This publication received support from the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University. It was made by students in the OSU MFA program for creative writing.
Dear reader, our namesake is the latitude line equidistant from the equator and The North Pole. This imagined in-between delineation unites the work of the artists and writers who have trusted us with their brilliant work.
The work in this issue addresses the complexity of human relationships, how we hurt and harm one another, what we say and what we leave out, and how the body remembers it all. This issue contains the tumult of the 21st century: awkward one-night stands, addictions, incantations, fist fights, bruises, and the consequences of war. The work in issue 11 is bold and sharp and we hope that vibrancy reaches you.
This issue was created through hours upon hours of volunteer effort. Each year a new team takes on the challenge of editing the journal. The editing staff and the reading team has my deep gratitude as does as the School of Writing Literature and Film. I hope you feel that passion in the final product. Thank you for reading 45th parallel.
Sincerely,
Anmol Priya Desai
Black Lemons and Egg, 1987
Selen Frantz
Four surfaces, impossibly smooth, or rather obscured in the way shadow ink floods each pore–aquatint as charcoal dust orbiting its surface, as eclipse, aquatint as the umbra, the penumbra.
Study the calcium / rind, searching for contours to define the vertices and their curves. Man must uncover the hidden. Determine which had bruised in the fall and which had shattered. Discover which way the negative space extends, carving its zinc river across the frontier.
How I Learned I Was Allergic to Cats
Christa Lei
I was nineteen, desperate, and hungry for attention in the particular way that afflicts the young, dumb, and horny. A recent transplant to Chicago, the city stretched before me like a promise I wasn't sure I deserved. I decided the best way to learn a new place was through its residents. An early adopter of OkCupid, when online dating carried a whiff of transgression, I was always dating or texting someone new. If I wasn't on a date, I was with new friends— allergic to the prospect of spending weekend nights inside, alone.
Two conversations crystallized into Friday plans: one with a cybersecurity professional whose profile photographs intimidated me (let's call him the Adonis), and another with a rockabilly enthusiast whose messages possessed the right alchemy of strange but charming. The Adonis was so beautiful, double-booking felt like insurance against my nerves. I’d danced around him, flirting with enough moxie to hook him in—but hesitated when he asked me out. So when the rockabilly guy suggested Big Star, I said yes, telling myself I'd keep it short before meeting the Adonis, whom I was more physically attracted to, later. Looking back, I see how my ADHD drove these decisions: the need for multiple options, and my inability to pick one and stick with it. I tried to keep my dates straight as I knocked back more pints.
A taco crawl with two different romantic prospects. What could go wrong?
Rockabilly was short. Maybe 5'6" at best. A goofy-looking dude with a DIY-punk sensibility—upon introduction, he pointed out his signature: an oversized leather jacket embroidered with colorful patches. His uniform paired well with a pouffed pompadour that probably took him longer to style than it took me
to do my makeup. We bonded over our lore: why we both moved to Chicago, and elaborated on our hopes and dreams. I proffered the genuine reason: I fell in love with the city while visiting an exlover during my old university’s fall break. Even though we’d broken up during that trip, I romanticized transferring to the city. I told him about my five-year plan: crush college, graduate with honors, a post-baccalaureate pre-medical program, then medical school. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t distract myself with his company.
He adjusted his pompadour between stories and kept mentioning bands I’d never heard of. When I confessed I didn't know about The Meteors, he looked scandalized, but promised he’d show me his favorite album on vinyl later (even though he was broke as shit, he amassed an impressive collection, he bragged). There was something disarming about his earnestness— the way he spoke about his last job as an assistant in some warehouse back in Michigan, how he moved here to make it in Chicago’s music industry (despite limited opportunities, which we acknowledged with a rueful optimism.) I leaned in, charmed by his mix of confidence and vulnerability. We operated on a mutual brand of desperation, horny and yearning for each other, both convinced by the possibility of strangers turning into soulmates after three beers.
By the time we left Big Star, my careful timing went to hell. My Adonis texted, asking where I was. “Sorry, I have to take my friend home. Rain check?” I typed, the words technically not a complete lie. As Rockabilly and I wandered the neighborhood, we passed the other taco place where I was supposed to meet the Adonis. I recognized the irony—drunken horror soaked in humor. Then, Rockabilly announced his intention to piss. Rather than go into another bar or restaurant along a crowded stretch, he ducked into a side alley to relieve himself. My nineteen-year-old brain thought, Yes, this is the person I should prioritize. Wasn’t this destiny?
stammering in between sentences.
“Do you think I could massage your feet? Kiss them?”
The pause pushed him further into elucidating my confusion. When he emerged from the alley, zipping his fly back up with a sheepish grin, he suggested we head back to his place. “I promised to show you that vinyl collection.” I nodded before processing what I had agreed to.
He lived in a greystone walk-up near the last Brown Line stop. We climbed three flights of narrow stairs, and I heard him fumble with his keys before he got the door open. As soon as we entered: a huge fluffy white and orange cat. He introduced her as Polly (short for Pollyanna, he explained.) I pet her when allowed, charmed by her affection for this strange man in his leather jacket. We cracked open a couple of beers and settled onto his couch—Polly immediately claimed the space between us. True to his word, he had an extensive vinyl collection stacked along one wall, though he seemed more interested in telling me Polly’s origin story. A remnant from his last roommate, he explained. It was a depressing tale about how the roommate moved home after losing his job, unable to take Polly with him. But Rockabilly lit up as he spoke, grateful that they’d found their way to each other.
I’d never had a pet at that point, so his attachment confused me. There was something competitive about the way he doted on her, like I had to vie for attention with his soulmate. As we made small talk between making out, I found myself increasingly aware of Polly’s presence. She weaved her way between our limbs, fur clinging to our clothing.
Eventually, we found ourselves in his bedroom, but the night devolved into a series of awkward negotiations around his whiskey dick. Not uncommon or the end of the world, I could navigate around that. I could, but did I want to?
“Can I kiss your feet?” Wait. What?
The unexpected request involving my feet, delivered with a humble earnestness, made me realize I was in deeper waters than
I'd expected.
“Do you think I could kiss your feet?” he tried to clarify. The look on my face must have scared him, because he tried to explain, “Can I suck your toes?” he finally asked.
I dissociated, calculating escape routes. What had I gotten myself into? How could I extract myself from this situation as soon as possible? But I was stuck—the trains stopped running, my phone was dying, and this was before Uber. He lived on the outskirts, far enough that cabs wouldn’t be easy to hail.
“Maybe another time. Do you have a phone charger? My phone’s about to die…” I reached over for my iPhone, holding it up in the air as proof. In response, I heard futzing—I wasn’t sure what he was doing, maybe looking for a charger—before a loud sigh. He held up a tiny blue screen and groaned, “I have a Nokia.” He squinted at the pixelated screen before staring out the window, and then back. “Look,” he began, patting the mattress. “The trains aren’t running. Why don’t you sleep over and you can go home in the morning?”
So even though I wanted to get out of there, his generous offer caused me to succumb to what seemed like the only option: I said, fuck it, and went to bed.
I woke up disoriented, the strange sensation of fur against my cheek. Polly made her way into his bedroom during the night. As soon as I moved, she slid aside with feline dignity, as if she hadn't spent hours using my face as her personal cushion. I went to the bathroom before leaving and caught sight of myself in the mirror. Half my face was swollen, my left eye nearly sealed shut. The left side of my mouth looked like a beehive attack. I touched my cheek —hot and tight; the skin stretched in a way that felt odd.
“Oh, fuck.”
Standing there, staring at this grotesque version of myself, I felt a strange mix of horror and dawning recognition. Everything clicked into place: the sniffling during our conversations, watery eyes I'd attributed to too much beer, the way my nose felt stuffier
as the night wore on. He walked me to the door with a politeness that suggested he was eager for our encounter to end. “I'll text you,” he said.
We both knew he wouldn’t. I caught him glancing at my swollen face one last time before he averted my gaze.
As I trudged towards public transit, the fall breeze whipped my skirt over—exposing my bare ass to innocent passersby. Between my swollen face and a brief wardrobe malfunction, the universe was punishing me for my poor decisions. On the El, a concerned woman asked me if I needed to go to an emergency room before explaining, “No, I wasn’t in a fight. I just discovered I am allergic to cats.”
She switched seats.
The Adonis and I never rescheduled. When I worked up the courage to text him, his response was polite but distant. “No worries. Hope you’re feeling better.” Our tentative plans dissolved into digital silence. I’d sacrificed a promising connection for a guy who pissed in an alley and shocked me with his foot fetish. That night forced me to listen to my body’s warnings, even when my mind was too drunk and horny to understand.
And that’s how I learned I was allergic to cats.
the prodigal son but it’s brat
Rachel Warren
we serve cunt at the lesbian bar we’re blowing the paycheck on shots and snake-dazzled lingerie we miss home, but not enough to tear our eyes away from the weave of her hips, the sweat glittering her throat, tangerine as sequins in the cellar lights sunday mornings still find me kneeling for forgiveness; in the group chat, at the altar, my body is a cooling star and so are all of yours and the difference here is shame, regret: we have none. we see that it is good.
The Hearing Hours
Barely sober, you insist on visiting an ocean at war with the shore, tides lapping up land only to drool it back out. You say the best cure for a hangover is death and the best cure for death is becoming a creature too large to bury.
。
I remember coming home to your body lolling towards me, bloated belly cleaved with sweat like a hill dazzled with grains of salt. Your skin clings to my spine, silken and stubborn, all twenty lights to the ER. Your BAC was 0.38, and you vomited pink foam into your shirt sleeve, like a relic I dragged up from the sea.
。
We are tired of seeing you like this, the nurse says. Well. Imagine how I feel.
。
Last October, a young Humpback named Coco is struck by a ferry. She descends for hours, jawless, her scarlet song translating into seismic current & I thought of your voice, low and vodka-sweet, slurring stories that made no sense.
。
Miles away from Cape May, wind unspools itself in long, hollow notes—boat horns, or maybe sirens. It’s terrifying, how our most familiar songs grow from the silence of prayer. This two-man charade: your promise of abstinence, my faith faulted, a thing without ears.
Elaine Liu
A Cloudberry is a Falsehood
Brooks Lampe
jingly and parapatric, for it’s hard to know false from true
oh how it jingles hollow and wears a foolish bronzy gold grasping the alpine air it seems to love
I have gathered theories of falsehood as others gather hypotheses of truth new species fill and break space with ease pleasing the soil with bucketfuls of what they are fill up mountains until they ring orange pyre at a high school ball, feeling life brightly breaking a family before it splits up to generate more families with tales illusive, wild.
Ask the oar why it is not a paddle, you’ll get stories wholly false in microtonal chimes written by architects standing under their favorite door.
Break me on the curvature of the orange cloudberry. Sing the glassy song learned in those up-there breezes mountains monotonous communing in moan.
all our dead moms are hanging out with us
after Olivia Gatwood
KJ Kieras
imagine this is the incantation:
not the hospital bed with the septic smell nor the graveyard overlooking the highway not the collection of dust on the mantle nor the hole under the backyard maple not bent over in the pews or under the view of any good & vacant god
let us imagine our dead unburdened by our weight their bodies releasing like fireflies loosed from the jar we listen like children with our ears pressed to the wall for the sounds of a party in the other room: our mothers, who are both the party and the wall
it is always the first warm day of may in minnesota the wild yarrow has just begun to reappear they are laughing over some dirty joke half-remembered their cheeks ruddy and pink like knock-kneed girls
our mothers are down at the river with their jeans rolled up trying to catch water striders in their cupped palms and when the bugs prove themselves to be too fast our mothers go home with mud-streaked arms take turns spraying each other down with the garden hose girlhood stretched between them, a tender offering
when it becomes dark our mothers settle under the cool cotton of their sheets
look to the ceiling & think of us as if we’ve gone to the neighbors for a sleepover as if we’ll be home come morning
poetry KJ Kieras
Somewhere Alongside the Water
Leela Srinivasan
you are trying to keep quiet, so that later when the sun dips behind the pines and the marching band of waves begin, you’re left with only your micro-abrasive song. The water is so cold it makes your heels itch; you halfheartedly plug anthills with pebbles, exhausted by looking at everyone’s photos online. Where on the beach you stare at the sunbathers who all look different than you, and happy about it, and you will not write about their bodies or even think about them at all because you don’t care for your body or theirs either, the whole concept of bodies, you think we should bury it somewhere and let an asteroid punch it out of the earth. Fling it to the troposphere where all the soundless memories can go. All you want to remember is an old landscape of churches you saw years ago. All you want to relish is that simple peace of unbelonging. Where now by the craggy rocks a dragonfly loses its wing, slowing its flight without stopping, apologetically disappearing into the blue.
The class suddenly turns on the person farthest from the door
Ron Riekki
In the military, there was no nature. In nature, no military. In the military, there was no God. In the churches too. In the military, there were skulls. We got out of the military and there were TBIs—traumatic brain injuries. Yes, there were still skulls. I live a block from where they killed this guy for his ring, outside that sushi place. I can’t be photographed; they taught me that. At the vet retreat, they lecture us about getting good sleep, as if getting good sleep is as simple as being told to get good sleep. My uncle told me guys’d stab themselves so they could get sent to the hospital during the Super Bowl, hoping they’d get to hear it from the other room.
That was in the prison. People don’t stab themselves to see the Super Bowl outside of prison. My uncle never changed his microwave clock when we’d have a time change. He told me it just made him an hour early for things. He told me in six months it’ll be the right time. Another uncle, when he found out
he was getting divorced, took a chainsaw and cut the couch in half, said she could have the left side. They took him right to jail. He was Democrat when he went in, came out atheist. His face looks like a wrinkled envelope. I went to a job interview for a creative writing gig and she said, I don’t see any grace in your poems. I said, “Give me a job and they’ll be full of grace.” They didn’t give me the job. I went back to doing security. That week, I saw a guy who’d been shot in the stomach, swallowed bullet. He ran up to me like I could do something. I called 911. His friend said, Aren’t you 911? Not even close. Security is to cop as gunshot is to Death. I embrace that I will never have children now. I’m too old. I’m not too old. I mean, I’m too old to be worth anything. Same with used cars. Take ‘em off the lot. The Buddha said all life is suffering. They didn’t have Rocky Road ice cream back then. I get sick being around men. I worked in the prison and it was 100% them. Same when I played college basketball. Same when I worked in the mines. Same when I was in the military. I work the jobs where no one asks your pronouns, because grammar means
nothing when you can’t read. I bleed my jobs. Ever heard of minimum graves? If you could see my face right now, you’d say, Jesus Christ, what happened to you?
It’s called rent. I’m tired of all my diagnoses. You get used to bipolar. It’s a rhythm. I just can’t have a roommate or friends. I need poems. And now this one must end.
Remainder
Joseph Conrad Payne
It was just Dean and Paul and me. You didn’t see much of Paul these days, not since his parents pulled him out for homeschooling. He seemed to like it. He had slicked back hair now and he liked to dress in leather jackets, like a greaser, like someone from a long time ago. His older brother dropped him off. The beech trees swaying. Dean and I sitting in the grass, the Australian Shepard fenced in nearby, his stump tail thumping in the dirt.
Dean funneled us off to the city, some flat expanse crouching in the middle of nowhere. It was just like our own town but with more concrete and no animals, a maddeningly hectic crisscrossing of roads poorly mapped out, as if no one had ever expected the place to come this far. Paul played music for us that he had made.
“It’s good,” we said.
“Getting there,” said Paul.
In the city lived Roger’s brother, a gangly band of tightlypacked muscle with a scar eating into his crew cut. He used to be in the army reserves and he bought our alcohol. We waited in his apartment which was just one flat, skinny room with a pitbull inside it. It beat its tail and its eyes like old marbles glittered at us. Then we headed back. The odometer clicked 200,000 miles.
It was a Tuesday night. Warm, the trees lush. Dean’s place was one of those rare areas situated on a hill, and it rolled down to flat farmland where stalks of corn for miles stood erect and golden. This was the land of Dean’s cousins, barons of farmland in the center of the state. I stood on the lip of Dean’s driveway openly drinking a bottle of whiskey—his parents must have seen me—and pondering the ridged infantile rows of corn, not yet ready to bloom nor to produce what we take from them. I hated the corn. Not because of these facts but simply because it was there. At the end
of these fields, I spied a sprawling house, some trees. The sun bubbling up red from under the horizon. Like a fresh wound. Soon it would vanish under the treetops but right then I took it in, let it spill into me.
And then we were in Dean’s pole barn, the artificial light thrumming overhead and underneath it whiskey and rum. Night fell. We listened to music. Some of it was Paul’s, some of it was music that our fathers had listened to.
Then Paul said, “I’ve got to take a piss,” and opened the door to the dark. “Don’t touch my iPod.” He left. The music kept playing.
“Hey,” said Dean. He pulled closer to me, his lawn chair scraping on stone, his dark hair falling over his face.
“Paul’s really good,” I said. “The music.”
“Sure.”
“He’ll make it.”
Dean leaned forward. The rum inside its bottle swished in his hands. “He doesn’t even want to be here.”
“No one wants to be here.”
“Fuck you, man.”
“Oh. You meant, here here. In the barn.”
Dean lolled back.
“No, here—fucking whatever. I like it here. I will remember this.” I pointed to the ceiling, where the light was contained. As if in the plastic bulb cages my memories could be held, collected, screwed back into place when they inevitably went dim.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey.”
Dean looked at me. He looked like he was waking up.
“What do you want?” I said. “Like what do you want to do.”
“Everything,” said Dean. “Every drug there is.”
“Why.”
“It’s like… Other worlds. So many things to see that no one else ever would. And then I’d become an anesthesiologist. Because I’d know what to give people then.”
“I think you need to be really smart for that.”
“I’d know how to help them.”
Dean looked at me. Or right through me. His eyes were barely white, the pupil swallowing up the iris, just all pit. A hole looking through itself. And then Paul was back, splayed inside the doorframe. “A walk,” he said. “We’re going for a walk. Down the hill.”
The corn wasn’t very tall. We stomped through it without much care and as I was drunk I took pleasure in ensuring that I kicked the frail, still-growing stalks. We were walking towards the house down the hill.
“Kara,” said Paul. “She lives so close to you and she never comes to drink with us.”
“Neither do you,” said Dean.
“The fuck are you talking about?”
“With the rest of us. With Duck and Roger and—”
“I don’t want to see the rest of them.” Paul stopped. The moon at his broad back, the corn fronds shifting around him, Kara’s house behind him. “I just want to see you two. We’re the only ones getting out of here. All that spice and shit. I heard Duck’s been doing fucking heroin.”
Dean scratched his arm.
I pushed past Paul and he looked at me but I didn’t look at him. I stepped on a young cornstalk and felt it jam into the sole of my foot before it crumpled, broke.
“Watch it,” said Paul.
But I was looking at the house. Light from certain windows slashed out against the dark. I stared at the lights and, drunkenly, felt certain that if I looked inside those windows, I’d see clean through the house. I’d see me, somewhere far beyond this place, where the buildings were made of gleaming steel and glass, and I’d be satisfied, happy—but with what? Then, suddenly, one of the lights flicked off, and alone in the dark I startled. Steadily, the rest
of the lights followed suit, until only one remained.
I stared at it until it became just a square and, then, nothing at all. Just light under a slant roof from which the moonlight dripped onto the trucks in the driveway. Shiny, new things with tinted windows I’d never look inside. Beside them was the corner of a pasture fence and I knew that Kara rode horses, took pride in it, and she had several. I couldn’t see them now but I wanted to. I imagined her stroking the neck of one of them, saddling and mounting it and taking off into the woods, those thin copses of trees that still dotted the edges of farmland, putting the fields and the vacant windows of the house—of the trucks—behind her.
“She’s your cousin, Kara.”
“Yeah.” I felt Dean come closer to me.
“She used to have a crush on me. Would chase me around the playground.”
“Did you ever kiss her?”
“No.”
“Do you think she remembers?”
I looked back at the house. The final light had turned off. I wanted it to flicker back on, even dimly. I wanted someone in there to see us. I wanted Kara’s father—who was dead, even then, who I knew was dead, had died inexplicably a young man sitting upright in his truck, and that it had been she who found him stiffening in the sunlight—to come barging out, screaming, with a mallet, a gun, a sword, telling us to get the fuck out of here.
“I’ll talk to her, dude.” Dean put his hand on my shoulder.
“What?”
“I’ll talk to her. Maybe she still likes you.”
“Fuck you.”
Dean raised his hands.
“I want to fight,” I said. I circled back around and saw Dean. He looked confused and afraid but I saw him nod anyways; he understood. “Paul. You want to fight?” called Dean.
We only heard Paul’s voice. “Yes.” It was very dark.
Joseph Conrad Payne
The night was warm. You could smell it. Dirt and grass, something oddly sweet. I faced Dean and I could no longer make out the expression of his face but his thin frame must have mirrored my own, half crouched, arms cocked. I could feel my shoes sinking in the dirt. As if it was turning to mud. And then I punched Dean.
I hit him in the face. He made no noise. He took a few drunken steps back. “Sorry,” I said. I punched him again, in the stomach. He bent. “I’m sorry.” I put my hands down.
And then Dean lashed out, his thin arm whipping into my face, the bone of his wrist clacking against my forehead, and then another one of his hands was at my face, his fingers out, his nails scratching at me, and I remember thinking that he was pathetic. Suddenly two thick arms were around our necks. More fat than muscle but there wasn’t much we could do and our heads were locked in. We flailed. We couldn’t see. The small stalks of corn came alive in our struggle, whipped around our ankles like palm fronds lashing in the wind. Then Paul’s body heaved. I was released and I staggered and I watched Dean’s body ragdoll through the air. I stared, gape-mouthed, as his body tumbled into the darkness. And then a fist struck me in the jaw. I was on my knees but then I scrambled back up and I charged headfirst into Paul and he planted his feet. Our bodies shuddered. We pushed against one another and somehow I didn’t give way and our heels churned up fresh soil and a cornstalk was uprooted, its tiny body crashing like a tree in the night.
Paul’s arms tensed and pushed and then I was on the ground, dirt spraying in my face, and I gasped, coughed, and Paul’s fingers curled around my collar and lifted me back up to my feet and I was face-to-face with him, his hair still perfect, not a single mark on his face but a look of pure rage unfurling from the two black holes that were his eyes. He had a fist raised.
“Stop,” I sputtered. “It’s done. We’re done.”
For a moment Paul held the pose. Then he lowered his fist. His
face softened and he was just Paul again, some soft-eyed boy who just liked to make music. He wrapped his arms around me and drew me into an embrace.
“Love you, man,” he said.
And then we let go. We looked at each other, breathing heavily. “You all right?” he said.
I wiped my jaw. Bloodless. “Yeah. Let’s go get Dean.”
We found him crumpled in the field just a few feet away. Paul and I each took him up under an arm and he groaned. “I shouldn’t have made us do that,” I said.
“It’s okay,” said Dean. “You’re all right.”
Drunken and draped across each other’s arms we made our way back to the pole barn, drained the rest of the whiskey. For the pain.
White light through soft blue curtains. My eyelids unpeeled and I looked around the room. This was Dean’s little sister’s bedroom. She wasn’t there. I was on the floor and I could see under her bed, the brightening shadow that lay underneath, all the childhood toys she had scraped underneath there as a fresh teenager. The beady eyes of a doll. Its fingerless hand outstretched, reaching towards me. My head was thick and leaden.
I walked downstairs. The place was empty and the windows were closed and the sunlight beamed in. Wednesday morning. Dean’s parents at work. I saw hummingbirds flitting around a birdfeeder, jabbing at it with their beaks, eyeing me with their dark pinprick eyes.
I found Paul in the kitchen. He was sitting on a dining room chair that he had pulled out and the dirt and green scuffmarks on his all black clothing matched the ones on mine. He had his shoe propped on a stool he’d dragged from the bathroom and he was at it vigorously with a towel. He looked at me and nodded and resumed his task. I pulled out a chair and watched silently. My head throbbed.
There was only the small squeak of the towel. I watched the shoe become clean, as layer by layer, the muck and the grass and the bits of cornstalk that had once seemed permanent flecked away, simply disappeared. Paul’s fists clenched around the towel, as if by squeezing harder and harder he could wrangle some purer essence from the fabric. I looked at my own shoes and was ashamed to see them caked with mud, was ashamed to know that I would not clean them. In the kitchen window, a bird landed on the sill, trilled silently, and a car pulled into the driveway, and I could see Paul’s brother—through the kitchen window, through the car window— gently yawning. And then with a slap the towel slid off Paul’s shoe.
He said, “Good as new.”
And now his shoes were spotless, shiny and black all the way through. He tossed the dirty towel on the table and he looked at me. “I’m out of here.”
“I’ll see you next time,” I said.
Paul clapped me on the shoulder. “When you see Duck again,” he said. “Tell him that I don’t hate him.” And then he walked out the door. Through the window, I watched him and the car pull off and drive down the road. I went and slept some more on Dean’s couch.
Dean woke me up by gently shaking my shoulder. “Hey man,” he said. “Sorry.”
“What time is it?”
Dean shrugged. “Come on outside. Bear’s gotta shit.”
We went outside and Dean unlatched the caged Australian Shepard. “I threw up last night,” said Dean. “And he ate it.” We watched the dog’s short stocky body contort around the yard. We stood there without saying a word but the feeling of the breeze and the sound of it through the trees was soothing. The dog, bouncing around, was happy. He rolled in the grass and that must have felt nice.
Dean pulled a tin out of his hoodie pocket. He shook it at me.
Joseph Conrad Payne
I looked at it. With a thumb Dean cracked open the top. A thin sprinkling of spice.
“I thought you gave it up,” I said.
Dean shrugged. “You wanna?”
I looked at the tin of spice for a while. It had been so long. Months. Not since the turn of the new year. “Yes.”
Dean capped it and slid it back into his pocket. “Okay. Let’s go to Duck’s.”
The dog finished shitting. He went back to the cage. We went to Duck’s.
There was not a single car in Duck’s driveway. Duck had picked up a summer job power-spraying the empty carcasses of semi-trailers. Nobody was home but, curiously, the deck light had been left on. I walked up to the deck and turned the knob and it flicked off. Barely a difference in the day. Then we walked past the horse enclosure where no horse stood and where the skeletal remains of the shed I had first gotten high in were taking shape. Through the trees, to the train tracks. No one to see us either way but the hot sloping gravel must have brought us some comfort. Sitting there with the shade of trees on our back we smoked.
We passed the pipe back and forth. “How are you doing?” said Dean.
“This shit’s supposed to make us laugh, man. You’re fucking asking that.”
Dean blew smoke out of his mouth and shook his head.
“My dad moved back in.”
“Thought he would have loved to stay at that campsite forever.”
I plucked a stone and just as quickly let it slip between my fingers, watched it tumble down the slope. “I don’t get it. He could have left. Started over.”
Dean handed me the pipe and I let my finger trace the stem. “Guess he doesn’t want to be alone.”
“I had a chance to say that I didn’t want him back. They asked
all of us. My parents did. I could have told him to go.”
I watched a bird land in the stones between the tracks and poke its beak in. Looking for worms but it was in the wrong place.
“He says the alcohol doesn’t change him. He says that’s just who he is.”
Dean had the pipe now and he paused. He thought about that. He took a hit and blew it out.
“How are you,” I said.
“My stomach’s fucked up.”
My own stomach sank. “From last night.”
Dean laughed. “Sure. But like, always. Probably from smoking this shit.” He examined the thin trail of smoke emitting from the ember. He took a quick puff and handed it off to me. “Kill it,” he said.
As he handed me the pipe, the sleeve of his hoodie folded and I saw red dots snaking into the shadows of his arm. Dean saw me looking and he tugged the sleeve back into place and turned his head. I palmed the bulb of the pipe in my hand for a while. We sat in silence. The sky was blue and the leaves were gentle. It was the sort of summer day that you could barely feel the weather, just had an inkling, a pleasant sensation, of the near-perfection of the day. I thought about Kara, now just a girl I had once known in a different life, doing then what I did now: chasing a pale fragment of a boy, trying to touch something that had once been me. I thought of my father and then I thought of those few days while he was not home, of me sitting on a deck we had built together, staring at an old oak tree, limbless, its heaving arms having been split clean off by lightning.
Then, before me, a bird landed on the tracks. It began to sing a song. And I placed the stem of the pipe in my mouth and I did as Dean had told me and killed what remained.
The Echo
Kenton K. Yee
it happens every so often when he passes the closet he can’t bear to clear and catches her scent, faint as perfume on an old note, the silence after her last rasp
Cold Cuts of Plumeria
In full bloom, the unsullied tabula rasa white flowers declare that you’ve arrived someplace tropical. Stalks thick. Leaves green. Keep talking.
Let’s say you own a small ethnic foods market with an eat-in patio. You’ve made a mighty effort to keep afloat, and then some. Your parents back home age, as folks do.
One falls ill, the other falls apart, & there’s no one near to bear the burden. Back home is a world away, so back you go. The shop’s shuttered. One year. Now two. Bills unpaid.
Power’s cut. Plumeria’s a storehouse of value. A certain passerby’s pruning shear’ll get that gold. Larceny for ill-gotten gardens. Those were deep, cold cuts.
Who’s the wiser? I couldn’t tell you. Picture that blade, wiped off (once, twice) on the legs of worn overalls. Insignificant green stain. Unnoticed.
Hal Bogotch
Peter Rustin
Hey There Heaven Residents!
If you are reading this, your FirmaNet is working. Finally. We had to switch platforms from Windows 95, with its constant updates and incessant viruses. Don’t worry. When Bill Gates gets here, we are going to have a looooong talk, and trust me, he’s got a lot to answer for. I swear to Me, if I see ONE MORE Erectile
Dysfunction pop up, I’m gonna unleash a plague that will make COVID 19 look like a pinkeye outbreak at a kindergarten. Steve Jobs, DO NOT send me another message. ENOUGH ALREADY! WE GET IT!!
Anyhoo. It’s me! Yahweh. Elohim. Jehovah. El Shaddai. Allah. Adonai.
For you mathematicians, the first letter of my name is 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679. Don’t get too excited. That’s just the first letter. My full name is about 4 billion letters long. And trust me, I don’t like it any more than you do. You should see my driver’s license. Not pretty.
No? Fine. Did you ALL skip Sunday School?!
IT’S ME!! GOD!!
Surprised? Yes, I know it’s been a while since I reached out to you. Hey, I’ve been busy. It’s one Me Damned thing after another. Lately, there was that whole 2000 election kerfuffle, when a bunch of old Jewish alta cockers (old farts, for you non-Hebrews) in Southern Florida managed to vote for Pat Buchanan, of all
Peter Rustin
people. Result: President George W. Bush (a guy who never met a beer he didn’t want to take home to meet his mom). Then, a few years later, some self-important yo-yo decides Pluto isn’t a planet, and so we had to figure that out. Oh, don’t forget that whole La La Land Oscar mistake, when Faye Dunaway and that idiot Warren Beatty managed to biff the 2017 Best Picture Award by announcing that the winner was La La Land, instead of Moonlight (a movie that nobody has seen, BTW).
But good news, campers. We are drawing close to December 25. And we all know what that is! Yup, it’s my boy’s BIRTHDAY!
The Prince of Peace. Lamb of Me. King of Kings. Light of the World.
Or, as I like to call him: Jesus H. Christ.
No. NO! We’ve talked about this. I told you that I’m not giving out his middle name, and I meant it. Are you guys never satisfied? FOCUS, PEOPLE!
It’s Christmas. And I’ve got a very special treat for you all. No, Gossip Girl is NOT coming back. And no, the Beatles are not getting back together, because John is still insisting that Yoko sit in on any future sessions, and I JUST CAN’T, so stop asking.
This is one you never saw coming, and trust Me, it’s a doozy. I’m going to let each of you ask Me 10 questions about your life, your world, anything. Just type them in below, and I will answer them, along with some helpful context.
But beware. Choose carefully, because you may not like the answers. But in honor of my boy’s birthday, here’s your chance to, let’s say, ketchup! Each of you has their own survey, and nobody else can see it but Me.
And so, as the influencers would say, HBJHC!!! Sigh. For you analog types, that’s HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS H. CHRIST!!
Here we go!
WELCOME, JAYDEN KADEN PAPPALARDO.
Please enter your questions below, and your answer will instantly appear:
1. What girl or woman secretly liked me?
>>>>>>>>>>> I get this a LOT. Unfortunately, it rarely turns out the way people hoped. In your case, it was Gladys, the hair net lady in your high school lunchroom who gave you extra tater tots that one time. Yeah. I know. But keep this in mind: In all recorded time, the gorgeous red head barista with the perfect wildflower tattoo appeared as an answer to this question exactly once, and it was for River Phoenix.
2. What was my worst decision?
>>>>>>>>>>> Do you remember that time you bought that ancient Ford Edsel, thinking that you would restore it, and then it sat in your driveway until your mom had to call Troy’s Mobil to come tow it away? Well, Troy actually did restore it, and sold it at auction for $173,250, right around the time that you finished repaying your mom for the towing costs by cleaning her cat Rupert’s litter box for 3 months.
3. What was my biggest missed opportunity?
>>>>>>>>>>> This is gonna hurt. In 1997, you bought 4 Quick Pick PowerBall lottery tickets at a Drug ‘N Go. You were going to buy 5, but you bought a chocolate almond bar outside the store from a kid selling them for church. The next random number hit for 1.6 billion dollars. Don’t feel bad, though. That chocolate bar was delicious.
4. What happened to my dog, Sarge?
>>>>>>>>>>> Ah yes, Sarge, your dog from 4th-6th grade. Good news. For the only time in the history of Earth, he actually was sent to a farm upstate, where he frolicked and loved his new owners and their puppies; saved a boy who swam over a dam; and eventually served as a model on a box of Milk Bones. He forgot all about you after 5 days.
5. What would have been the best career for me?
>>>>>>>>>>> For decades, you slaved away as a nurse at a small midwestern medical practice. You did ok, but you were, in light of your intellect, cultural affinities and innermost desires, best qualified to be a carny.
6. Which of us was my parents’ favorite?
>>>>>>>>>>> Another question that is often asked, and just as often regretted. It turns out that you were actually adopted by your parents Cressida and Earl. Your real parents were a Connecticut socialite who was impregnated by—you guessed it—a visiting carny. On the bright side, you were indeed their favorite—and only—child.
7. How did I die?
>>>>>>>>>>> Right. We wipe everyone’s memories of death here, because we think that everyone deserves to enjoy the Afterlife without the trauma of reliving their demise. But since you asked, you died in a hot-dog eating contest from an overdose of meat byproducts (in your case, pig gums). But hey, you were declared the posthumous winner, and your picture is still on the Men’s Room wall of the Der Weinerschintzel in Alomagordo, New Mexico. So there’s that.
8. What is the best decision that I ever made?
>>>>>>>>>>> Another perennial favorite. It wasn’t marrying your wife, Destinie (who, by the way, has remarried and has an
online business selling used celebrity hairbrushes). Nor was it your deciding to have 3 children, at least one of whom will most decidedly not be joining you in the afterlife. No, the best choice you ever made was in 2004, when you threw away that leftover Halloween candy. What you didn’t know at the time was that one of those Tootsie Rolls contained the remains of a stoat, which wandered into the poorly-guarded factory at night and fell into one of the candy extruders.
9. What famous people can I meet here?
>>>>>>>>>>>Well, it’s complicated. We use an algorithm that calculates your charisma, your personality, and your overall worth as a person. You should also know that some of these people have not yet arrived. We also have a celebrity exchange program with our neighbor to the south, Hell. As for you, we have determined that the celebrities you should meet are Tonya Harding, Pauly Shore, Paris Hilton, Imelda Marcos and Bill Cosby.
10. Who killed JFK?
>>>>>>>>>>> How the hell should I know? Go ask Satan. That’s his department.
Sajjadah
Nura Al-Shumari
We kneel here. the elderly woman who smells of baby powder and pennies kids too young to understand it’s a sin to distract and run around the praying person the occasional, small family arriving fifteen minutes past the first call of adhan scurrying to their places, dropping a ring of clunky keys and a leather purse onto the carpet like heavy luggage they are relieved to finally let go of before bending down sweaty palms against knees breathlessly murmuring sacred verses a litany for forgiveness we kneel here. young women wardat whisper with reddened cheeks a flurry of clothed heads of wedding preparations and what kind of gold necklace matches that gown men shake each other’s hands at the conclusion of maghrib congregation before chewing into the shriveled skin of a date breaking a 16-hour spell of voluntarily induced hunger we kneel here. on intricately designed matting with flaxen illustrations of flowers intertwining swirls depictions of a holy cube where rubble often settles barely concealing the limp bodies of tiny bundles unfortunate casualties in yet another war for peace we kneel here. mothers pressing their foreheads against clay tablets indulging in faraway fantasies of one Eid dinner with thick fasolia steaming biryani a gooey heap of fried dough balls and no vacant chairs kneel bring trembling hands up to collapsing skies seek refuge again surrender again prostrate rise
Rapture
Caleb Merritt
The almost plain necessity of owning our complicity in South Dakota’s massacres, discontent in every circle I find breathed scripture. Sphere-so-planár.
Shame in every attempt. Shame in the possessives of pocket-space. Everything we took and the laces. Honesty like an old Kleenex.
Skirt-by-skrrt, letter to letter, damp overture of ruffled stamps, a whirlywind made of the absolute value of dust.
Too bad for a bald spot; I am not the image of a dog. Not really outriding; how excellence falls into stories, new screeplings. A tiny-hapfold prayer in a Mega-church’s screenplay. I suck up the wrong people.
I’m a tinny-relapse of unfolding. I can’t get along with rust.
Self-mastery because the doorways are hiding. God is a thousand-faceted polygon this time.
The paper cranes are migrating for clearer skies; for a richer-textured people.
What the River Wanted
Julian Danailov-Benguernane
The river begins by taking. It drags away what it no longer wants. Light, the shape of trees, your reflection if you look too long. But when it recedes, it leaves behind what we forgot we lost.
I walked the banks after the storm, barefoot in silt. The air heavy full of rot and memory.
A bicycle handle gleamed under reeds, half a doll’s face stared through mud. Somewhere, someone’s name was carried away years ago, and no one noticed.
I knelt to touch a piece of glass
smoothed by time. It felt warm, almost living.
I held it up to the light and thought of you, the way you said everything broken finds a shape eventually.
Maybe that’s what the river wanted me to remember.
I kept walking past the bend where we used to sit, counting clouds drifting slow, where you swore you could hear the earth turning if you stayed quiet enough.
The trees still lean toward the water, roots twisted like questions no one answers.
The path remembers us. The press of shoes, laughter breaking the air, but it doesn’t call out anymore.
I found your scarf snagged on a branch, poetry
threads brittle, sun-stained. I almost laughed: you never were careful with what you left behind.
I tied it around my wrist anyway, a map leading nowhere I needed to go. By sunset, the river turned silver, all movement without destination.
I could see my face, a blur between staying and leaving.
Maybe that’s what the river wanted too: to remind me nothing holds its shape, everything worth loving is already half water, half gone.
A heron rose from the reeds, wings carving silence from the air.
For a moment I thought it carried something of you. The tilt of your head, the way you’d walk ahead but look back to make sure I followed.
poetry
The river curled around my ankles, cold and certain. It didn’t ask for anything. It never does. It just keeps moving, gathering what it can, giving back what it doesn’t need. And as the last light caught the water, I understood: we were never meant to stay. The river wasn’t teaching loss, it was teaching me to let the current carry what I couldn’t anymore.
I let the scarf go. Watched it drift, turn, disappear. The surface closed without a ripple. Only the water remained, its slow, endless voice, taking, taking, until all that’s left is what was meant to stay.
poetry
Makai1 Eater
Pallavi Shrestha
I had to write this on paper. Scratch-scratch. It has 26 lines. It knows what roasted corn on a cob tastes like: like charcoal with 16 lines. Now, the Eater of these words cannot see that bird I just saw —Eater, do you know its color? Its size? I won’t write it down for you to eat, will keep you only sufficiently alive—there, it flew away. See?
I ate makai once, with Musa2, a girl my size. Her smile appeared passable enough as human, despite her befriending a mute.
Musa ate one line of makai, and I ate another, turn by turn. A bird was perched atop a stone Garuda’s head…I can’t tell you what that bird looked like, Eater, because, “Gaun jaane aba,” Musa said, “Aji chhaina re.” Going back to the village…Grandmother is gone.
Second page now. This paper is corn colored, yellowish, and my words are born on it as I pluck my thumb—scratch-scratch leaving behind dark ink that has a hint of blue. The sky has infected it.
What should I tell you, Eater, in this remaining space? That I visited her gaun3 after fifteen years? That I met Aji, but Musa was the one who’d left? A landslide had filled her up. And after they cremated everyone, “I got this second life,” Aji said, her room smelling like firewood. “Baachne bahek aru kehi garnai sakdina.” She cried. I can’t do anything else but live.
1 Literal: Mouse
2 Corn
3 Village
My surprise was this big: [ ], empty like the sky.
You won’t hear my voice, Eater, but Musa had heard my wails, my tears wetting the lines of corn. I couldn’t form the words “Malai pani laga”, Take me with you, but I was loud enough to scare the bird. So why wouldn’t I write this on paper? It can be burned, after all.
This is why I call you ‘Eater’: corn is all I have.
Sick Lamb
Pallavi Shrestha
The sheep chew on the hay half-heartedly. There isn’t much grass up in the clearing—Biru also says it seems to be late this year. At least the days are getting warmer. But the evenings are still cold. Need another jacket.
The steps are uneven going down—can feel the sharp stones through the soles of the old shoes. The dog is a nuisance, should’ve made it follow instead of letting it go ahead. It is too old now, doesn’t help with the sheep at all and is more useless than the sick lamb—the lamb is too light under the arm, like its fat and meat have fallen out leaving the bones and some fluff behind. Need to get it to the vet down below, if Dac-saab1 will be in.
“Chhya, tan pani ladchhass, hai?” bark loudly at the dog as it stumbles on a crag, Damn, are you going to fall? “ani ma k garne? Tanlai pani bhet-nary kaha laana sakdina.” And what will I do? I won’t be taking you to the veterinary. Its fur is coming off. If the blanket is not kept over the dog at night it will probably die.
Home. Tin roof supported over one side of the rock wall, bamboo poles lifting it off the ground on the other side—the plastic tarp has come off. The lamb gives a pitiful bleat as it is dropped upon a nearby patch of dry grass. The sheep corral into the fence, door closed now, the old wooden ceiling rattling dun-dunn in its wake—their house is better than mine, a dry grumble, dry throat. Need water. Tobacco.
It takes too long to put the tarp back on. Need bigger rocks to hold it down over the roof, “Kaha gayiss tan?!” Where did you go?! Yelling at the useless dog that is nowhere in sight. The lamb is sitting still, obedient. It is too sick to recognize its own mother.
1Doctor
Tea then some dhido2 then some sleep; inside the house, the oil lamp is lit. The days still get dark quickly, so dark—did not even see the next mountain on the way down. There was a big cloud over it in the afternoon, maybe rain tonight. Boiling the water, putting the sick lamb next to the kerosene stove fire – it shakes with the cold or the fever.
The dog had been inside the house all along. Lying down beside the plastic bags of clothes—old thing doesn’t even move when the bags are shaking with the rummaging and the jacket being pulled out. HHHH—a loud, buzzing noise shooting across the quiet from somewhere—
Hett! A scared breath out of the mouth, “what is that!?”
There, on the table with the crooked, murky plastic jars holding rice and flour. It is the phone. It is shaking with a call.
Tapping on the green circle, Chhoro’s3 face opens inside the small thing. The glass is cracked, with streaked, black lines across his young, tired face. The phone had dropped on a rock some days ago.
“Baba,” Chhoro says.
“Huh.”
Water is going to boil over, put the phone away and take the pot out of the stove. Put another pot of dhido on the fire.
“You’re up there?” Chhoro says.
“Yes.”
Putting the lamb on the lap. Under the cracked glass of the phone, face beside Chhoro’s face is streaked with wrinkles and a white beard. The beard is why the face is itchy these days.
“What happened to it?” Chhoro asks about the lamb.
“Sick. Will take it down to the village tomorrow.”
A long silence. Chhoro is looking at something else, up beside the head, towards the tin ceiling. “Paisa chha?” Do you have
2 A meal prepared by continuously stirring flour with water over a low heat.
3 Literal: son fiction
money?
The lamb has stopped shaking. “Chha.” I do. “Is it hot there?”
Chhoro sighs, says yes. “Since 3AM in the morning. They give the most work in the afternoon, when it's too hot,” Chhoro adds, “it’s fine.”
Stirring the dhido now. Chhoro doesn’t speak for a long time. The dog sneezes in the corner. Chhoro is staring at the tin ceiling again, not at his Baba.
“Should I get you new shoes?” Chhoro asks. He has gotten thin. He used to smile wide when he was little; a loud memory of the boy riding on one of the sheep, almost about to fall.
Don’t know what his adult smile looks like.
“Why? I have shoes.”
Chhoro is thinking. He is looking at his Baba now, “I send you money, why do you still go up there with the sheep?”
“I give the money to your mother. The sheep are my own money.”
Chhoro sighs.
“Herr,” showing him the jacket, “look. The jacket you gave me. I wear it.”
“La la,” Chhoro concedes.
Won’t make this call turn into the same old argument: Leave Qatar and come home.
And where will I make money there?
“La, I’ll hang up,” Chhoro says.
“La.”
Chhoro disappears inside the black of the phone. Dhido tastes a little burnt. Lamb needs milk, can’t even suckle the mother. Cloth —is it clean? It is probably clean. Dip it in the milk, feed the lamb —oh, now it is suckling. The dog is asleep. It already ate on the clearing. Bastard is still alive, lasting longer than expected. Looking up at the tin ceiling beside the head—what is over there? Chhoro kept looking at it: A pair of old canvas shoes, white many years ago, now brown-grey, with some holes on the side. It
is tucked between the tin roof and the bamboo rafter, waiting for feet during the summer.
Throat is dry…need more tobacco…No, need the money for the lamb, some medicine and flour. Need to wake up early and take the lamb down to the village to see the vet doctor. It will take three hours to reach. Lock the sheep up. It will be safe, the dog will be here.
Home Ownership
Sarah Brockhaus
I keep reminding myself to buy lace curtains for my someday house. It exists
like a dwarf planet, something I want to believe will grow up one day and be real—clear the asteroids in its path and planet. Have you heard of matriphagy? Mostly, it is an insect phenomenon. The babies eat the mother to survive. I pretend I am my own mother. I pretend I am a bug. I matriphagy. I tell myself I rent because I don’t believe in the idea of property at all. I am the idea and I am the mother and at night the idea eats me so I pretend
I am a father. You cannot let the father rabbit near the babies because he will eat them. My friend learns this on a summer night and I imagine the scene out of the story she whispers. I pretend I am a rabbit. I eat my ideas alive. I hang lace curtains in my mind, in the future somewhere.
Livery of Seisin
Greg Walklin
Black pickups blast past
The gravel’s dust, and by The time they arrive, at sunset, You can’t even see the logos. They put the papers on the truck bed.
In sunglasses they surround me.
I hold the clod in my hands
Like the blue baby my wife had born, What two no three decades ago, That clear cold night suffocated by stars, And still I clutched both Unable to believe they had gone.
My father, who lived here too, once told me: We stand on nothing but the remains of the dead
Between the rock and our feet
All the life that has come before us
We run it through our fingers
As our plants take root.
Now I think: but in our fists, the soil is just black, Moist with yesterday’s rain.
Hell, they said, now you can enjoy life. But I just nodded, walked over
To where the foundation had slipped— Was that spot there where the raccoon
Had drawn with the rooster?
Where our lab was buried?
Where Uncle Aubrey once took a rummy piss
Cursing on Thanksgiving?
Our buildings round us off, erase us And from the outside we disappear Behind their walls. We enter them As they dictate, only shit where They help us wash it all away. But not the land. On the land We’re who we have always been, Alone in the void.
The pickups laughed when I handed it to them, looking from each to each and dropped the warm dirt at their tires.
Midnight Blue
She splayed her knotted fingers proudly flashing nails painted a startling midnight blue. She could barely speak— words stolen by stroke—but her hands remained defiant.
In her final weeks she wore an antique ring: the stone’s setting lifted on a tiny hinge; In the secret compartment a single white pain pill cradled on a disc of velvet.
Tabor Flickinger
The Restless Spirit
title taken from the lost 1913 short film
4AM
Grendel’s mother howls her grief as sirens signal an approaching doom
The bed in which I lie will hurt my neck for days. I dream of viruses, monsters. Helpless.
In the pecan tree, the mockingbird’s cardinal call disturbs my sleep.
My dad in the next room experiences his sixth panic attack of the night. Wild-eyed.
The mockingbird takes up the nameless myth’s keening, her desperate wail.
Neighbors’ voices argue the relative value of the self versus family. Loudly.
poetry
Tabor Flickinger
Sirens, distant now, whisper. The mockingbird says “You’re just visiting.”
I dream viruses, monsters.
My dad’s seventh attack begins, if, of course, it’s not still the first.
On Coquina Beach
Lisa Sullivan
A tired wave crawls to shore, draws back the shells, deposits them, almost exactly where they were. Unless there’s an undertow, like the one that took my mother years ago. Then— everything disappears.
She never learned to swim but loves the ocean—a small woman who’s rarely had cause to laugh. I warned her the undertow could sweep her away. And it did. Those frozen seconds of not knowing. I scrambled into the water, searched the horizon, looked left, then right— and found her tumbling onto the sand, twenty feet from where she’d been—black hair plastered to her skin, swimsuit straps stirruped around thin arms,
poetry
coughing up the din, and on her face—a grin!
My mother laughed. She laughed and laughed. I swear: she laughed. §
Each shell I find reminds me of her.
Here—an augur twisted, spiraling into the shape of my mother’s grief.
And there— a shell I’ve never found before, the Lettered Olive, slender, glossy, curled into itself, beige with the zig-zag pattern of a fleeing rabbit. I wrap the shell in my fist— make a wish for my mother.
A fellow sheller asks if I’ve had any luck. In some ways, I tell her, holding up a lightning whelk, covered in burnt-orange whorls, but for poetry
the bolts that strike counterclockwise down to a creamy point, its aperture dark with echo. §
For hours I search among the ibis, the piping plover, the sandwich tern, the laughing gull, until my feet are brined,
until, at last, I find my mother’s favorite delicacy—the oyster, its shell dull and craggy.
To her, at times, I am the irritant that starts the pearl.
Something unseen but felt.
I cannot husk this lifetime of nacre. Cannot trust the recurrent dream of she and I together on Coquina Beach.
My mother calls to me, but each time, her voice drowns in the sound of the surf.
She, always the wave, I, the breaking. poetry
My Doctor Said I’d Fall, Go into a Nursing Home, and Die
Kurt G. Schmidt
My new primary care physician said if I didn’t follow her recommendation, I was going to fall, break my hip, and die in a nursing home. My former PCP had retired, and the clinic had assigned me this heavy, dark-haired woman with a wispy mustache who seemed oblivious to my anxiety about doctors. She thought at my age I should have a bone scan, which had revealed a slight case of osteopenia (bone thinning). She decided I should begin taking a prescription drug called Fosamax. I’d read about possible serious side effects with this drug, so I suggested first trying to build bone with calcium supplements, more exercise, and calcium-rich food. She said it was too late for me, implying that my age meant I could no longer build bone mass. What would happen if I didn’t take the drug? She said I was bound to “fall, break my hip, go into a nursing home, and die.” I wanted to say I’d rather die with a bunch of bums, smoking weed beneath an underpass.
I called the clinic to see about getting a new doctor, but they said the shortage of family physicians meant no switching at this time. Then my foreseer of broken bones went on maternity leave and didn’t return. I began eating more yogurt for extra calcium, which did little to allay my anxiety about falling and dying. When health advocates write about a patient’s emotional state, they encourage doctors to talk with them about their fears and worries in a calm, private environment. Listening without judgment is important for the patient to feel safe and heard. Doctors should acknowledge a patient’s feelings and find out how he or she would feel about dying in a nursing home after breaking a hip that could have been prevented with Fosamax.
Kurt G. Schmidt
I was having a routine colonoscopy, because I was seventy-five and hadn’t had one in ten years. I woke up in a haze and heard Doctor Jennifer, the usually upbeat young woman who’d performed the procedure, say to my wife Shelley, “Whatever it is… it has to come out of there.” I turned my head enough to see the doctor’s frown. Even in the fog of anesthesia, I sensed she was going to begin using the C-word. My medical compass was beginning to twitch.
Weeks later I met a smiling little woman with a long skirt and white doctor’s coat, who entered the examination room and immediately cupped her hands around one of mine. She said, “I know you don’t want to do this again, but I would like to see the enemy. I promise I’ll be gentle. Then we can form a plan to defeat the enemy.” On a later occasion, she guided Shelley and me to her assistant to set up a surgery date. Doctor Lilliana took my hand again in hers and smiled. “You’re so cute.” Then she hustled away. I didn’t believe “cute” really described a small, anxious man, but her remark made me feel as though she saw more in me than a damaged patient. My interaction with her confirmed that the best person to perform cancer surgery is a well-regarded specialist of the opposite sex who thinks you’re cute. One who holds your hand and tells you not to be afraid. The greater the emotional investment the doctor has in you, the more likely he or she is to pull your mind out of its dark places. …
I remember being nervous around doctors long before my cancer surgery. When our son was about five years old and susceptible to any child virus currently circulating, it was my wife who took him to our pediatrician. And she had done so at the beginning of the week only to worry days later when his temperature was still 102.
"Probably bronchitis," Doctor Freeman said to her on the phone. “Bring him in again.”
Although I’d never taken him to the doctor, Shelley’s facial
expression said it was time for me to overcome my anxieties and deal now with the child virus. In the car Jesse kept telling me how much I would like Doctor Freeman. "I'll bet you can hardly wait to meet him," he said.
I didn’t respond that this was an erroneous assumption. I was exceedingly anxious in the waiting room with bedraggled mothers and sniffling children. I could catch the child virus and die here. But once inside the examining room, I felt more at ease with the elderly doctor. When Jesse’s examination was over, Nurse Rosemary gave him a lollipop. Doctor Freeman asked us to meet him in his office after Jesse put his shirt on. They left. Jesse examined the lollipop wrapper. “I don't like this flavor. I want to get a different one."
As a father who avoided conflicts about lollipops and almost any other potential dispute, I said, "Oh, that one's just fine."
"I want a different one."
"That one's just fine. Put on your sweatshirt. Where are your boots?"
He shrugged. Apparently he’d kicked them off in the reception area. "I don't want this one," he persisted, "I really want a different flavor."
I scowled and escorted him across the hall to the office, where the doctor was writing a prescription. The minute we walked in, Jesse said, "Doctor Freeman, I'm going to exchange this lollipop for a different flavor," and he went directly to the lollipop box on the doctor's shelf.
"Rosemary tries to get rid of one of those flavors nobody wants," Doctor Freeman told him, "but you were too smart for her."
Doctor Freeman’s response surprised me. He understood children and had a tolerance for outspoken kids. And empathy. Perhaps the reason Jesse liked him so much was that they’d had these adult exchanges before I came into the picture.
Kurt G. Schmidt
Shelley’s mother Mary was in her early nineties and living in Indiana when a cardiologist told her something that I still find difficult to believe. Mary had been having chest pains and had had a friend drive her to the ER several times only to have the pain disappear once she arrived. Intuitively she knew she was having heart problems and scheduled an appointment with a cardiologist whom she’d never met. In his examining room, she explained the nature of her chest pains. He looked her in the eye and said, “We all gotta go sometime.” On her way out, the receptionist asked if Mary would like to schedule another appointment. “I won’t be coming back here,” Mary said.
Her next cardiologist was Hispanic and not yet possessing full expertise in the English language. After examining her, he said, “It’s not your organ.”
Her next cardiologist was from India and had an accent that was foreign to Mary’s ears, which made it difficult for her to understand. He told her she had a blocked artery and that he’d like to try to open it by inserting a stent. But after two hours in the catherization room, he was unable to do so. I’m unsure whether her artery was too damaged for the procedure or what other complications might have existed. I only know he did not say, “We all gotta go sometime.”
Why couldn’t the asshole doctor and the others have said something to help Mary’s physiological and emotional needs? Did the asshole think complaining elders were expedient?
So Mary had to endure agonizing chest pains until near her death, when Hospice provided the necessary empathy and pain medications.
Around the time I turned eighty, a doctor said to me, “You’re having a heart attack.” I knew I was having a heart attack. The crazy part was that it was happening to me, a non-smoker who’d been physically active my whole life and drank only one beer a week on Friday night with our family pizza. I had just past my
Kurt G. Schmidt
five-year anniversary of being cancer-free and figured I was home free. My wife cooked healthy food. I had a salad every night with supper. I was slim and fit. And yet…I was having a fucking heart attack.
In the hospital after having a stent placed in a blocked coronary artery, I told a team of doctors at my bedside that I felt hot sweats now and then, but maybe it was just anxiety. Two young ones nodded as though anxiety was the answer. I thought interns wanted to know about heart problems and not hot sweats or anxiety. They lingered near my bed, but a middle-aged, balding doctor hung back and seemed to observe. I thought he was the cardiac surgeon in charge of my case. He must have been satisfied that his minions were doing the job, because he just slipped out of the room quietly. No one asked about my shaky emotional state.
The next evening, I was watching the Red Sox/Yankee playoff game from my hospital bed until it got late and the Sox were ahead. I hoped they’d win and proceed to the playoffs but decided I needed to sleep. In the middle of night, a nurse came to take my blood pressure. Bending close to me, she whispered, “The Red Sox won.” I thought if all doctors were as tuned in to a patient’s emotions as most nurses were, then broken old farts like me would have less trouble dealing with the terror of a heart attack.
I wondered why none of the doctors had asked about my emotional state. I’d read it was common for heart attack patients to feel anxious, depressed, and somewhat broken. And I was no different. I learned later that cardiac doctors don’t deal with the emotional heart, just the physical heart. I’ve been puzzling about why ever since.
Upon leaving the hospital, I’d have to consume a slew of heart medications and worry about why I felt so broken, why I was frightened like a child who’d just fell off its rocking horse. Was there anything I could do about it?
In his book, Just Mercy, A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson writes, “I guess I'd always known but never fully
considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing...In fact, there is strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in all of us.”
After driving me home from the hospital, my son Jesse left for his house, which was a forty-minute drive, saying to call him if I needed anything. I had a calm night and felt pretty good the next morning, and so I drove to a pharmacy to pick up my five new heart medications and do some grocery shopping on the way home. On Friday I drove to another pharmacy where I’d made an appointment for a COVID booster shot before the heart attack.
On Sunday, Shelley arrived home from Indiana, where she’d been dealing with her mother’s death. It was a relief to have her with me again. During my chemotherapy days, her kindness and empathy had given me more insight into the depth of our love. One of her friends had even sent me a soft napping blanket similar to the one she’d used while recovering from breast cancer. Despite receiving mercy from so many then, I still felt broken. Many who’d written notes of love and encouragement five years ago as I recovered from cancer and colorectal surgery sent uplifting messages of sympathy about my heart attack. I wrote them of my experience and gratitude, realizing that they had all probably experienced brokenness too. I wrote how Doctor Lilliana had comforted me during cancer treatment and, by touching me physically with her hands, had somehow softened my anxieties then. I thought my connection to humanity was stronger than before and began writing essays about it. I had read an author who
Kurt G. Schmidt
said writing about trauma helps the healing process. I recalled an early spring morning when there had been fresh snow on the bushes and I’d been startled by eight bluebirds that had squeezed onto the edge of my small bird bath. A spiritual congregation! Before I could get my camera, four flew off. And yet even four bluebirds on the bird bath made an exciting photo for the local newspaper. I thought how grateful I was to still be seeing a world that I was only beginning to understand.
Kurt G. Schmidt
The Fumble
A mis-placed fish draws infinity circles within an old glass bowl and it’s in here I hold my head up. What tidbits drop into the contents of my sea.
I know nothing more than the layout of a home, its garden, the way volunteer tomatoes wrap mistakes around death stalks, flowers sick from the bloom.
If string is a thing that binds us, stem to wooden stake, hook and weight to rod, then go ahead and call me mother. Because a lure is also any ground petaled heavy with the color of birth, I crawl to the nearest bed and unravel.
Beth Oast Williams
November, Again
Another lamb sacrificed, the butcher wraps a rack— four ribs for my husband and four for me, Adam and Eve being equal now. The dog at our feet, we’re careful with crumbs, lean further into the slaughter. They call this an Indian Summer, and we wonder what the smoke means, the first time we light the chiminea this season. Tomorrow’s frost might extinguish the last of the mosquitoes, tomato plants already caught with their hands up.
Beth Oast Williams
Irresistible
Linda Drach
It’s just us now. My elderly husband snores in his recliner, while my elderly pug snores on the couch, and here I am, watching them again –those You Tube videos where someone is surprised with a puppy. Trust me, I know. It’s imprudent, at best, to foist a living being on the unsuspecting. What happens when it’s time to trim toenails, swab ears, and brush teeth? How many people cheer while draining anal glands? But today! My god. Look at their faces. Wide eyes and open mouths, hands flown to cheeks like Munch’s Scream, but overcome with mirth. And sure, the family in matching PJ’s— fat Santas and green trees—are no strangers to glee. But what about the tattooed dude in beat-up trucker hat, who falls to the floor, swiping his eyes, when he sees the fluffy collie? Or the cancer survivor, who—in her excitement—knocks off her wig, reaching for the teacup chihuahua? An old man weeps and weeps over the golden retriever plopped in his lap, as the dog’s tail flicks madly, a windshield wiper, trying to keep pace with the deluge. A few people freeze when faced with delight, disbelieving and denying. But ready or not, the puppies keep coming— French bulldogs, Chocolate Labs, German shepherds, mixed-up mutts. They wear ribbons and bows and helium balloons attached to their collars and little vests with slogans like I heart my daddy. They emerge from paper bags and hatchback wagons and even a tall soup pot, once, with stainless-steel lid.
Irresistible joy— it could be waiting for me, too. I like to think when I least expect it, it could leap into my arms and let me call it mine.
hideout [2003]
here— where only death knows the distance between it and i is my momentary paradise tucked legs against my rust-boned chest is how i pray to nothingness two months with the johnson’s— two months without a mother the war separates flesh from eden’s dust
alas alas— my friends my head carries ashes for them i watch a child watch her father watch a pigeon beak red soil a woman lies in— lifeless?
clouds rainbow monrovia a covenant remembered never will water destroy this earth but with guns pointed at each other
poetry
Jeremy Teddy Karn
Jeremy Teddy Karn
the genealogy of refugees begins with jesus
over six hundred civilians, women, and children were massacred by the armed forces of liberia in an internal refugee camp near harbel.
— Human Rights Watch
Jeremy Teddy Karn
june 6, 1993 ends in the sins of a moonless night same as when the sanhedrin places jesus on trial secrets blacken— firestone-harbel’s refugee camp and pretend war won’t follow them into heaven
jesus christ fled two thousand years ago— children plot to get smuggled for an afterlife—diarrheal and the government militias bullets both find a home in their bodies we are not the first to come here there are more bringing
Jeremy Teddy Karn
hope in ghana-must-go bags as the family’s treasure passed down from mothers to sons fathers to daughters first the photo: families standing beside their bags of chinese butter rice medium-sized salt bag vegetable oil before unicef erected tents last when everything is consumed bullet shapes a sculpture on our backs we are wheelbarrowed from tents to holes dug outside the camp
Jeremy Teddy Karn
A Letter to the Sea Lion That Kissed Me on a Catamaran in the Bay of Banderas
Sharon Goldberg
Dear Luca,
I saw you before you saw me. Midway through our sailing and snorkeling trip, my partner Arnie and I were chilling and sipping sodas with other tourists when you climbed aboard from a speedboat with your trainer and waddled onto our deck on all four flippers. Your sleek, chestnut coat shone in the sun and your long, white whiskers framed your snout. “Who wants a kiss from a sea lion?” asked the trainer, a slim, tan Mexican wearing a royal blue Vallarta Adventures swim shirt. He smiled beneath his sunglasses. “Line up.”
Why not? I thought. I’ve never been kissed by a sea creature. Another vacation photo op. I joined a dozen or so kids and adults. The first in line, a child in a wet swimsuit, stood next to you. “Kiss, Luca!” your trainer commanded. You hauled yourself part way up, braced on your large front flippers, and planted one on the check of the giggling kid. Your trainer tossed a fish which you deftly caught in your mouth and slurped down. “Smile, Luca!” he said. And you did. Another fish toss. The encounter was over in a few seconds. Next in line. Another kiss. Another smile. More fish. Repeat.
When my turn came, I gazed into your deep black eyes and stroked your coat hoping to establish a quick connection and distinguish myself from the others. You smelled musky. “Kiss, Luca!” Whomp! Arnie snapped our picture. I gasped. The smooch felt wetter and more forceful than a human kiss but thrilling nevertheless. A fish and a slurp followed. Was it a herring? A sardine? An anchovy? I couldn’t tell the difference. Could you? “Smile, Luca!” You smiled, I think. I’ve since read that your
mouth, with its corners turned up, at least gives the impression of a smile. “Next!” your trainer said and I padded back to my seat.
Since returning home to Seattle, I’ve been thinking about you, your species, and our shared experience. You interact with more tourists than I do sea lions; I have difficulty telling sea lions apart. Can you distinguish between us homo sapiens or do we all look the same, just an endless parade of tailless, flipper-less, sunglasswearing non-pinnipeds?
I asked your trainer if you minded the kissing job. He said you like it. Do you? I learned that California sea lions like you are known for their curiosity, intelligence, and playful personalities, so maybe you enjoy entertaining tourists. More likely, you performed because you’d been conditioned and training keeps you stimulated and active since you don’t face the usual challenges of the wild. I hope, at least, that you didn’t find the work onerous. If I was obligated to kiss a line of random people for raw fish or even chocolate, I would not be joyful.
I wonder, Luca, how many times a day you board a boat to kiss and smile, kiss and smile, kiss and smile. How many days a week? Do you think it’s a good gig what with the guaranteed fish? Were you hungry when you boarded our catamaran? I sincerely hope you’re not being deliberately deprived of food so you’re desperate to work. I remember my Experimental Psychology class in college where we taught half-starved white mice to run through a maze. Not nice.
As you know, Vallarta Adventures has its own Marine Mammal Center dedicated to protecting and preserving marine life. They rescue, rehabilitate, and release animals in need. Were you captured from the wild or rescued because you were injured? Even if you were, I question now whether you should be required to kiss, kiss, kiss.
Your trainer said you’re fourteen years old. How many of those have you spent in captivity? I’ve learned that your species lives twenty to thirty years in the wild, but twenty-five to thirty or
longer when captive. Is the tradeoff worth it? Are you bored or troubled because you lack the typical stimuli of your natural habitat like weather, sea conditions, and navigation cues? You can’t control your environment or express your natural behavioral repertoire. You may not be able to create social bonds of your choosing. And, of course, you don’t forage for food. Would you prefer to forage since it’s instinctive? For the most part, I forage at grocery stores and prepare my own meals but I gladly eat at restaurants.
Do you have a mate or mates? I understand that your species is polygamous, that you usually mate with different females, sixteen on average per season. Wow! I suspect that’s not an option in captivity. I also learned that some males don’t find a mate at all given the competition for reproductive success—survival of the fittest and all. I hope that isn’t the case with you. As for me, I prefer monogamy now but admit that during my twenties I was involved with more than one male at a time. Unlike the females of your species, I took steps to make sure I didn’t reproduce.
A sea lion named Pepe hangs out at the edge of the marina in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico. A regular fixture, he even has a name plate. Pepe barks loudly as tourists pass by. When I met him, I couldn’t tell if he was greeting us or angry. Have you heard of Pepe through the sea lion grapevine?
Are you buddies with the dolphins at the Marine Mammal Center that also work in the tourist industry, swimming and frolicking with visitors? Do you tend to stick with your own species? Is there a hierarchy at the Center? Any intraspecies jealousy or rivalry? Any fights over food? I, for one, am very protective of my desserts and don’t like to share them. At Xcaret, an eco-archaeological theme park in the Riviera Maya, I swam with dolphins in a large pool. They seemed to relish the experience as much as I did, doing tricks, circling around us, and letting us touch them, but maybe they were on autopilot. Can you sense how the dolphins you know feel about these encounters? Children,
especially, adore playing with dolphins and I doubt they think about the pinniped point of view. I was an adult, however, when I splashed in that pool. I wonder now if I contributed to animal exploitation.
Beyond the marine mammal community, I acknowledge I engaged in animal interaction that I’ve since learned is clearly worse. I rode an elephant in Thailand, unaware of the cruelty and abuse involved in training baby elephants to carry humans on their backs. They are taken from their mothers, confined to a small place, and repeatedly beaten with bull hooks until they become submissive. I’m so sorry to tell you that. I suspect the elephant I rode was not jubilant, nor was he excited to hold a brush in his trunk and paint a picture that we were invited to purchase. One web site I checked claimed elephants are only trained to paint if they exhibit genuine interest and artistic aptitude. Really? I was relieved to read that sea lion training uses positive reinforcement in a comfortable environment with animals actively participating in the process. Is that accurate or just public relations spin? I hope it’s true, but I still feel icky.
Anyway, thanks again, Luca, for your service. I wish you and I had spent more time together. I would have put my arm around you. I would have kissed you in return. I would have fed you a fish with no obligation on your part. Would I then have made a memorable impression? I’ll never know. But when I look at our photo, your snout pressed against my cheek, I hope you at least didn’t resent me. One last question. If I have another chance to be kissed by a sea lion on a boat in Mexico or Florida or The Bahamas, what do you think I should do? I admit I’m still tempted.
Foxy Brown
Bridgette Roberson
In 1974, my parents broke up for good. Mom and us four kids are on a Greyhound bus. We are moving back to California to live with Grandma, who doesn’t want us. There’s a bag of apples on the kitchen counter. We can’t have any. Grandma is taking them to church. The dog is eating leftover meatloaf. Mom goes down to the county office to get on welfare. The welfare worker tells her she’s pretty, she looks like Foxy Brown, and to go back to her husband. He only used a belt on her once. She makes a pallet on the floor and lies down beside us. She tries to rent an apartment. The landlord tells her she is pretty and looks like Foxy brown. He says that he will rent her the apartment for cheap if she lets him visit when his wife falls asleep. He gives us a dollar for the ice cream truck. He gives her money to get our school clothes out of layaway. We think he’s not such a bad guy. We don’t understand why Mom lights a cigarette and fiddles with her necklace whenever he comes around. Foxy Brown, the movie, opens and gets rave reviews for its star, Pam Grier, the star of blaxploitation cinema and an icon of female empowerment. Grier steps out of a limousine onto the red carpet wearing a brown suede jumpsuit with a blue fur collar and sparkling platform shoes. Mom steps out to catch the bus to work wearing a white uniform, stockings, and white shoes. She’s a star. She is pretty. She looks like Foxy Brown.
Brother dates a white girl
Brother eats grass like a healing balm. Brother holds his phone open nearly all day, laughing unabashedly on the bus to the east side. Brother is not the moon, and has never been asked to be. He licks ice cream slowly, uncaring of the way it drips down forearms, sticks to newly cleaned streets. Brother shears his nails short, gnaws the cuticle down to bone. Brother, what are you so afraid of? Brother is welcomed into my mother’s open arms, Brother eats her flesh as leftovers. Brother has a signet on each finger, a family name he carries easily in strong forearms. The word bubbles under his skin, then pops, dissipating into his blood like soap, air. Brother’s tongue is dry as desert, doesn’t feel the slow, heavy heartbeat need to wet it. Brother has never laid flat on a bare mattress, washed hair soaking into naked pillows, bergamot lingering in cracked walls. Brother makes the conscious choice to be happy. Brother has never had her hair stroked while asbestos rains down softly on chapped lips. Brother dates a white girl. Brother’s veins are as thin as the nation where he left them, never squeezed progeny from their narrow valves.
Claire Lee
On Account of God Maybe Being Dead
Claire Lee
I.
My cousin has been crashing with me for the last few months. He has brain cancer even though he’s nine months older.
I asked him once what it felt like. He just shrugged and said that some things exist beyond how they could be described. He’s a devout believer in the god of everything canceling out. I’m a gemini so I tend to think things more just in tilt in a new direction, but I don’t argue, on account of the whole cancer thing.
II.
On Tuesdays, I get in the car and drive south to the ocean, or to the idea that maybe eventually I’ll reach it, like if I keep going long enough something blue will open up. He never comes with and I wonder if he’s afraid of arriving somewhere, on account of it meaning you’re leaving somewhere else. Or maybe he just doesn’t like not knowing how long something takes.
III.
I asked him if he thinks about what happens when he dies and he said he’s more concerned about what happens if he doesn’t.
I didn’t want to say, but sometimes being at home makes me wonder if that whole shebang is even worth it.
IV.
I can’t stop looking at the church outside of the kitchen window. The sign says “God Bless America” but the tape for the B is peeling. I’ve been watching it slowly sag for the last month while I eat my breakfast.
I’m not much of a pastor, but I do believe in omens.
It’s mostly the simple stuff, like the B falling, or the fact that I keep going to bed hungry and waking up full.
I’ve started to worry that this might be what he meant by canceling out.
V.
I still haven’t found the beach, even though I drove for three hours last time. I would’ve kept going but I got spooked that he’d be dead by the time I came back.
Lana and the Baby and High School
Sarah Gokhale
When Zoya and I were sixteen and she got pregnant, we prayed to Lana Del Ray for an answer. Zoya was my best friend, my favorite thing about being alive, and she was screwed.
Zoya’s parents were first generation Muslim immigrants from Tehran. Zoya called herself Catholic because Katy G, a girl at our high school who taught us it was cooler to mostly do coke and not drink that much at parties (advice we follow even now in our thirties), was Catholic. My dad was a first generation Hindu from Bombay and cursed anyone who wasn’t also Hindu, especially my white mom. My mom was the kind of Christian where her pastor was gay. It was a small immigrant town, south of Los Angeles and north of San Diego.
Zoya and I had no one to tell. None of our peers had had sex yet, besides that white girl Erika who had a baby at 14 and dropped out of school. We didn’t think the Muslim or Hindu Gods would approve of her pregnancy, but we knew Lana wouldn’t care. She would call it transgressive, punk rock, sweet. We always ended our daily Lana prayers with a quick nod and thank you and we’re worried about you to Britney Spears, who’d recently shaved her head.
Zoya was pregnant by Colin F., her sometimes–but definitely not anymore–boyfriend. Colin F. was also my first boyfriend, in the loosest possible meaning of the term. He asked me to square dance with him in seventh grade PE class. I said yes because our PE teacher, Mr. Davis, said I could not say no, and then all our friends said we were dating.
One time Colin called me and said that he was lighting something on fire in his room and I was supposed to be impressed but I wasn’t because his braces produced so much saliva it was hard to take him seriously and more importantly I was busy trying
to impress Sabreena Z. who, it turned out, was not gay and ended up marrying her high school boyfriend. Colin and I almost made out once at the Winter Formal but I swerved my mouth in time. Colin had gotten early admitted to MIT as an eleventh grader somehow because his parents, unlike most of our friends’ parents, were native English speakers, had enough money to pay attention to him, and knew how to fill out online forms. Also, Colin was actually way smarter than us.
In first grade, Zoya snorted her chocolate milk out with laughter at something I said on the school bus, and from then on we were attached at the hip. She accessorized with bengals, pendants, hoop earrings, and vintage sandals. She dreamed of being on or writing for Broadway. Either would do. I wore one of my four Mia Hamm jerseys to school everyday and played every sport. But we were magnets to each other. I had a bowl haircut for about ten years longer than I should have, which our peers were not shy about telling me. Zoya told them to Fuck Off Asshat, before we even knew what that phrase meant. Zoya has always looked like she could blow over any second. Tough as nails, frail as could be. As kids, we were both terrified of our mothers and idolized our fathers, even though on paper our fathers were the scary ones.
Zoya could not get an abortion because, at least at that time in Southern California, it required parental consent. Her father would rather murder her than consent to this. His second generation Persian-American daughter and future star lawyer getting pregnant at sixteen? There was no worse fate.
Even without the pregnancy, Junior year of high school already blew. We drew on each other’s hands in silver glitter Sharpie during AP Calc with Mr. Farley, and claimed we were on our periods to get out of PE most days. Some days we sat with Banu B. while she hotboxed in her Volvo instead of attending AP Bio. We pretend flirted with Pejman S. in AP Political Science so he would be debate partners with us. Pej cared, we feigned caring. We all got
A’s. I took Latin because I thought it was contrarian, and Zoya took Spanish. That was the only hour we were ever apart. Neither of us had taken the driver’s test yet so after school, there was nowhere to go with our anguish.
It was eighty degrees outside, like it is everyday in our hometown, but everything that year felt sub zero. We started a band named Scorpio, after the astrological sign the baby and I would come to share. I played the C, D, G, and occasionally E major guitar chords. Zoya sang. We wrote and recorded songs on GarageBand in my room and uploaded them to Scorpio’s Myspace, with Zoya crying in most of the takes. We were always eating Sour Patch Kids and drinking Diet Coke. Sometimes we walked three miles to Pinkberry to eat tart ice cream and say tart things about our peers.
Zoya had zero pregnancy symptoms and remained ninety-five pounds dripping wet, so sometimes we convinced ourselves that it was all a sick joke, despite the twenty-three positive pregnancy tests she kept hidden under my bed. We guessed she was four months along but we had no idea how it worked. We didn’t have laptops or smartphones to consult. Everyone we knew was, as far as we knew, a virgin. Well, besides Emily W., but Emily W. was such a gossip that we couldn’t risk involving her. We never once wondered about the baby’s gender. How could it be anything other than a girl? Even the cruelest God wouldn’t hand us a baby boy.
The only cool thing about our cul-de-sac was that it was close to IHOP. IHOP was our office, our therapist, our third space. Zoya and I would share one Grand Slam breakfast sans bacon every day after school so that we could say, if anyone asked, that Zoya was just eating too much. Also her black, thick, curly waist-level hair hid everything.
In May, we took the bus to La Jolla to sit by and then skinny dip in the ocean instead of going to Junior prom. We sat on the pier with Monster drinks, arguing about whether we loved Cat Power or Jenny Lewis more, whether getting older would be better or
worse than whatever fresh hell we were in right now. We both wanted butterfly tattoos behind our left earlobes, which our parents would, of course, never consent to. We’d watch South Park at night after Zoya’s parents had gone to bed and couldn’t hear us and talked insufferably like the character Butters to annoy our peers. We started calling the baby Butters, too.
Zoya was six months pregnant but not showing at all when we took the SAT in August. I had spent the month prior at Barnes and Noble reading every test prep book they carried and then teaching it back to her. I became obsessed, so much so that ten years later, teaching unmotivated, artsy, angry kids just like Zoya how to get a perfect score on the SAT became my profession.
On Zoya’s seventeenth birthday, we geocached all over town with Desi B., listening to the Chairlift song Bruises on repeat. Most of our peers were in their last few weeks of summer school at the local community college or at pretend internships their parents created for them for the sake of college applications.
Instead, that August we ate pomegranate seeds on Zoya’s bedroom floor, willing ourselves into a different reality, one where there was no baby and Colin F. was an actually useful character in our lives and the 7th season of Gilmore Girls hadn’t gone off the rails. One where we made it to college, moved to New York City, weren’t forced by our parents to become lawyers, and we had enough money to buy a red couch. That was the epitome of making it in our eyes. Red couch, Zoya and I still text each other when something good happens, fifteen years later. Our back up plan was asking Maryam T. to try to get us jobs at American Apparel, where she worked as a cashier.
In my mind now, that summer before Senior year lasted fifty years. Every day was a marathon of waiting, wondering when some adult would figure out what was happening and offer to help. I kept thinking I should tell my mom, but I knew Zoya would hate me if I did. I felt nervous all the time. I started biting and chewing on the sides of my tongue and never stopped. Have I bitten off
most of my tastebuds? Probably. Food has never really done it for me anyways.
That same summer, Lindsay Lohan started dating a woman, Samantha Ronson. We watched the TMZ video of them in the drugstore where they had a cute little peck so many times. Perez Hilton was not yet cancelled. Celebrity worship was our first and favorite drug.
That same summer, Death Cab was now lame and The Strokes, Phoenix, M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend were cool. Our summer reading assignment was The Scarlet Letter, which we read the SparkNotes of. We called too many things ironic, because we didn’t know what else to call them. I never asked Zoya if she was scared because fear was the only emotion on either of our faces. We listened to the same songs on separate iPod minis in the same room over and over, pretending we were renegades. Both of us developed lifelong insomnia.
It wasn’t until the very end of August that Zoya’s mom left a post-it-note on her bed that read: I know, baby. It will be okay. The bottom of the note had the date and time of a doctor’s appointment she’d arranged for Zoya.
Zoya cried tears of relief for a week. I took my first semi-deep breath in 6 months.
Zoya’s mom told the school that Zoya had mono, so Zoya got to skip the Fall of Senior year without hardly anyone knowing the truth. Our high school was too busy dealing with the Sophomore skateboarders who kept OD’ing in Newport Beach to notice Zoya wouldn’t have enough credits to graduate.
Without Zoya by my side every waking hour of the day, I had so much free time. I went to visit colleges in the Bay Area one weekend and came home with a shaved head. I became obsessed with the concept of lying–Is it immoral? Can it sometimes be good?–and started ordering books by and about Immanuel Kant on the internet, sometimes mistakenly in German.
Zoya and I both got Gmail accounts with too many 8’s in them,
that we still use now, professionally, though we didn’t understand the point of email then.
My mom didn’t know how to be supportive to Zoya but really wanted to be so she bought the baby a lot of gender-neutral shoes, and Zoya a lot of cardigans.
The month Zoya gave birth to Maya in two hours and seventeen minutes, Prop 8 passed (bad for gays) and Obama won (mostly good?). I had spent every Saturday of the prior six months standing on Alton and Culver, the busiest intersection in our town, holding up No on Prop 8 signs. We felt so betrayed by our parents and their friends, who we assumed had voted Yes on 8 even though they said they wouldn’t. We lost the battle but won the war, my older sister texted us. We were inconsolable.
That same month, Mormon kids from school put a bomb in my grandma’ mailbox and tagged Fag on my mom’s junky Honda because of my so-called homosexual agenda. I made Winston Y. pretend to be my very heterosexual boyfriend in exchange for help with the Latin homework for a few months so mom would stop worrying about my safety.
Maya was an easy baby, everyone agreed. Zoya threw up more and was way fussier than Maya. Same with me, if I’m being honest. But it was still so hard. There was too much shame in the air. We didn’t know how to help baby Maya feel safe in a world that felt so unsafe to us. It was the best and worst month of both of our lives, in the extreme depth of feeling that only teenage girls have access to.
Over the years I’ve told people that my first election was voting for Obama in his first term, but Zoya and I were only seventeen then. I guess everything after Maya’s birth just felt like the start of adulthood?
Zoya came back to school for Senior Spring and played the lead in the school production of Annie. The night of graduation, Reye C. showed us what has become a lifelong passion for swimming laps fully clothed while dropping acid. I went East for
college. At least one of us had to be in New York City, Zoya insisted. Zoya got a job at our local Barnes and Noble. She, her mom, and her dad raised Maya.
Persian girls can be pregnant teens too, is a joke Zoya’s dad sometimes even willingly tells people now. Maya speaks even better Farsi than Zoya does, her dad made sure of it.
I got a PhD in moral philosophy to continue my obsession with the morality of lying. I struggled to make friends in New York for a long time because, it turns out, no one else is Zoya. Gay marriage became legal nationwide in 2015, the year after Kissgate happened. Zoya got to college in New York City eventually. Zoya, Maya, and I even lived together in the East Village for a summer. I bought many couches, but never red.
I fall for a woman named Meredith, who I start another band with. My favorite fact: Zoya and Meredith have a daily texting thread without me. Meredith teaches pre-teen Maya how to produce music. After a few years, Maya remixes one of our songs, Unworn Sweaters, from high school. If my house was on fire, the first thing I'd grab is the cd Maya made me of that remix.
Today? Today Maya is fifteen, the kind of fifteen where she thinks boys are gross and playing tag is still sorta fun. She still tells Zoya everything. She has the body of Gumby and the laugh of an only slightly gentler version of Janice from Friends. She is a better listener than we are. She never sits still. Baby Bouncing Bean Butters, we call her. Maya’s group of friends claim they don’t like Taylor Swift, but we know they, like us, all secretly do. Maya wants to be a DJ when she grows up. Or a therapist.
Colin F. is an unshowered burnout who, last we heard, still lives in our hometown and adjuncts at the local college. We still worship Lana Del Ray. We still have the senses of humor of sixteen year old girls. Both Zoya’s husband and Meredith have independently referred to Zoya and me as having weaponized incompetence. Maybe we’re still sixteen in more ways than one?
Zoya has never told Maya a lie, not once. A TikTok of Maya and Colin high-fiving exists. Maya doesn’t hate him, truly, and we’re happy about that. Maya wears the same white Converse hitops we did at her age. Even if I eventually have my own kids, Maya will always be my next of kin.
There’s this joke or truth or both about immigrants where the first generation survives, the second generation goes to college to become doctors or lawyers, and the third generation gets to become poets who like to snowboard. There’s no chance in hell any of us will ever want to snowboard, but Zoya’s dad still holds out hope that Maya will become the star lawyer, and we all let him.
Glasses
Marceline White
My mother always said, “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses”. Near-sighted, she would sit cross-legged in the bathroom sink’s porcelain bowl peer into the mirror to fix her face: first, beige concealer to hide all the blemishes only she could see; then, a streak of pink blush blended upward, followed by three shades of green Cover Girl eyeshadow and a flick of black mascara. Finally, she would line her thin lips, enlarging them with a rose gloss until she was magazine-ready. I watched her paint her blank face with an artist's palette, tease her hair into blonde cloudburst, transform from a tired, single mother into a pretty china doll. She left her glasses on her bedside table every date night. Without her glasses, she could not see dozens of red flags these men waved like toreadors. Blinded by their brawn, by her youth, her need to be seen as desirable, she only saw what was right in front of her face: a bull charges, then, china shatters, flowers fall, men’s fists rain down.
Author Bios
Nura Al-Shumari is a recent graduate of Michigan State University with a degree in English and a concentration in creative writing. When she's not writing, she can be found cheering for her favorite sports teams (go Pens and Bucs!), drawing, and visiting aquariums.
Hal Bogotch, a native New Yorker & U.C. Berkeley grad, has had recent work appear in four anthologies by Moonstone Arts Center, as well as in Beyond Words and BlazeVOX. Poems of his can also be found in Rattle, The Sierra Nevada Review, New Press Literary Quarterly, and The Lucid Stone. Hal & his bilingual esposa live in Southern California. (Kid’s at a college near Black Mountain.)
Sarah Brockhaus is an MFA student at Louisiana State University and has a bachelor’s degree in English from Salisbury University. She is a co-editor of The Shore Poetry. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize. Her poems are published or forthcoming in North American Review, American Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, Permafrost and elsewhere.
Julian Danailov-Benguernane, a high school student at UNIS Hanoi, is an emerging poet whose work explores memory, nature, and human connection through reflective, narrative verse.
Linda Drach is an Oregon writer, creative writing teacher, and author of the poetry chapbook, Pop-Up Shrines (Finishing Line Press, 2025). Her poetry and prose have been published in Bellingham Review, CALYX, Crab Creek Review, The Good Life Review, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. Find her online at lindadrach.com and on Instagram: @inky_lyrics.
Tabor Flickinger is a physician, scientist, teacher and writer. She grew up in Egypt and currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work has appeared in Cordella, Oracle, and Intima.
Selen Frantz is an urban planner from Detroit and is currently the William T. Battrick Poetry Fellow at Oberlin College. Her work has appeared in Lucky Jefferson, BarBar, Meniscus, Prime Number Magazine, ellipsis, and elsewhere.
Sarah Gokhale is a producer from Orange County, California. Her favorite condiment is Trader Joe’s jalapeno sauce. Her dog’s favorite condiment is cream cheese. Her favorite cities are NYC, Albuquerque, and Philly.
Sharon Goldberg is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, The Citron Review, New Letters, The Louisville Review, Cold Mountain Review, River Teeth, Green Mountains Review, The Southern Indiana Review, The Lost Balloon, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Sharon won second place in the On the Premises 2012 Humor Contest and Fiction Attic Press's 2013 Flash in the Attic Contest. She is an avid but cautious skier and enthusiastic world traveler.
Dan Hawkins is a poet and librarian from North Carolina living in South Carolina. His poetry has appeared in The Yearbook of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, Pictura Journal, and Half and One.
Reiner Heidorn is a painter from Weilheim near Munich whose work spans both botanical studies and figurative explorations. In addition to his extensive paintings on the natural world, he has developed a long-term series titled “The Welcome Pain.”
Jeremy Teddy Karn was born in Monrovia, Liberia. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received fellowships to support his work. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Houston. He is the co-founder of Pepper Coast Mag. He can be reached through his website: www.jeremyteddykarn.com
KJ Kieras is a poet and screenwriter currently based in Minneapolis, MN. They have previously competed on several slam poetry teams including the YouthSpeaks Seattle 2020 Brave New Voices team and the MacSlams Traveling Tour Team. In 2023 and 2025 they won the Midwest Poetry Mashup alongside the MacSlams team. Their work can be found on Button Poetry’s YouTube channel and in Beaver Magazine. When not writing, they can be found performing in drag around the twin cities as Lucy Goosey.
Brooks Lampe has been a poet at heart since discovering Whitman in the eighth grade. That love drove him to study American poetry in graduate school and the Surrealists for his dissertation. He spent his thirties running a poetry site, Uut Poetry, exploring American surrealist poetry. The site hosted the works of poets, such as Dan Raphael, Howie Good, Dale Wisely, and Bob Schofield. Since 2016 he has been teaching literature at George Fox University in Oregon, where the massive trees and a renewed and expanded love affair with world literature has steered his work in a new, neo-Romantic direction. He has dozens of poems in online journals, such as The Shore, Bombfire, and last year published a chapbook, The Planet of Left Hands.
Claire Lee is a writer and filmmaker from Memphis, Tennessee. They have published or forthcoming work in Ninth Letter, Pictura Journal, Rawhead Journal, Black Sheep Magazine, and more. Find their substack at Clairelbea.
Christa Lei (they/them) is a writer based in New York. They hold editorial positions at Blood Tree Literature (creative non-fiction) and JAKE (poetry). Christa is a regular Matador Network contributor and their work is forthcoming in The Seventh Wave's On Seperation anthology and has appeared in HerStry and Vast Chasm amongst others. They are a proud Tin House, DISQUIET and Southampton Writers' Conference alum. When not writing, they are traveling and wrangling their two dogs. Read more at isthiswhatyouwant.org or christalei.me
Elaine Liu is a Homo sapiens shaped by her life on both sides of the Pacific. Her poetry has been featured in EPOCH and has appeared in Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Bellingham Review, Folio, and other publications. She is compelled by inherited historical trauma and the porous intimacies between science, identity, and grief. She is forever grieving the lives lost in Unit 731.
Caleb Merritt is an Autistic artist who lives and works in the Treasure Valley.
Sofia Mosqueda has a B.A in Writing and Literature from UC Santa Barbara where she also minored in Professional Writing with an editing concentration. A recipient of the Brancart Fiction Prize, CCS Most Excellent Writing Award, and the HFA Creativity Contest Award, her poetry and short fiction can be found in The Catalyst, Zaum, Across the Margin, Laurel Moon, and elsewhere.
Joseph Conrad Payne is an English professor. He enjoys bicycling, walking cities, swimming, and well-written TV shows. He lives quietly with his cat. His fiction has been published by Ponder Review, Light and Dark, and Gival Press, and others.
Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki's listening to "Fontaines D.C.The Lotts (Live on KEXP).“
Bridgette Roberson hails from the planet Funkentelechy. After spending nine months in the Placebo Syndrome, she was born through the birth canal of a zenith, whom she refers to as her mom. Currently, she is a graduate student pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at San Diego State University. First, she dreams, then she writes.
Alexandra Romero is a poet from Southern California. She holds an MFA from CUNY Hunter College, where she served as poetry co-editor for the magazine Solar Journal. Her work has recently appeared in Apricity Magazine, TINGE, Kestrel, and Rust & Moth. She lives in New York City.
Peter Rustin and his wife Leslie recently moved from Los Angeles to Peter’s native Connecticut, with their three rather intelligent cats. Peter is an attorney practicing remotely with his firm in Los Angeles. He plays guitar badly and drums decently. His work has been published in the Arboreal Literary Journal; Free Spirit; Wrong Turn Lit; Assignment Literary Magazine; Piker Press; BarBar, Gabby & Min’s Literary Review; The Rumen; The City Key; The Sandy River Review; and the South Florida Poetry Journal.
Kurt Schmidt is the author of one novel "Annapolis Misfit" (Crown Publishers) and the chapbook memoir "Birth of a RiskTaker" (Bottlecap Press). His essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, Bacopa Literary Review, The Examined Life Journal, and others. Kurt is finishing a 30-year chronicle on parenting a risktaker, who once crashed dirt bikes and sports cars and now races a Porsche and flies his own plane (hopefully crashing neither). www.kurtgschmidt.com
Pallavi Shrestha (they/she) is a writer, artist, and researcher. Their writings involve Nepalese social settings, queerness, flawed human choices, and identity. Their short stories – 'Tigerskies' and 'Grapes' – have been shortlisted for the Writing Nepal Short Story competition 2023 and 2025 respectively. Their flash fiction piece –'Makai Eater' – was shortlisted for the Prism International 2025 Grouse Grind Lit. Prize for V. Short Forms.
Leela Srinivasan (she/her) is an Indian-American poet and educator originally from the Jersey Shore. She received her BA in sociocultural psychology and MA in communication from Stanford University, then received her MFA in creative writing at UT Austin's Michener Center for Writers. In 2024, Leela completed an artist residency in Breckenridge, Colorado, then served with Social Capital Inc. AmeriCorps (SCIA) as a Community Engagement Fellow in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leela is passionate about interdisciplinary education and community development in all its forms, and has worked as an artist and teacher for the past decade while moving around the United States.
Lisa J. Sullivan is a New England native who holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program, where she was a Kurt Brown Memorial Fellow. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in The Comstock Review, Burningword Literary Journal, The Chaffin Journal, Evening Street Review, and elsewhere. She was the United States winner of The Poetry ProjectIreland in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets and was an Adrian Tinsley Program Creative Grant recipient. Lisa is the Art Editor for Lily Poetry Review and a Poetry Editor for Pink Panther Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Theory of Impact, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2026.
Greg Walklin lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he serves as the Executive Director of the Nebraska Public Service Commission. His fiction and poetry have most recently appeared in The Words Faire, The Bookends Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Arts & Letters, and Emrys Journal, among other publications.
Rachel Warren (she/her) is a Portland, Oregon based poet and editor, and a current MFA candidate at Randolph College. Her work can be found in Barren Magazine, The Confessionalist Zine, and more.
Marceline White is a bisexual, chronically ill, Baltimore-based writer and activist whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, The Ekphrastic Review, trampset, yolk, Prime Number, The Orchard Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, and others. She has received fellowships from Aspen Words, Key West Literary Seminar, and an AWP Writer to Writer mentorship. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, when not writing, Marceline can be found serving her two cats and telling her son to text her when he arrives at the EDM show. Read more at www.marcelinewhitewrites.com.
Beth Oast Williams is the author of the chapbook Riding Horses in the Harbor (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poetry has been accepted for publication in Nimrod, Salamander, EcoTheo Review, Leon Literary Review, SWWIM, One Art, and Rattle's Poets Respond, among others, and nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize.
Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, Cincinnati Review, Quarterly West, RHINO, Electric Literature, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Wales, Columbia Journal, Rattle, and other journals. His debut chapbook is forthcoming from Bull City Press in 2027. Kenton writes from Northern California.
