ISSUE 17
SAND Journal c/o Jake Schneider Willibald-Alexis-Str. 16 10965 Berlin Germany info@sandjournal.com www.sandjournal.com Connect with us for news and events: Facebook: SAND Journal Twitter: @sandjournal Instagram: @sandjournalberlin ISSN 2191-429X Published in Berlin Copyright © SAND Journal, 2018 SAND e.V. is a registered nonprofit association (gemeinnütziger Verein) under German law. Designed by Bárbara Fonseca Printed by Solid Earth Cover image: Pool Day by Melissa Spitz, 2015
SAND is JAKE SCHNEIDER
SIMONE O’DONOVAN
Editor in Chief
Managing Editor
GREG NISSAN
FLORIAN DUIJSENS
Poetry Editor
Fiction Editor
ASHLEY MOORE
SUSANNA FORREST
Assistant Fiction Editor
Nonfiction Editor
STEPHANIE HANNON
MATTHEW DEERY
Art Editor
Copy Editor
BÁRBARA FONSECA
NADIRAH PORTER-KASBATI
Designer
Distribution & Finance
ZOË FAGAN
MANDALENA MUNKONGE
Distribution & Finance
Events Coordinator
EMIL GRÜNER
LIEKE KESSELS
Events Coordinator
Communications & Outreach
RUBY MASON
CHRISTINA WEGENER
Communications & Outreach
Verein Coordinator
3
4
Jake Schneider
Editor’s Note The Motto That Wasn’t
The motto is dead – long live the motto. Slogans and hashtags swing elections on baseball caps and buses, propel social movements for and against prejudice, and recently took down dozens of Hollywood’s most formidable harassers and abusers. make the decision to change your life, commands a subway advertisement in “Camila” by Vanessa Bates Ramirez. “You’ve just got to find the right mantra,” counsels Brina in Caroline Beimford’s “Under My Skin.” Do we though? When I contemplated the writing and art we’d picked for our last issue, I saw containers everywhere. And when I decided to label each item in the table of contents with its own example – bathtub, fish tank, exoskeleton – the idea went down well. Containers are hollow. I chose the ones the writers had chosen themselves; they were in no danger of redefining their contents. Then, this winter, I learned that the Latin motto on the US coins of my childhood, e Pluribus unum (“Out of Many, One”) originally came from the title page of Gentleman’s Magazine, the first periodical of its category, back in the 1730s. In the format’s infancy, the magazine consisted of extracts from other publications reprinted without permission. Just as these six syllables had bound together unrelated sections of (copiedand-pasted) text, they later rallied a scattered group of colonizers around a common cause. e Pluribus unum romanticized an invented nation. It also romanticized the systematic theft of the world’s first magazine editor. Before long, my own editorial mind was crowded with mottos and their banner-waving possibilities. What if we sprinkled the next issue with its own slogans?
5
When the rest of the team realized I meant actual mottos – “clichéd exhortations,” in the words of our Fiction Editor, Florian Duijsens – the objections filtered in. Poetry Editor Greg Nissan outright vetoed the plan for his section: “Most concerning is that it provides the first piece of language, the first idea or image. But that’s exactly what the opening of a poem strives to do, and so much of the craft and ingenuity of a poet goes into opening up that space for us.” Who am I to upstage Elizabeth Metzger’s opening salvo, “The unborn depend on the love of / nonmothers” or to preface Ahmad Almallah’s “an order / is an order”? Florian and Greg weren’t wrong. As I scoured the poems for quotable catchphrases, it felt like the work of my eighteenth-century plagiarist predecessor. In fact, it felt like filling the poems’ “waistcoats with stones” (Mark Russell) or suggesting a “function for decoding their world” (Novisi Dzitrie). Is that any less true for prose? Even without such gimmicks, publishers already bury books beneath marketable labels. SAND has always been more interested in what slips through the cracks between genres and philosophies, what “pools in tar-black shadows around the edges” (Jon Ransom). To name is to domesticate. I conceded that these mottos were at risk of becoming a false “answer key” that could strip the enigma from the landscapes of post-apocalyptic Finland (Maija Mäkinen), post-marital Macedonia (Lidija Dimkovska), post-vegetarian Australia (Nate McCarthy), or post-mortem Oregon (Patrick Vala-Haynes). And wherever we positioned them on the page, they would distract from the work itself. Even writing about all this now, in the one text that is mine to compose, I’m displacing descriptions of what you’re about to read, such as the gaggle of bulky birds that seems to wander, in no meaningful formation, through the issue’s pieces: swans, geese, spoonbills, hornbills, flamingos, rotisserie chickens. According to legend, our magazine was named after a song by Lee Hazlewood: “I am a wandering man / in your land / call me Sand.” In the early years, we printed those lines in our issues. Yet we are committed to publishing writing by and about women and gender non-conformists – we’re no Gentleman’s Magazine, despite the brilliance of Mark Russell’s
6
“Men on Men” – and, dammit, Berlin is our land too. The song is catchy but those aren’t lyrics to live by. Mottos never last. Eventually even the motto-maker has second thoughts. Yesterday we painted it on a sign; today we’re kicking ourselves. Indeed, Gentleman’s Magazine abandoned e Pluribus unum in the mid-1800s and the United States downgraded it during the divisive Cold War. Since I moved here, Berlin has quit flaunting its “poor but sexy” reputation as rents skyrocketed. In the end, I decided to kill off this issue’s mottos preemptively. The one motto we have left in Issue 17 is the title of Melissa Spitz’s prizewinning documentary photo series You Have Nothing to Worry About, which punctuates these pages with its cheerful pastels. Chronicling the ups and downs of her mother Deborah’s mental health, Spitz captures pain as well as moxie. The series title comes from a note taped to Deborah’s door: “TO DO: ¡BE FUCKING HAPPY! – REMINDER: YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT!” That’s what real mottos do: remind us of our aspired states of being – united, happy, unworried. The photographs, meanwhile, show life’s layered reality. Spitz describes them as “simultaneously upsetting and encouraging; honest and theatrical; loving and hateful.” She leaves in all the ambivalence but, unlike me, she also leaves in the motto.
7
Contents 10
SALES
36
Jenna Cardinale
11
MY GRANDMOTHER ASKED I NOT BE INVITED TO THANKSGIVING FOR FEAR OF MAKING MY FATHER UNCOMFORTABLE
Elizabeth Metzger
37
GLOBAUDE shelley feller
39
Megan Leanne
13
A BIRTH INTERRUPTED ON AND OFF BY THE WORLD
UNDER MY SKIN Caroline Beimford
IF SOMETIMES I SEEM NOT HERE, IT’S NOT DREAMINESS; IT’S FEAR shelley feller
22
COOKING Adam J. Maynard
23
THE FIRST STEAK OF THE REST OF MY LIFE Nate McCarthy
31
40
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT Melissa Spitz
47
I FATTEN MY FLEET/ I PRAY FOR MEAT
MEN SMOOTHING WALLS, MEN ON MEN, MEN WHO WORSHIP ATHENA Mark Russell
shelley feller
50 34
BLEST BY WINDEX Kell Connor
35
A HISTORY OF SHEDS Jon Ransom
8
WHAT IT IS LIKE Lidija Dimkovska, tr. by Ljubica Arsovska, Peggy Reid
54
AIN’T NOTHING HERE NEEDS FIXIN’
87
CAMILA Vanessa Bates Ramirez
Patrick Vala-Haynes
100 CITADEL 66
BIRDS I RECALL
Adam J. Maynard
Sarah Mangold
105 67
NEITHER HAD A SURPLUS OF ELEGANT LEISURE Sarah Mangold
71
MUSEUM OF BODIES Ajibola Tolase
106 LEAVING CATABUAN
FOR A QUARTER
Scott Platt-Salcedo
John Greiner
116 72
INSTINCT
ENCLOSING WITHOUT BLOCKING OUT IT’S STILL TRANSPARENT
Megan Leanne
Tse Hao Guang
YELLOWSTONE Maija Mäkinen
79
81
ELECTRIC VOLTS IN COMMUNAL GEOMETRY
117
Novisi Dzitrie
82
PLACE Novisi Dzitrie
84
CITIZENSHIP INTERVIEW Ahmad Almallah
PLANTING DAFFODILS IN YOUR WATERLINE Reina Nelson
118
GLITTERING DARK Jeremy Packert Burke
126 AFTER ANATOMY Elizabeth Metzger
9
Jenna Cardinale
Sales We provide a decorative system of exposed pipes. We offer a good faith estimate. Here! Our fattest rats. Our drippings. Yes. There’s blood coating the mouth. I have been improved. Just listen to the clocks. Listen. I’m going to simulate an alarm. Let me show you this new fur.
10
Megan LeAnne
Poetry
MY GRANDMOTHER ASKED I NOT BE INVITED TO THANKSGIVING FOR FEAR OF MAKING MY FATHER UNCOMFORTABLE feather the fragments of a bad seed
Fiction
As a girl, I regularly aimed to arrange myself accordingly commondaughter disease
Consider syntax to instinct
expected arrangement of parts often opposite
hardly digestible deluge of measured vowels and brackets
I have been probing this code for most of my life
inflexible machine
and you
you language of tormented tongue and tidy
dumbpuzzle. I have made myself hideous in your name
proper,
even. My forehead pocked with toenails bloodless mouth
11
Nonfiction
what was I but a prayer bead lodged in your esophagus?
LeAnne
MY GRANDMOTHER...
brainfolds inconsolable and wheezing. Should I be pondfroth at your riverbank
or
clammy sticks poking off the lip
of your ridge? At twelve I tugged on my hair till creeping thistle
spilled from my scalp and I told you this made me feel humble. You were unstunnable
kneecaps plunged in mulch yanking out
perfectly lovely benedictions. The narrative of God is charming
but the humankind-riddle more sane
I whispered. Always
I am mothermilk astonishing your kidneys. Always I am thrashing myself awake in your uncrackable crux. Show me
what pattern of girl I must master to jolt you into love. I would wear my elbows as earrings I would mosaic my cells to a dazzling pulp and sing in the key of symmetry
12
for effect.
Caroline Beimford
13
Fiction Nonfiction
He says I have striking eyes and he’s staying in a condo behind the Gillette building. I have normal eyes. Of medium size and average color. The shade of slush. So he lacks imagination then. That’s fine. He’s in town for business and staying with a friend, but the friend has had a baby, and he feels he’s in the way. His friend’s couch smells like baby powder. I ask: Is that such a bad thing? It is. “It’s one of those smells,” he says. “Ruined by association.” “Like air freshener?” “Air freshener, baby powder – it’s all shit to me.” He has impeccable posture and debates a third round of martinis’ return on investment. To think, I’d imagined I was done with all this. David had hunched – over bars, when he walked – creating a curved space where words were buoyed and protected, a private room. This man with his posture is like a megaphone. From behind the bar, Sal offers to call me a cab. It’s just struck two. I almost accept, but that won’t get me anywhere. “Thanks, but I think I’ll walk.” Sal eyes the man beside me and shrugs before we’re thrust into the cold. Perhaps he’ll tell David I was here. We take side streets towards the water, but by the time we want a cab, there are none around. Such a sleepy city, Boston. He has a good chin, a jaw that catches my attention. Always the angles, such predictable penchants. We haven’t discussed where we’re going exactly, if there’s even a “we” to speak of. He says he’s from Phoenix. It had to be somewhere like that, with a tan in December. I think of cacti, crag cathedrals in the desert. “I’ve never been there.”
Poetry
Under My Skin
Beimford
“It’s nice.” “Does Boston compare?” “I love it,” he says, flashing a smile. “I’m in town for an interview.” If it’s a line, it’s a good one. Just enough promise to hook the serious and flighty both. He pulls up his scarf against the wind and is eager to reveal other things. Genzyme. Dartmouth. So he’s clever. Brina calls this the triangulation game. Setting down our dots – job, degree, hometown. Orientation points for strangers. “Are you cold?” My teeth are chattering. Small traitors, each of them. Inviting advances when I’m still making up my mind. David with his jacket that first time, insisting until I took it. I pick my way through the last of the sidewalk’s old snow. He’s very tall, at least six-two, and broad in the shoulders. A nice change, to look up. “Anywhere else we can get a drink around here?” There isn’t. We’re in a part of town that’s all warehouses, unoccupied office buildings, and lofts. A no-man’s-land between Fort Point and Soutie at an hour when nothing’s open but the South Street Diner across from the bus station. Be bold. “Just my place,” I say, turning to walk backwards and look him in the face. His eyes smile. “Lead the way.” We pass the Gillette Building, its first “t” gone dark, and cross the channel. I wouldn’t walk it alone so late, but we can cut through the post-office lot and skip the bit under the overpass. New snow’s collecting. He thinks it’s grand. Bends to feel the weight of it. Powder or packing? In the bar he’d been so serious. What do you drink, he’d asked earlier, as he took the stool beside mine. Like what do you like in bed. Today it’s gin. Pine-Sol for the brain. Then it was about the music, what did I think of it. I thought it was terrible. I hated Sinatra, he sounded so smug. Was I lying? I prefer to think I was finally telling the truth, and that I’d been lying for years. When I told David I loved hearing the standards. When he cooked chicken piccata or cleaned the refrigerator. When we ate, read, fucked, or danced in the living room. He had the same taste as
14
Under my Skin
my paternal grandmother – her only taste, now she’s forgotten everything else. Only Frank and Ella and Dinah and Duke are left. The whole gang. A couple of months with David and I’d learned the words too. We had a regular party, that first visit. David dancing with Gram, Gram singing with Frank. And everyone thinking I had the world on a string. I hadn’t planned to go in, had been walking three blocks out of the way to avoid the lounge since the split. David’s favorite dive. It trafficked in Rat Pack cover bands and dirty martinis. Upholstery all ruby vinyl. I’d forgotten to turn on A Street and ran into Phoebe on the sidewalk, chain-smoking. “Well, hello,” she said. Waitressing in the lounge had rubbed off on Phoebe’s speech. “Haven’t seen you around in a while.” She spoke like Lauren Bacall, or tried to. Modulated her delivery, overused the pregnant pause. Even parted her hair way over, managed the finger waves. She was more David’s friend than mine. “I’ve been branching out,” I said. What did she expect? She nodded and took longer than necessary to exhale a mouthful of smoke. “David isn’t here tonight.” The pause, a slow drag. “You could go in.” The smallest shrug of a bony shoulder, no coat in the cold. “If you wanted.” It was 9:45 on a Friday night and I’d only had one martini at dinner with my mother. “Is Sal on tonight?” Phoebe turned her head. I think she looked away just so she could look back in slow motion. “He sure is.” I left her and took the steps down to the bar. They kept the lights dim, reddish. Carpet like a bowling alley’s. Sal gave me extra olives. The man and I cut through the lot where they park the city’s postal trucks. All lined up in rows. Formal almost, like a closet of hanging suits. “This is really neat,” he says, gazing around like it isn’t a parking lot. “Through here.” I guide us down the rows. They’re narrow, labyrinthine, as private as my apartment. David and I paused here more than once. Something about the outdoors, the stolen space. He’d loved it anywhere but in a bed.
15
Beimford
This one has ideas too. He takes my hand, tries to swing me in. I play crack the whip instead. Turn down the alley and run. We always ran down the alley. He catches on quick and chases. On the street he wraps his arm around my waist and pulls me into his side. With our coats and gloves the contact feels chaste, like kissing a photograph. “So what do you do?” he asks, suddenly chatty, realizing, perhaps, that we’ve talked only of him. Brina would tell me to make something up. She’s brilliant at it. Has twenty full biographies on the tip of her tongue. Says it keeps things light. Like Charles Wallace and his multiplication tables. They can’t get in your head if you’re busy making shit up. “I edit textbooks.” Not only am I terrible at lying, I seem always to make the truth sound duller than it is. Two more points and I’d be pegged. Butterfly to corkboard. Or moth, from the way it’s going. Destined to die in a closet. Brina would suggest an exotic expat childhood for balance. Or a degree in art history from the Sorbonne. But he might speak French. People who spoke French always wanted to prove they spoke French. They launched into it at the first sign of a phlegmy “r.” “What sort of textbooks?” he asks. “Psychology.” “That must be stimulating.” He nods to himself, sounding almost sincere. Textbooks are a dead end with most people. “Did you study psychology? Or get into it another way?” “I studied history, actually,” I say. The snow is falling faster, in globs and at a slant. It’s deep enough to make tracks. “Tell me about Arizona.” I’d considered it before, moving to Phoenix or Tucson. Just before I met David. Somewhere stark, with clean lines, where each of the things I erected would be deliberate and well-planned. Before David, Boston felt cloying. I was too often swept along. By family, old friends, an academic press lashing out in its slow decline – ugly to watch, uglier to be a part of. The plan blanched upon meeting David, but it seems a small treasure now. An artifact from an age when I thought a new city was all it would take to change my whole life. “I lived in Chinatown too,” he says as we pass under the pagoda, “in San Francisco.” I know I’m meant to ask about San Francisco, but
16
Under my Skin
I’ve managed to misplace my keys. I root around as we stand on the sidewalk between the Gourmet Dumpling House and a shop selling rotisserie chickens. Finally, a familiar rattle. They’ve gotten into the lining again, in with the change and hairpins. He continues talking about San Francisco as we climb the stairs, about the damage to his gearshift on the hills. As soon as I get the door open he lunges, and while there’s some gnashing of incisors at first, it improves once we get the door shut. We bring the cold air in on our clothes. He asks about photos on the fridge, posters on the walls, mostly things of Brina’s, though she moved in mere months ago. I tell him about Brina and how she’s out of town. I should tell him she’s coming back, weave a net. “Where’s she gone?” “Montréal. For the weekend.” “For work?” “A show. She’s an opera singer.” For some reason, lying about other people’s lives is easier. Although Brina had warned about audaciousness. She only used the opera gig when she was really, truly drunk. Why couldn’t I have been the opera singer? I was drunk. But then they always asked her to sing. “I love the opera.” Was he serious? Why couldn’t I meet a man with standard tastes? Who liked Dylan or Springsteen or the Rolling Stones. But then, he could be lying too. Internally rolling his eyes at another fine-arts-inundated late-twenty-something looking for love that only exists in Puccini. He slides along the sofa and takes my glass. “Perhaps we can see your friend sometime, if I get this job.” He combs the hair away from my face and neck. “I hear your opera house has excellent acoustics.” Was this considered smooth? It feels smooth. When I close my eyes just before he kisses me, the spins set in and I open them again, too late. Conventions are important when kissing strangers. When the kiss is not yet more than a sum of its parts. Lips, teeth, tongue, too-large pores, and the stray hairs between eyebrows. I’m affected by how he doesn’t know I’m looking at him, how we’re engaged in a pact I’m already
17
Beimford
breaking, that we’ll both shut our eyes, feel instead of look, attempt to be swept up, and in the event of falling short, pretend out of empathy or etiquette – unsure where the other stands, how serious we’re all being. Does he really want to take me to the opera? His lashes are long and curly, and there’s nothing wrong with the kiss except his mouth is cold and unfamiliar. David referred to sex as “makin’ whoopee.” “Shall we make some whoopee?” he’d ask, arching an eyebrow, charmed with himself. “Let’s,” I’d say, choosing to be charmed, as well. It would be difficult to say what we’re making now is as blithe, as easy, as unrestrained as “whoopee.” But it’s something. Polite, proficient. Like a foxtrot. In the morning, an arm pulls me into the hollow of a body – the movement jars. He’s not awake yet, but rooting around, like he’s accustomed to waking up beside someone. The forearm has a heft to it, a weight that David’s didn’t. This is something. I pull the duvet up over the pillow, the feathers clumped in their separate squares, blocking out only half the light. Coffee wafts, like smelling salts. He brings me a cup, has put on his pants. To leave? Or because he’s coy. David had liked to prance, was naked at every opportunity. Vain that way. Perhaps this man is just normal, wearing pants as a rule in unfamiliar places. “Good morning.” He bends, kisses my forehead, hands me the cup. It isn’t what I expect. Each sip brings me closer to myself, though I’ve not yet decided whether to join the living completely. He climbs over me and under the duvet. I’d pushed my bed against the wall a month ago, convinced I might use more of the space if no one would be sleeping on the other side. Now it feels childish. He sits up, cross-legged, tan lines all over, but even his pallid parts are darker than my forearms. We’d disdained sunbathing, David and I, remained pale and freckled – any limb of his could’ve been mine in a tangle. The man and I camp out until the sun moves past the window and it
18
Under my Skin
becomes dim enough, safe enough to emerge; once we overheat, oversleep, become sticky with sex and sweat, must seek out supplies, fresh water, acetaminophen. I make omelets while he showers. They’re sad and flat, with nothing in the fridge but mustard and lemons. After we eat I escape to the bathroom. Sit on the edge of the tub and let my face slacken. He’s neat. When David showered it was like the flood. Floor slick, bathmat sodden. The only sign of this one is the steam. I half expect, half hope he’ll be gone when I emerge. Instead he’s washed the dishes. Smiles from the sofa like he doesn’t know the steps. He flips through David’s copy of Steppenwolf and I pretend to have read it when he asks. The afternoon wears on, and he doesn’t leave. Because of the snow emergency, he says. Two and a half feet and counting. Hasn’t got the right shoes. We order Vietnamese from the only open restaurant on the block. He picks an armful of films, instructing me to choose. We go to bed early, wake up late, and I can’t imagine why he stays. The sex is the kind that makes me think more, rather than less, though we seem to be pretending it’s something better. The fact of bad sex had been one of those bleak adult discoveries, like filing taxes for the first time. There I’d been, blithely assuming sex was a pure, cosmic added-value, only to discover it was more like roulette, and I’d been on a lucky streak since high school. David now a lost oasis. The man asks for my number as he gathers his things. “For the opera, remember?” In my head I’ve already closed the door. “Of course.” He roots for a pen. I offer to get one. “No, it’s here, I’ll find it. I like to use just one until it runs out.” He laughs, suddenly self-conscious. I fight the physical urge to let my fingers form a handgun, let it float up to my temple. David and I would argue over what it said about us, that I aimed for the temple, that he put the barrel into his mouth. I recite my number, trying to figure out where to invert the digits, whether to switch the last nine for a five. But it comes out correctly, too quick. Let him have it. I close the door, feel relief. Then it recedes. The snow muffles sound from the street.
19
Beimford
I go back to my bedroom to sleep, to strip the bed, to curl into a ball I’ve just got the sheets off when I feel how stuffy it is, how strange. I climb over the bed and push at the sill, get it up in one heave, inhale the sharp fresh scent of snow, the familiar tang of garbage beneath the ice. Fish sauce, Durian pelts, fry oil, and cabbage. Overlaid with the waft of roasting chickens from next door, a signature aroma. I was always the one to close the window; David would open it. A small war. I sit by the window. Breathe it in. Noon on Sundays we’d awake to hoisin and chicken on a spit. David claimed he couldn’t sleep without fresh air. Fresh! I’d say, incredulous. A sort of script. He slept on his stomach. I can still see his shoulder blades, protuberant, elbows rough, nails cut to the quick. He hated spaces where things could lodge. Why do I still snag on details – the stupid pomp of bitters in brown bottles, post-shift food-smells in his shirts, wee-hour traipses across the city, the alleys and docks and parking lots. He liked to scrub things while hungover, brought out the Pine-Sol and bleach to combat the alley air. Scoured the bathtub and toilet bowl stark naked in canary rubber gloves. Always someone crooning through the stereo, never a still moment, a set of parade years. Remember to spot, he’d say, showing off when he spun me. Then he spun my Gram around her living room filled with Russian nesting dolls. Spun her till she laughed and called him Lou. I’d stopped spotting after that. Fake it till you make it, is what Brina keeps saying. It’s another of her maxims, all of them to do with lying. Mostly to others, but in dire circumstances, to oneself. All the great brainwashers use repetition, she says. You’ve just got to find the right mantra. “The Best is Yet to Come?” I suggested. “As Time Goes By?” “Too trite,” she said. “You need more – ‘Strangers in the Night.’” Even Brina was certain. Of what was best, of what I needed. I wasn’t trained to withstand so much forthrightness. The way David was certain I was exactly what he needed like he was certain good gin should smell resinous instead of waxy. Certain too that we were done, and so
20
Under my Skin
compelling in his conviction, like he knew something I didn’t. It seemed the price of being certain was to never be certain of the same thing for too long. I could do that. Hadn’t I just? “The Lady is a Tramp?” I considered. “Now we’re talking,” said Brina. My best impression of myself would have to do. I’d roll it out thin and be endlessly discoverable.
A version of this story previously appeared online at The Southampton Review under the title “I Was Told I Could Stay.”
21
Adam J. Maynard
Cooking I am a cooking show Gently famous Married to a goose Your generous face Your green hands Your reflections Are pieced back together So you can hide somewhere Successfully in the day With your comic ancestry intact Think of nothing While slicing a cucumber With your green fingers I can disappear As quickly as a bird As the silver tears of ants Drop through a non-existent floor Made of rain Cooking a goose In the empty kingdom Of your kitchen This afternoon I will buy you a jumper That costs $2,500
22
Nate McCarthy
23
Fiction Nonfiction
It was Dave who finally got me to eat meat again after sixteen years of being a vegetarian. I watched him from the living room as he lit the barbecue in the backyard; I was drowsing in the soporific warmth of the gas heater, stretched right out on the thick rug that his mother had begun to make while she was pregnant with him. I was too weak to hold my thoughts with me on the floor so I let them float up with the heat and disintegrate. I loved the rug and I loved the heater. That was about all I could manage. It was my ninth week on the elimination diet, a stringent diagnostic regimen developed by immunologists, and I was wild with hunger. I’d been severely unwell for a few years, and the doctors had very little to suggest apart from the elimination diet and paperwork for a disabled parking sticker. The sticker had helped. Perhaps the diet would too. The elimination diet is an agonising staircase for the chronically ill to climb. It is meant to bring to light any food intolerance that could be causing a patient’s symptoms. It means, often under medical supervision, dragging yourself up floor after floor of food groups, week after week. First comes food that contains the lowest level of triggers, then the next, and the next. Pears at the bottom, pineapples at the top. You could only progress through the stages when your symptoms improved. Mine never did. I was stuck on the lowest landing, down in the culinary dark, unable to eat a single meal that had not been prepared at home from the complicated advice book filled with tables and lists. I could not have bread, milk, or gluten. If I went out, weak as I was, there was no sustenance I could easily grab, not a hunk of bread, not an apple
Poetry
The First Steak of the Rest of My Life
McCarthy
(I could only eat peeled pears of a certain variety). The diet was proving to be unlivable without meat. I had scrambled for months, with the help of my mum and my best friend, to make nutritious meals out of a dismal list of ingredients (choko gourds, mung-bean sprouts, cashews, potatoes, and sugar were among the more exciting). Had I eaten meat, this would not have been so confounding: the mung beans and the choko would have made an austere side to a nice lamb cutlet, a small concession in a healthy and rounded meal. But as a vegetarian I was in real trouble. And by now I was on my knees, all but eliminated myself. Dave had taken to making me toffee and honeycomb to get calories into me, and I carried them in a little tupperware if I went far from home. My mouth was pocked with sores from eating so much sugar. I was bound more than ever by the constraints of my illness. I was weaker, and I had a tyrannical diet to follow, which meant I couldn’t share food with anyone or have a coffee out. There was no joy in food, no distraction in snacking, no idle nibbling in search of pleasure, and no happy eating to mark the milestones of the day. There was my sickness and there was flavourless choko and cabbage for dinner. I was wasting away, willing to cross lines. Surrender had been a long time coming. Across from the bedroom window of my share-house, the oak trees in the park had taken and dropped their autumn colour three times since I’d become ill. I’d watched their slow changes from my bed, buoyed in spirit by the flush of their new growth but unchanged myself, every detail of my life still shaped by a body that pushed itself to the forefront of my experience and sat there, broken, blocking out almost everything else. In those oak-tree years I’d venture out when I could, often to lug groceries home from the shop, or to sit in the park, or see a friend and then crumble back into bed, feverish and spent, like an ancient thing. And then I would rest until I had the strength to cook or to heat up food delivered to me by friends and family. With no known cure and not many prospects, I sought solitude and quiet in the countryside, a self-made sanitorium. A car full of books, no internet, no phone signal. I rented a room for a couple of months in a
24
The First Steak of the Rest of My Life
beautiful small town, hours from Sydney, to lie beside streams and float in the river that cut through the village, to sit at dusk where the houses stopped and the paddocks began, where the fireflies bobbed and bats flew down the valley in great plumes. I had eaten fresh greens and eggs from the community garden on the hill and slept to the sound of frogs at night. And oh, the places I napped! I rarely went anywhere without a rug and pillow, and went to ground in the most beautiful spots: by rainforest streams, on quiet beaches by driftwood fires, between the beds of untamed vegetable gardens, and by sagging fences laden with fragrant vines. I slugged down paracetamol by the town river and watched rain fall silent as snow on hot summer nights, heard owls while I lay stuck somewhere. And after years of the same view from my Sydney house, I was relieved to at least be in a new bedroom if I couldn’t leave my bed. My new house was a new world with a view of the valley hills, sitting on a road which ran through paddocks where gentle-eyed beef cattle gathered at sunset. It was up in that town, during my rural retreat, that a friend and I had talked about eating meat as we lay in the shallows of the river at dusk on a hot evening, stray cows bellowing from time to time from the paddocks behind the ancient camphor laurels. “At this stage, Nate,” she said, lying on her belly, “even a committed Buddhist might consider they need to eat meat.” I listened, heavy in the water. A mullet broke the surface of the river and splashed back down. “I know. Maybe one day,” I said. If the elimination diet had not been beginning to starve me, I would have let that idea float off forever downstream into a hazy future which didn’t much bear thinking about anyway. I certainly had strong ideas about the ethics of eating meat, but what I felt most immediately was a filthy horror about having dead flesh in my mouth. Meat had become disgusting to me the moment I was directed to cut open a thawed and bloated rat in biology class and dig around in its stink for its heart and brain. I didn’t care for my ham sandwich after that. Shortly after the dissection, I watched Babe, a film about a piglet who narrowly avoids being slaughtered, and that was it for me. There was no sense of giving anything up, abstaining, wistfully foregoing a
25
McCarthy
steaming breast of roast chicken, or covetously eyeing crackling rashers of bacon. In the blink of my teenage eye, meat became awful and people had no business turning creatures into it, of reducing animals with lidded eyes and quivering snouts and complicated biological functions to a meal to be eaten once and then forever over. I quietened down as I got out of high school and didn’t give it too much thought. Yet I retained a gentle sense of uncertainty about my meat-eating friends: how did a person’s kindness and generosity fit together with their eating of animals, of working with meat in the kitchen as if it were no more than citrus fruit, cocoa, or figs? I folded my hands on my chest and lay like a corpse in the lamplight as Dave closed the lid of the barbecue, leaving it to heat up, and came back inside to prepare the vegetables. We would be having New York steaks (sirloin) with mashed potatoes, broccolini, asparagus, and button mushrooms. Dave and I have known each other our whole lives, or at least since we were able to eat solids. And that’s really when it all begins, isn’t it? When you learn to taste, to begin to be able to recall what it was that you so loved, to understand the things you want, and to share them at the end of the day. Little Dave lived six doors down from me, and we’ve rubbed off on each other so much that people who have met us as adults have sometimes been taken aback. When my friends first encountered Dave, many idiosyncrasies that they had thought of as mine – a gesture, a turn of phrase, or the way I got dressed up – turned out to be just as much the singularities of the soft-spoken bearded man I introduced them to. There had been a flow between us over decades that we hadn’t noticed until we were saturated. A sharing of aesthetics, of habits, of history. Our finger and toe joints swell arthritically in the same places because we both began cracking them on the long car ride south to my family beach holiday when we were little. Later, by the time we were old enough to drive ourselves around, still cracking our knuckles, Dave liked my barber, so we got our hair cut the same way for a long time. He altered our jean hems to make them slimmer at the ankles and shopped for me when he had time to browse opp shops; it didn’t so much matter if he found anything for himself as long as he found something right for
26
shelley feller
If sometimes i seem not here, it’s not dreaminess; it’s fear
i get stabby in my faggy bugaboo jubilee—ack plastic stallion, i guzzle polluted {ack-ack} google stiletto balloon barrage, ascendant — o sacral kite my natal chart inscribes, i dream nothing so flagless as this piracy. spangled dandy, i suture couture de rigueur— our blood, fatty informatics, evolved as law gone awol. our legend lives in the between, believes in teeming we’s beyond ha! i wore fear like a hot pink corset. anonymous pommel rode under him sore’d. ack, dumb bunghole. i saddled up somatic we spree we freely we mutiny, etc. 39
Fiction Nonfiction
+ ack, morbid cordial, get ripped, get ribald trim vim tomorrow’s man scans manorama, ahistoric industrious-numb. scruffing minutest gropings, all the beautifuls buttered in silhouette. hark, o love-lean, mincing in his undergrowth i farce bad — splat in the knick of. this is not a cum joke, zoloft. i blow sanity animals into many mini balloons, congrats
Poetry
after Kerri Webster & Hart Crane
You Have Nothing to Worry About Melissa Spitz Documentary photo series of indefinite length 2009–ONGOING 40
“Here, take these. You’ll feel better.” Xanax from Mom 2013
Mom’s Ashtray 2015
Novisi Dzitrie
Electric Volts in Communal Geometry
Nonfiction
Fiction
Poetry
What you do with your naked body we dream of representing landscapes in electric volts. They say you formed a rhombus in 3D the other day at the exhibition – a tilted square of you on all fours, your bottom well raised to the abstraction of what this community seeks in elaborate semiotic studies. The hidden meanings to the expressions of our political elite and the priests announcing themselves as representatives of the gods. To maintain order, they take your number and knock on your door for private sessions. This turns on particular geometric shapes – no cameras allowed. And that’s not all. They say the public stood spellbound in awe of your formations. I missed. I should have been there. I'd have taken cues for what particular potential differences trigger the current of functions we put forward for decoding the world. Take the case of pi. The truth is, I'd have taken an indisputable position behind you to have a good view of the circle building up electricity between us and proceed to relate the circumference and the diameter. This is the truth. Come to think of it, myth is the shoulder upon which we lay the burden of naked truth.
81
Michael Lee Rattigan
Place A name’s full payment in seven-fold flame fruit exploding within that looks out of our eyes grabbing the horns of a miracle acknowledged by all one never fails to mould a cast-off glob to thresh out the seed from seven-year-old heart-scars banish sorrow as a function of the larynx the clock stops just in time giving a new heart on equal terms rainproof to protest down the untraveled road a soon-returning word rolling back into eternity a touch to the throat right under the nose repeating praise from room to room
82
Reina Nelson
Planting Daffodils in your Waterline
Nonfiction
Fiction
Poetry
In a brief interlude, I kiss you but no – not you it is the pastry boy or the next girl door, with the yellow rain boots and the lips like artichoke hearts, a wonder they can kiss at all
117
Jeremy Packert Burke
Glittering Dark The insects revolted that summer. No one knew why. Grasshoppers, locusts, beetles, and bees, buzzing and chirruping, jumping from the grass. The houses of Holloway watched them come in chitinous hordes. Crawling from the earth and shaking the dirt from their gossamer wings. We would crunch and squish across a half-inch layer of locusts, ladybugs, and Hercules beetles to get the morning paper, only to discover it had been eaten clean through by moths. We wore flu masks to keep the airborne creatures from burrowing into our mouths, goggles to protect our eyes. We didn’t allow the children outside, afeard by rumors of entomic masses carrying kids off and stripping them of their flesh, leaving only pure white skeletons. Those were only rumors, but the insects did strip a whale that way. It washed up on the shores of Lake Hesperus, beached and moaning in the breeze, surrounded by thousands of flitting, scuttling, green-gold shapes, until – like a magic trick – it was reduced to a gargantuan white nightmare. In the cage of its ribs, a large nugget of ambergris, which Travis Gehry stole and sold to Bucky Foucault, the perfumiér. Sunsets were incredible that summer. We all stood on our porches and watched the red-speckled dusk sink towards full dark, rays of sunlight bent through the wings of insects, disco-balled in the many facets of their eyes, so that patches of every colored light imaginable danced over the woods and the walls, over our upturned faces. Sweeping over the town as if it were a roller rink. And even at night, the moonlight caught their many shifting carapaces. The leaves fell, red, along the paths of the forest, the roads of the town.
118
119
Fiction Nonfiction
During that summer, when none of our children could go outside, they grew restless and agitated. They tied twine to the backs of cans and pitched them past their window screens, let the seething waves of insects carry the cans across town, twine unraveling, unraveling until another kid spied the can from their window and, reaching with a telescoping back-scratcher or a runcible spoon, plucked the can from the glittering mass and grasped it firmly in hand, brushing aside stray insects that clung to it still. —Hello? Who's there? —Fidel. Who are you? —Bonnie. Are you stuck inside? —Yep. You? —Yep. As more and more children caught on, sending dozens of cans out to all corners of Holloway, a web of twine rose over the town, a network of string that crossed and double-crossed itself. The lines gathered, dense above the bug-filled streets, thick as a rainforest canopy. The strings were every color from rose-gold to ultramarine, a rainbow of pareidolic lines that described a vast array of shapes in the air like constellations: mythic beasts, gods, heroines of antiquity, all drawn in multicolor between the land and sky. Where the strings touched, they rubbed secret voices into each other so that, if you were quiet, you could eavesdrop, hear others talking about their pink eye and their missing cat or singing loudly to each other. I stood on the porch, beating the waves of insects back with my broom, staring at the net above me and the patches of brief blue sky that broke through. My wife was in the basement, buttressing the defenses at the windows and doors, and I thought of the Christmas party a year
Poetry
Then winter came, and all of the insects froze to death. In the spring it took a week to sweep up most of them, and even then there were little frozen bug carcasses found under piles of melting snow for months. I never spoke to you again after that summer and fall. Never saw you but at the mandatory gatherings: the cleaning of the town, parentteacher conferences, the puppet shows on the solstice.
Packert Burke
prior, my wife likewise basement-bound and seeking wine, the red and green polish of your nails, the way they trailed across the braceleted beads that spelled out my son’s name, Poker, which he had given me in some deranged gift-giving game. Your eyes behind your thick glasses shining like carapaces. The moment my fingers moved towards yours the footsteps returned. Your wife’s from the bathroom, mine from the basement. Like fate. Fingers falling to our sides. I swept. I knocked a dragonfly from the air. I swept more. My body held, in hazmat suit, between seething insects and still suburban dreamcatcher. When our work was done, my wife practiced her timpani late into the night. BOM BOM-BOM BOM. BOM-BOM BOM BOM. Each BOM sending queasy shivers through me, making me long for your painted nails. The strings became so dense that sometimes the insects would get caught in the web, and their beating wings would punctuate the children’s conversations with bursts of distortion. —My PRRRR-arents are fighting again. —I'm ZHHHH-rry. —Dad sma-ZHHHH-ed six plates this time, and when they sto-BZZZZed fighting he tried gluing them together again. So now everything tastes like glue. A silence full of humming. —I wish I could THTHTH-ee you. —I FWFW-ould like that very much. And so on. Unlikely friendships formed. Relationships. Teenagers discussed various sex acts they would perform on one another if they ever left their houses again. They would sneak out right now, they said, except that Denis Tribulant had been eaten by a colossal swarm of gnats (they'd heard) and, well, they didn't want to turn out like Denis. I searched through Poker's cans, testing them with whispers to see if you were on the other end of them. A map would be helpful. Or better, an exchange, an operator. —Hello, hello? I called, but was met with buzzing, or silence, or the voices of children: —I wish you could come here.
120