Re:Visions 2019

RE:VISIONS 16TH EDITION

RE:VISIONS 16TH EDITION

This representative collection of writing by Notre Dame students is published through the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English. Each year, a new editorial board consisting of graduate students solicits and selects manuscripts, and oversees the production of the journal in order to encourage creativity and recognize student writing of notable quality.

Editor-in-Chief: Kimberly Swendson Assistant Editor: Scarlett Wardrop Managing Editor: Sara Judy Design and Layout: Scarlett Wardrop, Patrick Harig, Ruilin Sang Undergraduate Editors: Patrick Harig, Mary Lusebrink, Ruilin Sang, Catherine Truluck, Abigail Wager Cover Artwork: “Raw Grace” Angela Ketcham, water and ink, 9” x 12” John Huebl named Re:Visions in 1986. Re:Visions, New Series began in 2002.

This is Re:Visions, New Series 16.

Copyright 2019 by Re:Visions

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Readers and Contributors, We are honored to present you with this collection of prose, poetry, and visual art created by our local undergraduate community.

We asked for your wily whispers and barbaric yawps, the introspective and incendiary, the personal and the global.

We are delighted to present to you these pieces. We hope you enjoy and feel inspired.

Thanks for picking up Re:Visions.

Sincerely, The Editors

6

CONTENTS POETRY “Here, Static, Elsewhere” Michael Donovan

12

“the flavor of Being…”

Angelica Ketcham

19

“this body ode” Sierra Rainey

21

“Poison Apple” Emma Jaques

22

“Stars” Laura McKernan

24

“O Comedian! My Comedian!”

Jackson Mittlesteadt

25

“fato profungus” Christopher Parker

27

“I’d like to be in Paris” Anna Staud

29

“Sag” Audrey Lindemann

31

“Villainous and Elegaic Villanelle to Youth” Claire Turgeon

33

7 “Wool-gathering…”

Christina Zobel

34

“Dark Room” Gabriel Niforatos

46

“Lamppost” Jackson Mittlesteadt

47

“Persona Poem of an Ex” Emee Marjorie Dy

48

“astrolabe” Bella Niforatos

50

“Schadenfreuder” Nicholas Jeffrey

52

“Hurry” Audrey Lindemann

55

“baby on board” Sarah Kikel

56

“Necropop” Michael Donovan

58

“Granite” Laura McKernan

59

“Truths” Emma Jaques

60

8 “黄河 (Huang He)” Angela Lim

62

“First” Lucas Don

64

“Privilege” Jackson Mittlesteadt

65

“God Upon Making the Black Woman” Sierra Rainey

67

“Love Letter from an Athazagoraphobic” Annette Cai

70

“NRA: Never Really Accountable” Caroline O’Sullivan

73

“Ethos” Gabriel Niforatos

76

“Permanence” Laura McKernan

77

“A Mile-High Lament” Jackson Mittlesteadt

78

“Parenting” Caroline O’Sullivan

80

“lifeline” Angelica Ketcham

81

9

Prose “Dire Dire Clocks” Hayley Flynn

84

“Standard Deviation” Theresa Azemar

101

“The Beast” Isabel Nguyen

107

“Stealing Home” Kay Bontempo

110

“Welcome to MGTO 30110” Michael Donovan

116

“It is scientific fact…”

Audrey Lindemann

122

“Alors on Danse” Hayley Flynn

126

“Egg Head” Victoria Devine

130

“For Whom the Willow Weeps” Annette Cai

134

“Kisses” Isabel Nguyen

139

10 “Keep It Together” Theresa Azemar

145

“DDDD” Michael Donovan

147

ART “Raw Grace” Water and ink, 9” x 12” Angelica Ketcham

Cover

“Lavender Drift” Water and ink, 6” x 8” Angelica Ketcham

156

“Flocks on St. Joseph’s” Photo.

Joseph Raabe

157

POETRY

12

Here, Static, Elsewhere Michael Donovan [start transmission] 640AM (i) ordering avocado toast excuse me sir. sir! your avocado toast is ready. sir, please come get your avocado toast. chew quietly. several customers are visibly upset. sir, don’t look out the window. i don’t think you’ll like it. it doesn’t suit your demure aesthetic. and sir! you mustn’t shatter frames against the street’s edge. there’s a dispensary down the way, sir. the best in the city. jenny’s cousin works there. no sir, don’t take the bike. go up the 10. you’ll like that better, sir. but don’t go until you’ve finished your avocado toast. i also read about a great brew pub in silver lake. best kimchi in town (hands down). but don’t drink too much, sir.

13 you don’t wanna end up like … you know. how was your avocado toast, sir? wonderful! glad to hear it! goodbye now. (ii) looking out the window after finishing my avocado toast blinds cracking on the edge near the window still i only focus on the bottom of the pint, last night a confessionalized pop song, not so long as to burrough through but enough to sinks its gums you have a name (it has a meaning) that happens to pick out a contingent track record pain is c-fibers firing but it could have referred to something else gray skylights, a wind against solid ground digging? and sound rings don’t opt out from it and othering tries, fails to unearth (iii) walking past threshold of door, cup in hand can you repeat yourself, i’m caught between he said, “you need to sleep to meet yourself, to feel complete” don’t assume this works the same as yours and mine reframe your gaze, intent come down, come over to me

14 now let me see repent for the chords are weak the flickering is in retreat (iv) visiting an old prison while high loitering by threes in a city’s oldest prison — rest and then refraction upends reflection, suspending it in a solution of cheap Czech beer better off, better than austerity i’d say teaching semiotics to 20-year-olds wires the unformed to the communal opioid strand safer than current practices (obviously) she and i we and the rest of them aren’t oblivious as its waves of obligation advance / recede i’m not much of an imposition am i your name’s not long enough it doesn’t make sense here 8 steps is a lot of steps i’ll start with six 6 steps backward inch-wise one at a time (one more) and we’re back (v) walking through an outdoor market with no food stalls

15 a market (how quaint!) the sun beams and i walk into the heavenly gorge the sun beams right in my face and i’m pretty sure these folks are using their legs for the very first time bambi-like [the sun still beams] the good part’s coming soon with food vendors i gotta stick it out til the end purgatorial, the sun beams [still in my face] more socks, more sandals separated by extant commas (oh how they exist!) is not how i would more socks, more sandals in the sun, heavenly unfun i smell it now see it at the end of the crowd none of whom know how to walk and i can’t talk with them don’t speak italian [i smell it] coming soon to a theater nowhere near you a single truck, an old panino he sat close on the stoop beside her breath pungent (cigarettes, peroni), collapsing into her sweetened blond she doesn’t care // ostensibly shaken bus text came before but also next [tuning] (vi) static

16 stay ahead and so, so angry or confused in service of beauty {?} embedded in god or something intractable or juissance or whatever or at least not nothing — &&&&& he said before going down taking you with him wraps his bone-fecking head around fluid dynamics (rather difficult for someone incapable of scientific thought) [risk system] just say a thing it doesn’t even have to sound good {bad is the new good and it’s not good if you don’t know how to write badly in verse and line} sounds quite good woven within whatever else fucking metaphor you found forming when you woke up to steal from the prosodic pudding, the bottomless shit pit and no magisterium can help you now no one else will respond no one else will respond to your hysterical pastoral regardless of line-breaks however incisive nor will they the American claim (you cuck!)

560AM (vii) memory of skinny subway book finds me in a field i read about this place in the book with the dogs on a subway in the worst place in the universe, introspectively aligned, i was to my self-interest [somewhat redundantly] “dogs with the exception of guide dogs are not permitted inside” she fucking lied to me! about the dogs, about Innishire always asking for more

17 (viii) me in a field cranes crooked over green space can’t, won’t lift me into space or some other distant venture a mushroom dream — seems eccentric — but i’m sure you think they mean something more than they do like that phrase (“cows, nature’s chicken”) if you were to moo instead of grunt coveted prize of the low-key hunt, which now comes to an end when i make pretend (unrhymed) attempted intimacy, the fancy type like i’ve seen on tv or in movies (ix) me — thinking about water — in a field many things in our water might kill you slowly but not the milk that cascades, sounds like a system of imports / exports opening floodgates and filling vessels impartially stonewall laxatives protect, localize its life-giving measures promiscuous planning permission permits such things to occur underneath the green lands of a flatulent earth [tuning] (x) static, reprise pain, clouds, music notches too loud grab a stout and listen rhyming dream sound too loud!

18 step harmlessly [clumsily] away & against granularized systems — structural smatterings superimposed somewhat softly selling selective sounds swiftly (alliteration is fun) swelling wordy caloric veins of or related to the present / anything else remotely resembling the physical [at least give yourself a flat surface] they gain on you, let them: brace down past MySpace (2003) and dreams, fool dig [end transmission]

19

the flavor of Being, served on a chipped plate Angelica Ketcham five years two days thirteen hours and nine minutes ago my child asked me where do babies come from and i said they grow on trees and now she will not stop tilting her neck towards the sky five years one day eight hours and forty-three minutes ago i realized it was time for her to Live and Live Fully and Know Things and Grow Up and she must eat the world that is her imperfect oyster but a world cannot be eaten by itself so i have provided several appetizer options below for her convenience: fresh water and brackish waves and blisters that cover her entire foot ———————————————————— $22 notoriety fragility the notion of flight

20

disappointingly cold bonfires with flames that never reported for duty ——————————————————— $9 sparrows couscous the smell of rain wretched tears from the bloated spawn of ambition and bitterness ——————————————————————— $18 eyelashes fingertips brie on brioche an urban miracle of chaos theory and ice cream at midnight ——————————————————————— $31 corkscrews candles flypaper without flies the dull ache that has no name ———————————— $5 stale hope fermented dreams rancid convictions

21

this body ode Sierra Rainey ode to this body a vessel come down from the Motherland where flesh-toned lightning bolts rip through a kingdom of hips made holy as hymnals but hip-hop always bid them swing as wild as rivers to haunt the dreams of men whose tongues and whiskey-drenched minds declared you tamed before you came and brought offering to that quivering altar tucked between thighs as thick as thunder that threaten flames each time they meet like thirsting thieves that make men crave and beg to make a feast of you lyrical lover where toes polished purple on feet stained bronze curl best at the tickle of sin-soaked breath caressing a neck birthmarked with a smudge of cotton-field dirt shaped like the land where Jesus was born with mud brown eyes open as wide as the Father’s hands who commanded time to craft from curves and eager flesh a tight-lipped prayer, blessed and brown, that sings of nothing but itself.

22

Poison Apple Emma Jaques The steam that rises from the subway grate stains my mind with its neon promulgations.

The air here is hot and thick and tastes of metal, and something more foul.

The man begging under the bright lights of Tiffany’s glances for an instant at the diamonds three inches of glass away and as I walk past my boots beat an uneven pulse into the cracked concrete.

America - a country America - a city As lovers scream through barred apartment windows and police cruisers creep through darkened streets the city curls around herself and aches with all that she contains.

Spires of buildings stretch into the sky like heroin needles and the thump of bass permeates the night and sinks into my bones.

23 Every face on the street is my own and I recognize not a one.

Every new block contains a heaven and a hell– can you find them?

I admire the work of graffiti Michelangelos in tunnels that smell of piss, and the neat Park Avenue homes behind sidewalks littered with crushed cigarette butts Everyone I have ever met exists in the stench of humanity that comes off this city, all our triumphs, all our falls, all our loves and losses.

The city blinks at me and howls.

24

Stars Laura McKernan Generations of Looking upward, Textbooks and soliloquies Spawned,

thinkers moving onward spawning from the same source

Connection, years spanned Forged in the quiet and the dark Relationships unknown Insignificant but irreplaceable

25

O Comedian! My Comedian! (in style of Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” as a tribute to the late Robin Williams) Jackson Mittlesteadt O Comedian! My Comedian! How great is your wit Your lavish rants, your whimsical smile, all your immortal quips On your head, you sit and smile, the people a-cracking up Your pokes, your jokes, your love of coke, all combine, though corrupt But what! what! what is this!

O the noose and the chair Where on the floor the comedian lies Committed not on a dare.

O Comedian! My Comedian! Why does the sun shine even less?

A blue face, a rueful face, replies a nation in distress For you, great mind, gave the world enduring finesse Your grace, your prowess, upmost countenance, you barely caressed Come back Comedian! O dear man!

Why have you taken a gift of promise?

Seized your laughter and great thought That many a man has vainly sought

26

The Comedian does not answer – the irrepressible character away He does not think or reply as he did yesterday He cried “Carpe diem!” and tore up the text But then he, that comic, was seemingly vexed Though this life of grief is done Your rise to fame that brought you angst not fun Your grace, your wit, echo across the seas Oh, please dear man, rest, for now you are free.

27

fātō profugus Christopher Parker my white converse were already tie-dyed with jungle juice and anonymity, the loudest silence i’d ever heard blasting under the speakers. from across the turret we locked eyes and came to a mutual understanding. now it’s march and we wake up together her mascara tie-dyes my pillow black i kiss her on the nose and she smiles a week later and i wouldn’t have been there a month earlier and she wouldn’t have been interested her shadow danced behind my back at every party we could have been best friends wading into love instead of diving but, alas! ‘twas not in the r.n.g. why does “meant to be” sound cuter than “lucky” we were just a face and a body in the eyes of the drunken other but we wrote our fairy tale in reverse

28 so please don’t belittle me by invoking savage juno. i think the universe is random and she could have been anyone but she’s her and i’m me and we lifted this house

29

I’d like to be in Paris Anna Staud I’d like to be in Paris On the banks of the River Seine On a Sunday afternoon Just like in the painting by Seurat My grade school art teacher painted it on her classroom wall The whole wall The curved wall Right by the hooks with the smocks embroidered with names Next to the shelves where we would turn in our paintings every class Our spaghetti splatters and globs of glue We would smile with pride As our papers dripped rainbows For our eight-year-old souls were art And the world our canvas We would laugh when our smocks would say “Tom” or “Bob” We would laugh at everything I haven’t been in that room in years The mural Now memory I wonder if the colors are still as bright The berry sky and the eden shore The copper shirt of the man leaning back I wonder if he’s looking back

30 Missing someplace or sometime or someone As he looks out into the winding river The original’s hung in the Art Institute of Chicago Just a train ride away from my home He and I had plans to go one afternoon this summer But we never made it Just a train ride away…

I realize now I never told him about the wall The curved wall Right by the shelves Next to the smocks It’s not a big deal But maybe it is Because I’d like him to know about the wall I’d like him to know about a lot of things Actually That I never had a chance to remember to tell him We could have been like the couple in the corner Looking at the paintings Side by side On a Sunday afternoon And I would have told him about my own river of recollections The Seine of my youth But I can’t be in Chicago with him Or in my grade school classroom So I guess it’s easier to say I’d like to be in Paris

31

Sag Audrey Lindemann Oops, me have slipped in some collossall doom-doom.

Me thoughts ride your ghost self on sag armchairs that once snuggled our fetal entrance.

Me hate you for the night of sleep waking frightmares. Me can only therapize the shit hurt you left quitting there where cat now unlicks him self.

Fear of arm

32 chairs, me-traying my where abouts to stalking ghosts whose sleeping finger’s still space fingering my dripping poems.

33

Villainous and Elegiac Villanelle to Youth Claire Turgeon Oh, soft, but here I heed your righteous pain, Your golden stitch of dream to mark this hem So dolefully stitched in end without refrain.

Of butterscotch dreams I’m sure you’ve stained With promise of prints left so condemned You forget to restore their owner’s gain.

And whorls of summer, yellow, though it feigns Such infinite youth that wilts against its stem And turns, too soon, to shades of bronze and rain— Where figures flee when once they did in vain Sleep lulled by lilacs lording over them, Which now pulse with pressures of mortal chain.

To you my valediction is but plain Though grant me not your diadem To wear in mournful hope for you to strain My dreams that do go dormant as your thane.

34

Wool-gathering – an essential process – taking my time, and all this by instinct.1 Christina Zobel

Stop. This is Oxford Circus Please mind the gap between the train and the platform This is a Bakerloo line train for – Harrow and Wealdstone The next station is – Regent’s Park Please mind the doors – Doors closing beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep click It’s a Friday afternoon in mid-February, The temperature’s reached nearly fifty degrees.

Despite living in London more than a month, I still measure it by Farenheit by cups and teaspoons hours recycled at noon.

The sun is boundless – The whole city out on its feet.

1

Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade.

35 There is Regent’s University.

Inside the park, green pressing in.

How I would’ve loved to go there instead – how different my life would have been.

A quiet lake, a bench to read.

Light and wind and water.

Branches drip with infant buds – withered stumps of roses burrow.

Flowers that won’t bloom till June.

Static, dormant, waiting.

Until I’m gone.

I wonder if I’ll bloom then too.

36

sustains innumerable young people who are at sea, know it, and cannot direct their future in a comfortable way.2

2

Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade.

37 Outside the gardens a bicycle whirls in the far-off green.

Children play soccer, play rugby.

Laughter burbles – gleaming Couples idle, clasping warm cups of tea.

A lady blocks the path hands propped on hips a puppy flopped at her feet.

A step in her direction – A smile in answer to my own.

“Are you a student?

What do you study?

Where are you from?

Oh, you’ve a lovely accent.”

My accent has never been called lovely before.

It’s Midwestern plain and flat and nothing special.

My smile brightens.

And so I tell her – She tells me the puppy’s name.

Pink wet on my palm fingers filled with fur.

He belongs to her son gone off to university.

Now she’s stuck with him.

38 I empathize, I think of my mother, I think of the dog we never had.

“London’s a different place these days.

No room, no air, no space to breath. It’s strange to be surrounded – yet feel closed off.

Don’t you think?”

Yes, of course, I agree.

I’ve never liked big cities, I tell her.

That’s why I came to the park.

It feels like home.

It’s my goal to visit every park in London.

“Ah, to be young and ambitious again.

I hope you’re enjoying the city.”

I thank her Check my watch Stand up Give Diego a pat Set off on the path To Camden Town.

I wave goodbye and she calls back to me.

39 “I know people like you are going to change the world.�

Through parted lips some bottomless, unspeakable thing crackles The pup flops down Yawns The world passes him by

40

run deliciously through her veins like the movement of her blood.3

3

Doris Lessing, “To Room Nineteen.�

41 I have seen the River Thames by day Bridging the sunrise, strolling through – Westminster, Jubilee, Millennium, Waterloo.

Step above the whirling clouds below the city’s hot air breathes – Tracking prints in Oyster cards.

To Charing Cross, to Covent Garden, Trafalgar and Sloane Square.

The sun is rising on Embankment.

Enter in the shining waves.

I have seen the River Thames by night.

When the orange moon hangs low and full – drifting over St. Paul’s dome, a crowd mingling at the rails.

Men and women, elders and children, Londoners and foreigners, we gather round.

We are the slow heartbeat of London.

This night we are renewed, we are watching, we are waking.

Our eyes are open.

42 The darkness, circling around the light, devouring the light.4 Red bus, second floor – take the 76 from Epworth Street Spitalfields, East End Yellow streetlights black sky Yellow letters black screen Aldwych/Somerset House 12:13am – waiting, swaying, barely waking.

Waterloo Bridge/South Bank redbuttondingSTOP I scramble down the upper deck – Out the door, raincoat swirling Black and white A night spent dancing The taste of stormclouds on my tongue I am the dark between the edges The reflection in-between.

How those sunny days in Regent’s Park are shadowed in these heartbeats watching by the Thames the waters black as ink.

If I should climb upon this rail, stand with my arms outstretched 4

Aimee Bender, “The Devourings.”

43 will there be space left for me?

Will I meld into that static light Green Pink Azure Orange Yellow electrified veins – frazzling nerves – floating through the abyss

44 And the darkness, eating light, and again light, and again light, lifted.5 The sun is setting The sun is rising and I am far from London White cliffs climb in darkness steeped golden, with streaks all the hues of twilight In the air that whirls round are Sirens calling down, down where waves crash battered earth Here I am – Balanced on the edge A break in the cliff Step over, step above Be porous – Let the wind Howl in you Thrumming through all your gaps

5

Aimee Bender, “The Devourings.”

45 Plummet down into the sea hear the city calling on this ancient, wild island Catch soft-spun clouds in palm shaped knots Spinning and weaving Twining the gaps.

I am a wool-gatherer too.

So far from all I’ve known – Growing toward the sunlight.

46

Dark Room Gabriel Niforatos Maybe he takes photographs So that if he looks at it long enough it will stay Frozen and glossy and staged With the lighting above them and below So he could remember the smiles on their faces And the hint of one on his face Frozen and glossy With the lighting falling a certain way Around him Never look away, never drop your gaze Unless you find yourself in a dark room whose only company Is a photograph much younger, undeveloped, and hazy And you see it with an eye, hear the snap of a shutter Emboss it to hang above your mantle maybe But not living it really Preserved and waxed and shiny But a prison only a couple of millimeters wide And a pain in your back the dryness in your mouth The arthritis grip of a lens with cobwebs To keep a moment suspended and growing old to keep it preserved Without feeling the goosebumps of rain on his skin Just feeling the water in a dark room cupped into his other hand.

47

Lamppost Jackson Mittlesteadt The Lamppost stands against the gray night a beacon swimming shining and swimming piercing the night as an orb – like a ghost but translucent and fixed in the dark as it flickers occasionally illuminating a small patch of grass and cracked cement – But what do you really show to me other than what I cannot see?

48

Persona Poem of an Ex Emee Marjorie Dy 1. Who are you and whom do you love?

Two days ago, I walked across school. The soles of my boots clung onto the snow. You walked ahead of me like you always do. My half-ripped Herschel backpack on my right. You’re out of sight. You didn’t turn around.

2. How will you begin?

A love song. “Stay” by Post Malone. My ears were not performing quite well that day, but I’m glad. You were singing. Thank you, ears. Since then, my ears have been working perfectly fine. I’m glad with how my ears are working now. Living it up to my high standards. An A for my ears!

3. How will you live now?

Laughter. Happy. Texts full of L O L indeed. Netflix and chill.

7 days a week. 200 bucks richer. Tinder matches. Swipe right.

Swipe right. No time for standards, madam. I’m going to go eat some fine dining at the French restaurant next door - you in? Bet. One more thing, I’m also – *chuckles* – 200 pounds lighter.

Bitch. I hate Sour Patch Kids and the Bachelorette.

49 4. Describe a morning you woke without fear.

Well, when I was single again. Free. No longer trapped in the claws of her jagged teeth. Her stench. Her onion-breath. I am a free man in the land of the free and the brave.

Fear holds most people back… I’m a fighter, though. No problems here.

5. And what would you say if you could?

Oh I did. I already have. No regrets, no turning back. That’s what I’m all about. Ya feel?

50

astrolabe Bella Niforatos i held the sonic landscape of stars above our heads while we explored in the footsteps of Magellan and Vespucci, circling the world that ruptured underneath our timid fingertips. we turned celestially, held in the power of what we’d once thought of as love and now understood as mutual distrust: an obsessive-compulsive desire to spin, revolve, smoke each other’s breath like the cigarettes crumbling to dust underneath our bare feet. the ticking of the clock told us why we were here, what our final purpose was, how much time we had to accumulate our commonality and make something of it. when i was alone again, i held you like a broken-winged bird underneath the umbrella of my ribs, sheltering your memory from the rain of circumstance. why, why did you have to leave. dirt accumulated under pristine fingernails as i rooted for you in the mud outside of the blue house, finding only a single feather the color of a pyrotechnic forest or your jacket the night we ran. the pines morphed and distorted above me, my hair on end with static electricity as I metamorphosized into a being of pure hopelessness, a Kafka creature of ticking claws, buzzing wings, and tentacle-like anguish. why did you stay. your angular distance imprisoned me in a precise box with prismatic walls and shrinking air molecules. the smell of burning hair acidized the tunnels of my nostrils as the hydrochloric stars fell by one by one and seared my toes. my toes that crunched through

51 invisible ice, seeking boundaries and signs, why oh why did you melt. melted into an iron and bone castle whose foundations could not hold under the agony of our love, now understood as mutual distrust.

52

Schadenfreuder Nicholas Jeffrey I was lost in a maze the Other day, Straining to absorb every scratch and pattern on the walls.

I came across a ragged merchant, Selling promises from a hole he’d Carved in the brick.

I asked him for an herb or Tincture to boost my Perception.

He gave it to me.

And I saw a large rat scamper away with the last of my cash.

I wandered for a year, Going straight in circles.

Eventually, I ran into a bleeding bush I’d met at a D&D convention, And conversed About whether Virgil was a sellout for Ever • I beheld a vast and legless door of painted glass, And decided not to go through it. I

53 Turned about face And I beheld a vast and legless door of painted glass.

Naturally, I opened the thing – to a vast and toothless room – And began looking for exhibits.

• An information desk in between the walls, Manned by a woman.

Pop pop pop the bubbles Serena was blowing, Licorice lipstick, tar black hair, and wearing her church pants, I asked her if she had another piece for me.

“We don’t sell gum.”

“But of course, you only deal in– ” I beckoned to the sign. …

“Could you tell me the way to the exit?”

“You don’t need anything else while you’re here?”

“No, I’d just like to leave.”

“Ya well, the exit, you just take a left up there, then a right, and a right, then left, then right then left, then straight, then left, then…

“Oh, could you speak up just a little, I couldn’t quite– ” _

_

_ o o =o( )

_ o o =o( )

….Nevermind....

_

_ _ o o =o(

)

_ o o =o(

_ o )

_ o __

54 • Still in the maze I reach for the slushee I got at concession, And slurp until my knuckles turn white.

I sugar rush my way Into a cobbled bazaar where I haggle With a crack in the wall for a bell jar in which a Shrivelled simple-Sybil Predicts the price she’ll be worth after twenty thousand Grains of sand.

– Sybil, how long will I be in this maze?

– The Black Gates stand open day and night I find her funny, And feel less Forgonely With a simple-Sybil in a bell jar.

55

Hurry Audrey Lindemann When the sun falls into my

garden

I want to be fist deep in a jar of peanut butter, fly down pouch out and heavy.

When the yolk

Gleaning.

CRACKS

I want people to cosset in the least expected spaces and tender the egg shells clench.

When the lemon tree

in a big hairy bends

I want people’s love spatter I cower.

It’s not fear of change, it’s the LOSING EVERYTHING that gets me the ice is drooping droop.

One last mango is in the balance it’s groaning at the ground.

56

baby on board Sarah Kikel she storms into the room in all her baby glory drool and diaper and all pudgy dinosaur legs as she stomps over head fiery with intention deep grimace on her fat lips spaghetti stains on her mouth she wants the blocks for her castle she wants the space for her kingdom her older brother quivers and cries devastated by her desire watching the destruction quench his home watching the collapse of his paradise destroyed in seconds watching the colorful wood tumble at her command he retreats farther back into the bustling living room wondering how she learned to defy

57 and wondering if she will stop before every single block is hers and wondering why she thinks her kingdom will be more beautiful than the creation he built for her

58

Necropop (on Grouper, Mount Eerie) Michael Donovan dragging a dead dear up a hill as its death spoke to the mirror and I spoke to no one. it began as a group project, dragging our dead dear up this hill through the northwestern moisture calling on the moss, the vines to reanimate because the dear didn’t die a real death, a death from [because of, in line with] the contours of the sodden floor. we dragged the dead dear up the hill to remember its primordial mirror death, forget real machine death. her body sold to the compactor, wrapped in wires attached to monitors whose batteries always fail. daughter has to get to school, sandwich packed, (don’t forget) meatless mondays. machine death sputters and grows, a product of slow, postdeciduous violence. dead dear on the hill may return as she does to the soil, feed the trees, cycle of life and all that shit. but I wonder if the lead, lodged inside her oblong skull transmits machine violence to the cycling shit, a metallic plant roots downward to an interior not its own. daughter needs to be picked up. dinner? salmon, spinach salad, milk. grandma’s coming tomorrow with aunt. clean rooms, make beds. we have the space now. empty room, absent head shrink as microwaves dings.

I remove nuggets [minced, breaded], plate the with sauce, give them to daughter.

59

Granite Laura McKernan

My heart is housed in the ledge Behind my home.

And each night I climb up To visit Leo and rediscover Virgo, I leave a bit more of myself.

A year ago stone was rock, Smooth was plain.

Now the grain slides under my fingers, The coldness greets my skin, And four foot granite is my home.

60

Truths Emma Jaques You’re telling me truths again.

The painful truths that come from deep in your heart, the things that hurt for me to hear, that echo in my bones and keep me awake long past midnight, when my pulse resonates with the ticking of the clock.

You’re still telling me truths but now you’re saying you’ll start buying me flowers again.

You mean it, but you won’t.

You’ll see how much more expensive they are in winter, when the gardens freeze over, and you’ll buy me coffee instead, and pride yourself on being economical.

But by now I can see the end coming The way you can always tell in a bad thriller that someone’s about to be murdered.

You can shout at the television all you want asking how they could go in there, how they couldn’t see what was about to happen.

I can see

61 how I’m wasting our time, what little we have left.

You would think I’d know by now to cling to happiness where I can find it.

But times moves quickly, and to keep up with it I feel I must always be one step ahead.

How I’m wasting the truths that you’re telling me on resentment and wariness I want to tell you that I love you, a million times, but time is something we don’t have.

And all the truths you’re telling...

I think I like it better when you lie.

62

黄河 (Huang Angela Lim

He)

Huang He, Yellow River winds along a proclaimed trajectory.

There’ll be rain to rush her forwards, and she’ll outlast the dry spells.

But rather than congratulations, people fact check hydroelectric dams.

They tinker her floodplains until her dreams match formula.

I am only allowed to compare upwards. Measured in shifting metrics, I keep stretching for waning percentiles, for a figment of success.

After my first semester at college, when my state school friends bring back 4.0’s, my mother asks why I have not done the same.

Too dark: Huang He is smudged with silty memories of Loess Plateau.

Still flushed as a hazard sign, the river reaches the sea leaving muddy beaches no one sunbathes on.

Yellow wounds weep seawards― silt steeping outwards like tea leaves.

63 Because pride is shameful, because hard work is only done in shadows, because results are the only thing worth recognizing, I have spent years skirting gravity, waiting to be pulled to earth.

I am wanted to stand straight, not stand out. In San Diego, my mom flinches at how dark I’ve become. She wishes me bleached as the Coronado sand.

Along the sepia’d riverbanks, the Yellow River steams nearby vegetation. Mosquitos probe polluted drainage.

The villagers turn to other sources of water, pocket up separate pools of turtles and fishes. Fence freshness; ignore damage. They wait for the river to run clear.

If rivers are boundaries, then I am a river. Once, (not once), but once, my professor extrapolates that my speech is pretty smooth considering English must be my second language. So, I hold my humid tongue stiller. Pinyin drowns in my mouth, gurgles clumsy tones. I am a tributary rejected by each main stem.

64

First Lucas Don

The devil danced with me at midnight He swallowed my words and put them away I touched the light with my embrace The subtle signs of a deadly taste I drew on the walls of my cage Slept with the figures of a phantom shape Stared at the shine of the stone Left the only world I’ve ever known Stayed awake as the sun crept toward Whispered a melody overheard Stole a moment long awaited Swallowed the feeling I created Wept and wondered where I went Worried and waited for time to relent The devil danced and cackled with glee But the morning showed the only devil was me

65

Privilege (in the style of Allen Ginsberg) Jackson Mittlesteadt I have seen those raving mad and driven crazed over a lost pen Heaving chest eyes blazed and full of scorn Distraught over the lack of bucks and booze and not the bombs Which roar over the unsuspecting, the Frail and Weak and Tired And Lonely, deserving no wrong, yet torn to shreds by the dynamo And the machinery of the night Distraught over no food, no family, no home, no shelter Against the callous blaze of the impinging fire of war Which will consume Them as we complain that our rooms are too hot Too cold too dry too wet all my clothes are dirty my bed is too stiff As They in dreams on mud and streets want beds and sheets And Millions of People are gasping for water and food and care As the bombs roar overhead and the flame of war spreads And the hunger spreads and meanwhile oh I missed lunch since I was plastered This ice cream is melted and the clock is off by an hour I am late to yoga As whimsical minds ponder deep the meaning of life In their lofty cushioned beds overlooking the dynamo of the city As They have no city left after the raids and the mags ripped through the drywall

66 They who cherished a drop of water and the sparse moments of silence When the machine guns and the disease was not tearing Them apart And now as the wars scream they scream at the waiter about a messed-up order And their coffee has no cream and no sugar and my dog needs a bigger bed And refugees scramble past others fallen in heaps in soil and sod unheard dirges Clambering over steely fences labeled as threats by the white world And the bombs roar and become commonplace with the setting sun Will it rise again as ragtag bands of militia scourge the streets and rob Them blind While the crying and the sighing and the dying and the lying of the world Screams in Their ear as the tumult ensues like a storm in the desert eating up the land And they scream at their ex over a breakup over the phone and cry and sigh and say You are killing me while disease rips through the People of the world and the dynamo presses on And how I hate rain it is like needles on my skin as They pray for rain to their god And dream of it coming laying on the dark mud wet with tears while we Never knowing, never caring, are here, making no difference at all.

What have we become?

67

God Upon Making the Black Woman Sierra Rainey Expect some sadness always not the soft, cerulean kind but a hard one like shards of graffitied concrete tearing at your cheeks a jagged, white boulder lodged between your prayers and your little boy’s heartbeat his open-mouthed breathing a flickering lullaby he will one day stop singing his throat glutted by blue or black metal If he should grow to hate you you must love him still your arms must find a way to comfort his ghost when his body is uprooted from bone and muscle

68 and human you must remember him And your beauty expect it to belong to you inconsistently they will adore every part of your body except the flesh but if you are light enough to pass tread softly you are ballerina in this imitation dance pirouette fast enough for no one to catch you if someone does you will be robbed of all your limbs and few will be willing to stop it or remember you If they declare you are pretty for a black girl smile be gracious you are counted among this garden of moonflowers

69 it cannot be helped that the darker dahlias get their petals plucked the quickest No one can know this but I made these most sacred of all.

70

Love Letter from an Athazagoraphobic Annette Cai february— in the midst of winter, only the chilled breezes remind me of you. there are no rains, but the sky is grey and dreary. the clouds drag pass slowly like a thin film of haze. i look up at the sky and think of you.

I like you. you are the tender winter frost the sweet spring petrichor the rumbling summer storms and the warm autumn gold. early mornings, the world is still under the night’s sleeping spell. the universe is quiet, but my thoughts clatter into my mind like midnight trains in empty subway stations. i feel the rush of winds hear the screech of brakes as they pass me by i watch them transform into gnats—unrelenting and persistent. the gnats morph into steel chains, winding tight coils around my neck and torso. it’s suffocating—the moonbeams against my window—but i think of you and

71 take a breath. i survive on bent wings and broken feathers, but— you soar past my life with metallic wings firm, unyielding. icarus had smiled when he plummeted from the skies.

I love you. taste me in every song you hear see me in every turn you take feel me in every second that ticks by —there are thawing icicles buried in my tender chest. i am selfish and i cannot unlove you. the tide recedes but it beats unrelentingly against the shore day after day. we are a reverse grenade. s e p a r a t e, w e ’ r e h a r m l e s s s o u l s, a d r i f t. together, we’re the apocalyptic end the Mayans had predicted. exploding supernovas dim in comparison to the scenes etched on the backs of my eyelids whenever I fall asleep next to you. when I’m with you, i feel the white-hot plasma burning against my bare skin.

I am afraid.

72 but, i ask of you: please forget me. there is an impossible possibility of a future for us if i had never existed in your life. i will hold the memories of our time together alone —carry them upon my shoulders— you have burned chasms into the landscape of my heart the faults linger even as the centuries roll past. perhaps in other universes, we did not meet. perhaps in the worlds running parallel to our dys— —func— —tion— —al one, we are scar-free happy. i sleep, comforted.

73

NRA: Never Really Accountable Caroline O’Sullivan

“Violence isn’t a Democrat or Republican problem.

It’s an American problem, requiring an American solution.”

“The challenge with gun laws is that by definition criminals do not follow the law.”

“It’s agonizing to see your baby’s name on a grave.”

“I keep looking for him. I reach out for him.”

“I keep thinking he’s here and can’t understand why he’s not.”

“It’s just unbearable for me to understand how to get through this life without him.”

“There’s no guidebook for this.

Not at all… For me I have moved forward.

But I will never move on.”

“A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined…”

“Please keep everyone in your prayers as we work through this tragic event.

74 Thank you for your thoughts and love.”

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”

“Please hug your families tonight. And be safe out there.”

“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.”

“I keep seeing people on the floor. I keep hearing gunshots.”

“The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own.”

“None of us knew if the bullets were going to hit us.”

“I was just screaming for somebody to help me.”

“He turned blue. Another guy checked his pulse and said he was dead.”

“I was just yelling at him not to go.”

“He did not say goodbye.”

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

“There are no dangerous weapons. There are only dangerous men.”

“Guns make small men feel big.”

75

“People pull the trigger but guns are the instrument of death.�

76

Ethos Gabriel Niforatos There are no stories, Only nighttime reflections, headphones and dreaming, Gripping your hand until our fingertips are white.

In the light of darkness, From an upstairs glow, I saw us race across my pillow, I loved you, I killed you, I burned and felt every fiber searing my skin, The fibers of the fabrics sewed into my pillow, Wings that peeled out of my shoulder blades, Like the silhouette of your outstretched hands against the blueblack of my bedroom window.

I saved you, I lost you in the pulsing dark, My eyes adjusted, And I saw you fixed into the clouds, Etched onto the rain-drop glass reflections of my window.

The clouds have a kind of small glow to them, Overlaid upon the city’s reflection upon my face.

I roll over and slip back into my headphones, Your smile filling up a golden field with dusky cumulus fixed like the iris of your eyes, That’s the sheets running through my fingers, The dreams behind marble eyes.

77

Permanence Laura McKernan For years the only futures I imagined with them Were of clenched fists, bitter silences, and watery eyes.

But with you, my dear, I imagine the brush of our arms around one another, confessions sung in the dead of night, and glittering white surrounded by twinkling lights.

We have a permanence, a phosphorescence, a scary sense of lasting that shakes me to my core.

I hope you are shaking with me.

I hope you are permanent with me.

78

A Mile-High Lament (This poem was inspired by Working, a book by Studs Terkel documenting the lifestyles and views of the American working class.)

Jackson Mittlesteadt The wind gusts are thinner up there Harder to breathe, taking in frigid air That freezes the bones, makes muscles tight And gets even worse through the endless night Working up high, with no support below Except for the wind which whispers death row One small mistake, a slip or a slide And the result is a plunge that has never been defied An iron arm stretching into the sky Is where I work hard and where I sigh Wishing that I could have been a star Or a well-dressed man smoking a cigar One of those politicians on the hill I’ll bet they never worry about their bills But what I have is what I got And why go wishing for things when they’re not Possible, at least at this present time And, therefore, I sit and lament with this rhyme

79 Still, I am but a man under God Who has been given a hammer instead of a wad To do my work, and be a hero to those who look To the sky first rather than their pocket book It is I who build their buildings and streets And labor and work but will never meet All those millions who will work here for pay While never thinking about he who built it to stay The city passes without knowing Me and my trials as I set out roaming Searching for a better life amongst the vast jungle Of deceit and scandal, and every time I tumble So, instead of pursuing the vast and the obscure I climb up that iron to find my cure My woes and sorrows drift away with the wind The birds, the breeze, these are my kin I stand, broad chested, one foot posed high Knowing of my treasure that no one could buy The quietness, the tranquility, which man has sought for ages Is truly above him, not on finite pages It is in his spirit, as he gazes for miles Seeing the beauty of the metal piles Of buildings, reaching out in an urban sprawl The view of the world is the greatest gift of all.

So, who am I to wish for riches For I have found what my niche is It is to build these high-rises for all To see the beauty of the world, vast and tall To learn of untold wonders wordless stories Which express themselves, increasing every story

80

Parenting Caroline O’Sullivan Jack, Donal, Katie, Caroline, Mikey, Kelly, Too many names, They never got it right on the first try.

23, 22, 20, 19, 14, 11, Changes every year, They saw no point in memorizing them.

Dropout, College, High School, Elementary.

Too many recitals, teacher conferences, activity fairs.

They could never go to all, so they went to none.

They had their own ambitions.

No time for so-called “parenting.”

Hired Felicia, Theresa, Helen, Joan– kids knew more Polish than English– Raised by women whose wombs they were strangers to.

81

lifeline Angelica Ketcham my glasses got bigger as my hair got smaller as each year became a smaller fraction of the fraying thread (or perhaps it is dental floss) that is my lifeline (one day, among the roses, a pair of garden shears may see fit to join their blades in holy matrimony while snugly resting around the long string pulled taut by years of “when are you going to make me some grandchildren” and the crisp tone — like that of a paper cutter splicing half-sheets of second grade homework, or perhaps a guillotine — a sharp intake of breath that brings no life into a set of lungs but only particles of ice that pierce the walls of quivering flesh that deflate like a balloon that got a little too confident and missed the flock of geese in the distance because maybe their honks were from cars below but very far below and much too far to be audible to this bright-red nomad in the stratosphere for whom a sharp beak is akin to harsh words uttered across the oddly clean dinner table whose five legs — why five? — are

82 not at all the same length but are trying their best so that the bowl of alphabet soup does not slide slowly down the table and fall to the floor before the old woman with poor reflexes can fail to stop it from spelling “caveat emptor� on the carpet) for now i sit one more counterfeit anarchist in a cafe that pretends to be hip via salvaged barn wood industrial lighting and coffee served in mason jars

PROSE

84

Dire Dire Clocks Hayley Flynn “The Feeling of Becoming” Before becoming, there is unbecoming.

“The Broken Bridge and the Dream” The dream died years ago. Shadow-slaves labored incessant for millennia, converting cloud to castle underneath the dream’s feet. Dreams don’t need to walk very fast, so they managed to stay in front of it for about half of forever. But finally, one fateful day, a shadow turned around to say, “I see the dream.” They threw panicked brick on panicked brick but some skeleton left a hole somewhere and when the dream’s feet found it, he came crashing to the ground.

“The Broken Bridge and the Dream” Have you heard what happens when a dream dies? The shadows told me its scream was so piercing the sound wave became tsunami. Afterwards, it only got worse.

“Melancholy Atomic” Twisted figures drift like bad-night dreams. Disregard the disfiguration or die trying.

85 “The Broken Bridge and the Dream” 1. Dream in freefall 2. Skeletons hold their shadow breath 3. If time was moving, it freezes 4. Dream hits dirt 5. Fuck 6. A scream like a knife through your eardrum 7. Fuck 8. It’s not ending 9. How could this happen 10. Everything we built 11. All for nothing 12. Our whole lives 13. All for nothing “Melancholy Atomic” In a cave like an ocean. No sun or moon for company, only nightmares. Memories of that outside open blueness tease you.

“The Broken Bridge and the Dream” Ever since the dream died, the shadows just want to follow it.

Trapped in dead-dream no-time, their skeleton feet trace its final footsteps, spectral bodies follow that tragic trajectory. But shadows can’t die.

“Melancholy Atomic” Faces abundant, but none of them friendly. They can’t even face you. There is no you here, only everything else, except what’s on the outside.

86 “Honey is Sweeter than Blood” Where land meets sky. Grey meets blue. The horizon. Or, where death meets freedom.

“Honey is Sweeter than Blood” The greyblue line divides the mind, colors the brain half dust half flight. The blue looks empty but it’s just bigger.

“Honey is Sweeter than Blood” Death meeting freedom means ephemeral flesh becomes ethereal. Look at all the dead, the dying. The decaying. Why stay on this side? Blood, still thinner than glue.

“Honey is Sweeter than Blood” Dear horizon, does it hurt?

“Melancholy Atomic” Escape. Escape.

“Premature Ossification of a Railroad” You and a shadow wait for a train that might not make it. A distant pair of people has already headed for the mountains, but there’s nothing else in the desert for miles. You resist the urge to correct the clock’s melting fingers, but fuck that feeling lingers.

You scan the sky for sun or moon to divide the days but find only open blueness.

87 “Premature Ossification of a Railroad” The trains weren’t supposed to stop so soon, but a voice booms from the blueness that the bones of the railroad have grown close to frozen. You doubt your skeletal legs could get you far but is there any other option? You’ll go wherever the shadow doesn’t.

“The Feeling of Becoming” Black and white means mostly gray. No-time, all-time. No one else, but you couldn’t bring anyone here even if you wanted to. Here is a no-here, a no-where, no-when. Dayless days and nightless nights passed in the gray non-light of no-time, all-time.

Imagine emerging fully formed, finally.

“The Persistence of Memory” Melted clocks littered like dish towels across an otherwise almost empty landscape. A mountain in the distance, ants in the corner.

One little tree with one little branch, barren except for a clock.

Something dead on the ground, maybe.

“The Bleeding Roses” A woman semi-stands, one arm wound around the column that keeps her upright. The sky matches her skin but darkening clouds converge overhead. The sea is near but far too far for someone who can’t swim. She can’t even face you. Her stomach bleeds painful roses. A shadow approaches.

“In Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies” Black blue white sky unrolls behind him, him half dry,

88 impossibly. Toast-gold mountains sink indifferent into the frozen ocean. Not temperature-frozen, time-frozen. Invisible sun casts shadows from nowhere, somewhere to the right. Cowdog sleeps, maybe. Thank god for the shell.

“The Persistence of Memory” Feet planted on this plantless flatness. No other organisms but eyes open everywhere. Gravity drags me more heavily here or maybe it’s the hands of the air that push back at me. I’m here to fix time I try to tell it but no response. No matter. No one around to distract me or attack me. No sun or moon to divide the days. How will I know what time it is until I can correct the clocks’ fingers but my dream self knows from yestermorning that fuck that feeling lingers lines the insides of my eyelids dream in and dream out.

“The Bleeding Roses” Kept captive on the roof, a flesh sacrifice to the sky. Poignantly feminine pain at the mercy of the shadow-man. If she jumps at least she’ll sink bloodless, staunched by the sea. She craves reclamation, but not by the shadows. Unseen clocks are ticking.

“In Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies” Steel piñata releases something sweet, closest to you they’re all xanadu, rust, beige, and bister. Wait for the later ones, the smaragdine, cerulean, amaranth, and fuchsia. Waiting is worth it. The invisible sun is warm on your honeyed skin, and in notime there is all-time.

89 “The Persistence of Memory” Clocks mock the command they demand landing liquid and dripping insipid in a dreamy scheme but a mean one eyes open everywhere find rare reasons to reject projections protect rejections or infect connections you can correct the clocks’ fingers but fuck that feeling lingers.

“The Bleeding Roses” The shadows always whispered that beauty is pain but this pain does not feel beautiful. This pain is private, pitiful, pathetic, and yet blossoms for him to see like a heart on a sleeve. Unseen clocks are ticking. Jump, sink, sleep.

“In Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies” The piñata vomit looks like a variegated grape-fall to his hungry eyes, but to the starved mind they stretch like Sylvia’s fig tree.

Is waiting worth it? Beige now, fuchsia later? Or nothing now, maybe, and everything later? The dog might be dead but he can’t cry for it. Not now, maybe never. Maybe in the cerulean later, the fuchsian future.

“The Bleeding Roses” If your flesh must be sacrificial, follow your mothers. Repose with Woolf on the indifferent riverbed. Forget Sexton’s asphyxiation, Plath’s pot roasting – slip into the ocean, and cease.

90 “The Persistence of Memory” No other organisms but eyes open everywhere. Gravity more, lungs less. Yesterday is the moon, tomorrow is the sun, and I am trapped in the vacancy between. Even when eyes open. Fuck that feeling lingers.

“The Bleeding Roses” Never meet the shadow’s eyes. Jump, sink, sleep. Satisfy the sweet tooth for escape. Let the storm take it. The sea will never surrender you.

“The Persistence of Memory” Dear Mother Time, I am an innocent bit of space dust, tomorrow is the sun, and you are the gravity dragging me to my incineration. Yesterday is the moon, I am the child who longs to touch it, and you are the teacher who speaks tears into my eyes by telling me that will never be. You are the seconds that pass like days and the years that pass like dreams. Dear Mother Time: explain yourself.

“In Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies” Go colorblind and lower all your expectations. Stop waiting for some apple-ideal. Snap your fingers and all of them come crashing. Fuck the fuchsian future. Here is now.

“The Feeling of Becoming” A tree, a blanket, and you. No-time. Mountains in the distance.

Nothing else in the desert for miles. Black and white.

91 “The Persistence of Memory” A dreamscape designed to laugh at time. To laugh is better than to flee in fear: confront. If you can’t fix time let the timekeepers melt in the unseen sun. If you’re not laughing, you’re running, and you can’t run forever. Relax in the no-shade of the solo tree, ignore the maybe-dead something, stare into the empty sky, and melt like dream-time. Maybe then you’ll see something.

“The Feeling of Becoming” You emerge fully formed, finally, into a desert empty for miles.

You could head for the mountains, but you’d rather head for nothing. Something will cross your path. Some something always does.

“The Accommodations of Desire” Still desert, still darkness. But egged pockets of bright hold heads and their faces, some outlines, some spaces. Fierce and feral and a few ants.

“Rose Meditative” One rose in the otherwise almost empty sky. One thin cloud. A yellow strip to separate the blue expanse above from the brown ground beneath. Two tiny people flee the distant village.

“Ship with Butterfly Sails” Forget flimsy flax and pathetic synthetic fibers. Fabricated forms of manmade transport can only take you where you’ve already been. Set sail for new sights with serene scales and setae. Head

92 for the yellow snake of sky on the horizon.

“Lincoln in Dalivision” Why spend all day staring out the Lincoln window at some fiery something soaking up the sky? Could be a comet, careening toward her castled squares. Can she care? She might not mind.

After all, who are they? The faces facing everywhere anywhere but at her have been silent for centuries.

“Rose Meditative” Two tiny people flee the distant village. Destination somewhere, maybe. More about the moving, mostly. Maybe not. Might not matter. If the blood-rose comet crashes, at least they left.

“The Sublime Moment” Before this moment, the eggs had to be cracked. Night and day bickered about the sky space. The phone spoke and spoke and spoke over the sand. The snail squared up with the curve, and decided to climb.

“Ship with Butterfly Sails” Wings gleaming green and golden fling the ship forward.

Lepidoptera are known for navigation, and they have moon and unseen sun for guidance. Sail for cauliflower clouds, cut new paths through the open blueness, destination anywhere.

“Rose Meditative” The rose rises a dim crimson layered lips unfolding unfurling and

93 with each uncurling the whirling slows sky becomes stiller rose like breeze-killer like easing the filler and maybe that thrills her chills her fills her with some something some missing something maybe it’s at the middle of the rose-sun blood-moon god-brain giant’s-mouth hanging over their heads cruising through the blueness it could be a comet leaving petal-lips in weightless strips like fateless trips through naked space trace the petals to their origin and maybe there you’ll find some something.

“Night of the Butterflies” No one knows what this place is, but if you follow the butterflies this is where they bring you. Lepidoptera are known for navigation, and here, the nights are white. The golden egg at the center might be the sun, but maybe not. It doesn’t matter. Head for it anyway, from any direction.

“The Persistence of Memory” But fuck that feeling lingers.

“Lincoln in Dalivision” Is it a sunset or did someone stab the sky, staining the blue expanse above bloodred and lovegolden? Could be a cosmic gesture, a giant’s rippling whisper slipping down to the horizon.

Watched water never boils and maybe keeping eyes on the air will hold it golden. If she looks away, will the beauty bleed like liquid dripping to the thirsty earth? What will she watch then?

“Ship with Butterfly Sails” Eleven butterflies power the ship while two more watch its

94 progress. Cauliflower clouds curl through the blueness. The butterfly catchers can’t believe they let them get away. The calm after the storm means unexpectedly smooth sailing, sun behind and moon ahead.

“Rose Meditative” How could a rose mark time’s passage? Maybe a petal peels away periodically, affording those fortunate enough to stand where it falls a brief reprieve from the blue expanse above. Maybe that’s what the fleeing people seek. Rest and relief underneath a pink sky-leaf, out of sight of the distant village, waiting patiently for the final petals to fall. Maybe then the giant’s-mouth will speak its truth and we’ll understand something, some missing something. Maybe not.

“The Bleeding Roses” Unseen clocks are ticking.

“Rose Meditative” The rose hangs in the sky like a blood-moon or a god-brain or a giant’s-mouth. Above it, a cotton ball cloud has been stretched thin. A snake of yellow sky reclines on the horizon.

“Ship with Butterfly Sails” Fuck the butterfly catchers still trapped in dead-dream notime. They think capturing the creatures will give them what only giving in can give them. Too afraid to take the plunge into bottomless blueness. Winged rebellion rings across the open water, flying in the faces of those still stuck on land. They don’t

95 know how easy it is.

“Lincoln in Dalivision” Dear Mr. President: have you seen the sky today? It’s hard to see between the squares but something came from somewhere and I swear it might be beautiful. It might all be in your mind and maybe that doesn’t matter. A mind-sky is a beautiful view, I think. She certainly seems to. Dear Mr. President: look.

“The Persistence of Memory” But fuck that fuck that feeling lingers.

“Rose Meditative” Do we have any other option but to watch the rose that replaced our sun-moon trace its path through naked space? Could be a comet careening toward collision – more likely weightless, fateless. Beautiful regardless. Lips: unseal. Sky: speak your truth.

“Ship with Butterfly Sails” Wings harness wind with unprecedented swiftness, ship slipping through liquid like dreams easing past the eyes of the mind.

Sailing has never been so simple.

“The Sublime Moment” Night and day stand together in the sky. Two eggs sleep beneath the watchful ear of a snail who’s slimed high enough to hear their slow sizzling. The sand expands.

96 “Rose Meditative” Dear Mr. President, have you seen the sky today? Some something has eclipsed our familiar sun-moon and now cruises through our open blueness. One cotton ball cloud keeps it contained in our atmosphere, one snake of yellow sky would cushion its crash to earth. Dear Mr. President, what is the meaning of this?

“The Accommodations of Desire” You might not expect to find desire in the desert. But think: drought. Dryness wants water. Desire thirsts like raisins missing grapehood.

“Night of the Butterflies” Nuit blanche means white night means eyes stay open while the sun slumbers. Sleep is for the bored and if this egg means anything it means boredom is foreign here. This place is allspace all-time, so expansive it’s deceptively empty. Here the shadows stay behind you.

“The Sublime Moment” Two eggs, fried. Almost touching. Nestled in the curve of some something. A snail sits on top, listening. The phone in the tree can listen only. Nothing else in the desert for miles. Night and day.

“The Bleeding Roses” But this pain does not feel beautiful. Private, pitiful, pathetic.

97 “The Sublime Moment” After this moment, the eggs might burn. The moon or the sun must concede. The snail descends eventually.

“The Sublime Moment” Nestled in the curve. Some something. Almost touching. Listen.

Nothing else for miles.

“The Broken Bridge and the Dream” Have you heard what happens when a dream dies?

“The Sublime Moment” Two, nestled. Almost touching. Nothing else.

“The Accommodations of Desire” Aren’t what you’d expect.

“The Broken Bridge and the Dream” All of this Everything we built All for nothing “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” Separation seeps ripping brick

disease-like through the dreamscape from brick and limb from

98 limb and space from time.

Liquid drip ticks into the no-time. The reflection from its original.

clocks persistently disconnects

“The Broken Bridge and the Dream” Have you heard what happens when a dream dies?

“The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” Sun spreads like leaked broken egg through sky soup.

Time d r oops dismal from fruitless branches. Things fall apart things fall apart things fall apart.

“The Sublime Moment” This moment can pass but it can’t be unbecome.

This moment will pass but there might be another.

99 “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” Here

the fish are dead

and time is slipping

into the depths.

No other organisms near to try to stop it restart it no other organisms but eyes open You can try to correct the clocks’ d ri p p i n g fingers feeling lingers you can try but fuck that feeling you can but fuck.

“The Feeling of Becoming” After becoming, there is unbecoming.

everywhere.

but fuck that try you can try

100 “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” All flesh

is

sacrificial shadows always catch what they’re chasing eventually shadows can’t die so fuck the fuchsian future or die trying to disregard the disfiguration invisible ticktickticking leave dream in freefall fuck that feeling

you can’t correct the clocks’ fingers fuck that fuck that feeling lingers even in white-night all-time fuck flesh sacrificial fuck fuck that feeling lingers there is no you here only everything else fuck that feeling fuck that feeling lingers even in the bottomless blue of sublimity.

Die trying.

101

Standard Deviation Theresa Azemar One night, as you are watching Wheel of Fortune with your family on the living room couch, your older brother pulls out a gun and says he has something to say. Your mom stands and screams his name like it’s the only word that’s ever been on her mind. She keeps telling him whatever this is, it isn’t funny.

You mute Pat Sajak and ask what the fuck is going on. Your question probably doesn’t come out that smoothly, or at all, but before you can finish, your brother makes himself small and begins to cry. He crumples to the floor. For the first time, you realize how long his legs are. His body folded over itself and his hands covering his face, he holds the gun like it carries no weight. Like a wand. When he gives himself the chance to breathe, he says I hurt dad.

When you and your brother are both in elementary school, you get checked out of class nearly every week because of something he did. Sometimes, it was get in the car— Malcom sharpened another girl’s finger, or Malcom threatened to reintroduce smallpox to the entire school district, or Malcom threw a butter knife at some kid during show-and-tell. Your brother knows that he’s a bad kid. Everyone who’s met him knows that he’s a bad kid. This is your brother’s personal normal. This is the standard he is held by.

You are actually a good kid. You win the math bee in your third-grade class. Things like that are always so easy for you. At the donut party for the winners, the teacher hosting the

102 event makes a comment that she is glad that not every child in your family is hopeless. You surprise yourself by clenching your fists so hard that your nails cut into your palms and make you bleed.

You are allowed to bring a plus-one to the donut party, but your brother is in detention. He calls it his cage. He imagines he’s a chameleon and turns into whatever touches him. He spends hours just dreaming from bell to bell; most people think he’s stupid for it. Lately, he’s spent most of his days in his cage; he goes entire school days without saying a single word to anyone.

You wrap an extra donut in a napkin to bring home.

These days, he sends you more letters than usual. Now, they’re shorter and sloppier. He asks you broken questions.

Hey B, how could mom have loved me?

B, do you think I’ll ever get married?

What does it all mean, B? B, did I let you down?

B, I need your help. I need…I need…I need…

When you have visitors, you keep the stack of envelopes locked in your junk drawer. You’ll get to them. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

Another day, you get home from walking your dog, and you remember that it’s been a few months since you last visited your brother. His birthday was one of these days. You say you’ll go tomorrow. It’s always so easy to say that you’ll visit him tomorrow. In your mind, he is standing in the very last place you saw him, frozen and only generally discontent. It’s always so easy to imagine that prison isn’t too bad for him. It’s always so easy to imagine that he’s eating well. That his cage is not a cage. That his conditions are not his conditions. That his body is his own.

Everything is always so easy.

103 At your dad’s funeral, it is too difficult to get yourself to cry. Imagining that he is still with you, that is the easy part.

When you are so little that you will barely remember, you envy your brother’s relationship with your dad. Early Saturday mornings, your dad calls from the base of the staircase:

second? I gotta show him something.

Your brother always comes drudging down the stairs to put on a pair of sneakers and be a body until your dad is done with him. In the meantime, you help your mom with little things around the house. Sometimes, enough time passes that you forget where your dad and brother have even gone off to. Whenever they return, your brother’s hair and clothes are disheveled from a tiring morning. He doesn’t want to do very much talking for the rest of those days. The Saturday morning ritual stops when your brother passes your dad in height. By that point, he doesn’t have to worry very much about giving a convincing no for an answer.

In 9th grade, a bunch of older kids in the back of the school bus make fun of your stutter. They call you a sp-sp-spaz.

You get this fiery feeling in your chest like a missile is trapped inside of you. Sitting there in the front seat, this is the first time you ever think that it might be good to die. When some kid starts to do a robot impression, you turn and look to the back of the bus again, your face and your neck flushed and burning. Your brother is in the back too, sitting silently and looking blood red mad. One of the mean kids says something you’ll never forget, and when the bus comes to a stop at next red light, your brother kicks open the backdoor emergency exit and throws the kid into the street.

That year, the bus driver gets fired and your brother finally gets

104 expelled. Everyone knew he’d do it eventually. The kid from the bus who said that you were not yet fully evolved actually wins the science fair that year. He never apologizes.

The next summer, your older brother takes care of you while your parents are at work. He even helps makes snacks. You wrap grapes in little spinach leaves and eat them with your eyes closed. It tastes like peaches. He looks up riddles online to ask you. He confesses some of the funnier things he got away with before his expulsion. You try to look surprised. He teaches you where babies come from, and you both share a laugh over the grossness of it all. He warns you to never hurt a woman.

You play cops and robbers. He always plays the cop. He’s pretty good at it. You think that maybe one day he could work for the police.

He slaps his girlfriend at the thanksgiving table.

You never tell him that you knew what happened to him.

You never tell him that his social deviations were a great help to your success.

You never tell him that he is the reason why your college essays stuck out.

You never tell him that his daughter called you dad.

You never tell him that his ex had another child.

You never tell him that he will always be more than a prisoner to you.

You never tell him your mom’s last words.

You never tell him that you’re sorry about everything.

You never tell him you love him.

105 You learn his inmate number to the tune of a nursery rhyme. The first time that you visit him, you go with your mom.

She is still alive. You drive there in your dad’s old car.

The waiting room smells like a pharmacy. This surprises you, as you’ve placed both places in unwaveringly separate positions in your mind. You decide the people in this waiting room look pretty sick, too.

When you finally get to see him through the glass, he smiles, and you wish he wouldn’t. He is suddenly so thin and so tall. You try not to breathe too hard so that his brittle bones don’t snap. His head is shaved bald, and he has scars all over his face.

You won’t remember the conversation that you have with him that day, but at the time you know that every other conversation that you will have with him from then on will sound just about the same. One thing that he mentions that you know you’ll never forget is that that some parents will never get locked away for.

Your mom is crying and crying the whole visit through.

She doesn’t have much time left, and she feels like she failed.

You’d never tell her this, but you agree.

On the glass, your figure mirrors your brothers. You can’t believe how much you both have in common. For a moment, you consider how easy it would have been for you to be him and for him to be you. A simple shuffle in chromosomes. In a sense, you’re both the same. You wonder why you are the brother who doesn’t end up in a cage.

In your sociology class, you teach about mass incarceration. You grapple with the fact that your brother earned his position as a slave to the system. He strayed too far from the norm; he was an outlier. You hear your students refer to prisoners as deviants. You want to tell them that deviation is inevitable. You want to tell them that you aren’t born a criminal. That there are

106 no good guys or bad guys. That nothing is ever that easy. It’s all about your margin for error.

Now that it’s all really over, do you think that there was anyone who knew him truly? That there was ever anyone who didn’t write him off as a troublemaker? Do you think that any of what’s happened is surprising?

All those people who you lied to and told you were an only child, will they ever know him?

You are always trying to cluster around the mean, trying to be as close to normal as possible. The choices you make are your only means of measuring the uncertainty of it all.

When you are 14, your brother swears at the church youth pastor for saying that you are both going to hell. When your brother is asked to leave, he snatches his bag and says he’ll do it gladly.

B, are you with me, or what? He reaches out to you.

You stay frozen in your seat, and, when the time comes, you listen to the sound of his footsteps as he walks away from you for good.

107

The Beast Isabel Nguyen We are trapped, but we are together, and that is enough.

We huddle together on the tile floor in the darkness of our flat despite the muckiness of the air, inhaling each other’s warm breaths, overheating, our sweaty bodies sticking together but too anxious to separate. I feel the tightness of my heart. It is swollen with fear of the beast, but also with love for my friend. I love her, I know, with absolute conviction. If we die tonight, I have found the thing that satisfied the core of my being — I found a kindred spirit, something like a piece of my soul in another person. The beast was coming for both of us. It enfolds you when it reaches you, suffocating you with your nightmares and desires until you burst with terror-filled ecstasy and fall limp. I have watched the faces of countless people being killed by the beast. They are all the same. Their limbs jerk wildly and their faces contort with a thousand expressions until it finally ends. It is inevitable and we have accepted it. The two of us sit patiently waiting to die, glad for each other’s company.

I say her name into the darkness, a simple syllable brimming with the essence of her person. I love you, I say. I love you too, she replies without a thought, plain and simple.

I knew she would say it, otherwise I would not have said it. It gives me an immense satisfaction. I want the beast to find us.

I want someone — any being at all — to find us sitting here together, wrapped up in our shared love and friendship. The idea is incredibly poetic. My stomach does a couple of flips thinking

108 about being killed next to someone I loved, someone who loves me back.

You know what, she says suddenly, I think I should go check on the other people in the other flats.

What?

There it is, that ugly feeling, rising in my chest. But they’re probably already dead, I whisper, unable to keep out the hint of whininess although my voice is barely audible. Besides, what use it it to check on them? I can’t just sit here, she spits out harshly. Accept it, there’s nothing to do, sit here with me. You want me to just sit here with you and die? Her voice was slowly rising, edging on hysterical. Hey– I love you. Please stop saying that! You’re so twisted. I just want us together to stay together.

Hey. Hey! She is twisting her body away from me, her arms straining to push the rest of her body off of the floor. I grasp at her in the dark, at her hair, her wrists, her pale, bony shoulders.

My clammy hands slip off her smooth moist skin. I fumble and wrestle with her, both of us frantic yet silent in our struggle, our sweaty limbs tangled and straining, until I finally get a good grasp on her wrists, so thin and delicate they seem like they could snap. I squeeze, holding her to me. I want to absorb her into my being, this human being that I love so much. She screams, breaking the stuffy silence, and slaps and bites at me.

I quickly release her wrists and move my hands to close around her neck. It is bulging with the force of the scream; it fills up my palms. This beautiful person, someone I feared I would never meet in the short span of my existence, loves me.

109 And I love her back. But her scream is piercing — I tighten my grip around her slim neck and snap it. Her body immediately tenses, her limbs suddenly spasm wildly in their last grasp of life, then they slowly grow limp. I stare into her eyes the entire time, communicating gently and silently everything she needs to know. I watch her face carefully, engraving its last moments into the folds of my brain. I wrap my arms around her body and lower it down gently, easing it into a slump, molding it around my own body. Her broken neck allows her heavy head to rest on my shoulder— a perfect fit. Now we await the beast together in peace.

110

Stealing Home Kay Bontempo Two bell peppers, a package of Muenster cheese.

A head of cauliflower, a pack of Newports, some Tampax.

Martinelli’s apple juice. Paper towels, two-ply, and cups for the temperamental Keurig that sat in the corner of her room, perpetually glowering. English Breakfast tea. Boil-in-a-bag rice, paper clips, Ramen noodles. Maybe some ice cream, if there was money left over. America’s Choice vanilla, eaten straight from the carton. It wouldn’t be bad. With a low, uncomfortable sound, he pulled out of her and lay, breathing hard, behind her.

She registered this, not unhappily, in a corner of her mind, but she did not reach out to touch him or pull him closer.

It was 11:52 pm. She wondered if the Shop’n’Save would even be open by the time she seamlessly made her exit.

Lucas was twenty-three, like her, and also recently graduated from the local college, with tightly wound dark hair and a calm assurance that things would be the way they were forever. In his apartment hung the same basketball posters and St. Pauli Girl beer sign that had adorned his erstwhile dorm room. In the corner, a Yeti cooler-fridge hummed, relentlessly content.

She liked him, she thought, rather in the way that she liked cereal—as a pleasant reminder, enjoyed on occasion, that some things would always persist. Some things changed from

111 week to week, from moment to moment, but raisin bran was perpetual and so, it seemed, was Lucas.

Gracelessly she rose and dressed, sliding out of the room with a noncommittal goodbye. She timed this so that he would not look at her, so that he wouldn’t see her swipe the mini cactus from the corner of his dresser and slip it into her purse.

Back at home, she fiddled with the hundreds of assembled trinkets on her bedside table and wondered what she would tell the next boyfriend about him, someday, when this one was gone. Maybe about his impressive collection of polo shirts, or that his favorite TV show was — an anecdote that was embarrassing and yet mild enough to share.

Show Guy, she would call him to the next boy, and they would laugh without shame but also without malice. She settled down to sleep, secure in this knowledge. The cactus sat by her side.

She had carved it into the exact shape of the state of Texas.

At work: The cubicle had three walls, the color of unpolished pewter, and a divider she shared with Marcia, a heavyset woman who typed with two fingers and carried the ever-so-faint scent of mothballs. She had sent twenty-seven emails today, more than on a usual Monday but fewer than most Wednesdays. The average hovered usually around twelve, with exceptions for days when she felt unusually productive. One day last month, exceeding all expectations, she had sent thirty-nine; the following day, however, crushed by the precedent she had set for herself, she had sent no emails at all.

Her desk was mostly bare, save for a too-smiley photo

112 of her and Lucas that he had placed there himself. In it, he was wearing a turquoise polo shirt and giving a thumbs-up; her eyes were half closed, something she had pointed out to him initially and he had ignored. The drawer where her keyboard belonged, however, instead housed hundreds upon hundreds of cap erasers, stolen one by one from the supply closet when no one was looking. Matte and pink, they pointed upwards like small animals in need of direction.

She had arranged them painstakingly into a map of the world, Africa looming large in the center and Japan hanging like a question mark. She wondered what it was like in Japan. She pictured bamboo reaching toward the sky, TV-inspired images of temples built like layer cakes.

“Did you send me those reports?” Marcia was talking to her. She had not. She responded mechanically, letting her co worker’s words wash over her, as she stole Marcia’s box of mints from the edge of her desk. One day, she thought, she would visit Tokyo.

“How was work?” Lucas was driving her home. He had picked her up in his navy-blue Toyota Camry; he had thought about springing for the Avalon, but decided against it. As far as she was concerned, they were exactly the same.

“I have to go to the supermarket.” She cracked her knuckles, a sound she knew made Lucas wince.

He looked disappointed. “I thought we could have dinner together. Maybe a nice night out?” He ran a hand through his dark, curly hair, seeming suddenly self-conscious. She felt a rush

113 of misplaced affection. He was acceptable sometimes, pleasant in small doses.

She would never make it to the supermarket. She pictured the vanilla ice cream being bought by someone else, someone who would put it in their cart and go home in a different car to a different street or town. She nodded, knowing how little of a difference it made.

He pulled the Camry into the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. The walls inside were fake red and yellow stucco, with a forced cheerfulness. Visit Cancún!, proclaimed a garish, vintage-style poster on the wall beside their table. Lucas took the booth seat; she the window.

She slipped her fork into her back pants pocket. With its one tine bent out to the side, it looked a bit like Minnesota.

“What are you doing?” Lucas looked at her hands; she followed his gaze. She had taken Marcia’s mints, arranged them into a near-perfect outline of Central America. At the right-hand border she could just make out Cancún, a place she had never been. Of course, she had never been anywhere, except for New Jersey. That was the problem. She took one of the mints and swallowed it; it tasted metallic.

Before she could answer him, a waiter came by, giving Lucas the opportunity to authoritatively order two Mexican beers. She hated beer, no matter its nationality.

The vacant church smelled of incense and selfimportance. Had they always had that air?

114 She knelt in a hard wooden pew, wondering if physical discomfort was meant to be part of the experience for people who were religious. She did not like the idea of organized religion; then again, she did not like the idea of emails, and she had sent seventeen of them today. Everything, she thought, was an accident of where you were. She wondered if a mysterious robed figure would appear, and inquire as to why she looked so lost.

When one did not, she was unsurprised but also a little bit let down.

She wondered what Lucas was doing, alone, not knowing she was here. Probably watching basketball, she thought not without fondness, and drinking St. Pauli Girl. She wondered what kind of person Lucas would be now if he had never gone to college at all.

A silver crucifix adorned the back of the pew. It was shaped, she thought, rather like the country of Argentina. She wrested it off, producing a small, reverberating sound, and dropped it into her pocket. She wondered as she absconded with it if this was sacrilegious, and how long it would take her to fly to Argentina.

Lucas was angry that she had not seen him at all this week. She would have known this even if he had not sent her fifteen texts saying as much, which he had. She certainly had not been too busy for him; she had sent barely as many emails this week as she used to in a single day. Marcia had left for the day, yet she remained, still and introspective.

She fingered the stolen silver statue in her pocket as she sat at her desk, her computer terminal shut off. Shiny and

115 hard, the crucifix felt expensive and wanted. She imagined with a start that people were looking for it, that they were looking for her, that a search had begun. They would know who she was, they would call her a thief. Outside the office walls, a police siren echoed faintly. She felt sure it was intended for her.

She turned her terminal back on and opened the keyboard drawer. There were no more emails to send. She closed her eyes and jabbed her pointer finger at the homemade map, knocking several cap erasers askew. It landed barely a state away.

She dumped the erasers into the garbage.

Carefully and without hurry, she arranged her belongings on her desk, one by one: the spoons bent into the outlines of provinces and states, the trinkets and buttons and cufflinks she had pilfered over time from Lucas’ bedroom and carved into coastlines and Pacific islands. She wondered if, without them, she would remember even wanting to visit those places at all. She left the crucifix on Marcia’s desk, to confuse whoever might be on her trail.

She drove herself to the bus station, rain pelting the windshield of her car. She squinted to see through the falling drops and the rivulets they formed down her field of vision. An oversized bus, heaving and groaning, pulled up to the station, and she boarded it, leaving her car where it was. She sat down beside a boy who was very blond, who looked like a surfer.

“I used to date a guy whose favorite TV show was The ,” she found herself saying conversationally to the nonplussed blond boy, as the bus pulled away from the station and toward another.

116

Welcome to MGTO 30110 Foresight in Business & Society!

Michael Donovan Thirty-six aspiring professionals gather in Mendoza College of Business L062 — a large rectangular room with four large rectangular tables (around which students sit) and four large rectangular screens (one per table) — in pursuit of a common goal: to (via the application of innovative analytic techniques, dynamic frameworks and synergetic interpersonal communication skills) Ask More of Business ™ and change the world. Some of the aspiring professionals hope to Ask More of Business ™ and change the world by “develop[ing] resilient and/ or shaping strategies that lead to a preferred future” as outlined in the syllabus. Others feel they can Ask More of Business ™ and change the world if they “demonstrate critical, creative, and systems thinking to fully understand complex change and how business can drive positive outcomes across all stakeholder groups” as outlined in the syllabus. One student (clearly unsocialized) conspicuously crosshatches his monogrammed leather notebook with motorik scribbles so as to declare himself Class 3 Semiotician, Reader of Poetry, Writer of Things and assume the role of the #edgy protagonist in his own undercooked narrative. “Al Dente,” the angry young man quips. “I prefer Al Dente.”

Gov’t Mule’s “When the World Gets Small” (a 7 min 35 sec portion of the band’s 2013 LP Shout! according to each of the four large rectangular screens) furiously slaps the angry

117 young man’s post-punk preferences (prepared al dente) with a relentless onslaught of twice boiled noise noodles.

The noodles fade.

[I hate to do this to you guys] says Jim. [I usually like to let the song finish first] Jim smiles. Jim wears billowing khaki pants and a loose-fitting blue button-down. He has no hair in the middle of the top of his head. From the side, Jim resembles the letter S: shins bending forward, stomach pulling inward (pushing the lower back further back), upper back curving back forward, and head angling to allow eyes to stare a few inches in front of feet. [Hi] Jim says. [I’m Jim, please call me Jim or Professor Jim or Mister Jim] to which no students (in accordance with social protocol) respond verbally or physically. [I’m gonna start with myself] says Jim. [You guys must look at me and think, ‘I didn’t know they came that conservative,’] Jim says in a tone that a person might use to tell a joke. There is no verbal or physical response. the angry young man decides now that he will dream of his notebook, he retraces lyrics he wrote months ago so as to convince himself (and everyone else) that a writerly magic has taken hold of his better senses i think you should all be murdered like that other sunny day if he’d moved out of the way that’s a joke i think you […a BA in social work. I was a tree-hugging, birkenstockwearing, bleeding heart liberal] says Jim. Jim smiles for the second time and angry young man looks up, stares, identifies the protruding veins accentuating Jim’s hair circle, looks back down. heard it

118 on the bus just yesterday the one the driver heard me say a little too loud as i’m prone [of any importance really. The only numbers that really matter to me are 35 and 31: the years I’ve been married and the age of my only son (uninthoughtteligcouldn’tlogiorbelovble)] the angry young man has decided that he will not listen to do some [so I owe them everything for that] times // ally replying to donny: “I thought Jim was a car” / donny responding to ally: “jim is a vessel that we fill with meaning” 12/29/18 - Twitter for iPhone // the angry young man proudly recalls [seems like he’s about to explode at the dinner table] Jim says [but won’t dare take his phone out because he knows dad will have a conniption fit] will you help me make a playlist of the texts i sent to you they were grey more so than blue [so I guess we should begin] Jim says [(with trepidation)] loud Foresight is about… the first slide reads. words suddenly appear on the slide, as if by witchcraft or advanced technology Asking and answering ambiguous questions. billowing pants, s-curvatures of the spinal variety,

119 orchestrate brutish elegance as if conscious of their status as the [this is not a class about predicting the future (soft smile). If it were (chuckle and / or gargle)] “You wouldn’t be here!” a rogue student proudly exclaims. [Yes, that’s right. I wouldn’t be here (quietly)] Foresight is both… the second slide reads. more witchcraft and / or advanced technology Skillset + Mindset [Let’s give it a shot. Can somebody give me an example of a disruptive force in the marketplace?]

- E-cigarettes. Generic boy answers.

[E-cigarettes?]

- Electronic cigarettes [Eeelectrahnic cigarettes?]

- Yeah, like the Juul®. [juul juul juul juul juul hmm juul] Jim removes a small dark rectangle from his large dark pocket and brings it to his lips. Jim exhales and a cloud of vapour envelopes generic boy’s rear facing cap [Juul®] Jim says one last time before returning the Juul® to his pocket. it’ll help me as i say this more directly than before as i knocked upon your door a little too loud as i’m prone to do sometimes [39 years a smoker.]

It’s about possibilities, not predictions: the ability to anticipate future change and devise resilient plans to minimize risk and capitalize on cognitively

120 distant opportunities. [and why do e-cigarettes pose a problem to traditional tobacco companies?] to which there is no verbal or physical response.

Obsolescence (Irrelevance) appears on the screen as if by witchcraft or advanced technology [E-cigarettes. New, safer (potentially) render (gulps and / or gargles)] Jim stops, rests in the safety of his spinal curvature. [sorry iwas uh iwasdisstracted. I’m a little distracted.

Anyways, E actually I’ll just say it] i’m freaking out but only between the lines the angry young man breaks characters, closes notebook, looks up.

“I got a call yesterday,” Jim explains. “It was about my dad’s brother, my uncle. We were close. They just found my uncle and his wife dead in their home, both of them.” i might read into it the angry young man pretends he was thinking but you read as much as i do Jim’s mouth initiates the usual gargle, this time louder and at length until it modulates to deliver a word: “Bodies.” and you take things as they are

121 “I spent most of the night talking to my dad about it. He’s shaken up and we don’t really know the details yet. I apologize.” Jim collects himself.

“Innovation begins with an Eye.” Tom Kelley, IDEO says the slide in plain text.

[Next week we’ll do a workshop on scanning and perspective in business decision making.] the angry young man can’t believe his luck

122

It is scientific fact that bodies decompose faster in hotter, more humid environments— but it is still possible to destroy yourself in the winter if you approach it with the right attitude and sense of determination Audrey Lindemann There are: four binges for the four months. In November, the dusty bender crumble lines your esophageal tunnel, your intestinal skyway, and your puckered stomach walls with a thin crust of bile and goop. You cough up the consequences, and the toilet greedily sucks them up and swallows. Then, the toilet swallows you, and I wake up in my girlfriend’s bed.

You kiss your girlfriend good morning, and she is a bowl of, no eight bowls of, cereal. You reach for a ninth bowl, but then remember your Childhood, and so fuck it you reach for a box of pencils, and slide them down your throat. You eat a book with your coffee. You drink a gallon of gasoline with your toast. You eat a stranger, then puke him up. He tries to fuck you, but you’re depressed, so that would be necrophilia. I fuck him, then myself, then the sunshine, which fucks me back to life.

The sunshine crouches behind the saggy armchair in the corner of your girlfriend’s apartment. You sneak up on it, but it’s gone, so you pull a wet glob of your girlfriend’s hair from

123 her shower drain and chew it. When you’re done gagging, it’s December. Good job, I made it through.

In December, you tie yourself to the bed, and binge on hibernation. You wait for all of your body hair to grow out, and use it as a curly blanket. The teeth rot out of your skull, and fall to the mattress where they snake the outline of your sleeping face like a piecemeal halo. You try to smother myself with a pillow, but its feathery innards are nowhere near dense enough.

The mattress becomes so heavy with your own cry and shit, that it falls through the floor. The man downstairs is a piano tuner— you fall asleep while he tinkers with you. Each time you wake up, you fall in love with him. You fall down the mattress until you’ve slid to the floor. You slither to his fridge, but it’s not November anymore. You slime yourself to his couch, and he wonders how one woman can be so sharp and so flat at the same time. He reveals himself as your girlfriend, and as only halfloving you. I love you pianoman, but it’s time for me to fall asleep out your window, you snore.

On the street beneath your girlfriend’s window, it’s January. You screw your nose back on. You drink your blood back in and tuck your liver in its place. You slept through Christmas. Before you can reach for your pinky toe, you’re run over by a Subaru, and your Dad is driving it. The car bisected you, so Dad puts your top half in the front seat, and your bottom in the back. He asks how you’ve been, where all your teeth are, and whether or not you still feel the effects of your Childhood. He takes you to a tanning bed to recharge. You get addicted to the light, and steal my Dad’s car to chase after it.

You drive to a nightclub and make a strobe light cocktail.

You snort coke through your eyes and squirt Xan and gin slurry from your ears. You grind on a disco ball so bright that you look rainbow from the other side. You go to the bathroom and buzz in its light. You put your head on the wall, the moist and cratered

124 wall, and I bounce in time with its techno clonking.

A girl with a half sleeve walks in and you stare at her in the mirror. Then, some urgent part of you and her are pawing at each other, whether it’s your old souls or your young bodies or your pathetic fetal vulnerabilities which roil somewhere below, I’m not entirely sure. The anger is manifested and it’s damn good— you’re growling. You grip two fistfuls of thigh and rake up the doughy ascent. You’re a bipolar baker kneading her anger bread, starving. You part the convergence like a midday curtain and exist in the buzzing for a moment, illuminated, before your body powder scatters on the tile, and you hope somebody slips in it.

Now that you’re dust, you float the sunlight home. You try to read a book by the yellow light of your desk lamp (but end up eye-fucking the lamp, instead of the book, and burn your eyes out with its sheer wattage). You were an animal last night, your girlfriend says suddenly, defibrillating you. Which half of me? you ask. She stays silent because your joke wasn’t funny, and the rest of February is silence. Everything and everyone is so incredibly loud. You swear to God you’ll claw my fucking ears out.

When you touch my girlfriend, she revulses. When I turn over, you cough silently in her face, and she revulses. The three of us lay in bed, silent, staring at each other, silent, gorging on the fat silence. How long you plan on staying this time? I mouth.

Quiet! you command me, and I comatose. You are my only master and I obey in mute prayer. We each lick the scab out of the other’s wounds, while reality and psychosis adult-wrestle in the guest room, and my girlfriend asks us if we won’t just have some manners and pipe down a little, can’t you hear that she is unresponsive?

Not

125 now. We are not your girlfriend. Everyone is a silent stranger in this bed, story.

126

Alors on Danse Hayley Flynn She likes drinking when someone else is driving. She’s also okay with not understanding things, because she knows that not everything needs to be understood, or even can be. So when I got that urge I sometimes get, to drive into the city and back, I invited her. I knew instead of replying, “why?” she’d just say, “you mind if I drink?” Which I don’t.

It was maybe two hours round trip. When we got back to her house, she said, “You can stay for a minute. You know, if you want.” It was only eleven, but her parents were asleep.

So I waited in the basement while she put in a frozen pizza. My favorite part of hanging out in her basement is how her dog always comes halfway down the stairs, then pokes his little head out to survey the room, like he’s deciding whether the scene is deserving of his presence. When there’s food, it always is.

Once the pizza was gone, her dog lingered, but eventually turned to bound up the stairs. I was mid-sentence when she held up a hand to pause me. She must have been able to hear him whining at the back door, because she disappeared upstairs with a, “Gotta let him out.”

A few minutes later she came halfway down the stairs.

Poking her head out towards me, she said, “I made sure I put on his collar, but he, uh, ran through the electric fence. I think there was another animal. I’m, uh, gonna wake up my dad.”

Momentarily she returned with instructions. Her dad thought it was a rabbit, said he’d chased a couple through the fence before.

He said just to wait, one of us at the front door and one at the

127 back. He’d come back.

I took my appointed position, but she had a bad feeling.

Put on her coat, said she would take a spin around the block.

Her dad must’ve had the same bad feeling, because shortly he lumbered down the stairs. We didn’t speak, but a couple minutes later he left. At almost the same time, she texted me to leave.

She’d found him, and he was still alive, but it was coyotes. Before I could respond, she said he was dead.

Two days later I drove her back to school. I told her we could wait; classes didn’t start until Monday, and it was only Friday. But she wanted to stick to the original plan. I figured she was itching to smoke. Fat snowflakes urged us not to stop, but we did twice: Burger King at my insistence, and a liquor store at hers.

Her apartment was all purple lights, piles of blankets, and paintings she’d done herself. She left her luggage heaped by the door and made a beeline for her roommate’s room, where they had stored their weed for safekeeping over break. No need for a maintenance man, intending merely to change a lightbulb, to be thrust into the moral dilemma of whether to rat out a couple college girls.

Eyes narrowed, arms crossed, she faced the door. “It’s locked. We never lock our individual doors.” I’d seen her pick locks before, but this one was electronic. After a few minutes’ silent debate, she said it’d be fine. Her dealer got off work at eleven, and he had never let her down, so until then we’d just have to drink until it was fun. I laughed. “Like high school.”

She put one of those big bottles of wine on the coffee table like it was for sharing, but she drank the whole thing herself and then some. She wanted to discuss our respective worldviews – what I call my philosophical apology and she calls her manifesto. She believes that everything is, in fact, only one thing, and for all of human history we have been endeavoring to

128 name that thing. She calls it ISMISM. Eleven o’clock came and went. I watched her watching her dismally black phone screen as she explained that it’d be fine, he was a bartender so sometimes he had to stay a little later, but still he’d never let her down.

The boy she calls my lover and I call the boy I’d been on maybe three dates with wanted to talk on the phone. I’d told her he had a stutter, so she made me put him on speakerphone. I did, and by watching her face I became suddenly, embarrassingly aware of how boring he was. She rolled empty joints and promptly spilled wine on them. The boy she calls her lover was in student government, and she pulled up a video of his campaign debates so I could hear his voice. He sounded smart.

At half past midnight her dealer said it was looking like a late night, wasn’t sure how long he’d have to be at work.

She scrolled through messages, trying to think of anyone who’d be back at school already that she could buy from, which was evidently no one. By two she was halfway through the next wine, and she got an idea.

Her roommate had told her the day before where exactly the weed was (forgetting that she had locked her door). She pinpointed on the living room wall where exactly she thought she could reach the weed if she were to cut a hole and reach through the rooms. Then, with a box cutter, she did.

What she didn’t foresee was that, after the drywall, there would be a gap of about six inches, and then an impenetrable wall of wood. I suggested she write a note and leave it in the hole before its eventual repair, and she took the suggestion with magnanimous laughter. The note said: “Dear whom it concerns: hello. Two nights ago, my dog, aka my best friend, was killed by coyotes. I found his body. I saw his intestines. I came back to campus hoping I could smoke weed in peace and go to sleep.

Unfortunately, my roommate locked the weed approximately on the other side of this hole. Life is fucking brutal.”

129 Her dealer responded at two the next afternoon. He arrived just a half hour later, and she filled all the empty joints that had survived the wine flooding. For about ten hours, we smoked and watched tv and exchanged a few limp sentences.

“It’s so nice,” she mumbled once, maybe as an apology, “just to sit and not do anything for a day sometimes. Gives you the energy to get through a few more of them.”

I left early the next morning. My phone’s gps said it would take me five more hours to get to my school. I waited for the windshield to defrost and perused my playlists, eventually settling on a French artist. She had gotten me into him, even though neither of us spoke any French.

130

Egg Head Victoria Devine Roy cracks the egg quickly, more quickly than the audience would have thought the old man was capable of moving. One second he is admiring the speckled brown egg and the next the oily contents are crackling in the pan, and the delicate shell is cleaved into two perfect halves. The unbroken yoke floats delicately across its lesser half. A handful of loud seconds pass. Roy imagines for a moment that the sizzling of the egg is the baby chick screaming at an inaccessible audio frequency. Then he lovingly turns it over, wrapping the yoke in its white, swaddling clothes. An almost unseen swipe of the spatula, and then the fried egg is atop a piece of sourdough toast (where did it come from?), and the impossible breakfast is seated next to the newspaper at the table, and Roy is seated with them.

Without taking his eyes off of the newspaper, Roy grinds pepper over his meal. Five turns, exactly. The ritual complete, he sinks his teeth into the open sandwich. Rather than oozing, the yoke bursts violently (some of the viscous yoke gets on the camera, viewers are delighted). Unperturbed, Roy wipes a trail of mucus from his eye and peers more closely at the obituary.

He appears to always starts his day this way, and a comically tall stack of old obituaries reigns over the far corner of the room.

Honestly, the stack seems like some kind of error, because the stack is clearly much taller than Roy, and there is no ladder nearby to justify its height. But perhaps the unreasonable tower of death will be explained later, so the audience’s attention returns to Roy, even though he is currently being distinctly

131 boring.

Roy is now reading about the tragic death of “neighborhood fixture” Mrs. Nelson. Countless societies are indebted to her, each had left a note proclaiming that their bake sales are doomed without her chocolate ganache cupcakes, whose secret recipe she had closely guarded. Carried to her grave, apparently. Each of their notes in her obituary, Roy notes, devotes more time to lamenting the loss of the cupcakes than to Mrs. Nelson herself. Near the end, a short line reveals that Mrs. Nelson is survived by her husband, two children, and six grandchildren. Now craving chocolate ganache, Roy smirks, and entertains himself imagining a backstory for Mrs. Nelson that would explain her strained family relationships. The secret recipe for the cupcakes, of course, is the menstrual blood of her third child, who she kept locked in a cellar (or basement, Roy was flexible).

Roy turns the page, fishing with his veined tongue for lost pieces of egg in his molars.

Roy Rodden March 28, 1945 – February 7, 2019 Phoenix, AZ – Roy Rodden, 73, passed away this Thursday in his home. Since his retirement from his career at local chemical supplier Durnham & Co, he has enjoyed a strict, but humble, lifestyle. Contacted former coworkers remember his meticulous work documenting incoming and outgoing chemical loads, as well as his objection to the implementation of a “Casual Friday” dress code. What friends he lacked in life he will certainly gain in death, as he was a regular at Sunnyvale Funeral Homes, and he often filled in as a pallbearer at poorly-attended funerals.

According to county documents, Roy never married. Roy was preceded in death by his parents and sister, Amy Rodden. All

132 three died in the same home in which Roy lived until Thursday. At long last, the family sleeps together in the cemetery on Bram Road.

The audience cricks their necks turning back to Roy, the mundane man from earlier whose death sentence transforms him into something infinitely more interesting. His mouth is slightly agape, making the thickness of his lips all the more obvious and horrific. Really, his lips have no right to be so broad.

They are mumbling incoherently (but isn’t mumbling always incoherent?) and then they are moving drastically (the camera zooms out), the whole head is moving (the camera zooms out), Roy has stood up.

Roy is looking around, waiting for a friend (he has no friends, didn’t the obituary make that clear?) to tell him that this is an elaborate prank, that he did not, that he will not, die today. His head is turning, turning, but his eyes never make contact with a camera. His dirty plate forgotten on the table, he folds up the obituary, his obituary. He places it under his arm, habit taking over in this world that was different before. There is no soundtrack. He walks across the room. The sound is almost unbearable, the sound of his quiet existence (the filmmakers are being a little too dramatic, here). The newspaper crinkles against his skin, his shirt moistens with sweat, he breathes through his nostrils, and the air whistles through the forest of his nose hairs.

Roy has reached the opposite side of the room and the monstrous stack of saved obituaries. The audience leans forward in their seats (how will he add this obituary to the stack?). He looks small next to it, and old. He leans back as if to throw the wad of paper to the top, frisbee-style (can that possibly work?).

Still, no music plays. The people in the theater are making too much noise. Why is popcorn the universal movie snack, why not gummy bears or raisins or beef jerky? Roy throws the paper, and somehow, impossibly, it floats to the top. He turns away–

133 to clean his dirty plate or to kill himself, who knows– when the stack, unseen, starts to sway. As though suddenly making up its mind, the tower crashes down. It is not in slow motion. Roy does not see it fall, but he was given a fair warning in the obituary; the audience had seen that. His head, speckled with age spots and curiously emotionless, hits the ground at an angle and cracks into two perfect halves. His brain rolls out, and it quivers atop a thick pool of blood.

On the way out of the theater, the audience discusses the ending. They agree that is was good, the way it tied everything together. It is so annoying when eggs don’t crack perfectly. Or heads.

134

For Whom the Willow Weeps Annette Cai He falls in love with the low notes of a viola floating through his window.

He had never felt drawn to the hollow hums of music, but he had always floated towards beauty, guided by an invisible string.

He falls in love with the summery white dress, a deep cut bordering on scandalous sweeping low across her breast. The hemline brushes her calves, the thin material catching and riding the breeze as she stands barefoot in the town square outside his window, her viola tucked against her chin. The sun is high overhead, casting a warm glow over the city center. Tourists and locals alike mill leisurely about, gelato cones stickily melting in hand as everybody enjoys the last moments of spring before it gives way to summer— hot and muggy. In a town where time seems to have been arrested, the passing of seasons is the only thing that reminds him that he is still alive.

The plain, beige curtains billow like her skirt and tickle his bare wrist lightly. He leans out of the window, bracing himself heavily against the adobe wall and lets the gentle, warm wind caress his face. It’s a two-story fall, but he risks it to edge closer to the haunting melody— a familiar tune he can’t place, lost somewhere in the recesses of his childhood. The music coyly urges him to close his eyes, but adrenaline fixates them on her.

He watches as she begins to twirl, bow nimbly flying across the strings. The children squeal and run around her as she dances.

135 The music crescendos, switches from major key to minor key and then back to major key, and the tempo picks up pace. He feels his own pulse quickening as her dance takes on an air of frenzy and the wind ceases. He can only hear an echo of the children’s shrieking now, and even that fades as the kids disappear from the square. It’s hot— a bead of sweat drips from his brow bone. It brushes against his upper lip just as she lifts her gaze towards the window.

There’s a mirage of a smile, but the sunlight is too glaring for him to make out her visage. He squints instinctively as the brightness intensifies, and the town square twists and disappears. He blinks, and suddenly he sees wide, jagged stone steps with lush, wild ferns spilling onto the path. His room falls away, and he feels the crushed gravel underneath his thin, disposable slippers. Through his shock, he registers that the viola is still singing faintly in the background. He searches for the girl, and his breath catches when he sees her standing a stone’s throw in front of him, a handful of steps down. There is no viola in her hands.

Without preamble, she begins to sprint down the steps, still barefoot, with her long, blonde hair sweeping behind her.

She turns around, as if looking for somebody, but her hurried pace doesn’t stop. He stretches out a hand, as if telling her to stop, but drops it when he realizes that she doesn’t seem to be able to see him.

The strings of the viola are replaced with laughter, the edges of it young and daring, very much like the unyielding sunlight shining hot against the stone pavement. A group of young boys dressed in dashing white blazers and shorts throw their heads back as they run down the steps, hands outstretched so their fingertips brush against the fauna. They sweep right past him, the fabric of their shirts skimming against pinstripe gown, not registering his presence either.

136 A sudden wave of fear washes over him, and he feels the periphery of his body run cold. He runs his palm along the length of a jagged branch, letting its sharp edges cut into his skin. The trickle of warm blood down his fingers calms him, but before he can even coach his steadily quickening breathing back to normal, one of the boys turns around.

The sunlight catches against his red hair, turning it two shades lighter. He has a devilish grin on his face, and there is a glint in his eyes. For a fleeting moment, he seems to be looking straight into his eyes. Then, his smile widens, baring teeth, and the world begins to fast-forward.

They chase her down to the pond, peals of laughter haunting as she runs. There’s something ancient and ritualistic about this hunt. The prey looks over her shoulder again and again to gauge her pursuers as she trips down the steps. The pond is wide, its depth unknown, but the ripples quiet at the center. When she reaches the water’s edge, she skids to a stop, and he glimpses her face in the split second when she turns around.

There’s something elfish about her— maybe it’s her wideset eyes, or her nose that is too small for her face, or her pale, thin lips. Her hair tumbles mangled past her shoulders, wisps of blonde falling into her face. A stone lands heavily in his chest as he watches the fear give way to grim determination in her eyes.

But before she can even step into the water, they are upon her.

The trees hang low, the lowest of the branches almost brushing against their reflections in the water. The scene is like Millais’s Ophelia— dead leaves splattering against the surface of the pond, its peace disrupted as ripples silently emanate from her skin to the far shore.

She lies face down in the shallow end, the skirt of her dress ballooning around her legs. The white fabric is tinged with

137 a red that trickles slowly into the water, like white smoke on a wintery night. The world falls into an eerie quietness, the only audible noise coming from the boys as they splash each other, the tips of their hair soaked with water. Their laughter is but a muffled echo. One of them sits against the lowest stone step leading into the pond with the water reaching his calves, arms propping him up as he calmly surveys his comrades. The red begins to diffuse, leaving only a pale vestige on the dress.

Hours pass, perhaps, but the sun continues to shine bright and strong, and they continue to play in the water.

Eventually, the police find them. They help the boys out of the water and hand them white towels to dry off. There is some lighthearted conversation, and one of the officers pushes her body into the deeper end of the pond as the group begin to make their way back to the town center.

He can hear their chatter and chuckles as they move farther and farther away from the scene. The water calms, but she is still spiraling into its depths. The pond is deeper than expected, and by now, only a sliver of sunlight reaches her, weakly illuminating her blonde hair and white dress. There is a rumble, but it is muffled like most noises underwater, and a sea serpent nearly silently swims its way to her lowering body, curling its tail around her as if trying to shield her from the inevitable drop.

It opens its mouth and engulfs her.

The door opens, and a tall, stern man in a long white coat walks in.

“How are you feeling today?” He mutters around the pen cap he has between his lips.

“Fine.” He thumbs the scabbing scar on his right palm.

The man looks at him quizzically for a moment, and then jots something down on his clipboard.

138 “Do you know why she is dead?” He asks as if he was merely asking if he had taken his medication this morning. The pen is still moving across the page.

His head shoots up, looking at the man in shock and disbelief. In the corner of his eye, he catches his reflection in the mirror, his red hair a stark contrast against his gaunt, pale skin.

“What?”

Fine.

The story hasn’t ended because the woman is dead.

The world has ended because the world was created to destroy women.

The trajectory spirals outwards, its serpent-like tail telling new stories as worlds burst into existence with the same purpose every time, again and again.

The door opens, a doctor walks in. Outside his window, there is a girl playing the viola.

139

Kisses Isabel Nguyen She dragged the red lipstick carefully against her stretched lips, lining up the tip of the bullet precisely with the edge of her cupid’s bow. This was the second trickiest part. The trickiest was the corners of the mouth, where the bullet is a little too blunt to fit. Lipstick had always been her favorite part of applying makeup. For her job, it was the most important part, the only one that really mattered.

Over the few months she had been working here, she had tried countless lipsticks. Frustrated that they could not last through a whole night of work, she had formulated her own: a formula so dense in pigment and long-lasting that she could perform throughout the night and only have to reapply a few times. She finished the last stroke of red and checked the reflection of her puckered mouth in a small compact mirror.

Perfect.

She was fresh out of high school when she found this job. Actually, she was chosen for it. A bald man approached her in the local supermarket, where she used to work during the summer. She was sweeping the floor in the produce section. He commented on the freshness of the lettuce, the lack of variety in fruits, and the beauty of her lips. In fact, he had an offer to make.

He needed a new kisser.

She never thoughts her lips were extraordinary. But that was before she saw her kiss print on a piece of paper. So precise

140 and full it was. It carried an incredible note of finality.

The process to get chosen as the kisser was not hard.

There were about two dozen other girls asked to try out. They were given an address, a time, and a date. They were instructed to bring red lipstick and some tissues. The designated building for the meeting was simple, rectangular, standing on a lonely forgettable road, and painted a jarringly cheerful yellow. She showed up just in the nick of time, out of breath, clutching a tube of red lipstick and pack of tissues in sweaty hands. The bald man was waiting for her at the door. He swung it shut it when both her feet were planted inside.

She and the other girls were ushered to a long room. It was bare and dimly lit, with a single fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling, chairs lined up side by side in two neat rows.

The girls were chattering as they came in, but fell silent by the time they sat down. The bald man stood in front of them, his smooth head gleaming beneath the light. He passed out a sheet of paper to each. They were asked to read it carefully, then sign their names at the bottom.

Her eyes grazed over the words, the letters jumped around, making her head dizzy. She signed quickly, and discreetly peeked sideways at the other girls. They were all fairly young, all with beautiful lips in varying shapes, all bowing their heads in concentration. She caught the bald man looking at her, an expression of contemplation on his features. She held his gaze. Perhaps he was wondering why she was not reading.

She was unbothered by his scrutiny— dyslexia is sometimes a beautiful thing. There are certain times in life when reading is not pleasant, such as when one has to read a contract. The other girls will read it, and they will still sign their names. She was simply one step ahead of them.

A collective gasp suddenly rang through the room, and she broke eye contact with the bald man. The girls began talking

141 noisily. She asked the girl next to her what the excitement was.

The girl’s eyes bulged as she stabbed at the paper with her finger, exclaiming that that was how much the kisser would be paid.

The bald man cleared his throat loudly and the noise settled. He asked them to apply lipstick, blot lightly, and kiss a letter. He collected the letters in the order in which they were sitting. He examined each kiss mark. He compared them side by side. He asked a few girls to leave. This process repeated until she was the only girl left in the room.

She felt very lucky to have this odd job. It was easy, and she was paid extremely well. The hardest part of the job was finding the right lipstick, and she took care of that by mixing a few of her favorite lip products. She would report to the yellow building every other night, where the bald man would be waiting for her at the door. In her office, she would carefully apply her lipstick. She would kiss about fifty letters. She would be done within an hour. She would be back to repeat the process two days later.

The letters were printed on heavy, creamy white paper, paper so white that it seemed to glow. They were identical in length. She assumed they were also identical in content— she never read them. She would kiss the bottom of each letter, making sure the full shape of her lips would be pressed against the paper, leaving behind a striking red mark against the milky white surface and the bold black ink.

After kissing each letter, she would fold it, tuck it into a slim envelope, and seal it. She would ring a little bell when she was done with the entire pile, and the bald man would come to collect them. He had explained to her on her first day that they get taken into the next room to be shipped out. He never explained where to, or to whom. Other than the soreness of

142 puckering her lips, she did not have any complaints about the job.

On a particularly light day of work, she sat back after the first ten letters or so and examined her office. It wasn’t really an office, just a desk, a chair, and a floor lamp in a cramped little room. And of course, a pile of letters and envelopes were awaiting her. She liked to think of it as her own space, even though she had not altered it in the least since she got the job.

There was not a reason to, since she did not have to stay very long, only one hour or so every night. She imagined that if she stayed any longer, the little room would be quite depressing.

She also tried to imagine the mysterious room next to her, where the kissed and sealed letters went. She wondered where the letters get mailed to, and what sort of people received them. Day after day, she had been taking part in an operation she did not fully comprehend. For the first time, she suddenly felt ignorant and silly. What did the letters say?

Looking around her bare office, she was seized by the desire to know. The bald man never instructed her not to read the letters, but she had a sense that she was not supposed to. And she never wanted to— until now. Her hands clammed up and her heartbeat quickened. Her sudden curiosity was scaring her. She cursed dyslexia, cursed her inability to quickly scan and gauge the content of the letters. She bit her lip, but stopped when she realized she was ruining her lipstick. She swallowed, suppressed the urge to know, touched up her lipstick, and continued her work. There was a great lump in her throat, reminding her what a great fool she was, doing work mindlessly like a mule.

Kiss, fold, tuck, seal. She worked slower than usual, but her heart beat frantically. If she could sneak a letter out, she would have enough time at home to dissect its contents. The pile

143 of letters in front of her quickly dwindled, until only one letter was left.

She brought it toward her mouth, her lips parted instead of puckered, her breath fanning hotly against the paper. Her heart pounded, she felt blood rushing to her head. What could possibly happen? She brought the letter away from her mouth, wrestled with shaky fingers to fold the stiff, unkissed paper into a square, and tucked it into her bra.

She rang the little bell, and the bald man came in to collect the neat little pile of envelopes.

On her walk home, she felt the square of paper rubbing against her bare skin, itching fiercely. She was not sure why she was so nervous. She had seen the same letter countless times.

She had never told the bald man about her dyslexia; surely he would expect her to have read it by now. Still, she did not dare to look behind her.

Once safely inside her house, she unhooked her bra with sweaty hands. The square slid down her shirt and onto the floor. She had never wanted to read the letters she kissed. Why read them when kissing them was much quicker and painless?

But tonight, she needed to know what she had been kissing. She unfolded the square, and the letters began to jumble up. Her brows bunched up in concentration, she began to untangle the chaos of letters. She held the paper gingerly, but the moisture from her fingertips dampened the paper.

She had not gotten past the first sentence when her head began to pound. So far, she had only found out that it was not addressed to anybody in particular. What sort of people are these letters sent to? A ring from the doorbell cut through her thoughts. She whipped her head around, wondering who could be ringing this late, but grateful for the break from the jumble of

144 words. She set the letter down carefully, making note of the spot where she had left off.

On the other side of the door was an envelope. She recognized it immediately. She pulled out a letter identical to the one she had been trying to untangle, except this one had the imprint of her lips at the bottom. She admired her own work. She laughed at the irony that one of these letters would be delivered to her. Why? she wondered. What has made her worthy of receiving one?

She picked up at the spot she left off on the other letter, her head dizzy once again from the chaotic lines of black ink.

An explosion filled her eardrums. She felt the bullet entering her body, breaking skin, nuzzling deep, deep into her torso. She gasped. The letter slipped from her hands and fluttered to the floor, its lipstick mark blood red, full, precise, with an incredible note of finality.

The bald man is looking for a new kisser. Non-readers are increasingly hard to come by. He wondered if the last kisser figured out what sort of people receive kissed letters before she bled to death. He was too impatient to wait for her to finish untangling the content before firing.

145

Keep it Together Theresa Azemar When Michael was in the third grade, he would accidentally leave his arms on the playground. Without his arms, his long sleeves would get caught in the classroom door as it closed. At discussion time, he’d speak up without raising his hand, and Mister Burke would snap at him and say something along the lines of folder, and Michael would have to say something like But monkey bars this time. Sometimes it was the basketball hoop, or the tug-of-war rope, or Idiot Isaac’s wedgied underpants.

Michael wasn’t very good at pulling his own weight. Whenever he’d get his arms back during detention, he’d find that some nervous first grader had nibbled off his fingernails, or that his hands had landed in an ant pile, or that some fifth graders had balanced them against the flagpole with his middle fingers up.

When Michael was in 8th grade, he had his first kiss. It felt exactly how he would have expected, except his lips came off when aunt Jennifer pulled back. She smiled and pulled them off of her face, the suction noise was so loud that a few of Michael’s hairs come loose. He smiled, too, though he didn’t have much of a choice. Aunt Jennifer said, , and Michael had to nod and watch her slide his lips into her pocket.

Shush him. When she tucked him into bed, the sheets tightly held him together. He wished they’d just smother him. He woke up the next day, and his lips were left on his nightstand, slightly bitten and chapped, with five dollars and a chocolate bar. His

146 pillow was covered in drool stains, and his mouth was so dry. He didn’t speak that day.

When Michael was a junior in college, he’d babysit this little girl named Astrid. She had a prosthetic leg, and she didn’t talk very much. Sometimes, when they’d watch TV together, Michael would think about how easy it would be to take Astrid’s leg while she slept at night and just let her wander. After these thoughts, he’d run to the bathroom and throw his intestines up.

Sitting on the tile floor, he’d hold himself as best as he could, wishing for ways to keep it together.

When Michael was 26, all sorts of parts from his body would get left anywhere. One Sunday, the priest at Michaels church shook his hand and took it home. Later that month, when Michael scratched his nails down his husbands back, all five peeled back and fell onto the sheets like tulip petals. He lost a foot trying on boots at the mall in September, and it frightened some shoppers so much that he had to be asked to leave. On Halloween, he lost most of his teeth on candy, and the trick or treaters’ parents would hold their kids closer when he’d open the door. In the winter, Michael’s head would always come off with his hats and roll to the end of the room. He’d have to spent most of those frigid afternoons navigating his figure while watching it from across the room, trying to solve a problem of the body with the mind.

When his husband finally admitted that it was all becoming too much, he kissed Michael softly and kept the lips for a few days while he put his things together. He’d say I don’t want to hear a word out of you about this. Michael would just wrap whatever he had left of himself in their bed, hoping for his heart to be the next thing to go.

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DDDD. Michael Donovan – I was sixteen when I had my first piece of fruit, D tells me.

D does not like fruit. She likes Programming and the Irish Language and Twin Peaks. I like Twin Peaks and D. I might even print(input(“what is an acceptable word for intense human affection?”)) D, and it’s possible that D print(input(“what is an acceptable word for intense human affection?”)) me. Whatever the case, I’m certain D likes me more than she does fruit.

D is my new and unexpected friend: an Irish Heartbeat comprised of cheap red wine, mahogany bars, misplaced references, a tenuous grasp of the English language, the untimely death of the Irish language, and circumstance. I spent the night in her room once. We shared three bottles of Tesco wine and talked. We talked about Programming and the Irish Language and Twin Peaks and we laughed. We laughed spleen-retching laughs associated with the craic (joy derived from the Irish word for good conversation, intellection). We didn’t have sex. We didn’t even kiss. We shared some wine, a room, a bed, words, and laughter.

I spent one night in D’s room.

– I was sixteen when I had my first piece of fruit, D #4 tells me as we sit together in the back of a bus heading west out of Dublin.

148 the body of the tale itself. This is the route of the Tain and the

and receded.

D #1 (Nighttown) — Dublin, The Republic of Ireland, East. are lots of young people. Two of them (a pedantic young man, a soft spoken and serious young woman) wander circuitously, Camden, then eastbound past The Hairy Lemon on their way young man thinks, wondering whether Catholicism is more bruise or laceration. The young woman is wordless.

I = young man = Special Agent Dale Cooper, FBI D #1 = young women = Diane Setting: Special Agent Dale Cooper, FBI: Diane, it’s late, June 16th. Nighttown. A curtain— red, like the tree circle— parts.

The light, persistent breeze hoots, as an owl might. It’s black.

But not moonless. No. Not even close, Diane. The moon’s out, and it’s bewitching. Beautiful really. Just like Washington. I see two men. Well, I shouldn’t assume. One of them, Leopold, is a bit of a shapeshifter. Remember Bob? Yeah. I won’t judge.

And there’s also this kid, Stephen, who, I must say, is one taco short of a combination platter. Out of his tree with the girls and

149 the drinks. Won’t shut up either. Anyways, these two lads— see Diane, I’m assimilating— seem to have triggered a wave of “metempsychosis.” Ghosts! Have you ever seen a ghost, Diane?

“Spooks.” Freud. Dead moms and dads. GIANTS! Scratch that, no giants. It’s like a dream, Diane. I’m dreaming with them.

Feeling Leo’s shame. My God Diane, Leo has so much shame!

And living Stephen’s weird Catholic sex fantasies. My God Diane, Stephen has the weirdest Catholic sex fantasies! And the girls, Diane. I’ve never seen anything like them. They speak in tongues, gibberish, spouting out the first thing that comes to their minds. Or is it the first thing that comes to Leo’s mind?

Or Stephen’s mind? Or my mind? Diane, am I going mad? It’s happened before. Ugly. Maine was quiet. Silent nearly. But these people. These people swim in a sea of endless nonsensical words.

“Words, words, words.” Diane! What’s happening? I’ve never even seen Hamlet! [static, a screech] Diane, I found the local boys— Private Carr, Private Compton. Tell Gordon I’m gonna need a little more time, four donuts, and a large pot of steaming coffee, “black as midnight on a moonless night.” This is the toughest nut I’ve tried to crack since Laura.

Diane: [silence — hasn’t read Ulysses] D #2 (Sheep’s Rock) — Ballintoy (Baile Un Tuaghe), Northern Ireland, North. host that day in quest of tidings and augury and knowledge.

– Ya know lads there are 72 words for rain in the Irish language, says the host, Prof. Kevin Whelan. Whether it’s raining or not is philosophically indeterminate.

It’s raining, D #2 and I determine. Rain, determined,

150 spews sideways, pelting us in the face. We and others listen as Professor lectures atop Sheep’s Rock. Sheep’s Rock is a large rock with a skinny pathway up one side and a tuft of grass on the top.

In the day time (on a clear day) you can stand atop of Sheep’s Rock, look out over the Atlantic and see the Scottish Coast. It’s the middle of the night, so we cannot see the Scottish coast. We cannot hear the waves either. Professor and the Wind are too loud. (trans. from Irish) So the lead of the way was entrusted to Fergus. Fergus before all fare forth to seek tidings, and a over him, and he led his troops astray in a great circuit to the north and the south.

– The skies up here, Professor continues, there always kinda changin, all peripatetic and whatnot. Ya never really know what’s gonna hit ya, then it come, sometimes sideways and really fierce, ya know, piercing or whatever. Ya gotta be on your toes out here lads, the Atlantic’s not a very nice lady.

Professor recommends we wake up for the sunrise to witness a Celtic Dawn from Sheep’s Rock. According to Professor’s translation of an Irish text (or maybe a regurgitation of Yeats, I really don’t know) “spirits kiss the earthly world and, for a moment, mingle with the living.”

[In 2011, a Catholic Church in Ballintoy requested that a bilingual street sign be placed opposite its door. The local council refused.]

D #2 and I take Professor’s advice. We wake up early the next morning and walk along skinny black roads, past a number of sheep, until we get to Sheep’s Rock. We ascend Sheep’s Rock (as we did the previous night). We look out, past the Atlantic and see the coast of Scotland. We listen and hear the waves.

– It’s beautiful, says D #2 a number of times.

– Stunning, I agree.

151 – I can’t believe how gorgeous it is, says D #2.

– Amazing, I offer.

We don’t make a lot of eye contact. The colorful sky takes precedence. We keep our guard up just in case ghosts and / or rain suddenly appear. Neither ghosts nor rain appear. I look at D #2. She looks at me and smiles a little. This is nice, I tell myself.

D #3 (The Rose of Connaught): Connemara, The Republic of Ireland, West.

Ár n-Athair atá ar neamh, Go naofar d’ainim, Go dtagfadh do ríocht, Go ndéantar ar neamh. Ár n-arán laethúil tabhair dúinn inniu, Agus maith dúinn ár bhfiacha Mar a mhaithimidne dár bhfiechiúna féin (Ach ná lig sinn I gcathú, ach soar sinn ó olc) D #4 recites.

Amen, we respond, making the sign of the cross.

Outside, a nun (in habit) drives a hatchback recklessly.

She nearly hits a family of sheep. We don’t notice this because we are inside praying in a language we don’t know.

D #4 and I talk about fruit, and her aversion to it, as

152 the bus takes us (along with Professor and others) out of Dublin and towards Westmeath, Republic of Ireland, Center to celebrate Samhain (an Irish festival, held at the end of October, that recognizes the end of the harvest and the beginning of the darkness). for Cuchulain came upon Fergus and he warned the men of them the rapacious lion, and the doom of oes, the vanquisher of multitudes, and the chief of retainers, the mangler of great – Samhain is about metempsychosis, Professor reminds us (at high volume) over the bus’s PA system. Transmigration of souls, the dead coming back to walk the living.

– Where are we going? somebody asks.

– Westmeath, Professor answers, flatly.

Westmeath is in the midlands, Professor tells us.

Basically the, well ya know, the, well it’s kinda like Nebraska or whatever. The Midwest of Ireland. Flyover space. Modernity lives in the East, Spirit in the West, Troubles in the North. But the middle. Well, it’s mostly peat bogs.

The bus drops us off at a small Westmeath shop wherein two Westmeath locals greet us, offer tea, inform us that we will be partaking in a spooky walk on their property, and teach us a traditional song: Ho, ro the rattlin’ bog The bog down in the valley-o Ho, ro the rattlin bog The bog down in the valley-o And on that feather there was a flea

153 A rare flea, a rattlin’ flea The flea in the feather The feather on the bird The bird on the egg The egg in the nest The nest on the twig The twig on the branch The branch on the limb The limb on the tree And the tree in the bog In the bog down in the valley-o Ho, ro … (misc traditional) The song, D #4 and I agree, is not a good song.

The spooky walk proceeds as follows: A wizard man (face painted, holding a walking stick wrapped in Christmas lights) tells us to be scared because scary things he will happen. Professor argues with the man, reaches briefly for his walking stick (which Professor refers to as a Hazel Wand) in an attempt to take over as leader. The coup fails. We start walking. I lose sight of D #4. The man with the wand says that we will soon enter a medieval monastery. We do this, and a few painted people pop out at us. Some of us jump. I don’t know if D #4 jumped. I couldn’t see. We leave the monastery. The wizard man tells us the story of a witch. We soon see a woman in a dress who says that she is most definitely a witch. We agree, without much fanfare. The wizard man brings us to a burial site and points to another man who lies inert on a slab. This is a wake, wizard man tells us, an Irish funeral. The dead man has been there three days, says wizard man. We want to make sure that he’s good and dead before burial. The body begins to move, clearly not dead. Someone applauds. The wizard man warns us

154 of a monster. We soon pass a teenager operating an inflatable velociraptor. Laughter erupts: Possibly D #4’s. There used to be a carnival here, says wizard man, spitting in the face of narrative.

Not long after, people dress as clowns jump out of the bushes and follow us casually for a few minutes. Then, the spooky walk is over. I find D #4.

Tired and underwhelmed, we get back on the bus, which takes us to a small hotel for dinner. At the small hotel, I sit at a table with D #4, a friend, and a friend who can’t eat gluten. We eat chicken tenders, a conflagration of chips, extra sauce (as was provided). We order dessert: chocolate scones.

– Do you have any gluten free options? gluten free friend asks a waitress.

The waitress nods, heads back to the kitchen.

The waitress returns, places a dish on the table.

D #4: [ear-splitting scream, inhuman pitch and tone, bloodshot] – Fuck! says D #4, tears welling up in her eyes.

I look at the bowl.

Def Ambrosia: Print( “{}”.format(8 oz frozen whipped topping, thawed + .5 Cup Yogurt + 1 Cup shredded Coconut + 1 11oz cup of mandarin oranges, drained + 1 8oz cup of crush pineapple + 1 cup cherries // .5 cup shopped pecans)) Return List_Ambrosia = A pustulous blob, pink and blue, with mangled fragments of fruit protruding from its every orifice, terror D likes Programming and the Irish Language and Twin Peaks. D does not like fruit, not at all.

ART

CONTRIBUTORS

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THERESA AZEMAR heresa Azemar is a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame, with an American Studies/English double major and a Musical Theatre Minor. She is heavily involved in writing and theatre at Notre Dame and has been cast to play a man twice thus far (note: she does look great in a beard). She has a particular interest in poetry and creative nonfiction, but is excited to be entering the world of fiction!

KAY BONTEMPO skaeps sdrawkcab sa reh tsrif egaugnal, but she usually chooses not to. Born and raised in New York City, her only true talent is falling asleep on the subway and waking up exactly at her stop. In her spare time, she plays guitar in a local band and likes to ponder how many surrealists it takes to screw in a lightbulb.

ANNETTE CAI is a graduating senior studying the preprofessional sciences and sociology. Despite her dedication to the sciences, she’s retained and harbored her love for literature throughout the years and spends much of her free time reading, writing, and trying to figure out what kinds of stories she wants to tell. She’s incredibly honored to be included in this issue of Re:Visions, and it’s definitely a great way to conclude her university experience.

VICTORIA DEVINE is a senior Marketing and English double major from Thousand Oaks, California. She likes crosswords and whistling, and she hates people who are better than her at crosswords and whistling. She’s currently researching how to make the perfect fried egg.

LUCAS DON is a senior at the University of Notre Dame, majoring in Business Analytics and Sociology. His interests include any and all Philly sports teams, exploring new places,

161 going to live music events, and following the world of television and film.

MICHAEL DONOVAN is a Junior majoring in English and Business Analytics. He wants to ease the pain of existence with (A) good words or (B) a well-tuned regression model. He has yet to succeed.

EMEE MARJORIE DY is a freshman at the University of Notre Dame from the Philippines. She is pursuing a major in Marketing and a minor in Sociology, with a passion for writing. She has always been apprehensive about others reading her work (especially when read out loud‌), so please do not approach her piece with great scrutiny. All that Emee hopes is that you pick up a cup of coffee and take yourself to the intricate world of that ex.

HAYLEY FLYNN is a senior at Notre Dame, majoring in English Language and Literature. She spent her junior year abroad at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

EMMA JAQUES is a sophomore Aerospace Engineering major from New Jersey who enjoys martial arts, snowboarding, and bragging to her friends about how she’s going to London in the fall. Although rockets and airplanes are pretty cool, poetry remains her first and most enduring passion.

NICHOLAS JEFFREY By day, a senior English major moving on to attend law school; by night, a purveyor of ludicrous poetry and weighted optimism.

ANGELICA KETCHAM is a first-year architecture student at Notre Dame, who tries to consistently write on the side of

162 classes, clubs, and research. Her great passions in life include sketching, watercolor, the cello, the piano, and Hawaiian pizza.

SARAH KIKEL is a freshman majoring in PLS who firmly believes that South is the superior dining hall but that North is the superior quad. She is commonly found drinking orange juice and pretending to be Nancy Drew. Her post-graduation plans include returning to the 1960s to drive a VW bus.

ANGELA LIM is a senior Neuroscience and English double major from Columbia, MO. Most of her brain power goes to poetry and the NPR Sunday puzzle. A recent Boggle addict and fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, she sometimes responds to Judy.

AUDREY LINDEMANN has satire featured in Queen Mob’s Tea House and a short story forthcoming from Ghost Parachute.

Her pamphlet of poetry “I have compiled 14 gay love poems” came out this year from SPAM Press. She is a sophomore from Northern Wisconsin.

JACKSON MITTLESTEADT is a Biological Sciences and English double major, Class of 2020. He plans to attend medical school after graduation, and was in part inspired by the career of American poet William Carlos Williams who practiced medicine.

He hopes that you enjoy his work!

LAURA MCKERNAN is a junior Neuroscience and English double major originally from Maryland. She spends her free time participating in theatre on campus, listening to her over 30 (and always growing) carefully curated Spotify playlists, consuming too much Diet Pepsi, and panicking about the future of the world and whatever other existential crisis she is having this week.

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ISABEL NGUYEN is a (rising) senior majoring in the Program of Liberal Studies and Economics. A friend recently challenged her to write a horror story and that got her into creative writing again.

BELLA NIFORATOS is a Psychology and English double major, with an intended Creative Writing Concentration. She enjoys writing (in case you hadn’t guessed that by now), walking around the lake, and evading the Muggles’ questioning stares when she Apparates around campus.

GABRIEL NIFORATOS is a sophomore at Notre Dame who studies political science. He wants to be involved in public service in some capacity when he graduates, and writing is the muse that he chases on his way to get there. Gabriel has no idea what the meaning of life is, but he will continue writing and dreaming until he thinks he has found it.

CAROLINE O’SULLIVAN is a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame pursuing double majors in both Management Consulting and English with hopefully-a-concentration in creative writing. She was raised in NYC as the fourth of six children born to two parents who were born and raised in County Kerry, Ireland. Caroline loves people more than anything but they oftentimes think she is ignoring them when she walks by and does not say hello. However, a lot of them either forget or do not know that she is legally blind and simply cannot see them.

She lives in an interesting world seeing in shades of gray and laughing during the entire ride that is life.

CHRISTOPHER PARKER is a Notre Dame freshman from New York, living in Sorin College. His favorite poets are Biggie Smalls

164 and Dr. Suess.

JOE RAABE is a senior from Cincinnati studying Political Science and Art at Notre Dame. He enjoys photographing the wildlife on campus and lives for a sighting of the elusive Canis familiaris.

SIERRA RAINEY originates from Chicago’s projects, a place where she learned to idolize the way sunlight dances across broken concrete. Though her family has moved to the suburbs, Sierra cannot find it in herself to call any place on this Earth home. She thinks that home exists somewhere between her scarlet heart and lilac soul; she hopes her writing can help others find a place within themselves to plant their roots and grow towards God’s galaxies.

ANNA STAUD is a freshman pursuing double majors in English and Economics as well as a minor in Theology. She is from South Bend and lives in Walsh Hall.

CLAIRE TURGEON is a senior at The University of Notre Dame studying English and Pre-Health with an honors concentration and thesis in Creative Writing exploring disability literature. She’ll be attending medical school next fall at the University of Toledo, but will continue to dissect the written word alongside her actual dissections.

CHRISTINA ZOBEL is a senior English and Greek & Roman Civilization major who spends far too much time dreaming up new worlds when she should be revising her thesis. She enjoys researching ancient queens, reading in the sunshine, and bingewatching Critical Role. If lost, please return to the Writing Cave (aka her single in Walsh).

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