Tea Volume 15

Tea

Te a

volume 15 a t the U niversity of Fl ori da

facebook.com/BrokenShelves | @BrokenShelves 101 SE 2nd Pl. Ste #119 Gainesville, FL 32601

Acknowledgments As always, Tea Literary Magazine would not be here without the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Student Council. Our organization would like to thank CLAS and Student Government for continuing to back us. Its professors, student leaders, and staff have provided us with unyielding and enthusiastic support. Without over twenty-one semesters of guidance and financial support from CLAS, we simply could not be able to do what we love.

We would also like to thank Broken Shelves, which has opened its doors and its heart to the English Society. Broken Shelves is a local bookstore new to Gainesville, and we are grateful for the chance to get to know them better. The staff of Broken Shelves have offered the undergraduate literary community a home. The free ad space we have given them in return is our way of showing our appreciation.

Tea is also grateful to the Honors Program for providing us with the means to reach a wider audience. The Honors Program is committed to promoting the Humanities and Arts here at the University of Florida, and their continued faith is encouraging.

Finally, thank you to all of the artists who submitted this year and all those that support and nurture art on campus.

Letter from the editor The making of a literary magazine is as much about fostering a community of readers and writers as it is about ending up with a finished product. We quote and misquote our friends as we do the classics, with a touch of irreverence and competitive spirit. The magazine is a reflection of the kind of writing that we are interested in—writing that is thoughtful but doesn’t take itself too seriously, that is inventive without forgetting to steal from the past.

It is difficult for an undergraduate magazine to have a consistent voice. Each year, students enter and leave college. Every few years, a new editor takes the helm. Nevertheless, there is a certain continuity in being an undergraduate student at the University of Florida, living in Gainesville, and reading voraciously. In the first issue of Tea, the editorial staff wrote a list of dedications that included William S. Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Ray, a film professor who still teaches at UF fifteen years later.

We are continuously expanding our online presence because we believe that the art and the writing in these pages is worth sharing. We are also trying to expand the parameters of what a literary magazine can publish. This year, we’ve included film stills from a film that will appear in its entirety on our website.

Whether you are holding the magazine in your hands or clicking through it online, we at Tea entreat you to continue reading as carefully and as diligently as ever, dear reader.

Yours, Anna Mebel Editor-in-Chief

staff Editor-in-Chief Anna Mebel

Co-Editor Carmen Dolling

Executive Prose Editor

Executive Poetry Editor

Executive Design Editor

Danny Ennis

Kimmy Kemler

Sandy Lu

Business Director

Art Director

Design Editor

Jordan Kady

Julia Karraker

Prose Editors

Poetry Editors

Design Staff

Kathleen Bonany Colleen McTiernan Kathleen O’Leary Kelly Stephens

Nicolas Casanas Caitlin Henderson Paige Quinones Anna Walters

Kathleen Bonany Lily Wan

Brittany Wienke

Additional Reviewers Isabella Gustave Katie McPherson Emilee Rochester Marla Rosen Samantha ThilĂŠn

About our selection process Each year, Tea Literary Magazine bases its content on impartial votes by the various committees of our editorial staff. The magazine is entirely student-produced and any undergraduate student attending UF can participate in the selection process.

All submissions are emailed directly to the Editor-in-Chief of Tea. Reviews are conducted by individual visual art, poetry, and prose committees. The staff meets weekly and, during these meetings, works are displayed with their creator’s name redacted. This is the first time anyone present at the meetings views each work. Only the Editorin-Chief knows the identity of those who have submitted works for review. He or she does not vote, except in the instance of a tie. In this way, each work is selected anonymously.

Those present discuss the integrity, mechanics, and technics of the submissions. Keeping this in mind, the committees votes on whether each piece moves on for further review. If a majority agrees that a work deserves more deliberation, it will be saved for the final round of selection.

During the final round, no commentary is made. In a single meeting for each category, the entirety of the final selection is decided.

Members of selection committees rate each piece with a numerical value. The highest averaging works are slated for publication. Only after the total selection is determined for each category are the identities of their creators revealed.

Because of the anonymity we afford our submitters, staff members are permitted to submit to the magazine. We do not, in any form, give preferential treatment to any poetry, prose, or work of visual art submitted by staff members. Tea has spent more than a decade perfecting our review process and we take it very seriously. The result is a magazine that represents the best work produced by our student body as a whole.

Those interested in being published in Tea 16 should submit their work to editoroftea@yahoo.com. We look forward to your submission.

Sponsored by the UF Honors Program, the winner of the Blackbird Poetry Prize is selected each year by Dr. Kevin Knudson, the director of the Honors Program. This year he has chosen “Bailando en la noche” by Paige Quinones. Paige Quinones’ poem evokes a rich atmosphere that lingers in the mind of the reader long after completion.

Palmetto Prize for Prose The Palmetto Prize is given to a story that shows both an interest in experimentation and the desire to capture the details of everyday life. We take pride in being Floridian, in being surrounded by alligators and palmetto shrubs, and in finding new ways to articulate our experience. Endowed by an anonymous donor, we are thankful for the opportunity to provide a cash reward to an undergraduate writer.

This year, our judge for the prize was David Leavitt, one of our fiction writing professors and the editor of Subtropics. He chose our winner, Danny Ennis’ Jumping into pools, because of the story’s careful observations and emotional resonance. From the “snore concerto” to the “snowl,” the story is filled with indelible details.

awards

Blackbird Poetry Prize

On the cover The image that graces the cover of this year’s Tea was captured on the bed of a scanner. A delicate crystal teacup was photographed there and abstracted by the light reflecting through the facets of the cup. The resulting cover came out of a long process of painting shapes onto the printed image and Xeroxing it over and over, embracing the abrasions of the photocopying process as painterly marks.

Our magazine was born out of the zine culture of the 90s, a product of free thought and expression, of people with things to say and images to make. In the early days, a Xerox machine was the weapon of choice for small press publications. The abrasions that arose from the photocopying process are a lasting hallmark of zine culture.

Today, though Tea is a little more polished and genteel, our cover is indicative of what we’re about. You hold in your hand a refined, delicate object, but the writing and artwork within retain the inspired spirit of the zine culture from which we’ve arisen.

—by Jordan Kady

fiction / poetry / visual art

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Bailando en la noche PAIGE QUINONES

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Days Inn CARMEN DOLLING

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Untitled (Light and Color I) & Untitled (Light and Color II) LEAH AUGUSTINE

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Untitled Sketch DOUNIA BENDRIS

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Jumping into pools DANNY ENNIS

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Vermont EMILIO SOLA

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Selection from Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town Series BAILEY MEADOWS

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Coexist ANDREA SARCOS

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Somewhere in Illinois ANNA WALTERS

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Melancholy Path JULIA KARRAKER

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The Jar of Honey in the Fridge KIMMY KEMLER

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In Praise of Progress CARMEN DOLLING

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A Wattle-less Rooster is No Good to Anyone CIARA LEPANTO

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Selection from Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town Series BAILEY MEADOWS

How to Memorialize a Gateway in Light of the Korean War & To Document a Kassel ROBERT EDMONDSON

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The Raven Knows MORGAN THOMAS

Room for Two RACHEL DELOACH

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Palpitation No. 3 JANET VARGAS

Yellow Walls KIMMY KEMLER

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Lost in Layers STEPHANIE MANONE

Ginger Series No. 1 MELISSA MOGENSEN

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On Your Thirtieth Birthday CARMEN DOLLING

Beds VANESSA MAYOR

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The Party EMILIO SOLA

Somnolence BRANDON SHENK

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Why the Sonoran Cactus Lizard is Illegal in the U. S. of A. NICOLAS CASANAS

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Self-portrait ZAC THOMPSON

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Thought KEL MARTIN

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Dream Catcher ZAC THOMPSON

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Ghost Shark Forest HEATHER FOSTER

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RACE MATT TOWN

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Self-Esteam MELISSA MOGENSEN

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Nessus’ Trousers EMILIO SOLA

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How to Love a Girl Afraid of Love CLAUDIA PERLINI

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Bailando en la noche after Pedro Figari’s Negros y mulatas PAIGE QUINONES The floor is tattooed with candombe footprints.

Dust swirls in the corners, and cigar smoke drifts from the doorway.

El gatito negro avoids the pulse of los tambores.

The rah rah rah tata and swelling printed skirts press him to the quiet edge where he bathes in peace. Fans quiver in the hands of las mulatas, printed-paper confections that cool the faces exhausted by the never-ending songs of the accordion. I wander back to my quiet room. Later I ignore the gloating roosters.

The humid night lingers in my sheets.

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Days Inn CARMEN DOLLING You’re stretched across the motel bed like a jaguar, a naked length of languid sinew, copper skin.

A rerun of Sex and the City has come on. You twitch, asleep.

I switch off the set. In the absence of Sarah Jessica Parker’s voice, I can hear it still raining.

I step out onto the balcony.

In the parking lot below, a couple slogs through puddles, heads bent, umbrella inside out between them. They look in love. I think of yesterday, watching from the cab as grey rain slapped the streets of New York, newly resembling the canals of Venice. The motel sign glared pink and gap-toothed.

You held the car door open.

In the room, we shed our sopping shoes, pants, underthings, fell dripping into the bed. We made frantic love and you whistled a few bars of Boléro.

Then we lay together, panting.

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Untitled (Light and Color I) and Untitled (Light and Color II) by Leah Augustine; digital photography

Untitled Sketch by Dounia Bendris; pen and ink

Jumping into pools DANNY ENNIS Both sides of Niagara Falls make Jack want to go swimming, but he knows the Canadians are probably just as strict as the Americans when arresting people who decide to jump in. He wonders if it’s illegal to swim there. He wonders which country would arrest him.

His uncle used to lecture him about maritime law, but he never really learned what that meant so he can only assume that the Americans and Canadians would fight over who should be able to arrest him if he decides to jump into the tank where the bodies of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combine.

The family has gone over to the touristy section beyond the falls on the Canadian side, past where the customs lines have gotten progressively longer. When Jack was younger they didn’t even need a passport or photo ID to get through, they just had to look like they weren’t dangerous. The last time there, they walked by Ripley’s Believe It or Not. They ate honey, peppers, ice cream, and bought Christmas ornaments. Nobody cried, nobody threw up.

He brings a flask of gin when he does laundry because it lets him relax as he stares everyone down like he’s a headhunter. He means that literally, not like he’s trying to hire them. He keeps the flask next to his detergent like he’s arranging the ingredients for some weird mixed drink, and he sits on the floor with his feet stretched out and his toes pointed outward at 45 degree angles and his back against the dryers as they rumble the sweat out of him for the next 45 minutes. He’d sit there just for the smell of laundry if he could.

He thinks he’ll meet someone at the laundromat that he can get to know or talk to because they both happened to be on the same washing machine schedule for weeks at a time, each having exactly fiction

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three weeks worth of clothes to get them through. He never thinks he’ll actually meet anyone because nobody else is weird enough to go to the laundromat at the same time every three weeks.

He brings a book. He looks at the washers across from him like they’re fish tanks for clothing. He’d sit there just for the smell of laundry if he could.

Karen points to a fish in a dark tank and the man behind the counter shouts from across the store at them. Not in a mean way, just to get their attention.

“Do you wanna see the real gems?” he asks Jack and her.

“We’re just looking for a nice little guy to keep for a while,” she says.

“Got a tank yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Well for what I’m about to show ya, you’re gonna have to buy the tank somewhere else. But you can’t get these little fishies anywhere else.”

She looks at Jack. Jack looks at the man behind the counter. The man looks at her. The man wiggles his eyebrows, which are huge and thick, visible from across the store, even for someone with 20/40 vision.

The customs line on the way back from Niagara is just as long, and the sun is set by the time they’re through. The dad drives and listens to NPR, the mom watches something on her tablet, the brother sleeps, Jack hates himself for realizing he’s looking out the window as he’s listening to music so it’s like the musical narration to an indie flick set somewhere in upstate New York.

“Are we going to stay up later when we get back?” he asks.

Either nobody hears him or nobody feels like answering so he assumes it’s a no.

“I’m going to sleep on the roof tonight.”

Still no response.

“I’m gonna buy some beer and take a bath in it.”

Nobody responds. He checks his wallet to see how much cash he has and realizes it’s not enough to buy a bathtub full of beer, so he rents Caddyshack from the hotel movie database for free.

The snoring around him as he watches the movie is like what he imagines an orchestra sounds like when they’re all tuning up before 20

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performing. He waits for them all to sync up their snoring so they’re in time with one another. One of Chopin’s concertos could start any second, with his father playing the first chair snorer.

They keep sleeping. He falls asleep before Bill Murray sees the gopher. He wakes up close to the end and feels like he didn’t miss much.

They go into the back of the fish store where it feels like the upper floors of Chinatown for exotic pets, where they keep the things that everyone really wants but nobody can really have.

“This guy’s one of the best one we have. Straight from the Ivory Coast.”

“I think we’re just looking for something that won’t last too long.

Maybe a guppy or—” she says.

“Let’s keep looking. We’ll find you what you need. Let’s look over here. This one is straight from the Mariana Trench,” the man behind the counter says.

“Seriously?”

“Oh yes. We take our fish very seriously here, it’s what we do, we’ve all or mostly dedicated our lives to the fish here and swimming around sometimes.”

“Yeah, so I’m not sure if we’re ready for one of these fish.”

“This Mariana Trench fish is a real steal. And we don’t just show it to everyone. Keep in mind, it isn’t easy to get a tank for one of these bad boys.”

“Where can we get one?”

“Well, currently, nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“There may be some online somewhere. You can always make your own. Bulletproof glass, triple thick black tinting, algae for the environment.”

They look at each other. He wants it. She probably doesn’t, but he can’t tell from the look on her face.

“We’ll take it.”

“Can we talk about this for a second?” she says to him. They talk.

This is how they meet: He sees a girl he’s seen at the laundromat as he’s walking to the laundromat.

“Just doing some laundry?” he asks.

“Who are you?” fiction

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“Oh. I’ve seen you before at the laundry place. I thought you were going there too.”

“No.” “Okay. Oh. Well I am. You look tired.”

“Yeah I just took a power nap.”

“That’s called a Disco Nap,” he says.

“I don’t really think it is.”

“I guess it doesn’t really matter. Do you want to get dinner sometime while we’re doing laundry at the same time?”

“Do you do this often? Try to go on dates with girls at the Laundromat?”

“We’re not even at—” “Do you think this is what girls are into? Why don’t you go to a party or date your friends’ girlfriends like normal people,” she says.

He looks at her. He remembers the gin bottle in the back pocket of his jeans. He asks her to drink some with him. She says no again.

He shows her the book he’s reading, the title doesn’t matter. He tells her to talk to him next time she does laundry. He tells her not to forget him. She says she won’t forget him. How could she ever forget him? she asks. He thinks she probably will forget him, or at least pretend to.

They go to museums together but don’t hold hands when they walk around so things stay ambiguous like the Impressionists in the Met. They go to the Whitney, the Guggenheim and MoMA but especially the Met when the Mets lose so he can still cheer for something. He doesn’t like sports but he pretends to like something so people like him more.

They look at the early Renaissance, the Baroque, Rococo, Contemporary. They hold hands, they don’t hold hands, they stand on opposite sides of the room. They look at Impressionists, PostImpressionists, Fauvists, Abstract Expressionists. Manet and Monet, Gauguin and Goya, Pollock and Frankenthaler, Twombly and Minter.

Over time, the details in the paintings are blurred, but from far away everything seems fine.

She meets him to eat pizza after he’s been sitting there by himself for a half hour or forty-five minutes or an hour. Who knows.

“Don’t you wonder why they didn’t just call it the Snowl?” She doesn’t say hello. “For snowy owl?”

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about snow owls from three days ago. That’s how she works, she finishes conversations with ellipses and begins sentences with ellipses, and he wonders if they’ve ever said hello or if they’ve ever said goodbye or if they ever will.

“Everyone thinks they’re white, but they have black feathers when they’re younger,” she says.

Her entire life is a run-on sentence, which is fine because he likes run-ons and he thinks run-ons are important to people that like runons but still it seems like even for people that like run-ons there gets to be a point where everyone stops. She never does.

“I think I’d like to go back in time to the day the Beatles recorded that song live on BBC,” she says. “‘A Day in the Life?’”

“Yeah,” she says. He’s unsure if she can tell that he was asking a question about the song or just suggesting a remedy or comfort for her dreams.

She goes to the counter to get her slice of pizza.

“No,” she says, “It was ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Did you know that Clifton Pugh was colorblind?”

“Shh,” he says.

She continues to be quiet.

He answers his phone. She looks at him, she looks back at her computer, she looks back at him.

He has a conversation, he hangs up, he tells her she doesn’t have to be quiet anymore, she asks who was on the phone, he says his parents, she puts one arm over him and puts two legs through his. She closes her computer and he can tell she is thinking about other things. She doesn’t ask how his day was. She is long gone from this moment. She is in twenty years and she is lost three weeks back in her mind. She is a spinning top, waiting to topple.

Today isn’t the day she topples. She keeps spinning, she keeps talking, she keeps shifting from one thought to the next and keeps him listening because until she topples he will want to listen. He doesn’t want to know she will topple.

“I almost jumped in, you know,” he says.

“You should have,” she says.

You think so?

“Yeah,” he says.

“Wait, what did you say?” she says. fiction

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Vermont EMILIO SOLA She remembers neither the cottontails nor the cottontails there used to be before the old type died out. She is repeatedly surprised to find cold air streaming through the walls, repeatedly at a loss for where to find insulation.

The young man distracts her who comes now and then to start the old car and never moves it from the lot.

And the boys that circulate her lodgings like gas, sick scrubland birds with no ideas and damaged voices, the impertinent health of fifteen-year-olds.

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Selection from Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town Series by Bailey Meadows; collage

Coexist by Andrea Sarcos; 11”x14” silver gelatin print

Somewhere in Illinois ANNA WALTERS there is a town where parents still tell their children not to play in old refrigerators put on the curb for bulk trash pick up.

It was rumored that a child died this way in the Thirties, sealed inside and taken off to the sinkhole. The kids of the block today cannot be bothered to take an interest in repurposing fridges into castles or caves— they have enough places to hide. Still, the parents rub their temples and pull out single strands of hair, hoping that a thing cannot happen at the same time you’re thinking about it.

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Melancholy Path by Julia Karraker; single print of two black and white negatives

The Jar of Honey in the Fridge KIMMY KEMLER “All she remembers is a jar of honey in the fridge,” the newscaster says, and I’m paying attention now.

The news switches to Republicans debating taxes. I wonder about the jar of honey in the fridge. About the girl whose mother was shot in the yard as she reached into the refrigerator for the jar of honey. Maybe she knew about honey—its natural preservatives.

Maybe she was preserving something herself: her desire to turn and look into the yard; the lilac-laundry smell every Sunday (it’s Saturday); the way the jar of honey looked, cold in the fridge, gold, like she could climb into it, suspend herself and be preserved; the way twelve years passed so fast; her mother’s shirt, flowered in blood in the yard, the way the blue and red lights flashed and reflected off the jar of honey in the fridge.

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In Praise of Progress CARMEN DOLLING On the television, a caterpillar time-lapses into its cocoon. “Papilio ulysses takes twenty-six days to metamorphose,” you tell me. Discovery cuts to commercial.

You flip the channel, and Jeopardy winks onto the screen. You drawl the answer: “What is Lake Baikal?” and switch again.

The television blinks past a tennis match, the Kardashians, Scooby-Doo, the news.

“There’s nothing on TV,” you say, returning to the caterpillar. A blue butterfly hangs wetly from the chrysalis, a glistening dénouement.

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A Wattle-less Rooster is No Good to Anyone CIARA LEPANTO I didn’t tell anyone, but I knew who stole the rooster’s wattle.

The statue stood in front of Cindy’s Chicken, a local restaurant where the food was usually adequate and always fried. But the company was warm, and who doesn’t love a giant rooster to pose with before and after dinner? People passing through our town on the way to more important places usually did a U-turn just to take a picture. Locals staged their family portraits with the ten-foot-something rooster towering above their smiles. My father insisted on having our pictures done there one year for our Christmas cards. We got a lot of positive feedback from the extended family, not about how much I had grown, or how my mother’s hair wasn’t thinning nearly as much as she had been leading on, but about the rooster in the background, and how fiction

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cute of an idea it was to put an oversized Santa hat on its comb. It was the pride of our town, but a wattle-less rooster is no good to anyone.

I don’t think it can even be called a rooster anymore, and most of the people here agreed that it wasn’t a chicken either. The whole thing was still very confusing for everyone.

Melinda Buckett from down the street swore she didn’t do it. She admitted that there were a lot of things that she’s touched, but the rooster’s wattle wasn’t one of them. I can tell you that she wasn’t lying about that, but she did lie last week when she assured her parents that she wasn’t sneaking around with Tom Hart, the senior with one dimple that could make your legs wobble and your heart catch in your throat.

I saw that too, but I never told anyone.

I stopped watching out for Melinda when she made fun of the way I stuck out my chest. I was only trying to mimic good posture, ward off the scoliosis that every school nurse warned us would develop if we didn’t start sitting up straight. I used to stare at her back sometimes, hoping that it would look at least a little bit crooked. It was always straight as an arrow.

Everyone wanted to pin it on Joey Marks, and no one was shy to admit it. I even saw a few of his teachers talking to the sheriff the afternoon he came to lecture our class about the “legal and moral ramifications of theft” and how the justice system doesn’t look kindly on “accessories after the fact.” Joey’s teachers probably explained to the sheriff how difficult he could be in class, how he never participated, how, when he did participate, it was almost always some crude interjection, and how so very like him this act of vandalism seemed. That shouldn’t have held any weight, but I saw an officer pull Joey aside after school that same day and take him for a walk around the block. Joey might have been a real pain, but it wasn’t him either.

Ms. Hempel was our World History teacher, and even if I didn’t already know that she didn’t take the wattle, I don’t think I ever could have suspected her. She took over her family’s watch repair shop when her parents died and spent most of the time staring out the front window. Sometimes I went into the shop on the weekends and pretended to look at the watches on display. Usually one of her hands cupped her drooping chin while the other was busy scribbling in a notepad. She told me one day that she was writing a list. I asked what for, and she explained that it was a list of things she never did. I asked why she had never done them, but instead of answering me she started to read the list aloud.

She never planned the hot air balloon trip she had been talking about since her sophomore year of undergrad. She never stopped 32

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her Seventeen magazine subscription, even though seventeen was many wrinkles ago. She never adopted a dog or a child. She never ran a red light. She never brushed her teeth from left to right like her mother said she should. She never caught a grape in her mouth. She never traveled farther than two states away. She never felt sexy when she was alone. She never walked barefoot in an open field and got so lost that she couldn’t find her shoes. She never jumped into a pool with all of her clothes on, or even just some of them. She never folded her pizza before taking a bite. She never curled her eyelashes. She never meant to think of her life as a summation of the things she had never done, but it always seemed to end up that way.

Everyone had a theory about who stole the wattle in the days following the news. Things like that don’t fade quickly in a town like this, and whispers crossed the street without looking both ways. About a week after the incident, I walked into my World History class, late but unnoticed, and claimed my seat at the back of the room. I always sat close enough to the lectern to hear Ms. Hempel’s half-hearted lectures, but far enough away so that there was little threat she would ever call on me. When I came in, I saw that she was sitting at her desk, both hands out of view. There was an essay prompt written on the board, but judging by the dull murmur in the room I took it as being optional.

The edge of a notebook peeked out from behind her desk. A nearby conversation pulled me away from her lists, and I leaned forward in my seat to get a better listen.

“I think it was that Connie girl with the nasty overbite,” Melinda whispered to no one in particular. “It looks like her mouth is trying to eat the rest of her face.” She paused, waiting for someone to laugh.

The class had heard this one at least seven times already.

“I bet I know who robbed the cock,” said Joey. He lingered on the last word.

“You’re disgusting,” said Melinda. Joey ignored her.

“We all know that you wouldn’t be afraid of it,” he said, raising an eyebrow. He looked back and forth between her mortified face and the back of Tom Hart’s head. I don’t know if my cheeks were actually redder than Melinda’s or not, but they stung like they had been slapped.

“Yeah right,” she said. “There’s no way you know who did it.”

Melinda forgot to whisper this time though, and Ms. Hempel looked up from her lap. She mustered up an indiscriminate warning.

“It’s not like you know anything either,” Joey replied. He didn’t bother whispering, but Ms. Hempel was already too absorbed in her expanding list to notice. I wished one of them would have turned around and looked at me. fiction

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“No, but I have my theories,” Melinda said. She scanned the room.

Joey probably replied with some obscene gesture, Melinda probably spun her head around in a huff, and Ms. Hempel probably added never splurged on a mani-pedi to her list, but I stopped paying attention.

The truth was I knew who stole the rooster’s wattle, but it was nothing to get excited about. Even if I told everyone, it’s possible that no one would have heard me. It wasn’t someone Melinda cared about, or Joey, or Ms. Hempel. It’s not someone that anyone else in this town cared about. I didn’t even care about him, though I think he and I might both be missing the same thing.

There’s a man around here that most people pretended not to notice. They made themselves believe that their shoelaces were coming loose whenever they saw him approaching, and I watched them stare at their feet as he passed by. I remember hearing my father say something to my mother a few years ago as we pulled up next to him at a stoplight.

Something about how the man had called the police claiming to have found bones in his backyard, but that apparently they were just dinner scraps from a few nights before. My father said that the man was a few parts short of a full set, bless his heart.

I saw him outside of the restaurant one night, standing beneath the rooster’s tail feathers. He was chucking rocks into the air, and as far as I could tell he wasn’t aiming for anything in particular. All of a sudden one of the rocks hit an unexpected target, and down tumbled the wattle. It landed right in front of the man, and he just stared at it. After a few minutes had passed, the man looked over his shoulder and, seeing that no one was there, picked it up. He took off his coat and wrapped it around the wattle. I watched as he walked away with an armful of lumpy cloth, completely unnoticed.

The funny thing was that the man actually confessed to stealing it. For the next few weeks he stood in front of the wattle-less rooster, not really apologizing for ruining family photos or Christmas cards, but just letting them know that he was responsible. They were all too busy examining their shoelaces and pretending not to hear him.

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Selection from Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town Series by Bailey Meadows; magazine and book clippings arranged both digitally and by hand

The Raven Knows MORGAN THOMAS That supper rarely comes to those who wait.

That a man bares more in muttered curse than oft-repeated song.

That winter runs hard on summer’s heels.

That it is the curse of a thing in flight to dread an incompetent landing.

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Palpitation No. 3 by Janet Vargas; charcoal on paper

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On Your Thirtieth Birthday CARMEN DOLLING Let us talk a while about the things to come.

We are not so old as we imagine.

The weary dog still wags its tail– let us, too, wag our tails, pour the coffee, eat the cake.

There will be parties, children, promotions, accidents, Christmases, cancer, grandchildren.

This is all OK. You will not see everything. You will not remember everything.

If they ask your age, tell them you are twenty-five.

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Lost in Layers by Stephanie Manone; sharpie, acrylic, and loose tea

The Party EMILIO SOLA A prince on a calico stallion, the jealous brother of a ghost, a fat gas station attendant just recently out of a job.

Norman Mailer and a date, two cherries, a box of prunes, some Minneapolis punks halfway through a reunion tour.

Brawlers, sycophants, the man who’s got Something to say.

An abandoned Greyhound bus, married hotel managers, she lived with Harry Nilsson, him too.

In time we’ll have to move outdoors. A baby put to sleep.

A Chinese pig roast. The final roster of the original Winnipeg Jets, ten birthday candles, an infection beneath the skin.

The lost pension, the abortive campaign, and the good days coming still fewer.

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Self-portrait by Zac Thompson; ink and watercolor

Thought KEL MARTIN

Thought. Sound and fury—morningmayhem. They’re stirring, all equivocations, my fear foaming insecurity, but I wake at the sight of my usual classifications suffused in eyes unaccepting and hair unrelenting. I’m yearning for my morning coffee, but I consider first the little orange pill to keep all the thoughts away coming in droves of verse: I’ve been thinking of picking up a couple of bad habits to xyst a couple years—trim along the border with a tallow knife that melts into vitiating toxins...

I wonder if these pills are parasite-producing, making me feel so good until I miss one, everything blurred and confused. The councilmen in my brain swirls are there deciding if I’m inadequate or socially mal-adjusted, even though it’s my day off from the XXX literary fanatics of 20th century literature, and my long coveted sabbatical from the orgasmo asking when the new erotica will grace the library shelves. fiction

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Maybe today I can look at my past praises, analyze them to the brink of extinction, or I can avoid all contact to the ne plus ultra, walk in front of a bus (not to kill myself, of course, but to take on the minimum injury for a charming hospital visit—a prolonged convalescence would be nice). To have such a deep-rooted ambivalence in all daily customs cannot be very sound. This state has become quite uncomfortable, constantly seeing all sides branching into a multitude of directions.

The pill is supposed to help, but I don’t think it does. I’m done with it. I’ll ride out the side-effects. I’m not afraid—let them come: And I inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale through the Ozone, make some apertures for the Earth to phone the planets about this philosopher man that everyone listens to because he’s dead.

My apartment has become plastered with anything that has somehow attached itself to my self-esteem: lists of obscure words to remember in the heat of conversation, posters of avant-garde bands from the 60s I can reference to the bored guests, and collections of little yellow Penguin classics that must remain in the most salient positions.

Any time I meet the whims of failure, at least I’ve read Naked Lunch, I reason—even though there are millions who have read it who can take a standardized test without trembling. You can imagine I was never very proficient at standardized testing due to a constant lingering suspicion of jiggery-pokery. Today should be fruitful because I’ve decided I want to create something beautiful, no longer constrained by those capsules. My work will be effusive and untarnished—analyze me, for I have no shame: This kakemono is forming under my scrutiny, FINDing itself wuthering in the shogunite war of the surface eye; the habitation of land has been scrutinized enough by technological diableries of wire plexuses and rotted xylographs that rise above the gibbets of pre-birth control America; your condoms sing America.

All the absurdity in the world at that moment had to blast through my window just as I began writing, “We are all alone here and we are dead in the snotgreen sea.” A rouge red stiletto sans foot shatters my windowpane, now lying amongst the shards in the most propitious fashion. I step very carefully over the shoe so as to not disrupt its natural form, and I see this rather small brownhairedblackattired woman in pursuit of this business-type man shielding himself from her piercing fulminations and the thrusts of her unwarrantedly gaudy footpiece.

I’m too distracted by the lovely glass shards behind me to question why this poor man is fleeing as if caught in some subtle caressing act, or maybe even employing an innocent hypocorism. I can’t decide if I should be more concerned about cleaning up this mess and returning 44

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the shoe, or if I should embrace this Dada vortex manifesto lying at my feet.

It was love at first sight. Initially plagued with that feeling you get on Sundays when everything is nostalgic and hazy around 5 PM, and you’re thinking about the 1990s or something that really forms an impressionistic fog over the entire evening, I gawk at this seemingly ugly tableau for an hour before I finally decide to write my poem: So much depends/Upon a stiletto projectile/Glazed with...Merde.

Remove clothing and engage in tribal dance: orgyporgy orgyporgy. No epiphany. Take pictures, paste on walls, scribble scribble.

Flash lights three times to form an image. Exhaustion. Let’s try a new angle—stab shoe through the ceiling (lovely). Sharpie diacritical marks on the heel; promethean fire forming—bookcase aflame, walls in blackened shame—procrustean crumbling crumble cruuumble—a microwave detonator somewhere in my brain swirls clicks, and all is quiet; return to order: The prescriptions for your internet hypochondria rattle in empty bottles but your electric cigarettes quell the luxury of zzysting your relatives a little faster.

A knock. I look around at this horrid pastiche: the stiletto hanging in the ceiling by what’s left of the heel, vitreous shards sticking out of my foot, making the sweet kroovy run in a puddle on the carpet.

Some obscure primitivist abstraction of the cosmos splashed on the walls of the urban subway system immediately comes to mind—a swirling madness of charred books and photographs fluttering from the ceiling fan, various trimmings of clothes stapled to the wall, and a fitting prose piece written in pointy sharpie letters on my door (in the only clear white space to the left of the knob—right in the center—the rest of the door blackened in soot and grime): Opal evenings and sapphire swirling/Velvet coasts and pastures forming/Detritus dementia/Rainbow gravitation burning/Lepidoptera laughing/Waxing wings/Saturnine springs/ Stiletto sings...But this knock.

I go to the door not altogether sure if I want this person to see me naked: disheveled dishabilled damsel distressingly demanding, “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m the one who threw that wretched shoe through your window earlier.. I just now cornered that bastard. I’m Sylvia, by the way. I would ask your name, but by the size of your erection, I assume you must be in the middle of something. So, if you don’t mind, I would like my shoe back. Here’s my number—please call me concerning the damages.”

I wonder if she would like to sleep with me.

“No, darling, I really just want my shoe.”

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Ghost Shark Forest by Heather Foster; mixed media on paper

Self-Esteam by Melissa Mogensen; acrylic paint on canvas

How to Love a Girl Afraid of Love CLAUDIA PERLINI I’m talking about staying up all night, I’m talking about peeling back the orange skin and finding the moon.

I’m talking about slanted January light on her rib cage where words

meet words meet music.

Because it’s easy to give away all your things when you have to move somewhere new.

Because I don’t like boxes or packing tape or goats that pretend to be sheep

pretend to be broken down pickup trucks with crates inside.

Orange crates, boxes of wishing and early morning windowsill kisses,

strangers seeing you naked through the windows while you’re having sex making love making time for love and making up words that aren’t love so that you don’t have to say I love you.

I love you like orange peel turned to chalk under my foraging fingernails, like talking about God when you mean daydreams, when you mean untucked sheets full of crumbs full of laughter full of light meeting ribs meeting music meeting folks who fake jokes.

If this all weren’t so funny, we wouldn’t be afraid, we’d be in love.

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How to Memorialize a Gateway in Light of the Korean War (above) & To Document a Kassel (below)

by Robert Edmondson; ISO 400 color film

Room for Two RACHEL DELOACH You ask me what I am thinking about and I say nothing.

You don’t want to hear phytoplankton, greenish sparks where the water touches shore, the splash of glow on the rocks at night.

I slouch on the edge of the bed, seeing luminous marine life in the spots of plastic-tinted light as your voice changes pitch with the A/C unit below the window.

The Come On Inn has a certain savoir-faire (blue plastic trash bins, faded paisley comforters, and two paintings of pelicans above the headboards) but it isn’t your style.

Your champagne Camry looks out of place in the parking lot, and my eyes wander to the bus stop. Nobody is waiting.

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Yellow Walls KIMMY KEMLER My mother never wanted to grow old without a son. The days passed by and now her face is creased; her once-plump hands are cold.

I can remember times when she knew how to hold a brush and paint the sun’s slow set in pink and orange hues. And I, sixteen, her muse in our sienna kitchenette, had never seen the porcelain figurine beside her bed. A pair of baby shoes were powder blue on the clay infant’s feet.

Engraved on them was 1992— the year she and my dad would learn of me and keep their fingers crossed for soccer balls or baseball mitts, but still paint yellow walls.

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Ginger Series No. 1 by Melissa Mogensen; pencil and watercolor on paper

Beds a series

by VANESSA MAYOR

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This series was inspired by my fascination with the human attachment to beds, and how the significance of the bed changes over time.

Each bed and mattress represents a different stage in life, from childhood to the deathbed.

The first stands for childbirth, its materials representing body fluids. The second is my interpretation of innocent attachment, and the third represents the dangerous and fragile stage of the adolescent years. The fourth bed signifies adulthood: there is assurance and power over the bed as an object. Finally, the fifth bed is the deathbed, where I unified the rituals of cremation and burial by making an ashes box containing soil.

Through this series, I wish for the viewer to reflect on the personal significance of the bed, and its continued presence in a person’s life.

wood, wood stain, foam, wax, oil paint, saran wrap, blankets, talcum powder, glass, pebbles, white fur, Vaseline, soil

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Somnolence BRANDON SHENK I saw a tabby once while taking a walk, eyed it with oblique affinity, and said, “What’s your take on things? You know, the human condition.”

The cat kept cool, real calm and indifferent.

It opted to glance at me passively, its black slits backdropped by jaundiced sunbursts.

Then it lowered its head to rest atop its paws and closed its eyes.

I couldn’t blame it.

Sometimes I don’t like to talk about it either.

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Why the Sonoran Cactus Lizard is Illegal in the U. S. of A. NICOLAS CASANAS Arnaud Rogers returned from his trip to Mexico. He ripped the tasseled sombrero off his head, threw his luggage down, and lay on the couch. Then he remembered: the cactus lizard.

He had to take care of the cactus lizard. There was hair growing on its back already. Arnaud stood up and rushed to the balcony.

Flowerpot. He tossed out the shriveled black flower that had been dying there since he moved in. He needed sand, quickly, quickly. He looked around. Futile. There was no sand in his apartment. He went to his kitchenette and mixed flour, salt, and sugar into a powdery mixture.

Not sand, but almost. Good enough.

He could not let the cactus lizard die, not after all the trouble it took to smuggle it across the border. For the sake of color, he sprinkled the mixture with cinnamon. Arnaud quickly filled the flowerpot a third of the way with his sand and dropped the cactus lizard in. It used to be a pale blue-gray color, with white diamonds on its back. Now it was turning green. fiction

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He flicked three droplets of water on the cactus lizard’s back. It twitched. The cactus lizard yawned and closed its eyes. Arnaud scooped up some more sand and buried the cactus lizard. Almost immediately it sprouted, scaly skin yielding to tough green ridges. Hair turned to spines, turned to needles. The needles pulsed as the cactus lizard exhaled. Then it was still.

A cactus.

Arnaud raised his arms and yelled “Olé!” He put his sombrero back on. *** About a week later, while looking for his wallet, Arnaud accidentally knocked over the cactus. As it fell, the cactus emitted a hiss, sprouted limbs and a tail, and transfigured into a lizard once more as it hit the ground. The lizard scurried up Arnaud’s leg, bit his knee, and escaped under the door.

His knee swelled. His leg swelled. His torso swelled. The next day he had a fever. The day after that he had a terrible thirst. His skin tightened and, as Arnaud reached toward the door, he found that he could no longer move. He was stuck standing in the center of his apartment, arms akimbo. *** Six weeks had passed since rent was due. Arnaud was declared missing. The landlord, after having lost the duplicate key, had the door broken down. He looked into the darkness of the apartment. There, inside, was an enormous cactus beginning to crack the ceiling and the floor. The landlord called for his wife. He pointed at the cactus. She nodded.

“I’ll get the hacksaw,” she said.

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Dream Catcher by Zac Thompson; pronto plate and collage

RACE a film

by MATT TOWN

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RACE is a case study of a dog track in Florida. Although I grew up right down the street from the establishment, I had never been inside. Exploring the space with a camera enabled me to see more than just dogs running around a track.

This film was shot at 64 frames per second, 24 frames per second arguably mimics how we see, while 64 fps produces more images per second, extending the amount of images we see for a second. 64 fps was the slowest rate I could shoot at with the handcranked 16mm Bolex camera I had access to. At first I wanted to use the slow frame rate to capture the beauty of the dogs midstride as they usually pass with such speed.

This way I could study the physique of the animals rather than the number strapped on them. I became less interested in that specific image as I spent more time at the track. I kept in mind the concept of being forced to see more when you have a succession of the same image.

As thrilling as dogs racing might seem, the atmosphere at the racetrack is very static. The intrusion of a camera, not to mention the buzzing hymn it produced, stood as a device that drew attention to my practice.

I visited the track a handful of times to shoot the film, starting around high noon. There were these long periods between each race. This encouraged discussion and involvement with the staff.

Some workers thought the dogs were unintelligent and felt angst toward them. “If I had one of these shit kickers at my house, he would show the burglar where

the shit’s at,” one stated. Others embodied compassion, namely one hand. She had a paw tattooed between the thumb and index finger, positioned right where her fellow employees’ muzzles rest.

Within the barriers of that track I observed a naked hierarchy between race and labor, between the white and black people, between the people and the greyhounds. Consciously working with the tattered images manufactured by the camera, nostalgic for a distant epoch, I attempted to bring that separation to light.

stills from RACE (2012, 16mm, 3 minutes)

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Nessus’ Trousers EMILIO SOLA Nessus’ trousers don’t burn.

They itch something dreadful and ride uncomfortably up in the seat.

The cut is unflattering—a fit for four legs—and like an electric lamp they attract hordes of moths.

They bring to mind—all at once— schoolchildren, cowboys, Russian tsars and rhinoceros hide. I don’t remember the color. You can wear them to the bank, or on a walk.

Once they were praised by a person I suspect was being facetious. Heracles never wore them; I did. I thought you should know.

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2013