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 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 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. ◆

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.

From the Sylvia Townsend Warner novel, Summer Will Show 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. winner of the laux/millar poetry prize

the fever's children

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. finalist for the laux/millar poetry prize

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.

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 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.

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.