sotospeak/docs/sts_su14

So to

Speak

a feminist journal of language and art

Summer 2014 Online Issue

So to Speak Summer 2014 Online Issue Subscriptions and all other correspondence may be addressed to So to Speak, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 2C5, Fairfax, VA 22030-4444.

Subscriptions: $7/sample issue, $12/one year, $22/two years Submissions: We welcome all work relating to feminism. Please submit no more than five (5) poems at a time; all forms are invited. Limit fiction and nonfiction to 4,500 words. We welcome collaborations. All submissions should be sent electronically through our submission manager. For more detailed guidelines and for contest information, visit our website at http://sotospeakjournal.org. Our reading period is from August 15 through October 15 for the Spring issue and from January 15 through March 15 for the Fall issue.

Cover art: “Untitled� by Alex Pohl The editors would like to thank Jennifer Atkinson, all the authors and artists who submitted to our journal, David Carroll, Kathryn Mangus, the Phoebe staff, William Miller, the Fall for the Book Festival staff, the editorial circle that founded So to Speak (Jamy Bond, Sara Brown, Leslie Bumstead, Jean Donnelly, Colleen Kearney Rich, Isadora Lector, Stephanie Muller, and Rebecca Wee), and all past editors of the journal.

So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art is committed to representing the work of writers and artists from diverse perspectives and experiences and does not discriminate on the basis of race, class, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, culture of origin, disability, political affiliation, marital or parental status, Vietnam-era veteran status, or similar characteristics.

So to Speak is published tri-annually at George Mason University. Opinions expressed by authors and editors do not necessarily reflect the official views of the university.

All rights reserved. No material herein may be reprinted by any means, recorded or quoted, other than for review purposes, without the express permission of the authors or artists, to whom all rights revert after serial publication.

So to

Speak

a feminist journal of language and art Editor Jessie Szalay Managing Editor Julie Dickson Joint Fiction Editor Robert Schuster Joint Fiction Editor Justin Lafreniere Nonfiction Editor Alexandra Ghaly Poetry Editor Alicia K. Padovich Art Editor Ceci Cole McInturff Blog Editor Paula BeltrĂĄn

Assistant Nonfiction Editor Rajpreet Heir Assistant Poetry Editor Ryan Meyer Fiction Readers Marissa D’Orazio Paul Michiels Lina Patton David Robinson Shannon Rosenblat Nonfiction Readers Eric Botts Linda Prather Poetry Readers Anya Creightney A. Moriah Jones James Merrifield Steve Minnich

CONTENTS

FICTION Allison Amend

Feels Like Drowning

32

Sara Erdmann

City Hall

47

NONFICTION Catherine Kasper

Keeping My Mother’s Brain 26 Erin Lyndal Martin

A Visit to Court Green 16 Erika D. Price

Humans and Other Digging Tools

63

POETRY Jessica Rae Bergamino

When She Leaves the Galaxy 10 Joanna Cattonar

For the High Desert Muse 23 Sarah A. Chavez

This, Like So Much 30 H. V. Cramond

Dinah 61 Dinah Responds 62 Donelle Dreese

Pollyanna’s Pain 8 Jeannie Galeazzi

Lean Mass 11 Jessica Glover

Because of the Angels: A Response 6 So to Speak

25

CONTENTS

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa from Distant Landscapes 38 Becca J. R. Lachman

That time of year when cherry blossoms

44

Gigi Marks

Composition 29 Freesia McKee Lucille Max 22 Laura Passin In Stubenville 42 Molly Prosser Nesting 70 Metalwork 71 Dean Shaban

The Poetress Says: a found poem

72

Meredith Trede Behind the Looking Glass 45 Joy Von III You Are a Simple Man 13 VISUAL ART Alex Pohl

Untitled 1 9

Untitled 2 14

Untitled 3 24

Untitled 4 37 Untitled 5 46 Untitled 6 60

Untitled 7 68

Untitled 8 73 CONTRIBUTORS 74

So to Speak 7

Donelle Dreese

Pollyanna’s Pain She says she bakes rocks in the oven hoping they will spread into pools of lava she can shape and mold into a new country.

She says the rim of shelving ice will melt into clear flakes of rain she can feed to fish that wallow in dry puddles.

She is Snow White denying her own apple a little girl archetype spitting herself out.

Here’s a wishbone from her sack of sundries.

She’ll offer you the thin slice of the stick and tell the world she won by gnawing on a sunbeam.

8 So to Speak

Alex Pohl

Untitled

Digital photography, black and white 10.49’’h x 15.23’’w

So to Speak 9

Jessica Rae Bergamino

When She Leaves the Galaxy Beloved, something is burning. Light takes eighteen hours to move

between us.

If we come to know each other like emptiness, then emptiness will be

all we have to live for. Let us keep breaking. Let the shell become the thing that

names us distinct from the choir we call home. Maybe the universe isn’t an apple, but a pear grown heavy on a sodden bough.

When the new breath comes you’ll quiver like

an echo.

Let your hair down, your riddle rise, your record prepare to break.

When star systems collide they dance until the end.

This is why my cancer-glow-heart-breaks, how density becomes a measurement for loneliness, floating in neon-night. Love, let us be true to our ambition.

10 So to Speak

Jeannie Galeazzi

Lean Mass You, moonfaced and beachball-bouncing down the aisle on your

chagrined father’s arm, good for you, early-thirties, today on your Big Day merrily letting your poppy-red milkmaid-princess gown and your bodiced-and-buttressed billows and curves and your glitter-dusted cleavage and cheeks and your bouquet of sparklers and spinning silver pinwheels tell all the hissers and tsk-tskers and yoga-toned cousins and

sniggering new in-laws to kiss your fat ass.

Me, back row with your geeky groom’s gay boss as his spinster last-

minute “and Guest,” good for me, late-forties, today every day all these years, doing the

same as you: letting my sleeveless black sheath, tight to bones winking through veined

parchment skin, tell all.

You, saying “I do”; and you, at the reception, on bacon-wrapped

nutted cheeseballs and batter-crisped beefsteak fajitas and buttercream-bedizened coconut-

mousse cake, you’ll pig out.

Me, saying “I won’t”; and me, at the reception, on a single undressed

leaf of endive, I’ll pig in.

Swine, both of us, greedily cramming our freakishness down the

heedless public throat So to Speak 11

Jeannie Galeazzi

as if we could shame or tame our loved-ones’ barbed tongues or soothe our own seething hearts.

You and me, equals in weighty folly, can you forever wax, or I forever

wane? Dare ya.

12 So to Speak

Joy Von III

You Are A Simple Man When you talk about porn I talk about PBS: the fading colors that slide over the screen. Last night, in bed you stopped snoring long enough to slide your fingers against my palm. You said I should be a porn star, but only for you. I dreamed once about walking naked through the trees, till I found one to lean against. I fought the urge to tell you I want to have Ken Burns’ babies.

They would be smart little girls with plaits in their hair.

So to Speak 13

Alex Pohl

Untitled

Digital photography, black and white 10.88”h x 16.32”w 14 So to Speak

Alex Pohl

So to Speak 15

Erin Lyndal Martin

A Visit to Court Green

When I began writing a book of poems about bees, people started asking me if I was trying to be another Sylvia Plath. After writing standard depressive adolescent poetry for years, I thought I had worn out the Plath comparisons. So I was surprised to discover the cycle of bee poems she’d written late in her life. Soon, I couldn’t get enough of her. I went to the science library and painstakingly photocopied every page of Bumblebees and Their Ways, her father’s master’s thesis on bees. I thought of her life and mine and had this sense that our destinies were somehow interwoven. I couldn’t quite explain my need to occupy the same physical spaces as she once did, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. I begged money from my parents to go to England, pilfering through Plath biographies beforehand to try to find out where her house was located. I finally learned that Court Green was in the sleepy Devon town of North Tawton, and that her house was near a cemetery and a church. There were no street names.

It didn’t occur to me until my plane had touched down in Heathrow that Court Green might not be a tourist museum for wideeyed poets seeking some sort of absolution for their angst. Or perhaps the word was resolution. As in, have we resolved anything since Plath’s lifetime, as individuals, as writers, as women, as people with mental illnesses, as society? I wondered about this through several modes of transport: the tube to the train station, the train to Exeter, the cab to the hostel, my feet to the bus station, the bus to Buckfast Abbey for a brief stop of beekeeping tourism at the monastery there.

I spent that night resting and catching a cold in nearby Dartington, walking out to a pub housed in a thatched inn that dates from 1300.

Leaving the pub, I saw a man enter who I decided, like Plath, was somehow complicit in my fate. I went back in the pub and sat down beside him. His name was Martin. We talked most of the night and he walked me home down a garden path, deep in the Devon darkness that comes without streetlights. He was newly divorced but had yet to move out of his house. I was the young tourist with a skeleton shirt in 16 So to Speak

Erin Lyndal Martin

my backpack stopping off for a beer in his town between monks and poets, all the while surrounded by bees. At the street by my hostel, we said good night. He went home to his ex-wife. I went home to the hostel bunk bed I shared with a 90-year-old woman whose breathing was so loud that I feared her dead anytime she went quiet.

The next day, full of elderberry-flavored cold medicine, I got on another coach and took a circuitous route to North Tawton.

Motion sickness kept me from writing, but the whole time there, I couldn’t shake the scene of last night’s parting. You’re either the wife at home, or you’re the girl on the garden path, I thought. Is this the only choice I have? This was still on my mind when the bus driver called that we’d gotten to North Tawton, and I stumbled off into the street.

As soon as I saw the granite-soup sky, I knew this wouldn’t be what I’d planned. I didn’t feel magical. I didn’t feel touched by some great poetic spirit.

I found a pub with a headless teddy bear outside, which I picked up, thinking it might be good luck. As soon as I got in the pub, someone saw the teddy bear and recognized it as her dog’s, thanking me for “finding it.” I sat down and ordered a pint of beer with the loud crowings of the instantly-recognizable town drunk in the background. I made a mental note to stay away from him and looked around for other locals who looked old enough to remember Plath.

I approached one man and asked him. He shook his head.

“I don’t know who that woman is, but the Poet Laureate used to live here.”

“She lived with him. She was his wife. She died several decades ago.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about, but his wife is still alive. She lives there now.”

Not only was Plath forgotten, but her house was apparently occupied by her widower’s current widow. I asked several more people and got a similar response. The town drunk overheard me, promptly ordered me a beer, and put me in a seat next to him.

He asked me 30 or so times who I was and what I was doing.

Inexplicably convinced that I was an Irish historian, he told me about some man named Ryan who I should meet. I kept correcting him, So to Speak 17

Erin Lyndal Martin

but it soon grew moot. That, and everything I said was met with him asking me, “Deal or no deal?” I answered “Deal,” trying to be positive, but he kissed my hand every time I did so. I started saying “No deal.”

Finally he offered to take me to the Poet Laureate’s house. I jumped at the chance.

“Do you know the person who lives there now?” I asked.

“Mrs. Hughes. She’s a good person. She won’t beat you up or nothing. She’s a good human.”

This was the only chance I’d get. “Let’s go,” I said.

We set off outside, me and the town drunk, whose name was Tom. He was well into his 70s and had a bad limp that he said he’d gotten from his rugby years. He took me to a stationery shop.

This was not Court Green. I had no questions for the stationer, despite Tom’s urging.

“Can we go see Mrs. Hughes?” I asked.

“First, let’s go see her mom,” Tom said.

“Her mom lives here, too?”

“Right there. Let’s go ask her if Carol’s in.”

So I followed along as Tom the town drunk knocked on the door of the mother of the woman who was married to the man Sylvia Plath had been married to.

“This here is Josephine,” Tom said, pointing at me. Okay then, I’d be Josephine….

“She’s writing a book on North Tawton, and she wants to ask you questions,” Tom said.

“I haven’t lived here long. I’m not sure what I could say,” Mrs. Hughes’ mom said.

I tried to correct him with my actual mission but there was confusion. Tom tried to explain, mostly by adding in even more false information about my purpose there. Tom got distracted for a moment and turned away, at which point Mrs. Hughes’ mother turned to me.

“I’ve never seen that man before in my life,” she said, bewildered.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, blushing now. “He claimed he knew you, and I had just been looking for someone to show me the town.

18 So to Speak

Erin Lyndal Martin

I’m a big fan of, of Ted Hughes. I was hoping to see his house here.

I’m sorry. I never meant to bother you.”

“Well, my daughter’s busy today with workmen at the house, and then she’s taking me to the doctor at five. I can call her if you want, but I know she gets tired of people coming by, asking to take pictures of the house and all of that.”

No deal.

“I’m sorry to bother you. We’ll go now,” I said. I had to coax Tom to let us leave, saying we should get back to the pub. We made it back and I chatted with some more locals, one of whom had been friends with Ted Hughes but had never known Plath.

“He’s a local man. We respect his privacy and don’t talk about him,” he said. I nursed a toddy at the bar and thought how wasted this day had been. I checked the timetable for the bus and looked up at the wall clock.

A Grinch-like smile, wonderful and awful, crept to my face.

My daughter’s picking me up at five. The words of Mrs. Hughes’ mother came back to me. That means the house will be empty. Deal. I waited until a few minutes after five for good measure and set off in the direction of the church steeple.

Separated from my house by a row of headstones, Plath writes in “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” I walked through St. David’s Cemetery, looking for the yew tree, then remembered that I didn’t know what a yew tree looked like. A black-and-white cat walked by.

“Excuse me,” I said to the cat. “Do you know where Court Green is?” The cat rolled over on its back and let me scratch its belly for a minute.

I left the cemetery and walked down the street. A high fence appeared to my right, plastered with “No Trespassing” signs. Geez, I thought. What house in this town needs that many “No Trespassing” signs? And then I thought that again. What house in this town needs that many “No Trespassing” signs?

I couldn’t see over the fence. I walked around it to try and catch a glimpse. Then I made out a small gravel driveway that interrupted the fence. Attempting stealth, I darted up the driveway and up to the house. I smiled when I saw it, tears in my eyes. There was a yard sign, overgrown with leaves. I went up to it, holding my breath, So to Speak 19

Erin Lyndal Martin

and moved aside the shrubbery. Court Green, it read. I was here.

I walked around the yard and took pictures of the house. I saw the porch light above the front door, and thought about that light having been on when Plath and Hughes would come home at night, and I thought about the beehives she kept painted with little hearts while she lived here.

I had gotten what I came for, I thought, and walked back to where I was no longer trespassing. The town was already closed up for the day, and I had a long bus ride awaiting me, so I ducked behind the church and peed on the street there, thinking how Sylvia Plath would never have done something so graceless.

That night I slept in a hotel in Exeter beside their own St. David’s Cemetery, the long graves casting shadows as I walked to a food stand for a veggie burger and chips, three pounds. The next morning I rode a bus to Bude, Cornwall, where I sat on the giant rocks at the beach and thought about the trip so far. Darkness came, and I sat up having tea in the hostel’s dining room. Their bookshelf had a biography of Plath.

I opened it to the section about life in North Tawton, started reading, and didn’t stop. The pages were full of descriptions of how miserable she was there, how little she fit in, how nobody recognized her talent. Plath told one story of a lady from the church coming over unannounced. The church lady was apparently horrified to find Plath still in her dressing gown, writing away beside a chamber pot in desperate need of emptying. She and I were bound again, not by poems or bees or sadness or St. David’s Cemetery. We were two women in a small town who didn’t pee in the right places.

It’s been five years since I went to Court Green. It’s also been five years since I had that late-night walk home from Martin—I can still remember the gray of his hoodie being the only light thing in our landscape. I remember following him through the darkness of the garden path, emerging onto the street. I remember waking up in the middle of the night with “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” in my head. And I remember traipsing around North Tawton, looking for the house where Sylvia Plath wrote and waited and left the light on. So maybe their fates are complicit in mine after all. In a way, both Martin and Plath were going through the same struggle: allegiance to 20 So to Speak

Erin Lyndal Martin

a home-life and the desire for the garden path. And there I was on the opposite side of the looking glass, loving every step of the garden path but still wanting home.

So to Speak 21

Freesia McKee

Lucille Max who lost parts of her fingers in a factory machine

accident in 1943 As a child, I cut myself wrong with a meat-knife, once.

It was different, that first time I knew my own heart’s work.

Long blade slipped and I hit a vein spurting on the beat, like a machine, melodic.

I can tell you about desire. My house looks perfect.

A lace glove, a long sleeve, pink mittens knitted by my sister. Cloth sheaths kept close, pulling the arm of my bad side behind me. Capping old lipstick with my left hand.

Kenneth told me there are these cells that generate new regions, taking the form of hair or teeth, even.

They can find inside of you a flesh-grown claw. Your body can grow something that disgusts you.

I was 19 in my first factory job. My dad said it was girls’ work. He wanted us to move into our own place; him and Kenneth didn’t get along.

Both those men were afraid of babies, but I never had any.

And my mother, she has always cooked in another kitchen.

I told you, most women know about blood.

22 So to Speak

Joanna Cattonar

For the High Desert Muse you start you stop put down pick up your pen the desert out there empty bleached as the page you tell yourself she’s come before she’ll come again but why why now why would she dare trouble herself to chance this grief and madness this place sodden with despair in town they dig a playground sandbox up to find a three-year-old his mother strangled and revived, then strangled — twice one woman on the mesa with one dog unearths one bone, and a dozen women and an unborn child in scattered fractals rise

you light a candle nub you burn a sprig of sage

you brew a sweet tea in an ancient mug and reach out for your pen

while the homeless old lie wide-eyed in the dark under the Central bridge waiting for morning while the river flows past them, relentless, deep, beautiful, and cold

So to Speak 23

Alex Pohl

Untitled

Digital photography, black and white 4.85”h x 7.27”w

24 So to Speak

Jessica Glover

Because of the Angels: A Response because the swollen ovary of the female

zucchini flower produces the summer squash

and the purse of yellow

on the vine evinces as two palms

cupped in prayer before the midday blossom because who hears the trumpets

if not the swallowtail butterfly because the black capped tanager wears its veil

same as the cloud forest wears rain

same as the ghost orchid wears air because what cause to question the oriental poppy

the virgin prairie’s arabesque

the dark purple pollen

on the bumble bee’s back because a riffle of ants carries the fleshy seeds

of bloodroot underground because a spade to the heart dyes the dirt red

So to Speak 25

Catherine Kasper

Keeping My Mother’s Brain

I have a CT scan of my mother’s brain in my closet. Occasionally, when I have a second alone––and this is almost always in the morning before I go to teach––I take out the pictures of miniature brains and hold them up to the window. The huge sheets are in their own oversized manila envelopes, and on each piece of black film are twelve photographs. Each of the scans is a white oval, within which swims a fetus-like cortex. As many times as I have done this, I am unable to discover a solution. These are the pictures of a brain that cannot possibly be any part of the person I call “Mother.”

On the CT scan are two hollows to hold her eyes, those eyes I have inherited along with her square jaw prone to TMJ. Here is a page of the accompanying diagnosis: a right subdural fluid collection and a worsening edema of the brain. This is what one interpretation says. The brain is, I think, what Wallace Stevens calls in “The Place of Solitaires”: “a place of perpetual undulation.” “Whether it be in mid-sea / On the dark, green water-wheel, / Or on the beaches, / There must be no cessation….” I have several scans, all of which map a deepening path; the river swells rapidly and in a few days expands upon the surrounding flood plain, saturating the land.

You must wait for absorption, we are told, which is unpredictable. If the flood levels become uncontrollable, a specialist can drill holes through the skull to release the pressure. They can drill holes–– and this they cannot say but must imply––so her head won’t explode.

I keep my mother’s brain in the closet because I could not sleep at night with it stored in the bedroom. I could not eat with it in the kitchen, and I could not work with it in the file cabinet in my office. The same is true for the bathroom, although the medicine cabinet would be too small anyway. These four rooms must remain untouched. These four functions I consider essential if I am going to continue living, long after the river has suffocated her memory.

In my mother’s head is an escalating river of blood. It longs to flow out to the coast and exhaust itself in an ocean. It can no longer be controlled by the pitiful prescription sandbags or by futile surgi26 So to Speak

Catherine Kasper

cal dams. It is time for reclaiming shoreline, for swallowing precious miles of beach, which, perhaps, were originally sea floor. Her brain inside its briny membrane is a marvelous coral, with its undulating edges, and depressions running the length of each hill. Its knobby hemispheres are ridged with unachieved summits. Like anyone, there were things she never got to do. These impressions are etched in like roads seen from an airplane. In places, they are shadowed by an indiscernible blur of hovering clouds. These images remind me of the first pictures of the surface of Mars captured by robotic cameras.

These are the pictures of imminent disaster; I am the keeper of pre-disaster documents. I am also her daughter. But this second fact is only useful for signing papers, papers that do nothing to alter or improve her situation.

My mother’s brain is not without phantoms, specters of what might have been or further implications of a general weakening of the borders. Like her dreams, her history was kept silent, buried in the cities below the surface. Who knows how much shifting of the plates contributed to the increasing angst of the river? Who knows what decaying artifacts warranted a regular sweep of the surface, and how much her desire for silence promoted significant erosion.

I admit I don’t go in the closet until daylight and then––right before leaving––I remove these photographs. I feel compelled to move quickly over subtleties, like reading newspaper headlines while trying to cook breakfast. There is little time to imagine the hats that donned this head, or the jewelry that decorated the ears.

Who will take responsibility for this curious chain of events, which occurred even though she had consulted several studied specialists? Who can predict the exact time of an earthquake? The tremors can be charted on seismic instruments; the crevasse in the earth can only be assessed after survivors have been pulled from under fallen debris. We are waiting, although signs tell us the odds are unlikely that anyone is still breathing. In my nightmares, we are digging out the bodies, and eventually one of them is the mother I remember.

She will emerge slightly shrunken, extracted from a fissure between right and left hemispheres, a shy young woman about my age who was never permitted to age normally. Even after such an impact, her unscarred body will remind us of the surgery she has yet to experiSo to Speak 27

Catherine Kasper

ence, the future anguish that has not yet contorted the map of her body. Would that we could revive her, now that she is free of the cerebral empire?

I am forced to roll her over, turn her opalescent spine to view her face. And I am forced to see those eyes that are two hollows, the decaying flesh that covers jawbones, and the bloody umbilical that connects her to the catastrophic occipital. Remarkably, she is breathing.

I have no influence over whether or not she should be severed, or if severing is more satisfactory than following disaster. By law, she is required to live interminably, the hematoma growing in subtentorial regions. I am only responsible for seeing, ironically, that her drowning body is bathed and hydrated, while the ventricles narrow and the river erases history.

I keep the pictures in my closet because no one else will have them: not the specialists, not the rest of my family. No one wants to be reminded that there is a general global warming causing a meltdown of our polar caps. I keep them because someone has to. Because this gray womb is, of course, where I was first conceived. And so it is not beyond possibility that I would imagine a day when––while glancing at the pictures––I would discover a solution. One instruments of prediction are incapable of identifying. It’s not likely, but I persist.

I keep the pictures in my closet because they are my mother now, and also, so I can remember that they are not my mother. So quickly, the human I have known has been reduced to a two-dimensional image. In my closet’s subconscious, her brain floats, drifts, floods. My mother has become river, mountains, valley, a tide of pitiful metaphors.

Only an approximation, they are the beautiful and inaccurate clothing that feathers reality. Unlike the stark photograph, which is also an image, they fabricate a home for my mother made of the elements of this earth. They do not, perhaps, tell you what you need to know about her. Those needs now change with her. For Stevens, there was a “palm at the end of the mind,” a “gold-feathered bird,” who “sings in the palm” (Stevens, “Of Mere Being”). At this early hour, sitting on the floor in my closet, I want more metaphors, mixed or not, more of what is rhetorically stunning and scenically inaccurate.

28 So to Speak

Gigi Marks

Composition I want to lose the composition of your cruelty, mixed into assurances, mixed into all that love and care, when you cook and you serve me and bring me what I want to eat, and I wonder what that losing will look like, will it be the loss of you or will it be only the loss of the imposition of cruelties? I like to look away from the dinner table, out the window to the fall aster, purple and white, and goldenrod all tall and bright on edges of field, wood, road. I want to lose the composition of your cruelty more than I want to lose you.

So to Speak 29

Sarah A. Chavez

This, Like So Much Like the night of my first kiss.

I was supposed to have been home by 10 p.m., but we just kept walking, our fingers interlaced, talking about Clive Barker books. When we got to my front door, the porch light was out and I thought it lucky, because this time I’d remembered to leave my retainer at home in case this would be the night. And it was.

We stood in the half dark, the glow from the street lamp back-lighting his silhouette. He ran the back of his finger down my cheek, while his other hand slid across my neck and under my hair. We were smart enough not to talk. He merely bent down and touched his lips to mine – sweetly – before our mouths filled with the taste of one another.

I’d never felt so full. My body burning and relaxed, my mind for once not racing.

I went in the house, feeling dizzy, giddy, sat on the couch and tried to preserve the feeling, tuck it away where I could always come back to find it, but from the other room I could hear my mom’s shrill screaming, her boyfriend pleading. The small mobile home shook as he tried to slam the bedroom door 30 So to Speak

Sarah A. Chavez

in her face, but she followed him, pushing at his back, yanking his shirt, yelling all the while Don’t you walk away from me! They brushed past me and out the front door into the cool night air I’d just left.

After the screech of his tires faded down the block, my mom stomped back into the house, her face twisted in anger.

The fair skin of her neck blazed as she grabbed a glass from the table.

The sweet high ting reverberated in the shower of shining shards that bloomed from the newly formed hollow in the living room wall.

And now is like that, like so much in this life – no moment of happiness is without cost.

So to Speak 31

Allison Amend

Feels Like Drowning

Dalia meets Matt one afternoon near Buckingham Fountain when Matt, drunkenly chasing an overthrown football pass, steps in Dalia’s picnic, splattering her dress with strawberry juice from the berries she is cutting.

He apologizes profusely and offers to walk her to Randolph Station to catch her train back to Hyde Park. While they walk, Matt tells her his father is the abattoir king of Chicago. Their family has been here for generations; they are rich. There is even a street in Chicago named after Matt’s maternal grandfather. Matt goes to Northwestern University, where he plays second-string junior varsity quarterback.

Dalia works as a secretary in the pool at a factory belonging to a friend of her grandfather’s. The Rosen factory makes zippers on the South Side of Chicago. The steno girls devote days to typing up hundreds of pages of boring inventories and taking shorthand for dozens of tedious letters, gossiping in German or Yiddish. Dalia never dreamed that zippers could require so much paper.

At 20, Dalia has given up hope of growing taller. She has also mostly given up hope of ever having long slim legs. The exercises recommended by Harper’s do little to whittle her calves down into shapely funnels. Her bust is too big for her short waist and her hair… her hair is a lost cause—curly and unruly and dark. She tried to dye it once, to match her mother’s, but Sophie is a natural blonde, and Dalia ended up looking like a yellowed piano key and not at all like Carole Lombard.

Dalia is cold in her wet dress, and so Matt gives her his jacket.

He writes down her telephone extension. The train is half out of the station when she realizes she is still wearing his jacket. Surely Matt will call to retrieve it, and Dalia spends a nail-biting fortnight waiting for the telephone to ring. “What is wrong with you?” her mother asks.

At night, when her sisters are sleeping, she sneaks the jacket out of the closet and brings it into bed with her. It smells musty, like 32 So to Speak

Allison Amend

wet wool, but still Dalia imagines, whispering endearments into its lapel, sticking her hand in its pocket.

Dalia’s mother watches from the window as this goyishe Matt walks her daughter to the car. Sophie is realistic. Dalia’s always been attractive, but her features are, well, ethnic, Sophie thinks. Like her father. Still, she is pretty enough, more so now that she has a light to her eyes. Sophie knows that light. That’s the unmistakable sign of a woman in love.

Matt opens the door with a blithe insouciance that she has seen before. She remembers her own past, looking for someone to make her feel beautiful. The memory still brings the sharp echo of pain, like a trick knee.

And then Dalia turns to the house. And in that glance, Sophie sees what Matt wants from Dalia. She sees the adoring gleam in Dalia’s eye. Any boy would want to see that look directed at him. But the look he returns her is one of amusement, playfulness. He throws his hat onto the backseat of the car. He is a wasteful man, thinks Sophie.

He will consume her and then he will toss her away, like the skin of a fruit sucked dry.

After Matt picks her up, they drive north to get Chester and Walt. It’s improper for her to be out with three men, but she can’t very well refuse to go now.

In the car, Walt leans across the back seat and whispers in Matt’s ear.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll pretend she’s Italian.”

“She doesn’t look Italian,” Chester says.

“Matt,” Walt says, “It’s the Saddle and Cycle Club.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t know how well she’ll fit in,” Walt says.

“Because…?” Matt lets the sentence trail off. Walt is reluctant to speak the words out loud. Matt continues, “What are they gonna do, kick my family out?”

The boys all laugh again, and Dalia feels a blush rising to her ears, as though the joke is at her expense and she doesn’t understand it.

So to Speak 33

Allison Amend

The Saddle and Cycle Club looks like a movie set. Girls are bedecked in shiny dresses; boys wear tuxedo suits with tails. Dalia wishes she had thought to wear gloves. There are flowers and confetti strewn all over the room. The tables all have centerpieces of carved pumpkins and Indian corn.

They sit down and Matt introduces her to the crowd assembled at their table. Chester’s date, Joanne, turns to face Dalia. “And where do you go to school?”

“She’s done,” Matt saves her.

“Have we met? Door County, maybe?”

“They summer…further south,” Matt says. The comment draws snickers from the table.

Joanne stands up. “I’m going to powder my nose,” she announces. All the men stand up too, so Dalia does as well. Joanne holds out her gloved hand and Chester gives her a few coins. Matt does the same for Dalia.

Joanne grabs Dalia’s hand, the palm damp through her gloves.

It is probably condensation from her drink, Dalia knows, still the imperfection is comforting. They weave through the crowd, Joanne stopping to admire someone’s dress or shake a hand. Dalia has never seen so many diamonds, dangling from ears, hanging on pendants, poking out of rings.

They step into the hall. It is cooler there, and Joanne bends close to Dalia. At first, Dalia thinks she is going to kiss her, but she merely brings her lips close to Dalia’s ears. “My grandfather was Jewish,” she says. “Don’t tell a soul. No one knows.”

In the bathroom, it takes Dalia a while to rearrange her dress after fighting with the girdle. Joanne is with a pack of girls, putting on her lipstick. They are all bent close.

“And he said,” Joanne waves the lipstick dramatically, “Come on, darling, don’t be a tease, you know I love you. Don’t you love me back?’” The girls all laugh.

“Did you do it?” a young girl gasps. She looks as though she has grown taller than she had ever planned on being; her arms and legs hang down like wilted flowers.

“Well sure I did.” Joanne puts the capped lipstick in her 34 So to Speak

Allison Amend

mouth and draws it out slowly, her lips still around it, like a popsicle.

“I want to marry him, don’t I?”

Another girl asks, “What’s it taste like?”

“Like the ocean,” Joanne says.

“Like lemon meringue pie,” jokes another girl, mimicking a popular radio advertisement for an arthritis tonic, her strapless dress slipping down on her small bosom.

Dalia and Matt walk along the shore of Lake Michigan. “Are you cold?”

“No,” Dalia says. She is cold, physically, but she has a warm knot of excitement in her stomach.

“Have you ever tried to count the stars?” Matt asks.

“No,” Dalia laughs.

Suddenly Matt’s face is close. His mouth finds hers and covers it. Dalia stifles her squeak of surprise. She has never been kissed before. Is she doing it properly? She’s practiced, of course, on a pillow, and watched with a scholar’s interest the movie kisses she’s seen, but now he is putting his tongue inside her mouth. It doesn’t taste like the ocean at all. It tastes like the champagne she drank earlier.

Before Dalia knows what has happened, he has pushed her to the sand. She worries briefly about her dress, but Matt seems to like it. He is wiggling around on top of her and making small moaning noises. Then he stops, and Dalia hears him unzip himself. “Just kiss it a little,” he begs. “Come on, you’re such a tease.”

She is lightheaded from the alcohol, and all Dalia wants right now in the world, with all her heart, is to be married to someone as vibrant and comfortable as Matt. And so she lets him guide her head down.

“Don’t choke,” he says, pulling on her hair. “Just a little more.”

She hadn’t imagined that men would be like this. She always assumed it’d be something softer, smaller. Matt gives a quick jerk and there is a liquid inside her mouth, salty like a sore-throat remedy. Is this what the ocean tastes like? She’s never been to the ocean. She wants to spit it out, but Matt holds her head so she has to swallow.

“Oh, you’re such a love,” he says, wiping her mouth with the So to Speak 35

Allison Amend

back of his hand. “Shall I take you home, now?”

Matt hands her the flask as they stare out into the gray water.

Dalia hugs her knees to her chest. It is November now, and the wind is off the lake, icy and sharp.

“Hey Dal.” Dalia is never sure if he’s calling her a nickname, or if he’s calling her “doll.” “Hey Dal, I have to tell you something.

Next week, my… Julie gets home from France. Julie’s—it’s just that Julie, she’s my girl. Our parents…. Come on, now, don’t cry. Don’t we have fun, haven’t we had fun?”

Dalia nods. The realization is swift and thorough. He was never going to marry her, a short, dark Jewess. Dalia doesn’t belong at the Saddle and Cycle Club. He brought her there as a joke, and she had played along, aching for acceptance. For him to marry her would be unthinkable, unnatural even, like marrying a devoted pet or a beloved stuffed toy, and equally as unlikely. Dalia’s disappointment bobs like a floating apple in her chest. “Sure, we’ve had fun.”

“You’re ok, right? You’re a great girl. Come here, give me a kiss.”

Dalia obediently slides toward him and opens her mouth. She is used to the worm kisses, now. They even feel good, like the first warm sun of the spring. She can feel him harden against her.

“Once more, now, for old time’s sake.” Dalia loves it when he begs her, panting like this. It is the only time his need for her seems as great as her need for him. She can feel him straining as she lowers her head.

This time, when she’s bobbing, when he’s almost finished, she feels like she is a buoy on the ocean, and for the first time the girls’ words in the bathroom make sense. It does taste like the ocean. It feels like drowning.

36 So to Speak

Alex Pohl

Untitled

Digital photography, black and white 5.07”h x 6.58”w

So to Speak 37

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

from Distant Landscapes bird outside a window flounder territory flagger border between body and a poem body and a forest mind without body shattering of words landscape lodged in my bones comparatively few things stand for words in the world in a pink house with dwarfed trees on a deadend street when she saw her everytime the word homespun sprung to mind checked pleated dress and bangs pleading pleasing frugal she lived in a dump if she could just see people without seeing them eviction notice sensed on hands a fractured pulse in their lair called the vampire teacher because of his fangs unsay lodestar tunable as fair as she he unsung form and dignity thither and back usurping kick up mind, another path to me sorry leg betwixt sludge cometh render under caesar tumble oath to pardon me a horse ran so hard his heart burst it’s not my shaky mental state livery of a nun barren sister his judgment look altar protect virgin thorn skull pantomime stew is richer and richter don’t sit on the thing i love more dismal than the sky needles in my arms children in a forlorn park i hate this body, it’s stuck 38 So to Speak

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

wimpy missal much to be indirect about is ouch for losing crippled bonsai the plebeian garden is up and coming quotidian of course, no sex for a long time if she could not see the pain on their faces hoping to run into a stranger on the train a handsome ouch he’d left that area months before moving back into his neighborhood did i sit on your hands train warped and tilted tiled and faces at the door moving backward two lovers like broken statues in a dim park beyond the window in the architecture of thought i can’t touch a wall room in which you are trapped do you know how many times i woke up i have tried to stop wanting stooped, you see architecture only felt one should always remain alert about her personal security why does my mother smile when afraid scratch my eczema make it

more red wandering light is panic the fact that i am moving a person in nature frozen torn sky brain injury culinary watery world most girls value their dolls as extensions of themselves liberty and dependence i could not appreciate the scene or the meaning of the past in a town symbolizing isolation and rejection implode my car happening unconsciously without my permission a distracting loss of the self already vacating space So to Speak 39

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

searching for but not finding what has disappeared of what the world is full i keep returning to the dilapidated shopping district reminding me of my mother just before the sun sets rivers pale and flickering damp smells fill my nostrils dirt streaked concrete building with large letters picturing myself in that window plaid torn curtains next to a dingy beige lampshade above an empty flowerbox an old man tries to mend a brazier on the side of the road variations on death after yesterday just cause is a tubal ligation manufacture evidence testify whorl passing the window a moment ago differences in social status inward light language fails the shortest path to a distant point is a bony mansion unusual loop reclining restraining order quagmire in disobedient machines ephermated, conjugal i think to shudder shuttered window strictly forbidden first responder skid row a mast cell sideburn cliff hanger is drone surveillance potpourri amnesia prison memoir fluid ways of being in the world a shrine in trouble shared anger of clouds iconic funeral in the capital my tired face a doll’s mercury poisoning makes gold positioning and missile launch schematics treasure stolen and failure not an option out of bonds pithy posse penance pity party pen name future died love triangle has grown so dark and fades so gradually mouth of leaves wrapped in silence a boot on the militant neck is talking point semiotics

40 So to Speak

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

death in life prison without bars nothing touching her so i covered my face she covered the photograph of a piece of lemon pie with a man blindfolded, a cat, a fork, a tampon, a baby’s head the teacher was a fat balding man who didn’t listen where once a person was farewell skimpy village and tart thicket a mountain is quiet with too much time and no balcony to jump from your skin is inhospitable enemy audition imaginary portrait sedated reflection a city always falling to avoid further inconvenience i too find the buildings terrifying erring the present glimmer of hope two doors down edge of the forest mob of culture (a dab of ) a person i pretend catalogue of a world disarray and impossible floating in your bones to become the building distant match melody in the meadow alone in a crowd doorways always empty people moving backwards i doubted that words had meaning metaphors sickened hardened and died comparatively few words stand for things in the world imagining describing the building to somebody walking beside you alone on the street, what eyes don’t tell

So to Speak 41

Laura Passin

In Stubenville They peed on her. That’s how you know she’s dead,

because someone pissed on her.

—Michael Nodianos, laughing 1.

The boys have been boys.

They’ve gone to boy jail.

2.

The girl, they thought as good as dead.

You can do anything to the dead: we only remember them when they are useful.

But the dead girl was not dead—she was a girl

instead. To be a girl at a party in Ohio

is to be as good as dead.

The boys will be boys

until they are men.

The girls will be dead.

3.

The girls are anatomical

sketches: here you dissect the body, here is where

the flesh splits clean open.

42 So to Speak

Laura Passin

Here is where the heart used to beat.

Here are the pearls that were her eyes.

4.

The girl was dead.

The girl was a thing that once, if you looked at it

from just the right angle, may have been a person. Not

a boy. The girl was slung and carried, hands and feet,

trussed animal.

The girl woke up naked, shoeless,

in a basement. Surrounded.

5.

The boys were shocked: they had held her

funeral. The boys had been boys.

6.

The girl raised herself up, Lazarus,

and testified.

She told us what it is like:

being dead.

It is like being a girl

where boys are boys.

It is any basement, Ohio.

So to Speak 43

Becca J. R. Lachman

That time of year when cherry blossoms are enough of a shelter. Walking home, skirted college girls are safe. One hill of the oldest cemetery covered in spring beauties—earth sending up its flair of confidence. Once a year, this week without humidity, no mosquitoes at dusk.

Not yet: sudden storms that tip over trailers. Far in the future: drenched backs of July. She who’s been drinking will hitch that ride with a 3 a.m. stranger and will simply be taken home. Introducing the violets, our fierce Greek chorus, and magnolias belting Wagner until the first rain. Beauty after a long thaw: this is the name we’ll answer to, not what the truck beds full of white boys who think since they’re truck beds full of white boys in sun they can shout any word, any name, and we’ll just have to take it in. After this week, green will be what forces out the gas-guzzling mower. I pray for my hair to turn gray some days; I take another road home, in case.

But for now, the tulips open fists pre-hollowed by someone much gentler than me. Even red, they are cradleble. We who look down can watch them let go, one glossy finger curling in at a time, knowing soon they will give in, they will drift on their own to the ground.

44 So to Speak

Meredith Trede

Behind the Looking Glass Her she-who-was blooms a ghostly presence in the antique armoire’s clouded mirror, mars of time dissolved, bringing back the seeking face of a girl who wanted and feared her wanting in equal measure. She crosses the bedroom, climbing alone under the duvet, shivering on cold cotton in the empty seaside air. Fragile glimmer of lost beauty, youth, surfacing only to haunt: gone, more to be mourned. Desire unbidden, unspoken. Too late. Tonight wanting only the veil of sleep, the shadow self.

So to Speak 45

Alex Pohl

Untitled

Digital photography, black and white 7.5”h x 5”w 46 So to Speak

Sara Erdmann

City Hall

There was only the sound of her boots packing the snow as Willa rounded the corner of City Hall. Over the doors was a semicircle of glass, rounded block letters, a stone carving of a bearded man with hair molded like a candle flame. Willa positioned herself on the front walk, which had not as much been plowed as flattened by foot traffic, and tensed her muscles to stay warm. The globes of light on the lampposts were on, had been on all night, and gave the snow a pale yellow wash. The stone rail framing the steps was wide enough to sit on but the cold would seep through her pants so she paced instead, lifting onto her toes until her calves burned. It was silly to have come so early. It was before eight and so nothing was open, not even the front office where an older man in a light blue uniform sat chewing his thumbnail and listening to talk radio. Someone would arrive soon with a large ring of keys and unlock the front doors for her. Willa felt the numbness drain from her fingers as she thought of the heat churning from the radiators inside.

Today it was Gretchen, a middle-aged woman with the streak of grey in her hair, who appeared first. She was wearing slacks under a long coat that belted around her middle and she looked agitated, perhaps because it was her day to arrive early. She may have slept through her alarm, had to rush herself in the shower, gotten a run in her stockings but worn them anyway. It was a day that hadn’t begun as she had hoped. Her eyes were a glassy blue and the tip of her nose was red from the cold. Gretchen was sniffling and dabbing at her nose with a tissue that she took from her jacket pocket but she stopped, as if startled, when she saw Willa waiting there by the door. It was the sixth time Willa had been there in as many days and her face warmed with guilt.

“Good morning,” Willa said.

Gretchen stuffed the tissue back in her coat pocket. “You know tomorrow’s Sunday,” she said.

“I do.” Willa smiled, trying to appear gracious. “I won’t be here.”

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Sara Erdmann

Gretchen nodded and pushed the key into the lock. It was just one lock, the simple kind that opened with a plain key in the knob itself, not an alarm system or double bolt that stiffened in the cold. It seemed so simple, commonplace, their assuredness that no one had the slightest interest in the books and papers that could be found in City Hall. How easily Willa could have broken in, if she had wanted to.

Willa followed Gretchen inside and stopped abruptly to wait for Gretchen to step out of her boots—the entryway was narrow and Gretchen was unconcerned that Willa had been caught behind her—and slip her stockinged feet into the navy pumps that fell with a clatter onto the stone floor.

Willa tucked past her and went straight to the Larenbaum Room—up the stone steps and to the right, through a heavy wooden door, ignoring the grumbling in her stomach. She would need to go back to Cornerstone Bakery and get coffee and something to eat, but she concentrated best in the morning and refused to break until she was starving. The motel where she was staying provided hot coffee in the lobby but it was terrible, weak and bitter. Instead she took a banana from a bowl and ate carefully around the soft brown spots that her mother had always called brown sugar.

“Those are the sweet spots,” her mother would tell her, but Willa knew better.

The papers were where she had left them, on a long table of soft pine with years of handwriting pressed into its surface. It pleased her to see her set-up untouched, as though this small collection of things was someone she recognized, sitting patiently, awaiting her return. This room was, despite her efforts with the motel, the one thing that seemed familiar to her about this city. She felt like she was back in graduate school, the way she would arrive at her study carrel and settle into the chair, take out her yellow legal pad and write the date carefully at the top with the black felt-tipped pen. She began to leaf through her print-outs, most of them grainy and difficult to read, copied from the microfiche onto flimsy sheets of white paper that felt slippery beneath her fingers. Nothing had been converted to digital files, which surprised her at first, but of course it shouldn’t have. So far she’d come across next to nothing she hadn’t known already; the 48 So to Speak

Sara Erdmann

same five photos printed over and over again, the same quotations from the sheriff (now dead), the elderly man who found the body while walking his dog (also dead), and her father. For the first time since her arrival she felt the gnawing frustration of how little she had accomplished. Something greater than disappointment.

The most recent article she could find, published in the late 80s after an anonymous tip that led to the dragging of the Mountsberg Reservoir, stated that the victim’s family had since relocated to the States and could not be contacted for comment. She was family; had anyone ever tried to contact her? How would she know? Her father wouldn’t have told her about any call, and then there were all those years living alone in Philadelphia, without even an answering machine. It amazed her how easily she could recall what it felt like to live alone, the way she left bras hanging in the shower, ate Wonder Bread and imported cheese, never bothered to sign up for cable television or turn on her air conditioner. She listened to French news on the radio, hardly understanding a word.

But that was ages ago. Edward, the man with whom she’d been living for the better part of the last ten years, hadn’t come with her to Guelph. He’d offered to, of course—when they were sitting at the dinner table, as she packed her suitcase on their bed, when she brushed her teeth the morning before she left—but she’d insisted that it was something she should do alone.

“You’d be bored to tears,” she said. “I’ll just be reading and sitting around in the library.”

As it turned out, City Hall was where she would find the papers. The library, she was told, had run out of space and only carried newspapers after 1995 in their stacks.

“I wouldn’t have to help with anything. I could just be there, even work from the hotel.”

“No, no. It’s okay.” She’d looked at him, the way his thick brown hair held the light from the window, his oval face and narrow features, long fingers that scratched at his beard. He somehow still held a bit of a tan from the summer before, a tint of olive to his skin that she’d always envied. “I’m okay on my own.”

And she had been. The drive was long but not unbearable, mostly scenic, evergreen and pine trees that lined the thruway, banks So to Speak 49

Sara Erdmann

of dirty snow, the occasional abandoned car buried waist-deep. It had taken just over five hours, I-90 through western New York and then onto 405 West when she crossed the border in Ontario. Suddenly the speed limit signs read 100 KPH; Willa couldn’t recall what this meant, so she drove slowly and let the locals blow past her. She hoped her New York license plate would appease them, or at least register a moment’s sympathy. (It was only once she arrived in Guelph that she realized kilometers per hour were printed on her speedometer.

It seemed impossible that she had not noticed this before.) She had stopped for snacks and coffee along the way, eaten a bag of salted nuts that did nothing but make her thirsty. It seemed she’d hardly driven at all when she saw a sign reading Last Rest Stop in U.S. and immediately decided she should stop for gas, although she still had half a tank. She decided she might be confused by the pumps in Ontario, but part of her knew it was only the sign, the way it stood like a beacon, leaving her no excuse if she left the country unprepared, that made her turn on her blinker and slip into the right lane. Only for that moment had she wished Edward was there with her, to laugh at her for her obedience, but even then she’d known it would have been harder if he was in the passenger seat asking her questions, trying to feel out how she was doing, making jokes about Canadian pronunciations of “about” and “sorry.”

On top of the stack of papers was a blurred photograph of Willa’s mother, lipsticked and thin. She looked at it briefly, folded the paper over so it was no longer visible, and began to read. Most of it was repetitive, things she’d already read, the same handful of details released by the police in the days after the body was found. There was a lot of terse language, sly shots at the investigators for things they hadn’t done or had done carelessly. Eager young reporters resentful of the injustices committed, demanding further investigation for the safety of all Guelph’s citizens. She glanced up at the top of the page.

This one was from 1978, almost three years since the case had gone cold. She’d gone to that very same police station three times since she arrived in Guelph, and each time someone had turned her away, told her they were sorry but they couldn’t comment on open cases. Most of them were younger than she was, receptionists typing her mother’s name into the computer as though she might have an outstanding 50 So to Speak

Sara Erdmann

parking ticket or need a permit to burn leaves.

Edward called her as soon as she arrived. She’d just gotten back from the market with microwave Indian meals and red apples and a jar of peanut butter. She was sitting up in the motel room bed, her legs crossed at the ankles, trying to read an article from The New Yorker while CTV reported about some benign vandalism in a local high school. The station was replaying shaky footage of a graffitied cement wall, blurring out where the student had clearly written “cock” in red paint, when her phone rang.

“How’s it going out there?” She could hear Edward’s concern; she recognized it as the way he spoke to his mother after her stroke.

As if she was delicate, as if he could hurt her with his voice. “You going to be out early tomorrow?”

“I’m sure I will. We’ll see if I’m able to sleep here. The room’s a little musty,” she looked around, taking in the cabbage roses on the wallpaper and the scratchy maroon blanket. “I’m already imagining fleas. Bedbugs.”

“Is it dirty? How’s the bathroom?”

“It’s fine.”

“If it’s unsanitary, you should—”

“It’s okay. Really. I wanted to stay here.”

If Edward had come with her, they would have had to stay somewhere else. He wouldn’t have been able to tolerate the grime in the bathtub, the half-roll of paper sitting on the back of the toilet.

“Is it the same?”

“Not really.” To tell the truth, she wasn’t even sure it was the right place. She could hardly remember. It had been renovated, and she was pretty sure the entrance faced a different road than it had years earlier, as if the entire building had been turned around. It was possible this was a different motel entirely, one that she’d managed to morph into what she’d been looking for. She tried to picture her mother sitting on the bed next to her but couldn’t get a clear image of what she looked like. Did they have a room that faced the highway?

Or were they facing the cement swimming pool that was covered now, noticeable only because of the dented fence that surrounded it? It didn’t really make any difference when she thought about it, whether this was the place, but it had seemed important when she So to Speak 51

Sara Erdmann

booked it.

She told Edward: She would stay exactly where she and her mother had stayed the week their apartment flooded, when her father was off doing work in B.C. and couldn’t get home to help with the water that had risen six inches from the carpet. She remembered the way her mother stood in her rain boots and neatly packed a suitcase for each of them, tucked Willa’s slippers in the front pocket of her luggage, saying it would feel fine, just like home. They’d grown comfortable once they settled into the motel, tucked into the big bed together, spending their evenings fiddling with the television antennae, trying to get a clear picture of Ed Sullivan, eating chips from the vending machine down the hall and falling asleep in their clothes. It wasn’t until her father returned home that her mother cried, said how frustrating it had all been, staying in a room that smelled like cigarettes, how their carpets were ruined. Willa had felt betrayed, seeing her mother act as if it had all been so terrible.

Anyway, any motel would have changed in over 30 years.

Everything would have been replaced, rugs and bed spreads and tacky wall art. The place they stayed no longer existed, even if it was the same building.

“Call me if you can’t sleep,” Edward said. “I’ll be up for a while working. I’m trying to get this piece finished for tomorrow and I’ve got a ways to go.”

Edward wrote for The New York Times Magazine, those longer, nearly sentimental pieces that most people skimmed over and then used as fodder for conversation in coffee shops and teachers’ lounges.

Proof that they did, in fact, pay attention to what was going on in the world, even if such erudition was limited to winter travel and recipes for cooked apples.

“Did you read about that new film director, that independent guy, the one who’s denying the Holocaust?”

Willa didn’t remember what piece he was working on, but she didn’t have the energy to ask. It hardly mattered, since he put the same agonizing hours into everything he wrote. He was sitting at his big mahogany desk, she was sure, wearing sweatpants and a fleece jacket, wool socks, wire-rimmed glasses. He had a cold mug of tea just out of his reach. He would stand up every few minutes and walk 52 So to Speak

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into the kitchen, look out the window, pinch his thumb and forefinger over his bottom lip. Even on nights when she went to bed early she heard him, nine steps to the kitchen, nine steps back. Reheating his tea only to forget it again. The floor buckling under his weight.

Willa held her hand against her chest and counted her heartbeats. She thought she’d feel her mother everywhere here, on every street corner, in the window of every restaurant. If she still lived anywhere, surely it would be here. There were a handful of things she hadn’t forgotten about her mother, the way she’d instructed her to blow on food at the dinner table, and to eat all her Halloween candy at once so it wouldn’t rot her teeth. Her mother had been the one who taught how to protect her glasses when she fell on the playground. Everything about winter—the feeling of the plastic candles they placed in the windows when she gripped them in her fist, the warmth of the bulbs as they lit her hand in a fleshy orange glow. The way her mother sat in a chair by the spindly Christmas tree every night, reading magazines by the dim colored lights, and the way she used to bribe Willa’s father to leave it up past the New Year. But from there it was a lot of vague smells and sounds, a combination of memory and photographs, things her dad had mentioned and she pretended to recall. Her father was remarried now, living in Dallas with a woman called Dot whose hair was just a shade blonder than grey. They had two kids of their own with whom Willa made desultory conversation over the holidays and then didn’t speak to for the rest of the year.

Willa looked back down at the printed sheets of microfiche and flipped through them one after another. There was one picture of her mother’s thin sneaker—the laces strung out against the pavement in a crooked S—that sickened her. It was mentioned in a majority of the articles—blood on the shoelace that didn’t belong to her mother.

They’d tested nearly everyone she knew, even Willa, just to rule them out, but the police were never able to match the blood to anyone else. This was before they were able to test for DNA and eliminated thousands of people with the click of a button. She put those photocopies in a second pile face down. The only photos of her mother’s face were pleasant, a couple pretty shots that her father had given the police when he came home from work and found two uniformed ofSo to Speak 53

Sara Erdmann

ficers at his front door. One showed her hair clipped neatly at the base of her neck and a dark stain on her lips, the smooth boatneck of what looked to be a dark colored dress. Her mother looked young, just married, and Willa realized that it would have been more important to her father that her mother looked nice in the photo than that it was an accurate likeness. Her father had told her what the picture was from at some point but she couldn’t recall now. The other showed her mother as Willa remembered her, looking straight at the camera and smiling in a thick-collared grey coat. Willa knew this picture well. If it was zoomed out, she would be there, standing at her mother’s side in a wool coat and dress, six years old. They were going to the Christmas pageant at the church. Her mother had just torn a hole in her stocking and would insist the camera be held high so it didn’t capture the imperfection.

“Excuse me?”

Willa turned around and saw a young man holding a stack of books in his arms. He had a narrow face and a crooked mouth; he wasn’t smiling but his face held the friendly openness of someone just about to laugh.

“May I join you?”

She must have made a face because he backed up a half step, as if she’d come at him.

“Oh, sure, sure,” Willa’s voice came out gravelly. She realized she had hardly spoken all day—all week, really—and was out of practice. She cleared her throat and then gathered her things and slid them so they covered only one half of the table, gesturing for the man to take the other half.

“Thank you.” The man sat down and settled his books into piles of two. There were at least ten of them in all, all fat and dulllooking with dark-colored spines. Willa couldn’t help but stare; she tried to make out the titles. They were all related to legal proceedings, something about land law in Ontario or housing regulation. He must have been doing a project of some kind, perhaps he went to the University.

“Are you a graduate student?” she imagined herself asking, although she knew she wouldn’t. He wore a thin wedding band that he thumbed as he read, occasionally bringing it up to his mouth; she 54 So to Speak

Sara Erdmann

eard the faint click of it hitting his teeth. Recently married, she deh cided. He hadn’t even gotten used to the weight of the gold band on his finger.

Willa tried to return to what she’d been doing but couldn’t concentrate. She was listening to the sound of his breathing, hearing him shift around in his chair, inhaling the faint scent of cologne or aftershave, or maybe just soap. It occurred to her for half a second that he could be her mother’s killer, that it would all be perfectly ironic, like a play where the main character falls in love with the man who murdered her mother, but she knew he was at least 30 years too young. He was probably born right around the time her mother was killed.

She’d have to find somewhere else to work. It was well past ten now and she needed food. She pushed out her chair and began to neaten her piles, separating the papers into what she wanted to keep and what she could recycle.

“I’m sorry. Have I run you out?” The boy’s eyes were a muddy shade of green. He was thin-lipped, yes, but, standing above him, she decided that he had a nice, elongated face. Not just narrow. Thin and a bit gangly in the limbs. His wife would find him quite handsome.

Bookish.

“No, no, I’ve just realized I’ve found all I can.”

“Doing some historical research?” he asked.

“Something like that.” She felt her neck grow warm and went back to her piles, trying to look occupied. She counted the sheets faintly under her breath, hoping she appeared busy, as if she was making important calculations that would inhibit her from further conversation.

“Same here. What are you researching?”

There was nothing flirtatious in the way he spoke, but it still surprised her the way he pressed on. Usually it was older men who approached her for conversation, began to tell her stories on trains or while waiting for a doctor’s appointment. It was her hair: Long and dark, it made her appear younger than she was. She tried to ignore them but they were always deliberately cheerful, refusing to sense her disinterest. One of the side effects of being a woman—being deemed open to conversation at all times.

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“Oh,” Willa half-laughed, embarrassed, as though she’d been caught doing something ridiculous. “It’s actually my mother. I’m doing research on my mother.”

“Oh. A notable woman?” he asked. His Oxford shirt was visible at the wrists where he’d rolled up the sleeves of his sweater. It was wrinkly, as though he’d pulled it straight from the laundry. A generation beyond irons, she thought.

“Yes,” Willa said.

“Well, I’ve lived here my whole life. I mean, my parents may have known your mother if she’s from Guelph. What’s her name?”

Willa tried to think of another name but all she could think of were famous people, screen actors and authors. She was caught off guard and felt uncomfortable thinking of lying to this young man who seemed so pleasant. A kid doing research at the library on a Saturday. A future academician.

Janis Joplin, she wanted to say. Shirley Bassett.

“Susan Morin.”

The man’s face didn’t falter. “Sounds familiar,” he said. He knitted his brows. “Was she a teacher in the area? I may have had her.”

“She was murdered.”

There was a beat of silence where Willa felt the warm slickness that came over her every time she told anyone.

“When I was young,” he said slowly. His face was straight now, not shocked but expressionless. He nodded his head. “I remember. My parents used to talk about it. Only thing like that that’s ever happened around here.”

He must have been older than she thought. Willa felt a familiar sense of guilt, as though her mother had done something wrong by scaring the town that way, becoming the kind of horror story that children remembered their whole lives.

“I assume I would’ve heard if they’d found the man,” he said.

Willa nodded. “And you’ve come out here to learn something?” Willa nodded again. “And have you?”

“Some. Not really.” Willa lifted the stack of papers in her hand. “Lots of coverage, a few pictures, people pointing fingers at the town or the police... Nothing I couldn’t have figured. But I felt the 56 So to Speak

Sara Erdmann

need to see for myself.” She wondered how she was able to discuss so blithely what she’d been incapable of explaining to Edward. “I guess I thought maybe it would help me to know the details.”

“You don’t live here now,” he said.

“No. New York. We left a couple years later—my father and I did. I haven’t been back here since.” She didn’t mention that her father had moved them only a month after her mother’s funeral, said it would make things easier for both of them if they could start over.

Willa couldn’t be sure he’d been wrong. She’d started the second grade in Pennsylvania, quickly fitting in with the other students once they recovered from their shock that she didn’t know a word of the Pledge of Allegiance.

He pulled out his chair and held out his hand. “I’m sorry.” It was what everyone said and for a moment she felt disappointed by his predictability. His hand still hung in the area and suddenly she realized that wasn’t what he’d meant, that he wanted to shake her hand.

She shook it, feeling the cool, dry skin of his palms.

“I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m Colin.” Willa was grateful that he didn’t stand. He looked at her for a moment before she realized she hadn’t said her name.

“Willa.”

“Like Willa Cather.”

“Sure. I mean, yes, but I wasn’t named after her.” Or was she?

No, it was that terrible aunt. The one who she had never met.

“Good. Her writing is crap,” he said. He smiled at her and she laughed.

“I haven’t read any of her work.” It was true. Once she had picked up O Pioneers! in a bookstore but she was sure she’d never read it. Perhaps she’d given it away to someone or let it gather dust on her shelves. It had seemed so exciting, the exclamation point at the end of the title, but she’d lost interest before she’d even begun.

“Better that way. She’s so childishly simplistic. Just these pleasant little Nebraska families and their heartwarming struggles. I’ve always found her painful to read. Like Little House on the Prairie.”

“Sounds brutal,” she smiled.

He grinned. His teeth were square and white, just slightly crowded. “You know what I mean,” he said.

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Willa realized she was still smiling and felt suddenly embarrassed, as though she was overstaying her welcome. “Well, I should be going.”

“Of course. It was nice to meet you, Willa. And—” he seemed unsure of what to say. Condolences about her mother.

“Thank you.”

Colin nodded, satisfied, and Willa turned and walked in between stacks and books and filing cabinets and out the door.

The temperature outside had risen just a bit, hovering in the teens. Willa didn’t say a word to Gretchen as she passed, despite knowing that she’d probably never see her again. It wasn’t as though she’d helped Willa with her research. She hadn’t even asked why she was there, only raised an eyebrow to note her arrival each morning.

When Willa went back to the hotel each night she thought of Gretchen and the other people she’d seen at City Hall. Somehow they all became larger in her mind—she’d had a dream about a few of them— and then when she returned the next day they always appeared oddly small to her. Like perfect strangers.

Willa walked purposefully down the sidewalk and toward the parking lot. She held her scarf against her chin, trying to keep the cold from slipping beneath her coat, and stepped into clouds of her breath. She felt a vibration against her hip and knew it was Edward calling her. She hated mobile phones, the way she could be contacted at any moment, the way she had to have something electronic practically attached to her or she was deemed stubborn and out of date.

It reminded her of an episode of the Twilight Zone. It was too cold to take her hands from her pockets anyway, and she found it nearly impossible to answer the phone with mittens on. She always ended up pressing the wrong buttons, feeling clumsy like her father when he tried to type on the computer. He was still convinced he was charged per word when he sent an email. “Good to hear from you,” he would write. “No news here. Feeling better, cold’s gone. Dot says hi.”

She ought to call her father.

But for now she would go to Cornerstone and get some coffee. Maybe she would leave the papers in her bag and take a magazine or a newspaper to read. There would be a few young girls behind the 58 So to Speak

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counter, university students with long hair and bulky scarves, girls without husbands or children. Girls like Colin, girls not yet born on the day her mother was killed. Their chatter would be audible as she drank her coffee. She would call Edward back. He would say that he missed her, that he was ready for her to come home. He would ask if she had thought any more about his proposal.

Two young boys ran by, red-faced and panting. They couldn’t have been more than eight years old, still round-faced and sure of their bodies. Willa stepped to the side to let them pass. One had his jacket unzipped, flapping behind him like a cape. They seemed pleased with themselves, running from someone who’d told them to slow down. She wasn’t sure where they were going but she felt her pace quicken in their wake, as if they alone could show her the way.

So to Speak 59

Alex Pohl

Untitled

Digital photography, black and white 10.18”h x 12”w 60 So to Speak

H. V. Cramond

Dinah For whom slaughter was slayed, foreskins overcome A ram and a pigeon and a vulture burnt. Did you make covenant? Did you choose, did you love? Was vengeance yours? Did you bathe in blood or find out the next morning? Was your kitchen warm, your banjo sweet when strummed or fiddled? Could your father know? Did he know you? Did he know anything or was he busy begetting? Did he get you? Did he know you? Did you cry when it happened did you smile? Were you jealous that your brothers were nations and you a just cause?

Did you cover your head? Did you cover your tracks?

Did you cover your mouth?

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H. V. Cramond

Dinah Responds The crime was named before I was born I call it mine because it was attached to me as he was attached to me but he had first another name the truth is, I liked the shyness of it a man veiled in his own skin until desire itself pushed veils aside a glistening secret that was mine only I thought it could never leave my mouth Haven’t we all had brothers who substitute a comma for an end stop and change the whole sentence reverse cause and effect the object of the verb is not only action can be shameful one or the other but to be right for them it must be both

62 So to Speak

Erika D. Price

Humans and Other Digging Tools

I think I just have to exorcise this. Sometimes when you feel a yeast infection coming on, the best thing to do is just throw one leg over the sink and reach inside yourself with your thumb and forefinger, and dig around to the side, and pull the clotted colony out and wash it down the drain. Then you have to switch legs, of course, and dig around, off to the other side, but that’s how it is.

Then you can feel your vaginal pH restoring itself. The burning ebbs. That awful, day-ruining, thought-occluding itch starts to abate. You don’t get nasty rips in your perineum during sex. It’s a dirty job, and a dark secret you can smell on your fingers all day. But human hands have endured so much worse for so much measlier gains than that.

I knew a girl whose brother came down with colon cancer.

Something about it just made her mind snap. She was a tough girl; well-adjusted, the daughter of a single mother, a self-supporting, selftaught Ph.D. student in School Psychology. At work, she spent seven, eight hours a day tending to the needs of abused children, soothing their psychological wounds with play therapy and terrycloth blankets and juice boxes with rounded edges. She came home and cuddled her formerly abused dog, who nervously chewed the corner of a blanket all day, twitching, waiting for her to come home. She could tend fragile things and beam a gigantic crooked smile all the while.

But her brother. Something about it was more than she could handle. He was younger than her—I think that’s important—and his rising mortality caused a few sprockets and nuts to fly off her mental circuit board. When she went to the bathroom, she started taking a long strip of toilet paper, wrapping it around her index finger, and inserting it into her rectum. Then she would dig around for a few minutes, going in as deep as she could muster, only to pull the wad of paper out and inspect its contents. Lather rinse repeat. She did this every time she was on the toilet. The strips of paper started coming off bloody. She did this until his chemo was done and he went into remission.

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Erika D. Price

Several months later, after her divorce, she had a boyfriend that wanted to do anal. And she wanted that, too. After years of going to sleep beside a man who wouldn’t touch her, my friend wanted all kinds of contact. She slept with a poet with a limp and a bad attitude, who never showed. She slept with the frontman of a Croatian punk band. He left her after she knocked drunken lips with a coworker on New Year’s Eve. She was 30 and divorced and making up for squandered years. I was worried for her. Not because of how many dudes she was fucking, but because of the enthusiasm she brought to each one. Each man was exciting and revelatory and new, until he was making her cry a few weeks later. I didn’t understand it.

But the hardest part for me to understand was, she and the boyfriend had great anal sex. My friend got over the hangup. Her brother was better, her ass was healing up, and with a little patience and some lube, it all went smoothly. I couldn’t imagine relaxing for some random hookup that way. Now she’s carrying his child. It speaks to the resiliency of people.

But that’s not what this story is about. This story is about someone I had anal sex with. Or rather, he had anal sex with me. By surprise. A few times. Until I caught him. And then, years later, he sent me an email saying he was suicidal. And I don’t understand why, but I tried to help him. I pointed him in the direction of numerous resources. I told him to call a hotline or join a support group. I chatted with him late into the night until his desperate pleas turned to horny recommendations and unwelcomed memories. It speaks to the resiliency of people.

I met this guy Dylan as a sleazy hookup. I am bad at casual sex; it took a slut phase of about two months for me to realize I am not sexually or emotionally calibrated for it. But I didn’t know that yet when I met him, because I was still in the weeds of those two months.

I was new to the city and nursing the wounds and ruminations of a recent breakup. I broke things off with my first long-term boyfriend shortly before moving to the city, and quickly and desperately fell into the arms of a coworker, who naturally had a long-distance girlfriend. I didn’t know anyone in town, and loneliness came off me in cool waves. People sidestepped me in bars and at parties; 64 So to Speak

Erika D. Price

they could sense how tragically socially inept I was, and how alone.

When I spoke, people’s eyes went glassy and they got sad.

Banging this coworker guy was my only outlet. But he wouldn’t have me. He kept coming over and using my internet connection to Skype with his girlfriend in Winnipeg. I went out to buy glass noodles and bubble tea, came home, and found him jacking off to her on my webcam. I’d only been banging the guy a few months, but the revelation sliced right through me, because I knew I had no one else to hang out with. So I went on as if it didn’t hurt me.

The solution, I thought, was to fuck others. I made out with a butter-haired boy at a conference, in front of dozens of drunk Cubs fans; I blew a 19-year-old who had taken a two-hour train ride into the city, but who only lasted 16 seconds in my mouth. Then Dylan.

Dylan thought he was going to be an anthropologist, but he’d dropped out of school. He was certain he’d be a hot-shot professor; he already had the elbow-padded jacket and the pipe, which he stuffed with girly flavored tobaccos. He was smart, but unwashed and uneven in his knowledge. He’d drop a Zizek reference but have no clue what I meant by an “Electra complex.”

He asked what kind of sex I wanted, and I said rough because I was depressed. I used him like a battering ram. It used to be that when I got sad, I’d like to bash my brain against the wall of my apartment. Then the neighbors started knocking. So I started using Dylan instead. He put just enough pressure on my throat. He bit my back so hard he left welts. I couldn’t go to Zumba class one day, the swelling on my thighs was so bad. I told him to batter me and while he did so, I mentally enumerated my failures. I was bad at statistics, my savings account was dwindling, I was in love with a guy with a girlfriend, my stomach was too pouchy, the usual sins.

Then one day I woke up and Dylan was already having sex with me. No condom. “Guess we can stop using condoms now, huh,” was what he said. He was trying to force the issue. Or make it a nonissue, I guess, by exposing me to all his pathogens.

It didn’t bother me much at the time. I told him to leave; he stole my copy of V for Vendetta and begged for cab fare, which I provided. Whatever. Months passed, then my coworker not-boyfriend tried to have sex with me in the same position and I flinched and So to Speak 65

Erika D. Price

cried; that was when I realized something was wrong. For years I couldn’t go in that position again.

So when Dylan emailed me three years later, asking if I’d ever been suicidal, I guess I should have been pissed. I had spent a lot of time thinking about what he’d done, and what I would call it, and if I needed to tell anyone about it. One day, I thought I saw Dylan on the train platform, and I shot him a look sharp as tacks. But I think I was hallucinating.

Yet his email didn’t make me flush with fury or shake in my booties with fear. I’ve always been the type of person to answer a question directly. I told him, sure. Yeah. Of course I’ve felt suicidal.

Why do you ask?

He wrote back saying he’d relapsed on heroin; I had no idea he was into that scene to begin with. Maybe it was an anthropological thing. He said he was a failure and had no one to talk to. He said he was thinking about getting some pills and having a last hurrah.

I dispensed with the usual stuff. I sent him the 1-800-Suicide number. I shared an email address with him, and told him I’d used it myself. I pointed him in the direction of local groups, chat rooms, meetings in church basements and YMCAs. I said I knew all these recommendations where schlocky and lame, but that they could really, really help. I told him to reach out to friends, schoolmates, his shitty family in Skokie.

I have no one to talk to, Dylan wrote back. Why do you think I’m writing you? Can we meet up? Nothing illicit, I promise...?

I said no. I just keep thinking about when we were together, he said. I feel like we had such a strong connection. I’m not trying to fuck you.

We went back and forth like this, me bobbing and weaving around his requests for sex, lobbing punches of sympathy at him, telling him he wasn’t alone, sharing personal details. Eventually I had to block him. Sexual connection? We had sex a few times, made eye contact about once, and then he raped me. What was he talking about?

For a few months, I lived without knowing whether Dylan had died or not. It felt as uncanny as the rape itself, really. Just a dull question in the center of my chest. I was curious but didn’t dare Google his name. Then I turned on Gchat one day and his words 66 So to Speak

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popped up, like a memory of something terrible you’ve done striking you in the line at the supermarket: You big tease.

I closed the window. I found yet another way to block him.

But I was kind of relieved. I guess I still hope that Dylan gets himself clean, realizes the depravity of what he’s done, and gets on track for that Anthropology degree. He was a shit, but he was 20, an addict, and an idiot. I could hate him for what happened. But I’d rather avoid him and be quietly thankful that he’s still alive. I guess it speaks to the resiliency of people.

So to Speak 67

Alex Pohl

Untitled

Digital photography, black and white 10.3”h x 13.12”w 68 So to Speak

Alex Pohl

So to Speak 69

Molly Prosser

Nesting She thinks about the puffins hidden in the clutches of the black cliffs

outside Reykjavik, huddled, alighting for haddock or herring as soft-spoken, thick-

bearded men in their blinds cast nets to catch them, trap them, midflight. They

swallowed the chum from schooners, the plankton spewed from humpback feasts, gorging

themselves until they were too fat to fly back to the volcanic shore and feed their

hungry chicks.

She considers the killdeer faking a broken wing, protecting her nest

from poachers, cooing and limping around her pile of rocks to distract her attackers,

eggs rocking

slightly in the stones at the edge of the crumbling parking lot. The

raccoons are close, sick of dumpster scraps, craving the crack of speckled shells, the thick,

golden yolk.

She opens her right hand, spreads her fingers apart and remembers

how the Bantams’ thin necks would fit in the spaces, and how she would curl her hand

around their soft, honey-colored heads, her thumb stroking their beaks, the feathers

between their eyes, calming them, loving them, getting them

ready for the sharp twist of the wrist.

70 So to Speak

Molly Prosser

Metalwork I’m in my father’s garage cutting siding for a hunting shanty in a dead oil town in northern Pennsylvania. His voice is muffled through the welding mask. He tells me to step back, keep my eyes off

the arc.

The weld pool, a mercury puddle just behind the tip of the heat, makes a seam in the metal. I watch as the corrugated tin falls in two pieces, slams on the concrete floor and topples the splintering saw-horses.

It wasn’t always about cutting. There were times he soldered. His calloused hands melting the rungs of an iron ladder to a massive iron frame, a homemade tree-stand that rested against a white birch in the back yard. I would climb to the top, solid foothold after solid foothold, and sit for hours

staring at the yawn of blue sky.

Now, waterfalls of light separate us. The ozone stench of the welding circuit and chewing tobacco stains on the floor push us apart, keep us at opposite sides of the metal until the inevitable break when we are left alone, holding our halves.

So to Speak 71

Dean Shaban

The Poetress Says: a found poem I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, eating men like air.

The dead have stopped knocking, every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken.

I have lain down.

The sleep of this night deepens. Sleep, she turns her moon-cold shoulder, the pure amnesia of her face– she can ill afford the chances she must take.

The dark heart of me said, “I’ve gathered the women like talismans, one by one, like months.”

Now I must drive, tramp to the edge of the world, bite, chew, transmogrify, because it’s the imagination draining its husks, because comparison is motive, which is why one writes with one’s desire.

Once on a plane a woman asked me to hold her baby and disappeared.

Taken from select women poets: Anne Sexton from “Her Kind”; Sylvia Plath from “Lady Lazarus”; Tracy K. Smith from “No-Fly Zone”; Adrienne Rich from “Planetarium”; Sharon Olds from “The Language of the Brag”; Tess Gallagher from “Under Stars”; A.E. Stallings from “Another Lullaby for Insomniacs”; Carol MuskeDukes from “August, Los Angeles, Lullaby”; Kay Ryan from “Turtle”; Roberta Hill Whiteman from “Reaching Yellow River”; Olga Broumas from “Calypso”; Jane Miller from “Miami Heart”; Naomi Shihab Nye from “Wedding Cake.”

72 So to Speak

Alex Pohl

Untitled

Digital photography, black and white 6.87”h x 6.91”w

So to Speak 73

CONTRIBUTORS

ALLISON AMEND, a Chicago native and diehard Cubs fan, holds degrees from Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her books include the award-winning short story collection Things That Pass For Love, and Stations West, which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize. Her most recent novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy, was just released in paperback. Allison teaches at Lehman College.

You can find her online at www.allisonamend.com.

JESSICA RAE BERGAMINO lives in Seattle, where she is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Washington. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in CALYX, PRISM International, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere.

JOANNA CATTONAR’s poems have been published in diverse journals and little magazines, appearing most recently in The Spoon River Poetry Review and Mezzo Cammin, and are forthcoming in Malpais Review. She received residencies at Yaddo and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Although a native New Yorker, she has lived in New Mexico for quite a while.

SARAH A. CHAVEZ is a mestíza born and raised in the California Central Valley. She received her Ph.D. with a focus in Poetry and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in North American Review, The Fourth River, and The Midwest Quarterly, among others. Her chapbook manuscript, All Day, Talking, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in August 2014.

H. V. CRAMOND is the Poetry Editor for and a Co-founder of Requited Journal for Innovative Art and is a Writing Instructor at Loyola University Chicago. She holds an M.F.A. in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the City of Chicago’s Community Arts Assistance Program. Her recent work can be found in Soundless Poetry, Keep Going, and Wunderkammer, among others. She’s currently in residence at the Vermont Studio Center.

DONELLE DREESE is the author of two poetry chapbooks, A Wild Turn and Looking for a Sunday Afternoon, and a novella, Dragonflies in the Cowburbs. Dreese’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Quiddity International, Hospital Drive, and Roanoke Review, among others.

74 So to Speak

CONTRIBUTORS

SARA ERDMANN is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in Literature and Creative Writing at Binghamton University. Her short fiction has been published in Offcourse Journal, Transverse Journal, and Adbusters, among others. When she isn’t reading and writing, she is teaching.

JEANNIE GALEAZZI’s work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous publications including Fence, The Literary Review, and Permafrost, and is forthcoming in Segue, Flint Hills Review, and Blue Fifth Review.

JESSICA GLOVER teaches for the English department and the Gender and Women’s Studies program at Oklahoma State University. She graduated from Missouri State University in 2009 with her M.A. in English.

Currently, she is working on her first book as a Ph.D. candidate. Her latest work has appeared in American Literary Review, Aesthetica, and Magma Poetry, and is currently forthcoming in EDGE, Spillway, and Pinyon, among others.

JANE JORITZ-NAKAGAWA’s poetry has appeared in New American Writing, ACM, Aught, Moria, Milk, Free Verse, Shampoo, and numerous other literary magazines locally and abroad.

CATHERINE KASPER’s books include Field Stone (poetry) and Notes from the Committee (fiction). She teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

BECCA J. R. LACHMAN’s books include The Apple Speaks and A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford (ed.) Lachman is a 2014 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awardee and a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars M.F.A. Her recent work has appeared in Consequence Magazine, Image, and Mothering Mennonite (Demeter Press).

GIGI MARKS lives in Ithaca, New York. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including American Poets Against the War, The Atlanta Review, Best American Poetry, and others. Her most recent collection of poems, Close By, was published by Silverfish Review Press in Spring 2012 and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2012.

So to Speak 75

CONTRIBUTORS

ERIN LYNDAL MARTIN holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Alabama. Her work has appeared in Lemon Hound, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She is the Assistant Music Editor for The Rumpus and lives in Wisconsin.

FREESIA MCKEE’s work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, The Huffington Post, and other journals.

LAURA PASSIN is a writer, professor, and feminist at large. She holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon.

Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, Adrienne: A Poetry Journal of Queer Women, The Toast, and Best New Poets 2013. Laura lives in Chicagoland with her partner, two cats, and way too many books.

ALEX POHL has photographed for artists, galleries, and collectors. His self-taught photography is inspired by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Gary Winogrand, and Pohl likens it to “stealing souls.” He says, “I quietly practice the art of black-and-white street and people photography, endeavoring to capture moments of loneliness, joy, boredom, etc. I like to think that with each human subject—a face, an emotion, a situation— there is still material to break new ground.” This portfolio of Pohl’s images captures an urban everydayness in its recording of female daily roles in life and in advertising, presenting a perspective as unobserved portraiture.

ERIKA D. PRICE is a writer and social psychologist in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Full of Crow, Literary Orphans, Blackberry, The Paper Machete, The Toast, and elsewhere. She writes regularly at erikadprice. tumblr.com. Currently she is writing for the podcast Wrong State, a science fiction academic satire available on iTunes or at wrongstateuniversity. tumblr.com.

MOLLY PROSSER is the Visual Merchandise Director for ModCloth. com, a fashion retailer that launched the literary journal “The Written Wardrobe” under her direction. She holds a B.A. in English from Penn State and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Carlow University, where she has taught literature, writing, communication, and marketing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Weave Magazine, Blast Furnace, Soundings Review, and Sugared Water. She currently lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and mini-dachshund.

76 So to Speak

CONTRIBUTORS

DEAN SHABAN is an aspiring poet and author. He recently received his Bachelor’s from Princeton University and is now in the process of getting his M.F.A. in Poetry from Georgia State University.

MEREDITH TREDE’s full-length book of poems, Field Theory, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in October 2011. Her chapbook, Out of the Book, was in Desire Path, the inaugural volume of The Quartet Series. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, The Cortland Review, Gargoyle, and The Paris Review.

JOY VON III is a poet who lives in Omaha, Nebraska. She works for a credit card processor and recently graduated with her M.F.A in Poetry from Queens University in Charlotte North Carolina. Her work appears in An Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraskan Women Poets.

So to Speak 77