Blood Lotus #18 by Blood Lotus Journal

Issue #18, November 2010

Apples by Yari Beno

In This Issue... Letter from the Editors

Poems

Photo by Yari Beno

Vero Gonzalez

On How to Break the First Commandment

Feng Sun Chen

Inter

Lucian Mattison

The Hunger Artist

Katie Przybylski

Shell Ethics

Marit Ericson

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d Hoped for Not-Idaho, But Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll See What Happens

anne rice krispies (or my body is no good without yours)

Mike Lewis-Beck

German Hotel Breakfast

Elsbeth Wofford Tyler

Bone Fruit

Michael Zinkowski

To the Preservation of (a series) Clean, Clean Yards

Melissa Carroll

Panning for Stars

The Gray Area

Photo by Yari Beno

Anastacia Marx de Salcedo

One Cup Hunger-Striking Prisoners, Two Cups Crazy Cuban Bloggers

Fiction

Photo by Yari Beno

Teresa Milbrodt

Larissa Loses Her Job (A Lament in Three Parts)

Nicholas Peruzzi

Nicholas Thurkettle

The Culling of the Beige

A.L. Yoder

Cellular Devices

Contributor Bios

Dear readers, We hope you brought your appetite! BL #18 is a literary buffet of awesome, our final harvest of such in 2010. Preemptive apologies if any of the deliciousness oozes out onto your keyboards. As you click-flip through this issue, take note of what photographer Yari Beno sees when he looks at food—the colors, textures, light, placement or arrangement, and utter essence of the red of an apple or bottle of Tabasco sauce, the curve of a spoon, the shape and shadow of a pear. This visual precision bleeds right out of Yari‟s photos and into this issue‟s writing. Poet Vero Gonzalez opens #18 with her poem “On How to Break the Third Commandment,” the defiant “blasphem[ing]” of a woman who refuses to swallow what she‟s being fed. Even if you like “deep-friend sweet plantains,” Gonzalez can convince you, in meandering lines that make use of much of the space of their page, that they‟ll “bleed in your mouth.” Feng Sun Chen‟s “Inter” is a mosaic of food images that are the speaker‟s cling-to-life reckoning with impending illness and fear of death. Chen reports that an x-ray is “foggy like shark fin soup,” and a morning sky is “a cold lemon brow…stretch[ing] tight.” Lucian Mattison‟s speaker in “The Hunger Artist” has gone “forty-five days without food,” and all around him are distressed. He is carried off and set before a table, presumably to be force-fed, when out of his mouth spill “hot honey and nougat.” Real nourishment, Mattison shows us, comes from within, and art can sustain. In “Shell Ethics,” Katie Przybylski tells us of a boy who “comes to suck the ocean dry,” swallows it up nonchalantly, then warns when he‟s going to let it out again: “You should run.” Marit Ericson, in “I‟d Hoped for Not-Idaho, But We‟ll See What Happens,” employs food images as adjectives—the world with “her apple-fed lips”—and as emblems of the speaker‟s station in life—“If I age enough to retire, I shall…subsist on free / cheese cubes from the supermarket before they ask // me politely to leave.” The poem ends, “Any morning will tell me what to have done”; Nicholas Peruzzi‟s poem picks up in the morning to finish “the job / you, last night, started.” The poem is the cleverly titled “anne rice krispies (or my body is no good without yours),” and comes with its (demon?) lover demands to “devour me for breakfast” and “tattoo your teeth marks.” For a more traditional meal, Mike Lewis-Beck offers up “German Hotel Breakfast,” a poem that examines how accurately and precisely the sensory perceptions of food can conjure memories: “Spreading cherry jam on a braided bread slice / a woman walks toward me, wet short hair in jeans, // tall. She does not see me.” We know LewisBeck‟s speaker is not remembering a mere meal. Nor is Elsbeth Wofford Tyler‟s “Bone Fruit” relaying a happy union when she personifies a bride and groom as a “cold arranged / still life, an apple sliced, pale meat // exposed.” Tyler‟s description of the wedding dress as “old bone, buried // in backyard Georgia clay” is, however, a nice segue into Michael Zinkowski‟s telling of two parents who “were tireless diggers,” their shovels growing “dull carving their mid 30‟s // into one new project after another” to make a suburban life for themselves. “To the Preservation of (a series): Clean, Clean Yards” begins with a sip of iced coffee and ends with a sip of white zinfandel, is framed by recognizable beverages which denote drinkers as not too poor and not too rich. From “white zinfandel” to “convenience store wine / from 4

paper cups,” Zinkowski‟s poem leads into Melissa Carroll‟s “Panning for Stars,” into self-conscious early love, the speaker‟s object of affection “a fresh pear plucked.” But love nonetheless, or “something / like love.” The piece for this issue‟s Gray Area (with its appropriate cover art of Beno‟s photo “Dinner for Everyone” spelling “love” in alphabet soup) is unlike anything we‟ve ever published. It is part political journalism, part memoir, interwoven with Cuban cultural history, anchored in food-as-commodity and food-you-should-be-eating— which you can, because food writer Anastacia Marx de Salcedo ends her piece with a recipe. A sprinkling of deliciously self-aware parentheticals, more than a generous helping of humor, and a dash of sarcastic cultural critique, the author shakes AND stirs by telling of political prisoners and hunger strikes and directly addressing Castro: “There‟s a virtual Cuba lurking out there in cyberspace, waiting for the day when yours—eventually, inevitably—collapses.” The recipe for Moros y Cristianos is gastronomic diplomacy: “bluntly racial,” she tells us, “But when you make it right— reducing the bean cooking liquid until it‟s thicker than blood—the colors all blend into each other.” In “One Cup Hunger-Striking Prisoners, Two Cups Crazy Cuban Bloggers,” de Salcedo shows us good food knows no bounds. For a third course, we‟re offering you a trio of fiction confections. We start with dark humor, which cleanses your palate for the bizarre. Teresa Milbrodt‟s main character in “Larissa Loses Her Job (A Lament in Three Parts)” is a newly out-of-work woman who dresses up like the Virgin Mary, mouths off, buys coffee for homeless people, and chews too many gumballs. The story is indeed a lament—Larissa justifies her attempts to declare herself dead by protesting, “there are many ways I am buried alive: health insurance claims, credit card bills, forms to show I have no job, all these mounds of paper cascading over my body, a figurative death or death by figures…” In 2010 America, how many can claim the same distress? Nicholas Thurkettle‟s “The Culling of the Beige” begins and ends in a bar, in banality and conformity, in beige. Like Zinkowski‟s poem which uses food imagery to ground a scene, Thurkettle‟s story depicts the watering hole as home base…a home base that is a little too homey for Harmony, whose silent boredom-turned-disgust seems to conjure an unimaginable metamorphosis of epic proportions. From this comically strange world to one with less humor—stark realism in satire will do that—we come to A.L. Yoder‟s “Cellular Devices.” Here, human beings are the meal, being devoured by our own obsessions with technology and the need to be constantly plugged in to something that feeds on our automony, our intelligence, our very existence. And if you‟re still hungry after all that, then go fix yourself a snack. Enjoy #18! The Editors

#18 Poems

Last Harvest by Yari Beno

Vero Gonzalez ON HOW TO BREAK THE THIRD COMMANDMENT I don‟t like sweet plantains/sweet young girls—with their eyes rolling back, drops of hot oil on their tongues the only sensual touch they‟ve known. I blaspheme; prefer my starches savory, my company un-. When I throw my hands up and say, ¡Ay, Virgen de los Piononos! (Oh, Virgin of the Battered— and Deep-Fried Sweet Plantains Stuffed with Ground Beef and Cheese), my eyes stay facing forward, mouth dry. Old ladies say it too, hands in the air at the road-side/beach-side stand. It‟s okay then. Their faith keeps this island afloat and no one would question their appetites—viejos in guayaberas still following them around. We blaspheme? Her face shows up—everywhere but/ everywhere but here making the Six O‟Clock News: What holds a face better? A greasy snack— a stained glass window. Prayer by chewing—try doing that with a communion wafer. They say it bleeds in your mouth—

Feng Sun Chen INTER The doctor gave me a ladle and said have some while it‟s still hot then I understood why the x-ray was horizontal. It was foggy like shark fin soup. I took in the universal deepness of light tables, settled square suns. Light can be brittle, light can be thick, light can see through the solid lake of the body. So is this where the trouble is? Little gumdrop fairies have camped out in the Forest of Alveoli. Yes, said the doctor, but you see, that is not the important part. The X isn‟t there. X is where the treasure is. I‟m a firm believer in material value, he said, everything meaningful is solid. I had some light soup and left. My friends tell me I am eating myself, and they are right. Only a friend can be so insightful. They surround me like trees scattering coins of sun from their hair. They are jealous of the new Lilliputians living inside my body. It is almost spring and the red lung garden is sprouting. Little tangles and subways run frenzied through the new cities. The red frog that lives in the center ribbits, faster and slower, slower then faster. He means to say they too want light. They are confused about the mark. They are confused about the loot. My friends dance until they vomit. They are caught up in the integrity of the body. I think it is sweet how the flesh curdles. What about your dreams? they ask. I have dreamed of this, I say. The morning increases in urgency and the cold lemon brow of the sky stretches tight. Soon there will be rupture. My friends are radiant. There was never the time to think about transcendence. It is easy to give back what I never had.

Lucian Mattison THE HUNGER ARTIST Forty-five days without food, he rests on hay from the menagerie. The people gather as the doctor takes measurements; he looks so savage, even when asleep. It is official, he is only the bones. The results are bleated out of megaphones and two lucky young ladies come to fetch him. The man is encased in his art; the gristle of his gums is white and his reprimanding mouth seems to ask, why stop after only 45? Thrift is twined up his cage door, joists of celebratory sea pink, tufts of flowers, low-lying muffs of petals, fluttering down to the feet of the artist. Unable to stand on his own, he is carried out by his sleeves. His body in a physical abyss, his toes kick up petals. The crowds mutter ventriloquial wisps counting his ribs and teeth, awed by the arch of his back, his scapulae like wings. He is sat down, his gaze fixed on the table, and then on a bowl steaming into his face. Hot honey and nougat spill from the poetâ&#x20AC;&#x;s lips, he is spitting it out.

Katie Przybylski SHELL ETHICS The little boy that comes to suck the ocean dry picks each question up like an oyster shell, his feet scooping small hills of sand as he runs, lopsided, the ocean rushing in his stomach. He stacks the shells in a pyramid on the high shore. He tells me not to touch them yet. How do you hold the ocean in? It‟s like a baby, he says, warm water dribbling from his lips. His face is round. You think I look like a fish? Like a statue of a fish spurting water? A minnow slips out. I‟m going to let the ocean back out now, he says. You should run. The stacked shells shine the same brightness as the sun, their corona blues the sand to a sky. The boy‟s eyes.

Marit Ericson I‟D HOPED FOR NOT-IDAHO, BUT WE‟LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS. I think I‟m doing alright, sure. If I land, I‟ll pause; then play my hip Swedish guitar in a landlocked pocket „til dawn. No blue notes, no worries! No tritone with a cherry on top! Okay, so I can‟t lie very well. At some point, the world will lean in with her apple-fed lips & nudge my letters away. Then? I‟ll have to redress loneliness in echoey dark bars: cling-clank & the ice breaks up like people in relationships—as far as I know. Ugh, I‟m tired and meant to think that part… If I age enough to retire, I shall—I like the sound of that, “I shall”—beach peacefully by the cobalt sea, paint moonrocks with amber, & subsist on free cheese cubes from the supermarket before they ask me politely to leave. Maybe the nights will be softer by then: just a quota of bad news from lingonberry town, a small rush of cares. Any morning will tell me what to have done.

Nicholas Peruzzi ANNE RICE KRISPIES (OR MY BODY IS NO GOOD WITHOUT YOURS)

nibble on my ventricle— a palette tickler. devour me for breakfast; i'm a sallow stickler for finishing the job you, last night, started. tattoo your teeth marks— a gentle reminder. you left me at lunchtime; don't be so resigned, sir! my veins, lonely, sobbed, and then you departed. reopen my wound— a scabby sinner. at dinner, the last meal; pour me some wine here! eternal life and angry mobs— unwanted, this, you imparted.

Mike Lewis-Beck GERMAN HOTEL BREAKFAST A large white bowl, bottomed with pure yogurt. Scooping it up in a silver spoon, a loose pudding. The taste comes back from the Munich youth hostel. My only memory but for the Hofbräu beer mug theft. Plates of cold meats, shades all pink, specked with convincing lard bits, the good lard. A row of cheeses, brick käse from white to gold-yellow. Bread baskets—burdened—brown, black, white chunks and slices, flecked from wheat, or perhaps raisins. Hard-boiled eggs and egg cups. I come for Frederick the Great to visit his Schloss Sanssouci, castle without a care. Alone in the halls, I learn he composed 100 flute sonatas and hear his flute, as I hear her flute. King Frederick cultivated cherries. Spreading cherry jam on a braided bread slice a woman walks toward me, wet short hair in jeans, Tall. She does not see me.

Elsbeth Wofford Tyler BONE FRUIT The bride and groom stand divided down the middle, severed by the cross between them. Its red glass spine washes the room in mutated light, turns her expensive white taffeta dress to old bone, buried in backyard Georgia clay. Carved at the bottom, tender vertebral letters: their names delicious ripe gold. This identity, print embrace unfulfilled by bodies, cold arranged still life, an apple sliced, pale meat exposed.

Michael Zinkowski TO THE PRESERVATION OF (A SERIES…) CLEAN, CLEAN YARDS

When fueled by iced-coffee my parents were tireless diggers, their weekend work hindered only by their share of a million, or so, rocks an ancient glacier abandoned creeping up the continent like a slug. Not that this ever stopped them. Perched on the swing set, I watched every kick to the butt-end of the shovel-blades, worrying that mom‟s handle would collapse in on its duct tape, or dad‟s kneecap might burst colliding with another unaffected rock. Not that this would‟ve stopped them. In fact the blades of my parents‟ shovels grew dull carving their mid 30‟s into one new project after another—a patch of rhododendrons planted, a brick patio arranged for idle furniture, holes dug deep to fit thick cement legs to support a deck, a propane grill, mom and dad, too exhausted to change out of their work clothes, sipping white zinfandel.

Melissa Carroll PANNING FOR STARS We sit on the curb and sip convenience store wine from paper cups, watching stars cartwheel above. I‟m talking too much again, you‟re throwing cigarettes at disinterested pigeons. On the cusp of daybreak we are blossom souls in the gutter, you a fresh pear plucked and me a silver windpipe. How lucky us two, to find each other in the wake of space time, fingers stamped with tar and horizon, the distant galaxy streaking the sky like smoke, all possibility dimmed in this half-morning, all longing drowned in cheap shiraz. I core you whole, taste skin and sweet, we clank against the wind. And when you walk away it isn‟t me trailing you, or my incessant voice pressing your back like a hot lamp asking What now? It‟s only the moon, bald and indifferent. A string of lights, not a metaphor, reaches my apartment to yours across 17th Street. Your balcony now empty, the broken green lawn chair and a pot of ungrown basil on the sill. It could drive me to madness and more shiraz, but there is something like love hidden in concrete groves, there is something like love burning all the houses down on this street. There just might be love up there, sifting stars like chunks of gold high above the crumbling rooftops, far beyond the pigeons‟ sickly coos, where we are forgiven our tempest words, where we are forgiven everything.

#18 Gray Area

Dinner for Everyone by Yari Beno

Anastacia Marx de Salcedo ONE CUP HUNGER-STRIKING PRISONERS, TWO CUPS CRAZY CUBAN BLOGGERS Sofrito A quick-sautéed base made from—in Cuba—oil, garlic, onion, green pepper, oregano and cumin, the sofrito makes everything taste better. Like humor. Joke #1 Fidel Castro is speaking to a crowd in Havana‟s Plaza de la Revolución. "Compañeros," he says. “I‟ve got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?" "The good news, Fidel!" the crowd roars. "The good news is that next year the only thing there will be to eat is shit." A stunned silence falls. Then comes a voice from the audience. "And the bad news, Comandante en Jefe?" "There won't be enough to go around!" Joke #2 Two whores are soliciting johns in Old Havana. Says one, "Times are tough." "Sure are," says the other. "No customers and lots of competition. These days, I'm charging just four pesos for a blow job. How 'bout you?" "Honey, as long as I've got something hot in my belly."' When I first met my husband—both of us journalists in Quito, Ecuador—he loved to repeat these two jokes. Jorge had just left Cuba, which was going through its “Special Period,” the economic freefall that happened after the Soviet Union evaporated, and along with it, cheap oil, a guaranteed market for sugar and tobacco, and flat-out subsidies for its little Caribbean bro. It was the blackest humor I'd ever heard, and I always laughed uproariously. Why not? He did. White Rice Rice rules the Cuban plate, forcing all other flavors to define themselves against it. It arrived with the Spanish (along with cannons, STDs and bureaucracy). Jorge grew up on the libreta, ration booklet plan. His family—two adults, four children—had the dividing thing down. (Even today, I always ask him to serve; who else counts shrimp and asparagus tips?) A cup and a half of rice, a half cup of beans, an egg and a roll that tasted like sand. If you were under seven, milk. Over 16, a pack of cigarettes (special bonus: appetite suppressant!). Enough to avoid starvation, but not enough to fill you. To keep from becoming totally depressed, the family added a dollop of free choice to their dietary misery: Everyone got to steal a little more of their favorite food. Mami, an extra cup of espresso alone in the kitchen. Jorge, bananas 18

Anastacia Marx de Salcedo stuffed into his catcher‟s mitt. Enrique, his older brother, cold black beans right out of the pot. (About now the word embargo has probably popped into your head. Let‟s discuss that right here, within these parentheses, which is all the attention I think it deserves in this piece. If you're liberal, you‟re shouting that US trade sanctions have been a major factor in Cuba's food shortages. Agreed. If you're conservative, you‟re screaming that Cuba's stunted economy is the product of a planned economy. Also agreed. And, even though it‟s technically a non sequitur, I know the next thing you left-leaners are going to say is that Cuba has excellent medical care and education. Agreed. Now that we‟ve got that out of our systems, can we go on?) Jorge‟s family—descended mostly from Spain, comfortable but not rich—were proud supporters of the Revolution. His father (like mine) was a statistician; his grandfather (incredibly, also like mine) a pharmacist. In the late 50s, Papi headed up the statistics department at the Cuban National Bank, which mostly analyzed the sugar industry. He and Mami saved up enough to build a modern dream house—every bedroom with its own bath! built-in living-room aquarium!—in the leafy outskirts of Havana. Like many others, when Fidel Castro overthrew the brutal (1000s killed) Batista dictatorship in 1959, they applauded—and sat back for a long-awaited return to democracy. It didn‟t come. Instead, and in quick succession, came some new laws: private property (businesses, real estate, machinery, commercial vehicles) was confiscated by the state; the economy was nationalized; newspapers were shuttered. Mami received one last visit from the door-to-door Chinese greengrocers, who warned, “Señola, we know communism, and this is communism!” and then decamped to NYC to open one of my all-time fave food phenoms, the Chinese-Cuban restaurant. Over 150,000 people also left, most of them from the whitish middle class, but not Jorge‟s family. His father continued to analyze the sugar industry, now for the Central Planning Committee. If things weren‟t going quite as he‟d imagined, well, he‟d work to change them from within, right? Right? By the time Jorge was born in 1968, Papi had lost his job (he‟d refused to join the Communist Party) and was working as a computer programmer in a dusty office far away from the action. Mami was teaching high school English, a somewhat puzzling vocation given that her command of the language is pretty much limited to “happy birthday!” Jorge and his siblings joined the Communist Pioneers and learned to sing cute little ditties like “Yo quisiera ser como el Ché” (I‟d like to be like Che [Guevara]) and “Él que no brinca es yanqui!” (If you don‟t jump, you‟re a Yankee). For all the little frustrations of daily life—shortages, outages, restrictions, prohibitions—the family, like the rest of the country, learned to resolver, a new Castro-era verb form which means, just fucking deal.

Anastacia Marx de Salcedo In 1989, the classic middle-class lifeboat—family connections—sailed into town: second cousin Julio (Jorge and he share a great-grandmother), head of an Ecuadorian energy company, in Cuba on a junket. After a round of espresso in tiny gold-rimmed cups and Tía This just made partner and Primo That was engaged, he got down to business. "How can I help you?" Jorge jumped in before anyone else could. "Get me out!" He hated it all—the mandatory classes in Elementary Marxism, the fun tobacco-harvesting "summer camp," the neighborhood spies who reported any untoward activities or visitors, the libraries missing large chunks of the Western canon (just for starters: John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell). Three years later, he buckled himself into a clunky Soviet-era Tupelov—the first flight of his life—en route to a job as a newspaper editor at Quito's workingman's tabloid, La Hora. Jorge says that when he looked down through the clouds and saw Cuba disappearing behind him, he felt like a taproot was being ripped out of his body. Black Beans Is there any food more deserving of praise than the stalwart bean, aka "the poor man's meat?” The inky variety adored by Cubans taste of earth and hold their shape to the bitter end. Orlando Zapata Tamayo was exactly the sort of person the Cuban Revolution was supposed to uplift. Born to an Afro-Cuban washerwoman in the hillbilly Oriente, he left school in 9th grade and—stereotype alert!—found his biceps were all he had going for him. For years Zapata worked as a bricklayer, and then moved to Havana where he scored a gig doing construction—digging ditches, pouring concrete, setting rebars. As is traditional in the building trades, he was skilled in the arts of non-verbal persuasion, at one point making an emphatic point on someone‟s skull with a machete. These talents didn‟t go unnoticed; in the early 00s, the Cuban security service recruited him to help keep the streets safe for socialism by harassing dissidents and breaking up illegal political meetings (i.e., any that weren‟t government-approved). When was the last time you truly changed your mind about something? I‟m embarrassed to say, I can‟t think of a single occasion. But Orlando Zapata Tamayo changed his. Radically. At one of the gatherings he was sent to disrupt, he started talking with a human rights activist and abruptly switched sides. Exactly why, no one knows—he was “a man of few words,” according to his mother. But she says he had a strong sense of fairness and had grown disenchanted with the government, which frequently stiffed his pay and fined him for living outside his home province. Zapata joined two illegal opposition groups, Alternative Republican Movement (all political parties except for the Communist Party are illegal in Cuba) and the National Civic Resistance Committee (all NGOs not created by the government are illegal in Cuba). He became a missionary, wandering around in a hand-lettered T-shirt that 20

Anastacia Marx de Salcedo said “¡Vivan los derechos humanos!” and preaching something bigger than resolvering to numb Habaneros. Zapata built up quite the rap sheet; between his street organizing and the deliberately public activities of the democracy movement, he was always butting heads with state security forces. In late 2002, he had a confrontation with police agents who were blocking his access to a human rights meeting in a Havana park and was arrested for desacato, insulting a public official. (In my imagination, I see him waving his fist and yelling the all-purpose Cuban diss "¡Me cago en la madre de Fidel!” but Jorge assures me it was something dignified like “Democracy now!”) He was imprisoned for three months and released. Less than two weeks later, he, along with 74 ultra-dangerous librarians, journalists, bloggers. lawyers and doctors, was arrested again as part of the infamous 2003 Black Spring crackdown. Zapata's crime this time? Participating in a hunger strike to free political prisoners, including Dr. Óscar Elías Biscet, the “Nelson Mandela of Cuba.” His sentence? Three years—which was quickly extended on the inside to 36 for continued acts of “contempt” and “resistance.” The dude was no leader. In a taped interview conducted from prison, he babbles, almost incoherently, filling up 10 minutes with rah-rah movement catchwords and 100s of “¿me entiendes?” (you know?). Maybe that‟s why the Cuban government felt it didn‟t have to take him seriously, refusing to acknowledge his prisoner of conscience status. Or maybe it was because to acknowledge it would be tantamount to admitting that the Revolution had failed among the group which it has always vociferously claimed to champion—poor Afro-Cubans. Whatever. Zapata‟s protestations grew louder, and after six years—six years in which he was allegedly humiliated, interrogated, beaten and tortured—he had had enough. On December 3, 2009, Orlando Zapata Tamayo began a hunger strike denouncing prison conditions— food, sanitary facilities, medical treatment, physical abuse by guards. The Cuban government ignored him. And then, when he was already weakened from months of starvation, it denied him water for 18 days and he went into kidney failure. He died on February 23rd, 2010. Moros y Cristianos The name of Cuba's hallmark dish is bluntly racial, referring to the centuries-long struggle between Islam (black) and Christianity (white) for Spain. But when you make it right—reducing the bean cooking liquid until it’s thicker than blood—the colors all blend into each other. In 1998, I went to Cuba so my in-laws could meet their granddaughter, then a toddler, and me. When I got there, Mami and I stuffed the ancient refrigerator so full that the freezer rained fish fillets and round steaks every time you opened the door. We bought some of the provisions on the black market; others from the “Shopping,” a 21

Anastacia Marx de Salcedo US-style supermarket, where things were sold in dollars so only foreigners or Cubans with money from abroad could shop there. Every day Mami got up at 6 am to start the almuerzo, which she cooked on a two-burner hot plate. Her food was what processed food aspires to—mild, crunchy meat or fish; white rice over which, like a dry martini, she had muttered the word ajo; tender black, red or garbanzo beans in thick sauce. Not my kind of cooking, but it explained why, when my husband did the shopping, he always came back with chicken nuggets, canned soup and instant pudding. Childhood. “Mami,” I asked her, “Would you please write down Jorge‟s favorite dishes for me?” When I got back to the States, I read Mami‟s recipes—recorded in a tiny, neat script that started straight but then climbed desperately up the right margin—many times. ("The secret to good beans is the soaking and a long, slow cooking, but if they're hard, a teaspoon of baking soda when they start to boil will soften them right up....") But I didn‟t make a single one. Pulverized, tinned herbs; canned produce; militant blender use; indiscriminate breading; a fairly serious commitment to frying—they were the antithesis of everything I‟d learned about food and cooking in twenty years of reading books, magazine and websites; going to restaurants; traveling in Europe and Latin America; and home-cooked meals with food-forward friends. These recipes had probably been the height of sophistication in 1950s Cuba, before the Revolutionary gates had clanged shut on the free flow of information. But like bodacious Chevys, the fact that Cuban women still do all the housework, and quaint 19th-century ideas about the proletariat, they were historical relics. And who wants to eat that? (Wondering how you block out the world for 50 years? Step aboard my magic carpet and we‟ll fly to Havana… I hereby declare you an honorary Cuban citizen! First of all, you aren't reading this because there's no home Internet access and most of the Web is blocked at work (enforcement is easy since the state is the only employer). That's fine, you'll just call or text a friend on your cell phone? I regret to inform you that— except for those with very rich relatives abroad—most Cubans don't have these “capitalist luxuries,” which easily cost more than a year‟s salary—not including monthly service. But no worries, there's still television, and you can choose from all of two state-run channels! Or, if you've a more literary bent, the state-run newspaper Granma (for the full-on Cuban lifestyle, recycle this afterwards as toilet paper). Outta here? Oops, did I forget to mention that you can‟t leave without government permission? Enjoy your stay!) Those gates are crumbling now. Computers, Internet access and cell phones may be harder to come by in Cuba, but come by them people do, especially the younger generation. (My 24-year-old nephew has a FaceBook account on which he does what most 24-year-olds do: post sexy pictures of himself, incessantly update the world about his doings and promiscuously friend people.) A small group of intrepid dissidents, such as the internationally acclaimed Yoani Sánchez, is blogging about 22

Anastacia Marx de Salcedo daily life on the island. They visit hotels or Internet cafés (which, because they cater to foreigners, have an uncensored connection to the electronic umbilical cord) to post, scan comments, download email. Abroad, hundreds of exile bloggers in the US, Europe and Latin America closely monitor the situation there, and provide realtime coverage for Cuba‟s repression of its citizens. (Linked here for your viewing pleasure: street scenes of Cuban security forces breaking up the peacefully protesting Ladies in White, female relatives of political prisoners.) The Castro regime calls its critics and opponents gusanos, worms. For Jorge, given the amount of sunlight he gets these days, the description isn‟t entirely inaccurate. What I see most of is his back silhouetted against his computer screen, enclosed in a nimbus of pinging emails, staccato typing and “Moonlight” Sonata ringtones. (“¿Qué bolá, broder?") A couple of years ago, he started a poetry blog that somehow morphed into… A launchpad for cyber-assaults on the Cuban government. Last fall, he and a merry band of fellow bloggers ran a successful Internet campaign to free an AfroCuban alcoholic arrested for saying—while totally shitfaced—that there's hunger in Cuba, a snippet of which ended up being seen by over half a million YouTube viewers. But that was just the beginning. After Orlando Zapata Tamayo died, Jorge organized an online petition to free Cuba's estimated 200 political prisoners. Over 52,000 people from 110 countries signed, including 2000 from within the island. Fidel, Raúl, you been served! There‟s a virtual Cuba lurking out there in cyberspace, waiting for the day when yours—eventually, inevitably—collapses. From an April 2010 note from Mami: “Thanks to you, I‟m doing fine. I really appreciate what you sent because it was looking pretty black. Here, if you don‟t have that [remittances], there‟s no getting by. You don‟t have any idea. Some day, if we see each other again, I‟ll tell you.” Postscript: On July 7, 2010, shortly after this essay was written, the Cuban government promised the Catholic Church that it would release all 52 of the remaining political prisoners from the Black Spring crackdown. As of November 7, 2010, 39 of those had been freed and exiled to Spain. There are still over 100 other political prisoners languishing behind bars. Recipe: Moros y Cristianos This recipe is meatless; I prefer it that way, as I think those little nuggets of ham or sausage detract from the less flashy but deeply satisfying flavor of the rice and beans. 2 Tb olive oil 3-6 cloves garlic, minced 1 large white or yellow onion, diced 1 large green pepper, diced

Anastacia Marx de Salcedo 2-3 sprigs fresh oregano (if you buy these, trying freezing them and crumbling them into food as needed) 1-2 bay leaves 1 tsp cumin 1/4 tsp cinnamon 1 cup black beans (homemade or canned; if the former, drain and reserve the cooking liquid to add color to the dish) 2 cups white or brown Basmati rice (not traditional, but I like the slightly firmer texture) 3 (for white rice) to 5 (for brown) cups bean cooking liquid plus water or water alone Sauté the garlic, onion and pepper in the olive oil over medium-low heat. When they‟re soft, mix in the oregano, bay leaf, cumin, cinnamon and salt. Add beans, folding them in gently (so you don‟t break them) with a large spoon. Add rice, folding again until everything is uniformly distributed. Add liquid. If you have homemade beans, use a mixture of reserved bean cooking liquid and water. If not, just add water. Increase heat to medium high. Allow to reach a low boil and cook until craters begin to form on the top. Reduce heat to low and cover pot. Cook for additional twenty minutes or more until rice is done. It‟s fine if there is a little extra liquid; moros y cristianos (and other Cuban mixed rice dishes) should be served enchumbado, a little soupy.

#18 Fiction

Nine Things and Tongs by Yari Beno

Teresa Milbrodt LARISSA LOSES HER JOB (A LAMENT IN THREE PARTS) Part 1: The Gumball Machine I steal the gumball machine after I‟m fired from the hardware store for being one employee too many, but it wasn‟t one of those Kiwanis or Humane Society or Help Small Children with Cancer charity machines—I have morals, I have scruples, I don‟t steal quarters meant for sick kittens—no, my boss bought the machine so he could stand by the register chomping gumballs and eyeing middle-aged women‟s asses like the piece of shit he is, and he shouldn't be working in a hardware store because he couldn‟t tell a flat head screwdriver from a Phillips head and wouldn‟t know a hex wrench if it bit him in the ass, he wouldn‟t even know a hex wrench can‟t bite him in the ass, but my ex-boyfriend was good with tools and taught me how to pick crappy locks with a few paper clips and a screwdriver, so at eleven at night I drive to the hardware store and in five minutes I‟m hefting that bubblegum machine into the trunk of my station wagon and waiting for the newspaper headlines tomorrow morning because stealing money doesn‟t get attention but stealing a bubblegum machine makes people sit up and say Hey, what the hell, because I left the cash register untouched, because this is a measure reserved for desperate times, because when the gum machines start disappearing, something is fucking wrong with the universe. I heard about this guy in New York who got fired from a pet shop because he stole a shark, scooped it from the tank and hid it under his trenchcoat and walked back oh-so-casually to his apartment aquarium, and he is something that is fucking wrong with the universe, so while I drive home from the store with the bubblegum machine in the back of my station wagon I know I am not that crazy. It takes seven minutes and another couple paperclips to get all the change out of the machine and buy myself bubblegum, so I sit in my apartment chewing all night, a jobless statistic with a bubblegum machine, and half of all store theft is by employees and I used to wonder how they could do it but now I know they are like me, have piece of shit jobs and piece of shit wages and that colander in aisle three looks pretty good and so do a few cans of soup. Gumballs are sweet for the first five minutes but they get hard and tough and rubbery and a lot of things in life are like this—jobs and love and home repair projects—so I stick the used gum under my Salvation Army coffee table that‟ll go back to the Salvation Army someday, and when I bought the table there was chewed gum underneath already so it‟s a good place for my new gum to be, all soft and sugarless, and it‟s eight in the morning, fifty gumballs chewed, and the people outside my apartment walk to and from jobs they do or do not have and I want to say fuck you and drop my wad of gum out the window, but I don‟t because the world is not their fault and I am not a bad person, but what will I do when I run out of gumballs, when the coffee table is three feet off the floor on this massive gum wad and I have no more quarters?

Teresa Milbrodt Part 2: Communing With the Virgin Three days after I lose my job I decide everyone needs more miracles, so I dress up as Virgin Mary in a white head scarf and blue silky dress and yellow cardboard halo behind my head like a huge lemon drop and I stand on the street corner, not speaking or holding signs because I don‟t know what Mary would say if she were around, but I want people to go home and tell their husbands and wives and assorted domestic partners, Hey, guess what I saw on the street corner today, but even miracles need a bathroom break so I duck into this coffee shop and it‟s like people assume the Virgin never had to take a leak, I come out of the restroom and these two ladies gape like I‟m a sacrilege and I smile beneficently because people see Jesus and Mary everywhere—camouflaged on moth wings in Texas, fried into French toast in Florida, blessing drywall in Alabama—so you‟d think the general public would be used to it by now. I return to my street corner and dispense miracles: some people sneer, some ask for prayers, some ask what the hell I‟m doing, some give me quarters so I buy coffee, stand in line behind women with briefcases and men with bad ties and the coffee shop guy tries to hit on me after I order four cups of the house blend: So I hear you’re a virgin, he says. Go to hell, I say. Can you say that? he says. I just did, I say, then I get my four coffees and find homeless people to share them with because I‟m thinking What would Mary do, and I sit with the homeless people on a bench in the park: the schizo man who lost his job because he wouldn‟t take his meds and says angels and devils give him lotto numbers, the teenage kid who ran away from home because he‟s gay and his parents can‟t deal, the middleaged woman who divorced her husband, lost her job and her apartment, and salvaged just enough pride not to call her friends and ask for help. I give them all coffee and say that I love them. I ask if there is anything they want to be forgiven for and they say no and since I‟m in a forgiving mood I forgive myself in reverse chronological order for stealing the bubblegum machine and cheating on my last boyfriend and what happened on the way to my dental appointment five years ago: While driving to my six-month checkup the car in front of me was going slow and I hate being late so I sped up to pass and hit the row of ducks in the other lane—a mama duck and her five baby ducks—I counted them, there was enough time to do that but not enough time to hit the brakes and I felt the sick thump but I had to keep driving, I had an appointment to keep. I haven‟t thought of the ducks in a long time, start crying in my coffee, but the homeless people comfort me, give me clean paper napkins for my eyes, It’s okay, they say, you didn’t know, they say, we forgive you, and my lemon drop halo is wilting so I straighten it and thank them and return to the street corner where people need miracles and give me quarters for them.

Teresa Milbrodt Part 3: Revised Standard Mortality Rates A week of unemployment and I have no money, no job, no calls on my voice mail, and I ask what reason there is to go on living because research studies show that everything will kill me: chemicals in water, mercury in fish, grilled meats, potato chips, too much sugar, too much alcohol, too many pesticides, and the constant stress of worrying that everything will kill me. The next step is easy, why not speed up the process, so I visit the office on Main Street, the Association of Dead People. A short black-haired man sits behind the desk, seems too animated to be dead. I want to join, I say. Who decided you were dead, he says. Me, I say. He says it‟s not that easy, death is a matter of paperwork glitches and filing snafus, the association helps people prove they‟re alive. You have no idea how hard it is, he says. You look alive to me, I say. Biologically yes, he says, technically no. Go dance on someone’s desk, I say, make them give you a life certificate, I say. He shakes his head, tells me he‟s tried to prove his life status by running for office, filing lawsuits, and getting arrested. Nothing has worked, he says, I am officially dead. Is it worth the hassle to prove you're conscious? I say. Death has benefits, you can still vote in urban areas, you don’t have to get up early in the morning. He leads me to a conference room full of the technically dead, a support group, we drink coffee with powdered creamer, eat day-old donuts, everyone explains where they are in their paperwork, the next steps they must take to be acknowledged, and I expect their hands will go through mine when we shake, but they don‟t. I want to be dead, I say, how do you manage it? I think the secret is not breathing for a long time, says the woman beside me, but I’ve never tried it. I sip my coffee, think of George Washington who feared being buried alive because back then doctors sometimes missed life signs and lowered false corpses into graves, but there are many ways I am buried alive: health insurance claims, credit card bills, forms to show I have no job, all these mounds of paper cascading over my body, a figurative death or death by figures, and this room full of un-dead dead is another place of waiting, like the line in the emergency room, like the line at the unemployment office, like the line panhandling across the bridge, everyone wanting to be named instead of counted, wanting to be looked in the eye and told Congratulations, you’re alive.

Nicholas Thurkettle THE CULLING OF THE BEIGE If there was one thing she was sick of, it was these dweeb assholes in the blue-button shirts and khakis. They drank together in clusters—consultants, software engineers, tech support people. Pink men with puffy little faces and puffy little stomachs, phones clipped to their belts, night after night striding meekly into her bar. Why did they all have to order light beer; or, when their company had a good day and they finally felt the smallest drip of testosterone in the blood, whatever cheap import was on the ascent this year? Why, when so many hadn‟t yet crested 35, did they seem so sedate and settled? And why did they all have to wear that outfit: blue above the waist, a crisp, medium-to-dark blue; and below the waist—beige? Wherefore beige? Harmony hadn‟t wanted to hate these men. Not a one of them had ever done her wrong. They passed through this hotel for a day or two, and in the evening they‟d make non-threatening conversation at an easy volume, leave at a sensible hour, tip reliably. And then, she imagined, they‟d fly coach class seats on an average airline home, and maybe those outfits weren‟t really separate pieces, but peeled off all in one like their daytime skin, and they removed them, and turned their tasteful lamp discreetly off and made adequate love to their acceptable wives. Fuck. Harmony took this job because she was good at mixing drinks, and because at a posh stop like this she was less likely to end up mixing drinks for jackasses like, well, the one she‟d been married to for five years. But these clogging, inoffensive, satisfied-with-their-lot men bothered her. Their immaculate and unchallenging politeness affronted her, disrespected her. Some nights there would be only one or two. But then some convention would come to town, and the bar would just spill over with them, their blabber full of numbers and acronyms and careful laughs, and those were the nights when the fabric of her shirt itched the worst, when she could feel the waistband of her prim black vest digging into her sides. She practiced squinting. Harmony found this a useful way to wile through the hours. Just squint and let the dark corners of the room swell, let the lights blur outward and hide the khaki-d men in their coronas. Who needed open eyes for this job? They‟d never order anything complicated anyway. They‟d never need a round of three-layer shots and a girl who knew how to serve them with a little sass. There were four tables of them, tonight, a high volume with no convention to speak of. She suds-ed out glasses and squinted with all her might. The song on the radio was the song that had played in the tattoo parlor the day Harmony had a lyre etched into the flesh on the small of her back. Her manager didn‟t like that tattoo—no ma‟am. Baseball played on the TV, and the tension was boiling with only two or three thousand games left in the season… And then there was a great cracking sound, and splintered wood, shattered glass, the hwhooshing of a fierce wind, and pathetic screams.

Nicholas Thurkettle Harmony opened her eyes. Table #4, by the pillar, was collapsing in on itself, as if a tiny black hole had opened up in the centerpiece. No, the hole was in the floor. A perfect black circle. The table, the bottles of light beer, the coasters, the pretzels, they were being sucked down into this hole. The men in the blue-button shirts and khakis, they were also being sucked down into this hole. They clawed and strained, digging their nails into the tasteful carpet, praying for a sudden usefulness in their biceps. Praying to Jesus or the 1-800 help line to pull them from this abyss. Their eyes popped and their tongues flailed, but they did not save themselves. And quick as you please, they and all their belongings vanished into the depths. No one in the bar turned a head. No manager scurried in to soothe nerves. No nerves needed soothing. There were no special bulletins on the television about recently-discovered tears in the fabric of reality. The men were just gone. The table under the ugly painting of hunters was the next to go. The group here had an especially fat one in their midst, his shirt could have tented Boy Scouts. Again the table crushed itself, again the hole in the ground, again that futile struggle for life, every wireless device on their person useless to them now. Over in seconds, and no remarks from the crowd. A woman who may or may not have been an expensive prostitute casually ordered a Southern Comfort, to be charged to the gentlemanâ&#x20AC;&#x;s tab. Harmony wondered if those sucking voids in the floor should be roped off. She was still trying to summon up appropriate levels of shock and pity when the other two tables of pink-blue-beige men dropped one after the other. Each time, after the cacophony, the final sound of each collapse was a punctual thwip!; like space and time sucking up a strand of spaghetti. Wherever the holes went, they were too deep to remember any screams. The song on the radio switched to something soothing, with horns. The holes in the floor closed up, leaving nothing but clean wood and carpet. Harmony searched every pair of eyes in the room for another witness. But everyone droned on with their conversations and negotiations. That vacationing couple was still scowling silently, because coming down here from their room had failed to make them love each other again. Her fellow bartender was still measuring his sideburns in the mirror. And now there was a new sound, a steady, muffled clop; heavy and arrhythmic. Getting closer. Harmony had a new customer. This one just kept being unusual with every detail she noticed. Almost eight feet tall. Noble and square face. Broad chest. No clothes. Four legs. Thick brown coat of hair below the waist. Black tail. Of all the bad jokes Harmony had ever heard, sheâ&#x20AC;&#x;d never heard the one that starts with a centaur walking into a bar.

Nicholas Thurkettle But that‟s what he undeniably was. Hooves instead of toes. Muscles everywhere. Wild and untamed hairdo. He smelled like dark soil that had a thousand things living in it. The Old Spice people would murder children to have the formula for a scent like this. It took an embarrassingly small amount of time for Harmony to consider the mechanics of fucking the centaur. The centaur spoke English, but she didn‟t recognize the drink he was ordering. Her lips and tongue were half-limp, she couldn‟t stop staring at him. Finally, she apologized, said they didn‟t carry his request. His eyes flashed displeasure, but he ordered a pitcher of their darkest beer. He grasped it in a giant hand like a regular mug, then strode casually over to the dartboard and made six dart-sized holes in the wall. She had completely forgotten to ask if he wanted to open a tab. He didn‟t have anywhere apparent to carry a wallet—oh, wait, there was a tough leather pouch slung across a shoulder by his waist. Runes were carved on it, perhaps the centaur word for Burberry. Harmony‟s jaw looked like it was trying to convince the rest of her head that the floor would be a very nice place to be right now. A second centaur came in now, and roared in greeting to the other. This one was shorter, wider, more pugnacious in bearing. He bounded across the room to the first, and both reared up and boxed with their front hooves, which then came cracking down onto the floor. This play melee resulted in a broken vase, three spilled drinks and a neon sign falling off the wall. They ordered two more pitchers of beer. Harmony was good enough at her job to recognize members of any species who have decided to stay for awhile. *** The next two years of Harmony‟s life were a thrill. The centaurs were everywhere now; trampling into City Council meetings to speak out against development of green space, recording albums that brought the edge and ambition back to rock and roll, and founding small businesses that brought well-paying manufacturing jobs into urban centers again. Thundering hooves were the answer to housing discrimination in more than one neighborhood. Wall Street was doing tumble-flops, everyone wanted to invest in these booming centaur-owned companies, only none of them went public. Instead, graying assholes in expensive suits wrote best-selling advice books about “The Centaur Method”, which contained the same twaddle as their previous advice books, and saw their per-hour consulting rates double. The cable news channels nattered endlessly, and pleaded with any centaur they could find to come join a thriving round-table discussion with an investment fund manager, the as-yet un-indicted CEO of a bankrupt transnational, and a representative of PETA. But every centaur invited to appear on television did the

Nicholas Thurkettle same thing—gave a haughty, booming laugh, galloped into the nearest bar and started singing songs and breaking windows. Harmony became expert at making centaur drinks, which were heavy and pungent, and if you weighed less than five hundred pounds a single one would put you under the table for the whole weekend. You‟d wake up on Monday morning in a pool of sweat, recalling strange dreams about hunting the Great Boar. These beasts worked hard, and played hard—the revenues at her bar shot up so high they could easily afford the new concrete reinforcements. Trivia night was cancelled indefinitely, and on some nights the sing-a-longs lasted until four. Good sense came over her and she never bedded one of them, but you heard stories. Doctors and nurses were telling morbid anecdotes about new categories of emergency room visits. Then the female centaurs appeared and all that stopped; instead everyone got distracted by the multitude of challenges to local indecent exposure laws. Harmony had four songs written in her honor, a record in her town, and her tips skyrocketed. She made a down payment on a house, got a business degree of her own and partnered with a former parks administrator and a Wiccan priestess to start a centaur events planning firm. The first party was a wild success, and the fire only took an hour or two to extinguish. Heady with success, she met an earnest and handsome young lawyer from Berkeley who was becoming a superstar in the growing field of centaur law. She ravaged him so thoroughly at night that his marriage proposal came out like a whimpered surrender. And so, with career and family ahead, it came to be her last night working in that hotel bar. Her regular customers bawled and howled and roared and threw blind punches at anything within reach. She was hoisted to the ceiling, passed from shoulder to shoulder, and was even granted that rarest of honors: she was placed on a centaur‟s back. The biggest one in the room (by day he made custom-designed iron gates with heart-breaking craftsmanship) carried her around the bar, the lobby, even the hotel courtyard, while they sang of her great feats, none of which she had actually performed but which sounded awe-inspiring. Her cheeks were flushed and her legs tingled, and she couldn‟t wait to get home and throw her precious fiancée down on the floor. And as the night waned and the crowds dispersed, she was straightening out the glasses on the racks for the last time, wiping out the special centaur mugs with her co-worker‟s help. And once again she heard that now familiar clop sound of a paying customer with four legs. Only before she turned around, she swore she heard it ordering a club soda. And that didn‟t make any sense at all. Harmony turned… And there was a well-groomed centaur, a non-threatening six-foot-something, with a polite smile and little reading glasses, and, tapering up to a relaxed-fit waist, a long, four-legged pair of khakis. Harmony knew in her heart he would not be the last. And she grieved.

A.L. Yoder CELLULAR DEVICES It wakes us up. It reminds us to bathe, to exercise, to take our medicine. It‟s never out of arm‟s reach. It‟s always in our pocket, in our jackets, close to our hearts, closer to our brains. We get communications every day—what funds we have available, what tasks we have to complete. We get in our cars and place it on the dash board. It tells us where to go and we follow it. We make noise when it makes noise; we push the buttons to let everyone know where we are and what we are doing. Now it‟s telling us to go to a sterile building downtown. We get out and look to the small screen for more directions. Proceed inside, scan your device. It lights up, grows warm, tells us to walk on. The lights are bright as the nurses take our fingerprints and swab the inside of our cheeks and give us clothes to change in to. They take our devices and put masks over our mouths and tell us to count backwards from ten. Ten, nine, eight… It wakes us up. It reminds us to bathe, to exercise, to take our medicine. The governmental decree pops up every day, reminding us that the measures taken were for our security. We nod, acknowledge, push our fingers to our forearm to receive more instructions. We never admit that it was strange at first. The screen implanted into the skin just beneath the wrist feels too invasive. But we are good citizens and we don‟t say anything. We take our children to that same sterile building when we get the message they‟ve come of age. We assure them it won‟t hurt. It wakes us up. It wakes us up. In the middle of the night, hours before it‟s supposed to, it wakes us up. It itches, beneath the scabs at the edges of the screen. It buzzes when we touch it with the fingers of our left hand, to make sure it‟s real. It wakes us up. We roll over, wishing it was a dream. It wakes us up. Some citizens begin to protest, and they disappear. So we lay awake, eyes open, mouth shut, wondering who is listening and why the two inch area beneath our wrist belongs to the government. It wakes us up. We realize that it is not the two inches on the wrist that isn‟t ours, but the entire entity of our lives. We wake up and try to go back to sleep. Knowing doesn‟t make it any better. We lie awake in the dark until the alarm goes off and It wakes us up.

#18 Contributors Yari Beno is Slovakian born in Czechoslovakia in 1971. He has been working for British Telecom as a frame engineer and living in the U.K. the last 7 years, and has been married one year. His wife is a ballet dancer in the Czech Republic and he loves her. Likes: homecomings, hugs from his wife, lazy mornings, people, intelligent humour, his parents, redcurrant wine and his aunt‟s cheesecake, an evening spent in light banter, order, cooking, spring, autumn, snow, Christmas, sea (even in December). Dislikes: departures, bastards, queuing, stupidity and smallmindedness, ignorance behind a steering wheel, being late, Christmas decorations at the beginning of November. His work can be found at http://yaribeno.dphoto.com. Melissa Carroll is pursuing her MFA at the University of South Florida, where her creative nonfiction was nominated for an AWP Intro Journals Award. Her poetry has received the Estelle J. Zbar Prize and the Kite Trick Award, and has been published in The Splinter Generation, Barely South Review, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Jerseyworks and elsewhere. She teaches yoga and is following many detours on the path to enlightenment. Read on at www.ZenOnTheRocks.blogspot.com. Feng Sun Chen lives in St. Paul. Marit Ericson is a fan of the alder and other trees. She lives within biking distance of a basketball court, a train station, and a statue of George Washington. She‟s up for chai at four. Are you? Vero Gonzalez lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico with her soon-to-be wife and their dog. She is a graduate of Pratt Institute and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. This is her first publication. Mike Lewis-Beck writes and gardens in Iowa City. He has published in Albatross, Bun Fight Press, Daily Palette, Pennine Ink, Penwood Review, Poet’s Ink Review, Stepping Stones Magazine, Waterways, Wapsipinicon Almanac, and Wild Goose Poetry Review. He has a novel, Death Walks the Riviera, that just appeared with Catstep Press. Lucian Mattison received his undergraduate from The University of Florida, and currently works in Gainesville as a freelance journalist and bartender. He enjoys writing, carpentry, gardening, and table tennis. Teresa Milbrodt‟s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Nimrod, North American Review, Crazyhorse, The Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, CutBank, and Sycamore Review, among other literary magazines. Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University.

Nicholas Peruzzi is the author of the forthcoming cookbook, The Sweet Little Book of Cupcakes, and frequent review contributor to Cinescare.com, a horror genre website. If you didn't think his styles could vary any more, his new poetry works deal with love, both carnal and emotionalâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a welcome change from frosting recipes. Katie Przybylski (shuh-bil-skee, ha!) hails from Michigan, where she grew up among many automobiles and squirrels. She currently writes and tutors in New York. Her work has appeared in Barrier Islands Review, Xenith, Mosaic49, Correspondence, Ascent Aspirations, and Way of the Word. She wishes you well. Anastacia Marx de Salcedo is a food writer who has trouble sticking to her genre. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Gourmet, Salon and Saveur, and she blogs regularly at Public Radio Kitchen: http://publicradiokitchen.wbur.org/ Nicholas Thurkettle studied theatre arts and music at Bradley University, and is now a screenwriter and playwright living in Southern California. The back of his head is on Wikipedia, and he hopes to get the rest of himself there someday. His fiction has previously been published in Paradigm, and he blogs at www.nicholasthurkettle.com. Elsbeth Wofford Tyler is currently a student at Longwood University where she is majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing. She is a married mother of four children, ranging in ages from 4 to 9, with another daughter expected in December. Elsbeth strives to remain true to the voice and message of each piece. Her work has recently appeared in the 15th Bite of Nibble poetry magazine, as well as in the Autumn 2010 issue of The Battered Suitcase, published by Vagabondage Press. A.L. Yoder is a senior at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her writing career began with a Crayola crayon on a very nice patch of the dining room wall. She recited fantastic original stories to tell her kindergarten class, not realizing that telling a story in the first-person is considering lying, unless it is specified that the story is fiction. However, armed with the ability to differentiate between narrative and lying, she continues to write fiction pieces, along with dabbling in the poetic world as well. Growing up in Southeastern MA and attending Syracuse University as an undergrad, Michael Zinkowski left most of the snow behind for Greensboro NC where he earned his MFA in Creative Writing from UNC Greensboro. The Academy of American Poets awarded his poem, "Star Gazer at 102,800 Feet," the 2010 Noel Callow Poetry Award. It will also be featured in the forthcoming Spring 2010 issue of the Greensboro Review. Presently, Michael teaches Introductory English courses at UNC Greensboro, practices yoga, eats vegan, listens to black metal, and misses snow.