First, Second and Third Year Students’ Work

First, Second and Third Year Students’ Work/ MFA in Creative Writing/Literature Department/ University of California, San Diego/2018

First, Second and Third Year Students’ Work/ MFA in Creative Writing/Literature Department/ University of California, San Diego/2018

First, Second and Third Year Students’ Work/ MFA in Creative Writing/Literature Department/ University of California, San Diego/2018

First, Second and Third Year Students’ Work/MFA in Creative Writing/Literature Department/University of California, San Diego/2018 Primera Edición (CC) T. M. Lawson (CC) Ayden LeRoux (CC) Evelyn Sassafras Murdock (CC) Alison A. Ogunmokun (CC) Zachary Tichauer Bushnell (CC) Shelby London Salemi (CC) Estefani (Gidi) Loza Torre (CC) Calvin Walds (CC) Katherine Agard (CC) Gina Alexandria issuu.com/fivewordsinalinebooks Diseño: Gidi Loza FIVE WORDS IN A LINE BOOOKS Esta obra está protegida bajo una licencia de Creative Commons Atribución-No Comercial-Licenciamiento Recíproco 2.5 México.

Algunos derechos reservados.

Table of Contents First Year Students T. M. Lawson Ayden LeRoux Evelyn Sassafras Murdock Alison A. Ogunmokun

13 15 16 24

Second Year Students Zachary Tichauer Bushnell Shelby London Salemi Estefani (Gidi) Loza Torre Calvin Walds

27 33 43 48

Third Year Students Katherine Agard Gina Alexandria

53 55

Acknowledgments We would like to thank Anna Joy Springer for her encouragement during the development of this project; Tania Mayer for her administrative support; and, the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) for funding and making possible to print 50 copies of this book.

First Year Students

T. M. Lawson Psychotic Break: A Thesis in Fragments

pistil pistol

prey predator nature nuture caretaker cage animal sentinel teeth eye tongue rend flesh pollen dense nails knife petal metal blood burial drug mother monster

infanticide suicide soroicide patricide matricide

trap feral cannibal moon fuck sun

silence violence noise strangle Walt Whitman / Emily Dickinson desire bite baby thorn

child food tear rip stab forcing tsunami ideal man-made nuclear bulb bully landscape veil soil fangs poison lick stone torn green baby brown bird woman red blue girl man yellow strange spill

offender body

plastic

overflow container

holy stigma home alien

inverse

AGAVEGAIAMARYMAGDALENELLORNASALOMELEAHRACHELLILITH VENUSEVE

the queen the beggar the witch seed bomb stalk fight poison hung Eden flight bitter root madness plague circumcision pearl trophy overexposed mutation faded paper

race bow blossom motherless origin egg ending leaves leave

milk blood ink water flower chew swaddle smother stink stake air prayer

shit amniotic hum

wrinkles decapitated tree trunk nightmare circle your box 13

Mood of the Day AM Fuck it: Go ahead and do it. I dare you.

Pair those dirty sneakers with that faded dress.

Forget what Mom said about young ladies.

Wear something tight, pink, and unflattering.

Thrift store bought, sold, traded, stolen, borrowed, the difference is in the lines.

Splash a drink in his chiseled face. Key that silver-lined car. Burn your bridges on your last day on earth. Why not? Throw on a day old tuxedo coat, late charges be damned. Someone is coming along shortly to pick up the tab. I should bottle up and superglue that shit shut. This tulle is a little off and hungover.

The corsage on my left hand is wilted.

I’m growing out my fangs after I wake up.

P.M. A child dresses like a horned devil, ripping out weeds. All I can hear is his laugh as he condemns dandelions to death, his fists full.

Ha-ha-haaaa. There is no rule I can’t staple on my prom dress, duct tape the stripper shoes, the punch sticky on my thighs.

We’ve done worse things with paper, displaced intelligentsia graveyards. Dusty, blessed ink. Instructions stripped out, labeled all over my ass are now maps for brave souls with wandering hands. It doesn’t matter when you’ve got guns out; shooting blank stares, pursed lips, the casual dead shrugs. Gather the daisies from my basket of fucks.

This day can’t get worse unless the wind stops flowing through my hair, spitting against my face, as I sharpen my teeth to cut the first fool with insults.

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Ayden LeRoux Scent Autobiography, 1989-present Coppertone Water Babies Sunscreen SPF 50 Lotta Luv Sugar Daddy Caramel Scented Lip Gloss Garnier Fructis Sleek and Shine Shampoo John Frieda Beach Blonde Lemon Lights Fresh Squeezed Highlighter Herbal Essences Hello Hydration Shampoo, Orchid and Coconut Milk Dove Go Fresh Antiperspirant Deodorant, Cool Essentials Cucumber Green Tea Adidas Moves Perfume by Adidas The Body Shop Shea Body Butter Lancome Tresor In Love Eau de Parfum sample Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Basil Scent Liquid Hand Soap Aura Cacia Ylang Ylang (III) Essential Oil, Organic Pacifica Persian Rose Solid Perfume St. Ives Timeless Skin Collagen Elastin Moisturizer Old Spice Fresh High Endurance Deodorant Heritage Store Rosewater Atomizer Mist

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Evelyn Sassafras Murdock Guns, Germs, & Steel a granola bar banana peel draped darned socks up on the bus seat

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Garbage Walrus, part 1 the garbage walrus comes freakly

laying there dying not lucid

into the hangar into the first and

drinking diet Grapico and you was

last place you look you look you

leaving because you had rehearsal

look at and like your mother at

you was leaving because you

and like your mom and your dad

didn’t want to watch him die you

compared you to Pawpaw said you

was leaving because you was

was wild that you was wild like

hungover and you needed a beer

Pawpaw that you had a beard like

before

pawpaw and you don’t know if

Huntsville and now you worry

that’s true but what you do know

that Meemaw is gonna die but you

is that you still hear that sound

never talk to her anymore and

still hear that I love you too that

Mom said that you’ll always be

you could only even tell was that

Shawn to her and you still gotta

because of context because he was

chew that up and swallow it

you

drove

back

to

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Garbage Walrus, part 3 tick ferment and laudedas heroes each successive field of poppies and granite and blue vinyl condoms which don’t rot the way apples do on the ground the way you you don’t hear ticks bulbous over weeks like waterballoons filled with your cytryc blood the tocks leak out its pores until the rupture from pressure oh feel it that stereo that whorl of mudmids thesoundsofJupiterandNeptune who have been sleeping an oddly long time good god the garbage walrus exclaims feed on gelatin piss and frighten your mother and then disappear, eat your used needles each hour I sit here I wait for the comet headed straight towards me and cigarettes burn down like dominoes.

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Smashed Sonnet I needa take a chiil pill man I needa cool down my freaky little nobes limón touch mo sprunket let’s have my guts untied I needa make a choise or two about whether or not I’m even gonna stay awake for this mmimes thise pantomimes that I’ve wri tten for you this no what ‘s the words maybe is it novel numbness oh wa it it’s a smashed sonnet.

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Calvert Cove gunplay in the hole punched in concrete give me space give me sips of moonshine stop the shaking stop the shots stop the hole punched inside through the basement floor assault rifles and moonshine and relatives — scared maybe one side says so who prays scared one side scared at the psycho scared at the anger heartattack wait for it and scoop empty shells from the red mountain dirt and scoop empty shells from those houses on that compoundon that empty shells on that mountain and the heartattackfuckwa d wait for it don’t run away his aim is too good and he still needs to be undermined

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{watching ants eat poison} is it suicide when an ant eats Borax sugar water it’s poisoning but what if a second ant does it after it sees the first ant die then is it{?} {{suicide}}?

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Captain This N. That’s Bus Stop Rant, September 22, 2017 I’m a modern woman woven in with commercials and carcinogens and post-modern pussy politics the sound of a wet clap old, dirt-colored gum that feeling of shoeburyness left by the sunshine’s ass gimme beakless, cubic chicken chunks lube me up with Valvoline extra virgin when will Victoria’s secret start selling jock straps so I can really dress like a slut?

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to anger busted teflon pots smash your banjo frightened and rosin and smoke and long walks through backyards and holy symbols leave marks on wide flat skin and skin and teeth and nails and jackhammers and roller coasters and radioactive strontium pearls like meats age hidden behind the dryer behind the façade of dead rats in the trailer’s thin walls

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Alison A. Ogunmokun Instead of Sleep hate flossing at five am planning for retirement between broken sleep cycles meditating thrice what’s debra messing doing right now? a mom’s smile “how are you” i’m an asshole. i’d like to be sedated. a day spent avoiding naps succulent as braeburn apples Where did this pimple come from?

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Second Year Students

Zachary Tichauer Bushnell Four Poems for Greentop 120902 practic had to hook to drag is out for just to see wasn’t much to look at

a limp dangling eyes sideways not willing to repent for fear of culpability and what a breadth of steel honed end flat and fluted barbed inside the hoop caught thank goodness through the leftmost cheek dragging heaviness behind it down tugging water from the ambience leech of the Nepheshayah ass at either end befuddled palindrome flapping on the briny board the surface bob converse interrogations descried a tongue somewhere inside that brackish head with pliers coaxed it

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Being and Rhyme Heidi heidi heidi Heidegger up in the mountains alone poring over reason to existence of a soul.

Baba, the blood is your own.

Flood from the cunt of the PhilosopherKing: an insightful brooch in one hand, his true first name the other.

Come down, pale prince. Chew pine needles, anise seed and fenugreek.

Clothes stained orange May through June.

Kool Aid’s mother-mouth like the original fruit.

Bring the children to the forest of the Hïnterland.

They will not long fear noises in the dark.

Brother! recall the bombs if you can from the banks of your molecular foot!

Yea, and the wind and the sea.

In whose tangential ring is found the dog of Nagasaki? Breeds mixed, grew gun-shy and dropped their ears.

Fine.

Built spaceships. Channeled the dead. Curbed and Fetishized innate desires. Blessed all ages’ most influential heretics, vagrants and martyrs.

Primarily ate and drank.

Copulated frequently.

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110204 Rubble. A calligraphic graffiti of faults scaffolding to preserve the ruins.

Crows have taken up residence in the windows or one at least, who sweeps low over me and dives slender to the greening river bank.

It’s Will made it and Will upholding. Cura prima finxit.

Cura tandem destruxit eam.

This is a bike city. People come from and go to work along its edges. There are two of them: one of stone and brick and one of water.

Which is more alive?

A frozen cascade winds within as a spiral staircase, given a thimble of liquor, and reeling ever since.

O city! O bird of ash, you suckle the crows on your blood forever.

29

Chords: Coolers humming Monsoon’s not come in yet Our neighbours’ fan be running Another night we feared one dead but they’d just been to Agra gone to sidle through the tomb and come on back exhausted he’d fell into his bed So when the Dominos hiked up later with two replacement pies and rang the dudes’ bird doorbell for twenty minutes or more all the time calling his boss also and the phone ringing inside

30

like

Page 256 of the Epic, DomestiCity impervious impressions of towel on a closet door tug of soft familiar dampweight wet cleanbody smell, a hung testimony to imprecations so small a century could fit within them and a hecatomb of knobs, of iron, when woodwounds wound up as concealment of minutest intimacies, the couples’ coterie whose Ts do where go or conspicuous proximity of undies, partitioned shirts and long dressblouses strung in inward-point array, which give perhaps the left and right shoulder respectfully, chorusline or cool, the cats’ habitual cabaret, the whole displayed by the influence of the towel that will one day maybe even come true the warped doors’ seam, which now hangs somewhat incongruously: the right bows everso over to the left (that most contiguous of hemispheres, intuit magician of perceptual synthesis, beckoner of lovers between walls,1 walled,2 uncompromised in its call), a thin right triangle gap be-

31

Notes to p. 256 (1132) 1) E.g., Pyramus and Thisbe 2) Ref. likely to this fragment of Persian song:

Paddle to this shore that I might see thee nearly.

For days I have stood upon the bank and beheld your progress:

back and forth of skillful craft upon the waters

in my feet I feel the transit of your wake Whether crossing there or back, its ripples find me unDiminished

from the nudge of the belly of your bark.

Only still but send them faster! arrive as light bear as velocity operate at speeds

keep keeping with frequency Row this way only. I am castled and undone: mine own Turrets would deceive me, peopled by spirits awaiting the

grizzled gape of my head, Expecting armies of invisibility, cavalcades of horns of wind, ad-

vancing always on the gates.

Should you arrive, the tallest of encampments could not contain my steps:

my flesh would well become you

your arms the river my seat!

We could converse easily.

Dig me from the water when I land.

There will be a smallish splash,

We are left with little opition.

So long have I traveled the country’s thoroughfares and the alleys of cities.

So often have I come across some flagrant hope, fugitive, borrowed in a room, So 32

Shelby London Salemi Anthroposcenes. Mind Map

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

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Estefani (Gidi) Loza Torre Conversations with A/An 3d Model/Point Cloud/Image of a Coral Reef

write don’t come

an image

back

image

write

don’t

an

of

write

of

an

image

images 43

I have you

right

you we

speaking

the

we

nature

where have no

skin

dead

with

symbols

are

surroundings being

purple

my nothing you

is will

what you

meet

me

something

we

will looking

nothing

or

not

amongst

have

you

me

not

I

44

you

are you

not ?

relativity

are

cosmos

how in

particular

cloud

of

memory

45

is

in

image

where an

home

46

it’s in

particular

in

the

about

in

freedom

together the

the

me

the

an

here

the

being

mean

about

me here

image

me

image

die

water

is nothingness here love here to travels me Image because empty please bring of you imagine the die try

not

behind

the

it

head

can

alone

now

apart

we

don’t truth

broken structure high

real

you else

not

the end

of my

like there coral

nothing

limits

image one

failing focus I

structure not

we

parallel

stomach

not

rest

longing from

dot

not

there regret

breathing

around

don’t

language

telling

right

cracking buttons

if behold

resemblance alive

home what

know

47

Calvin Walds Insecurely Logging You In

I think of letting go as free—copal mea plea culpable not expansion but corridor palate oil streaked follicles labored easting eating interiors. A pitched stirring palm.

A spoon submerged in mouth is object intimacy on the daily.

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Ashes and Embers by Haile Gerima

49

Third Year Students

Katherine Agard The website porn for the blind is a non-profit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those letters sit swampily on my tongue. They are dedicated to producing audio descriptions for blind customers. M mouth holding itself barely closed, A breath released from the tongue.

S the sibilant tip of the tongue, repeating its motions until the climatic tuh - turn of the tongue ready for another.

To prepare a recording of pornography the depiction of erotic behavior for the purpose of sexual excitement. The nowdefunct organization has fixed formatting instructions. Clear the throat: Porn for the Blind presents [website name]. This is a [clip length] located at [full URL including HTTP colon slash slash] [brief description of the webpage] In the course of writing this I write several frantic emails in the form [dear professor] [Here is what I do not know] [I apologize for being frantic] [I have never written a poem before and this appears to be poetry] It occurs to me that the description of the form misses the point. [Would you tell me if I am doing it right?] I cannot say that I am not excited.

Suzanne Farrell, I read before bed, was Balanchine’s most loved dancer. “Hard as Farrell’s class is, it’s partly about joy. I say to them, you know how there’s an employer and an employee? Well there’s a looker and a lookee,

53

and you can’t be both. You can’t be an honest performer and a spectator at the same time.

If you want to become a boring dancer, that’s how to do it, by trying to tell the audience what to see.”

If I were to caption the most important bits for those who could not see it, I would stop at the mouth and the tongue as it sounds out the letters at the tips of my fingers. To tell you the truth, I do not what it looks like, only how it feels. Is that why my captions fail? Or is that how they work?

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Gina Alexandra

How I Did Not Get Out

First one needs water. Then, to build a village, one needs to find a river.

A river with long winding trenches surrounded by mud the consistency of Armenian coffee grounds, thick with sediment, the ash of older worlds. The important thing about the river is that it has tributaries, and funnels, and that it leads to a way out.

But in our father’s country the village is built around such a high plateau. We will leave it soon, there’s nothing to be done for it. Already so many have left it—escaped in the middle of the night through the river, either by crossing to the dark side of the valley through the forest or by drowning. Then there are others who won’t leave no matter how low the river rides in the summer, no matter the sun shining through the trees through the forest, to the other end.

My grandmother tells me there’s an old saying: “Should the fear of the wolf make us forget our village?”

I ask instead, should the fear of wolves keep us in?

My grandmother was born in this village and before her, the wolf inside of me, too. Because the wolf remembers my grandmother from the time when she would run down the mountain to the valley, a blur of plaited braids and laughter and dust, rocks unearthed and following her down in her wake, I can show you. I can show you her before my greatgreat-grandfather left her for the war, before my grandfather left her for the bar, before my uncle left her for a small knot of blood that went the way of his heart. Here, she is a new body whose story is only one of running through sunlight, chasing the river, a body in dangerous play.

She says of herself as a child, “I was like a deer, graceful, leaping. I went in any direction I wanted, and I always wanted. My mother did not tell me about wolves so I was always sticking out my neck. It was only when I learned what wolves are that I learned to be afraid.”

In our father’s country, the men still go to the army when they turn 18 and so my father says, when he hears that the guard outside Parkland High School did not go in when 55

the shooting started, “That’s not a man. A good man is a shepherd, not a sheep; a good man would throw his body in front of any child to be a shield.”

I wonder: what happens to shields that fail at shielding?

I will never tell my father what slipped past him: I don’t want to find out.

In the songs of my grandmother’s country, all the women are likened to deers, their eyes large brown almonds and their fawn suckling underneath their feet. Behind them is the shepherd, his love of the mountains and his country, and the large staff with which he leads, at his feet.

In my father’s country, you raise boys into shields, to be shepherds, and your daughters into deer, graceful, with necks stretched out. To keep them in, you tell them about the wolves in the outskirts of the village. You still feed off the deer, but they lay down their lives willingly, for fear that the wolves will bring a more violent death.

When I become impatient with the rules of our village, with having always to tuck my tail between my legs, to hide my sharp teeth from hunters, my grandmother tells me this saying:

“The hungry man leaves bread crumbs that lead to hungrier wolves.”

She means to scare me, to say that my impatience is making me foolhardy, that my hunger to leave the village for the river, to run headlong into wanting, will lead the wolves to me.

But I am neither sheep, nor deer. I am a hunter, too; maybe too, a shield.

What happens to wolves who are tamed then released back into the wild?

I have had to make my own village and so I have made it inside out. In the center is the forest and on the outskirts are the homes and the people who are too afraid to venture in. They tell you that you are in danger of beasts outside of the village, but the truth is much simpler: you are in danger of being alone so long that you change your shape.

In my village, I am free to be what our people are afraid to name.

In my mother’s country, the women still go to college but it’s largely accepted that their biggest accomplishment is to be good mothers. The wolf inside of me knows my mother, remembers her, so I can show you her, young and standing at 56

the edge of a turbulent ocean, pulling her best friend in with her. They almost drown, and the policemen come and pull them out, both of their long black hair curling around them in sand and salt and air.

After, my grandmother rails at my mother, “What if something had happened to you? What kind of mother would I be?”

And later, when my uncle is dead and my grandmother remains, she says, “The walls of a mother’s house are only as strong as her son’s back will be.”

How long are we to grieve in this village, us childless mothers, us wild, yearning beasts?

I want to want to be a mother, to be a deer, to be a thing that has suckled and will suckle, to have a shepherd call me away from the wolves. But I have been out in the woods and I know where the river leads in my grandmother’s landlocked country: back into itself, feeds itself its own grief.

Growing up, all the girls of my family split off and ventured out, though our mothers warned us about what waits in the night. We grew wrong this way, but no one could catch us to bring us back. Where our mothers had been deer and our fathers, shepherds, we became horned and fanged to stay alive in the wild. We swore we would raise our children free of the village; allow them to name their own bodies, to be any animal they like.

But the wolf had always been there, the first fear.

Every animal we tried to be afterwards would always resemble a wolf.

Instead, my cousins and I sit at a family table after we’ve played blot, and when the men are gone to smoke their cigars, and the women have finished clearing the plates, we start talking about being moms and not being moms. One of us, a mom, tells a story about her mother, and I, about mine.

We laugh at their naivety at believing our lies, and we laugh at the lies we will be told when it’s our time. She kisses the head of her child.

“It’s different now, isn’t it?” she asks.

“It’s different now,” I say.

We’re older. The things that slipped past out mothers and fathers have made our teeth sharper. The things that have slipped past them have made me into a wolf; I drift through their home late at night, check at each bedroom door, that they are safe and asleep in their beds.

If I am the thing that they are most afraid of, I can 57

shield them from everything else.

One of my cousins says, “You know, not for nothing, but your mother would have raised an incredible son.”

We laugh. What is a daughter that refuses to be a deer, to be afraid, who chooses the dark and the woods and the want?

“I think she did,” I say.

“I think I am an incredible son.”

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