SpringGun | Issue 9 | 2014 by SprinGun Press

Derrick Mund Christopher Rosales

PUBLISHERS

Erin Costello Mark Rockswold

CONTENTS

Kiik A.K. • Oxlip and Pearl • page 1 Chaim ben Avram • from the philadelphian talmud • page 2 Jill Darling • Laundry, and Other Domestic Advice • page 8 Dennis Etzel Jr. • from My Secret Wars of 1984 • page 10 Brian Evenson • 3 stories • page 15 Noah Eli Gordon • from Bohr’s Spinoza • page 18 Seth Landman • from Confidence • page 23 KrisAnne Madaus • Life and the Four-Tiered Cake • page 33 Joe Milazzo • from The Habiliments • page 39 Lindsay Miller • Inside Joke • page 44 Rachel Moritz • Twenty Weeks & Second Emmanation • page 46 Erin J. Mullikin • Dear 2009 & I Was (Sometimes) Alone for These Films II • page 49 John Myers • I Hire One & I Hire Two • page 52 Lee Tyler Williams • King of Laredo • page 55 Chelsea Werner-Jatzke • 3 stories • page 57

N OT E S

• page 61

Kiik A.K. Oxlip and Pearl Michael Araki, the eldest child and only son of Margaret Morri and Yoshikane Araki, was conceived before their legal marriage, in the southeastern block of Gila River during the month of oxlip and pearl. Mud poured from the chutes of barracks and froze from the outer rafters in blackened stalactites. Behind neighborhood barracks, under threat of that violence, Margaret and Kane stripped nude as calves and engaged in night after night of doomed, clandestine, teenage fucking. The stalactites rocked, hummed against their moans, glinted as they collected the ghost-steam of their breath, and threatened to spear them through. Overhead the tower guards could be heard patting their rifles, mumbling to their bullets. Still, Kane and Margaret gladly returned.They lived with their families in partitioned barracks that were shared with two or three other families, and were rarely granted time to be alone together. In one of his notebooks, Kane wrote, “I now own my first home. It is in Gila River. It is somewhere between Margaret’s body and mine.” Through her pregnancy Margaret craved fried meat. Because red meat was tightly rationed in camp, Kane found a way to blue-plate diners in Casa Grande. In the mornings he hid behind racks in darkened trailers of bread and vegetable trucks. The freight trucks left camp, pulled into Casa Grande to load their cargo, and that was the moment Kane would slip away, locate a diner, purchase hamburgers and hotdogs wrapped in yellow paper, and then squeeze back into the trucks for the long, cramped trip back into camp. Kane was secretly carted around in bread trucks for sixth months. The evenings were reserved for singing. Kane’s brothers Dennis and Shimmy played guitar and ukulele. Friends and family gathered in the mess hall and projected song after song toward Margaret’s pregnant belly. Kane and Margaret were the first newly-pregnant couple in Gila, and the excitement of the Araki-Morri child vibrated through the teenage generation like radio current. The morning of the snake was just two weeks before Margaret’s due date. Kane and Margaret were walking in the camp gardens amid high grass, when Kane saw Margaret go under like a stalk of wheat cut at the ground. Margaret made no sound. Kane opened his mouth but all his voice rushed beyond his teeth and lips. He choked on his silence and ran. Kane never found the snake, merely two holes at Margaret’s ankle running with blood. The venom did not kill Margaret. She spent two weeks in the infirmary, during which she miscarried. Kane recovered the small, stillborn body of Michael Araki and carried him out of camp. He burned the tiny body and buried what the wind would not take. After Gila River, in the decades that followed, Margaret and Kane Morri had three daughters, all three of which claimed to share recurring dreams where they could hear singing and smell hot desert wind.

Chaim ben Avram from the philadelphian talmud

On Erev Yom Kippur, the Phillies trail the Cardinals 0-1 Russell, Reuben suspects, woke from his nap in time to make atonement for fathers, sons dead & those that cannot be present at minyan ( in Kaddish, maybe, our names are evoked ) I get a text later from Russell who overslept Kol Nidre: did we make it Well, we played the night on-deck, waiting, waiting out the burden of having to hit in the clutch, and praying, and yes, in that way we were godlike

Seated at the Wash Hgts. bar, two Jews in tennis shoes, one in rubber sandals w/ ( heaven forbid ) socks While at the minyan next-door, the Orthodox stand in line, acquiring their portion in the Book They stand as still as tourists, on Sunday, at the METâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; the moment art ( religionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contemporary ) transforms the object in question into the observer itself

Phillies had their winningest season on record It too has been a good year for Jews War in the Mid-East is costlier, as is peace The economy has left in ruins the kidsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; latest trend towards symbolic poverty The family has found yet another way to salvage and self-medicate against hereditary guilt In an instant, centuries with the eyes of a Cardinal fan trained on my nape fall away until all thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s left is this same nervous breath with slightly more room in my chest

9th inning, 2 outs, 2 strikes down, Ryan Howard hits in the clutch— the same schlimazel that blew last year’s playoffs One strike from ruin: one pitch, one swing In the end, the transgressions of the season are blotted out: errors, extra-innings— dust settled in the turf fibers and with each victory, with each loss the Book is transcribed and sealed in cedar Sealed six feet under 67 years of dirt Sealed, a son’s hands to shovel, Kaddish under his breath Sealed black Sealed jacket, the shovel passes to the next Sealed, the season of man

My father, a boy in a beat-to-death red cap, mitt crisp and mean, stands on the driveway, waiting, waiting out the repetition of history A clunky Buick pulls in and the boy runs in place to greet his father, as every American boy shouldâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; He asks for a catch

And once a boy, I threw a baseball at the sun The sweetness of sweat & autumn stung Somewhere, in Hebron, a boy is throwing a stone at a tank Somewhere, a starling drifts unaware that earth fixedly moves around the sun I outgrew baseball the day I learned heavenly spheres move always and that God writes the Book by parallax and seals its pages ( like the culled issue of Time on my bathroom floor ) with only God knows what

Jill Darling Laundry, and Other Domestic Advice “Because” she said, “you are the one who is responsible for this.” I would have intended otherwise if it were up to me. Alas, however, I am not entirely sure where all of the possibilities might lie. “We could,” she continued “wish or draw circles, in no particular order.” I think I would tend to agree. Because, if you consider it long enough, there is always some special little catch phrase, one that just gets you in the end, one that won’t let you rest until you get to the bottom of it or get away from the situation altogether. For example, she is always telling me, “when we have lunch next week, wear your blue socks.” She of course means the matching blue socks. I have many pair. And I also have one pair which matches exactly a pair that she has. This is the type of matching she really means. To start again, it is true that on a Friday I was looking for an appropriate date for the evening. In this case, and in retrospect, I would suggest a few important considerations. Upon looking for an appropriate date you should always ask questions, for example, such as: has she sent flowers to anyone in the past 10 days? Are there any shiny sparkly pumps lying around her house? Or, if you haven’t yet been in the house, is there mention of a continuous need to eat chocolate chip cookies, or water the lawn? You might consider as well, that certain lipsticks work, and glosses with more purple leaning hues generally don’t, on the date possibility or your own lips depending on the situation. And, I suppose, someone else might want to know whether or not dancing should be included in dating festivities. Well, there is always dinner, and sometimes dancing, but what kind of dancing are you even talking about really? And does it make a difference if you go steak and potatoes or look for something less Texan? Something more international? To more deeply consider some other issues, you might inquire how many hours a day she spends brushing her teeth? Washing her toes? Fluffing the pillows? Are you going to get upset when you have to make the bed in the morning, even when you notice that at her house the bed is always made, i.e., she does know how to make the bed. Or will this first or second date turn into a serious living arrangement and how soon will that happen? In five months, for example, will you look back and see when she started staying over and never leaving, and what happened at her own house in the meantime? Or will you look ahead and think, ‘yes, this is going in exactly the right direction’ except that she insists on cooking everyday and you already have lost 7 pounds, not because the food is healthier than you normally eat, but because she only cooks stir fry with broccoli and carrots and sometimes tofu and sometimes not and you just can’t eat it anymore. But, she doesn’t like to go out to eat because ‘why go out and spend lots more money than it costs to just eat at home?’ Saving money is nice, you agree, but you were just finally arrived at a comfortable size and feeling in your clothing and now everything is just too big and if the two of you do break up (which may be more of a 8

real possibility that you would have imagined three months ago) you will never get another date because folks will assume you are either pregnant and hiding it, or too poor to buy proper-fitting clothes. Of course there is nothing wrong with poor, but who wants to date someone without any money because who is going to pay for dinner and drinks and movies? And so you think she is really the perfect mate, because she knows how to save money, but then you realize, you are not poor at all, you are just ‘fasting’ and can seem to find no way around that. You imagine that you have to eventually tell her that you need to spend more time with your friends, whom you feel you have been neglecting since the two of you started dating. ‘Since we are over the, you know, the honeymoon phase of things, since we don’t have to have sex all the time, I’d like to reconnect with my friends and make a point of hanging out with them some.’ Then you can arrange lunches and dinners and work on fitting back into your clothes. Of course, just because you have a first or second date at the end of which she stays over and doesn’t make the bed in the morning, doesn’t mean she is going to make stir fry until you can eat it no more. Maybe, it could be theorized, this is the perfect person for you and she will make the bed and she will want to go out for burgers and you will be happy and do fun things and see plays and entertain friends and all of your friends will be jealous. Randomly drawn circles for example may be a sign of great things to come.You just have to consider it. These things happen, certainly, all the time; proof can be found on Oprah, or at least that’s what someone once said.

Dennis Etzel Jr. from My Secret Wars of 1984

So, I can only tell you about the manual—that we’re not in the habit of assigning guilt before there has been proper evidence produced and proof of that guilt, says Ronald Reagan. So, I have never seriously warned and said we must plan according to Armageddon, says Ronald Reagan. So let’s go out there and win it, already. Sometimes the dungeons drag on.

The mean teacher insists that poetry means. The meaning of a word in its place derives both from the wordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lateral reach, its contacts with its neighbors in a statement, and from its reach through and out of the text into the other world, the matrix of its contemporary and historical reference. The meaning pushed out-ofbounds. The mother becomes them other.

The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. The panels of my comic book contain the clutter that hides me as I create the comic book in this way—out of hiding. The “rage to know” is one expression of the restlessness engendered by language. The reality that someone would hurt my mother for being lesbian. The reflex. The same streets outside our different house. The schools teach Newspeak, I learn from Orwell’s novel.

While failing in the attempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinction, the integrity and separateness of things.White space surrounds the cut-out pictures in the middle school yearbook, so I fill in the names from what I remember. Who can figure all this ultra-cosmic stuff? Whoever you are back there, brace yourself for evasive maneuvers. Why donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we stop this madness now and draw a line and keep the heavens free from war? Walter Mondale asks Ronald Reagan. Wild boys.

Years may pass before the newly created community can thrive in peace. Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. Yet the very incapacity of language to match the world allows it to do service as a medium of differentiation. You can rule a land, bring civilization to the wilderness, and cope with all the threats to your territory, while facing monsters and magic of all kinds. You continue under blankets as storms rage. You put your thumb on a button and somebody blows up 20 minutes later, says Ronald Reagan.

Brian Evenson A Report on Brunch Neither K. nor I could be described as fans of “brunch.” We do not, however, actively dislike brunch. Sometimes we can even be said to “enjoy” brunch. Though, admittedly, when, by circumstances beyond our control, we find ourselves at brunch, we tend to order foods that could more properly be described as lunch. My previous partner, J., relished brunch. It is no exaggeration to say brunch was her favorite meal. Perhaps this was because it was not a meal you could get every day but, except in unusual circumstances, only on holidays or on the weekend. Brunch had for her a certain allure. I, on the other hand, found brunch to be a confused and even needy meal. Back when we were together, every weekend J. would insist we go to brunch. I would resist this as long as possible, hoping to resist until lunchtime so as to simply go out for lunch, but J. usually got her way. When J. and I used to go to brunch, she would order what she referred to as “brunch-appropriate foods”. Meanwhile, I would order what was for all intents and purposes lunch. It was as if we were at two different meals, as if there was a time zone being crossed from one side of the table to the other. Over time, this began to seem to be symptomatic of our relationship as a whole: even when we were at the same table we were never at the same meal. What a relief it is to no longer have to go to brunch.

Brian Evenson A Report on a Diet K. and I are in the middle of a diet which balances food in a deft way and increases our metabolism so as to make us lose ridiculous amounts of weight quickly, as if by witchcraft. The diet also deprives the brain of sugar, which makes us feel like we are losing our minds. Since we have done this diet once before, we know that we are not losing our minds, at least not permanently, that we will get our minds back eventually, once the diet is over. Just as I know too that the buzzing sensation I feel in my arms and hands at all moments will also pass. K. does not feel this sensation, never has, and the first time we did this diet she at first doubted that I felt what I felt, and then, once I had convinced her I did, worried that there was something seriously wrong with me. Perhaps she doubted it because of the way I first described the sensation, as being like having bees beneath my skin. Later, I described it as being bitten by many tiny insects all at once, and indeed, as I lie here at night, trying to sleep, I still feel that that was exactly what it felt like at the time. That is how it feels to me now as well, as if my body is being bitten by tiny insects, or as if bees have somehow gotten beneath my skin and are dancing to teach the other bees beneath my skin the way out of my suffering body to where they can find sugar. Eventually the diet will end, and then I will reintroduce sugar into my body and the bees will fall still. But how I can explain the bees to K. in a way that she accepts, I don’t know. And so instead in the dark I claim that there’s a tingling sensation in my arms, though this is not quite right. She asks me if I’m all right, and I say I think so, and she asks do I need to go to a doctor, and I say, no, I’ll be okay. I say all this in a calm and reasonable voice, as if I really will be okay. Even though it is dark I do not close my eyes, for I am afraid of what the bees will do to me once I fall asleep.

Brian Evenson A Report on Being Followed Two days ago in the early afternoon, I began to suspect I was being followed. I did not want to turn around because I did not want the person who was perhaps following me to know that I knew they were following me. Besides, at the time, I was following someone myself, as per my instructions, and worried that if I turned around the person I was following might take advantage of the lapse in my concentration to shake me. And so I continued walking, the back of my neck prickling, my breathing accelerating slightly. This continued until the man I was following halted at a bus stop. He took a newspaper from under his arm and began to read it, unless he was only pretending to read it. Uncertain what to do, I stopped as well, at the same bus stop, and pretended to read the paper that I had been carrying with me ever since beginning to follow the man I was following. A moment later another man, also carrying a newspaper, arrived at the bus stop and also pretended to read. Unless he was actually reading—it was difficult to say. Was he the man I had sensed following me? I had no way of knowing for certain. Perhaps the man who I had been following suspected he was being followed as well and was wondering the same thing about me. All three of us stood in a row, waiting for the bus. What would happen, I wondered, if instead of getting on the bus in the order we had arrived at the bus stop we got on in a different order? What if the man who was following me got on first, then me, then the man I had been following? If that was the case, then who would be following whom? Thoughts such as these filled me with anxiety, but I could not help but think them. After a while the anxiety was so great I could not bear to even pretend to read the paper and folded it and tucked it under my arm. The men to either side of me, I saw, had done the same with their papers. But when the bus arrived we boarded it in the order that we had arrived at the stop. I climbed the steps, staring at the back of the man’s head in front of me as he inserted his coins, feeling the eyes of the man behind me already boring into the back of my own head. And then I was at the box and depositing my own coins. The last coin slid in and I started back, only to find everyone on the bus staring at me. Unless they were staring at the man in front of me. Or the man behind.

Noah Eli Gordon from Bohrâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Spinoza

There will be no intermission. There is a projection booth. There are no two situations able to produce the same outcome. There are many cars. There is a parking lot. There is nothing behind the men. There is nothing in front of the men. There is a camera. There is the crushed abdomen of an ant stuck to one of the dogâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paws. There is a dead mouse near the dog. There is night. There are clouds and there is a clear day. There is rain. There is summer and there is winter. There is a mouse in the theater. There is a film of two men talking. Two men are talking. There is a man walking away from the dog.There is a man about to pass the dog. There is a man passing the dog. There is a dog in the front yard. There are three women behind him. There is a man to his right. There is a man in front of him. There is a man watching a movie.

It’s the third auditorium on Your right continued ethical engagement Of the narrative tradition Begins momentarily with geraniums to burst Concise articulation wasn’t what We’d wanted exactly I’m not So sure the line matters You don’t just get on a motorcycle And become a kind of historical Category feeling your solution To its problems a coherent program Or extension of power by an expansionist idea About the world being purely internalized Through reentry to that which Holds ardently an intellectual grip As sun disappears over hilltops As hilltops disappear with its loss Inscribing as meaningful the evening in Which we sense a particular fascination Clouding our ability to see beyond

You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just get on a motorcycle And become a kind of historical Category artistic innovation in early Twentieth century leaning rightly To think in questions itself Given a brief spotlight plausible Answers to render arbitrary constraint An affectionless roundabout way In our monument to the Crux of a crucial moment A contorting and cyclical inversion Evidence of fingers aimed at an auditorium Ethics aside Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d just like to relax Assume we are circled around discarded Design and individual flourish but Not painting real scissors thusly Assumption leaves a thread I love all my children Equally but I have no Children therefore stimulus freedom

I don’t know, I answer a little too loudly, perhaps because of my distress from the unexpected question, or, more likely, as a vindictive form of punishment for his intrusion, knowing that the head in front of me might give a quick, scornful turn, and that my inquisitor would feel accountable, guilty for breaching our collective, unstated agreement to enter the performance being projected in front of us. I’d guess it just depends on missing some of the dialogue. They might expect film to avoid something lacking motion.You don’t just get on a motorcycle and become some kind of historical category. Turning around, I see a man in a green shirt facing the screen, a flash of Nordic mist and seafoam blue. I should try and remember that an expressive form is a fallacy, but calling it such is false.

Excuse me just something finished Breakfast and now concerned About supposed recollection of Tranquility in events Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m trying Something with narrative I think You can see how one flattens the conceptual External consciousness entering Pleasure as we know is one Metaphysical position among others now I have proven that Anything rolls over the horizon And gigantic posters of musicians Acquiescence to wallpaper wallpaper Wallpaper a thinner Varnish might work As they posture what huh Good morning I think You can see how one flattens lazy thinking re Arranged the yellow hue of the flower Is firm and fully delineated

Seth Landman from Confidence

Here we are sunset in Boonville Indiana things just getting good just now in my imagination it’s pretty dire but always with me the hope I’ll live again when this living gets the most quiet around a lake I don’t get it the car keeps going so I do too and accumulate ideas I want to be for you it’s like when you wake up with a sore throat you know what is coming for a couple minutes it is really awful but in the day whatever it is begins to lose its teeth and like all horrors eventually subsides

but not really if your life has been up to this point about one thing and tonight is the last night of whatever that is may your progeny recall you in the sad sparks of their choices quiet nights and staring off into the distance it’s some sunset though isn’t it. Listen this is a feeling this is a feeling and I have been listening to it you can buy up all the votes I’m singing a miracle into the slow river I can’t make myself care any more where are we going this is a feeling

I’m giving it time and place midnight in Acadia it is freezing cold and everywhere else I’ve been and the things I’ve been reprise my birthday April in Paris what have you done to my heart. You reward the shine and the morning comes to get you it’s ridiculous trying to navigate the appointments you need to keep the body alive while the body is dying all the time sometimes the world reveals itself unexpectedly you call some large and pointless corporation and actually you get answers you need all of the sudden

an ankle has healed but a back and a knee go on with little issues last night I was so much myself I thought I might start crying the body is the impossible burden of the body too much the body too much the body too I felt around for the light switch and my head showed my room to me everything and everywhere here I am coffee Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m looking at the back of my hand and yes I think I know it reasonably well. Today is the day write it again it goes away I wrote this so

the moon landing streak of starlight twelve midnight across the eyes is that something in the room here with me hand in my hand thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no one there or you are again a pose like my best buddy tonight I know if the days go by too fast we are stupid discourse uttering the politics again and again coming away with nothing special the coroner reports oh well heavy blanket just me and you. Keep being light what is this job lightning and cotton walking in the woods it makes you feel startlingly small what you made

and what you want your kids to hold on to a week a month and before you know it your life is a mountain scheduled out six months in advance a doctor says ticking time bomb over and over again and that’s okay that’s reasonable it’s true for everyone I suppose but keep being light though today I’m terrible. It is fall and there is nothing you can do about it I’m not going to wait until I’m someone else to start being myself it’s fall let’s butter our toast without

prejudice or restraint safe in the knowledge that about health there is nothing we can do letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shove hands into pockets it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t matter whose go do what you just did but this time do it better by experiment a prayer we are different and that is good or I am different and mostly good I knew a moody person named the wrong thing the blood is clotting the brain worsens in sickness and in health I hear the ghosts remarking you are different all morning making plans and all evening breaking them just to not leave the house

sweet sunset lights on all over the uninterrupted town or no one is there living in the light left on I received a call your family is having trouble they said and I just said oh crap bacteria and big smile for the camera please it is the fall and life is stupid but I can be stupider I can in my great work make it plain it is better to travel the country mile from one eyeball to the next and my heart like an icebox my wingspan this much I miss you not even gone youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not ever what you were again youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not ever what

you could have been let’s keep our appointments with sleep it’s fall and we are going to do what we say. If there is no point you have a philosophy gone bad by November you are unfortunate you already are who you are it happened in April in the early 1980s steam coming up in a big field invisible life rotting invisibly and now you could be anywhere and call me and I would book a flight I’m professionally this coughing engine I’m going to have all these adventures and then tell anyone

who will listen that my life is beginning that it began that it happened while I idled outside unable to rain Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m out here raining six months six months can you believe it if you want to make a joke donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t close your eyes everywhere you go oh and sad map the world.

KrisAnne Madaus Life and the Four-Tiered Cake On a tired morning RJ watched his girlfriend Kayla’s baby while she attended her last recovering addicts meeting. He worked third shift operating heavy machinery in a factory downtown, and since last year, when the man who gave him the job was crushed to death by a forklift, RJ felt uneasy. Whenever he got home from work, he was always awake and anxious for the rest of the day. The baby peeked over the top bar of the Pack N Play and slobbered her teething mouth on it. As soon as Kayla returned this afternoon, they planned to celebrate the baby’s first birthday. He was sure that Rhonda, Kayla’s mom, would make an appearance, too. Now that the baby was awake, he stopped pacing the room and turned on the TV. Fresh Prince was on—the episode where Carlton finally loses his virginity. “Can you do the Carlton, Jenny?” he asked the baby. His fingers snapped and his noodle arms swung from side to side. She looked at him and cried. Kayla warned him about the “stranger danger phase.” It made sense. Jenny was only here on a special court appointed visitation. Her dad, Gino, had had custody since she was born. The apartment was small. Carpet, piss stained from the last tenant’s dog, would not come clean, and the only furniture (save for the loveseat Kayla had found in an alley) was a barstool that was only useful for ambiance when RJ, after a couple Buds, felt calm enough to play guitar. He took Jenny out of the playpen and sat back on the loveseat, holding her in place on his bare chest. Anything with buttons, he learned, was a potential toy, so while he flipped through channels he held his arm out in an arc. He decided on Animal Planet and watched a zookeeper care for a rejected lion cub. Jenny didn’t go for the remote, but she would not stay still. She was figuring out how to crawl. The zookeeper raised the lion cub in his home. Photographs of him with his arm buddy-buddy around the lion’s neck panned across the screen in slideshow, the lion growing older with each frame. In the end, the lion turned on the zookeeper, and he was found mangled and gone. “Sit still,” RJ told Jenny, who couldn’t understand. First her fat knee dug into his gut, and then her fingers reached for the tangled hair of his overgrown beard. Instinctively, he pushed away from her. It wasn’t a hard push, but she teetered on the edge of the couch, and before his arms could catch her, she fell, landing within one of the larger old piss stains.

For a moment she was quiet, stunned, and lying face up. In their stubborn infancy, her legs still curved upward, unable to make peace with the ground. A whimper escaped from Jenny’s lungs and escalated into a dry, deep cry. He tried to hush her, certain that the downstairs neighbor would hear. Both nervous and uncertain of what to do, RJ scooped her up into one arm and made a bottle with the other. She was okay, but a small lump had already formed on the back of her head. His restless hand dropped too many scoops of Similac in the bottle, and the extra powder chunks floated on top. In the waiting room of the dentist office, Gino flipped through magazines without looking at anything. “Gino?” the receptionist asked. “Can I help you with anything else today?” “Waiting on a ride,” he said through a mouthful of gauze. From his reflection in the front window he could see how swollen his usually square jawline was. “The clinic closes at noon on Saturdays.” He had to fill out a form at the front desk for low-income families. Every month, he got a check for child support, which helped, but it hardly took care of his baby. Finding a real job was next on his list. “I’ll be out of your hair in a second,” he said to her. Outside, he made his way to the blue sedan parked in the no parking zone. “You here long?” he asked the woman driving. She was old but had aged well, and her hair was freshly highlighted. Even with her mouth closed, her bottom lip drooped down like the lip of a water pitcher. She shook her head and sped up to make the yellow light. “I want to stop and get Jenny something from you,” she said. “I have some stuff at home, Rhonda.” This was true. He had a rattle and one of those interactive board books with lights and sounds all wrapped up. He planned to open them with baby Jenny when he got home, but Rhonda insisted they get something. Something about showing up to a party empty handed. They stopped at Target, and she picked out three onesies. One had an embroidered Eeyore moping around searching for his tail. In the checkout line he tried to hand her ten dollars. She didn’t take it. Instead she asked the cashier, an old black man with a new smile, for an application. He nodded and handed one to Rhonda who passed it over to Gino. In the car she gave Gino tissue paper and a gift bag that she had ready. 34

“Here. Wrap them.” He didn’t think Kayla would appreciate him showing up unannounced, but it didn’t really matter. She wouldn’t say anything. She would just give him looks that accused him of taking her baby away from her, ruining their marriage, using her mother for money. He asked if Kayla knew he was coming. “Of course not,” she said and turned up the radio. Kayla made her way home from her last meeting. The crack addict label had all of a sudden lost its sticky weight and fluttered away. She was a recovering addict now. She had been clean for months, but the final meeting with Helping Hands made it feel much more official, like she could announce it to the world. The city bus dropped her off two blocks from home. She lived in an unimportant apartment above Ferndale’s Cheesecake Shop with her boyfriend, RJ. As she passed the building’s front window Mr. Ferndale smiled and waved. After they shared a few beers at the corner bar, RJ had taken her to the cheesecake shop for a slice on their first date, if that’s what you wanted to call it. Inside, she found him walking around with baby Jenny asleep in his arms. “How is she?” she whispered. He handed her over and Kayla kissed her cheeks. “Do I get some, too?” he asked. She ran a hand over Jenny’s soft hair before stopping suddenly. “What happened to her?” “It’s nothing. She just fell.” He stood up and started toward the kitchen. Kayla flicked on the lights and sat the baby on the cushions to examine the bump. “She just fell?” she yelled to the other room. “All you had to do was watch her for a few hours.” “Your mom won’t notice.” “Is she okay?” “The D.A. won’t find out.” His steps automatically avoided the creaky spots of the floor. “She’s a baby. They’re resilient.” From the window sounds of the busy street filled their apartment. Crazy Mary was down there, muttering her usual bum-nonsense and shaking her McDonald’s cup for change. “Spare change, suh?” she said over and over. A mist of morning rain frustrated the people on the street who didn’t know whether or not to open their umbrellas. Police sirens interrupted a lonely dog’s barking. 35

“You gonna stay mad at me or can I sit by you?” RJ asked, nodding at the other cushion of the loveseat. It was the only available space unless he wanted the barstool. Kayla shrugged and pulled the baby closer to her. She felt detached from it, like it wasn’t her baby at all, and yet it came from her. “Don’t you think Jenny’s a weird name for a baby?” RJ asked after a while. “It’s like a hot teenager’s name, not a baby’s.” “Is that why you dropped her? You don’t like her name?” “I said she fell.” Whenever they fought like that—lightly, without meaning—she thought of Gino and how different their fights had been. Sometimes it was silent, but it was a silence you could pick up and carry with you. You could bring it back after work and set it on the table. She couldn’t help herself from watching from the window when on Saturdays Mr. Ferndale struggled to load the back of the truck with wedding cakes. RJ threw down his phone in triumph. “Googled it,” he said. “Jenny’s the word for a female donkey. I knew it.” He propped his feet up on a turned-down empty beer case. “Did you know that before you let him call her that?” Mr. Ferndale had spent all of Friday mixing, baking, and assembling an impeccable fourtiered cheesecake only to find out his labors were all for nothing. The bride called early Saturday morning, the day of her wedding, to say, “Forget it.” Later, the young woman dropped off four hundred dollars in cash and apologized for the cancellation through a mess of tears. When she left, he put a hand on the counter to support himself while he cried, too, as if sadness were a torch passed on from person to person. From his desk drawer he pulled out his stationery and began to write in stick print: Dear Mary, Use this money to get some food and maybe a nicer shelter for the week. It’s getting cold out. They don’t charge downtown, so you could even save the money. No more spare-changing and don’t spend it on you know what.

Take care, Mr. Ferndale

He inserted one hundred dollars into the envelope and walked out in front of his business to where Mary was leaning up against the streetlight. He stuffed the envelope in her paper cup and walked away. “I have to wait till Christmas to op’n it, Mr. Ferndale?” she called back. He shook his head. He didn’t know what to do with the cake. It wasn’t like he could resell it, he thought. No one comes in for a wedding cake ready-made. Back inside the bakery he decided to cut himself a slice, and then he thought of the couple upstairs. They hadn’t lived there for long. Maybe a few months. He wasn’t even sure of their names, but they had come into the shop once for a slice of raspberry cheesecake each, and the girl exchanged hellos with him as she came and went. His knock was answered by an older woman he didn’t recognize. “Were we being too loud?” she asked. In the background, a baby was crying. The young woman came to meet the older one and Mr. Ferndale saw the resemblance. “Hi Mr. Ferndale. I’m Kayla.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “We’re just having a birthday party for my daughter.” Another man he also didn’t recognize squeezed past them on the stairway. “Where are you going?” Kayla asked. “To have a smoke.” Mary opened the envelope Mr. Ferndale gave her earlier that day and let out a little shriek of glee. It wasn’t often she had one hundred dollars to work with. Last year her old partner, Larry, was saved by a woman who paid for anything that would make his life “a little more comfortable.” His gummy mouth filled with dentures, the dirt under his nails disappeared, and his speech—ordinarily broken and stuttered—came back to him in long, knowing sentences. But the empty stoop in front of the tobacco shop held onto their story. How they would work the Saturday night bar crowds and laugh whenever Mary could convince a young drunk girl to give him a kiss on the cheek. Now he was a cashier and Mary sometimes watched him secretly to see if anything had changed fundamentally. At the only payphone left in town she made a call to her dealer who said he’d be there in a minute, which she knew meant five. She went into the pawnshop across the street to use the bathroom but was kicked out, so she squatted in the back alley. When the dealer showed, she bought a rock from him and saved the rest of the money 37

for the things Mr. Ferndale suggested. Mr. Ferndale had invited them all downstairs for some cake. It was a gesture that didn’t call for reciprocation, but RJ said, “Come up whenever you want. I got a lotta beer.” Upstairs, the party had already been off to an uncomfortable start. He expected Rhonda to be there, but not Gino. Kayla wasn’t expecting him either, and when she saw him, she glared at her mom, who shrugged as if to say, “He’s better than what you have now.” Downstairs, they gathered around the cake and admired Mr. Ferndale’s handiwork. Gino rejoined them. It really was a work of art: four tiers of ivory cheesecake decorated with strawberries and chocolate drizzle. On the top tier, a bride and groom. RJ detached the cake-topper couple and set them on the table. Mr. Ferndale said the real art is in the taste and handed out slices to each of them. “Gino can’t have one,” Kayla said. “His tooth.” Gino ignored her. “I’ll take a slice,” he said. They sang Happy Birthday this way, around one of the small café-like tables inside the bakery. Mr. Ferndale sat between RJ and Gino across from the women. Kayla used the tip of her finger as a spoon to let Jenny try the frosting. An hour later, Rhonda kissed her daughter goodbye after stowing the Pack N Play and buckling in the car seat. She suction cupped the baby on board sign to the window and flew away with Jenny and Gino. Relieved, RJ cracked open a beer. He lay on the loveseat so that his head rested on Kayla’s lap. She tugged lightly at the strands of his hair and made a loud cracking noise when she popped the bubble gum inside her mouth. Craning his neck back to look up at her, he saw that her mind was somewhere else. Her eyes focused out the window. From her view, he imagined she saw nothing but streetlights and the roof of the strip mall. “What do you see?” he asked her. “The city,” she said without hesitation, as if she had already planned a response.

Joe Milazzo from The Habiliments This house is so tentative, some least possibility bobbing in a soup of angles. (Maybe the gutters boil over the yard, maybe the porch light kills the garden as it sprinkles it.) I’ve tried so hard to describe these structures to themselves: a security to keep a picture from having to prop singly; a wide feeling in which disorder can accumulate until it realizes how impossible it is; a wooden fiction whose flesh is what it wants for its senses. But mirrors aren’t ears, and small places can’t bring pacing out of prayer and into friendship. THE DREAM IN WHICH T H E S H E WOLF UNACC O U N TA B LY GRANTS YOU P A S S A G E This house isn’t ever ready for me, as long it it looks at me and doesn’t see you, temperate and impressive, above all repeating me and my encouragements as crudely as a harmonica hums. What other is a storm, then, than my blundering? My view of my modesty enveloped in a peephole abscessed with impatience?

Every 8 AM I parley with my costumes. They come blazing like trumpets off their pegs, dummies scything soft torches, extras loitering in their holes. Their lampoons thwart, I think, but only because they blab vowels I don’t know how to round. This is not the way I would have planned a truce. Maybe I’ve been benched all wrong. No odes will placate the slack. With a stock shriek, they bid I adopt a different mood. Fashioning white faces aslant, I try and tell them: none of us will be memorialized for this.You incline with wisdom as dulcet and greasy as a vellum genealogy: “Good luck altering the the gist of a bed settling, the interpretation of an overt door.” That might be, as might that I wouldn’t like to purport. THE DREAM I N W H I C H YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT Y O U A R E S E E I N G UNTIL IT HAS BEEN SHOWN TO YOU

T H E I AM DREAM IN P U B L I C LY WHICH EXPOSED To what glamour has this hodgepodge gaiety lured you? Are there lighthouses enough for these corrugated sails? How far beyond the trees does the curve of these fields surge? Now there are more solstices than there are sunsets. Here, these enormous mouths dazzle too quickly to crackle. Where one yellow cone intersects with another violet one back yards explode into palaces. Friday, and as soon as the cameras go for their nightly swim in the diesel freeze shed by the stars, the wind blows as it always must and, because mine are lessons in how to hover, I can no longer see through the window of my breath to where its indifferent pointing has spread.

THE DREAM IN W H I C H I SUCCOMB TO LOOKING BACK I know it, tomorrow I will fall apart into corners and infinitesimals. Tomorrow, I will be be the champion of your pains. Or I won’t. I’ll lie instead, taking the last red-eye and leaving all our repinings untidy, unpatched, unrequited. Confidence requires more than button eyes and the pudge of doll hands. Don’t set out to detain me, don’t believe you can revive my horizons with a simple phone call. Let me keep this perspective, let me shrink until the ankles gape, the shoes sag. I want to hear the laces flicker like scissors, or grass tall and dry. I long to be grounded where the promises have been rasped flat, where the footfalls are hoofed and each stampede cleaves me until there are no more halves left to fan their trains.

THE DREAM IN WHICH YOU DON’T H E A R THE BOOS

Your justifications mull into overtime and queer my deadlines. Some are Technicolor, some ennui, but most just smoke the opium of background flats. Even kingdom come has plans for gunslinger streets. Don’t you know anymore how occasion speaks? Why a moment becomes its own folklore? You don’t, you can’t shut up the fanfare and splash of that grail. And so I should toil over some staple more forgiving than this, my method. I should know not to belabor every duration with rehearsing in the sham chivalry of blame.

Lindsay Miller Inside Joke In the car, the dehydrated Idaho landscape sped by, like earth compacted in a vise. I held David’s hand and wished we were somewhere else. Emily and Alex were always inviting us to do things with them. This time, it was camping. I hated camping, but David hated it less, and had convinced me to go along. Just one night, he said. It won’t be that bad. I never understood double dates. Spending time with another couple felt too complicated, like we were two competing inside jokes. I was never sure how nice I should be to Alex. I was bad at distinguishing friendly from flirtatious. “Do you guys have any music we should put on?” Emily twisted around in her seat, brown curls dangling around her shoulders, with the enthusiasm of a preschool teacher. I could not imagine Emily becoming a lawyer, though she would be one in less than two years. I was still wandering around in the dark of local college courses, hoping I would bump into something worthwhile eventually. The campground was at the sand dunes, past the truck stop where they sold Indian arrowheads and turquoise bolo ties from a dusty glass case, north on a gloomy dirt road that led to a gritty clearing where a few trucks were parked. Some tents were propped up, slouching, on the patches of dirt. I pinched David’s palm but would not look at him. “Is this the right spot?” Emily asked, leaning toward Alex. They had only been dating for six months—friends from law school had set them up—and she still behaved as though he were a test she needed to pass. “Looks like it,” he said, jamming the parking brake on his station wagon. The guys put up the tents while Emily and I sat around the ashy remnants of the fire pit. David spent most of his free time swimming at his parents’ country club—it was where we had met—and I loved to watch his arms moving, working. I had been a waitress there that summer, and while carrying a Bloody Mary from the poolside bar on a tray one morning, I tripped and fell. The strand of pearls I was wearing broke, and dozens of them floated like tiny missiles into the pool, where David was swimming laps. I was too embarrassed to tell him it didn’t matter, that they were fake, and he had spent an hour retrieving each one from the bottom. Then he asked for my phone number. “How long have you two been together?” Emily asked. “Almost two years now,” I said. “Wow. I don’t think I’ve dated anyone as long as I’ve dated Alex. Two years seems like such a long time. I’m afraid I’d get bored before then.” “I don’t know. It’s strange how much there is to learn about one person.” I wasn’t sure if I believed this, but I knew it would get Emily to shut up.

Later that night, I could hear Alex and Emily giggling inside the nylon shell of their tent. “What do you think they’re talking about?” “Good question,” David said, closing his eyes. I looked up at the false sky of our tent’s roof, and imagined somewhere past it the whole invisible universe, out of reach.

Rachel Moritz Twenty Weeks

A bale of wet straw saturates the garden— strawberry leaves peeking out. Wilted beneath the world’s dimensions, they remain as my affective state, a gift who respites moments before returning. Not writing, not sonic labor but watching cars sweep our avenue toward light. Lush adder, how a seed stifles— while ‘cry and cry,’ my inclement mind for you, another.

Rachel Moritz Second Emanation

If confession, wishing you its lasting form, were written: the root of the word mystery means hide as twigs from a bush on the bank lean in water, so a trinity of questions hangs its permeate mobile as if to receive what light comes broadly now upon your resting mind: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;in the imageless temple, where gravity breaks awayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as if to find Good shining on all things: the sun being rolled like a scroll, the particulate dimming of earthly horizons: hide or close

I live in a blunt tool inside a house called an anchorhold and as sometimes I am in comfort and as sometimes I am failing â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;hindrances also give rise to the wave,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; that small piece of driftwood circling in a vortex, the same direction as alwaysâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;toward

Erin J. Mullikin Dear 2009,

you’ve been both a good friend and catatonic lover. A pet I picked up from the side of the road. A tulip’s head tottering on its stalk as if to say both Yes and No. You, the dead year that gave me a new feeling, the one where I repeatedly told others, There is no place I want to be. But to say it and to be in it: that was innovative: the same reaction as when my dying dog stops and stares at a graveyard. I must confess: sometimes I drink entire bottles of cough syrup and champagne before getting into my car, mostly because I want to see how close I can get to you. I’ve both known you and not, and both of us have encircled the same house, the very one where I tried to save a life but couldn’t, not for all the breath in me nor (an admission here) the way I knew that a death was to be in store before I could leave the farm. You’re done and I can’t get you back, but like any animal, I can feed you still. I can get back on the correct side of the sun, and what do you have to say to that? 49

You took control from my throat and gave me reason, but what’s good about logic when I know every mirror in the house has your stigmata? I don’t have much feeling in my right breast—the doctor said I wouldn’t—you know this already. But dearly departed 2009, when my lover bites down, now I can feel it.

Erin J. Mullikin I Was (Sometimes) Alone for These Films II

If we say a star is quiet, it is the truth. Nothing in space makes a noise we can hear, this relationship built on distance and the time to cross a distance, and light. But to me, even the idea of space is too heavy, incomprehensible. It’s just a nothing with things suspended in it. How was I to spot my own feelings about the physical universe when I learned the order of the planets in the 2nd grade, when we saw the Challenger explode on the school TV? I try not to step too much into the past though my chest is usually full of air. How is it that a plane can stay up, but for all my willing, I can’t? I mean, last night I dreamed of my dead dog. I had her with me at my mother’s house and I had to put her to sleep myself. I had to give her the injection, and I did, but she wouldn’t die. She was a lot like the last time I saw her, only not. The gravitas. I mean, I have trouble going to sleep when I’m alone, and this makes me very brave. Another thing you should probably know is that I conduct affairs that ultimately confront my death all the time, though not in earnest.

John Myers I Hire One

I hire a carpenter. As syncopation leans forward reminds me. Wind the shape of lubrication. A glockenspiel is German and hot in my housedress. A mosquito eater bandies about. The scissors will not share the pain with the night lion, its discomfort like the bent teeth a comb lists. I see my thought boil. Instead of sweeping my area I hire a carpenter. Authority flier. When I was caught withholding I changed my hand. Who likes the gutted fish to stare at. I walk down the street calling out: I had these mirrors. I had all these mirrors. Lousy teeth and a yellow the shape of a melody between the thought of my meat and any other gap in reality testing. Yet. The mosquito eater is back. I like being looked at. Help, the slats were hung because we had plenty of money.

I hire a carpenter to change the house around. Why my heart was beating inconsistently how I could feel it. From inside the slats looked open. I take off my housedress because my jock itch is back and the house is wet with carpentry.

John Myers I Hire Two I hire a scarecrow. I learn how to tie knots and forget. No doe and no wheel. A plum open to the sun. A missing rung builds itself in one slip. Cognates became us said the man I hired to scarecrow. I saw an eagle. I saw another. I saw a hawk and offered it an apricot. I hire a different scarecrow. Revolving door emptied of menagerie but what handsome careful emptiness and menagerie. Out in the sky most of the time any of us. A hawk dirties the sky so fully. Strong, suspicious, the future perfect leans on everyone I can see. Cardboard forms I plan to color in later. Cognates for generosity: Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re fortunate here. A new valence in the bedroom goes out of style. I think loss sustains something. A home full of silver minus shyness. 54

Lee Tyler Williams King of Laredo I get kidnapped all the time. It’s not so bad. Better than sweeping up hair, working for fifteen years as a geriatric crutch from the shampoo chair to the waiting area. Looking like Vogt isn’t what my mother or the salon ladies think. The mistaken limo rides and junior college girls with jean shorts shopping on the strip who come up to me and think I’m that guy who ran for county commissioner. They remember my orange tan and enviable smile from the posters their parents used to stake next to the sprinklers. Restaurant owners sit me by the window and bring me house bourbon. Strangers get shy and clumsy. They think I’m the one with all the power, the eternal overseer. They know they’re supposed to resent me, but they don’t. They trip over curbs when they see me, hold open doors for me at the bank and post office, even ask me to bless their child. Poverty of the spirit, I say, and cross the ugly demons. Just once has someone poured coffee on my lap out of nervousness. My wife wants us to leave town. If I had any sense, I’d listen to her. But what would we do for money if we left? And my mother couldn’t run the salon by herself. Besides, the border is where my piss sizzles, where my wife sweats under her chin, where the mosquitoes don’t suck your blood, they serenade you. When the kidnappers take me, they think I have all this money, and they’re scared to hurt me.They cover up my face and spit and curse. Use rope, never chains. At first I told them I wasn’t Vogt. It’s all just bad luck. I look like him, but that’s because my mother shampooed his father thirty-seven years ago and they fucked in the parking lot behind the salon. Then I guess he decided to wash his own hair. But his round pale face is what we both inherited. I don’t know if my father ever knew about me, his son’s lookalike. He was a fertilizer kingpin and got run over on the strip years before I first got taken. I guess whoever killed him didn’t think the ransom was high enough. The first time was to a desert trailer with a latrine in the corner. A deck of cards and a Bible on a crate. Bars on the windows, and a padlocked door. It got hot sometimes, but I had a sink. The guys who took me, I called them Poco and Lefty. They came in with pillowcases over their heads, left me food and beer and asked me whether I made my video. My last testament. The bait. Poco kept yelling, Half a million. After awhile, I stopped believing who I was. I thought I was rich and dangerous. The ghostly overseer of men. I said I’ll pay anything. Why not make it a whole million? Shit, I’m the king of Laredo. Name your price. This got them all frantic and they went to their safe house, and came back and screamed and left again.

If it’s not in the desert, it’s in an iced rig off the highway, or a pool hall closet. One time it was in a motel cellar. Those guys never said anything. They hooded me and threw me in a laundry bin. Their marching boots echoed. A walkie-talkie went off and it sounded like the border patrol frequency. I’m never taken for more than a week. It’s like a dreamt up vacation where you’re supposed to be scared for your life.You can’t have fun otherwise. When I think I’m Vogt, I don’t know who to trust. Myself, or the guy rubbing a 28 against my gums. But before he pulls the trigger, the ransom always arrives. Paid in full by the wrong guy’s savior. At least Christ isn’t afraid of showing his face. My mother and the salon ladies think it’s Vogt who pays. A blood wager for the border runt. The ugly demon. They say it’s the least he could do for his half brother. He’s the one with all the money, and you’re the one who wants to be saved.

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke Panda Porn When I loved I loved a panda. Notoriously bumbling lovers, the domesticated panda is forgetful of pleasure. Male pandas are known as boars. For two months we held hands. The panda has six claws folding out from their forepaws. My handholding panda. Assumed rude for their silence, in fact pandas are simple: solitary and shy. My panda was bashful. Preparing for a beach day found him hand holding a razor. A panda has two types of hair: An oily, fine underfur covered by a length of coarse. As I helped shave my panda’s back I sang the Panda Pants Dance. It goes like this: Put a panda in some pants and he’ll dance. Put some pants on a panda and he’s dancing. The panda pants dance! Pandas require no special place to bed down, they lay themselves wherever they happen to be. To love a panda is to bandy about between the sheets; pained rather than pinned, pining not primed. It never gets better. I loved a panda who loved porn. I tried to accept it–YOUNG COLLEGE SLUTS!!!! Two Petite Brunettes Go At It. Horny Teenager Finds Friend’s Dad. Standard stuff. It bothered me. Because my panda wasn’t there for me in that slutty friend’s dad sort of way. Because my panda was confused when it came to the inside of me. And because my panda’s back hair grew in patchy, his longing was layering himself.

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke Declarative Life Sentences No one says anything original. “The belt of my record player is broken.” “I never wanted to know your stupid name.” “Only names betray arms as all other arms.” I too am broken belted. Repair is a lost trade. Much like grocery bagging, everyone’s an expert. I’m claiming Safeway rewards on red wine with your phone number. The checkout clerk, reading off my receipt, says thank you, Mrs. Stupid Something–a name that won’t be my last. No arms are original in their reaching out. Seams of inner elbows stitch to seams of inner elbows. Fingers at the end of one wrap around fingers at the end of others. Nameless numbers of limbs intertwine to make the sheet I lie on, bare and grabby.

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke Indirect Mapping I forgot that the road trip, like the relationship, was supposed to end in family. Not a destination type of gal. The backseat driver through four states of my own grieving. The route I outline from Seattle to South Lake Tahoe hits all the landmarks I’d talked about seeing with someone else. My lost love, mapped all over me. Of the man I take this trip with I tell my mother, one day we won’t refer to him by name— he’ll be the guy who came after. Just as there were many after Joe and many during John. They are not memory’s proper nouns. They are modifiers and predicate adjectives, active and indirect. To Nevada and his grandmother’s ninetieth birthday is not all that far. But the distance between knowledge and disappointment isn’t a matter of miles. It comes in measurements of liquor and meatballs. When I go for seconds on either note is taken in the narrows of his mother’s eyes. I bite into another glass, sip some sauce from my fingertips. I am going hungry for something to do with my mouth since I don’t know what to say to these people. These people are not asking questions about me or what I’m doing here—it is assumed I wouldn’t be here if not. If they ask anything, they ask how we met. I watch face after face fall when I say “work.” I want to invent something but am worried it will be detailed with the truths of someone else. People want something they can agree on. No one wants work. They want to be convinced that there’s no W, R, or K in love. After the fourth state should be acceptance, but I return to Seattle thousands of feet above the miles of road that he will drive back alone.

Author Notes

Kiik A.K. is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Clara University. He earned an MA from UC Davis where his poetics thesis was titled “THE JOY OF HUMAN SACRIFICE.” He is a current graduate student at UC San Diego where he is working on a collection of counter-internment narratives, tentatively titled, “EVERYDAY COLONIALISM.” His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades,The Southeast Review, iO,Washington Square, CutBank and The Masters Review. “oxlip and pearl” is dedicated to the poet, activist and theorist, Angela Eunsong Kim.

Chaim ben Avram is a poet from Philadelphia. He currently lives & writes in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and teaches Literature at Kamehameha Schools. Recent work can be found at West Chester Review, decomP, softblow, and LUMINA, Volume XII.

Jill Darling has three poetry collections: Solve For (BlazeVOX, ebooks), begin with may: a

series of moments (Finishing Line Press), and at the intersection of 3, a collaborative project with Laura Wetherington and Hannah Ensor (Dancing Girl Press). She’s had work published in journals including /NOR, Aufgabe, 580 Split, Quarter After Eight, factorial, Rampike, Horse Less Review,Two Serious Ladies, in the anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders, and forthcoming in Denver Quarterly. She teaches at Eastern Michigan University and The University of Michigan-Dearborn.You can find her online at http://www.jilldarling.com/

Dennis Etzel Jr. lives with Carrie and the boys in Topeka, Kansas where he teaches En-

glish at Washburn University. His chapbook The Sum of Two Mothers was released by ELJ Publications in 2013, and his work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, BlazeVOX, Fact-Simile, 1913: a journal of poetic forms, 3:AM, DIAGRAM, and others. He is a TALK Scholar for the Kansas Humanities Council, and volunteers at the YWCA of Topeka and Midland Hospice Care. [“So I can only tell you”] page 10 Sentences 1 and 2: President Ronald Reagan, Presidential Debate, October 21, 1984 in Kansas City, Missouri. Public domain. [“The mean teacher”] page 11 Sentence 2: From “A Rejection of Closure,” by Lyn Hejinian. Used with permission from the author.

[“The open text”] page 12 Sentences 1 and 3: From “A Rejection of Closure,” by Lyn Hejinian. Used with permission from the author. Sentence 5: Title of song by Duran Duran. Sentence 7: Term from Orwell’s 1984, as the language that is deliberately impoverished. [“While failing”] page 13 Sentence 1: From “A Rejection of Closure,” by Lyn Hejinian. Used with permission from the author. Sentences 3 and 4: From Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars written by Jim Shooter. Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars © and TM Marvel Entertainment, LLC, and used with permission. Sentence 5: President Ronald Reagan, Presidential Debate, October 21, 1984 in Kansas City, Missouri. Public domain. Sentence 6: Title of song by Duran Duran. [“Years may pass”] page 14 Sentences 1 and 4: From Dungeons and Dragons Companion Set: Volume One by Frank Mentzer. Used with permission from Wizards of the Coast, LLC. Sentences 2 and 3: From “A Rejection of Closure,” by Lyn Hejinian. Used with permission from the author. Sentence 6: President Ronald Reagan, Presidential Debate, October 21, 1984 in Kansas City, Missouri. Public domain.

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Windeye (Coffee House Press 2012) and the novel Immobility (Tor 2012), both of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include TheWavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Department.

Noah Eli Gordon lives in Denver. More info here: http://www.noaheligordon.com/ Seth Landman lives in Northampton, MA. He is the author of SignYouWere Mistaken (Factory Hollow Press, 2013) and Confidence (Brooklyn Arts Press, forthcoming).

KrisAnne Madaus is a fiction writer and visual artist from Milwaukee, WI. She received

her BA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2014, where she specialized in creative writing and language studies. Her writing has been published in Furrow, and her art is currently on display at Fat City Emporium in Madison, WI.

Joe Milazzo is the author of CrepusculeW/ Nellie (Jaded Ibis) and The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books). He co-edits the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing] and is also the proprietor of Imipolex Press. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is http://www.slowstudies.net/jmilazzo/.

Lindsay Miller lives and works in LA. As a journalist, she spends her days interviewing

real people and her nights writing about made-up ones. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s written for Wallpaper,The Huffington Post, LA Weekly, and Nylon, and her fiction has appeared in Cleaver Magazine and Black Heart Magazine. She holds a BA in print journalism and a masters in nonfiction, professional writing, both from the University of Southern California.

Rachel Moritz is the author of BorrowedWave, forthcoming from Kore Press in 2014, and

three chapbooks: Elementary Rituals (Albion Books, 2013), Night-Sea (New Michigan Press, 2008) and The Winchester Monologues (New Michigan Press, 2005). Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Aufgabe, Cannibal, Fourteen Hills, Horseless Review, VOLT, TYPO and 26. She lives in Minneapolis, where she co-edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review and publishes a chaplet series from WinteRed Press.

Erin J. Mullikin is the author of the chapbook, Strategies for the Bromidic (dancing girl

press). Her poems, short fiction, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as elsewhere, Coldfront, Spork, and inter | rupture. She is the editor-in-chief for Salt Hill Journal and a founding editor for the online poetry journal, NightBlock, and the small literary press, Midnight City Books.

John Myers grew up in the Endless Mountains and now lives in Tucson. His work has

appeared in LUNGFULL!, Hot Street, and Dreginald, and has work forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly, Aufgabe and The Corduroy Mtn.

Lee Tyler Williams has been published in Absent, Thieves Jargon, Floodwall, Berkeley Poetry

Review, Smoking Glue Gun, Beyond Baroque and Fiction Southeast. A radio piece of his can also be found here on NPR.org. He was born in Dallas, Texas.

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is a writer from NYC living in Seattle. She received her MFA

from Goddard College, was a 2013 Jack Straw Writer, is a 2014 EDGE Artist Trust Graduate, and a Ragdale Foundation Resident. She is co-founder of Till, an annual writing retreat at Smoke Farm and Lit.mustest, a bi-annual reading at The Richard Hugo House. She teaches at Seattle Central Community College and is, or will be, published in Pif, Psychopomp, City Arts, Beecherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Pacifica Literary Review, Extract(s), Keep This Bag Away From Children,The Conium Review, and ListenParty.com. Chelseawernerjatzke.com