Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine

Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine

Issue 2, Winter 2014

Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine

Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine Sioux City, Iowa www.atlasandalice.com atlasandalice@gmail.com

Š Atlas and Alice, All Rights Reserved.

Our History

Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine takes its name from the ATLAS and ALICE experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. These experiments look to explain some of the most fundamental characteristics of the universe. Although the names of these experiments are technically acronyms, we find it beautiful, ironic, compelling that they also share names with two eminent literary figures.

We’re all about intersections. We like things that meet, conjoin, dance, rebound, explode. Bring two things together; see what happens. Among our favorite intersections are pieces that resist genre classification.

Editorial Board Brendan Todt – Founder Benjamin Woodard – Editor in Chief | Social Media Extraordinaire Mahtem Shiferraw – Managing Editor | Poetry Editor | Designer Whitney Groves – Fiction Editor Donald Quist – Fiction Editor Sarah Seltzer – Creative Non-Fiction Editor Emily Arnason Casey – Creative Non-Fiction Editor

Editors Emeritus: Jon Cone, Liz Blood.

Readers: Sarah Braud, Sarah Kilch Gaffney, Glenda Hoheimer, BJ Hollars, Emily Madden, Tim Quirk, Jamilla Stone, DJ Todt and Ian Wallace.

Letter from the Editor

For a little while, I honestly didn’t think this day would arrive. One thing you don’t realize when starting a literary magazine is just how hard it is to run a literary magazine. For those of you who have followed us on our journey, you know that we’ve had quite a shakeup in our masthead over the past year. Our leader is on hiatus (with an absolutely adorable new baby), and several of our editorial positions have switched hands.

And yet, here we have it: Issue 2.

I’m always amazed at how things come together. Our new editors and loyal submission readers have done a wonderful job selecting work for this issue. We have poetry and fiction from a mix of newcomers and established names in the world of literature, not to mention pieces that truly stretch the boundaries of genre. I couldn’t be happier to present to all of you this packaged set of work.

You may notice that none of the pieces here are non-fiction. This was not deliberate, but simply a matter of timing and masthead changes. Our stellar CNF editors are working closely with several writers to bring you some remarkable essays in our next issue. From here on, the essay will be strongly represented, I promise you that.

This issue couldn’t have come together without the hard work of all of our staff. I am grateful to everyone involved in putting this magazine together. But, of course, a huge thanks must go out to our Managing Editor, Mahtem. She is the reason the beautiful digital compilation you’re about to leaf through exists. So thank you all for your work, and thank you all for taking the time to read the writing we’re so proud to showcase.

To the continuous adventure, Benjamin Woodard Editor In Chief

CERN & the Higgs-Boson or “God” particle The Higgs-Boson or “God particle” is the simplest manifestation of mass of subatomic particles, confirmed by the ATLAS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (July 4, 2012). The particle is part of the standard model, which explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact with each other governed by outside forces. The standard model sheds light into the types of matter and forces in existence. It is thought that each fundamental force has a corresponding carrier particle (the boson) that acts upon matter. There is something mysteriously beautiful in knowing that matter is anchored by force in the field (Higgs), that affects particles in different ways.

Table of Contents Nicolas Grider

Apology # 3

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Fire Sonnet

12

Elizabeth Peterson

Flying Fish

15

Nance Van Winckel

PULL FOR STOP

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Dennis Barone

Pass Go & Collect

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Mitchell Grabois

Jodi

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Cathy Barber

Three Short Love Poems

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Katy Li

Correspondences

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Likenesses

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Ryan Sartor

Roanoke

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Kyle Hemmings

Believe or Fear Everything

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Jessica Hollander

The Young Mother Sings Loudly

55

Changming Yuan

Walking with Father

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Michael Cooper

Man from Shells

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Call for Submissions

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Contributor Notes

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Image Credits

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NICHOLAS GRIDER

Atlas & Alice | Issue 2 Winter 2014

APOLOGY #3 (from NOT WITHOUT SILVER) Emerald and oak be not sad, white | noise maker, turned up | in the heather, cloistered the people | __ cloistered | not above forgotten, not above | noise makers turned, polished heather in the wild the __ the | silence as an apologia the dictionary | as an apologia the stuttering stammering sit still | and have a seizure submission scarlet | and silver the gift of giving coughing | staggering forth into what light | belonging frozen | again frozen as if to the spot milk white milk | teeth and sliced hands from handling sliced hands | from concertina wire no | getaway car no secret hideaway stuttering | stammering no apology serene | sincere you were there she was | crimson warm breathing everything | everything she was frozen you were | territory unclaimed sweetheart promised token | gift and what did you do | with your __ you __ | cowardice bitterness ten-car pileup costume | jewelry distant revelry the reverb | won’t stop the earth | moves scar tissue give the gift of __ | the hesitant promise of __ | __ | the “things will never be | the same� when __ finally | getting around to not much luck with mordant verdant be not sad, pink | noise maker deep inkwell exhaustive | transcription for the archive | __ | what archive and for whom for what roar what sad | for where for absolutely still

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Fire Sonnet (from Your Wilderness) You can’t be alarmed ‘cause you’re too busy being on fire.

This has nothing to do with that fooling around at the hotel unbuttoning some mental buttons or waiting somewhere picking flowers you don’t know the names of, this is you.

Sooner or later this kind of fumbling won’t be allowed.

All your distant faces will be wiped from the report.

If you knew better you would leave with a proper name and a few belt notches and a lot of heavy lifting.

Or: you’d wait for romance to finish you off but without mentioning ghosts or Windsor knots or rote apologies and not much else to cover. Maybe you could go forth wandering the earth still singing his praises or instead you pound on his door and he’s not home and if he were he’s too busy being on fire to know you’re there.

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ELIZABETH PETERSON

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Flying Fish It was supposed to be romantic, this hike along the high bluffs of the St. Croix river, a celebration of our engagement, a picnic of wine and cheese, marking the beginning of our lives together, a life with dogs and kids, bills and mortgages, birthdays and anniversaries, fights and make-up sex, of skinned knees and first days of school, of graduations and grandchildren, sickness and health and rocking chairs on the front porch, of valentines and the question Do you still love me after all these years?—not this ripping of roots, this tearing of ground that sent me backwards, twisting through the air like some suddenly hooked fish trying to free itself from a steel barb and an invisible thread, not this spin and fall, this ricocheting of flesh and bone, this bare skin scraping past tree bark, this downward tear of grass and branches slipping through my hands, this sudden, unexpected thrust of free flight, sailing above the river like a kite that’s lost its way, not this moment of inevitability and calm and broken dreams dashed against these upward rushing rocks—not this abrupt, spine-rattling landing on this thin ledge still 60 feet above the river, this bright white moment of pain, this final memory of my nerves—or you, who took the long way down, asking: Can you feel your toes?

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NANCE VAN WINCKEL

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Selections from PULL FOR STOP The blizzard came for a cliff that had just arrived at the car that was carrying off the blotto husband. HUSBAND. He went staring staring staring into the white at the end of the road where the sky swirled the blizzard hard west and left four wheels spinning to stillness in the ravine.

Everyone was watching her.

She bent over him. Dead husband. IN the box. All remembered & remembered. The snow-cold radiating out from him. Her whisper toward the icy cliff edge of his face, into his ear: you’re not IN there ... don’t worry ... you’re not.

The last words she’d had to SAY to make real. Last words he couldn’t have cared less about hearing.

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Willa knew: a pigdog’s problems, they are many. Wolves being one. One tries not to think about where its incisors aim. Where they’ve been. Dag, poor thing, the pig in him can’t woof. The dog in him can’t fetch.

The Grate is a Problem!

It’s holding back he light the beast believes is food. Explaining the x, y, & z of this to him is wasted words, a Tuesday trouble. Cove of Standby is best. Hoof standing in her lightly.

If only pig and dog could just happen upon themselves in the sweet cove way.

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Or maybe the light IS food.

Maybe it WAS. Maybe the earwig likes your ear and likes that he can make you jump, make you itch.

What bug don’t love, every day, a little bug of its own?

What they goddamn want you to forget, you must make them remember.

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Love experts with big American grins were going great guns to get to her.

You like? You like?

The grins suggest a madly-in-loveness Willa had been told she SHOULD HAVE experienced by now, if a) the ‘beloved” as belief had grown enough hard rings of flesh, or b) the soul were the last distinct from a pimple and couldn’t be popped.

You LIKE? You LIKE? She shifts toward Wider Awake, noddingly, to greet a great gun aimed at the bull’s eye of any possible reply.

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Night medicines and day medicines, and never mind the betwixt and between. Never confuse the purple pill for the pink or lie down before an edge wears off. Willa had her orders – a stone tablet she bore in and out of the anterooms.

A cheek must be kissed!

A leg pulled!

A truth might be withheld in a white lie – “Of course I remember you!”

But then ZAP! – the other cheek will turn and expect its slug-kiss of surprise.

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They tell her when she wakes she’ll have a whole new life, all her dead two steps back in their crypts and their eyes quite closed, thank you. When she wakes they’ll stay asleep. The sole man alive she may recognize as Mr. True Mate: for better with zero worse circling.

When she wakes she’ll no longer be multiples but a singular hardshell her.

She’ll have a face the city regales, the face’s lovely mane spreading east across a wide water once called Lac de Les Lou. To touch its water is to sleep well and long among the waves of tresses.

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DENNIS BARONE

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Pass Go and Collect One sunny afternoon in May, after finishing a brief hike in a state park, I fell over next to my car in the parking lot. Someone called for an ambulance and I went to the nearest hospital, where they discovered they had to open me immediately and replace this with that and sew me up and send me on my way. That had been quite a blow, a derailment that knocked me from my tracks for five or six months, and yet the events of a different day a little more than one year later devastated me.

The day he died I had been out mowing the lawn, enjoying the sun beating down on me, something I refrained from doing the summer before – doctors’ orders. I showered after, put on some clean clothes, went downstairs and poured a glass of white wine, went back upstairs, turned on the computer, performed the necessary preliminaries, and looked at the list of messages. There to my surprise was one from a name recognized but unfamiliar with a subject line that included a name both recognized and familiar, a name for several decades bibliographically at least closely associated with mine own, or maybe I should reverse that order and say mine with it, but nonetheless the subject line importuned bad news, sad news, final news, or in short, the end.

When I fell in that state park parking lot I felt no pain and little discomfort. For much of that troubling time it had been as if my body separated from my mind and the latter looked down upon the former with distant and cold clinical interest.

Electronic mail. For someone who grew up when we did and can hear the sound of the old truck a mile distant or the step a block away, such a term seems an affront or 26

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an oxymoron at best. Electronic mail. One believed for decades that the phone could ring at some odd hour and if it did the news would be of a parent’s demise or something far worse, a nephew’s or a niece’s. But electronic mail – there it is with no dreaded ring, no mile distant engine … there it is amidst returned films received, requests for advice on historic homes … there it is – passed away.

And when did this euphemism become so popular? Everyone now says “passed away.” In the class the student says last year my grandpa passed. At the dinner party the nice real estate lady says a year ago my husband passed. Pass go and collect twohundred dollars. Why don’t they just say died, dead, and kaput?

Let’s not be crass, but my second or third thought was this: where does this leave me? When a parent or child dies that is one thing, but when the voice of your generation and for your identity passes that is something else entirely. If one makes you angry and open to impossible deals, such as take me first God please, the other sets you adrift on a sea of despondency. Now what?

No more the expectation of a new book outside the door, retrieving it, and sitting with it through an entire day reading each new page from cover to cover nonstop. But all that has gone before remains for the perusal of graduate students in search of an acceptable dissertation topic and so the correspondence will arrive from Geneva and Tokyo; Palermo and Prague. More explanations of the bent genres and strong but indecisive characters offered for inspection and advice, but most of all for encouragement – never say a discouraging word. What would be the purpose?

There before me in the clearest phrase possible appeared disheartening words final words addressed to a list of one-hundred names, those same names that would receive the latest book at their door always accompanied by the cryptic card noting in bold type “gift of the author” without any name or conversely with a name – that of the publisher – and no words of greeting such as “gift of the author.” All the names for the message had been disclosed, perhaps mistakenly. There were all the ones I expected, some that I did not recognize, and a few that quite frankly surprised me, such as the chauvinistic old professor from Yale. (Our author attended Princeton and not Yale and did not share, I am sure of it, the old professor’s views.) You see, I had studied that list closely, even before reading the message completely.

What had I hoped to find therein? My own sense of inclusion in the contemporary world of letters, I suppose, or some inkling that here I am amidst the living and not yet joining hands with the dead – if that’s anything like what the dead do after dying. I don’t know. But at just the moment I completed the message proper I heard a ferocious growl from the pit of my gut and I clicked off the message but left the laptop on. After I had something to eat, then I would respond, then I would send my condolences and sincerest regrets and ask if there is anything I can do.

No sooner had I returned from downstairs, however, then a second message for the committee of one-hundred awaited our attention informing all of the details of the service. It seems that at the end tradition would be upheld and burial would be almost immediate. It seemed, therefore, all I could do would be to alter, slightly, my plans for the next few days and attend.

Let me begin at the beginning. I once had a friend – an elder friend, a mentor of sorts – who constantly mailed me paperback books he had worked on one way or another for one large publisher or another. I read some of them but certainly not all of them, for at that time I had to keep up with the rigors of graduate school course syllabi.

But one book in particular caught my attention. I’m not sure why it did so before I had 27

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even read a sentence of it. If I remember right there had been no special cover design, no spiffy title, and no famous name above or below the title. Yet when I read the first sentence, when I by chance opened that book and read that sentence and not any other one I knew immediately – though at the time I would have been unable to articulate this knowledge to myself – that I would have to read every other sentence not only in the volume I held in my hand but every other one that this author would create. The sentence, then, I knew it at the start – these sentences fit the reader’s mind like a glove, a mixed-metaphor I suppose, but there you have it: words for both the body and the mind which together, yes, do indeed elevate the soul. Sentences so bound together that to read them one enters a state of reverie.

I had been blessed by the gift that morning of this cheap paperback reprint of the author’s obscure first book. And so it began.

I wrote a short piece immense in its praise of the book for the local paper. And then one day perhaps three weeks later a postcard arrived in nearly illegible scrawl from the author himself thanking me for the praise that he said quite frankly embarrassed him in its profusion, but, he added, the theme that I had identified (though I almost buried any analysis in the praise) he thought plausible. “I’m glad you pointed that out,” he said and promised to send a copy of his next book, due out “imminently.”

As things often do in publishing that second book took longer than its author hoped or thought. Though an artist always, he did keep an eye out for this own bottom line and calculated that the paperback edition of his first book might give his second book a little boost and vice-versa, time was key. But it took the publisher six months at least, and maybe ten, though certainly not an entire year, to get it out. And so when a taped and bound with string, slightly damaged envelope addressed by the author himself in his barely legible hand arrived at my door I had all but forgotten about the promised gift, though I had not by any means forgotten about the author. Indeed, I continued to praise that first book and even bought ten copies to give by my brother, my sister, one much admired professor, and some of my local writing friends.

Over the ensuing thirty year period we met face to face only three times I think and certainly not more than a half-dozen times. We wrote to each other occasionally and exchanged books. (I’m certain I got the better end of this deal. Mine to him remained always in hand-printed make-shift envelopes without any ambiguous publisher’s card.) It must have been around the time of his third novel that we met for the first time at a diner not too far from his house, and now we meet one last time at a memorial park not too distant in space even if it is in time from that diner, Lucky’s Diner.

The refrain I suppose would have to be what have you got to lose? Let’s see. Can we make a list: a friend, a moral compass, a voice grander than Caruso and Sinatra combined, a giver of gifts that came to my door with compliments of the author? What does that mean? It is too late to ask. Can I ask the family? Definitely not. Can I ask the publisher? Yes, but some years ago our mutual friend – also a writer – once warned us, don’t believe a thing a publisher tells you.

I didn’t know who to talk to when I arrived at the event. I offered my condolences to the wife and children. A couple of graduate students who had met with me over the past few years were there, and yet I felt out-of-place with the many celebrities from the world of high society literature or that of music and film. There seemed no space reserved for the adventuresome authors of Small Press Distribution best-sellers. To my chagrin I ended up next to his publisher.

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She greeted me warmly. Why wouldn’t she. After all, for several decades I had done something to keep her top-selling author selling to an audience of intellectual refinement – the university world of readers in other words: that would be intelligentsia.

Though I thought of my work as scholarly, or at least as literary criticism, I think she regarded me as a valued member of their marketing department. I suppose there may be some truth to that though whatever I accomplished amounted to far less than glowing reviews in global dailies or seemingly off-hand endorsements from the world’s most famous film directors. She held out her hand to me and I gently shook it. We looked at each other and saw that we both had tears in our eyes (it was a funeral after all) and then she offered me the seat next to hers and there I sat.

She also offered a book deal of my own, not for something of mine per se, but a quickly cobbled together overview of our deceased friend’s life and work. In between the Rabbi’s prayer and the Pulitzer-Prize winner’s eulogy, she would sketch out some of her thoughts for me. I hesitated, but felt curiously disloyal for having done so, and also rationalized that such a publication might help sell a few copies of my unsellable tomes.

And so I said yes. I agreed to turn out something part memoir, part biography, and part appreciative interpretation all within two months’ time, which I thought might mean some well-chosen photos included but no poetry allowed.

And so I returned to Litchfield ready to begin. I thought I would describe the funeral service. It remained fresh in my mind and so many of the people in his life attended that simple recall and description would make for a readable, though sad, and meaningful opening. But, I conjectured, he wrote more of life than death, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say more of love than death. Eros and Thanatos – the two big themes. What else is there to talk about? Once the marching orders are written it is easy to follow with a much longer double-file: war and peace, rich and poor, old and young, city and country, and so on.

Every reader knows the bare bone facts of his life and all literate folks know some of his work. What had I agreed to – a publisher’s ploy to turn a quick dollar after an unexpected death or my own desire to write something easy, not out of necessity, to assuage a damaged ego more than a shallow pocket? I had enough income, a steady position that provided time enough to turn out a book of some sort every two years or so, and income sufficient enough to render the question of sales of that work one of interpretation, of disdain, of self-justification and certainly not one of appeal or need.

Even now did I still want to be so dependent on the deceased, so posthumously linked? To write of an author one decade my senior would be difficult – like if I were to write of my sister of the same age. What do I know of anyone born in that year? Far easier it would be to write of the long ago deceased parent.

What have I gotten myself into? I wondered as I walked down the street to the Village Restaurant where I planned to sit by myself with a beer, slowly nursed, and figure this out, but Dan, the bartender, decided that I would be the object of his interest, his inquiries, and conversation this fine afternoon.

“Why so glum?” he asked. I hadn’t realized I looked particularly glum or any other recognizable way.

I replied, “I just got back from a funeral.”

“That’s tough,” Dan said.

“Not so tough for me. Tougher for him,” I wittily added.

“Maybe,” he said. “Sometimes it’s harder on the living.”

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I nodded. He paused and then asked, “Friend or relative?”

“Friend,” and then I paused. “Well, more a colleague of a sort then a friend, I guess.”

“You don’t sound very sure of yourself.”

“I’m not. Believe me, I’m not.”

He wiped the bar-top and I continued, speculatively, “We grew up in the same state, but in different towns and a decade apart – which makes a big difference when you’re young; less so as you get older.”

“That’s correct,” Dan agreed.

“Had we been the same age and had we attended the same schools, I think we would have been members of different cliques, though certainly with some overlap.”

“Okay. So you weren’t a relative of the deceased and you weren’t a friend but a ‘colleague’ from the same state but still a different time, place, and, so it sounds, sensibility. Why’d you attend his final rites then?”

“He was a writer, very well-known, and I wrote about him from the book that launched his fame until – so it seems – after his burial.”

Dan looked at me askew. “That’s cryptic,” he said. “A bad pun, I know, but what do you mean?”

And so I told him how I felt obligated to go to his funeral and by chance I sat next to his publisher and she asked me to turn out a quick tribute book in his memory.

“And that makes you sit here with a beer looking glum? That doesn’t sound like a bad assignment – colleague or friend, friend or colleague. Get started,” he chided me.

“It’s not so simple,” I moaned.

Dan was right: it needn’t be complex. Either I sat down and did it or I didn’t. My choice. I knew enough – backwards and forwards. And the pay I had been offered to churn this out seemed significant. In fact, more than I had ever been offered for any sort of writing project.

At home I checked for messages first off, and there near the top I saw that I had one from Hillary, probably the very top student I had ever taught. Her message thanked me for several books I had given her, ones I didn’t need to keep and ones authored by friends who taught at a couple of the universities she had been thinking about for graduate school. And she said, “Thank you for helping me become a better writer. I will never forget all you’ve done for me.”

Those two sentences made so much worthwhile – the anti-intellectualism of contemporary higher education; the administrative bloat – gluttony might be more accurate, had been so discouraging lately. “The justification for universities is not to certify that there are so many course units per square head, but to advance knowledge and to teach it. We should do what we came to do, and to hell with the administration.” Unfortunately things have decayed a lot since Murray G. Murphey penned those lines several decades ago. Now, alas, the esteemed administrators can’t even count heads.

Hillary had written two long works of fiction her senior year, both of them in that no man’s land (like some of her professor’s work) of a novella’s length, though one moves in continuous narration and the other jumps about in brief chapters. What most moved me were her enthusiasm for the tasks, that old abstraction imagination that she brought to bear upon those tasks, and most of all the language employed to do so. To borrow a phrase from the poet Wallace Stevens, hers is a prose that wears the poem’s guise, hers is a supreme fiction or, at least, one in embryo, one about to be born.

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As I sat there in front of that screen that stared back at me almost in accusation I wondered if it might be better for someone young and quite frankly brilliant to take on the contract project, someone new, rather than another writer who knew him from the start. I toyed with the idea of hitting reply to message and asking if Hillary might be interested in a bit of ghost writing.

Here’s how I had it figured. I did not feel like the labor of it, but the benefits in terms of prestige did interest me. While the money offered had been generous for me, it could not make much of a difference in the larger scheme of things. I have a decent job with an okay salary. What really might matter, or so I thought, would be the advertisement for myself that such a publication would produce. Then there was the fact that Hillary had been offered tuition at a few of the schools, but not a single stipend for living arrangements. Quite frankly, this angered me a little. I knew she’d be as good as or better than other students in her grad program, but since she graduated from a small, indistinct institution, prejudice and condescension would greet here every step of her way. And so she who so loved writing in and of and for itself, she who had a genius of language could ghost write the thing. She’d get the money; I’d get the spin.

She had some familiarity with the books in question for she had read some of them in classes I taught and others on her own. I’d be around or at least just an email address away to answer any questions that might come up, and I could provide a few anecdotes to give the thing that proper true to life human tone.

Or maybe I should take on a co-writer and be more upfront about the whole thing. Or maybe I should call and back out. So I wondered. How did I get myself into this? Or maybe the prayers should have been for me. Maybe, if our places had been altered, he could have been talked into delivering the eulogy. A far-fetched thought perhaps, but who knows? And maybe that eulogy might have been just the ticket.

Maybe my books might have witnessed a sudden uptick in sales during the days and nights that followed their author’s demise.

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MITCHELL GRABOIS

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Jodi Jodi Arias responded to my Match.com ad after 2013 we’ll begin to forget her and in five years the next generation won’t recognize the name any more than they recognize Love Canal but she was the one who stabbed her boyfriend so many times strangled him shot him he was a monster in a horror film and she couldn’t rest until she was sure he was dead.

In response to my ad she wrote: Yes, I have some baggage, but don’t we all?

No, I don’t know how long I’ll live, but does anyone?

Sure, I talk in platitudes, but who is capable of original thought these days?

Yes, we may have to suffer a commuter marriage, but many people do.

I’m going through a hard patch right now, “twenty miles of bad road,” but again…

I thought: all those things are true Jodi is a modern woman and a philosopher to boot she’s squared away and life with her would not be boring.

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CATHY BARBER

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Three Short Love Poems Love arrives like a cock strutting the hen yard. The sky is clear. It stays blue. I would stay in bed but for the context. The prose moves forward, or circles. Love arrives like an evening glove, like the field itself. Sometimes not: see Godot. Where were you when the pool opened for the season? Why do you interpret that line that way? The temple is built on liquid ants. Attach rope here; let out slowly.

Act I: downpour. ( ) sips tea. ( ) drinks beer. There must be an overarching theme here. ( ) affects an air but ( ) ignores her. Rats run after their tails. The elms shed leaves and dirt on the cobblestones, upthrust by roots. ( ) wishes she were home, her childhood home, the one with the swing. The one with a crack in the sidewalk. She mutters a prayer in praise of soup and whatever’s next. Maybe there is no theme.

Help is not coming. Did you send up a flare? Heads or tails will roll. Five miles as the crow flies, six as the pelicans lifting on any handy current event. Once, there was a king who loved gold. Once upon a time his daughter was... His wife was... His kingdom was... You heard it, too. Behind the wood shed, bad things happened. Same old story, told again. The hero rode in on a camel, lost his horse at the track. Never end on a sad note.

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KATY LI

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Correspondences 1. you are sitting in your kitchen writing love letters to ghosts, sending half-grown tulips out in envelopes, touching paper that no one has touched in a very long time. between one and the next you conquer small tasks: scraping peeling paint off the tabletop, pinning old war medals on the wall next to your water bills, watering the green bandages of your week-old fern.

2. this time you are making a drawing for you five year-old niece. you know that like most children her age, she likes to feel your portraits as much as she likes to look at them, so you pull out a dusty crayon box from the second shelf of your pantry and watch the bright wax leak onto paper like coffee stains. a pond, a dog, a red park bench, an old man, a few maple leaves. the dog lays at the old man’s feet, belly-up. you take a drink of water and pour the rest onto the plant. it nods.

3. you write the same letter over and over, cutting out all the parts she already knows until it only reads:

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“life is a constant cycle of drifting into new addictions,” and “the heart nods even when it disagrees.” you consider writing about how you would sometimes wake before the moon set and see her there next to you and want to touch her sleeping eyelids to change the dream, or how the sunlight kissed her face in the same way every morning but never managed to brush away the flecks of night caught in her hair. you consider writing these things and decide to abandon them in favor of a series of ink stains.

4. there is the heart the light does not reach and then there is the word for heart, which the light can only reflect.

5. you turn on the radio and start a new page. In the background the white noise of Cher crooning about old wounds and forgiveness. “note to self: there is a dead body waiting in your body like a ghost. god knows what it knows.” the plant moves again, sending words up at you from its softly potted dark.

6. you stay up the rest of the night with a warm plate of food and all the lights turned on, waiting for another epiphany. your hands want to move in new ways but they are tired: dried ink stains on your fingertips from marking down the list of typos made by god.

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the moon is staring down at you from the open window. even through the clouds you can see its body full and round and sick of love. framed in the yellowed light, a final letter begins “this one is for you� but then you lay your head down on the table and fall asleep so that is also how it ends.

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Likenesses Tell me about the dream where I call to you from across the water and you don’t look back. How it was late but no one could sleep, and the night scattered from the shattered trees in all directions when it heard your voice. Tell me how I was saying your names: names of birds and names of fire and names of flight; names of souls colliding in the dark.

Names that are spoken only once, names wider than oceans, names as bright as the silver lightning falling on the far shore. Names I clung to like the last bits of light which filter through a closing guillotine.

I cradled your name to my chest like a wounded animal dying in the frost; like the broken deer on the broken road that stumbled into winter’s heart on unsteady feet and lost itself to the strangeness of the forest.

Beyond the trees, you stepped into the river to see the reflections of faceless stars haloed in their shivery blue light. Shadows trembled in a vague recognition of water. A bird drifted past your feet and made a noise in the back of its throat that you had never heard before in a living thing.

Its body glasslike and gleaming amongst the pale rocks; the last vestiges of sun trapped between its feathers.

I said to you tell me about the dream again: your name caught in the back of my throat like grief, like a wish I couldn’t swallow or undo or hide, like the prayer I was afraid to say out loud. Your name a song I sing only to myself, in the softest hours of the night, when nothing else is there to listen.

In this dream your body becomes an altar, raising itself against the light, which is blinding, and I do believe this is absolution: you whispering names against my forehead and softer voices saying yes, yes, we forgive you, now go to sleep.

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RYAN SARTOR

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Roanoke I. Roger Sampson stood in front of a crowd at the First Unitarian Church, pulling the mic closer to his face.

“All of you are here because you have a reasonable fear that government intrusion will result in your arrest. We’re not here to judge one another or suspect what may be the source of this fear. Maybe you’ve committed a crime in the past. Maybe you’re actively committing a crime. Maybe you don’t know if what you’re doing on your computer or out on the streets is actually illegal or if it’s just frowned upon. I’m here to tell you that you should not be afraid. We’re all going to die—and some of us will even be arrested—but we have to keep living in the moment and take nothing for granted. The future will always harm you. You’ll get fat and old and everyone will forget about you. The only thing that can’t harm you is the present. Enjoy it, please.”

Roger stepped down from the podium and the all-male members of the Southern Connecticut chapter of We Dare Not Say (WDNS), a non-profit coalition/support group for self-actualized future convicts, started a light round of applause.

Meeting once a month in different church basements throughout southern CT, the members of WDNS discussed their ongoing journey towards emotional stability. They also planned and staged protests outside the filming locations of New York-based TV shows that had a reputation for eliciting confessions out of suspects—a practice that was less common in real life than TV would have you believe, the main offender being the Law & Order franchise.

Brian McJeffries, WDNS chapter secretary, had offered to drive Roger to New Haven, where he was catching a train to his next speech in Chicago.

“I really loved your sex addiction talk,” Brian said from behind the wheel of an early 90’s SUV, trapped between exits 39A and 39B. Both he and Roger could glimpse the edge of a jack-knifed trailer up ahead.

“Yeah.” Roger scratched his thin stubble. “Thanks for driving.”

“I had found myself in a situation where every fuck led to another fuck and I couldn’t bear the idea of taking a moment to look away from the shape of the next woman’s ass or breast, or even something as innocent as her smile, during that break between condoms. What I really wanted was to try and take a look at changing something else entirely, like my priorities, my point of view, or—if I could even stand to look for it anymore—my heart.”

Brian finished his recitation of Roger’s sex addiction talk—the first talk—from an actual sex addiction group of which Roger had been a member. He’d posted the video online, where it received twenty-one thousand views.

“I’m not one of them,” Brian said as traffic picked up.

Roger nodded.

“I’m trying to curb a potential problem. But mine isn’t illegal yet.”

The SUV was at the end of a long line of vehicles about a thousand feet from Union Station.

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“This is fine,” Roger said, beginning to open the passenger door. “I really appreciate the ride.”

“Sure thing.” Brian reached to shake hands as Roger botched a high-five.

II. Roger arrived in Chicago on Saturday morning, a few hours before he was scheduled to appear on stage. Alternating between club soda and well bourbon at the hotel bar, Roger messed around with a disposable camera purchased on eBay, flipping through the Other TED Conference (OTC) pamphlet.

His Roanoke talk seemed a bit more historically minded than other OTC lectures that year, the topics of which ranged from speculative time machines to the Last Lecture, as well as a few on the helpful versus harmful nature of machine to machine (M2M) technology.

The OTC always managed to book a small meeting room in whatever conference center or associated hotel the official TED (or TEDx) event was occupying.

This year it was at the Chicago Convention Center and its connected Sheraton Hotel.

Roger was signing his bill when a woman dressed in a tight pantsuit with curly brown hair sat down next to him.

“Are you with the TED conference?” she asked.

“Yes.” Roger looked down at his ice.

“Me too. I spoke about sip trunking and its effects on next generation teleconferencing solutions in Ballroom C. What about you? Did you give one of those spiritual talks?” She gnawed on ice with a frequency and speed that suggested the process was the only thing that could animate her.

“I’m late, actually. It was nice to meet you.”

Roger began to swivel his stool, but was pulled back by four fingers gripping the inside of his front khaki pants pocket.

“Let me buy you a drink,” the woman said, her eyes either colorless or grey.

“I have a girlfriend.”

“I’m not trying to muff you.”

“Sure, I’ll have a bourbon. Where did you go to school?”

“Cornell.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she said. “I don’t care where you went, but what did you study?”

“Photography.”

The woman slapped her knee.

“Is there a lot of money in that?”

“Not really.”

She spit out her drink. The bartender asked if everything was all right and she continued laughing and choking.

“I’m fine.” She put down a handful of bills.

“It was great meeting you.” Roger extended his hand.

“You didn’t ask me my name. It’s Alexandra.”

“Have a good evening, Alexandra.”

“Do you mind if I join you?”

“What?”

“That’s fine,” she said.

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Riding up to the seventeenth floor, Roger and Alexandra stood on opposite sides of the box.

“Can I help you find your room?” she said. “I think mine’s 1749, but it might be 1746.”

Roger looked at her room key. “It’s 1749.”

“What’s your talk about?” Alexandra was running away as Roger tried to hand back her key. She slid to the ground near her door.

“The colony of Roanoke.”

She shut her eyes, spread her lips, shook and scrunched her forehead. “I wonder what happened to those people.”

“I should go.”

“You don’t want me?” She leaned in for a kiss. Despite her general, vague stench, she tasted fine.

Roger stood up as soon as it was over and ran towards the elevator. She chased him, though, wearing one shoe. He closed the door and Alexandra stuck her arm out, allowing the door to briefly close on her. She wailed in pain. Roger walked her back to the room, apologizing. He found a Snickers bar in the mini-fridge. She rested it on her forearm, using her free right hand to scratch around his pants.

“Why are you doing this?” he said.

“I don’t have HPV.” “I don’t have a condom.”

“I do.”

“I have a UTI.” “Do you really?”

“I really do.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Roger ran for the door again, kicking her in her good arm on the way out. He ran down thirteen flights of stairs and then took the elevator to the lobby, towards the meeting room of his talk.

III. water.

When it was time, Roger walked up to the podium and poured himself a glass of

“Six years after their settlement was founded, the ninety men, seventeen women and eleven children who made up the colony of Roanoke disappeared forever. The only clue as to their whereabouts was the word ‘Croatoan’ carved into a wooden post.

There had been no letters sent to their native England asking for assistance, no evidence of a struggle or conflict in the wake of their departure. Five hundred years after the fact, experts have not reached a consensus—nor offered convincing evidence—as to what took place in the days leading up to their vanishing. Some believe that the settlers abandoned the colony for England and starved to death, lost at sea. Others claim that they sought refuge with local Native American tribes. The most fantastical theories involve alien abduction. Ever since first hearing this story as a third grade student, I’ve been fascinated by its mysteries, studying up on Roanoke through encyclopedias, academic textbooks and the Internet. In this age of Google, the Lost Colony remains an enduring puzzle of American ambition and assumed tragedy.”

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Roger gathered his papers and stepped away from the podium. When he did not return with a poster or PowerPoint presentation, a light round of applause began.

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KYLE HEMMINGS

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Believe or Fear Everything After my breakdown that caused me to lose control of a bus, (how it jackknifed and blocked an entire bridge at sunset), I was placed in Ward 6, where anyone could be anybody. There I met an old woman who called herself Greta Garbo. She lingered on my unintended smile. "When you give yourself a name," she said, " you inherit that person." She often dressed like Alice in Wonderland and told me that the doctors had the audacity to look her straight in the face and say, "'We just want you to feel safe and happy.' I told them--like a barking fish you do."

We shared cigarettes at break time in the courtyard. Her fingers, crooked and bony, shook. I asked her how long she had been here. She took a long drag, exhaled an abstract curvy form. "From the time, I discovered I had a fear of open spaces. We're composed mostly of space and will return to it, did you know that? Death is not the end of life. It's just a continuation of the space you were in or it is simply the origin of all spaces."

"Spaces not species," I said as if a joke to myself.

Her eyes drifted upwards. "To deal with this problem of inherent space, I tried to build the perfect soul mate. I took bone shavings, hair clippings, diary pages, the dried blood and semen, even the eyelashes of my dead lovers and attempted to make someone new and lasting and perfect. No holes at all."

"Did you succeed?" I asked.

"No, he failed me like all the others. They all crumble, turn into multiple casualties of space...And you? Why are you here?"

"I accepted everything as it was given to me. But I couldn't make out the overall shape, if there ever was one. Comets, cataclysms, flying rocks. Men falling into icy ponds, emerging as ducks. Girls with needy thumbs hooked me with a horizontal gaze. I remained a fragment."

"Nothing worse than a bitch with a hidden stitch." She winks at me. We're led out of the courtyard.

That night I saw the old woman through closed eyes. She was sitting in the corner of the room, studying my bone structure, perhaps approximating the size of my anatomical cavities, as if she had X-ray eyes.

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JESSICA HOLLANDER

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The Young Mother Sings Loudly In the Kindermusik class the teacher is always smiling. The young mother feels guilty seeing anyone with more energy around her kid than she has. Even her husband when he first comes home, sweeping Clint up and crowing falsetto – can’t everyone just calm down? She didn’t know having a kid meant feeling bad about not being happy all the time.

The room is blue with drawings of animals on swings and a wobbly earth and the top eighth of a sun rising from the door with absurdly long rays, yellow, gold, and orange. It’s the kids the sun represents. Parents rush in. She likes the frazzled ones, the moms complaining about birthday party expenses and boxes of outgrown diapers, the dads struggling to hold their two-year-olds still then releasing them like cannons. She doesn’t like the curly-haired mom who smiles wider than the teacher, with head bobs and loud cheers when her curly-haired daughter claps her hands or rattles a stick with beads inside. The young mother imagines this woman all the time glowing, walking everywhere fast, sweeping dishes and toys into wide arms, though probably dishes and toys don’t get put away very neatly. The young mother watches this woman from her side of the room, conserving energy.

“Okay, friends,” the instructor says, cross-legged on the purple-tape circle. Some parents wrangle their kids; some don’t bother. Clint sits sweetly on the young mother’s lap, curling his index finger around the end of hers, watching the wild ones. They sing a Hello song. Kids squirm. Parents sing, pat kids’ arms and legs, teaching their limbs rhythm, though the young mother doubts much is retained. When Clint dances at home some mornings it’s this head-jerk thing with belly-dancer arms. “I like that move,” she tells Clint and imitates him. They buzz around the room. She admits to herself these are happy times, though of course tells no one about them. What could she say? While you were an adult all day I pretended I was a bee?

The woman with twins comes in late and sits by the young mother. “My third and fourth boys,” she told the young mother her first day, shaking her head assuming the young mother – everyone – felt sorry for her. Doesn’t everyone really, secretly, want girls? “It’s the cars that kill me. I ask them, what about these nice cows over here? They want to play. So the cows get rides in cars. Or run over.” Every time she holds a squirming boy on each leg with her arms across their chests until they start howling.

When she releases her arms they tumble toward the room’s center, bounding into kids and wooden instruments.

Other than the curly-haired woman, the parents look slightly pained to be here.

Some set smart phones beside them and peck while they sing. Others stare tiredly into corners or survey the children, smiling if an unruly child treats another child kindly by passing a triangle or xylophone instead of clinging to it and screaming. The young mother isn’t sure why these people come to Kindermusik, isn’t sure why she comes exactly, except that though she dreads it she is satisfied when it’s over. It’s good to expose Clint to other children, to show him people aren’t as scary as they seem to be.

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The woman with twins is soldier-like holding a boy’s hand on either side of her as the class marches around the circle. It’s hard to read her tight smile, ironic but proud in the corners. The young mother envies her extra load. Why should the young mother sometimes feel so burdened with just one, a calm, sweet one? Burdened is not the right word. Before Clint, she remembers going to the grocery and deciding over apples as long as she wanted. Now she worries about Clint’s naptime, which she needs herself to rest. Lately she lies in bed and pictures dead people come to life. What a wonderful thing to imagine! The young mother watches the curly-haired woman bouncing down the line and whispers to the woman with twins, “Impressive, huh?” The woman with twins shakes her head. “You mean that robot, short-circuiting?”

The young mother’s husband asks sometimes if she wants to go back to work, not that he wants her to, but would it make her happier. Working has not yet appealed to her. She waits for the pull in her gut, but the urgency fled when her husband received a promotion double what she’d made; and she does not wish to abandon Clint to daycare rooms stuffed with plastic toys and apple juice when kids can’t tell safe from poison. She does not envy the tired-eyed mothers who sit twist-legged on the Kindermusik carpet in wool skirts and strappy shoes. The woman with twins sometimes comes in a suit. The young mother wears sweatpants like the curly-haired mother. She is more like this mother than the others.

During a free-dance around the small carpeted room, Clint stays near the young mother, jerking his hips. They watch other children run wall to wall smacking cinderblock or whipping themselves around like tornadoes trying to jumpstart themselves. The curlyhaired girl swoops low like a bird, gathers speed around the purple circle, and crashes into a twin. The twin swings a floppy fist into her chest hard enough the girl wobbles and stares quaveringly at the boy who then barrels across the room to high-five the wall.

“None of that, friends,” the instructor says nervously. The girl suddenly wails like a siren causing all children to freeze mid-dance. The curly-haired mother gathers her daughter, smiles through gritted teeth. “She’ll be okay.” Her curls bob forward, shielding the girl’s head. “He has older brothers,” the twin’s mother says, grabbing the boy’s arm and demanding he apologize. He looks at the girl buried in curls, some hers and some her mother’s. But these kids don’t have language yet. A dozen slurred words maybe, and most of those accompanied by pointing.

Why had the young mother expected a girl? Viewing the lump on the ultrasound which the nurse marked with an arrow and the words it’s a boy! the young mother had smiled then come home and cried in the shower. Perhaps because she was a girl and it seemed impossible for a boy to grow inside her. She felt ridiculous watching water fall on her ballooned belly; who else would grow boys? But now she is relieved. She sees little girls acting like girls and knows what it will do to them later, in society. But a sweet boy wins extra smiles from the Kindermusik teacher. She whispered once to the young mother as they left, “He’s one of my favorites.” The teacher closed the half-door behind them, grinning and waving like a puppet at Clint, who nuzzled the young mother’s shoulder and smiled shyly.

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The young mother watches different parents manage. Some pull out snacks though a sign saysno food. Some bring plastic cars or torn blanket bits. Some pull arms, smack bottoms, threaten to leave. The young mother feels sorry for the parents, believes this time can’t be trusted – people must, like her, survive it almost blindly. They are like children, too, responding to a cry, a thrown toy, a sudden dash across a parking lot – they catch their children and scream or sob or shake their fists – they are not on the ground. If children are the sun rising, parents are the sky falling, trying to quell the heat.

What would Clint have done if struck? In this world, boys can’t cry, even sweet ones. When Clint hurts himself at home, the young mother gathers him in her lap for a minute then tells him, “Come on. It’s not the end of the world.” Her husband on the couch with his slung tie beside him once said, “This is the end of his world. You, me, the living room.” She asked her husband, “You think we sit here all day? We know about the world. We’ve discovered it.” She must teach Clint to strike back. Or else say firmly, “Excuse me, please. I was dancing here.”

The instructor says she hopes the curly-haired girl is okay then gets down a basket of red egg shakers. “Two for you and two for mommy or daddy,” she tells the kids. This they’ve been trained for. The kids run to the basket, gather eggs in chubby arms. Clint returns to the young mother quickly, lets four eggs tumble to her lap. Across the room, cries continue, shielded by a curtain of curls. The instructor starts her next song loudly, repeats “shake, shake, shake your eggs” endlessly. Snacks and smart phones have been put away; everyone is eager to leave. The young woman imagines these people young and childless and old and childless and dead and childless – these are times real life takes place, when people are aware of themselves and a world with the others.

Parents sing loudly, glance at the crying girl, unsure how to judge this tragedy. The young mother thinks, Drag her away! Lock her in a room! Give her some peace! “Great job,” the young mother whispers to her son. She puts her arm across his chest and squeezes.

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CHANGMING YUAN

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Walking with Father: For Yuan Hongqi One thing I forgot to mention, Dad Is I intentionally moved either before Or behind you, each time we happened To be walking together. That way, you could Neither pinch my arm not slap my face So readily; otherwise, you would have to Embarrass yourself if you ran forward Or waited to do so, as you tried to Educate me in anger. Since my departure From you, from my home town On the other side of this world How often have I hoped to walk again, just once Side by side with you, getting or offering support Whenever either of us needed it But now I could only follow your footprints behind Step by step, while you wait to beat me in heaven, smiling.

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MICHAEL COOPER

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Man from Shells

– after Gaston Bachelard and Bly

i.

Temporal Man juts from the conch blows sour notes of command with a light flakey coat over fish mail soaks up the soy ginger sauce and down the gullet swinging his Pygmy paring knife—the crosshatch on the pig’s rump a snare of beauty and spiral cut

with the passive spite of the ammonites he centaurs from the buckskin lair—exposed now his command module floating well behind him Sheppard pulls down his glare shield like a third eyelid like a blindfolded lobster freshet in the water the temperature rises and all that heat from the cement reflects not love but the industry of Love and looking over the shoulder coyly one hand invites the other to spin in space—two terns and an ocean—a cortex lying on its back between them before into the garlic butter and down. ii. we writhe from the hair in our horns—rise from the home, the spike, the body a mask the lash of this whipline self.

These things voiced—a falling tower crushes—we so permeable that act carefree: are powerful

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Your breath starts at your feet and out through the mouth piece and the air outside you and inside you collapses to a single always moving medium. We speak with the dead columns of soldiers slumping back from the Russian steppes and no leader among them. The rags around their feet are our stomachs and the flags they wave our children. These teeth in your pocket, whose are they? When you are cold in the morning do you remember winter desert as mother? What was this first nest, but the night, the absence of security: the threat of falling is what keeps the warbler’s voice flying. The leaves turn to face the sun, everything but us remembers. iii.

What fed you to them. What hung you like lost sheets on the barbed wire, what grail did you drink the gas from that spilt you from your container. Are you milk. Who robbed you from the udder—what unsheathed you and left you on the snow tracing bloodlines in the tundra. No-one followed your trail, no ambush was sprung. That mirror— shrugged if this is so unpopular why does the marrow drink it so?

The words feel from someone’s mouth but it was not theirs—the mouth or words: there is nothing like ownership here, there is no account to hold it. The Xero matches the sight image of a human and squeezes lightly, breathout fogging, not knowing when the bolt carrier will slam forward, and then—as if by ritual—the machine cycles and the decimal place is shifted—at a very small cost. Centrefire.

Imagine Napoleon on the prow, early on, when still Holderlin’s hero, imagine him without a war, at a desk. Imagine his scribbling and his formations. You don’t need to imagine what you live. iv.

The 360 degree windshield—we leapfrog neighborhoods from green to green sign love and misery blurring in vinyl sheets and street lights measuring time by the strobed trees running from whatever is chasing us—time measures the overturned ketchup bottle waiting for the knife to ring in its mouth—broken glass and rocksalt entering our skin. The cartridges you hand loaded in your uncles choke, everything slide action thru the projects stubble beards of stubborn ply board and drywall that grab for the thick plastic sheets stapled over a home’s mouth—this freeway isn’t long enough, 230 years of vineyard underneath her arms Maria runs hands through the thistles singing crickets leap in all directions the headless tomcat sings sleeping and ½ mile away his jawbone in a Bobcat’s tread, the Blackfoot herding Walmarts over the cliff.

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Call for Submissions Issue 3 is on the horizon, so send us your work now! We’re looking for writing that spans genres, that demands to be read, that might be considered the black sheep of a family. Art and science thrill us, but so does the simple image of a man standing at a crossroads.

Surprise us. Thrill us. Make us laugh and cry and cringe. Tell us your thoughts. We can’t wait to hear from you! For submission guidelines, please visit http://atlasandalice.com/submit/

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Contributor Notes Cathy Barber‘s poetry has been published recently in Slant, SLAB, and San Diego Poetry Annual and is forthcoming in Sweet’s anthology. She is a 2013 graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. A past president of the board of California Poets in the Schools and a current member of the advisory board, Ms. Barber teaches in classrooms in San Mateo County. She also occasionally writes a humor and musings blog: Is It Just Me.http://isitjustme-cathy.blogspot.com/ Changming Yuan, 8-time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Landscaping (2013), grew up in a remote village, began to learn English at 19, and published several monographs before leaving China. Currently, Yuan tutors and co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver. His poetry appears in 899 literary publications across 30 countries, including Asia Literary Review, Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry (2009;12;14), BestNewPoemsOnline, London Magazine and Threepenny Review.

Dennis Barone‘s Memoir / Biography is forthcoming from Quale Press. Quale published his prose collections Field Report, North Arrow, and Precise Machine. Recently he edited two poetry collections: Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776 (Wesleyan UP) and New Hungers for Old: One-Hundred Years of ItalianAmerican Poetry (Star Cloud P).

Elizabeth Peterson completed her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts in July 1997. Her work has been published in several small literary journals. She was the winner of the 1987 Phi Theta Kappa National Competition in Creative Writing and has been a finalist for the Loft Mentor Series Competition (1996-1997), Hunger Mountain’s Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize (2005), and the Montana Prize in Fiction (2014). She currently lives in Boston, MA with her Golden Retriever, Riley. Ms. Peterson works as a freelance writer and teaches at Bay State College.

Jessica Hollander’s story collection In These Times the Home is a Tired Place won the 2013 Katherine Anne Porter Prize. Her stories have also appeared in many journals and in the anthology The Lineup: 25 Provocative Women Writers. She received her MFA from the University of Alabama and teaches at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Visit her at jessicahollanderwriter.com.

Katy Li is a hobbyist poet who splits her time between Baltimore, Maryland and a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where she lives with her mother, sister, and an extremely talkative cat.

She is currently in college hoping to double major in Political Science and Creative Writing, but her plans may be subject to change. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Polyphony H.S., Cargoes, The Adroit Journal, River of Words, The Postscript Journal, Transcendence Magazine, and Alliterati.

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Your Impossible Voice, Night Train, Toad, Matchbox and elsewhere. His latest chapbooks are Underground Chrysanthemums from Red Bird Press and Terminal from White 66

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Knuckle Press. He loves 50s Sci-Fi movies, manga comics, and pre-punk garage bands of the 60s. He blogs athttp://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/ Michael Cooper is an inland empire poet, PoetrIE member, MFA student, Veteran, and father of two great sons: Markus & Jonathan. His work is in Tin Cannon, The Pacific Review, The Chaffey Review, The Camel Saloon, Split Lip, and other fine (but wild) publications.

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois’ poems and fictions have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He is a regular contributor to The Prague Revue, and has been thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for 99 cents from Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition Nance Van Winckel has published four books of linked stories, one of which (Quake) received the Patterson Fiction Award. Her new collage novel is forthcoming in November. She has also published six collections of poetry and she is the recipient of two NEA literary fellowships. She teaches in Vermont College of Fine Arts’s MFA in Writing Program. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, Kenyon Review, Mass. Review, The Sun, Georgia Review and many others journals.

Nicholas Grider is the author of the story collection Misadventure (A Strange Object), which was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize, and the experimental book Thirty Pie Charts (Gauss PDF). His work has appeared in Caketrain, Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, Guernica and elsewhere.

Ryan Sartor’s short stories and essays have been published in The Collapsar and The Bygone Bureau. He attended Goddard College, earning an MFA in Creative Writing. He hosts theDifficult to Name Reading Series in New York City. You can follow him @ryansartor.

Acknowledgements: Atlas & Alice would like to thank our wonderful EIC’s, Brendan Todt & Benjamin Woodard for their hard work, dedication & great personal and financial contributions towards the magazine.

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Image Credits Cover image: Atlas & Alice design by Mahtem Shiferraw for Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine, 2014.

Visual Higgs Boson sketch by Mahtem Shiferraw. CERN information resource: CERN website. For more information to go: http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/higgs-boson Atlas and Alice magazine logo design by Brendan Todt, 2012.

Selections from PULL FOR STOP, illustrations by Nance Van Winckel & Rik Nelson, reprinted with permission.

Alice in Wonderland illustration by Arthur Rackham, image by Sofi via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.

All other illustration & images by Mahtem Shiferraw.

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