The Cabin's Writers in the Attic Anthology: Fuel

FUEL writers in the attic

FUEL

writers in the attic

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works selected by

J. REUBEN APPELMAN

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General operations of The Cabin are generously supported by: The City of Boise Idaho Commission on the Arts National Endowment for the Arts and the Idaho Community Foundation

This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN 801 South Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000 www.thecabinidaho.org (c) 2019 The Cabin All rights reserved.

Layout by Hillary Bilinski.

Edits by Tyler Weber.

Printed and bound in the USA in an edition of 200 copies.

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PAST ISSUES

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GAME

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ANIMAL

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ROOMS

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THANK YOU TO OUR MEMBERS MEMBERS OF THE CABIN AT THE SUSTAINING LEVEL OR ABOVE RECEIVE A FREE COPY OF THE Writers in the Attic ANTHOLOGY. THANK YOU! John & Edwina Allen Kay Alspaugh Christine & Bill Avey Karen & Cary Baerlocher George & Karen Baker Bruce Ballenger & Karen Kelley Thomas & Dr. Angela Beauchaine Karen Benning Kacy & Eric Berliner James & Dianne Bevis Karla & Bill Bodnar Fred & Phoebe Boetler Beth Bogue Patricia Buddress Nancy Budge & Gay Whitesides Darla Christiansen Lindsay Clarke-Youngwerth Nicholas Cofod & Janice Alexander Jan Tennant & Richard Cooper Laurie & Tom Corrick Jill Costello James John Cruzen Alex & Gary Davis Laura Delaney Linda & Thomas Dixon Tony & Shauna Doerr Gwen Ohlson & Robert Dry Jacque & Harold Eastman Janelle Eckhardt Phyllis Edmundson & David Yearsley Carolyn Eiriksson Deborah & Bill Eisinger Bill & Jan English Sydney & Clark Fidler Theresa Fox 7

Brad & Wendy Frazer Steve & Allison Frinsko Stefanie Fry Marshall & Leslie Garrett Julie & Andrew Gendler Mark & Marijke Geston Jon Getz & Kara Cadwallader Craig & Heather Getzlof Laura & John Gibson Scott & Nora Gill Kris & Brad Granger Sarah Griin Margaret Griith Bev & George Harad Kay Hardy & Gregory Kaslo Karyl Hayden Vicki Helming Alice Hennessey Lori & Guy Hudson Linda Hummel David Johnson Jill Johnson Debbie Johnson & David Clopton Linda & Steve Kahn Dana Kehr Don Kemper & Molly Mettler Tom & Teresa Killingsworth Vivian Klein Suzanne & Pat Knibbe Heidi Kraay Mary Kruzich Bob & Kathy Kustra Martha Lane & Douglas Peterson Pam & Jack Lemley Marcia T. Liebich Brooke Linville Carol & Brent Lloyd Drew Lobner Carol Lynn MacGregor, PhD

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Pat & Gary Machacek Beth Malasky & John Chesley Julie & Tom Manning Molly Mannschreck & Matthew Schwarz Kim Martz Philippe Masser & Kate Sutherland Andrew Owczarek & Susan May Robert McAndrew & Gwynne McElhinney Kelly Miller Alan & Royanne Minskof Betsy Montgomery Betsy Moynihan Wilhelm & Patricia Northrop Doug Oppenheimer Skip & Esther Oppenheimer Stacy & Mark Pearson Thomas Pirc Seth Platts Cynthia Pollock Wendy Rancourt Marge & Dr. Peter Reedy Henry & Sue Reents Kurt Holzer & Ellie Rodgers Cathy Rogers Sterling Russell Diane & Jonathan Schwarz Bonnie & Marshall Sharp Samantha Silva & David Nevin Carole & Richard Skinner Carol & Tom Smith Dorothy Snowball Michael Spink & JoAnn Butler Robert & Myrna Stahman Judith Steele Debbie & Peter Wachtell Mikel & John Ward Jane Watkins Jane Williamson Anne Woodhouse

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CONTENTS J. REUBEN APPELMAN

Introduction • 15

CLOUD POINT CATHERINE KYLE

cauldron • 25 RUTH SAXEY-REESE

Yemeni Song • 26 Swearing Of Gambling • 27 CAITLYN CURRAN

All I Wanted • 28 BEN AVI SHANE

Breakdown • 29

FLASH POINT STACY BOE MILLER

Set a Match To • 35 JUDITH McCONNELL STEELE

Preacher’s Wife • 36 Instructions for Revenge • 37 KIM MONNIER

Each Life Not Stillborn • 39 MICHAEL A. PAQUIN

Blackdamp • 40

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POUR POINT CATHERINE KYLE

selie • 49 LOUIE LAND

How to Be a Poet • 50 JUDITH McCONNELL STEELE

Burning the Library • 52 TRACY SUNDERLAND

721 Intercity • 54 JULIE M. FOGERSON

Jerry’s Market • 59

FRICTION. DISTILLATION. CATHERINE KYLE

collage • 67 LUKAS W. ROBERTSON

Coattails • 68 ANITA TANNER

For a Poet’s Solitary Voice • 69 TOMAS JOAQUÍN BAIZA

Hole • 70 CAROL KEOGH LINDSAY

Coral Charm • 75 12

COMPRESSION RATIO LAUREN YARNALL

Hey Little Girl • 83 christy claymore

Billion Year-Old Carbon • 84 GREG DUFFY

The Hand-Shakers • 85 SHEILA D. C. ROBERTSON

Collateral Damage • 90 KEENE SHORT

Ater Zion • 95

SMOKE POINT BEN AVI SHANE

I Bled on Her Cylinder Head • 101 KATRINA MAIRI WRIGHT

Home • 102 MARY L. SARAS

Hazards • 104 LIZA LONG

Jesus, Take the Wheel • 108 DENÉ BREAKFIELD

Mechanisms of Injury • 113 13

ABOUT Writers in the Attic • 119 Meet the Writers • 121

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INTRODUCTION My ex-wife and I bought a used pickup from a lemon lot in Billings, Montana twenty-ive summers ago, hoping to make Alaska, neither of us old enough to see that simply wanting to get somewhere isn’t the same as changing your life. The truck dismantled three hours down the road, shy of Butte, my ex’s loral sundress opening like a wingspan of the highway each time a semi-trailer roared pass, her thumb out for a ride to the towing station, maybe a motel, somewhere we could count to ten, think about getting our marriage annulled.

We’d known each other six weeks, married shotgun for seventy-ive dollars out of a storefront in Reno on the 4th of July. The cashier had signed as witness, handed me a Polaroid that developed in the sunlight bouncing through plate glass windows with the traic outside and my ex and me coming into focus on the synthetic plastic, kissing, but not like two people in love.

We eventually covered thousands of miles that summer, spent our savings and got nowhere fast, same as the sixteen years of our marriage, really. I used to quip that getting married on Independence Day had been like courting the Anti-Christ on Christmas, and I believe my ex agreed, although I now feel sadly about that, having matured enough to realize how broken each of our hearts must have been to have sought the other’s. None of us chase down the wounded by accident, but in the search for our twin we are, sometimes, undeniably hunting our own hurt. Being young when we married, our temperaments prevented us from healing, and so we lived in a state of desperation curbed by television, the routine of daily work, sometimes sex, and, more oten, the sheer beauty of our children, whom we loved to hell and back, 15

from the truest places in our hearts.

Raising children is like praying to your God: It’s the best part of your life, and if you can do it correctly, which is truthfully, a very wide love opens from the inside out. You become a igurine in a boat no bigger than a thumbnail, trusting in the surrounding, gargantuan sea. Give yourself over to something, and your God will take you where it wants, which is always toward love, regardless of the years you have fervently steered in another direction. The oars of your little dinghy were only imagined, ater all — your children, like your God, will prove this to you.

I say “your God,” and I mean that within you is a place without language, that is bigger than temporal desires. We retreat to this place for salvation, regardless of religious ailiation, and we call this retreating “prayer.” When I am at the gym, for instance, I am in a church so great that it has carried me through thirty-ive years simply by my stepping inside of it. What I pray to, by showing up, is the space between the walls, which is also a felt space inside of me.

Similar to prayer, I have raised a little jade plant from infancy, and as it outgrew the sill, it was moved to the porch, and soon it will move to the greater landscape, no longer needing my constant adoration. There is godliness in me learning to let go, which took exactly as many years for me to accept as the jade took to outgrow my home. This is not accidental.

I do not know the name of my ex’s God, but I know that she prayed to it. I could see this in the way she held our young children while sleeping, her body designed precisely to do so.

When they turned beneath the covers, so, too, did she turn in sleep, never further than inches away, a dance choreographed only by something predating our language to describe it.

This is the practice of beauty, which requires nothing more than the freest breathing. And so here is the woman whom I met on a drunk, then married almost as if getting even with

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myself, and ultimately quarreled with for much of my adult life, now expressed as if her soul were the purest, gentlest, opening and closing lily upon pond water. How have I come to this, ater so many years, graced by the remembrance of my ex in prayer, a singular, winsome image pulled from the lames of the burning barn that was our lives together?

It can only be the distance we carve between bodies — as if California on one hand, New York on the other, and between them the thousands of miles going only either let or right, ater all. In the middle, I ate from one bowl a thousand times, with one spoon, until the landscape became the sea, and I a igurine again, same as always when letting go, in the smallest boat.

There is no magic to loving. It is the easiest journey to take, although in the process we oten travel great distances to become what we already are. Like Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road, we are sometimes just speeding balls of burning wax across a landscape of lesh and sufering and sunlight, the sky at night an ininite canvas of deepest black painted by the stars kicked up from our treads. There’s an engine roaring inside to get nowhere. Perhaps the platitude stating “Where one road ends, another begins” is merely delection from the more important idea that the road we’re on might not even exist, certainly not in the unfathomable quiet that is, for each of us, the very end. Movement, which is entertainment, is the distraction from self — which might explain why the American epic is underscored by road trips — but in this distraction is the story: “I could not sit still because…” The answer to that, peculiar to each of us, becomes the answer to why one could not love. To tell our truest stories, we must tell of the movement that sidetracked us, my ex-wife and I coming to each other midway through the chaos of that equally American gesture, “Find a Target and Shoot,” our fantasy of marriage to a stranger almost cinematic, a line of

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beer bottles in the desert popped-of one at a time, shards of glass exploding into the air like rice at a proper ceremony.

For consideration, there were approximately two-hundred submissions to this year’s Writers in the Attic publication. Of those, the work of twenty-four authors was chosen, based on a holistic rubric. The theme of “Fuel” was contemplated and, additionally, whether or not the story or poem contained both propellant and movement. Did the piece start from one place and end in another? If not entirely, were there signs of combustion, or at least the longing for such, which is the longing for life or its understanding? Then, in appraisal of crat, how eicient was the piece? If gesturing toward pain, did the words hurt to read? If gesturing toward love, was the reader smitten? If the piece were minimal in nature, did its minimalism speak to a greater authority, against whom minimalism is the natural response? If the prose were loral, like the print of my ex-wife’s summer dress those two and a half decades ago, were it to convey a greater truth, perhaps the opulence of language as an expression of its opposite, longing? Interestingly, the bulk of the submissions spoke of either sufering or love, what in my married years I steered toward as abstractions yet understood the least.

Although my children are grown, their voices remain as constant as nearby windchimes while I walk the garden of whatever this life is. Over my sleep, snapshots of their childhood sotly twirl like a mobile, caressing my dreams. As I drive, I remember the way their skin felt beside me cuddled on the couch; as I run, the way they smelled on hundreds of summer days, lush from romping in the grass. Now, and oten, I see my family asleep in bed, sea horses turning in the water of our cotton sheets. The haunting of my life by such overwhelming beauty is likely both sufering and love at once, the fuel for story but not the story itself, the poetic image but not the comprehension — not yet. What will I remember in

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thirty years, my ex-wife and I having grown old, my children the age that we are now? Perhaps, in the end, we learn nothing that we do not already know. The human condition is to wrestle with such knowing, regardless. Today, I can speak of how we started, and of where we are. When the story is truly over, I hope to have become wise enough to tell it.

Perhaps it will be the same story I am telling now, of circling in on oneself, swallowing the ideas and imagery all at once, devouring myself in ceaseless low, to become what I already am. The pieces submitted for publication are to be respected for their eforts to ight against that current. As storytellers and poets, that is the calling — though we may question why, there is no answer. In the very end, as stardust, we might be lucky enough to look back and see the treads that spun us here.

J. REUBEN APPELMAN July 2019

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FUEL

writers in the attic

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CLOUD POINT It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success, and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.

SIGMUND FREUD

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CATHERINE KYLE

cauldron I just wanted to like spike the red punch with rhododendron. not to hurt anybody, just to watch the pink lowers like saturate the juice. I wanted to see their pollen dissolve and loat like tiny gold kelp. wanted to smell the tropical fruit punch mix with garden blooms. the woodchips and the wetness of a thousand rainy schoolyards plus the ardor and the sweat of thirty danceloor gyms. sound of bodies pulsing in the dark, nervously. if I throw a hair tie in and swirl it with a pom-pom, grass stains and anxiety, you’ll have my recipe. what some girls are made of: sugar pink & terror red.

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RUTH SAXEY-REESE

YEMENI SONG There always needs to be a place to hide the bones.

Think before this: Cambodia, Guatemala, Bosnia, Rwanda, and before that, and ater, places where eyes pretend not to see, where shovels rust and snap yet keep digging.

There is nothing you or I or anyone in this room can do, you say. Look at this photo of a captured rebel: one angle shows the muzzle pressed to his skull, one angle the canteen pressed to his lips.

I only saw the water until you pointed out the gun.

I only saw the man until you pointed out the crowd.

Silently, I reach deep into the wound of Yemen and pull out bleeding bones, lining them up whether or not you want to see the rows.

In a desert pooling with fuel and blood, my hands become a cup, my two hands, one cup, scooping dust to scatter, staunching nothing.

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SWEARING OFF GAMBLING No wager is sure, not even this one warming my vestigial stub of a heart, betting on the come, on the future take spent before it arrives, or not.

Corpuscles push and halt, push and halt, singing as he singes past all rivals, shiver at his ghosting breeze, shivering marrow winning handily like that brown colt with a cracked hoof, a sure thing, a lightning bolt of hope looping around the track, or not, or tripped on nothing and dirt-jammed teeth.

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CAITLYN CURRAN

ALL I WANTED I wanted Skittles when he died and Marlboros — so whenever someone asked can I bring you anything? that’s what I said.

Sour Skittles, their grainy choke to make your eyes well up. I’d suck them bald and sweet, then swallow. Marlboro 27s.

My touch stayed sour.

My raw tongue a thin machine of thank-yous.

That night of the wreck I couldn’t ind a lighter.

Kept pleading with the cops — Matches? Anything?

There’s got to be a ire somewhere I can lit my mouth to.

Ater, I wouldn’t eat for months without choking.

Spitting out my food like I never was programmed to swallow.

Now, six years pile up and I eat them with salt.

Like a freckle or a splinter, each mundane hour becomes a part of me without my permission, like he was then, with the tire on his back, part truck.

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BEN AVI SHANE

BREAKDOWN I walked across the lawn to my Ford Ranger parked on the street of a quiet neighborhood and kicked the already dented driver’s door before linging it open so that it bounced against its hinges. I slammed it shut and turned the key. The engine turned over, caught, and died. I tried again, and the engine turned over and over and over but did not catch. I punched the dash. In the engine bay, I found the remnants of a shredded timing belt, chewed up like tire chips on a playground. The front fender glinted in the sun. I kicked it.

My father had asked me to drive from Nashville to south Florida in order to help him renovate a house he had bought there. I’d recently been ired from the auto-shop, so I drove south. He threw me out the irst day for parking behind his truck. He threw me out the second day for not reilling his glass of wine when I poured my own. He threw me out the third day — the morning of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when my timing belt broke — for telling his new girlfriend that she was dating an asshole. She had recently divorced a rabbi who, ater two kids and twenty years of marriage, came out of the closet.

I walked to the nearest auto-parts store and bought a timing belt. The Ranger’s four-cylinder engine is noninterference — the pistons and valves, though out-of-sync, do not crash catastrophically together when the timing belt breaks. All I had to do was put on the fresh belt. As the sun rose in the sky it never stopped shining on me in the humid 99 degrees. The sun glared of my chrome tools, and the tools grew too hot to hold. My father and the gay-rabbi’s ex-wife walked out wearing sandals and carrying beach bags. They did not acknowledge me as they drove of. I kicked the toolbox into the shade under the truck.

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The sun was four-ingers above the trees when I inished and ired up the Ranger, and the engine loped no rougher than it had before. I snuck around back of my father’s house and took a cold shower, then dressed in fresh clothes but took nothing else. I walked across the lawn to my Ranger as my father turned onto the street. He parked in the driveway and walked toward my window.

“Come in for Yom Kippur,” he said.

I started the truck.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s Yom Kippur. Get your ass inside.”

I depressed the clutch and found irst gear.

“Maybe if you could ix other people’s cars like you do your own shitbox you wouldn’t have been ired.” He kicked my door.

I drove north and thought of how much thinner his hair had been. The sun set and night fell and the highway emptied of headlights.

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FLASH POINT I am building a ire, and every day I train, I add more fuel.

At just the right moment, I light the match.

MIA HAMM

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STACY BOE MILLER

SET A MATCH TO It’s a surprise how quickly you ignite, wake with ingers singed, hide them all day from your family. You eat anything in your path, learn how good hunger feels. You shout at yourself — every word an ember. You’re hands become eigies. You sing to the coals in your woodstove, scrape charcoal streaks down your thighs.

You look up the words purgatory, limbo, trial. Remember God loves lame: Pentecost, Sodom and Gomorrah, Mt. Sinai. You remind yourself how gold is made pure. Some days you pray a cool hand on your belly, some days you fall right in.

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JUDITH McCONNELL STEELE

PREACHER’S WIFE They said they saw her smoking in the church kitchen. Said she painted her nails red on Saturday, wore gloves on Sunday.

She never said No, never cut her wavy hair, kept her belly ire hidden.

Smoke curling from her mouth trailing down her legs.

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR REVENGE Begin with rage. Track down one small picture, it doesn’t matter how. Did he mind how he took care of you? Ask his mother, if you have to. She still thinks you’re sweet.

Place his photo carefully in a white saucer, so that no ashes will be lost. Burn it with the lighter you two found, the one engraved, “To M. from Yours Forever.”

Scrape up the pieces of his face with a sharpened paring knife. Wipe it slowly across your tongue. Lick of the plate.

Let no part of him remain.

Take to your bed. Don’t eat or swallow any pills, even when the cramps begin. Wait two days, then lush him out.

Dry his turd in the summer sun until it crumbles inely in your ingers. Mix it with black dirt in the clay pot you painted devil red and yellow.

Push seeds from the white mulberry tree hard and deep into the soil. Wait for them to sprout. Quiet yourself. Patience is not its own reward, but it will do for now.

As pale green shoots appear, pluck them out. Do not let them attach themselves to anything, especially you. Save only one, the largest, the one sucking deep on your revenge. Water it sparingly. It must survive without nourishment.

When your sapling tree is full of leaf buds, scatter silkworm eggs into your devil’s pot. Wait, wait for them to hatch.

Check your growing worms every day. Watch how they devour green buds, bite tender leaves and stems. Imagine tiny teeth grinding into bone.

Once every branch of bitter mulberry is heavy with spun silk, you may begin your work. Tear of the fat sacks and steam them over boiling water until all the pupae die. Harden your heart to their cries. This must be done.

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Slowly, slowly, unwind each cocoon until your room is illed with silken threads. This may take years. You have them.

Now you are ready to emerge. Weave a scarf of glowing colors. It should be long enough to strangle. Tie back your hair with it and let it trail all down your back. Put on your dancing skirt and the white blouse that leaves your shoulders bare. Walk to the fair down by the lake, the one you thought you’d ind with him.

Wait until night comes on and the band starts playing.

They know your song. Step onto the wooden dance loor and begin to turn, slowly at irst, then faster, faster. Let your skirts ly up and your scarf ly out. He will feel you spinning and not know why he’s stirred.

Pull of your scarf so your hair, grown long and heavy as your best worm’s strand, swirls around your head. Wipe of your glistening face with the devil’s scarf, your eyelids, your red, red mouth. Hear him sigh and move away from the woman in his bed.

Crush the scarf and press it down between your breasts to catch your dripping sweat. Listen to him moan.

Then leave, before the music’s over. Drop your scarf in the dead carnival dirt. Walk home calmly in the dark.

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KIM MONNIER

EACH LIFE NOT STILLBORN the wind has no voice I only hear from what it touches how it plays across surfaces I especially love the sound from living things air bending along wooden sheaths as unique as ingerprints branches and leaves blending in chorus over the years I had planted those fruit trees apple pear apricot cherry following the sot swell of the ground each atop a small body a dream seed set aside when they budded and bore fruit I felt redeemed in this rebirth I imagined small bones cradled in a net calcium siphoning upward into the yielding sweet lesh I taste my past one day the wind gave the oldest tree too much voice to bear uprooted small rocks the size of skulls had risen in a vertical plane

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MICHAEL A. PAQUIN

BLACKDAMP Marion County, West Virginia Circa 1889 Virgil threw open the lit’s gate in a violent metallic crash and stepped out into the dark. Holding a lantern encased in ine wire mesh to the cavern wall, he fumbled for a cable fed from above and jerked it once. A distant bell rang; one ring for hoist. The lit crawled back up the shat.

Five sets of eyes regarded him and waited.

“Hartford ain’t through yet,” he told them.

“What the hell time is it?” asked Youell.

“Quarter till.”

“Hartford never takes this long. I ain’t deductin’ this. We both of us know anyhow this whole goddamn inspection’s a farce. You really expect a company man to put the kibosh on a day’s work on account a’ smelling a little methane? He could step into a manway hazy with it and he’d give it his blessing.

Might as well put Edwin on the job,” he said pointing to me.

Hooks bent to hold candles stuck protruded from the east and west walls of the cramped corridor. Some were forced into the rock with an instrument, others it comfortably into cracks in the limestone. I shited my attention from the foreman and Youell to the wooden ribs of the vein’s ceiling. In the dim light, I could only see past the third or fourth, but I imagined they went on, ad ininitum.

Hiram’s cough startled me and I snapped my head in his direction. His gaunt frame slid down to a crouching position against the west wall and he held a drool soaked shred of burlap to his face. Already black dust was clinging to his white hair and had it not been for his formless jowls and the blackblue pits that his eyes were submerged in, he might’ve passed

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for a younger man.

Virgil and Louis knelt beside him and coached his breathing in quiet whispers. Youell elected to sulk by the lit platform. He stood on it and looked up.

“What if this whole damn thing fell on me, huh? Right now. The cable just snapped and brought that whole screamin’ mess a’ bullshit crashin’ down like the Lord’s vengeance.

Betcha Molly wouldn’t half mind it none when she sees that settlement from Beauregard.”

“Reckon I wouldn’t half mind it none regardless,” Virgil said from Hiram’s side. Hiram climbed back to his feet and nodded.

“There wouldn’t be no big settlement,” Tom said. “She’d probably just inherit your debt from the company store. You’d charge your itch-ridden whores to it if they’d let you.”

“What kinda Louisiana bullshit name is that anyway?

Beauregard. Is there a name for a reverse carpet-bagger?”

“Quit, Youell. No one’s interested.”

The child approached me. Louis wasn’t interested in their bickering. Beneath the Earth’s crust, a child is a valuable commodity. Small in stature. They make it easy, opening and closing trap doors to allow carts to pass through and keep chambers ventilated. Children were typically the only ones interested in my presence.

“Does that thing ever sing?” he asked Virgil without turning to him.

“Not that I’ve heard. Some do, some don’t. You ought to count yourself lucky. This one here’s a female. The females are lousy singers,” Virgil said.

“A female named Edwin?”

“We name’em all Edwin. I’ve probably been through a score of ‘em before we got this one. Seems this one doesn’t ind it inspiring enough here to grace us with a song.”

“What’s wrong with its beak?”

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“It’s deformed. Most of the ones we get are. Hatcheries can’t do nothing with them and pet shops won’t take them so they wind up here.”

Two frantic rings from the bell hanging by the lit.

“Finally,” Youell moaned.

“Gather your equipment. We’re already starting the day behind,” Virgil said. He issued directions and groups split up.

Those above lowered carfulls of equipment down the shat.

Picks, crank drills, blasting gear, fuses, 40-gallon ore buckets, stone-wedges, mallets, Davy lamps.

Indiferently, I watched loads of bituminous coal pass me on the iron track in a steady procession. Packed ore buckets on wooden cars with iron wheels rolled unevenly down the cold rails. The axles were drenched in grease, and their movement was silent. Tom pulled the cable three times meaning hoist — slowly with care.

I’ve seen the anterior cavity before. It’s a bulb shaped hollow, void and dark and as big as the atrium of a cathedral.

The naked piecemeal catwalks are assembled out of lead pipes to form an ascending walkway of birch, the well-trodden center black with dust ground into the wood with so many footsteps.

Sounds carry well here. Down the corridor I could hear fragments of their conversation: Youell discussed the beneits of collective bargaining, Hiram asked if he could sit down, Louis collected a myriad of racy jokes to impress his friends on the surface, and Virgil recalled a dream he’d had.

They took their lunch up top while I remained down here.

Out of what Virgil called “Unnecessary Consideration” for me, Louis hung a Davy lamp next to my cage. I could smell the aroma of cold rain pouring in from the mouth of the system, 200 t above me. Sound doesn’t travel from the surface and the only thing to break the silence was the scratching of my talonous grip on my perch and drips on wet rock.

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Occasionally a drat rolled past me, destined for the vacuum created below.

I shuled as I heard the lit make its way down. They stepped out in silence. No Hiram. A tension followed them as they passed me and made their way down the corridor.

Then followed bits and pieces of heated discussion.

“You know that’s exactly what’s waiting for all of us.”

Youell.

“If you cared at all about your job, you’d stow your grievances for the hour.”

Virgil.

“It’s getting harder and harder to tell the diference between us and this fuckin’ equipment!”

Deinitely Youell.

I could hear the congregation moving my way, with Youell preaching at the forefront and Virgil tailing him.

“You walk outta here and you’re done! Where the hell else are you gonna ind a job in Marion County?” Virgil yelled, partially to the crowd but to Youell in particular.

“Maybe I won’t stay in Marion County! I could go out west. Travel to the Paciic, clearing savages ‘long the way with the army irregulars — manifesting my fuckin’ destiny! All I know is, you’ve got to be a mad man if you think this hole is living. Anyone who’s inclined to join me can do so now.

Maybe if we stick together we can ask Beauregard for...”

Louis was the irst to notice, even before I did. Deafening silence washed over the group and for once, I was the center of attention “Why’s her head moving like that?” Louis asked.

“I’ve never seen ‘em do that before,” Tom said.

Through my hazy vision I saw my let wing had spread out, held stif. I didn’t do that. I looked at it curiously, and then lost my footing. I swung forward from my perch and hung there, upside-down like an acrobat. I heard silence,

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equipment dropping, and silence. They all gathered around for my show as I fell to the rusty loor of my tin cage. My malformed beak scraped it with sot scratches as I gasped for air and my heart split the ribs buried inside my breast. I could see the radiance of the lamp Louis let for me, its lame tall and green.

Running. Desperation. Tom screaming up the shat, jerking the bell wire. Five rings for evacuate. The lit dropped in a calamitous explosion that sent dust and debris rushing though the chamber — the charge of a Howitzer, tearing down the hanging pine panel covered in weathered leaves that diagrammed the tunnels of the system. Orange, twisted and frayed ingers of the lit cable hung like glowing red hair.

We could all feel the pulsating heat from above the shat and though I couldn’t see it, I imagined the oblong opening to the top chamber was a glowing distant red orb, surrounded by the blackness, and maybe one could liken it to the setting of the Serengeti sun at midnight.

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POUR POINT The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.

AYN RAND

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CATHERINE KYLE

selfie we’re whitening our fangs

extra cute, extra cute

& painting our sharpened nails with colors like plumbell, starmist, frock. we’re adding our mini pink potions to purses — just don’t mix them up, now! the pepper spray & perfume look so alike, you know. pose for me in tutus & I’ll watch your drink if you watch mine. snap a pic. show all your teeth. show all your weaponry.

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LOUIE LAND

HOW TO BE A POET Ater Wendell Berry Remember that smokestacks belch black vapor ichor or exhale lavender fog — the implication of the breath is paramount.

Remember to avoid the plague of mundanity, to circumscribe or elide meaning. Avoid opacity unless opacity is the point of departure.

Marshall signiiers as settlers circled wagons, shielded by cumulous canvas bonnets, discovering the land and language of another as your own.

We are all brethren and we are together complicit in the exhalation of ghost knowledge and lavender fog, and I wonder of the privilege of poetry, and how Paradise California burns and is extinguished before a dated poem reaches publication,

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before I transcribe graphite to glowing screen in the dead of Idaho night wishing for the ghost of an anthropomorphic paper-clip to invoke itself through the absence.

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JUDITH McCONNELL STEELE

BURNING THE LIBRARY for Sarajevo At irst, it was easy gleaning books for our ires.

One for the cofee, two to make soup, heat milk for the baby.

The children helped choose.

An old tome on physics, loose in its bindings. A second-grade reader, let in the rain.

Now I go alone.

Empty shelves whisper: Remember who fed you. History, religion, philosophy, art. Dante gave us our bread and hot tea. Shakespeare’s tragedies warmed us three nights.

I take down his sonnets, hug them close to my chest.

Walk to the kitchen, don’t look at my wife. She opens the book to a page sot as cotton.

Lays lat her hand, blessing words with cool skin. Then into the stove.

The songs rise over buildings, ruined and dark, drit like a prayer into smoked air.

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Our past is our stories, now charred into memory. Our future a page curled brown in cold ash.

Tonight we burn books and the baby still cries.

irst appeared in Boise Magazine, 1999

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TRACY SUNDERLAND

721 INTERCITY Train from Taormina Giardini to Catania Centrale Coach 3: Second Class Seat 58: unknown Sicilian painter Born Cefalù, Sicily.

Too long ago to a long line of isherman.

He is (was) the only artist.

He is bent, arthritic; has diiculty buttoning his merino cardigan, wears no socks even in winter.

He can no longer hold a paint brush. He makes ceramics now, for tourists.

Wears slip on loafers, ironed dungarees (his wife).

Sparse hair on his head, plenty in his ears.

Baleful, bugging eyes like anchovies.

Tattoo on his let bicep — a school of anchovies.

His whole life. Anchovies.

Mercurial blue and anchovies.

More than 100 species of.

He bets no one else knows this. (He’s wrong.)

The painter thinks of his father, the frigid black wake of water that drowned him.

The painter, then a boy, was there in his father’s ishing boat.

Was there in the water when his father drowned, but he did not.

He was 9 and lived.

Made art out of the unspoken thing.

The unknown Sicilian painter limps the aisle, Bottles, backpacks, trash crowd the loor.

The closeness of bodies, his arthritis laring in time with his nostrils.

His ancient wife asleep on their luggage, 54

Her body melting into the vinyl, leather, plastic of Seat 51.

They barely speak anymore.

He thinks of a long-ago girl he painted, of brushstrokes, of capturing blue and failing at it.

He can’t bear the sitting, the voices, the crinkle of paper around sandwiches.

Seat 71: Saint Agatha Agatha weeps every day for hours in the closet, muslin against her mouth vomiting tears, muscles aching from the heaving she tries to catch her breath she kneels, palms up, eyes cast down a renaissance madonna by an unknown sicilian painter.

Agatha is trapped by grief and circumstance in the House of the Tragic Poet (this is what she calls the place) she weeps and sleeps, weeps and sleeps the travertine loor a cool comfort where she presses her cheek.

Agatha wishes for arrows to take her like our lady of sorrows seven times pierced to the heart she wishes for her mother’s hands she wishes she could remember when she wasn’t always weeping.

Agatha is as exhausted as she has ever been.

Agatha weeps for love, for losing it, for having lost it a broken capillary in her right eye

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a vivid blood-stain talisman she hammers her ist into her thigh feel this feel this watch pinkish bruise turn royal purple.

Salvatore Mo demands Agatha marry him he is rich, she is young a dowry, cleansing and anointing of body parts, animals slaughtered in sacriices to gods Agatha feels none of this the boy she loved, loves, will love hangs in the catacombs like pork set to drying a slim, long-limbed shepherd boy dead now and dripping innards dead now for poverty, for donkeys, goats, dirt roads dead now because of her dead now dead always Agatha weeps, muslin-gagged, so that no one will hear.

No one hears.

Seats 63 (61): Me (You) near is luggage literal igurative baggage packing unpacking watching you packing unpacking organizing re-organizing disorganizing organizing your purse change counted held out counted dropped into a repurposed breath mint tin euros hand ironed and into the wallet

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receipts folded into that particular pocket zip unzip rezip a ginger chew the wrapper properly thrown away in the proper bin I wait look out the window at orange trees moving try to count the oranges I look ahead, look far ahead imagine other people’s lives (peoples’?) how we’re close but far away our walks are close miles kilometers along the Cefalù seaside our hunger walking one mile too many it is the stone literally cold sitting quietly in the ruins of our origin story far away is B.C. A.D. Classical The Renaissance Baroque Rococco Neoclassicism the anguish of slaves who laid the tiles we walked on near is a factoid: Romans invented concrete it is the cigarette kiosk and the Greek yes which sounds like no it is the museum that is closed until 5pm on Christmas Day though you have a ticket that says “opens at 4” it is us watching Italians walk arm in arm while we don’t touch you walking away because you want to experience places alone when I want to share far away is Lycebettus hill the Persian War languages I don’t speak the distant chiming of sheep bells as they graze on herby

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Sicilian grass the braids on the stone women who have guarded the Acropolis for thousands of years the Capuchin monk and the bodies hung like cured meat to dry in the catacombs memento mori near is you twitching in the train seat next to me Jad Abumrad in my ear the tiny old couple melting into the seats across from me the old man’s baleful eyes watching me his ear hair dialing a secret tune the woman crying so no one can hear the sweat in between my breasts even though I’m cold your red woolen hat pulled down low because you hate the furrows between your eyebrows a tiny shop selling blue-glazed ceramics of anchovies bug eyed and shimmering you bought me one as a keepsake all these, this a postcard moment I might send you Taormina to Catania And Saint Agatha raped somewhere nearby her breasts cut of rather than submit to marriage gods that wound, taunt, desire, ride chariots, drive back armies an elephant saint anchovies pottery found columns heaved mosaics inlaid a church and a mosque both the holes in stone so that blood would drain away violent-colored past now whitewashed ruins and tour-guide anecdotes

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JULIE M. FOGERSON

JERRY’S MARKET Thom doesn’t have to catch her eye. She is already ofering a smile. And he doesn’t miss the nudge a woman, mother maybe, gives her in her let side. He guesses coming on eighteen same as him, checking out this girl in his checkout line.

The job became his three years ago. Lard, hamburger and the rare, forlorn vegetable two-step over the red laser eye.

Thom accounts for bags of chips, cookies that will last until Rapture and packaged meals easily frozen and forgotten.

Multiple choices march through his hands to an indiferent beep. He hears that sound marking his day and the moments in it.

“It’s 35 dollars even, Reverend. Cash or credit?”

The last bounced check before they stopped taking checks is taped to the side of the register. Randy Smith’s lack of funds in December 1996 cemented in Scotch tape impermanence.

It’s rarely busy enough to warrant two checkers, so this makes Thom the sole target for every well-meaning advice giver. Thom stares back. He understands most people just want to hear themselves talk, so he lets them. These aren’t conversations. They’re carefully made speeches based on infant regrets that have reached adulthood.

Merv Anderson should’ve gone to college.

Sue Griiths hadn’t really wanted kids.

Smart, but not a genius; work ethic, but no great ambition, Thom doesn’t love his life, but he doesn’t hate it either.

His problem feels unforgivably boring. What to do next?

Where to start? He’s on the crest of a wave about to fall into the trough, and he fears he won’t come back up. He’s afraid he’ll break the surface and ind nothing there. So, this job he returns to every summer stretches into the horizon only a 59

week ater graduation.

Thom leaves at 6:15 most days to get wasted in the woods.

The kids loating in the summer space between their two inal years of high school are his companions. Thom sits there, smokes a Marlboro Light with a six-pack of Bud nearby and drits, listening to one or another of the gathered gaggle strum an old guitar. He sometimes picks it up and plays a song he knows. At these times, the irelight relected in their eyes makes him feel like a god.

He has his dad. It’s funny to him that an inconstant man is his only constant.

Twelve when his parents divorced, Thom understood the amount of time between the split, his father’s shockwave remarriage to a congregant, his half brother’s quantiiable delivery short of nine months, and his dad’s subsequent ousting from the role of minister didn’t add. Whispers surrounded Thom like a wind that could blow him of balance. His sudden stepmom was a woman he’d known as the lady with lipstick on her teeth.

Now, Thom waits for the man who took his dad’s spot in the pulpit to leave. He puts on a mask of aloof cool, and the girl inally moves stage center.

“Hi, what’s your name...” the older woman asks. Thom looks down at his nametag without meaning to, a relex.

She interrupts herself, “Thom, oh, it’s Thom. This is Katie. What are you doing tonight Thom? Mind showing Katie around?”

Thom is looking at Katie, trying to gauge her reaction as each crumb spills from her mother’s wide, overfull mouth.

Thom rarely hears from his own mom. When she let, she didn’t even leave a hole. It was as though she’d never been there. She moved into a nervous breakdown before the divorce was inal and then in with Thom’s older sister by the time the signatures were dry. Thom hadn’t seen his

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sister since she turned 17. She had retreated east somewhere and was two kids deep before 20. The only thing he could accurately remember about her was she loved Dukes of Hazzard, naming her sons Luke and Beau.

“What do you say? Show Katie around?”

“Yes, I’d really love to, Mrs...”

“Murphy. Miss. Mizz. Whatever they say. Went back to my maiden name ater Katie’s dad let. Oh well, good riddance.”

There are no other customers, so the mother continues, but Thom is focused on Katie. He’s thinking how quickly things happen. How within seconds of this girl pushing soda toward him, he has something to look forward to.

Katie lives in a neighboring town, a similarly nothing city about iteen minutes from his own. The outskirts of both near touching in the dance of urban sprawl that now involves even the ridiculously rural. The more obvious reason they never crossed paths is her age.

She’s only fourteen. It makes even less sense that her mom not only allowed this night but visibly pushed her into it. “She’s at the tail end of 14, but she’s real grown up for her age,” these inal words so carelessly tossed over her mom’s shoulder he might have heard wrong.

Katie’s explanation for the maternal prodding was only slightly more informative. They went into the store, saw him standing there and thought he seemed nice.

More than once, as they drive from Katie’s house to the restaurant and later from the restaurant back to her house, he looks sideways in disbelief. She has nutmeg brown hair that moves apart from the dark. Her long legs bring her mouth nearer to his than any girl he knows, and those inky pools she looks at him through are illegible. Thom worries he’s been staring too much, when she tells him to pull over.

“Just for a minute,” she says. “I need to tell you something.”

Her voice a whisper. He slides of the road, stopping in a

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stretch visited only by tumbleweeds, and she’s tugging at her shirt. Before he can appreciate it, she has it of.

Katie and Thom are together a month the night they start breaking into the uninished house on Jane Anne Road. It’s easy. No one expects a need to keep anyone out. The internal walls are not yet insulated.

The house all started because they’d “done it” or tried to in all available spaces. Thom’s car was cramped. Her bedroom inaccessible, and his father’s house didn’t lend itself ater one attempt. The grocery kept Thom late enough he wasn’t able to reach his home before Katie. He walked in on his dad being his dad and Katie acting far younger than he’d ever seen. She was chewing on a piece of hair as though an even younger facsimile of her real age could serve as armor. Thom quickly made an excuse and rushed her out. He knew better than to count on boundaries his father didn’t have, and seeing Katie be 14 was disturbing. The knowing sneer on his father’s face made Thom feel like vomiting.

The cookie-cutter home that isn’t theirs welcomes them.

Windows wink. Thom grabs a blanket from the ass end of his hatchback. Katie picks up the bottle of Boone’s and the last of a pack of Dixie cups. In the uninished house, the blanket is spread over the saw-dusty loor, and their jackets bunch up to serve as pillows. It is warm enough they can lie there hours later still naked, the heat of what they have done fading slowly.

This night she asks. As if she’d just thought of it.

“When will you decide about college?”

“I’m not sure. Not sure I want to go.”

“You’re too smart to stay here.”

“I don’t have the money to do it just to do it. I don’t know.

My dad can’t help.”

“What will decide it?”

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“That’s part of the problem. But I’m happy now.”

Katie shits, her movement liquid. Her bare chest rises and falls. He isn’t aware when the peace of it all closes his eyes. That last night with Katie in the uninished house, a something enters Thom’s dreams before waking reality takes hold.

They are inally coming to it, talking about the part where Thom began to sense wrongness. A smell that shouldn’t be there, and the weight of an arm absent. A jacket sleeve pushed too close to a lit cigarette.

Sitting in the courtroom, he waits. He feels Katie behind him now but still doesn’t know what happened to her that morning. An image of her grinning appears in his mind. It was another day at that house. She took a bike he usually kept in his car of a dirt jump. Peddling fast. Unafraid. It was a tremendous crash, but she bounced up ecstatic. Mouth full of dirt. Face scratched. And though it looked like a spur of the moment decision, Thom could see how she did things. She didn’t expect the result she got, but she preferred even that to inertia.

The forward motion her fuel.Thom igures he’ll make a good soldier. One that says yes or no sir (or ma’am) in the right places. He thinks about how everyone becomes a story someone tells. He wonders what Katie will say of him.

“All rise.”

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FRICTION. DISTILLATION. Our greatest fear should not be of failure… but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.

FRANCIS CHAN

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CATHERINE KYLE

collage I gather stars like winter lights and wear them as a necklace. wrap sunsets around my hips and wear them as a skirt. in the mirror are charcoal ghosts, a thousand haystacks scattered. in the mirror are unburnt queens, eyes unyielding lames. in the liminal, the fragments decoupage together — ferocious and tender, intact and alive.

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LUKAS W. ROBERTSON

COATTAILS We grew young into our years hand-me-down shirts and the family car ’til our clothes it better and we tracked MPG’s.

Life was a match, a bonire, sparklers in the street.

To burn bright and go to sleep seemed ine, reincarnated as 8am ear-worms on the coattails of a dream.

Echoes are not undying though — and my days are never enough, to get done and undone chasing horizons, writing with light.

I have not solved the problem of energy the space between one and another thought time between captured smiles worth telling in stories My time, your time, aligned somehow.

We always give chase to those coming things.

Now and again though, we do look back turn to pillars of salt against the red and orange of our histories.

I have not solved the problem of energy.

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ANITA TANNER

FOR A POET’S SOLITARY VOICE Shated licker, long dark bill drilling the wood, pecking at cavities, striking incessantly, your involuntary solitude compelled to excavate for sound and meaning, asking to pierce the bark’s darkness with a single shat of light — gray-naped woodpecker pelting the target like a drummer wound by a spring.

You too depose words into slots in the shats of trees where they are dismembered, fallen to the earth as seed — and once or twice how unaccountably small birds, maybe Pine Siskin, alight, scavenging the ground, liting the seed in their beaks, scattering the sounds as they startle upward to lutter and ly free.

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TOMAS JOAQUÍN BAIZA

HOLE The hole in the sidewalk was not terribly deep, perhaps only eight or nine feet from the bottom. Nevertheless, when you’re falling at a forty-ive degree angle, hands and feet splayed and seeking contact with any hard surface, it might as well be bottomless for those few milliseconds.

Claudia felt her sandals come loose, the ones she bought just this morning, still jet lagged from her red-eye light to Mexico City. The shop was just a block from the apartment her dissertation advisor let her rent for the summer. The irst time she visited the city she had stayed in a hotel.

Colonia Parroquia was a safe neighborhood, according to her advisor and the travel guides she’d read. Indeed, she was relieved to ind it quiet and even quaint, in that uniquely Mexican way that made allowances for the occasional rain of volcanic ash from faraway Popocatépetl. Safe enough for her to decide to take a long walk. It would be good, she thought, to get out and absorb the city before she spent the rest of the summer barricaded in archives and libraries.

The purchase made no sense other than to encourage a sense of agency, of purpose. Plus, she knew she had nice feet and she felt a slightly guilty thrill thinking that Mexican men might notice her as she walked the city. Not that she would want to talk to any of them. No. Maybe later in the summer, when she’d settled into this of-putting metropolis of bizarrely polite and persistent suitors whose attention could be both lattering and inconvenient.

In no way would she let them interfere with her work.

Better to leave such silly things until later, when she was preparing to return home.

It surprised Claudia as she fell, her body now 70

perpendicular, how perfectly rectangular the hole was. The perimeter of its slick dirt walls exactly matched the missing slab of sidewalk above. She had just noticed that the scalloped texture of the cement ended when she heard a young voice behind her. Still moving forward, she looked over her shoulder into the face of the President of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Wrapped in her new sandals, Claudia’s handsome feet ached slightly as she walked west. She wasn’t naive. She stuck to the larger streets. When a man smiled or commented, she would let her mouth curl slightly upward at the corners, her lips tightening into the ghost of a smile. Better a modest, non-committal acknowledgement than outright rejection. She didn’t want any trouble.

To her quiet delight, she found a bookstore on Fray Servando, a broad, busy street that would eventually give way to Avenida Chapultepec. It smelled like any other bookstore, though she was caught of guard by the sheer number of little books in such a cramped space. Browsing the stacks, she realized it was because there were almost no hard-bound publications, but rather hundreds of delicate, poorly constructed paperbacks, the pages thin as rice paper. Her scalp prickled when she found La Escuela Real de las Doncellas Ynditas and La Historia de la Educación de México Precolombiano, both of which she’d seen cited but were not in her university’s holdings.

The middle-aged woman behind the counter was so pleased that Claudia spoke Spanish, ¡y con muy poco acento inglés! she gushed. Claudia thanked her, carefully placing her new books in her shoulder bag. The bookseller patted her on the arm, thanking her for her purchase, adding Señorita, make sure to wrap those tightly. They’re delicate and won’t travel well.

Claudia’s arm instinctively clamped down on her bag, the 71

square corners of her books shoving into her bare underarm.

In these busy milliseconds, her mind did not register the pain, just the mindless relief of their proximity. As her body rotated in the air, Claudia’s eyes caught the top of the president’s bald head just cresting the edge of the pavement like a moonrise against storm clouds.

Avenida Chapultepec lead southwest to Chapultepec Park.

Cha-pul-te-pec!

Claudia repeated that exquisite word over and over as she perused the storefronts. Chapultepec. Grasshopper Hill. What luminous, inspired soul irst came upon that place and gave it that name? Was that person a poet, someone from whom such beauty was expected or even demanded? Or was that purity ubiquitous amongst a people who fought to survive every day and whose connection to this world could only be understood as sincere?

Distracted by such thoughts, Claudia found herself deep in the park, sharing the wide path with couples and families.

She smiled at the sight of men and women walking, hand-inhand, giting one another with afection. There were times it would have made her sad, or even jealous, but today she just watched and walked. Some of the couples were women, arms linked as they spoke and laughed, a signal to men that they intended to enjoy one another’s company and need not be interrupted or bothered. Claudia had forgotten about this tradition and felt her blood rise. She wished she had a girlfriend to spend the day with.

It was the irst time in a while she felt that occasional loneliness that sat like a hole in her chest.

Inexplicably, she worried about what the mud would do to her books and sandals. The uneven dirt loor of the hole was pock marked with shallow puddles from the earlier rain, each pool relecting the slate gray sky above like a dead eye.

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She thought she’d seen a lavandería near the apartment, but couldn’t be sure.

Claudia had forgotten about the mid-aternoon monsoons. Every summer aternoon, storms climbed into the ring over the Mexican altiplano and wrestled for dominance.

Thunder would roll across the valley as twenty-one million people went about their daily business. When the skies inally opened up — like a god tripping over a bucket — those twenty-one million people would act as though it was the irst rain they’d seen in their lives and break into a panicked sprint for the nearest shelter.

Claudia had just given half her lunch — ten tacos for a peso! — to two children when the skies erupted. She laughed as she ran to cower behind a stone statue and laughed even harder when she realized the statue was Tlaloc, the goggle-eyed Aztec god of rain. Sheltered by Tlaloc’s hulking shoulders, she curved her body around her bag and stood on a raised curb to keep her sandals dry.

When the rain ended iteen minutes later, Claudia decided it was time to start back. She would take the Paseo de la Reforma.

She knew he wasn’t really the president.

Probably because of the storm, Reforma was almost deserted and she found herself all but alone on the normally bustling street. The city smelled new and birds that she hadn’t noticed before now called out from palms and myriad other trees she couldn’t identify. She reminded herself to stop by a library and look up trees of the city, or maybe she would make a friend, a local who would know which trees produced such sensual, languid red lowers.

The voice itself didn’t frighten her, but she knew that it shouldn’t have been there, not so unexpectedly. Granted, she was staring at the trees ahead, but a voice behind her — where

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there had been no one an instant before — surely meant that the person hadn’t wanted to be seen. Without even time to freeze, she registered a change in the pattern of the sidewalk as she turned to look.

President Salinas de Gortari was short, much shorter than she’d imagined. She’d seen him on television and knew he was Harvard educated and that he was under pressure to modernize Pemex, the national petroleum agency, but that was it.

His face seemed wrong, rubbery.

It was the eyes that game him away. Eyes within eyes — or rather, eyes within empty sockets that made her think of Xipe Totec, the hideous Flayed Lord, whose priests would don the skin of their sacriicial victims like wetsuits from hell, lifeless hands and feet dangling from the priests’ limbs and gaping holes framing the fanatics’ gore-rimmed eyes and seeping lips.

It was a mask. Before she could react, the little thief, probably a boy, placed his small hands against Claudia’s waist and shoved her into the gap in the sidewalk.

Claudia stood in the bottom of the hole, her bare feet set wide apart to keep from slipping in the mud. Above, a diminutive President Salinas de Xipe Totec looked over the edge. Against the gray clouds, Claudia saw the silhouette of a long knife. With the blade, the president pointed at Claudia’s bag which rested on its side, splattered in ilth in a corner of her dirt cell.

His voice was clear and high, like a castrato.

“Qué hueco, Señorita. La bolsa, por favor.”

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CAROL KEOGH LINDSAY

CORAL CHARM Early twilight was her favorite time of day, the hour when responsibilities were laid to rest and she could ease into her nocturnal routine, tranquil, solitary, grounding.

She stood watering the garden and watching the sky deepen into gradients of cobalt, caught the scent of night jasmine just beginning to open for the evening, already heavy with bouquet. All around her the plants soaked in needed moisture ater the drying heat that had baked the garden that day, foxglove, peonies, yarrow, goat’s beard, salvia. She breathed in the dank smell of the soil as it absorbed the water, felt the slight temperature drop the added moisture brought as it mixed with the approaching night air.

The neighbor’s porch light came on and illuminated the tallest of the hollyhocks, amplifying their trumpet shaped blooms and casting seaweed like shadows on the fence. She moved the hose to a patch of daisies, pinched of a dead leaf and quietly relected on the mosaic of lowers surrounding her. Although she took great pleasure in their full sun spectacle, she preferred the evening presence of lowers, when color faded and became the less obvious characteristic, when shape and texture, shadow and silhouette, took on a new and exaggerated dimension. She thought about how much she loved this garden, this airming nightly ritual, and how he would have loved this too, the bittersweet pang of missing him just under her surface.

The garden had always been his. Upon retirement he had worked at it unremittingly, planning, planting and transplanting, weeding, trimming, always monitoring moisture, moving hoses and timing the watering cycles for each plot. In the winter, when the garden lay fallow, he poured over catalogs, drew up changes he would implement 75

in the spring, studied organic methods to improve mulching, dreamt of the new seeds and lowers he would plant. When a neighbor’s cat ate snail poison and sickened, he had spent an entire January researching how to manage his persistent snail problem without chemicals, eventually deciding on a quick blow with a hammer, painless, efective and swit. He maintained painstaking notes of such issues in a large folder and kept pen and paper by the side of his bed in the event an inspiration or solution might visit him in his sleep.

For seven years, year-round, the garden had been his darling, the captor of his attention, eliciting an unexpected and irrational jealousy on her part, an emotion she went to considerable pains to suppress given his obvious and intense happiness. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in the eighth season of his verdant love afair while weeding between a knot of peony bushes, the favorite of all his lowers. He had inhaled his last breath of heady oxygen collapsing into the middle of the especially spectacular Coral Charm variety, his right hand seizing a cluster of the enormous salmon blooms streaked with a golden center. She found him lying peaceably, face up, spade in one hand, snapped peonies in the other, a bucket of smashed snails just out of reach.

Ater his cremation she had spread his ashes among the Coral Charm bushes, mixing his remains deep into the lush, meticulously enriched soil. She gathered up his gardening tools and returned them to their appropriate places in the shed, fastidiously outlined in marker on the peg board on the back wall. She coiled the hoses, put away the wheelbarrow, walked into her house and closed the large shutters that faced the garden.

The shutters remained closed for over a year. She sequestered herself in her home, reading incessantly when not sleeping, bathing less than was needed, leaving only to attend to necessary chores like grocery shopping and paying

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bills. The garden grew wild and choked with weeds, some plants withering and dying while others went unchecked, growing into each other, losing all distinction and looking like strange new species. She went about her subsistence with intentional disregard of its presence, moving quickly past it and forcing her gaze steadily ahead, never allowing herself to look where he lay among the chaotic tangle of leaves, weeds and lowers.

Thirteen months ater his passing she was returning home from the market when she heard a noise from her neighbor’s yard, instinctively turning her head toward the sound.

Her eye caught sight of the garden, completely unfamiliar in its pandemonium of dense growth, debris overlaying unrecognizable feral plants, dead leaves curled in piles, serpentine vines creeping, twining, choking out the pathway.

In the middle of it all, blooming lawlessly among the confusion, were three large peony lowers, deep salmon with prominent gold centers. She dropped her bag of groceries, fell to her knees on the dying lawn, then lay prone on her belly and wept as she had not since he had died.

She woke sweating under a warm sun among cans, melted butter, souring milk, a loaf of bread steaming in its bag. She rolled to her side, rested her head in the crook of her arm and gazed at the garden. A slight breeze stirred the extravagant coral lowers and blew gently toward her across the wild foliage. She lay inert, waiting, watching the current of air rule dead leaves and the dried tops of thistles until it fanned across her face, carrying with it the rich, distinctive scent of peonies. She inhaled deeply, got to her feet and took her groceries inside, then opened the shutters that overlooked the garden.

She remained in front of the window for some time, at irst seeing only the tangled labyrinth of dead vegetation and the brilliant lowers, their vivid orange blooms and waxy

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green leaves an unlikely contrast to the jumble of brown that dominated the space. The longer she stared, the more it appeared the peonies were the hub from which numerous living plants lay repressed under the bent and heavy downfall of organic debris. Bits of veiled color peered discreetly here and there, shades of greens, pinks, purples, yellows, hints of covert life hidden below the desiccation.

She went to her bedroom, changed into sweat pants and one of his old work shirts, still smelling strongly of him and vaguely of aromatic soil, remnants of dirt ground into the weave of the fabric around the sleeves. In the shed she found the tools she needed, exactly where she had let them a year prior, but for the thick layer of dust and cobwebs. She wiped them down, gathered them on the walkway, picked up the large pruning shears, and began.

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COMPRESSION RATIO Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

KURT VONNEGUT

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LAUREN YARNALL

HEY LITTLE GIRL is what the stranger says to your back while you ill up your car, tapping your falling-apart boot to the tune of you’re already late. When you look, there he is: his baseball cap, the turquoise rust of his shitty car, the sliver of big belly white curving out like a frog’s throat.

You like to pull up your boyfriend’s shirt — just a little — to run your hand over the hair on his stomach while you cry in the morning. He doesn’t ask about the nightmares, just keeps his mouth closed above your forehead like it’s an envelope — you thought love — or maybe sex — was supposed to be like oil spilling in the ocean, or those plastic soda rings choking a sea turtle’s shell into a igure eight or like the glitter let winking on the desk of a pretty girl ater she opens a Valentine, and, like a wet dog, shakes it of — or maybe the blood risen purple on the months between each one of that asshole’s knuckles — on your sucked neck — or the way he would cut into fruit like he was carving a Jack-O-Lantern — or the way he would cut into you like he was slicing up fruit — saysomethingsaysomethingsaysomethingsaysomething — everything else you ignored — before now, the best thing you could be was wanted, but only if everyone else could see it loating like a country for a hundred miles — You say, Huh? Still holding the pump. He nods to your plates.

You be safe now. You’re a long way from home.

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christy claymore

BILLION YEAR-OLD CARBON Fusion is a word that attracts me, but I know very little about its iner points.

I know about the stars, though — I know they burn brightest on the irst cold and clear October night.

As I pedal home, they don’t just twinkle-hover in the sky, they pierce the black with a luminous script.

And as I ride, my cheeks hot with red wine, bones aching with the bite of breeze, the dispatch before me singes all the ibers of my mind.

A slice of galaxy revealing itself in only in part, simply one melon split open in a patch of many at the end of the season — seeds forming Orion and Cassiopeia.

We all move through the ripeness of this gathering, but looking up from the lamplit asphalt on our long, twilight-ride home is the trick to sensing the old combustions that eventually settled in our veins, seeing the body’s ancestors dancing in the orbit of galaxies, remembering the story of an ancient charge on an ordinary autumn night, the chill of God rebreathing into nostrils and then lungs.

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GREG DUFFY

THE HAND-SHAKERS The line of hand-shakers began four steps from my father’s casket. My three brothers, two sisters, and I stood quietly. The hand-shakers took my hand with a limp grip never making eye contact. They said, “Sorry for your loss.”

Immediately they reached for the next brother’s hand to repeat the same words in monotone. The hand-shakers knew my father not me. I wondered what do I say? What does it matter?

A woman said, “Sorry for your loss. I’m Jean, Joanne’s sister.” Her face was familiar, causing me to wonder, Joanne who? Seeing my confusion Jean said. “You dated Joanne in high school.”

The name threw me. It wasn’t Joanne. Once at seventeen I dialed the phone with my high school yearbook in my lap.

A woman answered. I asked, “Is Joan there?” She called out, “Joanne, it’s for you.” I touched the yearbook, the picture, the name. It was Joan. Joan answered and I asked if I could take her out for dinner. That evening Joan told me her name was spelled J-o-a-n but her family calls her Joanne. She didn’t care how people pronounced it. We both went to the same high school. We were in band together but we never spoke because the clarinet section was a long way from me in back playing tuba. In my mind she was Joan. The name stuck and we started dating.

Joan was a year ahead of me and that spring she graduated starting our lazy summer. I saw Joan every day. When summer ended Joan went to college in Waverley. She wrote oten and I wrote back. It was my senior year. I talked dad into letting me use the car on Saturday to see Joan in Waverly. For that one day I was in heaven.

I met Joan on campus. We walked around, had lunch.

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We spent the aternoon making out in her dorm room. That spring I graduated starting our second lazy summer and in the fall I started at the University of Iowa.

Freshman year was hard but every other Friday I took my backpack to class. Ater class I hitchhiked north and in four to ive hours I was at Joan’s apartment.

We had no money. We didn’t go out but we were together Friday evening and all day Saturday. We ate scrambled eggs and spaghetti. On Sunday morning Joan was sad. I was leaving. Sunday traic was light, adding two or three hours as I hitchhiked back. If I didn’t leave ater breakfast I worried I might be stuck on the roadside come nightfall.

I hitchhiked to see Joan every other weekend and got a letter from her in between. During my visits Joan asked me to call her Jo. The name, Jo, it her so well. Then winter turned cold and wet and I couldn’t hitchhike anymore. Jo had a car but between studying for tests and money for gas I only saw Jo once a month, if that.

My friend Dave and I shared an apartment together. On my weekends alone Dave and I might see a movie. We bought cheap beer at the grocery and made our own chicken noodle soup in a crockpot Dave brought from home. If Jo came to see me, Dave would make arrangements to be gone overnight to give Jo and me time together.

On a Thursday evening Dave came back to our apartment to introduce me to Dianne and Susie, two women he met earlier that day. Susie was interesting because she was Jewish.

It was a religion and a culture I knew nothing about.

A snow storm was coming that evening. When the snow started falling the four of us went walking around campus.

Later we walked down the middle of the streets because traic had nearly stopped. The evening ended when Dave and I escorted the women back to their dormitory and said goodnight.

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On Friday Dave caught a bus home to Illinois. I settled into my couch with a textbook. Mid-aternoon Susie stopped by to say hello. Susie and I talked. I soon realized I hadn’t talked to a woman for a long time. Jo had been gone for six weeks. Hours passed and I was hungry. I asked Susie to join me for a dinner of warmed up chicken noodle soup. Ater dinner we shared some beers. The winter sun set early. I told Susie I should take her back to her dormitory because it would only get colder. Susie laughed saying she had planned to spend the night with me. I was surprised and awkwardly said something about birth control. Susie lited her purse and took my hand leading me to the bedroom. Susie and I spent the night on my twin bed.

Susie wasn’t looking for love and commitment. She was just happy to be with me, so Saturday became Sunday. Susie asked if I was dating anyone at home. I said, “Yes.” But didn’t mention Jo. Susie said, “Just wondering.” That’s when my playful weekend ended with a thud. All I could think about was dating Jo in high school. How during our lazy summer we fumbled our way into losing our virginity to each other.

Joan went to college and I waited for her. I went to college and I spent hours hitchhiking hundreds of miles to spend my weekends with her. I didn’t want to cheat on Jo but there I was.

Susie interrupted my silence asking if I was okay. I brushed it of but Susie knew I had changed. I felt numb. I took her back to her dormitory that evening and kissed her good night. Susie and I never saw each other again.

On Friday Jo came to see me. I opened the door of my apartment, put my arms around her, and held on tight.

Feeling the tension Jo asked, “What’s wrong.”

I said, “Last weekend I had an afair, but it’s over.” Having an afair seemed a kinder way of phrasing what I had done.

I thought Jo would be angry. Instead her smile faded away. I wanted to say something but there were no words that would

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heal a wound that deep.

Inside I knew Jo would forgive me if I asked. I couldn’t ask because Jo deserved a better man than me. We sat on the couch. I reached for her hand. A hand that was cold and limp.

It only took a moment and Jo silently pulled her hand away from mine. She walked out the door. From the window I saw her cross the street and get into her car. She sat motionless behind the wheel. I wanted to run down to stop her but I was scared and I was so very wrong. Finally she drove away. I stared at her empty parking space for an hour, then two.

With no energy let I looked at my watch saying, “She’s in Waverley.” I started crying long and hard. In the morning I had to force myself to get out of bed. I told myself I was ine and made cofee. I looked at a textbook then heard a car engine come to life. Out the window a car pulled away from Jo’s parking space. The tears started again. Dave would be coming back soon. I took another glance at her empty parking space and let.

Three months later I was home talking to a friend. I asked her if she had spoken to Joan. She said, “Joan was done with college. Joan was moving to Colorado with a guy named Preston.” I knew I had no address. No phone number. I couldn’t ask her parents ater what I had done. I never forgave myself for hurting Jo. I never said, “I’m sorry.” Never said, “Good-bye.”

I thought I’d never see or hear about Jo again. Since then I felt sad, empty, and hollow inside. It’s a feeling I’ve grown used to.

That was forty-one years ago this April but who’s counting?

Tonight I’m at my dad’s wake. I’m looking at Jo’s sister, Jean. Jean waits for me to speak.

I asked, “Where is Jo…? Joan...? I mean where is Joanne nowadays?”

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Jean said, “Joanne moved to Fort Collins years ago. She worked for the city. A couple months ago she got the boss from hell. He ired her. She lost her savings, retirement, and everything.”

“That’s terrible,” I said, “What’s she going to do now?”

Jean said, “We haven’t talked since it all happened.”

Suddenly I realized: Jean has Jo’s phone number. I needed to call Jo to say I’m sorry. To say a proper goodbye.

By then Jean had turned and walked away. I lowered my arm ready to follow Jean. Suddenly a hand touched mine and a sot voice said, “Sorry for your loss.”

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SHEILA D. C. ROBERTSON

COLLATERAL DAMAGE “In Paris on vacation?” asked the cab driver as he heted our suitcases. “You sound like Americans. Where are you from?”

“We’ve been up in Normandy and we’re from Ohio.”

“Oh! I was born in Normandy. Let during the war and grew up in Michigan.” The cab driver closed the trunk. “What did you think of Normandy?”

I saw my father’s face slacken so I answered, “Kind of sobering. We were there to visit the D-Day beaches.”

Normandy. In the past year, it became a wish of my father’s to visit Normandy. He had been in the D-Day invasion and would never talk about it. But today we were driving in the autumn light through apple orchards, rolling pastures and along the limestone coastline of northern France.

Dad planned the route and I did the rest. Though we were enjoying each other, he became quieter and quieter as we toured the D-Day landing sites. At night in the village hotel, dad pored over a set of invasion maps and the guidebooks he brought along. He was distracted by his memories so I usually excused myself to the bar for a couple beers and amused the locals with my high school French.

We visited the beaches one by one…Sword, Juno, Gold and Omaha. The morning we walked the long sandy stretch of Omaha, it came to me that in 1944, the peaceful wooded blufs above bristled with weapons aimed at my father. We climbed the hill behind the beach to look at the German emplacements. My photos show Dad bent against the wind, a lonely igure in his black raincoat silhouetted against crumbling gray pillboxes.

We inally made our way to the American cemetery. As we 90

approached, the numbers of the dead rose from the ground in acres of white crosses and stars of David. I stopped in shock as thousands of grave markers marched over the green lawn and into the distance. “Oh my God,” I gasped. Dad pointed at his guidebook. It said there were 172 acres of graves. Ater a long silence, Dad saluted and with moistening eyes, he motioned me to sit on a bench.

“Look,” he motioned. “Just boys. The night before they died, they were laughing, joking, playing cards, thinking about their girls, talking big about killing Jerries. They were full of life, mostly of the farm or fresh out of the CCC camps.

My buddy, Billy, and I joined the Army right ater CCCs in northern Idaho. We had grown up together on farms in Dennison, played high school football, hunted chuckar, joined up together and made a pact to stick together over here.”

I nodded and he went on.

“On June sixth, we crossed from Portland, England. The swells were heavy and the weather was squally. About ten miles from France we transferred to an LCA. The skipper had a hell of a time heading that tub into the waves. Frigid water pounded over the sides. It rolled over us until we were soaked.

Half the guys were puking their guts out. Billy was so damned sick and scared. We all were. We just bailed like mad with our helmets to keep her aloat. As we approached the coast, noise from rockets and shells was hellish. We could see our boats in the pitch though. They were everywhere. Hundreds and hundreds of them.”

Dad paused and stared across the sand to the whitecaps on the gray sea. “I saw a shell hit an LCA and blow the front ramp of. It wallowed, scooped up water and went down like lead.

There was no saving those boys. It was the irst time I knew I might die,” Dad’s voice caught. Then he continued.

“When it was time to land, we couldn’t pull onto the beach

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because of all the wreckage. The shells tore around us while the Skipper tried to drive in around it, but it was impossible.

We were running low on fuel...had no choice but to oload in the breakers. When the front end lowered, I grabbed Billy and we jumped together. We went under and damned near drowned. A lot did. Our packs weighed nearly 100 pounds and Billy couldn’t swim.”

Dad looked out at the sand and blinked back tears. “The bodies, God, the bodies…we had to push through them to get to the beach. And the beach was piled with more. I was pulling Billy up on the sand and an LCA washed up on a mine. Parts blew everywhere. Men screaming in pain, praying. And the Germans were shredding us. We hunkered behind bodies and German hedgehogs. Somehow, we had to miss the landmines getting up that sucker,” Dad said motioning toward the beach.

I shuddered and realized it must have been terrifying.

Dad went on. “Men ripped apart. Death was everywhere.

I knew I had to keep moving, but Billy kept stopping. He was shaking bad and nothing he said made much sense. He kept wanting to go home. Talked about Sunday dinners and football. We were both so scared. The concussion from the rockets and guns was so bad the ground shook and my ears bled. But I kept track of Billy, trying to make it to a low clif.

There were no oicers in sight, so we just kept moving toward some guys who waved us to an overhang where Jerry’s shore guns couldn’t reach.”

Dad paused and stared of again. “It was hell, but there’s more than one kind of hell. Bad as it was, it got worse. We were pinned down all that day and couldn’t move until night.

We joined up with some other guys and kept inching forward for another day. Billy was getting worse, but we were all crazyexhausted from no sleep and nothing to eat. We engaged Germans as we fought across ields and cleaned out burnedout farmhouses. Everything was burned...the orchards, the

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ields, even the livestock. We inally dug in near an old barn for the night to try to get some sleep.

As it was getting dark, I spotted Billy running towards some trees. I grabbed my carbine and took out ater him. He’d been saying more crazy stuf how he was gonna go home. I chased him for about ive minutes and lost him. Then I heard machine gun ire. There were screams and a lot of yelling.

I was sure the Jerries got him. I saw shadows coming at me through the trees and ired. A woman started screaming and children were crying. I kept looking for Billy. There was more ire and I rolled into a ditch. God, there were bodies…a woman and I landed on a little girl, barely breathing, in that ditch. Such a little girl, blond hair, like my sister. Your Aunt Susie. All torn up, but her face. She went limp and peaceful.

Then I saw Billy coming along a hedgerow. I think he shot up this French family, but God...maybe I did too.

Someone ired of a shotgun. There was more machine gun ire and men yelling. I shouted for Billy. I grabbed him and we took of. We found our guys about midnight, but neither of us said anything about that family; I don’t even think Billy remembered. For me, the thought I might have killed that little girl….”

I put my arm around Dad and hugged him to me. He shook as he silently wept. “It’s over, Dad. It’s all over now.

Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t, but it’s time to let it rest. Time to go home.”

I climbed in and closed the cab door. We pulled away from the curb and swung past the Eifel tower. A itting farewell to Paris.

“What took you from Normandy to Michigan?” I asked the cabby.

“I was sent to live with an aunt in the states when my parents were killed. I’m an American citizen, but I came back

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here ater high school and married a girl I might have grown up with.”

“Sorry about your parents,” I said. “Those were bad times.

The Germans cost a lot of lives.”

The cabby glanced back at us. “Oddly, they were killed

by Americans. Got caught in a skirmish. Trying to get away from the battle, I was told. I suppose it was what the military now calls collateral damage. Happened outside Coleville, near Omaha Beach. Did you visit that beach?”

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KEENE SHORT

AFTER ZION We were covered in dust and sweat, patches of bodily mud, when we inally found a campsite. We set up the tent in the heat, then drove the broken dried riverbed called a road back to the highway and into Kanab, to the grocery store. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom and you selected beer, and I found the tortillas and cheese and apples while you washed yourself in the sink. Fundamentalist Mormon women, their dress collars rising to their chins and their hair in tight complicated braids like metaphors, walked by us, in our scant, sweat-stained T-shirts and shorts, burned and aching. The sun was starting to set when we made it back to the campsite, where we started a ire fueled by ponderosa pinecones and pinyon branches while we swatted the dust of Zion of our clothes and tended to our sore limbs. Nine miles up, nine miles down.

You read me the irst chapter of Desert Solitaire and I read you an essay about the history of tumbleweeds in the west, weeds brought accidentally by eastern European farmers that took root and spread quickly and viciously across the frontier like ratiication. That was when we had our irst round of beer.

I cooked quesadillas on the ire as the sky rusted, dissolving into salty shades of sandstone and granite.

The ire dimmed, but we were still hungry. You found an English dictionary from a used bookstore in my car, large and outdated, missing all the pulpy new vocabulary that had sprouted since its 1987 publication. One by one, we tore out all the pages containing our favorite words: bone, desert, fuck, holy, keen, solidarity, solitaire, wind, Zion. Thin pages, the kind used in Bibles and encyclopedias, wadded into nests and chucked into the shrinking ire, turning the smoke greyer. The next batch of quesadillas had rough grey-black streaks where 95

the chemicals reached upward, and we dined on these inkburned quesadillas happily, eating the ash of our words. That was the second round of beer.

Just that morning, we stood on a clifside gazing out at Zion. The City of David, the fortress on a hill, centuries of law and blood. In Brigham Young’s America, Zion was the promised land, the frontier we scaled in a day passing hikers who also scaled God’s country in a day, for the well-advertised scenic views at the top. It was a surprisingly small fee to get into Zion for a day with six thousand raptured souls in hiking gear passing each other at the visitor center. Most Biblical cities get to be destroyed one way or another. We read about the destruction that tumbleweeds brought to the west, turning plains to deserts, doing to the country what the Plague did to Europe, what ten plagues did to Egypt, if the rumors are true.

For a moment, with you, Zion felt real and safe.

Then the third round of beer, when we started tearing out whole sections of the dictionary. The A section had to go, then the F section. B and S followed, and then Z went into the ire.

The remains of the English language not thrown to the ire for our inal batch of quesadillas lost their support between the book’s hard covers. By then, we were full and relaxed enough to stare at the stars in silence, directing our stif muscles to the heavens, clear and quiet dangling breaths over the forested desert. We only found the same old constellations we always ind up there.

We relied on the same ictions we were comfortable with.

The same shapes emerged above us. We, as camping college students in the desert, burning ourselves under the sun in the parking lot of the promised land, had nothing new to ofer to that depleted place, not even in our stories. There wasn’t enough language between us by then to say anything that would have saved the ground we shared, and inally we were too tired to analyze the space between us.

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irst appeared in Blue Earth Review, 2019

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SMOKE POINT All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

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BEN AVI SHANE

I BLED ON HER CYLINDER HEAD I replaced the head gasket on Miriam’s car this winter. It must have been the edge of the fresh-milled surface that sliced my thumb-tip, but with numb hands I did not feel it. I ran down the lightly oiled head bolts into their clean blind holes until the bit slipped between my thumb and inger. I bled red on her cylinder head, let the beads of blood where they had fallen bright and irm and round on gray aluminum, on polished cam lobes.

I do not mean to say I sacriiced myself for her or put some igurative blood and sweat into her car. I mean to say that I bled on her cylinder head, saw shimmering red drip on bare metal, and my thumb quivered.

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KATRINA MAIRI WRIGHT

HOME She was a citizen of the world.

He was a citizen of nowhere.

Both were running.

I am from.

Where am I from?

How do you say you are from dark days, Restless nights, Not wanting to wake up, Saying hello is too sad because you had to say goodbye, Both of you.

All of you.

I am from wet — Damp, Cried out eyes.

I am from “Life goes on,” But they stop us at the border.

I am from brown, Brown eyes, Disappeared, Brown land, Dry, Too far to reach.

Brown water, murky — And unattainable.

We are from Rough waters, Waves that keep coming, Water that keeps drowning.

We are from, Cold hands, And warm bullets.

We are the “Keep goings.”

And the “You can’t come heres.”

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We are the “Go get helps,” The “No one’s coming.”

We are our grandmothers’ names, But they keep changing.

We are the “Sorrys” And the “I can’t imagine.”

It still happened.

We still let.

Packed up our whole world, Into a bag with a hole.

And the longer we ran, The less we had.

When we arrived with nothing You still manage to strip us of ourselves.

We are the ones who are tongue tied.

On dry land But still drowning in lost words.

We stumble And fall Through conversations.

She was a citizen of the world, He was a citizen of nowhere, Both were running, Running.

From the word that traps them.

Enwraps them, Holding tightly, Only to loosen when your tongue becomes Untied.

She was a citizen of the world, But only one word classiies her, “Immigrant.”

On the tips of united, Untied, tongues It became a Prison.

We clutch to asylum.

But you stand on our ingers.

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MARY L. SARAS

HAZARDS “Go get the rake, Phil,” I heard my dad yell in the backyard. “And hurry it up!”

His plea penetrated the walls of our old farmhouse, so I ran straight to my Grandma’s bedroom window for a closer look out back. Since my grandfather had died, Grandma lived with our family, although she kept to her room a lot.

Grandma Ola pushed against the arms of her wooden rocker, her frail elbows bending to painful angles, and rose to join me from the corner. The chair creaked, and the skirt of her olive jersey dress moved sotly around her legs. She wore hose and sturdy black shoes in the house. Liting at the knees, she gingerly picked up one leg at a time and inched across the carpet. Her blue-gray hair, teased and sprayed into perfect arcs each week at my aunt’s beauty shop, did not move with her body.

“Come on, Phil. Hustle up!” Dad shouted again.

I pressed my nose against the screen of the peeling window frame and hunted for Dad in the yard. Still and stif as if a rod were rammed up her spine, Grandma stood to my right, peering out the top pane. Just yards away, with hoe and spade in hand, my father ran toward the large propane tank which held our cooking gas. My iteen-year-old brother, Phil, scurried from a nearby shed and ran toward Dad. I couldn’t fathom why they’d stopped feeding the Black Angus cows to tend to this tank with garden tools. Phil, dressed in patched brown coveralls, and Dad, in soiled denim overalls, ixed their eyes to the top of the tank and manned their tools.

My forehead pushed the screen to its limit. My body wriggled. “What’s going on?” I turned to ask Grandma. I was only ive. Though I reached for her hand and my eyes searched her face, Grandma Ola did not budge. Her age104

speckled hands hung limp at her sides; her eyes peered straight outside, well above my sightline.

Thinking Grandma hadn’t heard, I tugged on her dress and asked even louder, “Grandma, what’s going on?” In the distance, six-month-old weaning calves, penned in the barn, clamored for their mothers. Over and over, they bellowed and bawled. Inside: stone-cold silence.

“Lit the top of the gauge-cover with the end of your rake,” Dad told my brother. Though the propane tank was of-limits to me as a kid, I had watched the serviceman come to ill it. I knew that on top of the tank, a series of controls and meters lay hidden under a long, dome-shaped cover. Dad warned that I was not to touch them.

Phil hastened to obey. Holding the rake by the business end, he inserted the tip of its rough, oak handle into a u-shaped slot in the end of the dome. Then he reared back and pried. When the gauge-cover sprung, its hinges held till it boinged to a stop on the tank below.

I searched for the meters and feared the worst: the tank must be leaking. My ears scanned the air for a telltale hiss while my nose snifed for propane, though I discovered neither. As my toes curled deep into the nubs of Grandma’s carpet, my eyes widened. For what I spied instead — teetering atop the base of the tank and twisting precariously around the gauges — was a bird’s nest cobbled from dry grass, twigs, and mud.

Dad edged toward the tank, and I studied harder. A robin’s nest? Because it was early spring, I guessed that a momma robin had somehow found her way under the oblong dome, built a hasty nest there, and hatched a lock of young.

Then something jutted from the nest. I blinked and squinted. Surely my eyes must be playing tricks or not adjusting to the sun. Once the black blur rose again, I knew it was for real. Jarred by the springing cover, a fat black snake

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swiveled his head from side to side to seek out the intruders.

Coiled in the belly of the nest, his body lay at the ready, what seemed like four or ive feet of him. He soon cocked his head at an eerie angle, ixed a stare on Dad, and licked his tongue in a recurring taunt.

Dad hooked the nest with the blade of his hoe and lung with all his might. Phil jumped back, wincing. As the nest tumbled four feet to a hard patch of lawn, it broke on impact.

Clumps of mud-bound leaves and twigs arced through the spring air and sunk into tuts of crabgrass.

Grounded, the reptile barely moved. Through the bedroom window, I could see that the pattern of its scales seemed mottled and stretched to twice the normal limits.

Strange lumps ran up and down its length. I couldn’t imagine why the snake appeared thin in some segments yet golf ballsized in others. A climbing snake, and one so bloated and sluggish — I’d never seen the like.

“Pin his head down, Phil,” Dad demanded. Recovering, Phil lurched forward to trap the snake’s head under the prongs of his rake at the same moment that Dad swapped his hoe for a spade. Then using both hands to hoist the handle above his lanky span, Dad locked his shoulders and bore down. The sharp metal blade of the spade sliced the creature’s head clean from its body. Both sections of snake slumped to the lawn.

A slight breeze stirred the buds of the elm tree which overshadowed the gas tank. Dangling from a lower branch on the opposite side of the tree, my rope swing toggled to and fro. “Now stretch him out, Son,” Dad ordered rapid ire. I saw a slight linch cross Phil’s forehead. But, in compliance, my older brother raked the reptile’s body to its full and lumpy length. And there it lay — beneath a sign on the tank marked HAZARD — at the feet of my brother’s gum boots.

Echoes of bellowing calves continued to trouble the air.

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“Now open him up,” Dad said next. Phil swallowed hard but managed to ish a jackknife from his lower coveralls’ pocket and open the blades. I longed to turn from the window, but now I couldn’t budge. So, aghast, I watched my brother slit the snake from tip to tail. A passel of lifeless baby robins lay inside; on my ingers I counted to ive.

I watched on as Dad and Phil raked up the mess. Forehead pressed against the screen and barefooted, I stood ixated.

The bangs of my pixie haircut poked through the holes in the mesh. A ly pestered my nose till I batted it away. Yet mute, like Grandma, I stood, breathing in shallow spurts. I’d never seen such a vile creature. I’d never seen such cold-blooded killing, though in my heart I believed that snake deserved it. I admired my Dad’s strength while I envied my brother Phil for getting to help with the chores. I felt sick for the baby birds. I felt sick for Momma Robin. I felt sick to my stomach.

I was only ive. In secret I wished that my mother would hurry back from the grocery store in our half-ton Chevy pick-up. That she’d never leave me alone with Grandma again. That I could somehow forget the cutthroat world I’d just witnessed outside and go back to drawing cats on the chalkboard hung low for me on a wall in the kitchen.

As Dad and Phil retreated to the garbage barrel, Grandma turned from the window and ambled toward her chair as though this incident had happened in a distant land. Lowering herself into the rocker, she took a white hanky from a side pocket and dabbed at her mouth. The ingers of her let hand smoothed every wrinkle from the skirt of her dress. Then reclining her coifed hair against the headrest of the oaken chair, she lowered her lids. I grasped her silent signal and tiptoed shoeless from the room.

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LIZA LONG

JESUS, TAKE THE WHEEL It wasn’t like Laura to leave in such a hurry. Her modus operandi in travel, as in most other things, was almost military in its precision: detailed itineraries printed in triplicate, low-sugar granola bars and water bottles placed in the kids’ cup-holders, a spare key tucked in a magnetic box behind the passenger side rear wheel, a day bag stufed with extra socks and underwear, “just in case” someone had an accident.

But this trip was an impulsive decision precipitated by a text from her college roommate. Jennie had gone to the emergency room hemorrhaging just two days ago — what she thought was just a particularly bad menstrual cycle turned out to be Stage IV cervical cancer. The doctors stabilized her and sent her home on hospice. Jennie was just 36 years old, and now she had weeks, maybe days let: “Please come,” Jennie texted. “I need you.”

Laura was still in shock. “I’ll be there tonight,” she replied, then added three heart emojis for good measure. What was the right emoji to send your best friend who was dying from cancer? The social media inluencers had not reached consensus on that one, and all the Instagram memes about living your best life and believing in the power of your dreams, the ones Jennie and Laura had shared and liked with the grim enthusiasm of the moms-who-wine set, now felt like false gods.

Laura called her husband, Mike, who of course, didn’t pick up. “In a mtg w client,” he texted her. “Talk later.”

“I’m going to Salt Lake City tonight to see Jennie,” she texted back.

“WTF??? Kids???” he replied.

“I’ll pick them up from daycare and take them with me,” she said. “We’ll be home by dinner tomorrow.”

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Laura sent a quick email to her boss requesting a personal day, then swung her Kate Spade bag over her shoulder and headed for her newish car, one of those late model Korean SUVs that was supposed to be better for the environment because it was built on a car frame instead of a truck frame.

God knows Idaho had more than enough trucks.

Normally, Laura would have booked a trip check with her mechanic before hitting the road. Normally, she would have scanned her iPhone’s weather app for storms at the state line.

Normally, she would have illed the car with gas, wiped the windows clean and checked the luid levels, and made sure the tires were at exactly 35 PSI. Laura signed Max and Emmie out of daycare. Max was a very wise four years old, with blonde unruly hair and longlashed brown eyes, just like his mom’s; Emmie, a wide-eyed two year old who looked more like her father, with red hair and a smattering of freckles. Mike kept talking about wanting another one, but Laura pushed back. “We’ve reached biological perfection, babe,” she told him the last time he tried to get frisky. “Why tempt fate?” Besides, at 36, she would be considered a high-risk pregnancy.

“We’re going on a road trip,” Laura announced as she buckled her children in their car seats and handed them their snacks.

“Where, Mommy?” Max asked, and Emmie joined in, “Where, Mommy, where?”

“To see Aunt Jennie and her kiddos,” Laura replied.

“Jennie has been sick and she needs our help. And anyway, we haven’t taken this car for a road trip yet, so it’s time to break her in. No time like today.”

Laura swung the SUV onto the Interstate 84 entrance ramp, hitting the accelerator to cut in front of a semi as Max and Emmie giggled. “YOLO!” Laura sang, and the children laughed harder.

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When the dry sagebrush landscape outside of Boise gave way to the rolling ields near Jerome, Laura inally checked her gas gauge. The tank was still half full, and the kids were napping. She decided to press on toward Burley rather than risk waking them.

The sun moved toward the horizon in her rear view mirror, and the glorious Idaho sky turned shades of pink and gold.

“Mom,” she heard Max ask sleepily, “Is this heaven?”

“No, Max,” she sighed. “We’re still in Idaho.”

“It looks like heaven,” Max said. He was silent for a moment, then added, “I think I know what happens when you die.”

“You do?” Laura asked, expecting the standard Sunday School fare: Jesus and the angels and mansions in heaven.

“I do,” Max replied. “You go back to zero.”

“What do you mean?” Laura asked, startled.

“Well, you are born, and you live, and you get old, and then you die, and then you go back to zero and you are born, and you live, and you get old and die, and then you go back to zero again.”

Laura looked at her son in the rear view mirror. Could a four-year old understand reincarnation?

“That sounds interesting,” she inally said, a strange equanimity settling over her. It was not her job to correct errors in his preschool understanding of aterlife doctrine — she could leave that to his father and the priest.

Laura looked down at her gas gauge again, and her heart suddenly stood still. The warning light was on. The tank was almost empty, and she was in the middle of Bumfuck, Idaho.

How long since they let Jerome? How far to Burley?

She turned to her phone: no service. In the fastapproaching dusk, she was disoriented, unsure. The car hurtled on into the darkness.

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“Mom, are you okay?” Max asked.

“No, Max,” she replied, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “Mommy made a mistake.”

“A big mistake?”

“Maybe. I forgot to ill up the car with gas before we let for our trip. And now we are almost out.”

“We can just stop at the next gas station!” Max exclaimed.

“Where, Max?” she said, pointing to the dark empty hills.

“We can ask your phone.”

“There’s no service.”

“Oh.” Max was thinking. “I know! We could say a prayer to Jesus! He will help us!”

Laura laughed, a harsh sound. “I don’t think Jesus works that way, Max,” she said.

“What do you mean, Mommy?”

“Well, I think Jesus expects us to be prepared and ill our own gas tanks.”

“But Jesus can work miracles. Don’t you believe that?”

For the irst time in her life, Laura, always a Sunday church goer, seriously considered the question. She thought of Jennie. Did she believe that a 2000 year old prophet who claimed to be the son of God could work miracles? She did not. But Max didn’t need to know that — he had plenty of time to come to his own conclusions about theodicy.

“Mommy?” Max asked, “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know, Max,” Laura replied. “I don’t know.” She suddenly felt very tired and alone. She shut of all the internal lights, the radio, the air conditioning, to conserve fuel as long as possible. Looking up from the car’s darkened dash, Laura saw what she thought at irst were the lights of an oncoming car. The lights grew brighter until the valley was illuminated in white hot light.

“Oh,” Laura said, and suddenly, she was not alone. She was burning up with love, for Jennie, for Mike, for Max, for

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Emmie, for the Idaho skies, for the memories of childhood that surrounded her like the sotest snowlakes. // “I think she is gone,” the nurse said, touching Mike’s hand.

Those dreadful last agonal gasps that had shaken his wife’s whole body were silent now, and she lay limp and still.

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “She was so young.”

Mike looked at Laura’s face, still lovely in death, and tried to memorize her features, though already, he knew he would forget too soon, that her face would melt like wax in his memories.

“Do you think she knew, in the end?” he asked the nurse.

He had found Laura unconscious on the loor of their bedroom when he got home from work the day before and called immediately for an ambulance. She had never regained consciousness.

“I think so,” the nurse said. “I think she is at peace. She is resting in the arms of Jesus.”

Later that night, Mike tried to explain why Mommy had fallen asleep and would never wake up.

“You have to kiss her, Dad” Max told him, crying. “If you kiss her, she will wake from her sleep.”

“It’s not like that in real life, Max,” Mike said. “This is real life.”

“Then you have to pray to Jesus to save her. I know he will! I know he will!”

Mike folded his little son into his arms as the tears ran down both of their cheeks.

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DENÉ BREAKFIELD

MECHANISMS OF INJURY We ran lights and sirens to a truck-versus-car MVA on old Route 33. I’d just started my paramedic ield training, a tagalong with zero experience, stuck riding in the back of the rig with my brain on fast forward, picturing the scene. I knew enough about the mechanisms of injury — vehicle size diferential, 50 mph speed limit — to know we were rolling up to a bad one.

Erik, my ield-training oicer, slung the trauma bag over his shoulder. “Pete, you stay put for now,” he said. I paced back and forth, watching him disappear into the scene while the air horns of approaching ire trucks about blew the leaves of the trees.

I was kicking up chunks of turf with my boot heels, desperate to channel my adrenaline dump, when Erik came back. “There’s nothing to be done,” he said, shoving the bag back into the rig. “Go view the scene but don’t get in the way.”

The area surrounding the wreck was soaked with spilled gasoline, the fumes stinging my nose and making my stomach turn over on itself. It looked like a giant pair of hands had balled the car up and hurled it into a tree. Bloody chunks of meat and metal were scattered along the periphery. I tried to detach, to intellectualize what I was seeing as the ill-fated result of force times velocity. Just then, a nasty wave of vertigo yanked the ground out from under my feet, and I ended up on my hands and knees behind a shrub, trying to regain my balance and shake of the loaters swarming in my eyes.

That’s when I saw a wallet. Inside was a driver’s license that belonged to Darci Butler, 26 — two years younger than me. The only other things were a couple one-dollar bills, an EBT card, and a shopping list, written in loopy cursive: chicken, bread, lettuce, cigs. I turned the wallet over in my 113

hands, hoping she hadn’t seen the truck coming, hoping it had happened too fast for her to feel anything.

Ater my shit, I drove down a claustrophobic street lanked on both sides by a dozen crumbling duplexes, their patchy brown yards cluttered with ratty lawn furniture, blue plastic wading pools, and kids’ bikes. I parked across the street a couple houses down from the address on the license.

Ater about half an hour, a car rattled up to the front of the duplex, and out came this lanky guy about my age and a gray-haired woman: Darci’s husband and mom, I igured.

Mom pulled a sleeping baby from the back seat and handed it over to Husband while she went and iddled with the front door lock. The baby couldn’t have been more than four months old, the same age mine — Beth’s and mine — would’ve been, if things had turned out diferently. He carried the baby in the crook of his arm, stroking its head.

“Goddamnit!” Mom had lung the house keys on the stoop and was trying her best to yank the doorknob of.

The baby startled awake and started screaming. Husband snatched up the keys and unlocked the deadbolt with his free hand. Mom slammed the door behind them.

I bought everything on that shopping list, plus a couple candles and a 5-liter box of wine. I dumped the stuf onto my kitchen counter, opened the box, and started pouring. Two glasses in, I dialed Beth’s number, knowing she’d check the caller ID and let her voicemail deal with me. I rehearsed in my head what I’d say, and took a long swig while I waited for the beep.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s me. I know I promised to give you space, but I had a really bad call today and could use some company.

I got stuf to make us dinner. I’ll do all the work while you drink the inest boxed wine $10 can buy. So, can we hang out

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tonight? No expectations, I just don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be alone right now.”

I called a bunch more times, each message more desperate and slurred than the last. Ater a while, I opened the cigarettes. It’d been about ive months since my last smoke, and the irst few drags made me nauseous. But it gave me something to do with my hands besides hit speed dial.

At some point, Beth must have turned her phone of.

Every time I called, it went straight to voicemail.

Around midnight, I popped an Ambien. While I waited for it to kick in, I lit the candles: one for Darci Butler, one for me and any hope I might have had of developing healthy coping strategies.

“You always hear, ‘Go to the light.’ So I do, and where do I end up? Here in this shithole with drunk-on-your-ass you,” said Darci. “Welcome to hell.”

“You smell like gasoline,” I said, sticking my nose inside the neckband of my tee shirt.

“I’d say that’s the least of my problems.” She sat, nonchalantly holding one hand, then the other, over the candle lame. “Look at that,” she said, holding her palms up.

“Nothing.”

“You’re going to catch the whole place on ire, you keep that up.”

“I’ll pass on taking instructions from someone who’s mixing alcohol and sleeping pills — the latest in your evergrowing pile of bad decisions, I might add.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, like screwing another girl and spilling your guts to Beth — what were you thinking?”

“I was drunk.”

“And right before she was going to tell you she was knocked up — impeccable timing, champ.”

“I’m ixing it.”

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“I can see that. Bum a smoke?”

She lit her cigarette with the candle lame and took a deep drag. “Ugh. I hate menthols — these’ll tear your lungs up. But then you’re hell-bent on wrecking yourself, aren’t you, sport?”

“I need you to stop talking.”

I pinched out the candle lames and sat in the dark.

The morning sun set ire to the sledgehammer pounding inside my skull, and I had to use both hands to lit my head up of the kitchen table. I was afraid when I opened my eyes I’d see Darci, still sitting across from me, blowing smoke rings and going on about what a colossal fuckup I was, but there was no sign of her.

I surveyed the scene: Candle wax had dripped onto the carpet, the chicken was going bad on the counter, and my phone lay dead on my lap. I made my way across the kitchen, downed a double dose of Anacin with tepid day-old cofee and headed out to my shit, praying for a rescue.

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THE CABIN

is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners.

WRITERS IN THE ATTIC

The program (WITA), is an annual publication contest for Idaho writers, both emerging and established, to publish work related to a one-word theme chosen

by The Cabin. This publication is meant to be platform for building an inclusive community and provoking creativity and experimentation through a love of writing. Work is blind-judged by a local literary notable and selected works are published as part of our annual Writers in the Attic anthology.

2019 THEME Google the word and Jacksons, Maverik, and Shell pop up as the irst results, followed by of-road wheelers from www.fuelofroad.com, a band named Fuel, and Thai cooking classes that advertise as “fuel for the soul.” Fuel is power, energy, the stuf that keeps us going. The need for fuel itself has waged wars, encouraged green energy and savings like solar power, and motivated marathon runners to cross inish lines. Is it food? Is it family? A muse, perhaps? What exactly ignites the imagination, accomplishes goals, and gels our creative juices when we’re searching for a boost?

FUEL

2019 JUDGE

J. REUBEN APPELMAN is author of the true crime memoir, The Kill Jar (Simon & Schuster, 2018), chosen as among the best true crime books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Oxygen, Bustle, and ELLE Magazine, and reviewed widely.

Appelman is also Executive Producer of the television series, Children of the Snow (2019) for the Investigation Discovery network, and has done additional writing for the ilm industry, including his work on the Netlix-streamed documentaries Playground and Jens Pulver | Driven, which he co-produced. He has published two collections of poetry, and is a two-time State of Idaho Literature Fellow.

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MEET THE WRITERS ANITA TANNER is the author of Where Fields Have Been Planted, a collection of poetry about life on a small farm in Wyoming, published in 1999.

She’s been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies.

She feels reading and writing are akin to breathing.

BEN AVI SHANE teaches and studies at the University of Idaho. He graduated from Vanderbilt University, where he won an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and has since used his degree in Mandarin Chinese to confound people at parties and for no other purpose. He likes when rain falls from a sunny sky, hermaphroditic gods, and sturdy, vertical rock.

CAITLYN CURRAN holds an MFA from the University of Idaho and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Her recent work can be found in: The American Journal of Poetry, Basalt, Grist, Hubbub, Miramar, PANK, Raleigh Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Willow Springs and elsewhere. She was a 2018 Centrum Fellow at the Port Townsend Writers Conference and recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize.

CAROL KEOGH LINDSAY

lives in north Idaho and is a retired professor of child development. She is an avid reader of iction but is relatively new to writing. She loves skiing, hiking and time spent outdoors.

CATHERINE KYLE is the author of Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming 2019), Coronations (Ghost City Press, 2019), Saint: A Post-Dystopian Hagiography (dancing girl press, 2018), Parallel (Another New Calligraphy, 2017), Flotsam (Etched Press, 2015), Gamer: A Role121

Playing Poem (dancing girl press, 2015), and Feral Domesticity (Robocup Press, 2014). Her writing has been honored by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and other organizations. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Western Idaho. Her website is www.catherinebaileykyle.com.

christy claymore

grew up in boise and has spent most of her life here, but somehow feels like a sojourner, in spite of that fact. she once taught English and Humanities courses at Boise State University, but is now pursuing other endeavors, one of which includes writing a novel with a good friend. her two wild boys are the very iber of her heart, and she enjoys running the hills the surround this beautiful city.

DENÉ BREAKFIELD has an MA in English from Boise State University. Her work has appeared in cold-drill, Nebo, Boise Weekly’S Fiction 101, Plays magazine, Boise State University’s Women Making History project, and elsewhere.

GREG DUFFY

In 2008 was a feature storyteller for Story Story Night. That evening he told his story about being unable to speak clearly ater a brain injury. Greg has published several short stories over the years. He has oten written about his life as a chimney sweep and the people he’s met. Greg is now retired.

JUDITH McCONNELL STEELE and her husband, Richard, moved to Boise in 1978. He was an Idaho native. She wasn’t, but soon found the environment nuturing for a budding writer. Judith is a published poet, writer, and writing teacher, the author of two books of newspaper columns and a novel, The Angel of Esperanca. She is naturally attracted to ire but is not an arsonist.

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JULIE M. FOGERSON is a communications professional and newly minted voice artist, with three stories published previously in Writers in the Attic anthologies. She is an ocean ogler, loving Boise ater life in Honolulu, Seattle, New York City, and Antarctica. Fogerson is a tireless traveler, lifelong learner (recently having earned a doctoral degree with Creighton), family gal and gluttonous polyglot.

KATRINA MAIRI WRIGHTattends Boise High and has won numerous Scholastic awards for poetry and short stories alike. She has also been published and awarded in Stories of Transformation by Our Gender Revolution. She enjoys acting and writing with BCT theatre lab, playing lacrosse, and scratching the ears of her dog, Penny. Although Katrina is not technically a Boise native she is proud to call it her home.

KEENE SHORT is a Southwestern transplant in northern Idaho. His work has appeared in Atticus Review, Split Lip Magazine, Waxwing, and elsewhere.

KIM MONNIER has a BA in English literature from Indiana University. He taught English at Mountain Home High School for twenty-eight years and is now retired and living in Boise. He is on the editorial staf of The Whistle Pig, a literary publication of Mountain Home Arts Council.

LAUREN YARNALL

received her MFA in Poetry at the University of Idaho, where she also worked as the Editor-in-Chief of Fugue Journal. She is a Centrum fellow and Pushcart nominee, as well as a Best of the Net nominee, Best New Poets nominee, and inalist for Yemassee’s 2018 Poetry Contest. Lauren’s work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Thrush Poetry Journal, Waxwing

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Magazine, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere.

LIZA LONG is an author, educator, and mental health advocate. Her book The Price of Silence was a 2014 “Books for a Better Life” award winner.

She teaches English at the College of Western Idaho and reads Latin for fun.

LOUIE LAND

is a second-year Master of Fine Arts candidate in iction at the University of Idaho. Originally from rural central Pennsylvania, he has taught courses in jazz literature and superhero graphic novels. He is also a working musician and recently released his irst album, At erglow.

LUKAS W. ROBERTSON is a poet, photographer, friend, and graphic designer. He believes life is photogenic and worth sharing, and that poetry is for people like him — who love stories but have short attention spans. With this in mind he sets out to share the charm in the minutia of things and places. Combining both urban and wild photography with moving prose, Lukas crats malleable, relatable experiences for anyone with a curious mind and an itch for exploration.

MARY L. SARAS was born in Illinois and made her way to Boise in 1984 to start a marketing career with Ore-Ida Foods. Later in her working life, she managed accounts for a local ad agency, consulted, and taught business as an Adjunct Professor at Boise State University. Now retired, she channels her creative juices into learning to write memoir — a genre which challenges her to write in complete sentences rather than in slogans and jingles. In addition to this anthology, Mary has been published in two previous Writers in the Attic anthologies (“Game” and “Song.”)

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MICHAEL A. PAQUIN

Originally hailing from north Idaho, moved to Boise to complete a degree in political science at Boise State University. He’s an avid reader, a decent guitarist, and a mediocre painter.

RUTH SAXEY-REESE

(Ruth Salter) grew up in Claremont, California and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine. She teaches courses in writing and literature at Boise State and Northwest Nazarene University as well as camps and workshops at The Cabin. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Boise Weekly, Chiron Review, Calyx, Nerve Cowboy, Hawaii Pacii c Review, and America Magazine and the anthologies The Healing Art of Writing, Volumes I and II. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and her latest projects include epistolary and travelogue poetry.

SHEILA D. C. ROBERTSON lives and works in Boise. She draws upon the rich texture and tapestry of the west and its people to inspire her prose and poetry.

On occasion she is fortunate enough to sit down with pen and paper in other lands and weave together new stories.

STACY BOE MILLER is a recent graduate of the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Idaho. Some of her recent work can be found in or is forthcoming in Midwestern Gothic, Copper Nickel, and Mid-American Review among other journals. She is currently preparing for a year abroad in Chile with her husband and children.

TOMAS JOAQUÍN BAIZA

was born and raised in San José, California, and lives in Boise, Idaho. He holds Masters degrees from Indiana University and the University of Michigan, a doctorate from the University of Oregon, and is currently studying creative writing at Boise State University. Tomas’s iction has appeared in NYMBM 125

(‘Adelante/Onward,’ April 2019) and Parhelion Literary Magazine (‘And Then A Wind,’ July 2019). When he’s not watching sci-i movies with his daughter, he’s playing guitar very loudly, reading very quietly, or working very diligently on his irst novel, Deliver Me: A Pocho’s Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery.

TRACY SUNDERLAND is a professional writer, director, actor and teacher working in theatre and ilm. She’s written and directed several short ilms and plays for young audiences; her irst feature script was shot in Greece this summer. She is the Artistic Director of the physical art company Migration Theory, and an Associate Artist with Boise Contemporary Theater. She also teaches at Boise State University and The Cabin. Tracy received the 2015 Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowship in Filmmaking Award and the 2015 Boise State Adjunct Faculty of the Year Award.

Denotes number of annual Writers in the Attic anthology appearances (by year).

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FUEL rs in the attic

write

Google the word “fuel,” and Jacksons, Maverik, and Shell pop up as the first results, followed by off-road wheelers from fueloffroad.com, a band named Fuel, and Thai cooking classes that advertise as “fuel for the soul.” Fuel is power, energy, the stuff that keeps us going. The need for fuel itself has waged wars, encouraged green energy and savings like solar power, and motivated marathon runners to cross finish lines.

Is it food? Is it family? A muse, perhaps? What exactly ignites the imagination, accomplishes goals, and gels our creative juices when we’re searching for a boost?

The Cabin is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization.

We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners. Writers in the Attic, or WITA, is an annual contest for local writers, both emerging and established, to publish work related to a theme chosen by The Cabin. This anthology is a stepping stone for new writers and a venue that showcases the talent in our community.

THE CABIN Log Cabin Books LITERATURE / POETRY