INKWELL Summer 2023 • No. 38

INKWELL

Summer

INKWELL Manhattanville College

MFA in Creative Writing

Purchase, New York

No. 38 • Summer 2023

Editor

Iain Haley Pollock

Creative Nonfiction Editor

Dana Wu

Fiction Editor

Drew Marines

Poetry Editor

Rye Fitz

Consulting Editor

Laurel Peterson

Graphic Designer

Danielle Cruz

Cover Art

Beverly Rose Joyce

Inkwell Journal 38

© 2023 Manhattanville College

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles.

Published in the United States by The Manhattanville College MFA Program, 2900 Purchase Street, Purchase, NY 10577.

inkwell@mville.edu

Inkwell seeks work in a variety of forms, both experimental and traditional, from a variety of authors, from established to emerging. Literary diversity and representing the wide range of voices currently writing in America is particularly important to us. For full submission guidelines, visit https://www.mville.edu/english-creative-writing/creativewriting-mfa-inkwell.php.

Denise Duhamel

ODe tO the library

We opened the heavy door on Main Street and huffed up the warped marble steps. I held my Grammy’s hand, my first library card—an institutional hospital green—tucked in her purse. I always took out the maximum number of picture books, some of which were wrapped in plastic. At home she’d open them on her lap, my finger squiggling under the words she helped me sound out. The books smelled like mold, a hint of a mother’s perfume— sometimes the surprise of snot or chocolate smeared on a page. I was allergic to my father’s cigars, my uncle’s cologne. I was allergic to roses, lilacs, ragweed. I was allergic to some of the mustier bindings but would never admit they were the reason I coughed. Those books that made we wheeze were the same books that saved me.

marilyn JOhnsOn the FOx

When I was still a girl, I tamed a fox. He lived in my house, my pet, my handsome boy.

The fox loved me to brush his jaw where it hinged beneath his ears. He lifted his muzzle and turned his head this way and that against the bristles.

Maybe you don’t know this. Foxes smell—not bear, not skunk, but just as rank.

When I stroked his fur, the reek of fox piss and another harsher odor stuck to me. I stank like a fox’s mate.

One night we lounged on a blanket while the TV droned, its circus lights flashing green, purple, yellow against his white throat, my girlish hands. A chicken wandered on the screen. The fox leapt.

To be a chicken then, or the image of a chicken, that’s all I wanted.

Just like that he was lost to me. I called for him in the March woods, in the May woods, all summer I looked, season after season, a red scarf at my throat.

JOseph CeliziC OlD

He stretches his balled fist away from his chin like he’s stroking a beard one only he can see. We’re in his room with his crib and dresser, his rocking chair that doubles as a spaceship. Old, he says, the L and D clear for the first time, and I’m so proud I could cheer, but we’re trying to tell him No hit, we do not hit, because he’s already pushed his older sister twice tonight, his mother once, the pattern infinitely more frightening than his four-year-old fists.

Old. New, he says, his hand now a cup swooping in front of him. His palms know more words than his tongue, and it’s mystifying how quickly he changes, how his hands can be anything he wants them to.

No hit. Our voices are firm and measured, our signs shaky. Maybe pleading. We try to celebrate the small victories. The results of thyroid blood tests. The naming of schoolroom items in his Sesame Street book. Counting to twenty. Trisomy 21 is a spectrum, we remind each other, especially in these moments when the lesson feels urgent, when I start to question how much patience our world will offer, what they might return shoves with.

You hurt Mom, I say too sharply, and it’s not quite true. I await his charming off-topic response, but the words don’t come. He’s quiet, his eyes drifting down, and I think I sense his shame, and then I share it, wish I hadn’t said it. I’m already praying this doesn’t wound him, that it won’t become a memory his mind cruelly revisits in the quiet of night, the way I remember my estranged father’s snarls.

Then it’s gone. A flash, like a light switch. That power he has to reset the moment, to take us all back to where we belong. He lands us like a space shuttle, rubbing his fist against his chest. I’m sorry. He smiles at his mom, hugs her like it’s the first time, as if to tell us that no harm lasts forever, that it’ll all get washed away, that it grows old so fast. He’ll sign his name and ours and night and love, and someday his fingers will find signs we don’t have words for, something that came before. Something to tell us what it was like for him.

mary mCCOlley

COmputatiOns

I count the names of flowers, and the downy tufts left in the wake of birds, each pinion ribbonthin and white as a bride. I fill the pockets of my mind with sky, some blue, some crackling with storm. I touch the bodies of the leaves through black fence bars, I walk in day until the sun paints my hair & turn around: behind me, still shadow-limbs, rough smear on the sidewalk, my raw self seeping: a pollution at my feet.

COurtney bambriCk

e FOr eleCtriCity

I turned six at the hospital. Made friends with another girl immediately, fleetingly. She was my age, paler than me. We shared my birthday cake.

I had seizures, but was told not to say epileptic—people might not understand. Doomed

in earlier centuries to hang or burn: demonic possession easier to explain than electricity popping in the brain.

I learned the word epaulet because it sounded like epilepsy; I named the fringed shoulder squares

at every opportunity. Eccentric, eclectic I learned the distinction. I liked these words with Es. Familiar, complex.

At eight, I thought, How interesting I must be. A child whose vocabulary draws from science and superstition. By the fifth grade,

I’d wanted to know more about the Salem witches, carbon dating: The Shroud of Turin. I’d had nightmares about Stonehenge, Amelia Earhart, Easter Island—

people who disappeared. How much danger are we always in? How stupid does history think we are? I pretended to understand

the science behind the wires glued to my skull with paste, the dim room where I wasn’t supposed to sleep while

the electroencephalograph, and probably, too, God, listened and recorded my fears—shuddering feathers oscilloscoped over the palest green graph paper.

meg yarDley

helping yOur neighbOr mOve Out

is a thankless job, especially if you have a crush on her, and the two of you are taking apart the bedframe together – while outside her wife, terrifyingly competent at furniture tetris, is lacing bungee cords across tables and mattresses –

as your gaze follows the tattoo (compass rays, intricate filigree) that dips below the neckline of your neighbor’s tank top, and you try to show off with your deft handling of the Allen wrench or your smooth taping of hardware to the frame, but the little blunt wrench twists out of your fingers and clatters on the floor, and you can’t find the blue painter’s tape anywhere – and she told you once

(on a walk, her voice slow and intimate) that she loves the ambiguous line between friendship and attraction; which makes you wonder, would you want to kiss her right now if she weren’t moving across the country tomorrow? – and although she thanks you for your help,

her eyes bluer than usual, in the end you don’t get to hug her goodbye, because she’s gone to the pharmacy and you have to make lunch for your kids, and as you walk down the block and around the corner under the drooping dogwood blossoms, your adolescent wish to confess your crush at the last minute – look what you missed out on –

is being unscrewed at the joints, disassembled and packed behind bookshelves, where the moving truck door rolls down

over the controlled chaos, and this is what it means to be forty-one, to resign yourself to the things you’ll never find out –all the things you didn’t need but wanted anyway –

xine rOse

100,000 temptatiOns

You have survived another winter. It is finally spring, and you’re sitting in your backyard. The little one needs nothing more than a rock to entertain themselves. You need to mow, but once you mow, you know you are locked in for the rest of the season. You decide the obligation can wait another day. The birds are thankful you do not fire up that godforsaken killer machine. They will spend their day twittering their predictions for the new year because something in the air feels swollen and expecting, like a pregnancy past its due date. A thing, yet unknown, is bursting from the rain-soaked ground, reaching up to the sky. Its rich green, unmowed fingers writhing with insects carrying out single-minded tasks with their short life spans. Their paths cross over your toes, and you refrain from jerking away. You are rewarded with a butterfly landing softly on your sandal—a good omen.

You are categorized as one of the lucky ones with an affordable mortgage. You snagged a house in a nice area with a “big yard.” It’s big enough for a small chicken tractor that you constantly forget to collect eggs from. There are flowers in the front yard you’ve forgotten the names of, but their appearance every year is like Christmas. Your home has a long to-do list—you’d love to make better use of that one room upstairs, or maybe clean out the garage, expand out into the side yard—but for the most part, you know that all those plans are just the product of being bored with what you look at every day. You don’t save as much money as you’d like. You don’t eat as well as you should, and you spend what little extra you have on some socially accepted addiction like clothing, house plants or new hobbies you never follow through on. There is a fox.

It sees you—freezes.

Pups stumble from the dead brush that you neglected last winter. They are barely smaller than the mother. Little teen foxes. They curl up next to their guardian. Three pairs of eyes are on you and your own offspring is still fascinated with a rock, unawares.

You gasp.

There is another fox.

An article comes to mind; “The Best Dads of the Animal Kingdom.” #7 Red Fox. Hunts for and feeds the mother and pups when he’s not roughhousing with them. At three months, he stops providing free food. Instead, he buries food nearby to teach the pups how to sniff out food for themselves.

The foxes skitter on and the weight of the secret passed between you and them is so heavy on your chest you are reminded of gravity blankets marketed as anxiety relief.

In the wake of the fox family, there is not dust so much as temptation clouding your judgment. The temptation to follow. Temptation to imitate. Temptation to rectify some wrongness that you’ve felt festering under a rug where you swept everything you didn’t want to admit that you wanted. You think you can sleep on it. You think you can have a drink and shake the nerves. You think you can submerge yourself in hot tap water with overpriced essential oils, but it is all manufactured pleasure—a Band-Aid for the pain of looking at your possessions stacked precariously where they don’t belong.

A final temptation knocks at the door of your home, like a door-to-door Bible salesman offering a new religion: sell it all, chickens included, in an inflated housing market. Your spouse is skeptical but intrigued. Your friends ask you, why so abrupt? With their faces incredulous, you tell them you are

just ready for something new, but let’s face it, it was the foxes— the secret you shared with the foxes who passed through your land as if bigger and better things were ahead.

Plus, you like having $100,000 show up in your bank account as barely illuminated numerals on the touchscreen of your phone’s banking app. Right next to “Balance” it says $109,732. You’ve never had 100,000 of anything. Now, you have 100,000 temptations. When you look at it, and you often do, your heart rate spikes. Your head feels light, in that head-rush from a cigarette at a party, or the first large sip of a sweet cider, kind-of-way. There is a subtle tremble to your hands that verges on imperceptible, like when you lay on the earth and swear you can feel the rumble of a jet plane taking off in the distance.

In the quiet of the chaos of brokers and closing dates, you hear your forefathers screaming in their graves. The ones that slaved away with a single job at a single company who promised pensions and retirements and the promise of progress and building a better future for your grandchildren. The ones that never left the country. The ones that grew up thinking “going overseas” was the same as “being sent to war.” The ones who believed they earned their retirement, even if you suspect they discovered the hard way, that they waited too long to reap their rewards.

A part of you knows you’re too young to call, whatever this is, retirement. Retirement isn’t the right word. You will be kept. You will now enjoy a period of your life where you go where you want, buy what you want, and waste what you want. You want to spend ten grand living in Paris for a month then rent a humble cottage outside Cork. Pay someone to teach you pottery. To weld. Make a movie. Write a book. And accept failure at all of them.

You say this over and over to your friends, who call this thing you’re doing a mid-life crisis. You laugh. Maybe it is

a crisis. They urge you to at least invest some of the profit. You respond, “what’s a better grown-up word for gambling, than investing?”

They all shake their heads, clinging to the haunting voices of their own forefathers.

“There’s too many unknowns,” they say. But you know, deep in the marrow of your bones, that you will come out of spending $100,000 with either exactly what you always wanted, or the absolute knowledge of what you didn’t.

In a month, all your family’s belongings are in your in-laws’ garage who swear it’s okay. Everyone is sleeping in the extra bedroom and your in-laws are treating every dinner like Thanksgiving.

“How blessed we are to have you right here!” They say as they pat your hands and hold the little one who squirms because the word cookie was mentioned on accident.

“We won’t be here forever,” you assure them.

“We know,” they smile. “Take your time.”

You can’t decide if they are being civil, honest, or desperate. You tell them you will take the entire family on a trip. The trip that you always planned to take before life got busy. Before you found out how expensive weddings were, and car repairs, and roof replacements. You will go to the places you always dreamed of. Give your little one the culture that you think will be so good for them.

“Sure,” they say, smiling down at the little one.

After a week, you can’t stand that life hasn’t moved forward yet. You research the names of places that have bounced around in your head your entire life, planted there by books and movies. You’re not even sure if they are real or fantasy. A list begins to form. There are destinations scratched out, circled, rated with stars, written faintly, and then

emboldened by your excited grip on the pen. You must make a decision.

You are so overwhelmed by the options, you throw a dart at a world map like you’re in a chick-flic so filled with tropes that you realize they are old comforts and maybe you aren’t the indie-film buff you thought you were. The dart lands on Bath, UK. That’s right. The place where Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, near Stonehenge. Thank goodness it was somewhere they speak English. You will work your way up to exotic, you promise yourself.

You don’t know where else to look, so you pull up Airbnb, quietly admitting you hate yourself for it. Somewhere on the map of the city is a month’s rental for $2,886. Your brain does some sloppy math and you realize at that rate, you could live in a different city, a month at a time, for almost three years. You figure in cheap food and a flight every now and then, and it would be more like two years. Two whole years you could live in furnished apartments, on the good side of town, spending your days eating from the bakery down the street or the bistro a few blocks away. You refuse to think of any grittier details—what your child or spouse will want out of this.

The flutter of your heart manifests into a giddiness that you haven’t felt since you were a child dreaming of lives for your ragged toys. When the possibilities were tangible things you swore you could put in your pocket and carry around with you. You check your phone’s banking app again. The numbers are still there. Three plane tickets and the pending reservation of a rental in Bath barely make a dent.

The night before your flight, you dream of Stonehenge. The sky is a dull gray, so big it reminds you of Texas, where you couldn’t get over all the dead armadillos on the side of the road. You park a car in a lot across the

road from the world heritage site and walk through a tunnel following the roped path towards the stones. They are smaller than you thought. Is it because you are so far away? If only you could walk among them, stand in the center of their circumference. Run your fingers along their smooth surface. Annoyance festers as, instead, you circle the pile of rocks hoping it will look more impressive from the south, or maybe the west. The east? North? Disappointment boils like a tea kettle. You are screaming. Tourists from around the world pass by you unconcerned, oooh-ing and awe-ing at the abstract gray masses.

You wake up and debate getting out of bed for so long that your bladder becomes confused and insists it must relieve itself.

As your butt bone grows sore, you are convinced Bath is a mistake. There is nothing for you in Bath. Screw the dart method. It is time you take your destiny in your own hands. You cancel the Airbnb reservation. There is a small fine for the short notice but you wave it off like a sluggish fly on the fringe of a winter season. You book a hotel in London where your plane is landing. London is better. You’ve never actually finished Pride and Prejudice anyways. Couldn’t get through its flowery language.

In the morning, your spouse is slightly blindsided by the change of plans, especially without consulting them. They had already made copious notes of things to do and haven’t looked at London at all.

Through a silent bowl of cereal, and the usual clean up after the little one is done playing with their food, everyone has moved on. London has its perks as well.

The flight is mostly a blur. The little one took it well. When you land, you are so jet-lagged you don’t realize you don’t know where you are going until a staff member at the airport stops you with a gentle grasp of your shoulder.

“Can I help you?”

You clear your throat, look to your family and back. “London,” you say. Something about the employee’s smirk makes you feel like a child who has been separated from their parents, found wandering the wrong way, so obviously out of place, bystanders aren’t concerned so much as entertained. Of course, you’re going to London. You’re in London Heathrow airport.

The employee gestures backward over your shoulder and leads your family to the train that will take you into the city. You are helped to purchase the correct tickets. The chest of the employee is so swollen with pride, you feel good about having offered your own confusion as sacrifice.

London is more confusing than you thought, and dammit you always underestimate how big a city can be. Somewhere in the Underground’s tube lines, on Baker Street you think, the crowds push you and your family along as much as your own two feet. You feel like you are traveling through a maze of oversized plumbing. No wonder the most famous detective in Western culture lives here. It takes Sherlock skills to navigate.

When you finally make it to the Westminster stop, and breathe the air that passes over the Thames, you look up to see Big Ben entirely dressed in scaffolding, disguised, and hidden from you. If you had had time to research London, you would have known this already. The London Eye witnesses your embarrassment, and your spouse says nothing, but you can tell by the way they breathe audibly through their nose, if they didn’t love you, they would have a lot more to say. The little one is distracted by honking taxis, barely keeping their eyes open.

Your family walks across the Westminster bridge, eats fish and chips from a food stand and watches people as you feed chips to the pigeons against your better judgment. Your

phone says it is 2 p.m. and the little one is overstimulated and exhausted, a dazed-and-confused poster child. You decide to go on to the Washington Mayfair Hotel, where everyone sleeps like it is the middle of the night.

The little one’s cries wake you up before sunrise. You suspect it is because the hotel room is foreign and stale, still smelling of glass cleaner and laundering services. The view outside the window shows you a stirring city. Its moving parts are so strange and surreal, you touch the glass like you might feel the heat or buzz of an LCD screen planted there to fool you. The smooth surface is cold from the system which blows beneath it, and when a truck drives down the narrow street, you feel it in your bare feet.

After a breakfast with mushrooms and tomatoes that the little one refuses to touch, you walk through Green Park. You watch the guards at Buckingham Palace. There is no queen. You walk to Trafalgar Square. Your family enters the National Gallery, humbled by its size and peaceful ambience. Your little one is a hellion, their sweaty hand is getting harder and harder to hold. You know each masterpiece you see is disrespected by your cursory glances, too scared to linger long enough for sticky fingers and quick clumsy feet to get away from you.

Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” is the only masterpiece you take a chance to really look at. The gold pigment is so intoxicating you have the urge to lick it. You laugh to yourself, thinking, you are the one who will need to be restrained. You take a step back just in case.

It is easy to imagine the vase of flowers on your dining table when the sunlight comes through the kitchen windows in the morning. When the table is not yet littered with bills and milk spills and coffee cup rings.

Then you remember you no longer have any of those things. Not the dining table, or the kitchen windows or the

bills or the mess—you have no home. You have nowhere to bring flowers to admire.

With a gulp, you promise yourself you will find and buy a bouquet of flowers to bring back to your hotel room. And you will buy the biggest, most expensive blossoms you can carry because you have something else: six figures in the bank.

Two hundred pounds gets you an arrangement that is titled “Girl with a Curl.” It is so large, its farthest-reaching tendrils clasp the sides of the elevator and hotel door, as if begging you to not be imprisoned in the small hotel room.

At the end of the week, you have seen the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Abbey Road, Hampton Court Palace, the Rosetta Stone and 221b Baker Street. You have purchased handcrafted toys from Camden Market that the little one has already forgotten. You tried very hard, but the little one can’t see the Golden Arches without crying so you fold and buy them a Happy Meal. The Big Mac is better than you thought it would be. You write it off as homesickness so minor it’s already treated by the salty fries you don’t finish.

When a stubborn rain moves into the city, the “Girl with a Curl” begins to wilt. The day you throw it away is the same day your family rides on the top level of a double-decker bus. This is the day you learn your little one does not like buses and will scream bloody murder until you dismount the bus too early in an area that you do not know or recognize and can’t get your Google maps to load for whatever reason. You notice a convenience store. There are maps right next to the cashier, and you don’t think.

You hold the map up and ask the cashier, “Can you tell me where we are?”

The cashier’s eyebrows jump up in disbelief, “You must pay for the map to use it.”

You almost apologize, but a screaming child has worn down your social graces. You think, back home there are good Samaritans, obsequious locals, door-holders. Here are money hungry assholes. You know you’re in the wrong, but you gently fold the map up, return it to its proper place, hold up your middle finger and leave.

Your spouse does not understand why you didn’t just buy the map, and to be honest, neither do you.

When you finally make it to the hotel room, the cashier haunts your dreams until you wake up and decide it is time to move on from London.

Your list looks different in the hotel lobby. Its scribbled suggestions in the margins look like warnings written by a doctor filling a prescription for your most recent sickness. The exclamation point at the end of Pamplona looks more like a bull horn and a puncture wound. In a hasty script, Paris looks more like Panic. Your eye is drawn to Budapest. A quick Google search tells you they speak Hungarian, and it is one of the most difficult languages in the world.

You type into the search bar, “Do they speak English in Budapest” but don’t press enter. Instead, you give yourself a hard time for being scared of anything outside of your own comforts. You’re a closeted, prejudiced bigot. You’re such a fraud. You weren’t meant for this, you should have stayed in your suburban home with your lawnmower and your mortgage.

For a fleeting moment, out of pure habit, you think, I can’t wait to go home.

The dawning of the truth soaks through you.

You no longer have a home.

Now you’re panicking. What have you done? You gave up your home. You were halfway through paying it off. You could have been mortgage free before you retired. You could have held out for a little longer, waited for the market

to steadily rise and you could have actually retired off of your investment. At this rate, you will have nothing to show for yourself. You have no earth to claim as your own. A tear rolls down your cheek as you stare at those around you in the lobby of the hotel; the lazy migration of travelers who love being away from home; the rushed scurry of those trying to get back home; and there you are, sitting on a tufted chair that was designed to look inviting but selected strictly to “keep guests moving.” Turnover, not home-substituting, is how a hotel makes a profit.

The unknown is a lot more jagged than you thought it would be.

Your spouse and little one are approaching you, and you don’t wipe away your tears in time.

“What’s wrong?”

You shake your head, embarrassed.

The tufted armchair across from you exhales as it holds your family. The little one is distracted by the chandeliers. Your spouse is distracted by you.

“Where should we go next?” you ask as you rest your chin in your hand.

“Where do you want to go?”

“I asked you first.”

Your spouse mirrors you, head in hand, save for a bouncing knee where the little one is perched like Humpty Dumpty.

“Where have you always wanted to go?”

“Here.” They look around, moving only their eyes.

“Check and check,” you wave your hand like there's a chalkboard between you two. “What’s the next place?”

“I have a very interesting list of things to do in Bath.”

“But do you want to go there?”

They shrug.

“So, where do you want to go?”

“Honey, I’m happy to go anywhere with you.”

“But I want you to pick.”

“This is your thing isn’t it? All this?”

“You’re saying you don’t want to be here?”

“No,” they laugh, “I’m saying, it’s your choice. Let's go where you want to go.”

“But I can’t decide.”

“Then, let’s just go to Bath.”

You stare at them. You don’t like the words let’s just. The words feel like settling, or wasting time. You’ve wasted so much of your life so far. There is so much of the world you haven’t seen. You don’t want to settle for Bath.

Right?

But, you’re exhausted and indecision feels heavier than a mistake so you nod. “Okay. Bath it is.”

The English countryside reminds you of home. Your little one’s face has been plastered to windows since the train rolled out of London. Their intrigue is contagious so you and your spouse press your foreheads against the window as well. Each herd of spotted cows that pass is pointed out to you with tiny fingerprints on the glass. The occasional farmer in their boots and overalls waves back at the train, as if they can see the faces of your family framed by the window of the train, like a traveling portrait exhibit.

Bath is shrouded in a fog when you arrive, like a veiled bride, gentle and modest. Maybe the countryside lulled you into a trance. You were hypnotized by the rolling beauty of the landscape. It sold you the city by means of a slow courting. The fog almost hides the rising steam from the baths, like a passion contained by a stark white bodice. By ten minutes of its cobbled streets, you are so intoxicated by the mystical city, you can only think of dipping your toes into its thermae. Your heart sinks when you learn they are closed until

the next day. You couldn’t have enjoyed them anyways, you still have all your luggage and you need to find your Airbnb, and eat dinner, and properly settle in. The rest of the evening feels like foreplay with the Roman Baths lingering in the back of your mind like a teenager waiting for after prom.

At 9 a.m., you are the second person through the doors. Your spouse stays in with the little one because one must be 16 years or older to go into the baths. You are grateful to your spouse, and the rules of the establishment, for the rare privacy they grant you.

You start with your toes. The water stings like a cup of coffee, sobering and delicious. You pull your feet away and try again, trying to replicate the feeling before your body grows accustomed to it. Too quickly, the sting rises up the length of your calves, over your knees and thighs. Finally, it reaches where your legs meet your hips. There are a few other bathers around you and in the heat of the baths, your flushed cheeks do not stand out but still you close your eyes so as to pretend the sensation in your groin is between you and the city.

Minutes pass and you have apologized profusely to the city. You are so sorry you doubted her. You were late, and she was patient. You were scared, and she washed your feet. You will make it up to her, you whisper as you float on your back, skin already swelling with the moisture and heat.

For the rest of the day nothing can shake you from your complacency. The little one’s finicky behavior is charming, reminding you of yourself. Your spouse’s research and consequential conversation about the city feels like a privately guided tour. When they point out buildings or plaques, you find yourself admiring how the fog of Bath looks so good on them. They catch you staring at them, blush, and kiss you. Then they grab your hand and pull you to the next thing, the little one, already running ahead.

On day three, you lose the argument with your

spouse. You don’t want to go to Stonehenge. “It’s just a bunch of overrated rocks.”

Your spouse can’t believe you’d be this close and not go. Your family has traveled over an ocean to be here. It would be an injustice to not see Stonehenge.

“But we’d have to take a bus!” you proclaim. “Don’t you remember what happened on the bus in London?”

“It’ll be fine,” they insist. “Please, will you give me my pile of rocks?”

You sigh. You are so attached to the city now. Its spell on you could be fragile, broken by a day trip away, or a toddler on a bus. But when they say it like that, like it is the only thing they have asked of you, you feel selfish, and maybe you are selfish. Maybe this whole thing has been you being selfish. So, you give in.

“Okay.”

The bus is much like the train, so the little one doesn't put up a fight. Or maybe it’s the countryside that distracts from the essence of buses. Or maybe it was never the bus. Either way, you are surprised and pleased that another gray day has been so easy. When the bus drops you off in a roped off circle, you can see the stones in the distance. The little one is tired and insists on being carried but has big eyes for the old stones and a mouth stuck in the shape of the letter “O”.

They are not disappointing so much as reticent. The stones stand in the distance, stoic and still as buses circle, dropping off and picking up humans who circle and pace, phone in hand, trying to capture what it is about the stones that have brought everyone out to an unassuming sheep field. Your little one reaches for your spouse who shares the same shape to their mouth and eyes. Both reach for the stones with their pointer finger. You fold your arms over your chest and watch the stones like they might turn their heads, looking

over their ancient shoulders at you. You can’t help but walk like you are sneaking up on them.

When the walking path circumnavigates the still-still giants and ambles closer to them towards the end, your family stops and looks at them with a reverence they could never have mustered a few days earlier in the National Gallery.

“Just incredible, don’t you think?” The question comes from a stranger next to you.

“Yes,” you say. “Very impressive. Nothing like it in the world.” You punctuate the regurgitation of words with a smile and do not disclose that you know of many, better preserved stone circles in the world.

“That accent—are you from the States?”

You nod.

“Did you know,” the stranger holds a finger up like a teacher starting a lecture, “that the mountains and plains of this big island are the same that stretch across the East Coast of America?”

“Excuse me?” you say.

“You know, Pangea. When there was one continent and one ocean, before everything drifted apart and broke up.”

You stare at the stones while this soaks in.

“I don’t know where you are from in the States, but if it’s the East Coast, your ancestors could be the ones who put these stones here, and here you are, generations later. Isn’t that fun to think about?”

You smile weakly at the stranger who shrugs, winks at you, and walks away. Subconsciously you know your spouse is whispering to your little one, who is giggling and nodding, but you are looking at the marks in the stone like you used to look at the moon when you were searching for a face. As if maybe you’ll find your own face looking back at you.

At first you do not register the bobbing and frantic movement of the little one headed for the stones. Your spouse

jumps the insignificant barrier rope and pursues the little one, who presses lips and checks against the surface of a stone giant before being ripped from their feet and returned to your arms.

Everyone is looking at your hot cheeks, your rogue child, and your smiling spouse.

“What in the world happened?” you ask.

Your spouse winks and corrals you back to where the buses are loading.

“I told the little one we have to make it look like an accident.”

Your spouse puts their arms around you, and you look between them and the little one who is so terrible at keeping this secret: it is bursting forth in the form of giggles, barely contained by your arms. Among the tourists with their maps and prosumer cameras, you get it. You know in the smooth hard stones perfectly configured in your body that it is just the beginning of 100,000 temptations and perhaps it always will be.

taylOr FransOn thiel Notre LuNe

Tu es dans la lune, my father says to me often, laughing the way he laughs, a full body endeavor me and my brother have both taken from him. I think about what it means to hear him speak and know I have never listened well enough. The one time he yelled at my brother, it was because he threw a baseball at dad so hard it shattered his watch. My brother and I spent the rest of his life trying to stop him from ever needing to yell again. We did not go to the moon, scoop gray dust into our mouths by the fistful. Though my brother dreamed of it, deeper than

I ever did. Spent his life telling us he was going to be an astronaut, if only they’d let boys with plans that big do whatever they want just because they wanted it so badly. I knew I had the moon in my hand when I touched the strawberry cheeks of a father who only yelled once. We stayed where we could always hear his voice. Touch the craters of his body where cancer left spaces. Show him that all along we had been listening, learning to laugh like him. It was enough. Il est la lune pour nous.

barbara lawhOrn

kitChen sOng

The winter sky burnished like the belly of my grandmother’s silver spoon, lone remainder of what once nestled within a full set, now parceled out, one to each grandchild.

I stir the soup, sing in my kitchen, sway in my socked feet, and momentarily dread going back out in the bladed cold.

My son reminds me my flannel nightgown will wait, and I imagine its massive arms spread wide welcoming me home, and anticipate

the pleasure of returning. I set the table simply and dark descends, a slathering of oil paint blues and then the moonlight stretches my yard

into a pristine sheet, spread flat. I want to make a snow angel in that light, part of me a child still. Instead, I pull warm bread from the oven and call to my children. Their voices are the trapeze my heart rides tonight.

When I slice the dense, honey-whole wheat loaf, steam unspools and braids with that of the vegetable soup. It clouds the window, obscures me from knowing my own face dressed in contentment.

raChel laverDiere

every Other weekenD: a DiptyCh

Sundays after communion, still dressed in our Sunday best, Maman and us kids flap and twirl in our living room. We are wild things until the song fades, and we become breathless statues—Maman is a stained-glass Madonna with jeweled oceans for eyes. Static crackles on the radio.

I do not truly believe in God but, just in case, I look heavenwards and pray that Sunday never ends, that Maman’s cheeks remain flushed with joy, that we children do not fight, and that Maman doesn’t cry when she thinks we’re asleep tonight. On the radio, a high-pitched cackle and a drum solo erupt. Maman screeches, “Wipeout!” and we become a fevered blur losing control on the dance floor.

The Sunday Sock Hop program ends. Maman makes grilled cheese sandwiches and mushroom soup before she sends us off to clean our rooms. A cigarette dangling from her lips, Maman gets down on her knees to scrub the worn kitchen floor. Her eyes gather pools of worry with each dip of her cloth.

By suppertime our trailer glistens. We eat chicken nuggets and tater tots before sprawling out in the living room to watch Walt Disney. The Sunday spell fades with the sun. With each commercial break, we fidget more and more. Pokes become pinches then slaps and sharp elbow jabs, so off to bed we go. First, Maman prays with the boys, then with the girls. My sister sighs in her sleep. I climb down from my bunk and creep down the hall and watch the cherry glow of Maman’s cigarette quiver as she calculates money until month’s end, days until Friday because every other weekend we must go to our papa’s and nothing is the same when we come home. Maman sees me and forces a smile. One last drag and we heave the heavy pine table and the chesterfield against

the door in case Papa follows through with his promise to hurt us while we sleep. ***

After a weekend at our papa’s we are a haunted family. Monday morning, we tug on tired clothes and—hair uncombed, teeth unbrushed—grab our paper bag lunches and barely make it to the school bus.

At school, I get to be a nine-year-old who likes to read and draw cats. I always ace the spelling test. In class, I never raise my hand to answer, but my teacher always knows that I know the answers. At recess, I am a kindergarten helper. At lunch, I help the librarian put all the books on the right shelves.

Today, my teacher asks us to journal about the weekend, but my mind is always a blank black space Mondays after I return from my papa’s. I glue little balls of tissue to a cartoon me and write I had a terrible cold, which is true. My teacher frowns, but writes, Feel better soon! I wish it could be that easy. All day, I try to stall the clock with my mind, but the final bell rings too quickly.

Once we are home, I must play mom because ours works overtime, but there is little I can do to stop the thunderstorms that threaten our living room. One sibling pesters another, and the room darkens. One sibling collides with another, and the tornadoes spiral out of control—bodies fly and casualties cry and scream and bleed, but there is little I can do to save us because our papa’s blood rages through our veins. I tidy up before Maman returns.

After supper, haunted Maman prays with us changeling children, then retreats to the kitchen where darkness pools beneath her eyes as she smokes and adds up the bills. After my sister sleeps, I creep down the hall. When Maman notices me, she stubs out her cigarette, and we push the chesterfield against the door in case Papa returns.

ysabel gOnzalez

ChameleOn On seeing her bODy FOr the First time

The whirlpool bubbles, froths at the lips and I step in covering my calves in heat, water so hot the mirror has fogged over. I ease my way in, skin goose bumping, perking up nipples that have been sheathed all day.

My eyes inspect, watching flesh as if for the first time, forty years in the making. How many times has it tried loving men who entered, left brutishly, ate piecemeal until full?

Truth is, I’m working on forgiving myself for being so stupid and eating my way through it, creating a fleshy belly that protects, fat that has acted like a shield for more than half my life, insisting this is what comfort looks like. Truth is I am big, bold and beautiful. Truth is I also worry that the belly I have no longer serves me. But oh, how I’ve learned to love my S, curves, meaty shape, plumping— overwhelming others and even myself at times. Carrying, shifting through the world of able bodies, pretending I’m no different. Truth is when that one guy forced me on the floor of an NYC roof,

I should have pushed him off, shouted obscenities and ran down those filthy stairs away from him. Truth is when the other guy called me

to his fancy hotel room and I said I didn’t want to have sex, I should have smacked his face hard at his advances. Truth is when that man that finally wanted us to move in together after his secret third DUI, just so I could chauffeur him around, I should have left then, too. Truth is I tried so hard to be a good girl, be normal, that it wasn’t always easy being angry. Or full.

I wanted what many other humans want, to be loved— so much, I was willing to risk my body for it. How do I reclaim flesh I’ve so often given over?

It all starts with a fuck you to every man that pretended he didn’t know exactly what he was doing with my body.

To my body. To our bodies. Truth is no matter how much I mantra, I still carry pieces of them

inside me, bits of undigested morsels that just can’t seem to make their way out of my body. But truth is that’s just the way life is. Holding a fuck you in one hand and piece of cake in the other.

arDen levine [gulF/Daughter]

She buoys on her back they scull the air (Giant starfish?) breasts, abdomen shallow landscape of no matter (Not beachhead. Not shell.) detritus

She is grateful for (Observing:) a body irrelevant

arDen levine [granite/Daughter]

She was already alive when they began cutting.

What they cut to make her body was her body.

Dave DOnelsOn brOther

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

But he doesn’t know. I know he doesn’t know. My brother Ken recites this mantra every time I show him how to do something. At this moment, I’m trying to teach him to set his digital alarm clock, but all I get is this automatic response. I don’t know where he learned it. All I know is it irritates me. I control an urgent need to shout, “No, you don’t know, so shut up and listen to me.” I don’t say it, but it’s hard. I’ve lived without much emotional distance separating my little brother’s disabilities and my own life for six decades, but now that I am his official, legal, court-monitored guardian, we’re bound together closer than ever—and he exhausts me.

“See this button?” I ask. “It says ‘time.’”

“I know,” he says, but he doesn’t know because he can’t read. Sixty years old and he doesn’t even know the alphabet. It’s not his fault, but there it is. I take a deep breath to push my irritation below the surface, then let the air out slowly so my blood pressure can come down to normal.

“Hold it down and push this one.”

“I know.”

I want to scream, “Really!? If you know, then why do I have to show you?” But I don’t scream. I take another deep breath. “Okay, when you hold both buttons down at the same time, the numbers change. See?”

“Yeah, I see.”

“Good,” I am relieved he seems to be catching on. “You hold them both until the time is set.”

“I know.”

Oh, God, here we go again. I squeeze my eyes closed to suppress my mounting anger. This morning, I flew from New York to Missouri, rented a car, and completely

disrupted my own life so I could check on his. The visit has culminated in me trying to teach him to set a digital alarm clock. We’ve been at it now for fifteen minutes. It feels like a decade.

In my frustration, my control slips just a little bit. From between clenched teeth, I say, “Okay, fine. If you know, you set it.” I thrust the clock at him. He hesitates, then takes it between the tips of his stubby fingers as if he’s afraid it’s going to blow up in his hand. He turns it over and around. Brotherly guilt bubbles up in me. I soften my voice and ask, “Which button says ‘time?”

He brings the clock up to his face, almost touching the end of his nose. He squints. If I weren’t about to cry, I’d laugh.

“T,” he says. “T is for time.” I have a flash memory of the picture book our mother read over and over to him, trying to make the alphabet cling to his non-stick brain.

The tension in my neck eases and the muscles relax. At least he seems to be trying. “Good, now what do you do with that button?”

“Hold it down?”

“Yes, that’s right. Very good. Hold it down while you push the other button.”

“I know,” he says.

My spirits sag again, but I hold it together. He hits another button at random and the alarm blares. We both jump, and he drops the clock.

Fortunately, it lands on his bed. I pick it up, grit my teeth, and point to the red “time” button. My jaw is cranked so tight I can barely speak.

“Let’s start over,” I say. “Hold this one down.” I point to the ‘set’ button yet again. “Now this one, too, at the same time.”

“I know.”

My little brother isn’t so little anymore. He’s a grown man by any standard, except he can’t read, he can’t add or subtract, he has a speech impediment. Nearly sixty years ago, just as he became a toddler, gangrene from an infection triggered convulsions that starved his baby brain of oxygen. Today, he lives on his own, barely, and I am his only support. It’s a role I wasn’t meant to play, but what else can I do?

After dinner, as I throw my things into my bag so I can leave for the airport the next day, I hear Ken talking to someone downstairs in the laundry room. At least that’s what it sounds like to me. But I didn’t let anyone else in the house, so what’s going on?

The basement stairs are dark, but I creep down anyway, my hand on the banister, careful to make no sound and leaving the light off so Ken won’t know I’m there. I want to see who’s with him and hear what they are saying. Ken sounds angry.

“I know you took it,” he says. “I know you did.”

The other voice is deeper as it answers, “I didn’t take it. You change your truck’s oil too much anyway.”

“I do not. You bring it back.”

The deeper voice says, “You don’t need it. Use that plastic pan.” I realize it’s not another person; it’s Ken arguing with himself—or I should say with someone else in his own head. And he uses a strangely deeper voice when the other person talks, as if he were possessed. My stomach turns over when I realize whom he is impersonating. That other person is our middle brother, Wayne, who died two years ago.

“I want the one Dad made. You took it!” Ken slams something in the laundry room. I’m standing around the corner out of sight and can’t see him. No glass crashes or anything, so I let it go on a bit longer. “It’s mine. Dad made it for me. I want it back!” He throws an empty soda can that

bounces into the hall at my feet.

I turn on the light and call his name. My voice frightens him.

“What!?” he shouts, “Who’s there?”

I step into the light so he can see it’s me. I’m not scared of him hurting me, even by accident, but I’m terrified that he’s showing signs of mental distress or even illness. I picture my neighbor in New York and how frontotemporal dementia affected him. How he lost the ability to deal with everyday matters and one time chased a garbage truck down the street, screaming and waving a shovel. If Ken checks into that particular wing of the mental illness hotel, I will have to handle it. I don’t know how, but I’ll have to.

The next morning, I fly home and try to put Ken out of my mind for a while, hoping he’ll get back into his routine. I know it well. He gets up every morning, coughs, smokes the first cig of the day, does his bathroom business, then picks up the lunch he packed the night before—bologna and cheese on white bread with mayo, no mustard, potato chips, chocolate chip cookies, and a Diet Pepsi—and heads to work. He does it all, every single detail of it, every single day.

It’s not the law or anything. It’s not even a rule like the ones our stepdad always cited. You know, cheaters never prosper unless they don’t get caught. Or it’s not what you know, it’s who you know—and how little they know about you. It’s not one of those rules, it’s just the rule of his life. He doesn’t know he has a compulsion to do these things every day. He just does them. He goes to work.

Besides, after all, at his age, what else would he do? Sit and watch John Wayne movies on TV? Hang around the bowling alley where he shot a mean game of pool once upon a time? Go to some museum and look at the bones, for crying out loud? Gimme a break. Ken is not like other people who

can retire and reshape their lives into something worth getting out of bed to live every morning. His job at the sheltered workshop is like an old shoe that got wet in the rain and then dried out as he wore it so it exactly fits his foot.

The next time I call to check on him, Ken tells me he found a good book. He says maybe he’ll keep it so I can read it to him sometime. The cover is torn a little, he says, but it’s in good condition and pretty clean. That is a miracle, I think, assuming he picked the book out of the dumpster behind the car wash while he was scrounging for discarded cans and other metal he sells to a scrap dealer. He says the photo of a classic Ford pickup on the cover caught his eye. Pictures of slick cars are like porn to him.

I’m sure why someone would throw away a perfectly good book is a mystery to Ken. He grew up learning to never waste anything. He cleans his plate at every meal. When he changes the oil in his pickup, he pours the used oil in the ditch behind the house to kill the weeds that grow between the rocks. After he eats his sandwich at work, he carefully folds the aluminum foil he wrapped it in so he can use it the next day. Ken learned frugality well during his years on earth.

Ken says Donna, his girlfriend, can’t cook tonight. Donna has a mental disability, too, and like Ken, she lives alone. She spends an evening with her older sister sometimes, like tonight, so Ken is going to Denny’s for supper.

As he tells me this, I imagine what happens if he takes the book with him. His friend, the manager, smiles when he sees it tucked under his arm as he walks through the door.

“Doing a little reading tonight?” the manager jibes. Ken smiles and shrugs before taking his usual seat, second from the end of the counter. “Need a menu, hon?” the waitress asks. “Nah,” Ken answers. “Chicken fried steak and sweet tea, please.” He orders the same thing every time.

As the waitress takes his order to the kitchen, Ken opens the book on the counter and slowly turns the pages, looking for a picture of a pickup just like his. Not that his Ford Ranger is any kind of show car like the ones in the book, but he’s as proud of it as if it were. He keeps it spotless. He washes it every week and waxes it every month and parks it carefully in the garage below his bedroom every night. He doesn’t find a picture of his truck in the book, but he sees several line drawings showing how to do some repairs that he thinks might be worth looking at later. Maybe someone will read the captions to him.

“Whatcha got there, Ken? War and Peace?” the waitress asks when she brings his tea. “Readin’ a lot of literature these days?” Embarrassed, Ken closes the book and replies, “No, just something I found.” The waitress smirks. “Well, lucky you! That’s what happens when you hang out at the library.” As she goes back to the kitchen, Ken pushes the book away so the condensation from his iced tea glass won’t stain it.

Ken pays his check, counts his change carefully, and leaves a small tip. He drives home with the book on the seat beside him where he can see the picture on the cover. At home, he packs his lunch box for work tomorrow, then sits down to look more closely at the book.

Each chapter seems to be about one car and how someone fixed it up. Ken marvels at the “before and after” photos and fruitlessly searches them for clues about how the restorations were accomplished. He puzzles over the how-to diagrams and tries to decipher their step-by-step instructions. He doesn’t bother to look at the text.

There are wonders in the words, he suspects, but he will never fully experience them. That’s okay—he’s used to it. Ken was always slow in school but he wasn’t a troublemaker so nobody paid much attention as he passed from grade to

grade until he graduated from high school right on time but totally unable to read or write. He’s still a little slow, but he gets along pretty well looking at the pictures.

The next week, I get a call from someone named Mary, whom I don’t know. She is Donna’s sister, and she’s calling to let me know Donna, Ken’s girlfriend, has died.

The sudden news incapacitates me. I am normally a clear-thinking person in times of trouble because I can switch off my emotions like the kitchen light, but her death paralyzes me.

“We found her on the floor next to the coffee table,” Mary says. “She was probably there for three days. Two for sure.”

Why does she have to be so precise about something so morbid? What does it matter? The picture she creates in my head is awful enough. I imagine Donna lying motionless, limbs disheveled, probably on her stomach with her lank gray hair across her face. Had she tried to run for help?

“Ken talked to her on Friday,” Mary continues, “but she hadn’t answered the phone since then, so I’m guessing it happened that night.” More information I don’t need or want. I can’t process it.

My brain becomes an automatic generator of banalities. “Mary, I’m so, so sorry. Donna was such a good person.”

“I guess it was her heart. Ken said she told him she was having chest pain and he told her to call me, but she didn’t.”

Am I supposed to say something now? Or do something? My brain still won’t function. I hear her talking, but the possible responses my brain provides don’t fit what she is saying.

Then it clicks. I know what I am supposed to do. “I

better call him,” I say. “I’ll be back in touch, okay?”

Ken’s voice is flat on the other end of the line. I ask how he is doing. With as much emotion as if he were telling me it rained yesterday, he says, “Donna’s dead.”

“I know,” I say. “Mary called me. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m okay. I miss her.”

They didn’t live together, but Ken saw Donna almost every night after work and most weekend afternoons. Sometimes they went to Denny’s together for supper. Sometimes she cooked at his house or they watched TV at her apartment. She called him whenever she needed a ride someplace or just because she was bored. He always obliged. She did his laundry in his basement. I don’t know if they slept together, but I hope so.

“Mary said I could go to the funeral,” Ken says. “Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I say, trying to convince myself he can handle what needs to be done. “Just tell them at work. You can take off a few days if you want. They won’t mind.”

“The funeral is Tuesday. That’s when I’ll go.”

“I know. That’s fine.” I start to say I will fly out to the funeral, but I don’t really want to. I tell myself he will be fine in a few days. “Don’t wear your overalls, okay? Put on some nice clothes.”

“I know. I will wear my brown pants and my blue shirt.”

The conversation hits a dead end. I hear a half-century of cigarettes in his rasping breath. He hacks a cough, but he’s not crying. “Do you miss her?” I ask.

“Thirteen years. We were together thirteen years. I told her to call Mary when she got sick.” His voice goes flat again. “I’m doing okay.” I know he isn’t really okay, but what can I do for him? I don’t want to put words in his mouth or

push him into tears. What would that accomplish?

I ask the question I dread. “Do you need me to come out there?”

“No, that costs a lot of money.” Before I can say the money doesn’t matter, I’ll come if he really needs me, he adds, “I’m worried about something.”

“What’s that?”

“I might be late for work.”

“No, just tell them you need the day off for the funeral.”

He stutters like he does sometimes when he gets confused or someone doesn’t understand him and he rushes his speech to correct them. “Th…th…th…That’s not what I mean. Every day. I mean late every day.”

Now I am confused. “I don’t understand, Ken.”

He takes a deep breath and slows down so he won’t stutter. “I can’t set my alarm clock. Donna always did it for me.”

Dave DOnelsOn

JaDe DrisCOll

psyCh warD elegy

To the girl who died when she arrived so I could walk out alive: please stay dead.

You died no less than fifteen times before you died. In cigarette smoke, vodka, stolen friendships, bought time— in walks across city lines, his room once his mom fell asleep, over the counter bottles.

To the girl who couldn’t kill herself so nurses finished the job with medications and mediated therapy sessions: please stay dead.

You died with pills— prescribed, not purchased— day by day. With their help, I tore you to pieces, left you in a room with no curtains, no outlets, barred windows and hidden lights. I locked you in from the outside.

To the girl who needed to die so I could wake up: I beg you, stay dead.

Daniel tOrDay

water mOnOlOgue #1

At one time it was: camshaft. Carburetor. Crankcase. Oil cap. Ignition starter push-in cigarette lighter. Dashboard had: eight-track cassette tape front-loading compact disc player FM radio. No seat belt arm rest drink holder phone charger USB port lightning drive. No roadside on call SOS push button emergency system subscription service.

When the river rose above the windows of all the cars with their car parts, dealership lots filled with top off naked bellied insides. No camshaft carburetor eight-track guts shown to the naked eyed casual customer window shop. Only plastic wrapped computer chipped silicate system run viscera open now to the sun stippled macadam showroom no show outdoor car display. No roadside on call push button emergency system assistance dries the insides of riverwet car parts. Only bare-bellied white covered plastic forged computer systems saving ozone from nimbus scattered cloudburst rainfall inundation future shock. In the eternity of it all. The eternity. The eternity of airdrying riverwet car parts.

water mOnOlOgue #3

Sorry I didn’t put my hand into fire to save you. I wouldn’t know how to handle you— didn’t know if I’d be burned too. I need you to know, worm, you made me imagine the ten thousand scenarios: the pines aflame in western wilderness, Santa Rosa houses of ash, my daughters and their death masks, baked hard, the heat to come for all of us on earth and below. Hellfire. I did, I did imagine myself in your place as you baked. Knowing you not I would survive the flood but sooner still we both will burn.

Daniel tOrDay

water mOnOlOgue #6

By the Wissahickon Creek

down

Forbidden Drive—where

the water is lousy with ducks with geese with children stuffing them with moldy bread: benches dedicated to Philadelphia’s dead. Dedicated to the memory of Alfred and Janis Platt they read. To Andrew Armstrong taken from us too young. The creek inching eastward ten feet below all of a Sunday morning.

All of a Sunday morning after heavy rains the benches are gone. In their place the wall lousy with twisted rebar. Flooded waters break benches pull them eastward ten feet below—tear them miles downriver to Philadelphia. Waters dedicated to breaking a Sunday morning. Where the water is again lousy with ducks with geese with children stuffing water moldy with bread—the creek is again ten feet below.

By the creek waters—where are the children Philadelphians stuffed ducks dedicated geese? Where are Philadelphia’s benches once dedicated to her dead now the creek lousy with moldy dead benches? Sunday morning creek water moving eastward with her imperceptible dead.

pamela hart

speCies lOss

After your death sadness fades into me makes a nest between the scapula and clavicle of my left shoulder while the jay at the feeder disappears like an empty thimble All around the forest collapsing like beehives

After your death

the smooth slender crabgrass can no longer be found the jaguarundi last seen in 1986 is finally declared extinct After your death

I listen for the cedar wax wing hear a scrape of wind against petal & branch Where will I go to find your name

pamela hart

still liFe with my brOther’s brain

Assemble objects on a table for my description of his history. Three metal fishing lures, the inherited hammer, several field guides to bird & weather. Order the social cues of glial cells. Set up two neatly folded sweaters & an ancient tool belt as backdrop. The wire-rimmed glasses that don’t foreshadow death. Decorate the dusty surface with a thought experiment about pocketknives. Invent Brother’s mind and drape it over the edge. Pay attention! Our brains fold together. Stick with synchronicity. Manifest impermanence. Now blow it all up.

myrOnn harDy

ali lewistOn 1965

Call me my chosen name. You know I am the greatest. Your taunts energize your hatred. Liston falls. His face is the phantom I punch. Malcolm X is dead. Vietnam is invaded. King has walked in Alabama. What is this name you keep you write in the newspaper?

Is it your river Androscoggin that keeps rolling back through your brain? The chaotic winding banging of the textile mills? But those eight-college boy runners filmed me. They know me my name. You know my name.

bOOts in three variatiOns

“What if a single, seemingly insignificant, choice changes the course of our lives forever?”

Doc Jay Prelude

Click. Click. Click. Sigh. Click. Click. Click. Click. The echo of my boots on the boardwalk. Click. Click. Click. Click. Breath. Click. Click. Quiet.

Variation I: A Cowboy’s Boots

Although the fashion history of cowboy boots is notable, cowboy boots are largely constructed more for function than fashion, as utility is the concern for those whose lifestyle and occupation branded this form of footwear. The cowboy boot has a pointed or slightly rounded toe for ease of capturing the stirrup; a slick sole so the boot will slip from the stirrup and ensure a fallen rider isn’t dragged; a wedgedheel so the rider’s foot won’t slide through the stirrup and get caught, again, causing a rider to be dragged; and a tall, thick leather shaft to protect the rider’s calves from scrub brush, cacti, and other potential pointy harm. A working cowboy’s boots have a bleached toe from sun exposure, a clear darker line between the bleached part of the toe and the instep, where the leather is protected by the cowboy’s jeans, and a dark, soft rub spot near the arch of the foot, which is where the boot leather meets the saddle leather and rubs round-the-

clock. These are the telltale markings required to legitimize a boot wearer in the eyes of the old-timers. And, as I’ve learned during the past seven years spent interviewing residents of Tombstone, Arizona, many of the “recent-timers” too.

At the bar of Big Nose Kate’s saloon, I sat next to a shriveled little old man who was drinking whiskey better than TV’s Beth Dutton on a bad day. He slammed his rocks glass on the bar, which vibrated as it absorbed the shock; he took a suggestive look at me and blurted: “Hey there, darlin’. Show me your boots.” When I did, he carefully examined them, seemed surprised, and then exclaimed, “You’re a real cowgirl!” “Yes sir.” “Ok, then, I will tell ya’ a story.” He had to confirm I was a true “cowgirl” (I prefer horsewoman, myself, but I didn’t tell him that), as opposed to a city-person co-opting cowboy culture for fashion’s sake, before he would share his stories with me. I sure am glad I wore my boots that day.

Horse people talk horses, any time, all the time, and to anyone who will listen, but I didn’t want to share my horse stories with him. I wanted only to soak up all he had to say. His stories washed over me, bringing me peace like a steamy shower at the end of a hard trail ride. It was only after my tailbone started to throb that I even realized I’d been at Kate’s for over four hours. I had become so lost in his depictions of living the cowboy life from dawn till dusk, day after day, week after week, that I lost track of my stillness-induced discomfort. He described the personal connections he made throughout his years, the topography of the ranch, and the daily ranch activities. He rambled on about so many of the horses he’d worked with throughout his decades as a horsetrainer that I couldn’t keep their names straight. Though, I’m not so sure he could either.

The longer he spoke and the more he drank, the more exaggerated the stories became. He began spinning yarns

and the crowd surrounding us grew. Local people and tourists comingled, all leaning in. We were riveted when he began to talk about working in Hollywood. A local person whispered into my ear, “Do you know who that is?” Me: “No. Why?” Him: “That’s Rooster.”

I only knew of one “Rooster” and just as I was about to respond to the stranger, I heard the old man chime in, “I trained many of John Wayne’s horses. … Dollor. Yup. Now, that was a nice horse.” Then, he took an evocative (and inappropriate) look at my cleavage. More quickly than I’d expect from a 90-something-year-old man, he buried his full face into my chest, wiggled his nose side-to-side like Samantha from Bewitched, and made a sound I wouldn’t replicate in public. Shocked, I rolled my eyes until I saw the sparkle in his. I sighed, laughed, and reluctantly placed my phone into the hand of the awaiting stranger. I grinned for the camera.

To this day, the photograph of the man’s twinkling eyes burrowed between my breasts brings a smile to my face, and I find myself wondering whether Rooster is still around or if he was wearing his boots on the day he died.

Variation II: Val’s Doc’s Boots

Val Kilmer changed my life. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As a teenager, I was head-over-heels in love with Val and obsessed with the 1993 film, Tombstone. Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday was sexy as hell, and his one-liners were even sexier.

“I’m your huckleberry.”

“I’m a daisy if you do.”

He should have been nominated for an Oscar for that role, but he was snubbed. I’ve watched the film, Tombstone, probably a hundred times, but I’ve not watched the Oscars since.

Fast forward 20 years. I made a choice to leave my doctoral profession of theatre artistry. I moved to northern Minnesota to direct an Honors Program and teach in a field entirely new to me. I’d fallen in love with the American West and selfishly, one of the first classes I developed in 2012 for the Honors Program (my new academic home) was about film, pop culture, and the Wild West. I included a unit about Tombstone, complete with a field trip to the actual town, a place I’d never visited but one that I’d been infatuated with for over half of my life. It was a great plan, except that (and I say this with love) the people who live in Tombstone and run the tourist industry are horrible at marketing.

Like any good Gen-Xer, I turned to the Internet to figure out what we would do there. I cold-called one of the few people I could find in cyberland, Dr. Jay. He is a dentist, an ordained minister, a walking tour guide, an amateur historian, and an actor. I asked him if he’d help me plan my field trip.

Dr. Jay along with his wife, Linda, took my class project to heart and helped me develop a life-changing trip for me and my students. If not for my love of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, I would never have met Doc Jay and Linda. Recently, they told me how amazing it was that a stranger’s phone call, a decade ago, brought a new daughter into their lives. They have become my Tombstone “mom” and “dad.”

My work expanded, in 2016, to conduct oral history interviews with the town’s residents.

When I arrived to begin the first round, I was met with a surprise: Val Kilmer would be the parade master for the first annual “Doc Holli-days” festival. Coincidently, this momentous event (luckily for me) would be on my birthday.

Doc Jay and I stood for over three hours to have our photos taken with my teenage idol. I had found the perfect piece of memorabilia to serve as a backdrop for Val’s autograph: an image of Val’s Doc, sketched by a local artist. It

was unique, not something mass produced like most items in the Tombstone gift shops. As we waited, Doc Jay and I deliberated over the origins of some of the best lines from the film.

As enticing as Val Kilmer’s Doc was, we actually don’t know if the real Doc Holliday ever uttered the lines for which he’s become so famous. The first reference to “huckleberry” appears in Walter Noble Burns’ book Tombstone, which was loosely based on interviews with Cochise County old-timers. Yarns that were spun by these old-timers were distributed in dime novels, which consisted of exaggerated stories that then became the foundation of the television characters loved by Doc Jay’s generation and their children, my generation. Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Curly Bill became household icons celebrated in living rooms across the United States.

Doc was from Georgia so “I’m your huckleberry” is usually translated as “I’m your man” or “I’ll dance,” which are common Old South interpretations of this phrase. Two other interpretations are more likely. In the Old West, the hand-holds of a coffin were called “huckles,” which suggests a “huckle bearer” was a pall-bearer. Fatefully, the character of Holliday offers to “dance” and accepts the role of pallbearer without breaking a sweat. Okay, admittedly, Val’s Doc sweated a lot. Like, profusely. But I still found him hot, teenage hormones and all. Anyway, the second oral tradition suggests that pall bearers would crush huckleberries and smear the juices across their upper lips as fortification against the overwhelming stench of decay. This tradition complements Doc’s line: “I’m a daisy if you do.”

Death was a lucrative business in Old West boomtowns, except when a person’s body went unclaimed. Occasionally mortuaries, like Watt and Tarbell Undertakers,

would have to process the bodies of unknown people—these folks they displayed behind a large picture glass window facing the street for five to ten days so their loved ones might claim them (and, hopefully, pay for services). Watt and Tarbell packed these windows with dry ice and flowers, often daisies, to curb the inevitable stench of decay. If the body wasn’t claimed, the morticians sold the dead man’s boots and saddle to offset the cost. The unknowns weren’t the money-makers.

Despite these losses, death remained so lucrative for Watt and Tarbell that they eventually invested in their own hearse. They christened her the Black Moriah. Gilded in gold, she carried most of the people who died in Tombstone during the last 20 years of the 19th Century to their graves. Her final resting place is at the Bird Cage Theatre, where she can still be seen today.

Decay. Lack of preservation. Only dry ice to combat the hot desert sun. Bodies displayed behind glass, which increases the heat. On display for up to ten full days. It’s no wonder that morticians packed these window displays with daisies.

“I’m a daisy if you do.” More than once, Val’s Doc threatens: “Either I’ll take you to your grave or you can take me to mine.”

The day Doc Holliday died: Nov. 8th 1887. He most likely died in a hotel in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Alone. To his own surprise … with his boots off.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” [looks at bare feet] “This is funny.”

Variation III: A Dead Man’s Boots

I find myself standing in the center of Allen Street outside the Bird Cage Theatre, the Black Moriah’s resting place. My mouth is dry. My palms are wet. The cadence of the

deep bass drum resonates in my chest.

Like a heart-beat. … No. … Not quite—Steadier.

The mass crunch of boot heels meeting the gravel road is palpable. I look down at my feet. Cowboy boots. The same boots that legitimized me in the eyes of the old-timer horse trainer de-legitimize me here, for an entirely different reason. With my boots, I wear a borrowed black broom skirt, a white button-up blouse, and my Italian scarf of emerald green and black covering my hair and slightly obscuring my face. The scarf, noticeably out of place, along with the loaned clothing evoking apparel from long ago, are all uncomfortably present on my contemporary being. I’m agonizingly aware that I might be the only woman in the crowd of residents wearing an Italian scarf and cowboy boots instead of black veils of lace and Victorian granny boots. The crunch of my own heel sets me apart from the other women.

I feel like an outsider.

Am I not?

Doc Jay and Linda invite me to attend the funeral of a close friend. He’s the third person they’ve lost this year. They know my great respect for the residents of this town, and out of their own good will they asked me to participate in, instead of observing, this important town ritual. The memories—especially the sounds—resonate in my chest cavity, simultaneously emptying me and filling me up as they sear themselves in my consciousness.

A grizzled drummer leads “the walkdown,” which is the colloquial name for an Old West funeral procession. Behind the drummer is a riderless horse and its handler.

While we wait for the procession to begin, my mind wanders to Genghis Khan. He honored dead warriors by leading the rider’s horse to the burial site, slaughtering it and eating it. My stomach turns at the thought of eating one of my beloved equines, but I’m strangely drawn to the idea of horse and rider united in life and death.

In the US military, a riderless horse is known as a caparisoned horse; the “cap horse” is led fully saddled, with the dead man’s boots turned backwards in the stirrups; a symbol of his final ride. JFK’s caparisoned horse was named Black Jack. Black Jack died in 1976, and his cremated remains were buried with full military honors. He is the only horse to have ever received such acclaim. It is easy to see why cow and ranch people in the old American West might have adopted this early military tradition in memoriam. Like their boots, a cowboy’s horse is central to his identity.

BOOM.

BOOM. BOOM.

The drum interrupts my musings. Behind the riderless horse the immediate family of the deceased gathers, then extended family and close friends, then important figures in town, acquaintances, and others who simply wish to pay their respect, all followed by a few tourists who mistakenly read this living ritual of mourning as an entertainment of some sort.

BOOM.

BOOM. BOOM.

On this day in the middle of August, at high-noon, under the scorching rays of the hot high-desert sun, the procession begins. I walk conspicuously amongst the dead man’s people. Most are dressed in their finest Victorian Old

West attire—frock coats, Gibson girl blouses, bustles, walking skirts, shawls, veils, flowered hats, parasols, handkerchiefs, beaded handbags—all in black and trimmed with black lace. I shouldn’t be here with the deceased’s close family and friends. I don’t even know his name. I don’t even know their names. I should be on the sideline with the tourists who are mindlessly snapping pictures of this town’s recent tragedy with little-tono-knowledge of the significance or meaning of what they are witnessing.

When I walk down the center of the street my boot heels crunch and grind against the already weatherworn gravel. The clicks of the heels of the ladies’ genderappropriate, Victorian granny boots somehow sound more authentic than the crunch that comes from my more maleidentified cowboy boots in this traditional funerary procession wherein Victorian gender ideals reign. Still, when I am able to shut out the voice in my head screaming at me for imposing myself, I notice the timeless quiet that resonates within and around the boot crunches and clicks.

The beat of the drum, the clop of the horse’s iron shoes, the click of the ladies’ waxed leather heels, the crunch of the men’s worn cowboy boots. Here and there the whirr of a camera shutter, the cries of a baby, women laughing, a blown nose, a teary sob, a breath.

The communal breathing of a group of mourners walking somberly from one end of the historical district to the other to commemorate the life of a cherished community member. Despite the searing sun, despite my feeling of unbelonging, and despite the whirr of tourists’ cameras, my skin becomes peppered with goosebumps. Under the crunches and clicks of collective boots, during a walkdown, Tombstone breathes with life.

Coda

My boots echo in Tombstone. A hollow sound when the hard leather heel meets the weathered slats of the boardwalk.

Click. Click. Click. … Sigh. Besides the people, this sound is the reason I return to this place year after year. This sound—the echo of my boots on the boardwalk, something so simple, made up of vibrations— is the quiet that comes alive when the past and present comingle.

Click. Click. Click. Click. I walk with Doc Holliday, Watt and Tarbell, Genghis Khan, JFK, and the people who came before me.

Click. Click. Click. Click. I walk with Rooster, Doc Jay & Linda, Val Kilmer, my students, and the others who walk beside me.

Breath. Click. Click. I walk with those who will, inevitably, walk after me.

Quiet.

The act of walking—the immediate sound of my own footfalls on hard-weathered wood—resonates with and collapses the current time and place into one that echoes all time.

On the boardwalk, I am an outsider. And I am not an outsider.

On the boardwalk, I am alone. And I am not alone.

The seemingly insignificant choices we make, like loving a movie, planning a field trip, calling a stranger, walking a boardwalk, or wearing our boots have the potential of timelessness.

My sketch sits behind my desk: “To Season. Happy Birthday. Love Val.”

JOhn hOppenthaler

Current events

From a folding chair, just inside the rolled-up garage door, the moon

a day from full this Good Friday, my view is scored by Longleaf pine needles, impatient in the breeze. The stretched-out limb of the Japanese

Magnolia alongside our driveway sags toward the top of my aging Toyota, lower

each season: even the blossoms seem to weigh it down. Later this year, maybe next, I'll have to saw it off. The world is wary, unsure of what's to come.

Our children are awakened, but because we don't trust them at all, we hover

and call that salvation, pass desperate bills and laws, waylay

what's inevitable in the name of Jesus Christ himself. So be it. This, too, is pealing bells

lost in currents of time, each desperate pull of the rope hanging

an awful burden by its neck. See it there, up in the branches, something that looks human kicking until it's only ghost nerves and evening wind.

I stub out my cigarette. The stone is so heavy. We'll need a miracle to budge it.

ellen hagan

marble hill sChOOl FOr internatiOnal stuDies

Today, poetry class is alive! Dylan wears sunglasses & dance moves. Smiles & struts. Alex is wearing a slight sunburn from his vacation in Puerto Rico where he tells us his family is full of doctors. He is so proud. Us too. And Mel stands on a desk to shout her poem about DR. We all clap wild like & tell her to do it again. Louder. Bigger. I pull out all my best teaching moves. We get in a circle. We community build. We play whoosh, whoa, groovalicious & I remember all the rules. We play the grid game & make silly noises & shapes. We laugh. Angel says poetry class is the best class he's ever been to & writes down all the upcoming dates, says he will not miss any of them. Reads a poem about falling in love with talent. It is soo high school I can almost not believe it. But I do. & I love it. Kim never ever removes her mask & Naya reads slow & loud so that her speech disorder is bowled over by the weight of her words. Meena reminds me it is Ramadan & she will need a place to pray on Friday night after we eat Cinco de Mayo in the Bronx & share our poems with teenagers

in Manila & Okinawa & Andong & Gotemba. After we all share who we are & everyone nods & says yes, we understand each other because we are 16 & 17 & 18 & on the verge of everything & nothing. Lena surprises us the most with her poem about running away from perfection & always questioning who she is & her place in the world. Mrs. Murrow, the assistant principal who is my co-teacher, cries quietly while she listens in the back. We all hold our breath. Know this work is lucky. High school is not forever, but sometimes it is the very best place to be.

JaCk pOwers

#livDöDkOnst

When the birds died and stopped coming to her feeders, Rachelle made paper mâché replicas and propped them on rails in the sunroom, hung some in mid-flight with wire. She made a giant diorama that looked real. When she posted the pictures on Facebook, she added the hashtag #LivDödKonst, Swedish for Life-Dead-Art and got almost 200 Likes. Rachelle was always arty and could make anything from whatever was on hand. In fact, she met Harry on arty.com. He made little houses and portraits and abstract sculptures out of toothpicks and old chairs, even twigs–any kind of wood. And he was funny.

When he moved in three months later, her Facebook friends were aghast. People had stopped going out or letting anyone in their homes and he was coming to live with her? “Who knows what he'll give you?” they said. “Are you wearing masks and gloves?”

When all the cows died off, she made plates with ceramic hamburgers and steaks in the middle. Harry made a life-size cow out of branches from a dead pine in the yard. It was the last year for pine trees. Rachelle didn’t know if she loved Harry, but she liked him a lot, and she didn't realize how lonely she’d been until he arrived. They called each other silly nicknames like Bonehead or Patootie. Would she have had children with him if that was still something people did? She didn’t know. They wrapped themselves in hazmat suits and put the cow on the front yard. It looked like it might start mooing. The Katzmans waved from their window across the street. Or maybe they were shooing them back into the house. The pictures got 311 Likes. She’d added #AtemDieKuh, German for Breath-Die-Cow and #Ninkompup, Russian for Nincompoop.

When all the flowers died, she planted wire and cloth replicas in the sunroom garden and in pots hanging from hooks in the ceiling. Harry made giant abstract sunflowers from packing crates and cardboard left by the delivery drones. They suited up and “planted” them in the back garden. Nobody saw them that time. Harry was little and sinewy and dark and always in motion. Rachelle was tall and pale and blue-eyed and calm. She liked to watch him work. He talked to the wood, whispering as he hammered or soaked and shaped it into being.

Sometimes Harry was like that best friend Rachelle used to do crazy things with on preteen sleepovers: prank phone calls, dress up like old people, pretend they'd just met in some French café. Sometimes they played kissing games like drop the ash or spin the bottle. Her flowers got 426 Likes. She'd added the hashtag #UlimwenguUsioNaPumzi, Swahili for breathless-world.

When the trees died, Rachelle suited up, encased the backyard crabapple in cement etched with bark patterns and glued on giant leaves cut from silk and old shower curtains. Harry tried to make a tree out of popsicle sticks and picture frames, but kept stopping to cry. And then he just ran out of wood. “If I'm not a woodsman,” he said. “Who am I?” They stopped playing games. He slept a lot and then started coughing and vomiting and got an eye infection. His tree sat in the sunroom half-complete. As the world got dryer, the popsicles sticks cracked and the glue degraded. Her tree post only got 112 Likes.

Rachelle made fake wood out of clay and plaster of Paris. She painted the grains so you couldn't tell from a distance. But Harry just turned his head when she brought them to his bedside. When he got pneumonia, the telehealth doctor said it might be avian flu. “Avian flu?!” Harry said. “It's from those damn birds!”

“They're not real,” Rachelle said, but they sure looked real in the sliver of sunroom they could see from their dark bedroom. When she wheeled him in for a closer look, the sun was too bright and the birds seemed to stir and squeak. Harry screamed, and she brought him back to bed. As Harry faded a little more each day, Rachelle realized she did love him. Maybe love was a habit she'd learned, a dress she'd grown into or just two lives overlapping like a total eclipse. She searched the internet for scrap wood or used toothpicks, but they couldn't afford what little she found. “We can take apart the cow and the sunflowers,” she said “Make something new.”

Harry clutched his stomach like he'd been stabbed. Maybe it was just the diarrhea. Rachelle rolled him on his side and sponged him clean, changed the sheets, dressed him in new pajamas like he was her baby. She spoke to him in fake French and dressed up like a grandmother and a beekeeper. Harry only groaned or gurgled as his lungs got worse. The doctor kept trying different medications, but Harry was gone before Christmas.

Her Facebook friends all said, “I told you so,” and “I said you'd be sorry.” They were half right. She never would have known she was lonely if it wasn’t for Harry. Once the eclipse ends, the moon seems starker and cold, the night sky nothing but black. She made a life-size Harry doll out of pillows and old dresses. She laid him next to her on the bed and pretended to laugh. The picture got 84 Likes. She hadn't added a hashtag.

But when the rain stopped for good, her throat got too dry to laugh. Rachelle just gave up. Her last post on Facebook was a close-up of her and Harry Doll sharing a pillow. She added the hashtag #Ninkompup. She died minutes later, never finding out she only got 14 Likes. And no Loves. Never any Loves.

saab stOry

Gordon had nodded off, perched on the upstairs toilet. Not the first time but almost the last. Luckily, his forehead hit the window frame preventing him from pitching out onto the roof. Groggy and feeling foolish, he imagined what the Burlington Free Press would have reported. “Gordon Hunter, local mechanic and race car driver, found hanging from his roof, naked from the waist down.” That was all that Micheline would need to pound the final nail into the coffin of their marriage. Micheline and their nine-year old daughter Katy were spending the Christmas holiday in Sarthe, France with the grandparents. Gordon was not invited, nor had he wished to be. Whether this was a test or simply his punishment wasn’t really clear. He had no issue with his French in-laws but rather an issue with the country of France in general.

Two years prior, he had been fired from the Renault Formula 2 racing team for reasons left unexplained. Out of six races in 1974, he finished in the points two times, quite an accomplishment for a young American. Although other private teams had expressed interest in signing Gordon, his bitterness over the whole thing sent him back to Vermont where he spent his days as a mechanic in his private barn garage near the shore of Lake Champlain. * * *

At thirty-four, with a shaggy thatch of blond hair, pale blue eyes and a perpetual tan, Gordon had the look of an

Eagle Scout gone to seed, rounded off by a growing beer belly. Most wives would have welcomed their husband’s retirement from the dangerous sport of motor racing. But Micheline knew Gordon well, and the longer he stayed off the circuit, the unhappier he became. He had worked too hard to just give up. Maybe it was his pride; maybe he was just scared to compete again. Maybe it was the two back surgeries that left him in constant discomfort. Whatever the reason, it soured their thirteen years of marriage, and there was no solution at hand. They both tried to avoid conflict, primarily for Katy’s sake, but even their silences were becoming more and more uncomfortable.

One morning, a few days after Halloween and the first overnight snowfall of the year, Micheline was busy at the kitchen sink. Her dark chestnut-hued case of bed head and lovely hazel eyes lent her the come-hither look of a European fashion model, which she actually was but currently retired. Katy sat at the table studying an issue of Road & Track while tucking into a plate of crepes. She was a blond, miniature version of her dad, minus the beer belly. Mother and daughter both heard banging and clumping from upstairs.

“Mom, what’s Dad doing up there?” Katy asked.

“I’m not sure I want to know–drink your juice, Katy.”

From the open doorway to the hall, the double barrel of a shotgun extended slowly into the kitchen.

“Any ducks in here?” Gordon asked from behind the door.

Katy didn’t miss a beat, turning another page of the magazine. “Quack, quack!”

Micheline shut off the tap and turned around, leaning against the counter, un-amused. “That’s not funny, Gordon!”

Gordon entered the kitchen in jeans and a white t-shirt. He leaned the gun in the corner. “Jimmy wants to borrow it.”

“And what is your brother planning to shoot, I wonder?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t ask.” Gordon sniffed the air suspiciously. “I smell coffee, but I don’t see it.”

“You smell it because I brewed it 20 minutes ago. You don’t see it because we have no mugs!” Micheline raised her arms like a saucy game show hostess, displaying the cupboard of empty cup hooks, and flipped off Gordon.

“Okay, okay” Gordon headed for the back door.

Micheline tossed the dishtowel onto the counter, “And take that rifle with you.”

Katy turned another page, not bothering to look up. “It’s a shotgun, Mom.” Micheline stood at the sink looking out the window across the yard to the barn, her arms crossed. Tater, their big, goofy, black Lab was curled up in a pool of warm sunlight between patches of snow. His head rose and his tail thumped the ground as Gordon approached.

Micheline turned quickly to Katy, still absorbed in the magazine. “How would you like to have crepes for breakfast every day?”

Katy responded, only half listening. “Sure.”

Micheline pulled out a chair and sat opposite Katy, leaning forward conspiratorially. “I mean real French crepes... in France.”

Katy finally looked up from her reading. “On summer vacation?”

Micheline patted her hand, “Maybe sooner.”

Gordon entered the kitchen with an armload of dirty coffee mugs and clattered them into the soapy water in the sink. A blue and gold oil slick formed on the surface immediately. He fished out a mug, scoured it vaguely, rinsed it from the tap and turned to the counter for the carafe of coffee.

He stopped as he saw his wife and daughter staring at him. “What?”

Micheline booked a flight for France that left the day after Thanksgiving. The ad hoc holiday meal had been a rather unpleasant one and impossible to salvage. The guests included Gordon’s older brother Jimmy “The Mailman.” He had signed up right after high school and was still delivering mail in his Jeep thirty years later. He didn’t share Gordon’s boyish good looks or sense of humor, was still single and didn’t own a dog or pet of any kind. Another guest was Gabe Frankel, chairman of the Art History department at the local college and Micheline’s boss. Tenured for years and closing in on his 80th birthday, he was given to loud, profane critiques of painters he loved or hated to anyone who was polite enough to listen. His thin, worn, corduroy sport coat hung unevenly due to the half-pint of Wild Turkey in the right pocket. The actual Thanksgiving turkey, a plump fifteen pounder, was fussed over by everyone and because of the ‘too many cooks’ rule was not cooked all the way through. Opinions buzzed around the kitchen like angry bees until the one that really mattered was voiced loudly by Mom, Isobel Hunter herself, who resembled a very pissed off Katherine Hepburn most of the time.

“Carve the goddamn thing, Gordon, and put it all back in the oven!”

Mom had been a resident of the Pine Island Assisted living facility for three years and was just as ornery with the staff as she was while raising her two boys. Her turkey plan worked. Everyone agreed the bird was delicious, and Katy built a mashed potato sculpture of Tater, egged on by Gabe. It was the heavy consumption of French Bordeaux

from the cellar that brought about the ill will. First, Mom accused Gabe of pining after Micheline, or more accurately, of “promoting her pussy.” Gabe tried to laugh it off and ended up choking on a gravy-laden mouthful of stuffing. Gordon laid him out on the sofa where he continued sputtering and demanding more wine. Then it was Jimmy’s turn. He had never been a drinker, but encouraged by the wine and Mom’s insanity, he stood to announce he had proof that Gordon had been canoodling with Emma the town librarian.

Micheline knew it wasn’t true, but turned on her sad, Genevieve Bujold face and began clearing the table. Jimmy was hauling Mom out of her chair to take her home while Katy began shouting for pumpkin pie. Soon after, Katy and Gordon ended up alone at the table spraying mounds of Reddi-Whip on massive slices of pie. The remains went into Tater’s bowl, and they called it a night. That was almost three weeks ago.

His pants now zipped and belted, Gordon carefully navigated the creaking wooden stairs down to the first floor. He allowed his back pain to slow the speed of his descent. He went to the kitchen window and wiped the condensation off the glass. His neighbor Jeff’s Ford Bronco was in the yard. Jeff had promised to bring back an ample supply of 222’s from Montreal. The preferred over the counter painkiller Gordon had grown dependent on. He stepped into the mud room off the kitchen where Tater was sleeping. Gordon shrugged into his barn coat and pulled on his snow boots as Tater thumped his tail on the linoleum floor anticipating a trip outside.

Together they shoved through the frozen shrubbery to Jeff’s front door. A ball-peen hammer on a short chain served as a knocker and Gordon rapped three times on the thick

oak. Jeff appeared a moment later wearing an embroidered red velvet smoking jacket and no pants, holding a massive joint between thumb and forefinger. He released a lungful of smoke.

“Hey Gordo, try this shit, it’s primo, man!”

“No thanks, Jeff, I’m not feeling creative, I just need the ‘two’s.’”

“That’s cool, hang on a sec.”

Jeff closed the door nearly all the way, but the cloud of weed and incense made Gordon’s eyes water. Jeff returned quickly, his stringy hair almost covering his unfocused, pin-wheeling eyes and held out both hands, each gripping something.

“What hand is it in man?” he asked with a stoned laugh.

Gordon wasn’t in the mood for games, but guessed, “The left one.”

“Wrong, brother!”

Jeff opened his left hand to reveal a raw potato that got Tater all twitchy and salivating. He chomped it and hustled back across the yard. Gordon had to play along.

“Okay, the right hand then.”

Jeff opened his right hand to reveal a plastic container and shook it sounding like a full set of Yahtzee dice.“The mating call of the Canadian Mounties, just for you brother!”

Gordon had prepaid for the pills so he bid Jeff goodnight and trudged back to his own yard stopping to catch a glimpse of the nearly full moon still hanging in the icy black sky. He recalled teaching Katy the names of the constellations two summers ago and how to find them. Maybe she was showing off her astral knowledge at her grandparent’s chateau. Same stars, different location. He kicked off his boots in the mud room while Tater crunched away on his gift.

An hour later they were both asleep, snoring on the big four-poster bed upstairs, something that Micheline would have never allowed.

At eight a.m., Tater’s tongue lapped against Gordon’s jaw line serving as an effective alarm. The accustomed odor of fresh coffee wasn’t present to drag him out of bed. Micheline and Katy had been gone for nearly three weeks.

There had been one phone call to let Gordon know they had arrived safely and another at Christmas, then nothing. Why should he call? He didn’t run away, she did. Therefore, any food or drink he wanted he made himself. Tater’s nails clattered down the stairs ahead of Gordon where he waited, head cocked sideways in the kitchen anticipating breakfast. Gordon picked a nice fat red one from the twentypound bag of potatoes under the sink. Tater took it politely in his mouth and marched into the mud-room to enjoy it in private. All Gordon wanted was coffee. He opened the cupboard to find a row of empty hooks where the mugs should have been. Proof that Micheline’s complaint that all the mugs ended up in the garage was true, soaking rusted nuts and bolts. It was too cold to go outside unfortified so Gordon drank his steaming black coffee from a saucepan, grounds and all.

The sun made an appearance promising to melt some of the snow that had accumulated over night. The lip of the roll-up garage door was stuck, but a few kicks rattled it loose enough to haul up. Tater paced to and fro, eager to get inside where his dirty, fur covered Volvo back seat waited for the first nap of the day.

It was a few days before New Year’s, and no customer cars needed attention. Gordon stood in the doorway

considering the two matching orange Saab Sonnet racecars resting on jack stands side by side. Number 6 and number 7. The 6 car was the lucky one, which reduced the 7 car to a parts donor. The cars weighed next to nothing and with front wheel drive and studded tires, they kicked ass on the thick lake ice. The left side CV boot was torn up and needed replacing but hopefully the joint itself wasn’t damaged by gravel. Gordon rolled underneath on the creeper to have a look.

The walls of the garage with its posters, trophies, photos and banners impressed visitors and customers alike, but Gordon was no longer interested in the past. A dustcovered winner’s wreath from the 1971 Monte Carlo Rally framed a photo of Gordon piloting his insanely fast Group B Renault R5 Turbo uphill from the Casino. The demands of international competition, especially the business end, were anathema to him now. All he really wanted was his family back, his two wonderful girls. He got the hose clamp off the boot and found plenty of muck and gravel in the joint. It was a goner. The 7 car had only one fresh CV joint to donate but it was the wrong side. He rolled back out and began tossing through his parts bin hoping to get lucky. No such luck. The day was shot, and it was early yet. He felt lonely, and the sky was clouding up, looking like snow again. Maybe he could take the station wagon and drop in on Mom and even Jimmy. Tater could come along too. Gordon hadn’t seen either of them since Thanksgiving. He was pulling down the garage door and calling to Tater when he heard the kitchen phone ringing inside. Was it Micheline? Are they coming home? He lunged for the back door with Tater close behind, sliding on the icy path.

rObbie gamble

what we learneD abOut hOmeless FOOtCare

As nurses, we were taught to flip the paradigm of head-to-toe,

to begin our assessments with their feet, not as a suffix of afterthought,

but as the truest portal into their lives, examining where skin, flesh, and bone

made contact with a hostile earth. The tattles these feet could tell:

rank fissures, blisters, fungal macerations from rain-soakings, ill-fitting boots;

his two absent toes from last winter’s frostbitten bender; chronic swelling

from nights of half-sleep, upright and wary on subways and park benches; bruises

from when a drunk boyfriend stomped her then raped her; oozing ulcers nurtured

by blooming diabetic blood sugars. We learned to kneel, with almost scriptural

intent, at these feet: bathing, massaging, applying unguents and gauze

until we could draw our gaze upwards across the body’s subsequent traumas

to meet, eye to eye, the one we had not yet realized, entirely human.

brian yapkO

the mOrning OF the earthquake

Awakened from purple dreams by the explosive cacophony of buildings collapsing—a roar so terrifying it surely came from God above. This was the brute cry of Earth grinding itself into dust. Our house trembled, listing like a sinking ship. The sky reddened as neighborhood gas lines burst into flame. And our troubled lives, built on my lie of identity, cracked open at the seams. Our

wedding photos were torn to shreds, betrayed by the very glass they were sealed in for protection. You blamed me for the seizure of the Earth. At first I believed you. But then in the garish glare of the fires I saw us as we really were. Only then did I realize in the rush of adrenaline that I had emerged from the guest-room naked with blood on my arm, face and chest. I saw in your eyes that you could no longer abide us, that you’d leave. Such was our destiny. You turned from me. I no longer minded. I could not lie about myself one more trembling minute. I gazed into the cracked mirror and resolved to rebuild on a strong foundation. Numb to my nudity, I walked openly out the front door bleeding, barefoot onto the grass. The neighbors could see what I was. I no longer cared.

rOnit plank

everything yOu Care abOut

Jordan is driving, and you’re sitting next to him when the flurries begin. You’re not supposed to be out this late, but you won’t get in trouble because your father and his new wife want you to make friends. You’ve only been at this high school since last year, and they’re happy you’re even out, especially since you didn’t want to move in the first place.

You know Jordan has a girlfriend. You’ve talked to her, and she’s nice for a popular girl. One time when you were at his house for a party and his parents were away again—you never have seen them, it’s almost like they don’t live there— you sat on the last step with him while everyone was in the living room, and he told you that when he and his girlfriend have sex—make love he called it, which reminds you of a Phil Collins song or something else old-fashioned—that she “reaches,” and you’ve never heard this expression before but you know right away what he means, and you’re embarrassed, mostly for her, that he’s shared this.

You’ve never had sex, certainly never made love, which still seems like it’s for adults in movies from the seventies, and you’ve never reached, which makes it even more embarrassing, but you clear any expression from your face, blank out your eyes, and nod as if to say of course, obviously, she reaches when she’s with you. You try to move on, but his eyes are shining, and he looks down half-smiling, and you wonder if he told you because he thinks of you as a friend or so you will know how good he is at it and if you gave him a try, you’d see too. That excites and scares you in the most heatshooting-through-your-torso-and-out-your-arms way because he’s sitting so close, you’re so close, and you feel guilty that you have much better hair than his girlfriend but not guilty because she has everything else and she reaches, she can reach,

she knows how.

You don’t know if he told her he’s with you tonight, the two of you so far away from town, the one your father and stepmom chose, a place you still can’t picture yourself living. If his girlfriend doesn’t know, maybe it’s wrong, and this is cheating, but really all you’re doing is driving out to the beach, to Montauk, late at night.

Snow is tumbling down from the icy sky and the snowflakes, you’ve never seen them so steady, so certain. They shine like glitter in the headlights, stick to the long blades of beach grass, fall on his eyelashes when you get out to hear the midnight ocean. And you wonder how can you be this old and never once thought of these things together before: snow on sand, the beach at night, that what you wish for might come true. You feel how much has still not happened, what could be, and you don’t want any of it to end.

And that spring after you pose for photos together at graduation, he’ll recede like so many people do, and you’ll think of that winter with him, what you both wanted, how you were afraid you weren’t enough. It will be years until you see how perfect you were then, years before you stop believing everything you care about goes away.

emily pulFer-terinO

three Fugues

a pair of us!

Indelible in memory: my mother’s woeful, rueful incantation, “I’m nobody, who are you?” Her face reflected in the pane she gazed through, as if her very self were floating through a world beyond her image. The question a motif I braced against, a pained refrain in mother’s fugal repetition, her departure and return. ***

Named after Emily Dickinson, I learned early the poem’s next line: “Are you—Nobody—too?” The pair of questions echoed, and their answer, “...there’s a pair of us!” filled the air my mother and I shared, heavy as a presence. Mother and daughter, each self paired with the other through this utterance, (exclamatory!), of effacement. ***

My mother really only recalled to me the first four lines— rhymed couplets, paired.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise, you know!

She’d committed to memory this half of the poem. I later observed it more thoroughly, entirely, reading and rereading. Having heard the words so many times, my finally seeing

the cooing, sonic rhyme of “you” and “too” introduced a multiplicity of “two”—two selves, two uppercase Nobodies, two halves of a secret. And then the more veiled, conceptual rhyme of “us” and “know” confounds distinctions among selves, pairing notions of no-self and knowledge. ***

Unuttered in my mother’s voice, the second half of the poem was unknown to me until I read it in print. As if I were scrying, the stanza rippled, radiating out, tonally shifting, exponentially.

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one’s name—the livelong

June—

To an admiring Bog!

Double negatives redoubling, I was struck at once by the “dreariness” of selfhood and the surprising, almost comical absurdity of the onomatopoeic frogs announcing themselves to the bog. I imagined that swampy atmosphere, heard that polyphonic croaking. I saw the water flocked with green, amniotic clouds strung through with tiny beads of eggs. Imagined tadpoles taking shape, some tadpoles and frogs at once. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”, my mother intoned as mantra, reiterating her competing yearnings to be paired with me and/or become inchoate.

Reflections seem to surface, buoyed through water, joining worlds. Then recede and sink again, submerged, beyond our finding. Sometimes, I find myself scrying shining surfaces, searching their reaches. ***

I think of Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror”, reflecting on the world reflected in it: wallpaper, gazes, aging, tears. Uttered in the voice of the mirror itself, the poem offers and exacerbates a multiplicity of pairings—signifier and signified, interior and exterior, seeing and being seen—reflecting and refracting the divide of self and other. ***

Lines that often surface in my mind:

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is part of my heart.

How “heart” follows “part” and rhymes, echoes, amplifying that the heart is expansive, a wide room. How rhyme and echo are both also modes of pairing, reiterating, rendering multiplicity. How the mirror moons and yearns, mistaking the wall for itself. ***

Most of the time growing up, I meditated on space around me—the inside of an expansive farmhouse choked, entirely,

with my mother’s hoard. Hard to move or even breathe in that space, that lack of space, flocked with mold and dust. How easily I mistook my context for my self. But in sun, motes gleamed like sequins, I imagined.

***

Each time she looks at me, my mother cries. Relentless tears she can’t explain. A flood of grief, or yearning? Is she mistaking what she sees?

***

When my mother was a young woman, she took care of an old woman in exchange for room and board. My mother had just been evicted due to dangers of her hoarding. The old woman never saw the hoard amassing in her own home. Because she was blind; my mother was her eyes.

***

Plath’s “Mirror” turns to water, claiming, “Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, / Searching my reaches for what she really is.” At once, the woman turns from her reflection, searching for illusion in the moon. How the sun and moon, darkness and light invert, reflect, refract. How the woman’s visage interrupts unknowing. How it pains the woman to perceive her self. ***

What she really is.

Part of my heart.

rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

Images capture my attention paintings, flowers, mirrors, light refracting, faces gazing as if my eyes exposed my consciousness to being caught. Does it follow, then, that each image is captured, lasting, in my memory?

***

My mother avoids being captured in photographs and video, evading any camera’s gaze, darting from upheld smartphones as if to swim away. Animate or still, my mother wants no record of her appearance.

***

A hoarder’s home can be a kind of trap. A child, I’d dart from her towering mounds or cower in a cleared-off corner of the wingback chair, gazing out at fields. Made in the late 1600s, the windows of my mother’s house were rife with ripples from when glass, as liquid, settled. The panes contained waves, tornadoes, rainbows, depending on the light. ***

Now I keep my home remarkably spare. It echoes, decorated mostly with the shadows daylight makes on walls. But just inside the front door hangs a small, framed tinsel painting from an antique store that closed. Crumpled tin foil spangles space between the flowers and leaves, a looping wreath, painted on the inside of the glass.

The painting is unsigned, as foil paintings often are. One of several domestic arts young women pursued in the 19th century. Confined by or inspired by! contours of the home, women’s creative practices also included patchwork, collaging photos, lacemaking, drying and arranging flowers.

***

Sylvia Plath’s pink speckled wallpaper, gazed upon by the titular mirror in her poem, and then by me as reader, is printed with roses, so the image of a bloomed rose rhymes with the heart, pink and pulsing. This is only in my memory.

***

The flowering wallpaper is my mistaken import from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish”, its tattered flesh “like wallpaper:/ shapes like full-blown roses / stained and lost through age.”

***

Of course, I see myself in photographs and mirrors, but I don’t know what I really look like. Neither does my mother.

***

Having just caught what she first calls “a grunting weight”, Bishop’s speaker treats the fish with acute lucidity. Images reverberate: the fish’s eyes with

...irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass.

Its elusive stare “like the tipping/ of an object toward the light.”

***

A river flows and glitters by my mother’s house, my childhood home. Summer days, I’d wade in and, bent over my own rippling reflection, dip the sieve of my clasped hands for minnows. The fish, orange and startling, flickered through my fingers, through the image of my countenance, elusive as ideas. ***

Plath’s mirror ruminates on wallpaper, its most constant object of attention, interrupted now and then by a woman seeking her face. The woman’s looking is a yearning and a loss. So the poem ends, “each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. / In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman/ Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” ***

I imagine shimmering rainbows in the fish’s release, but that is my mistaken remembering of Bishop’s poem, too. Instead, the speaker

...stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

Her “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” is the lustrous and oilspilled atmosphere radiating in ripples from the site of the fish’s entrapment. The speaker’s Sublime overwhelm, resplendent, untenable, inspires her to release the creature. She ends her poem here, the “letting go” resolute and invisible. ***

I love the poem. But always by the end I’ve engaged so many images it feels crowded, weighted. I’ve had more than enough accrual.

I realize I’m thinking about light, and waves that cause it.

I carry images as heft, although they’re made of light.

CONTRIBUTORS

Courtney Bambrick is poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories. Poems have or will appear in journals and websites including Invisible City, New York Quarterly, Beyond Words, The Fanzine, Philadelphia Poets, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mad Poets Review, and Certain Circuits. She teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia.

Joseph Celizic teaches writing at Bowling Green State University. His work has been published in Indiana Review, Third Coast, Ruminate, North American Review, Redivider, and CutBank, and has been shortlisted in Best American Mystery Stories.

Philip DiGiacomo is a former painter and actor from New York. He studied creative writing at UCLA. He lives with his wife, the painter Hilary Baker, in in Ojai, California.

Dave Donelson is a writer and visual artist. His journalism, photography, and art have appeared in over three dozen national and regional print publications. He is the author of fifteen books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and memoir, most recently The Journal of My Seventieth Year. He was awarded an ArtsAlive grant from ArtsWestchester to develop a collection of graphic poetry on the topic of aging and ageism.

Jade Driscoll (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Awaken (And Then Publishing, 2023). Her poems have previously appeared in Atlas and Alice, Plainsongs, Ponder Review, and more.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021), Scald (2017), and Blowout (2013),

which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

Season Ellison directs the Honors Program at Bemidji State University where she teaches theatre and humanities classes. Recent publications include chapters in Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom and Place, Self, Community: City as Text in the Twenty-First Century. She lives northern Minnesota with her family.

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in the Lunch Ticket, RHINO, Rust + Moth, Salamander, and The Sun. He worked for many years as a nurse practitioner caring for people caught in homelessness, and he now divides his time between Boston and Vermont.

Ysabel Y. Gonzalez received her MFA in Poetry from Drew University and works as the Assistant Director for the Poetry Program at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Ysabel has received invitations to attend VONA, Tin House, Ashbery Home School and BOAAT Press workshops. She’s a CantoMundo Fellow and has been published in Tinderbox Journal; Anomaly; Vinyl; Waxwing, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of Wild Invocations (Get Fresh Books, 2019).

Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. Her books include: Crowned, Hemisphere, Watch Us Rise, a YA collaboration with Renée Watson, Blooming Fiascoes, Reckless, Glorious, Girl and Don’t Call Me a Hurricane. Ellen’s

performance work has been showcased at The New York International Fringe and Los Angeles Women's Theater Festival. Ellen is Head of the Poetry & Theatre Departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. She is on faculty in the low-residency MFA program at Spalding University and co-leads the Alice Hoffman Young Writer's Retreat at Adelphi University. Ellen is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, Conjure Women, and is co-founder of the girlstory collective. She lives with her partner and children in New York City.

Myronn Hardy is the author of, most recently, Radioactive Starlings. Aurora Americana is forthcoming this fall (Princeton University Press). His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, POETRY, The Georgia Review, The Baffler, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine.

Pamela Hart is writer-in-residence at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, where she teaches and manages artsin-education programs in schools and correctional facilities. Her book, Mothers Over Nangarhar, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton prize, was published in 2019 by Sarabande Books. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in poetry.

John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. A professor at East Carolina University, he serves on the Advisory Board for Backbone Press, specializing in the publication of marginalized voices. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Blackbird, Southern

Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks.

Marilyn A. Johnson's poetry has appeared in North American Review, Nine Mile, Field, and Hole in the Head Review, where she is now an associate editor. Her poems are forthcoming in On the Seawall. She is also the author of three nonfiction books. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

Beverly Rose Joyce lives in Ohio with her husband and their two daughters. She holds a MA in English from Cleveland State University and was a high-school English teacher for 16 years. Her writing and photography have appeared in various literary journals, including but not limited to: The Raw Art Review, Hive Avenue, Alchemy, Vermilion, The Pointed Circle, Red Coyote, Meat for Tea, and The Ignatian. Her poem “Marble” was Runner-Up in the William Carlos Williams Prize for Poetry, and she has been a featured photographer in Snapdragon.

Rachel Laverdiere lives on the Canadian prairies. Find her recent prose in Sundog Literary, Lunch Ticket, Longridge Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal and elsewhere. In 2022, Laverdiere’s CNF was a finalist for the Barnhill Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Barbara Lawhorn is an Associate Professor at Western Illinois University. She writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her most recent work can be found at (or is forthcoming in) Santa Clara Review, Miracle Monocle, Sand Hill Literary Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Poetry South, Flash Fiction Magazine, Dunes Review, and White Wall Review. She lives in the Midwest with sons.

Arden Levine is a New York City municipal employee working to create and preserve affordable urban housing. Her poems, book reviews, and other writing have been featured by AGNI, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Ladies' Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021).

Mary McColley is a writer and poet who has been published in a number of journals and is author of the mystery novel A Wrinkle in Crime. Originally from Maine, Mary has wandered and worked in France and Thailand.

Ronit Plank’s work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, The Iowa Review, and has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction. She is author of the story collection Home Is A Made-Up Place and the memoir When She Comes Back, about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation. She is an editor, a memoir coach, and host of Let’s Talk Memoir, a weekly podcast featuring interviews with memoirists about craft, the creative process, and the writing life.

Jack Powers is the author of two poetry collections: Everybody's Vaguely Familiar (2018) and Still Love (2023). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Salamander, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. He won the 2015 and 2012 Connecticut River Review Poetry Contests and was a finalist for the 2013 and 2014 Rattle Poetry Prizes.

Emily Pulfer-Terino is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The

Collagist, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays The Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative nonfiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.

Xine Rose resides in Central Appalachia. Her written work can be found in Cake & Whiskey, The Uncommon Grackle, The Citron Review, and The Yearling (forthcoming 2023).

Taylor Franson Thiel is a graduate student at Utah State University pursuing her master’s in Creative Writing. Her writing frequently centers on her experience as a Division One basketball player, her family, the female body, abusive relationships, and mental health.

Daniel Torday is the author of The 12th Commandment, The Last Flight of Poxl West, and BOOMER1. A two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for fiction and the Sami Rohr Choice Prize, Torday’s stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and n+1, and have been honored by the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series. Torday is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.

Brian Yapko is a lawyer whose poems have appeared in over fifty publications. His science fiction novel, El Nuevo Mundo, was recently published by Rebel Satori Press. His gothic archaeological novel The Bleeding Stone will be published in Autumn 2023. His short story “Paradox of the Twins”

was recently published by The Ancible, and his novellas San Damien versus the Red Daggers and Erica Victor are forthcoming. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Meg Yardley lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry and short fiction have recently appeared or are forthcoming in publications including Gulf Coast, Salamander, SWWIM, Cagibi, and the Women’s Review of Books.