Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine - Fall 2022

i asked the world if it had something good for me today and the world said go fish

so i took my dad’s favorite pole because i know he won’t miss it but i hate the feeling of piercing a worm through a hook it doesn’t seem fair but the world said that’s life

and i cast and recast while watching where i stepped for snakes and goose shit until i caught a bass large or small i don’t know but it will make dinner all the same so i thanked the world and the world just said eat

HAILIE HENSLEY

You used to rest your elbows on the rusted windowsill Actually you leaned on the window pane your nose nearly pressed up against the screen No matter how stagnant and humid the weather an indication of the last few days of middle school Or the bone chilling winds from a ruthless winter which made your eyes water

It didn’t matter. You still waited. And every time I looked back you were still watching me. Waiting for my foot to hit the last bus step so that I could turn to you once more while we held up our sign. “I love you.” The only ASL you knew. With “The Blue Danube” lingering in my memory I watched you holding up your hand until you were out of my sight.

This continued until high school until I started driving myself in my 1987 red Subaru. Times I was too proud to say those words to mommy. But I did Now, I hope you knew.

And then I was gone off to college where the only mutual sign of love was a scribbled message in my fish shaped, spiral notebook that sat beside the phone. A message from my roommate: “your mom called.“ Not once but this repeated phrase took up several pages. Then I loved you too.

Once our paths crossed again and I needed you more than ever

You waited for me still in the pouring rain holding an umbrella

Smoking a cigarette Waiting biding my face in eager anticipation. Pushing me back to my tiny apartment where I never wanted you to leave.

Today

I staunchly wait for the typing awareness indicator Underneath our messages Words like an ancient tongue only we understand. No matter what I am doing Or where I am I wait for those three dots to show up on my phone so that I may never have to experience the unstinting regret of a missed opportunity to say I love you.

EMI GONZALEZ

built a house of cards on the back porch last night “economy’s about to shit the bed again,”

I love the color on these flowers. in the lawns of empty houses I hope it’s not windy tonight. Screen door chatterin’.

I don’t think there are enough bootstraps to go around, so we’ll turtle on our backs like that recurring dream

I hope it rains again this year, the flowers are so beautiful this April! If not, we can shut them in a novel.

so they can keep their colors. The air was still for a miraculous amount of time, but now there’s spot cards out on the lawn, bloated and bleeding. Face cards nowhere to be found

After Hera Lindsay Bird

SARA MAE HENKE

Surely Greta Gerwig’s Rodarte Oscars dress the color of California poppies would make a suitable death shroud, so long as my name still lingers like granules from sugar toast on the lips of every man I’ve ever loved, so long as my mother has gone first & at the appropriate time, having consumed 2.7 grapefruit crushes, enough westward mountains, & in the willows of slumber after one last phone call in which I gush about the photograph of her & the wicker basket of plastic daisies & she can nod to herself that she is the embodiment of beauty, & after she has had sufficient time with my father, who has also gone before me at the appropriate time in a heroic fanfare of jib sheet & brackish water & only once we have admitted we respect each other under all the arguments about Hollywood infidelities & have shared an epic motorcycle ride through the state that raised him, smelling the warm pines. This poem has no untimely deaths but it does feature Tony Soprano. I am Italian but not Italian like that: too many generations here speaking that pound cake language & the secret is while yes, I still sleep with a nightlight to ward off my abductors, death

in mob mythology has become a grounding technique. Within that logic, death is never untimely, & always deserved, or at least heroic! Dear whatever it is my ancestors crossed their hearts about, I am just not ready yet. I have yellow eyelet gloves to figure out how to incorporate in everyday life and a novella to start writing so I can reference my novella with strangers in bustling subway stations where rats lap green water, where the onion vapors of death are pervasive but somehow the living are too busy hurrying around with our lack of tidy resolutions to cry. All morning my neighbor in the apartment above me has been yelling at her dog I’m sick of you!& the clack of uncut dog nails still follows her around. The uncut dog nails could be the dreams in which I finally hang out with that lead singer I have a crush on & my high school nemesis shows up to testify that I’m a big fake, or the uncut dog nails could be the tremors of love that stays from when we admitted to our mothers we smoked weed at 17 & made her cry & didn’t speak for days. There is this scene in The Sopranos where Tony says to Meadow, alone at the dinner table, you know I love you right & right now reader, I want you to go to your kitchen, where my spirit is dishonorably hammered & trying to check all my boxes. I saw birds loop de looping at Druid Hill’s lake, & was trying to figure out how I would evoke them for you later. The Druid Hill birds. The birds that belonged to that water by nature of language, & the water to the birds. When Death comes for me, I want a word to belong to, a word that keeps me. The Italian daughter. The golden-gowned auteur. I don’t need to be tragic; just to have tried every kind of stone fruit known to man. This life is so arbitrary sometimes I want to vomit up a piano bench & make an excuse to dance. Even when I am selfish, I am trying so hard not to shake in front of you.

ABIGAIL HEDLEY • PPE

BAILEY FRITZ • BLACKBERRY JAR & LEAF BOWL

ANDREW TUCKER • HJORT

SARA MAE HENKE

I am devastating in my pelt of peach fuzz

Ankles an expletive scattered along the curb

We run through cul de sac & wood sorrel

We make noise like we can echolocate

Anything is sisterhood if you add major chords

Corporeal & pistil honey

When I died, the bed moved

God plays telephone with his omens

& how do you pray without a clipboard

without getting testy over the results

When I died the bed moved as in

They deflated the air mattress, my body

a joke folding away from itself

Is it the soul that evaporates 21 grams

I am already widowed to smoke

My husband chews cigars, sings to birds

If the bereaved will harmonize my crumpling body

If the bereaved will get a laugh from my lungs

I will haunt that swinging decade still

My girl friends inside getting RC Cola

We can use the bottles for cut flowers

We can shatter the necks on the pavement

We can make kaleidoscope of the ways they ruin us

We ration out sky in these cityscapes

I have given myself over to lower back freckles

An occult of nighttimes holding hands with girls

Naked & lakes complicated in our tinny teeth

Twang of chicory along the skinny-dipping shore

I am 75% water & the rest is costume jewelry

& I pulse with blood of a woman I do not remember

If I were to call out to her

If I were to disembody a voice

If silence is my lineage

Let us stick our heads in the ground

Let us lap solemnly at the roots

Grampa mispronounced our names

They sold Grampa’s Ford Ranger

He curses when they try to bathe him

Hexing is one way of hearing

They think we have just ceased to listen

We are always the last with our ears to the ground

I loved a girl like she was already gone

Histories are the nape you whisper into

Here is the girl I loved: fingers in her mouth

If I were to repress that night

If I were to preserve this sunset

If I were to hide in a jar of marmalade

Douse myself in the orange peel gloam

I want to lick the sugar from my arms

I want to tell you a beautiful story

How come I cannot hear her ghost

When was the first time I said our name

How do I make people believe me

When my namesake died the bed moved

When Grampa’s mother died the bed moved

The family held the remote the family laughed

Hysterically

Her son has lost his memory

But still hums like he is singing along

When they marked my time of death

My tired bones unfolded to make sense of it

Parody is another word for daughter

I am an adolescent ghost

I saw the Devil turn the corner on the Perimeter Trail, Whose twists beckoned us on—like Tobacco smoke rising from the fire pit. He kicked our soccerball at the man fishing In the water, scattering a myriad of invisible creatures.

We tried to follow him, but got lost in brown puddles, Searching for a way to see, we lost him to the forest. We were together with the small trees and forgot, for a while, Taking in the youthful sunrays. Staring, with squinted Eyes, down the Earth’s corridors.

The forest was split and the land stretched for miles. Transmission towers divided the waters like the steel tipped Hull of a freighter. I wonder if he was the one telling the Ship where to go. I wonder what he sounds like on another Planet, probably wreaking his covenant of revenge.

We had never seen anyone haul a creature from the pond, But sure enough, out he came. The size of the surface of The water itself, he rose. Blackening the sky around him, He lingered, for a moment, looking at us, then vanished. A stone came skipping across the water.

At the edge, you could see clearly down through. As it sloped deeper, though, the pale green tint thickened Into a richer brown mass, concealing the map of the pond. The further you got from it, the bluer it seemed. Better to keep our distance, we thought.

A cop circles by in the afternoon gloom and reminds us. We go, checking the ground, sending applications swishing Behind our feet, filling the air with laughter. Coming up empty, we joke our way to the truck And drift down the street and back like smoke through the air.

I remember what I saw, wondering how long it took them To plant this place, and if she thought her woods would Ever house something the likes of him. Curiosity like a Shattered altar. Praying from somewhere, the air all around Kept us light and serene in our adolescence.

Crystal pillars of golden pine adorned our place. Gleaming stalks, they reached to the sky and allowed Us to sway safely inside the broken wind. Together In our peace, we grew and existed, not tethered to any Luxury save for the truth in the leaves.

We knew, looking at one another, who would remain And who would go. Dying light moves across the water And he still moves through the trees. A hidden stag, A trophy for a lifetime’s game—he is contained In that acreage for boys to chase and spar.

10 centuries ago today, we started this walk And still it goes on. Like some contract, signed and sealed With candle-melted wax; a line of gospel sung To a clergy of 500,000 Loblolly Pines: the Lord and man And the byrds and the Devil perched on the rafters of the pavilion.

SARA MAE HENKE

Exquisite Corpse with Notebook Fragments

After Ocean Vuong

Vinne said you’re always in limbo

Had a dream someone sexted me a video of birds flying in the rafters at Cheesecake Factory

Grilled pineapple for the first time

Climbed to the roof in my Ravens t shirt and underwear after a rainstorm to see the double rainbow

I feel like I have so much more access to sky than I did before

Early aughts baguette bags

Carrying blue sea glass in my sports bra

Danny said I dreamed of picking blueberries and you best believe you were in the patch

Had a dream I was sneaking out to meet Archie from Riverdale to work on our relationship at an abandoned highschool but members of the KGB dressed up as Archie & kept tricking me

Cattails & skiffs lined up like hairs of a crew cut

A raccoon stopping traffic

Tangerine juice exists?

Vinnie said I put my ear to your elbow & I can hear the ocean

Mary said It doesn’t have to look real it just has to look alive

The church marquis said: “Strawberry Festival Cancelled. Pray 4 Peace.”

Eddying

Sam reminded me other things exist besides existential questions, for example spring rolls

Just because I’m around people I love doesn’t mean I’m not wildly depressed

Gardettos are the rye chip in Chex Mix?

What if I just bought a house on Hickory Ave?

The white cake splits in the middle & buttercream fills the empty

In an alternate universe I am not fixated on getting over you

People still have tongue rings

Bucolic

That tantrum when I was seven about the spaghetti strap top with golden retrievers

Kiss your own forehead

Driving by the hydro electric plant eye level with the water’s surface

I miss hair smelling like gasoline from the bay & eating salty, crunchy things & sunburn for everyone

The reason I can’t get past my grief is I only write about the past

Danny said I love the parts of trees worn soft from hikers’ hands

Sam scrambled eggs for me in briefs & salmon socks

Laundry drying over the shower rod

Zenaida said Harry Styles says I want your belly & that summer feeling

How many jellybeans in your jar

Grocery list: pie crust

In furniture years I am definitely not healed

I don’t want to understand you I don’t want to break my back stooping down so we can see eye to eye and I am not pretending I respect any part of your pharisaic opinion

You rejoice in the face of ruined lives, of suffering, of the exacerbation of class inequality and discrimination yet preach words not even written in your so called ‘Holy Book’

Why are you fine with this alleged remedy that’ll trap more people in poverty?

Why are you find with rampant starvation and abuse with no salvation?

Why are you okay with people bleeding out from coat hangers bent in the shape of desperation?

This is why your motto of ‘saving lives’ means nothing. You don’t even try to back it up.

All you have is your all consuming thoughts and prayers handpicked by Devil’s advocates No one can even try and tell you who you’re actually working for. You’ve coated your crusade in sanctimonious light and can no longer remember god says Abasement of others is a sin.

I hope you learn to bleed compassion half as well as you spew hate.

I’d love to see this energy go to a better place

I know you’re cruel, that you do not care if that ‘baby’ lives as long as it is born because you never tell us what would happen next.

So no. What you say means absolutely nothing. There is no thought, only follow through. Have you even wondered about the after? The complete lack of infrastructure that would be this even slightly more sustainable?

Not that it matters. All the planning anyone could ever do wouldn’t even touch the fact that it is not your body to try and govern

Sadie Kimbrough • Editor-in-Chief

Maggie Meystrik • Lead Designer

Diana Dalton • Art Editor

Maxwell Frasher • Poetry Editor

Case Pharr • Prose Editor

Presley Cowan • Copy Editor

Taylor McMickle • Business Editor

Abby-Noelle Potter • Staff

Raina Watson • Staff

Adin Lamb • Staff

Mika Tapp-Relation • Staff

With special thanks to

Aslan Gossett, Rose Hamm, Clint Liles,

Josh Strange, & Jaylin Witherspoon