Concrete 2017

35th Anniversary Edition

Copyright © 2016 Concrete All Rights Reserved Concrete Literary Magazine is an annual print and monthly online journal produced in downtown Boston, amid blue-tinted high rises and blackened train tracks, at the tables of crowded cafes and at the mercy of flickering wireless internet. Established in 1982, Concrete, like Boston, or New York, or London, or Shanghai, is continuously evolving to match its urban population. Within the journal’s pages – both virtual and print – can be found a collection of prose and poetry that represents the dynamic nature of city life. All of the work found within the pages of Concrete is original work published by undergraduates of Emerson College under the Student Government Association and the Writing, Literature and Publishing department. All rights revert to the authors and artists upon publication, and permissions to republish must be gained directly through the contributors.

Submissions: Concrete accepts unsolicited submissions from registered students of Emerson College, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry and screenplays. Submissions should be delivered electronically via Submittable at concretelitmag.com/submit. Please also include a cover sheet that includes your name, Emerson ID, email address, phone number, and the title and genre of the work submitted. Do not include your name within the document of the piece.

Please do not submit to both the Print and Online categories simultaneously.

Emerson College 120 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02116

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2016 Staff Edit ors-in-Chief Cara Dubois Rebecca Rozenberg Managing Edit or Sammi Curran He ad Designer Tim Biddick

Marketing Assistant Brooke Dunn He ad Copye dit or Sarah Heatwole Assistant Copye dit or Audrey Conklin

Pros e Edit or Kurt Hummel

Po etry Edit or Sahalie Angell Martin

Assistant Pros e Edit or Kelsey Costa

Assistant Po etry Edit or Erini Katopodis

Pros e Re aders Shane Iverson Alexis Leira Kaylee Mizell-Anzick Madeline Poage Alana Scartozzi Johanna Stiefler-Johnson

Po etry Re aders Sarah Alexander Marina Hart Samantha Schraub Erin Sherry Emily Taylor Brad Trumpfheller Richard Wheelock Genna Coleman

Marketing Managers Marissa Bracker Diana DiLoreto

Advis or Ben Brooks

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Contents 01

| Against Forgetting | Brad Trumpfheller

03 | Infinity Room | Erin Sherry 10 | Obituaries | Christine Lavosky 13 | little clementine | Emily Hillebrand 14 | Jane Doe | Mandy Seiner 16 | A Short Play or Movie on Figure Eights | Christine Lavosky 21 | La Plaza de los Lagartos | Andrew SiaĂąez-De La O 30 | I signed here | Kayla Carcone 32 | Elegy | Erin Sherry 34 | How to Hunt a Bottomless Pit | Richie Wheelock

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Against Forgetting Brad Trumpfheller A moon shatters in the river.

Catfish pulse beneath the slivers.

On nights moonless and spent in the gut of a dream I find you still in the short grass.

What is the best way to have a body in a dream? Your fingers are fishnetting and everywhere. Lightning veins in the long sky somewhere. Trees stoop to listen.

Language is the body’s most impossible work, and yet I want desperately to make sense of this.

In my dreamgut when you touch me I am a torch lighting my own mouth ablaze.

And catfish song. And grace. And how do I grace.

This unliving shortgrass.

What color were your eyes? The past tense is horrible to me now. A moon shattered

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and for years it rained white rock. I swam downriver with nothing to my name but a pencil and a mouthful of stitches and how do I shut a door and how do I relight a torch I’m so sorry I will shatter each dream and everything will burn when I touch it body or rotgut lightning or sky I will make us a new language we can live there together, alone not yet having names for the fish that shimmer in the riverbed or the grief whose hands we heard dancing in the bulrushes.

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Infinity Room Erin Sherry It’s 1976, and the hospital staff is humming “God Bless America.”

I’m pink and screaming and covered in smears of white vernix and a sticky red jumpsuit made of blood. You’re peach-fuzzed and wrapped in a crocheted quilt the color of frosting in the next wing, already bored of crying and eating and sleeping and crying. The cycle. The repetition.

The big frustration of your smallness.

The country blows out two hundred candles and hopes its lungs will last long enough to blow out two hundred more. Your mother mutes the grainy television propped up in the corner of her recovery room before the fireworks spiraling up into the sky above the Boston Harbor can crash into your little seashell ears in this maternity ward in Pittsburgh and stir you awake in her cradled arms.

When the nurse in the star-spangled scrubs that sliced you free and cut your cord and tucked your toes into your first clothes two days earlier pulls me out and repeats the process, your mother is sheathing her fingers around your tiny ankles–—memorizing your softness, your quiet. Your eyes that will cause all the problems. Your hair that will fall out next week and return in yellow, cow-licked tufts. The faint splattering of chocolate freckles already smearing your nose that will disappear by the time you’re old enough to grip the steering wheel of an orange Volkswagen and send it stampeding through every traffic light that tries to slow you down.

The nurse’s calloused hands are the first thing both of us ever feel. Her bare, cracked palms. The stippling of eczema across her forearms grazing our thighs as she soaks us clean in our first minutes of life. She wheels my mother and me into the empty bed next to yours, and I cry and shout for what I don’t have words for.

You sleep and stare and smile. Our mothers agree to keep the television muted during the twenty-four hours we share the room.

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“Too much noise.” They nod.

“Too much talk of the death penalty.”

“Things exploding every day.”

“And I can’t bring myself to care too much for Carter.”

They learn how to feed us and bathe us and burp us. They hold their breaths and watch the Viking 2 kiss Mars. They pack us up and take us home.

It’s 1986, and we’re gripping our pencils in adjacent school desks the way our mothers gripped each other’s hands across the space between their hospital beds, the unmistakable intimacy of sharing the same pain in the same place turning strangers into sisters. Sometime after we were born, they moved our families onto the same block, into two nearly identical, brick houses, and raised us side-by-side.

In your kitchen, my name is etched onto the wall alongside yours with every new inch we grow, my “Ellie” falling behind your “Lucy” for the first time the summer you sprout two inches and outgrow our matching swimsuits, and I remain frozen at four-foot-one. You run out to the sprinkler in my backyard one afternoon wearing something blue and halter-topped, and all of a sudden, damp and small, I’m imagining the little red flowers of my one-piece dripping onto my towel and leaving me white and new and, somehow, taller.

One morning you come to the playground in a new pair of glasses, because all of a sudden, you can't make out individual blades of grass anymore, and your mother is worried about all the other things you might be missing. They are thick, lined with tortoise shell frames. Your eyes are a whole different color behind them, bugged out like those of a goldfish with that layer of finger-smudged fish tank glass balanced on your nose in front of them. You take them off when we jump rope, when we hang upside down from the monkey bars and speak only in our own invented language, when we paint polka dots across each other’s cheeks in art class and are sent scoldingly to the sink to scrub them off before the bell rings. When I try the glasses on, I can’t recognize the playground anymore, all lumpy and dizzy and spinning. I give them back to you when my temples start to ache.

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“Why’d you get these things, anyway?” I ask, secretly jealous of your new accessory.

You shrug. “Doctor Karen said my eyes are good, but could be better. That’s all.”

You leap from your swing, stick your landing in the grass like a gymnast. “Let’s go inside.”

A few months later, on the day the flowerbeds lining the swing set are particularly pretty, I start talking about how I want to paint a thousand pictures of the gardenias and press all their petals between the pages of my mother’s cookbooks to make sure they stay this way forever. You smile, but not quite as big as I had hoped.

I worry that maybe something is wrong in your eyes again, and you can’t see the flowers at all.

“Are your glasses working?”

You wrinkle up your nose between your brows. “Yeah. I think so.”

But you must be wrong. They must be broken.

“They are gigantic,” I tell you. “The flowers. Huge and blossoming and the color of honey and lemons and Willy Wonka’s purple suit.”

You don’t say anything. You must be imagining it, how pretty it looks.

“And the leaves are shamrock green, covered in raindrops like little looking glasses for fairies.”

You smile again, but not as big as I had hoped.

When we play, you always jump a little higher than me, springing up off the pavement in perfect rhythm with the smack of the rope. I always ask how you’re doing it, and you always say you don’t know. And you can always stay hanging, swaying back and forth with your hair spilling down and swinging in the playground breeze for a little longer than me, too. I always ask if your legs get tired, all bent in half like that—if your hands ever start to blister from heaving yourself right-side up again.

“Look, Lucy.” I point my palms toward the treetops and show you the peeling pink patches. “Doesn’t this ever happen to you?” But you knit your brow and shake your head, and your hands stay soft.

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It’s 1996, and on the day you turn twenty, I drive us in your orange Volkswagen to the new exhibit they just opened in that old mattress-factory-turned-art-museum in the part of Pittsburgh that’s all graffitied, red brick tucked into terraced hillsides.

Telephone wires net the sky above us like fishing nets slung from rooftop to sagging rooftop. You’re tapping your feet and staring out the window toward the clouds that always seem gray and pregnant with rain in this hilltop neighborhood, angry at Doctor Karen and the specialist in Philadelphia for saying you probably shouldn’t be allowed behind the wheels of moving vehicles anymore, and even angrier at your failing eyes for making them say it. When we pull over to let a school bus pass us in the narrow street, you close your eyes and make a loud exhale, and I count the faces in the windows.

“It looks like a hockey team,” I tell you, in case you can’t see them. “Most of them are laughing. Some could be sleeping. Two are running up and down the aisles waving their sticks above their heads, and the driver looks tired.”

You don’t say anything, just drum your fingers against your legs and play with the radio. I’m not sure what you’re seeing and what you aren’t.

Outside the new exhibit, the tour guide is telling us about the artist—a Japanese woman who began to see the world covered in dots around the time we were born and set out to create circle-covered spaces made of mirrors where she and her imagined reality would have a place to feel absolutely infinite.

“The tour guide has amber dreadlocks,” I whisper to you as we pass into the installation. “They look like a beehive, piled up on top of her head, and her clothes don’t match.”

“I can see her,” you say quietly. It’s one of the first times you’ve spoken all day.

“And she’s wearing blue socks,” I tell you.

“I can see her.”

“In Kusama’s words,” the guide says as we enter a room that seems to stretch on and on for miles, millions of our own polka-dotted faces staring back at us in the reflective walls that have no detectable beginning or end, “‘A mirror is a device which obliterates everything, including myself and others, in the light of another world or 6

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a gallant apparatus which creates nothingness.’”

You are standing in the center of the small and endless room with your arms outstretched, staring at yourself lined up in neat, chicken-pocked rows above and below and all around you. I am memorizing your softness, your quiet. Your hair tangled into a knot at the nape of your neck, the exact pattern of the car seat wrinkles imprinted into the back of your denim shirt.

The tour guide recites the rest of the artist’s words. “‘One day,’” she quotes, “‘I was looking at a tablecloth covered in red flowers, which was spread out on the table. Then I looked up toward the ceiling. There, on the windows and even on the pillars, I would see the same red flowers. They were all over the place in the room, my body, and entire universe.’”

You plant yourself in front of a mirrored wall, clench your fists, and stare your spotted self in the eyes. The tour guide is saying that the artist’s flowers became dots, that the dots haunted her, that they filled the universe around her, trapped her in a world that no one else could see, chased her to places from which she could see no escape. “‘Unless I get out of here, the curse of these flowers will seize my life.’”

“Are you seeing this?” I whisper.

After a moment, you find my eyes in the glass. “Yes. I’m seeing this.”

In the room made of mirrors, I feel like I am standing in the eye of infinity, and my reflection looks small standing next to yours. The only parts of you that we’ll be losing soon are your eyes, and I know the rest of you isn’t going anywhere, but it’s the maddening repetition, the big frustration of my smallness, that makes all of my millions of palms begin to sweat when I imagine what I would look like standing in this room without you. Me and me and me stacked up on top of myself in the floor and in the ceiling and everywhere, without a you to stand next to me and help my eyes digest my own reflection. Without someone beside me to understand exactly what it felt like to be yanked out into the world by a pair of dry and calloused hands. Wiped up clean and shiny while her eczema scratched lightly at our skin.

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River and mark our growth on a kitchen wall, inch by inch, year by year, side by side in a world whose lungs are getting tired and sick, and every night on the television something always seems to be exploding.

“I can’t stand in here anymore,” you say after a while. “I’m getting dizzy.”

“Is it your eyes? I can try to describe—” “It’s okay.” You’re headed toward the hall. “Just overwhelming. Let’s go.”

We wander around the rest of the exhibits, and I describe them to you as vividly as I can. The wall of outstretched marble hands holding loaves and loaves of dried bread. The bedroom ensnared in gummy, black spider webs and the hole in the fourth floor that tunnels its way directly into a window looking out onto someone’s backyard. I tell you about the colors. The shadows and what’s causing them. We joke about whether a hole could possibly be considered art at all, and when you step a little too close to its edge, I pull you back. You thank me, but not as loudly as I’d hoped.

The next year, Princess Diana is killed when her driver stampedes too blindly through the traffic lights that should have slowed him down. They’re memorializing the ten-year anniversary of the Challenger’s obliteration, the deadly burst of light seventy-three fatal seconds above the Earth, and someone in Scotland figures out how to create a brand new sheep out of a single cell plucked and cloned from another. I’m telling you about her—about Dolly—the living, breathing animal not only pulled out into the world by a pair of calloused hands so close to both of our birthdays in the beginning of July, but made by them in a petri dish, too, as you tap your foot on the waiting room carpet. You are squeezing my hand, and a nurse in star-spangled scrubs prepares a room for the surgery that will take the tumors out of your eyes, but take the last of your sight with them, too.

“She is white and fluffy and healthy and looks so real you can’t believe it.”

You’re trying to smile.

“When this is over,” I tell you, “we can go back to that museum. I can describe it all to you until it feels like you can see it, and you won’t even get dizzy.”

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They call you back.

Your eyes, in their last exhausted stretch, are wet when they turn away from me, and even though I’m not the one being led away to an operating room filled with lab coats and lasers to have a part of myself removed forever, my palms are sweating at the idea that you’ll be different when you come out, and by extension, I will be different somehow, too. Because I am afraid I won’t know how to see the world, in playgrounds and in hospital rooms, in orange Volkswagens and in explosions, in the circular chaos of absolute infinity, if we aren’t seeing the exact same thing.

When you wake up, we turn the volume in your room as loud as it will go, just to make sure you can hear the fireworks. The world inhales, crosses its fingers for one more century. Exhales. Someone somewhere covers somebody else’s ears, protecting them from the noise of the sky catching fire. Someone somewhere is singing “God Bless America.”

In 2003, Dolly shuts her eyes and sleeps. Her lungs are too tired.

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Obituaries Christine Lavosky FIREWORKS we set off in our Airbnb’s parking lot in Maine. Vermillion orange fountains (yours) shooting showers over the concrete. More dangerous than the pop-pops you gave me to throw on the ground and watch ignite on impact.

Darkness and an imagined rustling in the bushes. Late. You squeezed my shoulder as we watched their light. Listened to their ruptured pops. I felt close to you, but then a sharp pain, like the bones in my shoulder were scraping against each other.

A MUG CAKE in your mom’s handmade pottery. Grey with orange-brown flecks. The one you hated for some reason. Watching it rise in the microwave.

You insisted that it only had to be cooked for three minutes and forty-five seconds, even though I argued (tone rising at the end of sentences) that it needed longer.

You were right, as always. Your culinary specificity applied to even this laziest version of cake imaginable. I could swear you used a temperature probe for toast when no one was looking. A lava center rose from the depths of the mug. I wanted to put sprinkles, but you said no.

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THE LAUGHS of fishermen sitting on the dock (toes poking through unwashed woolen socks, the smell of stale coffee poured from an army green thermos) as we waded through the pond. You saluted them as though you’d all moved through the trenches together, ammo strapped to bodies. Raced ahead of me on our hiking trail and yelled back at me that I was weak. You said the words while laughing, but still, I couldn’t help wondering if you really meant it. Of course, it was you that found our next adventure. We waded a long time before we finally got to that tiny island. When we got there it was empty. Silent. So we undressed, laid our clothes out to dry. Floated on our backs, you a little worried about people seeing us. I didn’t remind you of the chance of thunderstorms that night.

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A RAINY WALK on the beach. Another day on the Cape. We were pretending it was Scotland. Grey and dark blue hanging thick in the air. The off-season. You stopped short, turned to face me, ran the tips of your fingers over the back of my neck. Fine blond hairs rising. I felt them even through the cloud of fog, fingers suspended in its cushiony fibers. You stopped short, just looked at me, like you were going to say something. But then you walked away toward the water and mumbled to yourself about the tides or fishing. I whispered, “I love you,” to the back of your head. You were already peering over the edge of the dock, looking for striped bass.

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AN INKY PEN you once gave me as a gift. It was lovely—silver. Came in a velvet-lined box. I liked the weight of it in my hand, heavier than my cheap ballpoints, like it contained just the right words and phrases within its metallic casing. But I was clumsy. I smudged them. Images and thoughts I’d agonized over became unreadable. Just the way you would have understood them, anyway. Big blue stains all over my little hands. I always used it around you, though. Tried to keep my words from stumbling into each other.

Implored them to be graceful, to look out for cracks in the sidewalk and unmarked ditches. Tried compulsively to be neat.

Didn’t want you to be mad.

A POCKETKNIFE used to cut oranges for whiskey sours. Sitting on a small island of sand. You were in the water catching crabs with your net. Every time I looked up, you had another one. (Why were you so good at these things?) The knife had a circular, metallic ring over the wooden handle. I folded in the blade, I suppose too forcefully, and the ring twisted out of place. Had I broken it? I kept glancing up at you to make sure you hadn’t seen me.

Twisted, twisted. I thought I could fix it.

I rubbed the blade over and over on my purple bathing suit bottom, as least making sure all the bulbous orange shreds were off.

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little clementine Emily Hillebrand little clementine i got it wrong three months ago: december is not just bitter like the pith of a peel, but sweet like the juice itself, dripping from smiling mouths and sticking under nails. iIt dribbles down my chin every time she makes me laugh.

September september tripped us into ending— slow fall of goodbye—slingshot across coasts, echolocation and email. too too many times iI hear the clementine fall from the branch, wait too long to find my voice and summon bittersweet testimony from closed throat and cold chest. moving moving into tomorrow i will listen for the thump of fruit from tree, for the clementine asking to be taken from its peel, to be sectioned into sun and sweetness. i will deliver it from bitter yesterday, watching her as she weighs fresh clementines in her hands, palms remembering.

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Jane Doe

Mandy Seiner

Girl as symbol for youth Girl as metaphor for longing Girl as butterfly

Girl as bee Girl as a red-stained set of sheets locked in a chest

at the bottom of the closet Girl as something men can place themselves in relation to Girl as a thing that can only be defined in relation to men Girl as landmark Girl as herself Girl as someone else because her self is too complicated Girl as who she is in the eyes of others Girl as her failures Girl as her shortcomings Girl as a shadow on the sidewalk Girl as a shadow of herself Girl as someone whose shadow does all the talking Girl as a mouth that cannot speak Girl as a mouth that is useless unless it’s smiling Girl as not quite a smile Girl as a smile, but only from the right angle

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Girl as a da Vinci on the wall of a museum Girl as artwork surrounded by bulletproof glass because

once someone tried to take a knife to her insides Girl as something to be looked at, but not touched Girl as something to be touched by everyone but herself Girl as herself, even though it’s complicated Girl as a dead language Girl as a cut-out tongue Girl as the last breath leaving the body

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A Short Play or Movie on Figure Eights Christine Lavosky Scene 5 [int. train] MUSIC Swan Lake, Op.20, Act II: 10. plays through a dust-infested phonograph set at a speed slower than the composer of the song would have liked.

It lags. The song plays in the background; it does not take over the scene or impede upon the passengers’ thoughts. It just grazes their collective subconscious. If the song needs to be looped, a letter must be written to Sir Gale Peterson at the Institute requesting permission.

The phonograph can be brought out from our theatrical storage unit in Astoria.

ART DIRECTION Poker eyes peek out from behind mildewy pages——or perhaps yellowed newspaper or a book with cracked binding (purchase only from Randy’s Rare Relics).

Bleeding inklings leak off pages, ride along tumbling tracks while a waitress weaves through the CONCRETE

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train aisle, glasses clinking together on a tray.

A man’s voice crackles over the speaker, or maybe he is just crumpling paper. He announces, “New Haven,” or alternatively, “Tahiti.”

Passengers atop red velvet seats slice into berries financier with silver forks. Lips ensconced in glittering granules growing greedy. Flaky fingers suddenly sugar-coated.

Pinky rings dangle. Blue smoke hangs over playing cards, plates of goose liver pâté. Pinkies point upwards, towards low ceilings, lingering over crowded ashtrays. Tables are covered in lavish rubble.

Take great care that all windows are fogged and welded shut.

Dress the male players in thick ties, block colors. Tiny cloche hats for the women, mostly crimson but some ochre.

Indigo carpets zip along walls making tight folds.

Make sure the air is stagnant and eyes always open.

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Tell tall men with round spectacles to push the frames upward with nubby fingers. Keep lithe legs crossed. Crisp collars will stand up all on their own. A bothersome child’s whispering lisp will be received by an eye-rolling mother.

The time of day must be right for a thin light to snake in through the window, to gallop off a scallop-edged dress in a glossy magazine.

LINES No one speaks except for the lisp whisperer.

Until a grey-bearded UNCLE GREG, taking his niece, JILLIAN, on a trip asks (as if it is all her fault), “Where is this all goi—” He is silenced mid-line by a storm of cicadas, which pour out in torrential droves from his shocked lips that are shaped in a perfect “O.” As they say, “fights meet fights.” Tones——only questioning——are seen dripping with accusation and seldom rewarded with the answers they desire. The gilded punch bowl, born for soirees, is seldom filled with punch, but instead used as a basket to catch keys.

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In the next car over, A WOMAN sits. She hears the cicadas' disruptive buzzing, the lisping child’s vain shushing. But she doesn’t hear what the insect-bombarded man sees. She hears an electrical spasm, a malfunction with the train’s wiring.

A girl, SALLY, flails at the window with weak arms growing stronger. She’s pushing, nudging, grunting. When it’s open, she sees, not a damaged engine, but instead, reality. Where she was going was where she had been the whole time. Hours or possibly decades had been spent on a train moving in figure eights. On pre-determined tracks, passengers oblivious.

Blindly believing in progression.

Cracking the window open a bit more, SALLY sees A MAN on a bicycle much taller than her own training-wheel-attached apparatus. His machine looks like it belongs in a circus. SALLY wonders, her thoughts falling out into the air, where her bill-stuffed satchel failed her.

Questioning, "How did he get up there?"

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NOTES [The timing of the cicadas' interruption must be perfect, exactly on the “I” sound of the word “going.” However, due to our company’s dedication to insect rights, it must never be rehearsed with the insects so as to preserve the lives of as many cicadas as possible. Cicadas will only be purchased for the final take of this scene, or any live performance with more than fifty ticket-holders. This should be kept in mind when casting the role of UNCLE GREG. The bicycle must only be obtained through theft, using whatever methods are available to the Props Department. Do not, under any circumstances, give the biker anything for the bike. We do not have funds allocated for this prop, neither do we have any desire to raise them.]

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La Plaza de los Lagartos Andrew Siañez-De La O It's Christmas in El Paso, and Alberto finds himself drunk and alone in the heart of the city. The holidays can be rough for Mexicans.

Alberto is lucky; most of his family is on this side of the fence. He knew many of his friends had to save their Christmas wishes for letters or phone calls. While others were celebrating throughout the city, Alberto had stayed in his small apartment, where he kissed a small photo of his mother as he lit a candle in her memory.

He looked around his small, dimly lit apartment—at the couch where his wife used to sit and laugh with him, at the bed they used to share, at the empty spaces in the cupboards where she made sure to take the good plates with her when she left. He was ready to spend the night staring up at his stucco ceiling, counting the popcorn kernels like they were stars and hoping that they would all come crashing down and end it all.

But the sky doesn’t fall and she doesn’t come back. So instead he put on his old, paint-stained coat and left behind his empty apartment with a bottle of tequila in hand. By the time he made it downtown, the bottle was almost empty. He hadn’t even realized there had been a celebration. He didn’t question the mounds of trash and bottles that had accumulated on the sides of the street. Didn’t question the number of drunks wandering back home, passing him whistling "Feliz Navidad" between hiccups. Why would he?

El Paso was not what it used to be. It never lived up to the expectations of a border city, but it tried. Alberto could see its efforts all around him, ever since he was little. There were more high schools now than he could count on one hand, and neighborhoods were beginning to stretch out into the far east side. There were even rumblings of a baseball stadium in the northeast. But at the end of the day, you can see the rough edges of the city, the concrete slab sidewalks that puff up and break in CONCRETE

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the desert heat. Not even the city will survive the desert.

Right in the heart of downtown El Paso sits San Jacinto Plaza, a small park whose trees are the only living green things you’ll find for miles. It is neatly maintained to provide a place of rest for city hall employees and shoppers from Mexico. Alberto, much like the rest of El Paso, takes the plaza for granted, doesn’t know the history behind it.

In 1883, J. Fisher Satterwhite, the Parks Commissioner at the time, brought to the park a new gazebo, seventy-five Chinese elms, and three alligators, kept in a pond separated from citizens by only a small, two-foot wall. El Paso may be a desert city, but don’t let anyone tell you it is dull.

Over the years, the alligators became a staple of downtown El Paso. At one point there were as many as seven of the scaly beasts sunbathing in the plaza. Alligators can live to be as old as fifty, and that made them a worthwhile investment for Satterwhite. But the alligators of San Jacinto Plaza were always more than an investment.

These creatures were never meant to live in this desert.

Jack and Jill, alligator siblings donated by a wealthy El Pasoan, were stolen. Jack was placed in the office of a Texas Western professor, while Jill was thrown into the collegiate swimming pool before an intramural swim meet. Neither of them would make it back to the plaza. Oscar, another alligator only twenty-five years old at the time, suffered internal injuries from being thrown back into the pond by a group of teenagers when the cops caught them trying to carry the alligator.

It has been ninety years since Satterwhite brought his first alligator to the desert city, and now there is only one left. Minnie, a five-hundred-pound alligator, lost her mate, Mickey, two weeks ago. At forty-five years old, Minnie is the oldest alligator to live in San Jacinto Plaza, and it shows. Her hide is scarred from rocks and bottles that have been thrown at her and, in some places, still covered in paint from graffiti artists trying to lay their claim.

She watches as Alberto stumbles through the plaza. He reeks of alcohol, and she recognizes the smell. She thinks of Sally, a young alligator from a few years back, 28

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the subject of a weight-guessing contest, who was stoned to death one night by a group of drunks leaving a nearby bar. Minnie lifts her body from the cold water of the pond and walks closer to the edge of the enclosure. Her joints ache as she does this, every step sending a sharp pain along her back.

Every instinct in her is telling her she will die soon. She isn’t as quick as she used to be. Children no longer scream when she snaps at them. They only laugh and point at her, call her a lizard, a viejita. She’s been trapped in this city for as long as she can remember. She’s seen her fellow alligators tortured and killed. Every year she was of age to lay eggs, the city took them away, donating them to far-off zoos.

She’d never see them hatch, and for a long time she thought she’d at least have Mickey, but now he is gone.

It’s hard to say what Satterwhite expected from his alligators. The financial crisis of 1894 took everything he owned, only eleven years after his first alligator was brought to the plaza. He’d leave El Paso soon after. San Jacinto was Satterwhite’s attempt at an oasis in the Texas desert, and Minnie is that final echo of his dream.

The old alligator looks up as a drunk Alberto makes his way to the short wall of the enclosure. Her nostrils flare as her body grows rigid, more from instinct than intention—even she knows she can’t make that leap—but she isn't prepared for what happens next.

The history of the plaza, and the stories of the alligators that have lived there, have never crossed Alberto’s mind, not until he finds himself lying in the cold water of the alligator’s enclosure, his shin aching from when he walked into the small barrier of the enclosure, when he tripped and fell into the water. He struggles to stand, the tequila still heavy on his shoulders. He rubs water from his eyes and tries to pull into focus the park around him. It’s four in the morning, but downtown El Paso is still brightly lit from the Christmas Eve party earlier that night. Every tree in the park is covered in lights, and the true beauty is the thirty-five-foot-tall Christmas tree that stands just outside of the enclosure. Music still drifts down the empty city streets, and, if you listen close enough, you can still hear the sounds of laughter CONCRETE

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hanging softly in the cold night air.

Alberto is still humming to the tune of Jingle Bells when he makes eye contact with the last surviving alligator of San Jacinto Plaza. He mutters something along the lines of lo siento or discúlpame, like he’s only bumped into someone or spilled a glass of water. Alberto can hear the alligator’s breathing, can hear it rough and coarse in her chest. The alligator' eyes lock with Alberto’s and he notices for the first time that they are the same color as his—a deep, dark brown that looks almost black when he cries.

The slits of her eyes start to widen as she tries to pull her world back into focus.

She blinks heavily and starts to shake her head, water sloshing around her. It looks as if she is pulling away from some invisible hand that tugs at her snout. She begins to move, her body turning towards Alberto, whose entire body stiffens at the sight of her.

Looking at the beast, he remembers the cholos that used to hang around his high school, selling dope to poor kids who wanted—no, needed—an escape. Alberto usually steered clear of them, but when he couldn’t, they’d push him around. Mock him and say "Que chulo, look at the fatso." Alberto takes a step back in the mud, but he quickly loses balance as the edges of the world start to spin. So he plants his feet back in the pond and just watches the alligator claw her way towards him. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the glimmer of a broken bottle shining beneath the water. Slowly, never taking his eyes off her, he reaches down and grabs hold of the glass. The broken end of the bottle looks sharp, but her hide is thick, and Alberto’s heart is racing.

He remembers the first time he raised his voice to his father; he was only seven.

The man had called Alberto’s mother a puta. Alberto didn’t even know what that meant, but when he saw the light fade from his mother’s eyes, he knew what his father did was wrong. His father beat him, but the way his mother kissed his swollen cheek made it all better. Part of him wants to scream out at the alligator, wants to raise his arms high in the air, make himself seem bigger than he is, but he can 30

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barely stand, and his throat feels dry and coarse.

Minnie looks at Alberto and opens her jaw as wide as she can, barely as much as she wants. She is missing teeth, but she hopes the look alone will scare the man, yet he only stands there, a bottle in his hand, one of the many that had been thrown at her that night. She can feel broken shards scratching against her underside as she slowly moves through the shallow pond, every sharp bite of glass adding to her anger. I’ll kill him, she thinks, and that will be enough. So she lunges at him, but she is old, and that will be the only thing that keeps Alberto alive.

He is able to push aside her snout, and in that brief moment, he puts all the strength he can muster into shoving the broken bottle into Minnie’s neck, the space between her jaw and left shoulder blade. The hide there is thin, meant to stretch when the alligator eats a large meal, but it's been years since Minnie has eaten anything more than scraps. The bottle cuts deep and lodges itself in her neck. She tries to put distance between her and Alberto, and she wants to cry out, roar, anything to make her feel strong again, but every attempt makes the bottle tear at her throat.

She thinks of Mickey, her oldest friend. She imagines the way he would’ve protected her. The way he would’ve clamped his strong jaws down on Alberto’s leg. The way they would’ve torn this drunk apart, anything to try and make up for all those they had lost.

Her breath pushing through her teeth flecks at the water, sending small ripples to Alberto’s ankles. The time between each ripple becomes longer and longer as Minnie starts to lose strength, as the memory of Mickey begins to fade. She looks back at him, the drunk who stabbed her, and cries.

Now, alligators don’t cry, Alberto knows this, but something in the slow rise and fall of her eyes lets him know. He remembers the mobile that hung over his childhood crib. Dinosaurs. A small T-Rex, open jaw and small arms reaching out to him. He takes a step forward, a slosh and a thud. Then another. Alberto makes his way to Minnie, wanting to help her, and falls to his knees, his body next to hers—bodies in the mud. He looks at her, at the blood pouring from the neck of the CONCRETE

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bottle. She swings her head at him as he reaches for the bottle, but the movement is painful, and he can hear a deep moan in her chest.

He remembers that his kindergarten teacher owned an iguana. Pancho Zilla was his name. His teacher was white and thought himself clever. Alberto remembered the way his teacher held his shoulders, the man’s hands holding tight as he urged him to feed the lizard. "Go ahead, Albert, he won’t bite." The man never called him by his real name—always Albert, never Alberto. That’s not me, the young Alberto thought, all of me is in that o. What a difference a single letter can make. In that o lived Easter mornings at Iglesia de San Ignacio, eggs filled with confetti and the first time he ever rode a horse. He was three, and the horse was a pony, but still that lived inside him. He can feel the soft fur on the pony’s neck and his mother’s tight grip on his waist. "Isn’t she beautiful, Alberto," she’d whisper, "Muy bonita."

Alberto, who can feel the cold of the water slowly becoming unbearable, whispers to Minnie between shivers, "Muy bonita." He notices for the first time how truly large she is. A beast of an animal, ancient and powerful. He remembers the day he found his grandfather’s old cowboy hat stored away deep in his mother’s closet. How his fingers ran so gently over the worn brim. How carefully he placed the hat on his head only to realize it was too small. "Alberto, you’re too big," his mother said from the doorway. But that was nothing new.

He can almost hear his sister’s jeers. "Fat Albert," she used to say, "Hey, hey, hey." She’d whisper it under her breath when he reached for a second helping at dinner. Or when she saw him running to the ice cream truck or waving down the old man who sold elotes on their street. He could take it from the others in the schoolyard but her, his sister, that hurt more than the others. Stung long and deep, a pressure pushing against his heart. He ignored her at first but, one night, when she had pulled an ice cream from his hands and threw it on the ground, he yelled at her. "Gorda, I’m not the only fat one in this family!"

That shut her up, made her quiet. Quiet for a long time—years, in fact. He’d 32

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see his sister look twice in the mirror, sometimes a third time with a pinch and a poke. Alberto was sorry, but it’d be years before he’d apologize. Before he could put into words how much he loved his sister. They wouldn’t come to him until he was sitting on the curb, his sister crying into his shoulder after her husband left. "Cynthia," he’d say, "You’re una mariposa, beautiful and gentle." He hoped she believed him, that it wasn’t too late. He should’ve been there to protect her, to watch after his younger sister, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t even there to protect her boys, to keep them safe. Now she only had Miguel, her oldest son. His nephew. Alberto thinks of Miguel's smile, the way he cried at his younger brother’s funeral, the way he stood in his backyard frozen in the shade.

Minnie is still now, barely breathing, her eyes struggling to stay open. Slowly, Alberto reaches out to her, and this time she doesn’t snap at him. He lays his rough hand on her thick scales. He can feel the cuts and scrapes and the places where scales have been broken or chipped. As he brings his hand along her side, he notices the pieces of glass cutting into her, and he sees the streaks of spray paint that once crisscrossed her entire body. He feels the moment her heart stops beating and that final breath that leaves her chest. He isn’t sure why he thinks it will help, but Alberto pulls the bottle from her neck and gently brings his head to a rest on the alligator, to be there with her as she passes.

The water of the pond comes to a rest and, in the reflection, Alberto sees the Christmas tree, tall and beautiful, the city’s centerpiece, wrapped in brilliant gold ribbons. At the very top, a star brighter than any he has seen before. He looks down at the edge of the pond’s enclosure, where he had tripped and fallen into the water. He shouldn’t have been there, he thinks. He should’ve been at home, or with his family, but instead he went out with a bottle in hand, like he was young again.

Like he was indestructible. Like the world couldn’t take anything else from him.

Alberto looks back into the pond, at the frozen Minnie, at her snout that lies gently in the water. The water is aglow with the reflection of the tree, and she is radiant. She is beautiful and carved from stone, her edges shaped by someone CONCRETE

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that loved her. He wishes he could take it all back. He can still hear the way she cried out, a deep trembling hiss that seemed to explode out into the night, that cut through his drunken haze, that reminded his bones of pain and fear.

Now, as the sun begins to rise, a beam of light comes down East Mills Avenue and lands on the small pond in the small park of a small city. It’s now that Alberto is reminded of his sister Cynthia and her son Miguel. Of the pieces of family he still has left. He pulls his feet from the mud, sending ripples out that break the reflection of the tree, now only a blur of light. He walks out of the pond, a wet, tired body pulling itself from the water.

He looks to Minnie one last time and says, "Lo siento señora."

Alberto makes his way back home in the freezing cold and knocks on his sister’s kitchen window, knowing that she will be up early making breakfast for her son. He pulls off his soaking coat as he stands, dripping, in her small dining room.

She gives him a small mug of hot coffee, the warmth of it reminding him, for a moment, of the tired heartbeat of an alligator. His sister asks him, "Where were you Alberto? What’s wrong with you?" But he only laughs and says, "I was out looking for Santa Claus. Damn fool hasn’t brought me a gift in years." She can smell the tequila on his breath, so she just shakes her head. Not worth the fight, she thinks.

Alberto watches as his sister places small presents in front of their Christmas tree. He thinks of how far she’s come. This is only her second Christmas without her husband and her youngest son, and he can barely tell. The way she moves throughout the house, strong and with a purpose. He looks down at his hands and wonders when was the last time he's done something with her, done something for someone else. Cared for someone.

Miguel runs down the stairs and throws himself onto the floor in front of their some-assembly-required Christmas tree. He doesn’t notice his soaking uncle, or his mother who asks him to wait to eat before he opens presents. Instead, he tears into the three presents his mother had wrapped for him the weekend before.

A small worn copy of The Adventures of TinTin, a matchbox car that looks like the 34

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oldie lowriders the viejos drove around the neighborhood, and a brand new toy dinosaur. "Orale," Cynthia calls out to her son, "What do you say, mijo?"

"Thanks," he says with a lisp. Alberto watches as Miguel hugs the dinosaur, a stuffed T-Rex, open jaw and small arms reaching out. The boy sticks his tongue out through the gap where his two front teeth used to be and hisses like a lizard.

Alberto thinks of Minnie, of the alligator he killed only hours before. Of the animal he left in a small pond in a small park in his small city. Alberto reaches out for his sister’s hand and holds it tight. She looks up at Alberto, who is crying, and asks, "What’s wrong?"

Through tears, Alberto says, "I didn’t get him anything for Christmas." And his sister, in all of the warmth that has come with losing those closest to her says, "You’re here tonto, that’s enough." She holds his hands, and Alberto can feel their hearts beat from behind their worn palms. Cynthia rises from her chair and puts on her coat. Even on Christmas she must go to work. Today, she’ll cook a ham for a family on the Upper West Side. She’ll watch those kids open more toys than her son Miguel has ever seen in his life. She looks to her brother, to Alberto, and asks, "Will you stay with him today?"

"Of course, Cynthia."

She bends down and kisses his forehead, the same gentle kiss she gives Miguel before she leaves. Alberto sits and watches his nephew play with the matchbox car and toy dinosaur, and he thinks to himself that he can do this. This can be his purpose. He can take care of this boy. He rises from the creaking wooden chair and makes his way to Miguel. His body moves slowly, as if through mud or cold water, and his knees ache when he sits down next to the boy. Alberto watches Miguel play with the small toy dinosaur, watches as his eyes light up as he tries to find the right roar. Miguel’s eyes are a deep, dark brown, like Alberto’s, like Minnie’s. Alberto picks up the worn copy of The Adventures of TinTin and begins to read aloud.

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I signed here

Kayla Carcone

—after C.D. Wright’s Autographs Not finding, not seeking: any god here.

Have found, have sought: (some) man in (some) moon.

Proven: strength is helplessness.

Loved: Tracy Chapman summers.

You: feel like a Thursday.

I was under the impression: got out, slowly.

Cataclysmic sin: holding on, white knuckles

knocking down the same doorstep.

Timed: the bridge collapsing in tangerine fire— Tangerine fire: botanical gardens, thinking love would come.

Isn’t there: anymore.

Being godless: a lot of talking to stars.

Stars: a lot of planes look like them.

Torched: redemption.

Cruised: along your coattails onto the kitchen floor.

Believed: something was something, nothing was

something, too.

Sinned: of course.

Not finding, not seeking: a moral compass.

Have found, have sought: (some other) compass.

Miracle: in the madness, a blinking plane overhead.

Leftover: big plans, love—in buckets, free.

Needed to know: never how, always why.

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Kept me up all night: his body with someone else’s—

his liking it too much.

Height: never mattered to me.

Heart: mattered, its tangerine fire.

Liked okay: ears, toast, sleeping in, pumpkins.

Liked more: blueberry eyes, rye toast, hot showers, bees.

Liked less: he, him, his every day (maybe).

Drink of choice: pretty skin (boy), White Russian (in a glass).

Close talkers: sweaty whisper, do not trust.

Messy hair: dangerous, also optimal.

Maybe something: I don’t know, not today.

I lied: [see: liked less] Not finding, not seeking: another way out of this.

Not finding, never not seeking: how to let go.

Not finding, not finding, not finding: blueprints for beginning.

Conversation, with night sky: “not finding not seeking any god…”

Night sky: sighs, a dozen blinking planes.

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Elegy Erin Sherry You turn on the television.

The local news station still looks the same after my year in Boston and our summer in New York and all those explosions lined up on the ticker tape. You’re adjusting the volume, watering the plants. One is infected with a leprosy of fruit flies. You grit your teeth, and we carry it downstairs. I stand back, and you buckle your knees and dump it all out in the gravel, and you’re saying something about building sandcastles out of the soil. I’m thinking it looks like those walls of jutting rocks designed to hold up the weight of artificial mountains, where we go to roller-skate and talk about regrets and abstractions that flit around without bodies, and we are careful not to scrape our palms on the rusted railings holding us up.

You look down at the spilled dirt and all the moving specks.

I’ve never bothered to memorize the way home, because if I did, it would mean you wouldn’t always be there to point me in the right direction. If I have to spill you out onto a patch of gravel in the driveway, you will have never done anything more selfish. And if we talk about how close we are now, we might forget how far away we used to be. And when we pass each other the shampoo between the curtains, my dripping hand is telling yours that I will begin to miss this before it has even ended.

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You turn on the radio.

I remember every voice I have ever heard. I remember when they said Hello, Goodbye, I’ll miss you, or I won’t. I remember dancing in empty kitchens to other people’s wedding music. I remember missing you before you even went away. I remember the names of every body of water that ever flooded the road between our windows. I remember how you touched the roots of the sick succulent as they lay tangled on the ground. How its dying was the most selfish thing it could have done.

How I thought you could save it, but you couldn’t.

You start singing.

I’m driving barefoot. You tell me to make the next left. I’m telling you I already miss this. You’re telling me there will be other rooms. Other curtains concealing and revealing other nights, other I’ll miss you’s and other mornings when you feel not dead. Other plants to feed and situate lovingly in light. So many more patches of gravel, just in case. We’re driving to them. When we roll the hammock out, it will have forgotten last summer’s shape of us. When I turn on the television, something else will be exploding, and the mushroom cloud will look infected with a leprosy of shrapnel and stolen smiles and sentences cut off in the middle. And in the morning we will wake up and try to hold up a mountain made of all the debris and torn roots. And we’ll cut our palms on it. And you’ll adjust the volume.

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How to Hunt a Bottomless Pit Richie Wheelock Pack smart. Pack peanut butter and your favorite four-fruits jelly. You can steal bread from the Jewel-Osco. Pack every journal you filled with poems and doodles and unsent letters. The ratty green journal has a sketch of a bottomless pit. You marked it with anatomic arrows pointing to the ground, the mouth, the slope, the pit.

Leave home. If Mom asks how long you’ll be gone, shrug and say you’re sorry.

You might be gone years. Dad can’t sleep whenever you’re out past midnight, so he’ll be cracking wishbones, pacing back and forth behind the screen door.

Take the 1994 Camry and drive until it needs gas. The outbound express will be slow with traffic, but stay off the side roads. You’ll need as much open sky as possible. The search for pits is intuitive, the kind of rock-lifting you loved when you were a kid, fishing for beach glass on the junk-choked Lake Michigan shores. Once you get out of the suburbs, park on the shoulder and take a walk. Here you’ll notice the restless earth and leaves growing on the undersides of branches. If the signs aren’t there, keep driving. Don’t drive at night.

Stretch your legs. The search for pits will take you from the plains of Illinois to the deserts of Nevada—flat places with big skies. For a while, it will seem like the pits are teasing you. You’ll arrive in a town and talk with locals. They’ll say, "Yeah, the pit closed up yesterday, you missed it.”

Get faster. Get better. Predict the tides, the rain, the small tremors. Become a living almanac. That storm system is only backwash from El Niño. Follow the migratCONCRETE

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ing pronghorns instead. Sneak into mines and quarries when you can. Memorize the scents of minerals. You will learn to hate staying in one state for more than a year.

Do anything not to be lonely.

Smile at everybody who stares too long. Gossip with gas station clerks. At motels, invite strangers to your room. Some will say they only want to talk, and you’ll listen until they say all they can. After they leave, write down everything they told you.

Take note of their voices, the words they used, their faces when they spoke. For the ones who didn’t want to talk, sketch them from memory. Name them if you want.

Nobody will keep in touch.

Your first pit will open up in the Badlands, and you might be there waiting. It will be the size of a large pond. A breeze will come hushing across the flats, and the pit will make sounds like a sleeping cat, soft and secretive. You won’t know what it is, but the inside will be black like clotted blood, and you’ll think you can see the spinning headlights of cars still falling far below.

If you miscalculated the distance, hike an hour from camp to reach it. You will find a woman standing on the rim. She will be older than you and taller—skinny like a cornstalk—with her truck parked on the other side of the pit.

She’ll go into her truck and bring out a hamper stuffed with letters and photos and books. They remind you of yours—of the fragments of people and places you collected on your own search. But as she tosses each item into the pit one by one, then hands some over for you to toss, too, she’ll tell you she came here with a plan.

This is the biggest difference between the two of you. She’ll say feeding a pit is a way to soothe its anger. When a pit is calm and quiet and stupid, she'll tell you, that is the time to jump in.

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Help her tie a rope from her waist to her truck. Step back. She’ll leap over the edge like a kid at the pool—arms flung out and wild legs still running. The truck won’t budge as the rope slaps taut. Fix your eyes on the rope. It will start thrashing.

Fight the urge to look inside the pit.

The rope will slacken and go still. You will wonder if the pit swallowed her. Don’t look. Wait for her to climb back up dragging the pit out of the ground and keep your eyes down as she trusses it up like a dead whale. You’ve never seen a pit out of the ground before. Feel sick when you catch a glimpse of her looping the rope around this huge mound of empty.

Why don’t you stick around? she’ll ask, tightening knots. Lie. Give her some bullshit about someone—a girlfriend, a boyfriend—waiting for you back home.

Truthfully, staying will hurt your heart too much. Your legs will be weak, and your heart will hurt for the pit and for the miles you walked to find it.

You’ll find the same woman at every pit after that. Her truck is the harshest shade of orange you'll ever see. At the fifth pit, in Idaho, you’ll arrive and only the truck will be there, radio turned all the way up. The rope will be dancing over the edge, and you’ll know she’s working on the other end.

If you want to look—if your curiosity is too strong—then look. Poke your head past the rim and squint. At first it’ll be impossible to see anything at all. Squint harder. Lean closer. Your eyes will adjust and follow the rope down to her tall, swinging shape.

She’ll be tearing at the skin of the pit with her bare hands. She’ll take out chunks with her teeth. The stuff she rips out—pieces of the pit wall—won’t fall like the books do. They are made of something that will bunch and choke and kill the pit until she’s ready to drag its body out of the ground.

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When you realize this, back up fast. You’ll find a knife in the bed of the truck and slice through the rope. You want only to stop her. There are other ways to do this, but in the moment, too much thinking will make you dizzy. The knife will do its job. The severed line will race across the grass and vanish over the edge of the pit.

There will be a sharp gasp for air. Ignore it. Stumble over your heels and away from the truck, the pit, the radio still going. The pit will close up after you’ve crossed the horizon.

Get back to Illinois. This is how you keep going. You’ll find the pits easily now that you’ve seen a few die. They’ll pop up under your shoes every place you stop to rest. This will seem backwards, somehow, but drive steady. Pick a highway town like Monmouth or Dover to park the Camry. Stay indoors and watch the windows. Wait for the pits to find you.

Signs will hit all at once, storms dropping out of the sky, leaves and cobs flying off their stalks. And the pits will shake the town when they arrive. These will be your pits, the ones crawling and crowding along the stretch of road. They’ll feel your spirit cleaving through the dirt like an ocean current, the strength of it herding them. They’ll feed on it. Feel their spirits lash out when you leave in the night to walk the highway. They’ll claw through your shoes and cling like hooks into your heels. Let them draw you close.

Bring your journals. Walk out to the highway and kneel in the rubble of the road.

You’ll count four big pits and a dozen smaller ones clustered around. You might be scared, too. You’ve been living in the clenched mouth of your own fear ever since you left home. Roll that terror around with your tongue, then open a journal and read aloud the story you heard from a boy in Galena. He had a brother who died from a heart defect. He said, "We didn’t know what was wrong. It was something the doctors didn’t see." Telling this, he had his hand over his own heart.

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Fold up his story and stretch your arm out with it over the nearest pit. Dip and swirl it in the darkness. Drop the paper. The pit will make a sound like breathing.

Read the story from a woman in Lansing who opened a bar. A girl in Spring Hill with a gold tooth. The drawing of a man from Booneville standing in the doorway, stuck between going and staying. Drop them all and feel the pit smooth out below you like an unwrinkled brow.

Drop pages of journals. Drop sketches. Drop letters and books. Drop lockets and burner phones. Drop wishbones and beach glass and pb&j sandwiches. Maybe, in the hours before dawn, you’ll want to collapse from exhaustion. Fight the urge. Dig into your bag. Find the knife you stole from the orange truck. Drop that last; it will spin on the way down.

The terror will ebb. The night will pale and wane. The pits will close by morning.

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Contributors Kayla Carcone is currently a junior majoring in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. She tweets too often @kaylasomething.

Emily Hillebrand is a junior at Emerson College, majoring in Writing, Literature and Publishing. Her poetry has been published by Golden Walkman Magazine and Persephone’s Daughters, and will be published in upcoming issues of The Oakland Arts Review, The Merrimack Review, and Susquehanna Review. She is a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Persephone’s Daughters.

Christine Lavosky is a novelist and poet currently writing a psychological thriller about an incestuous relationship between a young girl and her brother.

Within her poetry, she likes to weave misty, surreal worlds out of her own romantic experiences or entirely fictional worlds fabricated around the uncertainty of life.

Mandy Seiner is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Ketchup Capital of the World.

You can usually find her either teaching children about cryptids or marathoning scary movie trailers. Ask her about the 1944 DNC.

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Erin Sherry is a sophomore majoring in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. Her work has appeared in Concrete and Black Swan and is forthcoming in the Emerson Review. At this moment, she is brewing a strong pot of coffee and researching real estate in the mountains of Scotland. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Andrew Siañez-De La O (Emerson '17) is a Chicano artist from El Paso, Texas. He is an actor, designer, and writer. He would like to thank his family and friends for their continued support. C/S Brad Trumpfheller was born in Japan and raised in Virginia. Their writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Nashville Review, Muzzle, Winter Tangerine, and elsewhere.

Richie Wheelock is a graduating senior with dreams of going into education. After four years on the poetry staff, he’s really going to miss this mag. He loves the other stories and poems in this issue, and he hopes you enjoy reading them, too!

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