Abby Cohrs DISSING THE ILLUSION

Fix

Your eyes and issues with it. It is the dirty chimney rising out of the gyrating smoke, The terracotta flower pot springing from the rosemary, The tree inside the nest inside the egg, The stationary cloud.

(Needing

Fixate on that pinprick in the distance. See how each periphery detail introduces itself. See how the shapes do not blend or stir Or twist or whir into a splatter painted canvas Of children’s carefree scribbles anymore.

Next, notice how the sky

No longer looks like that

White-hot fiery blue blur

Grumbling with an influx of Steady anger and nascent rain

Because you forgot how to conjure those storms. You cannot cook up lightning anymore.

So when you get tired of your botched hurricanes

Giving way to reluctant tornados—

Ones that spin lazily, bored of their maker, Contained in clear canteens of ex-meaning—

When you get tired of the day, dreamer––

Please feel free to let

Those renegade eyes of yours

Stretch their wings once And then

Flutter back shut.

Rachel Wade

The Pan

It wouldn’t go away.

Fifteen minutes he’d been scrubbing the bottom of his best pan, the indestructible steel thing he used to make his dinner every day, and it was still stained with an unsightly black residue, stuck so tightly that no amount of scrubbing seemed able to take it off. And it wasn’t the whole bottom, that was the annoying part. It was one small, exasperating spot, under any other circumstance indistinguishable from the rest of the pan, where the burnt bit just stuck.

Well, this was impossible. Agnus had been using this pan for years. He was by no means a professional chef, but he was regular enough with its cleaning and care that it had stayed pristine all this time. During its tenure in his kitchen, it had survived tomato paste, soy sauce, caramelized onions, frying grease, and even rice, back when he hadn’t had a rice cooker. Nothing touched this thing.

It had a misleading flakiness and hard little bubbles that gave the impression it would be easy to scrape off with the coarse side of a standard kitchen sponge. Nudging and prodding at it didn’t seem to do much, however, only producing, after some time, a black sludge caked deep under his nails.

Agnus sighed and knelt down to reach under his sink for the steel wool.

After searching through the subterranean depths of his cabinet, he found it, along with some heavy-duty Ajax dish soap. He returned to the sink and turned on the water, a little warmer this time. He stared out at the backyard to distract himself from his growing exasperation, but was only met with a sinking feeling as he took stock of its condition. He’d been neglecting yard work lately, and the grass was starting to stretch up and curl around his lawn chairs. There were surely legions of insects and pests out there. He had noticed ants in his pantry only yesterday. The squalid conditions didn’t even stop at his yard’s limits, as his fence was also decomposing, bent over with moss and fungus.

The deterioration of his backyard hadn’t been born entirely from laziness. He’d been dealing with another problem recently. Rats had moved into his attic.

At first, Agnus assumed the disappearing food and frayed electrical wires were byproducts of simple human carelessness. To their credit, the rats had been very quiet. It wasn’t until they’d chewed through the insulation between his bedroom ceiling and the attic that he heard their squeaking and scuttering, and by then, there were hundreds of them.

Traps weren’t a practical option and Agnus didn’t have the money for an exterminator, so he’d gone out and bought a tub of rat poison for $4.99 at the supermarket, placed it in the middle of the attic crawl space, and waited.

According to the advertisement on the back of the tub, what smelled like death to a human was apparently so tantalizing a scent to a rodent that it would have the entire colony dead in one night. The tub had delivered on this promise, but Agnus had not been prepared for the implications of the slow, painful death of an entire infestation of rats right above his bedroom ceiling.

Death by chemical neurotoxin is no quiet, pleasant affair. All night, Agnus had lain there, eyes wide open, as the rats fought to the last, stumbling about the attic, clawing the wood paneling until they had navigated into the walls and floors. After several sleepless days and nights, when the rats had finally exhausted their strength, came the horrible, desperate scratching, like the sound of steel wool. No matter how many dead or dying animals Agnus extracted, there always seemed to be one more with the tenacity to sink its little nails into the walls.

Agnus often felt he was the sort of man who things happened to, not who did things of his own accord. The rats, the lawn, and now this pan seemed to be plotting against him. Well, not this time. If he couldn’t assert control over a piece of cookware, what kind of a person was he?

He was brought out of his reverie by a sharp pain in his hand and looked down, realizing with a muted despair that there had been very little change, except for a fine cut the steel wool had made across his palm. It wasn’t bleeding, but it smarted like a papercut when he pushed against it with his thumb. Time for a new plan.

Agnus didn’t often use his dishwasher. It had come with the house, but it added fifty dollars or so to his utilities bill. This, however, was a special case.

On the top shelf of the pantry, Agnus found an almost-full package of Cascade dish pods, which he stared at doubtfully. It had been almost a year since he’d bought them. Could dish soap go bad? What did it matter if it could? Old dish soap is still dish soap. It would still clean the dishes, right? He shrugged, popped a pod in the soap slot, and began to load the dishwasher. The pan, of course, got the prime real estate in the middle of the bottom tray. It would be a waste of water and electricity if he only washed the pan, so in went his dirty plates and silverware, old coffee cups and cereal bowls strewn about the house, some tupperware from the fridge holding moldy food, and a wine glass he’d forgotten in the bathroom. It had spilled and stained the floor and counter crimson, but that wasn’t the focus right now. Right now, he was going to run the dishwasher, and that pan was going to get what it had coming.

Glancing once more at the scum, he kicked the dishwasher shut and squinted at the blinking orange display.

DELICATES—STANDARD WASH—POWER WASH——HOT—COLD——START

A good power wash on hot should do it. He selected his settings and sat back on his heels as the washer began to whir. He wasn’t quite sure what went on in dishwashers, but he didn’t trust them much. The machine would give every dish the same choreographed treatment, but what was it? Splashing the dishes with water? Throwing some soap on them and spraying it off? This was another reason he always did his own dishes. He couldn’t trust a stupid machine with no capacity to discern if one dish had a stubborn spot clinging to the bottom of it, holding out against his best efforts, like it had a mind of its own and was using its power to enact some sort of cosmic punishment upon Agnus, despite how much he’d had to deal with lately, ambivalent to his struggles—

Agnus realized his face was so close to the dishwasher that his nose was touching the settings display, staining his vision orange. He shook himself, stood, and surveyed the overgrown backyard once more. While he was waiting and still had daylight, he might as well get that done, too. Sighing, he went to go look for his shoes.

Fifteen minutes and one pair of shoes later, Agnus was walking his mower out. It was old and rusted, handed down by the previous owners of the house, but it worked. As he bent down to pull the chord, Agnus felt his eyes drawn to the rust, which clung to the mower the same deceptively brittle way the burnt spot was stuck to the pan. The engine finally started up, and he felt his eyes flick away to glance at the kitchen window. The room was still bathed in the same orange glow from the dishwasher.

The motor stalled. Agnus sighed and bent back over. A few tugs on the chord, and finally it roared to life again. Mowing his lawn when it was this overgrown was an arduous task, and not going as well as he would have hoped. The grass was so thick that it was impossible to cut through quickly. Instead of leaving behind a flat, clean lawn, Agnus was leaving more of a chaotic hackjob, rolling over hidden branches and bushes and even dead animals that had gotten tangled in the thicket and strangled to death attempting to escape. Agnus felt a drop of sweat drip down his neck despite the cool air. He was trying his best to mind the backyard, but every few moments he had to redirect his thoughts away from the damn dishwasher.

The urge grew stronger with every passing second, settling uneasily somewhere below his stomach. A restlessness crawled up and down his spine as the kitchen window steadily glowed brighter and stronger in the fading sunlight.

He could feel his conviction slipping as he watched the light grow more vivid. It couldn’t hurt, could it? Just to peek at the washer’s progress? Surely it wouldn’t. If it was helping, he could shut the thing and let it finish. If not, he’d be able to tell; he could just take the pan out and try something else.

On the other hand, interrupting the cleaning process was bad, right? He’d barely given the washer a chance; he should just wait and let it cycle through.

But what would it hurt, just to peek?

That thought continued to thrum at the back of his mind as he drove the mower around his yard, no longer paying attention to its course. He drove over a rock. It clanged around in the clippings bag, probably damaging the inner workings of the machine.

What would it hurt, what would it hurt…

He hit a mound of dirt, clogging the blades. They rattled in place angrily.

What would it hurt, what would it hurt…

The motor finally stalled, but Agnus was long gone, unable to control himself any longer, nearly tearing the door off its hinges as he went to check on the pan. Mud and grass accompanied him into the kitchen, and he skidded when he stopped in front of the dishwasher, filling his vision with an orange blaze so bright he had to scrabble along the counter to find his way to the handle of the door separating him from the pan.

He ripped into the washer and it screeched, billowing out a cloud of searing steam that singed his skin and turned the small kitchen humid. Agnus stared into the washer, and the sight that greeted him made the bottom of his stomach drop out.

The stain hadn’t been cleared away, it had spread. It now covered the entire bottom of the pan, dripping from where it had been tilted down, pouring black slop onto the dishwasher floor. Worst of all, the gunk had spread to the other plates, staining them a foul, smoggy grey.

Agnus picked up the pan and curled around it, rubbing at the burned material, just to find an edge, or wear through to one by force. It fought back, chafing the tips of his fingers, ripping open the cut in his palm. He moved to his knuckles and when all of those were bloody and oozing from the friction, he began to pick at the residue with his nails, absolutely convinced that the scum could simply be peeled away if he could just find that edge.

Agnus didn’t know how long he sat there, his blood staining the yellow linoleum a nauseating rusty brown. It was long enough for the light filtering through the dusty window to dim so that he was lit only by the pulsing glow of the interrupted dishwasher. As his last nail split down the middle, pushing up a raw mass of angry flesh, a desperate wail escaped his throat. Scratching at the pan with his bloody, nail-less stubs, he set about gnawing at the scum, gnawing and licking and biting, rubbing his nose in his own mess of tears, blood, and saliva. It was his pan, his property, he controlled it, and he would not be taking this blatant disrespect lightly.

He cast his eyes around the kitchen, settling back on the sink. If water made the pan stain things black, that meant that something had to be coming off. He’d had the right idea, but the wrong execution. It was better not to trust the help of machines. This was his property; only he knew what to do with it.

Agnus jumped up and cranked on the tap. It ran cold, then warm, then hot, but it wasn’t enough. The dishwasher had been hot. This water needed to be scalding. He continued to run the water over his hand as steam began to rise. After several minutes, he finally extracted his hand. The skin was stretched pink and tight, and when he formed it into a fist, it broke along the seams and began to ooze with blood and pus. Perfect!

In went the pan, screaming as it came into contact with the boiling water. Agnus grabbed a rag from the side of the sink and plunged both hands in, scrubbing rhythmically. The water in the pan clouded until he could no longer see the bottom. Agnus watched in horror as the water overflowed, staining the bottom of the sink the same rotten color as the dishes. His eyes crawled back to the pan, cold fear lodging in his throat as he took his hands out of the water. Sure enough, the rag he had been using was now coal black, and his hands were black and grey and brown all the way up to the elbows, mottled with unnatural shadows cast by the pulsing light of the dishwasher.

He screamed, but it was no use. He hadn’t gone hot enough. He could no longer use water, water only gave it more power. Pulling at his hair with stubby, dripping hands, he backed away from the sink until he hit the wall in the next room. What was hotter than the water? What could he possibly use that could get hot enough to...His gaze fell upon the fireplace.

There was no firewood in it, but this didn’t matter. The chair in his living room had a broken leg anyway, and he had matches.

There it was, his final refuge. With the pan in his hands, he stood before the roaring flames, compelled by their inviting light. Nothing could stain a fire. Agnus plunged the pan into the flames with both hands, and began, once more, to pick at its surface. The delicious smell of meat cooking in its own fat filled the living room. Agnus’ melted skin and roasted muscles dripped down in tender morsels from their bones, hitting the pan, sizzling and sticking there. He pulled one hand from the fire, watching it bubble and ooze, and brought it to his lips, biting down, eyes rolling back as the juices ran over his lips.

The fire celebrated with him, dancing in his eyes as he stripped the flesh from his hand. Agnus felt himself leaning in, letting its tongues lick at his face and pull at his clothes, finally surrendering to the warmth and climbing inside the fireplace.

And as he rested, roasting in the flames of his own creation, he smiled—he had no choice, the flesh was melting from his cheeks—and felt, finally, powerful.

Maeve Aickin

VILLANELLE 1/1

When I die, you will find a resolution. There are many secret shapes of grief yet each is a ratio of pain to confusion.

Go outside. Hang your tongue and seek ablution where the sky cleaves and rain beads your brow like sweat. When I die, you will find a resolution.

Go to sleep. Relish the tender illusion of a half-life dream about my childhood pet then wake at eight impaled by pain and confusion.

Say only “yes.” Welcome the intrusion of bad sex, pasta, angels, Marx, the internet; to stay alive, you will make a resolution.

Go to church. Let the knots in you loosen. Tell the old folks a story of how we met as they tug their hearing aids in confusion.

If I had croaked first, you’d leave no challenge unmet. Instead, I sit at a desk and count up my regrets, because you are dead and there is no resolution

Berna Da’Costa

I was always a hungry girl. The doctor said that in the delivery room, I ate the light right out of my mother’s eyes and then smiled to share some with my father. I only cried in her arms. They took me home and I made a meal of their peace.

My mother seemed to stand in the kitchen all day, softly humming the hymns they sang that week at church as she walked with the cutting board to the stove, where I sat, in between the wet guts of a tomato that still glistened on her knife and blue flame. She opened the windows when the smoke and the spices started to make me cough. She showed me how to taste curry, poured a drop of it into the riverbed of her palm and raised it to my mouth. Her bangles rushed down her wrist, making a sound like clinking glass. I stuck my tongue out and pressed it flat against her skin, licking like I was trying to redraw the lines of her future so that they all pointed toward me, until my tongue was in the air and curling up to my nose. Her food was always too sweet, even though on Saturdays she didn’t sleep—I’ve seen her, her hands folded on her belly like she was lying in a coffin instead of a bed, her eyes watching mildew engulf the ceiling—so that on Sunday she was awake before the sun and the morning birds and the horn of the mailman, so that she didn’t have to wait for my father to get out of the bathroom, so that she arrived at the fish market before the other haggling wives to take her pick of the tarla, her favorite fish. She met those fish before she met God, their flesh as salty as the ocean they came from. But her food was still sweet. My mother said it was because my father likes his food sick with sugar, his meat like candy, his oil like honey. The day she got married, she tried to pack her suitcase with salt, but her mother dumped it down the toilet and told her she must honor her husband’s home now.

Those days I sat with her in the kitchen, I think I was happy. While she cooked, she fed me slices of beetroot and carrots and the tips of our fingers would turn pink and all the carrots would be gone. By the time dinner was ready, we had a frizzy halo of hair around our faces and I didn’t want to eat anything more because my stomach was already full. Then one day I woke up hollowed. I went to the kitchen when my mother wasn’t there and ate everything. Slurped ketchup straight from the packet, scraped my teeth up frozen sticks of butter, scooped up milk powder and jars of pickle. I sucked on tamarind until my tongue burned. A box of those heavily processed sugar cookies that dry up your mouth. I devoured them by the time my mother came home and found me lapping up the sugar in between the cracks in the floor. She got down on her knees and stuck her hand in my mouth, picked out every speck of sugar like it was dirt in a scraped knee, reached further down and checked the density of my heart. I felt it lift in my chest, and I floated for a moment, floated into the space between her patience and her forgiveness, then she took her hand away and it dropped like stone.

My mother once told me that if you swallow a fish thorn, it’ll plant in your stomach and grow like a tree. I imagine that’s what my hunger would’ve looked like. Thorns poking out of my belly button, my nostrils, the tips of my fingers. Nothing else seemed to fill me up. I began to chew on the rounded edges of plastic bottles. The glue on the back of new credit cards, as good as bubblegum. Pencil grips, straws, shopping tags, the spoons from Thai restaurants because they bent easier in my mouth. The best part of a lollipop became the stick. The slow task of its obliteration let me lose focus. I pinched the tube of plastic with the front of my teeth and grinded it down until it was smooth and my jaw was sore. My mother worried, and I tried to consume that too, which tasted something like the sound of her voice telling me to be careful when I crawled to the top of the stairs and dangled my legs between the banisters so that when she found me, she found my feet first, alive to the toes, disobeying the ground. My father took pride in my magnificent appetite and hand-fed me all of his dreams. In one, I am a doctor. In another, I am the tallest kid in school. In another, I am a pilot and I fly him home whenever his parents’ garden needs to be watered. The one where he was standing in the audience with a camera was the most delicious. He liked my big eyes and the way my anger spit. He believed I was great, greater than a son, so I heaped luck and happiness into my hands and licked them clean.

And then I threw it all up. I lost enough weight that my father fed his stubbornness to the stray dogs. He became humble. He let me have my own dreams. I slept. I walked on the ground. My mother made me eat. She marinated tarla in swaths of masala and fried it in a thin pool of coconut oil. She left nothing for herself. After dinner, she peered over the frame of her reading glasses and said, show me your plate, show me you’ve digested all my labor, my sweat, even the strands of hair I lost in the process, and appreciated it in your stomach. There, at the edge, a speck of rice. Leave nothing but thorns, they’ll hurt you, but eat everything else. It is good for you. I have made it, so it is good. She told me to remember, remember the taste of the water in her womb, remember where I came from, remember I used to cry to sleep next to her, remember her hand pushing my hair away from my face, remember that I belong to her and not to the world, so I finally swallowed those words she first whispered to me when I cried for the first time in the hospital to show her the magnitude of life she had given me. How gently her lips fed my mouth. Today I am like God, looking at the world he made, and how glad I am to see that it is good.

Micaela Francis

Afro Speaks Back

you never want to comb me / i was revered in the seventies / there were movements formed for me / now i’m constantly trapped in synthetic braids / i miss defying gravity / invincible to the whispers of the wind / my ends haven’t been trimmed in seven months / you might as well take a razor to your head / buzz me off down to the scalp / you’ll look just like your dad / bald head glistening under the flickering light bulb at Tilden Street / i hate when we go there / your Aunt Hazel makes weird comments / she says she had good hair when she was young / seems like she doesn’t think i’m good hair / i think i look pretty good (sometimes) / you know your brother’s hair is longer than yours / we should try a new oil concoction / jojoba, peppermint, lavender / please don’t put me into a bun again / remember when you used to swim / you had great diving form / i’m not scared of the water / yes i tangle and knot / thick roots / strong roots / get your fingers stuck in me / play with me / i wonder how dreadlocks would feel / maybe that’s something we should try / or Bantu knots / i miss when your mom twisted me up / no one else can touch me / i love when you wear me out / i stretch up to meet the sun / she tinges me brown /

Naomi Rottman

Journal Entries On Love And The Lesbian Chop

I cut my ex’s hair every week with kitchen scissors and their dad’s razor. I cut slowly alongside my fingertips, I pin sections up and ensure the line of their undercut is precise. I trim it for them every week, before I texture my own bangs. It’s silly to pay for a small haircut.

I eat all of my breakfast, but I have a headache anyway. I don’t sleep well in anybody’s bed but my own, not yet. I pull their piercing eyes from deep in the back of my head, and toss them out of my window into the ocean. Splash. They have new tattoos I haven’t touched.

I sit at the bar on Long Island sipping my fifth free drink and the bartender says she needs a haircut. I say: Hey, I can cut your hair. She doesn’t believe me. I pass her a bite of lobster ravioli over the garnishes. I feel older than I used to. Hungrier. More adventurous. Less eager to prove myself.

I butter bread for people who will become good friends. The one I like is flirting with someone else, who likes me, I think. How many of us will we cram into this bed? I paint someone’s nails. I say: You should let me put cinnamon sugar on your toast for you.

I picture us laying beside each other in the grass. Crinkling bags of snacks, sucking salty residue off my fingers to flip pages of a new book. Reading so fast my breath can’t keep up, or not reading, but paying attention. Maybe to the wrong things. My hair has gotten long.

I stand in my mint shoebox of a room, with a flooding shower and a microwave with fingerling potatoes in it. I fiddle with my sneakers on the train. I’m late for class. I’m holding myself higher and sitting wider. I feel better. Call me sometime. It would be a nice surprise.

Tula Campan

Lucia

Marra

ONE SEASON IN INWOOD, NEW YORK

For half of the summer months, my air conditioner was leaking tons of water. So much water that the wooden floors are now warped underneath my window. July made me turn it on anyway. Then I decided to wedge a towel underneath it. Then I ruined most of my towels. I asked advice from people I know. My friend at work told me that it happens to her unit when it’s overworked. She’ll turn it off for a few hours and it’ll be fine. I feigned like I was receiving good news, but deep down, I knew that I wasn’t gonna have the same luck.

I finally decided I could live without it. Besides, it wasn’t that hard: getting home at four in the morning, ripping off my clothes and passing out in a steamy, stale apartment, waking in a pool of sweat and realizing it’s almost time to leave again. Outside feels like tepid water. Whenever I walk on the swollen, uneven panels underneath my air conditioner, I think to myself: “I’m leaving in a couple months. Who cares. This apartment is a piece of shit anyway.”

On most mornings I only leave myself time for a few errands. I haul large loads down the block and past the bodega, where the men outside have leered at young women in the same way for almost five years. They’re still there when I walk back to dry my clothes and back again to pick them up. The heat from the pile is dry and hot. When I’m almost out of time I run to the cleaners then to the train, only leaving myself two minutes because I know that’s exactly how long it takes me if I sprint. If I have time to walk there leisurely, I feel lucky and reward myself with seltzer from the corner store. It seems I’m increasingly impatient with every passing month.

When I get off at Fulton street, I step off of the crowded A train and into what feels like a sauna where all the humans are made of garbage. On my way to work I cross giant intersections and small corridors. Through large heaps and piles of rat-infested god-knows-what that mutate into mountainous piles at night. When I turn the corner onto Pearl Street, a four-story gust of fryer grease and meat fat wash over me for about ten seconds. I’ve come to know this corner well and now hold my breath before it arrives. Everything seems more revolting in the suffocating heat. Even things I find amusing make me cringe, like the snake shaped calzones all coiled up in the window of the pizzeria. I walk into the smoke shop to buy a vape since I can’t smoke on the 64th floor.

The elevator is already tight when I get in. One person is holding a tray of about thirty quails, all shiny and stuffed, with their legs bound together, almost like they’re going to pop. I hate that I’m surrounded by death so I breathe in deeply, close my eyes, and try not to look. We stop in the basement and another load of people pushes us further toward the back of the elevator. The quails are now being held way up above our heads. A chef’s voice from the back says sardonically: “At least if the elevator gets stuck, we’ll all get salmonella.”

As I run around for the next nine hours aiming to please a fussy FiDi clientele, I pray for thunder and rain. It brings everyone inside. Now the rain is a personal act of terror, carried out to ruin their evening and their Gucci shoes. This gives me a smattering of personal enjoyment. Sometimes I’ll go back outside with no one there and watch the water make all the expensive tables and chairs look glum and useless. Clouds cover the tops of some buildings and there’s a threat of thunder you can sense from the purple hue of the sky. The warm mist blazes through the cold rain. Everything is quiet and it’s just me and the pitter patter for a few moments.

Today is sticky and humid. The kind of weather that begs for chaos. The worst weather to sit with your thoughts. Today I had the most thoughts to sit with. The same ones, circling and sticking, springing around in my brain. It’s too crowded up there. I can’t wait for winter, when the cold will encompass all my feelings and freeze over most of my problems. The razor sharp wind is gonna slash my face and getting warm will be the only necessity. I try not to think of the other stuff, sludging home through the night slush, alone.