blue moon vol. 22

blue moon

blue moon

1

Editors’ Note

Co-editors-in-Chief g l o ry b u sh e y J e n na m u Ku no layout editor de i r dr e g or m a n Poetry editor m i m i Pysno Poetry staff gr a n t br a dl e y h ay l e y h e m P h i l l C a r a l oW ry Col l e e n o’ba n non da r i a r e av e n

twenty-two volumes later, we ask ourselves, what is blue moon? glory bushey and Jenna muKuno

Prose editor m e l i ssa r hode s Prose staff K at i e d e C r a m e r a m a n da h o l b e rg t ay l o r ov e rt u r f dy l a n P l u n g a m a n da P ro t t i art editor K i e Wat a n a b e art staff m a x f r i e dl a n de r a m y gi Psm a n l au r e n h i s a da a m y l i eC h t y a n a st a si a z a m K i n o s

Cover art

Suspension of Red J e s si C a C o n r a d mixed media

2

blue moon

digital/video selections editor l au r e n h i s a da Public relations a m y l i eC h t y t ay l o r ov e rt u r f

blue moon 2009

W hitm a n College

volume 2 2

blue moon, Whitman College’s student-staffed art and literary magazine, is published annually in april in Walla Walla, Washington. subscriptions to blue moon are available for $12 an issue. blue moon is a not-for-profit media group within the associated students of Whitman College. all donations and gifts to blue moon are tax-deductible. Please make checks for donations and subscriptions payable to the associated students of Whitman College. blue moon accepts unsolicited submissions of art, prose, poetry, and video. all submissions to blue moon are judged anonymously and selected by the editors and staff.

Whitman College is not responsible for the contents of the magazine. the magazine accepts no liability for submitted artwork and writing. the views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editors or staff members. the individual contributors hold copyrights to artwork, texts, and poems in this issue. no material may be reprinted without the permission of the magazine or contributors.

Copyright 2009, blue moon for more information on how to submit, subscribe, and donate, please visit www.whitman.edu/bluemoon. blue moon Whitman College 280 boyer avenue Walla Walla, Washington 99362

blue moon

3

Contents POETRY

ART

11

Jellybeans

16

On Longo’s “men men in the Cities”

22

The Divide

Christie seyfert

17

Distilled Illusion

Christine texeira

20

W.L.

CJ Wisler

21

Waves

Kento ushiKubo sean bradley meghan urbaCK

34

Untitled

daria reaven

24

Public Service Announcement

36

Catharsis

aaron hardy

25

Space Re-Sized

39

Illusion

Camila thorndiKe

26

After the Rain

greg lehman

52

Beach House

olivia mitChell

27

Jesus’s Neon Crypt

blair feehan

58

Candles

Jon-ross KlaPP

31

Icy Crawl

67

Vegas, After Midnight

CJ Wisler

32

Untitled

86

V.

sarah godleWsKi

33

Doorway

Peter baryshniKov

92

Rising

zoË ballering

35

Skybridge Prism

miChaela gianotti

raChel hahn

38

A Friday Afternoon

Christie seyfert

40

Garden

aaron hardy

41

MaMo

zoË ballering

51

Resist or Die - Union Square, New York, 2001

53

Land of the Long White Cloud

100

Walla Walla, December 2008

112

Laundry Labels

122

The Quietest of Joys

125

Surrealism

4

blue moon

Carissa KlariCher JessiCa Conrad

simon van neste hailey flanigan

Colleen o’bannon Carly lane rue Joanna sWan Peter baryshniKov sarah Wiley

blue moon

5

66

J.F.

76

Propaganda Prayer Flag

81

sean bradley

PROSE

meghan urbaCK

14

There Were Three Dozen Cookies

Life Eyes

tyler CalKin

18

The Sheep-Baby

85

Still Blue

miChaela gianotti

28

Red-winged Blackbirds

lara mehling

88

Untitled

binta loos-diallo

42

When Mirial Runs

graham trail

89

Untitled

laura benson

54

The Blind Revelation

zoË ballering

90

Meet Your Meat

andreW matheWson

60

The Red Scarf

Jenna muKuno

93

Untitled

laura sPoor

70

Irena

96

Fade

Julia darosa

77

He

97

Untitled

Julia darosa

82

We Sped Down

98

A Miserable Afternoon . . . A Cockney Deathbed

dylan Plung

94

My Lightbulb

99

Reach

amanda holberg

105

In a Paper World: A Story of Charlie and Jane

greg lehman

116

The Euro Fell Today

102

Directing Dance

103

Untitled

Julia sChneider

104

Change Your Life

Krystin norman

111

Lamplight

115

Vakacalaka (Accident)

Colleen o’bannon

121

Grandma’s Silverware

amanda holberg

124

Pier

roxanne valdez zoË ballering

Pat henry blair feehan roxanne valdez Paris White anastasia zamKinos John-henry heCKendorn

Carter

sarah Wiley

6

blue moon

blue moon

7

Thanks to Whitman College Office of Admission Associated Students of Whitman College Pontorolo’s LOUISE STEPHENS LINDA MOTTET & DWIGHT MUKUNO for their financial support

Special thanks to Professor Scott Elliott Amber Woodworth & William thompson andrew witherspoon Whitman College Office of Communications Tony Cabasco, Dean of Admission & Financial Aid Pat Bender BOB austin and merchants delicatessen sun rental center

blue moon

The Whitman College Multimedia Development Lab Barbara Maxwell and the Reid Campus Center penrose library JAmie soukup, kim sommers and the Whitman College Pioneer fouts center for visual arts Professor cara diaconoff

8

blue moon

blue moon

9

Jellybeans ChristiE seyfert

I. In the winter they come in cherry, cinnamon, watermelon, and coconut.

The Christmas colors.

But they’re just little bits of flavor swallowed between the couch cushions.

Uncle Lynn shot himself on Christmas Eve so I can’t eat the Christmas ones anymore.

His cherry stickiness soaked the watermelon carpet of his cabin in Sun Valley.

The coconut flakes fell thick through the windowpanes.

Thick enough and sweet enough to prevent Kim from reaching him in time to save Christmas Eve, to save her birthday celebration with her brain-damaged, alcoholic, chain-smoking father.

I can’t eat the summer flavors, either.

Blueberry pool time and lime green golf course.

Juicing lemons for lemonade between smoky games of solitaire.

Watching the tangerine and cantaloupe sunset slather the sky in raspberry jam from his peanut butter porch swing.

Buttered popcorn and Disney movies.

He liked my hair in braids.

10

blue moon

blue moon

11

se y f e rt

j e l ly b e a n s

II. When I was 10 (whispers in the dark): “God, real quick can I just say hi to Uncle Lynn?

Hi Uncle Lynn. We miss you.

I miss your golf cart.

Just wanted to say I love you.”

and back and back.

It’s pleasant, like his favorite— licorice.

I leave it be but imagine the gooey in my teeth, having broken through the sugar shell.

When I was 12 (in the car on the way to Dairy Queen): “Mom, is Uncle Lynn in heaven?

Or is he. . . in hell. . .since. . . you know. . .”

When I was 14 (a discussion in confirmation class): “I’m not sure what I believe.

I think that some people don’t want to hurt anymore.

But it doesn’t make them bad people.”

When I was 16 (Uncle Brent’s in jail. Uncle Brent also has brain-damage. Uncle Brent’s also an alcoholic): — “Well, who’s gonna be with Uncle Brent on Christmas?”

III. Suffocating and shiny, the “incident” was a just a big balloon welcoming the new year.

But months are funny: they float by as names or numbers, whichever you prefer, and to pluck it would just be another loss.

My eyes strain over my shoulder counting Decembers, or 12s, like mile markers.

Ten back, I think I see it.

It’s a dark jellybean now, its color indistinguishable, released from my wrist floating up and up,

12

blue moon

blue moon

13

There Were Three Dozen Cookies roxanne valdez

There were three dozen cookies downstairs frosted in bright colors covered with sprinkles and little candies on top of the counter so little hands couldn’t reach them those delicious cookies I wanted one so bad not because I thought they would taste good but because they were pretty the type of cookies that I envisioned the Queen of England would give to her children because they were so fancy for royalty but mama said no you can’t have one Marina you’ll ruin your appetite those are for later.

I was so sad so I went

rocks in his yard because he has no real friends only rocks

I didn’t forget about those cookies but I ate my broccoli I hate broccoli and I was a good girl and I hoped and I hoped so bad that mama would let me have just one cookie little pretty cookie with bright frosting and sprinkles and candies for the children of the Queen of England I wished so hard that she would give me one.

So I asked mama if I could have one now I’ve been a good girl and I ate my broccoli I hate broccoli and she said of course you’ve been a good girl you should be rewarded for doing as you’re told and following the rules here’s a little pretty cookie for being a little pretty good girl.

outside and rode my bike all the way down the block until I got to the busy street and I drove all the way back to my house and then I did it again I honked my horn at Johnny who was playing with the

14

blue moon

blue moon

15

On Longo’s “Men in the Cities” christine texeira

Sooner or later the stress on every muscle cannot be held. The restraints provided by obligation and that perfect, sharp suit burst forth into contortions so living that I am almost sure you were dead before.

Sooner the tie loosens and the neck turns to look somewhere that never breathed before. And never was seen before the muscles contracted enough to force those pinned eyelids closed. For sure your feet left the floor.

Later the jacket falls on top of slacks crinkled and stretched from a feeling so etched in coal it is almost funny to think it could be pleasant. Sitting in a naked, white shirt with no black accent to blur between the bite and the sore.

There is a twinge in every organ that is still pulsing, functioning. There is a hurt in every man in his city. Your ankle is bending in ways I never thought possible.

16

blue moon

Distilled Illusion k e n t o u sh i k u b o acrylic

The Sheep-Baby ZOË BALLERING

My mother was surprised I came out right.

They counted all my toes and all my fingers. Ten and ten, plus two of everything that ought to be in pairs. I lulled them into thinking that pregnancy is a normal circumstance, when, in fact, it is quite the strangest thing you can do, carrying a little alien inside yourself.

It was rather unexpected, then, that my brother was a sheep-baby. He was half baby and half sheep. In a conference a little after his birth, my mother started weeping and my father capped and uncapped a pen.

Don’t worry, the doctor said, We’ve seen this problem rather frequently of late; the other day a woman had a raven, another a bouquet of daffodils, a third gave birth to a wheelbarrow and, nine months later, six plums— they were so sweet and so cold. The doctor smiles. My mother tearfully admits that Yes, she had been reading poetry, a single poem, actually, about a sheep child; her friend Eileen had mentioned it was scandalous and she only wanted a bit of titillation on a dreary afternoon.

My father frowns, the doctor nods, A new phenomenon, this impregnation by poetry. You read something once for a bit of fun and it grows inside of you and comes out whole.

18

blue moon

He has hooves attached to his arms and legs and a human face. We are constantly spooning food into his mouth. Like the sheep on my grandmother’s farm, my brother gets the bloat. Then my father takes a length of hose and forces it down my brother’s throat, puncturing the gas bubble in his four-chambered stomach and relieving him of the terrible tautness that makes him bleat and groan. Once, when the hose didn’t work, my father grabbed his pocketknife and stuck my brother in the stomach. I felt sad, watching, eating cereal at the breakfast table, but I also remembered what my mother told me.

During the pregnancy she underwent an amazing change. She said that suddenly things weren’t flat anymore, they stood out; she said that all the objects in the world were special, she claimed they had something called “color” and something called “smell.”

My brother understands such matters; he talks with her while she feeds him, and they trade words I have never heard before like green and blue and vermilion. And I am sad all over again at the breakfast table, as I listen and before I go to school, because I have no poetry in me, like my brother and my mother, and I like all those words, they sound pretty, but I don’t know what they mean.

blue moon

19

Waves M e g h a n u r b ack cheesecloth, thread

W.L. se a n b r a d l e y 35 mm negative print

The Divide cj wisler

The light turns and we speed ahead, sloshing the truck With ruddy citywater. Though not before the man looks Up, his eyes jagged, broken shale mirrors.

My baby tooth comes out, egg-colored. I turn it in my hand.

Its brown root silenced, locked in the white.

November: the rains come in cold sheets, falling Sleety, and the sky is a big frozen Grey balloon outside the car. I am wiggling my stubborn baby tooth In the backseat. It groans and squeaks in my head.

Man on the corner wrapped in a city-stained Swiss cheese shirt, casts His eyes down as we stop at the light in our big White truck. His skin is graying wet cinnamon.

The rain beats its steady drum as I press my face to the window.

They’re always Indians, he says up front. The driver nods.

The voices crinkle like aluminum cans. My breath Fogs the window, sugarcoats the world. I remove my nose from The glass. The man sits in the ring I made. Ah, cold clarity.

Last week I played with two young boys. We split A Coke between us. He praised me for it, And when I asked why he said, “Because they are Crow.”

I see their dusky skin and say their names, close my arms around me.

22

blue moon

blue moon

23

Space Re-Sized j e s si c a c o n r a d mixed media

Public Service Announcement c a r i ssa k l a r ic h digital photograph

After the Rain gr eg l eh m a n digital photograph

Jesus’s Neon Crypt BLAIR FEEHAN digital photograph

Red-winged Blackbirds lara mehling

Red-winged Blackbirds are not always colonists. In fact, only sometimes when their breeding grounds are patchy do they revert to colonial behavior.

Blackbirds are well adapted, but they prefer cattail marshes to hay fields, wooded swamps, and roadside ditches. When good habitat is found the little black male warriors chase intruders aggressively with their plumage, red and wide in defense. They stand boldly; they fly in military order. But when watching flocks gather at the end of day, one would never know the threatening purpose of their red-spotted wings. The blackbirds’ formation is precise, and it is beautiful. As the sun sets, they assemble rather harmoniously once again in order to settle into the cattail marsh.

I first watched the dynamic motions of blackbird flocks a week ago. The sequence of flocks moving in and out of each other, merging and diverging, let me see their grace in addition to their order. With enough distance not to notice the red wings, color and sound became invaluable in comparison to shape and motion with the spectacle at hand. They were shuffling off the fringes of the uniform shapes and landing in the cattails several at a time. They looked like they were being sprinkled in, shaken off mid-flight.

28

blue moon

In the midst of a dance routine they look less like soldiers and more like ballerinas in black. But these are my own musings and thoughts; I grow no grain or rice crops and so I fear no blackbird invasion.

Some may know them as threats, as diving fighters in sleek machines. And so they are poisoned to end seed consumption, to save the crops. Suffering from their relationship with humans, each season less of them hang onto grassy nests lashed to cattail stalks.

They prefer these marshes, yes, but they do not fear new habitats and do remarkably well in human-altered landscapes. They are threats to us, and despite our role in the loss of their habitat, I somehow doubt that they fear us.

Their red patches are not symbols of pain but flags of defense. Their flag is their fame. Indigenous languages of the Anishinaabe, Ojibwa, and Lakota noticed the alarming red dot a long time ago: “bird with a red patch on its wing,” “bird with a wing of small and very red patch,” “wings of red,” and, my favorite name, “Memiskondinimaanganeshiinh,” literally “a bird with a very red damn-little shoulder-blade.” I think that even damn-little shoulder blades go a long way in pleasing an audience of bird watchers. After all, it was not their song, but their dance that mesmerized me at the pond.

These long aerial dances are pure manifestations of the third dynamic. For an instant they appeared as flat curtains of black specks. Then they tore apart, the fabric ripping open in the sky as they diverged paths with perfect synchronization— their movements much more so than their song. But as more blackbirds rustled in the tall stalks and less in the sky,

blue moon

29

m e h l i ng

their pauses grew shorter and their song grew louder.

Last week I heard their songs ignite at sunset, voices slowly catching up to the flapping of their speedy wings, turning bodies, and twisting formations in preparation for their descent. It was like a grand entrance for them, but to me below, with the larger empty sky in view, it was more of a formal exit.

I will not try to imitate the tune, but the Lakota translated the songs of the Red-winged Blackbirds long ago. When I heard chaos, they heard, “Oh! That I might die,” “…and me,” and “me too!” and “a beaver’s running sore.” But unwounded they do not bleed red; they bleed black like the females of the roost. You may not recognize them in flight because they migrate in singlesex flocks. While the females are in flight, the males are already standing tall atop the swaying cattails, wings wide, flashing red aggressively. They sing for territory, though they are not colonists.

30

Icy Crawl blue moon

Si m o n va n n e st e digital photograph

Untitled h a i l e y f l a n ig a n digital photograph

Doorway P e t e r B a ry sh n i kov composite print

Untitled Daria reaven

Time will always be ripples, the act of throwing seashells back into the ocean. (the trick of it is knowing they were always yours.)

Skybridge Prism

34

blue moon

m ic h a e l a gi a not t i digital photograph

Catharsis aaron hardy

Even in their occasional proximity, your eyes spell distance.

A diminished span of attention, more roommate than friend.

Perhaps once we fumbled towards a pretext of intimacy; now I know the place I occupy.

For a moment, your pillowed head next to me silent and sleep lulled, the child emerges.

An old vulnerability and a remembrance of carrying you once, sleeping, to bed.

Arising, water glass to the same remembered lips.

Shorts and bare feet, a fleeting feeling.

Almost love, quieter, subdued.

Age didn’t improve you.

A soul that craves friendship but retreats, frightened, at the first real sign.

You’ve found love now, or some near approximation, but I sense warmth lacking.

An absence of tenacity, a zealless coupling, safe only in its familiarity.

36

blue moon

blue moon

37

Illusion Camila thorndike

If that scene is but a painting then I will smear my body with its buttery hues and wash my eyes with melted pigment, carve the canvas, and devour.

A Friday Afternoon col l e e n o’ba n non lithograph blue moon

39

MaMo J OANNA S WAN oil and acrylic paint on canvas

Garden C ARLY LANE RUE oil on masonite

When Mirial Runs graham trail

Though she hasn’t yet begun to show, Mirial instinctively navigates around her own belly, bending carefully as if she might pop as she tries to tie her shoes.

Her long black fingers fumble with the strings. With a frustrated sigh she drops to one knee, wincing as she feels her middle compress, and ties her laces down.

Running magazines litter the floor, some with old muddy shoeprints stamped across their glossy covers.

Dirty clothes spread in piles and whorls. On the wall is a poster of her favorite band that she bought when the band unexpectedly came through her tiny town a few years ago. Mirial lives alone. Shoes tight, she straightens up and pushes out the door.

The cold morning draws clouds of vapor from her throat, each breath sending crystals rocketing through the air, and she stands on her porch for a few moments to squeeze all the pleasure out of the simple action that she can. The neighborhood is dim, the light coming from a sun just over the horizon, spreading out in long horizontal rays. The faint, thin scratch of a jet trail scars the sky. She begins to walk. Her neighbors, in anticipation of ice, scatter gravel on the roads like feed for hens. The little jagged shapes crunch under her feet as she picks up speed. Small dogs burn their kindling energy as they run and bark between the fronts

42

blue moon

of houses and behind yard fences, and along the small roads a few lonely cars growl and hum. It’s a small town. Mirial sucks these images in and releases them, letting them scatter like breath. She’s running, she’s gone, falling into her usual pattern of foot then foot then foot then foot then foot.

When Mirial runs, she is running away from something.

Mirial has swallowed a stone. She can feel it falling inside her, shoving her guts out of their proper places, drinking of her, and swelling. She has such a small house. She has such a fragile body. How can the stone ever come out? Where will it go? She grits her teeth. She thinks of her baby. She thinks of phrases like vaginal tearing. She thinks of the cost of toys and doctors. She follows her usual route: one lap around the town and then west, toward the lake.

From far above, like from the windows of the planes that Mirial envied, the planes that flew from horizon to horizon without ever stopping, the lake is so still and so blue that it looks like a hole straight through the earth to the sky on the other side, like something adventurous pilots would try to fly through as a shortcut. No one in the plane looks down at the boring town, the roofs like a piece of the landscape, the cars moving slowly along their predictable paths; clearly it was a place where nothing ever happened. Foot then foot then foot then foot then foot.

blue moon

43

trail

w h e n m i r i a l ru n s

When Mirial runs she reunites with the half of herself that was formed in her father, the part that earned itself in speed. She connects to the primal drive that once motivated her flagellum to thrash in search of completeness, a drive that has remained deep in her even as her bottom half thickened and split, now transformed into the long, muscular legs which she uses to run circles year-round around the lake. By now, others see her footprints in the shore as a part of the landscape; her running body is regarded with the familiarity of the lake itself— unsurprising and occasionally beautiful.

Mirial found the lake when she ran away from home at age eight. Back then the cookie jar that stood on the counter in the kitchen was shaped like a rabbit, filled every so often by the polite woman who came over sometimes to talk in private with Mirial’s father. Mirial liked her but didn’t know her, a relationship she had with most adults, those tall beings that blew about the town along unfathomable paths to fulfill inconceivable obligations. Like everything in the house, the jar had belonged to someone else before her father found a place for it. The jar’s long ears made a convenient handle that could be used to pull off the head, and Mirial was performing this grim maneuver when she slipped, tipping the jar off balance. She looked down at the shards of the former rabbit; cookies spread like innards across the floor, and she considered the matter with great seriousness. She couldn’t think of any stories that would trick her father into thinking it wasn’t she who had broken the jar. There were no pets to pin the blame on, no storms gusting inside the house, no chance that the jar might have come alive and

44

blue moon

made a fatal, experimental hop. Her father would be home that night, and it would be obvious that it was her fault. It wasn’t that her father would be angry at her, or lash out at her. He would be disappointed in her. And she couldn’t bear that; he was her only friend in the world. There was only one thing to do. She gathered her things, scooping up several cookies from the floor for when she got hungry on the road ahead, and set out, away from town.

She had seen maps, little fold-out sections in magazines in the library and the yellowing atlas her father had brought home from a yard sale, the maps made by clouds colliding in the sky. Mirial loved them, read them like stories, and saw narratives unfold in the little dots of cities and wind along the borders of nations. She spent hours devoted to their study, and knew that the world was surprisingly close together, and had often thought that she would like to see it. As she opened the door of the house she felt not a sense of exiting, but one of entering, stepping into a better world. Her spirits were high and she hoped that when she returned, her father would understand and forgive her. She would find him wonderful things from the places she went—new things—chopsticks, treasure, a sword. When the village was behind a hill and her cheeks were red and scratched from a fight through a row of bare black trees, Mirial came to a body of water, lying flat and open under the sun. Awed by its size, she brought a cookie out of her pocket and began eating it, studying the landscape. How far had she gone? She must have gone pretty far. She felt a swell of accomplishment. She couldn’t even see her house behind her. The lake was an old thing, wide and deep,

blue moon

45

trail

w h e n m i r i a l ru n s

filled thick with salt to deprive the local population of food during the war her grandfather had died in. Even now, fish skeletons lie embedded in the muck and sand and Mirial’s feet.

She realized she had finished her cookie when her teeth sank into her finger, and she yelped and looked down at her empty hands. She wiped them on her pants. She looked at the skeletons underfoot and looked behind her at the dark trees which sprayed upward into the suddenly dimming sky. She felt the weight of the moon lift the hairs on her arms. She considered all these things. She reflected on how it’s always daytime in the maps. And with just the same seriousness she had when she decided to leave home, she decided to return to it, putting an apology together in her head. Her father almost forced his lips through her cheek he kissed her so hard. But she always remembered that sense of distance, of having traveled.

Now she breaks through the trees, exiting from a small path she found years ago, the smooth grey sky highlighting squirming specks in her eyes. She feels a strange exhaustion in her limbs, tiny invisible weights dangling from her like bells; she imagines the stone resting inside her, growing, taking her energy. With a furious breath she banishes this image out her mouth and tries to reenter her rhythm. Foot then foot then foot then foot then foot.

When Mirial runs, she feels connected to the tightness of her body, and the workings of her insides, feeling with excellent clarity all those fibrous sinews and ligaments, the strings that pull and relax and hold

46

blue moon

her together, the strings of an old violin her father used to play. When she runs she remembers how the sound of the strings strung across that instrument changed as they warmed from the cold of the shelf to the heat of his hands, how they were pulled from horses that ran like she runs. They say that everything, the entire universe, is made somehow of strings, is made of the humming and tangling and turning her hair performs, following behind her as she runs.

Mirial began running shortly after her father died. She organized the service (he wanted to be cremated) and cried for a while. Coming home to the empty house, she was struck by a vision of herself as a kind of rope, coiled tight around various nails in the town. Over the years this rope had unraveled and become slack; the tree she always climbed was cut down, her favorite stray dog killed, and now her father gone. She was a tangle, tied to nothing but a boring job and a small house. She gathered her things, done with the village, with its slowness, its isolation, and set out, away from town. Maybe her father would understand and forgive her. She had no car, and no bus came through town. No airport— that goes without saying.

But there was a town with a bus station just five miles away, past the lake, across easy terrain, that wouldn’t take too long to walk. She went to the lake, stood on the shore for awhile, tossing rocks, watching their unnaturally slow descent through the water. Her path traced out along the lake edge, following its contours, leaving her back where she started. She tried again, but the lake still held her in its gravity. There was a world out there, she had seen it in maps and magazines, heard about it in music and on the radio. But this town had

blue moon

47

trail

w h e n m i r i a l ru n s

an atmosphere, thick and familiar; she had a job, a place to live. And out there: nothing. She couldn’t muster escape velocity.

The father of the baby inside her used to sit on the shore and watch her run. He thought she looked like an eclipse, dark through and through, but somehow radiating, light spilling from around the edges. He was at that old age when he felt no shame in loving someone simply because he liked to watch her. And she was at the young age when she felt no shame in loving someone simply because she liked being watched. He began to bring her food and water in a little wicker basket. He waited across the lake from where she always began, where the sand gave way to rock, and she nodded to him as she went by. On the second lap, she stopped in front of him, and took the sandwich, and ate, and took the water, and drank.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” he replied.

After her run they would sit together, the water gnawing at the shore, and he would tell her stories of the marathons he had run, when he felt that every footstep he made would leave a bloody print, and he told her of the final fall that tore his legs open at the knees and now confined him to a slow walking pace.

She reminded him of the pleasures of running, of how right movement followed by right movement creates a sensation of beauty in the body, just as vibration piled upon vibration produces music in the ear and color placed upon color creates art in the eye.

48

blue moon

When he died, he died in a car crash. He was such an impatient driver, made anxious by his age and the lethargy of his legs. He had asked for his ashes to be sealed in a weighted urn and cast into the lake.

This is the father of the child inside her.

As she runs, her belly is flat before her, mute and unmoving. They say there’s life there, but to her it feels like the pregnancy of the moon, a gradual swelling of lifelessness. Her only certainty that a child grows within her is the continual slowing of her laps around the lake. She fears the pull of gravity and the long fall.

She knows that as the baby inside her grows its mass will be added to hers, and running will be impossible.

She sees the exertion of birth, her strings stretching taut and then snapping, a harsh chord sounding, the last parts of the baby leaving her, foot then foot.

Foot then foot then foot then foot then foot.

It was her mother who taught Mirial about running. She never seemed to feel the weight that pulls at most people, the tiny gravities created by relationships and places that keep them locked in rigid orbits. No, she burned through atmospheres, flashed across skies, and then was gone. Mirial was five when her mother left.

The lake is calm as Mirial runs around it, the pounding of her feet too minute to disrupt the still and reflective waters, just powerful enough to push her forward to the next step, and then the next, the familiar rooftops of the village visible at the crest of her gait,

blue moon

49

trail

barely peeking over the contours of the landscape. She runs past the space where he used to sit and watch her, offering food. She feels empty, hungry, starving. She feels lost in some strange season. She feels the weights in her limbs and knows that this time will be slower than the last, and the next slower than this, and seeing the shore curve away from her she knows that she will collapse into that ground, cold and snow-covered, her arc completed at last. And, instinctively, she curves another way. The first step is a surprise after running for so long on solid land, her foot sinking into the cold grip of the water, her form penetrating the boundaries of the lake, but as she places her steps in order she adapts to the new, uncertain footing, each footfall pushing below the surface, landing on the sand and stones underneath. Her muscles pulling and pushing farther and farther as she runs toward the center of the lake, legs wet and freezing, her strings singing and aching inside her, until she finally finds herself too deep to run, the ground sloping away from her, her legs dropping out from under her, and she falls backward, inward, laughing, floating on her back, finally getting somewhere new after years of running, laughter billowing out of her like smoke from some burning thing, falling and floating with life inside her, and she remembers her mother, dim and far away, with a hand on the doorknob, walking away for the last time, looking at her and whispering, “The love of a woman is a thing that moves, child. The best I can do is run right past you.�

50

Resist or Die - Union Square, New York, 2001 blue moon

p e t e r b a ry sh n i kov print

Beach House Olivia mitchell

At the windy edge of the world framed by a picture window I found black birds their mouths searching at the once barren vertices of sand and shore green-glass buoys lined the pine paneled walls caressing the often lonely floorboards.

Unaware of the solitude and hastily laid poison industrious ants had perished their skeletons and eyes, onyx like the ocean depths which had once housed those salty floats.

I wanted to trace the house’s ants and mint orbs in crayons but could no longer find them packed away, in drawers of finely-pressed particle board.

When I passed, I touched the arms of dainty keys unplugged the worrisome television, and turned each switch in the fuse box to rest.

In haste, I left like I had come, wind and sand escaping like breath.

52

blue moon

Land of the Long White Cloud Sa r a h w i l e y black and white photograph

The Blind Revelation zoË ballering

I. As a child, I astounded my friends with the cruelty of my fingers, plucking ants off sidewalks and dropping them into spider webs, watching as they struggled, rocking the silk—delicate and deadly—back and forth, back and forth, like a vertical trampoline, like I had just bestowed a game upon them, not a death. My friend Hannah, my most constant companion, would squeal as we stood at the corner of her swing set where the spiders built their webs between the metal joints.

She never objected. I knew I frightened her, choosing the ants that carried some crumb or prize. Spiders moved like time sped up, one moment resting in a corner, the next injecting their prey with a paralyzing venom, wrapping the body and waiting. I wanted to be an entomologist because I believed entomology gave me the right to destroy the world in small and acceptable chunks; I dreamt of impaling stiff, iridescent beetles, pinning them to velvet, catching butterflies and caressing their wings.

The only time I cried was when Hannah and I pretended to be pioneers. I took a sharp rock and harvested a yellow-flowered shrub that grew behind her deck, sawing off bundles that I carried in my arms like kindling. And Hannah, half afraid that her mother

54

blue moon

would find out, skeptical of my claim that it was only a weed—I was, after all, the girl who tortured ants—sat on the swing and declared that all life was sacred, the Bible said so, I was a sinner for cutting down weeds.

II. Our teacher showed us a slideshow of the bombing of Hiroshima, read the testimony of a man, a photographer, who had been carrying his camera when the world was shattered. He was right beside an all-girls school whose students had been exposed to thermal rays. They were covered with blisters— on their backs, their faces, their shoulders, and their arms. The blisters started bursting as they ran from the building and their skin dangled down like rugs.

While our teacher read to us, a picture hung on the screen of a man, burnt black, beside the body of a horse. At the end of the presentation, Mahri, a diabetic with a gymnast’s body, raised her hand to speak.

“What affected me most was the horse.”

I wanted to hide beneath my desk. I wanted to be a lion tamer, a secret coward: inside the cage I would at least be safe from people. She never saw the man.

Words ran off her as rain does. She didn’t have to imagine the slow descent of girls a few years older than herself, folding up one layer at a time, lower, lower, until their bodies were part of the ground— later beneath it.

I wanted to shake her and beg her not to cry for weeds.

blue moon

55

ba l l e r i ng

t h e b l i n d r e v e l at i o n

III. I’ve heard that Amon Göth would shoot prisoners from his balcony. Far away, they must have looked as small as ants, carrying some bundle or some crust of bread. I’m sure he was the kind of man who cried easily, over anything: embarrassing sweat stains, drapes hanging askew, water circles on the coffee table, overstuffed armchairs, silent keys on the grand piano, his knuckles cracking accidentally, toothaches, earaches, headaches, bad wallpaper. Perhaps, in bed at night, he would read passages from Rilke and be so overtaken by the sadness of poetry that he would weep into his pillow thinking, Oh, the humanity. In the morning he would wake, shed tears over the dog-eared pages in the book beside him—what defilement—grab his rifle, clean it, step outside, and take aim at a skeletal woman in stripes thinking, There is nothing sadder than poetry in this world.

IV. There is something sadder than poetry in this world.

V. Her eyes are half-closed, her lips are half-open.

She is wearing a scarf on her head. The wall in front of her is covered in clay and macaroni. The clay pressed low; the macaroni pressed into the clay. They have built a lake, tiny blooming flowers, and four apple trees on the edge of the lake; they have built a sun, which is really just a circle surrounded by spears and a scallop cloud. There is a house with a chimney and out from the chimney comes smoke.

56

blue moon

Her palms press against the wall in reverence, exploring a tactile landscape. Her eyes are like aerial maps of a dark city. She lives in Baghdad and she is at a makeshift museum where the walls are covered in clay.

She tells the man interviewing her, “The hardest part is not being able to see the guns.”

Her name is Zainab Radha and she is blind.

After she speaks of her fear of being shot, she tells about the time a gunman opened fire in the courtyard of her home.

She says, “My brother took my hand and we ran.

And I had a feeling then that life was precious.”

I wonder if we have shot her yet. In some true reality, it happened as she spoke those last beautiful words. We have hit her in a single place, our marksmen excellent, bullets puncturing the meaty column of her throat. She could not see the guns, but we saw her— body moving awkwardly, body moving blindly. We have realized her greatest fear: hearing Kalashnikovs and not being able to finish her words.

VI. Here is what we heard, “My brother took my hand and we ran. And I had a feeling then that life was— ” Three gunshots. Silence. And because men cry for weeds, horses, and poetry, we never had to weep.

blue moon

57

Candles Jon-ROSS klapp

Old deep-cushioned chairs and rested their eyes.

From the neon strip-club across the street, Unshaven men came to fall asleep, drawn in by The candles dancing through the open windows.

I. Beginning

More came from the church, one from A motel room, a grocery store, One from a sandwich shop, to sleep

It began with the flicker of light.

A little cherry-blossom of a flicker.

Nothing else. Except

In the candlelight. Soon the floor was filled With the sounds and smells of sleep.

In the back corner of the library,

A bald librarian lifted his eyeglasses Pointed to his left eye and winked.

Can’t miss a wink like that. Then,

One woman, 40, coldly forced her eyes open Resisting tranquility. But the thin curls of scent From a round white candle brought memories to her

Like an assistant in a magician’s show The books were gone, each one spirited away Like a ship from a bottle.

Of her Mother’s cookies, then her eyes swayed As her lips smiled, in cresting shadows Against the warm dancing light.

II. Candles

III. The Books

Endless expanses of candles replaced the books, Waving from thousands of bookshelves.

Like a slow swarm of fire-bugs dancing

And the books, trading places With the candles, sat on clothed tables, On walls, on cakes,

In rhythm, the warm steam of lights Began to coax the patrons to sleep.

The children whose picture books had vanished

and in quaint little shops.

Where old women sniffed at them And walked on.

Fell asleep on the ground with thumbs in mouths While down another aisle, old men found

58

blue moon

blue moon

59

The Red Scarf Jenna mukuno

At first we made rounds of the campus on opposite ends— like magnets strangely attracted, then repulsed. We were two people meandering the university without any sense of our interconnectedness.

I had only heard of his name in passing conversation, but that sufficed to begin our relationship. Or what I deemed our relationship. I think he would find it so.

First there must be an object to which one wishes to draw a relation. Enter stage right: the tenor, the object who inherently receives the comparison.

He walked with a large cheese pizza in his hands hoping to “bump” into someone along the way down Perth Street. You could read it his eyes. He despised cheese pizza, the way the grease pooled in the craters and bled out along the crust. In truth, he despised all pizza, considering it too representative of his latest slump. He was bogged down by cheese; his world was cheese; there was too much cheese in his world. Plus, by this time, the cheese pizza was hardened in its curdly rigor mortis. He had walked up and down Perth Street three times with that vaguely arrogant, half-crooked smile and soft, unassuming gaze, tracing the same path like he had walked it hundreds of times. The goosefeather grey flecks in his eyes spoke of an

60

blue moon

intelligence that was burdened by the drudgery of dayto-day existence. He searched the street for anyone with whom to make contact. Though he’d met several people on campus in his first weeks at the university, at 11:30 P.M. on Perth Street on a Friday night, not one of those acquaintances was to be seen.

A tenor does not stand alone; it’s the object that receives the comparison. A comparison does not exist without a vehicle. The vehicle must, in a way, initiate the relationship or analogy (that pre-exists the metaphor). Enter stage left: the vehicle, the object that draws comparisons.

Perth Street seemed to hold an obsessive quality for him. For me, there was nothing particularly interesting about this street, except its proximity to the freshman housing unit where I lived that semester. I was one of the fortunate few to secure a single at Mentis Hall— the north side of campus that was considered “artsy.” My room possessed a small, periscopic window which quickly became my entry to the university world.

It was through this lens I saw him on that late Friday night.

We found ourselves pulled together by some dialectic urgency. When I discovered he was to be my T.A. for my upper-division literature course on Dickinson, my entire spine coiled. I found it uncanny at a university of 30,000 undergraduates that I’d find myself in an intimate discussion group led by the guy who paced around my dorm with stale pizza. But I was intrigued. My whole body was intrigued.

blue moon

61

MU K UNO

THE RED S C ARF

The first day of discussion I absorbed everything he said, every syllable that left his mouth. I grasped onto them as if they could paint an entire portrait of him. In fact, words were just the vibrations of his voice leaving the larynx. I filled in the gaps, and I could expand his presentations until they were my own. His ideas would be transmitted through my pen.

Each day, he’d enter class wearing a red, knit scarf. This silly little scarf was the only form of physical contact he had all day. It was his idea of a hug. Otherwise he’d have zero sense that he was actually present in his classes. You should have heard— the intonation and emphasis of his language was so haphazard; one sensed he couldn’t even discern what he sound was producing. Most people can’t even stand wearing a turtleneck for more than a half-hour, let alone a tightly knit scarf meant to remind him that he was alive. It slithered around his neck and took root until there was no space between flesh and fabric. He never took off that damn scarf.

The scarf was the only thing that grounded him in the classroom; otherwise his mind would catapult into the extremes of false intellectualism. I say false because being “smart” enabled him to escape the lackluster life ahead of him. He was deceived; he knew nothing of himself. Emulating his forefathers gave him a sense of reckless power, but he got lost in the performance of it. In his notes on Dickinson, he’d ramble off page-long quotes of scholarly criticism as if he were their author. It didn’t fool me, though. But I never questioned him. No. I swallowed every word of it. It drove me closer to him. It was all I had. I wanted

62

blue moon

to strip away these quotes, and see what lay behind, but there was always that damn red scarf barring entry. He wore it every day, like a yield sign indicating caution.

Just as I felt shielded from him, he was shielded by what he read; his books kept him running through multiple characters and multiple performances that ceased to formulate who he really was.

The distance between vehicle and tenor is often stretched apart. A breach? No. Nothing but an expansion like gold to aery thinness beat wrote Donne. Tenor and vehicle exist intrinsically together.

I knew he desired true human relationships; why else would he buy that cheese pizza every Friday night?

Seemed glaringly obvious to me. Clearly he wanted to divert his passion for characters and abstractions into the reality of everyday life. Dreams intersecting with Perth Street. Sometimes he thought he beheld glimpses of a world where he could connect with others, but he insisted on wearing the red scarf. The scarf made everything fruitless. I observed from my round window, the wooden chair in class, and the bench outside the dorm. I even started reading outside.

He couldn’t make this leap. I couldn’t make this leap to him. He lingered around doorways, watching people pass in and out in migratory patterns that he could never fully predict. I followed his migratory path, and it became predictable.

I found he appeared in my dreams constantly, as if one day he walked straight from Perth Street, through the foyer, up two floors, and made a left into my

blue moon

63

MU K UNO

THE RED S C ARF

doorway. In one dream he even carried a fresh cheese pizza with basil and Roma tomatoes. In these dreams, we’d never speak to one another; there was no need for that. He toiled his way to see me, and words would make no impact. These dreams would never suffice.

Words often fail the metaphor.

I toiled too, just like him. I’d find myself in class thinking of what character might provoke a response— the kind of response that is both natural and seamless. The kind of response an overly-analytical freshman girl my age cannot bring about without notice of some kind. I tested and re-tested several drafts before I stumbled upon a Louise Erdrich poem from an anthology not assigned on the syllabus. I could easily become the speaker of a poem. Poems became the architectural sketches which I could formulate myself, too.

He and I had never exchanged words except through essays and other assignments. In my papers I would unfurl the slinking voices of dead poets and narrators, resuscitating their beings in a tricky game of role play in which I knew he was far superior.

I come toward him a lean, grey witch through the bullets that enter and dissolve. I sit in his house, drinking his coffee ‘til dawn and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps, crawling back into my shadowy body.

With every word, phrase, and line a renewed sense of power filtered through me. And I think he took notice too. His age-old habit of smoking started up again. On Perth Street he stopped pacing, and slumped

64

blue moon

on a wooden bench where he gingerly nursed a pack of Pall Malls. (What other brand would he smoke, really?

Charles Bukowski. Phillip K. Dick. Kurt Vonnegut.

That’s why.) Our relationship was draining the life out of him, but he was at a loss for how to react. In truth, it was distance and isolation that energized what we had together, not closeness. Intimacy would’ve destroyed everything. How could I foresee this?

It was all in that email. . .

Composed on 2/2/07 at 4:13 A.M.: To: sandersjf@calibra.edu From: prestonjr@calibra.edu

Please meet me at the bench on Perth Street.

Message received by your humble narrator at 4:14 A.M. I dashed downstairs, through the darkened halls of Reed, and onto the quiet landing. Sweat descended from my neck, and down the back of my silken pajamas.

Through the frosty windows, I saw him. On the crown of his head was a woolen cap, along with what looked like earmuffs.

My eyes slowly inched down his neck. No red scarf.

I turned instantly and fled the scene.

Exit stage: The vehicle drives away down Perth Street in the opposite direction.

blue moon

65

Vegas, After Midnight CJ Wisler

Rio Casino glistens like sweat, like veins— The black hypnotic.

Shifting traffic, glowing blood cells.

All this, extinguished in an instant In night thick as fire.

Only cars moving, meteorites On a smoky skyline.

There is a cityheart beating now Its delicate warmth— Machinery, madness A hot and restless love, A motion of phosphorus cells, An amplification, And then, As far away as God’s eye.

J.F. SEAN BRADLEY 35 mm negative print

The heart falters, dies.

The great lights turn out.

For one moment, existence Is a word without substance.

And then it lives, burning.

Is. Everything.

blue moon

67

W ISLER

VEGAS , AFTER MIDNIGHT

Descartes thought the heart Heated the blood, expanding— A glowing ember to set fire To veins And move the compact life: So we glow Little mitochondria A source of heat for something More than substance.

For something not receding but Circulatory, something Darker And brighter, full of lust And something glowing a little Like wanting.

An electric blanket.

This window, I want to catch, hold This feeling of cold and shifting Coloring my eyes— Traffic lights whispering like wind Or platelets As twenty stories up The wind shifts: The heart skips a beat, The world grows cold, fills with smoke— I feel this hotel twist and The whole of the world Shifts with it:

Twenty stories down The blue pool glows unnatural And Vegas Breathes deeply— And the whole of this place Inhales me, and down, down there— So hot again, so hot and bright And black—

And we are the glowing red end Of extinguished cigarettes Of women in neon fishnets.

68

blue moon

blue moon

69

Irena pat heNry

When she first moved into the neighborhood in November 1954, with her husband and their two young sons, Irena quickly became known as the woman who would never answer the bell if the person at the door was in uniform. I remember distinctly yelling to the Parcel Postman one afternoon, “Don’t bother. She’s there. But she won’t come to the door.”

I was born into that neighborhood in Flushing, New York in 1940. It was mainly Catholic, Irish and Italian, and Jewish, composed partly of immigrant homes like mine but mostly of first-generation families.

As we grew up there, talk of the Holocaust was verboten.

No matter how much time I spent with my Jewish friends, in their homes, in mine, playing ball and socializing in the local Jewish Center and in the street, we never spoke about the Holocaust. Not once.

Not even, my sister recently reminded me, after a half-naked Mrs. F…, in the very late 1940s or early 1950s, ran frantically down the street screaming: “The Germans are coming!…The Germans are coming!”

But all that came was the ambulance, to take her to Creedmore State Hospital.

70

blue moon

Not even after an earlier incident that burned itself into my psyche either in 1946 or 1947. My mother and I had stopped in a candy store in the neighborhood on Union Turnpike. The woman at the cash register was emaciated, with stringy, disheveled, bleached orange hair. She was staring off into another world. When she reached down to hand me my change, I saw the tattooed number on her arm. I had recurring nightmares about this incident which remained troubling and unresolved.

I would see the tattooed arm detached, as it now appears to me, as if in a Surrealist painting of the Holocaust.

When I left that neighborhood in 1960 to go into the Army, I could not say that the Holocaust was the unspeakable. (Certainly, I assumed, Jewish people must have spoken about it among themselves.) In my experience, between Christians and Jews, it was the unspoken. I would later learn, with astonishment, from my Jewish friends that, for the most part, they never spoke about it either.

When I was discharged from the service in 1962 and continued to live at home while I attended Saint John’s University, I got to know Irena much better. She was once again my next door neighbor and her younger son, Jackie, liked to ride in the Good Humor ice cream truck I drove from 1962 to 1965. Irena and I became good friends who discussed many things including aspects of her childhood in Poland during WWII. I left New York City in 1965 and have never lived there since.

Irena also moved out of the old neighborhood into an apartment in Manhattan. She was the first Holocaust survivor I knew personally.

blue moon

71

h e n ry

ir ena

About ten years ago, we renewed our friendship and Irena sent me copies of her unpublished accounts of her youth in and around Warsaw. These accounts take the form of four illuminating stories: “Being Jewish,” “My Gold Key,” “There Will Be a War” and, above all, “My Dog John.”

Irena was born in May 1929 to Jewish parents in Warsaw. When she was three years old, her father divorced her mother, who shortly thereafter married a non-Jew who officially adopted Irena in August 1939. Her maternal grandmother and her father were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto and gassed in Treblinka. Her stepfather, a chemical engineer, was one of the sappers in the Resistance who made gun deliveries to the ghetto, issued false papers to Jews who escaped from the Ghetto, and blew up German supply and ammunition trains headed to the Russian front. He was arrested and executed by a firing squad in Warsaw in May 1944.

Irena and her mother never lived in the Warsaw Ghetto. They were in hiding in the family house in the city and by themselves in the country. Irena visited the Ghetto once with her mother in February 1942. They walked past starving people in the street and avoided thieves who snatched at packages with the hope that they contained something to eat. There she saw her grandmother and her father for the last time.

As a child, Irena felt alienated— particularly from her maternal grandmother and friends her age, all of whom lived in the Ghetto. She was fearful and conscious of the fact that she endangered the life of

72

blue moon

everyone she spoke to who knew she was Jewish. But she was also courageous. With her stepfather, she carried guns and grenades in her muff that she tossed over the wall into the Ghetto to be used later in the Ghetto Uprising.

One Saturday afternoon in August 1942, thirteen years before I yelled out to the Parcel Postman, while her parents were visiting friends and Irena was home with her dog and the maid, she heard the doorbell ring. In “My Dog John,” she writes:

“We found two men who stood there and asked to see my mother. One of the men had on a German Army Officer’s uniform. I became so frightened that for a little while my legs became paralyzed…I had very sudden and severe cramps in my stomach.”

Despite her fear, Irena told the German officer and the Polish informer that her mother had died in the 1939 bombardment. After an hour, the two men left.

Irena’s mother did not return to her home for almost two years.

With her mother, Irena survived the Warsaw Uprising. As members of the partisan army, they cared for young men wounded defending the barricades. In October 1944, when the Germans reentered Warsaw, Irena and her mother were transported by cattle car to Germany. They were liberated in May 1945 when the Russians entered the POW camp in Milheim in Saxony where they had been incarcerated. From there they went to Holland and arrived on Ellis Island in February 1947.

blue moon

73

h e n ry

ir ena

The highlight of our renewed friendship came in January 2004 when my wife, our daughter and I spent a week with Irena in Poland. Exactly fifty years after she had moved into the old neighborhood in Flushing, we were together on her native soil. Irena was our guide walking through her WWII Warsaw past.

We saw the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where Ghetto fighters are honored along with Polish heroes. The monument to the Ghetto heroes, the monument to the Warsaw Uprising, the monument erected in memory of the 500 people killed by a boobytrapped tank— a catastrophe that took place only half a block from Irena’s house and one she narrowly avoided.

The monument built on the spot where she, her mother, and the other partisans descended into the canals.

nuns. When asked what he would do if he survived the war, this great Jewish humanitarian replied, “Take care of German orphans.”

Like Korczak, Irena is married to the present.

Today, her beloved Warsaw has been physically rebuilt from ruins. She herself has been spiritually transformed. She still paints, sculpts, and teaches art, but now spends six months a year in Poland hosting workshops on forgiveness throughout the country. In a land still struggling with long-standing enmities between Poles and Germans, Poles and Russians, and Poles and Jews, she urges all those she engages in her seminars to move out of the past, beyond fear, to forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, and love of life.

We also visited the Umschlagplatz, where trains departed for the concentration camps, the remarkable museum of the Jewish Historical Institute where we saw materials related to the Holocaust in Warsaw, including the milk cans in which Emmanuel Ringleblum buried the diary he kept from January 1940 until December 1942.

It was an honor to spend time at Janusz Korczak’s orphanage. Korczak, a pediatrician, teacher, and radio personality who ran an orphanage for two hundred children, had every opportunity to escape from Poland. He chose to stay with his orphans and went to the gas chamber with them. Korczak, who co-directed a second orphanage in Warsaw for poor Catholic children, would be happy to know that the building is still an orphanage, now run by an order of Catholic

74

blue moon

blue moon

75

He blair feehan

When he saw her for the first time, he sidled up behind her to kiss her neck, softly holding her vertebra between his lips, spreading warmth up her spine to the crown of her skull, dimming the light before her eyes, causing the axis right above her ears to stab with pain. . . .

He would awake around 1:00 P.M., preferring to lie-in while she would nurse her responsibilities, getting her work in before his dawn arrived. Upon opening his eyes, he would dress and then twist her arm right up to her shoulder blades, then shove her to her knees: nothing else to be done that day. . . .

Lying in bed, overwhelmed by her reaction to his touch, he would creep in to press his body into the shape of hers, asserting all his weight and power into every crevice, every follicle of her being. He would gently peel away the cold compress on her forehead to lavish her temples with barbed kisses.

Propaganda Prayer Flag

. . .

m e g h a n u r b ack linoleum print blue moon

77

feehan

he

He would follow her around in his suave black suit and skinny tie, snapping at her heels as she went from class to class, building to building, hour to hour.

He would stretch one long, pale finger to poke her in the back of the neck when he was out of her sight, to remind her. A laugh, a thought, a question: none were to exist without his glower. . . .

They never had a honeymoon stage: they never grasped for each other’s hands in the dark of a movie theatre nor wondered about how a first kiss might be.

Instead, he preferred to jump right into the routine, the paralysis, the violence of a long-term relationship. He always forgot to say, “I love you.” . . .

Anything else was a third wheel. She would try to sneak away, when he had his back turned or when he had his eyes on someone else, but his long strides could match her short, determined ones in a minute or two.

They were inextricable lovers, together for habit and his pleasure: his duty, his obligation, his employment, his fulfillment, his success. . . .

He would sit beside her in restaurants, back straight, right leg crossed over left, fingers woven in his lap. His glance was penetrating but unassuming, curious and a little bemused, always looking at her.

78

blue moon

He would enter a space with hair slicked and eyes narrowed, leading her in with a forefinger and thumb clasped around her wrist and shoving her into a chair to have a date or a chat or a drink with someone she was less committed to. . . .

He loved the grocery store: the fluorescents, the dim soundtrack and squeak of cart wheels, and the varying temperatures were his stomping ground. She would push her cart, eyelids limp with pain, while he galloped in the aisles, yelling his existence louder and louder in her direction. His shoes made a throbbing noise on the linoleum and echoed in her temples. . . .

Going to the doctor’s office, the neurologist, the psychologist, the orthodontist, the ophthalmologist, he would strut in, dressed to the nines in his suave black suit and skinny tie, and then hide in the cabinets, under chairs, in pockets, evading analysis. He would crouch on the examining table, knees bent and arms spread when the doctor would turn his back and shout, “I AM HE!” at the top of his lungs while she would cringe and try to explain his behavior away, “He’s sensitive to caffeine,” “It’s that time of the month.”

. . .

These days, he only comes when called. When her mother asks when she saw him last and she can say, “It’s been weeks,” he feels summoned and crawls right

blue moon

79

feehan

back between her lobes. When she forgets about him, when she becomes all-consumed with better memories and activities, he falls away. He doesn’t get angry or theatrical, biding his time and saving up his potency for when she will remember him, for when he will orchestrate his crippling symphony inside her head, wiggling her hypothalamus and cerebellum in time with her heart beats, punctuated with sharp stabs to the axis right above her ears. . . .

I am she and he is headaches, and so we are she.

Life Eyes tyler calkin acrylic on wood

80

blue moon

We Sped Down roxanne valdez

We sped down 50, 60, more miles per hour windows down night air whipping my hair around my face (aviator sunglasses). It felt like summer to me. Palm trees, orange-roofed stucco houses, and hello Mr. Cactus reaching up to the sun tall amiable with round features and a rough exterior. I’d been to Phoenix before but not like this with one arm outside the window like I was flying and the other arm reaching toward the driver a young man very young whose hands were smooth and soft and warm. He wore one of my hair bands around his wrist torn and fraying barely hanging on, a remnant from when he had come up to Seattle and we had ventured out of my room only once to explore Pike Place Market and eat Piroshkis and soup as the rain drizzled onto the little hairs that stuck up on our head. Mostly we just laid on my bed and said, “Let’s get all tangled up.” And we would lie there all tangled up in each other and my blankets and watch the Today Show.

Only once did we do anything like that in Phoenix. The last day I was there two hours before my flight was to leave for home we laid on his couch all tangled up and I knew I knew everything was reaching its last. I kissed him on the cheek on the ear on the neck (they were lasts). I brought his arms around my waist I leaned into him my legs weaved through his. He nuzzled his head

82

blue moon

into my hair he breathed into my ear he laced his fingers through mine (these were lasts) and I felt his blood pulse through his body through my body (this was a last) and he breathed me in (this was a last) he breathed in deep and hard then he drove me to the airport, 50, 60, more miles per hour windows down night air whipping my hair around my face (aviator sunglasses). And it felt like summer to me.

On the plane, I shivered with the crisp artificial spring night air. They didn’t have that in Phoenix— only thick air only warm air only friendly air. As I sat on the plane I imagined that the air in Seattle bit; it bit my face my back the hairs on my legs like little ant bites small and stinging. I had fallen out of love with the mountains and the evergreens and the earthy Seattle the friendly grungy dreary Seattle in the days I had been away. But the plane began its descent and the city lights winked at me, downtown south south south black water glinted and the lights winked. “Welcome back” is what they said and the man sitting outside the arrivals in the airport played a song on his guitar, and “Welcome back” is what they said and the man in the Rambo headband gave my mother his phone number when she picked me up and “Welcome back” is what they said.

The next morning it rained while I was walking down 19th Avenue and my hair was damp and the cool air hit my chest and goose bumps erupted all over me like little mountain ranges on my skin. I slipped into a coffee shop— “Hello Mr. Dreadlock man,” I thought and I ordered some tea and sat down and smelled fresh rain Seattle rain and I loved. Not like the superficial Phoenix love but the deep-seated Seattle love—

blue moon

83

va l d e z

Dear Seattle, You are miserable and depressing and wet and cold and sometimes I just want to scream because maybe the sun will poke its head around the corner if I do but I love you Seattle anyway. Love, me.

I thought about how I had sat in the car in Phoenix like a bird flying across the hot hot pavement, sun pouring down like rain almost oppressive and it all seemed like a dream I had last night (fleeting, good, God so good) and getting all tangled up was all I could remember distinctly. I remember getting all tangled up. Yes that and I remember sitting in the passenger seat of his car playing with his warm and soft and smooth hands tracing my fingers across the thin skin of his wrists where I could feel his life pumping so fragile.

84

Still Blue blue moon

m ic h a e l a gi a not t i polaroid emulsion transfer

V. sarah godlewski

— with anger at the cursed hand fate did deal As the dead keep on dying and the living keep on crying With the growling and the scowling of the bells Of the bells, bells, bells, bells With the sighing and the crying of the bells.

Hear the mourning of the bells — leaden bells What a song of sadness their sorrowful dirge foretells!

In the wake of someone dying how we hear their constant crying of the sadness that they feel they can only peal, peal, peal . . .

And they cry out on the graveyard full of worn and weathered stone their sorrow filled chant sounding like a moan.

But the wails of lamentation are merely commiseration for those who inter with tears, Their lost. Their loved. Their dears. and so it goes for years.

But the bells keep on tolling and the dead sound keeps on rolling off the graves where no ones showing the respect the dead deserve!

And the Heavens in so seeming to match the death bell’s keening has the air catch the meaning and turns the winds to weeping with the sadness that they feel While the funeral bells peal

86

blue moon

blue moon

87

Untitled bi n ta loos -di a l lo acrylic on watercolor paper

Untitled L au r a b e n s o n digital photograph

Meet Your Meat a n d r e w m at h e w s o n digital photograph

Rising zoË ballering

Do you remember that day in summer?

I pressed my body forward, opening my fingers on the chain.

You applauded at that highest moment and I—like a cat—landed standing.

My perfect ten, you said, My circus boy.

Then the train moved angrily against me and I felt my powers of living sap away, I finally understood I would be found in seven separate parts, my thumb in gravel, my sneakers filled with blood.

How I wished for thoughts of so much savor that I would be imbued with dreams of life, all of me, each piece rising as Jesus rose, my limbs the parrots of Telegraph Hill; I hoped to roost in eaves like cooing pigeons and drip on passersby from high above.

I only want to rise like the swing rose up— it was August and the air was sweet.

I don’t deserve to be collected from the ground, that boy who always finds his feet beneath him, not far away—on the side of the railroad tracks, by the flowering elm and the old barn— which is what you found as you wept for me.

92

Untitled blue moon

l au r a sp o o r ceramic, cotton string

My Lightbulb paris white

“Ah! Now we are free of this electronic glutton!

We have evolved, we have grown, we have moved forward; Thank god, we are fantastic!�

My lightbulb should not give off heat when I turn it on. The temperature on my skin is sometimes stronger, more real to me than the beam of light itself.

It is not a heat lamp, only my lamp, a simple lamp I use to light the way through arduous reading and lost keys.

I do not need its heat; I have other things that warm me.

I own five sweaters, two coats, and one blue hat that can cover my head and muffle sound when I pull it all the way down over my ears.

The heat from the lightbulb is no longer friendly. It is a sign of poor design, the eco-antagonism of a bumbling anachronism, an old timer in our environmental era. Quickly forgotten, it is not even an appliance, but a part of an appliance that was once part of a symbolic legacy. Now it is destined to be usurped by its children, replaced by a new generation of responsible, behaving lightbulbs. When it departs we will not miss it. We still have space heaters, furnaces, sweaters, and sunlight to keep us warm. We still have handwarmers, gloves, and body heat. We still have the flow of blood from our core.

say:

94

We will sigh with relief when it is gone. We will

blue moon

blue moon

95

Fade J u l i a da ro s a oil on canvas

Untitled j u l i a da ro s a oil on canvas

A Miserable Afternoon . . . A Cockney Deathbed dy l a n p l u n g mized media

Reach A m a n da h o l b e rg silver gelatin print

Walla Walla, December 2008 rachel hahn

Everyone will talk about this snow.

We will all write it so that we can own it, so that it exists through us and not without us.

We will hold this snow in stories, in photographs, in analogies that tie us together into single memories, into the humans this happened to, and while we remember it out loud, we will think to ourselves, “How strange, how strange it is to live.”

When we cry it will be snowflakes and out of our mouths will dribble these drifts, piles.

Our shoulders will carry feet of it, our noses inches.

It will be our white freedom and we will all look the same in our coats, our faces peeking out enough to laugh and nod, sigh and nod, to hurry, to sit.

Next May we will recall it, the winter that settled when our backs were turned, the places we’d walk and how everything looked so different, how glad we were to be together, to be alone.

100

blue moon

blue moon

101

Directing Dance Gr eg l eh m a n digital photograph

Untitled J u l i a Sc h n e i d e r assorted puzzle pieces

In a Paper World: A Story of Charlie and Jane anastasia zamkinos

Change Your Life k ry st i n n o r m a n digital photograph

Charlie raises paper animals.

He spends his days in his fourteenth floor studio apartment cutting paper vines, blossoms, and leaves; paper rivers and seas and mountains and prairies; paper clouds and stars; and a perfectly spherical sun and moon, all to provide for his creations. He has a lot of cranes and frogs in particular, since they are by far the easiest paper species to raise, but there are certainly more elaborate creatures: bears and hawks, ants and unicorns. This paper world has entire ecosystems— arctic shadows chilled the area just beneath the window sill, tropics overwhelm the part of the room that receives the most direct and constant sunlight, deciduous trees and shrubs near the door of the apartment let their leafs flicker and flap in the slight, exhausted breezes that climb their way, on rare occasion, through the gray outside and in through Charlie’s window. But this can only happen when the window is open, only when Charlie feels confident enough in the dryness of the day that he doesn’t feel it jeopardizes his paper world.

If you want to picture Charlie, think of Charlie in his navy blue sweater and his pale blue jeans. But sometimes, when Charlie is crafting a new animal, Charlie sits naked in the tundra near the window, still,

blue moon

105

z a m k i nos

i n a pa p e r wo r l d

with a piece of paper in his lap and a toothpick dangling between his fingers. (He would probably smoke, but the idea of any ignition in his apartment, any flame in his paper reality, is too alarming.) Though he would never affirm it with something so obtuse as a smile, these times make Charlie happiest, though they are also certainly the most difficult. Charlie loves his paper animals. He loves the paper world he has crafted for them. And as it happens, so he comes to love Jane.

Her hair and eyes are brown. She wears her wavy curls in messy bird’s nest buns. She is pale, though not remarkably so, not so white as to merit a comparison to a blank sheet of paper. She wears medium wash blue jeans from a discount store and she wears a scarf the tail of which floats behind her when she walks, like water sprayed by the wind from the lip of a waterfall. Her nose is asymmetrically placed on her face, tilted slightly to the left, and she looks up when she walks. She knows a lot about light fixtures. And about clouds. And she likes things that can be other things.

Charlie and Jane meet at the grocery store when their hands touch when they are both reaching for the same loaf of milk & honey sandwich bread. He likes to buy this bread so that he can crumble it into the window box outside his window. There are no flowers in this window box, but he likes to feed birds so that the birds can come and provide a study for him to create better and better birds. She likes to buy this bread because it is particularly moldable and she likes to turn her bread into little boulders then little hearts then little stars then clouds then serpents and then—

106

blue moon

She adjusts her scarf around her throat, loosening the coils of cloth and re-tucking stray hairs behind her ear, and since they are both lonely they decide to get a cup of coffee and Charlie tells her a bit about his paper world and she asks about it and is interested in how clean it sounds and asks how he can afford things like milk & honey bread and navy blue sweaters and coffee with almost perfect strangers and he tells her how he sometimes has to sell some of his animals. He explains the elaborate goodbyes, both proud and mournful: rubbing the beak of an eagle shifting nervously from talon to talon, scratching behind the ear of a puppy meekly thumping his tail on the woven paper prairie, tickling a koala’s belly and watching his ears twitching and eyes narrowing. These goodbyes are always sad, he says, but I am proud of my creatures.

Can I see them? She asks. And each time they see each other after that day at coffee she asks, Can I see them? And eventually he says yes and they go up to his crisp white world and she enters, looking up as she always does when she walks, and she says, “I like the moon,” and he says, “I always thought that one was the sun,” and she blushes and says, “Perhaps...” and he says that he likes the moon, too. And Charlie comes to love Jane and Jane comes to be fascinated with Charlie and he makes a little paper crane for her that nestles in her curls and flies around her head like a crisply manifested abstract thought. Like a maddening little question.

The days go by and the paper world goes on and Charlie and Jane spend more time together but she has never seen him making his paper animals. She wants

blue moon

107

z a m k i nos

i n a pa p e r wo r l d

to see how they work, what makes them move. And one day her little paper crane dives back into her hair and clips the rim of her ear and she instinctively grabs at the hurt and catches the wing of the little paper bird.

She scowls at it as it tries to flap away, and she tries to discern this writhing paper bird’s construction, and she pinches the tips of the two wings together between her thumb and forefinger and begins to unfold the delicate and deliberate creases.

The bird writhes, twisting its corners out of her fingers, but she says, “Oh no you don’t” and begins to undo each fold. As she unwraps the paper crane it becomes more and more desperate, wrenching and tearing itself at the edges, twitching and convulsing, until it releases a final shudder as she smoothes out the page on the table with the edge of her palm.

There is nothing there.

She turns over the paper and the other side is blank too. No words, no magical inscriptions, no herb residues, no sparkling magic powder. Just careful creases uncreased, deliberate and delicate folds unfurled, lying undone in her hands. There is no beating heart. There is no little animal or unseen bit of machinery, only a blank white sheet of paper, still and unmoving.

Though she refolds along Charlie’s creases, pressing along the lines his fingers folded into the sheet of paper, desperately trying to reconstruct it, the bird is still motionless. She fingers its wing. It does not move, and she begins to regret her undoings; she tries to

108

blue moon

weave the little bird back into her hair but all she does is crumple its neck against her scalp.

She sits on the woven prairie, paper wrinkling under her weight, and holds the limp and crumpled bird, creases discolored by the dirt on her fingertips, in her limp hands, one folded over the other and resting on her crossed ankles.

When Charlie opens the door she is still bent over the lifeless paper in her hands. He tries to tell her that it is all right, but she does not believe him. She can’t, really, because he can’t seem to make the bird come back to life, either.

He spends more and more time in his fourteenth floor apartment building, naked in the light, crafting more and more paper creatures.

He sees her less and less.

She leaves.

It’s not for us to know where she goes. Maybe she moves to Maryland to plant trees on an organic apple orchard. Maybe she goes to India to meditate and practice yoga with the monks; she never spoke Hindi before, but she could learn. Maybe she returns to her parents’ house in the suburbs to take care of her dying mother, or maybe when she’s there she goes to work in the nearby paper mill, yes, the paper mill, and maybe while she’s there she spends all day working on handcrafted papers, and maybe she takes her work

blue moon

109

z a m k i nos

home as a hobby, trying to make a paper that will come to life, and maybe she takes the screen off her childhood window and leans it in the slim lawn crammed between their wall and their neighbor’s so that the sun will dry the paper and maybe she wants to take in just a tiny bit of sunlight herself and lies on the screen and it dries her out and the wind blows her away like sawdust into the red sunrise.

110

Lamplight blue moon

c a rt e r graphite on paper

Laundry Labels christiE seyfert

But always she is marked with a label the size of a thumbnail.

I. A friend gave me her red shirt.

On it, the outline of Israel and the symbol of the Scouts.

Inside of it is a quiet square-centimeter of yellow fabric marked with the number 11, her own, by which she could be found on her family’s Kibbutz. Some weeks she works in the garden; others she washes everyone’s laundry.

Once dry, she minds the numbered identities of her patchworked community and delivers fresh laundry.

In the summers she trains young men and women to train other young men, some women, to fight with large weapons, to wear gas masks effectively, to gas others effectively.

To run, to flatten oneself on the desert’s flaky back,

112

to sleep in cabins, in tents with other men, some women.

blue moon

II. An elderly woman told me her stories.

In them, a young Dutch girl, a Scout, during the Second World War decided to join the resistance.

She changed her name.

She silently, fearlessly fought for her friends who were forced to wear loud star-shaped patches of yellow fabric; who knew only the outline of Israel— the Promised Land that today promises no deciding— instead promises that every young man and young woman at 18 will serve in their own, their new their old resistance. She was caught helping Jews and was thrown into jail but found

blue moon

113

se y f e rt

hope in the newly but falsely initialed square-centimeters inside of her fraying shirts. She etched letters on perfectly folded fragments of toilet paper with the clippings of thumb and index finger nails.

She was practiced at hiding— the art of tucking faces under floorboards, fitting facts, findings, and locations into the hidden, muted fabric of (false) identification.

Vakacalaka (Accident)

114

col l e e n o’ba n non black and white photograph blue moon

The Euro Fell Today john-henry heckendorn

The group considered Franklin with a collective stare. Surmounting the inclination to ask Franklin what the hell that had to do with anything, Stephen instead twiddled his pencil and said nothing.

Franklin looked intently at his paper, his eyes two giant moons behind the rims of his glasses. Again he murmured, almost as if he was the only person in the room, “The euro fell today…”

Robert’s self-control gave a little wriggle and slipped out of his grasp:

“What the hell does that have to do with anything? Look at the board, Franklin. It doesn’t say anything about euros.”

The group digested Robert’s outburst with a baleful silence. Robert’s had not been the kid gloves approach they had been instructed to take with Franklin.

“Okay, you’ve got five more minutes.”

“We don’t have anything yet,” Anne Marie told the class. The class didn’t seem to care.

116

blue moon

Five minutes later the group members returned to their desks. They decided on a rather confused idea of Stephen’s that featured a fleece jacket and a box of tissues.

At this point they were given seventeen minutes to write a story. Seventeen minutes later Anne Marie produced a decidedly obvious innuendo. How she managed to introduce an almost pornographic level of detail to a story ostensibly about Kleenex puzzled her group members. Nonetheless, Anne Marie was always eager to trumpet her manifold sexual exploits through the instrument of creative prose.

Stephen wrote an inspired folk tale, set on Mars and starring a herd of goats. Robert went to the bathroom and hadn’t been seen since.

The group looked expectantly at Franklin.

Deliberately he placed a piece of paper, face up, in the middle of the table. It was a copy of an email. On it, Franklin wrote in block capitals: THE EURO FELL TODAY. Stephen and Anne Marie looked at him.

Franklin shrugged, and returned the paper to his backpack.

Franklin Costa scored high on his SATs. He received lots of emails from mediocre colleges hoping fervently that Franklin might hold the solution to their woeful rankings in US News and World Report. Franklin didn’t check his email much.

Franklin also didn’t shave much. This was generally okay because he didn’t grow very much hair;

blue moon

117

h e ck e n d o r n

t h e e u ro f e l l t o day

although he did maintain a dark, unsettling growth on his upper lip. It couldn’t really be called a moustache, nor could it be ignored. Most people assumed Franklin didn’t know it was there. Franklin was secretly very proud of it. Every day he looked at it in the mirror.

The teacher didn’t like Franklin. This probably had a lot more to do with Franklin’s upper lip than she would have cared to admit. Franklin had a haphazard method of turning in his homework that did little to endear him to this teacher, or any of his teachers for that matter.

Actually, the teacher didn’t much like anyone in her creative writing class. She found Anne Marie much too vulgar. Once, in the faculty room, the normally passive Ms. Atkinson shocked the other teachers by declaring that, even in class, Anne Marie spent more time on her back than at her desk.

The class assumed that Ms. Atkinson liked Stephen. Stephen certainly seemed to like Ms. Atkinson. However, it was not Stephen that she furtively favored, but Robert. She found Robert’s dour attitude and moody trips to the bathroom dark and alluring. The girls in the class decided that Robert was probably a closet homosexual, and if not that, at least had a very small penis. This perspective eluded Ms. Atkinson entirely. She became so enamored of Robert that she made him the brusque, bohemian hero of the novel she was writing.

Franklin Costa was also writing a book. The only person who knew anything about it was his mother,

118

blue moon

and Franklin felt that she didn’t really comprehend the grandeur of the work. He also understood that his teacher would lend little credit to the idea of a book by Franklin Costa. This did not bother him.

The title of his book was The Euro Fell Today.

He stole it from the white board in class. Franklin could not have realized that this was the same title that Ms. Atkinson was using for her book. She had written it on the board as part of a writing exercise because she hadn’t been able to think of any other interesting phrases. This decision would prove a mistake.

Franklin Costa was small and fat. He wore glasses, and didn’t say very much in class. When he did contribute, he didn’t make any sense. Rather than subject himself to the ridicule of bored classmates, Franklin generally used class time to work quietly on his book.

Ms. Atkinson used class time to work on her book as well. She had given up her early aspirations of opening the hearts and minds of young writers to the possibilities of creative expression. Instead, she resigned herself to putting a prompt on the whiteboard and asking the class to write quietly. Occasionally she would collect work and assign grades while watching late-night television. In class she became so engrossed in her own writing that some students would gradually start to leave before the bell rang. This practice became very popular.

blue moon

119

h e ck e n d o r n

One afternoon, late in the term, Ms. Atkinson looked up from her computer to find herself alone in the classroom— with Franklin.

Grandma’s Silverware a m a n da h o l b e rg scratchboard

120

blue moon

The Quietest of Joys aaron hardy

Across the valley, three coyotes howl at the setting of the sun or the clarifying moon.

Their laughing chorus rises up childlike, against the traffic-sound of a stream.

The horizon remains colorless, dropping into night with no protest; only a long acquiescence.

Birds still populate the air, about their placid errands.

Arrayed granite sentinels stand aligned to the Western sky.

Silent, waiting eons, or indifferent to the passage of time.

Faces weathered, somnambulant spirits now asleep, the long, slow heartbeat of the earth their only sign of life.

122

blue moon

Greeting snow covered slopes each morning and each night, scattershot through the landscape in impenetrable formation.

Expectant despite their stillness, clairvoyant, perhaps, of the coming war.

Unemotional defiance amidst their stoic quietude.

There is a starkness to this setting.

Not harshness or unrelenting ferocity, not aggression, or even grandeur.

Simply indifference; stately, somewhat past middle-age.

Decline begun the pallor of death hangs like the wispiest shroud echoed in the delicate dusting of snow.

Death here holds no fear, no morbidity, no sorrow.

No promise, but an acceptance.

And in the mornings, the quietest of joys.

blue moon

123

Surrealism zoË ballering

Salvador Dalí, that gilded and excessive Catalonian, his moustache askew from the journey, sits between Man Ray, the alchemist, and Dora Maar, Picasso’s muse— René Magritte, a lover of women, stands so the sleeves of his jacket might brush against her wisps of hair. Salvador toys with my water glass, peering through the curvature, causing Man Ray, that constant clown, to turn to René and say, This is not a water glass, ceci n’est pas un verre d’eau, when, of course, it is. René harrumphs once, then fondles Dora’s breast, unconcerned with all but the gentle swell of her— the female form, as every surrealist knows, that final and most beautiful enigma.

Pier

Listen, Salvador Dalí says, A camera tells a splendid lie, just as clocks draped like dressing gowns describe the endless movement of hands on faces— think of the academic doctor’s touch, his fingers nearly preaching to your skin; men choosing to make love to your cheeks, not cup them coldly as the doctor does— heaven forbid, imagine if you took a doctor-lover unable to decide

Sa r a h w i l e y digital photograph

blue moon

125

BALLERING

whether to worship or examine the expanding mole above your upper lip. What fool could think that time is constant, people all the same, and photographs mere copies of the world?

The surrealists hiss, all but René, who stalks like a spindle-legged elephant, leaving me embarrassed by the plainness of my room.

Recall, he was a wallpaper designer before he was an artist, creating patterns of such intoxication they could strike you blind.

Dora says, Photography is capable of a surrealist inversion; the most repulsive subject can seduce a concrete mind.

I photographed the embryo of an armadillo, suspended in formaldehyde— what a small, pink child he was, his expanse of forehead smoother than the curve of a woman’s body.

The men sigh with appreciation. René casts no reflection In my closet mirror, but his bowler hat bobs.

126

blue moon

Contributors

with favorite words

sam alden Portland, OR Undeclared Trasnochar

SEAN DAY Seattle, WA Rhetoric & Film Studies

AARON HARDY Logan, UT Debate Coach Desolation

BINTA LOOS-DIALLO Portland, OR Studio Art Inscrutable

ZoË ballering Portland, OR Undeclared Dromedary

ZACHARY ELLENBOGEN Colchester, VT Undeclared Crumbelievable

JOHN-HENRY HECKENDORN Andover, MA Undeclared Sebiferous

ANDREW MATHEWSON Newberg, OR Biology Gymophoria

PETER BARYSHNIKOV Palisades, NY Rhetoric & Film Studies BADONKADONK

BLAIR FEEHAN Belmont, CA Theatre Intersticesr

PAT HENRY Walla Walla, WA Retired Whitman Faculty Pax

CARTER Seattle, WA Studio Art Frindle

LAURA BENSON Spokane, WA Politics Zeitgeist

HAILEY FLANIGAN Portland, OR Biology Jili-Mili

AMANDA HOLBERG Seattle, WA Undeclared Guffaw

OBREANNA MCREYNOLDS Sebastopol, CA Rhetoric & Film Studies Callipygian

SEAN BRADLEY Houston, TX Rhetoric & Film Studies C.H.U.D.

MICHAELA GIANOTTI Portland, OR English Pilgarlic

JON=ROSS KLAPP Spokane, WA English Laughter

OLIVIA MITCHELL Vancouver, WA Undeclared Incandescent

TYLER CALKIN Davis, CA Studio Art Phosporescent

SARAH GODLEWSKI Spokane, WA Classical Studies Perfidious

CARISSA KLARICH, ‘05 Billings, MT English/Rhetoric & Film Studies Boondoggle

LARA MEHLING San Rafael, CA Environmental Humanities Koyaanisqatsi

JESSICA CONRAD Whitefish, MT Environmental Humanities Unhinge

RACHEL HAHN Los Angeles, CA Psychology Gritar

GREG LEHMAN Walla Walla, WA Whitman Photography & Communications Yeshua

JENNA MUKUNO Granite Bay, CA English Natatorium

128

blue moon

blue moon

129

Jessie neill boise, id rhetoric & film studies Zest

Julia sChneider southlake, tx studio art onomatopoeia

meghan urbaCK edgewood, Wa studio art Squiggle

Krystin norman reno, nv biology Collision

tim shadix ashland, or Politics Scoundrel

Kento ushiKubo, ‘08 vancouver, british Columbia studio art/Japanese oi!

Colleen o’bannon dallas, tx undeclared gnome

laura sPoor des moines, Wa studio art/Chinese tiddlywinks

roxanne valdez seattle, Wa undeclared Be

dylan JosePh Plung West richland, Wa asian studies Sparagmos

Joanna sWan davis, Ca studio art Visceral

simon van neste sisters, or Psychology Peachy

daria reaven denver, Co undeclared illuminate

Christine texeira Kent, Wa english Sinew

genevieve venable duvall, Wa Politics Flibbertigibbet

lani rosenthal berkeley, Ca environmental studies/biology Crepuscular

alex thomas minneapolis, mn rhetoric & film studies Finagle

Paris White talkeetna, aK undeclared Child

Carly lane rue, ‘07 eugene, or religion ecclesia

Camila thorndiKe ashland, or environmental humanities Diminutive

sarah Wiley Portland, or geology - Physics archipelago

Christie seyfert bozeman, mt english Flush

graham trail ashland, or Politics Scabrous

anastasia zamKinos tucson, az english/education hasta

130

blue moon

blue moon

131

Staff DVD INSERT 1

EmPlosive

2

Thinking of You

3

Boys Will Be

J e n na m u Ku no Co-editor-in-Chief

de i r dr e g or m a n layout editor

m i m i Pysno Poetry editor/Copy editor

h a l e y h e m Ph i l l Poetry staff

gr a n t br a dl e y Poetry staff

Col l e e n o’ba n non Poetry staff

C a r a l oW ry Poetry staff

da r i a r e av e n Poetry staff

m e l i ssa r hode s Prose editor/Copy editor

a m a n da h o l b e rg Prose staff

K at i e d e C r a m e r Prose staff

dy l a n P l u n g Prose staff

t ay l o r ov e rt u r f Prose staff/Public relations

a m a n da P ro t t i Prose staff

K i e Wat a n a b e art editor

a m y gi Psm a n art staff

m a x f r i e dl a n de r-moor e art staff

a n a st a si a z a m K i n o s art staff

a m y l i eC h t y art staff/Public relations

TYLER CALKIN SEAN DAY, OBREANNA MCREYNOLDS, JESSIE NEILL SAM ALDEN, ZACH ELLENBOGEN

4

Lalluminii

5

Joey Hotshot Trailer

6

Goodbye, Whiskers

132

g l o ry b u sh e y Co-editor-in-Chief

TYLER CALKIN

blue moon

ZACH ELLENBOGEN TIM SHADIX, ALEX THOMAS

l au r e n h i s a da digital art editor/art staff/Copy editor

blue moon

133

134

blue moon

blue moon

135

136

blue moon