Anastacia-Reneé
Grisel Y. Acosta
JC Alfier
J. Mae Barizo
Chris Belden
Sheila Black
Nicole Callihan
Audrey T. Carroll
Robin Dellabough
Katherine Dering
B.K. Fischer
Jaden Fong
Carlene M. Gadapee
Seán Griffin
Katherine Hill
Marcus Jackson
Em [Marie] Kohl
Deborah Leipziger
Erin Lynn
danilo machado
Zach Keali’i Murphy
Sarah Perry
Grace Sleeman
Daniel Summerhill
Vincent Toro
Xenia Gianiotis Turner
Jonathan Vatner
Spring 2024 • No. 39
Purchase, New York No. 39 • Spring 2024
Editor
Iain Haley Pollock
Managing Editor Rye Fitz
Creative Nonfiction Editors
Mariah Lanzer
Xenia Gianiotis Turner
Fiction Editors
Drew Marines
Xenia Gianiotis Turner
Poetry Editors Rye Fitz
Mariah Lanzer
Contributing Editor
Laurel Peterson
Reader Dana Wu
Designer
Danielle Cruz
Cover Art
JC Alfier
Inkwell Journal 39
© 2024 Manhattanville University
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 University 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, 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.
Sheila Black GhoSt
It is different when you realize everyone you know will die—not just the badly behaved or the unlucky, the ones who were old to start with—but everyone. Such a simple fact and astonishing how we don’t and don’t see it. My father’s ghost greets me under the dying elm beside the film theater with the lovely name Avalon. The last time we were here, he fell asleep as the credits rolled and told me after “Now that was a fine film,” though I knew he had not glimpsed a single frame. A violent story, a man bent on revenge that ends with a series of beautifully staged battles in a building made of glass, where in room after room bodies are left. We had gone because my sister had lit the set, described the mornings with the crew—light bouncing astoundingly off the glass walls, how everyone at some point saw something that wasn’t there. My father’s ghost comforts me. He says, “Think of memory like a length of cut thread. It won’t get you everywhere but will take you from here to there,” holding his hands apart as if measuring something. “Now,” I tell him, “whole weeks go by when I barely think of you and somehow that is worse.” He does not reply. He does not even appear. This is the trick the dead use to keep us talking. It is different when you realize there is no evening out of this equation—no infinite love
that will balance out the shortness of time. There is art, and that is something. There is a voice that sings down the street from the Avalon tonight, a woman wearing headphones, carting her heavy work bags, not even aware that everyone is listening to her sing along with “If This World Were Mine,” belting out the words as if she were on Broadway.
tidy accumulation is typical in these kinds of times: scattering everywhere, floors littered with laundry and not-laundry the usual, object reflections of thinking-clutter—too much and all too at-once; strains—best to not pretend they are all separate, distinct, or mutable
‘cause everything tangles and leaks and bleeds if you look, there’s reminders of that too : stains of the last time—and you smile recognition: oh, there you are again mirror portraits of mess made tangible how significant the order we find even just in syllables which we count
RoBin dellaBouGh
my necklaceS have all oxidized
Silver tarnished to dull grey, as if this old body doesn’t deserve to be adorned, to call attention to itself.
How slowly we sag toward earth.
With such stealth.
Once I wore earrings, bracelets that jangled when I danced like a goddess, believing I was immortal.
Now I will give away my jewelry, even the wedding ring I haven’t worn in years. I’ll offer my stripped-down self to the gods.
Let them dance me into silver air.
vincent toRo a BRief hiStoRy of my ScReenS
My first screen was large enough to fit me inside its mandibles. Immobile, it weighed as much as a baby rhino. It poked me with grainy sculptures of showrooms filled with domestic wares begging me to guess how much they cost. How much?
* My second screen was smaller though still unable to migrate with me to untenable borders. The lines were sharper like a spaghetti strainer where I tried to sneak my broken action figures through. It always refused to go dark when bed time came to arouse me.
* My next screen did not belong
to me or to any relatives. He was a stowaway in the front room I shared with two flat mates (or maybe I was the stowaway). One of them could always be seen trying to wedge themselves into the tubes, vying for space among the clicks, among the cliques that this screen promised would make us all beautiful.
* My fourth screen was desperately lonely. We mostly kept it turned off because we were too busy falling in love, and besides, it had terrible reception.
* My fifth screen Gremlin-multiplied until there were more screens than rooms. They, too, despise sunlight, water. Devoted, they have learned to be a walk through Tokyo streets, a Pacific beach, or even an eagle’s nest.
Fluorescent balm for analog chafing, my pores
engorged by their lucent marvels until I became a twisted nematic hominid, living liquid crystal shroud.
* (So much time spent looking, looking, searching, hoping something…anything… was looking back.)
SaRah PeRRy
1. Be stupid.
2. No, young. So young that now, you can barely remember her.
3. Think that because you are from Maine you can plan and execute a three-day hike. This will be the perfect way to introduce your boyfriend, who is from—who can remember? Let’s say a suburb of D.C. Somewhere tame, warm, with malls—to your home. It’s June, after all. And hiking is just walking.
4. You need everything: boots, rain jacket, tiny fancy stove that catches your eye at the R.E.I. near campus. You’ll take the backpack you use to haul books to classes. What’s the difference? You do own a Nalgene, covered in stickers from the coffee shop, the co-op. Bands, bookstores.
5. Neglect to check the weight of everything you’re carrying, including your desire for this man, ballast against the grief that travels with you always. You won’t be introducing him to your mother, gone now for a decade.
6. (This is before Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, a book that might have saved you a lot of trouble.)
7. Forget that although you’re from Maine, you are not from an L.L.Bean family. On sunny summer days, you and your mother sometimes walked up a gentle little mountain near your house. The trails were sandy; you could slip off
your shoes and go barefoot. You stopped occasionally to pick blueberries. This was the extent of your trekking. If it was really sunny, she’d take you to the movies, for the air conditioning.
8. Lying in a rickety extra-long twin, still on campus down South, stare at the pale expanse of his back, the knobs of his spine, the scattering of moles a pattern you will never learn. Feel nothing but the abyss waiting for you, the moment you are brave enough to be alone.
9. Get on the road, long stretches of highways forever lost to you. It’s impossible to remember traveling when you have no real idea of your destination.
10. When you arrive at Saddleback, it will have been raining for three days, the skies just barely clear. You will start late in the afternoon, because you are stupid. But why is everything up to you? In the rain in memory, you can’t even see this man.
11. Love is attention.
12. Hiking is just walking. Rain is just water.
13. As the dove-gray sky falls to silver falls to pewter, understand what it means on a mountain when the rain has been falling for days. Understand how a rocky path can become a stream that threatens to pull you down. Learn what a false peak is. Again. And again. And again.
14. Cry because you are on a mountain that will not yield. The guidebooks have told you to expect a flatness between peaks, a place to camp and rest, the saddle of the saddleback. A destination. You should have reached it by now. You should be better oriented. You should be moving faster.
15. You are graduating soon. All you can see before you is one false peak after another.
16. Crying is social. Humans witness each other’s pain. Realize this is the wrong witness, wrong mountain, wrong journey.
17. Yell at this man, who did nothing to help you plan. Who passively followed you. He should have understood that you didn’t know where you were going. Be angry that you fooled him.
18. It’s getting dark.
19. It’s dark now.
20. Turn around. Use your overpriced headlamps to get back to the car.
21. In a hotel, weeks from now, when he says, “I love you,” don’t say “Thank you” and continue dating him for another six months.
22. Get off the mountain when it wants you to.
There is a cloud rising at dusk, roads winding towards a blue house beside the lake.
She waits for me in the room full of bowls. In the fields are ghost plants, red mushrooms with death-veil webs.
Wasp nests beneath the porch, razor sting above my eyebrow, slender hips loafing across the yard.
She tongues a tadpole in my body, unhinging ciphers, body as light-hive. Fractal planks, bodice, a single thorn.
The sea a page of light. The light a blue relief. And so my love rises late in morning, the slow practice of forfeiting dreams for waking, an ant which twitches in the ear, hears a child shriek through the blue while I cut melons in the other room. Thinking of your body walking into another room, dismantling it.
Six days I slept untrammelled by love and seagulls.
My hot yoga teacher says, if you leave your right palm facing upward, I will place a cool towel in it. I leave my right palm facing upward; he places a cool towel in it. It is hot yoga. He is a hot hot yoga teacher. I’ve decided not to climb on the elliptical to watch Sex & the City reruns. I will not mourn the loss of late ‘90’s NYC! Not today I won’t! I will go to hot yoga and listen to the soothing voice of my hot hot yoga teacher. In downward dog, he presses my hips. There you go, he says. There I go indeed. But he is terrible with metaphors. He makes me wonder if everything is a metaphor for everything, or if nothing is a metaphor for anything. I drape the cool towel over my eyes. I am a corpse. He waves incense over the class. I want you to know, he says, no matter how you feel, you’re all batting a hundred. And because my first celebrity crush was Dale Murphy; and because, as a fifth grader, I was a diligent dugout baseball scorekeeper—the smell of Jeff Leatherman’s Juicy Fruit and his father’s deodorant, all those tiny diamonds!; and because of that one spring I followed the Cubs because my lover loved the Cubs, and I thought if I could feel joy when my lover felt joy, or disappointment when my lover felt disappointment; the popcorn!, the breeze!, the seventh inning stretch!; because of these, I know that it is not a hundred one wants to bat. Not even close. Now, my still sort of hot yoga teacher asks us to wiggle our fingers and toes. Like little worms. Like little worms! My yoga teacher. And yet, perhaps, one out of ten is not so bad. Perhaps, one out of ten is really just about right. Perhaps, I am the ridiculous being with the unruly wielding of metaphors! I am humbled. One out of ten. I am a humbled little sweaty being on the Great Jumbotron of Life. One out of ten, precisely! Namastay, my hot yoga teacher, namafuckingstay.
The great gates of the bridge pierce sunset’s purple clouds as the slender houses set their windows aglow and close their discrete doors. I’ve done this before: walked the blocks at dusk, alone and without warning, head aching from a day in four walls, the little luxuries of boredom. Wanting to palm the plane tree’s bark firsthand or hear how its leaves brush one another in wind and touch the brick, or catch across the street the couple’s argument, the way our son is now attuned to ours, infrequent and quick to fizzle as they now are, a miracle to come home, to have come this far.
G R ace S leeman o RP heu S , f ool Hello, sweetheart. You’re avoiding me again. Inside your head an alarm goes off, a dog howls. It is time to run. A boy slips his fingers inside your body. Maybe he will find the discarded selves you hide there, deep in your skeleton crumpled and empty, nestled in your pelvis for safekeeping. After, he tries to touch your hair and instead you put your clothes on. There have been men sweet to you before; you know this. Their fingers shuddering through your hair, lips to forehead; after, you feel hollow. Your windows shatter. You tangle yourself in their limbs to tie yourself down. But now you put your clothes on. Maybe if you leave first they can’ t see you at your sweetest. They can’t take what you’ve given and decide it’s lacking. If you treat
yourself like an object first, they can’t hurt you by telling you that’s what you’ve been all along. Because you know, beloved. You made this object yourself. You remember, don’t you, the work of it? Your eyes sting; you pour eucalyptus oil down the drain. Someone has smeared muddy handprints on your walls. No, not mud: charcoal, blood, the unmade ink of you. When did you begin to cannibalize yourself? Pull your body apart to create stories, a girl made into a meal. You must look a mess—your hands tangled in your guts. A boy will touch your skin, enter your body, leave you hollow again. The body is a container. She’s behind you, the girl you left behind, all blood and gristle and not at all beautiful. Don’t look back! She can’t follow if you do, you’ll lose her forever, Orpheus, you fool. Didn’t you learn the first time? Inside your head you are screaming. The windows are shattering outwards and in at once. You have done this before and you will do it again.
Jonathan vatneR
When I came home to New York after three years in San Francisco, my father escorted me into his study and made me promise to wear a kippah during kiddush and hide my tattoo from Mom and not “have relations” with another man as long as I stayed under his roof.
Which, I realized, would not be long.
“You turned my bedroom into an office?” I asked. The shelves buckled under the weight of his prayer books. In the mosaic of frames on one wall, I registered just one picture of me, taken when I was sixteen, a few months before I came out.
“We’re very glad you’re home, Moishele.” His breath smelled like shul. I promised everything and backed away.
Mom was in the kitchen, wearing slippers shaped like Goofy the mutant dog and savoring infinitesimal bites from clementine wedges. My sister’s baby, looking spooked, batted her breast like Moses striking the rock for water.
Mom sized me up. “You’re so skinny!” It was an accusation and a compliment.
I hadn’t lost the weight on purpose. I found comfort in being hungry. As a teenager, I loved fast days, hoping devotion could make up for the sins I knew were coming for me. Of course it couldn’t: The rabbis had drilled into me that sodomy was as bad as murder—years before I learned the definition of sodomy.
“Ronit,” Mom said to the baby, “this is your uncle Moishe.”
“Mike,” I corrected.
“Whatever you like,” she said.
“I thought this was Ilana.” I squeezed the baby’s rubbery arm.
“No, Ilana is Esther’s third. Ronit is her fourth. And she’s pregnant!”
“Does number five come with a free mezuzah?”
Mom imitated a laugh. “You’ve always been so funny.”
Esther wandered in from her old bedroom—one that hadn’t been desecrated with a cheap laminate desk and shelves. A ratty auburn sheytl cloaked her hair, a toddler dangled over her arm, and Getzel, child number two, burrowed into her long wool skirt. Only Esther’s fingers and face showed.
“Mike, so good to see you,” she said, prying Ilana’s hand away from her wig. “Maybe you’ll come over for Shabbos dinner now that you’re back? The kids are excited to get to know you.”
“Sure, yeah, totally,” I said.
Shabbat dinner was sliced pot roast, baked chicken coated with Mrs. Dash, meatballs in sweet-and-sour sauce, glazed chicken wings for the kids, and three kinds of kugel. I cringed at all the meat. When I left home, I stopped following kosher laws—invented by rabbis in the Middle Ages to ensure no Jew could eat with a gentile—but the one time I bit into a McDonald’s hamburger, my throat seized up. Since I wasn’t going to support the Jewish-industrial complex by buying kosher meat, I became a vegetarian. Now the smell of cooked flesh made me gag.
My father and Zvi, Esther’s husband, packed greasy lumps into their mouths and chewed in wide circles. Mom minced half a chicken breast, deposited a morsel into her mouth and moaned with pleasure. Esther encouraged her kids to try the meatballs. I carved a mound of potato kugel from a casserole dish and took a bite. It was dry.
“How did we raise children who don’t like to eat?” my father asked.
“I’m vegetarian,” I said, suddenly angry that they hadn’t asked what I could eat.
“My son, the vegetarian.” He said it like the title of a tale about a village idiot.
Eat shit, Abba, I wanted to say. “I don’t think it’s morally defensible to kill animals” is what I said.
“So Moishe, tell us about San Francisco,” Mom cut in with a panicked smile. “I haven’t been there since before we had you two. Your father took me for my birthday—our hosts were the nicest people!”
“I read that anti-Semitism is on the rise out West,” said Zvi, sucking on a drumstick. “It’s not just the goyim, either. The secular Jews hate Israel, too.” The word “goyim” was full of exclusion, entitlement, and disdain. But I couldn’t educate them.
“I wouldn’t say it was anti-Semitic,” I said. But I sensed it. The director of the LGBT health clinic where I worked had argued that circumcision didn’t reduce the transmission of HIV, and that “no one should get circumcised except Jews.”
It was in his tone. I asked that he be more respectful. He went on about how much he loved Jews, how he had been married to one. In my next performance review, he eviscerated me, and I quit. I was done with that shit city anyway.
“You may not see it, Moishe, but it’s real,” my father said. “The UN adopted twenty resolutions against Israel this year, and three against all the other countries combined. When Palestinians are the ones killing innocent people!”
“To think that so many people hate us just for trying to protect our land,” Mom said, shaking her head.
“I think it’s more complicated than that,” I said.
“Don’t tell me you condone terrorism,” said my father, heating up.
“I don’t think he’s saying that,” Esther said. I thanked her with a strangled smile. “I just think you can’t look at these attacks under a microscope.”
“One doesn’t need a microscope to see evil,” Abba said. “Israel is standing on Palestine’s neck,” I said, “and then they play victim when Palestine fights back.”
“Israel acts only in self-defense,” my father said. “If you think that’s morally equivalent to terrorism, we wasted our money on your education.”
“Yaakov, don’t you think the meatballs came out tastier than usual?” Mom asked. “You’ll never guess what I put in them.”
“We don’t have any moral high ground anymore, Abba,” I said. “We’re the bad guys. You just can’t see it because the Torah gives you a free pass to trample on everyone who isn’t exactly like you.” I wasn’t a person in a body anymore; I was acid and flame.
“You may have forgotten,” my father said, his cheeks reddening, “that six million of our people were murdered for no other reason than our religion. But I see that you don’t consider yourself a Jew anymore.”
“I do consider myself a Jew,” I muttered. “I just don’t hate non-Jews.”
“It’s soy sauce,” my mother said to Esther. “I put soy sauce in the meatballs.”
“They’re delicious,” Esther assured her, though she hadn’t tried them.
I fled to the bathroom and opened Grindr on my phone, and the buzz of message alerts blunted my father’s cruelty. In San Francisco, I’d exhausted all my options, but in New York, I was fresh meat. Christopher, nine hundred feet away, told me I had a beautiful ass. I loved Christophers, men on sailboats in polo shirts, their pale, uncut cocks coiled in crisp white briefs. This one was forty-one and had a trim,
muscular body and a perfectly shaped bald head. He invited me over. I told him I’d be there in an hour.
But Abba hadn’t yet given me the new keys to the apartment. ***
After dessert, a dry babka with gluey parve ice cream, everyone speed-mumbled birkat, thanking their monstrous god for the food. I thanked the animals who gave their lives for these dopes. Then Zvi dived onto the droopy leather sofa, my father opened a large-print mystery on the recliner and Mom read to her grandkids a Dora the Explorer rip-off called Little Gittel Learns the Brochos while I helped my sister with the dishes.
Esther scrubbed the plates and filed them into the dishwasher while I spread foil over the platters and made room for them in the fridge.
“Why did Abba change the locks?” I asked.
“The building misplaced their spare keys. Then there was a stabbing a few blocks away, and Mom was scared.” So it wasn’t about me. That was a relief.
“Do you know where they keep a spare?”
She studied me. “I think there’s one in Abba’s office.”
“You mean the occupied territory? I still consider it my bedroom.”
She laughed, more from anxiety than amusement, I think. “When Abba found out you were coming home, he wept, he was so happy.”
“Maybe he was crying for all those poor Israelis getting criticized for depriving the Palestinians of human rights.”
She shut off the faucet and wiped her hands on a towel.
“Hey. I’m on your side. I want peace too. You don’t have to provoke everyone just to prove you’re different.”
“I wasn’t provoking…” I stopped, not wanting to provoke her. But now I was pissed. “You know, I told you about my tattoo in confidence.”
She held up her soapy dish gloves in surrender. “I didn’t say a word. Abba guessed it—I didn’t confirm or deny.”
“That’s confirming.”
“I couldn’t lie.”
“I’m sorry if I thought we still had some loyalty for each other.”
She squeezed out the pink sponge used for meat dishes, rinsed her gloves and wiped them on a towel. “Just to be clear, I liked our conversations,” she whispered. “I missed you. A lot. But every time I told you I was becoming more modest, you came out with some crazy story about … crazy things.”
“They’re not crazy to me.”
“How is being intimate with a different person every night not crazy?”
“It’s not every night. And it’s how my people find love.”
“Your people? We’re the same people,” she said.
“Tell yourself that.”
I’d called Esther a few times from San Francisco, describing the weirdos I’d slept with; one with a wife and three kids, one who made me watch a Golden Girls marathon while he chain-smoked, one who wouldn’t take off his baseball cap and wept after sex. She talked about her efforts not to arouse men, how she read that it was forbidden for a married woman not only to touch men but also to look at them, because one of the Talmudic rabbis had said that the gaze was a kind of touch. And she realized that wearing makeup in public could be seen as seduction, so she put it on at night for Zvi and washed it off in the morning. In a way, we were talking about the same thing.
I thought Esther and I were meeting each other halfway: I left out details that might upset her, like the guy who drank
my piss and the one who was so well-endowed I ended up bleeding on his sheets. But on one call, she stopped me. “I want to know about your life,” she said, “just not that aspect of it.”
That was the last time we’d spoken. ***
The lights in Abba’s study were off, and everyone would know I broke Shabbat if I turned them on, so I used my cell phone’s flashlight to help me find the keys.
Abba poked his head in, and instinctively I jammed my phone into my pocket, wishing I weren’t afraid to show him I wasn’t religious. “What are you doing in here?” he asked.
I couldn’t think of a good lie. “You didn’t give me the keys.”
“Where are you going at ten o’clock?”
“You remember Aaron Weissman? We made plans.”
“You did, did you?” He smiled. He knew me too well.
“You gotta meet me halfway.”
He examined me, his eyes tender. Then he dropped his gaze and scratched his beard. “I can’t help you break Shabbos.” He stepped back, leaving the door open. “The keys are not near the edge of my desk.”
This was just like him, making a Talmudic puzzle out of everything. “Abba, just give them to me.”
“They’re not in the middle of my desk, either. And they’re not in the desk drawer.” He sat in his office chair and swiveled to face the opposite wall.
In the dim light from the hallway, I scanned the desk. A set of keys was mixed in with rubber bands and paper clips in an ashtray toward the back.
“Please be careful,” he said, swiveling back around and gesturing toward me with both arms. It didn’t occur to me
until I was waiting for the elevator that he had been trying to give me a hug.
Christopher’s studio apartment looked like a page from a catalog and smelled like a spa. A plastic lantern like a prehistoric sea creature breathed light into the room. His meek smile and balletic stance reminded me of a famous artist I’d slept with in San Francisco, and he wore a gray waffleweave Henley and loose sweatpants that revealed the contours of his bulge.
He locked the door with two dead bolts and a chain.
“I know, I know,” he said, shooing away the anticipated criticism. “You can’t be too careful in this city.”
“I won’t steal anything,” I regretted saying.
“Please don’t,” he said.
“I won’t.” As if that helped at all.
He hung my jacket on the shower curtain rod and offered me a glass of wine. His stainless-steel fridge had nothing but white wine and stacks of plastic takeout containers. He chose a bottle and poured two glasses, apologizing for using champagne flutes instead of the proper stemware. I decided against telling him my family drank out of the glasses yahrzeit candles come in. It would have been too hard to explain.
When I finished my wine, he pulled me close and kissed me. I pointed my dick skyward in my underwear to give it room to grow.
“You look like you’re sixteen,” he said in between kisses.
“Good guess. I’m fifteen.”
He practically jumped away.
“Kidding. I’m twenty-four.”
He pursed his narrow, thin lips. “You mind showing
me your ID? My friend went to prison for sleeping with a kid who lied about his age.”
I dug out my driver’s license and handed it over, too horny to be annoyed.
“San Francisco, huh.” He flicked the license.
“I moved back to New York today.”
“You just got off a plane? We should celebrate”—he squinted at the ID—“Michael Moskowitz. Yum. I love Jewish boys.”
I didn’t love the way that sounded. “I’m actually a pretty big jerk.”
He grabbed my crotch. “Tonight, you’re my jerk.”
I didn’t love the way that sounded, either, but my dick was all in. Maybe I wanted to be demeaned.
“What brought you to San Francisco?” he asked.
“I was trying to get distance from my parents. I thought I might hate them less.”
“I hated mine when I was your age,” he said.
“And you don’t now?”
He shrugged. “They’re dead.” I flinched at the hardness of the word. He seemed like someone who would tell me they passed or were angels now. “But I stopped hating them before they died. I accepted that they loved me in their very flawed way.”
“I might not hate mine if our religion wasn’t designed to hate me.”
He looked at me as if he’d just noticed he wasn’t alone. “Do you like to be spanked?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure. I had a hard time saying no.
“Take off your clothes, boy.” His breath smelled yeasty and sweet from the wine. Soon I was naked except for my socks. He pushed me onto his platform bed and rolled me onto my stomach, cleared away the neat mound of block-
printed throw pillows and walloped my ass. It didn’t hurt at first, but soon the pain became excruciating.
“Bad boy,” he said, alternating cheeks. “Bad little Jew boy.”
Politically, I was none too pleased, but it hurt too much to think.
“You need to be punished,” he said, hitting harder.
The embarrassing truth was that I was aroused. With every slap, my hard-on rubbed against his sateen bedspread, but all I felt was the obliterating throb. Just when I thought he was going to tear flesh from bone, an orgasm ripped through me. I screamed from the surprise.
“Good boy,” he said.
As my sensations returned, I became aware of a cold wetness under my belly. “I’m sorry,” I said, rolling over to see how badly I’d soaked his bedding.
“It’s OK.” He brought a warm, wet washcloth from the bathroom and cleaned me. It felt good to be taken care of in this way.
“I didn’t realize I was gonna cum.” I touched my slimy excretion on his duvet cover. “Sorry. Sorry.” Now I was sobbing. I knew I was being ridiculous.
He held me and kissed me on the forehead as the apologies rolled out of me. I hoped I wasn’t freaking him out, but I couldn’t stop until I had apologized to everyone: my father, my mother, my sister, the god I didn’t believe in who made me gay and hated me for it. As if Christopher could forgive me for everything.
Now the bed was wet in two places. We spooned until the weirdness dissipated.
“What’s this?” he asked, caressing the scar on my upper back. “Were you burned?”
“Oh, that.” I reached over my shoulder to touch it. “It was supposed to be a tattoo. I’d just moved to San Francisco,
and I wanted to prove something, I guess.”
“What happened?”
“Maybe I didn’t take good enough care of it, I don’t know. It scabbed over, and when the scabs came off, the tattoo was gone. The guy who did it said sometimes the body rejects them, like, the ink just falls out.”
“And he wouldn’t try again?”
“I’d been having second thoughts about it anyway.”
“That sounds sad,” Christopher said.
“I’m over it.”
He traced the scar with his finger. “Did it say ‘freedom’?”
I jerked away, mortified that the word was visible, like the ruins of a prideful civilization. “Please pretend you didn’t see that.”
“It’s sweet. It means you’re earnest.” He kissed my failed tattoo, and for the moment it did seem sweet, and I wished I could be that earnest again. I wished I could believe, if not in a religion then in the idea that a tattoo could free me. I wanted to cry again, but no tears were left in me, just ache.
“What do you believe in?” I asked, nuzzling into his chest. His shirt was soft and probably expensive.
“Love.”
“But no religion or anything?”
“Not since I was a kid.”
“Do you miss it?”
“I used to. I grew up Catholic, and I was lost for a long time. But I like it better this way. No one can tell me I’m a sinner. Unless I ask them to.” He laughed, and I felt embarrassed about the spanking and how he’d known it would turn me on. I didn’t like that he’d sensed this erotic trigger I hadn’t known about. It dragged me back to the years before I could name my desire but when any stranger could have named it for me.
I didn’t want to be naked anymore. I told him I was hungry, and he heated up some pad Thai while I dressed. Then he watched me eat. The noodles burned my mouth, but they were tasty.
“Wait,” he said, “do you eat shrimp? I think pad Thai has shrimp paste in it.”
I swallowed. “Like, all pad Thai?”
“I think so.”
Astonished, I stared at my fork, coated with oil and bits of peanut. I had eaten tofu pad Thai for years, not realizing it had been treyf. And I hadn’t gotten sick, as my father had warned. It felt like proof that I could finally leave Judaism. I couldn’t remember feeling so free. “I don’t keep kosher.”
“That’s good,” he said. “No use locking yourself in a made-up prison.”
I knew he was trying to be considerate, but it sounded condescending. I thought about how he’d called me a Jew boy and felt insulted. My San Francisco friends had told me I was too sensitive about anti-Semitism. And my father thought I was an anti-Semite. “It works for some people,” I mumbled. It came out like a retort.
The air between us chilled. I blamed myself.
“Sometimes I can be callous about religion,” he said by way of apology. “I guess I’m still a little angry.”
“It’s fine.” I could hear how cold I sounded. I wanted to leave on a friendly note, because I wanted to see him again. Maybe we’d make a date to see a play or go out for Thai food and swallow more shrimp paste. Maybe we’d fall in love, or he’d ask me to be his houseboy. But when Christopher took my plate and said, “This was fun,” basically kicking me out, I felt rejected. Wasn’t I the one who had a right to be annoyed? “I’d like to see you again,” I said. “Maybe next time you’ll get naked too.”
“Yeah, definitely, that’d be great.” I tried to think of
the right thing to say as he rinsed the plates and put them in the dishwasher, wiped the dishwasher handle with a sponge, squeezed out the sponge, wiped down the sink, scrubbed his hands with foaming soap, and applied hand lotion. It was like a religious ritual. “Thanks for coming,” he said.
“I guess I wasn’t your nice Jewish boy after all,” I said, laughing. It was the worst thing I could have said.
He cocked his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Forget it. I’m just an asshole.”
“You’re not an asshole. You’re angry. There’s a difference.”
I needed Christopher’s help to unlock the door. A peck on the lips, and I was alone in the hallway as the locks clacked shut.
eRRand
Papa was a stolen drone, I sing quietly to myself while waiting for my prescription.
Maybe I’m imagining the pharmacists being more comfortable in their masks, and it’s simply the spring climate lending ease to their movements behind the glass. Tonight, for an hour or two, I’ll want madly to step again into a commoners’ bar and pay cash upon every few mouthfuls of fog. Meantime, I’m going to find the front of the store, the produce and the soup, maybe the magazine racks to stare at all the glossy, ludacris faces.
maRcuS JackSon
In the beautiful no longer, you could smoke while you ate at the Burger King where as a teen I’d meet my friends, hungry to keep lying and laughing ourselves into new proximities with invulnerability. Twenty-five years ago, same as now, news and politics could lay their filthy hands on your soul, and I still hanker for catching a Phillips Avenue bus in February and steeping through the half-filled cabin in which no one looked at me with anything except a measured wish they wouldn’t have to flee or combat any wrongdoing I may bring upon the ride.
Jaden fonG
headed to a Beach town, don’t think i’ll come Back
Driving through it, there’s lots to see through my eyelashes, which are sticking to each other—prison bars or walnut trunks in line like soldiers, whichever you prefer. There’s
cars covered in freckles of autumn rust; an oxidized Lutheran church in a standoff against the tea shop across from it; there’s my cousin, sitting on a cliff overlooking the shore. We chow on banh mi, talk about how things change. How there’s not as many surfers out there, how neither of us have been able to catch a rainbow
trout at our secret camping spot in years. We compare notes on where we’ll be moving and if we want to be there at all. “Here is as good a place as any,” she says. “Over there is just as good, I bet,” I tell her. Our bodies feel normal and we palm more mango and pluck more mint and eat more bread.
caRlene m. GadaPee
We hauled bags and bags and dumpster-loads from my dad’s house all last summer. There are few objects that I prize, that I say, That is mine!
Things are just things. Except the little three-legged stool. It’s supposed to be a milking stool, but never came near a cow or a goat. I sat on it, evening
after evening, while my dad dried my hair, using the expandable hose attached to the bonnet-style hair dryer. I can hear the hollow crinkle as it heated,
hummed, and stretched. It was a pink quilted vinyl box like a small suitcase with a little slot through which warm air breathed, intended for the time-
pressed housewife to dry her nails while curlers, snug under the ballooning plastic bonnet, set her hair into impossible sausages. But as I was saying,
before the hairdryer crept in, it was my dad who used the wide-toothed comb and dried my hair in sections, while I sat still in my cotton nightgown, clutching my teddy bear, long before I loved the fur off and it lost an eye. That stool is something I will not part with. It is one of the few things I claimed.
A woman came home and found her husband in bed with a younger woman, and this was sad because it was so common, but it was also enraging, because for years the woman and her husband had talked about this, how common such scenes were, how frequent in life and in books, and they had laughed, in honest agreement she’d thought, at the poor fools who had to play out the scene, again and again and again. But now her husband was implicitly saying he had misled her, because now, as he clung tearfully to this younger woman in their bed, he was explicitly saying that what his wife was witnessing was not in fact common, he was so sorry but what she was witnessing was love, it was extraordinary, and he was so sorry he had fallen captive to such an extraordinary feeling, a feeling he had tried to tell her about many times, but how could he tell her, it was too devastating a thing to tell to someone you loved, someone with whom you had a child and so much history, and so much else in common.
Grateful that their daughter was in school, the woman sat down at the foot of the bed and began taking off her shoes, which was something she normally did at the door, but which she’d bypassed that afternoon in her distraction at having discovered her husband’s affair. Her husband was the one who always failed to take off his shoes indoors, sometimes wearing them right into bed, and she had always teased him about this, how mildly barbaric it was to wear the grit of the city into bed with his wife, but she had also been charmed by how comfortable he was in her presence, how unconscious of the weight of his shoes in his eagerness to be close to her body. She’d loved the weight of his body on hers, so she’d surrendered, happily, to the grit.
Wondering if he would be consistent in this habit with bodies that were not her own, she stood and lifted the duvet. Sure enough, he was still wearing his shoes, though the rest of his body was naked. She couldn’t see if the other woman had a body at all, and that was just as well, because the other woman didn’t really matter. The woman who mattered picked up her husband’s foot and unlaced and removed the first shoe, which was torn at the spot where the big toe met the canvas, and which probably should’ve been replaced months before, but then he had never been one to replace a pair of shoes, not until they’d completely come apart. She dug her finger into the hole, sad because he had misled her and because they were all so common, and then she clapped him across the face with his shoe.
They lived in the middle of the noisy city, but close enough to the harbor that they could often hear the ships, which came and went at all times of day, some of them at regular intervals and some with no apparent schedule, blasting their foghorns to announce their movements. It was an old joke of theirs to honk at each other when they heard the ships indoors, especially when they were in separate rooms, or sliding past each other at the sink, and so she couldn’t be sure if the sound she heard now was the sound of his shoe against his face, or the sound of a foghorn in the harbor, or the sound of her own voice, or the sound of something else entirely, a seagull maybe, which was another common thing they were often surprised to find in the city.
em [maRie] kohl
midnight black house spider, stills— eight legged tongue encircled /trapped\
by a pursed lipped jar
a-top eggshell white linen, soft focus landscape of, drawn back bedsheets, mussed pillow creased in the middle, morning light fangs the curve in the glass
a window out of frame
- After Paulus Bor, The Disillusioned Medea (1640)
You look away from her face because you can’t stand rage without beauty, you have no use for it, this unforgivable snarl and squint, left eye larger than the right, these cheeks ruddy from detergent and wrath. You are inclined to walk on, behold another
version of vrowenleven, lives of women less driven to ire, but she seems to brush the velvet across her lap one way then back, lightening and deepening the violet, the glint in her sea-glass irises making you forget she’s poor, a washerwoman, a treader of peat, prone to moods and acne on the chin. She’ll deny her age until you’re close enough to see
her hands—veined, spotted, reduced to their work.
None of this has much to do with you, walking past her this late in the day this late
in the empire, when all virtues have become brands: Tide, Zest, Caress, Bounty, Fiat, Dove.
Having power-walked from Atlantic Avenue to DeKalb, I arrived at Brooklyn’s Fat Rabbit Diner with a few minutes to spare. Standing on the sidewalk, I checked the time: 9:56 a.m. I peered in through the dark glass—the diner was empty. I pulled on the door. Locked. A few people gathered loosely on the sidewalk, and it occurred to me that perhaps they were in line for breakfast too. I confided in a couple a few feet away, but the man told me they were not waiting for breakfast but for the B38 bus. Then, as if conjured out of thin air, the bus materialized and everyone fled. Alone again, I waited, enveloped in a geometric conglomeration of grayscale beginning under my Chelseabooted feet and emanating outwards and upwards to infinity. I looked up to the sky and saw the sun fighting the clouds overhead. It was almost like a mirror—this cinereous city— but placed in the desert, so that the light eclipses the looking glass and leaves it empty of reflection. With nothing inside but an absence, mirage after faceless mirage rises out from the refracted rays and crowds the frame.
Moments later, a silhouette of a bird—a raven, I imagined—perched atop a bicycle, cruised around the corner. As it landed, I approached with faint skepticism, until suddenly, a smile emerged from under the raven’s jetblack cap, and out from under its inked wing, a warm hand. I reached out and shook it as we exchanged hellos. Then, the door to the diner opened.
We’d already settled into the vinyl clad booths, two
massive plates in front of us, the porcelain painted over with eggs, toast, and home fries when Nick Flynn asks me, “Are you sure that’s the one I don’t answer?”
“Yeah,” I say, “it’s in the epilogue of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, but the question appears again in Stay—”
“Can I have your carrot?” Flynn interjects while I’m whacking away at the dead horse of a question.
I oblige his request, offering up a radish and praise for the book’s title, cuss words and all. “That’s what made me pick up the book...”
“It’s almost mathematically perfect,” he says, “the number of people attracted to it was the exact same number of people who were repelled by it.”
I take Flynn’s assessment with a grain of salt, but then he divulges a few anecdotes about the pushback he received in the aftermath of the book’s release: run-ins with sensitive booksellers, letters from disgruntled nonreaders, and being withdrawn from a keynote address in Kentucky. I ask him if the situation gave him much grief, being his debut book and all, but he doesn’t harbor any ill will about it. He just gives a shoulder shrug and a few laughs. No stranger to the rules of the game, he decided to go rogue anyway—simply because staring at that curse-word-filled, formerly working, now permanent, title was where he found some joy.
When I discovered the book, I had just arrived in Denver with my former boyfriend (now husband) and our two cats. We moved from Vermont at the end of the summer, drove for six days through the South, and then pointed ourselves west, until we reached our new, same-old apartment in the Mile High City. The road trip was a fantastic adventure that came to an end once we settled in and reality got mechanical again. While it wasn’t my first uprooting (I’d been wandering for years), it was the first time I hadn’t felt the sense of renewal that comes from a change of scenery,
and that was a fix I desperately needed. Wading in an expanse of eternal sunshine, drowning in air deprived of oxygen, baiting the Rockies’s knifelike spires to tear me down, I was landlocked. The day that I wandered into Kilgore Books, I had never felt so lost, hopeless, and alone.
“Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” gently swims through the speakers and up to my ear as Flynn waxes esoteric about the evolution of written language. With a reverent and boyish enthusiasm, he expatiates on ancient pictographs and phonograms, marveling at how the letter “M” maintains the same place in today’s twenty-six letter alphabet as it did in the ancient Phoenician alphabet that originated it.
“The change from the oral culture of poems to the literate... completely changed human beings,” Flynn attests as I take a bite out of my toast. As writers are inclined to do, he elaborates on the subject: “If you had to have someone in front of you, telling you the story, and now you don’t; now, the person’s conjured in your mind, in your imagination... it’s a total different consciousness,” he pauses. “It creates a whole new consciousness, and it is what we’re playing with.”
Flynn’s latest release is the poetry collection, Low, and in “Notes on a Monument to Ether” he reverse engineers the downward spiral by virtue of linguistic ascension. Flynn explores the origins of certain words, the proverbial rock bottom, and builds upon these etymologies by weaving a web of linked stories that meander from the imagistic to the elucidative, from the autobiographical to the spiritual. The words that Flynn dissects are inspired by The Ether Monument in Boston’s Public Garden, a statue commemorating the medical use of ether as an anesthetic, as a
relief from suffering.
They are words with a paradoxical quality—words like apocalypse, essence, and revelation—but the poem doesn’t dawdle in abstraction; instead, the etymological refrain serves as a stabilizing poetic device, a kind of defense for the reader against the disorientation of bewilderment. His aseptic perception tugging ever so gently on the metaphysical realm that undergirds reality, Flynn offers an unadorned look at the monument in the opening lines of the poem: A man perches atop a pillared tower. He is seated & draped across his lap is another man, nearly naked, who seems to be unconscious.
It continues:
I never looked up to see the man lying in another man’s arms, this pietà. This says something about the statue & something about me.
The contrast between the tone of poem and the images it evokes is stark, hovering between asseveration and indifference, and divorced from definitude. This is characteristic of Flynn’s oeuvre, the way he seems to reserve the part of the emotional display—what he might consider the revelation—for the reader.
On 13th Street in Denver, between Wax Trax and Your Mom’s House, sits Kilgore Books. Housed in the city’s most populated district, Capitol Hill is the land of salaried hipster transplants and party-hopping transients who take in life as if it were a cocktail, equal parts delusional and desensitized. Resident tourists turned privileged taxpayers, they step over the city’s displaced and dispossessed to procure their lattes
to-go, navigating streets littered with camping tents and cardboard dwellings. They nosh on their piquant breakfast pastries, sleepwalking around the shadow of civilization as if all the days of their cosmetic lives boil down to the first twenty minutes of Groundhog Day. Unable to stop the onesided dialogue in our heads without a microdose, or to toss a buck in the tip jar when no one is looking, we all turn a blind eye to the double-walled paper cups that pock this cold hard country.
“The value of the indeterminate image,” Flynn says, “which is a post-modern thing, forces the reader to participate in the act of making meaning.”
“Well, I am curious about the three strands that you have in The Ticking Is the Bomb,” I reply, unconscious of my need to tame the philosophical with rationalizations about the mechanics of craft. “There’s impending fatherhood, the love triangle, and curiously, the torture at Abu Ghraib. How did those come together into a cohesive narrative?”
“Well, I never thought of it as those three strands... I see it like an image cluster. Almost like a planet, like a ball of energy,” Flynn says, staking his position in the vast unknown. “For the first thirty or forty pages, these things appear, which is asking a lot of the reader because their hand is not being held—like, how are these things connected? Why is he at childcare, you know... there’s fatherhood, torture, monkeys, photographs, swimming; what holds these things together?”
Kilgore Books features floor-to-ceiling shelves that hover like beacons for lost souls. One afternoon, while wading through stacks of secondhand books, I latched onto a wellworn cover dressed in head-to-toe black and branded with yellow typeface and a green tree. I turned the book over in my hands and the blurb on the back screamed to me as if this meeting was not in fact our first but a surprise reunion or a botched homecoming. The fact that I was some two thousand
miles away from Massachusetts didn’t seem to matter; the book transported me home: back to my family’s wounded cast of characters, back to their romantic attachments to suffering, back to the havoc I wreaked trying to leave behind what I carried with me always.
“A lot of that is trusting your subconscious,” Flynn assures me. “Whatever hooks on your subconscious is like a key to your inner life.”
“Was that the impetus behind your interest in Greek mythology?” I ask.
“I got Proteus from Stanley Kunitz... he thought of Proteus as the poet’s archetype because he’s about mutability and change and uncertainty, things not appearing as they seem and having to stay with something for a long time,” Flynn answers. “When I was working on The Ticking Is the Bomb, that sort of came up—the archetype. I don’t think every book needs an archetype, but sometimes it does seem like it can create a unifying metaphor for the whole, which is what elevates it into the universal in some way.”
“So, do you think of the archetype as a way into one’s subconscious while also creating space for the reader to bring their own associations into it?”
“I mean, anyone who opens up your book and reads it is already on your side in some way, and has a level of intelligence that you don’t have to speak down to,” Flynn answers. “Those that pick up the books and read them are so few, let’s just assume that they’re intelligent human beings with their own lives that they can project into it.”
“Poetry really showed me how associations and the associative quality to things can open up your work. I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but my early drafts are quite
solipsistic, which is something that scares me about memoir, but I think it’s a necessary jumping off point.”
“Yeah, it’s a type of threshold you have to cross in the beginning. Do you know Brenda Hillman?” Flynn asks me. Seeing that I don’t know Hillman or her poetry, Flynn shares an anecdote of her unconscious, yet poignant take on the poetic mystique: “'When a poet begins to write'—and she was on stage at the Dodge Poetry Festival—'a poet begins with the seemingly autobiographical,' and she sort of had her hands around her head,” Flynn says while miming the gesture with his own hands. “'But the more you work on the poem, it pushes into the universal,' and then her hands moved down her body. 'But then, in order for it to become a poem, it has to cross the threshold into the deeper mystery,' and her hands were down by her hips. I asked her about it afterwards, and she had no idea that she was doing this, but I was like yeah, that’s it!”
I left Kilgore Books, walked the three blocks home, and set the book back down as I left again, this time for a shift at the new, same-old restaurant where I was waiting tables. I don’t remember what happened the day I decided to open the book back up, or why it was that particular day and not one day sooner. I don’t remember if I had started therapy yet, or stopped driving drunk, if it was before or after I turned my insides up and out for the last time: first at Humboldt, then again at Lipan, and once more, with feeling, on West Meadow Drive.
“It feels like a ball of energy, each thing gets repeated, and they keep moving towards a center, but the center is a mystery, because I think the center of any memoir is a mystery that we never solve,” Flynn says, rendering an image
of the infinite cosmos as George Harrison’s slide guitar swoops out of the stereo speakers and seeps into my consciousness, the mantra in “My Sweet Lord” growing more prescient with every chorus.
Senses intermingling, the leftover image of the poetic ideal in my mind, I reply, “That characterization really gets at what thrills me most about memoir and real human stories. I guess I like the unknowable, the untraceable, the feeling of it. You can’t say it’s one thing, it’s open for everybody.”
“The whole experience is the experience you have reading it. That what it’s about. Each person has their own experience reading it, and there’s many ways to do that,” Flynn affirms.
Of the tragedies held in Flynn’s first memoir, of the many heartfelt, meandering lines the book contains, three in particular, spread out over a hundred pages, light up my brain like a neon exit sign: Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink. I see that I don’t really know what I’m doing, that I’m adrift, as the Buddhists say, on a river of forgetfulness. Before I read Flynn’s book, I didn’t know there was an antithesis to drowning in a river of moonshine, nor was I sure of what it was I contemplated while sidelined on those banks. I thought I had to trudge up the mountain, as if the ocean—that final confluence—lay just opposite the peak, but the pressure mounting, Flynn in hand, I made the decision to turn back.
Asking the unanswerable demands relentless digging, always pushing deeper, always moving into the mystery, and Flynn’s voice is testament to the excavation of the past using oneself as spade. Grueling work, but Flynn’s oeuvre succeeds
in unearthing latent connections, revealing layered meanings, and transmitting novel consciousnesses through his own vulnerability. Hallelujah! The chorus sings through diner speakers, in response to the celestial George Harrison in the sky. Hare Krishna! ***
Back on the sidewalk, outside the diner, Flynn and I perch as if two ravens preparing for takeoff. The sun now in full view, it seems that over the course of our conversation, the light has transcended the darkness, and buzzing like a light bulb connected to a power source, I, too, am beaming. This time, we hug as we say our goodbyes.
Walking down DeKalb, I am reminded of early on in the conversation, when our porcelain breakfast plates still appeared bottomless and Flynn described an interdisciplinary workshop he’s been teaching at the University of Houston. The workshop gets artists, writers, musicians, and theater folks together to see what happens when their work is channeled into different mediums, and I poked at the method to try and reveal its magic.
“So, is it a meta-analysis of your own work, or are you gauging how it resonates with the audience, too?” I asked.
“Well both, ideally. At the end you’d probably have the same poems only they’d be transformed by what you just put them through,” Flynn replied. “They’d resonate differently and have different energies to them, you’d open up different parts of them that are unexpected.”
Thinking about it now, with the image of a raven in my mind, I see Flynn’s workshop as sensitive to the bird’s unique vantage—extraordinary as it is, the view is only ever partial, and with so much to see, two birds are better than one. A solitary craft by nature, it is easy to diminish the power
of collaboration, but Flynn extols the transformative effect that it can have on a writer’s work. As a writer and poet, Flynn embraces a collective sense of wild abandon, formal restraint, and presence of mind, but to presume that his artistic aesthetic is fixed, or his creative process immutable, is to disavow his ongoing poetic development. Whatever the subject matter or image cluster, Flynn paints with bold strokes like stars shooting into the ether, led by the streaks of light in darkness and dissolving in the shadow of a deeper mystery. But as testament to the poem, dissolution is not destruction, and within the vast unknown lies another level of consciousness.
From across the street I hear a voice calling out my name which halts the recollection and the successive freefall of associations. When I turn to look, it’s Flynn on his bicycle, waving to me as he cruises down DeKalb. I wave back, our bond in literature secured by a book and fortified over breakfast—this time, though, the homecoming is a celebration.
my girl my girl
tell me where did you sleep (wake) last night
my girls are wearing upside down tarantulas on their eyelids & running braless in the middle of an ai day shouting no justice no peace through the silver holes in the back of their imminence
my girls are mopping with broad shank-y strokes & feathery textures in sunglasses & needles for red pumps & chuckling toothless & blue tongued with rows of deer lining their tonsils & spots & spots & spots.
my girls are yellow starfish & giving anyone the finger who doesn’t believe in the sleek power of the number five & anyone who is afraid to let two triangles pave the perilous concrete (together) like a perfect star. a cacophony of cracked fuck you’s & smooth prayers wrapped in meteorites & orion’s thong.
my girl my girl
my girls are dead & alive with the dreams of the demise of brainy demons spitting fire on hairs of tomorrow. for the weight of religion on thin skin & the blister break of unstoppable runway beauty that doesn’t always intends to slay but—does.
my girls slip their ankles out of shackles & dip ovaries in queso to prove the patriarchal slash on reproductive rights is
ain’t nobody’s business where they slept last night.
my girls—tell a vulture it is not allowed to walk the bridge of a girl’s mouth & forget about the thousand shards which reflect her name.
a na S tacia -R eneé d i GG in G we weed our adversaries like dandelions yellow with the desire to rope around our waists what would it be like to stem tall lush garden pickled with sprouts of boundless opportunity & infinite chances rolling through soil like skates sweet whiff stank of well done & too many trees to think there could be just one
zach keali'i muRPhy
PoPPy iS my half-SiSteR But that’S not the whole StoRy
Poppy is my half-sister and she has a whole lot of nerve. When I was twelve, Poppy tried to poison me by baking me a cake that had laundry detergent in the frosting. It took me hours to get the taste out of my mouth. Poppy offered up an apology by baking me a new cake. I threw it in her face. It was half-baked anyway. My dad said I should be more forgiving, but people usually say that to excuse their own mistakes. Poppy and I have the same dad, but we don’t have the same mom. My mom’s spirit died when she found out about Poppy. Poppy’s mom died during childbirth.
Poppy is my half-sister and she doesn’t use her whole brain, but I’ve been told that no one does. When I broke my leg climbing a tree during my freshman year of high school, Poppy brought a hibiscus plant to my hospital room. After she placed it by my bedside, she turned around and her backpack knocked it over. The bulky plant fell directly onto my bad leg. I had to stay in the hospital for an extra week because of it. I could’ve sworn Poppy knocked it over on purpose. She probably enjoyed having the house to herself. My mom salvaged the hibiscus plant. She’s more forgiving than I am. Or maybe she just really likes plants. After I left the hospital, we brought the hibiscus home. It’s actually quite beautiful when it blooms.
Poppy is my half-sister and she’s full of surprises. When I attended my junior prom, my date ditched me midway through the dance. While I was hiding out in the hallway, wiping my mascara onto my turquoise dress, wondering if it was possible to die from humiliation, Poppy was puncturing
the tires of my date’s car. The entire incident was caught on the school parking lot’s security camera. I asked Poppy why she did it, and the only thing she said was, “I was feeling spicy.” That night, Poppy was expelled from school but accepted into my heart.
Poppy is my half-sister and I miss her a whole bunch. When I left for college, Poppy decided to help me move into my dorm, but only after I promised to bring the hibiscus plant with me. She even helped me decorate the drab walls. My mom and dad come to visit me, but Poppy never makes the trip. My dad always says Poppy isn’t feeling well. When I came home for the holidays, Poppy wasn’t around. My dad says she’s staying at a friend’s house now. But I think friend is a generous term. The late nights of studying feel extra lonely when I’m worrying about Poppy. I take good care of the hibiscus plant. It’s dormant right now. But just when it seems like it’s done growing, it always seems to bud again.
daniel SummeRhill
look, noah was short a bird & threw my ancestor in the boat instead. this is how the Black swan got its melanin. how they call us unprecedented now. unpredictable even. god left the sky running & said he’d never do it again— it's always the arrogant ones that make mistakes. it's always the animal with wings trying for freedom that suffers the most.
// the homies don't know words like antideluvian but could nail a jumper anywhere 28 feet in Malik could make the metal net sound like a wind chime in a storm. wrist raised like a doppler. we knew the outcome by the angle of his arm. Malik the geometrist. Malik the physicist. Malik the god of rain. once, during the playoffs, Malik hit four in a row & sent the crowd to the rafters. everyone clasping hands with the person beside them. everyone air-suspended like a held breath which is to say, we didn’t need an ark to float
// circa 1998, Victor’s trembling ankles anchor him to the edge of the slide, the water waits— imagine watching your friend attempt to take flight in search of his father. hurt is always on the cusp tilted more towards us like the earth's axis slow nodding
to the moon. he let go and got wings. the waves teach me to surrender the way he did, crashing through the water. death nodding back. another flood. always the wings, making ghosts of Black boys
// once upon a time, people were stolen & dropped off in the middle of the ocean/ on the coast of someone else's land/ in the middle of someone else's deeper hell & have been treading the fire since—
// usually they call a boat of people fleeing death, “immigrants,” or if you’re from south america: aliens but some folks love a good epic. so for magic -al realism’s sake, we’ll call it a miracle. the end is a long exercise in patience. on the fortieth day, noah sent out the dove & it came back with hope in its beak. at the vigil we held for the migrants who didn't make it, we release doves, they never return
// legend has it, there's a rainbow gushing out of Grizzly Peak: East Oakland’s rugged crown, drowners at its steep feet. juvenescence jigsaw piled into whichever ill-equipped ride we could negotiate. a scrapper: Park Avenue, LeSabre or other General Motors car born before we were. we ascend to find the beginning of the colors. blunts in hands, we aim to get high.
we don't wait for god’s generosity, we peel back the clouds. up here, after 8:00 PM, even a city-wide graveyard looks like a pot of gold.
i’m not saying there is a god but we jumped into the flood without knowing how to swim & waded in the water or sifted through the cracks on the ocean floor. in the photo a Black boy is holding another Black boy & out the mouth of the small one’s chest is a beam & i know no other way to compute retribution than Black folks being owed heaven & only having to say amen for it.
audRey t. caRRoll
a celeBRation of unGendeRinG
a child tugs on a thread and pulls and pulls and pulls delighting in the unraveling of mass-produced synthetic blend until all that is left is soft hills of possibility authorities on such matters act as though it has now become useless, as though it cannot be untangled, as though it can no longer be woven into something new, something where every stitch is a signature of its craftsperson
Seán GRiffin
side snapped to show it’s hollow, bone without marrow, room without sound. strongest material in bodies, but mine, like me, worn from within—weeping from gum better than I cry, not restrained by its company. these teeth stained from coffee, red wine, seem foreign in my face, and each time I deign to present them in a feigned friendliness, I grit molars till this one broke. tongue tip has played on the ridges of this cavern within a cavern till raw, till this hole is filled. the cement taking the texture of my bite.
chRiS Belden
Once a week I rode my bike five blocks to the local community recreation center, bashfully changed into my swim trunks with the other boys, and entered the indoor pool area to await my torture. There were a dozen of us, boys and girls, aged six to ten, standing beside the pool half-naked and afraid.
Betty was our teacher. She seemed impossibly old but still trim and fit in her blue one-piece bathing suit. She wore a tight rubber hair-cap that accentuated her pinched, wrinkled face and dark eyes.
Richie had warned me about Betty before my first lesson.
“She’s mean,” he’d said. “She’ll make you hold your breath under water until you drown. She especially hates boys,” he added with a grin.
Sometimes my brother exaggerated to frighten me—about the nuns at school, for example—but he had not exaggerated Betty’s meanness. On day one she ordered everybody into the pool and seemed to enjoy our lack of coordination and fear of drowning. And, indeed, she did make us hold our breath underwater, timing us by the big wall clock and berating those—especially the boys—who could not last at least thirty seconds.
That was five weeks ago. In the time since, we had learned the basic strokes, and some kids even managed to make it across the width of the pool without sinking. The rest of us thrashed and gasped until Betty jumped in to scold us about what terrible swimmers we were.
Today’s lesson was diving. We all lined up along the edge of the pool’s deep end, where we had never ventured before. At eight feet deep, this side of the pool had always
represented danger.
The tall windows at the shallow end let in a curtain of yellow sunshine and gave a view of the ballfields and, beyond that, a church steeple. I wanted more than anything to be outside on my bike or just running on grass.
Betty ordered us to stand with our toes hanging over the edge and bend our knees. She then had us put our palms together as if praying (Dear God, please get me out of here . . .) and lift our elbows over our heads. She went down the line and closely observed as, one by one, each child bent forward, letting gravity pull them down toward the water while also pushing off with their legs to, ideally, make an arcing leap into the pool.
I stood about halfway down the line, between a chubby boy named Kent and a painfully skinny girl named Brenda. The first several divers plopped into the pool like ungainly monkeys, face or belly first, with a harsh slap that echoed off the tile walls. One by one they struggled back to the side of the pool, their faces red as Betty reprimanded them for their sad diving form. By the time she got to me, just after Kent had dropped horizontally with a loud thwap, my bent knees shook with terror.
“Let’s see it, Carl,” Betty said, gleeful at the prospect of my failure.
I stood up straight and faced her. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Not till you dive,” she said. “Come on now, Carl. Show me.”
I shivered and tapped my knees together. “I really gotta go. I don’t want to pee in the pool.”
This possibility, I could see, changed Betty’s demeanor completely. She had lectured us about using the pool as our personal toilet, a disgusting practice that would earn us immediate expulsion from the class.
“Well, hurry up,” she said before moving on to the cowering Brenda.
The locker room was empty except for two men in their underwear making muscles in the mirrors. They talked about weights and bench pressing while I quickly changed into my street clothes. Picturing Betty waiting by the pool, I didn’t even bother to tie my shoelaces. I ran from the locker room to the lobby and out to the bike racks. I unlocked my blue Schwinn, hung my gym bag from the handlebar, and took off.
I rode around for an hour so my mother wouldn’t know I’d left the lesson early. When she asked how it went, I said, “Fine,” and ran upstairs to my room. There, I lay on my bed worrying. I hadn’t considered what I’d do if Betty called my mother, nor what I’d do at next week’s lesson. But maybe Betty wouldn’t call. Maybe I could skip the final four lessons and no one would be the wiser.
From next door I heard Richie’s stereo blasting “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” After it ended, he appeared at my door wearing gym shorts and no shirt.
“How’s ol’ Betty?” he asked.
I considered telling him what I’d done. If anyone would understand, Richie would. He might even laugh and tell me, “Way to go.” Or he could rat me out to our mother. Or he could threaten to tell our mother if I didn’t do everything he demanded.
“She’s not so bad,” I said. He scoffed. “Yeah, right. I’m surprised you haven’t drowned yet.”
I ignored him and picked up a book, The Disappearing Floor.
“You’re still reading the Hardy Boys?” Richie asked.
“So what?” He thought he was special because he was reading Kurt Vonnegut.
“Grow up,” he said before leaving my room. A moment later, the music started up again.
I lay there unable to read. I felt like a failure—a familiar feeling. I never finished things. A month earlier, I’d quit my bat boy position on Richie’s Little League team. The coach, Mr. Troy, was a screamer, and I felt unsafe. Somehow Richie didn’t mind all the yelling—it bounced off him. I’d gone to my mother in tears, and though she didn’t approve of my quitting mid-season, she allowed it. But now I couldn’t even go to the games. I couldn’t face the players and Mr. Troy.
This brought up a terrible thought: I could never return to the pool for fear of running into Betty, who oversaw the lifeguards. I’d never learn to swim properly.
While my mother prepared supper, I heard my father arrive home from work, and he sounded irritated. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to my mother as she cooked, but his voice had that edge to it. The phone rang and my mother answered. I strained to hear what she was saying, but she spoke softly. When she hung up, she said something to my father then called for me and Richie to come down and eat. I considered pretending to be sick but decided against it.
At the table, I sat next to Richie across from our mother. Our father sat to our right, chatting about work while he doled out our food one plate at a time: a pork chop, a pile of mashed potatoes, a glop of green beans. On the table lay a basket of Pillsbury biscuits, a dish of soft butter, and a pitcher of milk.
I stared down at my plate. Normally, by this time I’d be starved and digging in, but tonight I had no appetite. I was waiting for my parents to ask about the swim lesson, and I didn’t know whether to lie or not. Had that been Betty on the phone?
“So, what’d you get up to today, pal?” my father asked Richie.
“I went over to John’s,” my brother reported. “We shot some hoops, hung out—you know.”
Satisfied, my father turned to me. “How about you?”
My father was a trial lawyer, and I’d seen enough TV to know that good lawyers lay traps for witnesses on the stand. “Always know the answer before you ask the question,” he’d once pronounced while watching Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law.
“I went for a bike ride,” I started, hoping this one piece of information would satisfy him. My father never gave the impression of having any actual interest in our daily activities—he simply felt the obligation to involve us, as minimally as possible, in dinnertime conversation.
“That’s all?” he asked.
“He had a swim lesson,” Richie said, and my father turned to him with a sharp look.
“I wasn’t asking you,” he said, and I knew I was in trouble.
My father turned back to me and, with his eyes trained on mine, began to cut his pork chop. “What’d you learn today at your lesson, Carl?”
My mouth had gone dry. I glanced at my mother, who looked disappointed, and at Richie, who grinned.
“Uh, how to dive,” I whispered.
I could see where this was going. Either my father would wait out my confession or my mother, impatient with games, would announce that Betty had called and told her everything. Meanwhile, Richie ate up my humiliation like Jell-O.
There was one other possibility: I could fess up. But, as awful as those other options were to me, confessing was worse. I held onto the slim chance that Betty had not called and this was a slightly atypical dinnertime Q & A that would abruptly end so my father could talk about himself.
But as the seconds ticked by, this possibility grew less and less likely. All three sets of eyes were trained on me as they waited for me to confess. Instead, I began to cry. Unable to come up with words—either a confession or my anger at their sadism—I shed water. To my right, Richie sighed with disgust. He would not only have admitted running away from the swim lesson, he’d have bragged about it, and my parents would have chuckled at his gumption.
My mother looked away, too ashamed to watch me blubber. I couldn’t look over at my father but imagined the curl of his lip as he took in his younger boy’s weakness. Only much, much later would I identify his reaction as one of fear as much as of anger—fear of this crude display of emotion, and his role in it.
An amazing thing happened then. My brother, shaking his head, returned to his pork chop. My mother buttered a biscuit. And my father, after a slug of his gin and tonic, cut his meat, swallowed a chunk of pork, and started in on a story about the case he was working on.
There had been no yelling, no ordering me to my room, no grounding. Instead, I was ignored. When the relief wore off a moment later, I started to shake. I couldn’t stand being invisible. No one looked at me or said anything, even when my knife clattered against my plate as I tried to cut my food. I could barely swallow and tasted nothing. Time slowed. My father continued to talk, my mother asked him questions, Richie contributed the occasional jokey remark, and I slowly disappeared.
I never did learn how to dive.
You cut eyes into the cobalt sky to make a tent of twilight
History moves through us tunnels of coming and going under quilted skies forward backward in time’s continuum
We weave a past to occupy under oceans over oceans under sky
Living the tilting wells and swelling stencils of history
katheRine deRinG
Joy
The path to serenity, I’ve read, is to find joy in daily tasks: baking bread, polishing furniture, folding clothes and placing them
in their homes in dresser drawers and closets, emulating the medieval monks who praised God as they hoed the fields or tended the apiary.
I run my fingers over freshly laundered items as I fold, noting the silkiness of a rayon blouse, the softness of a lamb’s wool sweater.
I smooth each tee shirt and fold it inward twice, creating a six-inch-wide strip, neck to hem, roll it loosely, then tuck it into one of three rows
of rolled-up shirts in the drawer, and survey the paired and rolled-up socks, bras, and panties —cells of honeycombs in the friar’s beehive.
Task done, I stare out the window. No traffic on the street. I wonder about the servants in Pompeii hanging laundry on the line, sweeping debris from the patio moments before Etna began to spew ash. But what is the alternative? Scanning the horizon for signs of smoke? I glance again at my honeycomb,
a kaleidoscope of textures and colors: sky blue, yellow, deep purple—my bees must have been into goldenrod last week. And blueberries. Witness their joy.
GRiSel y. acoSta
your mouth was my planet—Le Butcherettes
how long can I spin mid-cosmos without oxygen is not something I considered alone in New York City, broke and eating an imagination breakfast in an ac apartment you opened a space ship of foolish whimsy and aerodynamic rocket wishes beyond the farthest stars, fed me magic words like, “sing to me” and “yes, even you,” surprising me with opportunity to soar fire high, beyond planetary borders, open rivers, undam and flow powerful over what was once dry earth, contained and solid, now fluid, that is to say when you held me it was good, but when you let me go the universe gave birth our supernova shivers both gravity and explosion waves that continue to sound and sound and sound …
Anastacia-Reneé is an award-winning writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, TEDx Speaker and podcaster. She is the author of Side Notes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/ Amistad), (v.) (Black Ocean), Forget It (Black Radish) and Here In The (Middle) of Nowhere (HarperCollins/Amistad). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in BOMB, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, Foglifter, Auburn Avenue, Catapult, Alta, Torch, Poetry Northwest, Cascadia Magazine, The Fight and Fiddle, Ms. Magazine, and others. Reneé has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, 4Culture,VONA, Ragdale, Mineral School, and The New Orleans Writers Residency.
Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is the author of Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, and editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity, which features over 30 Latinx contributors. They are also Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies. Select work is in Platform Review; Best American Poetry; The Baffler; Acentos Review; and Kweli Journal. They are a full professor at CUNY-BCC, Macondo fellow, VONA alum, and Dodge Foundation Poet.
JC Alfier’s most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include The Emerson Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and doubleexposure work, and the founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review.
J. Mae Barizo is a poet, essayist, librettist and multidisciplinary artist. Born in Toronto, she is the author of two books of poetry, Tender Machines (Tupelo Press,
2023) and The Cumulus Effect. A finalist for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the 2023 Megaphone Prize, Barizo has had her work anthologized widely. Recent writing appears in Poetry, Ploughshares, Esquire, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paris Review Daily, Boston Review, BookForum, among others. As a librettist, Barizo is the inaugural recipient of Opera America's IDEA residency, and has also received fellowships and awards from Bennington College, Mellon Foundation, Critical Minded, Jerome Foundation and Poets House. She is on the MFA faculty of The New School and lives in New York City.
Chris Belden is the author of the novels Carry-On, The Private Dick, and Shriver (recently adapted into the film A Little White Lie), as well as the story collections The Floating Lady of Lake Tawaba and Who Am I to Judge?
Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone, Love/Iraq, Wen Kroy (winner of the Orphic Prize in Poetry), Iron, Ardent, and Radium Dream. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently, All the Sleep in the World (Alabrava Press, 2021). Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Academy of American Poets Poem a Day, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She is a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow and a co-founder of Zoeglossia, a non-profit to build community for poets with disabilities.
Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023), SuperLoop, and the poetry chapbooks: The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, and Elsewhere (with Zoë Ryder White), as well as a novella, The Couples. SLIP, which won an Alma Award, will be published by Saturnalia in Spring 2025.
Audrey T. Carroll is the author of What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024), Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), and In My Next Queer Life, I Want to Be (kith books, 2023).
Robin Dellabough is a poet and editor with a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley. Her first collection, Double Helix, was published in 2022. She has recently published poems in Gyroscope, Yellow Arrow, Stoneboat, Lines + Stars, Halfway Down the Stairs, Blue Unicorn, and Mom Egg Review.
Katherine Flannery Dering, MAW ’00, MFA ’13, has published a memoir—Shot in the Head, a Sister's Memoir, a Brother's Struggle; a poetry chapbook—Aftermath; and individual poems, essays, and short stories in literary journals, recently in Goatsmilk Magazine, Inkwell, RiverRiver, Tilde, Cordella, The Manifest Station, and Adanna. She serves on the executive committee of the Katonah Poetry Series.
B.K. Fischer is the author of Ceive, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, and five other books— Radioapocrypha, My Lover’s Discourse, St. Rage’s Vault, Mutiny Gallery, and Museum Mediations, a study of ekphrasis. She teaches the Comma Sutra in the MFA writing program at Columbia University and served as the inaugural poet laureate of Westchester County (2021-2023) and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.
Jaden Fong is a writer with a sweet tooth and a soft spot for the whimsical and the peculiar. A two-time nominee for the Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award, you can find his work on the Academy of American Poets website, miniskirt magazine, and The Santa Clara Review, among other places.
Carlene M. Gadapee is a poet-teacher by both vocation and by trade. Her poetry and critical reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including English Journal, Waterwheel Review, Gyroscope Review, Smoky Quartz, Think, Allium, Vox Populi, and MicroLit Almanac. She also received a “Best of the Net” nomination in 2023.
Seán Griffin (she/they), MFA ’17, is a PhD student at St. John’s University. Seán’s writing appeared in [PANK] Magazine, Mud Season Review, multiple issues of Impossible Archetype, and elsewhere. Seán contributed to the long poem, Arrival at Elsewhere (Against the Grain Press). Seán’s plays Late Late Night and Solitary will be staged at two NYC fringe festivals in April 2024. Seán teaches writing at Pace University.
Katherine Hill is the author of two novels, The Violet Hour and A Short Move, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice. She is also co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, The Common, The Guardian, n+1, The Nation, and Story. She is Associate Professor of English at Adelphi University in New York.
Marcus Jackson is a poet and photographer whose work has appeared in such publications as The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. His second book of poems, entitled Pardon My Heart (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books), was released in 2018, and his forthcoming photography monograph of street portraits is slated for publication in 2024. Jackson teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State.
Em [Marie] Kohl is a neurodivergent white queer creative living in Lenape (BK, NY). Their personal and community practices move from a trauma-informed center. Em’s current work is in dialogue with loneliness-isolation & its redress, access & accessibility, cosmic ecology and love. Recent publications: Everybody Press Review, Pom Pom Press, The Ana. Em is co-founder of the queer reading, workshop, and publication series exquisites. They build community through mutual care and an openness towards continual growth.
Deborah Leipziger is an author, poet, and advisor on sustainability. Born in Brazil, Ms. Leipziger is the author of several books on sustainability and human rights. Her poems have been published in eight countries, in such magazines and journals as Pangyrus, Salamander, and Revista Cardenal. Her new collection of poems, Story & Bone, was published in 2023 by Lily Poetry Review Books. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems.
Erin Lynn holds a PhD in Poetry from The University of Connecticut, an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, and an MA in Irish Literature from Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as Narrative, The Nashville Review, and Lunch Ticket. She won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize for her chapbook, Forgive Our Kind (Cordella Press). She co-curates Poor Mouth Poetry in the Bronx and is Assistant Professor of First Year Writing at St. John's University.
danilo machado is a poet, curator, and critic living on occupied land, interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. A 2020-2021 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, their writing has
appeared widely. They are the author of the collection This is your receipt and is not a ticket for travel (Faint Line Press, 2023) and the chaplets wavy in its heat and to be elsewhere (Ghost City Press, 2022/2023). danilo is Producer of Public Programs at Brooklyn Museum and with Em [Marie] Kohl, proudly co-organizes exquisites, a queer reading, workshop, and publication series. They are working to show up with care for their communities.
Zach Keali’i Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in Reed Magazine, Maudlin House, The Coachella Review, Raritan Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and more. He has published the chapbooks Tiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press) and If We Keep Moving (Ghost City Press).
Sarah Perry (she/they) is memoirist and essayist who writes about love, trauma, gender-based violence, queerness, and the power dynamics that influence those concerns. She is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse and the forthcoming essay collection Sweet Nothings. Shorter work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Off Assignment, ELLE, The Guardian, and more. She teaches in the graduate program in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
Grace Sleeman has fallen out of every tree she's ever climbed. For her, much of the contemporary feminine experience means finding the sensuality in the mundane and finding worms after a thunderstorm. She grew up among the lilacs in Damariscotta, Maine, and now lives in Portland. Her work has been published by Koukash Review, Slipstream Press, and Red Rock Review.
Daniel B. Summerhill has earned fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts and The Watering Hole. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Monterey County and has published two collections, Divine, Divine, Divine and Mausoleum of Flowers. His poems and essays appear in The Academy of American Poets, Columbia Journal, Obsidian, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. An Oakland native, Daniel lives in the Bay Area and is Professor of Poetry at Santa Clara University.
Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and professor. He is the author of two previous poetry collections: Tertulia and Stereo.Island.Mosaic., which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He is Assistant Professor of English at Rider University, is a Dodge Poet, and is contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal. His third collection, Hivestruck, is forthcoming in the Summer of 2024.
Jonathan Vatner is the author of The Bridesmaids Union (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) and Carnegie Hill (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019). His fiction has earned praise from People, Town & Country, The New York Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the managing editor of Hue––the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology––and teaches fiction writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers Center.