Sacramento Literary Review, Summer 2024

Contributers

James Butler-Gruett’s writing has appeared in Poetry London, DIAGRAM, HAD, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Arizona MFA program, he’s an Associate Professor at York University in York, NE.

Nazifa Islam is the author of the poetry collections Searching for a Pulse (Whitepoint Press, 2013) and Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems (Shearsman Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Smartish Pace, and Beloit Poetry Journal among other publications. She earned her MFA at Oregon State University. You can find her @nafoopal.

Glen Armstrong (he/him) holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. His poems have appeared in Conduit, Poetry Northwest, and Another Chicago Magazine.

Jen Maynard Campbell is an emerging poet in her forties. She uses poetry as a catalyst for healing in this crazy world.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been performed and broadcast globally.

Cash Bruce is a first-year student at UC Riverside from Corona, California. He co-founded and served as vice president of his high school’s literary magazine, and is now seeking to write for himself. He enjoys frequenting the cinema, reading what others have to say, and expanding his vinyl collection. He believes that everything he writes is tongue-in-cheek.

Mark Jackley’s poems have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Natural Bridge, Tampa Review, The Cape Rock, and other journals. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his latest book of poems, Many Runs Will Rise. He lives in northwestern Virginia.

Sarah A. Etlinger is an English professor who lives in Milwaukee, WI, with her family. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of four books; most recently, A Bright Wound (Cornerstone Press, April 2024). Work appears in Spoon River, Pithead Chapel, Rattle, and many other journals. When not writing or teaching she can be found cooking, baking, birdwatching, and spending time near Lake Michigan.

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.

Emily Hunerwadel is the author of the chapbook Professional Crybaby, selected by Kyle Dargan for the Poetry Society of America’s 2017 Chapbook Fellowship, and Peach Woman, selected by Doublecross Press for their Bound-Together contest and published alongside Zoe Tuck’s The Book of Bella. They won Columbia Journal’s 2019 Fall Poetry Contest, judged by Monica Sok, and their work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets, Bustle, Fonograf Editions, Vassar Review, Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, and Palette Poetry, among others. Hunerwadel holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Born and raised in the deep south, they work as a book designer and writer in Western Massachusetts.

Gregory Alan Kingman Hom is a cut-andpaste collage artist rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a “mixed-race” Chinese/Jewish person making a living as a public librarian. Hom’s art has been published in the Shanghai Literary Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Kolaj. He is the sole member of the Xavier School for Radical Interrogation

On the cover:

Skater Utopia by Gregory Alan Kingman Hom

Two Found Poems

nazifa islam

We Didn’t Pick This Love

a found poem: The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery

Our crisp sere old love was no glorious glad home of scarlet and gold virtue.

It was a nondescript blue sky with trudged trails of funny yellow cloud straying over stubble-lands and pastures plastered with dirt and mud.

It was something like a lacy bright white birch—just perfectly and brilliantly tattered from a deep exhilarating hate.

Gestures Toward Life

a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

To write is a kind of madness when God is without meaning the mind slack with solitude and the letters are always teetering on the edge of the pink sky. But poetry—shaping the spirit of desire without fear— is the world to me. It is beating the drum of the human imagination making dreams—instead of death—a moving synthesizing force. It is wanting more than the horrible black truth. What I must always do: anything that sprouts words.

from The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery

This has been such a perfectly exquisite day that I’ve just got to say something about it. It was so bright and crisp, with an exhilarating air and such a lovely sky brilliantly blue, with lacy trails of misty white cloud straying over it. But I hadn’t much time to enjoy it. We were picking potatoes all day up in our hill field. I don’t think anybody ever got to such a pitch of virtue as to like potato-picking. I hate it! But since pick I had to I was glad it was up in the hill field because I love that field. There is such a glorious view from it—the deep blue sea, the pond as blue as a sapphire, the groves of maple and birch just turning to scarlet and gold, the yellow stubble-lands and the sere pastures. I just love to look at such things. But glory be that we are done with the potatoes! To be sure, potato-picking has its funny side. It would have made a hermit laugh to have seen Lu and me as we trudged home tonight, in tattered, beclayed old dresses, nondescript hats and faces plastered with dirt and mud. But we didn’t feel funny—no, indeed!

from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world It is that synthesizing spirit, that “shaping” force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poeverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine: it is that kind of madness which is worst: the kind with fancies and hallucinations would be a bosch-ish relief. I listen always for footsteps coming up the stairs and hate them if they are not for me Why, why, can I not be an ascetic for a while, instead of always teetering on the edge of wanting complete solitude for work and reading, and, so much, so much, the gestures of hands and words of other human beings. Well, after this Racine paper, this Ronsard-purgatory, this Sophocles, I shall write: letters and prose and poetry, toward the end of the week; I must be stoic till then.

Three Poems

Purple Voices Whispering

The wild violets bloomed like tuning forks. Their shimmer slowed the day, pulling at time’s hem as if desiring nothing more than a fuller skirt for the occasion. It was the sort of spring day that made my loss of hearing bearable, the sort of spring day that whispered pleasantries I didn’t mind taking on faith.

Antonyms for “Cutlery”

Let’s hit the road. There is a fork that leads to the sea and thousands of tiny pink spoons used to sample exotic ice cream flavors. Their sharp edges against my tongue feel like mistakes: omissions maybe, or thoughts not taken far enough.

Some of the cream is gelatin. I take my pill and trust it to dissolve. I have hopped through enough frothy tides to know what’s required of me changes constantly.

Never Song

The city’s flow is predictable up to a point like smoke from a cigarette.

Youth bloom. Pesticides and ground cover fail.

My heart is as empty as the zoo, defunded, some of what used to sing there butchered and fed to some of what never sang.

I cover my shirts with nirvanas ironically.

Rungs for Birds jen maynard campbell

The process of growing branches looks painful, brutal even.

I gaze up at this tree and the branches are spears. Did they erupt from the tree in ecstasy, or were they received with much pain?

Does the tree grow from Within, or Without?

Does she grow by accepting the assault and standing tall? Still.

Resolute.

Or does she send forth these spears from Within— the warring parts of her bursting outwards, away from and against herself, delivering, breaking through what is not right in her— creating rungs for birds and other unenlightened creatures to grab hold of as they rest and prepare to grow themselves?

Nadja: A Theme and Variations

james butler-gruett

Allegro

Pierre and Nadja were meant to be together. He was sure of it. Or at least he meant them to be. From Nadja’s perspective, she was meant to be various and conflicting things.

Nadja believed her life was destined to be written about. In her car, driving him back to his dorm at night in late March, she’d told Pierre

this. She confessed to him, hair still mussed and limbs still loose, that she often daydreamed of her life’s events being described in a chapter of her art history textbook, Gardner’s Art through the Ages: The Western Perspective, Volume I, 14th Edition. Nadja spent hours in high school in used bookstores thumbing anthologies, or online in Wiki rabbit trails, or watching documentaries, finding out more about the backgrounds

of the artists she admired. She liked the details of their madnesses, the trails of addictions and poor decisions, almost—no, definitely more than the art itself, if she were to be honest. And, she smiled toward Pierre, she could be honest with him, right?

“Of course,” Pierre said.

“Peachy.” She zoomed through a yellow light. (Her car took the downtown potholes like a covered wagon, Pierre thought.) First Nadja’d found Françoise Gilot, with her illustrious and tumultuous marriages to both Picasso and the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk. Then there was the quotable Andy Warhol, who elevated drag queens and claimed to be a virgin

and barely escaped being murdered by a radical. From him Nadja rose to Basquiat, that boyish, addicted charmer who’d said in an early interview, “I can really paint, you know.” And Francis Bacon had been a revelation to her as a teenager, of course, as he must have been to everyone, right? (Pierre nodded, though he was imagining a man in a ruffled collar, some distant mention of the scientific method.) The David Sylvester interviews and BBC documentary about him had lit a fire in her. Bacon’s screaming brushstrokes were compelling, but the violence in his personal life, the illicit and dangerous affairs, and the masochism and transactional relationships with those around him, and furthermore the endless discussion and narration around his life and its consequences in his art—these inspired in Nadja a strong desire to be loud and crash through life, and to tell everybody all about it. She wanted what she lived to be something worth telling.

“Goodness,” Pierre said from the passenger seat. He poked a curl from her ear. As a vocal performance major, he wasn’t sure of the details she was mentioning, but he liked the sound of that, crashing, like waves under the sea. “What would the chapter be called, if you wrote it?”

Nadja thought. “Something long and involved,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not sure.”

Pierre nodded and steepled his fingers. “Long titles make you seem very serious.”

“I don’t know that I’m serious, but I’m definitely involved,” Nadja said. Her mouth was wry but turned away from Pierre. She pulled into the parking space slowly, looking up over the steering wheel at the curb, which she crunched. “Whoops.”

“‘Whoops’ isn’t a title,” Pierre said. He reached into the backseat for the textbook but couldn’t reach it.

“No, ‘Whoops’ might be great, actually,” Nadja said. “Sums up the bulk of my involvements.”

Pierre opened the car door to get out but shut it and came back instead, and they kissed a while more. Pierre’s elbow squeaked against the plastic as he leaned on the car’s old center console.

Nadja still suggested titles for the chapter on her life when they paused to take a breath. “We could go historical? Or academic-sounding? ‘Embroidery in Early Millennium Narratives,’” she said. “Or, ‘Mysterious Happenings in the Rib Vaults.’”

“Interesting,” Pierre said, then looked impish.

“What interesting?”

“Those both sound like love.”

Nadja blinked, then fluttered, her eyelids. “That was fast,” she said.

Freely

Bret and Nadja had been meant to be together—or at least Bret had meant them to be, starting at the moment when he swore to her he would forego his dalliances with fellow musicians (and others) and be faithful to her. From Nadja’s perspective, even taking into account the various charms and virtues of Bret, she was conflicted about being his “thing,” even if she was his main thing. She wanted her own life of artful histories.

In her downtown apartment one evening— sprawled out in an armchair with Pierre’s head in her lap, while they watched a movie called Goodbye, Please, whose plot they were both halfheartedly trying to determine by the characters’ actions, since the movie was more interesting on mute—Nadja explained to Pierre her history with Bret. Pierre listened, himself in muted pain and envy, because when a girl he loved at first sight spoke, he listened, if it was about an ex or a current:

There were Bret’s virtues. He remembered her name and used it often in that first conversation—like a salesman, she supposed, now that she said it aloud. But there was a reason that worked. He’d say, “Well, Nadja, as an art history major, you surely must know that.” “What do you think of musical history, Nadja? Is that an interest of yours?”

Musical history wasn’t at first an interest of hers—musicians expected everyone to be interested in what they did, she said—but his solicitude was. Bret was good at seeming invested. He asked people for things, facts, bits of personal history, and then remembered them later, which made him a good flirt and a good gossip. He knew how Nadja had a preternatural sense of direction (“like a goddamn Garmin”) and what her favorite noodle was (rice) and how her older brother had died (car accident). What’s more, he asked about these things in the first place. And if he blabbed about them to his friends, he didn’t tell her.

As a consequence of this same knack for getting the details, he was also able to grant

Nadja backstage access to his and the music department’s own world of artistic knottings and uncouplings and rivalries, so that it felt, as she further fell for him, as if he was expanding her world. Pierre, of course, was a part of this same world—he was a baritone and Bret a tenor—but he was also somehow apart from it. Pierre had such a reduced awareness, compared to Bret or to anyone else really. Pierre was charming, but he was also the kind of person who’d lived in his current dorm room for months without knowing until Nadja’d pointed it out that one of the walls was blue. Unless he was the one involved in the gossip and entanglements, no one thought to inform him. Pierre was never, then, breaking news to Nadja—which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, she added—but Bret was. He bought her a first poke bowl, the bitter rawness of which she ate with disgusted gusto. He brought her to her first clarinet DMA recital, of whose accompanying string section he had dated two members. He sang her her first serenade, “Non di scordar di me,” a sweet Napolese love song, in the pumpkin patch in a November crepuscule. He named the first joints of all her fingers, before pulling her hands toward him.

“And if it weren’t for Bret,” Pierre pointed out, raising his head from her lap, “you would never have met me.”

“Yeah,” Nadja agreed. “I should have mentioned that first.”

But despite his virtues, she continued, what began to stoke Nadja’s displeasure was when Bret started more and more often to use that term for Nadja, called her my thing. He squeezed her behind her knee when he said that, and she convulsed reflexively. She was inanimate to him, she supposed, but also useful to romantic practice, like an easel or a metronome. She was less animated than an opera singer like him, she had to admit, but who wasn’t? She liked his great connectedness, and how he opened bottles for her, and what his hair looked like brushed to the side, but she wasn’t fond of being unpersoned, the verbal stinger of it—and besides, her knees were sensitive.

Once in February, months into their relationship, she and Bret had been at Slow Bert’s Frozen Yogurt, making their way through a pile of their Dirt ‘n’ Worms, when his friend Sal walked in. Sal was a brisk musicology major, eyes vantablack, with a pretentious pair of brown driving gloves he always wore. He peeled one off for a handshake as he straddled a plastic

bench opposite them.

“Who are you?” he said to Nadja. She shook his hand.

Bret said nothing but slurped a gummy worm from Nadja’s bowl and flipped cookie crumbs onto her scarf.

He probably was asking for her name, but Nadja felt compelled to qualify herself. “I’m an art history major—Nadja,” she said. “I’m interested in the lives of the major artists—and minor artists, I guess. It’s probably not far off from musicology. You’re a musicology major, right? Bret’s talked about you.”

Sal’s smile indulged her. “Sure,” he said.

He and Bret made eye contact.

“Where’d you two meet?” Sal asked. With his gloves off, his hands were out now and looked white and squirmy, two prehensile cod filets.

“Around,” Bret said. He wiped his lips with a napkin and sat up.

The discomfort of this question, of the seedy circumstances of their meeting, always shamed her. Last semester she had lived with a French horn player Bret had been seeing. The horn player had left Nadja and Bret alone for a few hours one night while she went to rehearsal (for the Shit Pit). Nadja had sat at her desk doing her homework for biology. Bret had leaned over the desk as she annotated an article about Typhoid Mary, rolling up his sleeves and asking his questions, poking her with a pencil eraser, until they’d found their way into one of the bunk beds. Two weeks later, the French horn major found out. She was upset only with Nadja (“You know how Bret is,” she said. “Everyone does.”) and demanded she move out—and pitched her horn’s new silver-plated mouthpiece at Nadja, which caromed off the thick fire-rated door. Nadja found herself an apartment downtown instead. Bret never apologized, of course. Whenever she brought it up, he smoldered and flexed and evaded the subject. All that moving and arranging, all that mouthpiece-dodging, only now to get Oreo crumbs on Nadja’s dry-clean-only scarf.

To Sal, Nadja said, “He knows my old roommate.”

“Knows,” Sal said, snickering. He turned his fishy hands and face to Bret for a paired laugh at Nadja’s expense, but Bret shook his head.

“Knew,” Bret said. “Nadja’s my main thing now, Sal.” He smiled at Nadja and squeezed her hand, the squeeze as halfhearted as his defense.

After Sal left, Nadja tried bringing this term up with Bret. She wasn’t, in fact, a thing of his,

main or secondary. Did he care that that upset her? What were his thoughts on her thoughts, if any? Didn’t he ever wonder what she felt? Wasn’t he worried about her perception of him? No, no, no, no. He dismissed her questions and began to fast-walk back to Durant as she struggled alongside him. What was maddening was that he seemed unbothered by this conversation. He was obstinately assured of Nadja’s presence and placidity. Whatever her feelings toward him, she would continue to go about her quaint ways while he captured the music department. His assuredness was enough to verge on indifference, or at least that’s often what it felt like. The months passed, and she began to be ignored in their dynamic, taken as a given. She continued to follow him, to the dorm, to Durant. Of course she would accompany him to the ASOE concert, and of course after to the North Bottoms party.

At first Nadja did nothing to buck these assumptions of his. She gave up her study time and gave up socializing with the art history department (“Socializing with the art history department?” Pierre said. “You must have missed some scintillating plinth talk.” “Patina palaver,” Nadja said, poking his head.), gave up her afternoon naps to continue dating him (“No,” Pierre corrected, “accommodating.”). Though there was—she realized at the North Bottoms party where she and Pierre first found themselves drunk together on a porch—something positive about this preposterous assuredness.

It left her, to a certain degree, free.

As she saw it, she was now off the romantic hook. If Bret had kept up his end of the relationship and evinced more concern for her aside from her thingness, she would have owed him something of her fealty. If he’d just been respectful to her, was the thing. If he had held the door open for her ever, or if he had replied to her texts within a day, or if he hadn’t once, right in front of her, tried to chop an onion with a butter knife, as if that was perfectly normal (Pierre snorted, pretending to know what was wrong with that), then she would have stayed at his side. She would have, now that she thought of it, become less of herself and more of him.

“Not good,” Pierre said into her thigh, which he kissed. “In fact—bad.”

These kinds of developments between Nadja and Bret, along with a certain baritone’s guileless charm, led her to her current state, enmeshed with Pierre and watching Goodbye, Please. The lead actor was yelling at the lead ac-

tress, who walked over to the enormous Christmas tree in their luxurious living room and kicked it over and walked out the door.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Nadja said.

Con moto

Pierre knew that he and Nadja were meant to be together—or at least he meant them to be—when he finally understood Nadja’s perspective. She didn’t know about him, she said one day while they were exercising, but she’d always believed that she was meant to be various, conflicting things.

“To be?” Pierre said. “What do you mean?”

“That is the question,” Nadja huffed. They were in her apartment’s small workout room, side by side on ellipticals. Nadja liked the elliptical, the sustained, purposeless roll of it, especially when she was thinking. She said the perpetual motion made her feel like a dipping bird. Even the equipment’s name described a planetary boomerang, eternal return, which, she told Pierre, was how her life felt recently. She turned over to him as he sweated through a Pinocchio t-shirt. “You don’t want to be anything? Really?”

“I want to do things,” Pierre said, “not be things. I want to sing, I want to perform, and I want to have fun. I don’t care about anything else.”

“Eh. Do, be,” Nadja said. “Same thing. You are what you do.”

“Is that true?” Pierre said.

“Sure it is.”

“You are a performance, then?” Pierre said.

“You are a singer,” Nadja said.

Pierre couldn’t argue with that.

Since she was a kid, Nadja said, she had quested after what—or who—she wanted to be. The question never caught her off guard. When she was eight, after watching a TV special on Duchamp, she’d begged her mother for her own urinal. In seventh grade, after reading about J. M. W. Turner lashing himself to a ship’s mast during a blizzard to paint Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, she’d forced Amanda Klenke to tie her to the tetherball pole. In high school, she gave an oral book report on Dalí while wearing a diving helmet (“Really more of a diving cap,” she confessed). Art history was a puzzling procession of people who somehow had both no idea who they were and utter conviction about who they were, a series of moves and gestures ventured or appropriated, relationships crossed

and twisted. After all, who was anyone but a series of stunts and motions?

“Sounds good,” Pierre said. It sounded better than staying on the elliptical any longer. He leapt off its pedals and hand grips as if he were dismounting the pommel horse and sprung onto the mat to stand and stretch before the mirror. He stared at his reflection and heard a blank, warm whole note in his temples, low and droning, buzz buzz. After workouts his mind was nice and calm. Nadja, stopping her elliptical, swung off, and came to stand beside him and stretched as well. Pierre looked at her, her hair darkened past red at her temples with sweat. He reached and touched her left cheek with his thumb as she smiled at him, and it was always so much softer than the rest of her face. Back and forth, across the cheek’s apple. Her talk was sometimes too much for Pierre. This was where he lived, in looks and silent exchanges, where his charm worked most. No talking. She grabbed his forearm, held her face open up to his. He noticed her: she stirred: the air opened up around her.

A tempo

Pierre and Nadja meant to be together all the time now—at least, when they could. This meant several things. One of them was that Pierre needed to cancel his various, conflicting obligations.

He stopped showing up to rehearsals and classes and lessons whenever they infringed on the time Nadja was free. Sometimes this meant emailing Gerald ahead of time, and sometimes it didn’t. Nadja could carve out only a few hours a week in which to see him, spread out among three or four days, so they had to coordinate their schedules to break off and briefly paw at one another. Nadja herself had four classes to attend, an honors senior project to complete, two weeknights on duty as an RA in her dorm, and weekend shifts slicing bagels and scouring the urinals—real ones, not fountains—at Enfilade, a socialist cafe near campus.

On top of all this, Nadja and Pierre needed to know when Bret was busy in order to avoid running into him. When he was free and in a good mood, Bret wanted to see his “main thing,” of course. Fortunately for Pierre and Nadja, however, Bret was busy much of the time, practicing or rehearsing or auditioning or meeting visiting professors for chai lattes. Nadja kept a detailed schedule of his whereabouts in her notes app

and often texted Pierre seconds after Bret left her apartment. the tenor has flown, she’d text, or, the duke has abandoned me, or when she was tired, simply, come over

This went on for as long as it could, their hectic scheduling and sneaking. Pierre knew as well as Nadja did that there was a limit to how long they could keep up such a frantic tempo. This past Wednesday, as late afternoon slipped into evening, the two of them worked up an appetite and drove together to get fried pickles and soft pretzels. The restaurant, a boutique sports bar called Triple P’s (for Pickles, Pretzels, and Pickleball, which they had courts for in the back) was next to Slow Bert’s Frozen Yogurt, and it was a favorite spot of Nadja’s.

“Do you even like pickles?” Nadja said, her mouth sideways over her lemon water. She looked over the lay of the bar, a massive knot of students at one entrance crowded around a TV, a rag pulled out of a waiter’s apron to mop up squelching pickle juice, the rotating stand of salted, soft, hot pretzels, the enormous spread of twelve varieties of her favorite condiment, mustard, arrayed in shades from lemon to saffron to taupe, and the pocks and thwacks from the back of frats taking out their aggression with glorified table tennis. All this and her mouth still went sideways.

Pierre, as usual, looked dreamy-eyed and smiley, his gray irises in bloom above an offwhite polo shirt. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll like whatever.”

“You’re cute,” Nadja said. She poked at the ice cubes in her water with her straw, drowned them one by one. “How are rehearsals going?”

“Rehearsals?”

“With Austin? For your recital?” Nadja looked up at him out of the tops of her eyes.

“Ah,” Pierre said, as if he’d forgotten about the idea. “I’ve been putting them off a bit, I guess. We were supposed to have one tonight.”

“I’m sorry,” Nadja said. “That’s my fault.”

“Don’t be.” Pierre reached out for her hand.

The waiter arrived with a steaming pile of fried pickles. This was the kind of place where waiters drew on the table coverings in crayon, and the black crayon where the waiter’d written his name smeared as he set down the hot plate. Pierre caught his attention.

“Could we have two Coke floats?” Pierre said.

When the waiter left to fetch them, Nadja said, “You like Coke floats?” She cocked an eye -

brow.

Pierre laughed and drooped a little. “I mean, sometimes.”

Nadja sighed. She squeezed his hand once, twice, in short pulses, Morse code palmistry. “Pierre, I want to go back.”

“Oh? Like, back to lemon water,” Pierre said, and raised his eyebrows, “or back to your apartment?”

“Back to the way it was, I mean,” Nadja said. “Between me and you, and me and Bret. A return to tempo.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t like not knowing what we are,” Nadja said.

“Oh.”

“And I feel dishonest,” Nadja said. She tapped with her fingernail on the pickle plate in the center of the table, more codes for him. “I still like you.”

“Oh.”

“But this feels,” Nadja said, “like not the real thing for me. Like a reproduction. Like a put-on.”

“We did it, though,” Pierre said, childlike. He buttoned the top button of his polo shirt and unbuttoned it again. “You are what you do, no?”

“Not always,” Nadja said, wincing, hedging, sucking at her lip. “Sometimes you are who you are.”

“I am someone who likes you,” Pierre said. “We were meant to be together. You know it. You’ve said it.”

“I think I’m meant to be various things,” Nadja said, “at various, conflicting times. This time has come to an end, I think. But we can still see each other. I still like you, I said.”

“Your Coke floats,” the waiter said, beaming, plunking them down.

“But my ship sinks,” Pierre said, looking glum. He could have prevented this. He knew she loved him. She needed more persuading. He could get a gift. Why, he thought, had he not gotten root beer floats instead?

He didn’t have time to answer his question. There was a change in the air right in that moment, a drastic one, as if ten dogs had burst into the room. Everything turned even more horrific. First the waiter smiled, simpering in confusion at Pierre’s remark, and bent down to write in black crayon on the tablecloth, “Thanks for getting in a pickle with us at Triple P’s!” Then Nadja and Pierre, who had stopped holding hands across the table and now retracted their arms to both put them in their respective laps, looked

up at the waiter, as if he might be able to help them out of this, and he frowned, as if to say, I’m just being polite to you, what do you expect, I’m a waiter, and took his tray and pickle rag away back toward the kitchen. But before Pierre could taste one sip of his Coke float or turn his head, as the waiter’s body moved out of the way, he and Nadja saw in the window facing the street, strolling downtown with his stupid brown leather driving gloves in one hand—Sal.

They had forgotten about Sal. As a musicology major, Sal’s schedule was different from Bret’s, and he didn’t have rehearsal in the evening. Instead, he was walking from the library after a long afternoon spent studying to reward himself with a Dirt n Worms at Slow Bert’s. As soon as Pierre and Nadja made eye contact with him, a wolfish smile dawned on Sal’s lips. He stopped before the window, waved, and backtracked toward the entrance, where he began to push through the crowd. The ambient athletic pocks and thwacks of the pickleballers seemed to sync with his footsteps as he closed in.

Later, Pierre would ask himself why they didn’t stay put. They hadn’t even been holding hands when Sal saw them. They could have told Sal they were having an innocent fried pickle between colleagues at Triple P’s. But they didn’t. Instead, they fled as fast as they could. Pierre panicked and left an enormous cash tip, all the bills in his wallet, on the table. Nadja abandoned all pretense of secrecy and sprinted out the front door, soon followed by Pierre at a fast walk, and they beat Sal out the other door and booked it down the block in the opposite direction. As they crossed the doorframe, they could hear the waiter, delighted by his tip, call out after them, “Come back soon!”

From Pierre’s perspective, this was a sign. He and Nadja were meant to be together. Or, at least, someone meant them to be. From Nadja’s perspective, all this meant a bundle of various and conflicting consequences.

Pierre didn’t hear from Nadja for the next two days. She wouldn’t reply to his texts. He lay in his dorm bunk—still not going to class— watching movies on his phone. He found a free illegal stream of Goodbye, Please and watched it again, this time with the sound on. It turned out the characters were British and spoke in posh accents, which undercut the drama for him.

It turned out the woman who kicked over the Christmas tree said as she walked out, “Brilliant. Just brilliant, then. How’s that for an exciting life?” Pierre paused the stream and clicked his phone off and stared up into the dark.

On Saturday Nadja texted him. She gave no explanation for her absence, none of the specifics of what had transpired over the past two days. She said only, bret’s gone.

Pierre frog-kicked in his bunk in delight. He hopped up and grabbed his coat and corduroys, ready for action. She must want to see him now, either at her apartment or for dinner at Triple P’s. That cash tip had bankrupted him for the week, but he could ask his parents for a loan on the way over. They could ask for the same waiter again, and maybe they could get away with not tipping this time. He stopped himself, midway through the left leg of his corduroys. If there was a chance she’d broken up with her long-term boyfriend, he thought, she might not be in a good mood. Good thinking. Smooth—and frugal.

how are you holding up, he texted, lying back on his bed in his one pant leg and feeling suave. He even added, ?

Nadja’s icon showed three dots, an ellipsis as she typed, then nothing, then three dots, then nothing. Nothing for an hour. Pierre didn’t move from his position in bed. He stared at his phone, waiting, on hold, unheld. Then:

you made my life pretty hard since wednesday, Nadja texted. since sal saw us

im sorry, Pierre texted, not sorry. That would patch things up. what happened according to our last convo, Nadja texted, and paused. Then she typed the words that would torpedo Pierre into a stratosphere of optimism, sever the tether he’d put on his hope, get him to leap back out of bed: we’re on a break.

You are what you do. Nadja was right, and he saw branching before him the options of how to respond. The universe had overtipped him, shown him his prospects, the golden chances that could pass him by, bubbling up like a Coke float. He thought of their previous conversation about what she wanted in life, about what great artists had. He pressed that button.

you had an affair at a pickle bar and sprinted to outrun the spy for your boyfriend. you left your anthology in my dorm room. youve always wanted a life worth writing about and now you have it. its madness. dont you like it

Nadja paused for what seemed like forever.

On Sleep bruce mcrae

A night blacker than Adam’s cat, a thousand stars firing fiercely, some misguided winds at rest in a garden ...

I often wake before dawn, made feebleminded with dreams. I have to tell you, brother, there are some dark mornings. Sister, there are darker days than the absence of light allows.

When we attempt to weigh the stillness against the noises of living, driven by visions, prayer lacking in dimension, thoughts possessing little bearing— especially late-night musings on the qualities of darkness, what with a kettle on the boil and the promise of breakfast with your morning news— noting the ways of the people, genuine individuals who go about their business and are not damned and seldom worry.

*

If the night itself could sleep it would dream of darkness, the stars very curious as to the meddlings of Man.

I’m lying beside you, beside the thought of you, the idea of what it means to be with you, to be you.

Bats, moths, owls— these are your guardians,

our little boat rocking in the sleep of the sea.

In the dream we share there’s a glass world made of love and derring-do. A world without money, without arms or fear, without Death’s ghost haunting the multifold house we’ve willfully constructed with our numberless dream-hands.

Come morning we rise. We wake and we forget sleep’s bountiful embraces. We need to forego the lack of beauty and grace.

On a planet that nods.

In cities of slumber.

*

Sleep the sleep of false memories. Enjoy the fleet fame of the comedian, the gun-nut in love with his hostage, the mad sexton boiling his shoelaces.

Be an astronaut made foolish by the stars. One consulted by politicians over the necessity for war. Or future papal assistant.

Walk the walk of failed promise, an actor touring the lowlands, a beauty after her acid bath, a child face-down in a river.

Now I lay me down to sleep, having experienced copious blood loss. You’re asking death for a cupful of water, your name an instrument, but in the wrong hands.

Tonight, lie on the low ground, an embittered outcast from heaven. Come to me in your hour of need. I am your beautiful creature.

* Sleep is infantilized death.

Oblivion tastes of sleep. It’s what annihilation smells like, our reward for daring existence.

Insomniacs daydream of sleep, seers casting faraway glances over worlds of blissful repose.

A mind is like a house, sleepwalkers looking for an exit, for a single door in a city of many mansions.

A warm breeze pushes through town, supple rain falling easily on an eye. The world is rocking gently.

* Sleep is a comfort, unless you’re dreaming of jagged clouds or fly from colour to colour, going clod to clout in the ructions of fear, a cold hand seeking the familial hearth.

Unless you ride upon a blue swan or magical carpet, a demon on your one arm and a god on the other, the wind’s melodramatic music in the stark tree branches, ice-ghosts dancing

among spruce and fir, the pines aching with the work of winter, Sunday’s dust gathering in a narthex, quietude rustling in the vestibule.

Sleep. Unless plagued with fever, the night a clot of muddled badinage, turning onto your left side, then onto your right, a wall clock loudly clicking in a vacant corridor, dreams stuffing your pillow, sleep a tenant to slumlord night, a straight line in a land of circles and ovoids, sleep a hyacinth planted on the side of a hill, being that which is and that which isn’t.

vulnerability, the way you like it (me)

cash bruce

I peel the orange because you sighed at my request for you your hands gently ripping me apart

I peel the skin bruisedblood under the skin am I that sour?

I shed I molt

I leave myself behind

I linger I scratch

I am the pulp under your nails

I beg

I peel the orange tasting my own bitter sweetness I am a paradox, a complication summarize me pity me

I’ll let you lick my wounds even if you bite take me back take me back back across the river styx

I’m lost under this skin now condemned to peel it away this time in a bus the color I wanted to paint my bedroom when I was nine when we shared the taste of being

I peel the orange take my slice please

I miss your sour sweetness under you I was always tasted your gentle tongue your sharpened teeth you always had your way the way you liked it the way I could never refuse peel my sins away

I peel my orange it will always be me

Means of Transport mark jackley

It’s assumed that when we die we fly or float away. I’ve never heard it said that the soul walks out the door like it’s going to 7-11 for a Red Bull and some cigs or takes the bus, deepening the natural silence of strangers drowning in the self or hops a ferry across the Mississippi to find the afterlife bears a resemblance to St. Francisville, Louisiana, where it’s hot as Satan’s crib. Speaking of burning up, I’d like to think the soul melts like butter on a griddle, and somebody I love takes the next bite.

Thinking About the Horses sarah etlinger

Afternoon’s the best time to see them, when the morning feeding is over and most of the day’s work is finished, only the long hours before night left; perfect for slow grazing at the pasture, tails mindlessly swatting flies, ears flickering, long snouts arched low to the mud, bridles loosened a little.

In this light, the light the old Dutch masters loved, their bodies brush to chestnut and roan as they drink, meander to the fence, whinny or scuff their hooves.

As I watch them, I wonder how it would be to think not with the mind, but with the body, need fastened to the day like horizon.

To know only the tug of instinct, hunger’s shape, fullness. Warmth on one’s back to divine the sun, the seasons. Cool mud, cool shade, cool water. Hay’s comfort, then dark, which means barn and narrowness, protection.

Not to know death the way we do, or the sound of the farmer’s wife coming at night to find the sheep’s body mangled and dented, death already in her throat.

Only to know, after the hay’s in the trough and the light folds back behind the cornfields, the whispers and nudges that guide you to the pasture, the feel of wet night in the grass.

The Art of the Found Poem

interview with nazifa islam

Nazifa Islam is the author of the poetry collections Searching for a Pulse (Whitepoint Press, 2013) and Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems (Shearsman Books, 2021). Her poems and paintings have appeared in publications including The Missouri Review, Poem-a-Day, Blue Mesa Review, Gulf Coast, RHINO, The Believer, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She has long been fascinated by literature

that is preoccupied with mental illness and the existential. Writers she admires, identifies with, and who are perpetually influencing her work include Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. She attempts to dissect, examine, and explore the bipolar experience through her writing. To that end, she is currently working on a series of L.M. Montgomery found poems.

Nazifa earned her BA in English at the University of Michigan and her MFA at Oregon State University. She lives in Novi, Michigan.

INTERVIEWER

What draws you to found poetry?

NAZIFA

Fellow poet Phillip Watts Brown introduced me to found poetry back in 2013 while we were both grad students in Oregon State University’s MFA program. He proposed a writing prompt: Write a poem using only the words from an Amazon product review. To my surprise, I found that I really enjoyed the writing exercise and I

suddenly saw the vast possibilities lurking under the moniker “found poem.” If I could write a relatively successful found poem using only a random Amazon product review, what could I accomplish with more sophisticated source material I felt an actual connection to?

At the time, I wanted desperately to write about my experience living with bipolar disorder; however, I found myself perpetually dissatisfied with the poems I was coming up with. They just didn’t accomplish what I wanted. Found poetry opened a door. My first series of found poems used Virginia Woolf novels (The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway) as source material; given that Woolf

explores themes I also wanted to write about, her work felt like a natural fit as I started intentionally focusing on found poetry. My Virginia Woolf found poems, ultimately published in the collection Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems (Shearsman Books), satisfied me as I was finally writing poems that I felt authentically expressed my reality living with bipolar disorder. Oddly, my found poems feel much more honest than my other writing.

I think the restrictions of found poetry really spur creativity, which might seem counterintuitive; instead of having limitless options for a poem, which can feel really daunting, found poems can only develop along certain parameters. Having those parameters makes the writing process significantly easier for me—the paragraph gives me a starting point that I vastly prefer to a blank page.

INTERVIEWER

How do you select the passages from which you write your poems?

NAZIFA

When I was writing Woolf found poems, I would look through her novels for specific words that I wanted to build a poem around. My internal anxiety mantra is “Something is wrong,” so at one point I went hunting through The Waves looking for a paragraph that included those three words. I found it too. Over time, the selection process has become very random, and I’m rarely specifically drawn to a particular paragraph. It has happened before—for example, when I started writing Sylvia Plath found poems, I knew I wanted to use the famous fig tree paragraph from The Bell Jar to write a poem. In general, though, I scan through texts looking for paragraphs that I can on a logistical level use to write a found poem. The selection process is really about practicality. Are there enough pronouns in the paragraph? Are there enough verbs (including linking verbs like “is” and “was”) in the same tense? Does the paragraph provide a variety of options for adjectives? Not all paragraphs have the necessary components to build a found poem.

INTERVIEWER

What is your process for writing a found poem?

NAZIFA

Once I’ve found a paragraph that I believe will

work given my strict parameters (I only use the words from a specific paragraph and don’t allow myself to repeat words, add words, or edit the language for tense or any other consideration), I type it into a Word document. Or, if the text is in the public domain, I’ll copy and paste the paragraph using a resource like Project Gutenberg. I read through the paragraph many many times to familiarize myself with the language/ my options. I then start searching the paragraph for specific words—I count and keep a list of the number of “and”s, “but”s, “is”s, “to”s, etc. It’s impossible to write a found poem without having plenty of connective tissue to link ideas and create momentum. Once I have that list, I’m literally just reading through the paragraph again and again trying out different lines to see if one seems promising. Most of the time, I end up finding either the opening line of the poem or the conclusion. Then I work forwards or backwards accordingly. Every paragraph generally does have internal cohesion, which means it’s definitely possible for the poem I’m creating to also have internal cohesion. I’m a firm believer in the existence of the muse. There are days when I can stare at a paragraph for hours and end up with absolutely nothing to show for my time. Other days, the poem seems to just jump out at me.

INTERVIEWER

What is the relationship between a found poem and the original text?

NAZIFA

My Woolf found poems very much reflect the contents and intentions of their source paragraphs. I wanted to write about existential dread and bipolar disorder and Woolf often wrote about existential dread and bipolar disorder. She was the right author for me to choose as I started learning how to write found poems; the poems echo their origins quite often. Over time—as I’ve grown more confident in my skills as a writer— the relationship between the found poem and the source paragraph has become, at times, a bit diluted. For example, many of my Sylvia Plath found poems bemoan the necessity of having to be a writer. These poems do not at all reflect Plath’s views on writing; they’re an expression of my own perspective on writing. I’ve also written many L.M. Montgomery found poems that are rather grim when Montgomery is known for stories that are optimistic and joyful. I’m more

capable now than I was ten years ago at adapting the source material for my own particular purposes. I’m no longer trying to strictly echo the source paragraph with my found poems; instead, I’m managing to figure out what I want to say using the words available to me. Sometimes, this results in poems that neatly reflect the source paragraph while at other times the found poem is incredibly removed from the original text.

INTERVIEWER

What draws you to Plath and Montgomery for source texts?

NAZIFA

Sylvia Plath is my favorite poet while L.M. Montgomery is my favorite novelist. I have Plath poems memorized and I read almost every Montgomery novel (Kilmeny of the Orchard tends not to make the cut) at least once a year. I feel a strong connection to their work. Woolf, Plath, and Montgomery also all have diagnoses of bipolar disorder in common—and I am continually writing about bipolar disorder. A found poem is on some level an homage to the writer who inspired it; I am very comfortable spending my writing time paying homage to these writers I love and who make me feel seen whenever I return to their work. This is especially true since my found poems—regardless of who’s providing the source paragraph—continue to feel more authentic than my attempts at “regular” poems.

INTERVIEWER

Is there anything else you would like to add?

NAZIFA

Going through the process of writing a found poem can be incredibly helpful if you’re struggling with writer’s block; the limitations end up being freeing. I personally find it incredibly rewarding to spend so much time entwined with authors I adore. Instead of looking at found poems as limiting, I think a more accurate perspective is that they’re a unique opportunity to intimately engage with language in a way that is atypical; you can stumble on some truly surprising poem possibilities when you have only a certain bank of words to work with.

What We Do When the Power Comes Back On

ace boggess

Empty the freezer of meats in foil, many from lost origins. Have we eaten lion? Does the black bear howl with regret? What of the skunk & the serpent? Some will be beef & venison— we won’t unravel their shrouds. More than flesh, this mustard expired a decade ago, & do you remember buying chocolate-covered bees? A jar of pigs’ eyes has stared at guests for years until your friends refused to look.

Unhinged emily hunerwadel

Desperation is the goth cousin of zany, zany is mania’s slutty little sister, and the tiny producers living behind my eyes are having a hard time pinpointing which role to type-cast me into. At the roundtable, they ask what it would even mean to be hinged— like a portal instead of this open hallway living. They ask if, without these pills, I would assume the position of a universal remote connecting to nothing—if, without this overestimation of my ability to control, the demons of divine femininity would humble my own personal lore. But! The forsythia bursts open like popcorn, the birds are acting in their own spring-type unhinged way, and we all smell the headache on the breeze.

I’m advised that without tethering my emotions to embarrassment, I’ll once again lose that twisted ankle of human relations and never find it again no matter how many times I click my heels together

4144 winding way

sacramento, ca 95841

sacreview.org

editors@sacreview.org

fiction, poetry, & art by James Butler-Gruett - Nazifa Islam - Glen Armstrong - Jen Maynard Campbell - Bruce McRae - Cash Bruce - Mark Jackley - Sarah Etlinger - Ace Boggess - Emily Hunerwadel - Gregory Hom

WE ARE A TAX-EXEMPT NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION. TO DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE, PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE.