Issue 1 - 45TH PARALLEL

Mary Adelle | Danielle Badra | Hugh Behm-Steinburg | Cindy Bradley

Laura Carter | Sean Cearley | Vincent Chabany-Douarre

Chloe Clark | Tim Craven | Robert Farnsworth

Matthew Gavin Frank | Rebecca Hazelton | B.J. Hollars

Timston Johnston | Michael Levan | Ginny MacDonald | Shivani Mehta

Ander Monson | Tom Montag | Gabrielle Montesanti | Mariko Nagai

Austin Sanchez-Moran | Allison Seay | Diane Seuss | Lindsey Simard

Mei Skvortzoff | Gretchen Van Lente | Nicole Walker

Alexis White | Evan Morgan Williams | Gary Young

ISSUE 1

SPRING 2016

Editor-in-Chief

Managing Editor

Assistant Editor

Nonfiction Editor

Comics Editor

Fiction Editor

Poetry Editor

Web Editor

Social Media Manager

Production Editor

Alana Folsom

Michael Chin

Maggie Anderson

Erica Trabold

Andre Habet

Ian Sacks

Hannah Kroonblawd

Dylan Brown

Verity Sayles

Dakota Clement

Readers

Andrew Bashford

Cristalyne Bell

Zoë Bossiere

Nicholas Brown

Robin Cedar

Victoria Drexel

Rita Feinstein

Matt Flanagan

Sarah Marie Kosch

Mara Lubans-Othic

Sam Mitchell

Steven Moore

TJ Neathery

Linnea Nelson

Kayla Pearce

Austin Schraub

Mackenzie Evan Smith

Cover Art by Nicholas Keen “A Cloud,” 2015

www.45thparallelmag.com

Copyright © 2016 45th Parallel

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

A lmost exactly one year ago a handful of us found ourselves in Oregon State’s MFA program in Moreland Hall in Elena Passarello’s craft class in squeaky chairs dreaming up a literary magazine. It was going to be a mash-up of our favorite magazines: Ninth Letter, Normal School, PANK, Winter Tangerine...the list was long and our creative appetites were large.

On the other side of that year, I am happy to say that creating a lit mag was not nearly as easy as we had first imagined. Instead, this was a slog of a year. One of the hardest tasks, I learned, was asking a dozen writers to name the thing. But the minute 45th Parallel was proposed, it stuck. The 45th parallel is not only Oregon State’s latitudinal line, but it also works to represent the in-betweenness that this program embodies: a program where genre matters so much less than passion.

W hich leads me to the people who have helped make this issue a reality. Our staff are, very truly, some of the hardest working and most thoughtful people I have ever met. I want to scroll through an Academy-Awards-esque thank you list. I want to note that there was no magic, smoke-screened Academy helping us out. I want to hug each person—each staff member and faculty champion and contributor and submitter alike—and then buy them a beer. But, primarily, I want to say that the time we put in (in addition to our classes and our lives and our own writing), was worth it because 45th Parallel exists. It exists directly after my rambling and sentimental note (go ahead: turn the page! Take a look!). And the work on the following pages speaks to the lively and varied minds not only of the writers in this amazing literary community we find ourselves a lucky part of, but of the readers that combed through submissions when they should have been writing pedagogy papers or calling home.

We are so happy to present this, our inaugural issue. We are so excited for issues to come.

Alana Folsom Editor-in-Chief

Yo-yo Hugh Behm-Steinberg

I go to the eyeball store. I tell the owner I’m just looking, and she says, “No, you’re not, not really, you’re just being hesitant. You want a third eye.”

I say, “You’re right, I’ve been shopping for one for some time now, I believe I’m ready.”

The owner asks me if I have my papers, so I show her the note from my spiritual advisor. She says that’s nice, but when I show her my Orange Belt Certificate, which represents the growing power of the sun, how I’m beginning to feel my body and mind open and develop, she sits me down, she puts her hand on my head.

“Forward or back?” she asks.

Then time, I meet time, she’s using the universe as her personal yo-yo, she’s showing me her tricks. She makes it look so easy; she’s going around the world, she’s walking the dog, she’s rocking the baby.

Later the owner shows me my eye. I open and close it very deliberately at first, but soon I don’t have to think, I just choose and I see. As soon as I get my x-ray monocle, I am going to have a magnificent life.

Trapped in that sort of alchemy where joy turns into anger, I go see another alchemist. She buys me chocolate milk, makes me sing. I don’t feel like singing, she makes me sing, she harmonizes around me. I stop; she kicks my shin. “Don’t stop,” she says. I start over and after awhile I’m not alone, or don’t feel so alone.

It was like that one time, when I was high with friends, I was watching a bike rodeo, because that was where my head was pointed, and I got so angry because it was so fake: everyone was just fucking around, everyone who was there. The best they could do was fuck around and my friends said “It’s just a rodeo, and what’s so wrong with fucking around?” It took me decades to accept that; it’s still hard for me to turn that into joy. Stubborn experience.

My alchemist knows. Mostly I want to be serious, but my alchemist crosses me out and makes me eat a photograph of myself smiling. I look ridiculous so I start smiling. She says “Can you feel it, is it starting to work?”

“There’s this image in your mind. It’s photography’s mother. It’s how your mind creates the world; it’s developing all the time,” my alchemist says. “I know another way,” she says.

I’m sweating light. My blood is light so mostly I spin. And spinning my light floods the room.

Ginny MacDonald

Scorpio, Born in the Year of the Cock

If I were a Virgo I would wear white pants. Like the ladies on QVC and tampon commercials, I would be immaculate. I would have creases in my slacks even though nobody irons anymore, and I would get my hair cut professionally. It would swing. My nails would gleam, and whatever might be under them dog shit, potting soil, blood could be easily scraped out. There would be no scars on my hands from the oven burns, the knife slices, the bathroom-sink wart removals.

A Virgo can look back on her day and see the purposeful actions roll by like so many boxcars. She knows what each contains, its position in the train, the speed of the engine. She owns a healthy 401(k). She does not wish the train would turn around, is not afraid of the destination, wouldn’t throw herself on the tracks rather than watch it all proceed. She does not lie to her mother. Her hand is not terrified on the switch.

Virgos do not have umbrellas that do not open, dogs that might bite, dishpans full of grouse feathers. Every article of clothing they buy, fits. They own Roombas for their taupe Berber and salad spinners for the mesclun and mizuna. They remember their first time fondly; it was sweet and expected, with a boy named Jerry or Mark, who had waited, and brought flowers. Not different boys, various events, things done alone in a room. A maidenhood not so much given as worn away.

I f I were a Virgo I would buy appropriate little gifts to commemorate others’ promotions and anniversaries. I would have scented soaps for Mary, an alma mater tie for Lawrence. I would be described as “thoughtful.” A Virgo knows what day it is, unsurprised by the calendar. Two days before her child’s birthday she is not scrambling through Amazon, paying extra for one-day shipping.

W hat does she do, this Virgo, when the reflection in the mirror is not improved by careful plucking and the application of a tasteful amount of eyeliner? Does she run the side of her hand across the shower steam on the glass, pushing hard, hoping it will break? There’s gin in that orange juice, Virgo, and I’m having breakfast. Comb your hair, bitch, and get on with your day. Get on with it.

I f I were a Virgo I would.

But it is way past September, and of the many things I am not, a Virgo is one of them. The eighth house nears and I, menses-stained and pungent, dry my hands on my jeans and wait to be born. Again.

Arabic Danielle Badra

I am not listening. Writing a poem to Marcel Khalife about you singing khalas.

That is not t he oud. What this is is extraordinary.

I am only every other syllable. Putting down thoughts st rummed on paper. A scene set near South Lebanon.

Thoughts a l-shajaar zeitoun and al-jabaal about you. Accents full of phlegmy sighs, yes, glottal stops.

But ukhtee, only I will memorize thoughts— t he language of my dead.

They are not r ising phonetic so permanent f rom quieted earth as a poem yet. A s skeletons of accentual,

they are rattling. Resurrected only by ancient rhythm and words— a desire to summon mindoun.

Laura Carter

Because I am a good horse, I have an imaginary body. I eat apples all day long. Once, someone brought me a weak horse for a friend. I said, “No! I am larger than that horse!”

My weak horse friend was sad and lonely at Christmas time. Every day is a joyful Christmas for me, though, so I stayed far away from the weak horse and sat by myself in a flower bower. I said, “No! I am strong! Can I tell you about my babies and children?”

My weak horse friend went far away from me. I ate fruits by myself and pretended I was in heaven, because I was a good horse.

[Because I am a good horse, I have an imaginary body. I eat apples all day long]

Because I am a good horse, I believe I am totally creative. My creativity is more important than the fact that no one listens to me because I am a fool. It doesn’t really matter what other people think, because I am a sock. I sock people with my ideas. I love spring. I love guns. I tell people over and over again about all the babies I have had. When they get tired of listening to me talk about my babies, I talk about my religion. My religion is the only one that matters. I don’t believe in science or anything. All you need is faith, in my eyes. That’s what makes me a good horse.

Because I am a good horse, I express myself easily. Here’s a piece of me. Anyone can eat me. I don’t have any pains about telling the world everything about me. It seems easy, and I don’t think there is any reason to fear anyone in the whole wide wild world. Once someone threatened me, but I continue to tell this horse everything about me. It’s so natural that it hurts. I am a spiritual horse. I believe in sharing my spiritual gifts with everyone who might ever know me. I have no fear, because I am sure that everyone who has never met me will also love me. I am not afraid of anything. I have no reason to fear, because God will protect me. God is the leader of my country, and I am in charge of it. Everyone follows me all the time. It means I am important. I am a good horse, after all, and I am also a special snowflake. The snow falls on my face every day and night. In my country, there are no prisons except the ones we make for ourselves. We are bound to be loved by the world. See, I said bound. And we.

Michael Levan

Thanksgiving

Too far from family, they had planned a small meal: / a turkey breast, mashed potatoes, salad, maybe a tofurkey for her, / red wine and bourbon to let them slip into sleep / they’ve never had at their families’ holiday to-dos. / It was to be them. /

Instead he sits at a classmate’s house wondering at / how quickly her Midwestern family has added Southern staples / to the menu: black-eyed peas, cornbread, okra, / extra-creamy mac & cheese washed down with sweet tea. / He is polite and tries some, passes on others, but always comes back to what he knows: / turkey, potatoes, glazed carrots. Nothing exciting, nothing new, but nothing like what he’s had for weeks. / He’s made boxed soup, rice and broccoli, whatever’s odor / will not carry from kitchen to bedroom, turn her / stomach more than the bathwater she’s now begun to complain about. /

He does what he can to not check his phone, to sit like nothing / is wrong. When she’s named, he apologizes for her absence: She woke up / not feeling well, which isn’t a whole lie, maybe just / a half of one, he reasons, / knowing her pain could still be taken away / from them both without reason this early. / When he’s asked what he’s thankful for, he says, My wife, your hospitality, / this food we will eat together. He fails to mention he’s also grateful for / a few hours without her. The chance to enjoy the company of people / who can speak for a few minutes without need / to retch in the bathroom. But he pushes this thought, these dreams / of small escapes down. She is down and suffering and everything / he can’t imagine. /

W hen he leaves, he’s offered leftovers. / He scans the table, tries to do math on microwaves and reheated food’s scents, / settles for more potatoes, please. And for your wife? the hostess inquires. She’s still tender, / he says, careful to not drop any hints, to not let anyone / else in this soon. But thanks for a great meal. /

Driving home, he thinks maybe he’s dreamed this and the time away / will have erased it all. Maybe it will be, / at least, a shorter illness than other women / he’s read about online. Maybe this is the day she feels / better. When he pulls up to their house, though, he stays in the car. / He stares at the front door which will open, / he fears, into the answer.

Anger #1 Michael Levan

Home and alone, he makes a mess / of rigatoni with meat sauce. He browns the ground beef, dumps a jar of sauce, tosses in several teaspoons of red chili flakes / to arrabiata his first homemade meal in weeks as the noodles boil. / A simple pleasure he’s missed, cooking takes him / away; he needn’t think of the two seminar papers, the poetry portfolio, twenty-one research essays to grade / and add to the other calculations he’s fallen / behind on due in a few days now. This is not complicated, / mixing store-bought ingredients with some extras to doctor it / to his liking. He can let everything else fade / until it turns into echo wind whispers away. /

He thinks about when they were dating, / her apartment on Stuart with the kitchen bay window, / its glass so sun-comprehending even he, the night owl, didn’t mind / sitting at the table, all that sun pouring over him, / as he watched her slice and toast, bake and parboil, roast and simmer. / He remembers her talking about her two trips to Italy, / and how before the first, she took an Italian class with her father / whose tongue never quite wrapped around the language / so he ordered their meals louder: / stracciatella, bucatini coi funghi, caponata, names buoyant enough to carry a man and his daughter / into memories they’ve shared for years. / How on the trip with her aunt, their luggage was lost, they were robbed three times, / and the skirt she bought was so short on her American frame / she wasn’t let into Saint Peter’s. He remembers her / telling him her favorite word— arrabiata— / and asking if he knows what it means. Angry, she says. / The dish is so spicy from the peppers, they say it’s angry. /

He eats, and the heat settles on his tongue, / then it comes from everywhere inside him: pharmacy lines / and no sleep, his favorite boy names removed from the list, / the phone call to his mother. / He washes the pasta bowl, brushing hardened sauce / down the drain. He feels / his body tingle and shake, he wants the world / to fuck off for everything it’s taken from him. / For keeping joy and excitement from his reach. / He can’t begin to fake either, carried as he’s been these last few weeks by nothing / that resembles wonder.

Similes Michael Levan

And then the days come like a flood / that inches higher without anyone realizing until it’s too late / and the water is too tall for its banks. It sweeps through the town, / nothing untouched by its purifying ways / because it’s all meant to change eventually. Or /

maybe the days come like a flash- / forward, cliché as it is for just one blink to leap him through / the down months where life turns normal. They meet Dr. E for routine check-ups, / a twenty-week appointment to learn boy or girl / and a gestational diabetes test; call their parents to announce his last name will live, / God willing, for another generation; take late afternoon walks to get her active again— / not that growing their son isn’t like climbing a mountain / or running a marathon or the hardest thing she’s done—; / find a new home that has space enough for three; / move; nest; research car seats and pediatricians; / disagree into the night about how to put a name / to this life. Blink. Blink. Blink. /

Or maybe they come like a train, / its drive wheels lurching forward at first, / slow and pained as a man pushing a boulder / up a hill until it reaches the crest, and then / one last heave to send it tumbling down, the stone’s momentum, / or the train’s momentum, he means, enough to carry it / through valleys and over other peaks, which are their own / overused metaphors but he’s not thinking / clearly enough to realize these are mistakes he’s making. He wants / to see it all with fresh eyes or like new, / or with a fresh perspective since perspective is like what comes / through his eyes to his brain, / which isn’t working well, either, / like it’s in a fog or underwater or like it has legs, / yes, legs and it’s walking through quicksand. /

They each make sense to the man / at different points of the day, or the hour / depending if he’s slept enough or panicked / or finally given up planning, birth to death, his son’s future. / There is no preparing for this boy, no one / vehicle possible to understand the complexity of all the complexities / he and his wife will face now. He will learn / to not be jealous of his son who will demand / everything of her. Or he will try to because as he watches her / nurse for the first time, he knows he will never be / the center of his own life again, and this is what it’s like / to become a father.

Course in Photographing Intimacy for a Digital Generation Desensitized by Nudes

First know: everything’s a lens. I mean a film. I mean your skin seems warm, but isn’t uniformly so. I mean it’s a flimsy thing that separates a surface

from the hurt and roil. Easy to believe at first that it’s the nude that means: the camera zooms & hovers over you like a drone. What I mean’s meniscus,

the line between being and beginning thinning the more I think about it. I mean skin’s a screen that registers all stimuli, however slight:

how not just what you think you’re photographing gets captured. It all registers: the infant’s breath in the next Starbucks over as she pivots, mid-shriek,

from anger to laughter as someone slips a lace and falls. The catalogue of lower back tats you’ve known, or how a safety razor

drags along a cheek, scraping sweat, and snaps. I mean a lot more light lands than you realize & film can’t catch it all. It makes an impression:

the sudden summer hail on hoods, the sexy tintypes in the gallery, all the selfies catching all of the reflections on all the surfaces add up incrementally.

Haha, we get it, teach. You fear our hearts and heat and indecision. It’s not like nude’s the only thing we know. If we’ve traded love for information and feedback loops

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the expert system buried in our voice recognition app mentors us better than you ever could. It knows enough to listen before it opines. Forget what you said before.

Your Camaros know hard surfaces remember their collisions longer than skin can. It’s like desire never scarred you into being.

I bet if you still yourself enough you can feel your own atomic trail as it degrades across your instrument.

What does it feel like to watch it fade?

It’s indecent, its descent, unaided, naked, a streaking bomb in a game

of Missile Command, now decades old. Now it only runs on the emulator. When were you ever brave?

If it’s become lame to say these things are beautiful then I quit. But not for long: you can’t keep a hard man down, nor a down

man hard. Whatever we said we always meant to say something else about the world; we waited for our opportunity but it never came; this printscreen

just kept spooling out instead: it prints and prints on screens and screens, each screen a tongue, anesthetized. It’s easy to believe

that it’s the nude that means; then the heat shines through your skin the best; I watch over you like a drone, map what I can

make out of love, upload it to the cloud. You’ll note it doesn’t get real close. It can’t. An ASCII-rendered slice of breast is not a breast. In fact a breast is not a breast, not anymore. It’s all just bytes and tits. Anything can be rendered in bits. The quicker that the culture gets

the less well it remembers. I don’t mean to say it’s wrong.

3.

Vincent Chabany-Douarre

The Mumblers

You tell me you had a family house in the Mumbles, somewhere in Wales. I imagine darkness toppling out of darkness. Fishing nets hanging rotten. Slipping on shiny fish guts. Dusty clementines in a wooden bowl.

You flash a picture on your phone. It looks clean, hermetically sealed. High cream walls. China red accents every now and then. Wifi, you tell me. I smile.

You shut the trunk on my little suitcase. I haven’t packed much, never did. I like the drama of walking with one small suitcase. The sound of my soles against the pavement isn’t the same that way. I seem more alone.

You haven’t packed, truly. Keys and lighters in your pocket. Coats and boots on the backseat. Wetsuit in the trunk. Books in the glove compartment. You blow dust off the windshield. You don’t drive much. I wonder why you want to drive now.

You tell me I’ll love it. I’m sure that I will. You tell me you love me. I’m sure I do too. You adjust the rear view mirror, and I see myself.

My face is muted by dirt and dust. I seem confused, disoriented. My legs are jammed, I can barely move. I keep putting my cap on and taking it off. I stare at its insides. There are black threads like hairs I would’ve lost. Fat stitches twisting caterpillar-like, but softer to the touch. You once told me you ate caterpillars when you were young. We were at my place, in my bed. My sheets are peach-colored, I grow lavender on my nightstand. You hate that about me. Every time you come, I need to hide the pot behind the toilet and pray I don’t forget it there.

You said you ate caterpillars before kissing me. You wanted me to wriggle my nose, for my face to shrink in disgust. I did it, for the show. So you could have your laughs. I think I even called you caterpillar-tongue.

You start driving. You don’t like talking when you drive. Your family never talks when they drive. I shouldn’t either.

I shiver. The heat is broken. The faux-leather cracks cold under the weight of my body. I wrap a second scarf around my neck, and you scoff.

I don’t want to look at you. Usually, I like looking at you, but if I do, you ask questions. Why am I staring. What am I thinking about. I can never answer them. I rarely have anything interesting to say on the spot, I need time, I need some dirt and a stick to prod spirals with. So I usually shrug, and it is either another reason to fight, or another reason for you to think I’m slightly dumber than you are.

I l ike watching you when you study, you don’t ask questions. Your arms, they’re so much bigger than mine. I could probably slip my slender limbs into your skin, and it would be like a loose sweater. I picture it like an oilcloth, some sort of nineties design

you’d see in dusty photographs. You never think you’re ridiculous at the time.

You do not want to go to your home straight away. I close my eyes. First, we drive to the Gower Peninsula, and we take a selfie with a sheep. Its dirty white wool is stained with a drop of pink. Others have electric blue crosses. Lemon yellow arrows. Whose is whose. I wonder where the pink shepherd is. What he does with his sheep. Where he lives. T he tide has receded, we can walk on stones to make it to an island. It juts out of the water, enormous, like a prehistoric back. In fact, everything has an artifact-like nature here. The limestones that serve as steps seem hollow, they exhale saltwater through their many crevices. I leap from one to the other, you struggle. I nearly twist my ankle, but keep leaping. You can probably see me in my tea-green coat, bopping up and down like some vintage cartoon animal. The sun reflects on my sunglasses. They used to be yours. Now I stole them. They are perfectly opaque, two circles like ponds, mercury or blue, sometimes black. They reflect soda cans nestled in the stones. I crouch, waiting for you to catch up, but you rarely do. I keep leaping forward. I try not to fall or hurt myself. The stones feel grubby against my soles or the palms of my hands, like some magnified eggshell.

We go back to the car. You tell me I’m light-footed. The rain beats against the windshield and rivulets of gray water drown the road in front of us. The opacity allows for it to reflect us. We seem distorted and yet truthful. For some reason, the water captures mostly your image. Your beard, especially. I can grow one, but I don’t like it on me. You don’t like it on me. The hairs are weak, they curl and twirl serpentine around themselves, drowning my cheekbones out. I seem fuzzy that way, my outlines and boundaries violated.

You have a brown beard, it’s such a rare thing. I’ve always seen them passport-colored or tar-licked.

We have lunch in a pub. You have gravy stuck in your mustache. It thickens your upper lip like a seal’s.

You ask me who the guy was. I ask you who you’re talking about, putting down my glass of lukewarm cider.

T he guy you said hello to before we left. I barely remember, I don’t remember much, people don’t like that about me. I forget names, faces, secrets. It seems like I don’t care, but I do. I keep little folders in my room, little notebooks filled with data, I make patterns. That way, I’m either the most informed person in the room, or the least. I like these extremes. They make me seem more interesting than I truly am.

T he guy with the red sweater you insist. I remember, but his sweater was a darker shade of maroon, like cheap cinema velvet. Just an ex, I say, and I drink again. I haven’t eaten for a while. You once told me my teeth were very big. I don’t like showing them now.

W hich one, you try to act casual. The one that tried Buddhism for a hot minute, loved everyone since he thought that would get everybody to love him. Took cocaine on rainy days. Pretty good drawer.

You ask me more. I do not know why. You make me uncomfortable. My fork screeches against the plate, and I apologize. I tell you he said he was a good guy. You do not ask more questions. I have already discussed this. I do not trust good people. I trust people who want to be good. Good people do not process that they hurt you. That they ever could.

You nod and chew and swallow. You ordered fish. I can smell the lemongrass on

top. I pick it out and place it on the edge of your plate. You never eat it. You thank me, and pay the bill. On our way home, you put your hand on my leg. You have Welsh feet, you tell me. Especially for a Frenchman. I try and pretend like we’re both in on the joke. As if obscure classes had both taught us some kind of historical burn on the French through the point of view of the Welsh, and we’re both remembering it now. I try to recreate that circle. I realize my laugh was so soft you didn’t hear it.

We’re there. The roads have become emptier and emptier. You have a house on the pier. Your family does. You do. The owner always changes, depending on the position of the sun in the sky, depending if I promised something or if I don’t look pretty that day.

T he pier is encrusted with small boats lined up tacky. Most of them have viridian green covers. It rains a great deal here. The covers sag with puddles of rancid water. I see you unlock the door. You’re only wearing a plain black tank top. I do not understand your system, how you operate. You point at my hooded raincoat, and at the boat cover. You’re probably trying to tell me it looks alike. I look at them again, blankly this time, not really looking as much as I am resting my eyes.

We don’t even look alike, I think. This is viridian green. My coat is tea green. I feel vaguely superior in this moment. The hood smells of fresh vinyl. It makes me slightly nauseous. You tell me to come in. I look at the boats again. Scabby white paint cracked away in skeletal winks. Welsh flags too heavy and matted to fly. Rusty wheels pricking the black road with copper eyes. The rain starts beating down, it curtains into thick eyelids. I come inside.

I put my suitcase on the bed, and you try to have sex. I let you. You go to fix yourself a snack afterwards, you walk around naked. You always bare more skin than I do. I find about ten dices in the nightstand, and mistake them for a necklace before they rattle in my hand. The absence of string startles me for some reason, I really thought that’s what it was. Their white has passed, it’s more like the color of light bulbs now.

You come back to bed with some biscuits you found on a high China-red shelf. You offer me one and I refuse. I cannot bear them. They are circular and dry, sand-paper eyes you gobble down. On the package, there’s a flat little bear winking at me. There must be a leak, his left leg has turned gray and bloated.

Your bedroom, is it your bedroom ? Am I slipping on my plain gray underwear in your father’s sheets? I refuse to ask this question. Your sense of property is so askew, you probably wouldn’t know how to answer. My back feels cold against the wooden headboard. The pine finish is tacky. You stroke it delicately with only three fingers.

You stare at me, the light has changed here. The bed has become dissociated from the room. The floor, the wall, the ceiling, they glitch.

There are flashes of old trophies in this room. Strawberry-red watches piling near the window. Salt crystallizing on eager feet. Plastic shovels with handles shaped like rhinos. Jump ropes knotted thick with cold ocean water.

T he bed exists on its own, I have trouble connecting it to anything else, like a sticker on an oil painting. It is as old as the rest, but there is this alien presence, is it my thinning presence? Your family must be strong, you seem strong. You don’t shiver. You don’t offer tissues when I sniffle. That’s it. The walls, the ceiling, the walls, the ceiling, they’re fragile. Not in a glass-like way, in a gooey way, porous. You can escape through them. The bed will stay here. Solid black like a lagoon.

I want to draw the curtain. You want me to stay in bed. You want me to stop sitting so far away from you, even though our feet are still touching. I see what you mean. I uncross my arms. You look at me, you look at my face. I imagine it moon-like, heart-

shaped and flat, drops of dark circles falsifying shadows. You tell me I have a Victorian face. I tell you you are not the first one to think that. You do not like that answer.

Your brother is a good father. I meet him at the St Davids Bishop’s Palace. The ruins here are disappointing. There is too much to imagine. Every wooden beam I try to conjure to fill in the picture comes out too light and too shiny as if bought at Ikea’s.

Your brother has a little girl. There’s a game for her. There’s always a game for little girls. She has to find symbols in the ruins, replicate them in the correct places in a little leaflet, she’ll be rewarded with a drawing, maybe a synthetic red lollipop at the end.

She’s not very focused. Her little blue raincoat swallows her and runs around like a shiny animal. She nearly bumps into me twice. You pick her up when she charges at you. You laugh and make funny faces, sticking your tongue out. Your tongue seems pinker like this. Up close, you can see its fleshy gray cracks, and you can guess blood pulsing underneath, beating against the tip.

Your brother picks her up on his shoulders. She is tired, her head bobs forward, but she still squeals with delight. Her little hands are pressed hard against his temples. Your brother asks me how I’m doing.

I’m fine. Can’t complain.

We go out the next day. We drive to a waterfall, but the tour is closed. They sell thin tin keychains with your name engraved in it. Behind it, a blond with shiny teeth gives us direction to another one. We skip stones there. A family comes, wrapped in synthetic garments. They look so fragile, bundled and carefully putting one step in front of the other. We leave. You do not like to swear in front of children. I do not like them at all.

T his irritates you. Once we’re home, you open the car’s door and toss me the keys. You want to be alone.

I stay in your home, your family’s home, my home.

I find your games, I’ve never played Mortal Kombat. The deaths fascinate me. The blood spills out of headless necks in equal streams, primly red. The characters flash their muscles and skin, showing every angle, highlighting technological improvements. I like playing with the bigger ones. Those who kill with their bare hands.

You come back and challenge me. I win, then lose. You tell me you want to surf.

You eat a banana, before you go out, we are both huddled in the car. The rain falls in thin droplets like needles. I look at you, gathering sustenance. You offer me a bite. I shake my head. It wouldn’t seem right. You are the one who eats. I sit on a pebble beach watching you carefully get up on your board. The waves roll into themselves. I sigh. I feel fleshy, dense. I think about my lavender plant. I used to grow flowers back home. Baby-blue cornflowers. Butter-yellow cosmos. Coral-pink roses. I don’t think my father takes care of them.

You look at me once you’re done. We barely notice the rain anymore. You wiggle out of your wetsuit. Slipping out of a black frog’s skin. Your hair falls around your face, I want to touch it. Hair, out of the ocean, seems synthetic, plastic. You stick your tongue out, smiling. You seem younger that way.

You look at my feet, I’ve slipped off my shoes. They are a waxy shade of white striped with crawling lines of pure purple. You touch them with your wet hands, but I feel nothing. My toes don’t even move. You do not manage to warm them up. I lie, and tell you I feel better. Good, you answer. Good.

B.J. Hollars

A Field Guide to Extinction

Grasshopper (Caelifera)

We buried what we couldn’t bring back, returning to the site of the slaughter— plastic shovel in tow—to scrape against the broken half of its body. What we needed was a putty knife, or a spatula—anything thin enough to find space between the sidewalk and the freshly flattened insect. My two-year-old son Henry was the cause of the flattening, and upon realizing the finality of something as simple as his footstep, he paused, crouching low to examine the creature’s insides seeping out.

“ What is it?” he asked.

“It was a grasshopper,” I said, still scraping. “It’s dead now.”

Henry’s eyes flickered, the causal relationship between shoe and dead grasshopper suddenly becoming clear to him.

“He’s dead?”

“ Yup,” I said, shaking the creature deeper into the scoop. “Now it’s our job to bury it.”

We don’t always bury our bugs, but given Henry’s role in its demise, I figured we could use a little closure. Moreover, if that grasshopper could get us talking about life, death, and the environment, then at least we could tack on some moral to its story.

O ur funeral procession lasted all of a hundred feet—the distance between the sidewalk and the backyard pine. Upon our arrival there, Henry dug like a dog until he’d made a hole in the earth just wide enough for our insect.

I watched that creature fall from the lip of that shovel, its body folding back into the earth.

“Anything you want to say?” I asked.

“Poopy.”

“Anything else you want to say?”

He declined.

His silence, coupled with a perplexed expression, led me to believe that he was embarrassed, or ashamed, or a little confused by our burial proceedings. He caught me staring and shot me a glare, his go-to response when no emotion seemed to fit.

“ You’re not in trouble,” I told him, our mortality lesson now complete. “It was just a grasshopper. There will be others.”

Pinta Island Tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii)

In 1906 the world thought it had seen its last Pinta Island tortoise. That year, the California Academy of Sciences led an expedition that yielded a total of three males, after which the search for the long-necked, leather-skinned species went cold.

Fast forward to December of 1971, when a Hungarian scientist in search of snails spotted a Pinta Island tortoise, instead. Upon the tortoise’s capture and relocation, we bestowed him with a name (Lonesome George) and made him a modern “poster child” for extinction. Here he was, living proof (at least for awhile) that there is such a thing as a last representative of a species.

We have a name for them, “endlings”—a fraternity with far too many members as it is. Martha the Passenger Pigeon was a member (1914), as was Benjamin the Tasmanian tiger (1936), and Celia the Pyrenean ibex (2000). But we remember Lonesome George not only because he was the “last” but because he was just here, dying in the early morning of June 24, 2012.

T he cause of death: heart failure.

W hich admittedly, provides my heart some relief, particularly given the frequency in which we humans are the cause. Though Lonesome George’s heart failure is merely what scientists call a “proximate cause” of his species’ extinction. Had my son stepped on the last grasshopper, his step would have served as a proximate cause, too. In both of these examples, no single incident is responsible for the extinction of the species on the whole. Extinction is always more complicated than a heart attack or a stomped shoe, and to understand it fully, we must consider also the “ultimate causes” that precipitate a species’ demise.

In the case of the Pinta Island tortoise, I’m afraid we humans have a bit of blood on our hands after all. Or at least 17th century humans do, namely those who killed 200,000 or so for meat, thereby dramatically diminishing the tortoises’ total population. Add an abundance of habitat-damaging feral goats into the mix, and those remaining tortoises never stood a chance.

Except for Lonesome George, who persisted for 102 years. What did he do with himself? I wonder. How did he pass the time?

A nd equally baffling: How does a creature that sleeps 16 hours a day—well, I guess that’s how he passed the time—go undetected for over half a century?

Had no human ever stumbled upon that snoozing behemoth anywhere on Pinta Island? Had nobody spotted a shell-like rock that was actually a rock-like shell?

Of course, it’s hard to spot a creature that so often changes form, though less so when the “changes” are a result of our perception. Born a tortoise, Lonesome George soon became our symbol, and then, our spectacle, too.

I’ll concede that I am at least a little complicit in encouraging this latter transformation. But who doesn’t want to see the last of a species? To catch a glimpse when the glimpsing is good? To snap a selfie, post a picture, snag a souvenir?

W hen face-to-face with the last of any creature, doesn’t some small part of us hope to be the last face it sees? Isn’t that the story we most want to tell our grandchildren? Not that we saved the last, but that we saw it last, and to trust us when we say it was beautiful.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis)

In the case of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, we know the last man to have seen it—or at least the last man in America with a confirmed sighting of the alleged last. This dubious honor goes to wildlife artist Don Eckelberry, who in the spring of 1944 was sent to the Singer Tract in Louisiana to draw a few pre-post-mortem sketches of what was believed to be the last of her kind. And there he found her, later describing how “her big wings cleav[ed] the air in strong, direct flight,” as she “alighted with one magnificent upward swoop.”

I, too, want desperately to find her, though since most scientists are in agreement

that she’s gone (the species, that is), I know my odds are pretty slim—less than one in 15,625 according to a 2012 report in Conservation Biology. I increase my odds by taking a safer approach. I call up the Field Museum, tell them I’m writing a book on extinct birds (it’s the truth), and ask if I can see an Ivory-bill or two.

Sure, they reply.

Months later, when I arrive at the museum, I’m greeted by 33-year-old research assistant Josh Engel, who’s gracious enough to show me in drawers what I’ll never see in the wild.

He leads me to the elevator, presses the button for the “staff-only” third floor, and then, after a brief tour, directs me to the bird collections room.

Upon entering the room, the first specimen I see is hardly a specimen at all.

It’s a bust of a Dodo, its head cocked curiously toward me.

“ You don’t have any of these guys, do you?” I joke, knowing full well that the bird’s extinction predates modern preservation techniques.

“ Unfortunately no,” Josh says, handing me a pair of purple gloves as we move toward the cabinets. “But I think we’ve got a few other specimens you might find interesting.”

Stay calm, Hollars, I remind myself as we move toward the drawers, but even I know that’s wishful thinking. How am I supposed to stay calm, after all, given the many months I’d been dreaming of this bird? The many mornings I’d woken to its carmine crest, its bill of ivory, its image fading the moment I opened my eyes.

“ This is sort of our show-and-tell drawer,” Josh says, snapping me back to attention as he reaches for his keys. “It’s what we like to show visitors.”

He pulls the drawer, and the room bursts alive with color.

T here is the pink of the Roseate Spoonbill, the green of the Carolina Parakeet. And nearby, an array of blue and red-feathered birds the likes of which I’ve never seen. Placed belly up alongside the Carolina Parakeet is a rosy-chested male Passenger Pigeon, while in the far right corner of the drawer rests another bird—this one with an unmistakable ivory-colored bill.

“ So we’ve got a few extinct birds in here,” Josh says, pointing them out one after the other. “The Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker...”

There he is, I think, eyeing the bird and maintaining my composure all at once.

Josh takes the Ivory-bill specimen and places it in my hands.

“Here you go,” he says.

Suddenly I am holding him, my hands trembling beneath my purple gloves.

“Can you…would you mind snapping a photo?” I ask.

Josh takes my phone and begins snapping as I pose alongside that bird.

One day, I think, I’ll show my grandchildren.

My extended photo shoot with the Ivory-bill confirms me as a fan boy of the highest order. But it’s more complicated than that. This is my moment of quiet reckoning, my real-life anagnorisis.

I’m in love with a bird, I realize. But I’m also mourning the bird that I love.

T he photos keep coming— click, click—though after awhile, as I peer down at that lifeless thing, my smile becomes difficult to maintain.

Human (Homo sapien)

Do not be alarmed: the tone is about to change. It has to. Because my faux-field guide doesn’t appear to be working as it should. Or rather, it’s working precisely as a field guide should: by introducing readers to species. But what good is an introduction if we know we’ll never meet?

T hankfully, field guides can serve another purpose, too, and when feeling particularly helpless, I often find myself flipping through them, desperate for some visual reminder of all that still remains. When that doesn’t work I turn to the dictionary, hopeful that words might offer a few clues to our behavior.

A nd one day, words actually do.

“Homo sapien,” I learn, comes from the Latin for “wise person.”

“Ecology,” I learn moments later, comes from the Greek for “study of house.”

T he irony being that if we were, in fact, wise people then perhaps we might more fully study our house. Or at least realize that we are not alone in living in it.

I’m reminded of a quotation from Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold who wrote that man is but “a fellow voyager with other creatures in the Odyssey of evolution, and that his captaincy of the adventuring ship conveys the power, but not necessarily the right, to discard at will among the crew.”

T here is some comfort here; after all, we’d never dare sink ourselves. But what if I told you we’d sprung a leak?

Or that our house was on fire?

W hat would it take for us to care about the death of a grasshopper?

Chloe Clark

How to Watch a Barn Fall Down

Pull over, because the air feels heavy and you think it is just the heat a last burst of summer but then notice the old building and think that it can’t possibly be swaying.

Take a few steps closer, smell something in the air—cut grass gone sweet with decay, hay aged into mold.

Remember a childhood dream of standing at the very edge of a bottomless chasm, swaying, too close, but unable to step back, dream-frozen.

Listen to the creak and groan, wondering how long has the abandonment been, noticing the dull of the red paint, the cracks in windows.

Quickly close eyes at the moment of collapse, hoping to unspool memory’s film, rewind back to life and movement, a bustle and sway of work.

Drive away soon, take no second looks backwards, fearing the chance of turning to salt.

If You Asked the Earth

When Eurydice was a child she named birds. Silly names that made her laugh. She had a laugh like a song.

These are things we do not know.

When Orpheus was young he was scared of the dark. He thought that shadows held the memories of ghosts. Once he even woke up screaming, having felt a shadow kiss his hand.

These are things we cannot know.

When the satyr was first born he was not given a name. His mother had no tongue, his father was not living. The satyr cried from his crib and his mother could not sing him a lullaby.

These are things we do not know.

When the viper first left its nest it thought that trees were snakes grown too large. It marveled at the color of the sky. The viper had scales the color of leaves reflected in water.

These are things we cannot know.

When the stones first heard Orpheus’ song they did not wish to weep Stones are very set in their stoic ways. But they did weep because even stones are not always cold.

These are things we do know.

When Eurydice heard her lover’s voice after death she thought she was still alive. A bird had been named Echo because she thought it was echoing songs back to her from somewhere else.

She thinks she really died when Orpheus turned back.

These are things we cannot unknow.

Evan Morgan Williams

Samuel and Aviela

Their uncles had warned them: people in town slept lightly, twitching like dogs, naming every creak and rattle their houses made, and damning the noises that were new and strange. Older folk kept bayonets under their mattresses, rusting from pee, and they diced stray children and stirred them into their stew. Samuel stuck close to Aviela as she scurried from shadow to shadow. They left footprints on the cobblestones—country mud and horse shit—and their footprints were close together because Samuel had wriggled under Aviela’s shawl. When they came to tidy rowhouses, amicably nudging, grateful for each other’s warmth, Aviela stopped, and Samuel bumped into her. Samuel guessed she was sizing up the rowhouses to find the richest prize. Gazing at the houses, Samuel could only believe that his uncles had been wrong. Decent people dwelled within, people who drank tea with cream poured from silver pitchers, people who told happy stories ending only in accord, people who could not imagine a morning they would find their silver pitchers gone. Samuel wondered how long until the rain rinsed their footprints away, not to cover their tracks, but to restore the ordered cobblestones to clean.

Aviela would know. So why was she so afraid?

A coal truck rumbled past, and Aviela yanked Samuel against a wet stone wall. Her fingers dug into his arm. Their cheeks touched. Samuel listened to Aviela’s panting. Samuel wondered whether she resented having to bring him along.

Aviela picked a house with light flickering from the second-floor window. As Aviela kept watch, Samuel scampered up the downspout, nimble as a cat, and peeked inside. The window was streaked with rain, but Samuel could tell from the crowd gathered around the pump organ, from the candles on the blood-red tablecloths, from the singing, that it must have been a party, or a rite, and that the rest of the house was likely deserted. Samuel let himself drop the full length to the ground, rolling into the fall, the way his uncles had taught him. Easy. He came up. Aviela found a darkened window and began working the latch with a flatware knife. Her breathing was slow and steady. Samuel made his breath slow and steady too. Their breath fogged the glass.

Light from the upstairs window shone on their work. Aviela had not tied back her hair, and it slid glossy and black from under the hood of her cape and got in the way of her hands. “Fuck!” she whispered. Samuel had never heard her say that before. He was eleven, she was fifteen: what else did he not know? Aviela shoved her hair under her hood and went back to working the latch.

She had been ignoring Samuel all day. Last night, after the tightrope, Samuel had found her and Peter, a horse handler, in the caravan. Peter was fastening his pants. Aviela’s silk skirt was pulled around her waist, and she was daubing at her crotch with a bloody rag. Her eyes looked terrified. Samuel tried to climb into the caravan, and he did

not understand when she screamed at him and sent him away.

Samuel blew the rain from his lips. “Peter says he wants to dance with you when we get back.”

“Hush.” She glared at Samuel. She still wore her glittery makeup, and her face sparkled.

“ You’re still angry?”

“Hush.”

“ What were you doing in the wagon?”

“ You...hush...now.” She squeezed Samuel by the jaw. She squeezed until Samuel felt pain in his teeth.

“I won’t tell,” he managed to get out.

“ You better not.”

Samuel did not want to press her. He knew she was afraid. He could smell it in her sweat. Usually, when Aviela was on the tightrope, she displayed a calm that Samuel clung to like a log in a tumbling stream. Her jaw and mouth became firm. She breathed through her nose, moving through her leaps and flips gracefully, seeming to will her worries away. Samuel, standing flat-footed on the platform awaiting his turn on the rope, felt emboldened to step into the air, and Aviela would always be there, always beautiful, reaching her steady hand to his. Her face did not flinch from the gasps from the crowd. She floated through all the perilous tricks the crowd liked best. But her sweat gave her away. She was terrified. Samuel had smelled it when he found her and Peter in the caravan. He had smelled it two years ago when she tried a stunt her uncles were always urging on her, and she fell from the rope and landed on the hay; her uncles were afraid to lift her body, and the audience wondered if it was a gimmick, but Samuel, kneeling beside her, knew it wasn’t a gimmick, because of that smell. Now, as the two children huddled at the window, whose pane buzzed with every steaming truck that passed, Samuel smelled Aviela’s sweat and wondered if he should be afraid, but he remembered: fear was something Aviela had taken on so he wouldn’t have to.

A s Aviela worked the knife beneath the sash, Samuel saw she had cut her finger. A trickle of blood crept down the back of her hand to her elbow. She must have known, but she kept working, saying nothing. Mistakes did not exist. Tight-rope walkers did not make them. Neither did thieves. Samuel knew that Aviela, in fact, made a lot of mistakes, but he figured she saved them for when it didn’t matter: a jar of apple juice, spilled in her lap; a patch on Samuel’s sweater come loose; Aviela tripping over a rock on the warm safe ground.

“ You’re bleeding.”

“I told you not to talk about that.”

“No, dummy, right now. You cut yourself right now. It’s dripping all the way to your elbow.”

“Hush, it’s nothing.”

“It’s going to get all over the place. They’ll come out to the caravans, and their dogs will sniff you out.”

“ They never come out. And townspeople don’t have dogs.” She wiped the blood with the edge of her wool cape.

“ You say that, but you don’t know.”

“ Will you stop talking!” Aviela slid the windowpane up. She dropped the dinner knife, and it clanged on the paving stones. Samuel expected lamps to converge on them, he expected voices, he expected dogs to chase them away, but Aviela did not flinch from the noise of the knife. Then Samuel remembered: when he and Aviela were not walking a tightrope in the show, they were invisible. Begging for change on a market day, picking a few pockets on the sly: invisible. Leading their caravans down a road, slow and squeak-

ing, while the coal trucks roared past: invisible. Being invisible was their best chance. They left the dinner knife twitching on the cobblestones, and, invisible, they climbed through the open window.

W hen Samuel was small, when his mama’s blankets were a safe raft on a stormy sea, he had climbed onto the raft and watched her die. They never did figure out what it was, and the remedies his papa stirred into her tea did not help. Samuel always remembered the moment when his mother grasped the sad truth: soon she would be alone, really alone, for the first and last time, and alone meant apart from everyone she loved. She and Samuel rode that raft, and she whispered to Samuel she was about to die. He knew it was true when his hands stroking her face did not seem to matter to her, and she closed her eyes, and the tears had to find a way out on their own. Then it was Samuel who felt alone, but only for a moment, because Aviela was suddenly behind him. She must have been weeping too, her sweater wet with tears, but she wrapped Samuel in her arms and led him out of the caravan. Aviela’s long black hair fell around Samuel’s face. The fear of being alone, well, he would store that away for another time. He had been doing so ever since.

It was a thrill, a terror, to slide his feet on the smooth wooden floor. Samuel and Aviela unlaced their shoes, dangled them around their necks, and skated past dressers and cabinets that loomed as big and dark as bears. They coasted over noisy floorboards and hushed them, stroking them with their soles. Aviela opened doors slowly, tenderly, and the doors made squeaks and cries like a baby unsettled in sleep. Again and again Samuel and Aviela jostled elbows, bumped knees, breathed the same stale air, and she frowned and handed him the end of her shawl to hold. She said, “Back off!” That was how Samuel followed Aviela through the rooms of the house, skating in his bare feet, a burlap bag in one hand, his sister’s wool shawl in the other. They looked for things their uncles had asked for, coins and jewelry, and they found them. They found palladium prints in tiny frames. They found an ivory chess set, the smooth pieces tumbling into their bag like plums.

Coins clinked in the dark.

Samuel heard singing from the room upstairs. “When Jesus calls my name...”

A set of alabaster combs.

“And bids my spirit rise...

A gold pocket watch.

“No earthly pain or peril...”

A blue bottle of perfume.

“ Shall bar my journey home.”

Samuel bumped into Aviela’s shoulder. Aviela’s fingers stroked his face. The gesture said, “Don’t be afraid,” but why did her fingers tremble so? She moved on, and Samuel followed.

Years ago, before a steam truck crashed into the caravan and scattered their family across the road, Samuel had always lived with the assurance of his papa and his sisters and brothers around him, their touch as warm and comfortable as his own clothes. At night he had always known their voices telling stories, their breathing in the dark. In the morning, when the family ate buckwheat meal together, leaning against the flanks of horses for warmth, and the steamy breath of the horses hovered in their midst, he knew that he would never be alone. After the coal truck had smashed into the caravan the way a boot kicked a pile of leaves, Samuel sat with Aviela on the side of the road in the steam and rain, counting the bits of gravel at their feet because what else was there to do, and they held each other because who else was there to hold. Their family and their horses were dark wet shapes on the road. Aviela’s wet hair stuck to Samuel’s arms. He knew he would never leave her, and he knew that neither would she.

Now, as they moved through the rooms of the darkened house, Aviela guided Samuel like a blind boy. Aviela’s fingertips on his arm told when to crouch, when to slide, when to scurry across rugs as wide as fields. But her breath was quick now, and her eyes brown and large as chestnuts—were they swollen with fear? It was the same expression as last night in the caravan when she held the bloody rag to her crotch. Or the time she fell from the rope to the hay, her leg twisted beneath her, her eyes gazing at the rope, bare and quivering, thirty feet above; she seemed to be looking for someone’s eyes, anyone’s eyes, but no one came, and she began to weep right there in the circus ring, and then Samuel was there, turning her face toward his. He would never leave her alone. But he needed her not to be afraid.

T hey opened jewelry cases lined in velvet and silk, poured pearls into their burlap sacks, slippery and tumbling like baby onions into a stew. In one room they found a silver snuff box. A millifiori paperweight. A harmonica. Aviela blew into it. Couldn’t they hear upstairs? Watching Aviela take this risk, the same girl who shut out the whistles and catcalls and ooh-la-las when she walked the tightrope with a slippery silk scarf shaking on her hips, Samuel guessed: you learned to be terrified by some things and not others, and maybe it was the crying of a child in the night, or a door squeaking open, or the wind slipping into your caravan where no wind should be, but nobody found terror in a child’s musical instrument, lips touching breathy notes. Beyond the window, a truck screamed past, and Samuel turned. Trees groaned in the sucking wind, branches reached to touch each other but failed. Samuel watched the window, then turned back to his sister, and he held the bag open as she dropped the harmonica in. Her short breathing finally began to slow.

In the hallway, a man walked past the room, singing about Jesus. Samuel didn’t even freeze. They watched him shuffle, smelled his breath. They were invisible. They were ghosts, their uncles had promised him, they could not be seen. Their uncles, rubbing lavender into their tea, had told stories about this...no one could see them. They would camp for the night on someone’s field and be gone by morning. Always at the edge of the field, always against the trees. They followed the backroads where you could still pull a caravan with a team. Invisible. That was why the crash had happened: the humming coal truck had crashed into them as if they weren’t even there. Oh sure, at night they would put on silk and sparkling makeup and Aviela would braid her hair into a thick coil that dangled and danced down her spine as she walked across the rope; people saw them then, but they only saw what they wanted to see. As painters and cobblers and tinkers and farriers, picking up jobs at this and that door, they were invisible. Their uncles sold jewelry hammered from coins; no one noticed that it was their own coins sold back to them, made beautiful. As they made the circuit, year to year, town to town, the same faces brought the same pots and pans for repair, the same faces gasped and cheered as Aviela and Samuel balanced on the rope, but the faces looked through them. Invisible.

Aviela promised Samuel that in the kitchen they’d find the silver laid out openly, and there it was on the counter. Samuel and his sister grabbed fistfuls of the stuff. No one came to investigate. Maybe, when they heard a clatter in the kitchen, they were relieved to know that the servant was doing the dishes.

In a study that smelled of leather and smoke, Samuel bagged a silver letter opener and letters that he and Aviela would read later at night, shining an oil lamp through the parchment, casting the letters onto the ceiling of their uncle’s caravan for everyone to see. Watermarks and secrets made plain.

With a brush on Samuel’s arm, Aviela signaled it was time to leave. They retraced their steps, lugging bags over their shoulders as they glided down the hall. They found all the quiet spots, the tender boards that wouldn’t complain. Samuel reached for Aviela’s hand and she let him take it. They slid across the floors side by side.

T hen Samuel lost Aviela in the dark. He lost the silky touch of her fingertips for only a few inches, but a few inches became a mile, and she was gone. Did he make a wrong turn? Had she slipped ahead of him down the hall? Had she gone left or right? Which door? He had never been so alone. He ran.

T he bag fell from his shoulder, sending jewels and coins and flatware clattering and clanging across the floor. Samuel was afraid to move. He reminded himself that he was invisible and, trusting this, he froze. They will never see me, they will never see. Like the sound of silverware pinging on the floor, I too will fade and disappear. He saw Aviela at the far end of the hall, waving madly for him to run to her. He saw her eyes, afraid. Footsteps thumped down the stairs. Aviela gave him a final urgent stare, then scooted out the window. A gas light flickered on. Silver and copper and pewter and gold sparkled around Samuel’s feet. Aviela was too far, the hall too long. Samuel turned and ran the other way.

W hen a doorway came up on his right, he twisted the knob exactly as Aviela had shown him to make no noise, making only a breath of soft air as the door sucked open. The footsteps thudded past. A rainstorm moving on.

A candle flame flickered in the swirling air. Samuel guessed he was in a child’s bedroom: for the first time in his life, he touched music boxes and stuffed bears and a stack of wooden blocks spelling out words. He had never felt so alone, so afraid. He thought about giving himself up. The ceiling tall as the sky, the ocean of cold floorboards—it was the silence that scared him the most. He couldn’t bear a quiet not stirred with the soft breathing of another, the beating of a heart close to his. His hands moved ahead of him in the darkness, not to find his way but because Aviela had always been an arm’s reach away. He found nothing. The candle flame settled, became still. Samuel’s solitary shadow stopped swaying on the walls.

Samuel heard a sigh and turned. On the bed lay a child. Samuel could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl. The child seemed to be about Samuel’s age. The child lay as still as a doll. The child’s eyes blinked and turned towards him. Smooth blonde hair fell across the child’s face. A silky white nightgown. The child’s eyes were wet with tears, and they sparkled from the candlelight. Samuel sat on the side of the bed. To be close to someone. Anyone.

“Are you an angel?” the child asked.

Before Samuel could answer, the door swung open and smacked the wall. The candle blew out. Samuel froze.

“Are you alright?” A man’s voice.

“ Yes, Papa.”

“Have you seen anyone?”

“I see an angel, Papa.”

“ That’s fine. Now go back to sleep.”

“ Yes, Papa.”

T he door closed.

Samuel had not moved.

He touched the child’s hair the way he had once touched a leaf of silky gold that his uncle was hammering on his anvil. The child’s eyes watched his. Samuel felt a fever on the child’s skin. He heard labor in the child’s breath. He saw in the child’s eyes the same understanding he had seen in his mother’s eyes a long time ago, and he knew that the celebration in the upper part of the house was some kind of vigil: this child was soon to die.

Beyond the door, someone was gathering the coins and jewels and letters and all the good jingling objects Samuel had lifted a thousand heartbeats ago. He continued to stroke the child’s hair. “You are beautiful,” he said.

“ So are you.”

“But you’re ill.”

“Yes.”

“ You’re going to die.”

“I’m going to live with Jesus.”

Samuel thought of his family, and he felt a knot in his stomach. The bodies strewn across the road. His mother, lying in her blankets and closing her eyes for the last time. It was hard to remember her face. He and Aviela had a tintype of their mother, but her gaze was frozen. Samuel realized this child’s eyes were exactly the same, frozen, and he wanted to look away, but the child was so beautiful.

“ You’re going to die, and they’ll forget you,” Samuel said.

“ They’re going to pray over me.”

“ You die, that is all, and then you’re completely alone. I’m sorry about it.”

Tears welled in the child’s eyes. The child fought for breath between high-pitched squeaky sobs. The tears dripped down the child’s face and into the blond hair. Samuel sat with the child until the eyes were closed, and that awful feeling of being alone came into the room and sat beside him.

Samuel heard a noise. It was Aviela at the window. She whistled a soft cooing note meant for him alone, a breathy whistle any sleeper would mistake for the wind at a window. But Samuel knew. Aviela tapped the glass with her fingernail; to anyone else, it sounded like hot water knocking in a cold pipe, but Samuel knew it meant hurry.

He left the child on the bed and slid over to the window. He turned the latch and tried to slide up the sash, but it had been painted shut. He pushed with all his strength, but it wouldn’t budge. His breathing was hard. Someone would hear him. Outside, Aviela pressed her hands against the glass, and Samuel pressed his hands against hers, but the glass between their palms was cold.

Before Samuel could move out of the way, a scowling Aviela smashed her fist through the pane, again and again, showering Samuel with glass, shattering the silence. Aviela cried out with each thrust of her fist, and Samuel heard in her voice an anger he knew was meant not for him, but for herself. It had never occurred to him before: Aviela was miserable. Her hair was snarled with sticks and leaves. She must have hidden in a tree. She had lost her cape. She had lost her bag of loot. Streaks of blood veined the skin on her hand.

Samuel climbed into the window opening. He felt Aviela’s bloody hand on his wrist. He felt himself yanked away.

T hey ran down the dark cobblestoned streets as fast as dogs. When the town thinned to low, flat-roofed cottages that stood apart from each other across fields of brown, crooked grass, they cut across. They left the cottages behind, and they ran down a road narrow enough for one screaming truck at a time.

“ They’re going to whip you when we get back!” Aviela stopped to rest beneath a tree.

“I’ll tell them you left me behind.”

“I can’t believe you, Samuel. You’re so hopeless! What’s going to happen to you? I’m too tired to do this anymore. At night, I can’t sleep, and it’s all from worrying about you. I hate the tightrope. I hate breaking into houses. I hate being afraid.” Aviela was sobbing, her face buried in her long black hair. “Afraid for you.”

Samuel tried to say “I’m sorry,” but the words did not come. He tried to pat her snarled hair, but she batted his arm away.

A fter a silence where the only sound was timid rain, Samuel said, “That time when you fell from the tight rope, did you—”

“Come on!” Aviela ran ahead. Samuel followed, making his own solitary foot-

prints in the muddy road. Maybe that was her answer: fear was something you figured out on your own.

L ate at night there was fiddle music and dancing. Aviela put on a dry velvet dress and brushed her hair, and she danced with Peter and shook her hips and laughed in a way she never did with Samuel. She flipped her hair over her shoulders and looked at Peter from the corner of her smiling eyes. Samuel leaned against one of the horses and watched Aviela dance. Samuel knew he would be alone someday, and that day would come sooner than later. He was not happy about it, but he nestled into the warmth of the horse’s flank the way he used to nestle against Aviela’s back while she was sleeping. He felt the horse’s flank rise and fall with each breath. Rise and fall.

A s Samuel watched Aviela dancing, she tripped on a simple clump of hay, stumbling to her knees, her arms splayed out, her pretty face a scowl. A clump of fucking hay! Aviela stormed off, left her dance partner and the fiddler standing there. Watching from the shadows, Samuel knew: now was the time to be afraid. No one could do that for him anymore.

The Salad Spinner

My mother let me help her cook at an early age. I got to use my muscle to take control of the kitschy salad spinner.

And I spun it with such power, the drying leaves suddenly set aflame, like skyrockets burning. The colander lifted away.

Disappearing through the ceiling. The dark kitchen I conjured up had me shaking, the chandelier out of control and I in awe.

And this persists. My green chaos shows no restraint. But I don’t know to be afraid. The confetti of the world spins all around me.

Suburban Sleeping Austin Sanchez-Moran

Launched from out of my wet, dark mouth, a ship, ironclad, navigates the hallways that channel from my bed.

The front door unlocks, swings wide then the stern, cruising down my calm sea street, is gone.

But to leave a wake in all the neighbors’ eyes.

Mary Adelle

forty days in the wilderness

these storms these storms that come clustering clustering magnet and ultraviolet they’re hard and botched sun-whipped and humming and green as choke wanting us to whine like our dogs giving devil pressure to our ear pockets all the while i’m smiling at the impound just like jesus would have my ears pocket this man’s peanut sucking the way he hosts my car keys under his knuckles and smiling smiley the good life the full belly the love bugs i leave and the door jingles or maybe my keys or i guess the storm in my ear something is definitely making a sound

Mary Adelle

in line at the lewis farm stand

your pick of the concords weighs half a pound and don’t they look good you say don’t they look blood and honest? you are so public your voice rubs us open behind you we imagine you bent over your grapes dripping in the sink approaching your lips because they are so sweet really really sweet too loose and sweet for a bowl the whole half pound the chewy skins down your throat in minutes.

Timston Johnston

The Predetermined End of Asteroid-2013 MA85

This rock does not know what it’s doing. Its motivation is not sinister, does not think of victims. It abides the laws of gravity and apples and De Mundi Systemate. It does not know it was once—and will be again—the victim. This rock. This hunk of iron and sodium and carbon and nickel and copper and gold and nitrogen and magnesium and calcium was at one time, beyond memory, a much larger rock in an orbit with a balloon of hydrogen fire. For eons it obeyed, swam in the vacuum, harbored lonesome moons, tilted and wobbled with seasons until another rock’s path met its own. From that rock, this rock was broken and separated and hurtled out of sashay and became something else, something scorched and burned and cracked, something molten and wild, something cooled and hard and aimless, waiting for something to grab hold of it again, to be kept by gravitational pull, that never-ignored force, that blind, unshakable squeeze. T his rock is destined to meet its end. This rock will meet our rock. This rock will happily, finally, destroy itself simultaneously breaking, scorching, and hurtling our rock out of orbit. We, once aware this rock is coming, will kneel. Mercy will be our word but there will be no knowledge of how to obtain it. There will be no thought that this rock and our rock are cousins, made of the same metal, birthed in that same microsecond of a microsecond of a microsecond, that moment of disconsolation and ozone, that moment of dejection and confinement, that moment of everything you and everything I and everything we. We will pray for an understanding, but all we will understand is that understanding isn’t the problem. The problem is the problem and terminology is not the solution unless that term is topological defect. The solution, for us, is acceptance. And there will be acceptance, just as there was when this rock mindlessly went from homeostasis to that microsecond of a microsecond of a microsecond when sublimation took over, when dry ice became apparition. The acceptance was the exhale, that last feeling of breath given back. It was slow. It was the breeze playing the hollow notes of the wind chime, the persistent F-sharp and A-minor until the green flash of ozone-lit magnesium turned white in oxygen. The blue of the iron, C-sharp. The vacuum before the sonic waves. The osmosis of dew on grass. This is what we will need to learn—that breath before the boom, that moment when dipoles fail.

We will abandon the instinct to rampage, to fall back on the heels of our humanity, to yield ourselves to trees, to develop gills and slink into water, to dissolve into single-cells and sift to the forgotten depth of ocean where light also means predator. We will be bacteria. We will not think of what’s fair and what will never be. But I fear we will again forget our flight and attach ourselves until we are out of water, breathing oxygen, and harvesting orchards until our first retreat filters through our minds and retells futility. We know we will never satisfy ourselves, and we will welcome the rock, understanding, finally, that this rock’s path was set in place long before we were we. We will

understand that this is a rock. We will understand that this is the rock that will be the liberation, the squeal of the nail ripped from the wood, the exhale of what was never ours to keep.

Lifeguard Robert Farnsworth

after Tomas Transtromer

From the whitewashed Weathered dock in shining Wind, into the shifting Swell of coinage sun Makes of the sea, my sons Are diving. I mean to keep This picture of them.

*

Beyond the peninsula, toward its talon of breakwater, Glides the tall sloop’s reaching mainsail, a furtive steeple Above the trees.

The actual requires us in its effort to be.

One dive after another, stitching water to wind.

Then the entire boat appears, loudly comes about, and whispers away.

*

Swaying six i nches in its U-joint, one warm, smooth piling kneads my bare shoulders.

Gary Young

Repeated beneath the surface of the pond, the redwoods reach impossible depths, and below them, clouds gather and pass on. Fish slip in and out of the branches of the trees, immortal carp drifting through the chill, inexhaustible bowl of heaven.

Gary Young

At dusk, a whale surfaced in the cove, close to shore. His body was black, but his breath was white, vaporous and ghostly. Even after nightfall, I could sense his body floating there. If I rest my head against the darkness, I can hear its heartbeat. It sounds like a cricket calling outside my window.

Gary Young

In a turnout off the ridge road, someone left a pair of red, sequined, high-heeled shoes. They’d sharpened two short, thick spikes and driven them through the sole of each shoe into the hardpack. Teenagers sometimes park there to make out or drink beer, and loggers stop to check their loads before descending the grade. I once dragged a dead stag off the road at that spot, and heaved its body into the ravine below. The deer was missing an eye, and its tongue had been nearly torn away. I pulled it by the antlers, and tumbled it into the gorge.

Matthew Gavin Frank

Fishing in Vain Zoonotics, or, Be Mine

Today, I searched for the giant squid in Bat Lake, formerly Bait Lake (the name changed in 1968, for cautionary measures). I thought about how meaning always changes when one removes an I, becomes winged, and a little toothy. For bait, I used bat. Even the cat knows: that’s not true. Here’s the truth: for bait, I dismantled my wife’s tea cozy—the one sewn of the spitballs fashioned from the six-page Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division Report #2946, dated May 20, 1983, on Rabid Bats in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (abridged version). The unabridged version, I’ve heard, is supposed to be really disturbing. I cast and, given that this is Valentine’s Day, I thought of so many Upper Midwestern hearts beating with the panic and zoonoticism (not as sexy as it sounds) of rabies—the poor hearts of foxes, skunks, cows, horses, the frothy lips of dachshunds, and dilated pupils of the raccoons. The rabid silver-haired bat of Escanaba had, in 1968, ignited an epidemic with legs—the sort of epidemic the DNR is compelled to call “unfortunate,” inspiring them to devise all sorts of contemporary rabies tests for bats, using such classic methods as “impression smears of brain material,” and “3-pound coffee cans containing chloroform-saturated cotton balls.” My lure snagged a yellow short-sleeve shirt with an alligator on the breast pocket, and a pair of lefty scissors. I closed my eyes, prayed for squid, performed a few textbook air-cuts with the scissors, even though I’m a righty. My wife’s tea was getting cold. I recited to myself a treatise on love amid despair. I pulled another ball from the tea cozy that read...species, sex, acetone, and age. It’s been a tough winter. Nothing blind screamed overhead. Everything that screamed was able to see just fine.

Matthew Gavin Frank

Fishing in Vain Henotheistics, or, Aten’s Revenge

Today, I searched for the giant squid in Pointe aux Chenes River, which I first mispronounced, chain, then mispronounced, chin. On the bank, a colony of frozen ants necklaced a sad-looking oak with a dewlap. They were once Ghost Ants, or Acrobat Ants—I couldn’t tell, even after checking the thoraxes for coconut-like odors and unusual flexibility. Look: it was dark, and my flashlight was waning, and I had all that winter in my nose. The guy at the St. Ignace Mobil station—the one who tried so hard, and failed, to sell me a Mars bar—told me that the squid here are attracted to gold. I found my wife’s old charm bracelet in the jumper cables bag, reflected that gold’s elemental symbol is Au, reflected that this was also my grandfather’s last word, but I don’t believe he was calling out for any final gold. I baited the hook with Nefertiti’s little face. She was dense, soft, ductile, and dead. No bigger than a thumbnail. I dug with the toe of my shoe into the silt, hoping for a vein or, at the very least, some sylvanite in the alluvium. I found only a pathetic oak leaf, curled into itself like an empty cheroot, and the excised red mohawk of the Pileated Woodpecker, which I pasted to my left eyebrow (with ice) for luck. I caught no squid (which made me feel bad), and the wind criticized its own blowing, and the nougat in my chest shifted, both cheap and planetary. In the depths, Nefertiti said, In all burial is shining dawn and the radiant heat-resistance of the spacesuit sun-visor. “And a toothy suction cup?” I tried. Look: The wind stole the feathers from my eye, but the ice there stayed put. You said it, she said, and this made me feel good again.

Matthew Gavin Frank

Fishing in Vain Limnophiles, or, Ode to Fanny

Today, I searched for the giant squid in Lake Fanny Hooe, which is inappropriately phallic and rife with pulpy peat. A little rubble, too. Legend tells us that the “real” Fanny Hooe drowned right where the lake’s corpus cavernosum would be, if it weren’t for all that peat. Her ghost apparently croons about copper mines and homemaking and losing one’s footing while picking blueberries too close to a lake, and garters sewn of pondscum, and lipstick, but all I heard were the sharp-shin hawks screaming their way into the wood ducks, pulling their breasts from their sternums in strings that reminded me of the Matthäus Ignatz Brandstätter 1824 Viennese violin on which Beethoven’s Ninth was first performed, that Hooe played the morning before her death—the fingerboard ebony, the saddle rounded, the ribs quarter-cut maple and so terribly hard. I patted myself on the back for leaving the cat at home, safe from the raptors on the back of the orange couch, which she bites when sexually frustrated, and when the garbage truck comes. I cast, and wondered about my own F-holes; if, like those of Hooe’s Brandstätter, they’re just small notches cut into spruce, or something more—something goozy and ventricular. In my head, I made a checklist of the differences between steamer trunks and hope chests, the water in our lungs, and in our mouths. I caught half a fish, the tail of which I couldn’t identify. It was yellow-gold. I imagined the head in the mouth of the ghost and felt, for the first time in months, a passenger train in my chest, this tentacular strophe, severed and part of a larger order, phantasmagorically gummed, implacable joy.

Woman Looking at a Table Diane

Through the grid of the glass windowpanes the woman looks in at a table filled with the debris of a meal. A glass of wine, unfinished. Bread

torn to pieces as if fought over. A cheese in its rind, a heavy cloud of butter on a plate, half a pear, and a black-skinned ham, mostly intact,

but enough sliced away to expose the white layer of fat and the bone, a strange, phallic-looking thing visually linked to the blade of the knife, which points to it

like an arrow. The woman looks in, hungry-eyed, her fingers visible on the window ledge. Her face is odd, sleek like a deer’s with a deer’s

archaic smile on her lips. Maybe her mouth is watering but I don’t think so. I’ve looked at her gaze with my magnifying glass and I think she is looking at me, coveting my chair. I believe she wants in to the picture-plane, then through it, to sit where I’m sitting and to paint the scene as she sees it, maybe a lone intact pear on a naked table, or the wine in the glass, to practice rendering transparency. Maybe she’ll turn the ham to hide the gristly bone, or ignore the ham entirely. Or she’ll paint just the grid of the window with no blue-eyed woman looking in. Each pane of glass will hold its own measure of the night and a fingerprint or two. At the bottom of the canvas, signed with a flourish in the lower right corner, her name, whatever it might have been.

Rebecca Hazelton

Please Explain Please Explain Please

Every man might have a winter he holds secret to himself, a night so cold the ears of cattle brittle and break, a vast dark he can only cross as men cross from the barn to the house in a blizzard: by holding to a rope stretched between certainties.

When I say barn, I mean his outward face. When I say the house, the rooms collapse and the whole thing folds flat. If I knew a man and he had a face underneath the face I knew, if he had the potential

in him for deeds done best not at all and I didn’t see that face—am I to blame that the openings on my own mask were too small to see through? No, I don’t know what the rope is made of.

Open House Rebecca Hazelton

When we undressed her, t he body beneath hinged like a door, but what were doors in this new republic and why wear the uniform r inglets if one didn’t want them mussed?

She asked for her children, swaying f rom the apple trees, but we aren’t worried about memories anymore.

The bared body was like a table w ith every utensil in place, and we wondered for a moment

what if we’re the same but some of us had different doors to walk through? Even then, some of us just wandered from room to room, got lost from the kitchen to the bathroom. It was a large house, but that’s no excuse.

T hat moment passed. We walked through. We bent her over. We had our say.

Gretchen Van Lente

My Talk Show

In the year 2099, in the era of the anti-celebrity, Miss Harmony Love is the reigning talk show host in the world, heir to the longest running talk show ever. Technology being what it is, she produces her show in a public time slice referred to as Nuevo York. Then she bubble jumps the dimensions to open in a simultaneous time slice, in a secret location. She films live, although in the era of the anti-celebrity most audiences are androids, unless a renegade cyborg worms through the bubble jump. Harmony Love has some misgivings about showing a renegade the portal. Mostly she tolerates these politically motivated disruptions to her show. Her own cause today is the abolishment of self-adornment, but still, life can be dull in 2099.

It’s also apparent to her that an occasional renegade cyborg is a relief, as she never interfaces well with androids. But it is the age of the anti-celebrity, for which she is grateful, as we all are, and so she calmly accepts that audiences are hard to come by, unless you are filming north of Siberia where progress is slower. No way could she afford an audience, or handlers, or people ripping up seats from the longest running talk show ever. And anyway, souvenir taking is discouraged in the age of the anti-celebrity. As everyone knows, though, they just want the seats. In an earlier era, her predecessor had to replace seats every other week, and forget about a camera pan of the audience!

Tonight the camera blinks a three minute cue. It is hard for Harmony Love to feel pushed around by a disembodied voice, but if she doesn’t bubble jump fast enough the camera will insist rudely on a low frequency.

“Do I look all right?” Harmony faces her make-up Guru with the same high anxiety every night.

“Don’t be vain,” says Zero, who is part Gray and subject to discrimination on earth. “You know you look bad when you show off. Just be yourself. What are you paying yourself for?” Zero does not actually apply make-up or any adornments to Harmony’s face or body. In fact, jack of all trades, Zero has just finished his duties for the night as Harmony’s make-up Guru, which is a good thing. He has more important things to do before the night is over, least of which is being the bouncer—which is exhausting for Zero and involves eye strain and, in dire emergencies, a telekinetic sucking motion along the seams of the portal.

Zero is also Harmony Love’s best friend. They met on a space tour of outer-toxic coagulations seven lifetimes ago. In addition to his other demanding work on My Talk Show, Zero is Harmony’s co-host. Secretly Harmony was in love with Zero in another lifetime, but now he’s too insulting. He’s also not the greatest hybrid she’s ever seen, so she keeps her emotional distance. Zero is an anti-celebrity in his own right. He claims he doesn’t need anything—no substance, no outer wrappings. He claims that, as a half Gray, he only needs to be amused. It was a great day in recordable history when the Grays sat down with the Pentagon chiefs and explained that, after all these years, they simply

wanted to be amused, and then they gave us their masses of hybrids.

Zero and Harmony make a great team. They play off each other perfectly, never missing a microsecond. In real life they communicate poorly, suffering a cultural gap the size of a Zeta Reticuli vacuum slug. Zero has a few sand gray wisps of hair on his head like dead sea-grass. His eyes, peerless black almonds, are the biggest thing in his face. His body is gummy and sticky with little distinction, more fluid and wobbly than muscular, like hard Jell-O. Harmony is a seven foot tall eugenics experiment, an abomination from an earlier age—the age of the ultra-celebrity. One-hundred thirty-thousand other women in the solar system share her identical look—tan, blue eyed, perfect and beautiful enough to be boring after a minute of gazing. To distinguish herself from others she wears a new hat every night on her show, and she plays the victim of science. But enough exposition. Let’s watch the show.

“ Welcome to My Talk Show,” says Harmony as she appears diaphanous, and then solid. The roar of the audience is, to use a term from antiquity, canned. Zero has bubble jumped before her so he already sits in his rocking chair by her love seat. One of their sight gags—one which always gets the audience going, occurs when Zero says something sarcastic about humans and Harmony, in a supine manner, leans off her couch as if to gag. If it is a particularly good joke, she does a pratfall and lands on her belly on the floor. If the joke is a crowd buster, she swims on the floor like a fish out of water.

Harmony flops onto her love seat. “Well, Zero.” She slips her brocade slippers off, one after the other, and throws them; Zero flinches, but the second one decks his vast brow like a bulls-eye target. “I see that five trillion light year stare again. You mad at me for something?”

“Just cut to the chase, Harmony. I saw this one coming five years ago.” Zero sits weightless in his rocker. He drapes the old presidential relic like an empty dress.

“All right, honey! Whatever! I apologize in advance. I know that look. You’re killing me, Zero.”

“ Well, nobody ever said you were perfect,” says Zero, and it is a non sequitur, but when their chemistry interfaces slowly in the beginning the line is a certain crowd buster; the audience program claps and hoots automatically for any reference to the word “perfect.”

“In fact, you’re so perfect you look like a plasma cast.”

The audience pauses for the end of the line and then claps and hoots for the insertion of the word “perfect.” From Harmony’s point of view, the interface seems to be timing up well.

“ So would your mamma, I suspect, if you had one. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you for, like, seven life times already: who, or what, is your mamma, Zero? Do you even know? In fact, surprise, surprise, although apparently nothing surprises your rubbery ass, tonight we have, as our guests, three entities who claim to be Zero’s mother. And our sentient/biosphere viewing audience is already primed to simulate a vote during the break, if that’s alright with you, my friend.”

A nd peering into the audience, Harmony says, “Zero is a good sport, isn’t that right Zero?”

“ Since you’re ripe with condescension, what choice do I have?”

“Do I detect hostility?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I knew I’d regret asking. Let’s bring on the candidates. First, candidate number one, a pleasant young earth born woman who claims she can reincarnate without perishing the body. Let’s get her up here and see what her agenda is. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome the entity purporting to be Zero’s Mother, the former Miss Pacific Fault Line, Lila Wyoming!”

Nothing is perfect in the age of the anti-celebrity, so it is not an awkward moment when the android audience stiffs the former Miss Pacific Fault Line. The audience sits frozen, un-activated, and the camera pans them anyway. Zero and Harmony clap all alone and Miss Fault Line, Lila Wyoming, takes a seat on a bar stool beside Harmony’s love-seat. Light fades and the hologram of an old grungy Beatnik basement café materializes behind them, with brick walls and neon swear words and smoke. Lila Wyoming wears a barrette, black tights, a sweatshirt for a dress, and ballet slippers. She smokes a cigarillo from a long black tip.

“ Well, Zero,” Harmony starts to say, “Do you recognize…” But just then the androids catch their cue and clap politely.

“As I was saying, do you recognize this woman as your birth mother? You could do worse.”

M iss Fault Line smirks sardonically, which makes Harmony wish she were more telepathic today. She at least understands something is wrong, but then Zero saves the moment.

“Couldn’t I see all the candidates at once? I might pick her and then like someone else better.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Zero.”

“ Why not? Who’s running this show?”

“Nobody.”

T he android audience laughs on time. From the corner of her eye, Harmony spies a shadow like a water stain spreading out across the barrier seal and she realizes that a renegade cyborg or two or more may succeed in jumping the portal at some point during the night. She notices that the shadow is not diminishing. She hopes they’re merely looking for seats.

“Miss Lila Wyoming has come here from the lawless nether region formerly known as San Francisco, and she claims she ascended into astral space corporally, at will, during a poetry argument with the late great poet of the 20 th century, Allen Ginsburg.”

Harmony pauses, gearing up for a little pain. Many names and terms from antiquity are extinct and she is always relieved when one hasn’t been entered into her palm imbedded prompt. The device reminds her that she is a victim of science. She breathes a sigh of relief when her skin does not erupt, bubbling with code.

“Miss Fault Line further states that in that moment she had an epiphany that lead straight to hell. However, in 2020 she returned to earth as a soccer mom…”

Harmony winces in pain and reads her palm prompt, ‘…a soccer mom is a person of female persuasion who has issues with non-transgender males…’ Wow! Have you ever heard that before, Zero? I mean, she is your mom.”

“I confess I have never heard the definition of a soccer mom before,” says Zero. “It intrigues.”

Grays can be humorless. Miss Wyoming snorts without mercy. Harmony winces, but the show must go on.

“ To continue, Miss Wyoming once again had an epiphany and willingly left her body on the soccer field after tearing her daughter’s coach a new asshole. Zero wouldn’t know what an asshole is, would you Zero,” says Harmony Love and the audience laughs without a prompt. Zero vacates his mind momentarily.

“Miss Wyoming, you have an interesting story to tell about your present incarnation. Tell us, where did you conceive Zero?”

M iss Wyoming twines and untwines her legs. She surveys the river beams of magnetic rays overhead and feigns boredom as she drags on her cigarillo.

“I’m glad you asked that Harmony,” says Lila, “because I’d like to clear up a misunderstanding. You see, I met Zero on the astral plain. He and his guide were looking for

a fag hag to play Zero’s mother on the earthly plane.”

“I resent that!” sounds the haughty, disembodied voice of the automated political editor.

“ What’s a fag hag?” asks Zero.

“I resent that!” repeats the voice of the automated political editor.

Harmony scrutinizes her palm imbedded prompt which is lighting up faintly, reminding her once again that her skin is too thick. For a moment she pities herself, but the show must go on. “A fag hag,” she reads from the painful code erupting over the entire length of her arm, “is a term from antiquity. I can’t tell you what it means other than a vague reference to sexual preference. The code is in Sanskrit, and I am not fluent in ancient languages, but I will be by tomorrow’s show since it’s a glaring fault.”

“I agreed to the terms,” continued Miss Wyoming, “but after conception I reneged on the deal rather than live with the stigma of having a son with odd sexual proclivities. I dumped him as a zygote in parallel dimension number nine.”

“But Miss Wyoming, Zero is asexual, and parallel dimension number nine is, in general, considered a myth.”

“ Who can explain the ways of the Grays?”

“I resent that! I resent that! I resent that!”

O ver the voice of the automated political editor, the audience boos uniformly, right on cue, sitting up like boards. Zero, taken off guard because he is only half Gray and inconsistently telepathic, spits back at Miss Wyoming through gelatinized teeth, “You friggin Bitch! You’re from The Alliance!”

Zero is quivering like amorphous haze. Being half human, he can be ruled by his emotions.

“ So, you’re saying this woman could not be your mother?”

“Have you got moon rocks between your ears? I said she’s from the nether region formerly known as San Francisco. Or more specifically, The Alliance. They tried to exterminate hybrids in 2045! Soccer mom, my ass!”

Harmony falls off the couch and begins swimming over the floor. She wears a conical hat this night, cinched under her chin. The hat has stars and moons like Merlin the Magician, the magical ruler of the mythical domain once known as Britannia. The hat is cerulean blue, the same color as Harmony’s eyes. The androids should have, but don’t make their cue until she finishes and sits herself properly on her love seat. The effect registers as if the audience clapped because she completed a swimming contest.

Harmony rubs sleep out of her eyes as she sits on the couch. It has been a long seven life times and Zero has had some tiresome part in each one of them. Intuitively, she knows that Zero always has been a burden to her. A burden and a blessing.

“Miss Wyoming, you have been rejected as Zero’s mom. Do you have any explanation or apology you’d like to extend?”

Harmony glances toward the barrier seal. It seems as if the water stain has multiplied into something with six or seven heads and she no longer thinks she is being invaded by a few cyborgs wanting seats. She can see metallic noses and fingers pushing through the thin membrane of the seal, which is supposed to be indestructible. Discretely, she glances overhead at the magnetic river beams, hoping they hold for the next hour or two. She has no idea how many telekinetic co-operatives hold grudges against her show tonight.

“Long live The Alliance!” shouts Miss Wyoming, and she jerks something small and rectangular from its hiding places under her armpit. She waves it high over her head with slight enthusiasm.

Zero zeroes in on the small bit of cloth with his discerning eyes: “It’s the Rag Flag. Told you so.”

Harmony sees her palm lighting up. She reads the front and back of her arm: “The Rag Flag was popular with The Alliance of the former nether region known as San Francisco. It stood as a symbol of righteous self-pity, although individual members of The Alliance rarely knew of its significance as a war relic from an ancient dispute between northern and southern cousins in the region of the Americas.”

Harmony Love turns her entire body to face Miss Wyoming, who is dead panning the audience. “All right, Miss Wyoming. In recorded history we do know for a certainty that the Grays exterminated The Alliance in the year 2059. So your political cause, I’m sorry to say, is extinct, and that probably makes you a fraud. Or are you a hologram?”

“I’m just trying to have an epiphany, here,” says Miss Wyoming.

“Do it on somebody else’s time-warp, baby.’’ Zero chides her. Amused by Miss Wyoming, he makes a huge effort to smile.

Telepathically, Harmony is sensing that Zero is having fun for once, too much fun to pay attention to the barrier seal which has grown dark with the presence of so much body heat; she can only assume a renegade cyborg mob will succeed in causing a static pause in the river beam’s magnetic force, thus creating a window of opportunity for a worm hole to rip into her secret timeline on dimension eight. It’s pretty darn inevitable, she thinks, and she wishes for the life of her that she could remember which political cause is current tonight, so that she could prepare a good line or two. She ponders: Is it Dimensions Unite? Clone to Own? Daughters of Fame and Fortune? Augmentation at any Cost? How am I supposed to keep current? Every Cyborg is a renegade these days. Whatever!

“ Stay seated, Miss Wyoming. You may get your wish yet. Let’s welcome our next contestant. Oh, she’s already bubble jumped. If you look close enough you can see her outline in a cryogenic capsule. Ah, here she is in the flesh, and I do mean warm flesh, for the first time in a century. Audience, please welcome Miss Lunita Caracas, who is not only Zero’s mother, but also the first person to thaw in current time right on our show. You’re seeing it live, folks, in case you’ve never seen it before. Please give her a warm welcome.”

It’s a bad joke but the audience has malfunctioned again and Harmony is trying to get the clap and laugh at once prompt going. “Watch your step, Miss Caracas. You haven’t used those legs for a while. Look, she’s wobbly,” Harmony says to her co-host.

“ What’s her agenda?” says Zero as he watches Lunita flop down like an empty puppet over the back of Harmony’s love seat; her face drops sideways onto the seat cushion like a heavy head of sawdust. Her eyes pop open. She stares in a trance.

Harmony, being engineered for strength, flips her guest onto the seat next to her at light speed. Then she props her guest up. The young, less than perfect talk show host always has oxygen on hand, since it’s the law, and she mainlines Miss Caracas’ wind pipe, thus saving her life with one minute to spare. Once Lunita loses her blue tint Harmony resumes her show. It is not an awkward moment, as the audience is primed to clap at length for anyone who has ever experience cryogenic rebirth.

“Miss Lunita Caracas once presided over the directive for displaced hybrids, did you not Miss Caracas?” Harmony stalls to let Miss Caracas recapture her breath.

Lunita Caracas gasps long and then answers. “Yes I did. Back in the late 22nd century.”

“Ah,” says Harmony. “So this occurred during recordable time.”

“Recordable what?” Miss Caracas screeches with too much alarm for polite viewing. Her voice is craggy. In addition, she pumps her chest with her fist for air. Harmony fears Miss Caracas will vomit like so many who thaw before their due date.

“Before we started recording time backwards, Miss Caracas. Didn’t they brain feed you that information while you were in stasis?”

“No! I couldn’t afford it. You mean to tell me that was the lousy solution they came up with?” asks Lunita.

Harmony is puzzled. “For what, Miss Caracas?”

“ You didn’t know? We practically stuffed the moon with hybrids back in the 22nd century.”

“I resent that!” says the automated political editor in a tone which is guttural, banal, and testy.

“ Since you’re here, Miss Caracas, perhaps you can solve an argument that Zero and I have been having since, well, since before recordable time. Is it true that millions of hybrids were once systematically dumped off the bottom of a Deltoid Cargo Vessel like beam trash?”

“ Yes. It happened more than once, in the nether region once known as Detroit, and the Grays had full government co-operation.”

“And by government you mean…?”

“ Who even knew by then? It was my difficult task to control alien blooms in our part of the solar system.”

“I resent that!”

“I’m Sorry Miss Caracas, but as of yesterday, we no longer use the word ‘alien blooms’ in reference to hybrids.”

“I resent that!”

“ We call them Alien Diasporas.”

“ Well, I apologize, and I’m actually glad to hear that, Miss Love, and to know that you are using the automated political editor. In my day, talk shows never employed them anymore as an attempt to boost ratings, since only a few hundred people watched talk shows regularly. Vanity was on its way out by then.”

Zero and Harmony Love glance at each other perplexed.

“ Well, to speak the truth, Miss Caracas, Zero and I don’t even know who activated the automated political editor.”

“I resent that!”

Zero and Harmony share another look, sheepish, telepathic. Both understand that the automated political editor, so often unused, has morphed this day into an autonomous entity with a grudge. Harmony now telepaths to Zero, asking him what the hell is wrong with him? Why hasn’t he noticed the Cyborgs storming the barrier seal like pompous earth-borns with endless air supply packs. On a smoother wave transmittal, she asks him if the renegades have something to do with the automated political editor going haywire. Zero’s path is static, but he hears enough to know that someone is scrambling his magnetism, making it hard for him to intuit. We’re in trouble, I think, he manages to transmit, and since telepathy happens at the speed of light no one is the wiser that Zero and Harmony have stopped the show to have a discussion.

Harmony Love calls for a diversion.

“ We’ll come right back to your story, Miss Caracas, of how you became Zero’s mother, but first let’s take a relativity break. There’s no time like the present for arm chair space travel, for those of you who are lucky enough to own refitted armchairs, but if you are not one of the lucky ones, our monitor will simulate the lunar vacation tour package now being simultaneously enjoyed for the price of a glove and a pair of goggles. Zero, activate the tour, and folks, we will be right back with My Talk Show in just five lunar minutes.”

D uring the diversion Miss Caracas turns to her host. “I should have waited another fifty years. This is about as momentous as a Zeta Reticuli staring contest. Who are all those people?” Miss Caracas points to the barrier seal surrounding the studio. Currently, it appears that hundreds of bodies and faces and hands are pressing through the

seal which has suddenly elasticized. Something, Zero intones to Harmony, in their mass metallurgic aggregate has softened the seal.

Zero hums in a tone frequency that only Harmony understands. It’s their secret friend language: “The cyborgs, I believe, are rattled by a solar storm. Other than that, they’re not in sync with anything beyond a fierce malcontent. The word jealousy comes to mind. Free-floating jealousy.”

A s they look overhead Zero and Harmony can see the vague outline of them, pushing against the membrane like a herd of cloned bison, which are supposed to be docile, only there is nothing docile about this crowd, and they are most definitely not bison pushing against each other and bawling out for an inch of space in the vast Texas desert. As their silver faces push against the seal, their expressions tell the story; they are furious, evil, intent on domination and insurgency. They intend to conduct a coup, no doubt. Harmony turns to Zero.

“Oh well. I hope Miss Caracas gets to tell her story, at least.”

“It’s not like you’ve never been upstaged by a mass of renegades before.”

“ Whatever they’re demanding today will change tomorrow.”

“Don’t I always say that?” says Zero.

“Can’t you get a read on their cause? It’s too much chaos for me. Here, let me turn the river beam on unification mode. Nothing they do or think will jam your current once we put the river beams on unification mode. Too bad we can’t afford the unification mode all the time.”

“ That’s fine, Harmony. We’d never take vacations if we could afford unification mode.”

“ What do they want?”

“Oh, my Aggregate of Everything! They want your hats!”

“ That’s it?’

“ They want your entire collection!”

“No way are they getting my hats. Oh my Aggregate of Everything! That’s all the identity I own in this dimension! No way are they getting my hats!”

“Oh, my Aggregate of Everything! Like I’m supposed to care? Hybrids can’t even move through eight dimensions without getting slimed by half a dozen no good entities. Bo-hoo-hoo! Like I give a zygote’s hind-end about your friggen hats!”

“ Zero, please, you gotta help me save my hats!”

“Like hell I do.”

“ Zero, as my only hybrid friend, I’m begging you.”

“Excuse me! Only! Emphasis on the word only!”

“Please, Zero!”

Zero gets a look of deep consternation in his vast black almond shaped eyes. If he had eyebrows he’d be scrunching them. His eyes strain hard, and a sucking motion flutters around the barrier seal, as bodies magnetized to the membrane break apart and fly away, splintered into sharp slivers of space debris, but Cyborg life is cheap in 2099.

“ There,” says Zero. “That will hold them for a while. They’ll be back of course, in bigger numbers. In the meantime, let’s bring Miss Caracas back in.”

“I owe you one, Zero.”

“ You owe me my dignity.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome back to My Talk Show, the longest running talk show in history, and if you just tuned in a few minutes ago you know that we are about to interview Miss Lunita Caracas, who claims to be Zero’s mother. And you also know, many of you, that renegades of a yet undiscovered political cause are attempting to storm my studio for the purpose of stealing the one thing in my life I own individually the only unique thing I have ever owned, thanks to the once idiotic notion that every woman

should look like a casting coach dream. Now, I don’t know what a casting coach dream is and neither do you. Even my palm meter can’t find the reference. The meaning of the term has been lost to us for eons, but the damage has been done by people living in the age of the ultra-celebrity. I mean, look at me! I’m perfectly boring. I see hundreds of me every day. What insidious political movement would want to rob me of my hats! The one thing! The one thing! It’s inconceivable ladies and gentlemen!”

“Oh give it a rest,” says Zero.

“All right, I will. Miss Caracas, do tell us your story. How is it that you claim to be Zero’s mother?”

“Adopted mother,” Miss Caracas corrects Harmony.

“ Well, what difference would that make? Half the earth-born population is adopted.”

“ Yes, but they didn’t all begin their lives in a vacuum slug.”

“I don’t believe it,” says Zero.

“ Why do you care?” asks Harmony in a snide voice. It is clear that Harmony is still lugging a bruised ego from the attempted assault on her hats. Also, concerning her own conception, Harmony has a rough stigma of her own to combat having been cloned from butt flesh.

“I don’t care,” says Zero, who is used to countering Harmony’s testiness with apathy. “I’m just saying I don’t believe it. I happen to remember my conception.”

“Oh My Aggregate of Everything, now you tell me! I could have written a different show!”

“I didn’t say I remember who the fuckies were. I just said I remember the event. I’m just as curious as you are.”

“ Well, I suppose that’s different. Do tell, or let’s have Miss Caracas tell her side of the story, since she claims to be your mother.”

“ Zero is correct. There was an actual moment of conception. But it involved no specific fuckies.”

“Go on,” says Harmony.

“ Stop it. You are turning me on,” says the disembodied voice of the automated political editor. Zero and Harmony flash each other a worried look. The voice is sardonic.

“ Zero came to me as a cryo-specimen. It was a birthday present from a diplomat. One of the Blues, as I recall, a sentient species which is most likely extinct today.”

“I wouldn’t know,” says Harmony.

“No, I wouldn’t either,” says Zero.

“ This diplomat of a dying race told me that Zero was slated for great things someday. Well, he had no idea, being nearly extinct, that we had just exited the age of the Ultra-Celebrity. By the way, in my day, we had a limit on celebrities. Listen, in our day we had solutions. We handled the problem. Once a celebrity died, we never replaced them. Everyone else got their allotted three hours and twenty minutes of fame, and they took their minutes sequentially. The problem became reasonable. If it weren’t for the introduction of your new idealism, the ‘Backlash’ would be stuck on dimension nine without an air pack to split between them.”

“Dimension nine is a myth,” replies the automated political editor.

“It’s just an expression. I can’t believe your editor missed that. Don’t you download, Harmony?”

No one downloads everything in 2099. However, regardless of her near perfection, Harmony Love can be defensive: “For someone who couldn’t afford a brain feed you sure know a lot about the politics of the moment, Lunita. By the way, we’ve heard the poverty excuse before, like, a billion times. Half the people in stasis use that phony excuse. Obviously you had access to a cheap, pirated feed. Which means you haven’t paid an air

tax in a very long time. Believe me, you don’t want to know the penalty for breaking the law in 2099, Miss Caracas.”

Zero and Miss Caracas yell at her simultaneously, “What law, Harmony!”

“All right. Well, no offense taken. Excuse me for exposing you on a live Time Cast.” Harmony smiles at Miss Caracas and she smiles back.

“

Well, excuse me, as well, Harmony. I apologize for disgracing your show. In my own defense, I had reasons for getting the hell out of time/space. They eliminated my job, outsourced it to some degraded solar system I never heard of. Some place that spits sulfur five hundred feet in the air. I didn’t even have a womb to rent at the time. All I had was a fifth rate cryogenic plan which was about to expire anyway. I’m damn lucky I wasn’t salvaged for spare parts. ”

“By?’

“A harvester!

Harmony shrugs. Then she caught on. “Oh! They’re called realignments now, and there’s a two thousand year back log of spare parts. But would that be so bad? You’d be doing your part for science.”

“Holy Mother Aggregate! I never dreamed people would become so inured to it all by the year 2099.”

“Go on, Miss Caracas. That is, I mean to say, back up to what we were discussing before you had an agenda.”

“ So I kept Zero on my curios shelf, thinking, for the sake of our history, that someday he might be designated a specimen of the age of the Ultra-Celebrity, perhaps the last of his kind. Someone from my lab must have been a renegade spy from the ‘Backlash,’ however, for Zero was stolen, and the last I heard, he was shipped off to Cleveland for the purpose of creating another hybrid bloom.”

“I resent that, and I intend to respond with force.”

Zero, Harmony, and Miss Caracas all wince at the roughness in the voice of the automated political editor, who is talking in slow motion.

“I mean the Alien Diaspora. Whoever it was, they weren’t heartless. Cleveland, in my day, was a safe haven for hybrids. Most things in Cleveland were done telekinetically back then. Hybrids could go there and just chill for centuries. The last thing I did before I cryogenerated was to trace my specimen…”

“I resent that,” says Zero, since the automated political editor has missed its cue.

“I mean to say, I traced Zero’s migration records to Cleveland.”

“ That’s it? That’s all you have?” asked Harmony. “Zero, have you ever been to Cleveland?”

“Oh my Aggregate of Everything! Every hybrid vacations in Cleveland. Ask me if I have thin lips.”

“But do you remember being a child there? Do you remember being part of a Diaspora when you were embryonic?”

Telepathically, Zero and Harmony begin to argue.

“Are your ratings that low?” says Zero. “You would give me up for a few dozen extra biosphere plazma zombies?”

“ Zero, just make something up! What the hell is wrong with you? Can’t you trust me after seven life times? I would never tell anyone that you were viral in nature! Say something, quick!”

“Lady,” says Zero. “If you were my mother, which you’re not, I wouldn’t take you to a zygote show.”

“Fine with me,” says Miss Caracas. “I got a free thaw out, didn’t I?”

“Look at her. She’s smirking. If that isn’t the grossest damn thing.” Zero forces a smile as best he can, for he is highly amused.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the midnight hour,” says Harmony. “We’ll be back in five lunar minutes with our third contestant. For now, do enjoy the holograms dancing in your heads to the tune of “Whose Your Mamma Tonight,” a song from antiquity which Zero, our band master, is artistically arranging in his mind as we speak. My apologies to those in the viewing audience who don’t have the sentient link up to Zero’s left hemisphere. His spontaneous compositions are really worth the extra price. “Enjoy folks, and we’ll be right back with you in a lunar five.”

Zero turns to Harmony. “As I said, I saw this five years ago. You don’t have a third contestant.”

“I was going to use one of the androids.”

“I saw that too, you creep.”

“ Well great, sport! Aren’t you special! Why don’t you just tell me what happens next, Mr. Walks on Water!”

“Can I go now,” says Miss Caracas. “I hate talk shows.”

“No, that’s fine, Miss Caracas,” says Harmony.

“ You run along. Thanks for coming,” says Zero.

“ Where is Miss Wyoming?” asks Harmony, noticing for the first time that the former Miss Pacific Fault line and all her props are gone.

“Ha!” says Zero, “The entire thing was a hologram. Who duped you into buying that package? I hope you didn’t pay liquids for it.”

W hen Harmony feels criticized by Zero, she reminds him, in any way she can, that being human, even part human, can be painful. “Gee. How interesting. It looks like you’re drawing a vacuum slug for a memory blank. You gave me the package, you dolt! You sold it to me five years ago!”

“ Well that’s because I saw the show five years ago!”

“ Who can explain the ways of the Grays!” Harmony snaps back, but then she immediately apologizes.

Harmony and Zero face each other in the dead of night. The river beams hiss silently above their heads, but of course they can both hear them. For telepaths, there is no silence. Silence is deafening, like a wind gust through a lunar canyon, like a zillion simulated heart beats on the cusp of Zeta Reticuli, like a dimension collapsing in the slow, prolonged space of one agonizing star death. And for this reason, Harmony Love and Zero remain good friends.

Zero tips forward ever so slightly in his rocking chair—moving his body for the first time all night. “All right. Apology accepted. Let me tell you what happens next. The river beams won’t be compromised tonight. The renegades will be back shortly, in bigger numbers. They breach a wormhole, but it closes before they make up their minds about something. To be completely honest with you, I don’t see it any clearer than that.”

“I get to keep my hats?”

“ You get to keep your hats,” says Zero. “Why don’t you just power down and call it a night?”

“Let me check the data. One or two of the biospheres might still be time lining with us.”

“ Trust me,” says Zero. “They’re not.”

The Invisible Him Allison Seay

We spent all day walking in circles around the pond watching fish pluck from the surface the bloated bread. I dreamed last night (all my life)

of this not extraordinary day and like others sometimes will admit I did not know how much I loved until it was gone abruptly.

It is not that I think we can all live forever but that we should never die. There is a difference.

For example, it is the difference when the fog at dusk confuses what is pond and what is bank, confuses the moving from the still, confuses even

where my sadness could be lost inside the crepuscular light. I am certain where it was inside him—

the living tumor of sadness right in the liver.

If I concentrate I can almost see the impossible invisible him, see through the burial mound of grass and moss, through slate and soil, through roots and further down down to the blue veins down

even to the vermillion border of his thin little lips, down to the internal (eternal) him, the despicable organs.

I say you were betrayed. And the whole pointless thing is never over: it is always a living death sure as I am now some things do last infinitely— it was love

even when I did not have this voice to say it.

Allison Seay

The Well of Hours

It is the twenty-seventh hour afterwards. I cannot see or eat anything without being reminded of the sleeplessness and pleasure, the last lie I told. Everywhere a dark curse reminds me

I am not a real woman, but a wreck of a woman, a witch of a woman. The whole of myself confirmed a myth, starting with my empty tunnel of a mouth, my eye-tunnels, my witch’s brain one long damp unknown tunnel,

all the tunnels a map of my witch vessels and witch veins.

Like a dog, I want to retrieve twenty-seven hours like a stick and keep the beauty safe. I am sorry I lied, I am sorry

I lied about lying and lied again this time so brilliantly you will never even know I have lied and lied right into the kind globe of your face.

I would retrieve those hours hour by hour until I deserved still to be cherished, until I undid

what I did. I would retrieve then bury the hours so that the worst thing you feared did not happen after all and I would not be a secret ruin living in the tunnel of a witch-self you do not know even exists. I lied beautifully. We could live forever like this.

Alexis White

The Myth

The myth always starts with a girl picking flowers alone, snapping stems with delicate fingers or washing clothes by the riverbank— the regular slap, slap of wet linen against the rocks.

He is disguised as a pure white swan with a neck outstretched like a young girl’s wrist or a mountain-backed bull, eyes like two dark wells.

He swoops in, his beak a saber. He charges, his horn a dirk.

They will say these stories are about ascent into the spiritual realm, the consolidation of cultures, or the turning of the seasons.

They will say she shouldn’t have been picking flowers at that time of day, or maybe she liked those big cow eyes, or maybe her peplos was a little too short.

They will turn it into a myth.

But I am the girl in that field, amid its broken feeling, its wordless sky, the heat of the sun terrible on naked skin— staring down the gullet of the god and the animal.

Don’t tell me what these stories are about. These stories are about rape.

Shanghaied, iii. Alexis White

I am equally prepared for a hoax or history, on a tour led by a group calling itself “The Cascade Geological Society,” a “non-profit group dedicated to the preservation of Portland’s forgotten past.” We sign a waiver saying we will not sue for twisted ankles or use this experience for personal gain (a violation of which I’m now culpable). The guide walks with a cane he may or may not need, reminds me of my uncle, the one who drank himself to death (the one who no one talks about): the same gin-roughed cheeks and vaudeville sneer.

He has given us several options for the tour: the historical tour, the ethnic heritage tour, and the ghost tour. We want the ghost tour—everyone always wants the ghost tour. The pamphlet tells me this is the “10 th Most Haunted Place in North America.” Primetime tells us ghosts are the emotional fallout from unspeakable events, lingering radiation from a long-ago blast. If this is true, it follows that there are nine other places where worse things have happened than this.

Gabrielle Montesanti

The Persistence of Memory

Imastered the art of silent sobbing around the same time I learned how to draw. Occasionally, I locked myself in a closet just to wail out loud, but my lines were always straight. My spheres were toned, and my studies in value grew incrementally darker. I occupied the studio only at night and stayed until all my classmates were gone. Only then did I allow myself to unravel. After church, I sat kitty-corner from my mother at a breakfast diner every week. Somewhere between the pew and the booth I considered repenting. I thought about confessing. After a while, I snuck out of the house to kiss a girl on the lips but still wondered if I was going to Hell. The orange juice always tasted a little bitter after choking down the blood of Christ. My eighteen-year-old self was cracking. The guilt manifested both in my body and my artwork. I gave my ballerinas one eye and forced them to dance on a pile of old skulls. My lover stood naked while I painted her blue from the space between her toes all the way up to her tennis-ball breasts. If I pressed too hard and snapped a stick of charcoal, I lamented the broken pieces before tossing them aside and chanting amen, amen, amen. I perverted my mother’s romantic dream for me with two words. Even after we left church, the scent of incense lingered on my body, and even now I remain unclean. “I raised you in the church and I always hoped you would get married in it,” my mother told me. “I wanted you to have a real family.” I checked myself into a hospital and rated my own pain at an eight. The doctors performed an ultrasound on my belly but all they found was guilt kicking me from the inside. They gave me four types of pills and told me to swallow them when the panic came back, but usually I let it bubble in my body for a little while first. I wanted to know how long I could last before it lit me up from the inside. Then, I painted myself like Frida Kahlo after her third miscarriage. Nothing ever felt resolved. No matter how I positioned myself in front of the mirror in the studio, I could never see myself whole. Instead, I watched fractals of light break across my own face just like they did on my legs on Sunday mornings. I became the cubist version of myself. The sermon was never compelling enough; I preferred to watch the stained glass casting small rainbows onto the spines of wooden pews. Time melted away as if the clocks were Dali’s, and in this trance I prayed to end the persistence of memory. At the diner, my mother asked how I had become so damaged and disgusting. Was it college that had corrupted me? “I sent you there whole and you came back to me broken.” I practiced the art of silent sobbing while our waitress scurried between tables. I realized that if I held the tears between my eyelashes I could blur the diner into a scene crafted entirely of acrylic paint. The tables had a watery shine. The white hue of my mother’s knuckles could be applied with the blunt edge of my palate knife. The fabric of the waitress’ dress was smoothed down with a small sponge. The cracks between the floor tiles required my finest brush. The two eggs on my plate were convincingly imperfect and the yolk dropped off the canvas onto the top of my foot. The scene was still wet and so dan-

gerous. I had to excuse myself from the breakfast table. In the bathroom, I soaked up my tears with toilet paper and then slowly stepped back to survey my masterpiece.

Stormfront Tim Craven

Do you still have the blood dot on the white of your eye, Brother? A memento of a summer spent fishing tench (tiny, delicate, silver-green)

out of the flooded quarry. The bait: a bucket of worms and a tin of broken biscuits. Keeping score as we stuffed the keepnet.

Our imagined life as survivors, living off bushmeat and breadfruit, instead of the thick jam sandwiches that Mother stowed in the tackle box.

The stillness of the water, the panic of a bite, the returning calm, the vapour trails from a airplane ploughing the sky, a drift of sleep,

the pineal gland in control, the shape of a tiny pinecone from an age when anatomy was figurative. When the hook caught your eye from my wayward cast, you howled, then silent shock. The line sagged between us, the neon green feather resting on your cheek. I held my breath to unhook the tear

in your sclera, my fingers foul with fish innards. Then the full on roundhousing, haymaking, great arcing swings of retribution that junked up my face. When a stormfront blows through, my jaw still throbs.

Mariko Nagai

Home at the End of the Journey

I.

In the early winter light, the Yasukinu Shrine illuminates strangely, almost a ghost in the bustling center of Tokyo in 2006. There is a sheer quietness, almost otherworldly, a monster from the past. I hurry past it, eyeing the monument, then up the hill, to the Indian Embassy. I think of stopping, to see it again, maybe to see my grandfather, though I know that my grandfather never made it out of New Guinea in 1944, and his body never reclaimed by the government or the family. He would have been almost ninety if he were alive. But I have my recent dead to mourn, my father who passed away nearly three months ago, and that death is still raw. And ever since his death, all deaths are hard to take, to understand, and the present moment, the living must keep going, and this point, I have to worry about getting my visa on time.

II.

Only through my father’s death did I begin to think about the body as a property, the ownership constantly shifting, sometimes ours, sometimes belonging to the State. How much paperwork did we fill out first, the doctors filling out the death certificate, then multiple copies of permission to transport the body, from the hospital to our house, then from our house to the temple, then to the crematorium. Then another form to cremate his body; then to bury the ashes.

III.

W hen we travel, we are under the auspice of the State of our nationality, and we pay not for the travel, but as a cargo in a plane, paying nearly $1,000 for a thirteen-hour of flight perched on a chair. There is no comfort, unless you are paying for the first class flight. There is no rest. One becomes, in a truest sense, a cargo with awareness of the self. In the 21st century, the body has become something that can be paid for, something like a cargo. But maybe I’m criticizing the 21st century too much in reality, the body has always been subject of the State, and the Western idealism of the right of an individual has been, at the end, only a longing, a way of turning the eyes away from the reality. That the State, in whatever form, whatever shape, ultimately controls the body, and sometimes the spirit of the citizens. Take, for example, my mother’s father, Shiro. Born in 1918, he was a career army officer. With my grandmother dead and most of his sisters dead or dying, not much is known about him except for some photos, postcards he had sent from the various posts China, Tokyo and a government document, an army resume. There are a series

of photos taken in one day, his face taken from various angles, his face startlingly familiar my brother’s eyes, my sister’s nose. This was a required photo the government had all its enlisted as well as drafted men take so that when they died, the photos could be used as their portraits. And there is a copy of the family portrait my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and his three children one of them, my mother as a two-year-old that he must have taken with him. The army resume traces, in its mechanical precision, where he had been, which unit he belonged to, where he died, even though where he died is still up in the air because I can’t find the name of the river listed in the resume on the official war-time map of New Guinea. All I know is that: the official version of where he died, when he died, and the cause of death. That he did not die from illness or hunger, as was the case of most men sent to New Guinea, but that he died in the battle, on July 8, 1944, by a river called Sakai River. He had turned 26-years-old two weeks before, on June 25th . His body rots in New Guinea, and memory of him now that the carriers of the memory are dead or dying belongs to the State. The spirit the soul belongs to the State, and it has not come home. It has been captured in the glass case, entombed in the Shrine, in that monstrous monument, because he died for the State.

IV.

In the most obscure way, the State, under a different name and constitution, still claims our bodies sixty years later. It still laid claim to it.

V.

W hile my father was in the hospital, getting radiotherapy on cancer cells that kept eluding the doctors all that summer, I was searching for my grandfather in books and documents in archives in Tokyo, U.S., and Australia, looking for a trace of a man who existed nearly sixty years ago, and who I know only through my mother, though she was only three-years-old when he died, and all that time, he was in China, then later on, in the jungle of New Guinea. Perhaps my obsession started when I was in Australia for a month, sitting in a cottage, trying to write a story about a death of a parent. At that time, we believed that my father was cancer-free, and I was only writing a hypothetical story, fictional, about a girl who could’ve been me, and the bravery of the mother and the girl. Perhaps because I wanted to believe that death could be virtuous, that it could make people saintly because my father was not. And because my father’s sickness was too real, I wanted to bring out the very human side of him. The story was written; when I typed up the last word, I felt raw, but light, because I had given the girl hope, a magical ending, where though her mother did not come back to life, I gave her a rope to hold on to. That will lead her out of the darkness. And I still had three weeks left in the residency fellowship. As I looked into my files, I knew what I wanted to write about about a boy in war, fighting in a war that didn’t make sense to him. It was mid-May. J. and I were sitting in his kitchen, and we started to talk about the Australian version of WWII, and the air raids in the northern coast. And my utterance, “I don’t understand how anyone can go into a battlefield, knowing that they will die.” All the images I grew up with Japanese pilots standing around in the airfield, their boyish faces smiling, drinking their last farewell sake; the last battle cry, the attack, knowing that there is no way out.

VI.

A nd my father, with his suitcase and en suites, going to the most volatile part of the world the Middle East in the early 70’s, waving his hand as he got on the bus,

surviving through several revolutions, landmines, internments in refugee camps, always coming back with a suitcase late at night, and waking up early in the morning to go to work, slipping into the routine of the everyday salaryman the next day.

VII.

Maybe cancer cells are like soldiers hiding out in the deep jungle of New Guinea. No matter how much the bombs fell to flush them out, there are more. These soldiers wanted to live, as much as cancer cells, too, want to live.

VIII.

Something clicked. My father. His cancer. My grandfather. The will to live. Fighting and dying for one’s country. Citizenship. Loyalty. This is something I need to write about. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to write about, but I knew that it had to be about a boy, maybe 18, serving the country.

IX.

A fter I got back to Tokyo and the routine of going to the University to teach, grading papers, and, in between, I read all I could about the Tokko Special Force pilots— autobiographies and biographies of wartime soldiers, learning all I could about flying a Zero, all the while keeping an eye open for my grandfather’s name in archives. All the while, my father was going through his treatment, 25 doses of radiation every other day. And I also began to write. The first fifty pages came easily about a boy who grew up in America, a Japanese-American boy who came back to Japan with his family at the onset of the Pacific War. I read through the manuals of the Japanese army code of conduct, flight instructions, navigation, meteorology, going through the history of Japanese military. And meticulously, obsessively, I read the last wills of the Tokko pilots as well as the 1,000-page magnum opus of a book titled, The Wills of the Century, a collection of letters and poems and diary entries written by Japanese war criminals after the war, most of them written the night before their executions. I felt I was getting close to the question How do you face death? but at the end, I could not fully understand, to inhabit the mind of the men whose job was to die. How do you wake up in the morning knowing that your job is to die?

X.

It is human nature to resist death, to push it away, to fight again, to rage against the dying of the light. Here’s the proof, I told myself: my father, the most rational, most intelligent man I know, begging the doctors to keep going with the treatment when they told him that prognosis didn’t seem promising. It is the myth of the dying: to die beautifully, to die as close to a saint as one can, calmly, acceptingly. No one wants to know that their fathers or sons died a very human death, screaming, afraid to die, at the end. To protect the living from excess grief, we beautify their end.

XI.

It is the only kindness left. This is the way how we console ourselves to the grief, and perhaps for our inevitable end, too.

I have been riding this country bus for nearly an hour. Old people get on, get off, and there’s only four of us left a young man from Tokyo, stylish with a Louis Vuitton briefcase, tapping away on a small mobile computer; an old lady and her aging daughter; and me. I want to imagine that this old lady is making a pilgrimage to her brother or if I’m inclined to be romantic, her fiancé who died as a Tokko pilot. Throughout the research I decided not to use the word Kamikaze. It has too much historical baggage, too much American stereotype attached to it. How many times have I seen that word associated with fanaticism? Even 9-11 World Trade Center terrorists were referred to as kamikaze pilots: a group of fanatics who would do anything, including killing the innocents, including giving up their own lives, to get their message across. But, in war, the politics forces us to become the participants, there is no more innocence under the State. I felt that keenly only several days ago when I was in Nagasaki. In a small chapel tucked right in an alley in the gift shop arcade leading to the Grover Mansion as well as the Great Urashima Chapel, there, a portrait of Father Kolbe, the martyr of Auschwitz. And my first thought, albeit inappropriate, was, What are you doing here, Father Kolbe?

Father Kolbe, the martyr of Auschwitz, who stepped in front of the SS soldiers, quietly, calmly, and said, “I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.” Father Kolbe, twenty years before his death, had set up a printing press in Nagasaki, working furiously for the mission until he was transferred back to Poland. Then the war broke out. I still do not believe that the war should involve civilians, but in a small way, under wartime, logic and common sense is replaced by something abstract called propaganda and patriotism, a microstate, and in the eyes of the enemy, women, children, the elderly, they all represent the State. The pilot of Block’s Car, as he scrutinized the cloud pattern and found the 15-minute opening over the city of Nagasaki, was not thinking about individuals who went about their days, as usual. He was only thinking of doing his job, and his job was not to kill anyone. No. His job was to drop a bomb over a city, and turn around as quickly as he could. He was not thinking that there could be a POW camp; he was not thinking of children and women. In his eyes, it was only a job. A job he’d been preparing for such a long time, sacrificing so much of his life, just for that one second when he pushed the release button. He was just doing his job in a way my father would get up every morning at 5:30 a.m., put on his suit, to put in fifteen-hour days. And as I stand in front of the panels of photos of Tokko pilots, most of them in their early twenties, some smiling, most looking fierce as if they were pushing aside their youthfulness, they, too, were doing their jobs. They, too have the similar look the tight lips, the face of a man, though these are really boys, still hovering between youth and manhood. Did they ever know what it meant to be a man? There they are, boys my students’ age, and I wonder underneath the headphone music, the baggy pants, the appropriated westernization, that they, too, are fundamentally these boys, these men.

XIII.

T hey, too, were trained for one thing after 1944, like Charles Sweeney who flew over the sky of Nagasaki. As the war worsened, the pilots dying in the southern sea, one man Father of Tokko decided that, instead of shooting down one plane, it was more effective for one plane to drag down an entire ship. And, from then on, the veteran pilots my uncle, for one were pulled out of battle and put in a squadron to guide the young pilots who flew their planes like a fleet of young geese learning to fly for the first time. The young ones, most of them their first combat flight, were asked to dive three thousand feet down the air for a target as small as a pin. There is a myth about how, by 1944, Japan

didn’t have any fuel or resources, and these pilots flew out where the Americans were with only one-way fuel. That may be true, but on a practical side, they had to make the plane light enough to be able to dive. The planes were stripped of everything except for an engine and the steering. Usually, only the squadron leader had a radio, to tell the headquarters, “Target in sight. We’re ready to attack.” The guiding squadron would fly back; the battalion would dive head first, avoiding curtains of machine guns. In the NARA archive, I came across footage of a Tokko pilot, miraculously dodging shield after shield of bullets, diving head first into the camera, diving, diving, but not quite making it, and falling into the sea only a few feet away from the ship. Another plane exploding in midair. Another of a live pilot, in the sea, and the camera does not zoom. The face is blurred. He is looking at the camera. Then he reaches in, pulls something, and he explodes. There is a part of me that wants to put the face to the name, to make this pilot’s death as well as all the pilots’ deaths human. But who would want to know that their sons did not die dragging down a ship full of enemy like he had promised, but died alone, in the eye of the indifferent camera? I am not sure how long I can stay here. Under the glass cases, where all 1,200 pilots of this particular base have flown, southward, always south, I feel as if my life, all the pains of a woman living in the luxury of 21st century middle class, with all the privilege of the country called Japan, amount to nothing. My life is a privileged life, a life of a woman, not better than anyone, but privileged nonetheless. I get on the bus. I feel that I have stepped into a world where death carries too much weight, and where things cannot be explained by mere words. There is more immediate death at home, and that’s where I need to be.

XIV.

My passport, the one I’ve carried for ten years, is riddled with entry stamps and exit stamps, visas of various nations, mostly America. There is one country missing France in 2004. As I stood in Charles de Gaulle Airport, a yell from the immigration officer: Japanese, Brazilians, come over here. And I went over through the immigration office without getting stamped in, and entered France to stay for two months without the proof of entry or exit. It was a time of fierce anti-American sentiments in France, and Brazil was the first country which tightened its immigration against the U.S. as a protest against the superpower. Japan? Japan has been harmless. Is harmless. Because after WWII, it has put its head down and focused on rebuilding the war-torn nation that was completely flattened out after a year of intense air raids. And for its aggression, it has put in money into oversea development to atone for its past. As my father had done. Putting his head down, day after day, working, doggedly, flying to this or that country with the bulldozers he developed, to tear down bullet-riddled buildings, to help nations rebuild themselves. I was exempt from the scrutiny of French immigration. And my lack of French, in a country so proud of its language and culture, was an amusement, a stereotypical Japanese tourist walking around Paris, speaking only Japanese in shops and the French, speaking back in Japanese.

XV.

It is December. I am in India. Sharmistha and I are in the car, driven to only where she knows, through the dark highway, on a narrow street where dogs with hanging teats walk amongst children and men. She tells me that this is a special place for her, a shrine of a Sufi master, where she came accidentally or in life, there is no accident but fate when she was going through the darkest period in her life, when she was so beaten down that she had no choice but to get on her knees and yell, I don’t know what else to do,

and submitted to a greater force in front of this grave. And in the darkness, where there was no entrance, no exit, she felt something shift in herself. Though the darkness continued, she knew, somehow, that there was going to be an end to this dark night, though she did not know when. It is nearly seven at night. It is dark, India dark, as we drive through the streets. “Here,” she says. An alley brimming with people and children and hawkers and dogs and bicycles. We get out of the car and enter into the heart of the city, heart of a neighborhood: a bazaar. A labyrinth of colors: lapis, turquoise, mauve, fuchsia. Colors not part of home. Fabric, sheer, dense, with the elegant scripts of the Koran. Icons. Tapes and languages of so many levels and vegetables and women squatting amongst the wares. Women holding out their babies; men holding out their hands. I know I stand out, made taller by my boots, and fairer-skinned than the people around me. Turning left, then left, then left again, as if in this neighborhood, right does not exist, and the only direction is left. Then, right. Sharmistha whispers, there are many working class people here. And I think of the working class people home, me; every nation carries a different face of the class. But in this neighborhood of left, nothing makes sense except Sharmistha, who is my guide, and who can translate the meanings of life here. The profane space of this bazaar. As we get closer to the center of the neighborhood, the stalls change their contents. From everyday wares to flowers and religious cloth. Here we are, we need to take off our shoes here, Sharmistha whispers. We take off our shoes, her short brown boots and my tall black boots standing out amidst slippers and sandals. And suddenly, as we cross the door frame, the space shifts. On the marble floor, coffin lids painted green jut out, and homeless men drape their arms over the coffins, sleeping against them. A man sleeps next to the long gone, in the same posture of a corpse. First, the saint of music. We cover our heads with scarves and sit outside the sarcophagus since women cannot enter the interior. Men walk in circles around the coffin. The coffin covered in cloth after cloth. Flowers sprinkled on top. The same one I saw in Bali. The marbled floor of the shrine is hard; cold, but at the same time, yielding. We walk toward the center of the shrine, where the Sufi master lies, dead 600 years. A man walks with a 6-year-old boy in his arms. The man carries love, a burden. The boy’s legs are twisted like gnarled sticks. Women, all shrouded in scarves and veils and cloths, huddle outside, and Sharmistha and I join them. We watch men bow down, walk backwards out of the sarcophagus. A man open a green cloth, places it gently on top of the mounds of cloth, and sprinkles red flowers. Then I remember: these are the same flowers we placed in my father’s coffin, the ones that dyed my father’s bones pink. My father’s bones they were not ashes when it came out of the crematorium oven were a mottle of shocking pink, electric blue, and bleached white. Same flowers. This thought is carried away as a prayer blares out of the stereo. The Koran drifts in the air, lazily, and men bow. A beggar woman sits in the dark, only her eyes and her startlingly clean feet illuminating in the shadow. Sharmistha nods at me, and whispers that there’s something else she wants to show me, and leads me to an open-roofed, fenced-in gravesite made out of marble. There, three coffins jut out. “Graves of the women; they must have been his students,” Sharmistha whispers quietly. “They can always see him, their master, but no one can look in.” Three coffins are quiet, open to the elements. There are writings on the lids. No one visits them, but they are, as they have been, looking over the master, protecting him, adoring him, from a distance. But they are at home here. In their formal distance. We walk back, careful not to step on the dead, careful not to let go of the sacred, even through the profane, holding each other’s hands tightly. We are quiet. The bazaar has muted, and we walk as if we are in the sea, late at night, and we are the only two left, insignificant. Two pilgrims who started the journey together in France, and somehow found ourselves on an unexpected pilgrimage to the bodies of the unnamed women in New Delhi.

I am standing in front of the Christian grave in Nagasaki. Having climbed up hills after hills in the August sun, I’m not sure what I am looking for. In my hand is the map of Nagasaki with all its Christian-related monuments drawn in. Around my neck is a heavy medium-format camera I’ve been carrying, for what? It is a strange moment: I am walking through the Christian Nagasaki, retracing the 500 years of Christianity, suddenly overlapping with other faces of the city. This city I have been excavating, peeling, one layer at a time, for the past week. The city that encompasses so many layers of stories, so many layers of history, that some neighborhood corners have too much history to understand. Here, the Atomic history overlaps with Christian history, which overlaps with the Western history, all swirling, all 400 years of history, in one. And here I am, standing amidst the Christian graves, and I choose one at random: a Christian family, their tombstones stained from that day when the sky broke open for a fraction of a second and a light fell, sucking the air up, turning the city into ashes. The date: August 7, 1945. A child, his Christian name Miguel, 6-years-old, died a week later. And right next to it is a gravestone of a twenty-year-old man who died on February 16, 1945, in New Guinea. A Sergeant Major. His Christian name, Paul. And next to it, a woman, Maria, who died on August 7, 1945. And the newest one is engraved with a man’s name, Joseph, who outlived his entire family. Joseph, it says. Joseph, the father of Christ, who remained in the background in the Scripture. And all around, there is Simon, there is Magdalene, Beatrice. Did the plane that day know that there was, on the ground, a group of enemy who carried Christian names? The enemy with the Japanese face, who believed in the same god the pilot believed in. Who entered churches every Sunday, who believed in the Paradise? Does it matter? No. Nagasaki was chosen that day not because of its location but by chance, because the first target was cloudy. For the pilot, it was a mission. It was work, a day’s work, and like any job, the man’s concern is not with the consequences, but with doing the job. There is no morality in work; there is no questioning. When we have work to do, we must do it, whether we like it or not. That’s what we’re paid to do. That is what god has cursed us with, to toil the land until we die, and the land, now that farming is a dying art, has been replaced with papers, or sometimes, in the case of war, triggers.

XVII.

2007 will be the last year of the government-sponsored expedition to collect bones of the war-dead. Everywhere, the government sent out expeditions to New Guinea, Rabul, Iwo-Jima, Siberia, all the places where the army could not retrieve the bodies behind the battle line, to collect the bones. For Japanese, the body is the proof of death; bones take on more significance than the spirit itself. I am not sure if my grandfather’s bones have already been found, then spirit sent off with the ritual prayer. I’m not sure where his spirit is, though there’s a gravestone in the family grave plot in my mother’s hometown, right next to my grandmother. My grandfather landed in New Guinea in 1943, and where he died a year later was near where he landed a year prior. A march a retreat for a year, never-ending retreat. By the beginning of 1944, all supplies were cut off; men were ordered to find food on their own in the vast primitive jungle of New Guinea. By March 1944, there were reports of encountering men from different units, lost from their battalion, gaunt, dying from malaria, from starvation, from all the illnesses that they had never encountered. A government statistic says that my grandfather’s unit, 237, started out with 4,018 men; by the end of August 1944, after the Battle of Aitape, only 700 surviving soldiers. 17.4%. At the end of war, August 15, 1945, only 14 out of 4,018 are alive. The exact survival rate is 1.14%. And there was my grandfather, barely 26 when he

died by the Sakai River, with three children and a wife at home, with two brothers in the war, ready to fight his last battle. Why did he die on July 8th , two days before the Battle of Aitape? Was it night? Or did he see the sun? As a sergeant, did he lead, or did he stay behind? Was death instant, or was he left to die? Where was he? What was he thinking as the command came? He must have known that all the supplies bullets, food, had been exhausted and that Australians and Americans, as they set up their camps, listening to radio and eating canned food were advantageous. He was, afterall, a career officer, who had first served as the Emperor’s Guard, then later on throughout campaign in China. It was a lost cause. I am trying to locate him in history, to make him personal, but the only image I get is from the film reel from the Australian archive: bodies on bodies of emaciated Japanese soldiers in a river, their bodies rotten, disgraced, mortalized in a film, but anonymous in their death.

XVIII.

We place my father’s red scarf, his golf hat, and his best suit in the coffin, but not his passport. The last trip he took: Ethiopia, 2005. Where he is going, nationality does not matter because it is beyond the State. Where he is going, what matters is what life he had led. He is ready for the journey: wearing the pilgrim’s outfit, with a rosary in one hand and a cane in another, he is ready to go to the otherworld. We wish him a safe journey. We close the lid of the coffin. XIX.

At the end of the journey, home is the only place we can go back to. My father’s urn is placed in the grave, and a heavy sheet of stone covers it. He will have to be alone until my mother’s eventual death, then my brother’s and his family. My grandfather’s spirit who died for his country or who died because it was his job to die as a career officer, may or may not be at Yasukuni Shrine. His body may still be in New Guinea under the overgrown vegetation. After all, it has been nearly sixty years. Maybe there, in someone’s attic in America or Australia, is a photo of a Japanese family his mother, his wife, and three children, meaningless, except for as a war souvenir, an old veteran’s proof of having fought in a war and come back alive. And there is a meaning for that veteran, but for a different reason. And if that old man dies, then there will be no meaning attached to the photo. It will be thrown away.

XX.

I sit in the Indira Gandhi Airport, waiting to board. There’s a delay, and there are no seats left in the waiting area. The entire terminal, all twelve gates, is filled to the brim. I sit on the floor and watch the Tibetan monks in their mauve sweaters and robes carrying white backpacks; Korean tourists and Sikhs in business suites and Indian migrant workers all holding their passports in one hand and boarding passes in another. Here, it does not matter whether you hold on passport or another. It does not matter whether you are entering India or leaving. What matters is that this is a transitory place, an illusionary space created out of one common thing: that we are all in the various stages of going home. We all want to go home. With or without our bodies.

Tom Montag

Morning Light

Corn Tom Montag

Corn has taken all of summer and holds it now, the color of sun.

Shivani Mehta

I’m beginning to think of the body as a chasm

To prove my love, I let you bury me in the field beyond the house. Close your eyes, you said, but I couldn’t. I still see your face looming over me as I lay in the ground at your feet, remember your shirtless back, your hands like points of light. You used the shovel Aunt Helen gave you, with the blue handle, poured dirt on my body one slow small clump at a time. The earth was wet from rain. You spread it evenly over my belly, neck, lips, weighed down my eyelids with it. I understood tenderness, then.

Shivani Mehta

What comes after

I pretend my fingers are people. They say things that I can’t, like I think your dress is ugly. This is more than memory, more than faith. This heat between our bodies, a hiding place for small birds, regret. Remember the summer you almost drowned? How your head stayed just below the water’s surface, how you watched the sky turn grey, then black? Everything was a miracle after that, the barn with a hole in its roof, your father’s leather belt, even your torn, welted flesh. What comes after deep water is deeper water. Stillness is a lake waiting for its coverlet of crows.

Cindy Bradley

Monterey Peninsula

So much promise. As I walk along the beach, gently kicking up the white sand with my browned feet, my eyes lingering on the blue-green water, I imagine the possibility of new life stirring within me. I’m an emotional whirlwind.

T he cypress trees dot the top of the hill above. Eucalyptus is all around, lending the salty air a honeyed tone. The lilting breeze caresses, cajoles. So why the sense of doom?

We’re here to celebrate the first year of our marriage. We’re here, in this house in Carmel, with my family, at the spot where the sand at the top of the hill at the bottom of Ocean Ave begins its decline to the shore.

A peninsula is a piece of land that extends out from a larger land mass and is surrounded by water on three sides. This encompassing water is commonly understood to belong to a single contiguous body of water, but is not always elucidated as such. The origin stems from 16th century Latin, paene “almost” and insula “island” almost, but not quite, an island. I walk along the peninsula’s edge, crushed lemon-scented cypress needles beneath my feet, and it’s the almost that reverberates in my mind.

We’re here to celebrate our anniversary, but there will be no celebration. We drive up and down the peninsula, listening to my favorite Benny Margolis’ “Into the Night” or his favorite Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” on the radio. We drive and drive, looking for the perfect spot for dinner. I want something different, something cozy. He finds something wrong with the fish house and Italian restaurant I point out. Finally, hungry and tired, he pulls into the McDonalds drive thru and maybe it’s here that I first begin

Inspired by the poetry of Kimiko Hahn

Carmel, Early Summer (1980)

refusing to answer when he asks me what I want. 7

Begins its decline…why hadn’t I thought of this before?

6

L ately he’s taken to putting me down in order to build himself up. Nothing big, just a little bit, nothing I can’t laugh off. Although when he asks how can I be so stupid or insults the breakfast I prepare on my morning to cook the omelet was a little runny and fell apart in pieces my family isn’t laughing.

4

At times I feel so empty, a scooped-out, hollow version of myself. Like the seashells found at the edge of the shore, hold me close. Listen carefully if you want to hear me.

Pacific Grove, Mid Summer (1984)

9

Sitting on the deck with my four month old daughter snugly in my lap and a cup of sweetened coffee in my hand, I watch my three-year-old son separate the seashells he’s collected and imagine contentment, even if it’s only temporarily.

14

His love is frothy with jealousies, churning with an undertow of possessiveness. I feel as though I’m drowning.

12

Is it here the excuses began? To my family, to myself?

15

We walk along Fisherman’s Wharf, the sound of sea lions barking beckoning us to spot them. My husband lifts our son on top of his shoulders, and my son sits securely, peering over the weathered wooden rail, his hands resting in his father’s wavy blonde hair. Our son points to a brown shape in the slow churning water, “found one!” and I bend forward with the baby, holding her close, peeking into the depths below.

13

It’s the summer of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., Prince’s Purple Rain, and Tina Turner’s Private Dancer and I’ve got “Dancing in the Dark,” “When Doves Cry” and “Better Be Good to Me” continually playing in my head.

T here’s a look in my mother’s eyes, a look that occurs split seconds before the questions roll out of her mouth. She wants to know why I allow him to talk to me this way, taunt me this way, treat me this way. I don’t have the answers.

17

T he tide is low and there’s a glistening stretch of wet sand where I place my daughter in her infant seat. I stand with my camera a few feet away, wanting to capture it all the sand, the baby, the water, the sky, the isolation and the promise. One day years later my son will look at the picture and an anxiety will grip him as he asks in a panicked eight-year-old voice, Why was she alone? Why was she left behind? Where was everyone at?

19

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m hard to satisfy; maybe I don’t know what I want. He tells me I’m not the same person he married, and maybe he’s right. I don’t really know who I am.

I wonder how the land feels, surrounded by all that water. The ocean is so capricious here, it’s easy to think of the three sides as separate, competing with one another, crashing wildly one minute, nuzzling softly the next, completely forgetting they derive from the same source.

16

My daughter convulses in belly laughs as she watches her brother frolic in the waves. Their father is in the water with him, and they take turns splashing cupped handfuls of the Pacific. I dip the baby’s toes into the cool water and her laughter makes me smile. Maybe this will work, this little family of ours. After all, it’s what we both say we want. Maybe this getaway will erase the feelings of dread. Maybe I just make too much of things. Haven’t I always been told I have an overactive imagination?

10

A seagull shrieks overhead and I’m startled, spilling my coffee while the baby cries.

A gap is a blank space, an interruption, a hollow, a lull, an interlude between what came before and what comes after. It is both what we don’t remember and what we cannot say.

20

We’re lying in bed, windows open, ocean breeze drifting through, the billowing curtain rises and falls. Listening to the rhythmic sound of the surf puts me in a trance I’m suspended in time and space, lost in a waking dream tethered invisibly to the watery swell. He gets up and closes the window hard, snapping it shut.

T he sand rises in uneven mounds beneath my towel. Def Leppard implores to “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” George Michael declares “I Want Your Sex” while Steve Winwood prefers his “Higher Love.” I’ve decided I won’t choose. I want it all. 21

Different house, different beach, different desire, different man I’m dreaming of.

I tell myself it could happen to anyone, this disintegration of a marriage. Under these circumstances, under these stars, under this fate. Four babies in five years, three make it, one doesn’t. One person needs more than the other could give. Who wouldn’t buckle, who wouldn’t brittle, who wouldn’t break? I wouldn’t. 22

T he warm sand. The warm towel. The sun prickly against my skin. The heat of it all. 24

My children playing in the water. The sound of their laughter echoed by the seagulls overhead. Their blonde hair lightened, their cheeks turned pink, their well-being intact. So I hope.

T he peninsula reminds me of threes: my three children, three sides to every story and a forbidden love triangle. 26

I walk along the beach. The waves roll one after the other, undulating swells in close succession. The slant of the afternoon sun is silver this time of day, fat stars sparkling on the water. I look past the families, past the beach, past the wharf in the distance and into the hills, where I imagine you to be. If not this day, not this weekend, not this month, a day, a weekend or a month soon. 25

A s I inhale the tangy air I’m not sure which stings more. The callousness of the one before he left or the wanting of the other I can’t have. Oh wait. I know.

I t hink about what beats in the hollows, what pulses in the omission. 29

T he sun is warm and the air is cool. The fog is breaking up, exposing the blue sky that lies behind. My marriage broke up, shattered beyond repair. My husband’s blue eyes

turned to ice, exposing his hurt and how quickly he could turn. We were so young, so much ahead but still so much to learn. I tell myself I tried my best, all the while knowing he’d say that was a lie.

31

Inside the house I help my mother prepare dinner. She’s requested my pasta salad and I’ve obliged. The kitchen is sunny and warm, windows open. The ocean air mingles with the aroma of cooked pasta, Italian dressing and spices. It’s a rare night in, as we’ve always been a family seeking what’s outside.

Monterey, Early Spring (1989)

54

I climb into the car as the sun breaks through the early morning fog. It’s a stunning morning. The band Breathe comes on the radio and so do I, exhale and wonder what comes next.

32 You once told me if it’s going to happen it would have to happen away from home, we’d need distance from prying eyes and small town gossip. I remembered your words so here I am.

42

It’s hard not to have expectations when it’s something you’ve wanted so long and never really thought you’d ever have. It’s hard when the time you have isn’t nearly enough. It’s hard.

33

I’ve found a quaint little motel nestled in the cypress trees. I pull into the secluded parking lot as “Into the Night,” newly rereleased, plays on the radio. I see this as a sign. The lyrics, swollen with longing, create an incantation I can’t shake, as I slowly exit the car, book a room, and phone the number where I know you’ll be. I leave a message and wait.

34

Now I’ve got “I’m On Fire,” “Take Me with You” and “What’s Love Got to Do with It” running through my mind. It’s so funny how that happens, tastes change, cravings turn to something else, something different. Even if it’s just a song.

45

A hot hand slides underneath the small of my back. Fevered green eyes burn into mine. So much heat. A husky voice whispers in the dark. You’re here. Finally.

Will I pay for this, will I suffer? Will he? Will either one of us care?

49

One. Two. Three. Four. Five times.

41

You’re surprised. Didn’t think I’d really do it, didn’t think I’d come. Let me surprise you some more.

39

I don’t wish to know about your marriage. Not tonight. I know enough. She has her own distractions, her own indiscretions and has set you loose on certain conditions of which I’m not one. I wish so many things.

52

Even now, floating in the smoky penumbra, I find I have things I can’t tell you. Words become swallows in the hollow swells of gaps.

37

I’ve wanted this. I’ve been afraid to want this. I don’t want this to end. I’m afraid.

36

I think of my children but I try not to think of my mother. I’ve made plans to pick them up at her house on the way home. She thinks I’m somewhere else, and in a way she’s right. I don’t think of their father at all. Sometimes I don’t think of all the consequences.

47

I’ve brought food so we could stay in, accustomed as I am to keeping things hidden. He insists on taking me to one of his favorite restaurants, where we’ll order Italian. We venture outside and walk underneath a canopy of suddenly bashful trees. He reaches for my hand, pulls me close and we lean into the night.

Nicole Walker

Rotten Eggs

You would eat a pickled egg, yes? So the thousand-year-old egg isn’t so much different. Mostly, it’s called only a century egg and even that is pushing it a bit. This century egg, also known as the thousand year old egg, is a duck egg preserved in clay and salt, sometimes with quicklime and ash, but basically a kind of pickling preservation along the lines of kimchi. You eat kimchi, right?

T he century egg, a.k.a. the preserved egg, tastes like an old egg. Horse urine, cat pee, overwrought sauerkraut. Because raw eggs packed in salt and clay for six weeks, these alkaline substances raise the pH inside the egg, making it safe and also full of ammonia smells, which is a kind of rotten but in a good, or at least edible way.

My fridge might be going bad. I began to suspect something when I could smell the chicken through its packaging. They don’t wrap chicken in plastic just to keep it pretty on the shelves. The plastic helps prevent the chicken rotting, and, barring that, helps prevent you smell the chicken as it rots. I still cooked the chicken. I also had a raw turkey breast that was beginning to smell like flesh. I cooked that too. On the grill. It didn’t cook all the way through. I cut the raw parts off and put them in the possibly defunct fridge. And then I cooked those raw parts the next morning for breakfast.

My kids don’t say it so much—they’re more the “Not it,” “You’re it,” types but I did say and possibly sometimes still do when Erik and I are running to get today’s mail, “last one there is a rotten egg” because the mail is exciting and the eggs are always. From the minute they fall from the hootchie of the hen, also known as “the vent,” the egg begins a slow rot. The shell acts as a kind of protector, like the meat wrappers around the chicken and the turkey, but stronger and, until it’s way too late, odor free.

It doesn’t seem quite fair, when racing your friends, to be considered “rotten” just because you’re slow. Plus, how many times does the person who says, “Last one there is a rotten egg,” get a head start, making it halfway to the mailbox before the words are out of his mouth. And, what happens when the slow, non-racer, shrugs her shoulders and says, that’s fine. I’m rotten. How rotten is she? Game spoiler? Or just a wise person who knows the game itself is a bitter one.

You didn’t wear your hair up every day when you went to school. Later, it took four eggs whites whipped up in the bathroom and fingered into your hair to get it to stand straight up. You could let the edges flop over the shaven sides of your head and look like a choir boy or maybe more like a mop. In chemistry class, you sat not in the front but not in the back either. You loved balancing equations. Stoichiometry helped you sleep at night. The many carbons on this side. This many carbons on that. Thinking about the periodic table made it possible to stop thinking about the girl you kissed, really, to hard that night at the Massacre Guys show. Her mouth around the spigot at the water fountain. She wore a blue flannel and blue pants. She was everything the guys at the show were not. She wore no leather. She had no shaved parts. Her ears devoid of even a safety pin. She was either a total poser or a complete non-poser. It didn’t matter anyway because her lips open around that question mark of water and the way she answered it. Well, you had to take her sentence. She should be lucky you didn’t take more, girl at a show at the Indian Center wearing no eggs at all for protection.

Nicole Walker

What Do Turkey Vulture Eggs Look Like?

Avulture’s egg wears its turkey neck on the outside in speckled red dots, like a crime scene. You take the spattering as a sign of bloody-lust. Its speckles seem arbitrary and disorganized, just like love or the body accidentally run over by a car. The turkey vultures circle over the squirrel. The best part first: entrails where old food doubles nutrient value. You can take home part of the entrails, carry them like a worm your brethren robin might take, to the baby chicks, if they have in fact broken out of their speckled egg.

T he speckled eggs make a force field. You might not eat a blue robin’s egg because blue is a rarely edible color. But you might. You’ve met robins face to face. You could eat one, they sing so cute.

Turkey vultures have nothing to say. They don’t need to talk. They have each other. One two three vultures fly in like B-52s. Well, bombers until they tighten their circle. Then, they tilt into whirlpools spinning wind into spools. They can ride forever in a tornado of wing. Tilt ring right, there’s a dead squirrel over there. Tilt a wing left, a dead raccoon over there. Double wing tilters thank the cars for their driving, their wheels for flattening, their steerers for not really noticing the tufts of brown squirrel rolling in front of cars. We may know the deliciousness of squirrel. Of turkey vulture egg? Who would dare?

CONTRIBUTORS

Mary Adelle is a poet and editor living in Baltimore, MD. She is currently writing a book of poems about strangers, publication forthcoming in May 2016. She is a MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore. She likes witchcraft and wandering Trader Joe’s. Find more of her work in the Baltimore Fishbowl, Welter, Writers & Words, and Alien Mouth. Follow her on her blog maryadellecom.wordpress.com and on Instagram @maryadelle.

Danielle Badra is working on her MFA in Poetry at George Mason University. She is the poetry editor of So To Speak literary journal. “Dialogue with the Dead” (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister. Her poems are forthcoming in Outlook Springs.

Hugh Behm-Steinburg’s prose can be found in The Fabulist, *82 Review, Shirley and Gigantic. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the 2015 Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast. He is a member of the non-ranked faculty collective bargaining team at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Cindy Bradley resides in Fresno, California where she is a third year student in Fresno State’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction program and is an editorial assistant for The Normal School literary magazine. She is currently hard at work on her thesis collection Death, Driveways and California Dreams which she hopes will grow up to be a book someday. Her essays have been published or are forthcoming in Minerva Rising and Under the Sun literary journals. The Monterey Peninsula continues to hold a very special place in Cindy’s heart.

Laura Carter lives in Atlanta, where she earned her M.F.A. She has published six chapbooks and lives on the east side of the city with her cats. Numerous poems appear in journals both on-line and in-print.

Sean Cearley is a former professor of philosophy and artificial intelligence researcher in computer-derived writing. He currently lives eight inches above a river watching ducks, otters and herons. His chapbook “The Travesties of Plato” was published by Spacecraft Press in September 2015; other pieces were previously published in A Bad Penny, The Los Angeles Review, Lockjaw, Entropy, and Floating Bridge Review.

Chloe Clark’s work appears in Apex, Bombay Gin, Booth, Rock & Sling, Wyvern, and more. She can be found on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes

Tim Craven, originally from Stoke-on-Trent, England, lives in Princeton, NJ, where he works in a bookshop. A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, his poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, the details of which can be found at www. timcraven.co.uk.

Vincent Chabany-Douarre studies English literature at Lincoln College, Oxford. His work has been featured in The Bastille, The Belleville Park Pages, No Extra Words, The Birds We Piled Loosely, and will be featured in Glassworks Magazine. He writes a regular column on collective memory for The ISIS which will be on their blog soon.

CONTRIBUTORS

Robert Farnsworth’s poetry has appeared in magazines all over the U.S., in Canada and the UK, in two collections from Wesleyan University Press: Three or Four Hills and A Cloud (1982) and Honest Water (1989), and most recently in his collection Rumored Islands (2010) from Harbor Mountain Press. For seven years he edited poetry for the national quarterly The American Scholar. His work has won him a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a P.E.N. Discovery citation. During the summer of 2006 he was the poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH. He has taught writing and literature at Bates College since 1991.

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and 2 chapbooks. He teaches at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he tempered his gin with two droplets (per 750ml) of tincture of odiferous whitefish liver. For health.

Rebecca Hazelton is the author of Fair Copy and Vow. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Best New Poets 2011, and Best American Poetry 2013 and 2015. In 2014, she won a Pushcart.

B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, most recently From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, This Is Only A Test, and Flock Together: A Love Affair With Extinct Birds forthcoming in 2016.

Timston Johnston is the founding editor of Little Presque Books, which just released its first book, To Waltz on a Pin, a collection of poetry by Zarah Moeggenberg. He is a firm believer in pancakes for dinner, that way it can be paired with beer.

Michael Levan has work in recent or forthcoming issues of Copper Nickel, Ruminate, The Boiler Journal, and Hunger Mountain. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Saint Francis and writes reviews for American Microreviews and Interviews. He lives in Indiana, with his wife, Molly, and children, Atticus and Dahlia.

Ginny MacDonald lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with her husband and their dogs. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, Hobart, matchbook, Sundog Lit, The Midwest Review, and others.

Shivani Mehta was born in Mumbai and raised in Singapore. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and her first book Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded, a collection of prose poems, is out from Press 53. A recovering lawyer, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband, five-year-old twins, two cats, and several fish.

Ander Monson’s most recent book is Letter to a Future Lover. Find him online at http://otherelectricities.com.

Tom Montag is most recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013.In 2015 he was the featured poet at Atticus Review (April) and Contemporary American Voices (August) and at year’s end received Pushcart Prize nominations from Provo Canyon Review and Blue Heron Review.

CONTRIBUTORS

Gabrielle Montesanti is a recent graduate of Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where she studied studio art and mathematics. She will attend Washington University in St. Louis in the fall to pursue her MFA in Creative Nonfiction.

Mariko Nagai was born in Tokyo, Japan and raised in Europe and America. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for the Arts, Akademie Schloss Solitude, among others and has won the prestigious Pushcart Prizes for both in poetry and fiction. Mariko Nagai is the author of Histories of Bodies (2007), Georgic: Stories (2010), Instructions for the Living (2012), and The Promised Land: A Novel (forthcoming from Aqueous Press, 2015). She is an Associate Professor at Temple University Japan.

Austin Sanchez-Moran received his MFA in Poetry from George Mason University. He works as Education Coordinator at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Laurel Review, Sundial Review, Fjords Review, Rawboned, Texas Review, and Rivet.

Allison Seay is the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lilly Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of a collection of poems, To See the Queen, and she lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl, was published in 2015 by Graywolf Press. Her second book, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, won the Juniper Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. Her fourth collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2018. She has published widely in literary magazines including Poetry, The Iowa Review, New England Review and The New Yorker. Seuss is Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College.

Lindsey Simard creates autobiographical comics, zines, and songs. She lives in Berkeley, California with her tiny chihuahua mix, Marlow, who is her best friend.

Mei Skvortzoff was born in Paris, but moved to Brussels to pursue cartooning studies. Her major influences are Robert Crumb and teen movies. She usually draws in black and white because she is not gifted enough to master color. In her spare time, she enjoys thinking and drinking Belgian beer.

Gretchen Van Lente studied with George Saunders and Tobias Wolf and taught Creative Writing at Florida Gulf Coast University. She has been published in most genres, including children’s educational television, and as a journalist for The Malibu Times and various Santa Monica papers. She has over thirty short stories in magazines such as The Barcelona Review, Failbetter, Gargoyle (forthcoming), The Seattle Review, storySouth, and Drunken Boat, to name a few. She is currently working on a Space Opera.

CONTRIBUTORS

Nicole Walker’s forthcoming books include Processed Meats, from Atticus Press in late 2016 and Egg, from Bloomsbury in 2017. The chapbook, Micrograms, is forthcoming from New Michigan Press in early 2016. Her collection of essays, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, won the Zone 3 Press Award for Creative Nonfiction. This Noisy Egg, a collection of poems, was published by Barrow Street in 2010. She edited, with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, published by Bloomsbury. A recipient of a fellowship from the NEA, she’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona where it rains like the Pacific Northwest, but only in July.

Alexis White received her MFA in poetry writing from Oregon State Univeristy in 2012. Her poems have been published in magazines such as The Atlantic Review, The Blood Orange Reivew, Dilate, and Switched on Gutenburg, among many others. Her death in 2012 was an irreparable loss to her loving family and friends, and to poetry. We are glad to remember her voice here and always.

Evan Morgan Williams has published stories in such magazines as Witness, Antioch Review, and Kenyon Review. His collection of stories, Thorn, won the Chandra Prize at BkMk Press (University of MIssouri-Kansas City) and later won a gold medal in the IPPY award series. He teaches middle school language arts in Portland. Website: www.evanmorganwilliams.wordpress.com

Gary Young has been awarded grants from the NEA and the NEH. He’s received a Pushcart Prize, and his book of poems The Dream of a Mortal Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the author of several other collections of poetry including Hands; Days; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; and Even So: New and Selected Poems. His most recent book is Adversary In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.