The Grinnell Review Fall 2011

thegrinnellreview

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Copyright © 2011 by the Student Publications and Radio Committee (SPARC).

The Grinnell Review, Grinnell College’s biannual undergraduate arts and literary magazine, is a student-produced journal devoted to the publication of student writing and artwork. Creative work is solicited from the entire student body and review anonymously by the corresponding Writing and Arts Committees. Students are involved in all aspects of production, including selection of works, layout, publicity, and distribution. By providing a forum for the publication of creative work, The Grinnell Review aims to bolster and contribute to the art and creative writing community on campus.

Acknowledgments: The work and ideas published in The Grinnell Review belong to the individuals to whom such works and ideas are attributed to and do not necessarily represent or express the opinions of SPARC or any other individuals associated with the publication of this journal. © 2011 Poetry, prose, artwork and design rights return to the artists upon publication. No part of this publication may be duplicated without the permission of SPARC, individual artists or the editors.

The Grinnell Review is printed and bound by Pioneer Graphics in Waterloo, IA. It was designed using Adobe InDesign® CS5.

The typeface for the body text is 12 pt. Helvetica Neue and the typeface for the titles is 30 pt. Didot.

Cover art: Two original silver gelatin prints by Colin Brooks.

Inner cover art: “White Fluff” is an original photograph by Daniel Waite Penny.

Inner title art: “L ‘automne” is an original digital collage by Cassidy White.

All editorial and business correspondence should be addressed to: Grinnell College c/o Grinnell Review Grinnell, IA 50112 Letters to the editor are also welcome. Please send them to the address above or to review@grinnell.edu

XXXXI | FALL 2011 ARTS SELECTION COMMITTEE Colin Brooks Abraham Kohrman Karima Kusow Andy Lange Claire Lowe Paige Murphy Quinn Underriner

EDITORS Andy Delany Caleb Neubauer Daniel Waite Penny

WRITING SELECTION COMMITTEE Hannah Bernard Clare Boerigter Evangeline Dawson Geo Gomez Linnea Hurst Claire Lowe Clare Mao Emily Mester Paige Murphy Drew Ohringer Quinn Underriner

Contents

Linnea Hurst

New Game 73

Erik Jarvis

WRITING

Joan’s Way 80 Meditation 88

Clare Boerigter

Gusanos 11 Absolution 48 Strangers 69 4,10,14, 20 81

Blink 50 Santa Anita 83

Ten Unsent Letters from Duino

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Maroon Bells 26 Stella 68 Premenstrual Syndrome 69

Harrison Fertig

Desertion 41

Chicago 27 January Fantasy 24

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The Conversion of Saint Paul 23 Whistle 55

Clare Mao

Evangeline Dawson

Erica Hauswald

People Talk 48 Other Adverbs 72

Lexy Leuszler

Grace Carroll

Tessa Cheek

Ethan Kenvarg

Clementine 30 Second Language 42

Grace Mendel

Two Prayers for her Garden 23 Sisters, at Six and Ten 31 Bioluminescence 68

Emily Mester

O Splenda (For Upstate) 26 For Statler 30 Kansan 42

Robert O’Connell

Metcalf Avenue 27 Eric Dolphy 41 After a Fourth Round Headbutt 47 Hear 88

Drew Ohringer

Exes Exploding 65 Here is Where We Start 74

Daniel Waite Penny

My Dinner with Issac 43 Ortolan, Ortolan 54 Fancy Drinks 85 After Reading Howl...

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Zoe Schein

The Underbelly 44

Quinn Underriner

The Fog 31

ART Chris Barbey

Andy 59 Eva 59 Erin 67

Jackie Blair

Barcelona 37 Illutron 62

Lorraine Blatt

Untitled 37

Colin Brooks

Untitled 35 Untitled 87

Michael Cole

Nuns (Rome) 63

Pheobe Currier

Untitled 57

Evangeline Dawson

Tawny Fuzz 40 Jake with a White Flower 64

Andy Delany

Abondoned Greenhouse 28 Cinder Cavity 34 Rolling Slabs 86

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Lea Greenberg

Andy Lange

Evan Hockett

Paige Murphy

Bend 49 Carcel 56 Waiting Room 82

Tyler 61 Robo Cat 61

Iulia Iordache

When Stars Explode

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Samanea Karrfalt

The BaRbershop 34

Sara Kay

Market 29

Ethan Kenvarg

Guanacaste 32 Ashley 71

Free Gallery 38 Surface 38 Noise 58

Untitled 53

Caleb Neubauer

Evening Spread 25 Ninth Octave 52

Daniel Waite Penny

Molly Pond 33 Nat’s Feet 66

Hannah Strom

Untitled 36

Cassidy White

So Flat 39

Clara Kirkpatrick

Lioncow 60

Abraham Kohrman

Untitled 49 Untitled 53

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Letter from the Editors

Congratulations! You are our publication’s millionth viewer!!! Click on the dancing pioneer for an exciting prize.

And by prize, we mean the fantastic art and writing secreted within this tomb. We received some excellent submissions this semester and we’d like to thank all of the artists and writers who took the time to contribute to the forty-first volume of The Grinnell Review. We did some wonky things this time around; you might notice that book seems to be bound the wrong way.

Well you’re wrong—it’s bound the right way. We don’t want to make you nervous, but we also tried doing some wild and crazy things with our text, too. We hope you appreciate our rebellious streak.

We would like to thank the following people for helping to make this edition of The Grinnell Review happen: the members of the Writing and Art Committees, without whom this selection process would be a lot easier; the board of SPARC for being our sugar-daddies, and especially Phillip Brogdon for all of his financial acumen; Jim Miller at Pioneer Graphics, who put up with our rank amateur antics; Margaret Allen and Anna Halpin-Healy for opening their hearts and Bob’s doors when we really needed them; and the English department for their continued generosity and lavish banquets. Finally, we’d like to thank Mario Marcías, whose guidance has proved indispensible in our attempts to produce a semi-serious publication.

Your humble editors, Andrew Stirling Delany, Caleb Martin Neubauer, Daniel Waite Penny

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Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

Archaïscher Torso Apollos

Rainer Maria Rilke

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We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

Translation by Stephen Mitchell

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Gusanos

the shadow of his pack. That is not this Mateo, and I begin to see the man who summits mountains.

Clare Boerigter

We hike out of the pueblito and turn toward camp. In the silence, I feel the finger light touches of the peak on my shoulders.

I.

Mateo gets me drunk and tells me about his mother’s parties.

I stare at my reflection in the half-empty glass and lose myself in the white organza and tulle, the light strings and floating lanterns. Teo masks his familiar scent with cigarettes and cologne, but I still smell the sweat lacquering his forearms, Argentina moist on his dark skin. He buys another round of tequila, and we drink to Cash and the mountain, my throat raw and roaring, the drowned pink worm dancing against my lips like a second tongue.

The small room fills up with eyes watching this príncipe and his boyish gringa. I lean on the bar and laugh like my father, Mateo spinning words into worlds and building horizons with his long hands.

He vomits later, outside in the dark, his broad shoulders heaving like great shuddering wings. I hold back his long hair, the black strands ash against my rough palms. Standing, he rubs spit from his cheek and looks at me. I find him beautiful, and the lack of a camera weighs on me.

There is a photo of him from earlier this week when we met in Buenos Aires, another from the train where he fell asleep against his own hand, a third from two days ago when he tied a blue bandana around his head and grinned at me from under

The wait is almost over.

II. Cash rubs his palms against his thighs, thinking. I take his picture now because of the look on his face, the lines around his eyes like striking claws. He flicks his head and the curling tip of his braid snaps against the gear on his back, asking to be touched.

Behind me, Teo is singing, and if his Spanish could be tasted, it would linger like caramel, elastic and soft. He’s got that raised-hair look like dogs get, has since we forded the river, crossed the valley, ate dried mangos, and watched the sun begin its ascent of the sky.

Cash spits, and I frame the mountain in my lens, tracing the steep walls of this, the eastern side. Beneath the lightweight fabric of my clothes, the fine hairs of my body rise up and Cash, who feels something like this, runs his knuckles over the smooth rock, tilting his head back as though listening.

III. Teo moves across the rock like a conquistador, but Cash breathes it, his body flowing in delicate surges up the mountain wall. I’ve documented enough ascents to know that Cash has the instinctive gift that every climber hungers after.

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He reads the rock with the gentlest brush of his fingertips, rides its intricacies.

I rest in a shallow alcove above them, my line loose to allow me to lean away from the wall face. I catch the wind ruffling Teo’s hair and his half-lipped smile. I focus on his thick and calloused hands and find dark markings on the pale stone underneath his palms. Tight lines etched like worms.

Below us the valley spreads and the three rivers double back into each other. I breathe in the fall and the wind and wonder as my toes curl into the soft ledge, wonder if the sun would feel like melting butter on my back before the beauty killed me.

IV. I learn about these two men through my camera lens. Most mornings Cash prays, and breaking camp he always seems to leave some little thing behind: a string of raisins, a red band from his hair, a small white stone from the riverbed many feet below. This morning it is an elaborately twisted grass figurine.

He’s made it to look like a man and pinioned it between two rocks on a small cairn. Kneeling, I frame its features against the landscape unrolling below us. Cash’s shadow breaks the scene moments after I take the picture.

“This isn’t what you should be photographing.”

I tilt my head back to look at him, find myself surprised by the jumping lines in his jaw. His voice does not betray his anger, but his face is not as steady.

“I like these little things you leave.”

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“Mateo wants pictures of his climbing, his tent, his pretty face.

You should take photos of those things.”

“Cash,” I say, affronted by his sudden authoritarian tone. I’ve never taken orders well, “This is my job, and I’ve been doing it for a while.”

“Look, I’ve got a job here too. And if I’m to do it, I’m going to need you to stop following me every damned moment with your camera. No more photos of me, no more pictures of my offerings.”

Offerings. That word surprises me. A glimmer of the fantastical in my silent, pragmatic lead-man.

“In Mexico, there’s an indigenous people that prays to a nearby river.”

Cash’s lip curls, something like disdain darkening his eyes, “Just no more pictures. Not of this.”

“But Cash, you’re as much a part of this climb as me and Mateo. And this thing you do…”

“Is not something to photograph.” He spits, swears quickly in Hopi.

I can’t resist the pull of his stormy face, the way he has set his body up against mine, all cast-out shoulders and tense lines. I take his picture.

He blinks twice, slides his pack slowly off his shoulders, and takes three decisive steps in my direction before I realize what he means to do. I dance out of his grasp seconds before his hand jumps for my camera. From the campsite above, Teo watches the ludicrous exchange. Cash lunges, I hop away, raise my voice, try to reason.

“Cash, Cash….Cash!” He’s herding me back around, trying to hem me into the rocks, “Ok! Alright! I shouldn’t have done that. But Cash, c’mon, stop this.” He leaps for me and I stumble some, trip over my own pack and roll over backward, camera cradled to my stomach.

“Fuck! Fuck you, Cash!”

“You think because you’ve got that lens that it gives you the right to pry into things that you don’t even understand!” Cash snarls, leaning in close, his eyes bright and alive.

Mateo’s voice breaks in as his hands haul me upright forcefully, “Cash. Enough.”

Cash dismisses me with a toss of his head, slides his eyes to Mateo, “She’s a fool, and it’s on you. I’m done.”

Teo sighs through his teeth and watches Cash turn, yells at his back, “We start hiking in ten!” I hiss, touch my neck, check the camera.

“Leave Cash alone, yeah?”

“What? Mateo, he came after me!”

“But you were taking pictures of him. You’ve got to know he hates that.”

“Teo,” I laugh tightly, “that’s what you want me here for. That’s the whole point of me on this mountain.”

He grins at me stupidly, reaches out to ruffle my hair as though I’m a kid, “And here I thought you were along for the fun of it all, the rush.”

I bat away his hand as I try to hold on to some of my anger. “I won’t stop. You know I won’t.”

“And this is why I like you. Obstinate to a fucking fault.”

I stick my tongue out at him, and he makes as though to grab it, laughing as I back-peddle and nearly knock myself over again. Teo wraps his fingers around my arm to steady me, brushes pine needles from my hair.

“But really, you should stop.” His hand in my hair is deliberate and intimate, an appeal to familiarity.

“But why? This is what I do.”

“I know, but I need Cash. He’s going to get me to the summit.”

I turn away from his suddenly serious face, look up the trail toward the peak ramming up like a horn between the last of the trees. I think about Mateo as a child, Mateo and his family tree. When I look at him again, it is almost as if I can see death marking him right there on the gentle slope of his forehead.

From further up, Cash shouts at us in Hopi. We are moving, climbing, getting closer.

V. Mateo is from one of the wealthiest families in Argentina. On the walls of his grandparents’ castillo, he can trace his lineage through the growing tree that has been attended by four generations of painters. The room is taken up with it, and last year Teo’s grandmother had the ceiling raised to allow for the progression of limbs. Teo hates the room, calls it the funeraria.

In his first remembered memory, he touches the wall where the roots begin, and when he pulls back, his fingers are slick

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with blood. Teo cries out, but the sound is swallowed by the sound of the tree itself, alive and in agony. The bleeding spreads, dampening boughs in rich dark swathes. Mateo says that he heard his own name called, saw a delicate stem unfurl, knew the tender claim against his life.

Teo thinks about his place on that tree as we climb. He says that moment will always be with him, and that only here, when death and life cannot hide from each other, does he ever begin to let it go.

VI. We carry two tents, and tonight I sleep alone, the light oneman obscuring only the sky. I hear the sucking sound of the wind as I rub my feet vigorously, planning to buy better socks for the next climb. Even Cash is too tired to feel angry, and hard words are reserved for moments when we have the luxury to say them without losing our breath. My body hurts to simply be, and my thin mat does little to muffle the contours of the ground. I welcome the overwhelming smell of my own sweat, find beauty in the ache of muscles and the slow dulling pain.

Back home in the rig, I would drive with my left arm out the window, and watching my hand play with the swells of hot dry air, I couldn’t convince myself that it was mine. Pain changes that. When everything hurts, it is hard to forget your body.

Hard to forget what you were given it for. It is this pain that settles me inside myself.

I ball up in my insulated warmth and lose the thread of my thoughts against the steady foreign roll of my own heart beating.

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VII. Things start happening. The wrong things.

It’s too hot. I tie my extra clothes to the loops on my pack.

Laboring up the mountain trails, I am a rash of colors, bright reds and yellows, pure blue and summer sea-green, sleeves falling about, flapping. Cash pulls a pink bandana around his forehead and watches the mountain. Teo, ignoring the thaw and the shuddering weight of snow before us, tells me stories, half-aware of my camera.

“Have you heard the mountain folklore?”

“What?”

Teo adjusts his stride to mine, brushes his hands through his hair, “Los abuelos used to tell stories about a dragon on this mountain, how it set the foothills on fire, swallowed the old village. You’ve seen the burn area, the scorch marks.”

The gnarled obsidian trees, smooth like sand and oddly scentless, cover most of the southern side. Thistle and flagging weeds rustle in the charred roots. Years later, still nothing else grows.

“They still leave things for it. Goats, sheep, little bits of metal.”

I think of the faces in the bar the night we were in the pueblito.

There was some strangeness there that I’d taken as part of a surreal and drunk final evening. I remember with sudden clarity the face of a young man reaching out tentatively to touch my red hair.

“La gente don’t even like to climb much further up than the foothills. The men like to say it’s because the dirt isn’t good for

farming, but the women don’t hide the reason. Did you see the kids running around in the pueblo?”

“I took some pictures, yeah.”

“The women teach them to make little dolls and leave them in the trees around the mountain. Just little things for the dragon.”

I think of Cash, of the offerings he’s left and that I still carry with me, sealed into photographs. Cash remains silent, his face almost tender. He is almost always looking upward.

It is because of Cash’s sky eyes that we aren’t lost to the storm billowing up around the eastern side. We huddle for hours in the seams of a rock scattering, our bodies pressed tight, Mateo’s heavy breath a tyrant in my ear. The winds make noises like I have never heard before. Teo mumbles something about carnaval and being so drunk that the fireworks looked like exploding stars.

“No,” Cash murmurs, “nothing speaks like this mountain. Like her.”

And the winds howl beautifully and bring a wet layer of ice and snow to the mountain’s rough skin.

VIII. Cash cooks, carries a small pouch of cornmeal, and now tells us that he grew up in the backwaters of the Rio Grande. He speaks a Spanglish-Hopi hybrid, and if he is good at anything, it is staying alive. Cash knows the walls and the ground and the rocks, and even my unease at his superstition cannot overshadow his animal deftness. Cash measures and Cash

calculates, and more than once I’ve wondered if the thin scars on his forearms and the fading ink of a tattoo are mementos from some sand-and-bomb war.

Mateo pays me for my ability to document, pays Cash for his ability to keep us all breathing. Pressed close to Cash now, I discern what I can from his lined face. What sort of a man is it that has time for the practicalities of day-to-day survival and the fantasy of a mountain-dwelling dragon?

I feel as if I could look at those distant dark eyes all day and never really know.

IX. We make camp late that night. The fresh snow makes us all nervous and walking forward, we are trapeze artists. Snowmasked crevices spiderweb this mountain. To fall would be a sharp way to meet death, lost to unseen teeth.

Only one tent now. The pressure of bodies to my sides feels safe. The knots carving up my skin lessen, the hum of the wind fading in my ears.

“We’ll go down tomorrow,” Cash says softly, shifting onto his hip, “we don’t know the trail up, and I’m not risking it now with the snow in the cracks. Once we make it to the eastern wall, we can wait her out a bit, see how she firms up.”

Mateo rolls up against me from the right, “With only four days hike left?”

“And a climb up the costillas.”

Teo pushes forward, his hair falling into the thin space between my chin and the turned up collar of my coat. He will argue.

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“If we go down, we’re done. If we go down, we’ve failed.”

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and fighting. It’s too warm, the snow deep and thick and treacherous, the way up and the way down riddled with unforCash laughs and ducks his head, dry lips brushing my jaw line, giving falls.

“If we go down, we don’t make the ascent. The only failure I know of involves my funeral. Or yours.”

“It’s about time you asked me about the mountain. I’ve seen you looking at her all these days, but what your eyes are seeI can’t stop thinking of the costillas, the ribs. A beautiful nasty ing isn’t right. You don’t watch for the way she settles down stretch of scrabbling to the top, the stone wind-smoothed. The and breathes, how she lifts herself up to spit out the winds rocks slope up in crags like the bones they’ve been named and curls and shakes to shed off the snow.” after, and in the place where they meet is a short stretch of flat ground. The summit.

“You believe a dragon lives up there?” The words sound strange from my lips, as though my speaking them has lent It occurs to me that Teo is here to flirt with death, to posture them a certain right-ness. some in the face of his fear. Cash, with his level gaze and hard eyes, wants to survive this climb for another and another yet.

“The mountain is the dragon. She bares her teeth, and you And I, I find that this is the only place where living is anything and I both cower. What are we doing now?” at all like what I was promised.

Teo speaks abruptly to my throat, his eyes closed tight, “My X. grandfather used to tell me stories about this mountain. He lived not far from here when he was young and trying not to We do not sleep. The silence seems to be trying to speak to be my great-grandfather. He said he would get up early to say me, and I can feel the bodies on my right and left as they grow good morning to the dragon on the mountaintop. With the distant with thought. rising sun, it looked like the peak was alive with fire. He said the dragon had to have the most beautiful view from up so “Tell me something Cash.” high, and asked me if a fire-worm cared about those sorts of things.”

He starts with a deep growling laugh in my ear, “There isn’t anything I could tell you that you haven’t already seen. I see “If this mountain is a fire-worm,” I ask without thinking, the you watching, your eyes all funny.” thought of heat pressing on me, “then what are we?”

“Tell me about something I haven’t seen yet. Something I Cash laughs again, a barking sound from his stomach, “We’re can’t.” worms to this mountain, gusanos in the ground.”

Cash is quiet for so long that I wonder if he has decided not Teo snorts, props himself on an arm to lean closer to Cash, to speak. Mateo rests his head on my shoulder, his breathing his delicate throat bones inches above my nose, “There is no hard and unhappy. We’re both of us swimming in ourselves

dragon, Cash. There is nothing but us and this mountain. The only gusanos here are the ones dead in your cornmeal.”

XI. The tension beneath the seams of the tent brings some feeling back to my numbing body, enough to make the balls of my feet ache and spit warmth up the veins to my ankles.

“This mountain, she’s something beyond us. She’s beautiful, she’s deadly. And yet here we are, facing her, making something out of her, using her to make something out of us.”

I think about Cash’s words as the night settles, think about his dragon and my mountain, how perhaps the two aren’t so dissimilar. He prays to her with small gifts as I glory in her irrefutable beauty, photograph with reverence.

XII. I found them yesterday. Cash left the little pouch of green wool on a rock and after capturing it from four angles, I loosed the straw tie with stiff fingers. I didn’t understand why he’d leave it. The normal offerings were bits of things. This was more.

Cash pinched out the corn powder with his thumb and first finger, made daily peace with sprinkled particles and soft prayers. I couldn’t know, but it looked like the pouch had been with him awhile, holding penance close to his body. Forsaking it left me cold.

Inside were worms. Their bodies fat and looped, parts leading into parts leading into parts until one was indistinguishable from another. They must have crawled in down at the valley camp during one of the wet nights, rising up only as Cash’s cornmeal dwindled. They were all dead now, firm and pale, a

shiny, purplish-gray.

I took a photo despite the bile climbing into my mouth, caught the lifeless forms against the beautiful rising slopes: graygreen rock flowing into a dove snow peak.

XIII. I’m counting footsteps as we descend and humming one of Cash’s folk songs to ward off the silent unease. The muffled world extends unrelentingly before me, smothered under a filmy white layer of weak snow. I imagine the things I will eat first: the salmon smothered in miso, the undercooked steak, the yellow cherry tomatoes so easily mistaken for flowers.

One moment there is nothing but our soft sounds, and the next Teo is screaming, swallowed by a hidden crevice. The line connecting all of us throws me forward as I take his weight and hit the ground with an unforgiving clap, slide after him toward the fissure. I make myself into desperate points, scrape my knees and elbows, jut my hips and chin, grasp at the sheened surface with my teeth. The only thing I know is that I cannot follow him down.

Behind me Cash throws himself backward with a howl, and we flounder to a halt. Facedown, I take in great gasps before I roll myself over, the line painfully taut between the three of us.

All I can make out of Mateo is the red cord where it rolls over the edge, such a thin thing tethering his body to mine. Cash is on his knees, watching me, his face wild, nostrils flared. He says nothing but wraps his hands around the rope and begins to pull. For a moment all I can do is stare, watch his muscles strain, and then I’m on my stomach crawling toward him.

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I can’t see Teo, but the stillness of Cash’s face tells me the exact moment when we pull him up over the lip. Cash is on his feet, walking back with a bracingly choppy step. I hear Mateo crying and push myself to my knees, surge toward Cash in blind panic and drag Teo across the snow.

Cash drops down to Mateo immediately. I stay on the ground, heaving, too frightened. It is a long moment before I look.

We move him, or try to, but we are lost in drifts and between us he curls suddenly broken, suddenly small. I’m no longer sure if the things Cash casts off with almost every step are offerings, penance, or a simple lightening of the load. Another storm is rising behind us, and we dig in behind an outcrop of small boulders.

The fissure was sharp and narrow, grinding the skin from half of his face, throwing his shoulder out, bending his foot in an unnatural contortion. One of his eyes has gone missing beneath the bubbling flesh, and in the tent I work away the blood. He stares at me and makes these gawping sounds. He would have choked on the part of his tongue that his teeth bit through if Cash hadn’t curved his finger into the back of his bloody throat and scooped it out. It lay on the snow, very pink and soft.

In the photo it would look like a flower.

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I try to smile at him, but my face is frozen and stiff with my own dried blood, my nose a numbness in the middle of my face. Cash is diligent and silent, turning and splinting Mateo’s foot. Teo’s left arm hangs like a broken wing, and together Cash and I make a sling and secure it to his chest. He is crying again when the shuffling and awkwardness of our quiet attentions are over.

Outside the dragon rises. Mateo gapes like a fish and I see that parts of his teeth are sawn away. I curl around him more to keep myself from seeing what is left of his old face than to bring his body warmth. He collapses to me as if he has been waiting a long time. My fingers find their way into his beautiful black hair.

XIV. I think about the worms, about all the fucking worms. The rubbery body given the illusion of jumping life under the firey weight of tequila, the chalked in lines scrawling with ecstatic black frenzy along the mountain walls, the scar-purple, shiny and hairless corpses in Cash’s cornmeal.

I think in disgust how we are now like all those worms. Manyhearted we languish here, our bodies naked of defense, our eyes little more than holes in our heads.

I feel Cash under one hand, his ribs like a perpetual series of rise-and-fall valleys, his heart a cautious expanding and contracting. Mateo folds to me now, our legs a tangle of shins and knee bones. His breath still smells like Argentinean dirt as it warms the c-bone behind my ear, and when he moves, his nose drags coldness and blood into my hair. I wish its redness could give him warmth. The tendrils from my scalp should snap and growl, should burn holes into my body, should shed embers and devour us in ashes.

I think of the mountain and its teeth against my skin, feel distant from my own flesh. I came here to feel and to become, I came here to test and to defy. I did not come here to die.

XV. Cash isn’t gentle about anything. He brings me out of my sleeping stupor by running his fingers along my crushed nose and half hauls me out of the tent. Dawn is creeping slowly across the rounded wind-blown snow and as I hurry to pull up my hood and cover my hands, I realize it is Cash’s yellow pack that is catching the light of the sun.

“This is it. Last night it snapped colder than it’s been in a while. The snow should hold us. If we go, we’ve got a chance.

A good chance.”

“Cash,” it sounds like a plea, “Cash, Mateo isn’t up for moving. Let’s give it a few days, let his foot heal up some.”

Cash shakes his head and meets my eyes steadily. “There’s too many risks with that. What if this is the last cold spell?

What if it just keeps getting warmer? Then we’re talking an avalanche, not just the hidden falls. This is our shot. She’s only giving us one. I mean to take it.”

I sit down heavily in the snow. Cash growls, “I’m leaving in five minutes. You’ve got two choices and one of the most easy fucking decisions to make.”

I feel like I should feel like crying, but I don’t. I’m just cold and tired and bloody. I’m half-asleep still, the mechanisms of my mind turning with a precarious slowness. A thought emerges from the creaking grind.

over his frosted and red face, “Like I said, this mountain, she’s making something out of us. You can call it what you want, but I came here knowing what I am and what I do. I survive.”

I drop my eyes from the intensity transfiguring his face. Over the tops of my boots, the light cuts firey patterns against the rising slopes of the mountain.

XVI. Mateo is the gusano. A thing of blood and sinew, he lays in the dirt, divided from us. Cash and I still move, still reach out clumsily with unseeing hands. Above us, the dragon rears. The sound of her roar climbs into my skin, and lessening my hold on Mateo, I give him into the hands of our mountain. Worming through my veins, the pain is sharp and bright.

I take his picture in the half-light. It will show his profile, the side still wrapped in flesh, and the sleeping bag will cover the worst of his injuries. It won’t show his shallow breathing or the way he shudders and pulls himself inward. It won’t show the blood or the bits of teeth he choked up earlier. It will show his hair like a dark wing making a halo around his face, spreading like the night sky.

Outside, Cash drops the pack at my feet, settles his eyes on the beautiful rising sun.

We’re done waiting.

“But, Mateo?”

Cash looks up from where he’s systematically checking over the climbing gear in his pack. He straightens, runs a hand 21

Ten Unsent Letters from Duino Tessa Cheek The first: as the arrow endures the bow1 There is a picture I saw once of a man who contracted tetanus. I think about this picture a lot because it illustrates a useful lesson: the muscles of the back are stronger than those of the stomach. Someone probably told me that as a species we’re not quite meant to walk around on our two feet. What a lovely ode to the brain that we are able to make the millions, rather the countless and ceaseless, adjustments which allow us to balance. The back, strong like steel cords with a tiny bit of lycra, does most of this careful work. In the picture, the man foams at the mouth and his eyes—I imagine—are so red that there are no whites at all. The back contracts and wins.

The animal of the body is strung up, raving, on the marvelous rack of its own design.

The second: it happens to me, that at times my hands/ become aware of each other Here is today, belonging to you. Little by little, blue comes to the dome, the trees reveal themselves and we remember the grass which will someday flush, as if all one plant.

1

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All subtitles taken from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Dunio Elegies translated by A. S. Kline

“You know this whole time you have been drinking from my son’s cup?”

“Que?” “Yes, it says right there: Only Juan can drink from this cup.”

“O, si, con este gato gracioso…”

“Garfield.”

“Si.” “You’ve been drinking from it this whole semester, while you’ve been living with me, and you have really worn it out. It is tea stained and the cracks that were there before are bigger.”

“Yo la usé soló porque es la más grande! Pardoneme.”

“I know it’s the biggest mug. It was my son’s, it belonged to him and you are not my son.”

It happened, this dream of an impossible conversation with my Argentine host mother. The cup, too, was real and it held for me—in all the many ways two hands cannot—six months of tea.

The third: sap rises in our arms The arms, the toes, the fingers and their fists, for example, are more expressive and possibly more haunting than I remembered them. Because of this picture and because of the time when I was thirteen and stepped on a three-inch nail that promptly entered the ball of my right foot and anchored itself in my tendon, sending me into blank hysterics, I think about

tetanus all the time when my mom has a panic attack.

It is better to think of tetanus and the taut lines of the back.

The body wants for all kinds of things: sleep, water, the taste of pear. The body wants to persevere. The body wants to destroy. The body knows how close a thing can come and remain untouchable.

How is it, really, that a cigarette can calm the body, can focus the mind, can sooth the troubled stomach?

A cigarette is useful poison.

The sixth: ...We, though, linger,

The fourth: then there’s a play at last.

The land goes this way: flat. Flatter than Iowa, than Kansas, than Nebraska, flat all the way into town and out the other side until you end up in that other city of springs—Manitou—home of an annual coffin race, a tea-making cult, and at least nine witches.

Once, at fifteen, we walked up an old straightedge gash called ‘the incline’ which used to track a venicular. It tops out a mile or so up the face of Pike’s Peak. You can go down the same way, or you can take the bar trail: winding, icy, a place of torn menisci. We ran down. We were fifteen. I threw up at the bottom.

Today I wake up and feel different from before. The sky: lightest of grays, cruelest of whites. The oak, the pine, the poplar and the crow: black. Today will reach almost fifty degrees. Let us repeat again and again we are lucky, we are lucky, we are lucky. Spring comes so early to this place where usually we keep an icebox for living things, until March at least.

Dear friend: neither brave nor tall, neither cruel nor elegant, neither bitter nor honest. I find myself loving you. I carry you. I carry you in the Easter basket which my mother sent me—flat pack! It pops into place!—that terrible year. Let us forget the terrible year and always speak of it, by never again naming it.

The seventh: Where there was once a permanent house It is better not to think of throwing my mother, with all her clothes on, into the hottest possible shower.

At twenty, we the remaining, get stoned. We plan on going sledding and instead sit with our butts numbly cradled by the snow to watch the highway across the park, across the creek (we have no rivers here, only beds).

The eighth: terrified of itself, zig-zagging through the air, as a crack/ runs through a cup. or perhaps with the large gaze of the creature.

The fifth: King August the Strong would crush/a tin plate or on some unsayable carpet

In my Palmer High School Health class, they showed us a series of slides about the methamphetamine industry in 23

Colorado Springs. The show went something like this: ________________________

An armpit, also full of sores. ________________________

Teeth. Sores around the lips and the lips cracked. Sores in the cracks. Sores in the cracks between the teeth. Gums, in a silly effort, cling to yellow enamel. ________________________

A house, with windows sucked in and a child standing alone in front. ________________________

A house. The black bones of a house and through them we see: roof collapsed onto kitchen, floor prolapsed into basement. ________________________ _____ _____ _______ _______________ Once, on Rosebud, South Dakota, I walked around the rez by myself. Twice, a pack of three or five stray dogs followed me for a while until I spun on them, terrifying myself, screaming like a big, rabid cat. An impossible thing, but such a vaguely recognizable perversion of themselves, all the dogs did scatter. And later, broken road my own, I walked past one burnt out house and then another. In the largest, a kitchen had fallen into a basement and a refrigerator, like a makeshift bomb shelter, cupped an actual little boy. We didn’t speak. I walked by, some ten feet from him and as many above. He kicked the buckled door, it swung out, made the sad creaking song of metal performing treewood; it swung in, aching, maybe, for the give of his rubber sneaker. It swung out.

The air was very dry. The fire, old. The sky, whiter than abandoned bone. _____ _____ _______ _______________ ________________________ 24

The ninth: lives on, as the tongue/ between the teeth Finally my father wrote me a letter. Actually he emailed it to save on international postage.

I don’t want to seem obvious, but the cost of postage goes diligently unconsidered by my emotional aesthetic. Then again, I collect loose papers and small broken toys and accounts of how it looks out my window. It is possible that neither of us is very brave.

Because it is night, I look out my window and see myself, suspended in the glow cast by the egg lamp’s brown glass shell.

Egg lamp, lamp that I love. I broke your cousin, accidently, with a big crash in the Goodwill. But you, you I handled more gently and you carry me in your lovely golden glowy light.

The tenth: this is a load-bearing river If I am sleeping, it does not wake me. But if I am awake, I stand in the gravel or the snow nearby to watch the train.

Comforted neither by the impulse to jump on nor under, I watch with the strange solace of knowing that it goes through.

The train makes the ground shake. It grinds against the rails, echoes and sounds so very like some loved person’s intake of breath before speaking that I look over my shoulder three times, utterly convinced.

The Conversion of Saint Paul

Mustn’t interrupt or clobber the master in all his supine luster.

Lexy Leuszler Oh so Carvaggio shadows waltz on a fusty, horsey floor where Saul, not yet Paul, paws alien cobwebs with stumblebum palms and forfeits optics in a crimson,

Two Prayers for her Garden Grace Mendel I.

spread-eagle, turvy-topsy topple to dark.

Nicotiana, mint, and Hellibore– unlikely pilgrims in a flower bed, burst untidily from the bright margin which widens by a foot or so each spring and coyly infiltrates our sloping yard.

Take in the sheen of a gentle forehead with all the foresight

Intoxicated by the snowdrop’s stem, her footprint’s faint cocoon, she stoops to beat the dirt from trembling roots.

to steer iron garbed gravity away from flesh.

We never went to church. Instead we’d lie on hills of terraced grass, summer’s transitory psalm beneath us— a susurrus of bees and violet thyme.

25

My mother’s vow the weathered path from kitchen door to garden gate.)

II. Snow glosses the hills until they shine scalp-like. Only the gardens, which my mother refuses in the fall to level down, poke out of the snow: a wild, resilient hoard of stalks and stems. I walk the icy aisle to take the compost out. Hardened spectral twigs rustle in the wind: eerie cicadas. In summer flies traffic the compost’s pungent peaks But now it frosted terrain is still.

An eggshell sparkles from beneath a stem of yellowed parsley. I pause, not wanting to spoil this frozen wealth with the steaming dregs of our winter kitchen.

January Fantasy Erica Hauswald New England is like a club I want to join.

I want the long, flowing reddish hair, the color of autumn, of afternoon sunlight falling through the winter trees.

I want streams, half frozen, ridden with ice chunks, coursing through my arms, want the mountains, fuzzy with pines, reflecting in my eyes.

I want a simple country kitchen, white dishes, basin sink, decked with garlands of popcorn for the season.

And coffee in small rooms with dark tables, packed with fresh-faced people.

And miniature grocery stores, perched on the edges of old mill towns, stocked with cocoa butter lip balm and local honey.

I ride down the rail to my home, where it isn’t really winter, just cold, and the houses are so close, they’re hugging.

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Evening Spread | Caleb Neubauer | Engraving on matboard, digital photo transfer, vinyl

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Maroon Bells Eva Dawson First a wave of a sandy scent Then, gears writhe with a grainy roar, As we’re scraped up the stony heap.

Dandelions and twiggy oaks Blur together as we rush Into a yellowy-white pattern of green.

The eyes of aspens blink at me, Set in their shallow, crusty sockets.

Red rock from the alluvial fan slices downward.

Sprouts in an avalanche chute Birth dehydrated buds in the dirt.

The driver fills us in, “The Maroon Bells were crafted by a collection of eroded rivers.”

Fingers of evergreen stretch with thirst.

They race us upwards, up The mountain.

I watch and think; I’m so happy that this is where you’re from.

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O Splenda (For Upstate) Emily Mester My mom filled her glass with half fruit juice, half water to dilute all that sugar, I guess.

I’ve been absently mulling your presence for months in my mouth like a starlight mint and forgotten somehow to be thirsty.

Chicago Erica Hauswald What if I climbed into the churches, curled up in the dry safety of a pew, blood-red velvet carpet stretching out by my side?

I would stare through the small arcs of stained panes at the dripping city.

They pronounce Paulina Street with the long harsh I of vagina, not the fluttering ee that I expected, of prancing Thumbelinas down brownstone streets.

This city, fickle, coy, gives itself up to me block by block and then sometimes takes it back.

Where, they seem to want to know, has the lake been for all your life?

How did you live without it?

Metcalf Avenue Robert O’Connell Adolescent trees tilt in Wire crutches in front of The Borders, And the sun seems like Its collar is too tight.

My grandmother, With her store of if-you-can’t-say-anything-nice wisdom, Says, “This is ugly.”

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Abandoned Greenhouse | Andy Delany | Silver gelatin print

Market | Sara Kay | Digital photograph

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For Statler Emily Mester Sometimes, I watch you gnaw on Celery bovinally and am suddenly struck with the weight of The sheer number of days, hours, minutes, hot expansive seconds, wild and incalculable like the strings of your stalk, like individual pubic hairs, I’ll need to set aside.

Woman, who even with green cellulose flossing your teeth will never eat her words I ask you to please chew on mine.

Clementine Clare Mao I have never met a woman more prone to appreciating small things than you.

Your frankenstein enjoyment of the obscure, the precious, and the sentimental makes me think— God, your childhood must have been glorious.

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I’m thinking gardens and forehead kisses and the kind of air you can only find in upstate New York, and sisters, of course—sisters upon sisters upon sisters.

And people wonder how you grew up so well.

Sisters, at Six and TenGrace Mendel But the truth is, nothing else mattered when we played in the ocean, flipping and trailing our small bodies through waves that churned just for us, playing teatime, speaking in curious foreign accents, examining pebble fish and stinging weeds with assiduous care. The shallows tested our propensity to float. We quivered in slow motion at the frothing edge— water polishing and polishing a belly of sand—acrobats, each of us weightless, in each other’s arms, or else we’d walk the beach like nesting birds, squatting low to barter shards of glass and shells (their inverted pearly domes protecting nothing).

Water dripped in beads of lace on our browned skin, a nervous crab stalked our feet.

One night we ran to the water’s edge, stripped off our clothes, and dived in— you and I in the moon-reflected water or was it the moon itself we floated in?

The Fog Quinn Underriner Slinking out of glitter foot baths Exfoliated and ready Somehow these girls always hold me by the heels Drinking only glass in the pigdin nights Sometimes even sucking the silver haze out of the tumblers Prattling for hours And fogging up the only bathroom

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Guanacaste | Ethan Kenvarg | Scanned negative

Molly Pond | Daniel Waite Penny | Scanned negative

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The BaRbershop | Samanea Karrfalt | Digital photograph

Cinder Cavity | Andy Delany | Silver gelatin print

Untitled | Colin Brooks | Split cam C-print

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Untitled | Hannah Strom | Digital photograph

Untitled | Lorraine Blatt | Digital photograph

Barcelona | Jackie Blair | Digital photograph

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Free Gallery | Andy Lange | Museum board, foam core

Surface | Andy Lange | Chipboard, paper

So Flat | Cassidy White | Digital photograph

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Tawny Fuzz | Evangeline Dawson | Collage

Desertion

Eric Dolphy

Harrison Fertig

Robert O’Connell

The ash can dozed in the shade of a man all salt and sawgrass preserved by the brine of his pores.

He breathes, And angel frogs jump from him, Reach, hang, And come undone Like someone has tugged a loose string On a tenuous rag doll.

Ants sprint skittering In a row, Tiny legs tapping a frantic Morse code Before they slip and fall quiet.

No ladies today or any day but that boy in the window adjacent could be slapped up on a billboard.

Made him feel the old lulling rolling.

The most fearsome parts passed in little vignettes.

Seen in glass.

Heard through cedar shakes.

All the world’s beeswax can’t muffle some sirens.

His hand dropped to deposit a cigarette and another vessel cracked on the reef.

He breathes A loaf of bread That sits, fat and staring, on a skinny crooked table, And breathes it back again, Baking in reverse, turning it to lumpy dough And then flour that spills onto the floor While his table, tickled by a thin wind, Deconstructs and drops, clumsy.

He breathes, And his shapes glow, drip, or dangle From the bell of his bass clarinet, Connecting quickly, before evaporating, To a half-forgotten thesis That sits crumpled on the floor beside him, Fallen from an inside-out pocket.

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44

Kansan

Second Language

Emily Mester

Clare Mao

You are beautiful like canvas shoes, linen languid calm as a shortbread cookie the milk after the pepper a calico cat—you like a silk rat’s nest judicious as Midwestern soil dirty joke snickerer barbecue snob a walking ellipsis a lowercase I am so proud to be one of the fucks that you give

The only word my father pronounces like an American is ‘lucky’.

He practiced for months before sailing the summer halfway around the world.

It wasn’t yet winter when he reached New York.

He was almost disappointed.

My Dinner with Isaac Daniel Waite Penny For Molly and Elijah, who could not make it.

This was not your great-grandfather’s seder; nobody storms out when a young uncle Stephan replies, “If you gave me the factory, I would share the profits with the workers and run it as a collective” —like some kind of busty kibbutz, pregnant, milk and honey oozing out from the dusty beds of forsaken wells.

The charoset: cubed apples, sour and saccharine, walnuts craggy and carbuncular.

Isaac reads from the haggadah shucking and jiving, mock Hassidic and avuncular.

“Ba-ruch A-tah Ado-nai E-lo-he-nu Me-lech ha-olam a-sher ki-de-sha-nu be-mitz-vo-tav ve-tzi-va-nu le-had-lik ner shel ‘Boom-Boom’” or

“Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to kindle the drum set.”

There was a drum-set at our post-seder-seder (which the head of the table blessed).

Out of order and multicultural; we imagined ourselves hip and leaned back with satisfaction, made matzoh pizzas with canned Romano, and dipped our fingers twice the prescribed number of times, the sea-dark cooking wine —punctuated by pinkies wiggling with delight in the misfortune of our enemies.

Fear not, Grandma Cohen, the biggest proscriptions went unfilled, everything copacetic; a Schechter was there to officiate and bang the table with a strong hand.

We patted our bellies and whispered them consoling words, Dylan ferreted the afikommen from its hiding place, and my arms stretched out to pass the maror to Julia who bragged, “I can snort lines of the stuff like in Jackass.”

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The Underbelly Zoe Schein To study abroad is to descend into the underbelly. Beneath the glorious cathedrals, the great works of art, the hills and castles and the history—danger lies in wait like a predatory cat. According to the guidebooks, the off-campus study office, and your mom, danger will pounce, devour you, suck the marrow from your bones, steal your money and your passport.

That passport, desired, like a long, smooth thigh that you must keep covered, will tempt deft-fingered pickpockets whether you do so or not. Still, it’s safer to keep it hidden under layers of plain dark clothes with no English lettering, because you don’t know Danger’s politics and Danger is so often antiAmerican. Or anti-Jew. Or anti-gay. Or anti-something else you are. But you must go, you must experience. Never mind home. Danger lives there too, with a can of spray paint and a dictionary of epithets. But that’s different. That’s home, and this is educational. Double-mortgage the house and stick your head into the lion’s mouth.

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“Well, it looks like Eastern Europe,” Janie quips, and a man with heavy-looking eyebrows tosses an underhanded glance from across the aisle. Janie doesn’t notice. My hand jumps to my breast pocket. Passport’s still there.

The route is slow, the least direct to save money on bus fare, and so when the vehicle veers sharply or coasts for long, aimless minutes, we joke that the driver is just improvising, that he is playing a trick on us, driving us in circles knowing we would never catch on. I don’t joke about my mothers’ anxious voice, which has been ringing in my ears since we got on the plane in Stockholm.

Passport, wallet, phone.

There’s an old anthropological myth that the Eskimos have eighteen words for snow, that the volume of linguistic effort put forth into naming and categorizing the specificities of the flakes indicates its profound cultural significance. Taken, stolen, collected, abducted, ‘napped, snatched, gobbled, pinched, seized. We’ve come up with nine separate words for “kidnapped” since we left home.

We arrive in the city and are relieved to find that Prague is beautiful, that there are people and taxicabs and long streets The bus from the Ruzyn Airport scurries down the empty lined with tall, elegant buildings, buildings so beautiful we roads towards the city. It’s a long ride, but we clamp our come to suspect them of being not buildings but architecture. backpacks—stuffed full of underwear, miniature toothpastes, And since they are architecture, we linger. We linger, and Lili plain dark sweatshirts and emergency contact numbers— gazes, and Janie photographs, and I gaze and photograph between our legs. Our feet tap the sticky rubber floor. Our and wish fleetingly and for the first time in my life so far that hands are constantly in transit between pockets. Breast I had paid a little attention in my Introduction to Art History pocket, butt pocket, front pocket. Passport, wallet, phone. The class, if only to have something meaningful to say now. bus continues, and we stare out the window at the passing When Dru and Kat finally arrive at the hostel, they are a landscape. Grey sky and grey hills punctuated by concrete whirlwind of photos and postcards and excited, half-finished walls fringed with barbed wire.

stories. Slinging off coats, sliding out of sweaters and squirming into new ones, they explain that they took the later train, the evening train, because Dru fell passionately in love, that Vienna is her heart’s true home. No one is surprised at this, because Dru is always falling in love with something like Vienna: like a kindly old shopkeeper in the old-fashioned hat, the way a flock of birds plunges towards the earth and then catches itself and rises on a pocket of air. And as it happens with people who love big and love often, things return the favor. Like Hinrik, the strong-jawed Icelander who fell for Dru when Dru fell for Reykjavik. Hinrik took one look at Dru’s wavy hair (which often reminded men of strawberries and custard), another look at her cheekbones (which by all medical accounts should have partially obscured her vision), and perhaps one more look at her smile (which started out thin and rough, but could crack open suddenly and deliciously like a coconut split on a rock). He was spellbound.

The next day Hinrik showed up early at the hostel where Dru was staying, and found her waiting outside for a bus to Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon.

“That’s not Iceland,” Hinrik told her, “let me show you Iceland,” and he opened the passenger door of his car. Dru hesitated.

She looked Hinrik up and down, standing tall and Nordic and handsome by the open door, and I suppose her mother’s voice rang briefly like a gong in her ears before she silenced it and her face cracked open into a smile. She slid easily past him into the waiting car. He drove her up and down the coast, talking, listening to music. They drove winding seaside roads, on cliffs overlooking tumbling froth-tipped waves and clouds plump like full canvas sails patterned all the way to the horizon. When Hinrik pulled off the road and kissed her deeply, Dru obliged, just for a moment, before gently pushing

him back and telling him that he was very sweet but her heart belonged to Peter, who was back in Vermont, and who was good and strong and kind and loyal. Hinrik smiled, said he understood, and did not press the matter, even as he dropped her off, exhilarated and unscathed, at the hostel that evening.

Of course we thought it couldn’t all be true, he could not have said, “Let me show you Iceland,” no, that would be too cliché, too much like an old movie or a new romance novel, but Dru swears to it, swears that he said “let me show you Iceland,” and did. And because of her strawberry hair, and her high, freckled cheekbones and her coconut smile, we believe her.

We’re jealous, of course, that Dru fell in love, that Dru lived Vienna while we changed currency and pored over subway maps, but within the jealousy is excitement, because we know that now, with Dru here, our art history vacation will become an experience, something Jack Kerouac would write, though none of us has ever read On the Road, except for maybe Dru. Kat circles all of the places to go on a glossy, cartoonish map we find on the counter in the hostel. The only one who did any research, she talks us through the day plan—the Mucha museum, the Astrological Clock, the Charles Bridge.

“The open air market’s in the square from eight to five, and the Jewish Cemetery isn’t far from there,” she says.

“Only one Holocaust event per city,” I interrupt. I intone it as a joke, but I want to avoid scrolling through another list of carved or calligraphy names, avoid finding the maternal Prinzes, the great-uncle Silberts, maybe even one or two gutwrenching Scheins. It’s Eastern Europe, I think. Of course there will be Scheins.

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“One Holocaust event it is,” Kat laughs, starring the synagogue on the map.

At the cemetery the Czech Jews have piled gravestones on top of each other to fit them all within the outer walls.

The bodies beneath, we hear a tour guide say, look about the same. Inside the synagogue the painted names also crowd each other, jostle for recognition. Rooms upon rooms wallpapered with the names of the dead. Hand-lettered with care. Janie, Lili, Kat, Dru and I linger, gaze. We take illegal photographs and we all cry silently. No Laursens, Gundersens, O’Haras or Roessles in the even, ordered, endless lines of print. There are six Scheins, but no one else is counting.

On our last night in Prague we seat ourselves in a small bar on the far side of the Vltava River. It’s a hole-in-the-wall, the kind of place where revolutionaries might be sitting bent over tables, speaking in impassioned stage-whispers. “The real Prague,” Dru had excitedly muttered, causing a shiver to skip through our group like a flat stone on a lake as we ducked through the stone archway and into the courtyard.

It was small inside, lit warmly, yellow walls with painted tiles around the single room at waist level. We seat ourselves at a table by the wall, Dru with Kat and Janie with Lili, me on the end facing the bar. There’s a menu in English, and it’s cluttered with thick Czech stews, chunks of well-done beef in heavy brown gravy. Not vegetarian-friendly, but I’m the only vegetarian and it feels nice to be warm and off our feet. The bartender takes our orders, a young man with greasy hair and hairy fingers. A stained apron hangs around his hips. Everyone orders stew. I order salad. The place is decorated oddly. The tiles appear to be hand-painted, and badly so; they’re covered in mystifying symbols I don’t recognize. I point out the tiles 48

and Kat turns to look at the wall, gasping and stifling a giggle at the painted image of two women, naked and clearly having sex, next to Dru’s earlobe.

“How weird!” Dru says, baffled, examining the tile, and I slouch down in my chair, hot-faced. My eyes fall behind the bar, where there’s a large, circular painting of equally slippery meaning. A series of planets orbit a circle atop a cross, the base planted like a stake in an image of the Earth and chained to three coat of arms—two depicting ghoulish figures and one with a seven pointed sailor’s star. A circular inscription, black and gold letters that spelled out something in Latin, maybe, ringed the edge of the painting. I open my mouth to comment, to say, “What kind of a bar is this, anyway?” I’ll laugh a bit nervously and eat our food and go, but as I open my mouth to speak I see the noose.

My throat tightens.

I stare. A dense, sinewy rope looped down like a teardrop and coiled four, five, six times around itself at the peak of the loop.

It dangles from a crossbeam above the bar, swaying acutely every time the young bartender crosses under it. Kat follows my gaze.

“Oh my god,” she says, and Dru looks up, along with Janie and Lili, and they exclaim and gasp, and giggle a little, not quite knowing what to make of it.

“I wonder if it’s historical,” Janie offers. “Like an anti-communist thing.”

“Or to scare off tourists,” Lili laughs.

“I’m going to ask,” Dru says, as if it were a question on her

math homework, looking around the room with her hand halfraised for our server, who would certainly know, who could certainly explain it to us. No, don’t, I think, and realize that I’ve drawn my shoulders up tightly to my ears, pulled my chin down into my chest. Dru’s chin is up and her eyes track the barman, trying to catch his attention. The others watch, wait.

I’m suddenly angry. These straight shikse will go home to the East coast and tell their friends about the funny bar in Prague, with the creepy symbols and the creepy noose hanging above the bar. They’ll explain that Dru, their brave friend who knew how to get to the truth of the matter, who led them to this bar and to the Real Prague, had boldly inquired and they had learned something, something worth the money their parents had dutifully poured into this bourgeois coming of age ritual.

I don’t want to know whose neck the noose is meant for.

We’ve been asking the wrong questions. The Charles Bridge and the Astrological Clock, the cobbled alleys and the cavernous pubs. We have no way of knowing. We don’t know if the Jews still living still worry, whose names and deaths go un-inscribed. We don’t know if Czech queers come out to their families, or if they keep quiet until they turn 18 and move to Prague, or Paris, or New York by way of London. We don’t know whose walls collect spray paint in the night, whose bodies collect bruises in the alley. We don’t know whose neck the noose is meant for. But Dru is up now, asking, and she strides to the bar, stands under the noose with the easy stance of a woman certain of her safety.

After a Fourth Round Headbutt Robert O’Connell While Victor Ortiz puts down His hands and bends in Once more for forgiveness, Floyd Mayweather Raises him with a left And releases him with a right.

While Ten ticks past And Vicious’ chin rubs canvas And Money dances, Worn men With knotted knuckles and chipped minds Murmur, “Protect yourself at all times.”

Dru comes back from the bar and lowers herself into her chair.

“So what’s the noose for?”

“He said it’s a decoration.”

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People Talk Ethan Kenvarg For Johanna Justin-Jinich People talk about feeling as if the air’s been sucked out of their chest, or a single tear might undo the brusque brush strokes that heap up life so finely.

People talk about feeling as if they were inside an enamel pot, tapping on the lid, hearing the oven reverberate around them, or as if their lungs were filled with blood, swollen and hot, like rotting fish.

People talk about feeling as if their mouths were heavy buckets of well water pulled up from the ground, 50

or they had been force fed like geese whose livers swelled and whose feathers mottled and grayed.

People talked at your funeral about feeling as if they were as full as corked champagne, as empty as fine crystal flutes.

People talk about feeling.

I envy them.

Absolution Clare Boerigter You want me to tell you I love you, but I’ve given up lying for Lent, so for forty-six days and forty-six nights you’ll wonder why the words have gotten stuck in my throat, and I’ll kiss your neck with my mute lips and pray to God for forgiveness

Untitled | Abraham Kohrman | Digital photograph

Bend | Lea Greenberg | Collage

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Blink Grace Carroll Chickens, like pigs and humans, scream before they die. The sound pierced through the black-blue of a starless 3 a.m. and the chilled windowpanes of my bedroom, jerking me out of sleep. The scream lasted only a second before being consumed by a hungry silence. I wondered if I had heard anything at all. The world continued to slumber. Fathers turned, heavy in their sleep, drooling a little and grunting. Slow bubbles rose from the fish tank. The world had not changed. I fell back into dreams.

Second semester freshman year of college, the left side of my face became paralyzed. Just a month of immobility, but a weird month of lopsided smiles, Otimmune eye lubricant, and research on Bell’s Palsy. Part of my 7th cranial nerve was dead but, the smiling neutral nurses assured me, time and drugs healed all. Research on my freak paralysis brought me to special places like eye-patch-heaven.com, where images of celestially winged eye patches fluttered at the top of each web page as soft Christian music played and visitors could scroll through hundreds of cheetah print, polka dotted, or Christmas themed medical eye patches for purchase. I stuck with a plain black pirate patch from Walmart and a prescription of prednisone. Prednisone does many strange things. For the monthlong duration of my recovery, my steroid-laden sleep was filled with incessant dreams of dead pets.

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*

By the time I was in high school, my family had owned over fifty pets. Throughout my childhood we had three dogs, two hamsters, one rabbit, two rats, three ducks, one turtle, two birds, one hermit crab, fifteen fish, ten chickens, and roughly twenty-five guinea pigs. It all began with a little bag of feeder crickets, bought for a nickel and cared for lovingly, my first pets. How could one family, surrounded by three anxious neighbors in the urban sprawl of L.A. County, have such a gratuitous number of animals?

1. We could not stop the guinea pigs from breeding 2. Fish don’t count 3. Untimely deaths Dolly was the only one of our pets, as far as I know, to attempt suicide. * Prednisone tended to do funny things to my internal compass. Late at night, when I could stay awake no longer, I closed my eyes and began the sensation of falling. Without vision I became anchorless, no up or down, north or west, just endless spinning, floating through absence. I felt like Alice, falling through the holes in my cranial nerves, looking to the stars for my orientation. I dreamt of dead pets. * One morning my mother, while padding around the garden in her slippers and paisley bathrobe, found Beethoven’s severed head in the flowerbed. I ate cornflakes that morning. Our family obituary was growing rapidly out of control.

Beethoven was a White Crested Polish Chicken, whose absurdly fancy plumes gave him the appearance of a sleek, tuxedoed body and an unruly, white judicial wig. He was the first of the chickens to go. We found him on clearance the weekend after Easter in an exotic pet store and brought him home in a brown cardboard box, peeping and chirping, full of six other mismatched chicks. Gold Laced Polish, Buff Brahma, Black Sumatra, Cornish Game, Araucana, and a White Leghorn.

That summer we repainted our house, stripping off the leadbased paint that had been there for thirty years. The chickens swarmed around the painter’s ladders, pecking up the yellow paint chips like gold dust falling from the sky. They lived for two years and three months and produced one hundred and ninety lead-poisoned eggs.

Despite her psychosis, Dolly was a lovable spaniel.

She had an uncontrollable compulsion to chase cars and, like a riddled addict, went to any lengths to get over, under, or through our fence and lie in the dark shadows of the gutter, waiting for her multi-ton, steel prey. A genetic miscalculation had over-stimulated her herding drive; a Volkswagen would cruise down the street, and out of the shadows, Dolly would spring, foaming, with teeth bared, sprinting after the car and nipping at its spinning wheels until the frightened driver sped up and out of our neighborhood. She always returned home, paws bloodied, a slobbery grin across her muzzle, exhausted and content. It was a problem.

In April our neighbors, the Guzmans, moved out, and Dolly was carefully locked inside while their moving trucks arrived. This was too much. After barking, crying, wailing, she finally hurtled upstairs, her tense, anxious body bursting through the French balcony doors, and with one great leap, Dolly launched herself off the second story of our house. She was flying, falling, a jubilant black knot of fur who landed with

a sudden shock on the brick driveway in front of the horrified Guzmans. * Thick minty toothpaste drool fell in ropes from my mouth onto the front of my shirt. Humiliation tasted sharp and stringent in the back of my throat as I tried to swish and spit.

The muscles didn’t respond, and foamy water fell with a limp splash into the sink.

Without the ability to blink, my left eye needed constant coddling. Every evening I said good night and tucked my eyeball into bed, softly pulling the flap of my eyelid down and around the cornea and securing it shut with medical tape so I could sleep through the night without fear of waking up to a shriveled orbital. Conjunctival dryness. My fingers spread a medical mucus over the pathetic eye every morning, and it grew fat and lazy and content while the good eye worked overtime. Reading was exhausting. The tape pulled my eyelashes out. And yet, millimeter by millimeter, my nerve grew back. My dreams faded into normalcy. The face, I realized, is a symphony of muscular coordination. Things die and come back, like milkweeds, like seasons. Summer nights spent sleeping in my backyard have always been loud with the songs of crickets.

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Ninth Octave | Caleb Neubauer | Wood, stain

Untitled | Abraham Kohrman | Digital photograph

Untitled | Paige Murphy | Acrylic on canvas

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Ortolan, Ortolan Daniel Waite Penny Part I Caught— the fleshy vice holds him in its grip threatening to snap bones with the slightest squeeze.

And with a gleam of light sliding across a steel pin, the world goes dark, ensconced in layers of red velvet curtains so thick and unassailable.

He eats.

He eats and eats until he can eat no more, and still the food comes.

Millet marched down his gullet like some endless triumph.

He must be the conquered, a strange turn to grow so fat in captivity.

Arteries like straws struggling to slurp a malted milkshake, so bottlenecked and feeble.

He pants with the effort, stuffed so thoroughly the seams of his guts 56

threaten to burst like a hamster in a microwave.

And still it comes: the smell of another blandishment brandished before him like a club, face-fucked by brunch.

But the brandy was so fine: such quality had never wet his beak before his appetite was whet for more.

The trickle turned torrent and the hand held him fast.

His mouth runneth over, tributaries of liquor pooling at his feet, the brown tide rising, he thought of Nachon and whistled a dirge, a Hansel engorged.

Part II Like klansmen cloaked in white linen they sat salivating, waiting for the guests of honor to arrive.

Sneaking out of the kitchen, tendrils of aroma crept into the room announcing the train’s imminent arrival.

All at once, they poured out from the double doors, metallic domes cradled in gloved fingers, silverware clinking and clanking expectantly.

There was much lip-smacking and a bead of drool slipped steadily out from under a pair of glistening pink lips and landed on the silk tablecloth.

Together with their new brides, they hid in their tents, allowing their mouths to hang open cooling the carcasses, lest they burn their tongues on the white hot bones and bitter organs.

No one saw the maws chomp, slurp, swill, gurgle, swallow, and gulp; even the waiters tried to avert their gaze.

Only one hundred grams of flesh and fat and Argmanac— some men say they tasted God and the Devil and did not know whom to thank.

Whistle Lexy Leuszler TWeeet, TWeet, TWeet, chirps the titanium grackle.

Sweat beads soft shoe from skull cap to chewy waist flesh.

Meaty paws mush and mash air pockets. Glottal grunts beckon boys forward for a mesh covered sermon. Forty-four eyes track fresh torrents of upper lip spit. Bear paws cup rump cheeks with moxie that verges on the thresh hold of arousal. Pupils register the battalion of pick-ups that line the 100-yard kingdom. It’s time to find the fuck-up.

The pre-pubescent patsy who missed the juke, by a millisecond, and brought your immaculate blueprints crashing down. Buckup shit-bird. Must’a learned to run from you sister I reckon.

Sweat mixed with regret dries on your eyelids as you watch his father fling The small body in the cab. You wonder how hard can that man swing.

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Carcel | Lea Greenberg | Collage

Jack Nicholson | Phoebe Currier | Charcoal

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Noise | Andy Lange | Digital

Andy | Chris Barbey | Silver gelatin print

Eva | Chris Barbey | Silver gelatin print

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Lioncow | Clara Kirkpatrick | Watercolor

Tyler | Evan Hockett | Mixed media

Robo Cat | Evan Hockett | Ink

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Illutron | Jackie Blair | Digital photograph

Nuns (Rome) | Michael Cole | Digital photograph

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Jake with a White Flower | Evangeline Dawson | Lomograph C-print

Exes Exploding Drew Ohringer

After they broke up—right after, crying, they hugged and kissed goodbye for the last time—they each exploded.

A fragment of his spinal cord landed on the southeast shore of South Africa; a few inches of her small intestine were absorbed into the Arizona desert. In a flash, they saw each other burst apart, but neither registered the gore of the whole affair.

Of course, their lives went on. She went back to school in Canada, he in the Midwest. What happened to your boyfriend? they asked her, he was so nice. Where’s that girl you were fucking? they asked him. He replied: gone. She said: oh, he’s not around anymore.

Each weekend, dozens of chemicals buzzing around her brain, she went out to clubs and brought home with her an equally intoxicated young man. On the wall next to her bed was a picture of the exploded ex-boyfriend. Who’s that? the young men would ask, maybe a little or more than a little jealous and concerned. Don’t worry about him, she always said: he exploded.

He didn’t have a picture of her on his wall, but he wasn’t bringing women back to his room all the time.

Masturbating, he would often think about her; after ejaculating, though, his heart was filled with regret, remorse, rage. But then he remembered that she had exploded, and, if there were time, he would go for a second round

One day, four years after their break up—she was now engaged to a Francophile DJ; he was in love with three

different women, all of whom had birthmarks on their left breast—they ran into each other at a farmers market run by special needs children.

“I hear they have good eggplants,” she told him.

“I don’t usually come here,” he said.

“It makes me feel good about myself.”

They briefly inquired into their carnal togetherness. But they didn’t dwell on the subject—it was all so long ago, and they’d had so many lovers since. It was decided that they could have sex; after all, all their organs were working and intact. As they shared a poistcoital pasta dish of three cheese tortellini in front of the TV—her show about wedding dresses was on—they each exploded again. The next day, she chose a wedding dress and he noted that one of his lover’s birthmarks was in fact on her right breast.

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Nat’s Feet | Daniel Waite Penny | Scanned negative

Erin | Chris Barbey | Silver gelatin print

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Stella Eva Dawson I peer at her from over my glass. Reclining, I watch her slink down to the floor from her lofty sunlit seat. She moves towards me with overwhelming determination. Every move demands my attention. In her walk, she shows me where she needs to be touched, her nonchalant gait hints at her level of energy. In a single-footed leap, she moves to a plush perch on the cushion next to me, outstretching her chin for a kiss. I extend my index finger and follow a soft line from mouth to neck to ear. She purrs. I listen, and make my own noise.

Bioluminescence Grace Mendel Heavy with a flagrant yellow glow, the lower bodies of a thousand bugs pulse in the summer air.

The silhouettes of trees sway soft above me— tarnished, and billowing.

Mosquitoes add their taunting to the night, darting in counterpoint below my ear where I slap at them.

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If only light attracted you: my lower half designed to make you fly in dizzying arcs toward me.

Strangers Clare Boerigter He watches me from underneath the apple blossom tree, stands in his suit and tie, plum velvet and starched shirt, like a Japanese foreigner against the hyper-blue of the sky, the ragged green grass over-sharpened and aggressive, and he looks defeated under those windswept branches, bent boughs dusting his forehead in a petal and leaf crown of apricot and pink and dusk-rose I watch him from underneath the long-fingered uncut-nail clouds, stand up against the window in my mother’s foam cashmere, bare wood bruising the bones of my feet as the brush of denim makes me feverish and my pelvis itch; I use him and the window, framing my life in spare inches and eyes as the walls slump inwards like yellow rice pudding and I begin the act of eating distance I let down my hair for him that we could kiss, and trace buttons out of fabric loops to release my hips to the damp shape of moist air, which is not enough to keep my hands from hemlines and sleeves, and naked I lean on the sill and we make love, he and I until dark nips his heels and runs its hands across my haunches and like beautiful animals I mouth words to him, small things he will never make out from the ground: my name and how it is I love so many strangers

Premenstrual Syndrome Eva Dawson Feeling like a taciturn raindrop Pouting on a window sill I grow squat and round Finally, I’m lying on my back.

Clutching my guts, Counting to ten, Taking deep breaths, I squeeze my eyelids And try not to fathom what’s happening in there.

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When Stars Explode | Iulia Iordache | Digital photograph

Ashley | Ethan Kenvarg | Scanned negative

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Other Adverbs Ethan Kenvarg “I keep thinking about your adverbs:

wildly, remorselessly…” - C. T. I take off my pants as if I know what I am doing, or as if I have a button fly, and have mistaken it for a zipper, the whole time actually wearing shorts. I take off my shirt as if I know what my shirt looks like in the dark. Words like “psychrometrics” and “hygrometer” flop on the lips like fresh pudding skins. My slushy little tongue, bless its soul, is trying its best to asphyxiate me.

Back sweat has never been attractive, not even in the eighties, not even on Tom Seleck. The pillows are soaked because the wind blew gutter water inside. Think of beards and spurs and leather and other hefty, manly accoutrement. I blame you entirely because it is convenient, because it is easiest, because if I don’t, I will have to do the laundry. The rain sounds like cast-iron pans hitting the pavement when it falls. I ring as if I know what a doorbell is or where to put my finger to have someone answer the damn thing.

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I smack my head on the windowsill. The bed has no riser, and will remain without one until I can see straight again. I am hoping, subconsciously, to knock myself out, or to injure myself, or at least to draw some blood so I can excuse myself: to put on some deodorant, or to floss, or to sit on the toilet and pretend to have to piss while reading “Crime and

Punishment”. I’m twenty-one, a prepubescent, barren crotched, germinal libidinal preteen. And there you are with no clothes on, smiling like a mule.

I dream tonight before I fall completely asleep. We are talking inside of a cave. A light glows softly, coming from somewhere I can’t locate. The walls are covered in ancient paintings—a breath would degrade the pigments. You start blinking furiously. I think it is Morse code, but I don’t know Morse code. I can’t really tell. So I imagine that you’re telling me secrets, saying how good I looked when my hair was shorter, trying to remember the name of that hot sauce you like, but ultimately forgetting. I nod and laugh and blink back. I think I say something about your skin.

New Game Linnea Hurst “Let’s unzip our skin,” she whispers, Her hair a nest from the humidity I imagine a blue jay landing atop her head And laying three sky blue eggs— “Are you listening?” She inquires And the eggs fall to the floor As she shifts her weight, “It won’t hurt, I promise” She has already gripped my zipper And begins to tug— And she’s right, I don’t feel pain Only a faint tickle down my spine

Together we count “Three, Two, One,” And step out— Our muscles meeting open air “We should really do this more often” She muses— As I watch the slick surface of her heart Contract and expand

“Do me now!”

She melts— Her yellow skin folding like butter Down her back

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Here is Where We Start Drew Ohringer

The last bottle of wine left over from his graduation party; a gram of weed he purchased with money from the scholarship that the Jewish Big Brother Big Sister Association had given him for textbooks (this was an accident); Elvis Costello screeching advice from his car speakers; three lubed Trojans he bought from the Indian at the convenience store down the street—he hoped the awkwardness would be lost in translation—and a pack of Doublemint that he bought along with them: these are what he needs to get her to have sex with him.

To some extent, though, he is just following a script: play the right music, say the right things, put your hand in the right place—and she’ll let you fuck her. He knows that he is following a set of conventions. He also knows that his adherence to these threadbare conventions is unnecessary.

Just,” she said after the last time—when they’d kissed and groped and sort of humped and rocked in some dry rehearsal of what was to come—“can it suck less next time?”

She hadn’t hurt him, exactly.

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“I even wore cute underwear,” she said.

Kissing never quite did it for him. This was probably because he had no idea what he was doing. On the couch in her living room—while, on TV, a woman explained how to make the best French roast chicken—he initiated the first

make-out session (“I think I want to kiss you now, “ he’d said, in one of his best lines yet), but, as it progressed, he kept wishing that he’d feel more than the disconnected rhythm of lips. If hers are there then mine go there and if they move this way mine move—he’d only kissed one other girl in his life, drunkenly, in the woods at night. Throughout the couchkissing he paid obsessive attention to how hard he was or was not getting, going back and forth, it seemed, between pushing piercingly into her thigh or retreating with anxiety. He thought of what Dr. Stein had told him: just enjoy her.

“When are you going to take my fucking shirt off?”

He’d already been exploring a bit under there—all wires and bars and nylon—but now she finished his work for him.

Her bra stayed on, though. And when she led him to her blue room and they were in her bed, it remained there, hooked and taut, a challenge.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked, shirtless, lying next to him.

“Nothing. Just happy.”

It wasn’t the moment for post-coital questions.

“My dad loves Elvis Costello,” she says.

“Your dad sounds great.”

“Not really.”

“I just remember him trying to see if I was sober after your grad party.”

“Lift your leg and touch your knee.”

“We can go to my basement.”

“I think I passed.”

“Your brother will be there.”

“I told him I was having friends over.”

“I’m not losing my virginity in your fucking basement. Your mother will be upstairs.”

“They won’t hear anything.”

“We’re going to my house.”

“Ok, well I do have the car.”

“You’re not driving.”

“I haven’t had that much.”

“We’re walking.”

“That’s like two miles!”

“We’re walking.”

He drives them to Grove Street, the park where they and their friends have been drinking all summer. The last time they were there, still working on the left over wine, he’d rather bravely placed the back of his head between her legs, as if her crotch—covered under her dress, as usual, by jean shorts— were his pillow. She obliged him. When she got up to piss behind the big tree near the swing set, he told their friend to save some wine for her. The friend asked,“So you can use it to take advantage of her?” He thought, or perhaps realized: well, more or less.

“Let’s go on the seesaw!”

“It’s meant for kids.”

“Bounce more”

“It hurts.”

“This sounds like bad sex.”

Under the green plastic climbing structure she asks if he is going to fuck her. If I can, if you let me—can I? I mean, am I able to?—but yes I would like to. His hands: one sliding up her thigh to the rim of her jean shorts; the other ramming against that fucking bar on the front of her bra. Mouth: doing something that approached kissing where her neck meets her collarbone.

She calls herself a virgin, but there are complications.

He knows from various sources—their friends, things she’s mentioned about her intoxicated freshman year in France— that she has—haswhat?—has done things with girls. He also knows from their gay friend Dan that she had a boyfriend in France, Pierre. Her post-France history—sexual history, that is—did nothing to clear up his confusion.

“She’s a lesbian, man. I hate to tell you this but I really think she’s just afraid,” Dan had told him after meeting up to discuss the matter at Dan’s behest. She had had short hair

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for most of high school. And there was the Marina phase, he knew about that—a close friendship that resulted, at some point, in sex.

In sex? But she’s a virgin.

“How big are you?”

“Look at your face.”

“What? Oh. Around five inches?”

“Can I taste it?”

“That should be fine. Do you have condoms? My dad got me some for college, he’s very considerate.”

Sweat, maybe piss, the scratch of hair—where does this end?— a bead of toilet paper—isn’t that at the top?—a sweetness: he looks up at her.

“Look right here.”

“You were born to lick pussy,” she says.

“Very nice. Walking at night makes me think of Halloween”

He forgets that she’s drunk.

“You see that stop sign there? We used to spray paint over it every Halloween. We started the first year we went out alone. Alanna’s parent’s wouldn’t let her come with us.”

“Is it in?”

“I think so. I thought so.”

“In St. Thomas I’d always go off wearing these little girl costumes over slutty ones so my mom wouldn’t know.” “Lower.”

“I have weed if you want.”

“Oh, the stuff you bought from Richard? You’re an idiot.”

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This is the first one he’s ever seen, in real life. It looks— it’s just skin, puffy in a way, definitely not just another patch of skin—slightly splayed, opened maybe, like a cut that she hasn’t noticed and he’s found. She has shaven, although longer hairs spring out toward the bottom and betray the effort.

“Fuck. It must have fallen out in the park.”

“I have to pee. This always happens when I’m wet.”

“You’re wet?”

“I think it’s on inside out or something.”

“Wait.”

What first struck him was the difficult geometry of it all: slants, angles, legs, crevices. He’d known, going into it, that it might not be the effortless slide it was in porn and bad movies, but he at least thought he would feel something, not

just this characterless in-and-out. Like him, she seemed to be unsure if they were actually doing it, if this was actually it. They didn’t make noises (what noises, he wondered, would she make?) or throw their heads back or really lose focus—because they were both, in a careful but unsure way, focused—as he had hoped. He gave up after ten minutes or so of anonymous thrusting: he’d known right away that he wasn’t going to come—intricate vaginal subtleties couldn’t compare to the hard flex of jacking off; or perhaps the Zoloft had interfered, as Stein had said it might.

“Is it ok?” he asked.

He is, he knows, sort of a woman. Each time before they fuck he has to talk, feel around, kiss (he is starting to like kissing). Sometimes he thinks the sex itself is secondary to just being naked with her. Every thing he does with her—every thing she does to him—is immediately doubled and redoubled in his head: naked with her, he thinks; he is naked with a girl who is naked. And then come all the ingredients of what may be infatuation: skin, hair, scent, the dreamed-of things. Her tits flop but smell like vanilla. He hadn’t known that, when really touching them, you could feel the whole milk system down there, the ducts. “You can bite them,” she says.

“What?”

“My cousins are here, we can’t fuck in my house.”

“That I didn’t finish.”

“Car sex?”

“Yeah whatever.”

“If we can find a good place to park. That won’t improve the angle though.”

“We’ll have to use my mom’s car.”

“What did it feel like for you?”

“Good, I guess, in a way. You’re still pretty hard though.”

His own hand felt dulled, too, as though it were hers, untrained. He came onto his stomach and her thigh. She leaned forward and licked it off them. A shiver shot through him, more powerful than anything he’d felt earlier.

“I’m not sure if this means I’m officially no longer a virgin or not,” he said.

“Stop worrying.”

She doesn’t take her dress off, her underwear is somewhere under the passenger seat beside his boxers.

They go through the talking and kissing routine. He asks her to be on top. She pauses after each round of frantic spaceconscious thrusts; she is panting. He knows that this time the mechanics are working out. “Asses are for grabbing,” she told him that first time in her living room, and he follows her advice. She complains about her thighs hurting, but that doesn’t matter: he comes, ejaculates, etc. A few minutes later, once they are clothed and talking again, a cop knocks on the window and tells them they can’t be parked there at this time of night. “I’m not trying to bust your balls or anything,” he says.

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“There’s cum on your shirt you know.”

“You’re really into that?”

“Oh well.”

“Maybe.”

“I guess it’s my fault.”

‘”I never would have thought you were like this”

“I’ll pay for your Slurpee.”

“Like what?”

In the 7-11 parking lot, sitting beside her on the curb in front of his mother’s car, he feels like he has accomplished something basic, perhaps the most basic thing there is. He puts his arm around her, or almost around her. Next to a girl he’s having sex with—who’s having sex with him—cooling down, with the slush and the it’s-all-almost-over August air, after having sex with her. An older guy he knows from the tennis team walks out of the store and sees them; they nod at each other. Does he know? It’s like after you get high and keep thinking everyone knows; but this time, you want them to know. I’m fucking her! We’re fucking!

She is lying on him, under the lights in the park, cars are driving by, he is being delightfully a little crushed. She’s not fat but there is a lot of her. In middle school, he knows, she was anorexic: he’s careful not to make any groaning sounds.

Anyway, her weight is what he wants: to be pushed under, into, inside. He is ridiculous, it is ridiculous—he knows this.

They kiss, he pulls her hair back; her eyes look new, bluer, like someone else’s. I want to burrow inside her, he thinks, or half-thinks, maybe he’s been thinking that all along. And then he says: “I want to burrow inside you,” as if it could be a joke.

She laughs. “Like a squirrel,” he says, and laughs, too.

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Their friends know nothing, somehow. At this point, though, the friends are just blurs; he sees them to see her— which, in a way, he’d been doing all summer, hosting little parties in his basement on the off chance that she might make a drunken move one night. He gets in a friend’s car to go to a movie and she is there, in the back seat—waiting for him?

They laugh, talk; all bullshit, really. In the theater—like legions of adolescents before them, he thinks—they sneakily grope thighs and hips and knees. She gets up to piss. He could follow her, take her outside—why not, really?—but he stays seated: Russian spies get shot as he waits for her to come back.

They get dropped off separately, at their own houses.

She has asked for a night off; she says she is sore and wants to have enough stamina for the next two nights—their last until she drives away to college. His mother asks if he needs more socks.

He sends her a message before going to sleep: “Well, last night was better than that fucking movie.” She replies:“I don’t know, the movie’s ending was more satisfactory.”

His legs are straddling the seat divider in the back seat of his mom’s car; she sits on the seat below him, right

in the middle where a small child would go. This way his ass doesn’t slam into the front seats. It is too hot for car sex—this time they are parked in her neighbor’s driveway—but he is rather enjoying defiling his mother’s car like this, and there is nowhere else to go. They are slipping, squelching against each other, thirsty. But he is holding her legs apart, over and above her; he is, he thinks, really fucking her. She seems surprised, staring at him like he is a different man almost. He is proud— but only in response to her; he is proud of himself because she seems proud of him. Proud, not unlike a mother at a little league game would be: look at my little boy go! Look at him fuck me! look at what a man he’s become!

It is true that every time he has taken control, it has been because of her. But what’s so wrong with that? She gives him permission to want. When it is over, he is filled with a boyish thrill. “That was our best yet,” he tells her. “Well, you really fucked me,” she says.

“But why?”

“In eighth grade—no, I really shouldn’t tell you this.”

“Shut up.”

“In eighth grade, in the Caribbean, I was known—”

“Come on.”

“They called me the blowjob queen.”

“The blowjob queen?”

“Yeah. All these boys would ‘go out’ with me for two weeks just to get them. I’m not sure why I did it. There was

this one, Tommy, and you can drive there when you’re really young, and every morning he’d come and pick me up.”

“And you’d suck his dick as he drove. God.”

They are sopping, soaked, and it isn’t sexy or anything like that—it is time, really, to call it a night. But they are lying in the back seat. It is uncomfortable when their skin touches, just makes them hotter, but he doesn’t move. He is almost on top of her. “This is gross,” she says. He’s not sure why—or he tells himself he’s not sure why—but he pushes his dick right up against her thigh. He is almost laughing when he just almost gets inside her—he’s just fucking around, but she asks him if he wants it. Once it starts, though, he feels nothing, just more sweat pouring out of him. “Okay,” she says.

There is, he knows, nothing revolutionary, edgy, or surprising about a blowjob. Especially one received in a car—in a parent’s car no less. They are merely continuing an adolescent tradition, a parking lot tradition, a when-yourfolks-are-away tradition. But until now she has been so dodgy about it, saying things like I only do that for boys I love or I was raised to be too much of a feminist for that. So it is a bit of a victory, he feels, when, half kneeling, half leaning on the backseat, she inaugurates their place in the history of backseat blowjobs.

Two minutes in, she grazes him with her teeth. He almost doesn’t notice until she laughs a little shamefully and pulls herself away. “I didn’t even feel it,” he says as she apologizes. “I’m out of practice,” she says.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t feel much, just a kind of slurring ungrabbing wetness. What exactly do you do, anyway, 81

while getting your dick sucked? Run your fingers though her hair? Touch her arms? Try to grab onto a bobbing breast? He puts a hand on her head, loosely, then another. This seems too pornographic, but that is perhaps unavoidable. Perhaps under the pressure of his hands, she chokes a little: a girl just choked on my dick. How absurd, really, how unexpected and yet completely unremarkable. He pushes her head down further the next time. The most clichéd move there is, all those guys making girls gag in porn. Once with his friends he had watched a video of a girl actually puking because of that, being forced to puke really. Playful, lightheaded—there’s only one day left of all this—he does it again, harder, and she shoots her head up against him, coughing. “Sorry,” he says, as though it were out of his control. He drives home in his boxers.

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Joan’s Way Erik Jarvis

But what if she’d pinned him on the waterbed?

Not this time, Bill. Dangles needle in one hand, dangerous near waterbed, pops lipstick cap off in other hand, like champagne celebration of his Vitruvian helplnessness.

William, tell me why you need to be tied.

Smack.

Rips shirt open, with lipstick draws two red circles on his chest, one around the other, delicate apple sketched in the middle. I think there’s a bug, a worm in your apple, dear, Raises needle, Let me exterminate him.

4, 10, 14, 20 Clare Boerigter On my fourth birthday, I said goodbye to Saudi Arabia by rolling. I remember the blue carpet and how it overwhelmed the white-walled and now empty room, how Tommy and I floundered like beached fish against it despite both knowing how to swim. Mom made me a coconut cake and steak. We ate it outside waiting for the sky to darken. I could hear them talking in my living room, distant, and Tommy and I sat on the grass, combing our fingers through the stalks in search of smaller things. Laying back, the walls of the yard rising up, I felt his leg touching mine. He told me about America and how it was a place with strange animals called cows, which were a sort of camel but not. I listened, not frightened exactly but bewildered, trying to imagine being far away from me. Then he was done telling stories and even though it was my birthday, he sat on me and smudged a dandelion against my nose just to prove that he was still older.

We left Indiana two weeks before I turned ten. Mom cried when we drove away from the irises outside the garage, and I looked out the window as we made the familiar right-hand turn off my street. It was a funny thing to do, crying. We’d left two pennies in the cement where Dad had poured a new patio three summers ago: 1989 and 1991. I knew where the scratches were in my closet where I would go to hide and how it would feel to collect white paint under my fingernails, pinpricks of dazzling pain. When I rode in Dad’s moving truck, he

let me use the walkie-talkie, and Tommy and I told a winding story between the two U-Hauls until the batteries died. Callie sat between Dad and I, numbed, her ears low and back, her smile loose across her jaw. She put her long nose against my knee and I played with the soft fur around her eyes, wondering if this was how Mom felt brushing my hair on Sunday mornings. Dad asked me what it was like to be so close to double digits. I told him I wanted to be eleven because that’s the age Tommy told me when you start to know things. Callie sighed and I kissed the crown of her head, laying my cheek against hers for a moment, her hot breath filled with grass-and-dirtthings.

Three days before I was to turn fourteen, I sprawled on the hot rocky outcrop of our last campsite and looked up at the light through the oak leaves. My hair, thick with oil and stiffly malleable, smelled faintly of smoke and sunscreen. My skin had progressed to that point where dirt had begun to build its own little worlds, towered cities around my ankles, a lighthouse against my neck. I was alright with it. It was only a week but already I felt like I was taking on something more animal. My body leaned from days of nothing more than trail mix, apples and dehydrated pasta, while my muscles strained to paddle and portage. I heard my best friend singing as she pumped water into her dented Nalgene, and closing my eyes it felt as though the sun were melting against my face. It was a funny thing to realize then what time was doing to me. Indigo smacked the ground beside me, pressing the cool plastic bottle to my leg. “Drink.”

I spent my twentieth birthday waiting to cry. On the phone home, Dad talked to me rationally about options. He had this way of saying things that I wouldn’t, afraid of where they 83

might lead. When he asked if I wanted to drop out, I paused for a long moment, my fingernails biting into the skin below my knee. There was no simple answer to that. This place got into my bones. I wanted Arizona’s expanse of sky and time to watch the monsoons break from the tiered clouds and the kinetic canyons bringing to me the sense of motion in waiting. I remembered telling Travis that all you ever had to do was move fast enough over the rocks and you’d never have enough time to fall. But I had. I’d lost myself in the dust running down trails again and again, scrapping little mementos into my skin, taking a strange pride in my own blood and the grit I would wince to wash out later. Sometimes I felt like nothing more than a pair of eyes and inside I was hungry for more skies and mountains and dirt making powdery patterns on my hands. Away in California, Tommy told me to transfer, transfer now, like it needed to be done rapidly, like the switching at the junction of train tracks. He lured me over the phone with pictures of Claremont-McKenna’s hybrid campus and the promise of robust financial aid. I tried to tell him that moving to his coast wouldn’t solve my problems. Sitting on the grass, Dad waiting on the other end, I knew that leaving was easy. It was staying, it was waiting and letting all of the places fall away, that would always be hard. Later that night, I held my face together with my hand and Amanda told me that birthdays got to be like this when you were away from home. I shook my head, resting my arms gingerly against my lap and told her, “No, it doesn’t even feel like my birthday.”

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Waiting Room | Lea Greenberg | Collage

Santa Anita Grace Carroll Ruth Cassidy swung over the curb and into the driveway of 1240 Santa Rosa Ave., ripping a section of hedge right out of the scraggly front lawn as her Corvair screamed to a halt in front of the two-story house. It was 12:30pm. Time to go to the races. George, the pot-bellied corgi, had previous experience under the wheels of that Corvair and remained at a safe distance under the porch steps. Ruthie cranked down the window and poked her poodle-like head out, emitting a cloud of menthol smoke from the depths of the Corvair as she bellowed “DOOORA!” It was 1972 and, at age 70, Ruth was a cantankerous old beauty queen, with platinum tufts of hair and heavy odors of Chanel, a saleslady and bridge player. She proudly owned a white 1961 Corvair (which was recently ranked by “Time Magazine” as one of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time for its death-stick steering wheel shaft and slumping rear engine).

She bought the car for the glamorous red upholstered interior; however, after several years, thousands of cigarettes, and one-too-many ashtray fires, the car’s interior was worse for the wear. The buttons and knobs on the slumping dashboard were completely melted off, leaving behind a deformed Salvador Dali formation. The smoldering ashtray was never empty.

Ruth’s signature hairstyle, a Platinum Bubble, remained unchanged for decades. On Friday mornings her stylist set the Bubble, and for the next six nights of the week Ruth haphazardly wrapped her head in toilet paper before going to bed

to preserve the do. Without a girdle, heels, and red nails, she could not leave the house. She had rules. Bright blue eye shadow for special events. Kimberly Knit suits for work, and vodka gimlets for the races. Ruthie never missed a race. Santa Anita was her track, a sprawling complex, palm tree studded and set against the San Gabriel mountain range, demurely overlooking Los Angeles County.

Ruthie’s voice was deep and hairy from years of Kents and Virginia Slims, and certainly the most masculine aspect of her feminine physique. She often tried speaking in a falsetto to hide it.

“Doooora dear!” She sing-called.

Dora DePew lived down the street and, like many Catholic housewives at the time, was mother to nine children, which made her the perfect companion for strong happy hour drinks and long afternoon escapes to the tracks. As a post-Feminine Mystique philosophy, Ruthie believed vodka and horse racing were the best antidote to motherhood. Manically social, Ruth hated going to the races alone and was terrified of driving by herself, having only learned to maneuver an automobile after her husband died a few years earlier. And so, Dora and Ruth went to Santa Anita every afternoon from January till June.

Dora squeezed into the passenger seat, moving aside the stacks of newspapers Ruthie kept in the car. The entire back seat was covered in slipping piles of paper work and newspaper stacks. It was a mobile office for Ruth’s daytime advertising job. They set off to Santa Anita, smoking, cackling, and theorizing on the day’s race. It wasn’t until the intersection of Colorado and Allen that Dora noticed the smell.

“Ruth…I smell smoke.” The smell grew more astringent

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before she spoke again. “I smell smoke!”

“Nonsense, Dora.”

“Ruth, really—”

“Dora, I smell nothing.”

“Oh, but look! Your ashes are flying—”

“DORA I won’t hear another word. We’re almost there.”

“There is smoke coming from the back!”

Silence from the driver’s seat.

“We are on fire!”

More silence. Squinted eyes.

“Ruth, PULL OVER!”

“God damnit, Dora! Do you want to get to the races or not?” Ruth roared over the noise of the crackling paper flames behind them. Cigarette ashes had caught on the stacks of old newspapers filling the back of the car, smoldering and popping into small flames. Suddenly the car swerved off Colorado Blvd. and up to the Mobil gas station. Smoke billowed from the back windows of the Corvair as Ruth craned her neck out the window.

“Boy!” The gas station attendant hurried over, a pin-stripped high school senior.

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“Boy, is my car on fire?”

He paused. Customer care and service training hadn’t prepared him for this.

“Well, yes Ma’m, it is!”

Red nails reached for the clutch and Ruth shot the car into reverse.

“God damnit! God damnit, we can still make it to the races.”

Dora opened her mouth, but before she could protest Ruth shot her a crazed look, Virginia Slim dangling madly from the corner of her lips, stiletto grinding into the clutch. With a quick popping noise, the ashen piles of newspaper collapsed into a complete backseat fire. Flames licked up towards the upholstered roof. Santa Anita was only a few blocks away. The Corvair shot forward, swerved around the service boy and two open gas pumps, dark smoke clouding the rear window, as the car jumped back into traffic. Dora began her Hail Marys.

“Oh for God’s sake Dora, lets just get there and give the car to valet!”

They pulled into the parking lot with five minutes to go till the first race. Dora scrambled out of the car for her safety. Ruth jumped out to make it to the betting office in time. The valet was left with a flaming, melting, red and white Corvair. * Santa Anita still stands today in Arcadia, California, a gaunt survivor of the economic crisis, past it’s glory days but hoping for a comeback. It was at those tracks that, two years ago, my Uncle bought, trained, and raced Grandma Ruthie, a brown

and white thoroughbred, his first racehorse. So we went, as a family, to see the white-muzzled representation of our matriarch run one afternoon in early May. It’s not the brahs and hoorahs of the crowd or the quick drawl of the announcer that I remember so much as the terribly long, fragile legs of the horses, whose tendons and muscles bulged, stretched, and bunched over each incalculably delicate leg and anklebone.

We watched them sprint past again and again. The stands reeked of a past grandeur, of a fervor weakened by the blow of each decade.

I myself never met Ruthie, but that day my eyes stayed glued to that one little horse, proudly carrying a bright orange jockey, a large number four, and the name of my great grandmother.

Fancy Drinks Daniel Waite Penny “Heineken?!

Fuck Heineken— Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

-Frank What will become of my friends when PBR no longer becomes them?

Sometimes I see it in snatches, their youth already approaching the end of August; it evaporated one summer, poured out into tumblers, languishing in the long afternoon.

Now, the trees turn jaundiced with each nip of fall.

And the falls are certain: from grace, down stairs, off the wagon...

Don’t think me some hatchet-wielding Carrie Nation.

I’m not here to lay waste to the wasted, or those precious spirits laid out on the bar, (though lately, it seems nothing else animates you quite like a G&T).

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Rolling Slabs | Andy Delany | Silver gelatin print

Untitled | Colin Brooks | Silver gelatin print

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Hear Robert O’Connell Above a piano in summer, I see the sharp cords, Like needlepoints linked and fused, And the hammer knocking them three At once.

Front edges come Straight up in the sun.

Below a piano in winter, The chords curl and soak Through wood, Strained fat Cut with the pedal’s cold hiss When a slippered foot sinks it.

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Meditation Erik Jarvis Let me break this silence like shattering gourds, and bellow until my throat swells.

Take my prudence, my whispers, my woolen socks, and incinerate their fibers so that I may release the chatter from my soul.

Relieve me from my compass so that I may get lost in grocery stores and bookdust storms amongst the stacks. I do resist, but not like water droplets on candle wax. I do so from within.

I shout now so as not to sin.

After Reading Howl (Around Midnight) Daniel Waite Penny Who is he scribble-scrabbling for, this zombie of an author, this sad sack of bird bones— a thousand porcelain flutes whistling and buried under the blare of a thousand and one predecessors?

Who are his heros?

He counts them: in his head until he loses track, on his fingers and toes gnarled at an early age, and in the back of the Norton, so imperious and royal it should come with cape and crown (Scepter sold separately).

A blubbering white whale, the thought of hypothetical barbs keeps him at bay, automated rejections of such prestige like anchors in the mail.

Or perhaps, their gold leaf logos would arrive with little fan-fare or even interest, tossed in a pile of bills and J. Crew catalogues, sandy glass bottles bobbing in the foyer.

But in the midnight hour— the microwave blinks faster and he chokes on his own hyperbole.

Inhaling mahogany verse, the boy pines for the hot flames of madness like so many wanna-be’s before him.

Certainly, he would roam this great land, (which is your land and my land) combing over its surface and brushing aside its limp ropes of hair in the hopes of finding something meaningful— sans the sleepy lids of smug skullduggery— a kettle-bell of a white dwarf dense enough to withstand the smartest whips’ cloven-tongue-lashings and the minor shifts in fashion.

He decides: Behind a lover’s eyes and in the spines of books seems the best place to look for comfort.

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Contributors Chris ‎Barbey ‘12 There’s not much to say about Chris

Barbey: He tries to take photographs every day. It’s not very often that he succeeds, but it’s not really important, he usually gets the shots he needs.

Jackie‎ Blair ‘12 lights a sparkler everyday to watch how

a car’s tire but not a bike’s, and is majoring in Philosophy.

Michael Cole ‘12 is a Biology major from Livonia, MI. He discovered a passion for photography during his semester abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark during the fall of 2010. He also enjoys good food and good tennis.

Phoebe‎ Currier ‘12 is a Studio Art major from Minnesota.

the colored light illuminates your face.

Evangeline ‎ Dawson ‘14 doesn’t eat enough vegetables.

Lorraine Blatt ‘14 is a psychology/theatre double major

Andy Delany ‘13 likes darkrooms and darker rooms. And

from Hartford, Connecticut. She is honored to have her photographs in the company of all the ridiculously talented artists featured in this issue.

Clare‎ Boerigter ‘14 has given herself over to: banana

slugs, Borges, Big Brown Bats, Eveline, magical realism, Miéville, Darth Vader, a red-belted hotshot, García Márquez, elbows.

cats.

Harrison Fertig ‘12 is from Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. He

enjoys watching hockey, Beyoncé, and the great outdoors and thanks the Review staff for taking the time to publish his work.

Lea Greenberg ‘14 is a German major from Lawrence,

Colin Brooks ‘13 has green eyes and a right foot a half size bigger than his left.

Kansas. Lea credits her punny father with teaching her to piece together and play with words of different languages.

This time, she chose to use these skills to piece together paper.

Grace Carroll ‘12 is a Sociology major from Pasadena,

Erica Hauswald ‘12 is an English and French major from

California. She likes to look at things. And take her time. And notice small details. There are many, many things she finds beautiful.

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Tessa‎ Cheek ‘12 grew up in Colorado Springs, can change

Philly (the great, underappreciated city of America, which has birthed in her a defensiveness she will never quite get over).

She harbors a vast and endless love of potlucks.

Linnea‎ Hurst ‘15 occasionally succeeds at writing worthy things, but mostly just attempts to. She spends her time aspiring to be Liz Lemon, people watching at airports, and forcing Charis Russell to make her milkshakes in the D-hall.

Evan Hockett ‘12 is a Studio Art and Chinese major from

Abraham Kohrman ‘13 is a Bio major from Chicago. He

loves photography. His specialties are alt. process darkroom techniques and pinhole, but he mostly shoots portrait.

Andy Lange ‘13 is a Studio Art and German major from

Oklahoma.

Carroll, Iowa. Upon graduation Andy plans to pursue a graduate degree in architecture.

Iulia‎ Iordache ‘15 is Romanian, speaks fluent sarcasm

Lexy Leuszler ‘12 is a Neverland Player, born and raised.

Erik Jarvis ‘12 is a music major from Edmond, Oklahoma.

Clare Mao ‘14 is from Queens, New York. Her only

and people mistake her for a vampire sometimes. She plans on having a concentration in hipster studies.

The first poetry he remembers reading was Shel Silverstein.

He recommends investigating the poet Derrick C. Brown. He’d rather plant a poet tree than a bigot tree.

Samanea Karrfalt ‘14 has bad habits and good ones,

Usually one must go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of her stature.

ambition is to eat her way through life.

Grace Mendel ‘13 is from Monterey Massachusetts. She currently lives next to Sherlock Holmes in London, but is excited to get back to the cornfields for spring semester.

two.

Sara Kay ‘13 wants to live in a tree house. Let her know when you find one.

Ethan‎ Kenvarg ‘12 is from Boston, MA. He is delighted to

have his work accepted to the Review this year, and excited to be published alongside a number of other great artists.

Emily Mester ‘14 is majoring in American Cat Studies.

Paige Murphy ‘15 People seem to like me because I am

polite and I am rarely late. I like to eat ice cream and I really enjoy a nice pair of slacks.

Caleb Neubauer ‘13 might as well give up.

Clara‎ Kirkpatrick ‘14 is a History and Spanish major from Robert‎ O’Connell ‘12 is an English major from Kansas New York, New York. She takes after her artist parents and makes art often.

who likes sports and jazz.

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Drew Ohringer ‘14 is from Boston, MA. He writes fiction.

Daniel Waite Penny ‘13 is a smart alec and a no good jay-walker.

Zoe Schein ‘12 writes primarily in the genre of Nonfiction

Literary Complaining. She also has her own Grinnell Review: Positive.

Hannah ‎ Strom ‘13 started her photography career at age 8 by emptying a roll of her dad’s film on very distant chipmunks. It was a very expensive way to find out that chipmunks are not very photogenic.

Quinn Underriner ‘14 has never seen so many electric jellyfish in all his life!

Cassidy White ‘14 Sideways itch, acidity shews, daisy witches, wayside chit, sadistic whey, washy diestic.

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