Kithe - Fall/Winter 2022

fall/winter 2022

a journal for new art + literature

Giant Pacific Octopus No. 2

Woodcut print on mulberry paper, 2022 Christy Turner

vol.4 Kithe Interior_Fall Winter 22.indd 1

f e a t u r i n g D i x i e Lu b i n , A l e x B e h r, M a r i e C o n n e r, a n d o t h e r s

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FALL/WINTER 2022

Poetry

EDITORIAL NOTE Welcome to another issue of Kithe!

“Kithe” (pronounced kai-the) is an old Scots word meaning “to make known." Throughout 2022, we've been honored at Kithe by the creative voices that choose to publish with us, and we're hopeful that our fourth issue continues to bring our readers stories that have otherwise gone untold, and art that has gone unseen.

As we move into winter and the hope that a new year brings, we continue to turn our faces to the guiding light of artists and writers as they show us the way forward. Thank you for continuing to join us on this creative journey. Enjoy!

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

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Dixie Lubin - 1 20 41 Alex Behr - 7 Melissa Nunez - 11 Devon Balwit - 15 Shannan Mann - 18 Lilou Bo - 23 Patrick Rogers - 30

On Wilderness A Day in Ten Parts Terminal Nostalgia Spectacle Past Me/Aubade A Balm for Golems How do you love?

Doppelgänger: A Haibun Can't Find Yuengling Anywhere Around Here Marie Conner - 31 Errand

Writing Simone Martel - 3 The House Likes to Have Parties Nada Sewidan - 13 Handbuilding Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes - 17 After Asking My Permission, My Massage Therapist Climbs On the Table Güzide Ertürk - 21 Ketchup and Pasta Reagan Poston - 25 Domingo and the Deer Candace Jane Opper - 23 Love Buzz Katie Mitchell - 33 Fangirls Diane Cruze - 38 A "Chick Cig" for Jimi

Art Christy Turner - Cover 2 Rachel Coyne - 6 george l. stein - 12 37 Lawrence Bridges - 16 29 GJ Gillespie - 19 Dominique Elliott - 24 Marie Conner - 32

Giant Pacific Octopus No. 2 North American Pitcher Plants Untitled Immanence and Transcendence that moment LIGHT SHOW SLIDE HEADLIGHTS BEYOND THE TUNNEL I'd Love to Change the World Departed Errand 2.0

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On Wilderness

Dixie Lubin excerpted from Poetry for People: 50 Years of Writing

Dear wilderness, you steadily Dwindling resource Precious beyond worth And full of Earth's mystery What will you allow me to see?

I come to you in all seasons Even a tiny remnant of woods Is enough, a river Or a hill. I come to you quietly in Bitter winter, speak with your bare trees And what's beyond them I sense the Mother's energy there Feel the immanence of spirit In these earthly bodies— trees, animals Dry grass murmuring its subtle song.

Dear wilderness, home of all fairy tales What will you allow me to dream? Fireflies In black midsummer woods Beckon me to wander down a path With no flashlight, humming softly To the prairie...will you show me the plant devas?

Will the shrine to Mary, deep in the woods At Shanti Vanam Glow with her own light As she once did, as I kneeled in shaking wonder.

Wilderness that is my soul Will you reveal yourself to me Even though I'm frightened Of your wild animals.

If I help you survive In my little ways If I pray for you always Will you agree to stay, and grow And heal this madly tilting world?

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Kithe/Lubin

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North American Pitcher Plants Woodcut print on mulberry paper, 2022 Christy Turner Kithe/Turner

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The House Likes to Have Parties Simone Martel

I

n the car, after Christmas Eve dinner at my mother-in-law’s, I said how strange it was for her to put it that way: “The house likes to have parties.”

Not, “I like to have parties,” or “The house is good for parties.”

At the time, we didn’t know we’d just celebrated our last holiday at the big house in the hills, but we knew it was close to the last, and were feeling melancholy, though I was more downcast than Paul that evening. Parties in Paul’s childhood home were easy for me to enjoy, more difficult for him.

Heading downhill to our little house in the flats, we looked up at the stars in the clear, cold sky. There were just the two of us in the car. Our son was away at college, coming home the next day for Christmas dinner at our place, but he’d missed Christmas Eve at his grandmother’s house for the first time in his life, and I was sad to feel my mother-in-law’s holiday tradition dying away along with our son’s growing up.

His cousins had been there though, all younger but already in high school.

Paul’s mom started hosting her Christmas Eve dinners long before I joined the family. I attended as girlfriend, mother of the first grandchild, and wife, in that order. The best years, for me, were the ones when the cousins were still quite small; the years when Santa gave the three boys matching remotecontrolled cars or wind-up trains, and they’d play on the floor, rolling in the drifts of colorful wrapping paper with their baby girl cousin, and eventually getting so excited they’d chase each other through the house, living room, foyer, dining room, kitchen, breakfast room, back into the living room, round and round, until their grandmother told them to cool it.

There were always two Christmas trees in the house, one in the living room and one in the dining room. Usually about twenty of us sat around the table for dinner, including my own parents. Sometimes

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Paul’s father and his third wife attended, if they were in town. Sometimes the second wife, the woman Paul still calls his stepmother, was there; sometimes both ex-wives. Paul’s mom was broadminded that way.

Usually a solo woman or man, someone with nowhere else to be, joined us. Paul complained that the family party wouldn’t feel complete to his mom without an outsider to witness our happiness. To him, her inclusiveness felt like exposure.

My mother-in-law was a gracious but casual hostess who often answered the door in bedroom slippers and an apron over slacks and a bright Christmas sweater, a wineglass in one hand. She’d do the alternate cheek kissing thing; though not French herself she’d been married to a Frenchman (Paul’s father) for 15 years. Then she’d bustle us into the kitchen to set down whatever side dishes or pies we’d brought that year. The singleton would be there at the counter, being useful, making salad or mashing potatoes.

If I’m honest, I should admit to Paul that I too enjoyed having those witnesses to my playacting, because there was indeed something theatrical about those events and for years my role was “pretty young mother.” Who wouldn’t enjoy that? Dressed up, chatting with my sisters-in-law, grabbing my adorable little boy as he ran past, planting a kiss on his forehead before letting him dash off with his cousins. As an only child, accustomed to quiet Christmases, I felt lucky to step into that house and immediately have the party swirling around me, and to know that I belonged there as much as anyone.

A few years ago, we realized the huge party had become too much for Paul’s mom, so we all pitched in.

Plastic trees replaced the fresh-cut ones. My mom and dad drove up the day before to set the table and round up chairs. We all cooked. We cleaned up. And yet Paul’s mom still stressed about the event

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beforehand. She lost sleep worrying, no matter how much we tried to do for her.

And then, on that last Christmas Eve, the one we didn’t know was the last, as we all were leaving, standing out on the front deck, hugging each other, saying our goodbyes, thanking our hostess for her hospitality, Paul’s mom shook her head, as though defeated, and said: “The house likes to have parties.”

As though we should thank the house, instead of her. As though she was doing its bidding.

While Paul drove us down the broad, curving boulevard, past grand houses, many of them encrusted with holiday lights and set behind dazzling lawn displays, I brooded over her last words. I asked, half-jokingly. “Is the house mad she’s not doing it as well anymore?”

Paul looked over at me. “What do you mean?”

“She didn’t light the candles on the dining table until I reminded her and found the matches; she never did light the Duraflame log in the fireplace; and after the first Christmas music CD ended, she forgot to start a new one.”

“You sound lawyerly,” Paul said, turning the steering wheel sharply. “She’s losing it, okay, fine.

Why make a list?”

The big house on the hill did not recall warm memories for him, but flashbacks to vicious fights with his siblings when their mom used to leave them alone at night, after the divorce. For a while she dated a lot of different men, then settled for one in particular and started spending weekends away, too.

Paul acknowledged that she deserved to have some fun, after her marriage to his father, but she never heard the screaming and swearing on the nights she went out, never saw her kids chasing each other through the house with knives, or locking each other outside in the dark backyard.

“What did you fight about?” I asked.

“Limited resources.”

“Resources?”

“Food. Toys. The remote. You wouldn’t understand.” Paul paused. “Attention, obviously.

Love. That was the most limited resource of all.”

Excavating back even farther to before the divorce uncovered Paul’s memories of his mom and dad fighting quietly at the dinner table, hissing in French, the language of their arguments. Angry, closed-off people, observed by their anxious children.

Home now, I plugged in the tree-lights, while Paul lit our own Duraflame log.

“Remember when we couldn’t have fires on Christmas Eve?” he asked me. “Remember leaving cookies on the hearth for Santa?”

“And carrots for the reindeer.”

We sat on the sofa, watching the fire, and I told Paul how sorry I was that he associated his mother’s

house with unhappy childhood memories I couldn’t share. But what about all the Christmases there with our son? Couldn’t the new memories overlay the old ones?

“You mean like on a VHS tape? No. What happened there when I was youngest is strongest, still. Now I’m older, I feel like a guest, visiting my mom’s house. I feel—blank. That’s how I want to feel. If I let down my guard it all comes back.”

“What?”

“The fights. The loneliness.”

I had trouble understanding that sort of loneliness, the kind that didn’t come from being alone, as I often was as a child.

“That house was never a home.”

A year or so ago, Paul’s mom started telling the same family stories over and over again, mostly idealized stories of family dinners after the divorce when the kids took turns cooking and playing their favorite records on the turntable while they ate.

“I don’t recognize the people in those stories,” Paul said. “It’s like she’s forgotten what really happened, or chose to forget.”

“I don’t think she chose to.”

Nine months after that final Christmas party, Paul’s mom moved into assisted living. The big house was fixed up and rented to a group of six 20-something techies, because these days there aren’t many families with kids to fill a five-bedroom house, and, when there are, they probably can’t afford the $5000 monthly rent. If the new tenants entertain, their parties will be very different from our Christmas Eves.

Before Paul’s mom moved out, I imagined her alone in her big house on the hill, fiddling with the thermostat on her temperamental old furnace at bedtime. In the basement it would clank and thud.

What if the sound worried her? What if the house seemed to be speaking to her through the furnace?

The house was angry with her because it knew she’d leave it soon. The house likes to have parties, but those parties were over. The house contained her memories, but she was forgetting them. The house was becoming a shell and it was pissed.

Or was that me?

I was going to miss the house; I couldn’t help myself. I’d miss who we used to be there, when our son still believed in Santa Claus, before the Christmas the cousins watched a Star Wars DVD together instead of playing with their cars, and the Christmas after that when they sat hip to hip on the sofa, looking at their phones. I’d miss when we arrived with shopping bags full of wrapped presents; when presents were still fun.

Maybe I’m materialistic. I like things that remind me of special times, such as the pinch pot our son made in kindergarten. I like to hold it, Kithe/Martel

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because looking isn’t good enough. I want to feel connected to the little hands that made it.

Paul’s mom has forgotten what many of her things mean, though. She doesn’t remember buying the yellow and blue plates in Brittany, or which of her children painted the picture of the goat. So, I suppose she doesn’t need those things anymore.

While still getting used to the idea of moving into assisted living, she’d often say “If I do go, I’ll just walk out and shut the front door behind me.” That’s what she did, too, leaving her kids and their spouses to pack up, clean up and clear it all out.

In one of the kitchen cabinets, I found a bag of at least seventy partly burned red candles, because each party required fresh, new tapers for the candlesticks on the dining table. To Paul the candles represented the way the conversations remained superficial, year after year. “Always starting over with new candles, repeating the same stories. We never let the candles burn down, never got to the bottom of things,” Paul said.

Up and down the stairs a hundred times, we hauled out furniture, boxes of treasures and bags of junk. When the big house was empty, the siblings hired a contractor to update the bathrooms and kitchen.

Before the tenants moved in, Paul and I visited once, to admire the new appliances, new curtains, fresh paint. I smoothed my hand over the retiled countertop. “Wow, what a change.”

“The place still depresses me,” Paul said. Despite the makeover, the rooms held memories of all the old scenes that played out there. He paced through the ground floor and quickly left, jangling his car keys.

I lingered. Before I shut the door on that house, I wanted to take something from the place with me, but what? I paused by the empty fireplace where Paul’s older brother roasted chestnuts one year, then slid open the glass door and stepped out into the backyard. In our garden down the hill, purple bearded irises from my own childhood home grow near a peach-colored daylily from the house Paul’s father and stepmother shared when I first met Paul.

Maybe a pink-flowering fuchsia bush should join them.

I found Paul down by the car, standing with his back to the house that liked to have parties, his jaw set in anger. What was he remembering?

If physical objects carry memories, and physical places, too, then of course Paul wants to stay away from that house and forget the role he played in that sad family drama. And if his mom feels herself losing those memories so that all that is left is an oppressive weight, then of course she’s better off leaving that house. When people ask how she likes her new apartment in the assisted living place, she 5

always says, “I’m where I need to be.”

I showed Paul my fuchsia cutting. “Is it okay?”

He looked as though he hadn’t heard me. In fact, he hadn’t. I repeated myself, “Is it okay if this goes in our backyard?

Paul’s face softened. He was himself again.

Instead of looking inward, I saw him focus on the piece of plant in my hand.

“You don’t mind?”

“No, it would be good to give it a new home.”

Eventually the cutting sprouted roots and I transferred it from a water glass to a clay pot. It’s still too small to plant out in the garden, but it will be ready, in time. I considered giving the plant to Paul’s mom to grow on her tiny balcony at her new place, but I know she wouldn’t want it. There’s a time when people need things and a time when they don’t. ■

Kithe/Martel

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untitled

Acrylic and paper Rachel Coyne

Kithe/Coyne

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Spectacle Alex Behr Spectacle —1990, Mission District.

Chris says he has thoughts about dangerous fucking and jumps out of my Valiant.

I go to a friend’s and drink tea, listen to Sonic Youth.

Chris says he’s found beauty by meeting me.

The wheel hub is busted.

Then he breaks a pilot light.

He stays with me though he misses his girlfriend, who’s screwing a rich guy in London.

I make up a boyfriend named Fred.

Chris drinks, takes mushrooms.

Snorts speed and cocaine.

He says I’m trouble.

Outside the barred window, someone yells, “Norman, you abandoned me in the middle of an operation that went sour!”

Spectacle —a woman, a stranger, wearing an “I love my husband” t-shirt with an arrow pointing left, but to the left is only the ocean.

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Kithe/Behr

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Chris, courtesy of the author

Kithe/Behr

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Spectacle —the boyfriend drunk at the party.

Dickies on the stereo.

He wants to stay on the bathroom tile floor.

It’s cool on his cheek. But a girl wants to pee.

The boyfriend refuses to leave.

Men drag him out and punch him.

At home he throws up blood in the tub.

The girlfriend documents it on a paper bag.

Spectacle —the blonde chimera sock-skating down the hall— A San Francisco blue-eyed scream by way of Idaho.

A banjo-playing ghost wrangler unrepentant gypsy boy thief— she opens the freezer takes out a bag and another and spills out clothes— lace tops with rips and bloomers with ribbons.

“Santa Cruz hippies gave me scabies!”

Spectacle —the Saturn rocket. The gleam.

Eyes wet in Houston with my pregnant sister-in-law and other assortments.

The chocolate nestled in the paper.

I eat this one and this: the caramel the salted hazelnut the raspberry filling.

I eat my in-laws until they’re gone.

I go back to the apartment and bleed chunks of nonbaby into the toilet.

Now I can drink.

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Kithe/Behr

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Ben, courtesy of the author

Kithe/Behr

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Past Me/Aubade Melissa Nunez If I could sit beside you on an existential dawn, watch the warm wash of color-light—subdued silver ignited—shift across our face as we welcome brazen birth of new era in our life, I could finally tell you not to worry about your too-quiet words: your voice will grow. It is not so much about the volume but the lasting that leads to power. You speak and a heat sits at the back of the throat, that slow, fuzzing fire that builds to burning.

The way water seems to absorb all heat to no effect until the rumble.

The way a pound of feathers is a pound of rocks, the way grains of sand are nothing until a pile. The way a mustard seed is near invisible until it becomes future self—the tree.

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Kithe/Nunez

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Immanence and Transcendence Photography, 2022 george l. stein

Kithe/Stein

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Handbuilding Nada Sewidan 1. Hold a ball of clay in your hands. Now wedge it on the table. Wrap both hands and push in, over and over. 50 times. Wedge it until there is no air left inside. It is the only way your clay body will survive this process.

I am waiting for something. It’s the way I lie quietly in my bed. The way my head rests against the empty white wall behind me. The way I stare through and past open rooms. All the ways my body forgets it is there at all. I find myself at New Seasons on Hawthorne, it is always that one. I am standing in the middle of a random aisle, it’s where the chicken stock sits among itself in rows and rows. The fluorescent lights above feel like a silent alarm. I think maybe I’ll make soup tonight. It is 100 degrees outside. I am not there for chicken stock. I am not there for soup or for anything you can find at a grocery store. This New Seasons is all lights, like the days I’d roam the aisles with her, emptying the makings of charcuterie into a shopping basket. She made the best of them.

2. Roll your fingers and palms against the clay, it only comes alive with you (and fire). Place pressure with your fingers and watch the clay form its round shape against your hand. Keep rolling until air fills where clay used to be. This is the first body, the original body. There will be a large hole, but do not worry, you will fill it, later, when you know how. Or you will build around it. This is how you give it form.

Outside my window a pine tree stands firm. The sky is endless here, I see the line between the passing of night and the glow of day. Sometimes I do not leave my house. Because when I am out in the sun’s light, I bring my body with me. For months, I sit on the bed and count the hours till the day dims. I am tired. This tired is down inside my bones, it moves my limbs slow and cautions me against too much thought, too much work. It cautions me against dinner with friends or a tender conversation with my love, like the night she came home and asked where I am, even though I was right in front of her. She snapped her fingers silly to a jazz record in the background and it made me laugh long enough to remember I had a body. It never lasts before…the tired eats the wind from me. I am tired in a way where everything feels impossible. The brushing of teeth. The combing of hair. I am tired. I do not eat. I am tired. I cannot sleep.

I am tired. I dream of never waking.

Because when I am out in the sun’s light, I must bring my body with me. What I mean is—it is a burden.

All the light loses itself in the sky. I still cannot leave my house. My body is mourning something, but I do not yet understand what it is.

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3. Shape your clay into anything you want, if you know where to place your hands. Do you know yet what you’d like to make?

In this home there is a hole. This hole can be big or small, depending on who is here on the nights you can hear the rain bounce from the roof. I am back to fourteen years old and today the hole is as large as emptiness. I walk around the quiet where all I can hear are my footsteps. Sometimes the house is an echo.

I walk down the stairs to a dimly lit kitchen, my mom never wants to leave the lights on. She says darkness saves money. She does not understand she makes the hole bigger, stretches it wide on the nights she is not home. In the kitchen, I look for food, there are many ingredients but none of them I want. I don't think I'm looking for food. I walk around the empty hallway to our grand piano and stare at the ivory keys. Let me play, I say quietly to myself. But not even that sound, in all its softness and request for forgiveness, is what I am looking for. I shut the cover and let darkness wash over the keys until they disappear. I return upstairs to my room. The walls are purple, but everything loses itself in the dark. I sit on the bed with the lights off because darkness saves money. I lean my head between my legs and listen to a song long enough for me to drift to sleep. In this home there is a hole.

He punches me, hard, and I know a bruise will form where his hands were. You make the hole bigger, I want to tell him.

4. To build around your original clay body, you must coil and attach new, smaller clay bodies. This is where you start filling in the holes. Take a bit of clay and coil them between your hands. You should now have smaller clay bodies to attach to your original. Take a sharp needle tool and score the edges of your clay, slice marks into them, then, with water, run your fingertips against the sliced marks.

You’ll see them begin to heal and slightly disappear. Take your needle tool again and slice into the same edges. Now it’s ready to attach.

I am not there, not really. I cannot feel the bed underneath me now. I scratch my arms and my legs so I know I am here. But still I cannot move out of my bed. I cannot will myself to, so I scratch. Something will come of it. Sometimes blood, sometimes a bruise, any evidence of a body.

We are sitting in a downtown park. I am quiet, as I always am when I’m with her. My silence eats us away.

She tells me when she’s with me she feels in purgatory. An intermediate state of being, not fully there, not fully gone. I do not disagree.

5. To attach the new bodies in whatever space you want to fill, or whichever form you want to build, carefully place your fingers against the original clay. Gather as much clay as it will allow without separating the original clay body. Do the same for the new clay body. Merge from each side until you can no longer distinguish which clay belonged to the original body and which belonged to the new body. You now have a new clay body.

I have lived thinking it must be ordinary to wonder and want for the end of the world. I tell them this one night in their bed. They are new to me, but they feel like New Seasons. I am sobbing and I am drunk. I tell them how I want to leave my body, how everything leaves me burning and I need to crawl out. I go on like this for a while before I turn to look at them. Their blue eyes fixed on me. Their hand on my face before they pull me completely against their body. I soften and fold in.

Sometimes when I lay next to them, our eyes fixed, I have the urge to wrap my arms around myself and hold me together. In the low light of their room, if my hands did not curl into me I might have unraveled, part by part, bare to them the sides of me that might send them questioning.

Here, I realize, we are to bring our unfinished bodies.

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you finish your form.

Not everything has an end. ■

Kithe/Sewidan

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A Balm for Golems a sestina Devon Balwit Dread was what I felt at the bell, the certainty of a gantlet, the fiery breath of the cool kids ready to blister the lowly as they entered the doors.

Those years, that state of high alarm, pressed into my clay like a potter’s thumb, every capillary familiar with humiliated rage. I am the golem they engendered. We are a sizeable tribe, we golems, creeping the edges of the crowd, shielding our certainty that the world means to drain us to the last capillary.

When some of us marry and have our own kids, we become an army of one so they are never pressed, face to a wall, and humiliated. For them, a door must remain a promise, joyfully opened. Doors should lead to friends, to gardens—no golems there. If we could, we’d keep them pressed forever between the platens of our love. The certainty of suffering jerks us awake to check on our kids— their breath, their pulse, the healthy flush of capillaries.

We golems love how trees echo the capillaries within us, the physical world full of doors between phyla. Whale calves, goat kids, wolf cubs, play. Fractals are a balm for golems— the slow time of cliffs and oceans, the certainty that our anxious hearts will still and be pressed, mineralized like four-chambered trilobites, pressed by some alien mind and considered, capillaries lit by some future microscope. This certainty promises a someday blur of schoolhouse doors, erasing all residue. Gone are the golem’s and , truth and death. The kids responsible will be eons gone, and their kids, too, spectral like the layer of iridium pressed into the K-T boundary. All are golems now, elements in need of repurposing, capillary action. Back then, I couldn’t wait for the doors to release me, leaving town my only certainty.

Kids thread the September streets, capillaries widening to where kindergarteners line up by the door, innocent, as yet, of golems or falsehoods like certainty.

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Kithe/Balwit

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LIGHT SHOW SLIDE

Acrylics on glass, 1969 Lawrence Bridges

Kithe/Bridges

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AFTER ASKING MY PERMISSION, MY MASSAGE THERAPIST CLIMBS ON THE TABLE She places her hands on each side of my hips and then digs her knees into my calves.

Is this pressure okay? she asks. I mmhmm confirmation, and she sways back and forth before scuttling her knees onto the backs of my things, my butt, and my back. Her hands are now by my head, and I cannot imagine the shape we make in the dim light.

Sometimes I worry I’m not powerful, she tells me, climbing off of me and pressing her fingers into my muscles to untie the impossible knots I’ve tangled.

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes

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Kithe/Morris

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How do you love?

Shannan Mann How do you love? With tomorrow firmly perched in my mind because yesterday escaped on today’s sparrow.

Are you certain it was not a crow?

Who is certain of anything that “was” — how do you love with tomorrow!

I have a blackbird you could borrow.

She preens, flies, follows all the same laws.

Yesterday escaped on today’s sparrow.

A hunter alone could speak without sorrow.

But I am not the only one with flaws.

How do you love? With tomorrow.

Alright, take aim, unburden, blow your pistol. Was it a dream? Does yesterday escape on today’s sparrow?

Leaves fall like a curtain. The audience knows your shot has kissed its target. Applause!

How do you love? With tomorrow, yesterday escaped. Today bows.

Kithe/Mann

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I'd Love to Change the World

Mixed media collage on paper, 2020 GJ Gillespie

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Kithe/Gillespie

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A Day in Ten Parts

Dixie Lubin

excerpted from Poetry for People: 50 Years of Writing

One Has to be somewhere Why not in the newborn light Cascading through my east window Crossing the bedroom at the speed of itself Knocking, gentle, and persistent, on Closed doors of my eyelids?

Two Two cups of too-strong coffee Too much diet sugar Two too many pieces of toast To calm the ravenous beast inside You are too much, beast, You win again.

Enclosed You Will Find a PDF Copy of Your Email Address Three Three remarks have cut me Before I make it out the door One each dismissive, disrespectful, distrustful Three times I bite down on sharp retorts After all this time, I know they get me nowhere.

Four Four starlings fly and frolic Moving as one to the banquet of muffin crumbs I have left on the table near the small pine Four times black feathers flash Iridescent in the sun.

Five Five minutes to cross the bridge In rush hour traffic Through the open window, I turn To the long body of the river I am pulled into a dream Floating to a different life Maybe fifteen hundred miles from here Maybe only five.

Six Six ingredients make my dinner I am fortunate indeed Brown eggs from my sister’s farm Whipped into a frenzy Slices of Yukon gold sauteed in the pan With onion and red pepper.

Next, succulent greens spears from the garden Last the salty crumbly goat cheese layers in Finally, the eggs, in my grandma’s cast iron skillet Frittata!

Seven Seven o’clock, and it’s not hot Or cold, on the sidewalk outside the coffee house Where I sit with a shot of caffeine Golden evening light is kind To my friend’s aging face and to mine.

Forty-five years we have talked Never running out of things to say And more important, things to laugh at.

I look at her and wonder How many more years do we have?

Eight Eight times a year, earth’s energy shifts As the season upon us freezes or sizzles Crops are sown and reaped Equinoxes balance light and dark Solstices mark the longest and shortest days Between the arms of this medicine wheel Lie the cross-quarter days, heralding More subtle shifts Times when the veil between realities Grows thin – time to call the spirits, and invite them in.

Nine Returning home at nine o’clock We lock ourselves in, close the blinds, hold the old dog close Listen to the public radio blues until midnight.

Ten I used to sing ‘Ten Little Indians,’ and count on My fingers and toes Now I have asked you ten times to calm Down, and lower your voice, but you Have not been attentive, you’ve been on tenterhooks You are very, very tense.

For my part, I am feeling Tenuous; you are way too intense I certainly don’t want to dance attendance!

Still, a tendril creeps from my heart to yours And a bud of tenderness opens.

Kithe/Lubin

Kithe Interior_Fall Winter 22.indd 20

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Ketchup and Pasta Güzide Ertürk

I

said, “Excuse me,” as I bumped into the stranger.

“Excuse me? Ha!” he said, with a wave of anger. “Look at what you did before you say sorry, little lady. Everything in my hands fell to the ground, and without helping me, you just say, ‘Excuse me!’ Why should I excuse you? My eyes are so bad that my glasses are useless. I can’t even bend over and see what I dropped. My back hurts with every step. All I remember is, before you bumped me, I was holding a bottle of ketchup and a box of pasta, and I was thinking how much I needed to pay for both of them. Last week I spent 15 bucks, but I was going to buy a cheaper brand today. So, it should only cost 13 bucks. However, this was before you hit me.

“Now, I’ve lost everything. I can’t see where they fell, and I’m already tired. Are you sorry, little girl? You could help me find them, but talking is always easier and quicker, ha! People are always apologetic. Why shouldn’t they be? I have some meatballs in my freezer, and I thought of cooking them tonight. Ketchup makes it delicious. My wife Laila used to tell me not to eat junk food before she died. She used to eat healthy, but I’m alive, and she is not. Do you think it’s easy to live alone for five years? Cooking, cleaning, and sleeping by myself is not fun. I miss her. Sometimes, I said to myself, ‘Yes, I should eat healthy like her.’ Unfortunately, changing a habit is not easy, little girl, when you are eighty-five years old. Now, will you help me find what I dropped? Oh, now you are handing them back to me! Thanks a lot. And last: I forgive you.”

As I handed him the box of pasta and bottle of ketchup, his hands shook. My dad died when he was sixty-one years old. If he were alive now, he would be seventy-two. Younger than this old man.

Ten years later, I’m still upset. We could be walking together in this grocery today.

I looked back at the old man. His giant glasses prevented me from seeing his face well, but his pale, pink lips were moving as if he was muttering quietly to himself. Or did he think he was still talking to me? He wore a brown hat and an old jacket. There were coffee stains all over it.

Underneath, he wore a dark red sweater. Its big, black buttons were unfastened. A small, blue bag hung empty on his shoulder. It looked as if he might drop the pasta and ketchup again, so I parked my shopping cart in a corner, ran to the store’s entrance, grabbed a handbasket, and brought it back to him.

I said, “Sir, perhaps this basket will help you carry your stuff.”

Before he started to talk, he stared at me through his foggy, thick glasses, with his light blue eyes, “Thank you, little lady,” he responded. This time the tone of his voice was softer, “I wasn’t expecting that kindness. People have forgotten its meaning. They think that they are kind, but like queens, you see that their kindness is just a mask when you get closer to them. Do you want an example?”

I opened my mouth to talk, but he kept going.

“The other day, my neighbor, who always smiles when he sees me, was furious and came over to tell me so for putting my trash can too close to his garage. Ask ‘why?’ little lady. The answer is easy: because he couldn’t get his car out. What would have happened if he had just pushed the trash can a little further out of the way? Did he need to yell at me? Yes, absolutely! God knows why he was so short-tempered. Maybe he just had a fight with his wife. Instead of yelling at her, it was easier to yell at me.

“However, you are not one of them. Your kindness is as genuine as it comes. I’m so sorry; I can’t accept your offer. The basket’s too heavy for my old, weak muscles to carry around anymore. My doctor told me to walk thirty minutes every day, but I didn’t. The last time I went to see him, he also told me to get a wheelchair. Can you imagine me in a wheelchair! I hate them! It’s better to die on your feet than live in one of those. At least I’ll be buried next to my wife, Laila. What more can I expect from this life anyway? After all, it’s hard for me even to hold some ketchup and a box of pasta in my hands. Plus, my kids don’t call me anymore. It is best to lie down next to my wife, Laila. I miss her. No, I’ll never use a wheelchair. I’ll never walk thirty minutes a day. This life is so hard, little

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lady. Eat healthy while you can. Then, when you’re my age, you won’t suffer this torture. You’ll be able to carry ketchup and pasta at the same time. When someone bumps into you, they won’t slip out of your hands.

“No, I won’t ever use a wheelchair. It’ll make me look like a turtle, and I’ll feel like I’m always in the hospital. Two years ago, I had a car accident and ended up in the hospital for a whole month. If you don’t want to end up like that, little lady, never take your pretty hands off the steering wheel.

I had to have surgery for my broken arm. Oh, you can’t imagine! I thought I would never see the world again, that I’d never go back to my home. Every day at 3:00 pm, a nurse came to take me for a ride in a wheelchair. We would go outside and around the building. I would chit chat with her about the birds and my wife. She talked about her absent mother. Her name was… What was the nurse’s name? Oh, come on, I have to remember. Not Ayşe, not Fatma… Oh, her name was Ceyda.

Every day at 3:00 pm, she took me out of the back of the hospital. That was it. No, I can’t take that basket.”

He looked at the basket I was carrying and turned his back. Instead of putting it back, I set it inside my shopping cart next to the vegetables and stared at him as he walked off. What was I going to buy? I looked in my pockets to find my list. Then, I rummaged through my bag, trying to find that piece of paper in the mountain of mess. When I saw it, I couldn’t understand what I had written. I read it twice but my mind was still blank. “Tomatoes, potatoes, milk…”

My father had never had a surgery. He used to like walking. He carried a little, black radio in his hand to listen to weather reports, and loved to look at the sky every morning. But he spent his last days in a hospital, in a room that had a small window. Every evening we watched the sunset together while he was laying on a hospital bed. We didn’t talk. We were afraid to say “Goodbye.”

Cancer. Now, what was it again that I was trying to buy?

The store was crowded. It was New Year’s Eve, and everyone’s baskets and carts were full of food, and there were long lines at all the cashier stations. My eyes looked for the old man. I wanted to see him again. He forgave you. Let him go, I thought. And yet, part of me wanted to follow him. But he had disappeared inside the crowd, and I needed to get home and start cooking.

While paying the cashier, I saw the top of his brown hat poking above the crowd near the exit.

It was moving slowly as if sailing on a sea of heads. I hurried over there without thinking and asked if he had a car or not.

He said, “No, I don’t have a car. My home is ten minutes away from here.” He pointed with his finger towards someplace in the distance as if I could see his house.

“I like to come and shop before sunset. I like seeing all the colors behind the pine trees when I leave the store. Look! All the clouds are pink now.” We both turned our faces towards the sky and watched in silence. The color of the sun was orange, and away from it, a lone star had just started to come into view, shining a little.

After a while, he started to talk again.

“We are lucky today.” There was happiness in his voice. “Sometimes dark clouds hide the sunset. Sometimes it rains. I always take an umbrella with me on those days. Instead of looking to the sky, I try and look at the rain falling to the ground. But on those days, I just feel blind and wet.

I forget about everything when the sky is clear and the clouds pink. It doesn’t matter how much time passes. It always takes me back to fifty years ago, to my honeymoon with Laila.

“We spent it on an island for two weeks. I worked for a couple of years to save up for it. Laila also had some money. It was a dream. We used to go down to the island’s town square every afternoon. There weren’t any vehicles allowed on it, only horse carriages. They would slowly pass us by. Even now, when I close my eyes, I can hear the neighing of horses and the clop, clop of their hooves. The streets were quiet, and the islanders were friendly. We couldn’t speak their language, but they could say, ‘Hi!’ and tried to sell their stuff to us. Laila and I would watch the sunsets together. I would ask her, ‘Do you remember the pink skies?’ to appease her when we had fights.

She would say, ‘I remember them, but it won’t work!’”

He turned his face towards me as if waking from a dream and kept talking, “Walking back to my house from the grocery store takes me back to a memory that I will keep forever. I must regretfully decline your offer, little lady. I need to hurry. Otherwise, it’s hard to get back home when it’s dark.

“Nevertheless, thank you. Maybe we will meet again here, and next time, you can tell me about the skies you’ve seen. I talked a lot today without listening to you. Please forgive me.”

We smiled at each other. I said, “You look like my father.”

He tipped his hat to me, slowly turned around, and started to walk away. I knew that the pasta and ketchup were in his old, worn, blue bag. And I knew what he was going to cook tonight.

I never saw him again. ■

Kithe/Ertürk

Kithe Interior_Fall Winter 22.indd 22

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Doppelgänger

a haibun

Lilou Bo I found my spiritual doppelgänger while perusing online staff bios for a local arts center.

Hapa. Artist. Book lover. Feminist. Art Educator. Even our first born daughters share a name (though mine still breathes only in my aspirations). Her bio left me gutted. Had I spotted me in the wild? Me in ten years? My other half? My unknown lover? My heart teetered with the same anxiety, the same intensity, that I once ascribed to love at first sight. What greater love can be found than a me that I hope to become?

I want to be your friend, but how do you approach a stranger to tell them that you love them?

I burn too brightly for icebreakers. Could not possibly say hello without betraying the burden of having known you without you knowing. Would you see my admiration for the platonic regard that it is? Or would you think me too earnest?

Who is this fierce woman who thinks she can so scrappily curate her friends? I do not recognize myself, yet my desire to know you is grown from self recognition. We share skin. I imagine you laugh at the same frequency. Our cheeks pockmarked with mirrored melasmas, eyes pinched in synonymous walnuts, that whisper of our blood.

I want to pluck you, Kindred spirit, from this earth— Cut blooms will wither.

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Kithe/Bo

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Departed

Digital illustration with AI elements, 2022 Dominique Elliott

Kithe/Elliott

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Domingo and the Deer

D

Reagan Poston

omingo stared at the deer, and the deer stared back, eyes unseeing, heaped across the mouth of his driveway with her head snapped back between her shoulder blades. She was big, a monolith, moored thing, and the rain coiled into plumes of steam where it slipped against the matted ribbons of her pelt.

Domingo wondered, not for the first time, why his mother had given him the name of Sunday.

Domingo. The day her God was resting and not helping anybody out. He knew what she’d say, of course, could practically hear her ghost rattling out in rapid-fire Spanish that Sunday was God’s day, and that meant He would always be with him. Domingo, who’d spent much of his life feeling more like a Monday, wasn’t so sure.

Even in the low light of morning, the world was shaping up to be tropical, chokingly humid, and though days such as this were not uncommon in Mississippi, something about the heavy smell of the earth around him and the dusky light pilfering down through the trees made him feel like his very bones were being filled with lead. He didn’t know how long the deer had been there, putrefying in the sauna of that summer dawn, but the blood that had sludged out around the flats of her teeth was tar-black. It would probably have dried into a macabre crust on her muzzle, had it not been for the rain.

Even so, it was probably the rain that killed her, he thought, a roll of discomfort squirming into him as droplets, warm as bathwater, curled around his uncovered ears. Probably the rain, but mostly, whatever blue-sheened vehicle had slammed into her and rolled away unscathed, save for the transfer of paint flecks that now adorned her crushed ribs.

He didn’t know how he hadn’t heard the sound of the impact. Daylight was only just beginning to worm up through the thick mottle of trees enshrouding the property. Everyone else had probably been asleep when she’d died, but Domingo Vásquez was not sleeping much these days.

Mostly, he just stared up into the swampy darkness, felt their ceiling fan slosh the air back down uncooled, and asked himself why the insomnia felt so much like a sign. But this morning, he’d rolled over and seen Benny lying there beside him, obliviously sleeping on as the blind-broken moonlight cast bars over his skin. One freckled hand stretched into the distance between them, and Domingo realized all at once that the insomnia felt like a sign because it was one.

His mother’s God wouldn’t let him rest until he’d left Benny.

A passing train shattered against the stillness of the night—maybe it was here the deer was hit, the sound swallowed up by shuddering steelwork and the house’s crepe-thin windows rattling against their frames—and Domingo did the only thing he’d ever known to do with a sign: heed it.

He kicked away the sticky-sweetness of their single sheet, scrounged silently around under the bed for his duffle, tried not to feel as he nudged past dusty boxes of photos and the left tennis shoe he’d blamed Benny for losing. He kept his eyes down through the dark hall, the living room, the kitchen.

Wouldn’t risk looking around. Once he’d locked the front door gently behind him, he told himself it was only the suffocating heat of the storm that choked him.

Now, Domingo, superstitious at the best of times, was trying to heed the warned wrath of his mother’s God, but there was a dead deer heaped across the mouth of his driveway. Though it was barely visible through the murky dawn and the dim-cast beam of headlights at Domingo’s back, it was hard to ignore the fact that nothing said “sign” quite the way a dead body blocking one’s path does.

With the gulley on the left of the driveway bleeding out through the culvert on the right, the possibility of him leaving while the deer laid there was wholly, ruthlessly drowned. The rain, possessive and wild and warm, slipped greedily under Domingo’s upturned collar as he fell back inside the truck. He sat drumming restless fingers against the steering wheel, stared at the deer through the fogged windshield, and tried to figure out what exactly he was supposed to do now. His duffle, half-full of clothes he hadn’t even been sure were his in the dark, was resting on the bench beside him, silent as death.

Coming up with viable next-steps was made all the more difficult by the hazed skitter of his

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thoughts. Domingo was tired. Being tired was all he could think about. Every flayed-open second echoed his mother’s voice telling him with no small amount of contempt that he’d feel better if he lived better.

“Living better,” in his mother’s mind, meant settling down with a nice woman who would cook and clean for him. She’d told him as much the last time he’d seen her, said it as he was wiping the chicken soup from her chin with a dull-edged spoon.

She’d lost all of her fire by then, all the zest to scream and curse and demand to know how many bedrooms were in his and Benny’s house. She’d only had the energy to well up at him with her big, brown eyes and to look at him like he was personally spreading her cancer by murmuring something feeble about how Benny always took care of him. How Benny tucked the sheets each morning without fail. How Benny made the best damn cheesecake Domingo had ever eaten. How he was made of warmth and kindness.

None of it mattered to her. All she saw was that he was a he, so red-blooded-all-American to the undiscerning eye that she’d been wary to let him into her Mexican home even when they were children.

While she’d lived, she’d never hesitated to blame any misfortune in Domingo’s life on some imagined failure of Benny’s, and though Domingo had always been quick to defend him, he found himself unable to dismiss the notion entirely while he sat exhausted in the truck that morning. After all, he’d tried everything else. No herbal tea would send him off, no meditation, no medication. He was frayed and frantic and desperate to sleep. He’d do what he had to do to get some rest.

With that, he relented to the shuddering transmission of the truck, pumped the clutch, and shifted to reverse. The back glass was just as clouded as the front, and the rain seemed twice as obscuring as he inched his way backwards down the long, coiling, gravel drive. Each side was lined with careening-topped trees, oaks sagging with moss-soft limbs, and Domingo tried not to think about the anger of the summer storm pitching one down to crush him.

His shoes—untied, in his haste to leave—squelched as he climbed the front steps. He’d left his duffle in the cab of the truck to fortify his hard-wrought decision, just in case he walked back into that house and couldn’t keep his eyes off the photo of Benny beaming out with his first class of second-graders. He needn’t have worried about the photo, he realized, as soon as the screen door whipped closed behind him. Benny was up early, lumbering around somewhere unseen, and terror bled razor-sharp down Domingo’s spine.

“Mingo?” Benny called, then appeared at the end of the hallway. His face was dark as he crossed the short distance to Domingo, shrouded in shadow and a rough slash of stubble. “What are you doing?”

Benny stopped in front of him and frowned in the buzzing light of their kitchen.

“What are you doing up so early?” Domingo asked and prayed that the nervous lilt of his voice was just the mounting paranoia in his ear, a nasty consequence of the rising need to be moving, to be leaving.

Benny’s eyes—blue, usually, storm-gray now above the downturned corners of his lips— lingered at the rainwater drenching Domingo’s shoulders, and Domingo stood, his heart whirring like a jet engine in his chest as he waited for the cognizant accusation that Benny had woken up alone or for a heartbroken recognition that he was leaving.

Benny didn’t accuse him of anything, though. He just sighed and knuckled a fist down under his eyebrow like a sleep-drunk toddler.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” he mumbled. “Feel like shit.”

The nerves skittering like live-wires inside of Domingo crashed, and in their place, a mournful ache began to spread. He didn’t want to leave Benny, and he tried to cover the sudden lump in his throat with a sympathetic smile.

“Go back to bed,” he murmured. “I’ll bring you some tea.”

Benny nodded, and when he stepped closer, it took everything Domingo had not to fold in on himself in shame. Benny’s lips seared where they pressed against his cheek.

Domingo turned away to fill the kettle straight from the groaning taps and listened to the thunk, thunk, thunk of the stubborn faucet, the rain on the cracked porch roof, the pounding of his own heart.

Benny’s face was sweat-sheened and mashed into his pillow when Domingo made it back to their room. Drawers were half-open, and the dusty photo box was peeking out from under the bed skirt like an incrimination. He nudged it out of sight with his foot and swallowed. Benny grumbled a soft thanks when the tea was in his hands, and Domingo could tell by the way he was huddled under two blankets, despite the house’s stagnant swelter, that he was running a fever.

Domingo moved to the window anyway. If he looked too long at Benny, thought too long about what he was giving up, he’d stay. And he had to go.

“There’s a dead deer in the driveway,” Domingo said, pushing the curtains aside and peering for the corpse through the drumming rain.

Benny slurped his tea and coughed.

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“Not surprised with this weather,” he said.

“I’ll call the city,” Domingo said, reaching for his cellphone.

He knew that someone, somewhere, was unlucky enough to have the job of scraping dead things off the pavement. He’d never envied them, knew they must be sick to death of dying.

“Domingo,” Benny said.

“What?”

“Es domingo.”

Domingo went silent. Benny was right. City workers were like God on Sunday, helping no one.

Domingo felt the sludge within him begin to rise again, but when he began to rationalize his way out of the sick feeling, he realized that, in the grand scheme of signs from the universe, a dead deer blocking the driveway seemed more manageable than a lifetime of chronic insomnia. All the resolution a dead deer would need was a pair of gloves and some elbow grease, both of which Domingo happened to have.

“I can move it myself,” he said, still staring out at the deer’s corpse in their driveway.

“Come back to bed,” Benny said after a moment, and it didn’t sound like a request.

It sounded like a plea.

Domingo glanced back at Benny and considered his options. Go out to face the storm with all the other dead things, or allow himself just one more day of this, one more day with him.

He let the curtain fall closed as he moved away from the window, towards Benny. The breeze didn’t follow him, and the smell of them, Benny and him in the Mississippi August, was everywhere.

The deer could wait for tomorrow.

The next morning, Domingo startled awake after far too little sleep feeling like he was on fire all over. Benny had a heavy arm draped over him, and the sheets were practically dripping with the sweat of their night. He could tell Benny's fever was far from broken.

“Ben,” Domingo huffed, struggling to free himself from the octopus of his boyfriend. Benny grunted and pulled Domingo closer. “Ben, let me go.”

Benny shook his head, eyes closed, blond hair matting on his forehead. “Never,” he muttered, then smiled a bit.

Domingo rolled his eyes.

“Come on, you big doof. Your fever’s really high. You need meds.”

Benny sighed and burrowed closer, and when he relented and rolled away, Domingo tried to remember that he’d asked for this, that it was better.

“Alright, Dr. Vásquez,” Benny mumbled, and then he was asleep again.

Domingo didn’t bother pointing out that he had another three years of school before he would earn his doctorate. Instead, he shucked the dampened sheets away and began rustling through the bedside table for Tylenol.

All he found were their crinkled passports, dog-eared textbooks for the upcoming semester, and a photo of Benny that would make his mother roll in her grave. Domingo sat on the edge of the bed staring at the odd conglomerate and couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been. He’d been ready to leave, but he wouldn’t have gotten far without these things.

“D’you think I should call in?” Benny mumbled, startling Domingo so much that he damn near slammed the drawer shut on his hand. He could practically hear his mother chiding him about his guilty conscience.

“Yeah,” Domingo breathed. He tried in vain to get his heartrate to settle. “Yeah, definitely.”

Benny hummed an affirmative and let his hand come to rest on the bare curve of Domingo’s hip.

Domingo stood too quickly.

“I think we’re out of Tylenol,” he said, casting his eyes around the room. They settled on the stillopen window. “I’m going to—I’m going to go to the store.”

He dressed quickly and didn’t bother stooping to lace up his shoes. He just shoved into his rain jacket and tried not to flinch at the screen door slamming behind him.

He saw, once he was free of the porch’s cover, that the rain had stopped. In its place, a choking, spewing steam had settled in and turned the air thick in his mouth. He barely remembered to grab the work gloves off the porch rail before he was wading out towards the deer. She hadn’t moved since he’d seen her last, though he would have been surprised if she had, given the definitive deadness. She had, however, seemed to have swollen since he’d last been up close.

Bloat. His mind brought the word, along with a roll of horror. Some hazy part of his brain told him, with the steaming day pressing in around him, that the flies would come soon, the smell, the scavengers swooping in shrill and starving to pinion her through and make her burst. The stink of being stuck here would swell and swell until every move he made reminded him of wanting to leave.

“The longer you wait,” he told himself, still staring down at the dear, still swallowing the roll of his stomach. “The worse it’ll be.”

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He took another moment to steel himself, and then, he reached forward in the simmering dawn and wrapped his hands around the bristly hairs at her back ankles. The flesh gave under his fingers like clay as Domingo tugged sharply, once, twice, and the monolith, moored thing, did not move an inch.

Far down the drive behind him, Domingo could hear the screen door snap back against its frame, and in the half-second he sacrificed to turn and see Benny standing on the steps with one sock bunched around his ankle, his grip failed, and he went sprawling backward into the mud.

He wanted to curse, wanted to cry, wanted to shake this dead thing alive and ask what it wanted from him. He settled for titling his head up towards the sky and towards his mother’s God. “What do you want from me?” he asked Him instead.

“Do you want some help, Mingo?”

It took him a breath too long to realize that it was not his mother’s God answering him, but Benny, calling from the porch and looking like he was about to strip out of his socks—fever be damned—and jog out regardless of the answer.

Domingo sighed and struggled to his feet. “No,” he said to Benny.

As he walked back to the house, he scraped at the mud streaks on his jeans. A particularly stubborn glob was clinging to his hipbone, and all at once, Domingo was remembering he and Benny at fourteen, the way they’d raced each other through straw-grass towards the muddy pond behind Benny’s house. Its bank was half-cracked and algae scuffed, and they were a reedy, rowdy, howling pair, already scraped around the knees with dirt plastered to the divots of their collarbones.

He’d loved Benny ferociously then, innocently, and when he glanced up through the thick-mottled trees to see him still standing there on the porch and swallowing down a grin at the mess Domingo’d made of himself, he felt it anew.

He didn’t want to leave. He just wanted to rest.

“Shut up,” Domingo said, before Benny had the chance to snicker at him. Benny raised his hands in surrender.

“It was a ten from me,” he said, his face stone-cold sober. His eyes danced, though, and after a moment of him resolutely holding his pose of surrender, he began to wiggle his fingers in emphasis of the ten he’d given Domingo’s fall.

Domingo groaned. He didn’t want to leave. “Aren’t you supposed to be sick or something?”

Benny grinned and wrapped an arm around Domingo’s waist, mud and all.

“I think we could both use a hot shower, hmm?” Benny said, guiding him back inside. “Yeah, alright.”

The deer could wait another day.

The next morning, after another sleepless night, Domingo didn’t even need to open his eyes to know that Benny’s fever was gone. It was still sweltering in their tiny bedroom, but it no longer felt like there was an active furnace snoring into his shoulder blade.

He felt the end settle into his bones, jagged and cloying.

Benny didn’t move an inch as Domingo cleared his things from the bedside drawer, and he didn’t move an inch as Domingo laced into his shoes—boots, this time, better traction. The deer had to go so that he could go. He didn’t move an inch as Domingo left him, just laid there snoring softly as the brittle light of dawn fell across his face, one hand stretched into the warmth Domingo had made.

He deserved a goodbye, Domingo knew that, but he wasn’t sure he had a goodbye in him.

When he made it to the front door, the best he could offer was turning and easing the screen back into place once more, hoping that Benny could sleep through the whole thing.

His mud-crusted work gloves were right on the porch where he’d dropped them the day before, but before he could stoop to gather them and steel himself for the ache of leaving, something caught his eye through the trees.

At the end of the driveway, there was a deer.

It should have been a monolith, moored thing, but instead, it knelt, lapping at the slow-draining gulley to the left of the driveway.

Domingo stood, breathless, and stared.

There was nothing to show that there had ever been a dead deer keeping him from leaving, and Domingo thought distantly that someone must have called the city for him, that someone must have heard him when he’d asked his mother’s God what He wanted.

The deer looked over at him, and she was docile, staring at him with big, brown eyes, unafraid. He realized, suddenly, that there’d always been fear in his mother’s eyes when she looked at him.

For the first time in a long time, Domingo wasn’t afraid. He stood there staring at the deer and thought that maybe this was a sign, too, a sign that she was somewhere free of fear, somewhere she’d just be glad to see him happy.

He did the only thing he’d ever known to do with a sign.

Benny was still asleep when Domingo crawled back into bed beside him. ■

Kithe/Poston

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HEADLIGHTS BEYOND THE TUNNEL Digital photography, 2022 Lawrence Bridges

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Can't Find Yuengling Anywhere Around Here For Dave Jarecki

Patrick Rogers If you move your family If I move my family?

If one moves their family across the country does it pick up where it left?

This is not how I like to talk about the end of the world and before I answer I notice eat the rich scrawled on the back side of a real estate sign then remember my cousin Rich wanting to move to Chicago to begin again.

I don't fear dying on the left side of history.

If you drink a beer If I drink a beer?

Yes, if you drink a beer I think my mouth outruns my heart

Kithe/Rogers

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Errand Marie Conner I left the house for the first time in days Forgetting my eyebrows As I so often did in the post-life Almost missing the sun’s narrow escape From its February incarceration In the bakery section I rolled back as he rolled forward Waiting for a cappuccino Dissecting the merits of almond and oat milk A knowing glance instantaneously binding us I came for Half & Half And found discounted Valentine candy In the bin by the freezer isle Cherry juju hearts Consuming the whole bag over two days Trying to fill myself with love But settling for a stomach ache He smiled warmly as I offered him my art Sharing that his husband studied at the same institution How to create and critique I wonder if he is heavy with the knowledge Of the inequality and the price of the reward We shared an addiction to justice Optimism floating out over our lips Like a sunrise fog inching across wet cold cement Coffees squeezed between our knees as we parted My mouth dry with affinity I resolve to get out more But I’ll take my eyebrows next time

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Errand 2.0

a response to Errand

Acrylic on paper, 2022 Marie Conner

Kithe/Conner

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Fangirls Katie Mitchell

T

he first time they meet it’s in the tiny kitchen of a tiny apartment in the big city where they both have just moved.

Jane notices Kay: she’s got thick-cut bangs, a heart-shaped face. She’s wearing an A-line mini skirt and flats, a black scoop-neck leotard on top. She looks disappointed, like life has already let her down.

“You need to be friends,” their mutual friend says. “You both love Darla Star.”

As soon as their mutual friend says this, Jane realizes that Kay looks like Darla Star, the childhood celebrity turned indie band front-woman darling of the 2000s, now washed up according to some, revered by her fanatic fangirls. She sings about love gone wrong, boys no one can stay away from, telling the world in her sultry lilt, baby I’m bad news.

Jane and Kay sit side by side on the grimy couch, shyly trading Darla statistics: favorite album (Jane: Orange Dream, Kay: To the Hilt), favorite song (Jane: “I Am Trying,” Kay: “Loving You More”), first show (Jane: Big Sur, Kay: Santa Ana). Jane’s never met anyone who loves Darla as much as she does, so she feels protective, defensive. Jane feels seen by Darla, by her lyrics. How could anyone love her as much as Jane does?

Jane and Kay become inseparable. On weekends, Jane sits on Kay’s bed while Kay cleans her room, then they drive to Jane’s apartment and Kay sits on Jane’s bed as Jane cleans hers.

It’s like Jane and her sister used to do, before their parents got divorced, before everything fell apart. During the room cleanings, Jane and Kay play Darla’s records in the background. They talk about her. They ask each other questions.

“Do you think Darla loves Johnny as much as Johnny loves Darla?” Kay asks with a wry grin on her face, referring to Darla’s new boyfriend, a long-haired, quiet man with a baby face.

“No way, Johnny has to love her more,” Jane says, laughing, shaking her head. She puts her hands on her hips and juts them out to the left. “How far would you go to see Darla live?”

“Oh god, I don’t know, probably anywhere,” Kay says, all sincerity, no posturing. “How much money would you spend to see her?”

Jane considers this. “$1,000,” she says, slowly, surely. Then, eagerly: “When do you think her next solo album will come out?”

They are earnest, true. Between them, they own all of Darla’s albums on vinyl. They track down original concert posters on eBay, they scour Tumblr for photos of her and send them to each other. They make the photos the wallpaper of their iPhones. It is difficult to tell if they want to be her or want to be with her, but they never admit this, to themselves or to each other.

Before long it becomes a joke among their friends, how obsessed Jane and Kay are. They exchange looks and smile. They don’t have to explain. They understand, even if no one else does. They understand, and Darla understands them.

Their mutual friend who introduced them says to Kay, “If I ever need to find you, I’ll just show up to any Darla Star concert along the West Coast and I know you’ll be there.” Jane thinks this is kind of romantic, wonders if this mutual friend loves Kay. Finally, Darla comes to their big city. Kay has driven back for the show from a wedding in which she was a bridesmaid. They clutch hands tightly, and they cry at the same moments.

After, they stand outside the music hall, waiting for Darla to come out, so they can meet her, ask her to sign their posters. It’s cold and foggy and they nestle in close and bounce to keep themselves warm.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get married,” Kay says. She’s still wearing her bridesmaid dress, a long chiffony thing, which she’s covered with a black puffy jacket. “Do you?”

“Maybe,” Jane says. She considers her boyfriend: leftover from college, unsure of himself and of them together.

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They are silent for a while.

“You know how Darla says, I’d rather be lonely, I’d rather be free?” Jane asks.

“Of course,” says Kay. She has these words framed in her room, written in calligraphy and outlined in gold, created by a fellow Darla fangirl and purchased on Etsy.

“There’s that, too.” Jane has never expressed her doubt this plainly before. Kay nods.

Darla never appears outside the hall that night. Kay drives Jane back to her boyfriend’s dirty apartment, and there is a new bond between them, not just their love of Darla, but a kind of brazen honesty, a freedom they can share, can hope for.

Jane climbs into bed with her boyfriend. He wakes up, asks, “How was it?” He’s heavy with sleep.

“It was so good,” Jane says. “Go back to sleep.” He curls around her. She feels his nose on the back of her neck, hot puffs of breath against her skin.

Jane and her boyfriend fight all the time. They fight about little things, big things. They fight when they are sober, they fight when they are drunk. Everyone is tired of their fighting.

Jane knows she gathers bits of insecurities and hurls them at him. She forces him to thumb through them, the little shards.

Sometimes Kay witnesses their fights. Jane wonders if Kay is embarrassed by her friend.

Jane thinks she would be if she were her.

Kay drives them up a narrow, winding two-lane highway so they can hike through the misty redwoods. Kay and Jane want to feel the cool air blowing off the mountains, want to see the rushing water flow down towards the sea.

It’s awkward in the car between them. There is something that hasn’t been named.

“So how are you? What’s new?” Kay asks Jane.

“Not much,” Jane says. She feels cautious, careful. She’s not sure if it’s something she said or did to invite the awkwardness in. “I got promoted at work.”

“That’s great, Jane!”

Jane loves how Kay always says her name; it makes her feel good, seen.

What Jane doesn’t say is that the night after she got promoted, she went out with her boyfriend and their friends and got so drunk that she threw up in the garden box outside her boyfriend’s apartment. In bed, her boyfriend rambled drunkenly, repeating how he wished they had met when they were older, how they were too young to be so serious.

“What’s new with you? How’s work? How’s life?” Jane feels eager to shift the focus away from herself.

“Things are… better,” Kay starts. Jane stays quiet. “I don’t know, do you ever feel like…”

Kay pauses for a long time.

“Like what?” Jane asks, softly.

“Like, maybe you aren’t real?” It comes out so quiet and small, but the silence of the car is deafening in the wake of her admission. Jane’s ears ring, her heartbeat in them.

“Yes,” Jane says, almost immediately. She hasn’t really been able to put words to the way she feels sometimes when she looks in the mirror, how she seems to be floating above her body, how when she brings her hand up to her face, it feels like someone else’s hand, someone else’s face.

“I feel sick, like I can’t eat. I get dizzy and my stomach hurts and I feel scared of leaving my house.”

“Yes,” Jane says, stronger, firmer. Kay looks over at Jane, and Jane notices that Kay’s eyes are soft, relieved.

They develop a shorthand for this. They say, I’m having a Not Again moment, in reference to Darla’s song of the same name.

Internet forums say the song is about bipolar disorder, and Jane and Kay laugh about this, laugh in the face of their fear that that’s what they have.

They send lyrics back and forth to each other when they’re plagued by it.

You go up and you go down Round and round On a merry-go-round You’re no child You need saving Not again, not again Jane tells her boyfriend none of this. They keep fighting, keep drinking.

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One weekend there is a music festival in their big city and Jane makes a plan to get drunk to spite her boyfriend, to reclaim a part of herself that has been lost to him. She buys vodka and two slim silver flasks, one for her, one for Kay. The day before, Jane complained to her boyfriend that they weren’t spending enough time together, and he said, I used to think you were so cool but you’re actually really needy.

Kay and Jane get ready together in Jane’s boyfriend’s room. Jane’s boyfriend and his friends drink beer in the kitchen. Kay and Jane peel on cut-off shorts, stringy tops. They swig vodka on the walk over to the park. Jane makes a show of drinking, of dancing, of laughing with anyone except her boyfriend. It’s not long before Kay and Jane are bombed. They sit in the shade next to the porta potties, taking turns throwing up in the bushes. Kay calls an Uber.

They clutch hands in the backseat. Jane rolls the window down, sticks her head out.

“Hey, is she going to throw up?” the driver asks.

“No, she’s fine,” Kay says. “We’re almost there,” she whispers to Jane. Jane squeezes her hand.

Jane remembers in flashes. In Kay’s bedroom. Kay’s in her bed; Jane is stripping naked.

Jane says she loves being naked, that she wishes she could be naked all the time. Kay laughs.

Jane can barely stand. Jane gets in bed. Another woman comes in, covers Jane. Kay and Jane cannot stop laughing. There is the sound of a camera, the flash of one. Everything is spinning.

Jane throws up into a trash can that’s been set next to the bed.

Jane wakes later, sour and underwater-feeling, a foul taste in her mouth. Her head so close to Kay’s. Jane is soaked with shame, hot with it. What happened? Jane feels around for her phone. She looks down on the floor, her clothes strewn, her bag spilled open. She locates the phone, countless calls and texts from her boyfriend. Kay stirs.

“I feel like I got run over by a truck,” she says.

Jane groans. “Me fucking too.” Jane is afraid to be still, of silence. She doesn’t want Kay to say anything that might embarrass her. “I need to call him.”

Now Kay groans. Jane calls, but his phone is dead. “God he’s probably so mad at me,” Jane mutters.

“Who cares? He does this to you all the time,” she says.

“I know,” Jane says. “Come on, let’s go to their house, see if we can get them to order Chinese.” Jane is finding her clothes and putting them back on. Her stringy shirt is damp with vomit. Kay follows. They go back to Jane’s boyfriend’s house. Food is ordered. Jane makes an extra show of touching her boyfriend. She sits in his lap, kisses him. Get a room, guys!

Everyone teases them. At some point in the night Jane is drunk again and she notices that Kay is gone.

In bed Jane initiates sex with her boyfriend. She feels down the lengths of his sides, the long muscles of his legs. She wants to lose herself in him. After, she feels empty.

Jane’s boyfriend leaves her for a woman who is also named Jane. They meet in a smaller city, while he is on a boy’s trip, that phrase that Jane hates. They spend a magical weekend together swimming in natural springs and sipping healthy smoothies and Jane’s boyfriend comes back to their big city and unceremoniously ends things with Jane.

“We both know this relationship is a shitshow,” he says. “We fight all the time.”

“I know, but I love you,” Jane cries. Jane pleads.

“I don’t know if I ever really did,” her boyfriend says, in a tone of wonderment and awe.

Jane consoles herself with Darla’s new album. She has a new song that goes, she’s not me, she’s easy. Jane and Kay lay on Kay’s bedroom floor, chanting the lyrics like a mantra.

“That asshole,” Kay says. “I never liked him anyway.”

Jane laughs. This hurts her, but she won’t dare tell Kay this. Together, they are full-hearted and throated. Their pain is each other’s. Jane doesn’t want to introduce more to the equation.

The three of them, Jane, Kay, and Darla, become one.

Jane and Kay are on a bird-watching hike, sponsored by their local Audubon Society when Kay meets her husband. They have backpacks packed with sandwiches they prepared at Kay’s apartment, the spare room in which Jane is living, water bottles filled with her tap water. They each have a set of binoculars provided by the society. They stalk through the woods, careful not to step on branches or upset the local habitat.

It happens movie-like. Kay trips over a root in the ground and a man catches her, breaks her fall. Jane can see it happening in slow motion. Kay screams, scares all the birds away, then 35

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looks up at her savior, laughs.

Within three months, the man moves into Kay’s apartment, and Kay asks Jane to move out.

Kay is already engaged to the man when Darla Star comes to their big city again mere months later. Jane and Kay buy tickets, of course, but they get ready at their own houses; Kay’s with her fiancé, Jane alone.

The show is at a church, a venue that on Sundays houses preachers and a congregation and the choir – a place that finally matches their reverence for Darla. The ceilings are impossibly high, the pews wooden and hard. They wait in line to be some of the first people there. They spot a minor celebrity, some washed-up actor from early-2000s romantic comedies. Johnny is nowhere to be found. Everyone thinks he and Darla have broken up—he’s not in her backing band anymore, has been conspicuously absent from her Instagram. Everything feels different.

Darla comes on stage, standing just in front of the pulpit. She has departed from her usual cherry red Lycra skater dress from American Apparel, the Darla staple that both Jane and Kay have in their closets, too. Backlit in pink and purple, she is wearing a floor-length black lace dress, her face shrouded by a black veil. She picks up a guitar, strums it, strikes out into song.

Jane goes to grab Kay’s hand but it is on her lap, folded into her other hand neatly. They watch chastely, quietly. There is no dancing. No singing along. During “Not Again,” a single tear falls from Jane’s eye. She feels impossibly alone.

After the show, Kay and Jane hug and drive home separately. An open tattoo parlor is on Jane’s way home, she pulls over and parks. She strides into the parlor, tells the man what she wants, where she wants it.

Later, Kay sees it on Instagram: a picture of Jane’s forearm, the words black and puffy: I’d rather be free. Kay can’t help but feel this is a slight to her. She shows her fiancé the photo.

“That’s sad,” he says. “It’s a cry for help, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” Kay says. She remembers a Darla show they’d gone to years ago. They sat in Jane’s car after, the silence ringing between them.

“We could go get tattoos right now,” Jane had said. “I know this place that’s open late.”

“Should we do it? What would you get?”

“I would get Not Again on my wrist,” Jane said, confidently. “What would you get?”

“I’d get the same thing,” Kay said.

Kay can’t remember why they hadn’t done it. Now there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for not having done it. ■

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that moment

Photography, 2022 george l. stein

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A "Chick Cig" for Jimi Diane Cruze

S

he has been erased.

No obituary is published to record her existence. There is no recording of the date she was born and the date she died. No written proof that she had lived on this earth for eighty-five years. There is only a text from her son-in-law informing me that my oldest and dearest friend had gone to Hospice the day before and died on Wednesday morning at 10:00 o’clock. I reply that I would like to be informed about her funeral arrangements. My request goes unanswered.

The funeral home’s website says there is no obituary available. There is no place to write condolences and share memories about her. No visitation hours. No memorial service. No funeral procession to the cemetery.

No graveside prayer.

No saying goodbye.

I have only the text on my phone from a near stranger telling me she is gone. ∆ Our mutual friend John calls me on Saturday to tell me that Sabrina had been buried the day before. John tells me he attended the private small family gathering of only seven people including her oldest daughter and granddaughter. Her youngest daughter, who had insisted that there be no published obituary, visitation, or funeral service for Sabrina, had gotten into a last-minute argument with her sister and did not attend.

“It was one of the oddest things I ever attended” John tells me. “We just stood around her closed casket for fifteen minutes and shared a few memories and then it was over.”

An old hippie who is both a folk singer and an ordained minister, John has married and buried a lot of people, including many close friends, over the decades. Sabrina told me numerous times that when her time came, she wanted John to conduct her funeral just like he had done for her younger brother Jim, her husband Fred, and her teenage son Eric who was killed in a bicycle accident over forty-five years ago. Appearing with a guitar around his neck and a cabbie hat over his thinning hair, John knew the right words and the right song to sing for each occasion. Sabrina wanted John to sing for her one last time. But it wasn’t to be. ∆ More than anyone, John understands the deep loss that I feel. We had shared many moments with Sabrina and Fred over the decades. Their house was where many of us gathered because it was a welcoming place where there was always music playing. Musician friends often gathered in Sabrina and Fred’s spacious living room for impromptu jam sessions where songs ranging from The Beatles to John Prine were sung. At other times, Fred liked to put one of his hundreds of record albums on his turntable. His music selection could be heard throughout the house on the stereo speakers Fred had installed in every room.

I met Sabrina when Fred and I attended respiratory therapy classes at the community college while also working part-time at a children’s hospital. I was only nineteen-years-old and she was thirty-eight. Sabrina had recently become a registered nurse and was working in the regional trauma emergency room at the city hospital. She helped me learn to handle the stress of working in a hospital. She listened when I needed to talk about a patient who died. She helped me to understand and accept that death is a part of the cycle of life.

Because of our age difference, Sabrina always felt like a second mom to me. For forty-seven years, she was always there. Now, I have to learn to live without her constant love and support. Knowing I will never again hear her say “I am so proud of you.” Knowing I will no longer hear her say “I love you” at the end of an hourlong phone call.

John reaches out on the phone to console me. “She was the ultimate hippie chick,” he says. “And she was Kithe/Cruze

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our nurse whenever we got sick. She watched over all of us” “We both need closure,” John tells me. “You and I need to get together and sit and tell stories about our memories of her over the years. It would do us both some good” Yes, I need closure. I cannot let her life just be erased. Her memories and stories live inside of me. I want the world to know that Sabrina lived life to the fullest. I want the world to know her light shined brightly. I want the world to know she was a healer. I want the world to know she was a survivor. And I want the world to know her life mattered. ∆ Two years before her death, I sit with Sabrina in her hospital room where doctors are running tests to determine the reason for her irregular heartbeat. Meanwhile, her baby brother Jim lies dying in a Hospice unit on the other side town. She had already suffered the loss of Fred a few years earlier and now she was losing Jim. Sabrina met Fred because he was Jim’s college roommate and best friend. When she married Fred, Jim was a constant presence in their household throughout the years. Now, she is about to be the lone survivor and keeper of the memories of a threesome who once danced through life together.

There are no words that can bring comfort to her overwhelming grief. I can only hold her hand and help her wipe away the tears.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” she tells me between sobs. “They were both ten years younger than me. I should have died before either of them. They were my best friends. We did everything together.

Why do I have to be the one that is left behind?”

“Because God knows that you were the only one strong enough to live with the grief,” I tell her. It is the only thing I can think of to say. I am reminded of how her faith helped her to face all the things she had survived over the years. The death of her teenage son. Surviving breast cancer. Caring for Fred at home by herself as his heart disease slowly weakened and finally killed him. And now, knowing her baby brother was about to die without her by his side. No matter what sorrow she had faced in life, she leaned on her faith in God and the guardian angels that she said often spoke to her and watched over her when she slept.

At this moment, I search for a way to help Sabrina remember the good times the three of them had together. I decide to ask her to tell me one of my favorite stories about when she and Fred and Jim were young.

It is the story about a magical weekend at the Atlanta Pop Festival in July of 1970. Just a year after Woodstock, it was a time when peace, love, and music was all that mattered.

I look at Sabrina’s tear-streaked face. She is a tiny woman at less than five foot tall. She looks even smaller in her hospital bed. Her boney arms sticking out of her flimsy hospital gown are covered with purple splotches from all the needles that have prodded her. Some of the bruises are the same hue as the purple streak of color in her thick white hair.

I want to draw her away from this place, draw her away from her grief.

“Tell me about meeting Jimi,” I say.

At the time she was a thirty-three-year-old divorced mother of four children. The festival was the moment when Sabrina was able to once again embrace life. It was the moment when she fell in love with Fred.

It was the moment when she was able to touch pure joy.

Sabrina dried her tears and began to smile as she recounted the threesome’s adventure in Georgia. “We decided to just jump into the Volkswagen and head south for the music,” she told me. “There were so many people. Tens of thousands of hippies. We were all brothers and sisters. We were all celebrating and dancing to the music together.”

“As we walked along the road to the festival, one of the performers, John Sebastian, stopped his car and offered us a ride to the front gate. He was just like the rest of us, excited to be there to hear everyone play.”

“During a break in the concert, we decided to go looking for a bathroom,” she continued. “We stopped at a group of people to ask them for directions. A black man with a big Afro asked if any of us had a cigarette he could bum.”

“I don’t even know why I was carrying any because I didn’t really smoke. I guess I was trying to look cool.

So, I reached in my purse and handed him my pack of Virginia Slims,” she says.

I smile remembering the cigarette marketed to women with the popular advertising tag line from my childhood: “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby.”

Now Sabrina is smiling too. “The man looked at the pack and laughed,” she says. “Then he said to me, ‘That’s a chick cig! But I can’t be choosey because I just need a cigarette.’ He took one out and handed the pack back to me.”

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“As we were walking away, Jim looked at Fred and me and said, “You know, that dude looked a lot like Jimi Hendrix.”

“Fred just grinned and kept walking as he said, ‘That’s because he WAS Jimi Hendrix!’”

I smile at this detail in the story. Fred acting cool and collected. Not making a big deal about meeting the legendary musician. I imagine the shocked expressions on Sabrina’s and Jim’s faces.

Sabrina continues her story. “When we came back from the bathroom, Jimi and the group were still sitting under the tree. We hung out with them and sat in a circle listening to the music playing from the stage.”

“And I can tell you, we were smoking more than just cigarettes this time,” she tells me with a giggle. She is now smiling at the memory of celebrating her Fourth of July birthday by sharing joints with Jimi, Fred, and her brother Jim. ∆ As I process the loss of my friend, I think about how Sabrina taught me when I was a young hospital worker that death is just a part of the cycle of life. We both knew in her last months that Sabrina was dying.

She had been hospitalized numerous times in the past year and her heart was growing weaker. It was just a matter of time.

I watched as she fearlessly faced her impending death. She spoke of her steadfast belief that Fred, Jim, and her beloved son, Eric, would all be waiting for her with open arms when she passed to the other side. She talked about how they would all finally be together again.

I clutch a handwritten thank you note Sabrina gave to me just weeks before her passing. I run my fingers over her familiar but shaky scrawl and I find healing and closure. I cherish her words because they speak of the unbreakable bond we had formed over the decades.

“Thank you so much for all the kind things you do” she wrote. “You are truly part of my family.”

I smile through my tears as I think about all the times when she would refer to me as her other daughter.

And I recall her delight when I would call her on the phone with the greeting, “Hi, Mom. How are you doing? “ Yes, we were family. I now embrace her love that continues to live inside of me.

I like to picture a young Sabrina, holding hands with Fred at midnight on the Fourth of July in 1970 as they watched one of Jimi Hendrix’s last performances, just ten weeks before he died. That’s what I want to think about now, in the wake of my friend’s lonely passing. I imagine her at 33, clad in a peasant blouse with love beads hanging from her neck. I think of her hair and peace symbol earrings swaying to Jimi’s electrified version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while fireworks burst overhead. And I imagine the bliss she felt at that very moment in her life.

This is how I choose to remember Sabrina.

She has not been erased.

She will always be the hippie chick who gave Jimi Hendrix a “Chick cig” when he needed a smoke while waiting for his turn to play on stage. ■

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Terminal Nostalgia Dixie Lubin

excerpted from Poetry for People: 50 Years of Writing

Is this the nostalgia you feel As you enter the terminal one last time With your hopefully two-way ticket, “Straight to death" and back?

That would be a nostalgia greater than any other Remembering even the insignificant days, the difficult nights, the wins and losses: (with loss winning) pleasure laced with pain You want the natural world! The body!

However flawed and sticky You will remember the bird-sung dawns Of kindergarten, snakes swimming in streams Moonlight kisses Primal embraces, howling Music, places People who still love you (How will they do without you?)

Ready or not, here comes the train!

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Contributors Devon Balwit

"A Balm for Golems"

Devon Balwit walks in all weather.

Her latest collection, Moby Dick-themed “Spirit Spout,” is forthcoming with Nixes Mate Books in 2023.

Alex Behr "Spectacle"

Alex Behr is the author of Planet Grim: Stories. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Cleaver, The Rumpus, Gravity of the Thing, and elsewhere. An editor and writer, she lives in Portland, OR, and teaches writing residencies through Literary Arts' Writers in the Schools program and occasional Eno/Ono writing labs at Corporeal Writing. The poems in Kithe are part of her poetry manuscript in progress. Her new project is the adoption interview website Altar/Altered at www. altar-altered.com. See also alexbehr.com.

Lilou Bo

"Doppelgänger: A Haibun"

Lilou Bo is a half-Taiwanese writer of fiction and poetry and reviewer of works by AAPI and Asian diasporic writers and of international works that have been translated into English.

She has written for World Literature Today, Asymptote, The Maine Review, The Brooklyn Review, Koukash Review, The Cosmos Book Club, and My French Life Magazine.

She lives in Saint Louis with her husband and bunnies. Lilou Bo is a nom de plume.

Lawrence Bridges

"LIGHT SHOW SLIDE" and "LIGHT BEYOND THE TUNNEL"

Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary world. His photographs have recently appeared in the Las Laguna Art Gallery 2020, Humana Obscura, Wanderlust a Travel Journal, the London Photo Festival, and was recently on display at the ENSO Art Gallery in Malibu, California. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Tampa Review, and Ambit. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009) and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). He created a series of literary documentaries for the National Endowment for the Arts “Big Read” initiative, which includes profiles of Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolff, and Cynthia Ozick. He lives in Los Angeles. You can find him at @larrybridges.

Marie Conner

"Errand" and "Errand 2.0"

Marie Conner is a Portland-based non-fiction writer and interdisciplinary artist with a focus on fostering intersectionality through personal narrative. She holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and MA.Ed in Postsecondary Educational Leadership and Policy and a BFA in Non-fiction Writing and Sculpture, both from Portland State University. She has written as a journalist for the Rearguard student paper while attending PSU and for various online publications and literary magazines. Marie has a studio practice grounded in disability aesthetics and otherness

theories, striving to establish a framework and language with which to open lines of communication concerning difference and acceptance. She has worked as the gallery director for Littman + White contemporary galleries at Portland State University, run a residential gallery from her basement, and exhibited across the Pacific Northwest as well as in Antwerp, Belgium.

Rachel Coyne

"untitled" and "untitled"

Rachel Coyne is a writer and painter from Lindstrom, MN. Her books include Daughter, Have I Told You?, Whiskey Heart, The Patron Saint of Lost Comfort Lake and the YA series The Antigone Ravynn Chronicles. Follow her on Instagram @imrachelcoyne.

Diane Cruze

"A "Chick Cig" for Jimi"

Diane Cruze is earning an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. She has edited a small-town newspaper in rural Kentucky, freelanced for The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times, and written multi-million-dollar federal grants for a large urban school district. She now devotes all her writing time to creative nonfiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Artemis Journal, and in the 2019 anthology, The Boom Project: Voices of a Generation.

She was a finalist in creative nonfiction for the Bluegrass Writers Studio’s 2022 Emerging Writers Awards. Diane lives in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, where she enjoys sipping a glass of fine Kentucky bourbon while 42

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Contributors sitting by a fire with her life partner, Ron, and their rescue dogs, Apollo, Tiberius, and Xena.

Dominique Elliott "Departed"

Born in Belgium, Dominique Elliott is a multimedia artist and professor. She holds an M.F.A in visual design from UMass, Dartmouth and is a grant recipient from the Georgia Council for the Arts, and the National Association of Television Program Executives.

Her work has been showcased internationally, and her documentary “Flying the Beam” is included in the Eisenhower Presidential Library collection.

Much of her work is concerned with various facets of memory, nostalgia and the interplays of word and image. She applies the same ethos to poetry, experimental film, documentary film, painting, mixed media, photography and motion graphics.

She lives on a plant farm in Georgia with her husband and their four cats.

Güzide Ertük

"Ketchup and Pasta"

Güzide Ertürk was born and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. She is a storyteller, who currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and is studying Creative Writing at Portland State University.

GJ Gillespie

"I'd Love to Change the World"

GJ Gillespie is a collage artist living in a 1928 Tudor Revival farmhouse overlooking Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island (north of Seattle). In addition to natural

beauty, he is inspired by art history—especially mid century abstract expressionism. The “Northwest Mystics” who produced haunting images from this region 60 years ago are favorites. Winner of 19 awards, his art has appeared in 56 shows and numerous publications. When he is not making art, he runs his sketchbook company Leda Art Supply.

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes "After Asking My Permission, My Massage Therapist Climbs on the Table"

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes was born in Harrisburg, PA and has a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA from George Mason University. She has appeared in The Rumpus, Cartridge Lit, Gulf Stream Lit, Crab Fat Magazine, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her book, Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, is out from Mason Jar Press.

Dixie Lubin

"On Wilderness," "A Day in Ten Parts," and "Terminal Nostalgia"

Dixie Lubin has been writing for pleasure since she learned to read.

She is the author of Slightly Tilted Towards The Void (2008) and Poetry For People: Fifty Years of Writing (2022 ) and has had work appear in multiple anthologies. Over the years she has facilitated many community writing workshops, classes and written with incarcerated teens in her longtime residence of Lawrence, Kansas.

Shannan Mann "How do you love?"

Shannan Mann is an IndianCanadian poet. She has a two year old daughter and is a full-time student at the University of Toronto. A recent winner of the Peatsmoke Summer Contest, she was also a finalist for the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, 2021 Frontier Award for New Poets, and has been nominated for the 2022 Forward Prize. Her play, Milkbath, was selected as the resident production of the Toronto Paprika Theatre Festival. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Birdcoat Quarterly, Frontier, Humber Literary Review, Oh Reader and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @shannanmania.

Simone Martel

"The House Likes to Have Parties"

Simone Martel is the author of a novel, A Cat Came Back, a memoir, The Expectant Gardener, and a story collection, Exile’s Garden. Simone was born in Oakland, CA. According to her family, she was teargassed on her way to nursery school, though she doesn’t remember that. After studying English at U.C. Berkeley, Simone created and operated an organic tomato farm near Stockton. She’s working on a new novel inspired by that experience.

Katie Mitchell "Fangirls"

Katie Mitchell is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Hive Avenue Literary Journal, and she attended the Tin House Summer Workshop in 2021.

She was the recipient of a Sou’wester Artist Residency in

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September 2021. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Portland State University.

Melissa Nunez "Past Me/Aubade"

Melissa Nunez lives and creates in the caffeinated spaces between awake and dreaming. She makes her home in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, where she enjoys observing, exploring, and photographing the local flora and fauna with her three homeschooled children. She is a column contributor at The Daily Drunk Mag. She is also a staff writer for Alebrijes Review and Yellow Arrow Publishing. You can follow her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez.

Reagan Poston

"Domingo and the Deer"

Reagan Poston, a Mississippi native, finds inspiration through experimentation with Southern Gothicism and putting weird happenings in emblematic formats. A graduate of Mississippi State University, Reagan is now pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno. When she isn’t writing or teaching, she enjoys listening to true crime podcasts, making faces at her nieces and nephew over FaceTime, and generally being a pest in group scenarios.

Patrick Rogers

"Can't Find Yuengling Anywhere Around Here"

and Dot-Dot and Kurt Russel the cat. When he is not writing, he works at a non-ferrous metal recycler as a truck scale operator.

His poems have most recently been published in Propeller Magazine, The Gravity of the Thing, and Prometheus Dreaming.

Nada Sewidan "Handbuilding"

Nada Sewidan was born in Alexandria, Egypt. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing and an MA in English with a concentration in publishing from Portland State University.

Nada has received the Tom Bates Fellowship, has been an intern in the Charles Snowden Program for Excellence in Journalism, and was a finalist for the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing.

She’s been published in Portland Review, Oregon Humanities, and elsewhere. Nada is a memoirist, essayist, journalist and sometimes poet. She lives in Portland, Oregon, writes for CareOregon, and teaches at Portland Community College.

Christy Turner

"Great Pacific Octopus 2.0" and "North American Pitcher Plants"

Christy Turner is a printmaker and textile artist living in Walla Walla, WA. She earned her BFA from Oregon State University in 2012 in printmaking, studying book arts and embroidery on the side.

Turner’s avid interest in biology and natural sciences forms the foundation for much of her artwork.

George L. Stein

"Immanence and Transcendence" and "that moment"

george l stein is a photographer from northern new jersey focused on street, art, decay, alt/portrait, and surreal genres. He has previously been published in Fatal Flaw, Wrongdoing, and Tofu Ink Arts.

Find him online at georgelstein. com and on instagram @steincapitalmgmt.

Patrick S. Rogers lives in Portland Oregon with his wife Wendy, his two Boston Terriers—Chico Party 44

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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 writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. He's the author of the young-adult novel How to Forget Almost Everything (Korza Books), a series of chapbooks on Two Plum Press, and the forthcoming interlinked essay collection Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes (Perfect Day Publishing).

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.

Cynthia Carmina Gómez Editor

Cynthia Carmina Gómez is the Director of Community & Civic Impact at Portland State University. She has written plays, is working on her memoir, enjoys collaborating with community on oral narrative projects, completed various translation projects, and has published reportage stories. She holds an MFA in nonfiction creative writing. She enjoys birding, cooking, gardening, and documenting the stories of ordinary people's extraordinary lives.

Mike Schepps Editor

Mike Schepps is a current writer for the Oregon Encyclopedia and his work has also been published in We Are The Mutants, Popula, the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Portland Review. He is the head publisher of Korza Books and lives in Portland, Oregon.

His novella Split Aces was released in 2022 and is available wherever books are sold.

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