Orange Quarterly 2.1

orange Q UA R T E R LY

featuring poetry by kathleen glasgow

& more occupied volume ii • number i

winter

2012

“As the global Occupy movement has shown, words can move entire nations of people — even the world — to action. Occupy Language, as a movement, should speak to the power of language to transform how we think about the past, how we act in the present, and how we envision the future.”

— H. SAMY ALIM “What if We Occupied Language?”

The New York Times December 21, 2011

o r ange Q UA R T E R LY WINTER 2012

occupied

founded in

2011

volume

by allison leigh

11 •

number

1

OQ Crew

Founder, Publisher, Editor allison leigh Poetry Editor Fiction Editor Nonfiction Editor Visuals Editor Associate Poetry Editor

michael mlekoday amielle major jessica christiansen jess poli zack crawford

Web & Marketing Manager erin bernhard Web & Graphic Designer ashley kolodziej Layout Designer lidia dart Graphic Designer robby peters Blog Editor david kinzer Copy Editor joseph parker vanwagner Intern fatimah asghar

Orange Quarterly is published each autumn, winter, spring, and summer by Elemeno Š in Traverse City, Michigan. This is OQ Volume II, Number 1, Winter 2012. Orange Quarterly welcomes unsolicited manuscripts for publication consideration. For additional information, please visit www.orangequarterly.com. Copyright Š 2011 by Elemeno.

Orange Quarterly • WINTER 2012 1

about

the cover: eleanor leonne bennett

occupied 6 7 9 13 19 20 26 27 33

poetry

35

contributors

by nathan blake fiction by sean alan cleary poetry by kathleen glasgow fiction by milla van der have poetry by benjamin walker nonfiction by rachel jendrzejewski poetry by carl james grindley fiction by sean michael st. charles poetry by kristin fitzsimmons

ABOUT the COVER photography

by ELEANOR LEONNE BENNETT

ELEANOR LEONNE BENNETT is a 15-year-old photographer and artist who has won contests with National Geographic, The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winston’s Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham Science, Fennel and Fern, and Nature’s Best Photography. She has had her photographs published in exhibitions and magazines across the world.

“moris is red” photography by eleanor leonne bennett

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 1

“wall of fire” photography by eleanor leonne bennett

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 2

occupied

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 5

Love Sonnet In Which Song Chorus = Meat Hook poetry

by NATHAN BLAKE

So what if you aren’t a fan of the dirge?

As an art-form it is rivaled only by the rebel yell. Baby, like quails stuck in a chimney we’ll choke. Your disco heels can flay roads on my back in the startled evening venue. And sunshine? they ask. Fuck that. Sometimes you just need to sing the blues like your stomach means estuary, means boneyard. Cut me open and pluck these chords.

If I lie on my back I can hear my blood fester. Whittle Me Something might be a corny band name but I mean it, girl.

I still remember that song you wrote where you let me brush my beard against your stings.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 6

Skatewings fiction

by SEAN ALAN CLEARY

Later in the summer he would be sent back to the warehouse to sort through black seabass with Bill, the usual dock manager, mostly because he didn’t get along with the new guy who complained all Charlie did was look up the girls skirts on the observation deck above the pier and didn’t move fast enough to cover the good fish with ice to keep them fresh and the bad fish with ice to keep away the flies.

Charlie complained all the new guy did was go over orders incessantly — until the buyers from Fulton Market stopped taking his calls — and talk with his wife on the phone about what he was going to do to her later that night.

But before, early in the season when things were as they should be, Charlie arrived in his father’s old BMW down at the docks at 1am to help Bill collect the catch of the big draggers harvesting skate migrating out past the crab ledge, maybe twenty miles off-shore — he didn’t know. In early May it was cold and the summer crowds hadn’t gotten big enough and girls from New York didn’t stay weekends at Chatham Bars Inn so there was nothing too distracting, and Charlie and Bill got along grand: shoveling ice, waiting for the draggers to come in late off early season storms. Charlie came down between finals, on weekends, and went elbow deep into vats of skate-wings — the flapping, stinking remains of tailed nautical saucers, prodding them along the big silver chute from the boat with a shovel, separating smaller orders into totes, the slime running down his rubbers, staining his shirt.

He’d go back to school carrying the stink of those vats — something like rotten pumpkins and day old mackerel — with a wad of twenties in his pocket from the check Bill had cashed for him at the Local 5 Bank, taking his customary five dollars for the effort. Charlie would get back to his dorm and shower and walk down to the corner spa for a bottle of Simple Tymes whiskey to forget about inhabiting filth for 18 hours. He’d fall asleep on the couch and wake

up, shower again and go to the library. When he sat down, the sniffs would start around him and he’d get the point, eventually retreating to the basement to study in peace with the engineering students who were either too focused or too distracted by their own brand to notice.

He’d first got the job down at the pier before he even made it to college, looking through listings for summer help in a supermarket flyer, unable to force the indignity of the service industry on himself. He retired to the back porch of his parents summer cottage to watch his sister and her friends jump into the pool, running around to jump again and again to the tisking of his mother — “Slow down!

You’ll break your neck!” she screeched. But round they went anyways, even daring to slide along the slick pebbles glossed into a solid mass surrounding the pool, skittering and chattering as they flew through the cold May air. When he came across the listing he mulled it over for a day before calling up the office — they hired him on the spot, excited for someone without a thick Limerick brogue or broken EasternEuropean English looking for dock-work — ready, Charlie thought, to thrust hard work on a dandy trying to experience something for a summer.

But it was nothing of the sort, just four innocuous droning summers of slogging through vats and totes of skate-wings, dogfish, haddock, cod, founder, dace, redfish, ocean catfish, monkfish and seabass. There were no shanties, no rituals, no grand old times, just people, there — at work, calling out weights, culling sizes of fish, tossing rotten soaked groundfish to the seals: unsellable — looking up the skirts of the girls from New York who came and stayed at the Chatham Bars Inn and walked down to the docks to look at the seals and smell the fish, squealing as the slime splattered from another bucket of skate-wings.

Charlie couldn’t tell, halfway through a bottle of Simple Tymes if he had somewhere along

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 7

the line been naive about the whole practice.

If when he sat there, looking at his sister’s friends run around the pool, their fifteen year old bodies just beginning to be dangerous — him mulling over whether he should call up the office and try his luck at the fish pier — did he somehow imagine himself a brave enlightened fool off to drown himself in the troubles of those poor lumpen fisher-folk. Did he think they had stories? Had he too recently read the romantics — Marx?

He couldn’t remember, but he measured, at least when he was there at 1am in May in his father’s old BMW parked up in the visitor’s lot because it wouldn’t fit well between the old pick-ups of the fishermen, the dock workers’ beat up subcompacts and the new SUV’s of the Government people and Coast Guard, he had some semblance of romance — however fleeting. With the sun still not a glow over the cottages on the very end of Nauset beach, two of which would fall into the ocean during his tenure in late spring squalls before he was done with the place, he’d sit and listen to CDs of folk music his high school girlfriend made him and drift off until Bill would knock on his window and they’d start off unlocking the icesheds and getting everything ready for the first of the draggers to come in, their flood lights illuminating briefly gulls swooping and swaying eager for the skate entrails ditched overboard as they rounded the beach into Chatham Harbor.

He couldn’t remember, halfway through a bottle of Simple Tymes if he’d learned anything

from the men down there, if he had gotten any respect, if there was any more indignity to smelling like slime and being spat at by fishermen, angry and distrustful of your math who threatened to pack up and go with a rival company if you shorted — they thought — and when they’d yell, “Hey, you remember to tare that?” when Charlie would be counting up boxes of cod to send to New York and Charlie couldn’t remember, halfway through a large order and unable to recall the last few bleary seconds — lost between the sleep and three grimy boats filled with skate and the few precious Cod left. Was that were the dignity lay? In that moment, when Charlie and Bill would empty out the last two boxes and count them out again, all agreeing the second box was two pounds heavy the first time around, the captain now smiling and scratching his head with a hand speckled with dried fish scales — “should have trusted you the first time.” And Bill warning him to pay attention more afterwards in the office, but not meaning it really.

But it was a fleeting understanding.

Momentary. And each half ton vat of wings they loaded into the truck bound for New York took Charlie further and further from the few early mornings, when still in finals: his brief romance, his high-school girlfriend’s music, his memories of her, of his father’s BMW, of sunrise, of the faint smell of his clothes that never went away, waking up to that staleness of flesh anticipating the days perpetual-damp.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 8

How to Take a Punch poetry

by KATHLEEN GLASGOW

First, you must forget how much you loved the marigolds, tamping their dark earth tenderly, ignoring the rough breath along the edges of the yard’s horizon, the blaring white stitch of Adidas suddenly appearing. Your siblings pant for breath in the clearing off the garden. All day, he has run them and they are tired. His stopwatch is tired. Looking down, the marigolds seem tired,too, and you take them in your fists as he begins, soft heads sinking in your fingers. Your body grows slight as his grows bigger. Is everything a story, after all? The neighbors are ghosts. Schoolteachers are elves. Children are blind dolls. No one is anyone. Later, months later, you will step from the schoolbus, like any other day and any other schoolbus, and look up at the dead gray Altoona sky, like all the other skies you have lived under: Pottstown, Johnstown, McKeesport. Some laughter, it doesn’t much matter, will hit your chest like he did, and break you. The boy who lives up the street, whose father will die soon of some heart affliction, crumples against the curb. Get up, you will say.

Children, even your brother and sisters, will stare as you kick, kick, and kick. But still. You will say, Get up, fight me. Let me show you how it really is.

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 9

In Particular poetry

by KATHLEEN GLASGOW

After the cold snap, her grandmother’s fingers hunched up like newborn mice around the edges of the newspaper. That same day, the beauty queen from the mill town wore a dress the exact color of the northeast portion of the sky on the edge of the next-over town: fuchsia, like the splintery eye of an early hurricane. Like the moment before a moment occurs and everything shifts. Color of notice. Lilacs appeared near a bench in a park in the biggest city in the state, next to a pair of white tennis shoes, girls’ size two. They were still clearing out the car, its devastated wreck wrapped forlornly around the light pole. The bodies inside were final as a shut book. The papers were already beginning to report a strange phenomenon of discomfort: a flapping piece of that afternoon’s edition essayed the long winter, the sparkling and avid ice, the strange and spontaneous crying on subways and near junctions that had yet to be built. Her curled fingers followed each printed word as she listened to the sky inside her body not change at all.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 10

What the Mother Says poetry

by KATHLEEN GLASGOW

Anna McCarthy was a slut, skirt caught over her red, round knees, the whiskey rivering into the cup of her red, red pump. And my god there I was, killing my father with tuition and listening to Fats Domino and Ray Charles, tossed on gin and gingers, Richie Valens still alive, his meager body not yet stripped, like Anna’s stocking. My father didn’t know liquor had had its taste of me, that I could be so sick for gin, so sick to dance and press close to the redhead from the wrong frat, the redhead whose fingers swam and nooked, marked me forever then and now. I knew it was all wrong, but I didn’t know how much. All I had was on the record player: somebody slapped on Dorsey and Ellington, Daddy’s music and he came for me, then, back from the war, his polished blacks under my Maryjanes, swiveling me to the drums, lifting me up cool and silvery as an apple.

Your father is your first lover and we were so young then, another war burbling, who knew what could happen, and so we danced hard, all of us, smocked with sweat, heels breaking, another record, another kiss, the redhead landed like a bomb against my ribs and sang to me: Come, come, pretty one, come, come.

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 11

The Father poetry

by KATHLEEN GLASGOW

The bastards come when the day ends in this desert town as bright as duck down: they hitch up their boots at the slightest peek of moon and begin. The saucer he knocks in fright splits beautifully in five white pieces as they sing: oh your daughters, oh your sons, oh, your. They sing the song his son’s mouth made, wetted with blood, gutted, as the father brought the broom down.

The devils, the bastards, they climb the rafters and sing of the girls running in the yard and how hard his feet ached from running. They got away, anyway. Like the boy. Like the wife. And he was left then as now, alone with his numbers for the next day’s class, alone with everything past. Everything he breaks as they sing will be shuffled into bags. The night will go on. He’ll scratch his numbers out over and again, more problems, another plan. It is to be expected. He is a man full of long nights.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 12

A Year of Goats fiction

by MILLA VAN DER HAVE

A few weeks before my twelfth birthday, my mother has the last of her cooking frenzies.

There has been jam-mania, homemade ice cream, sweet Moroccan flavored lemons and kroketten, a kind of crunchy fried ragout, the recipe for which she got from an old Dutch neighbor back in Adelaide. My father doesn’t particularly like them, but still she sometimes locks herself in the kitchen to make enough kroketten to feed a small Dutch town. I think it means she misses Australia, much like when she starts humming Waltzin’ Matilda or when she drives out west to make me breath in the Pacific, the only real ocean in her book.

No one knows what sets off the goat cheese episode. All of a sudden, it’s just there. As to what caused the other cooking-episodes, we have some inkling. Like with the jams, the first one. That one started when I went to kindergarten. In fact, my mom made her first batch of marmalade right after she dropped me off for the first time. Of course, she has reasons. Like homemade is better, healthier, without additives. It makes sense. Unlike my dad, my mom always makes sense. It’s just I don’t believe it’s the whole truth and nothing but.

You see, we live in compromise, Oregon, so no one is truly happy even though we have this pretty big house on the outskirts of town and our garden sort of spills out into the wild.

There’s some neat patches, where my dad keeps his roses. Then there’s my mother’s vegetables, the ones she uses and the ones that she no longer needs, which have to fend for themselves. After those, nature takes over and the hills begin. If you go even further, you’ll reach a nature park, but I’m not allowed up there. In fact, sometimes I think they’d rather I didn’t go outside at all, which is fine by me, there isn’t much for me out there anyway. That is, until Julie.

When, by the end of August, my mom starts with the goat cheese it’s just one of those things.

I hardly notice her busying about with cloths and milk and whatnot, because I’m too busy noticing the new girl across our street. Her name is Julie

and even though she’s about my age, already she is sheer perfection. She moves like silk rippling.

She’s everything I am not and I can only hope something of her will rub off on me if I just spy on her long enough.

Meanwhile, more and more varieties of cheese clog our lives, our daily bread. My mom has such a limited attention span, so there’s every reason to believe that this cycle too will soon come to its natural end. A few more days of cheese and it should be done. But then she gets me Habakkuk.

At the crack of dawn she takes me outside to where a pink-ribboned goat feasts on the abandoned vegetables. She’s white, with a yellowish hue, and it’s this dirty look that draws me to her. She’s supposed to be my birthday present and though we both know it’s the best present ever, we also know it’s not just for me.

This is my mom getting serious.

Back inside, my father sits glumly at our kitchen table, a crudely wrapped box in front of him. I know what’s in it without opening it. He gets me the same thing every year. ‘So, what about a name?’ my mom asks, as she starts preparing my birthday cake. My dad grunts and I feel I’ve just witnessed a meaningful battle in a war I didn’t know was going on. To cheer up my dad, I choose a name he ought to like. I once read it in one of the books he has stuffed away in his drawer. He just looks at me in that way of his and then goes to work. Which is his way of being unhappy.

Habakkuk and I immediately like each other.

In fact, we are inseparable. So much so my father starts referring to me as ‘Laurie and that damn goat’. My part in all this is easy, predictable. I’m a quirky kid, in need of a friend. Habakkuk is all the more remarkable. Goats dream of few things: food and they’re not picky either; and maybe, if things work out, some offspring. But somehow, with Habakkuk a higher force is at work and often she abandons a perfectly tasteful bite of cardboard just to follow me around.

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 13

When I go out, she bleats me goodbye. Most of the time, she’s waiting for my return and if not, she’ll come running down the hills as soon as she, through that weird sixth sense of hers, spots my arrival.

Mid-October Julie speaks to me for the first time. She comes over to our garden just to tell me I am weird and can she pet my goat.

Habakkuk of course complies.

‘What’s his name?’ she asks.

‘She’s a girl. She’s called Habakkuk.’

‘Habakkuk? What kind of weird name is that?’

I stare at her shoes, saying nothing.

‘Where did you get him?’

‘Her. My mom got her for my birthday. Like a present. But she uses her milk to make cheese.’

‘Your mom’s weird too.’

‘I guess.’ My color rises. I don’t like it when other people point it out. I like them to ignore it. But I can’t tell Julie. She doesn’t look like she takes contradiction very well.

Habakkuk, old faithful, is done with Julie and saunters off to a sweeter pasture, my dad’s roses.

‘I like her,’ says Julie, looking at me. ‘See you around some time.’ Only after she is long gone do I dare breath out.

My mother keeps at it with the goat cheese.

She even thinks of selling it, though my father says there’s rules and regulations for that sort of thing and not anyone can up and sell cheese just because they feel like it. My mom shrugs off his objections and goes out to town. She returns with a package deal of goats. Now, instead of one goat working on my dad’s nerves, there’s five and they really apply themselves. Again, I get to name them and to keep with the path chosen, I call them Hosea, Obadiah, Nimah and Joel. My dad’s not impressed. ‘Goats don’t get names,’ he grunts from behind his paper.

‘Also, goats don’t get to live in a backyard. At least, not in a normal house.’ After that, he settles on the couch and turns up the game, as if watching a football match will somehow

magically transform things to how they should be.

Julie comes by more often and every time something inside me gives a small tingle. At first, it’s clear she comes over just for the goats, who seem to have the same mysterious attraction on her as on me, but gradually her attention shifts.

To me.

‘You’re not from around here.’

‘I guess not.’ I don’t like to be reminded of Maine. Even though I was only 2 when we left, my memories of it are dark, like we were living in a stuffy place, somewhere sad.

‘Me neither. I was born in California.’ Julie’s voice hardly changes, but I can tell things are different for her. She’s missing a place she comes from, a place she thinks of as home.

‘So why did you name them after prophets?’

She’s the only one who comments on their names. We do have a connection, Julie and I, I’m sure of it. Underneath her self-assurance, her brazenness, underneath everything that makes her picture-perfect and popular, she’s like me. She has to be. She gets me in a way no one does.

‘It’s sort of funny. You can call the whole bunch of them the Minor Prophets.’

For a moment, warm gratitude flows over me. Then, someone she knows drives by and she turns away so fast it’s like she was never even here, with me.

In those lost days after Christmas, my dad starts working on his first fence. It’s Sunday, a day of rest for most of us, but not for my dad. He’s hauling wood, hacking, sowing and sweating, even though it’s cold enough for the goats to huddle together in a far-away corner.

The fence is supposed to protect his roses and of course I have to help. Laying out the pattern, handing him hammer and nails, thinking up solutions for problems he encounters. As always, he wants to change me into someone I’m not. Someone who knows how to work her hands. Better yet, a son.

The air itself is stern. I know it’s better to

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 14

keep busy; I’ll stay warm and my dad will stay cheerful, but my thoughts dwell off all the time. To the Minor Prophets, who glare at me somewhat reproachfully. And to Julie, whose snugly lit house lights up the December sky. I picture her perched up on the couch, all holiday cheer and cared for. Daddy’s little princess.

‘Laurie, do you want to learn how to build a fence or what?’ My dad has no mercy for daydreaming.

I want to give my honest answer, that no, I don’t, he made me. But I can’t. He has this crispy blue in his eyes and I know that right now, he needs a lie more than anything.

Over time, more goats find their way to our herd. We don’t know where they come from, just that they seem to enjoy being around humans.

My dad tries to chase them off, but they keep coming back. Finally my mom decides that clearly they are meant to be with us and that’s that. I christen them like the others and they officially join the Minor Prophets, who now rank 9. My mom says she’ll find a use for them, no worries.

In general, when things work out my mom soon loses interest. She works to master something and then forgets about it. She says it’s because of the stars when she was born, this restiveness. The cheese thing clings though, even after all those months. She has honed it to perfection, but she isn’t done. There’s this room we hardly use and here she sets up shop. She clears out the cobwebs and the few reminders of the days my dad thought to make this his dark room, before he changed his mind.

Now he brings his pictures to the store every time, grumbling at the results, saying he could have been a great photographer if only. After cleaning, the windows reveal this stunning view to the hills and I’m almost jealous this isn’t my room.

My mom hangs up shelves and carefully stacks every cheese in its allotted place. Finally, she places a sign by the road that says Claire Richards. Cheeses. ‘Best to keep it simple,’ she says. And waits for customers. Against my dad’s predictions, they come. Reluctant at first, but gradually, they shed off the shy. My mom even

has to turn up production. Despite her success, she’s undaunted. ‘Sometimes we have to rise above ourselves,’ she says, taking on an air of mystery. At least her work is frowned upon, even by her frequent costumers, so that’s bound to be half the pleasure.

Sometimes, I can hear my parents argue.

I’m really not supposed to listen, but with all the yelling I can’t help picking up on things.

Like how my dad thinks the goats ruin our life.

And about my mother working, which my dad doesn’t like and about my dad working too hard and all the time, which my mom doesn’t like.

‘We never see you around here.’

‘If I’m here Laurie can’t get away from me fast enough.’

‘Oh Dan, she’s an 11-year old girl. It’s only natural for her to avoid her parents.’

‘Oh, really? So that thing with the goats, that’s natural? Why can’t she be into horses like any normal girl her age?’

‘Normal? You want things to be normal?’

‘It would be nice, for a change!’

‘Fuck you, Dan!’ Then there’s crying or a door slamming and that’s usually when I call Julie. If I’m lucky, she’ll take me and the goats for a walk somewhere.

I don’t cry, not with Julie. Sad people bring her down, she says. Instead, we talk about boys she likes or bands. She tells me about her brothers, who are annoying and how glad I should be there’s no one bugging me. I can’t believe Julie is jealous of me, while I would trade my life for hers in a heartbeat. When she sees my face, she frowns at first, but then relents. She says we can be sisters, like sisters. It’s a breathy promise, nothing fancy; a kiss on the cheek. It lifts me up either way.

By the end of March Habakkuk gives birth to the final goat, a young buck I call Malachi.

A few weeks ago, we adopted two stray goats.

Jonah and Haggai feel right at home with the prophets and now Malachi completes their number. My dads roses are no match against their combined forces of and neither is his fence. The few things they deem inedible, they destroy for good measure.

I don’t take to the hills, Julie does. I just don’t

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 15

say anything against it. She has so many friends, so I can’t be lame. And really, all these rules my parents made, seem to lose their meaning. And maybe breaking them is the normal thing to do.

Julie doesn’t even have to press me that hard. She sets out, I gather the goats, who follow in my footsteps as eager as I follow in hers.

We walk for hours. It never seems long enough. Out here, everything is different, even Julie. She’s bold, keen, like she has lost weight.

She seems enlightened and so do I. We’re out of worlds reach, that’s why. There’s nobody to tell us anything. It’s the closest thing to freedom we’ll ever know. We’re not trying to get anywhere, we’re just really here. We discover small wonders, a whole new world. And when we return, finally, the sun’s etched upon our faces, a landmark.

But it’s not just Julie and me growing closer, more than anything it’s me and the goats. I get to know them one and all. First and foremost there’s Habakkuk, female lead and queen of goats. She tells the rest of them where to feed, when to sleep, everything. Second in command is Haggai, a strong, willful buck who’ll anyone and anything even remotely challenging. Obadiah is a climber of trees. When she first disappears from sight, I lose my mind, but soon I learn to look up, to spot her among the leaves. And Zephaniah, our old maid, likes to quietly ruminate, as if she’s waiting for something but doesn’t yet know what.

Much like me, the Minor Prophets don’t want our hillside adventures to end. They start to follow me around no matter what, no matter where. Like into the house. One night in June, I even find them sleeping in my room. I usher them out hurriedly, if my dad finds out he’ll be madder than when Julie got me to sneak out to see The Empire Strikes Back and I told him he shouldn’t be angry because it was a boys-movie.

But things can’t be stopped. The prophets are everywhere and they won’t go back.

The only one standing between them and, well, everything, is my dad. And he doesn’t give up easy. ‘I traveled the outback,’ he tells me.

‘You know what that is? A hot, blistering hell.

And then I faced old McKintyre.’ That’s my mom’s dad, the granddad I never get to see. ‘He

would give a crocodile a run for his money and I brought your mom here against his wishes.

Seriously, those goats have nothing on me.’

My dad makes light but underneath, everyone can see darkness brooding. It’s there when he gathers his appliances. It’s in the way his mouth is set, in how it never lights up at the corners.

Most of all, it’s there when he orders me to help him, like he needs me most of all to win this thing, this beef with the goats.

But I’m on his nerves from the get-go. I hand him the wrong stuff. I drop things. I trip on the wire. It’s not my fault. It’s a beautiful day. Julie and a bunch of kids are supposed to go out for a picknick and they may just ask me along. It could happen and if it does, I want to be ready. Somehow, my dad knows this. He’s on my case like all the time.

Whenever I look over my shoulder, he scrapes his throat. If I saunter off, he finds something for me to get, to hold, to throw out. And if he sees me rushing something, which he hates, he pulls it apart and makes me do it again. I hammer away in a hurry, slam my own thumb. I curse something ugly and throw away the hammer. ‘Never throw with the tools,’ my dad barks. ‘Now pick it up.’

It’s late in the morning. Julie is probably already on her way, without me. Whatever. I still don’t want to be here, with him and his moods.

‘I’m done,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’

‘Too bad. Get your hammer and get moving!’

Somewhere in the back of the yard, the Minor Prophets regard us with a cool curiosity.

‘I mean it, dad. I’m done building. And I’m done doing boy-stuff.’

‘Well, you don’t like girl-stuff either. Like wear a skirt.’

‘Bite me!’ I say.

My dad’s eyes narrow. He’s angry for real.

‘Laurie Richards, pick up your hammer and get to work.’

I look at my dad, with his tools, his truths and his self-righteousness and there’s this coldness in me. ‘If you want a son so much, why don’t you go and make one?’

This sort of shocks him into honesty. ‘We can’t. Your mother.... You were our best shot.’

I don’t want to hear anymore. I turn away.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 16

My dad’s words echo off my back without comforting anyone. ‘Our lucky shot! Laurie!

You were our lucky...’

Summer. There’s a reluctant heat out. My dad’s fences, the few that are left standing, are about ready to melt. So are we. My mom worries about her cheeses. My dad spends most of his time in front of the TV. In the weekends, he draws the blinds, barricades himself indoors, so the heat can’t touch him, he says. All he ever watches is sports.

Julie isn’t here. I mean, she’s here, I can see her when she goes out with friends, to the mall or when her parents take her on trips to the beach, her hair light in the breeze. She’s just not here with me.

So it ends up just being me and my goats and we find ourselves roaming far and wide.

Our trips take them back somewhere they have forgotten, on account of me. They know exactly where they are, who they are. With every step, they blend in more with the territory. Me, I face stranger grounds. I stand out. This frightens me, in an exciting kind of way, like when you jump off the high dive and afterward you feel light all over. There’s a hill though that’s my outer limit. Because I can only go so far. Something down there scares me. The prospect of loss.

But that’s before I know about things you can lose at home.

Anything can break if you push at it hard enough and my parents have been pushing for some time now. It’s my birthday. I’m up in my room, staring at the phone. Trying to decide if I want to call Julie to ask her if she is coming to my party or to tell her don’t bother, if she doesn’t want to be seen with me, she can stay away for all I care.

The fight starts out a slow mope, then explodes without warning. Or maybe none of us pay enough attention. Like when you pump too much air into tires. There’s resistance, you think it will hold a little longer, just one more push and when it blows, it’s still a surprise.

I find myself listening in, a little shadow on a staircase.

‘Kids are coming, Claire. We can’t have these goats running around the house.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because people will think!’

‘That’s all you care about? What will people think! What will they think of your Australian cheese making wife? What will they think of your tomboyish daughter? I’m sorry, Dan, that we’re ruining your precious well-adjusted suburban life!’

‘I didn’t say that.’ I exhale. They will make up. Someone says something like that and they make up. They always do. My dad looks worn, ready to give in.

And then there’s a goat. Haggai probably.

Butting him in the knees, full force. Whatever he wanted to say is lost in a howl of pain. ‘This is craziness!’ he cries. ‘Do something!’

My mom just stands there, fumbling the ends of her apron in her hands, kneading them.

‘What do you want from me, Dan?’ There’s a silence like a judgment. Whatever we’ll find we’ll have lost, it’s taken from us in this moment.

‘Get rid of the goats,’ my dad says. I grip the banisters. Not that.

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘I am. I can’t live like this. I can’t’.

‘Laurie loves them.’ Like dear life.

My dad’s steeled, unbreakable. ‘Either the goats go or I go.’

My mom can’t speak and I fly down the stairs, run past her, past him, past everything.

There’s a goat, probably Habakkuk and I fling my arms around her. ‘Not Habakkuk!’ I cry.

‘Not Malachi!’ Not Obadiah. Not Zephaniah with her wisdom of ages. Not any of them.

Again, no one speaks. Then my dad nods and turns around. He leaves with a slam of the door.

My mom looks like she’s about to say something soothing or maybe something profound about the stars. She doesn’t. Instead, it’s: ‘I’ll better start baking you that cake now.’

She retreats into the kitchen.

It’s up to me. I run to the door, out the driveway. ‘Dad,’ I yell. ‘Come back!’ He doesn’t respond. I want to throw myself at him, hold him or hit him, but he’s too far gone, marching in that strong, unrelenting pace of his. Then he is just a shade, rapidly dissolving into hot air.

I have never before been to Julie’s house. It’s

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 17

plainer than I imagined it to be. Less impressive.

There’s a lawn and a car, on which I’m sure to find dents, if I’d look up close. And if I wait long enough, there will be fights as well. But there’s no time to see what shape their unhappiness would take. I knock.

‘You’re not crying, are you?’ says Julie as she comes to the door. ‘Because I so hate —’ ‘My dad,’ I break in. ‘He’s left. Gone. I gotta do something to get him back..’

‘And?’ ‘I need you to help me do it.’

‘Why?’ I’m ready for this. ‘Because you told me we were sisters and you better make good on that. And,’ I add quickly, ‘because if you don’t, I’ll stay out here on your doorstep crying and making a scene until you do.’

Maybe she believes I will. Maybe her sense of adventure plays up. Most likely, there’s nothing better to do. She squints her eyes and nods. ‘Fine.’

Again, we walk for hours. This time with heavy hearts and feet. The goats also know things are off. They feel the beck of the beyond and yet something holds them back, makes them want to stop and smell the roses and everything else we encounter along the way.

But no matter how much we drag, something drives us forward.

And then, we reach it. The hill. Goat country.

Rocky and desolate, a promised land. Here, there’s only one certainty. The goats won’t come back. I can feel it resonating deep within them. As soon as we enter, they quicken. Some of them eye the rocks, eager to climb them.

The others attack tufts of grass. They’re oozing happiness, a sense of place.

‘At least they’ll feel at home here,’ says Julie.

The whole way, she has been beside me, a silent partner.

‘How am I gonna do this?’ I say. ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’

Her hand’s on my arm, giving a gentle pull.

‘Best to do it fast,’ she says. ‘Believe me.’ Her eyes, suddenly, are soft with sorrow. ‘Come on.

Let’s go home.’

I don’t want to. But because Julie is holding my hand, I go anyhow. ‘Don’t look back,’ she tells me. But I can’t. Ever so often, I glance back, to where the Minor Prophets stand out against the rocks, cherished specks of grey and white.

Of course, we lose our way. We wander in all directions until we have none and there’s only the sun out high. And of course, it’s not my dad who saves us or my mom or even Julie’s parents.

In fact, I don’t think anyone even noticed we weren’t there. In the end, we find our own way home. It’s simple enough, we just refuse to give up. Well, Julie does. There’s something dogged in her, something decided. She keeps us on track, any track. When we wander off the road, she goes looking for another. Through forest and city, she sees us home.

Finally, in sight of our street, she lets go off my hand. It’s her way of telling me today doesn’t matter. Not here where people can see.

‘I better hurry,’ she says. ‘or I’ll be late for diner.’

I walk her to the corner, our steps oddly in sync. I keep watching her as she runs up the driveway. True to form, she doesn’t look back.

But I need to see this through. Only when she’s safe inside, out of view, will I start walking back, the scent of the last apple pie my mother will ever bake calling me home.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 18

8 Confessions Before the Occupation, 2011 poetry

by BENJAMIN WALKER

Father, my friends are street medics occupying McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza until the Rapture, the Great Collapse, or victory, whichever comes before the onset of winter.

Father, when I was four and tagging the apartment with crayon, my father lifted my thirty pounds to the wall and with a half-smile told me his name was Bubba, that I was in a heap of trouble now, boy.

Father, the Chinese caught me in sixth grade taking pictures

of their clay soldiers in the National Gallery. Years after, the Capitol

Police found me recording diplomat plate numbers in the Chinese Embassy lot, threatened to lock me up all night.

Father, the judges in Pennsylvania will trade your teenage years for kickbacks: you’d be caught with a pipe, sentenced, shuttered in a private prison called PA Child Care for the whole lost decade.

Father, I want to be that wooden shoe, wedged between gears.

I want to bake loaves of unleavened bread that endlessly divide.

I want consensus on our way forward, before my nephews

follow the pipers out of Hamlin, disappearing into half-light.

Father, my mother has no words of encouragement: I’ll be arrested if I’m dumb enough to follow my friends to the occupation. I’ll be as good as dead

to future employers, another Wite-Out child.

Father, tell me how to endure a thousand bookings so I’ll risk one more.

Tell me how much bail money America needs – I’ll take out

one more loan. Tell your congregation the Occupiers need weatherproof tarp and blankets to keep on going.

Father, that Capitol Police officer asked me if I wanted

to stop making trouble and rejoin the Burmese monks.

My mother asked if I really want to fight a losing battle.

Bless me, Father, for I told them what they wanted to hear.

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 19

Toward a turbulent, if not shining, sea nonfiction

by RACHEL JENDRZEJEWSKI

Ibrahim Abdallah, an Egyptian-born, New York-based marketing specialist who has spent time at both Tahrir Square and Zucotti Park, told PRI’s The World that he thinks Occupy Wall Street has “failed,” because protestors have lacked a “clear goal” and “clear slogan.”

He elaborates, “When I talked to people there [at the protests in Zucotti Park], some of them actually were saying that they were happy not to have a clear goal, because they wanted to create a bigger discussion between people. They wanted people to get involved, and talk, and discuss the issues. But in my opinion, I don’t think that works. I don’t think that works because the average Joe cannot operate that way. You need to give him something really simple that he can follow.”1 I was listening to this report on Minnesota Public Radio while driving, and the last part of his statement made me laugh out loud. How hilariously awful, I thought, pausing at a stop sign, to imagine the “average Joe” as someone who literally cannot have a conversation and instead needs to be spoon-fed someone else’s instructions on how to think and act. The PRI reporter moved right on to the next question. I wondered for a minute if Mr. Abdallah might be one of the Yes Men2, pulling a stunt to reveal the absurdity of marketing mentality at its lowest extreme. Yet very soon I realized he was absolutely serious — and that his sentiments actually echo those of many people in the wider public.

This sobering moment shifted my whole perspective on Occupy Wall Street, which I had been following closely since I first learned about it in September (through friends on Facebook, not the news). I realized that economic disparity is not the most dire issue that the protests are illuminating. Rather, the much more fundamental and pressing topic just might be

our country’s disinterest, unwillingness, or — per Mr. Abdallah — utter incapacity to have intelligent conversation about complex issues.

The bewildering behavior of too many Congress members has long supported this notion, particularly in their dealings with President Obama over the past few years. But are they representing the rest of us more accurately than I’d like to believe?

As a playwright and performance artist, I spend most of my waking hours creating theatrical work in collaboration with people who may or may not share my views. This work eventually brings all kinds of other diverse people together to experience that work and, should they wish, talk about it. In other words, my whole career is essentially rooted in the practice and facilitation of discussion, typically around pretty big central ideas — memory, grief, relationships, power, fear, mortality, love.

Listening to Mr. Abdallah, however, I realized that I take for granted that such discussion is vital and desired. I take for granted that it helps us learn about the world and have compassion for each other. Perhaps most of all, I take for granted that people want, let alone are able, to learn about the world and have compassion for each other.

Yet, even as I take these values for granted, I’m toying with a riddle, because one of the biggest obstacles to making art in this country is our market-driven culture, and people supposedly drive the market. We all know that success is often gauged, deliberately or not, by financial profit (or in the arts, whether or not one gets paid anything at all — Arena Stage made national news recently for giving salaries and health benefits to playwrights). Artists working in all disciplines know that risk — and I’m not talking about the titillating suggestion of risk, which does interest many, but the actual risk of failure, banality, offense, etc. required to explore and advance new ideas — rarely sells seats. If one is driven to take risks in one’s work, one

1 Werman, Marco. “An Egyptian View of Occupy Wall Street.” PRI’s The World. Rev 11/2011. http://www.theworld. org/2011/11/egypt-occupy-wall-street/ (11/2011).

2 http://theyesmen.org.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 20

better have a good back-up skill that will pay the rent. People outside art communities often don’t even realize risky work is happening. They ask me when they’ll be able to see my work in Hollywood or on Broadway. Those avenues have certainly figured out some formulas that “work,” financially, but in my humble view, they largely specialize in entertainment over art. I don’t mean that in a pretentious or even mutually exclusive way; I wholly enjoy summer blockbusters and perform in cheesy musicals. I certainly believe that both can be art, that art can be entertaining (and is often better for it), etc.

The distinction, to my mind, is simply one of intention. To borrow from Guy Zimmerman, Artistic Director of Padua Playwrights, “The artist wants to wake us up; the entertainer wants to help us fall back asleep.”3 Mr. Abdullah would probably agree and thereby propose art is useless in society, because it’s far too demanding.

It asks too many questions. “The average Joe cannot operate that way. You need to give him something really simple that he can follow.”

Judging by box office records and the number of schools that have cut arts programming in recent years, he wouldn’t be alone.

Now, I have encountered intelligent, thoughtful, curious people all over this country — enough to know that plenty of “average Joes” not only believe themselves capable of discussion, but very much enjoy it. In fact, I should think most people might be offended and downright alarmed at the suggestion that anyone ought to “give” them “really simple” ideas to “follow,” in lieu of conversation about and autonomous participation in current events.

Mr. Abdallah’s words nag at me because they undeniably echo the same critique of Occupy Wall Street that I’ve heard again and again from respected friends and colleagues, and certainly from the mainstream media: Those protestors need a simple, direct message. They need a clear set of demands. They need to market their points better. They need to put forward what they want. Otherwise, they are — or will be —

ineffective.

I often wonder when our culture came to prioritize certainty over inquiry. We rush to know and say what we believe because that somehow makes us strong, smart people. We’re fearful of appearing uncertain or unprepared, especially if we’re in the public eye, and for good reason — we’re quickly and ruthlessly shamed if we falter in the slightest way, yet most wisdom traditions paradoxically encourage “not knowing.” I’m not talking about ignorance — quite the contrary, I think — it’s the idea of “beginner’s mind,” staying open, without preconceptions, and therefore always learning, ever seeing more clearly. The great theatre-maker, Richard Foreman, speaking of his own practice, explains: We abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so you can cull from them their single, dominant meaning and in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks. But what I try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.’4 Foreman’s process replaces product, embodying endless possibility. Occupy Wall Street’s emerging process as policy5 offers a similarly open sea, one whose turbulent waves are waking us up and spurring our imaginations toward new, improved systems of balance and accountability.

Seized with fear over a need for certainty, however, we reduce possibility down to binary choice (Republican versus Democrat); and increasingly, we skip process altogether. Most people living in this country feel extremely disconnected from the government and the ways in which decisions are made6. And yet, with 4 Via Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 51.

5 Essig, Todd. “The Contrasting Psychologies of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the ‘Tea Party.’” Forbes. Rev. 10/2011. http:// www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2011/10/16/the-contrastingpsychologies-of-occupy-wall-street-and-the-tea-party/ (11/2011).

6 Montopoli, Brian. “Alienated Nation: Americans complain of government disconnect.” CBS News. Rev. 6/2011. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20074813-503544.

3 Zimmerman, Guy. “The Lens of Gravity, Light and Time.” The Times Quotidien. Rev. 4/2011. http://www. timesquotidian.com/2011/04/22/the-lens-of-gravity-light-andtime-2/ (11/2011).

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 21

technology driving the pace of living faster and faster and attention spans growing shorter and shorter, we’re increasingly impatient with the concept of process anyway. We don’t even want it. We expect our President to solve the world’s problems in four years. We skip fact-checking to get breaking news out faster. We promote our work more than actually doing whatever we supposedly do. We send e-mails while barely tasting our lunch. At this rate, our relationship to process is in danger of being phased out altogether with people operating as little more than products, packaged and available for perusal on your favorite social networking site, self-marketed in 140 characters or less.

We do this to ourselves also, in part, because advertising is the language we know best. We are better educated in marketing than anything other subject, period, if only innately.

According to Dr. Jean Kilbourn (known for her work on the image of women in advertising as well as critical studies of alcohol and tobacco advertising), each one of us is exposed to over 3000 advertisements per day.7 Advertising so thoroughly surrounds us from the moment we open our eyes to the world that it becomes ingrained within us. We have internalized its structures, patterns, habits, and strategies. Of course, many of us dismiss ads and insist they don’t affect us. We scoff and say, “It’s not like I’m going to run out and buy that car,” and “It’s not like I think that mascara will make someone love me.” And, most likely, we really won’t and don’t. But advertising works on a much more subliminal level. Kilbourne explains, “Advertising is a pervasive medium of influence and persuasion. Its influence is cumulative, often subtle and primarily unconscious. A former editor-in-chief of Advertising Age, the leading advertising publication in North America, once claimed: ‘Only eight per cent of an ad’s message is received by the conscious mind. The rest is worked and re-worked deep within, in the recesses of the brain.’” 8 Marketing

professionals study consumers closely, not just to cater to their lifestyles, but to manipulate their desires and steer trends. They’re not evil people, of course; they’re just doing their job.

They’re selling products.

Over time, however, the heavy saturation is responsible for some serious cultural conditioning — conditioning which devalues relationships, attaches spiritual value to material possessions, and fuels addiction, according to Kilbourne. Advertising skillfully and intentionally breeds cynicism, dissatisfaction, and craving, because these feelings beautifully fuel consumer behavior. Kilbourne elaborates, “Advertising performs much the same function in industrial society as myth did in ancient societies. It is both a creator and perpetuator of the dominant values of the culture, the social norms by which most people govern their behaviour. At the very least, advertising helps to create a climate in which certain values flourish and others are not reflected at all.” In a climate where a homeless man is sentenced to 15 years in prison after remorsefully returning a stolen $1009, while the CEO of one of the nation’s largest privately held mortgage lenders is given just three years for his role in a $3 billion scheme that is considered one of the biggest corporate frauds in U.S. history10, I cannot help but question our country’s flourishing values.

Now, mind you, I’m not here to argue the merits or dangers of capitalism, and I’m not proposing that we stop buying things. I am intrigued, however, that so many people think marketing strategies — which are designed to control and sell, even at the expense of human life — might be the way forward for Occupy Wall Street, whose precise object of critique is a culture that repeatedly prioritizes financial gain for a few over the well-being of most.

I have found hope in Occupy Wall Street because, in the face of widespread corruption and powerful financial influence on politics, 9 Thangham, Chris V. “Homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100.” Digital Journal. Rev. 1/2009. http://digitaljournal. com/article/265402 (11/2011).

10 Barakat, Matthew. “Paul Allen, Ex-Mortgage CEO, Sentenced To Prison For $3B Fraud.” Huffington Post. Rev. 6/2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/22/mortgage-fraudceo-prison-paul-allen_n_881946.html (11/2011).

html (11/2011).

7 Kilbourne, Jean. “Lecture Series.” Official Website. Rev. 2011. http://jeankilbourne.com/?page_id=12 (11/2011).

8 Kilbourne, Jean. “Jesus is a brand of jeans.” The New Internationalist Magazine. Rev. 9/2006. http://www.newint.org/ features/2006/09/01/culture/ (11/2011).

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 22

these protestors are asking — collectively, transparently, and loudly — how we might reimagine our culture to actually value people equally. They have begun, not by pretending they know what’s best for the world, but by launching discussions in public. They have created literal, visible, physical spaces in which everyone (including homeless communities) can come together, look each other in the eye, talk, learn, and brainstorm. And people from a near infinite range of generations, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds have been showing up, by the thousands, to participate. All over this country and all over the world, diverse people have been spending the last few months gathering ideas, voicing concerns, exchanging perspectives, holding teach-ins, having debates, sharing meals, making music, and dancing out broken prayers of stubborn, determined hope. Dr. Cornel West of Princeton University observes that this phenomenon is doing the following:

quite literally counter-cultural; it expands rather than diminishes process. But I’m convinced it’s worth the sweat.

Comparing Occupy Wall Street’s push for inclusion with the Tea Party’s penchant for exclusion, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Todd Essig writes: The ‘we’ of OWS is worldwide, a globalized, networked ‘we’ full of good and bad existing simultaneously and everywhere. The messier the better; better to let in those you don’t want then miss out on including those you do. Of course, inclusion can be a big problem because people say and do lots of really stupid things.

And all that stupidity is then felt as ‘us,’ not ‘them.’ But that’s the trade-off of inclusion; you have to take the good along with bad.

For Tea Party members, the world will always remain full of persecutory others (“Obama is the devil!”), while OWS holds out the promise of community, no, of communities of difference. The effort after inclusiveness can be so dramatically full of sympathy and concern for others that you may feel the movement respecting your subjective experience before they even know what their own point of view is. But if you knit together the union worker and ex-hippie, the college student sharing some shade with the cop, you find a belief that working together instead of against each other presents the very real possibility that people will end up not as triumphant winners but as people with enough — and in a radically inclusive networked world enough is, well, enough.12

[raising] political consciousness so it spills over all parts of the country, so people can begin to see what’s going on through a set of different lens, and then you begin to highlight what the more detailed demands would be. Because in the end we’re really talking about what Martin King would call a revolution: A transfer of power from oligarchs to everyday people of all colors. And that is a step-by-step process.11

To be sure, inclusion is confusing and exhausting, because it means people from all contexts, with different backgrounds, belief systems, opinions, and even methods of communication are equally welcome in the same space. Everyone will be concerned with different facets of the issues. Individual needs and opinions will clash.

Collaboration is downright hard and can feel frustratingly inefficient because listening and tackling something creatively with others takes way more time than making decisions alone. It is

This emerging model of inclusion and “communities of difference” swims handin-hand with the explosive, leveled openness of the internet, illuminating ways in which the rapid advancements of technology can help embody, rather than eliminate, process.

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls Occupy Wall Street “America’s first true Internet-era movement,” for, like the Internet, it is sprawling,

11 Goodman, Amy. “Cornel West on Occupy Wall Street: It’s the Makings of a U.S. Autumn Responding to the Arab Spring.” Democracy Now. Rev. 9/2011. http://www.democracynow. org/blog/2011/9/29/cornel_west_on_occupy_wall_street_its_ the_makings_of_a_us_autumn_responding_to_the_arab_spring (11/2011).

12 Essig, Todd. “The Contrasting Psychologies of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the ‘Tea Party.’” Forbes. Rev. 10/2011. http:// www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2011/10/16/the-contrastingpsychologies-of-occupy-wall-street-and-the-tea-party/ (11/2011).

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 23

interconnected, and nonlinear. He proffers that Occupy Wall Street is different from “civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign” in that it “does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, express itself in bumpersticker-length goals and understand itself as having a particular endpoint.” It’s a new kind of protest for a new juncture in how we live, or could live. Rushkoff writes:

Yet, here on our home soil, plenty of people are still rolling their eyes and flipping the channel.

As I write, city officials are sending police departments to forcefully break up and remove the discussions from sight — generally, by way of raids in the middle of the night with full riot gear, despite the movement’s insistence on nonviolence. Accounts fly, many documented on video, about peaceful protestors all around the country being injured, pepper sprayed, dragged by their hair, kicked, beaten, arrested and sent to jail, sometimes without urgently needed medical attention.15 Many of these raids are conducted claiming a need to “clean” protest sites, citing “concerns” about sanitation, despite committees of volunteers rigorously dedicated to cleaning16. In the most recent New York events, police destroyed thousands of books, laptops, and other personal belongings17, used flashing strobe lights to prevent people from being able to document their actions on film18, and arrested journalists (or barred them from the scene altogether)19. It all sounds like a bad movie; my partner and fellow playwright, upon hearing a friend’s account from Zucotti Park, shook his head in disbelief and said, “Yeah, if one of my students had written that, I might have suggested that the laughing cop throwing books in the dumpster was a little over the top.”

But this is all happening, right here and now, in the United States of America.

So what gives? Why such disdain and fear

The members of Occupy Wall Street may be as unwieldy, paradoxical, and inconsistent as those of us living in the real world. But that is precisely why their new approach to protest is more applicable, sustainable and actionable than what passes for politics today. They are suggesting that the fiscal operating system on which we are attempting to run our economy is no longer appropriate to the task. They mean to show that there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture.13

Millions of people around the globe are cheering for Occupy Wall Street. The website www.occupytogether.org tracks hundreds of occupations in cities nationally and internationally that have launched their own conversations. People who cannot participate on-site have sent donations of food, warm clothing, tents, and other supplies, as well as financial support, videos of encouragement, letters of testimony, and other shows of solidarity. “Thank God there are people in the streets who understand that there is nothing inevitable about this misery,” wrote Mark Weisbrot for The Guardian, at the end of a dismal update on American unemployment and political paralysis14. “It is their strength and organisation that is currently our best hope for a better future.”

15 “Beyond UC Davis, Worse Tactics than Pepper Spray.” http://www.businessweek.com/finance/occupy-wall-street/ archives/2011/11/beyond_uc_david_worse_tactics_than_ pepper_spray.html.

16 OccupyTVNY. “Occupy Wall Street Sanitation Committee Gets Down to Business!” Via YouTube. Rev. 10/2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Je9NXKcV0 (11/2011).

17 Anderson, Brian & Carr, Erin Lee. “Who Smashed the Laptops from Occupy Wall Street? Inside the NYPD’s Lost and Found.” Rev. 11/2011. Motherboard. http://motherboard. tv/2011/11/18/who-smashed-the-laptops-from-occupy-wallstreet-inside-the-nypd-s-lost-and-found (11/2011) 18 Kafanov, Lucy. “Occupy Wall Street: Tough Policing Fails to Deter the 99%” RT News. Rev. 10/2011. http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=1YZnLnwxy1Y. 19 Mirkinson, Jack. “Occupy Wall Street ‘Media Blackout’: Journalists Arrested, Roughed Up, Blocked from Covering Clearing.” Huffington Post. Rev. 11/2011. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/15/occupy-wall-street-raidjournalists-arrested_n_1094564.html (11/2011).

13 Rushkoff, Douglas. “Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase?

You don’t get it.” CNN. Rev. 10/2011. http://edition.cnn. com/2011/10/05/opinion/rushkoff-occupy-wall-street/index. html (11/2011).

14 Weisbrot, Mark. “The U.S. today: economic stagnation, political paralysis.” The Guardian. Rev. 10/2011. http://www. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/07/ usemployment-useconomy (11/2011).

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 24

surrounding proactive discussion? Why are people being mocked and arrested for trying to have it? What is this climate we’ve cultivated and what values are flourishing? Perhaps Mr. Abdallah was spot on about “the average Joe” being unable to “operate that way” — not for lack of desire or intellectual inability, but because he sees very clearly that we’re not actually free to gather publicly with others long enough to have the discussions that need to be had in this country. But I also can’t fully get behind the “us versus them” language, because it’s all a bit more complicated than that. People are layered.

Slavoj Zizek, speaking to Occupy Wall Street in Zucotti Park this past October, observed, “What we are missing is...[t]he language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we

are taught to speak about freedom, war and terrorism, and so on falsifies freedom.”20 He’s right; language we grew up using (“all men are created equal”) does not reflect the values that our system upholds. Yet we are all inextricably part of that system, so what are we going to do?

Over the past few months, Occupy Wall Street has started to build a new vocabulary from scratch, one that I believe is helping us reclaim our imaginations and envision what a culture prioritizing balance, transparency, sustainability and human life over big money might look like.

In order to get there, though, we have to keep the discussion going.

20 Watch or read his speech at http://occupywallst.org/ article/today-liberty-plaza-had-visit-slavoj-zizek.

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 25

The Basement Bar of the Bryant Park Inn poetry

by CARL JAMES GRINDLEY

The room heaved in a perfect storm And everyone took cover, tied on their Life jackets and tried find the radio, But the dial ditched around, lapsed around, Tore completely off, and the station shifted Into something no one wanted to hear, And I’m all like: I’m with you, man, It’s loud, discordant music With grim decorations, carved, I added later — Covering my ears, stopping my ears, disregarding The dwarves and trolls and slutty gatekeepers Who ran their three-inch claws along my neck — Out of neat wood, wrought iron, and trained To sense and seek out the raining heart, The dripping heart, the heart bathed in an entire Bleak November of blistering Pacific Northwest rain, And it’s like ice, man, I added, it’s loud like a stab Into an open eye, twitching and rich, So unexpected that it’s like the world suddenly shifted Color from blue to red, and it’s loud, Impossibly loud, and you lose yourself in it, Trying to write down the notation, Transcribe a song you don’t quite understand, But, man, I added, you keep doing it Until you’re — just think about it, just once, Just this one time before you grow too old To think about it ever again — and do you think That you’re immune? That you’ll outlast it?

That you’ll never wake up And realize that you were eighteen years old A long, long time ago, and that you’ve just been Kidding yourself all along anyhow?

Think about it, man, just think, That but for a couple of freezing stray Religious thoughts you could have been Pope — You could have been president, You could have been CEO of something You’d just as soon as firebomb into oblivion.

Today, man, I added, I don’t even care who dies When the building catches fire.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 26

Young Punk’s Guide to Nicknames nonfiction

by SEAN MICHAEL ST. CHARLES

The fox was blood and guts and bootprints.

Dead for hours. At least as long as they’d been in Boston. They being John Boy, Pip aka Mike P, Brennan (now Sleeves), and Sean. And they were supposed to be into it, or something. They were supposed to be punk rock motherfuckers.

Honest-to-god-devil-dealing-blood-suckingwe-don’t-give-a-shit-punk-fucking-rockers.

That’s why they were in Boston, after all.

Boston had seemed so nice in the morning.

Sleepy sort of town, like Ann Arbor back home.

Snow had fallen overnight and all the houses looked the same to Sean. Not brick houses or wood houses or white houses or blue houses.

He preferred it that way.

It was his turn to drive that morning. Nothing unusual. He was always driving or next in line to drive. Sean/Pip/Sean/Pip and so on. John never drove. He was a van sleeper. Blue suede seats like a dream: kept him real cozy. Brennan had the inverse problem. East Coast driving made him itchy. Too cluttered. Too move-itor-lose-it-buddy-and-piss-off-while-you’re-atit. Driving back home was something else. Not adrenaline pumping, but at least enjoyable. Real scenic and peaceful. Woods along the side of the highway and pine scent and windows down just a crack. Just enough to feel. Michigan, through and through.

So it was up to Pip and Sean. Which was fine. This division (Pip/Sean vs. John/Brennan) simply made sense. It was rhythm vs. lead. Of course Pip and Sean drove: bass and drums, respectively. At the show, they were in the back.

First to set up. Tune up. Shut up. Count off and kick it up. Make way for the talent. But out in the real-real world they were in front — driving to the show.

And today it was Sean driving. New York to Boston by way of Connecticut. He never would’ve guessed Connecticut was a trafficjammed-55mph-shit-hole. Boston seemed nice though. Big and white and blank. Filled with possibility.

The Bad Boy Shack looked like any other house in Allston: two story Victorian painted peach with white trim and a swing on the porch.

Coated in snow it was downright pleasant. Snug as a bug. Home-away-from-home kind of place.

If not for the boys on the porch in patched jean jackets, Sean would’ve driven rright past.

The Bay Boys sat on the railing with their backs to the street — drinking Mad Dog 40s out of paper bags, looking like the cold couldn’t touch them. They wore black. Black jean jackets and dark denim pants and black watch caps folded to hit above the ear. They all had matching boots: slick leather, ankle-length, with one-inch rubber soles. Permanent mink oil sheen. Goddamn, they were beautiful.

The driveway lay un-shoveled. Sean parked on the street. He knew the Bad Boys by way of a Massachusetts band he’d booked in Ann Arbor. The band couldn’t play worth shit, but were good guys and had promised him a fun time in Boston. It was the same with every band that came through Ann Arbor. You think this is wild, you should see our shows back home. Kids hanging from the rafters. Punching holes through the wall. It’ll blow your fucking mind.

Sean hesitated in the driver’s seat. There was a foot of snow on the driveway and his sneakers were already soaked.

“Cold feet, huh?” John said to him. “Cold feet, cold feet, cold feet,” building into a chant that Brennan and Pip happily joined. They pounded the roof with their knuckles and hollered at the top of their lungs. Cold Feet. John had been pushing the name since Cleveland.

“Fuck off, Mr. Pretty-Boy-Hollywood-HotShot. Why don’t you do the talking this time?”

Sean tried to get the name out with a straight face but couldn’t manage.

John laughed. He was dangerous in situations like this. “I’ve done the talking every night so far, and you know it. Now get your ass out there, Cold Feet.” His cheeks were flush and his blue eyes twinkled and he looked like

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 27

Ian Curtis. When John was in a mood, he had real gravity. You couldn’t help but fall into it.

There was no way in hell Sean was going to let Cold Feet stick. He slammed shut the van door and trod up the driveway.

“What’s happening, college boy,” one of the punks called out immediately. No sneer. No mean look. Just a smile, and a drag from his cigarette. Sean wanted to protest, but couldn’t manage it. The kid was right — Sean was a college boy, which was understood to mean Fancy Boy, which was a roundabout way of saying Faggot. They all were. No denying it.

Sean wore slim-fit chinos and a white button up with the top button done. He got his hair cut at an old-fashioned barber: faded, combed, greased, and parted on the side — a real 60s cut. He looked clean. There was nothing punk about it.

“Whaddya want,” another boy chimed in, “sellin’ textbooks?” The Bad Boys all laughed.

Sean’s face went red.

“We’re supposed to play here tonight, some friends said it was cool.” He sounded disinterested. That was the trick with rough and tumble types: the less you cared, the cooler you were. Within every clique there was certain etiquette. Drink with the street punks; talk animal rights with the hippies; talk shit with the 80s purists; ham it up for the girls. But across the board, you played it cool.

“Right on, load in the through the back,” said the first boy. He took another drag from his cigarette, clearing his throat afterwards and hocking a mouthful of yellow and brown gunk into the snow. Another boy did the same, and another and another until the snow at their feet was riddled with yellow-brown divots. When they ran out of spit they took turns stomping out the spit holes until all the snow was level.

Pip had final say of load in/load out. He was simply good at it. College had prepared him for such real-world situations. Sure — the others had taken plenty of their own classes, but Pip attended his; wrote notes and made study cards and did homework ahead of time. He kept a planner full of dates with actual importance: phone interview with NASA on January the 3rd; presentation for the School of Engineering

on the 14th titled, iPhones and the Airline Industry: Writing the Killer App — which admittedly needed some work, but words had never been Pip’s forte.

So he didn’t talk much. Never a pip out of Mike P. Never a squeak. That’s how he got the nickname.

“Bass cab out first, then the amps,” he ordered Brennan.

“Why don’t you move your own fucking bass cab,” Brennan retorted and Pip just stared at him. Tour had an understood list of rules and responsibilities. Pip’s job was to direct and Brennan’s was to do the heavy lifting.

Sean listened to the argument from the front seat. What a pair they were. Pip got a real kick out of seeing Brennan struggle with the cab. It was massive: eight ten-inch speakers, encased in solid wood: ugly as sin — but the tone was killer, and it could make a basement shake at quarter volume.

Next up was the guitar cab, then the amps, then the guitars, then the merch, then finally the drums. Sean only unloaded drums, and he was the only one to touch them. The kit was his baby. It took him three summers of pushing carts at Kroger just to buy the shells. Handcarved birch with a satin black wrap. Not to mention the cymbals and the hardware and new heads every few months. Being a drummer was expensive and it made him feel valuable. Here I am making the racket. Banging away. Bang-BangBang. I have visible and audible worth. I swear. I swear.

I swear.

John led the way downstairs through a rear cellar door. Ann Arbor didn’t have cellars. Back home, a basement was another room in the house. The Bad Boy’s cellar was a cave.

They set the gear down on a rug in the corner and turned to survey the space. There were your show standards: cinderblock to put in front of the drum kit, PA system with two mics snaking out from it, pillows taped to the wall to absorb the sound, shattered glass littering the dirt floor.

Then there were the oddities. Christmas lights hung from the rafters like some kind of new stalactite. An inflated children’s pool was set up at the foot of a second staircase, and — as far as Sean could tell — was filled with mud.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 28

The room was stuffed with knick-knacks of all sorts: a pile of broken toys, four bike wheels, a raccoon pelt, two deer skulls, a box of cafeteriasized milk cartons (presumably staled), and a statue of the Virgin Mary with lipstick smeared on her cheeks.

The whole cellar stunk of sweat and stale beer, and they didn’t mind so much. After eight days of shows and no showers, they were hardpressed to find a smell that offended. Not to say there weren’t odor-issues from time to time.

Brennan had this problem with gas. He’d been eating energy bars by the twos and threes all tour long. Smart thinking, really. Save a lot of money that way. But all the fiber had to get out somehow.

“You look like you saw something dead.”

They smelled him before they saw him.

The boy from the porch was smoking another cigarette as he climbed down the stairs. Sean coughed. Smoke still bothered him, even after eight days.

“Other bands should be here pretty soon.”

The boy them tossed them each a Natty Light from a thirty-rack he was resting on his shoulder.

“Have a drink. That’s something they teach you at college, isn’t it?”

Again, with that goddamn smile. Sean shuddered. It wasn’t a coffee-and-cigarette smile or a dear-lord-look-at-those-pearlywhites. The boy’s teeth were clean enough and straight enough. Not particularly unusual looking. Almost too normal. Like he wasn’t smiling at all, just holding up a picture of a smile he’d cut from Good House Keeping.

Who told the boy he could do that? Sean wanted to know.

He stood there watching the boy while the others drank their beers. John shot-gunned his.

Typical. The boy laughed, and Sean wasn’t sure if it was at John or with him. John didn’t care either way.

“You college boys are alright. I’ll bet everybody thinks you’re the Number One Punks, back home.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Sean replied for the group. Ann Arbor didn’t have a bustling punk scene. Sure, they booked punk shows at their punk house, but never on exam nights and

when they walked down the streets they weren’t those punks they were just that-guy-in-my-Econ-class or that-guy-that-makes-my-drinks-at-the-coffee-shop.

“Well, you’re gonna see what a real punk show looks like tonight.”

The boy still hadn’t introduced himself. He was gone before anyone could ask his name.

“What a weirdo,” Sean said to no one in paricular.

“Seems like a nice enough guy,” Brennan shrugged without much thought, and the others nodded.

He did seem nice enough. That was the problem. Sean sighed and set his beer down in the dirt. He never drank before shows. Couldn’t stomach it sloshing around while he played. He found a clean spot along the wall and took a seat. His feet hurt.

It was cold in the cellar. Cold and dark and one-hundred-percent-lifeless. He tried to imagine the room packed with kids, but couldn’t. Didn’t feel right. The cellar was a real nice place, right then. Sean could live in a place like that. He untied his shoes and slipped them off his feet. They were heavier than usual. Still wet. Wetter, maybe. His socks were wet, too.

Beneath his socks, his skin was getting mushy.

He considered pulling the socks off by the toe, but was afraid his skin might come with them. That wouldn’t do. He’d need to be gentle.

One sock at a time. Starting with the right, he peeled the cotton from his leg and folded it down. The exposed skin didn’t look his own.

Loose-leaf-paper-feet. Pale white with pale blue lines.

The blankness was overwhelming. He pressed the soles of his feet to the ground and rubbed as hard as he could. Nothing changed.

Another sigh. His feet were raw and filthy, but beneath it all they were white still and still cold and still not his own.

“You’re the fucking weirdo,” John smirked.

He walked over to where Sean had set down his beer and picked up the can. “We’re all fucking weirdos.”

John pulled his Swiss Army Knife from his pocket and stabbed the can, quickly popping the top. He looked like a movie star even then, beer dribbling down his chin. Brennan and

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 29

Pip sipped their beers and together the four of them waited. The cellar was a real nice place, right then.

The cellar was full shortly after doors. Turns out the Bad Boy Shack was the place to be.

Brennan sat at the merch table with his sleeves rolled up, trying to look tough. He was tattooed — not completely covered, but enough that he could pass for a tattoo-guy in Ann Arbor.

Classic American stuff: a black panther with an anvil in its mouth; a Rose of No Man’s Land for his mother. It seemed like everyone in Boston had more tattoos than Brennan.

“Cute ink, curly,” some guy with a skull on either side of his neck threw out as he walked by the table. “Your momma must be so proud.”

Brennan was a pretty big kid, but Skull-Neck was the kind of guy who could beat someone up just by thinking it.

Brennan’s “thanks” was nothing more than a squeak. He’d started the whole nickname thing. Before they’d even written a song, he was thinking up nicknames. He wanted to be Clawhammer and Snake and briefly Big Beefy.

On the first day of tour he was Chains. By New York he was Sleeves — as in Tattooed Sleeves.

He’d take any name that sounded tougher than Brennan. Sleeves would have to go.

There were only two bands on the bill: them and Boston local called Diet Coke Heads. They were playing first. Sean usually hated opening because the crowd wasn’t loose enough yet, but that didn’t seem to be a problem here. If anything, the crowd was already too loose. It was only 8 o’clock and everyone was drunk.

Even the frat guys in Ann Arbor didn’t start drinking before 10.

John was drunk and polarizing the room. It made Sean nervous just knowing him. A group of girls had surrounded John in a back corner and every guy around was glaring at him. Not punk girls, either. Beautiful girls — all dressed up and made up and feeling their drinks. Sean sighed. Good-looking girls were welcome in any group: a life lesson if he’d ever learned one.

“You’re like sooooo handsome.”

“You must be a singer.”

The girls were especially fond of John’s Michigan accent. He had a voice like a bonfire

— all smoky and crackling. He winked in Sean’s direction. That dog. He led the girls to the merch table and sold them each a t-shirt. Five dollars a piece. “Special deal just for you lovely ladies.”

After the girls left, John put the money in the moneybox and counted his earnings. He’d made thirty-five dollars, all told. Enough to get pizza later.

“How do you always do it,” Brennan asked and John patted him on the shoulder.

“I’m not a punk, that’s how.” He put his hand out and the four of them slapped five.

“Yeah, well don’t my ass kicked ‘cause you’ve been hitting on somebody’s girlfriend.”

The mean looks were getting to be too much for Sean.

He sat down and started to set up his drums.

Next to him, Pip had his bass out and was going over parts in his head. Brennan tuned his guitar first by ear, then with a pedal. John hummed scales out of pitch. It was those moments they looked forward to most: the sort of calm you’d never think to find amidst the cigarette smoke and broken glass.

Except, Sean couldn’t find an inch of calm, right then.

“Can you guys move my drums for me? I need to take a breather.” He booked it out the door before anyone could say no.

Cold air was hell on his lungs, but it was better than the smoke from downstairs. He took a hit from his inhaler and breathed deep — slow at first, then faster. One-Two-Three-exhale. One-TwoThree-exhale. Everybody-loves-me-exhale. Everybodyloves-me-exhale. Loves me. Loves me. Loves me. The air was sharp and hurt to breathe, but he wasn’t crying. It was the wind in his eyes.

From inside, he heard his band getting ready. John was talking into the microphone.

Pip methodically picked away at the opening groove and the whole house shook in meter.

Brennan messed with his levels until his amp was shrieking. He was a genius when it came to the guitar. Never took a lesson and didn’t know a lick about music theory, but the kid could play. He learned by listening. Spend enough time alone and you can figure out how to do just about anything

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 30

Sean closed his eyes. There was acid in his throat. One-Two-Three-exhale. One-Two-Threeexhale. He thought about running away but the noise from the cellar was only getting louder.

The house would blow if he didn’t go down soon. The entire world would shatter into a thousand slivers — sharper than the air outside, and it would be his fault.

He took one last breath and made his way downstairs. Every eye met his. He took off his shirt and sat down at the kit. One-Two-Three-exhale.

One-Two-Three-exhale. He looked up at John and nodded. On the count of four. One-Two-ThreeFour. Sean hit the crash and Pip strummed and Brennan strummed and everything went black.

John had punched out the light bulb above his head. Motherfuck. Exactly what Sean needed: something to piss the crowd off even more.

The reaction was immediate. One of the Bad Boys ran into Skull-Neck and Skull-Neck hit a Beautiful Girl and pretty soon the whole crowd was thrashing about.

And they fucking loved it. Everywhere Sean looked was a smile. John wrapped the mic cord around his throat and Pip turned to face his amp and Brennan knocked over a kid in the front and played even faster. Sean couldn’t believe his eyes. These weren’t his friends. They were animals. They all were animals: every last person in the room, except for him.

He looked away. The animals might see him.

All of a sudden, something stunk. It was the Bad Boy with the smile. He was coming down the stairs — something furry around his neck.

A fox with tire marks across its belly. Must’ve been road kill. It looked so fresh.

The boy marched to the center of the room and plopped down the fox. He started stomping it. Over and over and over and over. The guts squirted out and flecks of frozen blood went flying in every direction. The crowd gathered around and cheered as he stomped the fox into the dirt. The skull caved so easily. The eyes sparkled in the lowlight like treasure for a moment, and then were gone. The paws. Oh those precious little paws — seemed to kick with every stomp. He smashed them all but one.

Sean was next. He could feel it. They’d drag him to the center of the room and stomp him

to pieces. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. He screamed until the guitar stopped and the bass stopped and he was the only playing.

“That’s all, thanks for having us,” John said over the microphone. He looked back at Sean.

The set was over.

“Fuck yeah, you guys were really something.”

The Bad Boy came up and gave them each a hug. “Some of the best shit I’ve seen.”

They loaded out while the Diet Coke Heads played. Sean sat on the hood of the van and listened from outside. They didn’t sound very good, but he could hear the crowd singing along.

John hopped up on the hood and sat next to him. “You alright? Got pretty crazy in there.”

“Hell yeah it did,” Brennan shouted from behind the van.

Sean didn’t say a word.

John put his hand on Sean’s shoulder. “The kid already paid me, we can take off any time.”

He appreciated the offer. John had always been a good friend.

“Hold on, I gotta grab something first.”

Sean ran back down stairs.

The van was loaded and ready to go by the time he returned.

He jumped into the driver’s seat. “All set?”

“What was that about,” Brennan asked and Sean just shrugged.

John laughed. “You’re such a weirdo, man.

Let’s go.” And they were gone.

After Boston was Rochester and after Rochester was Pittsburg. It was Pip’s turn to drive that morning. Nothing unusual. In the backseat, John dozed and Brennan listened to his headphones. They’d slept in the van last night.

The sun was beautiful behind them — a dusty shade of red only seen at dawn — and Sean stared out the window as they drove.

Traffic was sparse so early, just how he liked it.

There was no snow on the roads. If they were lucky, they could make it to Rochester in seven hours. Not so bad. They’d been through worse before.

They made a hundred dollars at the Boston show: enough to fill the tank and get breakfast and the world was a nice place, right then. All

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 31

the world that fit inside the van. They were expected in Rochester that night, but they could go anywhere. Down to Florida, or all the way out to California. They could drive until no one knew their names, or who they loved, or what they dreamed of at night.

Sean reached into his pocket and pulled out

the paw. The fur was soft still and the claws were still sharp. It fit perfectly in the palm of his hand. He’d never seen a fox up close before.

It was so much smaller than he’d imagined.

He felt himself nodding off. Warm in the van.

Nice-and-cozy. Pip was driving. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 32

Hum poetry

by KRISTIN FITZSIMMONS

Humming wires. Throw a toaster into bathwater.

Electricity in an open meadow, spiraling around grasses. Charged grasshoppers on the edge of snap and buzz. Secret electric childhood. * I dream of a crack behind my teeth. The crack is audible, the way you can taste lightning. * Benign Rolandic epilepsy, like any number of fairy tale creatures, comes when you’re sleeping.

Wikipedia sez: “Roland blows his olifant so that Charlemagne will return and avenge them. His temples burst from the force required.”

No children’s brains explode in the process. Only sizzle. Only a handful of brains ever throw a toaster into the bathtub on a regular basis. * The brain as a puppy so happy it pees on the carpet.

Dogs have seizures too. Mostly poodles. * Of medication, Wikipedia sez: “Carbamazepine stabilizes the inactivated state of sodium channels, meaning that fewer of these channels are available to subsequently open, making brain cells less excitable (less likely to fire)” The chemical diagram looks like a 3-headed stick person. I don’t know to pronounce its body parts.

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 33

Bastard Son of Simon poetry

by KRISTIN FITZSIMMONS

“Well at least you’re a lucky sonofabitch. Blacks and spics get wasted but you micks make it every damn time.”

— Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

So we were the lucky ones

paleness in the blood

sugar in our cabinets.

Mom was a scientist for Monsanto, she worked with potatoes, that old Irish tuber, that new American freak.

She made mustard seeds glow in the dark but Dad wouldn’t tell her what he’d seen in Nam — he’d seen his luck in his eyes a flashbulb then the darkroom where I make prints of no use breathing in chemicals I don’t believe in, using that camera he gave me so afraid of it breaking there’s a dark room Dad doesn’t go into there’s a darkroom where I protect the most fragile photo paper there’s a dark room where I make the prints of things we’ve seen before like Mold-o-Rama machines and I had one of the Chicago Culture Center’s ceiling god, I felt so

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 34

Orange Quarterly • WINTER 2012 ELEANOR LEONNE BENNETT is a 15-yearold photographer and artist who has won contests with National Geographic, The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winston’s Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham Science, Fennel and Fern, and Nature’s Best Photography. She has had her photographs published in exhibitions and magazines across the world.

NATHAN BLAKE is currently a janitor in Virginia’s non-profit sector. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Monkeybicycle9, Bluestem, Tulane Review, and Word Riot, among others.

SEAN ALAN CLEARY is an MFA student at the University of Montana and a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has previously been published in non-fiction on PBS’s History Blog, “Inside American Experience.”

KRISTIN FITZSIMMONS is currently an MFA Candidate at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Her interests include photography, moss, and turkey vultures.

KATHLEEN GLASGOW’s poems have been published in Cimarron Review, Bellingham Review, Roanoke Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Buffalo Review, and other journals. She has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Jerome Foundation.

VO L U M E I I • N U M B E R I 35

CARL JAMES GRINDLEY grew up on an island off the West Coast of Canada and studied in the US and Europe. His book Icon was published in 2008 by No Record Press. He has recent work in Apocrypha & Abstractions, Anemone Sidecar, and The Moon Milk Review. Grindley is a founding editor of The South Bronx Review.

RACHEL JENDRZEJEWSKI is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Minneapolis as a Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center. She has written, performed and otherwise collaborated on performance, film, music and public art projects throughout the U.S. as well as internationally. Her work has been published in Back Stage, The Arts District Citizen, Common Ties, The Family Press, and Urban Honking (via Tools by Alisha Beth Adams). She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Brown University.

SEAN MICHAEL ST. CHARLES is a fiction and poetry writer currently residing Ann Arbor, Michigan. He earned his BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan in 2011 and hopes to begin study as an MFA candidate in the fall of 2012. His work has appeared previously in Xylem, Fortnight Literary Press and Wonderfort.

BENJAMIN WALKER lives in Roanoke, Virginia, where he is an MFA candidate at Hollins University. His poetry recently appeared in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Blast Furnace, Dirtflask, and PANK, and is forthcoming from Weave Magazine and burndistrict.

MILLA VAN DER HAVE wrote her first poem at 16, during a physics class. She has been writing ever since. Milla lives and works in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

O R A N G E QUA RT E R LY 36

CA LL

for

SUBMISSIONS

We are pleased to announce that Orange Quarterly is now accepting submissions for its next theme issue:

FACE Volume II, Number 2 SPRING 2012 We’re looking to publish work inspired by, informed by, or otherwise relating to “face.”

We’re excited to review any creative work that speaks to the theme of face in any way.

Deadline: March 15, 2012.

Refer to our submission guidelines at www.orangequarterly.com before sending your work. Please include the theme name in your email subject.

founded in

2011

volume ii

by allison leigh

•

number

1