"bone meal" — Lewis & Clark Literary Review, Edition 49

Copyright & Colophon

Individual pieces contained herein are the intellectual property of the contributors, who retain all rights to their material. Every effort was made to contact the artists to ensure that the information presented in this magazine is correct.

Opinions expressed in the Lewis & Clark Literary Review are not necessarily those of the college.

bone meal is published by Morel Ink. This edition’s typefaces are Brandon Grotesque and Atkinson Hyperlegible.

bone meal was created using Adobe InDesign and many, many Google Docs. Additional graphic editing was done in Adobe Photoshop and Procreate.

Editorial Staff

Editors-in-Chief

Eve March

Jillian Jackson

AJ Di Nicola

Editorial Assistant

Design Assistant

Editorial Board

Alina Cruz

Elizabeth Huntley

Anna-Marie Ahn

Max Allen

Anneka Barton

Apollo Beaber

Meghan Blandon

Sage Braziel

Kay Brooks

Elliot Chadwick

Claire Champommier

Alex Chew

Leila Diaz

Lola Ecker

Tiani Ertel

Kit Graf

McKenna Jones

Colette Kane

Alison Keiser

Adele Kelly

Joans Kelly

Yonas Khalil

Kathryn Kiskenen

Marijona Sasway

Mangelsdorf

Hailey McHorse

Sam Mosher

Rose Palma

Kayla Peer

Elliot Pfeiffer

Ashley Phan

Shelby Platt

Jack Quimby

Zach Reinker

Lily Ronda

Burton Scheer

Claire Williams

Lizzie Winkelman

Design Board

Jade Ferguson

Colette Kane

Shelby Platt

Lily Ronda

Zach Reinker

Faculty Advisor

Mary Szybist

Letter From the Editors

Molecular biologists believe that carnivory in plants has evolved at least ten times independently. In other words, this equal-parts wondrous and threatening phenomenon is a coping mechanism, a way to stay ahead and protect oneself.

As we “emerge from the pandemic”—for the third time— our contributors are flipping the realist tradition on its head, contorting it to a landscape that teems with ghosts, bloodthirsty cosmic entities, and maybe even King Kong.

Simultaneously, our contributors use adaptation and regeneration to unlock productive, whimsical possibilities. Perhaps a bison and a seagull can be friends, or a polar bear can join a dating app. The lines between human and animal, between decay and growth, between being nourished and being devoured, remain blurry.

As we move towards a degree of normalcy, we seek adaptation not only in the pieces we accept but in our club as a whole. This was a transformative year for the Literary Review. We welcomed more than 15 new members to our editorial board and worked on this edition from three different countries. Better still, we benefited from a distinct collaborative energy that came from a return to in-person weekly meetings.

We also sought to revitalize our design this year. In an effort to create a cohesive work of art, we established a design board with bi-weekly meetings, taking into account the themes emerging from the pieces we’d accepted.

We are thankful for the unprecedented amount of submissions that we have received, the dedication of our board members and new leadership, and the creative community that we have fostered this year.

Next year, the Literary Review turns 50, and we look forward to celebrating this milestone with our own kind of evolution.

We hope you enjoy the Literary Review’s 49th edition as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

Eve March Jillian Jackson AJ Di Nicola Editors-in-Chief

1 French for “Until tomorrow.” Jillian says Bonjour from Puteaux!

demain1,

Three

Three

Romance

Beautiful Like a Woman

He’s such a romantic

Pitcher Plant Genus Nepenthes

Lauren Caldwell

Digital Photography

Three Homies Sleep While Another Sees the Future

Sam Mosher

I wake up after senior year homecoming with a joint in my eye. Des’ jacket lies on my face and I can feel her curled with Jake besides me. I reach over, parting the morning sunbeams and cover them with the lavender coat. Laura is tucked in the corner of her bed, as far from the hole in the wall her dipshit boyfriend made as possible. I can’t look at the bruise on her jaw so I just pull her blankets up and go to the bathroom to steady myself. There I look at her mom’s pills for a second too long, and find my shirt and a lighter in the hallway. I end up on the window sill blowing youth and sativa to the five o’clock roses. I look past Laura’s car, our textbooks still piled in the front seat, down the mist dappled street, past the pockmarked sidewalks, through the day, the week, the year. Pretty soon we won’t fall asleep in the same room, laughing more than we breathe. I won’t feel their hands as we handshake in the hallways, never braiding our hair together. But that’s for later as I purse my lips around one of the last things keeping us together, rest my head on the blinds and play keep-away with the roses at my feet.

Cthulhu1 is bored

Amy Baskin

eating pickles out of a jar he found in the back of the fridge deciding whether or not

to run this morning based on secrets unfolding on his weather app he notes the 70% chance of rain

and heads out for coffee instead where he orders six feet from a masked hipster drowning in a screen

wearing his likeness on a T-shirt who doesn’t even notice him as he sinks a tentacle

into the tepid foam of his latte everyone is already insane these days he thinks

there is no one left who isn’t anxious no one even bothering to notice his foretold return

1 Lovecraft’s creature who, when imprisoned, is the source of relentless subconscious anxiety for humankind.

Three Crows Across the Street

Kit Graf

He saw two crows pinning a third down at the park across from his school this morning.

Disgusting, he muttered as we drove to the supermarket. How civilized we were behind the wheel,

on our way to get food the clean-way. Our fingers, bloodless, clutched grapefruitw

instead of livers and crossed each item off our list with a leaky pen instead of a claw.

How lucky we were, stuffing groceries into canvas bags and leaving with some dirt beneath our fingernails and dust on our shoes.

The only fear was of our ice-cream, melting before we could make it home.

In bed, he mentioned how the image of the crows, pecking away the eyes of the other kept him awake.

How haunting, I said.

Pomegranate

Solena Andrus Montalieu

It was early harvest when I cut open the first of the fruit, picking the seeds out with my nails. You were some thousands of miles away, And the remains of the rind made me wonder: If Hades is truly barren, then would this not be Persephone’s gift?

A fruit that is only ready when she returns, As Demeter turns the world cold. She is happy and warm in the arms of her lover, Bound by the fruit of her making. Does Hades tend to his pomegranates carefully, Ever grateful for the annual clock she has made for him So they may share their bounty together?

I finished the pink and red seeds and wonder if only six from this fruit is enough for you to stay.

Bored on a Monday Night

Acrylic Paint

Burton Scheer

Single Occupancy Apartments Coming Soon

Jillian Jackson

Last month, some bigwig with a pleated suit and no soul bought and tore down Donatello’s. You probably haven’t heard about it, so I’m telling you now. I’m telling you that there’s an Italian bistro-shaped hole in the scorched earth between the residential high-rises.

Since losing his ma-and-pop shop, Jerry’s turned to crime. Crime novels, I mean, with borderline culturally insensitive titles like Crime of Passion in Palermo. For her part, Carlotta sold the red-checkered tablecloths. I bought one and turned it into a babydoll shirt that rides up on my belly button.

Fair warning, I’m going to tell you that I wear the aforementioned navel-bearing, asking-for-it crop top to get wasted in the razed Donatello’s parking lot on Wednesdays. I don’t expect you to do anything about it, though. Don’t worry. I got your Christmas card in the mail. Your son looks just like you: freckle-shouldered and smiling with his eyes scrunched tight.

The white checkers on my shirt are stained with Sangiovese; the red ones look the same to my careening vision. I know I’m drunk because it’s April, and here I am thinking about Christmas cards. I’m picking pine needles out of my pinnedup hair. I’ll water the tree with $9.99 mulled wine from BevMo.

Wait. I made a mistake. You’re Jewish, and people who are Jewish don’t make a habit of sending out Christmas cards to their ex-girlfriends from seven years ago. I’m pretty sure they

don’t send out Christmas cards to anyone. No, that shirtless child in the Santa cap, taking up three-quarters of the frame, was not yours. My cousin’s kid just has the same approach to life that you do, pinwheeling his arms wily-nily. So, now I’m sure you’ve got a wife out there, kids and Christmas, kids and Hanukkah. But, most of all, kids that aren’t mine.

Help! I’m still at the restaurant, still cross-legged in the corner I haunt. I’m crying into my Pasta Fagioli and getting my dignity tangled up in plastic grape vines. Still, I outlived those fake grapes strung about the rafters. I outlived the rafters themselves. Next week they’ll deliver the plexiglass for the windows of 37 single-occupancy units. They’ll pack people in like the sardines from Donatello’s bitter-lemon pasta.

The whole joint took sides, remember? Jerry started to plot your untimely death in some moonlit piazza, but Carlotta gave you free, over-buttered focaccia breadsticks for a year.

You left me—no! You’re just moseying on up to Carlotta’s counter. She forgot to put ice in my lemonade. Of course, you don’t need any ice in a chipped wine glass filled with Sangiovese. I’m still twenty-three, and what twenty-three-yearold waters something down?

“You’re Jewish, and people who are Jewish don’t make a habit of sending out Christmas cards to their ex-girlfriends from seven years ago.”

Now, two women my age roll past with strollers, arms pumping for 6am Thursdays. I am a heap of gingham and grapes, plastic grapes, wine grapes. I am the clatter of soup spoons, one of Jerry’s meandering thousand-page detective novels, a woman in a ravaged, gentrifying ditch, a woman waiting for her boyfriend to come back to the checkered, still-intact tables.

“Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen?” One of the mother’s lips move, and I decide that’s what she’s saying.

“Break-ups happen everyday,” the other nods sagely. “You don’t have to lose it.”

I haven’t lost anything except my wallet, which is fine, since you wanted an excuse to pay for me anyways. Wait. I’ve changed my mind. You forgot your wallet and left me to foot the bill, to get my elbows sudsy while washing compensatory dishes beside Carlotta.

You left me no choice but to stay here forever. I am telling you that’s also fine. If you squint into the sunrise, everything’s sepia-toned, like the blurry family photographs Jerry used to frame on Donatello’s walls. Dust collects on my pinned-up hair. I’m right where you left me.

I don’t expect you to do anything about it, though.

This vignette was written for Professor Don Waters’ Fiction Writing II class, during which his students were tasked with interpolating the lyrics and exploring the themes of a song. Many thanks are owed to Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner, the writers behind “right where you left me,” a breakup track that I chose for Waters’ assignment.

Amy Baskin Do Not Pass Go!

I’ve got Marvin Gardens taste with a Baltic Avenue budget on Pacific Avenue though it’s priced as high as Boardwalk due to domination of the market by a single entity. Did I mention I’m getting around in a wheelbarrow?

Blueberry’s Garden

Maddie Dopp

Acrylic Paint

Annabel Paris Miriam FALLING

All the people all the dancers so crowded crowded together with laughing and shouting and talking alone together in time but not small lags mistakes not mistakes just fun it’s funny to miss a step as long as you jump back in and try try to keep a rhythm hope it is the same rhythm as the music the dance the crowd dancing stepping jumping always stomping and jumping in time a missed step a missed turn a missed spin now run the other way the other other way now no now bodyslam like a too-cool-for-school bro hug and fall and are you okay and smile and laugh and not care and accept a hand up and dance ignore it it’s much more fun to dance than not so there is no twinge in the ankle and dance dance dance all night because it is so much more fun fun to jump and twist and turn and step than dodge and skip through lines to the side where there are

others standing drinking water wine water and lifting and rolling your foot go back go back to dancing it is so much more fun to dance than not

SHE ASKING

Is it her? How can I tell when I get only glimpses through the writhing heaving mass of people dancing weaving a tapestry dancing in the open pavilion dancing in the crowded street dancing in the overheated room with the oversized fans and lights turned on because the sun can’t get in through the too-small windows because the stars can’t get in between the too-large drapes because the moon is new and has no one to train her to do her job tonight

Fingertips brushing fingertips asking let’s go let’s have fun please asking can we go we know how asking it’s been so long asking I’m scared nervous embarrassed asking don’t care don’t care do it it will be fun you won’t regret it I promise

asking but what if you’re wrong asking let’s go have fun please you’ll have a good time sing your song and move your feet you don’t have to know the dance you can follow along asking are you sure asking grinning pulling let’s go

HAIR

She runs and kicks and her shorts leave her legs free to move unhindered her skirt flies around her waist the colors are eye catching and bright and mature and refined with purples and greens and blues and yellows and pinks intertwining with jewel tones and tie dye and neon all flying with hair dyed to match and hair blonde as dirty strawberry platinum blonde it flies whipping around her head whapping friends and acquaintances in the face whapping her in the face getting caught in her glasses not glasses that never fall off or get loose it is too light too heavy to flow it tumbles to the floor skimming the hem of the skirt at her ankles it is too

heavy too light to fall it is short cut close to the skin light as a bird it lets the wind fly through and dry the gathering sweat it’s girly always girly because she is a woman except when it’s not except she always is except when she wishes she could be a woman without all it entails it is gathered up into a ponytail and a braid and striped with ribbons and color and it flies through the air as free as can be

MAKEUP

Her face is flushed and clear with black above her eyes that her best friend put on hours before it doesn’t smudge no matter how much she touches it and rubs the corners of her eyes and the eyelashes that itch along with the bright colors on her eyes the colors that match her dress and lipstick that disappears like it was never there before she licks her lips to smile wider and shriek louder as she’s lifted into the air flying by the arm around her back

WATER

Break for water because she has to because it’s important so she doesn’t get cramps or pass out and get trampled they wouldn’t actually trample her but the thought is there she can also get cramps from not breathing while dancing she always forgets to breathe it takes thought and dancing is just so much fun and so distracting but cramps hurt and make dancing less fun so she must go to the side weave out of the moving writhing masses and drink from the neon shiny plastic metal plastic bottle where friends are standing and they chat and talk while she drinks and breathes and they hug hello and they hug goodbye huge hugs pressing against each other cheek to cheek and chest to chest with arms wrapped tight like it’s been too long despite living so close and being so close they hug tightly and it doesn’t hurt the pressure is painless and soothing and it is right pressure on top of pressure it used to hurt to be uncomfortable and out of place but no longer now it is right and they hug goodbye before she goes back jumps

back into the hopping of the dance and the shouting of the people dancing with the music

SPINNING

She takes a hand it’s bala bala yaa take a step take three and spin spin spin around hair whipping around heads close cropped hair to the floor dresses billowing out like sails why like sails they are cylinders spinning round and round as the women in the middle are spun round and round a hand above their heads not holding just touching palm to palm talking and moving telling where to go while the mouths are busy with conversation and laughter with the music flowing through the air touching ears and hair and skin and skirts and shoes spinning around and around but not like a top because tops are unpredictable she is not she knows where she is going with her eyes closed with her hand above her head with her feet underneath her stepping on air stepping on music carrying her in a cig bircle

a bircle that is cig around and around and around

Romance Language

Jillian Jackson

I wanna know what you sound like in French.

The same as in English, maybe. You stroke my troubadour throat. Coax les mots doux1 out. Sap them from my mouth like honey. A sweet string drips from my parted lips. My accent might sour fruits.

I am not like you. I could not fold up a second tongue in my pocket, ribboning its wrapped des jolis cadeaux pour des étrangères. 2 Of course, you and I are not strangers. For you, I split my infinitives. Cleave them open like pomegranates. Make tart grenadine.

Je coupe en deux ce que j’aimerais vous partager jusqu’à ce que rien ne soit entier.3

I could call you ma mie, 4 in French. Roll out the idiom’s dough. Pinch the pie crust of my possessives around what I adore most: your soft middle. The tender, crumbly insides slathered with jam. I drizzle you in euphony.

So, what’s your French voice like?

Comme la mienne, mais pleine de sucré.5

1 Sweet nothings.

2 Beautiful gifts from strangers / foreigners.

3 I cut in two what I would like to share with you until nothing is whole.

4 Term of endearment that literally translates to the doughy, soft part in the middle of a slice of bread.

5 Like mine, but full of sugar.

Anneka Barton Beautiful Like a Woman

I do not want to be beautiful like a woman I want the beauty of a towering forest, All encompassing and powerful, Fear inspiring.

To be viewed not as an object of pleasure But a mirage of beauty, Elusive and untouchable With places men can never reach.

I want to shake in the wind

Like a dance, A warning

Not in fear of lurking shadows in Parking lots and empty streets

I do not want to be a woman

I want to be the thing in the woods that men fear.

He’s such a romantic

Kit Graf

He pulled up to my dorm and stood against his car, door open, all hard rock at 9 am and don’t you look nice. Lips puckered like he’s smoking a cigarette, but instead he’s wanting a kiss

and an apology for being late. Popped the trunk for me to throw my bag in the back, he laughed when I flinched at the slam of it.

I picked lint off my yoga pants in the passenger seat, looking at each piece up close as if to figure out which article of clothing it once belonged to

while he complained that the hill was too tall, but he still liked the drive with the big houses all the way up.

We called the modern one with a teak fence the “bamboo house” and tried to guess how much it cost, usually ending with him irritated at how money works, at least I’m in STEM, he’d say meaning that one day he’ll live in a “bamboo house” on a hill

and I would live in some shitty bungalow painted a weird color like mint green but at least I’d have a porch swing

and be pleased with my life.

After he’d say something risky, he’d reach for my hand and wait for me to squeeze it, confirmation that I wasn’t upset.

I began to feel like Pavlov’s dogs, drooling over complacency like a milkbone.

I’m his girlfriend, the phone number he doesn’t memorize yet calls every morning to say Good morning and Sorry I woke you up but look at this book about computers, zooming in on pictures of motherboards and calling number sequences his poetry.

He used to run his fingers through my hair, pulling each curl apart one by one, commenting that it looks greasy. But my Mom thinks you’re beautiful.

I’d hang his valentine in my dorm, the one he spent two hours making, with rolled paper that formed a brocade heart on the front and I like how cool and nice you are on the inside. He’d spend the next two weeks asking how much I liked it, A lot, I’d say, I like it a lot.

Canine

Anneka Barton

As a child I believed that gated communities were parks meant to contain wild dogs. I thought they held packs of rottweilers with shiny teeth that would chase my family’s beatup Subaru on the other side of the wall, looking for a crack to slip through. I’d press my little hands and face against the glass, hiding behind my breath as it fogged the windows, and picture them waiting for me. Large bundles of muscle pressing up against velvet fur, teeth gleaming in the streetlights. I was always fearless with dogs, but I knew to be scared of these ones. It was clear to me that these walls were not something I was meant to pass beyond. Those who do belong there always seem to smile with too many teeth. To dogs, this is a threat.

Sometimes I imagine that it’s true. That after long days the business men and wealthy retirees will go home beyond the crisp brick walls and unzip their skin suits. They’ll sit on their haunches and pant, waiting for some poor soul to wander in so they can get a bite to eat. The drool will cling to their jowls and for the first time all day their perfect manners become meaningless. Returning home reduces them to creatures built of hunger, interested only in consumption.

Even now, sitting in the front seat of a pretty new car, watching the man’s smile turn into a leer as we pass through the gates, I think they must have been built to hold something sinister inside.

Anxiety

Sophia Riley

In therapy she talked of a bottle cap

The soda shakes and fizzes and as you wait you assume it’s fine

Then the cap pops, jumps, runs

Brown liquid pours from all directions and I’m a kid in 7th grade science watching an explosion

The explosion is so encompassing it consumes. Life is sucked in at all angles

The toys, the pens, the homemade pillow, then you and me

We’re in the bottle and the caps screwed and we’re waiting

Because when the soda shakes and fizzes the cap pops

Sheppard Braddy The Boulder Boys

Up Rotary Park and down through the rocks with their boot-banging backpacks and outdoor socks, stuck onto slab-crimps by their chalk-covered fingers that brush away mullets, the blond locks that linger— You’ll find the Boulder Boys.

Some climb the sandstone, and some of them sit and even play cards on the sedimentary slits. But all find their way here, to Rotary Park, meeting beer-chugging buds and music ‘til dark. Too sweet, those Boulder Boys. Further up, herder yucks have fenced in their land. Barbed wire grief struck, with pricks fixed in their hands. With the money to spend if the mayor agrees, the town blew it up, poor Rotary. With no cracks to climb or boulders to boy They wiped off their chalk—too much time to annoy. The fellas all said their final tearful goodbye as they all raised up their calloused hands with a cry for the best of the Boulder Boys.

carson city, nevada

Luke Rotello

for a night i melt into your house on marion street. your turbid waters settle & we seep into totoro with billowing spirits. we are in love, if only for a moment; you take a long drag from my nail polish and sigh into another week.

i cascade from my hangover with newfound fears of forever. you assuage me only as i read between lines and swallow days like the lump in my throat. there’s something searing in your taillights—to my bleary gaze they’re leaking into storm drains. maybe i should get my eyes checked again.

you call me on facetime two months later & we talk about nothing. your ceiling is scattered and your walls are hollow. you lament the textures of space but i can only see your wildfire hair and the brass in your eyes. when you have to go—we’re running on fumes by now anyway—i wonder if this is the last we’ll know of each other. for all you made of me, i hope i was worth the miles.

Miles to Go Before I Sleep

Michael Mulrennan

It was strange, driving up there without him. Sure, the highway looked like it always did: heavily wooded, winding this way and that, small shops and dilapidated resorts sprinkled every dozen or so miles. The September air was dry and cool, still hanging onto the last bits of summer’s warmth. The Great Lake, a deep, ominous blue, lay calm in the amber sunset. As it had for centuries, the North Shore remained the same. But everything felt different. Maybe some of that had to do with the fact that my dad was no longer sitting next to me playing old Bob Dylan CDs and talking to me about which book he was reading from my sociology class. He was still in the passenger seat, but a box of ashes doesn’t do a whole lot of talking. I still buckled in his seatbelt. Sometimes I try to act like it never happened, like I still have a dad, rather than had one. I took a course on psychological first aid once and they told me that you can tell that someone’s depressed when they have a case of the “I used to’s.” I wish I had paid more attention after that and figured out how to get out of it; I guess I just couldn’t stop thinking about how I used to have a dad.

I had to get pulled out of school when it happened. I was in the middle of taking a midterm my sophomore year of college when the Dean of Students walked into the classroom. She whispered something into Professor Jones’ ear before they

“He was still in the passenger seat, but a box of ashes doesn’t do a whole lot of talking.”

tactlessly aimed their gaze toward me. They motioned me up to the front of the classroom and said I’d better grab my things and call my mother. They said it was urgent. I called my mom and she broke the news for me. She was crying. She had loved him before they got divorced. Maybe she still did. When you love someone enough you decide to have a kid, the love changes. When there’s a walking memory of what used to be you never really let go of that love. It just morphs into something else. At least that’s what my dad would have said.

After I finished talking to my mom I went back to my dorm, sat on my bed, and wondered where to look. February rain rapped against the muddy window pain. Every inch of the room was littered with memories. How could it not be? After all, he was the one who dropped me off. He was the one who drove halfway across the country to see his only son start a new chapter without him. It would only be fitting for me to come back to the North Shore and finish his elegy by spreading his ashes out over the land we knew best.

“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” I said.

“Oh come on. We both know that’s bullshit,” he responded.

We were sitting in the station wagon outside of the Student Union. There were people everywhere. Sons and daughters scoured the landscape looking for potential friends and future hook-ups as their parents gawked at the beautiful campus that lay before them. A handful of people wearing the school’s red and white T-shirts danced between people, smiling and offering words of encouragement to the incoming freshmen and nervous parents before directing them to their child’s dorm. The August heat pressed down upon my forehead as sweat trickled down my cheeks, which were almost certainly as red as those godawful shirts.

“Seriously Dad, I don’t know about this. What if I don’t like it here? What if I waste all of the money you and Mom are paying for me to go here? What if I—”

“Wanna know something buddy? Your mom and I have been your parents for almost nineteen years to the day and not once have we spent a dime we would have wanted back. Except for that one year you played hockey. Jesus that was a fuckin’ joke.”

That made me smile. He was right. Before I’d picked up a baseball and learned I had an arm like Sandy Koufax I’d tried out for the local youth hockey team. After successfully making the worst team and riding the bench all year my parents and I collectively decided that hockey was not a venture I ought to pursue. I haven’t put on a pair of skates since.

“That was different,” I said, my mood lightening ever so slightly. “I was a kid then. But this. Going off to college? That’s big Dad. What if I can’t take it?”

“Do you really think your mother and I would let you come out to Bellingham all by yourself if we didn’t think you could take it? Jesus Marty, how irresponsible of parents do you think we are?”

“Well you did let me go up to the cabin with Jeff and Dan every summer since we could drive and I think we all know what would happen up there.”

“Your mother just about had a conniption when she found all those fuckin’ empty bottles,” he said shaking his head. “So maybe we let you get away with some things. But we knew what we were doing, just like you do right now. This place is yours for the taking buddy. It’s your home to make.”

“I’ll make you proud Dad.”

“I don’t doubt that for one second.”

The sun was slowly making its way down the endless horizon. Night was approaching and I would have to find a place to sleep. I looked in the backseat at the little black lab sleeping on our dad’s old quilt. I reached my hand out and stroked her ears. They were soft and comforting. Millie opened her droopy eyes with a confused look on her face. “It’s getting late, girl,” I told her. “Best we start looking for a spot to spend the night. I don’t know how many of these grimy resorts take dogs so we might have to sleep in here. How’s that sound?”

She gave a long sigh, closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

I worried about her. She hadn’t been the same since he died. There was sadness in her eyes. A sadness that lingered like an insidious virus. It would lie dormant, waiting to be awoken and to strike its unsuspecting host when she was at her most vulnerable. I would take her to the park that she and Pop used to go to. Rather than launch herself out of the trunk and bark at me until I grabbed the slobber-crusted tennis ball, she would sit down and stare at me. She wouldn’t fidget or prance as I was so accustomed to her doing. She would just sit and wait in melancholy silence. I’d look at her knowingly, knowing what she was waiting for… knowing that I was waiting for the same thing too… both of us wishing we didn’t have to.

There’s something special about those that we love, and I don’t mean the people. I mean the soft, wool blanket that we’ve had since we were toddlers; the misshapen patch of sidewalk that made the perfect end to a game of hopscotch; the maple trees that rain down their helicopter seeds in the brisk, midwestern autumn; the jingle of a collar and the clickclack of paws on hardwood racing to eat kibble for the 2132nd

time. They are our left hand when we play the piano. Though they may not make up the complicated melody, they remain a constant. They support us when we get lost or veer off course. They tether us to a rhythm, a beat that is easy to lose and even harder to recover. Many of us neglect this seemingly unremarkable love until it’s too late, until we are left trying to pick up the pieces to a puzzle that’s missing its borders. It’s when I look at her that I remember to appreciate those beautiful, mundane flecks of consistency. When I remember to let my heart drip with the emotions I’ve soaked up from living in a world abundant with feelings.

Maybe that’s how you know you love something unconditionally.

“Oh shit girl!” I shouted, causing her to jolt up right and study me quizzically. “You must be hungry, huh?…” Her tail started to wag more ferociously. She knew what was coming next, but I couldn’t help myself. I paused, letting the magic word dangle in the air like a partially deflated balloon. She whined, stomping her feet in amusement and frustration. “Gosh if you could only just tell me what you wanted.” She was getting really hot and bothered now. Climbing on the center console she took to licking my ear with her anteater-sized tongue. “What, whaaaat,” I giggled, grinning more than I had in months. “Do you want some…”

“It’s when I look at her that I remember to appreciate those beautiful, mundane flecks of consistency. When I remember to let my heart drip with the emotions I’ve soaked up from living in a world abundant with feelings.”

But before I could spit out a word that sounds very similar to “tinner” the car began to slow down. I pressed my foot on the gas pedal but to no avail. The car sounded exhausted. Like a horse at the end of an arduous day the engine sighed and groaned until eventually it came to a slow, graceful halt. Bob and Johnny were in the middle of their heart-melting duet. The sound faded out into silence, but not before they were able to moan:

If you’re travelin’ in the north country fair

Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline

Please say hello to the one who lives there

As the radio faded out and the engine finally spluttered into silence I examined the fuel gauge. It read 0.0. I peered back at Millie who had since sat down, her head tilted in perplexity. Her tail started to wag again. Clearly, she had not forgotten what I was about to say. No matter the fact that we were stuck with no gas in the middle of an empty highway, the next town some fifteen miles away, and had a cold, dark night quickly approaching. In the mind of a labrador, food reigns supreme. My eyes fell back onto where the zeros had been. The electronic gauge evidently didn’t even have enough power to keep the numbers illuminated. I shook my head and gazed at the felt, black ceiling and began to laugh.

“What’re we at buddy?” the ol’ man asked.

“Oh Jesus, we’re gettin’ down there. We got five miles left,” I said, watching the miles tick down more and more. “Where’s the nearest gas station?” I asked.

“Ohhh not for another ten.”

We turned our heads towards each other simultaneously, eyes

wide and lips curled into a mischievous smile only a kid could know. We beamed at one another basking in the absurdity of what we had just said. Then, at the exact same time, we burst out laughing. Millie climbed up toward the front and began licking our necks, not wanting to miss out on the fun.

“Not for another ten?!” I shouted. “Uhh what the fuck are we gonna do? Just sit on the side of the road and stick out our thumbs?”

“Well, yeah!” he said matter-of-factly. “What else are we gonna do? Got any better ideas up your ass?”

“Um I dunno, maybe to have gotten gas half an hour ago!” I said, half-exasperated, half-cackling.

“But that wouldn’t have been any fun now would it? What’s the point of playing it safe when you can take a risk and have a laugh? If this ain’t livin’ I don’t know what is.”

“This isn’t living, it’s just stupid.”

“But of COURSE it’s stupid! Who says that living can’t be stupid?”

“Well, it’s tough to argue with that one.” I smiled at him and he smiled back.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, still laughing and grinning broadly. “Ya know bud, I’m sixty-five years old and I still get off on dumb shit like this.”

“It’s gotta be hereditary,” I said. “Something tells me I’ve got the same gene as you and all of the other rat bastards in our family.”

“So all of them?”

I bobbed my head from side to side, feigning real contemplation. “Yeah, all of them,” I said. Our laughter and Millie’s kisses continued all the way until we pulled off at a gas station ten miles down the road. Feeling both disappointed for not having ran out of gas and proud of ourselves for being so willing to test the limits, we got out of the car to stretch our limbs and knotted stomachs.

“Well,” Dad said. “Maybe next time we’ll run out.”

But there wasn’t a next time. That was the last time we drove down Highway 61 together. The last time we had spent the weekend burying our secrets under the smooth, silver stones of the North Shore. He died a month after that. This time, his miles were the ones that had run dry.

Millie and I spent the night huddled together in the back of the car. The seats, already laid down, made for a comfortable enough mattress and the Thanksgiving-colored plaid quilt was more than enough to keep me warm. I woke up to the sound of a gentle rain pit-pattering on the roof of the car. I looked over at the black ball of fur still slumbering peacefully next to me. I loved her more than I thought I could love another person. I checked the passenger seat to make sure that the wooden box of ashes was still tucked underneath the seat belt. Indeed, Dad was still there, entombed inside of a cedar chest—his favorite wood—waiting to be set free.

I yawned and let out a big, gurgling exhale that woke Millie on the spot. After several rounds of kisses, rubs, and a healthy amount of tussling I gave her breakfast. Grateful, she devoured the food in all of 20 seconds, threw it up, and then promptly ate it again. “You’re disgusting,” I said to her, but I had to give her credit. The girl gets what she wants.

After she cleaned up her mess, we went outside into the mist and relieved ourselves. A push here and a squirt there for each of us. He would have been proud. I re-entered the car, pulled out the bagels and lox I had packed and ate my own breakfast. Millie, ever hopeful, received several slices of salmon that just so happened to slip from my generous grasp.

The rain was still falling and a thick mist was starting to form on top of the lake. I hadn’t realized how close we were to the water. Only a few hundred yards from the shore, I could see the white caps forming atop the lake, now gray from the overcast. To my left I could see the retired lighthouse gazing out over the never-ending water. The waves crashed violently on the cliff it was perched on, splashing enormous black boulders with icy water. Straight ahead was a long beach, turned black from the taconite mining. There was something fitting about the color. Any coastline could have a normal, white sand beach. It’s easy, ordinary, too superficial to contain anything of substance. Sure, it looks pretty. But it doesn’t make you feel anything, it doesn’t make you wonder or make you cry. It doesn’t ask anything from you.

Millie and I considered each other for a moment. “Well, shall we?” She tilted her head. I could have sworn she nodded.

I stepped into the car and picked up the cedar urn containing our father. I cradled it in my hands like a bird with a broken wing. It was odd, holding something so small but whose contents were so vast. It was like holding a microscopic universe. Inside was the man who raised me, who taught me how to throw a baseball, and give a firm handshake, who relived every one of my heartbreaks as I sobbed and ached wishing the pain would go away; the man who was supposed to see my children, who was supposed to ruffle their hair and slip a five dollar bill into their hands to get candy at the convenience store, who was supposed to tell tales of his days stealing bottle caps from the neighbors and sneaking out to

meet ex-girlfriends in the dead of night, who was supposed to be here with me and our little girl walking down to the water so we could let our hearts bleed into the rock-filled shore. That cosmos, laden with stardust and memories, stared at me blankly. I might have been the one trapped inside a box.

We walked through the sodden grass until our feet touched the black beach and our lips could taste the cool spray spitting off of the lake. Normally, Millie would bound up and down the beach like a lunatic, barking at me to find a ball or stick to throw. This time, she remained by my side, trotting along, pausing when I paused, speeding up when I sped up. Occasionally, she would cast me a sidelong glance with her big, black eyes lingering just long enough for me to see her doing it. We continued to offer each other these little checkins as we walked toward the rocky peninsula that jutted out to our right. The stones beneath our feet sank with each step, whispering to each other as they slid underfoot. I wish I knew what they were saying.

The peninsula was not very big, though it was elevated above the beach some twenty feet. It looked like an ancient dagger, crusted in orange rust with chunks taken out of its blade. It was polka-dotted in bright green patches of moss and dying aspens. Its rugged surface made it difficult for anything to grow and the bitter wind that blew onto its jagged cliffside served as a constant reminder that life did not belong there. The water slapped against the oxidized rock face with ruthless determination. The lake was alive. Waves postured in a frenzy, battling for supremacy before conjoining and enacting their outrage upon the murmuring minerals. A layer of cold sweat

“That cosmos, laden with stardust and memories, stared at me blankly. I might have been the one trapped inside a box.”

enveloped the peninsula, making it slick with nerves.

Millie and I clambered up a handful of large boulders and walked toward the edge of the point. Several times I lost my footing, my heart leaping and hands trembling under the emotional weight of the red urn in my hands. Soon enough, we neared the last bits of scarred land where the wind was at its fiercest. We found a relatively round, dry rock and sat down in silence. Although Millie couldn’t talk, this silence felt different. It felt heavy, so heavy that I thought if we fell into the water we would sink to the bottom.

Several minutes passed and the urn lay quite still in my hands. We watched the lake fight itself and the gray clouds roll over the outstretched arms of the North Shore. Neither of us knew what to do next. How do you start, I wondered. How do you just let go, forever?

Millie’s low growl broke the silence.

It

so heavy that I thought if we fell into the water we would sink to the bottom.”

“What’s up girl?” I asked, holding on even tighter. She was looking behind us, hackles up. A man was approaching. He was as old and weathered as the stones we were sitting on. He had a deformed white beard that trickled down his neck and a big red nose that looked like it had been stung by a gang of wasps. He was wearing a buffalo plaid hunter’s cap and a dull, green vest above his torn blue jeans. He looked like the old man who used to run the abandoned lighthouse. As he limped closer I could see a red scar dripping down the side of his cheek like a bloody tear, dried out from the stinging wind howling off the lake.

“This silence felt different.

felt heavy,

“Can I help you sir?” I said, holding onto Millie’s collar. My voice was calm and measured but I could feel the tension beneath her skin, fear and instinct bubbling in her veins.

“Sorry son, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I saw your car parked over yonder. There aren’t many folks who come to this beach. Isn’t exactly the most forgiving I supposed. Figured whoever it was might need a helping hand.”

His voice, though as deep and gravelly as the lake, was tender to the ear. He bent down and offered his hand to Millie. I slackened my grip and allowed her to investigate. After a few sniffs here and there she was rubbing her behind on his leg as he obliged her incessant request to be scratched on her rump. She was smiling.

“Alright Millie that’s enough, stop badgering the poor guy,” I said.

“Oh that’s quite alright,’’ he said. “My wife and I used to have one just like her. So what brings you here?”

“Well, I guess there’s a couple things.” I paused, unsure of how much I ought to say. He noticed.

“Ah, now I don’t want to overstep my boundaries. I don’t mean to be a nosy old fart. It ain’t important what’s brought you here.”

“No no, sorry. It’s just that, well. You see, my dad died last February and we used to come up here together. Not here, exactly,” I gestured to the violent landscape. “But to our cabin up near Grand Marais. We just ran out of gas.”

“Is that who you’ve got in that box of yours?” he asked.

I nodded, swallowing the tears that were trying to travel from

my throat to my eyes.

“I see,” he said. “And I’m guessing this is the first time you’ve been here since?”

Again, I nodded. The lump in my throat was getting bigger, harder to digest.

To my surprise, his eyes were the ones glistening with tears. He shifted his gaze from me to the lake as a few tears trickled down the scar on his cheek.

“I brought my wife here when she passed,” he said. “I had a chest similar to the one you’ve got in your arms. There was a lupine engraved into the wood, I think it was Spruce. I waded into the water and stood there, searching the horizon for something I think was courage. I just stood there, wondering if I might just go down with her. Thought that might be easier. At least then I wouldn’t know that I let go. ”

“I waded into the water and stood there, searching the horizon for something I think was courage.”

“So how did you? Let her go, I mean.”

“Those rocks on the beach, the black and blue ones. You know what those are? Basalt. They come from volcanoes and form when lava cools down really quick-like. If you look close enough you can see tiny crystals twinkling at you.”

I sat there in silence, unsure if he wanted me to speak or if I should remain quiet. It seemed like he was getting somewhere and I didn’t want to interrupt him.

“After standing in the water I walked back to shore and sat down. My legs were red and I couldn’t feel my toes. Everything was cold. I saw something sparkling next to me and picked up a basalt stone. I had never noticed the crystals before. I felt something as l examined the stone. Something other than cold. I was thinking about her. Thinking about her short, salt and pepper hair, hazel eyes, her silly little giggle.”

He choked down a swallow, but his voice was steady.

“Those rocks have eyes, son. Eyes that listen. Eyes that pierce your own and travel down into your heart. They gave me the strength to let her go. Told me she would always be here.”

“Was it hard?” I asked.

“Hardest thing I’ve ever done. But that’s how I knew it meant something.”

I pondered what he said for a moment. I could feel the volcanic pool of fire coming to a rolling boil inside me. All of the agony I had endured over the last few months seemed to be reaching its climax. I was on the precipice of spilling all the contents of my aching, wailing heart onto the rock slab I was sitting on. Then, a wet, sandpaper tongue gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“Millie,” I sighed. I had been so caught up in what he had been saying I had almost forgotten that she was there. But of course she was. My left hand love. Her eyes were fixed on mine meaningfully. Although she couldn’t have known what we were saying, I knew she understood what he meant. She sniffed at the box containing her best friend before returning her attention to me. She blinked purposefully and rested her head on top of the urn, her eyes not leaving my own.

“She knows,” he said.

“I know girl, I know,” I said, stroking her ears. My throat swelled with lava.

“What say I go ahead and put some gas in that car of yours,” he said. He got up and began to walk through the fog before turning back.

“Is this goodbye?” I asked.

“For now, sure. But you never really say goodbye. Just ask the basalt.”

We exchanged a gentle look of finality before he set off through the mist where he was soon enveloped, disappearing from sight.

“Okay,” I sighed. “Okay.” I stood up and Millie followed suit. We strode over to the last rock at the end of the peninsula. The rain had subsided and the waves had calmed to a low whisper. The mist blowing in the wind was cool and refreshing. The burning liquid inside me was rising, but not with anger or agitation. It was moving steadily upwards like a rain gauge during an Oregon winter. As it passed through my throat and up into my eyes I could feel the smoldering sensation fill my ducts. Soon enough, the reservoir of tears broke through my last dam of defense and poured down my prickling cheeks. Each drop burned as it fell down my face and onto the ground, waiting to be swallowed by the lake. I bent down until I was level with Millie. I leaned in closer and pulled her to my side, our heads pressed against one another.

I opened the urn and stared down at the photo resting on top of the bag of ashes. It was of the three of us. Dad was giving his usual broad smile, eyes twinkling beneath his glasses. Millie staring up at the both of us, her grin as toothy and wide as could be. And me, wearing a smile that looked so unfamiliar. It was taken on that last trip we had been on up here, just a

few weeks before he was gone. The trees were green and the lupines purple. Our tattered old cabin glowed in the summer sun. Slowly, I pulled the bag out of its chest and held it in my hands. I felt the weight of him in my fingertips, letting it radiate through my arms and deep into my belly. The tears on my cheek had dried and I could feel the scars beginning to form inside and out. I held the bag out to Millie. She took in a long breath, smelling the memories as only she could.

“See ya pops.”

I opened the bag and shook out its contents as a gust of wind blew from behind us. The ashes flew out across the placid water, before disappearing on its mirror-like surface. I picked up a basalt rock and raised it to my face to be scanned. There was, unmistakably, a new crystal shining brightly on its rough and tender exterior, looking into my eyes the way he used to.

Alison Keiser Memory is a Moving Train

The train whistle is always that of a summer backyard; Bees in the pollen and under our skin. It’s my shout To the engine roar that reminds me, my sister, And you—my mentor—that the divine doesn’t come When we know it, but when we are too busy In our noise to feel the rumble.

And every whistle after is a remembrance of that sky— A portrait to memorialize the sun when she kissed The horizon and died. Every whistle, From childhood into the lonely night, Is a memorial. For moments that pass. For the reason we can’t clutch them.

But the sound, today as it will tomorrow, thickens the air, Pulls the bees out of their coffins and inside us.

If I am lucky, I will be burdened with not knowing what it is, But that it is as true—it is a backyard. And one day, I will hear the train whistle again and remember tonight Then it kissed me as mothers do

Then let our moment die.

family tradition

Tiani Ertel

my grandma hasn’t breathed for 90 years she says this is because of her mother I pinch my legs together on the bus, fold myself up like an origami swan a boy walks into the dorm hallway; key in hand, I flinch and immediately stammer something like sorry it’s my way of not breathing it’s a family tradition

what is a woman? a vessel through which guilt thrives a bottomless trench into which fleeting desires and careless whims are flung a blank canvas onto which grimy fingers smear blood, then claw at in fury when the outcome is not spotless

I have nightmares where I don’t even need to look down I feel my skin stretched and striped like a melon, bloated with a life I didn’t ask for and I wake up and wonder why it was a nightmare and not a dream maybe because I’ve already become the mother I never wanted to be for people I love, people I know, people I’ve met, people I passed three years ago on the street

and with every borrowed breath I fear that I’ll exhale and give birth to a wailing, screaming reminder

Sophia Riley Poppies

Sitting in a field

An embodiment of poppies

Sitting in a yellow dress

Imprisoned in its thread

Quiet on the hill

Please be quiet on the hill

Alina Cruz

Digital Photography

Faggot

The Flighty Room of a Home With No Roots

Alison Keiser

In my yellow kitchen, I absorb the warm tile, The silver clatter below of some late night Dinner at the restaurant terrace, The orange and teal lights of other kitchens Of other homes. The ache of this impermanence Feels so unfair; How dare I leave myself

On these mountains, street corners, and sunsets, In bars, in conversation, in the quiet

When one day I will quit it all for good? How could I make a home out of a moment?

My stubborn, child love—

I can’t admit that this is how we love things; Because they go, because they are the memory You feel as it unfolds. It’ll never fit in your palm, But it will always leave a mark as it slips out.

I think I’ve been here before, but it was only In some dreamscape, something I would lull Myself to sleep to when my bed was an island And I was the lone witness. I think I’ll be here, In this kitchen, again, but I can’t avoid knowing, Next, that it’ll be the view I see behind my eyelids

When I’m on the transport to another place, A new home to find rest in, a new place I know will fade just the same.

I touch the cold stovetop and imagine I lit it from beneath. So this is what home is. I let my fingers caress the blue-black skyline And feel something electric every time my skin Runs over a streetlight. This is what home is. I find my face in the reflection of the dark window— The day has turned inside out and this is the girl Who faced it. Perhaps for the first time, Her memories are mine. We share in our glance, Like the patrons of the restaurant below Share their food, something familial. This is only ours.

Brunch and Coffee

Caleb Weinhardt

There’s a knock at the door. My arm jolts, splashing hot coffee over the side of the mug, down the table leg, and onto the carpet. Mom’s hand, heavy and now wet with coffee, comes uncurled from the handle and thuds onto the table. The TV goes to commercials. Today is Sunday. On Sundays my parents come upstairs for brunch and coffee. They get so lonely down there. No one is supposed to come today.

Through the peephole, I see a short, balding man with thick glasses and a clipboard. He wears a suit jacket and tie. Maybe he’ll go away.

He thumps his fist against the door again and I step back. Dad’s head hangs heavy to one side. His left hand rests on Mom’s, but I can’t move his fingers anymore to clasp their hands together. They used to sit that way for hours. I imagine how Mom used to smile at him, project that image onto the pillowcase I’ve used to cover the cloudy eyes and cold, shrunken skin beneath.

“Mr. Miller,” the man calls, his voice muffled through the door. “We’ve been trying to contact you about your homeowner’s association fees. Is anyone there?” The doorknob jiggles.

My heart pounds in my ears. I drag the coffee table, as quietly as I can, to block the door.

“Mr. Miller? Is everything all right?”

It’s unceremonious, not the way I’d like to do it, but there’s no time. I pull Mom by the shoulders, tipping her forward until her weight carries her onto the floor.

“Sorry!” I whisper.

I grab her ankles and pull. Moving six inches at a time, I drag her to the closet, hoist her up against the wall, and slam the door before she can collapse. It takes even longer to move Dad to the bathroom.

Venus Flytrap Genus Dionaea

Nightmare

Shelby Platt

The wind blows the hot sun sweat sticks my shirt to my back and my soggy chanclas cannot protect my feet from the dry hay stalks. But this will protect us—will it protect us? No time to find out we must

a silent command but everyone hears it. People in the streets in the cars on the highways and yet all we can hear is the wind. Suddenly it starts to rain—white flakes— or was that a week from then?

Sitting in the car across from you I wanted to reach out and take your hand—we thought we would lose everything, although it wouldn’t come to that.

Driving that night air still hot and fierce blood dripping from the sky and monsters dancing in the streets, I pinched myself hoping to wake up but I haven’t yet.

Finally we’re delivered through the barricade and make it home. A place too many people will never return to.

Pertaining to Bone

Cleo Lockhart

Your new home is in the heart of a town which you have never been to before, which you hardly know, and the town, likewise, is dreadfully unfamiliar with you.

The sign comes into view, a tentative stranger in the dark which makes two things apparent. One, it has a name beginning with an O, and ending in something else. Two, as the modest population number shows, it is a town so small as to forget itself, and so quiet as to die without anyone’s notice. When you peel off the highway and start making your way down its twisting roads, it is dusk already, and you see few signs of life beside the odd fox or raccoon slinking into the shadows at the touch of your headlights. The people you do see all seem to be looking at you. You suddenly become self conscious at the sound of your engine, thinking its loudness is the cause of the unwanted attention.

It is not. But you have no way of knowing this, yet.

The house you arrive at is not haunted. It is built of wood and brick, and it sits at the top of a hill so that your pens will roll sideways should you ever try to set them on your desk. Beneath your home there is a storm shelter, which you did not have back home in the city—it makes you think of Dorothy just before being swept away to Oz. There are no windows at the front of your house, making it impossible to look out into the street. You find this odd. You begin unloading boxes.

As you are doing this, it comes to your attention that you are being watched. The eyes belong to a small woman sitting on the porch of a house the color of dusty bubblegum, or dried

meat. She has far too many lawn ornaments, and does not wave back. Instead, she hobbles inside and comes out some moments later struggling beneath the weight of a cow’s skull in her arms, which she sets down on her steps like some obscure jack-o’-lantern. Then she goes inside, and does not come back out.

You elect to take this as an unfamiliar form of greeting.

That night, the first night, there are noises coming from outside your house, though you can see nothing from your limited selection of windows. You hope they are owls, or some other thing of the night that would have no use for you. You sleep, because it seems the obvious choice.

The next morning, your house is full of boxes, and yet you find yourself unwilling to unpack them. This is mostly owing to a new sort of nausea you have never felt before, which clings to the pit of your stomach like you are rotting from the inside out, though you have no reason to be nervous. You try to distract yourself by getting to work, but it does little to help. You have a job, of course, maybe with the church, or maybe with the post office; either way, you are sorting through papers. That’s why you moved here, for work. What other reason would you have? You are from the city; you are supposed to be in the city. There is nothing here that suits you.

The quiet, for instance, is a thing that presses in on your peace like an unwelcome guest, as you are quick to notice when you elect to take a short walk to calm your nerves. The empty space, too. You hate the way that, walking down Main Street, you can see right past the small cluster of residential blocks and out to the expanse of desert, and beyond that, hills, and beyond that, a sky that could swallow you. And you do not like the people. You do not like the way that they stare, or the way that they look away just as quickly to pretend that they were not, or the way that the woman in the antiques store is so

quick to ask where are you from? when you stop in to examine a set of drawers. You tell the woman you are from the city, and there is fear and venom in her smile. You hate the way that she knows without asking that you are not from here, that you are an outsider. The people come and go, she says, but the town is as it’s always been. You make a joke about being fresh meat, trying to be friendly, and the woman’s laugh in response lasts a little too long, and does not reach her eyes. When you leave, she flips the sign to say CLOSED.

You are walking home, and as you pass through the neighborhoods you become suddenly acutely aware of the abundance of cow skulls. Some are set out on porches, like that of the woman from the bubblegum house, or else they are hung up on doors like wreaths. They are of different shapes and sizes, some more chipped and ancient than others, some with a certain amount of decorative hand painting, but most without. And they are outside nearly every house, when you are certain that only yesterday this had not been the case. You look at them, and they look back at you. The back of your mouth tastes like dust. You go home and return to your papers.

That night, the second night, the sounds in the street have grown louder. You lie awake, listening; they no longer sound like any creature you have heard before. Rather, they are oddly mechanical, with a twinge of warning to them. Are they car alarms? You have hardly seen any cars here—given everything’s proximity to everything else, there are few places one would need to drive to. There is something beneath the echoing wail, something that you cannot quite place. It is dry and rattling.

“You hate the way that she knows without asking that you are not from here, that you are an outsider.”

The sound swells and fades, ebbs and flows, makes you seasick and sticky with sweat. Your clock has stopped working, and the dark does not betray the time. You strain to look out into your street, but can see nothing. You do not want to open your front door. You decide you will leave in the morning.

It is dawn, and you are driving. There is not a soul in sight, and the morning light makes the landscape look like a yellowing newspaper. You have left your boxes back at the house which has nothing wrong with it, though you are now secondguessing this decision—the absence of objects in the back seat makes you feel painfully exposed. You pass the antiques store, and the CLOSED sign has been replaced by a skull. You are driving. And you are driving.

And you stop.

There’s the sign again, faded like an old postcard, which has now switched to face the town and not the main road. You are not looking at the sign, though. Mostly, you are looking at the skulls.

They are placed neatly side by side in a manner that blocks the road, and then wraps around in a vast formation that you suppose must encircle the whole town. They are all facing inwards. Many are, like those you saw on the porches, cow skulls. Many are decidedly not. You do not feel well. You step on the gas.

You open your eyes at the sound of your pen rolling off of your desk and hitting the floor. It is the third day, and you have fallen asleep over your papers. You mustn’t let your imagination get the best of you. You think of going down to the diner for a coffee, but there isn’t enough time.

It is the third night.

You are standing, though you don’t remember standing, and you are looking at the wall where the windows should be. There is the sound again, the awful sound, and it is louder than ever. It is the sound of snapping tendons, and behind it, something long and yawning and awful, like the rising and falling scream of a tornado siren. You realize, suddenly and fearfully, that they are here for you—naturally, they are here for you. You do not have a skull to keep you safe, and so they know precisely where you are. You are afraid, you think, but you cannot hear your dread over the sound of the sirens. It seems absurd to deny the fact that you are the thing that is wrong with this town, because you are the thing that has changed.

You open your front door.

The first things you notice are the birds.

This is your best approximation of a word to describe the creatures, but really there is very little to them but bone. They are tall, taller than the houses, with sickly white bodies and beaks carved sharper than steak knives, their legs too thin and too long. There are hollow pits in place of their eyes. They are walking the streets slowly, like diligent scavengers, and there are a great many of them, maybe thirty, maybe a hundred, maybe more. The sound, deafening now that you have no walls to shield you, is coming from them, though their beaks remain

closed—it is as though it is emanating from each putrid ribcage. At the sound of your door, they all turn to you. They have been waiting for you.

“It is the sound of snapping tendons, and behind it, something long and yawning and awful, like the rising and falling scream of a tornado siren.”

The second thing you notice is the feeling of pierced flesh, like you are being stapled to a signpost.

You are taken apart, piece by piece. It is a loud and unsightly process for such a quaint and quiet place. You should be ashamed.

After some time, once you have been adequately removed, the scavengers withdraw, and the town is quiet again. The doors along your street, along all the streets, open one by one. The people step outside, and they retrieve the skulls. They shut their doors.

By morning, the street is so clean as to have never been tarnished by you at all. And the town is as it has always been.

AJ Di Nicola i am fully—

i am fully aware (of the air right now and the hint of orangepurpleblueexplodingred that lingers so would you Please take a few steps further back into the hallway—)

, thank you

, now can you leave ((which means (you shouldn’t see splintering white you can’t ) pl,ease i beg ) get out get ouT geT OUT i do not Care if you Care anddontmakemehaveto—)

—stab you in the eye with unconventional,love, if necessary i will move back to terrestrial hell if necessary i will shove black dowN yoUR tHROAT if necessary(understand that) but

now there’s hues , (h)yous , hues ( oh , )

thedoorisclosed and youare gone ; there is only faded scarlet

Sheppard Braddy Hangman in the Closet

I’m playing hangman in the closet.

Yelling, no more yelling

Only letters

A loud thrash. A lamp, I think falls and bursts

Accusations and slammed doors

No more yelling

She’s there with me

Playing hangman in the closet.

Letter by letter

We almost spell the outside noise to silence

The lights flicker back on

And the door opens

I can see the tears on my hands and lap

It’s safe now.

Sunrise and morning again

And we’re walking to breakfast at Bluebird’s with Dad

Tearing frills off my napkin

I look down

And think about the unfinished game of hangman—

I don’t remember what they were fighting about anymore.

Nelumbo

Orion Whitcher

Charcoal and Graphite

Rose Palma Ceremony

The sea and a wedding dress you’d never wear, A cold fire casting embers against skin

The words on the tip of her tongue burning, blistering, blue.

A dream you had of when she left you in the forest without looking back

Only this time she’s closer, closer, reaching out from October, never saying anything quite like love —

The sun’s gone down in the arms of a girl you once loved, you have this unspeakable feeling she’s not the one you’re marrying.

Maybe the dress is a joke, a parade of intimacy she’s never wanted and

At the altar you’ll see that desolate campground and her eyes, ice just beginning to thaw

The sound of ice splintering— She holds her hands out to you in offering.

She’s got a knife and a roll of bandages. Right or left?

You rest your head in the divot where neck meets shoulder Remembering the one smile that reached her eyes:

I might love you if everyone else wasn’t watching.

It’s the same as always —

The press of the blade at your back lips against your ear, a whisper but never a promise.

Ciara Orness Diana’s Bath

Diana sat in her study with her laptop open. The cursor blinked and she looked at the words she had already written:

We are so consumed by tales of haunted houses that we forget to remember that it can be the land that is haunted. In 1815 the Hersch family lost their two oldest children after they went out to Diana’s Baths—in their journal they refer to them as the “fairy pools.” The father, James Hersch, a priest in Conway, found his children dead in the baths. He believed that evil spirits played a hand in his children’s deaths. That Sunday he preached to his congregation: “Be wary of the evil spirits of this land.” He was found dead in the forest that Monday by his wife Ann. She became a recluse. Her youngest daughter, Elizabeth, took care of her mother. She wanted to be a writer and so we have many documents from her. Their deaths, too, were mysterious. Elizabeth wrote about her mother’s death. However, it is difficult to tell the difference between what is fact and fiction in her writing.

“Bill asked us to sign for a package that’s supposed to come today. He said he’s working a double.”

“Soooo typical.” Lilly loved talking to her mom about Bill; together they made stories up about him. They would guess what he did for work, and question if he ever had a wife (her mom claimed that there was no way he ever did). Lilly wanted to know what went on in the dirt-frosted windows of his house. Sometimes Lilly felt bad for guessing that Bill was probably a murderer, but then her mom would one-up her saying that

he wasn’t just a murderer but a cannibal living in Truckee to pay a twisted homage to the Donner party. Lilly knew Bill had never done anything to deserve these theories; he had only ever been nice to Lilly and Diana. He just didn’t say much. He offered them eggs every week (and her mom always accepted), and waved hi to them when he saw them. Lilly hated to admit it, but she didn’t like Bill. The stories had created something in her, and her stomach would fall whenever she saw him.

“I can keep an eye out. Did he say what it is?” Lilly knew that he didn’t, but she wanted to know what her mom thought it might be.

“Just a pair of eyeballs and a kidney. He finally told me he sells organs on the black market.”

The package ended up being a small box from Amazon.

Diana heard Lilly enter the house and she began packing her bag faster. She didn’t know why she was trying to hide what she was doing. Her daughter would know. It was September.

“So, you don’t even tell me when you’re going to New Hampshire anymore?” Lilly stood in the doorway. Her face was blank, but Diane knew that anger was under the surface. It didn’t matter. Lilly was better without New Hampshire. She was better without knowing. Bill would be here. He would make sure she stayed safe.

So she replied: “I’m not gone yet, am I?”

Lilly rolled her eyes. Diana remembered having to get Lilly to stay with family friends before she was in high school. It had been difficult to find friends for Lilly to stay with—Diane knew what people thought of her, holed up in this tourist

town, staying inside through the winter, doing her research. Whenever someone would ask about her research she would wave it down. Lilly thought that she just researched New Hampshire—and she did. But Diane’s main body of work? It wasn’t finished.

“When are you going then?” Lilly asked.

“Flight is at midnight.” It was 8:15. Diana knew better than to tell her too far in advance.

“For how long?”

“We’ll see.”

Her mom left for the airport 45 minutes later, and Lilly didn’t have anything better to do than go to sleep. It was always hard for her to fall asleep in September. The street was empty now, except for Bill. There was no laughter coming from the lake, and no hope for even going in the lake anymore with the first snow on the horizon. Instead the forest commanded a silence that seeped into the house. The cottonwood and aspen leaves would latch like glue onto the bottom of her shoes coming into the house with her, making the house the forest’s domain.

Lilly put on a show and let herself fall asleep to it.

She woke up, sitting at the edge of her bed. Her head was tilted, looking at Bill’s house, as though she were a puppet. There was a light on in his garage. She couldn’t see into it; the glass was too fogged over with dirt, but the light was distinct. She’d never seen the light on. Her own TV was off now, and the darkness of her room made the light seem brighter. She felt a pull to it. She didn’t want to stop looking at it. If her mom were home she would run into her room, and make up some story

about how Bill was probably in there planning a murder, and they would laugh and she would feel guilty. But, without her it was real. Bill could really be in there doing something a true crime podcast would eat up. The light in the garage switched off and darkness came over the neighborhood. Lilly sat in it. She wanted to know and she didn’t want to know. She couldn’t even move her fingers, but her mind raced. She wasn’t going to go over there. She wished her mom would stop with all the stories or wished that Bill would move or wished that her mom was at least there with her.

The sun was shining in the morning. Her head hurt and her face felt puffy and sore from the night before. She made herself a cup of tea, determined to shake off the night before. Determined to believe that last night was just a dream or an overactive imagination. She sat on the porch, hoping Bill would come out with a cup of coffee. There was no point hiding in her own house. Maybe they could strike up a conversation. And then Lilly could remind herself that Bill was not a cannibal. He was her neighbor and she had no evidence other than her mom’s stories to be afraid. He was normal.

Bill knew she was there, and they both knew no one else was here. It was really convenient that of all the houses on the street, the two that people lived in here year round were across from each other. She looked at the Murphy’s house next door. They hadn’t come back this summer. The summer before the Murphy’s dog, Jack, had drowned in Donner Lake—another innocent body at the bottom of the lake.

“The forest commanded a silence that seeped into the house. The cottonwood and aspen leaves would latch like glue onto the bottom of her shoes coming into the house with her, making the house the forest’s domain.”

Bill did come outside. Lilly wanted to wave. She would even be okay with just bringing her hand up in a greeting. Even a smile would suffice. Just anything to invite him to speak, but her hand wouldn’t move and her mouth wouldn’t stop blowing on the already cold tea.

“Good morning,” Bill called out, interrupting Lilly’s train of thought. She looked up and knew her eyes were wide and scared. She composed herself.

“Good morning.”

“You know, I had this dream last night that you and your mom moved out,” he said.

“Weird, don’t think we have any plans to.” Lilly tried to cheer up her voice. But, it was barren and getting colder.

“Oh no, I hope not. It’s great to have someone else on the street that lives here. Makes me feel a little less responsible for all the other houses,” he said. He was right. One winter so much snow had piled up on a part-timer’s house that the windows collapsed in. Her mom and Bill had called the family, and instead of coming out, the family asked if Diana and Bill could be the point of contact for when they got contractors to come out. They had agreed.

“Well, I better get to it. Good talking to you, Lilly.” He retreated back inside the house. A leaf stuck to his foot, following him in.

Diana could feel the difference in the air the second she stepped outside the airport in New Hampshire. She breathed the air in, letting the cold infiltrate her down into and past her lungs. Letting air give power. It smelled as it should; changing leaves have a distinct scent: fresh and hauntingly woodsy.

When she was here she found it hard to check her phone. Even text her own daughter, even though she was here for her.

It’s what she told herself. She had no evidence that coming here was doing anything. Except that she was still alive. And that Lilly was still alive. That was enough for Diana.

Her rental car acted as a thin barrier between herself and outside. A safety belt for her to remember why she was here, to not become consumed by the smell of white pines. She went to the house first: her childhood home. She liked returning here and seeing how the world changed it each year. The driveway was long, covered in leaves with salt hay sprouting out in the widening cracks of what was left of the asphalt. Bloodroot had long ago taken over the front yard. It was fitting. She could see the house, the blue door, with juniper and birch trees brooding over, framing it like a story. Ivy twined into and through the windows, taking over. She called Lilly.

“Hi honey, how was your night?”

“Her rental car acted as a thin barrier between herself and outside.

A safety belt for her to remember why she was here, to not become consumed in the smell of white pines.”

“It was fine. I woke up looking at Bill’s house. He had the light on in the garage. It freaked me out. Wish you would’ve been here.” Diana scolded herself. She wished she had been there too. It was a fine line she was walking, telling all the stories she told about Bill. She needed Bill to help keep Lilly safe. But she didn’t need Lilly to like Bill.

“Yeah. That is creepy. I bet he—”

“No, Mom. Stop it. I don’t want to hear that.” Lilly’s voice was strong. It shocked Diana and she waited.

“I have enough money to come to New Hampshire. I saved up. It’s my money and I want to come.” Diana remembered the first time Lilly suggested coming with her. She had yelled at her. Her face was bright red. She had raised a hand up to hit her daughter. It was dangerous.

“No, I’ve told you no.”

“Why? I want to meet—” the line cut off. Diana looked down at her phone.

To meet her grandparents. She didn’t know why her mom kept them from her. She never talked about them. It was different from her dad. Her mom talked about her dad. Told her how he didn’t support her research and how he thought she was stupid. Her mom said he was a narcissist. Oh, she knew all about her dad, except for knowing him. It didn’t matter. She didn’t want to know him. She wanted to know New Hampshire. It made no sense. Her mom did research on the history of New Hampshire, and yet it was off limits. One time when Lilly had pressed her mom about what it was like to grow up there, she had stopped talking to her for three days. Lilly decided it didn’t matter. Maybe the line was cut off or maybe her mom didn’t want to hear it. It didn’t matter.

Lilly looked outside to the safe. It wouldn’t be her first time trying, but she was determined to let it be her last time trying. It was kept in the shed. A spot that Lilly had never quite understood as an ideal spot for a safe. It was impossible to get into the shed in the winter. Snow piled over it creating a new hill. When she was younger she took to sledding down it. Her mom caught her once and she was grounded for three

weeks. She hadn’t gone near the shed since. She only knew that it was in the shed because she had heard her mom talk about it in her sleep. Her mom hadn’t been feeling well, and so Lilly had made a garlic ginger soup for her. She brought a large bowl into her room and found her mom curled up in a ball, asleep. Over and over again she said: the safe is safe. The safe is safe in the shed.

The door to the shed swung open with a light tap. Inside she could see a burnt out light-bulb with a string dangling down into the middle. Below was a table. All across the table were etchings of trees and waterfalls and houses and just barely noticeable faces. They were inside the house and in the trees and falling down the waterfalls. The same two grimacing faces were repeated over and over again. At the center of the table was a blanket covering the safe. Lilly pulled it off and the safe sat there with its black sheen mocking her. It was like it was waiting for her to get some courage and open it up. There was a lock on it. She pulled at it and hit it against the safe. She tried her birthday, and then her mom’s. It stayed locked. Lilly groaned in frustration. She ran her fingers over the etchings.

“The safe sat there with its black sheen mocking her. It was like it was waiting for her to get some courage and open it up.”

“I was told you weren’t allowed in here.” Lilly turned at the voice. It was Bill, his dark figure against the sun setting behind him. Lilly didn’t have words. She was stuck. “You should listen to your mom. She knows what she’s talking about,” he said. Lilly stared at him. He blocked the entrance.

“How do you know?” Lilly finally got something out.

“I know more than you think,” he said.

“Then you should know.” Lilly took a step forward. She didn’t know what he should know, but she had to say something.

“That your mom doesn’t want you to know.” He took a step backward. “Listen, I know your mom doesn’t want you to go to New Hampshire. Your mom has her reasons, but I can’t stop you.”

Lilly walked forward and out of the shed. What the fuck. The wind was blowing, matching the turmoil inside of her. Her whole life she had barely talked with Bill, barely said a word to him and suddenly he knew more about her life than she did.

“9938.” Bill nodded toward the shed and walked away. She tried it on the safe.

There were three pictures inside: the first was a picture of a mother, father, and daughter. It was her mom and her grandparents. Diane looked like she was maybe ten years old. Her hair was in two pigtails. They stood poised next to a sign that read: Diana’s Baths. And beneath: White Mountain National Forest. The next picture was of a green house with a long driveway. She could just barely make out the numbers on the house: 9938. The third was another picture of her grandparents. This one must have been taken abruptly. They sat on a rock with their faces contorted, and twisted, with wrinkles crossing wrinkles. Behind them was a collection of waterfalls—of what must have been Diana’s Baths. Lilly kept looking at the picture, focusing on the faces they made. She realized that these faces were the same ones etched onto the table.

She booked her flight.

Diana had a text from Bill: She got in the shed. I’m sorry. I’m

so sorry. He failed. Of course he failed. He failed to believe in her research. He failed to believe in her. He failed to be a husband, a dad. She should’ve never let him live next door. Letting him watch Lilly grow up next door wasn’t revenge on him. It was stupid. She had known he wouldn’t be able to keep Lilly safe from this. From this house and her parents and truth and death and this. She had failed. She thought of the table, of all her etchings, of the pictures inside that would lead Lilly straight to the baths. She called him.

“You have to go with her,” she said.

“She doesn’t know who I am. She’s already creeped out, Diana. You need to stop this. Let her come to you. Tell her what happened. Tell her about your research. Tell her your theories. You have to tell someone. I know you were too scared to tell me. I know you’re scared to tell her. She is going to be okay.” Diana shook her head even though Bill couldn’t see it. She couldn’t tell her about the research or the baths or the spirits or her, as Bill called them, “theories.”

“Then I’ll tell her that you’re her dad. I’ll tell her that she needs to listen to you. I’ll tell her.” She was desperate and sounded like it. She didn’t care—she couldn’t care.

“No, Diana. This isn’t the way. I would love to tell her. I would love for her to be my daughter and not my neighbor. But this isn’t healthy and you know it. When you guys come back, then we can tell her. Good luck. I’ll see you soon.” He hung up.

Diana went to the baths.

They hadn’t changed. It was cold enough now that there were no tourists or even locals hanging around, and instead she was able to sit there and watch the water flow down and over the rocks. She remembered the blood. The water turned thick with blood and she could still see where first her mom had

fallen. The rock she had hit her head on untouched. Not even a drop of blood on it then. No stain as a reminder now. Her dad fell soon after, hitting that same rock. And again. Not a drop of blood. She shuddered as she brought her hand down to it, as though touching it would reveal stains that never existed. The medics had told her that it made sense that they hit the same rock. They had slipped and the head trauma was intense. They said there was nothing she could have done. They didn’t explain why the blood didn’t get on any of the rocks. Even then, Diana had known. She had seen the pools in the winter, the way that frozen circular discs spun. She had heard the tall tales about evil spirits in the forest. She had known even then. Her research only confirmed it and she was so alone. She couldn’t tell anyone. Bill didn’t know the full story. That was the true rift between them. It was easier to make him out to be the bad guy. From her research she knew that if she told them it would only end in death. She had done everything to keep it from Lilly, and yet she had failed. Of course, she had failed. Diana sat in the frigid water, numbing her toes, then her feet, legs and eventually her whole body.

She waited.

Ayanna Miller The Feast

When i go, take me down to the clearing in the woods. lay my body in the tall grass and let the still air envelop me, let the birds and the bears and the beasts of the forest come down, after a long life spent taking and taking and taking i want to give it all back, fingers stiff and outstretched let the foxes and wild dogs break open my skin, let the falcons pick the meat from my bones and let the insects make their homes in the dark corners of my body.

And after the feast, let the air become still again.

on pages 79-80:

The Red Willow

Zach Reinker Digital Art in Procreate

Hunger

Addison King

content warning: depictions of disordered eating and depression

We sway together in a house. Our house, with its purple exterior and wood flooring and the sound of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” emanating from a speaker in another room. We dance around, reveling in the empty space soon to be saturated with us. He is smiling at me, because of me, and I feel glorious. As we cross the beams of light shining through the window, I glance at my feet, careful not to step on his toes. Flames sparking beneath us, he spins me, and my head whips back to look at the fire, which licks at my legs, catching the hem of my skirt as I twirl. The flames spread across the floor, creeping up the walls toward the ceiling overhead. I drag him by the hand to the front door, flinging it open and pushing him out ahead of me. I have to save him. He sprints down the porch stairs, through the lawn of tall grasses and lavender into the street. Our friends wait for him with open arms, which he collapses into, coughing. I move to join them, but the deck collapses beneath me, wood splintering and the fire roaring. I look down and realize my body is gone, replaced by flame. No. I am the fire. And I am the burning house. I am burning myself alive. When I look up to check if he is alright, I see him embracing someone new. I watch as they wave to me. I wave in return and back into the house, inhaling the scent of burnt lavender. I continue to dance as the beams of our home, the supports holding me together collapse, the hopeful harmonies of the Wilsons serenading my demise until all is consumed.

I jolt out of bed, sitting upwards and clutching my chest through my shirt. The fabric is damp and sticks to my palm. John remains asleep next to me, undisturbed by my nightmare. My prophecy. How it is possible for him to sleep soundly while sharing a twin-XL dormitory mattress baffles me. As the initial

panic of the nightmare subsides, a wave of nausea arises, and an internal countdown begins. I am mere seconds away from being sick. My throat burns with stomach acid, foaming slowly upwards. I peel the sweat-soaked cotton sheets from my body, cold air almost painful against my bare skin. Careful not to wake John, I walk to the bathroom on shaky legs. The complete loss of control over the body comes on slowly. The process, in my experience, begins with the loss of appetite, moving to daily nausea spells, weight loss, brittle nails, cold flashes, increased bruising, and fainting in Professor Hunter’s Intro to Film Design class. If you wait long enough to seek help, you die. Death would be a relief, I tell myself. Embodiment is a curse.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror during my descent to the tile floor, and I do not recognize the person I see. She is gaunt, expressionless, with lifeless brown eyes underscored by dark circles. Her long brown hair is coated in grease, unwashed for more than a week now. As I curl around a toilet bowl, attempting to keep my retching quiet for the sake of the man I love, I know I must leave him. If I don’t push him away now we both will become consumed by my illness. His memories of my soft, lovely, healthy self replaced with a decaying body and unpredictable emotional outbursts.

I recall his loving words before I became truly ill: “Any opportunity to care for you is easily my privilege.” He could handle my panic attacks because he experienced those himself, but when it came to my troubles with eating, John had difficulty understanding. Some days he would stop by my dorm to let me know he was going to fast for twenty-four hours as an act of self-discipline, completely disregarding the enormous effort it required for me to eat even a single meal in a day.

“Death would be a relief, I tell myself. Embodiment is a curse.”

Men like John believe they can handle sick women, ignorant to the change illness causes. I refuse to let him wait around long enough to come to this realization. He would never look at me the same way if he knew how sick, how miserable I am. I love him enough to walk away, I tell myself.

Months later I sit in a similar position, huddled on the floor of my minuscule bathroom, a string of saliva hanging between my lower lip and the toilet bowl. I never thought leaving John would be the easy part. It’s the staying away from him that has been slowly killing me. Like ripping off a band-aid of codependency only to realize the wound has not healed and you are still terribly, miserably in love with someone you refuse to drag down with you.

My condition only grew worse in his absence. I sob, hideous gurgling noises arising from deep within my throat, the taste of bile lingering on my tongue. Once again, the contents of my single meal of the day are spilled into the porcelain bowl, a cruel reminder of what I cannot hold. Some days I can’t get anything down at all, even after picturing my mother pointing a gun at my head screaming “eat something, damn you!” The hunger isn’t there. Still, I wake each morning into a panic attack and rush to the nearest receptacle to empty the nothing from my system. I grip the roots of my hair and tug, hoping to distract myself from the burning sensation in my throat with a new discomfort. It is too easy to pull my hands through my hair, and when I look at my palm I am holding a lock of curls, dry and brittle to the touch. My nutritionist said this would happen if things continue as they have been.

“Please,” I sob to any higher power, inhaling tremulously like an asthmatic child throwing a tantrum. “Anyone who can hear me, I need this to stop. I can’t bear this pain any longer, I am so tired of fighting on my own. I don’t want to go out like

this. I want to live.” This is a horrifying discovery indeed. My wretchedness only increases in the silence following my weak prayer, the only perceptible change a sulfuric smell filling the bathroom. I look up to glare at the gods ignoring me, or where I think I would find them, only to discover a dark figure mirroring my position on the ceiling. I spend several moments frozen, staring at the creature in captivated horror. Its shape is vaguely human, and the longer I stare, the more it begins to look like me. Breaking from the trance, I scream, the sound ricocheting off the tile. My entire body shakes, and for a moment I believe I will faint. I must be mad, delusional from malnourishment. My hope that I am out of my mind is crushed as it speaks, voice garbled and dark, rapidly croaking out unintelligible syllables.

“What are—who are you?” I ask, attempting to shrink away into the cool green tiles beneath me. Tears slip from my eyes, lips quivering. I begin to inch subtly toward the door, the nausea rendering me unable to stand. Its language is indecipherable by my ear, but notably dead, possibly an indigenous North American language. It begins to change dialects; I am sure for a moment that I recognize Italian. I am almost to the door. After cycling through a few more languages, it begins to speak in a tongue I can comprehend.

“I am Ifera, a native of this realm. I exist to aid the tribes of this region in times of famine. What causes you to call upon Ifera?” I swallow the lump in my throat, the one that rises in an attempt to choke me when I ask for what I need. Ifera crawls across the ceiling, down the wall to sit facing me. I flinch. I want to leave, I want to run far away, but I look into its

“I never thought leaving John would be the easy part. It’s the staying away from him that has been slowly killing me.”

eyes and am rendered immobile once more. Its face vaguely resembles my own, though there is something distinctly inhuman, something dark about it.

“I need help. I’m sick and I’m dying. I eat and my body rejects the food, I don’t eat and my body rejects the nothing. The thought of eating repulses me, I haven’t felt hunger in weeks.” Ifera takes my hand, examining the brittle, yellowing nails, and the swelling of the attached arm. As it touches me, the pallor of its skin, if you can call it that, shifts until we match.

“What causes this ailment?” Ifera asks. I feel embarrassed by the reason, so trivial to an immortal creature. How could it understand?

“My mind is sick. In pain. It’s hard to care for yourself when you don’t care about yourself. My mind has punished my body so now it is sick as well.”

“Pain?” Its eyes glow brighter, and a new kind of chill runs up my arm. I pull back from Ifera’s grasp, its nails scraping against the flesh, leaving light pink scratches in its wake.

“Yes, pain. I tried to contain it, to limit the victims I inflict it upon. But I can’t handle it on my own anymore. I need a miracle cure.”

“I know well the sickness of the mind,” it explains. “One must be sick of mind to dare call upon Ifera. You are not the first mortal to call upon Ifera to prevent starvation.” I gather from its use of ‘mortal’ that Ifera has existed longer than I can comprehend, unable to die, possibly because it was never alive to begin with. Who knows how many civilizations it has saved from starvation?

“How can you help me? I don’t understand how this works, no one has answered my prayers before.” I am still shaking, from

fear or a cold flash, I cannot tell.

“I hunger always. It is a gift. For hundreds of years, I have hungered. Under my protection, you will be cared for. I will eat for us, nourish both our beings in this host body. But you must invite Ifera to be your occupant.”

“I won’t feel like this anymore? The nausea, the anxiety, you can make it go away?” Hope flickers in the pit of my stomach for the first time in months.

“All you must do is provide me a home in your body.” I pause. This is undeniably a horrible idea, a mistake I am making. But as I go to say no, a new wave of stomach acid encroaches on my throat, and after dry heaving over the toilet once more, I look Ifera in the eyes. I am desperate.

“I will host you, Ifera. I invite you to exist in my body if in return you can make me stop feeling this way.” Its eyes glow a brighter gold, and I shield my own.

“No. You must look, allow Ifera to enter through the eyes.” I lower my hand reluctantly, taking in Ifera’s appearance. The edges of its shape begin to dissipate, blurring with the fluorescent lighting as its face seems to draw closer to mine, though it hasn’t moved at all. There is no turning back. It glows brighter and brighter until I am blinded by it. Then, the light is gone, and the figure before me disappears. It is inside me. Only a few hours later, after flushing the bile and scrubbing my skin pink in a scalding shower, a knock comes from my bedroom door.

“Who disturbs us?” Ifera asks. Since entering through my eyes, her words have become internal, intertwined with my thoughts.

If not for her odd way of speaking, I might mistake them for my own.

“My roommate, she lives down the hall. Nothing to worry about,” I say. “Come in!” Her head peeks around the door, which is covered with horror movie posters and outdated maps. She is dressed as a pirate wench, an eyepatch flipped up over her brow.

“Were you just talking to yourself?” my roommate asks.

“Aren’t I always?” I retort. This makes her smile. I talk to myself with such frequency, she accepts my answer without further questioning.

“Are you feeling up to going out tonight? We can stay in and watch a scary movie if you’d like,” she asks. Ever the caretaker, she takes the evening’s temperature. For the first time in weeks, I am not feverish. Ifera has made sure of that.

“And miss out on Halloween? Do you know who you’re talking to?” I ask. Satisfied with my answer, she returns to her room to complete the winged eyeliner on her unpatched eye. As a result of my recent reclusion, I have no costume prepared. With nothing but a white satin dress and a bottle of coagulated blood from a previous costume, I transform myself into Carrie White, fresh from the prom. My roommate elects to drive us herself, permitting me to drink as I please.

“For the first time in weeks, I am not feverish. Ifera has made sure of that.”

“We’ll eat after the party, okay? I haven’t been grocery shopping in weeks, so we don’t have any food in the apartment right now. Maybe there will be something to eat there?” I tell Ifera.

“We will feed soon enough.” I am satisfied with her answer. Though we are ravenous, the promise of one night of costumes, candy, and Halloween pop music is too enticing to pass up.

The college house is packed with the loud, sweaty bodies of partygoers pressed closely together. I stand on the deck with my roommate and a handful of stoners, passing a pipe between us. We huddle together beneath the overhanging roof. I can hear Ifera mumbling in my psyche, overwhelmed by the sound of laughter and the thumping bass of “Heads Will Roll.” The end of October air pinches at my bare legs and arms, rain pouring down mere feet away. I look back into the house, observing my classmates in their revelry. I hold a drink in my left hand, a mixture of rum and cola in a handmade mug I found in the cupboard. The house was being rented by a group of art students, the mugs discernibly crafted in the pottery studio on campus. By the time we arrived, any disposable cups were already in use, the demand far outweighing the supply. The sliding glass doors of the house are entirely fogged up, condensation thick between the cold autumn night and the body heat of a hundred intoxicated undergraduate students.

My eyes stop scanning the crowd when I see John. He stands with his old friends, the ones he would shit-talk behind their backs. Standing closest to him is his girlfriend, the one who came before and after me. Their bodies face one another, the distance between them ever decreasing. My grip on the mug tightens. She looks stunning, kind, easygoing, and he looks at ease. I no longer remember if he ever looked this relaxed around me. He puts a hand on her waist, pulling her into his side. The mug in my hand shatters, shards slicing through my palm, crimson oozing from the wound. Conscious of my gaze, he catches my eye, and I turn quickly away.

“I’m gonna find a first aid kit, you stay here,” I tell my

roommate. She nods, hardly listening, her red glassy eyes focused on the pipe in circulation. I dart into the house, elbowing past groups of friends, and make my way to the nearest bathroom. I stumble upon the master bedroom, a feminine space decorated with warm string lights, stacks of poetry books, and dried flowers. I hear the door open and close behind me again. John pushes his mask to the top of his head, revealing light blue, troubled eyes. I find most blue eyes to be aggressively bright, but his are a soft shade, inviting me to pour out my pent-up feelings. My fingers twitch, arm jerking forward slightly. I am overcome with the desire to touch him, to run my fingers through the blond tresses and watch as we melt into one another. Like we used to. As he approaches, I am overcome with a hunger I have never experienced before.

“You shouldn’t be here.” I avoid looking at him as best I can, focusing my eyes on the cut. For someone with a love of horror movies, I should be less squeamish at the sight of my blood. Something about the proof of mortality sends me spinning, reminds me that I do not want to die. That I have allowed Ifera to make a home inside my body proves this. How else could I justify hosting a spirit? A demon? A god?

“I wanted to check if you’re alright,” he says, his deep, melodic voice never wavering. Tears threaten to spill. God, I hate that he can still make me feel like this. He loves to hold me when I do, to feel like he is protecting something fragile. But he can’t protect me anymore. He hasn’t been able to for a long time now. How can anyone protect you from yourself?

“I’ll be fine, go back to the party and enjoy yourself.” I toss the broken mug into the bin below the sink and run the water. The basin is momentarily stained red, hot water stinging the open wound.

“You’re bleeding,” he says.

“Hadn’t noticed.”

“Let me.” He takes my arm, turning my palm toward the ceiling.

“Yes, you are wounded, let the boy assist you.” I give in to John and Ifera’s wishes, letting myself be cared for. His touch is warm and gentle, the feeling of his hand on mine calling upon memories stored in the nerves there. I swear, he vibrates with such life that I can hear his pulse, steady and enticing. Ifera’s presence makes itself known within me, willing me forward, and I find myself leaning in toward him, a victim of his gravitational pull. He retrieves a first aid kit from under the sink, cleaning the cut and wrapping my hand with gauze. The sting of the alcohol burns in a way that is almost pleasant. I wonder what his girlfriend would think if she saw the way we still look at each other. With so much hurt and care and longing encapsulated in a momentary glance. I try to keep from prying, from acknowledging the truth of our situation, but the combination of the silence and feel of his caring touch unravel me.

“ASK.” Ifera’s insistence doesn’t help, either.

“Are you back together with her?” Through my watery eyes, he looks angelic, blonde hair forming a halo in the warm light of the room. He refuses to look at me as he answers.

“Yes. I’m sorry if that hurts you,” he says. If. If words could kill, “if” would. He seems ashamed, embarrassed of himself. I stay silent. If I open my mouth now only cries will spill out. The only

“For someone with a love of horror movies, I should be less squeamish at the sight of my blood. Something about the proof of mortality sends me spinning”

way I ever got him to communicate with me was by creating a silence for him to fill. “Turns out I’m not very good at being alone.”

And what a way to fill the silence. He isn’t good at being alone? As though I have fared so much better on my own. This revelation impacts my ears like a kick in the teeth, shattering my perception of John and our relationship. Did he ever love me, or did he just need the company to distract from his loneliness? I don’t know who I pity more in our situation: him, her, or myself. How sad, to think that my former favorite person harbors so much self-loathing that he cannot be alone with himself. How sad to think he feels the need to justify and downplay dating her to me. How sad to think he pursued me because he’s not very good at being alone.

This man does not serve you. He does not serve himself. A man with no purpose serves best as a meal, Ifera says, fueling my anxiety.

“Stop!” I cry. The force of my volume pushes him back a step.

“I’m sorry,” he apologizes, assuming I am speaking to him. I run my hand through my hair, lingering on the balding spots.

“Is that all you can think to say? You’re sorry? You’re sorry ‘if’ that hurts me? As though being with anyone else in the world could wound me more than her? You’re not fucking sorry.” I stalk closer to him. Under normal circumstances, I would not feel so emboldened, but now I am not alone. Now, I have Ifera. I grip his chin between my fingers, tilting his face down toward

“How sad, to think that my former favorite person harbors so much self-loathing that he cannot be alone with himself.”

me in a mocking manner. “You are a despondent, miserable man who can’t be alone with himself.” He is stunned into silence, hurt visible in his eyes. Good. Suddenly, I want him to hurt, want him to suffer as I have.

“Yes, wound him.” For a moment I forget about Ifera, her encouragement sounding like my own.

“Who followed who in here? I’m not the one lying to my girlfriend so I can be alone with my ex. That’s you. You did it to me at the beginning of our relationship, now you’re doing it to her. I can’t believe I was dumb enough to believe you were ever over her. It took you, what? A month after breaking up with her to ask me on a date? You never grieved either of us properly. It must be real easy to move on when you never fully devote yourself to anyone.” I stab at his chest with my finger, emphasizing each ‘you’.

“You weren’t around, you have no idea how long I—” He begins to argue, but I am quick to cut him off.

“Two months. Two months after a year and a half together? Didn’t take you long did it? To go back to what’s familiar and comfortable. It’s like you’re a freshman all over again. You don’t need to tell me you’re bad at being alone, I know. I see it now, it’s why you pursued me in the first place. It must be so easy with her, huh? I bet she never asks too much of you, just smiles and listens with open ears and legs to you talking about how life-changing trying shrooms was and how it took psychedelics to finally make you feel empathy.” A cruel smile strains the muscles in my cheeks. I know he is an empathetic person, but at this point, my desire for vengeance overcomes my reason. He takes a step toward me, raising his hands as though to push me or perhaps to grasp my shoulders. I catch his wrists in my hands, halting his movements.

“No.” This time, I hear Ifera’s voice pass my lips. John is near

twice my size, but the sound of his pulse and the hunger Ifera feels give me strength. With my newfound energy, I push him toward the bed in the center of the room. He collapses against the frilly, floral bedspread, terror in his eyes. I climb after him, straddling his hips, one hand placed around his throat. As I apply pressure my nails dig in, a rush of his blood oozes underneath them, and Ifera takes over, my vision going black.

When I come to, I don’t see John right away. I am facing the mirror above the sink. New blood covers my injured hands, and I busy myself with peeling off the bandage to clean the wound again. The gauze falls, revealing a completely healed palm. I turn it over once, twice in disbelief.

“Ifera, how is this possible?” When I look into the mirror, a shiver runs through me. My face and dress are soaked with gore, the white stained shades of pink and red. I wipe the blood from my lips, carelessly flicking it from my hands into the sink, splattering the mirror. I haven’t felt alive like this in months. What I have been doing is surviving, but this is living. My heart beats with the strength of two, my skin glowing like an expectant mother, a woman containing the life of another.

“Are you pleased?” My hair has regained its healthy shine, and when I reach my hand to the back of my head, the thinning spots are gone. I smile at my reflection with blood-stained teeth, and the first appearance of my dimples in months has me laughing.

“Pleased is an understatement. But how did you do it?” In the reflection of the mirror, I spot him on the bed.

“I have nourished us.” I turn to look at John’s emaciated body, once my home, my love, my comfort. He has been ripped apart at the neck and the abdomen, skin peeled back to reveal

wet, red innards. Gently lifting the covers, I bring them up to his chin, tucking the edges beneath his shoulders. With his body covered, he almost looks peaceful, as though he could be sleeping. I smooth the comforter with my palm, staining it red, the floral pattern watered with his blood. I crawl onto the mattress next to him, holding him tightly against me, sobbing into his chest. I want to remain by his side, but Ifera knows better.

“They will come for us. We must go, now.” Finally, I press a kiss to his forehead, the worry lines erased now and forever.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to take it this far, I never intended to hurt you. I tried, I tried so hard not to, to stay away, but it wasn’t enough.” I am overtaken by a violent sob, constricting my throat and preventing further apologies from spilling like poison into deaf ears.

“He cannot hear you. By feeding I have freed yourself from his clutches. You may now travel anywhere you wish, have any being you desire,” Ifera reprimands.

“Just not him.”

“No. Not him.” With one last glance at John, I wipe my eyes and exit the room. The music coming from the living room bombards my senses, dulling the volume of my internal dialogue. I am covered in blood. No one gives me a second glance. I exit the front door, into the cold and rainy night. Never looking back. I can never go back to my old life, but for the first time in months I am full, and I am healthy. The choice seems natural. Soon enough someone will open the door to the bedroom, likely with the intent to fuck on a stranger’s bed, only to discover John. The shock will take his new/old girl some getting used to, but I’m not worried. She’ll live.

Lack of Moral Fiber

Ruth Liebendorfer

I raped the cuckoo’s nest, Not you;

And that’s the last time I screw your head on too loose. Watch out—

Tinnitus comin’ in Smart dressed, some recluse

Pulverized and puttering; Let’s count our lotion-wet hands, Get the guns salivating— You know, charming.

Practice makes a clicking noise In my jaw. Just testing the new bulb... Takes only me to screw it in.

I think I know that Jew joke from somewhere... Oh right. My fingernails.

Tidal-wave-like trampoline on What’s left of my tongue... Forgive me, father, Or don’t.

I’m not here-there-anywhere.

I’ve got the smoke screen and the Deadbeat bloodsheen down, But I lost my gimmicks, My showtunes, my rigamarole—

Oh, please let me pay you back! Let me show you these arrector pili, These shivs in my spine!

Don’t do that. Don’t rub it in. Now the stain thinks it’s yours.

Emily Wagner Invictus

Disclaimer:

This piece is not a work of fiction and comes directly from the life of the author. Please be aware that it involves graphic discussions of self-harm and severe mental health struggles. Suicidal ideation and disordered eating are also mentioned within the work.

It is three in the morning and I am in the graveyard. I am lying flat on the ground, letting water soak into my sweatshirt. My dog is beside me, a faithful guard. It is three in the morning and I am staring at the sky. I am shaking in terror.

“Out of the night that covers me,” I begin hoarsely. “Black as the pit from pole to pole,”

Yes, black like the sky, like the sky that would peel from the heavens and consume me if I stopped looking. I shouldn’t blink. Going outside was a mistake. As soon as the door closed the sky began to watch. All I could do was run from it, but there is no escape from that expanse, broken only by the shapes of buildings and trees.

Soon it would coil, like a snake. I can see it starting, curling like the edges of skin when you dig a fork into the soles of your feet, prying up flesh because that’s the only harm no one would notice. So what if you dig too deep, too tender, and walking is agony? Is it worse than living?

Maybe not unconquerable. I was three when I threw myself down the stairs on purpose. They were steep, sharp and they led straight toward a solid oak door. I don’t quite remember the reason I jumped but I remember the fall. A bump on my head, swelling to the size of an egg. The shame was catastrophic so I hid in the cupboard under the stairs, curled into myself, burying my face into Winston, a stuffed dog as big as me. No one could know, but I couldn’t stop screaming.

The doctors said there was a blood bubble in my brain, that it would explode if I kept panicking. The episode ended well, but I still didn’t know what to do with everything that lived inside me. Sometimes I screamed until I passed out.

“My head is bloody, but unbowed,” I say and the sky thrashes. I wonder when the last time I took my meds was. I didn’t stop on purpose this time, it just happened and the mania was so good. . .

My dog whines in concern. It’s cold. Maybe she fears the sky too. I lay one trembling hand on her back, stroke the soft white fur, the slightly rougher black spots. I’ve forgotten to feed her today, except for handing over the plateful of taco meat I didn’t let myself eat for lunch. I shouldn’t eat too much anyway. I’m fat enough already.

Sometimes I screamed until I passed out.”

I have to remember why I bother, so I continue. My voice is the only sound in the world.

“I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.”

“I still didn’t know what to do with everything that lived inside me.

“In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance. . . My head, bloody, unbowed—”

The sky loomed overhead. It really is going to coil around me like a snake.

I shouldn’t have let my dog stop me from jumping off the campus bridge last year. It wasn’t like I’d hurt myself. I would have been fine when I landed at the bottom of the ravine. It was like a pit, and all I could see was the pit anyway. A running leap—it was a brilliant idea. Genius. Poetic. An experience. How could I have ever wanted to die?

I was five when I told my mother I was going to kill myself. She acted immediately. Four different psychiatrists agreed. An extremely early-onset case of Bipolar disorder. A severe Anxiety disorder. Then came therapy. Why do you want to die? I don’t know.

Under the watchful eye of my mother I hid my self-abuse. Nothing traditional, no slit wrists. No, I stabbed myself with needles, I stripped the skin off the bottoms of my feet, I bit my nails till they bled, I’d pick at scabs I claimed were from falls until they scarred. I’d jump off the top of my bunk bed over and over and over and pray for the courage to leap out a window.

Water continues to seep into my clothes. “Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years . . .”

My first antidepressant and mood stabilizers at five. My first antipsychotic at six, my first anti-anxiety at seven. They tried to hold off but what could they do? Let me die? I was a hard

patient to medicate anyway. ADHD meds weren’t an option. I’d have to get off my mood stabilizers to take stimulants and they’d make my mood tank once their effects wore off.

The way my disorder functions is atypical. Many bipolar patients have more regular, predictable cycles of emotion that are unique to them. They could switch their meds— antidepressants versus antipsychotics—on and off as needed. I couldn’t.

Psychiatrists in America call it rapid cycling. Psychiatrists in London call it abnormally quick high to low swings. You can’t reliably medicate someone for depression when they’re depressed five times a day interspersed with four different manic episodes over the course of eighteen hours. Sometimes they’d last longer, weeks, months. But they gave me everything they could so the pills would be in my system when I needed them.

“You can’t reliably medicate someone for depression when they’re depressed five times a day interpersed with four different maniac episodes over the course of eighteen hours.”

In high school, it was my twin sister’s turn to fall to pieces. A personality disorder, OCPD. Whatever. Just another to add to the nefarious mix of mood and personality disorders, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, Autism, ADHD and whatever else made up the six people in my immediate family.

“Passing of the years. . . Finds and shall find me unafraid.” My dog nuzzles my arm. “I should really get up.” I say. I’m not sure I can stand.

Either way I can’t move. The sky is watching.

I wasn’t scared of being on my own in college. Nobody to watch me. . . Nobody.

I drew hyperrealistic eyes and pasted them on the walls of my room along with pictures of my family. Watching, watching, watching. I wasn’t scared. I was fine, really. Stopped taking my meds once during my freshman year but I got back on them, passed my classes with flying colors and I made friends and I had a life.

Sophomore year, Covid. Alone in a narrow little single with my dog. I stopped taking my meds. I rolled over in bed a few times a day to turn on my computer and attend class with the camera off. I didn’t shower for weeks on end. My acne was a mess of scabs. Once every week or so I brushed the matted, stinking mess that was my hair. I’d lose a handful whenever I bothered. My friends noticed; how could they not? But I tried to clean up a little every time I saw them.

I wouldn’t be prepared for classes. I was so weighed down by existence I couldn’t move and so I would freak out. I would purposely work myself into near daily panic attacks. Shaking. Crying. Throwing up. The works. After that I could move. The fear made me functional. I passed my classes. My dog kept me alive.

Then came finals. I snapped. A mixed episode. I was depressed and manic at the same time. It was the kind of mania that itched in your bones and made your brain jump. It was the kind of depression that renders you immobile, but I had to move, but I had to stay still. But I had to—and then the sky was too small and I was a passenger in a car that was too suffocating and all I could do was scratch scratch scratch. Because I wasn’t real. Because jumping into moving traffic, ripping my clothes off and feeling the blessed relief of being

hit by a goddam truck wouldn’t be as great if it traumatized my friends for life.

The mirror in the car showed a face that wasn’t mine. I poked. I prodded. The skin was dull. It wasn’t mine. I was a flesh puppet, powered by the dim flicker of consciousness that remained in me, the little voice wailing in the far, far back of my head. I was loose at the joints. I scratched. Thank God my fingernails were already bitten short. Blood wouldn’t have stopped me.

The car reached our destination. I got out. I screamed. I shook. I sobbed. I wasn’t real. My parents lived in London, my therapist was unreachable, my pills were at my dorm and I wasn’t real. Crying, hyperventilating and eventually I came back to myself. I existed again. That wasn’t before I stabbed a fork into my hand and twisted, just to make sure I was alive.

I took my exams two days later. I passed. One B and 2 A’s. That fucking B will bother me for the rest of my life.

My dog barks. I’ve been out too long. The sky lay in wait, wavering on the edge. I might be able to get up soon. The headstones around me are clearer now, the trees are darker layers of blackness.

“I took my exams two days later. I passed. One B and 2 A’s. That fucking B will bother me for the rest of my life.”

“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. . .”

Extra therapy helped. Sixteen hours a week at the London clinic plus regular meetings with my US therapist and

psychiatrist. And so they cleared me. And so I am here. I am in the graveyard at three o’clock in the morning and the sky is still. I no longer shake.

A Taste Another Tomorrow

Zach Reinker Digital Art in Procreate

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

A Free Couch

Ruth Liebendorfer

Self-inflated search party

Abstract, not ambidextrous

Pilfering the wallowsphere

Discount hallelujah, I confess

It’s bleak to sell tomorrow

Restless, diem per diem

Hobgoblin and harrowfeels

Blind oak, harsh palm

Whales breaching security

Crying like before, in the anteroom

Ape-replacement theory—yawn

Not alkaline, just tenterhooks

Aquachlonic, hydrofeeling

Espionage gets talons teething

Crooked pasties amplified

Portage breakout, old wildfire

Elementary my dear:

Rabbit ears of bent up rage

Harkening the mindless “if”

Fortitude for empty’s sake

It’s okay to make no sense

Why else would—it—be—

… Hello?

Oh, I think I lost you.

Icarus on Fields of Gold

Sam Mosher

A figure stands atop a pyre of petrol and pines, it’s sooted skin in supplication to the phoenix-light about. A bear long dead and gone rests on the white and crimson that drapes the figure’s shoulders. Overhead the sky sits sore-red soft upon a crucifix of ashen clouds and paints the hills an effigy of coal. The wind shrieks but there is no one around to hear, the angels have long since left their city. The figure only hears the burning, the rustle of embers in its ears.

It turns and struggles to its throne of oaken barrels and whispered windshield glass, shattered cinder blocks and blackened rinds of orange. The wreckage bows and shifts ss the figure stumbles, grabbing the back-bent vines, their length long spent of every drop.

Silver lenses veil the flames flickering from its eyes, a heat that pulses its very being. Nine once pristine great white letters lay littered and forgotten, their seared expanse as cracked and torn as the glistenless earth they lie on. The ash lacerates the figure’s feet as it collapse to its seat, upon the final rusted monument of swoops and golden gates, a condemnation amongst the sea of soot and stars and stripes.

Rainbow Plant Genus Byblis

In Memoriam

Rose Palma

He’s dying and I just turned seventeen. Wrapped up in wires like an octopus caught in a net, He smiles, asks if I’ve had a boyfriend yet. Well, I had a girlfriend. We broke up. It wasn’t safe for her to come out to her family. After a year, her parents had caught on. I knew it when they looked at me Like I was going to dig through their silverware drawer And take home the life they had planned for her.

That’s how my first love was, too.

There were no words for it back then, Just summer nights, the cabin in the woods, the cicadas’ song. He couldn’t fall asleep next to the boy he loved. He heard the dog barking, followed it outside Where it had crept all the way under the porch.

He called out and the forest called back. It was a woman’s voice ringing in his ears. The voice of the forest; guilt, that buried itself in his abdomen. The tumor had been growing for ten years, But he recognized it as the feeling He carried with him his whole life. In the hospital, the voice softened to provide him comfort, As everything returns to the earth from which it came.

Wings Left to Mend

Aidan Paschal O’Dwyer

When we were birds we flew up until we hit the fan, or the window.

Ladders raising failed to reach in autumn skies to where our feathers soar suspended. Bones clatter—

wicker baskets—

on the floor until we take flight again. When we were birds, black balloons flew even higher—possessions in ceiling corners— but we never tried again to fly as when we were birds.

Muddy, dirty boots

Remnants of loss

Upended, unearthed roots

A weighty cross

Scuffed with love

Smudges of dirt

Hanging high above

Deep scars; hurt

Walking for days

Worn in souls

A new phase

Lack of controls

The threads torn

Passion being razed

A mournful scorn

A blackened haze

Once good shoes

Alina Cruz

Alina Cruz

Digital

another tie of the sailor’s hitch

Cleo

Lockhart

what odd recurrences: I dreamt of the sea again and us just talking, wave-tossed. have you sailed, really sailed? like sun-cracked lips and tongue-in-knots sailed, not sure if you would jump toward sky or sea if a voice like eternity told you, swim.

have you been overcome by the weight of it all? I imagine something rests beneath us, sleeping, larger than a universe, small enough to hold in your hand and able to swallow you whole (though it won’t).

and were you to walk far enough southeast you could slip through the fog into heaven and if the gods resting out in the water sat up to stretch they could speak like you and I do again,

tongue and cheek instead of mist and high tide. mother of coast knows nothing of flesh born from clay, or from rib—she remembers crafting limb and skin and laughter from what seafoam she had to spare.

she sent us to the shore in sand dollars and shells, each body a coarse and imperfect venus. now she sends us home with the taste of salt on our teeth and sand between our toes, saying, here, have something to remember me by.

until the day we remember no more, and return to her again.

all this, though, is distant. for now, we talk. the ocean babbles at such frequencies as to snatch from the air and put them in your pocket, and in quietness we do the same,

as though nothing else could matter. and nothing does; here, your hands are wet. hold them to the sun to dry.

Marc-Anthony Valle MULBERRIES

Picking mulberries, Sepals catching bits of conversation— From rusty pals, Not used to conversating.

Rusty rails, And poorly painted ladders Scrape the walkway. Their feet create a mulberry wake when pulled.

I feel like I lost track of you,

He says, while shaking branches, Causing potential pies and jams, To fall and stain his boots, On purpose.

He takes from the scant-filled basket— Stained fingers, bluebelly lizards scuffle fistfuls Into back pockets. He does not like them, particularly,

But he knows that the longer they pick, The longer they will speak.

Van Gogh in the Garden

Collage Work of Vincent Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear, Gustav Klimt’s Country Garden with Sunflowers, and Joe Webb’s Star Man

Alison Keiser Oil Pant

for the snakes

Aurelia

Tittmann

even when you feel your body could almost be buzzing with insect-sized angels, even with splendid instructions illuminated in the meadowsweet and marigold, even then, there are still many accident-evils. for one, the dead frogs in the petshop, floating akimbo, and the beady-eyed fish circling their jars, coming brackishly apart. fish in fish-size jars and, another thing, the smell of highway, driving west in your smoke-engine and thinking desolation, desolation. you lay for untroubled hours on the sweetgrass hill, looking at the clouds, which make goodhearted nursery shapes, and, standing up, see where you’ve crushed the clover. clover will grow, but not this clover, and that is the cost of being a living creature. the mark in your shape. the way you thrashed and thrashed when you were new and didn’t understand about hurting. often, recently, when you are wringing your hands over some small misery, you think of yellow eyed snakes who are fed soft white mice, swallowing them whole, curling unsorrowfully away, readied for the long digestion. remorseless in the way of yellow-eyed snakes, glibly aware of the price. on purpose, in the way of nearly all animals. they keep themselves alive on purpose. enough weeping over necessary bereavements, they say. enough picking the fragments of snail shell from the treads of your sneakers one at a time.think of the things you will feed: dandelion roots, blind white larvae. and sooner, the scattered kindnesses committed while buying toothpaste, while turning left at the stoplight. anyone who has ever touched you very softly on the shoulder, what you must have done to make them love you like that. the mosquitos who adore you, before sleeping in the fetid, feverish places mosquitoes sleep,

who adore fervently your thimblefulls of blood. think of the things for which you are needed. the mites in your eyelashes, the winter spiders finding your bodyheat in the midnight house. the things that draw near to you. the mark in your shape.

Cellar Spider

Yonas Khalil Digital Photography

Addio Terra, Addio Cielo

Bobby Campbell

“Preface to the 1923 Edition of Arthur Garnette’s Collected Stories”

by Perceval Middlebrook

Perhaps the most beloved of all Arthur Garnette’s stories is “Our Man, Inventor of Poetry.” As many who pick up this volume are likely to already know, it is a long and unique tale about the discovery of poetry by a young man of labouringclass background. Its setting is nondescript, though its universal concerns inevitably allow it to be read in a local context, no matter the locality. Its premise, lofty as it is, would seem to necessitate an Antique backdrop. One might reasonably suppose that such a tale would need to take place in clay dark Babylon or Sumer or sometime before those societal outcroppings, in the pre-civilised Arabian Peninsula or somewhere along the Nile. But because such a supposition is reasonable, and because it is based on a logical succession of facts, it could never appeal to Garnette. We can glean from certain details in the story’s opening lines (the rusting clock, for example; the brass-buttoned coat; the cobblestone cottage; the inkwell and pen) that it takes place sometime between the late 17th and early 19th centuries. It is therefore overtly allegorical and intentionally fantastical. Poetry, of course, is not an invention history can record. Garnette himself often turned to the poets of the English Renaissance (Henry Authsbruck in particular) for inspiration, making his decision to effectively erase their historical contributions within the bounds of his work all the more daring.

In the story itself, “Our Man,” (the only title ever allowed its protagonist) “invents” poetry by mentally comparing the wind to a flowing river, and subsequently scribbling down that thought in a rhythm pleasing to the ear on a little slip of paper. He shares the lines with a friend, who is confused and unimpressed.

From here the story opens up, and Our Man becomes an habitual, almost compulsive writer, describing everything he sees in verse, and inventing new things for the sole purpose of writing about them. Sometimes, even, the writing precedes the invention. The middle section of the piece is concerned with a bout of Our Man’s sudden urge to compose, described in the terms of illness, within the stupor of which he writes what seems at first to be nonsense. He comes to, as it were, and reads what he has written, quickly interpreting the lines as instructions of some kind. He follows those instructions carefully and comes out the other side having invented wine. This too he shares with a friend, who recognizes its value much more readily than the initial invention of poetry, even if he is unaccustomed to the taste. Our Man writes more, and therefore invents more, whether the invention is wheat or the carousel, and he quickly becomes an influential but largely misunderstood member of his local community. The work closes with Our Man the Poet composing a few stanzas describing the process of crucifixion, a process apparently asyet unheard-of within the world of the story. Garnette focuses on the sweat dripping from Our Man’s face and onto the page, smudging the ink, before he ends his story abruptly, without another word.

Of the story, scholars have noted that it “preconfigure[s] English Romanticism by at least two decades,”1 and that Garnette’s “strong yet detached authorial voice, as well as his direct focus on pressing, foundational moral themes,” gives his

1 Tillman, Geoffrey S. Garnette on the World Stage, 71.

work “a tonal quality more in line with scripture than with the frothy prose of his contemporaries.”2 The language of his critics has only ever ranged from the dutifully analytic to the unapologetically devotional. “He has revised and cut down the great grey Creation Myth into something more like a Creativity Myth,” writes leading Garnette scholar Harrieta Locklin, “and for that we must all show our gratitude.”3

Garnette’s position in the canon is well-earned, but presents a unique problem for those of us with an interest in literature and literary study in the modern age. His overwhelming genius and compelling personal history has inspired very few true literary descendants and has given rise to many more doting, helpless imitators. Still, more than a century and a half after his early death, Garnette’s shadow continues to loom large. So large, in fact, that in some cases it prevents a bountiful harvest. It blocks out the sun.

Perceval Middlebrook, Ph.D. 1922, Cambridge, England.

2 Fitzmorris, Wilhem Ferdinand. “Arthur Garnette,” in Literary Eminence: Defining an Artform, Vol. 2., 234-235.

3 Locklin, Jr., Harrieta. The Consequence of Genius and Implications of Influence: Arthur Garnette, the Man, 2.

Our Man of the Canyon

A strange window sits in our man’s study. It sits at the center of the back wall, and it is round. It’s a small window, like a porthole, but flush with the wall. The window is surrounded on either side by two large square windows. They look like bullies by comparison. They’re crowding the poor little one in the middle. They’re making it nervous; they’re making it sweat. Or is that the sun? In the early autumn, before the leaves have turned, the heat gets immense around the Canyon. It’s an oily, hoary, aching heat, not worse than at the height of July but made worse because no one’s expected it since then and all their wardrobes and attitudes are out of touch with putrid, panting reality. The window could have expected it; it happens just like this every year. And the window never moves. So you’d think it might learn. But it is always so eager for respite when the first rainfall comes around that it lets itself underestimate the intensity of what has yet to come. And as a result it’s left there sweating—indeed, almost melting—under the full brunt of the sun. It’s left contracting slowly and microscopically, producing strange rainbow ripples in concentric circles, an effect very attractive to the eye and the impetus for pleasure to a romping mind. The sun glares down even through these concentric circles and lights a spot some few feet behind the room’s central desk. More often than not, it throws its light on an old wooden chair trimmed with gold.

This is our man’s favorite spot to sit, regardless of season, and when the sunlight coming in through the tiny window lightly burns the shape of his hand onto his cheek (whatever shape it might take that day) he fails to notice. Often these little shapes, like bunny ears or children’s turkeys, get confused for a ruddy complexion or fickle rosacea on our man’s face. But they are not any such thing. They are the hard-earned result of

sitting. Sitting and thinking. These two are our man’s favorite activities. He values them high above anything else.

Our man’s name is Samuel Hart. Please, become acquainted with him.

Samuel Hart did not cut a heroic figure. He did not cut much of any figure at all. All his life he had been wispy, and his newfound old age only served to heighten that effect in a more generous, literal sense. He lived his days in a large house’s sprawling study, situated within a kind of wood and stone turret-outcropping at the west end of the massive property, overlooking the Canyon. The house itself was empty of life but for a few similarly elderly servants, servants who felt paradoxically too important in their loyalty and station to condescend to speak to the master of the house. The size of the property was overwhelming to Samuel, who never felt smaller than when placed beside (or within) a mountain of wealth. He limited himself to the study like a boat too small for oceans limits itself to the harbor. Samuel got a lot of reading done here, and sometimes he played music, but most of the time he simply sat and thought. He hardly ever received visitors.

Often, to interrupt his sitting and his thinking, Samuel would glance at the painted portrait of Bach that hung from the wall. He thought the stern chubbiness of the composer’s face and especially the arching, obtuse angle of his eyebrows gave the great man a strange but unmistakable air of contentedness as if that figure who loomed over the study knew himself to have accomplished greatness, and necessarily demanded the same from others. Samuel felt sometimes that the painting expected too much from him. But he did not dare take it down. It had hung there in that study for at least fifteen years. He had brought it in himself. And he loved Bach. So he tried to force it

into inspiring him, looking at it from different angles, trying to catch a kinder, more motivational gaze. But most of the time he simply avoided making eye contact with the artificial, musty genius.

Around the room were other small indications of his tastes. His shelves were lined with volumes by his favorite authors: Luther Chess, Elizabeth Lerner, Arthur Garnette. The authors represented here were few, but the volumes from each were many. In two opposing corners of the wide room, he had pinned up pennants from the college where he received his musical education. He tried all these paltry personal decorations as a method of limiting the overwhelming opulence of the room, but any small sort of bauble he tried to introduce would only ever serve to exaggerate the room’s gaudiness by contrast. There were antique chandeliers to match the candelabras on the wall, and everything had been given a thick gold trim. Even the door (which was around the size of three average-sized men were those men to stand upon each other’s shoulders) had received a mother-of-pearl inlay and a sapphire-studded doorknob.

Our man Sam, you see, was the unlikely heir to a large fortune. His older brother had been a legendary oil baron in his time, the dominant force in the industry for the previous thirty years, and the untoppled target of hundreds of dirty bohemian trustbusters. The seed of that fortune had been planted just on the other side of the Canyon, where the elder Hart had struck it rich in black gold one day and never looked back. Soon, the enterprising young tycoon shifted his commercial interests towards distribution and marketing, allowing himself the

“He limited himself to the study like a boat too small for oceans limits itself to the harbor.”

respite from his grimy oil fields. He succeeded here too, due in part to his seemingly inborn talent for business but also thanks to the country’s steadily increasing dependency on oil. Good timing and shrewdness built him his empire.

His talent and patience did not make him particularly conservative, however, and he led his personal life with unscrupulous abandon. His unhinged spending sprees and constant debauchery were almost without limit. He was caught and exposed in his unmarried romantic affairs by journalistic tracts on more than a few occasions, and he held the most notorious parties anywhere west of New York City. He continued to live like this, in a fit of furious festivities and the endless beginnings and endings of new love, until he could no longer raise a glass to his lips or scrawl out a trite love letter. That is, until he fell deathly ill. His empire began to recede in eminence from the public eye as he receded further down into the depths of decrepitude. His detractors called his illness divine intervention. He never knew what they said. He had stopped reading the papers long ago.

In a revelatory fit of death’s-door wisdom, and perhaps with some degree of remorse for decades spent in decadence, the elder Hart had sent for his attorney and had his will altered. In the end, he bequeathed his entire estate to his youngest brother, on the condition that the elder’s two children be given a large sum of money every month, just enough so they wouldn’t have to work and could still live lavishly. Previous to the alteration, the will had only set aside for Samuel a Stradivarius Cello, one of only about thirty known to have ever been crafted. Samuel was indeed the musician of the family, but he played the viola—a distinction his brother never recognized—and the now-heirloom cello made him nervous. He had it sealed away and sent to some museum-or-other’s special collections archive.

The elder Hart’s remaining family consisted only of his

younger brother Samuel and his two children. The Hart brothers’ parents had passed away naturally some years before, and their only sister, the youngest of the family, had died in a horrific train accident at seventeen. And so, the largest oil empire in the nation was left to a couple of kids and an anxious violist. These two children (let it be known) were among the least prepared human beings ever to be forced to enter reality. They were the result of the oil baron’s marriage to his first wife, whom he had married before fortune found him, but they were each born after his meteoric rise was well underway. The kids were raised by servants in overbearing luxury and only saw their father on weekends, during the day. Of their mother, we know very little.

I was not privy to these survivors’ first meeting after the oil magnate’s death, but I am told that the children regarded the passing of their father less like a personal tragedy and more like the sudden dispersion of some long-treasured myth. Instead of a funeral, they had something more akin to a lecture on the real truth about Santa Claus, received in kind with crossed arms and pouting. Admittedly, it would have been hard for anyone to have experienced a real sense of personal tragedy regarding their father, and even Samuel found it difficult to grieve for his brother more than abstractly.

I am told that, during this meeting, the niece (whose name was Cassandra) and the nephew (William) sat in front of the huge mahogany desk newly inherited by Samuel. All three in the room were dwarfed by the desk, but Samuel’s posture and aloneness and obvious dearth of confidence there on the other side gave the impression that the two children opposite

“And so, the largest oil empire in the nation was left to a couple of kids and an anxious violist.”

him were some meters taller; certainly they were meters more frustrated. Cassandra, around ten years old at this time, and three years older than her brother, had all but ordered poor Samuel to allow the children to live the life she had wanted from now on. And Samuel, being of an easygoing, childless, solitary sort, agreed to it all.

Cassandra demanded that thousands of more dollars be added to their monthly sum, and Samuel submitted. She demanded a personal tailor, and he gave her one. He had intended to raise them himself, but Cassandra wanted each of them transferred to boarding schools, either in England or Europe. William was too young to go abroad, Samuel argued, and even in her eightyear-old fury, Cassandra could recognize that. She, however, would not abide staying in their dusty, rapidly emptying mansion, far removed from intelligent civilization, thank you very much, and would be leaving to receive vocal training. She would learn how to sing for the opera. She had already packed her bags. She also had no mind to let Samuel raise William on whatever bohemian nonsense he had learned at music school (she said “bohemian” with spite, like she had learned it from her father) and she forced her uncle to agree he would send the boy to a boarding school in the area and have him take lessons from an etiquette coach. All along the way, young William quietly nodded at intervals and kept his little arms crossed, perfectly mirroring his older sister.

This first meeting between the three of them went so poorly, and scarred Samuel’s skittish brain so deeply, that we might forgive him for not seeing the children as often as he could have in all the years since. He had planned to leave his life of hermit-like introversion, to step up to the plate, as it were, and raise the remnants of another man’s family, but instead, he had been frightened back into an asceticism more powerful than he had ever imagined. And so, he stayed in his study, he didn’t receive visitors, and he barely had acquaintances.

In the intervening years, Cassandra had once dropped in to inquire about some family holdings in the northeast. She wore a golden wedding band Samuel knew nothing about. Samuel wept. Cassandra left, and made her inquiry with a letter instead.

Although he spent the bulk of each day in the study, in the mornings Samuel walked along the edge of the Canyon. He liked the way the sunrise lit up all that sheer earthen geometry. Rock spires stretched upward and cut into the steel grey sky. Samuel counted them every time he walked here, making sure they all still stood. The Canyon’s orange glow was more like the ghost of an ancient red than it was an orange of its own. Our man Sam walked along that desolate color palette and through the years the effect it had on him never faded.

“The Canyon’s orange glow was more like the ghost of an ancient red than it was an orange of its own.”

Always, each and every time he walked along its edge, he felt split by the Canyon. By this, I mean that while he walked astride the borders of the chasm, he could somehow feel another version of himself walking its floor. That shadowSamuel down there, concealed from sight by the shadow of the Canyon’s walls, would hop over boulders and natural obstacles with an athleticism unknown to the Samuel up above. The shadow would keep pace and maintain a rough symmetry with the real Samuel, no matter what kind of strange paths he might take. Our man Sam had his own theories about this phenomenon. He felt that his shadow-self was the version of him all tied up and congealed into human history, the universal

projection of his individual spirit. That version of him was the vessel for all the pains and joys felt by all the people who had ever lived, for all those pains and joys he had been too reserved and too quiet to feel in his own life. His shadow could weep for all the sorrow that pervades history so Samuel didn’t have to, so Samuel could read a book about a tragedy without dying of grief. It could feel all the physical and emotional pains of growing old, so Samuel wouldn’t have to face them head-on. The shadow, he felt, was his connection to the earth, and to all the life that sprung from it. All the Canyon down below, he felt, was inextricable from that shadow, just as he was. And if any part of the Canyon were penetrated or mined or excavated, his shadow would feel pierced to the bone, emptied. And if a part of the Canyon were drilled for oil, his shadow would have to bleed.

The Canyon was a fixture in the lives of so many, but for a man as solitary as Samuel, it was inseparable from himself. Its presence never left him. Even when he settled back into his study at the end of his walks, he could feel its warmth through the window.

Samuel had sent for his niece and nephew one afternoon some twenty years after that original meeting, and in the meantime he sat and thought, patiently awaiting their arrival. He hadn’t seen them in many months; he hadn’t had a serious conference with the both of them in much longer. In nervous anticipation, he cultivated his latest sunburn by his favorite window. When his nephew William arrived, the young man used the great bronze knocker on the other side of the door, jolting Samuel to attention. William entered and made his way across the huge room, gradually over to the mahogany desk.

“William. Thank you for coming. It is wonderful to see you,” Samuel told him.

Lauren Caldwell

Digital Photography

Cloudman

“Indeed, Uncle. I am not exactly preoccupied. As you know, I am on holiday.”

“Yes. Where is your sister?”

“She is away. In Europe. Probably Prague by now. She’s gone continental. On her second grand tour of all the damned opera houses. You should hear her go on and on about Monteverdi. And all those damnable mountains. She loves Switzerland. Of course she does, is it any wonder? I thought she would have written to you.”

“She did not.”

“So it seems. And why should she? Her ways indeed are always mysterious but she must have more sense than the rest of us, to be elsewhere than here, as she is.”

“Well, I wish she could have joined us here today,” said Samuel.

“Why have you called me here, Uncle? Is the fortune finally dwindling? Has the chairman of the board been shot? Is the estate sinking into the Canyon? Of all the dusty, sunbaked, dehydrated towns in all the world, all the terrible, desolate ghost towns I could be taking my holiday in, what news could possibly necessitate my presence here?” William had now settled into the chair opposite Samuel, looking just as puffedup and immature as he did that day of their meeting twenty years previous. Although then, of course, Cassandra was there too.

“I had a dream,” he said. “I had a dream that Arthur Garnette sent me a letter.”

“All this for a dream? Garnette has been dead a hundred years,” said his nephew, with the special air of educated

dilettantism that said I have read about Arthur Garnette but I have not read Arthur Garnette. Still, he was more polite than he might have been, as anyone would be who knows they’re speaking with the man responsible for all their worldly fortune and possessions.

“‘All this for a dream? Garnette has been dead a hundred years,’ said his nephew, with a special air of educated dilettantism that said I have read about Arthur Garnette but I have not read Arthur Garnette.”

“Yes. Longer,” said Samuel. “He was one hundred and thirtyeight years old in my dream. That is what he said in his letter. He said that he had suffered a kind of death that had more in common with compulsory monasticism than it did with getting sick and going to God. I could picture him, during the time I was dreaming, looking dropsical and heavy with age, hunched over an ivory cane. He must have been shaking with arthritis, and I imagined his eyes swallowed up by long spindly eyebrows. In his letter, he told me that he was abundantly sorry, but that the next step in a long succession of events ordained by providence fell unto me. He apologized again but suggested that I should feel some sense of honor and duty. It’s extraordinary; the letter was almost terse. Restrained. Not a bit like his writing. He wrote that I am required by providence to go to the edge of the Canyon around midday (he didn’t specify the hour) and read over its edge an excerpt he had copied on the back of the page. He regretted that the excerpt wasn’t from the Bible. But the excerpt was what it needed to be, he said. He made it very clear that he wished it could have been from the Bible.”

“What was it from, then?” his nephew interrupted.

“It was something he had written. Two little lines of blank verse.”

“Hm,” muttered William. Only Hm, in a tone that suggested that he would like to comment cynically about what those lines of Arthur Garnette’s were probably like but which also tacitly admitted that he had not read Arthur Garnette.

“Well of course I knew his signature from a thousand facsimiles,” continued Samuel, “and this one dripped with ink in a shaky hand, so there was no question in my mind as to its authenticity. I trusted it and I followed his instructions. When I got out to the Canyon, I looked down and I saw everyone who lives in town. Every single one. I’m sure I failed to generate a few faces, and perhaps I mixed a few of them together, but the impression it gave to my dreaming brain was of completeness, of a patchwork of identities I’d been acquainted with for two decades. Some of them I haven’t seen in months, maybe longer. It would have been nice to see them all, but not from so far away. Anyway, I didn’t find it so strange at the time, it being a dream, and I produced Arthur Garnette’s letter. I studied it again and read from the back. As I read I felt magnified, like I heard someone else’s voice in place of my own.”

Here the young nephew made a feigned sound like a ghost’s vocal flourish, mimicking someone mimicking a ghost: the white sheet, cutout eyeholes, the menacing marionette-arms, the whole bit. But verbally. Samuel ignored him, or didn’t notice, and went on.

“It seemed to happen automatically. In the dream I distinctly felt that I wouldn’t be able to stop the recitation if I wanted to. That voice that was mine but existed outside of me filled every limit of the Canyon like the great waters that once had flowed there. And as if upon those waters, every person down in the Canyon began to float. Slowly, they came into focus as they

rose up from the depths. I saw each one of their faces looking at each other, speechless and astonished. Speechless because they were unable to speak, or so it seemed to me. They kept on floating, up and up into the sky, now getting smaller and blurrier against the harsh blue. I looked down at my hands and the letter had disappeared; I looked up at the sky, and so had all those people.”

“Here the young nephew made a feigned sound like a ghost’s vocal flourish, mimicking someone mimicking a ghost: the white sheet, cutout eyeholes, the menacing marionette-arms, the whole bit. But verbally.”

“Bully dream,” remarked William, “inspired.” The cynicism was palpable, but our man Sam couldn’t be bothered by it. He still peered over the mahogany desk with a blank smirk.

“Am I a killer?” he asked. It was abrupt but measured, and quite sane.

“What?” said William, who was registering now for the first time that a certain gravity was latent in their meeting.

“I mean, in the dream. Am I responsible for the murder of everyone in town, or is Arthur Garnette? Or, if it was some kind of omnipresence responsible for guiding both Arthur and I, are neither of us to blame? I mean, shouldn’t I have written Garnette back, at least?”

“It was only a dream.”

“Even so. It taxes me.”

“All of them died? I didn’t think they did. It didn’t seem to me

like all of them died.”

“I imagine they must have fallen from the sky. Or starved up there in suspension.”

“Perhaps they floated off, up to the Kingdom of God.”

“Yes. Perhaps. Couldn’t I have joined them? In that case? Why wouldn’t I have?”

“Well,” said William, “It was only a dream.”

The gravity William had thought he felt while speaking to his uncle had quickly been all but exorcised out of his demeanor. He had shaken himself back into reality, back out of Samuel’s contagious perturbation and into a measured understanding that what he was hearing was, in fact, only a dream. Only the recitation of a dream experienced by his increasingly geriatric and always eccentric uncle, no less. He put on his coat and got up to leave.

“Wait,” pleaded Samuel, now with a voice more pointed than before. His desperation was beginning to leak.

“Uncle,” William interrupted, “if you have business to discuss or affairs to arrange, I am, as ever, at your beck and call. Nightmares and silly obsessions, on the other hand, are not exactly my area.” He left the room and shut the heavy door, leaving Samuel unanswered and alone.

After William had gone, the study grew piercingly quiet. Samuel could hear his beating heart, and he had the distinct impression that it produced two tones, and that these two tones were out of time with one another. Suddenly, illogically, the small porthole window behind him shattered into a

thousand tiny crystal bits. The broken glass on the floor, a shattered misplaced mosaic, fell and spread in such a shape so as to resemble a shimmering cup. It frightened him deeply, but you might not have known it, just by looking at him. It didn’t look as though he noticed.

The heat increased with the window gone. It became overwhelming.

Manically, and without thinking of doing so, Samuel gathered himself and left the study. He made his way down through the property and blew through its obnoxious iron gates. He walked to the Canyon’s edge. The heat caused the rock spires to throb like bleeding fingers. Samuel peered down towards the bottom. It appeared to grow darker with each passing second, although the sun still hung high in the sky. The Canyon seemed to be sealing the light from out of itself. Samuel looked on. He soon became aware of a strange breeze, converging on him from two opposite directions. He could feel it in his ears. He kept looking down. He stood there and thought.

short and inevitable story

Aurelia Tittmann

in art history class, yesterday morning, a number of useful truths were projected onto the whiteboard, including “the endpoint of all life is extinguishment”. this is a short and inevitable story. extinguishment, as in the stone buddhas with their faces chiseled off for the museum trade who now cling sightlessly and soundlessly to the cave chapel walls, as in the starving tigress who very soon found that she had no more martyrs to eat. as in the last pirate captains of great sailing ships which will only be seaworthy, now, for several months before the leaks spring, before even the toothy black rats walk the plank, saluting, stiff-legged and scabby with mange: i heard it in a seafaring song – there were more of us, once. once, there were more of us. the captain pulls a slick green fish from the nets, and all of the sudden, it opens its mouth and says: now, you will be alone for a long time, and indeed there is no one else to hear before he hauls the thing overboard, the last speaker of its language, like the birds who whistle into radios, wanting more than anything an answer. the yellow-eyed parrots inherited by three generations, pulling sixteen-men-on-a-dead-man’s-chest from the shape of last-century’s mouths. this week the news says that the ivory billed woodpecker is gone for good, last sighted fifty eight years before my birth, but still, i gather, some people were still hoping, would go out on weekends in the bug-humming hardwoods, eyes softly lidded in binoculars, looking and looking. the news says, there is no longer any use in looking.

my art history professor says, how can you explain to someone extinguishment, with no reward at all, and the answer, as she intends it, is in statues of such size that they suggest the process may be underway already, the dwindling to nothingness of each small body, splendor-caves, five hundred robbers blinded and turned out into the desert on a plaster wall where the colors have since withered, white to black, red to blue. where the commemorations of loss have now rotted. how can you explain to someone extinguishment when there are flashes of woodpecker colors in the leaves, the ghost trace of those white-eyed tin-trumpet-birds hung through the woods like a bright string of pearls. how can you explain: now you will be alone. you will be alone now. when the boat, still afloat, flies a raggedy flag, crossbones for the belowdecks now knee deep in saltwater. when the last bird of its species sings its own small song in the cottonwoods, and then sits very still and waits for a reply.

AJ Di Nicola

drive your hand into my chest and wrap it around my heart, now would you

erase from my memory how my dreams placed me on your lap, resting between your jean-clad thighs, my hands woven into your curls, pulling back to study the topography of your face.

(you have a lot of power, don’t you know? for your existence to make me smile.)

for now, pull on this poor organ, yank the traitorous bastard out of my chest, and maybe a lack of circulation will solve this problem of you.

Luke Rotello grasshopper epitaph

we furnished the home you found at the end of the world.

the year you scraped from the pavement, no different from mine, scorched and tumbled and choked and passed.

now i squint when i pick up my dr. bronner’s and pretend i can see your name when my eyelids meet—

i can almost make out the lines. we buried you shallow; i tear new leaves in the parchment of my thumbs.

My Pleco Friend

Maddie Dopp

Acrylic Paint

Dear King Kong,

Lola Ecker

Bow your head and prepare to repent

He hasn’t the time for all this dissent

Pray to the God you know will not listen

And beg to be spared

In the world he’ll christen

Though you are a king

He is divine

I advise you to grovel

In front of his shrine

All these lackluster claims of fame and nobility

You might want to look for a little humility

You’ve stoked his ire, that of course is a given And now from your throne you’re about to be driven

Immortal is his eminent Grace

On the way to a king he’s about to deface

For what is a king in the wake of a God

Who knows you to be

Incredibly flawed

So hurry it up—

You had best atone

Try not to trip

While you vacate the throne

Yes the judgement is daunting But we already know The verdict that he Is about to bestow

That despite all the frill And despite all your flaunting Godzilla will still Be finding you wanting.

Polar Bears Can’t Fall in Love, Idiot

Keshav Eldurkar

Aight fuck. Here we go.

The icy breath of the Arctic winds rustled the fur of the great white beast of the North Pole. His meaty paws created marks in the wispy snow, leaving a trail his prey would have no time to see. Puffs of snow erupted at every step, wisping into the brisk air like young volcanoes experiencing their first taste of earthly maturity. The great predator trudged on the open plane of the frozen tundra, searching for any sign of food underneath his furred paws, the bountiful harvest of the cold Spring dried up and leaving nothing in its wake.

Oh.

No.

I don’t think so.

Professor “Get-To-The-Point” Carson nearly crumpled up a girl’s story the other day because she wrote one lengthy sentence about the wind or the breeze or something. I would die. Then again, that wouldn’t be so bad.

Hey, I have something to live for now.

So focus, dipshit.

Fix it. Don’t go flowery. Be good.

Doug waddled into the snow pit he called “Bear Casa.”

Can polar bears waddle?

Doug plodded into the snow pit he called “Bear Casa.” It was a long day. His wife wasn’t handling the divorce well. She had started eating expired fish every night instead of hunting. She barely left her hastily made sno(w)tel. She even stopped taking care of the cubs. They were the reason this was a thing. Doug loved ‘em, but Sheila did not. Seventeen months after shooting the cubs out of her bear vagina—Hmm.

Do… Do bears…? They must. Mammals. I should know more before writing about this, but having “polar bear birthing process” in my search history doesn’t seem like the move.

I mean...incognito.

Alright, so it seems the cubs do indeed shoot out of the bear vagina, but whoa. Polar bears are sluts. They only stay together for a week, make a baby, then move on. The papa bear never even meets his children. Never takes care of them. Never takes them to their first big snowball fight. Never watches them graduate. And he won’t ever see his baby momma again.

I have a girl in my life now.

A girlfriend, I suppose.

It’s official as of eleven past ten last Wednesday night.

Still feels so weird to say. It’s nice to see it written.

She’s sleeping right now. Right on my shoulder. She wants to read the story, but I told her I’d rather she tried to read something in the chunks of Monster energy-soaked spaghettios I vomit out once I’m finished. She laughed at that. She doesn’t laugh with me a whole lot. I’m the one who laughs. I’m not too funny. She says she likes other things about me. She goes through them sometimes while we’re just staring at each other. She always changes the list up, but she always ends with my perfectly average penis. “It’s perfect. Fits right in.” Didn’t enjoy hearing that at first, but it’s growing on me.

Oh, that’s good. I should write that somewhere. For another story, perhaps, but st

Shit! Fuck!

Story you dumb sack of caca.

“She always changes the list up, but she always ends with my perfectly average penis. ‘It’s perfect. Fits right in.’ Didn’t enjoy hearing that at first, but it’s growing on me.”

Doug lumbered away from the pit where he just plowed Female 5. He stopped getting names after Louisa. It hurt him. He liked these lady bears. Athena, the first one, was Doug’s childhood crush. She asked him if they could lose their bear virginity together. It was beautiful. They talked for hours before it happened. About life. About fish. About that one time Fabio got seal guts stuck in his fur and he tried to rub it out with his tongue but he accidentally licked Doug’s mom and she got really embarrassed and slapped him on the head and everybody laughed because Fabio was hard for the next thirty minutes.

Doug loved Athena. He wanted to be with her now. He wanted to be with her as soon as he left. He wanted to lie down and be with her instead of working on Polar Bear homework.

But he would never see her again.

The rest of them were a little easier, mostly bearettes he had never met. There was a system you followed. It was kind of like Bear Tinder.

Bear Tinder?

The rest of them were a tiny bit easier, mostly bears he had never met. There was a system. You were set up, then you did it.

No love involved.

Doug wanted love. He didn’t care about babies or sex or whatever.

He just wanted love.

Okay, I’m stuck.

Oh, really? Couldn’t get far in a story about a polar bear who tries to go against polar bear norms? Noooooooooo. But that sounds so interesting! This story blows.

She’s never snored before. It’s hilarious.

I want to start over.

I should abandon the polar bear. Just write about people. I know people. Well, at least better than bears. Bears. Maybe I’ll change it to another bear. There isn’t much happening in the tundra this time of year.

A panda. I could get Chinese culture into the story. Which I know nothing about. Brown bears. Forest and stuff. Sun bears. They’re small. Long tongues. Southeast Asia.

A lost Sun Bear. Roaming the forest. Bangladeshi forests are easy to get lost in. They smell of cedar. Cedar and papaya. The lost Sun Bear eats papaya whenever he finds a fallen one. Sun Bears eat fruits and insects, sometimes small rodents, birds, or reptiles.

She’s a little fidgety when she sleeps. Twitchy. I know it’s natural and stuff but I’m always still scared for her.

She’s actually the one who gave me the bear idea. She was at a toy store getting a birthday gift for her cousin and she saw a bunch of those plastic animal figurines. She got me the polar bear because she said it was “as white as my cute little ass.”

I love her.

“I should abandon the polar bear. Just write about people. I know people. Well, at least better than bears.”

But it’s way too soon.

But I love her.

I figured it out two nights ago. We were on a drive, listening to some Bluegrass group she wanted to show me. Not huge into Bluegrass. The banjo sucks.

But I liked this band. They sounded really good.

She was singing and she messed up a lyric. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at me, wide-eyed. (Her eyes are gorgeous. Oceany…. My god, I’m a terrible writer. Just stop, man.) (They are oceany though.) Then, she started laughing. Suddenly, my chest felt like it was filled with hand warmers. It wasn’t hot. It was full. Full of heat. I started to breathe heavier. She didn’t notice. She was laughing at herself. I tried joining her, but I was in love. Then, I got an erection. That she noticed. It was a thing.

My arm’s getting sore.

I don’t want to move it.

The lost Sun Bear stuck his tongue into a natural hole in a Malay Paduak. There was no sap. He kept trying and trying. His tongue moved so much you could call it…

What, an electron? Doesn’t really fit the vibe.

What else moves a lot?

Your mom. Focus.

Wait, this sentence sucks. It looks like it’s actually setting up a “yo mamma” joke. Which, I guess it did.

Honestly, Joel. Fix your shit.

The lost Sun Bear stuck his tongue into a natural hole in a Malay Paduak. There was no sap. He kept trying and trying. There was food all around. He didn’t care about the papayas or the lines of ants scurrying around his feet or the sleeping bird he easily could have caught before it woke up and flew away. The Sun Bear was...

The Sun Bear was done being lost. He wanted to be found.

He pulled his tongue out and started looking around.

Nah.

Suddenly, his friends found him and hugged him. They all laughed.

Yo, Deus, thanks for the Ex Machina.

He got in his rocket and flew back to space. Hmm.

He got in his rocket and flew back to space. He could see the entire world from the one window where he was sitting. It looked like everything mattered. It looked like the people of Earth all had something bigger in their plans because they did. The tentacle alien passed the Sun Bear’s rocket when he was halfway to the moon. It barreled down to the planet, headed straight for Tokyo. The people of Earth were ready. They brought out their blasters and sent upwards rains of lasers into the beast before it had even touched the ground. It landed.

The humans stood strong.

The beast unleashed venomous sprays of liquid on the suspecting people of Earth, which their newly fashioned shields made from Lostsunbearium repelled. The chosen hero, Donna Shah-Dominguez, stood on the tip of the Tokyo Skytree, muscles glistening. She jumped, fully covered with Lostsunbearium armor, into the beast’s mouth with the space sword carved from a meteorite. From the inside, she finished the job. Everyone rejoiced.

The world was saved. The Sun Bear’s warrior had been trained, raised into the savior of mankind. His mission was complete.

What the fuck was that?

Stop. No, like I’m genuinely serious. You need to stop writing. Just forever. No one’s going to read this. No one’s ever going to read what you write because it’s empty and dumb and doesn’t make sense. Take every pen or pencil and piece of fucking charcoal you own and throw it out. Give your computer away so that someone more talented than you can use it. Stop. Stop trying to write. Stop trying to do anything. This has been the most frustrating two hours of my life. Honestly, it’d be better if you just went to the Tokyo Skytree and Hey. She’s up.

Doug, a polar bear, is in love. Have you ever wondered if polar bears can feel things like love? They can. It’s wonderful. It’s not as good as human love. Human love is unmatched. The capacity humans have for love is immense and unending. You think there’s a limit but you know there isn’t. Any love. All love. You can love a person. You can love a bear. You can love your own fucking life because it’s finally going well. You start to think maybe, just maybe, you deserve love. You hope love lasts forever, but in the back of your mind there’s a voice telling you it’ll end at some point. I don’t want it to. I push the voice to the back. The very back. Where I keep the terrible ideas for writing I will inevitably reuse in the future. I’m happy. Doug’s happy. Doug pulls out a piece of charcoal from his bear pockets, a notebook with a penguin on the cover he found at the Arctic giftshop. Penguins live on the other side of the world, but Doug doesn’t care about zoology. Doug writes about love. He doesn’t worry about the due date for his fifteen bear pages of a story in a week. He doesn’t worry about his asshole teacher with the big ass. He just writes about his love. There’s a lot to write about. Where does he start? Where do I start?

Marc-Anthony Valle TEAR-DROP HILL

Well-maned bison on a tear-drop hill Envy of all with eyes. Except for the seagull standing on his back, Who can see just slightly more than him.

With cocked head the seagull seems to show, That the feeling of his webbed feet on bison back (Stretched fabric over textured topographic map) Is somehow more notable this time.

Perhaps recollection, to a seagull, Is dropping a pebble while airborne, Then finding it split in two— Layers of sediment splayed on the driftwood.

Perhaps recollection, to a seagull, Is compulsively dropping the remainder Until half turns to dust, And dust to speck and speck to lost.

The bison releases the air of ten thousand balloons, As if to agree, in a sputter, That the seagull is trying to clamp his beak around dust Far too fine to be gathered.

Contributors

Anneka Barton is a queer writer who explores identity through fiction. Born in Denver, Colorado and now studying english and art at Lewis & Clark College, Anneka continues to experiment with expression through visual and literary means.

Amy Baskin’s work is currently featured in Kai Coggin’s Wednesday Night Poetry, Pirene’s Fountain, Friends Journal, and is forthcoming in Pilgrimage. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, an Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, and an Oregon Poetry Association prize winner. When not writing, she works for the Departments of English and History at Lewis & Clark College and helps run literary arts programs including Fir Acres Writing Workshop. She is the author of one chapbook: Hysterical Cake (Dancing Girl Press, 2021), and her collection Night Hag (Unsolicited Press) will be born in April 2023.

Sheppard Braddy is a third year English major at Lewis & Clark College. He has developed a deep love of poetry and hopes to one day consider himself a poet—we’ll see if he can get there. He sincerely hopes anyone can resonate in some way with one or both of the poems presented in this issue, and would like to express his gratitude for his peers and the wonderful love they have given his work. He would like to give a special thanks to Professor Jerry Harp and the Poetry 301 class of Fall 2021 for inspiration and to his family as well for helping to cultivate the way that he writes today. Finally, he says this to his father—“Thanks for all the books!”

Lauren Caldwell is a queer, 19 year old poet from San Francisco, California. She attends Lewis & Clark College in Portland, majoring in English literature with a focus on creative writing. In her work Lauren explores her struggles as a young

person grappling with bipolar disorder. She hopes to use writing to promote introspection and healing for all.

Bobby Campbell is out there.

Alina Cruz is a trans lesbian woman from San Diego, CA. She is a QSU coordinator, and an Editorial Assistant for the Literary Review. Her hobbies include reading, playing video games, and trivia. Academically, she’s a prospective English and Art History double major. Her favourite part of Literary Review is seeing how passionate people get when discussing the arts.

AJ Di Nicola has a brain that likes to generate “404 Not Found” errors. Sometimes, these errors overlap with the inordinate consumption of crunchy snacks and content on the internet. Other times, there was simply a cute bird.

Maddie Dopp: “My Pleco Friend” and “Blueberry’s Garden” were both created during the beginning of the pandemic. The artist, like many others, was stuck at home. She sort of felt like her pet fish, stuck going around and around her house. So, she decided to paint them as a side project to pass the time. Her plecostomus named Mr. Pleco and her betta fish named Blueberry were the inspirations for these two pieces.

Lola Ecker is a first year from Colorado who came here to see some big trees and some cool moss; so far she has not been disappointed!

Keshav Eldurkar, a junior Theatre-English double major, is an awesome, funny, super cool writer. He’s written many stories over the course of his life, but “Polar Bears Can’t Fall

Contributors, cont.

In Love, Idiot” is one that truly embodies how confident he is in himself and his writing. He unfortunately often dabbles in humor with his creative writing, of which he has experimented with screenwriting, playwriting, and writing short stories over the course of his LC career.

Tiani Ertel is a first-year student and a Theatre major. “family tradition” is a poem she wrote as a section for her poetry interpretation piece in Speech & Debate, which is a piece about the pressures women face to shrink themselves in order to please others. These pressures often come in the shape of the expectation that women should be mothers. The poem is titled “family tradition” because it exemplifies the trapped, frustrated feeling of being crammed into a mold that one doesn’t want because it’s “just the way things are”. Traditions are unchanging and beset with pressures. “family tradition” maintains that motherhood and people-pleasing feel like deeply embedded traditions that cannot be broken.

Kit Graf swears there’s more to her than her past relationships.

Jillian Jackson occasionally moonlights as a semi-competent translator of French and her own self-mythologizing fantasies. She lives in Puteaux. Her French professor says she’s a decent enough student but never remembers to use the past tense until it’s too late. Incidentally, Jillian has never gotten over anything or anyone that has ever happened to her (like ever). She is exceedingly proud to have brought bonafide Taylor Swift fanfiction to the magazine this year.

Alison Keiser is a third year at Lewis & Clark College pursuing a degree in English and Creative Writing. Through her interest

of self-expression, she is an author and poet, a painter, and a musician. Her creative focus is the written word, which she uses to articulate messages of beauty, memory, and intimacy in her work.

Yonas Khalil is a first-year student and a Biology major at Lewis & Clark College. He is interested in a wide variety of subjects, but he is especially interested in arthropods (which include arachnids, crustaceans, insects and springtails, and millipedes and centipedes). His hobbies include photography, philosophy (including discussions, Street Epistemology, and debate), gaming, and reading.

Addison King is a fiction and narrative nonfiction writer born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is an English major and Gender Studies minor, graduating with the class of 2022. As a writer with a penchant for the frightening and intersectional, her works focus on mental illness, magical realism, horror, and personal experiences. Her favorite soundtracks for writing are film scores and her bulldog Demeter’s snoring. Hunger is Addison’s first published short story.

Ruth Liebendorfer has been writing poetry since she was seven years old. It has been her most constant passion, and she feels truly honored to have her work included in this year’s journal. In her poetry, Ruth likes to experiment with giving free rein to her hyperactive, neurodivergent thoughts, letting them intuitively guide each word and line break. She finds the result to be typically dreamlike, surreal, and disparate, as well as highly liberating. Other than poetry, she loves spending time with her mom, cats, dogs, and horses, riding said horses, and watching TV and movies.

Contributors, cont.

Cleo Lockhart (she/they) is a L&C freshman from Colorado with a fondness for horror and magical realist writing. They are also fond of art history, ghosts, and decadent bowls of oatmeal. They can be found on Instagram at @clock.hart or out in the woods if you call their name very loud.

Eve March is a senior Art History major drawn to whimsy and funky creatures. This year she has come to love early mornings, flossing, and soft folk tunes (especially ones that involve whistling). She hopes you enjoy her collages, and she’d like to extend a big warm thank you to everyone involved in the Literary Review throughout the years. She is sad to bid it farewell and would like to acknowledge Cy and Kaes, her Literary Review Virgils, for their poetry, guidance, and light always. Cheers!

Ayanna Miller is an English major at Lewis & Clark with an interest in focusing in Creative Non-Fiction. She has been writing creatively ever since she can remember, with most of her work being either poetry or creative non-fiction. She has been a contributor for Unpublished Magazine as well as an editor for The Pioneer Log and Outlander Magazine. Outside of writing, Ayanna is passionate about feminism and mental health issues; she spends most of her free time reading, hiking, camping, finding new music, listening to podcasts, and playing board games.

Sam Mosher has proclaimed he has the best titles in the game and wishes to apologize if he insulted your piece in an editorial meeting. It probably wasn’t personal.

Solena Andrus Montalieu wrote this poem on an impulse after messaging with her soon-to-be partner and eating a

pomegranate. Solena doesn’t believe she’s going to become the next Sappho, but is still happy to contribute to collection of poetry that makes people yearn for others. Solena would like to thank her partner for being the source of their inspiration, and her friends for calling her a sap.

Michael Mulrennan is a soon-to-be graduate double majoring in English and Hispanic Studies. He is a big fan of the outdoors, sports, movies, and creative writing of all kinds! Michael plans on first working for the Fir Acres Writing Workshop this summer before going to Spain to work as an English Teaching Assistant after graduation. He has always had a passion for working with kids and is excited to help the little monsters learn English and teach him some Spanish as well! Following a stint in Spain, Michael hopes to begin teaching ESL classes at a public school in his hometown, Minneapolis. One exciting thing that’s happening to him this semester is he has started coaching a high school basketball team with one of his best friends, Sebastian. Who knows, maybe he’ll write a story about them one day. :-)

Aidan Paschal O’Dwyer is a first generation Irish-American from the South. To his poetry, he brings a southern gothic nuance with a Celtic flair, and in his writing he merges a contemplative sound with experimental typography and structure, as well as a gentle chaos. His influences vary from Seamus Heaney to Emily Dickinson to the Rossetti siblings and more, but he is especially interested in Baudelaire and the French Symbolist movement.

Ciara Orness is a senior English major. She is interested in exploring complex characters, conflicting emotions and family in fiction. “Diana’s Bath” was inspired by a connection that she

Contributors, cont.

feels to nature and a strange pile of sticks that her neighbor collected in the ice storm of 2021. Those sticks still sit where she can look at them from her bedroom window.

Rose Palma is a poet from San Francisco. Their work explores personal mythologies, often through magical realism. “Ceremony” is based off of a recent dream they had.

Annabel Paris is a 22 year old queer Jew who loves Jewish Folk Dance. She finds it a great way to connect with her culture and her identity. Between classes and hanging out with friends you can find her in the SQRC where she’s been tutoring for the last two years, or getting a hot chocolate at the dovecote. When Annabel isn’t at school she’s at home in Los Angeles, but she’s looking forward to moving to Portland and adopting a cat once she graduates.

Shelby Platt is a first year student planning to major in English and someday eat an entire carton of Umpqua Bordeaux Cherry ice cream in one sitting. She’s from Phoenix, Oregon and wrote this poem in response to the 2020 Almeda fire.

Zach Reinker is a junior studying English creative writing and Illustration. They grew up near Portland, Oregon, enjoying TT-RPG games, scary stories and graphic novels, as well as drawing what could be best described as a “concerning” amount of monsters. Many stories have influenced their work, including Coraline (2002; 2009), The Secret of Kells (2009), 9 (2009) and comics such as Stand Still, Stay Silent (2013), Gunnerkrigg Court (2005) and Mouseguard (debut 2009). Zach writes and illustrates small-feeling stories about misfit characters, with a recurring interest in gothic

dystopian settings and stories of ghosts, fairy-folk and other hard-to-explain tales. Outside class, Zach makes cartoons for The Pioneer Log, and has been doing on and off freelance commissions for the last few years. Post-graduation, they plan to self-publish their own graphic novel series—probably about something creepy and oddly cute. See @Grimwickarts on instagram for their most recent work.

Sophia Riley is a current freshman at Lewis & Clark College. She has been an active poet since middle school. Sophia is inspired by nature, friends, family, and her dog, Mango. Sophia hopes you all have a lovely day!

Burton Scheer is a Portland and Florida based creative who primarily works with oil and acrylic paint. While they have explored a variety of subject matter in their work, portraits are their personal favorite. Burton is constantly inspired by the ways their friends interact with the world through emotional and physical expression. This piece, “Bored on a Monday Night” is based on moments spent with their friend Jen. It attempts to capture how her personal expression engages with the mundanity of daily life.

Aurelia Tittmann once ate a bowl of moldy breakfast cereal and hasn’t been the same since.

Marc-Anthony Valle is a senior English Major, collector of broken music boxes, poet, and Adam Eget superfan. He hopes that you enjoy the poems, and that you are in good health. If you have a moment, he would be honored if you would enjoy a nice cup of coffee or tea, and allow a moment of silence for the passing of Norm Macdonald. He would like to thank you for that (if you did it), as well as thank the entirety of the English

Contributors, cont.

Department at Lewis & Clark for seeing him and supporting him for the last four years. He would also like to thank his father for giving him his handwriting, and his mother for his love for James Taylor. He hopes you live outside the law, and that you are honest.

Emily Wagner is primarily a SciFi writer but that teensy little discrepancy doesn’t stop her from writing in the literary genre. Her works usually address the ugly sides of life, particularly the ones she has seen.

Caleb Weinhardt is a Psychology major at Lewis & Clark College. His hometown is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He enjoys writing poetry and fiction, especially horror and suspense fiction. Caleb draws inspiration from Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Mary Oliver, and many others.

Orion Whitcher is fascinated with questions of humanity, beauty, and expression. Though he has experimented with many types of visual media, charcoal and graphite remain his favorite to work in. Portraits are Orion’s favorite subject, as he attempts to explore many of the complex parts of humanity in the deceptively simple form of drawing, examining the tension and difficulty of distilling a wholly complex and unique person into a single moment in time, a single rendering.

Tessa Rose Wolpert is a junior Art History major who recently studied abroad in Berlin, Germany. Her time in Germany influenced this piece which encapsulates daily life, societal and governmental issues, and the country’s forward trajectory. Several issues—contemporary and historical—are discussed in this piece. Featured here are museum pamphlets, show tickets, local magazines, catalogs, portrait work from former

World War II artists, and hand-cut black abstract forms. General confusion is welcomed and intended by the artist. Tessa’s goal in creating and exhibiting this work is to bring awareness to these topics in a welcoming and approachable manner.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, the Literary Review would like to thank the members of the editorial and design boards for their tireless enthusiasm. Your conviction that what we publish matters— as well as your boundless energy at 5pm on Tuesday—is appreciated.

The Literary Review is forever indebted to our artists and our writers, without whom the magazine would not be possible.

Many thanks are also owed to Zach Reinker, who designed the carnivorous plant-themed cover art, section dividers art, and visual motifs in the magazine. Zach braved a seven-hour time difference from their study abroad program in London to collaborate from afar.

Not only did she serve as our advisor during the Fall 2021 semester, Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities Mary Szybist encouraged us to ask difficult questions about what it means to publish and validate a piece’s existence.

At this point, it’s an English major cliché to refer to a revered mentor as your Virgil. Nevertheless, we would storm the gates of Dis for Department Chair Karen Gross. It was also a privilege to welcome new Administrative Coordinator Amy Baskin to the English department this year.

We’d also like to express our gratitude to professors Jerry Harp, Pauls Toutonghi, Robin Romm, and Allison Walcott for their help in spreading the word about Literary Review. A special shout-out is owed to Don Waters, who inspired his Fiction Writing 300 class to submit many of their short stories to the magazine.

The Student Media Board and Bille Sheikh were instrumental in helping us secure funding for the 49th edition. We’d also like to thank Chris Hammett and Morel Ink for helping Literary Review continue its legacy in print. Elizabeth Young in IT and Literary Review alumni Kaes Vanderspek taught us the InDesign tools to make that print vision a reality.

This year, each co-Editor-in-Chief paired lofty ambitions with a can-do attitude. Eve March, our graduating senior, will be missed after four years of stunning collages and compassion. AJ Di Nicola founded the design board through sheer willpower. Jillian Jackson burned the midnight oil from her study abroad program in Paris.

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t thank our outstanding editorial and design assistants, Alina Cruz and Elizabeth Huntley. Both of them have shown, time and time again, that the future of our organization is a bright one.