West 10th no. 1: 2007-2008 by West 10th

2007 - 2008

Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Note

Poetry Jodi Chao

Central Park on a Sunday Afternoon

Colette Becker

To the Former Owner of Outside History

Emily Kropp

Of My Mother

John Kultgen

(Time)lines

Kat Yakubov

Untitled

Marley Lynch

Freshman

Leah Evans

Lit Coals

Natalie DupĂŞcher

When the planes hit, I will

Catherine Cho

Some Other Yesterday

Karen Chien

Dog Dare

Chelsea Adelaine Hassler Go fuck yourself after the beep

Sarah M. Henderson

Ricardo

Joseph B. Calavenna

Steeplechase

Billy Collins, Guest Poet Keats in New York

Oh, My God!

Lex Evan Schoenfeld

Lasagna (The Boy at the Monkey Bars)

Miriam R. Haier

Jimmy Kittrell writes about war

Julia Fincher

Doubt

Lee Patterson

Reflecting Hurricanes

Kat Yakubov

Young Poet

Lauren Amelia Hart

A Letter to Myself in the Future

W.M. Akers

Manhattan at Night,

From a Plane Flying South

Geometry of Hope Nick Micheletti

Mutual Appreciation (Winner)

Patrick Blagrave

Geometry of Hope (Finalist)

Jesse Molli

On White, in Nothing (Finalist)

Alexa Wejko

Hacia la luz (Finalist)

An Interview with Emily Barton

Fiction Harry Leeds

Food Avenue

Ileen Choi

Mighty Morphin’

Galen DeKemper

On Leave

Agnes Petrucione

Pink Snow

Karen Chien

Learning How to Shoot

Megan W. Moore

The Stateline Virtues

Contributors’ Notes

100

106

Editor’s Note For a long time, I didn’t know what I wanted West 10th to be. I always had a clear concept of what it should not be. Not smug, not self-important, not melodramatic. Not whiny, not trite. Above all, not boring. We were imagining the journal’s inaugural issue, sealing the fates of all the West 10ths to come — and instead of a vision, I had a collection of nots. But that all changed when we started to say yes instead of no. Yes to metered rhymes and free verse; yes to a bold design; yes to stories funny and wistful, true-to-life and mystically charged. The pages of West 10th host the work of a freshman poet and a former Poet Laureate. You’ll discover photographs, stories and an interview. Writing from film students and business majors. Among the fantastic incoherence of West 10th, we hope you’ll find something that speaks to you. Because now I realize what I want this journal to be — what I hope you’ll find we’ve created. I never wanted it to be a testament to our talents, a celebration of our glorious words. A literary journal should be a gift. And so we present our eager attempt to capture your attention, to make you laugh, give you some sort of pang, pierce you in some place you once thought was invulnerable. We don’t want West 10th to be admired, we want it to be enjoyed. Many thanks are due: to Deborah Landau, Scott Statland, Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss; to Sam Potts for his brilliant design; to Billy Collins for his guest contribution; to Emily Barton for answering our many questions; to Managing Editor Michelle Budzilowicz, and the rest of the editorial board. And finally, thank you, our reader — always in our thoughts, a factor in all our decisions, you’re as much a part of the creation of West 10th as we are. —Abbey Fenbert

Central Park on a Sunday Afternoon Jodi Chao The sun has everyone outside today, Including myself, sitting in the dewy grass Alongside other city dwellers who have crawled Out of Fifth Avenue high-rise caves, Tempted by the chance of warmth Untainted by steel frames or the shadows of giants. Sparkling yellow blankets and terry-cloth towels Are sprinkled with birthday picnics for newborns, And couples caught in quiet conversation. I begin to think how different life could be If we wore thoughts like T-shirts Or had tickers where our deepest questions Scroll across our chests in vivid neon letters. Today Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m wearing the color of creamy confusion, And passing beneath my collarbone, in hurricane green, Is a stormy brew of questions: Did my great-grandfather sit like me, Under sheltering cypress trees painted on black ink hills, Staring into a sky of milky swirls And think tomorrow held nothing more? Would he believe the age of tank tops and flip-flops? Of underground trains and vertical cities? Or maybe he really could see A time when man would defeat the moon,

CHAO : CENTRAL PARK ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Capturing its mystery and pulling it down to Earth, And even imagine me, Resting beneath the shade of berry trees On the other side of the world, Among shirtless men who leap like tigers After white Frisbees floating through the air, Just out of reach.

To the Former Owner of Outside History Colette Becker I suppose that I should fault myself for not inspecting the book before I put it in my basket; those few dollars I saved are grossly outweighed by the havoc you have wreaked page after page. Your heavy, smudged lead (what penmanship!) crowds and mars the poetry, summarizing each stanza. Even numbering the lines on a particular poem which had a total of eleven. Really! I picture a collection of Shakespearean sonnets on your shelf, each marked with the rhyme scheme. Look, here you have underlined “injury,” and in the margin written “feels bad.” Or where you underlined “tea towel” and added

BECKER : TO THE FORMER OWNER OF OUTSIDE HISTORY

BECKER : TO THE FORMER OWNER OF OUSTIDE HISTORY

not one, but three question marks followed by “just got out of shower!” How on earth can you hope to grasp poetry if you don’t even know what a tea towel is? For all your clumsy script you have forgotten to write just one thing. The inside cover is blank; there is no name. Which is all for the best, really. Otherwise you would be found asphyxiated, your mouth packed with pink erasers.

Of My Mother Emily Kropp I. She wore a clothespin on one ear all day Once numb, she pierced the lobe With a sterile sewing needle That evening In the kitchen lined with yellow ceramics And wildflower watercolors Her mother sobbed, â&#x20AC;&#x153;My daughter is a gypsy!â&#x20AC;? The pot roast was dry The broccoli Sodden and over-salted. II. In a rusted pick-up She drove around Montana High on joints In big sky country Papers and bottles scattered on the bench seat Between her and a friend They haunted empty houses long abandoned Kicking around tin cans And bones Taking notes for the state Coordinates

KROPP : OF MY MOTHER

Dates Times. III. When they were small Dressed in swimsuits And old-fashioned life jackets My mother and her brother and sister Rowed the blue rowboat Into Little Black Silent Turtle nets poised in hand Sunburns on the backs of their necks They took with them a bottle of nail polish To mark the bellies of each catch Before slipping them back under the surface. IV. When my mother is happy She twists her fists in the air And pops one hip Trilling on a note All around the house she has written tiny words: Improvise! Smile! Make fun! She only gets wilder Kinder And more forgiving With each new year.

(Time)lines John Kultgen Suggestions for improvement: Unfamiliar traits A surgeon has scribbled a face that will Make me beautiful, Make me desirable, Make me what society will envy. Erase my father’s protruding nose, That sparked his insecurities Caused all but one girl to reject him. Reduce my grandmother’s bugging eyes How they caught the attention of a soldier, Saved her from a starving country. Shave off my relative’s belly, Which kept him warm through the dark ages, When fire often failed to spark. Straighten my ancestor’s jagged teeth His tribe never felt hunger, His mouth tore through any carnage. Lift my founder’s brow, Furrowed deep to help wipe the water As he rose from a prehistoric sea, Then stepped onto land . . .

KULT GEN : (TIME)LINES

And what Of those to succeed? The knife will not halt My son’s monstrous nose from smelling A Martian plant, With scent somehow light yet bitter. The scalpel cannot cease My grandson’s furrowed brow From shadowing eyes from the sun As he stares out the five-hundredth story window. A surgeon’s lines will Make me lone, Make me without legacy Make me forgettable, Without familiar traits, Suggestions of immortality.

Food Avenue Harry Leeds “Can you list five of your weaknesses?” I sniff my own poo. I fidget when I get bored and can’t control it, did you notice? I am overly sensitive. I am a sucker for Pushkin. I can’t think of a fifth one off the top of my head. “Well, I don’t really know,” I say. “Please list your weaknesses,” he says. “Well, I guess sometimes I get so wrapped up in something, and work too hard on it, I guess.” I pause. “And?” His beard is clearly grown long to cover up his double chin. I feel like if I’d met him in a bar maybe we’d get along okay. “I think sometimes I smell. No really, I smell . . . not good.” He scribbles something down. I can’t wait for my strengths. I get the job anyway. No matter how big the corporation, it seems like everyone has a boss. There’s a CEO and a chairman of the board, and they have to act like they have to answer to the stockholders. But no, if you have that much money and that much power, you can always sell everything you’ve got and turn your back on the world. Me, I work at the Pizza Hut in Target. It’s the first day. You can take the store out of the warehouse, but you can’t take the warehouse out of the store. The ceilings in Target are tall and the air ducts are exposed. Someone spent a lot of money to find out that tall ceilings make people want to shop. I try to feel my way around the kitchen. There’s a 10-foot-long toaster oven, tons of Styrofoam cups and five racks full of frozen dough. There is nothing in the freezer but frozen cookies. There are no ranges, no ovens, no utensils, no plates and only one knife. It’s dull. John comes up to me. “Hey Harry, this is Steve, he’s the team leader of Food Avenue,” John

20 leeds : food avenue

leeds : avenue

tells me. “You mean he’s my boss?” I ask. Yes, okay, hi Steve. Yeah Steve, I really look forward to working with you, too. Apparently Steve’s career at Carvel Ice Cream was cut short so he could be my boss here. Then Denise comes up. Her hair and makeup are overdone to suggest that she knows she’s just turned 30 and is frightened of 40. Real people don’t smile like that. “Hey Harry! I’m Denise. This is the supervisor of Food Avenue, Steve.” I know. “I’m sure his experience working at Carvel will come in handy. He’ll do a great job of leading your fellow Team Members!” Oh, you mean the other workers. Then Dan comes. “Hey Harry! I’m Dan! Have you met Steve and Denise? Sorry, we’re a little short-staffed, so it’ll be just you and Steve working today. I promise we’ll get some more people soon.” Thanks Dan. We stand around for five minutes and I don’t touch anything. This very first shift is for training. “So,” I ask, “What do I do?” Steve explains that the full-time staff makes the pizza and mans the counter, but it’s just him and me today, so I’ll be doing the dishes. Yes, I know, rinse, soak, sanitize, I know how to run a kitchen. But it’s not that simple. There are hundreds of pizza pans that need to be washed, and to make sure the pizzas slide out when they’re done they need to be scrubbed thoroughly. The pans also have a tendency to stick together, so often that you have to smack them hard against the counter so they’ll fall apart. Because of space limitations, they have to be stacked a dozen high in the sink, then broken up so they can be soaked, then sanitized and flash dried. These two pans are stuck together really hard, and I can’t get them apart. I bang and I bang and then stick my nail and half of it snaps right off. Blood runs into the sanitizer. At least it won’t get infected. “Hey Steve, do we have any Band-Aids?” He tells me to be more careful. He tells me that he needs to man the front. I explain that a register isn’t hard to use, I’ll figure it out. He says it’s really complicated. I tell him I really need a Band-Aid. Steve explains that I can’t get one myself because Target is worried I’ll steal them all, so he has to get them. There is a long

leeds : food avenue

line waiting for pizza, and I assure Steve that I can handle it. Steve doesn’t remind me to wear gloves when I serve food or to say good afternoon, but I’m a skilled worker so I do it anyway. The blood doesn’t show up against the tomato sauce, and nobody seems to notice. Steve comes back 15 minutes later and says he couldn’t find a Band-Aid, but the bleeding has mostly stopped. It’s back to doing dishes, and the soap doesn’t burn too bad. “Hey, Harry! How was your first week?” One of my bosses says, I’m not sure which one. Oh wait, it’s a girl, it must be Denise. “Hey Denise, you still owe me that coffee,” says Steve. “Yeah, so anyway, Harry, we’re really sorry but we’re really short-staffed still, so we need you to come in 20 hours this week, and we still need you to keep doing dishes. We’ll give you something better to do soon, in the meantime you’re getting lots of experience, you know, doing dishes.” I can’t come in any more hours, I have two other jobs. She tells me we’ll work something out, and leaves. “So Harry, how’s your finger? Great, so, you know a kitchen is a dangerous place. Heck, when I was young I cut right through my finger. We don’t want any accidents . . . ” I can tell he’s practiced this. The one knife we have is dull, and there are no cutting boards. Three days ago we received a shipment of hot dog buns without slits, and I had to go through and cut them. The knife we have wasn’t serrated, and I squished the buns more than split them in two. In the process, I cut my finger again. “I get it, Steve,” I say. “Well I just don’t want you to get hurt.” You don’t want a lawsuit. It’s good workplace etiquette to equivocate what you really want to say. But everything we mean to say is implicit, so why do we even bother? “Steve, I get it. I’ll be careful. You have more important things to worry about, right? [So get off my back].” He agreed. I did some more dishes. To make the time pass, I have to sing songs in my head. In my head I have perfect pitch and the harmony is always just right. Sometimes I get confused and start to play the bridge where the third verse should be, and

leeds : food avenue

sometimes I forget the words to the bridge, so I just hum along and add words like “baby” where it seems appropriate. Dan comes in. “Hey Harry! We finally found someone to relieve you. This is José, we brought him in from White Plains, he can help you out.” “Hi José,” I say. José just stares at me. I’m not sure whether he understands English or not. I extend my hand, but his blank stare endures, and it is clear that I’m not going to get him to shake. Steve says that with the new relief he needs to do administrative things, so José has to take over pizza-making and manning the counter (even though he doesn’t speak English, although sometimes neither do the “guests”) and I’m stuck doing the dishes again. At Food Avenue, it seems like we’re always running out of things. We run out of hot dog buns or hot dogs (but never both), and we don’t even make the French Fries that appear on the menu. We have one item under a dollar, and it’s popcorn. We are constantly making more of that. Guests complain that popcorn isn’t stacked high enough. We run out of soda and slushy constantly, and when someone spills their drink, I have to clean the sticky residue off the carpet with a wet rag. Someone standing nearby watches me scrub the floor on my hands and knees, smiles, and sips his soda. It’s okay, though, because I’m getting paid. “Steve,” I say. “Where have you been all day? I’ve been here for five hours, and—” “Administrative things,” he tells me. “I was here cleaning the kitchen for two hours this morning because whoever was here last night didn’t clean up properly.” “I was just wondering when I could get off dish duty. I mean, I know how to cook and—” “Well we’ll see. It’s just that you aren’t careful around the kitchen.” “Well I can’t see myself doing just dishes here for much longer.” He pauses for a second and says, “Okay, next week, I’ll have Conrad show you how to make pizzas. How does that sound? Now we need you to keep doing those dishes!”

leeds : food avenue

“Well, I was also wondering if I could get some gloves to do dishes with, my skin is like paper,” I say, and show him. He says he’ll get on it. I asked Steve if I could start making the pizzas (which involves placing them on a conveyor belt toaster) but today we’re up for review, and I’m just so good at cleaning the dishes. We’re so short-staffed, though, that I’ve been running to work the counter when it gets busy, and then running back to the sink. I figured out how to work the register myself. Steve, of course, is absent right before the review, and comes in with Dan. “So, Dan, as you know, we sold more pizzas last week than any other Target in the nation!” Steve says. “Do you want a coffee or something.” “No, Steve, it’s okay. Say Harry, how’re you doing?” “[Why do you even ask when you know I’m just going to say] you know, just doing lots of dishes . . . ” Steven taps me on the back while Dan is distracted and tells me to shelve the drinks. In retail terms, “shelving” means making the selection look pristine by bringing all the Gatorade bottles in the back of the refrigerator up to the front. This is supposed to give the impression that Target never runs out of anything. I run to the storage room to get a case of Gatorade, and hop to the other side of the counter where I have to push through three people to reach the drink case. Yes, it looks a little messy, but we’re busy, what do you expect? Shouldn’t the lack of a product mean it’s so popular that we couldn’t restock it in time? I have to fight through the pizza line to get to the cooler, and I do the best job I can. When I get back Steve says, “Oh, did you count the number of bottles there before you stocked it? We need to make sure nobody is stealing them.” “No, I’ll do it . . . ” “Come on, Harry! Anyway, there’s a pile of dishes.” Steve turns around and smirks towards Dan. Drew, who I know from school, comes up to buy pizza and asks how I am. “I’m pretty, happy, you know, red’s my color,” I tell him and he laughs. He works in the electronics section. He says things are going pretty well

leeds : food avenue

over there. He’s saved up enough money to buy a PSP. With his 10 percent employee discount, it’s only $290. He scares me because he still shamelessly plays Magic cards, but maybe we have more in common than I think. I turn around and I go back to dishes. Conrad’s talking about his car. “This guy sold me a lemon engine! Bullshit. I’ve known him forever and right on the middle of the highway it blows. Lucky I didn’t get killed. Shit, I don’t have any insurance, either,” Conrad says and shakes his head. “My mom warned me about that guy.” “So, I mean, how are you going to afford a new engine?” I ask. “What, you think I’m poor just because I’m black?” asks Conrad. No, that’s not it. Don’t do this Conrad; don’t be that guy. “I think you’re poor because you work at Target,” I say, and think for a second. “You think just because I’m white it means I don’t know what poor people look like?” “All right, I get it,” he says. “Now here’s how to put on the pepperoni.” At the end of the day, they weigh the bag of pepperoni to see if you’ve been eating them. If it’s under a certain weight, you go up for review. The regulation is an average of seven slices per pie. To make a pizza, you have to spray the empty pans with an industrial can that only says oil, then throw on some rock-hard frozen dough. The dough then rises overnight in the pan. There is a special tool to punch down the center, giving an illusion of crust. The material is so artificial, of course, that no true crust would ever form. Then you add regulation amounts of sauce, cheese and toppings, and shove the pizzas back into the fridge until they’re ready to cook. The oven is that 10-foot-long toaster with a conveyor belt that is designed to move a pizza through in just enough time to cook. This is how Pizza Hut Express makes all the food. The breadsticks and the chicken sandwiches are all processed so that they take the same amount of time in the one giant toaster. Donald, who is about 70 and has come out of retirement because he is bored, tells us he doesn’t trust anyone. His kids, he says, don’t call him even though he put them through college on a working-class wage. Nobody appreciates him. He says that the other day he saw a man sprawled out

leeds : food avenue

on the sidewalk with blood running from his head. He said that he just ignored him. If he tried to help and the guy survived, he could get sued for somehow making it worse. If the guy died, he could get sued for killing him. “Well,” I say, “there is a law, the Good Samaritan law, at least in New York State you can’t be tried for attempting to save someone’s life in reasonable terms.” “Bah,” says Donald. “No, he’s right. You can’t be sued for that,” says Conrad. “I’m an EMT, I’m sure of it.” But Donald insists we are just kids and don’t know what we’re talking about. Maybe there’s a reason Donald’s kids don’t call him, and maybe there’s a reason he’s working at the Target Pizza Hut. Me, I need the money. It’s 10 o’clock at night. Because of labor laws regarding minors, all staff under 18 must leave the building by 9:45. I have homework to do. Conrad and Donald’s shift ended at 9:30 and they left us to do all the clean up. Steve has been gone all day, and everything is filthy with pizza sauce. A quiet kid named Nick is working with me. He doesn’t like to talk to me. We know there are clean-up procedures we are supposed to follow and doors we are supposed to lock, but nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody gave us any keys. We are afraid to just leave the kitchen as it is, as we might be reprimanded for not cleaning up properly. Nick says he needs to go home. I tell him I’m not going to be left here alone. We clean up as best we can until 11, and don’t lock up because we can’t. There’s nobody to ask for help. All the administrators are gone for the day, it’s just me and Nick and the overnight warehouse workers. When we’re all ready to go, I see that Nick begins to walk out into the parking lot. He lights a cigarette as he goes and sulks. I offer him a ride, and he just nods and climbs in. I begin to speak, maybe to ask him about his life, but as soon as I vibrate my vocal chords he looks the other way, like he’s embarrassed of himself or me and I can’t tell which one. It’s late and the only sounds outside are barking dogs and crying babies. I drop him off at a

leeds : food avenue

nice apartment building. He doesn’t say thank you and slams the door. He makes his way down the block to the shitty apartment building we passed a minute ago. “Look at this! We’ve sold more pizzas this past weekend than any other Target Pizza Hut for the second week running!” Steve shows us all a sheet with some numbers on it. “I feel like crap,” I say. Steve says I should be proud. “Where are those gloves?” I ask. Steve says that he was unable to get them for me. I buy them myself, but we’re still understaffed so I have to work the register and wash the dishes. It takes too long to rip off those rubber gloves when you’re covered in sanitizer but need to serve a hot dog. Steve tells me that somebody didn’t clean up last night, and I told him that Nick and I were left to do it ourselves and didn’t know the procedure, and that he shouldn’t blame Donald. He says that Donald shouldn’t have left so early, that this isn’t the first time. Steve says he’s going to fire him. Then he asks me to cut open some hot dog buns, but tells me to be really careful when I do it. “If you’re so [fucking] worried about my cutting myself, why don’t you [fucking] do it your [goddamned] self [you asshole]?” I say. Steve doesn’t listen, because Denise passes by and he goes running after her, pretending that he has something important to ask. She’s too smart, though, and keeps walking as though she has somewhere to be. I leave my post at the sink and head right for Human Resources. The HR director, who is the most gentle person working at Target, tells me that they’re really short-staffed and that I should stick around for a bit longer. She says I should tough it out, that they are getting more staff soon and that it’s going to be okay. This woman is so maternal that I take for granted that what she says is true and go back to work. “What the hell happened to your hands?” the dermatologist asks, as she grabs my hand. I went to her so that she could take a look at my acne, but she grabbed my hands right away. “I work as a dishwasher. Well, not actually, but that’s what I do most of the time,” I tell her.

leeds : food avenue

She explains that my hands are completely cut up from being soaked in water, and that I must wear gloves or I’m going to have scars all over my hands. I tell her that I’ll wear gloves from now on. When I get up off the table I collapse on the floor. We take off my shoes and my white socks have big red splotches. Yes, my foot is bleeding. My calluses have grown so thick from standing that when they crack, they crack right down to the flesh. My dermatologist says that my pumice stone isn’t working because the bottom of my foot is too hard. The pumice stone is probably getting shaped by my foot, not the other way around. What I need, says my dermatologist, is this industrial-strength designer wrinkle cream by Merda. I need to rub it on my foot, and after two weeks I can just peel the calluses off. My dermatologist also happens to do Merda’s commercials. She says I can buy what I need at Target. I buy a new chair, because my back is killing me. I buy shampoo, hot chocolate, sunflower seeds, T-shirts and anything my mom asks me to bring home. I buy gas and car insurance so that I can get to work. I buy Advil because my head is killing me. I tried running down to the Super A&P to get Advil once on my break (because I didn’t want to buy it at Target), but I looked ridiculous wearing my red Target T-shirt, black apron and name tag. I leaned against the giant red balls that decorate the entrance in order to catch my breath and thought of how tacky my life was. Now I keep Advil in my pocket because I don’t have time to get it from the back room. The breaks at Target are 15 minutes and it’s all you have for lunch. Nobody can get food that fast; nobody can eat that fast. One time I bought a frozen Stouffer’s dinner from Target, cooked it, ate it and went back to work—and Steve told me I took too long. Instead, I’ve been buying those shitty mini-pizzas. They’re too disgusting to finish. This weekend I’m going to go out to a movie. This weekend maybe I’ll smoke pot or whatever normal people do to relax. In order to do any of this I need money, so I drive to an ATM after work. I check my balance, and I find that I am broke. I don’t have enough money for pot and I don’t have enough money to buy a movie ticket and I’m already revolted by popcorn. All the money I earned at Target, I spent at Target.

leeds : food avenue

Holy shit, I’m a sharecropper. *** “What’s good to eat here?” a guest asks. I think for a second. “Nothing, nothing’s good.” “Huh?” “Get out of here while you still can,” I say forcefully. He nods, he understands, and he turns away from the line. Nick looks at me like I’m stupid. Today is different though, because today I plan on quitting. Somewhere off in the distance, Denise is talking to Steve. I can see her telling him off. He comes up to me. “Hey Harry, I heard you’re quitting, I was just wondering if it was something I did, or some way we can keep you on. I’m sorry you’ve been stuck with dishes, we promise we won’t be understaffed for much longer . . . ” Steve says, but it’s all broken-up-half-sung bridges to me. The world inside my head doesn’t need to hear this. “Steve. I’m sorry. Obviously Target Pizza Hut is not the place for me to work,” I tell him. “Well if you had problems you should have gone to someone!” he says before walking away. I could yell back that there is no union, that I didn’t get overtime or benefits, but it’s not even worth it. How does everyone know I’m going to quit today anyway? Then Denise walks up to me. “Hey Harry! How’s it going? It seems you were thinking of quitting today. If there’s anything we could do to help you stay—” “No, there’s nothing you could have done,” I lie. Do they really need me here that badly? Then Dan comes up to me. “Hey Harry! I heard you were thinking of quitting. If there is anything we could do to help you . . . ” “Dan? Okay. I’m not going to wash [your fucking] dishes anymore. You say that you’re hiring more staff, but people are just quitting [because this

leeds : food avenue

job fucking sucks]. I can’t do it anymore,” I tell him. He seems shocked, like nobody has ever challenged his logic before. He turns around. I go straight for the Human Resources department. Nobody is there and I wait. Finally, the head of HR walks into her office. I follow her, and close the door behind me. “Okay, Janet, what do I have to sign to quit this place?” “What do you mean?” she asks. “Well, [you seem like you may be a nice person, so I’m going to be nice to you] I can’t work here for a single second longer,” I tell her. She slumps in her chair. “So, was school just getting in the way too much?” she asks. “Yeah, that’s it.” She shows me the paper I need to sign and I eagerly do so. She assures me I’ll receive my last paycheck. On the way out the door she says, “Say, Harry, there wasn’t anything we could have done better, was there? Or perhaps someone that didn’t treat you well. Maybe Steve?” She picks up a clipboard, and is ready to write something down. They don’t care that I’m quitting, they just want someone to blame. She’s just being paid to act nice. Would it do any good if I told them something? By the time she can expect an answer, I’m already out the door.

Untitled Kat Yakubov Still the taste of your consumptionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; The wine, the smoke, now on my breath He inhales and mistakes me, This collection of another, for myself.

yakubov : untitled

Freshman Marley Lynch Chameleons run up and down the walls like your words sliding down my body, changing meanings i can’t cling to. Even though i think i’m rounding a corner still i’m not quite following, and my toes nip your heels. Your hands are sticky with beer and guilty intentions i don’t understand, and i don’t want you to color me in. Are we having fun yet? Pound it down and wipe that grimace off, one more sip of how naked we can get. Fun is fun but hiding under my covers i think about forgotten grass stains and wonder, why are you an alien and how do you start to believe in this new language?

32 lynch : freshman

The Geometry of Hope

The Geometry of Hope Creative Writing Prize competition, co-organized by New York University’s Creative Writing Program and Grey Art Gallery, awarded $500 last fall for the best poem or short prose piece written by an NYU undergraduate in response to the exhibition, The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, which was on view at the Grey Art Gallery from September 12 through December 8, 2007. This prize was supported by a generous grant from the Fundación Cisneros. Entries were due on Friday, October 26, 2007, and Creative Writing Program faculty served as judges. A prize reading was held at the Grey Art Gallery on Wednesday, November 28, 2007. Special thanks to Edward J. Sullivan, Dean for the Humanities and Professor of Fine Arts, and, at the Grey Art Gallery, Lynn Gumpert, Director, and Lucy Oakley, Head of Education and Programs, for making this program possible.

G eometry of Hope : W inner

Mutual Appreciation Nick Micheletti “Eh, you’re just a cynic,” Carlos replied. “Altruism is possible, I can prove it.” He had the insistent tone of someone who knew he was wrong but desperately hoped he wasn’t. His interlocutor, Jésus, responded with a shrug, a condescending go ahead and try. “Mutual appreciation.” Carlos stated flatly. Jésus raised an eyebrow. “There’s no other explanation besides altruism.” “Uh—” “No wait, hold on. You see I know what you’re going to say. Like that my wanting to share my work with you is only to serve my own ego, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the desire to share the beauty of some random person’s art with you, for the sole purpose of allowing you to take part in a new pleasure. What do I gain from that?” Jésus bit back immediately. “You are really underestimating the bounds of the human ego, pally. The desire to share your favorite song, book, painting, or whatever with me, or the rest of the world for that matter, is merely a desire to confirm your own belief that you have a cultivated taste. There’s no accounting for taste, but we all want ours counted best. It’s a need to feel special, like everything else we do.” Carlos clenched his jaw, noticeably. Like all philosophical discussions with his friend, this one had turned into an argument, and he was losing as usual, simply because he could not match Jésus cold, disinterested manner. He said, “No, I’ll show you. Come over here.” Carlos stalked off to his side of the studio, motioning for Jésus to follow. Carlos led Jésus to what seemed to Jésus to be a great, solid red mural.

MICHELETTI : MUTUAL APPRECIATION

Jésus had seen him working on this over the last week but could not quite see what was taking so long, what with its seeming simplicity. Jésus stopped short of a fully frontal view of the mural. With a petulant shrug he said, “So what’s this have to do with anything. It’s just red.” Carlos grasped Jésus’ shoulders and shuffled him directly in front of his work. Jésus quickly lost his haughty scowl and forgot the recent contention. He remembered what was so attractive about Carlos. He could manufacture a real-life dream, the kind you had when you were young. As he had stepped in front of the mural, the red gave way to a wonderful spectrum of pastels. He continued to walk along the mural and the spectrum of soft colors followed him like a reflection. Carlos’ mural made it seem that he himself was a giant glass prism and only through him could the light reveal all the lovely colors hidden beneath the oppressive, violent red. He was moved. “This is beautiful,” was all he said. Carlos spoke. “You see, though, people are like this. When you look at them from all the bent angles of pessimism, all you see is a solid color of vulgar self-interest. But when you take the time to look closer, at the true nature a person, you’ll see there is a surprising depth of generosity and concern for others. A colorful goodness about them.” Jésus was pensive, and then said, “You may be right. I admit that you have, eh, redirected my train of thought. But I concede nothing. I have to do some work first.” * * * A day later Jésus called Carlos over to his latest project. As Carlos approached, Jésus said, “Now stop right there, what do you see?” “I see that you have gotten into our wiring again. Now I know why the toaster didn’t work this morning.” Indeed, Jésus had hung short lengths of wire in front of a black screen. Jésus was enthusiastic. “Yes, exactly! Now stand in front of it.” Carlos did so. And he saw that Jésus had actually made a nightmarish

MICHELETTI : MUTUAL APPRECIATION

optical illusion. Viewed head on, the distance between the wires and the screen behind them vanished. His eyes could not seem to comprehend any depth. They were crossing and uncrossing constantly, starting to water. He could not tell whether or not the wires were actually there. He knew they were, but his eyes were only registering wire-sized holes in the black screen. But they were black holes in black. It was incomprehensible, and was giving him vertigo. He knew that Jésus’ wires had, without a doubt, refuted the optimism of his pastels. Jésus prompted, “Now what do you see?” And Carlos replied blankly, “Nothing at all.”

G eometry of Hope : F inalist

Geometry of Hope Patrick Blagrave In art there are no longer observers but participants. The artist does not have the final word. -Jesús Rafael Soto

Hope takes shape by the artist’s hands, bounded by framework on gallery walls and on pages of canvas. By the artist’s hands working shapes like poetry on gallery walls like on pages, canvas— engendered—turns tangible. (It’s working!) Shapes like poetry, alive, lifted above abstract lines, illusions, all the ink’s engendered turns. Palpable: its concrete geometry, bounding out from framework; Hope takes shape.

B L AG R AV E : G E O M E T RY O F H O P E

G eometry of Hope : F inalist

On White, In Nothing Jessamine Molli (inspired by Alfredo Hiltoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Estructura Lineal)

The sun falls away; it tumbles not down, but back. And as it ebbs, the sun escapes me. The horizon is broken; even the vertical lines are allowed, such is the chaos. The world fades as it leaves, becoming nothing, as white is not a color but its absence, which means nothing. And in its wake, which points back at me, I am here, bereft without the horizon as a guide. And the sun looks like little more than a blood-orange speck on white, in nothing.

MOLLI : ON WHITE, IN NOTHING

G eometry of Hope : F inalist

Hacia la luz Alexa Wejko all we have to create are the remains of what has been left behind from before, all raped and broken, a walking burlap sack is beautiful 多que es la realidad? these shapes, they haunt me like bony ghosts of what could have been, our starved patria is fallen, puedo ver todos los colores, the colors (our own blood stains the streets) hacia la luz, miramos we can see it the future has a face hacia la luz, caminamos it has a body we can touch through these bars

WEJKO : HACIA LA LUZ

hacia la luz, corremos vertical lines are no longer our prison hacia la luz, crecemos black and white, red, purple everything is changed We are renewal and We are metal workers, who else could turn scrap into a three-dimensional eruption of life, la Vida y el Triunfo.

WEJKO : HACIA LA LUZ

Lit Coals Leah Evans Cooking beneath the Brooklyn heat On a roof, dirty and worn—with a ladder Reaching downwards into a junk pile— The green blanket underneath us warmed And grew damp with sweat. As arms and chests and tips of noses charred, Sun-kissed and crisping, A furnace moaned behind the skin of my cheeks, You stirred and poked the coals. The late summer had turned balmy And like two prospectors Looking upon fool’s gold, We smiled at the fall.

EVANS : LIT COALS

When the planes hit, I will Natalie Dupêcher After Agi Mishol’s “Red Hail”

Curl into a tight period, rocking against the final letter and first capital, A marble ricocheting around a sentence. Unwrap into a colon for the punctuational future: Sleep inside the curve of a question mark, Nestled against the sloping loop under a same-shaped moon shrapnel. Hunch in the cranny between an exclamation point’s line and dot, Then straighten into its shadow, jump out like its twin And in the whispered gaps between quotation marks, celebrate, Popping the champagne-cork apostrophe. Love like a tilde—these are my undulating hips and tongue, Are you the dash stretching above me? I will bend into a semicolon. Here is my small head, looking out. Here are my kneeling knees. Here I am, begging for the promise of a comma.

DUP

Ê CHER

: W H E N T H E P L A N E S H I T, I W I L L

Some Other Yesterday Catherine Cho Can you remember how we used to hide from the man in the moon? We would run in the church yard with graveyard ghosts laughing we watched our shadows intertwine— you always stepped in mine and pretend we had found shadowland where mothers didn’t drink in the afternoons and dads stayed home. You had curls that threatened to meet the sky eyes of shale and dimples that creased deep— made an easy smile as though you didn’t hear the way your mother slurred her words or the call of the planes your dad flew over the Atlantic and how some whispered it was a pity your luck was spent. I couldn’t see the tunnels in your eyes then And when we all could— You were no longer the boy who dreamed and greased his hair like Elvis and I’d forgotten about shadowland and never thought to pull you back.

cho : some other yesterday

They said you cried when you woke, deep shudders at the folded map of bones And they turned away while you screamed the dust off the moon. Whirl with me. Chasing—we are laughing it’s not too late— try to remember, I wonder if you can hear me through the taste of the dark.

Mighty Morphin’ Ileen Choi In fourth grade, my class drew pictures of our favorite animals for an open house poster display. Leonard Hannon, the blonde Catholic boy who sat in my table group, drew a triceratops. I never understood why he took it so hard when I told him they were extinct. Everyone knows that the triceratops is extinct. It’s a scientific fact. Leonard Hannon cried for 35 minutes straight over an animal that became extinct 35 million years ago, and I got detention. After I vented my frustration through the science fair by submitting a diorama of a triceratops family sinking tragically into a tar pit, Leonard’s mother demanded he be switched to a different class, and I received a full week of detention. And so, I met Kenji Watanabe. It was on a Wednesday. After my hour of penance was over, I threw my backpack over my shoulder and marched out, silently indignant, past the overweight gym teacher. My prison guard barely looked up from his magazine, which featured an anatomically preposterous blonde woman on the cover. The sky was aflame, orange mixing with purple. The sun was already setting. I walked down the hall, through the eerie gloom that settled just after dismissal. My life was subject to only three rules: Finish all homework before Mother gets home from work, don’t buy anything from the ice cream truck and never use a metal utensil to scoop rice from the rice cooker. Mother didn’t get home from work until 7 p.m., so I headed for the playground to swing for a few minutes. I passed the empty cafeteria, the smell of ketchup and sour milk wafting from the garbage cans into my nose. My stomach grumbled. When I reached the playground, I stopped short. Standing at the top of the slide was Kenji Watanabe, scrawny and fearless, staring motionless at the sky. Kenji had moved to California from Japan in the first week of October. Seated by the bookcase in the corner of our classroom, he paid as little attention to us as we to him, and since his arrival, had made no friends at

choi : mighty morphin ’

all. The only person he acknowledged was the teacher. While he never responded, he seemed to understand what she was saying. As far as anyone could tell, he either couldn’t speak English or was mute. He also did not play kickball or freeze tag, so eventually, we all forgot about him. Kenji and I were the only kids who didn’t get picked up after school, and our lonely paths were now crossing on this playground. I could feel in my chest this was a moment of great fate. I walked over to the slide and tilted my head back to squint at him. “Hey, what are you doing up there?” I noticed he was wearing a Power Rangers T-shirt—Green Ranger. I never understood the point of that character, and preferred all of the other Rangers by far, especially Pink. But to each his own. Kenji remained silently frozen to the slide, ignoring me so completely he could have been a rock. We learned about metaphors just that afternoon, and I briefly imagined Mount Rushmore superimposed on Kenji’s face. “What are you doing up there?” I asked again, and then began climbing up the ladder to where he stood. I moved carefully, in case I should knock him down to shatter against the pavement. Finally, Kenji turned to look at me climbing toward him. He looked annoyed. I paused, letting him get used to my presence. It felt a little like stalking a pigeon. Holding onto the ladder rails, I leaned back and smiled. “I said, what are you doing up there? Why are you still at school? Are you waiting for your mom, because maybe we could walk together if you live near my house? I live three blocks up from the high school . . . ” Kenji let out a quick short breath through his nose, and crossed his arms. I stood my ground, and met his gaze. A staring contest ensued. I won. Reluctantly, he responded, “I don’t need to hold onto the handrails,” and looked down his nose at me. “I can fly.” He turned, and resumed his position staring at the sky. I decided to stick around. It became clear after about an hour that while Kenji knew he could fly, he didn’t know how to fly—a subtle but important distinction. Every day, after dismissal, he stared at the sky from the top of the slide. Every day, I followed him and watched. We never conversed as intimately as we had

choi : mighty morphin ’

that first Wednesday, but I succeeded in carving myself a niche in our relationship. At the very least, I had discovered a blind spot in his antisocial nature. He handed me his backpack before going up the ladder, and after he came down, we walked home together. We would go five blocks before I turned into my driveway, and waved as he continued walking without a backward glance. Once, though, he commented on my Yellow Ranger shirt, which I had already worn three times that week, waiting for him to notice. “Nice shirt,” he said. “Thanks,” I said. Twenty-three days of this went by until something happened. It was a Thursday. After standing still for a solid 20 minutes, Kenji took a step, and flung himself into the sky. It took him almost a second to land with a thud on the rubber mat covering the pavement, and he narrowly missed the end of the steel slide. Our backpacks dropped with my jaw, and I rushed over to him. I didn’t know what to say, so I grabbed his face. His leg looked like it had bent at an awkward angle, but with a grunt he pulled away and sat up. I hovered over him while he caught his breath. “Okay,” he breathed. And for the first time, Kenji looked me in the face, and smiled. He limped all the way home, and I carried his backpack until we reached my house. The next day, he climbed the slide again, and I anxiously waited for him to crash to the earth. He stared at the sky for about 10 seconds before he leaped, and I nearly wet myself. His body followed the predictable arc, and began to fall. But then it seemed as though he had caught a wind current. He hovered briefly, his arms outstretched, and then he began to rise. He rose faster and faster, and he was moving forward and backward. He soared so high that he became a black dot smaller than my bottom front tooth, then he came barreling down to the playground, pulling up just before he embedded us both into the pavement. And I cheered. I whooped, spun around waving my arms like flags, and did cartwheels. Kenji had been right—he just needed to figure out how to fly. Once he got himself in the air, he was a regular Jonathan Livingston Seagull. After an hour of daredevil speed and tricks, he floated down serenely onto the slide. I picked up his backpack, ready to congratulate him and

choi : mighty morphin ’

head home. It had been an eventful day. Kenji squinted at the sun and breathed a deep sigh that seemed to empty his entire chest. He rose into the air again. At that moment, I had nothing to say to him, so I waved goodbye as he flew away without a backward glance. I watched him shrink until he became a dot, a speck, and then there was orange mixing with purple. Leaving his bag at the top of the slide, I picked up my things and walked home. The next few days were chaotic at school. The administration sent home a packet with an article about Kenji’s disappearance, a map of registered sex offenders in the area and a letter to parents: “Talk to your kids about safety and dealing with strangers; offer rides to friends; know where your children are at all times, etc.” After about two weeks, the drama died down, and Kenji’s mother came to pick up his things along with a poster we had made for him. It was green, with signed notes from us and anyone else who felt like it. We pasted on our class photo and drew a heart around his face, since no one had any other pictures of him. The notes were fairly repetitive, and read, “I wish I talked to you/got to know you better,” and “We will always miss you.” His mother moved out of town that week, I think to New Jersey, but before she left she gave me an action figure of the Pink Ranger’s pterodactyl. “He bought it for you,” she said. “Thank you,” I said.

Dog Dare Karen Chien He bit and every pore opened, sighing steam. No problem, he panted, his face shiny as the chili rind I paid him two pennies to eat. Flushed, his soles left behind damp footprints on the tile to the fridge. Wheezed like a parched cat, he asked for the milk, no milk he yowled for an iced salad and opened his mouth as a bowl for brown carrots & limp lettuce his breath burned up. I exchanged the cilantro stalks for his hands and took him weeping to the toothpaste which like a savior I squeezed into his burning mouth. I told his wet eyes: Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the best I can do. A menthol blue seashell floating on a milk-hungry tongue & calves for him to knead until it ended.

chien : dog dare

go fuck yourself after the beep. Chelsea Adelaine Hassler the click click click of callused claws on computers. the ring ring ring with rotaries and rickety robots. the dot dot dot in digitally documented diaries. the beep beep beep from bony beat-down blackberries. the shriek shriek shriek of somebody sick of science.

52 hassler : go fuck yourself after the beep

Ricardo Sarah M. Henderson Ricardo, You wouldn’t have liked the way you looked today because a square bruised head full of concrete doesn’t suit you. You know, Ezra and I were sitting in Sherwood Diner afterwards, asses (and my thighs) stuck to the dirty red vinyl seat booths of youth and I asked him if he remembered that you wanted to be put in the Lake not in the ground into something fluid not stuck in something still. Ricardo, I remember this because: You told me, and I said “Well let’s go swimming.”

henderson : ricardo

On Leave Galen DeKemper He lifted her into his chest for their first embrace in a year. His scent had changed slightly, she noticed, as if dust had become embedded in his skin, and she searched for a hint of his old essence deep in his desert fatigues as he whispered into her ear, “I love you, honey.” There were scenes like this all around them, in the old airplane hangar where the family members met their soldiers who were returning from Iraq. Everyone was hugging someone, and Laura was glad that she had skipped her afternoon classes and driven out to this military building in Queens to meet Mikey. The following afternoon he would fly to their Texas hometown to see his family, so tonight would be their only one together. His tour had been extended and in two weeks he would leave again from his battalion headquarters in Michigan. He continued to hold her tightly as she stood on her tiptoes, just as she had imagined happening. Yet now, with time already running out, she wanted nothing more than to leave the hall so they could start the drive to her father’s lake house upstate. They didn’t know when they would see each other next. She wanted to make tonight count. She led him through the crowd, holding one of his hands, and he followed behind her out to the parking lot. He recognized her red Prius and opened the door for her after she unlocked it with a click on her keychain. “You’re quite the gentleman,” she said, and returned his favor with a kiss. She had intended it as a peck but he intercepted it and she was too willing to open her mouth. She was up against the car while he dropped his bag from his shoulders and held her. “Baby,” she said. “Let’s get to my place so we can have some real fun.” He stepped back to let her get to the door and she paused to size him up. In the hall, she had been too excited to really examine him. He was looking at her, doing the same. She had worn 501s and a white T-shirt, which he always said was his favorite outfit on her even though she never believed him. He stood with perfect posture,

54 dekemper : on leave

dekemper : on leave

surely learned in boot camp. His skin had turned a deeper tan than he had even had in Texas, which she would have thought impossible. He had a small cut on his otherwise smooth face. There were also lipstick smears, now. “How are you so smooth, baby?” she asked him. She knew he would have a five o’clock shadow by the time they were back at her lake house and so there only could be one answer. It would also explain the nick. He smiled because she noticed. “I shaved on the plane.” She drove and they were silent, but there was no awkwardness and she found herself continuously looking over at him and marveling. She couldn’t believe he was beside her, with his hand resting on the mid-console of the Prius. She set her right hand on top of it and drove with her left. She had asked for the vehicle as her sixteenth birthday present. Her father hadn’t wanted to give it to her, but he did. “Hell, girl,” he had said. “I can get you free gas at any Marathon station in this state. What the hell are you wanting a hybrid for?” Mikey’s face had aged in the past year, she decided, and yet as she tried to determine how exactly, she had difficulty. It was something in the skin, from too many days under the sun after a childhood of even more of it. She couldn’t look for too long since she was driving, but it truly was hard to keep her eyes on the road. She was so glad to see him. They had sex before anything, as soon as they arrived. Laura came. She felt pleasantly, completely exhausted afterwards. It had been a year, and she would have been content to spend the rest of the night in bed with him. She saw he had grown more muscular as soon as he was naked in front of her, and he felt thicker inside her even. She realized that this was what she had been holding out for, and turning down from lithe trust-funders in V-necks. She got up to use the bathroom and when she returned, he was sitting up on the edge of the bed. “Do you want to go for a swim?” he said. She kept her mouth closed as she tried to conceal her minor frustration with him. He was always wanting to go out and do things while she was

dekemper : on leave

content to lie around with him. She had been a swimmer in high school, since the girls in her academy were defined by their best activity. She was annoyed that he might be using her love for swimming to give him a chance to get in the water. Over the summer in Texas, she had swum in her pool most days. In Manhattan, she had taken a membership at an expensive, plush gym, mostly because it offered a pool. She didn’t want to go swimming in it next week and only be able to think of how much she missed Mikey. The water had been her place of refuge from everything, and now she might lose even that. But she looked at him, and he had been the one fighting in a war, so she acquiesced. “We can go like this,” he said with a wink, and hopped up in his nakedness. “I’ll just get the towels,” she said, and then he followed her down to the lake. She hadn’t mentioned the water temperature to him, which, at this point in September, would be growing cool with the coming autumn, and he jumped in without hesitating while she watched from the dock. He let out a howl before he splashed in and she smiled. He had never been too cool to show when he was having fun, and at least that hadn’t changed. He came up to the surface. With his military buzz, he no longer had his shaggy hair to shake dry. “I thought about this the whole time these past two weeks, sweating all day in the sun. I said I didn’t care how cold this would be, that it would make up for all that over there.” So he had been dreaming about this as much as she. But then, he had only thought of the water. Had he ever really been thinking of her? “What about me?” she said. She hated herself for it, but she couldn’t help asking. She wanted tonight to be perfect but could already feel herself ruining it. He would be gone tomorrow. “Baby,” he said. “Of course I thought of you. Come on. Hop in and let’s swim out to the middle. We can do the dead man’s float and look at the stars. The water isn’t as cold as you’d think.” She dove in, with hardly a splash, and it wasn’t. They paddled out slowly, in a couples-only version of the backstroke, as they held hands

dekemper : on leave

and looked at the sky. It was a clear night and there were so many stars. There had been nights like this in Texas, in a government lake that Mikey had shown her, and she knew that he hadn’t forgotten them, and realized that that was why he had suggested they swim. She was very glad that her father was rich enough to have this land, and for a minute she didn’t care how he had earned the money for it. Tonight was hers, and she was here on earth, under a perfect sky, in her lake with Mikey. She used his weight for leverage and pulled herself towards him. They kissed, both of them vertical as they treaded water. They continued paddling, and she wasn’t worried at all, or cold, either. This was what she had been scared to let herself imagine for the past year and now she had everything. “Do you think I can touch the bottom?” he said. “No.” She couldn’t stand the thought of him being anywhere other than beside her. Also, she had been out here during the daytime in her father’s boat and knew that they were nearly as close to the middle of the lake as they could be. She was a strong swimmer, but even coming out this far had slightly fatigued her. She hadn’t swum competitively since high school. “What if I do?” he said. “Don’t try it, Mikey.” She didn’t especially want to be alone in the water at night. She called him by his first name, which she didn’t do very often, she realized. She wanted him to stay and hoped that she was showing it. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and he lifted his head to take a breath before dropping down and disappearing into the water. At first she expected to hear silence but there were sounds of nature everywhere, the calls of birds native to New York that she couldn’t name. Laura tried to think but all she could do was count seconds, and between the ticks of each one in her head, she tried to determine how long until he would rise again. She treaded water and turned slow circles as she scanned the surface. She was up to 35 seconds when the counting became too much and time wasn’t important, only whether he would return. Was he on his way down still, or was he coming up? How deep had her father said the lake was?

dekemper : on leave

She tried to think back to that sunny day on the boat but somehow the measurement he had given escaped her, and she couldn’t remember if it was only 25 feet, or more. For a second she thought it might be 35, but then remembered that that was only the number she had counted to. Or maybe it was a coincidence and they were the same. If it was, there was no way he could do it. The diving well at her high school was 16 feet and she had had to exert herself whenever she went to touch its bottom. She had once held her breath for a minute during swimming practice but that time must be approaching now. Maybe she had been counting too slowly or quickly in her head. Maybe there was some part of army training that helped him stay under for so long. And what if he had reached the bottom but didn’t have enough breath to come up? They shouldn’t even have been swimming this far out in the lake at night. She thought that maybe he could be joking but there was no room, literally, to joke out here. The ripples from his dive had long since vanished and the lake was shining smoothly like an oil slick under the moonlight. She wondered where he was below her; what if his body was rising right below her toes, and for the first time, Laura felt a fear for herself. The water was cool at her ankles and it would only get colder deeper down. Mikey couldn’t have stayed under that long. He had to know she was scared, and for him to wait this long to come up must have been deliberate on his part. What if he had gone crazy over there and wanted to do something terrible to her? He hadn’t been too talkative tonight. He could grab her right now and drag her down. She kicked her feet, to fend off anything that might be searching for her. What if his body floated up, or she felt a hand? She raced from scenario to scenario since they were all too frightening for her to consider deeply and so she continued to search for new possibilities, but they were all just as terrifying. Laura called his name, and her voice sounded loud and jarring under the moon on the lake. When the trees echoed it back to her the syllables were no longer distinct and it was only sound. She ducked under the water and propelled herself with her hands until her head was her deepest part. She opened her eyes. She felt the cold water

dekemper : on leave

on them and the only sense they conveyed to her was touch. She couldn’t see anything. Her fingers searched tentatively in the water, but she grasped nothing. She knew there were trunks of trees rising from the bottom of the lake, and she was scared that she would touch one and mistake it for Mikey. She realized that he had never even potentially seemed like a Mike or Michael to her, only Mikey, even now that he was a soldier. Maybe he had hit his head on a tree in his hasty descent, and he had been knocked out and was unable to tell which way was up. She imagined him swimming through the black water, going deeper and deeper, convinced he was about to reach air. She would need to get an ambulance regardless, even though it would take a while to come this far out in the country. She exhaled and then followed her bubbles to the surface. That was what coaches had taught her to do in case she was ever under water and couldn’t tell. In the diving well at her high school there were constantly bubbles rising, so any diver who suffered a concussion from impact would always know which way was up. She didn’t pause to catch her breath at the surface, and started swimming freestyle back to the dock. She felt the sensation that something was chasing her in the lake and she couldn’t maintain her poised form. She smacked at the water with her palms in her hurry to get up to her house for a cell phone. Mikey had been bragging earlier in the evening about how he got service even this far out in the boonies, and as she replayed the scene in her head, she realized she should have taken it as a warning. Of course she would have had to use the phone. She was kicking as hard as she could when she felt a toe touch something. Her body recoiled; she must have grazed one of those trees. She tried to swim even faster and then she heard a voice that was Mikey’s. Her body deflated, and she would have begun to sink from relief if her swimmer’s instinct hadn’t kicked in and kept her treading water. She tried to piece together the last minutes but she couldn’t. She was out of breath, and still having to work to stay afloat, when all she wanted to do was to crawl onto her softest bed with Mikey. The dock was still far away. “I did it,” he said to her. He was holding his hand up, for a high five she

dekemper : on leave

thought, but she lacked the energy and couldn’t believe he would have the audacity to ask for one. She brushed her wet hair out of her face to make eye contact. “I didn’t know what happened to you.” She thought this would prompt an apology, but all he said was, “I made it to the bottom,” and she hated him for not considering her. “That’s great,” she said, ironically and still breathlessly. “I thought something happened and I went down to try to find you. You scared the shit out of me.” His hand was still raised. “I told you not to go down there and I’m not going to give you a high five.” She didn’t know why she was explaining this. “It’s mud. I got it from the bottom. Here,” he said, offering it to her as proof. He really had gone all the way down. She swam the few strokes over to him in a breaststroke. She grabbed at his extended arm and brought it down to his side. She tried to pry his grasp loose and she could feel the mud, slimy and even cooler as it squirted out from between his fingers, but he wouldn’t open his fist. She started to claw at him, using her fingernails deliberately. “Hey,” he said agreeably, and then, “Hey!” sharper now that it hurt. He pulled back from her. “What are you doing?” “What do you think?” “I don’t know,” he said, and as she looked at him she saw that he didn’t. “Mikey. Do you know how long you were under? I counted but didn’t know if you would come up. I was going back to call an ambulance.” “Come on. I wasn’t gone that long. Look, I’m not even out of breath.” “I don’t know how long you were under. I stopped counting to go look for you.” He clenched his face as if he was straining to decide on an explanation. “I’m sorry, babe,” he said after a second, in a soft voice that didn’t come from his throat. “What do you want me to do?” “Just be with me.” There was nothing other than that. “I am. Here.” He swam closer. “You won’t be tomorrow.”

dekemper : on leave

“Laura. What do you want me to do?” His voice was deeper again. “I’m not gonna go A.W.O.L.” She knew that. She shouldn’t have said anything. He wasn’t stupid, but neither was she. They were just trapped. He held out his hand to her and she took it. As her fingers ran across his skin, she only wanted that, and embraced him. Her weight dunked him under and as she kissed his closed mouth he tried to swim both their weights back to the surface. It was too much and they continued to sink, so she gave up kissing and released him. Back up in the air, after a breath, she resumed swimming. They were going back to the house, she decided. She moved quickly through the water, with poise this time, as she would have in the middle of a distance swim when she depended on her form to keep her moving at pace. She paid him no attention, and was surprised when she made it to the dock and he was already there, waiting to help her out. She declined his hand and pulled herself up on her own. She sat on the dock with her back to him and her toes dangled into the water. All she had wanted was him and his skin, and he had to go dive and then not come up and not let go of that fucking mud. He had taken her hint and wasn’t speaking to her. She didn’t know what to say, either, and was silent. He tried to be gallant and handed her a towel. She reached out to take it, but he was trying to win her back. “Did they teach you that in the army?” She envisioned her father, as a cadet in the ’60s, learning something like this from a commanding officer in a mandatory etiquette class. Hadn’t the army realized that no one considered soldiers gentlemen anymore? An offered towel was meaningless when there were so many other things wrong with everything. Now, after a year, even Mikey was buying into it. Why couldn’t he just be himself? “No,” he said, and suddenly he pulled the towel back from her. Her expectant skin formed goose bumps from the unfulfilled anticipation and her nipples were hard. She cupped them with her hands to keep them warm and then tweaked them. Why couldn’t they have stayed in bed? “No, they didn’t teach us that,” he continued. “They taught us all sorts of shit, and they taught me how to swim a little bit better, and I can stay

dekemper : on leave

under water longer, but nothing else that seemed to matter, either there or out here. I was there for a year and I honestly couldn’t tell you one thing I’ve done.” She wondered if she should ask him what he had been doing then. He had never volunteered much in his letters and she had felt it wasn’t her place to question, only to be supportive. Was now a better time? She thought of him swimming in the lake, unsure of how far it was to the bottom but knowing only that he had to reach it. She would have turned back, and was upset that he hadn’t. He had done it though, at night, while she worried from the surface. She stood up to face him. Their fingers interlocked and she felt for the mud, traces of it, on his palms. They were tough, but still smooth, like worn leather. “Where’s the mud?” she said. “I washed it off before I got out. Look, baby, I didn’t mean to scare you like that.” She knew he hadn’t, and tried to tell him as much in a kiss. He had been down there while she waited, and that was the way it had always been. She thought that maybe that wasn’t what she minded, it was just the results. A handful of mud or a war. One night, about a week before he had gone off to basic, he had told her he was entering the army to be a hero. She had asked him what he meant. Apparently no one had asked him that before. “I don’t know,” he had finally said. “It’s like now that high school’s over, whatever I’ve been working for is kind of done. I don’t play sports, so there’s nothing to get better at. Everything else is just working to keep on working.” The war wasn’t giving him a chance to be great, but then again, neither was she. She only wanted to hold him and worship him, for the dreams that she knew he had in him, but he had to keep chasing them instead of being content with her. He had known this somehow, and was trying to make this evening count, and to make himself count, and she wanted to smile at him but she felt her face twisting because she felt like crying, too. She hugged him so he couldn’t see her tears. He would be gone tomorrow, and neither of them knew where he would be in a couple of weeks. She thought back to when she had been in the lake,

dekemper : on leave

and how alone she had felt there, out in the middle of the world, and she wondered where he existed in that scheme of her life. He was down below, but she decided that she knew that he would always be coming up for her, no matter how deep down he went. She wondered whether they would sleep that night, or fight it off to spend each second they could together. She decided they would stay awake, since she wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feeling tired at all. When they went back up to the house they had sex again. Afterwards, she was on her back and he was lying on his shoulder at her side. He said he wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tired, but he tucked his head into the nape of her neck and she listened as his breathing became slow and soft. She still wanted to stay awake, to linger in consciousness of his presence, but she was more tired than she had realized. She turned off the bedside lamp with minimum exertion, and she must have drifted off sometime after four.

Steeplechase Joseph B. Calavenna They rush through raging streets past cars that hate them, under streetlights that shine fury onto sidewalks hissing and muttering fumes Stop to drink, stop to smoke, stop to mix coffee into cream, sugar into cream, coffee into tea, drinking it black and grainy in condemned apartments next to crumbling shelters, their own crumbling shelter They dig for clothes, dig for bikes, and shoes socks paper pencils pens some kind of freedom from something, some kind of something to hold or paint or cut apart trash and put back together The Boys eat seldom and the Girls donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t eat at all and shout it at the Boys crying for them, crying for the things boys want and the things men expect They focus, lose focus, focus and return to dreadful feelingsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;their tour of drugs making good time sharing joints, sharing needles, sharing stolen pills and powders, sharing the suburbs they came from and the Detroit they want to claim Sharing confusion, confused wandering getting pregnant and killing the baby, keeping the baby, hating the baby, killing the baby, raising the babyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; some wishing sex was an option Boys with hair and girls with hair and both covering their eyes bumping and banging into each other, tripping and falling over one another, wandering wondering needing each other to see

64 calavenna : steeplechase

Keats in New York Billy Collins On the 6 train rocketing under the streets, I am looking forward to nothing so much as the sight of the ceramic beavers that distinguish the walls of the Astor Place station. Such time without end is gathered in their unwearied forepaws clutching a tree trunk and the buck teeth forever gnawingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; never to taste the bark, never to fade away.

collins : keats in new york

Oh, My God! Billy Collins Not only in church and nightly by their bedsides do young girls pray these days. Wherever they go, prayer is woven into their talk like a bright thread of awe. Even at the pedestrian mall outbursts of praise spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

66 collins : oh , my god !

Lasagna (The Boy At The Monkey Bars) Lex Evan Schoenfeld “You come here often?” the eight-year-old wannabe primate at the bar baritones from beneath a half-past-noon shadow to the six-year- old stranger in the sandbox. “You come here often?” the rehab nurse jabs the tabloid starlet who tries her best to act sincere, though her training is in sexy. “You come here often?” ponders the fast food cashier philosopher as a whale waddles toward the register. “You come here often?” the judge slaps the mother of five, as he finalizes her fifth divorce. She’s used to it and can only smile. “You come here often?” I huff toward the jawline and abs of the shirtless miracle/spectacle on the next treadmill, as I realize how Michelangelo’s now nameless contemporaries must have felt. “You come here often?” the photo album asks the widower. “You come here often?” reads the sign just beyond the entrance of the suburb’s fourth-most-popular whorehouse. “You come here often?” the Middle East deadpans toward the United States. “You come here often?” the husband butters his wife, as he enters a bed

schoenfeld : lasagna ( T he boy at the monkey bars )

schoenfeld : lasagna ( the boy at the monkey bars )

with her for the six-thousandth consecutive night. “You come here often?” the lush asks the bulimic as they share the downstairs toilet. And he holds back her hair. “Sometimes, I feel like I’ve vomited out my lungs and dreams and promise and capacity to love, and every single redeeming quality those girls saw flicker inside of me.” And looking up, with a flicker in her eye, the bulimic replies that she thinks hers was lasagna.

Jimmy Kittrell writes about war Miriam R. Haier Jimmy Kittrell writes about war. Jimmy Kittrell writes about war even though he’s never been to war and he just dares you to question him. Jimmy Kittrell writes about war crashing cozy in the basement blue beanbag chair writing on the back of his mama’s old shopping lists. Jimmy Kittrell writes about war and his sister shouts down the stairs her voice hitting high prissy pitch, “What you doin’ down there?” Jimmy Kittrell writes about war dull pencil point ’gainst paper and he answers her, he answers her: “Livin,’ Suzie, just livin.’ ” ’cause he’s never more alive than when he’s writing the dead dying dead gone dead— deep. and when they bleed (he writes) when they bleed (he feels) when they bleed (he’s alive); the dead are dying and he’s alive, different from dead dying dead gone dead but the same, the same, so much the same.

haier : jimmy kittrell writes about war

Jimmy Kittrell writes about war that’s real; war you can feel more than algebra problems, more than the lunch line or the once-gooey gum on the smooth side bottom of his school desk. Jimmy Kittrell writes about war ’bout brothers burnin’ up in Iraq those who never come back and those who do, too; yeah, those who do. Jimmy Kittrell writes about war ’cause it’s about sacrifice, paying freedom’s price and he ain’t no coward who hides from that truth. Jimmy Kittrell writes: Don’t participate? Still, appreciate! soldiering on, writing it down, doing his duty to his made-up screwed-up blown-up countrymen: Jimmy Kittrell writes about war.

An Interview with Emily Barton

Emily Barton is the author of two novels, The Testament of Yves Gundron and Brookland, both of which were named New York Times Notable Books. In 2006 she received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

an interview with emily barton

West 10th: Have you ever worked on a student literary journal? What do you see as the purpose or potential of such publications? Emily Barton: In college I served on the fiction boards of the Harvard Advocate and another, alternative magazine called Padan Aram. One of my favorite things about student literary journals is that people really read them—budding writers are able to share their work with the community, get feedback, and see the diversity of what other young writers are working on. Journals also provide an opportunity for professors to come to know their students in a different light. West 10th: In your review of Francine Prose’s “Reading Like A Writer,” you wrote that because of their “poisonous atmosphere,” you “used to inveigh against writing workshops —right up until the day I started teaching one.” Can you elaborate on your perception of the value of workshops? Emily Barton: When workshops at Iowa went badly (and they sometimes did, despite my teachers’ and peers’ many gifts) one of two situations seemed to arise: 1) A deeply flawed story would land on the table—one whose premise was shaky, or whose grammar was unintelligible—and no one would have the strength of character to talk to the writer frankly about the ways in which the story might improve, or 2) A cabal of students who were chiefly interested in “expressing themselves” (whatever that means) would complain that an author had no right to use sophisticated vocabulary or to write about any topic more intellectually demanding than that of the standard workshop Boy Goes Fly-Fishing With His Dad and/or His Dog and Has Some Kind of Epiphany story. As a result, the workshop could at intervals feel fakey-fake nice—to the detriment of writers’ real growth— and normative in a way that never sat right with me. It sometimes seemed that that aim of a workshop was to make all the stories conform to a single pattern, when clearly the aim should rather be to help each story become more fully itself. When I began teaching my own workshops, I realized I could address

AN INTERVIEW WITH EMILY BARTON

these issues with my own students right from the start by setting the standards for workshop behavior higher. I could teach them to read intelligently and critically, and model a manner of delivering a critique honestly but kindly. I could explicitly state my goal of helping each writer grow in whatever ways she most required, and encourage them to adopt a similar stance. I believe workshops are valuable not only for the ways in which they improve student writing, but also for the ways in which they improve student reading. Often a workshop is the first classroom setting in which a student is required to become awake to the wild complexities of language. West 10th: Tell us the best writing advice you’ve received. Emily Barton: My husband routinely reminds me that a little writing is better than no writing; if I wrote only a word or day, a hundred thousand days from now I’d have a novel, whereas if I wrote no words a day, I’d have no novel. The fact that I won’t be alive 273 years from now to see that worda-day novel completed is immaterial; it’s helpful to remember that a little work is infinitely better than none. West 10th: What would you advise students to look for when comparing MFA programs? Emily Barton: When my students ask for advice about MFA programs, I always tell them that the most important thing about attending one is not to get yourself into debt in the process: An MFA isn’t a law degree, and there’s no clear way of earning that money back once you get out. So once you’ve chosen programs to apply to based on their reputation, their faculty, the recommendations of others who’ve gone there, choose the one that offers you a scholarship or in-state tuition and a teaching fellowship. West 10th: Who’s your favorite fictional character?

AN INTERVIEW WITH EMILY BARTON

Emily Barton: There are so many. But at this moment, I’ll pick Daniel Deronda. West 10th: When did you realize you wanted to be a writer? Emily Barton: I always knew I wanted to write. I loved to read, and like many only children I had a fertile imagination and time on my hands, so I was writing novels at a very young age. When I knew I wanted to “be a writer” is more complicated. I suppose the answer is “always,” but I didn’t take it for granted that it would come to pass. I always imagined myself having some other career, though what it might be remained nebulous. While I was writing The Testament of Yves Gundron, I hoped it would someday be published, but I also accepted that it might not be, that fiction writing might end up being my hobby. I would have been okay with that. West 10th: How long did you work on your first novel? Emily Barton: My first published novel? I actually wrote it very quickly; I think it took nine or 10 months from the day I started writing it to the day I sold it. My second novel took something more like seven years. West 10th: What’s it like to look back on the writing you did as a student? Do you have a sense of the things you or other writers lose and gain at different life stages? Emily Barton: Well, I’ve grown up a lot since I was a student. I’m interested in broader topics and in writing about more different kinds of life experiences. I think this is a natural progression and that most writers (and most people who mature successfully) go through it. Also, it was the heyday of minimalism when I was a student: No writer was more revered than Ray Carver. So I was trying to write a kind of minimal, domestic fiction. As it turns out, my talents lie elsewhere, and as I’ve grown older I’ve grown more comfortable with writing what I want to rather than what prevailing

AN INTERVIEW WITH EMILY BARTON

tastes dictate I should. West 10th: What do you use as a bookmark? Emily Barton: Anything at hand. I also don’t scruple to fold down corners on books that I own. If I’ve borrowed them I treat them more kindly. West 10th: Is there still a significance assigned to gender in the literary world, and if there is, how would you characterize it? Emily Barton: This is a vast question. Francine Prose published an excellent article, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” on the topic in Harper’s in June 1998. She concludes, “There will always be categories into which fiction falls, standards that have less to do with stereotype and preconception than with originality and revelation, with the ability to translate life—in all its simple and endlessly mysterious complexity—onto the printed page. But there is no male or female language, only the truthful or the fake, the precise or the vague, the inspired or the pedestrian.” To deny that I’m a woman writer would be absurd; what I generally deny is that this fact has any real significance to my work or its place in the world. West 10th: Who do you read when you’re feeling blocked? Emily Barton: I don’t think I experience what people call writer’s block. I’m not always writing, but usually there’s a good reason for it. I always turn back to George Eliot when I need advice. At her best, she plots a novel better than anyone I’ve read, and her insight into and compassion for her characters is unparalleled. When she’s having an off year, her novels can get badly out of control. I find it heartening that she’s capable of both of these things. West 10th: Are books sacred, or are you a spine-breaking margin-scribbler?

AN INTERVIEW WITH EMILY BARTON

Emily Barton: The latter, unless a book belongs to a library or a friend. West 10th: Guilty pleasures: Is there a book you love that you’re hesitant to own up to? Emily Barton: I don’t have a thing for any particular raunchy or cheesy book, but my taste in film is more catholic. Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and The Producers are on the list, as is Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service. West 10th: Your website links to “I Can Has Cheezburger” and “Cats That Look Like Hitler.” What’s that about. Emily Barton: A) I like cats. B) Some cats really do look like Hitler, which is funny, even though Hitler is never supposed to be funny. (See exception for The Producers, above.) C) “I Can Has Cheezburger” is doing as much to upend mainstream spoken English as anything has since, say, Public Enemy in the 1980s. And also features cats.

Pink Snow Agnes Petrucione It was always Mari Ne-chan that my father picked. She used to cry and yell at first, but after some years all I could hear was the rocking of the bed. I would cringe until I fell asleep, dreaming violent, sickening things. I felt ashamed that my mind stored such thoughts and made me see those things, night after night. Mari Ne-chan’s eyes always looked like a doll’s glass eyes, but she always smiled when she saw me come down the stairs in the morning. I could see a light deep in her eyes that was still shining. Mom always pretended like nothing was going on, but I knew she cried alone in the bathtub and cut shallow wounds into her arms. I didn’t feel sorry for her. Ne-chan used to walk me to my school and then go to hers, but when I started going to middle school too, we walked there together. We talked a lot and laughed a lot, but I knew she was empty inside. Dad ate her soul out slowly, greedily, every night. We talked about anything but that. I don’t know why. I was the only person she smiled to and really meant it. She wanted me to bring it up, help her healing process begin. I was too selfish and she was too empty. We were both crying inside and pretended like we didn’t hear it. One night Dad didn’t go to Ne-chan’s room. In fact, he didn’t even come home. Then that went on for a couple days. “He left us,” Mom said while she was doing the dishes. She didn’t even look at us, her back to us the entire time. She did the dishes mechanically, one plate at a time. I thought of the old ghost story where a woman was killed by her master because she broke a plate of a 10-piece set. Her ghost haunted the well she was thrown down, eternally counting the plates, never to find the tenth one. “Oh,” I said. I didn’t take my eyes off the TV. I had figured that much. I looked over at Mari. The TV was reflected on her eyes, flashing blue

78 petrucione : pink snow

petrucione : pink snow

and white. I turned away. She was so far away. Good-bye, I thought. And she came to say goodbye that night. I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Ne-chan opened the door slowly. “Nami-chan?” she whispered. “Un.” “Can I come in?” “Of course,” I said, and sat up facing the door. She came in fully dressed, and sat down next to me. “I’m leaving,” she said, looking at me, her eyes full of color for the first time. “I know,” I said. “Thank you.” She looked confused. “Thank you? For leaving?” She laughed. “No. For waiting. To leave. You knew what Dad would’ve done to me if you left. I’m sorry.” She smiled sadly and stroked my hair above the ear. “I might not see you again,” she said. “I know.” Then she moved her face closer to mine and closed her eyes, giving me a kiss. I was taken aback at first, but I closed my eyes and let our soft lips overlap. She pulled away and gave me the brightest smile I had ever seen. “Don’t say bye to mom for me,” she said with a giggle. “Yeah,” I laughed. “She’ll probably just pretend like you were never here.” Then there was a sad silence because we knew this was true. “Bye-bye,” she waved at me, and left my room. I lay back down in my bed and stared at the ceiling. It seemed so quiet without the rocking bed next door. Then I felt a click in my head. I felt like my brain was changing its structure. I fell asleep like my body gave up to let all the energy go to my brain. The next morning I didn’t remember any of my dreams. “Good morning,” I said to my mom as I came downstairs. She turned her

petrucione : pink snow

head around from the sink. “Good morning,” she said with a nervous smile. There was a note in clear sight on the dining table. Scrawled in Nechan’s handwriting, it read, “I’m leaving at last.” I guess that was the way mom wanted us to agree upon the fact that Mari wasn’t here anymore. “Bye,” I said, and left for school. The smell of miso soup that mom had prepared for breakfast trailed behind me. As always, she didn’t say anything. The world was vibrant. I felt like I saw color for the first time. It was April and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom. A sparrow chirped at me. “Hello,” I answered back. Mari Ne-chan wasn’t here. She wasn’t walking with me to school, but she was happy, and for the first time my dreams didn’t haunt me. I felt like I could fly. Fly with the sparrow through the cherry blossoms. High, high, into the sky. School was a blur. People looked at me weird because I was smiling constantly. I guess I didn’t do much of that before. Life was crazy for me all of a sudden. No threatening footsteps, no silent submission. My life as I knew it was gone. Is this what being normal feels like? But will I ever be normal? No. The answer came to me as suddenly as being stung by a bee in a field of flowers. I never saw her before. I guess I never saw much of anything before. During class, I was looking down onto the field where another class was having PE. It was my sister’s class, because I recognized some of them from when they had asked me what happened to her. I always told them she flew away free as a bird. They would give me a look like they were disgusted with me and walk off. She was sitting on a bench at the side of the field in her uniform. I guessed she was either sick or on her period since she wasn’t joining the class. Or maybe she was just like Ne-chan. I could only see the side of her face but that was enough. She had long, straight hair that was shining a light brown in the sunlight. I could see her long eyelashes and her plump

petrucione : pink snow

lips. Smiling, I dreamed of kissing those lips and stroking back her hair. My teacher had been calling on me for some time but I hadn’t noticed. He told me to go stand out in the hallway. So of course, I went up to the roof. I climbed up the dark staircase to the door that said “No Entry,” stepping over a pail and a used condom. I opened the door and the light blinded me for a second. A breeze cooled my face and my hair danced in it happily. I walked over to the fence and lit a cigarette. It was a habit I picked up to see if my mom would notice. I smoke in the living room too but I guess she doesn’t see. As I blew out smoke, I looked down onto the ground where the PE class was in two lines, for a 25m sprint. They were all wearing a white T-shirts and black shorts. Their heads looked like black specks of mascara-tears. I felt like I could step on them and make a smear of sesame seed jam. Yummy, yummy, spread it on some toast. The bell signifying the end of class rang. “Uh-oh,” I said to myself. My teacher will find out I didn’t stay out in the hallway. “He can just die,” I laughed to myself, and I couldn’t stop laughing. “What are you laughing about?” I turned around with a smile frozen on my face. That girl I had seen sitting on the field was right behind me. I hadn’t heard the door open or any footsteps. Well, maybe I had left the door open. “Because I’m happy,” I replied. “That’s good for you,” she said, expressionless. “Can I have one of those?” She pointed at my cigarette. “Of course,” I replied, and lit it for her. She leaned on the fence next to me with her back to the field. She stared at the smoke trailing up, up, up into the clouds. “I saw you on the field,” I said. “I saw you in the classroom,” she said. “Why did you come up here?” “Because I wanted to.” I pondered that response for a while.

petrucione : pink snow

“Okay,” I said. We stood there silently together for awhile, puffing on our cigarettes and watching the clouds trail by. I saw one that looked like a lamb. “Look,” I pointed it out to her. She turned around and looked at where I was pointing. “Oh yeah,” she said. That made me happy. I felt like I was seeing the other side of Mari Nechan that she showed to everybody but me. I smiled. “You’re weird,” she said, and for the first time her eyes showed some interest. She put her hands on the railing and leaned over the fence, her hair shining like strands of silk. “If I tried to jump off right now, would you try to stop me?” I dragged on my cigarette and thought about it. Realizing that it was my last puff, I flicked it over the railing onto the field. “Yeah, I think so.” She plopped out of her position onto the roof. “Why?” she asked. “Reflex.” She giggled. That made me grin. Yes, yes, it’s only me. I know it’s only me she’s ever giggled in front of like that. The bell rang again, for the start of the next class. “Are you going to class?” I asked. “No.” “Okay then, I’ll see you.” I walked away from her towards the door. After a couple steps, I turned around. She was staring down onto the field, her skirt flapping teasingly around her thighs. I started going to the roof every lunch break. She would come up occasionally, then more frequently. She never ate, although she always brought up a lunchbox with her that her mother had prepared. It was always a very colorful lunchbox. I usually ate most of it because she wouldn’t touch it. She laughed every time I asked for hers after I finished mine. “You’re gonna get fat,” she’d say.

petrucione : pink snow

I learned her name was Yuki. Like snow. Like cherry blossom petals snowing on you in a pink flurry. “That name fits you so well,” I had told her. “No it doesn’t,” she said in her expressionless way. “Yes it does,” I had said, and kept on eating. I hated rainy days because that meant we couldn’t have lunch together on the roof. But I’d go there anyway after I’d finished eating, smoking a wet cigarette under an umbrella. She never came up on rainy days. But I imagined she was under my umbrella with me, all huddled up, passing a cigarette back and forth. I would even talk to her sometimes. “Get in closer, you’re going to get wet.” She would smile and wrap her arms around mine. I would be able to smell her shampoo. I never actually have but I imagined it would smell something like baby powder. I dreamed about Yuki day and night. I talked about her nonstop to my mother but I never knew if she was listening. Her arms had scabby lines all over more than ever and her eyes looked more and more like Mari Nechan’s during dinner time. I would yell, “Mom!” from time to time, and she would look over and smile an empty smile. Yuki was my world. My vision was blurred in pink, pink snow. And it felt good, so good that I forgot about Mari Ne-chan and only thought of Yuki; Yuki, the girl who reminded me of Mari Ne-chan. But of course the snow had to turn black, black, black. Yuki didn’t come up for lunch one day. Then the next, and the next. I would eat alone, hungry from the lack of Yuki’s lunchbox. I would look to my side and sigh. “What happened to you, Yuki-chan?” I would ask. A sparrow would chirp in reply. “People come and go, people come and go,” it sang, so I threw my chopsticks at it. It went flying with a light rustle of wings up into the sky, under which Yuki lived somewhere. I went to Yuki’s homeroom teacher. “Has Yuki-chan been absent?” The teacher eyed me suspiciously.

petrucione : pink snow

“You mean Kawahara? She’s been absent for a week now. There are all these papers for her for the classes she’s missed but nobody in the class wants to take them to her.” He sighed, as if it was Yuki’s fault. “I’ll take them then,” I replied and grabbed a pile of papers off of his desk. “Oh, okay, thank you then,” he said, and gave me her address. He didn’t seem worried that Yuki was absent, just annoyed. Or something. I skipped the entire way to her house and sang a happy song. Sparrows would join in, chirp, chirp, happy days. People would make way for me. They knew I was on an important mission. The cherry blossoms were blooming for me and for Yuki. I rang the doorbell to the house with the sign, “Kawahara.” Nobody answered. I rang again. Nobody answered. So I rang several times in a row this time, with a rhythm to it. “What!” I heard somebody yell. I froze. “What do you want! Why can’t people leave me alone!” I felt dark clouds collecting over my head. It was going to rain. I heard Yuki’s muffled voice calming the yelling woman down, and when it ceased I heard footsteps coming towards the door. Yuki opened the sliding door violently, the door bouncing back a bit after a slap. “Who is it!” she tried to say, but stopped mid-sentence when she saw me. She looked down at her feet, and shifted them a bit. “I’m sorry,” she said. It was raining. Yuki’s socks were getting wet. “One second,” she said with a sniffle, and put on some shoes, told the woman she would be right back and took two umbrellas from the stand in front of the door. “It looks like it might rain,” she said. Silly Yuki-chan, it’s already raining, I thought. Yuki-chan suggested we take a walk to a park near her house. I agreed and reached out my hand. She took it silently. There was a cool breeze, and

petrucione : pink snow

I smiled at the wind sprites carrying our hair up in a silky melody. “Not too strong,” I whispered to them, “or you will carry her away.” “Did you just say something?” Yuki-chan looked at me with playful suspicion. “Yes.” “What?” “Nothing.” We eventually reached the park. We sat down on a bench under a cherry blossom tree. Some of the bench was covered in pink petals. A petal fell on Yuki-chan’s hair. She didn’t notice and I didn’t tell her. It looked too pretty to talk about. I sat looking at her, smiling. “Why are you smiling?” she asked, more sternly than the first time she had asked me. I gave her the same answer. “Well I’m not happy! What are you? Do you even remember what just happened at my house?” Yuki-chan’s eyes were welling up with tears. No, no rain, no rain. I hugged her like I was trying to stop a little child from crossing a red light. I heard Yuki draw her breath. Tightly, tightly, I hugged her. I felt her breathing become slower in my chest. “It hurts,” she whispered. I let her go. “Don’t cry. Mari Ne-chan never cried,” I said to Yuki. My vision started to blur. “What do you mean? Your sister?” I nodded and looked down at my feet. It’s raining, raining, raining. The rain started at my feet, then was everywhere. Yuki opened up an umbrella and we huddled under it together. Her hair smelled like faded flowers. Yuki wrapped her arm around mine. “My mom . . . ” “My dad . . . ” We started at the same time. We looked at each other and laughed. We didn’t need words. After our laughter died out, there was a silence like a

petrucione : pink snow

sigh. We looked at each other. I put my right hand over her ear, combed up her hair, pulled her head closer to mine. She didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t resist. We kissed and kissed and kissed under the pink rain. The cherry blossoms were falling everywhere, patter, patter, patter. Under the same umbrella. Up, up, up we go.

Doubt Julia Fincher When we get coffee you tell the barista your name is Bartholomew— Then you look at me like what? And I want to take that paper cup With the fake name written on it and throw it at your face, so maybe You’d tell the truth every once in a while. You lie like third graders say the pledge of allegiance every morning: Quickly, without thinking, with your hand over your heart With at least some semblance of sincerity. You told my doorman that you have a professor with eleven fingers and You told that cop you’ve never been to New York before and You told me you only lie to strangers But I’m still itching to get my hands on a polygraph machine. When that milk was three days past its expiration date You said you drink expired milk all the time and have never gotten sick. But I thought about what it means to go bad Until I could feel curdled chunks in my throat and I threw the half-full carton away. Some things I’d rather not take on faith.

fincher : doubt

Reflecting Hurricanes Lee Patterson Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a city of warmth thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only cool on my hand passing quickly over the street, and the street is quiet and dark creating itself where headlights reach, or where slowly flashing yellow illuminates the rain and drains the mind of sudden speech: The rhythmic streetlights, each to each a common thread, a golden chain we circle round our hands to pull them closer when the street is brushed over with wind and waves and the lights disperse in blind retreat; the city darkens in sudden squalls. We gather each other in the gathering gloom and wait in warmth in our rooms and halls while the sun steps in, circling the sea. I draw my hand in, close to me to dry the palm and raise the glass, spotted now with moving mirrors that bend the leaves that slowly fall to cushion our steps through circling trees on the leaf-broken sunlight grass pulled gently from the ground. Careless of all we recline, our fingers entwined

88 patterson : reflecting hurricanes

patterson : reflecting hurricanes

in conversation with the new day near us, beside the days that came to call our reaching eyes to glinting windows to find ourselves outside our walls that can advance, compress the air, become self portraits to empty eyes until winds strike in crumbling blows, to strip lifeless art from gilded frames. We view the scene, our thoughts the same, though different storms will bring them near to memories of peace and chaos: the balanced, careful loss and gain that echoes and bends in reflection clear like the sunlight on waters that deflects toward our eyes. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a city of warmth whose every window is a mirror.

Young Poet Kat Yakubov With silver cape of youth My poetry writes itself the same. Each time, all thoughts of you In constructions tamed To make the tongue contort In shapes yet to be tracedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; A glossy truth, aggressions Wired shut in prose, Set free in verse. Pent up joy nowhere to be spent Turns whatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to anger? Solidified restraint? Instead, handcrafted phrases Stain blank sheets with ink and point To a body restlessly in haste.

90 yakubov : young poet

Learning How to Shoot Karen Chien The day after our stepdad’s funeral, Mark took the new BB gun rifle he got for his birthday and opened the window to the fire escape. “Come on,” he said, extending his palm to me. There was dirt under his fingernails and in the sweaty creases of his hand. Even though Mark was two years younger than me, he could still make me feel like he offered a whole world of promise so long as I accepted his invitation. I put my hand in his. He already had one leg out the window and swung the other one around, pulling me along. “What are we doing?” I asked. I already knew where we were going. When we had first moved into the apartment, our mom had forbidden us from going up to the roof for fear of prowlers trying to get rid of two nosy kids. Naturally, we were drawn to the roof, bringing our walkie-talkies and baseball bats, hoping today would be the day we’d finally catch a prowler and be awarded some sort of medal from the police department. “Eh. You’ll see,” said Mark. Mark was a small kid. The rifle hung at an awkward angle off his neck, clanging against the railing as we maneuvered up the stairs. “Someone’s going to hear us,” I said. Mark looked down at me through the grates of the scaffolding over my head. “We’re almost there.” I watched the bottom of his jeans climb up the last stretch of ladder and the BB gun rifle sway behind him. I scrambled to catch up. When I swung my sneakers onto the gravel roof, Mark was already at the far edge of the building, surveying the next roof over like one of those cowboys we’d secretly watch late at night on TV with Seth. Mark must’ve been thinking the same thing, since when he heard me approaching from behind, he talked in a lazy drawl that he tried to deepen

chien : learning how to shoot

into a man’s. “There be some Injuns out there,” he said. I walked up beside him and looked at the adjacent building. Six pigeons perched on the building’s giant TV antennae. Mark made a sound next to me. I glanced at him in time to see him pull out a mashed-up cardboard box of BB gun pellets, which he put on the cement ledge. “You want the first shot?” he asked, loading several tiny metal beads into the rifle. When he finished, he tilted the wooden handle towards me. Whenever it was my turn to walk our dog Boots, I always let him chase squirrels in the park longer than was necessary. Even so, when Mark offered the rifle to me something kept my hand at my side. “No thanks,” I said finally. “It’s your birthday present. You should get the first shot.” Mark shrugged. “Suit yerself,” he said, adopting the cowboy drawl again. We both turned towards the roof. I saw the beige pigeon at the same time Mark did. I knew it would be the first to go because that was just how things were. The rifle went off, the piston quieter than I expected. The pigeons took off—all except for one. “Got ’im!” Mark grinned. I glanced back at the beige body lying unnaturally still on the rooftop. That is when it occurred to me that even though we’d been in New York City for over five years, I’d never seen a dead bird before. “Hey, let’s hide and wait for more,” said Mark. “You can get the next shot. Let me go grab some snacks from the kitchen.” He handed me the rifle, still warm from where he had held it. I sat down and watched him go. Twenty minutes later, we were eating pretzels and drinking soda with our backs against the concrete railing. We sat there, eating and waiting for more pigeons to come. It was never silent in our neighborhood. There was always a car alarm, or a siren or a dog barking off in the distance. Even now, we could hear a Spanish radio station coming from one of our neighbors’ windows down below. I wasn’t very hungry but I ate anyway, since we weren’t doing anything important. As an older brother, I suddenly felt like maybe this was the time to talk about Seth like how in movies they show two outlaws sitting

chien : learning how to shoot

together around a fire. First one cowboy says something, and then the two launch into what they’d do with the money or how they weren’t afraid of the sheriffs and Indians trailing them. I didn’t know how to start so I peeked over the ledge instead. I saw some pigeons congregated on the building ledge. The roof remained empty. It was as if they saw the dead body by the TV antennae and knew not to perch there. “They’re back,” said Mark, suddenly urgent and quiet. He turned around and propped himself up on one knee. He picked up the BB gun rifle and started to reload it. “Listen . . . I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said. “Come on,” said Mark. “Don’t be a pussy. Just one shot. They’re just pigeons. Come on. I bet you can’t even hit one.” “Fine!” I scowled and yanked the rifle away from him. I pointed it at the pigeons when really I wanted to point it at Mark for calling me a pussy. I felt Mark slide up next to me. “Don’t hold it so hard,” he coached me, talking quietly into my ear. “You’ll jerk it the wrong way and miss.” “Who died and made you an expert?” I snapped, but I loosened my grip. The handle suddenly felt slippery and moist in my hand. Mark hesitated for a second. “Seth showed me how to shoot a little,” he said. I picked my head up from the telescopic sight. “What? When?” “You and mom had gone to bed. We shot cans on the roof.” “Oh.” “Yeah. . . . So which one are you gonna shoot?” I put my eye against the scope again and surveyed the pigeons on the ledge. I had wondered why Mark was such a good shot. I figured it was beginner’s luck. The rifle moved up and down the ledge as if it was looking for its victim on its own. Mark was crouched down beside me, his muscles tense and his breathing steady as he waited to see what would happen. I pretended the pigeons weren’t birds but empty soda cans lined up in a neat row. The breathing next to me wasn’t Mark’s; it was Seth’s. The rifle came

chien : learning how to shoot

to a halt on an average grey pigeon. Suddenly a gust of wind kicked up and the pigeons started to take flight. I pulled the trigger. Both Mark and I jumped to our feet as the pigeons shot away from the building. We saw one drop from the cloud of pigeons and topple effortlessly onto the sidewalk. Its wings sprawled out like it had started to fly when it was too late. Mark had his fist to his mouth, laughing. “Holy shit! You got ’im! You actually got ’im! In mid-flight, too!” I slung the rifle over my shoulder and brushed gravel off my knees. “Yeah,” I said, watching Mark peer over the edge and then jump at me. Mark grabbed my shoulders, grinning. “I can’t believe you got him! I gotta try that. It’s my turn next!” “Listen. We’re not going to shoot any more pigeons,” I said. Mark’s grin sort of wilted, but he kept a smile. “That’s fine. Just gimme the gun. There’s no way I’m gonna let you get away with that.” “No. We’re done.” Mark’s expression grew serious as he studied my face. “Okay, okay. We’ll go.” “Good,” I said. I shouldered the rifle and shoved the box of BB gun pellets into the back pocket of my jeans. The sun was beginning to set. Mark turned to the horizon and pretended to cock an imaginary gun at the sky. “Kra-kow! Kra-kow!” He jerked his arms back with each cry. I watched him shoot imaginary birds down from the sky. “Quit it,” I said, suddenly feeling sick. “Kra-kow!” “I said quit it!” “Kra-KOW!” I slid the rifle from my shoulder and grasped it by the barrel. I pushed past Mark, who almost fell back. “Hey! What’s the big idea?” he demanded, narrowing his eyes at me. I held the rifle over the ledge and let it drop into the narrow alleyway between the two buildings. Mark looked on, his mouth contorted. Keeping

chien : learning how to shoot

my eyes trained on his, I pulled the BB gun pellets out of my pocket and let them drop, too. When I heard them scatter on the pavement in a million directions, I stepped away from the ledge and started towards the fire escape. Mark seemed to have recovered. He stepped into my path, his mouth twisted into a hard line. “What the hell is your problem!” he yelled. I tried to walk past him but he shoved me back. His eyebrows knotted together. “That was my birthday present!” I tried to walk past him again. He shoved me, hard. I stumbled back. My hands curled into fists. I felt the blood rush into my fingertips, making them feel fat and swollen. I grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and brought my fist against his face. As I held onto him, I felt his fingers claw into my back, when suddenly my throat constricted and I tried hard to draw in a breath. I collapsed onto the gravel while something kept ramming into my stomach. My vision became blurry. I wanted to puke. Curled on my side, I saw Mark’s foot come at me again. My hands fumbled in front of me when I felt the rubber sole of his sneakers graze my palms. Knowing this was my chance, I grabbed his ankle and twisted it good and hard. He let out a yelp of pain, like a dog, and fell. As he lay on the floor, I rolled over on all fours. Everything around me drowned in a spinning white. I crawled away, gasping for air, until I stopped and threw up what looked like spaghetti. As I drew my sleeve against my mouth, I saw Mark storming towards me from the corner of my eye. I scrambled onto my feet and we grabbed each other like we were about to embrace. We wrestled each other to the ground. The gravel cut into our backs as we struggled to see who could pin the other. There was blood on our faces and T-shirts from Mark’s swollen purple nose. I finally pinned Mark down and pressed my forearm against his throat. “Fuck you!” yelled Mark, struggling to get the words out. A glob of spit piled at the corner of his mouth. I saw past his upheld fists that he was crying and realized then that I was too. I moved my arm and quickly brushed my sleeve across my eyes. I

chien : learning how to shoot

wanted to crush Mark to my chest, holding him there until my eyes dried up so when we’d pull away he could see my calm expression. I swallowed instead, and blinked rapidly. I swung my leg off of Mark, getting to my feet. “Come on,” I said. I helped him up and did my best to brush the gravel off his back while he tried to staunch the bleeding from his nose with the hem of his shirt. Silently, Mark followed my lead. We climbed back downstairs, ducking past our apartment window. Inside I saw the back of our mom’s floral bathrobe as she rested her head in her hands. I thought about ducking inside to rub her back, but then I saw the two untouched glasses of wine on the table and our grandma sitting with her. I jimmied loose the ladder to the street and we descended into the yellow light of a streetlamp. The pigeon lay in the pool of light, its breast to the floor and its wings stretched out, suspending it weightlessly on the pavement. I walked over to the dead pigeon. Mark trailed my footsteps. When I scooped it up, one of its wings drooped and gave an eerie rustle. Mark and I looked at each other. With one hand still holding his shirt against his nose, Mark followed me as I walked over to the garbage cans. I nudged the lid aside and gently placed the bird inside. As I slid the lid back in place, for a second I wondered whether or not we would’ve made Seth proud, but the floral print of our mother’s bathrobe quickly flashed in my mind. Clamping my hand on Mark’s shoulder, I guided him back to the fire escape. The ladder had withdrawn to the scaffolding. I stood on my toes and strained to touch the last rung. I wasn’t tall enough. Not yet.

A Letter to Myself, in the Future Lauren Amelia Hart I. My mother has taken everything and packed it into boxes, big brown playthings I could not have realized would not carry foliage or maple syrup. Neighbors have left parting gifts: a sack of walnuts tied with some red raffia, a bit of rock plucked from the cheek of the man in the mountain. It is the first I have seen her cry, days of it, I am scared, her flannel nightgown, her tangled hair. II. My sisters and I sip coffee-milk on a great swinging bench (our feet, they are bare, they do not reach the ground). We snip spreading chains of kudzu and count clouds and make bouquets of tissue paper. We pass sweet tea summers, lighting

hart : a letter to myself , in the future

novena candles for ma memere, and I soon find myself sinking so low behind the old dollar cinema, swatting moths away and learning just exactly how to use hand and tongue together, moist as a pear, sinking low enough, close enough to that knee-enemy, the pavement hot enough to fry an egg, and learn the hard way what it means to be cool, cool as a fall in New Hampshire, many miles and months away. One night my mother knows and does not cry, no, does not yell. She only sighs the greatest sigh of all sighs ever sighed, and through this sigh culls new wear and folds across her forehead, and sinks an inch, and like a piece of ribbon slid across the scissors, her back, it curls. For the first time in seven years she sings me to sleep, I have sowed, and now I reap.

hart : a letter to myself , in the future

III. Self, be wary of your own senses, for they have proven themselves to be untrustworthy traitors, conniving betrayers. Self, the body human is temple holiest, and cleansing of vendors should come each Spring. Live life in tides, leaving but all ways remembering to return, trust only the moon, that great pregnant mother, the only one you should expect to cry great shuddering tears at your misfortunes, because across this wide and hollow Earth, that feels and breathes and yearns, we must carry our selves upon our own backs, and learn, and learn, and learn, and learn.

Manhattan at Night, From a Plane Flying South W.M. Akers The messy yellow lines of Long Island and the Bronx Pour across the river to our artful miniature continent, Where they are resolved into absurd parallels that seem natural on the ground. I don’t know if I’m coming home or leaving it. The MTA map distorts, showing her giant, Surrounded by niggling islands, inlets and bridges She looks modest. (How rare!) Above the glow of Midtown and Times Square (Which runs eight blocks north to south, but a thousand feet into the air) Central Park is a precious rectangle, as substantial as construction paper, With the reservoir, a hole cut to show the schist beneath. And the fabulous thing, I know, is that context is impossible, Because as small as she is, I won’t ever doubt she could Overwhelm the sprawls of Tokyo São Paolo And (cough) Los Angeles With a turn of her heel, and a wave of her hair.

100 akers : manhattan at night , from a plane flying south

101

The Stateline Virtues Megan W. Moore The trip was almost too much for someone who had never seen the mountains — the desert, the insides of armadillos, the nothingness of cattle ranches and the white mile-high crosses that grow out of North Texas highways. In New Mexico, where the mountains flatten into mesas, I thought about grace. About a grace that was something more than Jackie O. and something less than redemption. I thought about the city, and realized that I was only graceful when I concentrated too hard on even strides in expensive tall shoes that count blocks, and so devastatingly—I was not graceful at all. There was nothing graceful about freckles and chapped lips, about curly hair and sex on bathroom floors, about protest and guilt. Nothing graceful about ripped jeans and sunburn. I looked to my hands for some last sign that I might be graceful, because I had long associated thin long fingers with grace—something about pianos and gloves. But seeing only dark yellow dust and chipped polish on small but masculine hands—unmoved—I quickly looked elsewhere. I looked to my best friend Kate as she drove, and adjusted the radio, trying with feigned commitment to find something without static. I focused on Kate and the way sweat gathered on her thin salmon-colored T-shirt as she leaned over the steering wheel, exhausted. It formed a line symmetrically over her spine. There was grace in that, and jealously I thought, Kate couldn’t be graceful—there is nothing graceful about one-syllable names or being too tall. The 10 minutes of silence were harder with nothing to look at. I said, “I am so fucking tired of country music and static.” “Yeah, try to find that crazy Native American station.” “You mean the Injun station?” Kate laughed like she meant it, and just nodded.

102

MOORE : THE STATELINE VIRTUES

MOORE : THE STATELINE VIRTUE

103

I absent-mindedly tuned the radio in and out of static and settled on K130, a public access radio station that seemed like a song or two an hour in between huge blocks of chatter that was vaguely sad. As if the whole station was broadcast out of some guy’s tiny hut out in the sun somewhere, and he only kept it going because the people complained that there would be no local weather reports without him. Not that they couldn’t have figured out the weather themselves, which was always fucking hot. He was playing Elvis. It was that song “Don’t” and it was heartbreaking. Neither of us mock sang along, like we might have if it was any other Elvis song. Kate checked the rearview mirror and said, “I wish this was ‘In the Ghetto.’ ” “I wish it was ‘Big Hunk of Love,’ or some other song that he stole from some poor black band in the middle of Georgia.” “I wish it was that crazy German one.” “You mean, ‘Wooden Heart’?” “Yeah, what the fuck? Is that about Pinocchio? Who was the target audience on that track?” We both laughed and “Are You Lonesome Tonight” came on. It was noon by now, and the Jeep was hot. We drove an ’82 Jeep Scrambler cross-country that summer. There was no A/C, and the floor wasn’t insulated, so all of the engine heat from 600 miles a day on hot highways flowed right into the hard top. Kate’s grandfather had given her the old Jeep when she told him she planned on leaving art school and taking up architecture. They had towed the Jeep to Mexico every spring, to their tiny family house near Yelapa. Kate and her grandfather would hunt for arrow heads in the morning and swim all afternoon. At night they ate fresh fish and handmade tortillas, soft rice and beans. Then she moved out East, and rarely made it back for their spring trips. By the time she was 15, the tiny Mexican neighborhood had gotten bad, a mangled grid of barbed wire and beaches, of gated streets and broken bottles in the sand, and the trips stopped altogether. I could feel Kate thinking about the Scrambler, about what it meant to be driving it. But she more pertinently noted, “We definitely need gas

104

MOORE : THE STATELINE VIRTUE

soon.” “Yesssss. Can we stop at a Casino slash gas station slash restaurant slash souvenir Mecca?” “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Ten miles later, we pulled off the highway, and in between two stands selling fireworks, we saw the bright red and blue towering compound. We filled up the Jeep and ate turkey sandwiches on white bread at the diner counter. I went to the bathroom as Kate leafed through some Welcome to New Mexico brochure. The bathroom was a dingy skim-milk blue, and the third sink in was only half connected to the wall—but it was cool. The fluorescent lights were so white-bright, different than the yellow-bright of the New Mexico sun against the red clay. I rubbed my eye, lazily shuffling my feet, and bumped hard into a tall tan woman with short blonde hair that fell into her eyes. She was handsome and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I mumbled, “Oh. Um. I’m sorry . . . sorry.” I looked at my feet and glanced at the tall woman’s ripped jean shorts, at her lean but thick legs. They were long, and melted into their work boots. She answered with a voice that buzzed around her throat. “Don’t worry about it. You okay?” I looked to her face. Green deep-set eyes that looked tired from squinting, with vague beautiful purple bags under her eyes, her aviator sunglasses rested on top of her messy hair. Her cheeks and nose were pink from the hot western sun. She spoke with a southern accent that was calming and deep. She had on a white T-shirt with the sleeves and collar cut off, loosefitting and cool. I managed to get out, “Yeah yeah, um. I’m fine, you?” The tall woman laughed raspy, as if she smoked two cigarettes before bed every night, and said, “I’m fine honey. Where are you from?” “New York.” “Far from home, huh?” “Yeah. Pretty far. We’re headed back East right now actually.” “Yeah, me too.” “Where are you going?” I couldn’t believe I had asked her that so forth-

MOORE : THE STATELINE VIRTUE

105

rightly. I sounded too eager—like I wanted to travel with her—right beside her—not cool and aloof like I might have asked the same question back in New York. She laughed quickly and answered, “I drive trucks. I’m hauling a load of Mexican beer out to New Jersey.” “Oh cool.” And because I could feel my legs crossing, and because I could barely handle her stare I said, “Um, I have to pee. Sorry.” She laughed again. It was soft and I shook my head. I felt entirely embarrassed and looked to my feet. She opened the stall door with dexterous hands, and I grabbed it, hoping that she would come inside with me, and kiss me hard on the mouth. That the tall woman would press her body against mine—so that I could feel her strong arms around my waist, as if the harder she pressed against me, the tighter her white shirt would become against her nipples. As if something could pass between us just from pressing. But she didn’t come in after me. I closed the door gently and she said over the hum of the fan, “Hey, listen—my truck is outside, maybe I’ll see you when you’re done in there.” I could hear the woman’s boots on the dirty tile, and put my head between my legs. “Jesus Christ, what took you so long?” Kate asked, looking over her sunglasses. “Oh, um. Nothing. Listen, let’s go.” “Yeah let’s.” I saw the tall woman outside, looking small beside her huge grey truck. She had two cases of beer in her hands, and nodded to me with impossible coolness. “Do you know her?” Kate asked. “Yeah kind of, come on.” The tall woman handed me the beer and said, “Enjoy. Have a good trip.” I smiled, and took the beer. I said thanks, as the tall woman climbed into her truck and started it. She waved goodbye, and I waved back. “Sweet, so she just gave you that beer?” Kate asked. “Yeah, I guess she did.”

106

MOORE : THE STATELINE VIRTUE

“Nice, let’s get going.” We still had four hours ahead of us until we reached camp for the night, a piece of a Native American reservation that a friend of Kate’s grandfather had hooked us up with. When we got there it was almost dusk and we pulled up to a tiny house surrounded by Yuccas and small barking dogs. We rang the bell outside of the gate, and out came an older man with jet-black hair, slicked back on his head with huge black frame glasses. He had dark, wrinkled skin and khaki slacks, and looked like an even more worn Elvis Costello. “You must be Kate,” he said from the front porch, letting us into the yard. “Hi, I’m Kate and this is Taylor. Thanks so much for having us.” The man was a nature photographer, an old friend of Kate’s grandfather from college. He took us inside and poured us cold iced tea that came from a powder. He showed us around his studio. Pictures of him with Wonder Woman were hung next to gorgeous gelatin prints of New Mexico sunrises and 35-millimeter portraits of men in traditional Native American garb. He gave us a tiny silver key to the gate that separated his land from the others, and gave us directions to take the Jeep up on top of a tall butte about 15 miles away, to a plot of land his family has owned for decades. He said, “Be safe girls. Don’t be ’fraid of mountain lions. They’re cowards anyway. Just hit your pots together and they’ll go runnin,’ I’m sure.” And after he paused to look at the sunset: “And come back down here in the morning and we’ll have some breakfast.” We drove up the butte, four-wheel drive for almost four miles until we reached the rusty gate the photographer had mentioned. We set up camp, our tiny tent and grill on a flat area of land overlooking the canyon. We made hamburgers, and drank the cold Mexican beers. We smoked a joint and didn’t have to wait long for the stars to come out. We kept drinking after dark fell. We sang like we wished we were cowboys. And after we sang and laughed Kate asked, “Hey Taylor, how did you meet that chick with the beer?” “Oh, I sort of bumped into her in the bathroom actually. She was stun-

MOORE : THE STATELINE VIRTUE

107

ning, right? There was just something about her . . . ” “Yeah I guess.” “Well, the beer is good anyway.” “Yeah.” We fell asleep in our tent that night, both on our backs staring up at the huge sky, because there is no such thing as a rain fly in New Mexico. The stars blurred and focused as we looked up, drunk and quiet. I felt a small pressure in my chest that I attributed to being so far from the ocean. The tent would have been perfect for two lovers. But Kate and I weren’t lovers, not even close. The strong beer helped us to forget that our shoulders were touching, and so we fell asleep. Kate was up first, stretching outside, and loading the truck bed of the Jeep. I stepped outside into the already bright sun, my heart pounding in my forehead, feeling hot and hungover. That morning the old photographer showed us albums of photos. His significantly younger wife was just returning from her shift at a casino, and offered to make us eggs as she tied back her thick black hair. He began to tell us about the folklore of the skinwalker, living out in the canyons. It was stealing children and women— shape-shifting into hybrid animals like some kind of Miltonian devil. I shuddered as he spoke, glad that he had decided to tell us this the morning after. Kate glanced out the window in an effort to stop paying attention to the story. We left that morning, bellies full of strong coffee, minds still cloudy. And as we crossed into Northern Texas I thought about what it meant to shift shapes. I wondered about the truck driver, free and tall, floating somewhere between a woman and a goddess bearing gifts, confident, with her own brand of masculine grace. If I hadn’t met her in the middle of the day, I would have sworn she shifted shapes—her woman’s slinking hips and man’s rough hands. She could have stolen me if she wanted to. Kate reached over to turn up the radio, and we kept on driving.

108

Contributors’ Notes W.M. Akers is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. His work has been published in “Struggle” magazine. Of the books he’s read lately, his favorite is Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Colette Becker is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. She majors in English and American Literature with a minor in Italian. Patrick Blagrave (finalist, Geometry of Hope) is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. His favorite book is Ulysses by James Joyce. Joseph B. Calavenna is a junior in the Stern School of Business. His favorite book is Digger’s Blues, by Jim Daniels. Jodi Chao is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. On her poem, “Central Park on a Sunday Afternoon,” Jodi writes: “After an afternoon on the Great Lawn, I walked away with a poem . . . and 15 bug bites (both from lying on the grass).” Karen Chien is a freshman in the College of Arts and Science. Though she didn’t set out to write two pieces about growing up, a line in a song by The Go! Team says it best: “Learning to be you is what hurts most.” Catherine Cho is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. She scribbled her poem, “Some Other Yesterday,” on a night she heard about a childhood friend whose luck was finally spent. Ileen Choi is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. Regarding her story, Mighty Morphin’, she writes: “The trick to flying is to think happy thoughts, and remember to take wind resistance into account.”

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

109

Billy Collins is the author of several books of poetry, including She Was Just Seventeen and The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems. His poetry has been featured in various periodicals and anthologies, and he has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001. Galen DeKemper is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. He has been previously published in the Tulip Literary Biennial, and his favorite book is The Grass Harp by Truman Capote. Natalie Dupêcher is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. She has been previously published in “Flashquake,” an online journal for flash fiction. Her favorite book is The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Leah Evans is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. Her favorite book is A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Julia Fincher is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. Her work has been published in the NYU in Prague webzine, “The Prague Wanderer.” She got the idea for her poem, “Doubt,” after a guy lied to her, for no reason, about his boss having four fingers on his left hand. Miriam R. Haier is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. One day, she hopes to write a novel about Jimmy Kittrell. Lauren Amelia Hart is a senior in the Tisch School of the Arts. Her favorite book is Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch. Chelsea Adelaine Hassler is a senior in the Tisch School of the Arts. She’s crossing her fingers that after graduation, she’ll be accepted into Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in Fiction; if not, she’s moving to the U.K. to write sitcoms.

110

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Sarah M. Henderson is a senior in the Tisch School of the Arts. After graduation, she plans to meander around the world, writing and photographing the night sky. Emily Kropp is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. She has been previously published in “Make This Magazine,” and her favorite book is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewsky. John Kultgen is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. On his inspiration for “(Time)lines,” he writes, “A person hardly ever thinks about his genealogy beyond his or her grandparents, but we have roots that go back thousands of years.” Harry Leeds is a junior in the Tisch School of the Arts. His favorite book is Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme. Marley Lynch is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. She is currently studying abroad in Paris. Nick Micheletti (winner, Geometry of Hope) is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. For his story, he drew inspiration from Jesús Rafael Soto’s Vibración - Escritura Neumann (1964) and Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Physichromie 500 (1970) and created caricatures of the artists that reflect the moods of the respective pieces. Jessamine Molli (finalist, Geometry of Hope) is a sophomore in the General Studies Program. On her poem, she writes, “The appealing thing about writing about a piece of art is that it allows you to share your experience of the work. . . . I loved that through writing I was able to express what I saw in the painting, and where it took my imagination.” Megan W. Moore is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. Her poem “Visions of Skeeter Boxberger” was published in NYU’s Minetta Review.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

111

The Stateline Virtues was inspired by separation anxiety she experienced after leaving the ocean in New Mexico. Lee Patterson is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. His work has been previously published in the Columbia Review. His ode to Miami, Fl. was inspired by a drive through a category 1 hurricane on the way back from Moon, a great restaurant that’s open for business despite most natural disasters. Agnes Petrucione is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. Her favorite book is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut. Lex Evan Schoenfeld is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. On his poem “Lasagna (The Boy at the Monkey Bars),” Schoenfeld says he was never much good on the monkey bars, and he doesn’t care for lasagna. Alexa Wejko (finalist, Geometry of Hope) is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. Her novel is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Kat Yakubov is a junior in the Tisch School of the Arts. She eats Kundera up like potato chips.

112

Masthead Editor in Chief Abbey Fenbert Managing Editor Michelle Budzilowicz Poetry Editor Ben Nardolilli Fiction Editor Amalia Child Assistant Poetry Editors Marina Galperina Zachary Heyman Assistant Fiction Editors Michael Porcello Rachel Ridout Readers Garrett McGrath Sara Lynch Lisa Miller Vanessa Friedman Layout Editor Olivia Hartsell Executive Editors Matthew Rohrer Darin Strauss Program Administrator 足 Scott Statland

113

114

West 10th is a nonprofit literary journal publishing poetry and prose by New York University’s undergraduate writers. It is edited and produced annually by the NYU Creative Writing Program. The ideas expressed in West 10th do not necessarily reflect those of New York University or of the Creative Writing Program. The NYU Creative Writing Program faculty includes Breyten Breytenbach, E.L. Doctorow, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Paule Marshall, Sharon Olds, Matthew Rohrer, Darin Strauss and Chuck Wachtel. The Director is Deborah Landau. The Creative Writing Program has distinguished itself for more than two decades as a leading national center for the study of literature and writing. West 10th New York University Creative Writing Program Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House 58 West 10 th Street New York, New York 10011 Copyright: All rights revert to the author upon publication. Reprints must be authorized by the author. Designed by Sam Potts Inc. Cover photo: Sam Potts Other photos: Michelle Budzilowicz, Abbey Fenbert, Vanessa Friedman, Marina Galperina Copyright  2008 West 10th The Literary Journal of New York University’s Undergraduate Creative Writing Program ISSN: 1941-4374