Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 2:1 by Synesthesia Literary Journal

SynesthesiaLiteraryJournal 2:1

Synesthesia Literary Journal 2:1 ÂŠ Christopher H. Gorrie and Seretta Martin 2013 Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Patent-Paradigm Publications All inquiries or other correspondences should be directed to: patentparadigmpublications@gmail.com All visual art within this volume is by Sabrina Elliott. Front and back cover silkscreens by Sabrina Elliott.

Table of Contents How I Heard It

Blame Rain

Wolf Peach

On Synesthesia (I): In History/We Could Have

Red Earth

Telluric Symphony

Learning Music

On Synesthesia (II): Releasing Comfort

In the Shadow of Gary Numan, High Priest of the X-Gens

Come, Autumn

Stagnant

The Stonefish: Intelligent Protection Strategies and Natural Selection

Irene

Clementine Confessions

How Do We Respond? : Reconsidering Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kind of a Funny Story

Two Venuses

Pajamas

Holdfast

The News

Contributor Biographies

Notes and Acknowledgments

How I Heard It by Ken Wagner “Oh my God I am hardly sorry for having offended thee.” – How I heard the first line in an Act of Contrition

when I was six I was afraid to ask was it grape was it apple my Aunt was mad at everyone she didn’t know especially if they weren’t Roman Catholic or blueberry for sure not pineapple or pomegranate but maybe grapefruit she did not like different and afraid of people

different made her angry even if they had a limp

there were ten cans of frozen grapefruit juice in her freezer enough to poison the whole family anger made the tip of her nose wiggle fear made her face shudder and turn red it was the juice she’d scream it was the juice that killed Jesus

Blame Rain by Ken Wagner I can't find the wit behind staggered syncopation and the spattered inconsistency is messing with the rhythm of my heart there is no round to this rain outside my window if it were up to Miles he'd mine the sorrow between plinks on the metal watering cans I forgot to put away last fall Coltrane would surround the rain with sheets of sound to placate the trees bowing over my fence Mingus would tie drops up with simple string slide down swap timbre to brown and challenge the water thwapping on the mud Charlie Parker would eat it all for breakfast then fly with the cans the trees the fence and mud as callous rain poured from his horn but I can only stand in my doorframe hold my inharmonious heart and try to breathe in the unnatural beat of nature

Wolf Peach by J. Ryan Bermuda They carried brass Zippos before knowing the risks the universe is expanding copper anchored their feet to the earth and they say zinc made a lid for the soul spreading ash across the Pacific growing up they called you Wolf Peach eyes like minted pennies clotheslines held up pecan trees fainting bike seat vinyl powdered and frayed exposing bisque yellow foam you soon knew the risk they gave you four lighters one of which your brother etched with a Frag pin Convince me finger scrapes hat band free of loose tobacco tags with no chain slips in the universe is speeding up

On Synesthesia (I): In History/We Could Have by A. Maureen Tant Can we forget what we already know? Grade-school students are taught that history repeats itself, and time forgets—that forgiveness is a function of memory loss, maybe even a necessary device, if mistakes inevitably happen again. But it isn’t true: if collective memory exists, we can believe in the “recoverability” of its contents. Tom Stoppard wrote an entire play around the idea that “we shed as we pick up”: We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew? (Arcadia, 1993)

Humanity renders nothing indelible, meaning it also never experiences catharsis. Erasure is impermanent because we’re engineered to fill in blank spaces. The entire history of human behavior could be defined as things done in “correcting” emptiness. Memory is imperfect, however, and can be outsmarted. No single person has the ability to perceive anything completely: in other words, because human nature persists as an ineradicable connection to all living beings, human intellect must reconcile its knowledge of each individual piece as unwhole. So there are pockets of forgetting, which prompt remembering bodies to intervene. It could be a comfort, to be unable to see but safely assume that something bigger, older and more knowing than us (more knowing, but free of a consciousness) maintains cosmic balance. *

hiatus newsletters was first reviewed in Synesthesia Literary Journal 1:1 (2013), in which Christopher Gorrie excerpted a line from Barton Smock’s poem “the winners of midwestern game shows”: “had we cut the palm, not the throat, of death.” Embedded in the middle of the poem, this line contextualizes the “if only” sentences preceding and following it. In my memory, this line was misfiled as “had we cut the palm, not the throat, of God.”

The conquering of death may not be the same as conquering God, but the two conditions are linked: the use of “midwestern” in the poem’s title is crucial to this realization. The Midwest—America’s heartland—is popularly understood as a place in which the “real” seems to maintain some significance. In the Midwest, “true America” might still be present—we might have a culture, we might be able to find ourselves and all of the mythology responsible for our creation, we might finally discern something cohesive in the form of an image of this massive, well-populated place. The Middle is assigned credit for manufacturing belief as well—without it, we might still be backing the dollar, we might not be a superpower at all (even a dying one), we might never imagine we could go home. America’s nostalgic tradition exposes us, for even calling this “nostalgia.” In Portuguese culture, that kind of ache is instead defined as saudade, which refers to the pain of absent love, or loss of something that may have never existed. There is no equivalent to saudade in the American spirit. The past escapes us because any time immediately after it—a time when people can remember, and are willing to deny themselves as participators—is a time in which we want to get away from it. It’s a brutal impulse, and it’s tradition: guilt, selfconsciousness and fatigue drive us to change, tear down what’s “recent” and remake the world into something “new.” “had we cut the palm…” If only we hadn’t traced the anatomies of nature, feeling and experience. If only we’d been able to understand of all that anatomy as unreal—as something that only became real because we took it apart. *

the winners of midwestern game shows by Barton D. Smock had we one mouth. had our teeth been field workers swept into a bar after a fight. that we could find them. that we could tell our wives where to look. had we not been dragging our shadow by the foot. had the ground not shrugged itself lower. had it opened. had we cut the palm, not the throat, of death. so that when it prayed. so that when it tried. had they not banned, so early, the dogs. had my best friend a suit. had he not talked so much about getting one. had it not been his hand I seen come outta the earth to take its pick of hats from the wounded. had I not laid his fat sister. had I gotten money for it. called her fat and not loved her for standing upright what was another’s tale of composure.

It by Marta RodrĂguez Iborra Worship the smallest detail in life's air. Take it and transform it, even if you can't see it; feed it with your breast, in your chest accept what comes from outside inside. Worship the "it"; as a baby you need to become big, human, perhaps to be a woman as you have always wanted to be. Do not listen to wars, they bore, you are not born to dig holes but to oar in foreign seas, to observe an ant, to paint butterfly wings, to sing whether you are sad or angry. Worship the language the smallest word or question mark, even a moth, a strange silhouette; write in the dark diaries and letters, and discover then a small light under your fear, something not public. It is there, you see? Take care of it, integrate it; it is a loan from life's air, remember?

Change it, price it, and then, when it is yours, in the end release it to nature, again.

Red Earth by Janice D. Soderling We had dug in a few places already, but this time we brought two sniffer dogs, two cute little beagles, and both independently marked the site. The actual digging wasn't so hard there; you could tell the soil had been disturbed before. It was sandy soil, red like it had a lot of iron in it, and big sandstones had been thrown in, probably to deter animals. The definition of an animal will vary. I know what the worst kind is. We were four men digging, two at a time, and Carter from forensics. The inspector was up where we'd parked the cars, talking to her, trying to convince her to go back home. She ran down from the house when we were getting out of the cars, she must have seen when we turned off the highway. The dirt road was plainly visible from her back porch. It didn't help that we'd planned so carefully to keep a low profile, no sirens and arriving just after sunrise. Maybe she couldn't sleep and was out on the front porch sitting in that old rocker, the way she sat when we were called out a month ago. She was a young widow about the age my daughter would have been; pleasant enough and polite for the most part, but stubborn as a mule. She disagreed with everything the inspector said from the getgo. It was a quiet early summer morning, the dew had dried up but the birds were still singing. No sound but that infernal birdsong and our shovels and our grunts. A beautiful place, too beautiful; it reminded me of the meadows from when I was a kid; you don't see many places like that these days. Rolling green hills in the distance, lots of wildflowers. I didn't know their names, but they were pretty. I can tell you the names of trees though. At the border there were sycamore and sassafras, broad oaks that were at least a hundred years old, and hazel with sharply forked branches like dowsers use to find water. The first thing we turned up was the saw and then the knives. They seemed to be just thrown in, like an afterthought. Carter took some photos, put on his plastic gloves, bagged them. Pete and I kept on digging. Pete saw the first one when I lifted a big sandstone. A piece of black plastic jutting out of the red earth. We took a break while Carter took photos. We dug some more, found the second little black package. "Somebody has to get the inspector down here," I said. The others nodded, and we were all wondering the same thing. How to prevent their mother from running down the path behind him.

Telluric Symphony by Olivier Bochettaz there in a green mild bushy bower filled with resinous buds and sleepy flowers is a crossway-inn for blue birds—merry sowers

there are two softly glist’ning backs of bronze

there in the hawthorns fly humming-birds

little hazy heads entranced with golden red pollen there is there perched an old blind lyrebird overlooking peeping in peace sweet nest melodies cadencing—ripen rest telling the ant build your temple free 15

Learning Music by Alejandro Juรกrez Crawford

1. Quickly The fast way to learn a new song is to learn it note by note. To eliminate each movement that might distract your single-minded, one-edged, focused effort to imprint the tune upon your mind. To let it keep your time so you become a curve along its contours, so you begin to measure your motions in multiple rhythms, rather than a steady tick, comparing everything to the dull repeated motion of a watch hand, or even the steady climbing sun. Learn the song quickly so it forms a million rhythms that converge and then depart, but enter the nature of each other: and because they have created each other do not fail to reconvene. 17

Learn it quickly so it multiplies the intervals according to which you measure your passing life till they become so diverse that it stops passing and enters you. Learn to sing so the rhythm with which you flip a straw between your fingers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the occasional creak of the door â&#x20AC;&#x201C; becomes part of that same music: so at any given moment, people are passing through you, the way they pass through the main chamber underneath Times Square, at all different speeds and gaits, to mount local and express trains that may hit a common stride, may achieve an equal speed for a passing instant, before one speeds up and the other slows to make its station stop.

2. Many Days The fast way to learn a new song is to let it enter through your mouth, when your bottom lip seals the edge of a plastic 18

cup. To let it stir your soda, let it bubble your sautĂŠ, let it form your instincts and become the lamp-lit shine of your hair against a mattress patched brown-gold from too many days without its clothes on, the mattress, many days you were doing laundry, many days when you just laid one sheet upon the bed to sleep, you put it on carelessly in your fatigue, this sheet â&#x20AC;&#x201C; holding moments off till sleep, and now the white elastic corner has slipped slowly till it pops off the firm wire end of the mattress, sleeved wire end of my world. The sheet furled up uncomfortably beneath your ankles as you slept, and your mattress got naked, and took on the colors of the room many days when you ate colors for breakfast and drank endless sleep for dinner; 19

you sipped time, instead of rolling rocks and opened up your memory to things that hadn’t happened, to the tan and yellowish tones of the taut spring mattress, painting pictures of the facts no one knew until just half a moment ago. The facts of the Fourteenth Street station as you prepare to duck down into it, knowing you’ll be waiting beneath the lamp bulbs – the uncovered reddish light still shed by isolated poles and newsstands, that kisses the night goodbye before you duck into the station’s entrance, the way you brace yourself to jump into the water or to ask someone for a date, taking leave of the night that knows to press you with arms that steel your motion into and out of its embrace.

3. Old Speech And suddenly it’s not so fast, is it? Not so fast, you’ve learned a new way to play and the old speech mixes with this one like string beans and chocolate in a salad of your and my disparate souls, being tossed together by the twin wood tongs of the salt-smelling night, tongs with their arms soaked wet by the hot day’s salt-crystal sweat, tossed by the twin steel tongs of morning, our diverging souls mixed roughly till they’re shorn of history’s bloody hair, its leg hair that’s been matted under pants and long johns worn too long, its been too cold to take them off to free our legs for a moment, but our legs now are bare and woken up, their skin smooth to each of my two fingers’ touch, follicles staring! Bits of hair stand up, and our own eyes now spare of gook, the grooves around their pools 21

swept clean of sleep.

4. Wrinkles The great thing about wrinkles is that within them it is smooth, like the clattering static space between the slots on an LP record: or the skin between your fingers that’s the soft palate of your fist, and now the fronts of our fingers purged of all dead cells and pungent fat, stand out, touch us coldly with their padded tips until this meeting, in camaraderie, of our deep-dipped souls like different fists. Now day is finally over as the warm night settles in – as soup poured from a coffee cup with lid and plastic handle and we’re the small white and brown oyster crackers soaking in tomato, half of me still crumbling like dry bread, half of you now sweet and moist and flexing shape against the soup. The newsstand light turned off. The great long highway silent. The cold grey cough no longer lying dormant, 22

hot volcano no longer waiting to come alive. And the deep blue light upon your side, the steep orange crescent shadow crossing mine, opens fifty four cafés before the morning buys its bread and bagels before dawn before the people open up into the streets like strings of sausage, all turning spatula attachments on machines to stir the clouds through the break-beat sky.

5. Slowly Do you ever forget a night walking through the belted constellations of the supermarket aisle, the greyhound bus waiting on the mariner’s hoard of childhood-blue detergent jars, half naked, stoic olive cans, while the blaring light upon your ears is smashing through your mind’s plight all the anger you’ve collected while the smell from below the deli section accosted you at every step; it makes you soon forget the filling in the croissant, its creamy artificial yellow din of factory shifts, makes you soon forget the fluorescence that runs into our eyes, makes you forget it, till it becomes 23

a stop sign’s gaze, cleaned off by the water splashed up from the cars yanking us entirely from our wildly hungry, eye-gold candy, looming, bandaged, stooping selves. The slow way to learn a new song is to listen to it play. Hear it call you by a name it just happened to hear while passing someone’s door when the inner occupant’s rhythm gently bit the small brown lobe of your shaking inner ear.

On Synesthesia (II): Releasing Comfort by A. Maureen Tant Mental illness is often too simply described as problems with the future or problems with the past, but all of its symptoms manifest in either of those categories. A depressed or anxious person is not someone unable to live in the moment, but those conditions do leave their bearers the task of reconciling a hyper-awareness of tense and time. Being “present,” therefore, becomes something depression and anxiety help a person forget to do. Moreover, it convinces that person first of the necessity of understanding, and then the necessity of forgiving themselves. Understanding is a burden. (For my purposes here, “understanding” has to do with any thought, mental state or emotion accessible/perceivable in our conscious minds.) It motivates the brain to finish incomplete images, to close openings before we get a chance to see them. It helps us to expand, complete and make everything less empty. Meaning is invasive: it will cover you like a clay. It has the ability to stifle a person if it isn’t given its due attention. It takes time to notice space and simultaneously be able to release a desire to mitigate its presence. The pursuits of knowledge and awareness are not in vain, but chasing these sorts of abstractions without taking time to recognize their boundaries (taking time to mind ourselves with regards to humility) quickly pollutes the process with greed, pettiness and disappointment. We pick up, therefore, and create meaning whether or not we intend to. Denying meaning can be an instructive, consciousness-raising practice on the way to understanding what gives us meaning—for myself, however, the habit must lead to a new kind of thinking. In my life, that path hasn’t been sustainable as an end in itself. *

In another of my Linguistics seminars, Syntax, we were introduced to the idea that the present tense may not exist. English may only be able to describe conditions of the future and conditions of the past. Because depression and anxiety (the most common psychological disorders in the United States according to the AADA [2014]) aim to alter a person’s perception just enough that the person loses faith in anything he or she might understand, this problem will be reflected in language use (language is, after all, the foundation of our accepted/established treatments for neurotic conditions, in the most common types of psychotherapy). The relationship between language and neurosis may furthermore be synergistic: an overly-stimulated person recognizes the lack of a present tense in English grammar and feels stifled, frustrated or a sense of dread upon labeling this phenomenon a “constraint”—that person may feel trapped in

a set of binary options (i.e. “My choices are rendering thoughts in the present, or the future…”), for example. Conversely, if mentally burdened English-speakers are unaware of this lexical gap, they may wonder about their “failures” to find themselves in the present. If those “Englishers” look for an answer in language, the present tense’s dubious status could inspire panic or hopelessness in response to noticing that deadend in the system. It’s nearly impossible to forget what we already know—we’re taught as grade school students that language can be dissected, and even that it exists for our interpretation. We’re marked on our ability to understand, based on the idea that words are full and meaning is singular. It’s an instructive, consciousness-raising practice on the way to more deeply understanding literature, and being able to really appreciate reading. It isn’t so often, however, that grade school students are debriefed: for the ones who get stuck on Why’s, interpretation becomes a way of being, and “understanding” becomes an ultimate goal. Sadly, “understanding” is rarely redefined as a tool, and remains forever either a law or a system of measurement. *

These permutations of thinking about meaning, self, dysfunction and trying to escape all of the above institutions amount to variations on need. There is something essentially empty in the psyche of the afflicted person—something that the individual needs to accept before he or she can be at peace. This space may not be concentrated but is diffuse, meaning we don’t even get to see it before we have to let it go. My lecturer asked us in Meaning for examples of non-literal thought and I answered “feeling blue,” which he defined as “synesthesia.” That afternoon, in therapy, my doctor asked me to describe a depressive mood, and I was surprised when I told her it’s a “dark, grayish green.” Before that point, I’d only been conscious of them as colorless. In the safety of her office, however, something was telling me that the world of mental disorder and the state of contentment are the opposite of what we expect them to be: depression isn’t empty, but full. It has color, texture and a body, depth and feeling of its own. Its bearers aren’t incomplete, but unaware of themselves as being self-completing . Because the depressed person is unaware of this completion, it holds no meaning for him or her. Contentment, then, could be an awareness and respectful emptiness—a significant emptiness. An eye turned inward, open on the landscape of a connected unconsciousness.

In the Shadow of Gary Numan, High Priest of the X-Gens by Marie Lecrivain (To my friend Sigrid, with thanks...) We arrive fashionably late to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, but the residents don’t mind. The full moon glides between the dark fronds of palm trees. We walk with the black-clad X-Gens, more of whom now hold onto the rails as they ascend the stairs into the Hall of Architects. Among them, my green-and-blue Venetian coat screams obscenities. We make our way to the merchandise table to purchase the obligatory offerings. I choose a CD filled with a new set of splintered psalms, and then move to the next line to procure the required amounts of spirits and water. We're adrift in an overheated middle-aged sea of geeks; bald domes set against faded Dead Can Dance tees, wives and girlfriends decked out in their classic goth best – it’s that kind of an occasion. I look like a soccer mom, my Doc Marten Mary Janes the only correct accessory. The haze from the smoke machine camouflages our wrinkles, as well as the other natural shocks to which the human flesh is bound. The lights dim as the musicians step onto the dais. Gary appears - stage left - his wiry body and shock of Robert Smith hair a blessing, and a joy forever. We tune into a seductive string of primal growls that generates from the low end of an amp under torture. Gary contort his body in tribute to dear old Max, the elder god of goth. Our bodies begin to twitch in a series of reluctant miniscule movements. We are golems who wish to shed our status quo and pogo like we used to. I search for a mosh pit - and sadly, find none. We start to bend and sway, our semicreaky bones now more pliant as we move through Gary's songs and our rediscovered muscle memory. The veils fall away as we shed the weight of a score-and-a-half years. We become what we once were, the bastard generation who danced in the hinterlands of the cold war. We become our own mythology. It is here we shine darkly. Above our heads, Gary's shamanic shadow reigns supreme, head thrown back in ecstasy, and right hand raised in triumph.

Come, Autumn by Reece A.J. Chambers She didn't want spring, she wanted autumn. She wanted the butterscotch leaves snuggling the curbs and porky pumpkins with fire for a heart. She wanted autumn even when underground, where seasons are unseen except in the snow sprinkled in a man's hair, or heard, a sneeze and a sniffle into a flimsy tissue.â&#x20AC;¨ She wanted autumn back, like a first kiss over again, like a childhood memory flipped to the front of her mind to stay there, a vicious, intense red. But she was stuck in spring, writing about Octobers, what happened back then, how it opened like a flower, and whether come next year the season will breathe orange again.

Stagnant by Reece A.J. Chambers You've done it now. Opened your mouth, hoping the ice starts to thaw. Maybe you have to spell it out, spill it out to hit your mark. Like a tree I need to drop my leaves and see if some person catches a few, a handful of paper-thin shapes. Everyone moves forward. Is that so? The water around my ankles has been here for years.

The Stonefish: Intelligent Protection Strategies and Natural Selection by Janice D. Soderling The stonefish is a flatfish species indigenous to South America and most plentiful in the Amazon River and its tributaries. The stonefish has many natural enemies, but its population stability is ensured by its unique strategy to distribute more eggs per individual than any other known fish species. This is because the male stonefish is also capable of laying eggs, though not naturally as the female does, rather it uses a method called secondary distribution. The male fish follows any female fish that is in the egg-laying stage and swallows an incredible amount of the eggs she ejects. These eggs go via a specialized channel (similar to the animal world arrangement of the windpipe running adjacent to the esophagus) and are stored in the male's egg pouch for up to half a year. He disgorges them when the female fish are sexually inactive and the population level low. This occurs at the end of the biannual drought periods when the monsoon rains create flash floods that swell rivers and streamlets. This so-called tandem reproduction strategy ensures that eggs are distributed equally throughout the year and the stonefish population remains constant. The name derives from the curious habit of the adult fish, both male and female, to find, just before the drought season, a flat stone slightly larger than the fish itself, under which it burrows to remain in a dormant state until the seasonal rains come. During this dormant stage, the fish slowly exudes a gluelike substance, eulgemils, that causes the stone to adhere to its back. When the spring flash floods dislodge the stonefish, the stone remains firmly attached to its back. The dislodged male disgorges its stored eggs which immediately begin to develop into transparent embryos. Within 24 hours the embryo has formed most of its tissues and organ primordia and displays the characteristic squiggly comma form. The attached stone loosens after about three months, off-loading stage, which signals the males to actively seek female fish to excite and fertilize. The female incubates until entering egg-laying stage at which time the male can collect new eggs in his egg pouch and the cycle is repeated. Uncollected eggs begin immediate development as described above. While the stone remains in place, it shields against predator fish (particularly piranhas) which instinctively know that if they swallow the stonefish, they will simultaneously ingest the stone and its weight will sink the predator to the bottom of the river from which it is not able to rise.

Possibly you think that you are reading a flash fiction, but you are wrong. This is an intelligence test that was developed at the Center for Modern Evolutionary Synthesis as a natural selection strategy for single women, and if you thought you were actually learning about stonefish, you are too dumb to be to be the father of my children, so eff off.

Irene by Sicily Famolaro Irene in the lotus pose, wrinkled sun hands opened; a question blooming in the heart of her palms Are you here? She breathes in lovely syntax, writing her sutra with closed eyes; incantations of nirvana, effacing the karma of a tired spirit, but she’s not like those post war children, those flower children— she’s not; She’s quiet and meditates with a still, small voice O universe I am not a killer my father was a killer I am not—I want peace I want Love I want —I don’t want: only to be Irene old and learning Irene understanding Irene as the ocean Yes, Irene, I am here; I am, and nothing but—

I am young in the lotus pose, effacing the fragments. You slip into the sun-soaked haze and the sea swallows our sutra, swallows everything and we are reborn. The sun sets: the sky is love and you and I its lovers. October 14, 2013

Clementine Confessions by Sicily Famolaro I run my mouth; you watch, listeningly, and then there’s a clementine in my hand. When it’s there, I don’t always notice, but such a lonely fragrance without it (the marigold blossom lightness); something warm like childhood— summers on the porch, a faded sundress... —As if fifteen years passed between the communion of our smiles and the holy fruit, that little sundress bleached away and every day I’m a little more undressed by the endlessness in your pockets— some salt-tears dripping with the juice of the last bite.

How Do We Respond?: Reconsidering “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” by A. Maureen Tant For most of Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2006), Craig Gilner is waiting for his “shift.” The shift, according to the novel’s protagonist, involves a radical alteration in paradigm, and more importantly: an eradication of all depressive feelings and tendencies. Craig narrates about his psychologist: “I’m waiting for her to say something profound…I’m waiting for her to say ‘Craig, what you need to do is X’ and for the Shift to occur. I want there to be a Shift so bad. I want to feel my brain slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before the fall of last year, back when I was young…” (17). (The character is fifteen years old.) At its time of publishing, IKOAFS was criticized for the seeming implausibility of its ending—“For some, it may not ring true that Craig adjusts so quickly to life on the ward…” wrote Tanya Lee Stone in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (June 18, 2006), “That he achieves so much during a five-day stay…also pushes the limits of believability.” It was praised, however, in that same review and elsewhere, for the bravery of its plot (a teenage boy considers suicide, checks himself into a psychiatric facility, resurfaces upon the story’s happy conclusion) and the author, who—it was often noted—followed a trajectory in parallel to IKOAFS’s fictional hero. Consider the book’s endnote: Ned Vizzini spent five days in adult psychiatric in Methodist Hospital, Park Slope, Brooklyn, 11/29/04 – 12/3/04. Ned wrote this 12/10/04 – 1/6/05.

Like Craig, Vizzini attended a magnet school (the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan), was raised by two brainy parents and held himself to high standards of achievement. His first published piece appeared in (no less than) the New York Times Magazine (“Advice; Teen Angst? Nah!,” May 17, 1998), which led to a job at the music magazine Spin and a book deal (Teen Angst?! Naaah… A Quasi-Autobiography, 2000). On December 17, 2013, Vizzini passed away after jumping off the building his parents lived in, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He was 32 years old. There have been enough writer-suicides that it shouldn’t be so tricky, to separate the writer from what he or she chose as a subject, or to separate considerations of the person behind the work from the work itself. But Ned—unlike Plath, who made a career of her illness (and—revealingly wrote The Bell Jar under an alias), or Spalding Gray, who had a relationship with his work similar to Sylvia’s (as in, was he was to be believed? Would he finally do it in the end?) while he was alive. Other examples are the big names—Woolf, Hemingway, Wallace—all of whom buried their mental contortions

in their work while downplaying that suffering to the public in their interviews. Ned, in that endnote, gave readers an open invitation to speculate on which parts of the novel were meant to reflect its creator. IKOAFS never leans florid, never digresses into any of the old mental-health story tropes (Craig isn’t helpless, isn’t insane and, unlike The Bell Jar’s Esther Greenwood, doesn’t harbor the delusion that he’s beyond the help of his doctors). Most importantly: “the system” does help Craig, who arrives at a full recovery in the final pages of the book. Most of IKOAFS’s characters are destined to remain fixtures of the ward, but nevertheless IKOAFS remains committed to its optimistic bent, which isn’t to say that this optimism compromises any of the story’s realism, nor that it obfuscates Craig’s suicide attempt, drug use or preoccupation with sex. Craig is more antihero than hero. He uses his hospital stay to elicit sympathy from the girl his best friend is dating, and later to seduce her, a choice that humanizes him, a choice that refuses to condescend to the novel’s intended audience (a middle and high school demographic). The subtlest aspect of this portrait, however, is Craig’s immersion in digital information. The character is thoroughly modern: though he doesn’t blog, obsess over his smart phone or conspicuously consume online media, the composition of his brain is something convincingly 21st century, in high relief. Craig defines his condition in terms of “tentacles,” “anchors” and the elusive “Shift.” …the Tentacles are the evil tasks that invade my life. Like, for example, my American history class last week, which necessitated me writing a paper on the weapons of the Revolutionary War, which necessitated me traveling to the Metropolitan Museum to check out some old guns…which meant that I didn’t get to respond to a mass email sent out by my teacher asking who needed extra credit, which meant I wasn’t going to get a 98 in the class, which meant I wasn’t anywhere close to the 98.6 average (body temperature, that’s what you needed to get), which meant I wasn’t going to get into the Good College, which meant I wasn’t going to have the Good Job…which led to the ultimate thing—homelessness. If you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away. The opposite of the Tentacles are the Anchors. The Anchors are things that occupy my mind and make me feel good temporarily. (14-15)

The poetic detail in that explanation—the body temperature he can’t maintain, even as a GPA—isn’t lingered on or fussed about, and is almost invisible in his anxious inner monologue.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tempting, now, to read these passages as ironic. Craig recovered, but his writer never made it out of the woods, which is the entire tragedy of suicide: with selfinflicted loss is also a loss of ambiguity, a hammering of the deceased person into something remembered, and much simpler than anything alive. The little pieces of poetry that were present in Ned Vizzini are diminished, and his place in the novel, has become something that compromises the story he started out intending to tell.

Two Venuses by Kate Harding My daughter hunts for perfect shoes the day before her best friend’s wedding. Clicking steps, hair flying, she runs to Famous Footwear, Marshall’s, Ross’s, Payless. My socks slide down into my Mary Janes. I straggle, sag behind, gulp thin March air. Afternoon sun slants down on her red hair. The homesick breeze flowing west to the sea. Her quick steps, the shape of her head, hair flapping against her back, her swinging polka dot skirt, her indented waist. A miniature Venus. From the back she looks like my mother. She is the age my mother was when I was two. Suddenly I’m crawling over the setting sun, the edge of afternoon. I stumble to my feet, take slow baby chick steps. Now there are two Venuses to follow. I always thought if they had met they would have loved each other. My mother, the ex New Yorker, sets the racing pace to Macy’s. She tells my daughter she saw a pair of gold heels there just the other day. Purses swinging on horseshoe hips, alto laughs erupting in their throats, arms linked, they will round the corner and leave me behind. They pause at Cinnabon. Two Venuses s in synch, they turn their heads, smile and wave for me to catch up. I follow the scent of sugar cookies.

Pajamas by Kate Harding for my daughter

In a rainstorm we drive to K-Mart, buy one pair of pajamas, get one free. We meet each other in our narrow rooms and stare at our twin selves. In matching pastel stripes, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m her fellow patient, not her mother. After my surgery, she serves me soup and Jell-O. I make sure she takes her meds, eats. On the days her tongue swells, her temperature soars, I slip a jacket over my pjâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, and rush to the pharmacy. Rain and wind, we build a fire in the wood stove, sit in our stripes, watch Pride and Prejudice. Like the Bennet women we do needlework. A faux spring January day, my daughter in her pajamas and garden shoes plants succulents by our door. I tuck the hems of pajama legs in rubber boots, empty compost, cat litter.

We live in the land of the ill, but this is a life. We put birdseed in our feeder, write our poems. Our flannel pajamas grow softer with each wash.

Holdfast by Kate Harding for my mother

I should have ignored the nurseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s warning and tiptoed across the hall. Overnight, your bedroom had become a tunnel to the unknown. The oxygen tent humming and puffing, you so small under that pulsating jelly fish. I should have laced our fingers together like strands of kelp in a ball at the beach. I should have held you back from the tide.

The News by Kate Harding for Danny

He said yes, you smaller than a Lima bean, were growing inside me. The doctor, a short Italian man with glasses, was smiling. The scale from the trickster universe, so heavy on the bad side: my dead mother, my gutter drunk dad, tipped wildly. My belly that once I girdled and bound, was expanding now, a pool for you little tadpole, little floating olive. Even as I changed from my paper gown to my shop girl skirt and plain blouse I noted my browning nipples. A bird hummed in my head. My fingers turned to fruits: guavas, fuzzy kiwis and pomegranates.

Contributor Biographies Sabrina Elliott is an illustrator who focuses on digital and traditional mediums. Some of her influences are pop surrealism, pulp horror imagery, Japanimaton, and early Rock and Roll culture. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2013 and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Her official website is http://sabrinaelliott.com/.

Ken Wagner is a volunteer poetry teacher in his daughtersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; classes at the local Elementary, Middle and High School. He has studied under the guidance of David Wagoner for the past three years. Ken lives in Seattle with his wife, daughters and their gigantic cow-like dog, Mrs. O'Malley.

J. Ryan Bermuda lives in Redlands, California, where people panic if it rains. His work has been published or is forthcoming in many local journals, online and in print. He and his wife Joannaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s adventures as foster parents serve as inspiration for his upcoming manuscript From Hell to Breakfast.

A. Maureen Tant studies at University College Dublin. She holds a B.S. in Cinema, Photography and Media Art. Her favorite philosopher is Jean Baudrillard and the last book that changed her was Jeanette Wintersonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Find her on Twitter and IRL in New York this summer.

Marta RodrĂguez Iborra (Barcelona, 1974) had a multilingual education at the German School in Barcelona. She earned a B.A. in Translating and Interpreting (German and English) and an MA in Creative Writing at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she now combines a position at the Graduate School with conducting doctoral research on modern autobiographical literature by women writers. She has published online critical articles and a creative epistolary essay as homage to the Virginia Woolf, her muse. Apart from the manuscripts still in her drawer, all this plus other fragments of her writing can be found at her blog: http://anatomiadelaintimidad.wordpress.com/.

Janice D. Soderling has published fiction, poetry and translations at many internationals literary journals. She has recent and forthcoming work in Rattle, Hobart, Measure, Evansville Review, B O D Y, Per Contra, Poetry Storehouse, Shot Glass Journal, Light, Raintown Review, New Verse News, The Rotary Dial, Mezzo Cammin, Blink Ink, and Alabama Literary Review. She lives and writes in Sweden.

Born in the French Alps, Olivier recently migrated to Long Beach in order to join the local community of poets. He has a B.A. and a M.A. in Literature in English from Stendhal University, France, and was granted the EAP Scholarship in order to spend his last year of undergraduate studies at UC San Diego. He is currently part of the M.F.A. in Poetry at CSU Long Beach. His poetry can be found in RipRap, Cadence Collective and Remedial Art, and his critical works in DUMAS Archives.

Alejandro Juárez Crawford has performed his serial poems at Galapagos Arts Space, the Blue Note, SOBs, and the Bowery Poetry Club, in New York, and has published them in Streetnotes and Stonefence. He writes regular opinion pieces for US New & World Report’s “Economic Intelligence” blog, is a senior consultant with Acceleration Group, and teaches at the New School, Baruch College of the City University of New York, and the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Marie Lecrivain is the editor-publisher of poeticdiversity: the litzine of Los Angeles, a photographer, and a writer. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including Edgar Allen Poetry Journal, The Los Angeles Review, The Poetry Salzburg Review, and A New Ulster among others. She is also the editor of several anthologies, including the upcoming Near Kin: Words and Art Inspired by Octavia E. Butler (© 2014 Sybaritic Press).

Reece A.J. Chambers is a twenty-one year-old writer and student from Northamptonshire, England, currently at the University of Northampton. He has been writing prose for ten years, and has been writing poetry frequently since 2011. His influences include Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage, the Beat Generation writers, and Nick Hornby. The vast majority of his poems are available online at Hello Poetry.

Sicily Famolaro is a San Diego native. She is a sophomore at San Diego State University, studying English. She has been writing poetry leisurely for a few years, but only seriously began writing the spring of 2013. Since last springtime, a few of her poems have been published through the university and other independent publications. Her style varies from sonnets to free verse—she enjoys experimenting with form, though she has yet to solidify her aesthetic. With the poems she’s written up to this point, she focuses on evocative images, and the personification of emotion and thought.

Kate Harding (a.k.a. Penny Perry) has been widely published as a poet, most recently in Lilith, and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Her poetry and book reviews have also been published in Poetry International Journal and blog and her fiction has appeared in Redbook and California Quarterly among others. She was the first woman admitted to The American Film Institute screenwriting program, and a film based on her script, A Berkeley Christmas, aired on PBS.A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee in both fiction and poetry, she was born and raised in Santa Monica, the setting for her first collection of poetry, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012), available at Amazon via CreateSpace.

Notes and Acknowledgements – All visual art within this volume is by Sabrina Elliott. – Front and back cover silkscreens by Sabrina Elliott. – Page 9, “On Synesthesia (I): In History/We Could Have” by A. Maureen Tant ^Gorrie, Christopher. “Barton Smock’s hiatus newsletters: Marrying the Precious and the Profane.” Synesthesia Literary Journal 1:1. 2013: 8-11. Web. http://synesthesialitjournal.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/synjourvol1ebook2.pdf ^Smock, Barton D. “the winners of midwestern game shows.” Hello Poetry, 03 Jul 2013. Web. http://hellopoetry.com/poem/213842/the-winners-of-midwesterngame-shows – Page 26, “On Synesthesia (II): Releasing Comfort” by A. Maureen Tant ^“Facts and Statistics” Anxiety and Depression Association of America (AADA) (2014): n.pag. Web. http://www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/factsstatistics