Kithe - Fall/Winter 2021

fall/winter 2021

a journal for new art + literature

Cosmic Light Anna Freyne

vol.2

featuring Dao Strom, Dionne Ir ving, Ke v i n H a d s e l l , R o b y n G r o t h a n d m o r e

FALL/WINTER 2021 EDITORIAL NOTE Welcome to the second volume of Kithe! “Kithe” (pronounced kai-the) is an old Scots word meaning “to make known." Our goal for Kithe is to honor all creative voices, and we're hopeful that our second issue continues to bring our readers stories that have otherwise gone untold and art that has gone unseen. As we continue to live through uncertain and challenging times, the editorial team at Kithe has increasingly looked to our creative community for comfort, inspiration, and light. It hasn't been an easy time to be creative, but it has been easy to find companionship with one another, which has been the enduring gift of this journal to each of us. We are so proud of the work in this issue and hope you enjoy it—and here's to a 2022 that holds the spirit of kithe!

EDITORIAL BOARD LAUREN HOBSON Editor-in-Chief JOSHUA JAMES AMBERSON Editor KATIE BORAK Editor KARLEIGH FRISBIE BROGAN Editor CYNTHIA CARMINA GÓMEZ Editor M.L. SCHEPPS Editor

Poetry Ashley Somwaru - 1 Robyn Groth - 9 18 Bridget Spoerri - 13 Susan Cummins Miller - 34

Dear Little One To Identify To Vitrify You, Too That Moment the Sun Seems to Stand Still

Writing Alec Ballweg - 3 Dionne Irving - 11 Jordan Nishkian - 16 Will Freeney - 19 Dao Strom, with Vi Khi Nao - 22 Thayne Casper - 35 Kevin Hadsell - 37 Jason Arias - 41 Rebecca Pyle - 45

Someone Else Interracial Love in the Time of COVID Little Things Compunction we breathe and breathing is (an) a | synchronous music, (yet) every body needs the air The Sun Struck Noon Over Katskid Hill I Have Seen the Future, and it is Newark Airport's Terminal C The Passion of the Pageantry Gerald

Art Anna Freyne - Cover 36 Leah Oates - 2 40 Rebecca Pyle - 10 K.L. Johnston - 14 Christy Boyer - 15 Jeff Mann - 44 Linds Sanders - 50

Cosmic Light Unconscious Emotions Transitory Space, Brooklyn, New York, Color Photography, 2020-2021 The New Parts Out of Gas and Out of Luck Poppies Dream Who's There?

Ground

Dear Little One Ashley Somwaru Forgive me.

I can’t cork your ears varnish the cedar planks of your mouth unwool the hibiscus sealed pillow cushions we use for eyes.

1

Kithe/Somwaru

Transitory Space, Brooklyn, New York, Color Photography, 2020-2021 Leah Oates

Kithe/Oates

2

Someone Else Alec Ballweg The light is too dim, you think, sipping the wine you’re pretending to like.

“What do you like to do?” she asks.

Panic settles into your throat, keeping company with the wine. Her foot brushes against your leg under the table. The hairs on your arms stand up in time to the jazz and the sound of her clothing against her skin.

“Oh,” you take another sip of wine. It sits. Petulant. “I don’t know.” You notice the way the candlelight flickers on her hands, a painting you wish you’d created. A painting just for you. “I like to read.” It falls out, a frantic jumble in your plate of spaghetti. It’s a wonder the sauce doesn’t splatter. “Though it’s hard to find the time sometimes,” you add, more measured.

More wine.

She smiles into her lasagna and you catch half a dimple. There only for a moment. “I love to read, too.”

She has turned the smile to you now and you find yourself lost. “I wish I could do it every minute of 3

Kithe/Ballweg

every day.”

“You wouldn’t get tired of it?” You’ve slipped off your shoes, resting your bare feet on the cold bar of the table.

“I don’t get sick of breathing so I don’t reckon I would.” Half smile, into the plate again.

“That was cheesy,” she concedes.

“Sure, but it’s true.” A sock foot comes to rest on your bare one. Not unintentional. You can feel the roughness through a hole in the sole. “God, this wine is terrible, huh?”

Half smile. At you. She takes a sip. “It sure is.”

— The spring night seeps through your open window and you shiver. She asks if you need a blanket, though it is your bed.

Her fingers are warm against your bare skin. You shiver for a different reason. You shake your head and kiss her. Chapped lips on chapped lips.

You keep your socks on. She falls taking off your pants. You feel the hum of her above, around, inside of you. You trace lazy patterns along her spine with your fingers. She smiles in her sleep.

— “The river is low,” she says, swinging your hand, warding off the dark.

“Yeah, it is,” you agree. “The swans are all in the middle.” You run your thumb along hers. Her hands are cold.

“I hate swans.”

“What? They’re beautiful.”

“Sure, on the surface. But look at them.” She drags you over to the barrier and points. “Look at those claws.”

You lean against the empty ring buoy holder and study the bird. It moves calmly, barely a ripple in the darkening water. But just below the surface, almost invisible, the feet tear the river apart. And only now, in the light from the bridge, do you really notice the muscles of the neck, the sharp bones of the wings, the eyes watching you from so far below.

“I know they’re supposed to be symbols of love,” she says. “But, Jesus, they’re terrifying.”

You nod, still watching the bird. The bird, still, watching you. She slides her hand into your pocket, cold fingers dripping into your warm ones, and pulls you away.

“We’re going to be late,” she says.

You look back at the bird one last time. You think the river is rising.

— You taste the tears on her cheeks, lips, neck, collarbone. You trace the line of them down her body until she forgets why she cried and you forget that you made her do so.

— You arrive, the streetlight pushing you on your way.

The cover of the book slides in your hand. You soak the pages in your nerves. You laugh at yourself, a short foggy breath in the dark. Even after all this time.

She is waiting for you in the window. The reading lamp breaks the dark and wraps itself around her, settling on the floor. She has not seen you. She is focused on something in her hands. You wonder what she is reading.

You stop, your toes just short of the gravel of her front walk, and watch her. You notice, now, how the light traces her, trailing along the lines of her neck and shoulders and down her back. Your fingers tingle and you wonder, half in the glow of the streetlight, how it never does that to you. You decide that it never could. She is something entirely different from yourself.

She turns her head and the light shifts with her, moving in the synchronized dance of a shadow. You forget yourself in that moment and you think this must be what love is. She catches you out of the corner of her eye, a half smile.

And then she turns away and you are suddenly more aware of yourself than you’ve ever been. Your body expands within you, straining against the flesh, reaching for the absence. You feel as though you have already been torn apart a thousand times over and yet you are trying to do it again.

The reading light goes off. The window goes dark and you close your eyes for a second, remembering.

The outline. When you open them again, she is there, waiting in the doorway. “You coming in?” she says. The same smile as before. One dimple. Half formed, perfect. You find yourself nodding, gravel crunching under your feet. She steps aside, holding fingers splayed against the red painted wood of the door. As you pass her, you feel the gaps of yourself begin to fill again. A faint whiff of soap, the brush of her hair against your arm, the anticipation of her taste on your lips. You are no longer made of shuffled pieces.

“Hello,” she says as you step into the soft light of the hall.

“Hello,” you say, and she closes the door behind you.

— Desperate and sharp, you tear at each other. You find hold in the folds of her shirt, she in your hair.

Desperate, you both pull until you are only skin. And Kithe/Ballweg

4

then you change. Breathless, desperate still, but smooth. She is so close. You try to pull her closer, to transcend the spaces between you. Desperate, you forget yourself.

— The river is high, calmly running its fingers along the bottom of the bridges. Sweat gathers at the small of your back and in the palm of your hand but she pulls it into hers all the same.

“I have a question for you,” she says. A dangerous sentence but said with a smile. “Shoot.” You swing her arm as high as it goes. Shorter than yours.

“When did you fall in love with me? When did you know?” She smiles at the pavement, watching the laces of your shoes. Your hands still sway lazily between you, counting the seconds. You wonder which of you is the minute hand.

You watch the gulls dive below the water, disappearing from the heat and realize you can’t remember. Perhaps you have loved her too long for there to be a before. Your whole life is colored with her. A blue bottle in front of a light. “I don’t know,” you say.

“What do you mean you don’t know? You have to know.”

“Well, when did you start loving me?” you ask.

She does not pause. “When you took your shoes off on the first date.” She smiles at you from the corners and lets go of your hand, skipping to the wall.

“The river is high,” she says, reaching down as if to touch it.

You lean against the ring buoy stand and watch the water reflect off her outstretched fingers. Made for you. “Yes it is,” you agree.

— “I miss you,” you say, your feet tangled in sheets and her.

“I’m right here,” she says, her breath leaving warm footprints across your chest.

“I know,” Her hair smells like lilacs and her and you.

“But sometimes I feel like you’re not.”

— 5

Kithe/Ballweg

“I can’t remember the last time it snowed here,” she says. Her hands leave sleep sweaty palm prints on the glass, her breath a soft dew on the window pane.

You roll over, sheets tugging at your feet. The snow rolls over, too, and she does not look away. She has been made a child by the cold and the shifting sky, her knees planted in the carpet as if she were outside. She shivers, toes dancing in their socks.

“There’s just so much.” She turns to you, half smile, one dimple. You do not notice the snow swirling behind her.

“Look at it!” She says, still the child you never knew.

“Come back here,” you say, opening the blankets, forming a her sized hole. “But the snow!” You watch her for a moment, letting the soft light of winter slide along her, falling from her shoulder blades and onto the floor. You roll from the bed and land in the discarded drippings of light, pulling the duvet with you. She tucks herself into your corners and you wrap yourself around her and watch the sky turn over again.

— You duck under and open your eyes. The salt stings, but you do not close them. She floats above you, light stabbing through the water around her, and you see her, truly, as if for the first time. She drifts back and forth, rocked by the sea.

She turns over and she sees you watching her. Your lungs begin to burn and it is changed. Her hands drift and are touched by the light and the salt and you realize they are not yours. She is not yours.

You come up for air and gasp and let the salt fill your lungs. You wade to shore, water clinging to your knees and ankles like so many hands. The sand is warm and it sticks to your feet.

“You coming back?” She beckons you with those hands. The ones you thought were made for you. The waves flood around her and she bobs, revealing and obscuring all at once. “Give me a sec,” you call. You take a sip of tea and watch her. She has turned from you, returning to the waves. The sunlight traces her shoulder blades and falls into the sea. She is not yours, nor will she ever be.

You replace the lid of the flask and wade back in, feeling the familiar pull around your knees and ankles.

She disappears for a moment and leaves you with the dipping horizon and the faint call of the gulls.

She resurfaces and sees you, surrounded by the sea.

Her sea. A smile and you swear you can see that dimple from this far. She is not yours, but that is not important. You think this must be what love is.

— She paints a picture along your spine, tracing the lines you have never been able to see. The second coat is painted with her lips.

— “I love you,” she says, handing you a coffee mug. It is hot against your fingers. Too hot, but you don’t put it down.

“What was that for?”

She shrugs, pouring her own cup, spilling some onto the counter. A masterpiece of coffee stains.

“I don’t know. Just ‘cause.”

You watch her. She leans against the counter, overworn t-shirt slightly askew. The steam from her cup reaches up to play with her hair. She watches you watch her. “I love you, too,” you say.

“You had to think about it?” She smiles. That smile.

Half formed. Perfect. “Not even a little.”

— “Where are you?” she asks.

You blink as if that will somehow return you to the present.

“Nowhere.”

— It is hot. Aggressively so. The heat claws at you, shoving fingers down your throat and into your lungs. You are drowning as you breathe.

“The river is high,” she says. You follow her to the barrier and look. It seems almost close enough to touch.

“You know, it’s days like this that I’m almost tempted to jump in.” You mock throwing a leg over.

She rolls her eyes and turns away.

“Watch out for devil birds,” she says. You catch up in a few short steps and reach for her hand.

“Don’t,” she says, pulling her hand away. “You’re sweaty.”

— You fidget with her belt buckle. You can feel the vodka swimming through your blood. It has made it to your fingers. They are fumbling and fragile but you get it off all the same. “What are you doing?” she whispers in your ear but she is kissing your neck, her fingernails on your back. You don’t do this anymore.

She kisses you. Hard. Her breath crawls down the back of your throat. It tastes like the drink. You don’t do this anymore. She pulls your shirt away, fumbling and fragile. You feel her lips on your chest, shoulders, stomach. Your hands warm to her skin.

“What are you doing?” they ask.

The sheets are tangled and confused. You don’t do this anymore. Her breath tastes like whiskey and you. The vodka vibrates inside of you. You are doing this.

— She sleeps. You watch the rise and fall of her back.

Slow. A dimple between her shoulder blades with each breath.

You kiss her there. Lightly. Your breath raising the tiny hairs on her back. She rolls over, hand dangling into empty space. She is smiling in her sleep.

— “I need a cigarette,” you say, taking your jacket from the hook by the door. “You don’t smoke,” she says.

“I’ll buy a pack.” Your feet stick to the tile. It asks you to stay.

— She hands you your coffee cup, too hot. She pours her own, spilling onto the counter, and takes a seat next to you.

“You’re just going to leave that?” She looks up from the paper at the stains and back down again.

“I’ll clean it up later.” She shakes out the paper. You feel yourself bend with the creases, losing yourself Kithe/Ballweg

6

among the folds.

You stand and scrub the drops from the counter and throw the rag in the sink. “I was going to do it,” she says.

“It’s fine.”

— “Where are you?” You ask, watching her fork play absentmindedly with her curry. “Hmm?” Not a question. “Nowhere. I’m here.”

You search, barefoot, for her under the table, but her feet are tucked neatly under her chair. You tear another piece of naan and watch the candlelight play with her hands.

— “I thought you didn’t smoke,” she says. The ash from your cigarette drifts, missing the ashtray and landing on the worn tabletop.

“I quit.”

“Okay.” She takes the pack from your front shirt pocket and taps one out into her fingers. They do not dance in the lamplight. The cigarette hangs from her lips, lazy and unpracticed. You reach across the tabletop and light it for her. You brush her cheek with the back of your hand. It feels familiar and wrong.

The smoke wanders from your hands and around your shoulders. It holds above your heads, lingering there before stretching itself out the window. You do not say anything. Neither does she. She rests her hand on yours. It is sweaty and warm. Yours is cold.

You take another cigarette and watch the old end smolder and dance in the ruins of the ashtray.

“I love you,” she says; her voice is full of smoke. You can see the wildfire in her lungs. “I love you, too,” you say. Your lungs are full of sand and seawater and the words fall, sodden and drowned.

She takes another cigarette and you reach to light it for her across the table. She takes her hand from yours and lights it herself.

— “Is it time?” She asks into your collarbone.

“I think so,” you say. You know it is.

7

Kithe/Ballweg

“How do we know?” You feel the warmth of her tears on your skin.

“Because we’re asking.” You kiss the top of her head.

She smells like lilacs and her and you. Her hair tickles your lips.

“I don’t want it to be.”

“I know. But it is.” You run your tongue along your teeth and try to think of other things. You are suddenly consumed by the before. You remember the time when she did not exist to you. Before the bottle. Before the light. Tears slide down your face and dry on your shoulder and you realize this is what love is.

— You sit on the floor of your shower, cold water tumbling down on you. It does not feel like rain.

Each drop feels like fingernails raked tenderly, savagely across your skin. Down your neck. Your shoulders. Your back.

Your hands feel foreign on your own skin. You reach up and turn the water colder, hoping it’ll turn into rain.

— Drunk. Hazy and narrow. The once familiar pavement now foreign under your feet, winding, unsteady. You lean against the elm, the one where you used to wait for the bus, and vomit. It’s grown, you think as you wipe your mouth and stumble on.

You do not remember where you’re going. Your feet lead you there anyway. You stop again, a fence post where you crashed your bike at twelve. You finger the scar where they put the pins into you. Turning your wrist, you think you can feel the metal at work inside. You are empty but you vomit again. Empty still, but this is another kind.

And then you find yourself under the streetlight.

That streetlight. Your toes wriggle in your shoes, wishing for the gravel just a step away. The window is lit, despite the hour, the blinds down.

You trace her shadow. It is hard to do; your head is washed out. But you hold it steady and travel down the curve of her neck, the slope of her back, sharp edges of her shoulder blades, shadowed blurs, but you see them. You feel yourself sliding along them and you do not remember that you have a body until you feel the shudder of the ground meeting you.

You begin to take off your shoes, though the laces slide from your fingers. You stretch your legs and let your feet rest in the gravel, toes still now. Familiar.

They do not move. You think of a summer day, barefeet and the sweet sting of gravel and dew.

There are no swans today, only the bikes at the edges, covered in muck.

“The river is low,” you say to no one in particular.

■

You pull yourself up by the fencepost and notice the light has gone out in the window. You do not know how long you have been here. The shadow is gone and you are here. You feel the rocks in the bones of your feet. You take your shoes in your hand and do not let yourself know you are crying. As you walk away, you think it has begun to rain.

— The sky is shifting outside your window, snow rising and rolling in the grey. You sit in your naked bedsheets and wonder when the last time it did this was. Six years. You know. Outside, it rolls over and so do you.

— There is nothing around you and yet you are strangled. Twisted and bent, you cannot move and you cannot be still. You find yourself on the floor, holding yourself together as tightly as you can and then tighter still. You can feel your fingernails leaving marks between your ribs and you cling tighter. Maybe you’ll draw blood.

Last night’s whiskey rolls in your stomach and you only just make it to the toilet before it comes pouring out. You wipe it away with the back of your hand but do not wash your mouth out. You let the bitterness sit.

You did not go to her house last night. Instead, you went home with another girl whose name you do not remember. She kissed you this morning before she left.

You crack an egg into the pan. Last night. She took your socks off. She kissed your neck and did not ask if you wanted a blanket when you shivered. You flip the egg. The yolk breaks. You vomit into the kitchen trash bin.

— You run your hand along the barrier, swerving to avoid the ring buoy holder. The buoy is missing. It has begun to rain. You wait for it to soak through your shoes. It only takes minutes, the water twisting into your socks.

Kithe/Ballweg

8

The perfect time for a walk, lit by cold orbs of night— stars, streetlights, racoon eyes.

To Identify Robyn Groth

Out in my pajamas, I found you nude, your tender throat bulging, with moonlight.

Cradled between palms, you stilled, frozen with fear, perhaps— or calmed by touch, by warmth, close walls, the security of darkness.

Anaxyrus americanus, I know you— skin cold when exposed, heart racing, such little light, this night.

Back to your children, you bury yourself. The muddled walls, a comfort.

9

Kithe/Groth

The New Parts Rebecca Pyle

Kithe/Pyle

10

Interracial Love in the Time of COVID Dionne Irving

D

uring quarantine, I joked with my husband that we would see which marriages would last.

"Divorce lawyers,” I said, “are going to make a killing.”

And then the world caught fire.

And during that summer of fire, I said their names. I watched the protests. But I didn’t go to one. As a Black woman with a PhD, I very often find myself in primarily white spaces. I felt deeply and totally alone. Any silly ideas I’d harbored about my beautiful biracial son and our loving family offering hope was a fallacy. My life is filled with caring white people, some of whom may have thought that my happy interracial marriage was a sign that we live in post-racial world.

This summer, as I watched friends and colleagues black out their social media pages, what I felt more often than not was anger. Anger at the self-congratulatory good intentions behind the concern. Anger at them for wanting my approval. And finally, anger at my husband because he is not Black.

I am on my second white husband. It has a ring to it, doesn’t it? Like the title of a story you’d like to read.

In the waning days of my first marriage, my then-husband attended his female friend’s wedding. On our own wedding day, a couple years earlier, this same woman had fallen into hysterics in the church. A friend later told me that, just prior to this scene, someone had said to her, “well, there’s no chance of you having him now.” So, as my own marriage was beginning to implode, I decided to sit out her wedding. When my then-husband returned from his weekend in Virginia, I asked him how it’d gone. In his hesitation, I knew there was more.

“Well? What happened?”

“There was something. . . .”

He shook out his linen suit and described getting drunk and driving golf carts around the groom’s family’s farm. He paused a moment and then shared how the groom had made racist joke after racist joke as they drove around. He’d said nothing, not wanting “to make anything awkward.”

And with a sense of finality, my heart slammed shut and I swore that I would never, ever marry a white man again.

When I first met my second husband, I was certain I would not be dragged into anyone else’s “I-would’ve-voted-for-Obama-a-third-time-if-I-could,” white savior complex. But we connected instantly and immediately. He grew up in the middle of Kansas in a town where his family has lived for generations. And me?

Well, if there was no slave trade, no tens of millions of Africans in the middle passage, no rape, no coolies dying in Madras, no desire for a cuppa with a little sugar, then there is no me: a Black woman with Jamaican parents, born in Canada.

But in the days after I met him, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wanted this person in my life. Our meet-cute, one we love to recount even after a decade, feels like the stuff of romantic comedies. A party after a poetry reading. Forgotten names. No exchange of phone numbers. I tracked him down through a friend and we emailed flirty messages back and forth until he invited me to Thanksgiving Dinner. I told him no and, later, yes.

11

Kithe/Irving

I was both pleased and relieved to arrive at the dinner to find I was not the only person of color there.

The first time my older sister met my now husband, she quizzed him about his parents’ feelings about him dating a Black woman. “They are going to love her,” he said without pause.

And they do love me deeply and truly. But sometimes in a rural Kansas garage or bathroom I find myself crying at a word or a microaggression and I wonder if this is worth it. Is my love for my husband, my son, and my in-laws worth sacrificing my mental well-being? Time and time again, the answer has been “yes.”

I am not sure the answer is going to stay yes. Because love might not be enough. Because, it might not matter how many books my husband reads, how many well-meaning Facebook posts he publishes, or what a good father he is to our son. None of it might be enough to push away the disquieting feeling that people who look like him have a history, a system for oppressing people who look like me.

The personal is always political, isn’t it? And love, isn’t that a political choice, too? On Loving Day this year, I reread Richard Loving’s beautiful request to his lawyer: “Tell the Court I love my wife.” A flawless distillation. But I imagine they still fought over how to raise their children, or what color to paint the kitchen, all while publicly having to defend their right to be married to each other.

When my husband and I argue, I try to find common ground by saying, “But we still love each other.”

Because when you are so enmeshed in your partner’s seeing things or feeling things the way you do, what else is keeping you together but that fragile idea that the person to whom you have committed your life is someone you do not want to be without?

My husband can’t ever understand what it means to live in a Black body. Or this particular sadness for George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many others. There are no words violent or harsh or complicated enough.

Recently, during a discussion about relationships, my husband said, “Sure, there’ve been times when I thought we would split up. But we choose to keep working at it.” His comment was meant to highlight his choice.

The one he keeps making even when it’s hard.

He chooses to love me even when I shut him out. And as his wife, I choose him back. I choose him in spite of the difficulty of the world, nurturing our healthy relationship so that it becomes a habit. But I have to work hard at it right now because my anger overwhelms my ability to say that the hard work of marriage is worth it. Not when it feels like the world hardly sees me as a human worthy of the union.

In class, I tell my students that we cannot ever really know another human’s lived experience. But, I remind them that as writers, we are deeply engaged in the project of trying. Marriage is kind of like that, too.

We try really hard to understand another person. And as human beings, the thing we desire most may be connection, to know someone, fully and deeply.

But there are so many things that I can’t explain. That I might not ever be able to explain. That my husband won’t make me try to explain. And that’s what makes me keep choosing him. Even when it doesn’t make sense, like his sun-cracked and wind-swept Kansas town, like the decommissioned missile silo next to the house he grew up in, like our child, beautiful and perfect in every way. Who insists, as he cradles my face between his tiny hands, that he is white. Like Papa. ■

Kithe/Irving

12

You, Too

Bridget Spoerri It started with a Pothos, a cut from a cutting of a cutting, Your grandmother’s legacy. And here you are now, Poring over a lemon-shaped pot, pruning ivy, Watering jade and African violets with great affection, Speaking their names and sending them your breath.

The Pothos, which after its gifting became, On more than one occasion, yellow and wilting, Italicizing the worry that you were not worthy, Now celebrates fifteen years of stretching her tangled vines, And she sings in the sun, Even while forgotten, alone on the sill.

She owns her patches of coarse brown skin, The calloused wounds left from sharing herself with others, Her few feet of fat, naked vine (From when you could not take the best care of her Or of yourself - but she forgives you), And she teaches you that when you love something That loves you back, you, too, will grow.

13

Kithe/Spoerri

out of gas and out of luck K.L. Johnston

Kithe/Johnston

14

Poppies Dream Christy Boyer

15

Kithe/Boyer

Little Things

Jordan Nishkian

—I

told you what I want.

She placed her phone face-down on the cubby shelf, stomach imploding. What could she say to that?

She left the cold stock room of sequins, flocked hangers, and loose threads to return to the sales floor. Her sections of evening gowns and intimates were empty of shoppers: holiday parties had all passed, and prom and wedding preparations were still months away. The only special event her areas of the department store were getting ready for was Valentine's Day. For that, they shipped in about five or six different boxes of lingerie.

“‘I told you what I want?’” she muttered as she adjusted her name tag, pulled her long hair into a sloppy bun, and headed to the lingerie racks to straighten out the displays. “Why would he say it like that?”

She fixed pairs of red and pink lace thongs onto slim plastic hangers. When they first came in two weeks ago, she asked him if she should buy a pair.

“Taline, what's the point of paying $30 for three pieces of string?” he asked. He had a point. Instead, she bought a teal nightgown to match the color of his 1994 Mustang, which he seemed to appreciate.

That was the night he really wanted to talk about becoming a family. She shook her head as the flimsy hanger she was handling broke in her palm. They were already a family, but in the last few days, it had become a perpetual, exhausting discussion.

Taline finished up in the lingerie department and walked to a checkout station at the front of the evening floor. Dozens of racks glittered with gowns, but her focus was drawn to the last open browser tab in her cell phone—it was the requirements list for the master’s program she’d been putting off. She checked the time. Another fourteen minutes before she had to take her prescription. After refilling the staples in the stapler, reorganizing the drawers, and testing all the pens, she reviewed her sales totals: $470. It was a Monday. She was never busy on Mondays.

A mother and daughter chattering in Armenian approached her floor, browsing the racks, and draping dresses over an empty stroller. A small, fair-skinned, dark-haired baby toddled behind his grandmother. Don't cry, she thought.

“Hello,” Taline’s customer service voice spoke for her. “Please let me know if you need anything.”

The grandmother’s eyes narrowed, wrinkled skin folding over itself as she studied her face and name tag.

“Inch bes es?” the middle-aged woman tested.

“Shad lav,” Taline answered. “And how are you?”

She achieved a look of approval. Her own tatik would be proud. “Well, thank you,” the woman responded, turning her attention to the child pulling at her pant leg.

“Can I help you find anything today?”

“We're just looking for now, but,” the daughter said, eying their stroller full of merchandise, “I'm sure we'll need a dressing room in a few minutes.”

Taline nodded. “Just let me know.”

She watched the ladies roll on with their dresses and their fluttering, red-stickered price tags.

The register screen read 12:23 p.m. Seven minutes. She could have technically taken it then, but she liked to be exact.

Something brushed her leg, and her pulse quickened. The toddler stood next to her, his chocolate-colored eyes inspecting the lace trim on her skirt. She froze and stared at the top of his curly head. Don't cry, please don't cry.

A grubby finger reached for the hem, and she winced as he grabbed at the fabric while struggling to keep his balance. She looked across the store and waved to his owners, but they were too engrossed with percentages to notice her. He began to wobble. Oh god, don't do that.

She extended a wary finger at him and he grasped on to her. His pudgy hand wrapped around her as he steadied himself. His fingers were surprisingly warm and not as sticky as she had imagined. Taline relaxed a bit; she didn’t mind being needed.

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He caught the glimmer of her wedding ring.

“That's been on my finger for a little longer than you've been alive,” she told him. She wiggled it back and forth with her thumb to make it sparkle more for him. His eyes grew wide, then so did his mouth. Soon he was running his tongue over the ring, and she suppressed cringing at the drool dripping down her hand. Her wedding band tapped against two tiny teeth that had barely broken the surface of his tender gums.

“I get it,” she said. “You're teething. My dog did that too.”

He looked up at her. His eyes were so dark that she could almost see all the details of her reflection.

“Parev yavreeg.” The words felt strange coming out of her mouth; they exited without her permission, mimicking what she’d heard relatives say when they squeezed her small face at holidays. “Hello, sweetheart.”

He laughed, and to her surprise, she laughed too. He waved his arms around, brushing the sleeve of his navy thermal against her leg. She crouched to meet his level.

“Ara!” His mother searched for him.

“He's over here,” Taline called back to her. The duo wheeled towards her with a few more items added to their stroller.

“Ara, do you have a new girlfriend?” his mother cooed and held her arms open to him. The three women watched his garbled legs try to run to her. In one fluid motion, she picked him up and propped him on her hip.

Taline closed her wet, empty hand. “Let me get those gowns in a room for you.”

She piled her arms with organza and tulle and walked to the fitting rooms at the back of the department floor. She arranged the items in a room large enough for the three of them, separating the size sixes for Ara's mother from the tens for his grandma, then examined the drool that was still on her fingers. She bit the inside of her cheek and wiped it off with the sleeve of her sweater.

It was probably time. She left their room open for them and walked across the hall into the stockroom. She checked her phone: 12:30 on the dot. She reached into her bag and pulled out a sheet of pills. Monday, second column, first row of the pack. Her thumbnail pressed hard onto the plastic bubble pack, releasing a small tablet into her palm, through her fingers, and onto the speckled linoleum. She bent to retrieve it as she read the new message from him:

—I love you, I think we're ready.

Taline sighed, staring at the white pill next to the toe of her boot.

She heard Ara begin to cry. ■

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To Vitrify

Robyn Groth Everything was clear— her skin & bones, organs, fragile muscles, nerves like strings of hot glue.

She was glass, and everyone could see through her once red heart, now clarified, to her soul, revealed to be wanting.

She was hiding nothing; she had nothing to hide.

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Compunction Will Freeney

M

[September 1970] y first contact with paronomasia came at age eighteen. A little late, maybe, but I had a sheltered childhood.

I stepped into my dormitory hallway, and Ralph stepped out of his room.

“Hey, new bee! Where’s your honey?”

I opened my mouth, unsure what to say, but Ralph rolled on.

“So, how’s it hangin’? Limp, shriveled, and to the left?” He punctuated this with a strange chuckle that seemed to be all inhale – before continuing. “Don’t worry, I don’t have X-ray vision.

But I do have an ex named Rae – and boy was she a vision. Not Fay Wray, mind you – but she was kinda fey.”

It only took a few seconds of silence to think that he must have run out of steam – or at least puns – but no. Not quite. He extended his hand, after completing his internal reminiscence of Rae.

“I’m Ralph, but I won’t.” Again the guffaw.

I extended my hand, which he shook with country bumpkin vigor.

“I’m Will,” I responded, bereft of rejoinder. I’m not sure I had ever heard a pun aloud before – much less a barrage of them. In my parents’ house such things weren’t allowed. Frivolity was right next to fun, and fun was tantamount to sin.

Ralph raised his hand in farewell, and in retrospect, I see the fingers parted in a Vulcan salute. He could have been the hillbilly Spock – if that isn’t an oxymoron.

“Well, I’ll see you around. Don’t be a square,” he said, with only a smirk, before turning 180 degrees and walking back into his room, closing the door gently behind him.

—

Once contact had occurred, paronomasia—defined as a ‘play’ on words based on multiple meanings or sounds— grew in my consciousness like a sleeper virus. The acquisition of new vocabulary and new languages fed its growth. By mid-life (assuming I live to be 100) I had written down and filed away all the puns that came to me – or all the ones that came and wouldn’t leave.

They were entered in journals and notebooks, tucked away in drawers and boxes, waiting to be discovered by the inheritors of my estate, like the alcoholic’s collection of empty bottles.

—

While there is a set of people inclined to look down their noses and groan at the pun uttered in their presence (John Dryden, who said the pun would “torture one poor word ten thousand ways,” may be their founding father), Charles Gruner, humor theorist, conjectures that that groan is actually their unwitting admission of defeat. Puns, Gruner claims, are “a product of humans’ adaptive tendency towards competitiveness. We may groan at puns as an acknowledgement that we have been outplayed by a speaker who has asserted his or her superiority over us.” Freud weighed in on the subject as well, saying that puns were a “victorious

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assertion of the ego’s invulnerability.” This correlates well with Shakespeare’s use of puns.

Many of the mouths out of which he issues puns are those of pages and buffoons – subservient commoners. The pun becomes a tool of subversion, socially as well as linguistically.

Douglas Kearney, experimental poet, certainly sees it that way. In his 2015 book Mess and Mess and he says, “pun [is] a mess of message where mess means confusion and excess. Pun teems meaning. It is marginalized speech due to this willful and perverse disorder. It is a shit talk, but one can pun to talk shit. The user trope-a-dopes listeners, briar patching their access to the message’s multiplicity. Pun is some prima materia of signifyin.” Kearney then footnotes ‘signifyin’ with what also serves as a synoptic assessment of pun (the dreaded paronomasia): “shit talk that allowed black folk (who were legally and socially shit folk) to talk shit and not just take shit without ending up in deep shit.”

Kearney’s works are rife with riffing on words, punning with a vengeance. Take the opening lines of “Swimchant of N*gger Mer-Folk (An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis)”: O, VERMILLION SHIP D’ WAH-WAH OOO OVER MILLION SHIPPED, WAH WAH-OOO

The entire poem is laden with multiple layers, each carrying its own heavy baggage of irony, but this opening couplet sets the tone, with its reiterated homophone – “o, vermillion / over million.” Vermillion: the color and tint derived from cinnabar (mercury ore) is also approximately the color of blood (like the blood of slaves cast overboard, that enticed sharks to follow the ships). Cinnabar: one of the (poisonous) products shipped in the so-called “triangle trade” – the triangle of trans-Atlantic shipping routes that included men, women, and children captured as ore, to be rendered as slaves in the “New World.” The next line (“over million shipped”) evokes the McDonald’s ever-augmenting motto (“over one zillion sold”) and heightens the reader’s awareness of the magnitude of this travesty, as flavored by the commodification of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Now that is a play on words that does hard work!

It is by no means the first such usage, though. Shakespeare had his disempowered characters speak a wide array of condemnations and askance assessments under the cloak of pun.

In fact, he may have uttered the first ever “yo’ mama” via the mouth of Aaron, in Titus Andronicus (Act 4, Scene 2): Chiron:

Thou hast undone our mother.

Aaron:

Villain, I have done thy mother.

He also created a popular euphemism that didn’t survive to our time when he had Iago complain of Othello’s adulterous liaisons, referring to their conjugal activities as “making the beast with two backs.” These two examples are sexual innuendos veiled in pun and used to express significant interpersonal dynamics. Sometimes, his pun is just for fun – just for the pun of it.

Some of Shakespeare’s puns are elided by the ephemeral nature of colloquial language – meanings that created the second meaning of a double meaning have fallen out of usage so long ago that modern readers don’t recognize them as such. “Nothing,” for instance, was a slang term for the female pudendum (an allocation of meaning with its own load of misogynistic implications) – making the very title of Much Ado About Nothing a pun.

—

In our reverence for Shakespeare’s undisputed prowess as a playwright, a crafter of human dramas of significant import, we shouldn’t forget that he was also selling entertainment to and for the masses. He was SNL and BBC on one stage. He worked to beguile the common folk in the audience, to keep their attention rapt by wrapping “dirty” jokes in clever puns. The subversion here is that of language and of moral proscriptions. The universality of the pun is due to its accessibility to all speakers of the language, and that may be the reason Dryden felt his elitist disdain for it. But damn it, it works, it twerks. It titillates the listener’s mind in a way that has more to do with intellect than biology. Perhaps the most notorious of Shakespeare’s puns, at this level, is Malvolio’s parsing of a letter from his lady, in which he proclaims, “These are her C’s, her U’s, ‘n’ these her T’s – and hence proceed her P’s” (Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5).

While many of the terms used in Shakespeare’s puns may have fallen into obsolescence, the impulse to pun for fun, as a mode of mass entertainment, persists. Although there is not much that will catch a censor’s eye today (if you can find a censor), it was not so long ago (a mere fifty something years) that the Smothers Brothers tried to slide this exchange into their television Kithe/Freeney

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show:

[Dick] Hey, did you know they have a ballet in Russia?

[Tommy] Bolshoi.

[Dick] No, really.

They tried, but it was bollixed by their censors’ intervention. Bollocks!

—

As citizens of the late capitalist era, we have seen (and continue to see) everything used to sell everything. But, whether it’s the voluptuous model licking burger condiments from her painted lips or the sleek but shapely model zipping into her leathers before a motorcycle ride, the top sales agent must be sex. The pun has stepped into this lusty arena with aplomb. Witness “Bottoms Up Espresso,” with baristas in a drive-thru hut, serving lots of lattes with little clothing – minimal coverage lingerie to be precise. In the realm of capitalist pandering, as in literature and entertainment, it quickly becomes apparent that the pun in the company title is there as much for the amusement of the owner as for the motivation of the buyer. Coffee, whether served au naturel or in classic Flo and Alice mode, seems to prompt its purveyors to pun. The Fish & Sip Café and Prospect Perk Café are just two of the more sedate examples. But beer and wine varieties proffer the same kind of whimsical paronomasia – both in the names of the specific brews/vintages and of the companies that created them.

Take ‘Citra Ass Down’ (double IPA) from Against the Grain Brewing or ‘Barbarian Streisand’ (IPA) from Cellarmaker Brewing, or ‘Hoppy Ending’ from the mundanely named Palo Alto Brewing Company – but depicting on its label a cartoon of a seductively clad masseuse rubbing down a sheet-draped hop bud, or ‘Hoptimus Prime’ (double IPA) from Ruckus Brewing.

The list really does go on and on.

Vintners are not without their wit, either. Take 3 Blind Moose Cellars – please. ‘7 Deadly Zins’ (Zinfandel, duh) is produced by Michael David Winery. Alexander the Grape is a microwinery (with a macro sense of irony). The Bearitage presents a pun that only a wine connoisseur could appreciate: the Meritage Association produces blended American wines in the Bourdeaux tradition. The Bearitage is a blend designed to be uniquely Californian, mixing the Bear Flag Republic with Zinfandel. The Bearitage has its own spinoff – the Polar Bearitage, a blend of sauvignon blanc and chardonnay. As a rule, it seems that wineries are not quite as rambunctious in the naming of their endeavors or their products. But that seems to follow the rubric of distinctions between wine and beer ‘culture.’ One slight exception (and there may be many more) exists in Goat Door (Côte d’Or) wine – from the Goats Do Roam (Côtes du Rhone) Winery of South Africa. This one apparently raised some hackles in France, where the Institut des Appellations d’Origin protested the similarity of the name to their registered appellation (Côtes du Rhone).

Goats Do Roam’s owner, Charles Back, retorted that, no, this was a literal nominative exercise, honoring the goats that escape their pens and wander through his vineyards. Good one, Chuck Back.

—

Could it be that caffeine and alcohol inspire this kind of whimsical, adventurous naming in the business sector? If so, where are the Folger’s or Starbucks offerings named ‘Slam This’ (also a contender for an Old Grandad distillation) and “Eyes Wide Shit”? Where is the Budweiser special edition named “Good Swill Hunting”? No, I think the key factor is the petit bourgeois latitude that microbreweries and craft wineries have – and exercise. Similar whimsy abounds (in lesser quantities) in other privately owned business – from dry cleaners to towing companies.

I’m no psychiatrist – and no entrepreneur – but I think that if I were, I would feel a deeper sense of ownership if I got to express my wacky personality in my business’ name (say, Freewill Form Factors). Apparently, I am not alone in this impulse. A Facebook user, using the handle @ jwoodsrobinson, posted, “I’m starting up a new restaurant that serves curry poured over French fries. It’s called ‘Curry on My Wayward Spud.’ And yes … There’ll be peas when you are done.” That there is the work of a punner of my own ilk – or illness, depending on how you see it.

No matter how you see it (as long as you’re able to see it), paronomasia isn’t going anywhere – but it can take a lot of people with it. Come for the pun, stay for the message. Whether the result is titillation, seduction, conversion, righteous indignation, or simple chuck-chuckle, as long you have the humility (sorry, Dryden) and the wit (forget it Donny, you’re out of your league) it can serve its purpose, attending the crash site of two meanings with one sound.

As for me and my house, we shall serve the pun—until that day when, I, like Mercutio, have to say, “ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.” ■

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we breathe and breathing is (an) a | synchronous music, (yet) every body needs the air Dao Strom translated by Vi Khi Nao

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A Note on the Text This poem was created in 2020-21 as a public art commission for the Vanport Building in Portland, Oregon. It resides as a permanent installation on the SW 5th Avenue side of the building (at the corner of Montgomery Street). Commissioned by Portland State University, OHSU, PCC, and City of Portland, the poem was written and designed by Dao Strom, reflecting on events of 2020 and beyond, with Vietnamese language translation by Vi Khi Nao. The poem’s text and voices are enacted also in an audio-video format, from which the stills on preceding pages are taken.

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That Moment the Sun Seems to Stand Still Susan Cummins Miller Solstice. Drowsy snare of summer.

Bees forage among the tiny blue flowers of rosemary. A house finch breaks into song before taking a turn at the feeder. Light wakes recollection: Remembering how we ventured, so long ago, into clear skies and shimmering days, explored a brushwood thicket to discover a clutch of Inca dove eggs hidden in buffel grass, paddled through blackpot shallows and deepening shadows that lay, without menace, in the path of whirlwinds snaking down the valley. Remembering long summer evenings, burnished leaves rustling in the failing light, wheatfields glowing under splintered stars.

At the moment the sun appears to stand still, I offer one prayer: Would that we could always have lived that freely, that unaware, that generously, oblivious to the elongated gash that the sorely tested spirit might have made on the wider world—oblivious to the shuddering instance of emergence, to the promise of an unspent life, of a puzzle waiting to be solved. Now, only a faint beat lingers in light and dark, succumbing to the calm truth living in the moonlight.

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The Sun Struck Noon Over Katskid Hill Thayne Casper

I

am a watermelon, flying high over Katskid. I’ve only known the earth. The gardener’s touch. The musk of morning soil. Water. Warmth. Vines, and earthworms. The thunk-thunk of knuckles and my croaky reply.

I know the smoothness of leather gloves and the thunder of a dirt road. I know the kiss of the sticker along my side. I know the cold fluorescents of the market. The Physicist’s cherry whistle. The canvas of the trebuchet’s sling. But I don’t know this. The force of being thrust into the heavens. Below me, the city grows larger.

I’m falling, not north to south, but like the meteors that once painted the night with emeralds. I never imagined I could fly, and a part of me knows I can’t. This, like all things too real to be real, will end, and as the last of the homes disappear beneath me, I welcome my eruption against Katskid Hill. A meteor meant to soar. A meteor meant to land. A fate conditioned by the acts of another.

I am a trebuchet, standing tall in the Physicist’s backyard, a javelin aimed at the heavens. I am a killer.

There is blood on me. My war isn’t supposed to be this close. Do you know what it’s like to be birthed for destruction? Do you know what it means for annihilation to be your purpose? I was built with compassion, and I can only return malice. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Why? Why would he open that box? Why would he fan the photos out on the ground in front of us? He raised my concrete counterweight and stood beneath me with his arms outstretched. Why did he pull the release mechanism? I was here, finally, at my crescendo, swinging freely on my greased fulcrum, whipping my arm through the air like a 30-foot fuck you raised to my exile. Purpose, design, and completion. But all it was was the dull umph of the Physicist’s body as he’s splintered against my counterweight.

We are the Black-Eyed Susans, nestled along the back fence, flecked with the Physicist’s red mist. We are yellow and crimson and bullseyes of darkness, and we are loved. The soft woman, his wife, she cares for us.

She sings to us. She tells us her secrets. She explains away her bruises, and why, on this morning, she matches our brilliant darkness. She whispers about where she goes, and about the one she sees. We remind her, not of this crumpled, used-to-be man, but of dim hours and gentle goosebumps and the warmth of two souls braided together. She snips us and cries. But we don’t mind. We welcome the cool water in the bottom of the vase. The other woman, the new woman, places us beside the bed. In the kitchen. On the coffee table. She photographs us. Them. The three of us together. Yellow and crimson and bullseyes of darkness, we are their hidden world.

From our spot along the fence, we can see the Physicist, broken and crimped like a dried spider. We can see the trebuchet, and next to it, the shoebox that belongs to the soft woman. We can see the photos on the ground. We know what the soft woman made him see. ■

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Unconscious Emotions Anna Freyne

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I Have Seen the Future, and it is Newark Airport's Terminal C

O

Kevin Hadsell

n February 5th, 2018, I flew into Newark with my longtime friend Jon after spending four days at sea on the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise. For a short time our ordinary lives, and in some ways reality itself, had been suspended: 60+ bands and 3,000 passengers floating around on a cruise ship in the Atlantic, the destination itself mostly just a formality (it was the Turks and Caicos, for anyone interested). So I had arrived, then, in a dreamy state of post-vacation afterglow, slowly coming back down to the "real" world. Since our departure from Ft. Lauderdale, I had been acclimating to it gradually, by degrees, like a goldfish introduced to an unfamiliar tank. Yet now, having arrived in Newark just in time to miss our connecting flight back to Portland, Oregon (we ended up circling the runway for several minutes until we received clearance to land, in an already-tight transfer), we found ourselves here, in Newark's very own airport largely against our will, until sometime the following morning when we would board an 8:40am flight back to PDX. I had never been to New Jersey, nor have I since. And while I know that, on some level, it would be unfair to judge an entire state by its airport, I am also reminded of an old Dostoyevsky quote: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." The Newark Airport is no prison, of course, no matter how long one may be "detained" for a layover or cancelled flight. But an airport is often the first (and in some cases, only) impression one gets of a place.

And while navigating these spaces one is completely at their mercy, from basic amenities to the details of where one's body will be, when, and under what conditions. In this context I'm pretty sure that the Newark Airport says something about the state of our society; and while it isn't clear what that might be, exactly, it's probably nothing good. The whole experience left me with the sense that I had somehow caught a glimpse of the future, and, well, let's just say that I have some concerns.

Wandering through Terminal C, there is nothing that immediately strikes the weary traveler as amiss. In fact, it appears unusually clean for a major transportation hub, gleaming and bright, with a vaguely futuristic aesthetic: wide corridors, clearly-labeled avenues, and a surprising number of ultra-modern bars, situated as islands along the corridors, with cushy swivel-stools connected to iPads at every place setting. Gleaming fluorescent lighting shines across the walkways, like a movie-set version of what heaven might look like. The whole place, in fact, projects the aura of a slightly futuristic, upscale shopping mall. A quick scan through the Newark Airport's Wikipedia page revealed that Terminal C got a $120 million renovation in 2014, a plan that included 6,000 iPads and 55 restaurants run by celebrity chefs. And framed this way, it does sound genuinely nice, almost like a destination in itself. Yet this first glance proved deceptive. Jon and I found a seat at one of the island-bars and ordered a drink just in time for Last Call, which

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may have been an ominous sign in retrospect – it was 9:30pm, local time.

“You know, that’s the thing about this place,” said Jon, glancing around. “It’s all very clean, very chic, very modern. But everything is just a little bit... off.”

Indeed. Maybe it was the terrible Muzak drifting over us everywhere we went, a ubiquitous, immersive sound that sort of seeped into one's pores1. Or that the price of a beer (as in, one of them) ranged from $7.50 to $11.25, depending on your preference. There was something peculiar, too, about the way that every available counter space had an iPad bolted to the table, loaded with games and wifi and mandatory, periodic ads one had to endure from time to time. From these tablets one placed all orders for food and drink, largely eliminating human contact from bar and table service. You simply poked the keyboard, swiped your credit card (there is no cash in the future, it turns out) and a few minutes later whatever you ordered arrives to your table by one of the waitstaff, someone you have never seen before and will never see again, who then vanishes into whatever crack or fissure leads back to the kitchen. Every surface was polished and gleaming, entirely free of dirt and debris, giving everything a sterile, factory-sealed look, as if the entire place had been removed from shrinkwrap moments before our arrival.

Like every good dystopia, the Newark Airport means well. But also like every good dystopia, it seems largely unaware of the gap between its own vision and the reality of what it has become. Here we have a sort of Jetsons-esque idea of what the future might look like, perhaps reimagined by Silicon Valley tech bros and filtered through an Olympic-sized swimming pool of venture capital, freshly updated for the 21st Century: a world that is technologically advanced, mobile, and automated, mediated by moving walkways and near-sentient algorithms, all designed for a facility whose ultimate purpose is moving people from one place to another at 30,000 feet in the air.

Air travel itself does, after all, carry a whiff of the futuristic and the utopian. Consider this passage from Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler:

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you

vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a

duration that is itself a void in time; then you reappear, in a

place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the

when in which you vanished.

Space and time: two forces that constrain human agency, here conquered through the technical feats of aeronautical engineering. And perhaps this does invoke a transcendent, even utopian impulse. In general, though, our visions of the future tend to be less about any literal prediction of what lies ahead of us than, say, the collective dreams and anxieties of the present moment.

Hence the uncanny weirdness of the Newark Airport: it is somebody's dream, somebody's vision of tomorrow, though it isn't clear exactly whose vision that is, or, for that matter, what kind of world it seems to be nudging us toward. But it does draw some uncomfortable parallels to current trends in urban environments nationwide. The pricy Terminal C renovation echoes the "renovation" many cities— among them Chicago, New York, and my then-hometown of Portland, Oregon—have experienced in recent years. In the latter case, I have 1 Though in retrospect the fact that we had just spent the last 4 days at

a heavy metal festival on a cruise ship may have left us overly-sensitized to the pumped-in atmospheric pop used here as a sort of audio wallpaper. In any case, the contrast proved striking, and seemed to have, in the absence of anything resembling a blastbeat, crunchy power-chord riff, whammy-bar solo or glass-shattering falsetto shriek, a soporific effect on both of us. But who knows: maybe it was jetlag or something.

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personally witnessed cherished neighborhood dive bars, affordable housing, and hole-in-the-wall music venues give way to strange, geode-like apartment complexes that seem to rise out of the earth like alien colonies, along with the usual "upgrades:" boutique stores, artisanal salt shops, a series of ever-trendier cocktail bars located on rooftops, and what have you. The fact that only Terminal C received this upgrade should not go unnoticed, either, while the rest of the Newark Airport terminals remain as they are, at least for the moment. Can one gentrify an airport? Or maybe, like, one neighborhood of an airport? Is this, too, part of the future that we're building towards?

Pressing questions, all.

We ended up making camp at one of the nearby terminals, setting our alarms for some ungodly hour of the morning. The benches had all been fitted with stainless steel armrests between every seat, preventing us from lying down. Eventually I fell asleep on the floor on a bed of potato chip crumbs ground into the carpet, using my carry-on as a pillow, only to be awakened at 2:00am by some guy driving a Zamboni-like tile cleaner across the main thoroughfare. I was awake, I realized, and for the first time in days there was no music playing, none at all—just the vacant drone of heavy machinery and some news report on CNN. It was this moment that I truly came back down to the "real world," whatever it was, or whatever it was becoming. I spent the next half-hour or so scrolling through my phone, my social media feeds on Facebook and Twitter: that other frictionless void that defines the parameters of our public space.

Looking back on it now, there seems to be some essential connection between these two worlds––that is, social media and the weirdly dystopian airport I had found myself in––which could have been anywhere in America, and nowhere. It seems to have something to do with the disembodied, de-contextualized flow of capital, of information, of whole bodies moving effortlessly through space; about a distinctly 21st-Century vision of transcending the local and the particular, of uploading everything to the Cloud where it can float high above this world that we created on purpose, for some reason, universally accessible and abstract.

I awoke the next morning somewhat haunted by this vision, wondering if in fact I had been visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future or whatever modern equivalent we have. But no: the Newark Airport was still there, in all its shining, immaculate glory, sunlight reflecting off its sleek and spotless surfaces. And so we gathered our things, our boarding passes and disposable Starbucks coffee cups, our carry-ons and flip-flops and half-eaten chip baggies and, wearing yesterday's clothes, boarded the plane that would take to the clouds and carry us home. ■

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Transitory Space, Brooklyn, New York, Color Photography, 2020-2021 Leah Oates

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The Passion of the Pageantry Jason Arias

"J

esus was a man,” Tobias’ mother said, while pointing a finger at Mrs. Retton, the day after she discovered Sarah had been cast as The Savior, instead of her son, in the school Easter play. Tobias’ mother sat side-saddle in the small student desk directly in front of the much bigger teacher’s desk of which Mrs. Retton sat behind.

“And Peter Pan was a boy that refused to grow up,” said Mrs. Retton, “but females classically play him.” In the upper left-hand corner of the chalkboard behind Mrs. Retton’s head was written: Time is of the essence! In the opposing corner: O Romeo, Romeo… In he lower right corner: wherefore ART thou...

Tobias’ mother shook her head, not at the quotes written in chalk, but at Mrs. Retton’s citing of what she now referred to as The Peter Pan Defense. “That’s because of the flying weight. You know that.”

“Look, none of the boys embody the tenderness that this role requires,” said Mrs. Retton. “It’s that simple.”

“What about Tobias? Just look at him,” Tobias’ mother said. “Those are a carpenter’s hands. Those are a savior’s eyes. Are they not? Are they not?”

“There is a very important role for Tobias, as well,” Mrs. Retton said using the voice she usually reserved for talking to the children.

“Jesus was crucified topless, right?” Tobias’ mother said. “How do you plan on pulling that off with a female? And have you seen Tobias’ chest? Flawless.” Tobias’ mother reached for the hem of her son’s shirt. Tobias double-fisted the bottom of the tee and straightened his elbows in an attempt to keep his belt-line hidden.

“That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Saunders.”

Tobias’ mother pulled her hands from her son and placed one palm-down on the tiny desktop, the other on her wool-pantsed thigh. “It’s Miss Saunders, thank you.”

Mrs. Retton pushed her shoulders back straighter from behind her big wooden desk and spoke the words, “I’m sorry, Miss Saunders,” without her face or voice seeming to believe it.

Tobias’ mother attempted to mirror the teacher’s position, but the effect from within the student desk was not the same.

— At rehearsal Sarah hunched under the weight of the solid lumber crucifix she was cast to bear. Her tee-shirt was getting sweaty. She’d be wearing an oversized leather jacket on opening night and be even sweatier.

“It’s supposed to be hard. It’s real wood. It’s real… Live… Acting,” Mrs. Retton said to Sarah, punctuating each word as if she were repeatedly hitting an invisible key on an invisible keyboard with her voice.

“My shoulders hurt, though,” said Sarah. “They really do.”

Tobias was glad he wasn’t Jesus.

“Use that pain on stage, Sarah,” Mrs. Retton said. “I’m counting on it.”

— At home, Tobias’ mother ran him through enunciation exercises. She called the exercises Facial Yoga. She commented on, and corrected, Tobias’ gait. “More swagger,” she said as he walked. “Just imagine that your father is God.” “I’m not even the understudy for the part,” said Tobias.

“We’ll see about that.”

They rehearsed the correct way to talk to cereal commercial casting agents, should any happen to show up on the opening night of the school play. Tobias knew better than to remind his mother that the opening night of the play was also the only night of the play.

Tobias’ mother would interrupt what she referred to as The Classics—one of the many

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movies that Tobias was forced to watch multiple times—to say, “Please, Tobias, pay attention to this scene. You need to emote this way. You need to e-nun-ci-ate emphatically.”

But all the actors in the films were so much older than him. And if they were old in black-and-white, then they were probably dead in color. His mother had told him her own tales of near-stardom. She had landed a small-part in a small play somewhere, but had been promised bigger roles in bigger places. She had promise. There was a playwright who had made and broken, as it turned out, many hearts and similar promises. “It’s not who you know or what you know, dear,” she was fond of saying. “It’s the difference between emitting your light or relinquishing your power.”

Instead of Jesus, Tobias had been cast as The Rock in the school Easter pageant. He’d be the boulder Jesus moved at the end, but his mother wasn’t about to let being cast in such a minor role damage her son’s career before he even had one.

“Let’s practice your big scene,” his mother said, slapping his knee.

“I don’t have lines, Mom. I just move out of the way. And then Sarah walks out from behind me.”

“Sarah?” his mother said, shaking her head. “Pphh. Amateur-is-tic.”

Tobias shrugged his shoulders high in response. His lips were chapped, eyes big, palms sweaty. The last thing he wanted to be was an actor.

“Of course you have lines, Honey,” his mother said while standing up from the sofa and squeezing his eight-year-old shoulders tightly. “Just look at you. You need to give this rock life.”

“I guess I’m supposed to move at the end,” Tobias said.

“That’s the spirit. We’ll figure out how to make you move the entire audience. Don’t you worry.”

“I’m not worried,” Tobias said. But he was. His mother had that effect on him. And all he really wanted to be was a stagehand.

— Tobias peeked from the side-stage of his elementary school gymnasium to find his mother seated in the third row of the audience, next to a woman with a blonde beehive hairdo.

Next to Tobias were ropes going high up to pulleys, then extending to other pulleys attached to objects. On the stage, Sarah was dragging the giant crucifix across the floorboards. She wore a red, suede jacket with frayed sleeves and a crown of papier-mâché thorns. Tobias’ classmates were whipping Sarah with fabric. She stopped at center stage, and his peers erected the slanted crucifix on Sarah’s back to an upright position and somewhat slyly deployed the four kickstands that would hold it up. One of them planted a stool at the base of the cross so that Sarah could crucify herself appropriately.

Sarah’s wrists were tied to the cross with red and black ribbons by her classmates. Her palms were hammered into place with plastic mallets. Her oversized beard was shifting on her ketchup-smeared cheeks.

Tobias kept comparing his mother to the woman with the beehive hairdo who she sat next to. His mother couldn’t see Tobias, but he could tell she was looking for him. Shifting in her seat. Furrowing her brows. The woman with the beehive smiled fully at the stage. His mother smiled tight-lipped, when she smiled at all. The beehive’s eyes got pleasantly squinty when she smiled, his mother’s were unblinking. The beehive’s body sat comfortably, while his mother’s body was bolt upright.

Tobias was able to see all of this clearly from the side of the stage because he wasn’t in his rock costume. He’d only been inside it twice. He’d never found the right time to tell his mother he was only the rock’s understudy. But Tony, who was cast as the rock, was approximately Tobias’ height. And there were only eyeholes in the costume, with everything else completely covered. And Tobias doubted that his mother could accurately identify that they weren’t his eyes from her seat, in this light. He just hoped Tony would take the advice he’d given him before the play started.

— Sarah was now fully fastened to the perpendicular 4×4 pieces of lumber that formed the instrument of her execution. A spotlight behind the audience was focused on Sarah, making a shadow silhouette of Jesus upon the crucifix on the white curtained backdrop behind her.

A week earlier Mrs. Retton had said, “Notice how the frayed strips of the jacket make Sarah’s shadow look like a Native American totem bird up there? Do you see? Someday you’ll understand the importance of this.”

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42

Mrs. Retton had asked if anybody had ideas on how to incorporate real stone into Tony’s rock costume. Nobody did. Eventually, Mrs. Retton started hot gluing fist-sized rocks to it, but the costume became too top heavy and most of the rocks had to be removed.

She had been right about the shadow, though—it did look hugely meaningful in the darkened auditorium.

— Tobias’ classmates—dressed in their soot-smudged bathrobes—carefully took Sarah down off the cross, after torturing her further and making sure she was dead-dead. The cardboard moon they’d all worked on was rising up behind her before going down again. It was a process—the torture and the raising and lowering of the crucifix and the moon. The classmates laid her (Sarah-Jesus) inside a cave constructed of Egyptian cotton sheets, bought at K-mart, that had been sprayed and sprayed with Aqua-Net Ultimate All-Day Hold and hung over various erected tent-poles to harden, over a week ago.

Tobias’ mother put her hand to her lips as Jenny, Laura, Benjamin, and Jorge began pushing Tony, inside the rock costume, over the mouth of the cave. It was meant to look like they were pushing the rock, but Tobias knew it was Tony who was doing most of the work in there.

Tobias watched his mother lean over and whisper something to the woman with the beehive sitting next to her. The woman with the beehive’s face squinted. The beehive shook her head and pleasantly opened her mouth sideways. Tobias’ mother’s mouth opened and closed and opened again, unpleasantly. The cardboard sun and cardboard moon rose and fell twice behind the cave made of sheets.

A gong played over the speaker system and Tobias watched Tony move the rock costume away from the mouth of the cave while he shifted from one foot to the other at the side of the stage, remembering his understudy duties, imagining the weight of the rock around him.

Tobias’ mother was busy gesturing quickly from the woman in the beehive beside her to the rock now coming to a stop. His mother stood and pointed as the resurrection began.

“You’re damn right that’s my son!” Tobias’ mother yelled at the woman with the beehive.

The beehive tried to calm her with her hands patting the air in front of her. But nobody calmed Tobias’ mother.

Tobias began having doubts whether Tony would actually say the lines he’d suggested for him—the lines Tobias’ mother had suggested to Tobias. He suddenly didn’t think Tony would sound enough like Tobias, even if he did say the words. Tobias prepared himself for plan B. He aimed his face in the exact direction of the rock, hoping for a blessed, acoustic ricochet off the costume and into the audience.

“I am the rock that saved the savior,” Tobias bellowed through his hands. “The rock that saved the savior,” he repeated, lower, creating his own kind of echo.

There was silence as his words spread over the audience.

Tobias’ mother beamed hugely. She made a squished told-you-so face at the woman with the beehive. Tobias ducked down behind a cardboard box as Mrs. Retton surveyed everything from the opposing side of the stage. He wasn’t supposed to be on the side of the stage that made objects levitate and curtains come down. Nobody was supposed to be here. Mrs. Retton worried that one of the stage levers would accidentally get knocked and ruin everything.

As Jesus walked out of the hair-sprayed cave, Sarah slipped on an uncleaned pool of ketchup blood and slid sideways into the rock that had moved for her. The remaining “real” stones that couldn’t be pried from the costume caused Tony to teeter and teeter in the top heaviness. And finally fall. Tony started moaning, lying horizontal on the floor, the soles of his shoes kicking at the audience. His moans didn’t sound enough like Tobias, but his mother didn’t seem to notice. Tobias hoped his mother hadn’t paid much attention to the shoes he’d been wearing. And even though he doubted she did, he kept waiting for her to say, Those aren’t my son’s Converse.

Tobias crouched tighter into the shadows made by the curtains and the vertical ropes rising to the various pulleys high, high above him. He knew that one rope was for curtains. One rope was for an elevated painter’s platform above the stage. One rope was for a relatively heavy cardboard UFO—left in the rafters from the Merry X-Mas-Files play last year’s class did. One rope was for who knew what. Each lever was an unknown power readied to be emitted.

Tobias closed his eyes and curled his fingers around the rope release lever closest to him. There didn’t appear to be anything in wait directly above the toppled rock or the risen, and more recently fallen, savior.

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“Just lay there,” Tobias whisper-prayed to himself, in hopes it would telepathically make it. “Just lay there and don’t crawl out yet, Tony. Please.”

Tobias breathed in, held his breath, and pulled on the lever he hoped would close the curtains.

There was a momentary click from the metal gear releasing next to him. Mrs. Retton’s superpowered ears must have heard the click, and locked eyes with Tobias from across the stage. Tobias looked quickly from the lever to his feet. It would not be good. But he’d rather be busted by his teacher than busted by his mother. He’d have a new teacher next year, anyway.

Tobias raised his eyes back to meet Mrs. Retton’s. The gear beside him clicked once more and started spinning. Last year’s X-Mas UFO swung out low and erratic, over the audience. Parents shrieked and tucked their heads under their palms. And for a few miraculous moments there was only the whoosh of air from the craft swinging and the squeal of the cords stretching with its weight. Everyone looked up from their crouched positions, mouths agape, wondering what could possibly happen next.

And that’s when Sarah, being the Jesus that she was—looking like a ‘70s rock star come back from the dead—stood, spread her arms wide and yelled, “Life!” as loud as she could.

The X-Mas UFO slowed to a subtle sway, high enough above the audience for everyone to stand. Everybody stood. The audience erupted in applause—Tobias’ mother and the woman with the beehive smiled at the stage together. Mrs. Retton brought the finger she was sliding across her throat in Tobias’ direction quickly above her head, waving and smiling wildly out at the standing ovation from her side of the stage. She began taking great strides to stand at the center of her accidental creation, clearly planning to end on an unintended high note.

Tony was still on the stage floor, inside the rock costume. Jesus was now rolling the rock stage center. If the play was over, then everyone would come out to take a bow, shortly. It was doubtful Tony would be able to crawl out of his toppling. They’d certainly just pull him out.

Tobias put his hand on another lever. He needed to buy himself enough time to pull Tony out and stand beside him for the final bow. He hoped it was the correct lever to bring the curtain down. He only wished to preserve that smile on his mother’s face. He only wanted to make her proud. But to do that something would have to be relinquished. Something would have to be sacrificed. He hoped it would only be Mrs. Retton’s expectations. He cautiously watched the painter’s platform hanging high above Jesus and Tony and his teacher, held his breath, and pulled the lever. ■

Kithe/Arias

44

WHO'S THERE? Jeff Mann

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Gerald

T

Rebecca Pyle

here’s a man who sends me chain mail. Actual chain mail—made from farmer’s or rancher’s baling wire, crimped into thousands of circlets, linked in a perfectly matched and orderly way, forming a fabric of loops. I wondered what this man, this dimwit I’ve secretly named Gerald (such a mild name!) could hope to win by sending me small bits of chain mail? That was my question to him, in my first, indignant days.

I was afraid, at first, to wear the necklace, the bracelet, the simple silvery-white watch-face with its attendant chain-mail band, ready to be clasped around my wrist. I was afraid to show anyone these out-of-time-andplace suggestions of a long-lost Guinevere and her historical across-the-ocean gang. Gerald, what did you want?

I wanted to ask. Could you, Gerald, be someone, like me, going quietly berserk too?

Perhaps he saw me as a project, one that rescued him in some way, but also rescued me in some way.

Or, more cruelly and truly, saw me as desperate, eager for the dangling possibility of love. Or as a dimwitted young woman, only existing in the half-lit glower of my parents’ love. A girl who needed to be rescued from that trapped tower/glower of her parents’ love, her parents’ over-crowned territory.

There was no population in the college town as smug and snug, to me, it seemed, as the college's anthropology faculty. Everyone knew who my parents were: both recipients of one MacArthur genius grant, they'd assembled a nifty facsimile of a small historic boat in which they had both succeeded in crossing a long, deep body of water disdainful scientists and archaeologists had always insisted couldn’t be crossed.

And knowing this was oddly painful and delicious. I had wanted nothing more than to leave this place, and I hadn’t been able to make it happen. As the song goes: time keeps on slipping (slipping slipping) into the future.

Yes, my parents had become famous because they'd risked their lives in a small, strange boat. But consider my point of view. I had to consider them heroes but I also had to consider their ventures as proof, had they failed, that they wouldn’t have minded, too terribly much, to have never seen me again.

Was I right to be bitter? Was I unwise? I would need the brains of Lancelot and Guinevere to know.

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And Merlin's heart, too, wise still, after all its centuries in a cave.

Which brings me to the word crossed. There are many meanings for the word crossed. Half of them, which I did not want to think about, were related to Jesus and those pieces of wood that signaled a choice necessary for direction: the ocean or the sky. Skyfather or Oceanmother. Which one? In their crossing the water, was I not, indirectly, their sacrifice? Or was it narcissistic of me to believe that? Never, of course, did I discuss this with my parents, and one reason was that I did not possess the proper academic jargon. And, perhaps, I did not want to face my de facto orphanage, a stage set they had presented to me like a gift.

I would say the unknown and imaginatively-named Gerald achieved every nuance of communication with me possible—if only he and I were deaf and mute. He did not cross any legal boundaries, but how could I even begin to describe how peeved I was that someone (whom I named Gerald in my head) was sending me real, physical chain mail to my real, physical address. In parcels bound so neatly with tape and carefully handwritten with my very own address. Was an address not private?

And then, after an irritable phase, I changed. It was time to change, and Gerald’s chain mail helped me change. I did something almost senselessly daring: I began to wear all the bits of jewelry made by hand with hundreds, even thousands, of tiny conjoined rings, by my admirer, or, if not an admirer, a person who had made me his strange and anonymous focus. Perhaps, I thought, he was one of my parents' acquaintances who took pity on me. Or, maybe, someone with a crush on me, terrified of my parents' renown. Or, neither of those.

The chain mail laid closely against my skin like an animal hide. It rippled and flexed, gathered up all of my body’s heat. It was not unbeautiful. I became daring. Even spoke to the twins about the chain mail. They worked with me at the restaurant, these sisters. They had glimpsed it around my throat, beneath collar of the dark green blouse I wore almost every day. Of all the people to talk about that jewelry, that chain mail, to, they were the worst. They were a Cerberus, Cinderella’s stepsisters, jealous of any beauty or advantage not their own. Jealous even of each other. At work, person by person, they made use of their twinned-ness. Made war on all that threatened them.

The very thin one said why are you wearing that, in a chastising nun's voice. The other twin was silent.

Obviously, they’d discussed with each other the necklace, the strange, intricate, metals that rippled around and beneath my throat. They were visibly, jointly annoyed.

Oh, someone who really adores me made this, I said in a voice that mocked myself.

Adores you? one of them asked. That’s the weirdest thing we’ve ever seen.

At that moment I wished hard I worked on a farm instead, smelling hay and mud and animals. Not this servile and anxious hunching over countertops, like a peasant, under fluorescent lights of the windowless room that was the popular restaurant’s prep kitchen. Looking out onto the main room, where professors dined with their dates, lords and ladies beneath the glow of gracious lamps.

They, the twins, were likely annoyed by my parents’ fame. Whenever they referred to them, they said their names in a brittle and suspicious way, as if my parents had false credentials, were thieves. Had stolen something from them and, thus, by extension, I had too.

Well, I said, I think he adores me. And I laughed to show that I expected no one to really adore me, ever.

Adore was just a clever joke word. To make them laugh, too.

Adore you, the heavier of the two said, heavily. Her voice said if they were unadorned and unadored, I should be too.

Angie the Adored, the thin one said, in her dead, harsh voice. That necklace. Really something. No one else has that for sure.

But you’re sure to get bits of chopped eggplants in it, the other one said. Or carrot greens. Garlic. They stared at me, smiling, their teeth glistening almost golden beneath their shiny pink gums.

Of course, I said. (Inside I was wondering: how many years at this job? Had it been five, now, hunching?

The faculty members coming in to have lunch with each other, over and over? My parents made a kind effort to avoid the restaurant. Too painful it was, I knew they must have felt, to see me in such unrewarding, ordinary labor, a servant to the system in which they thrived).

The necklace, I could see, was making me an insufferable Cinderella, perhaps, trudging from hearth to kitchen to sleep and all over again come morning, wearing the same cinder-smeared clothes but also a necklace that was secretly special, that no one else could have.

I truly needed, I decided, in that moment, a real Gerald. Who—if he loved me just a little—would help me leave this place.

But I did not know Gerald, didn’t know if he was Gerald. Did he mock me or love me, my secret

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prince? Was he even male? And where was he, where would he ever be? Sending those awkward lovely things no one else had ever seen before to me—lost and bitter about a Britain I so clumsily lost, once, after my visa expired. At home, here, I had the harbor of famous parents. Even after their obituaries they’d still be famous, and in some ways that was itself a visa. It was a privilege more valuable than their boats, their gear, their lovely many-floored house with windows that let light stream in all afternoon, no matter the time of year.

But I could only care so much about their boats-past. And boats-present. There was no twin I had, no person to share my predicament, the edges of our parents’ fame.

As I've said, I'd begun, at first wordlessly, to wear the chain mail which had been mailed to me anonymously. It was thrill, like hinting at suicidal thoughts to make people care about me, or prove they cared about me. To find out they didn’t care at all. Forming within me a mettle, almost metallic. It was a good distraction from noticing the new potholes in the streets in the spring, though I didn't even have a car to drive over them. I walked each day to the restaurant. I walked home.

Wearing the chain mail, at first clammy on my skin, and then, soon, warm and molded to me, I began charting a day I would return to somewhere, anywhere, in Europe, where I had once spent only a year. A homing pigeon who changed her mind about returning home! Sent out again, a new time, to stay where it had flown. That's what I would be. A clever, independent, pigeon, owned by no one.

But what if Gerald was a sort-of modern knight who’d arrived to court me, a Guinevere? Who secretly loved me, but was eternally shy? What if I already knew him? (I believed that it must’ve been true, but for sanity's sake, I had to dismiss, doubt the thought to avoid obsessing over who he could be.) I soon had a new passport with not a single stamp in it. I could now, with a confusion of will and effort, slip away to across-theocean. I'd make it sound like a short trip. Only later would I would tell my parents, my employer, I'd decided to stay.

One night, before I undressed for bed, I held the chain mail necklace in my hands and wanted to tear it apart. It could be easily done: it was only wire. But what labor had gone into it! It looked like fish scales or the shingles on the gables of Victorian houses, beneath which attics, and attic-memory, lurked.

I was both jealous of and in love with my parents. When I was younger, when they went on their boat adventure, they left me with friends. But their friends’ children never became my friends. They regarded me as a burden. The dull sweater no one wanted to wear. Not even I wanted to wear the sweater of my life.

My self-pity was so deep, but tell me it wasn't authentic. It, I knew, was true and deserved. As accurate as a dart. So, thank you, Gerald, for your pitying medicine of chain mail. Your pity rivaled my pity for myself, and so, it was very valuable. Very.

I’d once watched a National Geographic video and learned about a town in Germany that is completely round, built long ago in the spot where a large meteor had fallen. The town is still fortified by its perfectly circular stone walls and towers. At a precise time each day, a watchman calls out all's well, who goes there. Only sweet silence answers.

No one had any idea I was about to leave. Not even Gerald. Would he be surprised to know I had gone, once I'd left? I think not. If he loved me, he'd be glad he sent me off with jewelry.

But I also needed to believe that he, my Gerald, might even love me, that his heart might break if he knew I was leaving.

Gerald will wonder why I left him, why his chain mail was returned by the postal service: No Such Addressee. Sweet silence. But Gerald is no one, I heard my brain telling me. Gerald, just a ghost that will seek out another, similar almost-ghost. A nobody. And I will find another country, to which I’ll return to like a ghost.

I would not fly. I decided I’d travel on a cruise ship, repositioning to another season at the edge of another continent. A cheap fare, a big-sided boat sturdily, plausibly, imitating a docile and trained whale.

Equipped with lifeboats whose shapes would remind me of my parents' boat, my parents' terrible courage.

On the vast, safe boat, at sea, when the ocean and sky go jet black, I’d decide whether to keep Gerald’s gifts. Would they disturb me or bring me peace? Were they good luck? What luck was better—to keep them or to throw them over? Brass once bright was greenish now. The silver had gone gun-metal gray. All would rust underwater. Sea-things would grow through them and around them.

For my sanity, I needed to believe he loved me but was, simultaneously, eager to be free of things. I promised myself I’d begin, on my big-boat voyage, to believe Gerald was someone I knew but also someone I’d never know.

I pictured him with dark hair and bold shoulders. With sad eyes hiding behind tear-shaped lenses.

Someone whose heart faded into confusion long ago, who to balance his heart, had become as calm as a sailor on night watch. He dreamed the chain mail would fill me with a rage for change. He wanted me to find and

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claim my soul before it was too late, before it was covered up by so many bright autumn leaves.

Instead of pulling the jewelry apart I wrote:

Dear Gerald, it is the morning of my departure and I do not know what to do with your chain mail. What to do with the bits of chain mail, created with such pain and effort, with pliers, one little circle at a time, joining up with each other a little bit like the letter C joining another letter C? I had not yet even bought my ticket, then. Still, it was fun to try to write a letter to him, fun to believe my Gerald might even love me, that his heart could break terribly if he knew I was going, gone. Writing him was a type of dreaming very much, I imagine, like making chain mail, myself, to send to someone I wished loved me.

Thank you, Galahad, I could say, if I were to meet him.

Who? Gerald would ask.

— I am now in France, in Lyon. Last week it was Rome. Next week, Scotland. I’m not sure which town.

There is a strange sparkle on my wrist, my proof I will always be going steady with Gerald: his watch-band, of tiny, gun-metal loops, hand-made, replacing any other watch-band I’ll ever wear.

You look lost or something, says a man, as I walk out of a famous art center. He has an eye patch and wears a turban. He has bright, crinkly eye.

Oh, yes, I say. It is all I can say.

Just follow signs, he says. His eye goes crinklier still. They’ll get you out of here, he says.

Thank you, Galahad, I say. ■

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Ground Linds Sanders Kithe/Sanders

50

Contributors Jason Arias

"The Passion of the Pageantry"

Jason Arias lives on the Oregon coast. His debut short story collection is Momentary Illumination of Objects In Motion (Black Bomb Books, 2018). His stories and essays have appeared in The Nashville Review, Oregon Humanities Magazine, Harpur Palate, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. For links to more of his work please visit JasonAriasAuthor.com.

Alec Ballweg "Someone Else"

Alec Ballweg is a queer, trans/ nonbinary writer living and working in Portland, OR with work published in Deep Overstock.

Their work seeks to explore the unique intimacies of queer and trans relationships and the difficulty of being a human in this world. You can often find them biking, climbing, baking or otherwise doing anything but writing.

Christy Boyer "Poppies Dream"

Christy Boyer has been creating since her girlhood and was highly influenced by the creative play with her older sister while growing up. She has presented her paintings in galleries and coffee shops in Indiana, Florida and Ohio. She illustrated for the documentary film In a Silent World directed by Thaumastos Films.

Along with creating, she is currently teaching art lessons to children from her studio. She lives with her beautiful family in Florida. Visit her website at christyspauldingboyer.art.

51

Thayne Casper

Thayne Casper is a pickle master, cider czar, and hot sauce wizard, as well as an emerging writer and MFA candidate at Ashland University with a growing list of publications, including fiction in REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters, poetry in a closed-circuit collection of Minnesota poets, and a series of novels ghostwritten for a popular Indie Author. Thayne has spent his life surrounded by the Rocky Mountains, and his inspirations continue to come from the depth and mystery of the Pacific Northwest. He resides in Boise, Idaho with his wife, dogs, cats, chickens, and his ever-growing garden.

the novels Death Assemblage, Detachment Fault, Quarry, Hoodoo, Fracture, and Chasm, four of which were finalists for the WILLA Award in contemporary fiction. She compiled and edited A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: women writers of the American frontier, 1800-1922, an anthology containing the works of 34 women writers of the American frontier, and a finalist for the Longan Award. She received the Tucson Poetry Festival's Will Inman Award, and her poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in, or are forthcoming in, numerous journals and anthologies. Two poetry collections, Making Silent Stones Sing and Deciphering the Desert, a finalist for the Red Mountain Press 2020 Discovery Award, are forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Website: www. susancumminsmiller.com.

Susan Cummins Miller

Will Freeney

"The Sun Struck Noon Over Katskid Hill"

"That Moment the Sun Seems to Stand Still" Tucson writer Susan Cummins Miller, a research affiliate of the University of Arizona's Southwest Institute for Research on Women, holds degrees in anthropology, history, and geology, with a focus on vertebrate paleontology and biostratigraphy. She worked as a field geologist and taught geology and oceanography before turning to writing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She has been writer-inresidence at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Woodside, CA and the Pima County Public Library, Tucson, AZ. Miller’s writing, inspired by her life and work in the desert West, arises from the intersections of landscape, science, history, prehistory, and time. She writes to explore the mysteries that lie all around us—to discover what is hidden, what lies behind surface observations. Miller is the author of

"Compunction"

Will Freeney is an MFA candidate in his fourth and final year at Fresno State University.

Anna Freyne

"Unconscious Emotions" and "Cosmic Light"

Anna Freyne is a mixed media artist living in Ireland. She works with a variety of media including recycled materials in her work. Anna engages with the unconscious to experience different aspects of the psyche through imagery, utilizing art to inform their understanding.

Images of her work are featured in The Waxed Lemon, an Irish Literary Journal. She received a Bachelor’s degree in painting from the University of the Creative Arts UK. Anna is currently studying a Master’s degree in Art, Psyche and the Creative Imagination, in TUS Limerick School of Art and Design,

Ireland. You can view more images of her work at www. instagram/ artdreamspace.com.

Robyn Groth

"To Vitrify" and "To Identify"

Robyn Groth is a poet and bookmaker living in the Midwest with her husband, three sons and three cats. She has an MA in linguistics, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Autofocus, CALYX Journal, and Ruminate Magazine.

Kevin Hadsell

"I Have Seen the Future, and it is Newark Airport's Terminal C"

Kevin Hadsell is a writer and teacher living near Portland, Oregon, teaching dual-credit English and social studies at Metro East Web Academy. He has published with McSweeneys Internet Tendency, Entropy Magazine, Litro, The Portland State Vanguard, and Euphemism, among others, and holds an MA in English from Portland State University.

Dionne Irving

"Interracial Love in the Time of COVID"

Dionne Irving has published fiction and nonfiction in The Missouri Review, Boulevard Magazine, LitHub, and other places. Her novel, Quint, is out from 7.13 Books and her second book, Islands, will be published in 2022 by Catapult. She teaches at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend Indiana.

K.L. Johnston

"out of gas and out of luck"

K. L. Johnston is a poet and photographer whose first published photos appeared in 2014 in SC ETV Endowment’s in-house magazine, Scene. Since then she has had

numerous images published in journals, magazines, and reviews.

She sees photography as a natural extension of poetry, distilling maximum feeling into a single image. Her favorite subjects are whimsical and /or environmental and her camera goes with her wherever she goes. Other interests include horticulture, philosophy, and historiography.

Vi Khi Nao

"we breathe and breathing is (an) a | synchronous music, (yet) every body needs the air"

VI KHI NAO is the author of six poetry collections: Fish Carcass (Black Sun Lit, 2022), A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line (11:11 Press, 2021), Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine(Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute: https://www. vikhinao.com.

Jeff Mann

"WHO'S THERE?"

While I was Artist-in-Residence at a college, I discovered all the amazing parts in cars, that, and the fact that I am a transportation activist, has made it all downhill from there. I live in Fort Erie, Ontario right across from Buffalo and work out of a shipping container. More work at www.jeffmannart.com.

Jordan Nishkian "Little Things"

Jordan Nishkian is an ArmenianPortuguese writer based in California. When the sun's up, she's a freelance copywriter and editor, but she moonlights as a published author and poet. She is a friend of the Oxford comma, always in the mood for rooibos tea, and loves every dog she's ever met (but not as much as Scooter and Ella). After graduating from CSU Long Beach, there was a lull in her creative writing growth, but she has recently rekindled her love for the craft and returned to it with a greater willingness to explore her cultures, family dynamics, thoughts on womanhood, and love of science and anthropology. Jordan has always been intrigued by duality, and that's something that's often featured in her work, particularly her fiction. Whether it's experimenting with point of view, timelines, or her characters' conflicting emotions, her stories almost always feature two simultaneous plotlines: what's happening and what's really happening. For this, she thanks her multi-ethnic background, which taught her that people, things, and situations are hardly ever singlesided. During the pandemic, she started a literary magazine called Mythos, which features art, stories, poetry, and photography centered around mythology. She also completed and published her first novella, Kindred, a story of loss and acceptance told from different perspectives. Jordan's work has been published in Overachiever Magazine, The Kelp Journal, the New Plains Review, The Yellow Arrow Journal, The Plentitudes, Indie IT Press, Rabble Review, and more. You can view all of Jordan's professional and creative work at wordsbyjordan.com.

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Contributors Leah Oates

"Transitory Space, Brooklyn, New York, Color Photography, 2020-2021" Leah Oates has a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Fulbright Fellow for study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. Oates has had solo shows in Toronto at Black Cat Artspace and in the NYC area at Susan Eley Fine Art, The Central Park Arsenal Gallery, The Center for Book Arts, Real Art Ways, The Brooklyn Public Library and at the MTA Arts and Design Lightbox Project. Oates was in group shows in Toronto at the Gladstone Hotel, John. Aird Gallery, Connections Gallery, Gallery 1313, Propeller Gallery, Wychwood Barns Community Gallery, Arta Gallery and at Papermill Gallery. Oates has been in numerous group shows in NYC at Wave Hill, Edward Hopper House, Chashama, WAH Center, Metaphor Contemporary Art, Denise Bibro Fine Art, Nurture Art Gallery and The Pen and Brush Gallery.

Rebecca Pyle

"Gerald" and "The New Parts"

Rebecca Pyle is a writer of fiction and poetry. Her work appears in The Festival Review, Guesthouse, Eclectica, Cape Rock, The Honest Ulsterman, The National Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

She is also a visual artist whose paintings and photographs have been featured in The Madison Review, Cream City Review, and on covers of JuxtaProse. She conducts her mumblety-peg life of arts and letters from a small gray brick house with a deeply pitched roof between uncountable mountains in Utah.

Find her work at rebeccapyleartist. com.

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Linds Sanders "Ground"

Linds Sanders (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist living on the road. Winner of the Icebreaker Prize from Sparked Lit Mag, her poetry is found in FOLIO, Fever Dream, Rising Phoenix, and elsewhere. Her artwork, nominated for Best of the Net, travels in 3Elements, Bracken, Leavings, Harbor Review and elsewhere. While her whereabouts are ever-changing, her work resides at LindsSanders. com and on Instagram @ resounding_bell.

Ashley Somwaru "Dear Little One"

Ashley Somwaru is an IndoCaribbean woman who was born and raised in Queens, New York. She received an MFA in poetry from Queens College, City College of New York. Somwaru has recently published a chapbook in 2021 titled, Urgent \\ Where the Mind Goes \\ Scattered. Previous work has been published in Angime, A Gathering Together, Peach Velvet Magazine, No, Dear Magazine, Solstice, and more.

Bridget Spoerri "You, Too"

Bridget Spoerri is a high school English teacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When she’s not writing or teaching, she loves to go on adventures, collect and classify rocks and plants, and document the beauty in ugly things. Read her work in Sheepshead Review, Inkwell Journal, Pointed Circle, and Pocket Lint.

Dao Strom

"we breathe and breathing is (an) a | synchronous music, (yet) every body needs the air"

Dao Strom is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (2018, AJAR Press); a hybridform memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/ West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others. She was a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship recipient. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

Editorial Board Lauren Hobson

Founder, Editor-in-Chief

Lauren writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing, and her work has appeared in Riverteeth, Entropy, Backcountry, and elsewhere. If she’s not reading new work for Kithe, she’s writing about being a human in the natural world or about nature in the human world. Her dog, Cedar, is her constant companion. She loves stories about brave women and gentle men.

Joshua James Amberson Editor

Joshua James Amberson is a Portland, Oregon-based writer and creative writing instructor. His work has appeared in Hobart, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Tin House, among others. He's the author of the essay collection Everyday Mythologies and the mixed-genre collection Slow Motion Heroics, both from Two Plum Press.

Katie Borak Editor

Katie Borak is a teaching artist seeking unexplored avenues. They make short queer blackout poems from pulp novels and long stories about icebergs, fanaticism, and the sea. Outside the classroom Katie can be found in the garden with dirt under their nails.

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan Editor

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a houseplant mother, a jigsaw puzzler, a record collector, and a recovered addict. Her work appears in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Huffington Post, Entropy, Water~Stone Review, Lana Turner, NAILED, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

Cynthia Carmina Gómez Editor

Cynthia Carmina Gómez is the Director of Community & Civic Impact at Portland State University. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing. She enjoys long hikes with her pup Romeo, cooking for her family, and documenting the stories of ordinary people's extraordinary lives.

M.L. Schepps Editor

M.L. Schepps is a writer, publisher and editor in Portland. His writing has appeared in the Oregon Encyclopedia, We Are The Mutants, The Portland Review, Popula and the award-winning zine Is It Just Me or Are We Nailing This? Essays on BoJack Horseman. His debut novella Split Aces is forthcoming from Korza Books in January of 2022.

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