Raleigh Review 13.1 (Spring 2023)

new poetry by

kathryn bratt-pfotenhauer, hm cotton, tyler dunston, gabriella adriana iacono, justin jannise, nick lantz, eleanor levine, angie macri, jen mcclanaghan, stephanie mcconnell, rooja mohassessy, stephanie niu, kristian o’hare, kimberly ann priest, randy reynolds, christina seymour, jeanne wagner

fiction from marilee dahlman, ryan habermeyer, tim lehnert, michele moseley, will musgrove, greg november

“I watched as my husband moved the joystick controlling the mechanical claw, trying to position it perfectly over the squirming baby. I’d never seen him so hypnotized.”

RALEIGH REVIEW

featuring the winner of the raleigh review flash fiction prize

RALEIGH

— from ryan habermeyer’s “arcade baby” winner, flash fiction prize

book review from will justice drake

52000>

2013

9 780990 752288

vol. 13.1, Spring 2023

$20.00 ISBN 978-0-9907522-8-8

REVIEW vol. 13.1, Spring 2023

vol. 13.1 spring 2023

RALEIGH REVIEW VOL. 13.1 spring 2023

publisher

assistant fiction editor

editor-in-chief

senior copyeditor

fiction editor

copyeditor

poetry editor

editorial staff / poetry

Rob Greene Landon Houle

Jessica Pitchford

Leah Poole Osowski

editorial staff / fiction

​ ailihana Alfonseca, Chas Carey, D Madison Cyr, Susan Finch, Robert McCready, Jeff McLaughlin, Erin Osborne, Allison Frase Reavis

board of directors

Joseph Millar, Chairman Dorianne Laux, Vice Chair Landon Houle, Member Bryce Emley, Member Will Badger, Member Tyree Daye, Member Rob Greene, Member

Shel Senai

Elaina Ellis

Garrett Davis Chelsea Harlan, D. Eric Parkison, Sam Piccone, Melanie Tafejian, Annie Woodford

illustrator

Nora Beers Kelly

layout & page design Alexis Olson

literary publishing program interns Valcour Marcellus Anthony Young

Raleigh Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 2023 Copyright © 2023 by Raleigh Review Raleigh Review founded as RIG Poetry February 21, 2010 | Robert Ian Greene Cover image “Self Portrait” by Geri Digiorno.

Cover design by Alexis Olson ISSN: 2169-3943 Printed, bound, and shipped via Alphagraphics in Downtown Raleigh, NC, USA. Raleigh Review, PO Box 6725, Raleigh, NC 27628 Visit: raleighreview.org Raleigh Review is thankful for past support from the United Arts Council of Raleigh & Wake County with funds from the United Arts Campaign, as well as the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources.

table of contents

raleigh review fiction ryan habermeyer

5

Arcade Baby

michele moseley

9

Captive

will musgrove

16

Squeaky Clean Enlightenment

tim lehnert

25

B&E

greg november

48

All Alone in the Getaway Car

marilee dahlman

64

Warning: This Product Has No Label

angie macri

1

Blade and Sheath

christina seymour

2

Dizzy as a Child

nick lantz

4

Word of the Day

eleanor levine

13

Myrna

jen mcclanaghan

14

Square Lake

randy reynolds

15

Forty-first summer

poetry

poetry cont. tyler dunston

19

On coastal erosion

20

Sea that has become known

21

On lake immortality

gabriella adriana iacono

22

Alarm to Call My Mother

jeanne wagner

24

After the Funeral Director Tells Me He Won’t Need the Shoes

kristian o’hare

39

A Sudden Heaven

stephanie niu

40

While Peering in the Mirror

42

Ten Confessions to Set Me Free

44

Pastoral with Birds

46

Prayer

47

Ithaca, October

justin jannise

63

Four of Wands

kimberly ann priest

73

Divorce

stephanie mcconnell

74

Pen & Brown Wash, White Lead

hm cotton

75

Muddy Water Baptism

rooja mohassessy

76

Quince

kathryn bratt-pfotenhauer

book review. will justice drake

contributors

77

The Common Misfortunes of Everyday Plants Renee Emerson

raleigh review vol. 13.1 spring 2023

from the editor

seasons are strange here in the South.

Winter rarely feels like winter. Sometimes there is no fall at all but rather an October hurricane that shakes the leaves from the trees and brings a feverish, hot-turning-cold kind of rain. Guaranteed, though, summer will be summer. That’s one you can bet your sweat on.

But what about spring?

It’s January when I’m writing this note for our spring issue, and like a lot of us poor mortals heel-toe walking and stationary cycling our ways into another new year, I’ve been trying to get a little more exercise.

There’s a voice in my head that I’m sure is some amalgamation of whistle-blowing P.E. coaches screaming, “Get the blood pumping!”

It’s true that our family joined the ranks of those purchasing exercise equipment in the first week of 2023. (That part about the stationary bike was close to home.) But exercise is a little different for me. I have Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, defined by the CMT Association (I always look to make sure I get it right) as “a disease of the peripheral nerves that control muscles that can cause progressive loss of function and sensation in the hands, arms, legs, and feet.” CMT might seem familiar to you since country superstar Alan Jackson recently revealed his diagnosis.

With CMT, I can do the stationary bike, and I’ve been walking, too.

I wear leg braces and mostly when I walk now, I use a rollator. I do most of my walking on a short stretch of street in front of our house or down a brick walkway we have in our long backyard.

This brick walk leads to what used to be a functioning well and what is now a circular raised brick planter where I sit between walking spells and lift hand weights and where, during the spring, I like to plant zinnias. There, too, still come up a few Siberian irises that someone before

us had started there—some purple and just a few yellow.

The planter is a bit of a sorry sight right now, though there is a purpose to our neglect, I swear. We leave the last of the zinnias after they freeze and turn to a gray crunch. We let the seeds from the old plants start the new crop, and we’ve read, too, that leaving your old batch through winter helps the butterfly population.

All this to say, the planter in January may be performing well for what it’s doing, but it’s not looking its best.

So that’s where I was just the other day, sitting by the brick planter, lifting my weights, hearing that coach in my head saying, “Get the lead out!”

It’s been unseasonably warm this past week in the Carolinas, and I’m breaking a sweat on this last set of fifteen. Exercising isn’t exactly my favorite activity, and toward the end of my workout, I’m feeling a little desperate, a touch of biological panic. Maybe you can relate. I imagine I look a little like a horse out there. I don’t mean the athleticism, the rippling muscles. God, no. I mean I imagine I look a little spooked by the effort of it all, a little wild in the eye.

And it’s probably this rolling line of sight I owe for noticing all these tiny, you might even say miniscule, seedlings sprouting up from beneath all that has died over the winter. Neon green shoots, smaller than my pinky nail, with impossibly small leaves doing their level-best to meet the warmth of the day.

Recently, the university where I work had the pleasure of welcoming U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. During their readings and discussions, they both emphasized the importance of just looking around. Observe, they said. See. The poets in this issue are doing just that—noticing, taking note, and in many cases, ushering in the spring for us here at R.R. There’s “a sea of hyacinths” in Eleanor Levine’s “Myrna” (13). “This April,” Rooja Mohassessy writes, “blossoms weigh on the quince, / its slender arms covered in volutes about to break / into hives once the rains should pass” (76). In Christina Seymour’s “Dizzy as a Child,” “Honeybees swung in and out the loops / of the chain fence” (2-3). But it isn’t just plants and insects that mark the passing of time. In Gabriella Iacono’s “Alarm to Call My Mother,” the speaker is reminded, too, that “people / have seasons” (14-15).

Indeed, the characters in this issue’s fiction pieces come to experience their own kinds of awakenings through the sun-lit prisms of their relationships. In the winner of our annual flash fiction contest, Ryan Habermeyer’s “Arcade Baby,” the protagonist watches as her husband tries to win a baby in a claw game. “I tend to avoid the truth,” the main character says, “especially with a husband.” One of the honorable mentions for our flash fiction prize, a story called “Captive” by Michele Moseley, paints a tender but honest portrait of an eighty-seven-year-old woman from the perspective of her granddaughter. And Will Musgrove’s “Squeaky Clean Enlightenment,” another honorable mention, opens with the main character observing the way his uncle, once a heavy drinker, ends up joining a religious convent after going to a car wash that reportedly shows a person their true purpose in life.

Like Iacono wrote, “people / have seasons” (22).

It’s true here for us at Raleigh Review too. With this issue, we are saying “see you soon” to a good friend of ours and long-time staffer, poetry editor, and co-editor Bryce Emley. Bryce has been an integral part of RR since 2014. His ideas and insights have been a tremendous guiding force for the magazine. His support and encouragement of the entire RR staff has been a source of inspiration to all of us. Bryce, we miss you already, but we are looking forward to your next chapter.

And we hope you all are looking forward to this new issue.

Happy reading, happy spring. High fives for exercise and here’s to seeing, to noticing what a seed can do.

◆

Landon Houle, co-editor

angie macri

blade and sheath That piece of grass was sharp, a true blade.

She split it in half with her thumbnail lengthwise and tied it end to end.

A bracelet? Necklace? No, just because.

It stayed on the road where she dropped it, turning gold in rock dust, then brown in rain, before it was gone. Summer, a week could pass without seeing anyone else at all. Her father cut the grass down in hopes it’d keep the snakes at bay.

Grasshoppers clung to her clothes, then spread sudden, loud wings.

1

christina seymour

dizzy as a child Bees knock against the window, trying their bodies against pane.

They land alive and crawling— as I once did, timid, with a fever, being watched. That day, the yard was more nostalgia than the playhouse of dirt paths and thorn bushes.

Lightning bugs shook the air above the grass like soft piano in an ice cave.

Honeybees swung in and out the loops of the chain fence, rusted enough to prick young fingers not yet sure about danger.

Only after my brother got stung stepping on white clover did I learn to avoid the tiny feathery snowcaps.

Same as when a fly was a wasp that I swatted with too much bravery.

The sting amplified to a swollen welt that needed treatment. What is a sign of summer in the body, burning roof of mouth, spark of the fingers when hot?

Not one word works for all I have lost in memory. Not one red matches the cardinal flower. Precious is a chest of drawers full of once-sick throwing stars,

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raleigh review

and innocence is anything but a pink lip.

After the first fever, I thought I felt the world turn as I lay on the lawn, imagined planetary motion, remembered my sun-filled brain— the moon out during the day, every day, not just at night like they said.

Note: “all I have lost” and “cardinal flower” are references to Emily Dickinson’s fragment “Two Things I have lost with Childhood—”

christina seymour

3

nick lantz

word of the day a truck carrying 100 monkeys has crashed in Pennsylvania and at least 3 monkeys escaped well good for them my neighbor won’t take down her Christmas lights I need this she says Mt. Everest gets taller every year I still remember the student who walked in and blurted out y’all what is the moon when I can’t sleep at night I paint miniature plastic zombies with a brush fine as a needle look at their little faces sagged with hunger I use a magnifying glass to get the hollow of their eyes the right kind of empty in the waiting room I can’t concentrate on the forms I’m supposed to fill out what surgery what year I keep listening the woman on her phone saying my dear my dear my dear my dear my dear

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flash fiction contest winner

ryan habermeyer arcade baby it was my husband’s idea to win the arcade baby. We went after church. Hurrying past the Skee-ball and Quick-Draw, he pushed his way through the crowd. The baby was half buried in a heap of stuffed animals and carnival trinkets. Little scratches and scabs all over its face and legs. We watched its breath fog the glass cube. Most of the time it would just lay there babbling, but sometimes it crawled close to the metal drop box and drooled, like it was waiting for food.

It’s not a real baby, I said.

It looks real, my husband said.

Last week, a man tried to break open the glass with a lead pipe. The crowd tackled and beat him. There’s a stain on the floor. Now a security guard watches the baby day and night. He crosses his arms, doesn’t blink.

5

I tapped the glass with my nails. Then how does it breathe?

My husband shrugged. Babies are resilient.

I tend to avoid the truth, especially with a husband, but he must have known I would never care much for the arcade baby. Maybe there had been too many miracles lately. The dentist saved my tooth. I found my dead mother’s perfume bottle. The cherries jubilee melted into the face of Michael Jackson.

My husband put his quarters into the slot. The game lights blinked and a festive tune played. The baby giggled. I watched as my husband moved the joystick controlling the mechanical claw, trying to position it perfectly over the squirming baby. I’d never seen him so hypnotized.

The baby, however, seemed to fear the claw and immediately went limp in the pile of plush stuffed animals and plastic baubles. It whimpered.

My husband pushed the button. The claw dropped with a squeal. It clasped the baby by the arm, yanked up. My husband jerked the joystick.

The baby yelped. Several tries later, my husband managed to grasp the baby by one leg and hoisted it towards the drop box. The crowd gasped.

Without warning the baby slipped free and fell back into the prizes with a thud. Furious, my husband threatened the arcade owner, saying the game was rigged. He waved his arms and screamed that the baby should be wearing a diaper.

It’s an ugly baby, I told my husband as we undressed.

Who cares? my husband said, lifting his head from between my thighs.

How often do you see an arcade baby?

His head disappeared.

When he’s in me, I keep my eyes closed. What you see is what you can’t stop imagining, and too often I feel him emptying all his imagination into me. Usually, I think of useless things. But that night when I closed my eyes, all I could think about was the arcade baby. Alone in the glass cube, waiting to be hoisted away.

I don’t know how to mother, I said.

Nobody’s asking you to be a mother, my husband said. We’ll just put it inside you for a while, away from these assholes, maybe grow it a little so it isn’t so scrawny.

Out of one arcade and into another, I thought, wondering if I could use the baby like a shield to block all my husband’s imagination. But then I’d need another baby and another. And when would it end?

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raleigh review

As long as it takes. There’s this surgery, my husband’s voice trailed off.

It’s strange how nobody really wanted to rescue the arcade baby. Once it was out of the cube, nobody would care about it anymore. What they wanted was the game. The glass, the claw, the quarter in the slot, waiting for their heartlights to suddenly burn bright. But how much more terrible would it be to save the baby from the game? On this side of the glass, everything pinballs. It’s strange how what seems cruel often is not, but what’s kind can be full of menace.

ryan habermeyer

7

There’s a piano downstairs nobody plays. It was my mother’s. I don’t remember the sound it used to make, only the way her fingers fluttered over the keys. A pill after a pill after a pill is a kind of ecstasy, and that piano was her pill until it—thankfully, I think—swallowed her.

Often, she would play herself into a trance, and then I’d find her lying in bed with a wet towel wrapped around her head. Not now dear, she’d say, I’m having a panic attack. For years I thought she said piano attack, and I wouldn’t go near the piano, thinking I’d fall inside and be swallowed up the way cats eat mice in cartoons. It was only last month I opened it and was surprised to find it was just wire and string.

Sometimes I think of getting it tuned. But the sound of a creaky old note, trembling in the air like a spider on a thread, misfits my heart.

When my husband comes I picture my friend, Ruth Yorgensen, a great dane of a woman with leukemia. She had seven babies. Took them door to door with her, asking everyone in the neighborhood to get tested for bone marrow donation, and we hugged and cried, but then I saw the needle they use and how they turn your body into an ant farm of skin tunnels and left there in a hurry. She died, of course, poor Ruth. What happens to babies when their mothers go? Is a baby without a mother still a baby? What bothers me is that ever since the arcade baby, not a day goes by I don’t think about cutting myself open. Not because I want to bleed. But to see the mess of wire and string holding me together. Most days I feel something vibrating deep inside trying to claw its way out, something marvelous or something cruel, I can’t tell, or maybe one of those mystery arcade prizes. What else could it be?

◆

8

raleigh review

flash fiction contest honorable mention

michele moseley captive she kept it filthy and didn’t give a damn. The entire house brimmed with layers of grime and the sweetness of dog urine in the sticky July heat. My eighty-seven-year-old grandmother had no intention of moving out. She leaned back on the living room divan, patting the backs of her knees with a damp tissue.

“You see those?” She waved her hand at some plates with pink flowers on the sideboard. “Those were part of your great aunt’s wedding china.

There were more pieces, but they went to your cousin.” Her face went hard.

She bore the trappings of a lady but was clearly no longer interested.

Nude pantyhose and scuffed white sandals. Cotton dress with little yellow age spots. Hair pinned up and flattened from several days of sleeping on it.

9

Her eyes settled on me. I did not dare look at my watch, but I could see by the light it was getting close to supper time. She didn’t cook anymore. Not that she really ever did. And after her husband died and she was no longer tethered, she had found an unexpected wildness. And the unraveling was not yet done.

“Have you thought any more about moving closer?”

I had to ask it because I said I would. My sister and I were her only living relatives. People said we girls needed to do better and take care of her, but she was having none of that. Her house was on a weedy road past the county line, with nothing nearby but ramshackle barns and a broken-down fruit stand. She didn’t drive anymore. Her 1986 Lincoln Continental was zippered with moss and rust.

“Did you look through that brochure I left the other week?” Her eyes narrowed, sizing up the full meaning of the question.

“You can clear off a spot for us at the table,” she said, pointing to the dining room, which was heaped with stacks of junk mail and expired canned goods. The lace tablecloth underneath was crisp from dry rot.

I set about restacking and shifting to make room for two paper plates.

I lifted the chicken from the Piggly Wiggly out of the cooler. It was cold, but it should be okay I thought. Nowhere to heat it up anyways. The kitchen door was blocked off with piles of National Geographics and dingy bolts of chintz. She didn’t use that room anymore.

We sat in the dining room where we used to have Thanksgiving. The mauve damask drapes were drawn to keep out the summer sun, and the smell of must lingered. The AC unit in the corner window rattled.

“This is just delicious,” she said, not looking up. I was sure she meant it. She had always relished fried food, even though she said it was low class eating. She called out trashy behavior when she saw it, and no one in town had been spared. But it was late in the day, and we were alone.

The chicken piled high on the Dixie plates suited her just fine.

“Jack’s mother told me she knows of a nice place near the church.

Each unit has a little patio,” I said.

She pretended to love my mother-in-law. Jack’s mom was old-school garden club, D.A.R., and Presbyterian. Her ways smacked of ancestry from north of the Mason-Dixon line though, and my grandmother bristled at how Jack’s mother skimped on the bourbon in the Christmas trifle every year.

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raleigh review

“You know those red brick one-story apartments by the old Feed & Seed building?” I kept going. “Well, Jack’s mother told me Mrs. Abercrombie moved in there two months ago, and she took her dog.”

The words filled up the room. My grandmother put down her plastic cup of tea and began work on a chicken leg. Her manners had become rough, almost masculine, and she seemed unaware of the shift. Like a bird bred in captivity now suddenly released.

When I was young, she ruled over the scrubbed two-story clapboard house with the blunt resolve of a battle ax worn down from close combat. My sister and I moved carefully during our visits there and kept ourselves small. We did not move the little pink soaps carefully arranged in the porcelain swan in the powder room. We did not press the yellowed

michele moseley

11

keys on the antique piano in the front room. On the best days, we were given Ritz crackers fanned out on a little Limoges dish in the dining room while my grandmother tried to hush up the fights between my father and grandfather.

Her fingertips were shiny from the chicken grease. I dug through the cooler to get more napkins for us. They were cold from the melting ice bag and felt good. It was getting dark outside when I put the lemon squares on the table, and I saw her eyes spark. She loved those.

“I guess I should get on the road soon,” I said. It took so long to leave, and I had to introduce it early.

“I know you girls stay so busy,” she replied and stiffened a little.

We talked about people around town a while longer. And then I packed up the trash in a grocery bag and put it in the foyer to take with me. Every item we removed from the house now was one less thing to deal with later, I thought.

When I drove home, I rehearsed what I would tell my sister. I would say that I could not persuade our grandmother to move. I would tell her I tried very hard.

I rolled down my window and heard the low hum of the crickets and cicadas as I drove all of the familiar curves. I always did like that sound.

So wild.

◆

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raleigh review

eleanor levine

myrna You are like a faint redolence, a sea of hyacinths: midtown, uptown, all over town in sync with the ferns and nectarines all that is sweet even flying alligators love you floating in the air they take a bite

13

jen mcclanaghan

square lake Wasted on the lakeside wasted on the way, an hour a day, the last month, the last light falling, just another way to pass minutes, spring fed, rippled, the lake the light the ferns resurrecting.

Tell me, if there’s air in the float from last summer, the one we’ll take out late on Square Lake, looking up, surprised to see your condo emptied from a new angle.

Tell me, is that your breath still left on earth? Assurance you were here and not dreamed, fading like every other color eventually. That your lungs did their work, your mouth, sealed air inside the donut, frosted pink with sprinkles that your grandson will push to the most dangerous part, the part close to shore where you tied up to the dock each July afternoon and poured a drink and took in all the quiet you could, and all the sun that shined down like rain.

14

randy reynolds

forty-first summer It was good for a while.

The clouds hung low. Most days were hushed.

There was barbecue and baseball and a beer and lucidity.

Gates were hung. Grief painted rooms.

A second-degree burn with fervent dreams showing nightly.

It was an unseasonable summer, so ripe with rain, that its skin broke onto a hidden beach spilling blessings.

She held water in her mouth and brought sunflowers to my door and I let her in.

Yellow tulips and deer in the yard. Orange peels and hay. A kiss with teeth.

15

flash fiction contest honorable mention

will musgrove squeaky clean enlightenment everyone in town is talking about the new car wash. The owner claims driving through the whirling, soapy scrubbers will show you your true purpose in life. No one seems to know much else about the guy other than he has long, hippie-like hair and that six months ago he bought the old northside McDonald’s to refurbish into a car wash.

Last week, my uncle tested the claim.

After an evening of mudding, he drove his truck through the car wash. The truck came out clean, but so did my uncle, who’d been a heavy drinker since the first Bush administration. According to eyewitnesses, he went back to his apartment, where he chucked whiskey bottles

16

from his third-story window before taking off to join a religious convent. I didn’t believe it until he mailed me a Polaroid of him wearing a scratchy-looking robe.

Initially, I possessed little interest in checking out the car wash. My uncle’s experience was proof enough for me. I work at a meatpacking plant. Eight hours a day I slice fat from pork loins and don’t need anything affirming that as my place in the world.

I also don’t want to rob the world of someone great.

I look at my callused hands.

It’s not that hard to fathom, right? That I could be great.

I hop into my sedan and back out of my garage. On the way, I drive past the hospital, and I’m patrolling polished linoleum hallways, a stethoscope wrapped around my neck. Past the courthouse, I’m signing bills ending hunger and poverty.

will musgrove

17

At the car wash, a line of vehicles wraps around the block. Inside golf carts, tractors, vans, and everything in between, people wait for inspiration. I take my place at the end and count those in front. One among many. Who am I kidding? Pork loins begin piling up in my thoughts, so I turn on the radio to distract me from believing I couldn’t be more.

I move closer and see who I presume is the owner flipping one of those big cardboard signs, which reads: Squeaky Clean Enlightenment.

When it’s my turn, he gestures to me to kill the engine and guides me onto the rails. Chains pull me forward. Soap sprays. Ribbon scrubbers hum and spin, whipping my side-view mirrors and doors. Blow dryers evaporate the remaining beads of water on my windshield.

Closing my eyes, I brace for my future.

When I open them, I expect to see someone new.

But nothing.

I’m still nobody.

Smacking the dash, I squeal out of the car wash and park on the curb.

A knocking. The owner stands at my window, so I roll it down.

“I didn’t see anything,” I say.

“People see what they want to see. What do you want to see?”

I look at my callused hands again. Inside the hardened flesh I see them, hear them grunting. Pigs. They graze around me. No conveyor belts. No cattle prods. No plant. Just grass and sun.

◆

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raleigh review

tyler dunston

on coastal erosion A giant squid roams over the disappearing shore.

It is my grandfather flying his kite decades ago. I remember this beach.

I remember this city. It is December.

The seawall a quarrel of wires and weeds.

There are no omens anymore.

19

sea that has become known Lakes, oceans like lanterns or apples pendulous.

All night, sky somehow holds them up. Light or no light.

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raleigh review

on lake immortality Bottomless, it scatters weatherfish, alewife, sturgeon into space. You lie on the beach here where the water’s always cold, and dream of what your life was like, remembering is like dreaming to you now, a thousand years ago.

I find the shells that flicker like puddles of oil on the inside and lay them on the shore.

tyler dunston

21

gabriella adriana iacono

alarm to call my mother out back two cicadae hum a knowing like a hard shell they’ll outgrow eventually. I haven’t called my mother today.

I’m sure she’s outside sweeping her patio of the papery helicopters and sweetgum seeds.

I’m sure she’s wondering if I’ll come by and hold the pail for her. I keep forgetting to ask her if she calls them humming bugs or locusts, if it matters more that we call them anything at all.

sometimes there’s a ground swell in the middle of a makeshift pond. sometimes it’s on 59 north in the middle of a hurricane, or in the backyard I grew up digging. my mother is sometimes here to evoke something in me, to remind me people have seasons, and that my nasal bridge isn’t mine, that my laugh isn’t either—it’s an old bone, a broken rocking chair that’s been bonded again and again. I wonder how her hands got so gnarled at the knuckle, if it’s oak or maple that twist over one another in the swamp out front, if that’s where she was looking when I dislocated my arm.

22

of all things, roses are not predictable. I know this. my mother is a rose, which means she’s a placeholder for paradox, for I and my and me. and I and I and I wonder if she is my opus, if all the nights I lay awake staring at the yellowed ceiling, I am thinking about the alarm: the cough I pat out of her each morning—

gabriella adriana iacono

23

jeanne wagner

after the funeral director tells me he won’t need the shoes Remember when we saw that French film where a reveler drinks champagne out of a satin pump then puts his hand inside it and walks it around the room?

Marchéz, marchéz he says, like a child with his push-toy, his puppet.

Where does the body end?

Put your foot into one of those little caves, first the gaping mouth, then the shove into darkness.

Sense the tightness, like bedsheets binding you in before sleep.

Hopkins says the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

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tim lehnert b&e I In the summer of 1982, following our senior year of high school, Troy and I committed eleven burglaries.

We’d go through an open window or back door left unlocked, cut a porch screen or kick in the wood panel that surrounded the hose venting the clothes drier. If a job required skill, or was going to be difficult or dangerous, we didn’t do it. We weren’t ambitious, and we weren’t pros.

We robbed places with obvious clues (overflowing mailbox, fliers on the door handle, old newspapers on the porch) that the occupants were out of town.

We targeted houses on the East Side of Providence, choosing nice places, but not ones so nice that they would have alarms. Troy, who lived

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off Blackstone Boulevard and whose father was a dentist, fashioned himself a Marxist, or as much of one as is possible for a high school student.

The way Troy understood Marx, without having read him, was that some people had too much, or “excess profit,” and others had too little.

Therefore, it was appropriate to “skim the excess,” or “go skimming” as Troy put it. He argued that laws against theft prioritized property over people and existed to legitimate inequality in society. There’s something to this, but even then I knew it took a particularly self-serving application of Marx’s work for it to justify one privileged person stealing from another.

Rarely did our hauls net more than a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff. We didn’t take jewelry, art, or anything big or heavy. We nabbed odds and ends: binoculars, flashlights, tape measures, cigarette lighters.

Since we conducted the burglaries on foot, and had no idea how to sell stolen goods, we were limited in what we could take. And we had a code.

According to Troy, it was acceptable to steal if you needed something, but selling the goods was not allowed, unless you needed the money for food or rent. Since we lived with our parents, we had to use what we took.

A typical break-in would have us leaving with a three-quarters-full bottle of gin, a calculator, three dress shirts, a handful of cassettes, a sports coat, a few books, a bag of cookies, a pack of Pall Malls and some cash (if any was left in a jar by the door or some such other obvious place). When he grabbed an item and put it in his backpack, Troy would sometimes intone for comic effect, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just had a transfer of ownership.” We drank the liquor, smoked the cigarettes, and wore the clothes we stole. At concerts (Blue Öyster Cult, the Kinks, the Police) we peered through our newly found binoculars and held aloft appropriated Zippo lighters.

We got a big kick out of stealing shirts from the man of the house’s closet. We wore them in ridiculous combination with shorts and hightop sneakers. As we sat in a park or cemetery drinking beer and reminiscing about one of our “skims,” Troy would adopt a stentorian voice: “Dolores, what happened to my blue pinstripe shirt? I’ve got a big meeting Monday. You didn’t forget to pick it up from the dry cleaner’s, did you?”

“No, Henry, I hung your shirts in the closet where I always do,” I’d respond, playing the part of the high-voiced hausfrau.

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“You don’t think those thieves took it when they broke in last month, do you? For God’s sake! I’ll have to add this to the police report.” Beer would spew from our mouths as we laughed.

Occasionally, we fudged the “need code” and sold some cassettes or LPs, but Troy usually had some complicated reasoning that made this okay. It’s true I could have met my basic wants by getting a summer job, but Providence’s economy in the early ’80s was slow, and even jobs scooping ice cream, sweeping tennis courts, and bussing tables were hard to come by. Not to say that these positions didn’t exist, but, as my father put it to me one June evening, “You’re not getting on the stick about a job because you’re too shy to look. And you’re lazy.”

It’s been so many years that the burglaries have blended together; it’s almost a generic East Side house from which we stole. Still, a few do stand out, like the big Tudor place whose owners left their back door unlocked. Troy was poking around the living room while I headed for the second floor. I stopped on the landing halfway up and looked out the window at the expansive backyard and its well-tended hedges.

These people really did have way more than they needed. As I turned to ascend the remaining stairs, a voice came from one of the bedrooms, “Mom, that you?” Some kid, probably our age, still in bed at 11:30 am. I ran downstairs and grabbed Troy. We fled out the rear door and across the wide spongy lawn. Our escape was almost complete when I foolishly looked back and thought I saw something move behind the landing window; it was impossible to tell for sure, and I quickly turned away.

That was our eighth job of the summer, and it gave me pause. It didn’t seem to bother Troy as much, but he hadn’t nearly come face to face with an occupant of a place we were stealing from. Ultimately, nothing came of it. Probably the kid didn’t even get out of bed, or if he did, was too brainless to figure out what was going on. We joked about it that night, doing our voices routine. “Uhh . . . duh, Mom, that you?’”

Troy asked.

“Yes, Sweetie-pie, Mummy is here,” I answered in my high-pitched female voice.

“Hey . . . uhh, Mom,” Troy continued, “What’re you doing? How come you’re taking my stereo? Mom, that’s not cool. Hey! . . . wait a sec, you’re not my Mom!” We laughed, but it was a bit hollow, and it bothered me that the kid might have seen my face from the window.

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Neither of us joked about our last break-in of the summer. We were descending the back steps of a place near Miriam Hospital when a woman next door came out on her porch. She was in her sixties, wearing a floral print dress, clutching a mug. I pegged her immediately as a busy body, the kind who is fond of saying, “I keep an eye out.” She asked us point blank what we were doing; Troy tried some line about a painting job, but she wasn’t having it. We kept walking, proceeding along the side of the house and then out the front gate. The woman had turned around and gone back inside after interrogating us. She was calling the cops, we knew it. Years of minding everybody else’s business were finally paying off.

We split up and ran. I dumped my bag of stuff (an umbrella, a baseball, some postage stamps, a bottle of vodka) in some bushes, and tried to look casual as I walked down a side street behind the hospital. I saw a police cruiser, without its siren on, shoot up Rochambeau a few blocks away. It was just like on TV, the squad car comes for the bad guys. I felt a distilled panic. What to do, what to do? Running seemed like a bad idea. Hiding, sure, but where? The hospital seemed too official, a part of the system, a trap. Instead, I changed direction and walked up to Hope Street, a few blocks away.

There were some people on Hope, but not many; I could easily be spotted. What had I been thinking? I thought of pressing on to Swan Point Cemetery, but that was a five or ten-minute walk. I also considered going into a diner but didn’t want to be confined. How long could I stay in there? If the police came in, that would be it; I’d be nailed at a lunch counter.

It was hot and humid, and sweat soaked my shirt and stung my eyes.

Every escape option seemed bad, and I was about to enter a drug store to further ponder my options when a city bus came into view. I ran to the stop on the next block and got in line; there were three people ahead of me. The bus arrived, shuddered to a halt, and hissed. The doors opened and a few passengers got off, then the first two people in line quickly boarded. I waited, a clammy dollar bill folded in my hand, as the hunched elderly man ahead of me stood at the fare box, trying to extract coins from his wallet with shaking hands while he asked about schedule changes. Eventually, he shuffled into the seat behind the driver, and I stuffed my dollar in. Finally, the door closed behind me, and the bus

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pulled from the curb. I walked to the back, took the last seat, and rode the bus downtown.

I was the last one off. The bus driver followed me, carrying his seat cushion and making loud jolly chatter about the Red Sox with a uniformed man who stood on the sidewalk, smoking. I wished I was a carefree drone with no worries other than who was pitching that night. I’d half expected a police officer to be at the bus terminal to meet me, but no one was there and Kennedy Plaza was almost deserted, everyone lying low in the warm sticky weather.

I had no place to go and so wandered around downtown’s rutted parking lots and vacant buildings, wondering what had happened to Troy. A police car drove past me as I walked by the main library; I breathed slowly and looked straight ahead, but not too straight ahead.

The car kept going and didn’t slow. I soon realized that the cops weren’t going to grab me off the street now, but if they’d caught Troy they were probably at my house, asking my mother if I was in, wanting to know when I would be back, wondering if she knew where I might have gone.

All of those abstract fears about arrest, court, and a record that I’d had while stealing now seemed tangible and immediate. I walked past a rundown bar and watched a man stumble into its dark glass door on his way in. There’s nothing romantic about being down and out, a marginal character or a petty criminal—it’s not cool, it’s not pretty, it’s not fun. I nearly started crying; I wasn’t a thief in my heart, I didn’t deserve to be arrested, but maybe I did.

I traipsed around downtown for a few hours more, ordered but couldn’t eat a wiener and fries, gave the three dollars I had in my wallet to passing bums, and finally walked home. It was dinnertime when I arrived. No squad car was outside. I entered. My mother told me to wash my hands for dinner, and my father agitated about the front lawn looking shaggy, and since I wasn’t working it seemed like I would have plenty of hours in the day to do something about it, and where had I been anyway? I pushed down some food, engaged in excruciating chatter about the automatic garage door opener my father had just purchased, and watched a rerun of M*A*S*H in the living room.

I turned the television off and asked in as offhand manner as possible if anyone had called. Was I expecting a call? Oh, no, no, just wondering, that’s all. I went upstairs and dragged the phone by its long cord down

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the hallway and into my room. I shut the door, sat on my bed, and called Troy. We exchanged a few cryptic words and agreed to meet at the park.

Troy had headed the opposite way when we split up, throwing his goods into a garbage can before heading down the hill toward North Main. He’d gone into the Dunkin’ Donuts and sat there for a couple of hours before going home. We leaned on the monkey bars and smoked many cigarettes, but had no desire for beer, pot, or joking impersonations. We’d made it, but we were still nervous. The woman had clearly seen us both; the police had been summoned. We realized that it wasn’t too bright to be robbing places so near where we lived. There was also the matter of the stuff we’d taken. Could it be recovered and fingerprinted?

We’d planned on a dozen “skims,” but decided, like a sports team forfeiting the last game of the season, to stop at our current count of eleven.

There were only two weeks of summer left before college began anyway.

II September came and Troy, the Marxist, left for Williams College while I started at the University of Rhode Island. I had low expectations going in. I had been a mediocrity in high school: no girlfriend, not particularly popular, unexceptional academically, unathletic. My friends and I had excelled only at finding ways to denigrate our more ambitious and with-it peers. I was part of that great gray mass that lies below the high school stars, but above the dropouts, stoners, and complete social rejects.

By my second week of college, I had already begun to fall behind in my reading and find my classes boring. URI was an improvement over high school in that I was away from home and could smoke freely, but I had yet to feel any inspiration, academic or otherwise. I entertained thoughts of quitting school and moving to Colorado to work in a ski resort, but I’d never skied and didn’t know how I might engineer such a move. Instead, I slept through my early morning classes, and stayed up late watching TV in the dorm common room.

My luck changed when I met Erin, who was assigned to my group for a physical geography project. We had a few casual geography related meetings, sometimes in the company of the other two group members (a barely present athlete of some sort, and a high-strung girl whose fin-

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gers were a mess) and then a few actual dates before the “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” labels were applied.

Our relationship took on typical and idealized aspects of the college romance: studying together, going for walks, midnight giggling in coffee shops. Erin wore little makeup and looked particularly fetching in jeans.

Moreover, she was a good person—kind, ethical, an opponent of meanness, bigotry, and dishonesty. While I had been stealing, she had been working at a camp for the disabled. I told Erin I hadn’t done much of anything over the summer as I’d contracted mono in late June, and by the time I was better it was almost Labor Day. She was very sympathetic that my summer between high school and college had been so depressing.

Once it was established that Erin was, in fact, my girlfriend, I began to mention this casually in conversation whenever I could. “See you later, I have to swing by the library to meet my girlfriend,” I’d tell my acne-plagued roommate, a video arcade devotee. I also began to favor a preppie mode of dress, and often walked around with a book, even when not going to class. I was, you see, a COLLEGE STUDENT WHO WAS INTELLIGENT AND SERIOUS AND HAD A GIRLFRIEND. I was immensely pleased with myself and assumed that the delightfully novel situation I found myself in would prevail indefinitely, that it would not at some point end. I envisioned Erin and myself progressing through our degrees, earnest young people that we were, going to movies, having sex, making plans for the future. Erin was going to be an elementary school teacher, and I was entertaining unspecified notions of “public service” as I grandly put it.

After we had been going out for a month or so, Erin invited me over to her parents’ place in Westerly one Saturday. They lived in a substantial house, with a garage that had at one time been a barn, and a big white front porch with a glider. Erin’s father was outside when I arrived, wearing a red checked shirt and raking leaves. He shook my hand firmly and said, “So you’re Brian, the famous boy from Providence. Nice to meet you.”

I mumbled “Hello,” threw in a false sounding “Sir,” and awkwardly offered to help rake. Erin soon came out holding several pairs of gloves and a bunch of garbage bags—we were going on a beach cleanup. I sat

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in the back of the family wagon, in between Erin and her chatty younger sister on the ten-minute drive to the shore. Erin didn’t do this under protest; she actually thought picking up trash with her new boyfriend and her family was the perfect way to spend a weekend morning. Her parents were earnest but not judgmental; even though they hadn’t voted for Reagan, they were restrained in their criticism—he was the president after all, and they would pray that he do his job well.

I was crazy about Erin and completely reinvented myself. I now thought education, principled behavior and hard work were important, and gladly traded in my previous life as a cynical underachiever and common thief for this new one. The new me saw little of my old friends; Troy was away, and while a few of my other cronies were at URI, they disgusted me: partying, dropping courses, aimlessly cruising through their freshman year with no sense of purpose or mission. Naturally, I hid my old self from Erin, and that’s another reason I avoided my high school friends on campus. I was afraid they’d ask me for a cigarette (I had more or less quit, although I did sometimes sneak one in the dorm common room late at night), or start talking about kegs or scoring weed.

I spent most of my time with Erin and her friends. They were pleasant enough, although a little boring, forever dragging their lunch about in Tupperware containers, talking about getting a good night’s sleep, and being “stressed” about biology labs.

There’s a problem, however, when you fashion yourself a new identity with a romantic other as its retaining wall. When that wall collapses, so does everything else. After Thanksgiving, Erin began to seem distant, but I didn’t ask her about it. Classes ended for the semester, and Erin said she preferred to study for exams by herself. The coolness that had emerged unsettled me, but it also made Erin even more attractive in my eyes, and a gnawing desperation and desire took over.

We spent New Year’s together, at a party held by Erin’s best friend.

It turned out, as I had expected it would, to be a tame and uneventful affair. One girl drank too much and threw up, producing grave concern from the other revelers, and cementing for everyone present that alcohol just wasn’t worth it, and why did people get drunk anyway. At one point during the festivities, I managed to separate Erin from her friends, put my arm around her, and whisper that I loved her and was really looking

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forward to 1983. She arched away slightly and said something about years just being numbers. I didn’t like this kind of talk but didn’t know what to do about it.

We spent the rest of the evening apart; I ended up drinking beers and talking hockey with a guy from Detroit who went to Brown. Just before midnight, someone flipped on the TV to see Dick Clark and the ball dropping in Times Square. The party broke up soon afterward; Erin was staying over at the friend’s and started helping her cleanup. I kissed her on the cheek and drove home to my parents’.

Around noon on New Year’s Day, Erin called and said she was driving up to Providence to see me. It was odd; she’d never been to my parents’ place before, and I wasn’t sure how I should handle this visit. She arrived an hour later and chatted in the living room with my parents who, for the occasion, had morphed into friendly outgoing types. I suggested we go to the Newport Creamery in Wayland Square for coffee and ice cream, not knowing what else to do. We sat at a booth, and I nervously played with the sugar dispenser. I looked up and noticed Erin was crying.

I’d never seen her cry before and touched her arm. She blurted out that she didn’t think we should see each other any longer, and that I was really sweet and she was so sorry, but she just didn’t know if it was a good idea, and she really couldn’t say why.

I had no defense for what I took as a surprise attack. I was stunned. I could feel the blood rushing to my face and flushing my cheeks. I asked if it was anything about the night before, or something I’d said or done.

She shook her head. We sat for a while and I said okay; I didn’t know how else to respond. I’d never had a girlfriend before and so had never broken up with anyone. I drove her back to my parents.’ We stood out front for a few moments, then she hugged me, got into her car, and was gone.

I went inside. My parents noted that Erin was nice and that they hoped to see more of her. My mother said that I was lucky to have a girl like Erin, who, incidentally, was “cute as a button,” and she hoped that I was behaving myself. I went upstairs to my room without saying a word.

I closed the door, lay on my bed in the winter’s afternoon gloom, and felt immensely sorry for myself. I felt a retrospective humiliation for the New Year’s Eve scene; no doubt she’d told her friends that she was going

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to break up with me, and there I was, a clueless fool, telling her that I loved her.

Then it hit me, a clarion, the reason Erin was ending it—she knew about my career as a burglar. Of course. She’d found out. How, I didn’t know, but it was possible. I had a postcard Troy sent me from Williams which made oblique mention of our summer antics; maybe she’d read it.

Also, there had been a short piece in the Providence Journal in August about a “spate of East Side burglaries,” which I had stupidly saved and left lying at the bottom of my desk drawer at school. This was my karma; I was being punished. I hadn’t gotten away with it. My indolence, my dishonesty, my deceit had come back to bite me. Erin was right to break up with me. I’d stolen, not once, but eleven times. I hadn’t made any restitution to my victims and had lied to Erin and said I’d been ill over the summer. All this time I could have told her and hadn’t. Erin had found me out and thought: he’s a thief and not who he says he is; what else might he be capable of?

I consulted my newly acquired moral compass—I would confess to Erin. I would tell her everything and point out that I’d been “clean” for several months, and that meeting her had cemented in my mind how wrong and foolish I’d been, and that even more than the stealing, I regretted keeping it from her, and had only done so because her approval meant so much to me. I imagined myself saying this and then sobbing or some such thing, and her comforting and forgiving me, and then we would be back together and there would be some fantastic sex. Perhaps she would ask me a few more questions about the whole thing, and that would be the end of it. Case closed. Maybe I’d donate to a charity as penance or something.

The next day was a Sunday. I had to see Erin but was too nervous to call her. Instead, I borrowed my dad’s car, drove to Westerly, and rang her parents’ bell. Her father opened the door, looked at me dubiously, and offered that I come in. I declined and stood on the large porch for a long time waiting, passing the time by inspecting the white wooden railing. It was windy and cold, and I wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves. I tried to guess how long I’d been outside—was it ten minutes that felt like twenty, or was it actually twenty minutes? Or longer? Should I ring the bell again? Humiliating. But I couldn’t just leave. I decided I would

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count to one hundred slowly and then try again. Somewhere in the forties, Erin opened the door and said she was sorry that I’d driven so far, but she didn’t feel like seeing me right now and wished that I’d called. I lied and said that I had to have the car back in an hour, so why didn’t we take just a short walk and then I’d be gone? She went back in to get her coat, taking a long time to do so.

We hardly spoke as we trudged down her street, and then just at the end of the block I blurted it out, that I was a house burglar. At the time, I’d not seen enough police procedurals or dramas involving marital infidelity to know never to confess to something unless you are presented with clear evidence of your culpability. I waited for Erin’s reaction to my confession but couldn’t see her face clearly; she was wearing a hat and had been angling her face away from me, avoiding eye contact. She asked me what I was talking about. It was too late to take it back. It was out there. She quizzed me briefly. I started minimizing my crimes, back pedaling. She said that things were getting really weird and wanted to know if I was joking, but it was plain that I hadn’t been. My confession emboldened her. She said she was sorry, that she’d found herself attracted to someone else, but couldn’t say who. Now she knew she’d made the right choice. Right away I knew it was Dennis, her “friend” from high school who was in her Western Civilization class. I asked if it was Dennis.

She said that it wasn’t important, and I disagreed as I thought it a key point. She didn’t argue, but still wouldn’t say who was replacing me. We walked back to her house. It really was over. She knew about the stealing, and regardless wanted to be with someone else.

I got on the 95 heading for Providence, hating myself, hating Erin. I couldn’t go home; I just couldn’t stomach a tedious conversation with my parents. I thought of Troy, but I hated him too; after all, he was partly responsible for the hideous mess I’d made of my life. What I felt like doing was stealing—not skimming, but really stealing. Skip the small stuff, the goofy trinkets that Troy and I typically pinched. I wanted to take TVs, jewelry, watches, whatever real thieves stole. Candlesticks if they were valuable. I wanted stuff for me. I wanted stuff to sell. Forget Troy’s wannabe Marxism and his byzantine codes of theft. And fuck Erin and her smug disapproval, and that little prick Dennis, who I’d always been nice to, not knowing he was competition. The world was a tough place,

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but I was a free agent now, a rogue, and I’d take what I wanted, and wouldn’t have Erin or Troy to answer to.

I drove to the East Side, not far from where Troy and I had nearly been caught months before. I’d never robbed in winter. It was different.

The streets were deserted, even in daylight. Nobody was mooning about their porch, mowing the lawn, or shooting baskets in the driveway. Everything was closed up, locked and sealed, but at the same time highly visible—the leaves were off the trees and bushes, and you could see into backyards.

I parked the car and walked a while until I came to a duplex with a newspaper lying on the porch. It was mid-afternoon; the occupants were probably out of town for New Year’s. I went along the side of the house toward the back and found the plywood panel where the clothes dryer vented. I gave a quick look around before kicking it with the heel of my boot. The wood popped free, but the window was too small to get through. I tried again, this time splintering the frame. Another quick kick and the molding broke and the window cracked, pieces fell and hit the basement floor. There’s nothing to absorb sound in the winter; the glass shattering on the cement seemed like it was being amplified and broadcast.

I jumped in, and the shards of glass crackled underfoot. It was dark, and there was lots of junk strewn about, but I found the steps leading up to the first floor. I climbed the creaking stairs and opened the door slowly. I was in the kitchen. I could tell that the people who lived there were middle class at best and were probably old; everything looked wornout. I walked down a hallway and into a large space with a dining room table and living room. There were paintings on the faded walls, but were they worth anything? They didn’t look like much, but often that’s not much of a guide to value. I recognized one, and another, before I realized that I was looking at reproductions of old masters. One was by Monet, particularly painful as I’d given Erin a Monet print for Christmas.

The only thing worth taking in the place was a Betamax that was perched on a large TV console. I untethered the machine and wrapped it in a towel that I’d grabbed from the bathroom. I sat down on the sheet-covered sofa to contemplate my score. The drapes were drawn and it was dim inside the house, although some murky daylight leaked in, and a feeble overhead in the front hallway had been left on, probably as

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a deterrent against burglars. I could hear the occasional car going by on the street out front.

Where had the Betamax come from? I pictured an elderly couple, probably around my grandparents’ age, receiving it as a Christmas gift.

Perhaps they’d won it in a church raffle, or maybe it was their big purchase for the year—they’d decided to splurge and get with the times. The bulky device rested on my lap, immobilizing me, and I wanted to turn on the television in front of me. There was a thump from the bedroom. I sat up straight, clutched the Betamax, and looked toward the hallway. Shit.

An orange and white cat entered, approached, meowed loudly and dug its head into my shin, demanding I scratch it behind the ears. I obliged, and the cat, “Popeye” read its tag, jumped onto the sofa. It tried to sit on my lap, but the Betamax was in its way. Instead, the cat sat next to me, his head resting against my side.

A few drops of dirty water from my boots had settled on the floor. I moved the towel-encased Betamax onto the coffee table in front of me. I couldn’t go home and hook it up to my parents’ TV, nor did I want to.

There were no jokes surrounding it I could share with Troy, and Erin and I wouldn’t be cuddling together watching movies, that was for sure.

I sat for a little while longer, not wanting to go, but knowing that I had to.

I got up, reconnected the Betamax, and used the towel to clean the water from the floor. I folded up the towel and stuffed it in my coat— doubtful it would be missed—and returned to the basement where I used a rickety lawn chair to hoist myself up and through the broken window, trying not to cut myself on the glass still left in the frame.

I stood outside for a moment. Nobody was around. I probably hadn’t been seen. It was important that I not run or act nervous; after all, I hadn’t even taken anything, except for the towel. Some flattened cardboard boxes were lying next to the garbage cans in the driveway; I grabbed a few and leaned them against the broken window to prevent snow or rain from getting in. The broken window would be disturbing and puzzling, and would need to be fixed, but there wasn’t much I could do about that now.

They probably wouldn’t be away for long; after all, they’d left the cat. There was an errant paving stone near the driveway, and I leaned it on the cardboard to make it more secure and prevent Popeye from

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escaping—a missing pet would be a sad way to start 1983. As I walked the several blocks to where I’d parked my Dad’s Buick, I realized Popeye would be fine. I’d closed the door to the basement; there was no way he could even get down there. I felt happy for the old couple; broken window or not, Popeye would be there to greet them when they came in, and it would be nice to be home. Maybe they’d watch a movie together.

I hoped so.

◆

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kristian o’hare

a sudden heaven Cadaver dogs seek out charred remains— imprints of a body: a snow angel of ash, bits of bone, broken teeth. They snuffle a bundle of fake flowers: English cabbage rose, in eggshell cream; silk petals burnt to a grit-black powder. They push past skeletons of metal pipe, the melted red plastic of a Big Wheel, a weight bench, its foam stuffing crested like a fungus.

They detect a flame still burns, in the hollow of an old-growth redwood, a chimney tree, fire-gutted and scarred.

They look up as the sky unthreads a sulphuric blanket of greenish-yellow light.

The clouds skim like golden milk to reveal a wounded blue—a sudden heaven.

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while peering in the mirror The underside of my tongue blushes purple.

Uprooted irises dry in the field.

Crows turn the furrow the way the farmer’s daughter tosses her hair. Human faces are easy for corvids to remember. With enough concentration, my eyes appear purple.

The nature of the world appears to be feathered.

The confetti bark of eucalyptus trees invites fire.

In Sydney, flammable trees form a cathedral.

In Milan, my mother brushes her cheeks with holy water. I hold my beak to better hear the silence. Old fields usher me toward the promise: closer.

The lamp leading us forward runs on animal fat and air.

Faraway, she fills a quiet theater with her laughter.

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ten confessions to set me free In the absence of hunger, I eat.

In the face of tremendous violence, I do nothing. I told a friend I was proud of him for going vegetarian as I pried apart cold fried chicken with my hands, remembered the fish market in Shanghai where the butcher beat the fish that he thought was lifeless with a stick, bagged it, and left it to thrash on the tile until it suffocated. I still eat meat. In the face of violence, this friend started a nonprofit.

I pick my bones clean and go to sleep early.

He runs marathons, eats vegetables, teaches.

I keep forgetting to book a flu shot appointment.

It is October already, getting colder. Daily, I avoid the thought of aging. All I did this month was eat with people like my friend. Ones who are doing things with their hearts and with their hands. I am so scared that my heart is not big enough. That all I want is to look at stars and shake my blankets free of sand.

Please: I cannot stop turning my small life over in my hands.

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nora beers kelly

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I crept into the November night to watch. The door opened, bent like a broken finger, and outside, the first snow of the season, blanching the concrete. My old car in the lot, dusted, as though with confectioner’s sugar, and rusted from nineteen years of travel. My feet, traveled and bone-sore, toes curled against the cold. And around me in that darkness, the chittering of small creatures: a black squirrel scavenging the ground, in the trees, miscellaneous birds. I have measured the years by the beating of their wings, by the worms bisected in their beaks. I watched them scrabble in the winter months: the waxwing, the cardinal, the American robin. Once, a snowy owl perched on the branch of a dead tree in my front yard, and I thought its tracks were the handwriting of God. This had something to do with my dying grandmother and symbolism I think, the picture my father had sent me, where she was hooked to the world by a needle in her arm: red tube against white sheets, like the chokeberry bush outside my childhood home against snow. I waited for the season to deliver me to a better understanding. I fed the owl: a mouse had died

pastoral with birds

kathryn bratt-pfotenhauer

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behind the kitchen cabinets. For days I wondered where the death-smell was coming from, and when I found it, I wondered how I hadn’t heard it squeaking, and how it died alone, not unlike my grandmother. I carried it out with a pair of tongs. I left it on the garden path. I let nature do its yearning, bloody work, watched the owl devour the body of the mouse and felt nothing except a singular kind of regret: that I was not small enough to warrant such a dispatch, that I had not died too, and what’s more, my death would not be useful. It would be just a death. The bird, just a bird.

prayer after Czesław Miłosz Approaching twenty-five, and still with a hope of children, I sit in the doctor’s office.

Around me, the world bubbles in its clay pot. Late summer, and the heat— enough to kill someone. I read statistics on my phone, scrolling through stories of kids strapped in hot cars, unable to get out. Each passing summer, it gets hotter. I name the bloody rags of my underwear as the deluge comes: Miranda. James. Elise. Red ribbons down my legs. It shouldn’t mean anything anymore. At least, not like it once did. Confession: I got on my knees the other day for a man. I let him do things to me and feigned desire but didn’t want it.

I spent the days after clutching a test and praying that I stayed empty. It was negative. To believe in anything at all requires suspension. To believe in something higher than your own capacity for creation would stump anyone.

The older woman next to me saw me cradling my stomach. I imagine I looked scared. She put a hand on mine. Told me I’d be just fine. God: she wore a paisley shirt and blue jeans. She looked like my mother, or maybe just any mother.

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ithaca, october with a line from Lisbeth White What leaves must be sung to as it goes—the season, I mean— Persephone tying her hair and returning to her mother. The leaves cascade like debutantes down a grand staircase as we sit in the park next to the Presbyterian church and lose count of how many kisses we’ve sung into each other’s mouths. This is another way of rejecting permanence: I’ve thought about it, and the way the mouth moves against another is a geometry beyond comprehension. Who can quantify want in a way that doesn’t leave one wanting? This moment, frozen, except for the way the light moves slowly, like my father and his cane move slowly, or how we sit steepled in said light, slow dancing in the underworld of our own imagination. Your hands make a church of me, a cemetery. Something to return to or rather something I’d notice if it were gone.

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greg november all alone in the getaway car renny sold her story to the men from the movies and when it was done, the deal, she sold most of her stuff as well and packed the rest in the only possession she’d brought with her to that city of large and stupid dreams, a gold 1989 Pontiac, and began the return journey. She had a suitcase of clothing in the trunk and a few boxes of personal items in the backseat. She took none of her movies, which she’d been in the habit of displaying in her home the way other people displayed books or family photos or trinkets acquired from world travels. After selling her story, she meant to head home, where she still had a friend or two, and learn a new craft: coffee roasting, grape crushing, even ferry upkeep. She had money. What she needed was a new identity.

The car was a T-top, stick shift; only the back speakers worked, and the wheel wells had rusted through so that on wet days water spun from

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the tires soaked the floor mats. In winter the mats were slicked in frost.

Lucky there hadn’t been many wet days in Dream Town, less so days of ice. Renny took the inland route north rather than the coastal, not to save time, but because her inclination toward beauty had long ago been ground to a nub. Half a day into her trip she stopped to eat and use the restroom in a roadside diner called Peter’s—though the symbolism didn’t sit right, she hadn’t eaten but snack bars since the previous day, so she went in. At the counter, where she took a stool—Renny always felt she sunk into booths—a man in a ripped-sleeve Pendleton shirt, mud flap gals tattooed on his arms, turned her way.

“Hey, are you—” “No.” “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you are. I recognize you. Darling Jennings, sitting right here next to me. I can’t believe my luck. Hey, are you filming here? You guys looking for studs?”

“Sorry,” Renny said. “I’m not who you think I am.”

She left without eating, without even ordering. She drove on and found another town, some other diner. After placing her order, another man approached, this one looking like he’d just come up for air. “Miss Jennings?” he said. “I knew it was you. Even with the short hair. What happened to your web channel? I’ve been a subscriber since the start but there hasn’t been anything new in a while.” The man kept fidgeting with the buttons of his shirt.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not who you think I am.”

Later that day, at a rest stop in the Central Valley, a farmer offered to audition for her right there in the parking lot. Before she could say anything, the man unzipped his pants. Driving north, Renny regretted it was only now that she noticed men as pitiable and full of sorrow and for all it looked like they were in control, the reality didn’t bear it out. renny had entered the slipstream in the years before the work’s essential characteristics changed. When she started it was one business and you were either in it or not and she was in it. But with the Internet’s triumph over print and video came unlimited taxonomy, and you became one type of girl or another, known for certain activities or not.

Renny supposed you could say that about a lot of businesses, although few were as old as hers, which was older by ten thousand years than the

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technology that made her famous, that booked her as a repeat guest on Howard Stern, when that show was still king duck of innuendo, and even brought her to the stages of nighttime’s legitimate talk shows, from which her desire to validate the industry, to form a union, develop a protocol of behavior, and enroll girls in classes had been lauded, by the hosts of those legitimate talk shows as well as the public at large (although of course she had her detractors) as forward-thinking, almost saintly. Renny received airtime on national cable news and spoke her views proudly, the brainy mouthpiece of a begrimed, infamous industry.

But when she parlayed this mainstream visibility into a starring role in a Hollywood action movie, audiences pounced. Renny was panned, derided, humiliated. Those same legitimate talk show hosts who’d earlier professed her as a dirty angel of mercy consigned her to the shit bin of late-night persiflage. In the end she abdicated, sold her story to those movie men, and made her getaway in a Pontiac T-top. she took to driving at night. At sunset the horizon flamed like overripe fruit and later, when stars came out, Renny looked through the T at the quivering atmosphere above. For the few seconds during which she watched the rectangles of sky and stars instead of the road, she felt an aggressive pull, motion without control. The Pontiac drove itself and she was simply carried along, untied, unstrung, free. But as soon as she looked back to the road this feeling vanished, replaced with headlights and painted lines, a jolt of adrenaline as she yanked the wheel, followed by weariness and the gnawing of missed meals.

By morning, bleary and unfocused, Renny checked into a motel.

“What day is it?” she asked the clerk, who looked somewhat like an actor she’d worked with in her one Hollywood film.

“Tuesday,” the clerk said, as if admitting a secret.

Renny ate strawberry pancakes at the diner next door, where no one recognized her or stayed away if they did, then went to the dismal room she’d rented and slept. She dreamed about a scene she’d filmed once with a deaf stud named Don Stacks, who of course didn’t hear the directions shouted from those behind the camera, so on the day they filmed the scene, which in Renny’s dream involved a baroque and anachronistic coffee table with screaming banshees as legs, although in real life it had

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taken place in a fast food kitchen, Don went at her according to his own logic and plan. At one point, in the dream as in real life, he nuzzled Renny’s neck and kissed her there. He began moaning, incoherently but somehow lovingly. The producers decided the scene was unsalable, and in the dream they spoke to Renny about this. “You didn’t even smoke your dollar bill,” they said. “You just lay there staring at the goddamn coffee table.”

During her career’s height, Renny’s signature was to “smoke” a rolled dollar bill after her scenes. She’d done it once as a pantomimed joke, spotting a dropped note on the floor that must have come from one of the cameramen, and everyone on set flipped. From then on that’s how she finished her scenes, pretending to smoke that dollar bill, sometimes with a wink and a grin for the camera. It had even been her logo, a sort of duck lipped caricature of her face, one eye winking, and two fingers balancing a dollar bill cigarette, stamped on all her movies and, later, in the corner of the screen of her internet clips.

When Renny awoke, the sheets were sweat-soaked and it was dark.

She didn’t know where she was. Her dream lingered, an afterglow, momentarily undermining her confidence in the absolutism of physics.

Renny’s father had been a scientist, not a physicist but a chemist, and when she was young he’d acquainted Renny with what he called the beautiful realities of empirical existence. Thunderstorms and telephone calls did not lose their magic, he explained, when understood for what they were; if anything, they gained power, or you gained the power. As a young girl Renny had not understood any of this, and while her father was alive and she lived at home it had been a source of tension between them. Renny didn’t want to hear her father’s answers to her questions, so she stopped asking questions. Renny’s mother, a social worker lacerated by the injustices that faced her clients, chastised her husband, in front of Renny, for not allowing their daughter to dwell in the fictions of childhood. When she left home at eighteen, Renny’d been spoken to like an adult for as long as she could remember.

Renny rang the front desk. The clerk answered.

“What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“Still?”

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“Hey, are you—” “No.” “You on your way back to Seattle?”

Renny hung up. She slid the door chain in place and hooked the desk chair under the knob. Then she called her oldest friend, a woman Renny’d planned to stay with when she first arrived home. “I can’t come back,” Renny said. “They know where I’m from.”

Her friend didn’t put up much of a fight. Renny hung up and felt emptied. She showered and stepped with her wet hair into the buzzing, humming night. Moths loitered around the lamp mounted outside her door and across the parking lot two vending machines glowed like attractions at a terrible theme park. Beyond that, Renny sensed infinite desert like a subatomic force striating what seemed affixed to the earth.

The palm trees on the motel grounds were an illusion, transplanted from elsewhere, like Renny. This state was not tropical. It was dry and hard and impossible to know. She had to get away. Renny purchased chips and a caffeinated soda from the machines. The clerk watched through a window, standing at parade rest behind the front desk. He put two fingers to his lips as if smoking a cigarette.

Renny drove on through another night and scanned the outer depths of the FM radio band, settling for a time on rockabilly and then gospel, which warbled to her from the rear speakers, partially obstructed by her boxes in the backseat. She went through mountains and lost the radio.

Passing through Weed, yards from the state line, the radio came back.

Toward morning the news started, and she heard about violated ceasefires and kidnappings and parades and bombings and shootings and refugees fleeing bombings and shootings and a famous retired athlete who’d made a mysterious trip to a foreign nation with which the United States had no diplomatic ties to arrange a birthday basketball exhibition for the country’s young dictator. It felt like Renny had oozed from a decade slumber or stupor, and the events of the world clobbered her.

She turned off the news. It was daylight and she was tired. She needed to stop and rest, or at least have someone to talk with to stay awake. She was coming into a dusty town and saw a girl walking along the side of the road with a duffel slung over one shoulder. The girl wore a gingham dress that looked homemade. She was tall with long black hair arranged

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in a single braid that hung down her back, the tip bouncing against her coccyx as she walked. She looked about twenty. Renny pulled alongside.

“Are you a hitchhiker?” she said, peering at the girl.

“Not yet.”

Once in the car, the girl smelled of hemp and oregano. She sat with her duffel on her lap, as the backseat was already occupied by Renny’s things, and offered Renny a knowing smile, as if they were friends.

Renny supposed she should be alarmed, but instead the girl’s expression offered an unexpected comfort that proved disarming. The girl thanked Renny for the ride, and when Renny asked where she was going, the girl looked out the window for a moment before saying Albany, to see her grandfather.

“Is it far?” Renny said.

“The next town over.”

“You were going to walk the whole way?”

“If I had to. I’ve done it before. Between you and me, I wasn’t really in the mood today. I’m glad you stopped.”

The girl explained that her grandfather was probably dying. Although no one really knew for sure because he refused to see a doctor. “He’s got an old way of thinking,” the girl said. “He doesn’t trust Western medicine. I visit when I can and sit with him, rub him with oils and salves.

His place reeks of sage, which he burns in little incense things all around the room.”

The girl eased the seat back and closed her eyes. She didn’t say anything further and Renny regretted picking her up. She’d wanted company, someone to help her stay awake for the next stretch. Renny nudged her and the girl opened one eye. “Can you drive?” Renny said.

The girl closed her eye. “If you want me to.” renny was jarred awake by the entwined feelings of being stationary and sweating. She was alone in the passenger seat and had to urinate. It was midafternoon and the Pontiac ticked in front of a ranch home, next to a greenish, rusting GMC on one side and on the other a dusty yard occupied by weeds and the framework of a swing set, which seemed the only structure between the housing tract and the blue humps of shimmering mountains at least a hundred miles off. In between lay only the

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open scrub of desert and what could have been Montana’s sky. From the bars of the swing set, where the swings should be, a large and colorful rug dangled. Renny opened the car door, and an empty soda can fell out. The air clutched at her. She stood blinking and sweating. Then the front door of the house banged open, and an old man walked out. She thought it was a man. Momentarily, it looked like a sentient tree, arms and legs too thin to be more than bark-wrapped bones. The man looked her way, then walked with surprising sturdiness to the dangling rug. He swatted it a few times, sniffed it once, and then turned back to Renny.

“Carla will be back soon,” he called across the expanse. “Wants to thank you for the ride.”

Renny explained that there was no need to thank her, that Carla actually drove, and it was only the few miles. “I could use a bathroom,” Renny said.

The old man nodded toward the house, then returned his attention to the hanging rug. He began picking at it, perhaps removing lint or hair, and did not pay any further attention to Renny. She went inside.

The first thing that hit her was that it was just as hot in the house as outside. The floors were hardwood and the walls covered in floral wallpaper, peeling in places and water stained in others. The furniture was old but well-cared for. In the middle of the front room a large sofa faced a box television and what looked to Renny like the old Nintendo Entertainment System, which she’d last seen when she lived at home and her parents were both alive. A few game cartridges scattered between the television and a coffee table, on which a ceramic bowl issued a slow twirl of steam into the hot air.

The bathroom was directly off that front room, and Renny had to step down to enter it. The door did not close all the way, so she held the knob while she peed. Across from the toilet hung a framed portrait of Macho Man Randy Savage making his fists. She heard the front door, footsteps on the creaky hardwood. When Renny came out of the bathroom, the old man sat on the sofa with the ceramic bowl in his hands. He peered at the bowl as if waiting for it to speak, then looked up at Renny.

“Forgot my spoon,” he said. “While you’re up, you mind getting me a spoon? They’re right where you’d think they’d be.”

In the kitchen, Renny opened a few drawers before locating the one with spoons. “Help yourself to soup,” the man called out from the front

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room. “If it’s good enough for me, it’s good enough for you.”

When she’d returned to the front room, the man indicated where she should sit and then introduced himself as Edison. “Carla’s grandfather, in case you hadn’t figured that out.” He spooned soup into his mouth and made a face. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch. Listen, I have to eat this but you don’t. Hot as it is, who wants a bowl of steaming soup, anyway? Here, set it on the table there and don’t worry.”

Renny sat and watched the old man eat his soup. “Where are we?” she said.

“Price,” he said between spoonfuls.

“Not Albany?”

“Albany? No. Albany’s that way,” Edison said, waving his hand toward the windows. “South of here.”

“Is that your pickup out front?”

The man nodded, said “Family’s,” then placed the bowl on the table, wiped his forehead, and collapsed into the sofa. “There, that’s enough of that.”

“I should be going,” Renny said.

“Carla wants to thank you.”

“She doesn’t have to.” Renny stood. “Thank you for the soup.”

“You didn’t have any.”

Outside, Renny blinked in the sun. A boy stood by her car. A teenager. “You’re the one gave Carla the ride, huh? Are you leaving?”

“I have to be going,” Renny said, wondering where the boy had come from.

The boy offered a smile and must have read her expression because he added that he’d been around back with the other rugs. “You came all this way and Carla hasn’t had a chance to thank you yet. Come on, help me get this rug to the backyard with the rest.”

Renny didn’t make a move. The boy walked over to the swing set and gave the rug a yank, although it remained slung over the crossbar. “Come on!” The boy called over. “I need your help or this thing will fall in the dust. It’s no good if it’s dusty.”

Her keys. She didn’t have her keys. Renny felt a moment’s panic, realizing she had no idea where they were. Had the hitchhiking girl, Carla, taken them with her? Were they in the house still, with the old man? For all Renny knew, she could be trapped with this family. They seemed all

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right enough, but Renny didn’t know what to make of Carla saying she was on her way to Albany and then taking her to Price. Maybe Renny had heard wrong? She patted her jeans pockets, more habit than anything else, before bending and peering into the car window. The boy watched, casually amused, but offered no insight about her keys.

“Come on,” he said. “Help me with this rug.”

Renny grabbed one corner of the rug and the boy carefully slid it off the swingset crossbar, instructing Renny to make sure and grab her other corner as it came off, repeating his assertion that if the rug touched the ground, if it got any dust on it, it’d be no good. They’d have to repeat the process. She stood there, holding two corners of the rug while the boy faced her holding the other two, looking for all the world like he meant to fold it like a sheet.

“Just stay there,” he said. “Don’t move. I’m going to roll my end to you.”

The boy flipped his wrists in a smooth and practiced way, curling his end of the rug, then altered his grip, thumbs on top, and rolled the rug slowly toward Renny. He stepped carefully, as if he didn’t want to slip, although from what Renny could tell, there was no obstacle in his way larger than a pebble. When he’d rolled the rug almost all the way and was standing two feet from Renny, he told her to slowly let go, as he completed the rolling.

Together, they carried the rug around the side of the house and Renny watched as the boy placed it on a large tarp on the ground, where five or six other such rugs lay already rolled tightly.

“Appreciate the help,” the boy said. “Dustless rugs is our reputation.

I’m Edison. Carla should be home soon.”

Renny looked at the boy. “Edison?” she said.

“That’s right. The third, actually. And between us there’s another Edison I’ve never really met.” Then the boy explained that he and Carla had lived with their grandfather—and grandmother, before she passed about a decade ago—since their own mother left to seek her fortune in the movies. Renny thought she detected the boy lingering on that last part, but he offered no further explanation. He and Carla, he explained, had never really known their father, the middle Edison, who lived somewhere in another state and occasionally sent money but never himself.

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“Someday I’ll go find him,” the boy said. “We have the same name, after all.”

As the boy spoke, Renny thought his face seemed good-natured, like his sister’s, with wettish eyes suggesting a propensity for caring and a good sense of humor. Renny recognized the expression because she’d seen it a time or two in aspiring actresses she’d worked with, before they inevitably washed out of the business. But who or what amused the boy remained unsaid. Renny had a suspicion, so again she said she had to leave and again Edison said Carla would be home soon. In the meantime, he said, why don’t they go inside and watch a movie.

Renny’s bolt reflex kicked in, but before she could make a move Edison was already walking around the house, leaving her alone in the backyard, which may as well have been the entire desert for all that filled it.

Where would she go? Keyless, she could run for days, maybe, and not encounter anything but sand and scrub and scorpion husks.

Opening the front door, she heard herself speaking inside. The old man was asleep on the sofa and the younger Edison sat next to him. He waved Renny in. The kid wasn’t playing one of her pornos. It was Lights Out, the legitimate Hollywood movie that had ended her career. The scene was a medium shot of Renny in a tight shirt with a pistol clutched in both hands two inches from her ear. She had just kicked in a door and was doing her best “who the fuck is in here” look.

Renny had never enjoyed watching herself on film. Most in her line of work rarely watched their own scenes. Instead, they viewed each other’s and provided feedback in both group and one-on-one settings. They met up in each other’s homes to discuss technique and craft. Renny had enjoyed those meetings, and planned diligently for them. Sometimes she wrote a letter to the other actress and sometimes she had only notes, but she never spoke extemporaneously. Renny was always prepared. This was part of her in-house reputation: the diligent critiquer. And she’d always felt she was good at receiving feedback from others. But she hadn’t seen or even spoken to anyone about Lights Out since the premier.

Edison alternately looked from the television to Renny. He was grinning.

“I didn’t think this movie was as bad as everyone thought,” he said.

“I’m not who you think I am,” Renny said.

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“You’re not Darling Jennings?”

“No.” “That’s not you on my television screen right now?”

“No.” “It looks like you. Sure, your hair is shorter now. But, look, tell me that’s not you.”

“Please turn that off.”

The kid pressed the remote and Renny’s face, currently in closeup, disappeared from the screen. The old man snorted and seemed for a moment to be choking, but the fit, if that’s what it was, lasted only a moment or two and then he was quietly breathing again, eyes shut, gnarled workman’s hands clasped over his belly.

“Goodbye,” Renny said.

“Carla wanted to—” “Tell her she’s welcome.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just wanted you to know I know who you are, and I don’t really care. Carla knows, too.

And she doesn’t care, either. We’re pretty familiar with abuse and all that would drive a person to—” “Don’t say it.”

“Huh?” “Don’t say you feel bad for me.”

“I wasn’t.”

Of all the reactions she’d received from others—upbraiding, solicitations—polite sympathy had been the most irritating. Some, imagining themselves enlightened, assumed she’d been victimized and maybe even captured against her will in the middle of the night, brainwashed, forced into sexual labor, and offered Renny what amounted to their condolences. They lamented, made sad faces. They pet Renny’s arm like she was a gerbil. How detestable, they said. The misogyny. The chauvinism.

Renny knew these forces were real and had seen them up close—but it hadn’t been for Renny at all as the petting, lamenting dipshits imagined and she fumed at their need to cast all those who’d experienced hardship as victims. Renny did not see herself as a victim. Maybe her decisions had been poor or reckless, but they were decisions. She owned them. No one had forced her to do anything.

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“You’re not old enough to be watching my movies,” Renny said.

“Not even this one.”

Edison grinned again. “See. That’s what’s great about you. You were the industry’s moral compass, and they cast you aside because they didn’t know what they had. You were going to make it all better, turn it into something worthwhile, instructional even, rather than a sinkhole of abuse and retrograde thinking. Now where is everyone headed? I’m sixteen, by the way. That’s old enough.”

Through the windows, Renny could see the sun sliding toward the horizon, light slipping to those longer wavelengths that often reminded her of hunting for salamanders as a child in the creek behind their house.

Late afternoon was the best time to catch them unaware, her dad used to tell her. She was suddenly quite tired and didn’t want to face another night of driving.

Renny took a seat and asked Edison not to turn the movie on again.

She was going to close her eyes and wait for Carla after all. The old man had the right idea. Perhaps she would ask to stay the night. When Edison pulled a packet of clove cigarettes from his pocket, she asked for one.

Renny hadn’t smoked anything for real since she was a teenager still living with her parents, and she’d forgotten how long it took to entirely smoke a clove. She watched Edison tilt his head back and puff wobbly smoke rings toward the ceiling, where they gathered around a hanging light fixture. Amidst the clove smoke, she detected, she thought, the faint aroma of cherry tomatoes. It was like the scent of a small plant Renny cultivated one season before she left home. It had been her father’s idea, to give them something to take care of together, she imagined. He never said those words, never explained what they were really doing, but he didn’t have to. By that point every relationship in the house was strained and only her father seemed unwilling to acknowledge where it was all headed. They started sometime in May and tucked the small shoots in a plastic cone composed of sleeves filled with water, which kept the plant warm until nighttime temperatures reached fifty degrees consistently.

When that happened, Renny and her father removed the water wall and dumped the water. Their plants thrived even as her parents moved to separate bedrooms, and by July there were wonderful red globes of intense flavor. She showed them to her mother, look what dad and I did.

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Then in August a fungus hit that split the plants’ small globes into hemispheres. By the end of summer her parents split. When she finished high school, Renny left, found fame in a notorious industry. Later, she sold her story and drove away alone. again renny was jarred awake, this time by the sound of a screen door slamming. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. The old man and Edison were gone and Renny was sprawled on the sofa. She sat up, as Carla, holding a crate of blueberries, smiled at her from the doorway. “I need to thank you,” she said, moving quickly to the kitchen.

“You’re welcome,” Renny said, rubbing sleep from her eyes and gradually reestablishing her presence in the room.

“Not for the ride,” Carla called out from the kitchen. Renny heard water running.

In the kitchen, Renny watched while Carla rinsed one handful of berries at a time and then placed them into plastic baggies, which she then handed to Renny to place back into the crate.

“Okay,” Renny said finally. “What then? If not the ride, what do you have to thank me for?”

“I saw you on some talk show or another. You got skewered for trying to go mainstream. I knew who you were when you picked me up.”

Renny placed a wet berry baggie in the crate. Then another. Another.

Carla kept speaking.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re doing here in Price, if you’re running from something or maybe you’ll be filming here at some point. I don’t know and, really, I don’t care all that much. I’m not staying in this town all that much longer. I’m heading out, breaking free. I have plans, and they don’t include staying in Price and watching my grandfather die.

Only problem is Edison. Without me, he’d be left with our grandfather and he’s not with it enough to ensure Edison goes to school. My brother is the smartest kid I know, and school’s not always the friendliest place for those sorts of people. So, you see, I’m afraid of what will happen to him if I leave and I’m afraid of what will happen to me if I stay.”

Carla stopped speaking and handed Renny another baggie. By this point, Renny’s hands were wet and the crate was mostly full.

“Is that a thank you?” she said.

“I’m getting to it. See, I wasn’t really on my way here when you picked

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me up. I was on my way away from here. I was leaving, running away, I guess you could call it. Then you pulled up, broke my trance, I guess, and now here we are. So, thank you. Thank you for not letting me run away too soon.”

When they finished with the berries, Carla offered Renny a towel for her hands and then suggested they go sit out back and for a moment before Renny had to leave.

“Here are your keys,” Carla said.

“Is it possible, actually, to stay the night?”

Outside, the sun was beginning its descent and the sky was now pink and ripe. The temperature had come down some, as well. With the day’s heat behind them, the women sat in two ancient wooden chairs. Renny asked Carla where all the blueberries came from.

“Maybe I’ll show you tomorrow,” Carla said.

Edison came around the side of the house with another rolled up rug. He nodded at Renny and Carla. After setting the carpet roll on the tarp next to the others, he looked off to the sunset and then back at the women. Every so often, there was a whap from the front yard.

“Sky’s kind of vaginal,” Carla said. “Don’t you think?”

Edison made a face and then Carla smirked at Renny.

“I see you can carry a rug roll just fine without me,” Renny said.

Embarrassment bloomed on the boy’s face.

“Sorry,” he said.

Renny told him it was all right. Sitting in this family’s desert backyard, Renny felt comfortable for the first time since she’d left LA. She didn’t feel the need to move, at least not for the time being. She knew she wouldn’t remain in Price forever, maybe not even for the night, but a little while longer seemed just what she needed. Edison sat on the ground and said their grandfather was out front whacking dust from the day’s final rug. In the meantime, Edison said, he’d like to sit with the women and watch the sun fall behind the mountains.

The periodic whap of fist on rug continued from out front. It was a satisfying sound. A day’s end sound. Renny settled into her chair. She hadn’t always known she was running but now felt certain she’d escaped.

The world opened to her. It may as well have been the windswept roils of Pangaea.

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greg november

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justin jannise

four of wands The receiver’s in the End Zone, dancing. Half the stadium’s wild.

The other half’s checking its phone.

To put it wildly, you can hear the fight song’s opening drumbeat, see the cheerleaders’ pom poms glimmering in the morning light.

Hans Zimmer: every note either asks or answers a question. That’s quite the discussion. I walked today along the path we used to take. Each leaf in every tree disagreeing into song.

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marilee dahlman warning: this product has no label during the second civil war, I was mostly concerned with my divorce.

But I certainly noticed when California burned down and the Faceless Prophet seized all power. He devised a solution to establish peace, which was to “eradicate all labels.” He and his disciples preached it everywhere: Labels are a rotting, false construct that limit our natural gifts, divide us, and enslave us. They must be destroyed. NO MORE LABELS.

Everyone dealt differently with the cultural shift to the new regimethat-has-no-name, the New Order, No Order, Disorder, whatever you’d

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like to call it, because, of course, we do not give it an official name.

People got furious at first, like they do, and then they adapted, like they do. The Faceless Prophet and his disciples were charismatic and organized. A steady drip of antidepressants in the water system probably helped their cause. At the time of the regime change, I was busy addressing my divorce feelings with specific cheeses, chocolates, and red wines, the precise naming of which would now violate various state laws. My ex-husband? I won’t say his name, but he’d been perfect. Race, gender, and sexual orientation completely compatible with my own. We met through one of those old DNA match websites. So much in common.

Like me, he also worked in public relations and drove a Mercedes. Our wedding had been beautiful, though I don’t remember much more than his shining eyes and my designer lace gown.

“I’m done,” he announced six months later. “On the inside, you’re just a mess.”

A mess—how’s that for a label? Legalities settled quickly. While the Faceless Prophet ascended to ultimate power and the rest of the country closed the border against us, I was sitting on the carpet, head in my hands, alone with my dead TV and laptop. No internet—that was the biggest adjustment. All kinds of labels flourished on the internet, so the Faceless shut it down for good, mostly by cutting off electricity and confiscating devices.

You had to get used to boredom. You had to get used to yourself.

A few landline phone calls confirmed my PR job no longer existed. I closed my condo’s shades against the luminous blaze of nighttime Los Angeles riots. I told myself this would end, like all crises did.

Out of the blue, a lawyer’s letter arrived. It informed me that my ex had died when his black Benz shot off an overpass, one of many car accidents that happened after Faceless forces removed all road signs. At the beginning of the coup, it actually paid off to stay in and do nothing. The Faceless distributed flyers telling us to do that: Be calm. Stay inside as much as possible. Transitions take time. Spend these peaceful moments de-labeling your life: clothes, food, beauty products, everything. Contemplate who you are and what you are, now that you can’t use a single label to define yourself.

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We will make friendly, impromptu visits to certain neighborhoods to assist in this process.

De-label? I peeled stickers off hand soap and detergent, clipped labels off a few old shirts and sweaters. I threw out jeans that no longer fit. That all felt good, in a way. But that was as far as I could go. I slipped an extra garment bag over my wedding dress and hid it in the back of my closet.

I kept my old wedding ring pinned to my bra, not willing to let go. Not yet.

Eventually, flames outside stopped burning at night and burned during the day, close enough I could see they were bonfires. People, some willing and others not, were chucking things into the blaze: purses, t-shirts with words and logos, and electronics. Flags, even. That’s when I knew it was real, and things weren’t ever going back.

Eventually, my emergency stores ran out. I needed to get food and wanted what I was used to. Traffic was light and every car crawled carefully, myself included. Red and blue lights flashed in my rearview mirror.

Something normal, I thought. My Mercedes is cute and red so it used to happen, getting pulled over for no reason. I twisted around and realized the police car was actually an unmarked dark blue sedan, no license plate.

My hands got sweaty on the wheel. Two guys got out.

They didn’t ask for my license and registration. They just took a blowtorch to the front of my car, removed the Mercedes-Benz symbol and tossed it in the ditch. They stripped off my license plates. As they left, the one with the blowtorch clanked it against my window, leaving a thin crack.

I sat in my car for a long time after they pulled away, breathing fast, fear slowly shifting to rage. I’d report them, the first chance I got.

My usual grocery store had gotten shuttered for non-compliance, but I found another one farther out. Its sign had been taken down. I’d only been able to tell it was a grocery because of the metal carts in the parking lot. Masked guards on patrol wore no badges or name tags, but they had to be security from their posture and weapons. I squeezed the wheel, watched them, and slowly got out of my car.

On the storefront, the Faceless Prophet had posted the latest maxim:

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This is how it’s been for years: the unlabeled make labeled products. The impoverished woman, the trafficked child. All real humans, but unknown.

Clothes and food are necessities. Is that how we have always justified it? No more! In striking the label from food and apparel we explode the iron jail of cheap and forced labor, in this land and far away.

Did you think, in your mindless purchase of cheap everything, you did not enslave? Take heart! In complying with this directive, we join together against corporate conglomerates. We empower ourselves and others. Our true selves.

Inside . . . it had happened. The Faceless Prophet was actually making it happen.

Better than bare shelves, I told myself. We’d all been through disasters and disaster prep. But as I tramped through the store, reusable bags under my arm, my brain dropped to a dazed, uncomprehending buzz.

No labels whatsoever. All packaging was plain brown paper, cardboard or plastic.

Every aisle was fully stocked. Overflowing, actually, with more goods stacked on the floor. Plenty of customers, too. All safe and quiet, with strains of overhead easy-listening and soft footsteps of the confused.

“We don’t know contents, so please don’t inquire.” Employees at the head of each aisle repeated the words in a polite monotone.

I wandered the store, sweat dripping down my back but my shoulders shivering.

Rows of uniform and unmarked boxes. The only thing identifiable was produce that didn’t come packaged—lettuce, apples, grapefruit, etc.

But everything else? No labels. And you could forget nutritional facts.

Hunger bit my belly, a flush heated my cheeks. I wanted some granola bars, at least. Was that too much to ask? The kind with chocolate on top.

Tears popped into my eyes.

I grabbed a box, tested its weight, shook it.

“None of that, please. Everyone will want to.”

My brain went blank. I spun toward the masked guy who’d spoken and hurled the box at his head. He batted it away. Angry words spluttered

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up my throat and died to nothing when two security guards grabbed me and hauled me out.

Another grocery, and another. All labels removed. Having a clue about product placement in aisles did no good. Everything arrived unlabeled in trucks, so workers stocked everything at random.

Let’s just say, I started eating a lot more bananas. I couldn’t waste money on boxes of plastic baggies when I thought I’d get crackers, or jars of coconut oil when I thought I’d get fat-free mayo. i got a job as a receptionist at a well-regarded optometrist. She had her work cut out for her with no labels allowed, though I heard that dental offices really went back to the dark ages.

Rumors abounded that the Faceless disciples would be inspecting our condo building soon. I knew I had to do something about my wedding dress and engagement ring. Maybe I could compromise. Keep one but dispose of the other.

I decided the dress had to go. Mainly because it was bulkier and, anyway, was holding back my personal life. It was a symbol. A past love gone wrong. Sometimes in quiet evenings, I felt I could hear the satin rustle, like it was sniffling in self-pity, just like me. I knelt in my closet, twisted the lace veil between my fingers, and made the decision. At the nearest burn-meet, the Faceless disciples crossed their arms and nodded approvingly. I knew it was something I had to do, but as flames ate up all the ivory fabric I cried anyway.

The inspecting disciples didn’t discover the ring, which I’d hid in a large flower pot, dumping dirt and growing fiery pink hibiscus over it.

That small victory didn’t last long. I met more of my neighbors and organized an informal market to trade needed goods. I wore a billowing skirt, white with red and blue accents, that I sewed myself. A knock on the door the next day, the skirt got confiscated and I was sentenced to three days in lockup. “It’s not even patriotic,” I said. “I like the color, the look, that’s all.” My words meant nothing. When I returned to my apartment, my wedding ring had disappeared. I just stood and stared at the empty flower pot. A different kind of anger lit within me. Not the kind that flares hot. A low and blue fire that burns all the time. It burned in my heart. It burned in my brain.

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I quit my job and did more things that got me thrown into jail. I spray-painted half-remembered logos onto government office buildings, joined a scheme to smuggle in cell phones with working internet, and threw myself into a big box store mob scene where we ripped open packages. I stole two high-speed blenders that I didn’t even want.

“You’re rebellious and determined,” the Faceless Prophet said on a visit to the penitentiary, speaking to all of us in the cell block, staring at us with milky blind eyes. “We struck the labels and revealed your true selves.”

A two-month sentence that time, the prisoner uniforms hardly different from what everyone wore on the outside. All genders were shut up together, so there was the possibility of meeting someone, but I had doubts about any man who’d been convicted of a felony. I got a letter from my parents stating that they’d settled in an unnamed gated community and had taken up croquet and growing carrots, and I could move in with them, sew and sell things at their local swap market.

Forget that. “I want to better myself,” I said to the judge. I came up with the right lingo. “Go back to college and free my spirit, smothered under society’s stamps.” When a spot opened up, I got released in exchange for making a pledge in front of other inmates and prison staff to follow all maxims.

I got a part-time job at a veggies café. The college campus was quiet, overgrowing with newly planted, drought-resistant plants and trees. The steel skeletons of burned-down buildings had been converted to meditation gardens. Things were different from my old days as a communications major taking a few graphic art electives. The new system involved arbitrary selection the first day of the semester. Students wander through buildings and choose a classroom at random, having no idea what will be taught or who the professor might be. The sign at the student union: Peace will be born only when we open our eyes and see we are all the same. Us versus them, red versus blue, wedge issues that tip the cup of poisonous power to spill one direction, and then another.

So, more college wasn’t entirely to better myself. I wanted to meet somebody again. But how could I know if someone was the right fit?

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There were no pins or backpack patches or tattoos that could possibly give a clue if someone might be a good match or wasn’t worth the time.

If it had been up to me, I would have chosen a practical degree program, given that society had regressed to a pioneer days-type existence.

Manufacturing had dropped off dramatically. Without brands or marketing, as the Faceless Prophet had predicted, corporations crumbled.

Now manufacturers made a product and shipped it to big box stores to be bought up by unofficial middlemen who operated swap markets.

Liquor trade was most popular. By then I’d upgraded to harder stuff than wine. i stayed out of jail during college. Halfway through my degree program I got sick, found a healer down the street, and took the jar of plain white pills she pointed at. Two days later the fever broke. A year later I went back and, after some coaxing, she slipped me a note with meeting information for an alcoholic recovery support group.

On the romantic front, I made a point of trying to keep an open mind, but it kept not working out. Without labels, things were just too hit or miss.

There were rebellions, here and there. The Prophet took to traveling with syringe-carrying disciples with gentle voices and hard eyes. True believers acid sprayed those who committed clothes infractions. Jail sentences got upgraded to medical blinding to become just like the Faceless Prophet. Some people like it that there isn’t as much economic disparity. Now people are on an “even playing field.” Evenings are filled with candlelight quiet. There is community based on dependence and daily interaction. Exchanging clothes for paper, herbs for bread.

One day, as I scooped out an avocado at the café, there was blinding light, trumpet fanfare, a sudden rain shower of confetti. Ok, it wasn’t like that. But this person was The One. Such a term has no meaning beyond what I ascribe to it, and no labels would even begin to describe this person anyway. He’s not exactly what I expected; he’s a mechanic and a meat-eater and was only in the café to escape the scorching sun for a few minutes. He follows the rules. Most people do, though not all.

Late one night, studying for my last final, I spied a gleam of tin foil within the melting candle wax. I picked it out and un-scrunched it to

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find a tiny silver necklace. The pendant was three symbols, as incomprehensible to me as Egyptian hieroglyphics, but symbols nonetheless. I held it close to the light, enjoying the gleam off the warm metal.

After four years of general studies classwork, I’d randomly taken more medieval history than anything else. The administrators awarded me a general degree and rejected my request to write a thesis on the ancient Roman philosopher Boethius. “You’d call yourself a historian,” they said.

A historian? I would probably call myself other things. The fact that he’d been imprisoned and executed for treason is what intrigued me. On graduation day, I slipped on the necklace and hid it under my label-less sweater. When the Faceless commencement speaker spoke of a “glow of truth,” I remembered neon graffiti splashed on downtown concrete, parade flashes of red, white and blue, hot cars, designer purses, Instagram posts of perfect kitchens . . . okay, maybe I hadn’t defined myself in the best ways before. But now, I touched my necklace through layers of fabric and imagined protesting. Screaming chants and waving a sign.

My tongue felt as hot and heavy as coal; my stomach churned like it was filled with sulfur.

I stood up, intending to yell something, but found I couldn’t speak a single word. It was too dangerous. For myself, my partner, my recovery support group, even the people sitting next to me.

“You’ve got to move out,” I told my partner afterwards, kicking a stack of pickled carrot jars, scattering them across the floor. Maybe I was still a mess. But I’d finally become a mess with a mission. “I won’t be smothered by a slow burn, status quo existence of accepting a life without labels. I’m going to fight back. And it’s too risky for you.”

My partner nodded, like it was something he expected all the time.

He stayed.

I began sewing dresses of my own design. I traded them for food and black-market thumb drives. I’m back in the field of public relations, except now I’m selling my own philosophy. In a hidden pocket on every dress, I stitch this tiny label: Made by Ravaa.

Rebel, Artist, Vegetarian, Academic, Addict.

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When the fires of revolution scorch away everything you thought you were, when flames destroy false and limiting labels, you will finally find yourself. You will know yourself. You will be transformed. Dip a finger into those black ashes and paint the words that describe who you really are.

I include a thumb drive with more words.

I’ve left my partner. I took off down the highway in my old red Benz, basic necessities and smuggled electronics stowed in the trunk. I don’t stop for flashing lights. Ever since these troubles began, people have said, “California is an inferno.” But it’s raining again. Even as I write this, pulled over on an empty stretch of highway, purple and black thunderheads roll over the Pacific, cold rain slams the windshield, sweeps down and drenches everything, congealing ashes and soil that will feed new growth. I’ve got spray paint. Black and purple and bright yellow like the colors of the storm rolling in, and it’s time for California to explode into a million colors again.

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kimberly ann priest

divorce My husband had honey-colored eyes and honey-colored hair and he broke his teeth into the flesh of a strawberry as though it were something to jump rope with, never a bleed of juice left on his lips.

His shoulders were shrined in cotton year-round, taut to the bone with summer rituals of baling hay, and in winter the rigor of shovels or pulling our children in sleds.

He could bounce a smile off an egg freshly dropped from our chickens in the barn behind the house where he spent hours adapting the rhythm of a pitchfork to his tenor— its strong, sonorous vibrato rising over the grunts of his horses, all of which he nuzzled daily, kissed, and called by name, commanding them to lift their legs, inspecting their hooves, digging mud and rock out of their shoes; and they did with ease, because they knew he loved them.

He would, with equal care, tighten the lids on every jar of jam we canned together with berries we had picked together, cleaned, then cooked. And after a long day of barn work and jars cooling on towels in the kitchen, he’d wash the sweat off of his body in the shower, careful to turn on the overhead fan to keep the bathroom from filling with steam.

At night, I would lie next to him in bed and, with my eyes, rove the stubble on his jaw, under his chin, down the steeple of his neck, answer the shallow of his breath with my questions.

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stephanie mcconnell

pen & brown wash, white lead Many men have liked my breasts.

One preferred my eyes. His word for them was “hell”. You do not have a soul, C.S. Lewis said. Beds are for bodies and elsewhere is for spirits. A thousand bodyguards armored in virginity could not keep St. Ursula safe. You do not have a soul. You are a soul. Boys who wanted my breasts touched held kissed. Most of them sucked.

St. Agatha served her breasts up like floured table rolls. You are a soul. Boy, be kind to my bones until I come back. You have a body. The images of martyrdom comfort me. Shoulder in a lion’s jaw, chest thrumming with arrows, naked torso cooking in a cauldron. You are a soul. You have a body. A saint only ever offers that faraway stare, even while cradling her own severed head. As if it is all so everyday, like carrying home a loaf of bread.

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hm cotton

muddy water baptism The moon, lifting her skirts to show a bit of leg, cast her fish-net tights and caught us looking.

We hush and turn whiskey-eyes to the fatwood fire where her luna moth cousin dies in flame: gibbous wings powdering in ash.

Across our river-rock ring, you Adonis in a Coleman glow, puffing out verse and Marlboro smoke. Your cigarette dips with the stresses of iambs and I-am-nots. And we have heard your word and declared it good. Midnight comes on.

We shed our skins and stroke through the reflection of God’s eye. Rooting ourselves knee-deep in silt, we wash away the sweaty sting of our names and pluck new ones from the reeds.

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rooja mohassessy

quince This April, blossoms weigh on the quince, its slender arms covered in volutes about to break into hives once the rains should pass. Last fall, I drove five hours to Clovis and dropped my harvest of seven at my mother’s door. They’d peaked, past posing on the mantle for a still-life, their perfume still a head-turner like a woman cresting, her prime soon behind her. Amoo always kept to a few objects, the blue adobe jar, its rippled mouth hardest to render, and a pome fruit, a medlar or two, their spears in a tangle. But when the quince arrived in the market, we transported the Mallorca platter to the studio and I, the young assistant, stood sentinel as he balanced each fruit on thumb and two fingers, careful with the dreamy fuzz on the golden skin. He tipped and tilted till the light bared the most fetching profile, and one by one, pressing their hips into each other they sat, blossom-ends up.

And where the flesh dimpled, where the severed stalk still held to a last leaf, he left ample room, as though in a moment the breeze would enter and pass through the arrangement in praise.

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the common misfortunes of everyday plants renee emerson

belle point press , 2023 $

9.95

book review

will justice drake

the title of this chapbook from new, Mid-Southern small press Belle Point Press layers meaning in the same way as the poems throughout.

Though it suggests straightforward poems about misfortunes and plants (indeed they are about that), the poems hide, as plants their roots, that which troubles the speaker. The title’s adjectives allude doubly to the struggle the speaker endures, which are not merely common, but commonplace. The misfortunes are frequent and everywhere. In some poems, the surface appears lush and alive, and in others, something endures despite apparent death.

Renee Emerson succeeds most in the chapbook’s overall cohesion of sentiment. The first poem, “Grapefruit Tree in Cubicle,” begins the speaker’s mode of melancholic defiance, with diction that juxtaposes the natural and the mundane: half-grapefruit, Styrofoam, office fern, and technology-gray. Ultimately the title image of a confined tree represents the central sentiment of a more important work happening in spite of “work,” and, “some decades later, you’d always say / it was the best thing you did there.”

Whether addressing the subject directly or observing as a third party, the speaker reveals what important work is being done. Subjects both floral and human defy death, even death we create. “It’s easy / to believe people are the hazards,” the speaker says in “Backyard Sabbath,” and because of the poem’s placement midway through the book, the

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reader would want to agree with both sides of the thought, that people are, in fact, the problem, and much of death is still beyond human control. Here is Renee Emerson’s other great strength: skillful subtext.

The speaker continues to lament nature’s “useless bicker with progress” (“Roadside Buffalo Grass”) while praising its “coiling violence” Ode to Kudzu. Of course she knows what this may mean for humans as they wrongly expect “that God’s good earth can only give / us safe things.”

People in these poems cannot, or will not, see the conflict and its implicit outcome.

Emerson deftly uses metaphor to support as much, as the speaker’s family is “bent as we were / to our tight economy of form paperwork” (“Fern at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital”). Again in “Clearance Plants,” the poem subtly turns and becomes an extended metaphor when “most won’t put money / down on anything likely to die.” Death becomes calculated risk subsumed in the speaker’s transactional language. She distances herself from some specific yet unspeakable pain. Yet Emerson reveals her patiently constructed meaning in the penultimate poem, “Do You Still Pray?” wherein the speaker begins, “Yes. I write prayers on receipts,” but later speaks what was previously unnamed. The final poem completes the movement, helping the chapbook do what a well-compiled work should do. “Oak in Basement” returns to the first poem in its central image and in its perspective. Even the title’s grammar recalls the opening poem as Emerson’s speaker again shows the reader a tree within a room, yet this speaker, alone with the tree this time, sees something of herself as she addresses it directly. First she asks the grim question, “What is your exit plan?” but by the end she hopes this tree, against its misfortune, will at least outgrow or else cast off what humankind has made.

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contributors kathryn bratt-pfotenhauer is the author of Bad Animal (Riot in Your Throat) and Small Geometries (Ethel) The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, their work has been published or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, Crazyhorse, Poet Lore, and others. They attend Syracuse University’s MFA program. hm cotton is the managing editor of Birmingham Poetry Review, contributing editor for NELLE, and production manager for both journals. Her writing appears in places such as Greensboro Review, Poetry South, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She is the founding director of the SPARK Writing Festival and teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. marilee dahlman grew up in the Midwest and now lives in Washington, DC. Her other stories have appeared in Apparition Lit, The Bitter Oleander, Cleaver, Metaphorosis, Molotov Cocktail, Mystery Weekly, Orca Literary, Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter @marilee_dahlman. will justice drake lives in north Alabama, where he teaches English literature and coaches soccer. His poems and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the Southern Poetry Anthology, vol. X, Mid/South, the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Flyway, Trinity House Review, Poetry South, and other publications. He received his MFA from North Carolina State University. Twitter: @thewilljustice; willjusticedrake.com tyler dunston is a poet, visual artist, and PhD candidate at the University of Michigan studying literature. He received his MFA in poetry from Boston University, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, Nimrod International, Red Wheelbarrow, and elsewhere.

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ryan habermeyer the author of The Science of Lost Futures (BoA). His stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Cincinnati Review, Blackbird, Puerto del Sol, Seneca Review, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Salisbury University. Find him at ryanhabermeyer.com gabriella adriana iacono is a writer and artist from New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cherry Tree, minnesota review, Southeast Review, SAND, Josephine Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her cinepoem “Land Erasure” was recently commissioned by the Aurora Picture Show and Public Poetry Houston.

Iacono currently lives in Houston, Texas. justin jannise is the author of How to be Better

by Being Worse (BOA Editions), which won the 19th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. A graduate of Yale, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Houston, Justin teaches at Prairie View A&M University. nick lantz is the author of four poetry collections, most recently You, Beast (University of Wisconsin Press). He teaches in the MFA program at Sam Houston State University and lives in Huntsville, TX. tim lehnert lives in Cranston, RI, with his family and dog, Zeus. He writes short fiction and one-act plays, and his bread-and-butter work includes writing petitions on behalf of “individuals of extraordinary ability” so that they can obtain green cards. Occasionally, he serves as a “standard patient actor” for the RI Nursing Education Center. eleanor levine's writing has appeared in more than 90 publications, including Fiction, Evergreen Review, and Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters. She is the author of the poetry collection, Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria (Unsolicited Press) and the short story collection, Kissing a Tree Surgeon (Guernica Editions).

angie macri is the author of Sunset Cue (Bordighera), winner of the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize, and Underwater Panther (Southeast Missouri State University), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs and teaches at Hendrix College. jen mcclanaghan was educated at Antioch College, Columbia University, and Florida State University. After earning her PhD, she completed a two-year postdoc as resident scholar at The Southern Review, where she edited a special issue on Americana. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, New England Review, and in Best American Poetry. stephanie mcconnell is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared recently, or are forthcoming, in The Midway Journal, Plainsongs, The Fourth River, River Heron Review, Quibble, BarBar, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, Sugar House Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and The Worcester Review. She has lived many places, but still only writes about Pennsylvania. rooja mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet.

She is a 2022 MacDowell Fellow and a graduate of the Pacific University MFA program in Oregon. Her debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Prize and will be released by (Elixer Press) in February, 2023. michele moseley is a retired high school English teacher and school administrator. She lived in San Francisco and Nashville before returning to the Carolinas and is now pursuing small town life as a writer. She is particularly drawn to stories that reveal the ordinary as something beautiful. will musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in TIMBER, The McNeese Review, Oyez Review, Tampa Review, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove or williammusgrove.com.

stephanie niu is a poet from Marietta, Georgia and the author of She Has Dreamt Again of Water (Diode Editions). Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Waxwing, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City. greg november is a short story writer, college instructor, and senior submissions reader for New England Review. He was runner-up for The Missouri Review’s 2021 Miller Audio Prize.

His stories have most recently appeared in Boulevard, Carve, Epiphany, and Juked, among other places. He has an MFA from UC, Irvine. kristian o'hare's writing has appeared in Third Coast, The Citron Review, San Francisco State University's Fourteen Hills, South 85 Journal, Mud Season Review, New Orleans Review, The Indianapolis Review, Foglifter, Hobart, and Reservoir Road Literary Journal. He lives in San Francisco and teaches first-year writing and creative writing at San Jose State University. kimberly ann priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird, finalist in the American Best Book Awards, and chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place, Parrot Flower, and Still Life. She is an associate poetry editor for Nimrod International Journal and assistant professor at Michigan State University. randy reynolds is a writer based in Austin, Texas. His writing quietly explores such themes as grief, love, and hopefulness. christina seymour is the author of When is a Burning Tree (Glass Lyre Press) and the chapbook Flowers Around Your Soft Throat (Structo Press). Her poems also appear in North American Review, The Moth, Cimarron Review, Wick Poetry Center’s exhibit, “Speak Peace: American Voices Respond to Vietnamese Children’s Paintings,” and elsewhere.

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contributors cont. jeanne wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections, her most recent, Everything Turns Into Something Else, was published in 2020 as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize. She is the winner of the 2021 Joy Harjo Award and the 2022 Cloudbank Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, SWWIM and The Southern Review.

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