Issue 48: Exposure

EXPOSURE / 48

Fall 2018 $15

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ru’mi-nate: TO C HE W THE CU D ; T O MU S E; T O MED I TAT E; TO THI N K A G A I N ; T O PO N D ER

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staff

E DI TOR - I N- C H I EF

Brianna Van Dyke SE NI OR P OE TRY E DI T O R

Kristin George Bagdanov F I C TI ON E D I T O R

Raven Leilani NOTE S E DI T O R

Josh MacIvor-Andersen VI SU A L A RT E D I T O R

Carolyn Mount B L OG E D I T O R

Charnell Peters NONF I C TI ON E D I T O R

Madison Salters M A NA G I NG E DI T O R

Rachel King C I R C U L ATI ON & P U B L I SH I N G

Amanda Hitpas C OP Y E D I TOR / P R OOF R E A D ER

Sarah Wheeler

PRI N T + W EB D ES I G N

Scott Laumann ED I T O RI A L I N T ERN

Alex Keenan Olivia Scofield A S S O CI AT E REA D ERS

Laura Droege Carly Joy Miller Amy Sawyer G U ES T PA N EL I S T S

Stanley Dankoski Laurel Dowswell Nahal Suzanne Jamir Monica Jimenez Matt Jones Will Jones Anneli Matheson Anna Trujillo Jessie van Eerden Jeff Marcus Wheeler Seema Yasmin

contents

NOT ES

Editor’s 8 Readers’ 10 Artists’ 32, 56 Contributors’ 82 Last 86

F I C TI O N

Coda, Jason Villemez 16 Terra Incognita, Laura O’Gorman Schwartz 44 The Pistachio Farmer’s Daughter, Heather M. Surls 72

NONF I C TI O N

Storm Shelters, Bethany Maile 66

VI SU A L A RT

The art of Stephanie Serpick 33–36 The art of Daesha Devón Harris 37–40 The art of Richard Hart 57–60 The art of Leah Oates 61–64

PO ET RY

26 Minya, Egypt: May 26, 2017, Chaun Ballard 28 The Convert’s Heart Is Good to Eat, Melody S. Gee 29 Vampire on Dance Floor, Jess Turner 30 Lot’s Wife, Danielle Weeks 31 [My out-of-body experience], Levi Andalou 41 [Every present thing], Rebecca Doverspike 42 The Silk Lessons, Karen An-hwei Lee 53 Time Capsule of the Early Twenty-First Century, James Crews 54 from River, John Poch 65 Veil of Tears, John Blair 71 The Grotto, Kevin McLellan

2018 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize S P O N S O R E D B Y T H E VA N DY K E FAMILY CHAR ITAB LE FO UNDAT IO N

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

J A SON VI L L E M E Z

L A U RA O ’ G O RMA N S CH WA RT Z

Coda

Terra Incognita

HONO RAB L E MEN T I O N H E AT H ER M. S U RL S

The Pistachio Farmer’s Daughter

F I NA L I STS Z E NA A G H A

K A L PA N A N EG I

DA N D U F F Y

W I L L I A M PO L F

J A SON HI L L

J O D Y S T RU V E

C ONNOR M C E LW E E

CH A RL I E WAT T S

2018 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize F I N A L J U D G E S US AN WO O DR ING WR IT E S :

“‘Coda’ does what a piece of fiction should do: it opens up a world that is at once familiar and faraway—we are voyeurs here, in this precious, difficult love affair, but we, as readers, are also intimate members of the scene, the dance.

The narrative delivers exactly the right details—the kind of body-knowledge, heart-knowledge one lover has over another—to bring us fully into the world of the story. We hurt for the characters, and we hurt with them. Perhaps most importantly, the author is wise enough to know when and how to lay an image bare, to trust the reader to weigh the significance of a gesture, a touch. The story leaves us, like any great, real-life experience, a little wounded and a little softer for that wounding, but also immensely grateful.”

is the author of a novel, Goliath (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) and a short story collection, Springtime on Mars (Press 53, 2008). Her short fiction has appeared in The Cupboard, Passages North, Literary Mama, and Surreal South, among other anthologies and literary magazines. Susan currently writes and teaches in Marion, North Carolina.

SU SA N W OOD R I NG

editor’s note

My dad said this might be the big cottonwood’s last fall if he can’t get some more water to it. He said he needs to buy a bunch of fifty-foot hoses and line them up and out and down to the dying tree.

My mind flashes to an image of a makeshift fire brigade passing buckets of water from hand-to-hand, water sloshing painfully over the side of the bucket with each passing hand. The urgency is there, and so is the likelihood of failure, and so are the other priorities of greater concern than the great half-alive tree.

It breaks my heart, how this earth will grow you and then let you die. The letting-youdie part goes something like this: an old irrigation ditch that used to flow runs dry and stays dry for decades too long, the rainwater that used to be enough no longer is, what once was the right location now is not.

But still, the green-and-gold branches mix loudly with the gray branches and those black birds, I don’t know what kind. We want so much to live even when we know what we’ve lost, even when we practice the little deaths each day.

Teach us how to die now, so that we do not have to wait until our final death to learn what it means to live, I say, mumbling some version of a prayer I’ve held. Sleep is a little death. So is surrender. And they are offered to us each morning and night. Even with all that water, it may die. Even with all that water, it may live.

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This morning the La Platas are turning a dusty purple and the sun is breaking through the clouds and the smoke from all the fires, streaking down on it, shimmering even.

Spruce, piĂąon, cottonwood, greatest love. All here. And me, with my hand over my heart, wanting to touch the part that has been broken by this tree.

We get to be here, exposed, if we’ll let ourselves, in this place where the blue sky is always contrasting what is dead and what is alive.

With hope,

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readers’ notes ON E X P OSURE

We were from Kurdistan. The land where butterflies lived longer than children. Like three-year old Aylan Kurdi. We saw him in Kobani on the way to Canada with his family. Later, we saw a picture of his body washed ashore in Turkey in the pages of a muddy, discarded newspaper.

It was written how his father struggled to save them. How he kept pushing them up to the surface for hours so they could breathe. How the father watched helplessly as one exhausted child drowned, and how he pushed the other toward his wife, so he could at least keep the eldest one’s head up. How wild waves swallowed his family members one by one as he watched.

We had tens of thousands of Aylans lost on the mountain sides, lost on the hillsides, lost on the roadsides, lost on the seasides in the journey of hope. We lost against life. We lost in life. We lost gravely. We lost dearly. Our losses became the endless sea, and we cry on its shores in the lonely hours.

the sun and could just make out my father’s tall, lanky figure on the edge of the bluff. What was he doing there, so far from the guitars and singing? The potluck dishes were still half full of burgers, potato salad, and orange Jell-O. I’d seen him leave and left my chocolate cake to find him.

My father and I shared an unspoken kinship, especially when we were apart from the family. To have him alone was like having the phrase “safe and sound” in my back pocket. He was the one who always assured me that God was close by.

As I got closer, my father was looking the other way. His hands were cupping something, and a gray swirl hovered over his head. I stopped cold. I’d never seen him smoke. In fact, it was so foreign that for a brief breath I wondered if it was my father at all. But yes—that was his blue shirt, his black hair ruffling in the breeze.

Just then he turned, sensing my presence.

Our eyes met. In one blue-skied moment the wind suddenly shifted, making my T-shirt flutter.

ASLAN D EM I R , S A I N T C H A R L ES , MO

CHRISTINE HEMP, PORT TOWNSEND, WA

I ran as fast as I could across Ebey’s Meadow, the alfalfa swishing against my bare legs like waves. In some places I could barely see over the grass. Beyond the meadow, real waves unfolded, then dashed the beach below. I squinted into

“What are you hiding today?” The therapist meets my gaze, waits for my answer. I wait, too.

This is my second session. Since our initial meeting, I’ve been digging through poetry written in twenty-year-old ink 10

and, oddly, the themes of my younger self—dark and light, past and future, truth and hiding—are still the heartbeat of my older self. It’s a discovery I’d like to explore, but clearly, the therapist is more interested in the discovery of hiding places.

What am I hiding? I hold the question, take a breath, and hold that, too.

Last Sunday, beautiful truth tipped my stoicism and tears spilled, and for once in my life, I didn’t choke them back. Days later, the cabinet refinishers removed every door from my kitchen, displaying gadgets and dishes in the most unattractive manner. Not long ago, I would have banned neighbor kids and daughters’ boyfriends from traipsing through a room where shoved things are in plain sight, but I shrugged instead of waving them away. And this Sunday, I said goodbye to a friend, allowing finality to hover rather than running from it. Cancer pried plans from her hands last night and I’d promised I’d hold the best of her, so I’m not explaining away the loss or pretending my body doesn’t hurt today. I’m not hiding behind “I’m fine.” I’m not fine.

But I will be.

I know this because I’m spilling and shrugging and allowing instead of hiding.

And in my nakedness, I’m apologizing less. Hiding weakened me, shamed me, and brought me to this couch. I don’t yet understand it, but humility is making me stronger.

So what am I hiding today? As little as possible.

MICHE L L E S T I F F L ER , MES A , A Z

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Jim Morrison said, “Expose yourself to your deepest fear, and after that, fear has no power.”

A quote from The Birds says, “I hardly think a few birds are going to bring about the end of the world.”

But that’s my fear. And for a person with my phobia, the fear is as real as ever.

The fight or flight response comes from past experiences, films, and television.

So I only go outside in a hat to protect myself.

All my life I’ve toggled between feeling like a coward and being strong, so one day, I decided to expose myself to my fear. For somebody used to running from seagulls, yelling “They’re coming!”

I decided to take off the hat one day after class and walk around fully exposing my eyes and head to the birds around me on a college campus filled with the avian.

With heart palpitations, I walked to my car and let birds fly over me, fighting not to scream.

I did it. I wasn’t attacked. I inched closer to freedom.

J ACQUE LI NE BAGLI O, NORTON, M A

I was thirty-six and about to expose a secret that would end my marriage.

Outside our bedroom the sun scorched our tender new garden. Our dog panted genially, his eyes asking for a swim in the pond. My husband lay snoring on our bed. It was eleven in the morning.

He was passed out from drinking. I called my mom and told her the truth.

Lying to cover up his drinking had become a way of life. My denial was the

readers’ notes

edifice keeping our marriage together.

My mom was just as understanding as she had been six years earlier during his first rehab. I told myself it was people’s judgement I feared, so I covered up his arrests and verbal abuse.

But I really feared that if I told the truth I wouldn’t be able to stay.

He remained passed out until after dark. When he stumbled downstairs I told him that we couldn’t recover again.

I left him standing in the kitchen and ran outside to escape the heat. I crouched with my dog in the recesses of the garden and let the coolness of the earth gather around us. Overhead, Fourth of July fireworks cracked and sizzled.

Within a few months we stood in front of a judge to finalize our divorce.

He agreed to plead guilty to “extreme and repeated mental cruelty” in order to push our divorce through quickly. In a packed courtroom, he told the truth.

After ten minutes the judge decreed our divorce final. Both of our knees buckled. My lawyer wiped away tears and I noticed the stenographer crying.

I thought admitting our failures would bring shame. I hadn’t realized that once we burned away our lies we’d expose the only real thing that remained; our love.

GITA BR O WN , KI N GS T O N , MA

With one daughter graduating from high school and another on her way to Washington, DC, pictures are essential.

I pull my trusty Pentax camera with the IQZoom lens from its place next to the scarves in a bedroom drawer. I drop the film into place in the back of the silver camera, ease out the end of the roll and place it over the teeth of the roller wheel, snap shut the film door, advance the roll to #1.

On graduation night, the students enter to the familiar beat of “Pomp and Circumstance.” I count down the names, fix my gaze on the door, raise the viewfinder to my eye, and wait for the appropriate smiling face to appear under a maroon mortar board. My camera clicks once and again, capturing her triumphant moment.

In two days’ time, I hand the same camera to my eighth grader as she boards the bus with noisy classmates. When she returns at the end of the week, we rush to the drugstore to drop off the film for their one-hour developing service. We spend an hour at the gym, stepping and sweating to keep our minds off the pictures we can’t wait to see.

On the way back to pick them up, Jenny recounts the captured moments: the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol dome, Washington Monument.

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The young man at the photo counter meets us with a puzzled expression. “The roll was empty,” he says. “It was never exposed.”

We are too stunned—too disappointed—for words. But years later I find that, in spite of camera failure, the pictures we took are etched on our minds—all the beauty and glory we wanted to remember are captured forever on the perfect recording device.

landscaping isn’t good either; exposes the tree to insects and disease.”

I ask him about the species of the tree.

“An oak variety,” he says, pointing with his finger. “Like that one there. It’s got a bug problem. You can tell by the missing bark.”

I stare at the wraith-like limbs, nodding my head.

“They have to cut them all down,” he says. “I’m going to miss the birds.”

SHERRY PO F F, O O LT EWA H , T N

J ARE D BUCH H OLZ , GRE E NVI LLE , SC

I stand on a wobbly chair, poke my head into a fern plant, see the nest. The twigs and bits of debris. The naked baby bird— too young for feathers—exposed and crying. Its little beak opens, as if I were Mother returned with a meal. I do not know what kind it is. And I wonder why it chose the fern plant over the beechwood ten feet away.

When the neighbor lights up a cigarette, I want to yell, “There’s a baby bird here!” I imagine the carcinogens ghosting through the air, like some demon looking for someone to possess. But then I feel upset at myself—holier than thou—it’s only been ninety-four days since I quit smoking.

The next day, I walk with a professor down a concrete path leading from the science building to the chapel. He hobbles along using crutches the color of dull aluminum. He explains why the university has to cut down the thirty or so trees lining the campus mall.

“Back in the fifties, they didn’t plant the right kind,” he says. “All the

Art was there. We were there because few places tolerated sixteen-year-olds with bad Bowie cuts and snarky mouths and spiky attitudes forged to poke and pierce. Art was cool. We went because we wanted to be cool. And because the price of admission was getting our suburban selves downtown and not a penny more. We inched closer to inspect the brushstrokes, stepped back to better see the patterns of colors on canvas as we’d been taught in classes the academically ambitious never took. We pretended to understand. We did not understand. We tried to feel what we felt and wondered if it was enough.

Once, a faded woman, spine bent under the weight of bitter years and brittle promises, paused before an unimportant picture, and wept.

Afterward, we crossed Hennepin and wandered into the Basilica of St. Mary where my big brother was baptized but not where he was buried. I genuflected.

My bent knee and bowed head and

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readers’ notes

rhythmically crossed body was less pious and more Pavlovian. Kneeling felt scripted, an insincere drama. And so I took a seat on the oak pew, slid away from the altar until the hard wood backstopped my own. The air smelled dark and two-syllables blessed. Stained glass cast violet shadows across the holiness, bled red from a sacred heart, exposed and beating. I closed my eyes and imagined I could sense those colors through the skin of my arms. I felt them then and later and even now, seeping deep into the pores of my flesh, penetrating the empty space of every atom.

VIVIAN M C I N ER N Y, PO RT L A N D , O R

On rainy days, the den smells pungent of mildew and old photographs.

My ex-husband composed most of the pictures—me between Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny at Disney World, me shivering on Mt. Washington. He captured me unposed, too—licking a Friendly’s ice cream cone, panting in labor “heheHEEwhooooo . . . ,” braiding our daughters’ hair, crying at my father’s funeral.

Sometimes, we appear together. He pulls me close and presents a genuine smile, full of teeth.

His father loaned me an old Leica rangefinder with F-stops, shutter speeds,

and a focus ring. I moved ghost images left and right, matched things up for crisp, black-and-white glossies. In one, he’s holding a plastic goose and not smiling.

It takes me five to ten years to catch up with where I was, another five to ten with where I am. I’m always behind. Five years ago, or ten, I blamed unflattering photographs on poor lighting, angles or exposure. Today, they reveal a more acceptable truth: I’ve caught up with them. This doesn’t happen with photographs of other people, landscapes, or animals. It doesn’t happen (as often) with words scribbled in old diaries and journals. I make allowances for them; I forgive their naïveté, their awkward prose, their pathos.

The photo archive became a gold mine for special occasions like our daughters’ school projects, weddings, birthdays, and reunions. After the divorce, I guarded “my” treasures, but who starts a custody dispute over pictures?

On rainy days, my fingers play across the bindings. When I open our last album, circa 1994, snapshots fall out. I could reattach them with meaningful notes, but I return the album to the shelf. I don’t want to remember us in pictures, but I still remember us.

J OYCE WH E ATLE Y, I TH ACA, NY

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I recently taught a fiction workshop to a group of high school students at the Governor’s Institute of Vermont, a summer program kind of like a writing camp. I was shocked at the talent and drive in this group. Many had finished novel drafts, plays, poetry collections.

Even more shocking was that most had kept their writing a secret. Everyone knew they wrote, but few in their lives had seen their writing. When I mentioned there would be a public reading of their work at the end of the week, many students said they wouldn’t participate.

They were afraid to go beyond the solitary act of writing.

The Latin word for exposure is expositus, meaning “put or set out.”

When I think of the artistic life, these meanings seem to fit. First, of course, we put a piece of ourselves out into the world in the form of art. And then we share it.

We put it out for others to see.

It was an act of humility. It allowed me to set out on my work as a writer. I didn’t feel like a writer until I had exposed myself and worked in this way.

We started out small with the high school students. They shared their work with a partner and then a group of three.

By the end of the week, they had put their hearts on the page—they were ready to set out—to expose themselves in the most beautiful ways. In one another, they found empathy and understanding, which is why many of us create in the first place.

AMBER WHEELER BACON, SURFSIDE BEACH, SC

15

Albert was tall and thin and very dark.

I was prepared to discount him as we sat beside one another in the cafeteria.

I assumed he would be ashamed of the subject I broached, the Mau Maus behaving violently in his home country, Kenya. Instead, he explained to me how the British had been violent and demeaning toward his people. They confiscated his land and put his father in prison. He explained the Mau Maus were rebelling against the British cruelty and domination of his country.

I was the one who was ashamed.

Ashamed of my prejudice. I grew up in a small, segregated southern town. Black people went to separate schools, drank from separate fountains, and sat in the balcony at the movies. We had almost no contact. I was taught that the African American community was somehow inferior. Yet here was Albert, clearly more knowledgeable than I was. He was aware of his superiority. I felt it too.

My exposure to Albert was the result of the college I attended, which was dedicated to equality. About one third of its two hundred students were from foreign countries. I became aware of the richness they contributed to our little community. I am forever grateful to this small college which gave such a rich and enduring experience.

J OH N WYK LE , ASH E VI LLE , NC

Coda

J A S O N VI L L E M E Z

TH EY HEA R D HER VOIC E D RIFT I NG in through the kitchen window, from a radio

across the alley. Summer gave way to fall and to the swing of their first date. Tom took his hand and they danced. They shuffled gently across the vinyl floor, a half step behind the song’s rhythm, back and forth like bumper cars in a space too small. He followed the tips of Tom’s shoes, the push of Tom’s hand, and for the first time in his life, felt no concern over anything that had happened or would happen. They were bulletproof, wrapped in each other, swaying along to the sultry sound of a singer and song that Henry could no longer remember.

He asked Tom about it, years later, if any lyrics or a melody came to mind. They were sitting in the park, on doctor’s orders to get outside more often. New parents fumbled with oversized strollers. Kids ran around with kites, dragging them against the stubborn wind. Dogs smelled the lunch on Tom’s clothes and eyeballed him as their owners tugged them away. A saxophonist played under a cherry tree. Henry listened. The music flowed around them as the sunlight snuck between the corners of the skyscrapers.

“I don’t remember much,” Tom said. “But I know we heard it, and that night was the best night of my life. Those are the facts.”

Henry closed his eyes and slid his hand next to Tom’s. He felt calloused fingertips tapping his knuckles gently and the perpetual warmth of a palm he’d memorized more so than his own. The lines and cracks, skin so hard and dry from years of labor, calmed him. When dusk hit they prepared to leave. Henry stood first and held out his arm. Tom grabbed ahold and pulled himself up after a time, steadying himself before reaching down to zip up his coat. He zeroed in on the two halves of the zipper and brought them together. One miss, two misses, three. They remained undone. He shook his head, forcing the breath from his lungs.

“Jesus. I couldn’t even shoot myself if I wanted to. I’d drop the pistol and blast a hole through the roof.”

Henry reached for the zipper and did it up to Tom’s chin without a pause.

“Please don’t say that.”

“I’m sorry.” Tom inhaled, gathering as many of his senses as he could. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

“It’s not like that at all, Tommy. You’re fine. More than fine. And I’ll help you do whatever you need to do, whenever you need it. Just think of me as an extension of yourself. It’ll be like you have four arms instead of two.” Henry smiled but received no reaction.

“It’s only going to get worse. For both of us.”

They walked out of the park in silence. The light at the crosswalk flashed a redhanded stop as cars sped by in patternless formation. The two of them waited at the

17

17

corner. Tom wavered slightly, his weight shifting from the front to back of his feet like a flag in the wind. Henry reached over to steady him.

“It’ll be fine.” * H E N RY T HOU G HT IT G O OD P R ACT IC E, even therapeutic, to train himself to think

about other things. He kept a routine. Go to work. Eat, when he could stomach it.

Sleep, though it came sporadically. Some nights he’d dream of Tom and wake up

When he looked at his hands he thought of Tom, or when he passed a new home being built, or heard a hammer strike a nail.

smiling for a split second. Other nights he lay flat-backed on the floor, selfdestructing. Catharsis eluded him, even with therapy and all forms of distraction. The daily calls from their friends—which grew less frequent over the months—merely pushed him further down.

When he looked at his hands he thought of Tom, or when he passed a new home being built, or heard a hammer strike a nail. The more distance he thrust between the two of them did nothing to ease the memories in his mind, half-written declarations of an unfinished life, pinned onto bare drywall. He’d known no other carpenters in his life.

He needed to hear her song again. He listened to mix tapes in the car while recording new ones in the bedroom. The drives grew longer and longer, the lists of radio stations piled atop each other. He stopped setting routes. Some days he’d wind up too far away and need to find a motel to recharge. He left music on all night, hoping for her to find him in his sleep, but he awoke always to static. He wondered what sort of satisfaction he’d feel when he heard her again, what place of solace she’d lead him to. He wondered if Tom would appear and they would dance as they did, if her timbre would rouse all the glories of their past, if her words would finally reveal to him the ending that he could not construct. *

18

MI DDL E AG E CA M E upon them with little fanfare. For their tenth anniversary, they

slept in and went to a Billy Wilder double feature. A few mornings after, Tom dropped his coffee cup. The next week, a dinner plate, then his toolbox, down the stairwell.

Henry told him to get his hand examined, that perhaps all the construction was finally catching up with him. Neither of them thought much of it. They were probably just cramps. By the time Tom got diagnosed it had progressed so fast that he could barely hold a hammer.

Rage, first, and then a plan. Henry began working partly from home so he would be available to drive to the clinic and help around the house when Tom allowed him.

He swept up the items Tom dropped, he unscrewed bottle caps, he shook the ketchup free. Tom went on disability. He took physical therapy classes with men twice his age, men whose hair was gone and whose skin spots reminded him of water stains on oak.

Henry did the exercises with him at home. They learned how to shuffle like a boxer, how to give a proper ballroom dance.

The doctors advised Henry to do everything he could to alleviate Tom’s stresses.

Frustration would only fuel his symptoms. Often when they talked his cheeks became flushed, and every few sentences his words would cease. Thoughts gathered in his brain like a crowd after a concert, desperate to leave out of the same exit. When he was calm the doors opened up fine and wide. Other times they were weighted shut, and the words bottlenecked.

For a while, the balance between the two of them stayed level. They spliced the scenes of their prior life and packed them crudely together. Henry cooked, Tom cleaned. Henry dusted, Tom swept. Henry washed, Tom folded, though neither of them were bothered much by creases. When they went to the movies, Henry would hold Tom’s hand the entire time. The tremors were worse the longer he sat, so they’d take a break during a slow part and fester in the lobby, trying to predict the ending or making sarcastic jokes about the actors. One night they went to see a late showing of Some Like It Hot down at the two-dollar theater.

“Still the best comedy of all time,” Henry smiled and put his arm around Tom’s waist. “And we’re only through the first half.”

“You know I was born the year it came out,” Tom said. “My parents said they went to see it the week before my mother went into labor.”

Henry smiled at him. “And you’re just as cute as Tony Curtis. In fact, cuter.”

“And you’re my Marilyn. Minus the breasts.”

“Well, nobody’s perfect,” Henry said with a wink.

“Yup.” Tom pulled away from him and shuffled towards the door.

“Hey, wait a second. I couldn’t name one thing about you that isn’t perfect.”

“This is fucked,” Tom answered, pointing to his head.

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“Hey now, I lose track of stuff all the time. Most days I can’t remember how old I am. Forty-two? Three?”

“Doesn’t count when you choose to forget.”

They didn’t hold hands for the rest of the film. When it ended, they walked slowly through the hallway, wafting along with the smell of cold popcorn and dried soda.

The few other couples in the theater passed them. They spoke of trifles the whole way home. * H E N RY CYC L ED T HROU G H those memories as he drove. They popped up alongside

the nameless towns and novelty shops, on the roofs of homes, wrapped along the power lines. One day, after driving for a while, the landmarks stopped coming. The density of buildings grew sparse as trees took their place. He turned down a narrow path carpeted in pine needles. The car shook on the uneven ground, kicking up dirt and rattling his insides. He came up to a house with a porch dipped in faded varnish.

The siding matched the bark that surrounded it, the shutters the ground beneath.

He parked in front of the steps. A tattered holiday wreath hung on the door, overseeing the moat of unloved objects that floated around the perimeter: some gardening tools, a worn hose coiled on a lawn chair, a pair of cracked sand pails.

Things worth forgetting. He lingered for a while, taking in the history, the silence.

Afternoon light seeped through the needles of the trees, stitching shadows onto the ground. Gusts of wind pushed slowly through a technicolor sky. Henry came upon a wide patch of moss and lay down. The chill clashed with his body heat. After a while, with his back numb and nothing to be made from the shape of the clouds, he turned onto his side.

He hugged his legs and closed his eyes as one would who wished to be small. It was over a year since they woke up together, the clanks from the trash trucks rousing them both into consciousness. Tom would growl and plead for coffee. Henry would fix a cup, steal a few sips and jump back into bed to share the extra warmth. He’d kiss the back of Tom’s head as the scent of hazelnut filled the room, and they’d enjoy a second slumber, casually listening to the beginnings of the day outside, the mechanical dance of buses and cars, squeaky bicycles and flimsy walkers, children going to and fro, and the people who all knew where they had to be.

It was dark when Henry opened his eyes; the trees and their shadows had melted into each other. And still, no sounds. The air found the gaps in his clothes’ defenses and stormed inside. He couldn’t feel his face. He began instinctively rubbing his hands together, trying to douse invisible flames as he walked back to the porch.

He felt the frayed denim of his pockets and pulled out a set of keys. He wasn’t sure which one was right. After a few attempts and one emboldened kick the door

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was freed, and with that success Henry pushed inside to a dusty room. The family that owned the house had told him they were leaving anything they couldn’t fit in the U-Haul, but all that turned out to be was a couch in tatters, pushed up against a corner. Everything else was gone. * TO M’S B IRT HDAY. They ate handfuls of cake and laughed about how simple it was

to go without utensils. No gifts were given, per Tom’s request, but after they’d finished the last piece, Henry retrieved a bag from the bedroom, filled with tinsel.

“What’s this? I said not to get anything.” Tom pulled out a framed paper. Henry helped him so it wouldn’t drop.

“It’s a deed. For the very first house you built. I did some digging and it turns out the family was looking to sell. When I approached them and said the man who built

It was over a year since they woke up together, the clanks from the trash trucks rousing them both into conciousness.

the house wanted to buy it from them, they practically ran through the door. I’m sure it needs some fixing up, but, we can do it together.”

“It’s . . .”

“Yours,” Henry said. “Ours.”

“You realize that thing is miles from civilization, right? It was an experiment in woodworking.”

“It’s quiet, with plenty of space and paths to walk; the hospital isn’t terribly far away. And, they even lowered the price, so I got you something else, outside. Come take a look. At the very least we’ll have a nice stroll. It’s lovely weather outside.”

Tom walked steadily. Early evening was his best time, the time least likely to plague him with nausea or paralysis, so he capitalized on the relative ease of movement.

Henry walked slightly ahead of him, in case he needed to be caught. The street lamps glowed, illuminating the sidewalks as people wound up and down with a slow buzz. A girl about twenty played Bach on the violin. Tom stopped to give her a dollar. As they made the corner Henry stopped in front of a silver car. He pulled out a key attached to a bracelet and put it around Tom’s wrist.

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“Okay . . . I’m intrigued.”

“Get in the driver’s seat,” Henry said.

“You know we already have a car, right?”

“Oh darling, just you wait.”

They got in. Henry helped Tom start the ignition. The engine hummed baritone and the dash lights lit up like a first note. Tom looked down at the gearshift.

“What am I doing?”

“You’re going to drive.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can, with my help.” Henry pulled off a black plastic cover where the glove box should have been. In its place was a wheel.

“What the . . .” Tom arched his head back, scanning the passenger side.

“It’s like those cars from driver’s ed. You know, the one where the instructor has all the controls on their side, in case you’re about to rear end someone? I can steer and

Henry found him in the kitchen, sitting at the table, a sole light hanging above, spilling over everything like water on sand.

brake too, so if you lose control, I can take over in a flash. You can drive again.” Henry looked at him in a moment of brilliance.

“Why . . .”

“When I bought the house,” Henry said, “I realized that there wouldn’t be any other cars nearby, so I thought we could go for drives. It might be a hoot, two city boys bumbling around the country.”

“I can’t hold the steering wheel, Henry.” Tom’s voice crackled as if he’d imbibed something foul. “Why did you buy this? To see me screw up even more? What if we get pulled over? Oh, sorry officer, he’s not actually driving. I just let him pretend so he doesn’t feel bad about his brain. At least he can sit on the left hand side. Get it? Left hand side?” His eyes were slammed shut. “I can’t stack children’s blocks.”

“Tom . . .” Henry’s thoughts were jumbled. He tried to sort them into the best order, to minimize the unraveling happening before him. “You can. You can do it. Those gloves that help you grip, you can wear those. You can take the medicine before we go out. You’re not helpless. We’ll be perfectly safe.”

“And what about you? You keep badgering me about how I can do this, I can do that.

Are you going to babysit me five years from now when I can’t walk? Are you going to wipe the shit off my ass when I can’t do it for myself?”

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“Yes. I have to.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

Tom got out and limped away, back towards the apartment. Henry called after him in vain, and began following some steps behind, making sure not to stray too far. He would trail him until his anger abated, until the exhaustion made everything else matter less. But Tom went nowhere, only home. Henry found him in the kitchen, sitting at the table, a sole light hanging above, spilling over everything like water on sand. He knelt at his side.

“We had dinner at the diner, and we went back to my place.” Henry reached for Tom’s hand, clutching it in his own. “The song came in through the window, and we started dancing in this kitchen. And you put your arms around me.”

He tugged at Tom’s sleeve, pulling him to the center of the floor. “It was summertime, so we opened the window. You’d gotten some beer. It was so hot, and they were cold. I remember you laughed at the face I made as I gulped it down, the fish face, you said. And that was the best laugh in the world. You kissed me. I said I was lucky to see you thumbing through that gay journal in the bookstore. Then the music started.”

Henry shuffled them side-to-side. He took one of Tom’s hands and pressed it to his chest. Tom put his head on Henry’s shoulder. Henry held him up. They glided along a silent track.

“I don’t know how long I can do this.”

“We’ll get through, Tommy. I promise. It’s an easy song.”

Henry hummed an impromptu tune. They danced until they were the only ones in the city left awake. * TH E HOS P ITA L HA D L EF T A M ESSAG E on their phone. When Henry got home

from work, he hit play on the answering machine as he hung his house keys on the hooks. Nothing dangled from the others; the keys to Tom’s car were gone. He played the message twice, and then he ran.

A baby wailed in the waiting room. A man cradled it, pacing underneath the television. He held up a ring of plastic keys and rattled them together. After a while a nurse came to retrieve them, and they all disappeared through opaque double doors.

Henry watched them go. He looked around for someone else to pay attention to, but the room had emptied. He traced the ridges of his palm, the hills and valleys of his knuckles, up and down the shapes of his fingers. They felt new, like he’d never used them before.

A woman in a white coat approached him. She had a badge clipped onto her blouse, and although she introduced herself, Henry forgot her name as soon as she spoke. She

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repeated what he had heard on the phone. He couldn’t look at her. She sat down next to him and started asking him some questions about Tom. Her voice was too calm, and he had no answers for her, though he asked again something she’d said about Tom’s intentions.

“To help us understand what happened, if you can shed any light on how he was feeling, that would be important for us to know.”

“He was upset this morning. He fell down when he tried to flush the toilet.”

He also kissed me goodbye, Henry thought. He smiled after he said see you later.

The doctor put her hand on his shoulder. He still could not look at her. She handed him a paper with numbers for crematories and grief counselors, and she reiterated that they’d follow up shortly. When she left, Henry wondered if he was allowed to go home or if he needed to stay with the body. He wondered that for hours. Eventually he willed himself to get up and ask one of the nurses. By the time he left, the night shift had ended. Henry returned home, back to the kitchen, back to the table. He played the message again.

For the first few days he imprisoned himself in their apartment. He slept on the floor of the living room and left the window open. He cried in the bathroom. He scrapped the remains of the car and put the deed for the house in a box, taping the keys under the top and putting it all on the shelf next to their old tax filings and unsorted vacation photos. Boston, the Grand Canyon, a beach off the Carolina coast.

* H E TR AV EL ED T HROU G H T HE HOUSE, room after room, a world inside each. He

turned the knobs on the kitchen sink without expectation, forcing his muscles through the motions. Perhaps water flowed someplace else and two people were washing vegetables and preparing to dine together, accompanied by music of their own. He tapped the countertops like a hammer, rhythmic and slow, just as Tom did to every floorboard, every wall, every window, until all the seams were snug, no cracks, no weaknesses, finished at last. He wondered what Tom would have said as he put the last nail in place. Someone will live in this space someday. Someone is going to love living here. This place will last forever.

He went up to the bedroom and lay on the floor, looking through the skylight at all the stars and constellations he couldn’t name. Dust settled on his face like snow.

He brushed his hand against the grain of the wood, tracing the growth rings with his finger, around in one direction, then back the other way. Tom had told him that when the ring can be felt, when the line is thick and easy to spot, then the tree had survived a harsh winter. The thick line is a reminder of the trauma, a permanent scar, a cruel refill for what was lost. When the years are good the lines start to blur. Their shape

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grows thinner and thinner until they’re almost impossible to spot without assistance.

But each one remains nonetheless. Nature keeps records in its own way.

Henry opened the window and breathed in the forest air. He sat on the sill and looked out at the trees, the enormity of their branches, their trunks shooting skyward.

How many of them for a house like this? A thousand? Two? He wondered how many forests Tom had felled and repurposed in his life, turning them into something smooth and warm and new. Tom always kept the wood scraps from his jobs and carved them into small figurines and ornaments. He gave them as gifts to people on special occasions. Nothing would go to waste. He took comfort, knowing that.

Henry looked as far into the distance as he could, as close to the city as his eyes could take him. Past the trees, past the power lines, past the buildings across the alley.

He saw the yellow light flowing out from their kitchen. He heard the front door open, the footsteps of two people moving inside.

He put his hands together, and he began to sing.

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CHA U N B AL L AR D

Minya, Egypt: May 26, 2017 I’m sitting at a Starbucks in Saudi Arabia I’m sitting at a Starbucks in Saudi Arabia as a bus opens its doors to receive a small load of school children I’m sitting at a Starbucks in Saudi Arabia as the school children giggle and bound up three steps, a single flight of stairs, eyeing the perfect seat to sit next to their friends with small backpacks The children are loaded in the school bus and they are giddy: giddy about being children, giddy about being with each other, giddy about being on a moving school bus They are alive and giddy When the bus driver reminds them to sit down and be silent, I’m sitting at a Starbucks in Saudi Arabia There are children sitting here as well All of a sudden, I no longer think children are too young to drink coffee Give them whatever they want, I think, and their mothers do I’m sitting at a Starbucks in Saudi Arabia Many people are waiting in line to buy their cups of coffee, and I’m no longer thinking there is a good chance the coffee is not real in their cups The children are loud on the school bus Some are still bounding from chair to chair because they are giddy, because they are children I know this because I’ve been on a school bus I know this because I’ve been a child and a teacher The bus driver is thinking about a life of servitude and silence, taking up the vow of a priest I know this because I’ve been on a school bus I know this because I’m a teacher Give them what they want, I think to myself Give them what they want kilometers up the road Give them more kilometers up the road

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Give them the school bus Kilometers and kilometers up the road, the bus driver daydreams Bus drivers often daydream in kilometers on a school bus He is Egyptian His is a system of metrics, and he daydreams of arriving home Bus drivers daydream of worse-case scenarios and the worst case is losing children on a school bus Kilometers and kilometers up the road, men wait in three vehicles Kilometers and kilometers up the road, men wait with machine guns The children are excited to be on a school bus They are giddy The bus driver daydreams arriving home

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M E L O DY S . GE E

The Convert’s Heart Is Good to Eat The girl and her mother are seekers of water. They catch drips from a broken aloe sword. A wide cactus mitt oozes clear medicine. Tendril roots purify along blind channels hurtling toward blossom, toward the bright ovary picked for its blush.

What happens inside a body happens in darkness. Nothing to guide the cells’ churning and dying, or tug blood on its course. Nothing but scribbled echoes to expose an unborn face within the caul.

The convert’s heart is a fruit cased in rind.

Is it the kind with a ragged stone in its throat?

Or with seeds woven in each wedge of flesh?

Is it the kind webbed with bitter pith and oil?

The convert’s heart hangs low for gathering and open to the animal bargain of sugar.

The daughter sees the heart, ever on display and swollen with light. Ever thirst and appetite ripened to sweetest grief.

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J ES S T UR NE R

Vampire on Dance Floor A golden shovel after Saeed Jones’s “Last Call” I’m offering my neck more tender than ever. Here, where hunger is blacklit & burning. Imagine the tear, easier than

tissue. I’ve been clawing my collar for practice. Oh, this body where bruises are never dark enough. Can you hear me laughing? I’ll hold

still under more mouth. Prove your myth, your mad hunger.

I know exactly who you are, greater than

your own reflection. My God, the body can beg, can

boil. Cannot hold anymore— Call it wine in your cheeks. Hunger

is theatrical. Leviathan.

Touch a cloth to the corner of your smile. My body

continues laughing, a can cut open with a steak knife, & oh, your teeth kept hold.

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DA N IEL L E W E E K S

Lot’s Wife Some say it was the unfiltered sight of God, or angelfire burning out all her water, or maybe it was just her looking back, wanting what she was supposed to forget.

It’s hard to say. Yesterday I wanted to find her in the new city, maybe waiting at a crosswalk, maybe feeding a meter downtown, her hair pulled up. I wanted the time we sat in her car and talked about what else we could make out of living. She lit another cigarette.

I wish people didn’t need lungs, she said through the smoke, and we talked about whether it was better to be buried or cremated in the end, or if we could become metal, eternal, the worn-out pieces removed as needed.

Think about how much a day burns. Think of the body: nine gallons of water, a three-inch nail, forty teaspoons of salt. We never knew what to make of it all. Each morning I have to drink two glasses of water before I can even speak, my back turned to negative space, still memory. I wonder how long I could stand still, skin sloughing off a little more each hour, lost to the light coming through the window. How long it would take to be made again from this small point of everything.

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L EV I AN D AL O U

My out-of-body experience was somewhat disappointing due to my cramped sleeping quarters. Afterwards, I lay on my back and contemplated the four corners of the ceiling, where architecture becomes preposterous. Why do I get the feeling this room is not technically outside of me? The dimensions of the body when the eyes are closed. The dimensions of the room when no one’s there. I made a mental list of the parts of the body that can be severed with minimal trauma. The first one happened when I was nothing but a child. At will I could dream without dimension at all, the world dark and void. At will I could speak without tense. As the saying goes, take anything and imagine its absence. I took. And now? What is it we live inside? They pour a foundation in your head before they blind you with vertical planes. So I took out the east face of the room with a sledgehammer, a load-bearing wall. Then another. For I was strong with faith, my limbic system surging with molecules unmapped by the FDA. Then I started in on the exterior walls. Again and again, I was rewarded with an uptick in receptor function. Like all people who have glimpsed what is truly to be had in this world, I desired nothing more than views which terminated only as the earth fell away from me.

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artist’s statement

S T E P HA N I E SER PI CK MY MO ST REC EN T PA IN T IN GS, the series A New Fall, express my feelings on

dealing with personal issues over the past year or so. My emotions stem from both reactions to current events in our country and the world, as well as personal loss.

These are intimate paintings of unmade beds and tossed sheets, absent of any human evidence, on intentionally blank, somewhat rough backgrounds. The empty bed in these paintings represents a place for grief, depression, or isolation. The work speaks to our shared feeling of grief, with the understanding that while we all suffer in our individual ways, suffering is universal.

Source material for this work are photographs I have both taken and found. The intimate size of the paintings reflects the intimate nature of the subject matter. The backgrounds of the paintings are repeatedly painted and sanded, to create a frame and backdrop for the bedding that is flat, yet rough with work and time. The bedding itself, seen from different perspectives, indicates a scene of desolation and despair.

D AE S H A DEVÓN HA R R I S INSPIRED BY SLAVE NARRATIVES and folklore that involve the crossing of water,

my current series One More River to Cross addresses America’s enduring legacies of colonialism and systemic racism, while reiterating the central narrative that emerges from the referenced memoirs—the ongoing struggle for freedom. Using elements from these stories in combination with aquatic landscapes, I contemplate the contemporary state-sanctioned violence against Black communities, the approval of this violence by the general public (in the form of unsolicited advice on how Black people should “exist” in order not to be terrorized), and the absence of justice in response to these crimes.

This work claims the significant contributions and sacrifices that our ancestors gave civilization in both life and in death and acknowledges the burden of social constructs that to this day continue to threaten people of color. Drawing strength from our sacred texts and spiritual music, this series is about the Black experience that is deeply connected to the landscape, the idea of home, and its intersections with water.

Water becomes symbolic of freedom—whether it is in this world or the next—and simultaneously confirms social and cultural boundaries. Water has to be crossed on the journey to freedom.

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STEPHANIE SERPICK. A New Fall #1, 2017. Oil on panel. 16 x 20 inches.

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STEPHANIE SERPICK. A New Fall #8, 2017. Oil on panel. 16 x 20 inches.

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STEPHANIE SERPICK. A New Fall #12, 2018. Oil on panel. 16 x 20 inches.

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STEPHANIE SERPICK. A New Fall #13, 20 18. Oil on panel. 16 x 20 inches.

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DAESHA DEVÓN HARRIS. Stronger Than an Iron Hand, Fall 2017. Cotton rag archival pigment print. 17 x 22 inches.

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DAESHA DEVÓN HARRIS. Just Follow Me Down to Jordan’s Stream, Fall 2017. Cotton rag archival pigment print. 17 x 22 inches.

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DAESHA DEVÓN HARRIS. Get Away, Jordan, Fall 2016. Cotton rag archival pigment print. 17 x 22 inches.

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DAESHA DEVÓN HARRIS. My Soul Looked Back and Wondered, Fall 2017. Cotton rag archival pigment print. 17 x 22 inches.

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R EB EC C A D O VE R S P I K E

Every present thing, a ghost of something else.

Two oaks left in the center of a farm.

I tremble with what’s not there, full tenderness; the heart holds more than its own lifetime.

A dead bird, I told my friend not to touch it.

She cupped it in her hands, found a place in the dirt beneath a bush. She grew up on a farm, witnessed a calf cut, half in its mother, half out.

At home, the oak trees’ sway makes sense: books understand me because they are made from trees.

When I hear traffic on a hike through the forest, I think of how an ocean used to be there but now a road, and its traffic sounds like the ocean, but how the road cuts across a shy deer’s grace.

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KA R E N AN - H W E I L E E

The Silk Lessons 1. The First Silk Lesson Silk lesson number one. First, peace silk is wild silk. Peace silk does not sacrifice the fond lives of juvenile mulberry moths.

The cycle of instar to imago is seamless— the moth emerges. Harvest only broken cocoons unspun for their silk. Filaments shorter than sericulture adhered to beauty, neither peace nor wilderness—nor artifice, strand after strand, invisible without judging unraveled lines prior to human ransacking or rebirth—the latter, a sheer cruelty-free equivalence.

2. The Second Silk Lesson The second silk lesson. Not everything said about silk is true. The empress, for instance, who loved to hear the sound of tearing silk.

True or false? There is a qigong move called silk. The opposite move is iron. True or false.

Silkworms no longer exist in the wild due to overharvesting. Use over a thousand cocoons to reel one pound of silk. If no wild silk exists, then use peace silk where the pupa matures to the imago stage and breaks out of the cocoon rather than dying in hot water. This is still, however, a form of cultivated silk or human sericulture.

3. The Third Silk Lesson The third silk lesson. Old silk, when weathered, assumes the coppery rue of pennies. Calendered or watered silk has nothing to do with water.

This is like saying the light is without saying

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the word light or comparing it to another noun ending arbitrarily in three consonants. Not transparent things like a glasswing mariposa, espejitos or little mirrors, the salpas of the sea, texture of your sister’s hair over her shoulder as she washes. Not the sound of your harp at rest in a walk-in closet while you sleep with summer windows open, an electric fan stirring.

4. The Fourth Silk Lesson The fourth silk lesson. Liang sheen of waves means nothing unto itself.

Nonetheless, if silk could see its image in a mirror and respond to its name, then silk would say, reel me into skeins, then press me into books. Remember nothing of my original flesh in nature, the mulberry moth. Rather, recall me as a simulacrum of your other self, the one who never wished to leave paradise. I clothe a loss of innocence with my own manufactured skin.

In this case, if silk is synthetic fiber, it is neither genetically modified nor immortal, nor immune to death, nor this mutable skin of inheritance.

5. The Last Silk Lesson The last silk lesson. When real silk burns, it does not emit a pleasant fragrance.

Rather, it emits an odor like burning hair.

When you touch a flame to real silk, it only burns when the flame touches it.

Real silk does not burn apart from fire.

On the contrary, faux silk will go on burning.

Real silk will turn to ash while faux silk will melt like a lampshade, ardor of blazing polymer factories.

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TERRA INCOGNITA LA U R A O’ GOR M A N SCHWA RTZ

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TH E OL D M A P HA D CON G EA L ED to the wall, taken on its texture. There was no

removing it completely, so they didn’t remove it at all, just pinned the new map on top of it, bottom corners loose and still curled from the roll it had slept in. Word ambled down the street and the neighbors came to see the new face of their country. Bigcheeked Hanna, spackled with flour. Blonde Ria with her skinny husband. The young, curly-haired brothers Isidoor and Thomas. Erik, old and bearded. The very pregnant Juytken. Pretty Jo, the town’s white flower. Philip and his two flunkies—a gang formed in boyhood and cemented by adolescence. A few others. The tavern seemed embarrassed to be so full in midday, caught in the light. Perhaps it was this unusual combination of time and place that dampened their spirits and lent the rosy new map a poisonous sheen.

The town wasn’t invested in books. With no library or school, with the sea far to the northwest, the old map had been a rare window into the country beyond their fields. For some, it had been the only window. Ivo the innkeeper had won it over a decade ago, in a card game with a sailor in Antwerpen in 1504. Ivo hadn’t felt old yet then. Hanna hadn’t been married. Ria’s youngest was still alive. Erik had yet to be widowed. The map had hung above the bar since. It softened with them. The colors lightened. The words gently bled. The tiny ships on the painted waves of the Germanicus Oceanus contracted into strange ink creatures. Over the years, the map ceased to be, or perhaps never was, a representation of their country; in the townspeople’s minds, it was their country.

And in the span of a short morning, the world they believed was aging with them had been replaced with a crisper, more vibrant version. Borders they had come to think of as blurred and gauzy became impenetrable again. A black line squiggled down and around the land, marking the edges, trapping them inside. Even the eternal northwest waters had a new name: Maris Germanici. Hanna and Ria joked and scoffed. As though you could change the name of the sea! More startling, their familiar country was crammed with at least twice as many cities and towns as before, nests of calligraphy punctuated by circles and corralled by weaving roads. The old yellowed map had been spotted with its share of settlements, but the names had long been demoted to decorative details, a pattern for one’s eyes to roost in while a tankard was drained.

Thomas buzzed about, investigating the musty adulthood of the tavern, new territory for the twelve-year-old. He tilted his head back to take in the map.

“Have all those towns existed all this time? Or are they new?”

The innocent question was a stab in the ribs of the gathered adults. They didn’t know. As before, Ivo had dabbed a spot of red paint on their town. But the comfort of knowing precisely where they were on the Lord’s green earth had vanished. How could anybody feel found in a crowd like that?

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“The old map was better,” Ria declared, blonde eyebrows pinched together. “This one has errors.”

Ivo had left his duties to his overburdened wife in order to preen amongst his neighbors. Though a regular traveler out of town, he hadn’t acquired the map for geographical guidance; for that, he preferred the compass of his own memory. The map drew him for another reason. The warm palette and dark lines, the chocolatey curls and perked ends of the letters, the mellifluousness of the incomprehensible Latin maxim that crowned the frame—the entire composition was pleasing. When his gaze sank into it, a panting horse into a cool river, he felt that his heart

Youth cannot believe what Age tells them to be true. It won’t be real until they have aged themselves.

and his mind were connected. Closer than connected. That they were the same. Just as black dots on rich paper could also be a sea. Both the sailor’s map and this newer one climbed inside him and stayed there. Art, however, was not a well-trod topic in their town and, if asked, Ivo would have said that he couldn’t say a single word on the subject.

He rounded on Ria. “This map does not have errors. It’s just more recent.”

“No,” Ria insisted. “There aren’t that many towns.”

“How would you know?”

“It’s common sense. Look at how crushed together all the names are. Are we really supposed to believe there is no countryside in our country? Look outside!”

“I bet the mapmaker invented some towns so he could f-feel important,” Philip asserted, juvenile ego tripped by jitters.

Ivo set his jaw and folded his great arms. Had he known the phrases artist’s interpretation and not true to scale, he would have used them. As it was, he could only sense their unarticulated truth.

“Perhaps you could put both maps up?” Hanna submitted, picking at the dough drying on her knuckles.

“No, I won’t have an out-of-date map on my wall.”

“It was fine for the last ten years and suddenly it’s out of date?” Philip asked with a huff, glancing over at his lackeys.

“We didn’t need a new map,” one said.

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“We didn’t want one,” the other added.

“This is my tavern and it’s staying.”

“It’s a disgrace!” Ria snapped in a tight voice. “It’s—What proof do you have that these towns are real? You have no right to spread errors, maybe even lies, about our country.”

She had been like this in childhood too, Ivo remembered. Her temper and tears erupted if you changed the rules midgame, if you told a story differently than before, if you abandoned the plan. Her heels were forever dug into the earth. Ivo pitied her husband, a man who was clipped around the edges and crumpled in.

The argument continued, heating the pub to a stuffiness only enjoyed by the passionately angry or by drinkers on a winter evening. Hanna attempted to placate Ria, but Philip’s gang was teething, hoping for a real fight to chew on. They followed up on Ria’s flares with handfuls of fuel. Younger and slimmer than the other men, curly-haired Isidoor kept both his tongue and his little brother in check. Beautiful Jo was still entranced by the new map and paid attention to none of them. Erik stroked his greying beard and held the door for the waddling Juytken. Age serving youth.

Near-death serving near-life.

Blue skies on a market day meant a busy street. Children in filthy smocks brandished sticks and screamed their games. Straw baskets filled, townspeople who had heard the gossip gravitated towards the inn. Erik helped Juytken out of their path.

“You ought to return home. Walking around in your condition is dangerous,” Erik said.

Juytken nodded. The fingers not curled under her pregnant belly were fiddling with the sleeve of her linen undershirt. She studied the knobbed hand Erik rested on his walking stick.

“What do you think of the map?” she asked.

“I’m too old for it to make any difference to me.”

“The world around us changes so quickly. Ten years and the country has been completely redrawn,” Juytken mused, eyes lowered. “How can I know what sort of place my son will grow up in?”

“Take it from me. Some things don’t change.”

Juytken gave him a smile and made her way down the street, layered skirts skimming the earth. Erik monitored her until she turned the corner. Youth cannot believe what Age tells them to be true. It won’t be real until they have aged themselves. But he was correct. Some things didn’t change. A pint of ale will always improve a meal. A new map will always cause an upset. A young wife filled to the brim with life will always be a blessing. It was the natural flow of time. Juytken’s son would be his third grandchild. She was downriver from her mother’s pregnancies and from Erik’s own wife’s, the last of which took her from this realm.

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The road east shrank, became a path that bordered the farms. Escorted by his wooden cane, Erik’s steps were unhurried. Sheep bleated and moved as one away from the fencing. Clouds dragged a net of shade across the green fields. And he was an old man wandering after his thoughts, recalling how his wife’s right leg had a slight limp that made her shy. When she died, the priest assured Erik that such a good woman was unquestionably with our Lord in his Kingdom. It was a comfort to hear and it was what Erik repeated to his children, but he was embarrassed to discover that he was unable to imagine his wife in heaven. Erik was never a man for daydreams or fantasies, and he simply couldn’t place the image of her anywhere but home. Since birth, she had fit her years comfortably into their town, a small circle of which her and Erik’s house became the center. Even attending church or walking to the market spurred a frenzy of preparation. Her impatience to return to the cauldron, the cradle, the clutter of half-woven garments, often snipped conversations with neighbors short.

A frequent and amicable patron of Ivo’s, Erik had found this tiresome. After her death, it troubled him. How could a woman who had burrowed, body and soul, into this patch of earth, a woman who had never followed the road east beyond the farms, traverse the long journey to heaven?

A chilly breeze slinked through the expanse of sunshine. Erik held his wool cap to his head and listened to the rustling trees. The new map spread itself out in his mind, the precise lines, the four tiny trees, and he was delighted to see a figure on the buttercolored paper, barely more than a dot, traveling through the copse, away from the red heart of their town. The roads were so neatly marked. The rivers. Finally, they both had a guide. The path towards the borders, of the country, of the sea, of the entire map, was distinct yet crossable, even with her uneven gait. After a pause on the edge, she stepped off into an ungraspable realm, a kingdom of faith hidden in the thin air.

The thought lightened Erik’s bones and his feet. Sunlight swept across the grass, like satisfaction. Joy, even.

The quarrel at the tavern swelled and receded and swelled again. After failing to douse Ria’s blistering hisses, big-cheeked Hanna—whose heart pounded whenever voices were raised—retreated to the bakery. Young Thomas’s question stalked after her, clinging to the hem of her kirtle.

“Well?” Her husband asked, sweating.

She circled the loaves of bread, retied her apron, shrugged.

“Ria thinks it’s fake, that there are too many towns for it to be a true map.”

“No reason to change what works,” he said, shrugging back.

Grunting, he opened the oven grate and withdrew a pan of hot and fluffy koekjes.

The aroma of butter mingled with the brusque smell of charcoal and the autumnal scent of chopped apples resting in a bath of spices. Hanna hunched over the table to pull and knead the dough for appelflappen, massaging it thin with her chubby fingers, loving strokes she had learned years ago, when she married both a man and his trade.

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No reason to change what works. A recipe can be played with a little—raisins added, perhaps—but the ratio of flour to sugar to fats had long been determined. Like the name of the sea.

“Hanna. Why are you crying?”

“I’m sorry. It’s frightening.”

“The map?”

“Yes.” “It’s a painted picture. That’s all.”

“I feel small, as though I was a mouse all along.”

“You’re certainly not the size of a mouse,” he chuckled, belly jiggling.

But she didn’t smile. In front of her gaze hung the circle of their village, a droplet once buffered by empty space, now swept up in a swarm. All those towns filled with strangers. All those roots unearthed and bared to the sun. Names for things that didn’t need names. The more men stuck pins into the land, speared it with titles and

The more men stuck pins into the land, speared it with titles and dimensions, the more it would bleed.

dimensions, the more it would bleed. A pile of cake ingredients was not appetizing, couldn’t they see that? It was only the whole, the elements combined, that made something sweet and wonderful. Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great. To fear a gnawing appetite for knowledge was humanity’s earliest lesson and still there was this vulgar reaching for higher and higher branches of the tree. One did not inherit the Kingdom of God by dismantling and renaming His creations. Nor by following any ink-sodden map.

If their dear country could erupt in a sudden wealth of new details, like the distant hills sharpening after a storm, then what other unknowns lay hidden, ready to pounce? Insignificance wormed into Hanna for the first time since girlhood and her hands trembled. She could be crushed by so much, all that she couldn’t see and didn’t know. It was one thing to feel small and humble next to the unfathomable glory of one’s Savior, but to be trampled underfoot by unknown armies from unknown cities, the human unknown. . . . Her shoulders rose in a fear that set the Lord’s Prayer rumbling over her tongue.

Its familiar rhythm lulled her back into her work. Dough, apples, sugar. The formulas and measurements, the simple causes and effects, formed a landscape she

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knew intimately, one she could find shelter in. She would hold to the mystery of faith, the recitations of recipes. Give us this day our daily bread. Warm water and warm milk so the rolls rise properly. Add the flour a tablespoon at a time. And deliver us from evil. Amen.

Hanna wasn’t the only one ruffled by Thomas’s question. It roosted in his elder brother Isidoor’s mind, noisy, feathers and droppings coating his contemplation.

Which did he prefer? That other towns had lain cloaked in mist all this time? Or that they had sprung up out of the earth like weeds in a neglected kitchen garden?

Under a field of clouds yet to be ploughed by the sun, Ivo would be woken by caterwauling and bangs on the inn door.

Ignorance or rapid change? Hoping to avoid the notice of Philip and his drudges, he gave the map his full attention, fluttered from town to town, forwent space and time to touch on all the borders, run down the canals, and pause in places that resembled the names of people he knew. Canegem. Tempelmare. Dadisele. Trechyn. Gendt, of course.

Antwerpen. He’d like to see Antwerpen. Just once. Just to peek at the crashing flow of life in an international city, the Italian sugar and Portuguese pepper, the Spanish gold and American silver, the scholars and the sailors in combat with uncertainty. Just to walk alongside men who saw the coast as a starting point instead of an end, who entered into long affairs with the unknown.

And after seeing the worn and weathered faces of these men, Isidoor would be glad to come home. He was sure of it. How little the void attracted him, the opaque waters, the days flung wide open and blinding, especially in comparison to his work, his mother, his brother, the pleasant possibilities and manageable problems he would have here. Thomas, though, would become the type of man that the bottomless sea, with its promise of sugar and silver, would seduce away. Isidoor could only hope that she wouldn’t take his brother’s life as payment for his curiosity.

Isidoor’s eyes descended from the heights of the map to Jo’s pale and freckled face, which glowed in the half-light, framed by a wheat-colored linen hood. They had only spoken two or three times, nodded to each other at the market—her hands separating gourds and cabbages, his full of upside-down and baffled chickens—but for Isidoor she was a clearer map to his future than any. He could see, though, that Ivo’s new atlas held her fast. She seemed deaf to the clamoring newcomers, to Philip’s exaggerated posturing, to the squabble that ended with Ria yanking her husband out the door. Was

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Jo dreaming of travel, too? Of Gendt or Antwerpen? Of an adventure they could hold up years from now and see their reflections in? It was as though she was having a conversation with the map, a dialogue he didn’t understand and so could not interrupt.

He resolved to wait for the right moment.

Philip shouldered past Isidoor, and his flunkies trailed their ringleader out into the ripening midday. Sounds from the market rushed through the opened door. Isidoor ought to return to the poultry stall; Thomas would need help hauling the sacks of feed. They couldn’t linger any longer. But tomorrow would come, no matter what was drawn on any map, and Isidoor would wash his face, tamp down his curly hair, and ask Jo’s father if he could marry her. His heart quickened at his resolve, but Jo still didn’t look his way.

Before his wife reeled him back to his obligations, Ivo too observed Jo, puzzling over her fixation on the map. She had never granted the old one more than a glance.

Her parents and siblings weren’t the sort to chew over these things. He left her in peace. Girls’ fancies were marshes too murky to ford.

At the altar formed by the map and the bar, Jo paled and blushed, hid her flooded eyes and sudden smiles, embraced the storm and then the calm. So. There was no definitive version of their country, of the world. There never would be. If the old map was fallible, a temporary reflection, then the reign of this newer one must be equally precarious. The truth, so fixed, so obvious, could change. It all depended on who drew the map. And really, anyone could draw a map, could sketch the world as it was true for them. A local shepherd’s survey of the land would differ from a foreign merchant’s, but neither would be false. They would simply see with different eyes, through lenses sculpted by different lives. Could the truth ever be reached then? Certain atlases might approach it, breathe down its neck. But even if the truth were somehow captured, fully contained in inked borders, one felled tree would change the face of their country into a different creature. And what of other maps, other guides? All those laws and facts, decreed by God and nature and men and mothers? What makes a lady, what makes a cake, what makes a life. . . . Were they transient too?

“Jo, oughtn’t you get back to the market and help your mother?” Ivo’s wife called over an armful of cleaned linens.

One foot on the stairs, she cracked her neck and waited in vain for a reply. She was unsettled by the . . . lust, she’d have to call it, in Jo’s eyes. If her parents had any sense, they would get that girl a husband soon. Everyone knew pretty things were a danger to keep around too long. White flowers could be poisonous.

Soul still full of the map, Jo left the tavern and turned down the familiar street, its dips and curves long memorized by her feet. This road and this market, seemingly permanent fixtures in the landscape of her life, were really just one of many roads, one of many markets. In the burn of the late afternoon, the shops and stalls and houses took on the hollow echo, the weightlessness, of a traveling troupe’s set for

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a play. It was all manmade, wasn’t it? What was right. What was wrong. What was possible and impossible. The corset of certainties Jo wore—marriage was her next step, children were a woman’s greatest love, churchgoers went to heaven, cities were sinful, the sea was monstrous—loosened. She couldn’t think of what had prevented her from wriggling her fingers into the knots and undoing them before. Fear of not adhering to the world as mapped by someone else? Jo smiled. Maps could be redrawn.

At dawn, Jo’s mother would notice her absence but think little of it until a canvas bag and supplies were discovered to be missing from the pantry. Under a field of clouds yet to be ploughed by the sun, Ivo would be woken by caterwauling and bangs on the inn door. Jo’s red-faced father and inconsolable mother would thrust their distress onto Ivo’s broad chest, hoarsely damn his new map for bewitching and spiriting away their white flower, who had spent the night talking nonsense about walls not being walls and truths not being truths. They would push past Ivo, hearts like torches aimed at the map, but be brought up short at the bar, their bonfire of anger left flickering in the wind. The new map would already be lying in a froth of paper on the floor. Ivo would feel the bright shreds as keenly as though it were his own flesh in pieces, and he would groan upon noticing a long peel of the old map, thought to be permanently wedded to the wall, uncoiling to the floor in a limp arc, a casualty in the attack on its successor.

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J A M ES C R E W S

Time Capsule of the Early Twenty-First Century All the songs were about finding different ways to talk of the sky, especially at night— that blue before the black— which is to say we wanted to pray but were too afraid to ask for help. We had learned to live on so little hope that any scrap was welcome— like ants clamoring in a bowl for grains of sugar, only to find it was salt all the time. If you could still see the constellations through the ever-brightening skyglow of light pollution, you’d notice they were beautiful— the glittering plan and pattern of things not made by humans, bodies not meant to harm.

The stars gave even the hardest among us a hint of pleasure when we caught a glimpse of them through a lover’s bedroom window, or while leaving a nightclub, when we remembered to look up long enough to be amazed.

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J O HN P O C H

from River VI. If I had opened myself to the hooks of sky, hungered more with the discriminating patience of trout, the lazy survival of drawing close to a clear current, or if I had recognized my need as a feel for migration and taken it as my own coping with will, no sweet tune could satisfy my ears as no filtering gill denies the river flow. A river changes course.

This boulder fallen from the cliff face makes a stream, a bank collapses, a clutch of willows thickens, and pretty stones mix with muck and a driftwood pileup till an oxbow simplifies into a falls scouring silt from bedrock below.

Terrestrials dangle from the grass blades and crawl the osha stalks arcing over the undercut bank. The heavens now and then bless and let something slip.

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VII. The river being dead, yet speaks.

Remember yesterday? Yes. No. In a way, the way of rivers, a river is remembered.

Remember God? You don’t want yourself to will Him worship. There is a cast one makes that sets the fly atop the swirling pool.

There is a pool smooth as a mirror in an evening party living room.

You see yourself in it, you see an aquarium of bangles and glasses, you see the woman you want rising to your hand, your offering, her name. Now we are left with the perfect.

There is dancing, river willow thickets of feminine arms and dresses, green blouses moved by a music. God says choose her as if you had a choice and let her choose you if she will, and worship me for what will happen.

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artist’s statement

R I C HA R D HA RT MY WO RK D R AWS inspiration from Africa and its diaspora and touches on themes

of identity, displacement, longing, community, and the uniquely African practice of melding and hybridizing belief and knowledge systems. It is this practice—of borrowing and cobbling together something new from seemingly disparate parts—that ultimately forms the philosophical and aesthetic bedrock of my practice and allows me to blur the lines between fact and fiction, memory and intuition, observation and feeling, and which I hope proposes something new and optimistic.

LEA H OATES “The world thus appears to be a complicated tissue of events in which connections of different kinds alternate, overlap, or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux, and at moments this flux is visible.”

—Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard T H E T RA N S I TO RY S PAC E series deals with urban and natural locations that are

transforming due to the passage of time, altered natural conditions, and a continual human imprint. In everyone and in everything there are daily changes, and this series articulates fluctuation in the photographic image and captures movement through time and space.

Transitory spaces have a messy human energy that is perpetually in the present yet continually altering. They are endlessly interesting, alive places where there is a great deal of beauty and fragility. They are temporary monuments to the ephemeral nature of existence.

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RICHARD HART. A Way of Searching (a Way of Finding), 2015. Oil on panel. 22.5 x 21.5 inches.

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RICHARD HART. Mirrors (1), 2015. Oil on panels. 14 x 10 inches each.

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RICHARD HART. Awareness (Part 1), 2015. Oil on panel. 14.5 x 14.5 inches.

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RICHARD HART. Awareness (Part 2), 2015. Oil on panel. 14.5 x 14.5 inches.

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LEAH OATES. Transitory Space, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, Spring 2018 #1, 2018. Color photography.

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LEAH OATES. Transitory Space, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, October 2017 #2, 2017. Color photography.

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LEAH OATES. Transitory Space, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, October 2017 #3, 2017. Color photography.

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LEAH OATES. Transitory Space, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, March 2018 #3, 2018. Color photography.

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J O HN B L AI R

Veil of Tears It’s vale of course, some vined

valley sedge-ish and lush and rambled by long-limbed

girls and wild boys with spears or maybe just desert

burnt grim by contretemps and over-sharing but veil is kernel-ish truth you can tender in damp

curtains of specious when only lace and wet

lashes will do to make it a well in the wide valley

of weeping wherein rain also filleth the pools

and the grief you hide is the grief God gave you when

he smote your turning cheek.

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S T O R M S H E LT E R S

B E THA N Y M A I LE

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I DA H O ST OR M S W ER E L ON G , with warning. The wind was warm and a quiet rain

purled leaves. My father would pull the truck into the garage and my mother would whistle for the dogs and we’d wait it out together playing gin rummy.

But first, the horses alighted. All day they’d wade the pasture, lazy and tame. Then, as if a gun had cracked, their heads jerked up and their ears flattened. Tuned to some infrasonic register, they sprinted the fence line. Their coats turned slick and shined in the rain. They were a polyphony of whinnies. * WE D O A L IT T L E T HIN G with a machine that’s balanced on her lap. A black box,

two dials across the top, then a cord attached to two joysticks. She hands me the wands.

“Close your eyes,” she says. “Think of a happy time with your baby. When the wands vibrate, add more detail. What do you see, hear, feel? Understand?”

I say yes and she tells me to begin and I can’t think of a thing, not because there aren’t plenty of happy times, but because the jiggle-wands feel like grenades with their pins pulled.

“Any moment, just one.”

When I’d walked in, she’d stood up and closed her hand around mine and repeated my name and said, “My, that’s lovely.” So I tell myself to cooperate, to focus. Ignore the wands and the trickling water gadgets and mini Zen garden and her persistent, kind gaze. Any second these little sticks will electro-nudge me. Any second, she’ll ask again. I want to say, Fuck this, we have loads of happy times. But I don’t want to be rude. Instead, I talk about our first day home, how we’d had one of those Alaska spring blizzards, but then, falling in long hot slats, the sun. I held her bare-bellied to the window so she could feel it on her skin.

Jiggle jiggle.

“I sang her a Beatles song.”

Jiggle jiggle.

“She was quiet.”

Jiggle jiggle.

“I was happy.”

Jiggle jiggle.

She was here and it was warm and we were calm. What else is there?

Jiggle jiggle.

“I was relieved she was healthy.”

Jiggle jiggle.

I squeeze the wands.

Jiggle jiggle.

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The fountains bubble.

Jiggle jiggle.

“What else? Go deeper?”

The room is an oven. My temples throb. I cry and she presses a tissue to my hand.

“Why the tears?”

“I guess I hate the idea that I need all this to feel good about my kid.”

And I really don’t think that I do. Early in my pregnancy, my obstetrician handed me this counselor’s card as general protocol. Postpartum depression isn’t uncommon, she’d explained, especially in Alaska, where the winter is long and sunless and most families are thousands of miles away on the other side of ice and ocean. But I was happy with this pregnancy, my husband, our home. After I’d delivered, I’d never felt

I lift her to my shoulder, my hand cupping the soft down of her head, and I am braced to absorb her cry. the things doctors warn about: not wanting to hold her, or dreaming of chucking her from a window or setting her down and never coming back. So I want to tell her that I love the pants off my baby, that when she sleeps I miss her, that every day I press my face to her chest and breathe deeply because she smells like warm bread, that when she nurses I memorize the contours of her face. But this feels argumentative, so I just say the part about not liking all this production.

“Then why do you think your husband made the appointment?”

I put down the wands and open my eyes. For the past eleven months, more often than not, my husband would return from work to find me rocking our daughter, both of us hours into a hard cry. Our baby slept less and cried more than most. We saw three doctors, read nine books. Maybe I should pick up the wands and visualize.

Maybe I should be more willing and tell her that the pediatrician calls our baby a statistical anomaly. There’s a bell curve for typical behavior, and your baby is outside of it. Her nervous system works overtime so she’s hyper-attuned to the world. Most stimuli—a door opening, a friend’s face—prompt screams. “You’d think we’re stubbing out cigarettes on her,” we say, trying to laugh. High needs. Highly reactive. Highly sensitive. They all mean the same thing, the pediatrician had said. Healthy but hard, this one.

Or maybe I should discuss the body. I could tell the counselor that I hadn’t cried at the first miscarriage but I did at the second, and after that I’d waited out my healthy, drug-boosted pregnancy with a learned skepticism and held breath. Or how after a

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botched delivery, the stench of cauterized flesh smelled like a dead deer I once found on a river shore. Or how sleep deprivation yielded hallucinations, and more than once I’d stumbled out of our bedroom, frustrated she wouldn’t latch, and my husband would put a hand on my shoulder and say, “I’ve got her,” and I’d look down to my bare chest and empty arms. Or how hormones had overtaken everything, even my kidneys, and the first stone was smooth like a pepper kernel and only took two days but the second was barbed like a sand spur and took ten. Or how I’d gone in for that stone but when the blood pressure cuff squeezed, the nurse lifted her eyebrows and the doctor said something about exhaustion and best to keep you for a bit, try to get you rested. Or how one night, while breastfeeding, my thumb rolled over a hard lump and when the doctor said “mass” the surgeon drilled and the incision stayed infected for months, how my milk turned pink with blood. Or that each day I tell myself this baby is sunshine and you willed her here; you’ve given her your body and would do it again; be thankful; be tough. But unloading all this feels argumentative, too, or like I’m saying my story is special, or like I’m complaining.

“It’s been a hard year.”

“Do you want to continue?”

I shake my head.

“Just think about the moment you chose, how far back you had to go.”

I put on my coat and she says, “I’ll write down post-traumatic stress, adjustment disorder, some depression, just for insurance.” I nod and tell her thanks and I’m out the door. * WE’ R E W EEKS from her first birthday, and maybe something will click. At night,

instead of waking seized by hours-long screaming fits, she will sleep. She’ll take a bottle or pacifier. Neighbors will wave and she’ll blink back easefully. I’ll sneeze and she’ll hardly turn a head. The faucet can run; the shower curtain can slide; the toilet can flush; the car seat can click; we can read books with animals in them; we can sing songs; the grandparents, when they visit, can touch her hand. And I’ll go whole days without giving my body a thought. Everything will settle. * AT 2 A . M . we nurse beside her window, where I sometimes hold her and point to the

world: that’s a magpie, pretty but pesky; that cloud is a nimbostratus and full of rain; that moon is a waxing gibbous; the sun is shining hot today; the Beatles sang “Here Comes the Sun.” She eats and I rock and we occupy some crepuscular space between sleeping and waking.

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A bright, clashing sound ruptures the night. A snow shovel, I think, scraping asphalt. But there is no snow and the whole block is sleeping. I hear it again, now lower and louder, like a growl. We’ve never had bears, but you hear stories. I part the curtains. A moose lopes and its call is deeper than a horse’s whinny, more oscillating and stressed. It bucks its hind legs gracelessly, it rolls its knobby head and lets another pained cry fly. It is mangy in the moonlight. Then the wind slams the screen door against the house. Rain falls fast and the window pings with it. The pine trees shake and the wind screams on, dissonant and metallic. My heart quickens at those big pines bending just beyond us. I lift her to my shoulder, my hand cupping the soft down of her head, and I am braced to absorb her cry. Her body tightens and she twists to the window where the water runs in shining streaks. She presses her hand to the pane, curious and quiet. Then the moose jumps the fence and bolts out of sight. * TH E N EXT M ORN IN G I’ll tell my husband that a moose, possessed by the change

in pressure and the cold front gusting in, possessed by something that must be, to a moose, innate but inexplicable, tore up our yard. I’ll remember how quickly the storm kicked up, and I’ll think of my father’s ponies, portentous and rain-sleeked in the silver light of a gentle storm. I’ll think of my parents, removed by time and space, and how they called me in from the field, how my father shuffled the cards into a bridge and my mother kept score. I’ll think that just as quickly as the horses startled, they settled.

I’ll think that last night, I’d propped my daughter on my shoulder and told her that outside the wind was really something, outside was quite the show. And she watched it all wide-eyed until she eventually found sleep.

When she wakes this morning, she will cry for me, and maybe I can soothe her or maybe I can’t, but the air will be warm and still and somewhere even that wild animal will have gentled to the world. Somewhere it will have made a bed in the grass where it could wake to a calm sky.

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KEV I N MC L E L L AN

The Grotto i.

On the other side an obscure opening— light! A sky can’t endorse what I would think or have thought.

Memory, like ground -water or dust, misses the mother lode. ii.

Thank you for the occasional visit during sleep, dearest.

Was it really you? You left 23 years ago and I’ve been at least 23 people. This recent incarnation bookends an origin, when brightness started to dim so yes, I am alight.

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The Pistachio Farmer‘ s Daughter HEATHER M . SU R LS

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TAS N E E M SAT U P before she burned. Her eyes opened to the darkness like it was

daylight, gladly, and the room pulsed. She pressed her hand into her rib cage, felt her heart pounding like it always did. And then she felt her blood. She untangled herself from the sheet and rolled onto her knees, taking a deep breath, realizing what this meant.

The whirring of the box fan brought the room steady, and Ibrahim’s breathing beside her. She reached under the floor cushion and pulled out a Kotex. Not that she’d wanted this to come, but it had happened enough to know it was better to be ready.

She stood up carefully and shuffled past her niece and nephews lined up on cushions across the room. The fan—pointed at them—cooled her for a moment.

“Everything okay?” Ibrahim whispered as she returned from the bathroom. The cushion’s textured fabric felt cloying on her skin.

“I got my cycle,” Tasneem said. She couldn’t see him but heard him exhale.

“Hold my hand,” Ibrahim said, and she grabbed it like it was a life preserver.

“I had a nightmare too,” she said.

“Which one?”

“The one where they’re burning Baba’s trees,” she replied. She stared at the ceiling, wishing there was something there besides black mold to replace the images scorched on her mind, like she’d stared too long at the sun. “And after that, the part where I’m running or being chased, I don’t know what.”

“Do you want me to sing?”

Tasneem rolled onto her side. He meant the lullaby their mothers had sung to them, the one that could always calm her after the nightmares. “Yes,” she said, her throat thick.

He sang, and though his hand was sweaty by the end, she held on. This was the worst part—the lonely hours, wanting but not wanting to sleep—surrendering to it felt as frightening as death. She swore the jinn were busy at this time.

She startled when a crackle broke the air. The adhan began from the mosque a few buildings away. She relaxed into the muezzin’s chanting; someone else was awake, alive. Her mother-in-law would be getting up soon, pulling on the cotton prayer dress, a ghost washing hands and feet and face, unrolling the one prayer rug that had made it out of Syria with them. Her sister-in-law, Reema, would sleep a little longer—she was pregnant—and Ibrahim and Hussein would pray together before they left to look for work. Tasneem was bleeding, so she couldn’t pray. She lay there, hoping her motherin-law’s prayers would somehow cover her too. * WH E N S HE WOK E, Tasneem felt sick from heat, the muscles in her belly pulling

tight like jerky. Late-morning sun beat through the sheet covering the window.

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Sleeping cushions now framed the walls, and a square of newspaper covered the tile floor, with small dishes of oil, za’atar and yogurt, scraps of bread, the tea kettle.

Reema lay with her face toward the wall, still in her housedress. Her niece and two nephews slouched against the far wall, watching Tom and Jerry.

“Good morning, beautiful ones,” she called to the kids.

Only Zahra, already in her school uniform, looked up and grinned. She loved school, that girl, and it killed her to wait all morning for the afternoon session, when the Jordanian kids had finished and the refugee kids took their place. She’d been so happy the day Tasneem came home with the news that she’d secured a place for her in the elementary school.

She reached for the baggy veil she wore in the flat and pulled it over her head and shoulders, then knelt on the newspaper. The kids had left nibbled quarters and halves

She reached for the baggy veil she wore in the flat and pulled it over her head and shoulders, then knelt on the newspaper. of bread behind. She gathered them, remembering how they used to hang bags of dayold bread on the fence outside their home in Aleppo, how it’d hang there for the poor to take, stale but holy. And that’s what we are now, she thought, perhaps still shocked, though it’d been three years.

She poured a glass of lukewarm tea and stepped to the back door. A few minutes of fresh air and she hoped she’d feel better. The door opened to the rooftop, crowded with water tanks and satellite dishes for the whole building. Their rooftop flat was cheap—especially with no elevator—that’s why they’d moved in even though it had just one bedroom and no bathtub.

Tasneem sat in a bar of shade where she could look at the sky above the city.

Amman made her claustrophobic. Here in the eastern part at least, it was stone and stucco buildings as far as she could see, stacked on top of each other, layered on the hills. There was so little room to breathe, so few trees. Maybe that’s why she felt every day like she was carrying a cement block on her chest.

The door opened and Zahra slipped down beside her.

“Well, hello, hayaati,” Tasneem said.

“Hi, Susu,” Zahra replied, using her aunt’s nickname.

“Enough cartoons for you?”

“Yeah. The boys are so sweaty and my eyes are tired.”

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“I love your eyes,” Tasneem said. Truth be told, they were Ibrahim’s eyes.

Somehow the gene pool had given the eleven-year-old girl her uncle’s eyes and face instead of Hussein’s.

“Did your grandma get up this morning?”

“She ate breakfast and went back to bed. Said her joints were hurting her.”

“Hmm.” Tasneem cradled her tea, so strong she could see patterns of oil on top.

“Homework done?”

“Of course.” Zahra smiled.

In the street four stories down, a volcano of honking and shouting erupted. Must’ve been an accident, a fender-bender at least.

“What are you thinking, Susu?” Zahra’s hand touched a salt-stiff curl that had blown out of Tasneem’s veil, pushed it back with a solemn face.

“I had a bad dream, that’s all,” Tasneem answered.

“Was it about home?”

“Yes.” “Was it about when they killed your daddy?”

That girl. “Yes, love, it was.”

They sat quietly. Tasneem had married into Zahra’s family, so her father hadn’t been related to the girl by blood. But after her mother’s death, and later, in the presence of a distant step-mother, Zahra had spent many days at the farm with Tasneem and Baba.

“If Baba hadn’t died, would we still be in Syria?”

Tasneem put down her tea and wrapped her arm around Zahra. “Allah only knows.”

“They said in our religion class that we must accept what has happened because it is the will of God.” She sat quiet, like she was unsure about going on. An inhale, then a pause. “But I don’t understand why he would want what has happened to us.”

“I don’t either, Zahra.”

“Do you think, if we go to Jannah someday, if we are good enough, we will learn why?”

“Inshallah,” Tasneem said. “If God wills.”

A minute passed, then Zahra shook off her serious face and grabbed Tasneem’s arm. “If I win at recitation today, I will bring you my prize pencil. Then you can keep drawing your trees.” She smiled big enough to light the world.

“You’re so sweet.” Tasneem kissed her forehead. “Let’s go clean up breakfast.” * ZA H R A P ERFECT LY R ECIT ED her Qur’an portion, so Tasneem sat drawing trees

again. Sometimes, when she thought about it, she felt silly—a twenty-three-year-old woman who’d studied pharmacy, filling pages with pistachios and olives, almonds in

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blossom on grassy hillsides. But she was a farmer’s daughter—what could she do?

From the time she had memories, she’d been chasing Baba through the orchards after school, jealous that one of her brothers would inherit it all, not her. She’d started the pharmacy degree because it had matched her high school exit exam scores, that’s all.

Reema was chasing her boys, trying to wash leftover ice pops off their faces.

Hussein had bought a few on the way home, even though they hadn’t found work that day. Ibrahim sat beside her, scrolling through news and texting friends. Tasneem liked to have him there. Even after four years of marriage, she liked to prepare coffee for him when he got home and then sit and wait to hear what he wanted to say. Especially now, perhaps, because stories from outside were like sweets.

“Ahmad texted today,” he said, naming one of his cousins still in Aleppo. He reached for the cup near his feet, sipped and set it down. She saw text flying under his thumb, noticed the gray on his temples, so apparent after washing in the sink. He was nine years older than her, but still, it was early for so much gray.

“What’d he say?” she asked, shading the edge of a pistachio leaf.

“Things are awful there, Susu. Assad’s bombing them so hard the city’s a skeleton, but there’s no way to get out.” He tossed his phone aside, reached for more coffee. “He said there’s no running water, and even bread is getting expensive.” He sighed, looked over to her. “Even if it ended tomorrow, I don’t know if we’re going back.”

She closed her notebook, set it on the cushion between them. It was hard to describe how that hurt, even though they all knew it and had said it dozens of times.

After everything happened, they’d fled in less than twenty-four hours—all of them packed in a sedan to Damascus, then deciding that fleeing to Jordan and applying for UN refugee status was safer. It’d been five years now—the war—and nothing was better.

“And America isn’t looking great,” Ibrahim added. “Have you seen anything this Trump is saying about us? If he becomes president, we’re doomed.”

She nodded. She’d seen it on Facebook when she’d had a few minutes with their shared phone. “Maybe Canada would be better?” she offered. “Or Australia? I’ve heard that a lot of Iraqis are going to those places.” How hard it was to imagine going anywhere else but home.

“I don’t know,” he said. Back where they’d started.

“What are you doing?” he asked, reaching for her notebook.

“Oh, you know, drawing trees and things.” She knew sketching was a strange hobby and didn’t like to emphasize it. But it made her heart sing to see his eyes linger on the branches and flowers, on things that brought her heart a little peace, stopped the continual electric pulse she felt in her body. He went slowly until he came to the empty pages in the middle, then wafted through them. Then he put his hand down and stopped. “Tasneem. What’s this?”

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She tensed at the change in his tone, felt the muscles in her neck swelling, the metal band constricting her chest. She looked at the sketch of Baba’s face on the page. “It’s my father,” she said. “I drew it from memory.”

Ibrahim’s eyebrows narrowed, but he kept turning pages. They were full of drawings, sketches of family members, but most often portraits of his deceased fatherin-law. “You know we aren’t supposed to make images of people,” he whispered. “The prophet declaimed doing so, peace be upon him.”

She felt like he’d punched her. “That’s only in the mosque, Ibrahim. And besides, it’s

It was hard to describe how that hurt, even though they all knew it and had said it dozens of times. all I have left of him. Hardly a photograph got out with us, you know that.” She reached for the notebook, suddenly feeling protective.

“Still, it makes me uncomfortable,” he said. “It’s one thing for a child, but you know better. Allah sees all.”

The adhan began, cutting off any response she could make, any defense. Ibrahim drained his coffee to the sludge, glanced at his phone, and stood up. “I’m going to the mosque to pray.” She watched him slip on plastic sandals and step outside. The metal door banged louder than she wanted to hear. * S H E WAS RU N N IN G AGA IN, being chased or trying to hide, she didn’t know, but

it felt like being hunted, this pursuit, and the hunter was going to win if she didn’t stop stumbling. She ran like someone in the black and white movie reels Baba kept under the bed, in grainy, jerky images. Her chest heaved, feet clung to the ground like it was wet sand. Maybe the pursuer was one of the masked men, or maybe it was all of them—but maybe, she thought, maybe she was running from the burning trees.

Here they were, inescapable, blossoms burning and branches reaching for her still, stretching out their arms like they were accomplices in it all. *

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“C O ME , B OYS ! Let’s go!” Tasneem shouted from the low wall where she and Reema

sat, watching them play. This wasn’t a park exactly—just a triangle of dirt at an intersection with a couple of palm trees—but the boys were happy to run in the dust.

Tasneem was just glad she’d felt strong enough and brave enough to leave the flat.

“Yalla, boys! I need to cook for your father!” Reema stood up, pressed her hand on her lower back and groaned. “Though I wish it was your turn, Susu. You don’t know how much work it is being eight months pregnant.”

The jab hurt, coming from Reema, who’d been pregnant or nursing most of the time Tasneem had known her. So the opposite of her, so . . . productive. But she tried to brush it off, as the boys tumbled over, a mess of dirt and limbs and whining. They

It was dark, but she could see a pool of city lights above the sink, studded with emerald green from minarets.

each grabbed a hand and started toward home, passed by a continual flood of cars and exhaust fumes. Street cats scattered before them, scrounging for chicken bones in bags of trash and oily discarded rice.

“We need cucumbers,” Reema said. She stepped inside a shop at the corner, and Tasneem waited with a squalling boy in each hand. Sweat trickled down her back, under her clothes and ground-length abaya. She thought about not being pregnant again, about how the word “infertility” was kind of like the Jordanian desert, about the years of penciled charts in the back of her notebook, full of careful dots and x’s, without results. She was glad Ibrahim hadn’t seen those too.

She looked up and saw a girl running recklessly toward her, hands clenching backpack straps, braid pounding her shoulders, face blotched with tears. She didn’t recognize Zahra until she’d nearly passed them.

“Zahra!” Tasneem called. The girl stopped, and in the moment of recognition, her face began to melt. “What happened, habeebti?” Just below the hem of her school uniform, Tasneem noticed her jeans were torn at the knee.

Reema appeared in the shop doorway, tall and black. “What’s wrong, Zahra?” she demanded.

Zahra’s eyes darted from face to face and her mouth hung open, chest rising and falling with labored breaths. “I—I failed my test today,” she said.

Tasneem knew she was lying, immediately.

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“Did you get in a fight at school?” Reema said, coming to the sidewalk and grabbing one of her boys. “Your clothes are filthy. Good thing it’s Thursday and you don’t need them tomorrow.”

Zahra just nodded, swallowed hard, and like that, they continued home. Once they were in the flat, Zahra locked herself in the bathroom, not even asking if anyone else needed it first. Tasneem heard water running—more than Zahra knew she should use—a towel being wrung out over and over.

When the lights finally went out and her nephews’ chatter gave way to sleep, Tasneem heard the rooftop door open, saw a quick shaft of night sky before it closed.

She waited until she was sure Ibrahim was asleep, then wrapped herself in her sheet and followed. She found Zahra curled up near the wall, shaking with sobs.

“You must tell me what happened today, Zahra,” Tasneem said, pulling her niece into her lap and enveloping her in the sheet.

“Oh, Susu, I passed my test one-hundred percent.”

“Of course you did. I know that.”

“But after school, when I was walking home, there were two boys—” “Boys you knew?”

“No, two older boys—I think they were from here—and they started calling at me, so I just kept walking, but then when I looked they were following me.”

A rock sunk Tasneem’s stomach. “What did they do?”

“I started to run, but I tripped and they pulled me into an alleyway and—” “Oh, habeebti, what did they do?”

“I tried to fight and scream, but one held me and the other boy, he started to unbutton my jeans.”

“Oh God!” Tasneem’s head dropped back against the wall.

“But just then an older woman—a neighbor maybe—she came around the corner with her garbage and they let me go and ran away.”

“Did she see their faces?”

“I don’t know,” Zahra said, wiping her tears. She looked Tasneem in the face for the first time. “Then I got up and I found you.” The city lights reflected in her wet face.

Tasneem just held her hands as she took quavering breaths.

“Tasneem, I want to put on hijab.”

“Dear heart, this is not the time to think of that.” She tried to pull Zahra close again, but the girl pushed away.

“No, I want to do it, and I want you to come with me. And you can’t tell anyone what happened.”

“Zahra, I don’t care what anyone says. This was not your fault. It was those sick boys—” “I want to be clean, Susu, and I want to be safe.”

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What could she say? It killed Tasneem that they had come this many hundreds of kilometers and still weren’t safe. That they couldn’t escape evil men with evil intents.

That human hearts were so resilient—though shattered and violated, they kept beating. And how selfish it felt, wanting to bring a baby into this awful world.

“I will go with you,” she consented. “We can go tomorrow after prayers.” * I T WAS A M ERCY OF G OD that he called them to pray five times a day, something

to sustain them. Tasneem loved it—the structure the adhan brought to her life, the opportunities to meditate, to transcend earthly worries and repeat beautiful truth.

She felt more whole. Being barred from prayer during her cycle hurt, made her feel dry and frayed. The first prayer always felt urgent and needed and joyful.

But today it felt urgent and angry. While Hussein and Ibrahim were at the mosque, she helped Reema wash the boys, made up her mother-in-law’s bed, scoured the rice pot. She listened to Zahra practice her memorization for school the next day. “Gardens of perpetual bliss: they shall enter there,” she recited. “Angels shall enter from every gate with the salutation, ‘Peace be with you, that you persevered in patience!’”

She knew her cycle had stopped, so she closed the bathroom door and started to wash. She pulled on the prayer skirt and veil, saw her face in the mirror, and thought of Zahra.

Yesterday, after the men had come home from the Friday sermon, after they ate together, she had taken a little money and the phone, put on her abaya, and left with Zahra. They walked to a street crammed with shops selling DVDs and music, clothes, sewing machines, and home décor. They climbed a street filled with Islamic dress and turned into a shop displaying models’ heads covered in bright scarves.

Zahra looked quietly, but finally she told Tasneem she wanted white, because that’s what they could wear at school. The man gave her a stretchy underscarf, and Tasneem helped her twist up her hair and tuck it in. Then she showed her how to drape the scarf over her head, wind it under her chin and over the top. Tasneem pulled a packet of straight pins from her wallet and fastened the fabric. She wished she could buy a sparkly butterfly pin, that they could choose a scarf for every day of the week— colored ones, not this white that washed out Zahra’s face.

Hijab had a way of changing the face, that’s for sure. The eyes became the center of the person. Tasneem had looked into Zahra’s eyes and seen the rubble of a childhood with a little woman trying to climb out. Scared, perhaps, but determined. After they paid the shopkeeper, they walked down the big hill, ordered a lemonade because Tasneem wanted this to feel like a special day, not a day forced prematurely on a child.

But she didn’t know what she was doing, for goodness sake. Her mama had died before

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she was Zahra’s age, and she’d put on hijab as a teenager, when she’d gotten her first cycle, not a day sooner.

Tasneem opened the bathroom door, took the prayer rug, and closed herself in the kitchen. It was dark, but she could see a pool of city lights above the sink, studded with emerald green from minarets. She unrolled the mat and stood on its edge, barefoot and bare-hearted, hands crossed in front of her. She moved stiffly at first, then more fluidly, bowing at the waist, pressing her forehead to the ground, standing again, murmuring the words she’d prayed for years.

Then she sat down and began to draw.

Lines came fast—it was all in her head, what she had to draw, had been there for years. The outline of a pistachio tree; dry grass on a hillside, with flames leaping from it, charring the orchard that had rooted the family for generations. She’d tried to erase this memory, tried so many times to forget what it felt like to huddle near the secondfloor window, clinging to the metal safety bars, stuffing her mouth with her scarf to muffle her screams so the black-masked men wouldn’t find her too.

She didn’t know if it was wrong to draw this. Let God be her judge. She’d tried to erase it, but now she tried to draw it true—the body of a man, covered with bleeding bullet holes, hanging from a tree branch, fire already burning his clothes. She couldn’t draw the face, though she had so many times.

Tasneem was trembling when she set the open notebook before her on the rug and began to cry. Honestly, she hadn’t cried much recently. It was like her grief went so deep it couldn’t come out. But sketching had forced it up, like blood into a needle.

And now it was not anger that came out but “why?” and she laid her face on the rug and wept for her father and for Syria and for Zahra, for the baby that wouldn’t form in her womb, for all the wrongs she couldn’t right, for the injustice and the pain and the wounds.

Then she sat up, wiped her tears, and took a shaky breath. She tore the sketch from her notebook, lit the stove, and burned it, gathering the ashes for the garbage. Then she left the kitchen, lay down near Ibrahim, and slept.

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contributors

LEVI AN DA L OU ’s work has appeared or is

J A MES CREW S ’s work has appeared in

forthcoming in Spillway, Lake Effect, BOMB, Pembroke Magazine, DIAGRAM, Tampa Review, and other literary magazines. He is a finalist for the 2018 Greg Grummer Poetry Award, and a semifinalist for the 2018 Boulevard Emerging Poets Contest. The poetry editor of Black Warrior Review, J. Taylor Boyd, has said of his work: “These poems are surprising, and their linguistic turns reinvigorate the prose poem.” The poetry editor of Washington Square Review called his work “hypnagogic, surreal, and incantatory.” Contact him or read more work at LeviAndalou.com.

Ploughshares and The New Republic, as well as on Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, and he is a regular contributor to The London Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of two collections of poetry—The Book of What Stays (Prairie Schooner Prize, 2011) and Telling My Father (Cowles Prize, 2017)—and leads mindfulness and writing workshops throughout the country. He lives on an organic farm with his husband in Vermont.

lives in Alaska, but he spent the last eight years in the Middle East and West Africa, where he taught English in local area schools. His chapbook, Flight, is the winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize (Tupelo Press). His poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Frontier Poetry, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Rattle, and other literary magazines. His poetry has been nominated for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.

CHAUN B A L L A R D

is currently studying Buddhism and interfaith hospital chaplaincy at Harvard Divinity School. She loves old trees that crack through sidewalks, the intimacy that each person has a unique voice, and she tries to honor mystery as well as what is understood. She grew up in Wisconsin and holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from West Virginia University. Other work can be found in Leveler, Souvenir Literary Journal, 5x5 Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She loves walking in woods and mountains.

REBECCA D O V ERS PI K E

is the author of The Dead in Daylight (Cooper Dillon Books, 2016) and Each Crumbing House (Perugia Press, 2010). She is a freelance writer and editor living in St. Louis, Missouri, mom of two girls, and fledgling Catholic convert.

MEL O D Y S . G EE

has published six books, the most recent of which is Playful Song Called Beautiful (University of Iowa Press, 2016). He once played the character of Judd in an amateur production of the musical Oklahoma!

JOHN BLA I R

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After working for many years as a graphic designer, in 2009, R I C HA R D H A RT began exhibiting as a visual artist. In 2013 he moved from South Africa to the United States, settling with his family in New York. His work encompasses an array of disciplines, including sculpture, installation, video, and photography, but painting is at the core of his practice. He has exhibited extensively in South Africa as well as in London, New York, Belgium, and China. Fore more, see www.richardhart-studio.com. is a Saratoga Springs, New York, native, artist, and photographer who plays an active role in her community as a youth advocate, social activist, and cultural history preservationist. The gentrification of her hometown and its effect on the local Black community has played a major role in both her advocacy and artwork.

Harris’s most recent awards include fellowships at En Foco, Inc., MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Daesha is also an avid fisherwoman and hobbyist gardener.

DAESH A DE VÓN HA R R I S

is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo, 2008) and In Medias Res KAREN A N- H W E I L E E

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(Sarabande, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She authored a novel, Sonata in K (Ellipsis, 2017). Lee’s translations of Li Qingzhao’s writing, Doubled Radiance: Poetry & Prose of Li Qingzhao, is the first volume in English to collect Li’s work in both genres (Singing Bone, 2018). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria, 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series.

Currently, she lives in San Diego, where she serves in the university administration at Point Loma Nazarene University.

BET H A N Y MA I L E ’s essays have appeared

in The Normal School, River Teeth, Prairie Schooner, Essay Daily, and High Desert Journal, among others. Twice, her essays have been included as notable selections in the Best American Essays series and once in the Best American Nonrequired Reading series. She teaches writing and hangs out with her husband and two daughters. This is a happy arrangement. She also watches a lot of premium cable.

contributors

is the author of Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, forthcoming), Ornitheology (The Word Works), [box] (Letter [r] Press), Tributary (Barrow Street), and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens). He won Gival Press’s Oscar Wilde Award and the Third Coast Poetry Prize, and his writing appears in numerous journals. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

KEVI N M C L E L L A N

has had solo shows at Susan Eley Fine Art, Central Park’s Arsenal Gallery, Real Art Ways, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the MTA Arts & Design Lightbox series at Forty-Second Street, New York City. Oates has been part of group shows in NYC at the Pen and Brush gallery, Metaphor Contemporary Art, NUTUREart gallery, and Momenta Art. Oates is a Fulbright Fellow for study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

LEAH OATE S

teaches at Texas Tech University. His most recent book, Fix Quiet, won the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize. His work has appeared recently in Yale Review, Image, The Common, and Conjunctions.

JOHN POC H

was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and MFA from the University of Chicago. Her work has been shown in exhibitions in the United States and internationally, and she has been a fellow at several residencies, most notably at the Florence Trust Studios in London, MASS MoCA, and the Vermont Studio Center. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at the College of Southern Nevada. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

S T EPH A N I E S ERPI CK

Born in Ireland, L A U RA O ’ G O RMA N S CH WA RT Z grew up in Tokyo, Singapore, and New Jersey, before returning to live in Singapore in 2012. She holds a BA in Japanese studies from Bard College and has traveled to thirty-three countries, which she considers equally edifying. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in a range of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Wraparound South, The Shanghai Literary Review, Singapore American Newspaper, and Thoughtful Dog.

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uses her writing to explore cultures and listen to the voices of the stereotyped and marginalized. Her nonfiction recently appeared in River Teeth and The Windhover, and she is a regular contributor to EthnoTraveler magazine and www.culture-keeper.com.

She lives in Amman, Jordan, with her husband, a college professor, and her son, an unstoppable ball of five-year-old energy.

HEATHE R M . SU R L S

is currently obtaining her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University, where she is a fellow at the Center for Literary Publishing. She screens poetry for Autumn House Press and her own work can be found in Pretty Owl Poetry, New Delta Review, Rogue Agent, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Her muses include, but are not limited to: Sappho, hauntings, water, and parasites.

JESS TU R NE R

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lives in Philadelphia.

He has an MFA in creative writing from Boston University, and before graduate school he worked as a journalist for the PBS NewsHour and Philadelphia Gay News and as an English teacher in Japan.

He recently finished a short story collection about LGBT people and is at work on a novel.

J A S O N V I L L EMEZ

is a writer and childcare worker living in Spokane, Washington. She received her MFA in poetry through Eastern Washington University’s creative writing program.

Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, Salt Hill Journal, Sugar House Review, and Zone 3, among others, and her poem “Human Uses” was chosen as the winner of Atticus Review’s annual poetry contest in 2018. She’s always on the lookout for a good book about cephalopods.

D A N I EL L E W EEK S

last note O N E X P OSURE

When I moved to rural Vermont to be with my husband, I wondered if I’d ever get used to it. Everyone knew our comings and goings, or stopped to talk to us on our evening walks. Having spent most of my time in cities, I saw all of this sudden attention as invasive. These last few years, however, I’ve come to see that we need more of this exposure to one another to heal as a nation. We are not as divided as the media would have us believe, though we have learned all too well to “mind our own business,” forgetting that vulnerability lets others in, that we are neighbors above all else.

JAMES CR EWS , PO ET RY

I obsess over their protection. I set timers for reapplication, rubbing extra into the tops of their ears, the tips of their noses.

In the rain-and-ice of Alaska, we didn’t need sunscreen. When the plane landed in Idaho, my daughter squinted out the window and asked, “Why is it so bright?”

“It’s just the sun,” I said. “You’ll get used to it.”

Up north, I’d bundled my children in snowsuits. Tacky neon stripes, hard-tofinagle elastic ankles, snapping hoods: a tantrum prophesied. Always an extra pair of socks in my pocket. Being the mother who packs the right things is the blue ribbon on my chest.

“Free range,” my father says, lodging a complaint. “That’s what we did. Gonna grow up nervous wrecks.”

“Like I didn’t?” I lob back.

How many things I do and do again— tug the car seat straps, slice grapes, double-test bath temperatures. SPF-50.

The fervor of my motherhood, I hope, is a tacit mantra thrumming through their lives: you are loved.

BE TH ANY M AI LE , NONFI CTI ON

I know a woman whose parents refused to let her watch television as a child, and now that’s all she does. Same with a man whose guardians refused him sweets in his youth and thus became a chocoholic.

I know children who were banned from using words like gay, lesbian, queer. They were told such wickedness would never apply to them, so they assumed that words like HIV and AIDS were equally irrelevant. They became bankers, artists, criminals, plumbers. They got married and were happy for a while. Now, in the hotel room, in the backseat of the car, they convince themselves that it’ll be a one-time thing. The absence of a condom never crosses their mind.

J ASON VI LLE M E Z , FI CTI ON

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On hikes, runs, or bicycling, I love dancing around the complex tangle of exposed tree roots. But their visibility is partly due to erosion. Can we listen with our footsteps as well as speak?

In “Stone,” Charles Simic writes about the hidden star charts inside rocks, and then “I” steps aside, feels the presence of a stone’s unknown secrets, its deep time held. Can language help us listen? I wonder if a wildflower can feel each time it’s looked at, and if that gaze changes it. How can we let a wildflower open our eyes rather than sear our glance onto it? Monk’s hood, silvery lupine, phlox, trillium, jewelweed, princess pine and all: name us back; we will hold still.

until the knife-edged blades of our ribs, whetted for defense, can be pulled up, root and all, and left by the wayside to dry out.

LAURA O’GORMAN SCHWARTZ, FICTION

My paintings included in this issue have an undeniable relationship to its theme.

While no figures appear in the work, they are a representation of hurt and grief, and its eventual component: healing. At times of difficulty, I have found that a retreat to the bedroom creates an opportunity for healing and reflection. I wanted to represent a place and emotion that many people can relate to.

STE P H ANI E SE RP I CK , VI SUAL ART

REBECC A D O V ER S PI KE, PO ET RY

In its absolute rawest form, love is exposure. A hand smoothing over a bared belly, a soft penis, a grasp of each other’s flaws. The attack that guts you and hoses down every organ, roof tiles picked off like nail polish, cement nosing a grey corner out into the cold air. It’s light bleaching book spines of color, the sky in all its meanness measured by shutters, worm-white burns in precise lines, frostbite and sunlight. It’s being here after that, not even skin between us.

It’s sifting through the dirt of ourselves,

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Motherhood has been a gift and a terror. Every physical and emotional shadow side of myself has been revealed, enlarged, and made inescapable.

Motherhood continues to be a process of reconciliation, in which I question, doubt, examine, grieve, and process everything from my memories, my relationship with my parents, my body image, and my desires. It is continuous death and resurrection.

M E LOD Y S. GE E , P OE TRY

last note

Each moment is full of impressions.

Multiple exposures capture this. They allow me to display a more complete correlation of experiences. Every moment captured on film is over as soon as the shutter clicks, recording the ephemeral.

Yet, in reality, there is always a visual cacophony of experience and we are living in many realities at once. Multiple exposures express the way we experience the world more accurately. When I look at a moment in time, I feel more than can be recorded with a simple click of the shutter. I use multiple exposures to record a more accurate picture of how we can recall time transpiring.

I sit in Annemasse, France—solid honey in a jar, lemon tea, a room of four women.

J’ai un rhûme. I have a cold. I do not have words for anything more. So, I sit.

I sit and these women rummage through cabinets, talking over each other about oils—which I should put on my chest, which go under my feet, which I must eat with a sugar cube. I give the women my body. I am covered in oil, a baby after bath, and like a baby, I can offer my eyes, and a few honest mumbles. I want to say, Your kindness is a poem. I want to say, I feel safe.

J E SS TURNE R, P OE TRY

LEAH OAT ES , V I S U A L A RT S

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LEAH OATES. Transitory Space, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, October 2017 #7, 2017. Color Photography..

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