Utter - No. 1 by PJ Williams

UTTER

no. 1

utter

send forth the voice

MASTHEAD

P. J. Williams Co-founder, Editor-in-Chief Kir Jordan Co-founder, Editor Kenzie Allen Editor Cover Art

Old Book

Jane Hawley

poetry

CONTENTS

Laurel Canyon 1

The Matins Project 2

And We're Outside and We're Running 4 My Rocket Called Blackout 6

Eszter Takacs Pamela Hart

Nate Slawson

defying physics at closing time 10 Anna Weaver

Father 12

Ariana Den Bleyker

Grace 13

Sarah Sloat

The History ofthe Hoodie 15 Michael Mlekoday

Jessica Poli

Michael Karl (Ritchie)

Daniel Romo

Origin ofOne-Sided Love 17 Post-Post-Post Modernism 18 Caution 19

The Dinner Parties We Used to Have 25 Chloe Clark

fiction

Right Before the Blast Matthew Fogarty

Passed the Neighbor Joshua Matteau

And Death is the Sauce Nathan Blake nonfiction

Thunder Green Paul Crenshaw photography

Through, 1

Caleb Washburn

Bridgetown

Katy Rossing

Speak to Another or Live in a Lonely World Eleanor Leonne Bennett

The Salt We Are as Stone, the Hands Held Low on the Windowsill David Tomaloff

poetry by ESZTER TAKACS Laurel Canyon

This is the story of a motionless sky. Pieces from mouth to mouth and grouted lips, peeling cellophane. Your bluff is the profile of a broken chair that eases past the dust line where someone sat grieving. Accidents do happen, no strangle here, no point. The houses hold hands, tipped in prayer. Saints of oak and willow cling to the cerebral maize of sunup. Your arm isn’t bent anymore, its turn of the wheel a memory, its motion polite in its descent and the tail that is unending, bound by what came before it, cup into bowl, bend into bend and the crook of the curved line arching into the quiet of a brazen cloud. Nausea becomes terror. A dip in the road sparks sudden time travel that bore a child called noise.

TAKACS · 1

poetry by PAMELA HART The Matins Project

The moon shoves light into my left eye before dawn even though it’s waning In morning’s gray I become lake then witch and drink all the silky water

Mauve clouds glower above the tree line while my checklist snarls bed covers A certain dullness flatters the yard I travel from mother to Afghanistan

Picasso said he painted to stop motion Tell that to another five minutes gone

2 · HART

fiction by MATTHEW FOGARTY Right Before the Blast

I remember that right before the blast I was about to try to hold your hand and had planned, at the end of the block, to stop suddenly, to let you continue on until your arm pulled taut against mine at which point I would have flung you back toward me like a yo-yo and kissed you before you even had a chance to object. At least, that was the way I had planned it. I imagined our date in bed alone the night before. Played it out a dozen times before I could fall asleep. Thinking of your smell. Writing and revising the words we’d say. I almost typed a note in my phone to remind myself. I usually forget the things I think about in the moments before I fall asleep. And actually, I had been planning to do it for five or six blocks before we passed the exploding car. This is sort of a confession, I guess, because I really did know which block the theater was on. I pretended like I didn't because I wanted an extra couple of blocks to make the move, so I could get it just right and make the night turn out the way I dreamed it. I don't know if that's selfishness or fear or both or nothing at all. Maybe it means nothing at all, and you wouldn't have let me hold your hand either way or would have backed away from me like you usually do. But that's the way I like to think of it. Like it would have been the perfect night had you and I not been riddled with shrapnel from the shatterproof glass of the Ford Taurus.

FOGARTY · 3

poetry by NATE SLAWSON

And We're Outside and We're Running

The apartment is a hot air balloon My brain is bleeding propane into the rented air I shut the blinds and pretend the world is a girl who likes New Adventures in Hi-Fi as much as I do and then we're outside and we're running running out of our clothes and into each other's sticky faces I think your sunlight is record-setting The heartbeat is a brick the heartbeat is a giant window My body lies over a body of water My body is a cliff I want desperately to dive off of I want to dive into your sunlight and split my atoms from my navel to my throat Tell me you need my sorrow Nine hundred miles away is a sunset and I am a tugboat wishing for a longer rope the longest rope the moon

has ever thrown You have the loveliest feet in all of America and I am 30-something years old and writing the same six words repeatedly This means I am still alive and it’s 5:45 in the morning and I know I will die someday most likely before I swim in the Pacific Ocean or get eaten by a great white shark.

4 · SLAWSON

Through, 1

photography by CALEB WASHBURN

poetry by NATE SLAWSON

My Rocket Called Blackout

My rocket screams I love you I sing you another one about the cherry bomb I sing you with a mouth guttered in blood I am coughing up my heart I am choking on a helicopter I call it my face You look Coca-Cola dancing on the carpet dancing in the room you’re wet and raining glassy harbor is a goldfish bowl in the sun

I wear this brown suit like a deer I want you to shoot me in the head before I wake up and all the world’s a hospital Strangers are making me sick I need you to bite my lungs Call me blackberry I need a new blood-letting Blackout blackout wherever we are O come inside play come inside with me I am the sun exploding and you are morning We glow in the dark because what glows in the dark can never hurt us.

6 · SLAWSON

nonfiction by PAUL CRENSHAW Thunder Green

The only bar we were allowed in on Fort Jackson’s base in the summer of 1991 was owned by a Vietnamese man and woman who could barely speak English. We were there for Advanced Individual Training, the second half of Basic Training, and though we still had to do push-ups in the mornings and jog three or four miles every day, on Saturday night we were allowed out of the barracks to the bar across the street. The inside of the bar was cavernous, dark and smoky, dimly lit along the edges. Long tables took up most of the floor space, candles guttering in the wind from the fans that stirred the smoke near the ceiling. The bar ran the length of the back wall, but there was no mirror behind it and no liquor bottles stacked in colorful pyramids. They only sold beer in cans the old man and woman would fish out of ice chests empty of ice and hand to you luke warm, then hold up two fingers to indicate the price. Because we were soldiers, we talked of war. The Gulf War had ended not long before, and the soldiers were coming home. There were parades down the main streets of Columbia, South Carolina, and airplanes arriving daily with returning troops. But sitting in the smoky, dim room, listening to the old man and woman yell at each other in Vietnamese, our thoughts drifted to another war, and soon we had an elaborate fantasy running, one that we built upon each Saturday night. The old man and woman were spies, we decided, here to undermine the government and hoist Ho Chi Minh into power. The old man had been Viet Cong, and he had run drugs south to Hue City during the war. The old woman had led a VC sniper unit. She was a tunnel rat. Their children bombed Jeeps in Saigon. They had masterminded the Tet Offensive. The atmosphere reinforced our imaginings. Even though the room was large, the tables were wedged together, bodies in close proximity. The lights seemed to grow dimmer as the night progressed. The air swirled sluggishly above our heads, and in the South Carolina summer the fans did little to combat the muggy heat, mainly serving to stir the smoke. Often it felt like what we imagined the jungle would be like, or an opium den or a dark tunnel or a patrol late at night in which you cannot see anything except vague shapes in the darkness. Swimming drunk late on a Saturday, wishing we were anywhere but here, we imagined a vast underground network built on the base, an extensive system of tunnels and spies and signals the old man and woman had created. Part of the reason we believed this was their ability to sense danger. Because most of us were in training, and under age, a patrol called Green Thunder circled the base on the weekends, looking for drunk soldiers or people fucking in the bushes behind the barracks. They came to the bar two or three times a night, and the old man and woman always knew when they were coming. Fifteen minutes before Green Thunder arrived the old man and woman and their daughters—whose ages we could not determine—would circle the bar, leaning over the tables in the darkness and saying “Thunder Green come. Thunder Green. You no drink.” They’d take our beers and hide them behind the bar, and when the drill sergeants who comprised Green Thunder walked in and stood at the door staring down through their mirrored sunglasses, we’d be sitting, talking quietly, our faces flickering in candlelight. The old man would run over, bar towel over his shoulder, and shake hands with Green Thunder, bobbing and bowing the entire time. He was a small, thin man, and looked like a child next to the drill sergeants. They were always big, even the women, and they stood at the door with their arms folded and their hats on, heads swiveling to take in the dark bar. Even though Green Thunder’s personnel rotated on a weekly basis, there were always two black men and two white men, and occasionally a Vietnamese woman who was shorter than I was but still looked huge. She never spoke to the old man. Green Thunder never spoke at all. Occasionally they’d wander through the tables scowling at the soldiers sitting there smoking, no drinks in front of us, but mostly they just stood at the door, arms folded, as if to let us know they existed and were there should we get out of line. When they left, we’d all stare at the door, making sure they were gone. Then we’d rush to the bar, every soldier at once, and turn up the rest of our luke warm beers and order another. The old man and woman would nod, bowing, reaching for new beers. “Thunder Green gone. You drink now.” CRENSHAW · 7

The other part of the reason we believed they had underground tunnels and spy rings and plans to overthrow the government was because we couldn’t understand them, and we were pretty sure they couldn’t understand us. Their language was a mystery. Their inflection was all wrong. The rhythm of their words was off. We joked they named their children by throwing all the pots and pans out the back door and naming them the sounds they heard. Even when they spoke English, they rearranged words and phrases, so that “Green Thunder” became “Thunder Green”, “here’s your beer” became “beer here”, and “last call for alcohol” became “arcohor rast.” Our differences went beyond language. They were tiny, even compared to those of us who were short. The old man stood perhaps five feet tall, and the old woman was even shorter. We often rested our elbows on the top of her head for a joke. Their daughters were so small they could have been children. Their skin was a different color. Their eyes were dark, unreadable, and even when they smiled it was a nervous smile, flickering at the edges of their mouths. They didn’t know our names, just as we didn’t know theirs. Our names were sewn over our hearts, but they called us all Soldier, not a description of who we were or what we did, but like we all shared the same first name. We called them old man and old woman (if they ever told us their names, we didn’t know it). When we weren't at the bar we pulled at the corners of our eyes with our index fingers to achieve the almond slant the old man and woman had, and we pushed our front teeth out and talked in a highpitched voice and made little bowing motions to one another and said "Thunder Green, Thunder Green. You no drink." We tried to imitate the Vietnamese language, shouting words we heard from movies but didn’t know the meaning of. Sometimes, if someone got too drunk, the old woman would rattle off a string of Vietnamese, ending with “Thunder Green,” and pointing toward the door. We tried to repeat her phrases, but couldn't decipher the words in our drunkenness and mostly ended up yelling “Thunder Green” at one another. Who knew how they had ended up here? Maybe they were refugees from the war, and had been trying to assimilate themselves for twenty years. Maybe they were just business owners, like anyone else, trying to put their children through college, to claw out a living in a new country. It never crossed our minds they were looking out for us, protecting us from Green Thunder, taking our beers away so we wouldn’t be arrested. It never occurred to us they were just trying to make a living, and they’d probably seen ten thousand idiots like us tugging at the corners of their eyes. We didn’t know, or care. We spoke respectfully to their faces, but behind their backs they were gooks, zits, and zipperheads. We made fun of them incessantly. The Gulf War had turned our prejudicial hatreds toward the Middle East, but foreigners were still foreign, and therefore deserving of our mockery. We called the old man Charlie. We asked him where he kept the hash and the opium, where he grew the rice, if he had a water buffalo out back somewhere. We called the old woman Mama-san. Quoting movies that had been assimilated into our culture, we asked the daughters what we could get for ten dollars. Occasionally someone would ask the same question to the old woman and get the entire table laughing. She always nodded, answering in her rapid-fire language that didn’t sound like language at all, and she’d smile when we laughed, not knowing we were laughing at her. It was hard to tell how much they understood. You could ask one of the daughters how much for anything we want and she’d stare at you without changing expression. You could call the old woman a communist heathen and she’d only smile and hand you another beer. You could tell the old man you knew he had an AK-47 and a statue of Buddha somewhere in the back, and all he’d do was bow his head and hold out his hand for you to shake. It wasn’t uncommon to see a soldier shaking his hand, other hand on his shoulder, smiling and telling him what a dumb-fucking gook he was and if he tried to bring that communist bullshit to our country he’d get it shoved up his ass. We took them to be stupid, certain that not speaking our language or knowing our culture meant they were of low intelligence. Some nights, through the curtained door behind the bar, we would see the daughters bent over homework. Sometimes, at the end of the night, we’d see the old man and woman standing together by the cash register, holding the printout up to the thin light, squinting at the results and shaking their heads. We’d see the old man bent over a long row of numbers in his books, the old woman moving down the tables cleaning up what we had left behind, shoulders sagging, sighing heavily. The lights 8 · CRENSHAW

would be on as we left, and we could see them more clearly, but by this time we were all drunk and singing cadences of war and rain and dying in distant countries. That was what we did all through summer—drunk on Saturday nights, swimming in smoke swirling above us, vision growing narrower and narrower. Walking home, we’d sing cadences about wars we had never fought in, that were over before we were born but still lingered in our movies and songs and culture. Behind us, in the bar whose name I have forgotten, the old man and woman would be sweeping the concrete floor, readying for another night. When we woke on Sunday morning we’d lay in bed and cradle our heads in our hands, wishing we could go back to sleep or go home, swearing to God we’d never drink again. On Sunday afternoons, when we gathered for PT and went running, heads still swollen, sweating in hot muggy God-forsaken South Carolina, stinking of alcohol sweat and feeling the cigarettes we had smoked still stirring in our lungs, we’d leave off swearing to God and curse the old man and woman as if this were somehow their fault. But come Saturday we’d slip back to the bar and walk up to the long dark counter and take our luke warm beers back to our table and light our cigarettes and look around like we were back home. The old woman would come by the table to say hello and we’d toast her and raise our beers. The daughters would come by emptying ashtrays and replacing beers and at some point the old man would come over and tell us Thunder Green was coming and we’d hide our beers behind the bar and wait for them to leave. When they were gone we’d decide the old man and woman might be spies, but they were really not bad as far as spies went, and when we left late in the night, drunk and magnanimous, we’d shake the old man’s hand and hug the old woman and they’d bow and nod as they ushered us out the door. They were always smiling, even when someone told them that they weren’t bad for zipperheads, though now it occurs to me that in the dim light they might not have been smiling at all. Our last weekend on the base we watched Green Thunder arrest several guys. They’d had the misfortune or the dumb sense to walk out carrying beers as Green Thunder was walking in. While the drill sergeants were putting handcuffs on them, we wondered aloud what would happen to the soldiers, and the rumors started flying: they wouldn’t be able to graduate, and would be stuck here for weeks or months working off the extra duty; they would be dishonorably discharged and sent to Leavenworth; they would be fined all the money they had made this summer and wouldn’t be able to afford college in the fall. I don’t remember who asked what would happen to the old man and woman for selling beer to minors. A few of us thought Green Thunder might arrest them and their daughters and shut the place down, send them back to Vietnam where they would live in a rice paddy somewhere. We were about to leave when someone at the next table said, “Fuck the gooks. If they would have told us Green Thunder was coming those guys wouldn’t be getting arrested.” When we stood, the old woman was there. “We say Thunder Green come,” she told us. “Soldier no understand.” She wasn’t smiling, and we wondered if she understood the word gook, if she understood, as we didn’t then, the hatred and ignorance that can build up between two cultures, not realizing then that the old man and woman had heard it all more times than the number of soldiers who’d come through the doors of the bar. She pointed at all of us and let loose a string of Vietnamese that we took to be sympathetic, but for I all know now could have meant almost anything.

CRENSHAW · 9

poetry by ANNA WEAVER

defying physics at closing time

with mad props to DC

Thoughts move between people in this bar like trains through an algebra class. They left at the same moment, hours ago, from Chicago and New York, on tracks that could take them nowhere but here, moving towards each other at constant speeds.

Okay, so it’s not like algebra. Maybe geometry or physics... in that tonight some tracks intersect and trains of thought wrangle and bump through the smoke, transfering energy and picking up inertia despite their lack of mass. Okay, maybe it’s quantum physics... where his thoughts jump my tracks and I say out loud what he was only thinking: You hear that train? Let’s get out of here.

10 · WEAVER

Bridgetown

photography by KATY ROSSING

poetry by ARIANA DEN BLEYKER Father

Yes. Some things are engulfed in flames forever. Yes. The forest where I was a little girl is on fire. The future has never been ours to hold tightly, so why do you scour the well in your best fedora looking for yesterday's rain? It is not in you to expose yourself, to risk sharp weather looking to net a rainbow. It is not in you to wonder how many clouds live in the sky or how long they live, to pray for them to mourn for you just so you can take it all in, the way you knew all along you could if things had been different, your face torn with the awkwardness of knowing I've kept a spot warm for you in the orange light whispering over the bare shoulders of the fallen trees.

12 路 BLEYKER

poetry by SARAH SLOAT Grace

might as well aim a coin from a great height, he told her, might as well tell the smoke to straighten out

SLOAT 路 13

Speak to Another or Live in a Lonely World

photography by ELEANOR LEONNE BENNETT

poetry by MICHAEL MLEKODAY The History of the Hoodie

Maoists claim to have originated the Grim Reaper archetype. They worship the scythe, arguing that farmers invented a Death that would come for the wealthy the same as it would to them. The scythe—an early frost, the ability to make a body barren—became an icon of the revolution. Landowners came to fear the moon, how it made glints in the shadows like swift blades. Only blood makes the blade holy. Can’t stop, won’t stop. However, Jeff Chang traces the Reaper image to the Bronx. Wrapped in black hoodies, revolutionaries flowed through the borough and drained the streetlights of electricity. Reagan was afraid of the dark. Chairman Kool Herc broke the sun. By midnight, the White House almost vanished. A black noise rose from graveyards, from chain-link fences, from dead grass; a black noise like the stench of dried-out tongues revived.

MLEKODAY · 15

fiction by JOSHUA MATTEAU Passed the Neighbor

Kate’s style of walking her dog was to forget that her dog was there at all. She took deliberate steps along the sidewalks of her neighborhood, sometimes dragging her dog half-squat, leg up behind her. But he was used to it. The dog had learned to shit on the fly, dropping a little here and a little there as he bounced behind her. He didn’t know better, so don’t feel bad for the dog. Kate wasn’t married, but she had been living with her boyfriend for thirteen years. He had convinced her that they didn’t believe in marriage. She didn’t really care about the wedding thing, but she would like it if her family stopped harassing her about when she was going to get married. Kate thought it might be nice to just have kids, but she knew it would only ramp up the questions about her single status. She tried to explain that she was not single, but her aunts assured her that she was. They knew. There was no point in arguing. Kate liked to wear tight pants when she walked because she knew her ass looked good and this was one of those times when she could flaunt it without feeling guilty. Tight pants were better for walking, she told herself. Men who drove a little too slowly or peaked at her from behind their curtains had only themselves to blame. Kate was afraid to flirt outright. She had never learned to flirt in high school. She assumed that that’s where girls learned to flirt. She had two boyfriends in high school. The first didn’t know that he was her boyfriend, but they had kissed. So, there was Kate, wearing a purple and yellow top and tight black pants with bright white New Balance sneakers. Wendy lived down the street from Kate. She loved Kate, but they had never spoken. She was not in love with Kate, per se. But when she saw Kate, she knew that Kate had it all figured out. Wendy could tell by the way she walked. Wendy kept thinking up ways she could run into Kate on the sidewalk, strike up a conversation, start walking together. A few times she had stood outside and waited. She had only waved. Wendy was not a lesbian. Wendy had a husband who oversaw military contracts all over the country and traveled a lot. He made a lot of money, so Wendy didn’t have to work, but she did. She worked the register at the town Michaels, where she specialized in helping women come up with ideas for scrapbooking. Wendy thought Kate might like to scrapbook with her. And she had gained some weight. There was that. Maybe walking with Kate would help. Maybe her husband would notice. Maybe other men would notice. She would go out with Kate. They would meet men and tease them and never take them home. But maybe there would be kissing. So one day, Wendy bought a dog. She bought a dog she suspected would be a good playmate for Kate’s dog. She hoped the dog would sense her desire for it to be friendly to Kate’s dog and refrain from growing bigger than it was when she bought it. Wendy waited for Kate to start down the street before she leashed her own dog and headed out. Oh, she was excited. She was trembling. Here came Kate. In the purple and yellow and the rest. Wendy thought of all the ways she could start a conversation. I have a new. Look what I. I’ve been meaning to say. Would you mind a little? I think we should be. Wendy’s dog was sitting in the grass contemplating a piece of grass that an unseen insect jolted. Wendy willed the dog to leap off the grass, block the sidewalk, bark, bite at a heel, anything… Do something! She commanded from behind her brow. The dog’s head tilted back and forth over the grass. Kate walked by quickly. She caught a glimpse of Wendy, but thought it would be rude to look into the woman’s yard outright. Wendy’s dog raised its head to look at the other dog as it hopped away, one back leg raised high.

16 · MATTEAU

poetry by JESSICA POLI

Origin of One-Sided Love

This is how we dance: pulling lettuce out of the soil by its dirty roots. Grabbing panties from the clothesline. You call my eyes dead blue. You swear my pulse runs at an angle.

We watch what falls off the bed: good intentions, a collection of spoons, and endless strings. I catch you making spiders dance. Find you with scissors and too much hair. I fold the dirty sheets along the longitude of our sweat.

I'm a believer now. And you know this body holds beating. And you know I am still alone and still too young to be as naked as you’ve made me.

POLI · 17

poetry by MICHAEL KARL (RITCHIE) Post-Post-Post Modernism

Here are some outlines. Paint By numbers. Fill in the blank.

You do the work. I want to be fed And read to in bed. Insert here.

Operate separately. Love ellipses And parenthetical asides. Camp grounds.

If there’s a way to double up on the meaning Play for triple points. We watch them weep.

We watch them mourn. There is no other way To say this. The future is not perfect: Past.

18 · RITCHIE

poetry by DANIEL ROMO Caution

A pound ofmustard, you say. And at first I think I hear, I’m down to touch her or, the sound of rupture. I like to think you’re still bold

enough to lay your hands on whomever she is—for the sake of pleasure or pain. Hedonism or healing. For her sake, yours, mine. Emotion is negotiable when suppressed too long. We used to smile at the sight of open wounds. The bloodier, the better. It kept us honest. We had such nerve. These days we’re more stoic and discerning. We take delight in conservation, though we care nothing about the world. I need to believe something will ultimately give; to take stock in the unreliability of elasticity. Please say your bizarre fragment means more than just excess condiments. Please say sixteen ounces is the measure of overflow. Please say, We are the final droplets ofwater

that will demolish this dam.

ROMO · 19

fiction by NATHAN BLAKE And Death is the Sauce

From where we stood the headlights were two holes punched into tomorrow. We were watching it—tomorrow afternoon, weaned off of the Xanax by then and the skunked hash and the glovebox tiresealant. What we saw was nothing strange, or different. Just us wandering, retracing the same trails to the same hollows, full of knives and horror stories and flat-out fistfights. There we were, though, and all things had fouled to hell. The dead woman and the dead man still had blood in their faces; an old couple—sixtyfive or seventy, dead or dying. What was tomorrow? It didn't mean but piss to us now, a word for an open door with nothing on the other side.

In the liquor store, Slick Rick told us to stay off the streets hopped up on that shit, not that he hadn’t done his fair share of dicking around, but Christ, kids, learn yourselves some goddamn middle ground. But this time we weren't in hock. We paid with straight cash—forty-three dollars, all that we could find in the stolen car—and gave him something extra, too, just for the hell of it, just to watch him squirm, this being the first time in one-half year we’d held money. For Rick it might have been just as long. He put his head down and stroked the bald spot on top until we skipped, waiting for the whine of our engine and squealing tires before pocketing the cash I’m sure. The man had already croaked. Not a thing any of us could have done. His eyes had rolled back white and looked like those dime-a-pop gumballs at the pizza place. The blue ones with all the dye sucked off. It was sort of goofy the way he was laying in the grass a ways from the woman, arms propped back at the elbows, giving him a weird flayed-deer look. They angled back against the car so that his watch blinked in our truck's headlights. The watch was a thick gold thing, too nice to be from around here in Whistlewood or places we had heard of. Shit, Crout never learned to tell time. Maybe it was from France. “Did you know that turkey is both the name of a food and a country?” Moody was leaned out the bed of the pickup screaming, both rides hitting seventy side-by-side. There weren't even headlights in the little stolen station wagon but we could manage. We were happy to have seen another December. “Is that not fucking crazy?” This wasn't the first time—we had been stoned before, shitfaced and crooked. We’d stood hits of shoe polish. We’d licked the inside of rusted exhaust pipes. And Branch, he stuck a banana peel up his asshole. I mean that. He had been so quiet, not even there with us really, and when he left to hit the head we all listened through the door to him yanking that rotten thing out. Branch tried to shove it down the sink drain, which didn’t work, of course, just sat there stupid like a dead, shit-stained fish. And then he came out all smiles, like what the hell’s the story with you fucking faggots? If she’d been mugged closer to the highway, under a streetlight maybe, the old lady might have made it. If it had been any other person to find her—people—if it had been any other people she might have stood a fucking chance. The sound of her gurgling, so pathetic and wet, trying to make out the words but they just weren’t coming. They weren’t there for her to touch. She was reaching back so far for nothing, and we stood there and listened. Those croons, the hard heaves that spit out sad cavewoman grunts with her arms now thrashing demon-possessed electric eels and by God yes it was sobering us up big time. Dove and Crout got so trashed once they fought over a dead raccoon. Those idiots were going to rip the thing damn near apart. We had stripped-out a van and found some cleaning supplies, and Moody said he could mix them just right for us. “With this we're gonna make a Davey Jones hat, you bitches, Davey Jones the mountain man! We're mountain men, self-sufficient! We don’t need fucking farms where we’re headed! Fuck a farm!” “Man, it's Davey Crockett.” I was pissing myself, I really was. Can you believe that? Goddamn cleaning supplies. “What the hell, Betty Crocker? Baby rocket? What’s the difference? We’re talking raccoons here.”

20 · BLAKE

“Cracker Barrel.”

We passed through Black Stump, the junkyard dump of Wise County, on to Anders and Monteith, driving as the sun bled out across the windshields. Branch and Moody in Branch's little red pickup, Dove and Crout and myself in the stolen roadside ride. It takes twenty-five miles to get to the nearest gas station, forty to the nearest supermarket. Slick Rick’s Liquor is the only real place within ten miles of what we for the most part call home.

Dove’s dad would beat him with a softball bat wrapped in a hunting jacket. For breakfast Momma would mix vodka in her milk—dinner, too. We knew money was in their heads, all our parents and their friends, how they didn't have any. No one had a pot to piss in or a window to pour it out of. The farms were long gone, years now, the whole town upended and raped. Everything turned to shit and sour and dead. And sometimes you expected the moon not to come out on account of what was left for it to light up, down here in Whistlewood. There was promise in Remos, though. There was life there, they said. We saw the bastard. Or maybe we didn’t. Maybe the shit was really kicking-in and it was just the wind blowing up trash and old potato sacks. Maybe the dead had died long before we got there. Maybe we were heroes. Or maybe it was a man in a camo sweatshirt—but how could we tell? How could we really be sure? We weren't the only ones still scavenging. Maybe he was my height, or taller. Maybe we were storming down the road wrapped in the cool blanket of chemical rage, the night so young and void, and maybe the box cutter was such a bright yellow that we saw it, we had to have, almost thirty yards out but it glowing like an angel’s eye. And the lights in Branch's truck scared the mean fucker off maybe, his bony arm making that move across the woman's neck not smooth, but sure, so sure of itself and in itself, in knowing exactly what to do and how to do it. Maybe all of this happened. More or less, maybe it did.

Crout’s dad was the last to leave. Couldn’t sell the land, couldn’t give it away, sure as shit couldn’t live on or off it. He didn't see this place the way we did. He expected something in return for living here. For two months he sat on his hands, skinny though, teeth falling out, and we all knew he would leave us, go off with the rest of them, off to Remos—our folks already gone almost a year by then. Maybe two. Crout was a spoiled little shit in that regard. Crout's dad kept bags of rice in the cellar and he would cook it for us and tell dirty jokes he had learned from his dad, those nights when we weren’t all drifting through the vacants alone, every man for himself, eating shit from the bottom of crusted cupboards and what we could grab from the back of barns. Hay seeds usually, and corn if we were lucky. He didn’t like all of us staying the night that often. Once a week tops. Scared we would off him in his sleep, I guess and, I don’t know, maybe eat him. Not to put you out on your asses, he would say, but each of you had a shot to go primetime with your folks and you didn’t. That's on you. He always flashed the same shit grin after saying that—primetime—just to stick us deep. Now let’s chow down, you pissants, he would laugh, wrestling us all to the floor. The old lady wore a cardigan, toothpaste green with pink stones sewn like a wave around the collar, no jewelry. I bet she didn’t want to be caught dead in that thing, but guess what, now she was, and the blood made it look like a ratty Christmas sweater you’d find in a dumpster behind the hospice. She wasn’t a grandmother, you could just tell from the way she carried so much sadness on her body, but she looked like a real person from a real place with a real life, something you could hold. With bloody hands she kept reaching up from the ditch to try and touch us, and we wouldn’t dare let her get close. We wanted no part of that.

It was bright that morning when Momma stood out on the porch with her trash-bag full of clothes. She was drunker than any of us were by a long shot, and the others knew this was something personal, some of them already having had this talk before, so they went inside the house to terrorize our last cat with a claw hammer. She looked like a worked-over piece of meat. Daddy had been dead since I was born, and Momma said she didn't find it right to keep up her appearances out of respect of the dead. Her hair was BLAKE · 21

steel-colored and the wind spread it out all around her. “God, you look just like he looked. You’re just about now the man he ever was.” And she never would cry in front of me, only when she thought I was out of the house drinking or getting lit or stealing food where I could find it, but she looked like she was going to go all out this time. She kept her eyes closed for a while and stood very still, and when she was finished with all that mess she touched my arm and told me to take care of myself and to stay close to the guys. “You boys are gonna be fine if you stick together. Five heads is better than one. You’ve all gotten this far, and I’ve only slowed you down. Gonna send for you when I get a place up there, I promise.” She had the smallest ears, each like a fresh-picked peach quarter almost, and I kept staring at them, trying not to look at those eyes, just about dead as dead can get, so tired and washed out and sucked dry from years of the boozing and the screwing and the crying alone in the farm heat. I got word a few months later that she ended up getting killed in a hotel shower trying to make some quick cash from a group of rowdy boys at a salesmen's convention. The sheriff’s department should have come out to get me, but I figure they couldn’t find their way through Whistlewood even with almighty God himself riding shotgun. The cars had stalled and we were out in the night standing over the woman, letting the warm blood soak up our bare feet. She only had a few moments left. Everyone was blitzed to hell and back, and we were silent. Didn’t want to scare off the high. The night was cold, yes, a real witch’s-titty, but because our town—our town —was deserted, left for us to do with it as we pleased, handed over the goddamn skeleton key like royalty, we five backed away and sat down in the wet and waited with her, the headlights reaching out as far as they could, looking for something new but finding only road for miles and miles after that. We stayed in Whistlewood and made the best of it. It was all we had ever known, each one of us being the echo of the other's voice. Some of the younger ones went off to Remos to get jobs in the cannery or work dark hours at the prison where they made you wear a queer brown get-up and exercise three times a week in the gym. Young guys, not even twenty, some of them. In a prison, can you believe it? Most people left the state for good and kept going west until there wasn’t any more ground to cover. When this government-type group closed the school down, just came right in and boarded the place up, there weren’t more than thirty souls left total. Ten of them kids. Five of them us. Months went by and it was like paradise. No school, rules. We set fire to empty cow pastures, stayed up all night eating whatever it was we felt like eating, cleaned out the houses pretty quick after about a year. The days were long but we kept ourselves busy, playing ball sometimes out on the old courts until I put a Buck knife through the ball. There was time for anything, really.

It was definitely a mugger that got them. Probably not someone like us, but meaner. He had taken the old man’s wallet and bounced, a few pieces of paper and a driver’s license leading up out of the ditch. Couldn’t figure out the name, though. I’m not sure why they were driving through in the first place, no bags or anything in the trunk. No attractions on this side of the state to begin with. Maybe they were lost and had an old map with Whistlewood still on it. The newer ones got rid of us altogether. They looked like they were just out driving, having a good time together as the Mr. and Mrs. And those are the things I just can’t understand. Why’d they have to stop here? What the fuck did they even do to deserve this anyway? Whistlewood is the death sentence you never stop living. All it touches turns to rust.

Soon the food was going bad and we started getting high any way we could. Dove talked about stealing a truck and cruising the country until he found a nice place to settle, and that scared me. We were supposed to be doing this. It was something that had been done to us and we were doing the right thing, goddamnit. There was never any fucking choice. We could have followed our parents and finished school and all that. Led better lives and whatnot, yes, we could have. But we didn’t. And that night I waited for everyone else to fall asleep before I put my hand over his mouth and pushed real hard into his chest with an elbow and told him that if he left, if he even thought about it again, I better not find out because I would fucking kill him on the spot. On the spot. 22 · BLAKE

She looked familiar. Like I had found a picture of her in an old book once. She might have been a grandmother after all, one of our own grandmothers. Someone from a time when the town thrived on corn and tomatoes and watermelon and wheat. Someone who knew food straight from the land and loved it. Someone who didn’t get sucked up by Whistlewood and spit out like warm water. I might have loved her in another life. She smelled like fresh cherries. Someone so exotic, from out there, in the world. A real fucking place. I wanted to get down in that ditch and stay with her for good, breathing her in, letting the cold night wash over us until I could finally wake up from this shit I’ve made and be able to live again. There could be a lot left for me after that, after waking up. Now it was like sleepwalking in someone else’s dream. This person does not know or love you.

There was a time we found this mangy dog limping along the dirt road into Whistlewood. We had spent the whole day throwing rocks into the church’s stained glass windows. The dog looked like he had been smashed by a front bumper, its hair all bloody and matted near the shoulder. He limped something awful, and we thought he would die in a few days, but we kept him around for a while just for the hell of it, Crout and Dove going out twice a day to find extra food for Earl. We called the dog Earl, after the old sheriff. Sheriff Earl, go fetch boy! we would yell and the dog would stay stuck as a rock at our feet, looking up only to lick his cracked lips and pant before getting bored with us and dozing off. I don’t know what happened to that damn dog. I think he went out for water one day and just died. The silence of that night was green-blue in our mouths. The chemicals were really doing their job, top notch, and we met the night as a thick wet mother’s kiss on our faces. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I could have stayed forever in that high. “She’s food for the ground now,” Branch had finally said, crying, not knowing what it was he was actually saying or even what had him by the throat, “and death is the sauce. She’ll get eaten up for sure.” We all watched him, saw his eyes roll around left and right after one another. “You don’t have to worry about her anymore. It’ll be alright in the end. I can see it.” And with that he stood up all shaky and went out to the woods and we never saw him again. The sounds the old woman was making by now were godawful, so scratchy and wooden with pain. But we sat and listened and drank deep. Even at a distance we knew her then, we knew her more than we knew ourselves. Like a photo album we saw snapshots of her life, her now-dead husband so content as he cut the lawn, this woman inside making a tray of egg salad sandwiches for her bridge group. We saw her win twenty bucks from her first lottery ticket and how dizzy she must have been spinning round and round in the dim parking lot, the car a nice and new red horse beside her, the glitz of marriage filling her up like summer rain. When she stopped reaching up, when the woman knew there wasn’t a thing left alive that could save her, we rose, kicked the frozen mud from behind each other’s legs, and headed out into the forest to look for Branch.

Sometimes I’ll be in a barn loft on nights when the wind dies down just enough to hear all the noise welling up and puddled in my head—the cold sound of Momma’s crying, the way it was like soft chanting, then a flood of angry fits, then soft again—catcalls from the church roof where we took turns sucking cough syrup—old gospel hymns that came out from under the front door in springtime—the sweet sound of tractors that meant money and food and school and life and everything good we once took for granted but have forgotten already how to sound out loud. Other times I find myself trying to figure out what the hell that old lady was starting to say. It wasn’t for us, though, I’m sure. I like to think it was a prayer. A simple one, rehearsed, something she learned maybe fifteen lifetimes before but had kept hidden deep down inside her, and now the cut exposed it, it all pouring out like ribboned sunshine from a paper cup, all of it forging a wide river of relief, not making any sense to us, just rising, rising up fast because it could, because it was made that way, because someone had loved it enough to let it grow, because it had better things to do than spend its thrust explaining shit to dumb fucking kids like us, the nature of prayer being that those who are closest can’t help but listen and feel true grief and be reborn again and again and again and again and again. BLAKE · 23

The Salt We Are as Stone, the Hands Held Low on the Windowsill

photography by DAVID TOMALOFF

poetry by CHLOE CLARK

The Dinner Parties We Used to Have

My ten closest friends include: a chimpanzee and an ex-lover or two, a bullfrog and my mother's laugh, a lemonade stand and a picture of Jesus walking on land, a mirror cracked in two and my favorite bit of fortune cookie innards, and a little piece of time that I never seem to have enough of. Sometimes we get together and talk and drink and dance and leave masks of our faces out for the cleaners to find in the morning.

CLARK 路 25

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15-year-old internationally award winning photographer and artist who has

won first places with National Geographic,The World Photography Organisation, Nature's Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland Trust and Postal Heritage. Her photography has been published in Telegraph , The Guardian, BBC News and on the cover of books and magazines in the United states and Canada. She was also the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010. She maintains an online presence at www.eleanorleonnebennett.zenfolio.com.

Nathan Blakeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, Monkeybicycle, Word Riot, kill author, and The Dirty Napkin , among others. He is currently a fiction editor at attending Virginia Tech's MFA program in the fall. www.thatnathanblake.wordpress.com.

Mixed Fruit Magazine and will be You

can

find

him

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in a small town in New York where she is a

wife and mother of two. She is a graduate of William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ where she earned a B.A. in English. Her poetry was recently featured or will soon be included in The Homestead Review, Stone Highway Review, scissors and spackle, The Medulla Review, Grey Sparrow Press, and other fine journals. Her chapbook, Forgetting Aesop, was recently released by scissors and spackle. She is the editor of Emerge

Literary Journal.

writes too much to be considered civilized company. Her work can be found or is forthcoming from such places as Fogged Clarity, Prick of the Spindle, Weird Tales, Fractured West, Zouch, and Rosebud. She also blogs as Pints and Cupcakes (see, she does write too much).

Chloe N. Clark

work has appeared in Best American Essays 2005 and 2011, North American Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon

Paul Crenshaw's University.

Matthew Fogarty was born and raised in the square-mile suburbs of Detroit. His fiction has appeared in such journals as Zero Ducats and Nanoism . He is a founding member of the Washington-based sketch comedy group, Orbit Chef, and will soon be an MFA candidate at the University of South Carolina.

Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY where she runs a visual literacy writing program. Her chapbook, The End ofthe Body, was published by Toadlily Press in 2006. She recently completed a fellowship at the Purchase College Writers Center. She is also a curator with Lift Trucks Project art space. She is also a curator with Lift Trucks Project art space at http://ltproject.com .

is a writer and photographer who lives in Bakersfield, California. She documents the dual vibrancy and decay of urban landscapes in her literature and photography.

Jane Hawley

Josh Matteau lives in Raleigh, NC and tries teaching teenagers. He writes and is suspicious. He has been published in Down in the Dirt,

Green Spider, and Nautilus.

Michael Mlekoday is an MFA candidate at Indiana University and a National Poetry Slam Champion. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sycamore Review, Finch, and other journals. He has never seen the ocean.

Ninth Letter, Hayden's Ferry Review, Sixth

Jessica Poli lives in Pittsburgh, PA. She is the editor of Birdfeast and has current or forthcoming work in Sixth Finch, elimae and kill author. In the fall, she will be an MFA candidate at Syracuse University. CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Karl (Ritchie) is a Professor of English at Arkansas Tech University, where he serves as advisor to

the undergraduate literary magazine, Nebo . He has had three small press chapbook publications and work published in various small press magazines, including Gihon River Review, Margie, and The Arkansas

Literary Forum.

Daniel Romo’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, The Los Angeles Review, MiPOesias, decomP,

and elsewhere. His first book of poetry, Romancing Gravity, is forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press. His second book of poetry, When Kerosene’s Involved, is forthcoming from Black Coffee Press. He teaches creative writing and lives in Long Beach, CA. More of his writing can be found at danielromo.wordpress.com.

Katy Rossing will enroll in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama this fall.

Nate Slawson is the author of Panic Attack, USA (YesYes Books, 2011) and two chapbooks, including The Tiny Jukebox (H_NGM_N Books). Recent work has appeared in We Are So Happy To Know Something, DIAGRAM, diode, Sixth Finch, and other places. He lives on the SW side of Chicago.

Sarah J. Sloat remembers collecting stamps before the days of e-, back when you could smoke in the office,

the back rows of the cinema, and on transatlantic flights. If she could, she’d choose Philadelphia over New York, but for a long time she’s lived across the ocean perfecting her German grammar. Sarah’s poems have appeared in RHINO, Court Green and Harper’s Ferry Review, and her chapbook, “Excuse me while I wring this long swim out ofmy hair,” was recently published by Dancing Girl Press. She blogs at The Rain in My Purse (http://theraininmypurse.blogspot.com).

Eszter Takacs is a Hungarian-born poet living in Los Angeles.

In a few short months she will be relocating to Fayetteville, Arkansas to pursue her MFA in poetry at The University of Arkansas. Her poems have previously appeared in elimae, Mixed Fruit, The Dirty Napkin , Birdfeast, Otoliths, and Psychic Meatloaf. In her spare time she paints, runs, and contemplates new recipes involving spinach. She knows a bit about cars.

David Tomaloff is

a writer, photographer, musician, and an all-around bad influence. His work has appeared in several anthologies and in fine publications such as Mud Luscious, > kill author, PANK, Connotation Press, HOUSEFIRE, Prick of the Spindle, DOGZPLOT, and elimae. He is the author of the chapbooks 13 (Artistically Declined Press), A SOFT THAT TOUCHES DOWN & REMOVES ITSELF (NAP and Red Ceilings Press), Olifaunt (Red Ceilings Press), EXIT STRATEGIES (Gold Wake Press) and MESCAL NON-PALINDROME CINEMA (Ten Pages Press). His book of collaborative poetry with Ryan W. Bradley, YOU ARE JAGUAR (Artistically Declined Press), is due out summer 2012. He resides in the form of ones and zeros at davidtomaloff.com .

Caleb Washburn is a graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia and is now in the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, studying poetry. He does not have a blog, a tumblr, or even a smartphone, but you can follow his infrequent tweets @CPWashburn. He promises to tweet more often in the future. Raised in Oklahoma, Anna Weaver lives near Raleigh, NC, with her two daughters. An active member of the Triangle’s Living Poetry community, her poems have appeared in two anthologies of the best of Raleigh-area open mic venues, as well as Star*Line and Wild Goose Poetry Review.

CONTRIBUTORS

Utter welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, essays, art, and photography. We will only accept submissions through our submissions manager. We ask that you read the guidelines found on the website, see what weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re about, and get to know the people behind Utter before submitting your work. This ought to give you a glimpse into our preferences and tastes. Please be confident that this is a good home for your work before submitting. We will read submissions throughout the year and welcome simultaneous submissions as long as we are notified immediately if a piece is accepted elsewhere. We are not interested in previously published material. Our goal is to respond to submissions within 45 days, but we think you ought to hear from us sooner. If your work is accepted for publication, Utter assumes first North American serial rights. This means that we are the first to publish your work in the North American market. All rights revert back to the author upon publication. Proper acknowledgment must be given to Utter if the work is published in the future with another market or in a book. If you have questions, contact us at editor@uttermagazine.com.

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