The Lavender Issue 19: Bird's Eye

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

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The Lavender

The R oute 9 Lite ra ry C ollec t i v e p res en t s . . .

The Lavender I s s u e X I X : B i r d ’s E y e Wes leya n’s prose, poe try, and art m ag azi n e S pring 2026

route9.org • @route9wes ii

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

About Us

The Lavender is Wesleyan’s student-run poetry, prose, and art magazine that publishes twice a semester. The literary magazine is run under the Route 9 Literary Collective, which also publishes a multitude of other projects including Pre-Owned, Good Condition, The John, Poems of Our Climate, The Route 9 Anthology, and more. Learn more at route9.org.

Why The Lavender?

The Lavender is an homage to the fact that Wesleyan University’s official color used to be lavender. The color was changed because, according to an October 1884 issue of The Argus, lavender was not suitable for intercollegiate sports. “Lavender is not a striking color,” the article proclaimed.

Well, 1884 critic, we here at The Lavender find the color incredibly striking.

Why Route 9?

Route 9 is the road that connects Middletown to the rest of Connecticut.

It is the central artery of movement that every Wesleyan student, faculty, staff, and Middletown resident has driven on. It connects us and moves us forward. iii

The Lavender

THE LAVENDER TEAM Editors-in-Chief: Mia Alexander, Mel Cort, Isaiah Rosenn, and Sarann Spiegel Managing Editors: Elva Lindeburg Leth and Alexandra Potts Poetry Editor: Fae Leonard-Mann Assistant Poetry Editor: Kashvi Gera and Eli Goldman Prose Editor: Eli Hoag and George Manes Assistant Prose Editor: Georgia Guariglia and Tess Lieber Design Editors: Eve Epstein and Stella Steele Copy Editors: Ben Goodman, Clara Lewis-Jenkins, Jasmine Sklarew, Maddy Wisse, and Maisie Wrubel The Team: Josephine Abell, Zazie Anastasopoulos, Lillian Hoefflin, Luciana Johnson, Bailey Jones, Alexandra Lee, Adelaide Matthews, Kai Paik, Tommy Parker, Ellie Powell, Ethan Qu, Astrid Robin, Evan Salhanick, Anna Sewell, Vyom Tiwari, Lily Turner, Eliza Walpert, and Zahara Ziegler Cover Design: Maya Lozea Logo Design: Leo Egger Special Thanks to: The heroes at 86B Lawn, all the dear friends who make this magazine possible, Oliver Egger, Immi Shearmur, G+E, Merve Emre, Ryan Launder, Olin Library, the Shapiro Writing Center, the Wesleyan English Department, and the SBC.

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear Watchers, We’ve been chirping about this issue for so long, we’re glad to finally see it in print. If you haven’t noticed – use your eyes – it’s a bigger issue than usual (a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush). Don’t worry, it’s still light as a feather. Your first read can be from the air, a more broad view to get the full picture. Then we suggest coming in close and looking with those eagle eyes, so nothing flies over your head. If you feel a splash, it’s good luck.

Mel, Mia, Isaiah – we’d be nowhere without your guidance. You’re our cardinals pointing us in the right direction. And also towards trouble. Oops! To M & M, your cardinal sin is that you’re leaving us behind, but we’ll keep your red feathers as bookmarks for future editions.

Our Prose crows, with their sleek and beautiful words – Eli, George, what would we do without your caw-some judgment? Our Poetry peacock, Fae, has clawed her way from nestling to nurturer. You’re oh-so fabulous and you never fail to shine. Yael, our fabulous flamingo, whom we know not what to title but want desperately on our team, we’ve loved having you. Thanks for helping us hatch our plan. We hope we do it justice.

And to Maisie and Ben, the parrots of the family – thank you for listening carefully, copying exactly, and, when need be, improving our ruffled words. Stella and Eve, our doves of design, your small but mighty olive branch brings peace among our coop’s writers and artists. We’re already sad to think of you flying off next semester.

To the hatchlings we’ve taken under our wings: Zal, Kashvi, Jasmine, Clara, Maddy, Eli G, Alex, Georgia, and Tess, we are so egg-cited to see what beautiful birds you become.

Maybe you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, or count them before they hatch, but this batch looks pretty damn good to us. We wing it sometimes, other times we get chicken. We may be different birds, but we’ve decided to flock together. That’s how you kill two birds with one stone.

If you didn’t lay any of our wonderfully written eggs, there’ll be another chance soon.

Remember: the early bird gets the worm. And don’t be scared – you have to spread your wings before you’re sure you can fly.

Love from your favorite birdwatchers, Elva & Sarann v

The Lavender

TABLE OF CONTENTS Bander’s Grip by Mel Cort

2

Untitled by W.J. Ray

3

By Beauty Made Fleet by Ella Kramer

4-5

Sunset Over Lack a Want a by Sarann Spiegel

6

I have a flood song by Liv Rubenstein

7-8

crickets / undercovers by Michaela Somers

9

Interior by Jess Huang The Farmer Perched on Bright Pass by Shanti Hinkin

11

Playing Chicken by Isaiah Rosenn

12

Spectator Mode by Kashvi Gera

13-14

AMERICAN PROGRESS TAKES THE FIVE by Claire

15

Eve Epstein

16-17

Whispered truths are Lies by Jesse Valentine

18

Waiting by Kaitlyn Schaffner

19-20

Ella Wade

20

Upon Looking Through a Door’s Peephole by Eli Goldman

21

An Ode to Anthropology by Milo Aitken

22

The Striped Tower by Conrad Lewis

23

Anguish by Phoenix Gault Brown

24

Sarann Spiegel

25

Look by Sophie Neiblum Zoom Out by Jianna Shao

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10

26 27

Autopsy of a Woman by Anastasia Zhu

28-33

Horizon by Nina Kibria

34-35

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

The Strong-Willed Pig by Phoebe Mulder

36

cornfield lovecrows by Charlie Hartman

37

Beyond this Chicken Wire by E Kraft

38

The Farm Stand by Evan Salhanick

39-40

Stella Steele

40-41

Double Rainbow by Adelaide Matthews

42

the girl who you can’t invite anywhere by Michael J. Scott

43-45

CityScape by Ava Lesko

46

She Is Crying From Her Vagina by Virgenya Zhu

47

Medical Madness by Isabel Hewitt

48

Wicked Interference by Hannah Schwichtenberg

49

Myths I Like to Believe In #1 by Yael Ezry

50-51

What he saw, from above: by Gray Samsom-Chasin

52

My Room in Blue by Eva Gamboa

53

Bird’s Eye by Lela Jennings

54

The Care and Keeping by Jordana Treisman

55-56

Embroidery art by Maya Lozea

57

Philomela’s Song by Tommy Parker

58

Dedication by Jane Weitz

59

molting by Vin Wiemelt

60-61

On Writing by Adam Wilan

62

Meaning-Making by Elias Tobisman Pearl

63-64

A Rib From Charlie Kirk by Zal Rimer

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2

The hollow bones are not to make them lighter. They need so much air that their lungs extend in to their bones, fragile fickle faking things, holding and hiding on the in and the ex. I wonder about greed.

I wonder if I’m allowed a space in the split-open semi-embrace of an ulna.

Bander’s Grip Mel Cort

The Lavender

Embroidery art by Maya Lozea

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Untitled W.J. Ray

At midnight the roosters crowed

At noon the bats ventured out

At dawn the crickets chirped

At dusk — 3

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By Beauty Made Fleet Ella Kramer When she stepped off the South Hampton train I saw in her smirk we had that same knack for starting the party too early and keeping it going far too late.

This was a habit I’d tried to leave behind with high school house parties, but she brought it out in me, and I supposed there was no harm in an ephemeral rerun.

She was a bitch, she’d even say so. Staggeringly breathtaking as she was, she didn’t concern herself with niceties or lies or other people’s feelings. She was simply brutal, in every sense of the word. Brutally honest, brutally beautiful, brutally smart, yet thoughtless at the same time.

When she bullied I bit back and she hated that but it turned her on as well. The first night was spent one-upping each other’s fun, some lightly veiled display of competitive foreplay.

Should we start drinking? / Yeah, an hour ago.

Should we go swimming? / No, skinny dipping.

I’m gonna roll a spliff. / I’m gonna do a bump.

You’re such a fucking bitch. / You’re so fucking boring.

Everyone else probably just wanted to watch a movie. It’s embarrassing now to think of 15 people rolling their eyes at our pathetic power play, but we were too drunk on our own beauty to care.

When the sun melted away she insisted on Bodies Bodies Bodies and I kicked myself for not suggesting it first. I was hiding in an uncomfortably damp shower when the waxy curtain was suddenly swept aside and a dainty yet firm hand clasped over my mouth. My own hand shot forward instinctively, landing steady on her belt buckle. She closed her fingers around my wrist to keep it there. The hand on my mouth tightened, my teeth cutting into my lip. Relax, it’s me, she breathed. As if we’d known each other for years. We stayed like that longer than we needed.

The next day was a blur of watermelon slices and spliffs and sunscreen and her red bathing suit and margaritas and ping pong balls and her red bathing suit and 4

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

broken sunglasses and damp grass and charred hot dogs and her red bathing suit.

When everyone else got sick of the brouhaha, as those with self respect tend to do, she brushed my hair from my ear and whispered, Let’s Party. Such a Penny Lane Amber Waves kind of line I almost wanted to laugh but instead I downed my gin and tonic and bounced out to the pool, knowing she would follow but never looking back like some counterfeit Orpheus.

We raced to strip off our sundresses. When we crashed into the water we both shrieked even though it was 80 degrees. We jumped on top of each other, becoming one messy twist of blonde hair and sunburnt legs and pink thongs and bare chests. Our lips danced around each other, coming almost together then dipping below the surface just in time. I took her hand and helped her float beneath the moonlight. She teared up and I was unsure if it was real or just a new part of our game. She looked into me and gasped, I’ve never felt this kind of peace with someone. I called her bluff, of course, probably even laughed a little at this uncharacteristic breath of sentimentalism. But she maintained her case, and called me beautiful.

She was writing a story as she spoke, one we both knew was a lie but wanted to live anyway. What’s more intoxicating than knowing you’re living in a good story? So we let ourselves be drugged and entangled our bodies. We kissed and kissed and chlorine was in all of our orifices.

Later in the bathroom with hair dripping down our backs, she turned to me with a fragile, out of place seriousness glazing her eyes.

This won’t happen again, she lied.

Okay, I snorted, slamming the door in her face on my way out. I pictured her full lips pushing out to a frustrated pout. A toddler who didn’t get her way on the playground.

She followed me to the kitchen. I grabbed us fresh beers. She pushed the arch of my back into the counter top and kissed me hard. We spent the rest of the night laying around, hands in hair and mouths on shoulders. And in the morning I went home alone.

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Sunset Over Lack a Want a Sarann Spiegel I remember a time before I knew your soul. A pink light reaches for the longgone day; I try to find the place it ends.

Everything disappears. I can remember not knowing you as I began to know you and those days are still hard to decipher though I should have all the pieces by now.

Geese take to the grass for the night, faces tucked into feathers necks turned in on themselves dark eye blinking wet. Now you are no mystery.

I don’t have to look at you to know where you stand lacking and wanting before you.

A crane taller than a hundred men on each others’ shoulders, taller than we know how to love, flies an American flag. Operator’s post abandoned. Flag whipping in frozen wind. If it’s this beautiful in the darkness, imagine light dousing the operator’s skin, America wagging its tail, a dog in love with its commander obeying for once. Proud. Lacking wanting over the wrong water.

Myself for a moment

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I have a flood song Liv Rubenstein

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Sounds like feet hitting the sidewalk.

Like car jolting over seam to the feeder to the highway, trashcan over curb.

Have a flood song, sounds like rain on the roof, two thousands miles away earning a degree, watch the sidewalk fill and chew the skin from my finger, making the fingernail click like a flood song, like a worrying foot, waiting in traffic to go home and dream about going home, to worry paper into a new home, we only left because I worried when Leah told me she heard it would be a bad one, waiting in line for locker assignments the first day of eighth grade and then all of us, we all got a flood song, sounds like wind chimes screaming, like wind cracking open a live oak and birthing a river, call it a bayou, call it a sewer, call it the crunch of my bike weaving through hills of debris — somehow, the playhouse was still standing, I hid shards of mirror in the eaves, my mom said I shouldn’t touch the rubble but I did, cut open my palm, found white beneath the red.

Told no one, pressed it against my pocket til the running stopped

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running, til there was a new, pale line I could not read.

I went back to my cousins’ to sit inside and read about sex, flowers, promised land, waited for my mom to come back, kiss me, tell the miracle of twenty Hasidic teenagers arriving, not on eagles wings but on a bus from Brooklyn, to gut our house, gut the schul down the street, gut clean the whole neighborhood like a fish being cleaned — she ordered them pizza from the kosher place, which was, somehow, untouched, somehow, still kosher.

They made grace, they thanked her, watcher her pour the old liquor down a gutter.

No, they sat on the curb and sang flood songs Old, old flood songs, no words, a melody with a current, the coursing coming out of them, their hands, dark hair curling, slapping black pants.

Stomping thin feet, staring up at the wide green sky, that rich and dark canopy, that first sky with its chip glass stars poking through a river of leaves, waxy green like almonds, mother’s eyes, that, even now, 8

whisper.

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

crickets / undercovers Michaela Somers The voices of the night chorus drop one by one, hearts stopping with every frost.

We’re growing lonelier from the sun.

But I remember, with your help, the feeling of summer heat, sun-drunk delirium, easing out of pain. We make music and love— you take me home. Even as bare trees, no leaves to hold, stretch their hands out to us laid out in the midafternoon, the kind of light reserved for angels spills through behind you: a pure kind of joy comes upon me.

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“Interior”

By Jess Huang 10 10

The Farmer Perched on Bright Pass Shanti Hinkin

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Today I cracked an egg and it had 21 yolks. This is one in a many strokes of good fortune I have had this season, all thanks to the magnificence of my hens. When I opened the master egg, I scoffed in approval of the chicken’s brilliance. One and a half times the size of a normal egg and twenty one amber yolks. Absolute miracle of engineering by the bird.

But then, isn’t every egg? An omelette so rich will need but a delicate toast. Whole grain sliced paper thin and that’s enough for the farmer perched on Bright Pass.

Beside the hens I have cattle and a shepherd dog, and I grow on two fields. My son told his class that I am a chicken tender. But caring for the birds is a single petal amidst my garden of responsibilities.

Much more demanding is tending to the soil that needs to be turned inside out like a bed sheet. Plump, porous dirt can make meaning from a seed. I know how the earth must feel when a sprout begins to cast its shadow. The soil can relax into its gaps and tense his hold on the seed. Always with the tangled roots in his grasp, the plant becomes a mystery.

When he dresses in the morning, and his mucked-up tatters show the fruits of his labors, his torn heart will be darned.

Having worked up an appetite, I h-whisk the biblical egg and it sloshes on the sides of my skillet. I think to cook it differently than I would a single-yolker. Such an egg has no almanac and I must answer to another warble.

I switch off the heat, the opaque canary mixture still jiggling, rare as rare. My sweet son enters the kitchen and I plop him on a stepstool to see the stove.

“How many eggs that look like to you?”

“A whole dozen?” he croons.

“Nope. Just one.”

Then we dance around the kitchen in celebration spinning like tops. We sing and hoot for that which we know may never happen again. And if ever, years later, I should crack an egg with three yolks, or even two, I am sure that I will weep.

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Playing Chicken Isaiah Rosenn I found God on a wooden bench in the Tate Modern He was twice my size and solemn faced Demystified Pared down Marrow sucked out of the canvas So that the paint could sustain itself No feathers or accoutrements Like a naked chicken bawking around with its head chopped off Oozing a blazing red blood that splattered the barn floor with its being When the paint dried All that was left was a mirror Genesis reflected The world was made for me And I am nothing but dust and ashes

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Spectator Mode Kashvi Gera On top, lofted bed, roommate with the last choice: automatic brain cells.

Pokes fun like, “You’ve risen from the coffin.”

Groggy, unaware, in spectator mode.

Spatial surroundings, moving bodies below.

In dreams, forgotten.

Awake.

Rush Of Activity Beloved sitcom star, dead at 35.

The Olsen twin syndrome, poor child-actors.

Remember when Katy Perry went to space?

What happened to Sally Ride?

On top, lofted bed, roommate with the last choice: semi-automatic brain cells.

Microwave on the last second.

Turn that shit off already.

She looks up at me, mouths an apology.

I’m alive.

Blood bumping in veins, heart beating to the neighbours guitar, (don’t quit your day job). notifications.

Who’s mad at me? flashback.

It was gone with the wind, But it’s all coming back to me Google Calendar Maxxing Can’t find an internship.

On top, lofted bed, roommate with the last choice: functioning brain cells.

Period stain on my favorite jeans: Add To Cart.

The athlete, out the door.

The other, we squashed our beef.

Thanks for the coffee (breakfast in bed). “sisters” Sisters Can we talk about the political and economic state of the world right now?

Depressing international relations and poverty in my parents’ home country.

I’m grateful to be here.

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Immigrant Daughter Guilt /gamemode spectator switch /gamemode survival

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

AMERICAN PROGRESS TAKES THE FIVE Claire How romantic is going West?! I want to take you in my horse-driven carriage, press your heavy head out of the canopy, let your hair tangle in the wheels. Kiss my way down your spine as your lips drag against the dust of the gaping plains. I need to feel the bump of the open road. See California for the first time with you, in all its glittering beige strip malls and castrated palms. The East gets colder in winter. I’ll take you warmer places.

Can we play violent games again? I feel the tall grass scrape the horse’s belly, taste the honeysuckle growing between the birches. Britches unbuckled and feather-shaft bent. Mud tucked between toes. There is a mouse which sleeps in the valley, belly laden with June-swollen berries and he does not know the shotgun. “Manifest destiny” becomes masturbatory.

Prairiegirls in log cabins press metal mouths to new blue jeans. Cowboys deny friendly phone calls with the vibrate on.

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

By Eve Epstein

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Whispered truths are Lies

By Jesse Valentine With breaths so light and voice so sweet, love’s gale soars—her wings set sail Through clouds sweet lovers roam drunk on morns’ amour and sinful flesh our birds fly high Subtly, slowly, one pulls away, dead breaths now plunge toward ground

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Waiting Kaitlyn Schaffner

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

My uncle was a priest and a teacher.

He said “We believe that every human being is a priest, that the human task is to take whatever matter a profession or craft puts in hand, then to speak the right words, and then to wait for God to act, to transform that matter into spirit.”

I never heard him say it out loud because he died and I was never confirmed.

I’m sitting waiting for a stop that I just memorized the name of.

And the bus is rocking us all back and forth like wind moves leaves when there’s leaves.

I am doing the staring thing again and the woman across from me hasn’t noticed yet.

She’s thumbing over a crucifix.

I’m watching light fall off the edges.

The difference between waiting and praying, I guess, is a matter of upbringing.

“Our father,” she thinks and I do too.

Hers is sincere.

“All of us? That’s a lot of kids” I think.

She has coffee stains on the corners of her mouth and an open back pack.

She has these things that she’s forgotten about herself.

Her pants are too short for her legs.

Suddenly I’m trying to forgive a woman on the bus for looking how she looks.

I’m doing the daring thing again and nobody has noticed yet.

What happens if I get off this bus now? What happens if I take it to Montreal?

What if today I’m a child again, secretly?

How close is close? You with your arm around me in the city for once? You, facing me dancing.

Can it be you holding my hair off my neck when we get too far into the middle of the crowd?

I’m having the hearing thing again Things come back to me written by teachers on papers from years ago: Who’s the speaker?

No units. Label.

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You need to prove this first.

This is vague and unsupported.

I try to think of things that were funny I get to the look in your eyes when I’m joking and stop trying.

I take stock of things I do have.

I’ve got matter piling up.

I don’t know where to go about it I’ve got a few more stops.

I’m not sure how much longer that is But I’ll wait.

I think I’ve got to.

I’m hoping I’ve done the asking part of this right.

I know it’s not the right words.

By Ella Wade 20

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Upon Looking Through a Door’s Peephole

By Eli Goldman

;) eye see the i eye see across the way o’er the threshold ‘yond the door ‘s peephole. it’s fish i’d

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An Ode to Anthropology Milo Aitken I notice the rings on the scuffed teak Born of cups too hot or cold Condensed tears, an inhumanly perfect circle, A most human mark; Fleshy and carpentered legs intertwined My heel brushes the wood, ignobly ignites the air The pattern on my soles draped upon dress shoes My jeans on chairs colonized by tailcoats And the stench of cedar pomade Cork and birch and frayed linen The nicked brass of the reading lamps Align your head with the window light– Tiny teenage scars ebb like a September sea Two initials etched in a forced embrace A college romance turned joint tax return Burnished, replaced, forgotten; This sacred palimpsest of cold cases They probably had coasters

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

The Striped Tower Conrad Lewis The brass mill has long since been demolished All that remains is this putrid shipyard; The flag flies with no one to salute it Plastic bags drift slowly for a thousand years Through the rivers, whose innocence they sully; And feeble grass grows through the gray gravel In this smog, I know not where my country lies The eddying mist upon the water only brings me sorrow The laughing children have long since gone away All that remains is this concrete behemoth The future beckons with no one to answer it SUVs lumber languidly in confused huddles Over I-91, their operators growing restless As they switch off the morning news in frustration I watch the cranes pull the smokestack into the earth Will anyone remember its red and white stripes?

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24

“Anguish”

By Pheonix Gault Brown

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

By Sarann Spiegel

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The Lavender

Look Inspired by This Spring by James A. Pearson Sophie Neiblum How can I love this spring when it promises horrors worse than the last? When a summer of fires and floods is sure to follow these innocent spring showers.

Beneath the weight of such dread, it seems useless to watch a tree spend weeks slowly shedding its pink dress.

But look at how that one falls and that one and that one.

Look at how that bird soars on the invisible currents of air that surround us both.

Look at how that bud bursts from gnarled bare wood into beautiful, blinding green.

How can I not believe in this soft, blooming power?

This perfect, accidental grace?

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

“Zoom Out”

By Jianna Shao

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Autopsy of a Woman Anastasia Zhu “Lie down,” Doctor Pierce said in a voice cold as porcelain falling on ice, “There is absolutely nothing sexual about her.”

I see before me she lies down, on the flat steel bed of the hospital. She is dressed in a paper-thin silk gown that reveals absolutely everything about her. It is felt that my perception of her was absolute. If I were to look at a nude woman, I can only see her front, or her back. Only one side of her palm. Only one between the shoulder blades and the breasts. Only one between her knees and her buttocks.

Dressed in the thin translucent robe, I see her front and back and the insides of her ears and the cavities and the skin that lines the inside of her warm inviting intestines.

I always felt insecure about that.

When Janet was still with S she always protested: “Sometimes you look at me and I feel like we’ve just had sex. You do that thing where you stare through me and back.” S shrugged, she didn’t know how to turn that off. Janet would fight her, physically, throwing hands at S, and she would yell: “I’m sick of not seeing what’s behind your back when I see your face. I’m sick of guessing what you’ve kept from my sight when you see me through and through.”

S: I can turn to show you my back.

S strips down, peeling off her blouse over her head and lifting her left, then right legs out of cargo pants. Her boots stay on. S turns around to do a twirl.

Janet sits down on the bed and cries.

JANET: I just can’t find it in me to trust you when your face smiles, my mind drifts off to your back and sees a bloody dagger and when you turn back I see the dagger again in your front. You are like the moon to me and even one side I can’t have.

S puts her arm around Janet, who is balled up.

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

“Do you want to have anal intercourse?”

They have anal intercourse. S grasps the whole of Janet’s inner linings. In the Bible it is written that Joseph did not know Mary when she was pregnant with Jesus Christ. Janet is left wondering if S ever knew her throughout their years of mutual knowing.

I’m tired of the process of becoming. Everything keeps becoming and becoming and they desire me to become as well when I have no desire whatsoever about what my becoming entails. I used to be an ethical formalist then I was a moral deconstructionist then I was a modernist then I was a postmodernist.

Then I was one of a certain contemporary and the contemporaries just kept washing over me and dripping down my ribs. I’m tired.

Doctor Pierce assured Janet there is absolutely nothing sexual about her. She was comforted knowing she’s a person about whom no sexual innuendos can apply.

“What do you see, be honest.” Janet asked Pierce. A deep red hue of the sun shines through the hospital window onto her cheeks. It seemed as though she had just been harshly slapped. Pierce harshly slaps her.

I am drawn to her toes. I am sexually attracted to her toes. Doctor Pierce has not looked at her toes and I have been staring at them. They are gigantic creatures.

Janet asked S when they were having sex once. When she had her two legs sprawled over S’ shoulders and S kissed her toes while penetrating her: “Do you like them?”

S: They are okay people. Not as nice as with you.

Janet does not know S was talking about her new found polycule. S thought Janet knew because she told the polycule about Janet. The act of knowing is not mutual. Janet never knew the people S had orgies with. S is still pumping Janet with emphatic rolling motions of her hip.

“Imagine your hip is a car window.” S was taught, “Play your woman like a piano.

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You know how your hand needs to keep an egg shape? Play her like a piano, like you are playing Chopin.” S lost her erection at the mentions of pianos and egg shapes. “Do you need me to blow you hard?” “No just, can I rub it between your tits a bit?”

I never understood tits.

No person in my life has ever shown much interest in them but S. Doctor Pierce pushed up his glasses to stare directly at her nipples. Her nipples are like eyeballs of fish. Their eyes found each other. My cock is beginning to rise as I keep on staring at the pale, pinkish sole of her feet.

THERE IS NOTHING SEXUAL ABOUT HER BECAUSE HER BODY IS NOT A SOLID THING AND EVERYTHING SCANDALOUS COMES FROM DERIVING SOMETHING LIQUID OR GASEOUS FROM SOMETHING SOLID SHE CANNOT BE DERIVED AND THEREFORE CANNOT BE SEXUAL I think my sexual awakening happened watching The Devil’s Advocate. Al Pacino was The Devil. Or God. I can’t remember. And Keanu Reeves was his son, so The Antichrist, or Christ. I can’t remember. And Al was showing Keanu his powers, and wanted him to have sex with his sister. Behind him this marble wall sculpture began moving like sand. Like water. And I think Connie Nielsen was nude. Right, she was. Yes, it’s coming back to me now.

He was The Devil because the marbles were liquid.

Janet sold feet pics in college twice. First time to try it out as a hustle on bad days on footfinder.com. The second time she did it she made too much money for her to feel this is just a side hustle. She fears that if more than 50% of her monthly expenditures are covered by vaguely pornographic enterprises she would define herself as a sex worker. It’s different when you just did it as a silly little thing on the side for a quick buck but I can’t be making serious money from it. Why not? Because how am I supposed to convince myself to quit and actually study and get a real job? Foot fetish men are actually really nice, and they compliment me nonaggressively. One time this old white guy DMed me after buying a set and just venmoed me $500 and wrote “I can tell you have a kind heart from your beautiful Asian feet. I want you to have this and wish you a good day.” Then he blocked me!

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

She does have very nice feet. Every time S’ mentioned it she doesn’t understand.

Janet never understood what’s nice about feet or what criteria even judges the beauty of one’s feet. I have struggled to explain to people what I find sensual, or rather, intimate, about feet and I continue to struggle.

There is a hole on her heel. She has a hole there.

The world is unfair to the myth making of men: When Jesus sacrificed his heels on the crucifix we think of his selflessness for our sake, when Achilles loses the same life of man through his heels we mourn his arrogance and vanity and forget he too fought for his people and died. We mourn one and worship another because we know Achilles’ fall and he doesn’t and we don’t know Christ’s death but he does.

A woman is neither Christ nor Achilles, so the hole in her heel must make meaning of itself outside of their allegories. The hole in her heel is voyeuristic to me but introspective to her. I am reminded of the lack of sexual undertone in this context.

I can feel my heartbeat through my cock.

Genesis 3:15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise her heel.

The word of the Lord.

JANET: Thanks be to God. S: What did you say?

JANET: What about it?

S: Nothing, it’s just, sex is only sexy insofar as it is uncertain. And now you’ve prophesized what’s to happen.

JANET: It’s still an underdog story.

S: An underdog with plot armor.

S bit a hole in Janet’s heel and Janet bashed S’ head into the wall. Sex is war and

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penetration is the Trojan horse, but allegorical references to Homer are ultimately not Divine Intervention. David was never an underdog in the story of Goliath. Goliath was designed to die like that like there. Blood dripped down the white cement as S’ body pooled on top of Janet’s. A deep red shined on her cheeks like Janet had just been slapped. Blood washed over her and dripped down her ribs, the hole in her heels filled up with not her blood. Everything scandalous comes from deriving something liquid or gaseous from something solid.

Janet felt she knew S finally from her soggy loose self. Janet pulled S out.

Pop. Janet’s body lies dead on the flat steel bed. Her skin is pale against metallic reflections. Scratches on the bed: who made them? Many things we blame in our lives on living people are the works of dead men.

Doctor Pierce peeled back Janet’s robe and I saw that she was indeed a solid person.

“She’s a solid person.”

“Do you know her?”

“I know solid when I see solid. Liquid doesn’t look that way.”

I was reminded of the scene S turned liquid again. Or when Jesus Christ turned gaseous by Pilate and we all breathed him in. I breathed in and had no Janet. She is solid. Doctor Pierce assured me she is both unsolid and dead.

In the dance studio, Instructor Pierce told Janet to give up her verticality. “Give up your verticality” is what she said. S didn’t know what that meant until she saw Janet give up her verticality. Verticality is not voluptuous. S realized Janet is indeed an attractive woman. That night they had sex. S requested Janet keep on her mesh skirt. Janet did but said: “If you cum on it I will kill myself.” Her cum dripped down Janet’s ribs.

“Doctor Pierce, why are you scared to admit her sensuality?”

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“One, I am a strictly homosexual man, so subjectively there is absolutely nothing

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

sexual about her. Two, she is dead, only alive things can be sexual, so objectively there is absolutely nothing sexual about her.”

“Three, but I find her sexual, sensual, and potentially voluptuous.”

Maybe I’m not dead. You know? Maybe I’m never gonna die. I look at that restaurant scene in The Godfather, where Mike shot up the two guys in the Italian restaurant, you hear the bang and that’s not enough. They might still not be dead. He pulls the trigger and they might still be alive. You know they are dead when the pink mist blows out in front of their faces. The air of blood leaving them. The gaseous transformation of a solid man. 200-pound guys turning weightless and airy. I can’t imagine that on me. I’d need a big big pink mist to pump all that life out of me. Who played Mike anyways?

I remembered the Bride from Kill Bill.

“Four, looked dead didn’t I? Well I wasn’t. But that wasn’t from lack of trying, I can tell you that.”

Five. And Cain said unto the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear.

Six. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.

And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

JANET: There is absolutely nothing sexual about me.

I drove my eyes across the length of her corpse. Stopping at her lips, her nipples, her vagina, her thighs, her toes. There is nothing remarkable to say about any of them. Equally pale and pinkish and dead and matter-of-fact. There is absolutely nothing sexual about her.

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The Lavender

“Horizon” 34

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

by Nina Kibria 35

The Lavender

The Strong-Willed Pig

By Phoebe Mulder His fingers on my sweater turning it into some dark woolen drain. I dove for zebra mussels as a joke and he got grit in his eye and I almost went crazy wanting to knock the bathroom door down. I swear the water around us kept changing its mind. On the blue couch we laughed about the strongwilled pig who survived for six weeks on water and charcoal. Whom they cloned five times and I laid belly-up with my chin towards him. All the old metaphors went frizzy around me.

It was the second summer by then. He said the headlights would have to stay on.

Wouldn’t you lay on the blue couch?

I scraped rice from the sink after dinner and dared him to eat it. I ripped duct tape into bite sized pieces when his shoe split open.

Any other night I would’ve said aren’t the new pigs dying from water and charcoal.

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

cornfield lovecrows

By Charlie Hartman i think i could be that for her if blue was a color if thoughts came in waves steam rising from solids passion in the undoing i think i could be what she needs if what she needs is a man with feathers if what she wants is a stitched-together memory that i am hers i think i could be what she needs if what she needs is a fucking statue cornfield lovecrows a lean-to to lean to a lincoln logs kind of assembled kind of guy a tree chock full of rocks and human hox genes and a box of hand mirrors and i think i could be something she’s never had before hollow bones and a smile over easy a brain in a jar

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The Lavender

Beyond this Chicken Wire E Kraft you stood just steps away at the edge of the wired fence next to the grounded grains sprinkled around me while I stretched my neck towards you, begging for any seed but you stood still, silent as shadow, watching from the deck, watching without a blink, your silence echoing painfully, indifferent to my harsh hunger: beak tap-tapping the dust–desperate bits of rhythms, hollow crop aching beneath the feathery turtleneck. now I ignore you and rebuild my new domain, straw by straw until I no longer remember you

Embroidery art

By Maya Lozea 38

The Farm Stand Evan Salhanick

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

An old man runs the stall across from mine at the farm stand. I have seen him every Saturday, for as long as I can remember.

He does not change. He sells sausages instead.

Some old people are soft, and some are hard. Flabby or brittle.

He cracks like the wooden backing of a dryrotted picture frame.

He is always the same. In his Vietnam cap and corduroy jacket. Even now.

I asked him once where his wife had been. Three years after the divorce.

I thought she was dead.

Just "over at the neighbors" all this time.

Thank God. I worry for him now that I am older.

When he climbs atop his truck, When he bleeds his sows, and cuts their throats.

When they stamp out death throes on thin air.

I don’t know how the sausage is made. I kill chickens instead Gentle is painful for them.

They are stronger than you are gentle.

My hands no longer fit around their scrawny necks.

Once I was too delicate.

I felt so bad I put him back, but he just walked sideways with his head on backwards til I caught him up again - twisting out a shameful apology.

Spiteful bastard.

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My hands are cold in October and it's too easy now.

I worry for the old curmudgeon but I know his hand will burn me through my sleeve and his grip will shake like an engine on its fumes and if he falls I worry I will break him into kindling.

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Stella Steele 41

The Lavender

Double Rainbow Adelaide Matthews At a party for a girl who turned seven We sat and we had tea I was costumed by a lady Who put makeup onto me If I had to be done up I thought I should at least look pretty But I looked like two black eyes Orlena pink and giddy Today I was a matchstick girl Kaleidoscopic wings Hadn’t known that they were mine But reactions tell you things I turned to find them tethered To the fourth notch of my spine Far away and fearsome With a thousand yards of twine I stood for eighteen seconds Completely just cut open A thousand yards of twine!

How easily unwoven

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

the girl who you can’t invite anywhere because she gets too lit and starts pulling fire alarms Michael J. Scott Tonight, we rage.

That is the message I received that convinced me to leave the cramped safety of my Twin XL tonight. And yet, as I stand propped up against the wall of an amateur DJ’s dorm room, it is clear that I’ve been deceived.

A boy with sideburns is standing quite close to me and holding up both ends of our conversation. His breath smells like synthetic blueberries and Purell. He turns away to blow out his vape smoke—a courtesy that I am most certainly reading into. I’m carefully calculating the amount of respect I have for myself when something divine intervenes.

My front pocket vibrates quietly and I fish out my phone. It is a post from Kappa Whateverthefuck announcing what they boast will be the party of the century.

The theme: BORG-onia.

Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone’s disembodied heads stare up at me from my phone, trapped in a cannabis-induced Canva nightmare. I tap twice on the screen and look up at Blueberry Boy. There is hope for one of us tonight.

Moments later, I find myself exposed to the elements but not alone. Friends and acquaintances have gathered and now our merry band trudges through the frigid North, one of many groups on the pilgrimage to an unclean frat house.

Drunken hysteria and the shrill screams of the wind for an odd, discordant harmony. Walls of bodies jostle and push as the masses begin to converge. I am losing steam and I had very little to begin with.

I look around for an exit. I want to stop. To escape. But the crowd around me grows rowdy and dense. I am unmoored and afraid, caught in the current of a thousand Stones and Plemmonses as the riptide carries me towards our final destination.

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Once inside, I try to catch my breath, filling my lungs with thick, sticky air. I survey the masses of people gyrating and writhing in time to the hits of the 2010s.

Maybe this will be fun. I am pulled in by friends who dance freely—unabated by laws of personal space or their shoes sticking to the floorboards. I am resistant at first, but slowly, I am allured and assuaged by their rhythmic swaying.

I tepidly join them, rocking along to the song and letting the vibrations move from the creaky, beer-soaked floor through my legs up to my torso. My arms float up as I let something else take control. I twirl in communion with my brothers and sisters in this temple devoted to fraternity. I lower my raised head and open my eyes to take in the beauty of this moment and what I am greeted with is not the sight of drunken joy and ketamine-fueled crunking.

Instead, I see Her. The Girl.

A sea of bodies clad in power suits and bald caps and sexy beekeeper’s costumes parts in a moment of unholy reckoning. My heart begins to pound in sync with the bass-boosted Charli XCX remix blaring over the broken speakers. This is not what Yorgos Lanthimos intended.

A tacky laser light display bathes the room in sporadic pinks and purples and blues. The Girl is in stop motion, teleporting before my eyes with each bisexually-coded flash. Closer. And closer. And closer.

She is on a mission and I know Her target. It floats naive and defenseless, affixed to the wall beneath a poster warning against micro-agressions and a banner of Ice Spice in front of a pink American flag. I look to Ice Spice for salvation that will never come. One of us is confined to only two dimensions, and yet we are equally powerless. Forced to watch as history unfolds before us. Bystanders. Failures.

Victims.

Finally, The Girl arrives. She looms over the red plastic apparatus with its inviting white handle, slightly swaying beneath Ms. Spice’s gaze. I can’t tell what She’s more drunk off of—BuzzBallz or power.

She looks down. Even in Her delirium, the instructions couldn’t be more clear: PULL.

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

I look around and take in the faces of my sloshed peers. Their faces contort into lazy smiles and intense grimaces as they grind and pop and lock and flail. None of them know what’s coming. A bit of sweat flings into my eye and I don’t blink.

Instead, I wonder how I will be remembered.

When they tell the story of this day, which role will I be assigned? The doomed hero? A fool with the misguided delusions that he could delay the inevitable? Or worse, will I be a simple footnote in the chronicle of this moment?

I turn back to Her, only to see a placid look staring directly back at me from across the room. A cavernous pit opens in my stomach and burrows down to the Earth’s core as I buckle beneath Her gaze. Her lips twist into a devilish grin, rows of wet teeth bared as She stares vacantly in my direction.

It is time.

I close my eyes and weep as the trumpets of Revelation begin to sing.

Embroidery art by Maya Lozea 45

The Lavender

“CityScape”

By Ava Lesko 46

She Is Crying From Her Vagina; or Penetration Archive Virgenya Zhu

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

i am still. reborn in a screen of flesh, tear tracks like bruises from that time god swallowed me whole, and i could only stare at the sullen sky and sink. and i snuck through his back door and saw a prodigal son, ripe and ready to pluck. i enveloped him the only way i knew how, gnawed at bones. until god woke and cried out for my annihilation. at which point i was gone hopped the fence and ran. each footfall a meteor, leaking light.

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“Medical Madness”

By Isabel Hewitt 48

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

“Wicked Interference”

By Hannah Schwichtenberg

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Myths I Like to Believe In #1 Yael Ezry Before he kills me He says: His commander swallowed A worm from the earth And told him he needs to toughen Up, like the soil.

Did you know, What is an anthem was once A folk song about an ox-cart?

Before he kills me He is soft and young.

His black hair, dried dahlias, Wired glasses broken Released from his forehead, He misses, black hills The concave shape Of missing his old tongue.

He cries please forgive me, Lord— Before he kills me He tells me he is sorry.

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He whispers, I am still a

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Romanian.

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What he saw, from above: Gray Sansom-Chasin a ruin, dug tender with hatred, a brother in mourning, which had fingers; breath, breathing from ocean to ocean, to people and fingers rot, rot, rot; the acid ministry of loss melt mothers melt me and embers move to dance;

what he saw, so high: what he heard, or felt: what corrugated veins what shoulders hunched what futile page what boy, what tears, what mottled skin what armor, what death what dance, what dance what do, what to do: a darling: dance him, dead, to heaven; a dirge: and sing his life to living.

the end of love, just before the tree line, and just after the time of stars; that he had a shadow after all, lengthening longing meridian wrapped the whole world over; mourners in the street and the mountain, an obituary nowhere and misnamed “remembering” what he loved, this he liked, that he did to death, he did, he did, he did; me, under influences he, over them – what a joke;

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

“My Room in Blue”

By Eva Gamboa 53

The Lavender

“Bird’s Eye”

By Lela Jennings

54

The Care and Keeping Jordana Treisman

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

I got my first real manicure at the ripe age of thirteen, three months after my dad overdosed. Yes, I owned the baby Claire’s polishes with the star-shaped bottles, but I lacked any real guidance in color coordination or application. I also had remarkably chubby fingers, which were not quite suited for Cinderella Sparkle Blue.

It was 2010. I had been invited to my first bar mitzvah, and the party playlist would consist almost entirely of the Black Eyed Peas. My mother took me and my best friend Ruby to “Jazz Nail Salon” in the same strip mall as my brother’s taekwondo classes. At 4 P.M., the place was bustling, but they managed to find us seats, and the moment that will repeat itself for the rest of my life truly began.

My manicurist sat at the other end of the little table with sleek silver tools and my selected bottle of Essie’s brightest red, a color teeming with teen angst. With a surgical mask covering half his face, the man who trimmed, filed, and polished my nails could’ve been anyone.

He was the high school sophomore who tutored me in algebra, who was, at this moment, buying earthy weed from his older cousin. Is it safe? He asked what was once his best friend, but who was now nothing more than a bean pole with an eyebrow piercing. Don’t be a pussy, said his cousin, and they didn’t speak again for another six months.

He was also that guy from the pop band my friend Ruby likes so much. His name was Chance, or Trevor, or Colby? He had an amyl nitrate addiction and was sitting in a hotel in Melbourne, wondering, is this really all there is? Have all the choices in my life, the ones I thought over for so long, led me to this shriveling moment in a graveyard of other fleeting memories? When is the hooker getting here?

And the manicurist was also my dad’s friend from college, who, after he died, would always stop by for a drink and a bleak conversation with my mother that felt more than anything like a confessional. He had a chip on his shoulder, a chip within a chip, because he never needed to work, and he resented himself for it.

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He still mourns the Kate Spade handbag of a woman who once loved him, or loved to pity him. She had a great rack.

In the midst of all this, the man of many faces was massaging my hands with lotion. It was a strangely intimate thing, and I wondered how people go and do this without knowing each other. I looked at the nametag: Harrison. He was vacant, even I could tell, his hands were not really touching mine. The sensation of it had no body; a movement isolated from any mouth-breathing, snot-dripping, human being.

My friend Ruby asked me about my favorite part: It wasn’t the shiny red sheen in celebration of our classmate becoming a man or whatever, but the fraction of a second in which this all occurred. As a thirteen-year-old, this came out as: “I liked when that guy touched me.”

“Freak,” said Ruby, and that was the end of that.

What happened between then and now does not matter in the slightest, except that I have recently turned twenty-nine and am still under the trance of this alluring habit. Once a month, after my bills are paid and my reports are turned in, I allow myself a trip to the nearest nail salon. It doesn’t matter which strip mall I go to, as long as the manicurist’s name is Chip or Max or Gordon or Shane. Most of the time, I pick a glossy clear — anything else gets wiped off the second I get home.

Find me at the closest addiction support group, and I will admit to any vice you think up. I will lie straight out of my ass if that means ignoring the pervasive figure with disinterested eyes and no nose or mouth, with a pair of hands that might as well be warm rubber gloves. Among the outdated People magazines, I reunite with everyone I’ve ever wondered about, let my eyes rest on for too long. There’s some paranormal exchange to compensate for all the words I cannot speak. But my hands say it for me: I’m sorry. I’m sorry they didn’t understand that scratched skin doesn’t hurt any less when it’s your own fingers doing the job.

So good luck to the girls with press-ons and the guys who think it’s too gay to clip their nails, you will never know the joy that comes from paying thirty bucks in a fluorescent room stifled with the stench of acetone just to be held.

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Embroidery art

By Maya Lozea 57

The Lavender

Philomela’s Song Tommy Parker

Bright fruit has brute has you, you beadyeyed cheat. Through teary eyes, I bleat at you as you sleep. You, Tereus, I worla-cheap, worla-cheap and pick at your pillow, pinch pierce-pop-jump-jump then stick stop my stalk-thin legs at your mouth out with it—the sour truth—you brute, out with your fruit. My tongueless shame, the same scream straight from my lungs, is eep eeeep eeeeeeeeeep... your greed disgusts me. I plead.

I scratch. Hear me and lose sleep. Your mind-son is mine, a headless and victimless crime, your fruit consumed by worlacheap worlacheap.

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Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Dedication Inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s film Queer Jane Weitz I feel perverted watching you sway with the wind basked in light Dutifully I collapse into your shadow Slowly, surely I feel wrong next to you silent, still you move with ease I dissect your smile pollute you with meaning and breathe you in Inhalation suffocation God I watch like a A hawk gliding above its prey Desperately searching for the warmth of reciprocation.

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60

And now your eyes are closed and you are drifting back to that tangled sparrow you saw earlier, the one with the chestnut-brown wings

folded where they shouldn’t, beak gaping in a silent cry.

You remember what your mother told you about dead birds, how you weren’t supposed to touch them because they could have all sorts of diseases.

You wonder how it died.

Maybe the cold ate away at its heart; maybe its insides gnawed themselves until it fell from the sky; maybe it slowed down the flock, or maybe it molted so many times they stopped recognizing it.

Your gaze snags on the mirror.

Feathers.

And now you are once again looking for an answer between the sheets, lit by a false sunset, swallowing the sounds of night like a lump down your throat trying to remember how you felt alive, even in this place of designated death. Your calluses drag along her skin, warm, soft, breathless she tells you she likes your eyes—framed by your father’s straight brows, hazel, like your mother’s, which really means swamp green, with a light brown star around the dark round center. You used to tell people they were brown, just brown, because all your friends had brown eyes

and who wouldn’t want to be like all of their friends?

molting Vin Wiemelt

The Lavender

you collect your own skin under your nails, the words of strangers clotting together in your blood.

You think of the small ways a body can die without anyone noticing. You think of every time you tried to laugh until your breath caught in your chest, how you stood on the edge of every conversation until every conversation felt like a rooftop and you begged you would grow wings if you shut your eyes and jumped. You wonder if sparrows ever

look

down.

And now the same song is

playing over and over again, the

one she said she liked two

weeks ago, and you know she

won’t remember

the color of your

eyes in the morning.

And now you know that you will only ever be known in empty pages, the s p a c e between letters. You used to feed teaspoonfuls of yourself to anyone who would listen. Now

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

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On Writing (With a Dark Wood Pipe Clenched Betwixt Dark Wood Teeth) Adam Wilan Fellow man come, So our pupils can click Soar down from your rock spire throne Come, earnest friend, sit And we’ll circle around The truths we’re convinced we’ve derived Perhaps I will put on an accent today Just so I can gauge your reaction…

Join! We’ll scrawl down our thoughts On pulp pages with pen, We’ll craft paper-mâché busts of our skulls.

If you show me yours, Then I’ll show you mine (But please avoid even light laughter) / We can’t shout it all out Like the theatre kids do We won’t enter their cuddling circles Our Victorian mores Make us etch it in stone Thus avoiding societal hurdles Still I prefer that to this, This exhausting estate Built of dusty black rocks in my mind 62

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Meaning-Making Elias Tobisman Pearl Met Solly at party outside the Stoa. 43 degrees. Wearing fisherman’s jacket with hole in the right elbow. Graham post-industrial DMT trip. Lucas sick. I was an island surrounded.

Couple days later get the first sign. Pissing in stall. Nervous around urinals. Card slips under. “Would Thou Like To Live Deliciously?” Cornball.

Knock on door before midnight. Girl opens. Chloe? No more threesomes in LA. Solly in corner. Hair between pecs. Orders begin. Sit. Kneel. Prostrate.

Search starts with dusty book from yard sale in Northampton. Biblically adjacent.

Lot. Could never deal with the cruelty. Backlit face inside.

Start to rise. Transcend the mortal coil? Boring. Blasé. But Graham had gone home and dad was being a dick and my masturbatory dreams were asphyxiating by the wayside.

Book a farce. New secret Eastern. Sticky linoleum floor. Nautica underwear. Bells.

Brian Eno? Dry mouth. Chloe castigating me in dining hall. Performance art. Everything needed to be qualified. Could never just. Dreamt of speaking in tongues.

Ended in tawny cabin near the river. Eleusian. The Golden Woman. Smelt my fear.

Solly grasping at stars. Straws. It wasn’t us. Became obsessed with this church.

Tepid. Fake- stone facade. Turpentine.

Early sunday morning. Naked. Approach steeple. Wholly apolitical. A priori. Not even semiotic. Drink propellant. Cloying. Start to shake. Make Nero proud. Fuck.

Bad idea. No time to roll.

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Pastor laughs as he steps over me. Birds chirping in elm above. Jets won last week and he’s excited to talk about it.

Embroidery art

By Maya Lozea 64

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

A Rib From Charlie Kirk

By Zal Rimer I am the restless mariner, lonesome in my small bed.

I watched as the dawn broke between jagged glass peaks And the fog settled over the ground, my feet,

Tossing, and turning.

still.

In kind and benevolent dreams, I glide above

In the classroom, children dream of memes.

the tide.

My breath, taking great strides, leaps and bounds, like waves.

Sheep run through my head, while the gulls fly over me.

There are letters in the sky.

Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavanthu.

I rode the highways in peace, with my wares in various trunks.

In the summer, I reached Yankton, sat meekly under the Black Hills.

A big hairy fat rabbit in the corner of the dark parts of little rooms.

The hunter’s head hung high on the wall. ¡Viva la Revolución!

“One good girl is worth a thousand bitches.” said the Rabbi to the Priest.

I get my protein from the holy lamb of GOD. How much do you bench?

Lifetimes of fitness promised to me a millennium ago, when bees sprung from the bodies of dead cows and the fates twiddled their hair.

I am the restless mariner, lonesome in my small bed.

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Tossing, and turning.

In kind and benevolent dreams, I glide above the tide.

On benches in parks, the pervert dreams of his mother.

In kind and benevolent dreams, I glide above the tide.

I have never eaten a hamburger, let alone a cat, or dog.

Gone are the hungry days, Welcome to the promised land, A man in a van smiles at fathers and the land of opportunity. daughters.

Gentle, and kind.

Where only the fat grow hungry.

You have been sinister these last few months, I loved you, though you ate my fingers, and my tongue, and split me down the middle.

While you shrink your back arched, and toes curled.

Kick me harder in the mouth.

“Go stupid, go dumb,” said Group Leader to the dance floor.

Dance for your supper, while I spitshine your shoes.

The divers jump into empty pools.

Empty pools.

I am the restless mariner, lonesome in my small bed.

Tossing, and turning.

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You, my geriatric friend, old, wise.

I have heard the voices of sixty-seven prophets, and seen a monkey eat a boy in a cage.

The boys at their computers, bragging of their misery.

Space is the place, the world is useless.

Take me with you when you leave.

I am the restless mariner, Lying here with you in my bed.

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

Tossing, and turning.

Sometimes in my nightmares I glide above the tide.

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Bird’s Eye a Playlist From the Lavender Team Orinthology - Charlie Parker Big Ol’ Bird - Fat, Evil Children

Seven Swans - Sufjan Stevens

Chest Feathers - My Sister The Heron Albatross - Fleetwood Mac Seabird - Alessi Brothers Songbird - Fleetwood Mac Know Your Chicken - Cibo Matto Roadrunner - The Modern Lovers Little Birdy - Ween

Albatross - Public Image Ltd. Surfin’ Bird - The Trashmen Bluebird - Wings Otto - Fennez & Ryuichi Sakamoto

Double Infinity - Big Thief

Eyes of the World - Charli XCX & Sky Ferreira

Wings to Fly (Crow) - Cindy Kallet

Take It For Granted - Jeffrey Lewis Bird Sanctuary - 22 Halo

Bird on a Wire - Stina Nordenstam

Blue Flower - Herrmann & Kleine

Lovesong of the Buzzard - Iron & Wine

(Ghost) Riders in the Sky - Johnny Cash Clouds - Alex G 68

Issue XIX: Bird’s Eye

69

The Lavender

70