The Madison Review Spring 2025

featuring interviews from rickey fayne and danez smith

The Madison Review spring

2025

We would like to thank Ron Kuka for his continued time, patience, and support.

Funding for this issue was provided by the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Creative Writing Fund through the UW Foundation.

The Madison Review is published semiannually. Print issues available for cost of shipping and handling. Email madisonrevw@gmail.com www.themadisonreview.wisc.edu

The Madison Review accepts unsolicited fiction and poetry. Please visit our website to submit and for submission guidelines.

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Copyright © 2025 by The Madison Review

the madison review

University of Wisconsin Department of English 6193 Helen C. White Hall

600 N. Park Street Madison, WI 53706

POETRY

Editors

Madeline Mitchell

Brett Dunn

Jordyn Ginestra

Associate Editor

Lee Kessler

Staff

Aamuktha Kottapalli

Alex Ruiz

Angel Chao

Geneva Michlig

Jaan Srimurthy

Jake Reisfeld

Jamison Grimm

Jasper Huegerich

Katrina Kallas

Liz Martens

Lorren Richards

Milo Daly

Sami Diedrich

LAYOUT

Alex Gershman

Brett Dunn

Jordyn Ginestra

Madeline Mitchell

Morgan McCormack

Rissa Nelson

Taylor D’Andrea

FICTION

Editors

Morgan McCormack

Alex Gershman

Associate Editor

Taylor D’Andrea

Staff

Aideen Gabbai

Anna Lail

Anya Bery

Emma Stueber

Evan Randle

Kyler Hansen

Liv Abegglen

Lucas Miller

Nolan Heath

Priya Kanuru

Rissa Nelson

Sally Manning

Editor’s Note

Dear Reader,

Welcome to this Spring’s edition of The Madison Review. This issue is as tender as it is honest, grappling with deeply felt desires. The following pieces uncover what it means to yearn for connection— whether these relationships be platonic, familial, or romantic. Through distinctive voices, boundless formal experimentation, and evocative prose, each work begs us to reckon with our lost loves, the loves we wish for, and how we show this love to others.

We hope you are just as taken by the Poetry, Fiction, and Art of this issue as we have been again and again. We would like to thank each of our contributors, without whom this edition would not be possible. Thank you for trusting us with your precise craft, careful dedication, and tender care, as well as calling this journal home.

We would also like to thank our program advisor, Ron Kuka, for his immensely resilient patience, abundant wisdom, and steadfast support, along with the UW-Madison English Department and the Program in Creative Writing.

To the staff, thank you for the love you have poured into this journal. None of this would be possible without the dedication, profound curiosity, and careful attention you dedicate to the literary craft.

A final thanks belongs to you, our Reader. This issue would not exist without your devotion to, and appreciation for, the written word. We sincerely thank you.

Warmly,

The Editors

Table of Contents

Free Burgers!

Luisa Barron

The same man arrived at the art installation every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday promptly at 11:15am. Each of those days, Ryanne stared at him through her Ray-Bans as she handed him a clipboard with a release form. He made no effort to hide the fact that he had eaten approximately thirty burgers courtesy of her project, nor did he make any effort to acknowledge her, but he did not avoid her gaze either. It was as if she was the greeter at Walmart whom most decent people politely ignore or pretend not to hear as the greeter mutters a weak “hello”, while the customers suppress the deep pit of horror that someone actually pays rent and buys food (also from Walmart) with the money earned from smiling at strangers hurrying into a megastore in search of cough medication and Disney-themed sheet cakes.

Ryanne named the art installation FREE BURGERS! She first got the idea as an undergrad at Berkeley, when she fell into a semiradicalized activist group, who all road tripped to see Morrissey at a music festival back in Los Angeles, her hometown. Then, while working on her MFA at Otis, an ex-child star opened an art installation of his own down the street here on La Brea, granting permission to the public to watch him cry with a paper bag over his head. She wanted to check it out, but every time she was in the area –usually after a shopping trip at the Grove with her best non-radicalized undergrad friend, Mackenzie (or Mackie) – the line was too long.

In Ryanne’s installation, anyone over the age of sixteen could queue up outside to enter (as the man had done so approximately thirty times). Participants signed a release form covering the basics of “if you die, you die” and granting permission to be photographed or filmed, etc., etc., then entered a tight, dark corridor filled with echoing pipedin sounds recorded from a slaughterhouse. The participant waited here, one at a time, until the obscured sliding doors allowed you inside the next room.

The participant entered the room facing a large blank wall and one other person facing back at them, standing in the corner wearing noise-cancelling headphones, as well as a long-sleeved, immaculately white uniform, with a glaring neon yellow heavy-duty plastic apron

draped over it. About thirty seconds after entering, the same video of shaky cam footage began playing on the wall, of various bloody scenes from a meat processing plant. The sole job of the person facing the participant – other than to be deeply ominous – was to keep the participant watching, by any means necessary.

The release form went into more details, but the basics were that this person was allowed to yell at you, tap or touch you “lightly to moderately, in an appropriately neutral area, such as the shoulder or hand”, or carry out their own tactics in order to keep your attention focused on the screen, short of using the same devices used in A Clockwork Orange , though Ryanne had thought about it. (Set up for each participant would have taken too long to be feasible.)

Raul (Wednesdays through Fridays) liked to bark like an army sergeant. “KEEP YOUR DAMN EYES OPEN, MA’AM!” he would bellow at them, regardless of their age or presentation of gender, over the sound of wailing, shrieking cows, squealing pigs, flustered chickens, and clattering machinery, viscera slopping on linoleum floors and against plastic sheeting. Jeremiah (Saturdays and Sundays; this was just a gig for him to make extra cash while his acting career was on hold due to a healing nose job) was quieter, but terrifying. He stared at any closed-eye participant, tiptoeing up to them in the small room until he stood at an uncomfortably short distance, tapped them on the shoulder, stared into their shocked, now-opened eyes, and nodded back toward the projected screen.

Both tactics worked well.

Ryanne floated through the installation as she pleased, when there was no line snaking down the narrow, cracked sidewalk. She would not linger in the room with Raul or Jeremiah, but instead lurk in the dark hallway behind a waiting participant, pretending to send a very important email or text, or wait on the other side of the sliding doors. She plugged her ears and averted her dark brown eyes while slipping past participants, sometimes bypassing the room entirely by circling the building and entering from an employee-only door out back.

Her favorite part was at the other end.

Once the six minutes and thirty-seven seconds of footage ended, another obscured set of sliding doors allowed the participant – if they had made it through with eyes open for an amount of time deemed appropriate by Raul or Jeremiah – to escape the bloody horrors. There, they were greeted cheerfully by fluorescent lights and a rotating cast of young people (all from the Midwest, places like Iowa and Wisconsin, Ryanne had assumed) in checkered uniforms and goofy

paper hats, smiling, always smiling. They called out a quick chorus of “Hello!”s and “Welcome in!”s while neon menus and signs with the bright yellow and red FREE BURGERS! logo flashed above and around them.

Ryanne had had an old flame from grad school design the logo because she knew she could get away with a discounted rate, especially if she invited said old flame to the closing reception.

The participant would be encouraged to approach the counter and be promptly handed a steaming bag of mouth-watering grease, their equivalent of a Big Mac or Whopper: a double burger with cheese, mayo, ketchup, lettuce, pickle, onion, tomato. There was a small, modified kitchen area where the burgers were prepared, behind the façade of registers and menus and colorful signage. A mini-assembly line of prep cooks with zero prep cook experience threw pre-packaged and seasoned frozen patties onto a large grill, flipped, and sent them down the line to be bunned, adorned with condiments and limp veggies, and wrapped up nicely for the next waiting participant. However, the participant could request a fresh burger if they wanted any modifications – extra pickles, plain jane, only ketchup – but you had to wait five to ten minutes for those.

Not many people asked for modifications.

The man, however, always exited the slaughterhouse room calmly. No tears, no hyperventilating, no retching, no visible signs of distress. He stepped up to the counter to ask for his free burger with no mayo. She had followed him through the installation and watched him, now dozens of times, as he stood still in the corner, waiting for mayo-less buns. Who hates mayo that much? , Ryanne thought.

It was week 11 of a 12-week run. The installation had gone remarkably well: the LA Times ran a piece a few weeks in, which garnered some national attention, at least on Instagram. PETA got mad about it, their angle being that there was still exploitation of animals in the cooking and giving away of the free burgers themselves. Ryanne hadn’t told anyone, except for the one vegan actress who worked Thursdays and Fridays in the FREE BURGERS! area and who had bothered to ask, that, indeed, there were no animal products whatsoever in the meals being given away. She didn’t tell PETA because their ire was generally good for publicity.

There was also an artistic point to this. A certain subset of attendees were big “tough” men who were unruffled by the cries and bloodletting and deaths of others. They usually ate their free burgers with juicy relish and gusto right outside of the installation, sitting

down on the curb adjacent to the line, making violently focused eye contact with those waiting to get in (particularly young women).

There had also been an ongoing TikTok challenge amongst the senior high schoolers of the Los Angeles area, which had led to Ryanne prohibiting participants from filming or taking photos inside the exhibit. It was hard to enforce – and honestly, a few slipped shaky videos and blurry photos were nothing but good for hype – but the release form addendum gave Raul and Jeremiah permission to also employ their tactics on anyone using their phones. Most people didn’t read that far in the release form.

Other than the macho men and the high school assholes with their calculated showboating, most people took their warm bag and scampered off to their tightly parallel parked cars many blocks away.

Ryanne was doing a walk through around 10:52am before opening at 11, though at this point the place practically ran itself, like whenever Ryanne had one of the sharper Midwest actors fill in for her at the front for a few minutes while she zoomed into an interview or something like that. Really, at this point, she could be drinking bottomless passionfruit mimosas at the brunch place on the corner, or cocktails with gold leaf and Japanese blossom smoke and Manuka honey at the speakeasy across the street, where indeed she already had reservations for her and three of her best art school friends for late at night after the closing reception for her installation.

The same man arrived early today, waiting in line at 10:57am. Nothing else seemed different. Ryanne hid her surprise at his earlier appearance well as she slipped out of the side door back into a punishing angle of sunlight.

She didn’t have anything else to do, but she still made a show of sitting on her folding chair in the shaded corner, opening her Macbook Air with a sense of urgency that communicated how busy and overwhelmed she must be. She checked her email – inbox still zero, same as eight minutes ago – and her Instagram set up for the installation – no new DMs, a handful of likes, two new follows.

She stared intently at the screen through the glare when the man, still the only one in line, walked up to her and politely asked, “Excuse me. Is the exhibition open?”

She startled at him standing over her. He dressed nearly the same every day: chinos, a forgettable long-sleeved button-up shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, always, and casual-upscale tennis shoes, likely Allbirds, everything in a wave of aggressively neutral colors. He was, for all intents and purposes, beige.

“Oh, right. Sorry about that.” She shut her laptop and slipped it away in her bag, reaching for the perfectly stacked clipboard. She readjusted the pile of release forms, aligning them yet again, before handing him the clipboard and a freshly clicked black pen.

Nearby, cars honked loudly as someone in a Tesla truck ran the red light. Both of them looked over involuntarily, then returned their eyes to the clipboard without comment. She studied his emotionless (but not necessarily cold) face, as he filled in his name, initials, signature. His eyes, the curve of his mouth, even his hairline betrayed complete and utter indifference.

“So, uh—do you work in the area?” She kicked herself for such an inane question, especially after they almost went this entire run without ever acknowledging his daily attendance. They’d played chicken, and she most definitely lost.

He looked at her, blinking. “Yes. Nearby.” Then he nodded and moved past her into the dark hallway, the heavy door closing him in, her frowning at it, then quickly shifting her face back to neutrality, since she could not remember if the sliding door’s dirty glass made her visible from the inside.

��

Ryanne was never hungry for lunch before 3pm, hence why the installation took an hour break then. They picked back up at 4pm until 8, as the first wave of rush hour died down and the roads were restored to the ordinary amount of honking and gridlock.

Today, it had been hot, and all she wanted was a smoothie. She walked through the exhibit, making sure everyone was off taking their state-mandated breaks. She wondered why the man was so early for lunch every day. Was he a kindergarten teacher? The last time she remembered eating lunch before noon was in elementary school.

At the counter of Moon Juice, she tapped her phone to the Square screen to pay $18.50 for the green juice monster plus pea protein plus collagen (but really, a collagen “promoter”). Her skin had been feeling wan lately.

Usually, she sat outside the juice shop and clicked around aimlessly on her laptop, but all the tables were taken, lunch meetings and smoothie dates spilling onto the sidewalk. Possessed by a compulsion she did not know the origin of, she crossed the busy street at the intersection and walked two blocks to enter Pan Pacific Park.

Immediately upon passing through the gate, she sneezed. Not a cute, small, squeaky sneeze, but an ugly, loud, snotty one. Her family had always had allergies, but even if she did, she generally chose not to

acknowledge them.

The park was mostly empty, only a few pairs of nannies (or mothers? who knew) pushing tandem strollers of sleeping children. Another pedestrian or two wandered the looping sidewalks. A group of construction workers gathered under a tree, taking a break from the thick layer of heat whipped with smog.

Ryanne sucked down her smoothie. She supposed she could make this at home and keep it in the minifridge on the FREE BURGERS! set, but it wouldn’t taste the same after waiting five hours to be consumed. The little ice particles so finely ground by professionalgrade Vitamix blenders would melt, rendering the whole thing a sloppy, texturally unsatisfying mess. Besides, almost no one brought their own lunch to work at FREE BURGERS! No one except the vegan girl seemed to spot the irony.

As she watched a seagull bully a pigeon in one of the Jacaranda trees, someone power walked past her. She realized it was the man, and nearly dropped her smoothie.

He either didn’t recognize her or didn’t care, keeping his cadence as he looped that section of the park, staying on the sidewalk despite seeming to be in a hurry. She frowned beneath her Ray-Bans and the brushaway bangs she regretted going to that new trendy barber for. They were constantly needing to be brushed away.

When the man was nearly out of sight, she picked up her pace to casually follow. He was tall and seemed to walk quickly without effort, so she had to go at a clip her espadrilles did not appreciate. As he headed toward one of the side street exits, she briefly ran to catch up.

Out on the busy street, city dust kicked up and made her sneeze again. She tossed her empty smoothie cup into an overflowing trash can as she whipped her head back and forth searching for his profile in the clouds of car exhaust and the crowds of those too poor to have a car or Uber, doomed to grimy bus stops.

His standard issue brown head of hair bobbed past a group waiting for a bus as he strode away from the shops and restaurants, towards a desolate stretch of tall, sterile buildings. Ryanne jogged to see which one he entered.

As she saw his figure make a jagged turn into a set of rotating doors – tall white building, corner of Wilshire and Highland – her phone rang. “Fuck shit fuck,” she muttered as she rummaged through her slouchy bag. “Hello?”

“Hey, uh, Ryan?” Raul never stopped being confused and amused at her name. “Are we getting started again or what? There’s like, four

people waiting outside…”

“Ah, shit, sorry, got caught up on a call. I’ll be right there.” She flailed around, frowning. “Have Mara collect release forms until I get back. It won’t be long.”

“Uhhh, okayyy—”

“She knows what to do,” Ryanne said firmly before hanging up. She sighed as she reached down to feel her hot, throbbing feet.

Ryanne stuffed a bushel of old release forms into her laptop bag as they closed the installation that evening. On her drive home, the stoplights glowed in her periphery, and she let habituation steer her blindly back to her large studio apartment in Los Feliz.

Even though it had been eight months since the breakup, she still expected to see Chauncey pawing at the door to greet her. Though he was her ex’s dog to begin with, she was still in disbelief when he packed him up, along with all his vintage records, untouched pizza peel and cooking utensils, and video game accoutrement. They had never discussed custody, so one day, Chauncey was simply gone. She missed his ears the most, the way they alternated flipping over as he tilted his head.

The ex was not the most communicative, but in emotionally charged situations, he was particularly prone to stony indifference. Ryanne had felt the relationship embers flicker to ash when she told him of her new installation idea and he responded, without irony, that she was making him hungry, and where should they go to dinner that night?

She could not imagine Chauncey being too happy about the breakup either, considering her ex found walks to be a waste of time, and he had zero appreciation for the floppiness of Chauncey’s dusty brown ears.

At her kitchen table, which was really meant to be an accessory table, or some sort of bar top situation, she fanned out the stack of release forms. She took a deep inhale and swiped to Postmates, tapped “order again” on her usual – Kale Caesar salad with an extra side of shiitake bacon, and a fauxstess cupcake, which she would save half of for tomorrow – and sank into the miniature couch she’d gotten from a friend who was promoted and promptly got rid of all her perfectly fine furniture to go on a shopping spree at Ethan Allen. (Though it was possible that the friend felt bad for her after the breakup, Ryanne refused to consider that possibility.)

Her eyes were closed but not quite asleep when the doorbell rang. The compostable (how, exactly?) plastic bag was neatly waiting on her

stoop, the dog in the upstairs half of the duplex barking.

While she picked apart the salad looking for the most dressingsoaked croutons, she flipped through release forms. Comparing each to the one from today – which she’d folded over in a distinct but also unnoticeable-to-others way – she found several that matched the handwriting.

But that was the thing. The handwriting itself was illegible. The same scrawl, the same letters printed out each time – he wasn’t even trying to hide his identity, he was just a burger-loving man with very shitty, distinctly male handwriting.

Ryanne switched on the TV to the last thing she was watching on Netflix, a documentary on the dabbawala, or food delivery workers, in Mumbai. After a few minutes of low British voices commenting on how many people in India lived without running water and died from elephant stampedes, she clicked away and put on season 3 of Sex and the City. She spread the release forms again over the limited surface area of the non-table and felt momentarily like a detective, but definitely one on a syndicated crime show, with shiny luscious hair and snappy one-liners, not the dour, depressed, perpetually frizzy ones on the prestige dramas.

She scrutinized the handwriting on several release forms for the last time as Carrie started cheating on Aiden with Big ( what a moron , Ryanne thought, no matter how many times she’d seen it play out). She sighed and opened her iPad, searching for an appropriate app for her needs. Later, as she scooped up the last globs of dressing with her compostable plant-based spoon, she finalized her plan for the next day.

The freeway symphony of buzzing and beeps nudged Ryanne awake. Her alarm was supposed to go off in ten minutes anyway, so she yawned and rolled out of bed, stopping herself from glancing at the spot Chauncey’s bed used to occupy. After yoga, just a brisk eightminute walk away, she hurried to get ready. Before hopping in the shower to scrub her stupid greasy bangs (vinyasa flow had been extra sweaty that day), she looked at her tablet, making sure it was fully charged.

She was first to arrive at the installation but still parked in her usual spot third from the door. Once inside the silent, windowless space, she flipped open the salmon-colored, faux leather cover on her tablet, changed the settings so the screen never dimmed, and set up outside the main door as she waited for the Thursday employees.

There he was, at exactly 11:15am. A couple of teenagers skipping

school had already been through – Ryanne heard their giggles go silent one by one as they made their way inside. She presented the man with the tablet, not trying to hide her smugness.

“Is this the release form?” he asked.

Ryanne nodded. “Switched to digital.”

“Surprised you didn’t do that the entire time,” he remarked with some sassiness — or was it condescension? – as he took it from her hands.

“It was just…safety reasons. But I need to upload them all to an archive for this show, anyway.”

He gave her a tight-lipped smile, probably just to do something with his face. “Right.”

She scrunched her eyebrows above her Ray-Bans. He handed the tablet back. She kept standing there.

“Can I go in now?”

She stepped aside and made a big show of letting him pass her. He didn’t seem to notice or care, but she clenched her teeth at her own childish behavior.

Curious passersby and a few post-gym macho dudes and some homeless people all came in a steady stream. By now, she wasn’t having to explain the conceit of the installation very often. People arrived with their own pre-conceived notions, the promise of a free meal, and, it seemed to Ryanne, an already decided-upon reaction to the 6 minutes and 37 seconds of footage waiting for them inside.

Moreso than the steel-faced men who prided themselves on lacking empathy and compassion (or, at least, showing it), it was the young women – the ones teetering on the edge of caring about anything but themselves – that irritated Ryanne the most with their reactions. The meatheads came in with a clear, understandable mission: show their friends they weren’t no fucking pussies and rip into flesh minutes after seeing that flesh stripped from its owner. She rejoiced in knowing she was adding soy to their diets.

This specific detail was also disclosed in the terms and conditions that no one read, in a small paragraph warning away anyone with a “soy intolerance”. But nobody had yet to throw up or break out in hives immediately following consumption.

But sometimes, someone (or a small group of someones), usually young women in Birkenstocks and carefully thrifted overalls and oversized flannels, came through, bracing themselves for the experience. Ryanne never persuaded them not to but seeing their tears and hearing their pontificating on the busy street corner, hot bags

of burgers in small, limp hands, irritated her for reasons she could not quite explain out loud or even articulate in her own thoughts. Sometimes they left their meat bags by sleeping homeless people, which, maybe they appreciated, but still made Ryanne roll her eyes.

She was stuck in this circular thinking when she spotted the man leaving with his mayo-less burger, checking his watch and striding across the busy street in the same direction she had followed him in yesterday. As she handed the tablet to person after person, she watched his pressed chinos and clean, spiffy, robin’s egg blue collared shirt slip away into the city. A homeless woman who had been through the exhibit a sporadic handful of times, and had also recently thrown her purse into the middle of the busy street and pirouetted through speeding cars to retrieve it, much to all the people in line’s delight, snapped her grimy fingers in Ryanne’s face.

“LADY. Where you at?”

“Oh, sorry,” Ryanne inhaled, then stopped. Instead of handing her the tablet, she held it out for her to sign with her finger. The woman didn’t seem to notice or care ( she definitely would have made it known if she was offended , Ryanne thought, justified) and she waltzed into the dark hallway with a twirl.

��

On break that day, most of the employees gathered in the cramped but air-conditioned FREE BURGERS! space. Ryanne double checked the locked door at the entry to the installation, then snuck into her car, avoiding small talk with any of the chattier aspiring actors on the floor that day. She turned the hybrid on, blasting the AC, and nibbled on a bag of trail mix as she scrolled through the iPad.

She chewed on dried cranberries and Brazil nuts as her fingers swiped deftly across the cascade of saved PDF release forms. She cursed herself internally for not doing this digitally to begin with; one of the grant foundations she’d received funds from would require a digitized archive, so that hadn’t been a complete lie. She did not admit to herself that her initial resistance was because she did not want so many unknown, dirty fingers jabbing at her iPad.

The third saved release form of the day: Greg Roberts. Well, cool. She had a name. Finally. It seemed rather bland, not indicative of any grander mystery than a man who liked free food.

She swiped several tabs open: a LinkedIn page, Facebook, Instagram, a mention in UCLA’s student newspaper. Her eyes lingered on a photo of him with a frightfully thin young blonde woman before she decided she was indifferent to that aspect of his life and closed that

tab.

The mention in the newspaper was the most interesting to her. Seven years ago, he was a part of a schoolwide walkout of undergraduate students protesting the poverty wages of the school cafeteria workers, employed by Sodexo. As co-organizer, he was quoted as saying: “How can anyone look at someone in the eye who’s serving them food and ignore the fact that they can’t afford this overpriced, and quite frankly disgusting, meal themselves?” In the accompanying photo, she saw that his youthful style was not much more interesting than his current look, but it had more of a looseness to it.

Ryanne reapplied her lip balm, scooping the cruelty-free glossy product up from the tiny glass container, reading and re-reading the article. On the LinkedIn page – she promptly turned incognito mode on, so he wouldn’t be able to see she’d viewed it – it was listed that he had clerked with the Riverside County Superior Court after law school at Loyola, interned at an environmental and land use-focused law office, and now worked in the offices of Glaser Weil, a seemingly prominent entertainment law firm.

One of the FREE BURGERS! area employees knocked on her driver side window, squinting in through the white sunrays. “Should we open again?” she yelled, which was unnecessary, as the glass was not that thick.

Ryanne blinked slowly, turned off her car (as well as the AC, which she immediately regretted) and opened the door. “Hey, Mara. Sure. I’ll be out front in a minute, you can let everyone know to get back in places.”

After Mara went back inside, Ryanne dabbed at her forehead and nose with a pore sheet blotter, wriggled her feet back into her Tory Burch sandals, and headed around the building to the short line of giggling teenagers, fresh out of school for the day and ready to watch each other cry and possibly vomit.

Ryanne dozed off while scrolling on Friday night, but not before spotting Greg Roberts’ “yes” response to a Facebook invite to a local free show, sponsored by a cool indie radio station. So, on the drive home from the installation Saturday, Ryanne bugged and bugged friends from different areas of her life. She risked having an awkward friend group overlap, but there was no way she could risk appearing at a free concert night alone. Sure, a “yes” to a random online invite was a long shot, but, it was worth a try.

You like music now lol? Mackie had responded to her initial

inquiry.

Not really but I like drinking margs at the park

Lol you just ready to get back out there huh?

You got me lmao. You down??

SURE whatev. You’re getting the uber

Not even twenty minutes after this exchange, the nice girl who worked at the nearby bookstore and went to the same coffee shop as Ryanne responded. But Ryanne “forgot to check her phone”, she told her the next time she saw her.

She had rushed everyone through closing up shop, but it was Saturday night, so nobody had questioned it. They all had places to be, people to see, expensive cocktails and shitty beers to drink, headthrobbing electronic music to play and “This group, man, their shit will rip your soul out . Like, rip it out with the guitar,” to see, as Raul had tried to coerce her into going to a darkwave show with him that night. Ryanne politely declined. Raul had shrugged.

When Ryanne had gotten home, she caught herself calling out, “Hey Chaunc—”. Looking at the time, she bolted for the shower, turned the hot water up to an unsafe temperature, and slowly washed the sweat and grime and smog out of her highlighted hair and brushaway bangs.

Mackenzie had already come over with a bottle of sweating prosecco by the time Ryanne stepped out of the shower. Mackie could always be depended upon if one needed to get drunk. Thankfully, she’d switched from Malibu to mid-range bottles of wine since they graduated college.

“This is just to start us off,” she rattled the bottle. “Got us covered for the road, too,” as shooters of Tanqueray peeked out of her glittery little purse.

Ryanne kissed her cheek dramatically. “Thanks, darling. Needed this.”

They polished off the bottle as Ryanne fiddled with her fake lashes and Mackie called an Uber on Ryanne’s phone. “Who’s playing tonight? The Autry, right?”

Ryanne shrugged. “Some poppy folksy Americana bullshit.”

Mackie laughed. “Why do you want to go, again? Not that I’m complaining, we haven’t gone out in like, fucking forever. Since the breakup—”

Ryanne cut her off. “One of my emp—coworkers mentioned it, it seemed cool.”

“How old is she?”

“I don’t know, probably 21.”

Mackie laughed. “Don’t make me feel old, Ry.”

“We’re not old! We’re going out!” Ryanne swiped another layer of lipstick on.

“Are there gonna be a bunch of dudes there that brew their own beer and have mustaches and shit?”

Ryanne rolled her eyes as the Uber notification dinged on her phone.

After waiting in an egregious line, the two women made their way inside the park. Mackie beelined for the bar while Ryanne scanned the crowd, to look for her “coworker”.

Almost too quickly, she spotted Greg Roberts in another disproportionately long line for kettle corn. She was shocked at how easy that was and stared for a beat too long. He felt the gaze, looked around, and stared right back at her.

Frozen, she unstuck just her left hand to wave. The rest of her throbbed with embarrassment. The unstuck left hand went up to her head, did something with her hair, then fell back to her side.

She had not planned on what to do next.

He left the line to approach her. She tried to grin. It looked like a grimace, she knew.

“Hey. Funny seeing you here,” he said, not excited, but not outwardly disgusted, either.

She shrugged, sort of laughed, then frowned at herself for doing that.

“Do you like Stray Moth?”

She looked at him blankly. Something in his gaze was flat to her, like a stuffed animal’s round glass eyes.

“Oh, the band. Yeah, my friend likes them. I just came for the vibes.”

He nodded slowly, drank from his beer.

“Why do you come to the installation every day?” The Fireball shooters that had been hidden further down in Mackie’s pockets sloshed words out of her mouth.

He did not seem surprised. He tilted his head and shrugged. “Free lunch.”

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” Ryanne said as she thought oh my god, that was so fucking lame, shut the fuck up right now, jesus.

“You’re right. The videos.” He was talking with no intonation, no real emotion in his voice. Is he a psychopath? Ryanne wondered. Or just a man?

“Why do you do it then?” Every word smelled like cheap cinnamon whiskey. She didn’t care anymore.

“I mean, it is still a free lunch. I have a lot of student loan debt,” he joked.

“But you’re letting all that into your mind. Over and over again. Isn’t it awful?”

“Maybe to you it is.”

“Objectively, it is awful. I’ve seen people cry over it. Men, too. Privately. Or so they thought.”

He shrugged.

“Well. Anyway. Yeah. It’s weird. Of you.”

The “weird” comment, of all things, seemed to strike a nerve. This too struck Ryanne as weird.

“I guess, but you don’t have a limitation on how many visits one can make. Not even in a day. Though I imagine not that many people are coming through multiple times a day,” he said, very no-nonsense, like he was explaining things to a whining toddler.

“Nope. You might be the only repeat customer at all, actually. Other than some people who live on the streets and really need the food.” Now her mouth was a broken fire hydrant.

He shrugged again. “The burgers are good.”

Ryanne’s skin felt hot. “So, it’s just like, a chill content viewing experience. Something to just casually watch before consumption.”

She could see him restrain his facial muscles. “It’s going to happen anyway, what can I do about it?” he snapped.

Ryanne’s eyes nearly bulged out of her head. She took a big gulp of air and sighed. “That’s exactly the point.”

“So, what? Do what? Throw away food? Refuse to eat it?”

She shook her head. “Just don’t be complacent.”

“How are you any different?” he nearly spat at her.

In a rare moment of utter confidence in her own being, Ryanne stood up a bit straighter, elongating her spine as far as her 5’4” frame would go. “Know what? I’m not going to engage in a philosophical debate that will never be settled. Clearly you’ve made up your mind. So, enjoy your kettle corn. And the burgers.”

As Ryanne walked away with what she hoped was swagger, she whipped back around with what felt like a jab. “You know they’re vegan, right?”

He blinked, then nodded. “That makes sense.”

She rubbed the lining of her dress with twitching fingers, not knowing what else to do with her hands. “Yeah, it’s all in the release

forms but, no one reads those.”

He laughed. “I should know better, I’m a lawyer.”

“You can probably afford to buy whatever lunch you want, then,” she responded, her tone taking an edge again.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” He put his non-beer-holding hand in his pocket.

“I should go find my friend,” Ryanne muttered, already turning away again. Greg Roberts brought his hand up to wave goodbye, but she didn’t see it.

Mackie was double fisting High Noons and nodding her head to the beat of three guitarists and one tambourinist – all in old worn mechanic’s jumpsuits (with the cursive name ROBBIE still sewn into one) and ironic t-shirts from the 90s – while she leaned against a barricade.

“Was that your coworker?” she asked, elbowing Ryanne and winking at her.

“Nah,” Ryanne responded. “Did you just wink at me?”

Mackie winked again, even slower. “He was cute. In a very straight edge sort of way,” she said.

Ryanne shrugged. They moved closer to the stage, where it was too loud to casually talk.

��

The last week of the art installation had record-breaking attendance. A famous local artist came through – and made a cryptic story about the installation on their very-well-followed Instagram – as well as several undergrad art class groups, as well as a local city councilwoman who vowed to only buy meat rated “humanely” at Whole Foods from now on. The NY Times had run a short blurb about it in the Sunday paper and everyone who was anyone scrambled to get in line for the dwindling days left.

Every morning of that last week, Ryanne waited, at 10:51am, at 11:00am, at 11:13am, at 11:17am, to see if Greg Roberts would return for one last free mayo-less burger, but he never did.

Still Life of Gaza with Smart Bomb Smoke

Elina Kumra

Facing the sun, I imagine the world unraveling. A dull blade of light pierces the stained shroud of sky; smoke clings thick over the city’s bones even light hesitates to slip too swiftly through it. Like shredded khimars ravaged in winds of despair. Sometimes, even your fingertips vanish into the haze, vapors severing limbs into mysteries.

One year, a hundred domes crumbled beneath its weight—unseen without the red wail of sirens piercing the fog. It’s a fragile balance. Now, as smoke withdraws and wells breathe dry, rows of olives wither bitter on their branches.

But then, there were no thoughts but bread, and workers can’t be broken on the blank canvas smoke paints over their eyes. So farmers lit thunder cannons at the sky’s heart— burst the drones into gun -metal rain; swaths of sky bruised fire with the roar.

I know this was defiance, but mouths hungered. Families needed shelter.

Years later, I learned our cherished pomegranates gave the grenade its name —a bitter symmetry: to craft sustenance from ruin, thunder unhooked from the heavens. On the harshest dawns, the nearest pomegranates quivered till they burst unseen— honeyed hemorrhage. Every bird for miles, red fruit crushed and forsaken by a child’s small hand. Their hearts spilled seeds, scarlet nectar dripped from beaks.

Never Mind

Elina Kumra

Never mind the heat you shared with him — the orchard still thrums vermilion, and you gather small wounds like moths caught in a dim corridor. He called you Scarecrow — half-joking, half-cruel — each apple left bruised as though naming could wound the orchard itself. You traced his name in wet sand, ignoring the bones beneath. He brought debris-flowers and a cryptic book on teeth, as if your dreams might bloom fanged. Sí, yo sé: some truths sidestep translation. Disciplina tastes bitter, then bright across your tongue. Flights of fancy never quite land. In the quiet museum of pain, you keep small serpents — venom half-formed, coiled like secrets. You chase risk the way you bury scars, porcelain platters and cloud-colored knives tucked away. He once touched the hinge of your jaw —

do you still grind your nights to dust?

Certain frictions remain unwritten, sharp in the dark. Never mind that goodbye wouldn’t have spared you. He corners you with half-asked questions, splintering your sleep wide open. Some nights, you hum the lullabies your mother once murmured, homesickness braided with each note. But naming him will not conjure anything lost. Let water carry his name to the she-oak roots and the wind moan him out to sea. Listen — the orchard hums vermilion, still ripe with living. And you?

Your jaw remembers the weight of his touch. Pull off the old skin from that live wire — let the current spark through your soles, extravagant, electric. Because never mind the orchard hush, in truth, some ghosts — they bite.

In the Wake of Orchard Hush

Elina Kumra

i. orchard hush, orchard hum, orchard saffron

(like a memory incised into hibiscus bark) Baladi, Shamouti, Nafaqi — piled in battered crates, ferried past Erez gates. Baba once dubbed me Rag-Sentinel; you sense that name coiling behind my molars? in Gaza, he bent low in spinach rows, chasing half-shekels weightier than orchard twilight. Ummi yearned for quietude: burnished flats, frank truth, a companion freed from orchard sweat, orchard murk. hush or not, the orchard repeated his cunning grin — unruly at midnight, scouring tin walls, drifting into Ummi’s hair like contraband psalms.

ii. roasted peppers & demolished hopes

She keened alongside Surah Maryam in a sealed washroom — above, mortar bursts jangled the rafters.

That night, Baba disappeared on a sputtering motorbike with a faceless stranger —

over and over. Forty days dwindled: Qalqilya or Jericho, voices faltered. Debts swelled, hearts stiffened.

In Ummi’s lungs, roast-blackened peppers, orchard seeds refusing to rot.

iii. mother & neighbor

7:30 p.m., saffron haze lengthening on corrugated tin: Ummi’s knuckles mold Umm Samir’s cheeks, like a flicker in a grayscale melodrama dubbed in a dialect never naming Fatima or Nawal. Lips fuse, then part: hush. By eight, date palms recoil in a salt-laced breeze — Umm Samir glides away, orchard leaves quivering in her path. Inside, the faucet snarls: water scalds to flush orchard hush from Ummi’s shoulders, to rebrand thirst as steam.

iv. an unsettled recipe

Yesterday, Ummi rasped of departure, hair chalky

as moonlit mortar, orchard tang on her breath. She pressed coriander seeds into my hand: vow, vow to honor Baba’s lineage with gilded ribbons, a swirl of frankincense — no cones — clang the tray thrice at dawn. Then her stew: shrimp from Al-Mina, never those half-hearted frauds dragged from brackish gutters. But I recast it all.

I tear orchard from orchard, feed it to the embers in my chest. This patchwork dwelling, a husk.

For years, she kneaded her devotion in these walls — enough.

I’ll choose my own invocations.

v. orchard hush echoes

Under a torn quilt, a gaunt cat kneads Ummi’s ribs, uncertain if it whimpers or snarls. She pleads for thyme, for shelter, for that fluting bulbul — but naming yields no marvels. I step away: orchard hush braids itself — vermilion hush — across her brow as her hands lose warmth. Time slips

in half-lit, half-gone — a doorway jammed open, orchard dust swirling in its breach.

A Conversation with Rickey Fayne Alex Gershman

Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from rural West Tennessee whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, The Sewanee Review, and The Kenyon Review, among other magazines. He holds an MA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His writing embodies his Black, Southern, overchurched upbringing in order to reimagine and honor his ancestors’ experiences. The Devil Three Times is his debut novel.

Alex Gershman : Do you want to talk a little bit about how you got into writing?

Rickey Fayne : I’ll talk about first how I got into reading because I feel like reading and writing for me are deeply intertwined. I was kind of tricked by my accounting teacher into signing up for AP English when I didn’t want to, and some of the summer reading for that really got me hooked. The first book I read was Their Eyes Were Watching God , and that was the first time I saw that the way people could talk could be literary. That class just got me interested in literature and it kind of continued on into college. I tried the English PhD route, I got a couple chapters into my dissertation—it was actually on Spirit possession in 20th century African-American literature —and then I decided I would rather be writing than studying literature. So I pivoted and took a class with StoryStudio Chicago, where the homework assignment was to write this random thing and that ended up ballooning into the first chapter of [ The Devil Three Times ]. I taught high school for a couple of years while writing, and then applied to the Texas MFA.

AG : You said Their Eyes Were Watching God first showed you that how people talked could be literary. What was it about that poetic dialect of Zora Neale Hurston’s that drew you in?

RF : What I love most about the way Zora Neale Hurston writes is she captures this poetry in Black Southern dialects that you don’t see well represented. I feel like the worst examples would be the WPA Works Project Slave Narratives or the Uncle Remus Tales where it’s just this sort of dialect that’s written down in order to show that the person is ignorant. And even though it wasn’t popular to write in dialect, she kind of went against the grain and said no, the way these people talk, what I grew up hearing, is beautiful and I want to elevate the poetry of that to high literature. Just thinking about what Hustron was doing made me want to look at or think about the way the people I grew up with spoke, and to try to capture some of that in the characters that appear in this book.

AG : There’s a connecting thread throughout [ The Devil Three Times ], stories about the Devil or God, which you tell in that dialectical style. How did all that come to be? Because the short story I’m assuming you started with was one of the stories about the people, not that connecting thread.

RF : Yeah, that that part sort of came about organically. When I first had the idea for the Devil, I was workshopping the first-person chapters in my MFA program. Back then I had this really horrible title, Sins of the Father , and my adviser Elizabeth McCracken said at the end of the workshop, “This is a great start Rickey, but this title, no.”

But she really responded to “The Prodigal Son” chapter, she really liked the voice there, and she said I think you should call it The Devil Three Times . At that point this was the only character who had encountered the Devil and so I was thinking, I don’t know about that, and I sat with it for a long time and then decided not to take her advice. Later on, I took a folklore class with her partner, Edward Carey, and I remember he asked us to think about our experience with folklore. He had all these theories about how folklore was working and it made me go back to Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men . When I reread that and I saw the devil stories in there I really got inspired. I rewrote some of them and I used those for the assignments in his class, and then I just got really into that concept, as well the way that Zora can take the sort of marginal, maligned figure and make him the center, and then question your morality around that. I remember in one of them this guy is late for something and he’s rushing and he jumps over a fence post and he cuts his shirt and he says, The Devil!

and then he hears someone crying and he turns around and the Devil’s there and he’s like, You all put too much on me, not everything’s my fault. So that’s where that idea of thinking about the Devil that way was born.

AG : The inscription in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon , which I know had a huge influence on your novel also, is “The fathers may soar / And the children may know their names.” I’m wondering what you think of writing about the experiences of people who came before you. Did it feel like a responsibility, was it something that you struggled with?

RF : So, around the same time as I started making the transition between literary critic to fiction writer, my grandparents passed away, and I felt sort of ambivalent about being in Chicago and trying to get a PhD to do things that they never would have imagined doing. I kind of felt like I had cheated my time, that I could have been spending time with my Granddad but I was here doing this or I could have been spending time with my Grandma but I was here doing this. That definitely had an effect on me, thinking about what it’s like to think through their experiences or to try to put myself as someone living with the things they grew up with, so I do feel like that was very much at the forefront of what I was trying to do.

But then, also, I feel like we think about the past and past people’s experiences as fixed, or we don’t think about them as worrying about things the same way we did. Each generation is a repeat; it’s like you grow up and you think, no one’s ever felt this way before, my parents can’t understand what I’m feeling now, my grandparents can’t understand . But the reality is they do and they’re looking at you and they’re like, oh that’s cute, you’re having your feelings

And to think about them in those moments before I came to be did fuel a lot of my wanting to go back into the past and think about people who were going through those things or family lore that’s fixed, like what if I go back to that moment where things were fluid? What are the possibilities?

AG : There’s a scene with Porter and James that comes up in three separate chapters, and I’m thinking of how we see the scene from one person’s perspective, then you see it from another, and in both

perspectives you’re like, this dad is kind of awful . Then you get to the end, and it comes together in a shocking way. Did you have that in mind the entire time you were writing? How hard was it to make such crisp and also unique connections across the novel?

RF : That’s something I came to just through living. You hear one side of someone’s story and then you’re like, oh yeah that was messed up what they did to you . And then you hear the other side. Even the villains are the heroes of their own story, and just thinking about it like that, taking one moment and looking at it from different angles is just really interesting.

I remember reading A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, how she moved through the different chapters and you saw a slightly different vector on the same character. It’s really interesting to think about. I mean, we could even do “The Tortoise and the Hare,” like, maybe the Hare had ADHD, you know, he was neurodivergent, and he’s fast but he gets distracted. It’s not his fault! If he was properly medicated or diagnosed it would be a different story.

I feel like with all these kinds of narratives there’s an investment in having them be read or thought about in a certain kind of way and when you revise it and look at it from a new angle, it can open up new ways of looking at the world, right? Even something like Paradise Lost , where Milton was just like, what if we think about Satan’s side?

AG : I know the press around a debut can be a lot, and you’ve said that you’d rather be working on the second novel right now. Does it feel like there’s pressure? Do you wish the work would speak for itself?

RF : I mean, I really like that idea of like the work speaking for itself but even when we thought the work was speaking for itself there were people speaking for the work in different sorts of ways.

AG : Edward P. Jones I feel like is the best example, maybe the only example of that.

RF : Yeah, try to find some interviews with Edward P. Jones, there’s like five [laughs].

But some days I’m really anxious about it and some days I’m not. You naturally always think that—whatever you’re working on, you’re thinking, this is gonna be the thing or it’s not gonna be the thing—but I feel like I’ve been around enough to know that whatever thing it is, whether it’s successful or not, it’s not going to define you, and even if you can’t see it, there’s probably more you have in the tank.

When I was in grad school, doing the PhD program, I thought the dissertation was everything, that it had to be perfect, I have to be in conversation with this person and not that person, and if it’s not right then my career is nothing. And then I walked away from that, and I tried something else. And I was fine. Will it probably be harder if everything great doesn’t happen for this book? Maybe. But I think even if no one likes it and no one reviews it, I can write another one.

I’m excited about the idea of nobody liking it. I’m fueled by—I feel like I get more from rejection than I do from praise. So I’m just like, okay, nobody likes this book. I’m just going to work harder and make the next one better. Whereas if the opposite happens, it might be a longer time before the next book because I have to get out of my head about that. I remember the first time I got a rejection letter from a story, it was like, great, I’m gonna rewrite this thing and it’s gonna have this that and the other. And then I got into my MFA program and I couldn’t write anything for three months.

AG : So if people want another book from you, they should tell you this one’s bad.

RF : Pretty much [laughs]. That’s the best way to get me to write.

AG : And are you going straight into the next book now?

RF : Yeah, I’ve got the next one sketched out, I have a document and notebooks just accumulating mass. I’m trying to decide whether it’s one book or more books.

AG : And it’s tied into [ The Devil Three Times ], right?

RF : Yeah, it grows out of the chapter set in Chicago. The insurance guy, the one that owns the company that Porter works for—he tells Porter this story about seeing his father prepare a body for burial. So

it’s sort of rooted in that, that family, his story around it.

I’m actually just trying to reign it in. I have a section where Thomas’ great-grandfather is in Memphis, and he works at this grocery store where the owners get lynched so that another person can take over the store, and he helps prepare the bodies and that’s his first experience with death, and then he trains to be an undertaker, moves to Chicago, and he’s there in the twenties during the riots…it’s definitely ballooning a bit. But it’s still more focused than this one. My dream is for it to be under 70,000 words.

This interview was conducted in two parts, on January 20, 2025 and March 19, 2025. It has been shortened and edited for clarity.

The Devil Three Times is being released on May 13, 2025 from Little, Brown and Co. and is available wherever books are sold.

What Are the Odds

Daniel Lurie

Says the man fidgeting at the cash register. He wears the end of day on his face like a shadow. He assures me he doesn’t do this often, but that his wife sent him to buy lottery tickets: with the Powerball bein’ at a billion an’ all . In Judaism, we’re allowed to play the lottery once as a last resort, which “leaves you at God’s mercy.” But my mother keeps buying tickets along with the groceries, and unless her quota resets every month, maybe that’s the reason we’re about to lose

the house. Sometimes, I wonder what the odds are, if we get a running start for our bodies to just pass through one another. Once, I was speeding down a two-lane highway and clipped a pheasant with my car. I watched its feathers disappear in the tall grass. Maybe, growing up is being aware of the grief you cause without seeing it. Sometimes, I think about how atoms never truly touch, which means I’ve never held you. In a Trolly Problem desert scene, there’s a railway with diversions. On one side, I zip-tie a million strangers to the steel. On the other, my entire family. I use their hair as rope. I pull at the rail switch too many times and it snaps clean off. I see smoke rise and lie down on the tracks. What are the odds?

Please Take It

Halle Wyatt

On the night bus back from meeting Charlie there was always this woman in a felt cap and green rain boots. Tufts of gray hair stuck out around her ears, and between her fingers she clutched a small leather handbag. She would sit several seats ahead, her eyes clamped shut the entire ride until she stepped off at the apartments next to the horse stables. After several weeks I finally saw her eyes, a silver and pellucid color, but she would avoid my gaze if I smiled.

It was a lonely bus, even when it was crowded. Singular, quiet, the glowing advertisements all broken and leaving boxes of white light along the interior. Besides, I was always the last one off. Every time I said good-bye to Charlie and headed back to campus, his gangling figure growing smaller and fainter under the blue neon, all the heat in my body seeped out from my heel, into a puddle on the floor, dispersing into the machinery.

#

We met in Plinth each Friday at a roadside diner. When I thought of it, it only appeared in my mind under faint glimmers of starlight, a golden moon blurred with mist. As an angled square shaped by neon and oily glass windows, crouched alongside the rope of black highway wound between two unremarkable mountains. Charlie didn’t call them mountains at all. In fact, he could not even bear to call them hills, only mounds, like piles of dirt and wood chips kicked up by children’s shoes beneath a swing set.

Neither of us lived in Plinth, nor liked it much. It was a village on the river, all of its industrial buildings hollow and crumbling, scrawled with bad graffiti and browning vines, a Melvillian specter of a town. But it was barely equidistant to us both, an hour on the bus for me and an hour by car for him, a wavering dot between two colleges.

Still, he was always late, and then sat in the parking lot talking on the phone. I could see him frowning from our sticky vinyl booth through two separate panes of glass, his pale, stubbly face eventually atomized and fogged up by the heat blasting against the windows.

Most often he was on the phone with April. He didn’t like that I could tell when he was speaking with her, but it wasn’t as though he was so hard to read. When he finally walked through the door, his

body was nearly folded over in half as though he’d been kneed in the chest.

Charlie slipped into the booth, his legs long enough that they easily bumped against mine beneath the table. “So we meet again.”

“Have you heard the one where two west coast transplants walk into a Massachusetts diner?” I asked.

“Does it end with a good, hard look at their geographic choices?” I sighed. “You’ve heard it before.”

The waitress came over and poured him a cup of coffee, which he turned absent-mindedly. He asked, “Any word from Vincent?”

Every Friday he asked if there was any word from Vincent. He asked this repeatedly, week after week, though every so often he would announce to me that he’d finally heard from my brother and he was in some new war-torn bit of the world, pointing his camera at different piles of rubble. Then the cycle would repeat.

I said, “Of course not.” Vincent had been furious with me ever since he learned I’d coopted his oldest friend as my own.

“Your brother is ridiculous,” he said, as he always did.

“Our dad always says, you’re either a serious person, or you let your ear muffs in your fly traps.”

He smiled. “To which I say, sometimes you’ve got to finagle the ball pit.”

The waitress returned to take our order. I asked when she’d gone, “How’s our April?”

He made a face at me. “She’s no one’s April. She’s her own goddamn April. Today, she painted a wild white horse’s armpit. Tomorrow she’s doing mushrooms underneath an old rock with a woman she calls Tree. She’s living the unencumbered life of her dreams.”

“Well, she can only keep it up for so long,” I told him, leaning back against the booth. “One day she’ll look at her sea of horse appendages and realize she’ll never be Georgia O’Keefe.”

“She’s not that bad.”

“But notice you didn’t say she was good .”

“Mind your own business, will you? I don’t poke and prod you about your boyfriends.” He reached over and poked my shoulder.

“You could if you wanted to.”

“And tell me why,” he said, “I would want to know anything about a twenty-two year old’s dating life.”

I was pretty sure in Charlie’s mind I would forever remain a slobbering toddler with a doll in my mouth, a plastic arm sticking out

from between my lips. I said, “Do you remember coming over that day in the summer to wait for Vincent, back when he walked Ms. Viola’s dog? You sat on the floor with me in front of my dollhouse and listened as I explained the entire storyline of my evil doll orphanage. I think I went on for over an hour.”

“I remember the dollhouse,” he said, considering. “But I sat on the floor with you all the time. I was basically your indentured babysitter.” #

Vincent and Charlie were five years older, and as long as I’d known my brother, I’d known Charlie. He was at our house all the time because his parents were incorrigible workaholics and considered our parents as free childcare. For me, the boys were an endless source of entertainment. I followed them around everywhere. When I realized it annoyed them, I started documenting everything they did in a tiny red notebook: consumed two party bags of tortilla chips at noon, killed zombies online for eight whole hours, collected sticks from woods, walked into nettle bush. When Vincent discovered what I was doing, he threw it out the window straight into a mud puddle. Charlie later gave me a new one after I’d sulked all afternoon under the dining table, and that was the first time I found him more interesting than my brother.

#

Another Friday, and there we were again at the very same table in our eighteenth favorite restaurant. Charlie hadn’t been sleeping. This was partially because he wasn’t very happy, but also because he was enrolled as a PhD student while simultaneously trying to get over his girlfriend of many years by taking out a multitude of different women. So basically entirely because he wasn’t very happy.

I tried to ask him about these women, what they looked like, what they studied, whether or not they laughed at his jokes. Were they anything like April? Like any other woman he spent ample time with? But he would always shrug off my questions, tell me to mind my business, that as far as I was concerned, he was saving himself for marriage. He’d wag his finger at me. “Do your homework, Meara,” he’d say.

Tonight, his fatigue cast shadows beneath his light blue eyes. His hand knotted in his hair. He kept spacing out while staring at the side of my head. I reached out over our slices of pie and touched his warm cheek with my thumb. “Charles, dear, you must sleep more.”

He rolled his eyes. “You know, some say the Buddha only slept one hour a day.”

“If you’d like, you don’t have to drive all the way back tonight. You

can stay with me,” I said.

“I don’t much like the idea of being the creepy twenty-seven year old you sneak into your college dorm.”

“Twenty-seven is nothing,” I said. “Last month I saw a girl bring home some middle-aged accountant. At first I thought it was her dad, but then I saw him coming out of the bathroom in his underwear at two in the morning.” He smiled, and I pleaded, “My spare mattress nearly stays inflated the whole night.”

He shook his head and turned his coffee cup. “That’s okay, Meara.” #

My friend Rochelle didn’t understand this relationship. My other friends were too aboveboard to tell. They’d project a bunch of goo all over the whole thing. When I told Rochelle why I couldn’t go out with her, she asked me warily, “Where’d you meet this guy again?”

I stared at her. “Narcotics anonymous.”

“Seriously?”

“Of course not,” I said impatiently. “It was for sex and love addiction.”

She couldn’t understand why a straight man would drive over an hour out of his way to see a woman he didn’t plan to sleep with. She suggested I started dressing sluttier. I told her Charlie would think I was having a psychotic break. “But at least he’ll be thinking of you as a woman as he drops you off at the asylum.”

Charlie always paid the bill. He had old-fashioned inclinations like that, chivalrous instincts that dropped his coat across puddles, put his body between mine and oncoming traffic. If I even reached for my wallet he’d scold me. “If your mother ever found out I let you pay, it’d be my head on a stick,” he said after the waitress took his card away.

It didn’t matter that Mom was an ardent feminist who wouldn’t care in the slightest whether or not he paid for a meal that couldn’t cost more than twenty dollars total. He’d hear none of it.

“You’re not babysitting me ,” I said. “Nobody’s forcing you to hang out with me.”

He looked at me sidelong. “If I were forced to hang out with you, I promise I wouldn’t be paying for your meal.” Then he pushed my plate toward me. “Now finish your pie. Your bus’ll be here soon.”

One night Charlie brought a pile of his books and his laptop to the diner. He had a paper to finish by Sunday night, and had barely written two pages. He wanted me to be quiet as he typed his notes. He

said, “Just sit there and drink your coffee.”

I laughed. “Why didn’t you just bail if you’re so busy?”

“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I know I’m the highlight of your social calendar.”

I laid my head on the table next to my mug. “I think you mean the other way around.” He didn’t look at me or reply. He merely nudged my foot underneath the table. I watched him as he worked. His nose was red with a slight head cold he had barely started recovering from, his lips chapped, the top a little larger than the bottom. He was lazy about shaving. He’d been like that since his arrival, and I wasn’t sure if it had to do with the geographical displacement or the breakup.

“What’s your paper about?” I asked.

“The language between intimates,” he said. “Like inside jokes, for example. Its development, its changes with distance, time, digital communication, etcetera.”

I smiled. “I’d like to read that.”

He stared at me, then looked back down at his screen. “Sure, weirdo.”

I watched him until our server came back around. He was new, handsome, about my age. I sat up and we made small talk before I ordered our slices of pie, coconut cream today. When he left, Charlie narrowed his eyes. “That’s disgusting.”

“What’s disgusting?”

“You flashed him that creepy archaic smile of yours.”

“Archaic smile?”

“I can always tell when you’re inclined toward somebody because you look at them like you’re a statue on a grave bust. It’s like lust brings out your placidity toward death or something.”

I laughed. “You’ve never even met anyone I’ve dated!”

“Not true. That kid Tommy with the mohawk.”

“Seven years ago?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t look at everyone I’m inclined toward that way. What does my face look like right now?”

He tapped his thumb against the table. “Don’t say that, Meara.”

“Sorry,” I muttered.

Charlie looked back at his laptop, then said: “It’s fine.”

I leaned back against the booth, hugging my arms around my body. The diner was quiet except for the light reverberations of Carly Simon on the jukebox. The sounds of his fingers stalling on the keyboard.

Searching for words, I asked, “What’s April up to?” It was pathetic,

how badly I wanted his attention. What I would say to get it.

“What’s April up to,” he repeated hollowly, frowning. “She’s been selling beaded necklaces in town. And she got a dog. A dog named Diego. He suffers from vertigo and the occasional bout of dermatitis.”

“Oh,” I said. Charlie was allergic to dogs. “So I guess she’s really staying out there.”

“Well, that’s what she’s said all along.” He looked out the window, at our denimish reflections and the ghostly image of his aged Mercury under the fluorescent street lamp, the flashing figures roving behind us. I imagined he was inventing her figure in the shadows, a prismatic face illuminated with a gap-toothed grin, a straight sheet of ashy hair that I’d always remember shining on a moonlit porch, air heavy with cigarette smoke, her body covered in loose, thin fabrics even on cold nights.

Charlie didn’t want my comfort. I knew this. Still, under the table I pressed my knee against his. He closed his eyes for a moment and didn’t move his leg from mine until the server returned.

Forty-five minutes later and we stood outside in the frosty, brittle air at my bus stop. My wool coat fell past my knees, my hair trapped under the collar. He still hadn’t bought a proper coat for the rapidly approaching New England winter. He kept warm with the same thick Icelandic sweater and an orange raincoat. Our breath evaporated as clouds in front of our faces.

Cars whipped past us, clattering across the bumpy, pot-holed highway. Bare, shivering trees waved and slapped against the dark, flat sky. Charlie hadn’t looked at me since we’d come outside, only down the curve of the road, waiting for the headlights to come arching ahead. “Late tonight,” he murmured.

“Desperate to get rid of me?”

“You?” he said, his hand brushing against mine. “Never. You’re the highlight of my social calendar.”

When the headlights finally appeared against the shiny black tree trunks, Charlie gave me a quick, one-armed hug, and sent me on my way with my fare. “Until next time,” I said, and he saluted me.

It was after one in the morning and Rochelle and I were sitting in my window smoking dried flowers she bought off the internet. Their efficacy was nil but cheaper than a lifetime addiction to nicotine. In the corner the silver-painted radiator blasted, creating a sickly climate of bone-chilling drafts interspersed with pockets of airless heat. My nose was dripping as I took a drag. I’d probably caught Charlie’s cold.

Rochelle liked to smoke and complain about her thesis, or the notes for what might become a thesis, something smart and convoluted about French language in War and Peace . She was equally enthralled with the French as she was the Russians, though whenever she actually met anyone of either nationality she would disparage them behind their backs with little discretion. She once said, “They’re better in literature.”

I’d fall in and out of focus during these rants, too aware of my own mounting research, inexplicably about orphans in Victorian literature, specifically Dickens. I was making little progress because whenever I bothered to attend to my scholarship, I had to confront the fact that I had somehow become a person who studied orphans in Victorian literature.

From the mess of papers and pens on my desk, my phone rang, and I handed the cigarette to Rochelle, then climbed off the windowsill. By the time I found it under a notebook, one that contained more doodles of strangers than notes, it had stopped ringing. Vincent’s name flashed across the screen. I excused myself into the empty hallway vibrating with fluorescents and called him back.

It only rang and rang and rang. I was left at his voicemail, and a dull disappointment made a notch in my stomach. I said to my phone, “It’s me. Your wicked sister. Calling you back. But maybe you didn’t mean to call. You can try again, I probably won’t be in bed for a while. But I know you’re busy. I know your life is crazy. If I really think about it I’m amazed we ever hear from you. But Mom worries about you. Charlie worries about you. He talks about you all the time. I hope you won’t stay mad at me forever. But I’m sure you must know how hard it is, being so far from home—”

The phone beeped three times and disconnected. The message failed.

I went back inside my room, and when the draft slammed the door shut behind me, Rochelle yelped. I tossed my phone onto my bed and hopped back onto the windowsill. Everything smelled like lavender and rose stems.

I tried to call my parents the next afternoon, but my reception in those unremarkable mountains garbled their voices into sparkly fragments. It made the college seem like its own distant planet floating untethered from any sun. It was part of the reason why I’d been so happy to learn Charlie was moving nearby. A member of my own species had come to rescue me.

It started to rain, and it kept raining, icy sheets clambering out from the clouds, and my classes passed in clammy doldrums. My clothes were always a little bit damp, my skin a little goosefleshed. I crouched in front of the whiskery fireplace in the common room and read a novel too contemporary to contain any Victorian strays, texting Charlie passages I thought he’d find interesting. He replied with photographs of the groceries he was concurrently buying. When he called me from his car, I was draped across the little faux velvet corner chair, my book falling apart in my lap. After I’d told him what the book was about, he asked, “Do you like it?”

“It disturbs me,” I replied, “and I think it’s unhealthy for a girl’s constitution to remain undisturbed for so long.”

“Right, I forgot this whole thing of yours about reading for displeasure.”

“At least a few times a year,” I elaborated. “You should never get too comfortable. Civilization could collapse at any moment.”

“Speaking of never getting too comfortable, I might have to cancel Friday night,” he said. I could hear the rain pouring against his windshield, the whine of his wipers against the wet glass, the bumps along the pavement.

“You might?”

“I will,” he said more definitively. “It’s the only time a friend of mine can make.”

“You’re canceling me for a date.” I hung my head down over the arm of the chair, flipping the common room upside down, letting the blood flow heavy into my skull. “Tell me you’re not taking her to our diner.”

He sighed. “Of course I’m not taking her to our diner. I’d never take a respectable person to that godforsaken place.”

“If you were here, I’d bite you for that.”

“Forgive me?”

“Whatever.”

“Meara…”

“You shouldn’t talk on the phone while you’re driving.” I hung up. #

I shamefully stalked all of Charlie’s classmates through his university’s website. The date could have been any one of them. Charlie himself had a digital footprint the size of a baby’s. You couldn’t find his face anywhere. His cohort was easier to locate, and I carefully scrutinized the female linguistics students’ social iconography until I became panicky. They seemed to like European bookstores and the smell of

petrichor and the color beige but only in a caffeinated sense. I had only ever posted pictures of things like mannequin arms abandoned on sidewalks, spaniels wearing too-small sweaters, an entire dining room set on a church lawn with a sign that read Please take it , though I hadn’t posted anything in a long time.

Friday, the rain let up and then I had four extra hours in my schedule. Rochelle convinced me to tag along with her friends to a mysterious party a ways off campus. I didn’t like these friends of hers. They were rowdy and couldn’t take anything seriously, but they also didn’t understand any of my jokes. I accepted because I couldn’t bear to sit in my room staring out the window, smoking flower petals, pretending I’d start my research but really only thinking of the man whom Rochelle called my “pseudo-incestuous paramour.”

At nine o’clock, I met the partiers at the campus gates and joined Rochelle in the back of the clunky black Subaru. The car smelled like weed, cigarettes, sour alcohol, and tart candy necklaces. Their conversation swam around me, but I couldn’t define anything they said through the ruckus of the heater, the stereo, their snickers, so I just leaned my head against the cool glass and watched the sliver of moon brighten and tremble above the trees, mist obscuring the road ahead.

Eventually we arrived in front of a dilapidated farm house. Cars packed the driveway, harsh drums echoed through the cracked windows, cheers following. The air slit through my skin as we made our way up along the mossy, overgrown path, Rochelle’s body heat radiating at my elbow and hip until she detached herself from me and ran ahead to join the two girls with vibrantly dyed hair. In her place, the tremor of wind swelled against my torso and through the thin satin of my top.

Two steps into the house, and the bass was so loud I went right back out, back down the broken steps. In the soggy wade of grass, I followed the shingling sounds of laughter somewhere around the house. There was a group of five dressed in punk-goth attire sitting on a pile of fallen trees, a bottle of alcohol and a carton of cigarettes between them. I sat down without being asked. A girl with a leopard tattooed on her neck asked me how I was doing, and my teeth chattered in response.

I was handed gin. I was handed a cigarette and a lighter. I was handed a large Gray Goose coat (posers). I was handed. The hand slid up my knee, up my thigh, resting near my crotch, my body frozen in place. My joints were stiff, creaking. The swigs of gin softened the

glare of lights behind, blurred the woods climbing up around me, the bodies beside me. Through the stick-like trees, the sleek branches, white shimmery figures floated past. They brightened, withered, dissolved past the gleaming brambles. The molecules seemed to glimmer upward and become stars. I thought miserably, Was this better than orphans?

Nausea coiled through my torso, and suddenly I stood, ripping away from the hand. I shed the coat off, dropped it onto the hand’s lap, then sopped away through the grass back toward the house.

I found Rochelle in a kitchen full of dirt and vines and broken glass. The house shook with the rage of the music. She leaned against the filthy counter and laughed with several other girls. I yelled, “I want to leave!”

“I don’t know where everyone went!” Rochelle said.

“Can we go find them?”

Her brows furrowed. “Can’t you just wait?”

I stared at her, the floor arching up and down, said “Fine,” then turned around and went back outside onto the porch. I rifled my phone out of my jean pocket and dialed the most recent number.

It rang and rang and rang until he picked up. “Meara?”

“I know you’ve got that date, but is there any chance you can come get me?”

Charlie sighed. “Where are you?”

The Mercury came crackling down the drive. I stood up from off the steps, running to where it pulled up in a u-turn. I went to get into the passenger seat but stopped, noticing the dim silhouette of a woman sitting there already. I pulled on the backdoor, which was locked, and I tugged a few more times, blushing by the time he finally unlocked it.

Charlie said, “Meara, Léa. Léa, Meara.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said, sliding across the back so that I was behind him.

I looked at the woman—auburn-haired; round face; thick, unruly eyebrows and long dark eyelashes. She was bundled in a chic ochre peacoat and a charcoal scarf, an ensemble I remembered in front of an antique bookshelf. “And I apologize for disrupting your night,” I added.

“I’m hardly leaving you to be gang-raped by a bunch of…” He looked at the rotting house, the plants swallowing it up. “… rabid elves.”

I snorted. Léa only said, “Don’t worry about it. I don’t mind a late-

night drive.”

Charlie looked at me behind his shoulder. I realized he was cleanshaven. He was still wearing the Icelandic sweater. “You’re okay though, Mear?”

“I’m okay,” I said.

As he started to pull out of the drive, he and Léa instantly returned to a previous conversation about dying languages. As they debated something I could barely make out through the clattering car sounds, I struggled with my seatbelt in the darkness, my drunkenness, and even though neither of them noticed, my face was hot, probably blotchy. I slumped against the seat once it latched, staring blankly at Charlie’s head, an ache crumpling through my stomach. Briefly, his gaze caught mine in the rearview mirror, and I felt my eyes fill with tears. I looked away and out the window.

It took a little over a half-hour for him to reach Léa’s apartment. He pulled up right in front of the bricked exterior, the gothic wrought iron fence around the dry garden, and told me to come up front before getting out to walk her to her door. They exchanged faint words at the top of her steps, Charlie standing spindly and awkward, and I wondered if that was natural or because I was there, looking. Charlie kissed her on the cheek, and she went inside, and then he was coming down the steps and getting back in the car.

I adjusted the passenger seat for more leg room as he turned on the stereo, a slow, moody Cibo Matto song coming over the speakers. Charlie tapped the peeling pleather steering wheel. “So, I can drive you back to campus tomorrow.”

“Okay.” I’d never seen his apartment before.

He pulled off the curb.

At first I kept my gaze on the road ahead, the spill of fog in the brights, the empty streets, the black, silent houses. But then I turned toward him. I watched his face as he drove. He knew I was looking. His face became ruddy and sweet.

Charlie lived in a little unit in the back of a boxy colonial. As he unlocked the door, he told me to humble myself: this was where the servants used to live. He turned on the lights, the heat. He put a blanket over my shoulders as though I was a child that’d passed out in a movie theater, then went to the kitchen to get me a glass of water. I clutched the blanket around my neck as I circled around the tiny space.

The apartment smelled like Charlie, who smelled wonderful, like plain soap and earthy spices—cinnamon and turmeric. It was sparse,

like any near-destitute bachelor PhD student who spent all his chump change on a woman who was neither his girlfriend nor sister. But there were a few prints on the walls—a Monet of a blue cathedral and several Willy Ronis photographs. There was also something of April’s on the console table, back when she still drew pictures of furniture in abandoned rooms instead of horse buttocks. Scattered around every surface was a different pile of papers, a different pile of books all with “linguistics” in the title or subtitle.

I followed him into the kitchen. On the fridge there were mostly sticky notes. But there was also a photograph of him and Vincent in green caps and gowns, another of us on a camping trip several years ago. We were both on the ground, in the dry pine needles, his legs crossed, mine splayed out and mostly out of frame. Neither of us looked at the camera. We looked at each other. I didn’t remember who’d taken it. I’d never once seen it. Charlie pretended it wasn’t there and handed me the glass of water.

I drank it all and pressed it against my collarbone. “Thank you.”

“Do you need anything else? Have you eaten?”

I shook my head.

He pulled out peanut butter, blueberry jam (weirdo), and English muffins. As we waited for the toaster, leaning on our elbows at the counter, very little space between us, I joked, “ Now it feels like you’re babysitting me.”

Charlie shook his head. “You only ate adult food as a kid. I remember you used to say, at the age of six or seven, your favorite meal was a gingery stir fry and a side of watercress salad. You snacked on seed crackers and brie.”

“I was indeed a freak.”

“One person’s freak is another’s icon of sophistication.”

The English muffins popped up, and he put in another for himself as I spread on the peanut butter and jelly. I waited patiently for his to pop up before eating. When his was ready, we cheers-ed, bumping our sandwiches together, then scarfed them down. Our crumbs fell into the sink and onto the counter. I said, “Thank you.”

“You already thanked me. No need to get all sanctimonious on me now.”

I wiped my sticky mouth and stood up straight. “Not just for picking me up, or letting me stay, or the dumb sandwich. It’s for being here. I didn’t realize how homesick I was until you arrived. How much I needed you. I don’t have to explain anything to you, none of the fundamental stuff. You were there for it all. You already get it. That’s a

special thing.”

Charlie faced the window over the sink, a still, serious reflection staring back at him. He blinked and rubbed the corner of his eye. He said, “Yeah. For me, too.”

I hesitantly put my hand over his, and slowly, he let our fingers intertwine. His were still rough and calloused from his old carpentry jobs, together with mine like old, knotted roots. I stepped closer to him, and our hands slipped apart as he put his arms around me. The blanket fell to the floor at our feet. I gripped him tight. My heart drubbed in my ribcage. I pressed my face against his warm, scratchy neck, felt his heartbeat against my cheek. I touched the rough fabric of his sweater, the softness of his worn cotton jeans, his empty belt loops. He clutched my satin top, his hands riding slightly up my back, brushing my skin.

But he disentangled himself from me, carved open the distance. My body prickled in his absence. He smiled kindly. “Better go to sleep, Meara.”

Waves of icy drafts, pockets of airless heat coursed through my skin, porous and cavitied. I nodded. Charlie didn’t have a couch, just two mismatched arm chairs. He told me where to find some sweats I could borrow, and he cleaned up in the kitchen as I went to put them on and then splash my face with cold water. In his blue t-shirt, I smelled like him. I climbed into his wobbly bed, and briefly pressed my nose to his pillowcase. I listened for the clatter to cease in the next room. When he finally appeared, he was in pajamas too. He was still and tense, his eyes opaque, standing over the bed in the warm lamplight.

I started to reach out for his wrist, but he smiled again and switched off the light, hesitating before climbing in next to me.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness. He lay on his back, his eyes closed. My body faced his. I stared at the silhouette of his face, the shadows cast on his cheek by his eyelashes, the slope of his nose, the slight point of his chin. His chest rose up and down.

Charlie turned over. The walls groaned and ached, dried leaves brushing across the roof, a tussle of wind grappling through the air and tapping against the windows. Outside there were few signs or sounds of life: only the frosted saucer of moonlight. Only the dancing wrists of air, and the far off squall of a speeding car. He opened his eyes.

Brother, Brother Everywhere

Ethan Altshul

Your smallness. My bigness. Brother, we were genuine — Mom and I — when we asked if you were bullied. When you said no my mind went darker. Only for a moment. Your mouth propped open like a tulip pollinated by Cheeto dust, your unwashed hair coiled like a gorgon’s. How could I go darker?

Allow me a moment of summoning. Nana’s pond where the cows bent chewed weed ends into candy canes. Those cows who terrified you — the 4x4 I steered explaining how little danger they posed all the while, turned to look at you, I inched us off the path until we slide into a ditch like baby birds failing to fly. This was pre-pandemic. I’m sorry to mention it now.

* Your smallness. Yesterday upstairs

ambush desk. My hands garrote wire.

Love violence disguised Your smallness I forget

Beneath you smallness remembers Big

fight me off Smallness remembers

*

Love is NOT phony says the little girl on the Lauryn Hill song. I look over to you in the passenger seat. This is a problem of miscommunication, like most problems. The girl means boys are always acting like someone else. I mean I’ve written too many obits in advance, sat with them, hired a copy editor, stashed a few in a newspaper archive, locked one in a satellite and sent it off to the far reaches of space.

Yesterday, I galloped up the stairs on all fours, rounded the corner to your room. Your neck looked so small, my perspective distorted by your chair. Ambush my arms set beneath your chin like a garrote wire.

I don’t why these are all fantasies of death. I long for life. I promise. I forget your smallness sometimes. Your smallness remembers.

*

All this wizardry and no results. Wizardry doesn’t pay like it used to. I’m trying to talk about depression.

I don’t know how to talk about depression. My depression isn’t what it used to be. All these drugs. Some results.

* Your smallness. My bigness. I was the biggest kid in elementary school. You were the smallest.

I don’t mean this physically.

* Brother I have rubbed my hands on your door frame Brother I have tried to knock that door off its hinges

Brother I have learned to pick a lock from a YouTube video

Brother I have smothered panic in a pillow to prevent you from hearing

Brother I have skipped rocks on the pond

Brother I have loved you loved you loved you

Brother Brother-in-arms we have fought nerf battles with the neighbors

Brother Brother-in-arms we have hauled countless packages inside while Mom yelled watch the corner watch the corner

Brother Brother Brother I have spoken the word until the B and R eroded the crevices of my mouth

Brother Brother Brother Brother Brother until wind made tunnels through the valleys of my teeth

Brother Brother Brother Brother Brother Brother

* Mom said you can set them down in the kitchen , the packages, where she’d carry them the rest of the way to wherever packages went in our house. I had a favorite copy of Nat Geo with a jaguar on the cover that was lost.

Nat Geos went missing in our house. Put some shoes on the mat is wet , she meant the welcome rug outside, soaked through with rain. Go go I don’t want it getting wet , we hurried, it was heavy and awkwardly proportioned for the door. Rectangular, I learned later she’d bought a new table.

So what if it got wet?

We maneuvered through the door, you first through the breach, taking it slow hold on I’m gonna hit my back , you said, though you weren’t close.

The rain came down. Brother, Zach, your hair looked oily, full of dandruff, like my hair in dreams. Brother, it was beautiful and heavy and big.

Or Not Kurt Olsson

You chew what’s in your mouth, chew as you were taught to chew— thirty times, forty times. The less to swallow, the more to chew. Your job to chew what’s there until what’s what is too immaterial to lodge in teeth, lurk beneath the tongue, nothing dark to brush, spit out, and watch swirl down the drain. You keep chewing— three hundred, four hundred times— masticating, manducating, triturating, other synonyms you’ve never known, in languages still to be invented, mandible piston-like, unrelenting, except for an occasional tensile pop. Like stamping sheet metal, like machining product on an assembly line, except what’s produced is annihilation, is presence commuted to absence. Chew. Chew as you were taught. Only nothing will make you stop.

Behind Point Blank

Baird Harper

We’d only been in the hospital two days, but our apartment felt foreign upon returning. Could we still drink the milk in the fridge? Are these clothes on the bed clean or dirty? And what is this little metal something on the sofa cushion?

I didn’t even notice it at first, so bleary with exhaustion, still vaguely panicked by what our lives had suddenly become. Still breathless from the terrified walk up three floors with our newborn packed into her huge insulated carrier. Eventually, I put her into Michelle’s arms in the nursery, before making my way into the living room to sit down. Just a guy on his sofa in the dark, thinking how this funky little apartment would be the stage for my daughter’s first steps, her first words. She was going to be a city kid. A museum junky. A public beach goer. A child the magnet schools would someday fight over. Michelle and I had come from other places, but we were city people now. You wouldn’t believe the Mexican market we had nearby. And the tapas place around the corner? You can’t find ceviche like that just anywhere.

But then it caught my eye, the moonlight glinting dully off the seat cushion beside me, off the gnarled lead tooth of a spent bullet.

I considered not even telling Michelle about it, but then I noticed the hole in the window across the room, and the shadowy gouge on the ceiling. I got up and walked to the window and looked out over the nighttime street, my forehead so close to the glass that I could feel the cool air streaming in through the hole. I was rolling the lead nub in my fingers, when the lights flicked on and my reflection appeared on the glass before me, anxiety crimping my face into a stranger’s—a man with a bullet.

“What are you doing over there?” Michelle asked. When I turned around, they were on the sofa, our child on the very cushion.

~

That spring, I took a new job out in the suburbs, and over the summer, we bought a house near my office. The next-door neighbors appeared on our stoop the very first afternoon, announcing themselves as Dani and Danny Rolleen.

“Here’s a lemon visiting cake!” Dani thrust a platter into my arms.

“Actually, I prefer just Dan,” her husband confided to me in the kitchen. The women were touring the front rooms while I got beers, and this hulking sunburned man in his yellow polo shirt followed me, announcing along the way what the old owners had filled each room with. “The Creightons,” he said, fingering the bubble wrap on our toaster, “preferred a toaster oven .”

We found our wives on the sunporch with Cora on a blanket at their feet. Everyone stared at the infant until Dan said there’d previously been red couches in that room which had faded to salmon, so we’d definitely want some drapes in there. Then the baby spat up on Dan’s loafer.

This was life in the suburbs, I guess. Next-door neighbors to Dani and Danny Rolleen, who were into tennis, paddle in the winter. I remarked that I could use some pointers on my serve, though as I said this I was thinking of excusing myself to the restroom and then making a run for it. I could restart my life on a crab boat in Alaska, resume smoking, maybe date a Native American woman. But then I snapped out of this reverie and fetched some paper towels for the mess. When I came back, my daughter was looking happy in the arms of the neighbor lady, who was herself looking sad about being ten years too old for a newborn of her own. And Dani admitted as much, before explaining that her uterus was ill-suited to the carriage of a fetus, and that their daughter—Murphy, age seven—had been an unlikely child.

“A miracle,” Dan said, gazing intensely at his wife, and I could tell there was something heavy passing between them, something more complicated than miracles.

“But the other reason we came over,” Dan continued, “is to alert you that our little Murphy has a habit of entering other people’s houses without notice.”

“Without notice,” Michelle repeated.

“Now she’s smart as a damn whip,” Dan added quickly. “But her sense of boundaries…” He trailed off into the mouth of his pale ale.

“So if she shows up here,” Dani interjected, glancing about as if the child might already have gotten in, “you go ahead and tell her she can’t waltz into your house without knocking first.”

“No problem,” Michelle agreed, and I agreed too, though really I was back in Alaska, with my yellow rain slicker and my Marlboro Reds.

The next day, we took pictures of everything we unpacked, for

insurance records, in case of fire or theft.

“And when are you ever going to use this?” Michelle asked. I snapped a photo of the JuicePro I’d purchased off an infomercial years earlier, and carried it lovingly to its new home on the counter. But when I turned back around, Michelle’s face had turned white. “Jesus, Sean, you packed it with the kitchen stuff?” She held the big cedar box away from her body as if it contained a bomb. In fact, it held our unloaded handgun. The bullets were in a different box entirely, I explained. I had a system. In our old place, I’d kept it on a high shelf inside this humidor. In more agreeable moods, Michelle would joke that our gun smelled better than the other ten million in the city, but at other times she insisted I’d made a terrible mistake in buying it. “And now that we live here,” she said, “we’ll be pariahs if anyone finds out.”

I scooped the humidor into my arms with the same doting care as the juicer. “So, then don’t tell anyone.”

But Michelle had grown up with liberals. “People ask if you keep guns in the house before they accept playdate invitations.”

I took the revolver out and slid it into the front of my pants. “The only way anyone ever has to know about it is if I use it to save our lives, in which case I’ll be proved right for having bought it in the first place.”

But she didn’t appreciate this, or the way I’d begun gyrating with the handle sticking out of my sweats. But I kept it up long enough that her disgust gave way to an eyeroll. And then I started in again with my mocking impressions of the neighbors. “Dani and Danny! Here’s a lemon visiting cake!” I reached under the foil and ate a crumb. “Jesus is that bitter!” And then I strutted through the house describing the old owner’s furniture choices in Dan’s meathead drawl. But when I came around the corner into the living room, there was a young girl kneeling on our coffee table peering into the mesh-sided day crib in which Cora was napping. I waited for the child to acknowledge me, but she just kept staring into the crib, her lips moving silently as if she were singing a lullaby in a pitch my ears couldn’t detect. Finally, she turned, her eyes meeting mine before her gaze fell on the curve of polished wood hanging out of my waistband. “What’s that ?”

Michelle came rushing in, eyes bulging. “You must be Murphy.”

The girl released the edge of the day crib. “Where’s Mrs. Creighton?”

“She doesn’t live here anymore,” I said. “We do.”

“Sean…” Michelle began in a stony voice. “This is Murphy.

Remember?”

“Dear,” I said to the girl, “you can’t just walk into other people’s—”

But here I felt my wife’s fingernails biting the flesh of my upper arm and I sat out the rest of this discussion in the kitchen snapping insurance photos of the toaster, the microwave, the blender, and finally, our handgun.

Weeks later, after I brought the developed photos home, Cora pulled the whole stack off the dining room table onto the floor, and there it was, our steel-barreled revolver set against the warm cherry grain of the kitchen table, like some kind of ghastly still-life. I wasn’t really a gun person, you see; I just happened to need one for protection. But the crime rate was so low in our new neighborhood that it seemed unlikely we’d have anyone coming into the place other than the neighbor girl.

By that point, it seemed the thing with Murphy had blown over without incident. Her parents remained sweet to us, so we assumed the girl hadn’t heard us mocking them, or, as I had come to see it, had decided not to tell on us. In a way, this fear of being exposed made our life in the suburbs feel tenuous and endangered, and I began to appreciate the place. My Alaska fantasies waned. I traded in my Jetta for an SUV with a five-star safety rating. I began attending Dan’s monthly poker game. We even found a book club for Michelle to join. Meanwhile, Cora learned to walk and talk, and climb too, so I bought a gun safe for the bedroom closet. Unpopular sweaters piled on top of it. At parties, I got comfortable lying my way through gun-related conversations. This was a college town, you see, so you were basically required to own a rain barrel, but a firearm was out of the question. When the issue came up at barbeques, I’d dodge by telling the story of the hole in our apartment window, the ceiling gouge, the lump of lead on the sofa. “But if I still lived in the city,” I’d say, “I probably would own a gun.” At this, I’d feel Michelle’s heated gaze suddenly upon me, our little secret so close to the surface!

That night before bed, we fought about it again—about the gun itself and also about my teasing fate in such a way. She’d been standing only a few feet away from me at the time, talking to Dr. Scanlon about a boy who’d come into the E.R. after being shot by his own brother. But before I could explain how tedious I found Ted Scanlon’s self-aggrandizing medical dramas, I was interrupted by our two-year-old suddenly in our bedroom doorway. Or, I thought it was Cora. She’d been in a sleepwalking phase, climbing out of her crib

without even knowing it. But then I realized it wasn’t her.

“Murphy?”

“Good evening,” the neighbor girl said. “Sorry to bother you so late, but I’d like you to know that I’m turning ten this year, which means I can start babysitting.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was sitting on the end of the bed in boxers and a pit-stained T-shirt, khakis bunched up around my ankles. I turned to Michelle standing on the other side of the bed in her skirt and bra. “Babysitting,” I said, pretending to give the idea serious thought. “Sure, we’ll talk to your folks about it.”

Finally Michelle located her words, and a sweater, and she coaxed Murphy downstairs and back across the property line. When she returned, the tension between us had been interrupted, and we were able to go to bed less angry than before, though still irritated enough to lie awake awhile, then to fall into a shallow fitful sleep, then to suddenly wake in a panic.

“What was that?”

“What was what?”

“ That ,” said Michelle.

And then I heard it too, a creak of floorboards, a drawer whisking open.

“Someone’s in the house,” Michelle whispered. “Downstairs.”

“Huh?” I was still frozen with sleep. Alert, but paralyzed. The clock read 2:48.

“Did you hear that?” she said.

I could hear it more plainly now, the sound of a chair leg moving against the floor, the rustling of the change tray where I kept my watch.

“Go check,” she whispered.

I willed my legs off the mattress and staggered toward the closet.

“What are you doing?”

I squinted into the black closet, pondering whether my sleepenfeebled arms could even handle the weight of the safe.

“Are you crazy?” Michelle hissed. “Just go see .”

I stood a moment longer, inhaling the scent of our clothes, the gun inside its safe underneath my winter wools. I wanted to hold it right then, to balance it in my hands and let it lead me down the stairwell. But the effort to dig out the safe, unlock it, then load the gun—all this with Michelle in my ear—had me waving the idea off and moving down the hall unarmed, my fear of a possible intruder replaced now by plain annoyance. It would be nothing, of course. I will have gotten

out of bed for a mouse or a sleepwalking toddler, a neighbor child without a sense of boundaries.

But when I turned the corner at the bottom of the steps, there was a stranger in my living room with a flat-screen TV under one arm, laptop in the other. He looked young, like one of the college kids on move-in day, though in the gaunt half-light he seemed sickly too. Drugs, I figured, or just very drunk. I recalled a fraternity brother of mine who accidentally broke into the house of an elderly couple because, in his inebriated state, he’d mistaken it for his childhood home half a continent away. Later on, that friend became a first-grade teacher, and in my sleep-clouded mindset I wanted to believe the best about this fellow too.

“You’re in the wrong house,” I informed him, though even as I said this I began to understand that my own television was missing from its place on the wall, and that his laptop looked an awful lot like mine.

Here he became abruptly aware of my presence, and I woke into a clearer appraisal of the situation just as he bowled past me. I came-to a second later with the baseboard molding digging into my shoulder blade, blood in my mouth. The front door gaped wide, my burglar loping away with a TV under his arm. ~

The weeks that followed were defined by an intense desire to have acted differently, to have followed my own instincts. But Michelle believed she’d saved my life. “What if,” she wondered, “he’d had a weapon?”

And sure enough, when the same young man was caught coming out of Frank and Delores Pena’s house later that month, he’d had a switchblade on him and a clutch of dirty drug needles. He hadn’t been a student at all, but a meth addict who’d been breaking into homes and stealing things to sell to the resale shops. When the police told me about it, I went down to a place called Channing’s Second Hand on Irving Road to see if they were holding anything of ours. I strolled the aisles, through a beaded curtain, and into a back room with a wall covered in firearms.

“You looking to sell yours?” asked a middle-aged man in a black tactical vest, tinted eyeglasses hanging around his neck.

I perused the display case between us for my watch, then pretended to notice the guns for the first time. “What makes you think I even own a gun?”

“Just a hunch,” he said. “Most folks around here get all nervous when they come back here. But not you.”

“Well, I’m happy with my gun.”

A broad smile creased his face. “And what about your girlfriend?” He glanced toward the beaded curtain to make sure we were alone. “I get a lot of fellas come in here because they’ve fallen in love with a college girl.” He put his glasses on to get a better look at me. “Or a sexy college professor, perhaps? And they gotta dump their sidearm, quick-like, if they want any of that good liberal nookie.”

I asked him if there was another wall in the way way back where he had a bunch of these guys’ testicles hanging up, and this gave him quite a charge. He introduced himself as Channing. I explained about the recent break-ins in my neighborhood and how what I really needed was a place to shoot my gun, for the first time, so that I might become better acquainted with it.

“‘Acquainted,’” Channing said, casting an approving glance at the wall of firearms as if they were a gallery of friends. “I might know a place.”

On Sunday afternoon, I told Michelle I had to go into work for a few hours. At the second-hand shop, Channing was waiting out front in his truck. We drove out past the Home Depot, through a stretch of new housing developments and retention ponds, to a strip mall I’d not been aware of. Between a bait shop and a car parts store we pressed through a glass door labeled Point Blank , down a dim hallway into a recessed foyer where an old man with a ponytail chatted with a professional-looking woman in a tan blouse. They sat on either ends of a worn leather couch, each holding handguns. Channing greeted them as he ushered me deeper into the building, where we checked in with the establishment’s owner, a denim-clad man with an old-fashioned mustache. “Range is that way,” he said.

The first shots felt utterly violent, startling to the point of unpleasantness. But as I reloaded the cylinder, a breathless euphoria came over me. And when I came out of the range after pumping another hundred shots into the head and chest of the man-shaped target, the people I’d passed on the way in were all waiting on the other side of the soundproof door. “We like to see the face on a firsttimer,” the owner explained. The old man with the ponytail gave me a soulful handshake, and the woman with the tan blouse pulled me into a hug I hadn’t been ready for. I was hoarse from breathing the gunsmoke, exhausted by the thrill, and as I stood half-slumped in the shape this woman had drawn me into, I felt reduced to something elemental, like a pure ore squeezed from the diluted person I’d arrived

as. The smells of warm metal hung in the air, copper and lead, the sulfur and ammonia of burnt powder. And for a moment I let go of my regret for not having shot the intruder. Or maybe it was that, if he returned, I’d be ready the next time, so both of us might be delivered to better places.

~

But the meth addict went to prison instead. I sat on the stand and pointed at him in court and said, “Yes, counselor, I do see him, that’s him right there.”

Afterward, instead of going back to work, I spent the afternoon shooting. Channing was too busy to join me, but the range owner was there, and so was Nina, the woman who’d hugged me. She worked for a Christian charity based in the professional building behind the Home Depot, so close that she could walk to Point Blank, which she did most weekdays during her lunch hour.

We shot together that afternoon, then made small talk afterward on the leather couch. I told her about the bullet on my sofa, and she explained how, four years earlier, she’d been held up at gunpoint leaving a nail salon. The assailant got away with her money and her phone, but really he’d taken something greater, which she struggled to put into words, except to say that she now walked alone at night on purpose, with her hand clutching the loaded Ruger LCS inside her purse. I told her I understood. My morning in court hadn’t felt as good as I’d hoped, just pointing at the dude— Let the record show the witness has identified Stanley Colstead . “Institutional justice makes a poor substitute for having blown the guy’s head off to begin with.”

Nina laughed at this, her delicate fingers covering her mouth, then falling down onto the back of my hand.

I began sleeping with her a few weeks later, though she wasn’t really my type. Nina was older than me, for one thing, and a churchgoing person. There wasn’t much logic behind it beyond the shared experience of wanting to kill someone we’d probably never get to kill. Even if someone else broke into my house and I shot this next intruder, I doubted I’d be able to let go of my regret for not having gotten the first one. Stanley Colstead was like some awful ex-girlfriend, possessing forever my virginity.

On a Tuesday, we went shooting at lunch, then back to Nina’s townhouse. The sex was pretty good, and I believed we were falling into a tenable situation. The way other men become avid golfers, I had become a gun person, and an affair person too. But because I could

wrap them both into a single lunch break the efficiency made it feel defensible, healthy even, like a brief affirming workout.

When I got home, though, Michelle was on the couch in tears, and I assumed I’d been found out. Except that the TV was on, showing a heli-cam view of children streaming out of a building with their hands on their heads. Another school shooting, in California this time. Not one of the worst ones, it would turn out, but this was the junior high where Michelle’s college roommate Yara was planning to send her kids in a few years. I didn’t know how to feel about this, or if I needed to feel anything. I’m not heartless, but I have only so much concern to spread around. The world is a wide swath of misery, and sometimes you just want to go to Point Blank and pump lead into a paper silhouette of the man who stole your innocence.

Either way, my interest in the shooting range waned after this, and I broke it off with Nina. I began working out during my lunch breaks instead. I accepted more of Dan’s invitations to play tennis. Sweaters piled up atop the gun safe once again.

Cora was six years old by now, attending school all day, a milestone Michelle had claimed to be looking forward to—all the things she’d finally get done!—but a dark malaise came over her instead. She quit her book club, and then her knitting circle. She assumed a new and obsessive interest in jogging, rolling out of bed most mornings to run alone while Cora and I ate breakfast, or disappearing for whole weekend days to participate in obscure 5Ks in the city.

During this era, my relationship with Cora actually blossomed. I started teaching her tennis on the weekends during Michelle’s absences. We went out to lunches, sometimes in the middle of a school day. I learned to loom tiny rubber bands into friendship bracelets, which we’d deliver next door to Murphy, whom Cora had come to adore.

Murphy was fourteen by this point. She’d grown out of her home-invasion phase, and now gained access to neighbors’ houses by babysitting. We’d come home to find the bills out of place, the medicine cabinet in disarray, the bedside drawers rummaged. This drove Michelle crazy, but I didn’t mind. Cora idolized her, and I guess I was still grateful that Murphy hadn’t sold us out those years ago, as if we’d only been allowed this good life in the suburbs at her behest.

On a Saturday that year we went out with Dan and Dani to a great new tapas place nearby while Murphy sat for Cora. Over small plates, the Rolleens recalled their daughter’s “break-in days” with

sincere nostalgia, lamenting the onset of the teenage years. Murphy had entered a goth phase and was dating a young man who called himself Jug. This boy had a gold ring through his septum. He wore combat boots and a gray wool field blouse with the military patches blacked out by indelible marker. “The kid dresses like a Nazi,” Dan complained. “Or a goddamn school shooter.”

Michelle gasped at this, putting her napkin on her plate and excusing herself to the bathroom, gone for so long that she missed out on the chorizo and the stuffed mussels. By that point, her friend Yara had moved away from their old school district and was now living on the grounds of a winery, home-schooling her children, and lately, Michelle herself had been talking about us doing something similar.

“Not the home-schooling part,” she’d said, “but maybe it’s time to try something new.”

I’d entertained my own escape fantasies at one time, of course, but I no longer wanted to be the kind of person who runs away. We’d been scared out of the city already, and so what if Yara was teaching her children to stomp grapes. We had roots here with Cora in school and my regular poker game, so maybe if Michelle got involved with the PTA or something she wouldn’t be such a downer all the time?

I said this to her after our dinner out with the Rolleens. We’d never openly acknowledged Michelle’s depression, and doing so now, after so much sangria, felt like poor timing. Plus, we’d just come home to find Murphy on our couch with her national-socialist boyfriend. The fly on Jug’s black cargo pants was down, black lipstick on his ear. The movie paused on the TV showed a blood-spattered mime waiting to catch a child coming down a tube slide.

We sent them on their way without much of a tip, then began toggling through our standard marital quarrels until I said what I said about Michelle’s depression and she stormed out of the room, then the house, and finally, the marriage. She stayed that night at Ted Scanlon’s apartment, recently separated from his own wife. And when Michelle came back in the morning, she declared that she wanted the same.

“A divorce?” I asked.

She said she’d wanted it for months. That she needed it. It wasn’t about Scanlon, she insisted, but the way she kept referring to him as “Teddy” made it clear that it was, at least partly, about him. They were in love, she insisted. Or, she and I had grown apart? I could barely comprehend her logic. It felt like an out-of-body experience, like a dream. A nightmare is how this felt.

~

I woke up some weeks later in my car. I’d left my family in our house, and I was living in an extended stay hotel south of town with my work clothes and a lot of Jim Beam. I snapped awake while driving somewhere, beyond the village limits, along the road that borders the forest preserve. I was a drunk, I suppose, and uncertain what day of the week it was. My phone wasn’t in the car with me, but my revolver rode on the passenger seat.

“Oh Wyatt,” I said aloud. This was the name Nina had given my gun. Hers had been Trixie. This was one of many things I hadn’t liked about her. She also ate too fast, and used the word ‘irregardless’. These weren’t legitimate grounds for having broken off the affair, but my reasons for falling in with her to begin with had been roughly as shallow. Maybe I was depressed too.

“Wyatt, what are we doing here?” I pulled down the long narrow drive into the forest preserve and parked at the edge of its empty lot. It was a Thursday, I now understood, near dawn. I had a meeting in a few hours with our biggest client, but I wasn’t going to make it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even been to work, and there were dozens of concerned messages on my phone, which, some vague memory suggested, now sat at the bottom of the retention pond behind Point Blank. Lifting my hands to my nose, I inhaled the smell of spent gunpowder. Outside, the sun lifted over the willow trees at the far edge of the lagoon. An egret spread its wings and floated across the water. It was beautiful. I said goodbye. I pulled the trigger.

But of course the true victim of this was Cora. Shock, denial, anger. An only child quietly bargaining against the grief. Eventually, though, she emerged as a new person, more cynical than before, sharp-edged. The boys waiting in her future clad in combat boots, septum jewelry.

Meanwhile, Michelle went through her own stages, falling deeper into despair before coming out the other side. Like I said before: The world is such a wide swath of misery that you can’t care about everything in depth. It didn’t work out between her and Dr. Ted, so she moved back to the city and found a Frenchman who owned an upscale running shoe store. Laurent wasn’t into kids, so he treated Cora like an adult, which she appreciated. In this way, she came to accept him, if not the new person her mother was shaping into— peppy and spandex-clad, working part-time at the store pushing gel inserts. It bothered Cora that her mother seemed to be racing ahead in life, with the rest of us left behind in that house full of conspicuouslyvoided spaces—the left side of the two-car garage; the right side of the

walk-in closet; the divots in the bedroom carpet where her vanity once sat. ~

The cylinder was empty too, it turned out. The bullet meant to kill me had already passed through the head of a paper target the night before. But the fact that I’d honestly tried seemed to be enough, so I went home and slept off the hangover.

Then to Alaska on a lark, catching salmon on the Yukon River, letting my beard come in, smoking unfiltered cigarettes. But then a bear the size of a conversion van wandered into my campsite and looked at me with such shocking indifference that I snapped out of my self-pity and went home to be a father again.

By the time the papers were signed, our lives had found their new order. Michelle had returned to the city, living full-time with her jogging Frenchman. That I should get the house had actually been her idea. “You always fit in better there anyway,” she’d said. And then she cleared her throat and quietly added, “And Cora should stay with the house.”

~

I depended on Murphy more than ever, hiring her to sit most afternoons. There were after-school programs, but Cora liked having an older girl around, and in a weird way I appreciated how the drawers of my bedroom would be unsettled when I got home, as if Michelle were still around.

Murphy’s boyfriend was still in the picture, but Jug had assumed a more distant approach. He’d roll up my driveway in his Honda beater, honking as I’d pass money to his girlfriend. Every weekday evening like this—come home, hand out cash, honk, honk, honk—until it began to seem quite normal. Cora was happy enough. Ten years old now, always with news to share about her school day and ideas for dinner. We were comfortable. We even talked about the divorce sometimes, in ways I doubted she did with her mother. I didn’t ever comment on the reasons behind the separation, but Cora had made those up on her own. The Frenchman had appeared too soon afterward, she surmised. And why would her mother relinquish the house if she weren’t to blame? Part of me wanted to set the record straight, but Cora’s ideas seemed more constructive. I was to be pitied, a little less each day; meanwhile, her mother would, in time, be forgiven.

I made tacos for dinner that night, and later, when I got upstairs, I could feel Murphy’s recent presence—a sock pinched in the dresser drawer; the water glass on the bedside table nudged off its perspiration

ring; and finally, the permanently-open closet door shut tight with the light on inside, the seams glowing ominously. I put my hand on the knob, but before I even opened the door, I knew it was gone. ~

If your firearm is stolen, there are protocols to follow, reports to file with law enforcement. But what do you do if the thief is your consummate babysitter and the neighbors’ only child?

At first, I didn’t do anything. It would return, I figured. Or maybe I’d left it in the glove compartment, or at Point Blank. The next day, I went through the motions of a search, but it wasn’t anywhere, and of course I knew who had it. Still, I waited for it to return. And when it would, I’d say nothing about her having taken it, and she’d say nothing about knowing it existed. She’d been guarding my secrets for years already—of the time I mocked her parents; of the cache of expiring Vicodin in my sock drawer; of the choke-porn magazine I kept under my mattress during the contentious early phase of the divorce proceedings. We had an understanding. Didn’t we?

The next afternoon, I wrote her a check for twice the usual amount, with a note on the memo line reading, Because you set a wonderful example for Cora . Then came Jug’s driveway honking. But when I got upstairs, the gun safe was still empty.

Still I waited, sending my signals to Murphy, and to Jug too. She’d stolen it, but maybe he’d put her up to it and he was the one keeping it. I came home a little later than usual one day and he was already in my driveway in his rusting Honda shitbox.

“Hey, Jug man, what’s happening, buddy?”

He turned down his Teutonic scream punk and watched me approach his car, squinting as if he’d never seen me before in his life. I asked him what was new, and he turned down the music even further, wagging his head in a pathetic way. I readied myself to receive his sniveling apology.

“Murphy’s going to New York next year,” he said glumly.

“Cornell,” I agreed. “You landed a smart one. And responsible, too. I don’t know what I’m gonna do for a sitter next year. Hey, you seem like an honest guy, any chance you’ve got a sister who’d want the job?”

Jug stared desperately into his lap. “She’s gonna break up with me before she leaves. I just know it.”

It turned out Jug wasn’t going to college. He’d thought about it, he said, an art school maybe, but he was still a few credits short of a diploma and hadn’t attended much since spring break and the SATs

were totally fascist anyway.

I came away from our talk feeling almost bad for the guy. He was sort of sweet when you got past the black eyeshadow, the gravestones tattooed on the backs of his hands. A Nazi maybe, but a simple and guileless Nazi. I returned to the understanding that Murphy was solely to blame.

~

When the summer started, I took some time off so Cora and I could do a tour of the national parks, and when we returned two weeks later, I’d given up caring about the gun altogether. It was something from my past, like Michelle or Nina. I didn’t owe it anything. I contacted the local office of the ATF, claiming it’d been taken from my car, and soon after that, I decided to believe that this is really what happened. In this way, we were both absolved.

~

In August, just days before Murphy was to go off to college, Cora and I joined all three Rolleens out to dinner at that place where they cook everything right at your table. A good long meal, with hugs in the parking lot.

Afterward, as Cora and I approached our front door, you couldn’t tell anything was wrong. Door locked, porch light twinkling overhead. But inside, the place was pretty well sacked. Drawers pulled out of everything, computer missing, Cora’s tablet. My bedroom was trashed too, watches gone, cufflinks, even the empty gun safe.

The police attention that night made us celebrities on the block, all the neighbors out walking their dogs in order to find out what’d happened. And then, in the days that followed, they checked in on us. Mrs. Tabernathy baked us a lasagna. The Rolleens brought another lemon visiting cake. Murphy had cooked it this time, they announced proudly.

I called the insurance company to start the process of reporting our losses, with the shoebox full of photos at the ready. This wasn’t necessary, the agent insisted, but I wanted to show them how diligent I’d been. Then my breath stopped and it was there again, in my hands. Not the gun itself, but the photo of the gun, set against the wood of a kitchen table now living in the Frenchman’s condo.

~

Later, Delores Pena came over with peanut butter cookies and a security system brochure. Her house had also been burglarized by Stanley Colstead those years ago and her husband had testified against him in court as I had. “He’s getting out of prison in three months,”

Delores said, her eyes flaring frightfully. “I’m worried he’ll come back and hurt us. Frank’s talking about buying a gun.”

There were, of course, some things I could’ve told her about gun ownership. How it gives you the power you want but also a power you don’t. How it starts off as a responsibility and becomes a burden. The babysitter has it, then the sullen boyfriend, then the sitter again, and then it was your fault all along for leaving your car unlocked. It takes a toll and you don’t even end up shooting anyone. But I didn’t tell Delores any of that, because the greatest burden, in a community like ours, is that no one has a gun except the ones who do.

Instead, I got in my car a few days later and drove out to Grassland State Prison. I sat waiting in the fenced-in courtyard with the other visitors, each of us at our own concrete picnic table, everyone looking ruffled by the body search. I didn’t even recognize Stanley Colstead at first, and for a moment I wondered if I’d made a mistake in pointing him out in court. It’d been pretty dark that night. I’d been so worked up. But then I remembered the admissions of guilt he’d made at the sentencing and I recalled all over again that this man actually owed me something greater than the value of the objects he’d taken from my house.

“I had a gun that night,” I told him when he sat down. “Under other circumstances I might’ve shot you.”

Colstead studied me across the slab table. “Who are you?”

I introduced myself, but he didn’t remember me at all.

“You’re allowed to bring food in,” he said, craning to see the empty space on the bench beside me, then glancing under the table. “You didn’t bring me anything ?”

“I didn’t know about the food,” I said.

He wagged his head. “Well, next time then.”

I opened my wallet and pulled out the photos I’d brought of Michelle and Cora, and of the gun too. I wanted him to meet the variables he’d never considered. “This is my daughter,” I began, passing him Cora’s school portrait. “She’s the reason I wasn’t allowed to keep the gun closer at hand. And here’s my wife—my ex-wife, actually—who wouldn’t let me get the gun that night.” I passed him the photo of Michelle, then the one of the revolver. “And here’s the gun I owned, which, I’m telling you, I lose sleep sometimes thinking what would’ve happened if—”

“Are you threatening me, bro?”

“What?”

“I may be in chains, but if you come at me I’ll fucking down you, brother.”

“Wait, Stanley, please. I’m just—” But that was it. He was agitated, standing back from the table, licking his fists and blowing me kisses, inviting me to come at him so he could bite my eyelids off. The guards closed in and dragged him away. I didn’t notice until later, in the car, that he’d made off with my photos. ~

To say that I wanted, once again, to kill Stanley Colstead doesn’t quite explain it. I felt bad for him that he couldn’t recognize his good fortune, that he’d probably end up back in prison again soon, or that the next homeowner would finally be the one to kill him. Frank Pena, maybe. But not me. My gun was living with someone else. This thought brought Ted Scanlon to mind, and the jogging Frenchman, the point being that I’d had a nice gun at one time but hadn’t taken care of it, and now someone else had it. Oh well. I was trying to be a good sport about it all. Being post-gun is all about being a good sport. If someone breaks into your home, you have only your wits with which to fight them off. But if world order collapses, your charms may not be enough.

Speaking of that, on a Friday that fall, Cora and I scheduled a night at the movies to the see the new post-apocalyptic one. Guns were featured prominently. Cannibalism. Despair. Cora had to drop out at the last minute because a friend of hers was having a crisis. She was a good kid that way, a good friend. Or maybe they were just going to drink screwdrivers and talk about boys all night. I called the other girl’s father and said, “I’m okay with this sleepover as long as you tell me there aren’t any guns in your house.” He laughed at the very notion, but never actually answered my question, so who really knows.

I went to the movie on my own. Upon reentry into the preapocalyptic world of the theater lobby, I had a yearning to bury some non-perishables in the backyard and then go to Channing’s Second Hand and say, “How much for the entire wall?” But then I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I turned to find myself in the gaze of a skinny young man in a green MoviePlex polo. “Jug?”

He wasn’t wearing eyeshadow, or his septum ring. His name badge read, Francis . “I was always kind of a film buff,” he explained sheepishly. Then he said, “Do you have a minute?”

I told him I hadn’t heard from Murphy since she left for school, and he said that’s how it’d been for him too. Not an official break-up, yet, but he wasn’t holding out much hope. He stowed his little roller-

vacuum behind a pillar and I followed him out into the dark parking lot where the autumn air dragged soft drink lids across the pavement. This young man had been dumped for the first time, and now he required the attention of someone whose life had become a welladvertised disappointment. I readied my fish-in-the-sea analogies.

He popped the trunk of his beater and dug around near the spare tire, then pulled out the gun I’d once owned. “I’m real sorry,” he said, balancing it across his open palm. “Murphy cracked your safe. But I was the one who wanted to keep it.”

I reached for it, then stopped short, adrenaline pooling bitterly around my tongue, a metallic odor in my nose. Was I afraid? Maybe. I wasn’t afraid of guns, but I did feel afraid of this gun. God knows what he’d done with it. A young Nazi film buff coming off a bad breakup. Had I missed the news of his own mass shooting amongst all the others? I finally took its improbable weight into my hands, looked down upon it harshly, and thought: What have you been up to since we last met?

Jug shut the trunk and wiped his hands. He looked relieved.

“Was it always this heavy?” I asked him. But he only shrugged apologetically and turned away, jogging back across the lot and disappearing into the MoviePlex.

I tipped the cylinder out of the gun, removing a bullet from one of the six chambers, rolling it between my fingers under the moonlight. And then, beyond this little piece of lead and brass, I caught my reflection in the Honda’s rear window—a man with a bullet.

“Tell me,” I said. “What have you been up to since we last met?”

Musical

Aaliyah Anderson

*You missed stroking any instrument as, then, you held, owned, & made something while your hip could rest. Stench is what mostly pivots the axis, gravity false like Augusta in Maine. Plastic containers stacked against the broom, my earloop faded like horizon you overcame against me. Wrote a song in A Major. Breath fighting the sweated hair, bobby pins sliding up. I pretended to know myself, watched as I shook bottled water…the bubbles floating in fake carbonation. Weird times, I wanna talk about these horrible times. What constitutes an adjective? A reflection of someone else? Passion, my god, he’s humping his guitar —while I am not. A vehicle jerks off, & you stole its cry, the garage found, like me, a year from now. How must it look to question not what you consume? The refrain, a line from the confessionals. I checked the oven. How the lasagna begged me to talk, yet my ears had fallen off. Still, everything’s true; I heard how your pelvis slammed into string, that swollen Eureka when you realised it wasn’t me, your thumbs inside, moving for sound.

when they bred the pigs, who were they

Aaliyah Anderson

marking up? Their land’s predecessor— earthed grit? Mills upon mills. Say no to purism…if so, how did their fence collapse? God, speak it’s for words between—the half which is too much like the body felt. Skin shifting, folding, flaps, the fatted curls of pork, yes? Lard of colors, blots of life, yes? I’ve abandoned it. With napkin ready, she says are you Muslim? I spit, then tuck her kindness. No, she didn’t mean it as insult, just a seek for confirmation. Like when I was younger, & the farmer-man explained to us how they used pig to wrap themselves up, stopping life, but you’re too young to know what, how that is. Somehow, you understood, nodding with the chaperones, smiling as they scoffed.

Nailed panels are statues to grass. To move for me. I’ve forgotten how to say I went to the store & saw aisles of myself in French, so I get it marked wrong right below the section I responded superb . There are no names for the friends I made up, the life I calculate out of words I knew how to say. Like that stray…Sarah pointed to a hole in the forest before Mr. Harpole’s lawn where all the cats on this block kneaded, loved, fell on their heads, giving way to life. Guinea—an orange cat— born where all the immigrants set up shops, later, homes & bathrooms for themselves. I wished I’d cared less about what her furred

body may have carried, but, yes, I fed her. Shouted stop following us in faith of not backing Sarah’s tires into that infected eye. Rubber gloves to pop out the flees while watching those nails. Caterwauling, Guinea sung like what lives in slop? How they insist putting your nose to it all, the attempt without nerve to smell.

Night Speaks

Brianna Steidle

Wash me down with tonic water or milk —still I catch in your molars. I am juniper berries, dried and jarred, the memory of blue so much harder than blue itself.

A Conversation with Danez Smith

Brett Dunn

Danez Smith is the author of four poetry collections: [insert] boy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez has won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.

Brett Dunn: Many reviews about Bluff write about your approach to some sort of ‘anti-poetics’—it’s a confrontation of things you’ve already written and dealing with the fact that it’s already written. With that said, how has your view of poetry shifted since your first collection?

Danez Smith: I don’t know if it’s necessarily ‘anti’. When I say ‘antipoetics’, it’s not necessarily ‘anti-poetry’ to me. It is about illuminating what poetry can’t do, which I think is a nice reality to have. You know, I do think poetry is super powerful, but I also think the way maybe I’ve talked about it, or other folks have talked about it, I don’t know; I don’t think poetry can change the world. I think poetry is fuel to change the world, though. And if you think about fuel, it’s energy, right? And energy is a very valuable, precious resource, and nothing happens without energy, right? So, you know, there is no movement without energy. I think poetry can be fuel for movements. It could be fuel for living, it could be fuel for a great many things.

I think poetry is also big and strong. I just wanted to test it a little bit and press my finger on it. Bluff is the first book I wrote in my 30s. Which I think maybe is a little bit of a midlife crisis. But it’s also just me

interrogating this thing that I’ve been writing since I was 14. I don’t have the same impulses. I don’t have the same awe with it. I still have awe. I still have impulses, but they’re so different. And I think a lot of it, particularly after not writing for two years, which is not that long, maybe in retrospect, but was the longest I’ve ever gone without writing. I feel like I had to fall back towards language and figure out why—why I still wanted to be a poet. Why poetry, period?

The first part of the book is very: ‘this is what poetry can’t do’. But my hope is that by the time you get to the back half of it, especially like— who doesn’t believe in poetry and writes 140-something pages, you know? [laughs]. My hope is that it’s clear by the end of it that I very much do believe poetry is essential and has a great power in our life, but that poetry alone would not change anything. We can use poetry as but one of many tools to help, to help bring about something better from the bullshit we are all surviving.

BD: My follow up question to that is about moving beyond poetry; what might it mean for poetry to be community, or community to be poetry itself?

DS: Poetry is woven into the fabric of our lives. As much as people like to think poetry is too confusing, or they don’t have the tools to understand it, we still reach for poetry, and it still affects us so much, right? Most people’s wedding vows are just poems that they’re writing to each other—which is beautiful [laughs]. So, it’s already in our communities. A lot of us come from cultures where poetry is abundant, even if it’s not always named. Part of our job as artists is to liberate the minds and possibilities of those who interact with our work, and that, I think, is poetry’s place.

When I say poetry is fuel, I mean somebody should walk away from your poem feeling more anger, feeling more possible, feeling seen, feeling like they want to do something to change the world in the way that the poem changed something inside their interior. In that way, I think as poets we are in community, not only with our audience, but with the future. We have the responsibility—maybe not everybody wants to take that responsibility, but I believe in that responsibility—to really change something. That’s what makes art worth people’s time. You don’t go to art to feel nothing. You go to feel some. So can you make somebody feel like going to do something, and in turn, can they return to the world differently? And how does that engineer little change, after little change,

after little change, so some big change happens?

BD: My friend brought up his love for your ability to capture languages, the informal ones. His example was the language of class. How do different languages—of gender, of class, of race, of geography—build dimensions between your images and your sonics? Which is a very big question, but if you could talk about these languages that are both informal and formal.

DS: I feel very nerdy now [laughs]. For me, one of the most exciting things to do as a writer is to mix registers of language. I think sometimes poets have a tendency to write for other poets. I love when poems sound like poems. They’re great. And sometimes I don’t know what the fuck they’re saying, you know. And there are poets who do not care about clarity. I love those poets. There are poets who are actually trying to aim us towards mystery, trying to aim us towards some type of illusion, or defragmentation of language and image and sense, and I love them. For me even the first places I fell in love with language, I fell in love with language in my grandparents mouths because they’re from fucking Mississippi and, you know, do they speak proper, quote-on-quote English, the Queen’s English, or something like that? Fuck no. But do they make amazing sentences happen? Yes. [laughs].

The first time I understood the power of language was in church and watching my pastor be able to preach and make my mom jump out of her chair and run around the church and faint. What the fuck is that about? You know, sure, that’s about something divine and godly too, but that is about the power of his language to deliver that energy onto us. So by the time I made it to loving poetry, I was already in love with language that felt like home, and that wasn’t interested in being part of the Academy. But, it was invested in being part of the people. So for me, it’s so fun. I think all those languages, every register of language, has its use and its beauty and its peculiarities, and why not develop the tension in switching between those registers, right? I love being able to say something super colloquial next to something super, super poetic and sort of super adorned, or next to something that’s super plain spoken next to something that’s in slang, next to something that’s—like all these different things, right?

I think as a poet, you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you’re not using all the languages you have access to, and all the languages that you can call

from your witnessing and your hearing of other things. So that linguistic play is fun for me. I don’t know if it’s so intentional. When I’m writing, I need to be able to use whatever kind of English feels appropriate in the moment of writing that line, and sometimes that requires me to switch registers. From poem to poem, there might be a different type of impulse, and sometimes, I think writing is also about improvisation. I used to write poems based on ideas, and I still have ideas for poems, but even if I have an idea, I must wait for the right sentence to show. And so much can be prompted by: well, what did that first sound that comes into my head say, and how do I follow that sound into itself? So in that way, I don’t know how my poems are going to end. I’m following word for word, line for line, where does this sound, where does this rhythm or this image want to go next? And all four— sound, rhythm, image and logic—of them are all driving with their hand on the wheel. It’s hard to tell sometimes who is driving at a particular moment, when the decision was made in the poem. But those are sort of forces that are at play.

BD: Beautiful, yeah, I’m trying to think of what else I have for you.

DS: I could talk about being gay—

BD: I mean, yeah. [laughs].

DS: And nonbinary. [laughs].

BD: I mean, if you want to talk about it, talk about it! [laughs].

DS: I feel grateful to poetry for being the space to figure out that shit. I think the first time I ever said I was gay was in a poem. I was like, the word! [laughs]. I’m bisexual! At 16, you know—oh my God, I said it! [laughs].

As my relationship to gender was revealing itself to me, I think the poems were becoming increasingly feminine. The masculine body as a mother was happening a lot, and all this other shit. I think poetry—in terms of sex and sexuality, especially growing up in the Midwest where you’re maybe in community with folks who love you, but not always folks where it’s good to think about yourself out loud with, who can sometimes try to edit you as you’re still trying to figure yourself out—was a great safe space in order to try saying something first, and see if it feels true. I’ve had a lot of epiphanies, not only just in gender and sexuality, but

about myself and the world, in a poem. Because if you’re writing them the right way, they should pull things that surprise you out of you, and sometimes you got to write it down. And it doesn’t need to be true, but sometimes it becomes true. Sometimes it holds a bit of the truth within it. And so I think there was a way in which I’m grateful to poetry because it also gave the space for vulnerability and truth that felt very antithetical to many different identities I was raised in—which is Midwesternness, Black, Southern Baptistness, Christianness in general—are not often spaces or cultures in which the truth [laughs] is always championed. Or particular truths are championed, but maybe not always right. So poetry is definitely a safe space to try language out about how I talked about the world and how I embodied myself when the landscape would not allow for it.

BD: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about—maybe more of a theoretical question—poetry as the body, as the reflection of the body, and also a place for making the body. Specifically, I am thinking about a lot of your pieces talking about boyhood, that boyhood is maybe not something you feel anymore, or has died, or is still with you in ways that are very different. I’m struggling with similar things. And a lot of it resonates and makes me think about reimagining the body through poetry.

DS: You know, I think boyness was definitely really important to me in the first three collections—the first two particularly—because I think boyness lives differently from manness or manliness, and leaves room for possibility and wonder. Maybe that’s because of the youth. Maybe that’s just because even the sound of ‘boy’, sounds like ‘buoy’, sounds like it floats, you know? Where like, ‘man’ is just so weighted down and has so many connotations on it. ‘Boy’ feels more possible, boy feels more springy. So I really liked it. And also, boys grow up to be women sometimes, you know. And when you’re a boy, in that space of youth, you can grow up to whatever you want. You grow to be a fucking bird if you want to when you’re a boy, right? Whereas man feels like a sort of destination, more of a mutable identity, and not so active. So I think that’s why boyness was super important to me.

We usually spend our first book, or two, trying to argue that we exist in the world. And that is valid, especially as people coming from marginalized identities. And [Cameron Awkward-Rich] said this right when I was really starting to dive into Bluff. It really refigured how I was writing. It was like: what happens when your writing gets to move past the argument that you’re alive, that your aliveness matters? You know? I just

identify how I identify and these are things I think, and I don’t necessarily need to trouble certain things for representation anymore. I represent myself, I am in the world. I’m fine. So maybe that’s maturity. Maybe that’s just what happens in time.

But, I hope I’m not done with boyness because I hope to make things that are useful to boys or people that are in boyness, you know? I think even the way I think about nonbinaryness, it’s not a complete dismissal of the masculine or the male, either. It’s the embrace of all of it. Not my language, but I feel harmony and possibility within the Indigenous concept of being Two Spirit. I won’t use that same language for myself, but I do feel a kinship when I hear about it, when I learn about it, when I am with Two Spirit people. Like, yeah, I have this masculine feminine, and divine—maybe a little bit of something extra, too—in me that refuses to be named, and that allows me to live in gender pleasure, more than some type of gender. But, you know, I’ve gone through phases—and I still will—where something inside of me is making the outside need to be more feminine. You need to express that way. But I look like a bro most days, these days. And that’s fine because I know the girl I am, or the ‘them’ I am.

So, yeah, I think that definitely has come with age and also with love. I have a partner who sees me for me, and that lets me relax the need to perform for the rest of the world in certain ways. Because I exist in a home and in a relationship that puts me in a better relationship with myself. The outward performance of gender sometimes feels less at stake for me because I have such a wonderful home space and interiority related to that.

This interview was conducted on October 18, 2024. It was shortened and edited for clarity.

You can read the full interview on themadisonreview.wisc.edu.

Trying Anne Marie Wells

I mouth Please, Lord, please, at my legs in mid-air, face contorted into jig-saw pieces, arm a dead eel across my brow.

His eyes stare at the ceiling like a wrung sponge. His hand, a warm weight on my shoulder, cannot manage a prayer while our friends keep joking: Trying is the best part!

A roll of thunder shakes our little studio, our little hope. He whispers, Is that you, Baby?

—how crying is so close to laughing.

Letter to a Pain that Won’t Leave Christa Fairbrother

Remember, child home was a place where snakes were killed in the street with shovels. We looked away for the final blow turned our hair to the death rattles. To withhold witness is to deny death, yet a stony silence is no defense against a curse. The snakes sank their fangs into my skull, coiled through the cage of my ribs, lengthened into my muscles, I took up the pains of another, a pain of addition. Poets claim we contain multitudes. Like Chad, the blue whale at the San Diego Museum of Natural History. Chad is not a whale skeleton, he’s a pod. Four whales beached and bleached. The radius of his family, a rib from a cousin, a tooth from a relative so distant he doesn’t know their name, but we all chew on where we’ve come from.

Anniversary Kathryn Gilmore

The sun swells today, bleeding gold across the street, patterns of light distilled through the canopy like shards of glass on the pavement.

The dogwood leaves are green enough to taste, bursts of white flowers pearled along the branches. Somewhere above, a warbler cries.

On the grass, a rabbit pauses, stands, then disappears into the brush.

So much living all around, and the dead are closer to me than ever.

I have orbited back to the fracture when time split in two, when you began existing only in memory, buried in my mind’s ravine.

This is the task you left me: to harbor what you left behind, to hold you within the cathedral of my chest, carrying you with me as you once held me pressed to your back, my small arms wrapped around your neck, feeling your every breath

and looking forward, always together. Today, you filter through everything: the funnel of fallen leaves lifting off the ground with the August breeze, the ripple of heat above asphalt like a whisper of sun. I can sing to you and hear your harmonies without having to pretend it isn’t just my own voice echoing back and forth. I promise, again, to memorize this song before you quietly slip back into the unreachable part of me, soft and quick as a final breath.

Frozen Lake Waves

Joe Collins

That which is sapped by the vastness & depth: of space-time, of bender days, of the curlicues and off-ramps of love affairs, like affairs, steamheat, condensation, ice. My old watchdog. I shape what I think you have to say in our overnight dusting of snow. Take me. Slip your beach-blue finger into the orchid of my mouth. Carry me hipside. Finish me off.

Contributors

Aaliyah Anderson (she/her) is a Black and Asian American student at the University of Mary Washington planning to study English (Creative Writing) and American Studies. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Third Coast , Beaver Mag , Brink , and elsewhere. Winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Student Award, Aaliyah currently resides on Monacan and Patawomeck land and is obsessed with burnt cheese and intersectional storytelling.

Alan Wiltgen is a Madison, WI-based artist whose vibrant and emotive paintings bridge the gap between German Expressionism and animated cartoons. Inspired by masters like Max Beckman and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Alan’s work channels bold emotional resonance through playful, character-driven compositions. From his earliest experiences with art, Alan has viewed painting as a deeply personal and healing process. His approach embraces imperfection—spilled paint, wobbly brushstrokes, and unexpected textures all become part of his creative dialogue. For him, painting is not just a craft but a form of therapy, meditation, and self-discovery, where the ego fades and the formless takes shape. Alan’s art has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the Midwest, including shows at the Lakeville Area Arts Center and the AZ Gallery. He is currently a gallery artist at Lanesboro Arts in Lanesboro, MN, where his works have been celebrated for their emotional depth and imaginative energy. View more of Alan’s art at alwilt.com or on Instagram @alwilt.

Alexandria Bailey is a Graphic Designer and multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses heavily on the experiences of BIPOC as they exist on various intersections. She plans to extend her passion into the realm of photography in hopes of connecting it to her background in Graphic design, as yet another conduit for her visual storytelling and visibility for underrepresented identities.

Anne Marie Wells is an award-winning poet, playwright, memoirist, and oral storyteller. She is the author of Survived By (Curious Corvid Publishing, 2023) and Mother, (v) (Cinnamon Press, 2024). She is a freelance copy editor, writing coach, and creative writing instructor. Find out more on her website AnneMarieWellsWriter.com.

Baird Harper is the author of the linked story collection Red Light Run (Scribner). His fiction has also appeared in Playboy Magazine, Glimmer Train Stories, Tin House, Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, The Chicago Tribune, Mid-American Review, Another Chicago Magazine, CutBank, Carve , and elsewhere. His stories have been anthologized in two editions of Best New American Voices, 40 Years of CutBank, New Stories from the Midwest , and have won the Ninth Letter Literary Prize, the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, the Nelson Algren Award, and the James Jones Emerging Writers Contest. He lives in Oak Park, Illinois and teaches fiction at the University of Chicago.

Brianna Steidle is a poet and translator, and holds an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry London , The Missouri Review , Plume , Boulevard , and elsewhere.

Christa Fairbrother , MA, is the current poet laureate of Gulfport, Florida. Her poetry has appeared in Arc Poetry , Pleiades , and Salamander . She’s been a finalist for The Pangea Prize, The Prose Poem Competition, The Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She’s had residencies with the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Bethany Arts Community, and her chapbook, Chronically Walking , was a finalist for the Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize. Water Yoga (Singing Dragon, 2022), her nonfiction book, won medals from the Nautilus Book Awards and the Florida Writers Association. Connect with her at www.christafairbrotherwrites.com.

Danez Smith is the author of four poetry collections: [insert] boy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez has won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.

Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer, from eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho, where he currently teaches First-Year Composition. Daniel is a Poetry reader for Chestnut Review and co-founder and co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal . His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades , Sonora Review , Wild Roof Journal , West Trade Review , Birdcoat Quarterly , Fugue , and elsewhere.

David Sheskin is a self-taught artist who made his first work of art at the age of 40. His initial efforts were pen and ink drawings after which he began to paint in acrylics and subsequently utilized sculpture, mixed media, collage and digital technology to create an extensive body of works. His art has been exhibited in galleries and museums and over 200 of his images have been published in magazines as well as within other formats.

Elina Kumra is a poet and author of Ash and Olive . Available on Amazon. Net proceeds go to Gaza. Buy/Donate/Enjoy

Ethan Altshul is a student at Emory University whose work has appeared in Rabid Oak , I-70 Review , The Round , Broadkill Review , and Evening Street Review . He currently works as the Executive Editor of Sophon Lit . Ethan lives in East Goshen, Pennsylvania, where he is the former Youth Poet Laureate. He likes constructing crosswords and the Washington Nationals.

Halle Wyatt is a Mount Holyoke College student from Vashon Island, Washington. She is graduating in the spring of 2025 with a degree in English. Her previous work can be found in The Mount Holyoke Review .

Joe Collins was born in Illinois and currently lives and works in Chicago. A lifelong Midwesterner, he’s also spent time in Missouri and Wisconsin. By day, he writes about industrial supplies, such as gears and bearings.

Kathryn Gilmore is a poet and MFA candidate at Syracuse University. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Barnstorm Journal , Gulf Stream Magazine , Stylus , The Laughing Medusa , The Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College , and more. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and she is the recipient of various honors for her

writing including BC’s Dever Fellowship.

Kurt Olsson has published two award-winning poetry collections, Burning Down Disneyland (Gunpowder Press) and What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press). His third collection, The Unnumbered Anniversaries , is due out later in 2025 from Fernwood Press. Olsson’s poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry , Southern Review , The New Republic , and The Threepenny Review . Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Luisa Barron is originally from Houston, Texas, but now makes her home in the Upper Peninsula, where she recently graduated with her MFA from Northern Michigan University. Her work has been published in journals such as Untenured , Slippery Elm , and The Meadow , been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop. She is mother of two senior cats, Theo and Frankie, who make life worth living.

Richard Hanus had four kids but now just three. Zen and Love.

Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from rural West Tennessee whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, The Sewanee Review, and The Kenyon Review, among other magazines. He holds an MA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His writing embodies his Black, Southern, over-churched upbringing in order to reimagine and honor his ancestors’ experiences. The Devil Three Times is his debut novel.

Zachary V. Dunn is an artist and musician in Madison, WI.

aaliyah anderson

alan wiltgen

alexandria bailey

anne marie wells

baird harper

brianna steidle

christa fairbrother

daniel lurie

david sheskin

elina kumra

ethan altshul

halle wyatt

joe collins

kathryn gilmore

kurt olsson

luisa barron

richard hanus

zachary v. dunn