Raleigh Review 12.2 (Fall 2022) E-Issue

new poetry by colin bailes, allison blevins, mary buchinger, caroline chavatel, julia kolchinsky dasbach, joshua davis, gregory djanikian, j.r. evans, grace ezra, loisa fenichell, c. francis fisher, stephanie kaylor, peter laberge, justin lacour, cass lintz, owen mcleod, anne dyer stuart and fiction from erica jenks henry, katherine joshi, andrea lewis, caroline mccoy, john salter, mackenzie sanders featuring illustrations by nora kelly

“The night after my father’s body slid into its oven, / not at all like bread, / with none of its promise, //

RALEIGH REVIEW

featuring the winner of the laux / millar poetry prize

I wanted to make someone pregnant.”

— from allison blevins & joshua davis’ “the fever’s children” winner, laux / millar poetry prize

vol. 12.2, Fall 2022

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

52000>

2013

9 780990 752288

vol. 12.2, Fall 2022

RALEIGH REVIEW

RALEIGH REVIEW

vol. 12.2 fall 2022

RALEIGH REVIEW VOL. 12.2 fall 2022

publisher

assistant fiction editor

co-editors

assistant poetry editor

Rob Greene Bryce Emley Landon Houle

fiction editor Jessica Pitchford

poetry editor

Leah Poole Osowski

editorial staff / fiction

​ ailihana Alfonseca, Chas Carey, D Madison Cyr, Susan Finch, Robert McCready, Jeff McLaughlin, Erin Osborne, Daniel Tam-Claiborne

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

Shelley Senai Tyree Daye

consulting poetry editor Leila Chatti

copyeditor

Garrett Davis

editorial staff / poetry

Ina Cariño, Chelsea Harlan, D. Eric Parkison, Sam Piccone Melanie Tafejian, Annie Woodford

illustrator Nora Kelly

layout & page design Alexis Olson

literary publishing program interns Chris Ingram Jeremee Jeter Da'Jah Jordan

Raleigh Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, Fall 2022 Copyright © 2022 by Raleigh Review Raleigh Review founded as RIG Poetry February 21, 2010 | Robert Ian Greene Cover image " Haiku Collage" by Christine Kouwenhoven.

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 john salter

11

Kilowatts

caroline mccoy

22

Swept Away

katherine joshi

34

Burning

erica jenks henry

60

Aunt Mary

mackenzie sanders

79

Open Range

andrea lewis

93

Radiant

gregory djanikian

1

Later Years

stephanie kaylor

4

[For years I believed…]

5

Memoriam

6

Telescope

7

Book of Parables

14

To our firsts

16

The Fever’s Children

poetry

colin bailes

allison blevins & joshua davis

poetry cont. loisa fenichell

17

Another name for weather

18

Touching

julia kolchinsky dasbach

19

The first letter at the beginning of the end

owen mcleod

55

Dayshift at the Place of Safekeeping

caroline chavatel

56

Sonnet for Use Value

57

Failed Sonnet: The Money Feeds Us

j.r. evans

58

How to do it

c. francis fisher

59

Afterlife

justin lacour

75

Friday, 9:59 p.m.

76

Sunday, 1:04 p.m.

77

Friday, 8:37 a.m.

78

Saturday, 4:00 p.m

anne dyer stuart

88

Fourteen Summers

peter laberge

89

Stripping

mary buchinger

98

Incendiary

poetry cont. grace ezra

cass lintz contributors

91

I am told again that I am not gentle

92

Send Me Something Else

98

Tour of Separations

raleigh review vol. 12.2 fall 2022

from the editor i like to think of telling the truth and being honest as two different things. Telling the truth is a straight line from one point to another, while being honest is a passage, more of a toward than a to. Where truth is a clear tour arriving inevitably at its end, honesty is a roaming. When you tell someone the truth, you give a provable, objective fact. When you’re honest with someone, you offer something of yourself in the process. There’s vulnerability in honesty, something carried out from the interior.

Both poems in this issue by Laux/Millar Poetry Prize-winners Allison Blevins (also a finalist for last issue’s Geri Digiorno Prize) and Joshua Davis demonstrate the honest messiness of loss, of grief’s complicated grace. In their prize-winning poem “The Fever’s Children,” we see in the loss of a father not sadness, exactly, but a set of feelings that are sharper, more dangerous and shifting. In “To our firsts,” a father’s shadow returns even over physical longing, and as readers we’re left considering whether any of our own desires can ever really complete themselves, whether some histories will ever stop haunting us.

Finalist Loisa Fenichell reaches similarly to describe the indescribable.

“I want to touch the beginning of anything,” the speaker pleads in “Another Name for Weather,” a poem grappling with the beauty of a world capable of housing unnamable tragedy. “All out of voice,” Fenichell continues in “Touching,” “I jot down some notes that later, like a grief, I am unable to decipher.” And maybe that’s what grief is made of—its availability and shapelessness, how we’ll never truly know it though we’ll turn to face it again and again anyway like the poem’s shot bird, knowing already what we’ll find.

Aside from being our annual Laux & Millar Prize issue, this issue is particularly special for us—thanks to artist and musician Nora Kelly, for

the first time in our 12+ years, our pages also feature original illustrations that have been handmade for pieces within the issue. We’re excited to see our magazine continue to evolve with new elements like these, but we’re also excited to continue in more predictable ways: publishing more emotionally honest poetry, fiction, and art.

◆

Bryce Emley, co-editor

gregory djanikian

later years Sometimes a sadness comes over me and I think a house with its dark roof and windows has entered our lives, and the wineglass elms have disappeared from the street of dreams.

I should not be leafing through our address book with the many crossed-out names, the pile of letters marked “undeliverable.”

I should not be imagining that the birthday lilies you brought me yesterday have already begun to droop.

Where is that photograph I love of us, or rather of our younger versions, sitting by a fountain in our summery selves, the water behind us arcing from a fish’s mouth as if the fish held a river inside it?

It’s been years since we’ve felt so inexhaustible.

Still, there you are walking down the porch steps in your bathrobe to get the morning paper, even in snow, even on your one good knee.

It’s remarkable how we’ve come this far, your hands holding the news of the day as if we were part of it, the sun polishing the kitchen floor, the toaster tinging its bell.

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I wish it could stay like this.

I wish goodbye were an archaic word we could cross out without consequence, something left over from the old languages.

All the headlines have an ache to them.

All the stories keep holding out for a better ending.

And here we are, having our breakfast cherries before all the trees have been sheared away.

Here’s the honey I pass to you, love, honey made from a thousand bees tonguing a million flowers of sweet clover.

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raleigh review

nora kelly

3

stephanie kaylor

[for years i believed...]

For years I believed that the mourning dove was named the morning dove, because I didn’t yet hear pain— only consistency, their persistence, before I learned how often these choirs are both the same.

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memoriam In a corner of the backyard she buries fake silvers, half a dining set, pretending to have anything left, that they didn’t take the bones, even the bones.

Four empty chairs at the table; a single copper cup of water— it has been there for two weeks or two months, even the empty air declining to fill itself with this small offering. This devotion, some fat fish flopping in the wildness’s claw, and then escape: to learn to swim toward anything; to never know a route but the tides of away.

To pull away.

stephanie kaylor

5

colin bailes

telescope It is after school hours, approaching dusk. My mother and I pass through the gate of our backyard to enter the school grounds, a hundred yards off the buildings refulgent in the growing dark.

I can just discern the glow of dimly lit hallways, see into the vague caverns of light so familiar during the day. Centered in the baseball diamond’s clay geometry is a ring of telescopes. We are guided by amateur astronomers to each one, each one increasing in aperture, magnitude. At the last, finderscope pointed at a blank emptiness, I press my eye to the black eyepiece—distances collapse, and an image of Saturn—planet tightly bound by rings—totals my field of vision.

When I lift my eye from the lens, the orange and yellow sphere lingers. For a few moments, it is the only shape I see.

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book of parables My mother gifts me clippings from her garden, takes a pair of scissors to the whole tangled mess— Guiding me around the backyard, she shoves purple spiderwort, ruellia, devil’s-backbone, golden trumpet, shrimp and snake plant, blue porterweed into garbage bags for transport, cutting each stem below the root node.

When I get home, I plant them all directly into the earth, spread fresh soil and fertilizer.

After two weeks, most everything, except for the snake plant and purple spiderwort, has withered and died— the cuttings not properly propagated first in water to allow the ends to branch and root. ◆ On the only bookshelf in my parents’ house, in the living room next to an outdated volume of photography and an encyclopedia of Greek statues, sits a Gutenberg facsimile. The hulking spine is white-leather bound, the crimson bookmark—a silk ribbon sewn directly into the binding— dangles like a tongue from underneath. Gilded fore-edges,

colin bailes

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gold letters engraved into the pillowed hardcover with a burin, the spine emblazoned in gold.

Inside, the ornate Blackletter cascades down the page, illuminated floral designs branching from serifs, connecting to Gothic images of disciples. ◆ I remember one of the churches to which my grandfather was appointed, a modest southern Methodist building, wood-paneled sanctuary, slim windows of stained glass.

Laid between bars of lead—the Parable of the Sower, a lone tunicked figure, harvesting bag slung over shoulder, an outstretched hand absentmindedly tossing seed. ◆ When my grandfather died, we cleared out the house and the shed, threw away entire boxes of Bibles, all his sermons stuffed into desk drawers and folders—his tall handwriting

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raleigh review

in red and blue ink sprawling across thousands of loose-leaf pages, impossible to read. ◆ Over the phone, my brother is telling me about sinopia, how the fresco painters first applied an ochre outline to the plaster, a sketch from which to work, before starting on the final product.

He tells me that you can still see the red threads of pigment beneath the haloes of saints, remnants of error and fault before they were polished to perfection. ◆ And I’m thinking of the brown anole I skewered as a boy, from mouth to asshole with a twig, twining black intestines on a stick like some curious and tormenting god— I was learning where I ended and the world began. ◆ All I see is a band of blue bordered on top by a lighter shade of blue

colin bailes

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and hovering above a thin strip of ochre sand.

On the beach, tangled and clumped, dried stalks of sea oats—like bamboo, or the reeds of a pipe, only thinner, more brittle.

Behind me, a wall of sea grapes— and further inland, oleander and small plots of Norfolk Island Pine.

Ahead, the water flounces in fitful volleys—melting sandcastles children have built along shore. ◆ My grandfather is sitting in his maroon recliner, taking out his teeth for my amusement— the left canine and incisor wired to a bicuspid.

He laughs, smiling, displays a wide black void in the gate of his mouth.

Every time we visit, he begins with the same imperative—Tell me a story.

But I never do.

I am telling it now.

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raleigh review

john salter kilowatts the writers and poets were in town for the annual conference. People like me were in ecstasy, drunk on literature, starstruck. Ellen Gilchrist winked at me after signing my copy of Victory Over Japan. Jay McInerny bought a round for all of us clustered around him at Whitey’s. At a party at John Little’s house, I spotted you bent over the gas stove, holding your hair back with one hand while you lit your cigarette on the blue flame. There were a thousand lighters in the house but you chose the burner, and that hooked me. I attempted some small talk that seemed that much smaller after being awash in brilliant discussion all week. You were the first woman I ever saw with a diamond stud in the side of her nose. After all, I was only twenty-one, and this was North Dakota, always late to every trend. Yes, it hurt, you said, but cocaine

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helped. Cocaine! We remained in the kitchen, drinking wine. You were a former English major, though not a graduate, and liked to take in the conference every spring. An old drinking friend of John Little’s, like so many were. That’s cool, I said. Did you see my eye twitch when you told me you were thirty-three and married, with a baby? Your husband was in the Air Force, was a truck driver, was a secret agent, something like that, because all I heard was that he was gone a lot. Gone a lot. You were dressed in many layers, like some Victorian doll, a skirt with paisley tights underneath, a silk blouse over a tank top, tall brown boots that laced up.

The more wine I drank, the more I wanted to peel you, to get at least halfway there before the night was over. John Little reeled in, found us inches apart, made a viewfinder with his fingers and took our picture.

When he left the kitchen with a handful of limes, he shut off the light.

I kissed you and after a bit, your reluctant lips softened. Whatever I had going on in my life, and I had a lot going on, seemed to be on a distant planet. A ride home? Yes, of course, and we slipped out the back door and climbed into my ancient Catalina, an environmental catastrophe but with enough room in the back seat for a heavy-breathed, almost desperate assignation. I’d been pulling current from that electrified air all week, and it arced and crackled like some Tesla experiment, right there on the ripped upholstery. We lay there for a bit, our bodies cooling in the spring air, not talking. Then we dressed and I noticed how long it took you, how methodically you arranged and straightened and buttoned and smoothed. You weren’t quite ready to go home, so we drove out to Highway Two and cruised west, listening to music, smoking cigarettes. I talked about the literature I was in love with, have you read any Cormac McCarthy, have you read any Raymond Carver, I talked about my own stories on hopeful submission to The Paris Review and Esquire, my plans for graduate school, my disdain for academia, my thoughts on extraterrestrial life when we saw a light that turned out to be a B-52 flying very low toward the Air Force base. You seized my hand and read my palm in the dashboard glow, following my lifeline with your fingernail.

“You’re going to live a long time,” you said. What about my love line, I wanted to know. “You don’t seem to have one,” you said, and didn’t laugh when I laughed. You lived in a house only a few blocks from John Little’s, closer to the river, in a neighborhood that ten years later

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raleigh review

would be razed by floodwaters. I want to call you, I said, because I did, I really did, this was delicious new territory, this was an Andre Dubus story. You nodded and wrote your number in the back cover of my Ellen Gilchrist book, where I would see it thirty years later while packing up my library after yet another divorce. I want you to know I gave pause, as the poets say, when I saw the number in your looping, feminine hand.

I did call you a week after the conference was over, from a payphone at the Bronze Boot, where one of my sort-of girlfriends waited tables. You sounded reserved, even a little sad, and I wondered if the husband was in the background. Could I see you? Yes, you said. Could I pick you up tomorrow for lunch? That would be okay, you said. And I intended to, I truly did. But when I came around the corner and saw you on the porch, holding your baby across your chest, I rolled right on by, back into my lesser sins. I wish I could say it was some moral stand, but it was really just cowardice, my dear. You were wrong about my love line, though. I do have one, it’s just broken and hard to trace, and you might have seen that, had the light been better.

◆

john salter

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allison blevins & joshua davis finalist for the laux/millar poetry prize

to our firsts, When I unbuttoned your shirt, I was a jewel thief, a mythmaker smearing red ink—dove’s blood— into flowered margins. When I said, Finish in my mouth, I meant: Love me. Please love me. I am shattered.

When I lifted my body to straddle your body, everything turned blue-red like a car chase siren. In that blurred and soft alarm, I learned words would always slice with sharper teeth. I put you inside me, thought about my father’s empty shoes like boats docked by our front door.

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nora kelly

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The night after my father’s body slid into its oven, / not at all like bread, / with none of its promise, // I wanted to make someone pregnant. / I wanted to trammel my father’s soul, if he had one, if anyone does / before it could escape. // We’re tightening locks, anointing doorways against plague. / I remember the nurse with her butterfly needle. / She stuck me three times. / Come on, little thingy. Please work. // Once I stood in a ring of seven-year-olds. / When I said, my dad has AIDS, / they scattered like starlings. // I long to write a line that rises / like a mangrove / out of water, into air unmoving, surrounded by black islands of mosquitoes / as dull light carves letters inside gaps between leaf and leaf shadow. // I long to write the line that slides clean / as the bloody knife you left in the sink, grandma, / cleaner even—sharp as the tip of a Spanish bayonet.

From the Sylvia Townsend Warner novel, Summer Will Show

the fever's children

winner of the laux/millar poetry prize

loisa fenichell finalist for the laux/millar poetry prize

another name for weather The moon shines, far too beautiful through this window— it’s incredible. There must be another word for it. Another sentence for oceans and mountains dissolve. Some nouns cannot grow in the concrete behind this apartment. In a small droplet of mind, I see it—a tapestry depicting specks of mountain, depicting desert, showing the two of us moving through an unkempt city. I want to touch the beginning of anything, to make something that can be held. Instead, I tally the ways the pigeons shine, the ways you never eat your breakfast.

Our stomachs are parcels of sky toppled over. I’ve told you about the nights I went to concerts alone, the days when all I could write was the name of the deli across the way—what does it matter? You leave.

In the bath, I watch as the baby bleeds around my thighs.

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finalist for the laux/millar poetry prize

touching Night chirps slowly, delayed and fragmented by the spring. All out of voice, I jot down some notes that later, like a grief, I am unable to decipher. There’s the face a sound can make, shrieking, after discovering that the dead bird’s body still hangs from a thread attached to a tree’s dirty limb.

I grew thirsty. I cried. Because the fog was glistening, undermining my favorite season. My uncle was in the woods, pointing, whispering, look, look. I did look.

Hearing the shot was just too simple.

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raleigh review

julia kolchinsky dasbach

the first letter at the beginning of the end April 13, 2020

Dear L, The tomatoes have gone bad in the bottom drawer and there are tornado warnings—I thought you’d like to know about my fridge.

When my son asked for a scary story, I thought of all the frozen fruit that will not rot, so I told him, when I was his age on the Black Sea, I stuck my finger into a beached log and a wasp chased me down the Odesa sand and my hand swelled to a sun and it’s raining so hard here, L, like what I imagine our grandfather’s combat boots sounded like leaving, and there, my mother put a halved tomato on the sting because acid was the only thing we had to stop swell, and here, the baby just woke wailing and our street is flooding and I try to shut her mouth with my breast so her brother stays asleep as she wants and wants and not what I can give and I think, I have no ark but this ragged body that never learned to float. Still, she clings to its faults, its flaws and fallacies, unaware of all the ways its failing us. She doesn’t mind

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the tomatoes, L, how our past keeps filling our children’s mouths.

How do they not notice it’s gone so very bad? The day after Easter Sunday, nothing’s risen but fog, and a week after Passover, bread and the Red Sea stay unleavened in our people’s homes.

Little did either testament know flood and sickness were just the beginning. My son acts out the plagues, becoming beast, lice, frog, and locusts, slamming his hands and trains on hardwood like boots and trains and this rain and the men he comes from who never came home. He throws heavy things at his sister, unafraid of death or hurt because what child of any history understands permanence. Parents always come back, they told him in school in another past when we could leave the house.

How do you explain this to your children, L? Our air turned plague? Street turned river? Present turned strange past even our parents couldn’t have imagined. I wish I had your gift for jokes and baking, for beginning in laughter, so instead, I’ll try to end there, with my children, their bellies so full these days, faces the opposite of famine, laughing harder than this rain, L, I swear, laughing like there are no endings.

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I guess that’s the punchline after all, I’m going to eat you like a tomato, my son says into his sister’s rising stomach and their laughter, L, so hard and full, it wakes the dead.

julia kolchinsky dasbach

21

caroline mccoy swept away claire had rubbed the lace between her fingers, assessed its cheapness, before sliding the four-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent thong inside the sleeve of her jacket. That was a mistake, lingering over the merchandise, pawing a pair of garish green underwear that she neither needs nor wants.

The usual assumptions will work in her favor. It goes without saying that she has five dollars to spare. Just look at her. Pale face free from all but the berry-hued lip balm she swiped from the grocery checkout aisle. Hair pin straight and glossy with a leave-in treatment she “forgot” to scan during her last trip to Walmart. She is dressed plainly, in jeans and an ivory-colored sweater. Her jacket is a crisp, gray wool. A woman like Claire wouldn’t be caught dead wearing this failing regional depart-

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ment store’s tacky panties…. Or maybe it’s better to feign confusion, say she recently suffered a concussion and might she borrow the phone to call her husband because—well, look at that—she’s misplaced hers, along with her driver’s license and all identifying cards—credit, library, Costco, insurance, AAA. She’s planning her defense while being herded about the store by an adolescent-looking security guard who has said nothing other than, “Please come with me, ma’am.” It seems that overnight Claire has transitioned from a miss to a ma’am, as if all of central North Carolina convened on the eve of her thirty-third birthday and decided that it was time to stop humoring her. The kid ushers her past cosmetics and through shoes toward a mirrored door at the rear of the store. The two-way glass isn’t fooling anybody. Beyond her reflection, she sees movement, the lurch of a shadow.

The door swings open and reveals a woman Claire takes to be a manager. She is trim, angular, and wearing a well-tailored suit. Her silvery hair is pulled tight against her scalp, accentuating the penciled peaks of her eyebrows and the burgundy pinch of her lips. She smells sweet with the kind of fragrance that appeals to both teenage girls and old ladies, but her appearance is sour. She does not seem like the kind of woman who yields easily to indignation, so Claire decides right then to proceed with polite bewilderment. She smiles expectantly at the woman, as if she is awaiting something as banal as directions.

The woman steps aside and motions for Claire and the security guard to enter. The room is dimly lit and cramped, with a metal filing cabinet, a narrow desk and rolling office chair, and rows of mounted shelves holding cleaning supplies and busted inventory affixed with round red stickers. Claire’s gaze rests on the desk and the boxy security monitor stationed there. It is blessedly outdated, flashing black-and-white images captured by poorly positioned cameras—the glass-topped corrals that populate the cosmetics section, a register abutting a dishware display, a sea of circular garment racks. Grainy customers and employees filter in and out of each shot, occasionally revealing their faces but more often only the crowns of their heads. The rent-a-cop who oversees this makeshift security station is still standing behind her, so Claire steps toward the woman and allows him to pass and take his seat in front of the glow-

caroline mccoy

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ing screen. She senses that the woman’s eyes have remained fixed on her since she entered this room, so she meets them now and smiles again, conservatively, without teeth.

The woman appraises Claire. Stares at her, really, with an intensity that makes her cheeks grow hot, a sensation that is never not accompanied by an angry flush. As much as she’s tried to master the erudite poise of a professor’s wife, her nerves, her humiliations, her irritations always show up on her face, plain as day. Even this gloomy back room can’t hide them. The woman smirks. She seems pleased by the day’s turn of events, by the fact of Claire’s thievery and her red, red face; and, for a moment, Claire wonders if they’ve met before. She relaxes only slightly when the woman says the thing Claire has been counting on, the thing that always seems to exonerate her: “You don’t look like the shoplifting kind.” the first thing Claire stole was somebody else’s husband. She was twenty-one, in her last year of college, and trained only in the biblical implications of adultery—that is, how it might impact her soul and no one else’s. Dan had mentioned his wife and two boys, and Claire knew their faces from the framed, four-by-six family photograph positioned at the corner of his desk. And yet she could not imagine them beyond the borders of that picture. In her mind, they lived only against a cheesy blue backdrop, three endlessly smiling concepts—Nadia, Jack, and Cooper.

At first, she tended her crush in juvenile ways, referring to Dan as “The Hot Englishman” among her friends and recounting to them the unremarkable things about him that she then found dreamy—the way the hair at the back of his neck curled with sweat by the end of each class, the way he lingered over every word when he read the Romantic poets aloud, the way he licked his index finger to turn a stuck page.

To Claire, Dan was exotic and wholly adult—much too adult to waste time with college girls—which is why she was surprised when his interest in her became unmistakable. He had invited her to his office to discuss her midterm paper, a bumbling argument that Shelley was a misogynist. How else could a man who abandoned his child and pregnant first wife, who tethered women like moons to his orbit, write with such self-satisfaction about ethics? She had pondered such questions over ten discursive pages. This was well before she had understood that all

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that art-versus-artist talk drives Dan crazy. He considers it an American breed of discourse, subjective and irrelevant, as interesting as hearing about someone else’s dream. “Of course the art is better than the man,” he’d told Claire recently, when she reminded him that Picasso believed women were only good for worshipping or stepping on. “What would be the point otherwise!” But in his office so long ago, he offered no indication that he found Claire’s argument about Shelley as irritating as he must have. He only complimented her writing and recounted his own study at Oxford, how he had wept upon seeing the university’s marble memorial to the drowned poet. He had asked her, then, what moved her. No, he had asked her what turned her on. “Is there a work of art that inspires passion in you? Something that makes you want to weep or fuck?” he said. That his question made her uncomfortable felt to Claire like confirmation of her immaturity. She answered as best she could, by sidestepping Dan’s quest for some intimate piece of knowledge with a joke that now makes her cringe: “I cried over a Yeats poem once, but I think I was getting my period.”

They had been together for three months before she saw his wife in person. Nadia arrived at Dan’s office wearing gym shorts that showcased her lean, toned legs, and Claire realized immediately that she was beautiful. Her dark hair was pulled into an unruly ponytail. Her cheeks were full and glowing from whatever aerobic activity had occupied her morning. She knocked as she opened Dan’s office door and seemed startled to find him not alone but with a female student, Claire, sitting across from him. But as quickly as her jaw had clenched and her eyes had widened, Nadia’s pretty face relaxed and she smiled broadly. “I apologize for interrupting the scholars at work,” she said, addressing both Dan and Claire. Then, to Dan: “Your planner, love, and a little treat from Coop.

He drew a picture for you but was too shy to show it to you himself.”

She handed Dan a folded piece of yellow construction paper and the leatherbound calendar that, as far as Claire had been able to tell, never left his office.

Dan introduced Claire, then. He referred to her as his top student and told Nadia that the two of them had been discussing Claire’s complaints about the course syllabus. “Not enough women for this one’s taste,” he said, smiling first at Nadia and then at Claire.

caroline mccoy

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He was lying, of course. Claire had said nothing about the syllabus.

In fact, she’d said very little at all that morning. She had awakened earlier than she would have liked to visit Dan at his request. Before Nadia had arrived, he’d done most of the talking, telling Claire about a waterfall near his mountain house and promising her that he would take her there very soon. The view from above, he’d said, was intoxicating, almost spiritual in its way of making you believe that green was the only color worth knowing and that forever was the depth of your perception. Even for Dan, it was early in the day for such effusiveness, but Claire pictured that view anyway, imagined herself at the slippery edge of a rushing stream.

By the time she looked up to see Nadia in the doorway, she understood that he had orchestrated this meeting between wife and girlfriend, that he had guided the three of them to a precipice. claire learned long ago that it was best not to correct other people’s assumptions about her. When she was in high school, her pastor father probably figured she didn’t drink or ride in cars driven by other teenagers or lie about where she went on Saturday nights. When she was the other woman, Nadia probably figured she was a mousy girl who couldn’t attract anyone as vain and self-important as Dan. And the first time, when she slipped a tube of mascara into her pocket, the cashier probably figured she was the kind of woman who paid for what she carried out of a store. Who was Claire to correct any of them? In many ways, she saw herself how they had seen her—as good and principled. Even the mascara had been a mistake.

She’d taken it after a fight with Dan about a paint color he’d selected and then despised. “Too blue,” was all he’d said when he walked into the bedroom, suitcase in hand, after spending his weekend at a conference two states away. The color was pretty, Claire thought. She even liked the name, “Swept Away.” It was the softest blue they’d considered, and Claire had cut the color further by blending three parts with one part white.

“You picked it,” Claire said to Dan’s back. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, untying the sneakers he’d originally bought for Cooper’s eighteenth birthday.

“If that’s true then I did so under duress. I thought the room was fine as it was.”

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“What color was it?” Her voice came out tight and high. She hated crying in front of him.

Dan sighed. “You’re overreacting, Claire.”

“No, I’m not. What color was this room three days ago?”

“Oh, I don’t know, a whiteish color, something less repulsive than this.”

“Nope.”

She left him in their freshly painted bedroom, already spoiled in her mind. The walls had been a soft gray, not even slightly white or whiteish.

She planned to show him photographs of the room before, to prove her point that he was being disagreeable—mean, even—despite having no real interest in their bedroom décor. She could have painted it without telling him, and he never would have noticed. She could have saved herself the trouble by not trying to involve Dan. That’s what she was thinking as she drove around town and while she wandered the aisles of her favorite discount store and, likely, when she tucked the mascara into her coat pocket. She was already in the store parking lot, having legitimately purchased a vegetable spiralizer and a set of hand weights, when she realized she’d taken the mascara by mistake. Standing beside her car, she dug around for her keys and found the slender cardboard box. It was one of those designer brands that had been marked down for the masses. The store’s tag advertised the original price and their price. Instinctively, she turned back toward the store, prepared to pay her eight dollars and ninety-nine cents. And then she just ... stopped. Holding the mascara in her hand, knowing that she’d walked out with it undetected, she felt an odd sense of relief. It was a calm and steadiness she had no idea she’d been missing until that moment. So she slid the mascara back into her pocket, returned to her car, and left.

That was six months ago. The bedroom remains “Swept Away,” and Dan has warmed to it. Or, he has stopped complaining about it. But there have been other fights and long silences and now the time away Dan is taking, the four-day weekend he’s spending at the mountain house. Claire can more or less match these incidents to the number of items stowed in the bottom drawer of her dresser and the cabinet below her bathroom sink. She has no occasion to wear or use half of what she takes. Not one thing cost more than twenty bucks. Most—like the stupid green thong she’s still concealing inside her jacket sleeve—were

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cheaper. Not that taking inexpensive stuff is okay. But she’s not actually hurting anybody. No store will go under and nobody will lose their job because of her. At least there’s that.

Her father would say that this new habit speaks to her lack of integrity, some defect deep within her. She would die of shame if he knew of the chasm in her marriage, let alone her impulse to fill it with cheap underwear and beauty products. In her worst nightmare, he peers into her collection of neon and animal print, iridescent eye shadows and press-on tattoos, and says that she is not his daughter, that he has no idea who she is anymore. In the nightmare she cannot summon her voice to explain.

But an explanation evades her conscious mind, too. All she knows is that taking these things makes her hate her husband—her life—a little less. the stern-looking woman seems impatient for Claire to do or say something, to prove that she is or is not the shoplifting kind. Claire has always found it difficult to disappoint the person in front of her. It’s hard not to be whatever they seem to want or need. But she holds her ground and says nothing. She regrets obliging the uniformed kid who steered her here. What would he have done if she’d run or simply refused to cooperate? What would he do if she turned around right now and made a break for her car? He’d have to chase me, she thinks. Or call the real cops.

“Our cameras caught you stealing,” the woman says.

“I think you are mistaken,” Claire says. She is trying to project calm, coax the pigment from her cheeks.

“Carl saw you, too. He was watching you. Apparently he’s suspected you of stealing before.”

“Who is Carl?” Claire says, even though she already knows.

The woman gestures to the security guard. He raises a limp hand as if announcing himself present.

Claire nods in acknowledgement. “Nice to meet you,” she says, automatically. She underestimated this kid. This is only the third time she’s stolen from this store. Tried to steal. Technically the merchandise has not left the property.

The woman emits an annoyed grunt and motions for Carl to get on with something. He straightens himself and turns toward the security monitor, clicks an ancient computer mouse several times, and suddenly

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Claire is watching herself on the screen. Despite the distant camera angle, she recognizes her own careful movements, the way one of her ears pokes out from a curtain of hair. Her head turns left and right and left again, mimicking the ingrained motion of a conscientious driver. Her arm reaches across an underwear display, hovers over a section for a beat too long. When it returns to her side, there is left on the table a small gap among the tight assortment of items.

“There!” the woman says. “Right there. You stole a pair of lacy underpants. Maybe more than one.”

Claire has Googled this scenario. What to do if you are caught shoplifting. She knows not to admit fault in writing. She also knows that she likely won’t be charged, if the people in this room even plan to call the police. She’s a white lady without a record. The item in question is

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negligible. The world is fucked in her favor. This has always been true, though Claire didn’t know it when she was young, when youth itself was another advantage she failed to recognize. That’s how Nadia must have seen things when she realized Dan was cheating with a twenty-oneyear-old—that Claire’s age was her advantage. Nadia has always been cool to her but not unkind. After Dan announced their engagement, she even invited Claire to lunch to discuss her integration into the boys’ lives, their soccer and band schedules, what they liked to eat, and the tricks they pulled to extend their bedtimes. Claire didn’t appreciate Nadia’s composure, then, her absolute fortitude and grace. She only felt burdened by her existence. Nadia was someone she wanted to impress and outshine.

There is no saving face now, no denying or excusing what Claire and the other two people in this room know she did. She reaches into her jacket sleeve, pulls out a wad of lime-colored lace, and extends it to the woman, who snaps her fingers around Claire’s wrist and begins to squeeze.

Claire gasps at the strength of the woman’s grip. “Hey,” she says, trying to tug herself free. “Let go of me!”

The security guard stands, seemingly dazed by the scene before him.

“Lorraine, let her go,” he says.

The woman tightens her grasp and yanks Claire toward her. “I know what you are,” she says. Her slender fingers slacken, but her face remains hard. “Remember that next time you think about setting foot inside my store.” She lets go, but not before grabbing the pair of underwear from Claire’s palm.

Claire steps back and pulls her arms to her chest.

“Just leave,” Carl says. “We won’t call the police this time.” He remains standing before the security monitor, his eyes darting between Claire and the woman, who is smoothing her suit jacket and staring at the ground.

“See her out,” the woman says. “Escort her to the parking lot and make sure she goes.” Her voice is hollow. She sounds defeated, even though she is the clear victor in this embarrassing exchange.

The walk to Claire’s car feels endless. Long-legged Carl trips twice trying to pace her slow steps. People glance in their direction, but Claire trains her gaze on the store’s revolving door, on the brick pathway curv-

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ing around the building, on the dusty hood of her dark-blue Honda.

When she stops in front of her car, Carl does too. He’s waiting for her to go, like the woman instructed. Claire doesn’t have the energy to care what this kid thinks of her, but she is sorry—for stealing those other two times and trying to steal today, for that scene with his boss—and she says so. Sorry is a floodgate, and once she’s uttered the word, acknowledged her bad habit for what it is, she wants nothing more than to empty herself completely. “This isn’t who I’m supposed to be,” she says, but her words come out cracked and misshapen.

“It’s fine, ma’am,” he says.

He takes a step back, and Claire pulls herself together. She tells him, “My husband is having an affair.” She laughs when she says, “The woman he’s seeing is basically me twelve years ago.”

Carl nods knowingly. “My parents are divorced. It sucks.”

Claire has not said the word “divorce.” She’s barely let herself think in those terms—lawyers, assets, alimony. She can’t bring herself to imagine losing contact with the boys. She has no idea how she’ll earn any kind of living. She is in the middle of her Jesus Year and completely unskilled.

She was an English major. Most of her friends—if she can call them that—belonged first to Dan. Her father is the only person she is sure would take her in. He’d be smug about it, but he would help. “Yeah,” she says to Carl.

“Lorraine shouldn’t have grabbed you like that,” he says. “She isn’t a bad person. She’s my aunt—my mom’s cousin, technically, but I call her my aunt. Her dad opened the first store in Charlotte like seventy years ago or something. That one’s barely hanging on, and she’s about to lose this one and the one in Raleigh.”

Loss itself defies Claire’s comprehension, but the messy grappling with it, the struggling against it—nothing makes more sense than that.

She leaves Carl standing on the curb beside the building. She’ll do as the woman asked. She won’t return to this store. And a few months from now, when the building has been vacated and a For Lease banner has been draped across its prominent eastern wall, she’ll avoid driving by. “meet me at nine,” Dan had said to Claire on the morning she and Nadia first laid eyes on each other. In the years since, Claire has wondered whether she and Dan would have married had he not piloted his first

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marriage off that cliff. She’s wondered what the course of her life might have been had she not shown up to his office that day. He’d have moved on, she knows. If it hadn’t been Claire, it would have been a girl like her—quiet, admiring, eager to please. These very aspects of her nature are what makes a scenario in which she defied Dan, dumped him, never slept with him in the first place impossible. It would have taken an act of God to keep her from arriving at his office at eight fifty-five, jittery with specialness at having been beckoned by this man who seemed to adore her. And after Nadia became real to her, after Nadia knew and had filed for divorce, Claire turned almost militant about her own passion. She was unwilling to entertain the doubts and disappointment expressed by her father, let alone her own transient panic at the absolute certainty of it all—a marriage to a tenured professor, a ready-made family. Then and for much of her marriage, she believed she was loved and in love.

But this is the effect of her predicament: her whole life with Dan is now in question. Even what was good strikes her as an illusion. Their many giggling attempts at assembling toys and play structures for the boys (all of which Claire finished alone). Their dinner parties for Dan’s colleagues that always transformed into table-tennis tournaments (in which Claire, if she wasn’t clearing plates and cleaning the kitchen, played the part of spectator). Their lazy weekends and summers at the mountain house (which Dan spent mostly at his writing desk). In their decade of marriage, he has published four books and dedicated all of them to Claire with the same inscription: The winds of heaven mix forever. She was touched, at first, then perplexed. Had Dan forgotten that she hated Shelley? Certainly not. But the sliver of academe that engaged with Dan’s work might imagine that he and his wife shared a deep affection for the poet, and that was probably the point—to pad his public persona with some romance. By the fourth book, she had begun to resent the disingenuousness of the dedication. And now, she interprets it as a measure of Dan’s respect for her. What mattered to him was that he liked Shelley.

At home, away from the site of her humiliation, Claire can still feel the woman’s hand circling her wrist. She’d said, “I know what you are.”

Not who but what, a thing, a thief. She walks from the foyer through the den and into the bedroom, hers alone while Dan is away—thinking,

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he says, though Claire knows better. She assesses the cozy room, the king bed made fussy with oversized pillows, the matching marble-topped nightstands, the chaise that no one ever lounges in, the abstract beach scene they felt pressured to purchase at an art show. In terms of property, she brought little into the marriage, no furniture and not any real money compared to Dan’s own inheritance. She had a ring that once belonged to her mother and that she has since lost. It was a plain gold band set with an opal that Claire loved to watch glimmer multicolored on her finger. She had some knick-knacks from her childhood home, the sixpiece silverplate flatware that had belonged to a grandmother she’d never met, and a sizeable collection of books. Those things are mixed in with everything else—Dan’s possessions, gifts he’s given her, furnishings and photographs and souvenirs they’ve accumulated together, all the stuff that no longer feels like hers.

Claire spins loose her wedding ring as she walks to her dresser. She opens her jewelry box and places the ring in its usual, prominent spot.

Her hand lingers over the collection of jewelry, grazes the smooth garnet beads Dan picked out at an estate sale one summer and the velvet case that contains a set of pearl earrings he gave her on her twenty-eighth birthday. She fingers a small emerald pendant and its tangled gold chain.

The stone came from one of her mother-in-law’s gaudy dinner rings, which the family dog ate and expelled without damaging anything but that single emerald. Her mother-in-law had the stone recut and made into the necklace for Claire. Dan has always found its provenance hilarious, and Claire occasionally wears it to make him laugh. She disturbs a stack of bangles brought back from an anniversary trip to Peru, finds beneath it a Timex still ticking on a cracked leather band. It’s not valuable or memorable, just a relic from whenever she last found it necessary to wear the time on her wrist. She returns the watch to its place and looks again at her wedding ring. It’s worth more than everything else combined.

The oval diamond sticks up too high and snags her sweaters, but Dan chose it so she has loved it. Her naked hand hovers over the ring for a moment, before she closes the box and steps away.

◆

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katherine joshi burning driving home to dc on a late Sunday afternoon, Diana and Mark passed a truck burning on the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

The truck was in the northbound lanes, perpendicular to the bridge.

The sides of the truck were already illegible, black with smoke. The fire rushed toward the sky in great plumes, bright orange giving way to puffy black clouds, thick and impenetrable. Diana imagined what it would be like to walk through such a cloud, to experience the sensation of sudden blindness, smoke pressing into your eyes and ears and nostrils until the cloud absorbed you, becoming part of the fire. She leaned forward until her seatbelt caught, trying to wrap her mind around what she was seeing—the impossibly tall flames, the heat radiating in the air, visible against the still bright sky, the line of cars paused dangerously close, held

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back by an invisible barrier. Diana was considering the combined effort it must have taken to convince that much traffic to stop, when Mark reached from the driver’s side and pushed her toward the seat, her back slamming against the worn leather.

“That’s distracting.” Mark said this, as he did many things directed at Diana, out of the corner of his mouth. He always gave the impression that speaking to Diana was painful, forced. It was not unlike Mark to believe Diana was the distraction and not, in this case, the enormous

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clouds of smoke curling around the tops of the bridge, disappearing the green iron. She knew he was watching the fire as well, the truck now directly opposite them. Diana crossed her arms and rolled her eyes, and immediately felt flustered at her own actions. Before, she never would have dared to show her irritation so blatantly. Before, she had been consumed with being the good wife, but she also thought she had been in a loving marriage, so she had her reasons. They passed the truck and Diana turned around in her seat, consumed by the fire, watching in fascination as the flames turned even more orange, the smoke above impossibly thick. A deep smudge on an otherwise flawless sky. back home, Diana did her due diligence of helping Mark carry in the bags before escaping to the bathroom to look up the truck fire. A short article posted on WTOP provided minimal information—the fire was due to a car failure, not malicious intent. How odd our times are that the article had to provide such a clarification, Diana thought. The only other information the article provided was on the traffic delays, on a fire truck entering against traffic in order to reach the burning vehicle. She perched on the closed toilet seat and considered what this must look like, fire and smoke meeting the great gush of water, practically hearing the sizzle of extinguished flames.

Mark yelled her name from the bedroom, upstairs. She didn’t have to see him to know he was unpacking, her still-closed suitcase already a nuisance to him.

They had gone away for the weekend to a couples retreat in Connecticut. The website promised in-depth couples counseling, free of the normal stresses of everyday life. It also promised a rekindling of romance, a reckoning of any foundational issues within the relationship—specifically, the ones buried deep below or that you were not even aware you had. The website guaranteed that couples would leave the retreat feeling renewed, refreshed, and more committed to their relationship than ever before. Diana was more exhausted than she had been before they left and felt exactly the same toward Mark, if not even slightly more irritable. When he first suggested the couples retreat, she had been on board with the idea. Maybe the retreat would mend what had been brewing between them for years; maybe it would convince

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Mark he was still in love with her, although all signs pointed to the exact opposite. Maybe the retreat would give Diana the permission to excuse herself from the marriage, slipping out a side door after gaining proof that she did her level best to save the marriage—she had agreed to the couples retreat, after all. At different points throughout the weekend, her reasoning changed. The few times Mark smiled in her direction, it became easier to convince herself that she had been overreacting these last two years; reading into actions and gestures that were innocent and not directed toward her. But when Mark grabbed her by the wrist during breakfast Sunday morning and took her to a corner of the room, believing she had been particularly aloof to an older couple from Queens, she could not help but feel that she was being placed in time out by her very own husband. Diana had simply told the man from Queens that she had never had whitefish. But now, Mark’s tight grip on her shoulder erased any kind smile he had thrown her way, reducing Diana to pieces for allowing smiles to convince her everything was fine. She could no longer deny the truth, as much as she wanted to: a couples retreat would not mend their relationship problems, because those issues were buried so far beneath the surface they would likely never be uncovered.

It wasn’t that either of them had cheated or anything. Their families got along well. The two did all the things you would expect of a childless married couple in their thirties: weekend dates, happy hours with friends, outings appropriate with the season. Diana had hiked more times in her life than any sane person needed to. And even though Diana was pretty sure she knew why her marriage was an unhappy one, she still found the whole idea hard to stomach. Not the couples retreat by itself, but the fact that she was nine years into a marriage that had been throwing red flags at her from the very beginning, red flags that she hadn’t picked up on until a couple of years ago, so late into the marriage that Diana was too embarrassed to admit her ignorance up until that point.

When had she become a person who closed herself off in their miniscule guest bathroom to do something as innocuous as reading an article on her phone? When had she become an inactive participant in her own life, constantly placing her husband’s desires—and thoughts, and opinions, and goals, and approach to life in general—above her own? When had she become so content with being unhappy? Diana couldn’t deny that

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she had fallen a little less in love with Mark since their marriage. But when had she tricked herself into believing that was an acceptable way to live the rest of her life? she had been very in love with Mark in the beginning. They met as sophomores in college, and he would bring her banana laffy taffy and stay up all night helping her cram for exams and take her out for real dinners, at restaurants with tablecloths and martinis. Diana was young enough to still think love was a simple act, marriage an agreement you couldn’t back out of. She was idealistic. She watched each of her uncles divorce and remarry and assured herself that would never be her; they had made the wrong decisions. Judged the union incorrectly. She wouldn’t make the same mistakes. To her, marriage was like a math equation; maybe you put a few wrong answers down along the way, but eventually you arrived at the right answer. When she met Mark, she became quickly convinced that the boy who broke up with her by leaving a note on her car the first day of senior year in high school, or the other one who hid in the kitchen while his mom passed on the bad news, or all the other ones before had been the wrong answers. With Mark, she solved the equation.

It wasn’t until she sliced her hand open while pumpkin carving at her brother’s house that she realized something was off. They were seven years into the marriage at that point. Her brother, David, ushered her inside, instructing her to hold her hand up while he located the bandages and Neosporin. “You look like mom,” she remembered observing, then laughing at her own comment, David smirking briefly while he rummaged underneath the kitchen sink. Eventually his boyfriend Thomas emerged from the upstairs bathroom with the first aid kit, yelling about how David did this each time there was an injury, frantically searching the kitchen while Thomas calmly went upstairs to retrieve the kit. They stood on either side of her in their kitchen, taking turns as they bandaged the wound: David cleaning it, Thomas drying it, David applying Neosporin, Thomas wrapping the bandage, reminding her to keep her hand upright. She felt the warmth radiating off the two of them, the undeniable fact that they were a team, a properly solved math equation.

She felt almost embarrassed that she had caught herself in the middle of their connection, nearly apologized for that instead of apologizing for bleeding all over their kitchen floor.

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“No, no, don’t worry, you’re fine.” Thomas squeezed her shoulder when he said this, and Diana smiled, and it was the warmth of the squeeze, and the selflessness of the smile that made Diana suddenly envious. As she went to rejoin Mark and her brother’s other friends in the backyard, she found herself wanting to scream at her husband, why didn’t you come in and help me? But he instead was engrossed in a conversation with one of David’s friends from work, and it was only when she sat back down next to him, her chair scraping slightly against his, that he glanced harshly in her direction, muttering “are you done?” and then quickly “are you okay?” And before, Diana would have treated this as a slip of the tongue, but she now somehow immediately knew that it wasn’t, that he had intended to say the first phrase. She furrowed her eyebrows and tried to understand what was happening, to navigate the peculiar situation she had suddenly found herself in.

Here’s the thing about pumpkin carving when you have a hand injury: it proved remarkably useful to take stock of everything else going on. Since Mark was now in charge of carving their Stranger Things pumpkin (an idea she had earlier been excited about; now, she thought “how fucking original”), Diana drank her wine and tuned out the conversations and focused on the faces of everyone around her. And she noticed how Mark would smile his best fraternity president smile while he talked to David’s co-worker, but that it stiffened anytime he turned toward Diana, and that each time he gave her his stiff smile, David would leer at Mark, so quickly it was easy to miss, so quick that Diana wondered how many times she had missed it before. She noticed that David and Thomas were the only ones not to laugh whenever Mark shared something he believed humorous, and that Mark was the only one not to laugh when Diana tried to crack a joke, and she knew that couldn’t be coincidental. When they were done carving, and Diana gasped and commented on how good her brother’s Great British Bake Off pumpkin was, Mark seemed to choke down a scoff, before suggesting they share the pumpkins on Instagram to find out who others thought was the winner. David rolled his eyes at this suggestion, to which Mark said, “no, no, it will be fun! I’m sure yours will win!” But the practically murderous look in his eyes implied that he did not want to do this out of fun, and that he would react poorly if, in fact, David’s pumpkin did win, and Diana thought pumpkins, really? She was never sure if the thought was a

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reaction to Mark’s childish resistance to losing, or his determination to be the best even in trivial things, or if it was at herself for having to slice her hand open while pumpkin carving to realize something was seriously off with Mark, seriously off with her marriage.

David and Thomas went inside to get the Halloween-themed cupcakes and Diana slipped in quietly behind them to use the bathroom.

They must not have seen her because she stared at herself in the mirror while listening to them whisper about how insufferable Mark was. How they were unsure how Diana put up with him; why she didn’t get out while she could. “I mean, she’s thirty-one,” Thomas whispered. “Still plenty of time to meet someone else and start fresh.” Start fresh? Diana stared at her almond-shaped eyes so long she eventually couldn’t tell which version of herself was doing the staring: the real self or the mirror self. David, who was a groomsman in their wedding, who let Diana carry him around like he was a pet cat when they were children, who followed Diana to DC, didn’t object to Thomas’s thinking. Instead, he agreed.

He said he would help her, even.

They didn’t stay for much longer, Diana practically swallowing a cupcake whole, Mark glaring at her until she realized she had frosting on her cheeks, and she wiped it off, quickly, before returning her gaze to Mark, who was chatting to the co-worker, again. Diana wanted to scream. What, are you recruiting him? Are you trying to get him to fall in love? Their pumpkins all now sat in a corner of the patio and the longer Diana looked at them, the more menacing they became, the more she wanted to raise a foot high and smash them all to pieces.

David and Thomas gave her long hugs as they left, and she joked, “What, are we not seeing each other again?” They laughed, but the sickly feeling in her stomach told her she knew why they were hugging her extra long. How many other times had she received an equivalently long hug without realizing it?

Growing up, her father always teased her for being the last one in on a joke. “It just takes you longer to put it together, that’s all,” he would say, squeezing her shoulders. “But that’s what makes you you. It just takes you a few minutes to put the pieces together.” Leaving her brother’s house that night, she wondered how long she had not been in on the joke. How long had David and Thomas leered at Mark? How long had Mark acted

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as if every single move of Diana’s was a personal embarrassment to him?

In their twelve years as a couple, how much had she missed? diana told one person the truth of their weekend getaway, and when Prisha asked how the couples retreat was, Diana pushed aside the therapy sessions and early morning yoga and tower of muffins and instead told her about the burning truck. When Prisha expressed shock, having not seen anything on the news, Diana Googled the incident on her work computer, turning its screen toward Prisha, who peered over the top of her cubicle to read the article, her mouth gaping at the pictures.

She and Prisha had started working at Girls First at the same time four years prior, a nonprofit that promoted female empowerment in local public schools. Diana soon realized that it was very easy to describe what the organization did, but hard to actually put ideas into action.

There was always a parent who disagreed with their message—haven’t we already shown girls they can be whatever they want to be?—or who didn’t see the value in educating young students on things such as sexual violence and abusive relationships and how to advocate for yourself in the workforce. The conundrum was simple enough to work around: the idea that middle schoolers were too young for these messages, yet high schoolers had already received this information. Their director spent chunks of her day calmly explaining that we couldn’t assume high schoolers were receiving these messages from their parents, that the label change from middle to high schooler didn’t mean the girls were any less naïve. She was an astute woman in her early forties who wore pink blazers purposefully to confuse any male executives she had to go to battle with. Diana had read about the organization in the Washingtonian and applied on a whim; she went from teaching high school students to crafting lesson plans on things like “Being your Boldest Self.”

Diana shared the truth of her weekend with Prisha because she was the person she spent most of her time with, even more than her husband. The sad, accepted truth of desk jobs in the twenty-first century. If Prisha had a lighter sense of humor, Diana would joke that Prisha was her “work wife.” But Prisha, by default, was stern, hardened by years of correcting colleagues who added an extra syllable to her name, no matter how long they worked together; by dates that insisted on asking

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where she was “really from,” only for her to tell them she grew up in Philadelphia. Prisha had met Mark a handful of times, and, at their most recent work happy hour, Mark became obsessive at making Prisha laugh over a string of stories about his uncle that Diana had heard countless times. It wasn’t until he was on his third drink that he realized Diana had moved to the other side of the bar, half listening to another coworker complain about her dog’s recent trip to the groomer. He held Diana’s elbow tightly as they walked home, only waiting until they were inside their house to unleash how embarrassing it was for him to be left alone talking to Prisha. Diana, slightly buzzed from several gin & tonics, asked “Embarrassing for who?” before making her way upstairs. Knowing it would irk him, she dropped her purse on the bottom step. A second self had made its presence known after the pumpkin carving and when it showed up in moments like this—acting out through small, petty gestures, rather than taking a sledgehammer to their entire relationship to see what was salvageable—Diana knew the second self had been waiting for her attention for a very long time.

When she first told Prisha about the retreat, she hadn’t said what her mother would have if she had told her—“Good for you, commitment is so important”—before yelling at her father that she wasn’t going to show him where the TV remote was one more goddamned time. Instead, she asked if Diana had ever thought about leaving him.

The question was simple, and Prisha’s gaze on hers implied that, somewhere within those casual happy hours with Mark, she picked up on what everyone else had all along but had never bothered to mention to Diana. But unlike her family, who apparently decided long ago that stuffing the truth deep inside was the kindest option, Prisha decided to lay the truth out, where Diana could no longer hide from it. In years prior, she would have laughed in Prisha’s face, would have told her she was being ridiculous, would have blown up in anger. But now, the wiser self couldn’t pretend to be surprised at the question, even though she wanted to, and she coughed nervously instead of answering, the whole interaction leaving Diana feeling sticky and doubtful.

Looking at the fire photos with Prisha—the fire that she could still see burning inside of her—Diana felt that same sticky feeling return, a vastness opening. She could practically feel the rocks breaking loose and

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tumbling away underneath her feet, the valley of air patiently waiting to grab her tightly and suck her into the depths below. the truck fire was distraction enough that Prisha didn’t press Diana for more information on the couples retreat until mid-afternoon, when they were huddled next to the coffee station. Many of their Girls First lesson plans emphasized reflection as a way to spark growth. In her past life as a teacher, she had made the same speech to her students countless times but often found herself struggling to abide by the practice. She had barely reflected on the weekend at all. She was instead wondering how often cars caught on fire. To satiate her friend’s questioning, she murmured, “It was fine. Didn’t fix everything but we learned a lot,” and turned to walk her coffee back to her desk, wondering how much longer she could maintain the lie. that night, however, a memory of the weekend shook itself loose and suddenly Diana was consumed by it, opening her eyes against the dark bedroom, shifting from almost asleep to fully awake at dizzying speed.

Mark was snoring next to her, and she realized the snoring itself was what caused the memory to dislodge.

Late Saturday night, Diana had found Mark’s snoring unbearable and grabbed her cell phone and went for a walk.

The couples retreat was at a stately bed & breakfast near Woodbury, a place that looked prepared to host dignitaries and ambassadors and not slouching couples hoping to avoid divorce. Diana was glad to find no one at the front desk and greeted the nighttime air greedily, the day’s heat still thick in the air.

The spa and pool buildings, the tennis court, and the mass of cars quickly gave way to a thick, densely packed forest. They had walked through part of it earlier that day during a group therapy session, and Diana believed she could still hear the twigs and leaves crunching beneath their feet as they walked in an obedient single line, observing the therapist’s instruction to remain “silent and observe.” And Diana had observed, not because she particularly wanted to, but because she had always been good at following instructions. She thought of how her mother often picked early spring flowers before they died in the next

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freeze, once getting cursed out by a stranger who didn’t understand her intention. She was only trying to preserve their beauty before the late stages of winter gobbled them up again. Diana considered breaking the silence to share this story, Mark’s imagined response filling her with a strange sort of glee. It was hard for her to imagine that Mark was truly trying to improve their relationship to ensure they were both happy; she couldn’t shake the feeling that the decision to attend a couples retreat was good only for appearances. That Mark only cared about what the outcomes would show others. At his core, he was still the fraternity president, trying to ensure a shiny surface while the inside slowly rotted.

She should have asked him, during the therapy session, “Am I still just an accomplishment, a trophy for you to shine and bring out on special occasions? Did you forget to break up with me after college, after I could no longer serve you and your fraternity’s image as the impressive scholarship student and now you’ve found yourself years deep into a marriage, unsure what to do next?” Because even though she had dropped the role of “president’s girlfriend” long ago, he still considered himself a president, of sorts, with all the expectations that came with the title.

She followed the curve of the road, which dipped to the left. The lights of the B&B were suddenly extinguished, the line of trees consuming her in the darkness. Diana felt her heart quicken but she wasn’t afraid. The moon was out, and she knocked her head back to take in the stars. She relished the absence of people, the absence of voices, the countless stars that she so rarely saw in the city, greeting each one like an old acquaintance.

A twig snapped, and Diana kept walking with her head knocked back, assured in her footing on the smooth road. She did not wonder if Mark had woken up or worry about his reaction if he had. She let the heat glide over her like a new layer of skin, luxuriously bathing in the sickly stickiness, and it was only when she heard another twig snap, this time closer, that she looked straight again, already knowing that she was no longer alone.

The new presence was invisible in the dark, but nonetheless perceptible. Diana could hear it moving slowly in the nighttime air, imagining the heat parting around it like an endless curtain. Her heart started to race. She remembered an article on why rapists target runners, back

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when she used to be a jogger herself; the ponytails were easy to yank. She touched her own ponytail, her dark hair frizzy from the humidity. Fumbling, she turned on her phone’s flashlight and moved in a darting circle, hoping to catch the predator before he caught her.

When she finally saw the eyes, she had already accepted her fate. But the longer she looked, creeping slowly backwards, she realized the eyes were much lower to the ground, wide and yellow. They were unmoving and detached from whatever they belonged to and, for a moment, she stopped, thinking if she concentrated long enough that she would be able to make out the rest of the body; make out the thing that was waiting to kill her. She considered moving close enough so that the flashlight consumed the darkness, rather than the other way around, in order to bring the body into full exposure. The eyes were practically sparkling from the light and Diana’s breathing momentarily slowed, utterly mesmerized. But then whatever it was took one silent step forward, the eyes increasing in size, and she stumbled before jogging back toward the B&B, occasionally checking behind her to find the creature had not moved, was not moving, and she greeted the lights and electrical hum of the inn with a great, heaving sigh, practically shaking when she finally reached the front doors.

The B&B was silent, not a soul in sight, and Diana was momentarily consumed with the belief that she had stepped into some alternate dimension, left alone to survive on her own devices. This wasn’t a new idea of hers; ever since reading an article on mysterious disappearances in national parks, she was overcome with the conviction that that very thing was going to happen to her one day. That she would lose sight of any hiking partners and emerge to find herself somewhere else entirely, forever separated from those she knew. Plucked away into someone else’s world. Sometimes she didn’t think that would be too bad. Maybe the other Mark in the new dimension wouldn’t be so high strung.

But tonight she reached for something familiar, in order to help her organize her thoughts. She sighed with relief when she reached the room and opened the door to Mark’s snoring.

She locked the door and slid down to sitting, holding her forehead in her hands. She couldn’t quite grasp what she was feeling. It was something greater than fear—a concept that, by its nature, signified

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conformity. She often found herself unafraid of things others feared the most, firm in her belief that what people really feared was not the actual thing itself, but the unknown. And now, as she caught her breath and relived the encounter, she was not afraid of whatever she had seen.

Something else was growing inside of her; the unsettling feeling that she had come face to face with not her death, but her equal. Herself in another form. She closed her eyes and imagined she could hear it moving slowly through the hallway, waiting until it sensed her on the other side.

She never told Mark, knowing that he would focus instead on her leaving the room late at night and how that would look to others. She knew he would find some way to write off what she had seen; that it was probably a raccoon, or an opossum, or even a deer, but Diana knew the creature was none of those things. She wouldn’t have been surprised to discover it was an entirely new species, something unnamable. Something that did not yet clearly signal fear or curiosity or innocence.

Their row house was quiet. The street was, for once, quiet. She slipped out of bed and slowly rolled up their shades, taking in the street below. The neat line of cars, trees thick with leaves. The hair on her arms prickled, and she imagined any number of places the animal, if it was indeed an animal, could be at this very moment. Alone in its Connecticut forest; hidden away in a pack; walking down her city street; waiting on the other side of her bedroom door. Quietly breathing, ready for the inevitable. when diana brought mark to meet her parents for the first time, the first thing her mother said to her when they were alone was: “He sure smiles a lot, doesn’t he?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Her mother held her hands up, defensive. “I’m just pointing it out, it’s a lot of smiling. Who needs to smile that much? You can’t even tell what he’s thinking from all that smiling.”

“He’s probably just nervous.”

Diana’s mother looked shocked at this, her mouth gaping open.

“What’s he have to be nervous about? We’re the ones who should be nervous.” They were in the kitchen preparing coffee, Mark and Diana’s father in the living room. Diana could hear Mark laughing and wondered

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what her father thought about another man laughing so much and so purposefully. Her brother, still in high school, had politely shaken Mark’s hand before darting down the back stairs to meet friends. Everyone was civil. Everyone was polite, talkative, some more than others, sure. And was it so hard to believe that Mark was nervous?

Diana’s mother pulled out a tin of wedding cookies and, even though she loved them—and knew Mark would love to hear the story of how her father squirreled some away for himself each time a new batch appeared—she felt a twinge of embarrassment, thinking of the elaborate dessert Mark’s family had provided when she met them for the first time.

A delicately decorated chocolate cake, Diana dropping some of the dark frosting on the new dress Mark had bought her for the occasion. At first, she had found the gift thrilling, the very idea that a boy wanted to buy something so nice for her, but now, as she looked around her parents’ crowded, dated kitchen, she considered that the dress might have been more than just a nice gesture. He was from a tight-knit, waspy Connecticut family; her parents, both from sprawling Italian families, had grown up next to each other in Cambridge, in thin row houses that had been in their families for decades. Didn’t that bring its own kind of status, its own kind of wealth? They were both born and raised in New England, but might as well have been worlds apart, for the way Mark referenced their childhoods.

During the remainder of the evening, Diana studied Mark’s smile.

She was right; he had loved the story about the wedding cookies, and smiled as she told it, and smiled as her mother explained the significance of the wedding cookies to their family, and smiled when David came home, and smiled while he talked about his fraternity’s volunteer efforts for breast cancer research, and smiled during every embarrassing story about Diana’s childhood, and, by the end of the night, Diana marveled that he still had enough muscular energy to keep a smile on his face.

Later, much later, she would ponder the similarities between a smile and a grimace, how it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other.

Leave it to her mother to find smiling untrustworthy. Her family accepted Mark, not because they had to, but because they wanted to, for Diana’s sake. If acceptance had been required, she wasn’t sure, now, if the marriage would have made it past the first hurdle. Years into the mar-

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riage, Diana knew her mother still stuck by her original assessment of her now husband, that the smiling was, as she put it, “covering up for something. It just makes me a little wary, that’s all. What’s he hiding behind all those teeth?”

Diana didn’t have an answer, because she didn’t know how to communicate that, when it was just the two of them, he rarely smiled for her like he smiled for others. when had she become someone who Googled wild animals in Connecticut? Who clicked through pages of comment boards of people debating the likelihood of a wild animal caring about you enough to not only pick up your scent, but track it across state lines? b1rdsRlyfe said, “lmao that’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard,” and Diana poised her hands over her keyboard, prepared to write back, “you didn’t see this animal, you can’t have known what it felt like.” But Diana really hadn’t seen the animal either, just the eyes, and that alone had been enough to stick her hair on end.

Prisha stuck her head over their shared cubicle wall to tell her she had seen a report that the burning truck had been a marijuana truck, a company that sold weed candies to college students. Diana quickly closed her open web browser, wondering how b1rdsRlyfe would respond to that news. Lmao best contact high ever. “I forgot about the fire,” Diana said, and she was surprised to realize this was true. The thing that had consumed her sleep two days prior was now replaced by the other, more unknowable force. In the morning, awake before Mark, Diana had checked all the closets in their house, sure the creature was hiding in some barely used crevice. When Mark found her digging behind the washing machine, she murmured something about lost socks.

After the pumpkin carving, after the realization, Diana thought a lot about her two selves. Which self was it that encountered this mysterious presence in the forest? Was it the same one who swooned the first time she and Mark kissed? Or the one who faltered when he told her he loved her for the first time and she only said it back after noticing the tense crowding of his eyebrows, the disapproval on his face, giving her the same feeling she had whenever she got a question wrong on a test? Was it the one who cried when he proposed, on top of the Empire

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State Building at sunrise? Or the one who joked about making out with strange boys at her bachelorette party and only didn’t go through it because her high school best friend said, “you do you, but that’s probably a bad idea.” Even then, she knew her desire to kiss other boys wasn’t a great sign.

But still. She had made promises. She couldn’t just quit a marriage.

Quitting a marriage meant moving back in with her parents, which is what both of her uncles did after their divorces until they moved into a place together, which didn’t seem any better of an option. So after that Halloween, Diana decided if there was a problem in their marriage, then it must be her fault. Mark was too concerned with maintaining his nice fraternity boy image to cause problems he couldn’t fix, which Diana later realized was a naïve assumption. At the time, though, she focused on picking up on Mark’s clues. She was too loud, too clumsy, too disruptive, too aloof, too in your face. Apparently. She needed to be more considerate of others, more aware of others’ feelings, more focused on making a good impression. All the time. Even to strangers. Strangers, really? Diana had thought at first, and then fumed at Mark nearly breaking his neck to make a server laugh but then ignoring her on the walk home, his hand so tightly grasped around hers that it left fingernail impressions in her skin.

But still Diana tried. And the more she fought to be the good wife, the more her other self pushed back. The more her brother made his disapproval obvious, the more Diana panicked at having miscalculated her marriage equation so poorly, so off the charts wrong, that the only option out was to admit failure. And when Mark suggested a couples retreat, Diana thought finally, all her efforts had paid off, until Mark made it clear that the retreat was to address her contributions to the marriage, which he called “problematic,” and Diana felt her other self bursting at the seams to be released, to take control, but she was determined. Maybe this was the thing that would fix everything.

And that was the last thing she remembered thinking when she suddenly found herself at a McDonald’s, the cashier crying, a manager demanding Diana apologize, and Diana looked at the money in her hand that she didn’t remember pulling out of her purse and tried to decide if it was better to hand over the “I’m sorry” or admit she didn’t know

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what she would be apologizing for. She looked out the window and saw blinding lightness, an expansive parking lot, the highway stretching away in the distance. She saw her husband closing their car door, consternation on his face as he made his way to the entrance. She felt her stomach fill with dread, heard the manager screaming to others that she had called the cashier fat, and even though Diana knew she never would have said that, that there must have been some kind of misunderstanding, she tried to quickly apologize before Mark overheard, before the incident bloomed into something else entirely. But it was too late, and Mark snatched the money out of her hand and apologized, smiling his best smile, and then Mark gripped her elbow and ushered her out to the car and she asked, “what about the order,” even though she couldn’t remember what she had ordered and, besides, what she really wanted to say was, “I think I’m floating,” her head threatening to detach itself from her body and vanish. Exhaustion was heavy in her ears, and she watched as Mark navigated back toward the interstate, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, a sign screaming “Welcome to Connecticut” and she said, out loud, “Oh, right, the couples retreat,” to which Mark punched the steering wheel several times in quick succession, each punch turning into a beep of his car horn. When he stopped, he looked flustered, and anxious, and Diana asked, demurely, “Do you think we should apologize to the car in front of us now, too?” she knew now—she had always known—that the question Prisha should have asked was “why hasn’t he left you?” Why marry someone to be your trophy wife when they so clearly and repeatedly and fastidiously failed all of the requirements? Why pretend the world was yours to operate on, that partners, no matter how in love with you they had been in the beginning, were yours for the controlling?

Another truth, that she hadn’t shared with Prisha, was that she and Mark had seen another car on fire once. It was early in their relationship, living off H Street, equal distance to Mark’s classes at Georgetown Law and her first teaching job in Shaw. They used part of their income to take weekend trips, driving to Philadelphia and Dewey Beach, New York City and Annapolis and once, when they were feeling particularly adventurous, to Niagara Falls. Diana remembered the enormous gush

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of water tugging at her, how she eyed the waterfall with something akin to lust.

Diana wasn’t sure if Mark remembered seeing the other car on fire.

They were twenty-four and driving to New York City at Christmastime, two years before they got married. Diana was excited for the Rockefeller Tree, the Christmas villages spread out across the city; it had never taken much to please her. She had no idea Mark intended to propose the next morning, during their sunrise visit to the Empire State Building. Diana was too young, too excitable at that time to really see anything other than for what it was, but when they saw the car on fire on the side of the road, just north of Baltimore, her breath caught in her throat. She was driving and it took everything in her to keep her eyes on the road, to not stop cold at the fact that the car burning was identical to hers, color and all. Diana felt her heart quicken in a way she didn’t recognize and found herself urgently checking the driver’s side as they passed parallel, almost positive she’d see herself staring back.

Mark had murmured “shit” as they passed the car, but by the time he proposed to Diana the next morning, sunlight blinking off the hundreds of metal buildings and skyscrapers, they both had forgotten about the whole thing, turning their attention to the future. walking home from work, Diana wondered if she should have given more attention to things like that. A week had passed since the couples retreat. She crossed the street at almost every intersection, unable to shake the feeling that something was following her, making her way home in a never-ending zigzag. Each time she turned around, she only saw other commuters behind her, but that didn’t stop her from feeling convinced that whatever it was she was searching for would break through the crowd at any moment, throwing the street into chaos.

Mark was already home, reading a brief at the dining table. His palms were on his forehead, fingers tangled in his hair, and she watched him as she took off her shoes, hung her bag by the front door. One could reason that Mark’s temperamental attitude was due to his job, a lawyer specializing in insurance recovery litigation, but Diana had always felt that would give him too much benefit of the doubt. Why should he be given every consideration or excuse where the same would not be given to her

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if the roles were reversed? She refused to believe work-based excuses, especially the ones that came from men. She knew from her mother alone that women could handle whatever the world threw at them, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. It was time, had been time, for men to step up and stop making excuses for how difficult the world was for them, because the world had always been difficult. They were just getting an easier ride for a while.

Diana’s heart was racing; she could practically feel the blood moving through her body. She figured, by this point, that the creature must be paused on the other side of the door, calculating an alternative way to enter the house. She sat down opposite Mark, who had not looked up since she arrived, and remained still for a moment even after Diana asked, “Remember the other time we saw a car on fire?”

It took a moment, but eventually Mark pulled his hands out of his hair, briefly looking up at Diana. “What?”

“We were driving to New York.” She had subconsciously started twisting her engagement ring. “The trip we got engaged.”

No look of recollection covered Mark’s face but he said “Oh, right,” nonetheless, sitting back in his chair. Diana remembered their first years married, when they both put work aside at night to watch a movie, drink wine, sit in their backyard during the warmer months, the smell of their jasmine plants thick in the air. Diana honestly wasn’t sure if Mark’s work had become more demanding, or if he just preferred it to her; she had never asked and he had never volunteered the information. As with most transitions, it was gradual, Diana realizing how their evenings had changed when it was already too late.

She couldn’t pretend to be blameless, though. She hadn’t shied away from the hours she suddenly had to herself, the two of them feet apart but practically living in different universes.

Mark had already turned back to his work. Diana got up, poured two glasses of wine, placing one next to Mark. He murmured a thank you but didn’t look in her direction; instead, he carefully moved the wine far from his papers, an action that told Diana everything she needed to know. She thought about knocking the glass over, watching stoically as the wine spread across the papers. She thought about opening all the doors and windows to see if the creature that had been following her

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would finally make its way inside. Instead, she slurped her glass down, already finishing it by the time she made it upstairs. She would return for another glass, and then a third; again, later, to check all the closets, to open the back door and stare into their tiny backyard, waiting, hoping even, for something to return her gaze.

◆

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nora kelly

owen mcleod

dayshift at the place of safekeeping Flowers heat up in a truck at the edge of the cemetery.

A hairdo in the parking lot looks like Easter basket grass.

I can’t deliver another wreath to the tent. It’s impossible to communicate with grievers.

Victory doesn’t feel like this.

Still, “Have a good one” and “It is what it is” would be totally inappropriate.

What is anything anyway?

We are not dust.

We are not children.

We are not God’s creatures.

We are not going home.

Rivers flow into the ocean?

Big deal. Slumped in a chair on the Astroturf fringe, an old man sleeps like a baby.

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caroline chavatel

sonnet for use value fabric [noun] the word originally denoted a building, later a machine, the general sense being ‘something made’

For instance, The Burj Khalifa costs 1.5 billion to erect. I could buy a sports team or three White Houses, a private island of my own reckoning fail. The point is to show you how much I love you despite our losses. The spires give us permission, the edifice dazzling in this poor-light.

How many skeletons have you wished you could flesh back, revive? It floors me to know how much.

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failed sonnet: the money feeds us Because language is always missing, our mouths hunger for its origin aloud. I buy the slang for money with money: mint, cheddar, bread.

I am bringing home the bacon. I am building something delicious. If I were not caught in the teeth of the world’s gate, I would laugh and laugh at our misfortune. I cannot afford it. On Sundays, my mother would cook bacon and eggs and feed us with her labor.

She was building something delicious for us to sink our cogs into. We would sit around the table, share stories and laugh. And laugh.

And laugh and laugh.

caroline chavatel

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j.r. evans

how to do it These days I am wiser than I was before.

I put caps on the ketchup bottles Before I shake Like a dog at the vet.

You look good in a hat I say to myself Wearing a hat like a stone Wearing a hat.

But anyway I’d like to express The opposite of that.

Drive this old truck Through the what-have-yous Of birthdays and Thursday Night movies.

That means turning Away from myself And toward mollusks And things artists notice.

They don’t even do anything.

They just sit there and breathe.

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c. francis fisher

afterlife Once the cat was dead, we drove to Sunset Park and ordered roast duck heads from a Sichuanese restaurant. The best way to eat them: yank the bottom beak till the tongue comes loose. I squished eyeballs between my molars.

When my grandmother was alive, she made lamb chops.

Let me gnaw the bones clean and throw them over my shoulder. Other things I learned as a child: French, flossing, fractions. That I am not, in fact, a horse.

The grass I took for lunch turned up green and foamy on the carpeted floor. Last night, I was the one who found the cat panting in the tub. You became convinced of the need to take the poor thing on the roof so she could see the sky, then wring her neck with your bare hands. I would have let you kill her if we had a shotgun but we live in Brooklyn.

The cat certainly would have let you.

She loved you desperately, in the way only dying things can.

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erica jenks henry aunt mary mary does not look well. I mean, in a way, she does, but she’s skinnier than I remember, and the brown of her cheeks is not a friendly color. It looks forced, like she’s been lying out in her bikini in the ugly courtyard in the middle of her apartment complex as the men try not to watch or don’t try not to watch, like when I visited her.

Gemma walks into the kitchen where I’m making a lentil soup with leftover ham bone. We invited Mary for Easter, but flights were cheaper the week after, so this is what we get. “What’s Aunt Mary wearing?” asks Gemma, an amused smile on her lips. I hold it together. What Aunt Mary is wearing looks like a spaghetti strap tank top that’s been cut off beneath the part that covers the breasts, loose bra more than shirt.

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“We’ve talked about this. Women should wear whatever they want.

We need to be fighting for that right,” I say. “If Aunt Mary wants to show off her six pack, she should.”

“What about her boobs?” This is Jack, my husband, appearing. I put down the knife I am using to slice celery and smirk.

“Boobs too.”

“I know what I’m wearing to school tomorrow,” says Gemma.

We laugh. “Where is Mary, anyway?”

“On the deck,” says Jack.

“Don’t leave her out there alone. Let’s be good hosts.”

“She’s not alone. Tillie’s there.”

I dump mirepoix into sizzling olive oil and pour vodka lemonades. I stir the pot of colorful confetti squares and head out to the cedar deck that overlooks the unruly green of backyard. I seat myself on the rattan loveseat. Mary smiles into the distance. “So why did Taylor Swift break up with him?” she asks.

Tillie sighs dramatically. “You weren’t listening! He broke up with her!”

“No. Who would break up with Taylor? Unless you’re Brad Pitt or something?”

I laugh, leaning into a damp pillow, some woven, ethnic-looking fabric.

“Why don’t you go jump on the trampoline?” I ask Tillie. She frowns.

She knows I’m excusing her, and I raise my eyebrows. I mean it.

“We’re having a good conversation,” says Mary.

“But I haven’t gotten to talk to you. Hold on though.” I run back in to stir the base and add broth.

I return, remembering to pass Mary her drink. Tillie has gone to the trampoline and is doing splits in the air. “Wow, she’s flexible,” says Mary.

“How are you? You look good.”

“Do I?” Mary squints.

“I don’t know what that means.” I laugh, noticing lines in her face, the way she has aged. “You’re beautiful as always. Youthful. Fit.” “Okay.”

“How’s work?”

“Good. I just don’t feel like I exist.”

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“How so?”

“Since I broke up with Mick, I only exist online.”

“Why did you break up, anyway?”

“He was a loser. Mommy issues.”

“Wow.” “Do you know what Tillie said? She told me she’s hardcore feminine.”

I laugh. “She means ‘feminist.’”

“That’s what’s funny.” Mary bounces up. “Let’s go on a hike.”

“Are you joking? I’m making dinner.”

“The girls would love it. We need to get outside.”

“We are outside. Why don’t you chill and enjoy your cocktail?”

“I quit drinking. Come on. I need to move my body.”

I sigh. “Do you need a jog? It’s fine if you do. You’ve been traveling all day.”

“No, I want to hang out with you guys.”

“Mary, I’m making dinner.”

“Please?”

I shake my head. “Sure.” The soup can wait. I turn off the stove.

“Where’re you going?” asks Jack, when I grab socks from our bedroom, his office.

“Hiking.”

“Weren’t you cooking dinner?”

“It can wait,” I call, running downstairs.

“Want to go on a hike with us?” Gemma is doing homework at the dining table when I ask. More specifically, she is wearing headphones and checking her phone with furrowed brow, laptop before her.

“What?” She pulls out expensive earbuds.

“Want to go hiking with me, Mary, and Tillie?”

“I have homework.” She gestures to the array of papers and notebooks.

“Okay.” But when I get to the back door, she’s on my heels. Outside, Mary is double jumping Tillie on the trampoline. My daughter flies through the air until her belly is above the protective netting. They laugh hysterically and collapse onto the black mat. I wonder about Mary’s boobs. “You’re coming?” I ask Gemma.

“I guess. I just might be up late doing homework.”

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I consider arguing, but this is just a way to blame me for any potential poor performance.

Then we’re there, parking the station wagon and heading to the trail.

“Mind if I smoke this really fast?” Mary holds up a cigarette.

Gemma and I slowly walk, letting Tillie get ahead as Mary finishes her smoke.

“Guess Aunt Mary hasn’t realized that vaping is the way to go,” says Gemma. I can’t contain a laugh.

My daughter is becoming a woman—she has become a woman by traditional standards—in front of me, and she knows far more than I remember knowing at her age. She knows I am unhappy with my job and our performative suburb, that I want more; she knows Jack and I are tired of each other, though not exactly like that; and she knows I detest watching myself become old. We hike beneath wide, spreading branches of live oak trees, Spanish moss hanging in dry gray hairy clumps, locks pulled off a sea creature or Medusa.

Gemma is lovely, though she looks like her dad, with his big, hooked nose. She asks me sometimes if I tell her she is beautiful because I am her mother, or if I really believe it, and I don’t know what to say. “Both,” I say, “though I probably wouldn’t say it as much if you weren’t. I’m lucky. My daughters are both beautiful.” Then I realize how shallow and sexist and materialistic this sounds, like I am a mother who only desires that her daughters be fair. My friend brags that she only compliments her girls for things they can control, like working hard and composing stylish outfits, but I always remember this too late, after I have blurted out something about my daughters’ physical appearance. I delight in their lithe bodies, the muscles stretched beneath smooth skin, especially half way through summer, when they are decorated with rich tan lines in spite of sunscreen I pretend to remind them to use. What if they had been ugly babies? What if they were truly unattractive? Would it have been as easy to love them?

Mary catches up, scent of cigarette smoke only faint, and hikes on the other side of me, away from Gemma. The workout attire which materialized on her body is futuristic, it’s so fashionable. When did she change?

Gaps and holes with see-through material, lines and mixed fabrics that make her figure look like a machine, a stunning, feminine, human ma-

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chine. My old running shorts that do not flatter my derriere but hang down and pull tight in all the wrong places feel prehistoric by comparison. And my shirt, a slightly fitted one that I usually find attractive when I look down at myself or in the mirror, appears pilly and misshapen from all the times I’ve worn it.

“How’s your poetry?” I ask.

“Terrible. I quit that,” she says. Then she stretches out her arms, bending them at the elbows so that her fists almost reach her shoulders and then stretching them back out. “I’ve been unable to do any since Mick left.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She shrugs. “It’s the nature of the beast, you know?”

“Can I ask what happened, really? What are these mommy issues?”

I give Gemma a look that means she should leave us and go catch her sister.

“She can listen,” says Mary. “It’s good for teenagers to hear about relationships. The nitty gritty.”

Gemma shrugs.

“First of all, he’s way too attached to his mom.” She turns to Gemma.

“Don’t date men like that. You need to be the number one woman in his life. Or her life, if you’re gay.” Gemma nods seriously, receiving the information. “But he thought I was getting a little obsessive, I guess. With my cyber presence. Anyway, I bet it was his mom who put the idea in his head. She just started following my social media when things started getting bad.”

“Hmmm.”

She continues. “I mean, I can see what he’s saying, but it’s how I make money. Vendors pay me to post about my life. That’s why I get free stuff and checks in the mail. I think he felt it was becoming more about attention and less about business.”

“Was he right?” I ask. Gemma’s listening presence is tangible in the air, so eager to hear juicy drama.

We turn a corner, a particularly dense forested place, where the sunlight is all but obscured by foliage, and we come upon Tillie, squatting in the trail.

“What is it?” Gemma asks, hurrying to bend down too.

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“Some kind of animal,” says Tillie.

“That’s so gross!” says Gemma when she gets a glimpse.

I scoot my way around the girls to peek at whatever it is, and there is no animal, only internal organs, maybe a liver, red and dark and meaty along with something lumpy that is lighter, bluish and filmy. “I don’t think that’s an animal,” I say, trying not to let horror touch my voice. “I think that’s something’s body part.”

“The guts,” says Tillie.

“Disgusting. Let’s keep going,” says Gemma.

“That’s interesting,“ says Mary. “Isn’t this one of those teachable moments? We should figure out what it is.”

“Nah,” I tell her. “The teachable moment is probably not to look for too long.”

“How far are we going, anyway?” asks Tillie.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“Let’s get to that lookout. Isn’t there one ahead?” asks Mary. Gemma raises her eyebrows at this suggestion, since the lookout is three miles from the start of the trail and it’s nearing dinnertime, but we’re already out here anyway.

“You’ve got a great body,” says Mary to my teenager, looking at her, both of them a little ahead. Gemma is larger than my sister. “Everything’s in the right place. All your curves are so taut.”

Gemma looks down at herself and pulls her shoulders in a little, shyly.

I feel I should say something but I don’t know exactly what. I don’t think it’s good for girls to hear comments on their bodies. What if they change? What about when they do change? I want to interrupt, but it would be awkward now. And I am guilty of the same stuff.

At last we begin to climb, ending up on a bluff that looks out over the curling path of the old riverbed and hilly forest beyond. It’s not a high view, but there’s a rocky outcropping, and we walk out to the giant boulders.

“I just love the outdoors.” Mary’s hands are on her hips and her chest is thrust forward. She walks to the edge of the precipice and inhales deeply. “Meditation sesh, anyone?”

“I think we should hurry back, unfortunately,” I say.

“Not even five minutes?”

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“I want to meditate!” says Tillie.

I am the jerk, doing something Jack would do because I am worried about him waiting for us at home, refusing to help my daughters cultivate mindfulness.

“Come on, Mom.” It’s Gemma begging, who has too much stress in her life and could use tools for coping with anxiety.

“Oh, all right.”

We arrange ourselves in a line looking out over the cliff, thirty or forty feet high. Mary leads us with simple directions. “Scan your body, starting at the head. Move down, checking each organ and part for stress, all the way to your feet.”

I groan and peek at my daughters, both seriously focused.

“Study your breathing. Touch your belly, feeling it move in and out

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with the breaths.” At last she is quiet. Minutes pass. I can hear them ticking, and I spend the entire time considering saying we should go back.

At last, Mary’s voice. “Open your eyes. Good work.”

We realize we are no longer four, but five. We’ve been transported into a reenactment of the Old Testament story of God appearing in the fiery furnace along with Shadrach, Mishak, and Abednego.

But this is a flesh and blood human. A youngish man with buzzed red hair, large round black earrings, I can’t remember what they’re called, an armful of tattoos. He grins. “Hope I didn’t scare you.”

The girls are laughing hysterically, fearfully, but Mary appears mesmerized. “How’d you do that?”

“Quiet shoes,” he says.

“We’ve got to get going. It’s getting dark.” I stand, dust my shorts, offer Gemma a hand.

“Okay,” says Mary. “But could you get a quick photo of me here in lotus position?” She hands me her phone. The freckled man eyes her as she closes her eyes again and presses her palms together in namaste.

I take the photo, and the man grabs his phone to take one too. “Sorry, too good to miss,” he says.

I turn to him with a grimace. “You can’t do that. Delete it.”

“No, she was posing for a picture. Not like I’m going to do anything with it.”

Mary stands, saunters towards us. “I don’t mind. Don’t worry about it, Sarah.” The girls watch, mouths slightly open.

“Well, nice to meet you, stranger,” says my sister. Then she leads the way back toward our car. She’s in high spirits, practically jogging, and she leads us in folk songs. “If I had a hammer,” she begins.

Sun has set and the last light is fading when we arrive at the vehicle and climb in. But before we can pull away, there’s the man, running towards us. He taps on my window, and my heart races as I consider whether to open it, but somehow, feigning normalcy, I do. “Hey, here’s my number.

You should come see my band tonight.” He slips a small orange square of paper in and offers a final goofy smile.

“We should!” says Mary. I stare at her.

“That was fun.” I stretch to look in the rearview mirror at the girls, who look out their respective windows with furtive expressions.

Back home, Jack is making grilled cheese, the smell of cooking butter

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rich, filling our home. He scrapes and tosses the golden sandwich, orange cheese dripping, onto a plate, and walks to the table without a word.

“Mmmm, I want one of those,” says Mary. “Making them for us too?”

Jack shrugs, stares out the back window. “I can make you one,” I tell Mary. “Give me a minute. Who else wants grilled cheese?”

Jack hardly speaks, offering monosyllabic answers. He drops his empty plastic plate into the sink, with a noise that sounds like he may have broken something. “So you wasted all this stuff for soup,” he says, dumping the wet mirepoix mixture into the compost. I want to tell him to stop—I’m still going to use it, maybe just tomorrow—but it’s too late.

He marches out of the room.

“Someone’s in a bad mood,” says Mary, as she sits at the table. She pulls out her phone, feet on the chair by her butt, skinny knees near her face.

“He’s probably annoyed we left without a plan. Maybe he was worried. That makes him mad.” The sandwiches are finished, and I grab a jar of pickles. Gemma forks one out and turns on her computer.

“We should go see that guy’s band,” says Mary. Gemma’s face turns toward me so fast, it’s as though it’s responding to a lever, pressed down by the sentence.

“No way.” My teeth crunch through toast and sink into gooey cheese.

“Are you kidding? Why not?”

“Just, no way. That guy was a creep.”

“Not the vibe I got.” Mary is glued to her phone, food untouched.

The girls watch me, fascinated by this exchange and what I will say.

“I think you’re scared of strangers,” she says. “Look at this, Tillie! People love the pic I posted of us on the trampoline.” She slides her phone across the table, and my stomach clenches as my eight-year-old examines the picture.

I remember a time we went camping with our parents when I was becoming a teenager. We borrowed our grandparents’ old white, eggshaped trailer and drove a couple hours from home to a simple campground by a lake. The first night, Mary and I walked to the lake to take a dip, rolled-up, holey jean shorts exposing both of our pairs of long, golden legs, mine always a little thicker and paler than hers. Some boys

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on bicycles whistled as they passed. Mary turned to me. “Did they do that to us?” she whispered. I nodded.

A couple inches taller and getting curves, I had grown used to the way men could be. I pulled my shoulders more tightly in and sucked my chest back in to be concave. But Mary, beside me, had chosen to do the opposite. Her shoulders and chest were thrust out, and her gait had become an elaborate, wide-stretching saunter, one leg thrown ahead of the other as her torso swayed. When the boys returned a little later, this time our bodies wet and only covered by bathing suits on our way back to the campsite, Mary was ready.

The boys whistled and slowed down, and Mary continued to strut.

“What are you girls up to?” asked one, with dark, shaggy hair.

“Having fun,” said my sister.

“Looks like it.”

I held myself together, trying to suck all parts of my body into the smallest, most condensed piece of matter possible, tightening into a pillar, waiting for them to pass.

“What do you want?” asked Mary, turning suddenly towards them.

They dragged their feet on the ground, right beside us.

“Nothing. Just saying hi.” The blondest one, the tallest, leered, so close we could have touched him with an outstretched arm.

“Oh, really? You’re sure it’s not this?” Then Mary pulled down the top of her bathing suit and back up again, a pale flash of cold, round chest, the whole movement so fast I thought I imagined it.

The boys didn’t know what to do. They howled and whooped and laughed, though one or two looked more than a little terrified. I doubt Mary told our parents or spoke to the boys again, but they never bothered us the rest of the trip, not even glancing our direction when we saw them.

The girls are in their bedrooms, Tillie asleep and Gemma on her phone while she continues tirelessly on homework, only distracted every thirty seconds or so by a “bing” from her phone alerting her that someone else has shared a bizarrely boring photograph of the wall behind their head and maybe a little hair from their head too via Snapchat.

Mary appears in the kitchen, where I am wiping counters and sweeping bits of food off the floor so we will not wake to filth. It took years of

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living in mortal terror of a neighbor stopping by to discover my disgusting life to get me to exist as though I am a clean person, like pretending to sleep until you do. Now I can’t let things go. Part of me longs to walk out of the house, the island counter still decorated with an opened peanut butter jar, half eaten toast, crumbs on the granite, a sticky knife. But I can’t.

Mary hops up beside the farmhouse sink, watching me scrub white ceramic with a specialized cleaner. “We going to Fubbawubbit?”

“What?”

“The band. Their set doesn’t begin until ten. We’ll be on time.”

I ignore her and finish scraping the drain area, removing brownish gunk and returning the sink to marble white.

“Mary, come on.” There are so many things I can say. Jack will be annoyed? I have to wake up early? That sounds sketchy? She should know I have no interest?

“Please? You said on the phone that you haven’t done anything fun in a long time. That’s what I’m here for. I’m your reckless little sister here to bring the crazy to you.” She holds her hands together in a pleading, prayerful gesture. “What if we make a deal that if it’s not fun, I owe you something?”

“There’s nothing I want from you.”

“I bet I can think of something.”

I roll my eyes. “Okay, but you should know that I’m doing this as a polite host. I am fulfilling a duty to my guest.”

“Fine, if that’s how you want it to be.”

“I’ll get dressed.”

“Wear something hot.”

“Whatever.” I want advice as to exactly what that means, but I don’t want to indulge her.

I pull a loose hippy dress I have not worn in ages over my head. It’s short and flowy, and it feels more snug than it used to. My breasts are half orbs poking out the top of the colorful fabric. I grit my teeth and force a smile in the long mirror behind my closet, before I realize Gemma has come into the bedroom brushing her teeth. She goes to spit and returns.

“You’re going to see that band with Aunt Mary?”

“That obvious?”

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She rolls her eyes. “Did you tell Dad?” I shake my head. She makes a nervous face. “You sure that’s what you want to wear?”

“Why?” “It looks old. Why not jeans and a cute shirt?”

“Mary said to be hot.”

“I bet she meant something different.” Gemma rummages through my drawers and gets my tightest jeans, leaves, and returns with a tiny tank top from her dresser. “Wear this, and put on mascara.”

Jack is in the basement, so I text him to say that I’m going out. Mary comes downstairs wearing a skin tight ribbed olive green dress with spaghetti straps and a very low V-neck neck that looks like it’s straight out of the 80s, in the fashionable way, along with Converse high tops. “Wow,” I say. She could be anywhere from fifteen to fifty-five with her long, straightened light brown hair parted in the middle.

“Do you need to borrow something?” she asks.

“No, I feel comfortable in this.” She looks at my outfit.

Jack surprises me by emerging from the basement. “Where are you going?”

“We met this guy who invited us to come see his band. Want to come?” asks Mary.

He studies her and frowns. “No. Someone needs to stay home with the girls.”

“You know that’s not true,” I say. “We leave them all the time.”

“It’s a school night.”

“You can come or not, but we’re leaving now.” Mary is unapologetic.

Jack shakes his head as we march to the door and catch the Uber that Mary has booked. “He seems more controlling than he used to be.” She seems disturbed.

“Probably he’s annoyed we’ve been gone and now we’re going out all night.”

“Doesn’t he go out every Tuesday with his basketball friends?”

“I don’t mind. I go to bed and read or watch The Bachelor. Anyway, that’s his group therapy.”

“When do you get group therapy? Doesn’t he go out for drinks Fridays after work? And golfing?”

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“He probably wanted more forewarning.” I don’t add that he may be irritated that Mary has scooped me up to drag on her whims instead of making dinner and tucking children in.

“Whatever. You look cute, but not exactly hot.”

“I tried on a dress, but Gemma nixed it.”

“What do you wear when you go out on, like, date nights?”

“It depends. It’s not like I own much sexy stuff. I don’t want the girls to see me with my boobs hanging out. And I don’t want to bump into other parents looking all sexy.”

“Why not?” She makes a face. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing.” The Uber driver is painfully quiet. I want to examine him in the rearview mirror to see if he has been looking at us. I hope he doesn’t speak English. “I just prefer to be dressed modestly in front of them. I don’t like looking slutty.”

“Are you saying I’m slutty? Also, I object to you shelving your sexuality. It sounds like you don’t want your daughters to see you as a sexual person.”

“Can you stop? Sorry I don’t feel comfortable flaunting my body like you.” The niggling idea that I have split parts, the sexual and the nice mother that I present to the world, must be tabled. It’s appropriate that I’m not super sexy in front of my kids. They don’t watch me have sex; why do they need to be reminded that I do it?

We arrive at an abandoned house set behind industrial buildings in a crumbling parking lot, not far from river access points. “Have you been here before?” Mary pulls hair away from her neck and lets it fall against her bare back.

“No.” “I love this place,” she whispers. We walk up the aimless curb, part of a sidewalk that leads nowhere. Smoking men turn to stare. Three have white hair and beards, but one looks younger than us.

“Good evening!” calls Mary in a sing-songy voice. “Is this where we find Fubbawubbit?”

“You bet,” someone says.

“I want to smoke,” says Mary. “You want to wait or head in?”

I stay, though I wish I had the courage to sit at the bar alone. I watch her, not knowing what to do with my hands. One man offers Mary a

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hit of something off his electric device, and she enthusiastically accepts.

Inside, Mary pulls us to the bar. She treats everyone like she knows them. Though she is significantly overdressed and my casual outfit fits in better, she owns the place. Men pull back to make space as she passes, and she offers her merriest smile. She orders two vodka sodas, and we carry them to the stage.

“I thought you quit!” I yell.

“I did! You want this?” She holds out her drink.

“Why’d you order it?”

“I keep forgetting I quit.”

I down my drink and place the glass with ice cubes on an empty sidebar, holding Mary’s in the other hand.

Mary pulls us in front of the performers, just as the first band introduces Fubbawubbit. Our buddy from the trail is on drums. Within moments, they are playing, but his eyes dart around. He spots Mary. A startled look, mouth open, is overtaken by an eager grin.

Music picks up: a decent melody with painfully loud singing. Everything sounds off—the tempo, the melody, the tone, but the audience looks like they love it. I don’t understand the disconnect between the sound and the response of the people around me, and the only theory that makes sense is that we are surrounded by the musicians’ family and friends. My mind blanks as it does when there is football on the television screen. I consider my daughters, wonder if I have messed them up with my desire to be thin and the disparity between the type of work my husband and I each do. Though I say I am a feminist, I am not modeling feminism, not as I want to.

Mary begs me to stay, though it’s almost 1 a.m. Band members cluster around us at the bar, and I carry on a decent conversation about music and my past travels with the bassist. I’m thankful for alcohol. Mary declines every glass. The men are young, attractive too, and I feel vaguely alluring. I never mention my husband, but I allude to children. The bassist wears a wedding band and doesn’t seem to be flirting. But then he tells me I’m probably not used to being hit on, and I don’t know what to say or if that is a way of trying to hit on me. He seems happy I’m not seducing him either, but maybe I’m imagining that. I wish I was wearing the folksie princess dress with the generous decolletage.

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I convince Mary to leave, and she gets another Uber driver to appear.

“I can’t believe I got you out of there.” She slides in next to me. “I was sure you were going home with that guy.”

“I can’t believe it either.”

We sit in silence, until I speak again. “I tried making that ginger hangover smoothie.”

“Really?” She makes a face in the shadows.

“It was intense. I almost threw up.”

“Don’t try stuff you see on the blog, okay?”

“Isn’t that the point?”

“No, it’s just content. Did you read the comments? Nobody follows the recipes. They like reading stuff.”

I look out the window, more confused than before.

At home she changes, still completely sober though I am more than tipsy, and comes in the bathroom to give me a hug. “Thank you,” she whispers.

I notice the “But first wine” shirt she is wearing.

“Really?” I nod to it, my mouth full of toothpaste.

“I’m just taking an alcohol break this month. A fast.” I wonder how grilled cheese fits in, but I am too tired to ask.

I climb into bed, and Jack stirs.

“You’re back,” he says. His anger has left. I turn towards him, letting our bodies touch.

“Were men ogling Mary?” he murmurs.

“Why?” I ask.

“Just wondering.”

I retract. “Don’t you wonder if they were ogling me? A guy from the band bought me drinks.”

“That’s cool.” His voice carries a hint of surprise. The curtains billow.

I think he may have gone back to sleep, but then he speaks. “You’ve still got a great body.” He rolls toward me and reaches to grope my hips and belly and then up to my chest. I lie there, staring at the ceiling for a long time. I can’t figure out what any of it means.

◆

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justin lacour

friday, 9:59 p.m.

The cooks stop working, stick their fists in the pot of marinara sauce, and punch each other in the chest, leaving bright red stains on their aprons.

It’s like proto-paintball, I think, lighting a cigarette by the screen door.

A fog is filling up the alley mixing with my smoke.

I hum primitive songs of love as if it were my real job.

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sunday, 1:04 p.m.

My roommate is stoned, eating mashed potatoes straight from the pot with a wooden spoon, and watching golf on TV. I want to tell him about the mustard seed.

Like “Ryan, have you considered the mustard seed?

You know it starts out as the smallest seed, but then grows into the most ginormous plant.”

Not to convert him, so much as to change the pace of everything in this apartment, as if just thinking so could let enormous vines smash through the floorboards, wrapping around our legs and appliances, and we would be changed.

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friday, 8:37 a.m.

A fox wanders out of the thicket and starts walking on the sidewalk by the English Department.

A secretary sticks her head out of a window and yells at the fox to leave the poor squirrels alone.

(Yelling at the fox for being a fox) I’ve never seen a fox before.

My deepest hope is to fall in love and write songs against death.

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saturday, 4:00 p.m.

I have a crush on the woman who works at the ham store.

The one who looks a little like Paula Cole.

It’s hard to come up with a pretense for buying a whole ham that often, particularly when you’re single, so I just drive past the ham store slowly, listening to trip hop and questioning whether it is better to dream of starlight filtered through tinted windows or a musket shooting thorns into my naked thighs.

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mackenzie sanders open range billie pulled the bandana over the bruises on her neck, and tied it just tight enough so that she could feel the knot on her clavicle. Then she put a wide-brimmed hat on her head, careful to keep her ponytail down to protect the rest of her neck from the sun. Her father used to tell her that she came out too tan, and that she’d better cover every inch of herself to prevent skin cancer. When she first started working the ranch at eight, if he thought her cheeks showed any redness, he’d make her sit in the shade of the mesquite and hold its thorned branches until her fingers bled, and he’d tell her, “That’s what red looks like. That’s what’s hiding underneath the white.” Then he’d slap her burned cheeks and shutter her bedroom windows until he was convinced the dark had bleached her skin milk again.

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Her uncle came once for Thanksgiving that year, five years back, and asked Billie why she looked like the ghost child of Marilyn Manson, and she’d told her uncle about the sun, her skin, and the mesquites before she could stop herself. He looked at her father and laughed and said, “Now Hank I know you’re mad that our ancestors rode the river and the Santa Cruz spit you out here, but you can’t keep denying where you came from.” Her uncle had brought his hand to his chest where a silver man-in-the-maze pendant hung from his neck. The maze was turquoise, inlaid in the silver, and the man was red.

“We come from Elgin,” her father had said. “And we don’t measure that in our blood.”

Her uncle just laughed and said, “I’ve never seen a man so up in arms about six-point-two-five percent.”

And then her father uninvited him from Christmas, or any future gathering. And that was that.

She saddled Charlie and rode out into the eastern corner of the pasture to look for Penelope, who her father’s hand Ricky had said looked “off.” She ambled slowly, examining the barren earth, and Charlie occasionally let out a forlorn whinny at the lack of foliage for him to chew and spit out. They’d rotated the grazing, to prevent overfeeding, in the hopes that the rains would supplement the slow growing lovegrass, but the rains had been minimal, the moisture pitiful, and they were stuck with the unappetizing and invasive bullgrass.

Penelope was chestnut with a white head and legs. She was one of the biggest cows Billie’s father owned, and she had provided him many calves, and her mood from day to day and season to season generally set the tone for the cattle and people around her. Usually, she was content, if not aloof, and she would tolerate the occasional head pat or side scratch, like a once feral dog that had not quite allowed you its underbelly. Billie found her lying near the perimeter fence, and while she didn’t need to dismount to see what had happened, she did so anyway, as a sign of respect, and she lightly touched Penelope’s side. Then she withdrew her hand and remounted Charlie to head back to the barn and tell her father the unfortunate news.

Her father struck her with the back of his hand as soon as she finished saying the word “dead.”

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her father brought the vet to perform a necropsy, and he held Penelope’s powerful, white, insentient head against his thigh, and he looked away when the doctor made the incision at the base of her neck.

He kept hold of her head all the way through, until the doctor pulled a plastic chip bag out of her first stomach, and then he patted Penelope gently on the head, took the bloodied bag, and stared at it like it was an evil thing.

“She was my best breeder,” Billie’s father said.

“A fine cow,” the doctor said, handling Penelope’s lungs.

they buried her under the area of fence and barbed wire that had acted as her final crutch. Most of their dead cows were sent to the rendering plant in Phoenix or the slaughterhouse in Cochise to be broken down into saleable and useful pieces like meat and dirt and oil. But Billie’s

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father told her, “Penelope was already useful enough.” And that was that.

Billie and Ricky rooted the fence upright again while her father presided over them, holding the plastic chip bag in his fist, occasionally pulling his fist tighter, and Billie felt the crackle of the bag beat like lightning against her forehead. She willed it to rain.

“We need rain,” her father said. “That’s all that’s gonna save us now.”

Nobody wanted to sell off their cattle, who Billie’s father, more than anyone else, held close to the root of what little sensibility he had.

Billie stood and wiped sweat off her sleeve and stared at the green and gray rows of bullgrass, firm and unpreferred by the cattle. She watched Samuel, a younger black cow who had thinned since the spring, as he meandered by their threesome, unperturbed by their horses or their exigency to keep him through the winter.

They never underestimated the power of water.

“I know where that bag came from,” Ricky said.

“You know it and I know it,” Billie’s father said.

“I can do a sweep,” Billie said.

“You do that,” her father said. He stepped forward and rested a hand on Penelope’s fence post, then he turned and walked back towards his horse. “Mind the sun, keep to the shade,” he told her.

Billie looked around at the scant shrubs and squatted cacti. There would be the brittle oaks if she rode southwest, closer to Sonoita Creek, and the occasional pocket of mesquites, which made her stiff. She often thought of swallowing their pods like snow peas, and vomiting out all the red inside her.

“Ricky, sweep after her at sunset. That’s when the aliens move quickest.”

The three rode back to the barn. Billie filled a large metal tub with water and flicked her fingers under the hose to make sure the water ran cool. When the temperature dropped, she let Charlie drink and looked into his long-lashed eyes. Billie liked that cows and horses had long eyelashes. It was like a human lived inside each heaving body, and she stared into his umber eyes and wondered if he was conscious of the fact that he was not wild. He had weak back hocks, so only Billie rode him. He’d be kicked and broken outside the ranch for it. Billie pulled at the bandana on her neck.

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As she placed her hands on the saddle to mount, her father took her hands and placed the crumpled bag in them, angry and pleading. Billie nodded and put the bag in her pocket. She rode for the northeastern corner of their hundred acres, and would move counterclockwise about their diamond-shaped land, so as to ride the final stretch along the creek, and end at Penelope’s resting place.

The northern point of their land was both barren and teeming with life in the way only desert earth could be. The bullgrass wailed softly in the late summer breeze, and the thick yucca stretched upwards and out, pointing their multitudinous fingers at the empty sky and begging for a monsoon. Even the cholla was dry and eager, and a small joint caught on Charlie’s flank when he brushed too close to the perimeter fence. The long spines stuck out of his hair, and Billie daintily plucked the fruit and threw it over the fence so it would root and birth a child. The cows seemed mostly unaffected by the drought, since her father was supplementing the grass with the last of their stored grains, and so the cows were thinner, but no less fed. Still, Billie watched as Dot and Guinness, a heifer and a steer, touched necks and looked upwards.

“No rain today, guys. Maybe at the end of the week. Eat good in the meantime,” Billie said. She tipped her hat to them.

Guinness turned and flicked an ear back at her. Billie smiled.

She rode southwest, checking on the cows and staring at the ground.

She rode as slow as one could without stopping when she came upon larger areas of brush, inside or outside their fence. It was greener here, and green always meant life, be it past or present. She found a baby’s blanket, two empty plastic water jugs, a soleless shoe, and three other chip bags on the other side of the fence under a cluster of trees. She found a tattered yellow backpack hanging on a fence post, and she found an empty Tupperware container and plastic spoon lodged in the unspined stems of an ocotillo.

Billie put most of the items in the yellow backpack and attached it to a saddlebag. She was grateful she found no wire cutters, which were perfect for finding weak spots in their barbed fence. Her father used to say, “There is always something or someone to cut, just not always a means to do the cutting.” To her surprise, she found no larger dens or hastily discarded villages. She guessed it was still too warm for most of them to cross, even at night.

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She came to the southern tip of their land and smiled at the late blooming wildflowers. Her favorites were small and purple, and she guided Charlie so he wouldn’t step on them. She stopped here for a moment and dismounted, straining to hear the high hum of the low creek half a mile on. Without rain, the creek would be so underfed it would not make any sound at all, but Billie pretended. She propped her feet up on a fence post and sat her narrow behind on the splintering wood. If she wanted to she could hop over to the other side and breathe in wild air, pricking only her calves on the wire. She thought the sound of running water was like freedom.

Billie rode to Penelope’s place, and it was only when she was about to leave that she saw one. Billie guessed she wasn’t more than nine. She was crouched under a scrawny, half dead mesquite, in a dirty pink shirt and jeans. She saw Billie first, and kept staring at Billie while Billie dismounted. The two stared at each other until sweat beaded on Billie’s forehead and she had to remove her hat to wipe it. Behind her, Charlie snorted at the hulking bullgrass.

“Did you run ahead or did you get left behind?” Billie asked.

“Dejado atrás,” the girl called back. Her voice was small and thirsty, and broke at each syllable.

Billie started to speak, but she did not know which direction to send the girl. It was only a few miles to Elgin. The girl might make it that far, if she wasn’t picked up. It was a short walk to the creek, which is likely where the girl had just come from. It was sixteen miles to the border. It was twenty steps beyond the fence to the girl. Billie felt the plastic bag in her pocket. Billie did not move.

Billie wondered if Penelope had known she was going to die. If she did, was she afraid? “¿Tienes agua?” Billie asked.

The girl said nothing.

Billie stared at the fence, which seemed to have grown to insurmountable heights, then stared behind her. She could see the outline of the barn and their home with its stiflingly low roof. She could feel her shadow stretch on the ground beside her. She had been out too long.

“There is a creek, allá, for now” Billie said, pointing in its direction. “I can bring you water tomorrow, en la mañana.”

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The girl nodded.

The sun sank into the horizon like a ripe egg in water, and Billie felt blood pool under her tongue. She bit into it with the realization that Ricky was following closely behind her. She first placed a hand on the fence post, and she felt her heels push back against the ground in an urge to jump over it. The vein in her neck pulsed, and she exhaled hard and slow. Rays shone directly in her face. She moved her other hand to fix her hat and prevent the red burns from creeping into her skin. Instead her fingers pulled at the bandana, and Billie felt the purple and blue prints of her father tighten around her windpipe.

Billie immediately withdrew as though she’d been bit and stepped away from the fence. The girl stared at her with confused fear as she quickly remounted Charlie.

“You better go, now,” Billie said. “Before he gets you.”

The girl did not move.

“I’ll be back. Mañana.” Billie rode quickly back to the house. billie gave her father the yellow backpack full of trash and jettisoned goods. He nodded at her with quiet approval.

“Any nests?” her father asked.

“No,” Billie said. “Just what I brought you.” There was something sybaritic about a half truth. An outright lie was told out of necessity, fear, or spite. A truth was also told out of necessity, fear, or spite. But a middling was told out of self indulgence or desire.

Her father seized her chin and turned her this way and that to examine her face. Already Billie could feel the rough bark of the mesquite against her palms. He let her go.

“Good work today. Shutter your room. I’ll call you tomorrow when I need you out.”

Billie nodded and ran inside. billie sank into the dark. She shuttered her windows and flung herself onto her bed, and against her eyelids she saw red sun spots dance.

She thought about Penelope and her great, white head and strong belly that birthed seven calves and died from a one ounce bag of Cheetos. She thought about Charlie’s wise, all-seeing eyes and his weak hind

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legs. She’d be too heavy for him when she finished growing. What would her father do with him then? Release him? He would die in the open range; a wild horse was a mean thing. Would he let him stay in the pasture? He could be given to another child to ride, until that child grew, and he would begin the cycle of obsolescence, a cycle followed only by neglect and curtains. Billie understood the concept of natural selection when it came to ranching well enough, and she sometimes respected it, but she could not appreciate it.

Which way would she tell the girl to go? Either way she went there was little chance of her making it, whether “making it” meant alive or where she wanted to be. So was it more important to run away from something or run towards something? Billie didn’t know.

She sat in her cool, black room and let the heat drag out of her like smoke. After some time passed she heard her father and Ricky swing into the house and talk about money and property, which were the same thing, just inflected differently. For most people, money was about survival, property was about pride. But out here, in the not-gone-but-forgotten, pride was the means to survive.

When Billie was five, her father set her atop a neighbor’s horse named El Gordo. He was relatively small, but the concept of irony had not yet thudded against Billie’s skull, and she told El Gordo his name was stupid. El Gordo booted her off immediately, and Billie had fallen into the dirt and cried snot. Her father had picked her up to ensure she had not sprained anything, and then he’d smacked the top of her helmet and told her that she had insulted El Gordo.

“Even an animal has pride,” he’d said. “You must too, if you want respect, if you expect to survive.”

Billie did not know what these words meant, but she could understand the look on her father’s face, and she could feel the weight of his words as they left his mouth and floated through the hot air towards her.

On this, on instinct, they agreed. It was then that Billie first stared into the eye of an animal.

Billie listened as her father and Ricky argued about how to supplement the ranch’s income. Her father had no money, and Ricky had no pride. Billie scowled in the dark when Ricky used the phrase “dude ranch.” She heard the splintering of a dining chair as her father’s response. And that was that.

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billie’s father did not call her the next day for what seemed to be an exorbitant amount of time, though time to Billie was relative, since time was nearly always associated with light, even the artificial, and Billie was too tame to turn on even her reading lamp. She was, at this point in unmarkable time, so anxious that she had plateaued at a quiet, calm desperation. She was suspended in the lack of color or tone, and she was unwaveringly sure of what she would do when she could reach the girl at the perimeter fence.

Finally, her father smacked his palm flat against her door once, and she opened the door and followed him out to the barn.

It was late in the afternoon, and Ricky had already cut the grass. She helped her father check on the calves, then offered to sweep the pasture and check on the grazing cattle. Her father pushed her away with the wave of his hand.

Billie willed Charlie to sprint the several acres to Penelope’s corner.

She dismounted before he stopped and lurched forward into the barbed wire, ignoring the red as it ran down her wrists. Her eyes turned and in a daze she looked at the brambled mesquite.

The girl was gone. Billie stood there a moment in shock, her entire body an open sore. She did her best to cauterize herself as she scanned the flat land and felt the forsakenness infect her.

Her body ached as she rode Charlie back to the barn and returned to her father, who was weighing cattle in the corral. He looked at her with listless eyes. She pulled her hat down over her face.

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mackenzie sanders

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anne dyer stuart

fourteen summers In fluorescent biker shorts and ripped tie-dye, fourteen summers at the table shrinking.

On the grass a rat makes his escape.

For all you know he could be a girl.

Elephant ears by the fence cooling mud.

Between houses aging cedar. The judge dressed up like Santa Claus. That was never a secret. Beneath these bones buried under the magnolia by the playhouse bought from a girl my age who’d outgrown it lies a cocker spaniel named Little Man. He hated to swim but we threw him in again, again, hoping he’d change his mind.

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peter laberge

stripping South Carolina | Aug. 2021

It’s that time of year again: stripping the beaches of their pastels, pastels twirling through the winded sand. Almost like it’s planned. The men in the changing stalls stripping, then dressing, then stripping—they’ve come and gone, given way to the basic straight couples running for cover—they know, of course, rain is harmless. They must know rain is rain is rain is…god, I want to give them all a show—waist-deep, rising, unafraid, my legs wrapped around Rob, who’s walking us further in—

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mary buchinger

incendiary Say my life is a fire and I burn books wine food I consume stub-winged hopes crickets crows I eat cotton and ink friend brother son smack my lips my flames flit crest swell

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grace ezra

i am told again that i am not gentle An adult deer who has kept her spots and mary janes worn to bitterness and relief you told me that I am not gentle but hardness and ongoing limbs like a laundry line and roadkill’s breastbone and again not gentle yes unkind yes a kissed mouth and yes apples after sex the roadkill is a body separated from its head and its head in a ditch I do something that is nothing like humming the body is bloated and the head’s eyes are clear impossible and oh unbearable evening oh truculent bones and horns beneath my skin and still feeling the flesh

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send me something else A photo of a field, but it’s really of the moon I watch my ugly winter hands count and change and slice oranges like I make them The choice for things is to separate or remain whole One must spend half the day in opposition to the other

(My interior world is early)

The moons are drying in the oven I have not uncovered position, but I have learned to notice it intuiting a knot

my rim incisive One must be more than once Bright collapse

The moon was out during the day

Shedding light What is missing from this miracle (The things I really cherish) a health of what absence How are we more than once?

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andrea lewis radiant my plan for that night, August 11, 1972, was to watch the Perseid meteor shower. I wanted to see more meteors before I died. But a call came in at midnight about a disabled car on the highway south of Farmington. I took the smaller tow truck—the flat-bed—and started down New Mexico state road 44. The night was warm and clear, and I could hear the high desert all around me, breathing and stretching in the dark. Even as a little boy, I could see things—beyond what others saw—but now I could hear things too. Especially since my diagnosis.

Everything on the plateau hummed: the volcanic ridges and the red desert floor; the San Juan River and the Aztec Ruins; the spiny edges of rabbitbrush and piñon, moving in the breeze.

All I knew from the call was that a station wagon with Wyoming plates had hit two steers on the road about fifty miles from Farmington.

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I was driving south—away from the radiant in Perseus—but I still saw three meteors on the way down. I knew that each one was a tiny piece of comet-dust hitting our atmosphere, flaring into flame as hot as ten thousand degrees, and burning up.

Because the accident was on Navajo land and the steers probably belonged to a Navajo rancher, an officer from the Navajo police force was on the scene. Young guy in a white shirt with Shiprock insignia on the sleeves. His long ponytail, his jeans and running shoes, looked casual.

But his belt held a holster with a not-casual sidearm. When I got there, he glanced up from his flashlight and clipboard and nodded at me.

His squad car headlights shone across the wreckage: gray Plymouth with its front end folded up like an accordion and radiator fluid all over the road. One steer dead on the highway and another bellowing in agony in the ditch. Death can be loud or soft, and this was loud.

A man and his little girl, maybe eight years old, stood together on the gravel edge of the road. Unhurt, as far as I could tell. The dad was tall and tanned in a dark polo shirt and crumpled khaki shorts. If he was on vacation, all vacation calm had been shattered. His jaw was tight, and his hands were clamped on his daughter’s shoulders. She was the brightest thing there. Her clothes were all light pink—T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers—and her hair was pale and cut short. Her outline was the same gleaming silver of the shooting stars. She leaned against her father looking watchful, as if daring anyone to blame her dad.

I backed the tow truck into position, turned on the hydraulics, and lowered the ramp. After I dragged the chain and hook from the back of the truck, I had to lie down on the road under the car to find a good place to hook up. When I looked straight up into the sky, I saw the full sweep of the Milky Way, the gift of it, all its colors and generosity.

Static-y bursts of Navajo came from the police radio, but the young officer ignored them. He was studying the man’s registration and frowning. These steers were valuable property, and there would be hell to pay.

He probably wanted to find out about insurance and get us non-Navajos out of there.

I got the chain tightened and winched the car slowly onto the ramp.

Again and again, the injured steer in the ditch exhaled full-bellied groans of pain. I could feel blood filling its lungs as if they were my own.

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“What happened?” I asked the dad.

The officer looked up from the clipboard and cut me off. “Just do your job,” he said. He was half my age and wanted to show who was in charge. I wasn’t there to interview the driver. I threw the switch to pull the ramp and the car onto the flat-bed.

The little girl pointed to the sky and said, “Look, Daddy.” The meteor—coming straight out of the radiant to the northeast—cut a crystal-white swath that looked very close to Earth and lasted a full four seconds, the kind they call a fireball. The injured steer chuffed out another deep and hard-edged groan.

As we gazed at the sky, still in awe, the officer pulled his gun, clicked off the safety, and fired a single round into the steer’s head. The sound was enormous. So was the resulting quiet. He ignored our stunned reaction and stepped down into the ditch, knelt there, and placed a hand on the animal’s neck. Maybe ensuring it was dead. Maybe apologizing for the bullet, although he hadn’t had a choice. He climbed out of the ditch, holstered the gun, and took up his clipboard.

I was preparing to strap down the wheels when the girl again said, “Look, Daddy,” but this time she pointed toward the now-silent steer in the ditch.

“I know, honey,” he said. “It’s all right.” He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. He lifted his gaze to me. “She sees things,” he said. “It’s hard to explain.”

I wasn’t surprised, not really. I knew from her outline there was something. I wrapped a tire strap around the left front tire and threaded the strap into the ratchet. Yes, it’s hard to explain, I thought, tightening it down. It sets you apart, and people think you’re nuts. I was a halforphaned kid on a ranch, about this girl’s age, when I realized nobody else saw energy moving, souls departing, darkness clinging in corners.

Nobody else saw omens, auras, colors. I once cried over a sheep dog—a day before he died—and then was cursed as if I caused it. After that I kept quiet. I pretty much kept quiet for fifty years once I realized nobody cared that even a hacked-up rattlesnake returns something to the earth and air. Even a tumbleweed trapped under barbed wire has purpose. I loved that ranch, but it was the wrong life for me. I never denied the gift, if that’s what it was, but it came with loneliness.

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As I moved to strap down the left rear tire, I glanced toward Perseus— nothing happening—and then watched the dad, over by the squad car, as he unfolded a paper from his wallet and gave it to the officer. The officer in turn handed him the flashlight to hold while he copied the information.

When I came around to the right side of the car, where it was darker, the little girl was there. While I strapped down the right rear tire, she watched me, her energy now blue and calm, less electric. Before she asked her question, I knew what it would be.

“Mister, are you okay?”

I’d wondered since my diagnosis if anything had changed. If anyone would notice. She stood inside her own circle of stillness. There was no point in lying, but I did hedge.

“I’m okay for now,” I said. “I’m good right now.”

She nodded in the slow way kids nod when they are deciding whether to believe you.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“Farmington,” I said. “I’ll take you and your dad back there tonight.”

“Is that a good place?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s good.” I moved past her to the right front and pulled the straps over the tire. “I’ve lived there my whole life.”

“Your whole life?”

“Most of it.” I tightened down the last tire strap and tested the tension.

“So, is that where—” she rubbed her nose and took in a breath, weighing the words— “Is that where you want to be?”

It was my turn to weigh words, but what the hell, she knew that I knew she knew.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s where I’ll be. It’s all set up.” That last part was a stretch. The doctor had explained how it might go, hospice and everything, and I nodded along with him as if we were discussing a new alternator for the truck. But not much had been decided. I kept putting it off.

“Almost finished here.” I pretended the strap needed adjusting. I wanted to stay there in her company.

She took my hand—my calloused, grease-grimed hand—as if I might need help walking to the front of the truck. Her touch carried a charge

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that went all the way into the ground. I felt we were standing on the exact square mile of Earth we were promised to.

“Stars are falling,” she said.

“They’re meteors,” I told her. “It’s the Perseid meteor shower.”

“I know,” she said. “My dad told me. He knows things.”

The officer—friendlier now that we were leaving—waved goodbye, and we climbed into the truck cab. The girl sat in the middle on the bench seat and hummed lightly. Maybe she heard the same desert frequency I did.

“There was a rise in the road,” the dad said, finally able to answer my question. “When I crested it, those cows were right on top of me. I had no time to react.”

I turned the truck around, and we started north towards Farmington. The huge night held us in our small circle of headlights. We were facing Perseus and it was about two am. The dad leaned into the windshield and looked up. “This is perfect,” he said.

“What is?” the girl asked. As if in answer, one small meteor winked at us and disappeared but was followed immediately by another one, a monster streak of liquid silver close to the horizon. The entire plateau lifted towards it.

The dad explained to her about the radiant. “It’s the part of the sky where the meteors seem to come from,” he said. “In August, it’s near Perseus.”

“What’s Perseus?” she asked.

He pointed toward the constellation. He did indeed know things.

He even told her how Perseus was a half-mortal son of Zeus. I liked his knowledge and the way he talked to her. I wanted to ask if he was a scientist, maybe an astronomer. But it was hard for me to take it all in. The night was too crowded with joy. And the desert was making all that noise. And next to me, the girl was so solemn and yet so alive.

With every shooting star, she touched my arm and whispered, “Ooh, Mister, look.”

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andrea lewis

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cass lintz

tour of separations I rename the beach. I rename the sound of waves. I take everything I can, like dialect and those small orbs that dance orange into frame and loiter in the pennant of light cast, silent as dead canary yellow. I release the two magnetic stars, their earnest binary.

I bury the ring in the black guts of traded t-shirts and tape the corrugated sky shut.

I take the hill with the spliffs, those eucalyptus sentinels, smudge them clean again. Crush the cherry.

I wipe every mental table, the one in the very back— throw all the uneaten apples out, finally, dump the ashes, choke on bloom & stop smoking, stop traffic as I cut from our old route and run into woods yet to be named.

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from the publisher "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there/” —William Carlos Williams "Poetry is news that stays news" —Ezra Pound

Literary magazines help to fill the gaps left by the nation’s media, thanks to the keen observers of the outside world who are often put off by what is found in the day-to-day news coverage. That said, I’ve redirected my sustaining donation earmarked for National Public Radio to literary magazines that continuously publish the “news that stays news.”

Recovering after going downhill with an early heart attack has brought me a new heightened awareness that allows me to see those who really matter are already with me on Raleigh Review and in life.

This new focus also helps me to really see and appreciate those who’ve been with me for much of the last several decades along with those who came to help, whether it was an offer of timely advice or just showing up with food for my rather large and young family.

Dear poets and writers of this issue, I challenge you to send an initial or a second note of thanks to the team members who assisted you through the process from acceptance to copyediting your work to the galley phase to you now being one of our very own contributors. Reach out to our team members to thank them for not only your benefit, but for all those who’ll come after you. Thank and befriend our dear readers as well who are really your first domino to acceptance in Raleigh Review. We solicit, like, zilch of the work included in these issues so you should be proud that your work has made it through to this point based on the merit of the writing and on your talent.

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Dear subscribers, thank you. I encourage you to follow the careers of the writers and poets from our pages who inspire you. Reach out to them to let them know if their work has influenced you in some way, not only those works that entertain you, but also those works that challenge you.

Bob Marley once said, “Truth is, everyone’s going to hurt you, you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” With that, my hat is off to our team over the last few decades who are helping us build Raleigh Review. Some have moved on to other roles and responsibilities within our community of writers. Some have changed paths entirely.

The physical action of progressing and helping those we invest time and effort in as they move on to their next round of hopes and dreams is part of what makes organizations like ours successful, so there’s never any harm when we lose someone we helped in their transition from one place in their life to the next. This is a very welcome occurrence that comes when you’re both kind and generous. It doesn’t matter if you are an individual or an organization, it’s just part of the process.

That’s enough for me for now. It’s time to get back to work here.

There’s life yet to live, and there’s always something new to read for our small though mighty magazine, Raleigh Review, so let’s get to it, shall we?

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Rob Greene, publisher

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contributors colin bailes holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the 2020–2021 Levis Reading Prize Fellow and was awarded the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Meridian, Missouri Review, Subtropics, and wildness, among other journals.

He lives and teaches in Gainesville, Florida. nora beers kelly (Illustrator at Raleigh Review) is from Montreal, Quebec. Her notable clients include Concordia University, Plateau Astro, Temps Libres, The Tyee, The New York Times, and many other establishments. allison blevins is the author of the collections Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir (BlazeVox, 2022), Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021), and four chapbooks. Allison is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Executive Editor at the museum of americana. http://www.allisonblevins.com. mary buchinger is the author of five poetry collections, including /kla ädz/ (2021), einf√ºhlung/in feeling (2018), and VIROLOGY (forthcoming). She serves on the New England Poetry Club board and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston, Massachusetts. caroline chavatel is the author of White Noises (Greentower Press, 2019), which won The Laurel Review‚ 2018 Midwest Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Missouri Review, Foundry, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She is co-founding editor of The Shore, an editor at Madhouse Press, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia State University.

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julia kolchinsky dasbach emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee at age six. She is author of the collections The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023). Dr. Dasbach is Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. joshua davis is the author Reversal Spells in Blue and Black (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming) and Chorus for the Kill (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022). He holds an MFA from Stonecoast and from the University of Mississippi.

He offers online workshops at The Poetry Barn and teaches high school English near Tampa, Florida. gregory djanikian has published seven collections of poetry with Carnegie Mellon, the latest of which is Sojourners of the In-Between (2020).

His poems have appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, Boulevard, New Ohio Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, among others, and in many anthologies and textbooks. j.r. evans lives and works in Alaska. grace ezra (formerly Sutphin) is originally from Greenville, South Carolina, but currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky. She was awarded second place in Sarabande Books' 2020 Flo Gault Poetry Prize, and fourth place in the second annual Poetry Derby hosted at Churchill Downs. Her work has been previously published in Poet Lore, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. loisa fenichell’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been featured or is forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.

c. francis fisher is a poet, translator, and movement artist based in Brooklyn. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in the Arkansas International, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Los Angeles Review of Books among other publications. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at 25” was selected as the winner for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize at Columbia University. She teaches undergraduate composition at Columbia University. erica jenks henry grew up in Bangkok, Thailand, but currently lives in Chicago, where she raises children and works in public health. Her writing has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Lumiere Review, Oyster River Pages, Pithead Chapel, Lit Hub, Zone 3, and elsewhere. katherine joshi teaches writing at the University of Maryland, where she received her MFA in fiction writing in 2014. Her fiction has appeared in Big Muddy and Glasschord. Originally from Tennessee, she now lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, son, and nearly toothless cat. stephanie kaylor is Reviews Editor at Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She is completing her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and curates the Sex Workers’ Archival Project. She lives in Brooklyn. peter laberge is the founder and editor-inchief of The Adroit Journal, as well as an MFA candidate and Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University. His poetry has received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in AGNI, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Pleiades, among others. justin lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. He is the author of My Heart is Shaped Like a Bed: 46 Sonnets (Fjords 2022). andrea lewis writes short fiction and essays from her home in Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in over thirty literary journals, and her collection of linked stories, What My Last Man Did, was published by Indiana University Press. Find her on Twitter @AndreaCLewis.

cass lintz earned her BA from Mills College in Oakland, California. Currently, she's an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where she serves as poetry editor for Ecotone magazine. Her work has previously appeared in Rough Cut Press and The Walrus Literary Journal. caroline mccoy's writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Blackbird Journal, Juked Magazine, Electric Literature, The Bitter Southerner, and other places. She earned her BA from the University of North Carolina and her MFA from Emerson College. She lives and works in Savannah, Georgia. owen mcleod is author of the poetry collections Dream Kitchen, which won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, and Before After, forthcoming from Saturnalia Books. His poems appear in Copper Nickel, New England Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. john salter is the author of Alberta Clipper and A Trout in the Sea of Cortez. Purple Sage, his new story collection, is forthcoming from Slant Books. His short fiction has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Chattahoochee Review, Third Coast, Florida Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. He lives in North Dakota. mackenzie sanders is a fiction writer from Arizona. She received her bachelor's degree in English from the University of Arizona in 2020 and is a creative writing MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work is forthcoming in Passengers Journal.

Nominated for Best New Poets and winner of New South journal's prose prize, anne dyer stuart's publications include AGNI, Cherry Tree, American Journal of Poetry, and The Texas Review. What Girls Learn (Finishing Line Press 2021) was a finalist for Comstock Review’s 2020 Chapbook Contest. She teaches at Bloomsburg University.

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