This publication received support from the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State Unversity. It was made by students in the OSU MFA program for creative writing.
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Masthead
Editorial Staff
Nicolette Ratz Editor-in-Chief
Natalie Van Gelder Managing and Book Editor
Veronica Suchodolski Web and Social Media Manager
Monique Lanier Poetry Editor
Tor Strand Poetry Editor
Haley Kennedy Fiction Editor
Ellison Rose Nonfiction Editor
Cooper Dart Nonfiction Editor
Sam Olson Visual Arts Editor
Anmol Priya Desai Visual Arts Editor
Readers
Sukayna Davanzo
Elliot Laurence
Veronica Suchodolski
Celestina Agabi
Hyrum Blanchard
Georgia Gibbons
Erika Stewart
Bethany Catlin-Johnson
Iain Anderson
Sandy Naing
Pegah Oujik
Elyssa Cook
Anmol Priya Desai
Brian Ramanis
Editor’s Note
45th Parallel’s namesake is a middle, an inbetween, where “closer to the North Pole” meets “closer to the equator.” But the truth is, because earth is a spheroid, this halfway “point” is really ten miles north. Orientation is interesting like that: situational. It’s in this gradience of perspective—this inbetweenness—45th Parallel seeks to highlight the beautiful, arbitrary, terrifying nature of a line.
For our tenth issue, we asked contributors to examine borders, around and within themselves, engaging the creative spirit with outside fields of thought. The idea was not to translate one thing into another, but to encourage an openness to what constitutes an emerging record of understanding. Our hope was that folks would feel empowered to take risks in their artistry—and they did.
These artists and writers are brilliant and in community with the world around them. Their perspectives explore and challenge boundaries, binaries, and dichotomies—of form, of body, of mind, of land, of home. Here, we find resilience; we find the sublime.
This issue is the result of hours—hundreds—volunteered by people dedicated to the vision of 45th Parallel. Every year a new group accepts the challenge. And here we are, excited to celebrate the journal’s tenth with a special print edition. I send my deepest gratitude to our editorial staff and readers, as well as the School of Writing, Literature, and Film.
Dear reader, onward you’ll find experiments in light and photography; time explored through tragedy, narrative, and philosophy; science fiction that parallels the inhumaneness of today; and that, “in the rain / we learned a new degree of separation / meaning there was none.”
Thank you for trusting us with your time. I’ll let the rest of these pages speak for themselves.
Sincerely,
Nicolette Ratz
What We Sing For
Havvah Keller
Melon seeds wrapped in brown paper. A hand drawn map of the entire coast.
The way the ribcage is a fishing net. Is hanging over the 8th floor balcony. Is the tiny stature of a child. Is the dictator’s bodyguard who grows melons en el campo who lives by the sea, with his wife.
Raindrops like palms, clapping and skipping. Raindrops we wake to.
Rain which promises ceaselessness. Promises my name for your insides. My name for the unburied dead.
The silence of one’s pulse. Of one’s eyes.
Of homelands which do not recognize themselves. Homelands overgrown with fruit bearing trees. Overgrown with diseased cattle. With fields whose soil shimmers. Whose soil is nourished by blood and feces. Crimson soil only the river recognizes.
The family name.
The family song from within a shattered courtyard.
From behind a cherry door. Behind every door which has no lock.
Havvah Keller poetry
Behind an ancient alarm: that the port will go on burning. That homelands burn.
Like the silence of the tremor from outside the wall. Or the silence which follows the flight of the vulture.
Which is making love in earshot of your mother. Is making love in rage. Is the man peering down into his cart full of bread.
Into the depths where the sea bass glide. Where the accordion disappears into light.
Into a torn lace gown.
Into twisted cracks of unmined lapis.
Into the empty grain storehouse.
Into a light, unsatisfying snow.
Into everything which was once something else.
Which is the faint sound of drumming. Which is what rises like dust from the earth. What rises like blood to the brain.
The monarch from its crumpled chrysalis. Boiling water in the iron kettle.
The body, poised, and perfectly still.
Havvah Keller
Trust Land
Laura Da’
A rail path lumbers through town past swan falls and beauty screens of liver and rust, crow call,
bittern beak, long coffee-colored slugs. Every hometown hides its growth rings under the bark. The wafer
of Douglas Fir in the centennial log pavilion is pre-contact Salish old growth. Ochre tannin of the rainforest. Seven-inch skin deeply pitted at the diameter. A seedling in the gold dust lichen days of Yelhw village. Meadows carbuncled with a haze of amethyst camas then strung with the cluster gold of hops.
Hills assayed for the black diamond of coal, all layered under velvet emerald capes of logged timber.
Beside the Cypress Grove of distinction are grids of blueberry fields with rows marked
Bluejay, Rabbiteye, Aurora. Signposts at the river trails extolling the necessity of living in harmony with large predators. Floods and floods. At school they asked where to buy the best
Laura Da’ poetry
fireworks and if our fathers were inclined to drinking. Long slick heel slip on purple skat
studded with seeds. Puppies and children frittering at the edges of the cluster of trailers
at the foot of Indian Hill where women laundered towels in the Snoqualmie River. Iron spikes
embedded in blistering tree trunks like the modest earrings young girls wear for a month after their ears are pierced. Neighbors still complain at the mess of cars and burning trash, but underneath is trust land, so they can take it up with the moon. At the school bus shelter, boys gathered before the long walk home and spat down at the trailers. The youngest said get down there and spat
on me too. Warm sap and a hint of ore in the humid embrace of the understory
where the last fall of berries rendered a carpet of rough garnets on the outskirts of my hometown.
Laura Da’
Grave Robber
Lauren “Prophet” Girod
Ecocide
oikos cadere
“Anthropocene extinction”
Holocene Epoch holos kainos
nine thousand seven hundred before
“global super predator”
colonia
“a place for agriculture”
“exploitation colonialism”
Bay of Pigs Invasion
22° 3’ 41.76”N, 81° 1’54.84W
Canal de Panamá
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
“disease vector”
…severe liver disease with bleeding and yellowing of skin...
…fever, fatigue,
Sacrifice Zone
“environmental sacrifice zone”
common era
Manifest Destiny Common Sense
“american exceptionalism” “american imperialism”
Lauren Girod
coma, or death.
quietus thánatos
“escape velocity” eleven kilometers per second
“ultimate sacrifice zone” Spatial Colonization
Operación Nos Quieren Tirar
Natalia Martinez
They began sending us years ago, twenty or thirty at a time, when the detention centers became too crowded, and they no longer knew what to do with us. At first, they tried to cover it up, just like they always did, claiming they were only sending volunteers into the great unknown for research purposes, that of course they would come back, that sooner or later, all of the volunteers would come back down to Earth and tell the world what it was like to be a civilian in deep space. But there were so many send-offs, so many launches. It was unusual, even for the United States.
None of them ever came back.
So they blew their cover, just like they always did. Other countries had begun to realize that the U.S. was shipping us off into the cosmos to make room for the ones that kept coming in, desperate for a chance at a better life.
At first, there was outrage. People all over the globe marched into the streets in protest. Petitions were made. Assassinations of important but immoral people were attempted. The world was in turmoil, just as it had always been, but this time, they were talking about us. We huddled toward the doors of our detention rooms and listened to the radio of the guards, trying to hear past the sound of crying babies and diluted murmurs of concern that fiction
Natalia Martinez
It didn’t take long for the other countries to realize that the U.S. was onto something. China began investing heavily in cheaper alternatives to aerospace-grade aluminum. France increased its exit launches by seventy-two percent, eight months after releasing a public statement scrutinizing the United States for its “debased solution to the immigration problem.” Greece and Ireland had begun to express a deeper interest in space exploration than ever before, asking the European Union for unprecedented funding for space research.
And so began what the adults in the camps called Operación Nos Quieren Tirar (ONQT, for short): a series of covert weekly launchings that disposed of immigrants and refugees from various detention centers all over the world into deep space via rocket ship.
When I was much younger, my mother would often tell me stories about how my father had been sent into the sky. I imagined my father being shot from a cannon, his body, straight as an arrow, piercing the atmosphere like a pencil poking a hole into a large sheet of blue paper. He was one of the first, my mother said, back when no one really knew what ONQT was and where exactly their family members were going. At first, it was only the elders and the men who began disappearing. They called the place that they were sent to segundo cielo, second heaven.
18 Natalia Martinez fiction soared into the air in a chorus of languages. There we sat, a cluster of sound and humanity, listening to the radio, translating if it was in English, which it often was, hoping that one day it would broadcast our freedom.
Other people in the detention center called it by different names, whispering about it in languages that I never quite recognized. Some prophesied it would be beautiful. They described the wings of angels and the swiftness of their feathers, promising they would be there in all their radiant glory to guide our way to that strange other place. Some said it would be cold, like the Arctic. Others said it was a lot like this place, only worse, and without sound.
One of us was a scientist, an astronomist from Guatemala, who had been caught crossing somewhere in the middle of the Texas desert on his way to the Astronomy Institute of Arizona. It had been his lifelong dream to study at the university, and all he needed was to get there. They brought him to the detention center in the dead of night, scattering his ambitions to the Chihuahuan desert winds, along with all of the companions he had been traveling with, some from Guatemala, some from Honduras, and others that had joined them along the way in Ciudad Juarez. In the evenings, we would all gather around him as he told us of what lay beyond our big blue sky. Stars, he said, that could consume a thousand earths within the volume of its scorching body. A darkness no man has ever measured or contained. A galaxy made of milk.
The truth was, no one knew what it was like up there because everyone who had gone up had never come down. And never would come down, my mother would often say, with tears in her eyes and a longing for my father.
Natalia Martinez
The day they told me I was up for segundo cielo, I nearly wet myself out of fear. Rumors that this time they would send a child had begun circulating weeks before. They sent me home early from the detention center school, the only thing that allowed me a few hours away from the crowded detainment room. School was a break that the adults didn’t get to have. Coming back to the room early meant something was wrong. I remember being put on the white detention center bus alone with no other children and arriving at the grayscale detainee building. My mother and two officers were waiting for me by the plexiglass doorway as I stepped off. My mother, speechless, took me in her arms as the officers led us through a fluorescent hallway that seemed to extend for miles, until finally, we reached what looked like the administrative sector of the building.
The office doors, framed by gray slap-brush plaster walls, were made of dark wood. The hall smelled of cedar. It all seemed familiar, as though we had been there before, years ago, perhaps on the day that we had arrived, or perhaps because it had always been there, waiting for us as we sat in our detainment room, fearing the inevitable.
We stopped at an office at the end of the hall. The officers motioned for us to enter, and my mother opened the door slowly to reveal an older woman sitting at her desk behind a stack of paperwork, a young man dressed in black seated next to her.
“Welcome,” she said.
“Bienvenidos,” the young man echoed, and demonstrated with his arm that my mother and I should take a seat.
“I’m sure you are wondering why you are here, Mrs. Lopez,” said the woman, and in rapid succession, the young man followed with his translation, their words so close in time that they felt syncopated and uncanny.
“Yes,” my mother said and then addressed the man in Spanish. “Can you ask her if this is about our release? Are we leaving the center?”
The man in black turned to the woman and relayed my mother’s message. The woman shook her head, no.
“Unfortunately, Mrs. Lopez,” the man translated, “your request for residency is still being processed. Once the court date for your appeal has been decided, we will summon you alone.”
My mother nodded slowly.
“Then why are we here?” she said, this time addressing the woman in an accented English that she had begun to learn in the center. It sounded strange coming from her mouth, and the woman who sat behind the desk looked uncomfortable, as though my mother had penetrated an invisible shield that surrounded her. She looked toward the man in black but continued conversing with my mother.
“Your daughter is being relocated. We have a special program, farther south of where we are now.”
“What program?” my mother said. “We need to be here, for the day they summon us for court. I was told we could not leave the center.”
“It is the same program your husband volunteered for seven years ago. They are now accepting children, and your daughter was recommended highly by her teacher at the school.”
I knew this was a lie. We had a different teacher almost every day, switching back and forth between classrooms like musical chairs, a game I had learned at the center. Some were kinder than others, but none of them knew us by name.
My mother’s face went pale. “My daughter does not want to volunteer.”
The woman nodded.
“Mrs. Lopez, I understand. But until your court date, your child is a ward of the state. A court order has been issued to relocate your daughter. You can appeal it once your trial is over, but for now, she is under our jurisdiction.”
“Then let me go with her.”
The woman sighed. I had begun to notice the features of her face, the wrinkles that sank deeply beneath her drooping eyes. She looked tired and hollow, like she was in desperate need of sleep or sunlight.
“You are needed here, Mrs. Lopez. You cannot leave until you are summoned to court. The state is only sending children at this time.”
“Please,” my mother said, reaching for the woman’s hand across the desk. “Let us go together.”
The woman looked at her grasp, incredulous, but not offended by my mother’s unexpected familiarity.
“It’s not up to me,” she said quietly. There was something like pity in her voice, yet still, she recoiled her hand slowly, as if not to break her resolve. “I’m very sorry.” *
When we were finally sent home, it was very late. My moth-
er and I laid on our shared cot as I replayed the conversation that had just taken place in my head. I would be sent the next day to Boca Chica. My mother could come along to say goodbye. The woman had told us that it was an honor and a privilege to be one of the first children in our region. I wasn’t sure if this was true, but there was something in my mother’s voice as she soothed me that night that told me she was somehow relieved I would be leaving the detention center.
The room was quiet, with the exception of my sniffling. The lights had been shut off. It was after hours, and the guards would be watching us in the dark. It was obvious that the others knew. We always knew when someone would be sent to segundo cielo soon. There was just something in the air. A solemnness, an anxiety, like waiting for your last gasp of breath before death.
My mother had begun to hum a soft melody to me, a song she said was popular in the days when she was a young girl dancing in the discotheques of Ciudad Juarez. I did not remember Juarez, or any place for that matter, other than the center. The song was about a young man who had found the love of his life in Jalisco. But there was something in the way that my mother sang it that made it seem sad and longing, like a farewell.
And then suddenly, there was harmony. The presence of a softer second voice had emerged from somewhere in the dark, accompanying the sound of my mother. And then a lower voice with a lower tone from across the room joined, whispering the words to the darkness. One by one, they joined and began to sing my mother’s song. Those who did not know the language still followed the melody, and the sound of their humming filled the
Natalia Martinez
When the song finished, we all lay in silence. I could feel my mother’s tears making the cot wet. One of the men sleeping on the floor sat up to grab my mother’s wrist. He was older, and his hand, veiny and frail, clung to my mother’s arm with great force. “Don’t cry. Your little girl will be okay, here, with us,” he said, his grasp getting tighter around my mother’s wrist. Sometimes when a woman was sent to segundo, some of the men would try to have their way with them, reasoning that their bodies were lost to the cosmos anyway.
My mother shook her head and turned to face him. Her eyes looked glossy and hard in the dark, like two black marbles glistening under the moonlight.
“It’s not me who’s going. It’s her. Let go.”
I hardly slept that night, and early the next morning a different set of officers came to retrieve us from our detainment room. We walked again through the gray corridor, then through a set of glass double doors that led us into the blinding desert sun. We were escorted toward a large federal vehicle. Inside was the smell of industrial leather. I became carsick almost immediately. I watched my last glimpses of the desert through a small, tinted window in the back seat as we made our way toward the launching station.
I felt the sudden halt of the car as the door unlatched. We were asked to step out of the vehicle. My mother took my hand in hers and held on with unprecedented force. An officer led us toward a small, cylindrical cone made of aluminum in the distance.
Martinez fiction room.
My mother took me in her arms, heavy as I was. Doubt flashed across my mother’s face, a cold stiffness. She scanned her eyes across the terrain. No, we couldn’t run. There was nothing but desert for miles. Even if we somehow made it past the men who accompanied us to the launching site base, we would die of thirst in a matter of days.
An officer moved toward my mother in an attempt to initiate the exchange. She flinched and backed away, but the officer only drew nearer. I felt my mother’s arms tighten around my torso.
The officer’s hands reached for my waist, pulling me toward him. I felt the break of my mother’s grasp, the tips of my mother’s fingers sliding through mine. Then, the arms of the officers passing me around like an unyielding baby. I remember screaming into the ear of each man who carried me, the slap that silenced my wailing.
Then, a push into a cold darkness. The sound of an electrical hum.
The murmurs of men in confirmation, muffled by a wall of metal.
A violent thrusting upward, and then a piercing screech, like the sound of a dying hawk.
My heart, pounding against my chest. My stomach moving from the bottom of my abdomen and into my throat. A feeling like weightlessness, and then the black velvet night that forced my eyes shut. *
There is silence. They were right about that. The air is dry, much like the desert. I can feel it getting thinner. Time passes, Natalia Martinez
but I couldn’t say for sure how long it’s been since I made it here. I do not know if there are others, or if I am alone.
There is a window through which I can see everything. Perhaps this window is my own set of eyes. I watch the sun as it rises over the atmosphere of the earth, a bright, iridescent pearl. The hot flash of a neutron star imploding, all color, no sound.
Sometimes I try to imagine the place I once came from, what it looked like, what it has become, although this too is beginning to fade from my memory. I try to hold on to the image of my mother, the lilting sound of her voice. The sounds of the detention center. I try to hold on to it for as long as I can before it begins to fall quiet. Before it begins to become just another part of the earth.
Natalia Martinez fiction
Transcrypsis
Haley Bossé
1. Camouflage
In the era of rain, our only color was graphite with pebble, fossil, lead present in the fabric.
When I woke, I searched the piles for the closest feel to dry and plastered it, still heaving, to my body.
In the rain
we learned a new degree of separation
meaning there was none, just our skin, just the rivers of icy water flowing down through sticky strands of fur and over the chilled and porous landscape of our organs, only breathing in the water and out, a gill-less form of respiration.
Haley Bossé
2. Mimicry
The pleated skirt falls just below the crease that borders your thighs and you spill gratitude, know God would forgive you for this slight of hand, aposematism that tells your peers that you are easy and nothing else, that their lazy curiosity ought to land on something softer and more likely to run, so when you turn your snake-like eye upon them they’ll think “Ah, she’s just a caterpillar,” or “Ah, she’s just a snake,” but always “She.” She, she, she, rattling along the floor.
Haley Bossé poetry
3. Nocturnality
When the man comes through the window you think, here he is to kill me or hold me to the night, either preferable to the blue-aired silence that fills with growing hands, the pursing of his mouth as he slides his skin between the sheaves of fabric that pin you to this world. When he chokes you, you bleed into the room until the air comes rushing back. Next time the dark will burrow deeper and claim you as its creature.
4. Subterraneous Lifestyle
In the basement of the church, the boy tries crying as they lift their arms toward the rafters, hands open to receive something they’re told that they deserve. Later, they’ll argue with the man who pours the punch—it’s red bull spiked, don’t tell—about the security system for the kingdom of heaven, their skeleton locked essentially in place despite its growing looseness, the pockets of air expanding as layers of skin and what was once their self pull painfully apart. For now, when the man asks, “Still loving Jesus?” with a hand on their vibrating clavicle, the boy nods a yes and tugs their clothes back into place, still skirting through this kingdom of animals, dressed to the teeth and hiding their claws.
Haley Bossé
Fountain
Shir Kehila
It had been a dare.
The water wasn’t clean, but it was clear, which was more than you could say for the stagnant, polluted river a few streets west. The boys must have heard of the collapsed bridge, the fallen athletes, the infections. They must have learned to fear its slithering, green stream—its shallow, deceptive depths and teeming, hungry bed.
But no one, I imagine, said anything about fountains.
Have I told you, I wonder, about the boy? I can’t remember, but I must have. You needed stories of this kind— tragedies —and I delivered them like prey, mouth to mouth, relieved to have something to give you.
The boys had been out. It was night, a late summer weekend. This was their time, or so old people said, but how to enter it? The night was flat, impenetrable, disappointing—their claim on the present loose and slippery as the concept itself.
We have to assume they’d been drinking, that they weren’t yet ready, when the bar closed, to go home, back to the alien rooms they’d left months earlier, quietly into their childhood sheets. So they wandered around. This neighborhood had little to offer—an odd cross between suburb and Wall Street—but there was this sterile, manicured plaza, and in it, a fountain, and in it, water shaped
Shir Kehila creative nonfiction
by its flow, sculpted like marble, glinting, and suddenly it seemed like what they’d been looking for: a trap door into this moment.
The truth is, I know very little about this dare. But I know the fear engine behind it—the fatal drive to deliver, and be delivered. You know this drive, too, not just because you survived it, but because you weren’t sure you would, and that didn’t stop you.
I imagine the boys’ faces: what they looked like the moment after the “before,” and before the “after.” But I must not skip the earlier “before”—ahead of the curve that left the future toppled sideways like a train car. I can’t help thinking in these terms—before, after—despite what I now know about the passage of time, the blurred appearance of forward motion.
The boy was likely egged on. Just imagine it’s the pool, his friends may have urged, huddled around the fountain like a fire pit. I want to show you the during: how they laughed, deafened for a few seconds by their own abandon. I want to search further back—the months leading up to this night, the boys’ orbits around one another, their shifting alliances. But these aren’t my memories. I only know what happened next, what stopped happening.
I want to tell you the boys were truly all boys, but I have only a third-hand story, a sparse recounting in my mother tongue, where the masculine plural is ubiquitous, assumed to include the feminine, or erase it, if there was a difference. My friend had heard it from her father, who heard it from the boy’s father, his own friend.
I wrote it down at the time—it was, like this, a letter to you— though you were less its addressee than its conduit, a way to get it out of me.
Shir Kehila
There was nothing to be done for the boy, I learn now, reading the letter. I say learn because I’d managed, somehow, to forget. The story had stopped haunting me. The boy, like most of my ghosts, had been more disappearance than apparition.
But I’m jumping around. This isn’t the sequence of things. The boy jumped into the fountain, and the fountain kept him a boy.
When I googled “the fountain of youth,” I was looking, it seemed, for what wasn’t there: a myth of royalties and commoners fighting a shared poverty of time. What I did find was a slew of articles about Ponce de Leon, whose search for the fountain, I learned, was itself a myth.
But I’ve gotten carried away again. The story repels my grip, like water, refusing to still.
The day before my friend called to tell me, I met another friend for coffee. It feels outrageous to mention, to even recall such a sceneless scene. It’s also inconsiderate, because he was my ex—because he took me out when you couldn’t. But it had been that day, of all days, that he told me the Hindi word for yesterday, kal, was the same as the word for tomorrow.
I spent much of that afternoon wondering what it meant. What was the difference, really, between the not-yet and no-longer reachable? The blurring of their edges, I started to think, threw their essence into relief.
You were spending your days in a dark bedroom then, curtains
Shir Kehila creative nonfiction
pinned to the walls on both sides of the windows. You could hardly tolerate light. One could say your days disappeared there, in the dark, made illegible like the books on your shelves, heavy and long unopened.
I think now about what the boy couldn’t have seen then: the deadly current of that water. “Electric shock drowning,” I read online, “can happen when faulty wiring releases an electrical current,” paralyzing a swimmer’s muscles, and leading to their drowning. In some cases, though, the shock itself can kill.
The boy didn’t die right away. Still, it was only a matter of time; there was no hope for his survival. Still, he was kept on life support by law. His parents couldn’t take him off it so long as his heart was beating. They just had to wait and watch. . It had something to do with the sanctity of life—how no man could claim what belonged to god, though the claiming had been underway, and couldn’t be reversed. It might only take a day, the boy’s doctors told his parents, or it might take a year. A day, a year—as though the two weren’t very different. As though they, too, could have been synonyms. As though yesterday and tomorrow hadn’t already turned, within the span of one day, into antonyms.
“Why doesn’t everyone keep the same time?” asks the 19th century French writer, Alphonse Daudet. “A few explanations occur to me. Essentially: our lives are so different from one another, that it makes sense for the disparity to be symbolized in this way.” It made me think of you, back when I first read this: how different your life had been from mine, yes, but also how you knew, in the thick dark of your room, when it was time for this pill, or that powder, or spray, or gel—you had so many concoctions—how ceaselessly attuned you’d become to the passage of invisible hours. Shir Kehila
How, when we took a guess at the time, at random moments, you were always closer.
We keep different times not only from others, though, but within ourselves. “Time passes more slowly for your feet than it does for your head,” Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli writes in The Order of Time. Time passes faster on a mountain peak than in the plains, but also faster on your kitchen counter than on your floor. Specialized timepieces can detect the slowing down of time just centimeters apart. And so time has “lost its first layer,” Rovelli writes, “its unity.” Lost, though it never had it outside our perception— though our perception of it, too, was never unified.
Imagine two friends, I tell my friend, who is visiting. One moves to a coastal city, and the other to a town in the mountains. They reunite ten years later, by which point the friend at sea level will have aged less. Her plants, too, will have grown less than her friend’s. “I don’t believe in time,” she says, shaking her head.
“Times are a legion,” Rovelli writes, “a different one for every point in space.” There’s no “real time,” then; the notion is meaningless. Different times “have value,” like different currencies, only “relative to one another.”
Even on the coast, of course, time is fast in its slowness. Some years went by without my thinking of the boy. But his story aged in my memory while, and because, he didn’t.
The summer you and I got together, I went back to my hometown, which was also the boy’s. He was still alive, his last few weeks, and Shir Kehila creative nonfiction
you were hanging by a thread, and didn’t tell me. You were afraid I’d give up on you—you didn’t know me well—and I suspected nothing, not knowing you, either.
In my hometown, summer was either the longest or only season, depending on who you asked. Leaves didn’t turn vibrant colors, or twirled off branches; time’s passage was hardly evident in the landscape outside clocks and calendars and the body.
In Hod Halevy’s Degenerate, a novel I’ve started translating, a year is measured, within an hourglass as tall as a building, in sand. When the fictional mayor pulls down the drapes from over it—making promises about improving, within that time frame, the “face of the city”—it appears the “year” had already begun, at some unknown time, to fall.
How many grains of sand, I imagine you’d wonder, “make” one year?
“The hourglass is a declaration of intent,” the mayor drowns on— things would look different once the top is emptied of sand. “I’m glad to announce a year of change,” he says. To announce, that is, what would come anyway. To promise as much as surrender.
That first summer, when you and I were still new to each other, your symptoms were worse in the mornings, so we’d call in your late afternoons, my nights. Often, it was 3am where I was by the time we got off the phone, and so we joked about my dislodged schedule. I lived in “Icelandic Time,” we said: somewhere between our bodies. We had no idea how accurate the metaphor was—how precisely it captured imprecision.
Shir Kehila
Iceland observes Greenwich Mean Time, like countries including Mali, Portugal, and the UK—all much further east. On time zone maps, you can see it clearly: UTC+0 seems to leave itself before it can box Iceland in. On the ground, this geospatial distance causes a discrepancy between light and clocks. The island’s official time is distant, not local. Relative to light, its clocks are early; relative to clocks, light is in constant delay.
While you couldn’t leave your room, I lived removed from my own geospatial position, inside a time removed from itself. These layers of distance collapsed against each other, allowing me to reach you while you stayed in place—while it was still the one place you could be—while no light reached you at all.
In Halevy’s novel, a divorcé in his 60s—the protagonist—walks toward the hourglass. The structure towers over the city’s main square, and yet, the man has the impression that his palm “could encircle the narrow neck of the hourglass, the place where the future becomes the past.” The protagonist touches the glass, hypnotized by the falling sand. “While the moment of passage was beautiful,” he thinks, “the moment of impact was stunning.” Watching, he suddenly knows what he must do.
Though Iceland was thousands of kilometers closer to you, its time zone was closer to my hometown’s. This complicated my idea of Icelandic Time as the grounds of our relationship, a “middle” closer to you—a “middle” because it was closer to you. Now, I think it may be many, dispersed “middles”—as time is many times.
In the second chapter of his book, Rovelli writes of another, “more essential” aspect of time: “its passage, its flow, the eternal current
Shir Kehila creative nonfiction
of the first of Rilke’s elegies:
The eternal current Draws all the ages along with it Through both realms, Overwhelming them in both.”
“And what exactly is this flowing?” he asks. “Where is it nestled in the grammar of the world?” Grappling with this question, 19th and 20th century physicists “ran into something unexpected and disconcerting.” He continues: “The difference between past and future, between memory and hope, between regret and intention… in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.”
The grammar of the world, it would seem, is in conflict with that of English. It’s in conflict with that of other languages I speak. But perhaps not with that of Hindi.
Had we been able to see “the actual dance of millions of molecules,” Rovelli writes, “then the future would be ‘just like’ the past.” The difference between them, as the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann came to see, “refers only to our own blurred vision.”
Halevy’s protagonist couldn’t tell, while looking at the hourglass, whether the impression he’d had—that he could wrap his palm around its neck—was “an optical illusion or a real possibility.” He wanted, as I do—as I know you would, too—to feel the pulse of time: to hold the present in his hands, then tighten his grip.
“In the elementary grammar of things,” Rovelli writes, “there’s no Shir Kehila
distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’” But how not to distinguish between boy walks into a fountain and boy doesn’t walk out? How not to see them as action and reaction?
“Is it really possible,” Rovelli asks, “that my perception of the passage of time”—vivid, basic, existential, as he describes it—“depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world in all of its minute detail? On a kind of distortion?” Yes—the answer’s yes. The present determines both the past and the future, Rovelli writes—to the same degree. “The source of Rilke’s eternal current,” he adds, “is nothing other than this.” This being, as Boltzmann understood, our own faulty vision.
Boltzmann, the physicist who saw not only the blurring itself, but what it distorted, was “criticized by the majority of the academic world,” Rovelli writes, “which did not understand his ideas.” He “will end his life by hanging himself” in Duino, a small village near Trieste, “while his wife and daughter are swimming in the Adriatic. The same Duino where, just a few years later, Rilke will write his Elegy.”
It was also the same Duino where, to no consequence of note, time began to taunt me. Where another poet’s elegies—a contemporary of Rilke’s—started looping in my mind. Where Italian opened for me like a new eye. Where I started looking for you. There are twenty one tenses in Italian, nine more than in English, and nineteen more than in my mother tongue. I hungry, we say in the present, which calls for no “to be.” I speak, therefore, I am, the grammar implies; to say is to exist in the saying—to be “present” in language, in the confluence of speech and tense. To inhabit, implicitly, what inhabits us. Boy drowns, we say. He isn’t drown-
Shir Kehila creative nonfiction
ing. He isn’t anything. The action is limited, contained. Boy dies, too—he isn’t dying—though his grip on time is loosened finger by finger.
“Our thinking is prey to its own weakness,” Rovelli writes, “but even more so, to its own grammar.” Unsure how to think outside grammar, I’m confused by this distinction. It might be fittingly blurry, though, in its own right. Rovelli continues: “When we have found all the aspects of time that can be spoken of, then we have found time.” All aspects of time that can be spoken of, I assume, even if inadequately—even if they break in our grasp, or melt on our tongues, or blow to pieces in town squares—leaving glass shards and sand heaps on the pavement.
And didn’t time become, in breaking, more reflective of its nature—its plurality?
I should tell you, now, of my own discovery. The boy didn’t have to imagine that he was getting into a pool. He was getting into a pool. He’d jumped into it with a friend, but the friend survived and made it out of the story. The fountain, I’d thought, was time— its invisible source, its relentless percolating. I’d become fixated on that image of a boy swallowed by time. But the water was still and shallow, and the metaphor no longer worked. Except it did, I think now, for that same reason.
Shir Kehila
Formation
Time can be deep. Ours drop-shallow compared to the river. Deeper still what formed her— Cordilleran cadence, tongues of advance & retreat. Earth sinking beneath the weight of ice sheet. Pulse, core of meltwater forcing gorge. Hollow, seen. Here, a landscape left behind by a dead glacier, her bedrock. River’s story strata unwritten, earthed and unearthed in layers, rock slope, texture, terrain. Chasm & chert. Bone tools and hammerstone. Hozomeen, mountain of my dreaming, river dreams my dreaming beneath flexible & floodwise cedars.
Caitlin Scarano
Caitlin Scarano
After the work of Bob Mierendorf
poetry
Raven
black silk white milk raven unravels quadrants of snow a ruined river anabranches braid of joy braid of grief one in the same the same heart hangs like a question in the mouth or a wilderness in the mouth suffering beauty until it is devoured clotted with teeth with silt I am lying next to you
Caitlin Scarano
Luciana Abait Untitled #8575
Luciana Abait Untitled #0842
Donna at the Ocean
Meg Favreau
Donna had lost something; she knew that for sure. But she couldn’t remember what the thing was. Her mind kept slipping around it like it was an algae-covered rock. Donna just knew that it was a loss, and it was massive.
Huh. Was that right?
Was the loss massive, or was the thing itself massive? Donna tried to get her slipping brain around that. Could she have lost a whale? Was that a thing people could do? Donna’s eyes filled with tears at the thought of that. The ocean was too big. Searching it would take… at least three months, probably. But also more, now that Donna thought about it. The ocean was gigantic. The ocean was…
The ocean.
She was looking at the ocean.
That was something. Something real, something tangible. Donna decided to assess the situation. Maybe that would tell her what she lost.
She was sitting on some rocks, which was not very comfortable, honestly. Painful on the… plelvis? Pelvis. Butt? The butt itself does not have bones, right? Donna shifted on the rocks a bit and giggled, thinking about what a butt bone might look like. Like bone bowls, two of them, tucked under the skin. And butt bones would mean kids would be falling all the time, breaking their butts on the playground. Donna giggled again.
Meg Favreau fiction
A wave crashed, and it felt like a reminder: Donna, this is serious. Put on your adult hlat. Adult hat. She touched her head, to see if maybe the adult hlat—hat, Donna—was literal, and if so, if it was already there. But all she touched was hair, forehead, and wet.
Wet. Huh.
Had she been in the ocean? But Donna looked at the fingers she used to touch her forehead, and they were red. The wet was bood.
No, blood. That one did have an L in it.
Oh! The thing she lost. Was it blood? She appeared to be losing it right now, after all, out of somewhere on her head. It certainly seemed like that would be a problem.
Maybe she lost blood and a whale. Phew, Donna. Big day.
Donna. Donna.
She said the name out loud—“Dawn-uh”—and it startled her a bit. Even over the waves. The name felt unusual. Why? It was her name, after all. And Donna was… an age. She’d had that name every year of that age. Right?
And that age was…
Another wave crashed in, and a number came to her: 47.
Okay. So Donna was 47 and at the ocean, and she was pretty sure there were no actual bones in the butt. But also, that feeling of anxiety still gripped at her chest: loss.
“Mom!”
Donna turned to the voice, which was coming from an eel boy walking down the cliffside path, through the sage and scrub. No, not an eel boy. A boy who was skinny like an eel. Thin, in a
Meg Favreau
T-shirt and jeans. His face was annoyed, his teeth too big for his mouth. Maybe 10, yes? That was another age. Ten and forty-seven. 10and47.
Oh, this must be it: she lost an eel boy. Skinny like an eel, Donna. And here he was now, found.
Donna smiled, waiting for relief to flood into her chest. But it didn’t. This was not the thing she lost, even though the boy was walking straight towards her, saying “Mom” again.
“I didn’t lose you?” she said to the boy. David. David? David and Donna? That seemed like a lot of D names.
The boy—the David—didn’t register the question. “You said you’d just be a second.” He looked at her. “What happened to your head?”
“Blood?” replied Donna.
The boy squinted at her. His face flashed with concern, then fear, then that thing David did when he was trying to pretend he wasn’t afraid. Donna knew the Thing David Did. Of course she did. He was her slon. Soln.
Son.
Her son, who was now yelling “DAD!” up at the cliff. Was the cliff “dad”? No. Dad was coming down the cliff, down the path from where they parked the CR-V. They needed to get gas, remembered Donna. Probably before Santa Barbara. Also, the man’s name was Cliff. Wow, really? Yes. Her husband. Cliff on a cliff. Donna giggled as Cliff burst through the sage, running as fast as he could on the steep dirt. He was a trail runner, once. Before the knee thing.
He looked worried.
Meg Favreau fiction
“What happened?” he yelled, running towards Donna.
“Loss,” she said. “Blood.”
Cliff looked at David, who looked back at Cliff. Neither of them seemed stoked, exactly. That was a word Cliff liked, stoked.
“Did you fall?” asked Cliff, looking at Donna’s head where the blood was coming out. “It doesn’t seem too deep.”
Did Donna fall? Loss of balance was a type of loss. It felt like a small loss considering the feeling that had been gripping her chest, trying to explode out of her ribcage. But maybe she really loved balance.
“Do I love balance?” she asked Cliff. Cliff and David shared another look. But part of Donna was warmed by that. It’s nice to see them getting along after the go-kart incident.
And also, as she looked at that sense of loss more closely, she realized it was starting to fade a bit. It felt more dull than sharp, like a heavy bundle wrapped in flabric—fabric—stuck in her chest, rather than a bunch of knives trying to poke their way out, which is what it had felt like before. That was nice. Another wave crashed in, getting a bit of spray on Donna. She smiled.
“Can you stand?” asked Cliff, offering his hand. The rings on their fingers matched, gold rings with engravings of each other’s initials, as if to say Yeah, I’m married, and this is exactly who I’m married to, buddy. Or maybe they were like the ring version of Conner’s tag—Conner? Yes, Conner the poodle—these are the initials of who to call if I’m lost. Which Donna sort of was.
But can you stand, that was an interesting question. Donna looked at her legs, dressed in capri-length cargo pants, sensible sandals on her feet. Her toenails were painted red. An odd thing to Meg Favreau
do, Donna thought. To just throw some paint on little hard ends of the body.
Donna took Cliff’s warm hand and stood. Her legs felt shaky. Cliff must be right; she must’ve fallen.
“Can we go?” yelled a girl’s voice from above. Donna turned to see Chelsea up the path, holding Conner on his leash. Yeesh, all C names and D names. Chelsea’s shorts were too short, her hair too… hair. Just barely a teenager and trying to be 20. But it was the caring that really got Donna. Chelsea felt like she had to fit into a form other people designed.
“Coming!” she yelled up at her daughter, who was already heading back to the car. Donna smiled at Cliff, genuine. “I’m fine,” she said. “I must have slipped.”
And that feeling of loss was smaller now, shrinking, the size of a tennis ball, a clementine, a pea. It was filled up by her family and their concern, by the feeling of Cliff’s hands, which were rough from the woodworking, that stupid dining table he kept trying to finish even though there was no way to get it up from the basement. Like, what were they going to do? Eat dinner next to the furnace? But it made him so happy.
“You go up,” she said to the boys. “I’ll be there in a second.”
“You sure?” Cliff asked.
“I’m sure,” Donna told him.
Donna looked back at the ocean. The cool air whipped her skin, stinging a bit with its salt. The feeling of loss was almost gone now. So Donna turned and started up the path after her family, her shaking legs becoming more sure with each step she
Meg Favreau fiction
took, and she didn’t turn around again as she walked.
If she had, she might have seen the boy drag himself up on shore. Not elegant, because his body was made for the water. But straining, reaching with his human-like arms and dragging his eel-like tail. The eel boy yelled at Donna, and it sounded like the chitter of dolphins, laced with loopy Ls.
He was followed by a man with a tail, a man like Cliff, and a girl like Chelsea, but with her ta-tas out. That’s what Donna would’ve called them, if she had turned around to see them. They all yelled at Donna as they tried to pull themselves up on the sand and rocks, their wet hair clinging to their heads, their backs, their faces.
If Donna looked, she might’ve seen that they were crying, all of them, even the fish girl who had honestly been sort of a shit recently. But maybe Donna would’ve convinced herself that it was just ocean water on their faces.
Donna kept walking, walking on her beautiful, skin-covered legs. And Donna could say that, as she walked, the wind swept the fish family’s voices away so that she didn’t hear them. Or she could say that she didn’t understand them, but that wouldn’t be true either. Donna heard—
Please, mom.
You don’t need legs, mom.
You don’t need a land family, mom.
We can ask that witch to take it back, honey.
I’ll stop being a shit, mom.
Please.
Meg Favreau
Please.
But Donna kept walking. She was filled with love for her life, her people, her legs working to bring her back up the cliff. She walked all the way to the passenger side of the CR-V. From here, the ocean looked flat, uniform, bland. Gas before Santa Barbara, she remembered.
The loss was nothing now. A seed, a spark, a grain of sand, indistinguishable from the millions of others on the beach. There was nothing in the ocean for Donna. Nothing lost, nothing to miss.
Meg Favreau fiction
Considering the Hadal Zone
Elizabeth Bradfield
Cusk eels in the harbor ratchet for love all August. We hear them buzz at night, desire sounded as thumb up washboard, pulsed from where we anchor.
The deepest ocean trenches are named for Hades, god of the underworld, who waits for love to fall to him. In that dark, isopods feed on what drifts down from sunlit water: tissue, eelgrass, shipwood, Fukishima’s radionuclides.
Elizabeth Bradfield
The sea floor is mapped by satellites that ping the ocean surface and factor out the waves that pass across it, leaving swells and dimples pushed or pulled by peaks and trenches deep below, proof that what’s hidden can still be sensed.
3.
There’s a quartzite block a half-fathom high and larger than a kingsize bed to the east of Provincetown’s Town Hall. Its surface ripples with small waves stilled forever, memorial to the disease that flooded this town in the 80s, stormed those who held and cared for all who fell to them from places that would not hold care. I like to imagine, inside the block, delicate, sensitive forms drifting and brushing each other like cilia, sargassum, or tentacles.
Elizabeth Bradfield poetry
As a kid, my dream was to live on the sea floor in a domed house of glass. Last summer, on the Labrador ferry coming in to Natuashish, we passed the ship that weeks before had launched the sub that sank to visit the Titanic and never came back. On the ferry deck, a buzz everywhere at once and hard to locate like sound underwater to human ears there are kids on deck I’d quit for sure is that the crew in lawn chairs is that really they must be so where are they going can you imagine I hear the family how long do you think they waited 5.
I wear both our wedding rings and your father’s, too, on my right ring finger. They click quietly. Some cusk eels thrive in the Hadal Zone’s dark crush. The articles don’t say if they make any sound.
Elizabeth Bradfield
Robbers Cave Study —Oklahoma, 1954
Rebecca Dunham
Their limbs splayed like starfish, the boys sleep salt-damp in summer’s heat. The liquid hum of mosquitoes rushes in and out of their dreams like white noise and a scatter of angry bites rash their sun-red skin. The camp directors, Muzafer Sherif and research team—sound reveille. Its trumpet call is a locomotive burning through morning’s green. This is the summer before ethics concerns, before Lord of the Flies and informed consent, and if one wants to study what things can be done to a group of boys,
Rebecca Dunham
what things they might do to win a trophy or a fan of silver knives, then he can give them a pack of matches and a rival team’s flag to burn. Resentment is a parasite: its thread-like form beautiful as a spider’s silk. Irresistible as the confidence man’s pitch. His voice pulses through us, ceaselessly, until our every breath breeds a new grievance, multiplying like a snarl of worms in our canine hearts.
Rebecca Dunham
Brute Scrapbook
Hannah Cook
If I’d forgotten to feed the dog it was because I was without borders, there’s no edge to my brutality. The dried-up water bowl was just a trick of the light. I’m just recalibrating, I say to myself.
I was helpless to guess at my own wanting like I’m resisting this old old geometry: Your mouth is in mine like a plume of freshly washed teeth, a flicker of neither heaven nor hell, your hands are on my neck or in prayer I can’t remember anymore
& why is it that I still keep your teeth in a little cherrywood box & those rat bones too, still in a copper tin & shell casings from the time we went shooting & your other stupid smatterings on the wall like lapis frescoes & little vials of mercury under my pillow like dream catchers and Someday I will come to understand this is not a ‘mappable’ violence
Hannah Cook
poetry
The Lights of Flies
Joe Wilkins
When he wakes into what passes now for waking— tumor pressing hard against his amygdala— he insists he has been with his mother, that she rode a blaze-faced horse, her hair tied back with twine. Sunflowers stippled the verge. Every spring, he remembered— & how had he forgotten?—she’d pillow her blouse with black seeds for scattering, & this late in the season they’d grown high & bright, heavy heads nodding in the gathering dark. The snapped banner of his father’s voice sounded—his father calling his name!—& he ran for the machine shop. That long-ago voice of God lifted the tide of his blood, as his grown man’s legs lifted quick & clean as a boy’s. This was Iowa. Shaggy red prairie grass grew through the rusty bone-workings & eyes of foundered tractors, the gapped mouth of an old thresher. Dusk air funneled in & out of his suddenly wonderful lungs. All he’d need, he thought, as he ran, as switchgrass sighed at his ankles & thighs, was a stone & a scythe. But it was late, the lights of flies quick in the ditches & gone. He’d harvest tomorrow—for now, he had to go to his father.
Joe Wilkins poetry
Letters to an Old God
Jun. 12
Warm night, deep into second cigarette on front end of backwoods hotel. Armpits sticky with sweat. Sparse traffic flows by, sounds like rivers and white noise trickling down asphalt. Roads black. Lights old and dim. Street lines are craggy ruffians spilling out of Indian gas stations. Cicadas play symphonies more vivid than Brahms. I’d like you to know that things aren’t that great down here. Don’t send help yet. I met an angel. Man in beat down Carhartt slid out of a blackness blacker than his skin. Asked for a cigarette. I gave him two. He tucked one between his freckled ear and a tattered gray toboggan pulled crooked and low over his eyebrows.
He yarned about Nat Geo and pictures of lush jungles that he’s never been to and will never go. Our smoke mingled. He was sour redolence and clothing washed by rain, smelled like gasoline and rust. On my third cigarette, I bummed him another. He lit mine. Stubby fingers over a bright yellow BIC, tag ripped off in strips. I don’t know his name. He asked me for money, said it’s an honest request, he isn’t one of those gambling types, he won’t go spending it all on booze, promise. I gave him five, told him I don’t care, it’s his money now, do what he wants. He mentioned a local diner down the road that I should visit in the morning. Said
fiction
Whitney Stevens
I should ask for Cindy-with-the-C-cup because she laughs “big” and gives you extra bacon if you’re nice. I imagine you’re proud of me. I imagine you’re smiling and not saying anything about it, like you always do.
Jun. 13
Walked 3 miles out on I-22 toward Jasper. Saw signs for Birmingham. Changed my mind and turned back. Decided to visit the angel’s diner. Had two thick sausages, biscuits with sawmill gravy, a fried egg, and more bacon than I had originally ordered. Washed it down with tar coffee, black. Cindy smiled big and I tipped her my last five. Tired from food, I found a playground with an old oak and took a nap in its shade. Aware you spent a lot of money on the Herschel I used to prop my head up. Hope you find the crease charming.
Later, a toddler with sticky fingers poked my cheek and roused me from slumber. He asked, in broken child English, why I didn’t nap at home. I told him the Earth is my home, the grass, the tree root digging into my spleen. That my bed was in the soil, and I only had to sit and claim my space. He didn’t seem to appreciate the sentiment. Glad we never had children.
Jun. 15
Made it out of town. Took more effort than I had originally thought. Was thinking I know Cindy now, and the angel, and the rusty bike lying ancient on a well-worn path down by the park. I know the oak. I could get used to that child, the Alabama heat that drowns my lungs. Walked new roads twice to make them feel
Whitney Stevens
homey, to banish the giddy sick in my stomach at not knowing what the end looks like, if it’s a stop sign or a yield, or how much kudzu has eaten the birch, the Fraser magnolia, the winged elm. Cars revved engines on the highway, suspicious of my thumb, like it hovers over a trigger and my closed fist is a gun. I’d tell them I’m Supertramp, penniless and looking, looking. I’d tell them I’m Kerouac, but I’m not, and they move too fast. There are no Mexican cowboys waving dark hands from tall Appaloosas, chattering in clipped English and making jokes with words I don’t understand. No tractors pulling wide trailers stacked with warm bales of hay, no noble hick with flaky burnt skin asking, “Where you headed?” around a thin, chewed wheat stalk. Just interrogative cars filled with busy people too afraid to risk their lives on me.
Last night, I dreamed of getting a tattoo on my left forearm, intricate black-lined mandalas circling around the blank face of a pale matryoshka doll. Her lacy eyelashes and empty stare were knowing. There was a perfect simplicity to her pinched pink lips. Woke up to empty skin, and felt as if something had been taken from me.
They tell you to read The Greats. Thoreau’s tranquil little pond, Coleridge and his slimy sea, Milton’s Devil abashed and shaken by the awfulness of goodness. They needle them into you, brand you with this great sublime sadness, and you wake up bare-skinned, struck by loss for what you never owned. As if you’re incomplete without that better, sharper pain.
In 1949, Kerouac wrote his journals with a blue pen. What a human thing. He could have picked any color. Why blue? Nipped
Whitney Stevens
fiction
from a jar at the front desk of a hotel. One in an assorted pack bought from a corner store, the black used up, the green nestled between well-used couch cushions. Snatched from Ginsberg during a blinding fury of words, half-thoughts on how “pray” and “prey” sound the same. Why blue, Kerouac?
I realize I’m all over the place with this. Can’t get my thoughts right. Never got a ride. Pissed in the woods and found a warm ditch to curl up in overnight. I’m not sure I’m a person at all, but a hole where a person should be. Don’t send help yet. Please, don’t.
Jun. 18
I found a God. Thick set trucker pulling a rig full of Capelli rain boots and Zara handbags came to a clunky stop on the side of the interstate. “Need help?” he asked, sounded Texan, had found a way to air out two words in an open field. Just a ride, I told him, and didn’t know how wide my stance had to be to look trustworthy, wasn’t sure if I should keep my hands in my pockets or let them dangle awkwardly at my sides. “Where you going?” he asked. One of his eyes opened wider. The other squinted. I pulled my hands from sweaty Levi’s. West, I said. “Just west?” he asked. Yeah, just west. “You runnin’ from somethin’?” he asked. He chewed and chewed and bent over to spit out a wad of brown saliva. It made a dark, wet splatter across loose gravel on I-22’s shoulder. No sir, I said. I’m not running from anything. I’m on a walkabout. “Ah,” he replied, “ah.” He waved me on board and we set out.
Half an hour down the road, he started, “Problem is, the Whitney Stevens
West was won already. Us red-blooded Americans got an itch to conquer the wild. Not tame it, conquer it, see. Some of us hit the Rockies, said yeah this is good, we’ll settle down and call this place Denver. But that wasn’t enough. Some of us hit Mojave and said I’m good, nah I’m good, let’s make Vegas and fill it with lights. Still not enough. Then we hit the Pacific and started making golden bridges like the pearly gates ‘cause we’ve reached an end, right? There’s no more West to win, it’s time to pack up. And they expect that to be enough. Like the owning of it is the same as the conquering of it.”
So that’s why you pull a rig, I said, so you can find a new West and conquer it. “What?” he replied, and grabbed an empty Coke bottle from the cup holder. The remnants of his tobacco spit sloshed around the bottom before he uncapped it and added to it. “Nah, it’s a job, kid. Long days and longer nights. You wanna wax poetic when you can’t see two inches past your high beams, be my guest.”
I stared at the dark green can on his dashboard, Grizzly long-cut wintergreen EST.-1900-American-snuff-company. He dipped his finger, shoved another wad into his mouth. God presses readily into that promise of a high, and my Adam-mind stretches for contact, not quite reaching God’s lazy lean, his limp wrist, his finger pointing but not touching. Like the owning of it was not the same as the creating of it. God pulls a big rig between Andromeda and the Milky Way and waits for them to collide. Waiting is all he’s good for.
I’m far away from Richmond now, far away from you. I’ll bring flowers when I return—purple hydrangeas or blue calla
Whitney Stevens
fiction
lilies, red and pink tulips, or motley snapdragons so I can pinch their petals and make them yawn at you. Nothing white. You’ve always been brighter than that.
Jun. 19
I tried to connect with the trucker. I hear you laughing at the thought. He drove through the night while I leaned into the passenger window, cool glass on my head, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the very top of Texas dark shadows in my eye. I’ve been listening to Alan Watts, I told him. British guy, dead now. He has a theory about the universe. “Everyone’s got a theory,” he said.
Yeah, I replied, but I like this one. He says we’re brainwashed in the West. We only think in put-down ways. If you’re Christian, you’re small and subservient in the face of God. If you’re atheist, you’re a tiny cog in a big machine. You’re nothing without what’s created you. But the universe doesn’t have a system of power and control like that. We exist because of it, and it exists because of us. What is blue, but in our minds? How can the universe know itself without us? I asked. The trucker stared ahead. His eyelids drooped. “You can’t live like that,” he said. I felt him shy away, sleepily. “You can think like that when you’ve had a good meal and a good drink, but you can’t go livin’ it.”
I like to think that, when I die, my body will rot and the casket will rot and my molecules will disassemble into the dirt. They’ll get picked up into the roots of a loblolly pine and climb its thin, tall trunk. Some gangly logger with a cap on his head will cut me down, grind me into pulpwood, and I’ll be pressed Whitney Stevens
into paper. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll hold the ink of the last printed book within the pages of my bound spine. Maybe someone will love me like you love me. They’ll open me up and bury their nose in a paragraph just so they can smell it. I’ll sit on a shelf and gather dust. I’ll warp and yellow. I’ll get lost in a box of other books, and years later someone will find me, set me out on a cheap plastic table on their lawn. My colored cover will fade in a burning July sun, and I’ll sell for 25 cents. I like to think you’ll be that quarter, ridged and scuffed, and I’ll see you for a moment in the exchange, a passing glimpse, not quite touching, and your molecules will dance and my molecules will dance and I’ll vibrate, happy, until I break apart again.
I can’t live like that now. I may not see you again. I may not have eyes or be a collection of atoms that hold thoughts or memories, but the smallest parts of me will touch things that might have touched the smallest parts of you, and that’s enough.
Jun. 20, 8:34am
God the trucker, Carhartt the son, and you my holy ghost.
Jun. 20, noon-ish
I miss you.
Jun. 20, 3:40pm
You’re the wind, I think, cooling me and playing with my hair.
Whitney Stevens fiction
Jun. 20, night
Dropped in Albuquerque, middle of town, near local pizza joint. Thanked the trucker. “Stop thinking so much,” he said, “and hitch a ride to the Grand Canyon.” Why? I asked. He shrugged, said, “It looks blue at sunset,” and pulled off, headed to a warehouse, then Pensacola, no sleep. Streetlights flickered, their low, metallic sound nibbling up the back of my neck.
Walked to I-40, its line a thin cut through town. Thumbed a request up to a low-hanging cloud, gray against a black night. West, I’ll say, if someone stops, with your heart pumping blood and your smile on their lips. West, to the Grand Canyon, and “just west” after that.
Whitney Stevens
Late Winter, Middle Miocene
Merridawn Duckler
White, white sky, memory of the summer smoke choked mountains, like all memory inaccurate, a diffuser, vibrating above our hearing.
Not the past that never clears but light lace that takes all hours as a right, here among Nelson Rodgers Peak, eleven hundred feet over the ocean, tastes of salt, smells of dung. I foolishly turn my wipers on but there is no condensing.
Ascent into farm flats, now white hangs behind us, whole halos, snap of the pristine laundry line.
Summer is coming. Threat and promise—will it dispel sea fret and film? No memory rides the shotgun seat,
Whitman’s atom in my lungs, in yours, the mist tastes a pinked edge of dry plates we set for all the ghosts.
Leah Skay
We know that there are around three trillion trees on the Earth’s surface. We calculate how many a year are cut down, dividing those numbers into toilet paper, lumber, and a hundred other products into manageable percentages. Thousands of types all branching away from the big genetic tree of relation, tracking their histories back to the first DNA hiccup that made the birch white and the redwood red. We know their molecules, their atomic configurations, the edges of the leaf, the cycle. We know without them we suffocate. We know that if this page is printed, grainy or glossy, household printer or magazine, that a tree disappears from existence and still proves it was here in the first place. And we don’t know how wild eels fuck?
It’s not like we don’t know in the literal sense. Eels in captivity are forced to reproduce under the cameras and careful eyes of researchers every day. They can’t escape it. Some tangle in balls of wriggling slime, fins waving hello to those who watch on in horror and awe. Some drop eggs to the bottom of the tanks and spurt overtop of them in a thin, white blanket. And the eels look back at us with smug satisfaction. You’ll never find out, bucko. But we do find out, under our knives and our studies. But to this day, despite hundreds of thousands of transoceanic expeditions, we’ve never found an adolescent eel or eel egg in the wild. Ever.
Leah Skay
We have cameras, complex mechanical machines that capture reality in a still image using mirrors, light, glass, and ink. But we can’t find a single wild eel as anything but fully grown. No sexual behavior. No eggs. Nothing.
We taught Koko the Gorilla sign language. She was born in the San Francisco Zoo, a concept in itself which is insane (humans took wild creatures, put them in cages for our own viewing enjoyment, and then made the environments acceptable for those animals so that they didn’t revolt). She learned over one-thousand different signs, understood double that amount, and expressed intense emotional and mental understanding equal to a three-year-old human being. Koko adopted a kitten and named it All Ball. She learned all of these abilities from humans who saw potential and then abandoned the project just because. We know the capabilities of a gorilla’s mind and can teach language to a creature otherwise unable to communicate with anything outside of its own species.
We can do so much, and the eel sits there, waiting for us to find it and we never do.
There is a laboratory in Texas right now that controls a machine on another planet. An unfathomable distance away, a rover with conveyor belt feet, claw hands, and the capacity to sing itself Happy Birthday every year rolls its way over the desolate landscape of Mars. We’ve identified water pockets in the surface of foreign planets, found microscopic organisms in the vacuum of space, found foreign metals unlike anything ever discovered in the fabric of the Earth embedded in meteors that should’ve otherwise killed us. We’ve dug up entire dinosaurs from the ground. Diseases are reemerging from melted ice in the Arctic. Thou-
Leah Skay creative nonfiction
sands of ships have been recovered from the depths of the ocean. New species emerge every day, digging up our previous understanding of everything around us and adding to the list of things to find. We have put a man on the moon, probably. Who knows at this point? We’ve done everything and somehow none of it at the same time.
And the eel sits there, obscured by the surface of unseeing, laughing at us with its open jaw. If it threw itself onto the shore, we’d blame the oil. If it suddenly grew a new tail or curled teeth, we’d blame the radiation. If its reproduction could serve us anything, the wild-caught nature of its endless adulthood would continue as a mystery. But it does not benefit, so it remains in the depths of the ocean, wriggling and writhing in its own secret nests, leaving eggs we never find.
Leah Skay
Isabella Hellig
Isabella Hellig
random shit, put anywhere
Liam Strong
like butter ; you’re moving on. unlike yourself in the mirror five days unchanged a variable of catheters ; the nurse was a twin
centuries old philosophers ; said this was the point, hunger suggests you’re a ; blessing. or the inverse could be true ; a Billy Collins poem predecessor. we once placed ; bonfires at our midsections, to be more than aftermath. sure. your purse, which intent that dominates ; the breathing of one’s haunting the curtains ; their notes on your channel
Animal Planet. Animal Planet. a nameless Animal Planet. there are ; songless places, of night church with. the cookies don’t bloats like a dead horse. ; hydrogen peroxide to the tile. the lack ; of lesions. despite this be full of blood. cardboard nomadic to the basement,
threshold. your liver returns ; to you from where the hallmark cards when weeds will always return. frost heave usurps the garden pots who
Liam Strong poetry
-After Jane Huffman
unchanged panties, twin sister point, this here, to be talkative. inverse of any person, thing poem wrapped in ash or its midsections, correctness, claiming which sounds like purpose, one’s own prayers, practitioners channel surfing read nameless game show. Dance Moms. someone you went to Saturday don’t crumble, the prune juice peroxide fizzes in your ear, parallel this. a throat will still basement, garage, the sky ends, no need to promise who were once crochet baskets,
Liam Strong
chicken bones on willow ; stumps, habituated creatures. neutral earth, or. neutered. the bandages dirt lining your incision ; the now extinct kidney, unraveling. the sister’s nurse’s twin’s their way into wood. the two of you, again, lumbering toward a possible ; future. any number
a house together. no one ; prescribes the death worth living. there’s no antagonist in Platonic give you everything ; nothing actually heals rest, not sanity. from the jamb, there was once not. speculation is just ; a what-if. it’s stupid fester like it is; just leave it
Liam Strong poetry
habituated for your other starving bandages are soiled, the raw moist kidney, their snow tires bound for twin’s former self who once needled again, the organ donated car, number of screws ligamenting death of allegories to a danger
Platonic dialogues. you cannot heals wounds, not god, not once a door here, you think, or stupid to let this dwelling it alone.
Beetle Old Man
Yomi Lohunda
The one thing I was guilty of, the sergeant informed me, was not taking the old man seriously. If I had tried talking to him, we might have reached a different outcome. It was hard to explain. The old man wanted to become a beetle. How was I to take him seriously?
*
“Tola-son. See!” the old man liked to say. He spoke with the wonder of a newborn. He was always pointing out one thing or the other.
“Leave me alone, old man!” I usually responded. I found him strange and obnoxious.
*
The old man came to live with us a few months after my fourteenth birthday. While I prepared for school, Grandma left to pick him up at the taxi park in her old Honda.
Grandma’s friends were of two types: the athletic ones who played football and didn’t need any help getting around, and the delicate types who needed assistance getting through the door or settling into a chair. I hoped the old man was the athletic type. I could use some dribbling tips.
When I returned from school, I found the old man crawling around the living room like a vengeful cat. “Welcome. You must be Tola!” he exclaimed. He was a reedy man with a slightly pro-
Yomi Lohunda fiction
truded belly.
“Yes,” I answered. “Were you looking for something? Why are you on the floor like that?”
“Oh?” The old man looked around in confusion. “I must have forgotten how to walk on two legs. It happens sometimes, you see. Thanks for letting me know, Tola-son!” he said, giving me a thumbs-up.
That was my first encounter with the old man. He was strange in that way.
My grandmother and the old man had attended the same secondary school, a Catholic school left behind by the missionaries after Nigeria gained independence. The old man dropped out to marry a pregnant ex-girlfriend, while my grandmother graduated and went on to nursing school. They lost contact until they met at a hospital where Grandma did her maternity rounds. My grandmother was there by herself, and the old man was escorting his wife, who later died during childbirth. The old man never remarried.
“Really, I was impressed by his character,” my grandmother told me. She liked that he had escorted his wife to the hospital in an age where men neglected such things, so they remained in touch. He was also good friends with Grandpa. “They belonged to the same social club,” Grandma explained. “And the kids were obsessed with him. Whenever he came visiting, he brought along dozens of gifts.”
The old man seemed too unusual a person to be liked. I could not imagine my mother liking the old man, even as a
Yomi
Lohunda
child. Anytime I misbehaved, my grandmother regularly said to me: “You’re acting irresponsibly and pompous, like your mother. Don’t be like that,” Surely, a pompous child like my mother formerly was would think the old man annoying. During a phone call, I asked my mother if she recalled the old man. “Mr. Ayo!” she exclaimed, her voice exploding with joy. “Give him the phone!” she demanded. I went to find the old man, but on the way, my mother dropped the call to attend to her other children.
The old man used to work as a butcher. He hawked meat for long distances and on weekends, he remained at his stall in a market. After he retired, the old man stopped eating meat. A vegetarian ex-butcher? It was the sort of thing I laughed about with my friends.
Most nights we sat on the patio and lit a fire. My grandmother liked to tell me stories then. Usually, she went first, and I told my stories after. It was our special time, so to speak. I had been living with my grandmother since I was seven and maybe I was a little jealous of the old man’s intrusion. I was annoyed that the old man upstaged my unique story with a typical tale. “The story of the tortoise and the hare? I’ve heard that a hundred times!” I complained.
“Ah, you see, there’s a twist!” the old man said, winking cutely. In the old man’s version of the story, the hare and the tortoise explained to a large gathering of townspeople why they would each come first in a race scenario. He even taught me a song that came with the story. It went something like this:
“Jie-Jie-Jie
The drums have begun
Yomi Lohunda fiction
Gather around, people
And dance to my words.”
It was a silly song, but once, in class, I caught myself humming it.
*
There was another odd thing about the old man: his obsession with beetles. At the market, he liked to purchase cans of raw black-eyed beans swarming with bean beetles. He didn’t pick the insects out or anything of the sort. He intended to eat them too. I was disgusted. Too disgusted to even question him. I just marched home in angry silence with the old man trailing behind. As soon as we returned, I told my grandmother about the old man’s preference for beetle-ridden beans.
“Tola, seventy-two is a reasonable age to not be nagged by anyone,” my grandmother responded. She meant for me to leave the old man be. Very well, I thought. I shall do just that. I cleared my throat to make my tone more friendly. I tried to crack a joke. “Wait—that’s not very vegetarian of you, old man!”
“Ah, no,” the old man said, waving his hands. Then he pointed at the dozens of dead bean beetles floating in the cooking pot. “Tola-son, you see, I do this so I can become one of them.”
I was confused. “You can’t become a beetle. You are human.”
“Who says?” the old man said.
“It’s obvious—look at your arms, your head, your legs!” I yelled. I was losing my patience now.
The old man was silent for a while. We stood there in the kitchen, watching each other. “In that case,” the old man began. “I shall consume more bean beetles. More and more, until my Yomi Lohunda
body itself transforms into a beetle. I wonder—Tola-son—do you think I could become one of those flying ones? Imagine that!”
What a stubborn old man! I felt as deflated as a broken toy. The old man would do what he wanted, regardless of what I said. No wonder he had insisted on preparing his meals separately. At the dinner table, I tried to avoid looking in the old man’s direction as he ate his bean-beetle porridge. I really tried to avert interactions with the old man, but, for some reason, a good number of the boys on the street football team liked him, so I let him tag along when I went to the field.
On my fifteenth birthday, the old man and I organized a birthday party. Grandma was absent. She had to see the doctor about her arthritis treatment. Together, we decorated the living room with flashy red-blue ribbons. All my friends came, except Zero, my crush. He called to say something came up. I tried to knit a smile onto my face and failed. I tried to pretend I was happy, but the old man noticed it all the same.
“Cheer up. I’m sure she and you will figure something out, Tola-son!” the old man said.
“He,” I corrected him automatically, without thinking.
“I’m sure he and you will figure something out, Tola-son!” the old man said, slapping me on the back. He always spoke with an excited tone. “He’s not here today, but he’ll be here next time, you’ll see!”
“Thanks, old man,” I whispered. I suddenly felt grateful for the old man’s presence.
Yomi Lohunda fiction
The old man disappeared without warning. One day he was around, and the next day, he wasn’t. As I explained to the sergeant, not even my grandmother sensed that anything was wrong. Nothing was out of place. The old man was his jovial, odd self, up until the moment he vanished.
“It’s very obvious that he ran away,” the sergeant said. He explained that the old man’s beetle-eating was proof of this. “People often leave cryptic messages before making decisions like this. Almost like they want you to change their mind.”
“But what about his clothes?” I asked. The old man’s clothes had been left behind.
“Maybe he left in a hurry,” the sergeant said. “People have been known to do that.” He accepted a glass of juice from Grandma, then said again, “If you had taken the old man’s signals more seriously, maybe there’d be a different outcome. Tola, Grandma, you both should have been more discerning.”
The old man didn’t strike me as the cryptic type. He had seemed very certain about wanting to become a beetle.
“You should trust my judgment,” the sergeant said. “This is my job after all.”
After the sergeant left, I thought once more about where the old man could have gone. To see his grown-up son in Lagos? The old man and his son had a rather close relationship. Or perhaps he wandered from the house and lost his way? The old man could be oblivious to his surroundings at times.
“I’m not too worried,” Grandma said, reclining in her worn
Yomi
Lohunda
leather armchair. “It’s been three days. He was always like that, often disappearing for weeks. He’ll be back.”
Still, it was obvious to me that she missed him. For a few days, she remained sullen.
*
Someone found what was left of the old man’s body a week later. The sergeant arrived at our house looking very confused. As he explained to my grandmother, all that was left of the old man was his skin.
“I know how unusual this sounds,” the sergeant continued, ducking his head in apology. “But he seems to have crawled out of his skin. You can come with me if you like. I’ll show you.”
Grandma left with the sergeant to see the old man’s skin. “You’re too young to come along.” the sergeant said before I could say a word. I remained indoors, thinking about the old man. Maybe he had become a beetle after all.
*
It was getting late. I’d already eaten dinner and begun washing the dishes when I heard a sound at the door. “Tolaaaa-son!” the person called. It sounded suspiciously like the old man.
“Tolaaaa-son!” It was an insect-like voice, lined by a hum. It was a voice stuffed with excitement.
I opened the door a little. “Old man?”
I was stunned by what I saw. It was the old man! Or what seemed like it. His body was contorted into itself. His skin had the usual wrinkled contour of old age. His eyes were perfect circles, and golden brown mandibles extended from each side of his mouth, but his face was more or less the same. His wings were a
Yomi Lohunda fiction
massive force riling dust in the courtyard.
“O-old man?” I said again.
“Tolaaaaaaa-son!” the old man said, beating his wings faster now. He was wearing his usual excited smile.
For once I was speechless. I could only stare at the sight before me. I thought about the times I had mocked the old man for wanting to become a beetle. The idea of it actually happening was something I never believed.
“Bye-bye!” the old man called. He was flying away. “Bye-bye, Tolaaaaa-son!” he kept saying as his figure grew tiny in the distance.
“Old man!” I finally said, but it was too late. “Old man! Come back!”
I remained standing at the entrance, checking to see if the old man would return. A giant beetle! I feared many people would want to harm him. Maybe if the old man had stayed a while, we could have built him some armor. I was pretty good at metalwork.
Yomi Lohunda
Downcutting
Shelley Gaske
downcutting (verb): removing material to deepen the channel of a stream bed.
Behind our house in the woods, a little stream formed after autumn downpours. I marched over in my thick rubber boots after school to investigate. All of this fell from the sky? How did it know where to go? Did it need help?
I was good at fixing things.
From under thick bangs I surveyed the stream; recognizing a mutual benefit. We were each instruments of the other.
I could make it deeper, wider, faster. It could make me accomplished, recognized, helpful.
The plan locked in, my elementary school hands dragged the adult shovel from the garage.
Fearless, my boots french-kissed the mud as I stamped into the water. Wet coils cascaded over the boot and shocked my toes. The frigid water was my baptism in usefulness.
I orchestrated the babbling current. You should flow here, scolded an admonishing inner voice.
You don’t know any better, but I do.
The voice sounded like my mom but wasn’t directed at me. I knew because my chest tightened with effort, not shame. When the voice coached the stream, I could work undetected, immune.
You could be beautiful.
Shelley Gaske creative nonfiction
I stabbed the ground, bounced my weight on the shovel.
If you’d let me help.
I fished out fallen twigs, dragged out tree limbs. Beards of mossy sinew curled around my wrists. Sodden leaves splattered on the land by the handful.
My teeth chattered for me to take a break, but the voice still shepherded the stream.
Don’t you want my help?
When a hefty or embedded rock was tagged for excavation, I used brute force and a willful ignorance of limitations. At first, I clawed at the dirt and roots around the rock. My fingernails bent backwards, the nail beds too glacial to notice.
What little girl doesn’t want to be pretty?
Coaxing the boulder from the earth, I traced the edges with a delicate, metered touch as I felt it start to give. Bracing against my purchase in the streambed I hoisted my target. Water exploded into the fresh wound with a gushing force.
I’m doing this for you. For us.
The single fact bestowed upon me regarding my adoption was that my biological mother’s brother was a competitive weightlifter. The inheritance of these muscle fibers was the least the world could do. If anyone had checked on me, they’d be awed by the size of boulders I moved.
No one checked. Night fell in plump watercolor streaks. I noticed when my pupils couldn’t dilate more, when the water bathed in early moonlight. I heard the unsyncopated duet of my mom and dad yelling, foisting their knife-words on each other.
Shelley Gaske
Outside I was too far away to be cut.
I had to go in, eventually.
But I needed to be a little more numb before putting myself in striking distance. Lips already midnight blue, I sank into the dark chill of the water’s net.
Boots and fingers wedged into familiar banks to anchor me while the water sluiced into my ear canals, nostrils, the last dry holdouts.
A delta opened between my body and the stream; a barrier disintegrated.
In the water, the blurry stars, the wind, the rustles, the yelling from the house went mute. In the water, it didn’t matter if the voice understood our peculiar strength and resplendence anymore. In the water, a pride of my own was allowed, nay, encouraged to swell. In the water, there was nothing above the surface tension. In the water, my skin puckered, each follicle a sleek rainbowed scale; in the water, my lungs’ alveoli compressed into a minnow’s eye; this was the only bed I needed; nothing needed fixing.
This was love.
And what was numbing, bleeding, self-harm against love? Were we not equal in our metering of violence in the name of hollowed glory?
The water refused to leave our embrace first. I emerged, a silvery iced spectre.
Yet every step home returned me closer to my corporeal form.
Shelley Gaske creative nonfiction
A girl not feminine enough, again. Not pretty, again.
An ungrateful fool, again.
I trudged up the hill, nerves screaming awake, as the gurgling praise chorus faded away.
Shelley Gaske
Disambiguation With Holomovement and General Relativity Cal Freeman
Whereas we were of the future returning to the implicate order of our past, whereas the photographic emulsion plate was dust and the totality of each image cohered in specks, a large beast could ever turn in the cruel maze of self-similarity.
Whereas eukaryotes (chipmunks, bipeds, rats) have difficulty in the netting whose anti-Pythagorean curvature is caused by adjacent objects, their incidental mass keeps coddling the nearby nothing.
Whereas the books absorbed the moisture from the summer air then scalloped, atrophied, and hardened, we found the pages in an incoherent cirrhotic state.
Whereas we couldn’t locate the oracle at Petrichor
Cal Freeman poetry
that foretells thunderstorms and wrath, our thoughts became less static than they were in spring. Whereas unsure of why and rankled by the sunshine, we mistook the gaffer tape for the molted skin of a blue racer. Whereas thinking lyngbya a strictly freshwater phenomenon, we misnamed the blue-green algae in the harbor and postulated hepatotoxins beyond the purview of the clear half-pint in mud. Whereas “flotsam” is the word that covets us, whereas a fiberglass carport drifting in the turgid waters fractured into wafers at the Southfield underpass, we concluded the sacramental stuff had been corrupted by anaphora and pareidolia and the riparian zone at Ecorse Creek was infinite.
Cal Freeman
There is an I in Ribbonhead Donald Pasmore
After Ribbonhead by Forgetters
maybe I just can’t see it. I understand the gap is difficult to span, but so few stand naked with me in the middle—stare
down into the chasm of dualism and mindbody separation. When they built it, they called
thoughts computation and simulation mechanistic intelligence. They hooked wires into its head—a physicalist
masterwork and death to us—and flicked the switch. The soft whirring of hdd and heat
sink fans announced its (your) birth. And you lived, at least they claimed you did, because you were passable. My objections
barely convinced me. Your language is better called estimation, but how am I
different? I have always been a weak believer in weak AI. Maybe between the small gears and electronic
pulses there is a little empty box they put there so God could place the beeping and rattling of a neon soul inside it. Inside you. I’m not one to question the Almighty, but He refuses
Donald Pasmore poetry
to properly weigh in on the matter. Sometimes, I hear His laughter—but this is about you and what’s left of the dualists, not Him. We refuse to kiss minds built with circuits and solder. But when I read unhook the wires, leave you for dead, my eyes pause on the last word and refuse to move. Even if the warmth came from overheating processors, it was still there, still motion and vitality transferred through our joined hands. Your eyes are just cameras, but they refuse to be flat inhuman spheres—through the silver I want to believe I see a flicker, a spark of something other than electricity, something I once knew to call divine.
Donald Pasmore
biology
inspired by and borrowing a line from Toni Morrison’s Beloved
it is hard to make yourself die forever but it is biology will go somewhere else in the soil into the roots of a time asking myself what i want to be when i die not it is chemistry it is architecture providing me with not have hard time dying or is it passing or is it just it is biology that will allow my ashes to be in the foundation form that spawns coral reefs and long after i have died a fish whose lips peck algae and bacteria off coral death and i wonder if that is just one watery meaning
biology i wish the words alkaline hydrolysis were friendly but through water and a hot thing and potassium hydroxide i become the water the plants drink me where i am dumped into soil my Lenovo laptop tells me it will take make me water and in this before death not of the waste i am guilty of wasting my own biology
of my flesh that i whisper to myself is a hot thing that biology a brown basket that sheds biology crescent thread hair i cared for but still fell out anyways because separates from my flesh a hot thing that will not
my Lenovo laptop thinks i am preparing to die not forever is full of cremation alternatives as i search and my not forever death my biology can be friendly not forever water will not remember if i recycled my cans of beans to the food pantry if i liked biology at architecture ignored to the best of my ability physics its always knew was there but eventually stopped acknowledging poetry
Hikari Miya
it is physics my energy a tree i spend a lot of forever but it is biology with options to make sure i do just transferring this one time foundation of a ghostly holy died not forever there will be coral that has thrived because of my of forever of biology
forever when my search history and scroll and scour for ways friendly because in death though my juice bottles if i donated biology hated chemistry marveled its pulls pushes a moon i acknowledging i just blame my
friendly were gentle on my tongue hydroxide the return of chemistry dumped and seep not forever 300 gallons of water to not forever body i am guilty biology wasting the architecture
that is not forever but just moon fingernails because it is biology that not die forever
Hikari Miya
I Am Carrying My Mother
Nidhi Agrawal
everyplace. Mothers are on a cross-talk voyage with their children in the womb, outside the womb. Conversely.
At my third,
the surgeon pulled out a comet-like stone from my Ma’s gall bladder. Wilted in early fall colours, she handed over the Autumn to me; the early stages of decline. age /consuetude /Juvenile Cholecystectomy
My biology textbook says
The mother’s cells stay in the baby’s blood and tissues for decades. I am goosey about the fate of the travelling cells to my childunborn, unbruised, and yet to be carried.
Because,
All children become like their mothers. All mothers do, and this chimerism is called lineage. The carrying.
Nidhi Agrawal poetry
Author Bios
Luciana Abait was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and is currently based in Los Angeles. Her multimedia works deal with climate change and environmental fragility, and their impacts on immigrants. Her work has been exhibited globally in museums, galleries, and international art fairs, including LACMA, Laguna Art Museum and ARCO. She has completed notable public art commissions and has been featured in major publications. In 2024, she was a Guest Speaker at the Culture Summit in Abu Dhabi.
Nidhi Agrawal has been anthologized in Auscult Magazine, Wisconsin Medical University, Anodyne, the International Human Rights Art Movement, and others. Her poems have appeared in journals including Ars Medica, Altadena Poetry Review, Quadrant Australia, etc. She is nominee for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net anthology in the Arts and Poetry category. Find her at https://linktr.ee/Nidhiagrawal
Haley Bossé (they/them) is a queer, non-binary writer, educator and maker of things you can hold in your hand. They spend most of their time talking with young children about life, death, and community building. Their recent publication can be found haunting Petrichor, Paranoid Tree, and Partially Shy. Find Haley on Twitter at @TalkingHyphae.
Elizabeth Bradfield’s seven books include Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry, Toward Antarctica, and the co-created Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award and a ForeWord Indies Gold Medal. Editor-in-chief of Broadsided and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Liz teaches at Brandeis University and works as a naturalist and field assistant on Cape Cod. In August, 2025, Persea Books will publish her newest poetry collection, SOFAR.
Roger Camp is the author of three photography books including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002. His documentary photography has been awarded the prestigious Leica Medal of Excellence. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The New England Review, American Chordata and the New York Quarterly.
The intention of these Light Music images is to reduce a photograph to its essence - the transmission of light - and to turn light itself into subject matter.
All of these images were produced using sunlight transmitted through a prism. Transparent materials: Pyrex glass rods, strips of window glass, and industrial prisms were employed to give shape and form to the light.
Hannah Cook is a poet who lives in Minneapolis. She received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Boise State University and is a current MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her poem “Dogwood//Anthrocrose” was recently published in Burningwood Literary Journal. She writes about people. Instagram beans4breadfast_
Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee. She has served as Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and Poet Planner for King County, Washington. Da’s books include, Tributaries, winner of the 2016 American Book Award, Instruments of the True Measure, winner of the Washington State Book Award, and Severalty, forthcoming in September 2025.
Merridawn Duckler is a writer and visual artist from Oregon, author of INTERSTATE (dancing girl press) IDIOM (Harbor Review) MISSPENT YOUTH (rinky dink press) ARRANGEMENT (Southernmost Books) Beulah Rose poetry prize, CNF prize Invisible City, Elizabeth Sloane Tyler Award, Woven Tale Press, Drama prize Arts and Letters, Georgia University.
Rebecca Dunham is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book, Strike, was the 2018 New Issues Poetry & Prose Editor’s Choice. Her first book,The Miniature Room, won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize. Her second book, The Flight Cage, was a Tupelo Press Open Reading Selection. Glass Armonica was awarded the 2013 Lindquist and Vennum Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions. In 2017, Cold Pastoral was also published by Milkweed. Dunham’s chapbook, Fascicle, is available from dancing girl press. She is Professor of English at UW-Milwaukee and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Meg Favreau is an LA-based writer, artist, and filmmaker originally from the birch-fingered clutches of New Hampshire. Her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Real Simple. Meg also works as a screenwriter, most recently co-writing The Twits.
Shelley Gaske is a disabled, queer adoptee, cancer survivor and Oregon State graduate. She’s a 2025 Key West Literary Seminar Fellow and alum of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Ardent thanks to Sara Easterly, Alice Stephens, Brianne Hughes, and Hilton Als for their generosity and support for “Downcutting.”
Lauren “Prophet” Girod trades in all forms of literature. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia and serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Ascendency. Her poetry has previously appeared in Stillpoint, Outrageous Fortune, The Crawfish, and Bardics Anonymous. She can be reached at oraecle.card.co
Isabella Hellig is a PhD candidate who likes to write and take pictures in her spare time. She prefers quiet photos of inanimate objects or streetscapes without people in them. She is a cat person.
Shir Kehila is a freelance writer. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the anthology Here for All the Reasons (Turner Publishing, 2026), The Boiler, The Albion Review, and others. She holds an MFA from Columbia, and received scholarships from Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Monson Arts Residency.
As a photographer, Sarah E N Kohrs contributes to Foundation for Photo/Art in Hospitals. Her artwork is in CALYX, Culinary Origami, Litro, Progenitor, The Sun, Quibble, Voices de la Luna, and more. Sarah has a BA from College of Wooster and Virginia teaching license in Latin and Visual Arts. https://senkohrs.com
Yomi Lohunda is a writer, editor, and persistent reader of literary and speculative fiction. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria, where she divides her time between studying and replenishing her mental repository of pop culture references. Once a staunch dreamy-eyed creative, she now divides her time between writing and product management.
Originally from El Paso, TX, Natalia Martinez is a creative writing MFA student at Florida International University. Her writing has been featured in Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and is forthcoming in Whale Road Review. She now resides in Miami, Florida, by way of the Great Plains.
Hikari Miya is an author and graduate of Cornell University and University of San Francisco; she is currently a PhD student/instructor at Florida State University doing work in animal studies and ecopoetics. She is an animal care specialist and herpetologist working/volunteering at North Florida Wildlife Center and Tallahassee Museum.
Donald Pasmore is the Editor-in-Chief of 149 Review and is an Associate Editor of Poet Lore. His work has appeared in Permafrost, Harpur Palate, The Shore, The Broken Plate, Cherry Tree, and others.
Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize, won a 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the WA State Book Award. She is a 20242025 Watershed Fellow with the Public Humanities Collaboratory in Oregon. She was recently selected as the winner of CutBank’s 2024 Genre Contest in Poetry and won LitMag’s 2024 Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction. Find her at caitlinscarano.com
Leah Skay received her B.A. in Creative Writing from Ithaca College and is an alumna of hte Japanexe Exchange and Teaching Program. Leah’s fiction, nonfiction, and (most recently) poetry have found homes with HAD, Progenitor, Windmill, Sunspot Lit, and more. A full catalog of her work is available at leahskay.com.
Whitney Stevens studies Creative Writing at Tennessee Tech University. They are an emerging writer who writes weird stories about weird people who do weird things. When not slipping into liminal spaces, they can be found playing guitar, singing to their cats, and learning French.
Liam Strong (they/them) is a genderless question mark and the author of three chapbooks. They died in 2021 and have been writing ever since. Find them on Instagram: @beanbie666. https://linktr.ee/liamstrong666
Joe Wilkins is the author of the novels The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die, both of which have garnered wide critical acclaim. His latest collection of poetry is Pastoral, 1994. He lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon.
