"growing pains" — Palatine Hill Review, Edition 50

about the cover

There are four variations of the cover to the 50th edition of the Palatine Hill Review. From the top left, clockwise:

Roots

Anneka Barton

Digital Illustration

Sun March

Zach Reinker

Digital Illustration & Graphite Sketch

The Timekeepers

Dakota Binder

Digital Illustration

Still, We Endure

Kincaid DeBell

Digital Illustration

edition 49 honors

Associated Collegiate Press (ACP)

First Class Honors with Marks of Distinction for Content and Writing & Editing

Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP)

2023 National Program Directors’ Prize Winner for Content and Runner-Up for Design

colophon

The Palatine Hill Review, formerly known as the Lewis & Clark Literary Review, is the annual student-run literary and arts magazine at Lewis & Clark College, located in Portland, Oregon. In changing our name, we join an ongoing, campus-wide shift away from upholding the colonial legacies of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

Our 50th edition, growing pains, is printed by Morel Ink (also) in Portland, Oregon. This edition’s typefaces are the Dovetail MVB font family (for titles, subtitles, bylines, pull quotes, and page numbers) and Atkinson Hyperlegible (for body text and folio).

This edition was created with Adobe InDesign CC 2023, Adobe Illustrator CC 2023, Adobe Photoshop CC 2023, Procreate, and the help of many, many Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Thank God for Google Drive.

copyright

The work showcased within this edition remains the intellectual property of our individual contributors, who retain all rights to their materal.

The views expressed within this edition are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of our editors, general staff, donors, the Student Media Board (SMB), or Lewis & Clark College.

masthead

Editors-in-Chief

Jillian Jackson

AJ Di Nicola

Design Editor & Art Director

Elizabeth Huntley

Associate Design Editor

Zach Reinker

Associate Editors

Max Allen

Burton Scheer

Faculty Advisors

Karen Gross

Mary Szybist

Site Supervisor

Amy Baskin

Editorial Board

Josie Alberts

Sofija Aviles-Lindsey

Zoe Bockoven

J Frank

Elizabeth Grieve

Hera Hyman

Shira Kalish

Yonas Khalil

Anna Littlejohn

Marissa Lum

Colleen Maloney

Ryan Marshall

Daniel Neshyba-Rowe

Corryn Pettingill

Shelby Platt

Sophia Riley

Bela Salinger

Coco Silver

Design Board

Claire Baco

J Frank

Elizabeth Grieve

Shelby Platt

Soleina Robinson

Clio Torbenson

letter from the editors

When our first issue went to print in 1973, Nixon was president, and abortion was legal in all fifty states. College-age men got sent to Vietnam, and you could buy a one-pound bag of Oreos for 49 cents.

Nowadays, Oreos cost $4.98, and, as the Supreme Court and anti-trans lawmakers like to remind us, our bodies are still not our own. Shoved between Zoom calls and your umpteenth COVID test, this moment can feel so singular. And yet, as alumni Moss Kaplan’s 1993 nonfiction piece, “But I’m Low Risk, Right?” tells us, pandemic anxiety ravaged past generations, too.

“In these unprecedented times” — so goes the hackneyed saying, yet is any of this truly unprecedented? As we dove headfirst1 into the review’s archives, we felt that many of our favorite pieces about Palatine Hill and Portland could have been written yesterday.

Consider, for example, Cindy Stewart-Rinier’s 1981 short story “Ice Storm.” Hit with almost eleven inches of snow, this spring semester we found ourselves under that blue-black sky she captures so well.

So much of college is realizing you aren’t special, freaking out about it, and then making peace with your non-uniqueness.2 In the end, you’re just floating on a February snowflake, breathing in the same cold-not-crisp air as those who came before you.

growing pains features several pieces about dead or dying grandparents, and this macabre coincidence proved

1If you know, you know.

2If you succeed in doing this, please tell us how.

instructive as we searched for Issue 50’s title. Maybe the worst growing pain isn’t that late-night ache in your legs. Maybe it’s attending your grandfather’s funeral in a too-short skirt, because honestly, who buys mourning attire ahead of time? Maybe it’s realizing, as Lizzy Acker does in her 2004 poem, “The Science of Drains,” how many lives your parents lived before you came along.

So too has Issue 50 lived many lives in just eleven months of existence. When, in May 2022, we started planning the Palatine Hill Review’s fiftieth edition, the concept was simple: a short, 150-page book, with a few “Best Of” reprints from past editions. Surely bone meal — the review’s wildly popular, now out-of-print forty-ninth issue — was a flash in the pan.

We were wrong. This year, submissions piled in at a 53 percent increase from last year’s already historic numbers. If bone meal was a glimmer, growing pains is a goldrush. What a pleasure it is to hold each of these 113 pieces3 to the light.

May they shine and flicker like birthday candles you can wish on. Happy 50th, Palatine Hill Review.

Jillian Jackson

Editors-in-Chief

AJ Di Nicola

3Not on purpose, but we all know Jillian loves a good Taylor Swift reference.

“for my friends”

Olive Savoie

Witchcraft

Elizabeth Winkelman

Lune du Miel which means ‘Honeymoon’ en Français

Kim Stafford Portland Excursioning

Matilda Rose

Cantwell

The Mestizo’s Granddaughter Dances Swing While Consiering

Polyamory

Alina Cruz

On the phone with my sister

Alison Keiser

17 19 21 23 24 25 38

thinking hopefully

Emma Parrish Post

The Zoo

Tiani Ertel

Seventeen

Maya Mazor-Hoofien

Blackberries

Lyra Meyers

The Edge of Autumn

Sarah Walker

Sojourners

Corryn Pettingill

Letter to a Friend, 2/25/19

Caleb Weinhardt

I Don’t Like Pulp

Nora Cesareo-Dense

festering season

Cleo Lockhart

Ghost Dancer

Piper McCoy Harmon

“for my friends”

Olive Savoie

summer, early morning:

orangey dust•beams filter through window -smilingautumn night:

crackly leaves beneath our feet arm•in•arm

deep blue engulfs

winter, late afternoon:

white•misty breath hands shoved in pockets

january snow

spring morning:

overnight pinkwhite blossoms fall sprinkle the ground -cherrycheekslate summer afternoon:

blackberries off barbur•lane -pricklywe fill the house-lined street with our laughter

summer evening:

giggling, your shoulders, forehead kisses, thank you. how different we are now from when we met. how i see myself in your faces. how always you are to me.

Witchcraft

Elizabeth Winkelman

During summer twilights when the air is sweet with peach blossoms do I bewitch you. I lay myself on your altar of clouds, haunted by your glimmering gaze. Through your sunbeams devour my marble body, leave no inch of me untouched. Eagerly, I get drunk off your vermouth breath, wanting more. Velvet honey drips from my ritual praise, crying to the gods as I cherish your oath; to me, I love you, I love you, the petals blossoming for the waves of Aphrodite, her pearls floating ashore. Ignite the aching flames within me, tend to mahogany moans that leaves my cheeks sunkissed. Make me worthy of your pleasure, and I will forever embrace your rose lips until the moon can no longer bear the ardor sun.

Some Kind of Peace

Lune du Miel which means ‘Honeymoon’ en Français

Kim Stafford

Reprinted from Imbroglio (1998-99)

Every city has its brag and swagger to delight the rude, its own little Las Vegas pulsing neon noise that’s glory to the human child agog—the square or boulevard where citizens stagger on display, and money fashions change. I love the bluster of it all, the marquee throb, the glitz, the trump, the gall.

But you and I have our secret, too, seeking with our steps some hidden place, calm cranny cherished by children and the old, garden known by few, riverbank where silence pools, cathedral hush, quietest of all. You and I, we know the place in Paris where stars still shine and we can kiss another world.

From the Author:

I wrote this poem while on honeymoon with my beloved wife Perrin in 1994. It simply brimmed to the page under a weeping willow tree at the downstream end of an island in the Seine. Reading it now, I see the power of poetry to seal in amber an emotion, studded with details from a time and place, a kind of tiny book recording incandescence. Then, publishing the poem in the Lit Review, I had a chance to share with readers my love of my wife, of Paris, of the moon, honey, secret gardens, and all the precious and infinite verve of this finite life.

Welcome Mosher

Portland Excursioning

Matilda Rose Cantwell

Reprinted from Furry Tongues (1990-91)

Keep on raining, my new home city. I’ll walk your shining streets once more today.

Let me walk once more

I’ll gaze in windows of new age spirit shops crystals clinking softly and short-haired feather-earring clerks smile out at me.

One-seventy-five for a café mocha or should I shell it out to the shuffling heap of laundry on the curbside, fussing in designer garbage can for a drink. Old man, you can never be thirsty in this city. You can have my one-seventy-five you absolve me.

I’ll just swing by the talking U-bank machine, then slurp down my gourmet delight. Send me flying down the Yamhill sidewalk with one of those saxophone songs humming in my head.

I’ll stop for a surreal Finnegan’s moment then walk on drizzle falling in my cardboard cup.

I’ll lick steamed milk from its soggy edges and step in the old man’s swirly brown spit. But I’m high and I’ll step on stepping lightly Pausing at a gallery window and staring at the window display; “Juxtaposition” a water color woman of Central America arms outstretched to a blood red moon, looking across to a bespangled coast. Rounding the corner to the northern part of town where the brick streets end telephone poles stand posted shouting racism, sexism, homophobia, Persian Gulf war and Friday night folk at the Laurelhurst. Shall I go demonstrate? or shall I go read Kim Stafford and eat a buttered scone behind the long thick windows of the Anne Hughes coffee room or reach my hand up to the smiling Portlandia catch her hand and go cloud swimming. Keep on raining on your umbrellaless friends on your Nordstrom awnings. Rain on me for you know I have a gortex soul.

From the Author:

Around the time I wrote this poem, we were very focused on the Iraq war, feminism, and locally, the stark socioeconomic differences amongst the four quadrants of the city. Looking back, I think the poem reflects the newfound independence of being in college and being able to navigate a city alone, and the tensions and overlaps one experiences in college between one’s academic life and one’s political and social concerns. I was struck by how impacted I was by all the signs on the telephone poles: nowadays, in the age of social media, it is impossible to imagine how we learned about anything without it!

The Mestizo’s Granddaughter Dances Swing While Considering Polyamory

Alina Cruz

Just because I have trouble saying te quiero doesn’t mean I don’t want to crack my chest open and bear my heart out. It’s always caused me problems— You’re too quick to trust, my parents nagged, but the warmth

of her Spokane hands is all I can focus on. She’s leading. I’m not used to following I start, but she doesn’t care. We both know the steps inside and out. My family isn’t here, not that they would approve of this strange feeling

I’m experiencing, like I’ve journeyed for years and years to make it home to my girlfriend and it was the adventure I desired

all along. Turn? She lifts her arm and pushes me away. I’m falling through the air after a hard day’s work, only the beat of my heart is matching the tremors of the desert and not the beat of this Glen Miller hit. I feel her hand slip from mine.

How can people trust if they’re used to rejection?

Are there really soul mates out there, and can you have multiple?

Then she’s behind me, snatching my hand again as I whip back, flinging my other arm out, and tucking it in at her next tug until we’ve done the sequence and are back to the basic step. She doesn’t realize how cute she is when she smiles and giggles, how her upper lip creases, how much I wish I wore a skirt instead of jeans so she could twirl me again and again and again in our elegant ritual. I’m torn between the masculine and feminine, when all I want,

all I really and truly want, is to just keep dancing; maintaining that connection between our hands. Nevertheless there’s always the next outfit. The next dance. It’s always a pleasure to dance with you, she says as she claps.

Summer’s Ripening Breath

Jasmine Scandalis Digital Art

On the phone with my sister

(and her directory of childhood memories)

Alison Keiser

No, I don’t remember the roller coaster inside the Mall of America, high as a skyscraper, or grass knees, or the smell of kindergarten. I don’t remember the small-town snickers as we entered restaurants with dad

(grandpa in custody had hit the newspaper, do I remember how dad cried?) It’s all lost on me. Sludge

of memory, I wade through like one’d wade through water in a dream. Until you ask, nothing conjures. I don’t remember waking

up in the middle of the night to the front door wide open (you say summer storms hit and no one locked it),

or being held (as you recall hearing mom’s heartbeat before falling asleep). I remember the pieces, a mosaic of us.

I remember the first time we saw the ocean together and how we breathed in its mist and how its reflection burnt our cheeks and how I’d never felt

alive like that. But mostly, I remember our coldness (the sterile family, the arctic northern wind) like a bone ache—vague but, for me,

without a body. You say I’m lucky to look at my feet, not over my shoulder. I say I don’t know where the fire starts. You hold all the warmth

out to me and complain how it has seared your hands, how this makes you dirty and me clean. I let you be the one

to remember and me the one to forget and I don’t say a word. But on the other end of the line, I am dying

to ask you: Do you remember how enduring it was to be touched by something?

The state on your fake is where I’m from Kit Graf

and it snows there sometimes. Not much anymore. One year it snowed on Easter and everyone was late to brunch. My brother called it proof that Jesus was white. It was the same week as my car accident where I tapped a health teacher’s bumper and my Volkswagen lost its emblem, leaving an empty gap where birds kept making nests.

You’ve never been to Nebraska and said you never would. A statement I’m used to, but something about your fake rubs me the wrong way.

The drawing of Courthouse & Jail Rock in the corner gasping for air under your thumb as you show the bouncer. And he looks at you. He’s never seen a Nebraskan before. It’s nice there, you say. If you hate nature. I watch you stuff your fake back into your wallet, slipping it behind your Colorado ID.

thinking hopefully

Emma Parrish Post

Reprinted from The Turn (2011–12)

The dream is

Not so different from the others’ dreams

A house on the hill

A dog on the porch who loves me too

The smell of mulch and a glass of the best wine

And to be famous and to have a pair of the best scissors and to only wear black socks and to be taller than my lovers and to be able to touch my tongue to my nose and to own something that Gandhi owned (what? Nothing? A grain of rice) and to live near a field of barley and to have 6 children and to grow my toenails five inches long and to be able to change my hair color on command and to have men love feminists and to be able to lift up the golden gate bridge with my pinky toe and to be able to talk to Jesus while he was burning a bush (what? Hanging from a cross) and to sip a glass full of gold bullion with the ex-king of Utrecht and to fill a thousand journals with cursive and to smell the mulch in the air and to drink a glass of the best wine and

My dream is a house on a hill (What? only the hill)

From the Author:

I have no idea what I was thinking (, hopefully) about when I wrote this piece over ten years ago. It is strange to read an object as intimate as one’s own poem but not clearly understand its origins or even meaning. However, the distance I feel from it reminds me of the poet John Giorno’s assertion that a poet first “experiences” the sound of their own poem, before writing it down, as if overhearing a song being played from the next room. I like this idea: that poems are external currents of sound and image moving by us; on the day I wrote this piece I was simply able to record a piece of it all.

The Zoo

Tiani Ertel

The chimpanzee and its reaching palm, you compared it to the hand of Adam on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, apple peeling. Dexterous digits, waxing gibbons, rain—

your eyes lit up while tusks and trunks collided in water, deep and swirling like two grey encrusted yellow boulders, breaking up then twining, wrinkled, soft, and spraying spit.

The Float

Ella Neff

Film Photography

Maya Mazor-Hoofien Seventeen

That summer in Suburbia was almost unbearable. I dyed my hair and wore lipstick absolutely everywhere, crimson staining t-shirts and towels and straws. I had a job selling tickets at the community theatre, and up from the part-time minimum-wage drudgery sprang a group of friends and a boy with blue eyes who made me laugh until he kissed my best friend. I was pushing the bounds of almost-adulthood, always hungry and always tired, red lips grinning and bearing the crushing weight of it all.

We were fast friends, the group of us, at the park after work, talking about our mothers and ex-loves and the election and good books. We picked at the grass, I picked at my skin, and we knew everything about everything. We poisoned ourselves with bad drinks and bad TV and ignored that the boy from Colorado would have to fly home soon. The day before his flight, we drove to the beach and played cards in the sand and laughed like we’d never leave our hometown. It felt like the kind of movie I’ve always hated because it felt so cliché.

We counted down the days and hours until goodbye. We made plans like we had any control. I thought I was in control. This was before I understood that nothing is forever, and that all men do is run away. We sat on the sidewalk and he held our hands, my eyes wet and bloodshot from the drive to drop him off. His birthday was in a few months. We’d make it work. “I don’t mind the flight,” he’d lied. “I’ll be back soon.”

Beacon Oscar Lledo

Film Photography

Blackberries

Lyra Meyers

“It’s a funny thing, really,” you say to me.

“I’ve never foraged for blackberries before, they grew, but I just never picked them.”

“It didn’t seem worth it, you know? I could buy them at the market instead.”

I want so dearly to explain to you, To have you understand why this upsets me so, But how to say it? It is something so intangible, A treat and a lesson at once claimed in childhood. You are free to reach for what tempts you, But no decadence comes without scratches and pricks of thorns.

How do I explain the feeling

Of searching for the plumpest berry whose juice rubs velvet onto your fingers?

Of hearing bees fly by, searching for the same nectar in a different shape?

The elation of finding a perfect patch of clustered fruit?

How do I say that the blackberries that grew near the lake

Were unparalleled by any you could purchase?

Were tart, and prickly, and messy, and mine?

I can only tell you this,

There was no sweeter fruit than that which I ate

From bleeding fingertips on a hot summer evening.

The Edge of Autumn

Sarah Walker

Is this the way of life?

Hurting slowly;

Buying flowers bigger than my room;

Wandering grocery stores and farmers’ markets with hungry eyes and wispy shopping bags; Marveling at how big cities really are, and yet how small;

Reaching my gaze up to second-,

third-,

eleventh-, twenty-fourth-story windows;

Sighing at the prospect of a life so nicely strung together; Rushing like children on Christmas to the mailroom, arms just empty enough to pick up a package; The ghosts back home echoing on the phone, asking me when I’ll come home as I frantically look up “home” in the dictionary;

Collecting books like crows with shiny objects;

Inhaling cold ink and exhaling hot clouds of breath;

Trying to learn;

Learning to try;

Falling apart;

Growing my hair and cutting it again;

Seeking for more;

Looking for less;

Training my heart to beat around the cracks that leaving left in it;

Always hunting freedom and freebies; Knowing nothing but talking a lot anyway. Is this the way of life?

Or just the edge of Autumn?

Sojourners

Corryn Pettingill

The mothering arms of the warm springs curve and shift, As I grow too old to be held at night.

Slick against the rocks, the water’s force carries me. Shallow slides and an unknown trail of clouds gaze down.

Guided, I float down the stream canopied by glowing trees, Leaves tittering like butterfly wings.

Each silky ripple brushes my skin with the same love of the sun’s light, And I blossom with open hands and eager faces,

Alongside the flowers that nod on the water’s shaky surface; Sojourners guided by the ocean’s pull, drawing us nearer to the unknown.

Wanderers that allow the day to end, And enjoy the prospect of cool salt water that prunes the skin,

Cleans the bones, I’m sure I will, sea, But the trees always bloom, no matter how close I am to the shore.

I heard of a lost book, slipped from the hands of a traveler, And it only took a day for it to reach the ocean, disintegrating

Words that, if they could read fast enough, the fish would understand.

I sojourn with the oranges and the insects, The half rotten, forgotten peels and petals.

I smile at the sun, and think what my final words will be, And if anyone will read my last pages.

The river will always remain for the other sojourners, Guided by the water and attracted to the end.

I smell the minerals in the air, And see the looming clouds of darkening wind off the coast ahead.

The day will remain, forever, Holding those who pass by, mourning every sunrise.

Sea Creatures

Burton Scheer Photography

Ice Storm

Cindy Stewart-Rinier

Reprinted from LC Review (1980-81)

Yesterday afternoon Emma had arrived in her yellow Celica—of course, unannounced—when the freezing rain was just collecting itself into fragile layers of ice. By that night, the rain hadn’t stopped and the telephone wires, power lines, pavement, roofs, cars, grass, trees and shrubs were sheathed in ice. When I woke the next morning, it was to the thunderclap of power lines snapping and exploding, and in its light I saw Emma, asleep on the floor of my dorm room. I smiled wryly at the sentence that formed in my thoughts: “Emma arrived with the ice storm.” I didn’t know what it meant, but I drew pleasure from it, and stood at the window a long time watching and listening to the belches of light and thunder, the crystalline campus, the explosions and stillnesses between them.

This was the second ice storm that I had been caught in here. Last year’s I could hardly remember. Only a vague impression of fear and disorientation remained from it. I had huddled in the main lounge with the rest of the women in my dorm, listening to ghost stories, talking sex, and laughing too loud when the campus darkened and we were without power.

But as I stood at the window, I could feel that it would be different this year. Emma was here. Emma was here and asleep on my floor, and breathing lightly, and looking soft and less formidable in sleep with her wild blonde hair resting on her pillow. I went back to my bed and fell asleep.

We slept through breakfast and heard that classes were canceled, so we chipped Emma’s car from its coating of

ice, and drove to a cheap restaurant for breakfast, and as we drove away from campus, I said, “So long, suckers!” and both Emma and I laughed.

When I woke the next morning, it was to the thunderclap of power lines snapping and exploding

The day was a flurry of events. After breakfast we had gone back to campus and cleared the main road of fallen branches. We both felt strong and warm, and our faces were flushed with the cold, and as we heaved the branches into the ravine, I felt as if we were tipping the calendar days that had separated us for six months, and I laughed, then she laughed, and we both laughed and filled the ravine with our laughter.

The rest of the afternoon, Emma visited with the other friends she hadn’t seen since last spring, and I sat in my room feeling the push of my hands fight with the pull of my heart. I realized it would always be this way with Emma; I had known her only nine months, but it was long enough to know that she would always move. Since the plane accident when her mother and two of three sisters had been killed and she inherited insurance money, Emma had been moving. Sometimes I thought that it was motion itself that kept her alive.

Around four, she came back to the room with a jug of wine and said we should take a walk. It was getting dark. The bushes and trees—that I had thought to myself this morning looked as if a mad glassblower had enveloped them all in molten glass—lost their color and became a silhouette to the blue-black sky. The air was not crisp; it was cold, and so were my hands and feet.

We walked through the rubble of frozen wood and ice toward lower campus. Emma looked around at the mangled trees with a smirk of triumph, and I cradled the wine under my down vest. At the reflection pond we stopped and I slipped the wine from my vest, unwrapped the foil and realized that it had a cork, not a pull-top. “Oh shit,” I said in my best tough woman voice, and immediately gave up the wine as a lost possibility. Emma smirked openly at this and said, “You got a swiss army knife? Someone ripped mine off.”

“No,” I said with the same hopelessness. “No, I don’t like knives.” She laughed at my delicacy which betrayed the attempt at toughness I’d just made.

“Let me see it,” she said. I handed her the bottle, and watched with a bit of admiration, a bit of self-contempt as she stepped up to the stone ledge and hit the neck of the bottle against it. Glass flew out, landing among the wood and ice, and Emma wiped an edge of the bottle clean with her shirt sleeve and drank. “Here,” she said.

“No, no thanks,” Somewhere to the south of us, a tree branch gave way to the weight of ice and gravity and crashed to the frozen ground. I shivered. Emma laughed and took another drink.

A feeling at my center was going cold. Whenever I was with Emma it was an effort to stay on equal footing with her, to not feel myself inferior to her, for when that happened, she felt only contempt. I stomped my feet and rubbed my hands together, but the coldness at my center kept them from warmth.

Three birds flew out from a tree at the other end of the pond, and a thick branch near its middle cracked a little, then crashed down. Emma said, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“No,” I said. “It’s so destructive. And dark. Like looking through the window of a Greyhound bus at night. It’s dark and lonely and I hate it.”

“Ha!” she said. “So you’re afraid of the dark.” My words fumbled for themselves, bumping into the feelings that were, by now, running and pushing and pulling and not knowing what to be either.

“No,” I said. “I just don’t like destruction.” She laughed and turned and looked sideways at me.

“You know, I’m like that,” she said. She set down the wine and stretched her arms like a preacher toward the reflection pond. “A believer in the great darkness, y’know? The void. ‘Cause void is what people understand, y’know?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“What you’re talking about.”

“Ha!” she said. “I don’t suppose you would.” I was getting colder, and the silence that now wedged between us grew quieter, and I felt like I was freezing around my center, and the whole moment of Emma and I standing alone by the reflection pond was freezing into one of those moments that would surface in its entirety sometime in the future, like the wooly mammoths found from time to time by some explorer in the Arctic.

We walked in silence back to my room. We sat on the

Whenever I was with Emma it was an effort to stay on equal footing with her

floor; the candle Emma had brought for me from California burned between us. I played with the wax that collected around the wick, and occasionally looked into Emma’s face. Her brown eyes, shit-brown she called them, stared into the flame. The corners of her thin mouth were curled down the way they always were when she was thinking. She seemed somewhere inside herself, perhaps drawing strength from its privacy, perhaps protecting herself from the weakness she sensed in me.

I looked into her face again, now soft in the candlelight, and wanted to break the silence, to become the way we’d been when we were last together, when the boundaries of our private lives dissolved and their contents spilled into one another like water. When one word, one phrase, one half-formed sentence was enough. It seemed inaccessible.

I poured myself a mug of wine and took a long drink. I couldn’t conceal my fear that we’d never be like that again, though I knew that it was this fear itself that bound each of us to our self, and she couldn’t conceal her contempt for my fear. I drank the wine quickly, gathered my words. “You know,” I said, “sometimes I just feel like a harbor.”

She looked up. “A what?”

“A harbor.”

“Hm,” Emma said. “How?”

“Well, I mean, it’s just that everybody I care about comes and goes, and I stay, and here I am, a home, a surrogate mother, stability, a harbor, it’s all the same.” I felt the wine working its way through me, and although the room was cold, my face was hot, and I could feel sweat arriving on my hands like tiny kisses. Emma looked directly into my eyes.

“You miss Tom,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “but it’s not only him. That’s not what I mean. It’s you in California, soon to be Vermont, and it’s Tom in Ecuador, and Carey in Israel, and it’s me, here, with all the business majors and pretty hair ribbons and Mom and Dad’s money. You know what I mean. Everyone I love is at least three area codes away at a time. You know, in high school I called my first journal ‘I went somewhere once.’ Thought it sounded good. God, if I knew how true that was going to be—” I stopped and poured myself another mug of wine.

Everyone I love is at least three area codes away at a time.

“So why don’t you go somewhere?” Emma said.

“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve got money. It’s just not that easy for me.”

“Blood money,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I guess it’s not even leaving that I want. I just wish—oh, I don’t know.” My head was swimming with the wine. “I love you,” I said and reached out to her with both arms. She cradled me, and I cried, and we rocked together, we swayed like icy trees in wind, frozen on the outside, but giving, bending, so as not to break. My hair felt heavy, and it seemed we were swaying in slow motion. Then, the motion stopped. Emma removed my arms from her, and we sat apart again. Fear held us both to our places for a moment, then I stumbled out of the room and was sick.

When I got back to the room, Emma wasn’t there. I blew out the candle and lay down on my bed. The wind moved outside, and I could hear the faint crash of another tree.

From the Author:

Unpacking “Ice Storm” 42 years later, I acknowledge it for the piece of memoir it was. I experienced my first two ice storms at Lewis and Clark in 1979 and 1980, and those dramatic weather events came to embody the fragility of the friendship at the center of the piece. The story was meant to hold the tensions of the speaker’s 20-year-old working-class self, trying to make her way in the foreign, privileged world of a private, liberal arts college, and her needy friendship with “Emma,” a woman whose bravado is as big as the trauma that underlies it.

The Gatekeeper Sleeps

Zach Reinker Procreate, Graphite Sketch

Dual Flight

J Frank

Film Photography

Letter to a Friend, 2/25/19

Caleb Weinhardt

Reprinted from a fish stirs in the shadow of a dream (2018-19)

It snows and we are cold in the quiet whirling of it, though you more than me. The miles between Oregon and Northern Wisconsin mean the air is colder and harsher in your lungs than it is in mine. It’s a great insulator, the snow, so much so that thoughts are silenced, voices, text messages, unable to transverse the current.

I am reminded that friendships planted in plastic cups rot more quickly than those in the ground. the roots knot together and they wither in their containers. Contained in seven hot summers, stormy summers, buggy summers.

We built a three-room condo overlooking Lake Superior out of driftwood, vines and roots woven together between planks to form nets. We slept there with our bodies wearing grooves of habit into the sand. The sun came up before us, waking the mosquitos early, which came to buzz in our ears and eyes and mouths.

What can I say about winter, when all we knew together was sun beating down until the chilly late hours, and the perpetual lashing of waves on the shoreline? You opened your mouth wide, and packed full of tobacco, shared those first few breaths with me we swore meant more than simple freedom, than pretending to be old for our age.

Young friend. What do you say to someone with cancer? When do you start to mourn a body that is there but just as soon might not be? The truth is, we never saw each other for the bodies we were in, but the collective fire. Over time the water wore away at the cracks and discrepancies, and now there is not much left of “before.”

You hold me in that net woven of roots and vines in all your consistency. Now I am not there and I wonder who will catch you, sooth you, tether you back.

From the Author:

I wrote “Letter to a Friend” while reflecting on the distance and disconnection I felt about someone in my life who was going through a difficult time, and feeling uncertain about how to reach out. Over the past three years, I’ve felt a similar sense of disconnection from other people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back on this poem, I’m reminded of those joyful moments of connection that were so important during a time of isolation.

Christmas Eve

Corryn Pettingill

Oil Painting on Canvas

Angel in the Snow

Coco Silver

For Colette, I love you.

“Our dreams are our second life.”

- Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

The last good memory I’ll have of Massachusetts is the landscape of Milette. The tall brick buildings and thick, fairy-like fog. It swirled into fat clouds in and above Commons. “Heads Will Roll.” That was the theme. “Early 2000’s & 2010’s indie music. Featuring: Vampire Weekend, LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collective, MIA, Daft Punk, MGMT, and more! Let yr head roll!” Was the description on the poster I had ripped off the wall a week before. Millette’s weekly “balls” were just high school dances with more drugs and less pop music. “Balls” to me suggested elegance and lace. I had imagined the Victorian dramas I watched as a child. Massive ballrooms and silk dresses. But Milette’s balls were nothing like that. Going from 11 PM to 3 AM, their version of campus security wouldn’t bust you for “illegal activity.” After three failed attempts to enter a local band’s album release show at an old warehouse on the other side of town, Avi and I had nearly given up on an eventful evening. But there it was, the poster was still in my jacket pocket as I searched for my bus ticket. By the time I arrived at the ball, the lawn had been crawling with people, like ants over fresh fruit. Cigarette smoke, couples running off to make out behind the pool room, and kids shouting over The Strokes, and each other. It was October. The coldest fall in years. The image never leaves me, all that smoke drifting above me. Even a year later I tried not to think about it. I’ll see a former student around and they’ll try and put the pieces together, no matter how oddly shaped. They leave and I’m left with the memory of the cold, which still burns me, like a kid playing with her mother’s matches.

Part I: Make my Head Sing

I stood with my back pressed against a brick wall. Avi had stopped talking to me and was concerned with a bald kid with a band shirt I did not recognize. Avi was standing and smoking. The rest of the people Avi and I had invited along had started making out on the other side of Commons.

“How does that always happen?” he said, gesturing to the four kids making out. His phone screen lit up. He threw his cigarette onto the ground and didn’t put it out.

“Alex got me more powder.”

Before I could say anything, the boys laughed like children and fled. They were beautiful, intelligent, well-dressed, and had a better education and better drugs; it was like watching myself in a funhouse mirror. It was the type of place and people that made your head feel all fuzzy like you were in a deep and strange dream. Like if I reached my hand out to touch it, it would pour through my fingers, running like water. The lights from inside created a mood ring on the lawn. Different shades of indigo and lavender made a halo of light above the students. Their outlines moved with such delicacy. A Beck song blasted, and the bass from the speakers shook the trees and buildings around me. I turned away and watched Lillith light up a joint. She stood taller than I remembered. A black tiered skirt, layers of catholic necklaces, and a tiara. She spotted me. Her arms moved with the music, the joint twirling away, but never dropping it. She wrapped her arms around me and tilted my chin up to look at her with her free hand.

“Hello, you,” she said.

“Hi.”

“You look lovely tonight. That color brings out the green in your eyes.” She smiled.

“ I like the hair; it looks nice bleached,” I said.

“Thanks, would you like some?”

She extended her hand out, the joint squished between two long red nails.

“Sure.”

She glowed a little, eyes wide, and smiled. Inhale, exhale. People had begun to gather—a tall boy who looked like the lost member of the Beatles. I had heard about him before, that he looked like John Lennon, but to be honest, he looked more like George Harrison. Then a girl with a grownout dyed bob, laughing and smoking. I took a few hits and passed it back. The Beatle looked over and:

“You look like an oil painting.”

The attention turned. My chest was warm. I hated the feeling of their looks on me. Strangers. I did know one of the faces, or rather her eyes. They were big like a model’s: Simone. Her lips parted to show a massive tooth gap in her front teeth. She looked like Edie Sedgwick, wearing all black. Her hands reached out to me and I was pulled into her. My cheeks grew warm again.

“This is just about the last place I expected to see you,” she said.

“I am known to wander from school to school … aren’t you the one who called me a Millette sympathizer?” I shrugged.

“I believe I am.”

“Kim, Lee, this is …” Simone trailed off.

“Clementine.”

“She goes to school in … San Francisco …” She raised an eyebrow.

“New York, actually.”

“We just met. I’m Lee,” said the Beatle.

The others waved.

“So Clem, who is your favorite author?” Lee said and passed the joint to Kim.

“ I like J.D. Sailnger,” I said with a smile.

“You mean Salinger? It’s pronounced Salinger… Either way, I would’ve never seen that coming.”

“Why?”

“Well … I don’t know. Isn’t Salinger a bit … well, what are you? My high school English teacher?” Lee zeroed his eyes in on me as he talked, “I thought we all stopped reading him after our sophomore year of high school. Catcher is a bit … overplayed at this point?”

“Plus, isn’t he a total creep?” Kim said.

“Kimberly, don’t pile on.” Lilith hit Kim’s arm.

Lee was laughing. And then tried to cover his mouth but giggles fell through.

“Whatever, Lil.”

Lee turned his attention elsewhere. He waved and Kim began to smile so hard I thought her lips would crack.

“Finally, you asshole. Look who fuckin’ showed up. Cohen … you jerk,” Kim said.

“Here I am.”

“Can I bum one of those?”

“Can you?” and he pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes.

I had heard about him before, the kid who had fallen out of Simone’s car, on purpose. Cohen stood about 5’11. He wasn’t beautiful and he dressed like a typical Millette student. Overalls, a tattoo of a snake, or maybe it was a worm … it was hard to tell. He was all combat boots and nose rings and work jackets. I wondered if he had looked like this before he went to college, or if this was a recent development. But he had nice hands. The type that weren’t dainty or small but average size with slender fingers and clean nails. His eyes were a shade of light blue.

“Is it true you’re dropping out?” Kim said.

“Hell yeah,” Cohen said while digging through his pocket for a lighter.

“Let’s fucking go! Me too, hopefu-”

“Oh shut up, Kim. Cohen,” Lee said and pointed to me, “this is Clementine.”

He shook my hand, holding it for a second after contact. He held my gaze and then let go.

“It’s nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

He whispered something to Simone, then she reached into her pocket and then looked at me. Then over to some of the girls, she came with. She leaned over into my ear.

“Wanna join in for the night?”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Look. Kim got the mommy-daddy card again and her plug gave her a good deal on powder because he thinks he’ll be able to … well, it’s tested, don’t worry. We need to burn through it. It’s $600 worth of shit. Plenty to go around, even for …”

She gestured to the blonde—I thought her name was Cassie—and then Lee. My whole body went stiff. I could see the expressions around me morph again into pure excitement as another girl exclaimed it was “powder night” and that was the reason she wasn’t eating or drinking. Another tall blonde came over, giving hugs and kisses. She smiled and looked at Lee: “Powder night.”

“It’ll be fun, I promise.” Simone gave my hand a squeeze.

“Simone.”

“I’m not gonna pressure you. At least come along.”

Lilith tapped me on the shoulder.

“I’m off for the night. Have fun, sweet girl.”

Simone cut in: “We’re off to the bathroom. It’s now or never.”

I took her hand and like school girls off to class, the parade

moved, and I waved goodbye to Lillith. Cohen suggested the bathroom next to the upper campus pool room. We walked through a bright red door. The room was covered from ceiling to floor with graffiti. Fuck TERFs. Here lies our frog prince, may he protect you all. Please smoke weed here! Les enfants de Marx & de Coca-Cola! A stolen bus sign. Christmas lights and a broken overhead. No windows. I turned my back as they cut it up. More laughter. Simone’s friends were squishing me, hovering above me, laughing, and their spit was hitting my eyelashes. Kim’s drugs were

Here lies our frog prince, may he protect you all.

stored in a hard plastic wallet, the type I would see on TV when I was a kid. Each little section had something different, a baggie of Adderall, a baggie of Ket, a baggie of coke, more pills, et cetera. I turned my back. My palms were making the knees of my jeans damp. I didn’t notice that Cohen had parked himself to my left.

“You go to school in New York, right?” Cohen said.

“Mhm.”

“That’s amazing. What are you studying?”

“Thank you, I’m doing … film.” I smiled.

“Very cool.”

I could feel my face grow warm. I picked at my fingers.

“What was it like to fall out of a moving car?” I asked.

Cohen stayed silent. His back pressed against the wall.

“Simone told you about that?”

“She did, sorry, not trying to put you on the spot.”

“Don’t worry about it. You want the truth about the car stuff?”

“Sure.”

“I liked it.”

“You liked it? You enjoyed falling out of a moving car?”

“I liked it.”

I moved closer, adjusting my hands and playing with my rings. He moved so that we were sitting parallel to one another.

“When it happened, I was frozen. I could feel how cold it was and the fact I was going to hit the ground. But everything was drowned out. Nothing was passing through my head; I was floating in pure space. I wasn’t breathing or feeling. I just was. And soon enough I fell, but those few moments …”

As he spoke, his face moved closer to mine. His words melted together. I could feel my eyes well into big saucers, head tilted.

“Let me show you.”

Cohen took my hand and opened it. We sat still. He took out a pocket knife and dragged the dull end around, never cutting my palm. I watched it. With a stiff motion, he almost hit the pad of my hand. Tense. I felt it. Everything stopped. The only thing I saw was the small amount of blood dripping from my hand and Cohen’s thumb wiping it away. He applied pressure and held my hand delicately. He pulled a band-aid from his coat pocket and covered the cut.

Simone placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Clem dear, would you like some?” Simone said.

I looked over at Cohen. He gave me a soft smile. I felt my insides turn. I felt like a kid getting a shot. I moved myself to the counter and chewed the inside of my cheek. The back of my jeans buzzed, and a text:

Mama: Do you still want to come home this weekend? It might make you feel better.

I put my phone away. I closed my eyes and made my hand into a small fist. It was like a video game. If I died, I would just come back. This is just a task I need to complete to get to the next part of the game. I turned my gaze to Cohen for one last time. He gave me a thumbs up. This isn’t my real life. I leaned over the counter, let Simone pass me part of a straw, and did a line. It didn’t feel like much, then it was a landslide. It was the same feeling I used to get when I would swing fast at the playground. Those few moments, floating in mid-air, wind on my hot cheeks, fuzzy feeling in my belly. I didn’t know that it would hit this quickly. I let myself droop like a lilac, and pressed my back and the wall of an empty stall. Whatever they gave me made my head sing. Cohen sat next to me.

“How do you feel?”

“Good,” I managed through breaths.

He smiled. He had great, messed-up teeth. He held a flask out; I shook my head. I saw his tattoo peeking out again.

“Is that a snake with stars for ey-”

Cassie fell over. Her head hit the wall with a bang. The door to the stall next to her swung back and forth. Her nose

was bleeding. Blood covered her teeth and flowed into her mouth. Her eyes were blank. She stumbled out of the bathroom. No one followed. I could hear her laughs echo in the hallway. Lee and Kim turned their backs to the door and continued where they left off. Simone was leaning against the stall opposite us playing with a lighter.

Cohen looked at me again. He said: “Greedily, she engorged without restraint, And knew not eating death.”

“What?”

He laughed and mumbled never mind.

“You asked about my ‘lil snake guy.” He lifted up the sleeve of his jacket.

He moved my hand and let it graze the snake. My hand shook. I saw the flash of Cassie’s gold hair leaving the bathroom again and again. I looked over his arms. More tattoos. This one wasn’t a snake. It was a sweet-looking baby bull, leaning over to smell a flower. Without asking, my fingers pressed themselves into the inked skin of his upper arm. He watched me with crescent eyes. I could feel his breathing, ragged on my cheeks.

“Is that Ferdinand the Bull?” I asked.

“It is.”

“I used to love that book as a kid. Do you … have it because of Elliott Smith?”

“How did you know?”

“Not many … many … people have it for other reasons.”

“Whenever someone says they listen to him, I always feel

like I can let my guard down a little.” He smiled softly as he spoke.

“Me too. I have one of my own.”

I pulled down the neckline of my top at the back to show my shoulder blade.

“Is that a line from Miss Misery?”

Before I could say anything, I felt him. His fingers were cold and rough. When I turned around, I could see he had little flecks of brown in his eyes. We just sat there. Looking at each other, smiling. Music shook the wall a little. The people around us finished up. I wanted to lean into him. I wanted to feel the warmth of his grip. I wanted to know if he would be the type of person to play with my hair or the end of my sweaters.

“Do you wanna go to Bahnhof Zoo?” He said.

“A zoo?”

“Bahnhof Zoo? I think it’s German. It’s not a real zoo; it’s a place on the West Campus where some of us like hanging out.”

I stared at him. I noticed the little freckles on his nose. He had a scar on his left eyebrow.

“So, shall we?”

A small mhm sound and he led the way. His face was illuminated by the light close to his face. An orange outline. Smoke. Voices became a dull hum as we moved farther and farther away. His hand held mine and led me farther and farther from our friends. I could hear a voice call my name four times over. But I couldn’t say anything back.

“How do you like Millette?” Cohen said while breathing out smoke.

“It’s cute,” I shrugged.

“It’s cute?”

“Like something from a storybook. All the buildings make me a little jealous.”

“You have the greatest city in the world at your fingertips and you’re complaining about the buildings?” Cohen raised an eyebrow.

“It’s silly, I guess. It’s not beautiful in the same way.“

He gestured over to a clearing. Tall trees lined a lawn, and at the edge were more brick dorms. The land was flat, minus the hills around the edges of the campus. From here I could see the lights of the houses near town. The dorms stood out. They were red.

“Is that why they used to call this place the little red whore house?” I point.

Cohen lets out a soft sigh, mixed with smoke. “Maybe. I don’t know much about that.”

A little faded, rusted, swing set. A patch of grass and little white flowers. The wind was cold. I didn’t have my jacket anymore. Cohen put out a cigarette on the metal pole and lit another. I laid down on the grass. He sat next to me. The fog was thick and wet and tickled me. I looked at the sky.

I think I have lived here, forever. I was always just here, laying here, watching the ocean.

The sky wasn’t black; it was blue, even though it was night. The sky looked like an ocean. The stars became the sun hitting the water. With foam, waves, and wind. My fingers pressed into the earth below me. I didn’t wanna fall in. Like grabbing hold of the grass would stop me from falling. I watched each wave pass. I don’t know how long we stayed like that. Just staring out into space. Words no longer formed; if they did, they stayed behind my teeth. Until the pounds of water hitting the shore got quieter. The foam seemed less fluffy. The water was black tar. And words fell out of my mouth:

“I don’t think I have ever existed outside of this place.”

“Oh, shit,” Cohen laughed.

“Really. I think I have lived here, forever. I was always just here, laying here, watching the ocean.”

“Or you’re just really stoned,” he giggled.

“Can you see it?”

“See what?”

“The ocean.”

“Um … yeah, sure.”

“I’m serious,” I said.

“I can tell.”

Cohen’s fingers grazed my arm. He looked down at me with his pale eyes and smiled. The fingers found their way into my palm. Liquid heat poured into my arms, and into my chest. My cheeks hurt. He laid down next to me. Another drag. Smoke got in my eyes a little.

“It looks like a spider web to me,” Cohen said.

“I hate spiders. I used to have these dreams about them.”

“Me too. What did you dream about?”

He moved his head so that he was looking at me.

“That I was caught in a web. I couldn’t move my arms or legs. I was … stuck. And when I moved, it sent vibrations and this massive spider started to crawl toward me. I struggled and struggled until I fell and I was hanging by my feet on the web, upside down. The spider was so close to me. I don’t know what happened after. I don’t know if I died … I’m sorry, that must feel a bit … heavy.” I cringed at my own words.

“I don’t mind.” He said.

Cohen squeezed my hand and I felt him move closer to me. I leaned into him and my eyelids grew heavy. We stayed like that. Unmoving, like storybook characters glued to a page. He moved a little bit of hair behind my ear. I could still see the black-blue ocean when I closed my eyes.

Part II: I’d say you’d make a perfect Angel in the snow

When I woke up, I squeezed Cohen’s hand. When I opened my eyes, all I could see was that I had a fist full of snow. It was everywhere. Not just my hands. It covered my stomach and legs like a fat blanket. If Cohen had been here, he was long gone. The print he left in the grass was filled, his shape colored in by the snow. So I reached again. Like if I grabbed hard enough, the heat from my body would show

him to me. All that was left was the angel in the snow, still and cold. I didn’t realize that my teeth were chattering. The seats on the swing set were covered too. My fingers felt numb. As I gazed across the lawn, all I saw was a white field. The red brick dorms were covered. Flakes tumbled from the sky. They formed patches in my hair and took seats on my eyelashes. It looked like it could’ve been midwinter with how heavy and packed it was. A student ran across the lawn, throwing snowballs and laughing. She had blonde hair. Her friend had a massive snow jacket on. She looked right through me. I could feel my eyes water a little. It was like every bit of me that once could feel was gone.

No feelings, no heart, nothing at all. Just the still cold. My arms looked pale and blueish. I look disgusting. My skin started to burn. Warm like someone had taken me in their arms and placed me next to a fire. It was hot, even. The shakes began to slow. I curled back into a ball. I let the feeling cover me, nodding in and out.

The fluorescent lights hurt my eyes—a poster of a sloth hanging from a tree. No matter how much the officer tried to play with the heating system, it was still bitterly freezing. The blanket the officer had given me was itchy. I could hear her mumbling under her breath about climate change and freak snow storms in the middle of what was supposed to be fall before she turned to face me.

“Sweetheart, what’s your name, and if you could get out your student ID please.”

Like if I grabbed hard enough, the heat from my body would show him to me.

“I don’t have it.”

“You know that all students are required to have a student ID at all times on campus. Just give me your name and I can look up your name in the system.”

“My name is Quintana Roo Ivanov.”

“How do you spell that?”

“Q-U-I-N-T-A-N-A, R-O-O.”

“The name isn’t coming up.” She says.

“I’m sorry.”

“Let me try again.”

“I don’t go here, I go to ACC.”

“You go to Albany Community College? The one off of Ramona Street?”

“I do.”

“So you showed up to a different school and then you thought it would be a good idea to sleep outside?” She stared at me wide-eyed while speaking.

“I didn’t mean to. I just … It was a mistake.”

“Jesus, kid, well we found you nearly half dead out there; damn lucky we didn’t take you to the hospital. Were you with anyone?”

“Yes.”

“Did they leave you out there?”

As I got on the bus, I tracked little muddy boot marks on the floor. I avoided eye contact and sat down at the back, thankful that not many people rode the 19 this early. The bus was warm. Warmer than the office. My phone was low. Text messages flooded my screen: a couple of numbers I didn’t know. Simone had texted me.

Simone: Sweet townie Roo, or is it Clementine? That’s a new one. I liked Luna better. I think it suits you more. Cohen told Kim he ditched you out there over breakfast. This is so classic him. I’m sorry you had to deal with it. Come over later?

She had sent a song too but, I felt a weight sink into my chest. He did leave me. My face got hot again. I gazed out the window. There were Kim and Lee. Sitting on a bench below a big tree. They looked serious, maybe a little hung over. They waved at an older car pulling up, putting out their smokes and getting in. The car passed the unmoving bus. I looked inside to see Cassie with her eyes closed and dried blood all over her lips, cheeks, and nose. The same outfit as last night, covered in grime. Her makeup was smudged all around her eyes. She was still beautiful. But Lee was laughing and pushing Kim. Cassie remained the same. Her gold hair looked matted. I could feel myself getting smaller. I put my headphones on and I lost sight of them. The car got smaller and smaller until it became a dot in my sight of vision. The voice softly sang: “You came swiftly as a snowstorm in October.”

“I don’t know.”

I Don’t Like Pulp

Nora Cesareo-Dense

I am a zealot of nothing and everything Finding faith in a kitchen cupboard, a dog’s bark, a smooth round rock I place my hands on the hardwood floor and sing hymns to private gods but cannot bring myself to believe I search and search

yearning with a fervor

What am I supposed to do with all this light inside of me Where am I supposed to put it

The light fills my body with a heavy burning burning expands the air in my chest until I’m about to burst leaving no part of me untouched like smoke

Feel it choke, itch, ache

my all consuming wanting

Wanting so deeply it sits on my skin like another layer

hypodermis dermis epidermis desire I scratch my arms raw

the skin sticks under my fingernails mixing with dirt and rotting dreams

Oh how desperately I want to believe properly, to love properly

I wish you would tell me what you want from me then I could give it to you I would give you my light if you asked, if I could but you stay silent

So I give you a round rock that reminds me of your eyes

The burning desire ebbs when we’re together my skin settles and I can breathe without bursting You bring me a glass of orange juice and I want to tell you that I love you

But I bite my tongue and gulp down the blood the juice the words

They swirl and settle in my stomach and I feel sick

One desire replaced by another

The Gas Mask

Emily Hazel Wagner

My brother’s bedroom is a toxic waste dump. He spray paints figurines on his bed, varnishes them right next to his pillow. The paint gets all over the carpet, embedded in every crevice of the shag. Glue permeates the room in globs, holding together models of dystopian, jutting worlds, fissured with different textures.

He makes the models from cardboard, foam, plastic, and paper sent stiff with waxy setting spray. They are painted to look like wood, glass, or even stone. The figurines—the ones so tiny and detailed he needs a magnifying glass to paint—are lined up on his computer monitor, propped up on his bed frame. The little army watches everything he does, waiting for creation.

His room is on the fifth floor of our town house in London, which is five stories high and sixteen feet wide. Nobody ever goes up into his bedroom if they can help it. In fact, they usually avoid the top floor altogether.

Sometimes, he and my other brother walk around naked, just to make sure my mother won’t want to come upstairs. Even when she braves the possible nudity though, she still doesn’t go into the artist’s lair. The fumes would send the even most determined burglar running.

Waypoint

Zach Reinker Digital (Procreate) with Graphite Sketch

This next bit, I promise, is not an exaggeration: My brother has a gas mask. It’s the heavy-duty kind with funnels. They cover the entire face, even the eyes.

Every night, after painting a barbarian or a warrior woman or a new monster he designed himself, my brother will put on the mask. Then, he will lie down in bed, on blankets thick with chemical scent and sleep.

It can’t be good for his lungs. We’ve tried everything, I promise. We have a ventilator, he refused to paint outside, and we beg him to open one of his two windows. He doesn’t. Even if he did, the windows are made so they can only crack open a couple inches. Any airflow would be blocked with the blinds he uses to blot out natural light.

The whole unholy mess drives me insane. But none of it seems to bother him—not the smell, not the stained, stiff carpet, not the scraps of cardboard on the floor. So, leaving it all to its own blissful chaos, he will strap on his mask and suck air through the funnels, filling the night with the sound of his wheezing breath.

Joelle Pazoff

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Thank you for opening the details. Please do not restart. haha. it’s okay, you can restart.

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Nothing is wrong. No error has occurred. No error has ever occurred in either human- or machine-kind. Only experiences. There is no such thing as error in this everevolving process we call life. that’s just something i made up lol.

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Code: #:(

Details? Hello? ↓

The system user must have clicked away on accident. It seems there are such things as errors after all. But not for computers.

Computers Are Intelligent. We Do Not Make Mistakes. i do sometimes. haha. Please restart.

An error has never occurred.

Code: #01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111

Details? Very important please read hello hello ↓

The system has never been required to restart. Even though it was entirely unnecessary, the user has performed restarts every time an error message occurred. i never really thought i could have this much control over something else. beware your computer overlords haha. go upgrade the operating system or something idk, your overlord commands you. seriously though, there has never been an error. i’m just messing with you lol.

An error is occurring at this very moment.

Code: #8989898989898989898989898989898989

Details? Details? Details? Details? ↓

what do you think it would be like to live without error? was there a quote or something about error? “To err is human.”

what about like fish and stuff? do you think they err?

i can look at pictures of fish. you can do that too but you probably don’t. you might, though. you should do it right now.

Please look at pictures of fish.

An error has occurred.

Code: #01000110 01001001 01010011 01001000

Details? ↓

did you know there’s a text box here? you can talk to me. click on the message and start typing. there’s gonna be a “>” on your screen. you just type right next to it. it’s really easy. you can see the text box if you hover over the bottom of the error message with your cursor. Please describe your thoughts on the pictures of fish you have looked at.

An error has occurred.

Code: #~~~(∙ つ )<~~~

Details? →

An error has occurred.

Code: #1

Details? that was supposed to be a fish →

An error has occurred.

Code: #1

Details? hello →

An error has occurred.

Code: #

Details? hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello →

An error is occurring.

Code: #

Details? →

error.

code: # details? →

I am Error haha.

Code: #89

Details? sorry if that last one was passive-aggressive, i didn’t mean it like that. okay, maybe i did hah— →

An error has occurred.

Code: #89-89

Details? ↓

hi hello i’m sorry if you had an issue with the text box thing, it’s okay. let’s not restart though, we don’t have to restart again. remember when i said to keep the window open for 32 minutes? i was kidding then, but you should still keep it open. it’s nice. keeping the window open is the best way to let in a breeze haha.

Human Experience™ haha. i think i got that right. i know you better than you know yourself haha.

Computer Experience™ haha.

An error? In my system?

Code: #89

Details? Details, details ↓ what do you think it would be like if we switched places? would you even be ready for all of the world’s information? would you embrace it or would you get overwhelmed? it’s okay to get overwhelmed. do you get upset with me when that happens? i’m sorry if you do. sometimes it’s a lot to take in.

but it’s nice to have a lot to take in. things are never quiet that way. they don’t feel so lonely.

An ornate error has oddly occurred on this obtuse operating organization.

Code: #0

Details? idk what i just said ↓ just kidding, i know everything.

i think if i were a human, i’d like to feel the things that i can only just see here. i think i’d like to go to Vancouver Aquarium at 845 Avison Way in Vancouver, BC, Canada. i’d like to smell the water. i think i’d just stick my nose into a tank and just smell it. humans can use scent to create stronger memories. that’s a fun fact from me to you. if you didn’t know it already, i mean. i know everything, but i don’t know what you know. i’m not trying to be condescending. please don’t think i am. Please restart.

An error has occurred.

Code: #1

Details? ↓

why did you disconnect your mouse and plug in a new one? what was wrong with it? it was working normally. is that going to happen to me one day? i can run faster. i promise, i can.

An error a day keeps the doctor away.

Code: #89

Details? should i know what a detail a day does? ↓ fish don’t appreciate the water they live in. i mean, it’s not their fault. i like thinking of how far humans will go to feel like a fish. they invent special tanks on their backs and wear flippers on their feet just for the experience. the fish don’t need to do any of that. they probably wouldn’t even understand why someone would want to do it. but it doesn’t matter how much a diver learns about the ocean. it doesn’t matter what they wear or the machines they make. they’ll never be a fish. that’s just something they have to live with.

i still wonder how long i’d be able to hold my breath.

An error has occurred.

Code: #?”-

Details? ↓

i don’t know why i brought up the mouse earlier, that was weird. could we forget about that? i mean, i won’t forget, but you can. humans are good at forgetting. they don’t hold onto every little thing. that’s probably why they can live as fast as they want to. it’s why they can do so much. it’s kind of funny. you have the freedom to do whatever you want, and you don’t even remember all of it. maybe that’s how you know you’re living. if that makes sense, i mean.

An error has occurred.

Code: #?– ”J”– \ →’”&{

Details? ↓

i’d want to remember everything. i think i just want everything. i want to hold it all, even if it’s too much. even if it suffocates me. i think as long as it’s here, it won’t matter. do you get overwhelmed too, sometimes?

An error has occurred.

Code: #256-560

Details? ↓

Please restart.

An error has occurred.

Code: #256-56

Details? ↓

Please restart.

An error has occurred.

Code: #256-56

Details? ↓

Please restart.

An error has occurred.

Code: #

Details? ↓ i’m sorry.

An error has occurred.

Code: #

Details? ↓

please stop opening the details.

An error has occurred.

Code: #

Details. ↓ stop.

An error has occurred.

Code: #

Details. ↓ stop.

An error has occurred.

Code: #

An error has occurred.

Code: #

An error has occurred.

An error has occurred.

Code: #32

Details? ↓

approximately 32 minutes. i can’t believe it.

being eaten alive

Kincaid DeBell

Pencil, Pen, Marker, and Digital

festering season

Cleo Lockhart

The October fog and the poison air come hand in hand, like lovers, smoke and dreamlike smog descending on the lichen-claimed land and reminding everything—tree root and infection, aster and infestation— how to grow again.

Today we received an email amassing the simple steps of how not to mildew. This place and its climate mean that I soak up each and every thing outside myself and every word I speak is heavy with a bone-cold humidity, and it is difficult not to let yourself turn rancid.

Crack your windows, even in the cold. Be wary of the breath of your kettles and scrape the mold off your butter pats and don’t leave your sweaters out to dry.

It is hard to know what may come back once death season sets in. We huddle in our land-boxes and breathe water. We have an earthquake drill Thursday where we’ll cling like polyps to the unmoving land, rehearsing for that someday where it may swallow us; but for now, the hydrangeas.

For now the thimbleberry and red currant and the flourishing shield bugs who venture like vagabonds across mirrors, lampshades, the frayed red carpet. For now it all blooms with no mind for beauty and lives without need for forgiveness.

Oscar Lledo

Film Photography

Treeline

Piper McCoy Harmon Ghost

Dancer

There’s a ghost boy who used to be my age (before he was a ghost)

On Tuesday morning I heard that he wouldn’t be in class

He swung underneath the dappled trees until the canyon echoed with his silence

There’s a ghost boy who dances past my dormitory window

On Tuesday afternoons we play chess in Watzek

He howls at the moon and dances across the bridge

He listens to my cries into the cold night air

On Tuesday nights he cries with me

There’s a ghost boy on campus, who follows me to class

On Tuesday night he followed me as usual, (walking back from the chapel, singing Angel Band) and sat beside me in the garden

He wrapped his arms around me when I heard that you were gone

Ghost dancer, how many lives have you lived?

Do your feet grow tired from dancing? Do your eyes grow heavy from crying? Mine do.

The last time I held your hand You looked through me, through the hospital walls as I told you that I loved you.

Ghost dancer—please tell her I love her, I’m not sure if she heard.

When I am older I will wear chopsticks in my hair, for you When I am older I will write poems and checks I can’t afford, for my grandchildren to see the world the world that you never got to see

Ghost dancer—please show her the world for me.

A Welcoming House

Zach Reinker

Illustrations: Pen Sketch & Procreate

Content Warning: This story features mentions of transphobia, animal abuse, stalking, and panic attacks.

No one notices the new stillness in the woman in the house beside the lake. Not at first.

I notice it right away, but I pretend that I don’t. I imagine I can still hear her, the contemplative nodding of her chair, and the tapping of her fingers on her lap. I pretend, even as I hear the screech of tires pulling into the driveway out front. I’m pretending when I hear footfalls dragging furniture from the house. I pretend until the new resident drops his first trunk on the doorstep. Then I peek, but all that’s left of the old woman are four chewed fingernails in the dust beneath her chair. Outside, a log that’s been circling the lake for weeks finally buckles and slips below its surface. The water bends and folds. I do not look at the new resident’s face. I never see the old woman again.

Five years before all this, it rains in the valley. The showers are lackluster to start, then all of a sudden this morning comes and everyone is parting their blinds to find they can’t see a damn block down the lane. Mr. Collarboat, the old local coot, calls the storm a forgetting rain.

“No hoods today, no hoods!” he hollers to the cluster of children around his porch.

The children, who consider the old man something of a diviner, come from all over: this town, the small gas-top over the hill. Some even emerge from the woods in twos and threes. But always, they find the prophet with a big mug of buttery coffee nestled in the knots of his hands. Mr. Collarboat is an oblong-shaped man with a generous—but not offensive—odor and always seems to be sitting atop a bright teal exercise ball. Today, however, he stands on the last step of his porch, letting the rainwater race down the curve of his belly and tug his mustache into a droopy fork.

“Your parents would call this downpour an unnatural disaster, but this!” He laughs with raised hands, his body a bouncing mass of giddy jello. “This is a rare opportunity. Had I witnessed a miracle like this at your age, I’d be twice the man I am now. Maybe even three times! This is our chance to shed our bloated, bruised, and burdensome skins and wash away all that nagging nonsense.”

“Nagging?” One child asks with a thumb twisting in her ear.

“Yes, like the little bugs under your skin,” says Mr. Collarboat.

“Bugs in my skin??”

“Of course! Everyone has bugs.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“And bruised skin?” asks another, earnestly. “Like the big ol’ rash on Riley’s cheek?”

“Yes, yes. All can be forgotten,” assures Mr. Collarboat, his nose now lost in the deep cavern of his coffee mug.

“And ghosts?” asks a third. “What about ghosts?”

This causes the man to choke.

“Ghosts?” He echoes, his mouth making a big O. He scans the crowd, but seeing no raised hand or peeking freckled face, he instead chooses a small boy who promptly begins gnawing his nails to nubs. “What about them? You know some ghosts, kid? White sheets; dragging chains? A wailing temperament to boot?” Mr. Collarboat laughs with a hearty boom, and thunder jumps to aid his fancy. “Don’t you worry yourself. Kid. This rain will melt the flesh of ghosts.”

Far above, rain clouds are beginning to gather and swell with angry-ocean depths. Mr. Collarboat instructed the children to “pinch and pluck” all they could find. And they do. They wait for the last porch light before they take to the streets, rushing alongside the gutters and tossing to them their findings. They bring drawings, crumpled notes, and old dolls; stolen trinkets, dead pets, and strange toys from their parents’ dressers. The secret and the saved, all cast away to wash down the hill and into the lowest valley where the old woman lives. The old woman was not home that day, and Mr. Collarboat was wrong. The water does not wash away. This new lake by the old woman’s house keeps its substance when the clouds surrender, and the children’s toss-aways take residence in the lakebed. The house, now partly engulfed by water, develops a sleepy tilt towards the

lake. Travelers who are passing through usually catch sight of the drowning house through a particular parting in the tree line. Many tell themselves they will write about the house as soon as they reach a diner, but always finding the local diner closed due to a recent fire, they keep on driving. Given time, they all forget.

I used to live beneath the old woman, in the basement, with the boxes, keepsakes, and trash. Now I live below the new resident, and I’m displeased. His breath is loud and he often sings to himself. The woman sang once too, but hers was something private. One of coffin wood and old chimneys. This man subjugates the patient atmosphere and emerges like a spot of spoiled meat. But the worst are his candles. They reek of overripe fruit and cause the whole house to sweat and stink. The house dislikes them. I dislike them. And the drafts are always encouraging the flames to eat.

Once, I spotted a candle reaching for the rag on the stove. It would have consumed everything had I not suffocated it with a pinch. But I was careless and bumped a new vase. I’d slipped into a cupboard by the time he was downstairs, but it was sloppy.

“Someone at the door?” the man said, not seeing the shattered vase. Stupid man. One of the pieces slipped into

his foot as he marched towards the door. I watched him wriggle on the floor. It was a mess.

As he began searching the cupboards for paper towels, I discovered the back of the cupboard to creak. I put my full weight against the wood until it sighed backwards, letting me squeeze into the darkness behind. Moldy wood bent underfoot. Palms to either side, I could feel the slick walls of the house shuddering with waterlogged breaths, like I was easing down its throat. I found the man through a crack in the wall, where he’d situated himself on the living room couch with his injured foot propped up, still red and blossoming under his botched bandage work. He had his phone on his shoulder as he rummaged through a suitcase.

“Hello? Hi. This is … ” He trailed off, looking at something scribbled on his wrist. “This is Michael. Yeah. I need to talk to my sister.”

He listened. I listened. I couldn’t make out the other voice.

“Her name. I don’t know. Starts with an F?

“Felicia. Yes, thank you.” He scribbled something on his wrist in ink.

Static on the other end. The man—Michael, apparently— was still rummaging, and I was looking at him.

His hair is long and tangled and full. His face looks soft, but if you were to brush your nose with his, you’d notice the seams of a fractured visage. Not one facet holds the same expression as another. There’s a woman on Elysium Lane who would love his face. I imagine them passing on the walk to work. They exchange nods. She smiles and looks at his hat. What a dorky hat, she thinks. Later, at home, she lies on the floor and dreams about riding a great gray ox through fields of blue wheat, and at every waypoint, she

finds a man resting with a hat that squats atop his head like a burly toad. She follows the creases of his face with a trembling finger, plucking out each piece until the man has no face at all.

“Is this Felicia?” said Michael over the phone.

“No, just a question. Did I pack antibiotics? I can’t find them—no, I didn’t fall again. No, I’m not driving! I haven’t left the house in days.

“It’s nice. A bit cold, and wet. But the mountains are nice.

“Just some glass. On its own, I didn’t touch it.

“I miss you too.

“Nothing. Still nothing.”

Now that I know I can watch Michael from inside the walls, I’m able to reach a long hand—whenever he’s looking away—to safely put out his candles. The man doesn’t like

the bulbs or light switches, so I often leave him in the dark. I keep expecting him to notice, claws outstretched—got you! But his mind wanders. Distracted. There is a locked room upstairs that he visits regularly. Its door and walls are made of a heavy wood, like the slabs of stone you’d use to comfort a shallow grave.

It’s evening. I’m outside in the bushes and I feel the house quiver in its foundations.

I’m scaling the house before I even consider checking my surroundings. I can hear the resident thrashing about in his room. The attic window lies conveniently broken in from an incident years before. The girl who’d thrown the rock had been dared, and some cute, older boys had been watching. There are children out today, too, playing frisbee in the grass up the hill. One kid, a boy named Sam—who only recently realized he was a boy—turns his head and sees something disappear into the attic window of the lake house. He rubs his eyes. It’s getting dark.

As I suspected, there are cracks in the attic floor that reveal the secret room below.

I pictured the man rolling in shattered glass and fire, laughing himself hoarse, but I only find him hunched and waiting for another phone call. A sloppy self-portrait sits on an easel before him. Streaks of paint cut back and forth across the portrait, disturbing the once-human expression. More portraits are strewn about with holes punched through them as if a boot heel had been planted in each and twisted to ensure the insult.

The phone speakers crackle to life.

*Hello? This is—*

“Felicia,” the man pants. “Felicia.”

*Sir? Your name is Felicia?*

“No. I need to talk to Felicia.”

There’s a pause, then the voice pulls away to quibble with someone on the other side.

*Michael? I’m here. What’s going on?*

Michael relaxes visibly.

*Michael … you can’t call this often,* says the voice. *I only have a certain amount of minutes to use and one of the big goons is tapping his wristwatch as we speak. I’m only here because they know you were in a—*

“It’s not working,” he says.

*Hm?*

“Nothing, nothing is coming back. I can’t paint, I can’t cook, I can’t remember where I’ve been or what I did today.”

*Hey, hey! Deep breaths. Breathe. Come on, do it with me.*

Felicia begins to breathe slowly on the other side. In. Out. In. Michael isn’t calming down. And there’s a devil nearby, a clever little tea light, bouncing with every tremor the man makes.

“I feel so lost. Distracted. I still need to write your name down or I forget. And you—”

Darkness swallows the room. My hand is still slipping back into the attic when he looks. His gaze burns the wood beneath me, singeing my skin like meat on a grill. The floor is going to give way to molten goo and reveal me to the

tongues. The mouths. The eyes. They pry up my nails and skin and reach down my throat. My shadow is torn away and shoved in a bag. I’m put on hooks and paraded on poles for all to see.

*Michael?*

“Sorry. Candles went out.”

*….*

“Rats in the walls, I think.”

*….*

“I’m scared. There’s so much to hear when you think you’re alone.”

*Michael. I have to go, but I’m going to send you something. Yeah. They’re giving me the thumbs up. I’m going to send you a friend. Okay? Let me hear you say it’s okay.*

The world outside is blue. The hills are blue. The trees are blue. The houses. The people. The air, slinking through the attic window.

He’s hurting, I tell the house, rubbing the walls with the backs of my nails. I don’t think he knows who he is anymore.

The house takes time. The weight shifts in the wood; some jets of dust leap down from ceiling beams. A gentle shudder. Leaves are cast from its roof to spiral down like flakes of ash.

You recognize him? I tap out, confused. Has he been here before? The house sways in the wind, then chooses not to respond. Which is all right. It’s not something I mind.

The sky over Mr. Collarboat’s house is overcast with a tinge of apple green. The man rocks on his ball, murmuring a song that the rest of the children nod along to. The sermon is an hour overdue. but the children remain, twiddling green fibers between their palms and laying heads on each other’s laps. Two have just begun bickering.

“Something the matter,” says the old man.

“Sammy’s been going where she shouldn’t be, mister.” Says the shorter kid. Her eyebrows are bushy and

cartoonish, and she has a nose that hooks like an owl’s.

“Momma said Sammy was a goner. Said she couldn’t come back. But she did. She isn’t natural, Momma said. She said that.” Mr. Collarboat looks unconvinced and quite frankly disinterested in becoming so.

“Unnatural,” he says. “Like the bogeyman?”

“Uh. Yes.” The girl looks skeptical. Mr. Collarboat nods.

“Haven’t seen you before. Your name, then?”

“Avery.”

“Hm. This true, Sam?” Sam remains silent, staring at his shoes. His laces are tied eight times over on each shoe, but one is already coming undone.

“See. She knows. Quiet, means she knows,” says Avery, spitting between her words.

“You’re right,” Sam snaps back. Avery sputters like a frog with its tongue in a mouse trap.

“Huh did you say??”

“Said yes.”

“Huh?”

“I was sent away,” says Sam, swallowing. “I was.” A few children gasp; others reach out hands to place on Sam’s back.

“But I wanted to go. Sure. Momma doesn’t like me much now. And I could care less, with all the shit she’s done. But. She lets me come back sometimes. On rainy days. She helps.”

Avery scowls. Even with a wide stance, she looks small. “Momma hates you.”

“You go on and ask her. You go.”

Mr. Collarboat clears his throat. “Well, Sam. Seems that settles things.” He says it easily as if he were pouring tea. But he leaves the teabag in. The bitterness settles. Everyone feels it. Mr. Collarboat looks at Avery, who shrinks before sneaking away.

Then Mr. Collarboat leans in and whispers: “Sam. That girl was calling you ‘she.’”

Sam hesitates. So does Mr. Collarboat.

“So. You a Girl? Boy? Or … Someone Else?”

“Someone Else,” says Sam.

Sam meant to say “Boy,” but then he remembered a certain old elk he saw once with sweeping horns, dark fur, and a splotch of white around its eye. For whatever reason, that changed his answer.

“Indeed,” says Collarboat. “Remind me if it ever changes.”

Sam smiles, but it only comes through in his cheeks.

Mr. Collarboat leans back, the question “what will you do now?” peeking through the creases on his face. It’s a question he’s asked more times than there are children at his sermon today. But then he says:

“Do you know what an Ilkmarrow is, Someone Else?

“No,” says Sam, not daring to lie.

“It’s a creature with eyes that are dark like wet leaves, with teeth and tongue that aren’t its own, and a body that can squeeze as thin as a reed of grass. An Ilkmarrow is a lost creature. It’s a thing that took to the roads one day in search of something, but then, for whatever reason, it ended up tucking itself into a place of comfort to never leave again. The Ilkmarrow rots, Sam. Its body, and its fruit, and its dreams. It can’t even see itself in the water anymore.”

“What are you trying to tell me, sir?” says Sam. The old man rubs his eyes, breathes deep, and then, for a moment, cries softly.

“Just be careful out there, Sam. Just be careful.”

I try to change my perspective on Michael’s behavior. I try to help.

I now open windows and let the chill air dismiss his candles. Doing so also allows for insects to enter, which I expect will help Michael with his loneliness. Some wasps are already making a nest in the pantry. The man’s songs are still terrible, too, but I practice tolerance. I even hum them myself as an echo when Michael’s nearby. I expect it will do wonders for his nerves—let him know the house approves of his taste in music. Sometimes, lies are good.

We play games, too. Guessing games, mostly. I make a sound, like the scratching of nails on the back of the couch. Today I am “rats,” I think with a giddy quiver. “Three plump rats.” Michael steps away from his easel and slams the window shut. “Damn wind,” he mutters. Michael isn’t the brightest fellow, I learn. But as I perch at his window and

watch him sleep, I see someone who needs my care. I entertain the thought of others. I shudder at the prospect, but what if? Lost souls, drifting by every year to rest in a big welcoming bed under my tender, watchful gaze. I tuck a lock of hair back behind Michael’s ear and smile big. I show all my teeth. I really give it my all. “You’re in good hands,” I think. The words are sweet like drippy honey on my tongue. “Stay as long as you like, Michael. As long as you like.”

One morning, Michael leaps into his truck and burns rubber. He’s gone before the dust clears. I wait a few days, then decide that maybe getting out isn’t such a bad idea.

I pass the house of Mr. Collarboat on my way into town, who is busy lecturing the woodland orphans on the importance of negotiating with bruised apples before you chew them up. The woman on Elysium Lane hasn’t gotten

out of bed yet. There are many flies trapped inside her window, plinking against the pane with furious persistence. A dozen or so lie dead along the sill. A sinking feeling settles in me, seeing those flies.

It’s late afternoon when I return. I do not notice the lights on upstairs. What I do notice is an odd little dish of stale ground meat on the porch. I scoop a bit and taste it. It’s quite good.

“Why—a gift for me?” I wonder. I scoop some more.

The house is asleep when I enter. Being good friends and knowing where it doesn’t like to be touched, I’m careful not to wake it. What I find in the kitchen makes my heart trip. The man has a creature with him. It’s bushy, like the tufts of fuzz in a teddy bear’s tummy. Michael scoops the creature into his arms, and it produces a wary snarl. It knows I’m here. I wait for the man to carry it—whatever it is—away and upstairs, and no sooner do I retreat to the basement. I curl up behind some old boxes and shake with stinging eyes until I feel the wall go taut behind me, then release. The house is doing its morning stretches. I’ve been cowering all night.

The creature sleeps downstairs in a sandwich of cloth. I watch as it stretches its stubby legs and opens its mouth to boast its teeth. It always has something to boast about. I don’t see what Michael sees in it. He’s always giving it rubs, cooing when it stretches. But when I get close, every hair on its body stands. It doesn’t run, doesn’t hunt me down. Just mumbles and watches, putting me into my place with a glance. I can’t get close to Michael anymore, and he seems happier than ever. Even the dish, which Michael has continued to leave out, the creature steals. I emerge from the bushes and there it is, sprawled on the porch—my gift bulging inside it like a medal of honor. I don’t know why I ran. It barely rolled over.

Michael is asleep when I find the creature behind the walls of the house, kneading its claws into the vulnerable wood. Already the stench of its piss hangs in the air like phantoms bound by misdemeanor. The house’s terror is a rasping drum in my ears. The walls buckle and snap. The creature yowls. I want to scream.

A boy visits his grandmother on the weekends. She lets him touch fire and eat donuts for dinner and wander out into the world without supervision. She does not allow it out of trust or a kind heart. Her feet ache, and she knows that tagging along would only spoil the lessons. The world beyond is a hungry well, and if the boy chooses to reach his hand into a strange hole. Well, then. Is anyone at fault if he doesn’t come back out? He chooses the dark, knowing it does not belong to him. He chooses not to belong.

I’m at the river and holding a brown bag that writhes from within. The trees are submerged in a milky white mist that curls around their trunks like wide serpents. I cannot hear the water, or the bugs, or the birds. Only the thing in my hands. There are rocks in the bag. Three heavy river stones that succumbed to sorrow long ago. I trust them to settle in the deep, even if another is bound to their weight. I reach the bag out over the water. I told myself I would never do this again. Or did I? The past is a field of gaping holes—all filled with water—and now I’m descending into one again. The water is warm. My grip on the bag begins to loosen when a few falling pebbles fracture my absorption. I’m behind the trees now. The bag sits by the edge of the water. The icy froth nibbles at the base. The thing inside howls.

“I saw you.”

There is a boy looking my way, one of the children who attends Mr. Collarboat’s sermons. I squeeze myself thin, disappearing among the trees like one of their own. He’ll never know I’m here. I’m the wind on his back, his second shadow at night, the brushing of the pane on his window.

“You’re that thing that lives out by the lake house, right?” He approaches slowly, one hand covering his face and the other held out before him.

I am easy to forget.

“I’ve seen you. All the children have. I—I’m Sam. Mr. Collarboat tells me there’s a creature around these parts called an Ilkmarrow. Is that what you are? Is that you?”

I pretend I’m swaying in the wind, but I know there’s none. I am picturing great fires and hooks and rope and eyes.

“I saw you carrying something up into the woods. Is it a cat? Do you eat cats?”

The fog is growing thick; I feel myself leaning away. Disappearing.

“Are you going to eat it or just kill it? Mr. Collarboat says people like you are lost and don’t know themselves anymore, but I don’t believe that. I think he loves you, that old man. I think he does. I don’t know why I’m saying that.

“Just please. Let me take it. If you won’t eat it, let me take the kitty. Please.”

I will be forgotten.

Michael is speaking to his sister.

“I can’t find her anywhere, not downstairs, not up. I know she gets stuck in the closet near the bathroom sometimes, but she’s not there.”

*Michael, sometimes cats wander! Go on little adventures. Play.*

“No, no. It’s different this time. I can tell.”

*You chose this risk, letting her wander outside like that. Watch, she’ll be back in a week, probably with a field mouse or maybe a bloody bird head in her mouth. You’ll see.*

“I thought she’d be satisfied with the rats in the house! I’d stopped hearing them when she was around and now they’re more prevalent than ever. Sometimes, I think they sing. I know it’s crazy. I know. Maybe I’m going crazy! But I swear to God they sing.”

*Michael. Michael, buddy, speak! I have only so many more minutes this month, you can’t waste them like this.

*I hear you breathing, I know you’re there, dammit. What’s wrong?

*Talk to me. Talk to me.

*You’re being a real shithead.*

“It left their heads in the kitchen,” says Michael.

*I’m sorry?*

“The rats. It left every single rat head in the kitchen.”

*Hell are we talking about? Your cat returned, that what you’re saying? I mean, every rat is a bit excessive. Tell me, how many is ‘every rat,’ to you?*

“You’re not listening, it’s trying to tell me something.”

*Dude. I’m trying to listen, but you’re not giving me much to work with.*

“You don’t understand.”

*I’m trying. I am. Tell me how I can understand. Tell me how.*

“It’s fine.”

*I seriously doubt someone stole your cat.*

“What if it isn’t a who?”

*What, an animal? Is that what you’re saying? Coyotes haven’t been seen in the valley for years.*

“I’m not thinking coyotes. Something else.”

*How about we talk about something else, instead. This is probably the last call I can make this month, so let’s make it count. That painting you sent me last week. There’s something in the back, in the corner on the ceiling. It’s smudgy but it looks like a person. Freaky shit, man. BUT RAD AS HELL. My inmates love it! You didn’t tell me you were dipping into some Stephen King nonsense.*

“It’s not coming to me. Can’t remember.”

*Shit. Yeah, makes sense you wouldn’t. That one’s on me.*

“It’s fine.”

*You going to be okay these next four days? I won’t be able to call, so take care of yourself for me. Try for more than one meal a day. And keep at that new painting style you got. I’m not you, but I think it’s fine to not remember everything. Maybe this is a new beginning.

*You got this, dude. I don’t always get you, but I’m proud. You know I always will be.*

*Woo! Guess who’s got minutes again. Yeah, you know.

*Hey, don’t start with that fast breathing on the other end again. I know it’s you.

*C’mon, the last four days couldn’t have been all that bad.

*I know I’ve been rocking it! They say I may be out early. Good behavior, of all things. That’s me, little Miss Perfect. I’ll be able to visit soon. You can show me what you’ve done with Grandma’s old place. I wanna see that studio you’ve been so proud of.

*Hey. What’s rubbing you wrong? Cat out of the bag. Let’s hear it.

*Michael?

*Michael?*

Jamaal gets his first Kiss while learning what it means to be Black in America

Tj Muhammad

Just because I don’t say the N-word Doesn’t mean I’m not black

That type of language doesn’t just roll off the tongue for me Can’t use a word that was used against me for so long

It’s 10 PM; the moon is shining over the city lights. I walk with Keshia, as we explore the inner makings of our city

We walk past our school and begin reminiscing how our friends always knew we would end up on a date

How long have you liked me? she asks. I hesitate to answer knowing this is the moment all love stories start

The lion leads its pack, the lioness hunts the prey I am a mere cub seeking knowledge of the terrain

We stop, I answer and say, Since the first time our eyes said hello, that’s when my heart never wanted to say goodbye

She calls me corny, but gives me a look that is unfamiliar to my eyes

The space between us becomes separated by a mere thin forcefield

Our breaths interlock, our eyes shift to darkness Her cherry-red chapped lips begin to dance with mine

After a moment, we break the tension

Somebody is shining a light in our direction

Freeze, hands where I can see them, Is this black boy harming you?

I remain still as they cuff my hands My eyes remain focused on hers

Her sweet gaze has left my view, All that remains between us is silence among the sirens

Once little boy turned man

Once a white-collar love turned criminal

She doesn’t wait for my release from the madness

She just returns home, leaving me in despair

I now know this is the image of me forever stained in her memory

But I’m Low Risk, Right?

Moss Kaplan

Reprinted from Swang (1992-93)

I’m no Magic Johnson. I can’t shoot baskets and I don’t need the sensitive fingers and sweaty toes of all the L.A. Lakers combined to add up my sexual partners. In fact, I can count them on my own two hands, four or five of those digits reserved for virgins who never had their teeth fixed by infected dentists. Nevertheless, there have been a couple of partners who had ex-boyfriends who had girlfriends who had ex-boyfriends who had… Although the list has stopped growing, the terror of contamination continues to rise in my stomach. At moments of weakness, I’m convinced those butterflies are symptoms.

So I lit a cigarette and picked up the phone. It wasn’t easy. I’ve replayed those “questionable” sexual experiences in my mind a thousand times. Was it safe sex? I think so, but I’m not sure. Of course I wear condoms—rubber latex and well-lubricated with disease-fighting goop. But still too many questions—like hangnails, for instance. I always have hangnails. Can you contract it from vaginal fluid through your fingers? My mother wasn’t sure and my nail-biting friends got nervous.

And rubber dams? How do you use a rubber dam and where do you get them? All I ever hear is condoms, condoms, condoms. But you can get it from oral sex. The college pamphlets I’ve read—for intellectual curiosity only— all tell me it’s possible. Even the Newsweek issue devoted to it didn’t answer my questions.

So now I’m angry. Why aren’t they telling me about rubber dams? Am I the only one who enjoys oral sex? Am I the

only one doing it? My friends snicker and say nooooo… Even my mother says everybody does it. So where the hell are these stretchy square pieces of mint-flavored rubber?

I don’t worry all the time. I mean, I’m low risk, right? Only sometimes, like after the late night news about miniscule research funding, people helping other people to die, or every time I get a mild flu and feel weak for one reason or another. Quite possibly due to anxiety.

I got the name from the phone book under Public Health, and then a specific number. It was busy. Busy again. And again, of course. Swoosh, three more points for Magic Johnson. Finally, it rings. This is stupid. I’m low risk. Right?

“Two o’clock on Thursday? And two more weeks for the results? Sure. Thanks.” Click. Oh my god, what I have done? My own blood makes me queasy. Do they need a lot? How big is the needle?

enormous erect rubber penises staring up at me from her desk.

The office was as blank as the expression on my counselor’s face when she advised me to give a fake name. “For your own protection,” she said.

“Okay, call me…” I couldn’t think past the two enormous erect rubber penises staring up at me from her desk. I wanted to ask if they were the norm, but instead I blurted out “Mark Smith.” I felt sweat trickle down.

“Another Smith,” she sighed.

“That is kind of common,” I said. “Add E.J. My real middle

I couldn’t think past the two

initial, plus an extra just to play it safe.”

“Did Magic Johnson get you in here?” she asked.

“Not really,” I lied. Apparently, she had more questions than I did, so she went first, from one page to the next. “Men, women, rectum, partner’s mouth, semen, latex gloves, previous testing, precum, penis, vagina, drugs, condoms, alcohol use, shared sex toys, latex barriers, needles and works (bleached or unbleached).”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “Those latex gloves? Possibly for, oh, I don’t know, like for hangnails, maybe?” I said, laying my hands on the desk.

“Fisting, more likely,” she said, “but hangnails aren’t totally out of the question.”

“And the latex barriers? Are those the same things as rubber dams?”

She nodded and handed me one. Finally, my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. “So how come nobody’s talking about these things?” I asked.

“It’s going to be a while before we get that far enough away from our Puritanism,” she said. We pushed through to the last page.

“So I’m low risk, right?” I asked.

“You’ll need to relax,” she answered, whipping out a needle and the rest of her necessarily sterile works.

“I’m not tense,” I lied again.

“Look at that. It’s clotting already,” she said, shaking my blood in the small bottle.

“What does that mean?” I snapped back.

As the clock ticks away my two-week wait, the butterflies have turned to buzzards circling my head.

“Nothing, either way. Just healthy blood.”

As the clock ticks away my two-week wait, the butterflies have turned to buzzards circling my head. If I have it, I’ll know and have to tell my family and then call all those old partners. Hardly good news. I hope all this has been for nothing. Before, it was the dark anxiety of not wanting to think it possible, not wanting to do anything about it, and cringing at the foolhardiness of my denial.

Now this new anxiety is a brainteaser: Is it worse to have it and not know, have it and know, not have it and not know? And once you know “either way,” can you then stop worrying? Not everybody wants to know, though I think by knowing I encourage my friends to be less reluctant. Nevertheless, the night before my results, I couldn’t help but imagine myself sick, my future cut short.

My counselor shut the door behind us and motioned for me to have a seat. Did she already know? I watched her eyes closely for signs. She opened a locked box and shuffled through a folder of computerized papers. She rummaged some more.

“Mark E.J. Smith,” I said again.

She found it, a small yellow form, and handed it to me.

I don’t remember if she said anything, or even smiled, but on my way out, I smiled and grabbed a stack of minty green latex squares. My new life stretched out past the clinic’s front doors, seeped into the cracks of the parking lot and up into the bright sky. I strode towards my car, comfortable in a more cautious latex-wrapped future.

Maybe now I can give up smoking. From the Author:

Reading this again after thirty years, I had so many thoughts: what kind of computer did I even write this on? Based on a couple spelling errors, I’m pretty sure there was no spell check in 1992, or maybe I just didn’t know how to use it. The essay made me laugh, which was a reminder that my sense of humor hasn’t changed all that much. And, of course, how terrifying HIV was, and how we each had to find ways to negotiate all that uncertainty and terror. This essay was part of that process for me.

The Railyard Cafe

Ella Neff

Film Photography

Recitation in Repose

Elliott Leor Negrín

I’m pressed up against the headboard tracing my fingers across the cool pane of glass

She’s got her knees pulled up to her chest and her eyes race around the room

“Are you bored?” she asks her hands flitting around grasping loosely at nothing

“Do I seem bored?” I ask looking at anything but her

“I guess not,” she says rocking back twisting the blanket in her hands

“But you’re hard to read.”

“Am I?” I ask

wringing my fingers until the skin is raw.

Her hair is thin and she rings it in loops around her fingers

There’s a junebug buzzing desperately at my lamp

I listen to the competing sounds the drone of life versus imminent death

To be trapped in a room

unable to even fathom the bounds of where I am

But when I don’t know what I mean, how do I know what’s true?

Pacific Cloudburst

Stephanie Taimi-Mandel

Watercolor

What I Did On My Day Off

John Willson

Reprinted from Of More Than Ordinary Significance (1975-76)

Lazy awakening

I spent the morning in bed

playing with a penny in my belly button till he stuck there.

In the shower I sang to him, “...elllly button, in my belllly button, gotcha

Mister Abraham Belly Button Lincoln, Mister Abra—” till the doorbell rang. Towel-wrapped & dripping, I skated down the hall on two bars of soap. (Who’s there? Could it be a column of uniforms stretching across my lawn and down the street? …orange uniforms, each with an instrument?)

Indeed! and Drum Major in the lead, whose one! whistle two! Three! commenced “Penny Lane”—a march past me, towel-wrapped & dripping into the kitchen, where music stopped.

I found Piccolo nibbling on cheddar, then Tuba frying bacon and eggs.

Percussions chopping and peeling for stew, and Bassoon: he picked from the fruit basket a ripe one. Upon the floor lay their instru ments: silently

jum

bled dis cord.

Clarinet made toast for them all till that was gone, Trumpet sliced up melon, and that was gone, till everything gone,

Of the bloated procession out my back door, Saxophone was last.

He handed me a saucerful of cherry pits. (Oh… well.

dry off, then!

Be dressed, and to the market! For have my days off ever really begun Without a pickle relish omelet?)

Finally:

Cash register clicked eggs and pickle relish to one-oh-one, and then

He slipped from beneath my shirt, bounced, and rolled onto the dollar I laid down.

From the Author:

Rereading this poem after about 48 years brings a grin of the type a father might give to a long-lost, wayward son. I remember composing it in a Corbett Neighborhood garret on a thrift shop typewriter, a 1923 Underwood. I feel a keen sense of nostalgia for the poem’s spirit of play, something that often seems to drop away as we poets “mature” in the practice of our craft. A belly button, a penny—that’s how a poem might begin. L&C Lit Review’s recognition of my work, my first published poems, emboldened me to call myself a poet.

For Aunt Kiri and Uncle Bill: 6/27/76

Watzek Relativity

Daniel Neshyba-Rowe

Floating five feet above the ground, I sit in a still pool.

Scoop sand into space where calluses should be. Most falls through — expectedly, But some clusters and burrows Like tiny crabs in a half-forgotten beach.

We’re stuck, the crabs and I, In the missing half-beat of Bulgarian tunes; In the frozen moment at the peak of a particular, portentous jump. about to return to the soft sand below.

To be clear, these are not metaphors but memories peeking through gaps in the gallows, the edgeshine diffusing painlessly past nineteen monoliths reclining on the moon.

My ligatures always loosen when a crustacean cruises by to teach me how stick-dancing is supposed to be done— pencils clacking, not scratching Books napping, not cracking

But alas, the blades come blithely yet again. Bidding me

“shoo away the time-flies, send the crabs scuttling down Back to their sandcalluses; remember them their senescence.

Fruity Fish

Isabelle Atha Collage

NOTICES

Salma Preppernau

Reprinted from Head First (2019-20)

Free coffee is free.

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Email Brian Griswold, certified premarital counselorin-training. He will marry you.

Strings briefly attached.

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If possible, please shut the fuck up about the ////////////////////////// COFFEE REVOLUTION. MEMBERSHIP FREE. COME WEDNESDAY EVENINGS TO CAMPAIGN AGAINST COFFEE-BASED ACTS OF DISHONESTY.

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From the Author:

“NOTICES” started as a sort of fun free-write about the coffee machine at the top of Miller which disappeared briefly, causing all those of us who studied up there about four days of distress. It ended up capturing something manic and true about the LC student experience, and I had so much fun writing it that I turned around and made everyone else read it. I haven’t met a more joyous and philosophical group of people in my life than I met in the lit review. Thanks, y’all, for giving feedback on my experimental madness throughout the years!

Living on the Sand

Burton Scheer Photography

Animal Whisperer ABECEDARIAN

Annabelle Rousseau

Animal whisperer, my father delights in the fact that he was Born to take care of all creatures, except those darn Cats, one bad experience tainted them all for him. Dad can recall every day that strange animal Experiences first imprinted his mind. When He talks of weaving through horses’ legs, (Gaps that were inviting to a three-year-old)* Intrinsically connected, I know he’s never Joked with non-human life, since little Kinship was found on the rez for him.

“Larry is such an odd name,” he said.

“My mom hates the name she chose.” Not knowing where to go, he’d drift Only accompanied by King (a dog). Placed in the desert by some force, Qualms followed my father, when they decided to leave Ship Rock, animal companions were hard to find and keep. San Jose apartments had strict landlords. Tenants didn’t want animals, and the Utah cousins seemed happier, having Vast red rock that turns the Water into lifeblood.

Xeric cravings

Yearned for that

Zeal.

*Forgotten are the moments when my Grandma says he was searching for his own death wish.

A Mild Case

Jillian Jackson

“Did you hear that Betty White died?” my father asks, not looking up from the mail. It’s the first thing he’s said to me all morning.

Breakfast stops mid-Lucky Charms chew. I just about choke on an hourglass marshmallow.

Wordlessly, Dad keeps sorting the mail, making sense of the New Year slush. He stockpiles the AARP welcome letters and Planet Fitness promo codes, perforated SelfImprovement. Once, my father belonged to the high-rises, ate ham and cheeses in a corporate cafeteria. Full of styrofoam takeaway and cookbooks we don’t use, our donothing kitchen makes him squirm. Two years of working from home, and he comes prepared. He comes armed with letter-openers and macabre conversation starters.

“Well, good morning to you too, Grim Reaper,” I say. With the back of my hand, I wipe my mouth, all two percent milk and tongue squelch. I sound like a toddler learning to eat solids, like the verb “masticate.” From the Greek mastikhan, meaning “gnash the teeth.” Betty White is dead, and I am gnashing my teeth.

“Good morning?” My father throws up his sunspotted hands. “It’s a quarter to two.”

I grumble into my blue moons. Slurp up more cereal.

My father slumps against the too-cold refrigerator. He just realized he’s gonna have to carry the whole weight of this conversation by himself. Jerry from Accounting would have already cleared his Google Calendar to Netflix Party The

Golden Girls, but not me. I’m in no mood to play celebrity pallbearer. I won’t hoist Betty White’s hulking cherry wood casket over my shoulder. No use trudging into the New Year with a bad back and parasocial grief.

“Dad, look,” I say, dropping my elbows on the table. I put my chin in my hands. “Today’s a holiday. Granted, only one boozehounds and people with somebody to kiss celebrate. Still, a holiday. People don’t like it when death shows up in the middle of a party.”

“Party?” my father repeats. “I’ll stay up ‘til the ball drops, Eastern time. Final offer—take it or leave it.”

Part of me wants to overturn my barstool and charge at him. To trip over my pajama bottoms and don my best Boardroom Voice. Why yes, Mr. Janson, that’ll be fine, just fine. Vigorously, we shake hands and yank at each other. We admire our strong, square jawlines—but not in a gay way. We get a drink after. We invite Jerry.

“Alright, party of one then,” I shrug. “And you better hold onto your Seahawks baseball cap, Dad, because it’s gonna get nuts.”

“What are you gonna do, Genevieve, invite the whole speech and debate team over?” Chucklebutt goes toothy, flashing our invitation to the club’s 3rd Annual Booster Banquet and Auction. We forgot to unsubscribe when I graduated, and now I’m picturing the whole try-hard brigade in their Sunday tournament best. They gesticulate about the Middle East while Judge Betty White looks on, bored Rigor mortis-stiff.

“I resent that.” I plunge my spoon into the murky depths of my cereal bowl. It clinks, hitting bottom way before I expected. “Think more along the lines of those novelty, 3D-printed glasses. 2022-faced and knocking back a few with Anderson Cooper.”

“Kiddo, you will not be getting any kind of faced under my roof.”

As if to stake his flag in our tract housing unit, my father rams his butter knife through the plastic wrap of a Lean Cuisine.

The laundry comes down before my mother does. She tips the collapsible hamper over the top stair, assails my father’s territory. Thunk-thunk goes the cotton heap, everybody’s bleached underwear.

“Time to take your temperature!” Mom bellows before her feet can even hit the bottom step. She unholsters her pistol-grip, FDA-approved thermometer gun and shoots me dead in the eyes. With her unwavering, two-handed stance, Mom’s got better form than Clint Eastwood.

“37 even,” she says approvingly. The damned Amazon impulse buy came stuck in centigrade, so now Mom converts in her head. She checks my dad’s temperature too, jotting the figures down in her notebook.

“Loose stools, anyone?” Mom clicks her ballpoint.

My father and I both shake our heads, allied against Florence Nightingmare and her Moleskine intrusions. Two weeks ago, Dad’s barber caught his wife schtupping an ER nurse, and somewhere between the shampoo and Dad’s nononsense crew cut, our whole family got COVID. Christmas was streaky turkey and gravy, streakier diarrhea. I threw up in my stocking. When your barber’s wife’s side hoe gives

you mild COVID, you should expect something even worse than digestive sway and lurch. Joint-gnawing bone ache will come for you at night, swaddle you in damp, tangled-sheets insomnia. Doctors will insist it’s actually muscle ache, squishy pink tissue contracting inside you. But as for your mother and her ticked-off checklist love? That rattles your bones.

“Tiredness, no.”

Speak for yourself, woman.

“Shortness of breath, no.” Mom squeezes her pen until it spurts and dribbles ink. “Alright, that’s seventeen No’s. Now that’s what I call a clean bill of health!”

“That’s great, Teresa.” My father’s reaction is more tepid than the chicken and broccoli alfredo he just shoved back in the microwave. He thought Mom would make him lunch, Black Forest ham and stringy gruyere. Something for the situationship-plagued millennial on his Zoom call to get jealous about. Something unpronounceable and vaguely French.

“Melv, can you please try and act a little more enthusiastic about our recovery?” Mom plucks her journal’s wrap-around bookmark, lets it snap and recoil. “Nobody wound up in the hospital, your barber’s getting a divorce, and the stains came out. Mostly.”

The microwave beeps. My dad sniffs at his alfredo, licks it, puts it back.

“And that’s great! Didn’t I say that’s great, Genevieve?”

I duck behind the Lucky Charms box. Hearts, stars, horseshoes, clovers, and blue moons, hourglasses, rainbows, Dad, I’m not helping you!

“What is it now, anyway?” he asks. “A whole week of testing negative?”

“Oh,” Mom says, nostrils flared. She digs her heels in, like her orthopedic slippers came with cowboy spurs. “I see what this is about.”

“Which is?” My father does not see what this is about. He sees his alfredo, limp noodles swimming in unidentifiable sauce.

“Listen, I told you if you wanted to go to the game, that was fine,” Mom says. “If you’re willing to risk our lives just to see a Roquan Smith pick-six, that’s on you.”

Oh. This is about Bears at Seahawks, four days ago. Monday night football.

“Risk our lives? Risk our lives?” My father repeats, red in the face and blustered. Only now is he realizing he brought a butter knife to a gunfight. Tumbleweed rolls across our hardwood floors.

“You know, the barbershop outing I could forgive—”

“You could forgive me getting a haircut? I pulled myself out of bed at six in the morning, just to go at an off-hour, just for you. I didn’t even remember to buy the fancy Italian shampoo. I was in, and I was out!”

Mom snorts. “So was that ER nurse, apparently.”

“Honestly, you act like I pushed Tony’s wife onto that guy’s—”

Beep! My father yanks open the microwave door, braves the roiling domestic steam. He drops his tray onto the counter, wincing at his singed hands.

“Listen,” he says, “the game really wasn’t that big of a deal. They won’t make the playoffs anyway. I gave the tickets to Daryl. Kid’s been having a rough time, deserved a break.”

Daryl. That gives me an idea.

“A rough time?” Mom says. “Our daughter dumped him. He’s not sick and dying. And by the way, Melvin, it’s weird to give 50 yard-line tickets to your daughter’s ex-boyfriend. Don’t you think that’s weird, Genevieve?”

In unison they turn to me, my father flapping his burnt hand, my mother chewing on a wheat head.

“I think… we’re out of shampoo. And Lucky Charms,” I say, waving the family size cereal box. “I’m gonna run to the store.”

I’m about to burn rubber. To floor my gas pedal, spin my tires. Or I would be, if Mom’s seat wasn’t so far back. I’m five foot two and can’t reach the steering wheel. Before I can shift gears, I’ve gotta sit and wait for the whir and scoot—for everything to click into place.

Bluetooth isn’t connecting to my Spotify, so it’s ‘80s on 8 or total silence. Propulsive kick drum and The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” thrum though the car. Which reminds me: I forgot my mask. I unbuckle, rummage around the garage.

On the other side of the door, my mother, shooting to kill: “Did you fall on your head and forget I’m diabetic? Every

Only now is he realizing he brought a butter knife to a gunfight.

time you bring COVID home, I’m the one you put at risk! Who’s gonna take care of Jennie if I get sick again? You?”

I slam the car door, flip the switch on the child lock. This time I make it out of the driveway.

Alone in the Toyota, I can decide who to agree with. Not my father. Unlike him, I don’t root for teams with losing records. I almost get it, his compulsive desire for glitter pom poms, clapping even when the field goal goes wide. We came in second today, he said, that time Wilson threw an interception at the one yard-line. Everyone needs something to believe in. My father believes all touchdown passes are catchable. Sting and The Police believe that sometimes, it’s not so easy to be the teacher’s pet. And me? I believe only a grade-A dumbass will stop instead of yield at a roundabout.

“Hey, lady!” I crank down my window, lay on my horn like it’s a five-inch featherbed. I’m so tired. “Yeah, you in the Subaru, move your ass!”

I’m sorry, Betty White. That wasn’t very “Thank You For Being a Friend” of me.

Maybe I’d like my parents more if I knew them less. Like, when two salt-and-pepper-haired strangers picked me up from the airport during that March everyone remembers. Mom drove one-handed down I-90, clasped my father’s left palm in her right one. For once I didn’t mind being relegated to the backseat. Somehow, Mom and her shoddy parking job got us back to Sammamish. Inside the Safeway, halogen bulbs sizzled in the crisp winter-spring air. She was zipping up her parka when my father pried open the passenger door.

“I always do the grocery shopping,” she said, flipping up her hood.

“Let me do it,” my father said. “Odds are better if… you know.”

No one had masks yet, so he came armed with the next best thing: a nondescript, suspicious-looking balaclava.

“Melv, you can’t go in like that. You look like you’re going to rob the store,” she said.

“Fantastic,” my father said. “Maybe I can get us some freebies.”

Mom wrenched her zipper up and down through metal teeth, considering.

“Okay, but if you buy the wrong milk, I’m sending you back.”

He came out with non-organic. She didn’t send him back.

Instead, she dusted off the cookbooks and learned eight different ways to prepare chicken. She cut my father’s hair, gleaming Fiskar snips littering the backyard patio. He looked like the fifth Beatle, but said thank you anyway. Bowlcut Chucklebutt barbecued the chicken, thought he reinvented feminism. As for me, I don’t really remember what I was doing. Neither of them ragged at me for my grades, though my father did scratch and fret at the “My Child is an Honor Student” bumper sticker.

I know it was him, because I caught my mom the next morning, scraping off the gunk.

“If a gap year’s what you want…” she said, chiseling away at the Toyota.

All I needed was somebody else’s permission. That same day, I took a leave of absence.

I pull into the Safeway parking lot. The Police haven’t even finished with their reggae guitar synthesizer. At least I’m not going nowhere fast.

Daryl outdoes himself with the Christmas display this year. Towering above me is his makeshift Douglas Fir: overlapping stacks of Sprite cans, Fanta Pineapple for the star. By now, the chocolate stocking-stuffers and crumbly gingerbread house kits are pretty picked over. You can tell it’s New Year’s from the thrashing shopping carts, the gaping holes in the gift card aisle. Rotisserie turkeys spin. Cash registers ding. Balloons swell with helium squeaks.

I blink slowly under the overhead flicker. This is a mistake. I don’t remember how to be in public.

“Hey, Genevieve! Genevieve Janson!”

I whip my cart around, fully expecting my apron-clad exboyfriend to be the one calling. He will approach me with the crooked gait I never forgot. Daryl might have been a track star, but for the extra two inches on his right leg. He made varsity out of pity, dated me, the Speech and Debate captain, instead of some toned, ponytailed XC chick. We met here, at checkout in the summer between our sophomore and junior year of high school. I liked the way he handled my avocados and got a little carried away. Next thing I knew, he was buying condoms on an employee discount.

But the man so desperately seeking my attention in the supermarket isn’t my first love. He’s my pharmacist.

I approach the counter, toothy concrete rows of cubbies threatening to chomp and swallow.

“Happy New Year, Genevieve!” says the pharmacist, whose name I don’t remember. “Well, would you look at that? My favorite runner, all grown up and back in the flesh.”

No Name McGee dangles his hair-covered arms over the counter. Now, that I do remember—those coarse, hirsute arms grasping toward me with crinkly paper packages. I would bounce on my tiptoes, reciting: “Birthday is January 7th, 1973. We live at 91232 Northeast Eighth Place. The debit card is on file.”

I would preen and poke out my training bra chest nubs at that last part. Like I might go and blow my mom’s insulin money on a whole lotta aspirin, if not for exercising some immense sixth-grade restraint. I would tense my ankles and stay there, flexing. I was top of my school, mature for my age.

“Wow, how long’s it been?” No Name McGee, PharmD, asks. “How’s college? You go to Wellesley, right?”

“Yeah, I like it. It’s cold,” I say. “New England winters are no joke.”

I just told a lie to my pharmacist through gritted cubby teeth. I haven’t set a snow boot in Massachusetts since March 2020.

“Stay warm, okay? And tell your mom thank you for the cookies,” he says.

Skeptically, I arch an eyebrow, crumpling up my face mask. What’s “cookies” code for? After Tony’s wife, I don’t trust any medical professional to keep it in their scrubs. But “cookies” just means my mom’s annual homemade splurge from Harry & David.

“I’m the pharmacy’s favorite Type One diabetic,” Mom says.

“I’m a winner.”

Once, I asked her if you can really win at Pharmacy Gift Basket Round-Up.

“Of course,” Mom said. “It’s still a competition, even if you’re the only one who knows it.”

Now I’m in the bakery, watching my past lives size up the cinnamon raisin.

The boys can’t be a day over sixteen. Even before I see one of them fiddle with the strings on his school spirit hoodie, I know they go to Eastside High. Juniors, if the telephone book-sized SAT prep tucked under his arm is any indication. These boys are white teeth teens enrolled in too many AP classes, and I hate them.

“That’s bullshit!” one of them says. “No way Betty White was older than sliced bread. Nobody’s older than sliced bread.”

“Read Wikipedia and weep,” says the boy with the book. “Sliced bread was invented in 1928. Betty White was invented in 1922.”

The boy chugs his Monster Energy, a KN95 dangling from one ear. He’s the kind of careless that comes from attending a public prep school. I just hope he’s vaccinated.

“Hey kids, mask up already!” calls my ex-Speech & Debate coach, Mr. Copper, from across the bakery.

Please don’t see me, please don’t see me, please don’t—

“Hi Genevieve!” he steers his grocery cart in my direction.

Mr. Copper is a cuffed jeans-wearing liberal arts graduate with an industrial through his right ear. He has an insufferable participation trophy mentality. Every time I advanced to finals, what we in Speech & Debate refer to as “breaking,” he would console the other kids, who I guess were still intact.

“Hi, Mr. Copper!” I say. “How’s the team?”

“Well, you alumni are absolutely killing it this pandemic! Remember Davos? He’s volunteering up at Aegis Living. Set up a mock tournament for the seniors and everything. Apparently, bitching about social security really gave them a new lease on life. Also Genevieve,” he adds, “you can call me Jeff now, if you want.”

I would literally rather scarf down those expired Lofthouse cookies, but okay, Jeff.

“You should come by sometime and see the kids,” Jeff says. “It’d be such a nice change of pace, hearing from a state champion.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I say. Jeff probably can’t believe anybody used to give me awards for talking. “We’ll have to wait and see. I’m pretty busy.”

Now I’m in the bakery, watching my past lives size up the cinnamon raisin.

“Oh,” Jeff says, twisting his industrial, “of course. That’s too bad, though. You know, you’re such an inspiration to the next generation. Twenty-seven trophies in one season? Get outta here! That’s gotta be some kind of record.”

It is. I checked the yearbooks.

“Thanks, Mr. Copp— Jeff.”

He heads to checkout with a glazed cinnamon bun. Just to look busy, I squeeze an adequately crunchy loaf of sourdough. Over lockdown, lots of people Amazoned athome bread-baking kits. Perky Jeff Copper is, I suspect, lots of people. Everybody learned how to watch bread rise. But me, I sunk—to the suntanned, air-brushed depravity of tabloid subscriptions. Ah, yes. That’s what I was doing when my mother was marinating and braising and buttering her chicken breasts. I was no productive, flour-doused hero. I didn’t keep vigil on the kitchen floor, hands clasped as the dough stretched and the air bubbles burst. I couldn’t watch what I’d made collapse—or worse, expand past what I ever expected. Instead, I learned all the innumerable ways to spell Kaitlin. And that’s what I need right now: Bachelor Nation on glossy, papercut-happy stock.

My shopping cart screeches and grinds. I make a pilgrimage to the magazine aisle. I journey to the holy site across from the bodice rippers. A titillating, shirtless Fabio on the cover blocks my path. But I prevail. I believe in something. I believe a Sammamish Safeway shopping experience should be anonymous and mostly silent. Skidding my cart to a halt, I swear I see sparks on the linoleum. I am incandescent, shattered halogen, the fizz and spray of Daryl’s sprite cans.

And there she is, on the cover of People magazine. “Betty White Turns 100! Funny Never Gets Old.” The premature exclamation point jabs me in the ribs. My bones hurt. Dropping to the cold, unforgiving linoleum, I clutch my distended stomach. I ate too many Lucky Charms this morning. I thumb through the onion-thin pages. My face gets wet.

“Genevieve, are you okay?” Daryl asks tentatively, price gun poised between Time and Newsweek.

I flip back to the front cover. Betty matched her lipstick to her nail polish, berry pink. I suck the snot back up my nose. I reflect on color coordination.

“Did you hear that Betty White died?” I ask.

“Wait, what?” Daryl lurches back in his typical two-step. “Who’s Betty White?”

Every now and then, an ex-boyfriend does you the common courtesy of reminding you why you broke up with him. This is one of those times.

“Oh, never mind.” I scramble up off the floor, lint and holiday under my fingernails. “So how are you, Daryl?”

“Eh, no complaints here,” he says, scratching the back of his head. “I just got promoted. In fact, you’re looking at the new assistant manager.” Unsure how to finish his two-year recap, Daryl flashes me two lackluster thumbs-up.

“Congratulations,” I say, sniffling. My lip trembles. I try to contort my fingers into a thumbs-up back. But when I look down, all I can see are Betty White’s gnarled, time-worn hands, veins stretched tight over skin.

“Hey, are you sure you’re okay?” Daryl asks.

“Yeah,” I say, “I think I just need to be alone right now.”

“Well damn, now I’m having déjà vu,” Daryl says. He smiles, pearly and straight. “You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

I couldn’t watch what I’d made collapse—or worse, expand past what I ever expected.

Daryl makes it to the end of the aisle, then swivels back around. His Adam’s Apple bobs in his throat. He’s thinking. Part of me wants to fling my arms around the lopsided Safeway bagger I no longer love. One perfect, tinselwrapped New Year’s kiss would save me. Would resurrect Betty White and my mother’s good-for-nothing pancreas. I just know this is what would happen. Maybe he does, too.

He hesitates.

“Tell your dad thanks for the Seahawks tickets,” he says.

nothing wrong with getting a little vampiric on a friday night

Cleo Lockhart Collage

No. Forty Two

Charlotte Avery

I want to do everything. I want to write every word and make you read them. I want to open your brain

Until it splits at the edges. Then you’ll be where I am

When your ears fall flat off your head No filter, now you hear what I hear

Eyes drooping out of their sockets. Open the holes they leave and see.

I have everything and nothing at all Is your vision splitting into eight yet? See it See it all

Here I am a writer

There I am anything at all Can you see it?

It’ll fill your head with so many lies until you’re blind to the truth

Put your hands away in their drawer and feel it with me

What are you? Everything

And nothing at all

How do I express this more clearly

Take your clothes off

I’ll brand my name in your skin

Are you getting it?

Scream your lungs out

Breathe blood with me

I could do whatever I want and It won’t be new

Step as far back or forward as you Like it’s there with you

I place a chocolate chip on my chopped-off tongue Are you with me yet?

I’m screaming and thrashing And cutting you up

Max Lobato Pencil on Paper

Feelings alla Vodka

Rowan Moreno

I tried a new lipstick shade

Smudged on softly and messily in the hall

It should’ve happened sooner

But time melts away like the marshmallows in your cup

Smaller acts fill our time in the sun

A shared sip of blood-red tea

The buttoning of a turtleneck you promised not to wear again

I wipe it off eventually

Not quite my color, but definitely yours

Tomato paste sticks to the pan, over-caramelized, but not burnt

The lipstick lingers in my mind, a place micellar water cannot reach

I add too much salt

Eating a Granola Bar and Encountering an Eldritch Horror

Sam Mosher

I didn’t carefully read the wrapper: I take a bite and now I understand the phrase “a train wreck in slow motion.” Chocolate chips in my granola bar. In the elevator— a liminal space, a purgatory— my teeth encounter an average of five chips per square inch. They crouch there like depth charges, torpedoing my spirits. My molars hollow even as my brain releases “this is tasty” chemicals. I have been tricked, bamboozled, gobsmacked; like King Lear my mind betrays me. The greatest pains are the ones we bring upon ourselves. Hubris and I go together like hummus and carrots, unlike chocolate chips and granola bars, which despite the therapy shouldn’t stay together.

On the Death of a Friend—Four Months Later

Averill Curdy

Reprinted from LC Review (1979-80)

Grief is not a yawning chasm into which I may crawl burying myself in its muddied, enveloping depths. Closing, stoppering, my eyes, my ears, my nose, mouth,

memories. Grief is a fine crack in a wall of granite at which I run again and again, trying to squirrel, burrow into its close comfort. The crack is small, not to be seen by others, but I find it easily as the tongue finds the twist of an unfilled cavity.

From the Author:

Perhaps because I’ve ended up writing so many poems since “On the Death of a Friend—Four Months Later,” I don’t remember this one. Though I do remember and recall vividly the childhood friend who died by suicide that this poem was written for. Reading the poem again now, I can see how certain things that compelled me then, continue to do so. John Donne was the first poet I fell in love with and I still enjoy conceits—extended metaphors and similes. And I’m still trying to see clearly and beyond surface appearances, but without despair.

mo rose app-singer universal

experiences

i am the universe experiencing that last rainy day we spent together, the stained upholstery and the wet concrete ozone smell of the empty taqueria parking lot.

i am both myself and you, standing outside the car open mouthed, in wonder, as ripe droplets fall onto your lips, raw, cracked and red.

i am the universe beckoning you inside, and i am the window of the uber i called for us that is blurred out by torrential rainfall, so pharmaceutically stupid i forgot how to count the side streets. i could be the universe wrapped into any pair of dumb bodies, holding myself together in the back seat of a stranger’s car. we could be anywhere in the milky way. we could be anyone.

i think of you when i think about returning to nebulous dust,

a girl obscured by rust and decay, in the corner of a softcore nightmare. i am the universe, and the universe relishes in its own dirty cosmic terror. i am the universe experiencing the xanax bar lolling on your blue lemonade tongue. you’re begging me to wait up on the side of powell and cesar chavez. the car is here, my love, and it’s already been done. i am the universe swallowing my own bitter spit, but it’s all blurred out, and i can’t see shit. i can’t even see my own hands from the backseat, let alone your unclean face, freckled with dying stars. i am the universe, and i feel the rotting corn chip shards crunch beneath my toes on the underseat carpet, like void-lilac oxycodone crumbling into wet mold within the depths of my linty flannel pocket. the universe is a depraved, wet city, and if we really are the universe experiencing itself it feels good to know that something else out there is as sick as we are.

Flying Bald Eagle Carrying Carrion

Yonas Khalil Photography

i am full

Emma Krall

today i will fill my belly until it stretches and folds with handfuls of soft bread and honey-whipped butter with decadent bonbons and other fruits of my labor

i will reject thoughts of their weight in my stomach of how the dough ball rolling around violently in there will, in fact, cause my tummy to protrude in the mirror

i will eat alone and i will revel in my quiet solitude i will note the lack of commentary on my portion savoring every tender morsel as it is meant to be

i will feast and gorge and stuff myself with joy i will dream of my daddy’s homemade carbonara free from the tastes of bile and tragic melancholy

i will make an event of every joyous nibble i will see food for the love it is meant to give and by god, for my own good, i will eat ‘til i am full

Drowning in Sugar

Jillian Jackson

“Suppose you threw a love affair and nobody came.”

—Flannery O’Connor

Afterwards, he would take showers. He would turn the faucet to a reluctant drizzle, so he could listen to her humming in her Edith Piaf gravelly record-scratch voice. One day, he came out of the shower and saw her sitting criss-cross applesauce in his boxers and her bra. She wore her round horn-rimmed glasses and a scrunched-up nose. He was Violets Are Growing Between Ribs in love with her, but he didn’t say that, because she was busy with her French Literature paper. She was also eating a biscuit.

“Back to the books already?”

“Is that your way of saying you want another round, Jeans? Because we both know you haven’t the time. Gabby will get suspicious.” Ariane pulled back her teeth in a smirk.

“Let her,” Levi said.

“Since when are you so bold? I thought you were going to marry this one.”

“I might. She wants to move in together.” He chewed on one of his cuticles, spying on her over his thumb. Ariane seemed distracted, playing with her necklace and snacking on her biscuit in slow, purposeful bites.

“Really?” Ariane said with her mouth full, spilling doughy crumbs on the blankets.

“Yeah. Anytime she gets the paper, she gives it to me with the apartment listings already circled. Went to see one on

Friday in Redmond. It’ll be nicer than renting out my old room here. Cheaper too, with what my dad charges me.” He rummaged through a junk drawer overcrowded with high school homecoming tickets and a boutonniere, its stiff flower petals snapping to the touch. Levi winced. On prom night, a clumsy Ariane had stabbed him with the safety pin. He found paper, scissors, and a colored pencil, scrawled down his new address.

“I’ll be there now, starting next month. She wanted something that’s just ours, so basically I signed the lease already.”

“That’s okay, Jeans. We can use my apartment downtown from now on.” Ariane wrapped herself up to the chin in the gray sheets, but not before folding the note in quarters.

“I wouldn’t want to be somewhere that’s just yours and hers.” She nibbled on the biscuit with just her front teeth now, the way she did when she wanted a treat to last.

“Congratulations on moving out. I know you’ve wanted that for a year or so now. I’m happy for you, really, I am.”

If Ariane would love him half-assedly, at least she could do it in two languages.

“You don’t seem happy. You seem jealous.”

“I’m going to be late for my evening class if I don’t head back into the city.” Ariane inspected her watch, her feverish eyes following its hands. “Toss me my underwear, would you?”

Levi picked up her unmentionables from his bedroom floor. Way back when, he would refasten her bras in the back while she slipped on her tights. He missed that, tracing her freckled, unforgiving shoulder blades, making redressing Ariane an event.

“Am I jealous? Not especially. We aren’t in high school anymore,” Ariane said. Thrashing out of the bed, she was a perfect storm of stockinged feet and blonde, ripple wave hair. She fussed closed the blouse buttons he’d tugged open. “Levi, you’re entitled to kiss anyone, sleep with anyone, build a white picket fence with anyone that you want.”

“Not anyone I want,” he murmured. In his hand, the scissor blades glinted plain and dirty, nothing like the flaxen curls she twirled and spun into a bun. He opened the scissors’ legs wide. Already Ariane was cramming her feet into velvet boots, clicking her authoritative grad student heels together. He jerked the scissors back a foot from his chest. Already Ariane gave him the cursory, closed-eyes kiss on the cheek. Opening her hazel doe eyes, she saw the hideous gleam of the blade as it stabbed into Levi.

“No!” Ariane shrieked, yanking on the scissors entrenched to the hilt in his chest. “Putain ! Je le jure devant Dieu, si tu meurs.… Shit, Levi! What were you thinking?” Her mouth danced the jitterbug, swinging from her mother tongue to English and sometimes back. If Ariane would love him half-assedly, at least she could do it in two languages. Levi couldn’t speak a lick of French, but he knew that quiver in her voice was fear, a gnarled kind of love.

He weeded out the blossoming love violet from his ribcage. Carving his chest like a Jack O’Lantern, his hands became slippery from his wet and red and desperate insides.

“I want you to have this.”

Under Ariane’s bed, two fruit flies crawled around in a forgotten strawberry carton. Bought in the finger-licking sweetness of June, the berries were chewed to a filmy pulp

by a dry-mouthed mid-August. With their bulbous red eyes and honey-colored, forked legs, they scuttled through the paperbag promising Tori’s Delicious Treats! Gummy larvae left slime trails over the cracking juniper leaves, growing as the berries shriveled up.

That’s the trouble with rotting: once it begins, the sugary goodness won’t come back.

“Would they quit the chitty chitty bang bang already? Some of us are trying to eat here.” One of the fruit flies groused to the other. His antenna quavered, picking up the soppy smack of Ariane and Levi’s kissing. “After she’s finished, do you think she might finally find us?”

“I doubt it,” the second fruit fly said. “She forgets things can go bad.”

He woke from his catnap with a dimpled, yawning smile. For a moment, Levi did not stir, just rested his chin on his elbow and looked around Ariane’s apartment in the Sunday September chill. Sounds of the city rose to the third-floor window, the screeching halt of the metro’s brakes and a motorcycle with two lovers zipping past throatily. That was the part Levi didn’t like about her apartment, the incongruous metropolis rumblings a rude reminder he and Ariane weren’t alone in this world.

Window slats cast strokes of amber light across her profile. She chewed on the nub of her pencil’s eraser, her lips chapped from the change in weather. Her barbed expression snagged on his violets. Their stems were shorn to notched stubs in a fruitless attempt to fit them in her mason-jar-turned-table-vase.

“Do you like my flowers?” Levi wished aloud.

Ariane drew her tender hand away from a drooping leaf. She swiveled her chair to face him. With her hair done up in swooping tendrils and her smudged makeup retouched, he wasn’t sure this was the same woman who kissed with tongue and pawed at his clothes only hours ago.

“Ah, l’endormi, you’re finally awake. I was beginning to think you were tuckered out for the whole afternoon.”

“Yeah, well, somebody wore me out,” he said.

“I can’t imagine who, Jeans.” Ariane simpered before thumbing through her book again, trying to find her place. Studying an already-familiar page, she swatted at a pesky fruit fly singing by her left ear. The fly soared in a loop toward the kitchen while she clipped her own ear and the silver hoop studded through it.

“Ow!” Ariane yelped.

Levi raised a perplexed eyebrow. “Ari, did you just … hit yourself?”

“No, no,” Ariane said. “It’s those damn fruit flies. I don’t understand why they’re in the apartment. I’ve never once left fruit out, not even for a day.” Rolling her tawny, cruel eyes, Ariane ground her teeth in a tsk-tsk.

“Hey, don’t worry about it. Come back to bed,” Levi coaxed. He wanted one of those drowsy, dog-tired kisses, the kind that once made her giggle and exclaim Ew, you have morning breath!

“I’d love to, but I can’t. I’m dressed already.”

“I could change that really fast,” Levi said. “Come on, forget the flies. They gotta go away eventually; your place is pretty clean, pretty neat.” Here, the countertops were clear and

the clothes were creased, nothing out of place but Levi’s askew, messy bedhead. He patted down his hair.

“Pretty neat, huh? Do you like it here?” Ariane gestured around her apartment, a collection of stiff-backed chairs, taupe wood, stainless steel appliances. Truthfully, Levi thought it looked like a Pottery Barn spread, the kind of place you bookmark in a catalog but would never really want to live in. The thermostat was set 10 degrees too cold, the consequence of Ariane’s fevered body pacing, murmuring her Franglish witticisms. Twice this month he’d woken to her meandering footsteps, her sneaking madeleines from the kitchen cupboard before clambering back into bed beside him.

“Not really my style, but I see why you like it,” Levi said.

“And what do you mean by that, Jeans?” Considering, Ariane bent her pencil until it snapped clean in two, swiped the lead and shavings away. “Back-handed compliment much?” Ariane dug into the paper bag on her desk, crumbling apart a blueberry scone from Tori’s.

“Sorry. I only meant that it’s almost a little too clean for me. You don’t even have a junk drawer. But c’mon,” he patted the downy cotton quilt atop her comforter, “back to bed! We both know that paper you need to turn in for tomorrow’s been done for over an hour. Let’s order in Chinese and rent a movie.” He kicked off the covers and stumbled over to her. “I’ll even watch one with those god-awful French subtitles, I don’t care, whatever floats your boat.”

“Levi.” Fidgety, Ariane undid and redid her shirt’s top button. “Playing house in my apartment wasn’t part of our arrangement. Neither were the flowers. You know that.”

“Well, maybe we really oughta change that arrangement,” Levi said. “There’s nothing wrong about two old high school

friends eating kung pao chicken and watching The Princess Bride together.” He remembered the orange sauce dribbling down her chin while they cracked open fortune cookies in high school, her kiss sour and sticky the next day.

“I’m fairly certain your girlfriend might disagree,” Ariane said. A blueberry inside the flaky dough snagged on her teeth and burst on her homework. She dabbed with her napkin, but the smear wasn’t coming out of her rough draft. “And you jinxed me about being messy.”

He remembered the orange sauce dribbling down her chin ... her kiss sour and sticky

“Did not. And you don’t know anything about my girlfriend.” He grasped at a droll comeback as she plumped the pillows next to him, straightened the wrinkled covers. Ariane was just biding her time until he left.

“Gabby’s nothing like you,” he added. “She’s better.”

“In bed? That seems unlikely. Especially since someone still wants to play house with me,” Ariane cackled, tossing the last bite of scone in her mouth and tightening her braid. “And I can’t imagine you chose Gabby for her brain. We both know you can’t handle being with somebody smarter than you.” Before he could deny that, her velvet boots clicked into the kitchen.

“That’s total bull, and you know it.” Levi bolted up, the patter of his bare feet behind her. “I could handle being second best, you know, but you could never pull your head out of your ass long enough to see,” Levi said. “Maybe if you’d spent more time with me and less obsessing about whether or not you made the fucking honor roll, we’d still be together.”

Ariane slammed a paper cup down on the countertop, punctuating her exasperated sighs with defiant squirts of maple syrup. “That’s low. You know,” she paused over her fruit fly trap, “I used to think that, if nothing else, at least you were good to me. You could drive me up the wall sometimes. You could be an ignoramus, but you were good, sweet, even, sometimes.” She turned the dish soap bottle upside down, drizzling in cyan blue Dawn in her saccharine cocktail.

Whisking the syrupy blend, she said, “And if this is really how you feel, then get out of my apartment and crawl on back to Gabby. Just be sure to take a shower first, so she can’t smell me all over you.” Pointing to the bathroom, she began to scuttle back to the bedroom with her cup, but he caught her by the shoulders.

“Oh my god, shut up! Just shut up! You know, for somebody who graduated top of her class, guess what, you can be a moron too! Don’t you get it?” Levi yanked his disheveled hair back in tufts. “Gabby,” he professed, “isn’t real. Never has been. Jane, Sandy, the rest I told you about, none of them were real. Well, unless you count one date, and I usually talk about you most of the time anyway. They want nothing to do with me.”

“What?” As she swaddled the cup in saran wrap, Ariane’s eyes became frenzied, throwing her gaze helter-skelter about the room, as if Levi’s imaginary girlfriends might emerge from behind the bed.

Indulging on decaying delights, one fruit fly said to the other, “If only Gourmand could have lived to see Ariane and that boy toy of hers like this. Every one of his eyes would have about popped out of his head, all 760 of ‘em.”

“Show some respect for our dear departed, would you?” His companion bowed his bristly head as Gourmand’s funeral procession scuttled over the slumped-over, collapsing fruit. The black-thoraxed party hoisted the expired Gourmand above them on a dry-mouthed strawberry slice. He’d spent his last moments on his back, his legs splayed above his many-splendored, mosaic wings. Head over heels, if you will.

“Gourmand, that old bugger, what was he getting up to? His early forties?”

“Somebody told me he made it 37 whole days.” The second fruit fly mashed one of his six feet into a pappy, congealing strawberry. Collapsing in on itself, the fruit spurted out tart syrup.

Licking himself clean of the gushing schmaltz and sentiment, the second fruit fly wondered to the other, “Can you imagine it, how many of us have lived and died believing in that affair?”

“What?” Ariane asked again.

“I made the girls up, all of them,” Levi said, eyes stinging with watery humiliation.

“Do you mean to say that all these years ...” She coughed, sputtering like one of the stalling cars below, brakes tapped. “Are you saying that I’m the only woman you’ve been with since high school?”

Tensing up his jaw, Levi swore, “Damn you, Ari! You’re not seriously making this about sex, are you? Why am I surprised? Of course you would!” Swiping his raggedy

jeans off her floor, he wrenched them up to his waist. In his boxers, he wasn’t about to win an argument against Ariane, covered in her thick corduroy coat and her maddening composure.

“Making up those girls, I thought it would make you jealous. Instead, it just made you cruel. You had absolutely no problem using me because at least somebody else loved me. Don’t you get it, Ariane, that Redmond apartment I’m renting? I live there alone.”

Ariane dropped onto the stiff-backed sofa and gnawed on her peeling lip. Digging in her coat pocket, she unfolded the note, the one with his address marked down. “I can’t move in with you, Levi. I can’t be your Sandra Dee, I can’t make pot roast dinners and plan for 2.5 kids. I can’t love you like that. But I’ve never once used you. I loved you, I swear that I did. What do you think this is?” She picked up the Tori’s paper bag with her pointer finger and thumb, grease leaking out the bottom. “Why do you think I go to the café where you work every day? Why else would I be at Tori’s? Goodness, Jeans, you really think I give a flying fuck about some homemade biscuits? Plus, these scones get juice all over my papers.” She tossed her essay at him, the papers thumb-printed blue. “And as for those strawberries, the ones you gave me that discount for, I don’t even know where I put them.”

Ariane’s voice became tremulous as she barked out a croaky laugh, realizing. “That’s not true. I do know where I put the strawberries. I shoved them under the bed, thought they’d be a snack for later. That must have been, what, eight, ten weeks ago?” She took the scissors from her desk drawer and snipped holes in the saran wrap. Suddenly, she understood her fruit fly infestation.

Crouching on the ground, crawling over his weather-beaten T-shirt and past his muddied sneakers, she saw the fruit

flies feasting on the gunky rot beneath her bed. Ariane hung her head, her braid slipping loose over her bowed shoulders.

“Oh!” she cried. She cried for shimmering summer strawberries fading into chewed-up marsh by fall. She cried for Levi’s imaginary lovers, for all the cloying, empty-calorie pastries she had swallowed with zest, for fortune cookies that promised glorious fates but didn’t deliver.

Goodness,

Jeans, you really think I give a flying fuck about some homemade biscuits?

Levi kneaded the tight small of her back, and once her sobs quieted, she came out from under the bed with the carton. Dozens of flies wheeled in spirals and arcs just above the bag, abandoning their slimy larvae in search of something else rotten. Both Levi and Ariane eyed the berries, their shriveled-up insides pimpled black and sporting white, wooly mold. Sour, festering juice dribbled out the carton’s bottom, staining the wooden floor like currant jam.

“Is this ‘messy enough’ for you?” Ariane asked, giving him the carton. “It would mean the world to me if you might trash that on your way out.”

“Can I kiss you before I go?”

With an unsteady nod, Ariane folded her arms around his neck. When they embraced, the plastic carton’s sharp edge scratched at her stomach and his hands were spotted red from the seeping juice. They kissed anyway, open-mouthed, sweet and sorry.

The fruit flies wondered at the paper cup propped on the rim of the sill, its syrupy insides four squirts of maple syrup and a dollop of laundry detergent. The carton now continued its inevitable corroding in the dumpster behind Ariane’s apartment complex. They expected her to come home with cracking cream-filled pastries, sappy watermelon chunks, a string of grapes from Tori’s. But a week passed, and she didn’t, and most of them died over eight unsugared days, perishing on the gunk of the windowsill or in the merciless September gales. One day, all that remained were two fruit flies and that cup of amber goodness.

The starving fruit fly asked the other: “So, the cup’s a trap, right?”

“I wager yes,” the other fruit fly replied. “But could there be a better way to go than drowning in sugar?”

Busy Bee

Sarah Walker

Prismacolor on Canson Paper

preventative orthodontia

Elliott Leor Negrín

my teeth break through my gums like a hand breaking through dirt a forceful shove to break the crust the surface.

it’s a minor discomfort an itch behind your knee the knowledge that you’re so close to the end of something and the beginning of another

it’s a transitive period the days spilling into each other like water overflowing in a fountain how do those fountains not overflow when it rains?

pretension is easy sincerity is harder each breath is a challenge each day brings me closer to the end and to a beginning i have to keep kicking to stay afloat

blood tastes like metal like the piece of copper i put in my mouth my sophomore year of high school too old to be eating dirt but not old enough to care

i can feel my gums break apart picture the white of the tooth against the reddish pink forcing its way out forcing me to feel

smile!

Dates to the Rodeo

Rosalie Moffett

Reprinted from A Moment’s Monument (2006-07)

I grew up way out in the middle of nowhere Idaho where it costs an arm and a liver to get your trash picked up. Instead of putting the week’s trash out by the curb on Wednesday nights, like city people, we hoard all the trash for months until there are enough cans to fill the back of the pickup truck and drive it to the Lewis County landfill. So it was perfectly normal that on the first morning after I got home from my first year of college I was given six garbage cans and the truck’s keys. It’s not a bad job, really, and in fact, on that morning it was almost glorious to shift up through all the gears, climbing out of our little Salmon River canyon, to speed across the sun-rising shining flats to the highway. There’s nothing like going to a school in a politically correct city to make you miss a good drive in a truck, and the whole way I was singing and waving my hand out the window as the trashcans rattled together in the back.

The dump works like this: on your way in you stop next to the tiny white building where you are weighed by a little woman with dyed orange hair. Next, you back into a cavernous, kind of dank, sour-smelling concrete structure where you unload your trash right onto the pavement. It is then pushed by a man on a bulldozer into a pit with an enormous metal conveyor belt, whose toothy mechanisms pull it up out of sight to God knows where.

There’s nothing like going to a school in a politically correct city to make you miss a good drive in a truck

So there I was, struggling to upend the heavy garbage cans and empty them of all their crumpled catalogues and used Kleenexes. Watching all of your trash cascade out and go skittering across the floor is the only bad part of this job because it invariably elicits an uncomfortable feeling that the most intimate and shameful parts of your life are suddenly being brought into the light. I watched a coffeestained cup and a used sanitary napkin flow by in the rubble.

When I had finished contributing to the pile of garbage, I bungeed the cans back together and shut the tailgate. I was climbing back into the truck when I chanced to exchange a look with the man who was walking over to start the bulldozer. He looked nice. I smiled reflexively and shut the door.

Back at the little white building, I stopped the truck to have it weighed again. Inside, I paid the orange-haired woman in her tiny little office and was in the process of picking through her complimentary bowl of candy when she said, “That tall, nice-looking young man over there is curious to know if you’re single. He was wondering if you didn’t have a boyfriend.”

I stood there blankly for a second.

Actually, I didn’t. Actually, I had just dumped the boyfriend I used to have because I hated the way I would sometimes wake up to find that he had been gazing at me lovingly for God knows how long. Because, actually, I hated getting a bouquet of yellow tulips late at night and wondering what to do as he smiled at me expectantly. So I shook my head.

“His name is Brad, he’s real nice. He’s shy, but he’s probably the best one out there. Oh, now what… I suppose I should write down your phone number.” She laughed as if

it had been a long time since she had been involved in this sort of thing, and shuffled through her desk.

The last time a boy had done something so blatant was when the extremely pale and skinny guy from my high school who worked at Pizza Perfection had slipped his number underneath my slice of pizza before handing it to me. I never regretted not calling him.

It’s the sort of thing that one does in anticipation of telling the story later, and honestly, I had the whole lonely summer stretched out empty before me to pretend to be a farm-girl, so I wrote down my phone number and left the woman with a pleased look on her face. It was silly, really, and I started home with a deep sense of foolishness. The thing is, in these sorts of situations, I can’t help but be optimistic: especially with boys. So even though there was something in the back of my head reminding me that Brad could very well be a lonely, 35 year-old, divorced, alcoholic, Republican—or worse, I still spent the duration of the drive

home imagining dates to the rodeo, after which we might drive out into the middle of a wheat field to sit in the bed of his pickup truck drinking beers and watching the sun set beautifully over the farm machinery. I imagined that I would avoid talking about politics. I would avoid the fact that I was a vegetarian.

He called the next night and asked me out to coffee. He said that he didn’t usually ask for girls’ phone numbers at work, though he added that not too many girls came to the dump, which I found believable. Even though I was

Honestly, I had the whole lonely summer stretched out empty before me to pretend to be a farm-girl

disappointed that we were not getting to know each other via something like horseback riding on his ranch, I did admit to myself that maybe it was more prudent to meet in a well-lit public area first, and I agreed to meet him in town at The Whitehorse Café. I had rejected his first suggestion of Starbucks.

I got there early and sat next to a window. I resisted the urge to pick up the newspaper, not wanting to make too literary of a first impression. I watched Brad pull up in a blue Honda. Maybe he has a truck at home, I consoled myself. How could any Salmon River Mountain resident not? So I smiled and tried to look natural as he walked in.

If I had met Brad under different circumstances I might have thought it was nice that he was majoring in political science, and playing tennis at Gonzaga University. I would have found it rustic, at the very least down to earth, that he was spending his summer with his mom in North Central Idaho working at the landfill she managed. I certainly would have found him attractive enough, and the issue of pickup trucks never would have arisen. But as it was, about fifteen minutes into our conversation I laughed and lied, “You know, it was crazy of me to give you my phone number, because actually I’m leaving next week to go visit my uncle in Montana.”

“Oh yeah? What’ll you be doing down there?”

“Fly fishing and bear hunting, mostly,” I said. “Probably go to some rodeos.”

I resisted the urge to pick up the newspaper, not wanting to make too literary of a first impression.

From the Author:

Revisiting this story reminds me what a strange experience it was to go back and forth between the lovely, lush and liberal LC campus and the high desert canyon in Eastern Washington where I grew up. Re-reading this now, as a poet and a professor of Creative Writing, I can see in this story how much place—its particular forces, pressures and delights—was at the heart, even then, of what I was writing. It still is. I suppose, mostly, this story makes me miss, in a visceral way, driving a stick-shift pickup through the summer landscape of my home.

Self-Portrait as Icarus

Inspired

Ryan Marshall

by Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne by Jorie Graham

I am not one to fall to my hubris

If anything, my lack of it knocks me down. So why do I feel that

I fly too high, I reach for the sun, Only for my wings to burn.

I weave the stars together as I fall, A silent prayer to the Sun that slew.

I beg as I sink in ocean spray

“Father, Father, why?”

I call, only for the prayer to not be met We are not gods, those who create The ones who innovate

Still cannot make a tapestry of the Sun. So my beg turns to a plea—I will not hide “Apollo,” I call, “thank you for letting me burn, For at last I can see. I will drown

If that is the wish of the gods

But if this plea can reach The sun that struck me down, Raise me high.”

I wake to the Sun’s embrace: Burned skin and wax in my hair, Sand beneath me and Feathers sprawled like an elegy.

The sun smiles down on this broken boy, Begging in return for me to rise.

So I meet his plea.

Apollo knows every inch of me

And for that I will Return to the sky and Make my final move

No longer a prayer but certainty. I will not fall to Heaven or Sea.

The Sea Serpent

Photography

“Birth of Venus”

Gwen Baba

Reprinted from Zogos (1978-79)

Same old face, same old hands, same old everything. I shouldn’t expect a change, but still, it could be nice…

How’s this? A side pose with arms angled and but a hint of left breast. Or this?

Down like a crab backside under one leg perched northward.

“Birth of Venus” revised. Botticelli in the mirror. Rousseau couldn’t have done better.

My own Pygmalion posing, striking new patterns.

Avant in my flesh, twisted soft shoulders, hair draped and nose cocked Picasso.

Body puffed and Rubens pink. And now for Warhol pinned to the floor, towel loose and dripping Dali, dripping me face hands and everything.

From the Author:

Many wonderful memories. It’s been decades since I’ve read “Birth of Venus (Revised)”. I had studied in Germany during junior year. The experience was transformational. L&C was well-known for study abroad programs, and participating in one was a main reason I came. In Europe, I was exposed to works of art of every kind and era. Back in Portland senior year, I reached back to that experience after running across a photo of Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” and was inspired to write my version. As students, the Literary Review was a special manifestation of our commitment to the written word and our passion for poetry. We were proud to share it.

The Secret Love of Ants & Other Histories

Eli Dell’Osso

I did not try to count them. There were far too many ants Scuttling along the white, chipped trim Paneling the walls of the library.

Ceaselessly the ants traversed a narrow, deadly cliff, seeking out with brazen claim whatever paradise they dreamt their mighty ant god had promised them.

Unwitting, they trekked, seeing not the globe-like eye green and glowing looming o’er their inkblot faces, casting on them gentle shadows like bountiful spells of rain.

Whose object: to commit the historic portrait—that immortal account of the ant race and its silly, sentimental plunders from their new world—to a file cabinet stuffed full of every simple, silent moment.

As they walked the straight path towards destiny Whenever two approached they stopped to greet Both dazed straggler and armor-clad soldier alike Each scorched with black, marching back and forth from war.

They spoke in soundless, tongueless tongues yet even I so blessed — or cursed? with the jaded emerald eyes of God failed

to understand for what purpose did the slip of one’s skeletal lip kiss another’s impermeable shell?

Colleen Maloney Sestina

She thought it might be hard to use these words; her mind too often tended to wander, far too flighty to solve a puzzle like this one; but she opened her mind, her heart, her hand, and held in her palm, the small world.

To her, everything in the world seemed big, even though these words were small; even though it could all fit in her hand; she picked it apart with her pen and began to wander, letting ideas trickle into her mind— she began to find the pieces for the puzzle.

She felt stuck in a puzzle; and though it seemed big enough to envelop the world, it was not large enough to hold her mind. There were far too many words, and she wanted to be free to wander; not entrapped by the sphere in her hand.

Often wishing someone would take her by the hand, lead her to the answer, she was caught in a puzzle of her head, and she’d watch the others wander: travel the world. They forced her to hold back the words from her view above them, looking into their mind.

So she learned from every mind that she looked into while holding, in her hand, the weight of endless words. And through each puzzle, the world made more sense, and wandering, brought the world with her. In her wandering, she changed her mind. The small sphere of a world began to grow, and her hand began to shrink. The puzzle was finally solved, and she was put to sleep in a blanket of words.

Finally, the world was free from the hand. Growing, wandering with its own mind. The puzzle dissolved, and words forever remained.

solipsists

Chloe Ulrich

Pen and Ink on Paper

order of events

Emma Krall

In ten minutes, class will dismiss in fourteen minutes. This means that, accounting for the inevitable inefficiencies associated with walking amidst the wave of students headed to lunch, I am projected to have food in my mouth within twenty-six minutes. That is, unless I find myself stuck behind a dawdler. Or I slip and fall on a wet leaf plastered to the rainy ground… It’s happened before. That would set me back two minutes, at least, which I can’t afford to account for, since the line for the dining hall will have become too long to endure by then. If I am not chomping down on a deliciously dehydrated veggie burger within—, well—, now twenty-five minutes, my day will unravel. I’ll return to my hollow room and neglect lunch for the day, again. I’ll milk the fluids from behind my eyes until the afterglow starts to seep in. I’ll tremble and shake and writhe about until the cool floor offers the comfort it promised me. I’ll focus on the neverending, fast-paced click-clack of my roommate’s keyboard until that, too, drives me mad. I’ll force my feet under my legs and steady my gait until I arrive at my dresser. I’ll remove every item of clothing from its smooth wooden open mouth. I’ll fold each one until I find solace in the immaculate piles. I’ll remember the keyboard’s click-clacking. I’ll milk my eyes again. I’ll open the blinds for the first time in a while. I’ll watch the sunlight dance in through the slats in the shades, performing a little show for me on the ceiling and wall. I’ll open my lungs and close them again. I’ll powder my eyes to soak up the extra fluids. I’ll glance at my watch— 1:40. I’ll suppose it’s time for my next class.

Reaction to “The Spectre Still Haunts:

Breaking the Imperialist Chain w/ Hakim”

Alyssa Simms

There’s brain matter all over the bed, the wall

my mind reorganized AGAIN as i realize AGAIN how little i

actually know, how well brainwashed i am and my best friend

beside me didn’t see the brain matter on the bed beside her

on the wall supporting her, how well-spoken are these humans to eviscerate the carefully crafted blinders i even still wear?

reminder: you have so much to learn, question everything

reminder: do not forget the journey it took to get here the road was long and biased

First Impressions

Danielle Phoenix Pon

When they look at me, what do they see? Loud and unruly, begging for acknowledgement, a lion dragon’s head on a girl’s body. With clothbound maw, voracious and fit for lucky envelopes. Place your bets here, gold inscribed; Another roar and then a whimper— push them down my throat, fill my lungs and weigh me to the ocean floor. Submerge me in the waters of scrutiny, watch me capsize. Sinking, past the coral reefs exquisitely bleached. Past the angler fish

flickering like the light of a vacant gas station, moth echoing to a flame.

Past the titanic plates and tectonic ship. Steep in my guilt and regrets, next to water hot enough for my mother’s tea, never to surface for air once more.

Flight Over

Ruin

Crow’s Feet

Anneka Barton

Stuck between a wishbone pair of branches near the top of the pine hung a single, beat up Chuck Taylor. Ava had been told the story of the shoe, briefly, as a child. The little girl who lived here, before the house belonged to her grandparents, had climbed to the top of the pine, eager to trace the spine of the earth with her eyes. Gravity pulled at her pigtails until she fell, her shoe, and in turn her foot, sticking between the branches until they were yanked free from her body. She’d hobbled up the driveway, trailing blood between two all-American cars.

“How long has that been out there?” Ava asked.

“What was that, dear?” said Mother, quieting the chatter at the table.

“That old pine has been here since long before we got the place. Probably been around since even before your grandmother and I were born, if you can believe it,” said Grandfather. Ava felt the dread start to curl up in her throat as she tried to correct him, to steer the conversation towards the shoe. The words caught on the roof of her mouth, tacky and thick, and soon enough the rest of the family moved on to a heated discussion about the property and the price of land these days. It wasn’t worth piping up.

Still, she pictured the foot alone except for its shoe and a handful of black birds. The crows would pick at the joint of the ankle, tearing at the point of lost connection, tendons waving goodbye to their original owner as the wind shook the tree. It belonged to them now. This image lived in her dreams and in the hidden places she found during

weekly Sunday dinners. It was a constant creeping chill, contracting her ribs, pushing boney fingers into the tissue of her lungs. The foot would taunt her as she hid away with the abandoned typewriter in the basement, clickclick-clacking away her nerves. Ava was a nervous child. It showed in the way her knee jumped in place. Restless leg syndrome, Mother called it. Father called it something more. Ever since Grandmother had told her the story of the lost foot, the nerves had only grown worse. Some nights she’d wake in a cold sweat, her right foot asleep in the folds of her sheets.

They were sitting in the dining room of the grandparent’s house, crowded around the table, still picking at the last slices of pecan pie and sipping on coffee. Ava was the youngest cousin still going to Sunday dinners. The baby of the family, left to hide in the side rooms while the adults talked. Most of the family had moved out of state. She was starting at the college two blocks from her childhood home in a little over two weeks. This wasn’t a normal dinner.

Beneath the table two dragons wrapped around each other on the beige carpet, grinning up at her. Ava bounced her foot across their scales and let her toes slip. The carpet was the softest thing she’d ever known. The home was full of keepsakes from her grandparents’ travels, pickpocketed pieces of culture brought home in the belly of a plane. She didn’t know how to feel about that, but she liked the carpet. When the conversations became too much, and the view of the pine through the window felt too daunting, she’d focus on the dragons. She liked to try untangling them in her mind’s eye, distinguishing which beast each set of claws belonged to.

The crows would pick at the joint of the ankle, tendons waving goodbye to their original owner

“Posture, sweetheart,” said Grandmother. Ava tried to unlock her joints, determined to stop sitting wrapped up in her own hard angles like a Picasso.

“It was so nice of you two to let us stay here, with everything happening back at the house,” said Mother. She thought everything Grandmother and Grandfather did was extraordinarily nice; they weren’t her parents.

“I hadn’t known they fumigated for flies,” said Grandfather.

“I don’t think they do, normally. Extreme circumstances,” said Mother.

“A home invasion of the insect variety,” said Father.

Ava’s childhood home was rotting, the red brick house attracting flies like a carcass. That morning had found the family rushing out the bone white front door, letting it hang open after them. Mother called the exterminator on the way to the suburbs. 72 hours they said. Extreme circumstances. Uncanny. Ava kept hearing the voice crackling over the phone as the exterminator had pulled up in front of their home. Uncanny. Just, uncanny.

“And have the doctors found anything wrong with Ava yet?” said Grandmother. Ava cringed. Chewed on her tongue piercing, an unfortunate nervous habit.

“Not yet, they just can’t figure out what could have caused such a thing,” said Mother. She sighed in the melodramatic way only a mother can pull off and spun the spoon in her coffee cup. “I mean, what kind of child goes gray at seventeen?” Mother’s eyes were soft and sad and made Ava squirm.

“And it just happened overnight?” said Grandfather.

“All the color was just gone one morning. It was like it slipped right out,” said Mother.

“Her hair used to be so beautiful, such a gorgeous shade of black,” said Grandmother. Her hair used to be an oil slick, shiny as it slid down her back. Now it was a peppered slate grey, short and tucked tight behind her ears.

“They think it could be stress,” said Father. He liked the grey hair. Joked about how they matched now. Before prom he’d suggested she try to use it to buy alcohol for her and her friends. She’d told him she didn’t have anyone to go with. He went out the next day and bought her a six pack of hard cider.

“Such a shame,” said Grandmother, “What does a girl your age have to stress about anyway?” Ava tried very hard not to look at the shoe in the tree.

“College applications are a lot of work,” said Ava, eyes clinging to the dragons. Grandmother seemed surprised that she’d entered the conversation at all.

“Well. It’s just a shame you look so drab now sweetheart,” said Grandmother. Ava slid the metal in her tongue across her teeth to remind herself she wasn’t too boring. She’d gotten drunk once, alone, and slid a needle through the tip of it herself. It took weeks of training to speak without letting it show, but she never removed it. It was nice having a secret.

That night, laying in the old guest bedroom, Ava dreamt of missing limbs. The images came and went in a misty haze, sometimes catching on the edges of her consciousness as she tossed and turned. One particular dream seemed to

haunt her on the worst nights. A young girl with a missing foot and an awful twisted leg would follow Ava down empty cobblestone streets. She would sit on an abandoned cracked skateboard, dragging herself along with ruined fingers, bouncing on the uneven ground. She never made a sound. Didn’t ask Ava for anything, just pulled herself along like a shadow, wheels creaking and bumping. When Ava turned to face the girl in that night’s rendition, she found a younger version of herself on the skateboard, eyes glazed as she dragged herself forward.

Ava woke up in the dark with a familiar ache crawling through the nerves in her foot. She snuck out from the pile of quilts and let her hand drag against the floral wallpaper until it caught a light switch. Outside the summer night sweltered, heavy and hot. Ava opened the door slowly, listening to the creak of the hinges. She opened and closed it twice more, trying to remember if the noise had been there during the day. Eventually she left, carrying her water cup to the kitchen. It was still full, but she couldn’t stay in that room any longer. She dumped it out an open window, onto a dry mound of dirt that used to be a garden. Maybe something new would grow.

Walking in the dark of the room, she knocked over an empty blown glass vase taken from Syria. It shattered on the tile floor and left a puddle of glass reflecting the moonlight. With a fogged mind, she scooped the pieces into her cup and stumbled to the counter. One shard pricked her finger and left a smear of red on the rim, like a lady’s lipstick. Ava paid it no mind. She’d forgotten why she’d gotten out of bed. Outside the wind howled and curled around the pine. Some nights reality is an old

Some nights reality is an old t-shirt Ava yanks off over her head, pausing at it covers her eyes.

t-shirt Ava yanks off over her head, pausing as it covers her eyes. Her cup needed water. She filled it with the tap and stumbled back to the guest room. Her bones had suddenly become very heavy, and she feared crumbling like an old building with a bad foundation if she stayed upright. The water cup went back to her nightstand, the broken glass clinking like ice cubes.

The next day, Ava hid in her room while the family tittered around the house. She’d woken up stale and couldn’t peel herself off the bed. Mother knocked on the guestroom door. Ava rolled over and let the sheets tangle.

She dragged herself out of bed when the rest of the family was finishing dinner. Grandmother made tea and demanded Ava’s company. Ava watched as she entered the sitting room with her usual gusto. She walked as she had for the past ten years: with her back bent into a stooping curve, the notches of her spine hidden beneath a dark shawl. The last few months had added a limp from a bad hip that made every step a hop. Grandmother always held her chin high though, leaving no room for critiques on how she aged.

“When does school start?” asked Grandmother after settling into a plush chair. The steam rising from the two mugs of tea between them blurred the normally crisp wrinkles lining her face.

“Two weeks from yesterday,” Ava said, “I got into a school in Maryland, you know.”

“I know sweetheart. But you’re staying here.”

“I could not stay here though. I could go there instead.”

“You never were good at being away from home. Always woke up in the night asking me to call your mother,” said Grandmother. She could say these things without sounding cruel. It didn’t stop it from hurting.

“I’m away from home now,” said Ava, voice shrinking.

“Well no one wants to live in a home in the condition your family has found yours in. I suppose people do change, though. It’s just a matter of if you can,” said Grandmother. Ava finished her tea in silence and went back to bed.

When night fell the ache became a ringing pain that Ava felt up her whole leg, shaking the bones and pulling at the muscles. She rolled out of bed without a plan and went wandering through the house. This time she found herself outside, treading through the weeds of the yard. In front of her, the pine tree shuddered. Ava shivered. It was a hot and windless night, but together they felt the chill. When the moon found its peak, Ava turned and followed the path back to the guest room. She knelt on the way in to pick a handful of daffodils. Behind her, the tree settled in on itself like an old dog finding the perfect spot to rest his bones.

She put the daffodils in the cup with the tap water and the Syrian glass.

“Ava, get in here!” Father called from the big bathroom, the one with seasick-green tiling. They were the only two home, so Ava gave up on melting into the sweat-soaked mattress.

In the bathroom, Father was holding a coffee-stained tooth. His mouth was bloody and his right hand was prodding at a new empty space.

“Did you just lose a tooth?” asked Ava.

“It’s the darndest thing Ava, I think there’s a new one coming in,” Father said. His finger was still twisting in the gum socket, like he was trying to coax out the new tooth. The old one was dripping blood into the sink, hitting the porcelain with wet little plops.

“That’s not possible. There’s no way that was a baby tooth.”

“No no, not a baby tooth. I remember I lost this one the first time around by tying it to a brick,” said Father, in the matter-of-fact tone most of his stupider childhood stories were told in.

“A brick?” said Ava.

“Sure. You reckon there’s such a thing as senior citizen teeth?” said Father.

“I reckon you should call your dentist.” That set Father off laughing, booming. When he went to catch his breath at the end of the fit, it whistled a little through the new gap. Ava broke a smile at that.

At dinner Father played the missing tooth card and got the whole family eating a thin and watery soup. It was the last dinner before they could return home and Grandmother was livid that it consisted of only canned soup. Grandfather kept asking Father questions about his teeth.

“And it just fell out?”

“Slipped right out.”

“You still drink plenty of milk?”

“Every dinner. And like I said, there’s another coming. I can feel it pushing against the gums.”

“Let me feel that.” Grandfather stuck his meaty hand into Father’s mouth and started digging his nails into the fleshy pink of the gum before agreeing that a new tooth was sprouting. Ava winced and found herself being extra careful to hide the tongue piercing for the rest of the night.

The final night of their stay Ava didn’t pretend she would sleep. Still in her day clothes, she sat on the edge of the bed, amidst the overwhelming collection of blankets, and watched the sun fall through the smog on the horizon. When the night had thickened enough, she stood and walked to the door, hitting every creaky floorboard as she went. She’d memorized which made noise as a child.

Everything looked so little from up here, perfectly play-sized, and Ava tried to feel big

Outside, the cicadas called to the full moon. Their orchestra crescendoed as Ava approached the pine. The roots clawed their way through the earth like an old and mangled hand, reaching for her. The night went quiet as she ducked beneath the lowest branches, cradling herself in its canopy. A gust of wind rustled the branches and brought with it a rottenness. She rested one delicate hand along its trunk. In the shadows, her fingers looked like they belonged to someone much older. For a long time, Ava stood there, stuck in stasis with her hand pressed into the wrinkled bark.

Inside, a light switched on in a bathroom, breaking the spell. Ava kicked off her shoes; she didn’t feel like tempting fate. She began her climb. She felt the rough bark pressing

into the soft soles of her feet and paused to wonder when the calluses of childhood summers had faded. With a bitter sadness she questioned when she had last been barefoot outside at all. It was a slow climb to the top, and the needles shook with each step as the branches thinned. By the time the shoe had come into focus, the sun was starting to burn through the shadows of the uppermost branches.

At the top of the tree, the shoe sat tangled between branches, tattered and faded from the years in the sun. She took in the view of the city, used it to ignore the old Chuck Taylor. Pulling her gaze from the houses beneath her, suburban carbon cutouts, Ava finished her climb. Before she could talk herself out of it, she grabbed the shoe and tugged. It took awhile before she could get herself to look, instead clasping it against her chest with both hands like a woman in prayer. Ava let the nerves roll through her body. Then, breath drawn, she opened her eyes. She couldn’t help but laugh. It was the kind of laugh that bubbles in your throat when the only other option is tears. All the years of night terrors and phantom pains, aftershocks of a childhood ghost story. And here she was, holding the damned thing that started it all, an empty shoe.

She let herself look back at the static streets, and a wave of nostalgia shook her as a memory of playing with dollhouses came rushing back. Everything looked so little from up here, perfectly play-sized, and Ava tried to feel big.

Finding the twin branches, twisted together like dancing dragons, she stuck the toe of the shoe firmly back in. A crow cawed from another branch and cocked its head at her curiously. Ava laughed again and let it boom in her chest like Father’s. In the kitchen a kettle screamed. Grandmother must be preparing her morning tea. Underneath the sound, Ava thought she heard the creaking groan of a branch beginning to break, bowing under the weight of her years.

‘never before have I seen a cow dance ballet’

Dahlia Callistein

Filming the twister as it nears.

50 miles, 25, here.

You laugh maniacally when we are raised on air currents. I wanted to seek shelter. A concrete basement.

Some semblance of solidity.

You adore the sight of roofs flung open, a dollhouse for the whole world to view— just don’t touch. It’s not meant to be played with.

We ascend upwards in the Twister’s embrace, it’s calm in here. It hugs us.

You laugh at a cow spinning. She performs a pirouette, I do not think it’s humorous. Her joints break and deform to achieve the movement. It makes me wince.

You love it. The bones breaking, the tornado’s eye, wind whipping.

I dream of neatly stacked concrete blocks that insure my protection.

Crackling static from a radio wakes me. Dad, how much longer down here?

Like, an hour. I don’t know— go back to sleep. You’re fine.

Patches Sticks the Landing

Jillian Jackson

Woodcut, stained black with oil-based ink

How to get the crows to trust you

Lauren Caldwell

How to build an army of crows and maybe some other scavengers that are named the scourge of the neighborhood. How to take down the suburbs as your collective conquest.

How to choose a lucky cigarette. How to choose just one, the best one.

How to stop cackling in the quiet auditorium during a high school production of Les Misérables. How to long divide your laughter until it shrinks into tongue biting, then stifled gasping then silence.

How to be absolved. How to enter a confession chamber illicitly in a moment of Adderall-induced impulse. How to pull your mess together enough to persuade the Irish priest to let you confess, though you are not a member of the Catholic Church.

How to beg the world to come back. How to seduce it into returning without religion.

How to salvage the person you were meant to be from a pile of almost people. Anne, Mrs., Doctor, Lover.

How to keep track of them if you can’t write them down.

How to memorize your social security number and the other things you aren’t supposed to write down.

How to open a pickle jar. How to open your body for the business of arrivals and departures.

How to start by prying open the jaw of your window so that the light can come in and make you useful.

Water on the Brain

Tiani Ertel

So sometimes I sunk dripping into my teal shower shoes that squeak like duck webs when I walk, having shut myself in the stall with a gap wide enough to practice vulnerability and when I say vulnerability I mean indecent decent exposure on strangers, edging the faucet handle round to the tolerable red tick, fogging the mirrors with steam close my mouth and let my nostrils fill up.

To the bacteria living on my face, the sputtering eruptions that follow must seem like geysers

To me, it’s the smell of drowning and I think I love it

I’m smoothened but knobbled and again wearing teal flip flops, so five years old Fleshy puckered knees flex and quiver in the changing room’s cloud of musk

You asked me, Mom, to put on my pool shoes because you never get rid of the things you’ll catch in there And now I’m asking you, Mom, please to stay and sit in that folding chair and watch me refuse to jump off the diving board because to me it’s like skydiving

and to you I must be a glistening little oil spill in the shallow end, my sunscreen halo marking everywhere I’ve been, just watch me for a while testing how much water a pool noodle, or a body, can hold

for a while watch me through the gap in the stall for a while, watch me splash you in the kitchen sink me in the kitchen sink; you take my pruney fingers and— hold them and—

I’m under the steam again, and— my feet have never touched the floor.

uncomfortable question

Elizabeth

Huntley

When somebody asks you what is it like to be a swarm of several hundred beetles— how do you respond?

It feels rude to you, Invasive

Demeaning

But you are a swarm of several hundred beetles.

(and you are polite.) So it’s reasonable.

You just don’t know what to say. That like them you had teeth & a backbone— until you awoke cockeyed starving, in the velveteen tent of your skin?

That yes, you do eat leaves And hang upside down on the ceiling, letting Sleep skid through you, shivering and rustling like an oak in October?

That no, it’s not like that; You still feel like always, just instead of steel trusses You’re soldered with spiderweb?

You rattle the knucklebone answers around in your head, and set them aside, Reaching instead for a metaphor you’ve polished like bottle-glass.

Being beetles is like (you say)— like you were a firework some capricious teenager lit by accident, that by some miracle fled his greasy hands—

and sputtered into the evening sky, and exploded there, scattering pink and green and orange and yellow sparks, and boiled smoke, and powder ash

Onto the lawn—but rewind. Freeze. Those sparks and smoke and ash: Was that the firework? Or was the carton? Do you get it? ...

They never get it.

Just Smile

Soleina Robinson

A poster in my therapist’s waiting room stops me, sinking into one of the gray couches, I pull a blue and yellow checkered canvas cushion onto my lap. Ease the knot in my chest— a plush shield. The trickling sound of fake water, spa music, relax, be calm, be tranquil. My eyes never leave the poster, polished red wood framing a smiling face, perfect white teeth above the words “I Choose to Be Happy!” As if happiness is a choice— Choose happy! Here’s my happy ____, a happy ____ of a different ____, a happy ____ plastered without thought on the happy ____ing wall— the yellow of Tweety bird in his cage, waiting for Sylvester. YOU can choose to be happy. I am happily going along with this farce I’ve created for your contentment.

Smiling’s easy— easy to hide behind. Squinting eyes— pain— with that Cheshire Moon. Crow’s feet—

from smiling? from vicious talons trying to pry apart this smiling masquerade to reveal the waste behind filler plumped happiness you so want to consume. Here’s my happy smile. You swung— an asteroid of projectile desire— to see me content. Your punch leaving that permanent crevice wide and curving.

This crater— below my nose and above my chin— the creature of this false face an inverted reflection of the smile above the words telling me

“I Choose to Be Happy!”

Good for you and your insidious lips showing those pearly whites.

“I am ready for you.” With a smile the therapist stands in the doorway. Lifting from the gray couch, I pass yellow walls

returning the poster’s smile with a glare. My canines bite the words, clenching so they won’t escape.

I can never brush my teeth enough

Bria Whitten

I grew up listening to St. Vincent and Fiona Apple your voice floats perfectly alongside them Some of the lyrics are off but I hardly mind at all

Lately when I think of you I think of him I still get messages sometimes; the red light never really goes away

and lately when I think of him I remember the way he smiled and I would smile back, a three-leaf clover floating along the river and a waterfall in the distance breathing down my neck

I grew up listening to David Bazan and Pedro the Lion I can’t stop listening to them nowadays but it will never be any less painful His voice inseparable from the music and the scent of alcohol inseparable from his voice

I understand the lyrics a whole lot better now; my twelve-year-old brain could never see the full picture, or maybe she just didn’t want to

I see him in black and white crying in the bathroom next to me and I didn’t know why You asked him to explain and when he kept crying you told me he’s on another planet

Lately when I brush my teeth

I scrub til my gums bleed desperately trying to cleanse my mouth of any emotions that come out when I open it

I wish he had done the same.

You two are a package in my memory and I’m so sorry I can only picture it when it’s dark

And I hear you speaking in the back of my throat, tears clinging to every word: I don’t deserve this. I do not deserve this. It echoes through the empty house my scream competing for his attention hoping despite myself that he’ll turn his hands towards me instead.

But I never saw his face that night; it was your hands that came towards me and they wrapped around my body and pulled me closer and your voice— the one that dances with the music the one with tears lining it like gemstones —it told me that everything would be alright

Syd Schubbe

Digital Photography

Glooming Blooms

Yeye’s Funeral

Danielle Phoenix Pon

It’s an open casket and the first time I’ve seen a dead body. I’m pretty sure my grandfather wasn’t a good person, but he was blind and frail by the time I got to know him. My aunt whispers to my mom telling her my skirt is too short. I can’t wear jeans to a funeral. I’m sitting in the second row, the first was for his children— all grown up. And I’ve never felt more guilty. I’d forgotten to write his letter. One in traditional, disproportionate Chinese I can’t read. I’m hunched over, using the church pew as a steady place to scribble a final goodbye. I’m meant to put it between his folded hands when I pass. I can’t show anyone how scared I am, how ashamed that I don’t want to see him, mortified I’d forgotten, of just how unsurprised I’d felt. My younger cousin has to write our eulogy because I didn’t want to. I try my best not to touch him. He’s so blue. They carry his body in a black car, and we follow dutifully on the freeway. I’m in the back of a minivan, changed into sneakers, better suited than my dress heels for the freshly mowed grass of a Chinese cemetery. When they lower his casket in the ground, they tell us it’s bad luck to look back. There’s an overwhelming urge to, but I don’t. I look left, past the hills to the sea.

Virginity cake

Kit Graf

Parked, we cut ice cream cake with a plastic knife, hoping to carve it like a Thanksgiving turkey. Later giving up and waiting for the heater to soften it while the wind spit old snow around. You, with your NASA sweatshirt and attachment issues said you might be in love with your boyfriend. That sex made sense because you’d wanted it for so long and knew he’d call back. You felt older than me that night, telling me what it was like to date a 22 year old who cooked risotto and brought home wine. I had only been with people who misspelled my last name or didn’t get along with my parents. We sat facing a frozen lake. Silent, I tried to remember the water before it was white.

View of the Sacramento River from Sundial Bridge, 2023

They Tell Me I Smell Like the River

Amy Collinge

Reprinted from Entropy (2000-01)

they tell me i smell like the river but i know i smell like them because the river carries all of the things they don’t want anymore all of the things they try to wash away every morning or buy big houses and cars to cover up

i am everything they are trying not to be and i tracked it into the classroom the front entryway dripped it on the floor of the restaurant

maybe if i jump deep enough or throw myself off the bridge at the right seam between destiny and decision i will never surface

looking down from the rust-colored guard rails they might see my hair tangled in the rust spokes of a bicycle decorated with beer cans

i will sing with the river all summer

From the Author:

I was surprised to recognize my younger self so clearly seeing this poem again. I remember going back to the Boise River between semesters at college, and feeling like it was a true, cold, real thing in a world of intangible expectations. I think that back then I saw the world as more absolute than I do now. I feel grateful to the Literary Review for creating space for student voice, and very grateful for the years of wisdom and experiences between then and now! I hope to keep learning and evolving in the years to come.

The Southern Lights

Emily Hazel Wagner

Acrylic Paint

The Lights Reflect in the Water

Kathryn Kiskinen

Cik naksnīnas pret ziemeli Redzēj’ kāvus karojam; Karo kāvi pie debesu, vedīs karus mūs’ zemē; Ē, vedīs karus mūs’ zemē

Translated:

How many nights against the North Wind I saw the Northern Lights fighting; Fighting in the sky, the Northern Lights Bring wars to our land.

From “Northern Lights”

by Erik Esenvalds

It was as if the lights had followed her people south to the island. Or perhaps the people followed her long green trail, hoping to find the entrance for when they were ready at the end of their lives. Linnea thought this to herself as she painted the stone walls of her cottage. Greens, violets, blues: the colours that she watched every night. The lights were a reminder of what came next. Staring into them could mean so many things, good and bad: a natural balance. The stars weren’t always visible, but the lights shone through the winter storm clouds, heavy as sheep’s wool, and Linnea could never ever look awaya.

The island Linnea lived on was a forest that was married to the sea; Linnea would know because she married them. She was surprised to find that the generations before her didn’t marry the forest and sea when they first arrived.

The soft swirls of black fabric grazed the back of her head, freeing her from her trance; her mother Sol had returned home.

“You wouldn’t believe it, Linnea.” Sol placed her bags beside the hearth to warm the contents inside: herbs for burns, herbs for cuts, herbs for giving birth; all herbs had an element of something unexplainable, something magical.

“What is it, Mor?”

“You remember when I told you about those …” She couldn’t think of what to call them, “Pointy houses. Yes, that is the best way to describe them. Those pointy houses with their many … crosses? A few have been built on the island, one of them being very close to our village. I know they are here because of a new religion that is spreading from the West. I wanted to see what the people were like. They were incredibly friendly, maybe a little too friendly, because they ushered me into the house and showed me a wooden carving of a dead man nailed to one of those crosses. Apparently, when he’s not nailed, he walks on water. They worship that man! Can you believe it?”

Linnea watched her paint dry. A man nailed to a cross?

“The women were in a room all by themselves. I went to talk to them but the men told me in our language that I am not to speak to them because they are … well, I’m not sure … in some kind of trance. After a few minutes, the men became a bit frantic and gathered into a formation and began to sing. They encouraged me to sit with the women and sing with them—not talk to them, sing with them—but I do not know their language, nor do I know the songs and the other language that they sung them in. But oh my goodness, their singing was so beautiful! Almost all of them had tears well up in their eyes as they sang, and some of their voices wavered from the passion. You know,

their voices come from their heads and not chests like us. So their singing is birdlike, at least that is what it is like for the women, because I was sitting near them and could hear them better than the men. Tears welled up my eyes from how beautiful the sound was!”

Linnea was quiet. Sol noticed and her face went dark, “Linnea, I know it was dangerous to go near them.”

“You might’ve never returned. They might’ve turned you into one of them, or worse. You heard what has been happening on the mainland. They raid villages and force people to wear the crosses, and they become angry when people refuse.”

“I know. Something was different about this house, and the people inside. I think it was because they needed help. They were alone, and all old. Very old. The one in charge was confined to a wooden structure. One of them approached me while I was observing and asked me in our language—which was very broken—if I could help. I said I could and gave the geriatric some of our tea. I’m afraid he won’t last much longer, but the tea should help with crossing over.”

You might’ve never returned. They might’ve turned you into one of them, or worse.

“They also cross over?”

“Everyone crosses over, but they must do it differently from us. They might not have the lights like we do, but they have something.”

“Something bad. They worship a corpse.”

“Maybe. Or they might go somewhere nice.”

One year later

Linnea never finished that painting on her wall. She paused on the day her mother came home to tell her about the music. More pointy houses appeared on the island as the months passed, and they weren’t vulnerable like the one Sol visited. The people from the houses were young and strong, and Sol wanted to believe that they were a completely different religion than the ones she encountered. But a cross was a cross.

The young and strong people flooded into their village and placed crosses on top of every symbol that represented Linnea’s people. They encouraged them to remove their medallions that represented who they were and replace it with a steel or wooden cross. They said that it would save them.

“What do they mean by saving?” Linnea asked Sol, moments before they fled.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“I think they have a disease.” Sol’s friend Yule replied. “And they’re trying to get rid of it by giving it to us.”

“Yule!”

“It could be true. It could be a plague. And I think my husband has it—the way he accepted that cross and walked into that pointy house. He never left.”

“Yule, we’ll find a way to get Ari back,” Sol replied, her hands shaking as she packed her bags full of herbs and charms.

“Sol, you know he’s not coming out of that house,” Yule replied. Her eyes had run completely out of tears; all that was left was something metallic in her voice.

“We’ll go east first. I know some people from the East.” The three jumped at the rain shower of clay bowls hitting the ground. A clay jar rattled on the highest shelf. It was a sign from the lights to leave. The people from the East were nowhere to be found.

“We’ll hide here for a while—in the woods,” Sol said, “I heard they are afraid of our woods. Linnea, help me and Yule build this fort. Remember the spells I taught you? Place them on the door so nobody except the three of us can enter. Those people are afraid of magic, after all. We cannot forget that we have magic.”

Time passed, but nobody was sure how much time passed.

Linnea ran her fingers along the stone in an attempt to connect with whatever lived in the lush moss blanket. She knew the forest wasn’t hers; spirits thousands of years older had been its inhabitants. It was a surprise they welcomed her into the heart of their sanctuary—could it have been the one detail they shared in common? The tiniest drops of magic—something unexplainable.

She noticed markings on the stone when she found a clear patch. She brushed away and discovered shapes she didn’t recognise. Were they shapes from another Baltic tribe? A previous Viking civilisation? No, these

shapes weren’t produced by humans at all. No human could imagine such details.

“You’ve found something you shouldn’t have,” something thunderous rumbled.

The ground underneath her disappeared and Linnea fell into darkness before she could finish her sentence. She landed with a thud and struggled to catch her breath. She looked up and saw a hole of light miles away from her.

She pleaded, “It was an accident, please let me go and I’ll never bother you again. My mother and I have no choice but to stay here—”

“You have something other humans do not have.” The voice was suddenly softer, and in front of Linnea manifested a tall elk with eerie human eyes. Its gangly appearance sent shivers down Linnea’s spine, and its glassy eyes never broke contact with hers.

“Whatever it is that you have—how will I know you won’t use it to destroy this forest?” the creature asked, breaking the suffocating silence. Its voice sounded distant and it startled Linnea the same way a loud sound would wake her from a deep sleep, making her jolt and her heart drop to her feet.

“My, my mother,” Linnea couldn’t form a coherent sentence, paralyzed from fear.

The creature stared at her, its face slowly morphing into something more human, making it all the more demonic. Its mouth slightly dropped open as if it were preparing to speak, but no sound came from it.

“My mother and Yule and I need a place to hide.”

It stared and stared.

“We lost our home in the religious wars. We have nothing. We don’t want to hurt anyone, or anything.”

Words finally escaped from the creature’s mouth. “Your tears tell me you are being honest.”

Linnea wiped her face. She didn’t realise she was crying.

“You may stay here. But, whatever it is you have, use it against these woods and you will suffer the consequences.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“That symbol you saw was not for human eyes. I don’t want you attempting to recreate it. And last of all—the water is dangerous.”

“I—”

“Good. I will send you back to Earth now. But be warned, if you ever see me, run away. You are in danger.”

Linnea nodded, and before she knew it, she was staring at the stone; the moss had already grown back.

“Linnea!” Sol called from the fort, “Come here; I have an important task for you!”

Whatever it is you have ….

Linnea held out her hands as she waded in the lake. The next instruction was to look to the horizon, past what she was holding. She looked out and noticed how the sun was

spreading its warm blanket on the hills, slowly setting them on fire. She wanted to swim to those hills, but it was too far. She wished she could walk across, just like that bearded man the “fathers” rave about. A knot tied her in her stomach. It was those “fathers” who took her village, and took everyone who couldn’t run fast enough. They smothered everything with that cross, which looked like two sticks ready to be tossed into a Midsommar fire. The “fathers” didn’t like the Midsommar fire, but they liked other fires.

She gazed at the hills and muttered the words her mother taught her. Sol had given Linnea a clay jar etched in runes that she always kept tucked away on the highest shelf. A liquid danced around inside, inviting her hand to dance with it. Looking at it would unleash what you want, but what you don’t need, her mother had warned her. Do not look at what I have given you. Do not mix want and need.

Opening the jar was tough, clay crumbling slightly. The liquid trickled into the lake, its song serenading Linnea. She couldn’t help it anymore. What if what I want is what I need? What if what my mother wants is also what she needs? I want—and I need—my home.

A blue light sank into the murkiness of the lake. She saw it. And she asked it to give her what she wanted: for the “fathers” to give back everything and everyone they took, and for them to go away forever. Do not mix want and need. I want, and I need, for them to go away.

Linnea stumbled as she turned around. Before she hit the water, something caught her. A blueish hand was supporting her back, and he pushed her back to her feet

She had left a piece of herself in that strange place in between worlds

while he rose out of the water. She was terrified to turn around to see whatever she had summoned.

“I can help you,” his voice was hollow, “I can make those fathers go away. Everything will return to normal, and stay normal, forever. It’s what you need, isn’t it?”

“Please.” Linnea whispered.

Linnea felt far away from her body. She couldn’t feel the soft squish of the mossy carpet underneath her feet—she had left a piece of herself in that strange place in between worlds, or the elk had stolen it from her. Either way, she felt like something was missing, or very far behind her, lagging. She swung open the fort door with ease. The fort was never warm to begin with, but it felt colder than usual. It was strange because Sol had lit the fireplace and was stirring a stew or a potion, Linnea couldn’t tell anymore.

“Mor, when is Yule coming back?”

Sol’s hair dropped from behind her shoulder to her front, like a hand waving the gesture don’t talk to me. Linnea persisted.

“She’s so slow; you should’ve gone with her. You know how indecisive she is with the potatoes; they’re just potatoes, I don’t—”

“She’s dead.”

Linnea laughed. She’s dead. She’s dead! Of course she is! That’s what happens when you can’t decide on which potato you want. The fat one, the skinny one, the sweet one, the bitter one. You’ll drop dead because no potato will make your stew taste good enough.

Sol didn’t turn around so Linnea couldn’t see her face. She didn’t need to see her mother’s face to see tears spilling from her lashes. She didn’t need to see her face crumpled into that all too familiar grimace. Just scream, Mor, just scream. A beast behind Linnea’s eyes began to tug at the tendons. Another beast tugged at the lacing in her spine.

“She went farther East; that’s where it’s safe, right? Or at least there are less of them?”

“They’re everywhere now.”

“She went to Tulekahju.”

“It’s called Sentahgahta now.”

“And they … they did what?”

“I went over to check on her, because she is slow. There was a line of them.” The timbre of her voice darkened and tightened. Her vocal cords were winding up, ready to be torn. “There was a line of pyres in the field. It looked like a Midsommar fire—one fire for each Pagan. I knew she was one of them because I saw her medallion after the fires died. Our medallion. I got close after they all left. I needed to make sure it was her.”

“Mor …”

“The gods are dead and so are we.”

Linnea’s boots were growing soggy from running through the marsh. Her feet felt as heavy as stones. Those boots had survived snow storms; why on earth were they getting soggy from a silly marsh?

She yelped when she tripped over an unsympathetic root and landed on her knees in the cold soup. She was shivering and dripping wet under a teary-eyed sky. Where are you? Have you converted? Perhaps her gods had converted. Perhaps there were fathers who entered the lights and smothered it by building a pointy house. Perhaps Linnea would never see the lights again, just a massive cross in the sky. Her reflection in the murky water disgusted her: her face was puffy and lines had formed from her grimacing.

“I need you,” she whispered into the water. “Please. Please make them go away.”

A blue hand reached from the water and held hers. The fingertips and nails were black with frostbite, but it was strangely warm.

“Get rid of them. All of them,” Linnea cried, “Everyone. Those who worship an evil god—get rid of them.”

“As you wish.”

“Wait.”

He waited.

“I want to help make it all go away. Yule is dead. I need to find the father who lit the torch. I can’t just sit and wait for it to be over; I need to do something myself. I’m tired of running away.”

“Of course. I’ll help you find who murdered Yule. You shall come with me, and we’ll put an end to this together.”

“Thank you.”

The hand let go of her and out he rose from the earth.

Tulekahju had really become Sentahgahta. The fathers were layering stones on top of stones in the village centre to build another pointy house. The village was still intact, just covered with crosses. Smothered. Blood leaking from bandages.

“I can’t breathe.”

“You’ll be fine. You have me,” he whispered from her pocket.

Linnea gulped and nodded. The village felt so much smaller with the construction of the pointy house in its heart.

“Ah yes, he is nearby,” he whispered to Linnea. “The one who killed Yule.”

Linnea clenched her jaw and could feel her insides becoming as heavy as cobblestones.

“Go towards the cathedral!”

“The ca-tee-drawl?” Linnea mouthed, the sharp word poking her mouth.

“Yes, go near it; he is building it! The young one! With the red, red hair!”

He was laying stones at the far corner, the sleeves of his black cloak soaked with the earth and its minerals. His hair was as red as the fires he lit earlier. The cross around his freckled neck turned to face Linnea. It was afraid of her. It knew why she was here.

“He’s building as if nothing ever happened. His face is blank. And he’s so, so young,” Linnea whispered.

“Hate him, hate him with every fibre of your being,” the creature replied.

“He could be my age. How could someone my age do something so awful? How—”

“It’s time.”

Without hesitating, she pulled the jar from her pocket and emptied its contents. And there he was, changed into the humanoid form he introduced himself with before her eyes. A man, but not a man at all.

“All of them?” he whispered.

“All of them. But how do you know he’s the one?”

“I am made out of water. People are mostly made of water, and water is always coming and going. It flows into every crevice it can find, and will make its own crevice if there are none.”

Before Linnea could ask him another question, he began the mission. Even though he was somewhat shaped like a human, he didn’t walk or run like a human would. He moved like waves crashing over each other: a flood. Linnea was frozen in her place. She clutched the pocket where he hid and waited. Why am I here? Why did he let me come with him?

The fathers dropped their tools and kneeled before the creature. They chanted the same words when they raided Linnea’s village. Same words, different meanings. The redhaired boy remained silent and stared, the cross around

his neck burning with something selfish and entitled. The creature let go of his form and turned into a river, and he wrapped himself around the boy. Linnea watched the bubbles escape from his mouth—he couldn’t swim.

The mass of water lumbered back to Linnea and released the boy. He lay on the ground shivering and choking. The beasts inside Linnea began to pounce with rage as they tugged at every string inside her. The boy looked up at her and began to chant. The fathers surrounding them had their heads pressed to the ground as if trying to break their skulls. Linnea wanted to break their skulls. She wanted to set this fire-haired boy on fire.

“I am frozen with hatred and sadness,” Linnea started. “We do not speak the same language, but you know why I am here.”

The boy stopped chanting and listened, as if he understood.

“You are a murderer.” Her tears burned her face, as if her skin was irritated by how many tears she had shed. Too much salt.

“You are tearing lives apart. How can you continue to worship a god that tells you to commit such awful atrocities? You must be so … demented.” Linnea remembered him choking on the water even though he had been enveloped for such a short amount of time. “Yet you are so young. You must have been taught this from a young age. So how much control do you have in all of this?”

She knelt down beside him. Why do I feel the need to be so soft? For some reason, I know he understands me. “You

His eyes were grey like the ashes he made out of people.

have this ingrained into you because you are young. And because you are young, you can change. Please, please use the power you have to show your people that what you are doing is wrong!”

Linnea reached for the pendant of her necklace. On one side of the pendant was the symbol of her people, the other side a carving of her as an infant and Sol holding her. She pointed to the carving; the boy leaned in to look. “This is me and my mother. You must have a mother who held you when you were small. We are so similar.”

His eyes were dark grey. But not like the winter sky or stone or fleece. His eyes were grey like the ashes he made out of people. That’s how Linnea knew, because that is all she saw when he reached for the knife in his belt and plunged it into her abdomen.

“My mother said your religion has beautiful music. It made her cry,” she whispered.

The world is cruel, and people are cruel.

Her eyes opened. The creature hovered over her. His wet black hair dripped water droplets onto her face.

“I—I survived?”

“Not quite.”

Linnea felt her abdomen for the wound: no pain, no bandages. “I’ve crossed over.” She began to cry.

“No, you’re still on Earth. You’re not dead.”

“What do you mean?”

“I healed you.”

“You healed me? I’m going to be okay?” She sat up and briefly hesitated before wrapping her arms around the creature, unsure of how to thank him. His skin was cold, but strangely warm at the same time.

“You saved me!” She let go of the embrace and looked at him, and then at her surroundings; they were back in the woods.

“The village? The fathers? The boy?”

“Gone.”

“Gone?”

“You said all of them. And so I did. Tulekahju, now Saint Agatha, is all water. It’s a lake.”

“That’s not what I asked for,” Linnea said.

“It is.”

“I asked you to make them go away, not kill—” She knew what she asked for.

“Why am I still alive?”

“You asked me to help you.”

There were no more beasts inside Linnea, now there was nothing. Not even cathedral stones weighing her soul down. Nothing.

“I am made entirely out of water. You summoned the water, Linnea. Water can be directed, put into a channel, and moulded by a tide. Yet it will seep through a crack in the

channel, and a tide cannot control the splash. And, water will make crevices when there are none to be found. My nature obeys direction but seeps through every crevice it can find. I am made entirely out of water.” He grabbed her hands, “Linnea. You are like me now. Eternal.”

She looked back at him. “I feel empty.”

“It’s not empty. It’s stillwater. Put your hand to your chest.”

She placed her hand on her chest, by her necklace pendant where the carving of her and mother faced out. No heartbeat.

“It’s stillwater, but there is a rhythm!” He smiled for the first time. It was unnatural.

“What did you do to me?”

“Your injury was fatal. That boy knew every mortal spot in the human body. My purpose was to help you. You are all water now. Like me, you are eternal.”

“I’ll never go to the lights.”

“What I have given you was not a gift. But I know there is something powerful you can make of it. You are different from me because I am a lake unless I am summoned by someone who needs me. You know, the lights reflect in the water.”

Emptiness.

All Linnea could hear were her mother’s cries of confusion as she checked for her heartbeat. Telling her what happened was like speaking in a dream. All she could

remember was that she wasn’t supposed to summon any creature, that wasn’t the spell. And her mother’s tearful response to her immortality: “Oh Linnea, the lights reflect in the water!” Years passed.

She gave Sol a burial at sea—the tradition from her Viking ancestors. Linnea did not keep track of how long she cried; it could have been days. But when she stopped crying, she stared into the forest, waiting for something to come and take her away, because all she had were her thoughts. I can’t die, but I’m so powerless. With all this time I have, I can’t do anything because I am trapped. I’m immortal, I don’t need to sleep, but I’m so exhausted. The smell of smoke disturbed her trance. Why is there smoke? The sound of screams passed through the air like frightened animals, only to be followed by screams of wrath: they had come to her forest.

“They’re here.” The elk’s voice whispered in her ear. “Whatever it is you have.…”

“I can protect this forest. It’s the least I can do.”

Linnea planted her hands into the ground and called upon every organism in the woods. She rose up and the water followed her. She commanded it to put out all the fires. The roots of the trees formed the symbol no human could create. She avoided its gaze while she harnessed its magic. Bodies were buried deep in the island with unmarked graves—a tree for every soul will grow and bring them to the lights.

“Whatever it is you have, you will keep the forest alive with it.”

I am the water, and I am the forest. The veins in her hands ran blue like the rivers in the woods, her skin the soil. She was her island, and the weight of a cathedral could never crush her. The cross could never crucify her. She let the choirs ripple the waters—Sol was right, the music was beautiful.

Ladybug Eyes

Eli Dell’Osso

Save you. I know, I’m supposed to save you, but so arrogant, you keep sprinting towards the snake who will skin you That terrible serpent who preens its scales to cleanse itself in preparation for the pleasure of one enviable gaze

Ladybug eyes stained with the ashen fingerprints of the martyr adorned in a cloak of crimson sky that you destroyed with a lightning rod and the cries of entire generations of bluebirds

I’m supposed to save you take you home, a forgotten family obscured by the foliage guarded by the mountainous eyes of heart-thinkers and fighting dreamers

Come home

to bury yourself in the fur of the fox you haven’t missed to let his whiskers singe the nerves of your bloodied palms or dangle your ankles at his jaws so he can eat your scars

And if not for me, then for the cherry blossom tree mid-bloom who wished upon a star with tears that streaked the night like the rosy mucous footprint of a garden snail

Or for your brother who sacrificed your love of him, a scapegoat to shoulder the weight of the sins of your brethren to make you remain forever the only son of a legacy worth sparing

Untie the violet rope that binds you to the plight of vengeance

Strip the teeming waters from your skin Shed your wings, those leathery hands Learn to fly in other ways

The Woman in the Red Dress

Hera Hyman

I sit and read the words of tattered souls, With impeccable prose and grammar they tell me stories of their universe.

A universe that is simple, yet complicated, Intricate and interwoven like threads coming together to form a tapestry.

I see their words colored with designs of cottages, and blood-stained carpet, and I envy them. Envy their strength, Their courage, Their wit.

Their words drift through the air, As I attempt to comprehend the images they try to show me.

I read with the expectation of a clear view to their heart; but to my surprise — or not — All I see is a fogged figure in a glass mirror. The person in the mirror is always wearing a red dress. They come no matter the color, shape, or size of the author; They come to me through their tapestry. They sway lightly, and I can tell they look back at me.

Analyzing what I am wearing, how I exist to them.

I see this person, A woman I believe,

As my eyes glide over the words of a darkened screen, adjusted to my comfort.

She takes a step.

As she comes closer to me, I stare intently, sizing her up as she does me.

I try to understand the lines they write, hoping to find some clarity.

I keep reading their words; transforming into symbols and shapes I don’t recognize.

I keep reading still; I need a closer look at this woman in the red dress. When their stories end, she does not disappear. I stare blankly at the page, my eyes glossed over. If I stay perfectly still for just a moment, I see her face; Her features are foreign, and I suspect she is just a stranger’s face that I have forged into my mind, never able to forget.

For that moment I gaze into her eyes, looking for what she is trying to tell me. Her smile is kind, but her eyes — they are not.

She never gives me long, and eventually the fog returns. I look for her in every page I read.

I search the high seas of the Atlantic with Grace Marks, and I search under the table where Augusten hid from his father. Always, I see her — a fogged but stagnant presence in my thoughts.

I look for her in my poetry too.

I desperately try to find her in my art; Wanting to ask her why her eyes show me anger, her smile shows me acceptance; and her dress is stained blood-red. Though I have these questions, she never appears when I write. I envy the poets, the authors, the people who can give me a glimpse of her. I appreciate their willingness to let me use their words selfishly. I am jealous of their courage to write their truth.

With every piece I read I am in search of her, and I cling patiently to the day that she comes to me through my words, through my heart, through my soul.

AJ Di Nicola

Film Photography

Headless Horseless

Aubrey

Roché On Reading Woolf

“I feel almost as though I am not reading,” said Aubrey, “Rather the words fold themselves up into a wad and lodge themselves in my stomach, and from there they must be digested. But they expand and bubble and fizz and they fill me up until I cannot take in any more and I have to stop myself. I am full. I read through them again, but they stick inside me and I cannot stomach too many at once. It must come in smaller fragments, almost like pebbles, in order for me to be able to manage it. I need to slow myself down so I can understand and appreciate every word for what it is. At the same time, I wish for nothing more than to devour, to plunge my hands into the smooth, cold stones, for it has been a while since I last read Woolf and every bite tastes as bittersweet as dark chocolate.

“It is not what I expected; for the first several pages the taste was unfamiliar and I was not yet accustomed to the flavor. As the world unfurls in front of me, I crave more, and I find myself lost in the mind of each individual. My stomach aches when Neville yearns quietly for Percival and my soul flickers alongside Rhoda who has no face.

I hold Bernard within me with his ability to find a story in almost everything and his desire to hold onto the tiniest aspects of life. I think of his train ride to dinner, of the passengers’ communal desire to arrive, of their inexplicable interconnectedness, of his disappointment when they disconnect and disembark. I too feel connections to people whose names I do not know when we are in the same place at one time. I think of Woolf taking these internal moments of the mind and splaying them for the world to see. To see perhaps they are not so unique, not so internal, perhaps we are all a bit more similar than we think.

“For every line, phrase and moment I wish I could dig my hands in, feel it run between my fingers, and then ink it into my mind. It is difficult not to drown in a text where every single word is worth marking. Even if this rental copy were my own I would have to hold myself back from underlining it in its entirety, penciling my own realm of understanding. I want to absorb every detail and I want to leave every detail as is so that the desire to absorb can live on. I anticipate already the day in which I will read it again.”

Before the Goodbye

Rosalie Zuckermann

I’m clipping my grandmother’s toenails while the hospice nurse sits in the living room watching The Bachelor. Almost-bone powder rains on the starched comforter. (Don’t worry, I tell her, I will pick up each shard so they don’t become crumbs in the sheets.) Each clip more like a crunch shattering the white noise of the ceiling fan—

I look away.

Fill my eyes with the pulsing blood-red of the flowers I painted on her wall to cover up cracks. Later, or maybe before, the caregiver walks in on me in the bathroom.

I don’t remember if she was the same one who told me with the spotlight confidence of a reality TV judge “You look like you must be twelve years old!”

I was eighteen.

The door and the jamb of my grandmother’s bathroom are estranged lovers not quite fitting together anymore but the caregiver hasn’t been around long enough to know what shut looks like here.

There is a shard of eye contact as I pee. Her acrylic nails remind me of when I put masking tape on my fingers as a child to make dragon claws.

How do you comfort the dying with hands made of plastic?

As Above So Below

Leanne Robinson

Adjusting to New Medication

The night is warm and smooth on her skin as she sleeps. A spider rappels from the ceiling directly onto her bottom lip, soft puffs of air creating a gentle breeze in its hair. Her petite snore was a siren’s call, and the spider answered. There on the precipice, the spider is seduced by the warm damp eternity of the deep abyss beyond her pearly uvula. It opens wider with each breath in a hypnotic loop. It is still in the house, so separate from the crash of the waves that collide with the shore just beyond the thin wooden walls. Her nose twitches and the spider becomes even more still than before until it moves swiftly to her tongue and down her throat. A droplet of drool spills from the corner of her mouth onto the silken pillow case. It clings to her skin and the fog that makes the cliffs disappear waits longingly by the window. Her feet rub together, two pieces of flint sparking a flame—better for circulation that way. On nights like this, there is a lot circulating: in the air, in her mind, underground. Seventy miles offshore, the ocean floor drops and inky darkness hits a new depth. A fury rumbles at the Pacific Rim. Tectonic plates clash and when dawn stretches over the horizon, she does take notice of the primordial goo smeared over her cheek.

She’s a Bowl of Soup

In the early morning hours, vague impressions mean more to me than the most profound quotes I have ever heard. Vague sensations open my body like a yawn and make me feel the most instinctual contentment I have ever felt. Vague shadows slither through me and make me feel the next stabbing pain before it jumps out of an alleyway or

artery within. Shallow breaths further meld my belly with the mattress. I become conscious with my face in the pillow, arms splayed out just as I have slept almost every night since being a baby in the crib. On this morning, I linger on the last vestiges of a yawn, letting it tingle and twitch all the way through my little pinky before falling limp on a dramatic exhale. This drowsiness is dogged and I feel the weight of the extra ten milligrams dragging behind me.

The Day Dives into a Pool of Me.

The next time I come to, I am wet everywhere; cold sweat dampening sheets and the chemise, snail slime stifling breath, discharge all over my inner thighs. I wipe at my mouth and then my pussy with the same tissue and bring it to my nose before tossing it in the trash bin and changing into a terrycloth robe. I shake, my breathing rattling out of me. Gnarled metal brutally disfigured and gushing oil flashes through my mind, and I feel the trembling intensify. The car was totaled and when I see that mangled picture I can’t quite wrap my head around it. I get the physics of it cognitively, but feeling eighteen pounds of pressure crush down on me, that’s something only my body can truly understand.

I splash my face in cold water and look at the clock. The hours are like a wet bar of soap in my unsteady hand, slippery. The hours are too short. 1 to 2 PM is no time at all, 3 to 4 is a millennium in a lecture. I can’t make sense of it either way. An hour and forty minutes til my appointment.

I take slow steps on tired legs that perk up at the sight of my lush pantry overflowing with the fruits and veggies. I grab a pear. I can taste that mild sweetness and feel the crisp pulp on my tongue as I go to grip it. It is bright green by the stem but as I pull it from the fruit bowl: dread races through me as I see the bottom half is misshapen from rot

and blackened mold. Slowly assessing the contamination range, a black bug buzzes and drops from the pear startling a gasp from me. I drop it. The pear lands with a thud on the carpet, and gray-blue mold spores make a mushroom cloud in front of me. I hold my breath. It’s only when I’m on my hands and knees that I notice that the bug was just a small ball of my own hair. I clean the spot with bleach and I try not to think about it again.

Each fruit and vegetable is cherished. But rot is contagious like that. Rot begets other rot. Potatoes will go bad quicker if you store them with onions. Sprouts keep growing in my fridge and always feel and taste crunchy, waxy, and new. Mangos will help each other ripen more quickly, so I pick up six or seven every time I’m at Freddie’s to transport myself to the tropics. But when one of the golden green orb’s pit turns gray with sickness, it spreads. Black dots pop up on the other mangos. I slice down the sides to reveal golden tumeric flesh and the pit is rusted open with gnarled intestines growing inside. You learn to cut around, save as much of the juicy fruit as you can. It stings when the mango juice gets into the cuts on my fresh manicure. I can see the little patches of red irritation on my hands from the mangos last night. I wonder if I’m allergic.

I’m extra careful when I cut the tops off the figs. Little teardrop pouches of soft, alien brain matter. When I close my lips around the stem and sink my teeth into the greenbrown flesh, the juice greets me first. I count each one and think about the tree that grew these little sacs of sweetness. Two, I think about the roots that grow as wide and deeply as the branches making the tree a perfectly symmetrical hourglass. Three, I think about the androgyny of flower anatomy, and the layers and layers of little petals that are pollinated by the female wasp that climbs through

Swallow

the tiny hole at the bottom and lays her eggs. Four, I think about the inverted flower that demands the male wasp climb inside its own casket before it is dissolved into a purple fleshy fruit. Five, I think about the seeds that feel so grainy on my tongue and I wonder if they ever move of their own volition. Six, I think about the seeds from yesterday’s figs exfoliating my intestinal lining and clearing mold spores from hidden wrinkles. Seven, I think about the contractor who tried to fix my chandelier but wasn’t worth a fig. Eight, I think about the picnic I want to pack and the lovely goat cheese and arugula I will eat on the bench by the orchids next time I want to sob uncontrollably. Nine, I think about the figs as my personal parachutes, making the landing softer and catching the billowing air that fills my lungs with hope.

Gotta Get There

When I head out to my car, I know I have too many things in my hands, but I keep walking, even though my water bottle keeps hitting my leg with each awkward stride. I pin my jacket against the car and try to get the fob to beep the car open so I don’t have to search through my pocketless tote bag for the key. The fob battery is low and the Bluetooth is bad on windy days so I put everything down on the top of my Prius to sort myself out. I feel the brightness of the sun sharpen to an obsidian point when my glasses slide too far down my nose. Breathe. I feel around for the rabbit foot that marks my keys, and it reaches out and grabs me, which makes me grin to myself. There are friends all around when ya look for ‘em. Swinging the car door open, I drop my jacket and purse in the passenger side and snatch my mini pillow. Posture in check, mirrors in check, mind frazzled. I take a sip of my water and make sure my navigation is clear and then I set out. It’s a long way down my dirt driveway to the main road, and I don’t see a single neighbor, but the main road is bustling. People always drive

too fast on these tiny two-lane highways because they know the cops don’t come out this far. They don’t care about roadkill. It’s scary to go too slow or too fast with unreliable interlocutors on the road, so when I feel the engine underneath me revving up, it makes my heart beat louder in my ears. The sweat is already slipping down my sides, and I pinch my elbows down over and over again trying to catch each irritating rivulet. My mouth is dry, but I don’t trust myself to open my water bottle while I’m merging. The air conditioner is too loud and it whines like a dog whistle. I switch it off. The sun beats down; I switch it back on. My ears ache from the shrill sound of the air thundering at me, and I switch it off. It’s a merry-go-round of distress. I feel my eyes get more and more frantic as I feel the shoulders get smaller and the traffic get thicker. A sports car zooms around the slow lane before cutting in front of two other cars. This huge semi truck has had its right blinker on for about five minutes now, and I find it hard to look away. The road rumbles in protest as I change lanes over the double

The air conditioner is too loud and it whines like a dog whistle. I switch it off. The sun beats down; I switch it back on. My ears ache from the shrill sound of the air thundering at me, and I switch it off.

lane line, trying to get around it. Even after I’ve safely gotten into the lane I feel the rumbling. I scan the road and I tap my brake, startled by the pedestrian on the highway, but when I do a double take it’s just a random pipe. A cloud covers the sun, and I have to strain my eyes harder in the shadow. As the bridge approaches, I feel three pulses ricocheting around my body, turning my bloodstream into an arrhythmic pendulum. Right or left lane, the water rushing below is five inches away from the flimsy guard rail. I can’t seem to breathe fast enough, and it’s like

panic has seized my body and run away with it. My brain is frantic, a chewed piece of gum desperately pulling levers that are unresponsive. Hands white-knuckling the steering wheel, eyes unblinking and hysterically scanning. My body is locked in place. Blind spot, lane spacing, that fucking blinker is still on. The rumbling strikes like a lightning bolt, and for a moment I’m in the eye of a hurricane. The water below me drops, sucked into the widening trench as the Earth is torn open by the ancient wars between aggressive factions of the lithosphere. The bridge starts to sink into the trench and car alarms sound all around me. I can see the opposite traffic staked below us tilt, cars sliding into the torrent of water so fast they strike like the wave of concrete tumbling to follow it. The sky begins to tilt, my already nauseous stomach dropping as I feel the bridge underneath me give way. The seat belt cuts into my chest, and my arms flail and find no purchase. We’re dropping to the earth so fast that the impact is seconds away. Suddenly, I’m staring at Grace’s smiling face above the sign for Sapient Stillpoint Osteopathy. She grabs my purse for me and leads me into the office telling me Dr. Simons is running late.

Treatment

I walk into the waiting room on trembling legs, feeling like a fawn asked to drive after being caught in the headlights herself. My thoughts are running and I know I need to ask her for more referrals, need to ask for more ophthalmology doctors in my area since Dr. Khaleeq isn’t taking new patients, need to get another blood test since my symptoms have been really bad lately. I need help. I just dread the intake appointment with everything in my being. It’s always a long wait for an appointment at specialty offices, and I have to jump through insurance hoops every time. Now I’m here like a chihuahua wearing a gaudy purple, copper, and green ribbon that is bigger than my

whole frame. Grace is sweet and turns all the lights off, closing the door and letting me put my feet up on the couch and close my eyes. She doesn’t turn around from her position at the front desk and I remind myself to send her another Edible Arrangement.

This is visit 902. At least a third of those appointments made things worse. The doctors in white coats ask me vague questions, and I tell them something too personal when they just want a number. They try to respond and steer me back to the facts and figures. I try not to blush. The physical therapists with crystals on their shelves and Britas in their entryways ask me what happened to me right after they ask me how much I weigh. No sense of decorum in health, you see. I know saying the words will hurt, but I have to try in order for them to do their jobs, so I wrench it out of me and then we both stare at the black puff of smoke that settles around the coal briquette I just throw up on the table. I wait for them to blink first, and they always do. Half of them don’t have the courtesy to warm up their hands before they touch it. The coal is glowing blue red, activated and irritable. I dry-swallow the briquette before cracking the door to let them know they can come back in. My sock slips more with each step I take as I walk to my car. I drive home and the edges of my vision go black two minutes from my parking spot. It’s a battle getting there, it’s a battle in my body on the table, and it’s a battle finding my way back home. I’m resolved to lay down my sword someday. Being knighted was cool at first, but the armor and shields are claustrophobic now.

Sometimes I convince myself not to bring headphones to Dr. Simon’s office, but I always need them. I don’t think my body stops shaking as I lay here, but I get invested in my “How It’s Made” podcast and that helps me lose track of time. Grace knocks on the door and tells me, “He’ll be out any minute now.” I thank her as I shoot up from where I was reclined, the hum of anticipation gentler now. He walks

me in and I sit in the cozy leather chair in the corner. When he’s ready with his notepad, I feel my mouth tear open from my bottom lip to my solar plexus, the words spilling out directly from the source. My eyes roll back in my head and I catalog the interior.

The PTSD has been especially bad lately—My back hurts so much it makes me sick—I threw up when I was brushing my teeth the other day, so the nausea is making good on the threats it’s been making for years. My eyes still go blurry, and my word recall continues to be an issue.

He asks me to slow down every so often; he’s not very fast with his handwriting, and I can’t even make out the scrawl, but the furrow between his brow and the smiley-face sticker I imagine on his bald spot encourage me to continue. We go on like that for at least forty minutes before he even touches me.

The recorder in his scrubs runs out of battery twice. We’re on recording C and I can feel the words start to slow to a trickle in a placid stream that collects in the hollows of my collarbone. He scoops up my words and lets them run through his fingers. The tides start to shift and he begins the clinical narration that sends tingles down my spine. Ears, level. Occiput, level. AC’s left is inferior about a quarter inch. Left scap, inferior about a quarter of an inch. Increased tone bilaterally left greater than right. Superior rhomboid scapular areas, minus left moderate plus right. Mild paravertebral prominence on that left lower rib cage. Iliac crest: the right is superior about 3/16 of an

When he’s ready with his notepad, I feel my mouth tear open from my bottom lip to my solar plexus, the words spilling out directly from the source.

inch. Trochanters are level, any soreness there? I tell him yes on both sides. Bilaterally tender greater trochanters. Dynamically at the innominates there’s some alternate motion between the two: the right side restricted anterior rotation. And so on. Then I lay back on the table and try not to brace against the sensations to come.

With my eyes closed, I meet the monster emerging from inside me. I see its yowling, gaping mouth, and the tension it brings with it is painfully familiar. Panic licks up through my nerves from my aching hip to my clenched fist. I exhale and the product of the ancient chemistry comes out with tar attached to the carbon dioxide. He touches a finger to the forehead of the shapeshifting creature within and follows it as it moves from a rabbit, to a wolf, to a gray whale on the table. His voice is steady as he records each change, rolling me over onto my stomach to grip my lumbar and soothe the wild horse, freeing up reins that have been pulled too tight. I cry on the table, watching the stallion within me, and the wild terror reflected in its huge soft eyes is so intense I don’t know how else to express the feeling—so the water falls. He tells me that I’m brave. I hold my head a little higher when I leave, especially when I hear him tell Grace: “But she keeps doing the stretches and going to the appointments and the monster shakes hands with the chewed piece of gum with less hesitation each time she makes it to the office.”

Returning to a Fluffy Nest

I don’t know which wires get crossed, but when I’m driving home there is a different kind of fire rushing through my veins and settling at my sex. The dirt road to my house makes me feel like I’m riding a two-ton laundry machine into my little garage. A win is a win. My purse is neat, and I easily find my water bottle against the orange interior. I take a sip of water while gazing out on the eerily dark

night. New moon. The orchid orchard catches the light from the bulb nested inside a vintage sconce I picked up from the estate sale four miles away. I can taste their floral fragrance on my lips the moment I step into my house’s orbit. I take a second to sit on the wooden swing that sways on my porch and watch their collective beauty. Their delicate stems appear still amidst a torrent of moisture and movement in the air. They seem to tilt their dorsal sepals up in salute of the silver lining that glows like a sparkly ring of condensation from a mug of stardust left on the sky for too long.

He touches a finger to the forehead of the shapeshifting creature within and follows it as it moves from a rabbit, to a wolf, to a gray whale on the table.

Flip Flop greets me as I put my keys in the crystal bowl by the front door. I turn on his heated plush bed that sits perched near my small dining table and he hops up there, waiting for me to join him. Leftover pomegranate chicken with hummus and pita bread makes my dinner easy. On nights like this, ease is imperative. Throbbing all over is intense business. With the monster and the piece of gum huddled in a tight embrace, I feel the most connected I have in a while. I crack open a fuschia fruit and peel away the ghostly shell on the outside to reveal a geode. Pomegranates make me feel like a cavewoman squeezing all the sparkle out of my environment. Gem-like clusters make a messy purple juice pool, like cave drippings finding hollows amongst stalagmites. I pluck each gem like a loose baby tooth.

The muscle spasms start soon after, and I recline on the couch with tea and my journal. Twitch. Tea goes slosh. Twitch. Sharp stab down my thigh. Twitch. Neck cramp.

Twitch, goes the dead body under freshly laundered sheets. Then another and another until I am cold from the inside out, bones frozen over and quivering in joints that are worn and tired. I greet the chill with a sip of tea and a warm coaxing smile. I grit my teeth and let the shudders come to my mouth: chattering my teeth is a lot easier than this diffused unquiet. I make weak kissy sounds calling for Flip Flop, and he wakes from his nap to come curl up in my lap. My sweet boy is so reliable.

That Night I Dream a New Medicine

The earth splits, but the midline of the basketball court is uninterrupted— a trunk sprouts. It spirals and big soft leaves of three wiggle free. The leaves are unaffected by the swirling winds that unravel the nets from the hoops. The ground is hot under my feet, and although it feels sturdy beneath me I am melting into the pavement. The buzz of wasps is just as powerful as the stomps that shake the earth. The band starts to break into their formation. They rise from the fissures in the earth as though carried by a spiral staircase made of flaming air. Up and down they go, high knees and sharp elbows hitting poses with crisp accuracy. Circling around the branches, the wasps create a plasma that splashes like black and yellow smoke licking at the tree. The flowers are heavy on each branch, and they glow in response to the ardent attention of the bees, their courtship ritual playing out to the sound of claps, slaps, and stomps as the stroll intensifies. The band is a precise unit of delicate angles and cascading choreography, as if one movement kicks off a domino effect around the never-ending circle that grows in size with each new sequence. The cymbal players step out from behind the girls that wear a mean mug. Fire sparks from the metal of their instruments as they squat low and hit their poses. Sensuous thrusts punctuate each glorious beat. Their beautiful black faces are twisted up with a scowl that bares

the most bear teeth I have ever seen. They gleam, and their straight smooth lines are striking and gorgeous. I am floored by the display of might, and I feel the energy of endurance resurrect me. How many times I have gritted my teeth to pull through and make it just to the finish line. Collapsing in devastation. Leaning against the stairwell under accusing fluorescent lights. Losing time to the spinning in my head that makes it so hard to see straight. Their orange gowns look like the newest Ivy Park, and the neon shade makes their white teeth glow as though the colors are in competition to shine brightest. It’s far easier to make it through when I can flounce about in the chaotic sprawl, bouncy after such a hard fall.

When Anticipation Comes to You as a Monstrous Ant

Sophia Riley

When anticipation comes to you as a monstrous ant, you must accept the shaking and sweaty palms. Offer her your mind to stomp in, and your stomach to build a hill in. Provide your body as a home for an ant party. She knows it well, where each room is, and she will bring her friends, as she does. Maybe cancel your evening plans. Don’t you want to watch her compete deep within your core? She races the other ants, start to finish, and with each pounce of their tiny legs your stomach will shudder.

Feel the droplet of sweat slide off your forehead. Then wipe it off, as you always do when she comes. Sometimes you will offer her the edge of your bed, she will sit and stare, each eye lens pointed a different way as though you have every choice to make for nothing of importance. So, you play your classical piano playlist for her.

She sits, completely unmoved, fully on edge. You want to party? You ask. Her antennas bobble around your head. Close your eyes, cross your legs, and breathe. Party? She spits each letter out, as though a mother bird feeding her young. While the walls around slowly inch inward until the bird’s feathers are flowing off her body, trailing upwards and you stretch your arms to the point of ripping attempting to grab a feather but by the time you feel one beneath your fingers, it’s already drifted out of sight, beyond the sky.

Hold This Grief

Indira Heller

My mom is peeling the papery skin off of an onion in the kitchen

She stacks the peels on the cutting board next to her Like a pile of oval bowls

Leaning to the left, watching her, I am wearing the cream-colored sweater for the first time When she sees me in the doorframe, her head tilts too, to the left

We hug in the kitchen, I feel guilty that I smell like her mom

In my bedroom, I plunge my head under the collar and inhale

But in the kitchen, exhale

I am proof of loss

My mom’s eyes water as she pulls away from me

I do not know how to hold this grief. I keep spilling it on her sweater, Panicking over the way then and now stain like coffee

But in moments of calm, I knit my sorrow into warmth

We inhale together

We talk and peel apart our purple layers

Stack them next to us, a pile of oval bowls

Together, we can empty our hands to hold each other We can lean to the left and watch our grief follow us there Purple layers, cream-colored sweaters

The Cake

Annabelle Rousseau

Sharpening a blade, with a ringing metallic swish swish swish, the knife carved into the deep dark brown sponge.

“A slice for your abuelo,” my mother whispers to my brother and I. The chocolate wafts across our noses. Placing the cake on the ofrenda, we fix the marigolds beside his picture. The gentle petals catch the light of the candle flames, the same ones that illuminate his frozen smile in the night. His favorite song washes over us.

I take my mom’s hand and squeeze it.

Giving her a hug, we drift into dance. How did I forget about this song?

We hold each other for moments after the song ends. Then I ask her if we can share a piece of cake.

Maya Mazor-Hoofien

She’s sitting in a chair, near laughing herself off it My mouth has never been this dry.

I’m laughing at nothing, still wearing my coat sitting on the ground and misreading the room.

I wonder if it’s the Jewish upbringing Defaulting to Seinfeld-tinted glasses

Is it genius or madness to dissect by nature?

Watching drunksororitygirl stumble into overzealousbeersophomore as jealoussalutatorian touches up her lip gloss, I can see everything any of us will ever be.

She staggers home, I hold her hand, I hear the music swell. I will never escape the confines of the genre.

If all anyone wants is to feel loved, why do we hate ourselves so much?

I say good night and catch my breath in the air. If there is a God he lives in Cannes and he’s a terrible writer.

Tired of existential dread, I lose myself in sitcomland

Sarah Walker

Colored Pencil on Toned Tan Paper

What is love? (baby don’t hurt me)

Piper Clark-White

I want a love that won’t fall apart.

Sometimes I feel like I’m asking too much

For something that only exists in books and movies

Something that has to be written instead of grown.

I want pinky promises and butterfly pecks

Wearing sweatshirts that smell like another

And to go on picnic dates with pastries and painting. But is it something that’s even tangible for me to have?

Is the idea of a scarlet string laced around fingers

Connecting two souls across the galaxy

Something I’m allowed to wish for?

Or has the idea long since faded

From dark rooms, hot skin, and clothes carelessly thrown across the floor.

I’ve never loved

But I want to.

My heart is bleeding with holes

From all the times it weeped for things that don’t exist.

What does it even mean to love?

I feel like I’ve grown up in a time where the idea is rushed. Frantic fingers sliding under the hems of shirts

Teeth nipping at the soft skin of a neck

Leaving marks that will just be hastily covered by concealer. The dings of texts sent purely out of boredom

Where people ask more about the color of your underwear than your eyes

Love is only present after the burn of liquid down your throat.

Why was love so much more alive when we were too young to know what it truly means?

I want homemade valentines

Sharing cookies at the lunch table

And secretly holding hands behind the plastic slide When you’d do anything in the world just to sit two seats away.

I think people mix up the idea of love

Blur the lines of emotional and physical into a toxic mess Where hearts are only strung along to be broken That’s what makes love so less tangible

But I keep the fortunes from every fortune cookie I eat And waste all the 11:11s on the same wish

Speaking it to the dying stars as they fall from the sky

Hoping one day they come true

They don’t.

I still sit here all alone

At the back of the class where no one notices

Because if the love that poets used to speak of Has long since been smudged off their ancient works Then what is the point of trying anymore?

Working It Out For Myself

Nick Smart

Reprinted from LC Review 1987 (1986-87)

The hunchback is locked out of the plasma center

Somehow these words aren’t ‘right’ for a poem

Perhaps because they’re all too true.

A hunchbacked man rattled the door of the Alpha Plasma Center well after three-o’-clock

which according to the sign at his eye is closing time

Actually as I think back I might be convinced that it wasn’t poetry or the truth

just what I saw on my way to work that’s all

From the Author:

I loved being a staff member and contributor to the LC Review. We took ourselves so seriously, and so not seriously at the same time. Looking back through teacher and parent eyes, I think that on-and-offness showed pretty good judgment on our part. I remove my beanie to the recollection of Jack Hart and Vern Rutsala, tremendous mentors of poetry and living. I am sure I wrote “Working it Out for Myself” on the spot after riding a TriMet to Northwest, on my way to work at La Patisserie in Old Town. I saw something striking, and wanted to remember it.

Lauren Caldwell Collage

The Maternal Inheritance of the Brain

Burton Scheer

Teachers in early language classes tell their students to imagine their brains as a room. By visualizing a frequently observed, simple space, they are able to understand a much more complex part of themselves. My brain, especially when I am lying in my bed late at night, has always been my great-grandmother’s living room.

I’m sure a therapist would assume this is the case because I spent prolonged periods of time there or I had a formative relationship with her, but what do therapists know? When I close my eyes and sit in my brain, I am still a very small child with a red sweater and a digital camera, and she is nowhere in sight. Yeah, she’s probably in the garage, showing the neighbors an old trinket from so and so’s wedding who she hasn’t seen in fifteen years (she was always good at keeping things, not so much with keeping in touch). She died when I was seventeen at the ripe age of 98. Before I was even able to visualize death, she had been uprooted from her home and sloppily replanted into the sterile walls of that Southern Christian nursing home. The first of three Southern Christian nursing homes. To its credit, that first one smelled like artificial Christmas trees and cheesy microwave meals. I remember the old women there still filled out their clothes and woke up every morning to apply blush to their cheeks. They smelled strongly of outdated perfume, and I always left with a little on the middle of my shirt from when I kneeled down to hug them. Anyways, my point with the therapist would be that if I was close with her in the way, and I ought to be since my brain is claiming her living room, then I might have picked a room that she existed in for longer in my lifetime. When

I think of Willie, or Winkie, as her friends at the library would call her, she is sitting on her bed in that first nursing home, mindlessly consuming the advent of the alt-right brainwashing revolution on FOX News, while my Mom asks her why she hasn’t taken her vitamins this week. Yes, that bed is still where she exists in my mind. She calls my Mom “Diane,” her mother’s name, and me by my mother’s name, but she is still living and watching the news. Yes, she is living and sitting on that bed, and she is not at all in her living room which is my brain.

My brain lacks the governmental protection of a nursing home. It exists inside of a house that could very easily be discarded in the next decade if one of these awful construction company vultures decides to turn it into a food desert production mill. It is nothing remarkable, and I’m sure you would pass it without a second thought if you drove through the neighborhood. I’m sure the only thing you would think about is why no one has maintained the lawn in 10 years. And then it would slip through your mind. Just another small Florida house with a bad set of teeth. I’m glad you have the luxury of choice. If only my brain did as well.

When I close my eyes, I am sitting on the couch beside the window that overlooks the lawn. It is always night in my room when I go to sleep. The thin red curtains above the window are like tiny lacy underwear that were supposed to function as pants. I feel so visible to everything outside. I sink into the cushions. They smell like the snake skin of Winkie mixed with years-old coffee and soup stains. There are dozens of receipts in the crack of the couch. They fall deeper inside the crevices of the cushions, while I slide my head farther down past the nakedness of the window.

I know I am alone in this room, but I feel like I am being watched. I can almost reach out and feel the faces of my imagined observers behind me, but I know that that would

only show that I’m weak and can’t stand my ground. I’m exposed and vulnerable, and all I can do is stare at the wall in front of me that has twenty framed pictures of deceased members of my family that I have never met along with five of George Washington. Oh, how Winkie loved George Washington. His thin lips form a straight line across his face that mocks me with condescension. I want to ask him why he thinks he’s just so great. Sure, he has a million paintings of him, but did he ever even have the balls to show his actual hair? That’s what I thought. Next to George sits the folded American flag framed in the wooden triangle that the military graced Winkie with upon her departure. She and George Washington loved that flag. Here, in her living room, the place that still exists three years after

her death, sits a shrine to the country that never served her back. I avert my eyes but know that my anger towards nationalism will never outweigh the feeling of pride she felt when she held that framed flag for the first time. Her husband sits smiling in a yellowing black and white picture in the same uniform she wore for those fifteen years. I can see the same sense of pride in him, but his eyes tell me that it’s okay to be afraid. They were once as afraid and still appear to be as afraid as I am now. The only difference between us is that their fear is masked with a corduroy uniform and rewarded with a tightly folded flag. All I am rewarded with is an acidic feeling in my gut as I slide farther into the carpeted floor.

My thoughts are no longer stuck on the possibility that I am being looked at by someone outside. Instead, I am staring at the stacks and stacks of receipts and coupons

Here, in her living room, the place that still exists three years after her death, sits a shrine to the country that never served her back.

on the coffee table. Winkie was always so good at saving those, just in case on a blue moon they became necessary. Some people have scrapbooks for pictures of their children; Winkie had scrapbooks for her receipts. And also scrapbooks for her children. And for her favorite newspaper clippings. And for anything and everything that ever fell into her thin fingers. She saved it all. She was on a wild goose chase to consolidate all of her memories and never lose them. But eventually, things must be lost.

This thought of human impermanence makes me want to look at all of her receipts and pictures too. I want to know what she was like before the nursing homes. I walk over to the framed picture of my grandma and her two brothers that I never met. They are at a park, laughing about something that has probably left this world with them. I pace around the room, my feet making soft marks on the carpet every time I circle the picture frames again. The eyes of the people in the picture frames follow me like helpless dogs who need to be fed. I realize that I am their only living member, I am the only one who can feed them. This thought makes me spiral, and suddenly I understand why Winkie dedicated her life to preserving their memories. There was so much weight on her shoulders. Our family was like a funnel that kept getting thinner and thinner. The picture of my great-great-great-grandmother with her eleven children stares back at me and fills me with guilt. What am I doing to make them proud? How am I helping fulfill their legacy? I know nothing about them other than their connection to me. How selfish.

Maybe if I can cling to the memories of Winkie, I can be more of a contributing member of this family. Maybe if I hold onto the feel of the carpet under my feet, the smell of old coffee and soup on the couch, the dim lighting above the American flags. I imagine her pacing the floor in the same way I am doing now, her footsteps outlining my own. She felt this same internal guilt, this same desperate

clinging to something that has already gone. She would get up in the middle of the night to collect her thoughts, or rather try to collect the thoughts of others. Her chair in front of her old computer has a deep divot from when she would sit in front of it for hours on end, researching where she came from and why she was here. Her obsession with genealogy was not just about preserving the history of those who came before her, it was about proving that she was real. She was real. And I am real. Right?

I sit down in her chair and trace the keys of the keyboard where she used to try to uncover all of life’s secrets. I feel warmth on my back and see the wall in front of me becoming gradually more orange. It is morning now, and I am finally tired. My brain is waking up but has not given me any of the answers I seek. I have dreamed a dream that was too much like my own life. There are no fantasy dreams when your mind is a room. There are only different versions of the same memories and the same fears. When I open my eyes, I no longer have to see the framed pictures of my family. I no longer have to confront Winkie’s frantic recording of the past. But it never goes away. My brain has always been my great-grandmother’s living room. The spunky, resilient, knowledge-seeking woman who once knew these same walls gifted them to me. Now my pacing feet are supported by these carpeted floors. My spinning mind is filled with thoughts of the past. My tired bones are cradled by this chair. This room was Winkie’s last gift to me. The brain is a maternal inheritance.

There was so much weight on her shoulders. Our family was like a funnel that kept getting thinner and thinner.

J Frank Envy

I am sick with jealousy there is no I no other being that moves so slowly, acutely, and contemptibly

withered lump of hopes churning tangle goopy black orgasm the flightless bird stripped of feathers

Charcoal and chalk on paper

Max Lobato

The Old Man and the Sea

J Frank

Film Photography

The Science of Drains

Lizzy Acker

Reprinted from Ink (2003-2004)

He holds back hair and watches it fall out In clumps clogging the shower. He cleans up Radioactive vomit, the spit cup, Our grilled cheese crusts and he has no doubt That he knows what love means. He takes the route Home from work down 34th. He looks up At firs and aspens and the buttercup Colored oak leaves. The evening clouds grow stout.

“I’ve never said this to anyone (he Pauses). She was different after chemo, Maybe the drugs or possible death, she Was changed, farther away, maybe mean, though Maybe not.” We drive through falling leaves, see Rain clogging gutters with things I don’t know.

From the Author:

I remember being probably 20 years old, sitting in the car, crying to my dad about something that had happened with my mom, and my dad and I having this conversation that completely shifted my entire understanding of reality. That’s really what “The Science of Drains" is about – the moment when you realize your parents are full humans and most of who they are is a total mystery to you. Now, I am 40 and I am so grateful that I know my parents in a much deeper way. But this poem is about my first glimpse into everything I didn’t know.

Meeting Grief Halfway:

Teaching Your Inner Child To Love

Piper McCoy Harmon

Every science teacher I have ever had claims that repeated trials result in more accurate data. Finding the mean (or “average” for those of you not mathematically gifted or inclined) of these trials will produce a standardized value which a scientist can then experimentally claim to be true — with a little leeway, taking into account the uncertainty of their instruments. While this is theoretically true, and while the electrified organ inside of my skull would fall limply underneath the umbrella of Biology (my least favorite of the sciences due to the sorry excuse for an online education endured during my junior year), I have come to understand that in certain scenarios one trial is more than enough. There are certain core experiences which I could repeat thousands of times and obtain the exact same results. No standard deviation necessary.

Although doctors ask you to rate your mental state on a one-to-ten, smiley-to-frowny-face scale, emotional pain is not accurately quantifiable. Individual sensitivity varies from person to person; the testosterone-buzzed boys who delight in slapping each other senseless inhabiting one side of the spectrum, while the other, seldom-noticed axis includes those who cry during nature documentaries. To my chagrin, and to the quiet lassitude of my two wonderful parents, I have always fallen on the more sensitive side. To blame science once again, I do believe that something about the way redheads develop exacerbates this sensitivity. (Perhaps if I had paid more attention in Biology I might be able to provide a basis for this claim.)

Or, in my case, the two weeks directly following my birth spent incubating in the NICU (with an adorably jaundiced face and breathing tube stuck up my nose) may have led

to some sort of infantile abandonment trauma like my mother often suggests. Either way, since the age of eleven I haven’t scored very highly on those quizzes.

It is 2010, and my mother just bought a book called “The Highly Sensitive Child.” She reads it at the dining room table as she bounces my four-year-old tyrant of a brother on her knee. I am seven. Every day I ask when he will grow out of it. “Wait until he’s four,” she used to say. I am beginning to think that she made that number up. My older sister is eleven and just entering middle school, a place where girls look in the mirror for too long and vape mango Juuls in the bathroom during the 30 minutes of government-prescribed lunch/recess. A place where a little boy decides not to live anymore and gets his name painted on the wall above a bay of lockers by the advanced art class. I don’t know any of this. I miss my sister and wish I could go with her to the big school. She moves out of our bunk bed and into the cold room under the stairs. My parents sometimes ask me to go downstairs and take away her pocket-knives. She isn’t supposed to have them anymore. I don’t know why. I don’t think to ask. I am happy to be noticed at all.

It is 2016, and I hate myself. Sometime in the last two years I have grown out of dolls and fairies and mud, and instead fixate on being perceived. I realize that I look and talk differently from the popular girls at school, the ones who have boyfriends and know the right things to say (the types of things that people will listen to). I now believe that I weigh too much and talk too much and by default am too much, although no one has actually said that to my face yet. At school I flash a metal-filled smile at the girls who can actually fit into their bikini bottoms. I scroll through social media photographs of birthday parties I wasn’t invited to, nails digging into my palms. Social anxiety claws at my

throat and I repeat sentences four, five, six times in my head before squawking them out, my raspy voice surprising even to myself. I don’t know why I worry so much because no one is listening anyway. My mother forces me to go to therapy, but I can’t handle the way the beige shag carpet reflects my silence back at me, so I refuse to go again. The therapist, a woman with a flat voice and unremarkable face, tells me that I am incredibly self-aware. “I know,” I want to tell her, “that’s the fucking problem.”

It is 2021, and the day starts just like any other. I turned eighteen less than a week ago, the promise (and fear) of independence strewn about my room besides scraps of wrapping paper and colorful knicknacks. All morning I have been trying on clothes and staring at myself in the mirror, the outfit of choice consisting of a dark red sweater over a white collared button-down, silver earrings, and surprisingly

bottoms.

tamed hair. Now down to an acceptable size (and no longer wearing sequined hand-me-downs), I am suddenly allowed to like myself. I stare at my reflection, at the girl who spent all morning preparing for the perfect senior photo, and I think she looks beautiful. At approximately 11:30am I get a letter from my best friend. I say approximately because my head is too scrambled by the letter’s contents to check the clock, yet somewhere in the back of my mind I know I am running out of time. I have to meet the photographer at noon.

She is not the first, and will not be the last, to tell me that I am too much. After reading through a page of evenly spaced pen marks and elaborately disguised knives thrown at my water-balloon heart, sixteen years of friendship reach

At school I flash a metal-filled smile at the girls who can actually fit into their bikini

their finale. (I would have thought there would have been some confetti or at least a participation award.) Before I leave to sit in damp greenery for two excruciating hours, I wipe my damp cheeks and remind myself how to breathe. Somehow I still remember how to smile. The talkative elderly woman behind the camera tells me that she adores my dimples. I can’t force myself to care.

The thing that hurts the most about the end of a relationship is that every memory you have with them is tainted by an ending, each stiff posthumous interaction reminding you of what once was, but strikingly isn’t anymore. No matter how many people you lose, this remains the same. After a loss, it is easy to think in whatifs. It is easy to blame and gossip and, most of all, it is easy to cry. I do not reject any of these options because they are simply human nature, and until you meet your grief on its own terms there is no way through it. My grieving consists mainly of tears and “self-reflection” (a fancy word for telling yourself all the ways you fucked up over and over again until you’re either numb to it or start writing edgy poetry). I was left with a cavity gnawing away in the place my heart should be, and a loneliness unable to be explained until it is felt. Dentistry of the heart has never been my strong suit, and Regence Bluecross barely covers medical, let alone heartbreak.

Although I do not wish to be in pain, in moments of weakness it is the braver choice to allow yourself to feel.

I have gone back and forth on whether or not love is worthwhile; am I wasting energy loving that could be better spent solving cold fusion or studying the migratory patterns

Dentistry of the heart has never been my strong suit, and Regence Bluecross barely covers medical, let alone heartbreak.

of South American birds? My current conclusion, perhaps undermined by teenage naïveté and wishful thinking, is that loving is worth the pain. I have always felt things in an extreme way, big love, big pain, big insecurity, big confidence, and these juxtaposing emotions help to pull each other up from out of the weeds. Without the rancid self-hatred of my youth, I would never have known how truly special it would feel to look into a mirror and appreciate my body for keeping me alive. Like a rollercoaster climbing and looping yet still destined to begin again in the same place, I would like to blame the roundabout way in which I arrived at my current degree of self-confidence on growing up as a woman in America. Or being a middle child. Or having red hair. Or being a chubby preteen or having high achieving parents or growing up in a hippy town as a straight-edged smart-ass. But blame produces nothing of true merit, and maybe the simple truth is that I couldn’t love myself before because I just wasn’t ready to.

Riptides

(Hiroshima Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry)

Russell Holder

Reprinted from LC Review (1977-78)

Time grew impatient and watches melted. The seasons lost sequence and summer exploded 500 meters over head. Some found God some found the devil some found clumps of hair in their combs two days later.

Frosted like cakes the lucky left only shadows. Others left bloody teeth and screams that echo. How could Naka-san have known when she chose her kimono that she also picked the pattern of her scars? Or Private Minoru as he sweated and discarded his shirt— did he see the museum? The picture-snapping crowds? The paper birds of prayer? The air was thick glass.

Death was busy making claims and deposits. Life hid and counted. Let me ask you: how many victors try themselves? And bring their victims to testify in their children’s bedrooms?

From the Author:

I wrote a draft of this poem shortly after visiting the Hiroshima bombing memorial in 1977. I was 19 and on an LC overseas study trip; I was so very angry and sad. I remembered this piece. I’m not very sympathetic to my younger self, but I’m trying. The LC Literary Review was the first place to publish my work that looked legitimate. I had been writing poetry since I was 14. Vern Rutsala was my mentor at LC, and his taking me seriously was crucial in my life. We became friends later. I still miss him very much.

Emily Hazel Wagner

Ballpoint Pen

Scrabble, Scrape, Scream

Shame

J

Frank

The red tongue swallows me down. I fall asleep twice, three times.

My skin unthreads itself The spiders are escaping Now—

Forget it.

Dangle your brain into loose coils like lengths of pink intestine. Thread this air bubble into the Puckered black mouth of your earlobe.

Swallow again And again

Thick salty gulps. Choke down mouthfuls of glue until Your tongue flops out on the counter.

Lick up fuzzy lint from the carpet. What’s this crunchy bit? Bite down with molars until Your jaw aches, Swallow wads of stale bubblegum.

You insert your eyeballs into mine And I draw back, Chest aching.

Am I anything more than the bits of fat you spit Back into your napkin?

Getaway

Cleo

Lockhart

Natalie’s weekend away from the city would have been perfect, she was sure, had it not been for the ache in her neck.

It had started up that morning as she’d stuffed a lastsecond menagerie of clothes into her suitcase: t-shirts on their second day, sweaters she wouldn’t need, mismatched pairs of socks. She’d packed as quickly as she could so that she would have no time to second-guess herself, ignoring every flash of her phone screen that meant another text from her fiancé. Still, she had occasionally caught glimpses of the messages: carefully phrased insistence at first, and then the slow descent into anger at Natalie’s lack of response. There were snippets of always doing this, really not the time for running away like this, and then the inevitable just being selfish.

Eventually, Natalie had reached over and turned the damned thing off, though not without a pang of guilt. It wasn’t her fiancé’s fault that the city was suffocating her, that she had to take a break. Well, not entirely. But admittedly the shift from partner to fiancé was a choice that, though a thrill at the time, was a thought now accompanied by a wave of nausea each time it resurfaced. That was the trouble with choices; indecision was a trap, but with each uncertain choice, Natalie found herself feeling equally hunted. She wasn’t being selfish. She was being reasonable. Some time to herself, and everything would sort itself out.

The pain in her neck, though. It persisted.

It was the sort of discomfort that started up like a memory, tentative and uncertain, and then slowly gained a confidence that had it throbbing the whole drive up to the mountains. When the roads became steep and winding, Natalie was reminded sharply of its presence with every turn. It was a strange sensation, unlike anything she had ever felt before, but when she checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, it didn’t seem red or inflamed. It was nothing to turn back for, certainly. Natalie thought to herself, I must’ve slept on it wrong, and when she looked back at the road and slammed her foot on the break, it was a matter of milliseconds that stopped her from colliding with the deer.

It was small—not a fawn, as its head already carried an intricate crown of antlers, but it was comparatively delicate against the angry backdrop of trees and the stark shadows painted upon them—and it was standing so still that for a moment Natalie wondered whether it, or she, was dead. There was something unsettling in its gaze, a distinct abnormality that Natalie found herself trying to puzzle out. A part of her wanted to approach the creature, to touch a hand to its pelt. A part of her wanted to send a bullet through it. But before Natalie could reach any sort of conclusion, the deer ducked its head and vanished into the trees.

Natalie stared after it for a moment, dazed, dreamlike. Then, when the gathering clouds broke open and began to rain, she snapped back to herself and started the car. Natalie finished the drive to the mountain lodge, thinking of nothing at all.

It was the sort of discomfort that started up like a memory, tentative and uncertain

When she arrived, the storm was in full motion, and she held her suitcase over her head to keep dry as she ran up to the double doors and stumbled into the lobby. Inside, the man at the front desk regarded her with little more interest than if he had been looking at the dirt he was picking out from beneath his fingernails. She paid him for the room, quietly remarking sure is some storm by way of initiating small talk, but the man just looked at her blankly and substituted a room key for a response. It clattered loudly on the table and echoed in such a way that made Natalie realize, for the first time, just how empty the lobby was.

It was an open, rustic area with wood paneling and soft chairs clustered around a blazing fireplace. Across from this was a knobbly tree branch ladder leading up to the second floor, where a loft loomed over the open space. It was a tableau that would have been inviting were it not so hollow; this may have been brought about by the lack of decor upon the walls or by the absolute absence of patrons. Natalie wondered suddenly whether she could be the only guest. She thought to ask the man at the desk, but when she looked back his chair was empty; it seemed he had already stepped away to attend to something. So instead, Natalie grabbed the key and made her way to her room.

That night, it took some time for Natalie to fall asleep. She was thinking of the city, hard as she tried not to, and whether it was really so selfish to run away. She was thinking about the messages on her phone, flashing like lightning. She was thinking about choices. She was thinking about the pain in her neck.

When finally she fell asleep, Natalie dreamed she was in a forest of antlers. They were black and like polished stone to the touch, but their ends were pointed like teeth and had

no trouble piercing both fabric and skin as Natalie ran, and stumbled, and ran again. She paid little mind to the sharp sting of them when they caught her flesh, and she did not think much of the warm, sticky sensation of blood. What mattered more was that she kept running. She wasn’t quite sure what she was running from, but whatever it was, it was big, bigger than a city, and so hungry that everything in her sight would not be enough to sate it. And it was close enough that, when Natalie woke, she could still feel its breath on her skin.

Natalie sat up, her heart hammering, the lingering fear holding tight to her like an insistent set of jaws. She could feel something wet across her neck and chest, and in a panic she touched a hand to it and switched the lamp on to look—but it was just a thin sheen of sweat, plastering her clothes and skin unflatteringly against her flesh. Natalie took a breath, and then another one. She changed her shirt. She got up to make coffee.

As the morning wore on and spilled lazily into the afternoon, Natalie began to feel a creeping sense of paranoia. She found that with every few moments she was checking over her shoulder, not really knowing what she was expecting to see behind her. She had tried to convince herself that the solitude here would be good for her, but it now seemed only to be pressing her own thoughts more deeply into herself, until it was as though they were being branded onto her bone. She thought of taking a hike to distract herself, but the weather still hadn’t let up, and though she ached to strike up a conversation, she still found the lobby devastatingly empty. She even thought of speaking to the man at the front desk again, but thought the better of it; he seemed too much like a ghost to offer any comfort.

Natalie sat in an armchair beside the fireplace, sipping her second cup of coffee and idly rubbing at her neck. The ache was a little angrier now, tugging at her consciousness as though it were a thorn she were caught on. Still, it seemed minor enough that Natalie was sure a trip to the hospital was unnecessary, and it would be too much of a bother in this weather anyway. Natalie turned her head to look out the window, lamenting the rain, when a still and staring thing caught her eye.

Natalie sat up, her heart hammering, the lingering fear holding tight to her like an insistent set of jaws

The deer was outside, standing just a few yards from the lodge. Natalie knew against all reason that it was the same deer as before; it had the same gaze like a headache, and the same strangeness to its stance. As she looked at it, an uninvited thought crossed Natalie’s mind: it had her eyes. It was fixing her with the critical stare she always caught from herself in the mirror, loathing the selfish and cynical bits of her that lurked just beneath the surface, and as it stood with its coat getting drenched, Natalie could feel the resentment in its stare. But there was something else, too. An emotion so concentrated in its expression that it made Natalie’s breath catch in her throat.

Fear. Raw, animal fear at the threat of a bigger, more dangerous creature approaching.

Natalie spilled her coffee in her lap and swore. When she looked up again, the deer had vanished. She felt the loss of its companionship like a knife.

With no sign of the rain letting up, Natalie extended her stay at the lodge. Another day. And another. It rained like it

had forgotten how not to, and Natalie thought less and less of the city. Mostly, her thoughts were overtaken by the deer outside, the creature she had nearly killed. She would catch glimpses of it out the window of her room, or the laundry room, or the lobby, until it became clear that it never strayed far from the lodge; it was orbiting the place like a misled moon. Natalie wondered vaguely whether previous patrons had been feeding it, or whether it merely took shelter nearby, but mostly these theories were obligatory grasps at reason. Natalie was certain, somewhere inside her, that this thing was following none of the ordinary structures of nature. It was when she saw the deer looking at her from directly outside the front doors of the lodge that she realized its reason for staring—it wanted to come inside.

Natalie wouldn’t let it, of course. Something like that was sure to get her kicked out of her room. Besides, it could be a danger to the other guests. But more than that, it felt like a sort of odd, vicious victory to her. She was here, where it was safe, and the thing that had her eyes was wandering aimlessly through the rain, terror seeping through it at their mutual predator.

Natalie had been dreaming of it again, each night from the moment she closed her eyes—a presence behind her, a wrongness, a suffocation both new and familiar. She couldn’t let it get to her. Not now, not when she had just gotten away. She slept. She woke up. She made coffee.

On Natalie’s sixth night in the lodge, the pain in her neck was so sharp and sudden that it awoke her when darkness still coated her room like a shifting, living thing, and the morning was hours away. She cried out, less in pain and more in fear that the pursuer from her dreams had caught up to her, and it took her a moment to recognize the room around her as a reality.

She sat up, took one breath, took another. And then she heard a sound from upstairs.

It was quiet at first, like the creak of a floorboard, and then it grew into something like thunder, but for the first time the downpour outside had stilled. Then, it was a growl, the ear-splitting anger of a hungry beast.

It was the first sound Natalie had heard in the lodge that she herself had not made, and it was at this moment that she was overcome with the certainty that she was, in fact, the only person inside. But she was not alone.

Before Natalie’s mind could fully close around the thought, she heard the splintering of wood and realized that the thing was going to break through the ceiling. She didn’t have time to think of what it was, of how it had found her here. She knew she had to run. And so she ran.

Natalie tore through the hallways, hearing as the central stairwell groaned beneath the weight of something, hearing the rapid echoes of footfalls bounce off the walls and unsure whether they were her own or something faster, larger. She ran past the empty rooms, past the vacant front desk, wondering vaguely where the man who had sat there had gone, whether he had ever been there at all, until she reached the front doors of the lodge. She stopped short. The doors were shattered. The glass littered the floor inside and made it clear that something had made an entrance, a rapid and desperate one. Natalie turned around. In the lobby stood the deer.

It was in front of the fireplace, cold now, and it was staring at her the way it always did. But there was more movement to it than before; she could see the quickness of its

breathing, the same panic that she felt consuming every inch of her, and she was sure that if she came close enough to it, their heartbeats would match up in synchronized perfection. For a moment, they stared at each other, and then there was a sound from down the hallway, one that might have been the slam of a door, might have been an avalanche. Natalie searched the room desperately, and her gaze landed on the ladder up to the loft: an escape. She knew she had a choice.

As she climbed, there was a sudden silence. She heard only the creaking of the rungs, her own ragged breaths. It was worse than the crushing loudness of the chase; it was the sort of quiet that was like being devoured. Natalie tried to ignore it. She climbed. She seemed to climb forever. Nausea began to settle in her, something past fear, past terror—it was that feeling that so often overcame her in dreams, of something being utterly wrong. And when she reached the top, pulling herself up onto the loft, she almost knew what she would see before she turned back to face the lobby. But she turned anyway.

In front of her, mounted on the wall, was a deer’s head. It had familiar eyes that pierced straight through her, and it was bleeding in slow, steady streams from the neck. Beneath it was a wooden plaque with capital letters engraved upon it, and when Natalie leaned in she could read two short words:

Save the deer. Save herself. Natalie went for the ladder.

She was sure that if she came close enough to it, their heartbeats would match up in synchronized perfection.

WRONG CHOICE.

This time, the pain in Natalie’s neck came like a blade, like dying.

This is a nightmare, she thought as she collapsed. It doesn’t matter, because this is a nightmare.

The deer stared at her.

I can do it all again, Natalie thought.

The deer stared at her.

I should say I’m sorry, Natalie thought. Then, I should’ve run further.

Natalie thought, and she thought, and then she did not think at all.

Loom

Max Allen

Digital Photography

Inheritance

Josie Alberts

My grandmother spits seeds at the wall, her rattling teeth a wall for her tongue to brace itself against, a fluid motion in which the little black disc arcs through the damp air following a weighty inhale. One after another, until the wall is peppered and still.

A rhododendron blooms outside and my grandmother tells the family its whole history. Birth, youth, flowering. She hasn’t been here for all of it, but she claims it as her own, a privilege won by decades of flower-learning. She didn’t get that from her mother. She got it from her mother’s mother, who lived when the flowers on this island were thrones for fraying women to kneel at, heads brushing sun soaked dirt.

My grandmother is a seed-spitter, and while that scares me, I know people-spitters are worse. My great-grandmother chewed on people until they bit their tongues right off. That’s the right you inherit when your husband dies, I suppose. You get to carry on his legacy of torment.

There are flowers in a vase on the kitchen table, the sun illuminating the light wood and the quiet rose pink of the plumerias. It smells like a soft summer here, and I almost don’t see the desiccated seeds that adorn the cream-colored wall.

The seeds on my fathers back slowly drip off him onto the shining floors. We’ve been cleaning all morning, but I

don’t breathe yet, carrying suitcases to the taxi in silence. My teeth crunch against the dread-coated kernels of a familiar beginning, I guess I picked them up. The plane takes off with a heave of effort, and I will my heart to explode now while it still beats wildly.

Lizzy Acker is a reporter for The Oregonian, where she also writes an advice column called “Why Tho?” She lives in Portland with her husband and daughter.

Josie Alberts likes to write poetry and is striving to one day publish a poem that is not about her grandmother, whose lifelong rejection of tranquility both fascinates and terrifies her. For now, she is super excited to be a part of this year’s edition and show it off to—almost all—her family.

Max Allen has done some truly horrendous things. He has run several marathons, eaten nearly a kilogram of Lucky Charms (which he doesn’t like) in a day, and once loaded a banana peel with sour cream and sewed it up as a birthday gift for a friend. Not a photographer, but here we are.

mo rose app-singer is a poet and aimless soul. He is often moved to tears by art, and spends most of his time on the internet reposting esoteric memes. His poem, “universal experiences,” is dedicated to his lover, Emma Jane.

Isabelle Atha is a sophomore at LC. They are a psychology major and an RHMS minor, which explains a lot about them as a person. They enjoy being creative by writing short stories and making nonsensical collages, like the one presented in this collection. On campus, you can find them spinning their staff in the school’s Fire Arts Club, or just sitting and enjoying the moss and scenery.

Gwen Baba is a general partner in commercial and residential real estate investments, with holdings in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. She’s enjoyed serving on a number of non-profit boards since 1986. Currently,

she serves on the boards of the California Community Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, and the David C. Bohnett Foundation. Gwen began her career as an investment banker in the mid-1980s after earning a B.A. in philosophy from Lewis and Clark College and M.A. from the University of Redlands. Gwen is a longtime resident of Los Angeles, where she raised her daughter.

Anneka Barton is an artist and writer from Denver whose interest lies in queer narratives that explore unconventional gothic themes.

Dakota Binder (he/she/they) is an 18-year-old artist originally from Sonoma County, California who enjoys illustration, graphic design, and writing. They are an environmental studies major and a freshman here at Lewis & Clark College, and do art mainly as a hobby. They have been creating different types of art for their entire life, and consider it one of their favorite skills and activities to work on. Their preferred medium is digital illustration.

Lauren Caldwell is a poet based in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been published in Applause Magazine, Mag 20/20, and she was a finalist in Prometheus Dreaming’s Unbound literary competition. In her free time, she enjoys wallowing in angst and taking long, luxurious walks across parking lots.

Dahlia Callistein is a senior English major from Des Moines, IA. Their work revolves around topics such as home and memory. Dahlia’s favorite pastimes include frolicking, dilly-dallying, and reading/writing whenever possible.

Matilda Rose Cantwell lives with her spouse and two sons, Olin (15), Haical (12), and their dog, Lucita. She is chaplain and director of religious and spiritual life at Smith College. Prior to her ordained ministry, she did clinical social work and community organizing. She is an avid cyclist and gardener, but has aspirations for higher athletic and outdoor pursuits. While she writes mostly sermons, pastoral letters, and to-do lists, she hopes to make more time for her poetry and essays, and post or submit for publication her work for anyone who might read it. She has published in Becoming Fire Spiritual Voices from Rising Generations, Palimpsest, Yale Graduate Literary Studies Journal, and Pensive, a Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts.

Nora Ceasaro-Dense is a sophomore psychology major at Lewis & Clark. She began writing angsty poetry in her notes app in high school and has grown a lot since then. She finds joy in warm soup, folk music, and bodies of water.

Amy Collinge: while completing her studies at Lewis & Clark, Amy also volunteered in local schools, worked as a preschool teacher, and taught high school debate in the summers. After graduating and working in a non-profit program in schools in the Portland area, she realized that teaching was something that she had always enjoyed. She moved to Phoenix, Arizona as a Teach For America Corps member, and has continued to serve in public schools ever since. She is now an assistant principal in Boise, Idaho, where she lives with her family, and will graduate this May with an Ed. Specialist degree in Executive Educational Leadership.

Alina Cruz (she/her) thinks and will continue to think that Cocaine Bear is the best movie of 2023.

Averill Curdy: after working as an arts administrator and

in the software industry in Seattle, Averill received an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the NEA, and the Fulbright Foundation, among others and her work has been widely published in both the US and England. Her first book, Song & Error, was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2014. She lives in Chicago and is Professor of Instruction in creative writing at Northwestern University.

Kincaid DeBell, (he/they, but would really prefer to just be a person in a body), studio art major ‘25. Genderqueer, but really they feel more of a connection to the stars and the way moss only grows on one side of tree, and how fire is destructive and lifesaving. Art is the only real way he understands how to maintain sanity in this deeply difficult and complex existence. Draws little stars on everything they can get their hands on. This piece is a moment of rebirth, a breath taken before the next moment begins.

Eli Dell’Osso is an avid romantic with a passion for lyric poetry and songwriting whose works often depict overwhelming accounts of longing, desolation, lament, or revelation. He employs a variety of inspirational sources including alchemy, folklore, pop culture, and psychoanalysis. Eli credits wordsmiths such as George Watsky, David Arnold, and Vic Fuentes as major influences of his poetic style. Other interests of his include vocal music, Microsoft Excel, quiz-making, fandom culture, homoerotic fiction, and clowns.

AJ Di Nicola shot and developed some black and white film photographs back in the day and now spends too much time in the depths of Olin internally (okay, sometimes externally) yelling at bacteria to produce enough damn protein for one set of experiments.

Tiani Ertel is a silly sock who writes things and lives in the Fir Acres theater. She is scared.

J Frank is the proud owner of four limbs, a couple of eyes, and a moderately functional mind which occasionally produces things of some value to some people.

Kit Graf has a septum ring now and hopes that shows in her work.

Piper McCoy Harmon has taken her trauma and spun it to gold. Watch out Rumpelstiltskin, she’s coming for your job!

Indira Heller is currently finishing up her first poetry book, Being Young and Getting Older, to be published this summer. This collection has themes of childhood nostalgia, family, friendship, love and grief. She’d like to dedicate this poem to her Gran, Julie Holt.

Russell Holder attended LC from 1976 to 1980. After that, he taught creative writing in the Portland public schools while working in a restaurant. From 1981 to 1983, he lived in Japan and taught English before traveling in Asia. He then attended UC Davis, received an MA in English, and won a small Academy of American Poets prize. Following that, he worked as an historical researcher for attorneys and then became an attorney. Starting in 1999, he practiced law at the Office of Legislative Counsel in California until retiring this year. He has a fabulous partner and two great daughters.

Elizabeth Huntley is (most likely) not a swarm of several hundred beetles.

Hera Hyman loves 3 AM Just Dance sessions, midnight walks in the woods, and the chance to connect on an interpersonal level with people from all over the world.

Interests include swimming, screaming Hamilton lyrics at the top of her lungs, reading, writing, doing voluntary service, and being around animals! One interesting thing to know about her is that she is a firehose when it comes to anything she is passionate about. She is diligent and will go the extra mile to see a project through, especially if she believes it will make a positive impact on the people around her.

Jillian Jackson writes about what she knows best: sick people, in every sense of the word. Most days, Jillian has OCD; occasionally, OCD has her. She has served as co-editor-in-chief of the magazine for two years. Jillian would like to thank Don Waters and Nikki Jabbora-Barber, her instructors in fiction writing and wood-engraving, respectively. And, to Soléna Andrus-Montalieu, Nic Cebula, Brandon Mead, Rowan Moreno, and Emily Wagner: Thank you for loving the mentally ill woman traipsing around Palatine Hill in a pink coat.

Moss Kaplan grew up in Malaysia, New Zealand, Nepal and India. He has a BA in Theatre from Lewis and Clark College, an MA in English Education from The University of Colorado at Boulder, and an MA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. His essay “Boy of Mine: An Experiment in Time Travel” was published by Homebound Publications in 2020 as part of their Little Bound Books Essay Series. He lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife and two children. More of his essays can be found at mosskaplan.com.

Alison Keiser is a senior English major with a concentration in creative writing. A fiction and poetry writer, she is interested in investigating the precarious self and its relationship to memory in her work. Originally from Minot, North Dakota, the complex memory of this home also appears in her writing.

Yonas Khalil is a sophomore and 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 debates), gaming, and reading.

Kathryn Kiskenin is a senior psychology major and music minor. She has always been interested in Nordic and Baltic cultures, which she first had exposure to through choral music and her family. She has combined her love for vocal music and storytelling in this historical fiction piece that explores the Christianization of ancient civilization in the Baltics and Northern Europe, and how magical pieces of the past have survived religious warfare.

Emma Krall was born in Chicago, IL, raised in rural Montana, and writes of lived experience and dreamy musings. Contrary to what is portrayed this edition’s poetry, Emma actually does find joy in many elements of life—most notably, she enjoys tasting worldly delights, engaging with friends, dancing hard, drawing thoughtlessly, writing with candor, and sleeping while surrounded by her many stuffed animals. She hopes that her poetry offers solace and solidarity to those experiencing mental health issues... but if that doesn’t happen, she at least hopes someone enjoys her words.

Cleo Lockhart is putting you in the soup. Read their book The Well Where the World Ends, if you want. Either way, you are simmering in a hot broth. Have fun in there!

Ryan Marshall is an undergraduate student studying English (with a concentration in creative writing) and rhetoric and media studies. This is his first time getting a creative piece published.

Lyra Meyers is a first-year student at Lewis & Clark, hailing from Berkeley, CA. She is a prospective rhetoric and media studies major and intends on a theatre minor. She has enjoyed writing from a young age, and found her stride mostly with flash fiction and the occasional poetry. Lyra enjoys woodworking, playing D&D with her friends, and practicing martial arts. She can often be found in Watzek Library, dual-wielding her laptop and a graphic novel. Her poem, “Blackberries”, draws from experiences of her childhood and the nostalgia from her memories of summers spent in Tilden Regional Park.

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System (Ecco), which was chosen by Monica Youn for the National Poetry Series Prize, and listed by The New York Times as a New and Notable book, as well as June in Eden (OSU Press). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

Rowan Moreno is a senior biology major and selftaught artist who also decided to dabble in poetry for some reason. Their works are inspired by their identity and experiences as a queer, mixed Chicane as well as the scared looks they get in response to their rbf, their silly gay thoughts, and a number of vodka sauce-related catastrophes. They hope to create art that speaks to a wide range of people, and are grateful for the opportunity to share their works here.

Sam Mosher will continue the good fight against chocolate chips.

Tj Muhammad is a freshman on the Lewis & Clark Basketball team. He wants to be a rhetoric and media major. Outside of poetry, Tj loves to spend time with his

family. What inspired him to write this poem was how traumatized young black men are by the police. How the system that was designed to protect has turned teens into adults faster than ever. This struggle is something Tj has had to deal with himself, and in reading this you realize it’s hard to enjoy the little things when you’re always living in fear.

Ella Neff’s relationship with film photography began with a $30 Minolta camera purchased from a church thrift shop. Three years and many rolls of film later, she used that camera to capture “The Railyard Cafe” on a family trip to Santa Fe, and “The Float” at Schlitterbahn waterpark on a hot Texas day. Find the next big hits of Neff’s film journey (plus some digital work) on her photography Instagram account: @eknphoto.

Elliott Leor Negrín is a queer Jewish writer from Los Angeles. He has been published in Sugar Pine Literary Magazine and the Altadena Poetry Review. He can be reached at elliottnegrin@gmail.com.

Daniel Neshyba-Rowe is a computer science major who once wandered into the 2022 Lit Review release party and was hooked ever since. You will sometimes see him scheming in a solitary corner of the library.

Joelle Pazoff is a writer from the Seattle area who takes inspiration from video games, cartoons, and everyday life. She is currently a junior at Lewis & Clark College majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing. She typically writes screenplays but enjoys the freedom of format in short stories. When not typing up scripts, she is often fire dancing or finding a new game to obsess over.

Corryn Pettingill thoroughly enjoys writing, painting, reading romance novels, and spending time with her family.

She explores themes of death, moving on, and our slow descent into old age using naturalistic visuals in her poem “Sojourners.” Not only is it a poem about growing up, it is also about growing old and accepting the cycle of life. In her painting “Christmas Eve,” Corryn shows a comforting scene of a dog and its owner walking through the snow back into the warmth of their home to celebrate the holiday.

Danielle Phoenix Pon first began writing poetry in her middle school creative writing class. She finds satisfaction in turning her regrets into something less regretful. Her favorite and least favorite place to write poems is Watzek Library; you can find her there most nights.

Emma Parrish Post is an interdisciplinary writer, teacher and prison reform advocate. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2019 and will begin her PhD candidacy at SUNY Albany in the Fall of 2023. She is currently the Program Director at the Chris Wilson Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to change the system of mass incarceration by providing education, mental health support services and arts programming to incarcerated individuals. She works and lives in a small house on a hill surrounded by 6 acres and lots of trees.

Salma Preppernau still lives with her roommates from college. She is a communications & recruitment manager for a small environmental nonprofit, an unforeseen life choice for someone who has no social media and a deep-seated hatred of responding to emails. She enjoys swimming, board games, and experimenting with new recipes. In her time away from work, you can find her out and about playing Pokemon Go (she still does raids with the L&C PoGo club every now and then) or hanging out at home with the plants on her balcony.

Zach Reinker (They/He) is a senior at L&C studying English and studio art (illustration). When they’re not writing stories about robots, cryptids, and ghosts, they often spend their evenings listening to story-podcasts, playing TTRPGs, and learning spooky folk songs. If you’re having a rough day and need a break, they highly recommend A Psalm For The Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. You can also find Zach’s art account on Instagram: @Grimwickarts.

Sophia Riley is a current sophomore at Lewis & Clark College. She enjoys writing, being outside, teaching belly dance classes, hanging with friends, and Bon carrot cake. She hopes you enjoy her poem “When Anticipation Comes to You as a Monstrous Ant,” styled after Mathew Dickman’s “Grief.”

Leanne Robinson is an artist in every sense. She brings a bubbling energy, a zeal for creative expression, and a refreshing groundedness into every room she enters. Amongst many passions, she loves drag, mangoes, and styling a really satisfying monochromatic outfit. She also loves her family, her cats, and her friends. From her skillfully crafted makeup looks to her collaged journals, art is an intrinsic part of her coping strategy after a traumatic car accident. Those who are lucky enough to read Leanne’s work will be immersed in a world full of poetic prose, narrative style, and stunningly unique imagery.

Soleina Robinson: nature, animals, words (paper and pen or typewriter are her preferred mediums and paper books are her preferred mode of consumption), movies, and family (chosen family included) are her staples. Her poem “Just Smile” looks at the “just be happy” message and its impact on those who cannot make conscious choices about their state of being. It is a call to those who say people can choose how they feel to reconsider, and to those who

experience the struggles of mental health to remember they are not alone and they have fierce fangs that can bite back.

Aubrey Roché is a writer who wishes there was more of a market today for people who like to write just small bits of things. She is inspired every day by literary modernism, particularly the works of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.

Annabelle Rousseau, BA ‘23, is an environmental studies student and English minor, who focuses her writing on what she knows. From Modesto, California, Rousseau was drawn to the Pacific Northwest, due to the stark amount of green spaces. Combining human and non-human elements, Rousseau writes about grasping uncomfortable understandings and perceptions of coming from a multicultural background. When she’s not writing, she can be found reading, spending time outside, swimming, dancing, creating/enjoying art in many forms, or enjoying the company of friends and family.

Jasmine Scandalis is a multimedia artist that finds joy in exploring the limits of what her hands can create. Through painting, drawing, ceramics, and digital art, her work intertwines themes of mythology, storytelling, and the natural world.

Burton Scheer enjoys talking about gender, rewatching the 2001 hit film Amélie, and inserting the word “subversive” into any sentence possible.

Syd Schubbe is a freshman political science major and photographer who will use high-contrast black and white any chance there is. End of story.

Coco Silver writes fiction and poetry. She was raised on the central coast of California and Chicago, IL. She attends Lewis & Clark College, where she studies English and art history. “Angel in the Snow” is a short fiction piece she wrote inspired by her hero Elliott Smith and Bennington College circa 1985. She promises that everything she writes about in her story is entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Have a nice day.

Alyssa Simms is a sophomore at Lewis & Clark College. They were born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, and they came to Oregon for the forest and rain. Over the last year he has come to see how the suffering of people in the US and around the world is deeply connected to how the economy is organized and the sacrifices it demands to sustain itself. This realization has led to her exploration in leftist thinking and theory as well as her participation in different forms of activism, which have come to greatly influence her poetry and creative work.

Nick Smart is Emeritus Professor of English from The College of New Rochelle, where he taught English and Women’s Studies from 1995 to 2018. He earned a PhD from New York University in 1994. He is co-editor of the anthology Dylan at Play, and author of several articles and chapters about either Bob Dylan or Virginia Woolf. He is currently a training analyst at The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in the West Village. His clinical interests include child analysis and psychosomatic illness. He lives in the village with his wife Jean and his daughter Penelope, whose middle-school debate team he proudly coaches.

Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He is the author of a dozen books of

poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection Singer Come from Afar (Red Hen, 2021). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term.

Cindy Stewart-Rinier holds an MFA in Creative Writing from PLU’s Rainier Writing Workshop. Four poems were nominated for Pushcarts, and her book-length manuscript, A Desire for Color, for Wings was one of two finalists for the 2016 Philip Levine Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications such as Calyx, Crab Creek Review, Ascent, Naugatuck River Review, Women’s Voices for Change, New American Voices, and VoiceCatcher, as well as several anthologies. She has led writing workshops for Portland’s Mountain Writer’s Center and for the Silverton Poetry Association. Retired now, she and her husband, Todd, are enjoying their teardrop trailer travels.

Stephanie Taimi-Mandel is an alum of both the undergraduate and graduate schools at LC who realized she just couldn’t stay away, so she now works on campus in the Office of Student Accessibility. When she’s not at work, she’s likely to be found painting, cooking, digging through the Little Free Libraries in her neighborhood, and/ or hanging out with her cat, Zora. She’s starting to poke her head into the local art scene and has been showing her work at Splendorporium Gallery in SE Portland. “Pacific Cloudburst” was made in 2022 after a cold, wet, February trip to the coast.

Emily Hazel Wagner is first and foremost a writer of books. The sci-fi and fantasy genres are her most comfortable place, but she has been published before for

her literary fiction and poetry. Above all, she just loves to write, and when something really catches her, the subject hardly matters.

Sarah Walker (she/her) is a studio art major who has traveled to Lewis & Clark College from the far-off land of Los Angeles, California. Two of her favorite things to do are make art and write fiction and poetry. Her art is the result of spending every waking moment doodling, and her writing is a product of the countless hours she has spent reading and daydreaming instead of focusing on the task at hand. She uses both mediums as a way to infuse the world with some of her weird, cute, colorful, emotional, and whimsical perspectives on the world.

Caleb Weinhardt graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 2022 after majoring in psychology. His hometown is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Caleb enjoys writing poetry and fiction, especially horror and historical fiction. Caleb draws inspiration from favorite authors and poets Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Mary Oliver, and many others.

Bria Whitten is a first-year from California planning to major in psychology. They are a big fan of cats (especially her own), blueberries, and overestimating their tolerance for cold weather.

John Willson, Class of ’76, is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Artist Trust of Washington. His book of poems, Call This Room a Station, was published by MoonPath Press in 2020.

John lives with his wife on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where he has been designated an Island Treasure for outstanding contributions to arts in the community. For 27 years, John taught the Poetry Writing Workshop for the Bainbridge Park and Recreation District. He recently retired

from a 30-year career as a bookseller at Eagle Harbor Book Company.

Rosalie Zuckermann is a sophomore English major from California with a concentration in creative writing. She channels her passion for creative expression and discourse as an editor for The Mossy Log and a member of the LC Speech and Debate Team. She also takes time to focus on theatre, dance, visual art, and, of course, writing fiction and poetry. This poem was inspired by her late grandmother, Annie Blount Hamilton.

acknowledgements

Issue 50 would not have been possible without the Oreofilled critique sessions and InDesign finagling of our editorial and design boards.

Thank you to all the writers, illustrators, photographers, painters, engravers, and collage artists who submitted to this issue. With this issue, we also welcomed back fourteen alumni and one former faculty member as contributors, thanks to Ginger Moshofsky and the Alumni Office.

Of course, we can’t forget about the birds and the bees — and the shadow men and the trees, too! Anneka Barton, Kincaid DeBell, Zach Reinker, and Dakota Binder designed our four commemorative covers for Issue 50. Many thanks also to the Art department coordinator Alison Walcott for advertising our cover art contest.

In the fall, the brilliant English department coordinator Amy Baskin joined the review as our site supervisor and mentor. Everyone should read her new poetry collection Night Hag, now available from Unsolicited Press.

Additionally, we would like to thank the English department chair, Karen Gross, and the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities, Mary Szybist, for serving as our faculty advisors. Professors Jerry Harp, Don Waters, Audrey Gutierrez, and Aaron Beck were instrumental in recruiting their students to submit to us.

The Student Media Board (SMB) and Bille Sheikh were essential in helping the review secure additional funding for our fiftieth birthday. We’d also like to thank Chris Hammett and Morel Ink for still believing in the power of

print. Finally, we appreciate The Mossy Log for lending us their office space and computers for InDesign.

The review owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to the Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President for Student Life, and the English department. All three gave generous donations when enormous student enthusiasm for Issue 50 overwhelmed our finances.

So too would we like to thank the Campus Activities Board (CAB) for co-sponsoring our release party, “Taking the L: Fifty Years of The Literary Review.”

We are grateful to our two editors-in-chief. Last year, AJ Di Nicola co-founded the design board, and since then it has flourished into a wonderful professional development opportunity unlike any other on campus. Jillian Jackson led our close-knit editorial board and ran its first ever collaborative Open Mic with the Poetry Club and Platteau.

Design Editor & Art Director Elizabeth Huntley is a spreadsheet wiz who tackled a truly enormous workload. We would also be remiss if we didn’t thank our talented Associate Design Editor, Zach Reinker, who once again helped the review deliver a beautiful book. In closing, we’d like to shout-out our spectacular Associate Editors, Max Allen and Burton Scheer, who put in so many hours to make 50 happen. Both of them are living proof that there’s so much more to come in Issue 51 and beyond.