West 10th 2008-2009 by West 10th

title

new york university college of arts and science

2008 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2009

Editor’s Note

Poetry Alexa Wejko

Melt Eventually

Daniel Mehrian

The Joy of It

Caitlin Steever

AC/DC

Carmen Petaccio

Wordless

Jesús Adam Esparza

nothing garden

Ryan Stechler

Moonset

Jason Lee

a haiku

Joseph Knight Haldeman

The Shooting Death of John Bell

Amanda J. Killian

Huis

Ben Radding

Moving from Indiana to Massachusetts in June

Kathryn Mitchell

Cameras With No Film

Soren Stockman

Flowers

Jason Jiang

Striving for Heaven

Lucas (Luke) “Meir” A. Gerber

Another Sunday

Eileen Myles, Guest Poet

The Birds

Maggie Hall

After Six Years Pop Lets Go

Ernest A. Hartwell

Grandma Marian teaching my sister to set the dinner table

Johnny Gall

Beth Israel

Tyler Weston

Our Fear

An Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

Prose Anna Zucker

I’ve Been Looking

Lisa Martens

Marble-Head

Joe Koplowitz

That Heavy Moon Just Won’t Quit Staring

Alexander Fontanez- Ordonez

Deli-Boy

Matthew Capodicasa

Poolside

Umar A. Riaz

Main Market

Contributors’ Notes

Editor’s Note With the help of a devoted and talented editorial board combing through a slush pile of submissions as diverse as the population of Jamaica, Queens, we set out to make this second issue of West 10th worthy of its predecessor. The inaugural issue established West 10th as a journal without airs or strict specifications, one that hosted an incredible range of high-quality literary work. This year, we had to build on that strong foundation to create a successful sequel. In other words, we had to do what was done in The Godfather: Part II as opposed to what was done in Jaws 2 or Jaws: The Revenge. But a literary journal doesn’t follow a single narrative. The material that made up last year’s “script” would be replaced. We would encounter different writers with different stories to tell and moments to portray. Instead of continuing a specific “plot” or adhering to a stringent aesthetic vision, we could only rely on our strong conviction that this year’s edition should provide a forum for writers of all academic backgrounds. Their works would be chosen based on our careful readings and honest reactions. This issue is defined by what we discovered rather than anything we set out to find. The creative works that follow are valuable contributions to an ongoing and evolving “script.” We are proud to present them as a continuation of the story that West 10th began to tell a year ago and will continue to tell in the future. I would like to thank Dean Matthew S. Santirocco, Deborah Landau, Scott Statland, Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss; Managing Editor Miriam R. Haier and the rest of the editorial board; Sam Potts for his exceptional journal design; Eileen Myles, our guest contributor; and Jonathan Safran Foer for answering our many questions. Finally, I would like to thank all of the writers who submitted their poetry and prose. Without their courage and their belief in their craft, the “script” of this year’s West 10th could never have been so beautifully written. Sara Lynch

Melt Eventually Alexa Wejko icicles melting in the dusk the sweet smell of rotting mahogany crawling in the smoke of Friday night, Castles made of sand pretty images and fig trees lemons freezing and freezing in winter a round sunset and the night made pale by the moon women dancing in the nineteenth century children waltzing underneath the tables my love doing jumping jacks on a dock outside of New Haven Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never been, I hate it already four AM and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m an impressionist.

W e j k o : M e l t e v e n t u a l l y

The Joy of It Daniel Mehrian To bite into a pair of grapes is to return home after a shitty date where the girl cracks her knuckles in 4/4 time. She still throws rocks at my window.

M e hr i an : Th e joy of i t

AC/DC Caitlin Steever Flip that cool pillow’s reign. Heat and wrinkle shipwrecked curls Stranded on an Egyptian strain Of sheet with clumps of heaving girl. Beautiful in this bowl of dry wall Nails are capped like Pope’s hats. Fingers titter off the mattress. Fall Away, crescent dead as aftermath. New rhythm, fresh washboard to cheek on To peck on to thump flatter. Mortar to pestle. Chest lawn. Laughing fit at nature’s fit And cocky Pollock splatter. Thunder pitched, you too are held Under neck and ochre afghan, Spinning skins of realms That thicken in a hand. No one current powers this lover’s inventory. Electric shocks wear well on a mannequin. Beauty is what it does to me. As long as the light turns on and the bed frame spins.

s t e e v e r : ac / dc

I’ve Been Looking Anna Zucker The first time I lost her was in the flowers. I was eight and she was four, and we still lived in the Ukraine. We were playing hide-and-seek in a field of tall grass and wildflowers. It was our favorite game. But Lily was too good at it. It was her turn to hide, but I failed to find her. I kept looking until it got dark, but I had to go home and tell my parents I had lost Lily. Mama wailed when I said it, but Papa grabbed my arm, and we ran back to the fields to find her. We brought lanterns and searched for hours, hoping for a glimpse of her stringy brown hair, her enormous gray eyes. We didn’t find her until she popped out of the weeds; that’s how good she was at hide-and-seek. The second time I lost her was because of the potatoes. I was ten and she was six, and we lived on 7th Street in New York. Papa sent us out to buy a sack of potatoes from the market on 9th Street. First, we went to the river, even though we weren’t allowed. We loved the water. Lily liked to watch her reflection; she thought of it as a friend who she always wanted to meet, hiding down there below the surface. After the river it was late, and when I ran back to the market, I realized Lily had disappeared. We weren’t playing hide-and-seek this time. I weaved through the crowd all day looking for her, but she was gone. I returned home without the potatoes and without my sister. I knew she wasn’t gone forever, so I’ve been trying to find her ever since. Something isn’t lost for good until you stop looking for it. By now Mama and Papa are long gone and left me our apartment to live in, the only home I’ve ever known in America. Sometimes it gets lonely, but mostly I just look for Lily. As soon as I was old enough to carry a pile of dirty dishes, Papa sent me to work at a restaurant a few blocks from our house. I work at the same restaurant. It was just a few blocks from our house then, and it still is today.

z u c k e r : i ’ v e b e e n l oo k i ng

Z u c k e r : I ’ v e B e e n l oo k i ng

I’ve done just about everything there is to do there by now. I started out bussing tables and taking out the trash. Later I became a hostess, waitress, cashier, dishwasher and cook; I’ve poured water, scrubbed toilets and mopped floors. I’ve even stood outside in the freezing days of many Februarys just to hand out menus. Now I don’t do anything too difficult because my hands hurt too much. In the morning I wake up in the full-size mahogany bed that my parents used to sleep in. I get out of bed and walk into the bathroom to take my bath. As soon as I see the discolored tub, I close my eyes and see Lily and me splashing in the porcelain basin, shrieking, giggling and pulling each other’s hair. When I open my eyes I think I see some movement, but it is simply the dancing shadows cast by the tree branches outside my bathroom window. Sighing, I turn on the water. After my morning rituals I go outside to look for Lily, stopping in the lobby of my building to unlock my wire cart. Pushing it as I walk helps me stay balanced, and when I find Lily I think she might like to ride in it. Every day I search a different neighborhood. Today I am looking in the East Village, where I lost her. I walk down my block past St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church, where I go every Sunday. As I walk, I push my cart, I look and I ask, “Lily?” Today as I walk down Avenue B I come to a small community garden, my favorite place to look for Lily. Luckily there are many like this hidden throughout the city. In the garden I weave through the mazes of trees, bushes, shrubs, plants of all sizes and flowers of all colors. I ask, “Lily?” and think maybe, just maybe, she will pop out from the greenery once again. After my search, and just before I go home to change for work, I stop at a deli selling plants outside and load up my cart with them. I bring them home, add them to the room full of plants, water them, and then get ready to go to work. These days they don’t expect me to do much. Although the staff has changed since I’ve been there, they always take good care of me. Most nights I end up staring out the window in case my little sister walks by.

Z u c k e r : I ’ v e b e e n l oo k i ng

*** Sometime ago I read an article in the newspaper about a man using the Internet to reconnect with an old friend. It was very complicated, but what I did understand was that I could use the Internet to find Lily. That day, when I was outside, I stopped to ask a kind young woman where I could find the Internet. The young woman was sweet and politely explained that I could find it at the New York Public Library. The next day I decided to search Fifth Avenue for Lily so that I could stop by the library. I pushed my cart into the library and asked a young man working there where I could find the Internet, and how I could find someone on it. He showed me the computer and opened the Internet to what he called “Google” and said I just had to type in what I was looking for, and then use a “mouse,” which was not a real mouse, to click on the button that said “Search.” I couldn’t believe it. How long had this been here while I’d been out in the streets calling for Lily? I took a few deep breaths and carefully typed into the box on Google: “LILY.” My hands usually tremble a bit, but now I could barely stop shaking the “mouse” to click on “Search.” I anxiously waited for Lily to appear, but she was not there. I called for help. The young man came back. “Where’s Lily?” I asked. “Click on the blue words. They will take you to websites so you can find what you’re looking for,” he told me. I spent the next several hours clicking on every blue “LILY” there was. It just brought me to more and more screens, none of them containing Lily. I thought that maybe I was typing too small. I thought that if I could only type “LILY” big enough so that my word would project out of the computer, out of New York, out of America, and out of the Earth so that from space my word would be seen in large block letters, so that someone out there could answer, or at least know that I’m looking. I left that day with my head in a whirl.

z u c k e r : i ’ v e b e e n l oo k i ng

*** After I get home from work, I look through some photos that are brown and frayed around the edges. Papa took the photos with a camera he bought when we first came to America. There’s one of Mama, Lily and me watering a plant in our kitchen. I remember Lily and I fought over who got to water it that day, and Mama made us both hold the watering can at the same time. After Lily disappeared, Papa stopped taking photos. I climb into bed, silent as tears stream from my eyes, and I drift off to sleep. I think tomorrow I will look for Lily near the water. *** The old woman walked alongside the river, hunched over with stray silvery wisps of hair escaping from her headscarf. The morning was cloudy and cold; the water seemed to blend in with the gray sky, the horizon indiscernible. Suddenly she spotted a little girl with gray eyes and stringy brown hair. The old woman stopped. The little girl stopped. The old woman’s eyes glistened as she stared at the small child, staring back at her. “Lily?” she whispered in a gasping voice. “Lily? Is it you?” The old woman wailed and bent down farther, clutching the little girl tightly to her chest. “Lily! Oh I’ve been looking for you, I’ve been looking, I never once stopped looking!” The little girl struggled free and, having felt the old woman’s bursting heart against her own, slowly shook her head. As the child walked away, she glanced back to see the old woman still crouching, still mumbling, alone.

Wordless Carmen Petaccio David Foster Wallace’s mouth is agape and wordless, in my mind. Double-knotted cords of a word processor, Hung from a tropical ceiling fan, Keep him suspended and de-mapped. His body sways, in a manner, He may have described as chandelieric. David is pant-lacking and dead. There are cows on his boxer briefs. Meanwhile, three thousand miles away, I’m gabbing on the balcony of a three-story walkup, In the glow of September Christmas lights, Drunk and happy as David dangles in the dark. His wife finds him, suspended and pantless, And makes stentorian sounds with her mouth. There are no words. I am back, warm in my bed. The next morning I eat melting omelettes And blindly waste away the worst day of Mrs. Foster Wallace’s life. That night the news comes, and suddenly I am standing in that doorway with Mrs. Wallace, Slender hand gripping the light switch, Looking at a face, That only David Foster Wallace could have put into words. p e t acc i o : word l e ss

nothing garden JesĂşs Adam Esparza a girl chases me with hummus but i dont notice her i feel embarrassed when i walk in on the mailman putting letters in my box like hes the easter bunny i tend to lose things in the winter i think its a symptom of too many pockets i know this girl who always writes poems about her dead boyfriend she also sends me text messages the closer I get to becoming her boyfriend the deader i get i want to be hooked up to feeding tubes and a breathing machine and a machine that pumps my heart for me and one that simultaneously blows my nose and generates random thoughts moving my hand over a piece of paper in the shape of poems and i want to be surrounded by bleeps and blips that sound too alike to really mean anything to anyone other than robots and i want to see what thats like because people always say they would rather be left to die how could they know

e spar z a : no t h i ng gard e n

Moonset Ryan Stechler the dented pseudo-star spun lazily towards the region of the sky that hurts your neck to see. the crescent shape was slightly off-center and so it resembled yang more than a pastry, though flakes still crumbled from the sides to be scooped up by cosmic pidgeons; the same ones who spread their wings to connect constellations and told the Greeks the myth of Icarus incorrectly. his wings weren’t made of wax but light he didn’t crash into the water but left the atmosphere and tumbled sideways releasing thousands of little crumbs. little white lies. they didn’t want to give the secret of their food away to just anyone.

s t e ch l e r : moons e t

a haiku Jason Lee when the doors opened all the winterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s short lived suns closed our eyes for us.

l e e : a ha i k u

Marble-Head Lisa Martens Wong and Jon were going out tonight. Maybe I’d have an electrocution party while they were gone. I knew where they hid the batteries. I’d have some fun. I’d put my neck in a tiny brace to keep it still. I’d think of being a mistress, all those months ago. It’d be a good way to remember myself—as young, sexy, and in my fantasies I’d be looking down at myself, and I wouldn’t hear the rattling inside my own head. It’d be like watching a movie, everything is seamless, there are no kinks in the knees. I remember thinking it wasn’t anything he was doing wrong. I just wasn’t going to climax, even though I was supposed to. I was the mistress, you know, and mistresses are supposed to orgasm every time. Really, the guilt belonged to an injury from my youth, some loose cartilage in my neck that kept cracking back and forth. My neck cracks every time I move. It’s like there’s a marble in my brain, and when I move too much to one side, that marble builds up enough momentum to swing to the other side of my skull, and it lands on the bone with a click. Back and forth, the rolling marble inside my head. Whenever I hear it, I think of the marble. The marble is a deep sea blue. The marble is large, like an abnormal pearl. It’s rhythmic. And it kind of hypnotizes me, puts me in a trance, and so I never orgasm during sex. Just during masturbation, when I can keep my head still enough to prevent the marble from captivating me. Not that I’ll ever tell any lovers that. He was frustrated, and after a while, I made him stop, even though he was so good and determined. Everything felt nice. But it was going to go around and around. The more excited I got, the more the marble would roll, and then I’d go back to not being excited, and over and over. So I pulled him out and pulled myself up and we cuddled. We didn’t say sweet things, but I kissed him a lot. Kissing counts as pillow talk. I went the next two months without sex or masturbation. Maybe that

M ar t e ns : marb l e - h e ad

mar t e ns : marb l e - h e ad

sounds impossible or irrational. But that’s what happened. I missed the fun of being a mistress, but really, I’d had enough. I didn’t want to fake any orgasms. I didn’t want to spend the frustrating time getting myself off. I didn’t want to get new batteries for my sex toy or new batteries for those tiny self-electrocution nodes I attach to my head or get my curvy pillow out of the top of the closet. Weird things get me off. At about the two-month mark, I broke my celibacy with myself. I was watching a documentary of Hitler assassination attempts as my landlady told me about her daughter, Angel. My landlady is somewhere between a prostitute and a countess. I’m not sure how she got with my landlord, Jon, but I smell something illegal and money-related about the whole thing. Angel is not Jon’s daughter, but is my landlady’s daughter from a previous marriage. My landlady is Wong. She’s from China. “They have relationship,” she said while rubbing her fingers together and raising her eyebrows. “He’s white guy. Has money. Very high up. More than ten years they have relationship. He buys her things. Bought her the car. Mercedes car. But my daughter, she’s bad. She tries to be friends with his stepmother, she’s more rich. But what’s this woman going to do to her? If she gets divorce, who cares? She comes to me. Problem is, I give to her too much. Her birthday’s in June, and she already wants birthday money, ten thousand dollars.” Her daughter’s birthday was in June. She wanted an advance on her present. I looked at my phone for the date. December seventh. I wish I could ask my mom for a ten thousand dollar advance on my birthday present. Then she called Jon crazy since he takes acting classes. Her, “He’s crazy. He’s not going be famous. I say to him, give up, you’ve tried for twenty years, give up. Like right now he wasting time.” Me, “But he likes it a lot. And it’s Sunday. It’s his day off.” Her, “Yeah. But I don’t like it.” I tried to swallow my laughter and kept watching the near-miss assassination attempts of Adolf, including one where a bomb on the podium went off a mere thirteen minutes after the Fuehrer had finished his speech.

M ar t e ns : marb l e - h e ad

I sweetly missed that delicious sex, in the same way I missed Costa Rican fruit and that yo-yo from third grade. Sex had become something of the past. I’m sure if I ripped off my pants at that point, I’d have the genitalia of a Barbie doll. Plastic, straight-toothed smile, no hair except on the head, drawn eyebrows, no gut, and a straight seal where a pleasure hole should be. That was me. And here I was, listening to Wong flaunt the wealth of selling sex, of moseying up to rich dicks . . . literally. Wong called Jon twice. His class had ended at one, and here it was, half past three, and he still wasn’t home. Where was he? What was he doing? What was taking him so long? He should come right home after. I found these people on the Internet. They were nice enough to let me live in their spare bedroom for only six hundred dollars a month. After five months, I was just now realizing how psychotic these people were. I was sure they wouldn’t rob me . . . because Wong had tens of thousands of dollars somehow readily at her disposal . . . and Jon was a baby-boomer, very immaterialist compared to his common-law wife. Wong would hit Jon with keys, threatened to call the cops if he shielded his face, and talked about random men who “paid” her for undefined services. Jon just forgot absolutely everything I told him. He forgot that my mother lived in Texas, that I had a ten-year old uncle, my hair color, and if I’d paid rent. The last one was always in my favor; he assumed I’d paid when I hadn’t. That was nice. Sex evaporated. The batteries in my vibrator were dead. I wasn’t doing a great job of making money or having orgasms. I couldn’t even remember the exact details of any of the assassination attempts on Hitler, except the explosives used in the documentary looked like purple play-doh. My stupid damn neck. All the chiropractors had made it better. The pain went away. The ache. But they couldn’t get rid of that rolling ball in my brick brain, the one that made me retarded. Even when my lover, in a candle-lit room with the rain outside, picked me up by the backs of my legs and placed me gently on his countertop and rocked in and out of me, I couldn’t be in the moment enough to climax. There we were, in my mother’s empty apartment in Texas, the apartment she’d ditched to sleep on her office floor because we’d gotten into another fight over my dad. I was filled

mar t e ns : marb l e - h e ad

with rage that should have turned to passion if the marble didn’t fizzle absolutely everything. My lover with delicate hands, hands that didn’t do physical work, so they were nice and gentle for skin-touching. This was good. That night, I might pull out my electrocution machine. It was meant for the muscles in my back, for the large muscles. I wasn’t supposed to put it on my ass or on my temples. I pretended to give myself electroshock therapy and whimpered and held in screams.

The Shooting Death of John Bell Joseph Knight Haldeman was heard through Spokane a fire engine roaring on all fours the soothing cleft between imagined and real in my room I dreamt a man named Bell made him for my mind fixed his house in mine fed the man for years until I shot him with a pill

26 ha l d e man : t h e shoo t i ng d e a t h of john b e l l

Huis Amanda J. Killian You live in a house that bridges the river and you forsake your bed for the barn to drink and smoke among old dressers filled with 1930s photos and the blueprints of houses never built. Your grandfather finishes nothing but he straddles torrents and rocks in low-tide and sleeps skeletal next to plywood. Your mother is manic and searches the river for you at night with a flashlight showing only on fish. Your father drives trucks but tells you of ships and Catholic celibacy and Amsterdam at night. Your brother is lost and sedated with too much religion with an absent gaze on time. You study psychology and philosophy, sober and drunk You stay quiet too long as the leaves float under your house wet, molded and warm.

k i l l i an : h u i s

That Heavy Moon Just Won’t Quit Staring Joe Koplowitz She died. That was the way Nodder liked to think of it. She hadn't passed over, on, or away. She wasn't resting in peace, or meeting her maker, or pushing up daisies. She hadn't gone Shuffling Off the Mortal Coil. She wasn't crossing any River. There was no farm to be bought, no Good Night in which to go, Gentle or otherwise. Just dead, nice and heavy. A word that cut off conversation. That could be spat in people's faces, left to drip down their cheeks as he walked away. A woman of her age, it shouldn't have been much of a surprise. She had been seventy-four, three years his senior, and they had often talked of death. It had crept into the corners of their bedroom and slid its way under their sheets. It lay between them as they slept, and in the mornings it joined them for breakfast around the small wooden table in their airy kitchen. Sometimes as a black joke she would pour a third bowl of cereal or fix a third plate of scrambled eggs and set it at an empty seat. “We know he's here, we might as well make him feel comfortable,” she would say, and they would laugh about it. But this death they joked about was a friendly one. He was the calm, compassionate death of the elderly. The painless death of slipping away in your sleep. It will be easy, he told them. You'll be having the most fantastic dream of your life, a dream of youth and color and the leathery smell of your first car, and that dream will go on forever. It will unfurl into the eternities and wrap you up in its endless patchwork. That dream will become you. And you'll be dead. That was the promise, and Nodder, who in his seventy-one years had never once given anyone his complete trust save his wife, had believed it. How stupid you are! he'd thought to himself after it happened. How pathetic, to believe those hollow promises! He had seen many of his

k op l ow i t z : t ha t h e a v y moon j u s t won ’ t q u i t s t ar i ng

friends, guys he'd chummed around with in those hazy days of boyhood, go in terrible ways: cancer, dementia, stroke, cancer, heart attack, cancer, cancer . . . yet even those deaths held a certain appeal. There was time for preparation, time to gather your family, to say your goodbyes, to pick out a subtle-yet-authoritative headstone. Time to have your body pumped so full of Morphine that the stuff would leak, cool and numbing, from your ears and eyes. Time, period. In those deaths, there was time. But not for her. On some of his better days, when the swollen clouds of anger lifted oh-so-briefly from his mind, Nodder could find a sort of grim irony in what had happened. Even after the wrinkles had overtaken her face like a colony of thin white worms and her hair had grown wispy and gray (a cobweb coif, she'd called it), she had still given off a manic energy, a rowdiness, a teenage disregard for the prim and proper. Until their midsixties, when neither of their bodies could handle the strain any longer, they had had sex almost every day, and not the kind of sex you would imagine from two old farts. In fact, she refused to refer to it as sex at all . . . “We don't have sex and we don't make love,” she would say, “we fuck. And that's damn sure something to be proud of at our age.” And it was. They fucked in her flower garden, on the kitchen table, in the back seat of the Buick Century as it sat parked in the garage. Once, they had snuck out of a meeting at the JCCA and fucked in the front row of the empty synagogue under the watchful eye of Yahweh. She loved stuff like that, mischief, misconduct, disrespect, and he loved her for loving it. So she had lived like a teenager, and so she had died like one: unexpectedly, without the luxuries of time and preparation. Without saying goodbye. Nodder had come home one day from his afternoon walk to find the car missing. A note on the garage door, where she always left them, informed him that she'd gone down to the store to pick up a few things to cook for dinner. It was signed, as always, with a strange new pseudonym: Penny Knollwood. She used a different name every time. Jessie Jezebel, Kortni DeVon, Heather Salamander. Never repeated one, not once in fifty years. They always made him smile. He sat down in his tattered La-Z-Boy, flipped on the TV, and fell

Kop l ow i t z : t ha t h e a v y moon j u s t won ’ t q u i t s t ar i ng

promptly asleep. His dreams were full of dim hallways and pounding footsteps. He awoke slicked in sweat, a strange taste in his mouth like the ashes of an extinguished fire. Outside, the sun had dipped below the horizon, and the orange afterglow was quickly fading to dusk. He shook off the last clinging strands of sleep and cocked his head, listening for the sounds of her. There should have been pots and pans clanking out an awkward melody in the kitchen, the low hiss of the stove, the radio turned to the oldies station. There were none of these noises. The house was sepulchrally silent. He rose from the chair, the joints in his knees going off like M-80s, and before there was even time for the liquid unease that had begun to form at the base of his brain to solidify, the phone was ringing. It was an ancient, matte black rotary-dial with a full-bodied mechanical ring, a phone she had insisted on keeping even as the new cordless models with the built-in answering machines became cheaper and cheaper. “I like the way it sounds,” she had said. “I don't want any digital twitters.” He picked it up. The voice on the other end was flat and anonymous, the practiced monotone of a man who has spent his life doling out bad news to folks he'd never make eye contact with. “Sir,” asked the voice, “are you the owner of a silver 1985 Buick Century?” There was nothing spectacular about the accident. No drunk driver, no hairpin turn, no rain, no deer running out into the middle of the road. She had been driving down Olive on her way to the grocery store and simply. . . lost control. “Just one of those things,” an officer had told him when he arrived at the scene. “Ain't no rhyme or reason to it. Makes you feel any better, she was wearin' her seat belt.” Oh yes sir. That makes me feel just fine and fucking dandy. The Buick had swerved to the right, dove into a ditch, and collided head-on with an oak tree as thick as a grain silo. She was thrown from the car, the seat belt shearing straight through her left arm, the windshield shattering her skull, the car crumpling like an accordion. The police had tried to keep Nodder away from the accident, but he pushed past them, walked right up to the tree and kicked it as hard as he could. Pain bloomed up from his toes and coursed through his leg, and the tree just stood there,

k op l ow i t z : t ha t h e a v y moon j u s t won â&#x20AC;&#x2122; t q u i t s t ar i ng

arms crossed, staring down at him. It's not my fault, old man, the tree seemed to be saying, so he kicked it again. And again. And again. That was when someone had grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him away, his leg still swinging out uncontrollably, three words running through his mind in an interminable loop: not like this not like this not like this not like this not like this. A seventy-four-year-old woman killed in a car wreck. The very idea of it filled him with a pummeling rage. A rage that cauterized his sadness. That settled in behind his eyeballs and throbbed there, red and blistering. That never left. In the months after, alone in the house that now seemed to have developed an aural quality of absence, an echo where there should have been another body, Nodder began to experience a slippage. That was the only word he could find to describe it. It was as if her death, the circumstances of it, the suddenness, had pulled from him a linchpin, and without it his parts were slowly beginning to fall out of sync. There was, he thought, an incredible balancing act within a person. Everything had to be timed, rhythmic, churning along to the steady metronome of the heart. His machine was off time. Things were starting to get blurry around the edges. It began with the dreams. All his life, Nodder had been subject to vivid, powerful dreams, dreams that would stick with him for the rest of the day, that he could call to mind with the clarity of film running through his head. Now, he couldn't remember a single one. He woke up mornings with the odd sensation that his waking was in fact his falling asleep, that his life had become the dream. The things that had once seemed so familiar to him took on an air of mystery, and he found himself wandering the house in a daze, like a shipwrecked man who has returned from a long stay on an isolated island. One morning he spent almost two hours inspecting the toaster, pushing its lever down and watching it slowly creep back up, observing the coils as they warmed and oranged, running his fingers over the dents and imperfections in the metal. He had never seen this toaster before, he was sure of it, yet certainly it had to be the same toaster that had sat stoutly on the counter for years, a gift from a friend whose name he

k op l ow i t z : t ha t h e a v y moon j u s t won â&#x20AC;&#x2122; t q u i t s t ar i ng

could no longer recall. He knew this, yes, but he could not believe it. He would recognize that toaster. Perhaps someone had come in the night and replaced it without his knowing. Perhaps they had taken everything, the furniture, the appliances, the carpets, the wallpaper, and replaced them all with near-identical stand-ins. The thought terrified him. Then there were his afternoon walks. Once he'd hit fifty, his doctor had told him that he needed at least an hour of exercise per day, just to keep the ol' blood pumping. So Nodder started walking. As the years passed and he honed his route (Meadow Lake to Dautel, Dautel to Graser, Graser through Rainbow Village park, from the park onto Weatherby, Weatherby to Barbary, Barbary to Momarte, Momarte to Niehaus, Niehaus back to Meadow Lake), those walks became his favorite part of the day. Even in the winter, when the sun was little more than a sliver of dull alloy at the farthest corner of the sky, and the temperature crackled below zero, Nodder would walk. There was something about the beat of his footfalls, the whistling of breath through his nostrils, the street names flowing together like some sort of abstract poetry, that served to clear his head of all thoughts. But as the slippage began to take hold, and the rage blossomed like a poisonous flower, those walks turned sinister on him. It seemed that suddenly the world was much sharper than he remembered it to be. There were angles everywhere, and corners, points and tips and tines and barbs. His eyes would ache after only a few minutes of looking at it all, and he would turn around and shuffle back to the house, head down, hands clenched in quivering fists. He would bolt the door behind him, lock the windows and draw the curtains, convinced that soon enough that sharpness would make its way into his home and drive him instantly mad. Without the walks to calm him, Nodder felt something immense and terrible building up in his chest. One evening in early spring he went to the cellar, down the crude wooden steps onto the hard-packed dirt floor, and dug out his old Remington Model 1100 12-gauge shotgun. The wooden stock was rough with age and disuse, and the barrel had rusted slightly in the perpetual damp of the cellar, but the gun still felt good pressed up against his shoulder. Felt damn good. He found a box of shells and loaded

k op l ow i t z : t ha t h e a v y moon j u s t won ’ t q u i t s t ar i ng

them in, pleased with the way they fit so smoothly, like the world's simplest puzzle. After the gun was loaded, Nodder flipped it around and inserted the barrel into his mouth. It was cold as a dead kiss against his tongue and tasted only vaguely metallic, like blood. He left it there for a moment, a lurid, hideous smile breaking big across his lips, before deciding that this was not the final piece of the puzzle. Nevertheless, when he pulled the chain on the single bulb that hung from the ceiling and made his way back upstairs, he brought the gun with him. He placed it at the foot of his bed, still loaded, and went to sleep. The last thought that passed through his head before he entered that dreamless darkness was, at least it's here, just in case. In case of what, he did not know. The next morning, he looked at the gun and felt a wave of nausea slam through his guts. “You're losing it,” he said aloud. “You're slipping right on over the edge.” He went to the small safe under the bathroom sink and removed 3,000 dollars in neatly stacked twenty-dollar bills. He'd never trusted banks, always felt the need to keep at least some of his money where he could see it, touch it, run away with it if he had to. It was one of the few things he had ever really fought with her about; she couldn't stand having that much cash around the house. He put the money into his red duffle bag, slung it over his shoulder, and walked the three miles over to Dave Gibli's used car lot. After an hour of browsing, he drove off the lot in a beat-down '83 Sedan DeVille, eggshell white with matching leather seats. The car smelled mostly of cigarettes, though there were faint undertones of sweat and stale french fries. The driver's seat was warped and sunken, bits of foam peeking out from beneath the cracked leather like bone. Nodder liked it the minute he sat down behind the wheel. From that day on, the afternoon walk became the afternoon drive. He would head out around two o'clock and wouldn't stop until the sun began to leak from the sky, in towns whose names slipped through his head like snakes through wet grass: Rolla, Neosho, Eureka, Chesterfield, Wright City. The rides were long and soporific, and for the first time since he had kicked the tree he could feel some of his anger, some of his slippage, receding. Often he would pull off the interstate and realize he had no memory of the past

k op l ow i t z : t ha t h e a v y moon j u s t won â&#x20AC;&#x2122; t q u i t s t ar i ng

few hours at all. Rather than frightening him, these blank spots were his only relief, and he tried to hold onto them for as long as he could. Maybe, he thought, if I could just drive forever, I could forget myself completely. When evening fell, he would cruise through whatever small town had been closest to the highway until he found the local diner that looked the least charming, a place where the waitresses were black-and-blue and the neon signs were half burnt-out. He ordered the same thing every time, a cup of coffee and a side of hash browns, and as he sat there sipping the coffee he could actually feel the rage pumping back through him. It started as a trembling in his toes and worked its way up through his legs to his stomach. Please just stop there. I can handle you there. Please don't go any further. But of course it did, and eventually its warmth would slither up the back of his neck and soak over his head, and he was lost in it, flailing, unable to stay afloat. If there were any girls in the place, sitting six to a booth and giggling over their grilled cheese sandwiches, he would stare at them and imagine their bodies twisted and splintered in the flaming wreckage of fatal car accidents. He wondered how many of these nameless girls he would sacrifice to have her back. The answer was as many as it would take. Sometimes after dinner he stopped at a bar and had a drink while some shitkicker jukebox pounded out the kind of honky-tonk country crap he'd always hated. Sometimes he just got in the DeVille and went home. Driving back, he would talk to her, though he knew he was only talking to himself. It was something he'd never done before the drives started. The things he said were feeble and maudlin, and he wished he could take them back just in case she might actually be listening. When he got to the house, he would park the car in the driveway and sit on the hood, listening to the engine tick-tick-ticking itself to sleep. He would look up at the sky. He would make silly, meaningless deals with the sky. If that cloud moves from in front of the moon, it means she's out there somewhere. Come on. Come on. Move, goddammit. MOVE! And he would stay outside until the cloud drifted in the wind and the moon shone down knife-cold and merciless, and he would know that it had nothing to do with her. Clouds float through the sky at their leisure, and the moon shines regardless of ghosts, and the only ghosts

k op l ow i t z : Tha t h e a v y moon j u s t won ’ t q u i t s t ar i ng

out there anyway are the stars, shining down dead through millennia, haunting the sky with their dumb, unblinking eyes. *** The bar was called Kathy's Cozy Up, just five stools and a 26-inch Trinitron suspended from the wall. Nodder sat there, nursing a Jack Daniel's, trying to remember the name of the town he was in. Effingham, maybe, or Matoon. He supposed it didn't matter. Wherever I am, that's where I am, he thought. The words had a nice flow to them, and he began murmuring them under his breath like some nonsensical conjuration: Wherever I am, that's where I am. Wherever I am, that's where I am. Occupying the stool on his right was the red duffle bag. He looked over at it occasionally, as if assuring himself that it hadn't sprouted legs and walked off on him. He was on his fifth drink. “Slippage,” he said loudly. “That's what it is. Everything's just . . . slipping away from me.” The Trinitron on the wall was turned to ESPN, where Brett Favre sat in front of a microphone wiping tears from his gray-stubbled cheeks. The volume was turned down to make way for the jukebox. Nodder shook his head slowly back and forth. Favre was finally giving it up. Hard to believe. Hard to believe indeed. “I always liked the guy,” Nodder said to no one in particular. “You could see it in his eyes that he meant well.” The bartender, a sweet brunette with tight lips and a wide forehead, touched him lightly on the arm. “Everything alright, sugar?” Nodder realized he, too, was crying. Jesus, he thought, am I crying over Brett Favre? He couldn't tell. “Just fine, thank you.” “Don't look too fine.” She smiled at him the way the young always smile at the old, genuine but distant, a smile to make clear the canyon of decades between them. He smiled back and thought he saw her flinch away from it. “You just let me know when you need a refill.” “I certainly will.”

k op l ow i t z : t ha t h e a v y moon j u s t won ’ t q u i t s t ar i ng

Nodder turned back to the Trinitron. Favre was running a hand through his close-cropped hair, his bottom lip quaking, unable to bring his eyes up to meet the cameras. “It's the end of an era,” said Nodder, and as he spoke Favre raised his head and stared out at him through the matrix of pixels. “Well,” said Favre, his comfortable, chewy drawl ringing in Nodder's ears, “you could call it ‘Apocalypse,’ or you could call it ‘The Reckoning,’ but it ain't so much a biblical thing. It ain't like all the souls are gonna rise from the ground and go burning off into the sky. Nothin' so clean as that. But it is the end of times, and you better not get any grand ideas. Because in a few years, there ain't gonna be no sign of us left 'cept for the bridges and the dams, and maybe not even them. Concrete ain't much more permanent than bone when you get right down to it. It's all dust and dirt, deep down.” Nodder slugged back the rest of his drink and rubbed his chin. Favre's eyes were still fixed on him. Eyeballs threaded on a string, thought Nodder, not knowing where it came from. “So what do you suggest we do?” Nodder asked. “How the hell are we supposed to deal with something like that? When everything that matters is just dust and dirt?” The bartender shot a glance in his direction. She looked nervous. “I guess what I'm trying to say,” Favre said, tears dribbling down his beard, “is that it's best to just let go. No sense packing your bags or givin' your dog one last pat on the head. That's only gonna make it worse. Just. . . let it all go. There's a fire comin', and its flames are white like angels' wings, but at the tips they glow redder than a Mississippi sunset, and that fire's gonna lay us all down. It's gonna tuck us in and turn out the lights and poof. Put us right to bed.” Nodder drew the back of his hand across his eyes. He was really crying now. “That's no kind of answer,” he said. “I can't just let it all go. I mean, I tried. I really did. But it keeps on coming back to me. It is me.” Favre shot him a sly wink. Nodder didn't know what to make of it. “Not all of us can let go,” said Favre. “Some folks, they gotta go out with a big, bad bang. And all I'm gonna say to them is: If you're gonna do it, you better do it soon.”

k op l ow i t z : t ha t h e a v y moon j u s t won ’ t q u i t s t ar i ng

The bartender walked over and shut off the Trinitron. Then she turned to Nodder and gave him that smile again. This time he felt it like a knuckle jammed into his spine. “We're about to be closing up,” she said, her voice betraying her smile. She sounded scared. “Well I'll just be getting out of here, then.” Nodder raised his empty glass to her in a toast. “To Penny Knollwood,” he said, and hurled it past her shoulder where it exploded against the wall. “What the hell?” She stood there, frozen, her arms limp at her sides. Nodder reached over and grabbed the duffle bag. He unzipped it and pulled out the Remington. The bartender's face snapped into a rictus of fear. “It's the end of times, sweetheart,” he said, and the words came off his tongue like shrapnel from a grenade. “Don't bother packing your bags.” When the gun bucked in his arms, it was gentle as a baby's kick. Outside, he looked up at the sky, and there was that machete-blade moon. Seeing it, Nodder felt awash with heat, with fury, and he dropped the shotgun to the asphalt. “She's not up there!” he shouted, the cables in his neck bulging, his eyes lunatic-bright. “She's not! So just stop it already!” And then he threw a punch. He could feel his arm stretching, extending, as if his bones had gone to taffy. He watched as that arm, which no longer seemed to belong to him, flew up into the sky like a wild prayer. There was a faint burst of light high above as his fist went sizzling through the atmosphere, a meteor in reverse, and then a deafening blast as it connected with the moon. He felt the impact of the punch reverberate down through his arm, and when it reached his shoulder it knocked him flat. His arm came snapping back into place like a giant, fleshy rubber band. He looked up again just in time to see the moon shatter into a million pieces. It came raining down around him like sharp, fluorescent snow, and with that Nodder picked up the shotgun, tucked it under his arm, and walked off toward the DeVille. There was plenty of time left for a man to go out with a big, bad bang. He planned on doing just that.

Moving from Indiana to Massachusetts in June Ben Radding Dad’s mouth was formed of languid rigidity as his car came into the driveway. A plea from my mother, stern slang words from me; from my brother, drawings of slight morbidity: paladins, holding hummingbirds in their hands. I asked my brother if they were meant to be free. Dad taped them to the office wall, a decree that things can’t be as bleak in future lands. When we got to our new house, the walls were pink. The rugs were stained with mud and dirt, once white as porcelain. Someone had lived there before. “Temporary rent,” as Dad put it, the sink filled with murky water. My brother’s knights grasping hummingbirds, taped to his drawer.

R add i ng : mo v i ng from I N d i ana . . .

Cameras With No Film Kathryn Mitchell We wrote basement manifestos In used marble notebooks And that smile your parents paid for Outshone everything I had to say

m i t ch e l l : cam e ras w i t h no f i l m

Flowers Soren Stockman It’s time to put on shoes. Flower petals keep falling but the sky is gray. John doesn’t feel that he has to smile. His hotel room is filled with clay pieces and ants that stop every minute to scratch their heads. Across the courtyard, one boy counts to ten and ten and nine and a girl bellows. John has seen the hummingbird once today, drinking the flowers. The flowers are as follows: yellow windmills, orange carrots, red wine grape patches, and the purple ones that keep falling. White and magenta attract bees on the brick ledge where John repeatedly sees something dark crawling, under the hanging vines. There’s a mountain and a pueblo and John’s hotel with internet access. He goes to sleep every night full of food. At rest time every day, he lies on the balcony sofa that is really more like a crib missing one side. The sofa has three pillows, two blue and one green. John arranges the pillows to fit comfortably under his head, putting them on top of each other in various ways. A cactus plant leaks a wetness trail on the balcony too small to be of any consequence, like the dried wetness on his hand.

s t oc k man : f l ow e rs

Deli-Boy Alexander Fontanez-Ordonez Deli-Boy’s Boss waves him over. “Come here a minute,” he says. “You see that? You know what that is?” He points out the window. Deli-Boy wipes his hands on his apron and looks out at the luxury car. A woman in the passenger seat checks her makeup in the mirror. Boss speaks slowly for his benefit. “That’s mine. All of this is mine, Deli-Boy,” he sweeps his hand through the air. “So try not to burn the place down while I’m gone.” Deli-Boy looks up at Boss. “No sir,” he laughs anxiously. “She’s in good hands. I’ll make sure everything runs nice and smooth. I was even thinking—” Boss holds up a finger. “Deli-Boy. Did I ask you to think?” “Ah, no sir,” Deli-Boy bows his head. “Then get back to work, and don’t bother Cashier-Girl,” he says on his way out. Deli-Boy goes back to the sandwich station and shakes his head as he pulls on a new pair of gloves. Bother Cashier-Girl? Right. Like Deli-Boy would want to mess with her ugly ass, all reading books and shit up there behind the counter. He plans on just running out the back door if they ever get robbed. The bell over the door jingles. “Hey, Deli-Boy,” Regular walks up. “Can I get a number eight-hundred-and-sixty-three?” Deli-Boy nods and springs into action, hands flying over his workstation, without once stopping to consult the ingredients list posted on the wall. Regular raises his eyebrows. “You memorized the entire sandwich menu?” “All eight-hundred quadrillion of ‘em,” Deli-Boy says over his shoulder. “Yep,” he says, wrapping the sandwich. “Figure I’ll start saving up soon and open my own place one day. Make my millions, buy a house down in Tijuana.” Regular takes the sandwich with a pinched smile. “Sure. You can do

F on t an e z - ordon e z : d e l i - boy

fon t an e z - ordon e z : d e l i - boy

anything you put your mind to,” he says as he turns to walk away. Deli-Boy leans over the counter and continues. “Yeah, figure one of these days I’ll take some business classes or—” But Regular is already up front pulling out his wallet in front of the register, Cashier-Girl’s voice squeaking with small talk. Deli-Boy strains to follow their conversation from the back of the narrow store in the hope that Regular will shoot him a look that says, “Christ. How do you manage?” But Regular just pockets his change and leaves. Deli-Boy gets back to work, wrapping a rag around his finger and scratching dried condiments off the counter, just going through the motions until his day off tomorrow. Fashion Girl walks in and looks around like something dirty might jump off the shelves and touch her. “Hi,” she forces a smile. “Can I get a five-hundred-and-thirteen, but can you make it a Code Green?” Deli-Boy grabs a bread roll and spins it in the air in front of his face before catching it by one end. “Five-One-Three-Code-Green,” he calls out to no one, his hands working the knife through the bread as he looks up at her pretty face. “All dressed up, huh? Going out tonight?” She looks away and pulls up at her neckline. “Could you not make eye contact with me?” she asks. He shrugs and turns around to layer on extra portions at no extra charge, wishing he could be there when she first bites into the sandwich and realizes that he’s hooked her up. The two of them would lean against a wall outside a bar and polish off a shared snack, the summer night alive with people. The passing groups of guys would give him silent nods of approval, and the girls would breathe sighs of defeat when they saw how it was just Deli-Boy and his girlfriend in July, happy together, while all around them the city blinked and shimmered up out of the Pacific. He finishes up and hands Fashion Girl the sandwich with what he hopes is a look of a deep connection, but she just takes it by its farthest end so as not to risk bodily contact, and quickly clicks her heels back to Cashier-Girl. Deli-Boy watches her butt cheeks flex and compress through her tight black pants and sucks air through his teeth like it hurts.

fon t an e z - ordon e z : d e l i - boy

A group of well-dressed young guys walk up. “Hey, Deli-Boy. How fast can you make us sandwiches?” Deli-Boy decides they’re cool, the type of guys he could see himself cruising for chicks with on a night like tonight, all cocky swaggers and force-of-numbers as crowds made way for them. He says in mock challenge, “Time me,” and the guys give courtesy laughs before they resume their conversation. His hands become a blur. “That’s pretty damn fast,” one of the guys turns to watch. “Work hard, play hard,” Deli-Boy jokes. “Matter fact, you fellas need a few pointers on how to party, I might be able to show you a couple things. I get off in a couple hours,” he offers. The lead guy shakes his head decisively. “Nope. But you can shut your mouth and finish my fucking sandwich,” he counter offers. Deli-Boy shrugs sensibly. “Cool!” he agrees, and hands over the goods. On their way out, the guys brush past Boss coming in. Boss extends his hand and waves him over with short, impatient flicks of his fingertips. “Deli-Boy,” Boss stands by the register. “I’m giving you your check, but as you can see,” he pulls out an envelope, “I’m giving you cash, and for two reasons. One, neither of us have to pay taxes this way, and two, you can’t complain to anyone when I short you money,” he says. He flops the envelope against Deli-Boy’s face before grabbing a candy bar on his way out. “This is coming out of your paycheck,” he holds the candy aloft as he walks out the door. Deli-Boy scrambles to collect the scattered bills and jogs back to his station. “Hey, amigo,” Pimp looks up over his sunglasses. “Got something for you.” He gestures toward the girl beside him, who twirls her hair and scoffs at the light-skinned Budweiser girls in the promotional posters. “I don’t know,” he sizes her up. “I think I’ll just wait till I see you guys in T.J. tomorrow.” “Nah. I’m tellin’ you. Ain’t gon’ be nothin’ left, you wait till tomorrow. Act fast, homie,” he urges. Deli-Boy shifts his leg to tighten the jean fabric over his thigh and feels the reassuring pressure of the envelope.

fon t an e z - ordon e z : d e l i - boy

“The thing is, it just costs so much, and I’m trying to save up.” He shakes his head. Pimp stares out over his glasses in silence. “Nah, it’s not worth it,” Deli-Boy concludes, and Pimp steals a look over his shoulder as he leads the girl out by the arm. Deli-Boy starts to refill the sauces. “Excuse me?” someone calls over the counter. Deli-Boy sizes up Nerd’s backpack and glasses. “Yeah?” He lolls his head. “May I order a sandwich?” Deli-Boy barks an aggressive little laugh. “Alright. Which sandwich?” He whips his hand at the menu behind him. “Just . . . ham and cheese. On a roll.” Nerd lowers his eyes. Deli-Boy picks up the knife and begins a sloppy cut through the bread, only to drop knife and bread to the counter and squeeze the tip of his pinky. The cut is shallow, but painful. Deli-Boy hasn’t cut himself in years. He puts on a Band-Aid and a new pair of gloves before picking the knife back up and angrily turning on Nerd. “This for studying tonight?” he asks. Nerd holds the straps of his backpack and nods. “On the weekend,” Deli-Boy accuses. Nerd nods again. “Dude, no offense? But you need to get a life.” He finishes the sandwich and tosses it onto the counter with a dismissive flick of his chin. “Get some girlfriends or something.” “’Girlfriends?’” Nerd asks, bolder now that he has his sandwich in hand. “You have more than one?” Deli-Boy rolls his eyes out over the store. “What do you think, man?” The bell over the door jingles after the Nerd. Rag in hand once again, Deli-Boy is too distracted to see Bandana walk past Cashier-Girl and sneak up behind him. Deli-Boy turns with a start and throws his hands up as Bandana pulls his hand out from his waist and points two fingers at Deli-Boy’s head. His thumb makes a metallic clicking sound as he cocks it back. “We got shotguns, Deli-Bitch. You know? We take you out, you disrespect the ladies again,” he says through a thick accent. “No, no,” Deli-Boy waves his hands in front of his face. He pleads, “It’s

fon t an e z - ordon e z : d e l i - boy

just that I always pay for a girl ahead of time, but when I get across the border, you guys tell me they all had to go home. I wind up sitting in the bar, drinking alone. I just pay and I never get anything. That’s all.” Bandana nods. “That’s why you gotta keep payin’. So the girls will see you’re serious about the relationship and wait for you. You know?” DeliBoy nods back, relieved, and tries not to shake as he counts out some money from the envelope. The Bandana pockets the money and a generous tip on his way out the door. The world is once again silent. Deli-Boy squeezes his fist at his side, his finger throbbing in time with the humming of the empty store. He looks out at nothing for a long moment before his cheeks pull back into the start of a smile. Like a slow student proud to join the ranks of his smarterpeers with a display of comprehension, he declares, “I gotta get outta here!” Cashier-Girl closes her book and walks out from behind the register. She holds the front door open, and a sea of people flood in from the street. The front window explodes as a trash can sails through it and bounces off the floor, rolling off to one side as dozens of people crunch and slip their way over the shards of glass on their way toward the back of the store. Everyone is screaming shoulder-to-shoulder as they fight for space at the deli station. The mob roars, “Eight-hundred-thirty-two with no pickles! Balsa wood with extra mayo! Pick a number, any number, and add extra thumb tacks!” And Boss sails a paper airplane over to him with a note that says, “DeliBoy, the milk delivery is out back. You serve no purpose.” And someone punches the empty tip jar, “Can you hurry up?” And a group of people pick up a chant, “Can you do it blindfolded?” And, “Can you rewrap this? We think it’s leaking through! Don’t look at us, Deli-Boy, you’re from another planet! Early to bed and hurry to sandwich! Die, Deli-Boy, die, Die, DIE!” And he crouches down and hides behind the counter as he squeezes his head between his hands until it hurts. He uses a trick that works when he wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t shake the empty feeling in his chest, talking nice to himself and stroking the side of his face the way he thinks someone who cared about him would.

fon t an e z - ordon e z : d e l i - boy

Relax, he tells himself. Take deep breaths. (In) He moves his cheek over the calluses in his palm. (Out) He instructs himself: Start from the front. The magazine racks are empty. The register is empty. The coolers are empty. The walk-in is empty. Everything is empty. The store was empty before, it’s empty now, and it will be empty when you open your eyes. He takes long, deep breaths, fighting back the blood that pulses behind his eyes. There’s never anyone here. (In) You’re always alone. (Out) You’re All Alone.

An Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer is the best-selling author of Everything Is Illuminated, which won numerous awards, including the Koret Award for best work of Jewish fiction of the decade, and the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was a finalist for the IMPAC Prize. Foer joined the NYU Creative Writing Program faculty in 2008, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

an i n t e r v i e w w i t h jona t han safran fo e r

West 10th: Based on your experiences as an undergraduate student and now teacher, what challenges have you found young writers face? Jonathan Safran Foer: All writers face the same challenges, in a sense—how to work in a kind of void; how to work without any kind of immediate peer group or regular feedback; how to be your own judge and your own boss. That’s something that young writers share with very old, experienced writers. Young writers are maybe unique in that they’re writing into a different culture than has ever existed before, a culture that’s probably more skeptical of writing and the arts and probably less receptive to it also, so that’s a unique difficulty. West 10th: Is there any particular piece of advice that you’d offer? JSF: Not exactly. Writing is something that, in a way, eludes advice. But Joyce Carol Oates, who was a professor of mine, once said that energy is that most important quality for a writer to have. I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant when she said it, and I’m still not exactly sure, but what I take it to mean is that from the sentence level, the level of word choice, to the level of a career—how you move within books and between books—it’s very easy to get depleted, to feel tired, to get jaded or lazy. To really do it properly, to stay with it, to make a life of it, you have to keep mining your own energy. There wasn’t any advice in there about how to do it, just that this is what you should expect to be the most difficult thing. West 10th: How are your roles as a teacher and a writer related? Have you found a relationship growing out of your experience as a teacher now? JSF: Everything is interrelated—my role as a teacher, my role as a father, my role as a citizen—whatever it is, they all interact with my role is a writer. Writing is a particular expression of life, a way of looking at experience, so one really nice thing about teaching is that you’re constantly around ideas. Excitement about writing is contagious. When you’re left

an i n t e r v i e w w i t h jona t han safran fo e r

on your own, in a room, it can sometimes get hard to muster. When you’re around people who are excited about it, it’s much easier. West 10th: Does your experience of writing in New York or being a writer in New York influence your work? JSF: I guess I don’t find it a particularly strong direct influence. I don’t find it irresistible to write about New York, and I don’t even necessarily feel any strong identity as a New Yorker, even though I choose to live here and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I think I’m lucky in the sense that my life in New York is peaceful and comfortable, and I’ve had peaceful and comfortable periods of life elsewhere. If I were living in Iraq or who knows where else, or in a different time, then I might feel a different necessity. I don’t think New York influences my writing all that strongly—except in the sense that it doesn’t. It’s not constantly infringing on my imagination. West 10th: Do you consider Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to be post9/11 literature? Is writing different in a post-9/11 world? JSF: Well, we won’t know for a really long time. We have all sorts of ideas about what’s important or what literature is. In ten years and twenty years, who knows what people will think about the books we write now or what books will be read? I didn’t think of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in those terms when I was writing it. When I write, I never think of my writing in terms like those. It’s much more intuitive—it’s not intellectualized. I find it much more expressive or organic or imaginative. I think a mistake that’s sometimes made is thinking that writers and reviewers or students of literature think in the same languages. In my experience, they don’t. I know a lot of writers do like to write reviews and essays about literature. I don’t. There’s an old saying, which I find myself saying a lot, which is that a bird is not an ornithologist. Just because you do something, doesn’t mean you’re a student of it, or know why you do it, or can talk confidently about it.

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West 10th: You were quoted as having said, “finally having a writerpresident—and I don’t mean a published author, but someone who knows the full value of the carefully chosen word—I suddenly feel, for the first time, not only like a writer who happens to be American, but an American writer.” Do you think that this identity of “American writer” will inform your work from now on? JSF: I don’t think so, actually. It’s one thing to feel a certain way, it’s another to have those feelings guide your actions. With writing, I don’t even feel like I have the luxury of that sort of change or flexibility. I rarely feel like I’m choosing between good alternatives. I write what I write because it’s the only thing that can seem to work in a given moment. I don’t know, maybe it will creep in somehow without my being aware of it. But it would have to be that way. It would not be because I suddenly feel a different relationship to America and want to incorporate it. West 10th: What are you reading right now? JSF: I’m working on a non-fiction book, so I’ve had to do a ton of reading related to it. Otherwise, I tend to read things that people recommend— things that find their way in front of my face. Someone just gave me a book called, The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes [by Avraham Burg.] But it’s not exactly pleasure-reading, or representative of my reading in general. There aren’t stacks of such books on my bedside table, that’s what I mean. West 10th: Who are your literary heroes? JSF: Kafka is probably at the very top of the list. Bruno Schulz. Yehuda Amichai. David Grossman. Saul Bellow. Those are a few. West 10th: How long did it take you to write your first published novel, Everything is Illuminated?

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JSF: I’d say about two-and-half years or so. West 10th: Did you ever imagine it would be made into a movie? JSF: I didn’t even imagine it would be made into a book, to be honest. I didn’t have much of an imagination about my writing. I guess there were questions I didn’t ask or things I didn’t think about. I don’t know if it’s because it was too exciting or because that would have required too much confidence, or confidence I didn’t have, but I didn’t really think about it at all. West 10th: Did you like the movie? JSF: There are things I liked about it; there are things I didn’t care for. You know, it’s very different from my book, as it should have been. But that makes it hard as the writer to have any kind of normal relationship with it. West 10th: What do you consider to be the quirkiest part of your writing process? JSF: I guess it’s quirky to call oneself something and to do it well so rarely. I feel like if I do ten minutes of really good writing in a week, that feels like a pretty good week. Can you imagine a doctor who said, “I was only a good doctor for ten minutes this week?” That would not be a practicing doctor. People rarely believe me when I try to convey how hard I think writing is and how poorly I’ve been doing it. But that’s a very strange thing about the profession and something I’ve noticed a lot of other writers share.

Striving for Heaven Jason Jiang A drop of honey flows down the back of an optimist observing his thoughts on top of a radiator as he counts the holes on snowflakes. The wide-eyed boy plays pool on a diving board over ice water eating candied cardboard and hits the eight-ball with his pen. He sleeps beneath a napkin covered with his dreams of painting stars in the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes and he bathes in sweat from reaping mind-fields. Coolness protects his ambitions but he shivers every time he looks into a mirror and sees two sparrows perched side by side on his bicycle seat.

56 j i ang : s t r i v i ng for h e a v e n

Another Sunday Lucas (Luke) “Meir” A. Gerber There’s a world in your head, the ant told me, then he tiptoed up my ear lobe and dived into my inner ear. This was no ordinary ant. He collected crumbs or flecks of dirt from every place he went and stored them in between my walls. He dropped out of AA a few times after his wife left him. I felt kinda bad for him so I let him live in my walls until I caught him masturbating on my grandmother’s couch. I don’t know where he lives now, but he still comes by with beers every Sunday during the NFL season and to drop off crumbs and dirt in a crevasse in the wall. As he walked out of my ear, he said That’s one fucked up world in there. Then he told me he ate his ex-wife for breakfast.

g e rb e r : ano t h e r s u nday

The Birds Eileen Myles I sort of like myself each day as you express your longing looking out the window I witness your back I groaning and waiting for the grains to soak their minutes reading some stray thing eight years old you pounce: oh. Everything does its work. Bold or hidden? I enthuse to under lining moving you again. Bigger more insistent desires remind me of a friend I must call and what remains of last night accompanies me to a surprising wet street. Returning the formula & some of the workâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

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done in my absence. I will call you. Like the book your gift has arrived inside of me daily now the underlining to hold on and be heard now in the wake of the new knowledge. Just before finishing I interrupt to say. Confident in my relation to some sentence some thing. And when I thought your sweetness would be left you are gone.

Poolside Matthew Capodicasa If Sally was swimming, she was searching. There seemed to be no exception to the rule, unless perhaps she wasn’t actually swimming, but just lounging by the steps in the shallow end. But her mother, a sunbathing enthusiast, usually objected to this, because of Sally’s proximity to her. She told Sally as much. “Go away,” she said, turning the page of her magazine. Sally went, pivoting and dolphin-diving toward the deep end. Maskless, Sally wasn’t much of a presence in the pool. Blind, she couldn’t navigate very well, and tended to swim slowly. But masked, or even goggled, she owned the water, every cubic centimeter. She barrelrolled, dived, submerged, surfaced, and skimmed the concrete bottom, exulting in the sheer near-weightless joy, but always remaining focused on the task at hand: looking for lost, sunken things. Sometimes she abandoned the feeling of laminar flow for the feeling of stillness, and just hung in the water, feeling the currents of senior-citizen-paddling in the shallow end. (Sally, at seven, was usually the only one in the pool under forty. Discounting her mother, who rarely got in, she was the only one under sixty.) Stillness afforded her the chance to survey the briny deep of the regulationsized pool without actually interfering with it. She stayed underwater so long the skin of her fingers wrinkled and were pruny enough to hurt. Sally lived underwater. Every now and then her mother noted this. “Don’t stay underwater so long. You make the lifeguards nervous. And I don’t want to talk to them,” she would say. But Sally and the lifeguards had an understanding. They let her stay underwater as long as she wanted, so long as she flashed them a signal every now and then to let them know she hadn’t drowned: a simple thumbs up. It had been Hal’s idea. Hal suggested that they establish some sort of communication with him and the other lifeguards so that they didn’t have

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to worry about her. They decided, after much debate, that a single thumb in the air would be acceptable, but only if Sally was too busy searching to devote an entire hand to relaying the message. The thumbs up was overused, sure, Hal said, but its purpose and message were clear. “I need to know you’re okay, Sal,” Hal said. He called her “Sal” and she called him “Hal.” It was their thing. Everyone else knew him as Harold. But this way they could be pals. Hal and Sal. Sal and Hal. “I’m fine, Hal. Always,” she protested. “So just tell me that,” he said, “What’s wrong with letting me know that my girl’s okay?” Then he grabbed her and tossed her back into the pool. It occurred to Sally, mid-flight, that their deal probably worked out better for Hal and the lifeguards, because it allowed them to avoid her mother. She hit the water and sank and stayed there for a while. Her mother had little regard for most of the lifeguards, probably for no other reason than that they were there, or so Sally reasoned. But the disdain she sometimes displayed toward Hal came from somewhere else. Perhaps her mother targeted him because he inserted himself into Sally’s life, and, by extension, hers. She pretended not to know his name. She usually called him “William” first, and depending on how tired or irritable she was, she sometimes turned to monikers like “Tiny” and “Spike” and, once, on a particularly hot day, “Fang.” Sally didn’t quite know what to make of these substitute names her mother conjured. They bore little resemblance to the actual Hal, a smiley, clean-cut blonde with no body piercings or snaggle teeth to speak of, at least that she could see. But Hal was Hal, her mother was her mother, and there were things on the bottom of the pool that needed to be found. Golf balls constituted the bulk of Sally’s collection of found objects, the spoils of the driving range across the road. Skewed drives bombed the pool like artillery, much to the senior citizens’ annoyance and Sally’s delight. She was, after all, usually safe from the depth charges, as she pointed out to Hal. “What if one lands on your head when you’re swimming and you get knocked out?” Hal said from the lifeguard chair, tipping his sunglasses

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down on his nose. Hal’s lowly chair was plastic. “Then you’ll just float away and get stuck in the skimmer.” “I’m too deep to get hit,” Sally countered. Her arms emerged from the water and clutched the side of the pool, and she hauled herself out and onto the deck. She stood and dripped on him. “If anyone’s going to get hit, it’s you.” Hal laughed. He started to say something, but instead sprung from his chair, picked her up like a baby, spun her around and discus-tossed her into the pool. This was, by far, Sally’s favorite way to go back into the water. Aside from golf balls, Sally’s collection counted amongst its number hairpins, bottle caps (Orangina, mostly, a favorite of pool members), rocks, coins, a thimble, several Matchbox cars, the nosepad from a pair of glasses, a pair of nail clippers, and an old skeleton key. There were also various pieces of glass and plastic, but Sally didn’t keep inventory of them, mainly because they didn’t have names. But she kept them just the same. She didn’t know where they came from. She just assumed they were lost. Lost things that needed to be found. Hunting and searching never struck her as complex activities. She was the rescue person, the rescue girl. She didn’t show her mother the blue shoebox Hal had furnished to store these treasures. Her mother would find it tacky. Sally chose instead to indulge her mother’s indifference towards her, and left the shoebox in its hiding place: behind a rock on a patch of grass beyond the diving board. Sally didn’t understand her mother. She always chose to be away from Sally, and Sally never saw her interact with anyone else at the pool club. That she ranked lower on her mother’s scale of swim club social strata was not lost on Sally, but she chose not to be offended. Her mother preferred avoiding the senior citizens alone, without the bother of her seven-year-old companion. But that didn’t stop Sally from questioning her. “Why do we even come, if you don’t talk to people? You hate everyone there. Why do we go?” Sally demanded one day as she and mother crossed the parking lot to the pool. “Because there’s a pool, you’re a child, and I like sun,” her mother said, increasing her pace to a light speedwalk. Sally kept up. “Sunbathing isn’t

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something you do with others.” “But you don’t like being here at all. Isn’t there sun in the backyard?” “I’d have to deal with you in the backyard. And I like the pool. I like to sit by pools. I like the feeling of the sun on my skin, and the option to go in the water if I want. I’ve been doing it since I was a little girl. Satisfied? Now, go bother William.” “Hal. Or Harold.” “Whatever. He’s a nurse. Like he’s worth my time.” “He’s an E.N.T., not a nurse.” “It’s E.M.T., Sally.” Sally frowned. “No, I think it’s E.N.T. Hal told me.” “You misheard. What does E.N.T. stand for? Emergency Navel Tonguer?” “What?” Her mother froze. “Nothing.” “What’s a navel?” “A type of orange. Now go inside.” Her mother stopped walking. Sally realized this after a few steps and turned around. “Are you coming?” she asked. “Not until you get in there,” her mother said, holding her ground. Sally turned and trudged through the open fence into the pool area. She looked for Hal to confirm that it was E.N.T., but she could not find him. She asked Joe, one of the other lifeguards, about him. Harold was cleaning the locker rooms, he told her. Sally retreated to her blue shoebox and recatalogued its contents. When Hal emerged from the locker room, covered in sweat, Sally confronted him by the deep end and told him about what her mother said. “Your mom’s probably just letting you have fun. You love the pool, don’t you?” “Yeah, but . . . ” Hal put a hand on her shoulder. She let him. “Then leave her alone. Now. Go find some more treasure.” With that he grabbed her under her arms to heave her into the pool. Not his best toss,

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but a decent contender. As he grabbed her, his hand had brushed against her chest. She felt nothing more than the contact, a simple touch, the same as when we had touched her shoulder, nothing more. But Sally knew that this, her chest, was a source of something for her mother, and for other women. It seemed to be a protected area, an area of perhaps great volatility contained. She knew this region of her body to be a taboo zone, but why, she did not know. She knew it had something to do with womanhood, and adulthood, but not childhood. But she had occasionally seen her mother let her hand slip down to her breast and trace a circle on it, as if walking the path of something else before it, keeping the footprints fresh. Though Sally felt nothing beyond the pressure of his hand against her bathing suit against her chest, she knew that this should mean more. So she treasured it as well, for it was something her mother didn’t have that she did, and she was only seven. There wasn’t much in the pool that day, but her mother seemed particularly irritated, and Sally didn’t want to speak to Hal since he had sided with her mother, so she kept her mask on and swam around. She saw, from the shallow end, her mother dive into the pool sometime around noon (the sun almost directly overhead from underwater). Eventually, Sally reasoned it had to be at least near time to go, so she sculled over to the steps and walked out of the water. Her mother was walking by the steps towards the locker rooms, and was surprised to see Sally’s dripping form before her. The two stopped short of one another and said nothing. It was her mother who broke the silence. “I’ve lost an earring,” she said. “An earring?” said Sally. “Yes. When I was in the pool.” “Oh. Which earring?” “The diamond stud.” “Oh.” Her mother seemed to force herself to speak. “Put your snorkel on. Will you look for it for me?” Sally nodded, and darted off to their pool bag. Snorkel in mouth, she

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proceeded to the water, and jumped in, noticing her mother enter one of the locker rooms as she broke the surface. Sally started in the shallow end, but it soon proved difficult, as she had to wiggle around the senior citizens, or more accurately, around the skin billowing in the water and the aqua shoes covering old-people feet. Thanking God for small miracles, Sally completed a cursory search and resolved to return to that area when they left the water to go play bocce ball. Moving beyond them, Sally laid out her grid. She started at one side of the pool and swam straight across, canvassing the pool floor. Not discovering anything, she moved over one bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s width and swam back the other direction, canvassing the next strip of pool floor, all the while keeping her eye open for the glint of something shiny. It surprised her that her mother was in the locker room. She regularly complained of their dirtiness, and how she refused to use them until they were clean. But perhaps she had wanted a shower. And Hal had cleaned the locker room that day. So, perhaps her mother had given in. Sally kept swimming the grid, moving like a man mowing a lawn, snaking across the pool into the deep end. She ducked under the buoy conveniently demarcating the deep end for those little kids among them, and pushed her search into deeper waters. Then she saw something. Resting just next to a small grate. It twinkled, flashing off of the rapidly setting sun. Sally efficiently redirected her body towards it, breaking the rules of her grid. She spat the snorkel from her mouth and dove, dove, down towards it, careful not to make too many waves. She knew that her interference in the water could sweep her prize into the grate. She noticed, as she approached the bottom, that her ears hurt. But she paused, allowing her ears to become accustomed to the depth, and kicked over to the grate. The earring was gone. Sally panicked momentarily. It was one thing to never find it, but it was another to find it and lose it. She cocked her head in desperation, and the new angle refracted the light off of the earring which had rotated it to its non-shiny side. Sally extended her hand and grasped it. She swung her feet downward and kicked off the bottom, zooming up to

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the surface. She broke through, earring in hand, and thrust it in the air, victorious. She scrambled over to the side and lifted herself out. Clutching the earring, she went in search of her mother. She was not near the table, nor was she anywhere near the pool. Sally walked over to the lifeguard desk near the locker rooms. She found Joe, another lifeguard, sitting there. “Have you seen my mother?” she asked. “Locker room,” Joe replied, not looking up from his word search book. Sally began walking toward the door. “Eighteen and up, Sally,” Joe said. “Can’t go in there.” She moved in close to him, dripping on his book. “But my mom’s in there,” she said. “She’ll be out soon,” he replied, sliding the book out from under her. Sally stood there for a moment, and was about to walk away when she noticed a red shoebox underneath the desk. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing. Joe twisted his head to get a look without moving any other part of his body. “Harold’s junk. He collects it. Throws it in the pool for people to find. Says there are kids who look for them.” Sally looked at Joe. She hated him. She hated him more than her mother and Hal put together. She hated him for knowing only enough to destroy her, but not enough to know not to. She retrieved her blue shoebox from its hiding place and came back to the lifeguard desk. Squatting under the oblivious Joe, she upended the contents of her box—her discoveries—into Hal’s cache. She stood up, still clenching the earring in her hand. Hal stepped out of the women’s locker room, covered in sweat. “Hey, Sal,” he said. “Hey, Hal,” she said, and walked off. She walked as far as the water’s edge. She stood there, dripping, cold, her feet turned out like a duck’s. She considered her options. She could swim off. That could work, except that there were those that were bigger, and they could catch her. She didn’t have her mask; she would be swim-

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ming blind. Also, she could see the other shore, and it wasn’t any better. Sally imagined a more experienced swimmer might seek the safety of other shores, but in this case, she would still be fenced in. Sally spat out a gust of air from her nose. The choice lay before her. She jumped in. Her mother appeared on the edge of the pool. “Time to go,” she said. “Get out.” Sally turned around and looked up at her mother’s face, now about five feet above her. She noticed her mother’s cover-up was wet at the points of contact with her bathing suit, particularly her chest. Hal appeared behind her mother. He flashed her a thumbs up. “I didn’t find it,” Sally said. She swam into the center of the pool and submerged herself, daring them to come get her. When she ascended to catch a breath, a golf ball entered the pool’s airspace and followed a parabolic path into the water between Sally and her mother. It splashed, but not as much as Sally thought it would. She had never seen a golf ball land in the pool from above the water. It plopped pathetically and disappeared beneath the surface.

After Six Years Pop Lets Go Maggie Hall When you gave me a nod I could not be contained as if my heart was shooting through the too exciting window of my first snow. When you barely moved your lips I was in on your secrets, like Cinderella using the squirrel’s skills and the mouse’s magic. I was still holding your hand when you let go of mine like sand shifting out of my palm, emptying handfuls from within— or quicksand, sucking my forearm, pulling my face and whole body entirely in, flushed down, across the threshold, to a washed away rabbit hole. I left the room to tell mom when she said she could feel you had left, like smoke from a chimney when the fire is put out.

H a l l : af t e r s i x y e ars pop l e t s go

Grandma Marian teaching my sister to set the dinner table Ernest A. Hartwell Take your hands back, Penny. You picked them beautiful, yes, but wildflowers fall as they may. Don’t brush your cheek on the Queen Anne’s lace— you’ll sneeze. And when you pick them, leave at least one tiger lily at each cluster; I couldn’t stand myself if there were no more tiger lilies in the Bay. Look at them, leaning on that wavy glass rim. They are what I have. That’s why they call me Bird: my children are the flowers & fields. They come and hide in my skirt when scared, and if you try & arrange them, child, I promise you, they’ll just bend back.

70 har t w e l l : grandma mar i an t e ach i ng . . .

Beth Israel Johnny Gall I’m staring at John’s gap-tooth while we sit in the waiting room for detox, and he tells us how addicts are angels with clipped wings. He’s a fat, gruff man with a beard as big as his bald spot and when they call everyone in he hugs us close and calls us his sons before he goes to the back room and Mike and I go out for pancakes And look out the window at the sunrise. I walk a while through the November streets downtown, tipping my hat to the angels on the sidewalk. And God appears in the form of a burning oil drum, and the Holy Spirit descends as a flock of pigeons. I find the Kingdom of Heaven in a grating on Mercer Street where I stand and warm my hands before walking on.

ga l l : b e t h i sra e l

Main Market Umar A. Riaz The evening began to dim the sky over Lahore. It had been announced by a muezzin’s throaty call to prayer, sung in a sad scale native to no known musical tradition. Soon enough, others had joined in; more loudspeakers had crackled with static; thudded as mouthpieces were tapped; shivered with wet clearings of throat and mind; and, finally, boomed with Allah’s name stretched over countless syllables, scratching the air. And, as twilight spread over the sleepy city, the simple message of the azaan was lost in overlapping, god-revering howls. This had occurred five times a day, every single day since the invention of the megaphone. A black Honda turned right into the Main Market roundabout. It was a new model, with spaceship eyes and a grille curved into a permanent scowl. Inside, Asad turned to Sara, who was sitting in the passenger seat with one heel propped onto the dashboard. “Paan?” he asked. “Have I ever said no?” “Alright . . . I’ll get Nadeem to bring them—bastard always gets them right.” Sara turned the other way and looked through the window, blurring out the legless beggar navigating the distance. Asad eased the car into a parking spot at the south-west curve of the market, idling the engine and taking it down a level. He sat back and waited for the runners. In less than ten seconds, several kinetic, unshaven young men elbowed their way to the car. Asad pressed a button and took his window down by an inch. He was greeted by around half a dozen yes-sirs. “Nadeem,” he said simply. Their eyes lowered in disappointment. One of them turned on his heels and raised an arm with a shout-out. Soon the crowd parted, and Nadeem

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walked through at a brisk but measured pace. It was immediately apparent that Nadeem was different. He always appeared to hover—elevated in comparison to the other runners. He looked bathed. His shalwar-kameez did not hang emptily on his frame. He rarely ever wore shalwar-kameez, usually choosing dusty t-shirts in bold colors, and jeans with the dye faded dramatically at the knees and buttocks. They always fit perfectly on his wiry form, complimented his look: slicked-back, matinee idol hair, and eyes always coolly narrowed. “Sir,” he said to Asad, stretching the address with a punkish air of familiarity. “Nadeem . . . ” “New car?” “New . . . yeah . . . ” “It’s nice. The usual?” “Yeah, but add a couple of paans to that.” “The usual paan for you?” “Yeah, but a meetha for her.” “Done. And, if they don’t have Swiss Marlboro Lights?” “Just get any imported pack.” Nadeem took off toward one of the little shops that crowded the market. Sara chuckled. “What?” asked Asad. “Nothing . . . I like how the way you speak changes when you talk to them.” “Talk to whom?” “Them,” said Sara, her eyes shifting toward the runners. “What do you mean?” Sara raised her eyebrows. “You’re an idiot,” said Asad, smiling. Asad’s Urdu did change when he spoke to anyone who wasn’t like him— not that he would speak exclusively in Urdu to anyone like him. To begin with, his Urdu was not particularly good; his pronouns were mostly English, and the remaining grammar was creaky, prone to faltering and flailing

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without an English crutch. Yet, when he had to speak in Urdu, to runners, maids, drivers, cooks, underclass yes-men, waiters at dingy tikka and kebab joints, security guards, sweepers, sweepresses, etc. he would always doctor his tones with the bullock-gait cadences of Punjabi. Although learned in Punjabi swear words, and proud of his occasional innovations in their form, he could not string a coherent sentence together in the language common to them. So, for him, and many other moneyed graduates of British schooling in Pakistan, Urdu had to be the middleground for communication, pressed with a street swagger that fooled few. “Do you have condoms?” asked Sara, a weariness lining her voice. “Fuck, I completely forgot . . . there’s a Fazl Din’s right there. Lock the door behind me. I’ll leave the key in.” Asad stepped into the pharmacy. He hated buying condoms in Pakistan because of the way the attendants, wearing badly stitched white coats and thick eyebrows, would look at him, acting as if nothing were wrong. He usually asked Akram, his security guard and servile confidant, to get them for him. It was simpler that way. Everything was, as long as Akram was there. Now, Akram was not, and the condoms were under heavy guard behind the counter. Asad found himself flushing with anger at the irony that he could walk in and pick up powerful anti-histamines without a question asked but was supposed to walk up to the counter and ask for condoms. They might as well start demanding prescriptions for them. Asad began to enact his usual condom-buying routine. He would meander through the pharmacy’s whitened spaces, inching toward the general direction of the counter, all the while pretending to look over rows of cold medicine for something in particular. Naturally, by this time, it would be obvious he was really there to buy condoms. Nadeem walked back to the car. He lowered his face to the window. Asad was gone. He looked at the instrument panel inside, the painted chrome around its dials glinting in the dark. His eyes shifted up the dashboard to the pale foot reclining against its far end. He frowned at these rich kids. No respect—not even for a new Honda.

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Nadeem watched his murky reflection slide away with the window. He saw her light-skinned face in the light coming from the market. He found himself worrying about his hair. “Asad’s just gone to Fazl Din’s.” “Why? I could have gone instead.” Sara raised her shoulders, tilting her head to one side. “I have some money . . . how much?” “Seventy for the cigarettes, ten for the paans.” Nadeem’s Urdu had stiffened while talking to her, starched crisp by formality and a sudden shyness. Sara opened her purse and held it close to her in order to shroud its contents. She uncurled eighty rupees’ worth of notes. Nadeem carefully took them, making sure his fingers would not brush hers. “Oh yeah, sorry,” began Sara, and handed him another twenty, “this is for you.” “Thank you, madam.” “Please don’t call me that.” “Sorry mad—” Nadeem stopped himself quickly. Sara laughed. “It’s alright.” Nadeem smiled. Asad walked back to the pharmacy’s door, relieved. Moments ago, he had set a bag of Super Crisps, a tab of Paracetamol tablets, and two sachets of herbal tea on the counter. “Will that be all?” asked the attendant, his white coat drooping over his shoulders. “Yes . . . uhh . . . and some condoms,” Asad had said, pushing hard to sound as if he were talking about the weather. The attendant had nodded and placed two boxes on the counter. “Which ones?” Asad scanned the two boxes, making it seem like this was a formality, like he was a veteran condom buyer. One was a simple beige box with the Durex logo, while the other was a deep shit-brown with a picture of a lingerie model pulled straight from the glazed pages of the eighties, straddling a white horse. The text above her said, “Rough Rider.” “Durex,” he said.

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Now he stood at the glass door, watching his car in the distance. He could see that Nadeem was back and talking to Sara. He saw Nadeem smiling and thought he could see Sara behind the speckles of reflection on the windscreen, smiling too. Asad shook his head quickly, as if brushing something off, and walked toward the car. “You should have waited for me. You shouldn’t have paid,” he said to Sara, looking over his shoulder as he reversed the car. “It’s alright. He was cute,” she joked. Asad let out a pitched laugh as he changed gears. “Paan’s good,” she managed, her mouth brim-filled with its sweet spices. “Yeah.” Asad’s fist tightened around the gear lever. *** That night, Nadeem came back home late, as he usually did. His walk had been slurred against the chipped steps and dull grot of his neighborhood. He now sat staring deep into the space of the living room, its walls peeling with tired paint, once a marzipan green. His sense of time felt thick, and his heart seemed to pump faster, reasonless. “Please don’t call me that.” “Yes, mad-” “I thought you wanted me to take it down. Arshad just told me that you’ve been sitting here for hours, looking at it,” said Nadeem’s mother, interrupting his reverie. Nadeem squinted against the light coming from her room, and the picture of black-bearded, wild-eyed Baba Khagghe Shah sharpened into focus. “I wasn’t looking at it.” “It’s alright if you were.” “I really wasn’t.” “Look, I think you’re finally turning the corner. Arshad did when he was your age. He didn’t believe either. Look at him now. He’s older; he’s on a path; and, he supports us because khuda-taala supports him. He just had to

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realize it. Do you know how lucky we are?” Nadeem looked around the bare room. “Yeah.” “It’s a shame. A descendant of Baba Khagghe Shah, and all he cares about is getting groceries for people who are more than capable of walking.” “They pay, and anyway, I don’t get groceries.” “That’s not the point.” “What is it then?” he asked. “The point is that money, rich, poor—they all mean nothing. What means is God. Baba Sahib was the first in our family to feel it. And, he is in our blood. He was a great man, and he belongs to us. Just as we belong to him. He still has a sense of power. If he didn’t, you wouldn’t be sitting here, staring at his picture for hours.” “Can you please stop? Just not now, please.” “You’re just a boy Nadeem . . . if your father had . . . ” He got up. This was not the first time he had had this conversation with his mother. Each thought, sound, and sense since evening had been slipping over a constant undercurrent: the thought of the pale face in the black Honda. It was annoying him, as was his mother. “Can I ask you something?” he said, stopping and turning back toward his mother, baring his forearm. “Yes.” “It’s always about our blood isn’t it? Its purity, its connections. Just look here and tell me this: who, aside from you and Arshad, even cares about my blood? Whether it flows or spills?” “You’ll know,” she said confidently. *** Asad woke up that night and fumbled in the blackness for his hand-held. He pressed a button and checked the time, a blue glow fading into the dark. He slid out of bed and walked through the familiar space of his room. He

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dug out packet and lighter from his pockets and stepped to the window, opening it slightly after parting the curtains. The room brightened to grey, enough to see the smoke mist through it. He watched her thin form carved out from the sheets. Hours ago, she had lain there beneath him, waiting for him to drop down on her with a lasting breath. When he had, she had curved her arm around him, settling her hand in the groove running down his back. She had kept it there. He raised a hand up to the side of his head, rubbing his temple with his fingertips. He wished he could stop his thoughts, tie them down. But when he tried, his feelings would erupt and fissure through his body. “He’s cute.” “Impossible,” he thought, looking back at her. “Im-fucking-possible.” He saw her face when they had made love only hours ago, her eyelids tightening, her pupils drifting to the clock on the bedside table. He saw her face behind the windshield at the market. She was smiling. Was she? He cursed the dull lights at the market, the enveloping spray of dust and smog in Lahore. He cursed Akram for not dusting the windshield before they had left for the market. Akram. He wondered what Akram was doing. He was probably asleep or with a local whore. Asad looked at the scarlet and white of the soft Persian carpet he was standing on. “Fuck it, he gets paid.” Asad stepped lightly across the room, back to his mobile phone, some scant part of him wondering if he even cared anymore that it was probably all in his head. *** Nadeem walked up the stairs and into the green dinge of the Red Hat Snooker Club, his near-daily haunt, just a curb off the Market. His friends would be there, drifting in and out after seven. “Nadeem yaar, you look weak.”

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He knew it was true: after just a week, his clothes were beginning to hang on him; his features defined his face more aggressively; and his hair was half-heartedly oiled, jutting out at places with newfound freedom. He picked a cue up and walked to the nearest table. The cigarettestained surfaces of these snooker tables was where Nadeem found his natural place in the world. He never bothered much with angles or talcum powder. He felt and played and, nearly always, won. Pappoo the Pimp walked in. He usually sat in a corner twirling his bushy handlebar, conducting the odd bit of after-hours business by thumbing through his mobile. He lived in a starched white shalwar-kameez, always wearing a fierce middle-parting and the glazed eyes of a prophet. “Papoo!” some familiar face shouted out. “So . . . when’s the world going to end?” “Oh, soon . . . ” replied Pappoo, smiling. Nadeem’s face was barely an inch from the body of his cue. His eyes were still, looking at nothing but the red ball in the distance that sat right next to a pocket. He leaned in, struck, and missed the cue ball spectacularly—the tip of his cue shaking like a junkie in thin air. He stood straight and shivered with frustration as dull murmurs of laughter surrounded him. He wanted to knee the stick into two. He felt a light hand on his shoulder. It was Pappoo, who leaned in and spoke with silky concern. “You alright Nadeem?” “Yes . . . yes . . . ” “Really? You know I can always tell.” “I’ll be alright.” Pappoo leaned in more. “Is there anything I can do to help?” Nadeem paused, silent. He then sniggered. “You know I don’t have any money.” “I know someone who runs a very nice, very quiet little business around the corner. We’ll find a nice girl for you, skin like ivory, good hips. Consider this a favor, from a friend.”

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“Here? In the Market?” “Yep.” “I don’t believe you.” “Do you have reason not to?” Nadeem was quiet. He saw the room’s lamps reflected in Pappoo’s eyes. “So?” asked Pappoo. “Remember that I am a man of principle, but I am not so often this . . . generous.” Nadeem nodded very, very slowly. *** Sara sat back at the edge of one of the grass courts at the Gymkhana. She watched Asad and another friend from the American School lobbing a ball back and forth with violence. She smiled as the tension increased on the court, and the game grew fiercer with every grunt and groan—neither of them was any good, so it was a perfect match. She looked at Asad through the violet cast by her sunglasses. She watched as he stood—ever sinking with the ship—pointing at a line with his racquet, insisting, “It was out! I swear it was out!” She felt a sudden glow of affection. She wanted to hold him, stroke his hair and wrap him in, tell him that it didn’t matter that it was a point. That he was losing. And she stopped herself right there. This was how she had changed during their relationship. When she had first seen him in class, they had both been sixteen. He’d had an edge to him, a cockiness that she had found as attractive as his spiky hair. That was until she’d realized that he was as lost as she was; as prone and as vulnerable. The swagger was a front, and beneath its jagged surface was a person deeply human, and she could not understand which Asad she had loved, and if she could even use the word “love.” It just sounded so heavy now, as if it sank with its own weight every time that it was spoken into the air. A year ago, she would have found herself just knowing when a love song would come on. Now, she wondered if “love” was just a word at this stage

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in life, a promise disguised as an arrival; whether, like structure in wine, it was one of those things that you could only really understand once you were older, greyer—less caught up. She knew very few people in her life whom she cared for as much as him, family included. But over these two years, they had talked for hours, idled together for hours, walked into cocktail parties and dance floors bound at the hip, and out of them sozzled and falling onto each other. She was now eighteen and felt like she knew of little else but him and their Lahore. It felt as if the expanse of her passage into adulthood had been whittled down into a cozy corridor. And she couldn’t breathe. What now? She didn’t know, but she felt a piercing mixture of sadness and elation as she remembered when he used to call her “Rabbit,” and she would ask him to say it again. *** Nadeem had no idea why he was doing this. He stepped out of a rickshaw that coughed fumes as it died on its driver. The driver kicked at the accelerator pedal, shouting, “C’mon buoy! C’mon!” “Thanks,” said Nadeem, barely heard over a wave of fruity expletives, as he handed the driver a couple of notes and walked into the open court of the Data Darbar shrine. It was Thursday afternoon, and Sufis—part-time mystics, beggars, vagabonds, idlers and common-folk alike—were crowding the space, hungering for the sweet saffron of the charhawa rice being handed out. Alcohol-plied dervishes were spinning endlessly to the jigsaw march of dhol drums. The scene was thick with sweat, incense and atmosphere. Nadeem felt heady as he made his way through the crowd. He asked around for a mujaavir, a Sufi seer-quack who might help him. A bearded man, whose glazed eyes and diluted pupils seemed to speak of God and the greater universe, offered to help. He led Nadeem into one of the quarters of the main building, the beads around his neck chinking through

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the din. Nadeem found himself in a small room lit by green tube-lights with a crowd of people sitting on the floor. They seemed to converge at a point on the far end of the room where Baba Channey Shah sat cross-legged with two young boys on either side massaging his upper-arms. “A new soul!” he shouted, flicking the boys off. “Come!” Nadeem walked toward him, careful not to step over anyone. He sat down, gaunt and weary, right in front of the Baba. Baba Channey Shah had an intense, if visibly unfocused stare, and a long, salt-and-pepper beard that meshed with his lips. “Are you worried about how a blind man can be a seer?” asked the Baba with a thin smile. “Don’t you worry now. I may be blind, but I can see what you can’t. What is your name,” he said, as if it were a statement—as if he already knew. “Nadeem.” “I see. And why might you be here, Waseem?” Nadeem was about to correct him when one of the boys shot him a look that told him that this man knew what he was doing. “I was hoping that you could help me with that,” Nadeem said, lowering his eyes. “I have not been feeling very well lately.” The Baba nodded, knowingly. “Ishq,” he said. Nadeem looked around the room, embarrassed. His cynicism began to thin slightly. “Many a man has fallen to a woman,” began the Baba. “Read our poetry, hear our ghazals. Or, read our ghazals, if you will. Have you heard of Baba Bulleh Shah?” “Yes,” lied Nadeem. He might as well not have, as the Baba began before he finished the syllable. “Bulleh Shah was a man who was possessed by ishq,” the Baba said, raising his voice and his finger, “its anxieties, its questioning, its longing . . . ” Nadeem felt a great desire to run out of the room. “ . . . except!”

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“Except what?” “Except, you know whom he felt this love for?” The Baba leaned in, savoring every period in the ellipsis before he stated the obvious. “God,” he said simply, his voice dipping into gravel. Nadeem stayed silent. Sensing the dramatic pause to have been a success, the Baba continued. “I can cure you of your obsession, but I cannot redirect your love toward God. You have to do that yourself. Do we have an agreement, Waseem?” “Yes.” “Good, now show me your head.” Nadeem tilted his head forward. The Baba’s thin fingers felt it out, and he clasped his palm hard over Nadeem’s head. Then, his eyes rolled upwards in their sockets, and he began swaying, chanting furiously beneath his breath. Nadeem prayed for it to be over soon. After finishing, and barely suppressing a burp, the Baba opened his eyes again. He reached out to his right, and produced three tiny scrolls of paper with verses written on them in Arabic. “Take a glass of water. Read these to yourself in this order; the first, first; the second, second; the third, third; and, then the second, first; the third, second; and, the first, third. Then, take a deep breath and blow into the glass. Then drink the water. Do this once in the morning, on every alternate day.” Nadeem narrowed his eyes. The Baba turned to the silent crowd. “Everyone, Waseem will be cured!” The crowd remained silent. “And, take this . . . ” He rolled another scroll into a tiny bronze box and strung it, making a necklace. “Wear this around your neck, at all times,” said the Baba flatly. “Thank you,” muttered Nadeem, standing up. The Baba cleared his throat, significantly. Nadeem looked confused. One of the boys whispered into the Baba’s ear. The Baba nodded and purposefully lifted his gaze up to Nadeem. Nadeem wondered how a blind man knew where he stood.

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“Waseem, there is the small matter of a . . . what’s the word . . . yes, a donation.” “How much?” “How much can you spare?” “I have fifty rupees.” “I see. You see, most people do not donate less than a hundred . . . ” “I’m sorry, I only have fifty.” “Not a rupee more?” “No. I have nothing.” “Very well. You seem like a bright young man . . . in need of help. Consider the other fifty a favor, as long as you come see me again.” The Baba smiled for the first time, baring a chiseled set of teeth the color of stale cream. Nadeem tossed the notes on the ground and turned and left as briskly as possible, through the quarters, through the court, not stopping until he was back on the street. He caught his breath and took a moment to compose himself. He pried out the nearest urchin from the crowd and pressed the necklace into his hand. “Don’t you have any money?” the child asked, looking disappointed. Nadeem scratched his stubble, and looked around, breathing as if he had only a few minutes before the world’s unnatural end. He could see the evening seeping into the sky. He could hear the ensuing azaan. He could hear the dhol drums clatter, and he continued to feel that, between the sky and the earth in Pakistan, God remained just a promise—a favor. *** Asad sat in his room, looking out to nothing in particular, with smoke idling out of the narrow partition at his lips. Akram had left in his car an hour ago. He had assured him that no one would be hurt. Asad found that he could not justify a single thing any longer. He knew that he never could. It all seemed pointless, and it always

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was. “And, if they don’t have Swiss Marlboro Lights?” “Nadeem,” he thought, “always so meticulous, unlike any other runner. . . . ” He covered his face with his hands, hoping to fall into their dark. He did not think about what might have already started. He could not think about calling her, though a vague part of him wanted to. All he could think about was when, during an argument with his mother last year, she had pointed a hard finger at him and shouted, “You’re just a boy Asad, what do you know?!” *** Nadeem sat on the curb at the southwest corner of the market. It was one in the morning, and the Market was dark, mostly shut, and mostly empty. He was alone under the blanketing shadow of an oak tree. He liked it this way. He smoked a Pall Mall cigarette that tasted like wood, looking out onto the green patch within the roundabout where the lost and the homeless junkies came to sleep at night. He smiled to himself bitterly. “You’ll know . . . ” He suddenly found himself lit in headlights. He saw the familiar curves of a new black Honda. The expectation rose in his chest. He had not felt as fulfilled in weeks. He rose to his feet. The door opened and a tall, thick man got out. “Nadeem,” he said simply. Nadeem was disappointed, but open to a late-night customer—must have been a referral. He needed more cigarettes anyway. “That’s me,” he began. That was when the world turned over, and then kept spinning as if on a watery axis. Everything was sharp noise, hammering, and pain; black as pitch with sudden flashes and ruptures of light. He could hear panting, alarm and shouts up close and far in the distance, wrapping him inside a thick cloud

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of sound. He prayed that it would end soon. When his vision came back into focus, it was as if the Market had been rotated clockwise and then left there. All that was left of the Honda was the residual glow of its rear lights. His whole body pulsed with pain, and he could not understand where exactly he had been hurt. Lying there in the market, his day-by-day kingdom, he found himself wondering why he could not see it yetâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or feel it. He had expected to open his eyes and see his own face mirrored softly in its spreading pool. Yet all he could see were figures melting out of the shadows, running toward him ghost-lit and concerned as he finally felt it slide down his forehead in a thin, warm line.

Our Fear Tyler Weston yes your feet will get cold but the river will hide our footsteps and your boots are waterproof and I know this snow is cold in your mouth would you rather your breath be painted on the slate of night like chalk dust from two clapped erasers we can’t travel by day I’m sorry think of us like highwaymen escaping our lives on loan from the law be careful on the rocks a twisted ankle and I’d have to carry you it is only fear that chases us do you remember in our house the white rabbit in the painting above your bed with his two black eyes like chocolate drops I need for you to be like that rabbit and hide here under the snow for a little while yes the rabbit will be fine he was a flat sheet of canvas there was no blood beneath his skin

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Contributors’ Notes Matthew Capodicasa is a senior in the Tisch School of the Arts. His play, Animal Cruelty, premiered at the Experimental Theatre Wing in December Jesús Adam Esparza is a senior in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He was born in Pasadena, California. Johnny Gall is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. He has had copious works published in various composition notebooks, all of which have met spectacular failure in the market. Regarding his poem, “Beth Israel,” he writes, “Homeless people are a lot of fun to hang out with. I recommend it.” Lucas (Luke) “Meir” A. Gerber is a freshman in the College of Arts and Science. His favorite book is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. Joseph Knight Haldeman is a sophmore in the College of Arts and Science. His favorite book is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Maggie Hall is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. Her favorite book is East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Ernest A. Hartwell is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. His work has appeared in the Beaver Island Newsletter, MOLDE Online Magazine and NYU in Buenos Aires Exemplary Texts. His collection of poems, Council Trees, was self-published with the Peter Greensky Press in May 2008. On his poem “Grandma Marian teaching my sister to set the dinner table,” he writes, “My grandmother and her mother before her ran a country restaurant, the Red Fox Inn, between 1919 and 1973 in the home where I find myself every summer in Horton Bay, Michigan. This poem is theirs.”

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Jason Jiang is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. He hopes to become a filmmaker like Luis Buñuel or Eric Rohmer. He is currently producing a feature-length film called The Evangelist for Dependent Films, a production company that his close friend started in 2008. Amanda J. Killian is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. Her favorite book is The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. Joe Koplowitz is a senior in the Tisch School of the Arts. His post-graduation plans include snorting rockers, avoiding AIDS, siding with Cam over Juelz and Jimmy, Shower Shows at Roxy’s, loving his mom, and a fifth year of college. Jason Lee is a January 2009 graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts. He is teaching during spring semester. Over the summer, he plans on road-tripping with a trunk full of books, pens and paper. He’ll be going to Iceland to study the Eddas. Lisa Martens is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. She expects to graduate in January 2010. After that, she hopes to survive with moderate success and happiness. Daniel Mehrian is a freshman in the Tisch School of the Arts. His favorite book is Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. He writes that his poem “comes from the tastiness of grapes.” Eileen Myles has written thousands of poems since she gave her first reading at CBGB’s in 1974. Bust magazine calls her “the rock star of modern poetry” and The New York Times says she’s “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant garde.” Her books include Sorry, Tree (2007), Skies (2001), on my way (2001), Cool for You (2000), School of Fish (1997), Maxfield Parrish (1995), Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls (1994). She’s a frequent contributor to Book Forum, Art in America, The Village Voice, The Nation, The Stranger, Index, Open City and Nest.

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Kathryn Mitchell is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. Her favorite book is Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Alexander Fontanez-Ordonez is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. His favorite book is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Carmen Petaccio is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. His favorite book is Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man? by Charles Barkley Ben Radding is a freshman in the Liberal Studies Program. He is a contributing columnist to the Washington Square News. He has fenced since the age of twelve and is on the varsity fencing team. On his poem “Moving from Indiana to Massachusetts in June,” Ben writes, “The poem was inspired, obviously, by my family’s move, as well as a night alone with a Robert Lowell book.” Umar A. Riaz is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. He would like to thank his parents, sisters, Nina D’Alessandro and Sassy Ross for encouraging him to write. Ryan Stechler is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. His work has appeared in Jacket magazine. He will be graduating a year early, and after graduation he plans on attending a Master of Fine Arts program in New York City. Caitlin Steever is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. Her favorite book is Puddin’ Head Wilson by Mark Twain. Soren Stockman is a sophomore in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He wrote his poem “Flowers” in Mexico.

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Alexa Wejko (Winner, 2008-2009 West 10th Editors’ Award in Poetry) is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. Her favorite book is The Hidden Life of Stella by Richard Starkey. Tyler Weston is a senior in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is currently studying in Prague and working for the Prague Writers’ Festival. Anna Zucker (Winner, 2008-2009 West 10th Editors’ Award in Prose) is a junior in the College of Arts and Science. In high school, she had a poem and short story published at the New Jersey Teen Arts Festival. On her poem “I’ve Been Looking,” she writes, “Walking around New York City and watching the people that often go unnoticed inspired this story about an old woman on the margins.”

Masthead Editor in Chief Sara Lynch Managing Editor Miriam R. Haier Poetry Editor Zac Heyman prose Editors Sarah Dozor Harry Leeds Assistant Poetry Editor Lee Patterson Assistant prose Editor Jessica Hearn

Readers Linnea Bloomquist Bridget Hartzler Samantha Neugebauer Madeleine Pettway Marianne Reddan Community board Kimberly Lew Laura Macomber Executive Editors Matthew Rohrer Darin Strauss staff adviser Scott Statland

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, Jonathan Safran Foer, Yusef Komunyakaa, 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 10th 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: Sara Lynch Other photos: Julianne Cordray (Pgs. 10, 18, 26, 36, 40, 58, 86, 92), Sara Lynch (Pg. 70), Taylor A. Poulin (Pg. 53) Copyright  2009 West 10th The Literary Journal of New York University’s Undergraduate Creative Writing Program ISSN: 1941-4374