Issue 3 Winter 2016
Nonfiction editor
Brittany Hailer // @brittanyhailer
Fiction editor Sarah Cadence Hamm // @pimmscuppimpcup
Poetry editor
Kinsley Stocum // @kinsley17
Managing editor
Dakota Garilli // @dakoter818
Art
Shannon Kemp // @ShaKemper
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Our mission revolves around the Millennial generation. We seek to publish emerging writers born between the years of 1980 and 1995, but we don’t want to be ageists—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 Better late than never, Grandma always said. So here we are as the snow comes, offering you poems and photos of cough drops and the feeling of a warm, quiet cat in your lap. Heat up that hot toddy. Open the recliner. Turn on your indoor UV lightbox and let your seasonal affect be tipsy and planning for a spring revival. That’s what we’ll be doing, at least. Fresh announcement, all LED and front-yard animatronic: starting today, IDK will be on hiatus developing the steps we’ll take next as we lumber out of hibernation. Look for our next word on or around March 20th (read: June 20). As we read runes and fancy playing cards and the backs of cereal boxes for hints of divine providence, we offer you these horoscopes to be your North Star for the next 365 smackeroonies.
It’s ya horoscopes: Aries Set yourself on fire. Now rise. Taurus My dad’s a Taurus, so I’ve never dated one. Stubborn as all hell, but the life of the party. You love to charm, you love to hug, but god forbid if someone wants the log-in information for the Verizon account. Just give me the pin number, okay? My phone hasn’t kept a charge in four months. In 2017, just let the horns grow out so everyone can see them. We all know what’s under that weave, anyway. Gemini Who you calling two-faced? Only be the other face in 2017. Change your name. Buy a kayak. Start drinking whichever name-brand soda you’ve always said you hated. And your sister always said you’d never change...
Cancer Google “trench foot;” google “deprivation tank;” google “marshes near me;” google “bipolar or just crazy, like that jar of jelly he stuck his dick in after he drew lips around the rim;” google “mindful meditation;” google “how much do tears weigh on the moon.” Leo Life is usually all about you, Leo, but what if 2017 was the Year of the Co-Star? Whose wagon will you hitch your big, bright, beautiful, egomaniacal supernova to this year? Virgo You’ll spend all year trying to dig up the root of your anger, but its feet run deep, down into the core of you. Both weed tree flower child and dirty flaky crust, the x-ray shows no sign of abnormal growths. Organize your collection of potted plants in order of most to least useful. Libra Forget about yoga and keeping your real thoughts to yourself and making responsible decisions. Ride a roller coaster this year and let the roller coaster be you. The world is your oyster, Gloria—lean in. Scorpio Usually, when you tell people you’re a Scorpio, they go, “Oh yeah, I can totally see that,” and you’re a little offended by this. Next year, when you tell someone your sign, they will disbelieve you, and ask to see your driver’s license or some other form of legally binding ID. You won’t know whether this is better or worse, but that’s kind of what change is, really. Sagittarius 2017 will be the year when you finally remember that ‘Sagittarius’ has two t’s, not two g’s. Good job. Now open up a fucking savings account, stupid.
Capricorn From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Not to be confused with Capricornus.” Sources: Mayo, Jeff (1979). Teach Yourself Astrology. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Aquarius Since you’re already having dreams about the apocalypse, start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Yes, the first season sucks.) Soon your dreams will guest-star celebrities like Kate McKinnon and Gabourey Sidibe and together you’ll spearhead the 2017 underground railroad for queer women. Other dreams include but aren’t limited to: breaking Hillary Clinton out of a compound in rural Mississippi, getting hired as the seamstress for Pussy Riot, interviewing Solange and Beyoncé on Good Morning America. Pisces Ask yourself: what’s so great about being a fish? Laying eggs? Shiny Scales? Gills? Did you know if you have an extra little hole on your ear (where the top of your ear meets your face) you are just 0.1% of the population?! That little hole is where our gills used to be! Quick, go check a mirror. So maybe you really are a fish, fish. And if you’re not, you’ll be getting your ears pierced in 2017.
Table of Contents
9 Conversations with Strangers on the Train ryan downum 11 Our Waning Love Affair with the Moon mike oliphant 13 Afro-Seattleite Fragment #19: Ode To Gabriel Teodros, or Mixed Kid Learns to Sing malcolm friend 17 Donut Friday #14 darren demaree 19 Donut Friday #15 darren demaree 21 Memoirs of a Fairy Princess andy harper 29 For Better or Worcester chen chen 31 Poème à la gloire des étincelles chen chen 32 November Horoscope chen chen 35 The Visible Spectrum amanda wilgus 38 Rally Kid tess wilson 39 Sometimes, the Right Light sara wagner 41 Notes on Contributors 43 Acknowledgements
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ryan downum
Conversations with Strangers WAKE UP 1989! on the Train
At this point, we haven’t outgrown stopping on the sidewalk to pick up feathers. Take this. There is enough snow today to make me feel that something will happen. Something always does. Sometimes it’s receiving a transparent pebble, to build a fire in the snow, to talk to a fire. Such a mouthful! It’s a mouthful of feelings. Remain calm and draw shapes within memories. I think about how some trees were once people, how there are roses nailed upside-down on a wall somewhere I’ve never been.
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mike oliphant
Our Waning Love Affair with the Moon WAKE UP 1989!
When we first looked up, we were surprised that we hadn’t noticed the moon sooner, because of course it was always there—right in our own backyards, hidden between the leaves—our constant neighbor. What followed for years was moonlight that hit the earth with bare, shameless pride. Pretty soon we couldn’t remember a time without it. We were so accustomed to its presence that we smothered the streetlamps, slept more during the day and stayed up longer into the night. Businesses extended hours to adjust, schools rescheduled classes—we reshaped ourselves to fit this new, constant light in our lives. The impact grew palpable, a glow could be felt in the way we spoke to one another, a warmth in our voices, a calm in our steps—there was no longer an hour set aside to rush. Some nights were colder than others, but they were never darker or more mysterious. That’s why, the first time that it hid between the clouds, we scratched our heads and puzzled at the gray mass above us. All that week we saw little of the moon. We knew it was there. Some things need not be seen to be present. The ocean still rocked, the night air, though quite darker than usual, still rang with a white aura. Weeks later, it returned, full and beaming, all of it there for us to see, so close that we called it Super Moon. We hoped to boost its confidence and we contented ourselves when it returned our ecstasy with waves that thrummed the shores, with paths in the woods lit well enough to walk without the light of a lamp. This new, abrupt intimacy, the moon’s face so close to ours, brought fresh detail before our eyes. Previously unnoticed pockmarks now distinguished its surface—we traced with our fingers in the air each line and crevice. It stood then so plain before us that we felt as if it were the first time we had really looked deep into its valleys and cliffs. For three nights, white light splashed on our hillsides, thrown from the moon’s open mouth, like a halo of silence, a sound not heard but felt in our bones. We danced beneath it, our hair loose in curls, looped around our own mouths. We made love in the fields, grass stuck to our thighs, and in the morning no one spoke, no one left to go home, even the moon hung around all afternoon, a pale outline, a soft freckle in the sky. We asked the moon, now that everything felt safe again—how safe we felt in the crook of its gaze!—we asked if anything had been wrong when it went behind the clouds and turned its back on us. Was it us? Had we done something wrong to push it away? It replied that no, it was fine, everything
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was fine. This, of course, was a lie. And we sensed this, like a soft tremor in our muscles, but smiled and thought best not to push the matter, afraid that we had fouled the air between the moon and us with this question, this doubt. Our fear gave way to great trouble when we next saw the moon. All day it had disappeared, making an appearance in the evening, but a sliver of it now turned in another direction, as if it gazed just over our shoulders at something behind us. We thought to ourselves that maybe the way we felt was not the moon’s fault, maybe it was just our own growing paranoia. That night when we asked the moon what it was thinking about, it told us don’t worry about it, still not quite meeting our eyes and we sighed. All night we slept with our backs turned towards our open windows. The next few days only deepened our concerns. And it didn’t help that we had to wait through the daylight in order to see the moon again. It used to be that from time to time the moon would pop by, bobbing in the air like a familiar face in the crowd. Not anymore. Now we had time to do nothing but worry and guess at what the moon was up to each day. Then night would come and we were so exhausted and anxious that we had yet to draw ourselves a bath or to cook dinner or even to collect the mail. Those nights the moon gazed down on us with a dim orange light, disdain reflected in its shape and distance. We reached out to place our hands over its surface only to discover that pocks of dark and light were different. Here was a new and foreign landscape we had yet to discover. There was nothing familiar left in the face we gazed at each night. Our anger simmered beneath the surface until one night we boarded up our windows in protest, plunging the moon into darkness, denying it a city skyline to wink back at it. We thought ourselves clever, justified, wholly the victims of the moon’s cruelty and indifference. But the thought of the moon alone, isolated in the night sky, satisfied us in a way that also alarmed us and our sadness clung to our frail shapes as we sat huddled in lamplight. It went on this way until one night we snuck outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of the moon without it seeing us. Shame burned our cheeks, our hands almost too slick to hold our flashlights, now necessary in a dark that felt worse than unnatural. Our mouths hung open as we stared at the fingernail of light that winked back at us, our moon no bigger than the stars that pinpricked the dark around it. We fumed for days, cursing the moon, ourselves, everything around us. We damned it all, threw some dishes against the kitchen wall, drank more than we had in years. We didn’t make love anymore. We pitched ourselves against our beds and fitfully threw ourselves at anyone who would have us. We became withdrawn, kept to ourselves behind closed doors and gazed at ourselves naked in the mirror,
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searching for the answer to a question we didn’t know. All we knew then was that there was no moon and there never would be again. Months passed and we made a pilgrimage to the shore, assuring ourselves that the surface of the ocean would bring us peace, some closure, like it always had in the past; its constant movement a reflection of our own spirits, our best and worst selves. We thought that we would see the water run right up to our bare feet and we could look out across it, content that we could enter the water now with a new strength, without being hurled back or tugged by our ankles in another direction. When we arrived at the beach it was the early hours of the morning, the sun not yet a thought on the horizon. We saw the still surface of the water, a motionless mirror that stared back at the sky. We collapsed, kneeled for hours, unable to tear our eyes from that darkness, doubled in the wakeless sea. Down the coast the shriek of gulls sounded as they fed. We saw the ripples that reached out from their plunge, unmet, and heard the crash as they once again lifted their bodies into the air.
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malcolm friend
Afro-Seattleite Fragment #19: Ode To Gabriel Teodros, or Mixed Kid Learns to Sing UP 1989! WAKE
—after Rita Dove We both know it never stops: the alarm going off that lets everyone know we don’t fit. You say you were too light to be Black. For me, it was Brandon, in the middle or our pew. Telling everyone in Church I couldn’t be Black ’cause I’m mixed. Back when he was still my friend. Didn’t matter my dad is half-Jamaican like his mom. Too much salsa singing on his skin, a thicket in its own making that kept the words caught in my throat when I had to hold Brandon’s hand during prayer and that’s when I learned each phrase returns. In college Tariq says I wouldn’t understand Chief Keef ’cause I’m not really Black and he ain’t even that much darker than me. I had to finish
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the last lap in Mario Kart with nothing but the stupid Rainbow Road flutes whistling at us and I’m thinking this is why we turn to song. No chord is safe ’cause we ain’t never been. Dissect instruments and turntable alive and the notes stack themselves onto our skin. Bleed black onto us. Name us something new ’cause old blood never took us, our half-breed cries— There were no wretched sounds. The music pulls higher and higher.
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darren demaree
Donut WAKE Friday #14 UP 1989!
I counted ninety-four ampersands & those little emperors of the day kept me from refusing to choose. I always start with coffee because coffee is an ampersand as well. Next, I say the names of donuts until the workers look tired. We don’t eat all of the donuts, but we order until it feels like we need to catch our breath. The rest of the day, we are caked in a glowing, limitless aura.
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darren demaree
Donut WAKE Friday #15 UP 1989!
Last year, we spent four hundred & sixty-two dollars on donuts. We had refinanced the house at a lower rate, so we saved close to that amount. I am among the best of all of the adults.
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andy harper
Memoirs of a Fairy Princess WAKE UP 1989!
This is how it feels to be Sally: a prickling at my forehead from the tough, translucent threads that poke out stubbornly from the flap of my sofa arm protector wig. Scratchy burlap lays rigidly across the top of my forehead, half covering my ears. It falls to the tops of my scrawny shoulder blades, where its brown, floral microfiber is folded over and more stiff thread sticks out like loose fishing line. What I want to say is, it itches. A lot. But it looks like real hair and, when I look in the mirror, I am like a real girl. I am four, maybe five years old. At daycare they call me something else. But what kind of name is Andy for a fairy princess? *** Among the washcloths stacked dutifully upon the corner of a shelf in our linen closet, there is a soft brown one which features in one corner a flower with white, plush petals—part of a matching set of which the bath and hand towels have been either discarded or never purchased. When I am old enough to bathe myself, I choose this one for my showers. After turning off the water, I sweep my brown hair away from my forehead and carefully drape the wet washrag over my head so that the corners fall over my temples and the large white flower sits just over one ear. I pull back the shower door to greet my transformed reflection. The washcloth wig isn’t as long as the arm cover wig, but it is still too much hair for a boy, and the flower really does the trick. After my shower, I supplement the look by wrapping a bath towel around my chest, like my mom does. I spin for the mirror, for a score of imaginary photographers, then sit down on the toilet lid, crossing my legs the ladylike way. A second towel becomes a shawl or a layered dress. Stepping onto the toilet lid, I view my perfect, slender body in the wide mirror over the vanity, admiring the lay of the damp towel over my hips and butt. When I sit down, I bend at the waist to peek up my own skirt. ***
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I have been called effeminate – most recently by a woman I dated briefly in Omaha, who also said that my best attribute was my penchant for exaggeration. She could be a pretty mean drunk and, in the end, I don’t suppose she ever got to know me especially well, but that accusation hit home. My closest friends have refuted her claim, and what they’ve said sounds right to me. Nonetheless, I don’t feel quite comfortable calling myself “masculine,” and maybe that’s just because I don’t want to invite argument. “Well, you can hardly think of yourself as masculine,” slurs the woman from Omaha. “When was the last time you wrangled cattle?” Growing up, whenever I had to refer to myself in a gender-specific way, I squirmed and used the word “guy.” “Boy” didn’t do justice to my advancing adulthood, but “man” didn’t feel quite right either. Again, I think I didn’t want to invite argument; if I referred to myself as a man, someone might give me a detailed list proving I wasn’t one. In my small, rural Missouri hometown, manhood was farming and football; I was piano and marching band. Justin McFadden, the childhood friend who told me I couldn’t be a farmer because I dressed “too preppy” made more or less the same argument against my masculinity. I wasn’t rough enough, wasn’t tough enough, didn’t know anything about cars—but, then, what nine-year-old did? Later, in my freshman year of high school, I became a woman to the boys at the back of my school bus when I didn’t join the football team. Because I was afraid of heights and driving fast, I had no balls, became a pussy. As so many guys from my school graduated and joined the military—a prospect I rejected both as a pacifist and as someone who didn’t like the idea of becoming government property—I began to wonder what options lay open to me beyond wrangling cattle and soldiering up. Noel Perrin begins his essay, “The Androgynous Man,” by setting a scene: “The summer I was 16, I took a train from New York to Steamboat Springs, Colo., where I was going to be an assistant horse wrangler at a camp.” (One point to the woman from Omaha.) He goes on to recount an inkblot personality quiz he took titled “How Masculine/Feminine Are You?” in a magazine—and his unsettlingly feminine score. On critical inspection of the “masculine” answers, he observes that the makers of the quiz have identified manliness with machinery and violence, while art and natural objects make up the purportedly feminine responses. He concludes that there’s more to maleness and femaleness than the test makers have taken into account—and that there’s more room for play between the two. “What it does mean to be spiritually androgynous is a kind of freedom,” he writes. While traditionally masculine men may feel perfectly at home in their more conventional forms of gender expres-
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sion—and, indeed, may truly enjoy taking in a football game now and then—their more androgynous counterparts have a wider range of options available. Unfortunately, many men are “too busy trying to copy the he-man ever to realize that men, like women, come in a wide variety of acceptable types.” According to Perrin, men who eschew the self-conscious imitation are free to indulge in the pleasure of nurturing children, kissing cats, and showing emotion. I was a senior in high school when I encountered Perrin’s essay, and because I had already made an appointment with a Marine recruiter by the time I read it, his revelations meant two kinds of freedom. I had permission to be just the kind of man I already was. *** When I am eleven years old, my cousin Jonie comes to spend the summer with us. We swim when it’s warm enough, take picnics to Honey Creek, build blanket forts in the living room. We have a favorite game, which we call “Bookshop.” It involves tearing all the books from all the shelves in our house—the particle-board-and-veneer towers of Goosebumps and My Babysitter is a Vampire/Has Fangs/Bites Again and the dusty glass-front shelf at the end of the hall filled with my parents’ Louis L’Amour and Barbara Delinsky—and relegating them to my brother’s bedroom where they stand in rows in dresser drawers and on desktops and lay neatly open on every other surface. Matt and Jonie play the store owners and it is up to me to portray a colorful array of customers. There are Billy Bob and Jim Bob—each an amalgamation of overalls and hick accents—and a stuffy British gentleman, an encroaching corporate figure, ever concerned with the management of the store. Matt and Jonie laugh as I surprise them with each new character. I shuffle through the door on my knees, draped in layers of flowing robes—twin-sized bedsheets and throw blankets—alternately warbling weighty prophecies of astrological demise and appealing to the spirits that haunt this bookstore. I am the “Spiritual Lady,” here to warn the unsuspecting shopkeepers of the evil spirits that have taken up residence in their establishment—until they throw me out, denouncing me as a lunatic. Enter next the “bombshell,” all flowing arm cover wig and two plush footballs from the Big Dog store squeezed between the top of my bath towel mini dress and my flat, hairless chest. I push my bust forward and squeeze my shoulder blades together, holding my arms carefully in T-rex position to keep everything in place.
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My favorite character to play is that of Sandra McNulty, a strong-willed and curiously masculine female newscaster—a holdover from a fictional news broadcast I acted out in grade school. When she visits the bookshop, I complement her low, raspy voice and Brooklyn accent with a pair of red high heels and my mother’s shoulder-padded blazer. A wad of shower poufs carefully pinned to my head might sufficiently materialize the cloud of curly brown hair I have always imagined for her, but in the absence of appropriate tools I impatiently appeal to my playmates to use their imagination: “Okay, imagine, like—see, she has—” I stammer, groping at the air over my head, teasing an imaginary perm ceaselessly higher in proper nineties fashion. “Can you—do you know what I mean?” *** “Female impersonators are highly specialized performers,” writes Esther Newton in Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972). “In order to create the female character, female impersonators always use some props which help create the partial or complete visual appearance of a woman.” My primary props included dresses fashioned from bath towels, bedsheets, and black garbage bags; those wigs improvised from towels and washcloths, arm protectors, boxers, old t-shirts, and new mopheads; and a variety of prosthetic breasts, including teacups, cereal bowls, tennis balls, footballs, baseball caps, wadded up t-shirts, stuffed animals, and plastic Easter eggs. Not to mention my mother’s high heels, my cousin’s bows and costume jewelry, and, occasionally, nail polish. According to Newton, “this form of specialization is thought by everyone, including its practitioners (the impersonators), to be extreme, bizarre, and morally questionable.” But nothing about “Bookshop” or the other games involving what I’ve come to refer to as “trash bag drag” felt particularly bizarre or morally questionable. Maybe my experience doesn’t quite apply to Newton’s research after all; I was neither a career queen nor a street fairy, but an eleven-year-old kid who didn’t fit in with other boys and occasionally wondered how it would feel to be a girl. Newton posits drag as the “socialization” of the proto-female impersonator’s “underlying psychological conflict in sex role identification.” In other words, for Newton at least, from pre-memory through pre-adolescence, I was acting out the drama of my own inner crisis of gender identity. Her allegation is tough to dispute, given the uneasiness I felt in high school—and the immense relief I found in Noel Perrin’s interpretation of androgynous masculinity.
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Still, there was a decidedly fictional element to my drag performances. These personae were characters whose stories evolved over the course of that summer—imaginative creations crafted with varying degrees of nuance and attention to cultural tropes. Brought before the audience of my brother and my cousin, they became theatrical roles—I might only have been an aspiring playwright. But that didn’t account for those long moments in front of the mirror, draped in damp towels and the brown, flowered washcloth. In those moments, no one was looking but me. And yet, in the dynamic between these contextual opposites—the costume-over-clothing performance and my nakedness in those private moments—might there have resided some early wisdom? “Drag means, first of all, role playing,” writes Newton. “By focusing on the outward appearance of role, drag implies that sex role, and, by extension, role in general is somewhat superficial, which can be manipulated, put on and off again at will.” Or, as Judith Butler puts it in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself.” Indeed, my male roles relied just as much on social scripts as my female roles. I think of the props I used for the male patrons of our bookshop: a globe under the shirt for a large gut, an ATV helmet, an array of neckties, a pair of Groucho Marx glasses complete with bulbous nose and bristly mustache. I knew how to perform masculinity in the same ways that I knew how to perform femininity—not by the expression of certain inherent and biologically determined qualities, but by what Butler identifies as a “stylized repetition of acts.” Furthermore, Butler asserts, “the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character,” as well as the wide variety of expressive possibilities touted by Perrin. “Signification,” according to Butler, “is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition.” In other words, the gender roles that many of us compulsorily perform have no empirical or biological origin or cause, but only a cultural history of enforced performativity. “In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; ‘agency,’ then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition.” This understanding of agency resonates with Perrin’s meaning of freedom. For him, macho men were free to be their manly selves while those more androgynous ones could find agency only in their resistance of the pressure to perform. In that freedom: confidence, wholeness. Happiness.
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***
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It is the summer of “Bookshop,” and, as every summer, we are camping in the Ozarks with my father’s cousin and his family. We define “camping” as a trailer with electricity and running water in a park overlooking the Osage River, where we kids hunt river rocks in the morning before the dam opens and the water rises twelve feet on the limestone banks while my parents sip Miller Lite from nylon lawn chairs over Astroturf. In the evening, Cousin Danny and his wife Carol sit around the fire with my parents, smoking their cigarettes in halos of mosquito repellant, while towels and swimsuits hang on clotheslines strung from the trees above them. Inside the camper, Matt and I play games and watch movies with Danielle, who’s my age. At my brother’s urging, I cobble together a costume. There isn’t much to work with around the camper. I remove my red t-shirt and place the neck of it around my forehead and ears, so that it hangs down my back, whips gently over my shoulders when I toss my head. A roll of black, thirteen-gallon trash bags rests on the linoleum of the cabinet under the sink, alongside a bottle of Mr. Clean and a heap of dead flies. I rip off a bag, tear holes for my head and arms, let it fall over my bare torso and jeans shorts. Danielle has some fake blood left over from her brother’s vampire costume, and she smears some of it on my lips. I parade up and down the length of the camper between the foldout sofa and the small shower, yammering a mock “Miss America” speech in falsetto. Matt and Danielle are doubled over in the dinette, clutching their sides and wheezing with laughter, tears in their eyes. “You gotta go show my parents,” Danielle insists. “They’ll crack up!” So I waddle to the door, readjusting the cylindrical couch pillow that constitutes my bosom, and whisper excitedly to them, “I’m getting ready to make my big entrance!” They huddle around me, hands clasped over their mouths to prevent an outburst of laughter that might give away my surprise. I wrap my fingers around the cold inner door handle—then lose it, turning back to my cohorts in laughter. “What should I do?” I solicit them for stage direction. “Just do what you’ve been doing,” says Danielle with a wave of her hand. “It’s great, they’ll love it.” Then she clamps her hand back over her mouth, concealing a grin so big it crinkles the corners of her eyes. I compose myself anew, straighten out my face, and carefully nudge the door ever so slightly ajar. In a moment I have thrown the door wide, stepped down onto the black metal steps, felt the sandpaper scrape of the tread under my bare feet. I am yowling my Miss America act, flailing my arms in mock elegance. In a moment, the four fire-lit faces of my parents, my father’s cousin and his wife turn from their cigarettes and their stories, their elbows still bent, the brown bottles suspended in the blue
night, the first mosquitoes penetrating the cloud of repellent to land, unnoticed, on the backs of their hands; my cousin’s knobby Adam’s apple dips with a staccato swallow while my mother’s loose curls rustle against the back of her tank top as she turns toward me. Four dark mouths fall softly open, rows of nicotine-stained teeth emerging over raw, sunburnt lips. I feel their eyes on me, my own eyes zinging from one to the next, and I launch into my falsetto rendition of “America the Beautiful,” all swooping vowels and exaggerated vibrato. I wait for the laughter, but they just stare. I wait and wait, and then I fall quiet. My mouth falls open, and I stare back at them. I stumble backward, up the steps, the tread scraping my calves. With a bang, the hollow fiberglass door gives way behind me and I retreat back into the yellow light of our camper, the celebratory arms of a more generous audience. But I push away from my cohorts, withdrawing to the bunk beds in back of the camper where I rip off the trash bag and fall, shaking, into bed. I rub and rub with my fist at the fake blood on my mouth, crashing into the bathroom every few minutes to bore into my reflection, but I can’t tell if it’s going away. I seem to be looking somehow past the red smudge of my lips, past my reflection and through the thin aluminum wall to the gravel and Astroturf, the nylon lawn chairs, seeing only their eyes in the haze of cigarette smoke and mosquito repellent, staring back at me. Their dim, yellow teeth in the firelight.
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chen chen
For Better or Worcester WAKE UP 1989!
Your soup is hot & your butt hotter. Someone will burn his or her or your tongue on both. Your fiscal year is already full of fiscal days. You have all the reasons for some of your behavior. Your strength is waking up, never sure if you are, in fact, a possum meeting a pick-up truck. You have been told you are brave. You have been told you could model. You want to know the truth, but you would settle for more historical facts. Dates. Horses. Mustaches. Your weakness is singing the same two songs at karaoke. Some nights, you sing a spirited rendition of the alphabet to a smelly pair of sneakers. Some nights, you walk to the sea. A seagull, flying with a bag of Cheetos, spilling one, then another in the sand, is how you want to live.
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chen chen
Poème WAKE à la gloire étincelles UPdes 1989!
—after Joan Miró Hot sex in a rocking chair. Sad faces at a county fair. Someone’s high school nemesis on the last plane to Walla Walla, Washington. According to the Internet, everyone is either a handsome fishmonger or a talent agent for hilarious cats. Everyone is very busy. Do you have a moment to spare? I’d like to talk on the phone & tell you all the ways in which you’ve harmed me. It won’t take more than 10 minutes of your day. After that, you will be free to buy new shoes or talk to anyone else. After that, I will be free to buy basil & garlic or tell the dead fish in the market, Today, 4 days before my birthday, the sweater I’m wearing & the underwear I have on match, in color, pattern, & beauty, without me even doing it on purpose.
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chen chen
November Horoscope WAKE UP 1989!
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You will start coughing in a movie theatre while watching the new James Bond. The person you love will pass you cough drops, one after another. You will whisper thank you, every time. You will be shushed by neighboring moviegoers, every time. By the middle of the month, you will blame most of your problems on the new James Bond. By the end of the month, you will have eaten twelve bowls of chicken noodle soup & eighty-six cough drops. You will try honey lemon as well as glacier mint, but your favorite flavor will remain cool cherry. You will read four books & three hundred emails. You will let everyone know how horoscopes are a complete waste of time & human capacity, while finding yourself completely unable to unsubscribe from your Astrology.com daily digest. You will continue to hold out hope for an especially bad horoscope, one that you will share with everyone & everyone will think, What a funny, interesting friend I have. You will secretly wonder what your cold means, what the universe is trying to tell you. You will begin a James Bond screenplay in which Bond is finally dating Q & they finally get a pug dog.
You will plan to call your dentist, your bank, your friend in Austin, your mother. Your mother will call you. You will be annoyed by her advice but glad to hear her voice —or will it be the other way around? The person you love will occasionally eat a cough drop when there is no candy around. You will kiss, no tongue, a touch of medicated chapstick, a hint of cool cherry. You will kiss, just the smallest kiss, to avoid getting the other sick, & you will succeed at this for most of the month.
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amanda wilgus
The Visible Spectrum WAKE UP 1989!
The woman procured inimitable shades of color. She blended paint into a single concoction, then left the liquid to be mechanically shaken. This was her work—beguiling small business owners, do-it-yourself parents and adults of all ages who pursued passions like juicing and CrossFit and had marvelous one-bedroom houses displaying their very real talents for art and living fully. Her calves, naturally thick, were made thicker from standing. She wore unpretentious glasses—thin silver frames of rounded rectangles—that her peers found unappealing. Paint stained her shirts despite the apron she wore. She was immune to the scent and toxicity of paint. Customers sometimes told her where the paint would go. “This is for our master bedroom.” “The dining room is being renovated.” “We’re finalizing the color scheme of our new office.” And then again, she guessed. She imagined the powder blue with a hint of moss would adorn a hallway bathroom with a square upper window and seaside aura. The burnt sienna would become this hipster’s anthem for smoking pot and sexual misadventures. A woman once disclosed that her child had been killed by a car in a driveway accident and the burgundy paint would cover the boy’s playroom walls. The bloody shade tugged at dendrites attempting to connect in her brain. One day, after surveying her own apartment, she decided to add some color. She thought of the 35-millimeter camera she brought with her when she traveled. She thought of photos of singular flowers she’d taken and exposed—canary daffodils, periwinkle pansies, titian marigolds. She thought of orchids with spots of fuchsia crowded at the center of each bloom. She thought of lime green bamboo, pine needles stinking of their aroma, palm trees posing against the sky. She thought of the sound of the ocean and its infinite shades of intersecting blue, teal and white propelled from the sea floor. She thought of swarms of gold and amber koi fish swimming in the ponds of a Japanese garden. She thought of her first day of school as a young girl and the careful way she’d learned to cut shapes from construction paper of primary colors. She thought, too, of her community college’s colors—muted derivations of Stanford’s cardinal red and Cal’s Berkeley blue—when a degree was in her plan. She brought home as many sample-sized paints as she could and began painting with very small dots. Each dot held a simple memory. Some seemed to repel others, but she placed them beside one another anyway. The growing conglomeration left guests off balance as the wall seemed to vibrate
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steadily more, week by week. She was so exhausted when she finished, she lay on the floor and went to sleep. Almost two days later, she woke to a searing headache that left her unable to walk. She called a friend to bring her to a hospital. Doctors ran tests as she waited in a narrow bed. Within twenty-four hours, she learned she had advanced brain cancer. Five days later, she died. The building manager unlocked her apartment for her father to reclaim her effects. The men stared at the mural in silence. The manager found a point of ochre reminiscent of the T-shirt he wore the day he met the former tenant. Her father found a replica of his clear livid eyes looking back at him. They traveled the points of her life and murmured at its totality—yet it observed, watched and captured them, still. They turned their backs to its arresting pull. When the apartment was emptied, fresh white paint rolled in wide strokes over the wall.
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tess wilson
Rally WAKE Kid UP 1989!
Three times a year, mom strapped me tight on her back, packed rain gear, traded dirt road for interstate for second turn on the right, just past the sign, before you hit town. Hot between her thighs, a BMW 1960 R60 purred, pushed through Idaho, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee. We twisted with it. If paradise is real, it feels like denim, three days sticky, sun in every seam. Like bugs between teeth. Like a kickstart. Numb knuckles. Like throaty morning revs, exhaust snaked with coffee steam. Forehead sweat blessing. Baptized in bearing grease. Gut vibration revelation. When I say love I mean piston pump.
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sara wagner
Sometimes, theUP Right Light WAKE 1989!
All of a sudden, sister, I know what you are holding in— let go of it. I want to keep walking next to you. In the dim evening, scattering clouds race the semis above us on the highway; do you remember walking this road home before, thirsty, remember stopping at the creek, the moss like a body, a dead body— tell me that story again, only leave out the part where I wouldn’t stop talking and you left me alone in the tunnel, the great stones, each one, a grandfather turtle, beak open—this violence, a routine crossing—creek bed lit up, second floor windows yellowing the water. I am a shadow on the landscape, invasive. I want you to take me up in the glass you dip in, catch me unaware.
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Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and forthcoming spring 2017 from BOA Editions, Ltd. He has also authored two chapbooks and his poems have recently appeared in Indiana Review, Raleigh Review, Gulf Coast, The Normal School, and the anthology Political Punch. He is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary fellow, and a PhD student at Texas Tech University. For more, visit chenchenwrites.com. Darren C. Demaree is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly (2016, 8th House Publishing). He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. You can find him on facebook & twitter.
Malcolm Friend is a poet and CantoMundo fellow originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the 2014 recipient of the Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry, and is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the recipient of a 2014 Talbot International Award and Backbone Press’s 2016 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including La Respuestamagazine, the Fjords Review’s Black American Edition, Vinyl, Word Riot, The Acentos Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, and Pretty Owl Poetry. Here’s his twitter, you should follow him. Andy Harper holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska Omaha and is pursuing a PhD from Southern Illinois University. His recent work has appeared in Lime Hawk, Jenny, Hippocampus, and the museum of americana. He lives in Carbondale, Il., where he studies American literature and teaches college composition. Follow him on twitter @spotsonmyapples. Mike Oliphant’s short fiction and poetry have been published in Shooter Literary Magazine, NANO Fiction, The Molotov Cocktail, The New Poet, Carcinogenic Poetry, and Every Day Poets. His collection of poetry, A World Set Apart, earned him the 2013 Ione Sandberg Shriber Young Writer’s Fund. He cur-
Notes on Contributors
Ryan Downum currently resides in Lake Zurich, Il. and is a recent graduate from Knox College. Previous poems of his have appeared or are forthcoming in BOAAT, H_NGM_N, Pretty Owl Poetry, Witch Craft Magazine, Bear Review, and Reality Beach. Find him on Instagram.
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rently occupies Bellingham, WA, as an MFA candidate at Western Washington University and teaches composition there to sustain his caffeine addiction. Sara Moore Wagner is a Pushcart nominated poet whose work has appeared most recently in Lingerpost, Reservoir, The Wide Shore, and the Pittsburgh Poetry Review. She lives and teaches in Cincinnati with her filmmaker husband Jon and their children, Daisy, Cohen, and River (forthcoming). Though she doesn’t really blog much (boo), you can keep up-to-date with current publications and happenings here. Amanda Wilgus lives and works in Los Angeles, teaching children with autism by day. She has taught English in her mother’s native Taiwan. More of her work may be found in The Bicycle Review, The Commonline Journal and Blue Lake Review. Tess Wilson earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University and most recently served as Assistant Editor of Hyacinth Girl Press and Reader/Carpenter for the Pittsburgh Poetry Houses project. Previously, she was an Associate Editor and Online Layout Designer of The Fourth River, Editor/Illustrator of This Time: An Anthology, and a Poetry Editor of Inscape Magazine. Her work has appeared in Inscape Magazine, NEAT Magazine, The Crawl Space Journal, the annual Free Poems series, and the “Girls and Sex” issue of Squad of Sisters Zine. When she isn’t collecting very small things, she runs State Bird Press, a micropress featuring zines and illustrated works. Here’s her website. Shannon Kemp is a visual artist and writer in Morehead City, NC. She is passionate about play and creativity and interested in the roles each play in work and learning spaces. She works for a state aquarium and volunteers at a community library. She received a degree in English Literature and enjoys experimenting with cut and paste, found objects, and baked goods. // @ShaKemper // @sha.kemper
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The staff of IDK would like to thank the following people whose contributions were integral to the successful publication of our third issue: •
Ongoing gratitude to Sheila Squillante (editor at @TheFourthRiver, former associate editor at @PankMagazine & author of Beautiful Nerve) for telling us what to do with ourselves when everything goes tits up;
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Dave Housley (editor at @Barrelhouse, @dhousley) and the entire team at Barrelhouse for continuing to invite us to the annual Conversations and Connections Conference at Chatham University even though we spend lots of time sitting in the corner and anxiously pretending to check Facebook;
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All the people who keep tweeting about us even when we don’t even tweet about us;
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Everyone who ran against Donald Trump, for trying;
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Our roommates, partners, pets, and contributors who poke us when we glaze over at the computer with InDesign open and Word open and Gmail open and also this buzzfeed quiz about how, based on our choices of food, they can magically determine how many people we boned in 2016;
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Allison Joseph at CRWROPPS, the staff at New Pages (@newpages), and anyone else who continues to promote us and our calls for submission;
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And of course, of course, all of our other supporters, those who submitted work, and those of you reading this today. All that we do is for you.