Closed Eye Open - Issue IV by alexeyadonin

Cover images by Corey S. Pressman Cover design by Aaron Lelito Editing and layout by Daniel Morgan, Maya Highland, and Aaron Lelito

This volume may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic or print—without permission from the publisher.

The Closed Eye Open reserves all rights to the material contained herein for the contributors’ protection; all rights revert to the authors and artists upon publication.

Contents

Esther Sadoff

James Redfern

Andrew Furst

Julie Lloyd

Samara Landau

Victoria Costello

Victoria V

Nancy White

Hannah Maiorano

Kellen Bakovich

Corey S. Pressman

Lily Rose Kosmicki

Alex Aimee Kist

Fiona Hsu

Lauren Brockmeyer

Patricia Pedroso

Jacqueline Schaalje

Abigail Gray

Alexey Adonin

Natalie Coufal

Ann Christine Tabaka

Beverly Rose Joyce

Leon Fedolfi

Nicole Irene

Hayley Stoddard

Christopher Paul Brown

Rebecca Rush

Andres Aguilar

Jacqueline Staikos

Marianne Lyon

Jennifer Cahill

Julie Fritz

Christina Martin

Steven Capitani

John Timothy Robinson

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List of Contributors

Note from the Editor “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.” ― Vladimir Nabokov, in Speak, Memory

I’ve always been fascinated with this quotation. “Believing” in time would ordinarily seem like a given, but Nabokov’s fantastical metaphor illustrates that the narrative of time can quite easily be “folded up”—and of course this goes beyond simply closing the covers of a novel! The creative process can certainly be said to “superimpose” experiences from one time of life to another, layering images, concepts, and language that have been gathered over the course of time. One of the most gratifying parts of collecting the pieces for an issue is to see how a series of individual works—all with their own complex origins—fit together, resonate with each other, and maybe even become woven into the next person’s magic carpet. Thank you for reading…and be sure to take a moment to watch the next butterfly you see! Daniel Morgan

Esther Sadoff Everything is ripe if you know how to search Some crave the artichoke's heart, honey dew clear as rain. I crave rind and bone, a search for the grifting tongue. I've never chosen a perfect melon, a juicy tomato dreaming of sugared sun. Don't care if the skin is sallow, the flesh all pulp and powder. I like the cool ebb of pink to white, the green of a latent bloom. My mother scoops the red center of each halved melon, leaves them rocking. Two upside hills to carve. I don't desire the sweet trickle, the squelch of a yellow cob. Give me the pale hard kernels like unformed teeth, my tongue slowly turning gold.

James Redfern the jazz great gardens now he says he now makes music with his vegetables and flowers in his two-hundred-fifty square-foot, sandy-soiled apartment back yard he was a great jazz composer, still is, but he lost his hearing years ago gradually, not unlike Beethoven, he lives like a monk now in silence all the time. he lives with his woman, but they no longer use verbal language as a tool of communication between themselves. he plants grocery trimmings fertilizing the sandy soil with kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and egg shells. before the gardening monk lost the last of his hearing sound became amplified as its retreat left an echo chamber in its wake turning subtle sound into harsh noise when he closed his eyes tightly, he heard the roar of a conflagration up close it was such a torturous passage slouching slowly into silence sometimes the very thought of music, vibration itself, brings vertigo, nausea which is why the jazz great gardens now making music in yet another key. 8

Duplex

Andrew Furst

Good things in sight

Julie Lloyd 10

The battle

Julie Lloyd

Samara Landau Unidentified I have no mirror to know myself Just the shadow of my figure, the reflection I see in the window on the outside of people’s homes.

The humans stare and point, freezing their bodies so that I freeze too. But I can see their bellies rising and falling, their lips whispering, asking the same question I ask myself. I relish in this moment. The moment where I am unnameable. Where all that matters, is our eyes frozen on one another Wondering more important than knowing

Victoria Costello New Room, Old Brain An excerpt from the novel The Orchid Child Maybe it’s the pattern of holes in the ceiling tiles—thirteen by eleven, diabolical—plus the whitest walls he’s ever seen making Teague feel like he’s a stowaway on the Challenger. Aunt Kate says it’s temporary housing for visiting scholars. This place is so clean he wants to cough just to add some microbes of his own. The mattress is made of some kind of outer-space foam, hard as a rock. He didn’t expect to miss the lumpy bunk bed he slept on his whole life. When Kate asked him if he was up for moving to Ireland where she’s doing her new study, Teague said he was okay with it. She might as well have said Iceland or India or Iran. It can’t be any worse than living in Upstate New York with his crabby grandmother, Maureen, who told him a bunch of times she’s too old to handle the weird kid he’s turned into. Yeah, sure, he thought but didn’t say, it’s easy enough to love a normal little kid. No problem, he told her. Maybe he’ll find someone weird enough to be his friend over here. Now he pictures his old room the way he left it a day and a half ago, empty and echoey, and wonders whether his old enemies are staked out in the closet waiting to make the next kid’s life miserable. Teague hasn’t told anyone about the voices that have been bugging him for months. Every once in a while he’ll catch a glimpse of one of them, more often he hears them moving around out of sight, trash-talking him. A supersize rodent with a Russian accent he named Ivan, after the middle brother in The Brothers Karamazov, tells him he’s an ugly piece of shit and the world is a junkyard of toxic trash and nasty people. It’s like he is trying to get him to drop out of the human race and join the rat race. No joke. Larry’s a pit bull who talks like a kid and always seems to know when Teague is having a bad day. A few times, Larry told him things weren’t going to get any better, so Teague might as well end it. When he learned the word sadist, Teague knew who to pin it on. At Walgreens, Larry told him to steal a jumbo bag of Kit Kat bars. When Teague said no, Larry wouldn’t leave him alone. Teague put his hands over his ears, 13

yelling, “Fuck you! You’re not even real. You’re some trash that fell out of my brain.” People stared, but what was he supposed to do? Larry just laughed. “You wish, kid. Do it or I’ll be up your ass twenty-four seven.” “And if I go along with it?” “I’ll give you the rest of the week off.” Since Larry usually kept his word, Teague grabbed the bag of candy and ran out of there. That’s how his klepto career got started. Now it’s a habit he can’t break. Whoa, Teague stops himself. He shouldn’t be giving Ivan or Larry any airtime. It’s like saying, “Come on back, guys, I’m over here!” He wipes his mind clean and fills the empty space with nonsense. Da, da, da, da, da, zippity, da dooooooooooooo . . . Da, da, da, da, da, zippity, da dooooooooooooo. “Teague, are you awake?” How long has she been standing there? “Yeah. Why?” “I thought we could go out for breakfast, then shop for food. If you want, we’ll stop at the student bookstore and get you some art supplies. How does that sound?” “I can’t go.” “Why not?” “I haven’t unpacked my books.” She looks at the three unopened boxes lined up against the wall and back at him. “Aren’t you hungry?” “Yeah. But I’ll feel better after I do it.” Her face is scrunched up like a sponge. “Fine. So, why don’t I help you? It’ll go faster.” “All right.” While she gets a knife from the kitchen, he slides out of bed and puts on sweatpants. Besides the new pendant, nothing matters more to Teague than his books. When they were packing to come here, Kate suggested he give them away, since Ireland would have the same books and he could buy them all again. He didn’t want to sound like a wuss and say they were his only friends, even if it was true. In the end, he flat-out refused and she agreed to ship them. There’s an empty bookcase in his new room. Plus a desk he’ll never use. “Shall I do the honor?” She holds the knife over one of the boxes. “Or would you rather?” 14

“I’ll do it.” He slices the tape and pulls open the flaps. The smell gives him an instant high—and not just because he sprinkled weed in the pages of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Kate doesn’t seem to notice. She’s on her knees by the bookcase with an armful of paperbacks. He holds his breath. Worst case, he’ll just have to re-shelve everything. She stares at their spines and turns to him. “I bet you have a system.” Phew. “Yeah. Alphabetical, by author.” “Of course.” She smiles and takes down the books she already shelved. “Except Fyodor.” “Fyodor?” Her head is cocked to the side. “Alphabetical worked okay when I was just reading sci-fi. They’re good but there’s no way those guys can sit on the same . . .” He picks up his dog-eared copy of The Idiot. After he found it on the Metro-North last spring, he barely looked up for five days. When Prince Myshkin said, “If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions,” Teague couldn’t believe someone could know his all-time lowest thought without knowing him personally. “Of course, Dostoyevsky. So what did you think?” “It’s the best book I ever read.” His flat tone belies the awe he still feels as he traces the embossed letters above the Prince’s haunted portrait. “I’ll take your word on that.” He snaps to attention. Is she making fun of him? “I always took the easiest non-science electives I could get away with, and Fyodor is not exactly a beach read.” Probably not. He’s always thought of his aunt as such a brainiac. Maybe geniuses can only be good at one thing because there’s no room left over for anything else. He isn’t sure what his one thing is yet. Or if he’ll even have one. Lately, his paintings have been, well, boring. The same half-human, half-robot creatures, just different body parts. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? got him started drawing humanoids. Now he’s cranking them out like he’s a copy machine. It must be his new medication keeping the good stuff beyond his reach. He opens to the page in Electric Sheep he marked with a 15

purple sticky, his color for stuff to read when he can’t feel a fucking thing and needs something to remind him other humans have survived in this condition. “So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair. . . . So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everyone smarter than you has emigrated. Don’t you think?” Yeah, Dick-man. You better believe it. Kate stands up. “That’s two shelves done. So, we’ll leave in a half hour?” “All right.” He puts Electric Sheep with the other Dicks and gets back to sorting . . . Le Guin, Rowling, Tolkien. He forces himself not to look up at the ceiling. They’re just holes, even if whoever thought them up is out to get him. Teague runs his hand over a column fronting the Bank of Ireland in Ballymore’s Old Town Square. At three stories, it’s the tallest building in town, not counting the castle. A plaque by the entrance says it used to be a jail, then a lunatic asylum—they actually use those words—and now it’s a bank with an Italian restaurant off the back. He walks past a row of tiny stores—jewelry, hats, cigars, newspapers; no more than two people can fit in any of them—and stops at a pile of rubble on the same block. The bones of a house. Are they waiting for some ghost family to come home and clean up the mess? Maybe they are. Great zombie Jesus, it’s like living in Wizarding World. The towers of Ballymore Castle stick out over the trees. Yesterday, when he took the tour, the guide said the Normans built it in the twelfth century to get a good shot at anyone trying to steal their cattle. He went up one of the towers and checked out the angle it offered on cars driving on the M6. It would have been a perfect shot. The drugstore looks modern from the sidewalk, but the wall behind the register is stacked with antique bottles labeled by hand. A rusty scale, stone bowls, grinding tools. These people don’t throw anything away. “That’s all we’ve got left of my great-uncle’s apothecary,” the guy behind the counter says. He’s Maureen’s age, on the fat side. “What happened to the rest of it?” 16

“The Brits burned it down.” His name tag says Sean Mitchell, Pharmacist. “Why’d they do that?” “Retribution, subjugation, call it what you want. We had a little rebellion going on. I like the feeling of having my Great-Uncle Paddy looking over my shoulder while I carry on the family business.” Teague puts a pack of gum on the counter and fifty cents. Sean drops his eyes and lifts them again. “So are you planning to pay for the candy while you’re at it?” “Oh yeah. I forgot.” He pulls the chocolate bar out of his pocket and adds a Euro. Sean raises his eyebrows and blows out some air. From his other pocket, he takes out a pack of batteries. “I don’t really need them.” He gives them back to Sean and avoids his eyes. It’s like his hand has a mind of its own. Sean points under the counter. “Since I put in these cameras, I’m seeing a lot more than I’d like to.” “Sorry. I won’t do it again.” That’s wishful thinking but it can’t hurt to say it. Sean’s smile isn’t the happy kind. But at least he didn’t bust him. Teague is retracing his steps through Old Town Square when he catches the sounds. They’re words, parts of sentences scattered from whoever said them. But these voices aren’t talking to him—or about him. That’s new for him. Traitor . . . I’m the same as you. On your knees . . . He stops and does a 360-degree turn. Main Street is behind him, the old lunatic asylum opposite, Saint Brendan’s straight ahead. Maybe that’s where they're coming from. Except there’s no one standing outside and the church doors are closed. You’ve got the wrong man. You’re all the same scum. When he stands by the rock wall in front of the church, the voices are louder and the loose words have found each other. Not my boy. Leave him be. 17

There’s a fire. Run! Nooooooo. Mary, Mother of God, tell me it’s not so! What’s going on? He’s pretty sure these voices belong to dead people. Maybe they’re talking to each other. A lady carrying a shopping bag in each hand gives him a friendly look. Did she not hear anything? He leans against the wall and pops a fresh stick of gum in his mouth. Maybe Ballymore people are sick of hearing from these guys. Like he’s sick of Ivan and Larry. So, they ignore them. Which pisses off the dead people so they talk louder. He takes a few steps away from the wall and the chatter dies down. He backs up and touches a rock and it’s like his hand is stuck in an electric outlet. Take them, please. I can’t feed my babies anymore. Mam, don’t go! a kid wails. He jumps back from the wall, whirls around, and makes for Main Street. Enough! At a crosswalk, his stomach makes hungry noises. He considers skipping three o’clock group. “Don’t worry, Ryan will help you fit in,” Kate said this morning. She can be so clueless. He stops at a juice bar for a banana smoothie. He’s slurping it, checking out a video store window, when his thoughts line up. Let’s say, a hundred years ago the British Army are marching down Main Street to crush the rebellion. The ones getting shot at or burned out of their houses are calling out for help. People are dying on this street. The bad vibes coming from all that suffering are so intense the sounds get absorbed by the rocks. He goes in the store and checks out a display of DVDs and video players. Maybe these rocks held on to their voices the way silicon chips store data. Silicon comes from quartz crystals. Duh. Quartz is a rock. His arms and legs vibrate as he gets closer to solving the puzzle. So, the sounds stay in these rocks until someone comes along and tunes in at the right frequency to hear them. Someone like him. It could be a quantum thing. Wow. Pretty fucking awesome. Or maybe he’s just thinking crazy shit. He’s still sorting it out when the church bell peals three times. Damn. He’s late for stupid therapy, which turns out to be the same kind of stupid all over the world.

Don’t Say

Victoria V

Nordic Spell

Victoria V

Nancy White No Map When I miss my name in the dark, drive right past, turn off on a dead-end road that ends by the trailer park at the river where someone has hauled the TV outside on a long cord and gnats swarm around the image, a woman wearing white mink and heels, and offers me a Schlitz and a torn lawnchair, then my name rocks a little in the wind. It can’t believe it, can’t even call out, which would be against the law, and the dark old laws of the names do not bend. The dust boils up in my wake and curls around the place where the name was waiting, standing, and settles on the shoulders of the second-hand uniform it’s been obliged to wear, dogging me through this world. It thought for sure this time, thought I had learned, thought the past year meant something, that a turning had arrived. Now it must decide whether to hitch with the couple from DeMoines, or wait just in case I return, or sit in the ditch and cry. Should it give up the road altogether, set off through the scrub toward the bayou where over time its suit would snag and shred, fall away, and the walking shoes it wore only for me, to keep up with my insatiable motion: kicked off, left. It could soften then, blow open, go. Back where it came from. 21

There’s a place, it remembers, pitch-bright, quiet, and it thinks it was happy there, before someone (was it me?) called it to be.

Hannah Maiorano Surprise Houseguest A set of keys swing between fumbling hands they hang through fingers like a frame hangs against an 1889 cracked wall the lime disintegrating peeling white flakes gather between the seams dangling A man gasping for breath his black masked neighbor cradles reason in his arms a taut rope and bulging eyes one hand fumbles for a knotted throat the other frozen midair white knuckled Claw like It was winter when you came home to the sight of a great hawk wrapping talons round fragile neck piercing bone a yellow beak wrenching sinew and then a lolling head The yard is covered in fresh snowfall a small radius of red- a fleeting tombstone you notice the vibrant colour first but only because it mars the white ground Death so rarely stops at the doorstep knocks politely announcing itself as good houseguests are want to do 23

Kellen Bakovich

Argos (4)

Corey S. Pressman

Argos (5)

Corey S. Pressman

Lily Rose Kosmicki The Numinous •

numinous |ˈn(y)o͞omənəs| adjective having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity (Apple Dictionary)

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“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.” ― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

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Castle Marne in Denver, Colorado houses some of John T. Mason’s (world-renowned lepidopterist and founder and first curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) collection of over 400,000 butterflies and moths, probiscus intact.

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Butterflies don’t know what their own wings look like

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I bought a serving tray made of butterfly wings at a antique shop on Vashon Island, Washington. I was on my bike and it rained. It was my birthday. Later I bought a backgammon set with the board made of butterfly wings pressed under glass.

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Here are words that describe viewpoints of butterfly wings: dorsal, ventral. Dorsal means open, ventral means closed.

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Butterfly language is migratory. The question mark species has been found in southern Canada and all of the eastern United States except peninsular Florida, west to the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, south to southern Arizona and Mexico.

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People think that butterflies are called that because the reversal of letters in “flutter-by.” Not so sound based, is the idea that witches took the shape of butterflies to steal milk and butter.

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Maturation takes place through stages called “instars.” At the end of each instar “apolysis” occurs, in which a cuticle from the epidermis forms another layer, molting the old shadow layer and developing a new one. The development of butterfly wing patterns begins by the last larval instar.

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The majority of butterfly pupae are "naked." That means they don’t have the protection of the earth or a cocoon.

The Numinous I met the creator of the universe once. She’s no god or ghost or anything like that. She’s Alice, a Question Mark. She didn’t introduce herself. It was a fact that exuded from her, making it obvious that she’s “The One.” I accepted it, I guess. I met her at a round table with a floral tablecloth. I sat on a sturdy chair. She was at the exact center of the table on a pile of dung, probing it gently with her proboscis. At first, we just sat there. Every few moments her wings flashed open to reveal a dizzying pattern of red-orange color, splotched with cryptic markings. Just when it felt like nothing would ever move again, she shut them tightly to reveal the tree-bark camouflage of the underside. She continued her probing. I waited. I wondered how I should be listening. What do butterfly languages sound like? I imagined a series of quiet, ugly noises. I stood up and observed her from different angles. I walked a few steps forward, a few steps to the left. I angled my head to observe her underbelly. Trying to get a reaction I said, “Why aren’t shadows made of light instead of their absence?” 28

She said nothing. “If the sun died, would the flowers start growing into the ground towards the bright core, with their roots sticking nakedly into the air?” Nothing. “What if we added a new letter to the alphabet? How many new words could we create?” Of course, nothing. “Is this some big joke?” At that, nine flowers grew out of the tablecloth. She fluttered towards them, landing on each one. Her proboscis graced the hermaphroditic genitalia that is a flower. She was pleased with their beauty, but disinterested; I could tell she preferred the dung. •

Alice meets a hookah smoking caterpillar in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

•

Genus Polygonia, species interrogationis. Polygonia interrogationis, the question mark, is a North American nymphalid butterfly. It lives in wooded areas, city parks, generally in areas with a combination of trees and open space. The color and textured appearance of the underside of its wings combine to provide camouflage that resembles a dead leaf. The adult butterfly has a wingspan of 4.5–7.6 cm (1.8–3.0 in), Its flight period is from May to September. "The silver mark on the underside of the hindwing is broken into two parts, a curved line and a dot, creating a ?-shaped mark that gives the species its common name." (Wikipedia)

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A long time ago in Devon, England, people would try desperately to kill the first butterfly of the season and if they failed they would never have good luck again.

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At the last instar, it sheds its skin to become a soft fleshy pupae. Parts of a future butterfly start to emerge. The pupa takes on colors of its surroundings for camouflage. After many days to a couple of weeks the butterfly emerges, usually in the shadow of morning or afternoon hours.

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Butterfly Alphabet is a photographic project by the Norwegian naturalist Kjell Sandved containing all 26 letters and the numerals 0 to 9 from the wings of butterflies.

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Lepidopterologist Vladimir Nabokov said, “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

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One July, when I was nine years old a dying butterfly laid eggs on my arm when I was hiking in the Utah desert. It died and I carried it for a long time.

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As an adult butterfly, the question mark seeks out rotting fruit, tree sap, dung, or carrion as food sources. Only when these are unavailable do question marks visit flowers for nectar. (Wikipedia)

Alex Aimee Kist Blackthorns & Clay I watched the Lunantisidhe — spindled, sharp, and filled with enough hatred to blacken the moon — leave their home in search of their mother when the phase was right. And of this house, I made a pile of wood. Chopped the tree down myself, the sides of my hands nearly breaking along with the branches. And from the blackthorn I carved a coffin. Kept the barbs in tact, laced with my own blood and arranged them in my image atop midnight satin. Surrounded them with berries picked after the first frost, as sloes always are. There was supposed to be flesh there, cold. Yet in the time it took me to chisel in the skulls and flowers, cure the wood with weeping, engrave my name, just so — in the time I learned to build with my own hands something worth keeping, well… I kissed my palms and pressed the cool wet to my eyelids, imagined pennies blossoming from the rime, and still I chose to open once again to see something, anything before me. And thus buried my kist without a body. My own was built in placenta and blood and will not be mourned. My spirit though, was kneaded like a stress ball, then spun on the potter’s wheel of my own dizzying thoughts and molded by my own hands. 31

And if I must let one craft go I suppose I will free myself from sawdust.

Wilted Wings

Fiona Hsu

Lauren Brockmeyer A Simple Act The simple act of traveling down the highway for twenty minutes so she could be in a different town and wake up in a different bed became more appealing to her as she considered how being trapped in an apartment for the past several months was taking a toll on her mental health. As she began to pack her bags, she felt a fresh spring wind blow through her apartment window. There was no scent of the sea on the breeze, even though the sea was only kilometers from her place, but spring was in the air, and she felt the promise of a new season bloom in her chest. The soft scent of wildflowers from her terrace, and the smell of coming rain, filled her as she took a deep breath. It had been months back that she decided to move to the small city of Malaga; having been an ex-pat for most of her adult life, she decided, while living in Belgium, that she was overdue for a change of scenery. The dreary weather of the north was beginning to clog her view of the world, and she was in desperate need to feel like the world held meaning again. Moving to southern Spain did not happen to be the thing she needed. Instead, Spain was too bright and overwhelmed her. Even having more room to move around to go to the beach and be by the mountains, something she thought she missed living on the flat landscape of Belgium, didn’t seem to improve her mood. Even with the restrictions much looser here, Belgium was heading into their third lockdown this week; she hated it all and contemplated moving back to Belgium once her lease was up. Neither country was as loose as the United States, especially now that everyone was receiving the vaccination, such is the life she supposed. It seems that she can never get any satisfaction, a whole world of possibilities, and she still can’t find the promise of a fulfilling life, one with good friends, a partner, family, inexpensive housing, and a stable job. While she found her life significantly improved after moving from her country of birth to this new continent, this place would always be strange and unfamiliar. She would always be missing one, or several, of 34

the things that made life fulfilling, especially in times like these where it seemed the whole world burned with fury. * Her hotel room slowly fills with bright white light as she lays in bed, looking at the ceiling. The feeling of disappointment washes over her as she realizes that she doesn’t feel any better in this new space. She arrived at Belamadena Pueblo, just as the sun was setting the day before, in time to see that the hotel room’s balcony overlooked the sea. Standing there, hope-filled her, and she felt that being in this place was just what she needed. The next morning, not so much. Taking a breath in and out, she gets up and walks to the window of her balcony. Touching the wall, she feels herself being grounded in the moment. Things will change, time will pass, and things will get better, she thinks. “Look, the sea is out there, the sun is shining, and I have the freedom to walk down to the beach, with my mask on, of course, and spend a day in a lovely place. How many of my relatives can say that?” She speaks these words out loud to herself, and the sound of her voice relaxes her muscles, and she feels well again. * Come evening; she finds herself wandering down to the beach, lazily skimming her bare feet over the soft wet sand. The sky dusted in the pinks and blues of a dying day; she becomes angry all over again. Europe was supposed to be the new American dream. She was supposed to be able to see her future here in a way that the United States, with its broken promises, never allowed her to see. Instead, she was stuck in a life of mounting student loan debt, no prospect of a partner, no close friends to speak of, and a career as unsteady as the current economic situation. Nothing worked here; nothing worked anywhere. In the waning light of the day, she screams out at the sea. Lungs burning, eyes filled with tears, and visions of an orderly life disappear as she crumples to the ground.

Terra

Patricia Pedroso 36

Jacqueline Schaalje Pry Open My Fist Tonight I'm going to let you pry open my fist. Tsunamis haven't scattered its skeleton that's been holding me together like a dam. Exposure milled my nails to onionskin. Enough with war, lead laughter through the comb of pecking breakers and scoop wallowing waves, like cups of grain strewn in front of a French hen, at which vibrations of peace and pleasure cave back looping in my knot. But please don't slash your sword like Alexander. You're a great assist. Lay off, and there's my baby head thumb. Lick or shake this pseudofruit: no seeds, yet a present for us both. Others nourished on my flesh but you can breathe my air and be (my) content.

Abigail Gray everyone’s fragile, now that we’re still alive no longer are we collective dandelions, quickly sprouting through cracks in the pavement; no, we’re more akin to the domesticated houseplant. transplanted to a dim home office, terracotta planter sucking the moisture from our roots, yet we’re too afraid to make our thirst known. our caretaker sighs, wondering where she went wrong in her tender care, not realizing her trowel, fertilizer and exact moisture schedule (please nurture me each friday, before noon) was our downfall. give me danger, make me the prey quivering in naked daylight, seeds floating across harsh breezes and through fierce thunderstorms. i want to be herculean yet unruly, slip my roots into uncharted gardens. let me wither down into crisp dust during the 38

next drought. i’ve lived through too much sorrow to be forced back into captivity.

Distant Portal

Alexey Adonin

Under the Sea

Alexey Adonin

Into the Blue

Alexey Adonin

Natalie Coufal Blinding Brilliant I used to make jokes about the nuthouse. As a teacher I would tell my students to settle down or they’d have to haul me to Shoal Creek in Austin, where I’d be crafting necklaces out of Playdoh and wandering around in a bathrobe with no belt. I’ll be laying on a couch, recalling my troubled childhood to a shrink. Sitting at a crafting table where I can color pictures that reveal my broken psyche. Getting nicknamed “Sparky” for all my trips to the electric-shock therapy wing. They grin up at me from their desks. Damn, I’m funny. 2020. Our heat index has exceeded one hundred all week long. We have to handle the steering wheel with hot pads. Sometimes the local teenagers crack eggs on the pavement to watch them fry. The old men at Carolyn’s feedstore joke that it’s too hot to even screw. I chug my hot coffee anyway. I sweat. I’m nervous. I finish my coffee in no time, but I keep touching the rim of the cup to my lower lip, a nervous tick. Over the phone, I had asked if I could interview my twin sister about her suicide attempt and her stay at the psychiatric hospital. Steph comes right over with her two boys. She’s all calm as she sips her Diet Coke, talking as if recalling a stay at the Holiday Inn. We sit in the shade of the porch while our kids splash and shout in the pool. The reflection of the sun on the kiddie pool is blinding; it hurts my eyes. I’ve recently finished Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, where she delineates “a blinding bad time.” She gives it a timeframe, makes it something that can be measured, studied, understood. I need to understand this, our blinding bad time. I want to contain it. Her primary care doctor told her that a mental hospital would be the safest place for her. Dr. Leal diagnosed her—Major Depressive Disorder with Suicide Attempt—and referred her to Rock Prairie Behavioral Health Hospital in College Station. Patients have recovered beautifully from there, he assured her. I was scared and unsure, she said, but Tim urged me to go—he was scared himself, and convinced me that these were the experts, they knew what to do. Paperwork and admission took 42

up most of the first day. Once she was admitted, they patted her down. They took away her clothes and gave her scrubs to wear. They took her purse, jewelry, the contents of her pockets, and her shoelaces. When I say ‘they’ I mean a tech, she clarified. Mental Health Care technicians are random, unskilled people with no real training who are paid an hourly wage to do the grunt work of nurses and psychiatrists. The techs do anything from manning the front desk to patting down visitors to cleaning up vomit to wrangling a violent patient off of another patient. During her stay, Steph learned that Rock Prairie is notoriously understaffed. 1995. The movie Mad Love comes out, starring Drew Barrymore with her cute pixie haircut and Chris O’Donnell, with his bulging muscles and strong jawline. At fourteen, we drool over romanticized psychosis. We love to see Barrymore in torn up clothes, jamming out to Nirvana and 7 Year Bitch. Her chemistry with O’Donnell on the screen is almost more than we can stand. For us, it is a too-simple equation: we swoon over O’Donnell, the prince charming, and how he rescues this poor misunderstood girl from the psychiatric ward, and her rich, stuck-up parents are the villains, with their rules and their stainless steel appliances. We revel in their rebellion and pretend that its ours. Barrymore’s insanity is endearing and glamourized. She cuts school, has sex, runs away, lives spontaneously. When she returns to the psych ward in end, it doesn’t resonate. We only remember that crazy is the new sexy. After searching her, they lead my sister down a hallway to small room that had a bed and a toilet in it. Like prison, she said. She was required to keep the door open at all times, even when using the toilet. She was on her period, so she asked for sanitary pads. She asked every hour on the hour for pads. The lady at the front desk explained that a fight had broken out, and that they would be very short-handed for a while. After four hours, my sister just gave up and continued to bleed on herself. She sweated, tossed, turned and bled on a mattress with no sheets—she didn’t sleep at all because she was hungry and more nervous than ever. At daybreak she was still awake when a nurse came in with some new medication that Steph was unfamiliar with. She asked the nurse what it was and she said anti-psychotic. She asked her how it worked on the body, but the nurse didn’t know. She took the medicine 43

anyway. Just after the nurse left, a tech entered with her daily schedule. She asked for pads again, and the tech actually brought her some as well as some new scrubs to change into. From 9:00-9:30 Group Therapy was scheduled. Steph was escorted by a tech to a room where a dozen or so patients were seated in a circle. The psychologist was busy, the tech said, so she would lead the session; she asked everyone to state a goal they hoped to achieve for the day. A gothic-looking teenager named Sarah stated that her goal was to not get pissed off at anybody during group therapy. Another patient, Margie, sobbed when she reported that her goal was to forgive herself for the affair that she had—this made a guy named Mitch grumble under his breath: “Not this shit again.” A slight, brittle gal said she didn’t know—that she ate a whole roll and now was so full that she could die and couldn’t think of anything else. One man named Mike slept with his head on his desk for the entire session. It took about five minutes to go around the circle. Then everyone was dismissed to their rooms, and that concluded Group Therapy. 2001. One hot summer day in Houston, Texas we watch the story of Andrea Yates unravel before our eyes. A diagnosis of severe postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia. A good freak show, she drowned all five of her young children in the bathtub. One of the sickest patients we’ve ever treated, an expert witness, states. But we’re hard of heart; we Texans shake our heads and say what a shame to it all. I remember waiting tables that summer. I can sympathize with her depression, but it’s no excuse, says some old lady who sips her sweet tea and makes me reheat her potato soup. On TV we see a monster in orange prison scrubs, unattractively scrawny, greasy dark hair strewn against her sickly pale skin. Something sub-human. She is not the valedictorian of her high school graduating class, captain of the swim team, or a registered nurse for MD Anderson. The personhood of Yates is lost somewhere between the clang of prison bars and the bang of the gavel in the courtroom. Her insanity plea denied, she is sentenced life in prison. We all watch on TV, between bites of burger and fries, the incarceration of Yates. We are righteously horrified; who could do such a thing? I wipe blobs of ketchup off the table that is done and move on to the next.

My sister returned to her room but found herself thrashing on the bare mattress. She thought she would try the Community Room until it was time for her appointment with the Psychiatrist/Director of the hospital. The community room was small and dingey and smelled of disinfectant. A group of patients played Uno at a wobbly table. There was also a table with crayons and coloring books on it where nobody sat. Aside from tables and chairs, the room was bare except for a fuzzy TV which was on The Price is Right. A couple of patients dozed in chairs. Time is warped at the nuthouse, Steph told me. The clocks on the wall seemed stuck, unreal, like the ones in the Salvador Dali painting: melted, distorted, and still. When she gave up on the clocks, she used her own breathes to measure moment after moment. She sat in a hard, plastic orange chair like a child in a waiting room, jiggling her leg in agitation. A man near her own age, probably in his thirties, made eye contact with her from another orange chair where he had been browsing through a fashion magazine. He smiled and asked what she was in for. She told him her diagnosis, which she already had to repeat to the techs, the nurses, and the psychiatrist since she got there. It didn’t get easier. The syllables still stumbled off her tongue. He came across as likeable; he did most of the talking, mentioning that this was his second visit to the nuthouse. They talked some about their families. He said he bet that she would do fine, that she had a lot going for her with her husband, her baby, and her sister. He told her that if she wants to get out, she should do two things without argument: take her meds and go to therapy. 2014. Robin Williams hangs himself with a belt in his bedroom. The Oscar-winning actor was sixty-three. Police report that he had superficial cuts on his wrists and a history of depression and substance abuse; it sounds like your typical celebrity suicide. Perhaps he just couldn’t handle the fame. In Dead Poets Society, he is a wise and compassionate teacher, urging his students to seize the day. When Robert Sean Leonard’s character puts a bullet to his brain, Williams is gentle and steadfast—he exits the classroom as steadily as he came. He’s stellar in his performance of Mrs. Doubtfire, ridiculous in his old lady get-up, his fake boobs catching fire, his manly bulk evident underneath an old lady dress. We roar.

The patients got taken out at least once a day for fresh air. They were escorted to a grassy patch outside that was surrounded by four brick walls. There was one picnic table dead in the center. It reminded Steph of a hamster cage where humans could look down and observe them. The smokers sat and smoked at the picnic table. My sister walked back and forth from wall to wall, eavesdropping on the smokers. She learned that one smoker had the hots for the teenaged goth even if her tits could be bigger. After about ten minutes, they were brought back inside. Steph passed the time writing letters to me. When it was her time use the phone in the hallway, she waited in line for her five-minute phone call. The call came at 3:05 in the afternoon, startling me—my cell had been in my hand all day, even when going to the bathroom and then finally I got the call. I answered the phone on the first ring. I told her how I had tried to call her multiple times, that I lost count after four or five times. She cried into the phone and told me that she missed me so much, that the day had been hell—long hours of sitting around and shitty therapy. I told her that I had spent the day alternating between baking and trying to call her, and it was hell worrying about her. She told me about how shitty the facilities were, how she tossed and turned in hell all night, and how she wanted out. I told her I’d do anything for her, and that I’d be there for visiting hours. You’d have thought I’d have seen it coming. Twins share a magic quality; they speak a language all their own. Twins are supposed to have telepathic abilities, I’ve been told; they can detect when something is wrong with the other without even using words. Doctors say that the bond begins in the womb, around fourteen weeks. The twin fetuses will touch one another more than they touch themselves. They even know to be gentle around the eye area. I thought I was good. At an early age I could read her face, to know if she was bored, or mischievous, or content or constipated. I thought I had it down. One time we both showed up to a family barbeque wearing the exact same shirt that came from Ross: brown with pink polka dots. We had made the purchases independently, without informing each other. Another time we each got Dad the same Father’s Day card from HEB: a hotdog with googly eyes that sang when you opened it. Everyone marveled at how twins think alike, how they really are in tune with each other. My mental compass must have been defective. I thought she was okay. Everyday she would call at 7:30 in the 46

morning. She knew that’s when I finished getting the kids off to school each day. She needed me to pep-talk her for the day. She would ask me to tell how other mothers struggled, so I’d remind her of Kris Wunderlich, who refused to get out of bed one morning. Her mother-inlaw had had to come over and watch her toddler and newborn. I told her about Kelly Dinges, with her five wild boys, how they got kicked out of a Walmart because one of them threw a temper tantrum and knocked all the toys off the shelves. How once one of them swallowed her birth control pill. Another time, one of them pulled down his pants and pooped on the floor at someone else’s house. No, I thought she was in a good place: her miscarriage was over. She had conceived again four months later. She had given birth to a small, five-pound boy, premature, but healthy. She had a support system—she had joined MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) at Champion Fellowship Church. Every Thursday, she and I would attend to eat breakfast food, drink coffee, and swap war-stories with the other young mothers. She had cried one day and had told her small group that her baby was nearly a year old and she was still anxious, still overwhelmed and nervous as hell. 2016: March 18th, about 7:30 in the morning. She called. I was in the kitchen, right by the window. It was misty. Through a choked up voice, she told me that sometimes she had suicidal thoughts. She told me. We can do whatever you want, I told her; Kelly Pittman was coming over for a playdate but I would cancel. We could do anything, go anywhere, whatever she wanted. I could take the baby. She told me no, that she would go to Leonita’s house instead. I believed her. I hung up the phone. I hung up the phone. I never told anyone about that call. Kelly came over and we spent the day helping our kids catch frogs. I called Steph to check on her, and she didn’t answer, but I didn’t put the pieces together. I thought she was probably napping with Kyle down, so I crouched down and returned to catching frogs. My sister was downing three bottles of prescription drugs with a bottle of booze and I had hung up the fucking phone. 2018. In a fancy French hotel, Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef, millionaire, and author of Kitchen Confidential, hangs himself with the belt of a bathrobe in the bathroom. His mother, Gladys, says “He had 47

everything. Success beyond his wildest dreams. Money beyond his wildest dreams. He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this.” He was sixty-one. Authorities say that the act appeared to be impulsive, though the field of psychology reports that eight out of ten people who attempt suicide give warning signs. I wonder what wild thoughts raced through his brain before he did it. Or maybe he was super chill, calm in his knowledge that he had a way out. I wonder what secrets he hoarded, what he was trying to escape. Most of all I wonder if his loved ones feel how I feel—that they should have seen it coming, that they should have loved him better, that it is something they will live with the rest of their lives. I buy his book and search for clues. He is light-hearted and witty. Bourdain urges his readers to live daringly, eat oysters, take risks, travel and be forever changed. He insists that our bodies are not temples, but amusement parks—we should enjoy the ride. His oven-roasted eggplant recipe intrigues me, but I can’t bring myself to try the dish. On the cover, he stands tall and handsome, his eyes looking directly into the camera. He’s too alive for me, too good-looking, too memorable. 2020. My sister is calmer than me. She undresses her two-year-old son as she answers my questions about the nuthouse. She laughs at the way he shouts ‘naked!’ over and over as he runs to the kiddie pool to join Kyle who is playing with my three kids. They all laugh and scream as my eldest squeezes Dawn dish soap out of a bottle, creating a cloud of suds rising from the water. I’ve scribbled away at my spiral notebook; a mess of chicken-scratch words and phrases gawks back at me, a visual of the frenzy it took to jot them down. I’ve scrawled so hard, the words are like braille, or scrimshaw—they have dimension and meaning, and I’m depending on it. It’s as bright as hell out here; when my eyes look up to the pool, my pupils shrink in pain. My hands brush up and down my homemade braille. I don’t know anything, but everything is blinding brilliant.

Ann Christine Tabaka Her Story She was a story she was never real she played with paper and strings building cities on mountaintops cardboard skyscrapers reached the moon She was wisdom or so she thought carrying dreams in a bag of green silk woven with tears from the lake that she walked upon each day Telling her visions to all that would listen she believed the words that she spoke floating down from the precipice that she built she faded into herself

White

Beverly Rose Joyce

Leon Fedolfi Slush Half Lung Stop and look into winter gazes – what to think? I thought they are not like what I remembered. When I was four and following my cousins on a strange hike into winter danger. Who is and what perfects? A snow conundrum. As though my choice of words to describe things was far from where I am. The slush offers a hard fall on fresh pavement. And a cold white pine twists the oval small path where I navigate my survival. If I look down, it was to see Everest as a cleft – imaginative fate as my essence. Face, pushed into permafrost. Slush, a welcome collusion with my art. When I see as I think – I could be mechanical. And when I was a boy, I took the still into my gullet. Where white snow was in my forever belly.

Lacrimarium

Nicole Irene

Dreaming Sleep: The Aqueous Delta Wave Nicole Irene

Hayley Stoddard Ruined Pears “and then be reckless, be reckless, and resolved in returning gratitude.” -Gertrude Stein There is a cool cup in my hand held out to you a patent of pears and of ripe, green forgiveness which I must only hope you will drink down, a down comforter for all the sleep I have cost you the hours unkept, the bowl of fruit smashed by the door, spattering it with juice like blood a pomegranate murder of the anxious mind an offense to the goodness of your knowing me. I took your hand, brought you up the tree it bruised, scraped but I was still thankful you came I didn’t mean to cause the blood. I just wanted you to see the view that only I had ever seen.

Untitled (Abandoned Factory Nonlinear Dubuque) Christopher Paul Brown

Rebecca Rush How I Learned To Meditate, Or, The Little Room He took the three steps from the sleeping porch onto the beach and faced the ocean, arms outstretched. “I’m in love,” he said to the tide. I knew what he meant in that moment, but later I would pretend it was for me. His name was Tanner. He was dimpled and handsome, 6 years my junior. He would never say I love you. Or I’m sorry. He drove me home from my first day at a restaurant he had just quit. He kept showing up to steal free lunch with his old manager code on breaks from his new job at a car dealership. He had a baby on the way. I had my license suspended for a DUI. We would stay together until those facts changed. Our first date was an accident. I was going to the comedy album recording of a guy I hooked up with on and off, planning to stay with him in the hotel at the casino. A few hours before the event, the comedian called and said his ex was going to be there and she would be sitting with his family. He would pretend he didn’t know me if I found a way to get there. He would no longer pick me up. I called Tanner, sweet, adorable Tanner, and asked him if he wanted to go see a comedy show with me. I let him in and ran back upstairs to finish getting ready. He stood at the bottom of the stairs. When I began to walk back down, he looked up. “I know you aren’t drinking right now, but what about cocaine?” “Should be fine.” When I drank from the flask in his car, he objected but I waved him off. “I’ve already had cocaine, obviously I’m going to drink.” I was paranoid into silence at the show. I had beef with management, and the last thing I wanted anyone to know was that I was doing cocaine in the bathroom at a club I wanted to work. I was publicly sober. It was the only time cocaine benefitted my career. 56

I paraded Tanner by the comic, standing by the door on the way out, smiling, and blacked out. I woke up with lingerie flung all over my bedroom and Tanner in my bed. He came back the next night. We got drunk on each other. We stood, naked, facing each other, entranced before merging. The night after that, straddling him in bed, something electric passed between us that I couldn’t place. It was the same kind of energetic whoosh that left my body when my acupuncturist claimed to release an entity from my auric field by stabbing my toe with an exacto blade, except it was going into and not out of me. I had a roommate at that winter beach rental, an “academic” rental it’s called, as it lasts the length of the school year before the cottages can drive their prices up for weekly summer rentals. She was an older artist who used the ocean views and the quiet to paint part time. One of her sons defected from college that semester so she stayed in her main residence to keep an eye on him most of the time. That was unplanned. I saw her only once a week. Tanner had moved in with his mother to save money for the baby. My house and I gave him an escape. He drove me to all my comedy shows. Without him I wouldn’t have been able to take the gigs. We ignored the influence these benefits had on our desire to be in relationship. The sex was magic. We became addicted. He’d come home from a sales meeting with a doodle he’d say he realized after drawing was my vagina. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d look at his profile in the car while he was driving, watching his dimples break open his face, in awe that this beautiful man was mine. We spent so much time together so quickly that when we tried to take a night off it felt like something was wrong. The house felt cold and empty. I got drunk and called and cried and yelled and I have no idea why or what I was upset about. I was so broke that winter that I went to the food bank to free up money for drugs. That embarrassed him, but he ate the food and let me go halfsies on weed. Once he bought cocaine intending to both use and sell it. I dipped 57

into it after he fell asleep and confessed the next morning, tearfully. There was a little room off my bedroom with a low sloped ceiling, an easy chair, a mattress on the floor and a bureau. I decorated it with Tibetan prayer flags and old sheets I’d tie dyed and quotes about writing and art and existence. “Art is a wound turned into light,” said the biggest one. The birth of his son loomed. We tried to quit smoking. Once while my manager was showing me how to change the toilet paper roll I heard his car pull up to the side of the building and ran out, leaving her standing in the bathroom holding the roll. He had cigarettes. Everyone loved him at the restaurant. He’d grown up with the owner’s son, an extension of the family. Tanner had an alcoholic mom and a dad he didn’t meet until his 20’s, despite him living one town over the whole time. With that backstory and those dimples, they let him get away with everything. I was better on stage with him around, and my stand up provided him a diversion from his life. He’d fuss over the lights, the sound, helping in any way he knew how. “I’m a fixer, baby,” he said once after fixing some fact of my plumbing I didn’t know was broken. “That’s what I do. I fix things.” If I blew him on the drive to the show, what did it matter if I bombed? I’d already sucked for 10 minutes. One night, driving home from a show in Hartford, I called him my boyfriend. “I can’t believe you want me to be your boyfriend. That I get to be your boyfriend.” I gave up giving up drinking. We gave up pretending we didn’t live together. My roommate asked if he could stay elsewhere one night a week so she could be there with no men. We tried it once and she didn’t show so we never did again. We were at work, or we were together. We were dating for over a month when I was bending on to put my socks on and noticed that he wasn’t circumcised. “Wait, are you not circumcised? How did I not know?” “It’s okay, only my mom and my best friend know.” “How? Do you only date alcoholics.” “No, I just, push it up, and let it chill around the neck.” I was in love with a man who wore his foreskin like an infinity scarf. 58

He seemed embarrassed that I went to the food bank that winter, but never helped with the groceries. The electric bill skyrocketed as the house was heated by electric and not well insulated, but he begged off helping with that too. He did, however, take the money he was saving “for the baby” and buy a new Jeep Wrangler. He seemed nervous to show it to me. I would have these conversations with him, and he would say, “I’m a human being with flaws,” and it would resolve nothing. I got drunk at night and tried the conversations again, but with feeling. “It’s okay,” he’d say. “You’ll apologize in the morning. You always do.” He got off work before me. One night I needed wine and would be getting out after the liquor store closed. I texted and asked him to pick me up a bottle. “Just take one from the restaurant. I used to do it all the time. They never notice. I like the Malbec.” I slipped it into my purse behind the bar under the red eye of the camera. I didn’t want to, and I was mad at how cheap he was being with me again, but I needed the wine at a louder volume. For Christmas he took me to my favorite new age shop and bought me everything I wanted, including a rhodochrosite pendant. The stone meant love, and maybe so did he. On Christmas Eve, my roommate came by after a big family party with a young woman and a middle-aged man. The woman was over six feet tall and dressed as an elf. They were wasted. When I went to go upstairs to grab our weed the elf grabbed me by the arm, hard, because she wasn’t done talking. She apologized, but a bruise still bloomed. My roommate went to the bathroom, Tanner was in the kitchen, and I was upstairs when the older man put the moves on the elf. “Do you want me to munch your box?” He asked. “Just let me know. I’ll munch your box.” They had just told us that they’d known each other since she was a little girl. We laughed for a week, repeating in passing, “Do you want me to munch your box?” 59

The baby was due at the beginning of January. Tanner complained and went to parenting classes and fought with the mother. I started driving my car again, though my license was still suspended. He rushed to the hospital for the birth in the middle of a blizzard. That exact day I got a letter in the mail. My license had been restored. His texts grew increasingly worried. The baby was the wrong way, the cord was wrapped around it’s head, he was scared the baby was going to die, there was going to be an emergency c section. I was confused. He didn’t want the baby. Why was he so scared it was going to die? Would that not solve all his problems? At work everyone felt sorry for him, and what that girl had done to him. “The worst part is how he’s stuck in Connecticut now for the next 18 years,” lamented my manager. They acted as if the woman had snuck into the bathroom, stolen his dirty condom, and shoved it inside herself while ovulating. They got drunk and had sex. Everyone and no one was to blame. They were angry at her for not getting an abortion. Tanner pushed hard for it, but she pushed back, saying, “I’ve had too many abortions already.” Relatable. I really wanted to be cool about the baby, but I wasn’t able to. Alone at my house for the first time in months, the wind and snow rattling the windows and warring with my little radiators, I fell down the stairs. My socks were drunk. My shoulder was injured, so I went to the walk-in clinic. It was the same walk-in clinic I picked my mother up at two years earlier after she was brought in an ambulance after falling down the stairs. My shoulder was X-rayed. It was okay. But my urine revealed that I was pregnant. I texted Tanner right away, I couldn’t fucking wait, and when he finally arrived home, breathless and buzzing with birth, I greeted him at the door. “Congratulations. I’m sorry I didn’t fall down the stairs harder.” Later, I offered weakly, “I have also had too many abortions.” “How much money do you have in savings?” he asked. 60

“Eight cents.” “In eight years, I’m going to have an eight year old son and you are going to be a forty year old waitress who does comedy at night.” I thought I wanted him to be with me for the abortion, to sit in the cold hard chairs at Planned Parenthood in Old Saybrook, to go to the pharmacy with me to pick up the pills and the Percocet I’d begged for and been given because I am white, to drink and smoke with me while I cramped and bled, but in the end, I just wanted to sit in the little room alone and stare at the grey winter swells of the ocean and the snow on the beach and cry. My next day at work I got called into the office. I had been caught stealing wine on camera. “It’s not much to take you off the schedule. You’ve only been on a few lunches since we noticed you drank on shift at night.” I started crying. “I just had an abortion.” “I don’t know what it is with Tanner’s taste in women,” my manager said. When I stopped crying and looked up, she continued, “When I fired Ali (Tanner’s baby mama) she started crying that she was pregnant. Your bad choices in your personal life aren’t going to save you from the bad choices you made here. We will be keeping your final paycheck. You are very lucky that we aren’t pressing charges.” I didn’t tell her that it was Tanner’s idea that I steal the wine. I regretted this for years until I realized that it didn’t matter, and even if it did, she wouldn’t have believed me. The fact that my last paycheck was gone along with my means to get more money burnt my ass. There was no way I stole $274 of wine. I could only remember doing it two or three times. That too, was irrelevant. I walked out of the restaurant, tears blurring everything. My legs were moving but I couldn’t feel them. I drove straight to the liquor store, using a bottle of tequila to wash down a handful of Xanax. I sat in the parking lot of the town beach near my mom’s house and cried and smoked some weed. As soon as I felt a little better, a little less, as soon as I was not okay to drive, I turned the engine on and headed back toward home. I remembered an old roommate who owed me money. I called while steering to my exit, crashing my car into the guard rail just before the 61

ramp. The car shut off and would not turn back on. I called Tanner, whose new Jeep came with roadside assistance. Once I was safely in his car and mine was being towed to the house I got upset with him for being disdainful instead of sympathetic. “I wouldn’t have even gotten fired if you hadn’t told me to steal wine!” I screamed. I reached my hand toward him, then pulled out a double terminated quartz crystal and slashed at my wrist with it. I didn’t break skin. Back in my bedroom, he turned to me. “I don’t know whether to wrap you up in a straitjacket or leave you forever.” That sounded like love to me. The effort involved in putting someone in a straitjacket. He went back to work and I went back to AA. When he came home at night, he headed straight for my little room to play on his phone and ignore me. I said things I knew to say, like, “This is what early sobriety looks like!” Even though I was still smoking weed. At night I would crawl to the edge of my own bed and lie there stiffly. A week like this passed, then two. Something in me shifted. “You can’t keep coming over my house and sleeping in my bed and ignoring me!” “I don’t know where that even came from,” I told a friend later. “Suddenly I was like no, I don’t need you this badly.” “You are starting to approve of yourself enough that you don’t need his approval anymore,” they replied. He moved out. I offered to help him pack. He was overjoyed that I helped. Once he told me to always be nice to everyone because you don’t know when you will need them to help you. That his favorite game was to see how much he could get people to like him. Mine seemed to be to see how much I could disappoint them. He bragged about how mature our breakup was. I didn’t know it was a breakup, I just wanted my little room back. I figured I’d get 30 days without drinking, and we’d be back together before Valentine’s Day. It was January 17th. Something in the words he used when he left that I clung to, though when I looked back to inspect them later, they vanished like a puff of smoke. Nothing to hold in a hand. When he came over on Valentine’s Day, I finally got it. He wasn’t 62

coming back. Or paying his portion of the electric. I had no money, nowhere to go, and a car that wouldn’t start. I didn’t even have weed. I sat in the little room for hours at a time, watching the waves break on the sand, the light dance on the water, the sun rise and set, just breathing. One day I realized that I was meditating. I went out to my car, looked through the owner’s manual, and pressed a button. It started.

Rise of Vision

Andres Aguilar

Untitled (6)

Jacqueline Staikos

Untitled (7)

Jacqueline Staikos

Marianne Lyon Passion Praise wild passion fiery longings raging songs unsung free lurking hesitation curious compulsion ignite the set-aside not-yet-concrete Laud shamans magical spells generals who inspire peace priests who rouse devotion children who believe they can fly Applaud wild fever that nudges us to rush to zesty gold mine praise things we’ve always said we’d do indulgences we never thought we would Here’s to making dithering useless here’s to kindling that which makes no sense that which doesn’t rhyme fit the meter what we cast threw away Say no to parameters that suffocate fear not dissonance consonance will resound ecstatically resuscitate your arduous beacon enter locked secret room of vibrancy Congratulate passionate sun within your heart it maybe love lust rage determination envy heartache exhaustion joy allow it to burn its way out

Jennifer Cahill A Body, A Tree A white petal falls, it is of the early May bloom, it is of a blossomed tree that smothers with the light yielding weight of its insistence, that it will be stirred with the gentle wind, that a bee can hover, ponder its hunger for the floweret's soft pink nectar. And the black body of the bee is a deep night, its dawn-colored wings are the flutter of old heart strings that are plucked with the song of children at their delightful play: shouts(orders); laughter(independence). a melody of youth sung as the spring birds weave a dance over their bodies. A deflated shiny balloon is a captive of the watchful trees with the desert red buds, their limbs shape the faces of an ancient specter, seen through the snow tints of the wind-blown flowers milling an early May. 68

Hunter’s Moon

Julie Fritz 69

Christina Martin The Mountain Man When you're born here you can never escape them they build their walls in your heart with their incessant wind, their lichens flinging constellations at your soul peaks looming, preaching, white except for the summer cow bells heavy with contentment and the slow melody of feeding then it is all purple heathers and pink campion moss. There's no hope of leaving then. But just over the edge on the other side of the pass is the true wild. There only wolves and the prey of wolves long snarls white shrieks bloodied heads and part-forgotten mountain tales of an old man in a hut with a wolf, lone and gaunt. No one has seen him for years. He never escaped, his heart a creation of rock and spring clover; Some say they hear echoes of his two-tone flute carried on the wind across the snow, that he runs with the wolves.

But no one knows. No one has seen him for years

Steven Capitani Universal Constant Two leaves fall At the start of winter One full of color, Like a red drop Against a grey canvas, Gliding through the air On its own terms, Gracefully watching Father tree’s tears Wash away the dirt. Weightlessly waiting To absorb Mother Earth’s Embracing touch, Never knowing any other way Of existing. Never knowing What it means, To feel gravity. The other, Identifiable by Outlined edges and serrated slits Unfixable Frozen, Like a fox Caught in barbed wire, Once nimble, Once spry, Bogged down, Pierced by wind, Bitten by cold. 72

Father tree Discarded it, Mother Earth Rejected it, Judging leaves Formed communal grounds Without an entrance. It floated Weightless Between opposing forces, Never knowing Any other way, To feel gravity.

Eye

John Timothy Robinson

Contribute to the next edition of The Closed Eye Open Click Here to Submit Online publication of Issue V is planned for Fall/Winter 2021. Submissions are now open for Issue V and Maya’s Micros monthly feature of short form writing (108 words or fewer). ****** Do you have a suggestion for the theme of the next Ripples on the Pond special edition? Please email them to theclosedeyeopen@gmail.com or DM on Instagram @theclosedeyeopen

List of Contributors Alexey Adonin is a Jerusalem based abstract-surrealist artist. He was born in Slutsk, Belarus, in 1973. In his creative endeavor, Alexey tries to apply a more philosophical approach and hint at things' mystical origin. He mostly strives to get away from banal copying of reality, preferring to create one of his own, which somehow reflects his inner world. Alexey uses his art as a platform to express his profound ideas about reality, humanity, and their intertwined behaviors. His works have been showcased locally and internationally and are held in private collections around the world.

Andres Aguilar was born in Canada. He spends most of his time writing in multiple genres and drawing. Andres also has a poetry book on Kobo, named Sonando.

Kellen Bakovich is a film and digital photographer capturing abandoned beauty, remains of the “Wild West” and other unique sights around Northern Colorado and beyond.

Lauren Brockmeyer is a Latina who lives and works in southern Spain with her husband and their dog Coco. Her Spanish is horrible but something she’s hoping to rectify by taking lessons. She is an avid reader, hiker, traveler, and aspiring Flamenco dancer in her free time. You can find her on Instagram @literary_expat, where she posts what she’s reading, or @lauren.brock15, where she posts occasional pictures of her travels.

Christopher Paul Brown is known for his exploration of the unconscious through improvisation and the cultivation of serendipity and synchronicity via alchemy. He has applied this method to music, video, and 2-D art. Over the past three years his art was exhibited twice in 77

Rome, Italy and in Belgrade, Serbia. His series of ten photographs, titled Obscure Reveal, were exhibited at a Florida museum in 2017. He earned a BA in Film from Columbia College Chicago in 1980. Brown was born in Dubuque, Iowa and now resides in Buncombe County, North Carolina.

Jennifer Cahill earned a Masters of Science in Administrative Studies from Boston College. She has been a creative writing student of Gotham Writers Workshop, and The Writers Studio. Her book, Majestic Colors (2020) is available on Amazon.com. Jennifer lives in Massachusetts with her cat, Tilly.

Steven Capitani is a poet and fiction writer with a background in neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. His background related to how the mind works allows him to think alternatively about commonly viewed ideas, providing a different perspective than what is perceived to be normal. He believes that interpreting societal, existential, and scientific facets of life eclectically provides people with the ability to raise awareness and continuously ask questions.

Victoria Costello is a San Francisco-based, Emmy Award-winning TV and science writer and memoirist turned novelist. She served as staff blog editor for the UK scientific research publisher, PLOS, and as a freelancer, she's authored feature articles for Scientific American MIND, Brain World, Huffington Post, and Psychology Today. Her memoir, A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness, was published by Prometheus Books in 2012. See her work at www.victoriacostelloauthor.com.

Natalie Coufal is a nonfiction and fiction writer from rural Central Texas. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing at Sam Houston State University where she has received a

fellowship. Her work has appeared in Glassworks, 100 Word Story, Passengers Journal, and Touchstone Literary Magazine.

Leon Fedolfi is an aspiring poet and an avid reader of poetry. He has published in The Raw Art Review, High Shelf Press, Prometheus Dreaming, and others. His book, The UnInvented Ear, is coming out in 2021 through Uncollected Press.

Julie Fritz is an abstract landscape artist and memoir writer, capturing her subjects where she lives, in the backyard. But what backyards! The Rocky Mountains, the Finger Lakes, the Blue Ridge and the Tidewaters of Virginia. Her landscapes evolve from a life long-lived, full of memories, confrontations, and revelations. On the canvas and the page, the stories are simple, but the viewer has to go deeper to confront what is being represented.

Andrew Furst is an artist, author, Buddhist meditation teacher, poet, photographer, musician, and technologist. In the spring of 2019, he suffered a massive bacterial infection causing partial paralysis of his right hand. His work since then has served as physical and mental therapy on his path to recovery. His work revolves around balance and wholeness. Media include collage, three-dimensional works, watercolor, and ink. He prefers smaller scale works to remain intimate with the viewer.

Abigail Gray is mostly a writer, but also a full-time creature of the marshes who lurks in Earth’s beauty. Their work centers around nature, gender, the inner self and mental health. They spend their life collecting tiny tokens as gifts for the birds and discovering something new about the world. They have been published in Willard & Maple, Good Life, and Poet’s Choice. Like other writers, they are creating a poetry collection that hopes to find a home soon.

Anna Hillary is an educator, writer, and editor. She loves plants and animals, humid summers, and snowy winters. She calls both Buenos Aires, Argentina and La Crosse, Wisconsin home. Anna is based between the two cities, where she is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on high school student activism.

Fiona Hsu is a fine artist and self-taught photographer based in southern California. Her works captures the aspects of beauty within woeful and melancholic definitions, narrating a haunted yet quaint tale. Fiona's photographs, particularly self portraits, are inspired by her dreams at night, her childhood imaginations, and the complex forms of emotions she discovered within herself. She is currently an undergraduate student at UCLA pursuing a major in Art and a minor in Arts Education.

An art instructor, aspiring poet, and mixed media artist, Nicole Irene, creates in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. A gem and mineral enthusiast, eclectic solitary, and consciousness explorer she believes in magic and is moved by the beauty of the nocturnal sky, astronomical phenomena, metaphysics, and cosmology. Nicole is a practitioner of herbal medicine, empyreal dreamer, and an alchemical philosopher who dwells in a derelict apple orchard surrounded by an extensive collection of houseplants, geological specimens, and creature companions.

Beverly Rose Joyce lives in Brecksville, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, with her husband, Carl, and their two daughters, Mallory and Samantha, along with their two dogs, Shadow and Reggie. She holds a BA in English from Baldwin-Wallace University and a MA in English from Cleveland State University, and she was a public high school English teacher for sixteen years before taking a voluntary respite from the profession to spend more time with her children and to better focus on her writing and photography.

Alex Aimee Kist is a non-binary poet and theatre artist from Salem, MA. Working in Chicago, they became a founding member of “The P*ssy Paragraphs,” a queer artistic ensemble, and a proud recurring spoken word performer with Resilient: A Celebration of Survivors. It is here that they found their voice and felt moved to share it with others. Now residing in Southern California, Alex is a proud member of Neil Hilborn’s Writing Circle and will be featured in the Season One Anthology connected to this workshop. Additionally, their piece “Taxonomy of Moving in with Your Parents in Quarantine” will be featured in the Beyond Queer Words Anthology. Website: aakist.art / Instagram @alex.aimee.kist

Lily Rose Kosmicki is a person; for work she's a librarian at the public library, and by night she is a collector of dreams. Her zine Dream Zine won a Broken Pencil Zine Award for Best Art Zine 2018. Her work appears in Bombay Gin, Interim, Seisma Magazine, and elsewhere.

Samara Landau is a senior at Skidmore College studying psychology, neuroscience, and poetry. Her work will also be published in Beyond Words Magazine and Cathexis Northwest Press. She is currently working on a few projects including editing an LGBTQ+ anthology and a literary journal featuring college students. When she’s not writing, she’s watercoloring or rock climbing. She is now splitting her time between New Jersey and upstate New York.

Julie Lloyd is a lifelong Oregon native. Her work involves using common objects as well as pressed plant life with digital enhancement. She has been published in Eris and Eros, Cirque Journal, and The Closed Eye Open. Her work has appeared in The Beaverton Arts Mix and Las Laguna Art Gallery.

Marianne Lyon has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in 81

various literary magazines and reviews. She is a member of the California Writers Club, Solstice Writers in St. Helena California. She is an Adjunct Professor at Touro University Vallejo California. She was awarded the Napa Country Poet Laureate 2021 title.

Hannah Maiorano holds an MA in Medieval history and currently works as a copywriter in Toronto. Her work has previously been published in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing and Wingless Dreamer. When she isn't writing, she loves to paint and hang out with her cat, Ellie.

Christina Martin lives in West Wales and takes her inspiration from the sea and the natural world, finding the magical and strange in much of life. Her poetry has been published in various journals including Nature Writing Magazine, Light, Presence, Wales Haiku Journal, Failed Haiku, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. She has published two adventure novels in the magical realism genre, as well as three collections of poetry and a novella.

Patricia Pedroso is a freelance illustrator whose work has a hint of fantasy and darkness. Her work is inspired by different subjects like mythology, movies, and books, and she enjoys exploring the female as a subject of her illustrations. Her work is mainly digital, but she's also an experienced watercolour and gouache artist.

Corey S. Pressman is an award-winning artist, writer, and teacher living in the Pacific Northwest. He is an owner-member of Portland’s Waterstone Gallery.

James Redfern was born and raised in Long Beach, California. Redfern is a graduate of Grinnell College. His work has been published by The American Journal of Poetry, Transcend, Verity La: The Clozapine 82

Clinic, Dime Show Review, Swimming with Elephants, Montana Mouthful, Anti-Heroin Chic, Great Lakes Poetry Press, Fear and Loathing in Long Beach, Passengers Journal, DoveTales, We Are Antifa (anthology, Into the Void), High Shelf, and elsewhere.

John Timothy Robinson is a mainstream printmaker of the Kanawha Valley in Mason County, WV. He is a published poet and scholar with 163 literary works appearing in 113 journals and websites since August 2016 in the United States, Canada, India, United Kingdom, Poland, Germany. and China. In printmaking, he has published 104 print and photographic images, though his primary medium is monotype and monoprint process with interest in collagraph, lithography and etching. Recent work appears in Montana Mouthful, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Genre: Urban Arts, Signature Print, Months to Years, and The Perch Magazine.

Rebecca Rush is a writer and comedian from New London, CT. She hosts Vulnerability: A Comedy Show and is a biweekly contributor to the Workit Health blog. Her work has been published in numerous outlets, including Toho Journal, The Miami New Times, Fodor’s Travel, and Big City Lit. She holds a B.A. in English Literature with a Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Connecticut, where she wrote for The Daily Campus and The Long River Review. She is currently shopping a collection of essays and starting her first novel. She lives in Los Angeles with a tiny dog and gigantic kitten. Website: rebeccarushcomedy.com

Esther Sadoff is an English teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, SWWIM, Marathon Literary Review, Sunspot Literary Journal, West Trade Review, River Mouth Review, Penultimate Peanut, as well as other publications.

Jacqueline Schaalje has published short fiction and poetry in the Massachusetts Review, Talking Writing, Frontier Poetry, and Grist, among others. Her stories and poems were finalists for the Epiphany Prize, in the Live Canon and New Guard Competitions. She has received scholarships at the Southampton Writers Conference and International Women's Writing Guild. She is a member of the Israel Association for Writers in English. She earned her MA in English from the University of Amsterdam.

Jacqueline Staikos is a largely self-taught contemporary artist living in rural Ontario. She has exhibited her work in several Ontario galleries, including shows in Toronto and Kingston, as well as in New York City. Her creative process involves working with inks, acrylics, oils, and mixed media. More of her art can be viewed on her website, jstaikos.org. Instagram @jstaikosart / Twitter @jackie_staikos

Hayley Stoddard lives in Colorado, and is currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree. She has been inspired by such writers as Billy Collins, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Anne Lamott, Mary Oliver, and Leonard Cohen. Her work has been seen in or is upcoming in several publications, including Parley Publishing, Oberon, After the Pause, Eris+Eros, Drunk Monkeys, Button Eye Review, Sad Girls Club Lit, Beyond Words Magazine, and Eunoia Review.

Ann Christine Tabaka was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize in Poetry. She is the winner of Spillwords Press 2020 Publication of the Year, and her bio is featured in the Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2020, published by Sweetycat Press. Chris has been internationally published, and her work has been translated into Sequoyah-Cherokee Syllabics, French, and Spanish. She is the author of 13 poetry books and has been published micro-fiction anthologies and short story publications. Christine lives in Delaware, where she loves gardening and cooking. Chris lives with her husband and four cats. 84

Born in Ukraine and based in Vienna, Austria, Victoria V has incorporated in her art practice influences of Eastern European aesthetics as well as a Western approach. Interested in ancient symbols and mythology, she combines intuitive yet expressive manner with contemporary influences, planting Kandinsky’s and Itten’s theories on form and color impact. Victoria’s figurative as well as abstract artworks explore the humans’ social boundaries along with personal ones, engaging concepts of trance, subconsciousness, sexuality, mystics, and symbolism. Different media (acrylics, markers, collage, papier-mâché, ink etc.) used in her practice allow Victoria to create multidimensional textured original artworks with strong emotional vibes.

Nancy White is the author of three poetry collections: Sun, Moon, Salt (winner of the Washington Prize), Detour, and Ask Again Later. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Review, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, and many others. She serves as editor in chief at The Word Works in Washington, D. C. and teaches at SUNY Adirondack in upstate NY.

About The Closed Eye Open

Find more about The Closed Eye Open at theclosedeyeopen.com, including our current issues and submission information for visual art, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Follow us on Instagram @theclosedeyeopen. Editor Daniel A. Morgan is a writer and professor of American Literature. He has studied the work of Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson, and Aldous Huxley, among other 20th century writers. Bringing together insights from other disciplines, his current work draws connections among literature, Eastern philosophy, and the psychedelic experience. Editor: Writing Maya Highland is a life-long writer who has previously worked in independent publishing. Her current project involves a combination of old/found photography and narrative storytelling. Editor: Art & Poetry Aaron Lelito is a visual artist and writer, who started the art & literature website Wild Roof Journal. A selection his photography and digital art can be found at aaronlelito.com.