Cellar Door 2024-2025

CELLAR DOOR 2024 - 2025

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CELLAR DOOR

2024 - 2025 | UNC-Chapel Hill

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MISSION Cellar Door is the oldest undergraduate literary journal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The magazine has continually published the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and art of the undergraduate student body since 1973. It welcomes submissions from all currently enrolled undergraduate students at UNC.

THANK YOU To the Creative Writing Program and Department of English and Comparative Literature, for their ongoing support of student writers, editors, and readers.

To Bland Simpson, for his benevolent support of Cellar Door and other undergraduate literary causes.

To Michael McFee for his decades of dedication to Cellar Door.

To Melissa Faliveno for taking on the mantle, including distribution of copies to the campus racks, and storage of boxes in their office.

To the artists and writers who create every day, for letting us share their work with the rest of campus, and beyond.

Cover © Kyla Joyner 3

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Reader, Four years ago, I arrived at UNC-Chapel Hill nursing a decade-long dream to become a writer. This pursuit soon led me to Cellar Door. I remember stockpiling old editions in my dorm room, cracking them open at the bus stop, in the library, on the quad when the weather warmed. Immersing myself in the creative voices of my peers sparked in me a familiar hunger. This is why I read, I thought. This is why I want to write.

In this way, Cellar Door was my first introduction to the vibrant literary community that has made a home for itself at UNC. I became a staff reader, then an editor; I took part in creative writing classes and clubs. I delighted whenever my worlds as a writer and editor would overlap—when a story I loved from workshop happened to end up in my submission pile, or when I’d recognize a familiar name on a class roster, someone I’d published but not yet met. As I reflect on my time at university, I cannot extricate Cellar Door from my literary growth. Over the years, the poems, stories, essays, and works of visual art contained within these pages have, in small, meaningful ways, reinvented the way I see the world. This year is no exception.

Our contributors to this edition of Cellar Door wrestle with questions of vitality.What does it mean to live fully in a body, that animal mess of guts and sinew, breath and bone?

These pieces venture into worlds both real and surreal, familiar and fantastical, in order to findout.Liketreesorteeth,theydigtheirrootsintothecyclesoflossandwanting,violence andregrowth,thatmakeusdeeply,painfullyhuman.Theyallowthemselvestoberavaged by memory, by change, by time. They bleed, bloom, dance, and flood.

Cellar Door would not exist without the village of people who have helped to put this edition together, who breathe new life into this now half-century-old publication each year. To Carly, Liz, Lizzie, Rio, Boatemaa, Carrie-Anne, Sophie, Savannah, Victoria, Benjamin, Fiona, and all our staff readers—thank you. I am inspired by your passion, creative excellence, hard work, and vision. Thank you to our incredible advisor, Melissa Faliveno, whose insight and support have been invaluable. And thank you, of course, to our contributors. Your words and worlds remind me what it means to create and to live—the wildness and wonder of it all.

Best,

Luna Hou Editor-in-Chief

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AWARDS ART FIRST PLACE Know Your Role Naari Short SECOND PLACE Bullrider Ballet Kyla Joyner THIRD PLACE Lingering Ghosts of Home Moyan Wang

FICTION FIRST PLACE DIRT Tsering Lama SECOND PLACE The Greyhound Na'dayah Pugh THIRD PLACE Adam Emily Leventhal

NONFICTION FIRST PLACE Tree Roots Annabelle Oberst SECOND PLACE Backyard Field Guide to the Uncanny, the Trapped, and the Dead Emma Johnson THIRD PLACE My Precious Ella Sharpe

POETRY FIRST PLACE nothing kills you slower than / letting someone go Lauren Whitener SECOND PLACE Remembering Flamenco Ryleigh Bennett THIRD PLACE Ingydar Carlee Markle 5

JUDGES ART Kathryn Desplanque is an assistant professor of 18th and 19th century European art history at UNC Chapel Hill and a practicing visual artist and curator. A multigenerationalmixedBlackqueerimmigrant,Kathryn’sartworkexploresthemes of liminality through invented worlds. Her scholarship explores visual culture, art worlds, and the changing idea of the artist over time.

FICTION Jamieson Ridenhour is the writer and producer of the popular audio drama Palimpsest,theauthorofthewerewolfmurder-mysteryBarkingMad(Typecast,2011) and writer and director of the award-winning short horror films Cornerboys and The House of the Yaga. His ghost play Grave Lullaby was a finalist for the Kennedy Center’s David Cohen Playwriting award in 2012. Jamie’s short fiction and poetry hasappearedinStrangeHorizons,AndromedaSpacewaysMagazine,TheNewerYork, Across the Margins, Mirror Dance, and Architrave, among others, and has been podcast on Pseudopod, Cast of Wonders, and Radio Unbound. His poetry chapbook Universal Monsters was published in January by Main Street Rag Books.

NONFICTION Maddie Norris, author of The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays (UGA Press), earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and, before that, was the Thomas Wolfe Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her essays have won the Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Ninth Letter and been named Notable in Best American Essays 2020 and 2022. Her work can be found in Guernica, Fourth Genre, andTerritory, among others. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Davidson College.

POETRY Quinton Okoro is a Black, nonbinary poet from Nigeria, with a BA in Creative Writing from UNC-Chapel Hill. They are a 2024 Djanikian Scholar and the winner of a University & College Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among other awards. They serve as a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine. Their poetry is featured in The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, Poets.org, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Find out more at quintonokoro.com.

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EDITORIAL TEAM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Luna Hou

ART EDITOR Lizzie Herring

FICTION EDITOR Liz Vaughan

PUBLICITY EDITOR Fiona Huang

NONFICTION EDITOR Rio Janisch

POETRY EDITOR Boatemaa Agyeman-Mensah

TREASURER Carly Barello

WEBSITE EDITORS Benjamin Mills Victoria Wlosok

DESIGN EDITORS Savannah Bishop Carrie-Anne Rogers Sophie Strickland 7

STAFF ART STAFF

FICTION STAFF

Samantha Brenneman Bailey Gregory Addisyn McLaurin Abigail Mayo Lana Olarte Lanna Read Vyshnavi Aabbi Anna K. Sullivan Cal Stoke Samantha Taylor

Sheridan Barry Sydney Brainard Neha Jonnalagedda Nakayla McCounnaughey Cade Rodriguez Nadège Sirot Eva Vega Campbell Warren Brooke Xu

NONFICTION STAFF

POETRY STAFF

Samiha Bala Hannah Berhane Jessica Hoffman Isabel Kakacek Daneen Khan Anna Marie Switzer Ella Terry Donnie Wilkie

Aarti Anugonda Audrey Briggs Matthew Kostmayer Willow Lawson Tara Penman Cal Stoke Spencer Thomas

ADVISOR Melissa Faliveno

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TABLE OF CONTENTS ART Tiden Flyver

Kyla Joyner

Cover

A Dance With Doves

Cathy Wang

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Bullrider Ballet

Kyla Joyner

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Rooted In

Naari Short

31

Grace

Namrata Bingu

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Let the Light In

Kyla Joyner

44

Legs

Virginia Van de Riet

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Beauty In The Stars

Naari Short

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8-Bit Army (Mario/US Army)

Jesse Patete

70

Know Your Role

Naari Short

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Silent Whisper

Cathy Wang

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Lingering Ghosts of Homes

Moyan Wang

86

Senses

Ava Mayo

88

Pilgrimage Vessel

Marin Carr-Quimet

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Backyard Field Guide to the Uncanny, the Trapped, and the Dead

Emma Johnson

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Tree Roots

Annabelle Oberst

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My Precious

Ella Sharpe

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on pain and meditation

Elizabeth Newsom

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Picturing a Home

Eliza Benbow

80

NONFICTION

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FICTION The Greyhound

Na'dayah Pugh

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DIRT

Tsering Lama

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Adam

Emily Leventhal

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The Funeral

Beau Holmes

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Rain, Water

Audrey Zhou

91

reddit thread on the best tree to plant in your backyard

Lauren Whitener

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Ingydar

Carlee Markle

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i own too many bottles of perfume

Ayla Rodriguez

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a 2016 cabernet sauvignon

Ayla Rodriguez

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Remembering Flamenco

Ryleigh Bennett

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Human Fruit Bat

Chloe Winchester

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An Occasion of Exceptions

Andrew Sneed

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portrait of america as public school lockdowns

Ash Chen

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The Cockroach Crawling Along My Dual-Monitor Setup Came From A Hole In The Space-Time Continuum

Zoe Wynns

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nothing kills you slower than / letting someone go

Lauren Whitener

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POETRY

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Backyard Field Guide to the Uncanny, the Trapped, and the Dead

By Emma Johnson American alligator, Alligator mississippiensis Forest Hills elementary school, a historic two-story brick building, sits squarely in between a creek that always smells a little bit like rot and a house that boasts an addition, a four-car garage and a snow machine. Humid and enveloping, the creek bed beckons to children with promises of exploration and adventure. It was where we all tried on the hat of a naturalist for the first time. The school was close to my house, just a slight extension of a five-year-old’s world. I walked to and from school, eventually making the short trip with friends instead of parents, my mother convincing herself that it was picturesque and not dangerous. After all, neighbors were watchful, and the sidewalks were wide.

One afternoon, more community lore than my own memory, afternoon dismissal was pushed back to keep the young students away from danger outside: there was a gator on the crosswalk. At five years old, I don’t think that I ever actually saw the creature, but in my mind’s eye, the alligator was enormous, scaly, with bright yellow reptilian eyes staring intently into my own. Fuzzy recollections of frantic parents are cut with a clear image of uncaring animal control.Their brown uniforms and a ramp to a windowless van are among the more solid bits of the memory. Still, sometimes parents will bring their children to see that alligator that lives in the creek by school, staring between the iron bars of the gate that blocks the road from water.

The children’s eyes will be glued to the prehistoric predator, thinking about all the times their parents warned them to be careful playing in the creek.

Golden Silk Orb Weaver, Trichonephila clavipes Yellow is for caution. Nauseatingly large and electrically yellow, banana spiders arrive with the beginning of summer. I like to think of the leaps they must make to span the six-foot gap between the frayed bottom of the awning and top of the boxwood plants. Do they jump? Ride the wind? Carefully lower themselves on 10

Emma Johnson scaffolding of their own construction?Visceral urgers to run from the spider mingle with sentimental attachment, born from a familiarity with the arachnid protagonists in Charlotte’s Web and Mrs. Spider’s Sunny Patch.

The spider’s webs are only visible if you focus, carefully tilting your head this way and that. My father’s eyesight, poorer than he will admit, was too little too late, and he rodealawnmowerstraightthroughoneofthespider’swebs.Thefamilystillmaintains that he was bitten. The delicate patterns on the ephemeral structures oscillate in the wind of afternoon summer storms, bending so far it seems they must snap. The spider’s hairy, neon appearance hides what is said to be a docile nature. I reassure visitors horrified by the spiders’size that we welcome these visitors as they keep the mosquitoes at bay, the pests whose annoying whine harbors more disease than the nightmarish eight-legged residents could bring.They are afraid of the wrong animal.

Southern Toad, Anaxyrus terrestris Toads are welcome in this household.We place pastel ceramic toad houses that sink into the sandy soil underneath the gardenia bush in hopes that the toads might lend their housekeeping talents to our vegetable garden. They are abundant in the warmer months, their mating season running from February through October.The snapping jaws of household dogs chase them in and out of shadowy bushes, their tantalizing scent lingering for our pets.

She would not admit it, but I think that the leathery, warty creatures are my mother’s favorite animal. She brought one into the kitchen, coaxing her small children to hold it, determined to show us all the backyard had to offer. We screamed, pushing ourselves into corners to avoid it. Her earnestness turned to subdued glee at the irrational power she held over us as long as the toad was in our kitchen. Once, my mother sent me a photograph of two toads locked in a mating embrace on the corner of the front porch. The two animals’raw, violent interaction was in the same spot of concrete as my nervous teenage first kiss, but the natural world often does not leave room for that kind of hesitation.

The toads prey on the hornworms that kill our summer tomatoes, heavy and sweet, from the inside out.The hornworms are fat caterpillars armored with leaf-like plated segments, false eyes, and red posteriors.The toads ignore the warning signs, chivalrously defending our family’s crop. So, I eventually learned to hold a toad just right: too loose and the creature will escape your fumbling fingers, too tight and a warm stream of toad urine will trickle down the skin on your wrist.

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Emma Johnson Five-Lined Skink, Plestiodon fasciatus The concrete is blistering in the beginning of the summer, too hot for bare feet softened by a winter spent socked and shoed.We escape the hot summer days with beach trips, kiddy pools cracked from the sun, and refuge in the shade. At first, we only caught glimpses of the resident under the concrete driveway. It was long and fat, a shiny blue tail slithering, no, crawling, no, scampering into the concrete, impossibly large for anything later than the cretaceous. Animals like these were for thick jungles, not the sandy soil of North Carolina. Nobody ever got a full look. We caughtflashesofiridescencehereandthere,disappearingundertheconcretebefore our eyes had a chance to focus.

On Mondays, we dragged the green trashcan down the sloping driveway, the summer heat weakening the plastic. I gagged on the scent of decay and maggots, leftover from a week’s worth of kitchen rot, but my eye was out for the reptile.

I was afraid that it would emerge as its subterranean world shook from the can’s movement, and it would slither over my toes until I accidentally stepped on it. One day, my brother’s close encounter was substantial enough to identify the resident as a skink. Not quite lizard, not quite snake. Even with a name to the creature, I still shuddered at the vision of its fat tail being trapped between my foot and the rough concrete, the shimmering, slimy thing coming unattached, left behind.

Green Anole, Anolis carolinensis Green anoles, friendly lizards with dry, scaly skin, also have the ability to lose their tails in self-defense.When dropped, the tails can grow back within a few weeks with the original bone replaced by cartilage. Sometimes, if the old tail comes off far from the base, the new tail can grow before the old one leaves off point, retaining the old stump. These strange, forked tails mark the reptile’s endurance.

The anoles let their tails go in my brother’s fingers when he grabs them, determined that it is better to lose their appendage than to be clamped onto little earlobesasearrings.Ourhousecats,forgettingtheirdomesticity,exercisetheirfeline hunting prowess on the poor anoles. They do not stand a chance. One night, my mother, reaching onto my father’s pillow, withdrew her hand from the pillowcase with a reptilian stump. The cats had left a present. The lizard body had been deposited somewhere else, waiting to be discovered.

The bright green creatures scamper across the flaking white paint on our house, 12

Emma Johnson defying gravity as they retreat. They, in arms with the cicadas and banana spiders, mark the dawn of summer, their sheer numbers signaling their reptilian sovereignty for years. However, recent Mays have brought these anoles competition. Floridian tree frogs have taken advantage of this warming climate, changing the summer politics. They make worse earrings.

Eastern Box Turtle, Terrapene c. carolina As children, we poked our heads around the porch door, convinced that though we could see the box turtle, it could not see us in the cardboard prison we trapped it in. We determined that box turtles like strawberries best. It was a game of avoiding scaring the cautious beast, not for its own feelings, but so that we could see its leathery neck stretch out and take a comically bite-shaped chomp out of the sticky fruit. The orange and black turtles hibernated in the ground, their favorite nesting spot not far from the graves of our household cats. We risked life and limb for these state reptiles of North Carolina, stopping traffic to move the turtles off the road, out of the way of thundering, mechanical, roadside beasts.

My brother, at sixteen, hungry for a summer tan and operating machinery, knew to watch for the tree roots, dog toys, and box turtles on his laps mowing around and around the yard. On a Sunday afternoon, he came into the kitchen, and tears streaked his pale face as he told my mother that he didn’t see one until it was too late. I gagged as I envisioned the reptile caught in the whirling vintage John Deer blades. My mother asked where the pieces were, ready to get my father to clean the poor creature up. My brother said, “I already threw it in the creek.”

Largemouth Bass, Micropterus salmoides The creek behind the house came with warnings of cottonmouths, shards of glass, snapping turtles, and used needles, but my siblings and I used the small branch of the county watershed as a portal and playground. Its nooks and crannies were irresistible, the stakeouts and hiding places complete with kudzu-domed roofs and stump thrones. One year, a wooden chair showed up outside of the nook, a concrete piece of evidence that others frequented our domain, a fact that we diligently ignored in favor of keeping it our kingdom.

The creek was also the beginning of fishing for my little brother. Tall tales and hot air eventually morphed into grainy photos of fish too large to have come from 13

Emma Johnson the hypoxic creek. The bass in the photos grew as my brother did. The creek jumped the bank easily with the coastal storms’lent strength, running over the ground next to the vegetable garden, leaving behind bits of the decomposed to nourish the next year’s planting. The floods soak the ground where I have cried burying beloved pets, leaving their corpses to decompose in the wet, sandy soil. The creek’s swollen currents had no regard for the hand-painted picket fence or lovingly tilled garden rows. When the overland flow receded, the sweet, cloying scent of heat after rain carried wafts of rot. The creek left small bass (my brother would have thrown them back) belly-up to be scavenged.

Fairy Ring, Marasmius oreades After heavy rain, my siblings and I always carefully avoided stepping on any of the mushrooms that popped up in front of the house. We could not disturb any of the fairies living under one of the fungi. What else could explain the supernaturally perfectringofmushroomsthatappearsovernight?Themushroomsseemindividual but are connected by one system under the seeded and mowed St. Augustine grass, patiently waiting to disrupt.The scientific explanation is that the fungus, originating underground, spreads mycelium, a network of fungal threads, taking over the grass from below. The mycelium spread out in a distinct radius, emerging as a neat arc above the surface. This explanation is one that our family neatly threads into our contrasting patchwork of science and tradition.

Childhood friends thought our spooky specimens displayed in various nooks and crannies were strange, but I was delighted to show the molted snake skins from the decaying woodpile and fossils from the dredged coast. Our collected wishbones are bleached and delicate, cicada shells almost singing, feathers hollowed out and beautiful,andtheoldpaperwaspnesthangingfromthekitchenceilingamasterwork ofnastysculptors.Wecollect explanations in ourbasement’snever-endingshelvesof slowly amassed paperbacks and old textbooks we refuse to throw out, but we also fill mason jars in the kitchen with different, more humble acquisitions.

Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis One mama cardinal made her nest outside of our screen-in porch, finding shelterunderthelichen-coveredstripedawning.Shehadlearnedfromothermamas’ mistakes: the previous season, our house grieved for a wren’s babies, mauled by a 14

Emma Johnson housecat who slunk through a hole in the porch screen to tear open the nest like a wrapper covering its favorite treat.

Among my favorite stories are the ones that my mother brings home from her preschoolers. Laughs bubble from my throat at their matter-of-factness, their three-year-old minds seeing what even elementary schoolers begin to miss. But there is also heartbreak in the way that at three, children can tell their first lie or ask questions that they do not yet know as unanswerable. Near the end of recess, as her class was playing outside, one of the children called over my mother to a bird lying on the ground, feathers flat against the mulch. Its wings were spread at an unnatural angle, broken and unusable, the most obvious of the injuries that were pulling the creature into death. My mother pushed tiny hands from the dying animal, deciding how much the children should see. The time saved her, and some of the children turned around to follow their peers back inside. One turned to my mother, asking, “How will the bird get to heaven if it cannot fly?”

The cardinal’s nest, lovingly built out of long-leaf pine needles and dog fur, up high in wooden porch beams out of the reach of feline appetites, harbored four delicate eggs. My mother called me with updates on the brood, telling me about the mother’s frantic nest maintenance, tracking the incubation and anticipating the hatchling’s birthday. Overjoyed when the eggs eventually hatched, she took photographs of the mama bird returning with squirming grub, reporting that the hatchlings would fledge any day. My mother cried when the neighbor’s dog mauled three of the birds during what must have been their first lesson on landing, blasting our neighbor for her role in the murders. Heartbreak lingered for a few days while the mama cardinal stuck around, keening for her loss. She searched up in the porch rafters and down in the boxwoods, not sure when it was time to move on.

Roof Rat, Rattus rattus I believe in haunted houses. My mother, a new parent tasked with turning a big house into a home, jumped at a skeleton in the corner of the attic, baked and fossilized by the deadly heat rising to the top of the old house during Carolina summers. My mother determined the rodent to be a possum.

The shed in the backyard makes everyone nervous. There are too many hiding places. There are copperheads in the wood pile, wasps in the eaves, a roach coming out of floorboards, and black widows in the shadowed corners. My father pulled out the electric blue tarp, uncovering a huddled nest of rats. They were pink, eyes still 15

Emma Johnson closed. The group of them huddled together for warmth in the safety of their den.

It was decided that they could not be allowed to live. We take shovels to copperheads, but neither of my parents had it in them to behead the infants. No, instead, nature would take its course. After we had finished yardwork and showered off the dirt and humidity, my mother left the babies back on their tarp. My mother was restless, checking every hour to see if they had been taken. Nine o’clock, the sky only a pale navy, not yet. Ten o’clock, they remained as the day’s heat turned into a chill. Where was their mother? Eleven o’clock, they still squirmed in the night.

Midnight, and the tarp was empty. My mother went to sleep. We determined that the skeleton my mother found all those years ago must not have been a possum, but a rat.

Common Starling, Sturnus vulgaris Chirping birds are for the soft heat of summer, and starling murmurations are for the empty chill of the winter. The towering cumulonimbus that the humidity of the warmermonthswhipuparegone,replacedbycrisppinkdusk,adreamybackground.

Every time that I pull into the driveway, the car faces the skeletal forest behind the house,thetraintracksvisiblethroughthetreesthathavediscardedtheirgreenfoliage.

The starlings roost in those bony branches, poised to start their dance. Starlings can move in groups of more than five hundred, moving as one mesmerizing, pulsing entity through the cold air.The mass protects the small birds from larger hawks that prowl the coastal winter skies, confusing the predators with their dizzying ballet.

I like the body heat hypothesis better: that the creatures swirl as a mass to attract other starlings, hoping to recruit comrades to better brave the cold nights.

Coyote, Canis latrans The safety of late-night studying in thick cotton sweaters is interrupted by the long whistle of the train that runs behind the house. In the years that I started staying up later than everyone else in the house, reading and writing, I was old enough to know that there was no danger in a train whistle. I still froze when it sounded, waiting silently for the moment to pass. In later years, headphones and familiarity washed some of the terror from the sound. The first time that the train was accompanied by howling coyotes, I had to push down the leftover fear. Coyotes are skittish, chaotic beasts crowded into urban landscapes.

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Emma Johnson They are not the only ones. Somewhere, there is an answering machine with a message from my neighbor to one of his clients that starts with a greeting and ends with screams and shattering glass. A buck ran straight through a glass door, ricocheting off the living room walls. I am reminded of a text I received from a cousin. It was a photograph of her first kill. She was on her knees behind the deer, propping up its head as its body sprawled awkwardly towards the camera. She grinned, the blood of the beast a right-of-passage in the way it was spread across her pubescent cheeks.

Neighbors want to shoot the coyotes.They rampage, running beside the creek, up and down the dark tracks, and mauling chickens in the dark. Like deer, they have become pests, brushing against fenced yards and mowed grass. I admire their persistence and the way their howls still sound noble. I am sorry that they have been pushed into concrete jungles, but I still will not take out the trash alone if I hear their laughter.

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A Dance with Doves Cathy Wang Digital Photography

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reddit thread on the best tree to plant in your backyard

By Lauren Whitener obviously the answer is red maple. beautiful bark, quick growing, and hardy. not to mention the kids love the helicopters in the spring. will truly bring a vibrance to your backyard when the leaves change of course someone would say a Sapindaceae! all of their fruiting bodies are weird as hell. not to mention sometimes stinky! longleaf pine is the best. period. only someone clearly not versed in dendrology would say pine. what will happen to the sapling when the casual, everyday thunderstorm blows it over! and all of those needles. go ahead and buy a pine if you don’t care about the acidification of your soil pH so you’ve never see the eastern coast of the united states have you? what if you just planted multiple? i always loved eating the leaves of the sassafras trees i found in the forest, and black walnut has nuts you can collect in the fall. oh don’t start with the mixing of understory and overstory trees!

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Lauren Whitener you will always be disappointed by a free-standing understory tree in the mammoth shadow of a 80 footer. winged elm’s are always cool didn’t those all die? why would you plant something that’s just going to die? don’t be so obtuse! winged elms are not the same as american elms. you are a disgrace to this thread. why has no one said dogwood? because its the most pathetic tree out there. its barely survived against some stupid fungus and it doesn’t even have real flowers. yeah they’re bracts, not petals, look it up my father’s urn is made out of white oak. we used to have one in our backyard that i thought was nice

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The Greyhound

By Na’dayah Pugh Fiona is sitting on the last bus out of Brooklyn when she sees the man kick the greyhound. She doesn’t think twice before she deboards.

A light snow is falling, but the ground is still warm enough to turn it all to slush when it touches the pavement. She tightens her coat around her shoulders, sheltering herself under its weight even though it reminds her of her father and, by extension, of Robert, her brother.

Dog-Kicker is occupied with his phone. He stands beside the bus driver, who wears a neon vest and fiddles with a pack of Newports.

The greyhound whimpers, curled up against the curb.

Fiona approaches Dog-Kicker with heavy steps. When she slams her hand down on his shoulder, he catches her wrist. His sandpapery palm reminds her of her father’s the last time she saw him, and she flinches away.

“It’s just a puppy!” she screams. People waiting on the bus press their faces against the glass to watch—wrinkly old women and pug-faced old men and tiredeyed teenagers with pale faces and hoods like gaping holes.

Dog-Kicker ignores her. Behind him, the driver exhales a plume of smoke.

It catches the light from the streetlamps and forms a lazy halo behind DogKicker’s head.

Fiona grabs his shoulders, shakes him hard. “What did it do to you?”

“That’s a grown-ass dog, kid.” He shoves her away and climbs onto the bus.

The dog, not far, barks in its own defense. It curls up beside the gutter and watches Dog-Kicker board the bus without another glance back.

Fiona approaches the dog. It lets her.

“Pets aren’t allowed,” the driver says.

She scoops up the dog and wraps it in her coat. She does a bad job. Its dirty paws stick out from the bottom, and there’s a clear bulge at her hip where the dog’s torso rests.

The greyhound shivers against Fiona’s body. It looks so young.

She looks at the driver.

He sighs. “I’m sorry, kid.” He looks like he means it.

Fiona takes off her coat and drapes it over the dog. She makes him as 21

Na’dayah Pugh comfortable as she can before she leaves, but she knows it isn’t enough.

The driver climbs on after her, coughing tobacco breaths as he does. He closes the bus doors, sealing the passengers off from the wet, snowy air.

Fiona passes Dog-Kicker as she makes her way to her seat. He’s already halfasleep, the window slick from his forehead oils, the greyhound forgotten.

In the vacant seat beside Fiona’s sits a bag full of her most important belongings.

A couple weeks’ worth of clothes, a book of poems. She pulls out the drawing Robert made her weeks ago and cradles it to her chest. She focuses on not wrinkling the paper or smudging the crayon, because it distracts her from looking out the window, from watching her city disappear. But she looks out the window anyway.

She opens it, pressing her fingers against the cold glass. Brisk midnight air slips into the bus and past the collar of her sweater like the deft fingers of her last lover—a lanky girl whose name she never learned; whose bronze skin shone blue first in the party lights, then in the moonlight; whose back muscles rippled and glowed as she nestled herself between Fiona’s legs in the Coney Island sand; whose lean legs ran away when Fiona’s dad’s flashlight landed on their intertwined teenage bodies.

“I’ll be back,” Fiona says aloud, even though Robert can’t hear her. She imagines him clutching chocolate bars or lollipops in his chubby brown fingers, skin sticky as he reaches out to her, asking her not to leave without him, asking her not to leave at all.

The greyhound tucks its face against its body as the bus pulls away.

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Bullrider Ballet Kyla Joyner

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Ingydar

By Carlee Markle yesterday I heard the most beautiful song about death about Ingydar her horse flesh turning black like my pupils how dark and circular they stare back at me in the mirror two black dots looking out through all these years taunting me to jump as I teeter on the edge of an event horizon my consciousness circular and staring back at me I imagine falling into the black hole I imagine it sounds like the buzzing of flies carving their set paths to reach Ingydar’s eyes her pupils turning milky great white consciousness slowly seeping out pure as syrup onto distorted barn floor one moment right and here and the next stretched into body beyond identity 24

Carlee Markle was it even you who jumped that day?

I tell myself it had to be I watched your familiarity thin as you left me as you hurtled into the horizon past the darkness and nothingness of silence beyond belief until you became synonymous with memory and forgetting bereaved suppression the words almost unfair it felt like a storm was coming it felt like Ingydar galloping out across deep space to meet you it felt like you sliding onto her silver back riding off into this new realm together eating and drinking without me engorged in the sky I felt you growing in the reflection of my dark pupils in the mirror like a virus consuming my every thought like a greedy horse clearing a field like a final meal I felt Ingydar throw her head back and sing about how beautiful it was your death on repeat the delicate sunkenness 25

Carlee Markle of skin hugging frail bones the symphony cracking lungs in stage four failure the aged hands that once touched my own now falling out of reach and the song the flies sung as they carved and feasted on your cooling sugar like it was something natural one moment here beside me and then the next

26

Tree Roots

By Annabelle Oberst When I was nine, we grew a garden in the dog run. A horticulturist lived in the house before us and had planted various trees—fig, apple, plum—and a rose bush, leaving the soil perfect for planting.

That May, I helped Ney, my dad’s girlfriend, plant flowers with her daughter Aislyn. I watched how Ney’s slender, baker-hands gripped the earth and kneaded soil with a quiet sort of awe. With kind instruction she taught Aislyn and me to pull dirt over seeds, covering them just slightly. Handing us plastic watering cans, she told us to listen to the earth, that it would tell us what it needs. She was wearing blue overalls, the ones from Goodwill she always wore to the bakehouse, and dirt swirled stains into the knees of her pants when she stood.

She used to call Aislyn her summer child, evident from the tan around her shoulders and the freckles already darkening on her cheekbones. I was her little scorpion, three years younger than Aislyn and a November-born hotbox always wrapped in a blanket.

After we finished gardening, Ney turned on the hose for Aislyn and me to run through. The water soaked our clothes and I giggled, my bright blonde hair bouncing as we danced around the yard, our bare feet sliding in slick grass.

Somewhere in my movement, I brushed against a bee. It stung my ankle, and I ran inside crying, the screen door slamming behind me.

It was the summer the AC broke, so all the windows were open, but it was still scorching inside. I sat in the living room, my sweaty skin sticking to our black leather couch that left red marks on my thighs when I stood, as Ney laid my leg on her lap and plucked the stinger out with unprotected hands. She swore by the natural remedies passed down from her mother, so each sickness or wound was cured by warm honey, plant leaves, or tight pressure. In typical fashion, my bee sting was attended to with tobacco leaves and a hand pressed firmly against my ankle. ~ Aislyn and I went barefoot for years. She loved it, the feeling of earth beneath her feet, and I loved being like her, so I’d march out the door with no shoes on to match.

I was always mimicking her, begging my hair to curl and skin to tan. I wished to become a mirror, reflecting tan skin and kind eyes and everything I hoped to be.

27

Annabelle Oberst She taught me to climb in the nearby trees, helped me pull my body up from my arms and locate stable branches. We’d sit up there for hours, legs dangling off the side.

Sometimes we left the lawn and walked to the creek behind the park. Her legs were twice as long so I would walk twice as fast to keep up, my little legs always following hers. The creek had a rope swing, and I was terrified. Aislyn told me she’d catch me if I fell, and I believed her—the truth was knotted in her curly brown hair.

I trusted her with my life, with a curling iron and a small red wagon speeding down a neighborhood hill even when that ended with a bloody, scraped-up knee, and she had to carry me home.

She is not my sister biologically, but as she patched up my knee, I knew we were related in measures worth more than blood. ~ My dad and his girlfriend broke up in the spring of my eighth-grade year. Ney told me in an aisle of Goodwill, her hand anxiously readjusting a hanger, and by the next week, she and Aislyn had moved out. She didn’t say it, but I knew she was leaving because of Dad. His drinking had gotten worse, body sagging and speech slowing with each sip of boxed bottom-shelf wine from CVS. Ney couldn’t do that to Aislyn, who had nowhere to go when the drinking got bad. I could call my mom and wait it out with her, returning once sobriety set in.

And as much as I wished it, Ney and I weren’t related. She had to do what was best for Aislyn, and I couldn’t go with them.

I hated them for it.

The house returned to being quiet, echoing footsteps instead of laughter.There was no reason to be outside anymore—it was no fun to climb trees alone—so I stayed in my bedroom with the door locked. The grass grew long as Dad wasted away on the couch, and I mourned the now weed-infested dog run from my windowsill. Dad smoked more often that summer, and I became accustomed to the smell, how it lingered in the couch cushions and the old, worn-soft t-shirts Ney would wear to bed.

I held onto the hope that they would come back, but as Dad drank more and sunk deeper into his oblivion, the feeling died in my chest. Instead, I stayed inside, cleaning up bottles and pacifying my dad’s neglect. ~ What happens to a family tree when there is no longer a shared circumstance to connect its members? We weren’t related, not really, not in marriage or blood or 28

Annabelle Oberst anything that holds up in court. The ties were severed, and the plums that Aislyn and I shared in the front yard, purple juices running down our chins, existed only in my memory.

Our sisterhood snapped, crushed under the weight of distance. I no longer followed her feet, working twice as fast to keep up. I slowed and stopped, too old for bare feet on hot asphalt.

I wear shoes now, and we haven’t spoken in years. ~ Dad died that November. His and Ney’s breakup was supposed to be temporary, so he went to rehab in August, a four-week detox followed by hourslong conversations with his sponsor. It didn’t last, and the illusion of sobriety disintegrated the second he left the facility. I wonder if he even waited until he got home. Maybe, on the way back, he pulled into the ABC store parking lot, bought cheap liquor, and drank to wash the detox from his stomach. I couldn’t be at the house anymore, in the yard or inside where I would watch my dad drink himself stupid and leave me to clean up the mess. I started to spend more and more days at Mom’s, and by the time he died, I was living almost entirely with her.

Aislyn and I sat at the funeral pews apart. I can’t remember if we spoke at the reception, the numbness of grief edging everything else out. ~ How long can a garden last if the foundation has rotted? I could’ve tended the soil and tried to keep our relationship from dying. I couldn’t bring myself to do it because the roots that tied Aislyn and me together weren’t just cut—they were dead, and I didn’t know how to live with that. So, I sunk into my grief and stayed there.

Time moved on. I didn’t. All of them were gone, and I couldn’t follow. I didn’t try to. ~ I don’t live in that house anymore, the one with the honeysuckle fences and the fig trees and the rose bush.

I walked through the empty house once before we sold it, but I felt like a phantom floating through something haunted. I was there but I wasn’t, detached from my body as it idly stumbled through. I left without seeing the backyard or the patch of trees because the outside I cherished held no meaning without the people who made it safe.

I go back some days, perch in my car on the corner—engine on, ready to leave at any moment—and peer into the life of the new owners. A family lives there now, 29

Annabelle Oberst and they have a little girl. I think her name is Astrid. Sometimes, I watch her blonde curls bounce as she runs around the yard, and for a second, I’m the blonde girl and Aislyn is chasing me. We’re young and still sisters instead of strangers.

It is harder to grieve the living than the dead. No matter what I do, I can’t bring back the dead, and there is no use in trying to. I find comfort in the finality of that sentiment. With the living, I am haunted by what-ifs, by different decisions and rekindling relationships. It feels stupid to grieve something that is still there, especially when I am partially responsible for its death. I could call Aislyn and try to forge something new and warm out of old dirt and weeds crawling through red brick borders. I don’t. I stare at my hands and cry for my loss.

I think of reaching out every time I taste honey; when I see a front yard rose bush or plums at the grocery store. Last I heard, Aislyn was bartending in Wilmington, and Ney lived in South Carolina. I think about getting in my car, driving two-and-a-half hours, and walking into every bar. I think about calling, about the years-old phone number I’m not sure exists anymore. I can’t bring myself to dial or drive or do anything but sit in my self-made stagnation.

Fear stops me. What if it’s never like it was, what if we can’t create something better? What if our sisterhood was one-sided and fabricated in my mind—a young child latching onto anything in reach—and for Aislyn it was a shitty situation and nothing more?

Sometimes, I think it’s better to keep the past like pressed flowers, untouched so it cannot be ruined. I can live in my mind, in my old house and the dog run garden, where nothing has changed and the tree roots that tie us together stretch for miles.

30

Rooted In

Naari Short Screenprint Ink or Paper 31

i own too many bottles of perfume

By Ayla Rodriguez when i feel too exposed, too naturally unnatural, i cover my collar in my own form of collateral: a dab of musk on each wrist, behind the knee, the ear. i build an image of the girl i dreamed of being. i carry her with me as i shower my hair in sweet musings, brush twenty, thirty times over. affirmations pepper my nose, dust across my face in a soft kind of symphony. i blot my cheeks, gloss my lips in an effort to mask the uneasy churning in my stomach, the threat i’ve come to call friend. hiding my inner hatred has become second nature. my girlhood is covered in glitter and while it glistens — it glares. it is covered in smudged eyeliner mattering more than my mother molting away in front of me, masked in vanilla and hazelnut undertones preceding the untimely demise of my sanity. what a strange thing it is, to be a girl. to dip your feet into depression and only care 32

Ayla Rodriguez about the weight gain... i wonder if i’ll ever be enough or will i keep masking my melancholy in musk?

33

a 2016 cabernet sauvignon

By Ayla Rodriguez i want you to read my poems like a sommelier drinks his wine— do you know what i mean? swirl my sentences around in their literary glasses; suckle the sweet and the sour and the bitter from the edgéd softness of my words. care what barrel aged my ballad, how long it’s laid waiting for you. was it oak? or birch? was i brewed in the heart of a pine? taste my terroir, baby— can you separate the earth that birthed me from the root of my passion? or have i become one with your tongue? split my tastes into their neat categories— the juicy and the dry and the salty; the white grapes and the muscadine and the tamarind. i crushed them with my own two fists until my fingers wrinkled and my nails bled. i want you to taste it— my essence between the notes of ash and age. its my umami— my fruit fermented inside of your cup. when you catch a glimpse of the bottom of my bottle, beg for another glass, another chance 34

Ayla Rodriguez to savor the odors of my labor. lose your composure and slurp down my verse, my sommelier. i’ve let it fester just for you— my drink is yours to drown in.

35

QIAOAN “JOSEPH” GU

Grace

Namrata Bingu Ballpoint Pen on Paper 36

DIRT

By Tsering Lama Once it became clear the deer was following, June let the car behind her pass and politely pulled off the road.

The interstate had spat her out of Shenandoah Valley after extreme course correction. It shouldn’t have taken so long but halfway in, the urge to call Jane to hear her voice had grown overwhelmingly violent and Jane found herself dragging the truck onto a shoulder to shake and glare at the window.This repeated across two state borders until her bladder got the best of her and guided her to a rest stop. Back on the road again, she couldn’t say the break had helped any. The deer was still there.

In her right mirror it stood on the road, cocking a horizontal neck at her but remaining otherwise frozen. Other cars kept phasing through the poor thing, quick as a whip and dashing through some incorporeal form without a hint of slowing down. The dash camera also refused to pick up anything but cars and the same temperamentalsnowthathadbeenblowinginanddisappearingthroughoutherdrive.

It didn’t notice her at first. Beady, black eyes canvassed the road ahead, one stiff leg on each end lifting like it was preparing for a bright future of running. From its cracked mouth, blood dribbled through the asphalt. June’s hairline prickled with a static unease. This level of realism didn’t bode well for her.

She pulled out her phone and took down a note for Dr. Downs. more zoloft? less?

When she looked up, it was already in motion. Slow and unsteady, the deer lurched toward her, dragging its broken body across the right lane to the border of the road,whereitunceremoniouslystopped. June herselfhadn’tmoved.Shestoodafoot away from the creature who continued nudging at an invisible border.

Her arm swung out to test it herself. Nothing stopped her from swiping at the air and through the animal, fingers catching only wisps of vapor through their path.

Thinkingback,shecouldrecallthedarksmearontheroadjustoutsideWashington.

There’d been wicked turmoil within her those first dozen miles, multiple missed turns as she debated going back home. She’d packed for the ride, sure, but she could just as easily turn around, return to the apartment and try to hibernate until the lights stopped running and the water turned off. It’d be easier, less stupid, at least.The argument lasted through the night, right until the roads split down a quiet stretch of forest, cars thinning 37

Tsering Lama out enough that June couldn’t find another with her headlights on.

That must have been the deer, then. A lump she’d caught from the corner of her eyeasshesloweddown,steeredaroundaterriblestainthattaperedoffintothewoods, and drove on.

June shuddered. Her hand flinched back. Off the side another vehicle was approaching,someconcernedpasserbyflashingtheirhazards.Shewavedthemoffand backed away to the truck.

As she drove back onto the road, the back of her neck burned under the creature’s gaze.Junepulledherjacketcollaralittlehigherandcrankedtheradiountilsomething loud and distracting came on. The deer could wait. Mississippi was still a day away. # Oxford, Mississippi never got the memo they weren’t Tupelo, so tiny neon Elvis greeted June from the motel office window as she pulled in. She shook and jiggled her legs out of the car. Static was ramping up a thigh that begged for an ounce of relief after miles of abuse and the night wind was cool, welcome balm.

Her room, however, was less relaxing in nature. The Heartbreak Motel found its niche in The King’s flamboyant but plausibly deniable intellectual property, which turnedJune’scrampedsingleintoaemeraldgreenbungalow,everyinchofspaceeither wrapped in fake vine or covered in tasteful wood paneling. Gran had always liked a littleElvisontheradiowhenevershevacuumed,butJunealwaysmanagedtoscamper out the patio door the minute crooning and hoovering filled the living room.

Thenostalgiamadeheritch.Shehopedthemotelhadenoughhotwatertopower wash her brain clean.

June stepped into a bathroom full of steam, a white fog that had traveled in from the ceiling vent connecting the rooms. She stripped methodically, folding each item as it came off her and setting it in the basin of the sink. The water ran slow, then too fast all at once, painfully pressurized and freezing. After a few minutes of sitting naked on the toilet seat, she shut the water off and yanked a shirt back on.

The older woman who’d kindly checked her in wasn’t at the front desk. Instead, a reedy young man nodded at her from behind the counter, fingers rapidly jabbing into his small console.

“The water’s not getting hot in my room.”

“You give it a minute to run?”

“I waited, it’s still really cold.”

“Uh-huh...” The console gave a tinny buzz and the clerk cursed, finally looking at June. His eyes paused around her chest before dragging to her face, a vigorous 38

Tsering Lama interest in customer service straightening his back. Far too late, June felt her shirt directly against her bare chest, tight as ever.

“Is there anything you can do, or...” She adjusted her jacket, coughing.

The clerk sucked at his teeth.“Yeah, some of the singles just do that. We’re out for the night, unless you wanna pay for a double.”

She didn’t want to pay for a double.

“But I mean,” the clerk started, leaning forward on his elbows, “I’ve got a shower in my room. It’s my mom’s place, so we sleep in the back. But I’ve got my own room.”

His cadence seemed to imply that this room also came with free peepholes.

June could feel her face twisting against best efforts and bit her tongue. It wasn’t like she was a child. She could use her words, make someone listen.

“Um, no, that’s alright, thanks.”

“Yeah, for sure. You’re in Room 19, right?” He pointed at his little check-in book and smiled like the cat that got the cream.“If a single frees up before morning, I’ll just knock on your door.” # Gran had been a woman of many quirks. She was traditionally religious the way grandmothers often were, but enjoyed collecting old bottle caps she’d find on the ground and spending all of her free time buying clean tapes to record multiples of blackandwhiteJeopardyreruns,somethingJuneattributedtoalate-stageattraction to Art Fleming.

She also couldn’t stop burying things.

The way her mother told the story, hand always pinched between her brows like every word dug a knife into her ribs, Gran started putting the odd knickknack into the ground soon after Grandad passed. She’d christened their new home’s backyard with sewing kits, newspapers, socks and shoes–all fair game and harmless, if only a little odd.

The first real problem came after June had been born, when small Jane brought her even smaller daughter home from the hospital, birth certificate in hand. That afternoon, she’d woken from a well-deserved nap and looked to her bedside table where a piece of paper should have been.

Gran hadn’t been tight-lipped about it. ”Course I did.”

“Are you serious, Mom? Are you fuckin’ serious?”

“Oh, you can’t leave it out, Janey. They could get to it. Just waiting until you don’t noticeand then you’ve given it away and it’s gone.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?!”

39

Tsering Lama The tussle continued into the night, several lamps and fireplace pokers dealing with the brunt of the fallout and the backyard torn apart, yielding not one scrap of paper.JunehadaskedGranabouttheincidentonce,watchingfromthekitchenasshe meticulously rewound one of her tapes by hand.

“But it’s weird, Gran.” June’s little legs kicked from her highchair, happy to be spendingtheweekendwithhergrandmother,whoalwaysforgotwhenbedtimewas.“I think you should stop.”

Gran finished rewinding and set the tape back in the cabinet, grabbing another.

Her cracked hands ran over the grooves soothingly. “When I go in the ground, Junebug, only then. You can leave, but you always end up right where you shouldn’t be, giving them everything you got. Can’t when you’re down there, though.”

Drunk, Jane once let it slip that Grandad used to knock the two of them around whenever he got annoyed, which happened more often than not. “Just a little,” she said, but frowned hearing herself. She told June to forget all that, but little June heard Doc’s footsteps at the front door and had already run up to her room. # A thousand invisible ants were crawling down her body, biting into her spine and jerking her legs up and down like some coked-out racehorse. The house hadn’t changed. There were peonies wilting from the cold beneath the windows, different from when she’d left, but an alarming allure of familiarity that slithered into her already roiling stomach.

No lights on inside. They could have sold the property. It could belong to a nice familynow,agoodsetofpeoplethathavenoideawhathappenedinsideonecramped bedroom year after year. Maybe they hosted barbecues and played parcheesi in the living room, fancy shit like that. It was nice to think about, at least.

She cut the engine across the street and walked over the empty road. The spade from home thumped against her hip with every step, jutting from her jacket pocket like a broken bone. From the sidewalk, an overgrown tree peeked out from behind the roof. Apparently Doc hadn’t ripped it out like he’d planned to.

Right as she got a leg up on the wire fence bordering the back, June paused. Her neck prickled again. She turned around to find the deer, watching her from the road.

Much like before, it bumped its broken neck into a clear barrier, gently pushing to no avail. June raised a hand to shoo it away. No response. She huffed and turned back to hop the fence. Later, later, later, she could always deal with this later.

The grass was wet with the remains of a brief shower, fortified by the incoming cold front into crunchy blades underfoot. Soil surrounding the old oak was no 40

Tsering Lama different. June’s spade carved out a few tufts, but her frenzied swings made little progress against the packed earth, much like taking a plastic spoon to concrete. Even alone she felt embarrassed, foolish for not having bought a full shovel and stupid for whacking at dirt in the middle of the night.

But she wasn’t crazy. She’d seen Gran bury the bags under the tree. Before Doc, before Gran died, she’d been a child watching from the back porch as Gran winked at her, covering plastic bag after bag of folded bills with dirt. “All yours one day, honey.

Enough to pay your way if you keep it hushed.” And she did. She always did what Gran said.

Suddenly, floodlights under the gutters sprung on, blinding for a single, heartstoppingmoment.Behindthescreendoor,hermotherswayedinherplaidnightgown, smaller than June remembered.

“June,” she called out, casual as ever. “Baby?”

June kicked the spade into the shadows but remained by the tree. She stood with awkward hands that settled into fists by her side. “Hi.” The embrace nearly took the both of them down. Kisses rained down in a flurry, tightly pressed and so sweetly smothering.“Baby.”Jane’s perfume had changed, yet breathing into her neck, the wrinkled swath of skin felt soft as it did when she was small. “I missed you baby, missed you so much. You’re all bones, we gotta get you inside, warm you up some.”

June didn’t move. She was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Is he in there?”

Warmth never left Jane’s face, but a touch of smile slipped. “No, honey.”

“But you’re still together?” Stupid question.

“We are.” Of course. Jane was Jane, and she could never let a good thing go. And Doc was always good to her. Looking past her mother into the dark house, it wasn’t hard to see where their last fight blew up, the TV trays that were split in half and the kitchen thatnearlycaughtfire.Dochadstayedoutside,onlysteppinginoncehesmelledsmoke.

“What happened to the house on Petersburg? Weren’t you moving?”

Jane shook her head and gently rubbed June’s arm, silently stuck in the motion like she was gentling a spooked horse. “I didn’t want to ask him to spend all that money, Juney. I like this house, anyways.”

“Didn’t like it much when I told you—” “Let’s not talk out here honey.”

“You still want to talk, then?”While the words flew out like water skittering on hot oil, June felt an odd calm spreading from behind her eyes. Fine, this had been a bad idea 41

Tsering Lama and she knew it. And now that she had been punished with this terrible conversation, she could just return home. People got fired every day. She could always find another job, start another life, she was young, why would she ever come back here? Forget the bags, money had been tight before and it’d be tight again, fine. She’d live.

Jane was still speaking, asking where she lived now (far), if she’d made friends (none), met anyone (fuck no), how she’d been getting along (badly). All the while, the hand on her arm inched up to her cold cheek until a thin band of metal pressed into June’s skin. She blinked and lifted hands to meet her mother’s, ripping it away as if the ring had seared a line into her skin. Jane stayed quiet as June inspected the accused finger.

“Only took him a decade? Congrats.”

June wasn’t sure what sort of face she was making, only that it was freaking Jane out, her words becoming gentle and measured.. “You don’t have to forgive him, baby. Don’t do anything you don’t want, I know it still… hurts.” The last part came out so even, so smooth in tone and therapizing in nature June couldn’t help but recoil.

“Hurts?” Her cheeks felt stiff. When did she start smiling? “Huh. What happened to, ‘He’d never, June. That’s disgusting. Don’t lie to me’?”

And now her mother was about to cry. She could always tell when Jane was about to cry by how still she’d become, only her neck bobbing like a chicken over fresh feed.

Gran was the one to point it out. “Same as when she came crying to me, knocked up ’fore she could drive. ’S why I call her my little, little chickie.”

Gran’s little chickie was leaking like a faucet in front of June, reaching for her face only to get smacked away again. “June, baby, please.”

“So what did he tell you? What did he say when he told you I wasn’t lying?”

“He felt so, so guilty, and I didn’t let him back in the house, baby, not until—” “What? He said sorry?”

Jane covered her face in her hands, shaking.

It was easy to kick while she was down. “Until he ‘un-raped’ me? Because that’s a pretty hard thing to do, I mean, impossible really.” June’s cheeks felt flayed raw by the cold. Distantly, she realized her manic grin couldn’t have been helping. “Pretty impressive he managed to do it without me noticing.”

Jane looked so small, and June couldn’t remember when her mother had shrunk into something so little, barely anything at all. The wind had picked up, rustling a few remaining dead leaves off the old oak over mother and daughter. It was then June felt closest to the truth, why she’d been compelled to return in the first place. The pull 42

Tsering Lama hadn’t begun when she parked across the street and saw the house. It’d started when she first drove away with nowhere to go, and it’d been dragging her back this entire time. She hadn’t called any other place home after all.

Distantly, June wondered if Gran had ever buried that money, or if she’d just seen her with a bag of coupons in the backyard again. She couldn’t help it. Jane finally opened her mouth, another plea to come inside, but June just laughed and laughed and laughed. # The animals began to pick up on the drive back. Every other mile introduced her to anewflattenedraccoon,splatteredpossum,evenseveralotherdeerwhosebrokenghosts would show up sometime down the path. Walking, limping, always on the move.

June was an animal too, she realized. She began to recognize the garishness of the roads, overlapping and winding to no end, barely drivable in some parts and never finished in others. They stretched endlessly into oblivion and cut the mountains and valleys into asphalt ribbons.There used to be lives for these creatures there. Now their homes were gone but they were still there, trying to get back.

Walking. Crossing. Dying.

The drive took less of a toll this time, night and day blurring at the edges. Her neck tingled as she got closer, driving past on the other side. Another turn fixed her around and soon the truck slowed to a stop. The dark stain had turned black under moonlight. It hadn’t gotten very far, some shrubbery on the border covering its body, butitremaineduntouchedbytheelementsandotherpredators,waitingforher.From the trees, she could see it watching by the road as well.

Handshookedunderthefrozencarcass,shepulled,draggingitdeeperanddeeper in until the sound of rushing cars faded completely. Behind the wall of trees, June knelt down. She was tired and cold and her hands hurt and there was so much to be done and if she didn’t do it, that stupid thing would be walking on an endless road, forever searching for a place that was long, long gone. She’d had enough of homeless animals. It all needed to go somewhere.

The snow was starting up again.

She took out her spade and began to dig.

43

Let the Light In Kyla Joyner

44

My Precious

By Ella Sharpe Growing up, Papa1 was my favorite grandparent. He and Grandma babysat when Mom went to work, which was never for long because she was a part-time nurse, but long enough for me to get into trouble. When Grandma babysat, it meant nononsense. I wasn’t allowed to do anything“unreasonable”or“dangerous”outside of stealing chocolate chips before they made their way into the cookies. I couldn’t even eat the dough with raw eggs!

When Papa babysat, I could do anything I wanted because I was “his precious.”

Mom chastised him on many occasions when she came back from work to find me halfway up the catalpa tree, picking worms off leaves, or on the top of the pile of hay bales in the barn loft. I can just hear her saying, “She could fall off and break her neck!”Despite the hair pulling that ensued from leaving me under Papa’s supervision, Mom loves to tell the story of when she came to pick me up from their little one-story brick house and found Papa and I squeezed into their little bathroom down the hall.

I had stationed him on the toilet, or the commode as they call it, and I was painting his nails pink. I can imagine it was the gleaming blush pink polish that Grandma always had tucked into the little white cabinet above the commode. I’m sure I was very excitedtopaintPapa’sthicknailsandprobablysplatteredexcesspinkpolishalloverhis big, wrinkled fingers. *** Blood spattered the bathroom. It dripped down the white tile walls onto the black and white tile mosaic on the floor. It ruined the large-print word search book that sat, pages curling, by the commode. A few minutes before, Papa called Grandma from the bigshedwhereI’msurehe’dbeencleaningorputtingvegetablesawaybeforestumbling up the gravel hill to the house. He’d left his pants at the shed in a soggy, maroon-colored clump. Grandma was at choir practice, so it just kept ringing. He was in a panic; he couldn’t remember our number. When he finally did, he called Mom who was at our house down the street fixing supper. He told her,“I think I’m bleedin’.”Mom turned off the stove and jumped into her 2003 Honda Odyssey right away.

1 Pronounced “Pawpaw” in a Southern accent

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Ella Sharpe *** Back when Papa worked at the Sears mail order center, Grandma made him pie for breakfast every day.

When I was little, I went to their house to help her make it. I learned how to level off the tops of worn yellow plastic measuring cups with a dinner knife and watch as the bright white sugar landed gracefully in the bowl of her old KitchenAid stand mixer. I learned how to make a perfect lattice on top of a strawberry pie, made from farmer’s market strawberries in June. She helped me crimp the edges of the pie crust: rightpointerfingerindentingthecrustagainsttheboundsofmyoppositethumband pointer finger. Papa and I sat down at their bulky dark-wood dining table to eat it as soon as it was cool enough that it wouldn’t burn our tongues. We sped the process up by heaping a big scoop of Food Lion brand vanilla ice cream on top. I liked to get extra strawberries and gooey raw crust at the bottom and Papa got the leftover crimpededges.Coldicecreamshockedmysensitiveteeth,tickledmynerves—“brain freeze!”—andthesugarydark redstrawberrymushrelieveditasIreachedforanother spoonful, red ooze dripping off the edge of my spoon. *** The towels that Mom and Dad stuffed into her minivan were soaked with dark red blood by the time they got to the emergency room. Papa thought the blood was because of that watermelon he ate, but the blood was darker than even a ripe watermelon, darker than Grandma’s strawberry pie. Mom waited with him in the emergencyroombecausetheywereonlylettingonepersongobackwithhim,andshe happened to be the nurse in the family.They didn’t take him back immediately; he sat there, bleeding, in the waiting room. *** Papa is always “resting his eyes,” but he never fools anyone. He can sleep anywhere at any time. I remember him babysitting me at my house one time: I’m curled up on the right side of our navy-blue couch, and he’s sitting in the rocking chair across the room with his feet propped up on the ottoman. He’s covered in blankets and probably wearing a toboggan because he’s so cold-natured. My cat, Pumpkin, crawls onto his legs and curls up. She knows he’s not planning on moving anytime soon. We’re watching a show together, but he can’t hear anything because he desperately needs a hearing aid but refuses to wear one. I think he likes tuning the world out. That, and turning the volume down when Grandma screams “Norman!!!”He has no idea what’s going on in the show, but when the commercials come on, he launches into tangentially related stories. When he finally wears out, 46

Ella Sharpe his commentary drops off and his breathing gets heavier. He’s just resting his eyes, sitting straight up in the rocking chair with Pumpkin snoring on his lap in harmony with his breath. *** His wrinkled, wiry legs kicked relentlessly at the edges of the plastic hospital bed like they were trying to detach themselves from his body. He was a toddler having a tantrum; his words consisted of moans and gibberish. His arms tried to flail too, but they couldn’t escape the binds of the straps tying his wrists to the bed. His worn hands were contained in white cloth bound around his wrists with Velcro so he would stop yanking cords and IVs out. Mom stayed busy trying to keep his white hospital gown down and underwear up. We’d given up on keeping the thin hospital blanket on. It stayed scrunched up at the foot of the bed until his body had finally given out or the sedatives kicked in and he stopped fighting.

Mom went to check on him after her shift in the ICU that week and her coworker, Brian, who is about half her age and a third of Papa’s said, “Kay, I’m not gonna lie to you. He’s strong.” It took the two of them together to keep him in the bed, and he was really mad at Mom because she wouldn’t go get his truck.“Why won’t you go get my truck?” *** I was a farmer’s market kid. Every Friday night, we loaded up Grandma and Papa’s old cherry red Chevrolet truck with the covered bed that my dad used to camp in when he was a kid.We filled it with mismatched tomato boxes, bushel baskets, and old plastic Sears trays. As soon as I was finally old enough that Mom would let me go in public with all the public germs, I was at the farmer’s market with my grandparents.We have a pictureofbabyme,chubbyandbald,inGrandma’sarmsbehindthedarkgreenwooden table full of yellow crook-necked squash, big purple eggplants, and Cherokee purple, German Johnson, and Big Beef tomatoes.They were both beaming with pride for their first and only grandbaby, hairless and chubby though I was. When I was too little to make change for customers, I employed my cuteness to draw customers in. And when I got bored of that, I would come and go down the bank of the creek just outside the farmer’s market doors with my friends. I would bring a woven bag full of provisions: carabiners, Grandma’s scarves, little plastic cups, and flashlights. We’d set up forts on the creek bank and hop around the rocks. Once I was tired out, I’d go back inside and get a warm empanada from Nora, whose stand was next to ours, or trade some of my grandparents’vegetablesforasesamecookiefromZaytoon’sstand,orgetsomefreepeach ice cream or chocolate milk (one of the many perks of being a farmer’s market kid). I 47

Ella Sharpe evenhelpedthemgrowthevegetables,althoughmyprimarycontributionwasmaking mud pies and stomping in the red clay rows while Papa watered the tomatoes. *** When Papa was in his hospital room in the ICU, he had finally calmed down.

He talked to me a little. I’d rushed home from college just to squat down on the floor by his bed and hold his big, wrinkled hand, giving it assuring squeezes. I meant to tellhimYou’regonnabeokay,Papa.I’mrighthere.I’mnotgoinganywhere.Don’tworry.

I don’t know how much he heard or understood when I told him “Hey Papa. I love you.”But he knew I was there. Even when he wouldn’t acknowledge anyone else, he would say in his tired raspy voice, “my precious.” That’s what he always called me. I was his princess, his precious, his sugar. But then, sitting there holding his hand, he pointed up to the grid ceiling in his hospital room and started telling me about the tomatoes and June bugs he saw flying around up there. He was happy, I think. *** Despite how much she yells at him to “get out of bed, it’s 8 o’clock!” or “Norman!

It’s supper time!”, Grandma spoils him rotten. Every day, for years, she packed him a little brownbag lunch and set it by their back door before he left for work. His co-workers called him Wormy because he ate so much and never got fat, so they thought he had ringworm. At home, Grandma filled him up with fresh corn slathered in margarine, squash casseroles, lima beans, and a variety of her specialty desserts.

Whenever Grandma made her famous chocolate chip cookies, Papa got his own pan because he liked his cookies a little bit raw and fresh out of the oven. *** Papa ate ice cream for three meals a day when he was in the last unit he stayed on in the hospital. He kept complaining about how his stomach hurt, but it wasn’t because he had ringworm. He hadn’t been able to eat anything for the past week between his statesofhysteriaandthebleedingdiverticulainhisstomach.Evennow,overayearlater, he doesn’t eat like he used to. Grandma tells me that he doesn’t wanna eat anything anymore. He used to love pizza, but now he won’t eat it. He used to love Grandma’s desserts, but he’s lost his sweet tooth. He still ate the birthday cake I made, though. *** We celebrated his 89th birthday this summer. Mom said, “We’re so glad you’re here for it.” He just grinned his sweet, timeless smile, crooked teeth yellowed from years of sweets. When I hugged him, trying to be gentle, but still tight enough to squeeze all my love into him as if I could transfuse it into his veins with pure willpower, he told me, “You my precious.”

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Legs

Virginia Van de Riet Gelatin Silver Print

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Remembering Flamenco

By Ryleigh Bennett When I watched her dance Last March across the stage The wooden, clueless stage Clueless to her moving abilities Of fortune telling and dancing Short steps, taps, claps, shouts Shuffle across wooden boards ¡Olé! To my solid remembrance Solid via freezing and sheer time ¡Olé! To her strained face with Furrowed brows and friction Filled drudging following The Andalusian guitar, Following the voice. ¡Como duele mi alma!

Steps that rock the hips Hips rocking rhythmic Like a gasping breath A breath and a dress Moving swift, smooth, Swirling ¡Olé! To fabric I felt caress my fretting Spirit like a hand I felt Brush through my hair Short steps, taps, claps, shouts Shuffle across wooden boards ¡Olé! To her movement telling me Exactly what a dance is made of

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Ryleigh Bennett 回忆跳舞 2024年，三月 从左到右，从山到海， 我对她跳舞很陌生。 我不知道她怎么跳怎么说。 短时光留下了深的印象。 干杯我的回忆。 因为有时间，所以我看得清楚。 一边走路从左到右， 一边走路从山到海。 干杯她抱负担的脸。 眼睛看心里，看摩擦系数。 先是Andalusian的吉他 然后说话，以后听得懂。 上和下，左和右 跟呼吸一样。 呼吸和一条裙子。 跳舞的圆。 干杯受到的影响 短时光留下了深的印象。 一边走路从左到右， 一边走路从山到海。 干杯我们的沟通。 跳舞是什么？

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Adam

By Emily Leventhal The clinic bathroom wasn’t empty. High demand for plastic surgeons, I supposed. My medical gown crinkled awkwardly in the doorway as I waited for the other occupant to leave. I was a giant at the threshold, pale paper drifting away from my skin and swelling my silhouette. The woman didn’t notice. If she hadn’t locked the door, she must not have cared about company, my sedative urged. I needed to pee before they put me under.

As I walked into the room, I locked the door like she hadn’t. The woman didn’t look up from the sink. She simply stood, palms cupped together beneath the spout.

The water never came. Tan fingers trembled under the weight of soap suds.

I sat on chilled porcelain. She remained as she was. Her dark hair hung in a post-op oil spill, brown eyes fuzzy in the mirror as they tilted down-downdown. I could see the bulge of bandages around her torso and knew she had finished what I was about to begin. I flushed the toilet, unsure if I had done anything at all.

“They just don’t understand,” I told her, forming a line for the sink. “My husband, he thinks it’s all about getting hotter. That I wanna look more like an hourglass. So do all the idiots on the news. They miss the whole point, crying about how ‘trendy’ the surgery has go-otten.”

It was hard to say that. “Gotten.” The word was too thick to swallow but short enough to think I could. It was silly of me to imagine I could manage it. I had a horrible gag reflex.

She blinked in response, lids listless. I was close enough to smell her overripeness, musty and meaty. My pale reflection loomed around hers, buoyant as I bounced my weight from foot to foot. I wasn’t bothered by the differences, for once.

The ink under my gown throbbed feverishly, marking ribs for removal. I scratched at the bars, beneath the paper and marker and skin. I remained bound.

It was a heavy thing, carrying fractals of a foreign body.

I confessed, “I’ve wanted this my whole life. My mama always read me the Gospel instead of kid’s books. It helped my reading level, I guess. But I’ve been itching for this since I learned about our Creation. I know I shouldn’t want to get rid of them, but I do.”

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Emily Leventhal A horrible rattling overcame the woman’s body.Teeth, nails, and every hard part she had left clattered together. I missed her stillness, didn’t mean to strike a nerve, even knowing she was there the same as me. Bubbles slipped into the sink.

She shook as she recited, “Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. This is it. This is all. I don’t want it anymore, I never wanted it.”

Her voice was husky, parched as her hands. I grasped her shoulders, holding her together. If I let go, she’d fall apart like a rotten apple. I’d seen that happen, neighborhood boys poking at soft tissue until it had no choice but to collapse on itself.

“It’s gone now, honey. They took what they could. What’s left is all yours,” I assured her.“Honey”was tricky to think but instinctive to say, smooth and sweet on my dumb tongue.

I ranted as I held her, words as loose as her body when they tumbled out.

“They get to create life from bones, boners, bone,” I said.

“But we are meant to be soft,” I continued.

“They want us to hate what we are,” I claimed.

“I think they know what the surgery is, and they hate that it takes away the hardness they gave us,” I told her. “Screw Adam and all the rest.”

We were both dirty by then. Born that way, maybe.The woman’s hands bumped against the sink and the water refused to start. I regretted making the sweaty paper under my palms even ickier. It clung to thin skin and I knew I wouldn’t come away easy. The effort was nearly worth it when she started to still.

I worried for her, this stranger who wanted the same things as me. Who had them already.

The motion sensor winked red. She had no soap left to offer. I reached around her tender frame, our gowns rustling together like sand through a sieve. I waved my hand.

Water poured forth, and we were clean.

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Human Fruit Bat

By Chloe Winchester I can see the cells on his burnished chest replenishing themselves, replenishing themselves because I can see his tiny heartbeat pulsing at the surface of the skin right of the sternum, his left translucent epidermis And a heartbeat means replenishment And a heartbeat means organismic regeneration, blastema Blastema; the salamander's new nub that grows back when the old one gets chomped by the apex Canyon Bat And a heartbeat means he is alive and loves me He is alive so he loves me, these two are synonymous I know this because he tells me I am his flowers and his stars, his bluebird and once, his salamander My little salamander, (endearing) (I am missing limbs) (not his fault) I don't understand how he sees these missing limbs and loves me anyway It’s a privilege to be close enough to see someone’s heartbeat. The life-giving, bone building spine straightening movement of their chest The bone-breaking, regrowing, anti-electronic poundingmotorbloodsack I feel as though it’s a privilege to be close enough to see someone’s heartbeat and to know that every third or fourth one is surely for you.

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Beauty in the Stars Naari Short Digital Vector

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An Occasion of Exceptions

By Andrew Sneed I. I cannot name the fruit that falls from trees in evening heat when the sun licks and grooms the leaves with a fat and yellow tongue.

But it falls and pools at my feet, and the lanternflies hold feasting days in the storm drains and the gutters along the street, gorging on some distant cousin of the plum.

The work is like a blood clot today.

The heart flags, the evening thins, as I pick at calluses and pretend to attend to the meeting place of two old friends with names like Rosemary and Franklin.

At a table under other trees, in distant heat, they sit and cross their feet and smile, making small talk ’til the words grow heavy.

She wears her sunday dress, and he his trousers with a pleat, and the passing scent of cranberry and sawdust make ripples that remain long after smiles fade–– like the silence that clings to a campus in August.

The day is tired, boyish, and replete, and like the wind that dies to live again, has spent itself in figments made of men, in thoughts that swirl and steep in the evening heat, in the solitary sound of clotheslines when they bleat.

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Andrew Sneed And I am both of them again, wetting old white fingers in search of a thought to say, taking place––always taking, always placing–– in some exchange more like a slow dance than a ricochet.

But the evening fell without a word between us.

And the bastard plums, fattened on saliva of the sun, lose their brittle clutch, slip, and lie unwoven on the warm brick.

II. The parlor matricula may dismember the student body with a dull blade, but they cannot make it scream.

And the subtle fingers of a ghost may orchestrate our lobotomy, but they cannot disremember what we wrote.

For it was not South or North, but somewhere in between–– somewhere uncivil, undercommon, underspoken, that we first learned to make ideas dance on strings.

At a table in the corner near the window, I sit, watching partygoers crowd into a crowded room.

Certain ladies turn to meet my gaze, smile, and stare, their pretty painted faces powdered white like chinaware.

But they cannot say what can’t be said, because they do not know the books they have not read.

And besides, I was looking out the window at the street, at the breeze-beaten moths making refuge in the lamp glass.

I made some small attempt at small talk, politely and discreet, when a clown, wearing cufflinks of a smile and a frown, kneaded a sad expression onto sunken cheeks and contorted across the room to comfort me.

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Andrew Sneed Tyranny, he told me, talks like strangers at a party.

It prowls in people’s eyes when the conversation’s all the same, always sane and soft and spoken, and he played upon his words to slip a joke in, and his hands were in his pockets when he spoke them.

And there is nothing so insidious, said he, as an administrator poised with a black ink pen.

But I was thinking about the heat, and the people’s clothes that cling to them, and I was lonely.

One tends to make excuses for excuses and playthings of the people that we meet.

It is easy to protest and to pray, I say, to behead or to hang, to drop a drop of blood before the court and say hip hip–– and you know how it ends. We all know how it ends.

Then he offered me punch and pocket candies, but I refused.

I prefer the taste of coffee with my rubble, milk with my cake.

Lord knows we can’t have both.

And the truth will always have a taste; some think it bitter.

I find it more reminds me of eating morning foods at night or night foods in the morning.

Then he left me of my company to go sit applesauce in the middle of the parlor floor.

And the gallows boar and the rat its whore are tangled up in tapestry above the exit door.

The portraiture collapses but to cover me.

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Andrew Sneed I miss the taste of the mouth I used to have.

It said better words to better people and the tongue slept soundly in the teeth.

But I have less time, less sympathy, and a heavy silence sleeping, like a hound, like a boarhound after hunt, inside my heart.

So I keep tea at my table and listen to the sound of people speaking, and at least I am alone.

The feeling, I can bear; The silence, I cannot.

III. I met her in a coat room after dark.

I met her on uncertain terms.

We were people leaving places, strangers bartering for glances, making faces with our faces.

Mink and bangs, white licorice, and the room was loud with laughing.

It takes so little to make a man feel seen.

Come, let us play accompany, she said to me, let us live and die by keys and strings and make the cello scream with a lock of taffeta hair.

Let us take to Siren’s Chase, where petals flicker in the lamplight, where moonlight paws at pebbles under stoplights, pursuing sidewalks along the cobble seam.

We could have been good people, but we are far too strange.

So we forsake ourselves in night cafes and alleyways and plazas pertaining to a theme.

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Andrew Sneed When we could not find God, we found ourselves instead; Sitting on a subway train in a west-suburban station, the arthritic locomotion owing to some commotion between our selves and the direction they were going in; Becoming strange again in the hours empty moments that cower between the utmost and the only just beginning; Consorting to escape to the eastern side of Spring, where the morning and the afternoon become a greeting, and winter weds itself to a thinking, breathing thing.

So we forsake ourselves in night cafes and alleyways and dreams, where decent citizens, sound of mind and mostly sober, sell their tired stupors for malaise.

And in time we choke on words and wet the stoppages of the esophagus with a sweetish white, like drain pipes in the rain.

Under amber bulbs, in booths by windows black and gold, we watch ourselves grow thin before we fill our guts again on thoughts we cannot stomach, and grow numb, wearing suits to chum in parlors, using chopsticks to chew gum.

In other words, we talked our way into the night and took the long way out, foraging for out-of-place things in places out of movies; ourselves we found.

And the people eating pancakes in the diners in the nighttime are people that can talk, she tells me, before slipping back into the labyrinth of a dream.

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Andrew Sneed We could have been good people.

And some people have many things to teach you.

She had only two.

First, that there is nothing so pure as rubbing alcohol on open wrists.

And that gin and coffee give the same full sound sloshing in a belly on a mattress on the ground.

Mink and bangs, white licorice–– we could have been kind.

But instead we forsake and falsify and drink, entangling our resistible bodies in some sly imitation of a moth making love to a firefly.

Afterwards we sit opposite, chasing after words.

But they have nimble bodies like oiled birds, and perch in places out of reach of children.

And the light is falling backwards down the cheetah pattern print on the Chinese folding screen, the porous skins of bodies housing conversation, speaking homewards.

And I am both of them again, the boy and the girl and me, sitting opposite myself, stirring milk into my coffee.

And the boy will think that he is dreaming when the mother whispers there, there–– but where?

The boy will never know, never care, and the soothing promise that was there is nowhere to be found, not anywhere.

But he will think that he has found it 61

Andrew Sneed in the weight of a warm palm on a collar bone, in the eyes that blink and stare from the woman making angels on the mattress at the end of their affair.

In the night they shared noises; In the morning, words.

And what else can last between two souls in one dark room?

IV. The sunroom smells like alcohol in the afternoon.

Hog-bristle brush in hand, she stands before the soft white belly of the canvas to broach the subject nude, drawing blood.

The sunroom smells like alcohol and paint and pink perfume.

She was good to me, and I was undeserving.

And I do not do this often but the syrup made me homesick, and she was closer than the road.

And besides it was my birthday; I make exceptions for occasions, and occasions of exceptions.

Hog-bristle brush in hand, she turns to me, and some tectonic in the bloodstream shifts.

The primordial mass moves silently within, and she is lovely, standing next me in a closeness we may never know again.

To be so lifelike after sin should be a sin.

I know which voice to vocalize, some word to stitch and seam what’s left of momentary lives unlived in the moments lent them.

But silence tempts, and darkness calls, 62

Andrew Sneed and the heart stutters endlessly.

And is it so terrible, after all, for thoughts to tremble before they fall?

The gallows boar and the rat its whore–– I met her in a coat room after dark.

But we shed our coats of oil in the bedroom and cannot put them on again.

So we broach the subject nude, and the texture of her skin gives the impression of a still life painted by still dead men, by candlelight.

Then she left me of my company like a memory with a pulse.

So I let the alarm clock remind me to keep breathing, to keep my soul teething on the heartache bone, and at least I am alone.

V. At night the sick ward windows fog, where the soon-dead academics gather strength to field dress the future before it is born.

Old hands collecting cards and debts from folding tables set for dinner while the hours crawl away to gather dust in conversations and decay, the shadows dance in a landscape of candlelight, castles and dales recurring under the window curtain of a sick ward on a windy night.

When practiced minds approach the post-historic to find no pigment blown, impressions of the bone that burdens dust but ochre 63

Andrew Sneed muscles wasting into rust, what then?

No, they will not find us understood.

Merely remnants of remarks on black chalk boards attesting to a truth too cursive to reclaim, a refrain too scoliotic for the circus cord.

How empty the prey, lost the game, whose only predator was passing time!

How senseless the desire to remain when nothing tasteful tastes the same, and the Sunday morning paper smiles like a surgeon casting electric shocks through the severed heads of the lame.

Better to unwrinkle the present than remove the tumors of the past.

The blood will run in torrents down the blade.

On the sick ward windowsills we sit, suspended on a city of breath.

Choosing love above a metropolis that breathes on dollars and cents.

Above a people lately woken to reality, left taut between the incoherent and the infinite, toiling towards temporal deportation into the post–– post-mortem, post-haste, post-incident reports, post-tendential tendencies, post-graduate allegations, charting postal routes to heaven, parsing the difference from the same.

There is dignity enough in a dark room, but not enough to remain.

At night the sick-ward windows fog and say the same.

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Andrew Sneed What is left we left too soon; A bitter draught, a plum in bloom, an old woman rocking in a concrete room.

And the gallows boar and the rat its whore collapse in coils on the floor.

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on pain and meditation

By Elizabeth Newsom 1. there was this morning, deep in a jungle in northern thailand, where i crawled, feeling half-alive and dressed in white, from a wooden hut and climbed barefoot up a rain-slick hill of grass. i dodged tree trunks and slimy vines, eyeing the barely-blue clouds of a morning sky with an unrisen sun.

2. i breathed heavily as my legs moved. my feet slipped in the mud, but i didn’t care. it was soft, sole-cradling, sweeter than the dryer ground.

3. a monk in orange robes and a vacant smile waited patiently. i wondered if he delighted in the way the mist of the morning air freckled his nose (the same way that i did) or if he detached himself from that, too.

4. a massive stone circle sprawled, firmly set where there once were jungle plants.

5. morning dew soaked the wide ankles of my white pants, sticking them to my skin with mud crawling up my calves.

6. the monk began to explain the meditation. i was to walk in a circle, chanting (silently) with the gentle, slow beat of my bare feet as they landed on the sharp rocks jutting from the ground.

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Elizabeth Newsom 7. at the top of the hill, peering between leafy trees, i could see a sprawling landscape. mist settled in the divots between more hills, all drenched in a thick layer of soft, green canopy. the sun almost touched the sky now, ushering in a light gray before color broke the horizon. birds i’d never heard echoed, unseen, around me. the world tasted different at this hour, with an emptiness in my stomach and a burgeoning clarity in my foggy vision. i still blinked sleep from my tired eyes, and the monk’s instructions fell on fuzzy ears.

8. he nodded and extended an open palm at the circle embedded with sharp stones.

9. i started to walk.

9.5 i continued walking. once you start doing something here, you never stop. you only pause, push and pull, tide-like. you don’t stop walking, you don’t stop thinking.

10. the flat gray felt uncomfortable. it met my soles too harshly, grating like an ill-timed joke at a withering dinner party.

11. the first sharp rock twinged. i winced. the silent chant slipped from my mind, and all i noticed was the pain. i skipped off the rock, losing my tempo.

12. there is a passage in a best friend’s book, from the kybalion: “Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.”

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Elizabeth Newsom 13. there is a pendulum in my sweet friend’s hands that tells us what we need to know. i think it’s lovely, but everything i need to know is on a sharp rock outside of chiang mai.

13.5 sometimes i have questions too intense to ask the pendulum. i chew on them instead, shoving the chain back in the drawer because i just don’t want to know.

14. i regained my tempo after that first pain. i usually do. it’s not that the rocks grow softer, rounder, less capable of slicing my soft soles. i grow callouses, keep my eyes on tree trunks, and they don’t hurt so bad.

15. some time sitting with this meditation makes my feet go almost-numb. i settle into the rhythm of walking, and it becomes me.

16. in another jungle, i met a man who offered survival skills and contemplations on capitalism. Ben. he once worked for Nestlé and broke his leg alone in the rainforest. these were separate instances, of course, but he spoke of them in tandem, as if the pain was inseparable. he promised us that working for evil, even if you don’t participate directly, will kill your soul. he said meditation allows you to survive anything. to get back to humanity, to seek medical attention, he had to walk. hauling a broken limb in tow, he entered a state of such deep internal meditation that he could walk without pain. the only injury that can kill you in the wild is broken skin. the infection is stronger than you and your mind. some things just are.

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Elizabeth Newsom 17. i had this image of a tree that i used whenever i meditated. it was tall, straight, with green boughs at the top and a certain wave in its silhouette on the right. i’d breathe up the trunk and down the vines, and it sat with me while i did. its roots spread in the seams of my brain, watered by tissue and old stories.

18. once, on a day with a different walking meditation route (miles through the jungle and the rural thai mountain towns), wind swooped through my chest, emptying my ribcage and swelling my sternum. it was there, the tree.

19. it stood silent. it didn’t acknowledge me. i inhaled it.

20. i didn’t know it existed. i’d constructed something specific in my head, held it close, like a friend i’d always known, but always assumed it wasn’t real. but here it was, in front of me, unblinking. it stood the same way it always did in my head.

21. i didn’t say a word to anyone. we’d been silent for hours, walking and meditating and breathing through the moments that felt ripe with the ability to crush that peace.

22. i couldn’t do anything that felt honest to the moment except smile at the tree like the sweet, old friend it was and keep walking.

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8 bit army

Jesse Patete Screenprint

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portrait of america as public school lockdowns

By Ash Chen 2012 the first time i saw a grown man cry, it was my fourth grade teacher telling my class about Sandy Hook. he was a tall man, 6’5—one inch taller than President Lincoln minus the hat, as he was fond of joking during history lessons. but i’ve never seen a man look so small as he had, weeping on a stool before a class of two dozen nine-year-olds. we didn’t quite get it then, why Mr. C might have to die for us, but i get it now. like a headshot in a theater, this history cannot be made lighthearted. that month, we had our first real lockdown when a pizza delivery guy wandered in but didn’t sign in at the front office, so we all panicked and locked the poor guy out, hid from him like some great practical joke. we thought it was funny, then, didn’t understand that we were supposed to be scared, never wondered if a sawed-off shotgun could be hidden in his bag instead 71

Ash Chen of an extra-large pepperoni pie. we have learned to be scared since.

2018 i was scared shitless after Parkland, a high school freshman who finally understood how to die, what a gun is, and what men do with them. and it was surely a cruel prank when, that monday morning following the massacre, we had a lockdown drill before the first bell even rang, sleepy students still spilling into the classroom death traps. i texted my mother one last i love you, and put my head down in the dark to die in first period art class. the Times calls us generation lockdown, like the next gunman isn’t the kid sheltering in place next to me. later that semester, someone pulled the fire alarm just to get out of class, or maybe that was a prank, too, but none of us moved, just looked at each other, terrified that the shooters were perched on the roof waiting for us. if you figure the odds, no one’s died in a school fire since 1958. more than 600 kids have been killed by a gun in a school since 1970. so the alarm continued to scream at us to save ourselves, so we did, 72

Ash Chen and we stayed in our seats that day.

2019 Riley Howell died tackling a shooter in his anthropology classroom during finals week. he was shot three times, the last of which was fatal; straight to the brain. because Riley put himself in the line of fire, no one else was hurt after that—not by a bullet, anyway. as i watched the live drone coverage of students evacuating, hands held behind heads, i prayed to the patron saint of assault rifles and body bags that my friends were among the thousand traumatized living. the university canceled exams and held a memorial, and 21-year old ROTC cadet Riley Howell was martyred with full military honors, and his parents were handed a folded flag and a purple, shattered, heart.

2022 fire alarms now inspire hesitation, suspicion, a panic of the paradoxical sort. at least i know now that i would rather go up in flame than down in a slurry of indiscriminate lead. fire is more personal. it is a spectacle. shootings don’t even make the front page, these days. a wildfire might.

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Know Your Role

Naari Short Screenprint Ink or Ppaer 74

The Funeral

By Beau Holmes Everyone was gathered for the death. It was expected any moment now. And he was there in his proper place, not that he could have left if he wanted to; that was obvious. They had all gathered in a perfect circle around him, after all, and they all unconsciouslythoughtthesamethoughts.Really,howcouldtheyhelpit?Hewassuch a sorry thing to look at; so skinny, even under the bedding; he was not far from the skeleton he would soon become.

Had it only been nine months since the diagnosis, when the yellow eyes and the aches became too obvious to ignore? It was all downhill from there. Everybody knew that this was the kind of illness where the ball never stopped rolling. They all nodded solemnly and silently in agreement at this. Those treatments! What an idea! No, it never stopped, it only slowed down; one could not in good conscience have called them cures. No, the only thing they might possibly cure was your wallet’s weight problem; but nobody thought to laugh at that. It was not the moment, and there is always a moment, way over the hill. Now he was only near the bottom of his own, but he was so close; so close that they began to tremble in that light of pure feeling.

Howwonderfulthesemomentswere!Hewasnearlyready;sleeping,unresponsive;all was perfect.The door stood open, waiting to be violated by her, where the crowd had already cleared a path.

How the mourners did shake. Holding one knuckle in one palm, leaning against thewallandoneachother’sshoulders,bitingtheirtonguesuntiltheirmonthsflooded with the taste of copper; for the time, their joy was their shame; though it was a secret they all shared, it could not have a voice. Not until they had reached the peak, if they could contain it until then. They all looked at each other; the shame boiled out of them, puffing out the corners of their eyes as rivers of it ran from their nostrils. Their shame became shamelessness. And how tempted they all were to burst at the sight of theother.Whatasenseoffreedomandcommunity,ultimatebelonging,waspromised in the celebrations of this sorrow.

All the while, there he laid. Had his breaths not gotten shorter as the minutes passed? His chest hardly rose and released naught but a whistle from his stubby, unkempt face. She must be here shortly. It is nearly time; he is almost done. One thought this, but all felt it. Their faces puffed and blossomed and reddened. How 75

Beau Holmes muchlonger?Thetension,thesilence,thewait,itisunbearable.Howmuchlonger?We can hardly hold it in.

And so their joy was as great as their panic when one man opened his mouth, revealing a deceptively empty cavern. There his lips remained, still, but his body quaked with the trembling of an ancient volcano, as big as Pompeii and just as important. His throat grumbled and squeaked; their minds all reached out to clog it shut, though their bodies remained as still, for this, this was the rub, the stuff of future dreams presently promised.

How sweet the regret would have been, if only her shadow had not appeared in the doorway. Though what a sight the mourners made! No actor ever dared, nor playwright ever dreamed so quick a costume change; blushing cheek, tearful eye, bowed heads all donned with the levity of a mask.

The woman took no notice, however, remaining in the doorway only a moment; her head down, her face pale with passion, her body meek with loss; she trod the path prepared for her with heavy foot. Among all those waiting for her was his empty bedside chair; a makeshift, sorry thing if there ever was one. Perfect, they all thought. They hardly had time to revel, though, before she was in the chair and squirming from discomfort. Perfect; their trembling broke through again, just in time for curtain call. The woman, to their relief, became still. Her eyes were wide wells, soon to blossom with sorrow, but for now, they only stared, wasting all their sight on the man who had no idea, if any such thing remained in his head, that he was the object of such a loving watch.

For almost a minute, anticipation boiled; the climax was soon to come, they all assured each other. As such, it was a miracle no one cheered when she reached into her pocket. One man nearly jumped for joy but was lucky his wife was there to hold him down. One woman did grunt, however, when she brought it out: a piece of paper haphazardly folded to uneven edges. She soon opened it, revealing a page marred by shaky hands and tear stains.

The woman cleared her throat.

Here! The top of the hill had come at last! Their hearts and minds teetered on the edge of that ecstasy; the heights of such emotion could kill a lesser crowd, their eyes all boasted. Even so, one woman fainted, one man took suc strong breath that he unwittingly blew snot down his chin, and a child hid under her mother’s dress; the poor thing was nearly driven to tears.The woman was lucky not to have noticed; instead, she took a deep breath, and began to read: “T-Ten things I love about you.”

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Beau Holmes She gasped with emotion before restraining herself, straightening her back, and continuing.

“One. I love that you kiss me goodnight, every night.”

A deep breath.

“Even when I’m away on a business trip, you call me and make that big smacking sound through the phone that always makes me laugh. I always knew,”she gulped, “I knew I would never be alone… as long… as long as...”

She could not hold it in any longer; her tears dotted the page as the paper itself began to shake in her hands. Still, she read on.

“As long… as I had you.”

Deep breath. Shivers all around.

“Two. I love how you stroke your chin whenever you focus on something.

Every time you read before bed I’d make fun of you, because you looked like some snotty English professor, just rubbing your chin, like you’re onto something really profound, even though you were always reading something stupid, like James Patterson or Stephen King… and I made you read that one Danielle Steele book.”

She laughed, and a smile pierced the clouds.

“Then I knew you hated it because there was no chin rubbing. You read the whole thing, though, just ’cause I asked you to. And I couldn’t stop smiling when you were telling me just how much you hated it.”

Tears continued to roll, but her hands had steadied, and she still wore a smile as she moved to the next item.

“Three. I love how much you care for your students, like they’re your own kids.

I’ll never forget that one night I came home from work—this was when we had the whole mold thing and I had to do all that overtime to pay for it. When I got home I just wanted to collapse, but there was some kid at our table. I was so exhausted I almost just smacked him with my purse before you ran in with some coffee mugs. I guess seeing some stranger in our living room was just too much for me right then… I just started to cry… you and the kid just looked horrified...”

Her smile had gone, but so had the tears.

“You just ran up to me and gave me a hug. Then you held me by the shoulders and explained to me, calm as can be, ‘This is Henry,’ you said, and this kid just waved at me while I was sobbing. He was just as tired as I was, I think. But when you started explaining it to me I just… stopped. He had tried to go home but when he got there his parents were screaming at each other, one of them threw something, and he just ran here. He had nowhere else to go, you said, and… and you were 77

Beau Holmes just begging me, like some kid who just found a stray cat and brought it home to his parents. You looked right at me and just pleaded. I was surprised you weren’t on your knees at that point, but I could see the stress on your face, and I… I don’t even remember what I said exactly. I just remember your scared face and how you sounded like a little kid when you were asking if he could spend the night… and I just remember thinking how you were just… you know… wonderful.”

The woman smiled again, lost in memory, lost in the idea of the loving man. It made her invincible, made her forget, so much so that she found herself waiting for him to respond. She looked back up at him, and she crumpled. Doubling over, her wail filled the room, music to the ears of every mourner. They could not help but cry themselves; it was ecstasy!

Red-faced, lost, the woman bolted out of the chair, which fell over, striking the ground and only adding to the tumult. She looked down at the man once more.

Butthemournerscouldcontainthemselvesnolonger.Thepassion,theenergyswept them in such a way that they began to scream, to leap up and down in such numbers that the floor shook. They embraced each other, grabbed each other by their shoulders, and rocked each other. They did impossible things, unspeakable things. They howled and danced like apes, and the woman could take it no longer; had nothing left to give. She ran out of the room, almost tripping on someone’s leg as she went.

With the woman gone, the work done, the circle was broken. A well of pure sound, energy, and passion broke and came tumbling over the man like a tsunami; in the face of this, though, he did nothing. He could do nothing. He was swallowed like the rest. And under all the chaos, he stopped breathing, though to this day, his heart continues to beat.

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Silent Whisper

Cathy Wang Digital Photography

79

Picturing a Home

By Eliza Benbow When I visit her home in my daydreams, the front door has just barely clicked shut and the floorboards still remember her footsteps. A cigarette smolders in an ashtray by a light blue couch, and a window has been left cracked to let the air in.

I like to imagine she’s just left to go to a concert, red-lipped and perfumed, but perhaps she is on a walk along the river that runs through the property, thinking of a poem. Maybe she is collecting flowers to freshen up the mason jar on the ginghamcovered kitchen table and a pot is bubbling on the stove.

She could be anywhere, doing anything, but she is never there.

We’ve never existed in the same space, always separated by the gloss of a photograph and cavernous decades between lives ending and beginning.

I first met her, Teo Savory, nearly three decades after her death.

I uncovered traces of her through her possessions when I was a high schooler working in a bookshop where dusty shelves sagged under the weight of precariously-stacked books.The shop was owned by Al Brilliant, an eccentric man in his mid-eighties who had spent a lifetime dedicated to literature as a publisher and bookseller who had been her husband for over thirty years. Teo herself was a poet and novelist, and together they founded and operated Unicorn Press, an independent poetry press founded in 1966 in Santa Barbara that published handmade and artfully-bound works.

Al and I became quick friends as well as colleagues, and I delighted in long summer days and fall evenings spent in the bookshop’s crowded space, surrounded by new ideas and stories that overflowed from both Al and his shelves.

Teo’s presence spills from the shelves, her own books of poetry bound in dark blue paper and own novels in elegant white and red hardcover book jackets. Al and Teo first met in Eighth Street Bookshop where a 19-year-old Al was working as a clerk when she, a fifty-year-old poet dressed in a raccoon-fur coat, brought him her poems to publish in his magazine Pan. Though separated by age, a denominator that never seemed to deter Al from connecting with others, they connected through a love of storytelling and a passion for learning and were married shortly after they met. An American educated in Paris and London, she attended the Royal 80

Eliza Benbow Conservatory of Music, and translated the works of poets like Guillevic, Jacques Prévert, and Raymond Queneau for American audiences through Unicorn Press.

Her poetry and prose were scattered throughout several collections and publishers, from her first short story in 1947 to her debut novel in 1960.

She is preserved in smaller objects, too. A blue and white clay jar on a shelf in Al’s kitchenette bears her surname in light blue paint. She shares the name with an herb, and it feels fitting for a woman who gardened fervently, filling entire journals in tight cursive with plans and documentation of each plant in the yard of their summer home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

I clean bowls of half-eaten food and coffee-ringed mugs from the table beside Al’s futon, and he tells me that it was once an antique Chinese chair that had belonged to her, an only child who grew up in Hong Kong early in the 20th century, its delicate craftsmanship hidden by dust and crumbs.

She laughs in a gold-framed photograph in the poetry section, her head tilted back into a ray of sun, her hand on her chest. Al laughs beside her, lightly holding her forearm.

They were married for over three decades until Teo’s death in 1989, but it was not always perfect. They were passionate, occasionally to extremes, love poems and angry notes scattered throughout their relationship like discarded bullet casings. When Al did something at the bookshop that she would have considered sloppy or improper, he laughed heartily and told me stories about her high standards for decorum.

When Al died at 86 years old, I realized how little of his life I’d known, and how little I had asked about the people and places that had filled it. I sought answers in the only places I could – books, letters, the stories of others, clinging to anything that tangibly proved he had lived, that it had been good.

I have met her endlessly, and she will never know I exist.

I’ve caught glimpses of her in envelopes addressed to unfamiliar names in neat cursive, have recognized her eccentric elegance in sepia-toned pictures taken in lavish fur coats, and am fabricating my own idea of her voice. But she is translucent, built of paper and ink and entirely reliant on photos and letters to fill in the gaps of my faulty, second-hand knowledge.

I cannot picture what it would be like to meet her, but I like to imagine that for someone else, her touch is light and cool, and she shakes their hand with a surprising firmness. When she speaks, her voice is crisp and direct. I imagine just a few words from her mouth charm those around her, even if they can just 81

Eliza Benbow as easily be wielded against them. As I page through her journals and study her knowing, thin-lipped smiles in photos, I realize that she has somehow charmed me, too.

As Unicorn’s editor, Teo was as synonymous with the press as Al. Press decisions largely fell upon the two of them, and they continued its maintenance over the course of twenty years and a cross-country move from California to North Carolina.

Throughout their time at the press, staff cycled through, often young people working for little money, but Al and Teo remained constant, often at the expense of their own creativity and well-being.

As they edited and published the works of others, both lamented the inability to work on writing of their own.

When they felt particularly hopeless or in need of a break, they would travel to the house Teo bought just outside of a rural mountain town in the Berkshires, often closing out the rest of the world in favor of gardening and writing. The white clapboard house still stands on a quiet road with a river running along the right side, and mountains stretch beyond the back door.

In the photos I’ve seen, the house feels larger-than-life, with four bedrooms and an added wing for borders. The couple migrated every summer like wild geese to the house’s steady calm, often inviting other writers or hosting traveling musicians performing in annual symphonies to make ends meet.

I can most clearly picture her here, standing among the roses in her garden.

Her short, light hair is pinned away from her face, and she’s wearing a light green dress that comes up around her neck, embroidered with raindrops of a darker green.

Someone is taking her picture with Al, dressed in a white shirt and khaki shorts, and they’vepausedtheirdiscussiontogrinatthecamera.Theyseemgenuinelydelighted to be there, in the sunshine among the roses they’d so carefully planted and tended.

I try to preserve them both like this in my mind — warmed by the sun, laughing, content.

The living room’s walls are painted a crisp white and the hardwood floors are unfinished. A book sits on the table, and I imagine she was reading in the lamplight of a darkening night, turning the page of her book with fingernails shadowed by crescents of dirt from her hours of gardening.

I wonder if Al’s own fingertips were perpetually stained with ink, no matter how hard he scrubbed. He set up a printing press and binding tools in 82

Eliza Benbow the Berkshire house so he could spend more time in the mountains than in the humid, clogged city of Greensboro, and often spent his days setting the type for forthcoming Unicorn chapbooks, the remnants of which sit in a corner of the room. The white stone fireplace taking up the far wall is unlit, and a window is open so they can hear the buzz of frogs and crickets in the trees just out of sight.

A desk beneath a window in the other room is full of papers, books, a pair of discarded glasses, perhaps an ashtray.Teo spends her days writing here, poems and short stories and novels spilling onto unlined paper as handwritten drafts that she later methodically corrects in pen.

In the other room, their kitchen table is pushed against another window overlookingthegardentheyhavespentyearsplanning,planting,andtending.Roses and peonies thrive in carefully-determined rows, a bed for herbs lies beneath the kitchenwindow.Therearealwaysfresh-cutflowersontabletopsandshelves,splashes of color in mason jars and antique pitchers.

If I have built Teo out of paper, this house is built of film. The place I walk through is flimsy, its floors untextured and furniture one-dimensional. Still, I continue building, coating it in expectations and details I run my fingers over with urgency. I watch it bow under the weight and continue to roam its halls, no matter how they shake.

In the 19th century, West Stockbridge blossomed into a town through its marble, iron, and limestone quarries, but by the 20th century, the industry began to fade away, bringing the town with it. By the time Al and Teo lived there, it was a sleepy, impoverished area, and inspired several books Teo wrote about a fictional town and its residents.

Throughout their lives, the home shifted in meaning — sheltering them from the demands of the press; providing space for a sick Teo to get well; or a home for half of the year, dragging their printing responsibilities up and down the east coast.

The couple adored their home in the Berkshires, though I can only recall hearing stories about Al bathing in the river.

He never told me what the roses smelled like in late May or if he learned which floorboards squeaked when he climbed the stairs. I wonder which of his stanzas were written in a frenzy after a particularly inspiring walk; if the bottom of the river was littered with pebbles that formed calluses, or soft sand that envelops your skin.

I don’t know if he ever missed it, because I never thought to ask.

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Eliza Benbow Over the course of Al’s life, physical evidence of his past has been slowly blotted out, and when he died, what had once felt concrete became abstract. Gotham Book Mart went under new ownership, then closed for good.Where the press once stood in Santa Barbara is now home to a coffee shop. I helped pack up the bookshop, and in its place is an empty room with white walls. I still visit nearly every time I go home, standing on the sidewalk in front of the barred windows and testing my memory, recreating the shelves of books, reaching for a space I not only knew but understood.

The stories that I would listen to, sometimes new, sometimes repeated, became reliant only on the details I could hesitantly stitch back together. Memory is faulty, imaginations powerful, and I am terrified of remembering wrong. I long for the tactile, for film photographs and handwritten letters and the feel of mountain air on my skin.

Despite these fears, I have fabricated a memory of a house I have never been in. No matter how closely I examine photographs and letters, it is always inherently faulty, its skeleton wallpapered with imagined scenes, any conflict brushed over by retrospect. I can never capture the full picture, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to, that wants to cling to this idyllic home in the mountains. It glosses over its inhabitants’weariness, how they worked themselves thin and quarreled. There is a part of me that wants this place to be safe, kept neat and orderly for the people alive in my memories.

The Berkshire house has new owners. Al and Teo, now both dead, haven’t lived there in decades.

Though I’ve never laid eyes on it or them, I’ve wondered with a displaced sense of protectiveness how its owners over the years have changed it — if they painted the living room light blue or knocked down a wall in the kitchen. I’ll never fully know what had once been there to be changed.

I imagine driving down its gravel driveway one day, knocking on the door unannounced and being met with a kind stranger who lets me in without a question, lets me wander the home, running my hands on the walls still painted white, climbing up the stairs that creak on the fifth and twelfth steps. Maybe they also have Shaker furniture and a braided rug and keep a small, cluttered desk by the window. In my imagination, they’re not writers, but they like to watch birds at a feeder outside and tell me about the sparrows that nest every year in the bushes out front.They’re not gardeners, but there are rose bushes that seem to come back every year without much care. They came with the house, I imagine they explain, as did a small herb garden growing beneath the dining room window. I’d crush their leaves 84

Eliza Benbow in my hands and let the fresh scent linger on my fingertips. I wade in the river, dig my feet into the soft sand and collect smooth pebbles from the riverbed.

I imagine climbing up the front porch steps at dusk, picturing a phantom figure that was there moments before, putting on earrings and red lipstick before going to the symphony, the door just clicking behind her.

She will never be there again, but perhaps I could be, finally on the other side of a photograph. I would think about finally writing a poem – one that praises the smell of fresh earth and the silk of rose petals and the way the floorboards remember our steps, no matter how separated by time they are.

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Lingering Ghosts of Homes

By Moyan Wang Ink and Bamboo Paper

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The Cockroach Crawling Along My Dual-Monitor Setup Came From A Hole In the Space-Time Continuum

By Zoe Wynns I saw what I saw, but I still Google if depression can cause hallucinations, because I can’t find the damn thing anywhere. Sometimes I question if I’ve already missed my soulmate along the way, back sophomore year when sloppy kisses seemed like maybe something I could put up with for my whole life or when I was a kid, holding hands with someone and hoping they didn’t let go first. I guess what worries me isn’t if I’ll have to wear a plastic bag over my head to sleep tonight– it’s that the cockroach crawling along my dual-monitor setup came from a hole in the space-time continuum. Depression is one thing, but knowing there’s other universes out there he traveled from, getting lost on his way back home? That scares me.

I could be missing any number of things out there. I could be missing a world where I’ve already met you. I could be missing the world where I know what it’s like to be in love.

I could be missing the world where I get out of the shower with the stupidest poem title known to man floating around in my head and decide not to put it on paper.

Turn the movie back on. Pick up my antibac bathroom spray, hold it at arm’s length like a weapon, and peek behind the monitor once more, knowing what’s there. There’s only one place it could be.

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Senses

Ava Mayo Mixed Media Collage 88

nothing kills you slower than / letting someone go

By Lauren Whitener too drunk to think so i put on the record he likes and welcome in the thunder. he’s gone but the music retains a nostalgia for a past day. rather than living, he dies at the superhero-themed birthday party wearing a green lantern party hat. if only the water would pour through every corner of that room, soaking streamers, saturating wrapping paper, & rising up to drown me. but that day had no rain. in the attic of his old apartment, littered with vestiges of the past, he dies when i find the can of green beans from 1998. he dies in every golden retriever i see. when i pet their silken fur and ask what’s their name? the handmade card for father’s day is where he dies. the five we spent at the beach with sunburn peeling our noses and salt crusting our fingertips. he dies when i apply to be a bartender at the pub on the corner of 5th and main, smiling behind the counter. he dies somewhere in that drive; the one home, the one to the grocery store, the one to class, the one to the doctor. he dies saying a different name than my sister’s. my name. he dies saying sweetheart, pumpkin, ladybug. sweetheart, what can i do to make you stay? he dies in my mother’s body crying out in pain, for some god to take it all away. take it all: the silverware, the lawnmower, the tornado sirens. he dies in the walls too thin to block the sound. he dies in the expanse of lake between the shoreline covered in goose poop and the wooden dock sunken into the seaweed. he dies in June, an eternal summer, returning to the season again and again and again. he dies in every phone call. the phone only rings twice before i answer it. he dies in every text that reads: please call me when you have the chance. he dies when i take the bullet to my own head, the slashes to each wrist until–i pack my bookbag for preschool, golden hair in twin braids. and he drives me, radio on, windows down, summer rain evaporating off the asphalt

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Pilgrimage Vessel

Marin Carr-Quimet Ceramic with Cobalt Oxide and Tin Glaze 90

Rain, Water

By Audrey Zhou When the wind came we thought the drought would go—a west wind brings clouds, clouds bring rain—but instead there arrived a dragon.

It wasn’t like the stories. It didn’t land with a roar, a crash, or even a storm.

Grandpa Li, the only one who’d seen one before, nearly wept for joy at the first glimpse of its serpentine, numinous form, never mind that its scales were pale enough to blend into the sky instead of the ocean-blue ocean-born beings should be, or that it was only nine-sheep long, lengthwise, maximum—max! Its cry as it alighted in the rice field wasn’t awe-inspiring; its eyes were dark and round, not snake-slit slanted.

But a dragon was a dragon, and everyone knew that dragons controlled water. Made storms. We couldn’t have prayed for anything better if we’d prayed for a raincloud.

And we—everyone—had, that whole summer. Stacked altars tall with dried peppers,splitouronlyremainingthingsinsupplication.Burntincense.Feltthesmoke compound the heat. # Before the dragon could bring rain, there were rites. You had to honor a dragon before it would honor you. Or so Grandpa Li said, anyway.

So there was livestock. Auntie Liu brought out her goats—how we knew it was serious—and delivered them, unflinching, to the dragon’s chasm mouth, along with five chickens.Two eggs.There was celebration!The hweat was almost bearable at night: when dusk hit, we set the lanterns up, feasted on the last cups of rice.

We pooled our water rations with the other kids, giddy, and drank so greedily that droplets spilled down our chests.

We cringed at our wastefulness, awaited judgment, but everyone else was drunk on salvation.

“Tomorrow, there’ll be rain,”they said, benevolent.“Water enough for everyone.”

The next morning, though, the ground remained dusty and cracked. Sometime during the night, the dragon had flown higher up the surrounding mountain, but there was no rain. We crowded to stare up into the sky’s clear blue.

“It takes time,” good-natured Uncle Fu said. Grandpa Li explained, “Dragons 91

Audrey Zhou must get closer to heaven, to summon the rain.”

But when afternoon rolled by with empty skies, and then night and the next morning, doubt began to set in. Then rage.

“The dragon’s gone,” Uncle Fu said, furious, good nature evaporated. “It’s taken everything we have without the decency to give us a single cloud.”

Grandpa Li snapped, “Don’t talk like that. It’s only been a day. Look, there! It’s still on the mountain.”

Uncle Fu, despondent: “Only a day? We don’t have days left!” # Our urine darkened. Another day passed.

“You know,” Auntie Liu’s son said, as we redistributed resources to the children and elderly, “I heard drinking dragon blood—it makes you immortal.”

“Water is good enough for us,” Auntie Liu lectured. But she was thoughtful.

Everyone was thoughtful. Immortality elixir or not, blood was water. It hydrated. We were farmers: there were pitchforks, scythes. One dragon couldn’t kill everyone.What use was bemoaning the loss of goats when a dragon could feed a village?

We could feel it when the air changed. When it grew charged. We remembered the dragon’s cloudy translucence, its eyes, and felt our throats scratch.

Our dry mouths. # That night, we tossed and turned until we couldn’t bear it any longer.

We crept up and filed one by one out of the village. The whole night passed before we made it all the way up the mountain, but there the dragon was.

Waiting. Watching.

Nowthatwewereherewedidn’tknowwhattosay.Run?Go,beforeeveryonegets here with their pitchforks? We only needed a little water, didn’t it get that? Didn’t it understand that it could fix everything?

It didn’t. It refused to understand when we yelled, when we pleaded, when we bargained. But when we finally gave up, decided to turn back, something miraculous happened.

Tears. Big, watery tears.

The dragon began to cry. Saltwater poured down from its round eyes like the end of the world, an overwhelm disproportionate to its nine-sheep body, so sudden we were knocked to the ground by its force, subsumed.

Our mouths parted instinctively; we drank from the swell around us, soaked our 92

Audrey Zhou bodies, our parched insides, our very selves. It was the ocean in us, overflowing; river, falling down the mountain. Torrential. For once, our throats didn’t itch because of thirst. It wasn’t water, what the dragon gave us, but it was rain.

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CONTRIBUTORS Eliza Benbow, a senior studying journalism and creative writing, loves to write about creative people doing unique things. This interest has led her everywhere, from the Varsity Theatre for the Rocky Horror Picture Show to Brown University's archives, and she hopes to spend a lifetime seeking out even more creative people and projects. When she's not writing, she loves laying in the sun, cooking for friends, creating collages, and perfecting her Spotify playlists.

Ryleigh Bennett is a current Junior at UNC majoring in global studies and minoring in creative poetry writing and studio art. She loves to write and experiment with language. She hopes you're doing well.

Namrata Bingu is pursuing an English major and Asian Studies minor at UNC Chapel hill- She is an avid enjoyer of consuming and creating storytelling in all the forms she can get her hands on.

Marin Carr-Quimet is a North Carolina-based artist working primarily in ceramic sculpture, drawing and installation. They're interested in social ecology, disruptions of business as usual, and public spaces.

Ash Chen is a poet, activist, and student. She is a first generation Covenant scholar, Pushcart Prize nominee, and most importantly, a mother to a tiny blind kitten. In her spare time, she can be found sustaining injuries in local mosh pits, playing the new Dragon Age, and agonizing over her Honors Poetry Thesis.

Beau Holmes is an English and German major in his junior year. He has loved books and writing for as long as he can remember, and he cannot wait to share his stories with people.

Emma Johnson is a student at UNC, studying the natural world, storytelling, and their intersections. She loves libraries, cloud doodles, the ocean, and a good game of charades.

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Kyla Joyner is a Photographer and designer from Western North Carolina. She is a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While having a versatile portfolio, most of her artwork is through the lense of growing up as a minority in a rural area.

If you've seen Tsering Lama’s major and minor and would like her to explain herself, know that she really can’t. It sort of just happened and now she’s a senior.

Huzzah.

Emily Leventhal is a senior studying English and HDFS. She loves reading, Reese’s, and ruminating.

Carlee Markle is a senior from Huntersville, NC. She writes to make sense of how weird yet wonderful our world can be.

Ava Mayo is a journalism major at UNC Hussman School. Her other print experience derives from her capacity as a style editor for UNC's fashion and lifestyle Coulture Magazine. Her art process is inspired by a childhood passion for scrapbooking and her process compiles eclectic visual details to tell a story.

Elizabeth Newsom is a poet, essayist, and UNC junior currently studying abroad at King’s College London. She loves stumbling across live music, coming back from a hike with a slight sunburn, and spending evenings chatting in ambient lighting with her friends.

Annabelle Oberst is a UNC senior studying Human Development, Public Policy, and Creative Writing. She writes mostly creative nonfiction and magical realism. In their free time, they also like to listen to music, read, and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Jesse Patete is an up-and-coming artist from Asheville, NC. He plans to attend an MFA program and teach art in either a K-12 or collegiate-level program. His two favorite media are ceramics and printmaking.

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Na’dayah Pugh is an undergraduate in the Honors Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is passionate about creating stories through any and all ways possible, especially through creative writing, screenwriting, and publication. When she’s not toiling away at a new story, you can find her reading a novel, playing the guitar, or going toe-to-toe with the Duolingo owl.

Ayla Rodriguez is a junior here at UNC, working towards her degrees and writing poetry to cope with the weight of it all. She lends her thanks to her friends and poetry professors here at UNC for their continued support and praise of all her poems, even the ones that don't deserve it. She hopes you enjoy her work!

Ella Sharpe is a third year Psychology and English major. She found creative nonfiction during her freshman year at UNC and has loved it ever since! In her free time, you might find her at a coffee shop, the farmers market, or a plant store.

Naari Short is Liberian-American senior at UNC. His passions are art, fashion, music and sports. He aspires to become a fashion designer while continuing to produce art after graduating.

Andrew Sneed is a writer and painter from Davidson, North Carolina. He studies English.

Virginia Van de Riet is a junior from Indian Trail, NC. Her favorite animals, in order, are octopuses, bears, and snakes.

Cathy Wang is a freshman from Apex, N.C., double majoring in biology and studio art, proving that science and creativity can coexist. Cathy’s dream is to become a travel photographer, hoping that capturing the perfect shot of a sunset - or at least a really great taco photo.

Moyan Wang was born in China and is currently an MFA student at UNCChapel Hill. Her works explore the intersections of the personal, social, and historical trauma of Chinese people, drawing connections between the private and the public, the history and the present. Using diverse materials with deep cultural significance in China's collective memory, she addresses themes of immigration, diaspora, gender, surveillance, and resistance.

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Lauren Whitener is a poet, rugby player, and plant enthusiast from Conover, North Carolina. She loves a sunny morning in nature with a good coffee and great friends.

Chloe Winchester has been writing short stories, essays, and poetry since the beginning of high school. She has released two poetry books, Graveyard Chat and Nectarine, and hopes to release more soon!

Zoe Wynns is a senior at UNC studying Creative Writing and Music. Her work has appeared in the 2023-2024 edition of Cellar Door and in the Pinesong Awards Anthology for the North Carolina Poetry Society Undergraduate Award.

Her writing often tackles the complicated topics of mental health, family, identity, and love with her unique lyrical yet informal style.

Audrey Zhou is a senior studying computer science, statistics, and creative writing. She likes stories about bodies, watching bad reality TV with friends, and A24 movies.

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INFORMATION SUBMISSIONS Guidelines for submission can be found online at www.unccellardoor.com.Pleasenotethatstaffmembersarenotpermittedto submit to any section of Cellar Door while they work for the magazine.

All undergraduate students may apply to join the staff of Cellar Door. Any openings for positions on the poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or art selection staffs will be advertised online.

SUPPORTING CELLAR DOOR Your gift will contribute to publicity, production, and staff development costs not covered by our regular funding. Contributors will receive copies of the magazine through the mail for at least one year.

Please make all checks payable to “Cellar Door” and be sure to include your preferred mailing address.

Cellar Door c/o Melissa Faliveno Department of English UNC-CH Greenlaw Hall, CB 3520 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520

CONTACT US AT thecellardoor.unc@gmail.com www.unccellardoor.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/cellardoorunc Instagram and Twitter: @unccellardoor The publication of this issue of Cellar Door was made possible by the generous financial support of the UNC Undergraduate Senate. © CELLAR DOOR ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2025 98

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ELIZA BENBOW RYLEIGH BENNETT NAMRATA BINGU MARIN CARR-QUIMET ASH CHEN BEAU HOLMES EMMA JOHNSON KYLA JOYNER TSERING LAMA EMILY LEVENTHAL CARLEE MARKLE AVA MAYO ELIZABETH NEWSOM ANNABELLE OBERST JESSE PATETE NA’DAYAH PUGH AYLA RODRIGUEZ ELLA SHARPE NAARI SHORT ANDREW SNEED VIRGINIA VAN DE RIET CATHY WANG MOYAN WANG LAUREN WHITENER CHLOE WINCHESTER ZOE WYNNS AUDREY ZHOU 100