Chanter Literary and Arts Magazine — Fall 2016

Chanter Literary Magazine

Fall 2016

(noun): one who sings, or, the part of the bagpipe that plays a melody

Fall 2016 Macalester College Literary Magazine St. Paul, MN chanter@macalester.edu

Chanter would like to thank the following: All the amazing writers and artists who submitted their work Matt Burgess Jan Beebe The Mac Weekly Kristin Naca, who, as a creative writer and professor, empowers students through poetry The wonderful developers of InDesign at Adobe and Crystal Yam and Will Milch for their knowledge Austin come back

Cover art: Saint Croix (colored pencil and ink on paper), Ilana Budenosky

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Editor-in-Chief: Xander Gershberg Literary Editor: Zeena Fuleihan Associate Literary Editor: Miriam Moore-Keish Art Editor: Coco Banks Associate Art Editor: Elizabeth Loetscher Submission Manager: Bram Wang Associate Submission Managers: Theodore Twidwell, Claire Grace

Staff:

Shine Chin Emily Crnkovich Declan Cummings Libby Eggert Julia Fritz-Endres Maud Grauer Carsten Haas Alexander Komanoff Matthew Later Jude Macannuco Victoria MacKinnon Willie McDonagh Quinton Singer Katie Tsuji Crystal Yam

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Writing •

Some Two Hundred Miles

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Carsten Haas

Untitled 7 Jake Dunn

Mestizo 8 Susana Cardenas-Soto

The Sea 10 Marissa Heim

Carpet 11 Claire Looney

Ode to Fatness 12 Beenish Riaz

Blowout grass 14 Cole Chang

Southern Comfort 16 Spencer Fugate what does god know about chemotheraphy? 17 Miriam Moore-Keish Decapitation 18 Matthew Later Bloom 33 Nicola Morrow Dad 34 Armando Herrería

house imagined 36 Claire Grace

Sapphic to a Fop 37 Spencer Fugate

G(en)rowl 38 Richard Shmikler

Hell’s Kitchen 41 Parker Grubb

glance, revisited 42 Liza Michaeli

Empty Calories 43 Claire Looney

Inver Grove Heights 44 Carrigan Miller window 46 Eli Lilleskov The Hermitage 47 Carsten Haas On The Road Back Home 48 Jonathan Amezquita 4

Art •

Cartoon Donkey, 2015 21 Madison Reid

Wind 22 Claire Blood-Cheney

Guthrie Theater 23 Claire Blood-Cheney

“Mask, an homage to Annegret Soltau” (front and back) 24 Kelsey Fox

Later 26 Kava Garcia Vasquez Big Burn, 11,835ft 27 Cole Chang Jodhpur 28 Vaishnavi Madhavan Khubavali 29 Vaishnavi Madhavan

Bruised Boy, International Falls, MN, 2015 30 Madison Reid

Flower Man 31 Juliette Myers

Kyoto 32 Matthew Later

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Some Two Hundred Miles Carsten Haas We looked for stones there, at St. Bees, finding two to our liking on that smooth-pebbled beach.

We bore them over the isle, coast to fell, to field, to coast, thinking maybe to keep them – but in being kept, they were just stones, so we cast them into the bay.

What will they think of us?

Those who come after.

Finding just under the tide great cairns of western rock.

What brought us the breadth of a nation to hurl pebbles into the sea?

No god demanded our journey, and surely some sin lay in the heart, of the first to wander that same way.

But a father, and his son, walking those many miles?

Perhaps there is something holy in that.

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Untitled Jake Dunn The truth of it all is this: on your lips there bloomed a rose, same as the one you dreamed of having on your neck, bleeding a purple as dark as the thickness in your veins, a heart that hasn’t worked well in a long while, the marrow of your bones diseased, too much blood, too much blood, too much too much too much purple— but I kissed you anyway, drank the crimson of your sorrows, tasted the pain of a man you lost to the tongue you always wished you had and I swallowed the smoke of (as) your fag until my lungs burned with the miasma you had sown, seeds borne into an open wound and it festered, hot and heavy with the knowingness that your name will never sound the same as it once did, never so sweet, never so soft as the petals of a flower I thought could sanctify—but the only thing holy about those lips were the ways they could spin lies, webs of a religion I breathed for too long, believed in too much, trusted too blindly to see that in my own veins there dripped a poison, viscous as syrup, noxious as the day you said I don’t love you anymore.

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Mestizo Susana Cardenas-Soto January 1st, 1519. Hernan Cortez’s first attempt to conquer the Aztecs

with 500 men.

The creation of Horchata Humans, rice milk with cinnamon, brown but not quite brown, white but not quite white, Mestizo. Mixed.

October 28th, 1492. Christopher Columbus arrives in Cuba.

The Indians are exterminated throughout the Carribean, they are White because they are no longer Brown, but they are Horchata Humans too.

September 15th, 1997. I am born in Spain and immediately denied citizenship.

The Spanish around me curdles and clots meeting MexiCubana sangre.

Cortez and Columbus laugh at the Indio in me, the Brown, the Cinnamon, I lift my head in the incubator and scowl back, because to Mother, I am White, to Father, I am Brown, to the colonizers I am Mestizo, to myself I am Alive.

I am just a heartbeat, barely horchata, barely Human.

In kindergarten, I look at my friends and don’t see Brownness but Blanca Nieves, there are no Horchata Humans, rice without the spice, all sweetness, all cream, sallow arms wrap around me and they laugh and say, “Susana is just like us!”

At a college party, a White girl asks me where I’m from.

I say, “Chicago.”

She says, “No, where are you from?”

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In middle school everyone is asked to name their race.

I don’t know how to answer, if I am White I am not Latina, if I am Black I am lying, if I am Hispanic I am right, but I am not White, to them I am Not White, to them I am Colored, because I am Horchata Human, I am Mezclada, The Gray Area, the Middle Race, I say “Mexican” because I don’t know what else to say.

They say this is not a race.

I choose White.

Indio y Española, Cubana y Mexicana, Horchata Human, cinnamon tinted, white passing if I want to be, except when I say my name, except when I say Mexico or Cuba, except when I show my arms, except when it is convenient.

In the back of restaurantes I see Brown Women, stronger hands than mine mezclando the cinnamon and vanilla, sorry, vainilla, I wonder if they are Mezclado too.

If they are 100% anything.

In the Mexican Art Museum, I look up to see black faces in a world I thought was white, black faces among the Indios that look like my Abuelita, black faces among the Españoles that look like me, like mi mama, when I ask my mom my race, she scoffs, “You’re white. You’re from Europe.”

When I ask my dad, he says it doesn’t matter, the color of horchata, A Gray Area.

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The Sea Marissa Heim What I wanted, that night, was to float in a sea of women.

A sea that swayed and bobbed and pushed and pulled this way and that, where I would float like a buoy, where the salt would raise me on my back.

What I needed was to be a boat, my own solitary vessel but connected to everything else via the salty water.

If that one, over there, felt an electric surge, I would, too.

Currents connect, zap, electrify.

Currents tether you to someone else.

But the sea was dry that night.

I walked home, feet aching, across the night women of Istedgade, passed the drunk men outside Hovedbanegården, through the desolate expanse of Rådhuspladsen.

No one was there. Or I was afraid. Or it wasn’t for me. Or I

couldn’t swim.

The reasons I didn’t float are many.

I met no soothing waves, no beautiful mermaids, no kind coral reefs.

So I walked home, dry but for my eyes, wishing I could’ve drowned in that mythical safe sea of women.

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Carpet Claire Looney

Winona stares at the single mismatching carpet square as if her eyes could rip it from the floor. Her eyes flick to her cell phone, sitting on the desk with his number glowing on the screen. She was supposed to call him four days ago, but—

She presses the red button and throws the phone into a drawer.

The only bright spot in the tiny apartment is her cactus but even it has started to brown. Her mother says she needs to learn to take care of something, but she still burns toast and her dad does her taxes and she flosses her teeth sporadically at best. She has to call—

Winona twitches as if startled and grabs the plastic water bottle she uses as a watering can, wondering how much water it takes to drown a cactus.

10:53 blinks red on the microwave and Winona steps over piles of unread mail to grab her toothbrush from above the kitchen sink. When for a second she hears vibrating, her stomach clenches but it was only the radiator, not her phone, she needs to call him but—

In the morning. He’d be sleeping now anyway and it was too late to fix anything and what would she even say—No. Tomorrow.

In bed, the silhouette of the carpet square glows on the back of her eyelids. When his face tries to creep into her vision, she sits up and throws off the sheets. In the darkness of the kitchen, she rummages in a drawer and, pulling out a yellow x-acto knife, kneels on the carpet. The first cut reveals naked wood. When the frayed square is freed, Winona shoves it in the drawer with her phone and slams it shut.

That night, rows of empty squares fill her dreams.

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Ode to Fatness Beenish Riaz When the doctor tells you you’re too fat to find a husband, you feel the bulging clouds clinging to your skin, bunching in folds like a caterpillar’s cocoon, full of butterflies that never fly away.

You hold your stomach and the fat cups your palms, wispy feather soft, and you think if you just blow, the clouds would change form, crush and crumble and form curves and curls.

Or, if you cry, rain will clear your body’s sky, spill a rainbow to erase the negative space that forms a blur around your waist, until you can peek into the mirror’s shell and see a bright sun through the rain.

But you find that your clouds are not clouds, but stone, and when you dig your nails into your belly to claw the stone mountain, your nails crack and bleed and splinter into pieces, but the mountain stays smooth, bounces, and flows, like milk, to

the touch.

To turn stone to cloud: you go to the doctor, but you should have known the cure would not fit around your hips.

It spurts out and yellow bile pushes up your throat, cutting slices from your liver that spill out bright like white diamond drops.

In the hospital, you clutch your clouds.

They take the diamonds you spit and they tell you scratch the mountain harder, mine some more.

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Only one option you see: you could blow up the stone in you, fly back in space of black and white, smoke and dust up your nostril, fire polish you clean, purify, clouds spread away, fall around you.

Maybe your soul could watch the flames tear you apart, an out-of-body experience, and maybe you could see before you fade away into oblivion, glimpse the curves and curls you could have had.

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Blowout grass Cole Chang 1.

From this October atop the dunes, The grains of sand are small Crystals of ice. The waves crash onto The ground, turning the shore a dark chestnut. I stand here thinking how cold the water must be coursing Between the jetties’ massive rocks.

My calves take a beating at the Indian rice grass’ hands. One stick Of driftwood, one log, salt bitten, Wind torn stands tilted in the sand, Slowly falling, slowly falling.

2.

From this October atop the dunes, The grains of sand are small Crystals of ice. The clouds play Leap frog with the sun. At the end Of the walkway our sandals rest, Protecting us from sharp objects And our feet from wear. Beneath The desaturated green and white Umbrella, resting as a piece of sea Glass, the towels lay as blankets.

I can smell the corn roasting, Traveling over the electric poles.

3.

From this October atop the dunes, The grains of sand are small Crystals of ice. The beach

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Chairs are piled to the side of the path, Next to where the hammock would Sway. Sandpipers speckle the shoreline, Their thin legs racing the tide.

As a child I feared I’d be caught In a riptide and drift towards Europe, Only to be saved by the Coast Guard, As my father once had, Many years ago.

4.

From this October atop the dunes, The grains of sand are small Crystals of ice. Deer bound into The reeds we once snapped in half And marched with held high as Our flags. Their eyes bright Like the stars above them, shining Softly like linen. I can hear what I Cannot see clearly. I turn away From the shore and watch As celadon, scarlet and royal blue Lights tango across the bay.

5.

From this October atop the dunes, The grains of sand are small Crystals of ice. I return To a place I can return to, A place I can leave And not say goodbye.

I was once a child in October, now I am tall, No longer fearing if The beach will be there.

The ocean will be there.

Just as I was there.

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Southern Comfort Spencer Fugate I broke my fast with wine today But washed with whiskey yesterdaySeems my heritage falls away, As I become a sophisticate.

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what does god know about chemotherapy?

Miriam Moore-Keish I saw the pathetic fallacy And stopped making References to Emersin And Wordsworthless Through raisined eyes.

You say touching a bible Will make you combust And flames will unphoenix Your life. We will all go To the flames I know.

You lift middle fingers To the clouds and I Dig my toes into the Mountains, the red clay Staining my skin to blood.

You have seen my blood And I have neglected tears.

Your finiteness runs faster Than the world turns and Soon it will turn without you.

Now I lay me down to sleep Now my soul is mine to keep.

I never believed and I never will yet. For you-I Is real. Are softly. Are here.

You are good and you-I is right But your good fadesdims and Now I negatively pray For if god was real god would let You stay.

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Decapitation Matthew Later

Two sisters playing in the water at night swam into a cavern.

Once inside they lost sight of each other’s shapes moving through the water. The older one, Beth, called out her sister Frida’s name and heard it echo back. “Where are you?” The cavern repeated her words with such authority Beth questioned having said them herself. She heard her name in Frida’s voice and again in the voice of the cavern. Water splashed onto her face.

“Over here!” said Frida.

Beth followed the direction of the splash and landed on a bank of pebbles and sand. Frida grabbed her by the arm as she climbed out the water. Beth’s eyes saw through the outer layer of the cavern’s darkness, enough to see the line where sand turned to water and, scattered across that water, a number of small, white, floating shapes.

Frida’s damp hand slid off Beth’s cold arm. Pebbles rustled like leaves under Frida as she flew across them. Beth ran after.

“Frida!”

The sand under Beth turned into deep water. She paddled around in search of the bank she fell off of, but it was not in the direction she remembered. She stayed in place and treaded water.

Right before her eyes floated three of the small white shapes. Up close Beth could tell they were flower petals.

Frida laughed in the distance. “Come and find me!”

“How can you see?” Frida didn’t respond. “How can you see in here?” Beth swam to the light of her sister’s laugh. With every stroke the water became thicker, heavier, until by the time she reached solid ground Beth felt like she was crawling through a pit of sap. On land the sliding drops of water on her body were extra sensitive to a cold sheet of air coming from somewhere to her right.

Beth traced the draft back to the side of the cavern, crouched, and fed her left arm through a gap in the rocks. “Frida? Frida, are you in there?”

That afternoon the sisters had been playing in the schoolyard. Their teacher had asked them to pluck weeds but before long the girls began blowing dandelion seeds into each other’s eyes. Their 18

bodies were steeped in sunlight shining hot out of azure heaven, and half in exhaustion and half in jest they collapsed to their respective lefts, that is, in opposite directions. They lay on their backs and the sun overpowered their vision. When Beth shut her eyes tight a reddish glow projected itself onto the screen on the back of her eyelids. Now in the darkness of the cave and crevice that same red glow impressed itself upon the world around her.

Beth held her arm in the hollow on the other side of the crevice, where the air was even colder. Frida grabbed Beth’s arm and together they swam out of the cavern back to the main body of water, from darkest dark into lesser dark, and dried themselves off and went home and turned off the light and closed their eyes in a shared bedroom, again in darkest dark.

In Beth’s dream she appeared to herself as a shape on the cusp of becoming a body. Might the limp, waterlogged petals in the cavern have been how dandelion seeds saw themselves in dreams?

Beth woke up when she heard her sister trip and fall over.

She was trying to put on pants in the dark.

“Frida? Where are you going?”

“Back to the water.”

“To the water? It’s too late.”

“I’m going back to the cavern.”

“No, Frida, don’t, it’s too dangerous.”

“What’s dangerous about the cavern? We went in and got out fine before, didn’t we?”

Moonlight epaulettes decorated the shoulders of Frida’s silhouette. Beth pretended to fall back asleep but could not suppress concern for her sister.

This concern manifested in a roundabout way. After class the girls had walked to a seaside cliff to go flower picking. No clouds and a crisp horizon. After collecting several proud blossoms into her basket Beth went to share her findings. “What have you found?”

Beth leaned over Frida’s basket. It was full of just petals. “You only took petals?”

“So?”

Beth didn’t know what to say. She looked around. She didn’t like not knowing which flowers were missing petals. “I pick the whole flower off the stem.”

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Frida sat down and began tracing her finger around the edge of a daffodil. Beth walked away from the cliff’s edge and turned her back to her sister. She stomped on a balloon flower and left a depression of padded grass and petals into which she emptied the contents of her basket.

Now Beth was thinking of the flowers she had left on the cliff and missing them. What she was really missing, though, was her sister. So even as she thought only of flowers she found herself heading to the water.

On the beach Beth saw Frida’s clothes. A handful of petals were spilling out of the pants pocket. The moonlight robbed them of color. Beth could not tell whether they were blue or pink or white or red. She took off her clothes and left them in a pile with Frida’s. Then she entered the water.

In the cavern Beth swam until she reached a small rock she could crawl up onto. The rocks ahead were slanted and jagged so she moved across them low and patient, feeling the shape of the next one out with her palm before stepping. When she got to even ground she stood, hit her head, and fell down. Silence and darkness exacerbated the pain in her skull; there was nothing else to focus on. She tried yelling for Frida but the pain grew to an unbearable level.

Memories of the happy day returned to her. Beth’s jumbled last thought before falling unconscious was this: I shouldn’t have turned my back on Frida on the cliff. What’s the difference between leaving a flower without petals and leaving a stem without a flower?

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Cartoon Donkey, 2015 Madison Reid Title

Name 21

Wind Claire Blood-Cheney Title

Name 22

Guthrie Theater Claire Blood-Cheney Title

Name 23

Title

Name 24

“Mask, an Homage to Annegret Soltau” front and back Kelsey Title Fox 25

Name

later Kava Garcia Vasquez Title

Name 26

Big Burn, 11,835ft Cole Chang Title

Name 27

Jodhpur Vaishnavi Madhavan Title

Name 28

Khubavali Vaishnavi Madhavan Title

Name 29

Bruised Boy, International Falls, MN, 2015 Madison Reid

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Flower Man Juliette Myers

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Kyoto Matthew Later

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Bloom

Nicola Morrow I want to kiss your palms.

One by one I want to plant buds on the insides of your hands, So that you may hold them like secrets Or clench them in your fists, So that they may bloom as you warm your chilled fingers with puffs of hot breath.

I want to know the black hole that appears when your lips slacken and part.

In the darkness I will not find teeth and gums and tongue studded with tastebuds.

I will find memories of soft persimmon, maybe, Fruits I have not tasted.

I want to perch on the cliff of your jawline, To cannonball into the shallow pool held delicately by your collarbone.

Skin translucent I imagine I can see the machinery of your body revealed, Tangled veins churning blood, membranes stretching, muscles swelling.

I am amazed that the pale fabric of your skin contains everything.

All I hear is the thrush of your camel lashes Tracing shadows on your cheek.

The damp thumping of a heart, maybe mine.

I want to kiss your palms.

One by one I want to open your hands like sunflowers or books, So that they may unfurl into light, So that you may unclench your fists and bloom as I breathe into you.

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Dad Armando Herrería I remember when the officer asked you if I was your son. It was late, and you were driving me home from school, and you tried your best to remain calm, but I knew that it bothered you. It bothered me too. It wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t the last.

I remember the first time; at the airport, JFK, the baggage claim. I was young, young enough to be holding your hand.

I remember, because I was holding your hand.

I remember being confused when they asked me, thinking that I looked like you.

I remember we didn’t talk about it after. We’ve never talked about it after.

I remember my acceptance to Shore in the fifth grade, how proud you were.

I remember white walls and whiter students. Real silver and ceramic plates.

I remember feeling full, for the first time.

I remember my confusion when a boy introduced himself as Brooks, a girl as Lily.

I remember not wanting to tell you what the white kids at school said about my clothes, my accent, my hair, my lips, my shoes.

I remember not wanting to tell you what the white kids at school said about your skin. About the color of your skin.

I remember not telling you.

I remember seeing another boy at school who looked like me. No, like you.

I remember how excited I was.

I remember that his name was Matt Goldberg, that he was adopted, and that he absolutely did not speak Spanish.

I remember, because he told me.

I remember trying to forget the language you never taught me.

I remember succeeding, in part.

I remember growing up in two worlds.

I remember el barrio; fútbol en la tele y fútbol en the park.

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I remember Caio y Matheus y Gabriel.

I remember finding an old photo of us and realizing that I didn’t look like you.

I remember asking mom why I didn’t look like you.

I remember asking mom why she married you.

I remember asking mom why you weren’t white.

I remember wishing you were white.

I remember when you picked me up from school late at night and, I remember realizing then that you had an accent. You were speaking to somebody’s dad, somebody’s white dad, maybe it was Molly’s or Katie’s or Sophie’s or Gracie’s or I remember wishing that I had a single-syllabic last name.

I remember when I asked you if I could dye my hair.

I remember changing my clothes; collared shirts, and colored shorts, and I remember being glad that my lips weren’t as full as Alejandro’s, that my hair wasn’t curly, that my skin wasn’t dark.

I remember when my white, middle school Spanish teacher asked me if I did poorly in her class to rebel against you.

I remember thinking how stupid that was, how stupid she was.

I remember quiet car rides home, because we couldn’t relate, because I couldn’t tell you about school, because I didn’t want to.

I remember when I was accepted to boarding school, a semester program, college.

I remember your silence.

I remember understanding.

I remember when you weren’t anything other than “Dad.” I wish that I could go back.

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house imagined Claire Grace The night you confessed your mistress: her dark curls, the dimples of her smile, how you learned them the way you only learned mine from zoomed-in photographs, I saw love in you for the first time.

Your flushed cheeks, kind eyes: intruders in my home; you were no longer Husband, love, but something drowned in the pool of the imagined house where we would raise our daughter.

That night I prepared steak; left so much blood in the kitchen you asked what had happened.

You slunk to bed and did not call me in when I drifted to sleep, tears dried on velvet couch cushions.

The cat always knew better than I, knew to hiss, run, bite, long before I learned how to fear you.

On days I don’t know how to stay away from you, I pull her to my lap, bait her with spoiling dinner for two, beg her not to let me crawl back to you.

When I found a torn image of another woman bookmarking a verse in your Bible, I shook your favorite novels by their spines like a child urging coins from her piggy bank until pages fluttered to the ground around my feet.

The night you confessed you no longer loved me I stared at shattered glass and a wedding photo on tile and wished I could say it too.

The last night you reached for me, I closed my eyes and imagined it was the first time we’d met.

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Sapphic to a Fop Spencer Fugate Fuck me sweetly, fool of a boy, you tight-laced, Pampered, bourgeoisie young thing, this world’s dull, Wealth is cloying, learn from the wilderness’s kiss, Bed this silt farmer’s Daughter quick, I’m open, nigh-virginal, ‘least Tamed by neither Jack, with bland bravado nor Jill’s soft lips, I’m pure, I’m unclaimed, unowned stock, Though that’s subject to Change by grace not often offered to poor raced, Poorly raised creatures- but that’s beyond here, Certainly not there, and the focus needs switched Back to a matter Mattering beyond this fool’s girls innermost Navel gazing, namely, let’s let the song return to Acts erotic, wild and uncouth, and pretend my Thoughts are always such.

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G(en)rowl Richard Shmikler A Tribute to Howl by Allen Ginsberg I I have a tension in my back that runs through my legs as I walk and when I sit, my jaw when I speak and throughout when I don’t, so I speak to release in hope that I’ll say the thing that makes it cease, It’s talking to me, it spoke to Ginsberg, in the quiet voice of the universe, in Bob Dylan records, in Pink Floyd tracks, in Arctic Monkeys and Alt-J digitals, women exhaling, young spirits chanting, old ideologies chastising, echoing the sounds of money falling and evil counting and love burning and flags at half-mast like the unsatisfied cock uncovered on the sheets, Like he, I have seen the most transgressive souls of my generation destroyed by obscurity, starving for more, starving from malnourishment of that vital, minimum, hysterical, dragging themselves through the black streets that cry for justice and die at the hands of statist machinery, Manic pixies looking for expansion, craving their fix, burning and yearning, tripping over themselves for some modern and secular connection to the illuminated blanket interwoven in the stars that looks down upon the machinery of darkness and white, who, privileged and tattooed and stoned, with dilated eyes, lay smoking the green crack in the torn pages of bibles, in college dorms and victorian houses from Grand to their Summit, contemplating gender, entranced by tits and thighs and cocks, who choose to choke on those words, whose sacrifice of throat empowers, whose burning bush warms the cheeks of the prophet and speaks in godly moans to those that whisper into It, who mock the old slave-masters with whips of their own, who release their tension in alleys and raves and ballrooms, in basement lounges, who sniff white gold off iPhones, and purgatoried, numbed, worshipped their bodies night after night and morning after mourning, who passed through colleges and universities and publishing houses with thousand-mile stares and biting lips, hallucinating Berkeley and the slums of the Bronx, expelled from schools of thought and forced into rehab Bipolar, depressed, and posting obscenities, odes on the walls of the skull, files for flies of the 38

mind, Letting wastebaskets devour their money on tests marked with red like the theater seats in Paris or gasoline in their prius or hearts on their sleeves, who were ignored in their leather jacket and combat boots for returning from Venice with a backpack of marijuana destined for Minnesota who ate fire and paper and mold, DMT inscriptions on the ceiling, inside garden green tree cemeteries drooping and drying and screaming, igniting webs, breaking through to an ocean of white clarity, opening their eyes to the spiraling geometric patterns of infinite complexity glowing on the back of their eyelids, who roll to the bass and seize to the lights, who loop to the poetry and cry to their identity, who burned cigarette holes through their thrift-shop sweatshirts and melt ecstasy holes in their brains protesting the narcotic cathartic tobacco haze of capitalism, and Che T-shirts and prescription drugs and gendered bathrooms, Demi-gods in suits who are not gods idolizing the gold that rules themonly gods who make men murder their sons as sacrifice; Moloch.

II Moloch this man!

Moloch men!

Moloch time! Moloch patriarchy and orientalism!

Moloch Trump!

Moloch the political and the entertaining, and dissolution of the two.

Moloch those who fuck my mind!

Moloch myself!

Mental Moloch!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison, the entire complex, moloch the industry!

Moloch the thousand blind blue shirts that moloch the negro for crack, Moloch cigarette sales and breath, I can’t.

Moloch the tension of my generation and his generation and generationals, Moloch those who are not mad, driven mad by madness, Remade as robots with no tension, packaging us like children delivered like drones, we who stare at the walls and tapestries and blinking lights, More absolute hearts to the lyrics of suffering than the song of life, to the unlimited and the commercial-less and the commercial itself, to playlists running through the body like a needle on the arm, vibrating in the caverns and mountains of vinyl, with dreams and drugs and desire, to contemplating jazz of the ancient hipsters and post-hipsterdom.

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III Allen Ginsberg! I am with you in the bay,

where I am madder than you, I am with you in the bay,

when you quit your jobs and let the tension out through your fingertips on the same blessed typewriter, I am with you in the bay,

where you ogle naked women sunbathing on their balconies, I am with you in the bay,

where you smoke endless joints in the endless hours I am with you in the bay,

where trolley cars echo the dialectic notions of universalized truth and the incomprehensibility of individual values, I am with you in the bay,

where I am comforted by your mother, and where bars on windows show god’s true light, where doctors cry and laugh at you as your eyes sink into oblivion under the piercing icy water that will never bring us back to our bodies from the ethereal realm, I am with you in the bay,

in the basement, where I sit stretching the neural tension that cripples my spine, enveloped in plumes that wrap my ears and close my eyes, whiskey glasses refilling and falling and breaking, chatter and wine and tattered leather jackets and wet sissys and butts after cigarette butts on the floor, I am with you in the bay,

in the courtroom in the prison in the state house, in protest to the CIA traffickers of fairy dust and drones dropping crossbone pamphlets, I am with you in the bay,

in my dreams we walk reeking and wanderlust with Whitman in the marketplace, on the road, in Rockland, at Columbia, in the Bronx, to the Six Gallery, I am with you in the bay.

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Hell’s Kitchen Parker Grubb There is carnage in the kitchen, A festival of flesh Blood pools on the floor of the family-friendly abattoir Eyeballs glisten on fine green plates Saturated flesh; peeled back in abstraction, reveals rubies underneath There is death for sale; Ikizukuri Ortolan Lamb Tongues with no love for language baste in vinegar At the table Gorge yourself on holy sinew, splatter blood Sniff the starch of table cloths, gulp wine to hide the taste of death, and read the names of flesh like hymns: Veal Foie Gras Balut Tender life slides down the gullet, Innocence ingested.

Tripe Pluck Noisette Gnaw the bones, cut the throat Crack the back and drink the marrow Feast like maggots

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glance, revisited Liza Michaeli for comfort, i turnd to my only memory of you, tastes, smlels, the disquiet of communion revisited. how you could be this contorted, semi obliterated halfperson, yet so real. I am alive, living. I MET MYSELF BY THE LIGHF HOUSE qen You got me by the bruised part of my leg.

When you brouhgt me out, pulled mE in, shoewd me a glass house in the valley. in the moiddle of beautiful nowhere we lay, rock bruising my skull. Dancer the Japanese guy got me sailing in hte darkness of the lake at night. Eyes. eyes, s. They are beautiful atn ight. You are sialing toward them like savage wehen the time is run out. It’ slike KLIMT that painting nuda veritas, the rebirthing of oneself as permeable vessel, liquid body.

THAT performed exorcism. Is what just happened to me, the impermanence in the recesses of my bodY. LIke sharp warm caves. Me, the failed somnambulist. Me, the ceiling and the floor, the paint or something TRUEr. darkNess, when it wells up, from which slight reflections of twinkling light slowly emerge. i dreamt i was watching myself, couldn’t reach myself, crawled out of myself. So irrelevant. All is so rillelevant, wjen you ascend. LOOIK in my eyes, S. Look into the blue-green marbles of my eyes before they roll out of the socket, fall into the water. hte tension, broken periodicAlly by faint glimpses of sky. We magic. Feel magic. Lights of the banks on the shores reflected, obstructing the view. I am sad, but you hate taht word. I believe when the time is rigth, there ’s no point in searching for a less-worn one. sour, thinned out, beaten by too many. at the right sensation, at least. Re-desturction for the ake of re-birth, hiding in plain sight. If only I could see in them what they try to reveal. Or you could see me for what I - wanted to sho w you. Watned to cospectate this existenc with you. But I felt grieved like something was still unspoken, some limit had been reached, your eyes were drying, closing in forever. I remember when i felt your nails on the insides of my stomach. when I learned how beautiful it is to own someone. To stipulate that this is important. Show me what I cannot see. Show me what you see. Look into my eyes like in their blue there is magic.

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Empty Calories Claire Looney Pick the chocolate out of trail mix, rebellion. Can life not be all sweet? They say the sweetness of fruit salad is in the juices that share their flavors but I don’t like my fruit to touch.

He touches me. Stretch marks, cellulite. I inflate. Circus balloon, his slender fingers cannot keep you on this sidewalk. Cold hands, like gloves. Examination of hips. I want to melt but I am water freezing to fill my down jacket.

Fifth grade, That’s So Raven takes a bite of ice cream and a moment on the lips... At family picnics, my aunts sit and eye the dessert table. Did you know calories don’t count if no one sees you eat them? Or if you just worked out? Or if you’re eating a bite of your husband’s dessert?

My grandmother’s highest praise is you’ve been slimming. Cousins and aunts join weight watchers, Mom wants to lose just a flour sack around the middle when I’ll never be as thin as she is. If you break a cookie in half, the calories fall out. Aunt Jamie eats one egg white every morning, wears only baggy t-shirts and land’s end jeans and when I dress up for family potlucks no one notices. I stand in the corner, boots mascara pantyhose unwanted, think of school dances.

Skip the fruit salad and take two brownies without saying I’m so bad today or calories don’t count on holidays.

Ninth grade, I buy my first pair of plus-size jeans. Words wrestle denim between beige walls, fluorescent mirrors. Too many pairs of jeans don’t make it past my hips.

So when he puts his hands on me, I slip through his fingers, sink into the sidewalk.

Because oranges make everything else taste like orange. And chocolate is the only part of trail mix I’ll ever eat.

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Inver Grove Heights Carrigan Miller And as we pass over the hill The valley comes into view, A flood of trees and water towers And road signs. Each Water tower has the town’s name On it and sometimes their high school Mascot (Go Tornadoes! Fight Cougars!

On Spartans!)

And the spread ahead of us Seems fake like the toy trains We built underneath the Christmas tree, Each fold in the rug forming another Hill that the trains had to Make it over to continue their Endless loop. And I count the Water towers because I couldn’t count The road signs, and God forbid the trees, Four thousand five hundred fifty-seven, Four thousand five hundred fifty-eight.

A city is a song, writing itself Over and over and over, The rhythm of cars, bicycles jackhammers, each man and Woman the strings of an unknowable Instrument, strummed to the beat Of stoplights, harmonizing with Car horns and pedestrians.

Listen close and the bass line Of the subways is audible.

And the magnificent RV migration Across Indiana, great herds Of wild motor homes roaming free as they have for thousands of years, cutting A pavement and concrete trail through the Corn fed heartland.

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A place is a narrative, a book On a shelf in the den, pages dog-eared, Broken in and inviting. Thumb to The spot you want, get comfortable.

Read fast or take your time, Devour or savor.

And Los Angeles spreads like a fungus On the forest floor, like spilled milk On a table. A flexing muscle, Steel and glass blood A force of nature in contest With the desert and the mountains.

A windshield is a white projector screen. See America from the Comfort of your car, cushioned Seats, air conditioning, cup-holders.

Roll down the windows for Surround sound, listen to the Impromptu soundtrack and Watch the extras roll past at 70 Miles per hour.

And New Jersey, my home, Which is like the endless corridors Of some shopping mall, called The Garden State like some sort Of cynical joke, like Greenland Is icy and Iceland is green and New Jersey is the color of gunmetal, Of the sky after it rains all Night. There are no water towers Here with town names, not in Essex County. Each town is pressed Against each other like sweaty Bodies in a crowd.

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window Eli Lilleskov high beams from cars outside would shine through the window, projecting light that would translate across the wall, as trivial as any memory i can’t sleep tonight, i’m caught up in the endless loops... the blinds would split the light into horizontal bars a rising noise as the bars appeared, which fell as they moved across my wall and vanished where were they headed? the countless strangers whose night-time ramblings looped us together with a thin shining wire not enough information to trace their paths… just those bars of light fading as the cable frays a thin bond snapping as the braids unravel a shrug in the bulk

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The Hermitage Carsten Haas A hard time we had of it, And that even before we had left.

Too far for our currachs, We sold all we owned, all we could, Our writings become palimpsests, Our sheep mutton, Golden Christ roaming the land, As a thousand name-stamped pieces.

Naught in our bellies, But now we had a ship.

One brother died in the Spring, The first man, to our knowledge To die here – certainly the first to be buried.

We laid him in the earth, in a freshsawn casket, Palled only in the tang of pine, Sorry to see him leave, But he, like us, was finally at peace.

And he, like us, was happy.

Kept the coast to our right, Until it turned east, Said our matins, As we toyed with the ropes, Prayed with our hands, So easy to forget, how big, the sky.

In the eight hundred fiftieth Year of our lord, Twenty since we came, I see the ships, Tell my brothers.

Four of our number, lost to storms, Us surprised it was so few; It being a hard season, and we not sailors.

We spoke their names and sailed on, Trying not to grudge them their rest.

We limped, tatter-sailed, to this land’s shore, Kneeled, cried, laughed on that pebbled beach, Prostrated ourselves before the fells and dales, Thanking God, thanking Him, thanking Him, Saw the cruciform in every birch, The steeple in every peak.

Lord, how good to stand once more, In the great church of the land.

The boat had served us well, Although we hadn’t grown to love her.

Driven aground, we pried her apart – We didn’t need her now – And of her bones we built a home.

We’ve heard the tales, Know what is coming, We’ll stay.

What better place to die than here, Among our flock, among the rocks Of God’s Country?

We lay down our tools, Our crooks and our hoes, And sing the vespers one last time.

The sun sets as we broach the last casks, And sit among the crosses, All of us together, Watching the sails come in.

Their prows grind into the shore, As ours did, twenty years fore.

Then we see the women, the children, The ships’ too-wide frames.

Only now do we realize what they came for, And only now do we begin to shake.

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On The Road Back Home Jonathan Amezquita Bottle caps fall carouseling,

while we finish our discussion

about fate. About what it means

to be 20. Next year we’ll be forty.

Retracting my steps,

set foot in bumblefuck Lehigh to caress

the breath of the best degenerates this

world has to offer.

We’ll share our story,

cock matchtips whose lights granted greenhouse

an herb that only grows in the grooves

seeded with adolescence Louie did have a knack for greenthumbs.

Passing the remote as,

we flick through beer caps and old memories

Do you recall the time Black Betty

got us lost in the woods?

That old jeep couldn’t get you

to Orlando; only flash joyrides

and souveniring tickets.

Remember how’d we spend his time

waterwaist deep, sifting through sand

took us years to determine he was

on the wrong shore. Now Stan’s

somewhere on the West Coast.

Smokeboxed tents and crystallized skies, nights

spent listening to bonfires and

Charlie dying. Time threaded truth tying,

weaving us into this sulken town.

Now home I travel between,

the roads among us

trying to determine which, won’t bring me back.

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I hear the murmur, the shifting

shadows of myself in stories.

YOUR stories. Those of which,

I’ll never get to be a part.

A whole world where

my name’s an idea.

A reminiscence away,

I’ve raced back to dislocation.

Plead with them to come. Though

the room’s already empty. I pack up.

I tell them, I’ll be right back. I will only be gone a second.

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Chanter Literary Magazine

Fall 2016