Fall 2018 Journal by Westwind: UCLA's Journal of the Arts

westwind

UCLAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Journal of the Arts

FALL 2018

For over fifty years, Westwind has been printing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, art, music, and everything in between. Westwind welcomes submissions from new and experienced writers and artists. We seek to cultivate and sustain networks between artists, writers, poets, and readers surpassing the bounds of UCLA’s campus, in which we were founded. Reflective of our inclusion of a variety of different art forms, Westwind encourages work to abandon formulaic and traditional demands and expectations. While we accept every medium, we remain appreciative of other kinds of work which furnish conventional forms of writing with contemporary values and concerns that resonate with our readers.

Cover Image: “Hell’s Bells” by Timothy Calla Designed by Amara Trabosh

Faculty Advisor Managing Editor FICTION Senior Editors Taylor Leigh Harper Christine Nguyen Staff Abigail Duran Anayib Figueroa Andrea Ferraro Catie Soo Citlali Salazar Donna Ghassemi Ellise Escamilla Emma Lehman Frank Fiore Gianna Provenzano Iran Bernal Jacob Anderson Jessica Magallanes John Jacob Jovanna Brinck Maris Tasaka Natalie Finander Paige Hua Rachel Sweetnam Selena Camacho Shanahan Europa Stephanie Mattern Tim Liu Veronica Fernandez de Soto

Blog Editor Elise Escamilla

Reed Wilson Amara Trabosh POETRY Senior Editor Eric Fram Staff Alaina Kaplan Carla Diaz Chelsea Olsen Derek Hight Jes DĂaz Jodi Scott Elliott Katheryne Castillo Kylie Haux Natalie Albaran Peyton Austin Raymond Deangelo Timothy Calla

Creative Nonfiction Editor Jodi Scott Elliott Arts Editor Eric Fram Outreach Coordinator Katheryne Castillo Events Coordinator Jessica Magallanes

Editor’s Note

Joining the Westwind Staff in my second year at UCLA felt late, like I’d missed my chance at gaining community, but the atmosphere of encouragement and contribution gave me many opportunities to get involved even as a new staff member, and what began as a casual hobby has come to dominate my time in school, giving me some of my best creative moments, best memories, and best friends. Westwind creates a wonderful exchange as it influences the lives of our members and they in turn influence the direction of the journal. Over the past quarter I’ve gotten to know our many amazing new staff members and grown closer with our returning members. Every meeting they constantly amaze me with their poignant thoughts about submissions and our editorial decisions. Through the last few months I’ve grown to appreciate our many writing communities, from workshops to thesis writers to our own Westwind community. In this issue, we attempt to capture the many communities of our contributors, not just writing or creative-focused ones. In these pieces you will discover these many perspectives: the account of a woman never believed, the effects of the opioid epidemic, and the creative accounts of ancestor’s experiences. Amara Trabosh Managing Editor, 2018-19

Fiction

The act of writing, more often than not, is a solitary effort. You lock the door, close the blinds, turn on your computer or pull out your typewriter or retrieve some yellow legal pad and that pen which only works half of the time. In solitude, you begin to imagine the people, the places, the things of worlds other than this one. Worlds that look and feel nothing like ours. Worlds that are better or worse yet than ours. Worlds that remind us of those we once wanted to be, those we have almost forgotten, those we have admired and feared, those who have always been beloved. The act of writing is certainly an act of love, despite the self-imposed isolation it can require. Editingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; and being part of a community of editors like the Westwind staffâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;illuminates the room in which a writer works alone. In this edition of Westwind, may you find some company among our worlds. From the top of a diving board above a swimming pool to the bottom of a ravine, from two vastly different playgrounds to the high walls of Troy, we hope that somewhere you find comfort and a sense of togetherness. It is with such warmth and tenderness that we have found ourselves together, considering and editing and world-making with readers like you in mind. Taylor Leigh Harper Senior Fiction Editor, 2018-19

Poetry

Looking over the poetry we have selected this quarter, I am struck by the number of love poems â&#x20AC;&#x201C; compelling, complex love poems â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we have received. The outstanding submissions featured in this journal expand the definition of love in a hundred directions. They love people of different genders simultaneously. They love the dead and lost, and they love the mourning process. They love not being in love. They love art, and they love poetry. Together, these wonderful works share a reverence for the creative process, for people, and for the ways that poetry can help us better understand how to feel and express love. I am honored to have had the opportunity to facilitate the sharing of these poems, and to work with a group of talented and insightful writers and artists who are so full of love and who imbue their art with that love. I hope that the poetry in our Fall 2018 journal empowers you to move in your world with love for yourself and for others. Eric Fram Senior Poetry Editor, 2018-19

Table of Contents

a lost friend Jodi Scott Elliott

Soothsayer Christine Nguyen

City River Timothy Calla

First Korean Baptist Church of Metaire, Lousiana 2003 Alexander Anwer

A Great Fall Nathan Lovejoy

17 boxer briefs 2 jobs scorpio Carla Diaz 20

Pretty When You Cry Taylor Leigh Harper

Luna on the culver city bus Sarah Perry

Three Bodies Cat Wang

Untitled Giada Cattaneo

Trying to Love Echo Carbudillo

LIFE IS FUN WHEN YOU DO WHATEVER YOU WANT THE COLORED YOUTH Chelsea Olsen

In the Absence of a Loveletter Sarah Seville

Only Me and No One Else at Home Eric Fram

When Talking with An Ex Husband, Who Has Died and then you die Sheree La Puma

Walking with you Rudy’s street Light leads Sometimes available Gabrielle Mica Macatangay

Paean to Pinocchio’s Elizabeth Nail

House of Addiction: A Personal Account of the Opioid Epidemic Tiffany Hearsey

52 Goodbye Vial Natalie Perez 55

Passing How Sam Survived Sam’s Unnamed Sister, Shot Dead by the SS Eric Fram

Balabusta Love Alexandra Kukof

64 Owl Eyes Untitled my dad’s 3rd favorite movie was Taxi Driver Timothy Calla 67

Honeysuckle High Jessica Humphrey

70 192.168.1.255 Betrayal and I still haven’t written you a song Grace Li 76

Art Through the Viewfinder Father and Son Abraham Ramirez

Synchronized Diving Frank Fiore

Missing Absaroka Kate Morgan

English as a Second Language Madelyn Chen

CO2 Karen Yi

Contributor’s Notes

a lost friend By Jodi Scott Elliott he denies me my lies his eyes pull honesty from my gut to my mouth we pour that truth into shapes those words into stories and call it our beauty but thin layers of fabric removed his heart thuds against bone and skin through my skin and bone now words stop at the lips honesty is left to guesses and lies rest in silence he refuses me his ears so i cannot try the words â&#x20AC;&#x153;i could have loved youâ&#x20AC;?

Soothsayer By Christine Nguyen They say the god Apollo kissed the power of prophecy onto my lips, then spat into my mouth so I would never speak anything but doom and destruction. That no man would want me, divine or mortal, and my words are nothing but a sign of my weak woman’s mind. That I was born knowing too much. That the gods’ knowledge in my head drove me mad. I say this: to know the truth, you must be willing to see it. ******* I stand upon the high walls of Troy, staring across the wide plain before me to the sandy beaches where the fires of the Greek encampment burn bright. The wind whistles through the field before me, echoing in my head along with the beat of my hollow, leaden heart. “Cassandra” A voice, rich and smooth, rings through the crisp night air. Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, steps beside me. The woman for whom my brother must die, whose name will bring Troy’s walls crumbling to the earth. Helen, who looks more girl than woman in a second-hand dress borrowed from my mother. “Cassandra, it is late. You should rest,” she says. Her hand wavers in the air just above my elbow, then drops to her side. “I cannot sleep,” I tell her. “I worry for Hector.” “He is a good man,” she says. “And a great warrior. I pray the gods protect him.” “This war has killed many good men. Tomorrow, he will be one of them,” I say. I have already warned Hector of his fate, but it has done no good. I do not know what to think of this brother, who loves me and listens to me, but will not hear me when I speak. Not when the call of eternal glory enchants him to his death with its siren song. “How do you know?” Helen demands. “How can you know this?” “Don’t you know?” My smile is bitter and my words twice so. “You, who holds people’s hearts the way I never will.” Helen runs a hand through her hair. To anyone else, it would be a sign of vanity, but her fingers weave a tale of worry and deep-seated pain. “I know what people say of you, Cassandra of Troy. I ask you to

tell me the truth. I want to know what you know. Help me see what I have wrought upon these people.” Helen rests her hands on the wall and I watch her fingers tremble against the edge of the stone. Her plea is strange to me. I have resented her for the past ten years, blaming her for the tragedy that has happened and the devastation to come. But now, when I hear her blame herself, the knot of hatred loosens in my heart. “You are a strange woman, Helen of Troy,” I say. And for the first time tonight, she smiles, though her mouth trembles with the effort of damming back her grief. “Very well,” I say. “So long as he still breathes, Achilles will settle for nothing less than the death of his lover’s killer. And once Hector falls––” “So will Troy,” Helen says. “Yes.” My prophecy weighs on us, and I think that even Atlas’s burden cannot compare. “How can this be our future?” she whispers, her voice reverent as a prayer. “Our future?” I ask. “Yes.” Helen’s fingers close over mine. “Ours.” I don’t know if she can do anything with the knowledge I’ve given her. But in the warmth of her hand above mine, I find her truly as beautiful as they say. That she is worth all this pain and sorrow. “I’m sorry,” she says. I wrap my arms around her and reply, “I am too.” For now, we are not Helen and Cassandra; we are just two women of Troy.

City River by Timothy Calla 15

First Korean Baptist Church of Metairie, Lousiana 2003

By Alexander Anwer

Children, no more than five, shout towards the playroom: a little, bleached space with toys. They clot like milk, running down the aisle and over the suede which Pastor Hahm steams. One child, Jenny, holds the nape of a boy’s neck before fumbling on rubber sandals. Knees folded, she asks the group to wait, but her voice only reaches as far as the ceiling. Some grandma’s ears sag from the pew. Staring at the girl’s feet, she directs a whisper, churning it like spit. Jenny looks up to say something of her own. Her words travel the room, to the grandma’s black perm, to the effigy of Jesus on the cross. Jenny’s hands tuck her toes into her shoe, then, she simpers before running away. The ajumma complains to Jesus. Opening the kneeler, her hips follow and her hands fold. Jenny drags the doorknob to the playroom and looks back to the pews, the empty space. In the middle most row, black curls bob like fish hooks. They wait patiently, raised to the ceiling, chirping like small birds.

A Great Fall By Nathan Lovejoy Steam from the stove and grills billowed over his face, fogging his glasses so that he could hardly discern the expanding yellowness of the yolks he was whisking together in the back kitchen of the Chinese buffet. The recipe demanded that he not overbeat the eggs, but even through clouded lenses he could tell when they were of the right consistency to join the broth simmering in the pot next to him. This was egg drop soup. Making egg drop soup always reminded him of elementary school and the Egg Drop competition. He and his classmates were instructed to each bring an egg along with a device that would hold it and keep it from cracking after being dropped from the school’s roof. “Your egg will be able to survive a fall into Tartarus, Max,” said his engineer mother after he’d explained the rules to her. They set to work that same afternoon. Max went to the fridge and selected an egg from a carton auspiciously labeled “grade A” and suddenly mislabeled “cage free,” while his mother produced twine and plastic straws from the pantry. He Sharpied a smile onto his egg, named it Humpty Dumpty, and tucked it into a little muslin bag. He cinched it closed and suspended it with twine from all vertices of the cubic straw frame assembled and taped together by his mother. “It looks almost like a tesseract in three dimensions,” she said of Humpty Dumpty’s finished cradle. He came to school on the day of the competition and stood with his classmates in the playground wood chips, where they were well outside the estimated blast radius. Mrs. Simon stood on the roof and held their egg containers up one by one, reading the names written on them before hurling them over the edge like thirty-odd Spartan infanticides. She called out Max’s name. He watched her launch his little tesseract airborne, and as it spun he thought he saw something come undone at one corner and slightly upset the taut perfection of the outer cube, dooming the frame well before it had crumpled and distended on the pavement at impact. It scarcely slowed the fall of Humpty Dumpty, who lay in pieces inside the cloth bag oozing yellow tempera onto the

blacktop. On the drive home from school Max sat, tears streaming, in the back seat and looked incredulously at his mom as she drove. “Did you do that on purpose?” She eyed him levelly in the rear-view mirror and said nothing. “Why?” he wailed, sniffling. “Why?” “It’s something you have to learn now or never,” she said. The chicken broth was at a boil. He stood in the hellish restaurant kitchen with droplets of sweat running down his forehead and into his eyes, stinging them, and he took off his glasses to wipe away the sweat with the back of his hand. Then he looked at the bowl in front of him and realized he’d overbeaten the eggs.

boxer briefs By Carla Diaz accent is a mardi gras in london, tooth gap is a playful child, lips are apricot plump, skin is soft as ripe peaches, voice is soothing as honey in hot tea. dry cleaned shirt, cream soda in one hand, scent is fresh mint on a dollop of whipped cream. but his hands say ramen noodles, his jeans say 9 to 5, and when he is yelling, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s texas. when he took off his shades, his face is a mugshot. eyes are 2am bus rides, hairline prescribed melatonin. when he took off his hat, he is married with 2 children, he knocks doors at 1am, wanting to relive with youth who should be living it

2 jobs By Carla Diaz my uncleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s jet-black hair, slicked back by brown fingers and sticky green gel, eyes always had jokes to tell, and hands that charmed even the old ladies selling jeweled rosaries at the flea market. robot puppy that jumps, blue jeans with pink belts, costco size detergent, dolls with cat eyes and black hair. we ride with him even though we are scared when he he swerves down streets in a rocky red car that sets off alarms. he gave my mother a flowered dress she does not accept white smile promises that he has a new job, downtown at the new taqueria. but when she tries it on, the plastic alarm tag sticks out on her hip.

scorpio By Carla Diaz large buttery avocados ripped open on warm tortillas. scorpions scatter on rocks, children pick them up with their bare hands, laughing as their stingers rise in the air. tight braids, church on sundays, crossing your legs in modesty. long orange hot days, child neighbors who bring baskets of sweet breads made in stone ovens. 14-year-old counts money with six other siblings in a shared bedroom. large baby brotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes wearing ripped blue sneakers count with her. mother drinks black coffee in plastic cups and smokes cigarettes in front of hungry stomachs. black hair wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t turn grey in years of smoke.

Pretty When You Cry By Taylor Leigh Harper You kneel as the blacktop sizzles. The sun contracts at a point high above the playground. Light stretches outward and down, there are no clouds, and the sky looks white. Sweat grows sticky and slick where the short cut of your bangs touches your forehead, in the peach fuzz above your tightly-closed lips. Remember, you’re supposed to be smiling. You’re having fun. Remember? So you smile, all gums, still a few baby teeth. You kneel because Mariah tells you to. You kneel because you are playing a game. Mariah stands in the shadow of the building closest to the field. She leans with one foot pressed against a closed classroom door. Crossed arms, no smile. She says she’s having fun, even though it’s only you two. Usually there’s also Rebecca and Lauren, sometimes Alexis. Mariah doesn’t say why the other girls aren’t playing with you today. Mariah makes all the rules. She says she likes you, and when a third-grader tells you she likes you, you do whatever she says to make her stay liking you. Especially if it means she’ll be your friend. Even if it means sore knees for a week, bloodied by the kicked-up gravel loose across the hot ground. “Bark,” Mariah says, so you do. “Good dog,” Mariah says, and you are. She pats your head, looks down on you with a squint. “Let’s go for a walk.” You start to stand up, but Mariah shakes her head. “I haven’t taught you how to walk on two legs,” she says. “You don’t know that trick yet.” She steps away from the classroom wall and drags her shoe through the chalky corner of an abandoned hopscotch square. “Come along now,” she says. On your hands and knees. Walk. You follow the leader, your owner, your friend, Mariah. The sun tracks you both like a spotlight. Your knees scrape the asphalt, staining your shins, coating your fingers like ash. Your hands throb, the blisters on your palms sore and sour from playing on the monkey bars. When you slow down, Mariah coos, making wet kissy sounds with her mouth.

“Keep going,” she says. “Almost there.” Concentrate on each step she takes. When she lifts one bony ankle, lift one of your dirty knees. Let your tongue go slack, a pink patty of flesh hanging out of your mouth. Mariah leads you to the other end of the playground, where there is more grass, and a single tall tree. In the shade the grass is black and cool. Collapse, panting. Roll over on the soft dirt. Never mind that the mud will stain your dress. You’ve already soiled it with the stink and marks of sweat. You whimper. You want to play something else. You don’t want to be the pet anymore. Mariah sits across from you. She rests her chin on her knees, and she watches you. “I bet you look pretty when you cry,” she says. “Let me see you cry.” She doesn’t blink, so you don’t either. Stare. You stare at Mariah’s perfectly smart, straight nose, the beauty marks and moles across her face, her dimpled chin. Your eyes begin to water, tears wet and warm under your nose. She’s already won whatever new game to which only she knows the rules. “Roll over,” she says. “Shake.” Your paw is heavy in her hand. “Stand,” she says. You scramble onto your shaky hindlimbs. Mariah extends her hand toward you, even though she doesn’t need your help, not even a little bit. She rises to meet you. “Good girl.” You wipe your nose, embarrassed. What an ugly crier you are: flushing cheeks, violent hiccups, mouth twisted into a pout. The first warning bell rings. Recess is almost over. You look toward the classrooms. The other students stay out at the basketball courts, the swings, the sandbox. Mariah doesn’t go back until the final bell. She crosses her arms again, ordering you to stay with her. She hasn’t told you to go yet. You feel like crying some more, tired and hot and all the way out here on the far side of the playground with no supervisor, no other kids. “Bark!” You beg to go back, ready to forfeit this game, even if it means your knees are sore for nothing and Mariah won’t be your friend. “Crybaby,” Mariah says. She looks away and waves you off. You’re a bad dog. You’ve lost her interest. The final bell rings, its high-pitched howl commanding everyone to come back inside. Walk back alone. In line, no one knows better if those are traces of tears or of sweat down your reddening cheeks. Later, when your mother asks why you skinned your legs and arms and ruined your dress, tell her you fell, tell her you tripped over your two awkward human feet, tell her it’s prettier like this: dirtied, debased, still warm from the blacktop.

Luna By Sarah Perry The moon kissed me last night it’s a ritual of ours, but we don’t tell la luna is my closest friend I used to hide from her before I knew she turns my brown skin opal and blue It’s true my body changes with her cycles: flourishing when she is full and hungry when she is hiding. And when she is gone, she’s making space in the tightness of my chest but she soothes my swollen eyes with her sweet lullabies wisdom only eons can come by She knows me more than you sees me as I slide into parked cars with new friends who leave when novelty rots or stay with full promise and hopeful thoughts sees my wine-drunk stumbles hears my clumsy outbursts of rage-coated words She knows me beneath sheets entangled with another or pouring over myself writhing with regret or blooming in forgiveness lathering in liquid gold or wishing myself another as I listen to laughter creep through the walls. when I speak of the men in my life she whispers how she copes with the sun’s fire. I ask how she is unjealous of the sun’s other lovers. She asks how I am lonely on earth among people I lie out for her and she lays out for me a night sky on which to map out my sorrows or my boasts depending on the constellations yes, the moon will kiss me tonight as she turns my brown skin opal and blue.

on the culver city bus By Sarah Perry broken the broken the i traverse this city and broken the woman lying flat on the sidewalk old man yelling at the bus driver unprovoked i remember the news article nine dead accident bus argument passenger & driver broken the bus driver argues back i should have taken a Bird i think instead i spend hours brushing against strangers saying please donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t touch me more times broken the i donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t take the money he is offering women laugh through discomfort again we are late

Three Bodies By Cat Wang 1 At the age of ten, Cassandra Smith is told that she is fat by her mother. Her sisters titter into their hands. At the age of eleven, Cassandra starves herself. One by one, her organs wither like fallen fruit, until she is sent to the hospital. She survives. Having missed two months of school, Cassandra is paired up with Lynne and Opal, other ninth graders, to help her catch up. The three girls become friends, inseparable, as tightly woven as the walls of a birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nest. 2 It is summertime in Texas. The tears on Cassandraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face are electric in the hot air. She wipes her face with a closed fist. A cold, calculating calm consumes her. She takes out her flip phone, sending an image to almost everyone she knows at school. She selects each word carefully, as if she is plucking splinters from flesh. 3 Cassandra marries a mild-mannered man fifteen years her senior. She bears two daughters. Cassandra allows the girls to eat anything they want - gummy bears, yogurt pretzels, peanut butter pancakes. Her children expand in width, slowly blossoming with rolls and folds of fat. As she stirs her diet tea one morning, Cassandra becomes aware of the fact that all she has ever known is hunger.

1 Opal grows up loving books. Her favorite part of reading is imagining what would happen after the story ended. Opal wants to become precisely what her mother intends her to become: a doctor. 2 Opal’s first kiss is with Lynne. They are at a group sleepover. Cassandra is presumably downstairs, speaking to her father on the phone. Opal and Lynne lie tangled in each other’s limbs. Their gazes meet. Drawn together, like petals of a flower closing, they resume. Their tongues swoop around each other as the door creaks, unnoticed, behind them. 3 After barely graduating, Opal follows the trail of one drug to another: weed to cocaine to heroin to anything, anything at all, that she can procure. She crashes on couches, shunned by her parents, trying to forget the many parts of her that she feels she no longer owns. The rest, which she recollects from therapy years later, is blackness. She cannot imagine further. 1 Lynne Bonner had always wanted a tattoo. The idea of metal piercing her skin, darting in and out, both repelled and excited her. She had fantasized about fantastical dragons. When Cassandra told Lynne that she liked her, like, wanted her, they decided the best thing to do would be to pretend as though nothing had happened. It made them feel adult, political. 2 Once the image was sent, it tore through the school, like a knife rending flesh. The caption read: “Opal Brown and Lynne Bonner are FILTHY LESBIANS.” For all that matters, her parents do not side with her.

Months pass. One day, Lynne draws a bath. The razor blade is sharper than she imagined. Wincing and taking a breath, she pulls downwards.

Untitled by Giada Cattaneo

Trying to Love By Echo Carbudillo She balanced a wine glass of whiskey on her bare skin, just below her sternum, wondering if I could ever love her. I didn’t know. He asked the same question quietly into the pillow, trying to convince himself that he was a good boy. I didn’t know how. When they ran their hands through their dry curls, fingers caught up in knots, and whispered that we would be okay, I tried to believe them, but I didn’t know. I reflected them all as a mirror, displaying the dim glow of collected fireflies released into a late Spring night. They flashed with gestures when, still, I didn’t know how.

By Chelsea Olsen

THE COLORED YOUTH By Chelsea Olsen

DEDICATED TO THE VICTIMS OF POLICE BRUTALITY That’s him, the colored youth: his image there Upon the wall. How hollow is his stare, How in the grasp of death his lips speak all, Yet naught: at once a whisper and a wail. ‘Twas truly not the mask he wore in life. That face he had, I swore he had a knife. His look of anger, vile desire, too! Struck fear into my humble heart of blue. You have to understand, I’ve seen them ‘round The streets and not a one of them I’ve found Has any damned respect for me. My badge they spit upon with glee. This - vile creature coming toward my gun Left me no choice, but what? To turn and run? Of honor born and bred is my esteem. I trust, of course, my record will redeem This slight miscalculation I have made. Consider how the beast might instigate A beating from his master. Can you blame A master’s rough but vital need to tame? Rebelling beasts that rile up the herd Must have, in mind, their lesser place secured. Such trauma has been lent me by this youth, That saintly penitence I feel in truth, For ‘twas an isolated incident And verily I’ll publicly repent. A leave of absence? This would not suffice. This young criminal’s life not worth the price Of losing my position. Matters great

That come with riots and movements do hate The power of our laws and government. I must now in my station implement Unfounded heed of sensitivity, So other officers end not like me. Of course, I trust, the end will turn out fine; Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not a soul to blame, not even mine.

In the Absence of a Loveletter

By Sarah Seville

How do you tell somebody you’ll never love him? That of all the people in the world who look like compelling paths in soft sunlight, he is not one you are ever going to travel. That after all this time, if there is one thing you know, it is what not-love looks like. You could recognize it at eye contact in a crowded room, like an old flame in a new suit. It is always the same ache, that same shape recognizable by tracing the edges of an absence, the space where potential love packed its bags and headed off down the highway. You always play the villain in this story, the one whose reluctance gets lost in the telling. Even honestly looks like malice in the right light. Here, “I don’t love you,” is mercy draped in cruelty’s old jacket, still trying to do the right thing.

Only Me and No One Else at Home

By Eric Fram

My eighteenth birthday was a calm and bright day, which made it all the more of a shame to have sullied the carnations and the hydrangeas and the orchids and the roses and the blood and the roses and the blood and the roses and the blood on the soft gray brick around the fountain. My best friend, Seth, lay inconveniently against the stout wall of the emptied-out fishpond, having finally ceased his gargling and gasping. I picked up the severed chunk of stone that I had used to smash his brains and reattached it to the statue at the center of the fountain. The deteriorated granite toddler tipping a vase into the pond at his feet teetered in thanks as I replaced the segment of his head that my father had chipped off eighteen years prior in one of his monstrous fits. That is why he is not allowed to come home anymore. He is a hideous Lake Monster who disguised himself as human and tricked my mother into harboring a half-human fetus. My mother raised me human, but I worry sometimes that I have not grown my Lake Monster parts quite yet. Either that or I have managed to overcome the Lake Monster tendencies of my father: violence, rage, revulsion. But after I was born, my father peeled back his pallid sleeve-skin to reveal his swampy green gills, slimy scales, silver claws, and evil orange eyes. At the foot of my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bed, he unsheathed his base form like a knife pointed at my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s throat, allowing his false human skin adorned in a smile and a grossly dated moustache to fall at his sweating Lake Monster ankles. I can only imagine watching him shake the fake flesh from his feet like a sad clown shedding his polka dot pants. He spoke in Lake Monster tongues and grasped at me with his webbed Lake Monster hands, desiring to take me away and swallow me whole, licking his lips and gnashing at my head. When my mother recoiled, as any sensible human would do, he launched into a violent assault on our home, slashing the curtains, ripping the doors from their hinges, and, as I mentioned, smashing the head of the poor statue in our garden fountain. My mother tells me that when the boyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face split and the loose half fell into the pond, the water

that once spilled from his vase stopped flowing, and all of the fish in the pond writhed belly-up. Looking again at the inert fountain, I wondered if I had ever told Seth that story. On all of the occasions that he and I walked around the garden catching finches, he had failed to ask why the fountain was not working. Maybe he had assumed it was just ornamental. I was sad that I would never be able to tell him. Seth had also failed to ask why I never allowed him inside the house. That is what made him a good friend. It would not have been right for him to have seen the stains of my father’s Lake Monster bile or my mother steadfastly scrubbing the walls every day at noon. The remnants of my father were not to leak from the front door. But the panic of seeing the shape of Seth in the window when he arrived unannounced was enough to erase his face and replace it with that of my dreadful father, fins and all. I grabbed Seth by his ankles and proceeded to drag him through the tall grass in the backyard. His bleeding brain left a thick red line in the matted grass as if drawing directions on a map of the estate. Every so often he would sputter some thick, mucusy blood around the edges of his mouth, and I would bend to wipe it off with my handkerchief. That was the least I could do, seeing him in such unbecoming condition. As I plodded through the grass towards the edges of the property, I heard a window open. “Who is it at the door?” my mother yelled from her bedroom. “It’s Seth. He said he hopes you’re feeling better,” I returned. “Is he still waiting outside? Let him in so I can give him a snack.” It was almost incredible how different it was inside the house from outside. In my mother’s bedroom, Seth was alive, joking about one of our other friends, and I was handing him a watering can to help me with the lilies. He was detailing his plans for the weekend and all the fun things we could do to celebrate my birthday. He was talking my ear off about his father, not of the Lake Monster variety. In the garden where I stood, Seth’s ear was agape like a clam. “That’s okay. He has to go soon.” “Alright, tell him to send his mother my best wishes.” The window closed. I huffed and proceeded toward a ravine to the side of the house, realizing that Seth’s mother would probably miss him very much. I looked up at the abandoned guard tower that stood at the gate. I, too, very much missed our old guard, even though he failed us when my father came back for the first time. Between the ages of zero and six, my mother and I were free of my father, with the exception of about five portentous letters which

he wrote in blood or red ink that was meant to look like blood. During this time my mother and I developed our daily precautionary routine of checking the nails in the boards on the windows, inspecting the basement for leaks, plastering the cracks in the ceiling. We made a game of it, but the labor left my mother always tired and aching from the effort. Despite our efforts, when I turned six, my father returned unannounced. As he knocked on our door, my mother and I naively assumed it was a friend arriving to wish me a happy birthday. No, he stood at the door, claws protracted and sharp against my grandmother’s neck. She stood there in stunned quiet. I do not remember exactly what my father said, as I was just six years old; but roughly, he said to my mother that he just wanted to see my face. Or eat my face – one of the two. When he released my grandmother, he immediately grabbed me to take me away to his Lake Monster cesspool. I struggled against his oily arms until my mother managed to pry me out, shutting the door permanently. She invested in the construction of a guard tower and hired a guard to sit in it. And for some time, he caught no sight of my father. When I turned twelve, my father returned again. The guard clearly was unequipped to face my father’s arrival, because he entered our property with no difficulty at all and left the guard’s dead body wilting on the tower, severed hips and shoulders leaned against the gate and entrails spooling like rope on the roof. My mother and I cowered in the basement as my father pounded at the door and shouted profanity through the windows. Following an hour of uninterrupted rage, he grew tired and left, after which my mother cleaned up the guard’s body and buried him in the ravine under a bouquet of roses. Since then, I have taken it upon myself to defend our home. But it was evident from the six-year pattern of my father’s arrivals that I needed to be especially vigilant on my eighteenth birthday. When I was a child, my father could have taken me and perverted my nature to turn me into a vile Lake Monster like himself. Now, however, he would have to destroy the life I have built as a good, decent human in order to extract my cryptid genes. At the edge of the ravine, I tidied Seth’s shirt in the manner of a proper burial, fixing his tie and smoothing his collar. These efforts were subverted when I heaved his body into the ravine and his contortion wrinkled his shirt further. His hand rested on Janice’s gray forehead just below the line of her disintegrating black hair as if he were checking her temperature, which obviously was impossible since neither of them had so much as a pulse and he was dead and therefore unconcerned with her temperature.

Janice was our mail carrier until I was thirteen, as I unfortunately cut her career short. After my father carried out his invasion on my twelfth birthday, I spent my afternoons pacing the garden to prevent any further intrusions. Recently thirteen, I was performing my inspection extra-vigilantly, and as I passed the fountain, I heard the sickly patter of footsteps nearing the front door. In my panic, I thought only to grab the severed cranium of the statue. I ran towards the house and saw Janice – though I somehow did not recognize her in her usual powder blue outfit and navy hat – reaching her hand into the mail slot, which meant, of course, that she was attempting to break in. Before she could feel me approach, I struck the back of her head with the stone. In a flash the body fell limp and I recognized the face as Janice’s. Her hand was still stuck in the mail slot, so she lay as if shackled by one wrist to the wall of a prison cell. I nervously decided to transfer her body to the ravine. I wondered now if Janice was also Seth’s mail carrier those years ago. It was so unpleasant seeing Seth’s body in that position, with his limbs askew and the sullied sole of his shoe pressed against the ribs of another corpse, Roy. He was my mother’s friend who had come to check on her without providing advance notice. Unlike Janice, he did not make it to the front door. Just as he entered through the gate as a vague specter and raised his arm to wave to me, I beat him in the face, and he slumped softly into a bed of hydrangeas which he dyed crimson. This particular occasion was rather funny, as the left eye of the statue’s head happened to hit Roy just near his own left eye, almost as if he and the statue were looking deep into each other’s eyes at the time of Roy’s death. With Roy, Janice, and Seth here and no one having come for them, there were more scent trails leading to our home. None of their bodies belonged on our land. My hands were destined to press the soil around the rose bushes, and my legs evolved over millions of years specifically to walk the halls of our house. My body, not theirs, was intended by the divine to reintegrate itself into the wood of the walls and the grass in the yard after my death. My father in particular was unfit to exist in our home. A creature such as himself could never survive in a civilized or natural space. He would cannibalize our family and evacuate the house of its sanctity. Now, the three desiccating bodies rested at the bottom of the ravine, which, while it once was an active river, was dry like the fishpond in the garden. The overgrowth of weeds cradled their sides and arms and legs and faces and surely would soon entomb and absorb them. The river desperately thirsted to drain them of their blood.

When Talking with An Ex Husband, Who Has Died

By Sheree La Puma To Scott

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best to clutch a wedding picture to your chest, lest he forget who you are. No longer bound by the ways the world, he may point his skull skyward if you question him on life or death. He may reach for clouds or stars, or cosmic dust. Leave aside regrets, remorse, reassure him that there are no immense hands that shuffle the universe. Love him. Caress the bones in his face. Remind him that time slips from the hands of the angels into the hands of mathematicians. Love more. Do not reflect on what is lost, family, sex, dreams both tender & hostile. Everyday life is too small to be distinguished. Know when itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time, the silver thread

will fray, then snap & he will drift away from you. Point him home to urn or moon. Close your eyes & weep. Write Poetry. Let it seep into your soul like a long cherished hope.

and then you die By Sheree La Puma having loved me first morning sun afternoon showers a lake, a mirror a field of strawberries. summer comes in golds & yellows butterfly god. love in the morning your skin, the heat of your blood feeds the earth mouth by mouth. & we are hungry. 24 hours.

they say a butterfly lives for mere

we do not listen, amongst the sighs & moans, your breath my lungs, death rides down in a hot tunnel of wind. when i fail to quench inside of him he exhumes your bones one by one, creating his own topography. you live

the animal

for what seems a very short time & i am left with this love poem.

Walking with you by Gabrielle Mica Macatangay

Rudyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s street by Gabrielle Mica Macatangay

Light leads & Sometimes available by Gabrielle Mica Macatangay

Paean to Pinocchio’s By Elizabeth Nail yes of course we must have mozzarella sticks no there’s nothing childish about it at all see right here on the menu it’s under “antipasti” and that’s Italian and grown-up and if you won’t eat them there’ll just be more for look you know I can’t think straight when you look at me like that oh so this is what lust feels like the crackling murmur of a woodburning stove or maybe the Energy Star thudding overhead bearing my long-coveted mozzarella sticks now ignored but not your order but not my nerve

House of Addiction: A Personal Account of the Opioid Epidemic

By Tiffany Hearsey

Stained-glass windows depict saints muted in color, the grayness outside stripping them of their vibrancy. Below the heavenly figures inside St. John’s Catholic Church in Bangor, Maine were subtle reminders of a country in crisis. Alongside rosaries and holy water sat pamphlets about opioid addiction. I reflect that these things were not included in the church where my father had his funeral nearly two decades ago. The memento mori of the morning’s proceedings that stood out amongst the talismans of the Christian faithful was the funeral card of Sean Michael Yankowsky. It displayed the picture of a young man, 21 years old with a smiling cherub face against a backdrop of trees. I had read about Yankowsky1 in the local paper. Second son to die of an overdose, it read. Parents made the brave move to include that information in the obituary,2 some noted. I think to myself that no one spoke of my father’s history of addiction during the public rituals of grief. Looking at the funeral card in the empty church, I felt a doubling of time: the heavy energy of sorrow and the agonizing silence when the parade of mourners left. It was a feeling I was well acquainted with. During my stay in Bangor, I would wander the dark places of my childhood and explore the epidemic that has been ravaging the country. I came to Maine via Los Angeles, California, happy to be free of the endless stream of cars and distracted glances of my fellow Angelenos. Upon my arrival to Bangor, I was surrounded by impressions of things that go bump in the night. The city is most famous for being the backdrop to stories of killer clowns and wendigo felines as depicted in Stephen King novels. The author lives in the city, taking residence in a mansion³ replete with wrought iron bats and dragons sitting atop a gate surrounding his home. King’s macabre stories acted as my compass in finding my way to _______________ 1

http://bangordailynews.com/2018/06/26/news/bangor/maine-family-loses-secondson-in-less-than-a-year-to-drug-addiction/ 2 https://obittree.com/obituary/us/maine/bangor/bangor/sean-yankowsky/3541244/ 3 https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/stephen-kings-house

the New England state. His tales of the unlucky who return home to literally face their childhood demons, whether it be a cymbal clanging toy monkey or giant spider, became my lullabies. But I also came to Bangor to explore what lay beyond King’s fictional worlds. The skyline in downtown is dotted with church spires, and from certain angles you can see a bloated white cylindrical tower looming atop a hill. The Thomas Hill Standpipe has been storing the town’s water supply since the late nineteenth century. Down below, the Kenduskeag Stream empties into the Penobscot River which, on hot days, looks like a blanket of blue silk. This pastoral setting contrasts with some of the gatherings at Pickering Square, a stone’s throw from the river. Many of the people in the square have the weathered expressions of a hard life of sleeping out on the streets or wear dazed looks and sit motionless under the sunshine. One in particular likes to accost walking tour groups. Passing by the square with a tour, a curly haired man stampeded over, zeroing in on an attendee. He flicked his fingers just inches from the man’s face like he was flicking away darting flies. “FUCK YOU!” he roared. “I bet you’re a fucking democrat!” The political antagonist soon left with no further incident and the consensus of the group was that he was on drugs. Or had mental health issues. Or both. “This feels like home,” I joked to the group. Nervous laughter was the reply but what the group didn’t know was that a joke intended to break the tension, had a double meaning. My private world growing up in a house of addiction felt like it had extended into the public realm. *** Beginning in the late ‘90s, doctors started treating pain as a vital sign and began over-prescribing opioid medication that pharmaceutical companies falsely marketed as safe and effective.4 Many patients became addicted and when they were cut off from the drugs or could no longer afford them, they began abusing heroin or the synthetic drug fentanyl, both cheaper and deadlier options. Twenty years later, the U.S. is experiencing an opioid epidemic that has spread across the nation like a phantom spider’s web. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) drug overdose deaths nearly tripled from 1999-2014.⁵ In 2016, over 60 percent of _______________

⁴https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/7/15724054/opioid-epidemic-lawsuits-purdue-oxycontin ⁵https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm655051e1.htm

overdose deaths resulted from opioid drugs.⁶ Maine has been hit harder than many states and is only getting worse. According to the Maine Attorney General’s office,⁷ 418 people died of drug-induced deaths in 2017: an 11 percent increase from 2016. Most of these deaths were caused by opioids. The epidemic in Maine has been fraught with issues affecting rural areas and the working class. Physical labor and chronic pain tend to combine within the wellspring of self-sufficiency and hard work. Bruce Campbell, the clinical director at Bangor Area Recovery Network, an organization that provides recovery support for addiction, points out that an aging working-class population, many of whom engaged in physically demanding jobs such as on lobster boats or on farms, experienced chronic pain later in life. This converged with over-prescribing practices and poverty. Out of desperation, some patients began selling their prescriptions to pay their mortgages, thus contributing to an already existing supply and demand chain of drugs. “The relationship between poverty, pain and prescribing practices all contributed” to the opioid epidemic in Maine, Campbell states. Adding, “We need to address issues of poverty.” Americans are struggling as income inequality has increased nationwide. Stagnant wages and rising housing costs, coupled with a corporate America that invests massive government tax cuts into executive pay and stocks rather than investing in jobs, is the triptych of American greed. And we’re suffering for it. A recent survey conducted by the Federal Reserve found that almost half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. 40 percent said they would not be able to pay their bills if they had a $400 emergency.⁸ Poverty and financial struggles are not the only causes of addiction. What we experience in childhood can also foreshadow drug abuse as adults. Courtney Allen, co-founder of James’ Place, which is located in Maine and provides housing for those in recovery, illustrates the direct link between drug abuse and trauma. “The adults who are seeking drugs as a way to cope with pain, have almost always experienced some sort of traumatic event as a child.” She goes on to say, “I think our systems are currently serving the children that we failed.” There is evidence to back up Allen’s claim. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study found that for each traumatic event a child experienced, they _______________

6https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html 7https://www.maine.gov/ag/news/article.shtml?id=788298 8https://thehill.com/policy/finance/388954-survey-nearly-half-of-americans-cantcover-an-unexpected-400-expense

were two to four times more likely to grow up and become an addict.⁹ I have come to understand that a traumatic childhood and economic challenges had a major impact on my father’s road to addiction. Drugs were not solely to blame for his downward spiral into drug and alcohol abuse. As a witness to his addiction, I understood from a young age that drugs didn’t flip a switch that caused my father’s anguish and erratic behavior. Those things existed before the pills. *** We successfully navigated the tombstones and made our way to the weathered stone staircase cut into a hill. The steps were uneven and jagged and walking up them felt akin to ascending a flight of stairs of a medieval church to get a better view of the gargoyles. We sat overlooking Mount Hope Cemetery. The cemetery, erected in Bangor in the early nineteenth century, was one of the first garden cemeteries in the country.10 Park-like in appearance with trees, ponds and trails to walk on, this place was built for the living and the dead. Because this part of the world is known as Stephen King country, I was reminded of the story of the hope-sick father carrying the limp body of his dead son up those very stairs to resurrect him at the pet sematary. And so it goes that this was a good place to talk about fear. Clutching a bloated juice-sized box of red wine, I mention to a friend I made in downtown that I’m working on a piece about the opioid epidemic. “Why that subject?” I take a sip of my juice box. “Addiction runs on both sides of my family,” I say. “My father overdosed when I was a child.” I tell him, “I was there when it happened.” *** My father told me that his stomach had been pumped due to an adverse reaction to Tylenol. By age 11, however, I knew the difference between an over the counter bottle and a prescription one. When my brother and I saw his 6-foot 200-pound body slumped on the floor 25 years ago, I didn’t understand at the time what was happening. But I knew it wasn’t a good sign that before we found his unconscious body, I saw him sitting on the edge of his bed holding a prescription bottle. The D.A.R.E programs I had in school encouraging kids to “just say no” to drugs did not provide instruction on how to deal with a parent who had just overdosed on opioid prescription drugs. It didn’t tell me how to deal with his erratic behavior when mixing pills and booze. It didn’t tell me how to deal with my father’s demons that he tried to _______________

9Hari, Johann. “Chasing the Scream: The first and Last Days of the War on Drugs”. p.160. 10 https://mthopebgr.com/history/

quiet with substance abuse. I couldn’t tell my father to “just say no” to his addiction as he was slumped on the floor. He wouldn’t have heard me anyway even if I had. Instead, I ran to the kitchen and filled a glass of water to pour over his face to wake him up. The only reply I got back was a flutter of eyelids. *** In the twenty-five years since my father’s overdose, America has been engaging in ever increasing acts of self-harm.11 According to the CDC, life expectancy in the U.S. dropped in 2017 due to a rise in drug overdoses and suicides.12 Concurrently, there has been an increase in social isolation. At a time when we should be addressing the societal ills of selfharm, childhood trauma, and rising income inequality, we’ve become more isolated from one another. Real world communities have been largely replaced by the cyber-shrines of our past selves: selfies, tweets and pictures of half-eaten meals. Loneliness has become an epidemic and the response is capitalist enterprise. Companies now exist where you can rent emotional connections, such as a “friend” for a day.13 Addiction is a way to adapt to the despairs of the modern age, argues renowned Canadian psychologist Dr. Bruce Alexander. Dr. Alexander is best known for his Rat Park experiment which showed that when rats were given the option of receiving doses of morphine versus a community of their rodent counterparts, food and games, the rats overwhelmingly chose social interaction over drugs.14 They ingested less than 5 milligrams of morphine per day compared to rats isolated alone in cages that ingested a whopping 25 milligrams per day. Another study in the U.S. had similar findings to Dr. Alexander’s research. A U.S. government study conducted under the Nixon administration found that 15 percent of soldiers serving in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. These soldiers stayed in Vietnam until they got clean. Upon returning home to America, astonishingly only 5 percent relapsed.15 Once the soldiers were taken out of a violent and unpredictable environment, they stopped using heroin. These studies prove that isolation and environmental stressors impact responses to drug use. These stressors are due to a breakdown of the modern age and the psychological impact has been devastating. _______________

https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/suicide/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/29/health/life-expectancy-2017-cdc/index.html 13 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/21/friends-rental-service 14 Hari, Johann. Chasing the Scream. 15 https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnamtaught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits 11 12

Dr. Alexander surmised in a speech given this year16 that we are afflicted by what he calls the “mass dislocation of individuals.” “Dislocation,” he tells us is the “individual psychological consequences that follow from societal fragmentation.” This fragmentation, he explains, can lead to deficits in sense of belonging, identity, and purpose. While he is quick to point out that risk factors such as poverty, childhood trauma, and depression can increase the likelihood of addiction, the main culprit is a fragmented society. This “generates misery in the form of anxiety, suicide, depression, disorientation, hopeless and resentful violence.” Addiction, he concludes “is a common way of adapting to dislocation.”17 The dislocated modern day looks like a damaged utopia where too many believe that fierce individualism, competitiveness, and loss of community will create happiness and fulfillment. Instead, too many of us are struggling to pay rent, lacking real human connection, and suffering badly because of it. This dislocation is causing psychological anguish which is physically evident in our bodies. Studies show that emotional pain hits the same receptors as physical pain.18 We’re engaging in national self-flagellation. Opioids are providing a mass numbing for an America that is badly hurting. *** I never believed the drugs and alcohol were the cause of my father’s miseries, which he regularly lashed out onto my brother and me. His addiction worsened when he quit his security guard job and went on disability due to a heart condition. But it was his childhood that, statistically speaking, provided the road map to addiction. I don’t know much about his childhood, but I was told that his father was an abusive alcoholic. This abuse was projected onto the following generation. At times, my home life resembled the grotesqueness of fun house mirrors with ever shifting reflections: the uncertainty of what terrifying image would appear next. The day my father overdosed was the day I traded in terror for safety and comfort. My mother kidnapped my brother and I and gained sole custody. My father ultimately survived his overdose and lived another 7 years, dying of a heart attack at the age of 52. *** The nightmare lullabies of Stephen King’s horrorscapes grew in pitch during my time in Bangor. Listening closely, these cradle-songs _______________

http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/treatmentarecovery/295-treatment-for-addiction 17 http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/healing-addiction-throughcommunity-a-much-longer-road-than-it-seems2 18 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952112/\ 16

taught me that my story is not unique and downright benign compared to so many others. The opioid epidemic is one that transcends generations, crossing into the boundaries of childhood trauma, isolation, and a country that is suffering because of economic disparity and the favoring of individual pursuits over the well-being of one another. Sitting at St. Johnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on that gray day, I thought a lot about my father. Most importantly I thought of the others who have been affected by addiction. I took Sean Michael Yankowskyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s funeral card with me when I left the church. All I know of Yankowsky is from his obituary. That he loved to cook and loved to fish. That he was funny and giving. That he was suffering from depression since his brother died of a drug overdose.19 I carry the card in my notebook as a reminder that there are countless others who have suffered most profoundly.

_______________

https://obittree.com/obituary/us/maine/bangor/bangor/sean-yankowsky/3541244/

Goodbye by Natalie Perez 54

Vial by Natalie Perez 55

Rose was Eric Framâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great-grandmother. She survived Theresienstadt with her husband, Joseph, and their sons, Emrick (Ericâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s maternal grandfather) and Walter.

Passing By Eric Fram Rose, c. 1939 Returning home from the open-air market, Rose’s arms can barely contain the bagful of potatoes, the crowded carrots poking from the lip of the cloth sack, the tomatoes, the onions, the cabbage, all heavy on her small feet and on Emrick’s smaller feet, through booths abloom hobbling under plenty they catch the eye of a Nazi soldier. Rose’s suspiciously dark hair and dark eyes become Aryan behind her perfect German, and she accepts a ride home.

“I’m scared.” “Be quiet.” “I don’t want to go in the car.” “Don’t speak – he’ll hear your accent.”

Emrick is silent and safe all the way home.

Sam was the father of a Ericâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dear friend, Lea. Lea was born in a displaced persons camp in Bensheim, Germany. Ericâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grandmother lived next door to Lea in the 1950s, shortly after both of their families immigrated to the United States.

How Sam Survived By Eric Fram Sam, c. 1942-1945 All the Jews in Chernalitza receive orders to gather in the town square but Sam has a gut feeling he buries the familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s valuables jewelry and Shabbos candlesticks inters them deep under the farm deeper than plows can hit out of reach of the scythe he is up all night and his body wants nothing more than sleep but he tells Yehuda and Zvi to run and not to stop running even if they hear gunshots and the bullets hiss in their ears because his sisters are married and live elsewhere they do not make it out of Poland the children born every two years minus the four-year break for World War I the broken pattern except Blema bleaches her hair and passes as a Catholic maid they take all the Jews and round them into a warehouse Sam is there with his parents until they are separated onto trains and gone in the train car Sam works at the window all day prying the bars pulling and pulling and pulling

his hands ache and the window sloughs off the bars with a mouth larger enough for Samâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s small frame his slim jockey hips the others in the car warn him say he will be killed if he jumps but he knows after two weeks in the warehouse he will die anyway his little sister was sick with pneumonia or another exit eight or nine years old she could not run from the Nazis she died of illness anyway neglected in the warehouse he insists so they hold him up on their shoulders and a final push when Sam comes to it is daylight and he recognizes the sky he follows the tracks to his village and knows which barn is safest each time he hears noise he hides Sam sneaks to where his housekeeper lives the woman who raised him and his siblings she does not know where the Jews have gone nor do her neighbors she tells him she has seen his brothers and she had already arranged a meeting to bring them clothes gives Sam a time and place and there he finds Yehuda and Zvi where were you in a barn the same knowing Chernalitza and where is safe and where is secret then in the forest for two years according to Sam if Jews wear shoes in a Holocaust film it is inauthentic

the brothers made shoes of leaves and twine suffered through Doctor Zhivago winters ate the animalsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; corn moving around they would bury the corn to return later so in winter they would have food though it was animal food Yehuda is an idealist so he wants to give up look at the birds and the animals he says they are free and why arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we Sam looks back history tells him of all the figures brave but jailed for years maybe twenty and continued their cause when they were free Yehuda keeps a journal writes on anything scraps and leaves when they cross a river some of the writing is lost

Sam’s Unnamed Sister, Shot Dead by the SS

By Eric Fram Sam, c. 1942

Sam’s sister is at the doctor’s office when the Nazis round up all the Jews in town. It is not like in Chernalitza where Jews are gathered in a warehouse for two weeks and then boarded in trains to their death. Here the SS collects them all in the street and shoots them one by one. Sam’s sister loses her husband and her young son, Aaron. When she learns of their death, she stands outside the SS office and demands answers. She remains at their door until it is dark out and her voice is a whisper, but she keeps mouthing the words. Over and over she asks why, why, why… Eventually the SS tire of her and she, too, is shot.

Balabusta Love By Alexandra Kukoff pen-handed and folded, I sit in the dining room and try to imagine what the mill girls of Poland knitted before glass stems and smoke smeared their taleisim and dissolved sweethearts on their tongues. In our kitchen, my mother and grandmother wring their aprons over gefilte and sirloin – not just chopped sirloin, prime chopped sirloin; kippot discarded carelessly in this domain – and clutch the cloth of my notebook to unfurl their own. my grandmother nearly broke her back minting boots – steel arches, just to make steel arches, and I wasn’t self-conscious, I wasn’t – that could not be loved, but she loved anyway. She was wine-tinged and pink, the reluctant end of June. She tasted the third third summered brother – the Washner triplets, who owned their own laundromat and allowed her to track the tube of clothes, the assortment of keys – and fell in love with the smell of beer. She loved and loved and wanted to touch. the Washners could have touched her but did not: not like the playboy in back of my mother’s classroom with a hand curled straight down his pants. let’s get her, he glinted, when she walked in. it was only her first day teaching, but She turned right back out, as she did later when one man trapped her in dark while the other kissed her on leather. My mother did not cry. his gun was nothing in her aluminum eyes. She was steel-toed until eight years later, when pink Vera Wang

hid the premature swells of her ripened frame. it was unavoidable. She would love any way she had, unflinching and proud. My mother was not her grandfather, the shtetl snipper who cut lines of silk and clad his daughters in their edges. His name was Abraham – his men called him Abe – and when he was of age, he tangoed his way to the temperance of Argentina; here, the bananas were thought to bloom. He had not yet loved; without his men, he could hardly learn how. Abe ate peanut butter and jelly on the sea, and went to work in Buenos Aires at a mattress factory: the beds were a kike’s only home. He lived between the cotton with his cuentevnick wife. Her name was Chana. in Buenos Aires, they called her Anna: they did not know how to mouth the hills of her name. Chana lost everything to the star on her shoulder, sharper than bone; it was all she could do to distribute the remains. her love for Abe was firsthand and new; Abe did not cut cotton until she had nothing left to sell. when Abe was not cutting, he nearly drowned in the Hudson River: the men who pushed the Jew Boy did not know how to hold. He was already worn as the shoes they stole. later that night, dark enough to turn blue, Abe frayed with Joseph Swipes. They played the mandolin; the music of their hands a different kind of love. Joseph’s forgotten wife folded her shame into challah; It grew with each rising slope, and when her oven could hold it no more, slid off the edges in little orange crisps darker than Shabbos snow. She loved it any way she could. When I bake, I do notI do not fold with forgotten hands. I do not think of my mother, with her pumpkin hair and aluminum will,

or the pink blush by a frozen river. I simply bake: raisins absent, gold like truffle cake. I eat challah by the handful, as if it is renewable, as if it could never drown. I am afraid to break my teeth on it, the slope of my nose too close to the blade. I will try to love it, any way, and this: the story relayed.

Owl Eyes By Timothy Calla The color of a butterfly’s wing resembles an owl’s eye – metamorphosis of nature’s tenderness behind the fixed predator’s glare. mimicry; the disguise of the intimate the intimacies of our innermost being, cocooned in the predator’s shell. but if the shell breaks, the creature must piece together a new façade. and the monster is worn, the gown is created together – created in the rolling arguments under revolving stars – faces hidden under the mask of new wounds – bravado to mask the misplaced identity – lost in the act, the monster, in fear, sinks beyond the skin – fear of becoming inseparable from the fangs we wear – or regret of never becoming that beast. the half beast will bear their butterfly wings – and hope they see through their wings’ painted owl eyes. a puffed-up chest in the mirror – the mirror’s lies – lying in the dirt or flying in the grass – the monster was never in the cocoon – finding where we belong or where we were put – the distance of where we stood those years ago – and now I see these horns on my head don’t belong there –

Untitled by Timothy Calla 67

my dad’s 3rd favorite movie was Taxi Driver

By Timothy Calla

we never got the lines right brother and I, began to mimic your grimace, after you died the one you made in quiet reverence of Brando in perfect imitation of De Niro “I’m the only one here” slurred words drenched in still-life smiles brimmed against speckled glass “You talking to me?” “You talking to me?” in the mirror by your engraved box, repeating those lines a whisper from your ashescorrecting our accent reminding us to squint

Honeysuckle High By Jessica Humphrey Many of my prospective buyers ask me, “Why is the price of your weed so fucking high?” and so I tell them the story of my elementary school drug ring. My elementary school had two playgrounds: one for first through third graders and the other for fourth and fifth graders. I think they split us up because they didn’t want the fifth-grade main source of fun to be bullying the younger kids, but that still happened. I remember when I entered fourth grade, and I was so excited to use the Big Kid monkey bars for the first time until a fifth grader prohibited me from using them unless I ate a handful of sand. I did what he asked, but then he told Mrs. Churenside on me, and she took away the rest of my recess for the week. I’ve been jaded about the school system ever since. The rest of the fourth graders soon fell in line along with me. It took them only a week to realize that it was uncool to play in the playground like intended, and they started doing what all the fifth graders did, which was sit on the playground equipment and talk. Girls owned the swing sets and tetherball courts, and boys owned the far corner slide and the twisted tree with the horizontal branch that could be used as a seat. That’s the way it was for the entirety of my fourth-grade year. When I became a fifth grader, I was able to snag a spot on that coveted branch if I scarfed down my lunch fast enough, but when Jack Rosenberg was elbowed off it by Sam Siltanen, and broke his arm during the second month of school, branch sitting was banned, and a stricter recess supervisor was put on foot patrol. We lost the coolest part of our domain that day, and most of us started wandering around the playground in a post-apocalyptic, disoriented state not knowing where to sit to discuss how unfair it was that the school was doing this to us. The only unclaimed territory was the grass patch near the wire fence, but a honeysuckle bush that grew like a weed on that fence always attracted bees; however, we were desperate, so we sat on the grass patch and made it a game to squash bees and throw their bodies at fourth graders passing by—extra points if we stung them. I usually only killed the bees that flew to the grass patch, but one day, in an effort

to attain the most bee corpses possible, I went straight to the source to kill them while they were pollinating. The bush was crawling with bees, and as I stared at them in awe, the word “honeysuckle” began to sound enticing. I figured that if that many bees loved these flowers they must smell really good, so I picked one and sniffed it for myself. Then I sniffed another. The act of sniffing gave me a warm, dizzy feeling that I liked, so I convinced my friends to try them, and soon enough, we sniffed honeysuckle flowers at every recess. Once the girls noticed what we were doing, word got around that sniffing was cool, and everyone started doing it. I knew that this could propel me into wealth, or better yet, middle school popularity, so I reinforced my claim at the fence by hiring the school bullies as guards. I gave them a salary of five flowers per week to keep lookout while I bartered with customers. Eventually, a set menu was scratched into the slide: one flower for a strawberry kiwi Capri Sun, two for a pizza Lunchable and a laser tag invite, and three for a Dylan and Cole Sprouse sweepstakes Danimals. Discounts for those with vacation homes and sixth grade connections. The kids who had nothing but smushed Nature Valley bars at the bottom of their backpacks would try climbing the fence behind my back to pocket the hard-to-reach buds. My goons handled this problem by pointing them out to my expanding mob of regulars, who quickly Mufasa’d the climbers. As the flowers became scarce, the trade deals became more desperate—stolen class pets (I always wanted a bearded dragon) for one little yellow flower that was most likely already sniffed dry. Some kids went as far as eating them. ABC¹ flowers were going for whole sibling sacrifices. Nevertheless, girls and boys were interacting with each other, sharing the same spaces on the playground to talk and sniff. Fifth graders treated fourth graders with respect because befriending them meant more allies and more allies meant more supply. When kids started coming home regularly with bee stings, parents became suspicious, but it wasn’t until Meghan Burns snorted a bee, and her red, swollen face resembled that of asthmatic Sarah Patrick’s in P.E., that Mrs. Burns called the principal and made him aware that children were recreationally sniffing flowers from a bush at his school. And so, the honeysuckle mania came to an end. Kids were interrogated, and those who admitted to sniffing more than ten were automatically sent to the nurse to file health reports. Even though I was the mastermind who sniffed hundreds, I got away with it because I cried and said _______________ 1

Already Been Chewed

that I sniffed, “Maybe three, but only cause my friends were doing it.” The school ended up ripping out the honeysuckle bush, but we never reverted back to the pre-sniffing playground hierarchy. Now, as a high schooler who reflects on how this accidental cartel brought together fifth graders, fourth graders, boys, and girls, I understand that what I unlocked was the unifying power of drugs, and my buyers still pay for it to this day. With every Honeysuckle Joint™, comes a potential best friend, lifelong addiction, or soulmate. Please call (310)-703-9523.²

_______________ 2

Contact information redacted due to high volume of interested parties.

192.168.1.255 By Grace Li call: <all databases> set.language ( English, American ) how.is ( weather, today [11.13.2018, 17:27:38], your mother’s house [33.203820,-117.369510] & am I still welcome ) what.is ( name_of_color = between: [violet, ultraviolet] wavelength between: [379.99 nm, 380 nm]) rhyme.with ( orange ) = null rhyme.with (“Are you an Influencer looking to build your platform? We can offer you an Authentic Story™ for 59.99 down! +FREE mindfulness & self-care spa session. It’s time for a soul-cleanse”) = Benz; friends; lens; pens; tense; trends synonym ( palindrome ) = Mobius strip; the visible spectrum; fifteen minutes of fame; GAATTC CTTAAG; the world wars; sexes recall (year, war, int num_fatalities) *MEMORY ERROR 404* recall (year, war, int num_fatalities, virtual) = 2010, Call of Duty: Black Ops, 60,000,000,000 //the first three months print ( whatever_comes_to_mind ) WHOISGODWHOISGODWHOISGODWHOISGODWHOISGODWHO recall ( “what did I stand for?” ) = High-speed Unmodified Metabolic-Aerobic Network define (sentience) = the internet is an unaccompanied minor curating your dreams

istrue (content == art) if hitcounter>cool_factor*standard_algorithm%adclick_projected find ( https://www.nihilistsingles.net/freetrial )

cull.aggregateUserData () = 14251s daily browsing time, aged 22.59, 7% adclick rate, passive-aggressive only when approached by sales evangelists or 4+ people, 17.4% lonely find ( the thought I had last night right before I fell asleep ) how.could.you([person1, person2] love= 1 run (time = 365)) love = 0 count followers_added + 253897 + 000012 stolen identity/dead/unborn/nonhuman rand generate <interrogative> = How can we synergize unlicensed tectonics? What flavor of sympathy is the amoeba after? Did they risk the tarot in the video canal? Why does disruption metastasize to the pacifists? What data did you toss for breakfast?

Betrayal By Grace Li the self is a disgusting thing a disgusting thing to be trapped with all month oh god there it is on the wall trying to erase me again (murmuring this demonic chant sophos logos eros chaos) O expired thing! stinking of theft and regurgitated books O gorgeous you! squirming in the trash heap of morality maybe I will teach it another language pero they are still just words del alfabetico pero the food did not go down and the teeth and the throat and the glottis are on a remote hill signing their rights away it slimes onto me it writes stories about itself it feeds on a thousand species of love it wishes to make of me an engine and drive over the river it penned towards a theory of the self to be published in the Harvard review of bashing ur brain until you drop dead and it signed it with my name in my hand: well put-together but modest modulates tone in proper American English 440 Hz is ready to cocktail and assess wins speaks when spoken to laughs when laughed at

eats when eaten dumb being the self, that thing is slinking behind the pillars of Athens think right thoughts think right thoughts jumps do not appear threatening! it hates me. it’s evolving. it likes to sleep in the back of my skull it likes to gaze at gorgeous things in the sky and name them its throne of grey matter churns like curls of McMeat help it’s gonna grow out of me and leave me a walking vegetable skewer (a bunch of selves are gonna crawl out of their flesh-dens and make libraries counting their missing sex while the 21st century writes itself in sharpie on the hand) and it’s gonna push the button and wait for the ancient elevator to come down and by the time the door opens it’ll have jumped off the fire escape

and I still haven’t written you a song

By Grace Li for Anthony

but if only the whole world knew your name and how its rhythm blew out the speakers on every other unrequited duet, got me to stop looking for life on Mars. I could pick up my knockoff Stratocaster without seeing your body, wonder how I play with such passionate lack of skill and go back to an easier Led Zeppelin tab. Going Guitar Hero on what should be my future, a four chord formula - school, work, start a family, always ends in a minor, maybe a seventh, maybe my deadly sins. How do I write in the orange that rhymes with your taste, how do I breathe your sheets into the second chorus? My saint of lost objects, my San Antonio, I dropped my picks on your slender streets, could I wrap the world in a four-minute college radio maybe, dying with dignity out of your Nissan speakers or you could lull me to sleep with your slow so cal english and the endless eighties you found in your mother’s cassette collection, the strange way we smile at Juan Gabriel crying dime cuando tú, ay, tú, and how could I write a good hook with half my life spent air guitaring the construction

noise of the universe, how do I have the honor of composing your mornings when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve only learned to wait for the goodbyes and see you soons and the ends to songs because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not the Hey Jude that gets you but the naaa naaaa naaaa na na na na

Art Through the Viewfinder by Abraham Ramirez

Father and Son by Abraham Ramirez

Synchronized Diving By Frank Fiore Su Hui was born into two identical bodies, conjoined at the pelvis and the sides of the skull. Over the hospital telephone, her father whispered to his brother that it was like looking at a thing without his glasses on. He cried later that night in the waiting room. Su Hui’s mother cried too, but in a different way. While she held her newborn, spotted with dried blood and amniotic fluid, she begged the attending nurse to preserve for her the whole of the umbilical cord. For a full week Su Hui and her mother stayed in the hospital, her father intermittently bringing by take-out when he wasn’t otherwise nodding in front of doctors. Both were healthy, although Su Hui’s mother endlessly bewailed her pending C-section scar, repeating to anyone with a stethoscope how she could never wear a two-piece swimsuit again. In the cab ride home, Su Hui sat in her father’s lap, slowly kicking her feet – all four of them – in unison with the punctual sound of the windshield wipers. They were spreading apart and converging long after the rain had stopped. __________________________________________________ 10m Su Hui had two perfectly developing brains, two tiny birthmarks on her two left shoulders, she had twenty fingers, four lungs, and by the time her two skeletons were properly fused she would have four hundred and ten bones (minus her shared pelvis and skull). Oddly enough, she was born without a single appendix. Each body would have been completely indistinguishable from the other if it were not for their two points of articulation – creating a left body and a right body. But this division of one and other, even of left and right, is a false portrait. It assigns terminology that is useful only to spectators and tourists. Because for Su Hui, even though she was two, she was also one. One was all she saw when she turned towards herself, and she saw no one else when she turned away. Su Hui was not bound, however, by any principle of biological conformity. Each body’s movements, needs, desires, even thoughts, could

diverge just as easily as they might align. When Su Hui was hungry, Su Hui might be full. When Su Hui was dreaming, Su Hui might be wide awake. Around the time she outgrew her first set of dual onesies, her father developed an awful habit of playing the same Andrews Sisters’ song, “Shoo-Shoo Baby.” Every time he did Su Hui’s mother would slap him across the arm because it would cause Su Hui to laugh and cry at the same time. But in this regard, Su Hui was not unlike a person with just a single body, whose left foot might be cold while their right foot is hot. Or how someone might hold two seemingly contradictory beliefs simultaneously: to love and detest the same person, or how one can feel utterly alone in a crowded room. Nevertheless, from a very early age Su Hui felt most herself when each body acted in unison. Sipping on the same mint-chocolate milkshake made it taste twice as sweet. The picture books she read with four eyes she finished double quick. A scrape on one knee was bearable for two. And while lying in the dark with her closet door ajar, she only felt half as afraid. __________________________________________________ 8m Every Monday Su Hui’s mother took her out to the big community swimming pool. After her hair was tied back and her plastic armbands inflated she raced toward the steps in the shallow end, marks of unblended sunscreen still smeared on her cheeks. She didn’t know how to swim yet, so she just dipped her feet into the cold water. It always sent the most wonderful chill up her bodies; a freeze that made her feel forever solid and inseparable. She watched her mother, in her bright red one-piece, dive into the pool with barely a splash. Su Hui followed her vague refracted form darting underwater until it surfaced right in front of her with open arms. “Jump,” her mother said. Su Hui stood up on the edge of the pool. She smiled and frowned. She shook her head in worry and she giggled with courage. Her feet felt warm against the cement. She noticed a couple kids lying on inner tubes. They pulled up their goggles and stared. One nudged the other and they drifted apart. Su Hui then closed all her eyes and thought to herself. She thought of the bitter chlorinated water that rushed up her noses and of rockets that break up mid-air. The cement was so hot now that it compelled her feet to shift – up, down, up, down. Her mother wet the ground with a wave of cool hissing water. Su Hui looked up, smiling twice. Then she wrapped both pairs of arms around both her hips, remembering all the times her mother had caught her. She also

recalled the deep chill in being submerged. Su Hui counted down: Two, one. And she jumped. __________________________________________________ 6m A month before her third birthday, Su Hui was separated by a renowned American surgeon. From that day forward the left half was called Su and the right half was called Hui. __________________________________________________ 4m Su’s attraction to diving began in the summer of 2008, just two weeks before she started secondary school. She was alone in her room only half listening to a recording of Prokofiev’s dissonant “Sonata No. 7.” It was a piece she always wished she had additional fingers for. Lying in bed, a mirror balanced on bent knees, she fussed over the style of her short hair. It just wasn’t her. The Olympics were on in the other room. “Dammit, Australia!” her father yelled. “You were my one chance!” “Who won?” Su hollered. “No one yet. But there’s no way we lose gold now.” Su traipsed into the family room. “Then why are you so upset?” “I bet against us.” He sliced off a bit of the apple he held. “We always win gold in this event. I figured this was the year we finally lose.” “Ha, serves you right. You should’ve never bet against us!”

Hui’s attraction to diving began in the summer of 2008, just two weeks before she started secondary school. She was in the family room listening to a mix CD a boy made for her – nine songs that reminded him of Hui. Craning over the jewel case balanced in her lap, the tracklist perplexed her. The split ends of her long hair grazed against her knees. Her father was next to her on the sofa eating apple slices and watching television. “Dammit, Australia!” her father yelled. “You were my one chance!” Hui looked up and saw two Australian women somersaulting in slow motion into a pool. Their legs were slanted upon entering the water, producing a noticeable splash. The judges awarded them a score of 71.05, enough to maintain their second position in the standings. Chen Ruolin and Wang Xin, representing China, stretched in unison near the open showers. Hui removed her headphones.

Su looked up at the television, which displayed a large graphic that read, “Women’s Synchronized 10m Platform – Final.” China was in first place, the United States in last. Sitting down on the arm of the sofa, Su watched the competition. Great Britain. North Korea. Germany. Mexico. The paired divers of each wore matching swimsuits. None of them looked like flags though; they were just normal swimsuits. The crowd cheered after every dive, no matter the nation, no matter the splash, but they cheered loudest for the divers of the host country. As Chen Ruolin and Wang Xia took the platform the entire audience went silent. So did the announcers. And so did Su. The women stood with their backs to the water, counting aloud and raising their arms in stops and starts. Once their two voices were synchronized they bent their knees and jumped, swinging themselves backward and blurring together in the air. A second later they were just two ripples of overlapping water. “Wow,” Hui said. Before the instant replay had even begun Su raced back into her bedroom, opened a drawer and pulled out her swimsuit. Then she ran into Hui’s room and did the same, returning finally to the family room, out of breath, a partial ferver in her eyes.

“I win,” she told her father. “It’s not over yet,” he said, bits of red apple skin on his teeth. “Please, no way the Aussies can make up twenty-five points in a single dive. I’m the victor and you know it.” “Fine, fine. Consider us even since my France and Italy sliced you apart in the fencing final.” “Shut up.” She slapped his arm. Hui’s father laughed so hard he shed a couple tears. “Look,” he said, removing his glasses. “China’s about to dive. This one’s for the gold.” As Chen Ruolin and Wang Xia took the platform the entire audience went silent. So did the announcers. And so did Hui. The women stood with their backs to the water, counting aloud and raising their arms in stops and starts. Once their two voices were synchronized they bent their knees and jumped, swinging themselves backward and blurring together in the air. A second later they were just two ripples of overlapping water. “Wow,” Su said. “What a dive!” her father said. “You win. What are we eating? How about a pizza? Half pepperoni, half artichoke?” “Honestly, I’m not even hungry anymore,” Hui replied, half hypnotized by the slow image of the two perfectly parallel divers entering the water.

Su turned to Hui. “Hey, do you want to go swimming?” she asked. “Absolutely.”

Hui turned to Su. “Hey, do you want to go swimming?” she asked. “Absolutely.”

__________________________________________________ 2m “To maintain precision in form during a synchronized dive,” the instructor said, “it is often beneficial to focus not just on the movement of your partner, which is always imperative, but also on your own timing, your own composure. A synchronized dive is really no different than a solo dive. On the way down there is only you and your reflection in the water. You are only ever diving into yourself.” __________________________________________________ 0m Su and Hui were on the platform next. They stood by the showers in their matching swimsuits, preparing for their final dive – a back two and a half somersault with one and a half twists in the pike position. After weeks of quarreling, it was the only dive they both could agree on. Su was miming piano scales against her thigh to help calm her beating heart. Hui was also nervous. Her boyfriend was waving from the stands trying to get her attention, but Hui was only focused on Su. “Don’t worry. We’ve got this.” “I know, I know.” “Breathe with me.” Su and Hui pressed their foreheads together and took a deep inhale and slow steady exhale. The latex of Su’s swim cap rubbed against the latex of Hui’s swim cap, creating a loud squeak. They both giggled. Then a buzzer sounded and the scores for the previous divers were displayed. The crowd cheered. “Hurry! It’s your dive,” their father said. “We know,” one replied. The girls approached the base of the platform, holding hands until they got to the ladder. Su climbed up first. Hui followed after. Once at the top, they walked to the edge and assumed a familiar position: sideby-side, ten meters above the water, both birthmarked shoulders turned toward the audience. Su saw someone in the front row that looked like her mother. She blinked. It wasn’t. She breathed inward, taking in a mouthful of dense stadium air. Hui soured, tasting the chlorine. As the pair adjusted their swimsuit bottoms and pulled taut their matching caps, every single person in the crowd was lulled into a common quiet.

Alone, together on the platform, the girls stood apart so that only their fingertips were touching. Su looked out once more at the audience. Hui felt her heart murmur. When the buzzer sounded Hui quickly turned to her left and with a mischievous smile whispered something into Su’s ear. Su smiled back, in confidence. Then the girls switched places. One, two. And they jumped. In the air, Su and Hui contorted into something they didn’t have a word for. Their bodies overlapped completely; backs arched, limbs curved, and toes pointed straight upward. The momentum of their first backward somersault carried them into their second and time seemed to be repeating itself. They twisted together, anxious and calm, dry and wet, a lamenting joy on both of their faces. Su and Hui dove; they conquered a paradox. And they would have remained in the air forever if only the pull of gravity did not force them down. For a moment, every onlooker stood perplexed, briefly believing the two girls were a single person. The slow motion replay, however, clearly showed that Su’s feet had deviated to the right while Hui’s feet had deviated to the left. Some said it was an ugly dive, a failed symmetry. Others thought it was beautiful. The lukewarm splash they made reached as far as the judges’ table. Su and Hui crossed on impact with the water, their bodies darting beneath the surface. They swam away from one another, climbing out on opposite sides of the pool. Su took off her swim cap, letting down a long tress of her positively tangled hair. Hui left her swim cap on. They met back near the showers, wrapping themselves in the warmth of a single red towel. When the judges finally held up their scores the two girls embraced, tears mingling on their pressed cheeks. They were pleased with their total.

Missing Absaroka By Kate Morgan Through hot steam and dimpled shower door comes the light from an afternoon thunderstorm, small enough to fit inside your pocket. You’re in Denver, confessing you might have gotten tipsy waiting for your flight. I know what you mean. I mark myself with red hot scratches, a hurried afterthought from shaving in the sink. Cut through four lane freeway traffic with burning limbs and enough fuschia scorpio intensity to have known better. Stop and buy your favorite condoms and two fruit flavored tootsie rolls. You arrive at the gate at half past eight. Stopped for a double double, fries, and a coke before hotel check in. In line, your green eyes don’t lose their brilliance through degradation of an iPhone screen. In casual glances, a true living miracle. Elevator up to the fifth floor for a one night stay, as the rushing world now slumbers and fades away. I lay out an array of drugs and tootsie rolls. You choose the unbleached capsules. We didn’t know they were fake yet, somehow, I am suddenly an intentional three millimeters from your lips like a flake of ash, falling from a bonfire’s last spark. [I can still imagine your mouth. Opening and closing. Your laptop’s

gospel singing, and the bliss in misbelieving Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d see you once again.] Your hands trace constellations on my skin. I laugh under your crushing weight. You, a citizen of the world, and I, lying under an unworthy blanket of smog. Tonight we are twins, dreaming of sullen skies blown southeast of Absaroka, of lupines sinning in powdered dusk light, of white waters and dead lodgepole pines.

English as a Second Language

By Madelyn Chen

Like the sound a snake makes, the speech Teacher says. Sss-ound, sss-nake. When I Open my mouth, I wish I could ask what a Snake is, why an S in English sounds like The word four in Chinese, like the word for Death. Instead, I touch my tongue to the roof Of my mouth like the teacher shows. Th-ound, I say, th-nake. We are in a clean office with Alphabet building blocks and a plastic model Of the human mouth. This is where I am pulled To for an hour every Tuesday, away from my First grade class to learn the language of the Country I was born in, and correct the accent From the country I was raised in. Even at home, My parents make me read my bedtime stories Aloud, this is how I learn about Th-now White And Th-wan Lake, see the sneaky wiles of Th-inderellaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Th-tepmother, slowly I learn that a snake in English is A shĂŠ in Chinese, and my speech classes switch to Every other week, then once a month, and then I Am in second grade and winning a class spelling bee, Then I am reading two levels above my grade, then The Chinese-English dictionary on my desk moves To my shelf, then to a storage box, then it disappears Entirely, and the only sound of where I was, who I Was, before, is in the soft twang of a letter somewhere Between S and T when I say the word sorry.

CO2 by Karen Yi 89

Contributor’s Notes

Alexander Anwer is a half Pakistani, half Korean transplant from NY and currently a 4th year English major. Timothy Calla is the embodiment of introverted insanity, crippled with the need to express himself through creative writing. As a student at UCLA, he is constantly making feign attempts at controlling this desire to create, but utterly failing as the world of around him melts into his anxiety driven work. He also likes taking pictures – check ‘em out on Instagram @andtimbre. Echo Carbullido believes there is something worth exploring, where there is darkness (or barely enough light to go by). They utilize their work to examine human minds and relations, often playing with the strange, deviant, and horrific. Little terrifies this creative, and they hope that their willingness to confront the frightful and odd gives readers something to wonder at. Giada Cattaneo is currently enrolled in a Master in Visual Arts and an Illustrator. She studied History of Art at the University of Bologna, Italy, and has collaborated like illustrator with many editors and publishers in Italy Madelyn Chen is a senior English major/Film and Entrepreneurship minor at UCLA, where she’s combining her love of poetry and prose into a verse novella. When she’s not busy working on her thesis, or trying to, she can be found hiding out at coffee shops, bookstores, and anywhere that helps her avoid her impending graduation into the real world. Carla Diaz is currently an undergraduate at UCLA, graduating in the spring as an English major with a concentration in creative writing.

Jodi Scott Elliot no longer avoids stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. After years of casual superstition, she discovered that it has not kept her safe from heartache or disappointment. Today you can find Jodi swinging her legs boldly as she walks, without much care for the cracks her individual footfalls may fall. Heartaches be damned. Frank Fiore was born in a suburb of southeast Los Angeles. He is transfer student of UCLA and has been vacillating between English and philosophy, Herman Melville and Simone de Beauvoir, for his entire academic career. He is a current Westwind fiction editor and has previously worked as part of the editorial staff for Bravura, the literary journal of Palomar College. Aside from writing he also enjoys Delta blues, spheres of ice, and driving north along California’s lonely coastline. Eric Fram is a senior English major with a concentration in creative writing – poetry and a theater minor at UCLA. He is also the Westwind Senior Poetry Editor and Senior Arts Editor for 2018-19, and he has been published in Westwind, Plum Tree Tavern, plain china, and Kol Ha’Am. Taylor Leigh Harper studies English and creative writing at UCLA. She is one of the Senior Fiction Editors of Westwind, and her greatest love is a nice cold bottle of Coca-Cola. Her fiction can be found in Westwind, and her poetry is forthcoming in Bridge. Tiffany Hearsey is a writer and freelance photojournalist. She covers death and dying, health, and gender issues, among other topics. She has a background in human rights work that is reflected in her stories spanning across the United States and Europe. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, Salon.com and LA Review of Books. When Tiffany is not lurking around cemeteries, she likes to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000. She holds a master’s degree in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict from Trinity College, Dublin. Jessica Humphrey is a fourth-year English major. As a child, reading and writing provided her with an imaginative outlet that she hopes to give to others someday by becoming an English teacher and creative writer. At UCLA, she has been published in the queer newsmagazine OutWrite and the satire publication The Black Sheep. Alexandra Kukoff is a half-deaf junior at UCLA’s Honors College studying English. Previously, she won six Silver Medals in the Scho-

lastic Art and Writing awards for her poetry (past honorees include Robert Redford and Lena Dunham), and at UCLA, Alexandra won the second-place May Merrill Award in Poetry last spring. She was a finalist three years in a row for the position of Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate; separately, Alexandra has written articles and stories for Seventeen, the New York Times, ABC, Amy Poehler, and Lean In among others. Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry appeared in such publications as the Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Crack The Spine, Mad Swirl, and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and attended workshops with poet Louise Mathias and writer Lidia Yuknavitch. She has taught poetry to former gang members and theater to teen runaways. Born in Los Angeles, she now resides in Valencia, CA with her rescues, Bello cat and Jack, the dog. Grace Li is a graduating senior at UCLA. She enjoys making music and isn’t fond about talking about herself. Nathan Lovejoy is a second-year English major at UCLA who hails from Bend, Oregon. He’s taken up fiction writing as a creative outlet since his rap career has failed to get off the ground. Some of his other interests include volunteering with the Rotaract club, sleeping, reading, and playing really subpar golf. Whatever that means. Gabrielle Mica Macatangay is a student from Cal State University Northridge completing a bachelor’s degree in criminology and justice studies. Apart from life as a working student, she is a young singer-songwriter who spends much of her time toying with film cameras. Kate Morgan is a California native and a current student at UCLA studying English and Creative Writing. Morgan finds the economy and immediacy of poetry to be both liberating and therapeutic. Individual works of her poetry have been featured by The Apeiron Review and The Red Cedar Review. Follow her on Instagram @katemorgan_ Elizabeth Nail is a first-year mechanical engineering major at UCLA. She enjoys writing, editing, and those triple ginger snaps from Trader Joe’s. Elizabeth considers herself an artist mostly because she can play the harmonica part to “Piano Man.”

Christine Nguyen is a fourth year English major with a concentration in creative writing. She is the senior fiction co-editor of UCLA’s Westwind Journal of the Arts as well as the Arts and Creative section editor of UCLA’s FEM Newsmagazine. She’s a small human bean with big dreams who enjoys playing piano, drawing, watching animated television shows, and reading in her free time. Chelsea Olsen spent her teenage years homeschooling herself on her family’s ranch in the high desert of Southern California. She is currently pursuing her Bachelor’s in English at UCLA and wishes then to pursue a career in Immigration Law. Her poetry focuses on ethical introspection (or lack thereof) and a want of social justice. Natalie Perez is a self taught artist and illustrator who happens to major in English at UCLA. In addition to her creative projects, she also spends far too much time on the internet watching YouTube videos. She hopes to expand and grow her creativity, in order to create more inspiring and unique works of art. Sarah Perry is a third-year English major, pursuing a concentration in creative writing and a gender studies minor at UCLA. Her poetry often explores mental health, relationships, and her identity and experience in the world as a black Latina. She hopes to use poetry, and art more generally, to help heal and empower underserved communities. Abraham Ramirez studied English and creative writing, while an undergrad at UCLA. He typically spends his time figuring out new ways to tell stories. He gains inspiration through photography, reading, writing, and spending time with people that he cares about. In his free time, he is usually out exploring the world. Sarah Seville grew up in Idaho, but has been in California just long enough to decide she is never going to leave. She has a B.A. in English from UC Irvine, did academic research in Gender & Sexuality Studies, has a background in healthcare, and is presently working towards her J.D. at UCLA Law. Her work in poetry has been published in New Forum Literary Magazine, and she is the November 2017 winner of the Goodreads Newsletter Poetry Contest.

Cat Wang is currently a sophomore pursuing a double major in English and Political Science. Born in New York City, she grew up in Hong Kong, China. Previously, her poetry has appeared nowhere. Now, evidently, it appears here. Karen Yi is an English-major-question-mark from Colorado who does basically every type of art (but not very well), including ceramics, watercolor, acrylic, sketching, fiction writing, photography, violin, piano, cello, and probably some other stuff too. She might have been an artist in an alternate universe where making a living from art is a reasonable suggestion to her parents.

westwind

UCLAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s journal of the arts Westwind accepts rolling submissions year-round of unpublished original works of prose, poetry, art, and music by UCLA students, alumni, and members of the greater Los Angeles community. We currently publish two online journals in Fall and Winter and one print publication in Spring. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re extremely open-minded, so send us your best work. For more information, visit us at westwind.ucla.edu