The Columbia Review Fall 2022

the columbia review

An Editors’ Note It’s a whim-whim.

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vol 104

issue 1

fall 2022

contents Mutton Liver

Phi l i p Mills

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__ / \ _____________ / \ | / \ | | | | ( ) ( ) | | | | ___ | |____|__|___________|

Phi l i p Mills

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A r i el C hu

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THERE’S MORE THAN GOD & SEMI-TRUCKS IN INDIANA, NOT THAT YOU’D KNOW

Br yce Berkow itz

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TOUR POME

Neo n Ma shu rov

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C el este Goyer

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C a m ero n L ovejoy

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Eben Bei n

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Li z Schroeder

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10-12-22

Whi skey Radis h

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10-05-22

Whi skey Radis h

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Tailless Comet

K a m i Enzie

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Lindgren (I)

Jul i a n Ko slow

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Headstones

Si m o n A nton Nino Diego

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The Housewarming

You Can Finish This Without Me Aid Danger is when your name gets longer Wagner was Overrated

Ba ena Devoured

Seba sti a n Merrill

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Hair Cut

D yl a n Reber

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Mutton Liver Philip Mills

I Upon the hill, there lies a doghouse encased in tar paper and molded glue;

the withering shade of a nearby sycamore shrouds it indelibly.

Reach your hands into its doorway Allow the cur to lick the oil from your palms for it is rich.

Offer what little you have Be it neck, tongue, or mutton liver, the cur reveals itself.

And with placid eyes

she appraises.

II If you have no meat to offer exhaust those thoughts and retire

your senses rest away rest away.

Allow this weariness To overwhelm your spirit.

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rest Feel the cur Mold your flesh into the delicate shape of her mouth.

Quiet, Quiet

forget. forget.

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__ / \ _____________ / \ | / \ | | | | ( ) ( ) | | | | ___ | |____|__|___________|

Philip Mills

The gutters are clogged, and the fascia boards grow emerald.

There are no drainpipes, outlets, slopes— there is no child’s mouth to spew the bile. it isn’t bile

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i’ll bear no children.

fall 2022

The Housewarming Ariel Chu

Two of our friends have purchased a new house together. The first friend is a woman we have known since she was thirteen. The second friend is someone we have been made to like because he is newly married to the first friend. We are glad to see that the interior of their home is large enough to suggest future children, though there is only enough space for one child’s toys, and we anticipate some measure of conflict should unfettered reproduction ensue. We are also gratified to notice that in their kitchen, there are stainless steel appliances and non-toxic tools for cooking. Standing on the driveway and gazing up at the charming magenta bungalow, we are called to reflect upon the measure of a life.

Many small accomplishments made this moment possible. There were, for instance, the nights we kept the first friend from falling asleep at the wheel or drowning in her own vomit. Or the days we let the first friend cry in our arms about the various disappointments of the second friend.

Or the time we stayed seated as the officiant asked if there were any objections. There is a house in our minds where all these memories live.

It feels as though our friend has left all her childhood furniture lying in a room somewhere in that house. We are trying not to compare that house to this house, which was bought with real money. Which would easily catch on fire, if one of us were brave enough to start it.

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THERE’S MORE THAN GOD & THAT YOU’D KNOW Br yce Berkowitz

Some days I don’t wanna ask, why? my passive aggressive neighbor climbing my landlord fixing the door seven months quality pre-made pumpkin pie. stop yammering about the weather; There are plenty of Sterno cans plenty of depression too. when grazing at banality’s trough.

Take two scoops.

Make life the point.

Take a few naps in November. speckling the cracked alley floor. your worst habits–– you’ll create more bird-shit on the window. you’ll make bird-shit on the window and you’ll take every second of it personally.

Take some offense to that, But don’t go inventing problems I know––we’re all prone to do it.

Bad habits and euphemisms Just don’t make me part of your tomoato cause. once you start to look back.

I remember we’ll stop short of calling it a bender, blasting out of the city leaping through orange light disappearing from agony, long before torutous hangovers

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SEMI-TRUCKS IN INDIANA, NOT

Others, I look for something to believe in: out of her hammock to get a job, after I asked for it, Small talk is a nightmare–– Poets do it better. keeping hotel pans warm, Let’s not be short-sighted Let’s not hold hands either.

Don’t forget the bread roll.

Look past nothingness.

Enjoy the cinders of starlight Notice, if you mollycoddle thank you; no thank you–– Before you know it, your whole life story Go on... but just enough to get motivated. just to hike up the soap box.

The heart is a stupid muscle. are this year’s candy pink stove.

It’s time move on For example, pounding whiskey all night long–– bc I loved it–– at dawn to Cedar Lake, into dark water, from Illinois–– intercept life after twenty-five––

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forking French Toast into my moth, the Rain House, the House of Walls, with my skateboard tying a fresh apron around my waist, tips at the cafe with my cloest freiends, and again and again–– How long have I been dead? into my eulogy?

Maybe not., I know what this is.

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collapsing in the Glass House, launching from the rooftop into a pile of leaves, rocking my favorite thrift store and then doing it again God, do you hear me?

Who the hell sewed maggots Maybe it matters, Either way, It’s a place to begin.

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TOUR POME Neon Mashurov

i look up brain fog. you stop eating sugar. i call but not enough. constant companion. reckless with a heart. golden splooge on hotel room painting. wilmington or raleigh? gentleman or lady? it’s all wrong. who cares. at least the sun still warms my content farm. at least my penmanship is good. the past all stitched together, ambient. let’s keep this ambient. fake deep, everyone glossy, tell me again about the reclaimed wood from burning barns? sat with this long enough. mold in my water bottle kind of martyr. you saw a dragon waiting in the reeds. what happens when we’re not beside each other? i mean, i’ve never seen you laugh like this before. i’ve never laughed like this before. i mean, it’s dusk it’s dusk it’s dusk it’s dusk it’s clouds. i’m like a dog that senses home. no room for monotone in mobile homes: we came for magic. saw the sugar packet vanish in your fist. scrolled past the kids who made dead baby jokes all having babies, keeping them alive. just keep me in the context of the backseat. clothes that smell like couch & dog saliva. by the pier, the water shone so blue—i thought it was romantic. then watched a crow pluck out a fish eye, slit it gill to gill. nature’s ruthless precision. pretty, please. this will be excised too.

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You Can Finish This Without Me Celeste Goyer

Remember, rivers are little machines for stealing. They are ready to drink up a large part of our money based on ‘honesty first,’ their language very warm and free. But oh, our wintertime mistakes are on the radio now, calmly and quietly, their honey flowing out.

Our name for the drink that leads us under the river is ‘swimming lesson.’ First it takes our confidential information and drinks it up. Our breath explodes into a hot and bloody silence, like a car driving with the smell of the moon’s jacket left behind on the seats.

A little drink and we’re ready to start. We have a lot of money, in a good way, at first.

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Aid Cameron Lovejoy

I suck—solemn lemons when life gives them.

Cruel ulcer in the cheek, bell curve the tongue.

Didn’t always no one talk existing?

Signed design on the ass—another one.

The war is so raw in the news today.

Sewn my eyes shut, fart a raft, cast away to edit tides. Then one virus fuses with another crisis after Christmas of course these IPAs are racist look at gasoline.

Then I am introduced to some reductions: a cup some sugar cayenne an arctic cube I am cub puckering in his high chair and they laugh back in the day when the deltas lasted.

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Danger is when your name gets longer Eben Bein

I could write about anything and it will sound like I’m writing about my mother, for instance, Chickadees are named after their #1 Hit but they add more dees to the end of their song if there is a pygmy owl nearby because dee is for danger and the deadliest predators are small and agile, like when she starts telling me what the people who know me think, I puff up my feathered chest, trade in my little black cap for a size XL and I cheep like I could dart straight through the window of the Zoom and into her house, up to the room where I lived back when I was good, shove the bed in front of the door, crank the knob on my Sony CFD-ZW755 Boombox— yeah, I cached seeds for months for that thing— and play my song over and over, chick-a-dee-deedee-dee-dee or however many dees means danger, though, come to think of it, I don’t know exactly because every time I’ve heard the song I’ve been there.

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Wagner was Overrated Liz Schroeder

I like hairspray. I like sitting on it. I wish more people used it.

It’s sticky, and it helps me hold on when people move around.

It’s hard to shoo me off someone wearing hairspray, and that’s important. People are forever trying to shoo me off things. I am in very good shape from all the shooing.

I was sitting on someone’s hairspray when my friend Adam was killed. It was avoidable, the death. I told him not to get too close to their hands. I did tell him.

And I say my friend Adam, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t really my friend. He traveled with me for a time. We were stuck here together for a time. And now he is dead. And it feels as though the least I could do is say we were friends now. Now that he’s dead.

It is his fault I’m stuck here, though. I find it important to mention that being trapped here is his fault, top to bottom.

We were outside. We flew to one of the fancy buildings downtown. Adam said they would have good garbage. As if he knew anything about it.

I might’ve complained a little. The heat from the outside vents wasn’t very warm and the garbage wasn’t as good as Adam promised. Not that he noticed. He sat on the inside of an old wrapper and ate until he was full. I watched the last few drops of an energy drink from the top of the can. I didn’t have the stomach for it.

Once we were inside, Adam asked me, Is this okay?

As though he hadn’t been the one to lead us through the vents in the first place. As though the whole thing hadn’t been his idea.

I was happy Adam trapped us here, at first. I liked the red

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velvet curtains we slept on. I liked their matching seats with the gold armrests. The chandeliers were a particular favorite of mine, though Adam never appreciated them. He understood their utility, but never their beauty. I watched the diamonds sparkle when the theater lights dimmed. Adam sucked old wine out of the carpet.

We tried to escape after the first night of performances. People were leaving through a large revolving door. Adam flew close to a tall couple. He landed on a coat’s shoulder. He looked back for me.

I didn’t move.

I’m not afraid, I wanted to say to him. And I wasn’t. I wasn’t afraid, I was just waiting for the perfect time.

Too dangerous, Adam said later. Once we were back on the red velvet curtains, he said it. I don’t know which one of us he was trying to convince. We can try again tomorrow.

I think about the revolving door more now that Adam’s dead.

Adam was killed by applause, technically. He might still be alive if he had given me another minute. Just another minute, that’s all I needed.

But we never tried to leave again. We were trapped.

Once we were trapped, it was easy to become accustomed to our new life. We traded the dangers of the outside for the curiosities of our new home. After the first night of performances, there were two more. And two performances on the third day. Then we were alone for a while, together.

I sat in the box seats during performances. Sometimes I sat on the gold railing. If someone wore hairspray, I sat on their heads. I liked earrings. There were lots of earrings being worn in the box seats, and they dangled in a way that I enjoyed. If they were big enough, I sat on them. Some of them were slippery, and I couldn’t hold on. But some of them were not. I sat near the ears of several older women. I didn’t mind the perfume even though Adam said it gave him headaches.

Adam sat with the people. He called them that, the people. Because with the people came the action. And he wanted to be close to the action. He always invited me to come along.

It’ll be fun!

He liked the crumbs the people dropped from the sides of their

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seats. He liked feeling the rumble of the music when he crawled across the floor. He came back to the box seats after the performances. I told him someone left a silk handkerchief behind one night—silk!

That’s great, he said. Just great.

No appreciation.

I slept alone on my silk handkerchief that night. He slept on a seat by the stage. I remember thinking that was good.

I hope someone sits on him, was probably something like what I thought.

Those were the nights I was happy he wasn’t my friend.

The middle performance nights came with food. Real food, not garbage. Food served on trays and carried by people wearing perfumes that gave Adam headaches. Appetizers. I always held out for appetizer night. I didn’t need the crumbs Adam brought back to the box or the forgotten garbage from the week before.

Adam embarrassed me on appetizer nights. He preferred the fruit garnishes: lemon, lime, and orange slices. He had pedestrian taste.

He ignored the over-full martinis and stuffed olive trays. He disappeared the one time I needed help carrying an olive home. I am in very good shape, but I cannot carry a stuffed olive on my own. I tried to eat from the tray, but I kept getting shooed. The perfumed people shooed me, as if I was some sort of Adam.

Adam left me in favor of the trash.

This is very good trash!

I tried to tell Adam the food was better before it went into the trash, but he never cared. He crawled through the lid and sat inside until I told him appetizer night was over. He was selfish.

Between appetizer nights, Adam brought me leftover crumbs. I always refused them, and he didn’t understand.

What’s so good about the appetizers?

I couldn’t go back to molded sandwiches and expired milk with Adam. I wanted more. Each week tasted better than the last: bruschetta, smoked salmon, pomegranates. I starved during the weeks, waiting, afraid they wouldn’t come back.

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Adam liked the Rossini performances, which infuriated me.

They all sound the same, I tried to tell him.

All his operas are the same.

He never listened. We saw Barber of Seville once and he became convinced Gioachino Rossini was a genius. No amount of Puccini, Tchaikovsky, or even Mozart could sway him.

Pretentious, he called me.

Asinine, I called him.

I thought he would like The Queen of Spades.

It was good, he said.

Just good!

We both did agree that Wagner was overrated. That was something.

Once I’ve seen the performances a few times, I watch the audiences.

The audiences are interesting. I like to settle into hairspray and watch their reactions. I think it’s fun when someone realizes the entire performance will be in a language they don’t understand. I like it when they turn around in their seat, like maybe they’re the only one who noticed.

Like they might be having a medical episode. It’s funny when they shrug to the stranger behind them. I think maybe they’re thinking, I dressed up for this.

Adam wanted to be part of the audience. He loved the excitement of the applause. The end of the show was his favorite part. He loved a standing ovation. The applause shooed him back and forth, but like a game. Like how people ride roller coasters.

He did get to be a part of the applause. I watched it happen. He was far away, and I couldn’t see all of it, but I was watching the audience that night.

I wasn’t watching Adam. I was watching the audience, not Adam in particular.

He was too near the applause; I remember thinking that. But he always wanted to be in the action with the people. And then he was too much in the action. Smashed between the hands of the people.

I watched him smashed between a pair of sweaty hands that spent

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the entire performance clutching both armrests.

He got his wish. He was an irreversible part of the standing ovation. Trapped in applause for the next eighteen seconds, until I watched those same hands wipe him off on the back of a pair of capri pants.

I was in hairspray when Adam was killed, so I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get to him very fast. There wasn’t much to be done, but leaving the hairspray felt like the least I could do. It wasn’t easy. I had to lift one leg at a time and unstick myself.

The night Adam was killed, the hairspray I was sitting on was in a box seat. The woman underneath the hairspray did not clap like the people below. Her hands did not clap like the ones that killed Adam.

She turned to the man beside us, maybe a husband. She said, “Very nice.”

I thought that was elegant.

I unstuck my legs and went to see the smeared remains of my friend Adam and thought, What an elegant woman.

It is quieter now that Adam is dead. I don’t mind the quiet, but it is different. I am used to Adam talking.

No one brings me crumbs in the times between appetizer nights anymore. Not that I mind, I wouldn’t eat them anyway.

No one invites me to sit with the people at the performances anymore. This is good. The box seats are more comfortable, and the perfume has started to rub off on me. I am perfumed now.

No one argues with me about which operas are best anymore. I am right every night. This is perhaps what I like best. I fall asleep every night on my silk handkerchief knowing I am right—now that Adam is dead.

Appetizer nights are the same.

Except sometimes I’m so tired from holding out for appetizer night that I doze off into an over-full martini.

Sometimes I don’t wake up until I hear someone scream.

Yuck!

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And then I’m on the floor in a puddle of martini thinking about how Adam would’ve preferred to drink it like this.

And when I’m too tired to fly, I crawl back to my silk handkerchief. I don’t even look back at the stuffed olives.

I sleep on the seats now, and they’re not as bad as I thought. It’s warmer than the box and there is always food. I find the newer crumbs though, not the old garbage I’m sure Adam was eating.

I don’t sleep in the seat where Adam was killed. I sleep in the seat two rows back and a few chairs to the left. I try not to fly past that seat. Adam wasn’t my friend but I’m still not eager to see a stray wing or antenna on the floor.

I watch the performances from doorways now. No one shoos me from doorways. They can’t see me.

I waited in the doorjamb once. I closed my eyes and waited for the doors to slam when the performance started. But the door never slammed. When I opened my eyes, I saw the people kept opening the door for each other. They kept turning around and smiling at each other, holding the door. They were as useless as Adam.

It is Adam’s fault that I’m trapped here. It’s his fault I’m eating cheese out of the trash and thinking: Not bad!

It’s Adam’s fault that I tried an orange slice last week and now consider it one of my favorite foods.

But now I do fly past the seat where Adam was killed. I do fly past it and think, Maybe they’ll do Barber of Seville next week.

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10-12-22 Whiskey Radish

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10-05-22 Whiskey Radish

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Tailless Comet Ka mi Enzie

“You don’t look right?”

“Nothing else would bright there, right there.

That’s it.” “You read that?”

“Out your window. Focus: Ursa Minor? Aquarius?

Look. Between them two.

Without telescope.” “Impossible.

Without its contrail, can’t tell it from Adam.” “Up, there.

Slingshot planetary jostle.

Long flung. That’s it.”

“I can’t. Bogus news.

Nothing special to see!”

“Can. Focus.” “I can’t.

I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t I can’t.” “Ursa Minor. Aquarius.

URSA MINOR.” “When will I see you again?”

“When will I get my refund?”

“When will the cicadas be gone?”

“When will I ovulate?”

“When will you find the one?”

“When will my life begin?”

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Lindgren (I) Julian Koslow

We’re all going to marry our mothers, that much we know. When we say this to each other it sounds obvious.

And the girls will marry their dads we guess.

We ride our tricycles round the path they built for us out back: interlocking figure-eights; honking like geese, learning to play in traffic.

Back inside, rumor tiptoes in whispers about the boy snatched through his open window by a pterodactyl.

I wish I knew some way to doubt this. I keep mine shut to be sure.

We are ripe for fear.

We enjoy it, the way it spreads through our small herd, like a cold, like laughter.

A swirl of dust kicks up on the playground and it’s a ghost we all run away from, shrieking into the wooden castle in the corner. Sorry there isn’t room for you.

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Headstones Simon Anton Nino Diego Baena

All those voices he gathered in one scoop breathing rainwater inked on the graffiti wall he rubbed his eyes and found the sky floating with galleons

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Devoured Sebastian Merrill

How have I made division of myself? An apple cleft in two, I lie where I fall.

Sometimes I pronounce my grief aloud, howl toward the earth, an animal sound. Half-dead, I hollow in the dirt. I twin myself in shadow, I rinse my image in the river’s shallows. I drown my remembrance with salt water. I was yet of many accounted beautiful.

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Hair Cut Dylan Reber

I had been cutting her hair for so long that I never stopped to ask whether she liked the way I did it. I remember the first time, when I knew I’d done poorly because she told me how much she loved it. I caught her in the mirror later that evening toying with her bangs. She’d gone back over them in an attempt to fix what I had fudged. So I had her cut my hair, and she did well enough in spite of the cowlicks. And besides I had always worn hats.

I suppose it must have hurt her self-esteem to go out in public after I’d cut her badly, but we only had eyes for each other and really it mattered very little what anyone else thought. I had been losing my hair since I was nineteen. She was lovely when she was nineteen, and when her hair clippings settled in brown clumps on the floor of our bathroom, I would pile them together and hold them in my hands and find the strands as thick and full of life as they had been before I cut them away. But after ten years of cutting the thickness and the life had gone.

One Saturday in June she left early while I was out with the dog, or in the basement writing, or asleep, and when she came back I saw that she had gone to get her hair cut by a real hairdresser, and the way it fell now over her shoulders struck me as being quite unlike anything I had ever seen it do before, and my years of cutting were all of a sudden rotten years. When I told her how much I loved it, she turned to the wall and sobbed into a portrait of her mother. I approached, pulled her head close to my chest, and felt with my hands the places the stylist had undone my sorry work, thinking how well I would do the next time I cut her hair.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Philip Alexander Mills is a Greek-American poet and filmmaker. He’s currently completing his senior year at Vanderbilt University.

Ariel Chu is a PhD student in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.

She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she was awarded the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. Ariel has been published by The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and The Common, among others. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net Award, and Best Short Fictions Anthology, and she has received support from Kundiman, the Steinbeck Fellowship, the Luce Scholars Program, and the P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Bryce Berkowitz is the winner of the Austin Film Festival’s AMC TV Pilot Award (2021). He is the author of Bermuda Ferris Wheel, winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award (forthcoming). His writing has appeared in Best New Poets, New Poetry from the Midwest, The Missouri Review, The Sewanee Review, and other publications. Find him at: www.bryceberkowitz.com David Romanda lives in Kawasaki City, Japan. His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine and Poetry Ireland Review.

Celeste Goyer is a poet and visual artist living in Los Angeles, CA. She edited a literary quarterly for fourteen years and her poems have appeared in Aperçus, Times Times 3 and TXTOBJX, among others. Celeste is a member of the Wild Orchid Collective, based in Venice, CA, an interdisciplinary literary and visual arts collective. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, Celeste Goyer has lived in California since age 11, mostly in remote towns of the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts.

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Cameron Lovejoy is the editor and publisher at Tilted House, a small press in New Orleans. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Xavier Review, DIAGRAM, Barrelhouse, Bayou Magazine, and others.

Eben Bein is a high-school-biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate.

He is a 2022 Fellow for the “WritingXWriters Workshop,” winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest, and has published with Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, Passenger’s Journal, Thimble Lit, and the like. They are currently completing their first collection “From the top of the sky” which explores the weave of parent-child love and conflict. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with some ivy plants that are not dead because his husband remembers to water them.

FB/T/IG: @beinology Liz Schroeder is an MFA candidate at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

Whiskey Radish here, just outside of Boston, Ma. Selfie snapshot: Co-founder (with Char) of nDada, 2022 *** The Adventures of Char vol 1, Ice Floe Press, Toronto, 2022 *** AB Barnard College, Columbia University; major in French Lit *** Partner in poetic crime with Serge Gavronsky, poet, since 2001 (e.g.

AND OR THE, Chax Press 2022) *** Door person for Cambridge jazz clubs (Ryles, The Lilypad) *** Fan of The Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University (free and open to all)…….Gratitude to all who read my work -- thank you!

Kami Enzie is currently an MFA Candidate and Truman Capote Fellow at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Before Iowa, he was based in New York City.

IG: @yungwerther

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Raised, educated, and then educated some more in New Jersey (Ph.D. Rutgers, 2005), Julian Koslow was formerly a professor of English Renaissance literature at Virginia Tech, but left academia to take care of a child with special needs. He is currently a stay-athome parent and increasingly concerned citizen. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in SRPR, Cumberland River Review, New Ohio Review, Atlanta Review, Cider Press Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, and The Broadkill Review. He lives with his spouse and two boys in Fair Lawn, NJ. Simon Anton Nino Diego Baena lives in the Philippines with his wife and child. He is the author of two chapbooks, The Magnum Opus Persists in the Evening (Jacar Press) and The Lingering Wound (2River View).

His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, The Bitter Oleander, The Cortland Review, The Adirondack Review, Louisiana Literature, The Midwest Quarterly, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. He was a semi-finalist for the Tomaz Salamun Prize at VERSE (2021). He also publishes the online journal, January Review.

Sebastian Merrill’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from LEON Literary Review, Broadsided Press, wildness, and NonBinary Review. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Friends of Writers, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and the Academy of American Poets. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College.

Neon Mashurov (NM Esc) is a writer & translator from Brooklyn and the post-Soviet diaspora, currently living in San Diego as an MFA candidate at UCSD. Their most recent chapbooks are SERVICE (Bottlecap Press, 2022), a poetic memoir & reflection on class &

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conceptions of “the American Dream” while working in the service industry of Harvard Square during the 2011 recession, & Last Week’s Weather Forecast Made Me Nervous (Ghost City Press / Secret Riso Club), a poetry collection about living as a queer person in the aftermath of the 2016 election & the Ghost Ship fire. Their poetry appears in publications including We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Black Warrior Review, Hot Pink Magazine, Hobart Pulp, The Recluse, The Felt, Peach Magazine & Bombay Gin. They are working on a book-length lyric essay on collective organizing & its discontents, post-Soviet resignation, and the quasi-utopian search for “despite it all” tenacity, as well as a queer vampire novel on nightlife and gentrification. Find them at neon-hq.com & @neonsigh.

Dylan Reber is a writer and graduate student of English at the University of West Georgia. His short stories have been published in Four Palaces and eclectic.

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