Spring 2009 Issue

s t y l u s

Yongbok-Hwang - Untitled.jpg Collage in the shape of an ape’s head.

THE STYLUS

BOSTON COLLEGE

S

TYLUS

Spring 2009

STYLUS Volume 122, Number 2, Spring 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, 2008-2009. All rights reserved.

STYLUS Volume CXXII

Spring , 2009 Bostonese

8

Number 2

Staff

Verse Other than the Ocean Voyeur The Fawn Metal. Home.

Trains My Grandfather’s Penis Agnostic Battleship Dayanara The Contents of My Desk Olympia Coming Home Gypsy Woman on Gran Via Herculean Desire Ode to a Glove Dandelion Letter to Papa from Cedar and Fairmount After 9/11, I Understood God Estonia The Oval Vessel of Shigaraki Clay Song of Four Seasons Untitled Istanbul Some Thursday in December In Houston for the Funeral Boarding the Glass House Seeking Neon

9 11 12 21 22 25 26 31 33 34 37 43 44 46 47 49 55

Cedar Warman Colin Ryan Katie Finley Skye Shirley Heather McIlvine Richard Sinden Stephen Thomas Jack Neary Madelina McSherry Colin Ryan Cedar Warman Lukasz Kosakowski James Thorne Jack Neary Katherine Sullivan Caroline McCrossen Vanessa Vacante

56 58 61 63 65 80 82 84 85 87 89

Gino Orlandi Skye Shirley Amy Keresztes Stephanie Lee Matt Flagg Madeline McSherry Amy Keresztes Skye Shirley Gino Orlandi Crystal Schultz Alexandra Corcoran

What She Knows Generation A Function of Genetics Four Nights of a Dreamer Pods of Wisteria Frutescens The Whisper of Time Eulogy for My Hymen

98 100 103 105 107 108 109

Suzannah Lutz George Berry Danielle Solomon Amy Karesztes Katie Finley Rebecca Bills Julia Kirsche

Prose Scrank Allez-Allez!

Peripheral Air Friday/Friday Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

14 28 38 50 67 91

Sarah Martin John Flowers Jen Yoo Anthony Ogden Colin Ryan Caitlin Moran

Art ok cover Summer Porch 10 The African Sun 13 Apples and Oranges 20 Smile 24 photograph 27 Promethean Contraband 30 oil painting 32 photograph 36 mixed media 42 Girl in Mexican Market 45 Devoured 48

Yongbok Hwang Alicia Buchl Perez Kerry Kennedy Alicia Buchl Perez Daniel Thornbury Emily Rice Daniel Thornbury Lauren Bender Sam Hay Kelly McConnaughey Alicia Buchl Perez Richard Horan

photograph oil painting An Occasionally Honest Self-Portrait Witches Winter Abe photograph photograph mixed media Re: Oedipus On Friday, I Lost a Friend oil painting mixed media Unnamed Fairy Got Caught A Dying Soldier oil painting

54 57 60 62 64 66 79 81 88 86 89 90 99 102 104 106 110

Sam hay Lauren Bender Kelly McConnaughey Brian Chu Ryan Arredondo Yongbok Hwang Kristi Kleila Sam Hay Elisa Rodriguez-Vila Daniel Thornbury Hilary Flowers Lauren Bender Madeleine Hines Kelly McConnaughey Emily Corvino Richard Horan Alexandra Charleston

Bostonese TITLES HIT HARD

Due to the recent economic downturn, college writers and artists across the country have been forced to make cuts to their art budgets.

Some write in second person to save on pronouns, others photograph in black-and-white to avoid the color crunch, but we at Stylus have noticed that the number one way Boston College students show their artistic frugality is to refrain from purchasing titles for their work.

Stylus economists have discovered that leaving off a title reduces the raw materials cost of short stories by 15%, poems by 8.4%, and photographs by an incredible 30%.

But while adding “Untitled” to the top of your piece is a tempting way to save money for luxuries such as schoolbooks and drinking tonic, Stylus urges our readers to think of their pieces, of the ostracizing they will receive at the hands of the Titled, for not every poem can pull off that trendy, avant-garde, naked look.

TUMBLING

The stack of packets Tilts precarious above Richard’s bearded head

THE FOURTH RULE

It is with great fanfare and furious beating of drums that Stylus announces the birth of an unofficial “fourth rule” of Stylus! After weeks of grueling sessions discussing both the most professional “Pro”s and the most conflicting “Con”s, Parliament was able to reach an agreement with the ruling monarchy adding the special addendum. Thanks to the landmark decision, no Stylite leaving a Wednesday meeting early to catch the new “Lost” episode will be forced to leave without a commual “Fare thee well!” from the smiling faces of those still there ever again.

FINDING OSCAR

For yet another semester, the Stylus office finds itself without the delicate grace of a fair-finned aquatic friend.

Alas, our many fisticuffs and dawn duels over what to call our waterborne chum (code-named “Oscar”) were for naught! The empty spot on our shelf where his spherical home was to sit only emphasizes the wide-eyed exuberance for the simple pleasures in life he would have brought. Perhaps someday our fish will yet arrive. But only perhaps.

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Other than the Ocean

A panda bear at my beach house Threw a fish at my window

Slide to the ground Old fish

He came to the porch So I let him in through The sliding glass door He sat down like anyone would Feet-up at the kitchen table And took the can of soda-pop I gave him

What will they teach bears next I asked my kitchened mother After he opened the can Panda-tossed fish Bears closer inspections Clearly dead Of indeterminate species With a jaw like a crocodile

Cedar Warman

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Perez - Summer Porch.jpg b&w photo porch in sunlight

“Summer Porch”

Alicia Buchl Perez

11 10

Voyeur She always liked to change clothes with the door open, just a crack.

I lingered sometimes, a passerby.

She’d hide the creases from herself, gentle scars of the healthy.

Her body was illegible, a runestone smooth from wear and tear and restoration, her hair a passage poorly translated.

She’d run the towel slow across her breast, full of calm and simple energy.

The corridor stood cool before me and I huddled close to her, my vision stained in the charcoal of evening, tired as a baby born.

Colin Ryan

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The Fawn I sat feet up, nails scraping the edge of summer-soaked glass.

The prayer hung weightless like weeping willows hunched low, or one million homeless dandelion seeds blowing as if they had someplace to be.

The blameless fawn ambled, awkward across lanes of 101— I sunk my fingertips like miniature heartbeats into crescents beneath my eyes, fullness of my lungs murmuring please, please.

Its eyes were black holes, endless velvet depths wet with naivetÊ only a young one possesses. The four legs froze; the fawn had lost its mother’s scent, the vision of her white tail calling the littlest one home. Its eyes burned into mine, begging for mother.

We were desperate frustration plastered to seats of a hot car.

My scream sliced still-life, uprooting sleeping hairs from the backs of our necks: my mother swerved.

How long did the turkey vultures wait to weave their silk-less webs?

How long before the mother wondered why her milk dried up, the gently butting head a phantom thump?

The fawn grew up in the moment following impact: eyes faded with innocence lost, crimson blood speckled tender white spots. It no longer looked to us for salvation, its sole focus upon crossing the remaining lane of 101, making that final journey home to motherless hills. We drove back in silence.

Katie Finley

13 12

Kennedy - The African Sun Sets on the Okavango.JPG color photo of sun setting

“The African Sun Sets on the Ovavango”

13

Kerry Kennedy

Scrank

Sara Martin

Scranton, Pennsylvania is a great place to go and die. I don’t mean it is a great place to peacefully pass on if you know your time is coming and you want to be surrounded by beautiful landscapes, pleasant weather and attractive people. No. I mean if you hate your life, everyone in it and you have become so familiar with misery that you want to physically experience the most depressing place on earth as you’re kickin’ the bucket, then Scranton is your ideal destination to croak. There is a bridge three miles down the road from me named Freedom Bridge where seven suicides occurred over the last year and a half. Mayor Doherty considered it an improvement that only seven people leapt to their death in order to free themselves from this colorless, coal covered hellhole in the last five hundred days. Two years ago it was eleven. I first heard about Freedom Bridge when a senior in my criminology class at the University of Scranton named Rich threw himself off of it on a Saturday night. His recently estranged girlfriend had brought a supposedly close friend of his as her new squeeze to a party he was hosting. The ex-girlfriend, the new white meat, and two of Rich’s housemates were all in my class as well. Our professor had taught Rich at Scranton Prep and written his recommendations to attend the U. Thanks to the inbreeding social dynamics of Scranton, our Monday morning lecture following Rich’s suicide could have easily been mistaken for day time television programming. The only closure that came that morning labeling Rich’s ex a “scrank.”

“Scrank” is the local word for a promiscuous woman. It started out specifically for the girls from the trailer parks in Moscow or Dickson (the hills) who infiltrate the city to frequent Scranton’s local watering holes and get passed around. The term caught on quick and now it is pretty much an umbrella term for all of the self loathing, morally bankrupt sluts in this town. “Scrantastic” is a descriptive word for the wettest and oldest brains in the city. It usually applies to the last senior citizen still alive out of a group of old drunks. A truly scrantastic citizen is still throwing a few back at Tinks or Judge & Jury with his dentures on the bar and his name looming with omnipresence at the very last slot for a liver transplant at Mercy on Jefferson Street. A “scranbino” applies to the product of a one night stand in Scranton – aborted or not – and “scrangled” is a popular sexual practice where the female temporarily cuts off the male’s oxygen supply to enhance his orgasm. Ever heard of the “the Scranton Blackfoot?” That’s the combination of mud, feces and beer that coats your feet after an evening in “the hills” section and dodging coon traps as you drag your ass home. The Scranton Blackfoot was actually coined because of the trail that a skrank typically leaves when she stumbles out of your apartment in the morning.

Finally, a “scrantoo” is a series of track marks that typically

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graces the forearms or inner thighs of a Scrantonian heroin enthusiast. Once you get your first scrantoo, chances are those marks will be there for life and most likely multiply. During my stay in Scranton, I had the honor of living with a self proclaimed ex-skrank with scattoos to boot, two scanbinos and a permanent case of the Scranton Blackfoot.

I moved into Mountainside Estate for Women on a Thursday morning thirteen days before my 20th birthday. My roommate’s name was Trish Price and she was originally from Wilmington, Delaware which is the heroin capitol of the United States. Scranton ranks fourth after Detroit and Camden. If Scranton were in the heroin Olympics it wouldn’t receive a medal but it would still be brimming with junkies. Trish had followed her high school sweetheart to Scranton because he had family in the coal mining business and Lackawanna County dope was dirt cheap in the summer of 1958. Pity because in January, the Knox mine disaster of 1959 all but erased the mining industry in Northeast, Pennsylvania.

“Can ya even believe that shit luck? We was just a couple of kidsonly been there six months before Ernie’s whole goddamn mine caved in on him,” Trish used to say every time she’d reminisce with me about the metaphorical collapses our entire lives had become. Trish and her guy Ernie were sixteen when his mine collapsed and they were each using about 15-20 mg of heroin a day. 32 years had gone by since then and Trish was up to over 300 mg a day now, Ernie was long dead in that mining disaster, she had popped out two scranbinos with local junkies, and had just been escorted from her dilapidated trailer in the hills section by the Lackawanna County Police Department after buying from an undercover cop.

“It was a dyke cop.”

“Yeah?”

“When you’re a chick and ya get caught by a dyke cop, you’re fucked.”

“That’s funny cause you’d think you might be able to pull somethin’ ya know?”

“Men, they know how to haggle – they’ve got pricks ya know? But chicks – dykes especially – they love locking up other chicks. It like some Frodo shit or somethin’.”

“Freudian shit?”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s some of that.”

Trish’s endurance for heroin fascinated me and filled me with an unorthodox amount of respect, reverence and patience for her.

I knew Trish got high while we were living in the halfway house, but it didn’t bother me. I liked Trish and she always had my back against the other women. I was the youngest in the house and she never let anyone snatch my smokes or corner me into doing their dish nights or chores. She was by far the oldest smack-head in the house but there were still the crypt keeper ex-booze hounds who were rounding seventy; their brains wetter

15

than chew toys and they were the laziest bitches I’d ever met. I don’t even know how Trish used to sneak her bundles in but around midnight, an hour past “lights out,” Trish would fish around under her mattress and come up with a syringe no bigger than her middle finger. She’d give herself an injection in between her big toe and her long toe cause she couldn’t afford any more scantoos. At first I’d just listen. The silence and stillness of the drug penetrating her veins would be followed by a long release of air from her nostrils once it started to swim. She’d fall back on her stiff mattress breathing all heavy. I liked this. I liked knowing Trish was somewhere else for a little while and her sedated breathing made me feel slightly intoxicated myself. It helped me sleep in the beginning when the place was still unfamiliar; alien. Then I started to watch, but I don’t think she knew. If she did know, she didn’t care because that look on her face about 20 to 30 seconds after she pulled the needle out of her foot was a euphoric expression that is only mildly comparable to that of an orgasm.

Trish got kicked out two days before my 20th birthday. I had started going to school at the U; my parole officer had given Mountainside permission to let me take a couple part time classes while I got my act together . When I got back from class that day, all of Trish’s shit was gone and her bed had been stripped. Surprise room searches. They’d found the bundles underneath her mattress inside a pair of knee highs and they’d found my apple jelly beans and chocolate covered raisins too. Sugar and caffeine weren’t tolerated at Mountainside, but it only meant robbing me of my phone privileges and taking over the dinnertime dishes for two weeks –didn’t get me thrown out. I had the room to myself for about 36 hours.

Betsy arrived the night before my birthday.

“For three months we’d get high, sleep and fuck, sleep, fuck, sleep, fuck-” “Yeah? That’s pretty intense. Where’s the guy now?”

“Don’t care – probably still living in Avery’s basement,” “Avery?”

“Yeah, this dude Avery was just letting us live in his basement for the last four months,” “Crazy. So are methadone and morphine the same as crystal meth?”

“Not really, crystal meth is A LOT dirtier-” (it’s not) “-and I only got into the methadone cause I was trying to kick the morphine. Then it was just around and around hooked on both man. Both of us – we were just fucking zombies in Avery’s basement.”

“Wild.” Not really.

“This guy Avery was a real crazy bastard. Pretty sure he was autistic or something. One night he charged into the basement waving – you’ll never guess what – over his head – screaming like a banshee. Guess what it was, you’ll never guess what it was -” “Uhh, a cat, a– I don’t know.”

17 16

“He was waving a fucking samurai sword over his head. A huge fucking sword! Totally batshit. I swear he was autistic or something.”

“That doesn’t sound like an autistic person at all Betsy. Do you even know what autistic means?”

“Yeah –it’s just like down syndrome, or epilepsy,” “No. Not even. At all.”

At 7:07 am, I will turn twenty years old. When I was born I weighed seven pounds and seven ounces. Usually on my birthday I put an end to some phase that I’m in the throes of. Last year it was being a vegan.

Then I got drunk, ate half a platter of Mexican chili-cheese dip and vomited uncontrollably into the following afternoon. The year before that I woke up with a mouthful of sand on a beach in Wildwood, New Jersey next to a childhood friend I called “Bones.” So ended my benzodiazepine phase and I flushed the rest of my Klonopins down the toilet while my mother lit eighteen candles of a birthday cake that represented the end of childhood.

Betsy brought a sound machine to help her sleep. She asked if I minded and I shrugged and said it sounded like a pretty nice idea, which it did after not sleeping for the last thirty six hours since Trish’s departure. I imagined drifting off to percussion reminiscent of rainfall or a snare drum stroked to such perfection that Betsy and I might mistaken our windowless hole in the wall of a bedroom for a bed and breakfast in Mykonos. She retrieved a clunky little contraption from her makeshift luggage of Hefty bags and set it on the bedside table between us. It looked like a broken dial radio from pre-Gatsby era, and it sounded even worse. She clicked it on and that sound that was supposed to crashing waves at the beach sounded like sticking a screwdriver in a pencil sharpener.

Betsy shimmied out of her jean skirt and mid drift tee shirt that exposed her softening middle from being reintroduced to normal eating during her last couple weeks of detox. She unhooked her bra and kicked off her thong into the middle of our floor. She stood completely naked in our bedroom holding her small pot belly and running her hands over her breasts. She was a tiny woman, severely over tanned and already had wrinkles. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years my senior, but between the sun damage and the morphine, Betsy had the appearance of a woman well into her thirties. I couldn’t stop looking at her slight pot belly, and I suddenly became full of shame. I threw my eyes away from Betsy’s dark, naked body.

“You know, my roommate in detox said that the baby might not have to go through the kind of withdrawal that I did.” Betsy’s voice was much softer than I had heard before.

“Betsy, I- I had no idea you were-” “Yeah, four and a half months now,” she rubbed her belly button with her pointer finger’s chipped acrylic finger nail and laughed nervously, “gives me an excuse to eat like a pig!”

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“Aren’t there ways of giving the baby small and safe amounts of methadone after its born – you know, so that it can properly withdraw?” I knew that bulging belly on her tiny frame was too big from one week of indulgence.

“No doctor is pumping any fucking meth into my baby,” Betsy snarled self righteously with her feet planted firmly facing me. Her nakedness was suddenly very powerful. It paralyzed me. “Why do you think I’m doing all this shit? What are you, a motherfucking doctor?”

“I’m just saying…all I’m saying is that morphine usually goes through the amniotic sac an-and when the baby is born it has no defenses and can immediately go into seizures from det-” why was I still talking?

“Shut up. SHUT up. SHUT THE FUCK UP!!” She grabbed the snarling sound machine and her whole body was shaking. Betsy’s tiny, prematurely wrinkled breasts danced violently close to my face as she screamed at me, “tell me my baby is going to be motherfucking fine!”

She was nearly straddling me now where I sat on the side of my bed and I couldn’t find the words that she wanted me to tell her.

So she clocked me. She clocked me four times. The sound of nails in a garbage disposal became louder and softer each time she nailed the piece of shit across the side of my face and raised it away again to administer another blow. I let her hit me – I sat there in between her naked legs in mute disbelief and let her hit me. She raised it a fifth time in what appeared to be an attempt to hit me over the top of the head. She was moving in slow motion now, trembling as hot tears started to trickle down her leather face and onto mine. I jumped up and grabbed Betsy by the wrists. She was crying harder now and her arms went limp in my grip. She lowered the sound machine.

I looked into Betsy’s face and her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. I squeezed her wrists as hard as I could, “Go to sleep Betsy. Just, get some sleep.”

Her naked little body crumpled into her bed and she sobbed quietly with her face turned away from me. I picked up the little sound machine and put it back on the table in between us. It was gurgling and rumbling now with more dysfunction than before but I didn’t feel right turning it off. I flicked our light switch and the room became very still. I shoved the palms of my hands into my eyes until I saw stars and my head was pulsing and throbbing with the whiteness of each image that flickered behind my eye sockets. I laid like that for a long time and the noise machine changed; it began to crackle and pop like rapidly spreading forest fire. Betsy’s sounds changed too – she had started to snore deeply and in an eerily similar harmony to her machine. Time crept by, one hour into two into three. I looked at my watch as it struck 2am, 3am, 4am. Three hours and seven minutes until I’m twenty.

I crept out of my bed to see if they had found my stash of peanut butter crackers that I kept inside my coupled socks. I started sifting

19 18

through my top drawer undoing each little pair to see if any had escaped the greedy paws of the Madame of Mountainside during searches. Ah ha! This one was heavy alright, I uncoupled the pair and started to shake the heavy sock. Flour poured out.

Not flour. Not flour at all. I stuck my pinky into the powder and licked it. Trish, you old dog! I examined every single coupled sock set and found seven socks full of heroin.

“Shit,” I breathed. I sat on the floor with my drawer in my lap. I dumped all seven socks onto the carpet in a pile and ran my hands through it, letting it fall through my fingers like sand. I spread it out across my floor and I laid down in it. I laid my head down first and I worked it through my hair. I felt the powder on the tips of my eyelashes, and I dragged some across my cheeks like makeup. I spread it out on the carpet real thin so that it was it about the size of my torso and wingspan. I flapped my wingspand slowly up and down on top of it, feeling it stick to my arms in the summer heat and grind into carpet. At seven oh seven, I’ll turn twenty years old. But until then, I’ll make a heroin angel.

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Perez - Apples and Oranges.jpg A Color Photo of apples and oranges in a wire bowl.

“Apples and Oranges�

Alicia Buchl Perez

21 20

Metal. Home.

A machine decorated my cast iron radiator

with tangled tendrils, roses of white metal.

And in return, it whistles and whispers

throughout the night, warming the all of me.

Water tower: I can see you from the third floor,

gray overcast. I wonder at your bold launch

against the flurries, bad weather.

Drought comes, and we drink you, bathe.

Iron deficient, my body temperature can’t control

itself, so I eat fish and red meats.

The strangest marvel?

how my earrings slip into the piercings every

morning, slide out each night. What miracle

they nudge through me painless.

21

Skye Shirley

Train

I.

wheels screech against the turn pistons fight the pull the swing—hard machine claws its way around hits me with the force of a train wreck and wrack slick metal track snakes black toward me

II. Behind my house I hang laundry on the line.

Heavy sheets tremble in the air and my own feet send little shocks upward.

I can feel the charging engine in my bones before it comes, filling every curl of my ears with its hot screams.

I cannot stop my head from turning and the stomach and knees that follow— every part of me reaching for the house like a flock of birds that scatter the sky after a shot.

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III.

Like a telescope each car collapsed into the next, without care for the soft flesh warm, and moving in and out of sighs, feet that tapped the floor in intricate patterns.

Everything— toenails painted blue rib-bones and hips, braces, teeth, and twitching muscle lie in a steaming heap inside the train, broken and off its track.

Heather McIlvane

23

Thornbury - Smile.jpg A digital art piece of a man in a suit with a smile.

“Smile�

Daniel Thornbury

25 24

My Grandfather’s Penis

It drooped from my shriveled grandfather like a strange, prehistoric fish.

Each one of his eighty-seven years etched in the wrinkles and folds.

In the forties it pissed at Dachau, onto the seat of a Nazi toilet.

Charmed Lena, a tiny twenty year-old, behind a Tuscan fish market.

It delighted in Joan Fontaine, Brigitte Bardot, Diana Dors, and, somehow, my grandmother.

A lifetime of peeing and orgasms and kidney stones (four).

But never has so wizened a thing dangled with such austerity, such humility, such grace.

Richard Sinden

25

The Agnostic

What would it be like to know, with absolute certainty, that there was a God? I would have to fall down onto my knees and plead, “I’m sorry, God, I’m so sorry;” and then I’d fix a star over my house and leave to knock on doors and write books and come back, with my new nation, to pray at my house with the worst of them.

And what would it be like to know for sure that there was none that we were all alone?

I would wrap my arms around Billy Graham and sob “There’s not one, I’m sorry; “I’m sorry, god, I’m so sorry.”

Stephen Thomas

27 26

Emily Rice - Untitled.JPG A Photo of a child looking at a statue

Emily Rice

27

“Allez-Allez!”

John Flowers

“Allez! Allez!” – Chaos and choruses in Paris burst out in competition for attention, every arrondissement washed over with Fête de la Musique, The Music Party. The whole country seems to flood its capital with singing hordes and every street corner or free square of sidewalk blares with confounding decibels: all wax, no wane. The heat and the grease of the throngs slide through the silver night, two-stepping through the snail shell of the white city’s neighborhoods. The discordance of conflicting genres bombards ears and picks up feet. A marching band bomps along some ratty teenagers to “When I’m Sixty Four” in the Latin Quarter, while Buena Vista Social Club pulls tangoing women onto tables in the disapproving shadow of St. Severin. Speed metal spurs people past the soundless Musee d’Orsay and out next to a motionless, bronze Thomas Jefferson. By the industrial pipes of the Pompidou, in the three blocks between Rue Berger and Rue de Rivoli there are no less than four Native American wind ensembles. Do they know each other? Are they friends?

Trash sacks bulge over their thin wire rims, sagging like used condoms, while a graffiti portrait of Marilyn Monroe eating a banana looks on with carnal indifference. Glass like confetti– cigarette butts and beer bottles pile like the top of Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise.

In stretched, restless lines hang stern, mustached men and aloof, painted women clinging to one another to argue little and loud shibboleths with a bald bouncer. Break-dancers pose for photos upside down on their cardboard-cut-out stage, almost uprooted by several pairs of dilated pupils staggering and stammering past. Beardless Van Gogh look-a-likes find it fitting, entertaining to watch a drunk man stumble: step, correction, overcorrection, grasp and flail - he’ll bite curb if they’re lucky.

The St. Sulpice broods and says: Nothing, nothing.

A check-point of beefy drug dealers shout hey-boy-hey! while jogging through piss, accosting kids; it reeks barely perceptible smell lines off the Quai Voltaire. A toddler is lost and wailing, police in riot gear trot abreast, arm in arm, like girlfriends going stag to a homecoming dance.

Homeless rovers shiver on their knees, rattling tins to Notre Dame, their promised beloved. Bachelorettes drunk on Buttercup Baby trip into each other’s cleavage, shimmy and fall over the hood of their convertible into the droves along the Champs-Élysées, laughing and hooting and swinging clothes. Below the triumphant mist of the fountain of Saint-Michel casting the Worm out of Paradise, stoners inhale falafel, a witless Roma vomits crêpe.

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On the wharf, two young men chug bitter red wine. Holding the empty bottle above their heads, each with one hand up between them, they stand accomplished with their green glass– a torch, a symbol of peace in their time. On the count of trois, they cast it into the sky, end over end as it falls. Napoleon’s Pont au Change sees it smack the surface of the water.

Whether it broke or is carried along with Inspector Javert, the young men cannot tell. The glass cannot be found in the reflection of the now rising sun over the Seine, extinguished in the writhing current.

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Thornbury - Promethean Contraband.jpg Painting of a Lighter

“Promethean Contraband�

Daniel Thornbury

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Battleship A sigh to sink my ship Said more than a severe word, Malice, misunderstanding inhaled, Forceful disappointment, regret returned Like a sweater compliments of Aunt Maude.

But allow me free reign To paint you with my kiss, The Devil’s remedy sure to distract You and gloss my shortcomings Until the paint peels, Awkwardly undone like a teenage bra Without the benefit of darkness.

Jack Neary

31

Bender - Untitled3.jpg An Oil Painting of a White Rose

Lauren Bender

33 32

Dayanara

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”

– Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Someone had thrown a rock into her kitchen window while her mother read stories before bed. “We think it was my dad,” she tells me and slides a brick-colored crayon out of the box, draws a schoolhouse that looks nothing like ours. “I go to my new school Monday.” She points at her face in the school’s window. I glimpse a map on the wall, wonder where she will be. The teacher says place is secret and mouths the words “running from the father.” I bite the inside of my cheek, stay quiet. Women, I am not curious why we run.

I slip my fingers into Dayanara’s sleek black hair, find her ear and whisper, “the fault is in our stars.”

Madeline McSherry

33

The Contents of My Desk The first drawer is business on top and party on the bottom Gorilla Glue cap shut tight God forbid Two transcripts, lifelines to my cardboard boxfuture The pornographic playing cards my mom got me in Italy,

what a weirdo she is The webcam I use to communicate with said weirdo,

she’s very tech savvy A pocket deodorant sprayer, guaranteed to make women want to have sex with me

so they say in as many words Wacky sunglasses I’d miss more than my Ray-Bans A pin with John Belushi giving the finger, rest in peace you ridiculous human being A box of paperclips, can you imagine working in that factory A screwdriver with interchangeable heads, I should have thought of that,

I wouldn’t need those transcripts The pens I never use because you can’t take back what you say A bunch of gum because I have bad teeth so I might as well have

fresh breath The second drawer is electric My camera with gnawmarks from when I left it on the couch

with my dog in the room Full Metal Jacket, Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, widescreen, what can I say except

I have good taste A glow stick, for when Snake Plissken uses some sort of vaguely sinister

and poorly-explained doomsday device

to turn off all the lights (Good luck with that reference) Instructions for chewed camera, lines I’ll never look at because I’m young and hip

and down with filters, zooms and night settings A “D” battery for a Hess truck, the one with the wind-up motorcycle

that’s nine months late from my dead grandfather The sticky notes I use to write about ketchup and gin The old phone with the chewed antenna,

seems to be a pattern A condom, sealed of course, embarrassingly old I think that one belongs in number three This drawer is for secrets Like the computer game I play when people I don’t like are drinking

downstairs A note from a girl I used to like

who am I kidding, still like

who am I kidding, love, if there’s such a thing Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, because I’m sensitive A lighter for the cigarettes I don’t smoke

35 34

Old notebooks on the history of some faceless African country

and Italy’s silly attempt to conquer it and Plato and Sartre

and the Spanish word for fuck and Emily Dickinson and James Joyce

and kidnappings in Colombia and Machiavelli and Julio Cortázar

and how to draw dragons and what my name means and mudslides

and pahoehoe lava and the list goes on Printer paper, not much of a secret really The Idiot’s Guide to Playing the Harmonica, no need to elaborate A flask of tequila for someone to find or for me to drink whichever comes first

(Probably the drinking) A bit of cellophane from my predecessor’s drawers, a triangle of flotsam

From him, a secret

To me, a mystery

35

Colin Ryan

Hay - Petermann Island.jpg Five Penguins standing on a rock.

Sam Hay

37 36

Olympia Eighteen hours trapped in bed Shivering as occasional rain Splashed through the open window A woman there with me Of course or not of course Maybe in our underwear The flood was naturally indifferent We shared a gin and tonic Half and half split down the center Of plastic glasses, for the quinine Because water breeds mosquitoes and The flood will bring malaria For the first time to the Pacific Northwest Disease among the evergreens We serene, immune, and drunk She rolled on her side, new tattoo exposed To air, escaping touches, encircled by birds Suspending monochromatic ribbons They held for me the absence of decisions And the rain continued to move gently Down the walls, under the window And onto our flannel sheets

37

Cedar Warman

Peripheral Jen Yoo

“I never expect you to remember things,” she says, her eyes watching her own fingers trace an invisible pattern on the plastic table top. Her brown hair rests in strands on her cheeks and spreads over her shoulders.

“Why wouldn’t you?” he asks, intently.

“I don’t know,” she says smiling. “I guess I just don’t expect that of anyone, really.”

“Understandable,” he says, aiming his gaze past her, towards the football game on the TV in the background. Her outline fades into the background of his thoughts – the Falcons are winning.

She experiments, folding her hands in front of her on the table, folding her hands in her lap, putting one hand on the table and one hand on her cheek – it’s all slow and fluid motion, very subtle and very pretty, but still, experimenting nonetheless.

“Should we go now?” she asks, looking at her watch.

“Sure.” They throw out the used napkins that had been sitting on their plates the whole time, watching the exchange. They leave their plates in the plate-depository. He shoots for the recycling bin, his plastic milk container misses. She laughs and adds, “Really?” He gives her a look of disdain, wears a face that says “I’m trying not to smile,” and shoves past her, playfully. She regains her balance and catches up to him. He opens the door for her and she thanks him accordingly.

They begin their trek back to the residence halls. A blustery night – the wind is abusive, a jealous jet stream, hurtling bruised leaves and dancing through open windows. They walk along, with separate songs in their heads. She looks at the sky. He looks at the ground.

“You shouldn’t look all the way up when you’re walking,” he cautions her, “you could step on something.” He half-smiles and leans against her a little. It’s not the intoxicatingly-adorable sort of leaning, but he does lean. If anything, it’s to make sure she’s still there. She is a blur in his peripheral vision. He blinks his eyes forcefully as he refocuses his gaze.

“Thank you,” she says, flashing her eyes towards him. There she is, he breathes. A solid form against a liquid background. She was there all along. He watches her take his advice, now looking from ground to horizon to sky, horizon to ground, occasionally shifting left and right. It’s all slow and fluid motion, very subtle and very pretty, but still, experimenting nonetheless.

39 38

She grabs his arm.

“What is that?” she points to a heap on the ground. “What is it?” she asks again, a sweet tinge of fear in her voice. He walks towards the pile of blackness and says, “Oh that’s disgusting.” She cautiously follows and sees the dead cat, a heap of shadows frozen to the sidewalk.

“Someone should really do something about that,” he adds, turning to look at her. He is puzzled by the way she looks at him – her face seems to be covered by a layer of frosted glass. He shakes his head and blinks his eyes again.

“There must be something wrong with my eyes,” he says aloud.

“Yeah?” she responds. She grabs hold of his arm and presses her cheek into his jacketed shoulder. There she is. She was there all along. Her lips are chapped, her cheeks red with cold and her eyes watering.

“Let’s go, you’re freezing,” he insists as they walk faster. He delights in protecting her. She’s so little. She does need him, who else would better keep an eye on her.

They are finally home. He walks her to her room. Some banter is exchanged regarding her room code and the door opens. She sighs, happy to be warm again. She beckons him inside. Her roommates are out, quenching their Thursday thirsts. He does her bidding. She removes layers of clothing: her gloves first, then her scarf, then her jacket, then her sneakers. He sets down his orange backpack and takes off his shoes. She plops on her bed – orange sheets, orange blankets and orange pillows. He sits beside her, close enough so that their arms touch.

“It must be awful to be a dead cat on the sidewalk,” she begins.

“I guess so,” he offers.

“If I ever die on a sidewalk, I hope you don’t leave me there.”

“That’s a little morbid.” he smiles, “Isn’t it?” She looks away.

“Of course I wouldn’t leave you there,” he says as feels his vision of her sliding. He blinks insistently and rubs his eyes. She looks back at him. Her hands are folded in her lap, her legs are crossed at the ankles. A strand of hair rests on her forehead and trickles down the side of her face.

The experiment ceases; here she is. She was there all along.

“I promise,” he says. She smiles.

They are in the moment before the kiss. It is the moment where she looks into his eyes and there exists a mutual leaning-in-towards. The result is the kiss.

She vanishes.

39

She is just gone. Gone into thin air. He is left alone on her bed, completely perplexed, puzzled, bewildered. The phrase, “What the fuck,” rings through his head malevolently. His reaction is completely normal.

He sits there alone. Should he knock on the RA’s door? Should he go to his room, or should he wait for her there? Where did she go? How did she do that? Will she come back? An hour later, he shakily puts his shoes back on, grabs his bag and walks to his room. Her roommates will be back soon, and it will be even weirder if I’m sitting here by myself.

His roommates congratulate him – “Another late night in that girl’s room?

Shit man, sweet life.” Uh, no, he thinks to himself, she disappeared. He doesn’t say anything, just goes to bed.

The next day he texts her early in the morning. Are you okay, no response.

He follows his normal routine in a very rushed and distracted manner, goes to his first class, then texts her again. Hey are you there, no response. He eats lunch alone. He goes to his second class, then decides to call her. No answer. He leaves a voicemail, “Hi, uh, where are you? Call me. Bye.” He heads back to their dorm to do some studying – studying, being an illegitimate activity to try to do when the girl that you spend too much time thinking about suddenly vanishes. He stops at her room and knocks on the door (even though he knows the code). Her roommate answers, “Oh hey, what’s up? No, she’s not here, we thought she was with you.”

“She’s not with me,” he says. She fucking vanished, he thinks. Her roommates are scared now, but he promises them it’s not a big deal, makes up a story about how they got in a fight, makes them think he has everything under control. His hands are sweating now as he climbs the stairs to the fourth floor where he lives. He stops in front of his door, rubs his eyes and feels his lungs shaking as he breathes. Where the hell did she go, how did she do that? What if she’s gone forever?

He opens the door to his room, throws his backpack down, and oh my god.

Oh my god, he sighs, it’s her. She’s landed asleep on his bed. What, what, how? Jesus. He slowly walks closer and sees her chest rising and falling. He rightly is afraid of what might happen should he get too close, but he must know if she is really there. She sleeps on her left side, her left arm tucked beneath the pillow, her right hand in a relaxed fist next to her forehead, her legs tucked gently beneath her knees. A normal sleeping position. He hesitatingly touches her shoulder. She doesn’t wake up. He feels himself get nervous. He rubs her back, his fingers quivering. Her eyes blink open prettily. There she is. She was there all along.

“Where did you go?” he begs her.

41 40

“To tomorrow,” she answers simply.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he begs her.

“Why, were you scared?” she answers, smiling.

He gets into bed next to her as she embraces him. She runs her fingers through his hair. He breathes in her scent and feels a cascading relief as he holds her closer. He can hear her heartbeat. He watches her silver necklace rise and fall as she breathes. His arms wrap around her fragile torso, her cheek rests on his forehead. He closes his eyes.

They vanish.

41

McConnaughey - Untitled.jpg Painting of a woman lying on top of crushed beer cans

Kelly McConnaughey

43 42

Coming Home

I

Before the war she was wearing a blonde pageboy wig and flourishing a cigarette holder as long as Franklin Roosevelt’s, playing the phony Russian aristocrat “Irene” in Sherwood’s antiwar, Idiot’s Delight.

She had a poster of Marilyn Monroe on her wall.

When was the last time you saw a seventeen-year-old girl with one of those?

It would be nine more years before I’d see her again.

I was trained as a gunner in the States , with the 10th Air Force in the China-Burma-India Theater.

I learned how to knife-slash a throat and bullet-pierce a heart.

I saw blood and bones and bile and I returned home.

She saw me coming off the bus and cowered in fear not knowing what to expect, I tried to pick her up.

II

The first time I saw her nude I blushed—after everyone at the local restaurant wished her a happy birthday, we argued about my drugs, she made me take a hot shower with her to make the shivering stop.

I try to pick her up, but she slips through my bandages.

She says that I feel heavier, even though I’ve lost weight.

She is pregnant, with a song not written for me.

I’m too scared of change.

We won’t be the same since the last time, but You can always sing a song for America.

The last time I saw America, her trees were dressed for spring.

Now she takes a disco nap on the floor of an airport lying face down and I think she is sleeping.

She has sacrificed for the sake of her regulars

Lukasz Kosakowski

43

Gypsy Woman on Gran VĂ­a

The chestnuts, cradled in an oil-blotted white wax-paper cone,

had that smell of incensed palms on Sunday morning.

She gave me one with a shaky reaching hand, a toothless smile,

and there it felt light and warm, a world of ash.

I freed it quick with these sooty graceless fingers,

and, man, it tasted of autumn, just like the rotting leaves.

James Thorne

45 44

Perez - Girl in Mexican Market.jpg B&W Photo of a young girl holding a dog

“Alicia Buchl Perez”

Girl in Mexican Market

45

Herculean Desire Sculpted abdominals Deliver less joy than sculpting Aphrodite’s flawless figure.

A physical product of my father’s voracious Hormones while prisoner To my mother’s artistic spirituality, She enraptured A titan, saddling a hero’s destiny On a horse who would rather groom The track than run its circle.

Atlas gains motivation When he see the definition Built into my shoulders Since conception (of my burden).

Divine intervention Is a line without a dial tone When Zeus is your javelin coach And you ask him to pay for lyre lessons.

Jack Neary

47 46

Ode to a Glove Were you gobbled up by that asthmatic dryer, Joining the ranks of lost socks and underwear that went before you, Grateful to be relieved of your duties, Happy to never again wipe another nose, Stuffing the lint trap in your jubilation?

Or, maybe I dropped you in the park And now your tattered digits help keep a sparrow’s nest.

You’ll sit snug against the baby bird’s belly As worms spiral from beak to beak.

At least then you’d be keeping someone warm.

I don’t know how many sniffles I’ll have to subdue Before this new pair fells like you.

But, know that your mate sits in the hallway closet Atop a pile of ear warmers, Looking out from her widow’s walk, Scanning the horizon for white sails.

Katie Sullivan

47

Horan - Devoured.JPG Stylized woman with leafy hair holding a shallow bowl

“Devoured�

Richard Horan

49 48

Dandelion.

Slowly, softly the wind picks up

The cottony sphere pulled in two

directions

Yanked out by the caress of the gale,

The missionary goes to s p r e a d

its seed to the freshly cut lawn

below.

Carried by the gust, it ventures forth

To uncharted land, the New World

Those on the outside watch as it infests.

They watch it populate the land

Then they dispel the carrier

Triumphant once more over

The workings of the earth.

Caroline McCrossen

49

Air

Tony Ogden

His lips were speckled with red tomato blood. I didn’t say anything; it looked intentional, and I didn’t much feel like talking.

I remember most the red and green patterning and the darkness of the restaurant, like the designer had tried to make an Italian flag but used dusky grey thread instead of white. A thin, dull haze hung apathetically in the air, sifting only a little as the occasional uniformed waiter moved through it like a dark red wraith. There could have been one such ghost or hundreds hovering around in wait for an empty wine glass or a new set of diners and neither number would have surprised me. I fingered the crisscrossed table cloth and poked my tortellini dinner as I thought about taking another bite.

“So,” he said, twenty minutes of silence tinkling broken to the ground. “The lasagna is nice tonight…”

I nodded, waiting for him to clear his throat.

He cleared his throat. I had started noticing that recently, always a small comment, a clearing of the throat, then what he meant, always, never just a comment, never just what he meant.

“You’re probably wondering why I wanted to eat here tonight.”

No, I wasn’t.

“Yeah…”

“Well…” he started.

This was Our Place. We had our first date here. The duskiness had been mysterious then, a pleasant obscurity between smiling strangers.

It was still exciting at our one year anniversary where we (maybe just I) pretended we were spies for the Resistance stealthily passing information about the war in our dinner conversation. By the beginning of our third year, the restaurant felt like a warm blanket, a public hearth, a place to drink hot chocolate and smile wordlessly. He had proposed here, and as the fizzing of the champagne died down I had said yes. I remember the room looking strangely the same through happy tears, still as dusky, still as dark.

He cleared his throat again, his left hand playing with the cuff on his right. I swallowed my breath in bites and turned slightly to look at him.

His eyes, dark brown in the light though I often fancied them hazel, were avoiding me, rolling around as if fixed to a circular track.

“Well, uh, first, I got you something.”

He reached furtively into his coat pocket and pulled out a CD case, unwrapped, missing its booklet.

“It’s a ‘The Who’ CD. I saw it at Rasputin’s the other day and thought how you like The Who, so, well, yeah…”

He thrust it across the table, smiling weakly, and I took it, smiling weakly as well.

51 50

“-nks,” I managed to say, nodding. I had sung along to Baba O’Reilly once on the radio a few months ago, so once in a while since then he had gotten me one of their CDs. This time it was “Who’s Next.” I only had one other copy.

I held the CD and looked down into it, imagining it spinning and hypnotizing me into thinking I was a house cat or having an orgasm or taking pictures in a foreign country far-away.

“Anyway, I, I have something to say.”

My stomach locked itself as if expecting to get kneed and the locking radiated out down my legs and up to my shoulders and neck until—

“I want you to know that I love you, I-like-um, I mean, you’veyou’ve gotta know that, I love you, I; so much, and I would never want to do anything to make you think that’s not true, I mean, especially cuz, y-you know, because we’re getting married in a few months and you need trust in a marriage, right? I, well, I… I slept with Sally a few weeks back, you remember Sally, I think you met her at that office party last year?, and it didn’t mean anything and it has nothing to do with my love for you, It was just that one time and…”

The label side of the CD was scratched lightly and I wondered what the other side looked like. I tried to open the case but my shoulders were trying to heave and I had to concentrate just to keep them still. I wasn’t too worried, though: you can fix most scratches by rubbing white toothpaste into them and then wiping it off with a hand towel.

A couple arrived to sit down at the table behind him and I watched them as he continued to talk, telling me about how he had let her stay at his apartment the night of the blizzard. They looked to be about thirty, both dressed up. She held a red rose and placed it to the side of her plate before sitting down. Their faces were indistinct even at this distance but it looked like they were smiling. I imagined they were chatting about the political climate in the elementary school where he certainly taught 5th grade math or the big case at her law firm that her perennial rival desperately wanted to snatch. I decided they were named Bob and Marla, both only children, and liked reading fifties science fiction when no one else was watching. “…and I, accidentally walked in on her in the shower and that was, I, uh- … I’m so, so, sorry, and this has been killing me and I just had to tell you but it means nothing….”

My throat started to feel scratchy as I inhaled, so I drained my glass of water. One of the waiters buzzed by to refill it but I waved him away and he faded back into the fog.

“I still want to marry you,” he continued, “and I’ll totally understand if you want some time to yourself, but I thought this would be the best place to tell you cuz we’re used to it, and it’s Our Place, and you can say whatever you want or cry and no one else will look at us funny.

51

So, yeah, that’s, pretty much it, and, I, yeah…”

I glanced at the door. The thicket of tables and the spongy smoke spread in the way like a bog, and I suddenly wanted to feel spring-chilled air flowing around me like a chiffon dress.

“Cupcake?” he whispered tremulously.

I hated that pet name, hated it.

“No,” I managed to squeak out before bolting.

I crashed into a twenty-something girl coming from the bathroom and hurtled on towards the door. I glanced back quickly and saw her catch herself as my fiancée got up to chase me, hastily tossing some bills onto the table on his way.

I was swimming through sand and the air was slow to enter my lungs. I darted around the tables, shot past the maître d’ like a gust only to be caught by the lumbering mass of families and couples and business associates waiting in the vestibule. The smoky air was even thicker here than before and I gasped and gasped, hoping to find just a small handful of oxygen. An image of his fingers falling apologetically onto my shoulder flashed through my head and I closed my parted lips, lowered my head, and dove through.

The air plunged past me and I inhaled it all at once. I kept running listlessly for a few moments, letting my momentum slough away on its own until I stopped in front of the restaurant’s fountain (still empty until after the threat of snow). I held the chilly air in my lungs until its ice began to burn, then let it out like steam.

The world slowed, then, I saw cars slide by, painting with distant clouds of headlight and turning signal in swathing streaks along the street. Heavily distorted din pounded out the door of the restaurant and seemed bombastic out in the cold. A couple sat in the square on a bench, motionless, staring into each other, and I was surprised every time they exhaled. The brave, romantic souls eating on the restaurant’s outdoor space-heated patio played a percussion sonata with the clinks of their forks and cups on as many ceramic saucers, and the beat crashed over me like foamy waves. I closed my eyes and savored the salt.

I heard his rubber boots crushing heavily into the concrete behind me, his heavy breathing, and the high-pitched whine of words straining at the dam of his lips.

“Look,” he wheezed to my impassive back, “Cynthia, It’s not… not about you, really, it’s, I’m sorry—” “Stuart,” I interrupted, not turning around, “we’re breaking up.”

“No, y-, I’m-, I promise, it was a one time—”

“It’s not that,” I said almost sadly. “I thought it might be, but it’s not.”

Stuart breathed heavily, raggedly, trying to get out a question.

“Sally told me,” I said over my shoulder. “Earlier today over coffee.”

53 52

He gave a strangled grunt and froze through.

“She was teary and shaky and said she couldn’t take it anymore, and she had threatened to tell me if you didn’t by today, but that it didn’t matter anymore anyway.”

Stuart stuttered for something to say through his shock and anger.

“I thought I might be angry, or scared, and I guess I should be, but I’m not, not really.”

“But you said—”

“I still don’t want to marry you,” I said, almost to no one in particular. “I don’t know if I ever did.”

“Cynthia, I love you.”

I paused for a moment as a car with particularly good speakers drove by.

“Maybe you do,” I said. “Maybe I even love you still, I don’t know.”

I took a breath, savored it, swilled it around in my mouth, then turned around smiling wide.

“Look me up in a few years. Maybe I can tell you more then.”

The restaurant windows were leaking din and dingy darkness into the street, but it had all dissipated into but a wisp on the ground by the time it reached my feet. I could still taste the garlic bread I had eaten less than an hour before. The sign glowed darkly from the subtle neon backlighting.

“Though, why do you think we chose this as Our Place?”

“I—”

“It wasn’t really a question,” I said. “Go home, Stu.”

The night air rounded the corner of the restaurant and flowed in tumults over Stu and me. My hair danced invisibly in the black night sky, invisible except for when it caught the light of a street lamp or interrupted a star. Stu stood still for a moment before setting his jaw and clipping off in a speed. I closed my eyes and let the breeze whirl around me, then shivered and went back into the restaurant for my coat.

53

Hay - Foyn Harbour.jpg Color photo of a harbor with crazy clouds and icebergs

Sam Hay

55 54

Letter to Papa from Cedar and Fairmount Dear Papa: Remember the night you got the moon for me?

There was so much light. Like everything was pretty and clean and glowing.

But the more days I kept it, the less light there was. And after it was gone, well, I don’t really remember. The doctor tells me I have to try. That I have to try and remember what happened when it was dark.

Now I remember there were stained curtains tied together with shoe laces and doors swollen from the heat and always locked.

I was supposed to be real quiet, but now the doctor wants me to scream and punch and fight.

He wants me to hate you and to yell in a big voice that none of it was my fault. Now I remember yelling.

I’m supposed to write you a letter Saying that I was a good girl and you were a bad man, but I remember tripping over the rug, spilling your drink across the table, breaking the glass and dropping to my knees in tears.

I remember that it was my fault.

If I had just been more careful, if there had just been more light, maybe if I had asked you just one more time for the moon. Love, Monica

Vanessa Vacante

55

After 9/11, I Understood God sweat drips on foreheads—icy pearls under a blue-oyster sky shucking scattered shells on dunes of sand and metal scattered like dreams being sold at a bombshell bazaar a thousand footprints left in streets like buried aztec coins you hope you never find back in your pocket watch blades spinning like minutes on a mantle clock tick and turn and shout ‘heaven ain’t far behind boys stop the wheels to let her catch up’ grinding over rubble and bones and half-skinned prayers from mud-caked lips and selfish flesh and skeletons burnt by clawing sun and lost reflections in booming clouds of smoke and faith in golden crosses weighing down your throat you whisper through on shaking nights saying ‘i understood god with a gun in my hand but believed in him when i threw it down’ deep down that foxhole you dive inside to come out clean but buried in shrapnel of your mangled thoughts that whiz past ears like copper bullets you huddle together a thousand arms and legs of bloody bone clanking to the tune of America losing sight of sides and sex and home and hate tucked as one cacophonous trench where you the unit can rock to turbines and screams and remember what it’s like to have an ‘us’ in the world

Gino Orlandi

57 56

Bender - Untitled2.jpg Painting of a Flower on a brick wall

Lauren Bender

57

Estonia

I First, Stalin burned the forests.

Next, planted hemlocks in

mathematical rows so no one could hide in the woods,

sap running down the legs of the evergreens.

II I melt gooseberries into jam, mosquitos even swarming at my eyes.

III In the near arctic, the moon rises late— we don’t sleep.

I catch you crying: the constellations are different from home—

where is your Carina, keel of a ship?

at the sink of her cement house.

Her cat births, skin weathers.

The pond is lukewarm, pollen coated.

A rain of insects and woodsmoke bury us as you take the spoon from my hands already too sugared and dark

IV We collect milk from the woman uphill.

Deaf, humming

We bring her raw honey from bees in boxes.

59 58

V We never separate, not even to launder our sheets.

Together take our shoes off,

fill tubs in the pond, add clothing & soap, stomp,

churning suds barefoot;

water blackens around our ankles—

Skye Shirley

59

McConnaughey - An Occasionally.jpg An Oil Painting of a woman, mostly in purples and greens.

An Occasionally Honest Self-Portrait

61 60

Kelly McConnaughey

The Oval Vessel of Shigaraki Clay

I’ve seen you, standing in the dark dancing in the street You hold yourself like water in cupped hands.

Amy Keresztes

61

Chu - Witches.jpg A Cartoon strip of witches and a little girl.

“Witches”

Brian Chu

63 62

Song of Four Seasons In spring, rain against her skin, tapping light rhythms upon her spine. She delights in water, lives it, breathes it, sings it.

In summer, sun on her face, warming her like a melody.

She revels in sanguine sunshine, dances in radiance.

In fall, wind in her hair, pitching the world into song. She shivers with the leaves, dissonance in the air.

In winter, frost on her cheeks, like a lullaby. She fades into earth, left dreaming of spring rain once more.

Stephanie Lee

63

Arredondo - Winter.JPG Painting of a winter landscape

Ryan Arredondo

“Winter”

65 64

Sitting on a stone shelf Water-wizened feet Pocked by granite spine relief

Salt sea meets stone Erodes and reveals Surfaces subcutaneous

Grind a muscle shell against And unveil pink white pearl Beneath a blue-bland exterior

Matt Flagg

65

Yongbok-Hwang - Abe.jpg Abe Lincoln’s eyes depicted in pen and marker on a yellowish background.

“Abe”

Yongbok Hwang

67 66

Friday/Friday Colin Ryan

All the other bums shake their cups too, but I don’t just do it to beg.

Shit, people can tell that already: black man with large-ass boots, sitting on the street with no hat. When I shake my cup, I do it for the music. I move my mouth with it, put the sounds in there. Clinkity clonk. Jingle jangle. Swishswish if it’s full. Today, it ain’t.

Still, I got a damn good spot right here next to the ATMs. I waited a long time for it. Used to be Riley’s, that old piss-pot. I guess he’s some kind of veteran, Nam I guess. Or maybe he’s dead. He carved a nice living out of this spot for a while. I’d see him down at Blanchard’s sometimes, hair all combed and looking real good to buy his bottle. Pretty soon, though, boy got too familiar to people. The bills became coins, coins changed shape and color, then stopped falling period. But I’m the next guy, and I got a gimmick with these little bowls. One For Bread, one For Wine, For Lookin’ Fine, For Hangovers, For dancing, For Romancing. Now I don’t get much for bread, and apparently I ain’t a real good-looking boy. But Wine and Dancing make good money on weekends. Sundays are all about Hangovers, and Romancing always brings in the bills. As for today: it’s Friday, tee-gee-iee-effing-eff, wine and dancing, dancing and wine, best day of the week.

A lot of people would guess that it don’t matter to a homeless guy what day it is, since he ain’t got a job or a family to go home to. Fridays are reserved for real people, they’d say, or think without saying. But they’d be wrong. For one thing, Fridays are when everyone’s in the best mood. They’re when people are the most generous, but it ain’t just that. Everybody sees the world better on a Friday, sees how much there is outside their dirty little work bubble, sees there are lights and sounds and skyscrapers, and sometimes other people. As for me, I’ve got two lip-smacking reasons to love Friday: on Fridays, I get my voice from Ram and my action from Maggie, and it’s time to get getting. I kick my bowls off the sidewalk and point to my effects.

Don’t nobody touch my shit while I’m gone.

Like anybody would. What is there? Just a foam pad, a change of clothes, some paint buckets. I head east on down Comm Ave. I’d take Newbury but people are still outside this time of year and a guy can only take so many of those looks, the ones that say, “I’m looking at you but I ain’t seeing you, I’m seeing past you.” I go by the Harvard Club and wonder what actually goes on in there.

There’s probably rooms full of velvet and white men in smoking jackets, sucking on cigars and drinking Wild Turkey from real crystal. They’re probably talking about the Dow Jones and Iran and how times are tough and how the immigrants are killing them.

My jeans are stiff as a dirty board, full of grime. I was supposed to wear my other ones. I guess Maggie won’t care though, she never seems to care anymore.

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The wind is damn cold for October. Money’s tight right now, too. I got a few wads of singles wrapped in hair bands, maybe 80 bucks. But it won’t last till November. Not this year.

Man, when you walk everywhere. I know this city real good now, all the ins and outs, all the little sidestreets. I know it better than I ever knew Atlanta. I even know Chinatown—where to get old noodles, where the college kids go to chug sake and Chinese beer, which isn’t half bad when you get down to it. You wouldn’t think it, the way those Chinese drink. A shot or two and it’s all flush and lazy eyes and smiles.

Ram’s got me ducking into the T to visit his newsstand underneath the stairs. He’s walled up by Hershey bars and tabloids, like he’s in the pen.

Boy definitely looks like he’s in prison with that orange tee he always wears, and he doesn’t look happy to see me either. But he’ll give me what I need.

The Indians gotta be charitable and whatnot, it’s part of their religion. Part of ours too, but I guess that ain’t important to people these days. I get out my flashcards. I got ‘em in order. Good Morning—Ram.

Ram squints out from behind the gum. “Back again, my friend?”

Next card. We aren’t friends—Ram. “Yes, don’t I know it,” Ram says. “Every day you come by here scaring off my white customers. Like I needed any help doing that. Newspapers are fucked. The gum is older than my Bengali grandmother.” He pulls up a copy of Asian Fever from a blacked-out rack and shakes it in my face. “Only thing that sells in this neighborhood is pornography! Look at this filthy shit. I have to sell this all day, and on top of that I have you coming here asking for paper.”

Bengali grandmother. Now that’s a fun one. Next card’s all worn out, ripped at the corners. I’ve been pulling this one for a year now. I’m sorry for your troubles—Ram—It’s a fucked up world we live in.

“Yeah, you got that right buddy. I’ve got done-up whiteys slobbering over little Asian girls for five minutes before they go off to run the fucking world, and they don’t even buy, the cheap bastards.”

Somebody, some body pushes past me and I give him a little of the stink eye. I can tell just by his eyebrows he’s one of those overeducated little pricks, always thinking about what he thinks is the ultimate. Fresh out of Harvard or MIT, I’m sure, reading the paper like his boss does, thinking, aw, look at it, ink and paper and everything.

Meantime he sits at a screen all day putting in numbers, taking out numbers, talking to nobody. And when he can finally chat up a guy who doesn’t care about any of that shit, all he’s got is, “Copy of the Globe, yeah?” And Ram, he’s gotta stand there every time, take the change and pretend it doesn’t kill him, play like he ain’t interested in talking to anyone as long as he lives.

A quick one to the side of the shin, the ribs, the throat. Ruin him.

“What are you looking at?” He asks me.

He thinks he’s gotta act tough. The city does that shit to people, he thinks. It twists them around. It makes little beasts of them.

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“What? Don’t you have anything to say?”

Genius, this one. Time for the pen. Yes—Where’s your mommy—my little ginger snap?

His hand goes for his wallet. He looks at Ram. A nervous little giggle, then, “What is this? Is this guy deaf?” He looks back at me. “Are you deaf?”

Are you blind?

“Whatever.” Boy turns his eyes to the newspaper and ducks away into the crowd.

I’m fine how I am. It ain’t all bad, really. I make enough to get by, more than plenty of people on this earth—talk about India, what the people got there, Ram’s people, and that’s without cyclones and tsunamis and all manner of wrath. Me, I’m good enough that I get into the shelter most nights during the cold, and I like sleeping outside, anyway. Better for the lungs. Too much air conditioning ain’t good for you. Can I have the mailers, Ram?

Ram rolls his eyes, does it so much I get dizzy watching. “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not allowed to give them to you. It is illegal.

Do you understand?”

Always putting up a fight. That’s what I like about this guy. Nobody will miss them—They get emails about that shit—Come on, Ram—help out another darkie in need.

“I am no darkie, you homeless piece of shit. I am Indian.” His eyes go again, and I can tell I got him. It’s all just a show with him.

You ain’t supposed to like a homeless person, or domestically challenged, or whatever. You ain’t even supposed to talk to them.

Now I never understood that. In fact, I hear there’s a whole bunch of people in Europe who live like me, it’s their culture. Gypsies, I think. You gotta be tough to live like that. You gotta be smart. You gotta know how to survive. That’s what people forget. Nobody remembers what it’s like to make a couple bucks, enough to eat your next meal, what a warm coat is worth.

Nobody knows how to survive anymore. And how can you live if you can’t survive? You can’t. I can survive. I can live.

But people don’t want to learn, ‘cause you ain’t supposed to talk to a homeless person. You ain’t even supposed to see them.

All except Ram. “Fine, take them if it means so much to you,” he says. “What do I care? Nobody buys them anyway. Everyone just wants to browse.”

I get all the magazines I can, People and In Touch and all those shitrags mostly because they’re the most empty, which is why they throw so many inserts in there. Pretty soon they’ll be all junked up with yellow bubbles and discount math and photos of celebs without makeup, trying to rope in subscribers. Who wants these for Christmas, who’s got the gall to give them, I’ll never have a damn clue.

You’re a good man—Ram.

“Yes, I must be. Now don’t come back.”

This is the best part right here. Same time next week?

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His jowls on back and forth, like one of those big rescue dogs they got on cartoon ski slopes. “If you come back, I’ll call the police.”

I’m paying Maggie a visit, like every Friday night. How she ended up here, nice smart white girl from the suburbs, I don’t know.

And I don’t want to, either. I just know if I bring her home some food it usually ends up with us getting intimate, and that works fine for me.

We have a knock and everything, and not just “Shave and a Haircut,” either. A secret one. And I ain’t saying a thing about it except what I just said about it. She’s some kind of artist, Maggie. All kinds of artist, really. She tries to explain what she does sometimes, but she usually gets flustered and gives up. I ain’t even sure she knows what it’s all about. Anyway, art ain’t the only thing she does.

She cracked into speedballing not a few weeks ago. Last time I was there, the apartment was full of weird shit, even more than usual: black rocks, white rocks, sculptures made of needles, an easel, there’s tape recorders, cigarette butts, and stacks of Polaroids like she’s a big-time reporter timetraveled here from the 80s. I even saw a few pencil drawings of me. There’s other stuff, in there, too: books, nail polish, a little ceramic Cheshire cat. You can tell about someone. I came in and she was crouched in the middle of the room, like she always is when she ain’t stoned, looking up at me. Like she was trying to think about what she was thinking about.

“When was the last time you showered?” She asked me, first words out of her mouth. Every time that needle touches her skin, girl sounds more and more like one of the Nellie Lutcher records Ma listened to on our Unitra turntable.

I raised one of my eyebrows. I knew she liked that. Last time I was here—, I said. It’s cold out—I haven’t sweat at all.

“That’s not what I’m worried about. You eat nothing but cheeseburgers and egg drop soup.”

Yeah, and she’d probably eat nothing if I didn’t bring that shit home for her.

I went to the bathroom. I hadn’t brushed my teeth in longer than it feels right to say, and from the look of that bathroom neither had Maggie. I ran the water hot and held the brush under there, ‘cause they say whenever you flush the toilet all the shit particles shoot up in the air and end up on everything. The mirror was covered with grime and spit marks, like every time Maggie sees her mug in the mirror she tries to spit on it. Wasn’t any toothpaste left as far as she was concerned, but that was just her opinion. I took my knife and cut the tube open. This ain’t a bad city, but you’d be crazy not to protect yourself, particularly with all the fratboys walking around. I scraped some of it onto the brush and went at it. It brought me back to when I was learning how to brush.

I see they got bubblegum flavored toothpaste now for kids, with sparkles in it and Spongebob on the tube and everything.

Used to be had a toothpaste called Darkie, too, with Al Jolson on the

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box, but they changed it to Darlie like that was fooling anybody.

Anyway, it was always Gleem or Pepsodent or one of those brands Ma grew up using, and she’d watch me in the mirror with her hands on her hips, “go all the way back, Effie, and the insides too, and don’t forget the tongue, else your breath’ll drive all the other kids away and you’ll end up playing with yourself.” It wasn’t until I was eight or nine that I started laughing at that one.

She always called me Effie, didn’t matter to her that it was a girl’s name. I’d guess it was her way of wanting a daughter. Instead she got me.

That was back when I could still talk, and boy did I. I was a regular chatterbox—woke up chatting, went to bed chatting, chatted in my sleep.

And when I wasn’t chatting I was humming a tune. Ma got used to it, but the guys she brought home didn’t. “What’s wrong with him?” I’d hear them say.

Holding my milk glass up to the wall between our rooms was my Sunday morning. That, and church. “What’s wrong with him?” She’d say. “He’s five, that’s what’s wrong with him. He’s six, that’s what’s wrong with him. He’s seven, that’s what’s wrong with him.”

We ate ramen noodles from one of her cabinets because I was saving up for a pair of gloves. Then we went at it a while. Laying down, standing up, sideways. Maggie never closes her eyes. She likes to look around the room, see everything, watch everything. Her TV was broken so afterwards I flicked on an AM/FM radio I snagged from one of those places that still sells beepers and cellphones from three years ago. Maggie started playing with her chemistry set, wearing nothing but some bottoms.

Nothing like it.

I started talking on the notepad she keeps for me. I said, That’s how that artist died—you know—.

“Basquiat? A fucking genius.” She’s a sweet girl, Maggie, except when she talks about art. “Did you know he…?” And she stopped, like she wasn’t sure if Basquiat would be lost on me, or if maybe I knew a sight more than she did. “If only I were so lucky,” Maggie said.

Actually—I was thinking of Belushi—

“Ditto.” She tapped her feet at the box spring, belting up and flicking the needle as she did. “And anyway, that’s not how he died. It’s how he lived.”

She shot into a red blotch in the crook of her elbow. I watched her go up. She did a little dance with just her arms and hopped back into the bed, ready for round two. Hey, honey, how do you do. She was laughing now, having a time of it. It’s really something to watch a girl become the center of her own attention. But I saw her come down, too. All the muscles relaxed, even the ones down there, and her head rolled on her shoulders. I saw her losing everything.

I could see the “so what” what happens when a person knows somewhere, just knows nobody can help them or stop them, just knows they’ll be doing it forever. I could see it all right down to her toenails all chipped up.

She wasn’t afraid to close her eyes anymore, and I wasn’t afraid to

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do her backways.

Like I said, I’m paying Maggie a visit. But first I’m taking a little detour, stopping in at Terry’s bar for a beer. Around the corner I pass a skinny chick on with short red hair. She’s wearing Chucks and stockings, both with holes in them, and she’s got a ferret on a leash with a tinkling bell around the collar. Rich people are always trying to look poor, and always fucking up at it. Nice guy, Terry. Jewish, I think. He ain’t around tonight, the bouncer tells me. “S’alright by me though,” he says. Terry lets me sit and listen to jazz nights, all except prime time when everybody comes in that like to think they listen to jazz nights. I’m a drummer, you see. Used to have a cassette player and some tapes, stuff I found laying around at sidewalk sales and gas stations and whatnot. Miles of course, Charlie Parker, all sorts of Afro-Cuban stuff, even some rock band called Rush—god-awful, they are, but man can that boy burn up a kit. Now I just got my buckets and my sticks. I ain’t the best street drummer around, but I don’t play for money so it don’t matter. And in here it’s all those instruments talking to each other, horns honking at the bass purring for the sax wailing at drums blasting at everybody.

The house band is practicing, it’s a solid four-piece bebop. You don’t get much of that these days. Instead you got that garden party jazz where the drummer only knows how to use brushes. This is the best time to see a band, when they’re just being silly, trying shit out, trying to impress themselves, outsmart themselves. The bartender drops me a beer. It’s mostly head, but it’s a beer just the same, and free. I saw Maggie here, a long time ago, before we started together, even before I started seeing her at Ram’s newsstand. I didn’t even realize it until I heard her laugh once, a couple weeks ago at some joke I told her. It was a raunchy one about a truck driver and his young wife. Hers was one of those laughs where you forget you ain’t supposed to laugh, where you don’t give a crap who hears you because what you heard is so funny or unfunny. Those people, the ones that like to think they listen: Maggie was one of them, I think. It was a quick thing, really. I heard her, I saw her, I liked her, and I forgot all about her. Until she turned up at Ram’s newsstand.

Morning mama—, every morning I saw that mama. First time she said a word to me, she didn’t. Instead she blinked, real hard. What’s this black beauty telling me, she asked herself, I’m not his mother. She’d come to the newsstand and I wasn’t sure why, I was too busy loving her walk.

All the drugs can’t do a damn thing to that walk, what moves in all the wrong places and all the right ones too.

It took a long while. Started out Maggie ignored me, in a fashion.

Like I said, if she really didn’t care she’d stop coming to Ram’s random stand.

She bought Trident, she bought Vogue, she bought all manner of cheap junk, but she bought it regularly, and after a couple times of seeing her I got regular too, real regular. Most of the time I didn’t even ask for anything. Maybe that’s why Ram got so pissed off at me, because I was like one of the whiteys reading the Asian porn and not buying it. I don’t even like Asian

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porn, and I couldn’t afford it if I did. Anyway, I’d post up against one of the platform columns, or one of the benches, and she’d come down like clockwork, and I’d hold up that sign, Morning, mama—, even though it wasn’t near morning. It wasn’t a mistake, either, and one day she got to see why.

I’ll never forget it. She was wearing some kind of red dress, a gray cardigan. She looked different from in Terry’s bar. Thinner, sure, but more than that. She came up to me, saw me for once, and she said, “You know, it isn’t morning. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.”

It’s morning for me. Wait for it now, wait for it.

She raised an eyebrow. It looked good on her. “Oh? Why is that?”

And oh baby, here’s the kicker. Because—seeing you every week—is like waking up. Bam. And Maggie, I didn’t even know her name was Maggie yet, and all she knew how to do is tell me her name. I gotta say, I was surprised.

Sure, she looks fragile; sure, she looks like she needs someone. But this guy?

I was happy just looking at her until more started happening. And it did. She kept coming, and it was loverly. Once a week, we rapped about all kinds of things. Ideas, boy, she was an idea girl. She said I didn’t deserve the hand I got dealt. Now that was nice. Yeah, is sweet, was sweet, this girl. But she was sour, too. She talked about hippie communes and shit, talked about how much better off we’d all be if life was simple, modest. “Mark Twain said, ‘Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. Or something like that.” Or something like that. She said that one a lot, like a twitch, or like the way some people say “like” all the time, in between everything, using it like sawdust in a cage full of gerbils.

We started taking walks around. I thought to myself every Friday, ain’t it amazing what being with another person does for all the looks? It was almost like we were supposed to be there. Seems like it don’t matter if you’re a junkie or a bum, so long as you have someone to be a junkie or a bum with.

As for the junkie part, I figured it out early enough with Maggie. It wasn’t just the shakes, the scratching, all the same shit I know and done. It was the hiding. It was the longsleeve shirts with longsleeves too short, pulled down tight anyway. It was the way she stifled herself when she laughed. It was her fingernails, all clean, the skin around them scrubbed red. Ma used to scrub me like that. “Jim’s gonna think, Dan’s gonna think, Shawn’s gonna think you been doing handstands on one of them vacant lots over in Vine City all day,” all the while scraping away at my little digits with the same pink half of a washcloth.

One day she took me to her apartment. About the only things that ain’t changed are the Cheshire cat and the cigarette butts. Back then it was a tidy little affair full of tidy little hiding spots, bottom drawers and cabinets open, hanging pants with bulging pockets. And Maggie wasn’t scared, not one bit. She didn’t move anything, didn’t touch anything, she let me move and touch. She even blinked. Still, the way she does to this day, Maggie watched.

There wasn’t any hostility, nothing like that. No, it was curiosity. And for a man who’s used to being ignored, it took some getting used to.

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She told me to undress. So I did, and she watched. She asked me if I wanted her to undress. So I said hell yeah, and she did, and I watched. She pulled me into her bed, and I didn’t ask questions.

Waiting for the light to change, I fill the creases in my palm with green ink from my pen. Ma used to read palms sometimes. She knew just about every way to make a little bit of money, even if it wasn’t enough to put away in the jar. “You’ve got a nice, clear love line, Effie,” she said once. “That means you’re gonna be lucky in love. And these little lines here, they’re all different girls. You’re gonna knock ‘em dead, honey, just you wait and see.

And see here? It’s not broken. That means one day you’ll bring home a nice girl, and you’ll get married and stay married.”

Maggie ain’t quitting. Believe me, I know. I was one of those heads who saw nothing-faces in Italian suits behind every hit.

There wasn’t anything I could do about it, I said. Their fault, not mine, I said.

How I got off it, I don’t have a clue. But it took me a long time, that’s for sure. It always takes a long time, and usually it ain’t permanent. Everyone knows that, even the people who have no goddamn business. Maggie’s one of those. A nip of the real quality stuff now and again, some pills, one of those eating disorders, sure. But not this, this wadded up bill for a rock and a vial and a coffin shit. It ain’t right. And on top of it all she’s taking the shortcuts, snowballs, more and better.

It’s pathetic, what it is. Nothing but a sack of meat, sugar and opium.

But it ain’t for me to judge, I don’t think.

“Zombies.” That’s something Maggie said to me last week. I was asleep, more or less. I could tell from the sounds outside that a couple hours had passed since we got after each other. I sat up. There was a guy on the radio, talking about how the ghost of some Sirhan Sirhan was haunting his toolshed with the same pistol he used to kill whoever he killed. Maggie was crouched in the middle of the room.

What?

She didn’t answer.

I put on some shorts and sat down on the floor next to her, put my arm around her, nice and cool. Zombies? Like—Night of the Living Dead zombies—or—Return of the Living Dead zombies?

“Stop it.” She pushed me away, nibbled at a hangnail and spit out the grime underneath it. “Shuffling through life, rotting, stinking, groaning for brains and nonsense, knowing nothing except how to make more zombies.

And they don’t stop coming.”

That’s Maggie. Metaphors. Always with the metaphors. Maybe she got her last hit wrong, didn’t get enough, needed more. Either way, Maggie was hurting.

Am I—a zombie?

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She laughed. It was nothing like before, nothing like the first time I knew her. “No, you’re a vampire,” she said. “You suck the blood out of our prosperous little society. Or something like that.” She was being sarcastic, I guess. It’s probably something her parents would say. She kept on chewing her nail.

At least I’ll live forever.

She started picking up the room, her unmentionables, an ATM receipt, crumpled up papers and tissues, a free calendar from last month’s Vogue still wrapped in plastic. She was stiff and bothered, reminded me of Ma even, the way she kept her head stock still and looking straight ahead at what she’s doing, trying to forget about everything else, about me. But she couldn’t, so she took my bowl away. “Finished?”

She sounded like shit. She looked and felt like it, too.

A little while later, we were in bed again, the sheets coming off, her knees touching the rubber mattress. I rolled over the remote, heard the high hum of the TV. Wasn’t any picture, just a flicker. The news mixed with some Tito Puente on the radio. Two black males, stockings, stray bullets. ObaMcCain, a Spanish neighbor, apartment fire, the governor of Illinois, and all of a sudden Maggie’s eyes went wide. “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to be a zombie, Ephraim. Don’t stop don’t let, don’t let me become a zombie, don’t let me…”

I dragged my teeth across her neck, white as my two front teeth. Such a pretty neck. Don’t worry, hon. Zombies can’t hurt vampires.

“…let me, Ef, don’t let me. Say I won’t. Say it like it’s the truth.”

I shook my head slow for her.

Where is this girl? Age and a half and then some, I still don’t get an answer. I knock a couple more times, for good measure. Then I sit a while longer in the hall, real still this time so I can listen. I hear the radiator inside her place, a mug against a countertop in some other apartment, I hear someone walking across the room downstairs, blowing their nose, the walls giving and getting, I hear all the little paintbrush strokes of being indoors. It ain’t crazy the same way as being outside, no wind, no millions of people talking and screaming, no horns. Well, actually, the horns are still there, and the people.

Come to think of it, the wind is too. It’s just all a little less, a little less and more hazy, if that makes sense.

I guess it suits people. I don’t know about me.

The deadbolt’s still in place and I ain’t hearing anything inside. If only I had my milk glass. Thoughts start running through my head, thoughts of what she done, thoughts about what I don’t know and I don’t know what, and somewhere in there I kick the door open, takes me a couple tries, and I’m running around like a maniac, checking the bathroom, the closets, throwing stuff around. The place reeks to high heaven, that sour smell of sick mixed in with some blood. Sure enough, there’s a neat little pile of it, on the floor next to the couch.

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It must have been that shit. Speedballs. First the rockstars, then the fat comedians, then the silly girls, the silly innocent girls.

But she ain’t here, which means somewhere, she is. And it seems to me the place looks different, too. The junk is all in different places, and there’s more junk on top, new junk. That Cheshire cat must have got broken. There’s a piece of it, the eye. I don’t see the rest. Somebody found her, not me, but somebody, and they called the medics, those beautiful ass-kicking life-saving medics, and they took her to the hospital. And she don’t have anybody, Maggie.

The closest is Brigham, I think.

That or the children’s hospital, but she ain’t going there.

Must be a mile or more down Huntington. When you walk everywhere, sure, but I’m running. “Don’t run around with your hands in your pockets, Effie. You’ll fall and break that pretty nose of yours.” That’s what Ma used to say.

Everybody’s out tonight, blue suede shoes and all manner of button shirts and short skirts. But hot damn, it’s cold. Don’t they know? There’s a guy chewing down pumpkin seeds, spitting the shells into the street and watching the cabs run over them, watching the pigeons worry. Doesn’t he fucking know?

“I told you once with this, don’t make me tell you with this.” Ma would flick her cheek, then flick her belt buckle. It was a sideways heart made of metal and pink paint. “This one wants you to listen. This one will make you listen.”

I run by a bank and get to thinking about my valuables. Riley, that vet—what if he ain’t dead, what if he’s just in a gutter somewhere and comes back for his spot? He’ll wreck the joint, he’ll piss on it. He always liked to piss on everything, out in the open for everyone to see. There ain’t enough, there ain’t near enough money in my pocket for a hit like that. What about the buckets? My goddamn bed?

Matter of fact, forget the bed. What about dancing and romancing?

What about hangovers?

All this shit is floating around in my mind, and in the middle of it all I see that notebook of mine, laying somewhere in Maggie’s place, and I see the last thing written on it, At least I’ll live forever. It fills up the page, the whole notebook, it’s written on the walls, it’s blaring through the jazz and the talk on the dial, it’s a voice, a man’s voice. “At least I’ll live forever.”

Buncha winners in here, too bee shure. We got a lady, yellow fulllength parka, yellow skin. We got a couple of dark boys with slicked back hair and goatees, now there’s a style that should’ve gone out of style. We got drugstore reading glasses. We got granola bars and psoriasis. We got a bullet in the ankle. We got people pricked with knives, we got prickly people, we got pricks. And we got sick, all over the place, sick in bags, buckets, on the floor. Let it rot, let them rot, ruin and rot.

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Maggie, 5’5”—sht brn hair, grn eyes—OD?

“Last name?” She’s Jamaican. I didn’t just miss out on talking, I missed out on talking pretty. But last name? Why the hell does she need a last name? It ain’t like there’s two five-five brown-haired green-eyed Maggies what overdosed on speedballs in this damn place. I don’t know.

Miss Nurse looks up, and it’s like all the lines in her face slant downwards. She ain’t pretty anymore, and her voice ain’t either.

“You…don’t know?” She says. “What’s your relation?”

Boyfriend—. A little white lie ain’t gonna hurt. This jamma mamma, in her scrubs, she’s wondering. She’s thinking, what’s wrong with him? She’s thinking, what’s his story, really? She’s thinking, does this Maggie even exist?

She’s thinking all this and that, and she’s saying:

“I’m sorry, but only blood relatives are permitted to see patients, and, ah, without a last name, you’re out of luck.”

You don’t understand—

“What’s not to understand? Your, ah, girlfriend, whose last name you, ah, don’t know, may be one of, ah, about a dozen overdoses currently in this emergency room. I hope she’s ok, but I can’t do anything for you right now.”

Stop looking at me like that—

“Like what?”

Like I’m a fucking idiot—and you’re a fucking bitch—

“Alright, sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Wait. Goddamnit, wait. I ain’t supposed to let her. She told me not to let her. She likes—Basquiat.

“Huh?” And jazz—she likes jazz—she likes to think she likes jazz—and—

“Sir, if you don’t leave, I’ll have you escorted out.”

And she likes to be in just bottoms—she’s got a dirty little mouth about art—

“…a homeless dude here…harassing…”

She—reminds me of my mother—

“The nurse reminds him of his mother?’

No goddamnit, I already said the nurse was a fucking bitch. Fucking security guards.

The boys in blue drag me along to the entrance, shove me down the stairs. One of them says, “Don’t come back, man. Get it?”

Nope. No clue.

He waits for me like I’m gonna give him a yessir, but of course he doesn’t know who he’s talking to, so he gets tough with me. “Did you hear me?” he says.

And how much do I need to nod my head? A little more? All I want is to know. A little more? All I want is for her to tell me it isn’t morning. A little more? All I want is a palm reading. A little more? All I want is some

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Gleem, some Pepsodent, some of that pink washcloth, some, “that’s what’s wrong with him.” A little more?

“I think this guy’s deaf, Mauricio. Are you deaf, man?”

Are you blind?

He snatches my pencil and tosses it across the street. “Get the hell out of here.” He trots away with his boy, Mauricio. Mauricio, and I catch one last thing, one of those, “I’ve got enough to do without some bum—” conversations cut off by the auto doors.

I take a seat, right there on the pavement, people going in on gurneys, coming out in wheelchairs, moaning, screaming, watching those doors open and close.

I sit down, and I wait.

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Kleila - Untitled.jpg A Color Photo of flowers laid across a bowl next to a collection jar.

Kristi Kleila

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Istanbul

I tried to tell you my history of women in head scarves and palms like animal hide, but I lost your eyes to old Roman

aqueducts and the city’s moldering stone walls. We climbed the brick stairs and I searched with quiet eyes for the moon

in the Bosphorous River while you woke the current. Between my breaths, you spoke of the Rumeli Castle built in 1452.

Your good ear was facing the street so you didn’t hear me say how the taxi we took to the market smelled of cigarettes

and bubble gum or how I sometimes mistake distant streetlights for stars on the edges of the sky. So much sugar

in my Turkish coffee, had me confusing grinds with grains. Night was falling. You kept silent, I kept stirring, till the waitress

whispered in Turkish that the shop was closing.

I counted the hours to home, where clocks read late afternoon, paled at the thought.

You tried to turn my cup over like some Middle-Eastern clairvoyant and asked to read my future. But I said I wasn’t finished.

Madeline McSherry

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Hay - Useful Island.jpg Picture of a single screaming penguin

Sam Hay

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Some Thursday in December

Today I walked a while, reading a novel I said goodbye to you for the second time, and when I came home, the sun had already begun to set.

I took my maps off the wall, and watched the room expand, silent and lovely in its loneliness painted walls white and full of cracks

This time of day, you can stand in the street, look down the block and see who’s doing their laundry from the steam billowing out of the pipes

It writhes, blending into the still air which begins around four o’clock to dissolve into wide sweeping strokes of pink, gold, blue

behind the slyly naked trees, whose branches hang like black lace and the clouds are wild mountain ranges against the sky.

My feet are singing, swollen soles.

Night hangs leaden; tomorrow it will snow.

Amy Keresztes

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Rodriguez-Vila - Untitled.JPG A Painting of a girl with red string coming out of her head.

Elisa Rodriguez-Vila

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In Houston for the Funeral roses with no thorns, chairs in lines the room was empty just your parents crushed sheets of pink stationary on tables pens uncapped, the words: “Please feel free to share a story about Emma.”

I crouch for the girl we dodged fire ants together mud pies, our knees bleeding when we biked with our elbows I am wearing black heels like the big ones shiny in your mother’s closet at eleven I thought you were lesbian loved me, shuddered at my cruelties, I wouldn’t share the sleeping bag I place the ballpoint down smearing against the salt: you had found a sea star in the popweed, on Cape Ann in 2000.

I said, “Give it back. It’s mine.”

“It’s itself’s,” you said and its arms were pink sandpaper, salt

Skye Shirley

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Boarding the Glass House

You can keep your glass house transparent Prop it up on rocky fjord or cliff.

A hanging fog kissing crumbled Bluff; you stare On brackish seas, and salty weeds, and hope Some eyes might come sailing through Your prism shell.

You can hide among the rushing breakers Thrashing tombstones, shattering White-foam chop beneath bowed Beams of the house you prop and shim, Prop and shim,

Raised higher, mounted, peering Over the edge and down, Watching sinking masts, wooden Arms, submerged like hardened bone In the thick, deep peat-water.

You can loom and pace and pine, But those seas won’t look in, No matter how tall your beams, How clear your glass.

Why don’t you come next door? Cross Crunched gravel, feet dusted white.

I’ve built my shelter, a silent Box—heart-of-pine, No windows.

My chimney smokes salted meats, Cured and crisp Black kettle whistles tunes To the flame.

We could whisper secrets till the evening comes, Words I would never tell a soul.

Gino Orlandi

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Thornbury - RE Oedipus.jpg A Digital Painting of a condom.

Re:Oedipus

Daniel Thornbury

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SEEKING Nobody’s as bored as me I’ve searched the air, I’ve searched the sea Still the fact remains to be, that nobody’s as bored as me Some folks hang around and chat to pass their dying days Some go to the movies and succeed to be amazed Others hang out on the block and walk and chill and daze Some play with their tomahawks, some do paper mache Summer sun and money runs Basketball and paintball guns All this could be fun it’s true But still I’ve got nothing to do Play guitar?

I’ve played so much my fingers swell and sore Go to shop?

I would but what I want I can’t afford Call a friend?

I could do that, but this is what we’ll do We’ll hang around together and be bored, no, bored times 2 And I don’t even care to make a difference in the day ‘Cause that would simply bore me too, my boredom’s here to stay I guess I could pack up my things and leave this very minute Go explore the world and every boring thing that’s in it But first I have to finish all this unexciting work By then I’ll be too tired to There’s too much that’s required to Packing?

Boring Train ride?

Snoring Aimless travel?

How alluring

Nobody’s as bored as me Any fool can clearly see That 1 + 1 + 1 is 3 And gum + chew is busy be That tea for two is two for tea But things to do are not for me So not a girl or squirrel or flea could ever be as bored as me

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Crystal Schultz

Flowers - On Friday, I Lost A Friend.jpg A Color Photo of a fish floating on the surface of the water.

Hilary Flowers

On Friday, I Lost a Friend

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Neon

He soon felt arise in his soul a desire for desires, an anguish – Tolstoy

It was a beautiful day, lit with a sun sea.

Kids carved the names of infatuation in schoolyard trees, coated their fingers with bloody sap.

Down the street, a cashier at the corner grocery sold food down a black belt, smiled to customers without care.

Behind her in the fruit isle a wrinkled couple stood dreamy, faced with the decision of which ripe melon to buy.

In the parking lot shopping carts rattled across the deserted pavement of unfilled lines.

We sit on porches and avoid stares, the reflected vacancy of the hotel neon glare.

It was a beautiful day, lit with a sun sea.

Alexandra Corcoran

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Bender - Untitled4.jpg An Oil painting of the ocean, lots of green and blue, very nice.

Lauren Bender

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Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience Caitlin Moran

It is too hot to be learning about poetry.

By all rights, school should be done for the year. May is almost half-over and the summer weather is upon us in full force, pushing the temperature into the high eighties. Girls are violating the dress code left and right, and carloads of seniors leave school for lunch and don’t come back.

Outside the windows of the English and History wing, the heat shimmers in fat clouds over the parking lot, where the tar bubbles up in small patches; beyond that, the soccer fields dissolve in hazy sunshine and the edge of the woods appears as a dark blur, where the juniors in Honors Biology are collecting leaves and soil samples in the coolness of the shade. I would give anything to lay down under a tree and fall asleep. “‘London,’” Miss Cane says. She hands out a pile of photo-copied sheets and our thumbs leave sweat marks on them as we hand them down the row. “In my opinion, this is William Blake’s finest poem. Most other teachers use ‘The Tyger’ from Blake, but I think this one is a little more fun.

More edgy.” None of us has the heart to tell Miss Cane that poems can’t possibly be edgy, or at least edgy enough to overcome this heat. I can’t concentrate with the way the backs of my thighs are sticking to my chair. A boy next to me, James, has fallen asleep with his head on the desk.

Miss Cane doesn’t care about the heat, or the sunshine, or that the school doesn’t have air conditioning. She is a hard, crusty sort of woman, anywhere between thirty and fifty, too talented to be teaching standardized English literature to tenth graders. But she likes us well enough and doesn’t resent us, or wish we were a little brighter, or blame us too much when we can’t pass her tests. We like her because she doesn’t put up with our garbage—it’s common knowledge that she has never had a student skip out on her detentions, and the one piece of good advice we received from the seniors on the first day of high school was that Miss Cane doesn’t accept late passes. She is dark and, from what we can see, very complicated; she has a full-sized poster of some painting called The Raft of the Medusa hanging behind her desk, and when we asked her about it, she gave us a long speech about constructing meaning from chaos and Romantic poets and Frankenstein. She only added afterwards that her father drowned in a boating accident when she was young. A kid looked for the Medusa on the Internet during lunch and turned up some grisly stuff. There had been shipwreck and mutiny and cannibalism involved. Miss Cane, we decided, may have been too cool for our town.

She asks us to study the handout and reluctantly I turn my face to the page. The poem is mercifully short. I write in my notebook four stanzas, four lines each. Blake wrote it in 1794 according to the bottom of the sheet.

I write that down too. ”Let’s look at the first stanza,” says Miss Cane, once she senses that the

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class is getting restless. That’s another good thing about Miss Cane; she knows we’re probably not going to get anything out of the poem until she tells us what it means. “A four-line stanza in poetry is called a quatrain,” she continues. “It comes to us from the French, quatre, and originally from the Latin, quattor. You’ll need to know this for the test, so look awake,” she adds.

We scramble to jot down this valuable piece of information. Miss Cane is big on word derivation, something no other teacher in the school has ever taught before. The gossip from the Languages Department is that Miss Cane had gone to a private boarding school on a full Latin scholarship in her teens.

Miss Cane picks Betsy to read the first two lines aloud like she always does. Betsy’s father is a minister, and she inherited his melodious reading voice, perfect for Bibles or textbooks. If my life is ever narrated, I want Betsy to do the job.

“I wandered thro’ each charter’d street, near where the charter’d Thames does flow,” Betsy reads.

“Tems, Betsy,” Miss Cane says. “The Thames is one of the most important rivers in the world, especially for English literature.” I write that down.

Betsy repeats the word and Miss Cane, satisfied, moves on. “Now who can tell me what the word ‘charter’d’ means?”

No one knows. I tune out for a while, letting my pen run up and down the spiral edge of my notebook. James is still sleeping like a baby next to me. I should be paying attention, I know I should. Nothing would make Mom happier than seeing me on the honor roll, and I’ve never gotten higher than a B in English. I don’t think I should be wasting my time studying—I should be spending time with Mom—but she wants to see me do well. She wants to be proud of me. I start listening again.

“Think of latitude and longitude lines,” Miss Cane is saying. She is still talking about chartered streets, I think. “Think of a grid. These streets are chartered because they’re plotted exactly, street after street. Look at the repetition in stanza two. ‘In every cry of every Man, in every Infant’s cry of fear, in every voice, in every ban.’ Every, every, every. Don’t you get the feeling that the world is closing in on this guy? Order has been perverted.

Instead of a well-ordered city, Blake is wandering through a labyrinth.

The grid has become a prison that he can’t get out of.” I close my eyes and imagine a grid, and I see a hospital chart, intersecting lines and numbers that I don’t understand getting bigger and bigger until I’m standing in them.

They become a hospital, white hallway after white hallway; I am serenaded by the beeping of machines as I wander through. Each wing is appropriately labeled: Neonatal. Geriatric. Oncology. But somehow there are no exit signs.

“‘Mark in every face I meet, marks of weakness, marks of woe.’”

Miss Cane has moved on when I open my eyes again. “Weakness. Woe.

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So these people are pretty sad looking, right? Think of the people he’s seeing. They’re factory workers. Prostitutes. Chimney sweeps. They’re dying young. They have TB. They have syphilis.” A boy in the back chuckles and Miss Cane makes him cower with a glance. I’m only vaguely sure what syphilis is but from Miss Cane’s glare I gather it must be pretty severe. For someone who spends as much time in a hospital as I do, I don’t know much about most illnesses.

“Richard, since you so kindly volunteered—” the boy in the back turns purple, “—you can answer my question for me. What else does Blake mean when he says ‘mark in every face I meet’?”

Richard and Blake obviously aren’t on the same wavelength. He mumbles something and slouches down in his seat; one of his buddies kicks the back of his chair. Miss Cane seems satisfied with this humiliation and turns to the board. She writes “Sight” as graffiti.

“When you mark something,” she says, “you are not only looking at it, you are changing it. You are writing on it. Everyone in this poem is branded, both by their condition and by the narrator. And, transitively, by you, the reader.” We seem to have forgotten that it’s hot out. We’re all listening now.

“Sight,” Miss Cane says, “isn’t neutral.”

Sight isn’t neutral.

One Sunday morning back when Mom first got sick and started chemo, we went to the grocery store to get eggs. Church had just let out and the store was packed; I held Mom’s hand as we wound through the aisles, pulled her along against the stares through seas of canned peaches and bags of rice. Word hadn’t gotten around yet how sick she was. Walking made Mom too tired, and we had to leave without the eggs. After that, Mom covered her bare head with a red bandana when she went outside. She didn’t want people to stare at her anymore. She didn’t want to be marked as sick.

I don’t take notes the rest of the class. The bell rings and I tuck Blake into my notebook. I register fuzzily that Miss Cane has assigned us a paper due later on in the week on the poem but I don’t protest with the rest of the class. I’m not hot anymore. The sweat has dried on the back on my legs like a cob-webby film and I feel like I’m standing on a cold London street, listening to the Thames lap against the bank. I wonder how many times a passing glance has marked Mom. I wonder how many times I’ve marked her myself.

• • • Mom is sitting in her recliner, where she’s sitting every day when I come home from school. She is clipping coupons. Mom developed a coupon obsession after the doctor diagnosed her.

“Chemo treatments,” she says often, “are very expensive. I’m just doing my part.” The kicker is that no one ever uses the coupons. Mom clips them because they let her feel like she is still a vital part of the family infrastructure, a force with a firm grasp on the family finances, and by

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extension the family well-being. Dad gives me the coupons at the end of every week to throw out at school, because he doesn’t want Mom to find them in the garbage at home.

Mom looks good today—her skin has a healthy sheen and the sound of the scissors against the newspaper makes her seem active and brisk.

She separates the coupons into little piles: food, toiletries, restaurants (she continues to clip these, even though we no longer go out anymore) and smoothes them down on the coffee table. A glass of lemonade stands next to her, sweating in the afternoon air. The heat usually makes Mom feel nauseated—something about the medication—but this is a good day.

She asks me how school was, who I saw today, how my homework looks for the week. Mom taught high school science before the cancer made her quit, but she likes to hear about anything school-related so I tell her about the poem. She seems excited that I’m interested in something; I haven’t talked much since the diagnosis. “”Read it out loud,” she says. “I studied some Blake in college. I liked him.” My voice isn’t as nice as Betsy’s, but I plow through it, trying on some of Miss Cane’s inflection. Mom applauds when I finish.

“When I get better,” she says—Mom is always coming up with grand plans for when she gets better—”we’ll go to London. I bet some of the buildings that Blake talks about are still there. We’ll go see them. We can do lots of stuff there—we can walk the trail of Jack the Ripper. Was there a fire in London? I think some of his old haunts might have burned down. I’ve heard they have ghost tours around the city. You ride in a double-decker bus with an open top and look at the old insane asylums at night.” I don’t ask how she knows any of this, or whether she is making it up, but I like the idea of walking through London, Mom’s hair curly and blonde in the sun like it was before the disease, eating fish and chips and drinking tea, so I play along.

We decide we are going to visit Blake’s grave, wherever it is, and find old copies of his book in second-hand shops in alleyways. Mom doesn’t want the standard picture with a Buckingham Palace guard and his furry hat, but she says she’ll take one of me.

“Make sure to travel when you’re young,” Mom says suddenly.

“Promise me, Ellie.” I promise, and after that Mom is too tired to talk.

She goes into the bedroom to lie down. The good days only last so long, after all. Dad comes home and we make soup for dinner. I tell him about the poem while we wash the dishes but he doesn’t find it as interesting as Mom did. I open some of the windows to let the cool night air in and sit down to write my paper. I hope that Mom might still be awake but when I go in to check on her, she has fallen asleep. I take out my book and begin outlining in my notebook. I want to ask her why Blake hears so many people crying but can’t see them. But I decide to wait until tomorrow.

• • •

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On the last day of school, Miss Cane calls me into her room. At first I think she is going to yell at me for my shirt—I have finally broken down and worn a camisole to spite the dress code—but she says she wants to talk about my paper.

The only thing I don’t want to talk about is my paper. I wish she would yell at me about my shirt instead, or the length of my shorts, or even my haircut. I don’t want to talk to anyone anymore. Teachers have been stopping me in the hallway all day, patting me on the shoulder, saying they’re here for me if I need them. I want to disappear.

Miss Cane says I really seem to get to the heart of Blake. She hands me back my paper, marked with a large red A on the top. I wrote about fear in Blake, the limitation of the senses, the increasing darkness from beginning to end, the anarchy. It is the easiest paper I’ve ever written.

“I don’t know anything about Blake,” I blurt. “I don’t know anything about anything.” Miss Cane looks at me closely and squints a little. I wonder how much she knows about Mom. She knows about the cancer, I’m sure. When Mom came home from her first extended hospital stay, the teachers collected money in the faculty lounge to send her flowers. Miss Cane wrote the longest bit in the card.

I hate knowing that my teachers know. It is like they’re looking at me naked all the time. They want to see me upset, because they know how to deal with a crying student better than a silent one.

“Do you know what the original subtitle of Blake’s work was?” Miss Cane asks. I shake my head, and she pulls out a thin, ratty book out of her bottom desk drawer. She hands it to me, opened to the title page.

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul “Two contrary states in the same soul at the same time,” Miss Cane says. “You know a lot about a lot.”

I suddenly remember where I’m going after school. It doesn’t smell the same as the rest of the hospital, the oncology ward, and it feels different, dry, sterile, cold. The walls and even the floors seem to take on the pale, blue-veined pallor of the patients. And most of all the empty faces, the faces I look away from too quickly. I mark in every face I meet, marks of weakness, marks of woe.

“My mom is back in the hospital,” I say. Miss Cane nods, but she doesn’t move to touch me, which I’m grateful for.

“How is she doing?” she asks.

“Not well,” I say. “The doctors are talking months, maybe less. My grandma’s coming down from Ontario to stay with us for a while. They might put Mom in Hospice soon.” Miss Cane nods again. I hope she doesn’t start talking about when she lost her father. I know I will scream if she does.

But surprisingly, she motions to the book. “Keep it,” she says. “Read it over the summer and return it next year if you don’t want it anymore. But

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if you want to keep it, it’s yours.”

I thank her and, when it appears that she doesn’t have anything more to say, I leave and set off for the hospital.

• • • Mom is dozing when I arrive at her fourth floor room. She recognizes me. A good day.

I tell her about my last day of school, about talking with Miss Cane about my paper. I show her the book.

“Oh good,” she said. Her voice comes from her throat like the crinkle of tissue paper and her eyes are only half-open. “I’ve been hoping you could read to me for a while.”

I flipped through some of the poems on the bus—this is not the type of light reading Mom should be doing, not at this point. “A lot of them are sad, Mom. I don’t know if you’d want to hear them.” Mom smiles, her pale white lips pulling back over her teeth slowly, leaving lines of exertion behind on the corners of her mouth.

“Honey,” she says, “if I can’t hear sad by now I’m not doing something right.” She is panting by now, straining to keep talking. “I want to hear your voice.” So I open the book and start at the beginning with, “Introduction.”

“No, no, I’ve already heard this one,” Mom interrupts. “We read this one in college. ‘Staining the water clear’ and all that. Let me pick.” She takes the book from my hand and leafs through carefully; her fingers are pale as chalk against the weathered pages. “This one,” she says finally, handing the book back to me. The poem she has picked out is, “The Sick Rose.”

“Mom—” But she has already closed her eyes, an expectant smile on her face. The gentle beep and hum of the machines give me a rhythm to read to. I don’t have the energy to argue with someone who is so tired.

When I finish, Mom repeats the last line, her eyes still closed. “‘And his dark secret love does thy life destroy. I like that’,” she says, and opens her eyes. “That’s better than all this.” She raises her hand to indicate the hospital rooms, the tubes and wires, the nurses in their squeaky sneakers. I think she tries to include her hairless head too. “We can pretend about this. It’s my life. Wouldn’t you rather die from love than from cancer?” I cringe when she says the word. She is the only one in our house that uses it. Dad and I avoid it like it’s an evil charm that will bring the roof down on our heads.

She laughs.

“I am a sick rose. A withering flower. That means I was once beautiful and now I’m dying from love.” She coughs and licks her lips. “Tragic.”

She could ramble on like this for hours. I look down at the floor, hoping she’ll fall asleep, and for a few minutes I think she has.

“You’re not arguing with me.” She is awake again.

“What do you me to say?” I ask. Mom smiles gently.

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“You’re too smart for me, Ellie. My Ellie. You’re onto me. You know the rose isn’t dying from love. Do you want to know what it is really dying from, what Blake was actually writing about?” I nod. “Sexually transmitted infection. Disease. ‘The invisible worm.’ That’s grim, Blake. That’s really grim.” She looks at me and I wonder if she still knows who I am. Nothing she is saying is making sense to me. “The disease hit her and she didn’t even know it. It was invisible. But it wasn’t her fault, it wasn’t! The rose knows she’s dying. She knows. But she still loves, and that’s what makes it so hard. Poor thing.” She lays her head down and closes her eyes. “Poor thing.”

This time she is really asleep. I close the book and walk to the window.

For the first time in weeks, it looks like it is going to rain, but the air is still, for now. I kiss Mom goodbye and take the stairs to the lobby. Dad is coming in a half an hour, and Mom will probably be awake again by then.

I hope she doesn’t rave too much; Dad has been fragile lately, crying when he washes the dishes, thinking that the sound of the water will drown out his tears. She’ll frighten him if she’s like this. And Dad just isn’t very good with poetry.

I don’t get on the bus when I leave the hospital. Instead I start walking down the sidewalk, heading toward the block of houses around the edge of the park. Still no rain. Miss Cane’s address is listed in the front of the Blake book in tight, slanted script. I keep walking, forward and forward and forward. I hope she is home.

It begins to rain as soon as I knock on her door. I ask her how old she was when her father drowned, and she invites me inside.

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What She Knows She knows chasing the squirrels through the kitchen has No effect. She makes her coffee every morning only to discover the creatures Sitting pretty on a box of Wheat Thins, Trying to lose weight.

It doesn’t matter to her.

The fountain pen he left in her jacket last night Exploded in the wash, and now every spot and smudge blackens up her body.

She rubs off the stains, but she can’t throw the jacket away.

She says the stains are only on the inside of the jacket, But they bleed right through her And blot her back with watercolor.

Suzannah Lutz

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Madeleine Hines - Untitled.JPG Painting of a fashion model done over a squad of riot police.

Madeline Hines

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Generation They waited for the clouds to roll in And idle like parked cars; When the skies remained deepest blue, They prayed for rain – But the rain never showed.

They gathered in homes and buildings, Stood on dead leaves in dry air, Peered through dusty windows And conversed in overcast tones.

But hail and rain and leaden fog Stood absent like expected guests.

They shouted, writhed In their comforts, Swept their arms across Countertops, smashing Glasses and dishes, forks and knives Clanging in sterile kitchens.

And like children they shouted for thunder, For lightning, for pounding rain, For absolute mechanisms And old phrases revived.

Condensation formed On their iced tea glasses Left in the livingroom too long; This was proof, they smiled, Proof that old banknotes would be made good And that rain would come again.

The crops sold off long ago Would be watered at last; They would wash outside – The showerhead disused – And power all of their appliances With rivers that would flow And overflow.

They could almost feel The rain and wind on their faces As the days dragged on in expectation; Hands tapping nervously on desks And sick from caffeine, They had not slept for days.

And staring at the blank Sky, the dead front-lawn grass,

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They despaired and returned to life, Modernity – Fucking modernity – Would go on.

George Berry

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McConnaughey - Unnamed.JPG A Very scary intimidating looking oil painting of a girl.

“Unnamed”

Kelly McConnaughey

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A Function of Genetics.

“I’m going to end up like him.”

Says my best friend,

Fifth grade

Valentine –

Who once played roller hockey in parks

With a pillow tucked under

His shirt to protect

Him from the shots –

Now how his voice wavers,

So frail, all collarbone,

And I know he has been having

A Hard Time

Since his father died

In seventh grade

And when I told him

I am Sorry

He told me

“Don’t be. He was a fucking asshole.”

Later tells me

“But we share a name, we share two eyes.”

So that when I find out

His father

Hung himself,

I wonder what we’ve inherited.

Danielle Solomon

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Covino - Fairy Got Caught.jpg A Painting of a fairy’s ass. Yeah, I don’t know how it got in either...

“Fairy Got Caught”

Emily Covino

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Four Nights of a Dreamer

In sleep, she folds her legs into kneeling and clasps her hands as though her body unconscious arranges itself in prayer in waking life, she’d call on no god to carry her the ten thousand remaining steps to home

In waking life she is messy-voiced, feckless a raspy, blithesome drunk.

She pours fire down her gullet, rapid-paced not to keep up with anyone but to match the driving beats and bass, to complement the politic smoothness of our bodies -her thighs, sloppy, shimmeringtogether in huddled negotiation, in that strange conversing calm of one’s eyes never met by the other’s but in dark where known sounds are changed to tenors fraught with precision, gazing through the reaches of our years

This wet light brings with it a scowling monsoon and stirs up the scent of wet fir, split wood from the banks Grey day seen from the ferry, we cross water (and ourselves) while the wind growls rabid.

How lovely the wild wings of gulls coldly flapping against the heavy ornament! glinting in the steely light of the sun fighting to break through these walls of cloud Will you hold still for me one day so that I may pry apart your bones?

I imagine not much can be forgotten there, in those warm drained canals so like the streets of those who still taste the smoke and will not forget drinking their tea every morning and afternoon, they will not forget These days, these bodies, are all we could know.

Amy Keresztes

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Horan - A Dying Soldier.jpg A Painting of a Man in intense suffering.

He’s ochre colored.

“A Dying Soldier”

Richard Horan

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Pods of Wisteria Frutescens

In Tiffany glass, all ocean blue and sea green mists staining your hungry mouth, we push aside billowing wisteria and melt

cool ghost hands against invisible walls. We are trapped inside shards of dreams, tusks of white light submerged

in wilted sheets sticky with sweat.

But panes don’t give and our hands hang limp

as if I might emerge with ropes of hair, miles of cord-like vines.

I wake to watch the loneliest streetlight, the single orb of yellow,

surrender, snuffed by voracious night: the absence of your shape in the darkness.

as if the glass-blower’s bulb never bloomed. The ebb and flow of the streetcars grows quiet on the pavement beneath my dreams,

Katie Finley

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The Whisper of Time The hours slip by, a string of days, a year: A rustling scrape like silk or murmuring of trees Whose leaves quake in remembrance of a breeze Although the day is still; but who is there to hear?

The earth keeps time apart from mortal care, Whose ears tick to the rhythm of the clocks inside, When waning moon means darkness; ebbing tide Is just the lack of water when the sand’s laid bare.

But sometimes in the hollow of the night I wake, and in the absense of the light I feel abroad a silent whisper like a sigh, The pull of waves on sand, by moon allured, The leaves’ low conversations. And, adjured By night, I ask: is the world dreaming, or am I?

Rebecca A. Bills

109 108

Eulogy for My Hymen Pop! And it’s gone!

Julia Kirsche

109

Charleston - Untitled.JPG A Scene of two glasses full of scotch and a smoking cigar.

Alexandra Charleston

111 110

Stylus County Jail Prisoner Manifest Name

Richard Horan Tony Ogden Molly Shotwell Stephen Lovely Jill Forgash Kate Gazzaniga

Dan Thornbury Dan Yurko Emily Rice Tim Dean Leah Yashar-Brown Cedar Warman Matt Swaim Robert Hornung Sara Martin Mairead McNameeking Suzannah Lutz Brian Trepanier

Zach Markarian Anne Kilfoyle Greg Schafer Andrew Keener

Crime

Stole Christmas Waving the tye-dyed banner of revolution.

Killing with kindness.

Disturbing the peace.

Killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Threatening Richard with a variety of not-solethal weapons.

Practicing without an artistic license.

Mispronunciation of monosyllabic words.

Aggressively seeking chips.

Too interested in the speaker.

Provoking an officer.

Sacrilegious petty theft.

Wrongfully accused.

Broke a scandalous blue law.

Indecent exposure.

Moose trafficking.

Pleading the fifth.

Could not summon the will to defend himself‌ Tory.

Impersonating Carmen San Diego.

Drowning duckies in Bath.

Lack of pity in the second degree.

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