Bellerive, Issue 17: fathom

fathom

Bellerive 2016

Issue 17 fathom

1. to come to understand, to comprehend 2. to measure depth, particularly of water 3. to encircle or embrace with outstretched arms (Old English)

Cover Art: Release

Danyel Poindexter

Pierre Laclede Honors College University of Missouri–St. Louis

Ear th to Senpai

the verg e of a laugh

Between Friends

if beauty is tr uth

Raspber r y Chocolate

A Wolf in its Own Pelt

Beyond Re pair

Slice

Bubblegum

Lost Boy

Guardian

Fallen

Mother Bones

T he Spine

#5 Landscape Monochrome

A Conversation with a Strang er

Open Your Eyes

Edward K.’s Bench, or : T he Two

Kinds of Catholic Funerals

Shar p Objects

Four White Walls / A Psychoanalytic

Quiz on the Afterlife

Dish-soap and Dissociation

Stare

Hypochondriac

Release

South Side of the Mountain

Holy Landscape

Triptych

From Silence

Glass

Skipping Stone

St. Francis of Nor mandy

Bookstore Cat

12 Hours in a Coffee Joint or Used Gr ounds Ar e Fr ee

Pulse

Click. Of Alice

#5 36x48

Common Places

Ireland 2016: “Ar t Imitates Life”

Until Something Happens

Light in the Darkness

Iff

Cannibalism

T he Butterf ly Nebula

Lightning Bug

First Night

Essence

Tonight #1 Landscape Monochrome

Summer Map

Hot off the Press

June

Nectar

At the Botanical Gardens

Ireland 2016: “Ar t Imitates Life”

if you’re the king, i’m the dog you kick out at dinner

Naptime in Puer to Ayora, Galapag os

Superbia

Little Brown Leaves

Excellence in Writing Contest Winners

Featured Essay Contest Winner : “T hat Female Shell”: Female

Body Rhetoric in H.P. Lovecraft’s

“T he T hing on the Doorste p”

Biog raphies

Faculty Advisor Notes

Staff Notes

Staff Photog raph

Staff Acknowledgments

Ar t

Audri Adams

Zoë Scala*

Bailee Warsing

Editing

Sean Chadwick

Zachar y J. Lee*

K aitlyn May

JoHannah McDonald

Daniel Strawhun

Layout

Kristy N. Burkemper

Kevin Kuchno

Amber Scholl*

Public Relations

All Staff Members

Faculty Advisor

Geri Friedline

All members of the staff par ticipated in the selection process.

*Denotes committee chair

abby n. virio

Earth to Senpai

If a w oman could cr ush her own body…

I wonder as I draw my face on, two dimensions at a time. If I could print my skin like newspaper cheap and thin, you would easily consume and dispose of me

If my hair could receive a cell signal you would recklessly break my body and call me an “action figure ”

If you could kee p me in a box my value would increase the long er I hadn’t been touched. If you could drag me down Akihabara you would buy knockoffs (the original is wor thless)

If a w oman could flatten herself , lea ving only her outline… I wonder, watching your eyes widen at the screen, then I think you might notice her

the verge of a laugh

the sun waxes on the hillside and yet you prefer the shade your days spent living lives and lies as lines of unrecited poetr y verses spew for th from that beautiful mind of yours

when the last songbird’s warble fades not unlike the final timid ste ps of a ballet dancer as the cur tain falls you question life’s g reat mysteries like why is the coffee always shit and where will the wind car r y the wayward leaf

for something eludes you still a f leeting memor y you can’t quite g rasp in a sea of thoughts that do not matter perhaps in youth you’d call it love bur ning up downy plumes as you fell in and out of a dream yet unfinished

like a pretty face on the verg e of a laugh

Between Friends marie carol kenney

Your lips smother the lid and leave lipstick: a pink trembling stamp. I take your cup and with closed eyes put my mouth where yours had been.

In summer we read poetr y in the g rass your hands f lighty like hummingbirds near my naked knee. I wonder : will you touch me yet? You never touched me only her and lo! Poison.

haley r. graham

if beauty is truth

If beauty is tr uth, And tr uth, beauty, T hen I have never wanted to lie as badly as I do when I see you. Each second I spend thinking of you Means another shovel of dir t

I recall you as a whole and then always, always fixate

Your smile, slow as honey, And your eyes, relieving like daybreak

All of you, a bounty that rests on my head

jessie eikmann

Raspberry Chocolate

She slips the piece out of its metal sheet. As she eats it, her teeth become tainted and her mouth as murk y as the moment her suitcase bounded out of his door.

T he candy’s two par ts are cleaved by white knives.

T he raspber r y pulses se parately in her throat

T he raspber r y ’ s fate is now familiar to her.

She takes comfor t in the fact that the raspber r y insists on stamping its tang on the chocolate before the chocolate breaks from it. She hopes that residual raspber r y stings the chocolate

A Wolf in its Own Pelt zoë scala

Picture this:

You are the helpless, the meek and the young I am the beast with a g rin as wide as your eyes. For each discover y you make, each broadening of your horizon, so too does my knowledg e g row I know your fears, your doubts, all of your ever y f law and imperfection. It is all in the palm of my hand, the bit of food that never quite g ets unstuck from my teeth, an ever present and ever pressing reminder of the utter destr uction I could wreak upon you.

But even still, I am not the monster in this stor y. Even still, I am not the monster.

Picture that.

As her mother tug g ed her head left and then right, she thought: why couldn’t I have been the brother?

It was the second piece of gum stuck in her hair since the four th g rade star ted.

She imagined her head f loating, like bubbles, continuously bobbing about the popcor n ceiling, until it is caught by the atmosphere of the fan, re peatedly hit and finally popped

T he trees were so densely twisted into intricate patter ns that it was only possible for a small amount of quiet, evening light to touch the g round where we sat, anticipating the rattling exhaust pipe of our mother’s car. T he sun was star ting to dip into the place beyond the trees, and I had a sick, sinking feeling that this time she wouldn’t be coming

Of course, she had been late before, but never like this. She g ot distracted when she was g etting high and sometimes forg ot about us. I took my brothers and moved into the woods neighboring the park because from seven o ’clock on, the high school kids would claim the slides and the seesaw to fool around, drink, and do whatever else they wanted to do. So we would sit under neath a tree and wait for her three boys with searching glances. She’d show up, eventually, in a better mood than when we left the apar tment I would haul slee py and sweaty little Ezekiel and James into the back seat and buckle them in tog ether, then climb into the front seat myself. Mom would f lick on the radio and star t humming along to the songs. She would slap at my hands and yell at me if I tried to chang e the station, but this was only for show. If I tried a second time, she would sigh and wave her hand at me dismissively, and I’d g o ahead and chang e it while she mumbled about being a tired mama.

When we g ot home, Mom would pull out a box of macaroni from the cabinet and star t making it in the microwave. She wasn’t a g ood cook. T he cheese mix would for m into little clumps because it didn’t g et stir red all the way, and the pasta was always mushy. But she tried, she really did. After all was said and done, I had to admit that she did tr y

But her effor ts were few and far between, and we often fended for ourselves. Most of the time, but especially during that par ticular summer when I tur ned eleven, I took Ezekiel and James and f led the stif ling air of our two-bedroom apar tment, thick with the smell of Mom’s perfume that reminded me of days-old f lowers and over ripe melon rinds. T he smell wafting from her bedroom and into the rest of the apar tment signaled that Mom had cashed her unemployment check a meag er balance she was given when the manufacturing plant she worked for downsized and showed her the door and meant that her friends would be coming over. I hated all of them with their harsh voices and slur red words; their hands, slick with sweat they wiped from their foreheads, would reach for us, pinching our ar ms and inner thighs while Mom was in the other room shooting up or coming down in a sweaty mess.

After telling Mom where we were g oing, I took my brothers and

headed to the park on the cor ner of Prospect and Concordia. T here was a playg round on one small section of the water-star ved g rass, slung tog ether as an after thought. I think it must have been nice when it was first built, but by the time we were playing on it, the metal slides were r usty, the faded red tunnels had holes big enough to fit a leg through, and, of a few swings, only one of them was still connected to the base. Pieces of blue plastic were falling off the monkey bars and the bottoms of the str uctures, exposing the shar p cor ners of the jungle g yms Sometimes we picked at the paint covering the spout on the water fountain, dropping bits into the basin, swar ming already with mosquitoes and long-leg g ed water bugs.

But the state of the playg round didn’t matter to us; all we cared about was playing ar my and throwing rocks at the g eese that plagued the park We played there ever y day for hours, and when we g ot hung r y, I’d use Mom’s EBT card that I swiped from her purse to buy us bags of potato chips, packag ed bologna, and candy bars from the Save-A-Lot across from the park When Mom ran low on money and the people she called her friends didn’t come around as much, she would pick us up from the park and call sweetly to us.

“Come have fun with me! I missed you guys and the apar tment was lonely. Why do you kee p r unning off to the park? It’s too hot out here to play.” She would r un her hands along our faces and take us to g et ice cream cones. When she attempted to line us up for a picture that would inevitably tur n out blur r y, she’d throw us a big smile, her yellowed teeth winking at us as the sunlight bounced off them

It was as if she remembered for a moment that she was in fact the mother and we the children, but this never lasted long, and soon she g ot tired of playing After days of being our mom, the one who bought us candy and little stuffed animals whenever we asked, she would collapse on the couch and lay there snapping at us; her leg, draped on one ar m, would f lick up and down, up and down, as she twitched and sweated the dr ugs from her system. More often than not she would just walk out the door, calling over her shoulder that we could g o next door to Mrs Robinson if we needed anything.

Suddenly things went back to nor mal, and we became motherless ag ain Dinner consisted of whatever I could find in the fridg e and cabinets hot dogs cooked in the microwave or store brand chicken soup from a can. My brothers and I would take a shower tog ether, if the water was on. Afterwards we’d sit in the bedroom we shared, watching late night movies until we fell aslee p, or Mom would come home and I’d switch it off. I remember that James, who’d tur ned five that summer, asked me in a whisper

what was wrong with Mom after she came in one night alter nating between raving to herself and laughing hysterically while dropping ceramic plates into the sink one by one. I snapped at him and told him to shut his mouth he didn’t know what he was talking about.

T he worst days were when rain came down in heavy sheets, kee ping us from the park. My brothers and I would stay in our room, watching car toons on the TV or playing the Xbox that one of Mom’s friends bought us a while back T hat par ticular guy hadn’t been so smar t It took him a while to realize that Mom cared more for what he brought her than how nice he was to us. But by then, it was too late, and Mom had moved on and found someone new. I would hear them laughing, moaning, shrieking, g r unting in the kitchen and in her bedroom as I sat on my brothers’ bed. Next to me, Ezekiel and James would watch TV, curling themselves into balls of old t-shir ts and hand-me-down shor ts from Goodwill, their eyes glued to a car toon mouse jumping through fier y hoops. Sometimes I would forg et about the strang ers in the next room, enthralled as I was with the car toon, until a piercing shriek would puncture the air followed by throaty laughter or someone shushing Mom’s moans.

T he first time I heard them, I thought that someone was hur ting her. I came tearing into her bedroom to investig ate. T he room was dark, but I could make out the end table that stood at the foot of her bed. It was littered as usual with little bits of off-white g rain like a dog had peed on a sandy beach glass bottles and pipes rimmed with stains, and a lighter that bur ned holes in the table

Mom looked up at me from her reclined position on the bed and saw me standing in the doorway. So did the man in bed with her. He wasn’t wearing any clothes, and Mom only had on a thin, cr umpled night g own, the faded pink edg es tor n and ting ed with dir t.

“Dillon, g et out. Right now. ” Her voice was harsh and I could hear the emotions she was holding back leach into her words: ang er, and something resembling fear.

“I heard you yell ” T he second the words left my mouth, I realized the mistake I had made. I wasn’t stupid, but I’d never really thought too hard about the men and women who sometimes spent the night at our apar tment, at least not in the way that was becoming obvious to me now

T he man sat up, g esturing at me. “Your kid’s been here in the house this whole time?”

Mom didn’t say anything but looked back and for th between me and him. T he man leaned back on his knees, his f labby belly wig gling with him I knew I should have left the room, but for some reason I was rooted

to my spot in the doorway, staring at the man. I was fascinated yet mildly repulsed by the ang r y, red stretch marks snaking across his pale abdomen and the swirls of dir t and hair on his chest.

T he man shook his head like he too had discovered something that left a bad taste in his mouth He slapped my mother’s thigh, drawing my attention back to her.

“What kind of mother are you anyways, letting them be here? Especially when you knew I hate kids You better not be tr ying to g et knocked up ag ain. I won’t be paying you any child suppor t. You’ll g et an abor tion.”

“No, no. ” Mom g ave a breathy laugh that sounded like she was fighting back tears. Her body squir med under his weight, still half-lying on top of her.

“Don’t wor r y, please, don’t be upset I’ll take care of it, you just lie back down and I’ll take care of you. ” She added a little gig gle as she sat up and placed herself in front of the man ’ s line of sight. She tur ned her head towards me, making a jerking motion for me to leave For a second, before ang er re placed the look on her face, I recognized her panicked look; I had come to associate it with the times her friends didn’t come over, or she ran out of money and couldn’t g et her next fix. I backed out of the room, breaking eye contact. I swallowed the lump I felt rising in my throat and pulled the door shut, the man staring at me impatiently. T he last thing I saw was him bending back over my mom and r unning his yellow-tipped fing ers down her ar m.

T hat man stayed the long est of all Mom’s friends, but he left things in a hor rible mess. T he last day I ever saw him was one of those stick y, July days, when the air is so thick and hot you can see it hum when you look out the window, the kind that makes you realize that the last thing you want to do is expel any kind of energ y. Mom and the man were g oing at it in the living room. He was yelling about how she had been showing up late and causing too much trouble for him. I cracked open our bedroom door and peeked out to see Mom g ripping his ar m, her body semi-collapsed on the f loor, as she hung off of the man

“Please,” she beg g ed, pulling herself up and pressing her body ag ainst him. “I’ll do anything you want me to do, anything anything!” Her voice rose as she became more hysterical He shoved her away and beg an walking towards the front door. She g ot up and followed him, wrapping an ar m around his neck and r unning the other up and down the front of his body.

“I’m sor r y, I’m so sor r y. I swear to g od I’ll do whatever you want,” she pleaded with him, kissing the back of his neck and caressing his tur ned-

away cheek.

He pulled back his thick, f leshy ar m and str uck her hard across the mouth. I f linched as Mom fell to the f loor with a strangled cr y. T he door slammed as he exited. I r ushed out to her, hug ging her and tr ying to help her sit up But she pushed me away and slapped me I g asped and stared at her. She seemed star tled as well. Tears were r unning down her face, leaving dark black lines of mascara on her cheeks.

“Oh, baby I’m sor r y I didn’t mean that ”

I reached forward, expecting her to pull me in, r ub my shoulders, and make it better. I would forgive her, of course. I wanted the mom who bought us ice cream and snuck us into matinees at the movie theater. But she just knelt there sobbing, her ar ms wrapped around her waist as if her insides would spill out if she let g o I watched her, hovering off to the side, unable to leave her and unable to fix her. After a while, her sobs quieted and she g ot up and went to the door, fumbling with the handle until it opened and she stumbled out

Mom g ot worse in the days that followed. When we left to play at the park, we star ted staying long er. She had stopped picking us up, so we g ot into the habit of walking back to the apar tment as the sun beg an to set. Sometimes she would be there when we ar rived, sometimes she wouldn’t. She stopped g oing to the store, and the familiar faces of Mom’s friends would stop by long enough to see we didn’t have any food in the house or anything else they wanted. Only our next door neighbor, Mrs. Robinson, looked in on us She would invite us over for some Hamburg er Helper casserole and treat us to frozen fr uit pops after dinner. It made me uncomfor table the way she would inquire about Mom and the people at our house, especially now that I knew about the yellow-fing ered man I would tell her I didn’t know, but I don’t think I convinced her because she would mumble “hmm” and tap her cane on the kitchen f loor like a judg e calling for order.

T hen out of nowhere Mom was suddenly better. We came home from Mrs. Robinson’s one sweltering day in early August to find a tall, thickly built, and slightly odorous woman putting away g roceries in the kitchen, Mom trailing behind her, and dishing out caresses here and there. Groups of people would come to our house more often than before. T hey would huddle tog ether smoking, sharing glass bottles, lighters in hand, their abrasive laughter filling the living room. Whispering to one another, they would watch with hung r y eyes as each took their tur n. I watched from my bedroom as Mom sat on the woman ’ s larg e lap. Her hand rested on Mom’s thigh, fing ers playing up and down the skin as she breathed it in dee ply, her head thrown back in bliss

“T hese are g ood people,” Mom told us as she popped frozen waff les out of the toaster the next mor ning. Smiling at us, she pulled syr up out of the cabinet and spread it over the steaming food. Her hair wasn’t pulled back like it usually was, so when she leaned in to hug us and kiss us on the forehead, it tickled my jaw T he old, familiar smell of her hair overwhelmed me.

“I’ll pick you boys up from the playg round this evening, and maybe we can g o out to McDonald’s or something ”

Ezekiel and James cheered and whooped, wanting their Happy Meals now. Mom glanced ner vously around the room, urging us to hur r y up and finish our breakfast. She was g etting jitter y, and I could tell she was waiting for us to leave for the park so she could g et another hit. Her smile was weakening, and I knew she couldn’t last I took my brothers out to the car, my backpack brimming with newly purchased snacks. She dropped us off quickly I’d barely closed the door behind me before she lifted her foot off the brake and drove out of sight T he sound of the rattling tailpipe g rew fainter as she rolled a stop sign and tur ned the cor ner.

We played all day, sliding down the jungle g ym and leaping off the swings into the air. T he heat that had been blasting us for weeks had finally broken, and we spent the day gig gling and chasing after the other kids. Soon the sun was setting; little rays of light fell through the trees and created patter ns in the dir t next to us. Our stomachs g rowled noisily, and I craned my neck to catch a view of the road, but I didn’t see or hear Mom’s car. After an hour of waiting, I tug g ed my brothers’ ar ms, leading them home Cars zoomed past us on the busy road skir ting the sidewalk. A few people honked and waved at us, but I held my brothers’ hands tightly and ke pt g oing

A police car and an ambulance screamed past us a few blocks from our neighborhood, causing Ezekiel and James to pause and cover their ears. I was beginning to wonder if Mom would be home when we g ot there, aslee p on the couch and pre pared to apologize for forg etting us, or if she would be out tonight, leaving us to find our own dinner ag ain I didn’t realize until we were practically on the doorste p that the ambulance siren had subsided to a low, methodical howl and that the ambulance had stopped on the street in front of our apar tment complex, blocking one side of the narrow road. T here were two police cars parked nearby, their lights casting brightly colored blue and red shadows over the buildings and our faces. I could hear shouting and cursing coming from our apar tment.

Mrs. Robinson stood outside her door, leaning ag ainst her cane and speaking to a young policeman She looked calm enough standing there, but

when she saw us walking towards the apar tment, she beg an g esturing and pointing at us. T he police officer tur ned and walked towards us. Ezekiel and James squeezed my hands ner vously and leaned ag ainst me. T hey were afraid, and for a moment I was as well. Police in our neighborhood were never a ver y g ood sign It meant trouble for ever yone Even the police knew that.

“Hi there,” the officer said as he squatted down in front of us. He was tall, much taller than I He wore a kind smile on his face that eased my rising panic, although I didn’t relax the g rip on my brothers’ hands.

“You’re Dillon, right?” he asked, looking at me. “Mrs. Robinson over there said you guys live in that apar tment with your mommy?” He said, pointing to our apar tment. Two paramedics ste pped through the front door into the house with an empty stretcher, and several police officers on the patch of lawn in front of the complex cuffed men and women whose faces I recognized. T heir bodies, skeletal next to those of the robust police officers, were pushed ag ainst the g rass as the officers barked words at them I nodded ner vously and swallowed.

“Is my mom in there?”

“She is, but I’m not sure what sor t of condition she’s in,” the officer explained. “We really just g ot here. Where were you boys?”

“At the park playing.”

“By yourselves?”

I looked at him guardedly, but his expression wasn’t sur prised or ang r y, just attentive I told him that we were by ourselves, but we had been waiting for our mom to come. He nodded and g ave an understanding smile.

“Listen,” he said, kneeling down in front of us, “Your Mom is ver y sick right now and she’s g oing to g o to the hospital All those people that were in your house are mixed up in a lot of bad stuff, and it’s not really safe for you in there. So you boys are g oing to spend the night with a nice family I know. T hat sound okay with you?”

He phrased it like we were or at least I was in charg e of this decision, but I saw that we had no real choice in the matter We were g oing to spend the night without Mom there, but that was nothing new. Ezekiel and James looked up at me, expectant and watchful, waiting for me to answer. My head was dizzy and I felt my vision swimming in front of me I realized then that I’d been car r ying around this feeling, like a foot pressed ag ainst my chest, dig ging dee per into me, and suddenly it was g one. Unable to speak, I let out a shak y breath and stared down at my feet. I found myself nodding to the officer and then felt his hand g rip my shoulder.

He guided us to an empty squad car and ushered us into the back

before g etting into the driver’s seat and pulling away. I twisted around in my seat as we drove off. I saw the paramedics pushing a gur ney out of the house. I could make out a figure on top of it lying ver y still. A white cloth draped loosely over it; one long edg e skimmed the g round, g athering dir t.

lysa young-bates

Mother Bones

Autumn Daylight

A brisk gust of wind g athered a patch of leaves and car ried the swirling bustle of crimson and r usset to Pamela’s feet.

“Mmm, something smells like cotton candy. Do you smell that?” she asked, tur ning to the wear y-faced woman on pushing duty next to her at the swing set.

“Oh, you’re talking about those katsura trees,” the strang er responded with a nod. “It’s the leaves. T hey smell sweet, kind of like brown sug ar.” She smiled, glancing kindly from an aging Pamela to the young, wrig gling child in front of her. “Are you new here?”

“I am. My Texas roots must be showing.” Pamela laughed before lunging toward her g randdaughter who, in the course of that shor t exchang e, had g athered strength beneath her small frame, launched to standing position on the bowed black strap of her swing, and burst into a midair split, g rasping the links of silver-streaked chain mightily in her small, sure hands

“Woooooo hoooooo!” the child squealed with the zeal of joyful achievement. Pamela calmed her stance, taking in the hear ty surg e of fearlessness this curious, adventurous little one had manag ed to liberate despite her new sur roundings.

She lengthened her g aze toward a field just beyond the katsura, its manicured covering sprinkled with small heaps of the g athering leaves. A g roup of children chased a ball back and for th across its length, breathlessly shouting exchang es Over her e! Hit it toward that big tr ee! Sur veying their teamwork, Pamela imagined which of the homes they might live in as she g azed toward the row of quaintly framed and well-tended str uctures, each fronted with a small porch and a set of chairs or a swing where drinks and evening conversations were surely shared. T he neighborhood’s newness appeared most obviously in its small trees, spaced two per home, which still relied upon stakes and ropes until roots and tr unks could take on the full burden of g rowth.

Another r ush of cool air swe pt Pamela’s hair across her face She g athered the war mth of her jacket around her and, noticing that the mother and child were moving across the playg round, tucked the g raying strands behind her ear and leaned in toward her g randdaughter.

“I think they’re g oing to the slide or monkey bars. Would you like to check it out, too?” she asked.

“No, Grandma! Under dog!” the child hooted, and Pamela smiled.

Pushing her g randdaughter on the swing, she felt the war mth and weight of the child’s joy with each to and fro, the chain squeaking along with their laughter. She g athered her strength for one final push and, r unning behind her g randdaughter, launched the child toward open sk y. K atsura leaves g ently tumbled from tree limbs, joining the child’s retur n jour ney from air to ear th.

Winter Night

Mia wasn’t sure how long she had occupied this spot. Somehow night had cre pt in and with it an unnatural ambivalence toward her surroundings. Attention could only be mustered through one sensation at a time. T he sound persisted in its monotony: a screech and howl, back and for th, in and out, up and down. She shifted her g aze upward, barely able to make out the silver glint of bolt and chain secured in pendulum ag ainst the expanse of darkness It continued in sequence while her hands somehow remained outstretched, making periodic, scheduled contact with a for m encased in the arc. Wrapped in a blanket of silence, her child f loated as cold f lecks slipped out of the sk y, creating a soft cr ust on ever ything both in and out of sight.

T he scene hid itself in shadows, exce pt for rhythmic spacing of streetlamp bursts, which peered down into small circumferences, hyphenated environments quickly choked out by the veil of the sun ’ s absence.

Propped halfway within a f lood of vision, a collection of g arbag e appeared toppled and strewn. Ref lective orbs of movement pulled Mia’s attention as her eyes met the fur r y oppor tunist’s foraging. T he creature moved with scur ried pur pose, breaking through fields of plastic to g ather scraps in its small hands, peering left and right before taking the meal into its teeth and tearing the remnants to pieces. A gust of air whipped up the odor and dispersed it like dust into the darkness.

Mia searched for the moon but found only incandescence, its beam thrown across the backs of trees that stood like sentinels, casting their ar ms in distor ted stretches across the g round. She tur ned her head and squinted into the distance. A homog enous line of triangles atop rectangles dotted the expanse as if someone had cut their black shapes into a backg round of g ray. Faint f lickers peered from one silhouette toward the expanse of hidden g round that se parated Mia from the space. Her tongue felt heavy as she tried to utter words before the emptiness swallowed her thought.

Cold hands outstretched, she tur ned to the rhythm ag ain, the pulsing movement of palms meeting mass, mother bones meeting child, or lack thereof. She wondered when mor ning would come, when light would fill the voids that suspended her view.

The Spine zoë scala

Here at the end of this battle, when you are beaten down and bloodied and tor n, when your victor y is neither just nor wor th the str ug gle, before you g o back to your home to be lavished with praise you do not deser ve, here

you feel the battle field thr umming with the feet of souls that will forever be trapped in tor ment and motion, unable to rest while the war continues You hear the collective hum of chaos, the echoes that resound in your mind, filled with cries for the motherland, for the countr y that does not deser ve the blood of the men spilled in its honor.

Your ar mor tor n, you are picked up the g eneral of this disaster, the leader of this hollow triumph and placed on the back of the lives yet remaining. You are empty, but they are emptier, looking to place their memories into you, the living memorial of their strife, so that they may g o home and wee p for the men lost while you hold on to ever y last tale of “heroism.” So that they may g o home to families and you may g o home to stare at yourself in the mir ror and see a different man stare back at you ever y time.

But you’re used to that, aren’t you?

A Conversation with a Stranger kristen flood

Raelyn had spent a g reat deal of life hidden behind the pag es of old, dusty books. Even today, under neath the drear y, darkening sk y, she sat sifting through the musty pag es of a classic. She leaned her head ag ainst the r ustic fence that sur rounded her small cottag e and allowed her thoughts to drift And drift they did

Her thoughts found their way to the ballroom of the Duke’s mansion, which was huddled on the other side of town. In her mind, she could almost see the ladies with their satin ball g owns, fawning over the young Duke’s smile, their voices a mix of giddy shrills as they stole glances with each sip of their dr y wine. Eventually, as the night drag g ed on and the Duke g ave his attention to his wife, the ladies would shuff le into a cor ner and spin stories like thread on a spindle. Of course their idle g ossip would shift to Raelyn and her absence from yet another spectacular par ty T he r umors would bloom beneath a sunless sk y and judgmental eyes.

Raelyn blinked away those thoughts and br ushed her long hair behind her ear She always wore it down despite the scolding eyes of the church. T he church had a lot to say about her bare ar ms and her corset dresses exce pt for the Reverend, whose g reedy eyes almost praised her less-than-appropriate attire. T he Reverend was a shor t, wrinkly man with missing teeth who always made time for home visits in hopes of conver ting Raelyn to sinless ways. Or perhaps he hoped the sinful r umors were tr ue and she would lead him astray. Either way, she would always send him away with a fake smile and stale bread.

Raelyn stood up, leaving her thoughts on the g round along with her books, and moved inside before the thick, slow drops of the fall rain could r uin the rest of her dull day. Inside she kneeled before the hear th for war mth as the rain beg an to beat ag ainst her roof Her eyes beg an to droop as she listened to the constant fall of the water droplets outside. She lay down on the f loor and allowed herself to give in to the temptation of slee p, something she did most days now.

A sudden knock pulled her from her slee py sin. Sitting up, she listened for another knock After a few silent minutes, she star ted to lean back but didn’t make it far, as there was another thud on the door.

Cautiously, she stood up and made her way towards the door. Aside from the Reverend, she almost never had visitors, and at this moment she was sure that the Reverend would be spending this rainy day inside the taver n. At the third knock, she pulled open the door and stared into the dark eyes of a little boy dressed in black. His hair was whiter than the first frost

of winter, and his skin mir rored her own pale glow.

“Can I come in?” he asked

Raelyn had never wanted children. Some g ossip even sug g ested that she was responsible for the children who died after the last har vest they said that it was her lack of faith that forced God to bring in the thick sickness that took away the young est of the children. When she made her way into town she could often hear the frantic whispers of the children that remained. All of the children feared her.

But she did not recognize this boy. Yet, as she stared at him freezing in her doorframe, she felt compelled to let him in He followed her to the small table by the hear th, and she motioned for him to sit. She took time to admire him once more as she star ted to boil some tea. His eyes were larg e and appeared sunken into his face. His skin was stretched over his bony frame, and he appeared to be ver y young.

“How old are you?” Raelyn asked to lighten the mood.

“How old do I look?” he asked in a curious voice.

“If I had to guess, I would say you looked about five?”

His eyes seemed to g row three sizes before he nodded

Raelyn arched her brow but moved to sit next to him. He must have a reason for coming here, and it would be best to g et to the point, though Raelyn had long ed for company on this lonely evening

“What did you come here for?” she asked, “and do you take your tea with sug ar?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Good.” Raelyn decided not to pr y on about his uninvited visit. Quickly, she poured him the freshly made tea

“You live here all alone?” the boy asked after a long pause.

“Yes,” Raelyn answered and was not sur prised by his question. Nothing shocked her small town more than her ability to sur vive in this house without the company of a man.

“Have you spent all of your life alone?” the boy asked with sad eyes.

“I suppose that I spent at least half of it alone,” Raelyn said, taking a sip from her own cup T he hot liquid sent tremors down her cool ar ms

“Does that make you sad?” he asked, looking at his own untouched cup.

“Not really I have my books, so in a way I’m not tr uly alone ” But even as she said it, she knew that it wasn’t tr ue. T he comfor t of books did nothing but provide a one-sided conversation.

“Why did you not mar r y? Were the men in this town not g ood

enough?” the boy asked intr usively.

Raelyn had lived twenty years and was a little old not to have been cour ted. Of course, there had been interested men, but they were not ready to commit their time to such a small investment. She looked at the boy with questioning eyes and decided to simplify her answer

“I was always sick, and not many people expected me to live long.” She looked at his own sickly features and wondered how much time he had left

“What about the man who came to visit you so often during the last drear y season?” It was a strang e question. She did, in fact, have a male visitor for quite a while, but this boy couldn’t possibly have known that. Her old friend had only made visits at night and would retur n to his wife’s bed before the first rays of the sun peaked over the horizon

“Well, your parents must be wor ried sick. Do you want me to walk you home?” Raelyn was feeling another tired spell coming on. She always felt tired nowadays

“You want to put me out in the rain?” T he boy’s question reminded her what a long walk it was to town.

“I suppose we should wait until it calms down.”

T he boy nodded and dipped his fing er into his tea.

“You don’t like your tea?”

“I don’t actually like sug ar in my tea,” the boy said dr yly.

T his was, of course, why she didn’t like children: they were always so indecisive She remembered making the mistake of offering to buy a toy for each of the or phans in town with her dowr y money. It was a reg retful mistake because they took up a quar ter of her day with their decision-making

With a sigh she poured another cup of tea for the boy. He took a long, slow drink.

“Well, what brings you out here?”

“I suppose I wanted company.”

Raelyn couldn’t hold in her laughter Of all the company he could possibly want.

“Well, do you want to play a g ame?” She didn’t really know of any g ames they could play

“No.”

“Would you like me to read you a book?” she offered.

“Do you want to read a book?”

“Yes.”

“T hen you can read me a book ” He said with a small, pretty smile

T he first he had shown her since he ar rived. It was as if she had known this boy her entire life.

“You are familiar,” Raelyn said as she pulled a dusty book from a shelf.

“Maybe we have met before?”

“Yes, do you live in town?” Raelyn wiped dust from an old book about a mysterious woman. Yes, she was sure he would enjoy this one.

“No, I do not live anywhere in this town But I have visited it quite frequently.”

“Oh? Who do you visit when you are here?” She was hoping he would give her a bit more infor mation about who he was. She wanted to g et him safely home before the night came to an end.

“I have visited a lot of different people in this town ”

“Well, who are you visiting this time?”

“You.”

Raelyn shook her head T his boy could not have traveled all this way to see her, she didn’t even know him. She needed to tr y a new tactic.

“What is your name?” She asked with an expectant look.

“I thought you wanted to read me a book?” T he boy dismissed her question and with it her resolve.

She opened the book and beg an, “T here once was woman who long ed for ever ything, for she had nothing. She left her larg e house in search of something that could quench the thirst that ke pt her so empty. Behind she left her husband and three children She didn’t stop to say g oodbye and simply drifted away from the town.”

“I thought you said she had nothing?” T he boy asked from his seat.

“What she had simply wasn’t enough,” Raelyn tried to explain “But she had more then you have ever had.”

Raelyn pursed her lips. She wasn’t really sure what to say to those br utally tr ue words. So she continued to read the stor y. “She didn’t really know what she needed to feel whole so she beg an her desperate search. Her first stop was a larg e temple She went inside to ask God if he knew what she was missing. But as always, he wasn’t in.”

“Surely, the woman could just ask herself what she needed,” the boy inter r upted

“She didn’t know what it was that was missing.”

“Maybe it was because she didn’t understand what she had,” the boy was quick to argue.

“You know I didn’t write this book, right?”

“I know You only ever read the books ” He took another long

drink from his cup.

She pondered his words as the rain outside beg an to slow.

“Will you be coming with me today?” the boy asked as he stood up. His question was so familiar that she froze. She searched her mind for the memor y, but it was so faint She tried to cling to it as he held out his hand towards her.

“Have you asked me this before?” she said, tr ying to pinpoint the moment

“I have asked you this question three times,” he said quietly.

“When?” Her voice was a faded whisper.

“When you were six and your fever was high. When you were nine and you fell into the creek behind your house before the men pulled you out And today, when the fever tried to take you ag ain by that fire ”

She searched his dark eyes for a hint of a joke but there was no humor.

“Do I have to come with you?” She tried to hide the panic beneath her calm voice.

“No, you don’t have to g o today. But I don’t know why you would want to stay.”

“I have so much left to do,” Raelyn said as familiar feelings of exhaustion plagued her.

“How many more times will I come knocking at your door?” T he boy asked, his hand still waiting for hers.

“How much time do I have left?” Raelyn asked with closed eyes

“De pends if you decide to g o with me today. You have lived quite a lonely life so far.”

Raelyn smiled “I don’t think I have even begun to live just yet ”

T he boy frowned but ke pt his hand out.

“Would it hur t to g o with you?” Raelyn was only curious. She knew she wasn’t ready to g o.

“No. Not today.” He g ave her that familiar smile.

“I need to stay here ”

“Why? Do I not bring you comfor t?” he asked with sad, hollow eyes.

“I have so much more I want to do ”

T he boy placed his hands by his sides. “Will you actually do it?”

“Do what?”

“Live your life.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I suppose I will have to ask myself what I am missing,” Raelyn tried to reassure the boy.

“I see. ” He looked down at the g round.

“Shall I see you out?”

“Yes, but first I must ask you one more question ” T he boy looked up at her with those sad eyes.

“Ask away. ” Raelyn couldn’t help but smile at this curious child.

“Why is it that you see me as a child? Is it because you hate the thought of me so much? Or is it because you tr uly see me for what I am?”

“What is that?” Raelyn asked, her own curiosity piqued.

“Innocent.”

Raelyn shook her head as she pulled open the front door. T he cool wind br ushed past her, and as she tur ned to answer him, he was g one She closed her eyes for a long time, a silhouette in her door frame, pondering their discussion.

Opening her eyes she was sur prised to find herself lying on the f loor in front of the hear th. T he fire had long g one out, and she worked quickly to bring the war mth back to her cold cottag e. She wondered if she had only dreamed about the little boy and his strang e presence. Shuff ling to the table she saw three cups: two empty and the third one still steaming. She lifted the tea to her lips and could taste the sug ar she had mixed into it earlier. It was bittersweet.

As she savored that bittersweet taste she heard a faint knock on the door behind her She knew who was at her door Placing her cup on the table she decided to brew some tea. On the third knock she opened the door.

“Can I come in?” asked the white-haired boy from the porch

Raelyn welcomed in her familiar friend. “Do you take your tea with sug ar?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

She poured him a cup as he claimed his seat. His cup remained untouched as she asked, “Is there something wrong with your tea?”

“I don’t actually like sug ar in my tea.”

“Neither did I, until today.”

“How many times will you let me in?” the boy asked, looking into his steaming cup.

“T hat de pends. How many times are you g oing to knock?”

abby n. virio

Edward K.’s Bench, or: The Two Kinds of Catholic Funerals

I do not know where Edward K.’s body is, but somebody stamped his soul to a park bench in the nineties Whether it was a bourg eois relation claiming a piece of public proper ty in the name of philanthropy or a for m of tax evasion marking his favorite fishing spot, the world may never know. But somebody bolted a decorative bench to a concrete slab under a willow tree there, and Edward and I have had several conversations about its placement since.

It was a white stone bench, the surface inlayed with a familiar quotation the lyrics, based on the words of Psalm 91, of a song written by one Michael Joncas in 1979:

And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings

Bear you on the br eath of dawn

Make you to shine like the sun

And hold you in the palm of His hand.

T here was nothing enigmatic about that one verse of the Bible. It was straightforward, with vivid imag er y and a comfor ting tone. It was the kind of song that made all the Catholic school children hush, no matter how “cool” they thought they were with their Sper r y boat shoes, and their other shoes, and their boats. We were all equal in that song, which was probably one reason it was so wildly popular at funerals.

Catholic funerals are conducted for the most par t the same way ever y other Catholic celebration is conducted with an unnecessar y and drawn-out mass, followed by donuts. A procession of people donning brightly colored bedsheets car r y a big, shiny book over their heads and down an aisle. Flanked by candles, they make their way to the altar in the front where they can tur n and g aze condescendingly at the cong reg ation.

T he most elaborately dressed man will read text no one can understand, from an era no one can relate to, in a booming voice no one wants to hear. Incantations and other things that look exactly like witchcraft yet have somehow resulted in fewer public bur nings will ensue, as the comfor ting words of the funeral rite assure doting family members that their loved one made it to heaven, no matter how much of a jackass they were in life If you are not already cr ying, one of the plainly dressed altar ser vants will remedy that by shaking f lavored ash around your breathing space.

I was once such a plainly dressed altar ser vant.

I ser ved funerals for free on a regular basis for the span of approximately three years T he allure of being a funeral ser ver was this often, the 37

well-meaning families would tip you five dollars, and the obscenely wealthy families would tip you twenty dollars. For me, however, the Catholic funeral was the Great Leveler. Most people do not know that the averag e funeral is quite small; more often than not, there is no org an playing, no multitude of sobbing ex-lovers and g randchildren Usually no one bothers to tur n all the lights on. For the working class and chronically ill, funerals are dark and quiet. T he masses take place at 8 a.m. shar p, as the sun just begins to peek through the east-facing, richly colored stained glass windows T here is no extravag ant procession. T here are only timid voices breaking the oppressive silence death has laid out over the pews like a thick, dusty blanket, and one voice the voice of the presiding priest “celebrating” his umpteenth funeral mass as the unfazed she pherd.

At times like these, “On Eagle’s Wings” was often requested by family members desiring something simple, familiar, and comfor ting. At times like these, I sang the clearest and least self-consciously.

Six years later, I found myself on Edward K ’ s bench with a small, red box labeled “T he Vatican” in my palm, stocked full of orang e-andwhite capsules. T his time I wasn’t contemplating the mor tality of an unknown, elderly community member, but my own. I ref lected on the lyrics of “On Eagle’s Wings” lyrics I had once found comfor ting. Now, I wondered where these protective wings had g one. Had they melted away like Icar us ’ s mythical appendag es, or had I plucked the feathers out myself ? Either way, I had plummeted back to Ear th long before.

Now these words were no long er a comfor t Now they were the words of a system that had failed me. T hey were the words of a culture of shame and double standards, of subjug ation through lack of infor mation, of entitlement T hey were words that made bright-eyed little girls wonder whose hands exactly they should be searching for heaven forbid it be their own. And although some plainly dressed ser vants may have figured that out or never bought into the lyrics in the first place, in the stuffy, immense cave of the funeral I had lived by these words.

Edward, I asked, W hat happened when you died?

Death, the Great Leveler. Death had car ried Edward’s soul away, perhaps before I was even bor n. Yet it had also brought me here, to Edward’s bench

Although young and impressionable, in the ominous silence of the 8 a.m. church, I had found a glimmer of hope. I did not ser ve the funeral masses for tips, as a wedding could have easily paid out double. And I did not kneel before an old man with a book over my head for the g ood of my community I had been a little girl planning her funeral instead of her wed-

ding because in the presence of death, the showboating and pandering of a bureaucracy legislating salvation are cr ushed by the recognition of mor tality. “On Eagle’s Wings,” and the hundreds of other songs and prayers filling up the bent and chunk y hymn books, had no bearing on the spirit, which much like a noctur nal predator slipping through the night only shows itself in the face of darkness.

Popping the lid off my ironically decorated stashbox, I hurled the contents into the lake in front of Edward’s bench I watched the ar tificial colors sink beneath the scummy surface of the shallow water, at once envious of the fish about to experience the high of their lives before being poisoned to death, and also totally relieved.

T here are two kinds of Catholic funerals: those that take place in the suffocating fog of an early mor ning ritual, and those that take place on benches such as Edward’s, where little Catholic children g o to die. And when they are cold and stiff, their tiny cher ub bodies fall into the lakes and sink below the scum In their place, world-wizened adults stand, br ushing leaves from their laps and tur ning to walk away. Each ste p is heavier, weighted by realism and cynicism. Yet their heads are free and high, and their eyes are bright ag ain with comprehension. T his is the funeral of the Catholic childhood, and its hymn is all-too-often the whir ring of sirens.

In funerals like these, however, at Edward K.’s bench, the hymn was the lonesome hoot of an owl in the tree line and the whispered words as I traced my fing er nail along the bench inscription.

“Say to the Lord, my refug e I am now the rock in whom I tr ust ”

Sharp Objects william morris

Her stairs were wood tor n from ships by night and hammered each to each and they were stee p and he watched for loose nails like he had as a boy because r ust or broken glass or needles could make you ver y sick and he was g oing to be sick in the mor ning so he had best be careful now. Between the hall with her bed and bath and the kitchen hung an opaque tar p she said he should not cross because there were still loose nails and splinters. He had oblig ed for so long and ke pt his feelings to himself but he was barefoot now and dr unk before a border he could cross into a kitchen that was no kitchen yet. He realized she bathed and sle pt in that ver y house, and wanted all the edg es to seem softer.

Four White Walls / A Psychoanalytic Quiz on the Afterlife

Four white walls and me: It’s absolutely arctic in here.

My soul leaves my body in ever-expanding puffs I’ve become the weather.

Four white walls and a window: a single window

It’s classically paned, I postmoder nly.

Outside I hear the muff led clamor of a Sunday mor ning

one-dimensional pedestrians in polka-dotted petticoats. On the street, blossoming white f lakes pe pper their eyelashes, a g rayscale low on toner.

Specks of blinding white tur n to heat on my side of the glass.

Four white walls and no door :

Four inches of ice beg me to put my fist through them.

Ever y bit that shatters to the f loor is frosted exce pt for my blood, tendons curling back like g rated cheese.

Hel p, I call to no one the wiser, my breath filling the room.

At the sacrifice of an additional knuckle two plummy fing er tips pierce through to the outside.

Bent over the windowsill, one ar m suppor ting the wreckag e of the other I think, g od it feels like hell

exce pt for my two frosted fing er tips they feel like heaven.

zoë scala Dish-soap and Dissociation

You had me dreaming of Pinesol and ammonia, latex gloves and tightly bound recipe books. Waking in a cold sweat at 2 am, to find a husband snoring too loudly to hear my sobs. Shaking hands holding glass, jag g ed after the “third dropped plate this week, sweetie” Taking care of a child named after my g randfather, with your last name, and your middle name Of carelessly picked trinkets, acce pted with tight smiles, and long after noons spent staring listlessly at an ever-g rowing g rocer y list.

Even while your power fades, my nose twitches ever so slightly, acidic smells ling ering like unwelcome house guests

Hypochondriac

i was inches away just inches from the(what i thought was a)cure a median at eighty ninety but who’s counting through tearstained windshields how fast or how far or how soon or

Maybe I wasn’t sick.

Dear God I thought a crash would make me pure.

South Side of the Mountain megg roth

Ill-tempered and exhausted, I let the mountain catch me for the four th time. I lay heaving, my face covered with snow. I thought I heard you pass, when a hand wiped the snow from view. You said nothing of the fall, no r ush in your voice You simply sat, with your face re placing the sun, and the tips of your r ustic hair wet. From my bordered perspective it was all I could see: a sk y blue with melted snow drops magnifying the clouds, the chairs with dangling feet that kicked and f loated. It wasn’t that I couldn’t, I didn’t want to chang e this picture, move on to the next. Tr ying to catch my breath at 9600 feet, I was frantically memorizing what it felt like to be looked at in love, on the side of a mountain, with the tips of your r ustic hair wet.

william morris

Birds

One song lit the sun where it stood while the other and its moon still clung to the night before.

Mor ning

T he light star ts through the little window first blue then pink. I’ll be back aslee p before she’s awake.

Slee per Her breath sighs then g asps and she slee ps on her back so I can tr y to count the freckles on each cheek.

From Silence

From silence, a moder n rooster resounds, but I, refusing to wake in early mor ning, engulfed in thin blankets, surly hairs amess, matted atop and around

ears and foreheads, g rog g y eyes still glaring at the enemy blaring bright red tones onto the ceiling I’m feeling your moans ag ainst my neck bones, abr uptly squaring

my shoulder blades ag ainst your clavicles and nestling your stubble-studded jawline in the crook above my deltoid, a shrine ag ainst the phonic mor ning panic. All

I want is to forg et that I can hear this damned alar m and with you disappear.

Skipping Stone

Beside emerald banks alone many thoughts abide tranquil, and wor ries abundantly sown sing their par ting melody leaving a peace often unknown where life’s insanity is reconciled with a holy g ravity.

In my loneliness, to atone, I take up a pebble smooth and toss my skipping stone.

St. Francis of Normandy

Fear not the sound of av ’ an messeng ers who take to campus g rounds in mighty f locks for all these loathsome white-crowned scaveng ers find comfor t under neath his shar p g ray locks. T hese birds of prey shall cease their wand’ring ways to hear the lear ned professor speak his verse and listen to the dulcet sounding lays that f low so neatly from his mental purse T he smaller birds that make his conferences the spar row, robin, blue jay, chickadee are lifted up in f light by references to heathen birds who mig rate righteously. And yet these g entle lessons pass in vain; his students leave to crap a viscous rain.

maría t. balogh

Bookstore Cat

Golden big fat pompous he parades the aisles of used books caressed by customers as if it is his right lifting his ass toward extended hands

He tur ns to me his daylight eye-slits & gives me a most pitiful meow which seems too small for him asking why I have not reached down to pet him as all others do so I attempt to comply

But as I lean over an elderly couple walks in eyeing him & smiling before they even glance at a single book

He tur ns disdainfully away from me & pur ring arched back he swings his hips toward them

katryn dierksen

12 Hours in a Coffee Joint or Used Grounds Are Free

I come here because the sandwiches are g ood.

A trio of queer youths blows in through the cor ner entrance, bare faces and stomping Doc Mar tins, undercuts and once-rolled jeans

I sit by the window, now dark, now str uck by the light from within, now ref lecting this table, this chair.

In my Chipotle cap, I leave the car rots in the pasta salad, and three fing ers up from the juncture of my thigh and my hip a familiar pinch whispers to me,

“Gratitude.”

Up the stairs. Sometimes two or three at a time, slow exag g erated lunging; sometimes each one individually, ste p by ste p, jog ging; essentially bouncing up the stairs, transfer ring the weight from the ball of the foot into the hop up to the next, instantaneous r ubber-soled impact, conser ving momentum; essentially f loating up the stairs, each actual ste p a single frame of contact sur rounded by a g eneral upward rising swee p of motion. T hree f lights, three days a week Monday, Wednesday, Friday he f lew up these stairs, always breathless from the ascent, his pulse following the trajector y and finding itself in his forehead by the time he reached the top, thumping at the medial apex of his prominent brow line as he walked through the clicking antitheft g ates and past the circulation desk.

He had been given a par t-time summer position working in the archives de par tment of the university librar y, a position that didn’t actually exist exce pt upon occasional entreaty by well-connected faculty, budg et providing, of course. T he de par tment itself consisted of one dedicated main re positor y, lined with steel g rated shelves and packed to max capacity with only the most dignified of university e phemera; then, as the years rolled on, a g rowing number of re pur posed offices, storerooms, various file cabinets tucked away in remote cor ners, tables that had remained unused for spans of time, rolling utility car ts, and so on, were appropriated to house the accreted piles of yellowing documents that g rew behind each advancing year the caput mor tuum of passing time.

T he actual work he was responsible for completing during his estival tenure here in the de par tment was limited to a few projects of questionable urg ency. First, to org anize and consolidate a digitized collection of recorded inter views and their cor responding transcripts. T hese spontaneous inter views were the result of a 1973 sabbatical, designed by one Samuel J Myers, which sought to document the lives and opinions of remaining Native Americans by way of free-for m inter view; tribes rang ed alphabetically from Apache to Winnebag o. T he typed transcripts had already been conver ted to control-F-searchable PDFs, the cassette recordings of inter views already just recently conver ted to MP3s, and so the project for him was larg ely only a matter of g athering audio, transcripts, and content descriptions and filing them each under their cor responding memoirist.

What it really amounted to was a lot of on-screen shuff ling and highlighting and both right- and left-clicking, copying and pasting and dragging and dropping and other such (th)-ings. All this -inging around on the computer, while cer tainly a task with tangible, quantifiable results and there-

fore one thought implicitly wor thy of remuneration by, like, any public institution anywhere, felt to him like not even a simulacr um of actual contribution, more just a for mality his paycheck de pended on. By the end of his first day, he was reading ever y inter view before filing it.

It star ted as solely a compensator y reaction to the stultifying nature of the work, his brain seeking stimulation, g asping for input, never mind how cr ude. Soon it became a g ame, g estured toward some vague notion of self-improvement: How fast could he read an entire inter view? Rules appeared, multiplied; variations were bor n. Could he read the whole thing in half the time it took for the audio version to play? Surely he could read twice as fast as people spoke, yes, that was easy. What about the whole thing twice? Twice before halfway? Probably, but let’s just make sure. Some variants involved a cer tain temporal finesse: Could he, star ting at the bottom of the transcript and reading in reverse, pace himself so as to join seamlessly with the forward moving audio track at exactly halfway? Gradually, descend ing dee per still might the transcription differ from the spoken words? This transcript has been edited for clarity and ease of reading . . . well then, yes, quite obviously so . . . but every effort has been made to preserve the original feeling. So to what extent, he wondered, were the syntactical glitches, the undesirable tmeses and for mulaic ir r uptions preser ved? And to what extent cor rected, destroyed? Eventually his attention on the content itself. Bakeapples, Bisbee Blue, Lamanites, pemmican, NAC, AIM, the Wounded Knee Incident what did it all mean? He was sitting in the middle of the reference section but searched the inter net instead not because it was easier, he rationalized, which it undoubtedly was, but because it helped sustain the illusion that he was sitting there dilig ently clicking away with a sterile concentration on the task at hand, that he was really tr ying with all his might to cor rectly file those inter views in the most efficient way possible when in reality, he was reading an encyclopedia ar ticle on the peat-bog dwelling R ubus chamaemor us, commonly called the cloudber r y (a name which seemed to him much more celestially exotic and appealing than “bakeapple” [a Newfie colloquialism]. It looked like a distended orang e raspber r y had decided to star t g rowing in the middle of a buttercup).

Not that he thought K athleen would mind if she found out that he was dedicating an inordinate amount of time to reading, researching, and, now as a result, quite thoroughly enjoying the inter views that he had been hired only to file; on the contrar y, he g ot the impression that she already secretly suspected as much, and that her continued unobtr usive presence at the reference desk next to him was as much a passive condonation of his actions as it was simply the unremitting decorous composure of a senior

reference librarian and head (read: only) archivist. If Sam Myers had been the father of the project he died two years after its completion, according to the archives K athleen was now surely its leg al guardian, a g raying sexag enarian g odmother of sor ts. She was the person responsible for originally pulling the transcripts out of microfiche obscurity and into digital existence, for commissioning the tapes to be conver ted to MP3, and for conce ptualizing the whole electronic archive into which he was now filing them. T his was her latest pet project, and he sensed that his interest in it f lattered her in a way not dissimilar to the peripheral f latter y people feel when you take interest in their pets.

He liked K athleen and liked to think she liked him back, but it was g enuinely hard to tell. She had a critical, calculative g aze that made him conscious of ever y muscle, ever y contour of his face It was as if she were constantly tr ying to deter mine the purity of his soul based on his physiognomy alone, and quite often it seemed to him that she wasn’t entirely pleased with what she saw But then ag ain, they g ot along well enough, cr yptic body languag e notwithstanding. T hey weren’t usually looking at each other while they talked anyway, but rather at a 3’x3’ white sheet which helped mediate the conversation. She would often drape it over her desk toward the end of the day while he set up an old carousel slide projector.

T his was a closing hour routine they had begun under the ostensible pretext of discovering a lost cache of photos from the sabbatical project, supposedly of all the people Myers had inter viewed. He suspected that this was a unicor n almost immediately, although there were three mysterious por traits that had been recovered from Myers’ desk shor tly after his death, a fact that substantiated their ong oing search and one of which K athleen was never hesitant to remind him And ong oing it was: T here were boxes and boxes of the little things, almost four decades’ wor th, enough to last the whole summer. T hey would sit there for the last hour of each day, she, always the one in control, clicking through the thir ty-slide carousel with a wire-tethered hand control, he watching rapt the procession of projected imag es click by at a steady rate, all the while almost unconsciously readying another round of square transparencies into an alter nate carousel.

T hey were imag es of another era, a time predating inter net and statewide budg et cuts. T he students of the seventies all appeared more adult, somehow more wholesome and eter nally beautiful than the awkward pubescent lumps of today’s campus . . . the men all sculpted Adonises, the women callipygian nymphs. Fur ther more, they were confident, optimistic, you could see it in their face: T hey knew the countr y still needed them Or

maybe they didn’t know it at all, maybe the prospect of America bir thing a g eneration it didn’t need was still a conce pt incomprehensible to them, unthinkable. Even the professors seemed somehow more cultivated and collegiate, at least in par t owing to the culture’s affinity for tweeds and broadcloth at the time T hese were the oldest of the slides, seated in cardboard frames; shar p-cor nered, angular, they tended to jam in the projector, causing K athleen to inhale shar ply through cring e-clenched teeth. She was in constant fear of the projector breaking down and effectively robbing from them this hour of leisure, neither one having the patience nor ocular endurance to g o at it projector-lessly. She would hold her breath tensely as he set to pr ying the aber rant slide free, often then handing it to her for scr utiny and potential re probation.

On one such occasion, while holding the freshly unstuck slide up ag ainst the harsh ceiling f luorescence:

“A-ha, a continuation of our musical theme. A young lady playing the har p ” She handed it back to him

“It’s such a beautiful instr ument.” He was holding the slide a couple inches from his face. “As beautiful to look at as it is to listen to . . . Have you ever listened to Dorothy Ashby?”

“No, I don’t think I have.”

“Oh, she was a really g reat jazz har pist. Popular in the fifties and sixties.”

“You know, my niece plays the har p.”

“Really?”

“Yes, and ver y well. She’s g etting her bachelor’s at Iowa State because of it. Full-tuition scholarship.”

“Wow ”

“Yes, she’s ver y, ver y g ood. I went and visited her recently to help her buy a new one. I’m kind of her Lorenzo de’ Medici, you could say. You know, I haven’t g ot any kids of my own to blow it on . . . Here, I’ll show you some of the pictures we took.” She swiveled around in her chair. “I have them up on Facebook ” He watched over her shoulder as she switched tabs and star ted searching through her albums. She had hundreds of pictures stored here on Facebook, her own personal archive, a monument to ever y f leeting minor climax her life comprised

“Here they are. See, that’s her with the new one I helped finance.”

“It’s such a . . . reg al looking thing. Cour tly. Baroque. It’s beautiful.” He hesitated. He felt oblig ed to compliment the niece as well. T he moment passed.

“T here’s her with the old one T hat’s the one she travels with

now . . . And her standing between them both . . . ” She had fallen into that same absorbed rhythmic clicking she assumed with the projector. Click. More of her niece and the two har ps. Click. Her and her niece with the new har p, smiling. Click. T hem at dinner. Click. People he didn’t know and the niece in front of a fountain at night Click A man on a bench holding a little black schnauzer.

“Uhp! T here’s my little dog g y with my husband.” She’d clicked too far

“Cute pup. Schnauzer right?”

“Ye p ”

“And I didn’t know you were mar ried K athleen! What does your husband do?”

“Yes, well, he was a retired professor of histor y But he died ver y suddenly from a hear t attack last year.” She closed Facebook and swiveled back to face the white sheet.

“Oh I’m sor r y ”

“Anyway, what do you know about schnauzers? Do you have one?” She resumed click-ing through the slides.

“No, actually my neighbor had one when I was g rowing up. Had a couple actually. She was a dog trainer and would enter them into competitions I think. Her whole yard was full of obstacles seesaws and hurdles and cones and whatnot. Agility training. Hers were g ray though. Kind of salt-and-pe pper-ish. I think I like the black better.”

“So do I No pets then?”

“You mean right now? I had a beagle when I was g rowing up ”

“Yes, no, I mean now. ”

“I have moths ”

“Moths?” She stopped clicking and looked at him.

“Yes, moths. Well technically speaking I have pupae right now. T hey won’t emerg e from their cocoons for another week or so. ”

“A special kind?”

“It’s called the Polyphemus One of the giant Nor th American silk moths. Polyphemus after the infamous cyclops of Homer’s Odyssey you see, the adults have this big dark-colored spot on each wing, it looks kind of like an eye T hey’re really quite stunning creatures honestly, and all the more so because of their transient lifecycle. As fully developed adults, they typically only live a week or two just long enough to re produce and star t the cycle over ag ain. T hen they die. Of star vation. T he adults lack functional mouths.”

She was staring at him wide-eyed “Interesting And I’m guessing

your apar tment is polyphemus-friendly? Manag ement doesn’t mind?”

He laughed. “Well I’m not really sure about that. Reg ardless, I haven’t exactly been broadcasting the fact that I’m raising them to my neighbors or anyone. In fact, I think you’re the only one I’ve told.”

“Ah, a bit of a solitar y operation you have g oing on there ”

“Yeah. But, like I said, they’ll only be around for a week or so once they’ve emerg ed from their cocoons. After that, nothing. Death comes quickly to the Polyphemus Manag ement won’t even know they ever existed.”

“Only you and I will know they existed.”

“Right. T hat’s par t of what makes them so beautiful. You wait and wait and wait for them to appear, and then once they finally do, they’re g one practically the next moment Forever subsumed into the past A piece of histor y so small and insignificant that only one or two people even know it ever happened.”

“Sounds like the kind of thing Donald would have loved ”

“Who’s Donald?”

“My husband, the histor y professor.”

“Oh.”

T hey both tur ned back and stared at the white sheet. She advanced the carousel. Click. A clear autumn day on campus. Click. A faculty luncheon. Click. Passpor t photos. Click. A perfor mance of Hamlet. Click. Plastic g og gles and test tubes. Click. A g aller y exhibition. Click. A woman dancing. Click A hundred-meter dash Click

cody barton

Of Alice

She dove into ever y wor m-infested hole as if it were Wonderland, and for that I pitied her almost as much as I envied her.

#5 36x48 ramsay wise

katryn dierksen

Common Places

(to be read en tandem)

i. A Word on Content

I just remembered I had a dream last night where I was reading extremely long words and tr ying to pronounce them cor rectly, and someone was coaching me along and I ke pt stressing the wrong syllables.

I think I’ve been on vacation in my mind for a month. (I’d like to think I’m back.)

ii. Car Theolog y

You light cig arettes as candles for the night a sit in the car

Have you not asked for your pain? a comfor t in the dark

Having cleansed my spirit in forgiveness (which, it seems is a commitment) it now comes to me in dreams:

I may have left half of me for dead! to pursue the sadness in my hear t

I came to a monster in the maze and I left half of me for dead

We both lived, but I left her behind and it might not ever leave my mind

iii.

If I Wrote

f eat. Kierkegaard

What would I write?

Languag e is a ter rible means of communication

being that

“Tr uth for the existing individual is that to which he is passionately committed.

“T hus for the existing individual, as distinct from the abstract thinker, tr uth and faith are the same, ”

and my abstract understanding str ung tog ether loosely and definitely by literar y parlor tricks follows perce ption

given

“One can never know that one is obeying God, and if one could know, one ’ s faith would disappear

“Rather, religion consists in having faith that one is obeying God,” therefore

I chang e the font color each time I type my homework because that’s how I fucking express myself.

My pencil scratching noisily:

a lie an approximation a proverb

a joke !

iv. These Are the Color s

I feel the devil in my hand and refuse to release him

I abide by the creek bed; I’ve been misunderstood time and ag ain!

T hese are the colors:

At midday you crawl down to the rocks Endowed with fasting supplies

An empty water bottle Cellphone and room key

T he wall of g reen!

Were you walking down the stream? I was dancing up the creek bed

Mother, when I was young, Did I talk about before I was dead? It’s always been in my head!

v.

Ah, yes. It’s a stor y.

Cooking up characters ag ain, you son of a gun, you rag! T here you g o, pushing on in to the Notion that something Else is g oing on.

“It’s a lie! It’s an approximation! It’s a proverb!”

It’s a joke! It’s Ar t! Nay it’s INSANE !

Go on then, g et on with it! Get it out!

Wait a g oddamn second

You lied! It’s a poem!

Until Something Happens bryson miguel

It’s humid. Feels like breathing in two airs. Ever yone ’ s clothes have new patter ns tonight. T he Loop is under constr uction for some trolley.

T hey’re tr ying to tur n it into Disneyland but with hella cig arette butts and homeless people. Two round people emerg e from an Indian buffet joint with words stuck to the glass doors like those temporar y tattoos you give children. T hey’re chewing on some sor t of seed.

“I don’t know. T his tastes weird.”

“It’s supposed to be refreshing ”

“I like it. It’s just unusual.”

“Well, I mean this is what Sambuca tastes like, so. . . ”

“Well I’ve never had that before, so . . . Oh this is funny.”

“What?”

“Look ”

“Is that like a puppet?”

“Yeah sor t of. Most puppets aren’t supposed to show the hand, but ”

“I like the g oogly eyes. You just car r y that around in your bag?”

“Yeah. Apparently I need this.”

“T hat’s funny.”

“I was involved in puppet ministr y when I was a kid.”

“Cool.”

“I was in dee p, man. ”

“Really?”

“Yeah I have a stor y You wanna hear it?”

“Sure.”

“You really want to?”

“Yeah I said I did ”

“Are you suuuuuuure?”

“Yes, tell it.”

“Okay. My church’s volunteer puppet team was headed up by this really, really sweet lady who said ‘wersh’ instead of ‘wash’ and died the next year after this happened ”

“Oh my God. I’m sor r y. ”

“Yeah, it was really sad. Anyway she wanted us all to lear n really g ood technique as puppeteers, so we went to this puppetr y convention held at some church far away. ”

“Oh cool! PuppetCon! Was Ker mit there?”

“No, it was small. And Christian only. T here was this one kinda

sor ta famous puppet there but ”

“Yeah, Ker mit.”

“No, it wasn’t Ker mit.”

“Ker mit.”

“No His name was like, I don’t remember It star ted with a G ”

“Ger mit. Godly Ker mit.”

“No. I don’t remember his name. Anyway, the guy who made that par ticular puppet famous was hosting the whole thing We had like a talent show so each puppet team from each church could show their stuff. We didn’t par ticipate but we watched others. Anyway, for the most par t it was fine. Some were pretty bad, others were just boring. Oh and they insisted on using cree py, little-white-girl overdubs of g ospel songs. But it wasn’t too ter rible But then this guy went up

“Most churches had a whole team. He was by himself. He was wearing this por table one-person stag e, like this tall rectangular box that had straps around his shoulders inside You’re supposed to g et on your knees when you use those things, but he was upright the whole time. We could see his pale, hair y legs.”

“He was naked?”

“What? No. He was wearing carg o shor ts.”

“Oh God, that’s worse.”

“Yeah. Anyway, the host asked him about the equipment, and he told him all about the stag e he didn’t know how to use and this weird pocket amp he had on his belt and the handheld mic he had hooked up to it as opposed to using a lapel mic that would hook up to the sound system at the church. T he host was polite, but you could tell that he was, like, confounded at the ‘reasons’ this guy was giving for all of this

“T hen it star ted. He star ted r unning back and for th on the stag e, his face obscured, his little puppet dude f lailing around like it was on crack or something. His voice, was like, distor ted like those old drive-thr u speakers.”

“T hey still have those, you know ”

“I’m talking about when we were kids. T hey sounded even worse then than now. So, like he’s screaming this weird nonsense stor y that’s not even in the Bible and we can hear his heavy breathing because he’s r unning back and for th on the stag e the whole time. T he stor y was insane and stupid. He was all like:

‘T here was a man . . . He was walking down a path. He came across this rock. T his rock was giant. He couldn’t move it. He was stuck. So he prayed to the Lord and asked what to do about this rock And God told

him: “Push! until something happens! Push! until something happens! Push! until something happens! Push! until something happens! Push! until something happens!”

‘So the man pushed the rock for for ty days and for for ty nights, and the rock moved ’

“Now we were all ter rified. T hought he was g onna pull out a gun or something. Kinda wanted to laugh, but we were mostly scared.”

“I bet What happened?”

“He just ended it and went back to where in the chapel he was sitting.”

“Huh. T hat’s a weird stor y. Why would the guy need to push the rock for for ty days and for ty nights?”

“I know! It’s so weird ”

“Yeah.”

T he two round people kiss later that night, but that’s not as important

Iff katryn dierksen

No. “No!” I said. I can say it, aha! No, no, I don’t think so. You are so misunderstanding.

So, no

I'm an ocean, roaring, crashing, breaking with, “No, no, no, no, NO!” Do you suppose? I’m not? If I can say it? Is it yes then? If I say “ no ” & you hear it? Nooooooooooo! N-n-noh!

You are such a dick

abby n. virio Cannibalism

“Eat my hear t out, cannibal,” my toe traces onto the wall of this porcelain kettle. I mean in the literal sense of the words but at the same time, strang ely symbolic my body here tur ns to soup

My thoughts are seasoned by imag es of last night’s e pisode with his hands tightly g ripping my waist while he tastes the length of my neck and glazes my ample breast and thigh meat.

“Goddammit,” says my toe. Subconscious, you should know better than to tempt a star ving woman.

I move, and the water sizzles. Mountains and valleys r upture away until I am left a bare and slipper y dumpling with nothing but steam to cloak me.

I wait for some omnipotent character to reach in and pluck me out. No luck. Instead, I tur n to the candles, kissing them out one by one, until only one remains, and I hold it hostag e there making it light this room all by itself, f lickering weakly to the point when I offer the mercy I am not allowed and extinguish it

Alone in the dark, the timer g oes off. T he water cools, and only I remain absorbing. Such a wonderful f lavor and to think, they call me bitter.

The Butterfly Nebula matt colonna

cody barton Lightning Bug

She appeared as the world tur ned dark

With a light

T hat was just as inconsistent as mine, And in the excitement of catching her

I failed to realize

T hat she wouldn’t g et enough air

From the holes in the top of the jar.

zachary j. lee

First Night

We lie nosetonose and, breaths entwined, we soft pillow talk, fading to light whispers suspiring then muff led then muff led quilt babble until misguided ner ve until misguided ner ve endings sending mis

sending misfires itch

sending misfires itching

gitch twitching wires wnod

gitch twitching wires wno

gitch twitching wires wn

gitch twitching wires glitch t

glitch twitching limbs a limbs and digits int

limbs and digits into paralys limbs and digits into paralysis.

heather penrod Essence

You are the waves crashing painfully into the rocks and the tide lapping g ently at the shore. You are the lightning bugs in the back yard at night and the birds on the tele phone wires during the day. You are the empty fields of endless countr yside and the city sk yscrapers that reach for the clouds. You are the ache in my hand after writing too long and the soreness in my cheeks from smiling.

He asks, “What are you in the mood for?” and I want to say creation. I want to cover our feet in acr ylic and retrace each ste p we ’ ve taken side-byside, filling the imprint with the hue of us a map for my idolatr y. I want to tell him that tonight he is g oing to chase me about the field where he first laid his lips on my skin It’ll only be lit by the firef lies that are awoken by my naked legs br ushing ag ainst the tall g rass. “Tonight,” I want to say, “instead of wine, let me drown in the waters of you, immersed in your tide.” Let me g o under I want to strip the summer of its heat and lay with him, spinning the hammock into a web around us, stuck tog ether. I want to sing aloud the fer vent words, thick and heavy as molasses, so we can become cr ystallized. Let our knotted bodies be our evidence. Tonight, I want to fall aslee p with only his sweat to dress me and awake with the smell of his salt.

Summer Map megg roth

I love you most in summer when my skin shows different lines: a map of places light’s g olden paint could not reach. I am sun kissed by it, and you Crossing the pale landscape, you leave dee p pur ple footprints. Our days are inexhaustible, limitless we are kids, sharing what we have. T he fever increases. We retreat into nightfall, delirious and laughing at death.

I am painted Roy G Biv when walking (par tner, hand holding) down city streets as passersby meet eyes and glancing shyly smile/ scowl day de pending June is such a lovely time of year,

my favorite time of year, with f lowers painted Roy G Biv blooming g ently folding where stamen and petal meet (O’Keeffe is smiling with her sketchpad in June)

and the parades are in June though more forg et with passing years why we have claimed this Roy G Biv and are waving him on f lags while holding interwoven fing ers meet ing eyes with my par tner’s smile

yet in him I see the smile of pictures hung last June on screens when media paints my fears I can hide my Roy G Biv with white-clothed privileg e, by holding masks between my eyes and his, discreet

in private meet ing meanwhile their wedding bells ring in June and all throughout the year we ’ ve fallen through the sieve holding desperately holding onto hope that we’ll meet their benevolent smile

in June (and all throughout the year) when they see our Roy G Biv.

I am painted Roy G Biv when walking (par tner, hand holding) down city streets as passersby meet eyes and glancing shyly smile/ scowl day de pending. June is such a lovely time of year.

katryn dierksen

At the Botanical Gardens

Feet mur muring through the g arden, heels clapping cobblestone; by the $2 25 succulents a glass case of live bees fumble at their comb in my $2.19 coffee I stir a container of Smucker’s honey, tossing the plastic shell in the waste bin beside the compost.

I clenched my jaw when I smiled at my father. My teeth were always more intuitive than I was. I used to wonder what it would sound like if I g round one of his hands between them. If skin would cr umble like scabs, or if brimstone would f lood my gums

My family did not take pride lightly. We held it like sea glass, never too carefully It was evenly distributed, hushed into bedtime stories and tucked into blankets. My mother gifted me our heirloom, passed down from mother to daughter. It was the wind through the g rass. She told me not to tell my father that I had it.

He considered himself a g ood man, one for praise. Lo and behold, he paved down the path. Trampled g rass and stolen belongings and me littered the road behind him. I understood that we were made of sand dollars, or maybe just the seaweed that g ets mushed into the tide

T he Seal-Catcher suspended his prized skins at market with neat cobweb, the type spun from mist He presented slick, slimy pelts to traders; I remember tar bled from their eyes.

My mother hung about our house like the muted tunnel I ke pt safe in my pocket. She sang like waves, constantly g oing in and out. She used to joke that one day she’d like to sink into the ocean Either to visit selkies or have the kelp tangle down her throat.

I sat on rocks by the lake, inhaled old dir t, pressed down the hairs on my ar m one by one.

Ever y day, my mother tur ned my hand into hers and traced the leathersmooth of my palm. She said that I looked just like her sometimes, when it came down to the lines

Most nights, my father held my chin, bur ned my eyes, and told me to count the days I had left He laughed, and I did too Roots twisted through and around my stomach, and I took my first breath of our old attic, watching from the night stand.

if you’re the king, i’m the dog you kick out at dinner

haley r. graham

One day, I climbed the cliffside. I was told to g et some fresh air threaded into my lungs, see what I was about. T he side of it was jag g ed high. I watched my fing er nails pr y and pop off, layer by layer, ner ves screeching. Sheets of rock g rated my toes, puttied my calluses. Hair just right tangled in my spit; I cracked my mouth and swallowed the wind I crested the top, rolled my fing ers along silence pushed all the way to the bottom of my throat.

I saw the Seal-Catcher come from the hills with rotten blubber. I told him how in m y stor y, he didn’t receive forgiveness. No strang er retur ns him home on lightning. I told him that in my stor y, we g o down, down, down to dead man ’ s shoelaces.

Superbia

i cried the first time i saw the pridefest parade. i kissed a boy a nice boy, father, a kind and loving boy, father through joyful tears as rainbow banana-hammocked men tossed beads across city streets pecking ag ainst concrete at a small child’s feet. we stood near the back i could never be tall enough I could never feel taller

I held his hand through saint louis june sweat while my cheeks cramped, my lips curling dee p into my ear lobes. I never showed my teeth so much.

forgive me father, for I have sinned. I was Proud.

Little Brown Leaves

You were reaching for the world as I recall

You were standing on the brink as I remember

With the autumn winds r ushing past

Telling you we cannot last

Fragile as the leaves in mid-Se ptember

You were climbing ever y mountain in the foreg round You were pushing back the tr uth within your veins

Staring down the monsters in your chest

Fighting to claim back your best

Stubbor n as the boulders ‘neath the river

Of your blood

You were looking for a chang e in your appearance

You were hoping we would see into your life

Waiting for the final dawn to break

Chances are the one you’d take

Is f loating through the leaves in mid-Se ptember

When you’re g one

You were reaching for the world as I recall

You were standing on the brink as I remember

With the autumn winds r ushing past

Telling us you couldn’t last

Fallen like the leaves in mid-Se ptember

Now you’re g one

Excellence in Writing 2015–2016

The Pierre Laclede Honors College

Join us in cong ratulating the winners of this year’s writing awards!

1000-Level Writing: Rachel Morg an

“T he Spread of Soft Masculinity in East Asia”

Written for Honors 1330, taught by Ms. K ate Weber

2000-Level Writing: Kelsey Hubble

“An Analysis of Borderline Personality Disorder in the Film Eter nal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”

Written for Honors 2030, taught by Mrs. K ate Votaw

*3000-Level Writing: Jessie Eikmann

“‘T hat Female Shell’: Female Body Rhetoric in HP Lovecraft’s ‘T he T hing on the Doorste p’”

Written for Honors 3010, taught by Dr. K athleen Nig ro

4000-Level Writing: Hung Nguyen

“T he Violence of Nar rative: Christian Myster y and Divine Love in the Moder n Wasteland”

Written for Honors 4900, taught by Mrs Nancy Gleason

*Denotes featured essay contest winnner

jessie eikmann

“That Female Shell”: Female Body Rhetoric in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep”

H.P. Lovecraft’s 1937 stor y, “T he T hing on the Doorste p,” sets up what at first seems a clear case of a demonic female temptress hell-bent on the emasculation and annihilation of her husband. T he stor y ’ s nar rator, Dan Upton, wastes no time in setting up Asenath Waite Derby as a bane to all creatures and an all-around ter rible inf luence on her husband Edward due to “her snatches of knowledg e and languag e ver y singular and shocking for a young girl” (Lovecraft 147). Yet Lovecraft’s full presentation of Asenath Waite Derby ultimately reveals that she is not a powerful figure but an example of how weak the female body is in Lovecraft’s systems of magic and demonic possession. Asenath has the power to take control of another person’s body, but this only illustrates how inherently powerless and inadequate her own body is. Once it is revealed that “Asenath” may in fact be a convenient cover for a different invading identity, the weakness of the female frame in the face of super natural forces is fully realized. T he rhetorical g ap that is exposed between the reality of the situation and the ever-present witch stereotype is left to be controlled and exploited by the male nar rators in “T he T hing on the Doorste p.”

Asenath Waite Derby is a powerful figure when she is introduced to Dan Upton and his best friend, Edward Derby. In addition to having levels of arcane knowledg e that frighten even Edward’s weird g roup of friends at Miskatonic University, she has other abilities, such as being able to summon thunderstor ms and make dogs bark with a cer tain motion of the hand. Her most impressive magic, however, is her special brand of hypnotism:

“By g azing peculiarly at a fellow-student, she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protr uded with an alien expression” (Lovecraft 147). Asenath is called a “hypnotist” in this scene, but this is really a misnomer, as she does not simply put someone under a trance She is actually a strang e kind of escape ar tist who is able to escape her own frame and entrap someone else in hers. T his is an impor tant distinction to make because Dan Upton tells us in the following sentences that she does this out of an inter nalized inferiority complex, as “her crowning rag e . . . was that she was not a man . . . she believed a male brain had cer tain unique and farreaching cosmic powers. Given a man ’ s brain, she declared, she could not only equal but sur pass her father in master y of unknown forces” (Lovecraft 147). T his belief sets up a g ender-based hierarchy about a magician’s potential. Although Asenath’s abilities are impressive, they mean less to her be-

cause without a man ’ s brain she will never sur pass her father nor achieve “master y of unknown forces.”

Asenath’s achievements in “hypnotism” later ser ve as a solution to the problem of her body. After two years of being mar ried to Asenath, Edward finally reveals to Dan that “she constantly took his body and went to nameless places for nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs” (Lovecraft 152). T he fact that she must steal Edward’s body in order to g o into these magical realms and perfor m these rituals reinforces her belief that to be a tr uly g reat magician one must be biologically male. Asenath’s theft of Edward’s body sug g ests that there is something outside of Asenath’s perce ptions that makes her unable to access this realm when she is housed in a female body. T he nar rative does not explain precisely whether the female body is unsuitable because women are arbitrarily denied access to these rituals or because the female body has some inherent weakness that makes it incapable of fully perfor ming the actions necessar y for accomplishing the rites T he for mer is a magical re presentation of the same kind of patriarchal guarding of knowledg e that occurs in most institutions. T he latter is a motif that has foundations in early moder n witchcraft beliefs.

Elizabeth Reis obser ves in her ar ticle “T he Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul” that witches in a female body often physically tor tured only other female bodies because “New Englanders expected that men ’ s hear tier bodies were more difficult and less tempting objects of the devil’s attacks” (32). Puritans apparently acce pted the belief that even with the devil’s aid, the hear tiness of the male body was simply too strong an obstacle to possess or tor ture. Perhaps Asenath faces a similar problem behind the scenes in “T he T hing on the Doorste p” wherein her body is at a physical disadvantag e and is unpre pared for the feats required in the mysterious rites in which she par ticipates. Reg ardless of whether the limitation is a physically or socially constr ucted one, it is apparently constricting enough that Asenath must use a male body as a conduit to enter Lovecraft’s mythological realm all while the actual female body is left trapped and motionless in the Derbys’ librar y

De pending on how the reader inter prets some of the scenes, it may be that either Edward, Dan, or both also inter nalize the operating assumption that the female body is inferior In one of the many instances when Asenath’s body-swapping magic breaks mid-trip and Edward’s consciousness is suddenly brought back to his body, he is forced to claw his way out of Asenath’s mysterious world and sends Dan a frantic teleg ram asking to be picked up. When he describes the situation to Dan in the car, the languag e can only be described as misog ynistic:

T he worst thing was that she was holding on to him long er and long er at a time. She wanted to be a man to be fully human that was why she g ot hold of him . . . Some day she would crowd him out and disappear with his body disappear to become a g reat man like her father and leave him marooned in that female shell that wasn’t even quite human. (Lovecraft 152)

T his description explicitly states that there is something about “that female shell” that makes it undesirable and even subhuman What is less clear, however, is to whom the reader is supposed to attribute this belief. Because Edward is nar rating this passag e, it is possible that he is imposing this interpretation on the evidence of his experiences. T his reading is suppor ted by the fact that later par ts of this parag raph are broken up by ellipses, most likely as an indicator of the panic in Edward’s voice as he relates this tale Yet this parag raph is not set off by quotation marks, and this is a hint that Dan, the speaker of the main nar rative, may be imposing some of these insights about Asenath on Edward’s monologue In either case, it is notable that these two characters buy into the ideas Dan attributes to Asenath when Asenath is first introduced: that “ a male brain had cer tain far-reaching cosmic powers” and to reach her tr ue potential, she must be in a man ’ s body (Lovecraft 147). Neither Dan nor Edward are intimately acquainted with the g ender politics of the mysterious other world, but even without that intimacy, they acce pt the operating assumption that the female body is lesser than a male one. T he g ender hierarchy of sorcer y that Lovecraft arbitrarily writes into this stor y is also arbitrarily upheld by the characters not g over ned by the hierarchy.

Asenath’s theft of Edward’s body also significantly fits into a much larg er folklore tradition that privileg es the male body and plays on the fear of losing that body. T he theft acts as a more extreme for m of magical castration; by stealing his body, she has in effect stolen Edward’s penis and symbolically his manhood. As Moira Smith explains in “T he Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor : Penis T heft in the Malleus Maleficar um, ” magical castration is a trope that is prevalent not only in the Malleus text, but in popular folk belief as well. Smith traces the thread of penis theft from the Malleus to a conce pt in Southeast Asian and African cultures known as kor o, a fear that the penis has retracted into the body and will cause the sufferer to die (95). T his fear stems from a belief in spirits that, de pending on the culture, steal the penis for various reasons. Asenath in “T he T hing on the Doorste p” has motivations that strongly resemble the kor o-inducing spirits of China, which “are thought to have no penises and therefore collect them from the living in order to retur n to human for m ” (Smith 96) T his fits with

the androcentric definition of humanity echoed in Lovecraft’s text, placing “T he T hing on the Doorste p” in the larg er folk tradition of magical castration and the anxieties relating to it. Edward is understandably hor rified at the prospect of being “marooned in that female shell” and ter rified that “the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him” will be unable to fend off her attacks. T he impact of her ability to temporarily wear Edward’s penis along with the rest of his body draws some of its loaded meaning from a similar anxiety of loss of humanity that kor o monsters elicit in their respective cultures.

T he inadequacy of the female body is not the only stereotype upheld by the rhetoric of the male characters. A far more significant stereotype comes into play after the tr ue identity of Asenath is proposed. Edward g radually becomes suspicious that his wife’s painstakingly slanted handwriting is hiding a much darker secret. He finally comes to a revelation: that she isn’t Asenath at all, but r eally old Ephraim [her father] himself He chang ed for ms with her when he felt death coming she was the only one he could find with the right kind of brain and a weak enough will he g ot her body per manently, just as she al most g ot mine, and then poisoned the old body he’d put her into.

(Lovecraft

157)

T his means that all the feats of possession and mysterious rites were perfor med by Asenath’s eerie magician father during the entirety of the nar rative; by the time Asenath is first mentioned, Dan explains that “[Ephraim Waite] had died insane” (Lovecraft 146) T his assumption that Asenath had to succumb to Ephraim’s possession because she had a “weak enough will” echoes a similar idea that predominated in Puritan culture during the witchcraft period Reis, in “T he Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul,” explains that in Puritan theolog y, “ a woman ’ s soul, jeopardized in a woman ’ s feminine body, was frail, passive, and submissive qualities that most New Englanders thought would allow her to become either a wife to Christ or a dr udg e to Satan” (16). T he fact that so many women were thought to have colluded with the devil proved, in the Puritans’ minds, that women ’ s bodies were weaker and therefore naturally more susce ptible to invasion by the devil. When viewed through this lens, it is apparent that Asenath’s weak female body failed to adequately protect her ag ainst her father’s consciousness. Since Lovecraft draws on the same g ender and body politics as the Puritans, it makes sense that Asenath’s weak body would give in to Ephraim and allow him to use her body for evil pur poses, whereas taking over Edward’s body is challenging enough to make possession of him a more difficult task Edward has a male body, which poses more of a physical obstacle

for the devil wishing to break through the theological battleg round and access his soul.

Because it is now apparent to Edward and Dan that Asenath’s body is a smokescreen for Ephraim Waite’s sinister intentions, the reader might expect that Dan and Edward would redeem the “witch” by their rhetoric, as there is a clear difference between someone practicing witchcraft and someone whose body is possessed. Consider as an example the 1741 diar y of Jose ph Pitkin reg arding the case of a Boston woman named Mar tha Roberson. Kenneth P. Minkema re prints sections of the diar y in order to re present the rhetorical shift necessar y to accurately describe possession. Pitkin writes, “the Devill with her tongue Broke for th . . . as if he would spit in my face” (Minkema 102). T his excer pt acknowledg es that the devil uses Mar tha’s tongue, but since Mar tha’s consciousness is not involved in this act, Pitkin makes sure to emphasize that he, the devil, wants to spit in Pitkin’s face.

Unfor tunately for the real Asenath, she continues to receive blame for what happens to Edward because Edward is stuck in the predictable, but inaccurate, pitfall that is the female witch archetype. As Ephraim continues from a distance to switch bodies, Edward’s languag e use shows that he has fallen into the rhetorical trap that is Asenath’s identity; in subsequent conversations with Dan he refers to Asenath as a “she-devil” and declares that “she can’t g et me now ” (Lovecraft 158-9). He cannot g rasp what Jose ph Pitkin could about the impor tance of vindicating a possessed person Instead, he is operating under the same assumption that many people had during the height of the witchcraft trials. Malcolm Gaskill, in his book W itchcraft: A Ver y Shor t Intr oduction, concludes from his research that “ we can be more cer tain that the female-witch stereotype was established by 1500 . . . if we could g o back and ask a Tudor bystander to describe a witch, you could be fairly sure he or she would say a malevolent woman with diabolical powers” (32-3). Even in literature, Lovecraft’s characters are unable to escape this stereotype. “A malevolent woman with diabolical powers” is exactly the stereotype to which Edward is accustomed, so he continues to fall back on this stereotype when he refers to the entity possessing him. Edward continues to use the word she, despite his knowledg e that Asenath is actually a disembodied male consciousness looking for another male body to fully realize his dark ar ts.

Edward most likely does this on an unconscious level; he needs to hold on to the old familiar trope of the female witch because what is actually happening to him is even more ter rible and incomprehensible than he thought at first His rhetoric, however, is significant in that it fur ther disem-

powers the real Asenath. Not only is she disempowered by being trapped in a dying man and dying with him, but she and her leg acy are also reduced to a stereotype that she did not ear n. Asenath has no power to define herself in this nar rative, either physically or linguistically. Even after the extent of Ephraim’s evil is revealed, she is still written as the villainess by Edward’s languag e and Dan’s characterization. Unlike other witches who ultimately confess to or practice witchcraft, Asenath did not choose her role as a witch, and her role was only given to her because she was victimized by a real witch.

Ephraim Waite’s possession of Asenath’s body, though it prevents him from dying, is also a larg e par t of his problem because he is now being feminized by the languag e of the other characters. He takes Edward’s body to resist this feminization and par ticipate in magical rituals that females cannot perfor m in Lovecraft’s fictional universe, but by doing so he ironically confor ms to one of the traits of a classic female witch. His stealing of Edward’s body could be considered maleficium magic, or magic that directly har ms another person. Maleficium is usually considered the domain of a female witch. In E.J. Kent’s ar ticle, “Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England, 1593–1680,” she points out that, although the witches did not always fall into neat categ ories of male and female uses of magic, there was still thought to be a distinction. While Kent war ns that “‘feminizing’ the male witch is a problematic attempt to inser t a masculine subject into a feminist historiog raphy,” she argues nonetheless that there are cer tain types of magic that the archetypal male witch would be expected to perfor m She examines the case records of accused male witches in Essex, England, and concludes,

Men cer tainly did commit crimes of maleficium but, on the whole, they were more frequently persecuted for non-malefic witchcraft. Crimes such as using evil spirits in order to find the whereabouts of hidden treasure were fairly common, but men were also prosecuted for for tune telling and “using characters,” as well as using witchcraft to deceive, and on rare occasion, love magic (Kent 71)

Kent’s conclusions signal that Ephraim Waite in “T he T hing on the Doorste p” may be under mining his own ag enda by using a female witch’s magic to escape a woman ’ s body.

Ephraim Waite is ultimately successful in his bid to escape femininity forever, and the way in which he succeeds in trapping Edward reinforces the ideas that debase the female body in Lovecraft’s text. T he revelation of Ephraim’s success comes in the for m of a hor rifying figure on Dan Upton’s

doorste p. T he creature hands Dan a note explaining that it is Edward in Asenath’s decaying body. Asenath had not simply disappeared as Edward had earlier claimed. He had killed Asenath’s body and buried the cor pse in his house. Unfor tunately for him, Ephraim manag es to switch with him one last time and it is evident that this time the switch is per manent Shor tly after Dan finishes reading the note, the body tur ns into “liquescent hor ror,” and Dan instinctively knows that “the messeng er would not move or have consciousness any more” (Lovecraft 164) Dan then car ries out Edward’s dying wish and kills Edward’s body with Ephraim’s consciousness at Arkham Sanitarium.

T he fate of the dead female shell is fitting for “T he T hing on the Doorste p” because it brings the female body’s weakness to its apex. Lovecraft’s characters re peatedly emphasize that the female body is inferior to the point that it is subhuman, and at the end even the femininity of the “female shell” is taken away. When Dan encounters Asenath’s body, he obser ves that the caller is wearing “ one of Edward’s overcoats its bottom almost touching the g round” (Lovecraft 162). Edward’s last act before Asenath’s body decays was to re place her clothing with his own. T he only functioning power that Asenath has at this point is the falsely assigned power her body has as a symbol of the demonic female archetype a power which is taken away as soon as the body’s femininity is obscured by male clothing. Dan re peatedly refers to Asenath’s body by the g enderless title of “the figure,” and the prog ression of dehumanization reaches its dramatic end when the body melts into a g r uesome puddle T he title of the piece reinforces that idea; instead of a person, the reader is introduced to a thing on Dan’s doorste p. Lovecraft’s project to make the female subhuman is car ried out to its most extreme What tenuous presence “Asenath” had in this world has completely been stripped away, first by her father, then by rhetoric, and finally in the most visceral way possible, one that renders her a mere “liquescent hor ror” with bone fragments left behind as a haunting reminder of what she was.

Works Cited

Gaskill, Malcolm. W itchcraft: A Ver y Shor t Intr oduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.

Kent, E J “Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England, 1593 1680.” Histor y Workshop Jour nal 60.1 (2005): 69-92. Print.

Lovecraft, H.P. “T he T hing on the Doorste p.” Gr eat Tales of Hor r or. Ed. S.T. Joshi New York: Fall River Press, 2012 143-164 Print

Minkema, Kenneth P. “‘T he Devil Will Roar in Me Anon’: T he Possession of Mar tha Roberson, Boston, 1741.” Spellbound: Women and W itchcraft in America. Ed. Elizabeth Reis. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1998. 99-120. Print.

Reis, Elizabeth “T he Devil, the Body and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England.” Jour nal of American Histor y 82.1 (1995): 15-36. Print.

Smith, Moira. “T he Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor : Penis T heft in the Malleus Maleficar um ” Jour nal of Folklor e Resear ch 39 1 (2002): 85-117. Print.

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Votaw, K ate

K ate Votaw is an alumna of both UMSL and the Pier re Laclede Honors colleg e. She received her PhD in experimental social psycholog y from Saint Louis University before retur ning to UMSL, where she teaches psycholog y courses full-time and advises students in the Honors Colleg e. K ate has

spent her free time drawing for about as long as she can remember. In fact, she even traces her research interests in psycholog y (i.e., what features of an individual’s face and body are considered universally attractive and why) to her early interest in capturing beautiful people in her sketches. She often spends weeknights or the weekend with Netf lix on in the backg round while she paints or sketches, sometimes with her husband. Although she dabbles in many for ms of ar t, she has recently focused on character ar t of her favorite fictional heroes and heroines as well as simple watercolors of natural objects.

Wise, Ramsay

Working primarily in spray paint and acr ylic, Ramsay Wise’s paintings fit somewhere between abstraction and re presentation. He avoids proper paint br ushes, paints only on canvases laid f lat on a table, and mixes mediums. He is motivated by empty canvases, broad archetypal subjects, and unconventional application techniques. His paintings have been shown in g alleries in Columbia, Missouri; Jefferson City, Missouri; and Fayetteville, Arkansas. His paintings can also be seen in recent issues of Mud Season Re view, The Sonder Re view, Prick of the Spindle, Foliate Oak Literar y Magaz ine, and Columbia Jour nal (for thcoming).

Wise teaches film studies at the University of Missouri–Columbia. In the spring of 2016, he taught an advanced honors seminar on the films of Stanley Kubrick for the Pier re Laclede Honors Colleg e and loved ever y minute of it. He will be back to teach Master pieces of American Film there in the spring of 2017

Young-Bates, Lysa

Lysa Young-Bates is an underg raduate student, business owner, and mom who enjoys the writing process. Half of her life involves professional ghostwriting with work published inter nationally across trade publications, corporate websites, and other marketing pieces. Org anizing data energizes her brain, and she will find a way to create a spreadsheet for anything. Lysa has retur ned to UMSL to complete a deg ree in business administration, hoping to fur ther her education in data analytics. She and her husband share life with an inquisitive four-year-old who helps them to see the world in new ways daily She loves yog a and cycling, has completed a marathon and many half marathons and duathlons, and has crank y knees to remind her of her adventures.

Faculty Advisor Notes

With g reat pride and pleasure, we present Issue 17, Fathom.

Published works in this issue focus on discover y, recognition, acce ptance, and dee per understanding of the dynamic relationship between human experience and human spirit. Works navig ate the spaces between darkness and light. Darkness is notable at times, yet it is not powerful enough to per manently prevent movement toward light, or to effectively block coexistence with light. Moments of illumination are sprinkled throughout the issue like stars sprinkled in the night sk y. (T his is almost a direct quote from members of the staff and I wholehear tedly thank them for this precise and pretty imag e ) T he writing and ar t featured in this book powerfully showcase sometimes raw experience but also emphasize hope for what lies beyond the confusion, fr ustration, and scars that are par t of that experience T his optimism is not only found within the pag es of Fathom, it is captured in our cover imag e, “Release.”

Choosing a title and cover imag e are among the most challenging responsibilities we face yet one of the most exciting oppor tunities we embark on. T hese responsibilities are manag ed near the end of our production process, when the individual bonds between staff members and submitted works and their kinship with the manuscript sometimes spark temporar y confusion and fr ustration. However, professionalism and team spirit foil the for mation of scars; we acce pt that we can only choose one combination among many remarkable options. While the task is never completely painless, the outcome is always par ticularly rewarding. We hope you will be pleased with how this year’s choices ref lect the pleasure of a collection yet also reveal the promise of individual works within.

To our amazing featured poets, authors, and ar tists thank you for tr usting us with your creative works and for all that those works have given us. We hope that you will enjoy being a par t of this book as much as we enjoyed offering it to you and the readers who will experience and appreciate the talent and spirit that moved you to create and to share your works.

To the members of the 2016 Belleri ve Staff thank you for your extraordinar y dedication, superb collaboration, and unwavering commitment to this book, our process, and future success.

To all those who make Belleri ve possible thank you, thank you, thank you.

Geri Friedline

Staff Notes

Editing Committee

Here at Editing Scouts Troop 17, we ’ ve been hard at work pre paring the manuscript and ear ning badg es. We begin each committee meeting by reciting the Editing Scout Promise: On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to Gr eg g and my Belleri ve, to uphold the MLA, to cor rect others’ g rammar at all times, to kee p my subjects and verbs parallel, ag reeing in number and person, and free of dangling modifiers.

Our troop has had sur prisingly few hang ups this semester. Sean sur vived an attack from a wild poet, warding them away with some wellused alliteration Daniel easily ear ned his Hyphenating merit badg e by reminding us that -ly words do not take a hyphen with their equally weighted adjectives. K aitlyn conquered nature and subsequently ear ned her Tree Climbing merit badg e, while JoHannah pulled the br unt of our committee’s work, ear ning a total of 837 badg es this semester. To top it all off, however, our fearless(ly forg etful) Editing Scoutmaster, Zachar y, lost all of our paperwork as a result, none of us will receive our badg es until Belleri ve Issue 18. In the meantime, please enjoy our humble publication.

Ar t Committee

Audri, Bailee, and Zoe

Fathom, 2017

Photoshop, caffeine, tears, and creative-juices

4.25 x 7 inches

T hroughout this semester, we have had the immense privileg e to work closely with UMSL’s talented ar tistic community. T his publication is a compilation of us all, equally consumed by its creators It is our highest desire that its pag es relate the nar ratives hidden within us all, car ving an invisible yet lasting thread amongst strang ers. It is not easy to blindly entr ust a par t of yourself for appraisal never theless, ever y submitter valiantly overcomes this fear with each issue. Ever y piece that comes across our desk(top) vastly inf luences the lens through which we see the world. T his esteemed honor has g ranted us the means to appreciate fellow curators of ar t. We hope you enjoy this collection as much as we have enjoyed curating it. Our g reatest desire is that these pag es contribute to the lasting leg acy of Belleri ve.

$7.00

Layout Committee

We like to say that the Layout Committee is the best committee, and the tr uth is, we can say that because we are the ones pasting things into the manuscript, so none of the other committees can do anything about it. Sure, the Editing Committee g ets pizza, but Layout has the real power.

All jokes aside, working on the manuscript layout is one of the most rewarding jobs we can imagine We g et to design the look and feel of the pag es, and we take this seriously we believe the presentation should be just as professional and high-quality as the content. UMSL’s poets, authors, ar tists, and musicians are a talented bunch, and our g oal all along has been to make these contributors, as well as our fellow staff members and ourselves, proud. From picking fonts to deter mining the pag e order to fighting with the layout prog ram, Quark, we ’ ve enjoyed ever y wonderful, fr ustrating, hilarious, tedious, exhilarating, exhausting, rewarding moment. We hope you enjoy reading the book as much as we have enjoyed making it

Public Relations Committee

We are the face and voice of Belleri ve, so it makes sense that the Public Relations Committee is comprised of all staff members. T his makes us the larg est and most powerful of the Belleri ve Seminar committees.

Spider man ’ s Uncle Ben isn’t the only one who can claim that with g reat power comes g reat responsibility. We can’t shoot webs or swing among tall buildings, but we can and do use lots of computer and campus resources and know when to roll up our sleeves.

Our work includes activities connected with producing and promoting our issue, with planning and hosting the launch celebration in Febr uar y, and with promoting submissions and success for future issues. Committee responsibilities are directed and coordinated by the chair persons of the three production committees, and suppor t and advice are provided, as needed, from our faculty advisor.

Fall 2016 has been a time of g reat chang e for us. First, the Belleri ve submission period has extended; we now acce pt submissions from March 1 to October 1 each year. Second, we now acce pt and feature music submissions T hird, we are considering some g reat plans for additional suppor t of our submitters that will not only preser ve the professional integ rity of Bellerive (including the security of “blind” submission review) but will also promote future oppor tunities for submitters, including activities and events with T he UMSL Writers Group.

We have enjoyed creating and sharing Issue 17, and we will continue to tell you about the g reat oppor tunity that is Belleri ve. Cheers!

Staff Photograph

Back Row (L to R): Bailee Warsing, Geri Friedline, Kevin Kuchno, Zoë Scala, Daniel Strawhun, JoHannah McDonald, and Kristy N. Burkemper

Front Row (L to R): Amber Scholl, Sean Chadwick, Zachar y J. Lee, K aitlyn May, and Audri Adams

Thank

you for reading this year’s issue of Bellerive!

If you would like to submit to the upcoming issue of Belleri ve, you can send your previously unpublished poetr y, prose, ar t, & music to bellerivesubmit@umsl.edu

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