Mac or PC?
We raise our glasses to begin
and end by shattering them in the fireplace.
We open our mouths too much
stuttering our positions, slurring insults,
shutting our mouths in defiance.
Vinegary words coil like tendrils,
suspended on toxic vines.
We turn away from one another,
swirling refined poison on our tongues,
swallowing opulent judgments.
Drinking with the husband, the wife, the neighbor
proves unfruitful so we turn to our phones,
our laptops, our Kindles, and ferment the
pleasant chatter of friends and strangers,
pressing still until our marriages, our friendships
are the pulp that remains on the treading floor.

When you get home from work

At seven a.m. I am stirred awake
by the turn of a key in the front door.
I hear then smell rain
and the room is awash with light.
I rub my eyes.
Even your shirt looks whiter than
it did last night when you
sipped the coffee,
picked up the briefcase,
kissed me goodbye.
You slip in next to me and I nestle
my breasts into your back,
touch your hair with sleepy fingers.
Bachs Arioso comforts both of us
like your just-laundered cotton tee-shirt.
The fringe of the night brushes lightly
against our lashes
as a passing car tears the wet morning
from the street, slings it
to the steps like
a paperboy delivering the Post.
I whisper my never-ending love for you
as together we drift away under
our gently unfolding umbrella of sleep.

Fall 2016
Whe Foedisch

Wooster

Wantons and gasoline. This city always stank; I could taste it the moment I hopped off the bus and on
to the pee-splattered sidewalk. She wasnt waiting for me. Not that I expected her, but it wouldve been nice.
Not that I expect her to be nice.
April had encroached on the gray of March, driving me into a subtle stage of grief; spring meant sun
and sun meant light. I prefer the voluptuous dark clouds of rain that infiltrate the blue skies in winter.
Perhaps I am more vampire than human. Sometimes I like to pretend that the sun singes me, just to avoid
outdoor activities. But it was spring, and the sun was shining as I rode the bus from New York to Worcester,
Massachusetts.
My dad, Bruce, lived in a triple-decker down by Elm Park. A neighborhood with the facade of
affluence, tempered by the peeling cream-colored paint and lopsided balconies, hanging precariously from
the edges of the three-story homes-converted-to-apartments. Bruce waved from his Ford F-150, with that big
square palm of his: nails crusted with super glue and calloused from thirty years of being a roofer. I flinched
in the sunlight glaring off the remnant snow piles, brown and white mixed to look like a Coca-Cola slurpy.
When I was young, I attempted to eat the delicious looking concoction of snow and debris; Bruce had
laughed as I spit it out everywhere. He endorsed the rearing style of learn for yourselfthus I am what I am:
Eating shit until I find out its shit.
I slid-in the passenger side and reached over to give him a half-armed hug. He plopped an awkward
kiss on my cheek, Hey hun, how was the ride?
It was fineLong and stuffyHow are you?

Im hangin in. Got a few jobs on my plate for Spring. The ice is giving way in this sun. Sixty-one and he
still climbed ladders and dangled from gutters like an acrobat; it always amazed me that this lumbering,
barrel-chested man could move so agilely on rooftops. Bruce updated me on the current AA gossip and his
upcoming fifth anniversary of sobriety. I think Im doin good, ya know, the craving creeps up every now
and then, especially since Sandra leftBut fives years thats something, he boasted cheerily and with a gulp
of pride. I knew he had slipped up every now and then, but who I am to call him on his shit? Its better
between me and Bruce when I let the lies pass-by like trees on the highway. Congrats. Fortunately, he
wasnt too sharp on sarcasm.
The sun-visors in his car were overflowing with old receipts and proof of car registration from years
past, and a few random photographs clasped behind the mirrors flap. I tugged at the corner of one photo,
yanking it free, Bruce didnt seem to mind. Sandra was staring back at me with the tease of a smile on her
lips, looking lovingly into the cameras eye. Its the only time Ive ever seen her eyes tender, mostly she had
glared at me with angry eyes whenever I came to visit. I quickly tucked the picture back into place, before
Bruce could make out her image; so I wouldnt have to feel embarrassed for him. Occasionally he would
have a woman living with him, but this last one, Sandra, had left him for a younger bloke she met at NA. I
despised her so it was all gucci with me. Pretty sure she hated me too. Sandra would have gladly replaced me
with her own biological baby. My father could barely handle one kid though, and he didnt even raise me
not really. Thus, he wasnt going to donate any more sperm. I didnt blame her for leaving, hes like a rock,
stubborn and cold.
We parked curbside in front of the decrepit three-decker: I hadnt been here since I graduated high
school, two years ago. It looked the same, perhaps more like the leaning tower of Pisa. Bruce lugged out my
bags like a good dog, and unlocked the front door for me. The aroma of stale coffee and Old Spice mixed
with wet-tobacco, swarmed my senses, making me feel memories all over. The apartment was built in the
nineteen-fifties and was ornamented with beautiful cherry wood lush with floral designs. It was the one
feature that gave the abode a semblance of elegance. Bruce had obviously attempted to cleanup his
bachelor-pad before I arrived; I could see the pile of clothes pushing willfully against the closet door, and
still smell the Lysol on the tile counters in the kitchen.

You know where your room is, he stated, tossing my bags on to the once-white carpet, This is your
home too, somake yourself comfortable hun. Bruce plodded into the back part of the apartment, that had
more length than width. I listened as his bedroom door creaked shut, and heard his bed squeak as he fell on
top of it. He reminded me of a bear. Stalking alone in the wilderness. Will attack if threatened. Hibernating
in his denI mean, dungeon.
My room was the first door on the left as you entered the apartment, adjacent to the dining room, and
behind the kitchen. I hadnt been in that room for years and was afraid of the dust bunnies overrunning the
dark wood floor. Tentatively, I pushed at the door that was swelling into the door frame and unbudging.
Throwing my shoulder into it with the full weight of my body the door heeded and I stumbled over the
threshold. The room smelled of my teenage years, a mixture of dust motes and forgotten perfumes, tinged by
the must of mildew. The single-bed still wore the white and gold star-spangled sheets of my childhood,
covered by a quilt of yellow stars scattered across a cobalt background. The mattress gasped as I bounced on
its ledge. Shaking dust from its springs, I laid back on its familiar face, feeling a forgotten comfort.
My phone buzzed from inside my backpack, hurriedly, thinking it might be her, I jostled through the
pockets. Just a voicemail from Quincy. I listened to the eager screeching of my old friend, telling me to get
my ass downtown to come see her at the Main St. Dunkin Donutsshed be working until ten. Quincy
never left the Woo, born and bred like the cockroaches that scuttled around in the walls of this dilapidated
three-decker. She wanted to get out, but the inertia was too strong, paralyzing her in its churning stagnation,
cemented by the force of its gravity. This citya mucky puddle of a place, littered with used needles and
crawling with street urchins; I kinda like it though. Mostly I because the woman I love is here. I love Quincy,
but not the way I love Mik.
The bed was sunken in the middle, lopping from old age and overuse, it smelt like me. Bruce saved
the room, hoping that I would come back home, but it didnt feel like home, it never hasmore likea
smoking room at the airport. Feeling yourself dying, suffocating in the cancerous air, but all you can do is
wait there, and smoke cigarettes. Because the waiting is unbearable otherwise. Wait. And then keep waiting,
until your plane arrives and you leave the polluted room feeling less alive than before. Perhaps its not
Worcesters fault. Because when you get to your next destination youre still in the smoking room, and still
waiting and dying: waiting to die.

________
My eyes felt crusty. I rubbed the nap from their corners and hugged my bare-chest, wondering where
I put my cellphone. The windows had darkened with dusk, and through the dusty panes I could see two tiny
stars twinkling serenely. Worcester has the clearest skies. Pinks cut across pale blues and lavenders as if the
atmosphere were an untainted canvas. It surprised me, since everything at eye-level lay shrouded in gray
dirt and sooty grime. But if I remembered to look up when I walked down the streetspast the ghouls
nodding off in soul-sucking corners, past the starving prostitutes, and hungry pimpsI felt almost spiritual.
Like there is perfection beyond me, and all is well. This was always a fleeting sensation that I fumbled to
keep; the more I tried to retain it the faster it fled from me. Most of the time I didnt look up, since the loss
was worse than not knowing the feeling at all.
Bruce rustled around in the living room shifting through drawers and clanging dishes in the sink;
maybe Ill just stay here The fumes of Chinese food wafted under the narrow crack in my door and my
tummy grumbled in response. Groping along the side of the mattress, my fingers found the cellular device;
another message from Quincy, but nothing from her. I dont know why after two years of not speaking I
hoped, even expected, she would know I was here and would call me: would want to see me. I hadnt told
her I was coming. Basically, I was clutching to some asinine hope that she was telepathically inclined. I
wonder if she will let me call her Mik the way I used to. Her full name is Mikena, but when we got close that
first summer she told me to address her as Mik. She liked the gender neutrality that accompanied the
nickname, and I liked that she wanted me to call her something speciallike it was my name for herthat
no one else could call heronly me.
A soft tap on the door shook me from me dreams, Hold on! I called, searching for a T-shirt amongst
the pile of bags and clothes on the floor. Just want to let ya know dinner is ready hun, Bruce responded. I
clambered out of bed and pulled on my chunky sweats and a black hoody, sliding my phone into the pocket.
Bruce had set up the take-out boxes in a neat row, with a big spoon in each mouth, and two ceramic plates
waiting to be filled. The dining table was too big for a bachelor, constantly assuming he would have
company, but I knew he rarely did; never more than him and one other, thats for sure. It made me sad to
think that most nights he sat at this oversized table by himself, probably wondering why he couldnt fill the

seats. It was an old table made from Redwoods with delicate engravings of floral vines and sprouts, a rarity
in Worcester. Bruce had inherited it from his father an ancient Californian man, and even though it
reminded him of his loneliness he couldnt part with it.
I waited for Bruce to dig into the stinky food. The grease glistened under the luminescent ceiling
light, and made my nostrils flare. Go ahead hun, he urged with genteel politeness. Over the years,
especially since I had stopped staying with him, Bruce had begun to soften, making a concentrated effort to
appease his only daughter. I think he felt guilty for being such an ass those early years. I tried to stay angry
and cold, but his remorse hurt my heart, in spite of my resentment. My plate steamed with chowmein, white
rice, and mongolian beef. I poured packaged soy sauce all over the heaping mess and took my place at one
end of the grand table. Bruce piled on twice as much food, doused his plate in soy and sweet and sour sauce
then sat across from me. The perfunctory pray was mumbled by Bruce as I dangled my head in pretend
reverence. Bless us our lord and these thy gifts, from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen, he
rumbled with gracelessness, then shoveled a fork-full of noodles into his mouth. I followed his lead, not
lifting my eyes from the plate, just in case he was looking at me expectantly. The humid silence grew denser
with anticipation; he wanted me to converse, but I had nothing to say.
So Jen, whats been going on with you? How was the last semester of school? it was known that I
had dropped out of collegebut Bruce had an uncharacteristic diplomacy when it came to my life choices;
whereas, my mother had had an unbecoming dominance over my decisions. She would have screamed and
scolded me if I had come home and told her I wouldnt be going back to college: the paperwork had been
filed and I was officially a dropout. Maybe if she hadnt died I wouldve stayed in and been the normal
little girl shed always dreamed Id be. But she died. I hated myself for blaming her, but what the fuck.
It was only a year ago that she left. I went back to school for my junior year because everyone said it
would be good for mebut it wasnt. Coke became my most loyal ally and pot my dearest lover. I failed most
of my classes, but wrote some crazy fucking short stories for my creative writing classes; which no one
seemed to enjoy, but their disgruntled expressions intensified my pleasure. My favorite one was about this
teenage girl who looses both of her parents in a horrific traffic accidentboth decapitated. Unfortunately
for her, she has to identify their remains at the police station. The girl inherits a shit-load of money and
spirals into an insatiable heroin addiction, which culminates in her death. I only remember writing the

beginning of the story. By the time I had written her death scene my brain was beyond recognition, warped
by amphetamines and benzos toying with me in harmony.
I wandered into every lesbian bar in the West Village seeking out inspiration for my characters, but
usually just got sex, that was usually severely uninspiring. Most nights I couldnt recall what exactly
occurred between me and the woman I woke up next to. In a daze, I would stumble out of her apartment and
run back to my dorm room, no matter how far. I hated taking the subway those early mornings, under the
fluorescent white lights, the homeless men looking at me with their red eyes and knowing. KnowingI have
something they want, or perhaps they have something I want. Knowing that I was just as homeless; that
someday I too would be huddled under the Brooklyn Bridge or on a subway-seat trying find shelter from the
cold outside. Walking the streets I was just another shadow, like the ones cowering in doorways, or slumped
against stoops. Excommunicated from society, and being slowly and painfully eradicated from life.
I hadnt talked to anyone about my moms death, except Quincy over the phone. Bruce could barely
talk about it himself: I assumed hed just stone-cold the whole affair and never think about my mother again.
The only time we spoke about it was when he came to see me the first week she was gone.
I lifted a fork-full to my mouth. Ummmm... It was fine I guess. I mean obviously not that great since I
dropped out, but it was fine. Bruce waited for something more, but I ignored him and chowed down on
more beef and rice. He helped himself to seconds and I chugged my water then excused myself, Im gonna
head downtown to see QuinceThanks for picking me up earlier. I sauntered to my bedroom, leaving him
still eating at the oversized table; a dour still-frame of an old man eating alone at a family table.Why did I
come here? It is so depressing.
I scrolled through the contacts in my phone, finding Miks number. If I text her I dont know if she
will respond, or if she even has my number. Plus, it was bad enough last time that I dont really know if she
would want to hear from me. I typed out a message: Hey Mik, its Jen, I know its been awhile, but Im in town.
My finger dangled over the send button. I deleted the whole thing and tried again. Then three more times,
changing slight things like prepositions and then the whole meaning completely, attempting to find a
balance between expressing my longing and being cordial. Its hard to be cordial when youve been choking
back emotion for years. Miky, you know I miss you.

When my mom passed, I couldnt come back here. I stayed in her house for a week rummaging
through her dismissed party jewels and forsaken junk. Discovering treasures and untold secrets. I shuffled
around the cold single-story abode wrapped in her green leather coat from the 80s, with her favorite pink
sweater, and her sheepskin slippers on my feet. The jacket had big shoulder pads that made me look like a
scrawny football player who had snorted too much coke and was attempting cross-dressing. My scrawny legs
jutted out naked and furry with hair from a pair of dirty underwear, my hair a knotted ball of yarn on top of
my head. I thought if I wore all her stuff, it might bring her to me, might make it so shes here. The clip-on
crystals were always my favorite earrings, I attached them to my ears and slung her heavy gold and silver
chains around my neck.
She used to play dress-up with me on Saturdays when we had all day to lounge around and act out
my impish dramas. She would let me have my pick of her jewels and high-heels, which were always too big,
and she would adorn herself in familial heirlooms. I would assign her a role, like my assistant or pupil (she
always was the subordinate in my scits). And I would assume the role of the main charactera super model,
or haut actress, sometimes a stodgy professor. We would strut around our simple home pretending to be the
rich people we were not.
Between the tears and cocaine my eyes had swollen to vermillion red, puffed to a point of blindness,
but they still looked like hers, light brown, wide, and wandering. I didnt know what else to do, except
pretend to be her, or pretend to be meat some point I lost distinction between us.
Miky called me once after I sent her a drunken text stating bluntly that my mom had died, but I
didnt answer. Eventually, Bruce drove down from Worcester to find me curdled like rotten milk, my face
blotched with arid skin spots, my body starved, my nose flaming and crusted, my emotions dampened and
lame. We had never really been affectionate before, but he reached down and swooped me into his arms like
I was an infant. Tucking me into my bed, he stroked my forehead while I cried and passed out. Hes all I have
now. I used to have Miky, I used to have my mom, but one is dead emotionally and the other is dead
physically. And Bruce is disappointing. Its like hes dead. Or maybe Im dead, like a tree in the forest that
has been rotted out from the center, but still stands there as if it is alive: an illusion of life.
________

Be careful, Bruce called after me as I made a beeline for the front door. Do you want to take the
truck? he offered kindly, it hurt me a little when he was kind. I hadnt told Bruce that my license had been
suspended due to a pending DUI charge, Um, no thats okaythanks. Ill uh see you tomorrow, Ill probably
be back late.
Okay hun. Be careful downtown, you know its not a friendly place after dark; or even before dark, he
chuckled, pleased with his own joke. I shut the door briskly and left the lonely man to himself.
I couldve taken the bus, but public transportation in Worcester is less than reliable, plus I didnt
know what the bus schedule was anymore, walking would be refreshing anyhow. It was about a two-mile
stroll from Elm Park to the downtown Dunkin Donuts. I put up my hood and crossed the deserted park to
Highland Street; the streetlights worked on that street and businesses would still be open so I wouldnt have
to be as vigilant. Walking through darkened neighborhoods in this city could lead to an unwanted baby or
just a good mugging. Fortunately, I had cut my hair short, well shorter than short: I had shaved off the dark
curly knot and now had a stubbly scalp that made me look more boyish than feminine. This would deter the
rampant rapists that meandered these blocks, and the Johns looking for cheap sex. Being a man is safer in a
world of unchecked misogyny.
The orange glow of the tall lampposts casted everything in a strange haze, transporting me back to
when Mik and I had held hands walking down this street sharing a frozen yogurt from WooBerry. The other
customers had stared and whispered cutting remarks about us
lesbians. We could feel them allwatchingsome disgusted, some intrigued, others turned-on, all of
them disgusting to us. A scrawny white-man with purple track marks running up his veiny forearms sat
beside us and offered to watch while we fucked. After that we left. He followed us for a block until Mik
wheeled on him with a ferocious red rage in her turquoise eyes and chased him halfway back to WooBerry
with her nails clawing at his hideous face. Stay the fuck away from us you piece of shit junkie! she
screamed. I had run after her yelling at her to stop, but she ignored me; I loved her for being like that. But I
also hated her toughness, I could never be as close as I wanted to be to her. She would turn on me just as
quickly as she shed peel the face of that asshole. She could never melt completely, never be yielding and
soft, at least not entirely

That night we did merge. With no one watching. It was the first time either of us had been with a
woman. I remember orgasming, it was an experience I had never had. She claims she came before, but I
doubt it. It makes me tingle to think about it now. All summer we ate froyo and made love in her double-bed
or on my squeaky single mattress, spending the days and nights together as if there would never be an end to
us.
I took out my phone and looked at the unsent message I had scripted to Mik: I erased it all and tried
again. Hey Mikena, I hope you are well. Im in town indefinitely. Would you want to grab froyo sometime?
Something panicky in my chest deterred my ambition; it all sounded wrong to me. Id run it by Quincy first.
Maybe shed seen her recently, or could fill me in on what Mik had been up to. Or maybe she would talk me
out of it altogether, which might be the healthiest choice, in all honesty.
WooBerry was still open, I peeked insidejust to seeshe could be in there. But she wasnt, just
innocence waiting to be corrupted. I scoffed and continued on, passing the Coffee Bean and new chincy Thai
restaurant. Climbing the hill that separated downtown from the residential areas of Elm Park, I passed a
junkie nodding out on the corner by the Shell station, he cracked an eyelid as I crossed in front of him. I
dropped a nickel on the ground at his feet; I dont know if it was an act of goodwill or evil, but I didnt care,
Do what you chose, I half muttered to him and half to me. He the picked up the coin and dropped it in his
paper cup, then his eyes creaked shut again.
The dive bars were rambunctious down by City Hall, teeming with drunken college kids, and
inebriated alcoholics who found solace among the youngsters, whom one day would be exactly like them
or maybe notbut probably. I was just another shady figure passing-by so no on gave me a hard time;
although, a few creatures of the night offered me heroin and another oxytocin: I almost took up the latter
offer, but I was short on cash. City Hall might be the most aesthetically appealing structure in Worcester.
Grand like the Capitol just quainter and with bird shit all over its dome. It makes you feel like theres
greatness occurring behind those stone walls, but nothing ever changes here.
Dunkin Donuts sits kiddy corner to City Halls entrance; I crossed over to the corporate coffee shop
that was packed with disheveled faces wrinkled by abuse and disappointment. Blue-collared men getting off
shift from the steel plant, mangled humans seeking shelter from the crisp air, and prostitutes making eyes at
potential Johns. We all were there, waiting. Waiting for something to change. But nothing did, not ever.

Everyone looked so worn, like they had been beaten in Hell then spit out by the devil to live a life of
indignation. I sighed as I swung open the grimy glass door covered in greasy finger prints, and heard a shrill
cry from across the room, Indigo! Despite my efforts, a smile crept up my lips as the old nickname echoed.
Quincy once said my skin was so black that it looked dark blue, like the sky at midnightso she started
calling me Indigo. We had been best friends since high school; she was basically my only true friend. The
other people I met at college were acquaintances and the ones I had made during my high school years in
New York had all disappeared. Well it could be that I disappeared. I seem to be in a perpetual state of
disappearing, becoming less and less at every moment. I have this fantasy of dispersing into a million
particles of dust that just linger, making everyone around me choke, until eventually a gust of wind comes
and blows me far-far away. Sometimes I wish I could commit suicide that way. It wouldnt be messy and no
one would have to feel fucked up about it because I would just be gonelike smokeor the rays of daylight.
Plus I hate violence, so dispersion into microscopic pieces would be easier than stealing Bruces revolver and
leaving behind the messy violet pools.
Quincy ran around to greet me, forsaking a line of hostile customers. Indigo you came! Ive missed
you so much. She squeezed me, making me feel secure for the first time in a long time, and rubbing my
fuzzy head. I returned the embrace holding on to her as if we could stay like that for as long we pleased.
Hey, Im still waiting for my hazelnut coffee! Come on! a rock-like man in a Carharrt work suit yelled at
her. Yo hold on! Cantcha see Im busy! Her coworker behind the counter stepped up to the cash register
before things got unruly. Thanks Jane! Ill be right there, Quincy called.
You can go back, Ill wait around until you get off, I assured her.
Okay great. Do you want a coffee or hot chocolate; you look like you could use something warm.
I nodded, Yeah anything is good, thanks.
She hugged me hard, kissed my cheek, and strolled back to her position as lead cashier, while Jane slung out
the coffee orders. The carbuncular man glared at me from behind his styrofoam cup of flavored coffee; I
glowered back at him until he looked away.
Almost every table was occupied. Scanning the room for an empty chair I wandered over to the bar
lined with stools that faced out the big front windows. Luckily, I found a seat in the corner so I didnt have to
sit between the gruff characters that fidgeted in the other seats. Scooting up on the stool, the man next to me

jostled a bit and gave me a sideways glance. People in Worcester dont mind staring at you if you bewilder
them. They will stare and stare without shame. This man couldnt shuck his eyes from my head and face,
making me cringe a little. Yo, can I help you sir? I snarled at him. Finally he turned his back to me without
a word, just the unfriendly quiet of judgement. It made me want to scream at him, make him feel some sense
of remorse. I radiated sour vibes his way instead, not wanting to cause a scene.
The smell of aspartame-flavored coffee brewing and rubbery sausage sandwiches being heated,
mixed with the perfume of tobacco and stale human stench nauseated me, but also made me feel like I
belonged. Like I could be the piece of shit I am and blend into this broken community. Quincy caught my
eye and waved me over to the pick-up counter with a cup of steaming vanilla flavored coffee, Black, just
how you like it, she winked and handed me the cup. I walked back to my seat, before the strung-out
newcomers could steal it. The newcomers were young, probably my age; they looked a mess. Two boys and
an attractive girl. I was too busy scrutinizing the tall lanky boy with a pockmarked face and hunched
shoulders to notice the fourth member of their entourage entering the cafe. But I felt Quincys eyes gaping at
me. I returned her gaze and she straightened her lips into a distraught and cautionary expression. My brows
furrowed quizzically in return; she shrugged her head in the direction of the newcomers. Turning to look
over the motley crew again, I noticed the fourth member. Quickly, I covered my head and face in the shadow
of my hood, turning my back to the whole cafe and keeping my eyes out the window. My heart was fluttering
as if it were on speed, I couldnt stop the beating and jumping; I thought I might throw-up.
Ey Quincy, whats up? I heard a familiar voice slur. Let me get uh hot cocoyo make it on the
house ma girl, she cackled and her posse joined in, Yeah put it on the house! they hollered idiotically. I
would have loved to see Quincys face, but I was too afraid to turn around and be seen. I didnt want our first
meeting to be like this. I wonder if she would even recognize me; she sounded real fucked up.
I cant do that, sorry guys, Quincy responded patiently with an edge of contempt. She never liked
Mikena. Mostly because of how Mik treated me. Quince always dissuaded me from getting involved with
her; they had been in school together since the sixth grade, and so Quincy claimed she knew every shady
thing Mik had ever done to the girls and boys who adored her.
Mikena and I had a shaky beginning: morally opaque one might say. She had been seeing this
scumbag, Evan, who was ten years her senior and had crystal blue eyes that narrowed into slits when he

examined you. I hated his face. And everything else about him. He made me feel like I had been dipped in
black slime whenever he came around. But Mik was enamored. As if he were a win for her. She used to brag
that a twenty-six year old man wanted to fuck her. I was a jealous lover, so I couldnt neutrally discourage
her from engaging with him, but Quincy tried. We were all in my room at Bruces, drinking vodka and
orange juice; Bruce worked late nights at the steel factory so we had the run of the apartment. Obviously,
Bruce didnt keep any liquor in the house since that would only lead to perpetual temptation, but Miks
boyfriend came in handy for that. Evan would buy us handles of Mr. Boston vodka and if he hung around to
drink with us hed try to fuck us all at once. It was gross. Mik didnt know any better, I guess.
That night in my room Quincy laid it out, Mikena, you are a beautiful girl and he is a piece of shit
man that cant get any pussy from women his own age so hes preying on high schoolers. Like come on girl,
you dont really think hed turn down a woman his own age for a teenager? Mik flushed with anger at the
threat of another woman taking her man, Youre just jealous.
Quincy rolled her eyes and recoiled, giving me a look of utter disbelief and annoyance, then
addressed me as if Mikena werent in the room, Yo this girl is wack I dont understand why you bring her
around. They always put me in the middle, it was the worst position; between my best friend and the love of
my life. Mick rose to her feet, chugging the half-glass she had left of her cocktail and immediately dialed
Evan, speaking deliberately, Hey babe can you come get me, these girls are boring, I want to kick it with
you. Quincy couldnt care less what Mik did with her emotions and body, but I did; I always got caught in
the crossfire. Mick stormed out of the apartment and waited outside on the sidewalk for her babe to come
get her. I went out on the balcony and looked down at her frail figure all wrapped up in an oversized green
canvas jacket, her tiny porcelain legs sticking out from a knee-length dress like two toothpicks. If I had called
to her she wouldve ignored me. So I just watched to make sure Evan came, and grew hot with envy and the
protectiveness of a cuckold husband when she climbed in his truck and kissed him.
When I went back inside Quincy was tsking and giving me her look of compassionate disapproval,
Indigo, shes not into you like that. Plus, shes no good, trust me. She has like the worst reputation round
school. I bet youll meet someone when your back in New York and forget about her anywaysaw come on
dont look so torn up. Tears were already careening down my cheeksthe alcohol was having its effect.
Despite her dislike for Mik she always consoled me when I felt fucked up about her. She hugged me to her

chest and stroked my hair as I lamented the unrequited love. But later that summer, when Evan wasnt
around, Mik and I did consummate our love. She saw us both for awhile, until he became a gadfly to her,
and I became her one, her dragonfly. Eventually, I too became a gadfly to her and she replaced me with a
new one. But I know she loved me, maybe even still does. I hope.
The crew of kids Mik came in with turned the relatively halcyon cafe into a tense atmosphere. They
were speaking with the inconsideration of people who are out of touch with reality, and the disrespect of the
purely selfish. My curiosity was surmounting which gave way to false courage, but I needed to see her; to
really look at her. Terror gripped hard around my throat, its claws keeping my head towards the big
windows, but my mind wouldnt let me slink away from this opportunity for observation. I looked up from
the table and realized I could see the four of them reflected in the glass, yes. I watched hoping they wouldnt
feel my peering eyes. They were huddled around a tall table that only allowed standing: Mik had lost weight,
she was always petite, but now her hipbones protruded from the waistline of her saggy jeans. Her boney arm
the width of a telephone-line dangled over the shorter boy, whose hair hung over his eyes and ears like a
mop-head and he looked as though he hadnt showered or eaten in months. Miks face was familiar, but only
slightly. It looked like she had been wrung out in the laundry and aged well beyond twenty-one. Her hair
had been dyed a brick red hue, and cascaded past her shoulders midway down her back in stringy strands. I
couldnt get over how skinny she was: her cheeks were sunken and the taught skin displayed her bonestructure almost elegantly. To see her was ecstasy for me. Even though she looked half-human, halfskeleton.
The other boy was tall and lanky, his skin the sallow color of bone, his clothes hanging loose from his
body like he were just a hanger; his gangly arm was draped around the other girl, who I instantly envied. Her
skin resembled the bronze-gold of a Tahitian goddesses, with long brown hair streaked with blonde and a
zaftig figure more womanly than I could ever hope to be. Silently, I prayed that the strange girl was straight.
My scrutiny returned to Mik, truly a formidable sight, but still those old butterflies took flight in my tummy
as my eyes grazed her face, looking for an expression I might recognize. She looked up for an instant as I was
staring, finding my eyes in the glass but not seeing me, and immediately returning to her obnoxious
conversation. For a moment my heart stuttered, what would I even say to her. I didnt want our first meeting to

be like this; I didnt want to have to be around her while she was strung out. At least not for the first time,
and not if Im sober.
Miky lets get outta here. Drew is meeting us in ten minutes in Main South, and my veins are
beginning to itch, I heard the tall boy say. The use of her nickname made me shutter; thats what I call her.
Shes mine, dammit. I hated this possession I felt over her; I cant help it though, I love her so much. They all
shuffled out of the cafe, dragging their infested blood with them. As the four of them passed by the window,
Mik looked up, but I quickly averted my face to the now cold cup of joe. Did she recognize me? Part of me
hoped she did. When I raised my eyes again they were gone.
_________
Quincy walked me home after her shift. The air was biting cold by that time with a whipping wind
that forced us to link arms for warmth and protection. We slept in my single bed, our backs curled away
from one another with our spines barely touching. Sometimes we would cuddle, but neither of us was very
good at being tender or soft.
I watched the fingers of sunlight creep through the grubby panes, while listening to the steady pace
of Quincys respiration. My heart trembled as I thought back to Mikenas appearance last night. Part of me
wished I had said something to her; let her know I was herehome. She made Worcester feel like home.
Only her. Quincy groaned and turned her face towards my back, dancing her fingers up my spine as if she
were playing a keyboard. Are you awake? she whispered. I rolled over and faced my chubby-cheeked
friend. Her face glowed in the pale light, with the freshness of a good rest. My fingers twitched with a sudden
urge to brush the wisps of auburn hair from her temples and cup my palm around her rosy cheek. The blue
of her eyes taunted me, seeming to intuit my desire. How are you feeling Indi? she asked cooingly. Im
okayshould I have said something to her? She seemed sodifferent. Quincy grimaced, She is different.
Worse than she ever was. A tight knot was forming in my throat, which would lead to a deluge of tears if I
didnt keep myself together. Im sorry Jen, but she got hooked on heroin. She comes into Dunkin like that a
lot, with the same people, and theyre always high as hell.
We ate cornflakes with milk and wandered down Highland Street to the Bean Counter for coffee. Do
you think I should text her? I asked. Quincy shook her head vehemently, but seeing the pain in the tight
pout of my lips clarified, It wouldnt be healthy for you trust me, but if you cant resist than just do it. I

doubt her phone even works anymore. Quincy and I parted ways after we sipped the last tepid drops of
coffee, and licked the crumbs of croissant from our fingers. I sauntered back to Bruces while she made her
way to Main South to get ready for work. Now that I was alone, my hands gripped around my cellphone. I
tried to resist texting Mik, but every twenty-minutes I would start creating a message to her, changing it
slightly: a comma here or an adverb there. Finally, I generated one that felt complete and simple: Hey
Mikena, its Jen. Im in town indefinitely and was wondering if you would want to meet for coffee or something?
With a racing heart and sweaty palms, I pressed send and the deed was done. Her phone is probably
inactive anyways, I reassured myself; although, I desperately wanted to hear back from her. Throwing the
phone on the bed I paced back and forth across the molting carpet. A ting sounded and I jumped on the
mattress eagerly seeking the message. But it was just an email. Distressed, I left the bedroom and tried to
distract myself with Bruces sparse photographs. He had hung up a few photos of me from when I was a
toddler, and my high school graduation picture, where I am smiling as if I am happy, and have one arm
around him and the other around my mother. An unwelcome tear drizzled down my cheek. And then that
ache I knew so well clutched in my omphalos, constricting my lungs and clenching my heart. A pang that I
knew how to subdue and escape (for a moment); yet, it always returned, ever since she died. My chest
wrenched and I could feel my breathe catching in my throat, like a millions flies were stuck, gasping for air.
A whimper escaped and then the downpour. I missed her. So much. The carpet felt good, comforting, as I
crumpled into a sobbing ball, falling like a wet napkins to the floor. If I could disintegrate, or turn into a
puddle and evaporate, that would be fine with me.
_________
Bruce still wasnt home when I came to, with the golden light of afternoon streaming through the bay
windows in the living room. My face felt puffy and a deep tiredness tugged at my every limb. Laying out flat
on the floor, I stretched my arms and pushed myself up. I felt better. At least somewhat, or just benumbed.
I went to check my phone, finding that I had missed a call from Mik three hours earlier and had also
missed a text from her, preceding her call. Everything felt bright as my heart smiled with complete joy and
hope. It was perfect timing; she must have felt my pain, she knew I needed her, I shamelessly fantasized. Her
message read: Jen! Youve gotta come out tonight. Youre gonna vibe tight with my crew. And I have a surprise for
you.

My eyes could not peel away, a surprise? What kind of surprise? I guess she does miss me. I was trying to
run through what the surprise could be, when Bruce rumbled through the front door. Tucking the phone in
my pocket, I greeted him in the living room. He was looking at me quizzically.
What? I demanded.
You were just smiling hun. A huge grin broke across his face like rays of a sunrise ascending the side of hill
and casting light over the surrounding land. I shuffled uncomfortably and let the scowl return to my cheeks,
replacing the joyous wide-eyes with glowering squinted ones. Bruce still grinned at me.
Its nice to see you smile Jen.
I wanted to cry again. To crumple into a sobbing ball in his arms, rather than the putrid stained carpet. But I
couldnt step towards him, everything in my body tensed and froze as my heart reached for him. The
moment passed and the unhappy contortion remained, the smile lost like a flame to ash.
He flung his work bag onto the couch and switched to small talkI wonder if he wanted to cradle me
the way I needed him to, but just couldnt take the step, just like I cant. Maybe our stone-cold hearts are
genetic. Perhaps our emotional decrepitude is a heritable trait; something we just are. He probably gave me
is goddamn addictions too. The anger resurfaced, replacing my ache for affection with the stoic resentment I
preferred. Then I didnt feel any longing, I just feltnothing.
What do ya want for dinner tonight hun?
Im probably gonna be out.
He looked at me gloomily, but conceded with a nod. The loneliness seemed to hang on his shoulders
as if two hooks were pierced through the muscles and dragged down by giant weights. I winced as an ember
of guilt shimmered in my core, but expertly, I extinguished the emotion and crept back to my now-dark
bedroom, closing the door behind me. In the dusky dark of my room, I took out my phone and began
composing a text to Mikena. After a few drafts, I settled on one that seemed to be both detached and
wanting: Sorry I missed your call. I was sleeping. Yeah Im down to meet your crew, and for a surprise. Where should
I meet you?
Before the minute had changed she responded: Were about to cop. Meet us on the corner of Main and Richards in
an hour.

An icky feeling rose in my gut, as I considered what exactly they were copping. I had attended
enough AA and NA meetings with Bruce to know what that meant, and usually what that referred to in the
Woo. I think I knew this time too. The haggard look of her face in the coffee shop screamed heroin, plus
Quince had suggested that. Pills didnt do that to your cheeks the way intravenous extracurriculars did. It
could be OC, which I had snorted before, and enjoyed the subsequent subduing, but I doubted it. She
wouldnt harm me. I trusted her. My intuition reeled with trepidation, but I needed to be close to her again.
Digging through my unpacked bags I yanked out a pair of fresh black jeans, faded with just the right
amount of wear, and a slight tear in the outer-thigh, revealing a peek of brown skin. My tone only a few
shades lighter than the pants, barely noticeable, but it was my way of being sexy, that, and a dark grey Tshirt that hung from my shoulder and pulled-up at the belly a smidge. I dumped out the entire bag to find
my forest-green wool socks, and my mothers delicate gold chain. I couldnt bring myself to look in the
mirror, but I felt comfortable enough, so I laced up my high-tops and threw on my warmest coat. The pipes
began groaning, followed by the gurgle and creak of Bruces shower. Perfect. I slipped out the front door
without notice and leapt off the front steps into the cool night air.
Tonight I was not afraid. I seemed to float upon the pavement, confidently striding through the shady
streets and dank neighborhoods that had offended me the evening before. The ache did not even come. My
heart floated within me, it was lifting me from my head and into some sultry heaven. I even smiled to myself.
Lost in fabricated scenarios, where Mik draws me into her arms; the arms I remember: soft as clay, the color
of blanched-canvas, where I used to scrawl love letters as we lay wrapped in my blankets, while her eyes
waltzed in rhythm with my pen. She whispered, I feel so warm with you Jen. Read it to me. Then she
would close her eyes and listen with the faint glint of a smile resting on her lips. My voice would start slow
and quiet, not wanting Bruce to hear, but soon the passion would overcome me and my voice intoned in
synchrony with my heart. When I finished, she would open her aqua-algae colored eyes and stare, until I
had to kiss her. Or, I would look straight back at her, so that she knew I meant every word. So she could
never doubt any word. She would blush when I looked too deep and too keenly, so that I knew she heard
and felt every syllable.
In those moments we were in love. Not just acting out love. Love wasnt a verb in these moments. It
was a Thing. We were in that Thing; nestled in Its belly like twins in a womb. We were together, sharing a

place in Love. But I could also see, by the way her creamy cheeks flushed as if a white rose had suddenly
become a crimson one, that she was frightened by that place. It always made me smile to make her feel
vulnerable, but when her eyes would turn to beady dots and dart away from me, Id back off. Id recline on
the pillows and wait for her to come back to me. Sometimes she would. Other times she would leave; and Id
flog myself for loving her too much, and diving too deeply.
I was only two blocks from the corner of Main and Richards, but ten minutes early. I searched for her
amongst the orange glow of the street-lamps, scouting the scene from the sidewalk half-a-block north, while
biliousness gurgled like toxic waste in my gut. The fantasies had ceased for the moment, allowing my
nagging intuition to shoot a warning up my spine. There was no way I wasnt going to see her tonight. But
maybe Ill skip out on whatever party-favors they partake inThen I should be fine. I just wont do whatever drugs
theyre getting. Feeling safe and more confident in my decision I proceeded towards the corner, where three
figures were lingering by a stop sign on the opposite side of the street.
I appeared like all the others. Hood up, hunched shoulders, lurking in the shades of gray and black.
When I reached the adjacent corner I tried to decipher Miks voice in the conversation across the street.
They all sounded like men. When the small one turned around to face me, I realized they all were men.
Suddenly, two hands gripped the backs of my shoulders, making me jump and whirl on the perpetrator. But
it was only her. Every fear I had dripped away like rain drops on the car window, rolling into an abyss I could
not see. I only saw her. Gaping like a dumbstruck owl. I could feel myself staring, but her eyes drew me in
like the Sirens, towing me under like a whirlpool. Still a warmth was pluming into my chest. She smiled back
at me, but the Duchene lines around her eyes didnt wrinkle. I didnt care, because it was her, my Mik.
Her arms reached up and grasped the heads of my shoulders, resting there lightly. Overcome, I
embraced her around the tummy, and pulled her to my chest. Every rib poked back at me. I thought I might
crack one, so I loosened my hold and regained some composure. Her silence forced me to speak, Its so good
to see you. Fuck. Tears were stinging my eyeballs, I am not about to let myself cry, what the fuck. Mik drew
away and seemed to search my face for a moment, until a squeaky male voice called her name from the
opposite corner. The other two men were now gone. Mikena dropped her hands from me and waved to the
gangly guy. Quickly, I wiped my eyes and lifted up the hood that had fallen during our embrace, stuffing my
hands into my pockets.

Jen, this is Jeremy; Jeremy, Jen, Mikena curtly introduced us, anxiously looking at Jeremy and his
fisted hand. Hi, I said as friendly as possible, even though I hated him and recognized him from the night
before. He gave a nod in my direction and moved in close beside Mik, separating his fingers enough so she
could look inside, but not me. You think itll be enough? Did she bring cash? Jeremy asked Mik with a
sideways glare at me. Yeah its enough. Im covering her tonight, so shut up. At this point I felt obliged to
chime in, What are we doing tonight?
Its a surprise, she said and smiled, so I couldnt press her anymore.
If only we could be alone for a bit, I wanted to whisper to her. But she had fallen into a hushed conversation
with the ugly boy, leaving me to stare up the street and pretend like I wasnt trying to eavesdrop.
Brians over on Cambridge Street, lets head that way, Jeremy commanded, dragging his elongated self in
that direction.
NoI want us three to do it at our place, she retorted.
Our place? No. No. No. My hopes were quickly evaporating into the piercing night air.
Why? he whined petulantly.
Because, I think its her first timeJust give it to me then if you dont want to come, she demanded. I
recognized this Mik, by the way her voice deepened and resounded with obstinance. The stubborn Taurus,
who would scream and tear at your eyes if you dared to oppose her, or shun you without any remorse no
matter how much you apologized and begged. He obviously knew this Mik too, because he readily conceded,
and defeated, walked with her north of Richards Street. Past front yards decorated with plastic bottles,
empty beer cans, and plastic bags dancing like dandelions in snow-covered gardens of trash; past forsaken
homes with broken front windows and raped of their copper wires. I stalked at their heels with my chin
tucked to my chest. Mick swiveled her head every hundred-feet to make sure I was still trailing them, and Id
smile to reassure her that I was there. She would smile back, but it wasnt reassuring.
We reached the summit of Richards, crossing the street to a dilapidated white building, the paint
peeling like the skin of a matured sunburn. It stretched three stories high and was the width of three trucks
side-by-side; a torn screen-door hung ajar, banging against the wooden one behind it. Jeremy swung the
screen-door aside and unlocked the front door, jiggling the knob to get it loose. Mikena followed him inside,
beckoning me with a wave of her hand. I obeyed, cautiously stepping into the building that reeked of spoiled

dreams and fermented vegetables. My nostrils flared in the shock, while my eyes adjusted to the dimly lit
staircase, where my guides were mounting. Again I followed. The wood creaked as we bombarded up the
steps, disturbing the piles of dirt and debris communing in the corners of each stair.
On the third floor they turned into a hallway lined with five doors, two on each side and one at the
end of the hall. The indiscernible buzz of a television emanated from the first door, while an infant cried
from behind the neighboring one. Jeremy unlocked the door of the last apartment, corner apartment, I
thought sarcastically, smiling maliciously to myself. The outside wore a battered cream-colored door,
stained with brown fingerprints and a dried brown liquid that I hoped was coffee. A loud boom from
upstairs, brought me to attention as I tried to figure out where the fuck we were. Mikena turned to face me
while Jeremy manhandled the door knob; the key didnt seem to fit.
I was trying to keep my face a sculpture of peace and equanimity, but my eyes were noticing the
cobwebby corners in the ceiling and lingering on the browning baseboards, causing a grimace to spree
across my lips. When I realized she was studying me I quickly returned the gaze, unable to ask her
everything I wanted to: Like what the fuck are you doing in here? I tried to convey this with my eyes, but Jeremy
finally got the door open and tugged at Miks arm drawing her away from me and into the dark room.
The air felt sticky inside, like there were parasites nesting in every molecule of oxygen, latching on to
your skin and breeding in your lungs. The smell of unwashed clothes and forgotten food containers, mixed
with the stagnant essence of cigarette smoke hurt my eyes, making me long for a window. I spotted one at
the far end of the small boxy room, with a tattered khaki corduroy recliner pushed up against its sill. Mik
and the scum that attached himself to her were plopped on the double-bed, looking at a powdery substance
in a dime-bag. She pinched it between her thumb and forefinger, rubbing the tiny grains, while he pulled
open a drawer in the short wooden bureau next to their bed, taking out a Nike shoe box.
The recliner looked as though it might transmit herpes simplex to me if I sat on it, so I loitered by it
instead, trying not to stare at them. Instead, I began examining the dismal room, with no decorations and
only the nasty chair, the bed, the short bureau, a taller bureau, and a small card table with a fold-out chair.
A heaping pile of clothes rested at the foot of the bed, surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles and
some stray food packaging. I didnt notice a trashcan. That must be why they just leave their trash scattered, I
thought sardonically and slightly disgusted, but no less infatuated with her. I wanted to say something like,

Why dont you recycle? or Do you have a trash bin? But my attitude was subdued by my
uncomfortableness and a gnawing sense of being out of place. Mik finally noticed me shifting over by the
chair, Make yourself comfortable Jenwhy dont you sit down?
Uhhhthats okay. But can I open the window?
Jeremy scowled at me, No.
Its really hard to get up, Mik explained.
I sat on the arm of the chair, trying to ease myself into the situation. My olfactory system was becoming
desensitized to the smell, and the single-bulb ceiling light had slowly lightened into a brighter halogenic
glow. Mik got up off the bed as Jeremy tinkered with his tools and the pale-yellowy powder that he had
emptied on to an open notebook. Placing her hand on my shoulder, she asked, Have you ever flown
before?
My quizzical look was enough to tell her no.
Its really amazing Jen; the best thing Ive ever had. Not like anything else in this world. It is the best thing in
this worldIm sure.
She smiled at me, her lips curling up her teeth, showing me the yellow stains and mossy decay that
were quickly eating away at the once pearly enamel; her oxidized copper eyes placid as a waiting room with
not the slightest twinkle. Where did the light go? Her eyes once reminded me of the warm Ocean waters of the
Pacific, changing in color, like shadows and depths change the hues of blue from cobalt to turquoise of the
great sea.
I forcibly suppressed my cringe as Jeremy, called her Miky and lifted the spoon to flame, deliquescing
the powdery substance with baking soda, creating a liquid form. She trotted over to him and wrapped a
rubber-band around the upper part of his arm, causing the veins at the inner-surface of his elbow to bulge
with lust. Pulling a syringe out of the shoe box, Mik sucked the liquid out of the spoon, filling the syringe
with the urine-like substance, that reflected prettily in the lamp light. Jeremy flicked his vein twice, with a
tap-tap, the only sound in the dingy apartment. The process fascinated me, I couldnt tear my eyes from the
ritual, wanting to know how to proceed for when it was my turn. Because now I knew how to reach her. This
was the key.

I swear I could see him salivating, growing impatient with Mik as she fiddled with the needle. Im
ready, come on, he growled. Mik poked the needle through his skin and effortlessly pushed down the
syringe releasing the drug into his bloodstream. Instantaneously, his eyes rolled back into his head and a
sigh of delight escaped from his mouth, AhhhThats good. As if it were the best orgasm he had ever had.
Jeremy fell back on the bed with another Ahh.
Mikena grinned and ran her fingers through his greasy hair, then directed her attention to me,
Ready Jen? she asked smiling that stale smile. I didnt know if I was readySomething about the way she
was looking at me made me want to run-out and not ever see her again. But I love her. I love her so much
and I just want her back, like how we were beforein Loveand floating as if we were particles of light,
refracting in the likeness of rainbows. No death, no ugly boyfriends, no syringes, no putrescent smilesjust
her and me.
She was heating up another dose, Come over here Jen. Hesitantly, I padded over to the bed, just five
steps away, and sat on the far corner from Jeremy, being careful not to disturb Miks process. Jeremy was
moaning quietly, it was the happiest Id seen him. Personally, I liked him better this way: sedated. I was
about to ask Mik if we could leave him here and go wander the city, just catch up and whatnot. But before I
gained the courage, she handed me a rubber-band and instructed me to tie it around my upper arm, above
the elbow joint. I did as I was told, feeling as helpless as driftwood in the riptide, using my teeth to pull it
tight. My heart wasnt even racing; I just sat there watching it unfold, as she filled the syringe and flicked my
vein with her thumb and forefinger. As Mik placed the point of the needle to my arm I almost yelled, Stop!
but she looked up at me with those Caribbean eyes sending a serenity through every bone; until she smiled
that wicked smile, making me regret ever texting her, but simultaneously she flushed the fluid into my veins
and with a yelp and a subsequent convulsion the world went black and I felt myself vaporize into the
atmosphere. Floating above my body, I could see Mik smiling at me, pleased that I looked so tranquil and
idyllic. She called to me, but I couldnt respond. I tired to move my tongue to speak, but I did not know
where my mouth was, it felt separate from me, like it was down there on the bed, and I was up here in the
corner of the moldy ceiling. Jen, she called. It sounded like an echo in a distant canyon. Jen, her voice
cooing like she knew how good I must be feeling. Jen, she called again, more anxious, putting her hand on
my shoulder and shaking it. My eyes were staring into nothingness, not even a blink disturbed their repose,

and my body laid there limp next to Jeremy, like the plucked bud of a flower left out to dry on the kitchen
table: wilted before its time and lifeless before its bloom.

Fall 2016
Acta Biographia - Author Bios

Amanda Gomez
Amanda Gomez is an MFA candidate in poetry at Old Dominion University. Some of her works have been
published in the following publications: Eunoia Review, Ekphrastic Review, Manchester Review, Expound
Magazine, San Pedro River Review, and Avalon Literary Review.
August Evans
Find more of August Evans at augustevans.com <http://augustevans.com> . Artwork by Alex Fry:
@wordswefeel
Amie Sharp
Amie Sharps poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Atticus Review, Badlands, the Bellevue Literary
Review, the Lascaux Review, New Plains Review, and Tar River Poetry, among others. She lives in Colorado.
Brandon Boudreaux
Brandon received his MFA from the Northeast Ohio MFA program. He currently teaches English to
international students and composition. His work has appeared in The Coe Review and Sanitarium
Magazine. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and three cats.
Bridget McFadden
Bridget lives in Brooklyn, NY with her houseplants.

Cara J. Okun
Cara Joelle Okun habitually destroys paper with the arrangement of letters and symbols from various
systems of communication. It is possible that she is, to date, the only human with her biological name.
Christien Gholson
Christien Gholson is the author of two books of poetry, On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press, 2006)
and All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press, 2016; finalist for the New Mexico Book Award); and a novel,
A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian, 2011). You can find him at: http://christiengholson.blogspot.com/
Christine Andrada Henley

Dilip Mohapatra
Dilip Mohapatra (b.1950), a decorated Navy Veteran started writing poems since the seventies . His poems
have appeared in many literary journals of repute worldwide. Some of his poems are included in the World
Poetry Yearbook, 2013 and 2014 Editions. He has four poetry collections to his credit published by
Authorspress India, and one non-fiction, a book of wisdom titled Points to Ponder. He holds two masters
degrees, in Physics and in Management Studies. He lives with his wife in Pune. His website may be accessed
at dilipmohapatra.com.
Donald Wellman
Donald Wellman is a poet and translator. As editor of O.ARS, he produced a series of annual anthologies of
experimental work, including Coherence (1981) and Translations: Experiments in Reading (1984). His poetry
works with sources from several languages. His collections include Roman Exercises (Talisman House, 2015),
The Cranberry Island Series (Dos Madres, 2013), A North Atlantic Wall (Dos Madres, 2010), Prolog Pages
(Ahadada, 2009), and Fields (Light and Dust, 1995). He has translated books by Antonio Gamoneda, Emilio
Prados, Yvan Goll, and Roberto Echavarren. Albiach / Celan: Reading Across Languages is forthcoming (2016)
from Annex Press. Songs is from a collection new work, Meditations.

Dan Frazier
Dan Frazier is an entertainment journalist who has contributed to Entertainment Weekly, Playboy, BlackBook,
NYLON, and SPIN.
David Felix
David Felix is an English visual poet who lives in Denmark. For over fifty years his writing has taken on a
variety of forms, in collage, in three dimensions, in galleries and festival performances, in video and
publications worldwide. Born into a family of artists, magicians and tailors he still possesses the skills to
stipple a background, catch the bullet and buttonhole a waistcoat.
Elena Botts
Elena grew up in the DC area and currently studies at Bard College. She's been published in fifty literary
magazines over the past few years. She is the winner of four poetry contests, including Word Works Young
Poets'. Her poetry has been exhibited at the Greater Reston Art Center and at Arterie Fine Art Gallery.
Check out her poetry books, "we'll beachcomb for their broken bones" (Red Ochre Press, 2014), "a little
luminescence" (Allbook-Books, 2011) and "the reason for rain" (Coffeetown Press, 2015). Her visual art has
won her several awards. Go to o-mourning-dove.tumblr.com <http://o-mourning-dove.tumblr.com> to see
her latest artwork.
Frances Wiese
Frances Wiese recently moved to New York from California after graduating Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with
a B.A. in creative writing. Currently, she is writing unfunded screenplays, starting her own business, and
making her money through a variety of odd jobs. She is flattered BlazeVOX is publishing her story.
George McKim
Pushcart nominated poet George McKim has an MFA in Painting. His paintings have been exhibited in
various group exhibitions in galleries and museums in the Southeast and his poetry has appeared or is
forthcoming in Ilanot Review, Diagram, elimae, The Found Poetry Review, Poetry WTF, Scissors and
Spackle, Dear Sirs, Shampoo, Ditch, Glittermob, Cricket Online Review, Otoliths, Blaze Vox, The Tupelo
Press 30/30 Project and others. His chapbook of Found Poetry and Visual Poetry Found & Lost was
published by Silver Birch Press in 2015 and a second chapbook of prose poems titled Ghost Apparatus is
forthcoming from ELJ Publications in September 2017.

Greg Autry Wallace

Gregory Autry Wallace is a poet, painter and collagist living in San Francisco. He studied English, World
and Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. His poetry and
collages have appeared in Athena Incognito, Atticus Review, Paper Radio and NRG. In addition his work is
soon to appear in Black Scat Review, Clockwise Cat and Five 2 One. He was a poetry editor for Ink Magazine
and a founding editor of Oblivion Magazine. Mr. Wallace is the author of The Girl with Seven Hands and is
currently working on a poetry collection called The Return of the Cyclades.
Haley Guariglia
Haley Guariglia grew up in the creeks of Columbia, MO and currently resides in Kansas City, MO with her
boyfriend and 18 year old cat Fedora. Her interested include interpretive dance, bugs, costume creation and
reading aloud. Her favorite poet of 2016 is Kate Marvin. She can be found online on her blog at
http://www.itwillbeallwrite-itwillbeallright.com/
Hannah Fradkin
I am 17 years old - young, queer, and underrepresented. I write to honor and acknowledge my communities,
to express my many identities, and to ultimately create work that represents who I am as an individual.
hiromi suzuki
hiromi suzuki is an illustrator, poet, artist living in Tokyo, Japan. A contributor to the Japanese poetry
magazine "gui" (run by members of the Japanese "VOU" group of poets, founded by the late Kitasono Katue).
Author of Ms. cried, 77 poems by hiromi suzuki (kisaragi publishing, 2013 ISBN978-4-901850-42-1). Her works
are published internationally in Otoliths, BlazeVOX, Empty Mirror, M58, DATABLEED, Black Market ReView, h& and NationalPoetryMonth.ca 2015 amongst other places.
web site: http://hiromisuzukimicrojournal.tumblr.com/
Ian McPhail
Ian McPhail Brand Short Poem

by Ian McPhail

Inez Walls
Inez "I.V." Walls is a young writer from Mooresville, North Carolina. Her love for writing budded in
elementary school where her fourth grade teacher encouraged expression through literary works. Now as a
23-year old North Carolina Central University alumna, Inez works as a fifth grade literacy teacher in High
Point, NC and writes poetry in her leisure. Inez credits her HBCU education, Langston Hughes, Maya
Angelou, and India Arie as influences in finding her poetic voice. Her works celebrate "blackness" and
spirituality while confronting Afro-centered social, cultural and economic injustices as well as the plight of
African American women in today's American society. Inez believes that her poetic voice is an extension of
herself that speaks to young African American women and the African American community on an
intellectual level.
Jaden Farris
is a PhD student of English at the University of Oregon.
Jake McCulley
Jake McCulley is a young writer from Iowa. This is his first literary publication, but it won't be his last.
Jake Tringali
Lived up and down the East Coast, and then up and down the West Coast, and now back in his home city of
Boston. Runs rad restaurants. Thrives in a habitat of bars, punk rock shows, and a sprinkling of burlesque
performers.
First published in 2014. Journals include Catch & Release, Boston Poetry Magazine, Indiana Voice Journal,
and twenty-five other fine periodicals.
Jenna Cornell
Jenna Cornell is a professor of English Composition at Lakeland University and is a radio broadcaster with
Cumulus Media. She was recently published in the anthology Mirrored Voices: Best Modern Poetry (Vol 4) and
also published her first collection of poetry titled Fantastic Illusions of Life, Love, the Birds, and the Bees in 2015.
Jenna's poems and fiction have been published in several print and online publications, including
Sheepshead Review, Mauthe Center Magazine, and Northern Lights Journal.

John Martin Petriccione

I am a student at Temple University in Philadelphia Pennsylvania studying Biophysics. I love to learn and
have many interests in a variety of fields. I put a great deal of emphasize on the importance of eclectic
thought. Writing is a passion of mine.
K. D. Rose
K. D. Rose is a poet and author. K. D.s book, Inside Sorrow, won Readers Favorite Silver Medal for Poetry.
Her poetry, essays, and short stories have been published in Word Riot, Poetry Breakfast, Candlelit Journal, The
Voices Project, Strange Poetry, and showcased in the Tophat Raven Art and Literary Magazine. Publication is
forthcoming in Stray Branch Magazine, Ink in Thirds, The 2016 Paragram Press Anthology, and The Nuclear
Impact Anthology. Her latest release is Brevity of Twit. She has a B.S. in Psychology and a Master's Degree in
Social Work.
Kurt Cline
Kurt Cline is Associate Professor of English and World Comparative Literature, National Taipei University
of Technology. His full-length book of poetry, Voyage to the Sun, was published by Boston Poet Press in
2008. Poems and stories have appeared, most recently, in BlazeVOX; Danse Macabre; Mission at 10th;
Wilderness House Literary Review; HuesoLoco; Apocrypha and Abstractions; Black Scat; and Clockwise Cat.
Scholarly articles have appeared in Glimpse; Anthropology of Consciousness; Concentric; Beatdom Literary
Journal; and Comparative Civilizations and Cultures. Cline is also a performance artist, theatrical magician and
singer-songwriter. His original album Alien Shoe was produced by 12 Studio in 2013.
Lia Gutierrez
Lia Gutierrez holds a BA from Harvard University, an MA from Fordham University, and a PhD in
English (specializing in poetry writing, twentieth-century American poetry, Lacanian studies, and
phenomenology) from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She has had poetry published in journals such
as The Prague Revue, Yemassee, Wicked Alice, Eratio Poetry Journal, Deluge, Animal Studies Journal,
Counterexample Poetics, and others.
Linda King
Linda King is the author of Dream Street Details and Reality Wayfarers, both published by Shoe Music
Press. Her most recent collection - No Dimes for the Dancing Gypsies was published by BlazeVOX Books in

2016. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals in Canada and internationally. King lives and
writes on the beautiful Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. Canada.
Lambert Common
Lambert is a poet working the Los Angeles area. His poems have been published in Posit, Otoliths and
DATABLEED. His hopes are to have and unnecessary kidney transplant, own a koala and visit Bognor Regis
before he dies of boredom.
Marcia Arrieta
Marcia Arrieta lives on the canyon in Pasadena, California. Her work will or has appeared in Barrow Street,
Word For/Word, Clockwise Cat, Great Weather for Media, Of/with, Paper Nautilus, Fourteen Hills, Moss Trill,
Wicked Alice, Eratio, Posit, Osiris, Altpoetics, Futures Trading, and Little River. BlazeVOX published her second
poetry collection archipelago counterpoint in 2015, while Otoliths published her first book triskelion, tiger moth,
tangram, thyme in 2011. She edits and publishes Indefinite Space, a poetry/art journal.
Marjorie Sadin
Marjorie Sadin, a docent at the Library of Congress, has poems in The Barefoot Review, Microw, Emerge, The
Little Magazine, Jewish Womens Literary Journal, Tower Journal, among many others, and five books of poetry
in print. Her new Vision of Lucha book portrays struggle and survival, love, death, and family. It was
published by Goldfish Press. Marjorie lives and reads her poetry in the Washington DC area.
Mark Cunningham

Mark Young
Mark Young's most recent books are Bandicoot habitat & lithic typology, both from gradient books of Finland.
An e-book, The Holy Sonnets unDonne has just come out from Red Ceilings Press, & another e-book, For the
Witches of Romania, is due out from Beard of Bees.
Michael J Pagan
Born and raised in Miami, FL, Michael J Pagn spent four years (1999-2003) in the United States Navy before
(hastily) running back to college during the spring of 2004. He currently resides in Lake Worth, FL, with his

wife and daughter where he continues to work on his poetry, short fiction, and a collaborative novel. He is a
contributor to his alma mater's blog, The MFA at FAU, as well as his own, The Elevator Room Company,
and is a co-founder of 100 Miles & Running A Collective.
A graduate of Florida Atlantic University's Creative Writing M.F.A. program, his poetry, fiction, non-fiction
and drama have appeared or is forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review, Hunger Mountain, The
Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Spork Press, Coachella Review, BlazeVOX, Menacing Hedge, Revolver, Hobart, Mad
Hatters Review, Juked and The California Journal of Poetics among others..
Michal Broussard
An isolated island girl grows into a traveler of the Western United States yielding work stemmed from the
suffocation of treading water and the freedom that comes from catching ones breath traveling to higher
elevations. Inspired to write by Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Anne LaMott, and Rainer Maria Rilke,
my work has a surplus of sound and extra emotions for those who have trouble tapping into their own. Dive
in. My submission spans the last four years. Find natural truths and the promise of a young poet ready to
continue to produce.
Raised on Galveston Island, and educated in Denton at the University of North Texas in English with a
concentration in Creative Nonfiction, I have continued to develop my role as a wordsmithvarying
language, utilizing a cultivated lexicon weaving in foreign languages, and keeping lines concise. Writing
must have innate rhythm, sound worthy of songs, and a deeper attachment to the world around it. Topics on
the surface vary, but each holds a few pieces of my perspective on this life. I have room to grow and Im not
going anywhere, so give me some water and all the food because when Im finally harvested, youll see how
far these roots reach.
Naomi Buck Palagi
Naomi Buck Palagi grew up in the woods of central Kentucky, and his lived in a variety of places throughout
the South and Midwest. Her poems have appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, BlazeVOX, Masque and
Spectacle, Otoliths, Eleven Eleven, and others. She has two chapbooks, silver roof tantrum (dancing girl press)
and Darkness in the Tent (Dusie Kollectiv.) Her first book, Stone, is forthcoming from BlazeVOX press. More
of her poetry can be found at naomibuckpalagi@weebly.com.
Nikki Ketteringham
Nikki Ketteringham lived in Shanghai, China as an expatriate for one year. She now lives in Southern
California with her husband and son.

Patrick Chapman
Patrick Chapmans most recent books are The Negative Cutter (fiction, 2014) and Slow Clocks of Decay (poetry,
2016). He has also written for film, audio drama (Doctor Who, Dan Dare, Extraordinary Tales) and childrens
television. In 2014 he produced an award-winning adaptation of Ray Bradburys The Martian Chronicles for
BBC Radio 4. With Dimitra Xidous he edits The Pickled Body http://thepickledbody.com/ He lives in Dublin,
Ireland.
Raymond Luczak
Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 18 books. Titles include The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My
Lips and QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and online at
raymondluczak.com.
Rebecca Weigold
Rebecca Weigold's poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The Tishman Review, Tipton Poetry Journal,
Winamop, The Ekphrastic Review, The Skinny Poetry Journal, and other publications. In 1987, she founded
and published The Cincinnati Poets' Collective which featured the work of national and international poets
for nearly a decade. Her writer's page can be found on Facebook at Rebecca Weigold-Poet.
https://www.facebook.com/RebeccaWeigold/
Roger Craik
Roger Craik, Associate Professor of English at Kent State University
Ashtabula, has written three full-length poetry books I Simply Stared
(2002), Rhinoceros in Clumber Park (2003) and The Darkening Green (2004),
and the chapbook Those Years (2007), (translated into Bulgarian in 2009),
and, most recently, Of England Still (2009). His poetry has appeared in
several national poetry journals, such as The Formalist, Fulcrum, The
Literary Review and The Atlanta Review.
Sandra Kolankiewicz
Sandra Kolankiewicz's work has appeared widely over the past 35 years, most recently in Appalachian
Heritage, Gargoyle, Fifth Wednesday, Prick of the Spindle, Per Contra, Prairie Schooner, Appalachian Heritage, and

Pif. Turning Inside Out won the Black River Prize at Black Lawrence Press. Finishing Line Press published The
Way You Will Go and will soon release Lost in Transit. Blue Eyes Dont Cry won the Hackney Award for the
Novel. Her novel with 76 color illustrations by Kathy Skerritt, When I Fell, is available from Web-e-Books.
She lives with her family Appalachian Ohio. http://sandrajkolankiewicz.blogspot.com
Sarah Estime

Sarah Warren
Sarah Rebecca Warren is a writer, musician, and instructor. She is currently working on a Ph.D. in English at
the University of North Texas in Denton, and though she has lived in Texas since 2006, she will always
identify as a native Oklahoman. Sarah currently teaches composition and creative writing at the UNT in
Denton, and at Richland College in Dallas. She received scholarship to study at the Sewanee Writers
Conference, and her writing has appeared in Gravel, Hobo Camp Review, and World Literature Today.
Scott Thomas Outlar
Scott Thomas Outlar hosts the site 17Numa.wordpress.com <http://17numa.wordpress.com/> where links to
his published poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews can be found. He has three poetry collections currently
available: Songs of a Dissident <https://www.amazon.com/Songs-Dissident-Scott-ThomasOutlar/dp/0692526463> (Transcendent Zero Press, 2015), Happy Hour Hallelujah
<http://www.ctupublishinggroup.com/scott-thomas-outlar-.html> (CTU Publishing, 2016), and Chaos
Songs <http://weaselpress.storenvy.com/products/17374139-chaos-songs> (Weasel Press, 2016).
Simon Perchik

Suzie Baker
Suzie Baker has a Master of Arts in English from the University of North Texas. She currently teaches
freshmen composition and sophomore literature. In addition to being a college professor and a poet, Suzie is
also a photographer and a Browncoat. Her colleague affectionately refers her to her as Ms. Snarky Pants.

Skylar Abdeljalil
Skylar is a young writer from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She hopes to pursue a career in journalism, and this
will be her first publication.
Whe Foedisch
Whe Foedisch hails from the northern valleys of California, but currently dwells in Berlin as a Masters
student of Neuroscience. She studied Creative Writing and Psychology at the State University of New York
in New Paltz and has worked as a counselor on both the East and West coast. Whe is deeply inspired by the
clients she has served; thus, she aims to explore and express psychological states and experiences in her
writing, both poetically and empirically.
Virs Rana
Orphaned at birth, Virs Rana was raised by Chrysalisian Monks in the Carpathian Mountains, where he
studied ancient languages. Since leaving the monastery, he began writing a journal and decided to share his
experiences in stories. While he holds no formal degree, he is, in some circles, acclaimed as a MOG (Master
of Organic Geometry).