Green Blotter 2016

Green Blotter 2016

Green Blotter is produced by the Green Blotter Literary Society of Lebanon Valley College, Annville, Pennsylvania. Submissions are accepted from October through February. Green Blotter is published yearly in a print magazine and is archived on the following website. For more information and submission guidelines, please visit: www.lvc.edu/greenblotter

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GREEN BLOTTER Editors-in-chief Jarrod Goss ’16 Hunter Heath ‘16 Art Editor Molly Gertenbach ‘16 Assistant Art Editor Jackie Chicalese ‘18 Poetry Editor Jess Coughlin ‘17 Prose Editor Sydney Fuhrman ‘18

Design Team Molly Gertenbach ’16 Luke Dougherty ‘18 Reader Board Jenn Bowers Kaylee Kilgore Emily Branson Maria Scacchitti Erik Hoover Julie Wiker Cheyenne Heckermann Faculty Advisors Holly Wendt Sally Clark

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CONTENTS Bryce Detweiler Cal Louise Phoenix Abby Truong Lindsay Zwally Bryce Detweiler Sarina Bosco McKenna Sickels Connor Feeney Michelle Westhoff Evin Schmidt Miranda Milillo Kems Sylvain Mason Boyles

Victoria Gluszko Erica McKeen

Sarina Bosco Kris Swanson

Taylor Frey Christopher Eskilson

Julia Cavicchi

Abby Truong Abby Truong Austin Shay

Hemingway Note of Apology Better Than Your Fairytales Out of DarkneSS Reflex Action Pursuit Eluveitie A Religious Experience This Project is Killing Me Breaking Art School Habits What I Untitled Don’t Look Now Remix Trifecta Petie and the White Rabbits new england, shifting September’s Children Masquerade Where Is Your Rupture?

On Singing the Wind Songs Wandering Winter Into the Wild Arrival

Cover Art: McKenna Sickels

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1 3 4 5 12 13 14 15 22 23 26 27 28 38 39 47 49 50 51 52 53 56 60

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Dear Reader,1 As a species, we’ve watched the horizons from the shoreline, all 2.9 miles we could gather, with awe. And we once reached 2.9 miles and kept going, drifting unnoticeably through until necessity or self-direction brought us in the elsewhere of the limit.

However harrowing, the limit houses some of the most inspiring work. 2 But, the holistic presentation of a work of art locks the limit into genre, ignoring the context or the vessel in which the idea comes, escaping the limit. This is an artistic sin in our eyes, and a cheapening of the creative possibilities we celebrate here at Green Blotter. We want—very much—to convey that the presentation of the fragments enclosed are distant from the affects that brought these pieces to life; and we want our readers to concern themselves with the possibilities of re-presenting these creative bulwarks as mere steps to one another’s limit.3 As editors and art romantics, we take pride in the aesthetic of the presentation of the work, figuring this 2016 issue just as much art as the work within. One can notice the self-reflexivity and profundity of the work in the self-reflexivity of the book. Our issue is as much a journey as the photography, as much a tale as its prose, as much fusion as nuclear reactor: even if the pieces do not seem to fit, somewhere along the contours, there’s a link and a fit. In truth, there is no such thing as a conclusion and every story enjambs, every end is a beginning, and every departure is an arrival elsewhere.4

1 To read is to work—to be in transit, in flight, amongst the copious amounts of submissions integrated.

In short, we thank those submissions included and also excluded, which have reinforced the 2016 issue of

Green Blotter.

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“The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; theseamounts people, as they seem, 1 To read is to work—to be in transit, in flight, amongst the copious of unworldly submissions integrated.

burrow intosubmissions their own particular construct, in miniature, a strange utterly In short,like we termites thank those includedmaterial and alsoto excluded, which have reinforced theand 2016 issue

of individual image of the world” Stefan Zweig, Chess Story.

Green Blotter.

3 As a ladder maylimits take you up and bulwark, weinfinite; envisionthese this issue or as collection of creativity as a 2 “The more one oneself, thedown closeraone is to the people, unworldly they seem,

ladder that readers climb in and out of to reach our contributors’ fixations. burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly 4 Our final hope is that our readers breathe lifeChess into this collection and move amongst this space. To do so

individual image of the world” Stefan Zweig, Story.

3 is to contribute to the same vessels the artists and writers envisioned in their artwork.of creativity as a As a ladder may take you up and down a bulwark, we envision this issue or collection

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ladder that readers climb in and out of to reach our contributors’ fixations.

Our final hope is that our readers breathe life into this collection and move amongst this space. To do so is to contribute to the same vessels the artists and writers envisioned in their artwork.

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This is why we’ve chosen the most skilled of undergraduate submissions by the way limits are approached, genres mixed/crossed/destroyed and the way the pieces can be fixated on one and another.

Sincerely, The Co-Editors-in-Chief Hunter Heath ‘16 J.P. Goss ‘165

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See note 4 on previous page.

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In memory of Liz Coughlin.

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Hemingway Bryce Detweiler Hemingway is drinking a daiquiri in his highpoint plank-walk studio, where balmy Key West breezes fill the lungs of an American icon, shipwrecked like Theseus on a thirties island refuge, writing to preserve an era for succeeding museums and mentalities.

Prowling below his permanent ink-well brimming with the fuel of free-handed histories, six-pronged paws claw at concentration, demanding a word in edgewise for the pentadactyl cats down the road playing in garbage heaps where little Suzie makes her mud pies, baked with idle apathy, for sweet Old Ben in the print-house pressing new-age bibles, fated to gather dust on disregarded flea-market tables set up every Sunday on busy-bodied Main Street,

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next to guilds of starving artists crying watercolors, humming bum-legged Joe in a hurry for a foot-race, upright Mama Jane carting coffee cakes and coca tea, the wild children: Donald...Paul...Crazy Frank and all the other countless cursed souls without a quill, condemned to be forgotten in pre-war gallery exhibitions, remaining in the inkwell, untouched by aging Ernie’s opera as if never graced by that Southern Florida open-ocean sun.

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Note of Apology Cal Louise Phoenix Seasons expire –it’s the price of gleaning ties.

Urgently, dissolve to stained glass.

This is Chicago. This is Little Rock.

This is Kansas City.

It becomes a song in our sides: this is art now A story about bees.

Something torn, like lace.

We bore it in dresses of translucent segments and held each other with throat-probing bloodletting fingers –two sinking ships trading lifeboats.

One loves to shame, to paint enemies of used condoms and hotel bills.

It won’t end while distance sketches the insufferable sting of summer, while I wear your shadow to bed.

Transitioning praising grey –the lake became a vehicle moving on, becoming fast in forms that stretch into a comic darkness and creep over yellowed grass and street debris.

You say your teeth don’t remember –mine can’t forget.

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Better Than Your Fairytales Abby Truong

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Out of DarkneS.S. Lindasy Zwally Train ride after processing: February 19, 1944

I am now 27998. I used to live in a quiet neighborhood on the south side of Vienna. My father was a businessman and my mother stayed home to take care of the house. I went to church every Sunday and went to school the rest of the week. My best friend, Daria Kielce, spent every day at my house. Her father, Bertek Kielce, owned a business with my father.

Then the war broke out. Herr Kielce and his family were sent to Auschwitz. We ran to Poland. Those Nazi bastards invaded there, too. My mother was shot for hiding me in a closet, and my father and I were put in camps as well.

I keep seeing her in my head, lying on the floor in the kitchen. Her eyes focused on me until they shot her a second time. If this is what German is, then I am not.

Ravensbrück Camp: June 5, 1944

“The first night is the scariest,” they say.

I sat alone on my bunk after my first client left, choking back heavy sobs. Tears stung my eyes, but I dared not make a sound for fear of the guard outside my door. With my legs curled to my chin, I wept silently for the last part of myself I’d managed to steal away only to have it stolen from me like all the other trifles.

I had but one client tonight, a skeleton of a man with a patchy shaved head and empty eyes unconcerned with pleasantries or graciousness as one might be in the world of the living. He had come claiming what he’d paid for with the sweat of his back, throwing bodies into the furnace, and left without a word. That was what scared me most—his emptiness. Was that what the camp made you, mindless and indifferent to pain? How awful it must be to feel nothing, being no better than a stray dog hunting for food.

Sleep, if you’d call it that, found me writhing under the thin blanket, and awakening at every sound. The house had shut down and everyone lay asleep in her bed, but the man’s haunting eyes hang in the darkest places of my room hovering static and unfeeling. Dead eyes.

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This morning I woke, made my bed, and found a seat by the windows. The other women sit and talk at a long wooden table. Some speak of families and friends, others of the men they had seen. My body still hurt and I had no desire to engage in their petty talk.

I didn’t want to cry as the memories from the past night seeped back into my mind, but despite my efforts, once again tears streamed from my eyes.

“Not what you expected is it, kid?” came a voice from the table behind me.

I wiped away the tears and turn to see twenty sets of eyes watching me. They seemed sympathetic and concerned with their motherly gazes offering pity. The woman who spoke looked older than the others, maybe close to thirty with piercing blue eyes and beautiful blond hair that swept down her back.

I shook my head. “No, not at all.”

“Well, we all fell for the same thing.” She put down her book. “I’m Eliana. How old are you, schnuki?”

“I turned nineteen just before they brought me in here.”

“Nineteen!” another woman said with astonishment. “That’s the youngest they’ve brought through here.”

A woman stepped into the room from the hall where our rooms were, “What did they get you for? They got me for prostitution. Punishing with the crime.”

“My father owned a business with a Jew.” Tears formed again. “They shot my mother.”

Ravensbrück Camp: June 20, 1944

I liked sitting on the porch overlooking the camp. The other women stopped trying to talk to me when I stopped answering. They saw four or five clients a night without missing a wink of sleep. I had no desire to take part in their meager attempts at happiness and normalcy. The women I saw returning from their assignments in the labor section of camp filthy and thin, seemed more acute to the lifeless heartbeats around them. Though numb to the sharp sting, the throbbing pulse of pain meant they still clung to life if only by the single finger. They saw my full stomach and showered hair as a sign of an easy life, but they do not know. I didn’t realize the mutuality in envious glances, until I met the eyes of a young Jewish woman. She couldn’t have been much older than

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eighteen, the same as I had been when I was brought to the camp. I saw in her the same heart-wrenching longing to go back to the way it was before the camp—before brutal men won countries. They gave me a choice “joy division” for six months or labor indefinitely.

She would never be offered that choice. As pretty as she was, she would be thrown into the chamber with the rest of the Jews.

I watched from the porch as the sun falls behind the distant trees signaling it was soon time to start the night shift. The guards would come soon and start assigning the prisoners to a room.

“You okay, schnucki?” Eliana asked from the doorway.

“Fine,” I stated plainly without turning around to look at her.

She stepped out on to the porch and made her way to sit on the rail across from me. She lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the open air. I could feel her eyes studying me in the quickly fading light of the day. Her long blond hair curled around her face but otherwise hung straight down her back. She often wore blouses that clung to her trim figure, exposing the engraved black words “feld-hure” scrawled across her chest. I kept mine covered in attempt to hide the shame I felt. She seemed to embrace the words, or at least not care to notice their presence.

I’d studied all of them, watching as they laughed and talked with each other, waiting for a crack in their gild of happiness. Eliana never let the others see, but when she thought no one was watching, sorrow would overwhelm her otherwise seamless glow.

“They told me they would release my husband if I served here for six months. I remember the first night thinking that I have to do this for my husband; that it was the only way to free him. I couldn’t help but feel I’d betrayed him in some way. I miss him so much.” She paused, looking out at the camp. “Assholes forgot to tell me they’d already sent him to the chamber.”

“I’m sorry,” I managed to say but couldn’t find the words to continue.

“It’s not your fault. He lost his left hand in the mines. He wouldn’t have been able to work.” She watches me for a moment. “I see you out here day after day, and I know how you must be feeling, but you should know that you’re not alone. Every single one of us has given up the same indispensable part of ourselves.”

“What’s that?”

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“Our dignity.”

“Can I ask you something?” I turned to look at her.

“Of course.

“If you could go back, would you choose here or labor?”

She sighed and played with the hem of her shirt.

“Did I ever tell you I have three babies staying with a family in Kent?—Eleven, nine, and five. Whatever I have lost in here, I lost it for them. At least we have a chance to make it out of here.” Eliana stubbed out the cigarette on the railing and took my hand.

“Just keep faith. God hasn’t abandoned us yet.”

Dachau Camp: March 15, 1945

The night was over and I stand under the hot stream of water, rinsing away the lingering odor of the men from my skin. The other women had finished and retired to their beds finally able to rest after one of the busiest nights in the house.

It’s almost as if a set of wings fluttered within me or if the soft tassels of a dandelion were sent gliding through my abdomen. Somehow it is a part of me, but not my own. As if I am rushing over a waterfall, hope suddenly engulfs me in warm rays of light. I want—I need to live in order to save my baby from the fate of the camp.

I slip back to my room careful of the lingering guards in the hallways. I’d heard stories of other girls getting pregnant in the camps. The thought alone sent shivers down my spine. They won’t find out. It is my secret and mine alone for the sake of myself and of my unborn baby. Most nights, I spend with a hand softly resting on the small hint of a bump waiting for another signal that my hope still lived.

Today I sit by myself as I usually do contemplating when it could’ve happened. I’d arrived in Dachau five months earlier and passed the entrance examination, so at most I could be that—five months. I’d noticed I was gaining weight, but I attributed it to eating more. I tried to wear looser blouses, but found myself pulling the fabric tight across my stomach when no one was looking.

“Come with me.” Eliana pulls me from my chair.

Ever since Ravensbrück, she had taken to looking out for me. She tells me stories of her family and where she grew up. We were both from Austria. She had sent her children away, and she and her husband tried to cross the border into Switzerland when

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they were caught. Sometimes when shadows crept out of the dark, I would tiptoe to her room. She would sing German lullabies until I fell asleep next to her. We had found each other good company and more so friends.

We arrive in the back part of the kitchen, where she closes and latches the door.

Moving to the back door she peers out making sure none of the guards were posted outside. She then turns scanning me vigorously for a moment.

“What do you think you’re doing? If they catch you…”

“They won’t.”

“They will! They always do. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“You said yourself the Americans were closing in on the camp. We just have to make it a little longer.”

“Rumors only. No one knows for sure. It could be months until they arrive. You should tell them now and maybe they will let you keep it.”

“You know they won’t. You don’t understand. We’re going to make it out of here.”

The way she looks at me was something I’d never seen in her before. She wants so badly to believe it was true—that we would all escape hell, but years in the camp hold her back forcing her to see only darkness. After all, we were women of the night.

“Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

Dachau Camp: April 24, 1945

They come for me in the middle of the night, pulling me by my hair to the infirmary. I scream and one of the guards kicks me with a heavy boot in the stomach.

Everything freezes in that moment. I know why they’d come and it is too late now. They drag me onto one of the operating tables and strap me to bed. The next moments fade in and out of blackness, but I see him—I see my baby boy. He lay perfectly still in a bloody mess discarded to a basin to be thrown out like garbage. I like to think he was sleeping.

His hands clenched tightly by his face were just big enough to hold the tip of a finger. If only, it were merely sleep. When they take him away, I scream until one of the men in white jabs a syringe in my arm.

They drop me off in my room as soon as they finish with the stitches that hold together the jagged edges of their incision. There are different kinds of empty. Hungry empty, emotionally empty, but the worse and truest empty comes when you have

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absolutely nothing left. I lay in my bed staring at the ceiling.

Alone. Torn from me like everything else in this world, Michal’s gone—named after my father. What did I have left? My mother shot twice and pulled out into the street, my father sent away to a work camp to be run into the ground, and now my sweet baby. There’s more to live for in death than in life. At least, I could see them all again.

Dachau Camp: April 26, 1945

“Look, Michal! They’re leaving,” I say.

Outside our window, I can see the rows and rows of the walking skeletons lined up before the gate. The day has come that we will be free. I dress as quickly as I can without pulling at my stitches and gather the few possessions I owned, placing everything in a small bag on my bed.

“I’ll pack your things in a moment. Have you seen my…here it is.”

I can hear the front door open and the heavy boots of one of the guards. I open the door to hear Eliana as she speaks with him:

“You and the other girls are to stay here. No one is to leave the house. Is that understood?”

“Yes, of course. May I ask what is going on?”

“Berlin has us moving the prisoners to another camp. If you would keep the other girls from leaving, it would be in their best interest.”

He moves past her and walks straight for me.

“You’re to come with me.”

He takes my arm and half drags me behind him. I scream and pull against him.

“Michal!”

“Leave her. She’s no use to you!” Elaina begs, taking my other hand.

“Verpiss dich.” The guard slaps Elaina. “Get these girls to their rooms or you will join us.”

I struggle more and the guard pulls out a pistol. He holds it to my head, but I continue to struggle. He points the gun to Elaina.

“Be still or I’ll shoot her.”

I stop fighting and let him drag me out. Elaina holds her cheek. I take her hand

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and kiss her untouched cheek as we pass her.

“Pass auf dich auf, mein Freund,” I say. “Go find your babies.”

The guard leads me out the door to the front of the camp where the lines stretched back through the rows of weathered, gray buildings. Hundreds, mostly men, stand as shadows of their former selves. Their faces hollow and sunken like those of skeletons. Clothing is scarce and most wear only a simple cloth covering their extremities. Each rib protrudes from their bare backs, showing the extent of their suffering. These aren’t the men of camp I knew.

I stand hunched over, clutching my stomach where the stitches held my womb closed. This is the first time in two days I even bothered to stand, and now we are set to march. Elaina had brought food to my room, but I refused her efforts to bring me from my mourning. The sun rose above the distant mountains and the gates open, revealing a darkened forest still in the shadows of night.

We barely leave the gates and I find myself exhausted. Each step feels like miles of walking. I fall back in the ranks with my legs growing heavy. My stitches throb, soaking my thin shirt with blood. The strain of keeping pace tears some of the stitches away. The sun shines down from above as we reach the top of the hills overlooking a beautiful valley filled with thousands of small white flowers.

My world stops, spiraling down a deep blackness overpowering my senses. I awake to the sunlight’s warmth upon my face and the sweet scent of the mountain flowers filling the air. Birds chirp somewhere in the distance and a seamless blue pours over the sky. Everything else fades away. I remember this, life outside the walls.

Building pressure on my chest draws me from my dream state, extinguishing the fresh air from my lungs with biting pain. Standing above me, a looming black figure of a man holds a pistol at my head. He shouts something that I can’t determine. He cocks the pistol. I don’t struggle under his weight. I simply closed my eyes and let the light fill me, lifting me away to Michal.

I am not 27998; I am not a feld-hure. I am Ilse Müller.

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Reflex Action Bryce Detweiler

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Pursuit Sarina Bosco He had a preoccupation with wrists. With throats and the insides of mouths and tear ducts. Watching women bend at the waist to gather dianthus, watching the young men’s bodies knot.

Humans have a way of forgetting to worship the gods and worshipping each other instead. Most likely mistaking the moments of twilight for a time when they can go unseen; but he heard them. Passing storms of the flesh.

Perhaps if it had just been the women, the other gods would have said something; watching from Cyprus trees and the edges of streams, as he delved into their mortal bodies. Cleaved to them.

But they could smell each other like animals do.

The desperation in him like mist on the air; lingering after, as the women cried. As the men sat in shock.

And he licking the salt of their bodies from his lips. A god’s own search for the divine, found confusingly in that which they deem chaotic and grotesque. At dusk on the edge of mountains he likened them to oysters or young trees still green when you strip away the bark.

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Eluveitie

McKenna Sickels

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A Religious Experience Connor Feeney The priest approached the bar, a near empty glass of beer in his hand, and scanned the row for a proper bar stool at which to sit. He chose the stool next to mine and gave me a slight nod of the head as he pulled it out. We sat there in silence for a few minutes, until I decided to strike up a conversation.

“Isn’t that a bit un-priest-like?” I said, pointing to the few sips of beer settled at the bottom of his glass. He was a diminutive man, dressed crisply. His priest’s collar was neat; his pants finely pleated. It was his receding hair line that struck me the most.

He puffed a shot of air from his nose, a polite recognition of the joke I had made, and answered, “How are you?”

“Hell, I’m good, Father. You?”

“Doing well. Thank you.” The conversation trailed off, caught in the wisp of some bar patron’s cigarette smoke. I didn’t know quite how to talk to him. Nor did I know what to talk about. I thought about mentioning religion, but that would be too obvious. I began to wonder about him, about his life. Why was he drinking on a Wednesday night? I wondered if his wife kicked him out too. Then, I wondered if priests could have wives, or if he was a priest at all. Maybe he was a pastor. What is the difference between a pastor and a priest? I began to confuse myself, so I fell back on sports.

“Damn shame what they’re doing to the Eagles.”

“Excuse me?”

“Fuckin’ take another quarterback in the first round, then sign Hackenberg for three million.”

“Oh, yes, the Eagles”

“I mean, Hackenberg’s as old as you and me!”

The priest just kind of looked at me and gave me a slight nod. Again, the conversation died out and we sat there in silence. I asked the bartender to bring me another glass of beer. He asked what kind and I told him it didn’t matter and it really

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didn’t. I would have ordered another beer for the priest, but I didn’t have the cash. I didn’t think my credit was any good here either.

The bartender brought me the beer. I sipped it and tried to remember why exactly I had started talking to the priest. I couldn’t. We sat there in silence for another minute or so. I couldn’t take it anymore.

“So, how’s Christianity treatin’ ya?”

“I’m sorry?”

He was giving me nothing to work with. “I don’t know, like, how’s your job?”

“Oh. It’s good.”

“Which church you work at?”

“St. Margaret’s.”

“Oh yeah, I heard of that. Off 33 right?” The priest nodded and looked down at his hands. I tried to pick the conversation back up, “I pass there almost every day. I noticed it’s been pretty deserted, lately.”

“Yes, not many come this time of year.”

“Yeah, I guess this is kind of your guys’ offseason, huh? That space between Easter and Christmas?”

“You could say that.”

“Yeah, I haven’t been to my church lately.” It was true. I hadn’t seen the inside of a church for three months. Last time was probably right before I started sleeping on my brother’s couch. “Been meaning to go, though.” That was true, too.

As I was saying that last bit, the priest reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He flipped it open and peeled off a couple of bills and laid them on the counter.

He nodded his head at me and said goodbye. And that was it. He left. I guess I won’t be going to his fucking church.

I looked down at my wrist and read the time: 6:06. The show was at 6:30. I quickly swallowed the last few gulps of my beer and threw five bucks down next to the empty glass. As I did this, I saw something glimmer in the light, standing out against the faded wood of the bar top. I stooped over to investigate.

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It was a tiny crucifix, complete with a miniature, dead Jesus. I picked it up and let it slide into my palm. The priest must have left it there. I considered it for a moment more, shoved it down into my pocket, and rushed out of the bar.

Outside the school auditorium, I searched the crowd to see if she was among the bustling horde of proud parents. I slipped by a set of even-prouder grandparents to enter the auditorium. Everyone was carefully selecting their seats, clumping in their parental cliques and buzzing with feigned excitement to watch their kids butcher classical music.

I found a seat as quickly as possible. Around me, couples oozed with public displays of love for their families.

The first part of the show was standard. The sixth-grade chorus struggled through a couple of foreign songs and the seventh grade band squeaked some truncated Gershwin. The conductor had to stop and restart the band twice because they had fucked the song up so badly. I couldn’t remember if my daughter was in sixth or seventh grade, but I knew she played the trumpet. There was no spotting her among the mass of uniformed kids and glinting instruments. I just hoped she was in sixth grade and not a part of that Gershwin debacle.

At intermission, I spotted my wife from across the auditorium. I hadn’t seen her for quite some time. Three months already. I didn’t want to talk to her and I didn’t think she wanted to talk to me, but I went over to her anyway.

“Hey.”

“Oh.” Her voice seemed crawl back inside her. I think she may have flinched.

“How’ve you been?”

“Uh.” She shifted from her right foot to her left. “Well, okay.”

“Yeah?” Her eyes flitted in her head, searching for something else to settle on.

They seemed to reject my image. For once, I had no words to fill the silence. “You sure do look good.” That came out wrong.

She furrowed her brow. The corners of her mouth turned down and she muttered hesitantly, “Thanks.”

I tried to recover, “I mean, you always do.”

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“Yeah, I get it.”

“It’s just…I miss you.” I was not very convincing. Not because I didn’t miss her; I did. I just had trouble concealing the frustration in my voice. I always felt like I had to pull words out of her head.

“I’m sure.”

Her coldness sunk into my chest; she had a way of restricting my breathing. I didn’t understand why she had to be like this. I was just trying to be polite. “Come on, hon. Please don’t be that way.”

“What way?”

My temper reached a boil and I spat, “You know what the fuck I mean.”

At this, her shoulders slid down her torso, and she exhaled as if she had finally shrugged off some great weight. Her eyes, which so many years ago blazed with brilliance, at last darkened, and they drifted to the stage. The house lights flickered in warning. I realized how useless this all was. Suddenly, I stopped regretting our constant arguments, our marriage, our hiatuses. Now, I only regretted having approached her.

I regretted ruining her evening, ruining her life. I stuck my hands in my pockets and started for the exit. My middle finger brushed the crucifix and I began to walk faster. I thought of the church off 33.

It was a typical church, I guess. The ceilings were extremely high and I figured they wanted to try and reach Heaven but then remembered they had a tight budget. The walls were lined with a step-by-step re-telling of Christ’s crucifixion. A bit morbid for me. And directly ahead was an enormous sculpture of the world’s most iconic corpse, towering over every row of un-cushioned wood. Even more morbid yet.

I spotted the priest kneeling in the first pew and slid quietly into the pew behind him. He heard me and turned to see who I was. A look of genuine shock washed over his face and he smiled at me.

“This is a surprise.”

“Yes.”

“A pleasant one, of course. What brings you here?”

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I extended my hand to him, the crucifix lay in my palm. “You left this behind.”

“Ah. Are you sure it was me that left it?”

“Who else would it have been?”

He laughed silently, but warmly. He was one of those people who laughed with their eyes. He stood up and moved to my pew. As he did so, he picked up a tiny Bible from the end of the row. “Well, anyway, I’m very glad you came. I thought I recognized you in the bar. I see you there often when I stop in nights.”

I nodded my head solemnly. I had been in there a lot in the past three months.

“What reason do you have to drink on a weeknight?”

“Well, I always kind of hope for something like this to happen.”

I didn’t follow. “What?”

He dismissed my confusion with a polite shake of his head. He scooped the crucifix from my palm, which still hung between us like a bridge too short to reach the other side. “Is this little thing the only reason you came in here?”

“I guess not.”

“Well?”

“I’ve…I’ve just been having a tough time lately.”

“Would you like to talk about it?”

I did want to talk about it. I hadn’t talked to anyone about it. Not even my brother. He cared; it’s just that he didn’t know how to talk about something as delicate as this. I figured the priest knew how.

“Yes.” Finally, my voice cracked and tears leaked out of my eyes. They trickled into the corners of my mouth; they tasted stale.

“There, there.” The priest put his hand on my back and offered me a tissue. It was all wrinkled up from being in his pocket. I wondered if the crucifix had been wrapped up inside it. I started to wonder if he left the crucifix on the bar on purpose.

For the next forty minutes I explained to him the entirety of my marital issues.

And for forty more, he explained to me how Jesus could help me solve my issues. Jesus wanted me to try again with my wife. Jesus thought we could make it work, at least for

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our daughter’s sake. Jesus had faith in me, even if I hadn’t always had faith in him.

The priest read Bible quotes about marriage. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love...make every effort to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

Over the course of his speech, I felt my heart rise within me. Each quote worked to lift the weight off my mind. I thanked the priest and headed out the church, remembering to cross myself with a bit of holy water on the way out. It felt just like average water, only it smelled funny. Today, I relished its old, musty smell.

I passed a man on the way out. He was about my age and I recognized something about him. Perhaps it was the helplessness I had felt just two hours before. But now I was a new man, and soon he would be too. I had faith in that.

Just before leaving, I thought to light one of the votive candles in the church’s atrium. I dropped a few coins in the collection jar and picked out a candle. I lit it and the flame whipped around in a crazed dance. I admired its beauty before heading out the door.

I got in my car and drove but decided not to turn down my brother’s street. I kept going a few more blocks and pulled up outside my house. I stepped out of the car and stood on the sidewalk, breathing deeply the night air, which was surprisingly cool for May. The house was dark except for my wife’s bedroom window. Its light reached through the darkness and touched my face.

I thought for a moment about our honeymoon. I didn’t want to go originally; I didn’t think we could get the money together. But she insisted, and I wanted so badly to please her. It wasn’t much, but we spent a weekend at the Jersey Shore. In those fleeting moments, we spent too much time thinking about the future, planning our lives. If only I knew then this was the future we were headed toward. I would have dug my toes into that sand a little deeper, swam a little further from shore; I would have let myself get lost in each moment, the way we used to when we were teenagers.

20

Now I stood in front of the house we used to share, so very far from the coast. I felt hopelessly landlocked. I wanted to burst into my house, wake my daughter up and tell my wife to get packing. I wanted to take them to the beach for the first time. I wanted to show my family I was a new man.

But I just stood there on the sidewalk, paralyzed. I felt more and more like the same old husband that was kicked out of his house, the same father who couldn’t remember his daughter’s age. I felt my rekindled faith slipping, retreating from the bleak reality before me. Before it slipped any further, I got in my car and drove back to the church. In my side mirror, I caught my wife’s bedroom light going out.

I entered the church quietly. I didn’t want to disturb the man and the priest. I heard the priest reading him Bible quotes about marriage. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love...make every effort to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

Hearing them again, these ancient words had no effect on me. The priest lifted his head to look at me, and I smiled and waved to him. He nodded his head in return. I don’t think I could explain to him how much he helped me; I don’t think he would understand.

I turned around, plugged my nose at that old, musty smell, and re-entered the atrium. As I opened the door to the outside, a strong rush of wind blew past me and put out every candle in the display.

21

This Project is Killing Me Michelle Westhoff

22

Breaking Art School Habits Evin Schmidt I see the canvas the competition I learned about this one in Art History had to study his work at least half the term I know that he is a Master Painter but competition he must remain if I am to believe someone like me could get better and better and better better than him scrutinizing all of the finest details I am wondering:

did he mean to let the tooth of the canvas

show here

and not there?

the figures seem disproportionate

I’m really not sure about his palette choices eyes following the pattern of his strokes tracing the wood grain along the side of that house set against a stark black sky with no stars a choice no doubt to accentuate that soft yellow porchlight

23

it happens again, the painting steals me the frame holds out its hand and I am persuaded, romanced, thrown off my feet in Paint wondering: did he sigh into himself and concentrate, focus-eyes like a telescope until he tumbled from his own forehead slow motion and beautiful head-first into the wisely nuanced subtleties of that wood grain his spirit falling, smaller than a flea. gaining momentum and losing speed, as his body in this physical world is hypnotized to keep painting he probably fell into an even smaller size until he lands with a thud and a pigment splash before he can stand he is already running leaving pigment behind, throwing it forward, Unbridled Freedom did he run on and on and on until the painting kicked him out: a huddled mass on the ground to look up and see the beauty his body was allowed to create

24

did he drag himself into the bed as the Sun is watching smiling as he is drifting to dreaming the tired satisfaction of lost hours existing in and for the canvas the importance of such a sabbatical so much more than mortal competition

25

26

Untitled Kems Sylvain

27

Don’t Look Now Mason Boyles

Jermaine is easy. A little grease and you’ve got him. “I was in the war,” you say, then he’ll give it to you. Plenty of the rest have more but they’re trickier, they want to connive you out of it, they’ll keep their heads where the spat-out gum goes and put in earphones. Those are the ones you say nothing to. You’ve got to act like you aren’t even trying anymore, and when they see you—they will always see you, these kinds of people— they well up with some impossible instinct, thinking for example of a hundred times they’ve wronged society at large, and toss you one generous bill to atone for it all on their way by. You grab that bill and you go buy you a milkshake. Jermaine, though, he’s the gravy.

It’s a good summer. A little cloud, a little rain. I lost the dog hitching back from Charlotte but that sharpened me. For a while I’d forgotten how much harder it is when there’s no pet for them to see you with. First day I got back, Jermaine asked me what had happened to it. I told him cancer; couldn’t take it to the vet, you know, due to obvious limitations. He folded up the five before he handed it over.

I sit in front of the courthouse and smoke. The mayor goes by. The lawyers go by. In each briefcase a little hunk of America, stamped and sealed for court approval. I like to watch them, plus there’s nice shade.

Little after ten Jermaine shows up. Because of the limp I see him before he sees me—that left side of his listing down, perpetually stooping to hand over alms. No one wants to see a man like that. Hurts to watch them from your privilege of evenness, parallel ground to shoulders. No one wants to see men like me, either, and that’s why Jermaine is the gravy. We’re the ones who make parallels with each other.

He probes on over with his cane but no cash. Holding a frown in his lips, too; how wretched, those split wrinkled things.

“Got nothing much today,” he says. That brief case of his a pendulum in his good hand. “Got something to tell you though.”

The problem is his daughter. Twenty-three and shows up in the kitchen unannounced, the flaccid boyfriend lurking along with an infant in each arm. Looking

28

like something well south of the grave. Every part of her gone concave, all that Princeton money shot up through her elbows. Of course they took her in.

Days she haunted her way around the house, rooting for valuables. Nights the boyfriend showed up at the backdoor with the infants and pockets full of chemical appeasement. From the daughter’s room crinkling plastic, then silence, then the soft whine of the children. Jermaine went to check on them, finally—their babies but also his own—and there was the whole thing, spread out before him like a tardy prophecy.

Daughter and boyfriend propped up by the bedframe and sinking into carpet. One infant crawling freely between them. The other with a needle through its hand.

“Should have been too much for anyone,” he says, but his wife ached with motherhood and beat him back before he could call the state.

Now we sit. Lawyers drifting by us on currents of hourlies, dollars sticking to them each time they take the courthouse steps. These lawyers, they would have more to say to him than I do. What a poor choice I make for confidant. A long time ago—well before I lost that dog—I was drained of all sympathy. Still, Jermaine searches me with his silence. Limps through it, looking for me to be a cane to him.

“Well,” I say, “It’s been a good summer, at least.”

Jermaine looking at my backpack. Smelling the nicotine, probably. “You ever been like that?”

“Like what?”

“My daughter.”

I wither him real thin with my eyes. Crisp under his sunburn. That whole left side shrunk back toward his spine. Oh, this man—if he knew the things I’ve done. The sand and rust I’ve waded through, the slick white tiles of waiting rooms at offices where there is nothing really to wait for. And he asks me about some minor crisis of brain chemistry?

“I can appreciate it,” is all I can tell him.

He creaks up from the bench with his cane. Not much taller standing, sagging down from briefcase and burden. “I’m going in to work,” he says. He says, “when I’m finished I’ll take you to meet her.”

29

His car is too big and his house is too small. I sweat through the passenger’s seat on the drive across town, sitting knees folded to my chest like a child. So much floorboard. I’m trying not to think of the Humvees back in the desert, the guns we kept aimed at the windows all the way to Fallujah. Jermaine sightless and empty behind the wheel until he jerks us into park, him too trying not to think of something.

Brown grass but flowers in the garden. His wife moving among them, clipping patiently. Jermaine takes me up the stoop without a word to her.

“Ready?” he says.

She is rolled out across the sofa. Ribs strewn over her bare chest. Eyes not just closed but pinched shut as if she’s trying not to see something. There is no woman to her. No beauty. I’m thinking Pieta, Deposition. The weight of it all—I can see why Jermaine sags in his shoes.

He nods to me, some one-sided signal, and leaves for the kitchen.

What else to do? I sit down by his daughter’s bare feet.

No movement from her. Throbs of breath push through her throat. Those eyes still pinched shut, toes and fingers curled against air. I’ve seen something like this before. There was a house we cleared too quick. A room through the back wall of a closet. Swinging past that door with a flashlight, tasting the piss and mildew—it’s another thing I try not to think about.

Instead I think of her deepest parts. Her dryness. Impossible to imagine children gestating there. A fly lands on her knee; I brush it off. She’s a drainpipe and a sieve.

Then—no warning behind this, either—she sits up with her eyes still closed.

“Are you a counselor?”

“No.”

“Are you here to talk to me?”

Jermaine is watching us from the kitchen, crunching cereal dry out of the box.

“I think so,” I tell her.

So she opens her eyes and boy, are they something. Milky opal, neither quite the shade of the other, pooled around the pupils. The whites all pink and varicose. Mine got that way at ranger camp when they kept us up for sixty hours with music and push ups.

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“You’re tired.”

She nods. “In some ways.”

“What do you do?”

“I went to school some. I painted. Then I got tired of it.”

“You dropped out.”

“I found another way,” she says. “I was tired of everything for a while. I’d sit in my room and paint over the same pictures a hundred times before I got onto this stuff.”

Her fingers siphoning through her hair, tangling and untangling and searching for something to hold on to. I remember my own epiphany of selfness, my tiring of night shifts at the Hanes factory and my infernally sick bloated mother who drifted through rooms waiting for me to bring her prescriptions home. We all have a chance at seeing a better way, and those who don’t take it suffer by the billions as decent, quiet martyrs. So I left my mother and went to Jacksonville, then Fallujah. I funneled burning lead and sent dogs out across the sand in front of me waiting to settle into the spoils of my better way, but I never did settle.

“I used to be like you.” That’s what I tell her.

“What happened?”

“I ran out of people who cared about me.”

That night I get the couch. The flaccid boyfriend drifts in and I recognize him, I’ve seen him a thousand times on all the medians and benches and street corners I stay away from. He is the worst kind of my kind, and that’s why he has the babies with him.

A car window might roll down and he will hold them up, each one a piggy bank, and when the money comes he won’t say anything, he won’t even look at it. Too ashamed to acknowledge himself. He drops the kids into a crib in the corner. His pockets bulge with the product; his veins bulge with anticipation.

Jermaine’s wife comes in with diapers. She cleans the babies. She feeds them.

She has broken Jermaine and the daughter has broken her, each one putty to the other.

She drags the crib into her room without looking at me.

I could leave now but it’s raining. The courthouse is the other side of town and the shelter is closed up already. The house reeks—not just mildew now, but piss.

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Ammonia. A.C. fluid. Everything stinks with the cartilage of living. When I can’t take it I go to the porch for a cigarette and watch the rain weep down thick and slow. Never got rain like this in Fallujah. Never got much of anything out there—not what I was looking for, at least.

The door creaks open and here’s Jermaine. I don’t put out my cigarette and he starts one up, too, leaning there on the railing instead of his cane.

“The babies won’t shut up,” he says. “And I can’t get my wife to talk to me.”

We listen to the rain, then we listen to the space between it. So much empty. Seems like if you yelled just right it would echo.

“I’m a weak man,” Jermaine tells me. He’s one of the quiet martyrs.

I don’t want to talk but my mouth follows him. “I was like you for a while, then I was like your daughter. They’re about the same in the end.”

“What are you like now?”

Seeing who you are in the middle of being it—that’s the need, isn’t it? The impossible need. I tell Jermaine I’ll have to think about that one.

I dream my way back to the desert. We go fast in the Humvee and our mouths ache with curses. You taste sand long enough and swallowing becomes cursing, too.

We screech into the coordinates. Fast, fast, fast, kicking doors in, no silencers so the whole block hears us. I’m up the stairs, I’m through the room with the flags and the books and the guns we were counting on, I’m feeling out the walls of the closet for that damn door. The barrel and the flashlight go first. Thick humanity crawling up my nose, sucking bile from my throat like a magnet.

I wasn’t the same back then. Or maybe I’m not the same now. It was a point of pivot, at least—that room, what I did in it—but I don’t know which direction.

When I wake up the daughter is on the couch with me.

“I want to come with you,” she says.

“Where?”

Pupils big in the moonlight, eating up all the pretty in her eyes. “Home.”

That gets me down. I sit for a while and she sits on top of me. We’re locked in static grinding but it’s been too long since I’ve felt the heat of anyone. Too long for me to

32

remember what happens.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” I ask her.

“He’s my fiancé,” she says.

“You want him to come with you?”

“Either way. He’ll be around.”

Here was this skeleton with two lurking men in her life. Jermaine still stuck giving things to people. Then the fiancé, who must have first dragged her into his own chemical misery, then gotten stomped on and subdued to a walking nadir. Through the back of it all was her mother, sticking her hands into rose bushes to appease her. Now she wanted one more to suck down below her. One more to stand on.

Well if I’d learned anything out by the courthouse it was never to stand up.

Always to slouch, go slack, hang limp and flaccid until the windfall leaves you something good. Jermaine’s daughter rides me and rides me, but not once do I grab onto her.

Finally she tumbles off.

“You aren’t much,” she says, more withered in the face for her disappointment.

Jermaine gives me cereal and a twenty. “Would you stick around for the day?” he asks. He wants me to keep both eyes on her.

It’s still raining and the courthouse is far away. I take a handful of cereal, a seat at the table.

“Where’s the wife?” I ask—a little cruel, trying to pain him.

“She went to Miami.”

“My God.”

“Visiting cousins,” he says, but that doesn’t make it sound any better.

His cane from the wall, his hat from the table, his jacket from the back of the chair. He goes slow getting ready. Starts heading for the door before he turns.

“You don’t care what other people think of you.”

I nod. My hand deep in the cereal.

“But you’re decent.”

“I try,” is what I say. But I’m thinking again of that dark room in Fallujah. The piss, the mildew, the flashlight beam and what fell under it. I’m thinking oh, if he knew.

33

“How do you do that?” he asks me.

That’s not a tough one because I did it a long time ago, way back when I left my mother and the Hanes factory.

I put down the cereal box. “You stop giving things to people.”

Jermaine swings the door open. Plinking rain hisses through the ambience.

“Just make sure she doesn’t steal any jewelry,” he says.

Jermaine trusts me because I was in the war. He was in the other war, he got his limp out of it. Everybody in a war gets something taken from them. Soon as he’s gone I head for the liquor cabinet.

All the time I’ve spent waiting in VAs, you wouldn’t believe it. I’ve been to Dallas, Newark, Charlotte—they always shuttle you straight from the airport to the clinic, they don’t want you going into the city. They did scans of my brain, then they did tests on my hormones. They sent me to groups full of guys like me, only these guys drove cars to the meetings and met their wives for dinner afterwards. These guys were sad in a compartmental way. I was saturated by sad and by something darker, too. Something more hollow.

Before I was evicted I filled myself up in various and typical ways. I tried to subjugate, to push something down so I could stand on it. I was like Jermaine’s daughter back then, clawing the black for a foothold to get out of it. Filling and filling and always more empty. But I was out of that by now. I was on the road, across from the courthouse, in Jermaine’s living room. I had all day to seep through the benches. The dreams were getting worse, though.

At the end of them—these dreams, I mean—I am in the room behind the closet. I tip my flashlight into the darkness and see the shackles first. Too big for the wrists inside them. The kid is naked and withered, he is as angled as Jermaine’s daughter when I met her on the couch, eyes sutured shut and body writhing. You see plenty of these types drooling around the living facilities stateside, they have the utmost care and medication.

But here? In a war, in a place where the people think sin has genetic consequences?

This boy locked away. Punished. It wasn’t the shit or the piss or the rotted shriveled form of him that hurt me. What did it were the cobwebs drifting down and

34

settling on the floor. They’d torn off the doorframe when I’d opened it.

The sergeant was yelling downstairs. Close-up machine guns traded ticks with far-off ones. From in here the mortars sounded like a car in the garage. Everything trembling to its foundation.

They train you in decision making. Instant risk assessment, the goal not being to compute any faster but instead to objectify: what’s the sum of things without humanity gumming it up?

Those shackles. Who knew where the keys were.

I aimed my gun down there and he wrapped around it. Eyes still closed, clinging with crooked fingers. Desperate for something nearby to hold onto. The muzzle was still warm, I bet. And that was too much humanity for me. I dropped the gun, I didn’t do the right thing.

Whole drive back to base I kept my feet off the floorboard. Eyes on the rearview.

Divots all over the sand from sizzling mortars. I was wondering how long it would take someone so lean to starve to death.

The daughter topples down the hall well north of noon. I have a whole glassworks of empties in front of me, I’m into the liquor volcano deep. Each sip tumbling down my throat and sloshing hot through the emptiness. She takes some for herself.

The whole of her collapsing into her lips as she sucks at the bottle, then exploding again when she coughs it out.

“You tell me something,” she says.

I look at her like she’s in the crosshairs of my sight. Her cheeks so thin, her face taut across her chin and forehead. She clutches the vodka as if it’s the muzzle of a gun.

Holds it and holds it, maybe still warm from my hand.

She says, “How come you won’t help me?”

Right then I could have smashed her. In my younger days—my ones when I was more like her—I’d have brought fists to it, maybe the glass, too. Whole time beating her to beat myself back. To beat back that room in the closet in Fallujah. But I’m a new man. Or an older one, at least. I’ve spent enough time at VA clinics so I take Jermaine’s cigarettes from the drawer and go to the porch to smoke them.

35

The rain has worked up to furious. I watch it fall until the drops stand out from the stream, then I watch those until they fade back into a blur again. I’m thinking about Jermaine’s question. What am I like now?

I slouch. I sit by the courthouse. I am outside of things but I still reach for them.

The bills in hands, the lawyers with their briefcases. The nicotine puts a throb down my throat. It moves through me in a tingle and next thing I’m leaning on the railing like Jermaine, hips and head aching. All the cigarettes gone at once. Maybe there weren’t many in the pack. For the life of me—of anyone—I can’t remember.

Of course there are pivot points as we go along. We’re rolling and rolling and then we’re smacked by pinball levers, we tilt away in some new trajectory toward an equally final descent. All with hope, though, with desperate certainty that where we go will be good.

Too much mind has been given over to fate, destiny, will. What needs more precedence is the physics of want. Jermaine wants his daughter better. His daughter wants her fiancé’s chemicals. I want a bench by the courthouse and maybe my dog back, too, but mostly I want to forget.

Inside the piss and mildew sting like the cigarettes. I go to the master bedroom and find the daughter doing what is expected of her. Stapled over, elbow-deep in the jewelry drawer. Pockets of her sweatpants jingling like Christmas.

“You can’t be in here,” I tell her.

She turns around. Bracelets slipping over her knuckles, too big to stay on her wrists. “I know.”

“Where’s your fiancé?”

“Out,” she says. “But he’ll be around again.”

This leeching daughter, this earnest selfish deviant. What she needs is some great tragedy to empty her.

I suture my hands firm to the bedposts. “You get away from here.”

She shrugs. Sagging from the weight of gold same as her father sags. Same, maybe, as I sag on the benches outside the courthouse.

“I was leaving anyway,” she says.

I go to the kitchen, cram the balance of the liquor back into the cabinet. I toss

36

out the empties. I wipe down the table. The daughter leaning by the sink, watching and watching me. She follows me to the door. The AC whistles through the stomp and sizzle of the rain. Under all of it the static ambience of whining infants.

“I don’t have to do anything,” she says. Her eyes closed the way they were when I met her. She isn’t looking, but I see she’s put on shoes.

“Whatever you think.”

There’s a spare rain jacket on the coatrack; I leave it for her.

Who can say what it takes to change a man. How much it takes. But Jermaine— his wife, his daughter, her lurking fiancé—twisted and strangled, tugged and tugged and tugged at me until I tilted. I know that because now I can answer Jermaine’s question.

When he brought me to his house, I was the man who would decently lie to him and drink his liquor. An outlaw in the most visceral standing: I existed outside of it, outside of these lawyer’s briefcases. But if I can tell you that’s how I am, it really means that’s how I was. Analysis only works when you’re looking back.

I go to the courthouse and sit. I watch just like I used to, but I’m starting to sleep better. Instead of the room behind the closet I dream of canes and needles, infants and thinness and eyes pinched shut. Every time it’s the same; I get rid of them.

When I see Jermaine again it’s nearly August. The rain has died down, the sun has started melting through the clouds. I’m on my bench, thinking of how good the fall will be, when a rubber and chrome monster spins into the parking lot. Sleek as a missile, this car. Something straight from space. It squeals around the curb and parks in the handicapped spot.

The man who gets out seems too tall for the doors. His head right up to the sky, sky parallel to his feet. The fabric of his three-piece glistens like water. He is furiously straight, this man, and I don’t recognize him until he’s halfway down the sidewalk. No cane. No wedding ring, either. Strutting, preening, briefcase working a high pendulum at his hip. He blows by me without looking. New Jermaine, all things lacking in spiff invisible to him.

But I’m no fool. I watch real close as he walks away. Stare at his loafers. If I squint hard enough—if I work for it—I can still see the limp.

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Remix Trifecta Victoria Gluszko

38

Petie and the White Rabbits Erica McKeen

Petie and I, we’re growing rabbits in the basement, back in the crawl space where Mum won’t go because of the spiders. They’re white and small; some of them have red eyes. We found them under a fir tree in the backyard and didn’t wait for their mother to come back, no, not one moment, because we knew she’d be vicious and loving and we probably wouldn’t be able to stand up to that sort of thing. Inside now in the crawl space, they sit in a large white clump in the corner on some newspaper we spread for them and chatter with their long teeth. Petie is positive we should feed them milk but I’m just not sure.

Petie is positive about a lot of things. For example, he thinks his father is not his real father but some sort of invader—maybe not even human—and that in the mornings instead of being the man who drives the garbage truck around the streets to collect the trash he’s really hiding in pockets of the sky. I don’t know what Petie means by this, but I like to listen to him explain how his father must pull at the edge of a cloud until it separates from the horizon and then slide in behind it.

“But what does he do in there?” I ask, even though I have heard the answer the day before, and the day before that.

“I don’t know,” says Petie, “just sits around mostly. It’s warm inside clouds, especially when the sun first comes up in the morning. Warm and dark. You can shape the clouds into whatever you want. Like apple trees and footstools. Maybe you could even shape the clouds into smells and sounds, like a bird’s call or a chainsaw, I just don’t know. Anyway, I really couldn’t tell you why he ever comes home.”

So Petie is positive about the milk. He’s found a little dish and filled it to the brim.

The rabbits push it around the crawl space with their noses, splashing white drops all over the newspaper, but they don’t do much else, and they definitely don’t drink it. So I’m just not sure.

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After watching them do this for a while and growing sick of their whimpering, Petie shuts the crawl space door and tells me the rabbits are just missing their mother and that soon they’ll get over it and realize it doesn’t matter. His face looks kind of puffed out and pale as he says this, and I think if he were to be a rabbit he would be one with red eyes. His eyes aren’t red in real life but as a rabbit I think they would be. In particular, he would probably be the rabbit that sits in the corner with the bent ear, doing nothing much but staring at the others and shifting its paws.

And then, just as if she had heard Petie talking about mothers, Mum comes in upstairs and starts calling my name. She says she’s brought something special, something she got on her way home from work. So Petie and I race upstairs and there she stands in the hallway, pulling out her hair with one hand like she always does after work and in the other holding a great big piece of cake wrapped in a napkin.

She sees Petie and sort of freezes, her body going rigid all the way up to her neck.

I guess she doesn’t really like him. She told me once before bedtime that he stares at her for too long, and another reason, I think, is that his overbite makes him look like he’s half-smiling all the time. Mum never smiles unless something really hits her in a funny place, so I don’t think she would understand Petie and his half-smile.

“Oh, Petie,” she says, lifting her eyebrows, “I really didn’t know you would be here. I really, really didn’t. I would have gotten you a slice too. Here, let’s get a knife.

Let’s split it.” Then she turns and goes into the kitchen, making loud noises with the cupboards and drawers.

“That’s okay,” says Petie, even though she’s already in a different room. “If the cake wasn’t for me then I don’t want it.”

He looks at me for a while and I look at him, then he nods and goes out the door.

When Mum comes back into the hallway she peeks out the window and watches him go.

“I really would have given him cake,” she says. The two of us sit at the dining room table in the grey light of the afternoon and eat our half of the cake. She asks me about what I did during my day and I answer her and tell her things that didn’t happen, like playing outside and watching a show on television, but really I’m thinking of Petie.

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You see, Petie doesn’t have his own mother. He likes to tell me that he never had one, that he’s an alien child who only came from his father. But then his father might not even be his real father because of the strange things he does like sit in clouds when he’s supposed to be driving dump trucks. It’s confusing and he never tells it to me all in one piece. He always ends it the same way, though, no matter where we are or what time of the day it is.

“I’m lost,” he says, not in a sad or scared way, but in a way that shows me he knows what he’s talking about. Like he knows that no one has ever really owned him, and no one ever will. “I don’t have a mother and most days I don’t even have a father. I’m a true lost boy.”

The thing is, I believe a lot of the stories that Petie tells me, I guess in the same way that anybody believes the stories that anyone tells them, but I just can’t believe that he never had a mother. Everyone has a mother. Even those rabbits had a mother before we took them away from her.

The next morning Petie comes over right after Mum leaves for work—really right after, he must have watched her car pull out of the driveway—and we run downstairs in a flash to the crawl space. The rabbits are scraggly and have yellow-streaked fur when we take them out and hold them in our hands. They’re shivering and their eyes are half-closed. A warm, brown smell pushes out of the little open door in the wall, as if the crawl space is exhaling, and Petie and I get to work at removing the newspaper which is soaked and full of wet piles of rabbit crap. The milk is completely gone, from the rabbits drinking it or from being dumped, we don’t know.

While we clean I try to tell Petie about a dream I had the night before, but he doesn’t want to listen. He’s on his tiptoes reaching into the crawl space and he doesn’t even look at me.

“No, really,” I say, waving my arms and letting loose a clump of rabbit crap from a newspaper clamped in my hand, “it was weird. You know that fir tree out in the back where we found the rabbits? Well, you and me, we were sitting beneath it, but,

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like, underground. We were sitting in its roots, you know? And below us was this dark nothing, like this black hole but it wasn’t a hole, it was just nothing, and all the little white rabbits were jumping from above us, from the real outside world and the tree, and they were tumbling down into this dark nothing. I was trying to catch them but really I just ended up hitting them and making them spin around and fall faster. You didn’t care that they were falling at all, you just watched and sort of whistled and looked pleasant.”

Petie still hasn’t turned around from reaching into the crawl space.

“And then this big crocodile came leaping up from out of the dark nothing and he had the little rabbits in his teeth and then I woke up. Isn’t that just the weirdest thing?”

Petie grunts and leans farther into the crawl space. “Did you say there was a crocodile?” he says.

“Yeah, a big one.”

“Huh,” he says. “Well, maybe we can feed it this.”

Petie turns and pulls from out of the crawl space something small and white. It’s a rabbit that is dead and limp in his hands. My mouth falls open and I guess I sort of scream because Petie flinches and squeezes the rabbit’s body.

“Oh, no,” I say, “what happened? I mean, did you just find it in there like that?

Oh, no!”

“Yeah,” says Petie, tilting the rabbit’s head up and looking down into its red eyes.

“I just found it. I guess it’s been dead all night. It must’ve been sick or something.”

“Oh, no,” I say. “Well, maybe it was the milk.”

“It wasn’t the milk,” says Petie.

“Well, it could have been is what I’m saying. Oh, really, no. Oh, no.”

Then Petie steps forward and puts the rabbit into my hands. I stand there, just sort of quiet and watchful, and feel its total deadness weigh down my fingers. Its little head rolls along my wrist, really flimsy and floppy, like it has no neck at all, and its little feet are folded over its stomach and pink on the bottoms. The fur on its back is warm.

“This rabbit is warm,” I say, playing with its little toes between my thumbs.

“So what?” says Petie.

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“So it’s warm,” I say, “like it just died right now.”

“Maybe it pissed itself before it went, or the other rabbits slept on it, or something.” He kicks a soggy lump of newspaper with his bare foot. “Anyways, we’ve got to bury it.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I guess we do.”

After that a rabbit dies every night, and we really just don’t know how to fix the problem. We even put some vegetables in beside the milk. Petie just keeps reaching in and searching for a body and eventually finding one, usually after a couple minutes of me dancing behind him and trying to get a look, which I never do because of the way his head moves always in front of mine. We bury them in the backyard underneath the fir tree where we found them in the first place. Now I wish we really had never found them, or that the mother rabbit had been there when we did, or something. I really just wish they wouldn’t keep dying all the time. Petie doesn’t seem too upset about it all. He comes every morning and rushes down the stairs like he’s full of some kind of excitement and hopefulness, and I come sort of pulling my feet behind me full of this deep dread.

Because those little rabbit bodies always have flimsy necks, and they are always warm. I just can’t understand why.

A rabbit dies every night until one morning there is only one left, and it’s the rabbit which sits in the corner with the red eyes and the bent ear—the one that stares and shifts its paws and has always reminded me of Petie. Or Petie reminds me of it. I can’t remember which came first.

Petie goes to reach into the crawl space and I pull at his shoulder and stand in his way.

“You don’t have to look today,” I say. “There’s only one left. He’s sitting there in the corner. You don’t have to look for any more bodies.”

Petie stares at me for a while and then tries to push past me, going again for the crawl space. I block him and we get in a sort of scuffle where he takes me to the ground and I start to laugh because sometimes we fight like this and it’s fun. But then Petie

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throws his knuckles at my mouth and my tooth feels sort of loose and I taste this sharp red water and Petie pulls himself off me and goes again for the crawl space. I grab his ankle and he shakes me off. Then he’s got the red-eyed and staring rabbit and he runs up the stairs with it and is gone.

By the time I get off the floor, upstairs, and into the hallway, Petie has left from my house. I hear the front door slam and see him through the window running down the driveway. I also see a bundle of white fur in his arms and I think maybe the rabbit is still alive but really it probably is not.

That night Petie’s dad shows up at my house and says he doesn’t know where Petie is. Mum answers the door and then calls my name. Petie’s dad is thin and has a long beard. Above his beard and his nose are these solid blue eyes that really are the color of the sky on one of those perfect summer days. His name is Joe, I think. He smells like cigarettes and fish.

“He wasn’t home for supper,” says Joe, pulling his hands through his beard. “I haven’t seen him all day, not since this morning before I left for work. I thought he was over here but then it got dark, and… and… and I should have started to worry earlier, I suppose.”

“Oh, no,” Mum says, “Petie’s always here. There was no reason to worry. But he, well, he isn’t here. So maybe you should have worried. What I’m saying is it’s not your fault. And now we just have to think of what to do.”

Joe half-smiles. He has an overbite too, probably, under that beard. He looks over Mum’s shoulder like maybe he wants to come inside but she stands firmly in the doorway, one hand on the door and the other on the frame.

“Now we just have to think of what to do,” Mum repeats, and then motions at me to get the telephone.

Petie still isn’t anywhere to be found the next morning. Joe called Mum and Mum called Joe and they both decided it was just time to wait and see. No one out of the three of us could think of a place that Petie could have gone, and the police really had no idea

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either. I guess they had been up searching all night and had found nothing but those scummy things you find when you are searching for lost boys in the city, like homeless people and maybe some dead kittens.

So it’s morning and Petie is gone and I’m feeling sort of melancholic—a word Petie taught me—so I go out in the backyard to the fir tree where we buried all those rabbits. We’ve been burying so many rabbits for so many mornings that I guess it feels like a ritual that I don’t really want to give up. I kneel down beside the fir tree and feel the cool, grey air pushing around me and know that summer is almost over, and know also that I will probably never see Petie again. It’s just this feeling I get, this great big hole in my stomach, like there was a reason I had that dream about us sitting in the roots of the fir tree. Like there was a reason Petie didn’t care that the rabbits were falling into the dark nothing or that the crocodile came up with the rabbits in its teeth. I never did see Petie’s teeth, even with his overbite. His half-smile never opened all the way.

And then, kneeling there beside the fir tree, I hear something funny and high and very, very small. I bend down and see beneath the branches something white and fluffy sticking out of the overturned dirt, the stuff that has been covering all those baby rabbit bodies all this time. The fluffy white thing has red eyes and a bent ear. It’s wailing and screaming and I pull it out of the ground and hold it to my chest. It writhes in my arms, screams one more time, and then dies right there in my hands, its one bent ear tucked between two of my fingers and the fur on its back warm from the dirt and the bodies of its brothers and sisters. I guess it was really just shocked or it was just that close to dying when I heard it there in the ground, but whatever the reason it died in my hands and I didn’t bury it under the fir tree with the others. I didn’t want it tumbling between those roots.

In fact, I didn’t really know what to do with it. I ended up tucking it in my pants pocket for the time being, its little ears sticking out against my leg, and walked inside.

Before I closed the back door behind me I looked up at the remains of the summer sky and I saw this one white cloud, pushing out against the grey. It was white like the rabbits

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and the milk, but it was also white like the crocodile’s teeth. I wondered if Petie had finally gotten behind it somehow, had lifted its corner and hopped right in—warm and dark, he said it was. I thought if he had really done it, if he had really gotten behind the cloud, he wasn’t going to be like his dad. He wasn’t ever going to come back out.

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new england, shifting Sarina Bosco for Drew I. I have found where the rabbits lie and it is true that it smells of decay; things only rot among the roots of the forsythia. I’ve let the thistle grow too large, a constellation spread amongst the fallen leaves collecting dew and the quivering bodies of bees.

The ochre door where it has been these last two seasons under the grape vines is dampened by insects. It is the dreaming place of field mice. I place my head carefully beneath the devouring branches and listen for the pill bugs.

II. The accident tomatoes break through near the drain pipe and grow like bruises, purple and thick.

Some tumble to the ground and I confuse them for the planets that hang low on the horizon.

I am awake and waiting for the frost.

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I dream of it the night before – fracturing across the mirror and diffusing the light.

That morning barefoot I secret the globes away to breathe inside of paper bags, to ripen under force, their skin splitting the seeds half-formed.

III. How could you have existed here with my life already so full?

The fragrant soups, the wildflowers, the slivered moons and the cigar tree flowering always. Perhaps I could have used another set of hands to cradle the tomatoes this past season, but then I would not have known the abundance nor the solitude.

And the wine would not have tasted so bitter and rich without the loss of you.

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September’s Children Kris Swanson Inside they kneeled Dawn spoke to their hanging heads, their thoughts distracted9 Infected with the songs singing in their minds13 Evening continued into a dark abyss Digging into their minds now lost Finding the missing note skating aimlessly15 Ovens seething their bodies Roasting a taste most fowl Transported they lay19 Heaving water from within collapsed lungs22 Eyes uninvited Intruding disbeliefs shot into their brains23 Reaping the fears they had once sown Sweet hors-d’oeuvres dangling under their noses29 Inviting them along the path1 Near a concrete resolution29 Spotting the train to take them home30

9 13 15 19 22 23 29 29 30

Romans 5:15 James 1:17 2 Corinthians 9:15 Philippians 4:13 Matthew 18:18 1 Corinthians 13:13 Matthew 19:19 Proverbs 17:17 2 Corinthians 2:14

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Masquerade Taylor Frey

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Where is Your Rupture?

Christopher Eskilson Point it out and trace it with your finger doing cursive with your body’s malcontents.

But you’ve never been the finest at calligraphy, those swoops and zags, the impossibility of O’s bemusing you a chubby kid that one day grew up skinny just by thinking hard enough.

Connecting all the letters through the most intricate of squiggles has never made much sense; each letter is an individual striving for some meaning outside the spelling of a word.

Can you see your cracking skin, rifts of flesh, blood runs along a fault line forged by considering perhaps they’re always right and you’re nothing else but wrong.

This couldn’t cause the earthquake on its own— it just triggered what tectonic plates could do for you as seismic master of your mind.

Look how the bone’s exposed— who knew it was that white in real reality, that terrifying to the eye when all around it’s fruit punch and the steak of human.

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On Singing the Wind Songs Julia Cavicchi In the bamboo forest, one tree has toppled. I have no idea how long ago but now—for what was story, and what was photograph, and what I truly saw are all inseparable now—the other trees are sprawled out under its weight. And every summer, though only for a few years, it was the challenge, an early verse in a long song.

I was a toothy kid in a tiny town, where the houses all stand a skip apart, where I’d been seeing everything since birth but was only just now beginning the knowing— those early summers and winters where I was discovering the wonder of being lost.

I still see myself weaving through the sweaty maze of the weedy growth until I find the spot, where the sturdy stalk disappears into a pitter of waxy leaves. I reach way up and grab hold of the rod, the green pungency in my nostrils, spicy and thick. Here is the brown base, gritty under tingling fingers. Here the wobbling tree is green and the stalk has a ring, a ridge at the end of a segment, and I shuffle my feet, reposition for better grasp. And sometimes like an accident, the wind gets rough. And when the wind gets rough it picks up the little Village of Cream Puffs and blows it away off in the sky— all by itself.

In the winter bamboo, there is a labyrinth of caves and passages. Hiding, I am in the heart, though the edge is possible too; before me are only the immediate green poles and snow. But it’s here that I curl, draw knees in tight, lean against bony bamboo, jointed even then like skeletal fingers protruding.

The hide and seek, the soggy knees and the clumps of snow that drop on eyelashes, nose tips, toes. I shuffle my pins and needles foot over dead brown leaves matted, under white bright snow above. There’s just a hush, and a quiet stillness; bated

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Wandering Winter Abby Truong

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breath and thawing nose that drizzles into this cavernous, disorienting space.

If you go to the public square in the middle of the village you will see a big roundhouse. If you take the top off the roundhouse you will see a big spool with a long string winding up around the spool.

Now whenever the rough wind comes and picks up the village and blows it away off high in the sky all by itself then the string winds loose of the spool, because the village is fastened to the string. So the rough wind blows and blows and the string on the spool winds looser and looser the farther the village goes blowing away off into the sky all by itself.

Soon there are other soft and padded bodies hiding within these woods and it is now my turn to be without. I do the seeking; looping with tramping feet into tracks ahead of me, more feet in tracks behind me, and footprints above on the snowy roof of those sacred chambers. I’m up where there are sinkholes where you might lose yourself in the hollows below and there are also poles for balancing with the snowy clouds above.

Here we shift our weight, now on top of so many bamboo trunks, now on top of this single one beneath my fingers, which stretches so far and crosses that one and intersects these hundred others.

Back on the earth, I am weaving again, and the leafy wet curtain of leaves anoints me as I rejoin the cathedral. Here a dark shape, amorphous and unclear—foot, elbow, or head?—but distinctly human. This part is all a blur, the part where you remember the tune, but not the exact words, though it doesn’t really matter because it still carries you to the chorus that you love to belt out, love to hear the sound of your voice singing it, the shape of those so familiar words in your mouth.

I may yelp with glee, or sound out a triumphant “A-ha!” or call to the others, “I found her!” but finally I collide with this other polyester body, those familiar laughing

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eyes. Like wavering, uncertain fingers over a forgotten keyboard, we’ve found the keys (or perhaps not, but hand comes plummeting down on the notes despite.) We are proudly laughing, remembering that the cathedral and the holy silence is just a beat in this game, as are now the joining hands, the coherent recounting of “I thought” and “we saw,” “and darlin’, darlin’, stand by me.”

Then at last when the rough wind, so forgetful, so careless, has had all the fun it wants, then the people of the village all come together and begin to wind up the spool and bring back the village where it was before. In the late night cold of a cracking old house, we are all huddled under the puffy white comforter, historic as the sky. Dad is reading again from The Rutabaga Stories. The gentle voice of Wing Tip the Spick hushes softly in dreams, bubbles and surfaces with a force of her own. She, our little relation, comes from a long ways off. *** The age of the houses was not as important as the breadth of the trees in Washington Grove. The houses were measured by lifetimes—Mable Dean’s old house, where the Pachiones used to live—and centuries—built in 1840, rolled across town on logs in 1910, and planted on Grove Road since. But the trees were immeasurable. They are the forces that hold down the streets and that pride their homes—the classic house whose porch for a maple was built around. And always a grave event when the winds grew too strong and an oak tree’s roots finally gave way and it toppled, lay uprooted on the ground; up-rooted and down leafed.

In our ‘town within the forest,’ we started at the railroad tracks and ended at the highway past the field. And on the fourth of July, the mayor drives the tractor through it. She leads the raggedy parade of barefoot children and ‘eccentric’ folks and the one old lady who sometimes brought her ancient cat on a star-spangled pillow.

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Into the Wild Abby Truong

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Now the people in the village all understand the winds with their wind songs in summer and winter. And they understand the rough wind who comes sometimes and picks up the village and blows it away off high in the sky all by itself.

What are the wind songs of the people in my village?

In the town hall, eight sides and echoing, the gray haired ladies open their mouths and sing, songs from the old American songbooks—it’s delightful, it’s de-lovely— and they swayed together, strolled together. And at Christmas, the town gathered to watch Pat Dibella’s Grover Express, taking us back in time to the Chautauqua days, where David Rapkevien plays his balalaika, and the Strother girls sing their harmonies and every year it was the Lord of the Dance (dance, dance, wherever you may be). Even Missy and Joli warbling drunken Christmas carols as someone hassles the piano—we younger actors huddled and giggled in the corn room nearby—is joy to the world.

One year Leigh Partington, jittery and verbose (my ceramics teacher), sang alone.

Someone had turned all the lights off, and we heard just her voice in the back of the hall.

She came walking forward, deliberate and somber; I wonder as I wander out under the sky. Then outside McCathran Hall, some days in late night summer, we’d gather around the campfire instead of sleeping in our tents. Tom Clifford in the flickering flames would sing blues and soul and the weepin’ willow stands there, limbs all hangin’ down until we were all singing too.

And there is Craig English, for whom the world becomes layers, stencil after stencil in his screen-prints where the streets are sometimes purple. Jim Fletcher paints the road signs, a spotted frog on ‘Grove Avenue’ just outside my house: Rana Palustris.

Chuck Kershaw photographs it all, recognizing wrinkled grins and cluttered back porches.

At town potlucks, for any reason at all, it is again a marvelous mosaic. Amy’s

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thick, thick chocolate brownies and David’s glazy sugar cookies and Annie’s heaping basket of donuts. In the heart of the array is always Beirget’s rhubarb pie from the stalks in her garden. And of course from the Strothers, a plate of stuffed grape leaves.

The town legends are triumphantly recounted in the streets. There was the saga of the Humpback Bridge; the year the gnomes from under the bridge starred in a summer camp movie. Then there was the heroic struggle to save the lower fields from the impending inter-county connector—when the meadow midges marched in the 4th parade. And the developers who built new high-end condos atop the spring that fed our Maple Lake; Pat Dibella wrote and directed us in a musical extravaganza with vaudeville caricatures of the Toll Brothers.

Even in the bamboo summer days, we had begun noting the wind songs on the pages of our Squirrelly Times newspaper. Pages where George Paine taught us how to peer through the lens of his camera, taught us how to never change or alter, how to find the image in what was there. Pages where Nicho chronicled all that he saw in the woods and by the park, the fox family in the field, and the snapping turtle in the pond. And he brought offerings of bird’s nests and deer skulls to the doorstep of the Cavey kids’ house, just left them there to be discovered.

I contemplated, as I ran the road that stretches in a ring around my college campus, that all this was lost. The loss of wonder. My sneakers thudded on thin, snowdusted pavement, and—as is usual when I am running and my breath is bated and I can never quite think straight, but rather in loops and spools and reckless leaps—began on a track of circular nonsensicals. People say they get their greatest ideas while running.

They say that is when a mind can be cleared. But the waxy tip on the end of my shoelace makes a soft tick with every step, and I can’t stop hearing this unrequited metronome.

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I’ve never been so wonderfully lost since the days of the bamboo forest. Any human, considering herself to be post-child, who returns to these childhood places— the caves and crannies and small little nooks which had held such vast and wondrous mystery then—will surely see the heart-gripping disappointment of their smallness. Now my shoulders have hunched too high, and I focus on lowering them.

And worse still, when home for break last week, I had walked past the bamboo forest. I was on my way to work. My heart wasn’t gripped. My lungs didn’t stop for woe that they were not filled with the living green and the dying brown, though now they are burning with fatigue. My eyes, they slid aside, like an acrobat’s foot on a too slick pole that has lost its footing and begins to topple. Then, the passing had meant only an exhalation, a sigh that was too wearying to even contemplate.

I’ve now come full circle around campus, and I’m meeting my old tracks in front of me, and behind me there are two. Two pairs of tracks lay side by side (I’m not alone); there’s the past me and the passing me, and I’m beside myself. I’m wondering if I should weave in, back to the dorm.

But then I am eating the salad. We are alone with Cole Porter and Carl Sandburg and some crowding potted fern in the third floor of the science building. But first I pause.

I shut my eyes. I taste. And on my quaking tongue the pepper is a burning campfire.

There sprouts a weedy arugula forest. A small globe of tomato bursts, and unfolds lightness into a bright clear sky. The umami of a walnut lays the soil, and a soft egg floats the billowing clouds.

Rolling and reeling I go through this land. I am a living spool with my village on a string, floating where the wind blusters and belts. This was never once grounded and so will never uproot.

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Arrival Austin Shay

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CONTRIBUTORS Sarina Bosco is a chronic New Englander. She devours myths and homemade tomato bisque. Previous work, as well as where it has appeared, can be found at: sarinabosco. wix.com/the-poet.

Mason Boyles is a senior at UNC. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Cutthroat, Temenos, the Chariton Review, and Kansas City Voices.

Julia Cavicchi is currently an environmental studies major at Skidmore College (Class of 2018), where she’s also vice-president of the Environmental Action Club and employed as a sustainability representative. She’s interested in studying the role of storytelling in forming and describing the human-nature relationship.

Bryce Detweiler is a student at West Chester University majoring in communication studies and Philosophy. He runs a business as an art dealer and writes for his local newspaper in Hershey, PA. Christopher Eskilson is a sophomore student at Pitzer College where he works as senior copy editor of the Claremont Colleges’ The Student Life newspaper. He is also a founding editor of the small literary group, the Hexagon Collective, out of Los Angeles.

Connor Feeney is a physical therapy major at Lebanon Valley College, class of 2017.

He hails from Reading, PA. He hopes his passion for acting and writing is never dulled by the pursuit of a “real job” in the “real world.” Never stop searching for your own religious experience.

Taylor Frey is a senior art history major with a dual minor in political science and law & society. She will be attending Duquesne School of Law. During college, Taylor has been a Valley Ambassador, worked in the Registrar’s office, Arts Chair for Valleyfest, a

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volunteer for the Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery, and a member of various honor societies.

Taylor’s art historical research was recently published in Color + Culture. Her artwork has been used as the cover of the book Mope: A Remix of Frank O’Hara by H.G. Heath published in 2015.

Victoria Gluszko is a senior philosophy major with a concentration in environmental philosophy at Lebanon Valley College. Her artwork is made through various mediums, ranging from photography, to mixed media, to painting. Victoria also takes interest in experimental art, especially with regard to color and color perception.

Erica McKeen is a Canadian writer of fiction and experimental works, based in London, Ontario. She is currently completing an Honors Specialization in creative writing and English language literature at the University of Western Ontario. Her fiction and poetry has been previously published in The Quilliad, This Dark Matter, Nom de Plume, and the fourth and fifth issues of Occasus.

Miranda Milillo is a senior religion and English literature major at Lebanon Valley College. She has recently been inspired by experimental works and hopes to continue crafting literature that pushes against conventions.

Cal Louise Phoenix is an undergraduate student and tutor of creative writing and sociology at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. The great joys of her life include hand-sewing, attending synagogue, and her cats Filburt and Gojira. She was the winner of Beecher’s 2015 Contest in nonfiction, and her poetry has most recently appeared in the likes of Cactus Heart, HOUND, with work forthcoming in 30N and Sink Hollow.

Evin Schmidt grew up in Florida under the impression that drawing, painting, and printmaking were the only ways for her to express herself, but she’s excited to realize poetry’s power of communicating things she never could in graphite or acrylic. She graduated from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and is currently earning her bachelor’s degree at University of North Florida as an English major. This is her first

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poem in Green Blotter, and she is excited to make more work (both visual and textual) in the future.

Austin Shay is an English major at Penn State Harrisburg who is highly involved with writing and editing the literary work of others. He is also the editor-in-chief of his own literary magazine called The Paragon Journal. His work has appeared in From the Fallout Shelter, Zaum, Komorebi, and The Paragon Journal.

McKenna Sickels is a senior English Literature major with a studio art minor. She is color guard captain for the LVC Pride of the Valley Marching Band and coaches color guard professionally. She is the new member educator in her sorority, Alpha Sigma Tau, is an Irish dancer, and loves heavy metal music and puppies.

Kris Swanson is a senior creative writing major and history minor at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Kris dresses up as himself for Halloween so kids know to be themselves and not to hide under a mask. Kris looks out for the little man. Kris is different. Kris is cool. Be like Kris.

Kems Sylvain is a junior business administration and global studies major at Lebanon Valley College who grew up in Haiti. As a foreigner, Kems finds it can be hard to see cultural things the way other see it. Photography is his outlet and connection to the cultural world. Instead of always trying to see things through people’s eyes, they can see it through his.

Abby (Vân Anh) Truong is a student, designer and photographer currently based in PA. Abby spent her childhood in Ho Chi Minh City. Her photographs are personal and most of the time melancholy. Her recent work focuses on the greatness of nature and also studies the side effetcs of society isolation that eventually leads human beings to find a way back to nature. Her photos are strongly inspired by her own dreams, her old memories, Mark Twain’s and Jack Kerouac’s books and upsetting movies.

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Michelle Westhoff is an early education and special education student at Lebanon Valley College from Horsham, Pennsylvania.  Although not her major, she loves to draw and paint in her free time. She is also a lover of cats and chocolate. Lindsay Zwally is a senior communications/ creative writing major at Lebanon Valley College. After graduation, she hopes to attend a screenwriting workshop in L.A.

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