Black Fox Literary Magazine Winter Issue #11

Black Fox Literary Magazine is a print and online literary magazine published biannually.

Copyright Š 2015 by Black Fox Literary Magazine.

All Rights Reserved.

Written and artistic work included in Black Fox Literary Magazine may not be reprinted or reproduced in any electronic or print medium in whole or in part without the consent of either the writer/artist or founding editors.

Issue 11 Cover Art by Judi Calhoun

Editors’ Note

We've been thinking a lot about resilience. Resilience is the one thing you need if you're going to be a writer. It's no secret that the road to a career as a writer is full of rejection. It takes courage to fill the words of a blank page and then send it out into the world for criticism.

We want you to know that as writers ourselves, we feel your pain. We get it. We are victims of rejection and criticism ourselves. But we have made sure to equip ourselves with resilience. No matter how many times we get rejected, we return to those pages (despite the internal bleeding). We find ways to make our stories better and we keep going.

Whenever you get a rejection, just know that we understand and we appreciate you taking the time and mustering up the courage to submit to us. To you all we say: keep being brave. Keep sending your work out. For a writer, often times we can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. But we keep going anyway. In the words of Winston Churchill, "Never, never, never quit."

Thanks to our staff and our readers for your continued support!

-The Editors Racquel, Pam and Marquita

Meet the BFLM Staff: Founding Editors: Racquel Henry is first and foremost a writer. She is also a part-time English Professor and owns the writing center, Writer’s Atelier, in Winter Park, FL. Racquel writes literary, women’s, and recently YA fiction in hopes of having a novel published sometime in the near future. She also enjoys reading a variety of genres, and is currently obsessed with flash fiction. She earned an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Blink-Ink, The Rusty Nail, Freight Train Magazine, Lotus-Eater Magazine and The Best of There Will Be Words 2014 among others. You can follow her writing journey on her blog, “Racquel Writes.”

Pam Harris lives in Williamsburg, VA and spent seven years as a middle school counselor. Currently, she is interning at a family counseling center, and when she isn’t helping families resolve conflicts, she's writing contemporary YA fiction (and has also recently started writing middle grade). Some of her favorite authors are Ellen Hopkins, Courtney Summers, Jandy Nelson, and Stephen King. You can also find her at the movie theaters every weekend or pretending to enjoy exercising. She received her MFA in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2012, and will soon receive her PhD in Counselor Education at the College of William and Mary.

Marquita "Quita" Hockaday also lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. She is an educator who has never been able to shake her love of writing and reading. There is always, always a book near her. Marquita is currently enjoying writing young adult (historical and contemporary)—and

most recently wrote her first middle grade novel with coeditor, Pam. Some of her favorite authors are Laurie Halse Anderson, Blake Nelson, Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates. Marquita also graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2012, and is beginning to work toward her doctoral degree in Virginia.

Copy Editor & Reader: Elizabeth Sheets is copy editor and reader for Black Fox Literary Magazine. She is an undergraduate student at Arizona State University, majoring in English, Creative Writing, and currently interns as Student Editor-in-Chief for Superstition Review. When Elizabeth is not writing or loitering in coffee shops, she works full time as an administrative assistant for an electrical contractor in Gilbert, Arizona. Her work appears in Kalliope – A Consortium of New Voices and in Black Fox Literary Magazine.

Interviews Editor: Alicia Cole is a poet and fiction writer. She edits for Rampant Loon Press, and has interviewed for Bitch Magazine and motionpoems. Her creative writing is forthcoming in Vagrants Among Ruins, Torn Pages Anthology, Gadfly Online, Dawntreader and Lakeside Circus. She spends much of her time either freelancing or playing with a menagerie of animals.

BFLM Blogger: Jaime Mathis grew up half feral, half in a cult, in the countryside near Oregon City, Oregon. Without books she would have gone pure Tarzan and hence, thanks literature for both sanity and social skills. After travelling the world and picking up a husband in Spain, she returned like a salmon to her spawning grounds where she now resides with 13 chickens, a son and her Dane. You can see her work in places like FORTH Magazine, Dirty Chai, and The Flexible Persona.

Readers: Shaun Taylor Bevins is an aspiring writer, voracious reader, dedicated mother, wife, and teacher. She has eclectic reading tastes, but prefers writing that has something meaningful to say about the human experience.

She also appreciates clever and original characters that leave lasting impressions. You can learn more about Shaun from her website: www.broadneckwritersworkshop.com.

Donna Compton lives just outside of Washington, D.C. and recently graduated from the University of Maryland University College with a Bachelor's degree in psychology.

She began taking creative writing courses a few years ago, with a focus on short stories. Currently, she's reading and writing a lot of flash fiction. Her other favorite genres include literary fiction, mystery, thriller, science fiction and fantasy.

Contents: Fiction Lupe’s Lady by Dawn Fuller (7) A Dish Served Cold by Sonja Condit (37) Bodies by Aiden Thomas (76) It Is Not Our Way by ‘Pemi Aguda (82) The Children of Hamelin by Eva Langston (103) Mariah, Appearing by Willow Becker (137) Exoskeleton by Shannon Fox (134) Orbiting by Mandy Brown (163) The Brothers by David Haight (181) Geographic Cure by Amy Yolanda Castillo (220) Poetry Selected Poems by Nathaniel Sverlow (34) Selected Poems by Zvi A. Sesling (72) Delta Song by Gabe Russo (81) In and Out of Rhyme: A Tribute to Maya Angelou by Kiana Donae (102) Selected Poems by Byron Beynon (130) Selected Poems by Brad Garber (134) Selected Poems by Doug Van Hooser (148) The Inevitable by Geenie Yourshaw (152) you were a boy of twelve by Caty-Scarlett Coleman (158) Selected Poems by Francine Witte (171) Selected Poems by Daniel von der Embse (174) Selected Poems by Carolyn Elias (178) Selected Poems by Allison Thorpe (208) Selected Poems by Suzanne Rae Deshchidn (212) Selected Poems by David Klugman (217) Cover Art: Starmaker by Judi Calhoun

Lupe’s Lady

By Dawn A. Fuller

As we wound around the deep dusty grooves of the back country roads driving out to Gio’s farm, Daddy let me sit on his lap and “drive.” With his big calloused hands covering and guiding mine, I happily steered us along in his big blue truck. He said I was an “expert driver” - minding the crooked white lines in the middle. An occasional spotted brown and white jackrabbit bounced in our path, and sprang out of our way just as quickly. I strained to see what lay in the road ahead through the splattered body parts of green and yellow bugs covering the windshield.

After I climbed back in my seat, I stared out the window. I watched the endless rows of swaying alfalfa follow me faster than I could keep track. I saw swerving gangs of black squawking crows land abruptly on tall piles of freshly picked sugar beets and long aluminum irrigation pipes patiently waiting to come to life. Yellow crop dusters

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raced back and forth, carefully depositing white floaty puffs as purposefully as a fly fisherman drops a colorful fly on a babbling riverbank in June. In between infinite rows of sweet onions and thick milky haze, I spied the stooped backs of migrant field workers wearing colorful scarves beneath ball caps, bent over like Letter L’s. The familiar stink of fresh manure rising out of the fields in the scorching valley sun hit me in a thick wave and made me pinch my nose shut. Daddy looked over at me and smiled.

“Don’t cover your nose. You know what that smell is?” he asked.

“Cow mess, Daddy,” I answered.

“Money, girl. That’s the smell of money,” he said.

Daddy chuckled to himself, smoothed the back of his hair with his palm, and with the scruffy dust-coated farm mutts racing to keep up and barking wildly alongside us, drove up the rambling dirt road to Gio’s.

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Daddy was an Ag Appraiser for the bank. He appraised everything to do with farming operations - farm land, ranches, crops, feed lots, slaughter houses, feed mills, produce packing plants, feed inventory, barns, cotton gins, tractors, ploughs, crop dusters, sheep, cattle, and more.

Daddy spent years building strong bonds with stubborn old growers who eventually came to trust Daddy - even though he worked for the bank. Once Daddy shook hands with a farmer, it was a “done deal.” Good or bad, he knew all of the local farmers well, but not like Giovanni. Giovanni was Daddy’s best friend. Giovanni was his full name, but we called him “Gio.” Gio and his wife, Marietta, came on a boat all the way from Italy to America to farm. I liked Gio’s dark warm skin, his large jack-o-lantern triangle nose, and the way his thick glasses sat on top of it like a shiny aluminum Christmas decoration on an unwanted stumpy tree. Marietta was a big lady - with equally big hair - that felt like a black

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springy cotton ball when you touched it. Even though sometimes I couldn’t breathe, I liked to get completely swallowed-up by her strong perfume-filled hugs. Marietta’s kitchen always smelled like crusty bread just pulled out of the oven, crudely chopped garlic, or my favorite, rich Italian frosted cakes and sugar-filled cookies. I loved it when I found a big plate of lemony frosted Anginetti on the too-tall kitchen counter waiting for me to greedily devour.

Momma let me go over to Gio’s with Daddy when I wanted. She knew I loved it there and she liked to have a break now and then to get stuff done around the house. She said she needed “a blessed moment of peace and quiet for once, Dear God.” Daddy said Gio would die before he ever gave up farming. Gio’s daddy and his daddy before him were both farmers. It was in his “blood.” He came here with nothing and created a successful farming operation out of “hard work and sheer determination,” Daddy said. Some years

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were better than others. Gio and Marietta knew hard times, but made it through with ample parcels, a few meager high interest bank loans, and when God was shining on them, good soil, enough rain, a bumper crop here and there, and honest Mexican farmworkers with “strong backs.” Gio and Marietta felt lucky - “After all, the sun shined 360 days out of the year in the Valley.”

When we got to Gio’s, I sprinted ahead of Daddy into the big red barn, hugged Gio’s sweaty brown neck, snatched one of Marietta’s sweet buttery cookies off his desk, and ran straight to the coat rack in the corner. I wanted to see if “Lupe’s Lady” was hanging there.

Lupe’s Lady was on the back of Lupe’s work jacket. She was the prettiest lady I had ever seen. Her head was covered by a beautiful shimmery blue blanket filled with a million twinkling yellow stars. It looked like she had magical powers. Lupe’s Lady was surrounded by a glittery gold bubble and tons of colorful roses. She was held high in

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the air by a tiny chubby angel boy and her long slender hands were pressed together in solemn prayer. I loved staring at the lady on Lupe’s back when he was bent over working the fields. I think I spent more time staring at Lupe’s Lady than I did working. I wanted to ask Lupe if I could take his jacket home and lay it on my pillow next to me at night, but I didn’t.

Lupe was Gio’s “Farm Overseer.” Gio called Lupe, “Loopie,” which always made me giggle my head off. The farmworkers called him “El Jefe” (Boss). I called him plain old “Lupe.” He called me “Güerita” (Fair Skinned One).

Daddy said Lupe came to work before anybody was ever awake, except for Gio of course. Gio was always awake worrying about the crops. I think Gio loved Lupe because they were always together. Lupe and Gio. Gio and Lupe.

Lupe and Gio walked side by side in the fields - so close that it looked like they shared one body. I guess that was kind of true, because when they weren’t sleeping, they

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were always together. Gio counted on Lupe to run all of the important things that needed doing. Lupe was also in charge of all of the other farmworkers, and from what I could tell, he was pretty important to them too.

Whenever I got home from school, I slapped on my play-clothes and raced through my homework and chores as quick as I could before daddy came home from work. I couldn’t wait to get to Gio’s. When Daddy and Gio were busy talking about crop budgets, bugs, irrigation stuff, or having “just a sip” of their favorite Early Times Whiskey, I got to go to “work” in the fields with Lupe. I followed him everywhere. I liked riding on the cotton picker or tractor with Lupe, and just like Daddy, sometimes he let me sit on his lap and drive. Lupe helped me shift gears because it was too hard for me to move the big black ball on my own.

Lupe turned on his transistor radio while we drove. I loved the men’s scratchy voices who were singing the jumpy songs. Our favorite song was “Volver.” Whenever it came

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on, we sang it together. Sometimes, when Lupe sang, he sounded like a hungry coyote with an empty stomach yowling in the canyon at dusk.

One time, I got to go to Lupe’s house with Gio to give him some money. Lupe didn’t live in a house with different rooms and big beds like ours. I was surprised that Lupe’s house looked more like the cardboard fort my friends and I built last summer down by the old canal out of cut-up cantaloupe-box scraps. I looked around the room in amazement. On the floor, I saw a ratty brown blanket with a bear on it and a flat discolored pillow - without a pillow case. I asked him was that his bed. He smiled and said, “Sí,” revealing the big shiny silver tooth that I adored. Next to where he slept, a statue of Lupe’s Lady sat on a homemade wooden stand. Also on the stand was an almostburned-out candle and a white plastic vase filled with dried-up faded roses. I put my nose up to the roses, sniffed, and touched the blue starry blanket on Lupe’s Lady’s head.

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I couldn’t smell anything but dead flowers. Lupe laughed.

His laugh reminded me of gurgling soda at the back of your throat when you are trying to make your friends laugh. If stealing wasn’t one of the Ten Commandments, I would have stolen the queenly statue of Lupe’s Lady.

Lupe’s family didn’t live with him like we did with Daddy. They lived in a town called Mexico, far, far away. I knew it made Lupe sad to be away from them all the time.

Sometimes, Lupe would leave the farm and go visit them.

He showed me pictures of his two girls and his boy all the way in Mexico. I wished I could meet them. Maybe Daddy would let me go to Mexico some time. From the looks of things, Lupe didn’t have very much money. What money he did have, he had to send to his family. They were real poor. When Momma found out I was passing Granny’s Sunday Flower Hat around at recess collecting money to send to Lupe’s family in Mexico, she was none too happy.

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When Lupe came back from Mexico, he always brought me a spicy chili lollipop that burned my lips for a long time after I ate it. One time, he brought me a fancy red, green, and white layered ruffle dress with silky satin ribbons all over it. On Cinco de Mayo, Momma let me wear it to Mass with too-small white tights and my new ballet slippers. She even put my hair in a tight bun that hurt my head with a big red hibiscus flower from the backyard on top - after she washed off a bee. I loved the dress, but I wished Lupe would have brought me back a jacket of my own with his lady on it.

While Lupe and I rode back and forth through the fields, I liked to hear Lupe tell me the story of his lady over and over again. The story went like this: There was once a man named Juan. He had a hard life, and so did everybody that lived in his town. One day, when Juan was up on a hill, he heard heavenly music. A big ball of light came down from the sky, and so did the

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lady. She wanted everyone to know who God was and that she would help them if they just asked. She also wanted a great church to be built right on the spot where they stood. The lady told Juan to go tell the Big Bishop, but Juan was scared. He wasn’t important, so he couldn’t talk to the Big Bishop. Plus, nobody would believe him about seeing the lady. Juan got his nerve up and went to talk to the Big Bishop. The Big Bishop made him wait for a long time, thought he was telling a fib, and wanted a magical sign from the lady. The next day, Juan stayed away from the hill because he didn’t have time for the lady. His favorite uncle was dying. He was on his way to get a priest for his uncle when the lady appeared in the middle of the road. Juan told her his uncle was dying, that the Big Bishop didn’t believe him, and he needed a magical sign that she was real.

The lady said his uncle was already saved. She told Juan to go to another hill and bring her back a bunch

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of roses. Juan did what the lady said. Even though it was winter and there shouldn’t have been any roses, there were. The lady told Juan to take the roses to the Big Bishop and there would be a special sign that she was real. When Juan went back to the Big Bishop, he opened up his cape, and out came the extraordinary winter roses of every color. The Big Bishop was shocked by the roses. He was even more shocked by the breathtaking life-size picture of the lady on Juan’s cape, just as beautiful as she could be. Juan’s uncle was saved. The Big Bishop and everybody believed. The church was built.

Lupe said the lady could see everything we all did. I figured she was kind of like Santa Claus. She could see if you were naughty or nice. Lupe said his lady loved us and she always answered his prayers. Lupe asked to come to America for work, and here he was. He asked her to take care of his family, and she always did. He asked her to

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bring rain for the crops, and she did. He asked her to keep the Lettuce Loopers, Tobacco Budworms, and Whiteflies out of the fields, and most of the time, she did. Lupe said he even prayed for me to make an “A” on my Friday Pop Quiz. Guess what? I did. Not only was Lupe’s Lady beautiful, but she was magical. I knew she would help me if I asked, just like Lupe.

In the summer, my favorite part of working in the fields with Lupe was lunch time. Lupe, the other farmworkers and I, sat under a tall shade tree. The tired farmworkers drank paper cup after paper cup of cold water from the orange Igloo on the back of the sugar beet truck.

Lupe and I didn’t drink the water because sometimes it had floating bugs in it. He brought us special drinks. I loved hearing the loud metal snap when Lupe popped the top off my favorite tangy cold drink, Tamarindo. When I gulped down the fizzy Tamarindo real fast, I burped a little burp right after. Lupe would pull out two paper lunch sacks, one

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for me and one for him. Inside the bags were two soft bean and chewy carne asada tortas (beef sandwiches) with two pink shell-shaped sugar-covered pan dulces (sweet bread) for dessert. Lupe put the red hot stuff on his torta. I had mine without.

During lunch, Lupe and the other farmworkers talked in Spanish for a long time. Most of the farmworkers didn’t seem very friendly. Just lately, it sounded like they were saying something angry to Lupe. Lupe made “calm down” gestures to them. They said words that I thought weren’t good like “Pinché gringos,” “Gueros culeros,” “Hijos de su puta madre,” “Unión,” and “¡Sí se puede!”

More and more, I heard them talking about a guy named “Cesar.” The last few days, it seemed like all they ever wanted to do was yell at Lupe and talk about Cesar. Lupe looked uncomfortable.

One time, a farmworker shouted real loud at Lupe and some spit even flew out of his mouth, landing on Lupe.

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The man stood eye to eye with Lupe, pressed his chest to Lupe’s, and raised his fist real high in the air. I thought he might punch Lupe in the face, but he didn’t. Lupe and I had to leave our lunch break early and finish our tortas on the tractor. On the way home, I told Daddy how the farmworkers were yelling at Lupe and talking so much about Cesar. I asked Daddy who was Cesar. Daddy didn’t say anything. He just stared straight ahead. I saw the familiar blue vein pop out in his neck that only showed when he was mad.

That night, after I went to bed, I spied on Momma and Daddy talking in the living room and I sneakily read a few more pages of Little House on the Prairie by flashlight under the covers. I just loved that sweet little Laura Ingalls and I sure hated that mean old Nellie Oleson. They did get into some scrapes. After I was done reading, I closed my eyes and said my prayers. “Please Dear God, bless Momma and Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa, cousins, aunts, uncles, and

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everyone in the whole wide world. And Lupe.” After my prayers, it never failed, I always thought about the same things. Will I make an “A” on my Friday Pop Quiz? Will Momma get Daddy in trouble at the dinner table for calling someone in town a “Sumbitch” again? Will Jack and Audrey on Momma’s stories finally kiss - even though Audrey’s leg was amputated on account of the car crash at the beach? Is our crabby, stinky, old, next-door neighbor, Mrs. Gacy, really a witch? Will Momma give me a whoopin’ when she figures out I was the one that picked all of Mrs. Gacy’s prize roses and that I buried her favorite missing pie tin after I poked holes in it to look at the stars?

Who IS this Cesar? Where does he LIVE? Why is he making everyone so mad? What would I say if I met him? I always ended up on Lupe’s Lady. Sometimes I prayed to her and asked her for things I needed or wanted. Sometimes I talked to her about my worries. I asked her to help Lupe and me. Other times, I asked her to give me magic signs.

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A few days after I told Daddy about the angry farmworkers, when we arrived at the farm, Gio and Lupe were at the desk talking. Gio shouted. He slammed his fist on the desk - which I was sad to see - because Marietta’s beautiful cookies with the dried cherry-in-the-middle flew all over the dirty floor. Lupe stood in front of Gio with his head hung down and his John Deere hat held low in front of him. He softly agreed with whatever Gio was saying. Lupe would have to do extra work because some of the farmworkers took off and it was harvest time. Daddy said he would help too. Cesar was riling everyone up. After Lupe went out to the fields, Gio called Cesar bad names that I knew Momma wouldn’t want me to hear. Later that same week, some men we didn’t know showed up with the farmworkers who had left. They chanted things I didn’t understand and held big signs on sticks up in the air. Daddy and I had to leave when Gio and Lupe went out in the fields with shotguns and called the police. As we drove away, I

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saw Gio and Lupe hanging their own signs on the fences that said, “Ponga su culo fuera de este campo!” (Keep your ass out of this field!)

In the weeks that followed, whenever Daddy’s friends came over for dinner, just like the farmworkers, it seemed like all they wanted to do was talk about Cesar.

Momma made me go in my room and practice my spelling words, write Grandma a letter about my progress in school, or sort beans for soaking. She didn’t know it, but I could still hear a little. That Cesar. He made Nellie Oleson seem like a doll baby. The farmworkers walked out during the most important time of the year, harvest time, because of him. They came back late at night after drinking and stole heavy machinery that the farmers couldn’t afford to replace. Farmers without workers were forced to sell off parcels, drive hidden in ditches to check on their own fields for fear of being shot, or completely abandon unpicked fields of now worthless, rotting crops. There was a shooting

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out at Salvatore’s farm. I couldn’t hear if Sal or the farmworker got shot. Still, someone got shot. Nobody better shoot Gio or Lupe.

From then on Gio and Lupe were worried all the time. Cesar was hurting Gio and Lupe, and making them do more work. They couldn’t do it by themselves. They were already bone tired. Everything was changing because of Cesar. Cesar seemed liked the devil to me. Someone should really have a serious talk with Cesar about all of the trouble he was causing. I couldn’t go out with Lupe on the tractor anymore. Daddy said I had to stay with him and Gio in the barn. It was SO boring. I could hardly stand it. I saw Lupe’s Lady hanging on the coat rack. I wished I could be outside with him and the farmworkers, even if all they cared about was cruddy Cesar. When nobody was looking, I hugged Lupe’s jacket.

Early one morning, the phone rang. Momma was still sleeping. Daddy told me to get dressed. He lifted me

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into the truck and buckled me in. I didn’t get to drive. We rushed passed the rows of cotton, onions, sugar beets, and all of the sleepy, stinky cows in the dark. I didn’t even notice the tweeting song of the cicadas, which I normally loved. I was bone tired myself. I was so nervous when I looked over at Daddy and his big vein that I didn’t even care about the stinky cow smell. When we got to Gio’s, he was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands. His face was dry, wrinkled-up, and old. His hair was sticky-uppy, like he didn’t even run a comb with water through it when he woke up. Momma would have said he looked like a “hot mess.” I saw an empty bottle of Early Times Whiskey laying sideways on the floor next to his muddy work boots.

His shotgun was propped up against his desk. I stood behind Daddy’s legs while he talked to Gio in a whispery voice. I looked over at the coat rack. Lupe’s Lady wasn’t there. I felt a big lump come up in my throat. Gio told Daddy that Lupe didn’t want to go, but because of Cesar

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and the other workers threatening him, he had to. Lupe wasn’t safe. He said Lupe was crying when he left. I never saw Gio cry before, but he did when he said that. His smile was gone and his shoulders shook real hard like mine did when we had to put our Brittney Spaniel, Brandy, down and bury her in the field behind our house.

Later, when Daddy and Gio weren’t looking, I slipped out the barn door, and headed down the road. I kicked rocks the whole way and put a bunch of them in my pockets. I walked and walked and walked. I finally reached the end of the brown water canal where I was not allowed to go because Dippy Duck at school told us it was too dangerous for kids; we might drown. I took the rocks out of my pockets and chucked them into the swift moving canal furiously, one-by-one. When I finished with the small rocks, breathing hard, I dragged over a huge red desert rock. I strained to lift it with both hands and heaved it into the canal as hard as I could. The loud kerplunk sounded

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good. Lupe was gone now because of him. Dumb old Cesar. I hated him. Didn’t he know that Gio and Lupe had to be together? Didn’t he know it was harvest time and there wasn’t time for nonsense or fooling around? Cesar was ruining my life. I didn’t know where Cesar lived, but if I did, I would go there and kick dirt on his shoes. Like Momma said when she was mad at me, he “ought to be ashamed.”

A little while later, Daddy and Gio drove by in the blue truck. They didn’t say a word, and neither did I. I hopped in between them. Daddy drove us straight to our favorite place to eat, Grasso’s. Daddy took me by the hand to the bathroom. He held my face with both hands and scrubbed it with chunky pink crystal soap from the wall dispenser, a scratchy brown paper towel, and freezing cold tap water. It should have hurt, but it felt good. Momma and Marietta came down and met us. Marietta handed me a bag of Anginetti Cookies and Gio bought me a syrupy sweet

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Shirley Temple with extra cherries. Daddy let me sit up at the bar by myself on a tall red vinyl stool. I tasted my Shirley Temple, savoring it, while they had “grown-up talk.” I swirled my drink round and round with the little red and white straw. I took small sips and stabbed the cherries.

I watched a man at the end of the bar who looked like he was sad, and taking a nap at the same time. The man rested his head on the bar and cried. I felt like crying. I felt like giving the man a tissue and asking him if he knew who Cesar was and did he know he was ruining my life. When I asked Gio for a second Shirley Temple, Momma told me no matter what was going on I was done.

That night when Daddy put me in my froggy pajamas and tucked me in, I asked, “Daddy?”

“Yessie?” he said.

“Do you think Lupe will come back?” I asked.

Daddy rubbed his face like he was real tired. After a few minutes, he got up to go. When he got to the door, he

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turned around and said in a low, sad voice, “No, honey. He won’t be back.”

After Daddy was gone, I lay on my back with my hands behind my head, staring at the white cottage cheese ceiling. If Lupe didn’t work the farm, how would he get money to send back to his family? I wondered if Lupe had to go back to Mexico. Would horrible Cesar and the angry farmworkers hurt Lupe? Was Lupe’s Lady helping him?

Would she help me? Would I ever see Lupe again? I got out of bed and kneeled on the hard floor. I put my hands together and squeezed my eyes shut tight. I prayed to Lupe’s Lady. I prayed for her to make everything all better for everyone. I prayed for her to take care of Lupe. I prayed for her to bring Lupe back. I prayed for her to give me a sign that Lupe loved me.

That night, I dreamt of Lupe’s Lady. She floated down on a puffy white cloud. She was extra gold and glittery. The little chubby angel boy wasn’t holding her up

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because she was walking on her own in her bare feet.

Momma wouldn’t have thought much of that. She carried beautiful roses and handed them out to people. When it was my turn to get a rose, I asked her to get Cesar in trouble because he made Lupe go away. I asked her to bring Lupe back. I asked her to give me a magic sign. Lupe’s Lady just smiled a dazzling smile and gave me a rose.

We all slept in late. I woke up when I heard Mrs. Gacy yelling at the neighbor boy for walking across her Bermuda Grass. Momma was cooking creamed eggs on toast and Daddy was sitting in his La-Z-Boy sipping strong black coffee and reading the morning paper. It almost felt like none of it had happened. Daddy patted the arm of his chair for me to sit on and rubbed my back in slow circles.

Nobody talked for a long while. I got dressed and went out back to start my chores. I spied on Mrs. Gacy through a knot in the fence for a few minutes and then launched a dead beetle into her yard. When I started to sweep the

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porch, I noticed a tiny black velvet box sitting on the corner, right next to a chili sucker. The brilliant sparkling gold medallion with the breathtaking image of Lupe’s Lady inside the box was all I needed to see. Lupe’s Lady was for real.

On the way to Sunday Mass, rows of lettuce, watermelon, asparagus, and onions chased after me like a country child’s game of field tag. The muddy brown canals moved swiftly. The rainbow-colored spray from the aluminum irrigation pumps danced rhythmically across the glistening emerald broccoli crowns. The deep red and orange desert sun beat down on giant mounds of sugar beets like a throbbing heart. Bands of cicadas whirred their favorite songs. The stooped farmworkers’ bright bold head scarves became a distant colorful sprinkling of pleasant faraway dots.

At the church the feast was already in full swing.

Tall white candles in glass jars covered every surface.

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Fresh fragrant flower garlands hung from wooden rafters. I sat on top of my hands - squished tightly between Momma’s pretty cotton Sunday flower dress and Daddy’s scratchy grey polyester church pants. Daddy smoothed my hair twice and let his warm hand rest on top of my head for a long while. I fingered the cool gold medallion around my neck that reflected little shards of light when I moved. I craned my neck to watch the procession beginning at the back of the church. Brassy mariachi music filled the electric air. Precious girls with dark, loopy braided hair in ruffled red, green, and white dresses made their way down the aisle towards us carrying soft, full rose bouquets and small bundles of alfalfa tied with satin bows. When they passed, proudly displaying the ornate gilded frame, I didn’t even look. I shut my eyes.

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Selected Poems by Nathaniel Sverlow Sit Still only a Master can sit still he can’t hear the heartbeat he doesn’t count the breath he thinks nothing of the brain and the electricity of neurons he could be an illusion he could be a brain in a vat in serious fucking trouble he could be nothing non-existent the singularity of a black hole yet, he sits at his desk rigid like a skyscraper waiting like a lion

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he thinks only of the Masters that came before how they sat how they typed how they grabbed hold of the word and beat it senseless he needs to take a piss he needs to scratch his ass but he doesn’t the word is there keeping low moving cautiously closer and only a Master can sit still

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After That I sit at my desk while the others make lunches and go to work I stare down the blank page like I’m worth a damn like I have something to say I sit and sit and sit and sit until my ass gets sore until my feet swell and I stand and make my lunch having written nothing there’s enough paper left for a resume for a letter for a suicide note I clean my plate I wash my hands I pick one the word comes easy after that 36

A Dish Served Cold

By Sonja Condit

The trouble began with a black mote, smaller than an ant. It drifted on its own airy parachute across the bestdefined border in Glenaughtry, the brick seam between the Reyfords’ Bermuda grass and the Browns’ zoysia: a dandelion seed. It flirted with the trailing skirts of Leigh Brown’s Boston ferns, spun in the tumbling air as Leigh opened her front door, and settled like a snowflake in her right hand.

Leigh stared at it—a dandelion seed—and then she looked into the face of the wind. A flotilla of seeds fluttered all around her, dispersing all over her lawn. Leigh slammed her coffee cup down on the glass table and ran out after the seeds, catching some in the air, scrabbling after others as they hid themselves in her perfect grass.

A child’s laughter rang across the morning gardens, and she looked up at the Reyfords’ house as the youngest

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Reyford, four-year-old Clark, puffed at the bouquet of gone-to-seed dandelions in his fat hands. Leigh marched across her lawn, brushing seeds out of her face. She stepped over the brick seam, from the satin of her own so-carefullynurtured zoysia to Surrey Reyford’s coarser, taller Bermuda, as plush underfoot as an eight-inch mattress.

“You!” she yelled. “Drop that! Drop it right now.”

Surrey Reyford came out of her side garden, gloved and booted, carrying a bucket of deadheaded roses.

“Morning, Leigh,” she said, “your lawn looks nice.”

“Not for long, y’all keep doing this.” Clark Reyford puffed his dandelions again, and Leigh snatched them from his hand. “Look at them.” She shook them under Surrey’s nose. Seeds hovered in the air between the two women.

“Dandelions! He’s blowing them all over my grass.

Millions of them.”

“Well,” Surrey said with that annoying smile, the corners of her mouth tilted while her lips tightened over her

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teeth, “not quite millions, don’t you think you’re exaggerating?”

“Millions. Unbelievable. It’s a dirty trick. You and your dandelions.”

“They’re not my dandelions.” That smile again, as if Surrey kept a piece of sweet caramel tucked in her cheek, behind the dimple. That was the first thing everybody said about Surrey: She’s so sweet—but Leigh knew better. “I don’t have dandelions,” Surrey said. “I sent the kids out to pull weeds from the mulch bed around the neighborhood entrance, just to keep it looking nice.” Oh yes, and wasn’t that just the sort of thing the Reyfords would do, kissing up to the Garden Club. Surrey did good by stealth, but she made sure everybody knew it. “Clark, honey,” Surrey said, “I told you to put the seedheads in a plastic bag. Now they’re all over Ms. Leigh’s yard. You say you’re sorry.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” Clark glanced up at Leigh and stuck out his tongue, just the tiniest flick at the

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corner of his mouth, and twisted loose from his mother’s hand to run into the Reyford house.

Leigh knew for a fact that Surrey was every bit as deceitful and insincere as her nasty-eyed rug monkey Clark. “Sabotage, that’s what it is. You know you can’t beat me fairly, so you’re doing this. Well, I’m watching you. It’s three weeks till the Club picks the Garden of the Year, and you just better keep those boys out of my yard.”

The sticky-false NutraSweet smile vanished from Surrey Reyford’s face. “You’re in my yard now,” she said, with no trace of the dimple, so Leigh marched away, digging and twisting her heels into Surrey’s lawn with each step. She didn’t have time to deal with Surrey. She had to get the hand-vac and go over every inch of her lawn, sucking up the dandelion seeds before they had a chance to take root. If even one of them grew, it would be in full flower when the Glenaughtry Garden Club came in three

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weeks, or else she would have to pull it up by the roots, divoting her flawless grass.

Surrey Reyford had won Garden of the Year for two of the last three years, with her whore’s mattress of a lawn, and her unusual and antique varietals, some she had inherited from her grandmother and others she had bought.

She had blue Willow Pattern lilies, hundred-year-old dahlias with flowers as big as a child’s head, and Symphonie Fantastique, a climbing rose so strongly scented that all of Amber Court smelled like jasmine and tangerine and gardenia, with a smoky undertone of unwashed cat.

Leigh’s husband said he could always find his way home in the dark. Leigh thought it smelled like a middle school dance just before curfew. Surrey had coaxed and trained Symphonie Fantastique up and across a trellis screwed to the south side of her house, creating a three-story wall of peach-colored blossoms from April through September.

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Nobody could compete with Surrey Reyford when it came to the exotic, the unusual, the historical, the rare.

Last fall, four years into her five-year plan to win Garden of the Year, Leigh Brown had decided she would not even try. She wrote her inspiration in her garden calendar: The Ideal of the Commonplace. Let Surrey grow Symphonie from an antique climber into a Godzilla espalier. Let her grow her Willow Pattern lilies, her dahlias so old and rare they didn’t even have names, her Siberian salvia, her real French lavender from Provence. Leigh Brown, ordinary as her name, would grow the plants everybody grew, but she would grow them better than anybody else. Her lilies were Stargazer, her roses Peace, her clematis the dull purple Jackmanii. Even her crape myrtle was the anonymous pink tree left by the developer.

Surrey’s garden was unique. Leigh’s was the garden anyone could have, if they were willing to work for it.

Shouldn’t the Glenaughtry Garden Club be tired of blue

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lilies by now, a little embarrassed by Symphonie’s overwhelming growth? It was time for something different, and if you started with Surrey’s garden, there was only way for different to go. Yes, it was Leigh’s year to win the prize. But not with dandelions. Commonplace, absolutely.

Ideal, not so much.

The Reyfords might do anything to ruin her chances and take home the trophy for another year. To give Surrey something else to think about, Leigh stayed home from church the next day, pleading a migraine. When she was sure the Reyfords had left, she went next door with her pruning shears and cut off the blossom stems of the blue lilies level with the last pair of leaves, every single one.

All Sunday afternoon, Leigh waited for Surrey’s response. The Reyfords came home from church. Luke Junior and Raphael, the older boys, went out on their bikes, and Surrey ran after them with their helmets. Of course, she was that kind of mother, the kind who bought helmets and

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made sure her boys wore them. She had organized Glenaughtry Fire and Rescue’s bike-helmet fundraiser just before Easter, so every child in the community could have a new, safe helmet that fit. She was on the front page of the paper. A color picture, in spring, standing in front of her wild mountain laurel in full bloom. That was just completely Surrey.

Later, little Clark came outside with a rainbow Popsicle, which melted in his hand all over the front porch.

Ten minutes after that, he was out again with a bucket of soapy water, scrubbing the dribbles. Surrey was that kind of mother, too, the kind whose children were clean and polite and picked up after themselves, without even complaining.

In March, Leigh’s daughter Lenore had sent a letter from God knows where to tell her parents she had withdrawn from college, cashed in the tuition refund, and was going to Arizona to be a tattoo model with a guy

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named Omar. Leigh could not be sure who was going to be the tattoo model, Lenore or Omar. Lenore hadn’t even had her ears pierced until she was fifteen. Last Christmas, she’d come home with a nose-stud and a goldfish tramp-stamp on the small of her back, and it was all downhill from there.

Surrey’s kids, Leigh knew, would never do that. Probably, Luke Junior was still a virgin.

Surrey came out to give Clark another Popsicle and send him into the grass. She went around the house to her vegetable garden in the back, and Leigh scrambled into her gardening shorts to get to work, as if coincidentally, in her own vegetables. The Glenaughtry Garden Club weighted vegetables at fifteen percent of the overall score. Her husband had done the math, so Leigh knew homegrown vegetables cost three times as much as farmers’ market produce, but her own math told her she had to get at least twelve out of the possible fifteen points to have a hope of winning. She’d planted full-grown tomato plants from

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Home Depot, each one in its own eight-foot-tall aluminum frame, and fertilized them devotedly. They rewarded her with cascades of fruit the size of apricots, still green. When the Garden Club judges stood here, in three weeks, the tomatoes would be as big as oranges, and all perfectly red.

Leigh trimmed her tomatoes as if they were topiaries. She cut off any withered or yellowing leaf and tied the new stems to various bars of the frame, all the while watching Surrey sidelong. Surrey’s vegetable garden was twice the size of Leigh’s, but her tomatoes were stubby and mismatched. She had at least four different types, two or three of each, and her garden lacked the Italian-terrace formality of Leigh’s. But she got full points for her vegetables, year after year. With that mess? How? “I’m expecting a lot of tomatoes this year,” Leigh said, unable to bear the sound of Surrey contentedly humming as she worked the soil between her beanpoles.

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Surrey glanced up at Leigh’s magnificent tomato towers with her hidden-caramel dimple. “If that’s what you want.”

“What? Sure it’s what I want. It’s a vegetable garden.”

Leigh stepped back to check her garden’s symmetry. The four tomato towers, one in each corner— each quadrant with one large vine (zucchini, cucumber, cantaloupe, ornamental pumpkin), two pepper plants, and a selection of kitchen herbs—and in the middle, the massive stone three-tiered fountain framed by flowering rosemary.

Leigh’s husband, doing the math, said her tomatoes would end up costing three dollars each, if he included installing the fountain, which of course he did.

Surrey shrugged. “Big box veggies. The fruit you’ll get, you might as well dump it straight in the compost, that’s all they’re good for. Better Boy, aren’t they? It’s the white trash of tomatoes. I wouldn’t grow them on a bet. I

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start all mine from seed. They’re all heirlooms, it’s hardly worth growing them otherwise. They won’t all be ripe at the same time, and they’re not pretty like yours, but if pretty is all you want, you can always just shove some plastic foliage in the dirt, can’t you?”

Leigh had decorated her flowerbeds with plastic tulips last Easter, until Jane Ada Byce, the Garden Club President, called to ask if that was really what she wanted to do—was it, dear? Plastic tulips, really? Leigh blamed neighborhood children pulling a prank, and had pulled up the tulips within the hour. Trust Surrey to remember. She’d probably remind the Garden of the Year committee, too.

“At least my tomatoes will be ripe when the Garden Club comes round!” Leigh retorted.

Surrey shrugged. “I’ll have three kinds ripe just then. Lunar Eclipse—it’s one half white, one half dark purple, you’ve never tasted anything like it. This little shrubby one is called Plumcherry. They look like grapes,

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only black. Very pretty in a salad. And this one doesn’t have a name, my grandmother grew it and I collect the seeds every year.” She gestured to a mesh tent covering a mass of sprawling vines, at least six of them, maybe as many as ten. “I keep them covered so the bees can’t get to them, and I fertilize them by hand with a paintbrush, so I don’t accidentally hybridize them.”

“Most people,” Leigh said, “don’t get involved with their plants’ sex lives.”

And there was the caramel dimple again. “Most people never win the Garden of the Year award. And nobody’s ever won it twice except me. Good luck with your Better Boys, though. They look very, you know, sturdy.”

Leigh snapped her shears, accidentally amputating a main limb thick with fruit. When she went up to the front yard, she discovered that someone, maybe one of the Reyford boys, had neatly trimmed the slaughtered lilies.

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Their foliage fanned out, a graceful texture behind Surrey’s massive dahlias. The loss of the Willow Pattern blossoms made no difference to Surrey’s color beds.

For the next few days, Leigh hardly saw Surrey.

Leigh, a second-grade teacher, was on summer break, taking an online course in Managing the Hygienically Nonstandard Child for her continuing education credit.

Having fallen behind, she had to write a paper and take two tests in three days. Lenore didn’t call from wherever she was, but Leigh was able to track her through the credit card statement. Her husband suggested they close the account; “a starved cat comes home,” he said, and Leigh slept that night in Lenore’s bed, alone. On Wednesday evening, having finished her essay on how to discourage nosepicking, she stood under her crape myrtle tree to take stock of the damage half a week’s worth of neglect had done to her garden.

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It wasn’t so bad. She had a few hours of clean-up to do the next day, especially at the edges, where the weedy saplings of mimosa sprouted thickly every year, and the bloodthirsty weeds—cat-thorn, wild briar, the thornyleaved deadly nightshade—always grew so fast and so strong. Strange that briar was so sturdy and roses so delicate. Maybe she could put up some sort of trellis, weave the briar into it, and call it an antique wild rose. Deadly nightshade, with its yellow-eyed violet flowers and gleaming purple fruit, would look much better in the garden than its tame cousin, the tomato. Sure, it was poison. Leigh filled her house with poinsettias every winter, so what was the difference?

As she considered planting a garden of weeds (maybe that would be her garden’s theme next year, except that she’d have to call them native wildflowers), Leigh became aware that the tree above her was buzzing. She looked up suspiciously. For the last three years, every

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February, she had paid Glenaughtry’s best arborist six hundred dollars to prune the crape myrtle. Instead of lopping all the branches off short, he carefully trimmed away the older, thicker branches, and twisted wires around some of the thinner branches to give them an elegantly twisted look. This spring he came back to remove the wires and to loosen some of the bark, so that it would flake in perfect sheets and scrolls. The tree was supposed to look like an open pair of arthritic hands full to overflowing with pink blossoms. Looking up, she thought he had gone too far: instead of a mass of pink flowers, she saw sky between the branches. And although there was no wind, the bark seemed to ripple and squirm. What was wrong with it?

Leigh shook the crape myrtle’s trunk. The buzzing exploded into a roar, and a volcano of beetles erupted from the tree. Hundreds of them tumbled over her, clinging and scrambling—they were in her clothes, in her hair—they were in her mouth. The tree stood leafless, almost barkless,

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in a swarm of beetles. They settled into it again, like the specks in a snowglobe. Leigh stood with her mouth open, screaming and beating at herself, until her husband ran out to slap the beetles off her body and pull them, one by one, out of her hair. He hugged her, and she could feel the hard round bodies pressing into her flesh.

“Those are Japanese beetles,” he said, as if she didn’t know. “I thought you had the lawn guys exterminate the grubs.”

She twisted in his arms. “I can feel them, they’re all over me, get them off!”

He was doing the math. “There must be hundreds of thousands of them. I’m surprised there are that many in the whole neighborhood. Everybody exterminates lawn grubs.”

“Jeffrey, let go of me, please, I have to take a shower now.”

“Look,” he said. “What’s that?”

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Under the glossy purple-green swarm, Leigh glimpsed yellow plastic. She danced in place and clawed at her arms while her husband carefully brushed a few hundred beetles aside to reveal a Japanese beetle trap.

Kamikaze Kilrz, the label read. Contains pheromones to attract Japanese beetles. Do not position near garden plants.

“Unbelievable,” Leigh said.

“There’s another one,” her husband said. “And isn’t that another one, up there? They must have attracted every beetle for miles.”

“Get them down,” Leigh said. “Burn them. I’m going to take a shower.” She could smell beetle musk all over her body; she had to get it off her.

“They’re mating,” her husband said. “If even ten percent of them lay eggs in the neighborhood—” “Just get them out of here.”

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“I’m just saying, the whole street’s going to have one ugly infestation next year. I’ll go get the stepladder.”

After four showers, Leigh could still sense the tiny dry legs crawling all over her, though she knew the beetles were gone. So was the hot water. And, when she went outside to look at it, so was every single crape myrtle blossom, every leaf, most of the twigs, and even large swaths of bark. The tree was gnawed down to the bare white wood, and it would certainly die.

The arborist had done a good job. The skeleton of the tree was a beautiful object in itself. It shone in the dark, reflecting her porch light; the twists in the naked wood were as elegant as a runner’s muscles. Maybe she could pass off a dead tree as a deliberate artistic choice.

Surrey Reyford could have pulled it off, but Leigh Brown? Not so much. Leigh went inside, filled her spaghetti pot with water, brought it to a boil, and hauled it out to the back yard. The brick seam divided the two

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gardens here, too. When the two families moved in, eight years ago, Surrey and Leigh picked out the bricks together, and their husbands did the work. Twelve-year-old Lenore, her face as sunny as her young heart, hauled the bricks in a wheelbarrow, ten at a time, while Luke Junior and Raphael Reyford, aged five and four, toddled along after her, carrying two each in buckets. Surrey, pregnant with Clark, rested on the back porch, drinking sweet tea with Leigh.

The two women, both moving from apartments to these new big houses, agreed they were looking forward to putting their gardens in the new topsoil. Surrey offered to propagate a slip of her grandmother’s climbing rose for Leigh; Leigh asked what kind of grass Surrey planned to plant.

Now Leigh stepped over the brick divider and walked through Surrey’s vegetables, dumping a pint of boiling water on each plant. The water hissed into the soil.

In the dark, she couldn’t tell if the plants wilted as they

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cooked, or if they stood proud in death, like her crape myrtle.

She got all the Lunar Eclipses and most of Surrey’s grandmother’s variety under their incestuous tent, but the security light snapped on over the Reyfords’ back porch when she got near the Plumcherry plants. She froze, and then took two careful steps backward, toward her own garden. Luke Junior came out and called, “Somebody there?”

“Just watering the veggies,” Leigh said cheerfully.

“You shouldn’t water tomatoes at night, it makes mildew.”

“Thank you, you are so helpful.”

The next day, she watched him at his helpfulness again. All three of the boys spread out through Surrey’s flowerbeds early in the morning. They wore gloves and carried buckets. Leigh thought they were catching slugs, which had been a plague on everybody’s hostas this year

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and had wiped out every strawberry plant on Amber Court, even the ones Surrey tried to grow in hanging baskets.

That was the trouble with gardens. All that slimy life working away in them. Leigh thought longingly of her plastic tulips. There was always hardscape: could she simply pave over her entire front yard and plant a single row of boxwoods along the street? Instead of the Ideal of the Commonplace, her garden theme next year could be Suburban Mall Parking Lot. She went back inside to log on and read her instructor’s comments on her nose-picking essay—she got a B—and forgot about the Reyfords’ slugs until she found them the next morning. All of Leigh’s hostas, the cheap and common hostas she had nurtured to tropical magnificence, with more than ten flower stems each, every single one of them was a slug condominium. Most of the big leaves were gnawed down to the ribs, and every single bud had been eaten off the stems.

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So the Reyfords were going to let the wildlife do their dirty work. First Japanese beetles, now slugs. Well, Leigh was not afraid of chemical warfare. And she happened to know that Surrey used Doctor Green-Em-All’s Organic Fish Emulsion Fertilizer.

“Right,” she said, feeling happy for the first time since the shower of beetles, “I can totally handle this.” She dug up her hostas and bagged them, slugs and all. That left gaps in her flowerbed, but it could be worse. She went inside to wash her hands and change. “I’m going to the nursery,” she called to her husband as she grabbed her purse and keys.

“That’s a surprise,” he muttered. “Wait for me.” He picked up his briefcase and laptop, and she set the alarm.

“Even with the price of gold what it is,” he said, “I could buy you a solid gold trophy cup, four inches tall, and engrave your name on it, and it would still cost less than what you’ve spent on the garden this year.”

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She kissed his cheek. “I love your sense of humor, Jeffrey.”

“Not joking. I did the math.”

“It’s not about math.”

“Maybe it should be. Have you thought this through?”

“I know what I’m going to do. You don’t have to worry about Surrey Reyford.”

“We went to their New Year’s Eve party,” Jeffrey said. “We’ve eaten their food. Whatever’s going on between you two, it’s not worth it. You’ve got to drop it.

Let it go.”

She kissed him again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just have to buy a few plants, that’s all.”

“It better be all. Lenore’s pushing us near the credit limit on that card. She’s got another two weeks, the rate she’s going. Unless she tries to buy a motorcycle. Surprised she hasn’t tried it already.”

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The hostas at the Washington Road Nursery weren’t anywhere near as beautiful as Leigh’s had been, but they had some absolutely gorgeous gardenias, with a scent that would put to shame that reeking beast, Symphonie Fantastique. Leigh bought ten gardenias to plant in the holes left by her murdered hostas. She bought a spray attachment of Surrey’s favored Doctor Green-Em-All’s Organic Fish Emulsion fertilizer, and a gallon of superconcentrated weed killer. After planting the gardenias and watering them in, she used the Green-Em-All on her own garden, then refilled with empty container with weed killer and left it outside Surrey’s garage.

Sure enough, the Reyford boys, so sweet and helpful, took it as a hint, and set out to water and fertilize every inch of Surrey’s garden. Leigh was serenely gratified to observe that the weed killer was every bit as effective as advertised. So few products did what they promised, but two days after the spraying, Surrey’s annuals were withered

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to the root. From aster to zinnia, the slaughter was complete.

Leigh was up on the stepladder, hanging chains of Japanese lanterns in her poor dead crape myrtle, when the Washington Road Nursery delivery van pulled into the Reyfords’ driveway, followed by a caravan of Tahoes, Expeditions, and Acuras. The entire Glenaughtry Garden Club arrived, unloading flat after flat of color from the van.

Leigh finished placing the Japanese lanterns and slowly walked over to the border. From her own side of the brick seam, she called to Jane Ada Byce, “What’s going on?”

“We’re just helping Surrey with her little problem,” Jane Ada said as she nestled a Candy Apple petunia into the soil.

“Don’t the Garden Club judges come around in a few days?” Leigh asked.

Jane Ada wiped her face, leaving a smear of dirt on her cheek. “Next Saturday. It would be so sad if Surrey had

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to withdraw from the competition. Especially since the Garden Club is having the luncheon in her back yard after the judging.”

“Really?” Leigh said. “You’re helping her fix her garden—and you’re eating at her house on the day of the judging?”

“We always have our garden party luncheon at last year’s winner’s house,” Jane Ada said. “Grab a trowel and come on over. We could use some help.”

“I’ve had a few garden problems too.”

“It’s been a bad year. Your crape myrtle’s looking peaky. When are you expecting Lenore?”

“She’s traveling with a friend in the Southwest.”

“I heard about that.”

Leigh remembered Jane Ada had a niece a year older than Lenore. The girls had lived in the same dorm, so the entire Garden Club knew about whatever it was Lenore had done at school—more than Leigh knew herself, since

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of course the college administration couldn’t tell her, citing privacy laws. They had, however, sent her a bill for three thousand seven hundred and six dollars for damage. She hadn’t told Jeffrey about it yet. He was doing Lenore’s math, charging her six percent interest for the tuition refund and all the Visa charges, and adding each month’s interest on the card to the principal. Leigh hoped that tattoo models were well paid. Lenore already owed her father more than twenty thousand dollars.

“Come on over and plant some English daisies,” Jane Ada said.

“Sure, why not? I’m always happy to help.” Leigh gave her best version of Surrey’s caramel-flavored smile, but she didn’t think it worked. By evening, Surrey’s garden was as bright as ever.

Even so, Surrey didn’t have Leigh’s grass. Nobody had Leigh’s grass. It was the jewel of Amber Court, a perfect emerald. Although it wasn’t due for fertilizing,

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Leigh pulled out the box of Zoysia Chow granules and gave it a few handfuls, broadcast all over the sleek silk-velvet, with its perfect checkerboard mowing marks. Jeffrey enjoyed the geometry of lawn-mowing.

Leigh set the sprinkler and went to bed, and the next morning, her lawn was freckled like the moon with craters large and small. Where each pellet had fallen, a zoysia root had died. She saw that she had been careless and had not fertilized evenly: the lawn was black in patches, and in other places green as ever. She didn’t even wonder what had been in the Zoysia Chow box. It didn’t matter.

Probably, it had never mattered. She waited for the Glenaughtry Garden Club to arrive with a truckload of turf, and they did not come. She stood under her dead crape myrtle, under the stupid little twinkling lanterns, and surveyed her tragic, hopeless garden. The cat-thorn had overrun her flowerbeds. Great patches of deadly nightshade, in full fruit now, overshadowed her Gerbera

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daisies. The new gardenias had dropped all their flowers.

The only thing blooming in her rose-bed was—what else?—a dandelion. She leaned back against the crape myrtle and covered her eyes.

Engine, car door, footsteps, and Jane Ada Byce’s sweet and friendly voice: “Hey, Leigh. You’ve got some weeding to do before the judges come.”

Leigh dropped her hands. “I’m withdrawing from the competition.”

Jane Ada clucked her tongue. “Too bad. You’ve let the place go, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been distracted. I’ve been taking a class.”

Jane Ada stared out over the lawn. “Zoysia’s pretty, but it’s not really reliable, is it? Surrey’s new flowers are doing well.”

“Sure, they’re great.”

“I just dropped by to see if she needed any more help, but it looks like she’s doing fine. And you’re coming

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on Saturday, aren’t you, Leigh? The Garden Club’s meeting for the luncheon at one-thirty in Surrey’s back yard. Do you have any white tablecloths you can bring?

And make some muffins, or bread rolls, or something.”

“Sure,” Leigh said. She shook herself. “I’d better get back on the computer. And you’ve probably got to get the plaque engraved, right?”

“Not much doubt about who’s winning this year,” Jane Ada agreed. “Don’t forget. Muffins and a white tablecloth.”

Leigh bought new white tablecloths for the occasion (Jeffrey added them to the garden’s running tab, and informed her that they could have had a week in the Caribbean for less than she’d spent so far) and baked cinnamon-chip muffins. She went over early to help Surrey and Jane Ada set up the party. On her way, she stopped to pull a few weeds from her own garden, out of habit. The cat-thorn tore at her hands, and the deadly nightshade

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plants were too deeply-rooted to move. She stripped them and filled her pockets with the berries.

When she arrived, she found Surrey in full flow.

“It’s not the season for lettuce, of course,” she explained as Leigh pinned the cloths to the tables and Jane Ada folded napkins into swans. “I turned my sunroom into an airconditioned greenhouse and grew all the cool-season vegetables in there for the salads. Lettuce, radishes, everything.”

“Broccoli’s two dollars a head at the store,” Leigh said, doing the math: an air-conditioned greenhouse? What had it cost Surrey to grow broccoli?

“Broccoli’s like fish,” Surrey explained. “It’s only good when it’s really fresh. I haven’t even picked it yet.

We’re eating at two, so I’m picking it at one forty five.”

“Lunch at two,” Jane Ada said to herself, leafing the pages of her notebook, “judging from three to five, and then we meet here again . . . .”

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“Coronation at five thirty,” Leigh said, not quite softly enough. Jane Ada gave her a startled look, and Surrey smiled. The caramel hidden in her cheek was particularly luscious today.

“When will Lenore be home?” Surrey asked. “I was hoping she could babysit Clark a couple times. Such a sweet, pretty girl.”

“Lenore won’t be home this summer. She’s working out west. What about your tomatoes, Surrey, any luck?”

“I had a little trouble, but luckily the Plumcherries survived. Have a look. They’re in the kitchen. I picked them yesterday. They get sweeter if they sit overnight. I’ve got two gallons of peach tea, Jane Ada.” “Cath’s bringing another gallon each of sweet and unsweet,” Jane Ada said, flipping through the notebook again. “Maureen’s bringing those little quiches, and sausage balls.”

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Leigh went into Surrey’s kitchen to look at the Plumcherry tomatoes. They were laid out in a tidy row on the windowsill, between African violets and a flowering wax plant. As Surrey had promised, they were the size of grapes, dark purple, gleaming in the sun. A sweet scent filled the kitchen. Leigh thought it was an air freshener, but as she touched the Plumcherries, she realized it was their own smell.

The back door slammed. “It’s time to put together the salads,” Surrey said as she entered the room. “I’ll go get the broccoli. You can just toss the Plumcherries with the lettuce in the big wooden bowl. You can probably handle that, Leigh.”

“Sure.” Leigh dropped the purple-black tomatoes in the salad bowl on the counter. Surrey and Jane Ada were in the sunroom, tasting the truly fresh broccoli. Jane Ada’s voice lifted in delight.

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Leigh reached into her pocket for the deadly nightshade berries she had picked on the way over. They were smaller than the Plumcherries, and darker, but not much, and they did not have the sweet smell. They smelled neutrally green, like grass. She wondered what they tasted like: sour, bitter, woody, even sweet? It wouldn’t matter, because only Surrey knew how the Plumcherries were supposed to taste. She dropped three deadly nightshade berries in the salad, then shrugged and tossed in the whole handful. Two dozen berries, enough for everyone, why be selfish? Everyone had pulled together to help Surrey with her garden this year, the whole Garden Club. Maybe they could all have their names engraved on the plaque. The salad looked delicious. Leigh hoped they enjoyed it as much as they deserved.

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Selected Poems by Zvi A. Sesling He Lives Behind A Cemetery He lives behind a cemetery at night coyotes howl but neighbors say it is ghosts wailing, the ones headed down and the ones who get no visitors to remember them The pain of being forgotten is too great for ghosts whose corporeal being is slowly melting beneath sod so they rise to wail their misfortune to tell the world they want to be remembered

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I Want The heck with all this concern about climate change I am looking forward to it when the weather here in Boston is like Miami I want to go to the beach year round I want baseball spring training and the regular season up here I want the retirement folks to stay here with their kids and grandchildren I want to not worry about my car in winter I want no more shoveling I want no more skidding I want no more wind chill factors below zero I even want those folks in Minneapolis to be warm I want palm trees in my back yard I want exotic birds flitting about I want, I want, but I don’t get

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Remembering Your soul was strong the body weak offered freely to passersby then sacrificed on the altar of false love Secret Behind The Gate The house is lopsided, rotting windows with holes where children threw stones Grass has grown taller than the children and there is an eerie feeling at the gate The gate guards a cracked cement walkway where a mouse entered once A cat followed, neither seen again at night a strange light inside in daytime a creaking noise The gate contains the house’s secret children dared and double-dared other children to enter the house Only one child took the challenge years later when it was demolished nothing was found inside

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War Never Ends War never ends Guns have stopped Bombing has halted It is all still in the head In the day sudden noises Are an ambush or mines Faces resemble the enemy Or a dead comrade At night dead return to haunt A horror movie of peeling faces Dreams never end Dead never leave Skin is raw and eyes hollow Bones in pieces and minds shattered

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Bodies

By Aiden Thomas

People always ask me what it was like to be an EMT in Oakland. They ask me to tell them stories. They want to know what’s the most absurd or gruesome experience I’ve ever had. They want to know what the hardest part about my job is. “You must have some really great stories,” they say, watching me expectantly. My job is interesting. I should be their source of amusement for the next few minutes.

After dozens of blank stares and hanging silences, I very quickly found out that people didn’t actually want to know the truth.

They want to hear things like, “we once got called to a guy’s house where he got stuck in his chimney,” “the siren that goes off in the fire house is loud enough to break your eardrums,” or “I’ve smelled more shit than a hospice nurse.” They want funny stories that can be shared over

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beers, laughed about, and then easily moved on from.

They don’t want to hear about the things that keep you up at night, what stays with you and won’t leave you alone. They don’t want to know what’s left behind.

They don’t want to hear about how the guy who got stuck in his chimney was drunk on Christmas and trying to put on a show for his kids. They don’t want to hear about how his own weight wedged him so far into the shaft that gravity was literally ripping the skin from his arms and legs. They don’t want to know that the chemicals and soot in the bricks were seeping into his skin, poisoning his blood. They don’t want to hear about what compression syndrome is or how, by the time we had chiseled him out of there, he needed a double amputation and extensive treatment for sepsis.

They don’t want to hear about how the siren really isn’t all that loud (much quieter than most fire alarms in apartment complexes), but you find yourself lying in bed,

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unable to sleep because every muscle in your body is tense and waiting for it to go off. They don’t want to know that you do this even at home. That you can’t use an alarm because it’s too loud and you wake up to an explosion of adrenaline in the safety of your own bed. You can’t sleep in the same bed as someone else because their slightest stirring, or even the gentleness of their breathing, will keep you up all night, on edge and dry mouthed. They don’t want to know that a monster sleeps in my chest. It awakens without warning and slams itself into my spine and rattles its cage of ribs. It doesn’t let me fall asleep like normal people and waking up is never slow nor gentle.

They don’t want to know what an evisceration smells like. What it’s like to see someone’s internal organs spilling out of their stomach and how a nicked intestine is the most putrid thing you’ll ever smell. How it clings to your hair and skin days afterward and it is impossible to feel clean again. They don’t want to know about the

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screams of the six year old boy as he tried to hold onto them, to pull them back into his body while you’re trying to dress the wounds.

They don’t want to know you were relaying a report to your chief and didn’t notice your cheeks were wet until he sent you home early. They don’t want to know how you can’t sleep without taking little blue pills. That you have no one to go home to. They don’t want to know that no one actually wants to be with an EMT because you have too much baggage. I can count more dead bodies I’ve seen than lovers I’ve had. They don’t want to know that you buy black pillowcases so there’s no evidence you’ve woken yourself up in the middle of the night sobbing again.

I am strong, I am confident, I will help you, I know what I’m doing, the badge reassures you. But my muscles now become rigid stone at the smell of smoke, the sight of a car on the side of the road, the wail of sirens. Please don’t be a dead body. The words repeat themselves in my head,

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cycling over and over again like a mantra.

They don’t want to know that I live in that moment you miss a step going down stairs, but it never stops.

So, when people ask me, “What is it like?”

I just tell them, “It’s fun running red lights.”

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Delta Song

By Gabe Russo An old woman dressed in plastic bags told me she could laugh the sky post-blue-smooth its colors like a satin gown and slide the North Star down a string, then wear her night to the river moon where Biloxi boys still jive and swing.

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It Is Not Our Way By ‘Pemi Aguda

You fold the shirt in threes. One-two-three down the vertical length and then three-two-one across its horizontal breadth. You lower the jersey material into the half-full box, ignoring the dark toes of your mother that have now appeared next to it. You got your toes from your mother—ugly. The second toe is uncomfortably taller than the first and crooked; like they belong to the witch in an illustrated children’s book. But your stubbornness…your mother swears it comes from your father.

“What is wrong with you?” she asks now; and again. It is all she has asked since you made the announcement. “Tell me, what is wrong with you?”

You sigh but do not pause to reply; or reply at all.

You fold the night dress your mother had given you many years ago—silk with lace trimmings and long and white and womanly. You do not put it into the box.

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She moves closer so her toes are now touching the box. “Bidemi, this is not our way. This is not our way oh.”

It is the other thing you have heard over and over.

From your father, your uncles, and all the neighbors your mother had convinced to drop by to convince you.

“It. Is. Not. Our. Way.” “What is our way? Our way. Our way. Our way.

Who made it our way? Is it still our way if it isn’t...if it isn’t our way?” you say now as you place a pair of faded jeans into the box. Your voice rises only a little.

“What are you saying? What have you been reading, ehn? It is these books that have brainwashed you, I know! A girl does not move out of her father’s house before marriage, Bidemi. Everybody knows this. This won’t end well oh. I’m telling you.”

You say nothing as your mother breathes heavily over you, her words dancing in the warm afternoon air and 83

then settling as sticky sweat on your brown skin. You wait for her to leave the room; then you put the night dress into the box.

Nobody walks you to the door, or out the door, or down the street. Nobody fusses with your shirt collar like when you were going off to boarding school. Nobody helps you lift your luggage into the dirty boot of the yellow taxi.

Nobody stands and waves goodbye until the vehicle is but a speck on the horizon. ……

Your new house is...cute; the only euphemism for tiny you have been able to come up with. It is a cozy (!) space. Your new apartment is indeed a box. It is what should be the boys’ quarters except it belongs to an Edo man whose wife believes every inch of unused space in the compound should be tilled for profit. So, she is presently

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converting the other half of the quarters into a tailor’s workshop.

You had overheard the woman’s housemaid (now ex-housemaid) complaining about it at the salon where you washed your hair. “And she is renting that tiny place out now, ehn? Who will want to live there, biko?” And you had pulled a skeptical her aside later on to whisper that you, yes you, would want to live there.

When you sit yourself down and have a frank conversation with your reflection in the mirror, you will admit that you hadn’t thought seriously of moving out until that day. You will also admit that most of your ideas come to you like this: after it has come. Like the man with the hatchet in every horror movie; once his foot is in the door, there’s no getting rid of him; or the idea of him. The tentacles clawed and grasped at your heart until you stood just inside the living room, behind the armchair, the spot all

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requests are made to be denied at first: “I’m moving out,” you’d whispered. Then louder, “I’m moving out.”

So now, you stare at the newspaper sheets that are your wallpaper. You had paid the reticent gateman to do the application. You gave him 500 Naira; and as he had looked silently from the bundle of old newspapers at his feet to the single currency note in your hand, you had suspected you were overpaying him. He has tacked the papers up at an angle, not straight, so that you feel you are living your life at a tilt; a heady headache-inducing angle.

But when you squint and bend your head a little to the right, you almost feel like you belong in a Tumblr picture. Low walls of bold headlines and black and white photos with italic captions; one window peeking at nothing.

Almost. ……

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You spend your first night in darkness because your landlady has refused to connect your small room to their noisy generator.

“But it is just one tiny room,” you protested.

“Ah ah, no oh!” She said as if you had just suggested being her husband’s second wife. “We don’t do that here.” It is not our way, Bidemi. Not our way.

“But what will one small room…”

“Ehehn?! Do you know how much extra fuel that will take? Except you let us add it to your rent?”

And you had backed off from her strained neck and red long nails and loud words because you couldn’t afford any more than you could. The night is long and hot but your contentment finally lulls you to sleep. You have left home, broken free!

You show up late for work because it takes you a long time to convince yourself that the gateman, Farouk, or 87

your landlady’s teenage son isn’t peeping while you take a bath. You imagine the young boy laughing outside your window, hand pressed to his mouth to stifle his giggles as he takes in the extra bit of flab around your belly and the cellulite assembled on your thighs. You shower quickly.

Peter, the fellow from Admin stops by your table and greets you good morning. He asks why you are late and you lower your voice to make your words seem like a secret only he is worthy to hear. “Woman problems,” you say and watch him fluster up and walk away. You stow that away in the folder of “Tricks to Be Reused.”

You smell Chioma before you hear her shoes. You take in a shallow breath and await her rancor. She delivers in a crisp voice that reminds you of freshly starched white shirts that have stayed too long in the sun.

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“I don’t like doing your job, Bidemi.” Chioma is fair and pretty. Her afro frames her face, curly and full. Her red lipstick does not stray out of its well-defined confines.

“I was only fifteen minutes late, Chichi.”

“Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes! You are the front woman of this department! Fifteen minutes is enough time to fracture a relationship. You’re lucky no one has come in yet.”

You work in Human Resources. You accept CVs and welcome important visitors with a wide smile and tell them to please have their seats for one minute. You believe you are the connection between the office and the world.

You like to think this gives you some power, some authority. But you do not like that you have been reduced to the secretary of the department, the front woman. You think that your father is probably cackling at your English degree right now.

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“And is that toothpaste on your shirt?” But the first visitor has walked in and has heard her intended loud outburst and you spend the next thirty minutes in mortification because he is a handsome man in a blue suit and you’ve always loved men in blue suits. It’s not black, or gray!

But the men never ask for your name. Not really, anyway. The occasional applicant or someone looking for a favor might say, “What’s your name?” Only so that when they say, “Look, Bidemi, I need a favor,” it would seem less opportunistic than “Look, I need a favor.” No one really asked for your name for knowing sake.

You eat lunch with Peter. You eat lunch beside Peter. Because Peter eats lunch alone and you just sit beside him. He is one of those people you have diagnosed with foolish intensity. It is your thing, labeling people so you could sound more intelligent to yourself. You are working on it. Chioma has a beguiling frivolity and Akin 90

has an innocent perversity because his every sentence is a dirty joke, a dirty joke that he always seems to get last.

You have always envied people like Peter. People like him who go through life with brows furrowed; but brows so easily straightened. Your mother would have loved a daughter like Peter because then she would have said, “Don’t move out!” and Peter would have looked confused and asked “But why?” and she would have said “It is not our way, Peter.” And he would have stayed at home.

He had once spent thirty minutes staring at his plate of rice and chicken, sighing intermittently and always on the verge of asking a question. “What?” you had finally snapped.

“Why have they stopped giving free bananas with every plate of food?” he had asked.

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“Prices have gone up, P. Hitting the roof.” You had only meant to be sarcastic, but Peter had accepted the answer and eaten the rest of his meal, content.

It is why people like him make you envious; and confused. Because why do they bother to question so intensely if any answer would do? ……

You sit with Farouk every evening. On his left side, on his wooden bench out on the street. In your silk and lace, long, white and womanly night dress with a faded ankara cloth thrown over to keep the evening chill out.

Your father would never have approved. You were to be fully clothed if you were stepping out of your bedroom.

Farouk never says a word and so you have created a dazzling history for him. He is a veteran of war, scarred by the cruelty of the world and content to defend this one small compound for the rest of his days. He holds a long

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rifle and sometimes you sit too close so that the cold metal brushes your arm and sends tiny tremors up your spine.

You talk to him sometimes.

“You know I’ve never travelled out of the country, Farouk. Never.”

And Farouk would say nothing; just twist his head from left to right, squinting into the distant night, perhaps looking out for some of the enemies from his colorful past. ……

This morning, you have a dream. You are a bird.

No, it is of a bird. It has boring brown feathers. You don’t know what type of bird it is. Only that it is free and singing and gliding in the blue sky. It zips up and down and shrills louder and louder. Then its beak hits a very clean glass window and the bird falls to its death. You wake up without a sweat.

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You are upset that your dream is so literal. You believe it must mean that your sub-consciousness lacks creativity. A bird—freedom. So, obviously your subconsciousness was getting the memo late. You had started worrying about money the week before. Your freedom was costing you more than you had anticipated.

You wish your dream was more cryptic. With white walls and holes and animals with three heads and one leg.

You would have narrated the dream at work and watched everyone vie to be a Daniel—an interpreter of dreams.

Tinuke would have invited you to her church to see a pastor and Akin would have asked: “Can it fit into the hole?” And Gabriel would have drawled: “That’s what she said.”

Your father had always dismissed your dreams as consequences of the Internet and TV (even that time you were twelve and cried for hours because you wanted him to hold you).

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It is the same morning of your bird dream that you get the first text from your mother. I have discussed with your father and we will accept you back when you come to your senses.

So you are angry as you walk to the bus stop. You had hoped they would have come to their senses, that your father would release his grip on the gear stick. A man in a gray Toyota honks and slows down next to you. He shouts out his window: “Eyss! Fine girl!” But you are too upset to feign indignation the way girls do when a man has just acknowledged their beauty loudly, so you ignore him and stomp along.

The bus preacher waves a stubby finger in your face and shouts: “There is a temptation coming your way, pray against it, sister.” You slap his hand away and tell him to stop spitting in your face.

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The next day, you accept the ride from the man in the gray Toyota. He works three streets away from you.

The day after that, when his hand strays from the gears to caress your thigh, you keep the smile on your face and turn to stare out the window at the sweaty pedestrians. You calculate how much these rides are saving you daily. You chant: Three hundred naira. Three hundred naira. ……

Your little sister is back from boarding house for holiday and she comes to visit your…cottage. Like you, she isn’t very pretty but she has wide hips and C cups above a flat belly. She is using an iPhone 5 and looks much older than her fifteen years.

“I don’t even understand you.” She is chewing pink gum and it peeks bright against her red lipstick. “Are you trying to prove a point? Because you’ve proved it.”

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“I’m not proving anything. It was just time to leave.

I needed...need my own space.” And you had taken to telling people who asked after your family that you had your own place now; just casual-like: throwing it into the conversation like confetti at a wedding, not out-of-place.

“I’m on my own now,” you say and watch pupils dilate in radii of surprise and curiosity.

“Why?” Your sister giggles at a message on her phone and taps out a reply. She will have to hide the phone when she returns home, so you do not get upset.

“I don’t know. I’ve lived with the parents my whole life. Time for a change.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.” That answer had been enough for you. You wonder now.

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

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You are overcome by the urge to lash out—to smack your sister across the mouth; wipe off the lipstick and erase her words in one swipe. To watch her eyes swell up with tears and confusion. For the first time, you question your decision to leave home.

But she is laughing at her phone again. So instead you say: “How’s school? I’ve missed you oh.”

And she tells you about her life and about how the most worrying thing to her right now is that Emeka will buy her only two new pairs of shoes.

You think of the man in the gray Toyota. She is not that different than you. ……

Peter invites you for his mother’s burial and there you meet a man. He is taller than 6ft and drives a jeep and has a mouth full of teeth which he bares a lot when he says something that is supposed to be funny like: “Let me bid 98

for your love, Bid-emi.” But you give him your number when he asks for it.

He calls you three times a day and starts each conversation with “Have you eaten?” He brings you treats like suya and yogurt and uses endearments a lot. “Baby, are you alright?” “I’ll sort that out for you, love.” “Just one more kiss, honey.” “I swear, I’ll take you round the world, darling.”

He thinks the concept of you living alone is “…just splendid! I wish more women were independent. Like my Bidemi…” And he would dig his fingers into your ribs; like an aggressive tickle. And you laughed the first three times; but now you just make a sound like a muffled chuckle. Like laughter that has been smothered by a pillow.

Your mother calls you finally. She asks about the man she has heard you are seeing and that she hopes he

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plans to bring palm oil to the house to see your father. She says: It has all worked out finally. ……

It is a rainy night when he asks you to marry him.

You are both sitting in his jeep and Chidinma’s Kedike is playing on the radio. He takes inspiration from this and tells you that you make his heart go ke-di-ke; that you are his lost rib and second half.

You look out the window; at Farouk. He has an umbrella opened over his head. You wonder how you can both be his lost rib and second half. If you are his lost rib, and second half, it would mean, practically, that the rest of him was only half of a rib. You tell him that his clichés are head-butting each other. He frowns in confusion and lifts the ring closer to you so the street lights glints off its minuscule beauty—a temptation?

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So you tell him no, that you do not love him like that, but that you know he is a great guy and you hope he finds someone as awesome. He tells you to get out of his car before you complete your platitudes.

Farouk silently makes space for you on the wet bench after the jeep has zoomed off. His head is cocked right, squinting into the distant darkness.

You tilt your head too and listen for the bird’s shrill song.

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In and Out of Rhyme - A Tribute to Maya Angelou

By Kiana Donae I'm reminded of your essence the way your spirit was a blessing.

The way it touched me way down deep, and the way your words always had a lesson whenever you would speak.

From your pen directly into my heart, you captured my soul in the pages of your art.

Every poem whispers to me every book says my name and every quote, on my quivering lips remains.

I will not forget nor will I lament in your death, but instead I will rejoice in the life works you left.

For they helped me un-cage my pen and write what sets me free, they challenged me to find out what makes me the phenomenal woman you see.

And as I remember your full and meaningful life I know you were not only mine yet I will love your words in and out of time, in and out of my rhymes for they will forever give me delight.

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The Children of Hamelin

By Eva Langston

There are only three children left, and I am one of them.

There is also Karl, one year older than me, and blind as a mole. He could not see the beautiful clothes the Piper wore: capes made of Chinese silk and dyed with blackberry juice into blood red and violet. He could not see the Piper's light-footed dance or his lopsided smile or his brilliant blue eyes that seemed to penetrate the soul.

One week ago today, just before the Piper left town, I saw him in the market. “Hello, Brigitta,� he said, and I was thrilled he knew my name. He looked down at me with eyes as blue as the core of a flame, and I felt him suddenly inside of me, standing at the door to my heart and peering through the keyhole to where I hide my deepest secrets.

He saw the evil feelings I have towards my family, how I curse them in my mind. He saw my recurring dream

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in which I run fast on long legs through the summertime forest. He saw the shameful thoughts I have about Bruno, the blacksmith's son. He even saw the time I pushed Sissy down a steep hill, hoping to turn her crippled like me. In one quick moment, he knew all of the black marks on my soul, and yet, he did not hate me for them. He only winked, like we were conspirators together, and I felt my heart flutter. Then he nodded, a little tip of his pointed chin, and continued on his way.

Elsbet is the other child left behind. She is one year younger than me, deaf and mute. She could not hear the Piper's beautiful song. He played it all through town the day he left, and its melody called to us children. It told us of a wonderful place in the mountains where our dreams would come true. Sissy said the song was about wild ponies with silver wings, and if she fed them carrots dipped in honey, they would let her ride them through the clouds.

Cousin Friedrich heard a song about elves who lived on a

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mountain top. While the children played, the elves did the chores, chopping the wood and tending the animals and every night cooking feasts of sausages and savory pies.

The song I heard told of a little stream that bubbled up from underground and tumbled down the mountainside.

And if I drank from this stream, my legs would be healed. I would run through the forest, just like in my dreams, and Bruno would see me at last, and love me.

Elsbet never heard the songs, and so now she seems content to sit at home and stitch, making fine needlepoint with her keen eyes. And Karl never saw the Piper, so he, too, seems content to continue helping in his mother's bakery, kneading the dough and shaping the loaves with his knowing hands. But I saw the Piper, and he saw me. I heard his song, and it spoke to me. So I am not content here in Hamelin any longer.

One week ago, on Saint John’s Day, the Piper skipped to the edge of town, playing his magical song. All

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the children ran after him, and I followed, too, hobbling awkwardly with my cane. But I was too slow, and by the time I reached the wall of the village, they had disappeared into the forest and were gone.

Oh, how I wish I were with them! How I wish I were in the beautiful mountains instead of here in lonely Hamelin where everyone is old and stupid. They all blame each other for the loss of their sons and daughters, and they forget about the three of us who remain, as if we, the broken children, are nothing, not even worth being counted.

I am stuck here in Hamelin. No one will ever marry me, and when I ask my mother what my future might hold, she says I will live at home, of course, and help her in whatever ways I can. This thought makes me feel heavy, as if my body is made of clay hardening in the sun.

And so my sadness builds each day, stacking like jars of preserves in a shelf above my heart. This morning I wake before dawn. I know the direction in which they

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went. And I remember the words to the song: “north to the golden castle, then past the whistling fountains, then west, west, west, on to the magical mountains.� I have never left Hamelin, but I know that the Gelbenfeste is a golden castle that sits atop a hill two villages to the north. And I have heard tell of a town, farther north and to the west, with three strange fountains that play a shrill song when the wind blows.

I know the mayor has sent out search parties of men, men who are strong and fast, men who can track footprints and ride for days. I don't know how I can expect to find the Piper's Mountain when the search parties cannot, but I know that I must try.

I dress in the dark, my heart already pounding at the thought of what I am going to do. My mother and father sleep soundly, and I creep about slowly so as not to wake them. I fill a pack with cheese and hard rolls and fruit. I

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tuck my sharp knife into my pocket and fill a leather flask with water from the pail.

In the blue chill of early morning, I walk slowly in my lopsided gait to the lean-to where we keep the animals.

My family has one horse, a spirited chestnut mare named Tussi. I have not ridden her since I was six-years-old, when she bucked me from her back then trampled my legs as I lay twisted on the ground. My bones set, but my legs are misshapen and my back is hunched. I walk with a cane, like an old woman, though I am only thirteen.

Tussi whinnies when I enter. “Shh!� I tell her. I know I must be long gone before my mother and father realize what I have done.

I approach her cautiously and hold out an unripe pear with a trembling arm. She takes it into her gummy mouth and crunches it down in two bites. I pull my hand back quickly. Looking at Tussi fills me with fear. And yet, if I have any hope of finding the Piper, I have to ride her.

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I know my parents will be angry with me for taking Tussi, but I have heard that horses can find their way home when they are lost, and so I intend to let her go once I reach the Piper’s Mountain. I hope she can make her way back to Hamelin. My mother and father will be more upset about Tussi’s disappearance than mine, of that much I am sure.

I tuck my cane under one arm and find Tussi’s bridle. I climb awkwardly onto a stool, holding out the bridle, but I am afraid to put it on her. Tussi’s head bobs, and she looks at me, her eyes rolling towards the back of her head. My palms are sweaty and my legs shake. But I cannot show fear. Tussi will sense it.

I take a deep breath and fit the bridle onto her face.

She stomps her foot and tosses her head, but after a moment she takes the bit. She whinnies again, and I hear a noise from inside the house. Is it my father waking? I have not put on the saddle or stirrups, but I must leave now before I am discovered. I do not have enough time to be

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afraid. I swing a leg over Tussi’s back and climb on.

She snorts loudly but does not buck me off. My whole body trembles, but I hold the reins tightly and manage to guide her out of the lean-to at a slow trot.

All of Hamelin is still asleep this time of morning, but the birds are beginning to wake. They chirp in the trees above my head. My heart pounds in my throat as Tussi and I make our way to the edge of town.

Once we pass the walls of Hamelin, I give her a tentative kick, and she takes off into a canter. My gut drops to my bowels. I grip the reins and squeeze my thighs against her to keep myself upright. I try, as best I can, to move my body up and down, following her rhythm, but I do not know how to ride, and I feel awkward and already sore.

We go for some time along the grassy road north.

To my right, the sky begins to brighten, and the sun rises, cutting through the damp chill. All I can think is how high

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above the ground I ride, and how terrible it would be if Tussi were to buck me off. I would hit the ground, my skull cracking open and my blood seeping out. I try not to think of such things. I hold on so tightly my fingers begin to cramp and the muscles in my legs quake.

The sun is out now in full force, and the sky has turned a pure blue. If I was not so terrified of Tussi, the riding might be pleasant. It is a beautiful summer day, and the trees on either side of me fan out their green leaves like playing cards. Hedgehogs rummage in the underbrush, and birds twitter above them. I feel almost happy. I have never been this far away from home, and soon I will get to see the Gelbenfeste and the whistling fountains.

I take a break for lunch in a clearing by the road.

Tussi grazes and drinks from a nearby stream. I sit in the grass, eating a broetchen and rubbing my bruised buttocks.

Riding Tussi has not made me feel at ease with her.

She still frightens me with her enormity and power. Her

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eyes are the size of plums, and her mouth is so large my head could fit inside of it. I walk to her and pat her on the nose, trying to become friends. She snorts wetly, tosses her mane, and I back away.

After a short rest, we set off again and ride towards the Gelbenfeste, which I can now see looming above us on a hill. The day grows warm, and I know that I could make better time if I brought Tussi to a gallop, but I am afraid.

My whole body throbs and my face is sunburned. When we arrive, I manage to crawl off Tussi’s back and hobble with her through the streets of the small village that grows in the shadow of the castle. The Gelbenfeste is not beautiful the way I imagined. It is only an angry-looking fortress with bricks of dingy yellow, not gold, and the town beneath it is poor and dirty, the streets awash with foul garbage and skittering rats.

I know I must ask someone how to get to the whistling fountains, but being crippled has made me shy. I

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am always afraid of being thought stupid, and I cannot wait until I reach the Piper and he heals me.

Finally, I approach an old man on the street who is selling potatoes. His eyes are bright, and his hair is white as a mountain-cap.

“Excuse me, sir,” I say. “Can you tell me how to get to the whistling fountains?”

He narrows his eyes at me. “Why do you want to go there?”

“Because I have never been,” I say. “I’d like to get there by nightfall.”

He makes a snorting sound, not unlike Tussi. “Right you are, little girl. It’s best not to be in the dark when going places you've never been.” There's something familiar about his voice. It lilts up and down, as if he's singing.

“Can you tell me, please?”

“Buy a potato and I will.”

I have only a few coins—all of my meager

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savings—but I use one to buy a large potato.

The man pockets the coin greedily and nods. “Take the road through the pines.” He points. “When you get to the fork in the road, keep to the right, and go on ‘til you reach the town of Wasserburg. That is where the fountains sing.”

I thank him and head out of town.

Tussi and I ride away from the shadow of the Gelbenfeste, and I eat the raw potato, still gritty with dirt. It is now late afternoon, and I am so keen on getting to Wasserburg by dark that when we come to the fork, I give Tussi a kick, and she begins to gallop down the right-side road. I flatten myself against her length, wrapping my arms around her neck as she thunders down the path that's soft with pine needles. If I fall, I will hit the ground hard, break my neck perhaps. My heart is in my throat, but I swallow it back down.

It is dusk when we near the town. I spot a small,

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dilapidated cottage along the road, its thatched roof half caved in. I pull on Tussi's reins, praying she'll stop, and she does, so quickly my body lurches forward, and I nearly slip from her back. I dismount, shaking all over, and lead her to an old trough filled with rainwater. I tie her to a tree, and she begins to eat the stalks of tall grass. Then I knock on the door of the cottage. When no one answers, I push open the door and find the one room empty and smelling strongly of mold.

I sit on the floor and cut some bread and cheese with my knife. After dinner, I wrap myself in a wool blanket from my pack and fall asleep. I dream of running through the forest on strong, healthy legs. Sometimes I am chasing the Piper, and sometimes he is chasing me.

The next morning, I lead Tussi into Wasserburg to see the whistling fountains. There are three of them, each a stone basin of water with a statue in the center. In the first

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fountain the statue is a fish, standing on its curled tail, and a spout of water arcs from its open mouth. The second is a gargoyle, hunched on all fours and spitting water. The last statue is the goat god Pan, with his cloven hoofs and bare, manly chest. He plays a set of flutes, and when the wind blows, it tunnels through the hollow stone pipes and comes out in an eerie, high-pitched whistle. The stream of water, I'm embarrassed to see, falls from a large phallus that hangs between his woolly legs.

Just as my face begins to blush, I hear a voice quite close to me: “What a sight, aye?”

I turn to see an old man with blue eyes and a pointed beard standing next to me in front of the fountain.

He must have slipped up quietly; I thought I was alone.

“Yes,” I mumble.

The old man smiles, his mouth full of brown, rotting teeth. There is something familiar about his face.

“Where are you off to so early in the morning?” he

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asks.

“Oh, nowhere,” I say. “But I best be going.”

“Yes, yes.” He winks at me. “It is best to hurry when you are going nowhere. Might I suggest the road covered in needles?”

I ride Tussi out of town and to the west. I come to a fork in the road. The narrower path is covered with pine needles, so I take that one. The mountains loom ahead of me, and I can almost smell magic in the air. My ears rush with excitement. I have almost reached the Piper. Soon I will have new legs, a new life!

As we go on, the path grows steeper and rockier. I think of the children of Hamelin, walking along this road, pebbles poking through the thin soles of their leather shoes.

We are in the mountains now, and the path begins to peter out. Tussi picks her way along the rocks, and I keep my ears open for distant sounds of music, or laughter. All I hear is the flap of wings. I look up and see a large, black vulture

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flying overhead.

Tussi's back is sweaty, and my hair gets caught in low-hanging branches. After a time, a flute song comes drifting through the golden leaves of the forest. I scramble down from Tussi’s back and lead her through the underbrush, going slowly on my twisted legs.

My body aches and my breathing is heavy, but the Piper's song grows louder. The bright notes tell of happiness and ease. A life of sweet-scented winds and soft feather beds. The sound is so close now, and just ahead I see a clearing. That is where he must be, along with the children of Hamelin. I wonder why I cannot hear any of their voices. Even the birds in the trees have gone silent, and there is a smell of rot in the air.

I turn to Tussi. “Stay here,” I tell her. I don’t want to frighten the Piper away.

I leave her standing in the woods and push through the leaves and brambles into the clearing. A fire pit smokes

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at one end, and there sits the Piper, perched on a tree stump in his blood-red cloak, his back to me. He is the first thing I see, and my heart seizes with joy, but then, as I look around, I clutch my stomach, feeling sick.

In the clearing are the children of Hamelin, lying naked on the rotting leaves of the forest floor. They are dead, and vultures fly above them in a lazy, black circle.

I see Sissy, curled like she's sleeping, her blond hair wrapped around her neck. Cousin Friedrich is close by, his lips a pale blue. And here, closest to me, is my beloved Bruno, the blacksmith's son. I kneel down to him and put my palm against his neck, feeling for a pulse. His skin is cold and damp, and nothing moves beneath it. Crying, I take his heavy hand and kiss the calloused fingers. They taste of metal and salt.

The Piper's song has stopped. I look up, and he stands above me, no longer young and grinning. His face is wrinkled and his hair white. He is the old potato man, the

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old man at the fountains. They are all one in the same. The brilliant blue eyes stare down at me.

“What did you do to them?” I ask.

“They wanted their dreams to come true.” He waves his arm across the clearing. “Now they dream eternal of unicorns and cakes and fairy princes.”

“But they're dead.”

“Of course they are. And better off for it.” The Piper smiles smugly. “Who wants to grow old and bitter? Your body giving out, your heart getting tired. Too old to believe in love or magic. Why not die when you are still pure, when it still seems like your dreams could come true?”

I touch Bruno's cheek. “I loved him.”

The Piper raises one eyebrow and laughs. “Oh, I know, Sweet Pea. But he would have never loved you back.”

My vision blurs with tears. “You're evil.”

“Whatever do you mean? These children died in

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perfection, with hearts full of hope instead of bitter regret. I did them a favor. Of course, there was a little something in it for me.” The Piper pulls a flask from inside the folds of his cape and shakes it. “I bottled their youth. A sip of this each day will cure just about anything.” He winks at me and slips the flask back into his pocket. “I've been living on the hopes and dreams of children for over two hundred years. What do you think about that?”

I sniff back my tears, my head beginning to pound.

“Are you going to kill me, too?” I whisper.

“Oh no. You, my dear, are hopeless. Already ruined and bitter towards the world. You are just like me, and it is we sinners who shall inherit the earth.”

I feel a rage building in my chest, stretching tight like rope. I stand up on my shaking legs. “No. No, I am not like you!”

“Haven’t you have thoughts of killing your dear sister? Wishing you could take her perfect life and have it

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for your own?”

“But I would never actually do it!”

The Piper laughs, delighted at my anger.

I have the bread knife still in my pocket. I wonder if it would be sharp enough to pierce his skin and slice its way into his shrunken heart. I pull it out and begin to lumber towards him, but he runs from me, leaping over dead children. He is nimble, even in his old man body.

“Don't be angry,” he says. “I can help you.” The Piper puts his flute to his lips and blows a swift tune.

Slowly, I put the knife to my side, watching as he moves towards me and slips the flask from his cloak. “One sip of this will heal your legs, Sweet Pea. You will be able to run and jump and dance. Two sips will make you beautiful, loveable even. Three sips...who knows.”

His eyes are so blue I feel blinded. “I don't believe you,” I say, but my voice lacks conviction. I feel my anger dissolving. It is replaced by a wash of desire.

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“The only way to be sure is to try.” The Piper holds out the flask, flashing his dazzling smile. I let the knife fall from my fingers to the ground. I reach out my hand.

“There is only one catch,” the Piper says. My hand pauses in mid-air.

“I would like a companion,” he says. “I am tired of traveling alone, and I think we will get along splendidly.”

The Piper laughs shrilly. “Just think of it, Sweet Pea! You will be a healthy, beautiful young girl. Children will love you and follow you wherever you go. I will hardly have to work at all.”

My arm hovers in the air. “Come with you?” I ask.

“Yes. We will travel the world together. Your parents won’t miss you, now will they?” He takes a step towards me, still holding out the flask.

My arm trembles. I want so badly to reach out and take a drink. But then I look down and see Bruno's dead body at my feet.

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“What about the children?” I ask.

“They are already gone. What about you, Brigitta?”

The Piper's smile is beginning to fade. His eyes narrow.

“Do you want to live the rest of your life in Hamelin?

Never going anywhere or seeing anything? A nuisance to your parents. No one loves you as you are. You are nothing but a cripple.”

Just then, I hear a whinny. I turn and see Tussi trot into the clearing. She looks at the Piper and snorts loudly, tossing her mane. And seeing her, the spell of the Piper is broken.

“I came here, didn't I? I may be crippled in body, but I am not crippled at heart!”

“Is that so?” His eyes turn from blue to black, and his face flushes with rage. He reaches down and grabs my knife, still holding the flask in the other hand. He lunges towards me, but I jerk away.

And then I see Tussi galloping towards us. The

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Piper raises his arm, the knife glinting. “I'll feed your heart to the vultures, you ungrateful girl!�

Suddenly, Tussi is behind him. She rears up on her hind legs, and her full weight comes down on the Piper's back, knocking his body to the ground. I hear the familiar crack of bones breaking, and the flask flies out of his hand, a stream of clear liquid arcing through the air. The flask lands with a thump at my feet The Piper cries out, and Tussi stomps on his head with her heavy, black foot. Blood seeps from his skull, and he is quiet.

I stand shaking for a long time. The Piper is motionless, his head nothing but gore. Tussi is nearby, snorting. Finally, I bend down and pick up the flask. There is a tiny bit left sloshing at the bottom, and before I can change my mind, I tip the flask over and shake its contents onto the ground.

I creep towards the Piper. Stooping towards him, I

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snatch the wooden fife from his breast pocket. Then I yank the red robe from his broken shoulders. I stuff them into my pack and move towards Tussi. She neighs gently. I press my face into her pungent hide and sob.

After a few moments, she drops down and allows me to scramble onto her back. She walks out of the clearing, and I whisper goodbyes to Sissy and Cousin Freidrich and Bruno and all the other children of Hamelin.

Tussi picks her way down the mountainside, back towards the path of pine needles. The light has begun to fade from the sky. The back of my neck is damp with sweat, and my throat is dry. My legs and back ache. But I have never felt so alive. My heart beats strongly in my chest, and I know that I am more than my broken body.

When the path becomes less rocky, I give Tussi a quick, confident kick. She gallops back towards Hamelin as the moon rises above us.

We ride all night, and it is dawn when I reach the

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town wall. I ride quickly through the village towards home.

When I arrive, the roosters are crowing, and I feed Tussi, patting her nose. My mother runs out from the house in her nightshift. “Brigitta, thank the heavens,” she says. “I thought you were gone forever.” She pulls me into her arms and kisses me roughly. Then she calls for my father.

We go inside, where my mother feeds me porridge and salted pork for breakfast. As I eat, I tell my parents only that I was lost in the woods, looking for Sissy. I tell them nothing of where I have been or what I found. They won't believe me if I tell the truth. Or, if they do, it will only upset them. I understand now that no one can find the Piper's Mountain unless he leads them to it. I myself will never see it again.

After breakfast, I hobble to the little house where Elsbet, the deaf-mute, lives with her grandmother. She is outside at the chicken coop, collecting eggs in a basket. She is startled when she sees me.

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As I approach, I pull out the Piper's red cloak and hand it to her. “We are going to be friends, Elsbet, you and I.” I know she cannot understand my words, and yet, somehow, it seems as if she does. She pulls the silky fabric through her hands, touches it to her face. She drapes it around her shoulders and smiles.

Next I head to the bakery, where Karl, the blind boy, lives with his widowed mother. I walk right into the shop where he is preparing the day's bread.

“Who's there?” Karl asks as I approach.

“It's me, Brigitta.”

“Where did you go? Everyone has been looking for you for days.”

“I traveled far from Hamelin,” I say. “I'll go traveling again one day, and next time I will take you with me if you want to go.” I step towards him. “Hold out your hands.”

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He does so, and I place the Piper's fife in his palms. “See if you can play it.�

He feels the instrument curiously then puts it to his mouth and blows. A long, pure note rings out, but it is nothing more than sound. The black magic died with the Piper.

I move towards Karl, and, sweaty and disheveled as I am, I push the fife away from his lips and kiss him. I understand now that it was not Bruno I loved, but his perfection.

Before Karl can say a word, I step out of the bakery and into the breaking day. Then I walk proudly, on my crippled legs, all the way home.

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Selected Poems by Byron Beynon Perfect Pitch I'm reading the club manager's letter inside an intimate room overlooking a bay where colors change at a secret pace; he once shared a space with Dizzy Gillespie, a story of perfect pitch and smokefilled notes, informing me of how the jazz trumpeter once listened to him shave, the almost-contact of his face in the cold mirror of light as he told him something real, shelled a musician's ear his way, towards the sound he'd never forget, that the electric razor held calmly in his right hand was in E flat.

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The Sketch My father once sketched my mother recovering in bed from a miscarriage, the hurt he never revealed but exorcized in their room, corners of silence as she slept unaware; a hard pencil working the shadow of moist grief from his mind, his hand moving across the page to capture the crystalline mirror of the moment, losing himself on the paper's cheekbones in rhythm with senses which gazed for so long as the rain-swept afternoon continued without respite, a wasteland of hope under a patchwork which neither memory nor heart could erase.

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The House of the Drowned Once when the chill of the air was entering the month we stopped by a field to ask, “whose house?”

Empty and silent the darkness inside, unnumbered in the many-headed catalogue of memory it stayed.

“It was,” you said “the house of the drowned, a place of starched bodies, brought there from the flint-hearted sea.”

We never found out whose home it was, walking that day near the wintry coast.

Seals This morning you telephoned that two seals were swimming in the Tawe, they brought with them innumerable seagrams, navigable rhapsodies gleaming with motion, a lustre of sea-eyes that floated in fields where tides registered global warmth, changeable seasons; for a moment they held your breath, sensed their need to escape at one with their tidings delivered across the miracle of unchained waters.

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The Tropical Balcony For two months he lived inside a room with two single beds, cane-chairs, table, lamp, shower, and the air-conditioning generated at night when he’d stand on the outer edge looking at the polished stars thinking of other worlds turning round like faces afraid.

The silence of his tropical balcony, with no pollution or sub-zero temperatures made time more agreeable.

His sense of order in life was to survive as he dialed a long-distance number, the one kept inside his head in case of emergency.

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Selected Prose Poems from Brad Garber Mercenaries Black kid gunned down arms in the air hood drawn cops blown away in traffic stops or in coffee shops women in pools of blood restraining orders don’t work pregnant mothers shot through the gang walls kids playing boom gays strung up along fence lines children with holes in their heads the insane man with a razor blade bleeding naked kid dancing on a patrol car rats in a crowded cage eating each other the man hanging in his bedroom the one choking in his bed another needle gone astray another bottle gone empty another barrel smoking and tanks roll across the nation not at war the bombs sent to distant countries in gray cloaks stoking hatred and hatred and hatred and hatred while bullet proof vests are for sale and grenades and launchers and recipes to kill twitching corpses in Chicago Ferguson Palestine Zagreb Portland Brazil Juarez Ukraine too many too many and dark shadow men in black black places make this shit make the bullets make the bombs make the instruments of death and sell it sell it SELL IT to the buyers the murderers the people with hands and fingers and brains and hearts and tears who don’t think about the beers steaks fries porn kids booze leather couches that the makers of death return to every night ready to ream out another barrel in the morning pack another bullet load another gas or bacteria that will rip the guts out one way or another and it’s all about job security money the slow leaks rivulets on streets deep wells of blood flesh feeding the invertebrates that will inherit this earth when our emotions have been burned into a thin organic sliver of distrust on an uncaring stage.

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Preparing for Things The world is not right sort of like the shoelace under the tongue or the last feeble threads in the heel of a sock and I know all about ice melting leaving earth bones to bleach in prolonged sun pink water in the toilet pesticide-coated grains and disappeared students fingers poking like mushrooms through damp soil cowering girls in black married on the savannah boys in underwear dust kicking up in front of their skulls the way apes in crowds go berserk but there are bullets aimed and glancing off their constant winging rushing past into empty space while a thick haze congeals about the globe dragging migrating birds into the oceans the headaches more frequent and longer lasting the deep lung coughs less productive molten blood flowing toward highways and hillsides flowing into valleys filled with matted feathers and leafless sentinels oceans of dead chickens washing across the land bare skin rubbing until blisters swell to popping the mechanisms of the globe unoiled and rusting flies and rats waiting in dark shadows toothpicks and martinis on the table troubadours stilling their voices for lack of safety and hog castrators shoot their way into power everything slowing in building heat and wilting grass bare feet of children burned beyond their toes falling hummingbirds littering sidewalks the down of milkweed turned into shrouds for butterflies fat cattle kicking at passing wolves the water receding into dark depths hoping to escape fracturing stones under oppressive weight of human birth and things do not fit the burgeoning gut building ramparts to fend off rising tides and rotting flesh piles of lead building into temples with obliterated faces their tears streaking parchment like mud worms on a boiling sea bottom boots on ground marching through dust dreams and digital storms dams flooding natives until drying up the reeds rattling in parched wind as eagles fly into steel blades their government carcasses littering 135

modified fields and so I shall wear a bone mask running into razor walls trying to avoid blasts outside fences of the zoo.

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Mariah, Appearing

By Willow Becker

The dirt path led directly past the front door of Mariah's trailer. Mariah walked home alone, because that’s the way they had marked her. She trudged through the sagebrush, feet trailing desert sand. Away from Callington Junior High.

She clutched her thrift store jacket close as October brushed against her ruddy cheeks. The sky was angry and waiting to storm. She shivered. It wasn’t just cold that chilled her pale neck, but a sliver of fear. Even though each step took her away from the school horrors, (laughingspittingstealinghergymclotheswhisperingpinching fillingherlockerwithsand) they moved her closer to the ones in the trailer: fitful dreams where hands chased her and ripped off her skin. The dirt path also took her through the junk houses of the West End, where there were rumors about men in vans. About girls disappearing.

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Just stories, her mother laughed as she lit a cigarette, baby on breast. Small-town rumors from smalltown bitches.

Mariah shuffled these thoughts into the dirt now, both the real-life specters and homemade ghosts. Her tattered Adidas squeaked as they trailed silt. Mariah always shuffled, except when Eddie shared the path with her. Only then did she pick up her feet.

Eddie had good eyes. He smiled easily. Guys picked him for teams. Girls sent him notes. Grown-ups watched him play baseball and tossed him words like “all-star” and “minor leagues.”

The path led him home, too. After practice, he’d follow the path past her trailer until it met the road that led to the gated community on the hill. Where everyone had a pool and a hand-washed pickup.

Sometimes, she’d hurry home so she could watch him pass, imagining what it would be like to walk beside

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him. At night, she would wordlessly form his name. It was her talisman against the bad dreams, both waking and sleeping.

Once, he smiled at her. She had looked down, counting the dusty desert steps that led to the squat, brown single-wide. He must’ve thought she was someone else.

Someone who knew what to wear, and the right movies, and how to make jokes. Instead, she’d gone home and written a story where he was the hero. Her mother had ripped it up, handed her the baby, and fallen asleep.

No. Better to say nothing than hear his voice whisper-laughing her name in the halls with Them.

Throwing words like stones to break her bones.

Smells funny…

Trailer trash…

Stuck up. Won’t say nothin’ to nobody…

Heeeey, Greasy! Greasy, don’t you know your name?

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Sometimes, she wondered what she’d done. What her crime was. All she had to do was look at Them, with their matching hair and Levi’s and store-bought lunches.

She was guilty of aberration. And, at Callington Junior High, it was a hanging offense.

"Disculpé?"

An older, medium-sized man hailed her. He rode a rusted bicycle, his fingers blunt and dirt-caked. He wore a floppy hat that reminded Mariah of Indiana Jones. His dark skin glistened beneath an oily, patchy mustache.

Mariah had never seen him before, though she assumed he was from the maze of dilapidated shacks and lean-to's between her trailer and the school. The West End. She walked through it every day, the tight gravel streets thick with broken machines and forgotten garbage. "’Cuse me?" he mumbled. As he rolled closer, she saw that beneath the tattered clothes, his arms were wiry.

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Strong. He was moving fast, and his smile made her skin prickle.

She said nothing.

He stopped the bike in the middle of the path, blocking it. Her hands tightened around the straps of her backpack. She had a memory flash. A sleepover she’d been invited to, back before she'd become Their common enemy.

Gasps and whispers. "It was a white van," the wide-eyed girl had said. "They tried to grab me, but I ran away."

Mariah cleared her throat, but no words escaped.

Her heart thudded. The grey skies hung low. The autumn wind whispered winter.

"Por favor. I help. Okay?" He dismounted his bike and took a step towards her. His breath fumed of rancid grapes. He smiled, but his eyes darted from side to side, calculating. Mariah was acutely aware of how alone they were. School a half-mile behind. Home a half-mile ahead.

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He took a quick step and grabbed for her arm, the other steadying the bike. She backpedaled just in time to feel his hands slip across the front of her jacket as she fell to the ground. It didn't occur to her to scream. Her brain was sending up signals like a foreign language. Run, it fluttered. Her traitor legs and arms remained silent, like mute bags of sand.

The man lunged again. She scrabbled backwards on her hands, chips of rock and dirt embedded in her skin. He caught the strap of her backpack in one hand. She yanked free of it, leaving it in his iron grip as she scrambled to her feet, wheeling backwards.

“I no hurt you,” he said. “Tengo preguntas. Mi perro, lost…” He dropped the backpack in a poof of dust.

Her legs quivered and started, and she remembered how to move.

"Wait," he called.

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She ran as fast as she could, her legs sawing up and down as the muscles filled with adrenaline. Her mousy hair whipped against her face, and her eyes teared. The school shimmered in the darkening sky, a phantom so far away.

She drove her legs faster, the laces of her shoe loosening as she pounded her feet against the pale desert scrub. There was a slight bend in the road, the edge of the baseball diamond behind the school. She could imagine Eddie walking home, mitt in hand, kicking rocks along the path.

Making long shadows on the dirt path.

Mariah could hear the rattle of rusted wheels behind her, picking up speed. The man’s breathing intensified as he labored to catch up. She glanced behind. His eyes were dark and glassy. His tattered brown jacket flapped in the desert dusk. He reached for her, and Mariah’s mouth opened to scream. Nothing came but emptiness. Silence so practiced, so safe, that it could not be broken.

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She stumbled and tripped, and she grunted. There was a snapping in her ankle. The man’s hand missed, catching only a few hairs as his bike overshot her. He swore in Spanish, and banked the bike around. This time, he was smiling. He pedaled towards her, that smile, those dirty hands, and Mariah’s throat closed around the scream that had been building inside her for longer than she could remember.

"Eddie,” she called. “Eddie! Eddie!”

The man, shocked, yanked his head around. Mariah trained her voice on the edge of the baseball field, calling for someone that she could not see, but could only believe in. She rose to her feet, then fell again as metallic pain flared from her leg.

“Eddie! Eddie come over here.”

The man’s face went ashen, his brown skin lightening to the color of caramel. He bore down on the bike, passing her completely without another glance

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behind. The smell of broken wine bottles chased him down into the West End shanties.

She realized that the school stadium lights had clicked on. In their orange glow, Mariah imagined she saw a familiar shadow. When she looked closer, he was real, and running. Eddie moved like a mirage in the deepening twilight. Closing the distance between them.

He reached her in moments. He was panting and wide-eyed. "You okay? I thought I heard someone calling my name. What happened?"

“I’m fine,” she began to say, but when he pulled her to her feet, she winced and teetered against him. He smelled of baseball leather and Tide detergent. She pulled away fast.

“You don’t look so fine. I mean…not that you’re not…” Words tumbled into silence.

Mariah brushed grit from her hands, wincing as she picked out a shard of glass. As she did, he half-jogged her

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backpack to where she stood. He patted clouds of dust from it before handing it back.

She took a deep breath and let the words escape: "Thanks. I’ll be fine." She put some weight on her leg. It hurt, but she could manage.

"What happened?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. There was a guy on a bike…” She stopped. It hurt her throat to talk to him. But it felt good to know she could.

“Well, I’m glad you’re okay. There are a lot of weirdos in this part of town.”

He smiled at her, then looked down at his feet. He kicked at a scrub bush. Why wasn’t he leaving? Why wasn’t he calling her ugly or pretending she didn’t exist?

He shifted awkwardly from leg to leg. His jaw worked like he was chewing on words that wouldn’t come. Could it be that he was as scared as she was, all the time? Were They

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all? She thought of what it had felt like, the hand reaching for her. Disappearing her.

Maybe silence looked different to different people.

Maybe to some it was being good at baseball. Or whispering in hallways.

"Well. I better get home‌" He shuffled his feet. In the light from the school, Eddie looked vulnerable and small. Hesitating. Or was that just her imagination? Mariah felt the words slipping from her mouth, like ice melting.

"Wait. Eddie. Will you walk with me?"

He smiled.

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Selected Poems by Doug Van Hooser Souvenir A t-shirt worn to translucence, a name or date that specifies like DNA who you are, what you did.

Anyone would want to wad it, tear it, cut it into pieces, make that moment a rag.

But you cling as if to forget is to deny. To let go the memory would disappear a kite on a broken string, adrift, untethered, like all yesterdays.

Better to let it go just as a birthday becomes another day where the sun rises, the sun sets, and the storm grays into a light rain.

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the thread of truth hand sews a quilt of rocks that burns like coal and warms the hands before you touch any possibility deception is key to survival a stitch that hems your life into clothing you can wear the dress a fit not always right loose in the hips tight in the chest short above the knee what’s exposed are the lumps and bumps a road washed out potholes that need filling hope: a haircut that grows out

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From Behind The dog punches, pokes, persuades from Back, the side and behind A choice constantly reconsidered The goal: no change in direction Keep the skidding herd moving Thought starved hollow blind Allows them to follow nose to tail A paragraph all words within the margin That ripples and wiggles But keeps it simple so there is no flight No point of view beyond sight Always behind the butts of but Or the maybes, perhaps, any chance Another look that cannot see A case of hoof in mouth disease Where you step on your tongue Muffle the scream Taste the billowing dust of the passing past

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simple praise I fantasized I met you by your design not some quilt just a straight stitch to the point simple praise: I like it and me I swoon dive like a cormorant into your unornamented phrase and like a well trained dog beg politely the difference between us is more than spit polished shoes it’s the ribbons of many combats that adorn the impeccable creases of your dress uniform while I stand next to you in camouflaged fatigue

Hitched like a draft horse you drag the past to plow the future you move along without urging with little urgency when you question something you turn your head a wide eye that is not shallow and blinks only once then turns to the task after cinching the burden a harness of does, don’ts, what-ifs and maybes all possibilities root in the soil the seeds you dropped without sowing problems come at harvest when the rows aren’t straight the corn hasn’t tasseled and the beans are mixed with weeds plow in the field in harrow hitch on a planter

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The Inevitable

By Geenie Yourshaw I'm falling but if I let go I'll end up on the tracks I'm scaredscared of falling, scared of holding on...

This freight train is moving much too quickly a bullet train heading nowhere fast the fall would hurt at first but potentially result in rest Peace .. finally Holding on means struggle, fight, pain the nauseating feeling of too much cortisol and adrenaline flooding my tired body— the unknown How long I can keep this up is anyone’s guess no amount of tears or screaming, begging, or pleading will help me now my will against gravity Am I strong enough?

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I've had to be far too strong for far too long.

Or do I choose to let go and finally surrender to the Inevitable‌

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Exoskeleton

By Shannon Fox

My hand remains on the keys, though the engine is now silent. The white and red sign hangs limply on the chain link gate, its corners curling inward. The house looks old now, dirty and without shingles. I still recognize it as mine.

I get out, letting the car door thud back into the frame. The keys are still inside. On the drive over, the spring sky has turned from blue to slate gray. Placing my hands on top of the fence, I hoist my body over, irrespective of the sign.

THIS STRUCTURE IS IN DANGEROUS CONDITION AND HAS BEEN CONDEMNED. Dead weeds have fallen across the path, their stalks snapping under my shoes. I place my foot on the bottom step. Then, I see it. Leaning down, I brush the old leaves from the cement. It’s still there. My handprint beside

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Abbie’s, mine fractionally larger, hers with the lopsided smiley face on the inside. Mine is empty.

I reach into my pocket for my phone, wanting to send her a picture. Then I remember. I take my hand from my pocket and straighten up.

The window glass is long gone. A few boards have been roughly laid across, so long ago now that the nail heads have traded their shiny gray skin for a rust-red exoskeleton. In the corner of the porch, there’s a pile of crumpled PBR cans and cigarette butts. I look at the door, rocked back on sagging hinges, and think about going in.

Instead, I sit down on the front step.

When Abbie and I were young, our best friends lived across the street. In the summer, our parents would barbecue on the sidewalk, watching us kids riding circles on our bikes. That house is a liquor store now. A man leans against the wall out front. He looks at me and lifts the brown paper bag to his lips, tilting the liquid onto his

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tongue. After he swallows, he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He starts towards me, wobble-walking across the street.

I don’t move, not even when he leans on the fence.

His eyes are small and dark, the brown skin around them wrinkled and leathery from a life lived in the sun. His beard is sprinkled with threads of white, the tip just touching the place where his belly button would be underneath his grubby white shirt.

“You see the sign?” he asks.

I nod.

“It don’t bother you?”

“This was my house.”

He lifts the bag again. I watch as a little of the alcohol dribbles out of the corner of his mouth.

“A girl died in there, you know. Went right in that front door.” He points over my head. “The floor boards were rotted, but she didn’t know it.” He looks inside his

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bag, appraisingly. “Course nobody noticed for a year. Was some of those neighborhood kids that found her. Thought they’d visit the haunted house on Halloween. Got the fright of their life, I bet.” He grins, revealing tobacco-stained teeth.

“I know,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow.

“She used to live here.”

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you were a boy of twelve

By Caty-Scarlett Coleman you were a boy of twelve in blue jeans and a shirt with stripes

you were all legs with small lips and small hands but big eyes that said, “Hello, I’m James” without actually speaking

you didn’t have need for friends because friends didn’t have need for you and so books became companion enough you fell past the class and into the bookshelf where big words small words all words called to you and laid bricks, one for each letter, 158

that turned into a path which lead you right to me.

i was a girl of eight and i held the book when you came from the corner to the shelf

and when i saw you, i just knew i knew anything and everything about everything and anything and, and, looking back i realize there were and are several things that make us right

for one thing, i loved stripes

cats were better than people, always

and my parents left the same time yours died so we both knew what it was to be by ourselves

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i too had a bike with rainbow streamers that made this cataclysmic funnel of color rush behind me

my favorite treat, like you, was a blueberry scone we both came to the conclusion on our first real date that the popping sound the round chunks made in our mouths was the best part

and Sundays symbolized sleep i always took naps from 1:30-2:02 exactly because 1+3=4 and 2+2=4 which leads me to the actual point that i loved the number four because you

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loved the number four

and the quirks in my brain that brought me to those strange notches in time

you see, this oddly worded list is for you so that maybe one day you’ll read this and you’ll look back that you’ll see what was and what is still great about us

maybe you’ll find your way stumbling back to me you’ll remember the algorithm of our love the input and the output of our time together and you’ll realize that when you were a boy of twelve, i was a girl of eight and that there are two things in this world that will forever be correct: the fact that twelve minus eight equals four, so maybe we weren’t and aren’t meant to love but that you and i will just 161

be, yes that we are

there is no question in that at all

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Orbiting

By Mandy Brown “Shake it off,” Coach Ted Parks said, staring into the bathroom mirror.

Every Halloween, the mobile planetarium came to the elementary school, bringing Ms. Celeste Fisher. She’d come to his gym, set up the inflatable black dome, and parade children in and out all day long. Somehow she always smelled like freshly cut grass and grape soda, and watching her teach about galaxies and black holes beat attempting square dance lessons with awkward fifth graders any day. Today would be even better because Ted planned to finally ask Celeste on a date.

He had even dressed up: white shirt, bowtie, vest, and campaign button that read Pluto is not a planet. This had to impress her.

“Who are you supposed to be?” she asked as he walked onto the linoleum gym floor to find her already

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setting up, her face painted to look like Earth and wearing a blue and green tie-dye shirt.

Ted yelled over the buzz of the fan pumping air into the dome. “I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson!”

She half-smiled. “Really? Did you just forget to dress up?”

“I…” He bit the inside of his cheek and nodded. I should have been the Moon, he thought. “The first class is here.”

Kids dressed as assorted characters flooded his gym as Celeste passed packets out. After getting the behavioral pep talk, they all clambered through the dome with Celeste leading them.

Ted was about to follow when he heard “Hi, Coach Parks” from behind him. He shuddered and turned around.

“Hi, Amy. What are you today?”

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Smiling and swaying side to side, she wore a basketball jersey and sweatbands. “I’m a basketball player because I like coming to P.E. Do you like it?”

Ted sighed and pointed to the entrance. “Join the class, Amy.” He counted the minutes until Celeste passed out constellation cards and they could have a quiet moment to talk. “Find these in your group. The first group to find all four gets a prize!”

Yes, now’s my chance! Ted thought. He walked up to Celeste, tapping her on the shoulder.

She turned as Amy called out. “Coach Parks, is that star named after you?”

Ted closed his eyes and breathed. “No, Amy.” “Coach Parks, did you know my favorite constellation is Pisces because I’m a Pisces?”

“Good.” He took a big breath and looked at Celeste about to speak.

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“Coach Parks?”

“What, Amy?” Ted said, tension laced in his voice.

Amy frowned. “Never mind.”

Celeste laughed and leaned in to whisper. “I think someone has a crush, Coach.”

Ted blushed, grateful to be in the dark. # The next class had a kid dressed exactly like Ted except he had an afro.

“Hey, you’re Neil deGrasse Tyson!” Celeste said, high-fiving him. “That’s awesome.”

This was also the same student who then threw up on Ted as the constellation cards were being passed out.

They had to go to the bathroom to clean up, and after taking off his soiled vest and bowtie, Ted now looked like a gym teacher with an anti-Pluto complex.

“Damn it,” he muttered, throwing the campaign button away.

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# Celeste had to go back to the museum for something during lunch, so Ted didn’t get another shot until the next period with Mrs. Emmerson’s class of literary characters. Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, Thing One and Thing Two, and various book characters swarmed Celeste as they left the cafeteria and ran into the gym.

Ted rubbed his eyes and counted to four before following them inside the planetarium. He sat on the black floor with Sherlock and Tinker Bell and watched the stars swirl around Celeste—her hair lit in twilight sprinkles— and tried to think up a new game plan.

“You like her, don’t you?” Tinker Bell asked, pointing at Celeste.

Ted jumped. “What? I…” “It’s okay. I’ll tell her for you.”

Ted shook his head.

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Sherlock joined in. “Yeah, I can make you look cool too.” He pulled out a real smoking pipe. “See?” Ted furrowed his brow and hissed. “Put that away right now! You’re not even supposed to have that. And you—” He turned around in time to see Tinker Bell pass a note to the girl next to her.

Oh, no. Ted stood up and walked toward the note that kept exchanging hands with swift earnest devotion.

“Okay, now you’re going to find your own constellations in groups,” Celeste said. Ted turned toward her, realizing this might be his moment, but then he saw another note heading for her.

He spun to face Tinker Bell who smiled and nodded. “Don’t worry, there are four of them. She’s gonna get one.”

Ted’s palms went clammy as the lamest pick-up line moved toward Celeste: Do you like Coach Parks? □Yes □No □Maybe. The notes moved like wildfire. Smoke

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came from the friction between the papers and students’ hands. Ted had to get to her before— “Coach Parks, Andy is smoking!” Thing One called out.

Ted turned to see Sherlock nodding his head, pipe filling the space with smoke. Where did he get a match?

“Put that out now!”

A bulb somewhere popped, and the speckles of stars went black.

“I can’t breathe!”

“Black hole!”

“I don’t wanna die!”

“Everybody out,” Ted shouted, and finally the students obeyed, running into the gym’s downpour from the fire sprinklers. He turned the fan off and found all the children accounted for, but Celeste was—he had left her inside.

“The walls are caving in,” she cried out.

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Ted dove into the inflatable dome, feeling his way through the space for her, praying his hands wouldn’t land anywhere awkward. They bumped noses. Ted felt a zap across his body. He grabbed her hand, electric prickles there too. “Here, this way.”

He led her out into rain to find costume-melted children dancing about and singing. “K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” Celeste looked around, laughing. Ted held his breath, wondering how much longer he’d get to hold her hand. She smiled at him. Their orbit began.

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Selected Poems by Francine Witte Cafe Crazy Where the stink of old perfume drowns out the coffee aroma. Where the hurt girls go to watch their loves die. It’s a slow death, Ruby will tell you. She’s the day waitress, and man, she’s seen it all. Old women with their walnut bodies who gave their lusty husbands one more chance, and others with a crush of dried petals that they just kept holding onto. Ruby wipes down the counter, lets the women rant and choke love by its scrawny little neck.

It’s Friday afternoon, prime time for heartache. All the men who said they’d call, and Saturday’s looking to be one long and lonely bitch. The door swings open, and three girls sulk in, swollen eyes and new to these parts.

Ruby simply flicks them the once-over. And when they sit down at the counter, she doesn’t bother with a menu. She knows exactly what they’ll have.

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So when Michael says goodbye this time he means it.

No more calling you late night, half-drunk and horny. No more books of clothes he left behind like bits of himself in your brainteeth. This time he’s moved on. For real.

Met someone new and she doesn’t play. Doesn’t buy the shit the others did, like you have a history or why can’t he have female friends.

This time when he unfollows or unfriends you, you best believe he’s a ghost. And a real ghost, this time. Not one of those clingy ghosts that creak the floors or tickle your ear or trip you on your simple way from here to there or anywhere you happen to be going.

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You know it’s gonna be a long night when even the bartender gets bored with you, wipes water-sweat off the beer mugs and won’t even look your way. You are nursing a bourbon and another broken heart. Another getaway love that got away even with you watching it the whole, entire time. The lights behind the bar are only mirrored reflections from the 6 foot dance floor where two college girls are wriggling out of their own sad stories. Each thrum from the jukebox taking them another heartbeat out of love. There was a time you would welcome such eager opportunity. It would have been so easy to slide in between them, their sad, open faces with all that beautiful pain just waiting to be kissed.

Lucky for you, the jukebox switches to a slow jam.

The girls look at one another and shrug, backs to their seats.

Everything empty now, the dance floor with the oozy music hovering above, the beer mugs rowed up like heartaches and your own glass, which like your love life, might or might not have one last swig left in it.

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Selected Poems by Daniel von der Embse The house where artists lived Stairs go straight up sixty-five of them, in stone opening on neglected rooms light begging to be let in Strange shapes on the floor and the smell of oils and old fires remind of the warmth that once lived here gone now but for the body heat of birds that reside up in the rafters giving the place a constant muttering of little moans, reminding of children bundled in their beds sharing stories and secrets after lights out before sleep It is in this place we drop our bags brush away the dust and feel completely at home

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The island was small She had her boundaries, which insured she never cheated with the husband of a friend – but a neighbor across the island would be okay until one day aboard the morning ferry where gossip rode to work so that her husband heard the details of her affair in a twittering conversation between two women recognized but not known The island was small that way, faces seen everyday of those who knew before you did the secrets you carried gone over like an old newspaper discarded, left for another to catch up on your miseries These quarters were too close, he decided, for one needing to breathe air that wasn’t already exhaled like secondhand smoke Standing at the stern he contemplated the churning beauty brought up by seven ton propellers perfectly suited to the slow lopping off of heads and limbs, his own destiny to claim, But not before he’d live to savor one last look of shocked surprise of the cuckold and his bride descending into black foam there to reside

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A matter of when The little place in Umbria is still there brand new, beautiful view – empty now but in the summer there are artists everywhere and musicians and people fill the sidewalks until it is time to leave town to the hundred or so full-time souls and many, many pigeons The Caribiniere keep watch but there is no crime except the noisy dog belonging to the chief, immune from prosecution for disturbing the peace At Christmas, they open the church of St Illuminata, putting lights upon on every available eave and sill so that seen from the valley, town appears twinkly It is here my island rest waits among the olive groves, asking when, when will we be coming home?

Just a few things to finish first – one last letter to write, a final chapter to send, and then…then…

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Back to dust Days of rain bring out tender grass bathing all in green cast birds drunken by wormy pickups do their victory dance Soaking awakens long buried plasm from muck carried on paws and in the right angle of my boot heel caked solid until dry settles in Days of sun warm our backsides grateful to be hung outside where the gradual air restores us gone from the mud and back to dust

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Selected Poems by Carolyn Elias Down the Rabbit Hole I fell, like Alice down the rabbit hole except the Rabbit wasn’t jumping about with a gold watch on a chain he was leaning against a graphittied wall, giving me the eye over drinking rum and coke with a neon green curly straw.

Indistinct techno music blares I dance with my friends up on a shale stage under an exposed, leaking pipe. behind me is the Rabbit, leering.

Why the hell is he wearing a top hat?

Between the vodka and the magenta walls I can hardly stand up.

I need to concentrate to get to the door painted in a black and white swirl, the stairs are too narrow, my heels are sticking into the cracks.

It is quiet upstairs.

People are lounging on mismatched couches chatting in low tones. Far away laughter.

In the kitchen I pour myself some water.

Nicola stands against sink drinking Blue Moon.

I tell her about the boy in the Rabbit costume He lives down the hall from me I think his name is Sean?

She probably thinks I am high Talking about a sinister Rabbit in a top hat Except he is standing right behind her.

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the White Rabbit gets a Blue Moon shower.

I rush her to the bathroom.

It is that reassuring pink used in church bathrooms I panic, leaning over the sink Nicola winks.

It is all a game to escape the white Rabbit.

I carry her out of the house, down the rotting wooden steps, past some pensive smokers, we hear the Rabbit cry out but we are across the street, Already safe in the night.

At home, a doctor ushers us up the green stairway into our clean, white beds.

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The Wound Rage, unquenched by sleep, beats like a second heart.

I, in the warm glow of dawn, rip out the bloody canker and stagger before the sun to cauterize the wound.

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The Brothers

By David Haight

As he walked past the front desk he noticed the receptionist’s purse standing at attention, her jacket folded neatly next to it. She had been waiting to go home too.

Exiting the building into the nearly empty parking lot the setting sun hit him square in the eyes. In just over an hour it would disappear into the horizon, effectively ending another day where he had accomplished nothing of any consequence. He reminded himself, rather unenthusiastically, that he was doing it for his wife, Maureen, and his son, Kip. But there had to be a better way. His wife worked long hours, sometimes longer than him, like today, one of her client’s, a childless woman, lie dying in hospice, and she would come home tired and irritable but satisfied. He had never been satisfied at the innumerable jobs which the resume on his desk sarcastically informed him added up to his paltry career.

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Turning onto County Road 13 he passed the Burwell nature reserve. His drive home was under twenty minutes. He was running out of time and nerve.

Begrudgingly he flipped open his phone and dialed his mother’s number.

“Tony, what a surprise, how are you?”

“Just leaving work,” he said. “I know I missed your birthday last week – happy birthday.”

“Can you believe I am such an old woman?”

“You’re not old. But I can’t say I know exactly how old you are,” he said with a delight he knew she could hear.

Sandy relished talking to her son, enjoyed any respite from her complicated joyless life. “Ever since I was a boy you’ve been telling everyone you’re thirty-one.”

“It was a survival technique. The Blade told all the neighborhood kids my real age, who in turn told all their

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mothers. I didn’t need everyone knowing how ancient I was.”

That was so her, he thought, to lie about her age, even to her children. Tony knew that everyone carried a secret around with them, something they never told anyone and barely admitted to themselves. He never presumed to know what those secrets were but he was certain he knew his mother’s: she wished she could be young again, even childless.

“He was really destroyed when he found out you lied to him.”

“He was always so sensitive. Still is,” she added as an afterthought.

Tony’s brother, six years his junior, had acquired the nickname The Blade when, as a five year old, he pulled a knife, a butter knife no less, on a neighbor boy who had insulted their stepfather Kevin, and the name stuck.

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Catastrophe followed him on his arrival into this world: being nearly choked by his umbilical cord, but that was only the prelude: he was accidentally poisoned at nine, came down with pneumonia at ten, and suffered three broken limbs in each subsequent year. After that the soul mimicked the body: he ran away nine times, dropped out of high school, was arrested for vandalism, petty larceny, and twice for stalking, up to and including this latest atrocity that just didn’t seem to want to go away. She was convinced it was her reluctant womb trying to tell her she wasn’t meant to have a second child or God punishing her since it was too late. She wanted to know what sins, or what specific sin, she committed that had resulted in his life. Was he revenge for the suffering she had put her mother through? Payback for her questionable second marriage that had devolved into one of convenience? Or was his life simply a way to recalibrate the karmic scales in a universe indifferent to him? Everyone told her with such

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smug certainty that he just needed to make different choices and it could all turn around but this was bullshit. It wasn’t as pedestrian as him being an inherently wicked person with wicked motivations, or conversely, a decent person who made impulsive instantly regrettable choices. It was that his life, from the beginning, had only one trajectory.

“How’s work been?”

“The same.”

“Have you talked to Rose lately?”

Tony rubbed his chin and ran his hand across his face. This wasn’t a straightforward inquiry but an indictment of some sort cloaked as a question. His mother and his Aunt Rose were always bickering over some slight one of them imagined. He didn’t have time for it today.

“Yes, why?”

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“Oh, no reason. She just doesn’t call much anymore,” she said with a trace of self-pity.

“She’s gotten phobic about the phone,” he said and let it drop. There was an extended pause. Of course you take her side, even though you’re my son it said. There was a long curve in the road.

“Well, how’s Kip?” “Seventh grade’s been tough for him. It’s the first time he’s in more than one classroom and he has a hard time concentrating.” He caught himself. It wasn’t just that his remaining strength was already being sapped by what he knew waited him at home: a hungry boy (who by his best guess hadn’t done his homework or started his chores), an even hungrier dog, a sink crammed with dishes from the night before being watched over by an army of flies, and a washer filled with damp stinking neon clothes, but that this exhaustion had nearly usurped the promise he made to

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himself when Kip was still a little boy and would rail at his mother for her lack of interest in her only grandchild. You never spend time with him, babysit, ask about him, nothing.

She would stare up at him with those pink watery eyes, a cigarette dangling from her bony fingers until he was done and point at the front door. It took years of therapy to quell the rage at being ejected from his mother’s home. But whatever solace he gained evaporated the moment he exited the sanctuary of his therapist’s office and suspicion, like a pleasing counterpoint, confirmed what he truly believed: that she didn’t give a fuck about choices, him, or her grandson. Better to be swallowed up by grief and anger then live with her bullshit. Either way he promised never to bring up the particulars of his son again.

“Yesterday morning was funny,” he hesitantly began, the road straightening out in front of him. It was the thought of her lying down to bed, on that frameless mattress flush to the floor next to a man whose job she

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depended on for survival and one son an abject failure sucking the life from her that pushed him forward. “I was getting ready for work when Kip burst into my bedroom screaming about there being a mouse in the house.”

“Oh, I’m terrified of mice.”

She inhaled deeply. She was either smoking or drinking wine, probably both, leaning deep into that old gray couch she had had forever, as if it were the first time she had ever sat down, being pulled into the earpiece by the sound of his reassuring voice, her surroundings disappearing. “Kip’s balancing on the arm of the couch directing me around the living room, from the ottoman to the fireplace, the end tables and back again with a broom.

Lish-Lish knocks over that priestess statue that Maureen adores, and that we hide in the front hall closet like a dead body (Front hall closet? That’s the first place she’ll look) before I finally toss a piece of Tupperware over it. Once everything had calmed down, Kip, hands on his hips, in his 188

little blue boxer shorts looks at me and says, ‘Well that was an eventful morning.’”

“Oh, Tony he’s something,” she said. When The Blade was in seventh grade he wouldn’t leave his room, and when he did it was late at night to mash cupcakes on pictures of Kevin or to cut the shoe laces off his work boots.

It had taken all the energy he had to tell that dumb little story. But even as he was recreating that morning for her (from a year earlier), embellishing it with flourishes and little lies, he felt a sense of gratitude. He was married to a successful woman who dedicated herself to helping others.

And he had a wonderful son, although moments like the one he just described were fewer than they used to be. His boy was pulling away. Tony didn’t know if it was his age or the effects of their house, which from the outside were placid as a frozen pond. While it was true that there weren’t a lot of troubles, there wasn’t a lot of joy either. He felt a rush of shame about the secret he carried: he wanted out of 189

his life, an eject button with enough force to catapult him out of orbit. Now he inhaled deeply.

“I heard The Blade moved back.”

“It’s bad this time.”

“What happened?”

“Becky got tired of everything. She couldn’t take it – couldn’t take taking care of him anymore and left. I thought it was going to be different this time. I thought she was different.”

Tony peered into his rearview mirror and out the passenger side window. The trees were in transition from their summer greens to their autumnal yellows and reds. He always hooked up with women who thought they wanted to nurture him back to health. He was slight of build with a quiet effeminate voice and inoffensive to a fault. For many women, especially women in their thirties who had suffered

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real disappointments and who were used to aggressive men, even aggressively charming men, he was a welcome oasis.

What they never realized was that he had nothing to offer.

Although his suffering was crushing him, he couldn’t survive without it.

“How’s Kevin taking it?” Tony asked. Although Kevin had painstakingly overcome his addiction to alcohol, or maybe because of it, he had no sympathy for the The Blade’s troubles and hid from no one his distaste for his youngest stepson or the inconvenience his troubles had on his life.

“He hasn’t said anything yet.”

He will.

“I left him a message earlier today,” Tony said.

“You did?” she said gratefully. He hadn’t wanted to and wasn’t surprised that she was unaware of this call. The

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Blade had either heard it and ignored it, or Kevin had erased it, wanting The Blade to pull himself out of this deep chasm on his own or to fail completely. (Tony wondered if Kevin had followed the latter to its logical conclusion and if so wondered how someone could be that hateful.) She went on thanking him for always being so patient and for the years when they were close. He half-listened and stared at the horizon.

Tony eased into the Super America parking lot and killed the engine. Entering the brightly lit store, the phone pressed tightly between his shoulder and his ear, he grabbed a Diet Coke, two cans of dog food, a pack of cigarettes, and a Playboy, annoyed that he was overcharged for every item. He threw the bag on the passenger seat, one of the cans of dog food threatening to roll out and onto the floor. Tony pushed it back into the bag.

“What’s he doing now?” he finally asked. “Put him on.”

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There was a pause, followed by a muffled rumbling, and another pause. A teenage boy and girl of fourteen or fifteen walked passed his car holding hands, simultaneously ignorant of the external world, yet supremely focused on it, as they tried to comprehend the magnitude of their love.

Tony chuckled darkly. They hadn’t yet discovered the trapdoors in the floor of love.

“He just went into the bathroom.”

Tony cracked open the Diet Coke and downed half of it. It was cool, not cold. He popped open the glove compartment on a hunch, and pushing through the papers and empty CD cases found a single small bottle of vodka, the kind served on airplanes. He dumped it into the can and drank.

He pulled out of the parking lot. He hadn’t eaten all day and could feel the effects of the alcohol immediately.

“I can wait.”

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There was another series of muffled sounds. In the back of his bedroom closet he had boxes full of pictures of The Blade and when he was gone it’s all that would be left of him. He had no home, no children and the few belongings he had that weren’t pawned were strictly for pragmatic purposes, holding no sentimental value. The few family videos he was in would become unwatchable. After his grandfather died 18 years ago, his grandmother (who has since passed) refused to talk about him and no one except Tony ever asked. All she would say was that she thought about him every day and dreamt about him often, although they were silent. He asked her if she ever watched the home movies that included Tony’s grandfather. No. His voice would be too much.

“I know you don’t have much patience for him anymore,” his mother abruptly said.

He hated when she talked like that and didn’t respond. He passed a complex of apartments in severe 194

disrepair. They hadn’t been painted in years and the decks were rotting. He passed the teenagers he had seen at the gas station. He was amazed they had covered so much ground in so short a time. At the last second he flicked them off.

They, of course, didn’t notice.

“Let me go knock,” she said. “I will call you back.”

“We used to go to this bingo hall.”

“What?” she asked, caught off guard at this admission.

“In Covertown,” he said. “It was in this large, cavernous hall filled with old people. We would stop at the liquor store and buy nine or ten little bottles of vodka and rum and shove them in our pockets to sneak them in and dump them in our sodas.”

“I never knew that.”

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Tony laughed quietly at the memory. “We would be sitting there drunk as skunks in the middle of this ocean of decaying people. We never won. Maybe we did. I don’t even know why we started going there. These people are pretty close to the finish line. That’s what he always said.

These people are pretty close to the finish line to be so worried about a twenty-dollar win or a fifty dollar coverall.” He wanted to talk to him now. Not to help him because what could he say? But just to talk to him and laugh (he had a shy infectious laugh) like they used to. He knew that was impossible. There was no him anymore.

“I’ll call you back,” she said again.

“Have him call me back,” he said emphasizing him.

He closed the phone and set it on the passenger seat. He turned onto the last winding road leading to his house.

This had been going on for years: the nights spent worrying, the breaking point and push for help, rallying the

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entire family, that small glimmer of hope like an unsheathed knife only to be plunged into the family’s collective throat when he fell again. It repeated over and over, each cycle aging his mother in some new way, thinning her until her clothes hung awkwardly over her bony shoulder blades, graying her once beautiful black hair, her skin ashen. Tony had resisted, dipping his heart in its own bitter phlegm to protect it like as a cub scout he had dipped matches in candle wax. He never asked about him and when he came up in conversation at the family functions that The Blade never attended, he sat sternly silent and changed the subject when an opening presented itself. Eventually Tony stopped attending. He tried his best to avoid thinking about him and even took alternate routes home to avoid passing his brother’s apartment and later his mother’s home. It never worked fully. He found that it took his full concentration to remember not to think about him, to find new routes around his apartment. Or if he somehow

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managed to legitimately forget about him during the day, by its end when he was worn out and tired his hand would guide him automatically, lovingly back past his brother’s apartment. In trying to forget about him he had become omnipresent.

Six weeks ago he called him. He hadn’t wanted to and had only done so at his mother’s behest. Hearing his voice Tony’s heart lit up like those wax matches struck on rock and with it: death. Because that’s what his brother was, a predetermined number of sunrises and sunsets until he ceased to exist. That was what he was avoiding: death and loss and emptiness. Tony didn’t know what would happen when that day finally arrived. On the one hand it would be a day that would come and would pass, the earth rotating fully on its axis. On the other it would be a human bomb detonating in the middle of their already disintegrating family.

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Pulling into his driveway he could see Lish-Lish in the front window. Even from his car he could see the triangular messages darting from her eyes to the car and up to her brain attempting to determine if her beloved daddy was home. Once she was certain it was him (which he confirmed with a wave) she sprang into action, jumping in circles, barking with delight, clawing at the window and rushing to the door. When he opened it she was ecstatic – bouncing off the floor as if it were made of rubber, dancing, barking at his feet, nipping at his hands and shirt.

He was also greeted by his more subdued son lying in exaggerated pain in the middle of the living room floor.

“I’m starving,” he said drawing out each syllable.

He eyed his son, raising an eyebrow.

“Okay, I’m not starving but I’m really hungry.” He rolled onto his back and stood up.

“There was nothing in the fridge or in the pantry?”

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Kip’s shoulders dropped.

“When’s mom getting home?”

“Later. I don’t know when. She has someone at her work that is very sick and doesn’t have family. So you’re stuck with me right now. Have you done your homework?”

Kip headed for the basement steps and the sanctuary of his room. Tony caught himself.

“I’m on it. Just give me a few minutes. I’ll make some eggs and toast and I’ll call you when they’re ready and we can do your homework together.”

Kip disappeared down the stairs with a loud thumping. As an afterthought he asked “How was school?” but got no response. Lish-Lish remained at his side, eyes eager. “Hey girl, it’s good to see you.” Her tail wagged. He bent down and petted her, hugged her. Ecstasy. “Bet you’re

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hungry.” Her ears sprung to attention, her tail a metronome at full speed echoing throughout the room.

Yanking open the refrigerator he pulled out the last can of dog food, stuck a spoon into it and scooped its contents into her bowl. She shoved her nose deep into it and ate. The door still open he pulled out the eggs, milk, a bag of shredded cheese, and a bowl from the cabinet. He mixed them together. Lish-Lish was already finished with her dinner and back at high-alert concerning Kip’s, her eyes wide and expectant. “You crack me up, dog.” She studied him as he bent over and pulled a pan from the lower cabinet and set it on the stovetop. Her ears sprung to life as he dumped the contents of the bowl into the pan. In a matter of minutes the eggs and a piece of buttered toast were waiting for Kip. “Kip come and get your eggs.”

The phone rang.

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“Tony, he can’t talk to you now, he just can’t. But I’ll have him call you tomorrow.”

He handed the plate to Kip who disappeared again down the stairs and into his room. He heard the door slam shut.

“Just hand him the phone.”

“I’ll have him call you tomorrow.”

Tony leaned against the counter. Was The Blade sitting next to her, hands wrapped around his knees like a petrified little girl or was he locked in the bathroom ignoring her pleading mother’s voice? Or maybe he really couldn’t talk to him. The truth was he didn’t know, had never known, even when they were best friends. He wasn’t even sure if they were ever friends. Not really.

“Of course. I understand.” This is what he always said even though he didn’t mean it and didn’t understand.

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Kip had already come back up, his plate decimated only the crusts and the white fatty part of the eggs left. He darted back down the stairs.

“Will you answer?” his mother asked.

He wanted to hang up and never speak to either of them again. “Yes. I’ll answer.” He put the plate down and Lish-Lish licked up the cold, gelatinous remainder of the eggs and chomped on the crusts with glee.

Tony gazed out the window. Only faint cooling traces of the sun could be found in the blue and black sky.

At the far end of the yard were the pine trees, which had stepped out of the darkness and the sharp tips of the fading yellow fence. In a short time the trees, the fence, the yard, his wife’s client, The Blade would all be enveloped by the approaching darkness. His heart pounded and his breathing grew shallow. For a moment he thought he was having a heart attack. He even clasped his chest like he had seen

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middle-aged men do a million times on television and in movies. Then for reasons he couldn’t explain he reached over with effort and he flipped on the porch light. He could see less than before, the cracked back step and nothing more. What did it matter? He knew there was nothing out there, nothing he could do to help his brother or comfort his mother but something compelled him to try. His chest still tight, his breathing still labored he picked up the plate from the floor, set it in the sink and called over his shoulder to his son, his voice cracking. Finally, slowly, he could hear Kip making his way up the stairs. At the sight of his son he felt relief and a rush of emotion he had a hard time squelching caught in his throat.

“Let’s take Lish-Lish for a walk,” he said panting.

“I don’t want to,” he said with finality.

Tony stared at his son. He looked so much like his mother: the large, soft cheeks, the strong forehead the

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sleepy, sweet eyes. And what’s more his son’s response to him and the yearning he had to get out into the darkness was identical to his mother’s. “Aren’t I supposed to finish my homework and do my chores before I do anything else?” She never wanted anything to do with those kinds of feelings. Go to work, provide and be thankful. Tony belched out an unattractive half-laugh. Kip pulled his face away, squinted at the floor.

“Just get a shirt on. I’ll get her leash,” Tony said attempting to regain control of himself.

Kip didn’t move. He frowned just as his mother would have frowned. Finally, after a long hesitancy, he did as he was asked. Tony wasn’t sure how he did it, but just like his mother his son was able to transform walking down a flight of stairs into the sound resentfulness. As he picked up his keys, Lish-Lish raised her head, trying to confirm if her greatest wish was about to come to fruition. When Kip reappeared he handed them to him.

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“Give them a good shake.”

Kip rolled his eyes but shook them. Lish-Lish raced to the door, spun in circles, bounced up and down as Tony, (leash in hand) wrestled with her until he got it fastened to her collar. They stepped into the dark, dank garage and stood as the massive door opened.

“Which way are we going?” Kip asked.

“So you remember that we used to do this?” Kip stuck his tongue out and rolled his eyes exaggeratedly. He didn’t find his father funny anymore. “Down by Gideon Pond.”

“That’s the long walk,” he said his shoulders dropping.

“It’s not that far. Come on. Lish is excited. And she needs the exercise. Wouldn’t kill us either?”

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And the three of them, Tony, his son Kip and LishLish, made their way into the darkness and down the still leaf filled street, the sun finally gone.

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Selected Poems by Allison Thorpe “These hillocks were scattered over with grovelets of wild roses & other shrubs, & covered with wild flowers--I could have stayed in this solemn quiet spot till Evening without a thought of moving but William was waiting for me.”

(Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals) Idle Thoughts While Sitting Idly (In Grasmere, England) I wasn’t prepared for the flowers.

Every daily outing, every hillside view, every corner ventured highlighted an aria of blossom, some vibrant serenade just for us.

I lusted a little cottage with fences flooding rainbows of color and chubby flowerboxes gushing every wall, so many blooms I would have trouble unearthing the door.

Windows would spew scent until the house perfumed chairs, dishes, books, ravaging me in sleep, clouting dreams of glutted daze.

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Frost Has Drooped the World Frost has drooped the world limped stems blackened leaves one day hope sings the next dreams flop and mumble in some garden of gutters I take it personally like losing change in a vending machine every red light when I'm late squirrels in the bird feeder the latest doctor's report unopened on the kitchen table later, your calm travels the telephone wires you tell me to watch a sunset study a stone find a fat stream nature's infinite miracles how our dreams can gush even those possibilities

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Nothing Was Random Nothing was random, the footprints a deliberate stalking across my lower field, around the hydrangea remnants to peek the undersides of the porch, a close circle of woodshed, twice around the house, down the outdoor cellar steps and back up again.

I put off my morning chores and followed the melting tracks, examining the widened impressions. Not deer or squirrel.

Maybe the draggled dog who lived down the road.

Raccoon a possibility. Hopefully not wolf or bear or the bobcat we heard in spring. What did it want?

Shelter? Warmth? Something more basic and raw?

I felt an insane urge to laugh. The tracks tied me suddenly to the living: an old woman alone among this remote expanse.

For an instant they made the solitude a community of sociable nature before casting a deliberate hook of unease upon the day.

I brushed snow from the truck, shoveled the pathway, loaded up the wood bin. While scattering crumbs for the birds I nervously looked off into the distance. Was it watching me? Studying this pile of bones, this seasoned carcass bearing a crust of bread?

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Once Upon a Time I live over a bar.

This is no fairy tale.

If this were a fairy tale, Cinderella would be below waltzing to Tchaikovsky, and Snow White would be baking pies, the smell of which would waft up to find me where I sit writing the perfect poem.

Instead, homeless dwarves litter the back alley mining the trash cans for cigarette butts, and tattooed princes on motorcycles gun their machines at 4 a.m. or scream obscenities over a game of billiards, interrupting me staring at the blank pages or drifting a haunted sleep, never finding a happy ending.

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Selected Poems by Suzanne Deshchidn the ghost of her she still haunts me even when i go to places we have never been to together i saw her at ananda ashram at a fire ceremony i sat beside the three foot tall ganesh empty cushions lined the room her master's picture on the wall smiling at me i had seen that master for a year as we would roll on her living room floor fucking before her altar i would grab the legs of the table and say rocking the masters she would laugh i could see the ghost of her enter the ashram bowing just so settle in on a red cushion cross legged serene every detail of her was alive in that room i tried to focus on the sanscrit chant later i found out she had been there years before of course i knew that i could see the ghost of her as i do sometimes early in the morning watch her brown eyes catch their first glint of day see her turn to gaze at her favorite tree i watch her naked white body rise from her bed and move through her apartment toward the bathroom jerking her head abruptly to the side to crack her neck i have to choose to look away though i see her everywhere

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is it really you

we sat in a patch of sun in the backyard borrowing the neighbor’s lawn chairs our hands resting in each other’s it was meant to be a brief visit twelve hours later i drove home my lover and i are still attracted by some otherworldly pull though i feel it changing there was not the heartwrenching of past days when i knew our imminent demise loomed we have been broken up for four months though every month or so she or i call and we fuse together for a weekend or a few hours this time i was wearing a new ice blue mandarin dress i let her uncinch the halter and find the hidden zipper which ran from my ribs to my hips she let my hair down and unclipped my anklet then shimmied the dress down my hips and lay it on the back of the couch this has become our way of saying hello i’ve missed you though she let an i love you slip out no you don’t i said but finally after waking up in her arms when i thought i’d never be there again i admit to loving her in our imperfect way anything can happen and does when i’m with her and nothing surprises us it’s all fodder for poetry she knows it’s true and we share lines that come to mind in the hours we linger in her bed but i’m changing we’re growing apart the distance is taking its toll

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stolkholm syndrome i love her in completely inappropriate ways when i know leaving her will result in emotional torment she will cry languish i will harden my heart assume the firmness the resolution of a mallomar

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she blames me for leaving though she was that side of goodbye for our entire relationship —the first of her life— though she’s fifty now i check in on Facebook though we are not friends and occasionally message a hello these burnings happen to coincide with stress in my current partnership with a woman who has no inability to commit or be present when we broke up i drew my swords and divided her with the precision of a butcher the only way to protect myself from future entanglements was to wound her so profoundly to scatter her dust to the wind so completely that she could not rise again so i two years into my new relationship find myself eyeing lot's wife granular woman reconfiguring before my mind's eye —her face still turned away— and we have only messages between us now but i cannot give myself as completely naively to my faithful partner as i could to this woman who ravaged and delighted me at once our relationship of torment ended and i find myself craving that 215

lick

of salt

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Selected Poems by David Klugman

Catch and Release Chelsea, England, second grade - American boy in London launching paper planes; the way that really fine one landed sharp-nose right against THE TEACHER’S CHEEK - the flush that followed and her outrage sent me “up the river” to the secondary school where everyone knew how bad I’d been: alone at a desk in the back of the room: a pile of dissociated fog turned in on myself like a safety pin wearing a dunce cap. How many times this happened...

I explained to the boys in the Square that I was from another planet, and that there all beings were afflicted with one stiff leg, which was why I couldn’t ride a two-wheeler with them. They never teased me for this explanation so I stuck to my story all year long, quite happy to be spared explicit shame.

Now I wonder what their parents must have told them about the strange American boy who claimed to be an alien from another planet, how in a way that is exactly what I was.

Cut-up, class freak, clown-faced mishap in the middle of a map I couldn’t read.

I stole money from my mother’s purse - thick English coins and stored them in a gobbet on the upper shelf of the hutch. I had nothing to spend it on and so by year’s end the cup was nearly spilling over. They didn’t

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ask me even when they found it, and I don’t think I missed itjust another message in a bottle from across the Atlantic.

Clever quipper, someone told me yesterday that “up the river” comes from Sing Sing, which is up the Hudson River from New York. I can see the Hudson River from my yard when the trees thin out in winter - not quite a river view but river glimpse. I can see the prison too as I walk down along the path; and on this bad, sad, grimy morning it dawns on me I’m not in England anymore. The relief is unexpected, overwhelming.

Early Warning Bare feet in the mud we stood thinking about guava jelly, that case of it you dumped into the middle of the small river behind your house, the one you had stolen from the Roché’s when they were on vacation: broke into their home and just carried it out - that was something I had no concept for, that kind of blatant, brazen wrongness I was too busy defending myself against feeling hunted.

Knowing just where it was you dove in first and came up holding a jar in your hand like a trophy. That’s how we did it, one jar at a time in the dark of night, as if guava jelly was some precious, Spice Island import.

Your name was Guy (mysterious, generic) and you were older by a couple of years. That explained everything to me then though now

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it explains nothing: the way you used to make me massage your balls in the woods, or the way you would cough up throaty, mucus lugies with your other, older friends until I got sick to my stomach because you liked to see me vomit, liked the power of that I suppose, of disowning our friendship when the older boys were around; disowning through humiliation. I don’t think I ever liked you and I do not recall you with fondness, but with strangeness as if ours was a friendship that should never have been and we meant so little to each other.

40 My friend who died last summer is still breaking up.

Clouds remind me how this happens as I watch the day progress through the venetian blinds in a series of sunsets.

A sparrow casts late shadows on the brick as other birds float in to gather against the dark.

It’s about two miles from here we buried you and I imagine you growing stronger in the grave.

It is a lie that helps me to contend with the bright beasts of your absence.

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Geographic Cure

By Amy Yolanda Castillo

Did you ever take a really long bus ride all by yourself? All by yourself? I did. I went from Vandalia, Minnesota—which is, like, this crappy hick town in the middle of a bunch of cornfields and barns and stuff—all the way to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

It wasn’t much fun, though. Half an hour into the ride, the novelty wore off and I realized it was going to be a long, boring trip. I wished I’d packed something good to read, even something cheesy like those Sweet Valley High books. And while I’d remembered to swipe three hundred dollars from the emergency fund in my mom’s underwear drawer, I somehow forgot to bring a sandwich and a juice box. I could feel my stomach starting to rumble. But there was nothing to do about it except look out the window and think, and that’s always dangerous.

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It was nearly sunrise, but still dark and we were moving west into Wisconsin, speeding past the cranberry bogs in Tomah. I turned off the little reading light above my seat and looked out at the scenery. The stillness in the landscape made me sad, and I wondered, all the way to Philadelphia, about what my life would be like if I was a normal person and not just some fat slob. And you know what? The time flew by. # If you’re a guy, it doesn’t matter how you look.

There’s always a way for boys to fit in, to be judged by who they are and what they can do. A fat boy can be a heavyweight wrestler and he’ll get a letter jacket. An ugly boy can run cross-country and people say, “Hey, isn’t that the guy who runs all the laps on the cinder track? He’s fast.” A pizza face can be on the debate team, and the adults will remember him as the kid who made the great argument against tobacco subsidies. A runty little shrimp

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can be the first chair trumpet in the jazz band, and everyone in the audience will sit there and think, “Wow, amazing, I didn’t know he could hit those high notes.”

Now let’s say you’re a fat girl. You don’t have all the options the boys have. You’re just fat. That’s all you are, and that’s all you can be.

If you wanted to act in the school play, the only part you could play—and you’d be lucky to get it—would be someone’s enormous relative. Like if you wanted to be in “H.M.S. Pinafore.” Even if you sang like an angel, you wouldn’t bother trying out for the part of Josephine—you’d settle for the choir and you’d be singing “And we are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts,” and you’d be squeezed into a matronly, old-fashioned dress that someone’s mother had to donate because nothing else in the wardrobe room fit you.

Maybe one year you might be very brave and decide you should go out for a sport. You liked tee-ball

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when you were a little girl, so you think it would be fun to play softball. So you went to the tryouts, only you didn’t realize how serious these girls were by now, that they’d been playing together for years and now that they were in high school they didn’t really want anyone new horning in, especially not some lardass. And they threw the ball extra hard when they had to throw to you, so it stung your hand and you started feeling scared. And someone laughed and said “oh my God, she’s got stretch marks” when you took off your top in the locker room, so you slipped it back on and walked home reeking of B.O. And you didn’t go to the second day of tryouts and it was just as well.

Here’s the thing. Every nasty thing you want to say to a fat girl—pig, blubber, wide load, heifer, thunder thighs, hog, whale, jumbo, oinker, tubs, fatass, lardo, porky, loser, loser, loser—she’s already beaten you to the punch. She’s said it to herself once, twice, a thousand times—before it ever even occurred to you.

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# I got the idea about Sanctum House from the new social studies teacher. His name is Jan Gerhard, but he told all us kids to call him Dutch. None of us knew why.

Anyway, he was the coolest teacher in school. He wore jeans and oxfords every day, with black and white checkered Vans, and he had a little gold stud earring in his right ear. He’d gone to school somewhere out east, I guess—I’m not sure why he came to Vandalia. He didn’t really fit in, but everyone loved him. I didn’t fit in either but nobody loved me, so I was always studying him, trying to understand how he did it.

He played a lot of videotapes for current events, and one time he showed us a segment from Nightline. It was about kids who ran away to Philadelphia and stayed in a place called Sanctum House. They interviewed this one girl who had a shaved head and a hoop earring in her nose. Her name was Joanie, and she was awesome. She said her

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parents were always beating on her so she ran away to New York City, only then she wound up with a pimp and he beat her up too. She was thinking of throwing herself onto the subway tracks but then “When Doves Cry” came on the radio and since she was Prince’s number one fan she took it as a sign that she wasn’t supposed to die yet. Then she saw a poster for Sanctum House and hitched her way to Philadelphia. Now, for the first time in her life, she was happy.

When the video was over, Dutch talked about Sanctum House. He said before he was a teacher, he was a social work student and he spent two years working with the kids at Sanctum House. He told us the kids there had been through some of the worst experiences you could imagine, that some of them had been in gangs and even in jail, but once they got to Sanctum House they changed their lives.

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It sort of dawned on me that I wouldn’t mind a little hardship if it got me to a place like Sanctum House. I didn’t want a pimp and I didn’t want anyone to beat me up, but…but Sanctum House was in a tower in the middle of downtown Philadelphia and had its own school, and the kids lived in pods with modular furniture and bunk beds, and they decorated their rooms with posters of punk rock bands, and they dressed however they wanted and were very cool, and they only had to go to school from nine to noon, and then they could do whatever they wanted until check-in at ten, and they were all very accepting of each other’s differences because they’d all been hurt, and they loved each other, Dutch said, and formed these tight-knit little substitute families to replace the parents who beat them up and the siblings who raped them and, well, you get the idea.

After class was over, I stayed back a minute and told Dutch I thought Sanctum House sounded like a really

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nice place. He looked at me like I was crazy. “Those kids have big problems,” he said. “Most of them don’t make it.

There’s nothing nice about it.”

It sounded like he forgot about all the good stuff, so I gave up trying to talk to him about it and went to my next class. # After I heard about Sanctum House, it was pretty much all I thought about. For one thing, I’d have friends there, because people weren’t superficial like they were in Vandalia—at Sanctum House they knew what it was like to feel hurt and used-up and lonely. And my friends would be cool. They’d wear leather jackets and mohawk haircuts and Army boots and I would too. After school we’d wander around Philadelphia together, and we’d go to underground clubs to dance and see bands play. In the evenings, we’d watch television shows and play cards and I could tell them all the things I thought about in private—poems I wrote,

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jokes I thought up, why Geraldine Ferraro should have been the Vice President, you name it. We’d talk about everything and nothing. They’d listen and be interested and no one would care that I was fat. They would only be interested in me.

The more I thought about Sanctum House, the more I wanted to go. Sometimes I’d take my big blue duffel bag out of the closet and think, “Tonight’s the night, I’m leaving.” It was always hard to decide what I should take and what I should leave behind—I didn’t know how much underwear I might need, or if I should take a can of White Rain hair spray, or whether they’d have a curling iron I could use. I really, really wanted to take my stuffed bear but I always decided he would be safer at home, on my bed.

But every time I packed that duffel bag, I talked myself out of going. My grandma’s heart would be broken, my mom might not take very good care of my hamsters, my parents might let my little brother move into my room—

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you get the idea. So then I’d take everything out of the bag and put it away and go to bed.

And that’s the way things stayed until the slam book. That was the end for me. # The final straw was the medical check-up. At the beginning of every second semester, the school always does a health check. The P.E. teacher pulls an accordion divider across the gym and puts the boys on one side and the girls on the other. I don’t know what happens on the boys’ side, but when the school nurse comes to our side, everyone has to take her top off part-way and bend over for a scoliosis test. Which is dumb, right? I mean, don’t they think our parents would notice if we were turning into hunchbacks?

Anyway, when it was my turn I bent over and my stomach pooched out over my belt and the fat rolls on my sides squished out, and I heard tittering or imagined I did.

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Then I tugged down my tee-shirt as fast as I could and sat down Indian-style at the back of the room. Because that wasn’t the worst of it. The next step was that the nurse weighs you in front of everyone. Oh, they set up the scale at the other end of the room, so theoretically no one can see exact numbers, but if you step on and the beam lurches over to one side, everybody knows you’re way over one hundred pounds. Not to mention, that stupid nurse they bring over from the community college doesn’t hide her clipboard, which is how I know that Connie Sletton weighs 114 pounds, whereas she obtained far juicier information about me.

After class, Connie went back to her locker, took out her slam book, and added “Weighs 245 pounds, oh my God, what a P-I-G!” to my page. She added a photorealistic picture of a pig (I’ll say this for Connie, she’s a good artist) with a hot pink marker. Then she passed it around to the other popular girls in ninth grade, and they showed it to the

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boys, and then the older kids saw it, and pretty soon everyone was adding mean things to my page, and before I knew it there was just no getting away from the thing. It took over my life. It got to be that I was afraid to raise my hand in class or look people in the eyes in the hallway, because when they saw me they’d say things like, “here comes Hungry Hungry Hippos” or “there’s Double-Wide.”

My mom said it would pass, but so what? Adults always tell you that, and in addition to being a lie, it’s not even realistic. And what are you supposed to do in the meantime? Let people keep laughing at you? All I wanted to do was disappear.

That’s when I decided to go to Sanctum House. # It was raining hard when the bus reached the outskirts of Philadelphia. I started feeling scared when I saw all the tall buildings on the horizon. I began to wonder if I’d made a big mistake, and I didn’t want to think that,

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not after everything I’d been through, so I tried to turn off my brain and just look at the city. It was the biggest and the best city I’d ever been to except for spring break in 1986, when my parents took us to Orlando.

We made what seemed like an endless series of right-hand turns onto one-way streets, spiraling around the bus station at ninety degree angles. Everything looked dirty and there were so many people, and it only got worse the closer we got to the bus station. There weren’t any houses or schools, just office buildings and shiny glass skyscrapers. There were cars everywhere—piled up bumper-to-bumper in traffic and wedged into tiny curbside parking slots. Even with my window up I could hear how noisy Philadelphia sounded—horns honking and radios blaring and people hollering and ancient mufflers that sounded like my dad’s shotgun.

I don’t know what I was expecting when we got to the bus station. I hadn’t really thought about it much. But it

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was scary, like something they’d show on Hill Street Blues.

The depot was filled with gross people. Some of them were carrying big black Hefty bags filled with their stuff, and others had stuffed everything willy-nilly into shopping carts. A couple of people were sitting at those little desks that have coin-op televisions bolted on. They weren’t actually watching TV though—they looked all spaced-out, and they kept falling asleep. Then their heads would all of a sudden jerk up again. I don’t know why. They must have been really tired.

I went into the bathroom but left immediately, even though I really had to go, because the toilets were clogged with, like, actual poop and toilet paper and it was disgusting. I wanted to buy a map of the city so I could get to Sanctum House, but I was afraid to take out my wallet.

So I went up to a little booth that said “Traveler’s Assistance.” I told the man where I wanted to go, and he looked at me funny, but he gave me a bus schedule and a

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map of the routes. He wrote down the buses I needed to take and showed me where the stops were.

By the time I got outside and started walking, the rain had picked up and my feet already hurt. This is a little known fact about fat people—our feet always hurt. That’s gravity for you. Anyway, I pulled up the hood on my jacket but before long my bag was soaked and so was I. I realized I was totally lost. I got to the first bus stop and climbed aboard, but my wallet was buried inside my bag and I didn’t have exact change, so the driver told me to get off and wait for the next bus. He wasn’t very nice about it either. That was embarrassing, so I thought maybe I’d just walk to the next stop and start over. But I walked for another hour and never saw it. I was afraid to ask anyone for help, because I didn’t want to look like some rube just off the farm.

I decided I should flag down a taxi because I could afford it. I waved and waved but they never stopped—they

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just sped by and sometimes the tires even splashed waves of dirty rainwater on me. By now I was ready to cry, and I must have looked like it because a man walked over to me and said, “Naw, naw, you gotta do it like this kid,” and he stood out in the street and stuck out his arm, and sure enough, a cab stopped. I thanked the man, but he just looked at me like I was totally demented. Then I got in the taxi and said, “Sanctum House, please.” # When I walked into the Sanctum House building, I had to take an elevator to the fourth floor. As soon as I got off, I was disappointed. The lobby area was groovy. It was the same shabby orange-and-avocado-green color scheme from the ‘70s that my parents had going on in their rec room. The furniture was old and the paint was dingy. But I’d made it all the way to Philadelphia, and I decided not to care. Not about the furniture, not about the paint, and not about the rumbling in my stomach.

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I took my duffel bag and stood in front of the desk where a sign said “SANCTUM HOUSE—YOU’RE ALREADY HOME.” No one was there so I rang a bell, and guess what? The person who came out was the girl from Nightline—the bald girl with the earring in her nose.

Joanie! I was so excited to see her, I could have cried.

“Helpya?” she mumbled.

“Yes.” I’d rehearsed this part on the bus, but seeing the real live girl from Nightline threw me for a loop. “I, uh, need to check in?”

“Check in? This isn’t a hotel.” She looked me up and down.

“Well, I’m here. To stay, I mean.” I stopped, then forged ahead. “And also? Uh, I just wanted to say, I saw you on television. On Nightline, I mean. You’re, like, an inspiration to a lot of people, you know?”

“Finn!” she hollered. “You better get out here.” She shook her head. “That show was stupid. What a crock of

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shit. You know how many dummies we’ve got coming here now? For no good reason? Like this is some dream paradise or something. Why would you come to a place like this if you didn’t have to? Dummies.”

I heard a man stomping through the back. He poked his head through the black curtain that divided the rooms, took one look at me, and said, “Joanie, why don’t you take your break?”

“I already took one.” She was sullen. “You said I only get one smoke break per two hours on duty.”

“Well, go ahead anyway. Just this one time. Be back in ten.”

Her face brightened. “Cool,” she said, and disappeared.

When she was gone, Finn said, “So you’ve met Joanie.”

“Yeah. It was, like, an honor. Because I saw her on TV. Her story was really inspiring.”

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“Doing that show was one of the best and one of the worst things we ever did. On the one hand, we were able to raise a lot more money, and that’s going to help a lot more kids. On the other hand, we’ve got some new problems now. Tell me, what did you think of Joanie? Were you disappointed?”

I decided to lie. It had served me well so far. “No, not at all. She’s cool.”

“That she is, that she is. She’s cool. But I’ve found she’s a much nicer person when there are cameras around.”

I didn’t want to get on anyone’s bad side, so I said, “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Hmm.” He smiled. “Why don’t you come back to my office?”

He led me behind the curtain, to a cramped little office cluttered with books and papers. He pointed to an avocado green chair. “Please, sit,” he said.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” I said.

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“Oh, it’s no problem, no problem at all. So where are you from? I think I’m hearing a Midwestern accent.”

“I’m from Minnesota.”

“Minnesota? That’s a long way to come. How’d you get here?”

“Well, first I hitched to the Greyhound station in Saint Paul. It’s by the Capitol. Then I took a bus to Philly.

And then I took a cab the rest of the way here, because I got lost.”

“I’m impressed. That’s a long trip. But just so you know, no one on the east coast says ‘Philly.’ And our kids don’t usually pull up in cabs. How much did you pay for that?”

I instinctively knew I couldn’t answer that question without somehow incriminating myself, so I shrugged.

“What’s your name?”

“Christa.” I always liked that name.

“Got a last name, Christa?”

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I shrugged again.

“Okay,” he said. “Then let’s try it this way. Tell me why you’re here.”

This part I’d mentally rehearsed over and over. It was the delivery that was most important. “It’s really hard to talk about. Maybe later, if I can trust you….” I said, and let my voice trail off. I looked down at my feet. I was hoping he’d think I was shy and mysterious and I’d suffered a lot. I mean, to me, my pain—always being picked on all the time—was just as real as what the other kids at Sanctum House had been through. Maybe even worse. I thought I was being fair. But I guess Finn didn’t.

He stood up, shuffled through some papers, pulled one out. He shook it at me. “You know what this is? We get these every day. The police and the FBI, they send us the missing persons reports they get for people up to twenty-five years old. Because as it turns out, almost all the kids who come here have been abused or neglected. But

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there are a lot of kids who come here for other reasons, too.

Reasons unrelated to abuse and neglect. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that?”

I shook my head.

“Not gonna talk to me?”

It wasn’t going the way I’d imagined. “I just need help,” I pleaded.

He sighed. “No, you need a lesson in honesty.” He waved the paper again. “Look, this came in yesterday.

Missing fourteen year old from Vandalia, Minnesota.

Female. Height five feet, six inches. Weight two fifty.

Name of Jennifer Barton. That’s you, isn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything for a good long minute. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t know about what it was like to be me. How bad it felt to be invisible on your best days and a target on the rest. That there are different kinds of abuses, and they don’t always involve closed fists and

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sex but they’re just as bad. I couldn’t find the words to explain, though. I just sat there like a dope.

“That picture? It’s you, right?”

I looked down. I knew what the picture looked like.

It was the one from the yearbook, where I had three chins.

“You should admit it, Jennifer. Things will go better if you do. ‘Cause if you don’t, I’m going to call the police, and they’ll take you to a foster placement.” He let that sink in until I gave up and nodded. “Listen, you don’t belong in a place like this. Maybe you’ve got problems. Hell, everyone’s got problems, it’s just a matter of degree. But this place—it’s for the real hard cases. Not nice little girls from Minnesota.” He sat down again. “And something else.

We’ve got licenses and permits and we need all of them to stay open. We lose them? Boom, this place is history. You being here with the cops looking for you? That puts us all at risk. It jeopardizes all those permits and licenses. I’m only allowed to have a certain kind of kid in here, and

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you’re not it. Do you want to be responsible for shutting Sanctum House down?”

I sank back into my chair and shook my head again.

“Well,” he said, “I have to call your folks. Do you want to be here for that?”

“No,” I said. “It’s going to be bad.”

“They’ll be pissed, I guess. But don’t lose all hope.

You aren’t the first kid to run away from home. Eventually they’ll think it’s kind of cool, you doing this. Someday you’ll all laugh about it.”

“Yeah, no,” I said. “They’re not like that. They’re more, uh, old-fashioned. Can I go now? I mean, while you call them?”

“Sure,” he said. The front door slammed shut, and there were footsteps outside. “Joanie?” Finn bellowed.

“Come back here.”

A drawer slammed, and there was a dramatic sigh.

Joanie appeared in the doorway. “What do you want?”

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“This is Jennifer. She needs a place to stay for the night. Put her in L-Pod.” “L-Pod is empty.”

“That’s the point. She’s only going to be with us until her parents pick her up. So get her a cot and something to eat.”

Joanie said, slyly, “Well it doesn’t look like she’s missed too many meals.”

The tops of my ears burned.

“Shut it, Joanie. Just do it already,” Finn said. “Go.” He picked up the phone.

“C’mon,” Joanie said. “I hafta lock up your cash.”

So I dragged my duffel up to the front desk again and dug through it, searching for my wallet while Joanie tapped her fingers on the counter. I finally found it and handed it over.

She opened it and counted. “$98.42. Unbelievable. If you have $98.42, what are you doing here? This place is for

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poor kids.” She locked up my wallet in the safe and said, “Come on, I’ll show you where your room is.”

I let her walk ahead of me, so I didn’t have to see her face. And then, because I couldn’t wait anymore, I asked, “Do you think I could have some dinner?”

She laughed. # My parents arrived in Philadelphia the next day.

They couldn’t book a flight home until the day after that, so we had to spend the night in a hotel. They barely talked to me except to say things like, “Are you done in the bathroom? Your father needs to use the toilet.” Then they had a big fight because the hotel was so expensive and they couldn’t find anywhere cheaper because they didn’t have reservations and they didn’t know the city.

At first I didn’t really blame them for being upset. I mean, I never considered that they might be scared when I

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left. All I thought about was melting away from Vandalia and, like, blending into a brand new life, you know?

When I think about it now, though, I wonder why my parents thought they were the only ones who had the right to be angry. No one ever asked me whether I wanted to stay in a crappy little town where everybody hated me, or how I liked being picked on all day, every day, or how it felt always having to be afraid. They were adults, so they got to be superior and act all huffy and ignore my point of view. I was a kid so I had to shut up. But my feelings were hurt every single day at school, and no one cared about that.

And when I tried to explain, they didn’t get it. All my mom’s advice was totally unhelpful, like “what goes around, comes around,” or “sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never hurt you.” Both of which are totally untrue, I might add.

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On the plane ride home, we flew business class to Minneapolis because those were the only available seats.

My dad grumbled something crabby about how I'd better enjoy it because next time it would be on my own dime. At least I got to sit by the window. My dad sat in the aisle seat, and my mom was in between us. I stared out the window while we took off and tried to pretend I couldn’t feel the weight of her eyes on me. I knew she was trying to lighten up, but she was still too angry to be very nice. She jabbed me with her elbow so I had to turn and look at her. Then she said, “You know, you can’t just run away from your problems. People are the same everywhere you go.” That was all she could muster up in the way of wisdom, I guess.

Then she shook her head to show she was still disgusted with me, and she opened up her Time magazine and started tsk-tsking about how people in Africa are still starving even though we sent them all that wheat.

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When we got back home my dad told me I was grounded forever and not to even ask him about it or he’d ground me into the next life. “I’ll let you know when things change,” he said. “I don’t want you nagging me to go out with your friends.”

Funny how he still doesn’t get it. I don’t care how long they ground me. I don’t have anything planned. I mean, you don’t need a crystal ball to read my future, right? No one’s going to ask me to the Homecoming Dance this year. I won’t play Powder Puff football when I’m a sophomore. Nobody’s going to invite me to the Junior Prom. My parents are the only ones who’ll clap when I pick up my diploma at commencement. And in the meantime, I’ll spend every day like a fat, female Rambo—a freakylooking, traumatized veteran of countless unwinnable battles.

And you know why, right?

Because people are the same wherever you go.

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Contributors: Cover Artist: Judi Calhoun majored in Art and English at Palomar College, in San Marcos, California. She studied the pure contour method as well as intensive creative communication discipline under the tutelage of Children’s Book Illustrator, Michael Sternagle and Portrait Artist, Steven Miller. Their substantial training provided Judi with a well-rounded education in both portrait work and illustration.

Some of her paintings have graced the covers of Romance and Fantasy novels, and many of her Watercolor paintings can be found on numerous web magazines, such as Pithy Pages for an Erudite Mind, and Dual Coast Magazine to name only a few.

In 2009, Judi was the winner of the Artist Innovation Award by Art Works, NH and twice commissioned to create a cancellation stamp for the US Postal service. You can view Judi’s work by visiting her website at, http://judiartist2.wix.com/judisartwork.

'Pemi Aguda is an architect during the day. Her short stories have appeared in The Kalahari Review, Prufrock Magazine and The TNC Anthology: These Words Expose Us among others. She tweets at @PemiBetty.

Willow Dawn Becker is a vibrant writer whose nonfiction work has been featured in many education and business publications. Her blog, weirdlittleworlds.com, receives over 10,000 views daily from readers who appreciate unconventional humor and unsettling horror. She is pleased

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to be sharing her first fiction publication with Black Fox Literary Magazine.

Byron Beynon lives in Swansea, Wales. His work has appeared in several publications including Agenda, Poetry Wales, London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Planet and The Human Rights Anthology: In Protest (University of London and Keats House Poets). His most recent collection is The Echoing Coastline (Agenda Editions).

Mandy Alyss Brown is a mother writer in Central Texas, the 2013 recipient of A Room of Her Own Foundation's Tillie Olsen Fellowship, and the author of The Sting (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013). Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Bartleby Snopes, 4'33", Page & Spine, and many more. Mandy currently teaches at an alternative school for high-risk students and loves it!

Read more of her writing at mandyalyssbrown.weebly.com.

Amy Castillo lives and works in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

She is a graduate of Augustana College (SD) and the University of Minnesota Law School. She has previously been published in J. Journal, the Tulane Review, Needle, and Third Coast, among others.

Caty-Scarlett Coleman is a writer from Fredericksburg, Virginia Sonja Condit’s novel, Starter House (Harper Collins) was released in January 2014. She is principal bassoon of the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra, and teaches at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities and at North Greenville University. She has degrees in music from the University of Victoria and New England Conservatory of Music, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College in 2012. With her 250

husband, Dr. Brent Coppenbarger, she wrote and performed on the CD Reeding Time, available on cdbaby.com. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, South Carolina Review, and other publications, and she has recently completed a collection of short stories. She lives and works in Greenville, South Carolina.

Suzanne Rae Deshchidn is a freelance editor who earned her MFA in Poetry from Solstice Creative Writing Program. She completed a Master’s in Creativity Studies at Union Institute where her thesis details her creative process. Suzanne received an Honorable Mention for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, 2015. Suzanne teaches in the English Department at Berkeley College and in the Developmental Studies Department at Passaic County Community College. She has studied primarily with Cornelius Eady, Maria Mazziotti-Gillan, and Laura Boss.

Kiana Donae is the author of her first poetry collection, Love & Ink (self-published). Her poetry has appeared recently in I Am Not A Silent Poet, Second Sight/Insight II art exhibit at Kalamazoo Institute of Art and Black Fox Literary Magazine. She lives in a small town in Southwest Michigan with her family. Please visit her website for more information about her poetry at: kianadonaepoetry.weebly.com or follow her on Twitter: @NakedSoulPoet.

Carolyn D. Elias’ poetry is in the anthology Turn Left at Nowhere: A Century of Morris Poetry. Her work has been published by Lunch Ticket, Apeiron Review, Sassafras Literary Magazine, East Jasmine Review, 1947, Slink Chunk Press, The Tower Journal, Digging Through the Fat, The Magnolia Review, Decades Review and Beakful.

Look for Carolyn's upcoming publications in Ann Arbor 251

Review, HelloHoror, The Voices Project, Poetica Magazine, and Torrid Literature Journal. Follow her on twitter @CarolynDElias and learn more about her at: www.carolyndeliasauthor@squarespace.com.

Shannon Fox has a B.A. in Literature-Writing from UCSan Diego. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in The Copperfield Review, The Fat City Review, Hoot Review, Mania Magazine, and more. Shannon has coauthored an article published in Scientific American Mind Magazine and was an editorial assistant for Teen 2.0 by Dr. Robert Epstein. She was also a research assistant for the recent book, Against Their Will, by Dober, Hornblum, and Newman. Currently, Shannon works in real estate marketing and is an Assistant Editor at Narrative. She also has her own blog, Isle of Books. When not writing, she enjoys reading, riding her horse, hiking, Crossfit, and exploring San Diego.

Dawn Fuller is a Los Angeles writer who grew up in the desolate, desperately hot (Hades-like), and nearly-forgotten Imperial Valley. She currently resides in Los Angeles where she works for the University of California.

Brad Garber lives, writes, hunts for mushrooms and snakes, and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. He fills his home with art, music, photography, plants, rocks, bones, books, good cookin’ and love. He has published poetry in Three and a Half Point 9, Pine + Basil Arts Journal, Red Booth Review, Meat for Tea, Peaches Literary Magazine, The Valley Review, Front Range Review, Spank the Carp, Dirty Chai, Coe Review, Gambling the Aisle, theNewerYork, Ray’s Road Review, The Round Up, Meat for Tea, Gambling the Aisle and other quality publications. He was a 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee.

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David Haight was born in Minneapolis and educated at Hamline University where he received a degree in English and Philosophy, and later an MFA in Writing. He was distinguished by the Quay W. Grigg award for Excellence in Literary Study. He published his first novel Overdrive in 2006, his second Me and Mrs. Jones in 2012 and he recently finished a collection of short stories. He lives in the Twin Cities with his wife Lynn.

David Klugman is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Program (1983), and has been a practicing psychoanalyst for the past 25 years. His poems have recently appeared in Empty Sink, Postcard Poems and Prose and Foliate Oak. He works in Nyack, NY, where he lives with his wife and his daughter.

Eva Langston received her MFA from the University of New Orleans, and her fiction has been published in The Normal School and the GW Review, among others. She is a regular contributor for Burlesque Press and the Carve Magazine blog. She recently obtained representation from Conville & Walsh Literary Agency. For now she works as a Skype tutor for Ukrainians and a college mentor for dyslexic students. Follow her adventures at inthegardenofeva.com or on Twitter: @eva_langston.

Gabe Russo is a filmmaker and writer living in Melbourne, FL. He's currently working on his first feature length screenplay.

Zvi A. Sesling has published poetry in numerous magazines both in print and online in the United States, Great Britain, New Zealand, Canada and Israel. Among the publications are: Ibbetson St., Midstream, Poetica,The Deronda Review, Voices Israel, Saranac Review, New 253

Delta Review, Plainsong, Asphodel, Haz Mat Review, Istanbul Literary Review, among others. He was awarded Third Place (2004) and First Prize (2007) in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition and was a finalist in the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Chapbook Contest. In 2008 he was selected to read his poetry at New England/Pen “Discovery� by Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. He was a featured reader in the 2010 Jewish Poetry Festival in Brookline, MA. He is a regular reviewer for the Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene and he edits the Muddy River Poetry Review. Sesling is publisher of Muddy River Books.

He is author of King of the Jungle, (Ibbetson St., 2010), which has been nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award and the chapbook, Across Stones of Bad Dream (Cervana Barva, 2011) and a second full length poetry book, Fire Tongue to be published by Cervena Barva Press.

Nathaniel Sverlow is a freelance writer of poetry and prose. He was born in 1983 in San Diego, California and moved to Northern California at the age of three. Since then, he has graduated from Sacramento State University and spends most of his time hunched over his computer hunting the Word. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beyond Reality Zine, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Literary Orphans, and Map Literary. He currently resides in the Sacramento area with four roommates, three cats, and one incredibly supportive girlfriend.

Aiden Thomas is a current graduate student at Mills College working on her MFA in Creative Writing. She writes stories of suspense, mystery and creative nonfiction.

In her free time enjoys drinking black coffee and reading the latest young adult fiction.

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Allison Thorpe is the author of Thoughts While Swinging a Wild Child in a Green Mesh Hammock (Janze Publications), Swooning and Other Art Forms (a NFSPS chapbook winner), What She Sees: Poems for Georgia O'Keefe (forthcoming from White Knuckle Press), and To This Sad and Lovely Land (runner-up in 2014 Gambling the Aisle Chapbook Contest).

Recent work appears or is forthcoming in South85 Journal, Scapegoat Review, The Meadow, The Citron Review, Clapboard House, Appalachian Heritage, Front Range Review, Green Mountains Review, Trickster, Freshwater, Clapboard House, Third Wednesday, Appalachian Heritage, Agave Magazine, Still: The Journal, Naugatuck River Review, and Motif v4 - seeking its own level: an anthology of writings about water, among others. A Pushcart nominee, she is currently working on her first novel.

Doug Van Hooser lives and writes in Chicago and southern Wisconsin. He is a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists Theatre. His plays have been read there and at 3 Cat Productions. His short fiction recently appeared in The Riding Light Review and his poetry in the Stoneboat Literary Journal.

Daniel von der Embse was born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, and graduated from Ashland University with a B.A. degree in Theatre. He began writing poetry after a career as an award-winning copywriter for advertising agencies in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco. His poems appear in The Missing Slate, Penny Ante Feud, Harpoon Review, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and Poetry Quarterly.

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Francine Witte is a poet and fiction writer. Her poetry chapbooks are, First Rain and Only, Not Only. Her flash fiction chapbooks are, The Wind Twirls Everything and Cold June. She lives in Manhattan and is an English teacher.

Geenie Yourshaw is a poet and visual artist living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, kids and dogs. Her raw, honest writing style reflects the reality of life.

Thank you for reading! Stay in touch: www.blackfoxlitmag.com Website www.facebook.com/blackfoxlit Facebook @blackfoxlit Twitter & Instagram

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