a man who was persevering, somehow, despite male pattern baldness; this is truly tragic.
And now, hair you are and Hair you shall be. On display, for eyes to see. Oh Ludwig, I am so very sorry. At least they did not trim that bush north of your pee-pee.
(Make it quick, make it easy, in and out.)
We’re after the same soggy-ass fix, illuminated by refrigerator light dim and dreamless, and crawling towards the end of everything [ready in just five minutes!] The timer tick-tick-taunts a wail from my open throat, as we marinate in this diluted atmosphere. Here in this silence, I once knew you.
(Make it simple, make it snappy, touch and go.)
And maybe I loved you in the way that our canned conversations would have loved the warm embrace of a 1200-watt industrial microwave, In the way that this solitary diner would adore a kick in the teeth, to expel the stale taste of sodium. Because the metallic flavor that blossoms is close enough to whatever iron supplement everyone keeps going on about. [tastes just like the real thing!]
morgAn Stumm
To pray the rosary Is to hold your hand In my palm, And trace a thumb Over each knuckle.
To touch first the index And to be, to exist Beside you, In that holy place Of stillness and of silence— As it was in the beginning.
To pass that peak and find That by the middle You want mercy; I grant it. You’re a sorry Confessor, wasting Weary time and weary eyes.
By the ridge of the ring I am saying a desperate Prayer, one made Of dust and ash. Whispers of a devotion— Your name in my mouth, Hallowed be.
But little is left and You’re gone; I grasp Tight to your hand But find nothing In your eyes, Holy ghost.
AmeliA JohnSon-pellegri
Night, Him, Flowers photography
You said the air drunk, like wine, forever memorable, and I tasted it. You said late sun lays bare and the scent of intimacy flooded back to me, the kind of mist over an afternoon where everything is golden, not just the light, but us, golden misted, and together and the way we’ll remember sun cascading over a stone wall.
You say forever memorable and I want it to be true and I hold my breath, hold my breathing deeply so that the sun keeps setting but stops leaving, keeps setting with no darkness on its tail, just the drunk air and more mist and everything golden and us, golden and memorable and awake to the glow.
megAn SteVenS
Your identity disseminates— cast away, stuck, spun and spat Out of a whirlpool of personas— pieces of you, invented and Uploaded on sudden impulses— seductive as the siren song
Calling you to scroll on— this isn’t what you wanted, but Algorithms steer the ship— there’s no changing course when No one profile— pixelated apart— can captain the wheel for the whole. Tired self-reproach ebbs and flows with enticement— a paradox
Linking each recursive decision to the promise it drowns. Eventually— surfing blind against the tide, weary and Adrift— a thought surfaces for air: assail it all, each corrupted Version, all data— mutiny, rebel, swim up from the depths now, Else sink in what you sought only immersion— in this sea of selves,
More than mere minutes are lost— you are submerged underneath, Encrypted in the waves, carried off by the current, far from the shore.
His shift, uneventful, is almost over and he can smell the mini rum bottles rattling around inside his desk drawer. Half-heartedly, he fills out medical records, details procedures, eyes old x-rays, lets time pass by. Slow day at the ER. Periodically, with certain disdain, he catches himself staring at the drawer. He sends a text to his wife, “Let’s get dinner tonight.” Awhile passes, she doesn’t reply. Perhaps she hasn’t seen it, but who is he kidding. “Dinner?” he sends. Another hour or so and the shift will be over; perhaps a small sip now wouldn’t hurt. A nurse whose name he can’t remember stands at his door, “Dr. Cohn,” she says.
There’s a patient that needs seeing, complaining of an “unbearable pain” splitting his abdomen. The man’s skin is jaundiceyellow, and his eyes look like they’ve been dipped in tea. Cohn presses his hand over the man’s gut, and he almost passes out. He orders some tests for bureaucracy’s sake, but he knows, of course, that the results will incriminate gallstones. It is no longer his problem. “Dr. Lurie is a very capable doctor,” he says, “she’ll take out your gallbladder and you’ll be home by dinner.”
“I won’t have to stay overnight?”
“Well, tomorrow’s dinner.”
In his office, he starts packing. He looks around. His door is ajar. He closes it, softly. He goes to his drawer and guzzles up a mini-bottle; it goes down warmly, like a scratched itch. He puts the empty bottle away in his leather bag, to dispose of later; it clinks around with old bottles he’s forgotten to discard. He sits at his desk, letting the final minutes slip by. It’s not time to leave yet. He reaches for another bottle, hesitates—a performance for his own benefit—then downs the rum. Shame, remorse, regret, then bliss. A bodily pain he wasn’t aware of—like breath, noticed only in its absence—is suddenly eased. There’s a knock on the door.
“I need you to do the cholecystectomy,” says Dr. Lurie.
“What? Why?”
“A cyclist and a car were competing for a lane. The car won. They’re prepping him now; I need to operate quickly.”
“I’m sorry, Monica, my shift’s done. I’m leaving in ten minutes. Maybe Steve is still here.”
“Steve is helping me. So is Wozniak. Robert is out sick.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. I have to—”
“His gallbladder is about to burst, Dave. It won’t hold till
morning. You have to take it out,” she says, hurrying to the OR.
His office shakes around him, shrinking. He feels cold sweat all over. To operate in this condition? Unthinkable. And yet, the alternatives? To confess his situation? Career suicide, dishonor, disgrace, class action malpractice. To let the swelled organ rupture and risk sepsis, risk death? Out of the question. He’s only had two mini bottles, he thinks—nips they call them, shooters. It’s barely one drink at all. Besides, it’s a routine operation. Surely, he’s done a lot more in worse conditions. In his indecision he’s tempted, with a certain pang of self-disgust, to reach for another bottle.
The surgical lights shine like pale scorching suns above his head. The green-tinted tiled walls creep ever closer, suffocating. With his scalpel, in a swift movement, he draws a thin red line across the side of the man’s belly. The skin parts on its weight, revealing muscle and fat and bloody viscera. He drops the scalpel on the floor; the nurses look at him. “It has a life of its own,” he says, and the nurses, through their masks, smile fake smiles.
He grabs the forceps, has a nurse pull the muscle and tissue apart. The ballooned gallbladder is right there, where it’s supposed to be. The forceps feel like a small earthquake in his hand. He can’t help but think that a drink would drown his tension, lubricate his movements. The guilt, the shame, impairs much more than the rum. Perhaps he should have had another bottle. He’s doing the right thing, he’s sure, the necessary thing. He guides the forceps where they are needed but suddenly stops. “Bathroom,” he mumbles.
“What?” someone says.
“I need the bathroom. I need water,” he says, rushing out of the OR. The nurses look at each other.
He can’t remember where the bathroom is. The halls look new, unfamiliar. The doors move around, blend with the walls, disappear. As he tries to find his way, for some reason, his mind takes him back: he’s vacationing in the Canary Islands with his wife and old friends. After a long day at the beach, they sit around at a bar. Neon lights flicker all around and Spanish music plays loudly. They crack jokes, tell stories. Cohn has a drink in each hand. “Hell,” he tells them, “is the time between cocktails.” They laugh.
By sheer luck he’s made it to the bathroom. He stares at himself in the mirror—a bit pale, perhaps, but otherwise perfectly alright. How could he be so stupid? If he had waited a few minutes more, just a few, before drinking, this could have been avoided. He runs to a toilet, bends over, and waits for vomit that never comes.
He goes back to the first night he ever had a drink. He’s seventeen. It’s a Halloween party; he’s a pirate. Elise is there. She wears a white polo, puffy tennis skirt and holds a cheap racquet in her hand. He finds it hard to look at her directly but even harder to avert his gaze. He goes to talk to her, walks past her a couple of times instead. A friend gives him a beer he would normally refuse. Tonight, he drinks it, then another. For good measure he downs a third. He finds that all the right words come easy. He finds that he is smiling. “Where’s Elise?” he asks with drunken courage. “She went home with the sexy fireman,” his friend replies.
He splashes water on his face, feels more composed. Surely there’s barely any alcohol left in his blood. A half-opened man with a gallbladder the size of a cantaloupe waits for him across the hospital. Breathe, he tells himself, breathe. He finds he is walking to his office, not sure what for. Like a reflex, as effortless as a blink, he reaches for his desk. He justifies it before it’s done: it will help, it will calm you, it will ease. It will make the surgery successful, he says as the drink goes down warmly, like a scratched itch. Shame, remorse, regret, then bliss. With the back of his hand he dries his wet eyes.
He thinks of his grandfather, with certain contempt, for the third time this week. The man was a serial cheat, a serial barfly. He loved his family, Cohn is sure, but his love of drink was stronger. He died alone, with a bottle at his side, many years ago. Somewhere in his mind he’s always been aware of the genetic risk—he is a doctor after all. But deep down he is a cliché, unoriginal in his secret belief: not me; I am special; I am the exception.
He scrubs the sterile sponge harshly around his arms. He regowns, re-gloves. Like a thirst quenched by drowning, he’s been calmed by the liquor. The nurses watch him expectantly. He grabs the forceps, then the scalpel. Guilt prolonged is guilt atoned—after a while it loses its bite. He is out of self-pity. “Pull him open,” he tells a nurse. Fat, muscle, and bloody viscera are revealed. He guides the scalpel inside the man. An accidental cut. He pauses for a nurse to cauterize. The cold sweat returns. He makes another incision and a slick streak of blood spurts onto his face shield. He jumps from the surprise. The surgical lights keep shining like blazing pale suns above.
……
He sits at his desk; his face betrays nothing. He grabs the remaining bottles and throws them in the trash can at his side, covers them with crumbled papers on top. There is no more denying it: whatever
the genes for dipsomania, they are within. He stares at the door, hoping it will open, that someone will walk in. There is a strange relief in knowing it’s not your fault, and yet it’s no relief at all. He checks his phone; his wife has not replied. He will never have another drink, he vows. A nurse knocks, walks in, hands him a medical record. He tries to read the nurse’s face, gets nothing.
Of course, he can’t cut cold turkey—there’s the certainty of withdrawal, the threat of delirium tremens. A rehab center, perhaps? And risk being found out? Certainly not. He will have to cut slowly, a little drink here and there. Salvation mirroring the damnation: gradual, then sudden. Yes, that is probably best. He will save himself. He texts his wife “I’ll bring you Mexican. Ok?”
He starts filling out the medical record. It will not be easy, he knows, but he will be cured. He is not his grandfather. What happened today will never happen again. Of that he is sure; of that he swears. He is done with the record and finds, to his surprise, that he is staring, as effortlessly as one blinks, at the trash can at his side.
There is a sudden buzz. “Burrito,” his wife has responded. A smile escapes him. He looks at his watch; he should have been gone hours ago. With his leather bag strapped at his shoulder, he stands up, walks out of his office and closes the door behind him. He can’t wait to get home. He pauses, turns back. There is something he forgot.
On second thought, perhaps he’ll leave it for tomorrow.
I remember slowing down at the intersection and thinking, I’ve been here before. Red lights used to be invitations. As June turned to July, cautious became callous. I came to see the hard way that there is such a thing as too much care. Let me be clear: my town was a mirage. Food was plentiful and green flourished but I was barren and so very hungry. That hunger was a companion. It sat beside me, held my hand, left purple kisses on my wrists and beneath my eyes. It broke my mother’s heart, but that summer I really was my father’s daughter. That summer I kept everything in a glass vial, or maybe it was an orange screw-cap container. Things like that are fuzzy now.
KAty gilmore
in dim refrigerator light i squint what did i come here for? it doesn’t matter, i suppose. i grab the peanut butter jar.
i sit, deflated in the dark, at the kitchen table eating cold peanut butter on a soup spoon. this isn’t what i wanted. how naive of me to look for other options.
my mother doesn’t believe in snacks. from the cupboard, i scoop out a handful of semi-sweet chocolate chips she won’t notice, i’m the only one who bakes anyway.
the chocolate doesn’t do it, not sweet enough or not bitter enough– i can’t tell. do i bother with a spoon of honey? a handful of unsalted pecans?
i should have thought ahead about my absence at dinner. no one except my stomach seemed to mind. i resort to a glass of water, which is always her recommendation when i ask for a snack.
rAChel herSChbein
In 3rd grade, we learned about globes. My freckled teacher spun Asia around so America gleamed for us. But if Vietnam spun back I would raise my hand––proudly.
We bought poster board, Crayola markers, and stencils. My mom and I spent the weekend gluing cutouts of Pagodas and rice fields. In glitter and smiles, I presented my show and tell, wearing the Vietnamese flag like a cape.
Other girls bought grilled cheeses, for lunch, their noses crinkled at my fried rice and spring rolls. I closed my lunchbox, smiling at their jokes, holding my grumbling stomach.
Frozen, my playmates posed eyelids stretched to slits waiting for my laugh, and I did, staring at the mulch underneath my sneakers.
Under our kitchen light, my older sister and I attempted, for the first time, to pan-fry frozen dumplings. Oil spat its sizzle onto our skin. I held a plate over the splash, squealing at my sister, who came dressed in goggles and gloves.
Lying on the floor, our laughs echoing over the oil-slicked stove, we bit into cold dumplings.
morgAn SAntAguidA
More specifically, the first bench to your left, as you enter from the corner of Pierrepont Street and Pierrepont Plaza. It’s dark, mind you. Sit on the far right side of that bench, and cross your legs or even lean an arm, that’s what the rest is for.
And perhaps Ray Charles is with you on this 60 degree evening as 2022 breathes it’s last; come rain or come shine. And this is a view, unfit for a photograph. Wouldn’t do it justice. Oh, if one were trained or gifted with camera lens; Perhaps. But that does not describe you.
You can see the majority span of New York. Wall Street, and its futile promise of satiation, glares back. One World Trade Center, Empire State, others you don’t know, you don’t care to meet. See, this isn’t about being oriented.
This isn’t about being an expert or a quick study. This is about a bench and a conversation, non-verbal, with your neurotic trust.
In life having your back.
Place your feet squarely in front now, lean forward with an open ear; Do you hear the color, for better or worse, across the River and even behind you? Turn up Alice Coltrane’s Turiya & Ramakrishna; and try again.
Music is a facet of lighting; affecting how we grieve. The lens contracts or expands with this mechanism. Music, on this promenade so very far from that falsity you called safe, is a pair of glasses allowing even the short of sight and color blind to grasp a clearness.
Oh, look, dear friend! The Brooklyn Bridge is climbing and plummeting like so, so many chests in this city you find yourself in. Do not be anxious; it only goes to show we are all an overpass. An anguished commute of emotions, regrets, and so-be-it’s
jostle through; some, tourists, soon to depart; others, locals, whom we will greet with quotidian resignation.
I pray you will firstly ruminate and secondly surrender to this truth.
Your bridge must not be a drawbridge. One regulated, in vain, by a lone soul that finds itself petrified of outbound and inbound tides. You won’t drown, you’re above the swells, so long as you stay attached to another something.
thomAS milutin
Little wooden horse black, shiny, Russian Smooth in my small hands, small fingers turning over and over, wood hollow and polished Small fingers asking How to love in retrospect? How to love well without knowing?
I don’t know what you thought about, where your mind went while your fingers were here, teasing open sticky pots of paint
Glossy black, harsh, bright red deep emerald, gold with just a touch of a sheen
I don’t know how little your fingers were, or how little your fingers weren’t, turning over and over, tiny paintbrush taking so much care
After you died, I took the horse home with me, said to myself, it reminds me of you
I like to ask it what your fingers were like what your thoughts were like, if it remembers the soft rasp of your voice, too.
megAn SteVenSVanilla whips across my senses; the candle warps the room’s scent from the must of new beginnings to an ache I will pretend does not exist. You never let me have the scented ones in your home, they gave you a headache.
The smoke dissolves into the dim room like a puff of her cigarette, and I think of everything she called me: the things she said and the words in between. It’s funny. Everyone in your house was great at that, even you. The I don’t love you enough hidden just behind the Maybe this is for the best, like a bad paint job. With another three coats, maybe I’d have believed you.
You knew her four years and me eighteen, but who’s counting, right? Just me, now, with the sheep before bed, adding up how you let me down, counting down like the buzz of a clock will set things right.
Vanilla used to be my cliché. Warmth, sugar, a scoop of ice cream at the shop down the street back when we walked hand in hand, Daddy’s little girl. It never used to be my candle.
I let the wick burn, look up at the darkened ceiling wishing your little tealights were pasted up there, flickering like stars flecked across the sky. Maybe I’d make a wish. Maybe it’d be to come home.
megAn CreSitelloUnderstory
n. a layer of vegetation beneath the main canopy of a forest.
At first we withered beneath the cold metal abdomen forced to drink the drip drip drip of oil leaking from above, remnants of a kindergarten science experiment. After nine months the pregnant belly gave birth to a sky— light rimmed in rust.
“Nature seems to reclaim what one wants to take away from it.”
-Thomas StrogalskiThe taught leather sighs off the weight of its former passengers like skin slipping off its bones. The body groans with the strain of suspending
as iron and oxygen catalyze its slow collapse into itself.
I.
If I were a tree, I could stay here and watch the seasons change. Maybe I’d mark them by the people who travel through. A little boy who exclaimed at a flower was wearing a bright blue bubble jacket, but perhaps in a week or two he will come back in a thin zip-up, then a long sleeve T-shirt, then short sleeves. Maybe he’ll have grown an inch, too.
Did you know that pine trees, like little kids, grow a few inches a year? You can measure it by the new growth that sprouts at the top every spring. Trees don’t have lifetimes like humans who reach maturity at a particular age, height, or weight. Given the right resources and the proper habitat, they could, theoretically, keep growing forever. The question then becomes: why do trees stop growing? How do they die?
III.
A single fallen leaf moves slowly across the pond towards me. It is belly-up, like a boat waiting for its passenger. Or perhaps its fate is more grim, a capsized carcass of a long-dead leaf waiting to fill with water and join its siblings decomposing to silt at the bottom of the pond. Already it has reached the part of the water that is untouched by the breeze. Soon it will sink.
The wind is strong today. The way it wraps around my exposed legs almost feels like it’s caressing me. My professor asked in my plant class last week: have you ever considered that nature is experiencing you? As the wind bends around me, I am hyper-aware of my place in things. I am a guest in this natural habitat, sitting on a bench that was put here by human hands.
I wonder what it would feel like to be nature experiencing me.
V.
The rapidly darkening sky is foreshadowing rain, but I’m not sure I’m ready to leave yet. I think I want the cold to seep into my bones a bit longer — the kind that settles in slowly and doesn’t dissipate for hours.
Off to my left, I find three short pieces of pink string next to a muddy hole in the ground. A rock rests beside the hole, as if someone has pried it up from the grip of the earth. Why? I wonder. What have other people come here to find?
VI.
Footsteps crunch over the bare ground behind me; a couple is coming. They’re old, both white-haired and wrinkled. He holds her hand as she steps down with her sandaled feet to rinse her hands in a man-made waterfall. She is lithe, bending over with an ease and agility you wouldn’t expect from her graying hair. Her legs are bare, too, blue veins exposed beneath a knee-length purple skirt like the tree roots just barely covered by the dirt below me. I wonder if she comes here daily, or weekly, or monthly, or not at all. I find myself hoping she stays.
VII.
There’s a green film covering the surface of the water near me. I pick up a fallen leaf and plunge it into the algae, swishing it from left to right. The algae parts as it passes through, then magnets back together a few seconds after I lift the leaf from the water. I repeat the motion, slower this time, captivated by the swirling patterns of the green diverging and reconverging.
VIII.
I let the sun rest on my eyelids as I listen to the sounds around me. A young girl laughs as she rides her bike down the street. A woodpecker pecks at a tree somewhere far behind and above me. A dog collar jingles from somewhere I can’t see. The T trundles past.
IX.
The plaque up by the entrance to the wooded area said that this space used to be a garden. The pathways were designed to circle the pond, with benches placed as stopping points to mark the views. The more I come here, the more I see: this small slice of nature was arranged by human minds and made for human eyes. But nature isn’t supposed to be made by, or for, humans. Right?
X.
I think I remember learning somewhere that bees get drunk off pollen and fly around in dizzy lines. I look up at the trees and wonder: Is that why I keep coming back here? Is this tiny slice of manufactured
nature enough to intoxicate me? XI.
I wish that I could plant my feet in the earth and root down into the earth like a tree. What would it be like to stay and see what happens when it rains, and the snow dissolves into mud, then greenery? To be the trees watching me here in each tiny, timeless moment? Would I be dissatisfied with the unnatural noise of the T and the constant flow of people below me? Or would I enjoy the company?
one day, we’ll have dreamy sunday mornings at the kitchen table over steaming cups of sweet coffee, sunlight streaming through white linen curtains. over scrambled eggs and buttered rye toast we can finish last night’s conversation. i dream of folding our laundry, separating your socks from mine, turning them right-side-out. our jewelry sharing a porcelain dish on the dresser, twin lamps sit on twin nightstands. at around four, our colognes catch the sunlight: green and amber halos on the wood.
you’ll bring home bags of groceries, bouquets of daffodils and daisies for the kitchen table, and too many cartons of raspberries, but you couldn’t help it. they’re in season. if we don’t eat them all i’ll use them for something, a jam to flavor those cookies you like. books fight for space on an all-too-small shelf. most of them are mine. but you’d buy me a brand new bookshelf before you stopped buying me classics. and our rooms keep changing colors, but i love the smell of paint.
rAChel herSChbein
Waning daylight, autumn-pale hue— I promise it’s better than it sounds.
Glossing, there’s no better word. A surrealist circus. Rain and cider sloshing, splashing on the pavement, liquid gold.
Haven of mismatched furniture, every cuisine on a single street— honey spiced tea, basil aioli, prosecco and mint cocktails.
Toll booths and lecture theaters, fairy godmothers and first steps, monolithic trauma, fatigue, burnout you know, the works.
I’ll watch you in the reflection of glasses on the bar.
I’ll hear you in the pipes.
I’ll find you in the intangible Always, now, later, tomorrow.
KAty gilmore
Fountain of the Hours, I am ever on my way. I miss you dearly, yet I have never met you. I know you from stories of Nonno, running the mine-covered beaches and swimming out miles into the sea, biting into live shrimp and swimming back, effortless; the marching, blue jacket buttoned and hand held high in a German salute, unknowing, six years old, un vero figlio della lupa.
I hope to reach you, someday, just to see Nonno again; I know he smiles there, waiting for his nipote to find his hometown.
ethAn bArroWS
I could say the sky last night was ineffable, but then, you wouldn’t know what I really meant— It started with a singular stratiform, painted dusty pink in the still-blue sky of an evening on its way. Upon next glance, the cloud, the leader of a parade of pure light streaming across the valley and roseate no more, transformed into spilled tangelo wine and indigo wildfire spreading faster than the lone hawk’s flight, crossing paths with infinite color.
Your laugh is ineffable too.
CeCiliA durCAnIt begins on the ground.
Over the curvature of the heat-stroked field, Sunlight starts its slow retreat, inching backward As shadows make their inky ascents To twilight watch posts.
She listens closely as the trees
Whisper their final sage secrets, and the pond frogs
Croak love songs into the cooling air.
They’ll continue their repertoire
Long after porch lights wink off.
Early hour moonbeams stretch gossamer arms
Over summer grass. The night owl
Returns home in honed silence
And sleeps with the window open.
lilliAn benoitMax “Seaside Woods” White
Cece “Dragonfly on Lilypad with Light” Durcan
Patrick “Emerald Isle” Conlan
Lillian “Fresh Cut Roses” Benoit
Grace “Black Cherry” McPhee
Michal “Twilight Tunes” Miller
Ethan “Do Re Mi” Barrows
Mariam “Romantic Magnolia & Lily” Chaduneli
Nina “Garden Sweet Pea” Khaghany
Holly “Snowman with Snowboard” Branco
Grace “Bright Pomelo & Amber” Wolski
Owen “Iced Banana Pop” Fletcher
Morgan “Hot Buttered Rum” Stumm
Eric “Cozy Cashmere & Pine” Serra
Victoria “Over The River” Oliviero
Patrick “Lucky Shamrock” Gaffey
Henry “Magical Frosted Forest” Troake
Matthew “Home Sweet Home” Kirven
Rachel “Juicy Citrus & Sea Salt” Herschbein
Amelia “Petals & Spice” Johnson-Pellegri
Katy “Sparkling Cinnamon” Gilmore
Serin “Bird House” Hwang
Caroline “Flowers in the Sun” Clark
Ada “Hydrangea” Anderson
Melanie “Midnight Tranquility” Cotta
Harry “Winter Night Stars” Smith
Olivia “New England Maple” Emerick
Aidan “Movie Night Cocoa” O'Neill
