IDK Magazine Issue 2 by IDK Magazine

ISSUE 2 autumn 2015

Nonfiction editor Dakota Garilli // @dakoter818

Fiction editor Sarah Cadence Hamm // @pimmscuppimpcup

Poetry editor

Kinsley Stocum // @kinsley17

Managing editor

Brittany Hailer // @brittanyhailer

Art

Genevieve Barbee // @APCollector

WEBSITE: FACEBOOK: TWITTER: INSTAGRAM: EMAIL/SUBMISSIONS:

idkmagazine.com facebook.com/idkmagazine @IDK_magazine @idkmagazine idkmagazine@gmail.com

Our mission revolves around the Millennial generation. We seek to publish emerging writers born between the years of 1980 and 1995, but we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to be ageistsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if you fall outside that bracket but are writing about the life and times of Generation Y, send us your work.

a letter from the editors

From: From:theebottom bottomofof our ourhearts hearts Things People Tell You That You Quickly Forget And Sometimes It Leads To Drinking: 1. He wasn’t a good boyfriend. 2. You should add roadside assistance to your car insurance policy. 3. Editing a literary journal is hard. It is nearly October. The ground outside is saturated with rain. My air conditioner sits dumbly. We huddle in a corner, cold, unfeeling, days since our last takeout delivery. Alright, so I’ve always been a little dramatic. Let’s just say this year has taught me a lot. The urgency of youth, the physics of longing, the importance of friends, and the futility of words. The weight of this moment, the fact that we can’t ever go back, how it feels to be spiraling forward hazardously. What it means to be hopeful. I’m trying not to be vague. We’re still Millennials. We gather at the bar and scroll through our news feeds while grumbling about social injustice. We triple-share selfies, #brandrelevance. We need sleep. We are very tired of Billy Collins. Through all of it, I’m grateful to still be standing among friends. We have some wonderful people here for you to meet. We hope you want to hold them. Our hands are open for your words. We hope you send them soon. We’ll be in the corner. Don’t worry, we’re listening — illuminated by the backlight of our phone screens. Sent from my iPhone Dakota Garilli, Nonfiction Editor and Digital Presence

I dunno why you’ve gotta come for Billy Collins but whatever. xoxo Kinsley Stocum, Poetry Editor

Table a noteofonContents Vaseline to my 13 year old self 7 9 11 14 15 17 29 31 34 39

The Gift of Forgetting kelly jones Negotiating Your Absence via Ghostbusters 1 & 2 krista cox Cotton Pickinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Mind nicole lourette tradition luther hughes a matter of body luther hughes Winter Wheat daniel lalley On Ending the Lives of Frogs jessica cogar Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re Only as Healthy as You Feel cortney charleston Teen Wolf adam atkinson Eastern Hop Hornbeam michael j. wilson

42 Notes on Contributors 45 Acknowledgements

kelly jones

The Gift of Forgetting WAKE UP 1989!

The problem with the past is that it lasts forever. Ten years from now I will still be lying on my bed trying to write this poem. My husband will still be sitting near me checking his email and watching video tutorials. Sometimes I get lost in the concept of time. Like how as soon as I type a word it is gone, but the next one comes and then the next and the next and eventually I realize the whole world is made up of little clicks, a chain of events that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist. The proof is in the reading, in the memory, in the passing on. Ten years ago I was drunk and driving myself and a lover home. I was concentrating on keeping the dotted lines to the left side of the car when he told me I love you. I kept driving straight and said great, letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s get married. He said fine, but only if we remove your legs so I can spin you around on my dick. We laughed then, got home, stumbled upstairs to my bed, passed out upon each other, and woke up tangled, the day almost over. I am not that girl anymore, but I will always be that girl. That lover is gone and my husband likes my legs the way they are. But when I hear the word spin my mind thinks of love. When I drive late at night the road blurs and I wonder if Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m still drunk.

krista cox

Negotiating Your Absence Via WAKE UP 1989! Ghostbusters 1 & 2

This is how it feels to save words for Wednesdays: it swells against my ribs, which are weak and tired of holding back a heart that is always straining to show its face. The best way to describe it, I think, is like a river beneath a city, rolling and churning like when I boil candy and I’m unsure if I’ve taken things too far again. Have you seen the pink slime McDonald’s puts in everything to bolster its bottom line? It’s like that, except if you bathe in it, you forget that Venkman skips past brown stone fountains and only remember that he electrocutes his carnal competition. This love is psychomagnotheric. I’m equal parts Dana drawing her bow across a page and Zuul panting for you while I hover in the in-between. I can’t even blame the Carpathian: possession often feels like the only way out.

nicole lourette

CottonWAKE Pickin’ UP Mind 1989!

My mother never picked cotton. She never knew the bite of an already bloody whip on her sun-scorched skin, black—from God and years of use. She was whipped plenty, her momma preferred an electrical cord dangling as if alive in one hand, half empty bottle of vodka in the other. My mother never knew the crazy that came from bending over prickly bushes Her fingers never scarred with wispy threads of raw leaves. She claimed to have Princess Feet, always soft and lotioned. My mother was never driven by a slaver. Never forced to fall in yield to his pursuit, open her legs in silence, remain silent. And yet, I am driving her out of her cotton pickin’ mind.

luther hughes

tradition WAKE UP 1989!

consider the movement of the lip. the way it lingers, hinged to the jawbone, pink, heavy against the chin, slender as it is slit into a stretched ‘m,’ how it curls into a slice of watermelon, all red wet, all let me get another slice of that nigga, a flit lick across the gums – fastened tongue and waiting, remember when slavery was a thing: hook-lipped and screams, how it rewinds itself when back flesh fissure furrow from shoulder blade to waistline, god splashed on the tip, releasing air, misshapen as it exhales.

luther hughes

a matter of body WAKE UP 1989!

there’s something to be said about – how the ruin in your lips are rosewood: how the color of his hands are cherry: how your hands are a ribbon of veins making the wrist: how your fingers churn when he is inside you: how your palm mottles: how your nails chip the neck of his shoulder. it’s natural – the making of wood – the smell of decay: how his head lumbers under pressure: how the scale of the spine makes you assume the vertebrae is ash; a brown or pale, a straight grain, curly – how he is able to mold you into figurine: how your hips whine and whither. you tell him to work slowly as he saws at the small of your back – how his cherry hands splinter your waistline into thirds: how he frames your ribs: how he likes to see the scorn in your face; in the way the body finishes – how flesh consumes blood: how bone carves through the skin: how he is able to veneer what is left of your body: how your body shrinks into a petal of dust.

daniel lalley

Winter WAKE UPWheat 1989!

The first time I really met Ray, he helped me pick out patio carpeting at Ace Hardware, where he worked part time on the sales floor. Before that, he was just a flashing shadow of my childhood; someone I wouldn’t know if not for my brother, who caught the word one pale July morning about a Playboy Ray found on the floorboard of his father’s cinderblock-stilted Bellaire and was selling firstcome, first-serve out of his backyard. Between the two of us, we pooled ten dollars and snuck away from my grandmother’s supervision to purchase the magazine, which turned out to be backlogged by seven years and missing most of the good stuff. It consisted of little more than cigarette ads, anecdotes that eluded us by about three seminal years, and the pulpy strips near the binding which once extended to foldouts we could only imagine. And though it served as little more than a trophy– a hard-won breach we snuck beneath the baseboards of my grandmother’s storage shed— it seemed well worth the hour and a half spent riding the longhorn handlebars of my brother’s Roadmaster. I don’t remember much from that first encounter, perhaps because my attention hinged on what was tucked in Ray’s waistband as he walked casual and shirtless to the corner of his chain link fence. I remember exchanging rumors on the trek to his house: that he smoked cigarettes, that he’d been suspended from seventh grade for bringing condoms to school. I remember he had a neat threeinch scar at the point of his sternum, which he supposedly carved himself with a pocketknife out of plain curiosity for what it felt like to come unzipped. Beyond that, he was more of a childhood legend than anyone real; the exchange having been so abrupt and rushed that as we stood, nearly two decades later, discussing weave options and fiber grades, neither of us felt we had the right to rehash that sticky July afternoon. “What kind of brick pattern you got out there,” he asked, pulling a small swatch album from behind the paint counter. “The door’s no problem, but you’re gonna want something that compliments the exterior walls.” He opened the binder to the weatherproof flooring and Astroturf file—a four-page mosaic of stone-colored samples. “Since it’s going to be semi-exposed,” he explained, “you’re gonna need one of these with the marine backing, for moisture resistance. They’re easy to clean and pretty much fade resistant for about seven to ten years. Feel how thick these fibers are. Almost completely unfazed by UV.”

I set my thumb against a beige sample called Winter Wheat. The pattern was light and unassuming— a refreshing contrast to the scab-colored stuff that’d been splayed on my grandmother’s back porch for the last fifteen years. “That one’s actually our best seller,” he said, admiring the swatch as if he were being sold on it himself. “From a ways off it almost looks like Gravel-Lok or sandstone. Most don’t realize how far they’ve come with this stuff since the seventies and eighties. You really don’t have to live with that one-dimensional green-turf carpet anymore.” He stood a bit eager-eyed as I thumbed through the remaining samples in the binder. When I finally decided on Winter Wheat, he continued to pitch it with so much zeal and expertise it made me wonder if he employed the same enthusiasm, years earlier, on the day he sold my brother and I on the Playboy. Now this is a nineteen ninety-one edition, as you can tell by the way the tits are inflated to a firm swell and there’s just the shadow of bush over the pubic region. These days Hugh prefers a more natural “girl next door” bust and a clean shave for the bunnies. Most don’t realize how far these magazines have come since the seventies and eighties. Before we hit the register, he led me into a white lit employees-only dock that smelled like sawdust and the inside of a new car. Behind a row of wooden pallets rested giant spools of the carpeting featured in the swatch album, and right in the middle of the last reel was the tight-wound roll of Winter Wheat. Ray threw it effortlessly over the slick, urethane-sealed cement. “Go ahead, take your shoes off,” he said. “It’s new carpet; it’s like a warm bed.” I hesitated for a moment, but I felt obliged to walk out of my shoes and stand tentatively at the end of the carpet roll. The pattern looked a lot simpler in the expanse of its full form and the carpet felt rough and sticky through my socks. “It feels pretty good,” I said, tracing a small arch with the toe of my foot. “I told you,” he replied, dropping to the ground and wrenching off his tight-laced Carolinas. He stepped onto the rug, hiking up on the balls of his feet, and sort of pulsated for a moment. “For an outdoor set up, I don’t think we have anything more forgiving. If you have your measurements, I can go ahead and cut it for you. Do you have everything to install it with? You’re gonna need some carpet shears, you know. Some seam adhesive, solvent, doubled faced tape, a utility knife, all that stuff, not to mention a fifty pound roller. I can rent that to you if you’d like. You know, if you want to do this the right way. Hell, I could come over and help you lay the stuff, if this is your first time doing this

type of thing DIY.” He paused for a moment, rubbing briskly at a small patch of stubble on his neck. “Notched adhesive spreader, straight edge, tape measure,” he said, at a near whisper. “I can give you hand with it, if you want. You’re still over there off Warren?” “Sure,” I said, conceding the bluff. *** My grandmother’s house was the last one built on a tar-webbed street in a working-class neighborhood. The first four blocks, constructed in the early forties, were now a broken file of gutted ranches, outlining the pigeon-colored network of roads running from Bowie Lane to Bonham Drive. The whole neighborhood was named in this “remember the Alamo” fashion, the last of these streets being Warren Lane, where my grandparents settled down at the tail end of the fifties. Like many of these suburban outfits, the neighborhood played tit-for-tat with the local economy, and when the red bricks and stucco-smothered expanse of chain restaurants and department stores sprung up, the money moved out and the “For Rent” signs appeared. Forget the Alamo. It was only the martyr-grade idealistic who stayed behind to watch their property values bottom out along with the neighborhood itself. Among those left in the wake of this new style of suburban compulsion were my grandparents, who still believed in the integrity of solid hardwood structures and anything bought with upfront cash transactions, no mortgage, on a World War II veteran’s incentive. My grandfather took two mortar rounds and a mild case of sandfly fever in North Africa to qualify for this little corner of the world–neighborhood fallout and property values be damned. And when wide-gauged Camels and a diet consisting almost entirely of red meat and Wild Turkey had done what the Axis Powers had failed to, the house and daily battle to keep it from the plight of a declining neighborhood became my grandmother’s. Once she’d been laid up in a nursing home, the house stood as precarious as the chip-boarded structures that studded the neighborhood like broken teeth. The St. Augustine lawn, the twin downy birches, it all began to take on the dead, straw-like quality of the surrounding neglect. The tenants of the other residences never got any better, the crime rate never froze, and with the government keeping a keen eye on the property they had once so charitably afforded my grandparents, any sale of the house was on hold. At least, until my grandmother was gone for good. I suppose I felt obliged to pick up the battle where she left off two years prior. Having just

graduated from college with no job, plans, and an entire summer between myself and the real world, I decided it was a better option to return to the Alamo and fight the good fight, rather than waste to a husk on my parents’ spring-shot La-Z-Boy. I approached the effort with verve. I had no direction and knew nothing in the way of DIY home improvement, but I was teetering on some obscure edge, and it just occurred to me to rescue something. *** My grandmother’s doorbell was one of those tri-toned numbers that seems to jam around the house long after it’s pressed. I remember waking up to the tremor of the last and deepest tone feeling as if I’d heard the whole bar. I’d taken up residence in my mother’s old bedroom, which, after a futile estate sale, was littered with corner-worn banker’s boxes and antique crystal wrapped in old newspaper and strewn around the room. This was my world. Outside the dew had burned off and the sun was already taking its cut of the lawn. My head was squeaky from a night of drinking and to glance outside obscured my vision with dancing phosphate ribbons. Ray, standing on the balls of his feet, wanted to know exactly why it had taken four knocks and a bell just to get me between the jamb. He smoked a menthol cigarette, pinching the hotboxed filter between two knuckles on his right hand and looking for a place to ditch it. “If we’re going to do this, we might as well get a decent jump before the sun really hits home,” he said, spitting in his palm and closing a trembling fist over the butt. “I’ll assume by the absence of a receptacle and what appears to be unspoiled, ballet-white top coating behind you that your grandmother isn’t a smoker. I hope this isn’t going to be a problem.” After inspecting the butt for traces of ember, he flicked it in a neat arc to the curb where his rust-scattered F150 sat, still idling and burping out thick loafs of exhaust. The long cut of carpet I purchased the day before protruded cannon-like from the bed along with an attaché case and various tools, not all of which I thought we’d need for the job. “Why don’t you give me a hand real quick, so we can get this stuff inside before someone makes a yard sale out of it. It’s not that we have a lot to haul, I just don’t feel comfortable leaving all my shit out in the street. You know, at least in this neighborhood.” ***

Despite the arsenal of tools and strange sense of permanence involved in laying a new section of carpet, there isn’t much to the actual task itself. Having already removed and relocated my grandmother’s potted bleeding heart perennial collection the day before, we had little more to do than a quick cut and paste before we found ourselves standing sweat-sheathed and akimbo in front of a job impossibly well done. Ray, shirtless and toeing the line between breathing and panting, scanned the porch with an expression of borderline disappointment. His eyes, which sat larvae-like and transparent behind a slanted brow, hovered in a calculated assessment of not only the back porch, but everything extending from it. When I went for the perennials, which I’d arranged around the border of the storage shed, he grabbed me by the shoulder. “Not yet,” he said, spinning me to face the porch. “We’re gonna need to wait at least a couple hours for the adhesive to set before we start kicking around on that stuff.” He walked slowly to the awning and stretched an arm high into the wrought iron framework. “You know, you could just as easily hang those planters onto the lattice work right here and save yourself some deck space. I mean, you’re not married to the idea of this porch garden I hope, because I could see this becoming a decent entertaining area. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he mused, spinning around the framework in a languid vaudevillian swoop. As he stretched further into his pose, his wingspan thinned to a stringy limit that made his biceps look more like plaque on bone than muscle. “The bricking around this porch could stand a color wash. With this new rug I could see crimson or robin’s egg blue being viable options, depending on what kind of mood you’re trying to set. We could throw up a wicker patio set, get some tiki torches, one of those mosquito-repelling candles, a deck of cards, beer cooler. You have an imagination, right?” He paused, and swung again to face the patio. If this were a musical, the percussion would’ve kicked in. “Maybe an outdoor sectional, too. I think we have the room here.” He slid over to me and put a filmy red arm around my shoulder. He pulled a cigarette from behind his ear, lit it, and drew a deep, satiated breath, drinking in ten square feet of possibilities. His paunchy stomach ran away from his rib cage. The scar on his chest was the size of a forefinger. *** I was the guy he’d been telling her about. The girl extended a rigid, all-business hand to me and said only, “pleasure.” She was as tight-skinned as a storefront mannequin and about a deviation

smaller, wearing a baggy white t-shirt that read “CAPE COD USA” across the chest and a pair of light-washed daisy dukes. Her hair was the color of a coffee ring, billowing out of a backwards denim ball cap and framing her thin, unmade face like a baroque mirror. Milling around beside her was a skunk-colored border collie who seemed to be searching for something in the grass. Neither Ray nor the girl, whose name was Dee Dee, acknowledged its presence. I found the both of them attempting to guide Ray’s truck into the backyard just a few days after we installed the carpet. I watched from the stair of the newly carpeted porch as they communicated silently in the small display of Ray’s left rearview mirror. She seemed to be taking the job a bit more seriously than he was. In the bed of the truck were cardboard boxes packed from the cab to the tailgate, and stacked so expertly that not one bit of the rust-caked lining was visible. There were no pictures on the boxes, but they all indicated which end was up, and only about half of them were in compliance. Ray popped out of the cab, clutching a blue plastic cooler in his right hand, and extended to me a cold bottle of Budweiser. The girl only spoke when spoken to, but had no qualms about taking Ray aside for a quiet huddle out of earshot. She looked at both the dog and me before whispering into Ray’s ear and lurching forward to shake my hand. “So get this,” Ray said, swinging the cooler onto the pile of boxes. “The god damn warehouse log, you know the inventory ledger? Well, these guys have a right hand and a left, and they may as well be on two different bodies.” He winked at the girl, prompting her to coil slightly with an affected smirk. “Anyway, we’re gonna realize this patio project today. And don’t you give it a second thought, because this,” he said, slapping thunder into the ledge of the truck bed, “is gratis.” In all, the boxes were probably worth a felony case of merchandise larceny. An entire patio set complete with a four-piece Caribbean lounge collection, glass-top wicker coffee table, Bahama Breeze bamboo ceiling fan, even a hemp twine hammock, were unpacked, assembled, and arranged under the meticulous feng shui counsel Dee Dee whispered into Ray’s eager ear. When completed, the setup dwarfed and outshot the modest and function-oriented design of the patio in a way that was both arrogant and borderline comical. Even the hanging bleeding hearts, which I fought a silent and unwavering Dee Dee tooth and nail to keep, seemed out of place against the waxy, low-gloss luster of the new furniture. “And I will sell you on the pièce de résistance,” Ray exclaimed, reaching into the cab of his pickup and removing a small box. “A little house-warming gift from the both of us,” he said, sliding

away the birch lid to reveal a shiny ceramic ashtray with bold Helvetica script: SEE YOU IN HELL. He placed the piece gently in the center of the coffee table and took several steps back to admire his vision incarnate. *** That night we stayed out on the patio enjoying one Budweiser after the other and dreaming up the next phase of the project that was quickly becoming more Ray’s than mine. Even Dee Dee, who sat curled like a housecat on the short end of the sectional, put a few cents in here and there as it might pertain to the polarity and gravitational chi of the design in question. “All I can say for damn sure,” Ray drawled, stubbing out his cigarette and removing another from the pack, “is that we oughta do something about this lawn. I can have some fertilizer out here in the next couple of days; hell, I can probably get a hold of sod too.” With his silver Zippo, he cracked a glossy flame over the cigarette, casting an orange glow on his face, which was the color of cheap cold cuts. I asked him if he didn’t feel like he should lay low for a while, having already pilfered enough merchandise to draw suspicious eyes. “If we’re gonna make a go of this,” he said, winking casually in Dee Dee’s direction. “I’d sure as hell like to do it the right way, and I sure as hell wish you’d have a little faith.” If there was a part of me that wanted to believe in him, it never counted on making the type of “go” at it that Ray had envisioned since that first morning. Within a matter of weeks the house was beset with more fixtures than I cared to accept - some of them being friends or “colleagues”, as Ray liked to call them, who each seemed to have an immediate stake in the project upon their introductions. Once the patio was complete, Ray got the ball rolling on an eight-foot spruce-paneled privacy fence; a must, he explained, if we were planning on doing any decent entertaining in this neighborhood. The sod came in the next day, and was laid with the help of a dead-eyed and hook-shaped guy who introduced himself as Danny the Roach and took up near-permanent residence in the hammock once the job was finished. More and more boxes came and went, most of which were stored in the living room and never even considered for our particular project. Calls were put in to have a small slab of cement poured where Ray planned to install a miniature tiki bar with a palm thatch umbrella. A kidney-shaped inground pool was discussed at length on more than one occasion. One day I came outside to discover a thirty-two inch plasma television mounted to the wall

under the patio. It was rigged for cable just in time for Shark Week, and when I heard the shrieks of a waylaid surfer, I dashed out to see if that dog hadn’t finally found what it was looking for. I threw open the screen door and found Dee Dee with a meaty, sweat-broken stranger sitting together on the sectional as stiff and rigid as sphinx statues. The air was still buzzing with panic and accelerated breathing. “This is Junior,” Dee Dee coughed, grabbing for the remote. “He was able to get us hooked up to cable.” The guy smiled, raising a pudgy mitt and told me not to worry; there’d be no bills for this service. Eventually, encounters like these became more common. The characters came and went. Some of them stuck around longer than others, but each contribution was explicitly free of charge. As long as I didn’t ask any questions or lock the gate on anyone, I had no bills coming. *** As the summer wore on, progress on the house slowed considerably, though the steady flow of strangers hadn’t stopped. My grandmother’s backyard had turned into a refuge for every rogue fuckoff in Ray’s address book, and my attempts to talk to him about calling the whole thing off were met with his own passive-aggressive brand of hostility. “I’m not sure what your concern is,” he moaned one night, lying in the hammock half drunk and staring at a star-lepered sky. “Haven’t I come through with this shit? I mean, look around.” The next day I found him and a handful of his colleagues knee-deep into the fresh sod. They wielded round-point torque shovels, tossing top soil in loose mounds along the storage shed. Dee Dee stood hip-shot over the crater, clutching a large schematic and directing their blows against the ironlogged earth. All at once, the crew spotted me standing there in the patio and paused. “What do you think,” Dee Dee asked, lowering the chart. “We’re going to finish it just like we planned all along. We know enough people who know what they’re doing.” The crew nodded silently before heaving their spades into the dirt, and Ray, tracking the back of his hand across his brow, just stood there staring at me with a face both confident and disappointed. He only stood there for a second though, before he stabbed back into the hole. ***

The last night I saw Ray, the air was heavy. A summer squall was blowing in from the coast, and the wind was coming fast and hard, legato sheets shrieking through trembling branches. The hole in my grandmother’s backyard sat gaping like an open sore, and when the rain fell the gouged dirt turned the air so tinny and mineral-charged I could taste it. I’d heard from Ray only sporadically since the digging stopped. His calls became more infrequent as the weeks passed, and soon the only communication I had with him was through Dee Dee and a handful of lackeys who assured me he would be back to finish the pool as soon as he had a moment. “It’s been tougher than we thought to get our hands on some of the gear,” said Danny the Roach, who was, by that time, turning yolky-eyed and swollen from a steady diet of UV and alcohol. “We’re gonna be delayed a bit longer than we planned, but we haven’t lost sight.” We were sitting on the patio as rain chewed on the dirt mounds and melted them into the fresh sod when I got the call from Ray. He sounded out of breath and wanted to know if I wouldn’t mind throwing open the goddamn gate for him, quick. “I’m in my truck right outside the fence,” he said, breathing pins and needles into the receiver. “I’ve got my lights off, so stand clear when you get it open. I need in fast.” When I threw the latch, his truck barreled in, spinning out in the viscid puddles that had shot up almost instantly once the storm broke. The entire backyard was taking on water at a dangerous rate. By the time we found the patio our ankles were covered and sinking fast. “God damn,” Ray said, pointing to Danny with a small red box he gripped under white knuckles. “You did remember to perforate this shit?” “I lit it up,” he replied, looking out in disbelief. “We’re having drainage problems somewhere or else the stuff just isn’t breakin’ in right.” Thunder cracked overhead. We all stood there for a moment watching the yard swell as jagged torrents broke off and slammed against the fence and white-chipped siding of the house. “I need to show you something,” Ray said, clutching the red rectangular box and trying to power the patio TV. Blue static raged against the screen and washed out the porch in a pale, frenzied hue. When the sky opened up and threw lightning across the street, everything went black and we stood silent against an indigo skyline. The thunder continued in a deep even rhythm, shaking the walls of the house and seeming to rise up from the ground. I only realized it wasn’t coming from the storm when it didn’t stop.

“Just hang on a second,” I whispered, opening the backdoor and listening into the rung darkness. “Just stay where you are.” I closed the door and felt my way through the kitchen and into the living room. The house had become unfamiliar with towers of stacked boxes, and besides the glints of sheet lightning coming in through the windows, I couldn’t see anything. The pounding was the only thing guiding me, and as I crept closer I heard the faint ebbs and swells of a hushed argument in the emptiness between knocks. “You can’t put your hands on anyone,” I heard a man say in low, composed voice. By the time I reached the door it seemed as if there were two hands knocking at once, belonging to two people with vast differences in their ideas of assertiveness. When I opened the door the rain blew in with a hard wind. In the jamb, a curt, pock-marked woman stood with one hand against the frame and another on her hip beside her service revolver. To her right, an officer in a blue nylon rain jacket fought against a beet-faced man whose veins hung around his neck like a wound noose. While he shouted something about getting his hands on a certain inbred motherfucker, his chin dug into the officer’s left shoulder. “I’ll go ahead and assume this is your place,” the woman said, producing a creased letter wrought with boilerplate and blue ink. The two men continued to struggle as a small car careened to a stop against the curb. The officer explained she had a search warrant issued on the grounds of grand larceny, construction without a building permit, and unlawful conduct toward a child. “How old did you think she was,” the man hissed, wedging an arm between his face and the officer’s slick neck. “And we have surveillance accounts for everything you took,” wheezed the struggling officer. “We’re reviewing for more as we speak.” A knock-kneed woman emerged from the car and came running to the door, coat draped over her head. Her rouge-caked face was running down to her shirt collar, and her lips revealed a few broken teeth when she spoke. “Where is he?” she asked. She seemed to recognize the man ensnared with the officer and began beating open fists on both of them, screaming something about her son and his misunderstood intentions. Something about a heart condition. She said she was sorry and wrapped herself around the men. When the female officer put a sleeper hold around her throat, she fell to her knees and began pleading again. “He’s sick,” she said, falling under the officer’s weight. “You’ll kill him!”

Something snapped on the other side of the house and the power came back with a hum. The male officer choked into his chest radio, requesting backup. When I caught the filmy eyes of the subdued woman, I felt sick and turned away. I backed into the house, bolted the door, and ran. In the backyard they stood before a blank, blue-lit screen. Ray opened the red box and pulled out a VHS tape. He looked at Dee Dee, then back to me. “I’m in a video,” he said, kneeling into the entertainment system. He pushed the tape in and stood back, taking Dee Dee’s hand. He said something else but it was lost in a clap of thunder. “What,” I asked, as bright, halogen light began to flood through the cracks between the fence posts. “I think it’s this one.”

jessica cogar

On Ending Lives of Frogs WAKEthe UP 1989!

Recoil of a .45, my lip is split by black steel and my father is laughing. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m in a cathedral and everything here is made of glass. I spit a tooth into my hand and climb inside the belled stemware. This is the way to West Virginia, to a town where everyone has my last name. He tells me time moves backwards when you travel by freeway. He is pulling stitches from his fore arm with his teeth, the same way he pulls the smoke from a joint as he hangs a row of raccoons by their tails, their mouths hanging open to be cured by the air. My father is laughing. I swallow my tooth. The carcass of a bullfrog rises to the pondâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surface.

cortney charleston

You’re Only as Healthy as You Feel WAKE UP 1989!

This is how it should be done: place the pistol, loaded, in the nightstand nearest where the last letter of the alphabet repeats itself. In the same drawer, set a stolen hotel Bible: the New International Version. In the event of bodies colliding in a fender-bender, stow away some condoms that can survive the tread of a hunger pang. It might even be worth it to stash a notepad and pen there if you’re a sensitive type, find yourself always at the tipping point like a bottle full of tequila. Don’t forget the pills, either. Hold those within reach of a gasp for air – pop them all, watch the lines blur and black swallow every other color like a ghetto music. Have a dog around, too. A big dog with a mouth the size of a city, teeth jagged as a skyline’s tracing. Two dogs, even. Two big ones. Think about Pit bulls, Rottweilers. Don’t bank large sums of money in the house; it’s trite and the back can’t cope with that kind of mattress anyhow. Before hitting the sack for good, make sure the house is empty, except for the dogs, of course. Check to see if the gun is resting safely in the nightstand drawer. there, check inside your mouth, by the dogs’ water dish, maybe under

If not

the toilet hood. Lock all your doors and windows tight. Keep light on in the hallway to scare away any dark figures. Pour yourself a glass of ice cold water, and bring it bedside. Read scripture and pray. Add several milligrams to make it happen faster, maybe not wake up too sore, back due for a good massage. Remember to put on a rubber before the night consumes you, in case a blessing comes in your sleep.

adam atkinson

Teen Wolf In The Subway – For John Bartlett I watch Teen Wolf on cable in the third grade. I make my mother record it with our VHS player the next time it comes on and watch it a couple dozen times that year. Michael J. Fox stars as Scott, the eponymous beast-boy, delivering a performance in his signature style: a powder keg of wit and nerdy charisma, awkwardly scrambling for a match. He has a real hold on me. I want to give him the match, or I want to be the match. This time, the muzzles on his innate elegance are his suddenly emergent lycanthropy and a budding attraction to a childhood friend. Not long after he learns about his family’s secret abilities, so does the whole town. His wolf self, which Scott can manifest at any moment, is much better at basketball than his human self, so everybody is pretty into it. *** Just before his private animal goes very public on the b-ball court, Scott comes out to his best friend Stiles, who immediately senses the implications of Scott’s pained delivery. Look, I wouldn’t even mention it to you, except I gotta talk to someone. Stiles stands alert and declares: Are you gonna tell me you’re a fag? Because if you’re gonna tell me you’re a fag, I don’t think I can deal with it. Scott physically backpedals, emotionally recoils, laughs. I’m not a fag! I’m a…werewolf. A few boys at school, older ones mostly, have started calling me a fag. I think about how it would go, saying this in reply, but I never work up the nerve. *** Every time I watch the movie, my mother covers my eyes with her hand so I won’t see a girl take her clothes off. I think, One day the hand will lift, I will see the girl, and I will be a man. A big reveal. I see the poster for the movie in the video rental store for the first time, and Michael J. Fox has fur pouring out of his collar and sleeves. He is ripping his shirt apart to show it off. This is a man, or he’s almost there. My father is covered in thick, curly hair, too, so it must be how it happens. One day you are bad at basketball, the next you are covered in hair and the girls take their clothes off. My father takes grooming very seriously. When he gets home from work he is sweaty and smelly from crossing

ravines and climbing hills all day. To get ready for his night job, he showers and colognes and unbuttons his polo shirt to show some chest hair and brushes his moustache and the hair on his head for maybe an hour. He brushes my hair too. He drops me off at dancing school and argues with the ballet teacher about how the dance I am in is too girly. It’s the storm song from Disney’s Bambi, and I have a big, feathered bird mask on. I represent the storm, and I scare all the girls who dance around like deer and rabbits. I can tell from my father’s frustration that these are the wrong kinds of animals. I’m not a fag. I’m a werewolf. *** In middle school, I see a book at the school bookfair that reminds me of the Teen Wolf poster. A boy is turning into an animal, growing fur, and the cover illustrates five phases of the transformation. I try to buy it covertly, but some boys catch me and laugh. The book is from a young-adult science fiction series called Animorphs, and I buy and read all of the installments that are out there. The young protagonists of the series are bestowed with the gift of transforming into any animal they encounter, touch, and bond themselves to. A dying, crash-landed alien passes on this ability as a means to protect Earth from the evil alien race—the Yeerks—that have destroyed his own people. The Yeerks slither their way into the brains of other beings and inhabit their bodies, memories, and lives—Body Snatchers style. The Yeerks disguise themselves as you. You disguise yourself as not you. As an animal. The art of the sneak attack is to be invisible, and what is less visible than an animal on a planet ruled by humans? Animals are landscape. *** My first wet dream is about me becoming a werewolf. The way penises move during ejaculation, I was certain something was wrong with my body. Less certain that when my mother lifted her hand, the right things would happen. ***

Jake, the leader of the new teen protectors known as the Animorphs, is pictured on the cover of Animorphs #21: The Threat. He is absolutely gorgeous, and he is also turning into a dog. Jake is sort of hero-worshiped by Tobias, the bullied nerd that Jake sometimes protects. Tobias gets stuck in hawk form, which is pretty heartbreaking. When any of them transform, there is a time limit. They risk staying in animal form forever when they near the limit. Tobias lost his parents and lives with a distant uncle, so when he screws up and gets stuck as a hawk, he gradually comes to prefer this new life. Yep, pretty sad. But also sort of a relief for me because it seems to kill off any sexual possibility for Tobias, with whom I feel so much kinship, despite my very alive and loving parents. Everything remains safe and elusive with Tobias as a hawk, allegorical enough to overlook. Years later, Taco Bell sells a toy Tobias hawk with a tiny yellow human soul inside it. At about the same time, in the books, Tobias starts to fall for a (female) hawk. Animals are landscape, until they aren’t. *** The tagline for The Threat is “The newest Animorph has a secret. And it’s not good…” *** I feel deep shame for enjoying the books. I believe this is because my father has been assigning me canonical titles since the first grade, when I read and loved Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. This is low art, this Animorphs. But those boys who laughed at me when I bought Animorphs at the school bookfair, they weren’t deriding me for intellectually slumming it. My taste in books seems to reveal something about me to others that I can’t place, though of course I sort of can. When my father walks into my room without knocking, I throw the book across the room as though it’s a porno mag, which is more incriminating than anything. *** Jake’s brother is a Yeerk from the onset, and later Jake learns that his parents are Yeerks, too. A whole family, closing in on him.

*** Mixed in with my growing fantasies about boys are fantasies about running away. I am forced to run away, in the fantasy, by my transforming body. I am becoming a monkey boy, or a lion boy, what else can I do but steal away in the night, hide in the forests of the Appalachian Mountains, cross ravines, climb hillsides, and let my hair grow out? When I am 14, I draw a picture of a monkey boy with a bindle and a map to the wooded hills across the Allegheny, to a life of invisibility as an animal in a world dominated by humans. My mother finds it and is confused but knows enough to cry. *** Very late in the series, Tobias’ ability to morph is restored, but his homebase form is the hawk now, not the human. He can become a human when he must, but he still has to mind the time limit. He minds it well this time, because he really identifies as a hawk and would hate to be stuck a human. There’s something else inside the little yellow soul, I think. *** In high school, after jerking off, I practice whispering to myself, “I’m gay, I’m gay, I’m gay,” just to see what I make of it. Does it have the ring of truth. Only for a few minutes, or else it’s real forever.

michael j. wilson

Eastern WAKE Hop Hornbeam UP 1989!

Elder forests that no longer exist : loom in history : are dark are green are : my mind fills with kudzu : make mush of my thoughts : I attempt to imagine a dark continent : I bead myself : attempt virgin wood : Here is a shore draped with long leaves shaded blue : Here is black noiselessness : A clearing somewhere maybe : I stack my thoughts : a necklace : totems : flavors : This Eastern Hornbeam : slow moving : Ostrya â&#x20AC;&#x201C; bone-like : the removal of bones : Imagine lower Manhattan as bare as a glacier : I will wait for you to clear the ground : wait for you to ease your hesitation of being responsible for clearing that ground : Now

imagine it all too thick to enter : almost : almost more an oyster tonguing a secret dark pearl : darker than night : the crack of the shell : the opening mouth : it is a secret a might : it is the smell of moss and of thick limbs : it is blacker than pitch :

Now it opens itself : Slowly : I hang my dark America on the thought of that moment : when the first space was suddenly there : that is easy to imagine : It is the peeling of a bandage :

Adam Atkinson is an Instructor of Creative Writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts and a doctoral student in queer poetics at University of Utah. Originally from Pittsburgh and 1/6 of the poetry collective Line Assembly, his work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Caketrain, Dreginald, and elsewhere. Cortney Lamar Charleston lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is a Cave Canem fellow, an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania’s performance poetry collective, The Excelano Project, and a founder of BLACK PANTONE, an inclusive digital cataloging of black identity. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Eleven Eleven, Folio, Juked, The Normal School, pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Rattle and elsewhere.

Jessica Cogar is a recent graduate of Ohio Northern University’s undergraduate creative writing program. This fall she starts graduate work in creative writing at Ohio University, where she teaches composition. Her poetry has been published in small po[r]tions, Sun and Sandstone, Cactus Heart and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Crab Fat Magazine and Scapegoat Review. Luther Hughes was born in Seattle, Washington, but currently lives in Chicago where he is pursuing his B.A. in poetry at Columbia College Chicago. He currently curates, “Shade,” a literary blog for queer writers of color. In addition, he organizes, “White Noise,” a poetry reading series, in the South Loop area in Chicago. Luther’s works have been published or are forthcoming in Word Riot, Muzzle, About Place Journal, Good Men Project, Toe Good Poetry, and others. Tweet him @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful. Kelly Jones works and plays in New Orleans, LA & in Durham, NC. A good deal of her adult life has been devoted to earning pieces of papers that verify her knowledge of things (resulting in an MFA in

Notes on Contributors

Krista Cox can be found in Indiana, where she lives with two precious patience-testers (children) and works with three of them (lawyers). Her poetry has recently appeared in Stirring, Words Dance, cahoodaloodaling, Rogue Agent, and Menacing Hedge, and she was the recipient of the Lester M. Wolfson Student Award in Poetry in 2015. Her OKCupid profile is a work of creative literary genius. Find her on the web at kristacox.me.

Poetry and a BA in Literature and Social Justice). She is terribly fond of manatees, glitter, Wild Turkey, and bad dancing. In her spare time she runs The Gambler Mag, consumes copious amounts of coffee, goes on walks with her dog, and tries to come to terms with the concept of infinity. Daniel Lalley is from Hewitt, Texas and currently lives in San Francisco, California, where he is completing his master’s in writing at the University of San Francisco. His stories have been published in The North Texas Review, The Pacific Review, The Emerald Coast Review, Printer’s Devil Review, Blotter Magazine, The Ottawa Object, Puff Puff Prose, Poetry and a Play Vol III, and Miami University’s Literature for a Cause anthology. Nicole Lourette is a Pittsburgh based poet and travel-writer originally from Rochester, NY. A recent graduate of Chatham University’s MFA program, her writing focuses on the complexities of the black female body and what it means to be multi-racial. Her work has been published in Vagabond City Literary Journal. Michael J. Wilson lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he teaches at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design and does freelance editing and poetry reviews for Publisher’s Weekly. Somehow, this all gets done. Recent publications include The Laurel Review, Luna Luna, and Limehawk. A movie based on his work was filmed in 2014. Genevieve Barbee is a visual artist and illustrator curious about what people do and why they do it. The audio conversations she collects and the oils and watercolors that she paints are portraits of people who live, work, and create in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Her podcast, The AP Collection, started as a simple request for people to tell her a story. It has grown into a regular podcast on iTunes and spawned the daily portrait project “That’s What You’re Good At” as well as a season art exhibition, called Finder Quigley. In 2015 she became an artist in residence at Most Wanted Fine Art and a full member of the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators. theapcollection.com // @apcollector // @theapcollection

The staff of IDK would like to thank the following people whose contributions were integral to the successful publication of our second issue: •

Ongoing gratitude to Sheila Squillante (editor at @TheFourthRiver and former associate editor at @PankMagazine) for letting us in on new opportunities, challenging us to take ourselves seriously, and generally being our literary mom;

•

Dave Housley (editor at @Barrelhouse, @dhousley) amd the entire team at Barrelhouse for continuing to give us the chance to flex our editorial muscles and connect with writers at their annual Conversations and Connections Conference at Chatham University;

•

Those indefatigable tweeters who keep a small corner of the interwebs buzzing with our names;

•

Sequestrum (@SequestrumLit) for including Rachel Ann Brickner’s Issue 1 piece “Effigy of a Princess” as an honorable mention for their Editor’s Reprint Awards;

•

Our roommates, partners, and pets, who dealt with our excitement, rants, coffee rings left on tables, and yellow legal pads covered with endless meeting minutes—especially Ace and Pepper ;

•

Allison Joseph at CRWROPPS, the staff at New Pages (@newpages), and anyone else who continues to promote us and our calls for submission;

•

Sarah Grubb for gifting us the knockoff of Klimt’s Wasserschlangen II that graced the backdrop of IDK’s Issue 2 Launch/sneak peek reading;

•

High five to Yvonne Garrett and the team at Black Lawrence Press for providing writers with the e-newsletter Sapling, and for highlighting IDK in issue #264;

•

And of course, of course, our contributors and supporters, those who submitted and those of you reading this today. All the work we do is for you.