Fall 2009 Issue

stylus cover issue v2.jpg This is a collage of a fish and a shark swimming with a red and blue background. “Stylus” is written in the image. PLease make sure is centered on page.

Stylus Flaming Hand back cover.jpg A stylus flaming hand with a black background and the words “the STYLUS of BOSTON COLLEGE”

S

TYLUS

Fall 2009

STYLUS Volume 123, Number 1, Fall 2009. Founded in 1882. Undergraduate members of the University are invited to submit original works of poetry, prose, and art. Direct correspondence to: Stylus, Room 129, McElroy Commons, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 or bcstylus@gmail. com. Works under review remain anonymous. Copyright 2009 Stylus Editorial Board, 2009-2010. All rights reserved.

Warman, I have tried your rituals, and find them repulsive.jpg A Photograph of a cut-up good and plenty box.

“I have tried your rituals, and find them repulsive�

Cedar Warman

STYLUS Volume CXXIII

Fall , 2009 Bostonese

8

Number 1

Staff

Verse Elysium Platform Flak Climbing Poet over New York Robert Johnson Plays Guitar into Eternity Economics White Lilies Widow’s Walk What Orpheus Saw Timber Deli Birdwell Island Inheritance A Ballad for Virgin Boots on Canal Street One Space Age Blues pt2 Inanimate Love Nightmares Over Water Chemical Change Meeting Ground For Annabelle, who left me Waltz of the Baby Giraffes La Ménagerie de Fleurs (en Avril) Metanoia The only obsession I’ve ever had with a person I’ve never met Indigo House on Stilts

9 10 12 19 20 22

Amanda Leahy Gregory Schafer John Delfino Elizabeth Kulze James Thorne Richard Horan

24 31 32 34 38 39 45 46 48

Ashley Schneider Richard Horan John Delfino Amanda Leahy Gregory Schafer Andrew Keener Matthew Hearns Gregory Schafer Elizabeth Kulze

52 66 68 70 74 81 83 85 86 90 95

Nathan Walkowicz Richard Horan Elizabeth Kulze John Delfino Julian Kiani Gregory Schafer James Thorne Katie Sullivan April Chang Amanda Leahy Richard Horan

102 Madeline Rose McSherry

Hungry Man Sunday School Memory Brothers and Sisters The White Willow

104 106 109 115

Samuel Lovett Trey Brewer Amanda Leahy Skye Shirley

Prose Order in the Onion Barrel Finally, Finally The Burial Clause The Turquoise House Schroon Lake The Second Week with Margery

15 26 41 55 77 97

Heather Maytham Jessica Yoon Trey Brewer Caroline Beimford Stephen Lovely Myles Gerraty

Art Flying Fish Cover Yongbok Hwang I have tried your rituals, 4 Cedar Warman and find them repulsive Carnival 11 Daniel Radin Linda 14 Michael Bell Finley Knight Mural 18 Meghan Borah Keep ‘em Closed 21 Jill Forgash Untitled 25 Kristi Kleila Quilotoa 30 Chris Kasper Self-Portrait 33 Meghan Borah Untitled 35 Michael Bell Untitled 37 Katherine Williamson Untitled 40 Bryan Leyva Hallway Dreams 44 Luke Tasechler Rainy Day Remnants 47 Jill Forgash Rivqua 51 Rebecca Muessle

God the Father, God the Son Hunting Dogs Compose Untitled Looking Back Untitled Still-Life on Brown Untitled A self-portrait with the headache she gave me Fish Untitled Untitled Untitled Atacames (Colonel Mustard in the Study With ) The Rope Goodbye Shoe in the Wall Untitled she’ll hate those curls one day Nighttime Childhood

53 54 59 65 67 69 75 80 82

Kelly McConnaughey Jennifer Eckhart Michael Bell Bryan Leyva Kasey Cullen Marissa Kaplan Daniel Thornbury Katherine Williamson Richard Horan

84 87 89 93 94 96

Yongbok Hwang Caroline Sullivan Katherine Williamson Bryan Leyva Chris Kasper Daniel Thornbury

100 103 105 107 110

Kelly McConnaughey Sam Hay Nicole Pasquale Jill Forgash Luke Taeschler

Bostonese OBSERVER WRITERS LIBERATE STYLUS

find himself the proud owner of three Seniors, five Juniors, a Sophomore, and six Freshmen. Keener postulates Due to a scheduling snafu, writers he will most likely resell the for BC’s conservative newspaper Freshmen on eBay. His only regret The Observer found themselves is, having forgotten to check the box attending Stylus’ September 14th indicating his desire to receive emails introductory meeting. Though notifying him of upcoming sales, he promptly alerted to their blunder, many Observerians chose to prolong will miss out on the bumper crop of Boston College undergraduates. their occupation of Gasson 300.

Most of the budding Republicans STYLUS GOES GREEN agreed it would be in poor faith to This semester Stylus committed fabricate an artificial timetable for withdrawal, and all agreed that they itself to playing its part in the fight wanted to end their literary intrusion to stop global warming. Editor-inChief Molly Shotwell’s innovative for the right reasons. In contrast, dedicated Stylites who attended the plan utilized previously untapped Observer meeting tended to “cut and fonts of renewable energy in the form of BC freshmen. Unfortunately, the run.” plan backfired when a meeting in Gasson 207 reached critical mass.

KEENER PURCHASES No students were wounded in the FIFTEEN BC STUDENTS resulting fission reaction, though Yesterday, while reportedly several were later treated for acute “fiddling” with the Agora Portal symptoms of posttraumatic stress. feature that enabled him to “place” students in his “cart,” legendary FINALLY, A FISH Stylus Editor Andrew Keener Years after the tragic demise of discovered an obscure button on the intrepid Stylus mascot Clyde, a new homepage, which allowed him to and dedicated piscine companion has “check out.” After filing his credit emerged to steer Stylus through rough card information and social security waters ahead. number, Keener was shocked to

Sid has arrived.

89

Elysium

Water shouts upon linoleum,

drowning cans

of corn, peas;

Empty tank lies green and open:

all the lobsters go

free.

Amanda Leahy

9

Platform The dim hum drum sounds Down the deep on cracked sand Buckets turned over From the day’s labors In a thud, thud drive— Tap my toes in time With the rhythm I reap And keep leaning sleepy soft Along the tired subway wall.

Gregory Schafer

11 10

Radin, Carnival.jpg color photo of a carnival

“Carnival�

11

daniel radin

Flak I. It’s only a tirade, a cousin may say, grasping at straws as an exceedingly simple melody repeats itself in the receding distance.

It’s an epic tune, one of grandeur and magnificence, recalling the days of knights and kings and trumpeters heralding the entrance of someone whose gumption was greater than yours or mine.

A closed fist beating a hardwood table simply for the effect of it all, as if the story could not hope to be worth telling on its own.

You don’t understand, he cries; you could never realize how it was.

How could we, a child responds. We weren’t there. But you will be, the wrinkled face replies.

He lacks subtlety, perhaps, but it’s truth he speaks.

II. struck by

bits and

pieces of

god only knows what

shot by

the sky a

bove

seeking

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cannons into

the saviors

the allies the

liberators. brilliant white

hot blasts of air

scream, banshees, in

as home,

all our ears

in an opera house, an obese soprano belts beautiful music

and shatters glass III. I can hear I swear I can I can hear the harps I can hear the death I can hear the pearly white gates calling out to me IV. You don’t understand. He cries.

Soon we’ll all be gone, and you?

You will forget all we have sacrificed.

John Delfino

13

Bell, Linda.jpg B&W Photo of a Secretary behind her desk

“Linda”

15 14

Michael Bell

Order in the Onion Barrel Heather Maytham

I wish I could say I never spoke to you again, but I did, little formalities tripping out of my mouth like errant birds. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling politely when we met, asking how the kids were and remarking, “Lovely to see Bill at the supermarket last Wednesday!” Seeing your husband at the supermarket on any day, but particularly on the ravaged edge of an endless Wednesday, is a deplorable and tedious occurrence. In other words, lovely. They should have an apple variety called lovely, I muse as I pick through the fruit, back again at the store but Bill-free for the moment. You probably wouldn’t pick that kind, it’s too whimsical or maybe redundant; after all, there’s already Golden Delicious. Then again, you would never go grocery-shopping at all. The aisles are confusing, the lines take too long, and you never make anything but frozen dinners anyhow.

Bill, the ever gallant Bill, is always ready to draw his sword and slay the carrots, pierce the radishes, sink the potatoes, fight onward in the crusade for homemade. At least, Bill tells me he always does the shopping.

The last time you kissed me, you asked if we would be together forever. Why would you ask? Lying in bed, you wondered if we would go away on weekends, watch the leaves change, ice skate on that terrible frozen rink in the city. My rational, ordered beloved, frolicking in the sights of some future you imagined for us. You dared to ask if I would groceryshop for you. Of course I would.

Somehow, though, that moment gave way, disappeared into dust.

Just a day later I heard you say, “I can’t do this. God doesn’t want two women together. God will hate me. My mom will hate me.” Other words, too, you flung at me, but all I could ask was, “Why’d you want to know if I’d grocery-shop for you?” That absurd inconsequential detail somehow made me the angriest.

Later I tried to be reasonable. I guess God had called that morning, obviously before I had woken. Still, if only I were a morning person, I could have picked up, told him he had the wrong number, unlisted us in the phone book. No one could hide from your mother, though. Every time you said “y’all” should have reminded me you can’t leave the past behind, but then I’d see you pop Pillsbury biscuits in the oven, something you’d first discovered in New York. You told me your mother would kill you if she saw you eating pre-made biscuits. All my hopes rested on those circles of dough.

I said I would never speak to you again, and I meant it. I meant it all the way through that month and at least half of the next, but my resolve crumbled like store brand feta, twenty percent off this week with your loyalshopper card. If you could walk away from me so easily, I reasoned, you could be the one to give up our gym. Thus I arrived at the treadmills.

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You waved at me, going nowhere on the elliptical and bobbing up and down like an indoors Tigger. And then you were walking over. Who knows what you said, probably, “Hey, how are you?” You kept asking every time I was there. Automatic politeness means I return the greeting every time, and sometimes even agree on the nice weather, whilst silently sending my own humble opinion in the direction of your back. Who cares if it’s sunny and seventies when we’re inside a gym!

Only months after that first encounter you were engaged, and was it only months after that? Married with a baby on the way. Soon, no matter I found I couldn’t begrudge you that. Always you wanted kids, when I never did and, let’s face it, I could never have gotten you knocked up as quickly as the ever gallant, piercing Bill. Although I did briefly consider it might be a good idea to get engaged, now that everyone was doing it. I even went home with a guy (Joe or Jared or John?), but it got called off somewhere between his pants coming off and me running out of the bedroom. Failing engagement, however, I will become a single success story, the last artichoke surrounded by cans of tomatoes.

Now, just another Wednesday shopping day, I’m left in the bramble of lemons and loneliness in your wake. I wish I had said last week, “Hello, Bill, I’m experiencing infinite suffering and loneliness. How are you today?” But I didn’t, probably couldn’t, say that truthfully. Particularly because tragic heroes don’t tend to congregate in aisle six (International Foods) or seven (Spices), and especially not nine (Bread and Baked Goods).

As I choose whole wheat or pumpernickel, I realize that nothing properly exciting or tragic will ever happen around the baked goods, or perhaps around me. Pushing a metal cart and wondering about the merits of breads is hardly the stuff of depthless mourning. No one jumps from cliffs holding Romeo and Juliet anymore, and it is almost absurd to utter phrases like one true love, particularly if you are alone amongst the onions. If you were wondering about my own life, I would tell you that although onions never jumped anywhere, I hope you would catch one if it fell. I was like a falling onion. You did not catch me. Probably you think of me as the onion that got away. It is possible, though, that you don’t think of humans in terms of root vegetables.

Lawyers aren’t often called by metaphors from the food pyramid.

They as a rule are too rooted, not in the ground like the onion but in the caverns of their arguments, their logic hard and solid as boulders. The order that puts your life into an almost perfect graph of square meanings could never have fit me in. Still I can imagine the days passing together: you commenting on the day in court with prickly wit, preparing briefs, and adding endless activities to your Blackberry, me spending hours debating the merits of lemon in raspberry muffins and nearly missing the train to work. I get lost in the city on purpose on a Friday just to explore, and you hated when even my thoughts wandered. I didn’t like your giant dog, and I couldn’t be positive I even really loved you.

17 16

Seeing two moms recognize each other and exchange requisite greetings, I consider answering truthfully the next time you ask how I am.

I’d tell you I have always considered elliptical machines extremely stupid, but I might confess that I feel nostalgic on a Wednesday when I see Bill, basking in his married glory. I’d admit that if God called, you would have to answer, even in the morning, even if he was disagreeable and couldn’t prove who he was, and especially if he mentioned burning brimstone. I would forgive you, I think. But, try as I do to stick to my list, I sometimes imagine bringing you home a gallon of overpriced milk, and I would never admit whether the feeling lasts past dairy. But what’s the use of crying over un-spilt milk? Maybe if I told you all of this, I could stop going to the gym.

Almost finished, I have reached the containers of nuts and candies and those queer green things you used to eat, edamame I think they’re called. I give them a withering look, telling them life’s not so great sitting pretty in those neat little bags, and turn away to checkout.

17

Borah, Finley Knight Mural Combined.jpg Mural with Boy in Wolf costume

“Finley Knight Mural”

19 18

meghan borah

Climbing

I’ve begun to question Why the leaves are falling, Or why my hair brushes against My elbows. It used to fall across My face— handicap to my tree climbing So I chopped it to my chin.

Shoes left at the bottom Next to yesterday And tomorrow.

But my hair grew out quickly— Quickly, you know, is the only way To live these days. Kissed Like coins and tossed out To drown with the weight Of wishes. I almost drowned once, Panicked in a cold pool, I couldn’t tell which way Was up Or down And now I wonder, Why didn’t I look for the trees?

A grip and dirty fingernails Are all you need to be On top of everything.

Elizabeth Kulze

19

Poet over New York

Banking to the left, southbound It seems so small, a few sticks Caught in the beach, as the tide Rolls in

September is far away, I know Because the Hudson sheens As the geese score and dot The sea

It looks to me a sandcastle A child’s play of monuments Who smiles dripping spires To scrape sky

As if the girders and the glass Were granules draining wet With brittle sun baked walls Of sediment

I wonder if it looked this way If that made it easier for them, The boys with sandy feet, to go Stomping about

James Thorne

21 20

Jill For-

pair of eyes rendered in pencil

this way up.

21

“Keep ‘em Closed”

Forgash, Keep ‘em Closed.JPG

Robert Johnson Plays Guitar into Eternity

I dreamt every night about a gentleman with a face white like ivory, perfect teeth and fingernails.

Finally I met him hitchin’ at the crossroads.

You who blends into the inky black He said Would you like to live forever?

He started to sing I went to the crossroads, And I’m on my knees…

I feel still air, have muggy night blue moonlit fingertips.

I sing the old way and I’ll never stop while the gentleman stalks my dreams.

Sometimes I’m in a house, overgrown with thistles, paper peeling off the walls and I watch the stars through holes in the ceiling while I strum and sing.

I walked to New Orleans, sat in the graveyard and just wondered where everyone was rushing to.

Sitting on a tombstone I learned the answer playing a guitar I bought for a price too steep, watching the dead dance.

I tried to go further, to see the Pacific but my feet were stuck in the mud of the Mississippi sucking down like tar.

I died in 1938 when a white-man handed me an open bottle.

I watched myself drink and heard the gentleman chuckle.

The next day I polished my shoes so they shone bright, smoked a cigarette as I walked away thinking I’d lost something I couldn’t put my finger on.

23 22

My suit is worn, smells like cigarettes and I need my hat to shade the sun, in the shade I disappear.

Nighttime in speak-easies, I open the window and in the moonlight I am full and climb from the inky black.

The gentleman buys me drinks so I sing until my voice is hoarse, my fingers bleed.

A barmaid touches my arm so I talk about the crossroads and the long blue-tar road that stretches out forever in front of me.

Smoke makes my head spin as the blue-lights make Mama cry, because I’m never coming home; the gentleman grins, and forbids from his seat in the corner booth.

Richard Horan

23

Economics Find the nature of paradox and Exploit it. The perfectly inelastic elasticity of tension in a naked field of peonies bind the wrong woman to the blood red blooms. Astoundingly lifeless faces project disapproving glares on her fixed crooked neck and twisted hair, sour cigarette tucked behind her ear. Far away from here still clatters his sharp demand with a shortage of conviction and a surplus of desperation.

That was after the bedroom froze the corner block into a metal rectangle. An opportunity that cost him his delicate equilibrium for the mere price of enduring hollow emptiness. Now here she stands, guarding her precious razor seeds. A new enterprise of destruction slipping from her throat. The right wrong woman with little incentive plucks the listless peonies that only live on in their leaves.

Ashley Schneider

25 24

Kleila, Untitled 6.JPG Photo of native american trader with his hands out

25

Kristi Kleila

Finally, Finally

Jessica Yoon

It’s a warm night, the kind that makes you want to lie on the grass until the stars appear after being invisible for half a day. It must be pretty boring to be a star. I mean, they just sort of sit there, flickering from time to time. Well, to be honest, I can’t decide. Maybe it would sort of be nice to be a star, to not have to talk all the time. Anyhow, I’m sitting with my legs hanging off the edge of what we call The Overhang. It’s the overhanging part of a little dark-green metal bridge, under which a bunch of water flows across campus. And as I’m looking up, everything seems nice and soft and I don’t want to be inside at all. But I have to leave the stars and try to do something that will maybe fix what’s been weighing on my mind, so I pick myself off the bridge.

I begin to walk to her dorm room, but my shoes and socks and jacket, all remainders of the formal dinner for which I’ve been forced to dress up, are stifling and I slip them off and leave them at the base of my favorite tree. It’s a little poplar, and sometimes I wish I could tell people about it because it’s beautiful, but when I think about it, I decide I’d just about die if anyone found out I had a favorite tree. I’d die if people knew how much I love trees. My feet touch the cool asphalt and everything seems much better. The tie’s got to go, too - off it comes, along with the top button of my shirt. The night air greets my throat and the small pile of clothes I’ve left looks a little less lonely by my poplar. I resume walking to her room.

Her name is Lucy and we’ve been together for a while. We met late Fall term when I was meandering through the woods. I wasn’t trying to do anything in particular - I was just bored and it was too nice an afternoon to spend inside. Anyhow, I came to a clearing at the top of a hill, and she was sitting there, like some sort of vision, with the sun making a fuzzy golden halo on her hair and her back turned to me. She was reading, but I walked up to her because it made me happy to see the first person I’d seen in about an hour. She and I began to talk and she showed the book she was reading, For Whom the Bell Tolls. That’s my favorite book and I had never met anyone my age who’d read it, so naturally I felt like I had met a kindred spirit, someone to whom I could pour out some of my thoughts.

I really liked her that day we met - she’s got really big eyes and freckles all over her nose and really ridiculous eyelashes. When I look at her face, all I can see are her shiny eyelashes. They’re absurdly long, so much so that they touch her browbone when she looks up. That day we met, I thought she was interesting. She isn’t. Her eyes are mysterious, like she has something deep to say that she can’t share with the world yet because it isn’t ready - but really, she’s just boring. Maybe it’s not fair to say that because to a stranger, I could seem boring, too. I mean, I don’t do

27 26

much. I can’t draw or paint to save my life and I’m pretty sure that my singing would have people in hysterics. I’m pretty good at sports and I get pretty good grades, but most of the time I stay quiet around people I don’t know well - it’s too tiring to try to be otherwise. But Lucy - God, she’s so boring she couldn’t say something I’d laugh at even if she tried.

I just recently found out that she doesn’t like Hemingway at all - in fact, she was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls for her Hemingway Seminar.

Coincidentally, her landscape paintings are fawned over by the art faculty and she’s got an exceptionally pretty singing voice.

I open the heavy door to her dorm and say hello to the adult. I wonder what she thinks of me, but from what I can tell, she would probably like me more if I weren’t going out with Lucy, or any girl, for that matter.

She seems like one of those old people that think that teenage dating is a sin or something, as if my liking someone at such an incredibly young age proves my immaturity. Funny how she’s capable of being so condescending when she’s looking almost vertically up at me. She probably thinks that Lucy and I fool around all the time and never talk about stuff. Well, she’s right. As soon as we try to connect or whatever, I want to leave because whatever Lucy has to say is just so - God, I sound like an asshole - boring.

It’s not because I’m a sociopath, it’s not that at all. I want to hear what she has to say, and I want to learn more about her. But seriously, Lucy is the most inarticulate person I’ve ever met. She just doesn’t know how to put the things she wants to say.

I knock on Lucy’s door. “Come in,” she laughs. She’s got some really terrible acoustic shit playing, the kind that’s probably written by brain-dead songwriters and then put to the worst scores they could find or something. “Hey, you!”

“Hey, Luce.”

I sink onto the couch next to her. She looks pretty with damp hair - she hasn’t done stupid stuff to it after her shower, so it’s wavy and messy, the way I like it. Her eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks. I look around at her room, taking in the walls adorned with posters of John Mayer, male models, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a beach on Nantucket, and a giant photo of a girl playing field hockey, on which “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take!” is emblazoned.

“How was Crew today?”

“It was fine. Hard. They want to move me up to second boat.”

“Oh my God, Sam, that’s awesome. Good job!”

“Thanks. What’s new with you?”

“Nothing much.”

“Oh, how did your paper go last night?”

“Ugh, it was awful. I couldn’t think of anything to say about A Farewell to Arms.”

“Oh. Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I just don’t really understand what the whole

27

book’s about. It just seems like Hemingway bitching about a bunch of stuff.”

Silence falls as Lucy absorbs the ridiculousness of the words that have just fallen from her lips and my heart sinks as I realize that she and I are irreconcilably complete opposites.

“Ha. I guess it is Hemingway bitching about stuff. What is your favorite book, by the way? I’ve never asked.”

“Um, hmm. That’s hard. Maybe The Color Purple? Oh, wait, no...”

I hope with all my heart that she’ll declare her favorite book to be something more permissible.

“Ooh, I know! Tuesdays With Morrie. Such an amazing book.”

She may as well have said Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.

“...So, what do you want to do?”

“Actually, Lucy, I wanted to talk.”

“Yeah?”

“So, we’ve been going out for a while, right? Like, a couple months.”

“Yeah, like, five months.” A shadow creeps into her eyes.

“Alright. Five months. Well, during those five months, I feel like I haven’t learned much about you. No, I mean, I know you have two brothers and a sister and a golden retriever and you like John Mayer and play field hockey and lacrosse and go to Vail over Christmas. Superficial stuff like that. But I have no idea what your passions are, what your greatest fears are, what you want to do with your life, the things you’d die for. I don’t really know what I’m saying, but I guess... I guess I just don’t see why we’ve been together for so long.”

“Sam—” Lucy turns towards me and brings her little knees up onto the couch, burying her bright pink toenails under my thigh. She starts to touch the hair that’s curling at the nape of my neck, and we sit in silence that straddles comfort and discomfort. I wait for an explanation for everything, the reason that will more than justify my substanceless relationship with her. Her eyes are sad, and she looks down so that her eyelashes become curtains, sweeping across her cheeks.

Before long she raises her eyes and opens her mouth and finally- “You’ve got a leaf in your hair,” she half whispers. She’s leaning against me now with her legs perpendicular, crossed over mine, their comfortable weight begging me not to leave. Her breath tickles my ear and I can feel her warm words on my neck, on the thinnest skin, practically going through to my veins. I close my eyes when she finally touches my face, because I know that I will not be able to break up with her. Her hands are so gentle and her hair smells so good that I forget how goddamn boring she is and all I want to do is have her touch me like that a little more because no one else does, because this feels so nice that I’m worried I’ll never have this again with anyone else but her, this stupid, vapid girl with

29 28

long eyelashes.

I think I half love her, and I think I’m half crazy.

29

Kasper, Quilotoa.jpg B&W Photo two people jumping

“Quilotoa”

31 30

Chris Kasper

White Lilies

Every summer there were new thorn bushes.

I’d fasten on my yellow gloves with blackened fingers, pull an old flannel shirt over my shoulders.

The barbs were an inch long sometimes, I would brush them from my shirt to keep on with my clippers.

Ignoring the tiny flourishes of blood that dotted my skin, the raw streaks on my cheeks and forehead.

I would use a spring rake and a long-toothed pitchfork to load limbs onto a merry black-smoke blaze.

When I was fourteen I found the core, wide as my forearm.

Thick and twisted, gnarled, I left a saw seized in the viny flesh.

My hatchet chewed it rhythmically as I hummed a song and spread its pulpy green wide with my swings, my sleeves stained with sap.

It fell on me, though I dodged to the side, dragged at me as I was caught in its dying embrace.

Its teeth snared in my clothes and flesh, vengeful bites that stung for days.

I dismembered it so it fit in a merry black-smoke blaze and dug its roots with my long-toothed pitchfork.

If it hadn’t been so violent, I might have called it a real tree.

The thorn bushes never grew back, replaced by skunk cabbage, maple and wild white lilies.

Richard Horan

31

Widow’s Walk

A breeze knocks The window open wide.

Salt enters, and the sea, and emptiness, and time.

Outside, water moves.

It carries with it a spyglass—

a toy,

a token,

a life.

Back and forth we float,

and then

gone, swallowed by the deep.

Is that—?

No. Only sea, and salt and

John Delfino

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Borah, Self Portrait.jpg self-portrait of girl in oil paint

“Self Portrait�

33

Meghan Borah

What Orpheus Saw

Deeper than the swindling snake, the two tiny slits in her heel, the swallowing darkness

there is she

feeling their way, edging their way along walls, knife-like in silence yet her breath hot on the knot of his neck then: stops He turns,

screaming wildly screaming but all that is left is song

deep deep down where lyre loosens lament to song, breaks the man from himself

In the separation of walking ahead and behind they are lost together

Amanda Leahy

35 34

Bell, Untitled.jpg black and white photograph of a fence

35

Michael Bell

Istanbul

She was stunning, that night in Taksim Among a sea of faces, it was just us I would learn her that night Her perfume of captivating spices told tales of times unknown She whispered through the plucked strings of the saz, gently reverberating against the walls of history Her body bejeweled with brightly lit minarets jutting into the air as if to challenge the sky Our skins kissed by the cool Bosphorus air

Julian Kiani

37 36

Williamson, Untitled 3.JPG black and white photograph of toes

Katherine Williamson

37

Timber

To and fro the soothing lathe falls In breathing rhythm and grunt, falling Over lines set down in wood as law.

The slice sound of blade severing grain From grain creates the pulse As the pencil sharpener in second grade Creates the stylus.

Wood shavings falling at my feet in a plump heap.

Wood shavings of limb torn from limb in breathless cleansing.

Now to the root, down to the root Where the heart lays soiled, beating Thump, thump, Lump, plump, hidden, no more.

Gregory Schafer

39 38

Deli Half a pound, please.

She lifts the bundle up Through the frosted windows, Placing it down, like a newborn, Upon the apparatus’ surgical surface.

As she saws back and forth, Rocking, gently but intently, Her eyes jot left to right.

The rosy face stands out From the burgundy tiles behind her And I wonder who’s at home.

What hands grasp the air, What other rosy face is missing out The attention, the care Wasted On processed meat?

Andrew Keener

39

Ieyva, Untitled 18.jpg collage of various colorful images in paint

41 40

Bryan Leyva

The Burial Clause Trey Brewer

The council underestimated the repercussions of the burial clause. The vested interests had hidden it within a much larger, much more attractive bill, and the council had believed that few would take advantage of it. People like to buried upon death, they thought, or at worst burnt to ashes – they saw no chance that the people would stop burying and burning themselves. It was too steeped in tradition, and thus the clause would only appeal to the vested interests.

The council was right for about forty years, but then the vested interests grew old and died, and they began to take advantage of the clause.

Some asked for their corpses to be dressed in three-piece suits and hanged from trees. Others merely wished to sit upright on their tombstones wearing large-brim hats to give off the impression that they were not dead but only resting in a strange place. They were, of course, trying to make their deaths look symbolic, but they underestimated the difficulty in aboveground preservation. The three-piece suits had to be constantly changed due to the defecations of birds and the gnawing of squirrels. Families, out of respect for the dead, would change the suits for a while, but eventually the task became too tiresome and too dreary, especially as the flesh plunged further and further into the rotting process. Rotting was a particular problem with those who lied on top of the tombstones. Their flesh fell off in maggotridden strips – this was in fact beneficial for the land, but many of the mourners for the underground dead complained that this impeded their own mourning, made it less attractive to honor their dead, made them realize how being dead was a progression of gruesomeness and, even worse, maggot consumption.

These developments pleased the council – they believed that few would follow the vested interests, seeing what was happening to the three-piece suits and those lying on tombstones. Yet the freedom to be dead whichever way one liked sparked the creative powers of the more imaginative citizens. More took advantage of the clause, and in much more attractive ways. A famous, rather flamboyant musician asked to be placed upon his death inside of a gigantic inflatable ball, so he could be tossed around during concerts. Concert-goers were always ecstatic when the ball came out (it was never announced prior; one would be dancing to music and suddenly above him an inflatable ball of famous rotting flesh would appear, to his delight), and it led to an immediate rise in concern ticket sales throughout the state. This spurred less famous musicians to do the same thing. Unfortunately, many of them played in smaller clubs, where the ball could not be tossed. The ball would sit in the corner, collecting dust and permeating a pungent effluvium until the club owner had to throw

41

out the remains of the musician – a person they liked so dearly in life but who had become such a hassle in death – and let squirrels gnaw the ball to pieces.

This pattern was seen amongst other professions as well. A famous novelist would decide his corpse should be placed on a small boat filled with live grenades (a symbol of some sort, certainly), and then the waterways would be filled with small explosive boats carrying the corpses of obscure authors. This impeded waterways tremendously and led to the deaths of many sailors. A great chef wished upon his death to be diced up and dispersed as an ingredient in his recipes. Only told about this addition after their meals were finished, restaurant-goers initially were surprised but delighted by the extra flavor his flesh added. This led lesser chefs to do the same, but, coincidentally, they did not taste as good. In fact the very worst chefs turned out to be poisonous, and many restaurant-goers died slow, gutdestroying deaths. Sailors and restaurant-goers had very little say with the council, however, and thus the burial clause remained law without protest.

The rest of the population saw the clause as harmless; in fact they saw it as an innocuous pleasantry. The corpses were something to look at, and there was no doubt pleasure when a jet-skier crashed into an explosive ship. Thus the burial clause stayed on the books for years in this way – a mere idiosyncrasy of the state, making the state different but in no way better, in no way worse. The council themselves felt they had to do nothing about the burial clause. Looking at the figures, the clause was helping the state: tourism was on the rise, and the rotting flesh and maggots above ground was turning all the grass a worthy green (the censuses of the time say that our state had the highest percentage of worthy green grass in the province).

The initial problem came when the clause began to be used by the councilmen themselves. The councilmen asked for their corpses to be placed in their offices. They requested to be seated upright in their old office chair, dressed in their official state tweed suit, cradling a gigantic state flag between their arms. They claimed they did this to show, even in death, their dedication to the people, but they could not have been blind to the political advantages. The newly elected councilmen could not move into their new offices. They smelled of rotting flesh, the huge flag took up too much space, they could not make legislative decisions with a dead man’s eyes staring at them the whole time. Most gave up their council positions immediately; some fought for a while (“For the people!” they would say), but they could only fight the smell of rotting flesh for so long. No new candidates stepped up to fill these open positions. The council could do nothing but allow the dead councilman to take up his old position

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– he was in his office still, anyway.

Seeing the effectiveness of this maneuver, more and more councilmen began taking advantage of the clause. As more and more councilmen died, the problem became so exacerbated that the council seemed on the brink of death itself. It was down to five living members (with six thousand four hundred and fifteen dead members) when a particularly courageous councilman – Finks, they called him – decided to abolish the burial clause. He was able to get the two younger councilmen to vote with him – their names have been left out of the history books – and, despite the adamant protest of the two older councilmen, the clause was abolished in the state.

Finks believed that he would face little opposition in the realm of public opinion. The burial clause was tolerated, but it was still only used effectively by the most creative citizenry, and the majority of the public, he knew, cared more about the survival of the council than the clause. He underestimated, however, the power of such a unique freedom.

The citizens thought about what had occurred. They watched as crews took the corpses out of trees, as gravediggers buried those dead who were now seen as criminals. They began to think about their lost freedom. It had been so tangible – a citizen could walk outside and see this freedom hanging, rotting from a tree in a nice suit; he could go to his favorite restaurant and eat it. No freedom had ever done such a thing before, the citizens thought. It made their state unique; others in the province had councils and the living freedoms that came with it. No, it was in this freedom of death that they were different! Public opinion went against Finks, the citizens now wanted no other freedom but to be dead as they wanted, they would give up everything – the council most especially – to secure it. Revolution occurred. The council was dismantled. Finks was killed and given the worst of all dishonors – he was buried without choice.

A new leader – Jones, they call him in the history books – took control.

Jones took control and abolished all the living freedoms. This state has been a tyrannical monarchy (Jones XXXIII would like me to call it a kingship) ever since, hundreds and hundreds of years. We the citizens are now prisoners, but we are given our one treasured freedom. And for that, we are infinitely proud. Our state motto is still our old revolutionary cry:

“We ask for one allowance: let us make mockeries of our own deaths!”

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Taeschler, Hallway Dreams.JPG color photograph of a hallway

“Hallway Dreams”

45 44

Luke Taeschler

Birdwell Island

I wanted to go out to breakfast And buy a round of pancakes for all.

At least last night I did.

Now Everyone is too bright and loud to be around.

I watched cartoons instead.

I never got a Big Red Dog. Probably because of the fleas.

Or the gigantic paws, Tracking mud in the house.

And when I played with my friends, There was supervision, And video games, And regular sized dogs.

They should really advertise Clifford.

People would come to see A house sized canine.

And there is a beach.

And Big Red Dogs are recession proof.

Everyone loves them

Clifford the Big Red Dog destroyed a public park.

People are too nice to that dog.

He is a huge drain on that town’s economy.

And the downturn has really hit tourism, Which is all an island has going for it.

But the kids get to run around all day And play with a gigantic dog.

And Everyone is Nice to Everyone.

It should be darker in this room.

And the dogs just keep getting smaller

And smaller

Until they fit

in fancy girls’

purses.

Matthew Hearns

45

Inheritance

Between my finger and thumb, I hold my mother’s soulSixteen still and beautiful, nestled in amber light.

Her brothers, my uncles, held her hands between them.

Once upon a time, three musketeers going forth.

Skin of her thin wrists, my wrists, cracks dry red As the months grow grey— each winter’s blood toll.

A tax levied by the weight of memories She can’t forget. I hold her soul still

Between my fingers, my pulse beats through her Amber eyes and my soul stirs with a quiver Now confronted by its creator. Recognition— What memory does pulsing blood hold.

Today my mother periodically scalds her hands with water— A cleansing of the five minutes previous. Her hands— Every weather beaten crinkle crumpled Like a sheet of well-worn parchment paper.

Gregory Schafer

47 46

Jill Forgash

pencil drawing of three teabags

this side up

47

“Rainy Day Remnants”

Forgash, Rainy Day Remnants.JPG

A Ballad for Virgin Boots on Canal Street

Her boots step out onto Canal St. A hop skip in spit And gum and burned cigarettes— The freedom dance In the waste of souls.

She thinks of other dancers Millions of boots Dancing on the sidewalks Of a million stories, Many of which she knows Dreams about In romantic ways—

Starving Aesthetically In a shoebox on St. Mark’s Gutting herself, pulling a From way deep inside, spitting Ink into notebooks All night. Jazz cigarettes On the fire escape, real Jazz leaking from Saxophones below— Artistic and sexual symbiosis, A blue eyed painter, her Word lines for his acrylic Ones, sitting beneath stars they Go to, but cannot See—

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Not there yet, boots Fresh on Canal St. Basil and beansprouts abound!

Tiny Asian abuelitas walk As tipping scales weighing bags Of bokshoy, eggplant, Bamboo. Lebanese men Shine in cultural travail Over falafel fryers.

For pretty girl!

Nike kings Harlem Shaking at crosswalks. She Shakes like an Anglo-Saxon.

Damn girl!

A wilted flower Child, hair wild as an Unpruned rose bush, coital sagas of groupie days.

Girl let me tell you!

Rag men that live Right there or inside Their violins, open case And closed eyes, strumming To screams of the streets.

Girl won’t you spare meeee A quarter or twoooo.

She is girl And everyone sees her.

49

She is the night, Tired, but like it Cannot sleep— stories Unfold unending like hands Before some queen, unfurl Like overpopulated Butterflies. So many Characters.

Her bag puts a slant In the carriage of her Shoulder. A bag full Of nothing really— A choir of hopes beneath The chest, a lust for The strange, a vestigial Ethos from the depths Of the Mason Dixon, Twenty years, and a pair Of dancing boots are What she really brought.

She stops. Feels the hum Of the insane Brush by, brush off, The hunger for life In the half-light, And thinks, I belong in this story.

Elizabeth Kulze

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Muessle, Rivqua.JPG sorta-cubist drawing of two women in pastels.

“Rivqua”

51

Rebecca Muessle

One

One in a million trillion sperm.

I, a murderer for living.

My Brothers and Sisters never born, I’m sorry for the killing.

Instead of You, who had a chance to fix this twisted world I am here, to quench the suns, alone, among the other Ones.

Those Aristotles dead inside,

the Einsteins

who were not may have cured your mother’s cancer, but rather I was wrought.

Nathan Walkowicz

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McConnaughey, God the Father, God the Son. jpg color oil painting of a boy holding a dog, and another boy

“God the Father, God the Son�

Kelly McConnaughey

53

Eckhart, Hunting Dogs.jpg photograph of dogs

“Hunting Dogs”

55 54

Jennifer Eckhart

The Turquoise House Caroline Beimford

The gua-gua slowed just enough that I could jump off without twisting an ankle. I had once – twisted an ankle, I mean – but that was before I’d become familiar with the hole in the floor over the back wheel. The bus hadn’t stopped and I’d ended up two miles down the Malecón with a bum ankle and no left shoe. By now though, the jump was easier, and I rarely missed the corner by more than a block.

Padre Bellini was like a lot of streets in the Zona, but it was easy to find because of the turquoise house on the corner and the man who sat under it each day. The first time I met him he’d told me to call him Sammy Sosa, but he was a painter, so I called him Pablo instead. We’d had a drink on the stoop one night and he’d said he lived close – said he had a kid who mixed paints for him and a fish that lived in his bathtub.

“Wife?” I’d asked.

“Puta,” he’d said.

The turquoise house wasn’t on a main street and I asked him why didn’t he sell his paintings on El Conde, like the others. He said the color of the house made his paintings pop.

The landlord had told him to move a hundred times but I could see him now at the end of the street like usual. I guess you could say he popped too.

The turquoise was really something. It was why I liked the building as well.

It was the same color as the water you could see if you stood on the roof and looked towards the ports – over the trash dump beaches and the rocks that stank in summer. Sure, I’d been to Boca Chica a few times—I’d even made it out to Cabarete once, and those beaches really did look like the postcards Pablo painted, but the water was always that crazy blue, even here. And it wasn’t so bad on Padre Bellini. If you breathed through your mouth and tilted your chin up you could almost see what it might’ve been like, back when the Spanish had set up shop, before the sprawl. Bougainvillea still climbed some of the older houses, bright against the bleached plaster, and the clinging vines grasped, like old women’s fingers, holding up the crumbling walls. There were even some windows – if you tilted your chin a little higher still – that had no bars.

The soles of my shoes crunched on the sidewalk and the bag I carried banged against my leg. The beaches didn’t have sea glass as far as I could tell, but the city sure did, and the grit that in most cities is brown is green here, the glass of a thousand broken Presidente bottles smashed under shoes instead of waves. The bag had a bottle of rum in it and a box of cornflakes.

The rum tastes the same here as it does at home but the corn flakes don’t, and I bought them for Pablo anyway since he said they were good for feeding his fish.

Looking at Pablo’s paintings, you could tell he wasn’t a very good artist. I’d told him so a few times, but he’d only ever laughed and asked

55

for more rum. Today there was a new one, but it looked like the others, the kind only the greenest tourists ever bought. It was a generic nod to the island’s Taino heritage, a flat portrait of a dark face with empty eyes. His postcards were pretty terrible too, but my mother seemed to like them. The weeks I sent them she wouldn’t call, and so I sent them often. After a year of bland beachscapes the voice on the message machine had finally begun to mellow.

I dropped the bag next to Pablo and kicked his foot to wake him; there was no more shade on this side of the house and the tar by the steps was already soft. Leaning down to shake him I inhaled. He didn’t look dead but he smelled it and I stepped back so quickly that my ankle twisted in the steep curb. It was even worse than the open gutters in the early mornings and though I’d never smelled a dead body before, I knew this was what one smelled like. There was drool on his shirt where his chin hung over his chest and luckily his eyes were shut – I didn’t want to have to close them like they did in the movies. I had been under the impression we were supposed to look peaceful in death, but Pablo looked the way he always did, apathetic and too tan to even be pale. His sweat stained baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes, but I tugged it down further before standing to look for my keys. I went in and saw the landlord on the stairs. “Pablo’s dead,” I told him.

“Tienes el alquier?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I went back down later for the rum but I held my breath the whole time.

I was drunk before the sun went down and I thought if I cried, I’d cry rum-tears – I think Pablo would’ve liked that. But I didn’t end up crying, hell, I’d barely known the guy, and I couldn’t see him crying for me. Still, I figured someone should call somebody, the police for starters, but when I picked up the phone I knew 911 wouldn’t be right and put it down again.

The police were bastards anyway, or so I’d been told.

I had another drink and thought about the fish in the bathtub waiting for its cornflakes. Then I thought about the kid and hoped he wasn’t up mixing paints, waiting for his father to come home. I’d taken a studio course in college where we’d had to mix our own paints, but all I remember is how the pigment would cake under my fingernails and stain my skin. My hands felt dirty then, and I remembered I’d touched a dead guy so I went to wash them in the sink. The bar of lavender soap had arrived in the mail a month before and it smelled like Connecticut. It is why my mother sent it. I haven’t decided whether I like it or not but I’ve been using it all the same. It’s one less thing to buy.

The room was hot so I added ice to my drink, but I didn’t turn on the fan because the switch was by the window that looked out on the front steps. I didn’t know if I could keep myself from looking down so I sat in the rocking chair on the far side of the room and rocked to move the air. The ice in my glass clinked and my head spun a little, but the creaking

57 56

covered the sound of my neighbors and their bedsprings, so I didn’t stop.

Pablo was still there in the morning when I got up to look out the window. My head throbbed as I lay in bed, hoping for someone to notice or do something so I wouldn’t have to walk by him again. The picture on the table beside the bed stared at me until I flipped it over. Too many dead people.

When I finally left my room not much had changed. The body had slumped further over and there was now no mistaking it for dead. Someone would notice it today for sure. I gagged when I saw the flies but made only a half-assed effort to wave them away—I didn’t get close enough to do much good. His paintings were there too, still leaning against the side of the house in stacks, “popping” against the turquoise stucco. They were beginning to shine in the morning heat and I wondered if paint could melt. I walked down the street toward the corner and started to laugh. The paintings were so bad that even in the Zona they hadn’t been stolen. They’d taken the cornflakes for Christ’s sake! What a horrible joke.

By the end of the block the whole thing seemed absurd, and I turned around instead of catching the gua-gua. Who left a dead guy in the street to rot? I went back into the house and knocked on the landlord’s door. When he opened it I realized my game was up.

“Cual es el numero para la policia?” It had been convenient before now to pretend that my Spanish was worse than it was to avoid neighborly chit-chat. For instance when the landlord told me not to do something – don’t smoke on the roof, he’d say – I’d feign amiable ignorance with the dumb American grin-and-nod and then go right on doing it. Let him think what he wanted, you know? Now it looked like the quickest way to get this over with was to ask straight out, but the guy just stood there shaking his head like I’d asked him for a gun or something. I repeated myself a few times but he just kept at it, and his face would go one way and his chins the other and his flabby, undulating neck was more than I could handle. I think by then I was yelling.

“Hay un hombre MUERTO! En el calle! El numero, por favor!”

What did Dominicans normally do with corpses, I wanted to ask. Let them melt like the tar on the street? What was I supposed to do, Mr. DiazDolio, drag Pablo across the Malecón and build him a pyre? A burning trash heap on the beach along the highway? And what were they here, Catholic?

So that wouldn’t even work – we’d just have to bury him in the reeking sulpher sand and hope the seagulls didn’t peck his eyes out. What a way to go. The police were sounding better every second.

He called them eventually, after I started on him in English. But he took his wife and kid out the back and I didn’t see them again that day. And the police came, all right. They asked me if the dead guy owed me money.

“No,” I said.

“Su nombre?” they asked.

57

“Pa—” My jaw snapped shut. “No se…” I said. They looked at each other and then the taller of the two took a step forward – I got the picture pretty quick and backed into the gate. There was a fee, they said, to take the body away and deal with the paperwork, find the family. I didn’t know how bribes worked but I was pretty sure I didn’t have the cash to swing one.

The one guy towered while the other smirked and neither of them felt like policemen. I told them I didn’t have a dime – or a peso, I guess is how it translated. I didn’t know if idioms converted well—but they didn’t believe me. “Una Americana sin dinero? No creo.”

Did it look like I was rolling in dough? I asked them – would I be teaching a couple of rich kids how to stop rolling their R’s if I were some kind of fancy tourist? The tall one backed up a step. It egged me on. Do you think I’d be living on the festering edge of this dilapidated city in this STUPID blue house if I had pesos coming out my ears? I’m not sure how much they understood but I think it was the English that worked on them too – or the edge of hysteria I was suddenly fighting to keep an undertone.

And when I turned around they didn’t follow me, but one of them called me a whore under his breath. By the time I’d bolted the door and taken the stairs to the roof I was thinking old Diaz-Dolio might not have been so off the mark. In fact, I was also thinking I wouldn’t mind it if he came back, and soon. I worked on slowing my heart rate before peering over the lip of the roof. The thugs were still down there and rifling through Pablo’s pockets. Bastards. Then again, I’d called them.

When the shorter one had finished his search, finding no more than a few pesos, he tossed the remaining contents into the gutter and walked over to the paintings. “Qué mierda,” he said to the taller one as he flicked through a stack. The newest painting fell face down on the sidewalk but he didn’t pick it up. Then they walked away down the street. Before turning the corner though, the short one turned and blew me a kiss. Great. Smooth. And I’d thought I was being stealthy. When they’d been gone for a long time I went back down to the street.

Bougainvillea petals had fallen from the vine on the house next door and a few had landed on Pablo’s chest. I didn’t want to touch him again but I brushed them off quickly because they looked like blood. Immediately after I wished I hadn’t—the view from up close showed his skin had gotten puffy and slimy, and as I brushed his shirt his neck lolled to the side. I jumped back shivering and thought about leaving, but when I picked up the cards in the gutter I felt like an idiot for not thinking of them sooner. They were the normal things to have in a wallet; identification, for one, and an address. That was a start. I’m not sure why it was so damn surprising that Pablo had an address – the place where he kept his kid and his fish and his paints – but I’d only ever seen him right where he was sitting, and it was disconcerting to think of him elsewhere. It was also disconcerting to think of him as Jaime Bernardo Torres. He didn’t look like a Jaime.

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Bell, Compose.tif black and white photograph of a wall with white panels

“Compose�

59

Michael Bell

It seemed obvious that I would go. I mean, what else was there to do?

I didn’t want to be haunted—the island was too goddamned small for that kind of thing, and I got the distinct feeling that ghosts had the upper hand here. I picked up the painting that had fallen on the sidewalk and brushed off the grit. Some stuck, but I didn’t think it made much difference as far as the artwork went—it may even have given the face a bit of character. I felt like I should bring it with me. When a guy died in the army they brought the family his hat. When they’d brought us my brother’s hat I was pretty sure it was a fake since the official report said he’d stepped on a land mine. How did the hat make it back to sit on the mantel when his head had been blown to bits? Anyway, I felt like I needed to bring something and the painting seemed like the best choice. God knows I wasn’t touching Pablo’s hat.

I didn’t really know where I was going but I walked towards El Conde out of habit. There was a hotel at the end of it which was nice enough to have a doorman and he gave me directions when I needed them. It was a rather grand hotel by Zona standards and it opened onto a square filled with pigeons and an old Jamaican walnut tree. There was even a church on the opposite side of the plaza, long abandoned but crumbling charmingly, which drew tourists with cameras from their shopping on the street. You could tell Jorge was terribly proud of his job by the way he stood, erect in his brass buttoned uniform, in front of the door with the planted palm and red mat.

No one stood for that long in the midday heat if they could help it but Jorge never so much as slumped. I walked over and felt the fresh cold air pour from the automatic doors as I got close enough to trigger the sensor. I often teased Jorge about being a doorman for a building with automatic doors but he would just push his nose higher into the air and ask whether I wanted the correct or incorrect directions to wherever I was going. When I showed him the address on Pablo’s card his nose went higher still, and he said he was unfamiliar with the area. I managed to squeeze the general directions out of him but didn’t get the feeling the walk would be a pleasant one. Plus there was no way in hell I’d be able to jump onto a moving gua-gua with only one arm – I was barely able to do it with two. I started walking.

Once I’d passed the Parque de Independencia I got lost. I often got lost when I left the Zona. And while the Zona was a shit hole, at least it was my shit hole, and too small to get lost in for very long. There you were bound to run into something – the ocean, for example, or Columbus’ house. When I’d first read about the Zona Colonial I’d thought it was really nifty that you could live a few blocks from Columbus’ house and still pay such low rent.

Good old Columbus, all the way from 1492 – he had been the one to land me here. Him and the turquoise stucco. That had been the clincher.

I passed a main street I’d heard of before and turned onto it though I knew it wouldn’t take me in the right direction. I’d been wandering in the

61 60

right direction for a while now but if I did it much longer I would stop running into familiar streets which ran in the wrong direction and just run into unfamiliar streets running god knows where. The buildings were taller now, and more generic, and it was hard to tell if you were going in a circle when the only landmarks were palm trees and Presidente ads. Pablo’s painting became awkward to carry and I thought several times about putting it down somewhere and leaving it, maybe on the edge of another street artist’s display, or maybe in a dumpster. But then I thought of my mother’s fingers clutching my brother’s hat and how glad I’d been at the time that her fingers weren’t clutching me instead, so I held onto the painting.

I went into a dim café for a cold drink and sat at the bar. There were only a few linoleum-topped tables and it was the kind of place that took pictures of its food and put them up on the walls. I had never found this an appealing choice of décor and when the barman came over I decided to stick with a drink. I ordered in Spanish but he answered in English. I hated it when people did that. He wanted to practice, he said, and he’d never practiced on a real American. His eyes lit up and I shrugged, I just wanted my beer. He pointed to the painting I’d propped against the chair leg. “That is pretty painting.” He beamed.

“No it isn’t,” I said, and he frowned, confused. “La pintura es fea.”

He laughed and shrugged, “Yes, I supposes.”

I reminded him about my drink and he left. When he returned he tried again, pointing at me this time. “You very pretty.”

I wondered if that even registered as a compliment, considering its previous recipient. Then he leered at me across the bar with his twinkly eyes. I decided to be terse.

“So, why you come to Santo Domingo?”

“To work,” I said.

He laughed. “You leave America to work in Santo Domingo?”

“Yes,” I said. “I teach English.”

“You teach me!” He seemed to think this was funny. “Where you live?”

“La Zona Colonial” “Ah, very beautiful place, very…historic.” He said “historic” like most people would say “sexy.” I snorted. He looked confused, but continued, earnest, “He siempre—no, lo siento—I have always wanted to live there… again.” I realized then that he was being serious, so I listened as I drank my beer, seeing no other option. From what I could tell, his family had lived on the Duarte when he was a boy, right in the heart of the Zona. When his grandfather was killed by Trujillo’s thugs over a tax dispute, their house had been sold to pay debts. It was his dream, the barman said, to repurchase the house and make it the way it used to be. It was a nice story. And I hoped he would do it, I really did. I even left him a bigger tip than usual to contribute to the cause. But I had a dead guy’s painting and

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some really bad news to deliver, so I got up to leave though he hadn’t finished talking.

“Your English is really coming along,” I said. It was one of those nice, noncommittal things you said to people. I asked him for directions to the address on Pablo’s card and by some miracle I’d already gotten pretty close.

The three hour hike hadn’t been for nothing then. And as I was picking up the painting to leave the barman asked me another question, that odd light behind his eyes in the dim room. “Why you so far from home, Senorita?”

I hoisted the painting, stuffed the tip from the counter back into my pocket, and walked towards the door. “What’s so great about home?”

I turned then and left. Not even a nice, healthy language barrier could keep people from their nosy bullshit. It was remarkable, really. Why had I left home? Simple—because if I’d stayed I would have died. Of suffocation, perhaps. Or second-hand grief. After Jack’s hat came home without him it had become difficult to breathe in Connecticut. My mother had begun to clutch things—first hats and baseball trophies, then mostly me—and she worried and clutched and hovered and clutched until she had used up all the air and there was nothing to do but unpry her fingers and run. There was a time before when my father would have run after me. But that was before he’d begun to sit in his recliner during the day and stare at the television antennae, drinking hard coffee out of the mug that said “World’s Greatest Dad.” The few times we’d spoken since I left he’d always ended with, “I hope you’re enjoying yourself, honey,” as though I were still on the spring break that the round-trip ticket I’d only used half of had been for. There may as well have been two hats on the mantel instead of only one.

So the barman could take his house on the Duarte and the third degree and shove them. Then I thought about his directions. He’d told me how to get to Pablo’s house as well as the quickest way back from it. Meaning that when he’d said “home,” he’d probably only meant the Zona. Meaning, also, that I probably should have left his tip on the counter. Whoops. There was no going back though, and I’d already made it three blocks.

The sun was beating down at a harsh angle and I hauled the painting up to shield my face. The searing heat of it was making my throat ache and I thought about how I should’ve ordered water instead of beer.

Looking at the canvas from upside down, with orange sunlight filtering through the thin pigments, the painting was a bit less ugly. It was abstract now, and instead of the flat faces in their bland colors there were flame flowers and eclipsed suns, and patterns which changed as the sun sank lower into the horizon. I reached Pablo’s street as the light finally faded and I tucked the canvas back beneath my arm before looking at the house numbers. The houses were all gray, though they might have been something else once, and the stink of sewage seeped into my nostrils though I tried to breath through my mouth. Pablo’s house could hardly

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be called a house, really, and though it had four walls and a roof, the plaster and tile construction looked as though it might cave in at any moment, and where the plaster crumbled genteelly in the Zona, it fell off in chunks here, and exposed the chicken wire mesh and rusted studs beneath it. Laundry that didn’t look clean hung from a line that obscured half the front step and I had to walk up and down the street a few times before I thought to push a sheet aside to find the number. Most of the houses on the street didn’t have any numbers at all.

I stood outside the door that looked like it might dent if I knocked too hard and wondered how I should hold the painting and what I should say.

I wondered how delicate I could be in my second language when I had difficulty with tact in my first. I rapped on the door through the gate and the sound was loud but hollow. No one came. I waited for a full minute before knocking again, and I even gripped one of the paint-peeling bars and gave it a hard tug. Flakes of rust floated to the stoop and clung to my palm but the gate didn’t so much as rattle. The only solid things about the place were the bars. I thought about the fish and wished I’d brought the cornflakes, if only to leave them on the doorstep. I wondered where the kid could be, did he have relatives? Did they already know? I sat on the doorstep until it was fully dark, but I had the distinct feeling it was not a place I should be for much longer. I wanted to leave a note or something, but I’d brought nothing with me to write one and I wasn’t sure what I would’ve said if I had. I slipped the ID cards into the space between the gate and the door and hoped that would be enough. I left the painting too, though I doubted it would be there for very long, but I thought that maybe, if the kid came home soon enough and found it, he would know what it meant. And so after a last rattling knock I propped the canvas against the gate, tugged a gray sheet from the line to throw over it, and walked back down the street the way I had come.

It was late by the time I reached the Zona again – much later than I normally felt comfortable out alone – and I looked around for signs that I should be wary but found none. Instead of turning down the quieter streets which would take me to my turquoise house, I walked along the Avenida Mella and saw the prostitutes on the corners. I listened to the bachata blaring from the bodegas and watched the people grind and sway to it between the plastic chairs and sidewalk tables. I turned onto the Duarte and looked at the houses and wondered which one had been the barman’s and if it would be his again one day. Then I walked back along a different road, past Diego Columbus’ house and through the square with no benches and a statue of Padre Bellini himself. Looking up at the statue I noticed for the first time that he was bald, like my father, and the light from the moon caught the polished crown of his large head and made it shine. The street beyond was quiet and even from the end of it I could see there was no dark silhouette beside the steps. When I got nearer, I could see that the paintings were gone too. As I unlocked the gate I hoped someone had finally found

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the son who mixed his father’s paints and whose mother was a whore, and had given him the sweat-stained baseball cap or the terrible painting or something to clutch. I took the stairs past my room, empty but for the rum, the rocking chair, and the lavender soap, and continued to the roof without stopping.

When I stood on the roof to smoke and look out at the sea I often got stuck on the beaches and the rocks. They were not as they could be but neither was anything. I looked at the blue that was so dark without the sun that it was black, and listened over the city to the waves. I breathed in through my nostrils for the first time in a day, smelling the salt, and I thought about going home.

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Ieyva, Untitled 13.JPG painting of chemicals in beakers

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Bryan Leyva

Space-Age Blues pt2

I believe in the little-green-men of Alpha Centuri because I hope someday my children will grow up big and strong, to kill the little-green-men of Alpha Centuri.

It would be better, even, if those piteous little creatures were gelatinous fiends, with spinning suction-cup tentacles, gnashing squid-beaks and slimy compound eyes.

If they gripped plasma pistols in twenty grips, charge into battle with phase armor, spewing acid and sounding blood-curdling screams.

It would be very nice, I think, if there was something like that for my children to kill on Alpha Centuri.

Richard Horan

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Cullen, Looking Back.JPG black and white photograph of a child on a swing

“Looking Back”

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Kasey Cullen

Inanimate Love

After years, A back porch, dense with summer heat and time, I remembered him, wondered at the man Grown out of the boy, the blue guitar he fingered for me, If it would make the same sounds as before, But the screen door slammed—

He had fallen in love.

He had fallen in love with boy’s eyes.

He had fallen in love with a white woman who didn’t breathe.

A succubus between his sheets, cradling his head like A mother does, whispering things, sweet genius, singing him To sleep.

But he tells me, It was a numb kind of masturbation, one that left his arms Too weak to get off. He’d given her everything— Money, unholy flesh and blood, even music.

I thought of stray dogs and old coats and Rags and I wished I could love him then, Be his flesh.

I wanted to pour myself into him, Wash him, Scrub him clean with a pumice stone, Raw and white as a baby.

I wanted to breathe against the bones Of his chest, and cheeks, and shoulder blades, Just so he could feel it.

I wanted to poke my fingers through the holes in his shirt, Play against his ribs like guitar strings So he could feel that too.

He bent his arm over the body Of a blue guitar, his torso an accordian Of ribs. Does he know a woman’s face is painted Across the neck of The Old Guitarist?

Elizabeth Kulze

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Kaplan, Untitled 2.jpg Color photograph of a shack

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Marissa Kaplan

Nightmares Over Water (from Shehabi) NIGHT: A rigid icy Atlantic beach town belies a warmth below

bellows to the moon

An ounce of wicker contains our souls Water is the blood and waves, the— DEEP NIGHT: They seine and colonize the seas Ice cold procrastination drowning out death IMBALANCE: A sailboat subsides; basalt and shells devouring timber We gouge our eyes with sand and stillness

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MORNING: a fissured figurehead I’m still a vagrant in your arms, a wave moans Shore’s breath caught in the back of your throat LOW TIDE: I cannot

(ebb)

hide from those

(flow)

crushing jaws Bind me

(ebb)

to my grave (flow) HIGH NOON: A crown exclaims Maranatha! and expires.

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AFTERNOON: a young man had not yet come to pass his eyes emeralds his feet burned he bows to the black water.

IMPETUS: A rigid icy Atlantic beach town languishes in nearsightedness

Who are we but empty shells water is the institution TWILIGHT: Crushed by unhinging weight by the unholy-above

Furnaces of life, zoetic only in their icy sepulcher

John Delfino

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Borah, Old Man Jenkins.JPG painting of a man smoking a cigar

“Old Man Jenkins�

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Meghan Borah

Chemical Change It’s science, magnetism positive and negative charging towards each other, and ion the other hand remain static shocked that she wants my physical properties so solidly, liquidly, like I’m a noble gas pedal down, and we’ll make electricity lights flicker with the energy we’re using on the periodic table legs shaking but balance like a protons of times I’ve imagined this, knowing her bio logically I stay fresh by popping an elemint condition like the girl in the mag net her like a butterfly; all mine It’s just science

Julian Kiani

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Thornbury, Still Life on Brown.jpg drawing of coke bottles and poker chips

“Still Life on Brown”

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Dan Thornbury

It just happened

He sat down on the scrunchy covers Tucking his knees under his chin.

She moved, towering, to flick on Some of that indie-shit Her ex used to like.

Light was cross-hatched,

Like a game of pick-up sticks.

A whisper about her sister

And he fades through his body,

In another language, onto the pillow.

Andrew Keener

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Schroon Lake Stephen Lovely

The tree branches hang oddly, disjointed, with no leaves left to hide their crude realities. The ones around him look like swept-together bunches of angular driftwood; they hang from trunks amidst evergreen trees that clutch their clothing still in the cold, immobile air. Sorrowful mysteries.

“He couldn’t be lost because he knows his way around by now,” Catherine announces.

Well, he says, we’re going to find him. Catherine nods. He kneels in the snow and looks into the woods. There are no tracks and it takes him a moment to realize he’s only playing the part of the keen woodsman. He’s not looking at anything and he’s only gotten his knee wet. He stands back up and walks on.

“Nothing out here would eat him, right?”

Maybe. Bears, I guess. But it’s not likely, Cath.

“But he’s too fast.”

What?

“He’s too fast, a bear couldn’t catch him. We couldn’t catch him, even. We can only catch him because he comes when we call.”

You’re right.

“I thought so.”

Nothing will eat him.

The edge of the lake, around where he’d figured it. He takes a moment and looks at it – a bowl, crowded in by woods. Houses pushing the fringe until they fear toppling in. Water now, ice within a few weeks. Hard, different, substansively the same. It’s still water now, for all that it looks like ice, placid and undisturbed. Snow underneath his boots the only thing that reminds him that putting your head under the water would freeze it.

It’s four thirty, he says, checking his watch. We can look for an hour more and then we should head back. Mom said there wasn’t much point in looking through these woods with a couple people for a lost dog and she was right. Needle in a haystack. These last things he doesn’t say out loud.

“We can look again tomorrow?”

Yes, we can look again tomorrow. Let’s go this way.

They trek uphill in slanting light. Strike the fear of God into some Iroquois, he thought, skinny paleface and his kid sister. Patches of snow lie across the ground like band-aids; naked trees raise their branches like emaciated fingers clawing for heaven. She was carrying the backpack she used for school.

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What’s in that? He asked.

“Doggie treats,” she said.

Oh good, he said, I’d forgotten those. She looked at him oddly.

“There’s a sticker on your backpack, still,” she said, and pointed.

He peeled it off. Inspected by #3.

“What’s that mean?”

That’s who you blame if the thing isn’t made right, he answered.

Cracks in the knotted wooden sky show mountains rising above untouched land. The Adirondacks. God’s own country, his father says.

Purpled mountaintops and spacious skies in the same place. God’s own country. What were the people? Squatters?

Catherine is crying. The dog.

In front of him the dog is splayed grotesquely. Its fur is matted with water and blood, half-melted snow walled around it. Its paws are almost dissolved; claws hang by soaking strips of flesh. A massive gash is carved in its side. Warm blood flows down from it, over the dogsbelly, into the snow. Organs can be picked out just barely through the hole. Its tongue lolls comically out of its mouth. Is this supposed to be beautiful?

It doesn’t smell like anything has died, but he imagines his nostrils are assaulted. He vomits in the snow and it half-melts below him in bizarre colors.

He breathes. He recovers. The dog’s death is the culmination of logic and clues. When realities die they are replaced with new realities.

He’s seen it coming and he’s sickened but released. This is clearthinking.

Stand up straight. Catherine?

Catherine doesn’t answer. She’s hunched over the dog so closely that he expects blood on her mouth when he pulls her away. Stop it, Catherine, stop it. She can barely breathe and barely sob. One steals so much from the other that she’s left with nothing but a frozen, open mouth, a silent howl at the death of an aesthetic. She seems so inconsolable that for a wild moment he wonders if Catherine will spend the rest of her life with a dead dog in the back of her mind.

Don’t cry, he says. Don’t look, as if she hadn’t already seen. He gives up, waits for her to slow in grief. She gives up sobbing in favor of breathing and he sets down his backpack. He pulls out a tarp.

Catherine howls again and as he turns her eyes burn into him.

Benedict Arnold. Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. A backdoor deal with dark possibility. Her backpack lies untouched in the snow near the corpse.

Benedictus.

I’m taking him back with us, he says, so we won’t have to leave him here. You don’t want to leave him here, do you? He wraps the tarp around the dog and ties it as neatly as he can. He pulls a rope up over his shoulder and hauls the corpse onto his back. Put my backpack in yours, he

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says, and we’ll go home.

He turns in place and picks out their path. This way, he says, and she trudges off behind him. She’s not speaking. The sun slants, blinding, through the wood. The trees look like dead spiders on their backs, limbs contorted, upside-down. He finds their tracks from earlier. He turns and follows them back. The snow is impermanent this early in the year. It’s melted back in streaks perpendicular across the slope of the land. Stretch marks. They reach the fringe of a marked path, cut out by himself with his father. A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness, his father told him. Had they shed their own grace there? It seems to him the only beautiful thing in the woods. The world seems harmed in its creation, like a wood figure carved crudely by a dangerous man.

Catherine has stopped walking. He turns around.

Cath, he says. Tears stream silently down her face.

“Put him down,” she says. “I wish we’d never found him.”

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Williamson, Untitled 5.JPG black and white photograph of a streetlight against the sky

Katherine Williamson

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Meeting Ground

After E. Bishop’s “The Moose”

With wool socked feet propped on the dash And grainy Tchaikovsky humming through the radio, The soft heat of the elderly Oldsmobile cradled me To a medium between sleep and dream.

The bottom of my spine pressed against The synthetic seat behind which my mother sat Praying to herself, to Saint Michael the Archangel, Defend us in battle, be our protection against—

The bones of her knees dug in the small of my back Through the synthetic fiber seat. Bone, grind On bone. The music rose and fell in line with the fall Of the road, twisting into the Hawk’s Nest highland.

A lookout trapped between river and mountain, A lookout over the valley below, under clouds Driving across the winter moon’s cold face above.

A look out,

And a screech and squeeze of brakes.

And the cold eyes of the frozen buck

Glowing green in the headlight beams.

Green like my mother’s eyes, my father’s.

In that breath, the river and mountain exhaled

Slow and deep, with pulse pounding,

As travelers turned wanderers made

Their way through the skylit night.

Gregory Schafer

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horan, portrait.jpg A purple oil painting of a guy holding his head in both hands.

“A self-portait with the headache she gave me�

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Richard Horan

For Annabelle, who left me

It’s a damn shame I’ve got to be the one, just like that rust can or the too ripe pear, left sprawled out here after our river’s run, not knowing quite why you should shift the gear and rev on to Carson City fording rain, in a huff like a porcupine in mid-July.

You told me no more malt, only St. Germaine, got some class, sipping elderflower, an eye for highway boys with raw dreams and fresh lines.

Well go on then, drop a lead foot through pickup floorboards, shove off for shit-dry silver mines and scram from this old double wide, this fuckup.

James Thorne

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Hwang, Fish.jpg painting of a group of green fish

“Fish”

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Yongbok Hwang

Waltz of the Baby Giraffes

Cobalt tutus itching, underwear peeking out of our tights, arms outstretched, we welcomed the audience.

We dipped our heads to the ground, almost kissing our slippers, admired our reflections in the stage floor.

Heads heavy, we teetered forward; a foot or two jolted out like a baby giraffe.

To chase the beat, we stampeded chassés.

Oh! Had Pythagoras been invited, he would have died once more and sunk into his auditorium seat having witnessed our doomed ellipse.

If only Rosie had not felt the urge to fish for something up her nose, if only Avery’s itch had not been so inviting and if only I had realized that this was a recital, not the usual, competitive round of freeze dance.

But, as I made a final bow I caught the eyes of our honored guests, sparkling at their daughters’ romp.

Katie Sullivan

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La Ménagerie de Fleurs (en Avril) She watches roses bloom from blue vines of her wrist– so Thumbelina thin.

Before the silver sliver in the ink sky, Prince Cornelius kisses with paper lips till her face streaked, till her mouth riddled, with love– and paints her tulips a strange, clotted glaze of rust and ebon tears that drip off her chin and stain her pillows till there is no need for rouge.

He cries out in his sleep and tears at the sheets that imprison them.

She is claimed by the darker colors of the rainbow, his thrashing limbs and frantic fingers.

Caressing, snaking round her ribs, throat– she finds it hard to breathe: his agonizing mouth to mouth– O save me!

The next morning, a new necklace of garnet and amethyst rings her neck.

He dashes out, after seven strokes/strikes of the (hour) hand.

The neighbors ask, How can such bold flowers blossom on your eyes and cheeks and thighs and feet? and they were no rhyming poets, but true– her garden was achingly beautiful.

April Chang

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Sullivan, Untitled 5.jpg color photograph of a beach

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Caroline Sullivan

A Transfer’s Covenant

New body, do not reject me.

They’ll just prepare another pint and it’s certain you will survive but what might become of me then?

Donor doesn’t want the donated back so trust the tests that proclaimed us a match and I’ll move to the beat of your city center flow through your streets as long as you’ll let me try not to leave with every abrasion just please keep me from biohazard bin prison save me from last resort vampire visions.

Sarah Beck

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Williamson, Untitled 2.JPG Black and white photograph of a light

Katherine Williamson

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Metanoia

I.

This is what I take from my body:

the weight of a small dumbbell,

the force of fifteen pounds,

one sixth of my self

lighting up against gravity

into air.

II.

If you look closely, I am (my body is) made of two unequal halves:

the bigger part is courage, the smaller, fear.

Courage protrudes, bony from my shoulder blades, my kneecaps, the

snail shells of my spine; fear lingers about the soles

of my feet, shallow and thin as snake-skin when it peels

but strong enough still to charter my every step.

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III.

They could take it from my arms, my thighs, my cheeks, calves;

my stomach, my chest, the blades of my shoulders, from the fleshy parts of my fingers

they could take it until there is nothing left to spare.

I wouldn’t care.

I wouldn’t care at all.

IV.

But the resiliency of my body then amazes me to this day I think, how marvelous, even in the midst of torture—

I think of the infallible internal clock, the waking at 2am without fail to empty a bladder that might otherwise shatter,

the natural willingness toward pain, the uncanny enjoyment of various piercings, scrapes;

[the cavernous quality of thoughts and emotions,] Hollow.

Saving up, shutting down.

nosebleeds as if to compensate for what had been deliberately lost.

A body covered in fur;

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V.

Before I was born My soul was a spirit of the earth I was raised by the goddess of the wind, and wolves, who, without loving me, taught me a truer kind of love: survival.

I have no mother the watery moon at night gives me dreams so that I am never lonely.

I see that one day I will have to leave this place and become the thing I am not;

one day I will hate myself, have to learn this all over again, try to kill what feeds me, and fall apart, sink in it before I slowly stand up rise, and return.

Amanda Leahy

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Ieyva, Untitled 7.jpg painting of chinese food boxes

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Bryan Leyva

Kasper, Atacames.jpg black and white photograph of a building with faded silhouettes

“Atacames”

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Chris Kasper

The only obsession I’ve ever had with a person I’ve never met

Shara Worden has a voice such that its pitched ululations reverberate to twist my stomach into something like jelly.

Swimming thoughts turn her hawkish nose, indie hair and poor-fitting outfits into a golden goddess visage.

Such that when I hear her voice is sad, I almost cry. almost but when it is happy I have sex with my girfriend who is nothing like Shara Worden, for hours and hours.

Richard Horan

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Thornbury, (Colonel Mustard in the Study with) The Rope.jpg pencil drawing of a rope

“(Colonel Mustard in the Study with) The Rope”

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Dan Thornbury

The Second Week with Margery

Myles Gerraty

It was dark when I woke up. I felt my chest and my balls. I was naked. “Marge?” I said, confused. Her laugh came from above. Then I knew it had happened again. She probably thought it was cute. It was only our second week in the apartment. Everything was new for now.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re under the bed again, honey.”

I was. I crawled out and felt the braille clock on the dresser in the corner of the room. It was 2:45 p.m.

“The thing is, it’s not okay,” I said in the direction of her voice.

“Why didn’t you stop me? You think this is funny or something?” I was half-serious and she noticed. I stood with one knee bent against the mattress. I rested my hands on my hips.

“Well, you were pretty intent on getting under there,” she went on.

“And it was late.” I sucked my teeth loudly.

“And Pierce wouldn’t let me go near you, he tried to bite my damn arm,” she said excitedly.

Whether that was true or not, he is a real asshole sometimes that dog. He hurried to my side. I rubbed him aggressively. I could feel his underbelly was wet. I smelled urine. He’d pissed his small bed and slept in it again.

I put a shirt and sweatpants on. Pierce and I walked around the block. We walked down Milton Street and took a left after the baseball diamond. We stepped through the grass field. There is a small hill. Pierce took a shit at the bottom of it.

“Guess you don’t have to piss anymore,” I said to him.

I knelt to follow the scent. I put my hand inside of a plastic bag. I grabbed the shit and turned the bag inside out. I tied it up and held the knot in the opposite hand of the one that held the leash. We climbed the hill.

The white daisies must have sprouted since our last walk because Pierce was distracted. He stopped every few paces. I heard him sniffing.

Margery tells me how he likes to smell the white daisies.

I tugged him along as hard as I could. We took the longer way back, near the banks of Keller Brooke. I like to hear the sound of running water against the skin of the rocks. I imagine the small guppies that are pushed along.

The apartment was quiet. Margery was probably out on a delivery run, seeing that Pierce had not reacted to her. She is a fortune cookie writer and often leaves on her bicycle. Every Chinese restaurant in the city uses her fortunes. “It’s a surprisingly lucrative business,” she says. She’s right, despite how much it ticks me off.

She sits there everyday like some philosopher at the keyboard.

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“How’s this?” She clears her throat. “May you go as far as the road leads.”

I’ll roll my eyes. “Or this, or this one: Someone very close to you is saying good things about you.”

“Oh, that’s a good one,” I’ll say. She will probably nod with a smile. The keys will go on clicking. I don’t know— I think it sucks.

Anyhow, there is plenty of demand for those damned things.

I put on a vinyl Carla Bruni record and got into in the shower. Her voice is my favorite. I vowed to myself not to jerk off in there. I would wait for Marge and make advances when it got dark, really work at it this time.

But after hearing her sensual accent, I jerked off anyway. It could be worse; I could be cheating. I always think that when I jerk off. Sometimes I even do it out of spite.

“Honey, I’m homeeee!” I could hear as I dried my hair in front of the mirror. I’d begun to hate that. Like she’s Ricky Ricardo or something, the breadwinner. And I’m the whacky, no-talent Lucy.

“I walk the damned dog,” I said to myself.

I went to the kitchen to make some coffee. The faucet was running.

She stood at the sink, gulping a glass of water. I’m not going to lie, I was still thinking about Ms. Bruni. Marge wasn’t much of a firecracker anymore.

Not the one I’d met two years ago.

She was a self-proclaimed neurotic. She wore thick black-framed glasses and an army fatigue jacket. Her anxious knock came on the apartment door every evening at six. I’d stand with my back to the door and open it. She would leap onto my back. I always thought she gripped my shoulder blades like some tired coal miner would a shiny stone in the dark. I called her diamond.

She would take the sheets and dash them to the floor. Hearing the swipe, I would smile. I was going to get laid.

“What have you seen today, my diamond?” I would ask. I would sit with her on the bare mattress. She would brush the left bang of her hair to the side of her face. She sounded as if she were biting her lower lip when she spoke. One day it might be, “Marvels of my mother’s spring garden.

Flowers, my love! Oh, the Hyacinth, the Dahlia and the Birds of Paradise!

They are just splendid.” She would go on.

I would corral the images in my head as I undressed her.

When she stopped speaking we made love on the mattress. Before she left she would say casually, “I’ll see you when I see you.” That was the girl I asked to move in with me.

The coffee machine was sort of an old one. It sat next to the microwave. I reached for the pot.

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“Oh honey, no,” she said. “Don’t worry, I bought you a Latte Mocha Fresco at Steele Cafe. It’s a large. I carried it back. I rode my bike one-handed for thirteen blocks.”

“Whoopty-doo,” I muttered. I wonder if she reads my facial expressions sometimes. I wonder if she even thinks anything of them.

Maybe she thinks that because I can’t see them, I don’t mean them.

“Jesus Christ, I was only trying to be helpful!” she said.

I heard her shove my coffee machine. “Why do you keep this damned thing around, anyhow?” she said.

“Why? Because I like my coffee. I like my coffee and…and I don’t like you fucking with the things I like.”

“You know…you can be a real asshole sometimes, Isaac,” she said.

“I just want to help you.”

“No!” I wasn’t holding back now. “Just listen for one goddamn minute. Listen! There is nothing you can’t learn by just listening sometimes.”

“Why do you feel bad for me?” I said. “Because I don’t see things the way you do? Because I sleepwalk? Because I like my dog and Carla Bruni? Or my own goddamned coffee?”

She was sniffling now. “Who the fuck is Carla Bruni?”

“Never mind who Carla Bruni is,” I said. That is not the point. The point is…is that I’m not some sob story,” I said. “Alright?” It got quiet.

“I walk the damned dog!”

“You walk with that fucking thing because you need it. It walks you, Isaac!” she said, pointing to the corner where Pierce lay.

Her footsteps stormed out of the kitchen. The front door slammed.

The apartment was the most quiet I had ever heard it. I needed to get out too. Out, but away from Margery.

“Pierce,” I called. It was still quiet. “Here, boy!”

It was very dark that week.

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McConnaughey, Goodbye.jpg oil painting of a man and a woman kissing

“Goodbye”

Kelly McConnaughey

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Upon a Lonely Street Corner November is darker than she recalled.

Silent cement stands a static stage, as life, lingering, fleeting, fades slowly away.

A towering street lamp casts an amber glow upon the couple holding hands. They stand below their sodium sun, losing the world.

He whispers in her ear, his stalwart palm pressuring tenderly the foundation of her spine. She smiles widely, recalling the life she chose to pass by on the street. She waves to it.

It could have been a great weight lifted from atop her shoulders. But instead she will bat lashes and tug collars, prolonging a game that burns through her very soul like a flash bulb illuminating a felon for his mugshot.

Short hairs prickle her soft skin, reminding her of her father’s raspberries when she was a child. Their fingertips meet once more; a spark, a current. The streetlight clicks off for a brief second, and on once more— yet they have gone, naught now but a wisp of memory lingering about a tragic bend in a silent road.

John Delfino

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Indigo House on Stilts

(or Revitalization Project: Bronx, NY)

Our treehouse, dollhouse, fashioned high to fight the rising tides of our city’s precarious sewage system.

Once, while taking chalk dust to urban earth, Amanda told me it was haunted, as if boarded windows and crumbling ceilings marked living space for the dead.

We kids buried childhood beneath its floorboards, pitched stones at the door to wake ghosts, till the glow of streetlights told us it was time to go home.

Amanda was long gone when I finally came back for her, finding only our handprints in cement near the high rise: baby palms full of rainwater.

I counted missing glass windows, uncovered confederate roses burgeoning through rotting wood, until construction workers ushered me off and golden machinery clambered up the street: excavator, demolisher.

I cringed as it clawed at the indigo stilts, sending ghosts toward the sewer in storm water runoff.

Madeline Rose McSherry

103 102

Hay, Shoe in the Wall.jpg color photograph of a shoe in a wall

“Shoe in the Wall”

103

Sam Hay

Hungry Man

special is a winding stream that slumbers onward like a dream with singular purpose for to find a sunken mouth hole in my mind—

and somewhere in my bloodline there creeps a Cherokee paddling red riparian, only to break free—

down a gauntlet of wild heather with hard and steady strokes, til’ the white man binds his hands together and feeds him till he chokes—

Samuel Lovett

105 104

Pasquale, Untitled 13.JPG color photograph of a statue of a small child with water

105

Nicole Pasquale

Sunday School Memory The room taught us their interpretation – Soured air vented itself Onto stale yellowing walls As a lone statue of Joseph Watched a lone statue of Mary.

For he is without decoration – Name us an apostle, can you?

We felt we were breathing in sin, Our eyes trapped on the clasp-kneed girls, Bibles on their skirted laps: Leatherbound capsules of forbiddance.

Our legs trembled as they gave us The New Communion: Cold white glaze on our daily bread, Vitamin C in our blood.

For he feeds appetites An apostle, just one.

I could not contain myself – Knees were too much.

What could I do?

I had a Bible And, carefully placed, Ironic erection protection.

I could not name an apostle – I was too poetic.

Trey Brewer

107 106

Forgash, she’ll hate those curls one day.jpg pencil drawing of a girl with curly hair

“she’ll hate those curls one day”

107

Jill Forgash

Brothers and Sisters

How to think we were all just buzzing salt, we were

newborn fires spitting, splitting molecules of hell between our baby teeth; we were

nests of genius in the empty nothing, moving so fast, shaking— we were atoms of energy then.

The electric life, the pulsating jazz soul radiating through stone and singing through tin and vein and flesh and blood and we were—

Amanda Leahy

109 108

The White Willow

Delayne planted it on the banks to keep

red dirt from eroding in flood season,

and once each horse died birthing or aged,

he buried their bulks under its veil of leaves.

The tornado dragged the tree out with roots

intact, so I made a fort from it, swirling a crazy

quilt through the dust. It was only when

I dug for treasure there that I found

each bone: the teeth engraved

like movable type, the pale crescent

of pelvis. I unearthed each lace

skeleton, the textiles of loss:

Diamond, Chase, Shadow and Morning

Glory, we tumbled again in the bristlegrass.

Skye Shirley

109

Taeschler, Nighttime Childhood.JPG color photograph of a playground at night

“Nighttime Childhood”

111 110

Luke Taeschler

STYLUS INFIRMARY PATIENT FILES

NAME

ILLNESS

Molly Shotwell Richard Horan Jill Forgash Stephen Lovely Anne Kilfoyle Gregory Schafer Zach Markarian Andrew Keener

Stress headaches Inflamed ego Dead on arrival Sick of the staff page Selective hearing Hepatitis Scurvy Extreme dehydration caused by the Middle Eastern sun

Mairead McNameeking Elephant Flu Suzannah Lutz

Advanced enigmatism Sofi Morales

Infected dinosaur bites Cedar Warman

Melancholy of the spleen Dan Thornbury

Digital virus Chris Khan

Khan-junctivitis Brian Park

Laryngitis Trey Brewer

Permanent hat hair Brian Trepanier Got his face stuck that way Daniel Monan

Crippled by writer’s block Erica Tasch

Strained vocal cords Katie Fuccillo

Twitter thumbs Keith Noonan

Broke his wrist in a Freudian slip Sarah Beck

Transfer-motion sickness Jessica Yoon

A severe case of the giggles Jennifer Sanchez Trampled by the Rhinovirus Joseph Baron

Ludwig von Hoffmeister’s Disease Kristen Drew

Broke a leg on stage Emily Rice

Girl, interrupted syndrome Rob Hornung

Disappearing disorder Liz Kulze Literary schizophrenia Kevin Valenski

OD’d on James Joyce

SWINE FLU QUARANTINE Mark Bronzo, Clay Venetis, Jennifer O’Brien, Andrew Borsa, Patrick Lazour, Chris Criswell, Jack Neary, Leana Rivera, Brielle Kilmartin, Kelsey Swift, Kristen Kehlenbeck, Saxon Eastman

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