own next to me and turns my hands around to show p of cracks on the backs of my hands. She shows me tates branch off into bloody avenues and stop at culws me as if I don’t know what they look like. As if I ng of dryness. As if I don’t feel the sting of shame as I my thoughts and behaviors.
2020 - 2021 volume 35
The Vanderbilt Review
On some days, dreams are faraway my great grandmother, hemorrha despite the emptiness of the pantr I see la bienvenida de un héroe: gr A hero’s homecoming into a hous on his palms, like prophecy, rippin I open my eyes and it hardly seem with the bleariness of heat-stricken with clarity. On days like today, I if any of us ever will.
Cover photo by Grace Brady and Julia Nahley Cover design by Emily Kopec
The Vanderbilt Review 2020 - 2021
The Vanderbilt Review is not operated by Vanderbilt University. The views and opinions expressed by The Vanderbilt Review are those of the editors and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of Vanderbilt University or its official representatives. Vanderbilt® and the Vanderbilt logos are registered trademarks of The Vanderbilt University. ® 2021 Vanderbilt University. 1
Editor-in-Chief Emily Kopec
Managing Editor Darius Cowan
Head of Recruitment Grace Brady
Art Editor
Catherine Sheehan
Layout Editors Grace Billman Amber Yun
Poetry Editor Kelly Morgan
Prose Editor Laiba Fatima
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Layout Staff Kaitlin Joshua Lilly Zheng
Poetry Staff
Staff Pragya Bhagat James Blair Thanvi Dola Helen Hicks Chris Loveland Annie Mahaffey Clara McMillan Eric Ponce
Staff
Prose Staff
Michael Bruebach Zhi-Ying Chua Abigail Forsythe Abigale Harrelson Lauren Maresca Gracie Pitman
Art Staff
Angelina Chung Lyndon Vickery 3
“
Letter From the Editor
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It goes without saying that this past year has been challenging in more ways than we can count. As much as we have all felt the distance between family, friends, and classmates, I am thrilled to present a publication that occupies a shared creative space in our Vanderbilt community. This body of work reflects our nature to heal, hope, and find comfort through art in challenging times. Whether you’re a creator or observer, I hope you, too, find a sense of community through the words and images shared in this year’s publication. I will always cherish the four years I have spent with The Vanderbilt Review and the opportunity it provided me to connect with the creative energy that buzzes beneath the surface of our campus. I would like to thank everyone who submitted to this year’s publication, not only for letting us peak into your creative mind, but also for setting aside the time to make work amidst the newfound hurdles of daily life. Thank you to our advisor, Paige Clancy, for helping us navigate new territory as we moved our publication to a purely digital format this year, and to our judges for helping us celebrate student work. Lastly, I’d like to thank the staff and editorial board for their energy towards creating a platform for students to share their prose, poetry, and art. It has truly been a pleasure spending my last year at Vanderbilt leading the Review, and I hope this publication can remind you of the power of creativity to create community.
Emily Kopec
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Content 10 Hush, Little Baby by Brooke Deasy 18 Untitled by Harrison Smith 20 Ten Years After June by Clara McMillan 22 Still by Natalie Elliott 23 Grows by Natalie Elliott 24 Stop Painting the Trees by Lorrie Axelrod 26 Sincerely by Clara McMillan 32 Self Discovering by Anna Bright 33 Rebellion by Catherine Sheehan 34 Keep by Zoe Pehrson 36 Minor Adjustments by Hannah Anderson 37 Gordon T. Unger City Council by Anjeli Chapman 40 Piano Man by Jenny Gao 42 Still Life by Lyndon Vickrey 44 Rosemary by Clara McMillan 46 Untitled by Kahero Harriott 48 For Permanent Relief of Dry or Cracked Skin by Benjamin
Goodman 54 Siren by Jenny Gao 55 Self-Envy by Rachel Perrotta 56 The Unbraiding by Abigale Harrelson 58 Authenticity by Anna C. Bright 59 Acceptance by Anna C. Bright 60 Remnants by Grace Brady 63 Portugal by Karina Popowycz 64 Untitled by Harrison Smith 66 Rebuilding by Rachel Perrotta 68 Proper Sleep Hygiene for the Homeward Bound by Carrie Martinez-Schmidt 6
ts
70 New Zealand Sunsets by Josh Lipsey 72 Lactose Intolerant by Brent Szklaruk-Salazar 73 I Know You Don’t Hate Me by Geronimo Owen 89 Isolated by Rachael Perrota 90 The Opera Moon by Josh Lipsey 92 Top Surgery by Zoe Pehrson 94 Feeling Harmony in the Forest by Asya Azkin 95 Throwing Hands by Brigitte Jia 96 Asphyxiation by Ayana Wilson; Award Winner in Prose 117 XO til the death by Hermella Kassaye 118 Go to the Ground by Megan Jordan 120 Untitled by Harrison Smith 122 The Man on the Table by Kirsten Koehler 126 Green City by Catherine Sheehan 127 Afternoon Bathing in Karesansui (Japanese Rock Garden)
by Danni Huang
128 Henrietta Lacks Discovering Her Own Tumor by Abigale Harrelson 129 Untitled by Kahero Harriott 130 Untitled by Harrison Smith 132 Face Your Problems! by Brigitte Jia 133 Time Dilation by Hannah Anderson 134 Wŏ hái ài ni, even if I’m an ugly crier by Jenny Gao 141 Epigenetic Inheritance by Carrie Martinez-Schmidt; Award Winner in Poetry 144 Vanishing by Natalie Elliott; Award Winner in Art
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Art Vanishing- Natalie Elliot
Awards
Judged by Jana Harper, Associate Professor of The Practice “I chose the copper plate etching/linoleum print Vanishing because it is both highly skilled and it communicates the uncertainty and strangeness of this moment in time.”
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Poetry Epigenetic Inheritance- Carrie Martinez-Schmidt Judged by Major Jackson, Professor of English and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities “A profusion of language marks this poem of tender awareness, particularly, of cultural inheritances and beauty.”
Prose Asphyxiation- Ayana Wilson Judged by Sheba Karim, Writer in Residence
All prose, poetry, and art is judged anonymously.
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Hush, Little Baby Brooke Deasy 10
Hush, little baby. A feeble thing The solemn creature crunched towards its heart in agitation, a shape altogether abnormal and startling. A heap of disheveled feather; the softness of Lake Placid blues traced along the childish wing, rich chestnut rippling through its center. The sweet creature. It twitched in uneasy movement, the wind teasing its temper, dancing through the red. Red. Piling, oozing, it stained the electric yellow grass caressing its fragile frame. Eyes of ivory, they pierced the sky with reason, searching. Peculiar. Those eyes of ivory, lacing upwards and upwards and upwards, strong and lovable and spectacular. A sigh of defeat, the blues and chestnuts and electric yellow heaved. Plop. A feeble thing. It sunk to the ground helplessly, but not the ivory. The glistening sphere stood firm, anchoring the notion of hope. “Mama, Mama, look. A birdie!” A petite polished nail speared the minty autumn air, gesturing five feet forward. Two Skechers shuffled humorously, unable to keep up with the quickening pace of the beguiled girl. She halted. Her eyes and mouth gaped strangely, seeming to outgrow her tiny featured face. “Stand back Brooke! Don’t get too close. I’m coming.” “I’m so sorry you had to see this, poor bird. I don’t think we can save it. I’m sorry sweetie.” The girl’s birdie was dead.
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* 5:15 am bzzzzz. bzzzzz. The strong shriek of the alarm seizured through my sheets, and I scrambled to silence it. Taking a deep breath—one, two, three—I flung my sleepy limbs into the dark of my cradle-shaped bedroom. Slicing across the icicle-like hardwood with bare feet, I reached my underwear drawer where, hidden under a heap of thongs, sat a pink box. Snatching the scandalous package, I tiptoed into the hallway. Moments later, I found myself crouched over the toilet seat, trying futilely to calm my shaking hand cemented to the shaking stick. Hey it’s me. I was right, I’m pregnant. I’m 18 years old. This stuff doesn’t happen to girls like me. * That Morning I scuffled into AP American Literature with pink tears crusted to my cheek. But that was the least of my worries. I watched as my boyfriend swaggered into the room, dressed in grey sweats, and took his seat directly in front of me. After a few moments, he tossed me a look of pity and concern. I felt myself sinking, my body went numb. “Alright class, today I’m going to read the short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ Then, we’ll hold a class discussion. Sound good?” Mr. Drake received no reply, save for the drowsy faces 12
clustered around the room (it was 7:20 am—a truly pitiful time to make minds think). I listened, hot and weak, as my boyfriend laughed heartily over some joke his friend squeezed into the silence. As I realized that I would truly be alone in this, at least emotionally, Mr. Drake began the reading. … It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig, the man said. It’s not really an operation at all. The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in. Let the air in? I thought. * Jig—at a crossroads There we were, just one week later. Me and him. Bounding down Providence Ave, rolling past nameless landscapes and shapeless concrete to get It done. Our little secret, our disturbing little secret. In a cream-colored room of 3 patients and 4 doctors, I was keenly aware that I was the only white one there. We went here, did this and this, walked there, did that and that, came back and did some more of it all. And left with a pack of pills. Routine enough, I suppose. But this part wasn’t so routine, wasn’t expected. Why I hadn’t used the massive black hole of knowledge the great Internet provides to research what It actually looks like, feels like, smells like, beats me. Denial perhaps. In a CVS parking lot 2 days later, I stuck the white pills to the inside of my bottom lip, felt them dissolve, too slowly, taking as much time as they pleased. But once they did—my lungs 13
fighting the white cake contaminating my mouth for air—I knew the mifepristone and misoprostol had entered my body and started their day’s work. The overnight shift. Cold. A sudden chill sprung over my thin frame; a parasite. The chill twisted my inner vitals and stacked them into an arctic ice box. I froze from within. He amped the heat, turning the dial to High despite wearing a thick black sweatshirt. He was unselfish, I’ll give him that. But then the blood started, and the cramps (the devil herself). The blood stormed out of me, like a violent river overtaking a triple-walled dam. The red seemed to seep from every pore, every organ, every functioning unit of my body. It reeked of iron and metal and rotting. He decided then it was time to get me home, but only after purchasing three boxes of Heavy Flow pads. I don’t use pads. I opened the door with a prescribed air of childhood innocence, squirmed through the kitchen, avoiding all interaction, and set myself in front of the bright and blaring TV with him. But soon the red was too much. I darted to the bathroom every 10 minutes to swap out a swamped pad; the tiny trash can began to look like a crime scene. And then it hit. Nausea, dizziness. The light of the bathroom swung and spiraled, expanded into dynamic crystal diamonds and sparkling rhinestones; it whispered seductively in my ear, a soft sweet annoying purr. It was coming, though I didn’t quite know what. I floated towards the stairs, my head a thousand miles above my body, trapped in a bank of cumulonimbus clouds. My clothes were off in a second, my hand gripping the shower handle for support. Oh it poured. Hot, flaming beads of water pierced my icy skin. My eyes fluttered open and closed, open and closed. 14
Stay awake Brooke. Let the water wake you up. Stay awake. Everything became a blur. I nearly fainted, my naked body folding towards the floor, but managed to hurl myself into bed. No time for a tuck. I lay, sprawled on top of white sheets, successfully lodging a towel under my wet body for fear of red stains. You need something to focus on. Brooke. Focus on something, like the movies. Stay awake. My eyes latched onto the dim lamp stationed on the armoire, the only source of light penetrating the dark room. The light grew thinner and thinner and thinner, but I refused to forfeit my focused gaze. My eyes were stapled to that ever-softening light, warding off the unconscious. They fluttered repeatedly, open and closed open and closed, the red racing and diving and splashing in loopy delight, until a sudden sense of release seized me. Plop. The skin of my kin fled my body in a flush. With the rapidity of a bullet, I snapped into the unconscious. Sleeping like a dead man on his deathbed. The next morning I woke in a pile of blood with the realization that he never came to check on me. Moments later, a tap disturbed my bedroom door. My mom wanted to tempt me out of bed with the prospects of breakfast. “Morning sweetie! I made a delicious breakfast downstairs you have to—” “Are you okay? What happened?” “Oh, I wasn’t feeling well at all and tried to shower but couldn’t so I got to bed really fast and I have my period I guess 15
so that’s why—” “Poor thing <chuckling> it was a big one. I’ll wash the sheets.” “Can I just have space?” * Breakfast? I toss around “I’m good” as a protective shield—as a self-defense mechanism from the realities of fiery pain and dark loss and bottomless regret—knowing that no one will dare delve beyond those too-taut, too-assuring, too-pink lips furled in a sordid embrace. No one will dare stretch open those lips, rip inside willingly and genuinely, and tear out the poisonous words that take too much comfort on the inside of my cheeks. —I’m Good— But Good is an artificial device. It’s malleable. It’s plastic. Itching to burst in fierce fever, red and oozing and piling; itching to shape-shift, to mold and remold again and again as it pleases, playing with time and growth and Moving On; resolving, greedily, to break down into its basic vile components of heart and gut and expectation and waiting. A lustful “fuck you” from your own self-constructed I’m Good. But in most regards, I’m as good as I’ll ever be: A lifetime of waiting, for nothing, for an eternal internal silence. Perhaps I could “move on” in the most traditional and cookie-cutter and conforming sense of the words, overlooking everything that should matter. But I don’t want to. I grip blindly onto The First Words I never got to hear. The first “Mama.” The first “I love you.” But I don’t want to, 16
move on I mean. In keeping my kid in my thoughts every day for the past 15 months—snippets that ebb and flow and topple into my mind like dutiful ants on a sandy patch when I’m at the dinner table, shoveling undercooked potatoes and steaming green beans into a quivering mouth; when walking to class in the mildewy morning sunshine, passing the daycare and the little kids with their little smiles and little shoes and big hearts; when trying futility to slip into a night’s infinite white slumber, its arms stretching and stretching, wanting to take me away in a warm and loving and forgetful embrace—In keeping my kid in my thoughts, I keep him alive, I keep her alive. As if my birdie never died. And died at my shaking hands.
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Untitled Harrison Smith Photography 18
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Ten Years After June Clara McMillan
The wild bush was heavy, pregnant with the strawberries we’d run to go see, red marvels with brown freckles. With our mom’s help, we learned to preserve them, the recipes we read said they’d last for years on the shelf. In September, the jars came off the shelf, jam on toast made our stomachs heavy as we finished the books we had to read for school that day. We always had to run to make the bus. We learned about plant life cycles, the summer sun fading with our freckles. My sister and I have matching freckles. Starting in May, they sit on our noses like books on a shelf. Ten years after that first June, we learned how to cover them, using thick, heavy foundation, watching the brushes run over our cheeks, guided by beauty articles we’d read.
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That year, I started to read her mind. At night, when stars like freckles dusted the sky, I knew why she’d run far beyond our highway exit, filing the sights away on some shelf. full of books, heavy books, that I soon learned how to read. With time, I learned that we both missed the days before we could read, before our vocabulary grew ripe and heavy. To days we’d never call the stars or seeds freckles, because we hardly knew the word. The shelf of our shared library used to be light. How fast we’d run out of space. All we’d known was how to run, how to save berries in jars on the shelf. Now, when I read her mind, I look through her covered freckles and see that strawberries are no longer what is heavy. On our shelf, our hands run across the spines of heavy books we’ve learned not to read. We’ve stopped covering our freckles.
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Still Natalie Elliott Linoleum Print, Copper Etching 22
Grows Natalie Elliott Linoleum Print, Copper Etching 23
Lorrie Axelrod
Stop Painting the Trees Stop Painting the Trees Stop Painting the Trees Stop Painting the Trees Stop Painting the Trees 24
Someone has been painting the trees. I’ve seen it happen. When I sleep I dream of the faceless. The vigilante Who runs his orange brush along the leaves. Whose harsh strokes Cause the leaves To fall. Stop, I say.
He turns.
Runs his brush through my hair.
Paints me orange.
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Sincerely Sincerely Sincerely Sincerely Sincerely Sincerely Sincerely Sincerely
Clara McMillan
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Maggie Layne’s handwriting was dark and cramped. In folding the note, she’d smudged the purple gel ink. The blot marks looked like rounded tears. Junie Please meet me under the blue slide at recess. Sincerely yours, Maggie. It took Junie nearly a minute to read the note. They’d just begun learning cursive, and the close, connected print was difficult to decipher. The letters looked like they were dragging each other across the paper, forcing each other to play along. It took another minute for her to guess the meaning of the last line. Junie had forgotten what the word ‘sincerely’ meant, though she’d gotten perfect scores on her last spelling and vocabulary test. She remembered her mother quizzing her on her list, drinking bitter iced tea from a lawn chair as Junie biked fast circles in the driveway. “Ability!” “A-B-I-L-I-T-Y” “What does it mean?” “Means you can do something!” Swoosh. She liked the way the wind got through the holes in her helmet. More than once, Junie thought too hard about the spelling of a word and hit the big sideways crack in the driveway, causing her wheels to shudder. She had to picture the letters in her head to spell things right, shiny red block letters emerging from an ambiguous grey cloud and arranging themselves when she announced their names. She’d seen a black and white movie with her father once where the drill sergeant named his soldiers in this way. June turned around to look at Maggie, who sat in the fourth row. She nodded twice. “Miss Tucker, eyes up front.” “Yes-Sister-Amelia.” It came out as one word, a much-used password to forgiveness. Around eleven, Junie stuffed her tropical flowered lunch bag into her locker. Her parents didn’t serve meat, but the cafeteria did, making Junie one of the only students who brought lunch from home. The only days Junie 27
got to eat lunch off the faded green trays like everybody else were Fridays, the day that Catholics gave up meat. She didn’t know why fish didn’t count as meat, but she looked forward to the days when she was served fish sticks, shrimp pasta, or tuna sandwiches alongside the other kids. Her parents were unaware of this technicality. Once a year, the loud, laughing ladies in the cafeteria served a big pan of Cajun fried rice with warm spicy peas. The other kids turned their noses up, picked out the shrimp and threw away everything else. The rest of the day they whined that they were starving and dramatically sucked on the cherry cough drops their mothers put in their backpacks. But Junie always got seconds on Fried Rice Day. She liked the way it made her hair smell like turmeric for the rest of the day, though she didn’t have that word to name the smell. Her head vaguely called the scent “warm apple cider”, “Christmas”, “hot tea”, and “Dad’s big brown suitcase” instead. Miss Louise, Miss Sophie, and Miss Isadora fawned on her on Fried Rice Day, scooping her out the biggest portions. The ladies knew most of the kids by first name, but only Junie did they call “Junie baby”. Junie grinned bashfully when they did, making sure to say thank you to each woman, a manner her mother had drilled into her. All three women had a short, deep line between their eyebrows, looking as though God Himself had painted the letter ‘I’ on their foreheads. Junie often creased her eyebrows in the mirror at home, pretending she was all grown up like Louise, Sophie, and Isadora. It frustrated her that the line never appeared, no matter what contorted faces she made. Once, she’d nabbed her mother’s eyeshadow to paint a thick, squat line above her nose. Her dad had noticed immediately when she came downstairs and wiped it off with a damp paper towel. He had kissed the spot where the line had been. Under March sun, Junie walked across the cedar-chip playground. She hated these chips and the fussy red-brown threads they left on her white tights. The strands clung to her like burrs. They never came off, were impossible to avoid, and 28
looked creepy, like veins on a Halloween decoration. Maggie was waiting for her under the blue slide. Her neat Mary Janes pawed the ground, sending red dust into the air. Grown-ups always thought they were related, with the same stick straight hair that couldn’t be called blonde or brunette, identical dark blue eyes and slightly upturned noses. In their school uniforms, they were twins. The only noticeable difference was that Junie had a splash of pale freckles across her nose and cheekbones. “Wanna play tag?” “No. I’m going to play jump ropes with Katie and Ali and Sam.” “Oh, ok. Can I come too?” “No.” Maggie rubbed her thumb into her palm, a habit she was currently developing that she would never shake. “Why not?” “I don’t think we should play anymore.” Junie’s throat tightened, just like it did when the swingset made that horrible metallic squeal. “What do you mean?” “Did you hear what Sister Amelia said today about going to Hell?” “Yeah, what part?” “You’re not a Catholic.” There were a million ways everyone at St. Anthony’s knew who was and wasn’t Catholic. Who stumbled through the Nicene Creed, who forgot the order of the commandments, who didn’t know what a guardian angel was. Some could really spell ‘purgatory’ and ‘transubstantiation’ by the second grade. Junie didn’t go to Sunday School, didn’t have to go to Confession, wasn’t allowed to take a turn reading from the Bible at Mass. Junie never got to wear a white princess dress to school to get her First Communion, and afterwards get a photo with the Sisters or a glossy wood rosary. “So?” “Only Catholics can not go to Hell. That’s what she said.” “But I’m not going to go to Hell Maggie.” 29
“Yes you are. Unless you are a Catholic.” “I’m not a Catholic.” “Neither are your parents.” “Yeah. So?” “It means that you’re not good and bad kids make other kids bad. And I don’t want to be bad.” Junie knew just what Maggie meant to say. “I-N-F-L-U-E-N-C-E” “What does it mean?” “It means you have an effect on a thing!” Swoosh. Junie was ok with not going to Heaven. Sister Amelia had said Heaven was extra school with Jesus. She thought the Jesus parts seemed alright, but she’d made her peace with not getting more school. Junie was not ok with not playing tag with Maggie. “I’m not going to make you bad. You can go to Heaven and also be my friend.” “No, I can’t. Sister Amelia says that one bad apple can spoil the whole barrel.” She paused. “Hell sounds so scary, Junie, I don’t want to go there.” Sister Amelia had shown them a movie a while ago, about the three little children who were shown Hell by Mother Mary. In the movie, Hell had opened up right below their bed. Little red devils were laughing and people were melting and screaming. Mother Mary then asked all Catholic children to say one rosary a day to stop them from going to Hell. Sister Amelia explained how Mary became Our Lady of Fatima on that day as she handed out plastic rosaries to all the children. They each pinned crayon drawings of Mary on their cubbies. When Junie told her parents about the movie, they kept their faces calm. She talked through it with the same tone she’d used to describe her multiplication tables quiz. Later that night, while Junie’s parents folded laundry, her mother said quietly, “Why on earth would she show them that?” Her husband set down a folded towel down on the stack on the bed. “I’m not sure,” he paused, cracking his knuckles. “It’s 30
crazy. They’re just kids, we don’t need them scared by some movie. At least Junie wasn’t scared of it. I wonder about the people who spend their time making movies to scare kids into being Christians.” “I meant Mary. Why would she show Hell to kids?” Though Junie really had found the cartoon silly, she was frightened by how scared her classmates had got. For a long time, she remembered how David, the boy next to her, had started crying. Like her classmates, she’d said one rosary a day, after her parents tucked her into bed, until she traded it for an eraser and a caramel apple sucker. Maggie wouldn’t meet her eyes. Junie didn’t know what to say. She felt too hot and too cold, and her nose was running from the pollen in the air. Maggie looked over her shoulder at the plaid-bound girls untangling ropes. “Bye June. I didn’t mean to be mean.” June walked dully to the playground steps. She sat down, picked at her tights, and let slow, furious tears slide out of her eyes. This wasn’t because of Maggie’s eyes, it wasn’t because of the dumb cartoon, it wasn’t because of how mean and low she felt or how badly she wanted recess to be over. It was because the stupid, stupid cedar chips wouldn’t get off her stupid, stupid tights. Within a few years, no one called her Junie except her parents and the three lunch ladies.
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Self Discovering Anna Bright Oil on wood panel 16 x 24 inches 32
Rebellion Catherine Sheehan Acrylic 9 x 12 inches 33
Keep Zoe Pehrson I should probably attend to the murder – I’m grateful for the company of crows, As they are especially lovely this time of cold When the year is cold and the castle tower looms Over a way back, spiraling something lovely, Which the crow quorum can attest to. So many of them are gathered here together Like a cloud of witnesses or a black hole Or an overlook on a lovely, starry night. They seem to prefer the loneliest places Where the stars can’t reach. I thought if I could call Just one out of the thousands by their name, They would say it back, or with a turn Of the head or beak, dispel whatever curse Made this place a weapon – not the wind, And the crow chorus won’t say anything, but Their language isn’t for me, shouldn’t be: They have no regard for what a rooftop means. They have no regard for this, and yet. I’ve seen how they gather in one high place Together, continue to do so.
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My walk from wall to wall is ritual, Rationed without intent, yet the edge is so Indescribably rough and smooth, the reach Almost lovely. The dry land is shrinking, Eternity’s teeth are bared, and glaciers rot: Anthropocene, I have seen enough. One of my friends has turned From the circle, poised and speculative, Feathers on the wing bones tensed. My temple sears with a forgotten migraine. Suddenly, the castle is not a castle, The drawbridge is not a drawbridge, And gravity holds according to its customs, The way back not so shadowy anymore. As the bend of reality snaps back into place, My new crow friend appears almost delighted. As to why, I can only imagine My absence had something to do with it. How silly, of me, to assume so much.
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Minor Adjustments Hannah Anderson Oil on canvas 24 x 24 inches
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Gordon T. Unger City Council Anjeli Chapman
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He stood with his hat pressed to his chest, his jacket swung youthfully over one shoulder in the crook of a finger. The hat to the chest gave him the energy of an ardent suitor. It was an action vibrating with youth and sincerity, both frequencies that he’d been encouraged to hit. He had been standing long enough for the pose to become uncomfortable. He was holding his jacket at an odd angle, and the fingers of his left hand had become sweaty on the collar. He had knocked on the door nearly a full minute ago. The moment his knuckles had made contact with the wood, he’d heard a loud bark from some interior room of the cabin. He’d felt the urge to jump but suppressed it. Instead, he treaded politely backward down the stairs and waited a respectful distance from the door. It swung open abruptly. A man stood where the door had been, so tall that his head brushed the frame. He had a thatch of sandy hair and thick black dirt beneath each fingernail. His green flannel shirt was tucked into his dungarees, its sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms. There was light brown stubble on his chin and cheeks, but the hair on his arms was blond. With two fingers, he held back the collar of a whining mastiff who was scratching eagerly at the floor. Gordy introduced himself to the man, smiling broadly, pressing his tongue against the interior of his teeth to deepen his dimples. He tossed the jacket over his left arm and held the hat between his left thumb and forefinger. This made him free to shake with his right. Squinting from the bottom of the steps, it took Gordy a moment to realize that his countenance was marred by early wrinkles. He had what his mother would have called “elevens,” sharp creases between his eyebrows. There were tear troughs under both eyes and a deep web of crow’s feet beside them. His cheeks sagged, flesh, loose. 38
Gordy was familiar with hostility. A group of Mexican teenagers in Coral Gables had menaced him out of a soda fountain. An old lady in Punta Gorda had actually spit on him, lifting up the little mesh veil on her hat as she took aim. He had wiped it off his cheek with a sleeve, his smile intact. The man’s gaze held not hostility, but the apathy that receding tides have for pitiable swimmers. Gordy was acutely aware that he had been standing at the bottom of the steps for a beat too long. He gripped the railing with his free fingers and used it to launch himself upward, hand extended. The man looked down at the hand. He looked up at Gordy. Then he took the hand in his own, so massive that it had a private gravity. The man shook it once and then let it drop. Gordy stood there, blinking in the noon, forgetting his script.
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Piano Man Jenny Gao Nikon D750 photography
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Still Life Lyndon Vickrey Watercolor and acrylic
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Rosemary C l a ra M c M i l l a n
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My grandmother makes her roasted potatoes with rosemary. The first time I remember eating them, I didn’t know the word for rosemary. I had a smaller dictionary at the time. When my brain described them to me, they were Pine tree potatoes Outdoor tea party potatoes Easters when the snow hasn’t melted potatoes Fireworks in the driveway potatoes Aunt Marie’s lotion potatoes Uncle Aaron’s big leather jacket potatoes Campfire smoke that made my eyes all watery potatoes Bee-sting at the apple orchard potatoes Counting candy after Halloween potatoes Christmas Mass incense that makes my nose all itchy potatoes And then I learned the word, and they stopped tasting like all those other things. They are potatoes with rosemary. The potatoes taste like rosemary. The rosemary in the potatoes makes the potatoes taste like rosemary because there is rosemary in the potatoes. My grandmother Rosemary makes her rosemary potatoes with rosemary and they taste like potatoes with rosemary.
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Untitled Kahero Harriott Digital
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For Permanent Relief of Dry or Cracked Skin Benjamin Goodman
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I stare at myself in the mirror. I am alone in the bathroom, and I follow the commandments. 1. Turn the cold water on with your elbow. It is important not to use your hand because who knows who touched the sink before you. 2. Place your hands under the cold water. The cold water should close up your pores so that contagions do not enter the bloodstream. Entering the bloodstream is bad, very bad. 3. Pump the soap 3 times, and scrub your hands together aggressively. Scrub extra diligently on the infected area. 4. Place the infected area under the faucet, and turn the faucet on and off between 3 and 7 times; the exact number doesn’t matter, just be thorough. 5. Turn on the hot water to burn off any remaining pathogens. Pathogens hate hot water. 6. There is no way to know whether you did it right, so repeat at least one more time just to be safe. 7. Turn off the faucet, and grab a reasonable amount of paper towels, probably five or six, and make sure your hands are very dry.
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The Prophet Moses looks on and is pleased by my orthodoxy. “Ok, Ben,” Dr. Gordon starts as we stand together in the bathroom of his shoebox office located above an antique store that sells all the most horrible things from your grandmother’s home, “Show me how you typically wash your hands.” Turn on the water with your hands. It is important not to use your elbow because who knows what Dr. Gordon will think. Place your hands under the lukewarm water. Pump the soap once, and scrub your hands together, nice and easy. Turn the water off, and grab a reasonable amount of paper towels, one or two. “Well, that looked quite normal.” The Oscar for Best Handwasher goes to Ben. Wow, this is such an honor. Oh, no, here comes the waterworks. Instead of a gold trophy, my award is the title “Mild Symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.” The more well-known Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day Lewis is famous for his method-acting. He doesn’t just pretend to be his character during filming, he convinces himself that he is the character all the time. I feel like Daniel Day Lewis when fact blends with fiction in my brain. I know that my obsessions are false. I’m not stupid. I’ve done my research. I know a virus without a host can only survive for seconds to minutes. I know that touching a doorknob that someone with Oral Herpes touched an hour ago won’t infect me. But when I imagine having Oral Herpes, my brain shows me a hideous, blistery volcano spewing red liquid. People stare as I walk by. Everyone notices. Waitresses, cashiers, gas station attendants (I live in New Jersey, so we don’t pump our own gas, it’s quite luxurious) notice the atrocity on my upper lip. So, instead of risking that reality, I do a seemingly harmless task, I wash my hands. Harmless is 50
relative, I guess. From my spot on the couch, the one between the two cushions, I hear my mom speaking to herself. “One, two, three,” she drones on, “eighteen, nineteen.” As I hear her footsteps coming towards the family room, I try to wiggle myself deeper between the two cushions, as if I can hide in the couch. “Nineteen, Ben? Nineteen paper towels. I think this is your record.” “I spilled milk this morning, I was just cleaning it up.” “I just used the milk, and it’s completely full. You haven’t been doing what Dr. Gordon told you to, have you? Let me see your hands.” She sits down next to me and turns my hands around to show me the roadmap of cracks on the backs of my hands. She shows me where the interstates branch off into bloody avenues and stop at cul-de-sacs. She shows me as if I don’t know what they look like. As if I don’t feel the sting of dryness. As if I don’t feel the sting of shame as I cannot control my thoughts and behaviors. “It’s winter, they get dry.” My performances are becoming less believable. From birth until age 10, my brain skips happily down the street singing Yellow Submarine and enjoying the carelessness of youth. All of a sudden, a strong man grabs its arm with one hand, covers its mouth with the other and throws my brain into an unmarked white van. My brain tries to fight and scream but it can’t get away. Psychiatry calls my brain’s kidnapper a “chemical imbalance.” Dr. Patterson gives an impassioned speech about the effects of incarceration on health quality and life expectancy, but I can’t pay attention. I touched gum on the bottom of my desk and have to wash my hands. 51
When the class ends, I rush to the bathroom and wash my hands. I follow my commandments and feel clean. On the way out, I touch a sticky substance on the doorknob, so I turn around and repeat my ritual. My hands don’t quite look like roadmaps now, but they are cracked enough to constantly remind me of my compulsions. When I return to my room, I put on moisturizer to ease the pain. The bottle reads, “for temporary relief of dry or cracked skin.” It works, but the dry and cracked skin comes back. Even worse, the thoughts come back and they bring the compulsions with them. Again, my carelessness and joy are stripped away by anxiety and fear. I decide that I’ve had enough and I visit Vanderbilt’s mental health center. They give me a referral for an expert in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. They recommend Nashville OCD & Anxiety Treatment Center. I finally decide that by twenty-years-old, I’ve grown tired of acting. I have enough awards and accolades. Like Daniel Day Lewis after his performance in Phantom Thread, I decide to call it quits on my acting career. My therapist Jessica asks me how often I wash my hands. “Whenever I touch something or someone that I think might be unclean. And I usually wash more than one time for every trip I take to the bathroom.” Honesty liberates me. Jessica is understanding, and we talk through my issues some more. She says that OCD is a cycle and that I have to cut-off my compulsions to cool the fire of anxiety and unwanted thoughts. We develop a plan. She is extremely kind and helpful but could learn how to make a joke. I see her once a week for two months until we decide I have improved and don’t need to come back anymore. She hands me her card and it says, “Jessica Cameron, Social Worker,” and in small letters: For permanent relief of dry or cracked 52
skin. I stare at myself in the mirror. I am alone in the bathroom. 1. I turn on the cold water with my hand. 2. I add one pump of soap and scrub. 3. I rinse off the soap. 4. I dry my hands with a reasonable amount of paper towels, one or two. Moses approaches me in the bathroom and sees the sink and my handwashing. His anger burns, and he throws the tablets out of his hands, breaking the commandments into pieces at my feet. Moses ascends the mountain again. Maybe he’ll come back with a new set of commandments. I hope I make him smash the new ones, too.
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Siren Jenny Gao Nikon D750 photography
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Self-Envy Rachel Perrotta Pencil and charcoal on rag paper 30 x 44 inches
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The Unbraiding For Anthony
Abigale Harrelson
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after four weeks your head is fruiting. sweat dust dead flecks, the essence of living being. my pale fumbling fingers upbraided by pain, i’m hurting. plexus of scalp your head
of curls, laid bare is fruiting
nerve endings to reap. fertile blooming
black wool flower, cast iron implacable teeth of comb and pick you I don’t want to hurt you.
orchestra of coils. snarling through from soil
of skin, tender tendrils forth and now, we unfurl them, after four weeks your head a fragrant
battered but bursting from front-to-brainstem, delicately. garden fully fruiting
and you ask my help to till it, burgeoning being bursting with dimension. the sweetness of these cosmological helices inflect your hurt. sweet oil sap sweet body sweet roots of beauty’s blooming nexus, anoint these appendages. glowing fingers in your glowing head, both fruiting with indescribable cherishment. love’s implacable tooth implacable truth. am I hurting you, love?
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Authenticity Anna C. Bright Digital art 58
Acceptance Anna C. Bright Digital art 59
Grace Brady
Remnants Remnants Remnants Remnants Remnants Remnants
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Joey’s mother once told him that the most important thing in life was to find yourself a proper vacuum cleaner. She’d been on the ground at the time, her left arm fishing around beneath the faded, lemon yellow couch in the middle of their living room. Her face had scrunched tight, wrinkles carving deep lines across her sun-tanned forehead. Joey was seven years old then. His small hands dragged a set of brightly painted trucks across the shag carpet, their wheels trailing deep moats in the fabric. His mother let out a self-satisfied exclamation, placing a dusty caboose into Joey’s outstretched fingers. See, Joey, she said between panting smiles, a better vacuum would have sucked this up in no time. Now, at twenty-four, Joey is standing against the marble counter of his one-bedroom apartment, a steaming mug of coffee in his hands. His fingers are curled tightly around the painted ceramic, and his thumb traces the rim: back and forth, back and forth. Out the open window, city cabs disturb the heavy, humid air into rushing waves of noise. A faded light illuminates Joey’s face through the window’s metal screening, muted by a smattering of dark clouds that dot the grey sky. The apartment is eerily still; Joey’s knuckles are white. A box of chocolates sits nestled in the corner of his kitchen. The decorations are overdone; red frills pleat the edges of its heart-shaped perimeter, and gold foiling spells out the words “I Love You!” across the top. The lid is unbalanced atop a gold, tinfoil wrapper peeking out from the side. Just a few hours before, Meg had sat on their shared couch, her legs thrown across Joey’s lap, placing the chocolate between her front teeth. He remembered her flushed cheeks, hot against his own, when he had pulled her body towards him to taste the caramel that stuck to her teeth. They’d stayed like this for a while. You never bring me gifts, he had said, hours later, when they were pressed up against one another in bed, sheets damp between them. His finger absentmindedly traced the length of her arm from shoulder to wrist, circling a birthmark on her forearm: spotted, like the Aegean Sea. 61
Don’t hate me, she’d said. And it was then that Joey knew he had lost her, that he had been right the week before when he had begged her not to go to her family friend’s funeral, the same family friend who had a son Meg had fallen in love with when she was seventeen years old and living with her mother in New Jersey. The same boy whose name she sometimes whispered when she was fast asleep next to him. He needs me, Meg had told him weeks, turning away from Joey to fill the rest of her suitcase, I have to. But I need you, he wanted to say, Stay here. Don’t leave. But that had been before. It was convenient that she’d been half packed. It was silent between them as she went from room to room, taking her things one by one until Joey could imagine she’d never existed at all. Her toothbrush from the sink counter, her portrait she’d clipped to the corner of the mirror. The tea bags from the pantry, her slippers from the closet. And her cat, their cat, shut inside a carrier, gazing out at Joey with dark eyes as she placed the spare key into his palm. I’m sorry, she tried. Then she was gone, the click of the door a final goodbye. Joey lifted the coffee mug to his lips to take a sip. Absentmindedly, he picked a piece of hair off his tongue: dark, the cat’s. At once, a panic tore over him, a realization that his apartment was crawling with the cat’s hair, embedded with pieces of a woman he would struggle to detach. Hastily placing his coffee on the counter, he fished his vacuum from the closet, an old thing with a fraying power cord and a staccato rattling that erupted with each movement of the machinery. He pushed the plastic over his couch, reached it deep into the crevices and across the face of the cushions. No matter how hard he pushed, black hairs protruded out of the fabric like sharpened wire.
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Portugal Karina Popowycz Photography 63
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Untitled Harrison Smith Photography 65
Rebuilding Rachael Perrotta Oil pastel on paper 26 x 36 inches 66
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Proper Sleep Hygiene for the Homeward Bound Carrie Martinez-Schmidt Fall blue: unfiltered like sky upon skin in Sonoran July Fall hard: like laughter descending upon the embalmed victim— a centerpiece at the viewing and your mouth falls open like a casket opening to forever and asking you a question: had you ever been awake before you fell prey to tittering out of terror, phobia for the locking of the latches and the permanence of the closing? And never mind the decay— you will never fall asleep again expecting for your stiffly rouged, your dead to call; instead fall cataplectic, to your knees and begging some Omnipotent Daddy to refrain from forcing his fallacies into your mouth tonight because for years you haven’t just slept alone, in hopes of deep-throating a dream, in the obscenity of your own breathing: Blasphemies and ashes and coffee black like the void you stare into when you wake up and don’t know if you’ll live another day to evade the dark side of earth, the cool underbelly of grass overgrown with crawling—
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if you’ll live to ever fall asleep in your own bed again. Instead, persist in somnambulating in fear of the closing—suspicious of every hinge shrieking and buckling lock because you just haven’t laughed enough! All you can do is fall asleep once more, carefully, with the clock as occupant of your cruelest vacancies: the empty side of the mattress— your mind strewn with epitaphs and gladiolas and yellow tulips and in an abundance of caution, a century’s worth of quarantine, each year an obituary— one for every chance you didn’t take to fall into someone’s arms. All you can do is fall victim to the hope for lurid absolution: for roses red as the finale you craved—hot with fiction and climax and rage, all of black-and-white reverie, and the ache that shadows age— for the warmth you implored from strange and towering men, and when finally denied, ask for the last time for cremation.
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New Zeland Sunset Josh Lipsey Photography 71
Lactose Intolerant Brent Szklaruk-Salazar Digital photography 72
I Know You Don’t Hate Me I Know You Don’t Hate Me I Know You Don’t Hate Me I Know You Don’t Hate Me
Geronimo Owen
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I am sitting on the red futon by the window, in the living room, facing the television, which is off. I am sitting and you are talking and I am not listening—as has become our routine. I am sorry I’m not listening, not so much because I want to hear what you were saying, but more because I know that, shortly, you will ask, in an accusatory tone, “Are you hearing what I’m saying?” Or, perhaps, more gently and playfully you will say, “Are you still with me honey?” Or, perhaps, “Earth to Brian!” It really depends, your tone, on whether or not what you are saying is serious. I’m really not quite sure, but I am aware that I’ll find out shortly, by your tone, and I’ll be sorry, whether or not what you are saying is serious. “You’re a really good listener.” You’d said that once, on our first date, at Mike’s Kitchen and Bar (which was, I later learned, really just a bar). “Sometimes I feel like no one ever listens to me, but you’re a great listener.” I was sad when I heard this because I thought you were brilliant and had quite a lot of important things to say, and you were beautiful, so it was pleasant to look at you and listen to you. You terrified me, then, and I was worried that, if I did not listen, I’d therefore make some mistake, that you would decide that I was not worth your time (and what valuable time it was) and that you’d drop me not so much like a hot brick, something dangerous and unpleasant to hold, but, rather, that you’d drop me like how you now drop your car keys upon the table, absentmindedly, and in such a way that you are sure to forget them later; because you have more important things to think about than the location of your keys. And, so, I listened intently. And I loved listening to you, and you loved that I listened, and, so, eventually, you fell in love with me. I, of course, had already been deeply in love with you. And now here we are; you, talking, and me, looking in your general direction, trying to make my face look like a listening face. As I sit here I notice a faint mark, like a deeply faded scar, just under your left eye, that, despite the ten years spent looking at your face, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed before. I focus on it—I am determined to get to know this 74
mark. Maybe it’s a birthmark? Like the faintest of port-wine stains? I take a mental note to ask you about it later and then decide against it. If it was important, you would have told me yourself. It looks, sort of, like Oklahoma. Or a pot. There is a freckle in the center of it. Remember when you had freckles? I miss your freckles. Two nights ago (or was it three?) I found one on your back as you slept; you sleep, now, on the right side of the bed, facing out, and so I’ve grown very familiar with your back, and I now know that there is a freckle on your left shoulder blade, and I have grown to love that freckle. I become aware that you’ve stopped talking, and I begin to search desperately within my short-term memory to remember what it was you’d been talking about. How did this conversation start? Did I, as a matter of habit more than interest, ask you how your day was? No, it was a Saturday. How did you start talking? How long had you been talking? And what were you talking about? Did you expect a response? What response could I give that would be generic enough that you’d think that I’d at least been half-paying attention? Suddenly, I remember. You’d been sitting on the futon, a book tented on your thigh, with your head leaned far back gazing up at the ceiling. You were sighing. I’d sat down next to you, hoping to watch TV, and, figuring I should make an effort to engage with you, I had asked you what was wrong. Ah! I have it now. Yes, I’ll say, empathetically, “I’m sorry to hear that.” That’s what I’ll say. I can sell my momentary silence (I can only hope it’s been momentary. Oftentimes moments in our head last so much longer than real, physical moments, and I can only hope this is the case now) as a genuine moment of thoughtful contemplation. Before I can say it, however, you stand and, without a word, walk from the living room and into the kitchen. That’s it? I think. No “Brian, are you even listening?” or, “Really, Brian?” Not even a sigh of disapproval. I hear the tap start running, and dishes start clinking together – the same dishes that, yesterday morning, you had asked me to clean, and that I so adamantly promised I would. I turned on the TV. We first spent our night together—as in, slept in the 75
same bed, as partners, my arms around yours—ten months after that first date at Mike’s Kitchen and Bar. Our relationship had been, I think you’d agree, slow to get off the ground. A year of acquaintanceship—running in the same social circle, but not quite—a year of close friendship, the date, seven months of casual, off-and-on-type, not ready to commit hanging out (the vacillation being, mostly, on your part), three months of gradually building that commitment, and then, finally, March of our senior year, together. That night. We’d slept together, sure, while drunk or particularly horny or lonely and usually all three, but for the first time, that night, we spent the night together. Not because we’d had sex, and it was convenient to stay over, but simply because we wanted to. Wanted to feel each other’s warmth as we drifted asleep, wanted to feel the gravity of another body occupying the empty space on the mattress besides us. It was then, in that state of drifting, as if half in a dream, that you said, faintly, almost as if you were gently setting free some animal you’d kept trapped in a cage, only to later realize that it was meant to be free, you said, “Goodnight, love of mine.” I, also half-asleep, and not quite sure how to respond to this sudden admittance of love—I had, I should note, always assumed that my love for you, no matter how close our relationship became, would always remain unrequited—responded “Goodnight, cherry pie.” Despite the unbearable cheesiness of them—but, after all, wasn’t cheesiness central to my whole appeal?—these words, “Goodnight, love of mine,” followed by, “Goodnight, cherry pie,” have become a habit, an addiction. We’ve said it every night, for nearly ten years. Sometimes, like when you’re away for a conference or that time I had to spend a month in Madison with my mom before she died, we’d call each other or text each other, just before midnight, most nights, sometimes before eleven, so that you could say “Goodnight, love of mine,” which I’d follow with, “Goodnight, cherry pie.” I’ve become reliant on this. I’m not quite sure why, but I’ve never 76
been able to sleep well without it. On those few nights when you haven’t been able to say it—when you went camping with your sister and didn’t have service for a night, when you took a redeye to London for work—I’ve stayed up, lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, with a brain that refuses to shut up. I’m lying like that now. You’re in your study—you’ve been in there almost all night, since right after you washed the dishes that I swear, swear, I was going to get to—and there’s a faint glow emanating from the edges of the door frame. You do this, on occasion, usually on nights right before you have a case, but never on a Saturday, so I know something’s wrong, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is. You come out of your office—it’s well past midnight, but you’re wearing the same pair of jeans and the tank top you had on earlier. You stand in the doorway for a moment, completely still—you’ve always had such a remarkable gift for a sort of thoughtful, coiled stillness, like a world series poker player whose complete lack of expression belies total control over the table. You stand there and you look at me, your dark eyes nearly unblinking underneath your sharply angled eyebrows. In years past, I would have never known what was behind those poker eyes of yours—sometimes I wonder if the moment I stopped loving you was the moment I learned how to tell what you’re thinking—but, now, I know exactly how you feel. You feel sorry for me, and I hate you for it. You look away, for just a moment, almost unnoticeable, but when you look up there’s something in your eyes that wasn’t there a moment before. There’s a movie we watched together once, based on a true story about a man who got his arm trapped under a rock while hiking alone in the desert and had to use his pocket knife to cut his own arm off to escape and survive. The look in your eyes is the look I imagine that man had just before he dug the knife into his own flesh. “I’m done, Brian. I want a divorce.” The room returns to silence after this brief, violent interruption, and I try to decide how I feel. The truth is I don’t feel much of anything at all, but every so often, as I lie there, 77
a feeling will appear, faint and elusive and I’ll try to grab onto it, hold it down, but they keep slipping away. For a moment I think that I should explode, jump out of bed and start throwing out every hurtful word I can think of, and hope that something sticks. But in all our years together I’ve never yelled at you like that – I’ve always found better, more effective, lasting ways to hurt you – so really what would be the point of starting now? I think instead that maybe I should laugh and smile, tell you how glad I am to finally be rid of you, how I’ve been waiting to hear you say those words for years now, but if I did that you’d know I’d be lying and I’d know it too. Finally, I think of begging. Of telling you that I need you, that I have nothing, am nothing without you. That I won’t know what to do with myself, that I’ll never be happy again with you gone. This is probably the reaction you’re most expecting—to be honest, it’s the reaction I’m most expecting—and I don’t want to give you the satisfaction. Besides, in years past it might’ve actually worked—it has worked—but it won’t this time. So instead of exploding, or laughing, or begging, I sit up, and I look at you, and I look at you for a while; I look at the harsh structure of your face—I could always see every bone of your cheeks and jaw and chin, and I had once found those bones so beautiful, now they just haunt my dreams. I meet your still-bluffing eyes, and I say the only thing I can think of. “Okay.” You nod at me, and, finally, you move. You walk out of our room, and, shortly after, I hear a car start, and I know that you are gone. For some reason, whenever I think about how things fell apart, there’s always one night I return to. You know the night. It was your first semester of law school, at Chicago, and we’d just gotten our first apartment together. Our first weekend there, we had a housewarming party with some of the only people we knew in the city—Marley and her boyfriend (who I remember you didn’t like and who I pretended to not like too, even though I actually kind of did; you said you 78
thought he was manipulative, but he seemed nice to me) and Joseph, who had just so happened to move there a few months before we did. Our apartment was still almost entirely empty – we had a linoleum table in the kitchen with two unmatching chairs that we’d bought at a garage sale, we were sleeping on a mattress (the only piece of furniture we’d bought new) that we had yet to find a frame for and was thus lying alone on the floor, and in the living room we had your desk, a bookshelf, and a couch with blue and red stripes that we’d bought at the Goodwill just a few days before. For the “party,” we pulled in the two chairs from the kitchen, and Marley, as a housewarming gift, brought us a pink beanbag, which I don’t think either of us were particularly enthralled by, but Marley seemed to be proud of herself for it, and I could tell you were happy that she put in the effort, which was a very un-Marley-like thing to do. We all sat around the living room—Marley in the beanbag, the two of us on the couch, and Joseph and Marley’s boyfriend on the two kitchen chairs. Joseph had brought a handle of whiskey, which he, Marley, and I shared, and you and Marley’s boyfriend—his name was Kyle?—split a bottle of wine. We drank like we were in college again, because we didn’t have anything else to do, and because it had been a long week and you and I needed it and because Joseph was there, and Joseph hadn’t grown up at all since we’d graduated and, when Joseph is there, the only thing to do is drink. So we drank and we had a good night, even if Kyle—or maybe it was Carter? Something along those lines—did talk too much about things that none of us were particularly interested in (what did we do to make him think we were interested in sailing?), and, even if Joseph was drinking enough for three men and their dog. But you were happy to see Marley again, and Marley seemed happier than I’d ever seen her before, even if Carter did keep correcting her on things that didn’t need correcting, and I was just happy that we were finally starting to build something together. I’d stopped calling you my girlfriend and started calling you my partner, which, even if it is a somewhat detached term, made me feel like we were really something, like you were stuck with me. 79
Eventually, Joseph decided it was time to move on with his night, and Marley and Kyle decided to join him. It was only then, as I got up to hug them goodbye, when I realized just how drunk I’d gotten. I’d been sitting the whole night, and I’ve always had the theory that you never really know how drunk you are till you stand up and your legs give out. As I gave Joseph a hug I practically fell into his chest, and he gently placed me back onto the couch just before he and the others slipped out the door. It was then that the whole world turned into a spiral, like I was being hypnotized. I sat there, gazing dumbly forward and trying, and failing, to feel my body. Suddenly realizing what was about to happen, I lurched out of the couch and somehow made it into the bathroom, but not quite to the toilet, and covered the tiles—the only truly nice thing about the place, the tiles that you loved so much—in the remains of my most recent meal. I felt your arms around me, holding me steady before I could follow the vomit onto the floor. “I’m so sorry,” I said as you pulled my shirt—apparently soiled—off of me, “I’m so sorry, oh my god.” I kept apologizing, almost in tears from the feeling of absolute powerlessness that comes in that state, like I was a six foot tall toddler who had yet to fully gain control of my limbs. You reassured me that it was okay as you began to pull me out of the bathroom and towards the couch. I was fully crying now, for every possible reason and for no reason in particular. “I’m going to die,” I kept saying, and, for some reason—convinced that it was a trap of some sort—I refused to sit down on the couch. “You’re not going to die,” you said as you finally wrangled me into my seat. I tried to find a spot to focus on to try to hold the world still. You disappeared for a moment, and I began crying again, calling out for you, like a child separated from his mother. A glass was pushed into my hand, and you guided my hand up and the glass to my lips, and I began to drink, spilling as much of it onto my chest as I got into my mouth. You stayed there, holding me as I continued to blab80
ber, alternating between desperate apologies and fear of what I was sure was my impending demise. You kept telling me that I wasn’t going to die, and that I needed to lie down, and your voice sounded so harsh and demanding, and I cried some more. “Why are you yelling at me?” I said. “I’m not yelling at you, I just need you to lie down,” you said as you covered me in a blanket. I said that you were yelling again, and again you said that you weren’t yelling at me. I began to fall forward, and the world disappeared before me, and then there it was again, more watery this time, more whiskey than food, bursting out all over the blanket and the couch and my clothes. “Jesus Christ!” you said, jumping off the couch to avoid the splatter. Without you to hold me up I fell forward off the couch and landed on the floor in a puddle of my insides. You pulled me up, and I was in the bathroom again. You were taking my pants off, and I was in the shower; you were in there with me, still fully clothed, and water began to flow over me as you washed the vomit off me. “We need to go to bed,” you said, turning the shower off and pulling me back off. I began to nod my head, but the taste of vomit in my mouth became the only thing I could think of. “I need to brush my teeth,” I said, holding onto the doorsill as you tried to get me out of the room. “You don’t need to brush your teeth.” “No, I need to brush my teeth,” and I fell backward and landed on my butt, refusing to get back up. You cursed, and a moment later there was a toothbrush in my hand. I tried to brush my teeth, but I couldn’t hold the brush, and it fell out of my hands. You tried to get me up, but I refused to get up until I brushed my teeth. Finally, exhaling a loud “oh my god,” you grabbed the toothbrush, opened my mouth, and brushed my teeth for me. I looked up at you, naked, and cried as you washed the taste of vomit from my mouth. Finally, you got me up and began to guide me to 81
the bedroom. I stopped for a moment, and finally the world started to come into form. I leaned against the wall, trying to stand on my own, and for a moment, I managed. And then I threw up again. The next morning I woke up—you had already been up for several hours—and, hanging my head down like a misbehaving dog, I walked into the living room, apologized, and assured you it would never happen again. You looked up from your notes—you were studying—and gave me a strained sort of smile. You said it was okay, that it happens to the best of us, that we’ve all been there. You made a joke about how that’s why you don’t want to have kids. I laughed—a pathetic, meek, trying-to-find-it-funny laugh—and thanked you and turned to the kitchen to find something to eat. “Do you really see me like that?” You said as I sat down on the beanbag with my bowl of cereal—I could tell you had washed the couch that morning, but I still didn’t want to sit on it. You said it like you didn’t want to say it, the way people say things that they know they need to ask but don’t want to know the answer to. “See you like what?” I knew what you meant—I was pretty sure I knew what you meant—but, if there’s one advantage to drinking, it’s that, even if you remember exactly what was said and done, you can always pretend you haven’t the faintest idea. You thought about how to say it – that’s how you always were. I remember the class we took together on early Christianity, before we knew each other, and being fascinated by the precision of every phrase you said. You were not the kind of person that made mistakes, I thought. “Last night,” you said, “as I was trying to get you into bed you kept crying and telling me to stop being mean to you…” “I know, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I thought that…” “No, that was fine. I mean, it was really fucking annoying, but it was fine, you were drunk,” you said, closing your book quietly, as if you thought I wouldn’t notice, “but you kept asking me why I hate you,” you chewed the inside of 82
your cheek, and you looked genuinely hurt. I think that was maybe the first moment – nearly four years in – when I realized I had the power to hurt you. “I don’t hate you, Brian.” “I know,” I set the cereal bowl on the floor and tried to forget about it, even though I didn’t want to have this conversation, and I really wanted to have that cereal, “I don’t know why I said that, I’m sorry, I was drunk. I know you don’t hate me.” “Yeah…” you looked away from me and at an empty space on the wall where just the day before you had said you wanted to hang the only painting we owned—the one your parents had given you for Christmas. “When we first started dating, you always made jokes about how I scared you or intimidated you, and it was kind of cute, but I am really glad you grew out of that,” your eyes flicked back to my face, “and when things like last night happen it makes me worry that deep down that’s still how you see me, and still how you see yourself, and that’s just not how I want things to be.” “I know,” I said, “I promise that’s not how things are going to be.” And that was that. We moved on. That night was mostly forgotten about, only coming up as your contribution at dinner parties when people reminisced of blacked out nights and hungover days. “That’s how you know she loves you,” people would say, “there’s no way I’m brushing my boyfriend’s teeth for him.” And they were right. But there was something about that night, the humiliation of it, that convinced me that, no matter how much you wanted me to be, I would never allow myself to be your equal, and I would never forgive you for it. I’d never forgive you for a lot of things. I’d never forgive you for the moment, a few years later, when I got laid off and had to ask you if we could afford it anytime I needed to buy something. I certainly never forgave you when, soon after I got a new, worse job you asked me if it bothered me that you made so much more money than me, and I said “no, of course not, why would that bother me?” 83
even though you never would have asked the question unless you knew for sure that it most definitely did. I’d never forgive you for when—after Joseph’s drinking finally went too far, and I finally convinced him to get help— you asked me if I thought that maybe I, too, needed therapy. Your mother died barely two months ago, you said, and I know you think you’re handling it well, but you’re not, Brian, you’re just not. I know, I know, I said, but I really am trying and I just don’t think therapy will help that much. Why do you think it will help Joseph, but not you? You know that therapy works, Brian. Because Joseph has actual, deep-seated problems. My mom died, and it sucks, and I miss her, but people die, Julia, it happens, and I’ll be fine. You have actual, deep-seated problems, Brian. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know if it’s anxiety or depression or something else, but you have something, Brian. It’s always been there and you need to talk to someone. I’d never forgive you for when, finally, you agreed to at least look into adoption, and you tried to want kids, but just before we were ready to submit the paperwork you broke down and said you couldn’t, you just couldn’t, and you sat in our living room and cried for just the second time I’d ever seen you cry, and the first time had been just after your sister got into an car crash, and you weren’t sure if she was going to make it. It had nothing to do with me. “I’m so sorry,” you said as I held you and tried to care enough about you in that moment to comfort you, “I’m so sorry, I want you to have this, but I just can’t do it. I can’t do it, and I want us to work, but I can’t give this to you, Brian. I’ve told you from day one, I just can’t give this to you.” You said that you wanted me to have what I wanted in life, and that if I needed to move on, to find somebody who wanted the same things as me, that you’d understand if I pursued that. I’ll never forgive that, never forgive you for suggesting I leave, no matter how right you were. And I’ll never forgive you for leaving now, no matter how right you are. I get out of bed—I’m not going to sleep tonight, who 84
would?—and I head downstairs. Our house is huge, too huge for a house with no children in it. We bought it from your parents after your father retired and decided he wanted to move to California, and I laugh to myself as I realize there’s no way in hell I’m winning it in the divorce. Maybe I’ll get the TV, you never liked it much, anyway. I grab a beer from the fridge—I have to go down two flights of stairs and through three different rooms to even get to the kitchen—and head to the back porch. The house is on a mountain, and the porch looks out over the valley below. We’re just fifteen minutes from town, but you’d never guess it. It feels like the middle of nowhere, and I feel entirely alone. The first time I saw this porch—your parents always visited us, as our relationship had never been serious enough in college for me to go with you on break, and in the years after you were always too busy to really go anywhere, and the few vacations you had you wanted to actually go places you’d never been—was just a few weeks after we got engaged. Your parents paid for us to fly out, and we spent the weekend there and had a party with them and all of your old, deeply southern—plantation-owner southern—relatives. The whole weekend was my personal hell—I’m not sure how many times I had to repeat that I was trained as an engineer but worked in sales—but the food was, as always, good (or at least, the barbeque was. You had become a vegetarian a little bit before, and had maybe a worse night than I did). It got late—it was just after ten, but they were old people—and most of the guests had gone when you found me out there. I had yet to see the porch. I hated most of the house—it made me feel small—but I immediately loved this porch. Your parents had such a cold decorative style, full of greys and blacks and chairs that looked like they came out of 1960s sci-fi movies, but the porch was old, brown wood and hand-carved furniture. It was the first time I’d felt comfortable all weekend, and, being this high up, looking out over all the farmhouses and small towns glittering like the whole valley was a lake reflecting back the stars in the sky, made me feel like I could touch God. We didn’t have 85
views like this in Wisconsin. “You’ve always looked so good on a porch,” you said. I still have no idea what the hell that meant—maybe porches made me look contemplative or something. You came up beside me and handed me a glass of champagne. You were drinking a whiskey sour, and wearing a yellow sundress, which I thought was funny. You always wore pants, always—I joked that you’d wear pants to our wedding—but in all the pictures I saw of you in high school, and whenever your parents visited, you were skirts and sundresses, and it made me laugh. “How’s Uncle Charlie?” I said. He’d had a few too many, and kept asking extremely uncomfortable questions about “your oriental friend,” Marley. “He’s okay, mom called him a cab,” you said, and sat down on one of the cushioned chairs right by me. “He left his keys here; maybe we can take the Lexus for a ride tomorrow.” “Uncle Charlie seems like the kind of guy who keeps a gun in his Porsche just in case somebody steals his Lexus,” I said. “Uncle Charlie can barely see well enough to drive that Lexus, much less shoot a gun.” I sat down beside you. We held hands, loosely, and put our feet up on the footrests. We sat there for a long time, breathing in the very un-Chicago-like air. You looked beautiful. Halfway through my champagne I decided it was time somebody said something, so I did. “Why do you want to marry me?” I asked. You laughed, and looked at me, smiling at me with your perfect could-afford-braces when-you-were-young teeth. “What do you mean?” I shrugged. “Why do you want to marry me?” Your hand slipped out of mine and you rested it on your chest as you thought. “Because you’re gentle,” you finally said. “Alright,” I said, “I guess it’s my turn to ask ‘what do you mean?’” It was also your turn to shrug. You spoke slowly, like always. Always so careful. “I grew up around a lot of men who 86
were the furthest thing from gentle,” you said. I thought of Uncle Charlie, the way he always leaned in so close to whoever he was speaking to, always put his hands on their shoulder and never took it off, how his wife never seemed to speak when he was in the room. I thought of your father, how he never seemed to smile unless it was a joke at another’s expense, how for some reason you felt the need to wear sundresses around him. “And, before I met you, I dated a lot of guys who were far from gentle. And I just couldn’t marry somebody who isn’t gentle.” “Okay,” I said, taking your hand again, “but how am I gentle?” You smiled, and your eyes flicked up to the sky, then you turned and faced me. Your eyes glittered like the farmhouses below. “It’s just your presence. You just calm people. Like when Carter cheated on Marley, the way you handled that when I had no idea what to do,” you rubbed my thumb with yours, “there’s just nobody I know who has a presence like yours.” That night, with Marley, couldn’t have happened more than three weeks after our apartment-warming party. She showed up unannounced and in tears—which, to be fair, wouldn’t be the first time Marley showed up somewhere unannounced and in tears—and she sat on our red futon, the one that is now in our living room and which we’d gotten from Ikea to replace the Goodwill couch. You sat beside her, awkwardly rubbing her shoulder and telling her that she should be glad that he cheated on her, that you never liked him anyway, that you thought he was manipulative, that men are trash. It didn’t help much, and she kept crying. I was sitting in a chair, right by the futon, unsure what to do with myself, but feeling like it would be inappropriate to head to our room. She looked at me accusingly, “Why are men like this?” she said. I looked at you, not sure what to say, and you looked back at me with even less of an idea. “Because we’re constitutionally incapable of knowing a 87
good thing when we have it,” I said. She laughed. A lot. I didn’t think it was that funny—I was just trying to say something that a knowing, wise character in a movie would say, but it worked a little, and we spent the night eating Chinese food and bingeing the Bachelor. I had had no idea that night made such an impression on you— I’d almost entirely forgotten about it until you brought it up, all those years later. “Okay,” you said, “your turn. Why do you want to marry me?” “Because you’re going to inherit this fucking porch,” I said. You threw my hand from yours and told me to shut up. “No, that’s not it,” I said, finishing off my glass. “I want to marry you because you make me feel special.” You arched an eyebrow. “I make you feel special?” “Yeah…” I said, “You do. I don’t know how to explain it, entirely. But you’re the most incredible person I’ve ever met, I knew you were the moment I heard you talk. Seriously, you’re just absolutely brilliant and powerful and passionate and so beautiful and you have such a strong sense of justice and,” I looked at you, you were smiling at me quizzically, “I don’t know. Just being around you, the fact that you want to be around me. It makes me feel special.” You stopped smiling, for just a moment, and you looked vaguely concerned. You smiled again, giggled, and took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “Alright,” you said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I said. I was right. I don’t know.
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Isolated Rachael Perrota Charcoal, Acrylic Paint, and Multi-Media on Canvas 89
The Opera Moon Josh Lipsey Photography 90
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top surgery Zoe Pehrson
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In memory of Jude Maloney My gender is against the law // But so was your God – Christopher Soto The way he rolled out of the emergency room Was like leaving a tomb for daylight See the gauze on his chest, smell the bandages Hear the recognition as they are recovered Like old dead scrolls Lost to diligent geology How often are girls with dicks Forced into sex work Too often I am Mary Magdalene Waiting outside St. Thomas for my brother In every respect I am not the brave onlooker I will not tell you the waiting room was full Will not say his parents came to visit Father absent as a death For all the wailing and gnashing Of teeth, not one among them listened Well I said I’ll suck a billion dicks If you can have your family back and He said Here are my sisters And brothers and queer relations And he said Feel the scars on my chest And we were together there a while longer 93
Feeling Harmony in the Forest Asya Azkin Collage 94
Throwing Hands Brigitte Jia Ink on drawing paper 95
asphyx Ayana Wilson Award Winner in Prose
“That’s another one,” Annette summarized, turning off the television. “I’m getting damned tired of that news. Ain’t none of it ever good.” “Another brown boy gone. Disgraceful.” Momma agreed without looking up from her newspaper. “I wonder how long till he’s found. If he’s found, that is,” I said to Annette, since it was clear Momma had only been half listening to the news program. Like Annette, I was tired of hearing the stories about black boys being found strangled to death. The news had taken to naming our problem “The Atlanta Child Murders.” It sounded awful. This time, it had been 9-year-old Yusef Bell, gone missing nearly a month ago. He’d finally been found a few days ago in an abandoned school by a local janitor looking for somewhere to piss. Yusef was the fourth victim in this recent development in Atlanta. Around June, two kids had gone missing just days apart. Then, another one in September. Now it was October, and with 1980 just around the corner, it seemed the New Year would close without an answer to the murders. Annette did not respond. There was silence, ‘cept for the rustling of Momma’s newspapers. Annette headed into the kitchen, and I decided to make like Momma, and pulled a book out of my bag. It was Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I felt ashamed for never having heard of it till a month ago, picking up the kids from school from Diane, one of the other moms. It was bent up and torn up, having passed hands at least four times, and having survived at least four households, each with its own herd of rowdy children. I cherished it, even though it wasn’t mine. A book by 96
xiation a black woman like myself. I worked my way through it slowly, because Diane had told me it was a beautiful and complex book, using those words exactly. I reread pages and passages, trying to make sure I understood it all. I still was not sure that I did. We existed that way for a while, Momma and me reading, sitting on the ugly brown furniture of her living room, with Annette making herself busy in the kitchen. Every once in a while, something would bang in the kitchen, but it was otherwise quiet, till the children came running into the living room. “Don’t you run around my momma’s house like that!” Annette yelled from the kitchen as they ran past her. “You know better than that,” she fussed, more to herself than them. They had been running to me, so she was not too concerned with them. “What’s going on, Danny?” I asked my son, who was holding a hand to his head. “Eddie hit me!” my boy wailed, hand still to his head. I pursed my lips. It was not anything out of the ordinary for the boys to rough each other up. Danny was only two years younger than Eddie, and they were close enough in size where Michael and I felt comfortable letting them wrestle. Unsurprisingly, Eddie had disappeared to the kitchen to hide with his own mom. I reached out my arm and pulled Danny in. I pulled his hand off his wound to take a look at it, but there was nothing there but his curly brown hair. I kissed the spot anyway. “Danny, Danny.” I kissed his forehead. “You’re alright.” 97
~ When I returned home from the family dinner, Michael and I had our usual evening talk. How was his day, how was mine. I felt uncomfortable, I told him, at dinner tonight. Maybe Eddie was getting too rough with our Danny. “But you checked his head and saw nothing?” He asked from the freshly made bed, laying back on the smoothly laid comforter set. His creamy skin looked nice against the dull yellow and pink blanket. If my mother cared to look at him, she might say they were his colors. I had never been good at identifying such things. “I checked the spot on his head, saw nothing.” I clarified, since checking one spot was not the same as checking his whole head. I folded one of his shirts and placed it into the open drawer. “Well, you checked the spot, and there was nothing. I’m sure Daniel will be fine. Boys just play rough.” “And what about Annette?” I readdressed a discomfort I’d expressed to Michael several times over. “She would hardly talk to me over dinner.” I paused, placing his shirt under my chin to fold. With it safely tucked away in the drawer, I continued. “When I got there, we barely talked. She turned on the news program, and I thought, here it is, I might get to bond with my sister. And she turned it off, and barely spoke to me, save to say she thought the potatoes I’d brought were better than the mac and cheese I’d brought last Sunday.” Momma had always been better at keeping her dislike for Michael aimed at Michael. Annette made me and Danny her targets too. Ever since the news that prefaced our weekly dinners became filled with stories of missing and murdered black boys, she’d been particularly venomous. “Well, there’s your improvement, Brenda. She liked your cooking.” I turned from the laundry to see that Michael was now looking at me with wide blue eyes, giving me a funny thumbs up. I tossed the shirt I had picked up back into the laundry basket and climbed into the bed. “No, she only said that it was 98
better than what I made last week.” I lay on my back next to him, staring at the ceiling. “She never said she liked it.” ~ At work the next day, the phones were buzzing. As one of three secretaries at my station, and one of two competent ones, I was having a tiring day of taking nonsense tips from everybody who thought they knew anything in the Eric Middlebrooks case. Everybody and their mother had claimed to see him walking here or there with so and so, but of course, all who seemed eager to give tips were equally eager to know what rewards we were offering for information. “We’re not offering any rewards at this time, sir.” If the caller didn’t hang up right then, they hung up shortly after. I’d been mulling over the day’s lack of success over lunch in the break room when one of my many bosses came in. I stood as he entered, “Corporal.” “Ma’am.” He tipped his hat. As a note taker, I had no official police ranking. I answered phones and passed along messages and tips. Work our men were too busy to do in our wonderful growing metropolis, as Michael had called it. When I’d been hired, I’d been told that our city was growing too busy and was outgrowing APD. These past several months with the child murders catastrophe had convinced me they were right. Even if half the tips I got were useless, I doubted without Grace, Debbie and me, the APD would have the numbers to keep the phone lines answered and receive tips. I remained standing. “Sir, today...” I paused. A chance to speak to someone in charge was rare. I hadn’t thought I would get a chance to speak to the Corporal today, and so I hadn’t prepared what I was going to say. “A lot of the callers I got today offered information on the Eric Middlebrooks case, but they all want rewards. Could we scrape together the money for one? We might get more tips.” He grunted over the coffee maker. He was a tall and large man. “More tips don’t mean good tips. And the Middlebrooks case-” he grunted and paused “-we found him. Found him and his bicycle behind one of the bars. Poor fucker had 99
been stabbed to death. Not even suffocated like the others.” Walking out of the breakroom he called back to me. “Bring that coffee to me when it’s finished.” Michael never liked the idea of me bringing the men their coffee, fetching files for them or anything else of the like. I’d asked him about it, and he said it was too much like wifework. To me, it was too much like slave-work. But I was being paid, so I had stopped complaining about it a long time ago. Though sometimes I wondered if where Michael worked, the woman secretaries brought him his coffee, and any phone messages as well. I wondered if any of them looked more like him, with pale skin instead of brown skin, and thin straight hair instead of thick and tight like mine. I didn’t worry about it today though. I was far more concerned with when the next black child would go missing, and if we would find him alive, instead of dead behind some bar. ~ That night, I shared my concern with Michael. “This is the seventh child, Michael.” I whispered on his chest as we fell asleep. “I’m scared.” I heard him deeply breathe in, then out. His hand ran back and forth over my shoulder, in a soothing way. “Don’t worry, Brenda. Those things...Danny will be okay.” I stayed awake worrying for the rest of the night anyway. ~ That Saturday, I went to drop Danny off at a friend’s house. I was surprised to see other mothers gathered in the house’s living room. It was as Annette had described to me from picking up the boys at school. Mothers had become increasingly nervous letting their kids do things they’d been doing all their lives, walking to and from school, walking to a friend’s house. Now, Annette told me over Sunday dinner, the lawn of the school had plenty of moms waiting to pick their children up from school to walk home together. After giving Danny a kiss on his forehead and watching him run to the back of the house to join his other friends, I sat 100
down on the broken-in sofa next to the other moms. It was stuffy, and other moms were fanning their faces and ‘fros with BET magazines and scrap paper. As soon as Danny was out of sight, conversation resumed. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do with school ending,” one of the moms started. When no one followed her comment, she continued. “The kids… in the summer, they play outside all day, ripe for picking, if someone were after them.” “Well, someone is after ‘em. That much is clear.” “And ain’t no police officers doing anything about it either. It’s all clear as day.” Another joined in, followed by a chorus of agreeing gestures and sounds. “You know, I stay home with my own boys,” Louise spoke up. “I’d be willing to hold on to you all’s during the day, so long as y’all pay me to do so. Not too much of course. Just a little something for me to keep my eyes on ‘em, make sure don’t no men come chasing after ‘em.” I tried to hide my horror. To see the murder of young men as an opportunity for profit… was beyond any of the horrors I dealt with in the police station. Besides, what safer was her house than mine? How did I know she wasn’t using this as an opportunity to get more access to more boys? “So long as they stay together, they should be fine.” I didn’t join in on the conversation, since I didn’t want to scare anyone any further. But I was still worried. Even after playing together all day, each kid had to go their own way to walk home eventually. I felt anxiety rising in my chest, and a burning in my ears. It was May, and summer was just around the corner. ~ Summer came and claimed five more boys. I kept Danny at home with Annette, who herself charged a small fee, and also required me to send Danny with his lunch already made and picked him up no later than sundown. It was just as well, I thought. I didn’t want Danny walking home after sundown with or without me. I was short, and of slight build. If anyone was after Danny, there would be 101
little I could do to stop them. Besides, word around the station had been that two of the children gone missing over the summer had been taken by two men, not just one. That’s what I could get from listening to the task force detectives anyway. Few of them talked to me, unless necessary, but I was good at getting information indirectly. ~ “Well, we’ve got a lot of lines in the water just now,” the first police officer said to the other before taking another bite of his burger. “And they’re each pulling in different directions, too, I heard.” The second took a break from his cigarette to sip his coffee. “I’m glad they didn’t put me on that case. I wouldn’t want to touch it with a goddamn ten-foot pole.” “I’m surprised they didn’t put you on it myself. We’ve got recruits doing half the work around here, seems like we could use some more officers. But if that new black mayor wants to prove he can find those black kids, he’s gonna have to give us more money to do more work.” He sipped his own drink through his straw. Sounded like a shake. “But what do I know.” “Yeah, what do y’all know? I heard there’s been rumors about some house.” My heart almost came to a stop. For all the mindless conversation I had sat in on during my lunch breaks, this seemed to be something of importance. Had there been real progression on the case? I stopped chewing on my own homemade sandwich, not wanting them to suddenly remember I was here. It had taken no less than a year from the officers around here to get used to a colored woman working in the station, walking the halls, eating in the breakroom. In that time, they’d gone from being over aware of my presence, to ignoring it all together. Being invisible wasn’t ideal, but it felt a great deal better than feeling the eyes watching you every time you entered or exited a room. I quietly swallowed the mush in my mouth. I didn’t 102
want them uncomfortable. I may not have been a detective, or even an official officer like the rest of them around here, but I knew uncomfortable men didn’t talk. “Yeah,” the first officer belched. “Apparently some of the boys were known to frequent two of the houses in their neighborhood. A bunch of ‘em were seen hanging out there together too. FBI are thinking this is where their guy hunts ‘em down.” “They’re still thinking it’s one guy?” “One black guy.” He paused. “So says their new voodoo mind magic.” I could just about see the mocking fall off his lips. This wasn’t the first conversation I overheard where APD questioned the methods of the FBI’s “profilers.” The second officer laughed. “Does a black guy own the houses?” “Abandoned.” He stuffed a fry in his mouth with little more than a shrug. The second officer seemed to think it over. “They sending you over to look at ‘em?” “Hell no. Pointless sending anymore white officers in. And those are the only kind of officers we got. Blacks don’t trust each other, and they sure as hell don’t trust us. FBI just said they’re looking into it from afar. That’s all.” ~ At 10:22 am on October 13, there was an explosion at one of the local day cares in a black neighborhood. It killed four boys and one teacher. It injured six others. The Mayor was quick to come out and determine the incident an accident. According to his press release, an old boiler exploded. According to black mothers, who were already terrified from the Atlanta Child Murders, this was another act of terrorism by the Klan. They attacked our children on the street, now they attacked them in daycare. They wanted us terrified, and we were. The police came in to shut down dissent, reinforcing the Mayor’s account of events. Of course, this only added fuel to the fire. The next day, I woke up, and for the first time, did not want to go to work. Not because I was tired. I could always overcome being tired if it meant going in to have an impactful 103
day at work doing what mattered. But on that day, I dreaded waking up and putting on my uniform. I felt ashamed to be part of the very institution that was failing my community, perhaps intentionally. Of course, I eventually gathered the resolve to go to work. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. As a black woman, the only real options for work were government institutions, forced to at least try to counteract discrimination in hiring practices. I was lucky enough to have snagged a job at a police station, where I could be part of a meaningful bigger picture. Even with that, though, I knew I wasn’t a typical police officer. I was a black woman, and a clerk. I had limited… perhaps nonexistent influence in the station. But for years, I’d taken pride in working there and being part of something big and meaningful. Today, that was missing. ~ Halloween came around, and Michael and I had a long talk about whether Danny was to go trick-or-treating that year. I was strongly against him going, Halloween seemed to be the perfect time for boys to get snatched. There would be plenty for anyone to choose from, and nobody would be too surprised to hear a young kid scream. Michael, of course, was of the opinion that there was strength in numbers. In general, like the other fathers in the neighborhood, Michael didn’t seem too much concerned. In the end, Danny was allowed to go with the other kids, but was given strict instructions to return home by nine. When nine-thirty had passed, and Danny did not show up, I began to get concerned, though Michael thought I was overreacting. At ten, I slipped out of the kitchen, picked up my jacket off the coat rack, and slid out the front door while Michael dozed off in bed. The television was off, but I could hear Monica Kaufman’s familiar voice asking me as she did every night before the 11 pm news on Channel 2, “It’s 10 pm, do you know where your children are?” Because I had no real idea where he had been planning to go with his friends, I wandered the dark streets with no 104
sense of direction but hoping to find Danny on his way back home. I’d sent him out in a group of kids, hoping it would increase his chances of making it home safely. Now I was wishing I hadn’t sent him out at all. At ten thirty, after checking multiple groups of roaming kids for Danny and finding neither him nor anyone who had seen him, the gravity of the situation began to weigh on me. My heart was beating so fast it felt doomed to collapse and take me with it. I felt the shaking in my knees and felt like I might fall to the ground in terror for my child. But I was a mother, so I couldn’t. With one steadying breath, I hurried home to alert Michael that I had not found him, that Danny was missing, and that we needed to call the police. I passed a group of bat patrols on my way back, but it did little to comfort me on Danny’s situation. The bat patrol, a group of wary moms with bats, had initially formed in reaction to the child murders, and carried bats to escort children to and fro in the dark. But the bat patrol was rumored to carry guns too and shoot anyone they deemed suspicious. When I saw that the group of kids they were escorting home did not have Danny in it, my heartbeat again quickened, again threatened to bring me to my knees on the cold street. I only hoped that he, best case, was lost, and not kidnapped and murdered, lying behind a bar somewhere waiting to be found. My shaky hands fumbled with the lock on the door when I got home. After managing to fit the key in the lock and get it turned, I opened the door to find Danny on the couch watching the television. I closed the door behind me and slid down to the ground in relief. ~ In December, the cold finally got to Annette, and I was sent to pick up our boys from school myself. Michael had offered, but I felt a maternal obligation to do it myself. Even with the chill, there were plenty of mothers standing outside waiting for their children to come running out of the 105
school. With it being early December, no snow had touched the ground yet, it wasn’t as cold as it would get, thankfully. I hoped that the FBI would catch the man before January. We’d had a bad snowstorm seven years ago back in ‘73, and I would’ve hated for another to come and interrupt their investigations. I saw two familiar figures huddled together, and recognized them as Diane and Wanda, the mothers to two friends of Danny. I caught them in the middle of the conversation. “Well, I heard they brought the FBI in not too long ago.” Wanda sucked her teeth. “Well, I hope whoever it is in charge catches whoever’s doing it soon. It’s getting cold out here. And we’re up to damn near twenty children now. Can hardly leave the children to walk themselves home with the numbers growing like that.” “It’s a real shame what’s happening to our boys,” I joined in, feeling on safe ground talking about the same concerns that filled my days. “Our boys?” Diane looked horrified. Wanda next to her kept her look of disgust to herself, not bothering to face me. “The Klan is taking black boys, Brenda. I’m sure you and yours will be fine.” “This time,” Wanda murmured. “They’re saying there’s no sign of the Klan having any part. Truth is, they’ve got a lot of lines in the water just now. No mention of any of ‘em pointing to them.” I spent a lot of conversations correcting the rampant spread misinformation within the black community. With black mothers in particular. Some seemed to appreciate what I was saying, appreciate having an insider's view of the facts. Others seemed annoyed that I was disagreeing with their own theories of the case. It only added to the disdain they already felt for my white husband and my work in the white police station. It was hard for me to ignore what felt so much like a threat coming from Wanda. One of the concerns Michael and I had shared most frequently in the early days, was the Klan coming after us. It was a blessing that Michael and I had seem106
ingly been out of the Klan’s interest for the past ten years. I doubted we would pop on their radars so suddenly. But still, there was not a black woman in Atlanta who felt safe from the Klan. Being black, and being women, we were twice the target. As mothers, we were three times that. The Klan did not take lightly of the sin of bringing more black life into the world. For one to throw it in the face of the other was monstrous. To claim being in an interracial marriage made that any better was ridiculous. “Oh really? The white men said that?” She turned to look at me now. “I suppose then that it must be true!” I said nothing. “The white men said that the white men didn’t do it. Color me surprised.” My face burned, and not just from the sting of the cold wind on my cheeks. I grinded my toe in the ground. “My boy is still black. Hangs out with black boys. Goes to school with black boys. He is just as in danger as your black boys.” “I’m sure having a white daddy gets him a little extra security.” “You think the killer is running around with a color swatch? Must be this dark or darker to be killed?” I fired back. “Do you see his daddy? It’s just me out here.” I continued. “And I’m just as scared as you.” I walked away, crossing to the other side of the lawn. “Don’t nobody want her yellow baby.” I heard Wanda spit behind me as I left. ~ Easter was particularly grim. Three black men had gone missing in April alone, and we were less than two weeks in. These bodies piled upon the six that had been discovered in February and March. Children gripped their mothers’ hands walking into the church, but Danny did not grab mine. He was getting tired of the extra security measures I’d been placing on him for nearly the past year, and personally I was tired of enforcing them. But it was what needed to be done. With the three most recent victims being grown men, there was much concern about no one being safe. The target seemed 107
to have shifted from black children to black males in general. Who knew if black women would soon become an acceptable target? ~ Annette turned off the news. “There you go. Wayne Williams.” She sounded as if he was practicing saying the name for future use. I imagined she, along with plenty of other Atlanta mothers, would be saying a lot in the time to come. “They can’t prove he did it,” I frowned, thinking out loud. We’d endured nearly two full years of terror, and after four months and twelve murders, the FBI had decided to stop spinning their wheels and give up. “Well, they’ve got their DNA, and their evidence. Whatever type of science they use. They’ve got the matching rugs and dog hairs.” “But they’re only charging him with two murders.” “They say they’ve got the evidence to put him with at least another ten.” I could hear her buckling down. The frustration in her voice urged me to drop the subject. “Then why didn’t they arrest him for them? And if he did twelve, who did the other sixteen?” Annette, of course, didn’t know. Looming in the back of my mind was the larger national picture. With the attempted murder of Vernon Jordan in Washington D.C., and the .22 caliber killer only recently caught for his serial killings of black men up in New York, there was a large concern that the age-old fears of the black community were coming true. They were trying to kill us. Was Wayne the scapegoat? ~ After building up weeks of confidence, I slipped into the evidence room Thursday on my lunch break. I had questions… some of the other mothers had questions… it was time for me to try and find some answers. It didn’t take any effort at all to find the files I was looking for - only, I hadn’t expected there to be so many boxes of them. Of course, I’d help compile files to get them ready to 108
be sent to the DAs office, but I was still surprised to see exactly how much information we had on the case. I picked the box I wanted off the shelf and sat with it on the cold floor. I began shifting through folders nervously. I found the one with the information from the FBI profiler, John Douglas. Information and theories he’d gathered filled a box on its own. Flipping through and skimming pages… I began to get an understanding of how overwhelming the case had been for the people working on it. Notes showed Douglas’s typed up profiles, scribbled over and corrected, probably by him. His own copies of the individual case files showed the same signs of chaos. Particular words and phrases had been circled, underlined and connected with arrows. The profile seemed to fit Wayne like a glove. The first line read “familiar with the crime scene.” Hand scribbled notes in the margins listed 3 crime scenes where Wayne had worked nearby at some point. He’d done freelance work near where Richardson, Terrell, and Harvey’s bodies were found on Redwine Road. He’d also shot videos where Jeffrey Mathis had been found, and had an assignment on Niskey Lake Road, where Smith and Evan, the first two bodies, had been found in 1979. The profile also said that the killer was likely to be impersonating law enforcement. This wasn’t so much a surprise; I’d heard something like it in a conversation I’d overheard a while ago. Here, it listed that Wayne had been seen driving what the notes called a “detective-looking car” ... and carrying a badge and giving orders to kids. The notes also said that when Wayne’s car was repossessed back in ‘79, that police officers had found a police siren, a police scanner and a headlight equipped with flashers. He’d been arrested for impersonating a police officer a while back, and for unauthorized use of emergency equipment. I wasn’t sure what the last part meant, but it had been underlined, meaning it was significant. My heartbeat was beginning to slow down as I gained confidence in Wayne’s arrest. The profile next listed that “his favorite colors are black, 109
dark blue and brown.” I pursed my lips at this, understanding why police officers were skeptical of using the new profiling technique. How could Douglas know that? The “offender, in all probability is single.” It went on to say that he likely would have difficulty relating to members of the opposite sex and was likely sexually abused as a child. There was a check mark under “single” and “difficulty relating to members of the opposite sex”, both phrases that had been underlined. “Rarely seen with women” and “‘sissy’” were scribbled underneath. Under sexually abused, two question marks. “Between the ages of 25 and 29” was the last bullet point. The number “23” was practically engraved into the page… whoever had taken notes on this page had traced over the number repeatedly. The profile also said the murderer was likely to have been arrested for some violent crimes, grown up in the foster system, and had been sexually abused as a child. Each of these points were left blank, with no extra notes confirming their connection to Wayne. I wondered how important it was that the profile seemed to have been wrong on these counts. I felt a greater sense of relief from the profile. Though I didn’t understand it, Wayne had checked most of the boxes Douglas provided. I continued going through his folder. Another page seemed to be a collection of notes on Wayne, or a different sort of profile. Like the offender profile, this page had phrases underlined. The description of Wayne referenced unbearable financial stress, having failed at one job after the other. It said Wayne was an “angry young man,” hungry for power to mask his own insecurities. I took a deep breath and thought it over. I had my own financial struggles, but it never drove me to kill anyone, much less 28 people. But I supposed some people were just built different. Most damning was the description of Williams’ active recruiting of children. He posted flyers and spoke with children on the street, attempting to build his Gemini band, which he hoped to make into a Jackson 5 of his own. It was suspected this was how he was recruiting children, especially with suspi110
cions raised at a time like this. The next folder I went through included summaries from each of the crime scenes. I flipped past pictures of the crime scene quickly. On Lubie Geter’s file, someone had written “Klan?” Sticking out of the folder were post-it notes that hung off the top of their pages like tabs. The cases of Edward Smith, Angela Lanier, Latonya Wilson and Anthony Carter were marked with these sticky notes, each with a giant “X”. At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but as I flipped through the names and cover pages again and again, I noticed a common thread. Aside from Angela, these were victims where the causes of death were not asphyxiation. Rumor had it, these were going to be considered separately from the rest of the murders. The cases of Eddie Duncan, Larry Rogers, Michael McIntosh, Jimmy Rae Payne, John Porter and Nathaniel Cater, each in their twenties, were flagged with question marks. On Aaron Wyche’s folder, Lubie Geter, Earl Terrell, Patrick Rogers, Aaron Jackson, Alfred Evan, Charles Stephens and Terry Pue’s names were written on the front page. A bracket was placed around them, apparently each of the kids knew each other. “Charles Sanders-- Predator? -- Abandoned house??” was written beneath the bracket. It was apparent Douglas thought that these were separate cases as well, and that Wayne had not killed all of the children. And Douglas had interviewed Son of Sam, Ed Kemper, and, rumor had it, twenty other serial killers. Wouldn’t he know best? I wished I had a moment to talk to him and ask him why he doubted Wayne had murdered certain kids. If he didn’t think Wayne did them, why were they even included in the case? There were plenty of other kids gone missing that were never considered connected to the 28 other kids. Over 60. I had plenty of questions I suspected only he could answer, but he had already flown back to Quantico. ~ Christmas was a difficult time for the family. Wayne Williams’ trial was set to start in just three days, and it was all 111
I could think about over dinner at Momma’s house. It seemed to be on Annette’s mind as well, as she kept eyeing Michael from across the table. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the trial, or because she had not seen him in so long. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d forgotten what he looked like. Momma kept her eyes mostly on her plate, and dinner was mostly silent. Mercifully, Momma had allowed us to play some of the records we’d gotten her for Christmas during the meal. James Brown was singing when Annette seemed to snap. She put her fork down, picked her napkin out of her lap, and wiped the corners of her mouth, slowly, deliberately. In a lot of ways, it felt like a threat. “I guess I’m just wondering why you didn’t think to tell us you were bringing the white man to dinner.” My jaw dropped and I turned to look at Michael. He motioned to Danny. “Hey, go play with Eddie in his room.” The two boys pushed their chairs off from the table and ran out of the room. Like animals, they could probably sense a storm was coming. She sat her elbow on the table and propped her head on her wrist. She was mocking me. “It’s probably because you knew we’d tell you not to bring him.” I rolled my eyes. “Oh please. You know and I know that Momma wouldn’t tell Michael not to come. That’s just you. You’re just bitter.” She let out a short, mocking laugh. “Bitter?” “Bitter that he’s here,” Duh, her eyes seemed to say. The smug look in her eyes pushed me on. “Where is Eddie’s daddy? You judge my decisions all day long. Let’s hear it Annette, do you ever turn that back on yourself? You fucked a loser, and you’re mad I married a white man.” No answer. A sense of victory kept me talking. “Where is your baby daddy? You mad he ain’t here? Go get him. Don’t take it out on Michael and me. And Danny. You pitiful fuck.” I threw my own napkin and pushed my chair away from the table, getting ready to leave. I was already beginning to regret saying such things in front of Momma. She’d always 112
championed a family first motto, and I was spitting on the idea right in front of her face. Her silence in this only added my guilt. “I don’t take it out on Danny.” She said, just as I was starting to get up. “I watched that kid all summer while you were busy at that job of yours, working all day for them officers who don’t give a shit about us!” “Yeah, and you charged me for it too, even though you’re unemployed and didn’t have anything better to do all day. So glad to know I can count on family.” With frustration I got up to leave. Michael rose and stood up with me. While I went to the living room and put on my coat, Michael went to grab Danny from the back of the house. After a few moments, Annette came into the room with me. She addressed me quietly, but with the same intensity as when she’d been yelling earlier. “So what is it? You think you can count on them? On white men and white officers? Hasn’t the past year made you realize? They don’t got our backs, Debra. Why you always got theirs?” I spotted Michael walking with Danny over her shoulder. With Annette physically and metaphorically backing me into a corner, Michael seemed like that much more of a hero. He was much more supportive than Annette had ever been. He was naive, but he was understanding. He loved me. Annette had shown me nothing but distaste for the past twenty years at least. We hadn’t been close since we were girls. I returned her own angry whisper. “You’re wrong. He’s always had my back. It’s you who hasn’t.” I allowed Michael to escort me and Danny out of the house, placing one hand on my lower back and holding Danny’s in the other. On the ride home, I cried. I began to wonder if it was easier to be Michael, and cut off all communications from an unsupportive family, and miss the good parts too. Or if evenings like these were preferable to never seeing Annette again. Much like deliberations on the child murders, there was no satisfying answer. ~ 113
The trial was chaos. Never before had I seen a media circus of this extent, duration, or scope. Wayne was tried and convicted every day in the news. Both the papers and television programs seemed to be hasty to mark Wayne as the monster. According to them, he was our “Atlanta monster.” Fire raged on all sides. Blacks were angry that a black man was on trial for the murders of black children. Many saw it as a cover up attempt by the police and the FBI, both in a hurry to close the case and wipe their hands clean of this whole mess. However, there were others, mostly those who were higher class blacks, “uppity”, if you asked Annette, who thought us “sorry” blacks had better accept the work of the APD and FBI and Wayne as our murderer. Of course, they received generous backing from the white community, from those who even bothered to be informed on the case. Many didn’t. I didn’t have the privilege of being uninformed. The case, and the fire around it, consumed my every day. I found myself debating those who thought it was the Klan and those who thought Wayne did it. There was no evidence that the Klan was involved, but as the trial continued, it was clear they lacked real evidence to convict Wayne. It was possible the biggest crime he’d committed was driving across a bridge on the last night of APD patrols and being around when a trainee heard a splash in the river below. This was enough for APD to form a case around, and they leaned on this incident on the bridge heavily. More heavily, they leaned on what seemed to be the unsuccessful attempts from Wayne to form his Gemini band. Wayne lost his temper one day on the stand, and it sealed his fate. But I was not convinced that he was anything more than a short, eccentric black man, easy for framing. It occurred to me that it was possible, perhaps suggested by the infamous fiber evidence, that Wayne was responsible for some of the murders. I remained unconvinced that he was responsible for nearly as many as the police tried to put on him. ~ 114
The Wayne Williams conviction seemed to be enough for a lot of people. Kids went back to wandering the streets alone with no parental supervision. The bat patrols disbanded. Mothers didn’t walk their kids to school and didn’t wait outside to pick them up. Williams had been convicted back in February. Life in prison for the murder of two adults. The other cases had been legally “attributed” to him, according to the paperwork I had to file. I asked the Sergeant why we didn’t take him to court for these cases, and he muttered something about one life sentence being as good as twelve. He was away, so we didn’t have to worry about him anymore. That was the general consensus. APD moved past the cases of nearly twenty missing kids and seemed to have no intention of looking back. The year and two months the trial took proved to be necessary healing time for me and Annette. Over the months, we occasionally grew comfortable being in Momma’s house at the same time. Momma did little to moderate, but that was fine. We barely talked anyway, so things were pretty much the same as they had been before our Christmas fight. Annette got visibly upset when I discussed the case with Momma, but otherwise things had mellowed out. She and Momma both felt the Wayne conviction was the answer to the community's problems, and felt it was useless to dwell on it and discuss it anymore. In a way I was relieved they found some solace in the conviction of Williams. Had they, like the mothers in my neighborhood, thought the Klan was responsible, they, like the mothers in my neighborhood, probably would’ve stopped talking to me all together. Mothers at Danny’s school finally exhaled, relieved the terror had passed without claiming their kids. We had been the lucky ones. I thought about our circumstances and our community while taking Danny to go play with his friends from school in late May. Though there were plenty of kids at the house, I was the only mother that had chosen to stay with her kid to walk him home. I was probably the only one who’d walked her kid there too. So, it was just me and the mother 115
who lived there, watching the continued protests of the unlucky mothers on the news. After hearing the news anchor interview Camille Bell, who was still pleading for justice for her child, she turned the station to something “more agreeable.” I agreed with her that the circumstances were hardly “agreeable.” Williams was in jail for two murders, and over eighty had gone unsolved. While so many in the black community released their breaths, I held mine, waiting for the other ball to drop, and our mirage of peace and safety to fade. The mothers around me felt comfortable. I, like Camille Bell, Venus Taylor, and Willie May Mathis, continued to feel a deep and unsettling discomfort, distrust and disappointment.
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XO til the death Hermella Kassaye Digital Art 117
Go to the Ground Megan Jordan Acrylic on canvas 118
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Untitled Harrison Smith Photography 120
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the MAN on the TABLE Kirsten Koehler
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The first time I saw him, freshly plastic-unwrapped and silent, His face was hiding. My supervisor said I could leave the room if I felt sick, But I stayed despite the pirouettes in my head. My heart hiccuped and my fingers grew chilly As adrenaline forced me into a full-body jitter. I tried not to think about how stiff his hands would be As I stuffed mine into the pockets of my labcoat. I don’t think he wanted to hide his face, but I suppose he didn’t have Much say in the matter. It was out of respect but nobody gave him The clean casket privacy he deserved. He had opaque plastic, soggy paper towels, And formalin. It was a horrendous perfume, but not the corpse flower’s fault. I tried not to look at him with disgust As I unscrewed the rubber stoppers in his flesh And drained his yellowed embalming fluid. After a while, my hands steadied And they never trembled in front of him again.
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His name was Jacob And if he was standing, he would have towered over me. I was seventeen, just a girl. He was twenty-seven with textbook musculature And a dark mustache (I pulled back the paper towel once). He must’ve been a weightlifter, my supervisor told me. Messy eyebrows, hairy chest, mottled graying skin kissed by Medusa, A tattoo on his forearm, the color of blueberries (How could I think of food?) The ink was a name needled into his bulky arm, Too faded to read. He died of methamphetamine and fentanyl overdose. No ground teeth, no scabbed face. He hadn’t been using it for long. Don’t want to meet him in a dark alley, my supervisor said. Early onset, sudden progression. It had to hurt. At least he didn’t feel it when we took a chisel to his spine. My silver scalpel sunk into pallor mortis, always clean and careful. Jacob had tough skin and the boys standing over my shoulder Were sloppy-bladed and sharp-tongued. It was strange to pity the dead, But if I was the one on the table, I wouldn’t want their hands near me.
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In life, was the man on my dissection table more compassionate than them? It bothers me that I’ll never know. But I’m sure He struck the pit of desperation (those who leave early usually do) And he loved the person whose blurred name Stayed on his arm like a vow. I wondered, still wonder What it would have been like to see him smile, to hear his laugh. I wished I could have been there to hold his hand in his last moments. He did it to himself, my lab partner said, voice colder than Jacob’s blue fingertips. My heart withered. On this old, plywood table lies the man Who was judged, even in death.
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Green City Catherine Sheehan Acrylic 14 x 14 inches 126
Afternoon Bathing in Karesansui (Japanese Rock Garden) Danni Huang Brass, stones, sand, incense sticks 12 x 6 x 8 inches 127
Henrietta Lacks Discovering Her Own Tumor Abigale Harrelson At the mouth of your cervix, a bleeding, purple marble that you discover one night as you take a bath, thievishly locking the door behind you—between your body and your children. You slide into the heat of the water with a deep sigh that swells your lungs. You start to feel the fragile meat of your limbs relax. You spread your legs slowly, much slower than for your faithless husband, whose HPV is the reason that you’ll be dead soon. You touch gently (unlike the man), probing the hunk of offensive flesh, finding it quickly in yourself because it howls: the oozy marble your children can’t play with. That oozy marble your children can’t play with Your quick fingers find it as it howls its offensive message, preaching insult from within you. You’ve been nipped by the scythe, Death summoned by your unfaithful husband, whose carelessness is the reason that soon, the gentle touch of darkness will drown you. Your gentle hand inside yourself portends the moment when the fragile meat of you will loosen its grip and fall into cold sleep, a place your children can’t follow to—yet. Though they’ll listen to your life drain; to Death clearing his throat, not to weep, but for the message from your cervix’s bloody mouth.
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Untitled Kahero Harriott Digital 11 x 13 inches 129
Untitled Harrison Smith Photography 130
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Face Your Problems! Brigitte Jia Ink on drawing paper 132
Time Dilation Hannah Anderson Charcoal 18 x 18 inches 133
Wŏ hái ài ni,
even if I’m an ugly crier Jenny Gao
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As I cut open the neat stitches that held on for years, the nostalgia in the air pools in my lungs. I see Grandma 7 years younger in her reading glasses. I almost don’t recognize her in my flashback since she looked so good. Her younger skin used to be soft and barely creased. Her figure full of health. Her eyes alive again as she searched for the needle in my new dress. She worked a new symmetrical seam by hand, so quiet and grave that I was afraid to touch her. “Why does it matter if it’s perfect, Grandma?” I asked, only thirteen years-old and too impatient to wait on anything. “So you can undo it later,” she said. She did not move her eyes from the needle but arched up a corner of her lip. I scoffed. My washboard chest felt like it would never need the extra fabric. But I was wrong, as I was about most things we disagreed on. Now, I trace over the small gaping holes where thread for the seams had just been. It feels like she was saying, “As you grow, you need to undo your past.” “You need to let go of me.” I put my old dress on, but the buttons pop open over the curve of my bosom. How strange to think that you always want to grow up quicker as a child. Once you’re an adult, you just want to slow time and cling to what’s precious before it’s gone. 135
The next day, I shuffle in my seat in her nursing home’s waiting room, trying to smooth out the wrinkles my dress earned over the years while buried in the darkness of my closet. I hoped wearing it would bring her back to the days when we were happy and together. “She’s ready to see you,” the receptionist says without looking up from her computer spreadsheet. I knock once, twice, then until my knuckles feel raw. The door is cool and silent against my ear. I open it, and her shadow waits for me, stretching diagonally from the opened bathroom across the entryway. “Grandma? I’m here.” I wait with her shadow at the bathroom door. Her agape mouth reminds me of one of those carnival fish trapped in a plastic bag, able to breathe in dirty tap water but still suffocating. She remains a statue, and for a moment, I question if people can die standing up. “Hi Grandma, it’s me.” Her lip quivers soundlessly, swooping up and down like a plane through turbulence. I walk forward to take her outstretched hands. Her skin has thinned down to paper, no longer opaque. It squeezes her dark veins to her viscera like saran wrap. “Do you want to sit down?” I ask. Her feet respond with brisk squeaks on the floor though she stands in place. I rest her on her bed and hold her, afraid that if I let go she’ll disintegrate into the dust particles floating in her room. We listen to the cicadas outside. They scream an old tune that will always make me think of our summers together. Six years ago, we were trapped at home in the Californian summer heat. One day, Grandma was sawing through a watermelon bigger than both of our heads. The red juice spurted across the counter. She put down the cleaver. “Aiya, I hurt so much.” Bouncing her knees up and down, she hit her back with a puckered fist. I grimaced at how fragile she sometimes was, 136
though she intimidated me regardless. I slept in fear since she would sneak into my bedroom and pinch me awake if I had kicked off the blankets, even at age 14. The woman was born in the forceful and dreaded Year of the Tiger, and it showed in her spirit. But her stubbornness brought me comfort, and I couldn’t help but resent her for weakening as my body grew stronger and larger, preparing for a long life without her. As I pondered how life could continue after she was gone, I swung my legs from a tall chair that she used to lift me to. When my toes collided with the wooden table frame, I screamed before the pain came. Grandma stumbled and knocked the cleaver off the counter so we both screamed louder. When I opened my eyes, it was like a murder scene over the floor—watermelon juice splattered everywhere. Everything was silent except for our panting. We checked each other for severed body parts (none, though my toes were bruised), admired the juice art, then started laughing so hard we may as well have crashed into something else. I feel a tug on my shirt. Her skin looks so colorless in the present compared to my memory. “Yes?” Her lip wobbles into a crooked smile, slightly weighed down by a curtain of cheek skin. “Nǐ de yīfú (your dress),” she says staring at my clothes. “Yes… I found it while moving out. I still love it.” She bobs up her head like a turtle and shakes it left to right. Again, her mouth opens to catch air. Wǒ bù míngbái (I don’t understand), she isn’t able to say. “Wǒ hái ài tā (I still love it),” I tell her. “Wǒ hái ài ni (I still love you).” The moment I knew she was the love of my life was after my first school play. So many details still feel so real: the sweaty energy of my second-grade class, the burst of giggles that bubbled up in all the girls backstage, the ever mixing feelings of anxiety, zeal, and smugness that amplified to nauseous 137
states as stage time neared. I had separately invited my divorced parents and every day for two months, I had reminded them. “Look, that’s our daughter!” I wanted them to say, agreeing for once. “That’s our Jenny.” My dad worked 8 AM to 7 PM, occasionally having dinner with me and Grandma. He’d ask me to leave him alone since he was always tired, and I’d play with my food quietly, talking with my imaginary friends. My mom was busy with her new husband and raising my half-brother and five step-siblings, substituting her parenting with different nannies who switched faster than I could remember their names. This play was better than Christmas or my birthday, a chance to finally get what I wanted most: my parents’ attention. The curtains lifted to a shower of camera flashes. I beamed into the light, waiting to hear my name. Waiting to see their faces. My eyes raced across the crowd in an infinite loop, each time trying harder to find my parents, but it was no use. After the play, I sat on the steps, pulling up carpet pieces to seem busy. I couldn’t look up—it was too bright with everyone’s happiness. “Jenny?” I nearly got whiplash from raising my head. “Do you have anyone to pick you up, Jenny?” my teacher asked. “Good job, Jenny.” I turned around to see Grandma. As she thanked my teacher, I wiped my tears and runny nose on her pant leg. She took out a napkin from her purse and squeezed my nose hard. “Okay, that’s enough.” She peered into my face. “You look so ugly crying.” I cried harder, and she laughed. “Bǎobeí (darling), nǐ bùnéng kū (you cannot cry),” she said. I crossed my arms and turned away from her. “No one will want to be around you. I know I’m not who you wanted, but you are a strong girl who will only find love if you don’t cry all the time.” “But that isn’t true, because all the heroines in your Chinese soap operas always end up with handsome men after 138
crying,” I said. Her throaty laugh wrapped tighter around me like velvet. Then she snapped, “Húshuō bà dào (what nonsense),” in a tone that automatically made me sit up straighter. “Méiyǒu rén xǐhuān zìfā de nǚhái (no one likes self-pitying girls), yīnwèi tāmen hěn chǒu (because they are ugly). This is real life, not some TV show.” I looked down at my tissue soaked in watery mucus. “Nǐ shì yīgè piàoliang de nǚhái (and you are a pretty girl). Suǒyǐ qǐlái xiànzài (so stand up right now)!” I was too tired to disobey. At age seven, pouting in her face seemed to exert dominance, though looking back, it had the opposite effect. She grabbed a tissue, pinched my ear with one hand, then my nose using the other holding the paper. “Bié kūle shǎguā (don’t cry anymore, idiot).” Her cold hands felt good against my hot wet cheeks. Her voice sounded fierce, but her eyes were so gentle. “Nǎinai, wǒ ài nǐ (Grandma, I love you),” I say, crying for the first time this year. The woman I hold has regressed into the child I once was as she looks at me with an empty expression. Her protruding bones and loose clothes make her feel like a large, cold puppet. I long to hear her scream at me, to feel her grip around me, to know she is still here and worth loving. I feel a pat on my back. “Wǒ yě ài nǐ, bǎobeí (I also love you, darling).” What sounds like a hundred cicada ticks go by in the time she says these words. “Dànshì nǐ xiànzài hěn chǒu (but right now, you’re so ugly).” The air cools as I process. Suddenly, we laugh at the same time, loud enough to drown out the shrieking cicadas. Water keeps flooding out of me. The sweat, the tears, like a dam has broken in my body, I gasp for air at the top of my lungs. When I catch my breath, I realize Grandma stopped 139
laughing a while ago and has been staring at the wall in front of her. “Grandma?” She doesn’t move her head, but her empty eyes roll to me like heavy marbles. We sit staring at each other like strangers. Her eyebrows fold in the middle with confusion. Her eyes roll back to the wall. It hurts to keep visiting. Time is against us. Her stride is turning into limps, her thoughts into strings of nonsensical mumbling, her warm voice into shivers, her muscles—like those biceps that could lift me up—gone. Yet, I am getting stronger. My strides are springier, my mind is clearer, my voice is steadier. If only I could trade 10 years of my life for hers. They’d be much better spent that way. A decade would be enough for us to turn those daydreams into reality. I could buy our house, get married, and have kids in that span. I smile at the plans we made before her mind started rotting, before I turned 16. It feels like she’s been dead for years, and visiting the shell of her only makes my grief worse. I can’t help but hold on, because I’m more afraid of the pain I’ll feel if I turn my back on the woman who raised me, even if only a fraction of her still is alive. With these monthly visits, I’ll watch from a distance, as grandma must have done when I was growing into my own woman. As I lean over to kiss her goodbye on her forehead as she did on mine for years, I can’t help but think: “Wǒ hái ài ni.”
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Epigenetic Inheritence Carrie Martinez-Schmidt Award Winner in Poetry
I am of the kind born of earth: With exceptional vascularity, we draw life from the barren, conserving the July monsoon with painstaking premeditation, knowing always that water is rarity and knowing always that the root is reaching, every stilt of the maize terribly determined, anchoring itself in desperate sands. This is how we were taught to grow. Sin decir nada, there was the trickling of fiercest wisdom, the filtering in of the prayers uttered by those incarcerated by arbitrary delineations: in the blister of cruelest summer, incantations rolled through the valley; the furor rivaled only by the sudden bruise—the violet of thunder. At once I understood: Every synapse obscured the lobes with instinct, defiled the tender topography of consciousness with shadow: Throngs of muted specters came down from the mountains, came down with the murmur of rain and left me in the gutter. So easily, I could say I inherited the gutter. 141
So easily, we could say that we were left—afraid of our own names, Enucleated. Left with the sockets vacant, streaming after the tyranny of excess, our hands rent with fruitless reap, but tireless, because we have floated in the flood for years. Because when I close these eyes, I see the bones of my brethren reaching from the sulci, from the trenches of war-ravaged mind, like crude, sun-bleached sepulchers— all of these heavy certainties came trickling into a head once filled with dreams, and so easily, I could’ve said I’m incompatible with possibility. But I am of the kind that also knows: El alba nace desde adentro, nascent dawn blooms bravely from within, makes the eyes once hollowed by the throbbing of labor, pulse alight, wink warm like the wicks of the candles at our altars— when our eyes do grow dark, it is because the pupil does not need to be told to dilate when hope necessitates some light. And when the eyes stream and sand inherits wet: earth becomes Mother. She sustains fruits of the hardiest: the bitter pear matures and grows saccharine with spring. Its flesh yields and bleeds sweet; es el sudor de la frente of my grandfather. The cactus flower—the gift of mi Madre and my Father: began with seeds grafted at the root of the aorta and burgeoned into quivering chambers, into two synchronized worlds, worlds that exist in sempiternal conversation, atop the wings of the raven.
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Now, there is the blackbird that thrashes its two wings, frantic against the night that reposes beneath my ribs. There, blackbird longs to dance, to make its ascent into places where day spreads overgrown with sun. There, he wonders why others fly in circles, keen for mere remains, like vultures over violated cityscapes, overgrown with fear. There, within the space where heart should beat, blackbird sings. Since he cannot be heard, he attempts a new language, he drums against the breast until letters begin in the ventricle, distend in the lungs until I breathe in words that crackle on the tongue like firelight: My mouth is triumph incarnate, soy la victoria de nuestros sueños. On some days, dreams are faraway—I close my eyes and see my great grandmother, hemorrhaging desire as she concocts miracles despite the emptiness of the pantry, reconfiguring want into recipe. I see la bienvenida de un héroe: grandfather sits at a modest table— A hero’s homecoming into a house incongruous with the callouses on his palms, like prophecy, ripping through the life line. I open my eyes and it hardly seems memory, hardly registers with the bleariness of heat-stricken mirage, and instead blinds with clarity. On days like today, I wonder if abuela has stopped crying, if any of us ever will. Of all the victories declared, who can say that he has known of one fought for across generations, whose prize was only half-won by the child of the warrior, and not by the warrior herself? And yet the victory, only half-fulfilled, ends at the junction where father and daughter lay detained by premature treaty, facedown in the river.
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Vanishing Natalie Elliott Linoleum print, copper etching 144
Award Winner in Art
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