Kithe - Spring Summer 2021

s p r i n g /s u m m e r 2 0 2 1

a journal for new art + literature

Fool If You Think It’s Over Gary Gillespie

vol.1

f e a t u r i n g J a n i c e L e e, R y a n J . Pe t t e w a y, C a t h e r i n e J o h n s o n , a n d Lu C h e k o w s k y

SPRING/SUMMER 2021

EDITORIAL NOTE Welcome to the introductory issue of Kithe! “Kithe” (pronounced kai-the) is a Scots word meaning “to make known.”

We chose kithe to represent our mission: honoring all creative voices by celebrating a wide variety of perspectives, styles, and topics. Born during the midst of a global pandemic and a year that was, for many of us, defined by isolation, the guiding principle of this journal was engaging in the connectedness that comes from discovering and publishing the works of others. Whether it’s previously unpublished or unknown work from established artists, or an introduction to the offerings of an emerging author, this journal celebrates the unexpected. We hope you enjoy the art and stories that follow, and that you delight in the frissons that emerge when what was previously untold is made known as much as we did.

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

Poetry Mair Allen - 26

in dreams i name myself

Mary Buchinger - 33 44

In the bin of what I'm looking for— On Plum Island Sound

Jonathan Andrew Pérez - 8

Confession in Re-Conquered Lands

Ryan J. Petteway - 4 14 28

Revelations 20:20 The Breathing Dark Shanghai

Writing Lu Chekowsky - 6

The Egg

Gavin Boyter - 31

Wheatfield with Crows

Catherine Johnson - 35 Janice Lee - 17 Gabriel Stein-Bodenheimer - 10

Amenorrhea: A Blood Story The Old Man from Imagine a Death A Stolen Name and Other Gifts

Art Gary Gillespie - Cover Parisa Karami - 34 16 Serge Lecomte - 45 Tamerlie J. Philippe - 25 Cynthia Yatchman - 30 15 Britnie Walston - 27 9

Fool If You Think It's Over F,A/M10 Ab, C/M10 Global Cooling Hope COVID Floral #2 COVID Floral #3 Isolation Holding On

Revelations 20:20 Ryan J. Petteway [scene, shot from drone: light rain, heavy armor, pink smoke, iridescent yellow stripes, men in goggles, teens in white Converse, stained, partially obscured view of signs that read, “Your Silence is […?]” and “[…?] NOT PROTECT YOU”, raised fists, black masks, purple and gold butterfly on boarded-up storefront, camera pans up, bending branches, helicopter, faint quarter moon, searchlight, water on lens, pans down, glass reflecting broken sky, orange flare, smoke, spinning, cut to Fred Meyer commercial on low prices]

we pull waterproof gloves over knuckles split open on the edge of a rusted sky – sun smoke-blotted sherbet push-pop covered in sand worth cleaning light worth cleaning lens worth cleaning rubbing eyes look upon our bruises like fields of lilac and scilla dancing and bending towards aged light hot enough to mutate mutuality we rise with a radical vertigo

dizzied

by the slowness of search parties

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that trip on tildes and dark roots falling and falling and falling shards of twenty million broken flashlights forming our tombs mounds of excuses that flicker like flecks of tungsten, tongues fading lanterns fueled by a fortitude that can only be described as

mediocre

in our presence there will come a time when congealed blood slushies replace açaí bowls, our bones the flesh of coconut adding texture we’ll remove our gloves to shake your trembling hands as you wipe us from your lips worried that we've noticed

Kithe/Petteway

5

The Egg

F

Lu Chekowsky

or a long time, being an egg was ok. She made lots of jokes about herself and people laughed at them. She didn’t know if she was funny or if they just felt bad for her. She made friends who thought it was important to Instagram photos of themselves with her; to prove their charity of spirit and wokeness, but they never returned her calls when she was sad (which was often) and she felt very alone.

• At night, after a long day, when things got quiet, she’d think about her family. She wondered if any of them were still alive and if they wondered about her too.

Her mother had a soft down belly that no one ever touched lovingly. As far as she knew, her mother had only ever been touched by metal. In her dreams she saw her mother ride across miles of looping conveyor belts; a vibrating hum rubbing against her endlessly.

She knew hardly anything about the one million faceless siblings she had either, all shipped across the country in tiny Styrofoam boxes. Could any of them be really special? Was she special? Their goodness had been measured in sameness. She told people she was an only child and went about her business of trying to stay unbroken.

•

Her mother had been a prisoner, bound by chains to produce, produce, produce and resigned herself to doing what was expected and nothing more. It was a fair life; one her mother felt lucky to have because it had purpose. Everything was clear about what was required to be good. Make people less hungry at any cost.

She took after her mother in this way.

Most days it felt like life was happening to everyone else, just not her. She waited a lot. Killed time.

Watched the world go by from the wall of her sleek high-rise apartment above the highway. She had insomnia. There were too many things to think about that she couldn’t change.

Her mother’s name was 1X445T1; but it was only in adulthood she wondered if her mother maybe had another name that could help her understand herself better. It was too late for questions.

She tried hard to love her curves, love her brittle shell, because someone on TV had let her know that it was critical to do so, If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?

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She stared out of the thick, floor to ceiling windows every night. The traffic was beautiful, diamonds; the headlights shining their way home, to families, children, homes she imagined were better and safer than what she had. She wanted a ring to prove she was adored and important, but she had no hands.

Every night, she settled into the special refrigerated drawer with cozy, rounded grooves made just for her. When the door shut, it was pitch black, letting in no light at all.

• She had an inkling that maybe she had something soft inside, but she couldn't believe it, even when she jumped up and down and felt a heavy wave, moving from left to right. Was there something better somewhere deep, just hoping to break free? She often wanted to punch herself in her belly and pull out the mystery, but she wasn’t convinced she could survive the impact. Mostly she felt sick to her stomach and tried not to breathe too much.

• There were pretty girls, thinner around the middle, cinched in tight. These girls were the keepers of the time; they were soft sands moving through curves of gracefulness. They always ended things on their terms and with a sharp look. She knew it was important to pay attention because once they decided, it was over.

beautiful, she couldn’t stop.

A bird flew by, graceful and blue. She knew something about birds because her mother had been one.

A bird tied to the earth, but a bird, nonetheless.

And for a moment, she forgot who she was.

• Witnesses later reported it was intentional, a jump to escape her miserable cage of existence. What was good about the life of an egg anyway? Especially one that was unfertilized.

What a great fall, an onlooker said. I saw it happen from the street. I couldn’t look away.

Another reported, They couldn’t put her back together. It was just too late.

The men. They tried to mop up her foamy whites and her vibrant yellow yolk. It was a gruesome scene. The medical examiner who usually draws the chalk around dead bodies in the street was stumped and messily marked a broken blob of a circle around what was left of her.

Pieces of shell were found for weeks until one day they weren’t. ■

• She was an egg and she was special, but she just couldn’t see it that way. She was spotted in parts; light blue and pink smears curved along her rounded back. The colors were alive and unique and she hated them because no one ever told her they were beautiful. She wondered if she boiled herself in a pot of rolling water if maybe she could make the colors disappear. Hardness was one strategy for survival, she had heard.

• The night it happened she decided against her better judgement to sit out on her balcony and enjoy the evening summer air.

The sounds of laughter and a party, clinking glasses and gentle music were in the distance. She rolled out and felt the wind across her surface in a way she couldn’t feel from the ground. It felt dangerous, like she would crack from the pressure, but it was too Kithe/Chekowsky

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Confession in Re-Conquered Lands Jonathan Andrew Pérez

Confesión: the Snow Buntings had to make a living, despite their massive die-offs.

They took back winter's rural roads, edges, they did not hide in the warnings that the Ministry left them.

Our ancestors, Reconquista-machines splitting land but did not stammer: witness the plaza now filled with white and beige, brown-black signals: witness no urbanism, no economic downturn, only confessions of defunct crop damage.

A species of Gallaeci-Roman greed appropriated the image; Empire lady-like fingers, castle-mass strummed the terrible clouds.

Mid-day, a species of the irruption – searching for blame, peeled skins of torrential pandemics. The potatoes failed. My great grandfather died there.

We had a visit funded from the Ministry & Department of tourism & transportation, & communications – someone left her homey in the sharp brush-thicket; Someone else was knee-deep in snow bunting. Not in abundance but peeling away the world and everything in it.

The confession came and went – what was left did not owe us anything – the wind of reconquered lands was a comfort, emblematic of peace.

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Holding On Britnie Walston

Kithe/Walston

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A Stolen Name and Other Gifts

W

Gabriel Stein-Bodenheimer

ith my first paycheck as a teacher, I bought myself a nice watch. I wanted something practical to wear in the classroom—to keep track of timed writing exercises and to monitor the length of discussions that often spilled over the minutes the lesson plans allotted. At the Fossil store in Emeryville, California, I browsed the glittering displays of timepieces. Men’s watches were too big for my wrists; women’s were too dainty for my taste. Though I was in my twenties, I looked more like a 12-year-old boy. The salesperson, however, seemed to immediately understand who I actually was. She suggested a metal watch with a large analog face and a black leather band. It was perfect. I felt handsome and stylish.

On my next trip down to L.A., I paid my almost century-old grandmother a visit. We were in her kitchen, loading the dishwasher, when she caught a glimpse of my watch.

“Your watch is too mannish,” she said.

I squeezed detergent into the receptacle.

“This, I do not like. I have a very nice one I can give you.”

“No, thank you, Oma,” I said gently. “I just bought this watch. I really like it.”

“You don’t want to give people the wrong idea.”

Oma vaulted over her 100th birthday, and it appeared as if she’d live forever. It was certainly possible—the woman had an iron constitution. She liked her apples brown and shriveled, claiming they were better for her digestion. The herring paste in her fridge had been there since 1962. She swam for an hour every day in her backyard pool, having little modesty around family as she changed in and out of her swimsuit, offering unwanted glimpses of her naked body. She spent her days reading The Wall Street Journal and watching live broadcasts of concerts on PBS. She lived alone, though received visits from a home health nurse twice a week. Oma had survived Nazis, disease, and displacement. She was determined to evade even the Angel of Death.

Her tenacity made her difficult to spend time with. Our small little family—my mother, my father, and me—wanted relief from her nightly, self-important phone chatter, her unreasonable demands, and the petty arguments she once admitted to starting because they raised her blood pressure better than any medicine. She distributed her belittlements evenly. “You should get those removed,” she said repeatedly about the small neuromas on my father’s face. “Your birth caused me great pain,” she often reminded him. She told my mother: “You have a Jewish nose.”

I dreamed that Oma’s death would grant me the freedom to physically transition from genderqueer boi to full-fledged man.

My feelings about my gender had developed gradually. I never really felt trapped in the wrong body, nor had I known I was male from infancy. Rather, I held on to my assigned gender until it became unbearable not to change—which I began to do slowly. First, I changed my name. Then my haircut. And later, my pronouns. My friends readily offered their support and I anticipated my parents would accept me— that the entire family would. All except Oma, that is. I took her disapproval as a given and her disownment as a high probability. Though I knew I wanted to begin testosterone, I did not pursue it. I would wait until she died, which I assumed would not be long.

During Rosh Hashanah of her 100th year, Oma was recovering at the Jewish Home for the Aged. She fell in her kitchen, a few weeks before the holiday. I sat next to her hospital bed while she lamented in a voice that cracked like the folded, yellowed UCLA faculty bulletins I found shoved between the pages of her books.

“I want to die,” she moaned. “Why does God not take me?”

Isolated in her rehabilitation room, Oma cried for her father and sister. The SS had permanently disrupted Rosh Hashanah in 1943 with the several sharp knocks on the front door of the family apartment in Amsterdam. She had been sent to Bergen-Belsen, her sister to the work camps adjacent to Auschwitz, and her father and youngest sister to Sobibor, where they were murdered.

But she also cried because she hated the Jewish Home for the Aged. “Worse than the camps!” she 10

Kithe/Stein-Bodenheimer

declared. “They imprison me here. The ladies at my dining table are very stupid women.” The Jewish Home for the Aged worse than Bergen-Belsen! Especially during bingo night on Tuesdays.

Sitting in a chair by her bedside, I helplessly offered her the Talmudic story of a dying rabbi whose students’ constant praying next to his deathbed led to the lamentable continuation of his life. The rabbi’s housekeeper, seeing that his soul could not ascend through the heavy traffic of psalms, dashed a pot onto the ground. The startled students stopped for a moment, and the rabbi’s soul at once departed from this world.

“Maybe just let go?” I suggested.

“Help me to the bathroom,” she responded.

“No,” I said, close to tears. “That’s the nurse’s job. I don’t want to break the rules.”

Oma shakily swung herself out of bed and teetered to “the place.” I didn’t want to see her shriveled legs, or anything else. Mortified, I rang the nurse’s intercom.

“Why did you put me in that position?” I confronted Oma as the nurse helped her back into bed.

“I don’t understand why you are crying,” she said.

In Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns, a cartoon panel shows a father dressed in dark pants, a matching vest, and a self-satisfied look handing a treasure chest to his young son, who wears an expression of delighted expectation. The boy opens it only to jump back in horror as a dragon leaps out, wearing a prisoner’s striped cap and shirt, his terrible tongue whipping around wildly, the face of Hitler on its tip. Proudly, the father says, “and—just think!—someday you’ll be able to pass it on to your son!”

And so it was: with all of Oma’s gifts came all of her expectations. She insisted on seeing each frilly, flowery outfit worn, each shiny, sparkly piece shown off, and frequently. As a child, my mom wrestled me into dresses, promising, “only for yontif tonight. You need to for Oma.” By the time I was old enough to wear Oma’s collection of hot pink sundresses and smart suits from the 1960s, the repulsion I experienced toward wearing women’s clothing had reached a crescendo.

“I don’t even need to go out,” she often exclaimed. “I just open my closet doors and go shopping right here.”

I dreaded those “shopping trips” but begrudgingly accepted the matching shirt and skirt sets, the pair of diamond and platinum earrings for my high school graduation, and the tennis bracelets she had bought from her hairdresser. Post-college, I made appearances at her home in ill-fitting Target dresses with the equally hideous heart-shaped diamond necklaces she had given me.

For my 24th birthday, while we sat in the living room on her large champagne-colored couch with the silky embroidered flowers I used to trace with my finger as a kid, she handed me a small jewelry box.

Immediately, I began to loathe the box and Oma’s callousness for giving it to me. Inside was a string of pearls.

“These belonged to my Aunt Hedwig,” she told me. “She and her husband and her little girl were all murdered.”

I immediately regretted imagining what I could swap them for at a pawn shop. “They’re beautiful, Oma. Thank you.”

She looked at me sharply. “You must wear them. Pearls wither on the vine if they do not have contact with skin.”

After Oma turned 102, I was done waiting. I was done hiding. I was done catering to her expectations that I would suddenly enjoy wearing musty, daffodil-yellow dress sets. I had to give myself permission to live my life. I made an appointment with an endocrinologist.

My parents were supportive of my decision to do medical transitioning. They promised absolute secrecy in front of Oma. I lived hundreds of miles away, in Berkeley. Oma didn’t have a computer and only used her rotary phone to call up my father several times a day and belittle him. I was confident she’d never find out.

I imagined what it would be like when I came to visit next: her wolf eyes weak, her hearing dull (“My, Oma, what big teeth you have!”). I would shave my stubble and explain away my deepening voice. “It’s just a cold,” I rehearsed.

One morning in May, Oma opened up the Los Angeles Times to the obituary section, which she read religiously—as there was always the morbid and thrilling prospect of spotting someone she knew. She was shocked to find that there, on the opposite page, was a large color photo of her granddaughter dressed in that aggravating masculine fashion.

Kithe/Stein-Bodenheimer

11

Beneath the bolded section heading, “Education,” a confusing headline read: “Catholic School in San Francisco Lets Transgender Teacher Keep Job.” The page-long article that followed did nothing to clarify anything to Oma: "Teacher who came out as a transgender man at a Catholic high school in San Francisco has been allowed to keep his job by the order of the nuns that run the school."

My transition while employed at a Catholic high school became big news, as no other Catholic institution had yet allowed an out trans teacher to continue teaching. Oddly, even the transphobic archbishop of San Francisco, best known his work on California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8, agreed to disagree by “allowing” my employment. It must have been a parent who alerted the San Francisco Chronicle, who sent out a reporter to interview me in a room full of nuns and Sheila King, the school’s head of public relations. The story was picked up by the Associated Press and telegraphed across the nation. Strangers shared the articles on Facebook, and letters of support from liberal Catholics around the country poured into my faculty mailbox.

It was a moment of terrifying vulnerability, but I had gotten through it and kept my job. Delightfully, students began to address me as Mr. Bodenheimer.

Days later, the voicemail I had been anticipating appeared on my phone. “Hello, this is Oma.” I dreaded listening further, and yet the audio kept playing: “I was reading the paper and saw an article with your picture.

Someone has stolen your name!”

All my life, I sought to maintain the façade of femininity. Now she knew the truth, and rather than deny it, I avoided her. I never called her back.

Oma and I didn’t speak to one another for almost a year after the article had come out. I heard secondhand through my dad that she was furious with me. She blamed my parents. She blamed the college I had attended, which had a reputation for lesbians. She was horrified that Bodenheimer was said in the same breath as transgender rights. The thought of trying to reconnect with her was too painful; her rejection would hurt too much. I resigned myself to the fact that she’d die before we’d ever reconcile.

By the time Passover rolled around again, Oma had turned a frail 103 and my 15 minutes of fame had come and gone. We still had not spoken. My parents and I vowed that Oma would not sit at our Seder table.

Instead of the all-Hebrew Passover text Oma preferred, we would use the Haggadah that we liked, the one with the supplemental inspirational readings in blue ink. We were finally free to read the one in which Elie Wiesel lifted up those who kept the holidays the best they could in the camps. (“Nobody could celebrate yontif in the camps! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Oma would gripe.)

We had a great holiday filled with robust discussion. I had been on testosterone a little over a year and felt euphoric. With just three of us there at the table, a twinge of guilt tickled my throat. I missed how Oma sang Hallel from memory with her Frankfurt accent in her ragged voice, evoking the holiday table of her grandparents. It was a taste of how Passover would be after her death.

Passover is also called z’man cheruteinu: the time of our freedom. The Allies liberated Oma from BergenBelsen a week after Passover, in 1945. Oma referred to it as her second birthday.

The Haggadah begins: “Our ancestors were enslaved; our children are free.” That year we added: “freedom from trauma; freedom from bad dreams; freedom from impossible choices; freedom from losing what is sacred; freedom to be who you are; freedom to dress; freedom to speak out; freedom to love.”

We caved and invited Oma to the second-night Seder.

My dad picked her up from her house, and when they arrived, I was helping out in the kitchen. I heard her voice from the foyer and approached her sheepishly. She loomed in the warm light of the living room before sitting down. I was surprised when she received me, kissing me on the cheek.

“You don’t seem to have changed at all,” she said. “But you have gotten tremendously fat.”

That following December, news reports of the fires that were chewing up the hills on both sides of the 405, minutes from Oma’s home, had us worried. Whole neighborhoods had to evacuate. The Getty moved all its art to concrete underground vaults. For days on end, the blaze ripped across Mulholland and licked the asphalt of Roscomere. The Santa Anas whipped the flames into a frenzy, blowing smoke into the Valley one day and into the city the next.

Despite evacuation orders, Oma declared her resolve to stay in her house, like some kind of noble sea captain going down with the ship. My dad pleaded with her on the phone to pack her things and leave. She reassured him that the air quality was perfectly fine, that she didn't even smell smoke, and that her house was, 12

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in fact, cool. My parents and I tracked the map of the fire's reach, watching the red perimeter grow. Only a hill lay between her house and the flames. We were panicked, but what could we do?

Twice, the police came to her house, pounding on the front door and commanding her to evacuate.

Maybe it reminded her of the gloved fists of the SS all those decades ago. Or maybe she really wanted to die, like she had said before. But perhaps she stayed because she wanted to escape by the fire and the wind, like in the Untaneh Tokef recited on Rosh Hashanah: “Who by fire? Who by water? Who by war, and who by disease?

Who after a long life? Who shall be raised up and who brought low?”

The fire raged and then was contained, the flames never touching her house. Oma lived for another year and change, eating rotten fruit and badgering me to go into science—even though she didn’t “believe in” climate change. We spoke more regularly on the phone.

When I visited her next, we sat on her couch like we always did, eating zwieback and jam that had a few spots of mold inside of the jar. “Can you bring him some Perrier?” she asked the home health nurse.

Remarkably, my dad had been coaching her on referring to me with masculine pronouns. When she presented me with an unopened pack of Opa’s white handkerchiefs, I accepted.

More importantly, I accepted Oma’s gift of reconciliation. I loved her and knew that we didn’t have enough time for anger. She gave me what was special to her—preferences formed by the expectations of a long-gone world. She had been just as determined to make me into the grandchild she wanted, in pretty dresses and sparking jewelry, as she had been to live. But I was determined to live too. ■

Kithe/Stein-Bodenheimer

13

this must be what it feels like to be sand, that darker portion where tides touch often enough so soccer balls roll smoothly save for beak-broken claws and hollowed half-shells flashing purple along the water's reach, a jeweled necklace strung below a shadowed collarbone boundary space of distant debris, diatoms, driftwood and seagull shit upon would-be windows wondering if this is cleansing or drowning with toddler toes leaping over rippled foam edges

The Breathing Dark Ryan J. Petteway

landing unaware, their force pressing tiny bubbles from the breathing dark below – do they know the difference between sand and glass, that something was buried last night, that it's us inside their lungs that moons are not far enough to worship so long as lightning can burn and tides can erase them and their tiny footprints? yes, this must be what it's like to be sand, smoothed skeletons spent of power, power that produced the air that animates the joyful bodies upon us – surely they feel us swelling beneath their wrinkled soles, swirling around their ankles as they gaze towards a horizon waiting to swallow the source of our beauty, revealing the difference between appetite and hunger each day our sticky bones get rinsed from white tubs and no one ever wonders where we go

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Kithe/Petteway

COVID Floral #3 Cynthia Yatchman

Kithe/Yatchman

15

Ab,C/M10

Parisa Karami, in collaboration with trombonist Jen Baker

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Kithe/Karami

The Old Man Janice Lee two excerpts from Imagine a Death forthcoming from Texas Review Press in Fall 2021

I

t is true that a long time ago the old man had been married, that on the night of a strong and raging storm on the edge of the sea, his wife had screamed out in the middle of a night of the terrible pain in her head, the categorical and unyielding pounding from within her skull that would not subside and paralyzed by her screams that punctuated the rain outside and haunted by each eternal moan that reverberated through his bones like he was being rattled, he had been unable to do anything; she had begged him to help her and writhed in agony, her hands clamped over her head and then a hand reaching out for him, eyes clenched shut and screaming, still screaming, and he had been unable to reach out even his hand, still frozen, still immobile, like a sessile plant that reaches and reaches for the sky, the distance that will never be crossed because the plant will grow as tall as it can and still never reach the collapsible and impossible sky, that collection of particles that is defined by its distance from the plant, blue and bluer with the extended expanse from tendril or leaf to impossible blue, though he was not a plant and could not grow in time or grasp his wife’s hand, could not move his feet, could not use the sunlight that started to leak through the curtains to extend himself forward and though he loved her more than anything in the world, finally, the sea had its say and she collapsed right where she stood, and still overcome with panic and waiting for the burst of courageous adrenaline that might push him to react accordingly, he had been unable to lurch forwards and instead, had stood there still as the screams escalated, then stopped, even as the rain continued, and as he surveyed the room, his legs slowly crumpled and gave way and when the morning came he was there on his knees quietly sobbing, his wife’s body an untraversable distance away, like the sky, like the sun, like the rest of the cosmos. They had been visiting the coast for her benefit, the salty air gave her purpose, she claimed, but after the storm finally subsided he packed up only what he could carry in his one piece of luggage and returned home. He grew paranoid of the inability to predict the goings-on inside the human head, how could one prevent a wound or illness such as this when there were no outward symptoms, no data to be interpreted or observed. Everything had been fine. She had been fine.

And then— His mother had not approved of her, though most likely she would not have approved of anyone her son brought home short of an empress, and yet, even then, she might have rambled on about the entitledness or excess of regality, the slight tinniness of her voice—the standards she kept impossibly high for her son would have a certain effect on his egoistic dealings and reigned silences as he would constantly work to justify the vast thoughts and decisions made around him and attempt to live up to the icon that his mother had built, though he admired her and the elegant manner with which she was able to carry herself, her stately posture, her always-perfectly-symmetrical bun, her capability to have remained standing after the multiple storms that had tried to knock her down, she stood erect and regal, like a tall and wise redwood, while on the other hand, he bent easily with the Kithe/Lee

17

wind—adaptation, he told himself—like the palm trees in this great desert city that signaled the direction of the winds, or past winds, even when there was no breeze left to be felt, just the ashy air and beautiful, magnificent sky, the sky of perpetual burning, earned only by the cruel and unyielding destruction, as the most beautiful sky one could possibly encounter. It was the kind of renewal most humans had learned to fear: a complete one, and of course any dreamer that engaged with the process would be naive to believe they might be included in the time after. For anyone who breathed this air in this place, there was no time after, just time, and not much of it. What he regretted most was the way his family had treated his wife, and he had wondered if her place in the hierarchy of things was what really had dissuaded her from having children. What kind of proper wife can’t provide her husband with children, his mother would admonish. Not “can’t,” Mother, “won’t.” And the decision is mutual. I don’t want to bring children into this world either. And his mother would roll her eyes, sigh in frustration, and continue to complain about his wife’s inability to cut fruit properly, her indecent fashion, the way she wore her hair (in a perm, shoulder-length, with bangs that fell over one side of her face, like a starlet, he used to think), and his wife would take it, serve everyone tea and clear their plates as if she had somehow subsumed the role of the servant, and no one would say thank you, and neither would he, and only later would he realize what a snub that really was, how little he could have done to help her so much.

The old man’s ragged eyes are more ragged than normal today, and though the mountains call to him through the windows, the clouds block his view of their majesty, though of course those are not clouds in the distance but beautiful entrails of smoke, the blue escape now having deteriorated completely and only the filtered light coming in through the density of particles and ash that signifies the loss of mobility, an alley of symbols; it was his wife who had kept the house in order, who had kept their schedules aligned and their meals prepared.

When he returned to their house after her sudden death, he was thrown into a series of endless struggles, and all he could imagine was the menacing and threatening shore of the ocean, as if he were trapped on a large rock a small distance from the coast, the rock itself covered in slick and wet seaweed, troops of barnacles cemented on the sides, the rock surrounded by other jagged rocks, and every time the waves crashed upwards he felt the force of the entire ocean beneath his feet and each and every time he would feel one of his legs slip and his foot dangling for a second over the brackish water and he would somehow find his footing only to await the next tidal wave, the whole of his identity somehow grappling there within those crashing waves, and because love’s failure was not the long and empty road ahead alone but the denial of his fate, he thought only of the distance between things, between everything and everyone he had ever known, the distances growing and shrinking and growing again, and he just a weed in the dirt, unable to traverse any distance, unable to grow without stealing, unable to become more without feeling like less. He hadn’t known how to run a household, given that the household had shrunk to a number of one, he still realized that he hadn’t learned where things were stored, the location of the sesame oil, where the extra toothbrushes were kept. He didn’t wear a watch (she had always been the one to wake him up each morning for work, had packed his lunches, had attended to his appointments and outings, had reminded him of meetings with colleagues and organized their itineraries) and so with an inability to sense the passage of time from the position of the sun or the quality of light coming in through the window at any given time, he would forget to eat (the actual feeling of hunger would elude him for some time, and though loss of appetite is a common symptom of grief, the mere mention of certain dishes would cause him to break down crying, leaving well-meaning visitors or friends speechless, confused, and then finally, silent, as it was easier to leave him alone rather than to stretch the formalities of “paying one’s respects” to actually trying to resolve any of his deep-seated issues, there are therapists for that, someone might respond to a particularly long and rambling monologue), sit in front of the television for too long (it was where he felt most at home, in distant places without actually having to travel anywhere—that had been her passion—and he found the view of things more 18

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advantageous, more consistent), and then, eventually, hours passing this way, he would find himself in the dark, all of the lights off (he hadn’t touched a light switch in years), a slight grumble in his tummy, and he would look into the darkness, and the darkness would look back at him, so he would continue to sit there in the dark: disoriented, hungry, alone. His hygiene suffered as well, as, either from lack of motivation or intentional ignorance for social expectations, he would go days without showering, only putting on proper clothes when he had to leave the house for cigarettes or coffee. Mostly, he simply aged.

On one afternoon, the old man (who was not so old yet) watched a TV documentary about Étienne Bottineau, who in the 18th century rose to fame by being able to predict the appearance of ships a long way from shore by studying the horizon line. Inventing a new science, nauscopy, his ability to see traveling ships at a distance of almost 1,000 miles from the coast without the support of radar or telescope was translated into a science of rigorous observation, though the emanations he claimed to see and their meterorical effects were unsatisfactory to many, just as the coining of the term telepathy by Frederick W.H. Meyers would be dismissed by authorities as pseudoscience or superstition. Though the old man had never been superstitious or one for supernatural beliefs, his wife had eminently believed in presences and emanations and resonances and all the possible possibilities of life and its reincarnations, and thus it was the possibility of generating such an intimacy with distance that pulled him out of the quagmire of grief, and imagining himself on the coast, his wife’s hand in his hand, the salty air swirling around them with the cool breeze and the two of them barefoot and content, he imagined how she would describe the distance between themselves and the horizon line, how she would describe the distance manifested by air and the color of the sky itself as possible only by this unnavigable distance. Blue is the color of that distance, she would say. And even between people, we can feel at a distance. And she would push his hand away and walk a few feet in the opposite direction, leaving him looking a little disconcerted, trying to smile and maintain his stance where she had left him, and she would hold up her hand, close her eyes, feel the wind passing through her fingers, and smile, simply stand there and smile, her hair swirling around her face, strands of it pulling taut across her cheeks then moved aside again by the wind, and though he didn’t believe her at the time, he knew that the night she had died he been unable to act, unable to reach her body, unable to access her pain, and when she had needed him most, he had been unable to accept the significance of distance, to comprehend its gifts and its curses, and watching the tide roll in and out, his eyes fixed on the screen, he thought he could maybe feel her now, could understand the significance of all the different kinds of emanations from the earth’s magnetic field, from the various densities of rocks and sand and water, from the currents of liquid and air, and in an attempt to regain order over his life, he would begin to reorganize the entire house, each cupboard and closet and box of unopened relics, he would upend it all to somehow find her again, tucked away in some corner or pocket, any way to travel some part of that distance that he had been unable to on that stormy night. He didn’t know how else to cope, how else to keep things in order the way that she had, and because he couldn’t sense the residue in the air, the meterorical effects as waves that rode out and around him, he cleaned and organized and created new footholds for himself throughout his home, partially hoping that maybe the disturbance of all of these objects might bring back her ghost; he would have preferred to encounter her ghost as an angry and vengeful entity rather than not at all, but of course he didn’t really believe in ghosts and hauntings (that was for children, he still firmly believed) and so she never appeared to him in any form, and he was never able to find her in the nooks and crannies of their onceshared home, and in his attempt to keep her from disappearing, after hundreds of iterations of reorganizing the house and dismantling and remantling all of the parts and items of the space, she did finally and completely disappear, many of her items donated or discarded, some intentionally and some because he no longer recognized their value (he wasn’t sentimental and didn’t understand attachment to objects, just things, they were just things, he could hear himself recite) or because they didn’t fit into the organizational systems he had Kithe/Lee

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created, and she would not have recognized the house even if she had returned now, the house arranged and rearranged so many times, and eventually he would crawl back to his place in front of the television, still finding time to fulfill his duty to order, but anchored in that spot in front of the bright and moving image—mesmerizing, comforting, warm—and he would stop thinking about her, would forget her face, would forget the feeling of her hand in his hand, would forget the ocean air and breeze, their footsteps on the sand, would forget his loss and sadness, her screams and pain, would forget each and every argument, each and every smile, would forget that he ever had a wife, had ever been in love, had ever held everything in his arms only to lose it all, would forget what and that he ever had lost. Perhaps it was just easier this way, or maybe this was just how memory worked. In either case, here he is today, the threatening shore a distant memory and the vast and blasphemous ocean roaring and contained to the confines of the television screen. He has already fallen asleep, is already snoring, is already dreaming and in some other place. Perhaps tomorrow he would remember something more. Or perhaps tomorrow he would finally slip, his leg dangling over the edge of the sea and he would welcome the fall, the being swallowed-up by the darkness because it wasn’t death he was afraid of, but the solace and loneliness in the living in the wake of its fear.

••• On the morning of the eclipse, the old man is visited by a cat. He does not get along with animals and he does know how to react, how to respond, or what to do. His inclination is to do nothing, to ignore it, and as with most things, the mewing will eventually stop and the cat will eventually leave and he can get back to his routine—today he has already been distracted from his previously prioritized task of sorting his mother’s clothes, which he has kept all of this time in large trunks and suitcases and boxes, and upon seeing a red stain on a silk white blouse, felt himself deranged and imagined her slipping on the blood-stained kitchen tile, here the slipperiness of the splattering more disconcerting than the color or the source—but this morning he feels that he is losing the memory of his mother’s voice, tinny and leaden, and his gaze flits from the table to the window and he can still hear the mewing and suddenly he recalls his mother’s voice insisting (she would adopt a particular tone of silvery insistence when she wanted him to eat something, to turn off the light, to fetch her medicines, or even to read her the close captions on the television with the volume muted), and so he opens the window a little, peeks his head out and waits for the creature to approach. Your move, he thinks, as he is new to this, interacting with animals, that is, and there it is again, the voice of his mother (Time to wake up!), though he is already awake, and he feels that he has undertaken something significant at her behest. The cat jumps inside without trepidation, takes a bite out of his lunch (he had been eating cold rice and beef stew, the same as his mother had made for him but he had never paid attention to the recipe so this was a clunky mimicry at best), and then stands, tail erect and behind at a slight angle, its head turned back to look at him expectantly, and wanting to fulfill the creature’s expectation, he reaches out to pet the cat, feels the cat arch its body into his palm, guiding his hand along its spine and back up along its stiffened tail, and when the cat is satisfied with this one long trembling stroke, swats some of the rice off his plate onto the floor, looks back at the man’s open mouth, then leaves the way it came in. What the old man does not remember is that he had a wife: this is the memory that he has most successfully hidden from himself, even all of her belongings have become assimilated into the forage of everything else, or discarded in those fits of difficulty, and though he remembers being in love—often he thinks to himself, I was in love once, but that was a long time ago—he is unable to conjure up her image anymore, rather, he has somehow replaced one unbearable loss with a bearable one. He had been dependent on his mother, yes, but that dependency would ebb based on the kind of situation he was in, that is, he didn’t know how to move past loss the way other humans did, and would, in any extreme emotional state, revert 20

Kithe/Lee

back to childish leanings and run back to his mother. His mother, as had always been the anchor, though the her death didn’t hadn’t traumatized him like the death of his wife had, he had manipulated the mapping of her influence and created a different, more manageable trajectory of mourning for himself. Like in pruning the pea plants outside, he relied on a kind of morphogenetic memory, influencing the shape and form of his future. In botany, it is the existence of the apical bud, the topmost one usually, that inhibits new growth on the lateral buds. But if the apical bud is cut off, it removes that inhibition, and the lateral stems can grow outwards, reaching sideways and creating new pathways. He hadn’t been able to live with his wife’s death, the memory and knowledge of that loss wasn’t just traumatic, it had inhibited him in all manners and he had been paralyzed.

He thought about the structure of a traumatic experience, that is, an experience like being pricked or wounded, and how that pain causes one to act differently, to have that traumatic memory affect future actions. The definition of a traumatic memory, he thought, was simply one that influenced future action in a negative way. A traumatic wound was a wound that was considered to be disturbing precisely because it influenced the future. It was terrifically complicated, he had believed, that if he were to have to react perpetually in response to a particular trauma, he would frame the original trauma differently, and somehow, with a belief in the possibility to change the expectancy in the heart of things, to change the shape of his wound and loss and therefore the shape of his future into one he could live in, he erased the memory of the only person he had ever loved, had ever really cared about, had ever given him a reason to live past the default state of mundane existence, that is, though he may not have possessed an actual drive to live, he did so anyway because it seemed like the proper thing to do.

He hears the mewing again emanating from the small space under the awning outside the window, but feels he has done enough, shuts the window with a gusto, and allows his humanity to dissolve like salt in the ocean and living in that zone of lingering, lingering on nothing, he feels small and faraway, fading into the horizon line like a speck and in the end, that’s all he is, another flitting dust mote falling slowly, meandering in the open space of the room with the air current and then eventually settling in the corner of the windowsill where dust rags often neglect to penetrate and here, he is comfortable, able to think again, able to rest.

The old man (how old is he really? though he has the knowledge of his own age embedded somewhere in the folds of his cerebral cortex he works diligently to suppress the surfacing of this piece of data, not for the fear of being reminded of how long he has left, but for the reminder of how long he has already lived) thinks of orchards, wonders if the apricot orchards he remembers running through are now just part of a dream or if he ever really lived there—had he really lived somewhere with so many trees in their orderly rows, planted there by darkly tanned men and he a pale boy running in and out of them, zigzagging between branches and plucking ripe fruit off the branches, wiping his hands on his jeans—it seemed impossible now that he could have run around with that much energy, that much enthusiasm and joy, and he thought perhaps this was a mirage, (could memories be mirages?), and he remembered too the day he was walking home and saw the boy that the other kids had already sternly decided was not one of them, he had decided this day he would go over and say hello, find out who this kid was who walked so far to get to school and walked home so far and somehow this unattainable and collective distance allured him: this strange boy traveled everyday by foot from a faraway land, lurking in the shadows and hardly seen, he always ate by himself at the yellow plastic table in the most remote corner of the cafeteria, the table that had previously only been occupied by the “special education” students, all of whom had either disappeared or been transferred to city schools, always with his legs crossed and his lunch accompanying him in a bright blue box with a tightly fitting white lid, he was always writing what seemed like poetry in his notebooks in math class, constantly chewing his fingernails Kithe/Lee

21

and always frowning, most of all, the old man, as a boy, had especially felt he could identify with the strange boy’s discomfort in any space he was forced to occupy, though the truth was he couldn’t really empathize, he only felt like he could, he wouldn’t have described himself as content, yet with the privileges afforded him at his age he should have been, and still, he was just a boy and he couldn’t ever be satisfied with what he already had and so seeing this other person who seemed to be so remote and inaccessible and so utterly of another place, so utterly not belonging to this world, and there was something in that posture, his sunken back and defeated nature, though he was a boy and boys shouldn’t be defeated so early and be made to believe they might be able to conquer the world before they conceive of the skepticism and realism of the world—he wanted more than anything to be friends with this other person, felt he could learn something more about himself and so, seeing him off in the distance, he couldn’t mistake that dark hair and certain manner of walking, slightly duck-legged, bowl haircut, he ran down the path, and out of breath, managed, Hello, I heard you live over by the coast, do you really walk that far every day? and the boy, with the expression of someone who had never heard human language directed at him before, that odd and curiously blank stare of a common pigeon, didn’t quite know how to answer and kept walking, as if a giant fly was buzzing around his head and if he walked faster maybe it would leave him alone, and again, Are your parents really oyster farmers?

Eventually the two boys became acquainted with each other, became friends even, though this was a complicated term within the disclosed hierarchy of their society, and the old man eventually came to know more about where the other boy came from. The boy’s family lived in a remote fishing village where almost everyone was an oysterman or oyster shucker. He would describe the monumental mountains of oyster shells that surrounded the town, these heaps of discarded shells that would form strange and uneven midden, the piles that were larger than his house, larger than all of the houses in the town.

How long have they been there?

They’ve been there ever since I’ve lived there, ever since my parents lived there.

Doesn’t anyone remove them? Isn’t there someone to pick up the piles and take them to the garbage dump?

The boy didn’t answer. He had memorized entire fleets of words and phrases, be prepared for any response, his parents had trained him, we are different and will always be seen as different here, his parents would warn, we don’t have much but we have each other, and that is more than some others have, they would attempt to lift his spirits on hot summer days when he would stand outside under the hot rays of the run, the stench of oysters and dead fish as thick and dense as the piles of cracked shells they emanated from, his only companions the discarded oyster shells, these giant monuments that reached towards the sky but would never find glory, and he didn’t know quite know how to explain the loneliness of being part of a family that believed so devotedly in the permanence of their situation, that they were lucky to be here, to be doing this work, to have something of their own, unwilling to see the hellish precarity of their existence, and again, the same blank stare of pigeons waiting for death, flanked on all sides by their own miserable past and their own miserable future.

On his thirteenth birthday, the old man received a one-hundred dollar bill from his parents, and in excitement, asked the dark-haired boy to join him for “a proper meal out.” They were boys, children really, and to the old man, a fancy meal at a fancy restaurant seemed like the pinnacle of luxury. After school the two boys arrived at an establishment that had been vetted and researched, and the old man’s parents (who were absent, as usual, but attentive to their son’s desires) had called ahead to let the restaurant know to expect the two young lads and to treat them with the appropriate level of care and attention, and as he tried to suppress the level of excitement that was visible by unfolding the cloth napkin and refolding it on his lap 22

Kithe/Lee

over and over again, he tried to take the appropriate amount of time in perusing the menu though the menu was only a single sheet of paper and he had already researched all of the selections the night before.

I’m going to have the potato pasta! He could barely contain himself, and was attempting to perform the etiquette of coming to a decision of what he might order at this present moment to allow his companion to also decide in this present moment, and he didn’t want to influence his companion’s decision; he cared genuinely for his new friend and had been excited to invite him to this event as, he hoped the other felt the same way, his best friend, but also knew that his family was poor and hoped that he would appreciate this gesture of allowing him to experience this kind of dining experience, and perhaps, afterwards, they would laugh together at the waiter’s intonation or kitschy lamps that dinned the interior, and then return to their respective abodes, their respective worlds, their respective positions in the stratified society which the boys would only learn much later that no amount of school or money or male bonding would break, and no matter how much they loved each other, they would always remain an untraversable distance apart. He paused and enacted a thinking face, studying the menu with his eyes squinted and eyebrows furrowed.

I think the special sausage and rice suits you, doesn’t that sound good?

The other boy nodded.

And then I thought we might share the oysters. I’ve never had oysters before! And then of course dessert. I think we should share the bread pudding. I hear that the chef here makes it without raisins. I just detest raisins, don’t you? My mother always sneaks them into everything and claims they will help with my digestion but I just feel like I’m eating old, wrinkly things and it reminds me of getting old. I’m never going to get old, if I can help it.

The other boy, avoiding eye contact, muttered out as if about to vomit something: I’m allergic to oysters.

Ah, right okay. Something else then.

You should still order them. It’s your birthday.

Well, okay. Maybe we will also ask for some extra bread and oil.

The other boy nodded, shifted his weight in his seat, and returned his eyes back to the comfort of the paper menu, continued to peruse, exhaled deeply.

The old man had assumed that it was the inevitable trauma of the boy’s own forced and intimate relationship to oysters that had prompted him to declare that he was allergic to oysters, and remembered feeling the shame of the entire situation, his arrogant impulse to help the other boy, on his own birthday of all days, giving the boy something special in order for him to feel better about himself, as if that was somehow a gift to himself, and he realized how ridiculous this all was. What did he know about the trauma of poor, immigrant farmers that had to shuck oysters to survive? He imagined the biblical-sized mounds of oyster shells piling up in the hot dry sun and then the arrival of a giant tidal wave that would cover the piles and the oyster shuckers and the boy, swallowing them completely and then sweeping clean the entire town, leaving behind only the stench and bubbling white foam along the coastline.

The old man realizes that the mewing has stopped. As he smells the faint smell of burning Kithe/Lee

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trees pushing through around the edges of the closed window, he wonders why he is still here, whether he even cares about survival. He is capable of killing, this he knows about himself as he has done it more than once before, but what does such a low gesture of survival mean in a world like this, does it mean anything to survive, to still be here, to outlast the others if he has never carved out an escape route for himself? As he catches the flicker of a dust mote in the light, he feels himself lowering the periphery of his vision, doubting what he has ever contributed to the living world in this long existence he has managed to lead, thinks about the trajectory of his entire life and all of the events that have led himself to this point, here, in this apartment, in this dying city, grieves the deterioration of his legs that are no longer reliable enough to even carry him out of the building, and remembering that he has nowhere to go, and that really, all of this started the day he was born, he remembers to breathe and answers himself with the only possible answer, Not quite yet. ■

24

Kithe/Lee

Hope Tamerlie J. Philippe Kithe/Philippe

25

in the garden i was named beast and rejoiced in the relief of being seen, a giant, hoofed thing, dancing in the field, stabbing clouds with great horns; in the womb my name was gentian, i clutched hollow stems of old grief in new fists, a blue baby, holding breath on the edge, bitter to the root, petals shut in the panicle; in school they named me girl, i learned to tuck all oddities in pockets,

in dreams i name myself Mair Allen

carrying each paperwrapped piece home to melt on the radiator in a thick wax cast; in love he named me apple and i tumbled into the devouring of swollen flesh around star patterned seeds, such disappointment, the indigestible core; in her mouth i was named atom and sang out indivisibility, that tongue split like revelation, fissioned: we a bomb, razing the world; in death they name us untenable, ruderal blooms forced to root beside dead byways, and deny the cut stems in their wide mouth vase

26

Kithe/Allen

Isolation

Britnie Walston

Kithe/Walston

27

Shanghai Ryan J. Petteway I.

III.

IV.

yes, we'll get in Nomah fold ourselves neatly into

we'll waddle with strangers search for signs of

her black bosom moonroof open listen to Nina

comfort

hands… above… head…

five songs say goodbye shuttle bags by bus, search sky for the departed

II. we'll put 2020 on the scale see how much it weighed if our bodies agree with numbers if our shoulders still burn

in postures (skin)tones question footwear guess occupations doubt stories envy ergonomic strollers smell morning routines cigarette smoke coffee maple syrup yogurt parfait parfum spritz white-walled stores women with red lip stick smiles like sirens sentinels track brown bodies – yes, that sound of heels familiar no, you may not help us

28

Kithe/Petteway

airport yoga is sidewalk art – remember them our bodies scanned for items found in hands of insurrectionists open-carry states of denial you know, police don't seem to need this apparatus, seems they need only to see our shells will these machines find the futures we guard inside our bruised fists – can they even see our bruises when they turn us white does that bring them comfort I struggle… what to make of surveillance that highlights

rogue rubber bands on braids yet cannot detect

sedition

V. carry on. carry-on. carrion.

VI. water and whisky pray this will be the year I sleep on planes the year they know to watch their knees for 13 hours or more how long it felt I’ll eat oxtail stew in a white tee and wipe my mouth on a photograph

VII.

VIII.

you'll give James toys,

will you recognize your unmasked smiles

a hug he'll give you hope, a bow for memories made together, the hole

remember how bicycle and ball saved our tiny little world

on the left knee of your autumn-gold sweats from your fall that summer

eat pancakes and plant

when you learned that love is always more

'til you return to the black bosom of our bruised fist

infectious

scallions

that China is a home that tears are no more water than they are words I hope you grow fearless into those words nurture gardens where they land

Kithe/Petteway

29

COVID Floral #2 Cynthia Yatchman

30

Kithe/Yatchman

Wheatfield with Crows Gavin Boyter

Y

esterday I burned three paintings in the yard at the Auberge. The acrid smell as the oil paint blackened and curled away from the browning canvas satisfied me deeply. It gave me as much pleasure as cooking sausages over a campfire had when I was a boy.

Dr. Gachet cycled by and threw his bicycle down, rushing up the lane to stop me. The pain in his eyes was almost comical.

“Vincent! What are you doing?” he said, coughing in a curl of blue smoke.

I held him from the flames with an outstretched hand, as I dropped the last work into the brazier. He tried to grab the edge of a frame, just as it’s varnish caught the flames. The old fool would set fire to his beard if he weren’t careful.

“I’m removing ugliness from the world,” I explained. I couldn’t help feeling a sliver of sadistic pleasure as my old friend struggled to comprehend what he considered an atrocity.

I don’t know where he gets his boundless sentimentality – those works were inferior, inauthentic, wrong. I tried to explain but he just kept bleating – “at least keep the frames and paint over the canvases!” It cheered me up – watching him blow on his burnt fingertips and do a little dance of fury in the garden.

“Old friend,” I told him. “You mustn’t worry

so. It will damage your health.”

We both laughed, since we are already ruined and I am convinced the good doctor will perish first, despite his homeopathic remedies, which I am sure are simply water blessed by naïve optimism.

It’s a great pity the farmer and his boys will come with their scythes soon. In a matter of days, the wheatfields will be razed to a stubble shorter than my own. I paint with diagonal dabs and slashes that are filled with urgency. Midswummer will be upon us, then just as quickly autumn with its scatterings, before winter throws a shroud over the Val d’Oise.

Each season races by with a terrifying acceleration. I paint like a man frenzied by the scythes coming up behind him. In just three years I will be forty! What have I achieved? Nothing! Everything! I oscillate between these conclusions.

I long for Theo and Johanna’s next visit.

Someone sane should remind me that what I do each day is worth doing. They departed, last week, my infinitely patient brother, his wife and their little boy.

They’ve named him Vincent. I wept when they told me.

The field is like a stretched canvas, like a pair of open palms. A steady wind slants the sheaves to the right, causes the crows to wheel drunkenly on its turbulence. I try to capture this motion against a Kithe/Boyter

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darkening azure sky. I’m tempted to look at my pocket-watch – a present from Dr Gachet. I refuse to do it. What need have I of clocks? I can tell by the shadows and the deepening blue that I have an hour and a half of sensible daylight. It is enough. I pull my coat tight around my neck and force the cap down over my ears. I really ought to obtain a scarf.

Honey, cocoa and asparagus. The colours of the field make me momentarily hungry, but the thought passes with a shot of absinthe from the flask in my inside pocket. It’s astringent bite never fail to warm me. Perhaps I will eat in the tavern on my way home, if the landlady will extend my credit.

The money Theo left me has all but flown.

I fill a flat, medium-sized brush will a daub of burnt umber, to delineate the pathway cutting between the fields and zig-zagging out of sight over the hill. It is rutted by the wheels of carts and the hooves of horses, red-brown dirt alternating with stripes of green grass where the wheels cannot reach. I’ve haven’t yet walked that path; I don’t know where it leads.

I’m glad I chose this wide canvas and came out today, instead of painting in the Auberge. The mistress doesn’t like it when I splatter her floorboards. But its good that I am not cooped up in the Yellow House with lesser painters sneering at my furniture and complaining of cockroaches.

The sun is behind me and I can feel its dying warmth on my neck. I’m glad I don’t have to squint.

Looking into the sun all day gives me headaches and fills me with fury and frustration.

It’s time to do justice to the clouds. They are usually magnificent in early July but today there are just two blobs of blue-white cumulous, rolled like napkins on a restaurant table. Once I have layered them in, to my satisfaction, I’ll concentrate on the crows. This painting is really about them, as they wheel and dance, daring one another to dive for worms or nibble at fallen seeds. They resemble the blades of scythes. I dash off several dozen, exaggerating their number, because I want them to merge into the sky. In fact, I’ll darken the sky at its fringes, and they can emerge from that unfathomable space above. A murder. That’s what the English say, and they know what they are talking about.

I don’t feel melancholy today. I rarely do when I’m working. There’s just too much to think about when I fill up my mind with colours and textures and shapes. Damnable art critics say my work lacks depth and form and precision, as if truth could be attained by making art like you might take a Daguerreotype, freezing reality onto a plate! As if there’s any truth in the bourgeois depiction of lords and ladies and prancing horses and spoilt ruddy-cheeked children! Give me a weathered farmer, crooked as a hawthorn, tilling his field, or a 32

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red-nosed postman drinking away his wages. That’s my kind of truth.

But worse than ignorance is the greatest sin of all – pity. I see it in Theo’s eyes constantly. And sometimes in the eyes of Dr Gachet, although fleetingly these days because I mostly just frustrate him. I see it in some of the kinder townspeople, wet-eyed and slack-jawed in incomprehension.

Why must he stand out in the cold for hours, why must he live on bread, cheese, wine and stolen apples?

Because I must. That’s the only answer I’ll give them and if it makes no sense then damn them all! There is always the revolver, and the wine.

There is always the lovely light just before sunset, the wheatfield before the scythes come, the cackling of crows and the rich red earth under my boots. ■

In the bin of what I'm looking for — Mary Buchinger

the what of ecstasy and half of how a long line of winter trees at the edge of a winter field the word for that the velvet a drake must feel beneath its neat-pleated wing December’s hawk a clot on the crown of a sky-etched oak I lift up the river beside me peer into its deepest eye how naked it is summer sleeps somewhere inside

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F,A/M10

Parisa Karami, in collaboration with trombonist Jen Baker

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Kithe/Karami

Amenorrhea: A Blood Story Catherine Johnson

"Y

ou’re still deficient,” the acupuncturist said. She peered into my mouth, her eyes narrowing, quizzical. This was how my appointments usually began.

The acupuncturist asked me to breathe into my uterus, which sounded strange, but I knew what she meant. I imagined my uterus—an organ that was a vague abstraction in my mind—and took deep, slow breaths.

“These needles are a little larger than normal,” she warned, queuing me to inhale and exhale before puncturing the skin, a quick prick followed by a slow burn.

“I want you to imagine the color of your uterus, imagine a flow draining from your body,” she said. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes to check on you.”

I was on my back with six needles protruding from my lower stomach, a row of slender steeples from pelvic bone to pelvic bone. I usually didn’t look at the needles, but this time I was overcome by an urge to see what was pinning me down. I lifted my head and neck, and a stinging sensation rippled through my core, pushing me back down.

I closed my eyes, letting the warmth from the space heater and the warbling sound of a sitar lull me toward relaxation. I thought about all of the doctors and all of the advice I’d been given since I stopped getting my period two years prior. No one knew why I’d stopped menstruating. The acupuncturist suspected it was because of a “blood deficiency.” According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, this has to do with the body’s qi, or energy. Blood is viewed as a condensed form of qi, which helps the blood circulate and bring balance to the body. No period indicated some kind of stagnation, imbalance.

I wasn’t especially upset about not getting a period. It was a relief to be free of cramps, gas, and the general nuisance of accommodating this monthly event.

But the results of occasional googling sprees and forays into online self-diagnosis revealed potential problems like polycystic ovarian syndrome, thyroid malfunction, pituitary tumor, premature menopause, and uterine cancer. The more time that passed without a period, the more these possibilities weighed on me.

When the acupuncturist returned she asked me, “Did you think of a color?

“Gray,” I said.

When my period first disappeared I was thirty and living in Washington, DC, two years before I started visiting the acupuncturist. Initially I thought my period stopped because I went off birth control. I’d been on and off the pill since I was sixteen (mostly to avoid getting pregnant), and it was normal for it to take a couple of months for my body to start cycling normally again. But after four months, I checked in with a doctor. “It’s probably fine,” she said. “Wait a little longer.”

At this point I was in the midst of a quarter life malaise. I had a decent job and great friends, but I felt more drained than inspired. Many of my peers were starting to think about life after DC: marriage and children and mortgages, none of which I desired for myself. I didn’t know what I desired for myself. So in an attempt to find out what I should do next, I left. I saved for months, sold most of Kithe/Johnson

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my belongings and embarked on two months of travel alone around the country, followed by another sixteen months living nomadically, bouncing between friends and family, all the while working at health food stores and teaching yoga to get by as my savings slowly diminished. I christened this time a “life sabbatical.”

All the while, I was enjoying this reprieve from menstruation and I felt good. In fact, I noticed a kind of pride well up inside when my girlfriends complained about their periods and I joked that I didn’t know what that was like anymore. As if I’d somehow evolved past the nuisance of pedestrian femaleness. Most days I didn’t think about it much. I didn’t want to. But every so often the possibly serious health implications nagged at me, and I’d check in with a new doctor, usually in a new city.

“Wait a little longer,” each physician said. “We’re not worried—yet.”

Menstruation has always been embedded with stories.

Menstruation as dirty, menstruation as cleansing, menstruation as a mystery, menstruation as powerful, menstruation as destructive. In the Old Testament, the Book of Leviticus prescribed specific rules for Jewish women: She shall be put apart seven days: and whoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the evening; Everything that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean. Women on their periods were essentially quarantined, isolated from the community. In Classical Greece, Aristotle interpreted menstruation as a sign of women’s inferiority. He wrote, “Everything reaches its perfection sooner in females than in males – e.g. puberty, maturity, old age – because females are weaker and colder in their nature; and we should look upon the female state of being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary state of nature.” Aristotle’s understanding of menstruation was steeped in misogyny, but it was still understood to be a natural, necessary sign of good health. Likewise, the Imperial Romans, according to Pliny, believed menstrual blood could be used to ensure crop fertility and even as a therapeutic topical medication to treat a wide range of conditions from gout and hemorrhages to headaches.

Menstruation is a biological paradox. It’s the exception to the notion of blood as an indication of illness, injury, or encroaching death.

On the contrary, it’s bleeding that is essential for the creation of life.

Some argue that in this paradox lie the seeds of patriarchy: men feared women because of their menstrual power and therefore felt the need to control them. After all, what kind of animal bleeds and bleeds for days and doesn’t die?

Even in this age of technological innovation and advancement, we still know relatively little about why humans menstruate. We are one of the only species that does it, and the only large mammal that sheds the lining of the uterus while the rest reabsorb it. Scientists still struggle to understand basic questions, like why we share this process with six species of bats and not monkeys. Menstrual blood is also different from regular blood: it can’t clot and contains immune agents, though no one knows what they do. And even less is known about why some women experience painful symptoms (PMS) with the onset of their period and others don’t.

In recent decades, western feminists have pointed out how menstruation has been cloaked in shame and secrecy. Growing up, I could relate to this picture: mastering the art of subtly slipping a tampon up my sleeve before heading to the restroom; the nausea in my gut at the suspicion that I’d sprung a leak at an inopportune moment; the stress of broaching this topic with new partners. I was never overtly shamed for my period; I remember my mother as being neutral on the subject. She didn’t make me feel bad about menstruation, nor did she celebrate it as a mark of empowerment the way I hear some modern 36

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mothers do. It was simply the burden women had to bear; the way life was. But I also gathered periods weren’t something you should talk about, let alone draw attention to, outside of the safety of slumber parties and the girls’ bathroom.

Some anthropologists posit that menstruation as taboo, the way I experienced it, is universal. Others dispute the notion that there is any universal meaning associated with menstruation, any single story. Apparently some cultures celebrate menstruation. The Apache hold a four-day ceremony that honors a girl’s menarche, her first period, as an achievement signifying her new status as a young woman. In other words, menstruation means different things to different people.

My menstruation story has been one of inadequacy. I got my first period when I was twelve years old. I’d just returned from my best friend’s house, where we’d spent a few hours sucking on red vines out of a Costco tub and watching MTV on her parents’ sticky leather couches. I can’t say I was completely surprised when I discovered the dark brown stain in my underwear when I got home. I’d sensed something was different. I had a peculiar new feeling down there. A sprawling warmth. Nonetheless, I cried. My mother was not home, and when my dad discovered me he asked, gently but helplessly, “Do you know what to do?”

I did not know what to do. I retrieved a panty liner from my mother’s stash, only to be corrected and given pads by her when she returned that night.

I’m not sure why I was so disturbed by this moment. I had known it was coming. I had friends a few years older who’d shared their stories, somewhat prepared me. Nonetheless, I was shocked by what having a period entailed. The whole ordeal seemed like a cruel cosmic injustice that profoundly troubled me: my entrance into womanhood left me feeling infantilized.

Wearing pads, like diapers, because I was scared of (and didn’t understand how to use) tampons, I felt immobilized. I remember attending a birthday party featuring a backyard trampoline, and as the other kids bounced and hurled themselves in the air, flipping freely, I watched from the sidelines with envy, too paranoid to join. It seemed to me I would never be that free again.

How do women live like this? I didn’t know if I could do it.

In retrospect, it’s funny that such a normal part of growing up took on such monumental implications in my pubescent mind. But that’s how I remember it feeling. I was already a shy, anxious kid, and when I was on my period, I was terrified that one uncalculated gesture would result in the kind of traumatic incident girls read about in the “most embarrassing moment” section in the back of teen magazines—bloody pads stuck to the bottom of shoes leaving the restroom, bright bloody stains on pants seats shining for all to see. My mother helped me fashion a kind of pelvic corset by cutting the legs off control-top-panty-hose, which I wore over my underwear, holding everything in place under shorts or skirts, prohibiting a pad from escaping.

This made me feel more secure, but it was not comfortable and I worried this odd contraption would be discovered by my peers.

In every way, I resented my new biological reality.

I learned to deal with it, of course. It became tolerable, routine.

Eventually I figured out how to use tampons and that was a significant improvement. But my period remained a reminder of my limitations, the things I didn’t think I could do. All of my insecurities and perceived inadequacies, which simultaneously materialize in one’s consciousness during puberty, were amplified. I was a physically lanky, socially awkward pre-teen that wasn’t especially talented or gifted at anything. A mediocre student, a mediocre soccer player, a mediocre pianist. On my period, my mediocrity seemed that much more apparent. I couldn’t think straight on my period (I wasn’t smart enough); I couldn’t exercise on my period (I wasn’t athletic enough); I didn’t want to leave the house (I wasn’t popular enough). I was angry that boys never had to think about something like this, and I imagined that because they didn’t, they were somehow whole and I would always be incomplete.

When I was living in DC, I practiced and taught at a studio called Kali Yoga. Kali is a Hindu goddess often associated with violence and war. She is Kithe/Johnson

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known for her bloodlust and fiery temperament. For western feminists, Kali offers an antidote to the narratives of women as submissive, docile, dependent. Popular images of Kali highlight her uncontrollable nature. In one contemporary lithograph, Kali dances on Siva: ravenous wide eyes, black tongue extended, skulls around her neck and severed heads around her waist, a many-armed force of death and destruction.

Kali intrigued me too. My “life sabbatical” culminated in a trip to India to practice yoga in Mysore, the birthplace of Ashtanga yoga, one of the oldest lineages. After four weeks there, I spent another two traveling around Southern India. Along the way I went to Hampi in Karnataka, which was the center of the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire in the 14th century, a wealthy city of temples, farms, and markets. In 1565 it was pillaged, conquered, and destroyed by the Deccan Muslim confederacy, and today it consists of sixteen square miles of ancient forts, royal and sacred complexes, temples, shrines, Mandapas, memorial and water structures. Amongst these ruins is a less-known shrine to the goddess Kali. She is carved against a rock with ten hands and a crimson tongue.

There is no structure, only a tree that offers her shade.

I went looking for her because she was an enticing symbol of feminine power, and in the overwhelming landscape of ancient Hindu religious artifacts, though I was not religious, I was seduced by an urge for pilgrimage, a destination. So on a blistering August afternoon, I stood in front of her shrine and removed my sandals.

At the time, I didn’t know or appreciate the complexity of Kali. I didn’t know she contained competing, paradoxical stories. And I didn’t know she might offer an alternative way of reframing my own.

“That’s not natural,” my older sister said one morning over coffee when I told her about my missing period. I was in Boulder, Colorado at the time, in the middle of my life sabbatical, sleeping on her living room floor and working at the Natural Grocers across the street. I figured my sister was probably right, but wondered what “natural” even meant. In most areas of my life, I strived for natural: organic produce, non-GMO tofu, no make-up. But I was also wary of the naturalistic fallacy; just because something exists in nature and is therefore “natural” doesn’t make it inherently good. (As an extreme example, rape exists in nature, but obviously that doesn’t make it right.)

I grew up believing that birth control, though maybe not natural, was a tool of women’s liberation. Having control over when we had children, if we ever wanted children, allowed women to work longer, chase their ambitions. Anything that gave women more control, more agency, struck me as an unquestionable good, a mark of progress. In addition to controlling when they got pregnant, women could also have more control over how they experienced their period, or if they wanted to have a period at all. The prevailing wisdom of the medical establishment suggested, and still suggests, that having a period isn’t necessary and there is no harm in skipping it. In fact, the only reason birth control pills originally included the fourth week of “sugar pills” to induce bleeding was because John Rock, one of the creators of the pill and a devoted Catholic, was trying to appease the religious authorities by demonstrating that this new technology was still in accordance with God's vision.

But the period one gets while on the pill is not a real period. It’s a withdrawal bleed from the lack of hormones that induces a disruption in the uterine lining. Birth control stops your menstrual cycle and replaces the body’s natural fluctuation of hormones with a steady stream of synthetic ones. Many women skip the sugar pill week altogether and go straight to the next packet, so as not to bleed at all. And now there are other forms of birth control that are even more convenient (no remembering to take a pill) and exclude bleeding for months or years at a time.

Biologically speaking, we’ve reached peak liberation.

There were also other legitimate issues that made me question not only whether a period is necessary, but if having a period is even safe.

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Modern women, especially those in industrialized countries, have far more periods now than our ancestors did, who lived shorter lives and spent far more time pregnant and nursing, and thus not menstruating. In short, women today may ovulate 3 to 4 times more than our predecessors and some doctors worry that it’s posing concerns for women’s health, the most serious being cancer. Cancer occurs when cells divide and there is runaway growth. So any time there is an opportunity for cell division there is also the risk of cancer. Ovulation is one of those opportunities.

When a woman gets pregnant and has a child, her risk of ovarian cancer drops ten percent. Similarly, with endometrial cancer. What if what was “natural” was also more dangerous?

So as the months went by without a period, I was conflicted about whether it was actually healthy for it to return, and torn between this set of competing narratives. On the one hand, the “natural” woman who embraces her biology and her period as a sign of health and power, the wisdom of evolution; on the other hand, the evolved woman who is not defined or constrained by her reproductive system, who is outsmarting it, and might be better off for it. I wanted to believe that maybe I could have both. I wasn’t menstruating and so my risk of cancer was (presumably) lower, yet I also wasn’t pumping myself full of synthetic hormones.

Perhaps everything was fine, natural even.

My life sabbatical came to an end when I moved to Portland, Oregon. By that time, it had been two years since my period disappeared and I decided it was time to press my doctors for answers, to stop “waiting” and earnestly find out what was going on, if only to quiet the concerned voices in the back of my head. That’s when I started to see the acupuncturist and a new OB/GYN. I consulted with the physician because I wanted a concrete, scientific, evidence-based explanation of what was going on and to eliminate worst-case scenarios. I kept going back to the acupuncturist because I appreciated her holistic approach, she seemed to genuinely care, and I liked her. She asked questions that other doctors didn’t. What are you working on? What’s your stress level? What do you want from life?

And yet, while I insisted on more testing, asked more questions, and ostensibly wanted a resolution, supposedly wanted to be healthy, another part of me was still loving this period-less state, which the doctor diagnosed as secondary amenorrhea. Not just loving it—attached to it. I still carried that strange pride about not menstruating, as if I was getting away with something. For my entire life my period had been a limitation that dampered my energy, kept me in bed, prevented me from working as hard or doing as much as I believed I should. The story I told myself about my period was that it made me deficient. Now, according to the acupuncturist, I had an actual deficiency, a blood deficiency. Yet when I was honest with myself, I found a deep fear of returning to normalcy.

While no one knew definitively what had caused the amenorrhea, the same questions came up again and again from everyone I saw: How much are you eating? What are you eating? What are you doing for exercise? Are you exercising too much? Since graduating from college—a reckless time of my life largely defined by nightly drinking binges, smoking too much pot, chain-smoking cigarettes, failing classes, and dating a manipulative alcoholic—I’d steadily progressed down a path of reform through health-consciousness. I was ashamed of the way I’d wasted part of my college years with idiotic decisions and was committed to regaining control of my life, making something of myself. And since I often felt insecure about what exactly I was making of myself, I turned to diet and lifestyle as a concrete, visible, measurable gauge of my transformation.

First, when I was twenty-two, I became a pescatarian, then a vegetarian. By the time I was thirty and living in DC, I was strictly vegan, ideally raw, mostly gluten-free, plant-based superfoods devotee. I did yoga daily, ran consistently, rode my bike everywhere, and picked up a side job at a fancy gym to get the free membership, including kickboxing, Kithe/Johnson

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weight lifting, and pilates classes. I was constantly looking for the next thing to exclude from my diet or add to my workout. I read self-help books and deployed tips for “life-hacking”—how to be more efficient, more productive, reach my potential. When the rest of my life was in flux or turmoil, what I ate and how I moved offered a handle for control and a means of seeing “progress.” I wasn’t trying to get small; I was trying to get strong. I wanted to see defined, cut muscles. Feeling my body change was a stand in for achievement I felt lacking in other parts of my life. It never occured to me that I might be doing too much. In fact, none of it ever felt like enough.

Without my period, it was much easier to keep up with this routine. Work more. Do more. Sleep less. Not having a period made me feel closer to accomplishing a story of myself I desperately wanted to be true: that I was disciplined, driven, independent. Strong. Complete.

While Kali’s fierce nature may be her dominant narrative in the West and the Vedic tradition, she actually has two lineages, two stories.

Kali is also a symbol of Mother Nature: creative, nurturing, loving and benevolent. In the seventeenth century her image began to soften when Tantric Bengali poets in Northwest India emphasized her duality. Kali was a paradox, as described by one author: “Her protruding red tongue signals both modesty...and her thirst for blood. Her dishevelled hair hints at unrestrained blood lust and alternatively the metaphysical mystery of death that encircles life. Her three eyes represent omniscience, her voluptuous breasts both sexual lust and nurturance. Her nakedness simultaneously represents carnality and purity.”

According to religious scholars, Kali’s duality inspires her followers to face life and death, recognizing that one cannot exist without the other. One of those scholars, Rachel Fell McDermott, suggests: “this essential and intriguing attribute of Kali has been forgotten or suppressed, in favor of a one-sided, usually fearsome portrayal. A pressing challenge to modern women is therefore to recover and reclaim this wholeness in Kali, and hence in themselves.”

I was drawn to the first story of Kali as fierce and independent because it reinforced an idea of female empowerment that I wanted to be true and complete. In this paradigm, to be independent meant to be without needs, without vulnerability. I was not interested in the second story of Kali. Motherhood and nurturing didn’t resonate in my life. I had no desire to be a mother. But also, motherhood scared me. I respected it from afar, as a choice other women were well-justified in making, but to me it represented the annihilation of one’s independence, another limitation on freedom. I wanted to feel “whole,” but I couldn’t accept the paradox of what that really meant.

When I went to see the OB/GYN for yet another batch of hormone test results, a year after I’d moved to Portland, I was nervous. If they were normal, that was ostensibly good, but it also meant more invasive procedures would be necessary to eliminate serious implications and find out what was really going on.

“Your estrogen is low,” the OB/GYN said when she entered the intimate exam room and took a seat on the rolling stool in front of me.

“That’s why you’re not getting your period.” She pulled out a flip chart and pointed to a diagram of the female reproductive system, explaining what was happening in terms I loosely followed: without enough estrogen (the levels of which may be influenced by diet and/or exercise) my uterine lining was unable to shed, thus no blood.

In order to raise my estrogen levels, she said, I’d need to go back on birth control. I thought about the last time I was on the pill: thickening hips, swelling breasts, mood swings. I didn’t like being on the pill and still wasn’t convinced that I needed a period anyway, so I asked if there were any risks associated with low estrogen. She said if I wasn’t trying to get 40

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pregnant then it was probably fine. Low estrogen did increase my chances for osteoporosis, but I was young and if I was getting enough calcium and vitamin D and practicing weight-bearing exercise to keep my bones strong, she said, then there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.

I reported this “good news” to the acupuncturist. She was not convinced.

“You need to be bleeding,” the acupuncturist said. “A blood deficiency is not the same thing as a vitamin deficiency,” she clarified when she suggested (again) that maybe the veganism had caused the amenorrhea, and I insisted that I’d been astutely monitoring my vitamin and mineral intake.

According to her, a diet that worked when I was 26 may no longer be optimal at 32. She said there were nutrients, “blood-nourishing properties” in animal products (beyond iron and B12) that I simply couldn’t get from plants alone, that could not be measured in a blood panel. And there were other things to consider, she said. Eating well was not simply about the nutrient breakdown of our food. We need to eat in a way that serves our specific needs and is mindful of factors such as the season and weather and environment. Whether it’s hot or cold, damp or dry. At the time, it was winter in the Pacific Northwest. That meant warm food and rest, she said. Time to build up the energy we’d release in the spring.

I had never thought about food in these terms. I’d adopted a trendy western perspective that viewed food as either nutritious or not—“clean” or “unclean”—and strived to eat almost exclusively from the former category. It seemed to me that if I was eating the most nutrient-dense foods, that should be enough to nourish me year-round. I bristled at her suggestions that I should rest more just because it was winter. This was the part of Traditional Chinese Medicine I found frustrating. There were no tests, no clear-cut lines, no scientifically-supported studies and prescriptions. I did not want to accept this amorphous understanding of health, though I also couldn’t deny something about it made sense to me.

The acupuncturist asked me how everything else was going. I told her I’d started going to a new hot yoga studio and the sweating felt good, purifying.

“You like to deplete yourself, don’t you?” she asked as I laid down on the table and she proceeded to insert the needles. She didn’t think the hot yoga would help me get my period. “It seems like you’re pushing things away, constantly emptying yourself, refusing to let things build up inside.”

Perhaps I did like to deplete myself. I took satisfaction from feeling drained. When I went to Mysore to practice Ashtanga, it was because I wanted to do something hard. It was that next new thing I imagined would make me even stronger, more disciplined. Each morning I left the shala drenched in sweat, exhausted. Walking back to the house where I was staying was my favorite part of the day. I felt empty, light, euphoric.

But while Ashtangis observe a rigorous practice six days a week, rest is taken seriously. They don’t practice on Saturdays and moon days (full and new moons) because they believe the energy on those days—the gravitational pull on the earth and on us—is powerful. Resting is a way of respecting that rhythm, our cycles and the cycles of the moon. Women are also expected to rest during their periods, their “lady’s holiday,” so as not to disrupt the downward flow exiting the body. Initially I resisted these rest days. Intellectually, I knew rest was important and that the only way to get stronger was to let fatigued muscles recover. When I was training for races I always factored in one or two rest days each week— rest from running, anyway. Instead, I’d practice yoga or some other form of cross training. Rarely did I allow myself an exercise-less day. On rest Kithe/Johnson

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days in India, I was grateful for the day off, but another part of me felt lazy, undeserving. I craved that euphoric reward.

I thought back to my visit with one OB/GYN who asked about my diet and activity level. When I told her about the veganism and the running she suggested that perhaps I was exercising too much, which can disrupt hormones. It’s not uncommon for female athletes to have amenorrhea, especially those with very little body fat. But in my mind, I wasn’t an athlete, and besides, my body mass index was normal (much to my chagrin). The half-marathon couldn’t have been too much—after all, it wasn’t a full marathon, it wasn’t an ultra marathon. I could have done more.

“Make sure you’re eating well,” that OB/GYN said. “And perhaps you should stop running.”

Finally, I thought, someone thinks I’m doing enough.

I was surprised by a sudden wave of relief. As if she saw how much I was trying to do and was telling me, “It’s OK. You can relax. You don’t need to push so much.” She was handing me a validation I hadn’t realized I was craving. I could see this, and I wanted to accept her offer. I wanted to accept myself as I was, instead of as a project that required constant improvement and forward momentum. But instead I thought: Perhaps I should exercise even more. If diet and exercise were causing the amenorrhea, then the only way to hold on to this validation, was to maintain.

As I lay on the acupuncturist’s table, I understood that I was terrified of my period coming back, that I was invested in this deficiency, because it was the only thing that made me feel adequate.

Powerful women have always stimulated my imagination and driven my ideals of what it means to be a whole person, which is why I was initially captivated by Kali. But in the wake of my amenorrhea, I’ve started to wonder if that drive for strength as the epitome of self-actualization overshot the mark, leaving me unwilling to embrace the parts of myself—the soft, still, vulnerable parts—that don’t fit that story. I’ve embraced the strong woman archetype as a salve against the parts of American culture that insist a woman’s value is in her beauty. But maybe I’ve just exchanged one aesthetic for another, one that is equally rigid and demanding, with no space for excess or nuance. By viewing my period as a mark of deficiency, I bought into an old story about women’s worth as less than men’s, and a newer one: that a human’s worth resides in her productivity and accomplishments.

For that reason, perhaps Kali as paradox—destroyer/nurturer, vengeful/compassionate, warrior/mother—is more helpful. There is room to breathe in paradox, more space to own our multiplicity and contradictions, and thus our humanity. Maybe I just need to stop fighting my other side, what some ancient philosophies call “yin” characteristics in order to balance the frenetic “yang.” I need to stop resisting my period as an indicator of weakness and embrace it as an opportunity for essential rest, as a reminder that we need balance. This sounds right, but I can’t shake the fact that I’m not fully satisfied with this story either. It feels more complicated than the fact that I should just accept these two sides of myself. Too easy.

Some religious scholars conjecture that Kali also inhabits a kind of third space, one beyond binaries. Kali also means “force of time,” and many view her as standing outside of space-time. Kali’s identity is boundaryless, unlimited, “oceanic.” One scholar, Axel Michaels, writes: “Goddesses reflect, in sharp distinction to Western concepts of identity, the Hindu belief in the power of primary, pre-verbal, preconscious experiences of reality...What makes goddesses powerful is beyond words, theories, analysis, separations, boundaries—beyond identity.”

Perhaps Kali’s power, then, lies not in what she means, in the way she represents human paradox, but in what she can’t mean.

Religions offer grand narratives, stories that make sense of the 42

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most disruptive parts of life (death, disease, decay), through ritual. But rituals can’t hold everything; some parts of life will inevitably slip through the cracks. Kali is a container for those parts too. David R. Kinsley suggests, “Kali, in part, may indicate one way in which the Hindu tradition has sought to come to terms with the built-in shortcomings of its own refined view of the world. The system doesn’t always work in every case, and it is perhaps best—even redemptive—to recognize that it does not.” I’m struck by the word “redemptive.” Perhaps Kali saves us from the error of believing that one story can ever be complete, even one that includes a spectrum of contradictions. When we acknowledge the failure of our stories, maybe we’re buying back a deeper truth, though one that doesn’t gratify our sense of identity.

My attachment to the strong woman archetype is rooted in a fundamentally human fear of chaos, and the most terrifying chaos is the decaying body, the descent toward death, the truly natural, inevitable final stage of life’s cycle. It’s hard to forgive my body for all the ways (my period being one) it reminds me that I am not in control. I know I need to change the story of my period, but even though paradoxes offer a truer version of reality—we bleed in order to create, vulnerability is a strength—they cannot ameliorate our most fundamental existential angsts. As another scholar wrote: “Kali is a very dangerous being. She vividly and dramatically thrusts upon the observer things that he or she would rather not think about.”

No one can say for sure why I stopped bleeding, but on some level I know my deep fear of deficiency contributed to an actual one. It led me to obsessively chase a story, an identity, that valorized strength to the exclusion of all else. And perhaps crueler than the irony that my first period left me feeling infantilized, is the possibility that the very things I’d been doing to become stronger, to fulfill this identity, have been— given the risk of osteoporosis—literally making me weaker, chipping away at my infrastructure, thinning my very bones.

Kithe/Johnson

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On Plum Island Sound Mary Buchinger

You wouldn’t believe how the gold stood upright above and below the blue horizontal staccato movement giving rise to light-slapped stalks stark against November sky its tethered sun all the brighter for its choking the part you won’t believe is how I felt even as I took it in the salt-lipped invitation blue-wrapped gash clear of summer I bobbed in my hollow vessel everlasting child on the silver way that swells moment by moment the long exhale of tide beneath day’s narrowing arc— Oh the squeeze of shadow in the scissored marsh the sucking green clay it springs from roots and sustenance submerged

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Kithe/Buchinger

Global Cooling Serge Lecomte

Kithe/Lecomte

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Contributors Mair Allen

Mair Allen is a writer living in Minneapolis, Mn. They are an MFA candidate in poetry at Antioch University. Their work can also be found in OROBORO and Mikrosmos.

Massachusetts, Gullkistan in Laugarvatn, Iceland, SPACE on Ryder Farm in Brewster, NY and in 2020, she attended the Tin House Summer Workshop with Saeed Jones. Her work can be seen in Pigeon Pages, Bending Genres, The Main Review and Hobart and at lchekowsky.com.

Gavin Boyter

Gary Gillespie

Gavin is a Scottish writer and filmmaker living in London. He has published two travel memoirs about running ludicrously long distances, Downhill from Here and Running the Orient. The latter book charts his 23,00 mile run from Paris to Istanbul, following the 1883 route of the Orient Express. Gavin’s stories have been published in Constellations, Bluing the Blade, DIAGRAM, Riptide, The Closed Eye Open, Bright Flash, La Piccioletta Barca and The Abstract Elephant, among others. He is also the writer-director of the 2015 independent film Sparks and Embers.

Gary Gillespie is a collage artist living on Whidbey island north of Seattle. Winner of 17 awards, his art has appeared in 52 regional shows.

The artists he admire tap unconscious feelings of longing for existential meaning that emerge from cultural icons. In his view abstraction should be more than pleasing design. Instead, art should evoke connotations that permit the viewer to experience a sense of wonder, awe and new perspectives of being. A favorite quote: "The world is but a canvas to our imagination." -Henry David Thoreau.

"in dreams i name myself"

"Wheatfield with Crows"

Mary Buchinger

"Fool If You Think It's Over"

"On Plum Island Sound" and "In the bin of what I was looking for—"

Catherine Johnson

Mary Buchinger is the author of six collections of poetry, including e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling (2018), Aerialist (2015), and / klaυdz / (forthcoming).

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is president of the New England Poetry Club and professor at MCPHS University in Boston. Her website is: www. marybuchinger.com.

Catherine’s work has been published in Oregon Humanities, The Los Angeles Review, Propeller, Gulf Stream, STORGY, Portland Monthly Magazine, Nowhere Travel Magazine and is forthcoming in Hypertext, Coachella Review and the anthology Evergreen: Fairy Tales, Essays & Fables from the Dark Northwest. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Portland State University, and is now an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

Lu Chekowsky "The Egg"

Lu Chekowsky is an Emmy-winning writer and creative director who built a successful career in media through gut intuition and addiction to approval. She has been a writer in residence at MASS MoCA in

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"Amenorrhea: A Blood Story"

Parisa Karami

"F,A/M10" and "Ab,C/M10"

Parisa Karami is an artist living in Brooklyn with her family. She has various ongoing projects such as Reyna De La Tierra and Cinema Scenes. Recent works can be seen on media outlets such as McSweeney’s. For more information you can visit www.parisakarami. com.

Serge Lecomte "Global Cooling"

Serge Lecomte was born in Belgium.

He came to the States where he spent his teens in South Philly and then Brooklyn. After graduating from Tilden H. S. he worked for New York Life Insurance Company. He joined the Medical Corps in the Air Force and was sent to Selma, Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement. There he was a crewmember on helicopter rescue. He received a B.A. in Russian Studies from the University of Alabama, then earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Russian Literature with a minor in French Literature. He worked as a Green Beret language instructor at Fort Bragg, NC from 1975-78. In 1988 he received a B.A. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Spanish Literature. He worked as a language teacher at the University of Alaska (1978-1997). He was the poetry editor for Paper Radio for several years. He worked as a house builder, pipefitter, orderly in a hospital, gardener, landscaper, driller for an assaying company, bartender in one of Fairbanks’ worst bars, and other jobs. He resided on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska for 15 years and recently moved to Bellingham, WA.

Janice Lee

"The Old Man" from Imagine a Death

Janice Lee is a Korean-American writer, editor, publisher, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the concept of han in Korean culture, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy?

She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

Jonathan Andrew Pérez

"Confession in Re-Conquered Lands"

Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq. is a trial attorney, teacher, and seer, and has published poetry online and in print in: POETRY Magazine, The River Heron Review, Blood Tree Literature, Allegory Ridge, Into The Void, Guesthouse, Hayden's Ferry Review, Blood Tree Literature, Dovecote, Coffin Bell Journal, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Rise Up Review, The Banyan Review, The Connecticut River Review, Cape Cod Poetry Review, The Chicago Quarterly, Connecticut Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Tulane Review, The Florida Review, Hawai'i Review, Cold Mountain Review,

The Westchester Review, The Worcester Review, Yes, Adelaide Literary , Mud Season, Frontier Magazine, Muse/ A Journal, The Bookends Review, Crack the Spine, Alternating Current, K'in, Waxing and Waning, Split Lip Magazine, and Ovenbird Poetry, Pangyrus, and Cosmonauts.

Jonathan has published two chapbooks, The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies (2020) and his second, The Diving: Dark was The Night of Justice (2021), won the Burnside Review Chapbook Prize. His first full-length manuscript will be published in 2022, by Urban Farmhouse Press.

Ryan J. Petteway

"The Breathing Dark", "Shanghai", and "Revelations 20:20"

Ryan J. Petteway is a public health professor, community-engaged scholar, and poet. He lives in Portland, OR, where he sips dark roast and rocks Griffey Max 1 Freshwaters, rain or shine. As a social epidemiologist, his research, writing, and teaching focus on structural social and political factors that shape population health (e.g. racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism), centering notions of power, (mis)representation, embodiment, and resistance. His poem, “TOGETHER//Untethered”, was awarded an April 2020 National Poetry Month Prize and nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. Another poem, “LATENT//Missing”, was honored with the 2020 Lawrence W. Green Paper of the Year Award by Health Education & Behavior and the Society for Public Health Education. Nas, Nina, and rum connoisseur. Alum of UVA (BA), Michigan (MPH), and UC Berkeley (DrPH). Still represents The Ville.

You can find some of his words/ work at www.rjpetteway.com.

Tamerlie J. Philippe "Hope"

Tamerlie J. Philippe is a young artist who was born and raised in Haiti.

She moved to Montreal, Canada to pursue her post-secondary education where she studied financial management. Her love of arts and literature never dwindled during that time. She has since evolved not only as a writer but also as a painter.

She’s written for Montreal Rampage and has been published in Sadgirlsclub. Luckily , her creativity expends further than the words she puts on paper. She is a portraitist, an illustrator and a cartoonist. The paint that dries on her canvases represent her vivid imagination.

Most of her art is inspired by her home country. The subjects of her paintings are often times faceless because she associates them to her fading memories. Furthermore, her work has been exhibited in colors of humanity. She hopes to reach and touch people with her art and one day be able to inspire young women like herself.

Gabriel Stein-Bodenheimer

"A Stolen Name and Other Gifts"

Gabriel Stein-Bodenheimer is a writer and teacher living in Portland, OR. He is working on a memoir about coming out as a trans while teaching in a Catholic high school. He attended the 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop. His writing has appeared in Alma, Lambda Literary Review, and the forthcoming second edition of TransBodies, TransSelves. Follow him on Twitter @GSteinBodenheim.

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Contributors Britnie Walston

"Isolation" and "Holding On"

Britnie is a versatile Maryland based artist who works with a variety of art mediums. Inspired by nature, her work reflects liberation and peace. She concentrated in studio art and received a Bachelor's degree from Goucher College as a fine and performing arts scholar. As a part of her college studies, she also traveled abroad in Greece with the University of Maryland College Park. There, she studied art history and Greek mythology.

Prior to attending Goucher, she also earned a scholarship for studio painting classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Britnie was also the White House Christmas Ornament Artist of 2008, followed by various other awards and honors such as Honorable Mention with Grey Cube Gallery and a Special Merit Award in Light, Space and Time Gallery's "Open" 2020 Art Exhibition. Her work has also been featured in shows with galleries such as Towson Arts Collective, Art Enables, and Art Show International of Los Angeles. Most recently she has been chosen as one of Art Show International Gallery of Los Angeles' permanent solo exhibition artists. Britnie's work has also been published in magazines such as Chestnut Review, Sonder Midwest, Glassworks Magazine, Blue Mesa Review, and many more.

Cynthia Yatchman

"COVID Floral #2" and "COVID Floral #3"

Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle-based artist and art instructor. With an M.A. in child development and a B. A. in education, she has a strong interest in art education and

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teaches art to adults, children and families in Seattle. A former ceramicist, she studied with J.T. Abernathy in Ann Arbor, MI. though after receiving her B.F.A. in painting from the University of Washington she switched from 3D art to 2D and has stayed there since, working primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections and has been shown nationally in California, Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Oregon and Wyoming.

She has exhibited extensively in the Northwest, including shows at Seattle University, Seattle PaciOic University, Shoreline Community College, the Tacoma and Seattle Convention Centers and the PaciOic Science Center. She is an afOiliate member of Gallery 110 and is a member of the Seattle Print Art Association and COCA (Center of Contemporary Art) and an affiliate member of Gallery 110 in Seattle.

Editorial Board Lauren Hobson

Founder, Editor-in-Chief

Lauren Hobson is a writer and teacher in Portland. Her work has appeared in River Teeth, Entropy, and elsewhere. If she isn’t writing, she’s probably hanging out with her dog, Cedar.

Joshua James Amberson Editor

Joshua James Amberson is a Portland, Oregon-based writer and creative writing instructor. In his work, he's explored the beauty of the cassette tape, mobile homes, post-punk poets, gender non-conforming celebrities, eyepatches, Hollywood's Golden Age, and the romanticization of the typewriter, among other subjects. He's the author of Everyday Mythologies and the forthcoming Slow Motion Heroics, both from Two Plum Press.

Katie Borak Editor

Katie Borak is a former seller of barbecue cookbooks and a current writer and instructor in Portland, OR. They make short queer blackout poems from western pulp novels, and long stories about icebergs, fanaticism, subverting the patriarchy, and the sea.

Cynthia Carmina Gómez Editor

Cynthia Carmina Gómez is the Executive Director of the Cultural Resource Centers and faculty in University Studies at Portland State University. She has a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and a Master of Science in education. Previously, Cynthia spent a decade directing leadership development initiatives in the Latino nonprofit sector. She is the recipient of the Governors' Gold Award in Civic Leadership and a Fishtrap: Writing and the West Fellow. Cynthia moved to Portland in 1993 where she lives with her partner and two children. She enjoys birding, cooking, and documenting the stories of ordinary people's extraordinary lives.

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan Editor

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

M.L. Schepps Editor

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

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