Underground Journal | Issue 9.1

UNDERGROUND Art & Literary Journal

Issue 9.1

Georgia State University Atlanta, Georgia

www.undergroundjournal.org

EDITOR IN CHIEF

Grace Aldis

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Rebecca Bates

POETRY EDITORS

Alice Benson Cayce Tiedemann

PROSE EDITORS

Cemberli Grant Zach Salling

ADDITIONAL STAFF

Jimmy Freels Titilope Akinwe

ADVISER

Bryce McNeil

COVER

Brhett Holtzen, Consumed

Underground is the undergraduate literary journal of Georgia State University. Production of the journal is funded by student activity fees. Issues are provided for free to all Georgia State University students, faculty, staff, alumni, and guests.

Underground retains first publication rights for submissions accepted by the journal. It is our understanding that all rights for the pieces in this issue remain with Underground until they are published, at which point all rights revert to the artist or author. Š Underground 2018 Georgia State University

Dear reader, Thank you for opening up this journal! This is my first issue as editor in chief, and I am so proud of the work my staff and I have done to make this happen.

We have spent some time this year thinking about what it means to be “underground.” As we are an undergraduate journal, many of our wonderful contributors have not been published before. We are honored to showcase these students’ work and provide a platform for their voices.

While we appreciate our status as a national journal, we are also very proud of our Atlantan origins. New readers and those far away may not know that we are named partially after Underground Atlanta, the ever-changing enigma of a mall that remains a part of Atlanta’s landscape.

In fact, our logo is modeled after an old gas lamp that still shines in the depths of the city. Our hope is for Underground to be a publication that sheds light on previously unheard voices and provides a way in the dark.

Whether you picked this journal up on campus at Georgia State, had it sent to the West Coast, or found a copy in the Midwest, know that you have a little piece of Atlanta with you.

All best, Grace Aldis Editor in Chief

CONTENTS P OETRY

ALEXANDRA FRANKLIN

DAVID H. XIANG

OLIVIA LEHMAN

Salt

1

ALYSSA R. STRZALKA

How to Catch Fire 3 Tell me a story 50 The Climbing Tree, and Two Old Friends Elegy for the Elegy for the Dead Doing the Thing Pop Quiz 22 ELI MAKOVETSKY

Once Fire I Once Fire II

ALEXANDRA FRANKLIN

SARAH HUERTA

Salt

11

20 21

9

ALLISON JIANG

8

46

Worthy of Love 27 Memories of Desert Storm

46

MIRIAM MOORE-KEISH

Great Blue Heron Brine 76

37

SAMUEL O’SULLIVAN

dead whales, Wikipedia, from an EPOS The Penis Landscape Interlude 44 LEHJA

Sun Kissed

54

38

SHANICE FELIX

Mistakes I’ve Made in Japanese JOSHUA PLACK

Settin’ the Pace O Philadelphia

SHERWIN S. RODRIGUEZ

Madurai

JENNA KAHLEY

65

AUDREY LEE

64

67

77

Dickinson and I aren’t exactly optimists I hear good things about Lyrica 85 How to Climb a Tree 88

79

CAROLINE WIRL

the sicker i get, the closer i get to pressing send

82

MAWI SONNA

portrait of the poet as a goliatch birdwing butterfly

PROSE

KELSEY WINTER

MICHAEL ZENDEJAS

NKOSI ODEKE

ELIZABETH WING

Nana Ingrid

4

Swimming Through the Void

Flames

18

The Baboon Year Stockholm 28 The Antlered God

24 41

12

84

JENELLE RYAN

ARYELLE YOUNG

SHANICE FELIX

JOSHUA DASSA

BENJAMIN LOCK

HUNTER THERRON

Hypochondriac 26

Blood Calls to Sap

Hailey and Will

Beta-Testing

47

52

55

Sarah Tran 61 For a Long Time

81

Puberty before Doomsay

ART

SADIE BURNS

JACKSON MARKOVIC

OLIVIA BARRETT

ANAHI LUEVANO

JACOB PERKINS-MCLINN

Not Today

2

Stance 10 End Extreme Wealth

Mother 17 Surprise 80

Stray

25

Alaskan River Purple 83

36

45

69

OLIVIA KHURI

NINA PALMIERI

LEAH BOOTH

HARRISON WAYNE GALLO

KOBE OPARE

JONATHAN AUSTIN MCDANIEL

ZACHARY DIAZ

WAYNE

Moon Eclipsed 40

Wedding Number Two

49

On a Balcony in New York

New South Old South

Garden Blossom

60

63

68

Splendorous Downpour

75

Barn Ladder, Watsonville, CA

So Far Away

87

86

UN•DER•GROUND /ˈəndərˌɡround/ 1. Existing at a subterranean level 2. A movement or group striving for artistic expression that is alternative in nature 3. Georgia State University’s undergraduate art & literary journal

ALEXANDRA FRANKLIN

Salt

Salt has turned the dog white, buried deep in my skin.

A cracking harried wind plucks, and a road of light cuts across the top of the choppy brown sludge of river.

Travelling from riverboat silhouette to me—shore dark under the eucalypt—I slip back into a wedge of shade.

There will be no recompense, no rescue.

Take a penny—leave a penny—I think, and crawling under the bridge of you, my fingers dragging, I pat my pockets for money.

My escape requires I dig trenches, crawl, hide, and feign death a few times.

I dash across perfect lawns, setting off porch lights.

I jump back fences into fields of peas and sorghum.

I flee. I change my number. I jump and edge into corners.

Downriver I find my pink daughter and scoop her up out of the clay, while the dog tries to lick my crystallised face.

1

SADIE BURNS

Not Today

2

UNDERGROUND

ALYSSA R. STRZALKA

How to Catch Fire 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

I sometimes catch my reflection looking different in the mirror.

My lips don't move as softly.

Honey, eat a sour orange.

Your nails are tinted like a smoker’s from the rind.

I watch you dance over every crack in the sidewalk.

Your mom broke her back when you were three.

Proving that when a vase falls, it splits not shatters.

Your father broke it.

Water, oil, gasoline.

You find words falling from your fireplace.

The opposite of red is pink.

The way sweat beads into a necklace at your collarbone.

You stay at my house because he drinks.

His veins are full of gasoline and igniter fluid.

The opposite of pink is black and blue.

If you dropped a lit match on his head.

We would catch fire.

Water and Gin. I’ve seen you trying to catch your reflection.

And all that happens is the rippling.

Sassafras tea and honey.

Your mom sings while she washes dishes in the burning sink.

She catches you dancing with a broom.

Drink it all in.

The way citrus makes your hands smell like sweet fire.

He finds you.

Smoke out the cicadas and weevils.

How it’s easy to laugh if others are.

Like the steady roar of cackling embers.

Honey, let it burn.

3

KELSEY WINTER

Nana Ingrid Death is always followed by flowers. When my Uncle Lou died, my dad bought his wife flowers. When we put him in the ground, everyone decorated the tombstone with flowers. Eventually, they go back and replace the withered petals with new ones. Flowers die, though. We respond to death by giving people more death. The stem is plucked from the dirt and starts the beginning of the end.

“I think the daisies would be nice.” Annie interrupts my thoughts.

She has a habit of doing that.

“We did daisies last time,” I say.

“Roses?”

“That’s overdone.” I squint my nose.

“Daffodils?”

“Huh, daffodils.” I taste the word on my tongue. “Good idea, Annie.”

The corner of her mouth slides up, and we make our way through the flower shop. My sneakers squeak on the floor, making me wish I would have worn my boots instead. We pass an array of different flowers. Sunflowers, magnolias, carnations, and marigolds.

“Purples and pinks and yellows and greens.” Annie sings in a kid like voice, as she gathers up a few daffodils by the stem. I slide my fingers across the petals of a newly bloomed lily. It’s silk beneath my fingers, and I want to crawl between them. I’d let the petals fall over me, and close my eyes. I wonder if that’s what death feels like. If being buried is uncomfortable, or if it’s similar to a heavy blanket being poured over you.

“I only have enough for three?” Annie butting in once again.

“Three would be lovely.”

The air is warm, and it smells of flower and honey and dirt and decay. But that’s just the tombstones that aren’t being kept up as much.

Annie and I walk shoulder to shoulder. The path has become so natural.

Annie carries the flowers like she’s a bride turning away from who she used to be. Her blue nail polish is chipping off on her thumb. She bites at the skin of her lip, her small rabbit-like teeth peeking out just a tad.

“Are you picking at your nails again?”

“I had a midterm last week.”

“Are you still stressed?” I raise my eyebrows at her. I pluck her thumb from her mouth and hold her hand.

“I talked to your dad.” She doesn’t say anything more. I know she wants to say more, but she ran out of words.

4

UNDERGROUND

“Look, Freddie is finally sprouting some grass,” I say. Freddie was new to the garden of bodies. He died a little over a month ago; he was fifty-four years old. Annie thought he died from something menial, like a stroke or cardiac arrest. I’d like to think he died dramatically. Maybe he cheated on his wife, Natalia, and she shoved him down the stairs. Or his mother, Anya, died and he couldn’t bear life without her wisdom, so he ended his soon after.

I glance at Annie and she flips her eyes away from me.

“Maybe we should bring him something next time.” I chuckle. Freddie doesn’t have anything decorating his tomb. He is nothing but dry dirt surrounded by neighboring American flags and flowers.

“He seems like he liked a good whiskey. I’ll grab some next time we come.”

“That’s perfect, he can sip on it during the Heavenly poker games.”

We share a small laugh. It was very formal. Like we were having a conversation at a business dinner.

We turn left, after Freddie’s grave, and smile at the familiar faces we pass. My hair dangles left to right along my back. Annie’s hair cuts off at her jaw. She hates it, but I think it makes her bone structure look more defined. I nod at my friend’s as we pass. Kandi 2003. Michael 2014. Annabelle 1991. I say hello silently. I used to take time with each one of them, but Annie says that takes too long.

Annie stops first, but I walk all the way up to sweet Ingrid. The stone is carved with delicate letters: Ingrid Silverstein 1912-1995 Beloved mother, nana, and wife “Hi Nana Ingrid.” I smile, and I can feel her smiling down on me. I pull a tooth brush from my back pocket. I scrub the dirt that coats the words. Annie steps forward, removing the withered daisies from the pot, and places in the daffodils.

“We hope you like them, Ingrid.” Annie closes her eyes; a soft sigh escapes her lips.

“Are you praying to Ingrid?”

“You pray to God, not to Ingrid.”

“Ingrid has probably been running that place since she died.”

“Leila.”

“Annie.” Our faces are stubborn, and it’s a duel to see who drops out first. “Just talk to Ingrid. I’ll mind my own business.”

KELSEY WINTER

5

“Do you ever wonder what she was really like?” Annie lays her head on my shoulder, and I stop scrubbing. “What if she was just some grump? What if we wasted all this time for nothing?”

“No, not our Nana Ingrid.” I’ve had the same photo in my mind since we found her tombstone two years ago. We sometimes get weird looks from the cemeteries keeper. Two girls in bright red sweatshirts stand over a tombstone of a forgotten woman.

“She was posh. She probably owned three fur coats, and never left her house without her pearls and leather gloves.”

“She probably had a Russian accent, and her husband adored her.”

I think back to the day Annie and I came here with two freshman boys. Annie and I stole their basketball sweatshirts for a keepsake, and we ditched them when we found Ingrid’s grave site. Now we wear those sweatshirts every month when we visit Ingrid. My back reads Parks, Annie’s reads Williams. We haven’t seen either boy since.We never really understood why we were drawn to her. Maybe because both my grandmas died when I was young, and Annie’s smells like the inside of a pawn shop, and they would be perfect candidates for the show hoarders. I knew I was meant to find her. I knew she was more than a name on a carved rock.

I think about the day when my days come to an end. Everyday time ticks away, for me a little faster. Every month the spot next to Ingrid remains open for the taking. I want Nana Ingrid to be my guide to the other side. If I’m next to her it won’t be hard for her to get to me. She won’t have to walk the cemetery path and get distracted by her chatty neighbors.

“We can’t keep bringing you flowers, Ingrid.” Annie picks at her nail polish. Annie lifts her head and our eyes meet.

“What do you mean?”

“Your mom says I should stop encouraging this.” Her eyes are dark.

I stay silent. I want to grab her arm and pull her away. This is not appropriate in front of Ingrid. Instead of arguing. Instead of explaining it all to her again. I give her a hug.

“Do you think Ingrid fought until the end?” I say.

“I think so,” she says. “But I also think she did what was best for her family.”

“What do you mean?”

“No one wants to see someone they love in so much pain,” she says.

“I bet her last words were fantastic.”

“She probably quoted Shakespeare or Hemingway.”

“Maybe she just told her kids she loved them,” I say.

“That would be just as fantastic.” I grab Annie’s hand and squeeze.

6

UNDERGROUND

Her hair smells of Hazelnut, which matches the roots of her hair.

“I’m going to keep coming back until my end.” I keep my voice just above a whisper.

“I know.” I can feel her looking at me. “Send my love.”

“She already knows.”

“Until next time, sweet Nana Ingrid.” I stand, swipe the dirt off my jeans, and turn away. I pull Annie up, and the two of us take one last stroll through our garden.

KELSEY WINTER

7

DAVID H. XIANG

The Climbing Tree, and Two Old Friends Today our sun dried up the crackling to let me hear all this life beneath me to keep it new I climbed this tree taller than anything tall a branch every arm’s length sanded leaves falling a flat brittle touch that doesn’t itch imagine gripping rusted sea glass gnarled and black brown rooted by an unspoken tempo pooling under spring, the end of things, in our defense there wasn’t a top to the sky, the trunk entranced, branches whispering into a net but I always left footprints this tree and I measured time with growing views of all sounds our letters borrowed twenty years later I returned to colors no longer mine bark painted over, hand carved messages read by the wind now soiled in lonely dust blue and this tree so much shorter so close to another newness a soothing touch, our hands forty-four steel teeth waiting on burial of a premature tale I climb for one last listen briefly it holds on, tempting me, to say what I really meant.

8

UNDERGROUND

OLIVIA LEHMAN

Elegy for the Elegy for the Dead We die— but that’s no big thing just think about that final party the streamers in gold, glitter leaving the hair only after weeks and weeks of showers.

All these breakfasts have filled us these twilight conversations as if light could obscure anything at all I have tried to make this hurt less.

Through moonshine or moments of genuine connection, talking and talking on the subway. I can see myself through the rust on the kitchen knives left alone to dry. Bring out the cookie cutters: the stars, the moon, the snowmen, the floured handprint on the counter there is something to be gained in this slowing. In the domestic wait for the water to boil or speaking with yourself quietly, between the flurry of nights.

On my deathbed I say I want to be a fresh apple and the years fling themselves back to a mountaintop. To legs straddling a tree branch, a golden delicious clenched in my teeth.

9

JACKSON MARKOVIC

Stance

10

UNDERGROUND

ALLISON JIANG

Doing the Thing Two bloated abdomen sit upturned, waiting to skitter across a reflective surface; a matador’s gleaming white thigh, perhaps, or some cracked bowl of Antiquity.

It is not hysteria, per se, nor is it an absence of tragedy that makes them buzz and clang, like a headache behind a right eye, or like someone shutting a drawerful of spoons.

The world outside is humming its also mournful tune: up, away, and onto the next.

I hunt down a Tylenol and wait.

11

MICHAEL ZENDEJAS

Swimming Through the Void “Swimming through the void, we hear the word. We lose ourselves, but we find it all.”

–Serj Tankian You lose it and grab the turkey by its crispy golden thighs, swinging it at Dad’s head. He thrashes his arms/legs around like he’s drowning in his seat and makes dishes on the tabletop clatter and bang. The family’s tight circular formation fragments as they pull you off of him.

Everyone shouts something at once. Their voices harden into a single chaotic sound that floods the room. You’re thrown into a seat at the table’s opposite end, gripped in place by hands from somewhere behind.

He sits in the corner, not making a sound, bleeding.

You scream at him to never bring Mom up again.

“Well, it’s true.” He clutches the laceration above his left eyebrow and repeats the line that started everything to begin with: “What would she think?” All becomes quiet and still amidst the toppled casseroles and shattered bits of crystal decanter spread under fluorescent kitchen lights.

“You can’t even stay off that shit for one dinner. Just one. If she could see you now, what would she think?” You try to blink away what’s left of your high. It’s impossible. Fidgeting. Teeth grinding against teeth. Everything so detailed it hurts.

“Out. Everybody get out.” At first, they stand still and look around as if it’s all a joke, so you scream “OUT!” again and again until their chairs shriek against the floor and they gather their things. Abuelita cries as she exits.

“Crazy junkie!” Dad’s voice slices through all thoughts as he rises to leave. Footsteps and a loud bang echo around you.

Drops of his blood form a trail that leads across the linoleum tiles, out the door. *** While stooped over cleaning, you can almost feel the food roll around in your mouth as handfuls of spilled mashed potatoes are plopped into the trash. A tongue the texture of sand hangs limply in your jaw.

Head meets trash can. Gag. A faint spattering sound. The bile leaves

12

UNDERGROUND

a sharp sour taste. You check your phone and half-expect someone to have at least texted and asked if everything’s alright. The screen’s completely blank.

Another orange capsule from your right front pocket is tossed back like a flake of popcorn.

Shards of crystal glimmer and remind you of how Mom’s hair would shine after she washed it. She’d lift you up and, with closed eyes, you’d bury your face in her hair and grip her shirt. The smell of jasmine shampoo would clasp onto the air even after she’d walk away.

Once it’s all swept up you speed-walk to the living room. The extended-release kicked in a few minutes ago, so it’s the perfect time to dust and reorganize everything.

While using Windex electronic wipes to clean a handful of dust particles from the TV, your reflection stares out at you. Dad’s voice repeats on a loop.

“If she could see you now, what would she think?”

The eyes that hover in the still black of the screen droop with lack of sleep. Tears start to pour from each of them.

“One dinner. Just one.”

You launch a picture frame into the 65” flat-screen. A chair is lifted by the armrests, its legs used to knock out every window.

“Crazy junkie!”

With each punch, each new hole in the wall, it becomes easier to breathe. The voice dies down. A lamp is bashed. Chunks of dusty plaster are ripped from the foundation. You kick down doors and flip couches, tear the house phone from its cord. You don’t even realize you’re still sobbing until a voice from outside (what used to be) the window says, “Sir?” Two cops crouch down. Flashlight beams swoop over the room.

Their bloated pale faces, bent in shock or confusion or both, press against each other like fish in an overcrowded tank.

“Noise complaint,” they say after you step through the busted-out window frame. A small headache starts from thoughts of how long it’ll take before everything looks like it once did.

They ask what your name is, but people who answer that question on reruns of COPS always go to jail. Better keep it zipped.

“Look, if you don’t cooperate, we’re gonna take you in.” This makes you take a step back, which makes them grab you by the pinky and ring fingers, dislocating both, and throw you to the ground. One climbs on your chest and starts the choking while the other holds your feet down.

Even though both eyes bug out, it gets harder to see. A curtain of black starts to lower. You clamp hands onto his and try/fail to pry them MICHAEL ZENDEJAS

13

from your neck. Legs bash and kick out at the other one, but he’s got a steel-grip around the ankles.

“My ankles,” you think.

The bang is heard before anything else. There’s no screams. Just rapid uneven breaths. A deep cold creeps in through the numbness.

“Shit.” The one who was doing the choking re-holsters his weapon and stands up.

No words will come out. They’ve crushed your windpipe. They stand over you and talk to each other, but whatever’s being said is a mystery.

Your heartbeat’s too loud. Everything starts to pulse and feel very far away. The wind gliding through the leaves. The blue and red lights that oscillate back and forth. The house with its ruined, stripped interior. *** At first, you don’t know what’s happening. Your family forms a loose semi-circle behind a ribbon of yellow tape. From up here, only the tops of their heads are visible.

Abuelita’s eyes are snapped shut and a rosary jangles between wrinkly gnarled fingers. News crews shove fish-eye lenses into her face and make her forget a line in the prayer. None take a step back when she swats wildly, blindfolded by tears. It’s Sweeps Week, and they’re willing to go down fighting if necessary. After all, the kind of ratings things like this pull is just insane.

Tio Vincent weeps. Dad just stands there. His cut has stopped bleeding but still has that fresh look to it under the camera flashes. It all crashes in when you see your face being zipped into a black leather sack.

You weep and slowly descend, lost in thoughts of the first birthday without Mom. How Dad overbaked the cake but made up for it by using five containers of icing. No one came to the party, but he just smiled and said “That means you get to eat the whole thing!” But you knew what it really meant. That the boxes of unpacked silverware/lack of picture frames/burnt cake depressed them, reminded them parents are just as small and destructible as the rest of us. You shoved the cake off the table and ran to your room.

More cops have shown up by now. They try to push cameras away, but flashes still pop in the night like supernovas. It reminds you of a Renaissance painting. The large-scale kind that depict wars or plagues.

Dad still just stands there. If it weren’t for the soft rise and fall of his chest, one would think he’s made of basalt. You try to put an arm 14

UNDERGROUND

around him and rest a cheek atop his head, but go right through him, splaying across the rough pavement.

The paramedics strap the black leather sack to a gurney, so you stay put whenever the driver cuts a sharp right. It’s snug, like when Mom would tuck you in after finding you face down in couch cushions while cartoons flared across the TV. But this time there’s no one to caress your cheek, kiss the forehead, maybe read something from one of the thin books on the bedside shelf in a hushed tone. *** Unfamiliar people give speeches. They cry so hard at the podium you wonder if you’ve actually met them and just forgot.

“Maybe I’m the asshole,” you think. Dad’s speech is delivered in cracked, uneven breaths. He seems completely alone up there, except for the gigantic Jesus figurine that hangs over everything. Rivulets of blood are painted around his plastic crown of thorns, but a certain peace rests at the edges of his eyes.

Dad’s stopped speaking. It’s as if all he can do is stand there and grip the speech so it crinkles around the edges. He balls it up and drops it, walks to you, stands over the coffin with his hand on the mahogany veneer.

For a moment, everything turns to sand, and it’s just you and him.

All the times you’d pretend to be busy with something more important become something to regret because now there are no beach days or movie nights or celebratory dinners to warm either of you. There’s only the memory of that day.

When you and Dad were about to go pick up the cake, Mom’s gaze broke from the telenovela she was watching to ask where the two of you were sneaking off to. Especially without her. She’d always wanted a surprise party, and he figured this was the perfect occasion.

“No preocupes,” Dad said with a smile as he shoved you out the door, “ahorita regresamos”.

The cake was a combination of the Mexican and American flags, with “CONGRATULATIONS, CITIZEN!” written in fluffy white cursive. This was the first thing he’d ever let you help plan. To prove yourself, you made sure to balance the cake perfectly and not let any icing touch the plastic lid.

Neither expected to come back and find the whole apartment building up in smoke because a neighbor forgot to turn their stove off.

MICHAEL ZENDEJAS

15

Dad tried to run in but was held back by two cops and a fireman.

You dropped the cake and watched him fall to his knees. The smell of smoke was so thick it coiled in the back of your mouth before collapsing into a bitter taste. He stared up at the flames flick across the building with the same look on his face as right now.

You want to hold him, pat him on the back, anything. This must be how he felt all your life, but you were too busy blaming him to notice.

That was over now.

Dad starts crying at the altar. It’s the first time you’ve ever seen him do so. It’s the first time anyone here has ever seen him do so.

“We all knew it’d happen eventually,” they think, “and now that it finally has, the air seems to have opened up, and a great release surrounds us. Fills us.”

After the last prayer’s finished two white doves are set free. The cage opens and they stand there, hooting and looking at one another with thoughtless eyes. Eventually, the priest gives the cage a little shake and one flies out, then the other, and off they go.

16

UNDERGROUND

OLIVIA BARRETT

Mother

17

NKOSI ODEKE

Flames Earlier that day, we had watched a rated R movie with fiery explosions, bad language, and even more fiery explosions. We were glued to the sofa in front of the TV. But, even for eight-year-old boys, watching explosion after explosion gets redundant.

“Let’s do something, Kwezi. Your dad’s gonna pick you up in two hours,” I said.

Kwezi looked at me, excitement shining through his smile. “I learned how to make a bomb at my cousin’s house.”

I smiled.

All the materials we needed were in my house. We also had a common enemy, the ants that built their home underneath the tree in the front yard. Game on. I grabbed the matchbox. He grabbed the batteries from our remote-control cars. We tore those cars apart even though they were almost brand new. We cut the wires from the cars and tied them to the positive ends of the batteries. Those ants built their anthill under the wrong tree. Two eight-year-old boys preparing for a battle against ants, the perfect weapon on the dirt patch next to the anthill, death was imminent. Cruel and merciless, we were the wrong boys to mess with. I lit the match and handed it to Kwezi. He set the wire on fire and watched it burn.

My hands covered my ears, but I didn’t close my eyes. I think faster with my eyes open. That’s how Kwezi and I were. I was the thinker, and he was the doer. I was always amazed by the things he could create, and he enjoyed turning my ideas into realities. I remember making wooden swords with him after watching Power Rangers. We’d also steal his little sister’s dollhouse and pretend Ken and Barbie were intergalactic warriors. We’d fantasize about the both of us flying through space. He’d be the pilot, of course. There’s something about the fire in the engines that just seemed to belong to him.

The flame died right before the fire hit the battery. We broke another car and tied a new wire onto each of the batteries. He set it on fire, and he sat right next to it lest the wind blow the flame out. That was how he was. He hated failing at anything he did. His eyebrows were scrunched together. He had a look on his face that I had never seen before. The fire seemed fine from where I was standing, but he was dangerously close.

I jerked his arm. He wouldn’t budge. He was hard-headed. So was I. That’s what caused our first and only argument two years before. We settled it by offering each other bananas.

The flame died again. We decided we would try it one last time.

18

UNDERGROUND

Only one matchstick left. We lit a new wire on fire, and Kwezi sat next to the flame. This time the wire burnt much quicker. I pulled his arm before it was too late.

Silence.

We looked at each other. Then we heard a hissing sound from one of the batteries.

Bang!

The battery flew around the yard, and we dropped in fear. We waited on the ground for a few seconds after the sound of the rocket slicing through the air had stopped. As soon as we were on our feet, I searched Kwezi for any injuries. That was how I was. I never told anyone I loved them. I showed it. As I made sure that he was alright, we looked for the battery. We didn’t find it. The anthill stood untouched under the tree. We stood in the yard and we barely said a word. In a few minutes, Kwezi’s dad picked him up.

I sat under the tree next to the anthill. Those ants could’ve died that day. I could’ve died that day. My best friend could’ve died in my yard.

But none of those thoughts crossed my mind at that moment. I knew I would have to leave Kwezi soon. I knew the flame of our friendship might die one day. Uganda was never big enough for the both of us anyway. He didn’t see it that way. He wouldn’t let the flame die.

NKOSI ODEKE

19

ELI MAKOVETSKY

Once Fire I Sometimes we cook dinner together,

we laughing we adding

extra spoonful’s of marjoram to unnamed dishes — lately we don’t eat, too inundated with CNN and talk radio.

We spent time on the edge of Duluth cliffs, taking in lake spit and gazes from an older woman spoiling.

We would collect bullets from the ground, weave neurons, counting littered shells and Rolling Rock caps to fashion a collage, paint the day and flowers into the folds of our hippocampi.

Sometimes we make love in the between spaces,

never under suns or coniferous trees — lately we don’t make anything, too full of echoes hurled at jonquils.

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ELI MAKOVETSKY

Once Fire II She/I striking flint packs ears with vetiver and copper you — the syllables, hum

and limp indent inside cellar walls piercing an unwanted cork She/I ignore.

The bottle showers jagged, chars mouths,

and She/I becoming oxeye fasten down butterflies, while other times forgetting how near fiction is to heat.

21

ALLISON JIANG

Pop Quiz On your way to dinner, the taxi driver keeps twisting around in his seat to look at you. He tells you and your father, who is sitting in the passenger’s seat, how sexy he finds Asian women. “They age so well, too,” he says. Do you feel:

a. the ichor of your ancestors

b. thick and angry in your veins

c. the taxi seat under you a throne hurtling through space and

time

d. none of these things—instead, you turn your head to your

city and drink its dryness, feigning majesty

You and your father get out of the taxi. He thanks the driver and pays with credit. You study his face very closely. Is it:

a. a programmable LED screen b. dignified (unflinching?) in the face of degradation c. none of the above—you know your father very well. He will laugh at the taxi driver later in the restaurant over steaming soup dumplings. His face is completely imperturbable this time, just a little tired, and you remind yourself to ask him about his health. d. all of the above: it is a depthless black hole you can never stop trying to fathom

You recall the time a young boy pointed at your father on the crowded subway and said, “Look! A Chinaman!” to his mother, with the same exuberance you would expect from a tourist who has just spotted dolphins from the deck of a cruise ship. Your father:

a. glances at the boy’s mother, who does not look up from her

book

b. has arranged the corners of his mouth in a way you have

never seen before

c. does not look at you

d. all of the above—you rush onto the platform and rejoin your

father. You are scared to look at his face, but when you do, it

is just his face again.

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That night under the Hudson River there is a traffic jam. Circle all that apply. Do you:

a. b. c. d.

detect your tunnel-yellow reflection in the mirror ask your father about his childhood memories laugh inhale the unintelligible breath of millions, again

ALLISON JIANG

23

ELIZABETH WING

The Baboon Year My senior year of high school I developed a habit of going to the zoo after school to see the baboons. When they rested, I worked on college applications. My parents wanted me to stay in-state. But usually, the baboons were out, clambering around on the rocks and logs. In the fall a pair of twins clung to the belly of one female. By the spring they were spry and alert, dashing through the waterfall or coming to say hello against the glass, where they’d toggle their heads back and forth, leaving greasy handprints on the pane. When they stopped nursing their mother’s teats flattened again, and she went back to looking like the rest.

I only mirrored their behavior once. A girl sitting next to me on the bench got her hair snagged up in an elastic at the nape of her neck. She asked me if I could see the knot. I helped her undo it, taking my time to tease out the snarl. You wouldn’t believe how tangled her hair really was in the understory. It looked so smooth.

The day one of the twins escaped, the zoo authorities saw me loitering by the gate and took me into a small, poster-plastered office where they questioned me. I guess they thought there was something odd about a teenage girl coming there alone so often. Maybe I was some crazed animal-liberationist. The twin was eventually found clinging to a lamppost on Flatbush Avenue and gently coaxed down. I maintain that there is no correlation between this incident and my decision to go across the country for college.

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ANAHI LUEVANO

Stray

25

JENELLE RYAN

Hypochondriac I tend to be tired in the space between my eyes nowadays, as if my brain is slowly creeping down my nasal passages, or perhaps that could just be a side effect of riding the train, fingers touching the hands of every person in Atlanta, germs crawling over every surface, throwing extravagant parties of dirt, dirt weddings, dirt baptisms, dirt-mitzvahs if you will. Perhaps this is how my brain has caught a case of the drips, through a super virus eating away at my meninges, an ailment which is exacerbated by hours of homework and sleepless nights, liquefying my think tank which drip drip drips through my swiss cheese membrane, sliding down my nose and filling up this gap between my eyes. Perhaps I’m being too cerebral, but with my condition drip drip dripping away at my cerebrum, that’s not very likely.

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SARAH HUERTA

Worthy of Love She doesn’t like eating her food hot.

So, when our pasta was done cooking, we went outside for a cigarette while waiting for it to cool down, me with an American Spirit between my chapped lips– “typical liberal arts major,” she whispered, followed by a laugh– her with a cowboy killer between hers.

There were kids splashing in the nearby pool, their parents watching, sipping on warm beer.

When the last breath of smoke left my lips, I made the space between us smaller and smaller until I was pressed against her, my body immediately filled with warmth.

I vocalized my anxieties, the fear of violence for loving who I love, my hand in hers.

“A gay kiss isn’t going to ruin those kids’ lives!”

If that kiss, and the half a dozen following it, shared by two women scandalized anyone under the barely visible moon that cloudy night, I’ll never know.

27

ELIZABETH WING

Stockholm I went to Stockholm with my friends Jen and Jeffery to get cultured, and one week in, Jen thought she’d found love.

The guy was named Ingemar. He had gauged earlobes and brewed mead on the windowsill of his apartment. At night he wooed Jen and during the day he worked at the Biologiska Museet, a rundown museum with elaborate taxidermy dioramas.

Among most friends, the situation would have been like a vase reeling on the edge of a table, but Jen was good with people. She brought Ingemar with us to arthouse movies and fika shops. It only took a few days for us to start thinking of him as one of us.

Friday Ingmar let us into the Biologiska after-hours. Outside, it was only twilight—we never had full darkness on that trip, but inside we needed flashlights. Behind a glass pane, there was a carpet of tundra moss, slender conifer trees with artificial foliage, stuffed snow geese with their necks twineing in some esoteric courtship ritual. I swiped my flashlight up and down till I could make out the painted backdrop of fjords.

Jen shuddered. “Everything looks so real.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I mean, you just think they’ll come to life when you look away.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Yeah. Well. I see what you mean but the realer it looks, the more unreal it seems, somehow...”

“Wait, what?” Jen made shadow puppets in her flashlight beam, casting huge bunnies and peace signs on the painted walls of the diorama.

“Hey look,” she said. “I’m Plato.”

“It’s like, what we're looking at is mostly made of plaster and paintSo, when it looks real, it’s farther from what it really is. By being more like life, it’s less of a diorama. But it obviously isn't life. I mean, that snow goose is dead. That leaf is fake—” “So it’s. It’s not either, then?”

“Um-hm,” I said. “It’s not just plaster and paint, but it’s not real either.”

Ingemar and Jeffrey came up behind us.

“I’m picking up on a kind of dark conversation over here,” said Jeffrey.

“Just philosophical,” said Ingemar.

Jeffery chuckled. He had just finished a course called The Decon28

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structionist Approach to Metaphysics, and he always thought it was funny when people called Hallmark card sayings, stoner theories, and various rantings “philosophy”.

On our way out Ingemar pressed a key into Jen’s hand and told her to meet him in the museet again the next night. Outside, it was 11 p.m. but still light. The moon bobbed in between clouds. Auks and geese and bears and caribou and rabbits were all dead and graying behind glass, but we were alive. Nordic pop streamed from the windows of the building above us, blonde women leaned out balconies, laughing through cigarettes.

Jeffrey went back to the hostel, but Jen and I were too buoyed up by the humid night to sleep. We decided to go to the sauna in the park next to the campgrounds. As Jen undressed, a pebble fell out of her pocket and ricocheted around the room. It rolled near a heating grate and she dove for it, plucked it up in the nick of time. She cradled it in her palm.

“Almost lost yah, hunny,” she said to the pebble. It was a very nice pebble, perfectly round and shiny.

“You’re talking to a rock?”

“You hatin’?”

“No. Sorry. Just curious.”

“Ingemar gave it to me,” she said, straining to sound modest. She unfolded a bit of paper with spidery handwriting. “His grandmother wrote this note. It says, Found this pebble in my garden this morning. It is the best pebble in the world. Please keep it safe until you find someone special.”

“That’s so sweet,” I said. It was dumb, but Jen was happy.

Saturday We went to the Moderna Museet, where I bruised my shin on a Duchamp readymade. I didn’t have a firm position on whether or not it was real art, but it was a real porcelain urinal, and it hurt. After getting chewed out by security, I found Jen and Jeffery talking over a Francis Bacon painting. Figure with Meat.

“You have to love our old man Bacon,” Jeffery was saying. “He is so cathartic.”

“You think everything gross is cathartic,” said Jen. “Actually I do not.”

“Do too.” She laughed. “Remember when you said stabbing Biddy in the stomach would be cathartic?”

It was an old joke of ours. I had been in a bad mood and had said, all relationships end in either death or breakup. And then I’d said, at least breakup is cathartic. Jeffery had said, death is cathartic too, and I’d ELIZABETH WING

29

been like Yeah? So if you stabbed me in the stomach that’d be cathartic? And he’d been like, Totally.

“If Freud was here—” said Jeffery.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m glad he’s not.”

“Me too,” said Jeffery. “But if he was, he would say that all cathartic activity is an allegory for sex, where tension is built up and then released.”

“Or maybe sex is just an allegory for catharsis,” I said.

“Shut up and look at the painting.”

A well-dressed museum guard glanced over at us with the mild disapproval you often see on the faces of haute couture models.

The figure in the painting just stared past us.

We ate big plates of meatballs and lingonberries for dinner, which sounds weird but was actually delicious. Jeffery and I headed back to our hostel and Jen went to Ingmar’s place. Around one in the morning, I woke up to my phone tingling. I swatted it off the nightstand, groped around on the ground, and answered it with a phlegmy, “Hey.” “Biddy?” It was Jen. “Oops. Did I wake you up?”

You hear your friend’s voice on the phone, sounding fragile and sweet, and they apologize for disturbing you and then you listen to their 45-minute story about why they’re sad. It happens a lot, especially during the summer and especially when you’re the single friend.

“It’s Ingemar,” she said. “It’s really bad and I’m just so mad right now. Like, I don’t even think I can talk to him.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. What is it?”

“Oh my god. What is it? So he was asleep, and I went to check my phone where I’d left it in the living room, and he had all the blinds down and the lights off and stuff, so it was dark and I ended up opening this closet. And inside there was this duffel bag. I kicked it and stubbed my toe, and I was like why is this shit so heavy? So I looked inside.

And it was full of pebbles. Like, round pebbles. Like the one he’d given me. And then I looked in the side pocket and it was full of little notes, all exactly like my note. He must have had fifty of them.”

“So he’s like—He’s some kind of pickup artist?”

“I mean, he must be. No one else—” “That’s fucked up.”

“I know. It’s, like, totally fucked up.”

“Where are you right now?”

“I’m outside his building.”

“Are you okay?”

She let out a short, exasperated laugh. “Not really.”

“Do you want me to come over?”

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“Yeah. That’d be good.”

I found her sitting on the curb in her fake silk pajamas. We hugged, then walked down the broad streets. She was a mess, cursing at passing cars and kicking trash cans. We reached the canal, and she threw the note and the pebble into the water. She dug through her pocket and found the museet key, swung her arm overhand.

“Wait.” I caught her hand mid-swing.

“What?”

“Don’t.”

“Why not? Why would I want—” I made a vague gripping gesture. “We could. We could, like, go back to the Museet. You and me. Just for kicks.”

I could tell that she wanted to argue, but she liked the idea. We walked in the direction of the museet. “So we’ll go in the back and—” she glanced over at me. There was something in her eyes pursed firmly between mischief and malice.

“And look around,” I said.

“Just, like, look.”

“Yeah. That’s right. Just look.”

Jen speed walked the rest of the way. We let ourselves in and switched our phones into flashlight mode.

Behind the glass, the animals were in the same positions as before.

I don’t know why that felt like betrayal. The reindeer lay curled on a bed of moss, the fox pups tousled above the den, the mother peeking out glass-eyed with her tongue curling from her narrow mouth. The snow geese spread their wings for takeoff. We tiptoed through the exhibits, then into a backroom where we found a long wooden workbench. It was some kind of maintenance shop. There were what looked like supplies for cleaning and repairing taxidermy: brushes and combs and neatly labeled bottles of soap. On the beach sat two squirrels, a pigeon, and one very strange creature.

At first I thought it was a fat partridge. But running my flashlight over its shape, it turned out to be a rabbit with the wings and tail of a pheasant. I picked it up and examined it. It was old, heavy, beautifully crafted. The seams were sewn deep and tight so the pheasant's dappled wings fused neatly into the fur. I cradled it and felt an urge to babytalk it.

I’m serious. It was Jen’s idea, not mine, to steal it. She was giddily angry and I was sleep-addled and it just seemed like an idea, not a good idea, but an authentic one.

We stuffed it in her backpack and skedaddled.

“Ok?” I said when we were out on the street again.

ELIZABETH WING

31

“Ok.” We passed by a statue of a general on horseback, and she yelled at it, scattering the pigeons.

“Still mad?”

“Yeah. I am. I think I’m going to be mad for awhile.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I said that a lot, it was a reflex, like blinking. “At least—at least we had the last word.”

“You didn’t get pebbled,” she said, and yelled at the pigeons again.

A street sweeper looked up from his work, wondering what the crazy Americans were upset about.

Back in the hostel we stashed the backpack under the bunks and went to bed.

“That felt good,” I said, staring at the ceiling.

“Really good,” Jen said from the bunk underneath. “I wonder who’ll find that it’s missing.” She stopped. “Ingemar will be the only one who will have any idea of who might have taken it. And it’ll be, like, he knows but he can’t tell his boss, I gave this chick the backdoor key and then I screwed with her, and I think she stole the rabbit thing. It’s just between the two of us, you know? Well, the three of us.” The bunk creaked as she turned over. “Goodnight, Biddy.”

“Goodnight.”

Sunday I woke up first, and took the Skvader out of the backpack. It was very early. I sat in the common room and stared into its glass eyes.

“Hey,” I said. “Sorry we took you like that.”

Jen was jubilant over coffee and cardamom buns but ended up sulking around the hostel reading Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl.

Jeffery wanted to go see this house where some movie director had lived, so we took a long bus crusade to the suburbs and stood in front of a victorian. Jeffery took a few photos. I filled him in on the pebble situation. I would have told him about the burglary, but he didn’t seem very interested. He’d always been more into ideas than people, a trait I admired.

Monday Jen found it in the papers. Roughly translated, the headline read: “Local Folk Art Icon goes Missing, Search Ensues.” I was in the common area, curled up with a copy of National Geographic, and she came in and slid it over the coffee table towards me.

“Okay,” I said, trying to stay calm. “We’ve had our joke, now let’s give it back.”

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Jen bit her lip. “You really think we can do that?”

We waited til the museet closed, then wrapped the Skvader in a towel and climbed the steps to the back door. A short man with tufty nose hairs and coffee-smelling breath popped his head out the window.

“Hej!” he said.

“Hi?” said Jen. He slid into English. “What do you guys want?”

“Um—” She hugged the towel-wrapped Skvader and wiggled her shoulders in an “I’m innocent!” dance. “Are you open?”

“No.” He side-eyed us.

“Have a—Have a nice night, then.”

The mission had failed. We told Jeffery everything when we got back. I included the part that I had taken the Skvader out into the common area earlier, and some people might have seen me. Jeffery paced back and forth in the kitchen and ripped the article into thin, even shreds.

“Let’s calm down,” I said. “These are socialists. If we get caught, we’re not going to a labor camp or anything.”

“Biddy,” he said, “Jen and I are international relations majors.

We care. This is a high-public interest deal. We do not want our hundred-thousand dollar degrees to be useless because of some senseless and juvenile prank.”

I was always joking about things that didn’t affect me.

“Did you see if the paper said anything about suspects?” I asked.

He rummaged through the shreds, found the word Amerikaner, and proceeded to flip his shit.

We made a strategic decision to check out of our hostel and head to Copenhagen a few days earlier than planned. It was not what you could call a well-calculated decision, though. When we arrived at the train station, bags slung over shoulders and Skvader wrapped in a towel in Jen’s arms, we learned that the last train had left for the night. We bought some weak grocery store beer and wandered around for a while, pretending to have fun. By eleven o’clock we were exhausted, so we went down to the campgrounds by the sauna. We had sleeping bags but no pads or tents, and the ground was wet. After an hour of squelching around in the dirt, Jen declared that she’d rather die of sleep deprivation than trench foot, so she squirmed out of her sleeping bag and wandered around the park. I lay watching her with half-open eyes in the twilight, one hand patting the Skvader in its towel.

She returned excited. The sauna door had been left open, she said, and if we were careful we could go inside to sleep. I was down. Jeffery was too tired to argue. At first, we tried sleeping in the locker rooms, ELIZABETH WING

33

but the ground was damp from the showers, so we decided to sleep inside the sauna itself, which had been turned off for the night.

“Guys,” Jen said quietly. “I really screwed us over.”

It was cozy. The three of us curled in our sleeping bags, the Skvader perched on our pile of backpacks like a quiet pet. Hunny, I made it whisper. How’d you end up like this, Hunny? My head was pressed up against Jen’s belly, and I synced my breathing with hers.

“That’s the thing,” I said. “I think people kind of want to be screwed over.”

Jen exhaled slowly. “Like with the pebbles? I didn’t want that. Seriously. I didn’t ask—” “You didn’t ask,” said Jeffery as he rolled over. “But Biddy has a legitimate point. I used to work in this summer camp. In the sandbox the kids always built stuff where they knew people would walk through.

It was like they were daring each other to come and fuck things up...”

“Not just kids,” I said. “Think about it. People who are in love tell each other all these secrets. Then they let each other borrow their softest, oldest clothes. Isn’t that just asking for it? If you tell someone your deepest fear and then you let them wear your favorite sweatpants, that’s basically saying, Come at me, Bro!” Jen pulled away from me slightly, leaving my head on the ground.

“You think people ask to be hurt?” she said. “That’s just called- Oh my god. What’s the word?” She curled tighter and mouthed different syllables. “Velo—vul. I’ve got it,” she said, softly. “That’s called vulnerability.”

Jeffery and I made eye contact over Jen’s head. He shook his head ever so slightly, and I nodded. We wouldn’t admit that she was right.

I had a dream that Marcel Duchamp was beating on my skull with a snow shovel. I had a dream where I was eating avocados off a tree in Ingemar apartment, where the meat from the painting I’d seen earlier talked to me and it said Shut up and look Shut up and look Shut up and look. I had a dream where Interpol trapped me in the attic of the house Jeffery had wanted to see; they sat in the kitchen below me and began to cook meatballs and cardamom buns and salmon quiche and pancakes and shrimp on toast. The heat rose up through the floors to where I huddled among boxes of yellowing photographs, I began to pace and it got hotter and hotter but I could not possibly come down.

The dream broke but the heat didn’t. I was twisted in a wet sleeping bag, body sore from rolling around the hardwood floor. My legs were glued together by sweat. It was morning, thin sun flooded the skylight, and the sauna had been turned on for the day.

Jen and Jeffery tossed in their sleeping bags, tormented by the heat 34

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but not quite awake. I unzipped myself and crawled out, choking on gulps of dry air.

“Wake up.” I shook them both. “Wake up. Come on. I’m dying in here.”

Jen swatted at my face. Then she scrambled out and tried to smear the sweat off her reddened face. “We’re getting the hell out of here,” she said. We wrestled Jeffery from his sack and ran, slamming the door behind us. Leaving our bags and our things and our Skvader, we ran out onto the porch, down the slippery path to the lake, where we dived in.

At first dip the water was nothing but a respite from the heat. Then, as I plunged in completely, it was bitterly painful. My chest clenched up, and shivers racked my body. The immense relief and the terrible cold collided, bubbling up into euphoria. I let out a whoop, and a flotilla of white ducks scattered across the water. Jeffery bobbed up beside me, then Jen, who shot to the surface like a rocket flinging water from her hair. We laughed. We were breathless and none of us had anything clever to say.

ELIZABETH WING

35

JACOB PERKINS-MCLINN

Alaskan River

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MIRIAM MOORE-KEISH

Great Blue Heron We always kept our eyes pulled by hairs, feather lengths above the water because that is where my grandfather said the great blue heron sweeps.

Careful or you might mistake him for his reflection, smooth as the water before hurricane season, a twin or wife he whispers to when he is close enough but drips into silence when he lands on the old oaks by rhododendron and huckleberry bushes.

We would look for the heron, point wet lake fingers, pruned throughout the family reunions, hidden from grandmothers and great-aunts, watch the heron until its reflections disappeared from the water around us, bubbling and churning.

The heron twin must have had a hard time keeping his course.

My great aunt said she wanted to come back as a great blue heron so now we squint extra hard, hairs in our pupils pulled taut to shore. When we go back my mother watches the herons like she knows something secret and we all give the lake one last scan before we drive away.

There are no Appalachian pinky toes outside my house, cradling the earth, holding it until sleep, all I see is sky reflected in puddles from rare yesterday rain.

Now all I have is the great blue.

37

SAMUEL O’SULLIVAN

dead whales, Wikipedia, from an EPOS (The Ship) Nobody cares what you know, really there’s no plot for your--Library knowledge Its all now elite, now that they can look up from their pocketsand read the chapter, some critics’ ideas co-vetereaequālium, all about Odontoceti don’t talk to me with smoke coming out of your mouth--It’s pulp to me and i’ve got the papers, if your acts are not yet done and stapled,

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(The Whale)

published posthumously and gathering dust, “i mean i guess, i know, mostly just blowing out spit and carbon oxides out with self-serving social unremarkables I am able to blow out carbon dioxide and suck in dioxygen Though, still, i wouldn’t know if that’s helping or bad ‘because it still says in black that it’s still debated’ What are we to do, i want to--Bebecause of just the discourse even, you’ll be opening to the truth about flukes What I know, it doesn’t matter ok but what you hear is confusing the conversation

SAMUEL O’SULLIVAN

39

OLIVIA KHURI

Moon Eclipsed

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ELIZABETH WING

The Antlered God On the night of your high school graduation, you encountered a God Whose Name You Do Not Know. Samantha was throwing a party; you had wandered outside for some air. The upstairs windows of the house were yellow squares, and silhouetted in them you could see Jen Motter and Leo Palk tangling together in the guest bedroom. Even though it was July, the ocean draft chilled you; you pulled your graduation robe around your shoulders for warmth.

A dry creek bed wound around the edge of the property. The God Whose Name You Do Not Know approached you there with sinewy, outstretched arms. Female, but with moss-covered antlers. Her eyes had no whites. You stumbled back—not in disbelief, but in crushing apathy towards the divine. As she moved closer you found yourself backed up against a boulder. She reached out again and removed your brand-new class ring. In its place, she put a simple twist of copper on your index finger.

Later that summer Samantha lost her class ring and enlisted you to help find it. Sometime in the process, she asked you about yours. You said you lost it. She pressed and you said you thought you lost it, you couldn’t be sure, you hadn’t seen it in a while. Samantha insisted that you look for it together, and you thought of the copper ring, slipped in an envelope and tucked beside your diploma.

After graduation you went to college in Ohio for a while, but ended up dropping out. You had been fussing over binder paper and calculators and red correction pens since you were five years old and you were sick of it so you hid out in the backwoods of Vermont for a year, working on a maple farm.

When you got Facebook you realized what a loser you were compared to Samantha and Leo and Jen and everyone from high school.

This propelled you to get a certification as an ultrasound technician, and you went to work in a clinic for pregnant women. The pay was enough to live comfortably, and for a medical environment the climate was warm and happy. One night, driving home in the rain, you almost hit a deer. As you swerved onto the shoulder you noticed that the gait was wrong, and the eyes did not glow. That night you drove in aimless loops for hours to make sure she wouldn’t follow you home. When you finally got home you realized you might have hit her, and drove back to the spot with a flashlight and a first aid kit, poked around the bushes, found nothing.

41

With the job secured, you decided to stay in Vermont and buy a modest ranch house outside of Bellow Falls. A nice stretch of property with a stand of birch trees and an old well. Making friends so far out in the country was hard. For a while, you had a cat named Nutmeg. When Nutmeg was ripped apart by wolves you decided to get a boyfriend, and after a series of guys named Matt or Christopher who played the bass and smoked weed, you found Jake.

The God Whose Name You Did Not Know was there in the crowd at your wedding. She didn’t come into the church—that was another God’s ground—but when you were on the dancefloor, waltzing with Jake you caught a glimpse of her leaning against the bar. Perhaps she held a shot of bourbon, the gold of it reflecting in her sea-black eyes. The lace of your bodice prickled your breasts. Your husband mistook your sharp inhalation for an intimate swoon; he nuzzled your ear. An aunt snapped a picture with her disposable camera. Later, she’d sharpie in a caption: Jake and Lena’s first dance, plaster the page with stickers of doves and roses. The picture would be blurry and underlit enough that your expression would look okay. Just a little silly, maybe. A little drunk.

A few months later you accidentally got pregnant. You were twenty-three, married, employed. It seemed like the timing was okay. When you emerged from the bathroom holding the pee stick with the two lines, Jake came at you with a bear hug. All day at the clinic women came in glowing and rubbing their bellies, and you were happy for them, but you did not want to be one of them. Motherhood yawed like a void, like a well, like the mouth of a monstrous worm. That night when he was asleep, you took the copper envelope with the ring and went outside barefoot. It was October. You walked up the hill to the old well.

Wind creaked through the silvery birches. At the well you pushed aside the cover and shook the copper ring out of its envelope into your palm.

Slowly, you raised the ring over your head, dropped it into the well, and waited. When the God Whose Name You Do Not Know arrived, she hovered above the ground on the other side of the well. Her head was lowered, peering past the stone lip, into the water and the dark.

“Take it from me,” you said.

She raised her head, eyes and unblinking.

“Please.” You could see your breath in the air. The God Whose Name You Did Not Know stayed still.

“Fine then. Do it to punish me. I threw away your present. Do it because I’m ungrateful.” The wind lifted the moss that hung from her antlers. “Or it can be a gift to you. Take it like it’s an offering.”

She blinked once, then crouched and dropped down into the well.

There was no sound of her hitting the bottom.

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A week later, you had a heavy period and bled it all out. Jake brought home Ben & Jerry’s, and you cuddled on the sofa. He thought you were being brave when you said, It’s okay. It was an understandable mistake: your voice always sounds brave when you’re relieved.

ELIZABETH WING

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SAMUEL O’SULLIVAN

The Penis Landscape Interlude She is a water bladder bloated and sobbing as she folds The Stars and Stripes into a wedge, the embroidered Subsisting Six stars to cry at later. * with her back to the wall that hangs his OG Frankenchrist poster still. She would oblige him to take it down whenever Nana requisitioned his room, because Irish-Catholic-Nanas should not have to count— 10 X inserted-penis-heads, one Apostle’s Creed, 10 X partially-filledvaginas, one Our Father, 1 condom, three Hail Marys, 1 Glory Be— to then repeat one O.F., ten H.M.s, and one G.B. for each of Jello’s Extragenital Mysteries. * Tell her, if she’s still refused to eat a solid foodstuff then I’ll call her Puddles, like the clown— affecting Vaudeville, leaving out Elvis Presley and Apollo Creed, and lapsing on her vague knowledge of statutes regarding ademption, abatement, and cy-près— (the rest is sing-songy) fast, fast the wheels on the bus go round blocked by something else

not there

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JACKSON MARKOVIC

End Extreme Wealth

45

SARAH HUERTA

Memories of Desert Storm I am writing at the coffee shop on 4th and Slide, at the table against the window, watching the West Texas wind assault the trees, rip through the dead and still dying grass.

I buy a bagel and a latte and tip the barista who shared my name, dropping the crumbled bills from the bottom of my bag– but I think the bagel was only out of habit.

I saw a new therapist yesterday so I could stop thinking about you without having to stop thinking.

But at the coffee shop on 4th and Slide, all that I write about is how they carted you off to Kuwait, a country devoid of permanent rivers, how you spent several moons and a birthday or two in a hole in the ground without much more than a bottle of tabasco and a picture of my mom.

You never talked about it– I didn’t even know details of that war until taking AP history, until I found that word document from when you thought you’d become a writer.

At the coffee shop on 4th and Slide, my back is to a man.

He tells of how he loves his daughter.

He will never know me, and I will know him as well as I know you.

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ARYELLE YOUNG

Blood Calls to Sap So the boys (you knew they were young men but they had seen so little, experienced even less, and you could not make yourself think differently of them) did the proper thing and took the duel out-side, even waited politely for an official to come and observe the killing. They stood rigid as the nearby willow your little sister stood beneath before they paced apart with a careful count. Then the whirl, the rising metal, the smoky pops, and the blood. The blood trickling over and into the willow roots was the real cause of it all, you came to realize later.

The responsibility of a newborn dryad was unexpected, but you did not need to worry. When Mr. James (absurdly guilty over what happened for a man of his kind) insisted upon giving you a month’s paid leave to grieve, you found that you had more than enough time on your hands. And you had been practicing nurturing for so long, helping the dryad felt as natural as brushing your sister’s hair used to feel.

You went to the tree often, with an oil lamp at night and flowers in the morning. Traced the ridged roots with your fingertips and imagined them to be the calloused hands of your unknown father. Laid in the dusky shade and let the fronds brush your face as you hoped your mother’s hair did when you were a babe. Recognizing the pieces of yourself, the familiar way the branches leaned into your touch (like your sister did in a hug), the glistening green of the sun-soaked leaves (the same way her eyes flashed in laughter), was the first step to drawing the dryad out.

You whispered to the willow on these little outings which stretched into hours. You need not have worried what any onlookers might think.

Those who noticed believed you spoke to a memory, but most never got that far, forced their eyes to pass over you so that they could ignore the truth of loss. They pretended they were immune and you did not exist.

This was fine. It was also fine for you to tell the tree tales, but it was even better when you sang. Funny verses you heard from the stable hands or tragic ballads from the heartsick boys who thought they knew what love was acceptable. But best were the lullabies, the quiet and simple tunes you used to sing in the orphanage on the nights when your sister was so cold her tremors kept her (and you) awake. These sweet little songs helped the dryad know that you were a friend.

You had not thought about dryads since you heard Mr. James reading a story to his children, one about a girl who was chased by a covetous man and how she cried out for salvation. She was turned into a tree, and

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the man was left grasping at leaves. The stories never talk about after, how the girl felt being clothed in bark and rooted in place.

You did not need to doubt yourself. The flitting shadow was not a raven flying overhead or the lamplight playing tricks on you. The willow bark was warm to your touch and only yours. That contented sigh (so like your sister’s when she snuggled close in bed) was not the breeze in the branches. The giggles when your petticoat snagged on a bramble and ripped were not from a clever and well-timed mockingbird. You were grief-stricken, but you were not mad.

The dryad was skittish and frightened. Born of violence, as you thought all dryads must be, at first it melted into the bark at your approach. But you were patient. You tried not to whirl around at the movement in the corner of your eye. You were still and calm and gave it time. It was drawn to you naturally. Blood called to sap. When you sensed that presence behind you, you relaxed and smiled. It needed your guidance then, just as you needed to be needed.

You were not careful, though. You did not remember that the likenesses you saw were half-grown at best. Names mean nothing to trees, and your insistence on calling the dryad by your sister’s name confused and angered it. It would not let you fill your loss with itself. It did not want your love, but your devotion. It needed to hear the story of its birth so that it could understand the taste of lead and the bone-splintered pain that was its first memory. It needed to hear it again and again. You taught it what alone means, a lesson you learned all too well. Taught it that there were no midnight revels anymore, no midsummer festivals. It was born out of season, born too late from a death wrought too early. It was angry, and it raged like a storm. You cowered from the lashes and splinters. After it calmed, it knew it had only you. Just as you had only it.

Your grief and its sorrow intertwined with each other, until one was indistinguishable from the other. Your month passed, and others came to pluck you away from the willow. When the separation became too much to bear, you ran to it.

The bark opened to welcome you, embraced you tightly. The roots wrapped and bound your legs, the leaves shielded and covered you.

Your struggles were too late. Your cry of fear was unheard. The dryad needed you. It could not let you go.

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NINA PALMIERI

Wedding Number Two

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ALYSSA R. STRZALKA

Tell me a story.

In the myth of my life

I awake in a cave my hands Tell me a story so I know

What earth I stepped out

full of chalk of

What makes my mother’s eyes

a river of steel

What makes her put her own life and others on opposite sides of a scale And What makes my father work until his fingers bleed for us

What makes his eyes twinkle when he sees the word family So

Tell me a story of when you were young Momma Maybe the one about growing sunflowers by the drive way Or

Watching your grandpa lovingly pipe whip cream

on a key lime pie Tell me about aloe plants and using glass tables to cheat in

card games

hidden chocolate in couch cushions and

cockroach filled apartments

Now

Tell me a story of how you grew up Daddy Maybe the one about how you got your scarf

stuck in the snow blower Or

How you beat a vase of flowers with a tennis racket

thinking it was an intruder Tell me about diet coke and neighbor’s broken fish tanks

cinnamon chocolate chip pancakes and

early morning trail rides

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Tell me the story of how you met

About the embarrassing car ride to the movies for your first date About teeth stuck in earlobes after soccer games About heart ache

About well timed

About rose petal Tell me a story so

I know

grocery

scavenger where

runs

hunts I

come

from.

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SHANICE FELIX

Hailey and Will Hailey bites her nails raw. I wonder if she notices. I wonder if she cares.

It has to hurt. At least, it must’ve hurt at some point. Now? I’m not too sure. She does it like it’s second nature, eating herself. Her fingertips have to be numb from all that crushing, and kneading, and gnawing.

Mine hurt just by looking at her. A person can only break something so many times before it gives.

Or maybe they can’t.

Will runs back to his mother again and again, no matter how many times she disappears.

She asks him, “Can I borrow a lighter?”

“Can I borrow $20?”

“Can I borrow your car?”

After that, he never sees her again. She just takes off—taking and taking and taking. You should hear the way Will talks now to his girlfriend, Hailey.

“Give me a lighter.”

“Give me $20.”

“Give me your car.”

Hailey gives and gives and gives. She’s used to expending parts of herself for pointless things. Lost causes. Bad habits.

The only difference between Will and his mom is he comes back— just not all of him. I think he loses parts of himself somewhere behind the wheel. You can tell by the way he stares off into space just like Hailey’s dad, looking over the town line like it’s the promised land, but never actually crossing it. I wonder if that’s how she knew Will was the one.

A man who’s not really going anywhere.

A man who’s not really doing anything.

Boy, doesn’t that sound familiar?

The two of them sit on Hailey’s porch the way you’d imagine old people wasting away at the end of their lives. I guess, in a way, they are. They stopped living a while ago. They just loop around the same day, holding each other as if that could make it stop.

They’re so starved for human interaction. They forget that, okay, you eat each other alive, and you eat yourselves alive, and then what? They don’t have an answer.

They only think in the now, because they’re just ideas of the past.

Debris floating around from two broken homes.

Will tries to change.

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He tries to pass the town line. He tries to be greater than the non-existent shoes his non-existent parents left him. He wants to make a name for himself, but if you saw him on the street, you’d think he was a ghost. He’s reaching, but he’s reaching for nothing. Nothing’s there, except Hailey. He paces the edge of her porch just like a caged animal.

I think he’ll cross the edge of that splintered wood someday and never look back.

Someday never comes.

I think Hailey’ll stop biting her nails someday.

Someday never comes.

Instead, one afternoon, Will puts his hand over Hailey’s fingers to stop her from biting. On one hand, it works. She realizes there’s nothing left of her to bite. But on the other, she eyes Will’s fingers a little too closely.

SHANICE FELIX

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LEHJA

Sun Kissed he shields his face with his brown hands I don’t want to get dark he says when it was clear the sun had made love to me when it had just kissed him he fears the sun as if looking a little more caramel instead of honey would make this country love him just a little bit less as if this country loves him at all he hides from the sun as if this country has been faithful to his brown skin as if this country hasn’t left him forgetting all the times his skin was dripping in shades of black and brown and his country asked him to leave

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UNDERGROUND

JOSHUA DASSA

Beta-Testing My eyes open. They’re supposed to be shut, according to Oprah and Deepak Chopra, whose whispering voices insist through my parked car’s speakers, that I continue to “make every moment matter.” This is day two of their free, app-based twenty-one-day meditation program.

I try shutting my eyes again but this enormous metallic structure is glaring at me through my windshield. The word ‘Viacom’ stretches across the width of the entire building in sterile white lettering. I think I need to know what Rupert Murdoch’s hands feel like. They might wrap around my throat until my eyelids flutter. No, they probably won’t.

They’d clutch a weighted fork and stab a marbled piece of red meat— piercing the sizzling fat globules nestled between slabs of medium-rare flesh. Is this meditating? Oprah reminds me that it is in fact, time to begin my day.

I step from my car, spilling scalding coffee on to the even hotter pavement of the parking lot. There is something retributive about watching the fruits of a laborious fifteen-minute Aeropress process evaporate at my feet. A few dead ants float by my toes, disappearing under my car via the newly formed lazy river of fallen coffee. Did they burn to death, or were they crushed by my tires when I parked? I don’t want to think about the atrocities my tires have inflicted on the insect community.

This is also day two of my summer internship with an ad agency called Deutsch Los Angeles (this is no coincidence, meditation in “this industry” is “a must”). They are most proud of their agency tagline: “We’re Deutsch. Not Germany Or The Bank.” This pride seems unfounded as it’s simply a clarification necessitated by the ambiguity of the company’s name. I wade through rows of newly leased and purchased Volkswagens (VW is one of Deutsch’s largest accounts, along with Pizza Hut/Taco Bell, Target, and Dr Pepper/Seven Up) and enter the office through a set of ceiling-high glass doors that open directly into a communal kitchen-bar-recreation room.

The kitchen counter-top boasts three forgettable beers on tap that rotate on a bi-weekly basis, usually accompanied by three or four equally forgettable doughy bodies that hover around said taps, burping sentiments like, “Where else could you do this at 8 a.m. on a workday!?” Today, however, I stare at a ruddy-cheeked man in his mid-thirties fumbling with one of the six Nespresso machines wedged between two leftover vats of rosé (from the Bastille Day party) at the opposite

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end of the counter. He is the sort of man who wears Oakley Frogskins™ pushed towards his hairline, and often catches his reflection in the glass of Proactive vending machines. He is also utterly inept at making coffee, despite having access to six different iterations of modern technology’s most streamlined, convenience-oriented coffee-maker. I want to grip the back of his head and smash his teeth against the glossed cement counter-top but again, it is only my second day here. Instead, I smile and say, “HTC,” when he notices my stare and asks which account I’m working on.

HTC, or, High Tech Computer Corporation, is a Taiwanese-based consumer electronics company that is both an industry and agency failure. I have been assigned to their account management team—a group tasked with mediating client-agency relations. In practice, this means quelling a non-iPhone-manufacturing cell phone company’s Apple-inferiority complex. At lunch my first day, three of the six account management supervisors informed me through apologetic, Caesar salad-stained grins that they would likely be leaving the team before the summer’s end.

Today, I have a 9:15 a.m. meeting in one of the “nests”—20 x 20 drywall cocoons suspended by industrial-grade cables from the office ceiling, covered in woven bamboo and dried twigs. Inside, are twenty-person conference tables, rolling leather chairs, and conference-calling devices that emit a soft blue light when a call is “live” (this light is essential as it warns us when to cease the complaints and shit-talk that ensue prior to client contact). According to Pete Favat, the Chief Creative Officer for Deutsch in North America, the space is meant to foster a spirit of creativity that might not be inherent or intuitive to employees working in non-creative departments. In case this metaphor is not already apparent and heavy-handed enough, Monica Finch, the HTC account’s financial officer, reminds us to “lay eggs” upon entering the nest. I sit next to Sara, another intern. She is scrolling through an email detailing this week’s food truck lunch schedule. She’s from Texas, has a soft twang, a manic smile, and loves EDM. I don’t hate her. She asks if I want to grab something to eat at “The Garbage Truck” later. Their slogan is, “Home of the Trash Plate!” I shake my head no and nod towards the blue light which is now flashing. A voice belonging to HTC’s communication liaison, Janet, booms through the speaker: “I want Chance the Rapper for our July campaign,” she says.

“We only have a four-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-dollar budget allotted to digital for the month of July,” says Monica. “We can’t afford him if we want to launch a multi-platform social media campaign. Also, our creatives just finished an entire deck based on the humor-oriented 56

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concept campaign we discussed last week.”

“Generation Y doesn’t care about jokes. They want artists! They want Skrillex! Drake! Chance the Rapper!” says Janet. “Ask the interns!

They’re kids!”

Monica glares at us, silently waving her hand over the surface of the table, motioning for a non-response.

“Janet, this decision is not up to the interns. It’s based on your company’s brand vision and our digital budget limitations.”

“Don’t bother having your creatives present that new deck. We’re not interested. Scrap it. Have them come up with something new that actually appeals to Millennials. Also, have one of the interns respond to customer comments on our Facebook page. Try to find one who’s funny.

It will humanize our brand a bit,” says Janet.

“I thought you said jokes are irrelevant,” says Monica.

“Let’s plan on chatting in a couple days,” says Janet.

The blue light fades.

“I fucking love Skrillex,” whispers Sara.

We are all dismissed from the nest. I return to my desk located on the first floor and check my emails. In the time it’s taken me to walk down five flights of stairs, I’ve received three emails: two from Monica, one of which contains HTC’s Facebook account login information, and another asking me to vet both Verizon and Sprint’s Facebook pages to gauge “our competitors’ digital personas,” before responding to customer comments. The third email is an all-agency email, listing the recipients of this month’s promotions. This public display of inter-agency career advancement is intended to inspire interns and entry-level employees with the possibility of progression, and threaten those who occupy positions of higher ranking with competition—the yielded effect being a harder working general whole. One of the names on the promotion list is vaguely familiar: Tessa Banks. She has just become the Pizza Hut account’s Chief Creative Director.

I stop by Human Resources and ask Natalie, the HR assistant, where I can find the Pizza Hut creative team. Their desks are situated in a semi-circle around a massive polyester, stuffed slice of pizza called “the creative cushion.” I near a desk displaying Tessa’s name. The person sitting at it has not yet turned around. I am within five feet of the desk when her chair swivels. We recognize each other immediately.

The face staring back at me is the same one that glanced up three years ago after snorting molly off the floor of Club Nokia and asked what the fuck I was looking at and if I wanted to dance. We’d had a mutual friend at the time, Justin Mercau.

JOSHUA DASSA

57

I was eighteen when I met Justin at culinary school in my “French Fundamentals” class. The first week of school, we were on a smoke break by the commercial-sized dumpsters filled with unacceptably chopped mirepoix, when he pulled up his shirt, exposing three, healed bullet wounds. He said he was in his thirties, his eyes solemn, and explained that “no one in this life could be trusted.” I laughed at the clichéd angst of this sentiment until he described the moment at which his business partner of three years revealed himself to be a narc via three shotgun pumps in a prop plane filled with Oxycodone, seventeen thousand feet above Juarez, Mexico. Justin lived, received a twelve-year sentence, and had just gotten out of prison early, due to “overcrowding” (I think he snitched). Tessa had met him shortly after at a rave.

He introduced us that night. She brought me to her apartment and promised to drop me off at my sandwich-making job the next morning.

She asked what I thought of her place and I think I told her that having your own apartment seems like a lot of work. She asked why I was hanging out with people in their thirties and I asked why she was hanging out with teenagers. I didn’t see her again after that night.

I assume she’s also just experienced some form of this memory because neither of us has spoken and I’m sure we’ve now been standing in front of each other for at least six seconds. I congratulate her on the new promotion and ask her a flurry of superficial work-related questions.

She thanks me, answers them, and scoffs when I tell her which account I’m working on. There is another long pause and she asks, “Would you be interested in helping me out with a Pizza Hut project this afternoon?”

I ask her what it is.

“So, you know those classic, little white tables that sit in the center of pizza boxes?”

I nod.

“They’re called pizza savers, and all they do is prevent the lid of the pizza delivery box from collapsing onto the pizza while it’s in transit.

Recently, we’ve been working on some tech-integrative campaigns that aim to transform the ways in which pizza consumption is experienced.

Our in-house software engineers recently completed a facial-recognition program that analyzes gender, ethnicity, age, race, and other demographic attributes. Our creative team just pitched a campaign concept in which the standard pizza saver, will be replaced with an automatized, swiveling pizza saver, outfitted with twenty-eight miniature camera lenses, providing a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of pizza consumers as they grab slices from a pizza box. These pizza savers will also be equipped with our new facial recognition software. This project would 58

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allow us first-hand access to pizza-consumer data including who orders our pizzas, which toppings they choose, as well as their facial reactions upon opening the box. Along with data, this project would provide valuable, authentic commercial footage. We’re conducting a focus group later today to beta-test the pizza savers. We could totally use an extra note-taker to observe and record the participants’ general reactions during the test.”

I say sure.

At 3 p.m., I am a voyeur on the right side of a two-way mirror. The focus group participants are made up of children (ages five to ten), teenagers (ages thirteen to eighteen), and adults (ages nineteen to twenty-six), all seated by demographic at separate round tables. The only prior information they’ve received is that they will be eating Pizza Hut pizza, in exchange for a Pizza Hut gift card. The pizzas are brought out in boxes and set in the center of each of the three tables. The lids of the boxes are lifted. The roving heads of the metallic cameras twirl in their beds of melted cheese. The children grab the pizza after a moment of hesitation. Their faces look upset. The teenagers immediately pick up the pizza saver and demand to know what it is. A voice from the adult table asks, “Will it shock us if we try to take a slice?” Their faces are distorted by steam on the screens which relay the camera footage in real time. The image on one of the screens becomes enveloped in cheese.

I glance through the glass and watch all twenty-eight lenses enter a mouth at the children’s table.

The beta-testing phase is complete.

JOSHUA DASSA

59

LEAH BOOTH

On a Balcony in New York

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BENJAMIN LOCK

Sarah Tran Researchers still aren’t sure why the ghost of Sarah Tran materialized at 563 Sampson Street in Aurora, Colorado. Sarah Tran hadn’t lived there; she’d lived forty miles to the north, in Garden City, working as a middle school biology teacher. She was unmarried with dead parents and died at the age of thirty-one as a result of asbestos exposure from a mismanaged electric grid construction project next to her home.

The leading theory on the cause behind Mrs. Tran’s post-mortem repositioning revolves around this project and its link to Aurora—namely that Xcel Energy, the company responsible for the construction of the electric grid, has a small base of operations there. But many academics that have dedicated their lives to the study of Sarah Tran believe there must be something else to the shift, as the Xcel office in Aurora is not the company’s largest nor their most important.

In Sarah Tran: The Scream of the Earth, Dr. Rohit Chaudhary argues that Sarah Tran’s spectral form travelled to 563 Sampson because of one of that residence’s previous owners—a man by the name of Gerald Brook, the founder of Colorado’s largest industrial contracting company, GE Construction. In The Scream of the Earth, Chaudhary asserts: Sarah Tran’s connection to the world over-soul has given her a transcendent insight into the long term repercussions of seemingly insignificant happenings. It is through this lens of cause and spiritual effect that we must dissect Sarah’s actions, not through the traditional lens of observable, scientific effect, but by philosophical effect, by effect of mindset. Gerald Brook set into motion the largest infrastructure expansion construction project in Colorado area history—but what is most important about his endeavor is the way in which it is still ongoing, the way in which it has changed hands and business ownership, yet never stopped growing. That expansion has not ceased. Sarah Tran can see this outward ripple and can pinpoint the disturbance that set it into motion, and it is for this reason that her ghost has materialized in Brook’s old home.

Dziedzic, though he disagrees with Chaudhary on the point of contention that Mrs. Tran possesses an otherworldly omniscience (believing instead that Sarah Tran’s post-mortem vocalizations are a result of a natural, though exceedingly rare “echoing of data or impersonation of

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consciousness”), provides a transcript of a 2014 conversation between himself and Sarah Tran in his book As the Gates to Heaven Closed that seems to support the ideological core of Chaudhary’s argument.

From As the Gates to Heaven Closed:

Dziedzic: Where are you?

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Tran: Please get away.

Dziedzic: Can you tell me where you are?

Tran: *Inaudible* Oh, oh, oh, leave me alone.

Dziedzic: Can you see me, Sarah?

Tran: *Inaudible*

Dziedzic: Do you know where you are, Sarah?

Tran: Please go. Please leave me be. Why can’t any of you ever just leave well enough alone.

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HARRISON WAYNE GALLO

New South Old South dedicated to Dr. Elizabeth West

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SHANICE FELIX

Mistakes I’ve Made in Japanese A statement I made in Japanese. / What I meant.

What I actually (accidentally) said.

Sore wa, ikura desu ka? / How much is it [to handle emotionally]?

How much is it [financially]?

Dare o simasita ka? / Who used it?

Who was used?

Watasi wa, gakusee dake desu ka? / Am I the only student?

Is a student all I am?

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JOSHUA PLACK

Settin’ the Pace Lunch break, half-smoke and a strawberry lemonade.

Too good today mama.

I step out onto the sun baked U Street where the riotous rumbles simmered long before Dr. King’s soul bid us farewell up an ethereal stairwell.

“Bye Bye Blackbird” I walk by the fenced in park where the police once made a young brother palm the granite before cracking him open like a pomegranate to appease the Ivory Venus.

“You Leave Me Breathless” Round the way to Ray’s Records, a browned mausoleum of Jazz, Blues, Motown, Funk, 45’s, 33’s, stacks and stacks of Stax tracks and wax, piled and crated in meticulous chaos.

And old Ray, the legend behind the counter with two bad hips and a Kool dangling from his lips, Impressions swaying on the spindle and Curtis wailing through curls of smoke.

“I Hear a Rhapsody” The buttery bellow of an alto sax calls my name, wild and frantic like the death throes of an ancient, language-less civilization.

Snares loose and rickety, the brush striking the head like an armor-plated rhino ravishing a trash compactor,

65

bass line pulsing so deep in the chest.

I wonder if it can stop a heart and wonder if it’d be so bad if it did.

“You Don’t Know What Love Is” I stand and hear the music of the ages in front of a door rusted shut and boarded up, and behind the spray-painted windows I see the pained, faded face of John Coltrane on a poster, his brow jutting outwardly in frustration as though he knew that A Love Supreme would be too good to last.

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AUDREY LEE

O Philadelphia you were lovers: one ate Jamaican beef pie on the El train, his molars in the meat mouthing lips around umami savoring the pastry crust.

Another resided in the coffee shop on 18th and Market with a photo of the dome of the rock.

Olde city is in Jerusalem, and below Northern Liberties gentrified when the falafel shop closed and the cumin and coriander were evicted from Fishtown.

One lover watched calloused palms pull, gently, goat apart and dripping with curry, chai— As they went down to the First Unitarian basement they prayed, silently.

The police do not hear their music. This is a form of religion one lover practiced every weekend and rode the graffitied subway home rocking two and fro like a mother comforting her offspring’s murmur.

One lover carved their names into the seats with house keys.

O Philadelphia, you were the keffiyeh one lover wore over curled locks at the Middle Eastern stand in Reading Terminal, sipping kefir in Rittenhouse with wine and Bud Light. A lover lives in University City and cannot learn how to love the rowers on the Schuylkill, sweeping oars and they leave soaking.

I will mention that I am none of these lovers. Instead I drive over the Ben Franklin Bridge and imagine wanting only this.

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KOBE OPARE

Garden Blossom

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HUNTER THERRON

Puberty before Doomsday Tyler’s stomach lurched and he was never normal again after his second detention in Room 404 when Adrian Lisea told him that girls bled from their vaginas. Adrian said that girls filled cups and bottles with blood. Room 404 smelled like corn dogs. Mrs. Lumpp ate corn dogs, extra mayo that dripped on the desk while yelling at the kids in neat rows who burped and farted, whistled or swore. Adrian pulled back his greasy frosted tips to lean in closer.

Adrian said that girls die from bleeding out of their vaginas. Adrian’s twenty-six-year-old girlfriend almost died in the backseat of his black Mercedes Benz. Adrian was fifteen. Tyler knew he couldn’t drive.

Adrian Lisea knew that Tyler wanted to kiss Shannon Gorrell. Tyler told Adrian during his first detention. Adrian smiled. Mrs. Lumpp shouted quiet in a sharp hiss. Her large boobs swayed and Tyler saw her deep wrinkled cleavage and he looked without knowing whether it was okay or not. Tyler didn’t know if he was a good person or a bad person.

Adrian made friends with the rich kids and stole their parents’ money. Adrian stole fifty bucks from Brett Rexilius. Stole sixty from Kegan Calkins. Adrian stole car keys from Trevor’s dad and crashed the Honda in the driveway and ran. Adrian stole his mom’s Misty cigarettes.

Adrian smoked cigarettes and Tyler remembered this all now as Adrian placed his mouth to Tyler’s ear and whispered, Tyler, don’t be a pussy.

Shannon’s gonna die if you don’t save her.

Tyler was twelve. Tyler knew that dying was a scary thing. Tyler liked Shannon Gorrell so much that he sang to her every week in study hall. Shannon liked Journey; she liked Flo Rida. Tyler liked detention because he could think of Shannon and memorize lyrics for her. Tyler was memorizing “Don’t Stop Believing” when Adrian told him that Shannon would die.

Adrian said that tampons were things girls shoved up their butts to keep them from dying. Adrian said he saw Shannon’s tampon hidden deep in Mr. Gridowski’s trash can, that it was brown and red and goopy like a sad snail. Tyler believed it. Tyler had seen Mom miscarry during a c-section. He remembered the blood and goop that escaped from her open belly. Tyler knew from a very young age that humans were filled with goop that’s determined to escape. Tyler was scared of the goop— he was scared to die.

The time was 4:13. With two minutes left of detention, Adrian leaned far across the aisle. Adrian’s hairy Adam’s apple bobbed as he

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asked, Hey Mom-Fucker, do you want Shannon to die? Tyler said no.

One minute ‘til the bell. Adrian said he’d help Tyler by keeping a lookout while Tyler stole her panties and gave them to Adrian, whose mom was a Creole witch. Adrian said that Creole witches can save dying girls through their underwear in a process called Santeria. Tyler didn’t know there was a rock song called Santeria or that Adrian’s mom was really a juvie guard missing her right thumb.

Tyler believed that if he could save Shannon, then he could save the world. Tyler’s second detention was on December 7th, 2012; that’s three days before the end of the world. Tyler knew that the world would end in three days because Julia had said so. Tyler believed in ghosts and good deeds and Creole magic. Tyler believed that one good deed could save everyone. The metallic bell rang. The farting kids ambled out of the stuffy corndog room. Mrs. Lumpp threw her extra mayo packets in the trash. Adrian and Tyler ran out of the room into the cold gray dusk.

Ran down Franklin street, with Adrian’s Jordan’s skidding on the ice they ran towards Wheaton College where Shannon’s dad lived in-residency as the famous pig-cloning scientist.

Tyler had dinner at five but lied and said he was at the library. This was the first time Tyler lied to his parents. Adrian played Ozzy Osbourne on his walkman. Running through frozen front yards at 4:25 p.m. with three days before the world ended, Tyler had the first independent thought of his life. Tyler breathed in the cold, humid air and thought, Crazy Train is the best song ever.

Tyler learned about the end of the world from Julia Cunningham on Halloween when Julia was dressed as Mother Mary and dragged Tyler into her basement after trick-or-treating. Julia was in highschool—she kissed football players and grinded at homecoming. Tyler was dressed as a banana. They watched It on a scratched DVD that glitched and froze as Julia moved her hand on Tyler’s thigh. Tyler couldn’t get a boner. This was two months after Mom’s miscarriage and now she was quiet and let him stay out late.

Julia asked Tyler why kids call him Mom-Fucker. Tyler said that Tony P. saw Tyler kiss his mom on the lips after picking him up from school. Tyler’s mom was from Texas; she held these long, brave kisses that Tyler always admired. Julia laughed and laughed she took her hand off his thigh and began to laugh some more. Tyler grew red hot and sweaty.

That was when Julia said it. She turned off the T.V. and looked Tyler square and brave, her brown eyes shining through the dark when she inhaled and said not to worry, that the world was ending on December 70

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10th and that we would all die no matter what we did we would all die.

Tyler didn’t want to die. When he was six-years-old he’d close his eyes and try to picture being dead forever. The T.V. hissed static. Julia looked solemn, her brave eyes now beady with guilt and Tyler tried to reach into those dark beady eyes. That was the first time Tyler ever reached for something. He stuck out his skinny, blue-vein fingers to touch Julia’s face and his fingers shook in the air. They shook when they touched Julia’s beautiful, pudgy face and she began to sneer. Tyler had never seen a sneer then Julia said, Hey man, I’m not your mom and laughed again as Tyler grew dizzy thinking about being dead forever.

Tyler fell over onto the shag carpet and Julia took a picture with her flip phone to prove that Tyler really was crazy like how all the neighbor kids said.

Tyler saw a ghost that night on the walk through the alley back to his house. The ghost was a little girl. She had thick, knotted pigtails. Her skin was pale—veins like a newborn baby. Tyler named her Josie. Josie was real; she smelled of harsh metallic blood, and as Tyler passed Josie, Josie smiled. She held tiny bird bones in her hands. Six baby birds, all pulled apart and bloody. Their skulls and ribs and wings bones had all been removed. Their skin sat like Jello in the gutter. Tyler looked at Josie’s mouth. It was bloody and crunched from the baby bird bones.

She looked into his eyes and smiled. Tyler ran all the way home where Mom was asleep alone on the couch with American Idol on mute. American Idol still on mute the next morning when Tyler discovered that his canary, Rembrandt, was missing from its cage.

Tyler and Adrian hopped over Mr. Weinberg’s backyard shrubs and ran across Main street, right in front of a minivan that swerved into a mailbox. The driver jumped out and chased Adrian and Tyler silently through the alley. Tyler saw Josie in the alley eating more birds. Adrian said Fuck You Fuck You to the burly man who chased them. The burly man sneered, then Tyler picked up a brick and threw it at the burly man—it hit his chest with a big thud and the man collapsed. That was Tyler’s second time hurting someone. Adrian laughed and laughed while Tyler looked back in the alley. Josie and burly man were both gone.

Adrian and Tyler ran onto the Wheaton College campus where the leafless maples were strung with yellow Christmas lights. Tyler and Mom used to walk through the trees and throw snow at each other. No snow now. Now the trees looked scraggly and transplanted and Tyler began to imagine the end of the world. Hey Adrian, said Tyler between breaths, What do you think the end of the world will look like? Adrian HUNTER THERRON

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raised his eyebrow and said, Orgies, lotta orgies man. Tyler didn’t know what an orgy was. For some reason he pictured those seventy-five cent Creamsicles from 7-11 and how he could probably steal one and hand it to Shannon. Just then Tyler realized that he’d never said a word to Shannon Gorrell in his whole life.

Adrian and Tyler stood outside of Shannon Gorrell’s house now. It wasn’t really a house, it was a big brick building labeled LAB that was crooked and draped in ivy. Adrian spotted Shannon’s room. It was four stories up. A thick black electrical line ran from the ground to her window. Adrian said, Climb. Tyler said no. Adrian said, Pussy.

Tyler climbed up the electrical line, climbed forty feet then slipped through Shannon’s unlocked window into her dark room that smelled like flowers and syrup. Tyler felt creepy but also thought he was being a good person by trying to save the world. Tyler looked through her window into the rolling grid of yellow and red lights. Tyler thought, Why is no one else trying to save the world?

Finding Shannon’s panties was hard—they weren’t in some special gold dresser or pink briefcase like Tyler was expecting. They were all in the dirty clothes and didn’t smell like flowers or syrup, and there were blood stains in the crotch that made Tyler sweaty, realizing how close she was to death. Women have gotta be pretty tough, he said out loud.

This was the third independent thought of Tyler’s life.

The electrical line looked scary coming down from the window.

Adrian was gone. Tyler opened Shannon’s blue door out into the unlight blue hallway and tiptoed down the blue staircase. Every room in Shannon’s house was blue. There was a big commotion downstairs. Tyler heard soft jazz and clinking glass and sharpening knives coming from the big blue door at the bottom of the stairs. Tyler cracked the door, squinted his eyes and got sweaty at the strange thing happening in the crowded room.

Pot-bellied pig elevated on an iron bed. Masked, lab-coated man attached electrodes to the pig’s body, its snout and belly, even its asshole.

The electrodes were connected to a big platinum machine with infinite dials and gauges. They whizzed and beep-booped as Mr. Masked Man latched the pig’s legs into big iron cuffs then without further hesitation he took a sip of wine, pressed a big red button. Then, silence. The crowd shut up. Tyler held his breath and scanned the room. He realized that Mr. Masked Man was really Mr. Gorrell. Then he saw Shannon, crouched down on the tile. Back propped against the wall, reading some book named Lolita.

The machine screamed, shot electricity through the pot-bellied pig.

The pig convulsed; it shook and squealed. The crowd bit their lips and 72

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stared in horror. The pig plopped down limp, then Mr. Gorrell took his scalpel and made a big clean cut into the stomach of the pot-bellied pig.

He spread the stomach and pulled out six see-through fetuses. They were all clones of their mother, but Tyler didn’t know that as the crowd explodes into cheers and champagne eruptions. Tyler stared at Momma Pig’s black pupils, the brown goop and blood exploding from her wound, and he suddenly wondered why no one was trying to save her.

Shannon read her book in the corner, oblivious to the bloody pig or the crowd chanting, We Make Life, We Make Life. The little fetus clones made small oinks and Mr. Gorrell declared their perfect health.

But then something stranger happens when one baby in his gloved hands begins to cough up blood, then another and another—soon all the babies spurt blood from their mouths onto Mr. Gorrell’s white robe. In a panic, he drops them onto the tile. Their boneless bodies explode into flesh and goop, which fries the wires of the big platinum machine. The adults scream. Sparks shoot out onto the crowd, singed suits and satin black dresses. Shannon shoots up from her book and sees Tyler standing in the doorway with two pairs of her underwear.

Tyler runs back up the blue stairs—past Shannon’s room through the blue hallway, all the way up onto the roof. Shannon corners Tyler on the roof, glaring at his shaky panty hand. Tyler looks bravely at Shannon and says, I’m trying to save the world. Shannon laughs then says, Aren’t you the guy who has detention for five months after pushing Tony P. from a window? Tyler says, I’m also the guy who sings Flo Rida to you.

Just then Tyler hears Adrian cursing from down below. Down below cop cars squeeze between the crooked maple trees, cops surround Adrian and throw him onto the hood. I’ll get these to your mom, Tyler shouts down to Adrian. Adrian laughs while being dragged into the car.

My mom’s not a witch you idiot, says Adrian, she’s a prison guard with one thumb. Tyler shouts down, How will we save the world? How will we save it, Adrian?

Adrian laughs and laughs. Tyler will remember this moment forever. Adrian shoves his shoulder into the closing car door. In defiance he shouts, I just wanted to sniff Shannon’s panties you fucking idiot.

The door slams. The cop car drives away into the shaky grid of yellow and red lights. Tyler’s hand shakes as Shannon says, Gimme those back.

Do you wanna watch the sunset? asks Tyler. Shannon Gorrell says, The sun’s already set you fucking weirdo. She walks back down into her dark blue hallway. Tyler thinks about dangling his feet off the roof before remembering the baby pigs and realizing that he’s even more scared to die. Shannon comes back up with a tray of oatmeal raisin HUNTER THERRON

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cookies. She hands them to Tyler without a word. She walks back towards the hatch, lifts it, then turns back towards Tyler. Hey Tyler, she says a little embarrassed, you didn’t sniff these did you?

Tyler shakes his head no. Shannon goes back down the hatch. Tyler eats eleven oatmeal raisin cookies. He counts all types of cars on the freeway then stops at one thousand. Tyler pictures Mom asleep on the couch but decides that’s too much to think about. Down below, Josie crouches in the bushes under Shannon’s room, dismembering a redwing blackbird.

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JONATHAN AUSTIN MCDANIEL

Splendorous Downpour

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MIRIAM MOORE-KEISH

Brine The miracle fortune telling fish I bought on the boardwalk must have felt at home in my oceancrusted palm that summer when it told me I was fickle and all I knew about the word fickle was that it rhymed with pickle so I thought fickle was like the brine turning cucumbers to pickles and my palm to the sea and peanuts to boiled peanuts to home.

My father mailed me a can of boiled peanuts when I left the South and said don’t forget where you come from and I said this is not my heritage this is a can.

I told an old Midwestern man that they sell boiled peanuts in cans if he ever wanted to try them but I said the real way is at a gas station that you almost miss because of the sharp turns around the mountains and the hand painted cardboard sign advertising regular boiled peanuts and Cajun peanuts for the adventurous.

I told him that they double bag the peanuts so you can put the shells somewhere and he looked into the air behind my head and thought of somewhere and he said “I saved a life today.

Maybe more.”

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SHERWIN S. RODRIGUEZ

Madurai The bus reached at 5.30.

You’re so early, it’s only 4.00! said my aunt, the most up to date in a house stuck further back in the past

(sometimes you can hear

arguments from years ago

echoing in their sighs) They’ll cut my legs off soon says my uncle, pointing to dirt on black soles. sometimes the past visits, His anger hasn’t subsided.

It’s like walking along the seashoreI can’t feel anything says the man, with tears gushing on the wrong side— The Scar runs like a river down his back, empty.

Take care of Periamma when I’m gone.

I’m acting every day, The pain is unbearable, it’s everywhere. death is the best I can wish on him— i feel no guilt. it’s not hard, in such a household to think of the city you love, in terms of the deaths of the people you love. here, the christmas star signals a departure, as it fades

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and fades again. the past hurts them, just as they had hurt it.

The mind delights in simple things— Whatever a child likes, you must also like.

People may say it’s childli— A sparrow just flew by, Wasn’t it beautiful?

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JENNA KAHLEY

Dickinson and I aren’t exactly optimists I remember my childhood home like I remember

watermelon rashes on sticky fingers, or sunroofs clouded by fly carcasses.

Underneath our kitchen tiles is where

I must’ve buried all my happy poetry.

You know, the ones that rhymed and rolled off the tongue.

Instead I’ll offer sullen lines

wrapped in ballads that crunch bitter Because sugar isn’t sweet inside a rotting mouth,

and yours is disgusting.

I laugh at those who will read the chronic verses

crammed in my desk and think me a melancholy woman.

Just like dandelions aren’t for funerals

and caskets aren’t for blowing wishes my happy poems aren’t for you.

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OLIVIA BARRETT

Surprise

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BENJAMIN LOCK

For a Long Time For a long time, I went to bed early. I had to. There’d be work the next day, and the minute I got home there’d be dinner, and after there’d be three kids grabbing at my shirt with their fingers still stained from ketchup. There’d be Lanette there too, her young skin smooth in the light, with that smile—a tired one, exhausted, but persevering, tenacious, bright. And there’d be TV and sometimes board games, and then there’d be bed. A soft, warm, tired kiss, and then the black wave of sleep.

Early nights for early mornings. Five O’Clock for the commute, always standstill traffic on the interstate. Winter mornings were the worst with the air so icy it dug right into my bones. Those mornings I just wanted to turn around and walk right back inside and get in bed with her. Never once did.

Work was a tiny box with a computer, a chair, and a picture of my kids on a grey plastic desk. My boss would put up sticky notes in the cubicle—deadlines, accounts. I’d punch numbers into an excel spreadsheet and print them out, breathe in the stale air, look out the window at the monoliths of grey, and think maybe I could leave. But where would I go?

I’d question what it was all for, and then, just mere hours later, I’d know. Home again. Dinner. Her sweet face and their sweet faces. I’d know for sure with every question they’d ask me, with every press of their little hands into my chest as they’d climb on me, laughing and laughing and being.

Now I’m standing under the orange light of the front porch, looking out over the nighttime street, and they’re all a hundred miles away. And now, in our faded home nestled between a forest wild with vines and a high, chain link fence, I feel like staying awake till the sun comes up.

This morning I quit my job. I haven’t told Lanette yet. And as I walked out of that building for the last time, set out onto the street, a free man, I searched for that flight of rebellion in my heart and didn’t find it. It was dulled, a barely-lit ember, and I knew that somehow, despite all the certainty with which I’d lived, I’d missed something.

I go back in because the mosquitos are getting bad. Lanette’s right where I left her, reading. Almost at the end of the book. I sit down next to her, and she puts her head on my shoulder, her silver hairs like the shine on a black river.

Out there, in the world, a wild violence tears itself through the sky, calling out. I have never found it, but I hear it now, muffled through the drywall.

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CAROLINE WIRL

the sicker i get, the closer i get to pressing send cut. my medicine finally started working although I think she may have been the cure and now it’s my birthday and she’s cutting out paper snowflakes because we never got around to it at christmas we were too busy falling in love copy. my headaches are coming back they always do and now somehow I’m sitting in a denny’s parking lot throwing up and my lips try to form words around the silhouette of her hands and she copies me and our mouths meet paste. my good days are still bad and now all I can see is the back of her hair is longer than the last time I saw her toothpaste is leaving mint flavored foam on her upper lip I go to wipe it off but she is just out of reach

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JACOB PERKINS-MCLINN

Purple

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MAWI SONNA

portrait of the poet as a goliatch birdwing butterfly

I want to be you, goliath. once upon a night dust over canopies rising, the world in small shatters

twelve thousand

eyes to be exact, your hair-thin legs bent over unlike monarch to milkweed. your confidence lands twenty-three

centimeters on tree barks meant for cicadas, and gentle buddleias only meant for butterflies

not goliath birdwings.

So please, goliath, let me be you for a day?

No, not like birds of prey – these golden

eagles, falcons, old world vultures. No, goliath – to be you,

locked behind a display case, as if

pages of membrane and scales opened a life worth envying.

Not ending in mortal tragedy

but an eternal beauty

under your jade layered mosaic

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wings.

for Curtis

JENNA KAHLEY

I hear good things about Lyrica I was in the handicap stall in my school’s bathroom—my legs outstretched as I sat on the toilet. The drool of the faucet, the growl of the hand dryer, and murmur of conversation between the girls at the sink suddenly dulled when one of their voices sirened “FIIIIIIIREEEEE.” No embers crept at the corners of the room. But just the thought of smoke brought oven heat that pulsed down every nook of my skin until it cried.

Soot entered my mouth, stole all saliva, and left my tongue mudcracked as flame splinters scratched their way down my throat. In the crack between the stall door and the wall I see melting mirrors. Flesh singed off the girl’s faces as they kneed chapstick onto their lips. Amist being burnt alive I realized the two had used the noun as an adjective to boisterously rave about Drake’s new single.

In a moment the bronze lensed glasses came off. I felt the air vent press my terror-stained shirt to my skin. Paint dripped onto my brow from where gullible was graffitied above my head.

This wasn’t the first time I realized I won’t be earning any purple hearts. Like when I was thirteen, just come from church, and peed through my stockings at my brother’s cry of wolf. The living room became a woodland. It was barely noon and yet the sky darkened and the moon was high. When he laughed, I crossed my legs under my skirt so no one would see but my parents could still smell it on me.

Nothing is chasing you. Why do you gasp for air? There are no howls hanging in the wind. Why does your heart hammer? There are no teeth preying to close around your neck. Why do you lay on your carpet with your shoulders to your knees and palms pressing either side of your skull whispering “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” on a Sunday afternoon?

There are pills for people like me. To whom microwave popcorn sounds like gunshots. Who jump at their reflection in the mirror, and have ash caught in their nostril hairs with no burn marks to show for it. But I don’t have time to take them. I’m too busy waiting to be devoured.

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ZACHARY DIAZ

Barn Ladder, Watsonville, CA

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WAYNE

So Far Away

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JENNA KAHLEY

How to Climb a Tree

Read all directions before proceeding I. The swamp floor is a club raided with bugs that swagger through and over top muck and dross.

Your feet don’t want any part in that.

Observe how the genesis of the tree, by growth, creates its own exodus from the mire and thus frees itself from a subsurface existence.

Know the two of you aren't so different.

II. Place your feet atop the tree’s and give to it your hands.

The tree is not your father.

Do not imagine this is a practice waltz.

That would require no elevation which is counter-productive. Instead, consider the soggy earth the sea and the tree a sinking ship.

Play a song inside your head.

Not to dance but to Nearer My God to Thee.

III. Become a spider.

This creates more commonalities between yourself and the tree so when you overlap limbs it thinks you no different than the mites that drunkenly amble in amass beside the brook.

You'll begin to believe that too with the higher you climb, the more flies you swallow.

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IV. Now that you've reached the top, it's time to decide either to remain a spider and strut back to the critter party.

Or be a leaf.

I’m sorry if you wanted to come out of this experience with your humanity intact.

Unfortunately, that's not an option.

JENNA KAHLEY

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