Featured Work Archive

8 November 2024

Meredith MacLeod Davidson

Flammable And Inflammable Have Different Meanings, But Non-Flammable Is An Antonym To Them Both

We felt it numbing in the ovoid synthetic caverns of each of us, bubbling our
fluid. A fuel frenzied, forced phase transition into a state of froth. One of ours,
gripped in the fist of the woman as she shook it at the shopkeeper. Shouting,
I just needed a light, I’ll give it right back! We can feel it lurking about our register
display, the collective discomfort of each customer present, quietly permitting
the altercation to run its course. Neon fringe of a store title leaking through the
windows, sheening green at the woman’s feet. The shopkeeper is hoping the police
will come collect her. That isn’t how this works! He yells from behind his plexiglass
defense. You can’t just come in here and take whatever you want! You can’t. An
insistence. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Uniformly manufactured, then
packaged neatly in a broad slotted tray for sales. A lighter is an ephemeral thing.
We pass from factory to shop to user to user to user until we inevitably mosaic
beneath tires on tarmac, butane seep and a plastic shattering announcing our end. 

An interview with Meredith MacLeod Davidson on finding poetry, POV, and holding an editor position

Tell us a bit about your poetic journey. How long have you been writing? What projects are you working on now?

I’ve always privately written poems (think full teen-cringe), but it wasn’t until undergrad where I started taking it seriously and realized poetry was something I could actually do. I went to Clemson for my undergraduate, and I had the privilege of studying with the excellent poet Cy. Jillian Weise. I took a poetry workshop there, and everything kicked off. I had my first reading in a bar in Clemson, during the Clemson Literary Festival – the same year Natasha Tretheway (then poet laureate) was one of the big poets on the festival lineup. That experience opened up so much possibility for me – I encountered for the first time a world where people were really interested in poetry in the way I was. After college I worked in standard office jobs for about 8 years, where I didn’t get much writing done, though was constantly thinking about it. In 2022 I was laid off from my job. For the first few days I was in a panic – urgently trying to find new work and applying for everything. But then I took stock with myself for a moment. Why shouldn’t I take this opportunity to shift toward a life dedicated to what I was most invested in? For me, that has always been literature, and creative community. At the time I was staying in Merida, Mexico, and I didn’t particularly want to move back to the States. I applied to several programs in the UK and was accepted to the University of Glasgow to pursue a Master’s in Creative Writing. Three months later I hopped on a plane to Scotland and never looked back. Glasgow has been so generative for my practice – not only the Master’s program, but also the greater Glasgow creative community. It is such a spectacular city of artists, creating really subversive, experimental, and earnest work. I completed my grad program in 2023 and since then have been working toward getting a chapbook/pamphlet together, and engaging as much as possible with the creative and literary community in Glasgow. This past spring I got together with another Glasgow-based writer to launch a monthly reading series in the city called crisp packet poetry. We’re now expanding into producing a print anthology and looking toward running workshops in the future too, so I’m really involved in that right now, in tandem with my own projects.

“Flammable And Inflammable…” is told from the perspective of a display of lighters on a shop counter. Did this begin as a persona poem? Can you tell us a bit about the creative process behind this work?

It kind of retroactively became a persona poem, I suppose, but I didn’t necessarily go into it intending that. This came out of a series of pieces in which I was trying to expand my understanding of POV in poetry, and has since fed into some exploration in poems endeavoring away from a species-based (specifically human-based) conception of the climate crisis. In the case of this poem, I imagined this altercation in a shop, then wondered what would happen if it were narrated from the inanimate object which the altercation was over. I was interested by the added layer of tension that occurs when narrated from that position, and had a lot of fun considering the motivations of sentient lighters.

The full title of the poem is “Flammable And Inflammable Have Different Meanings, But Non-Flammable Is An Antonym To Them Both” which is both a true fact and a striking title. How do you typically go about choosing titles for your poems?

This title was very out of character for me – I don’t usually do lengthy titles, if anything, my titles are typically one or two words long. In this poem, I think I chose the factual-statement-lengthy-title approach in part to ground the unrealism of the POV, but also because the apparent discordance between the title and the poem enhanced the added tension introduced by the POV.

You are also the editor of a literary journal. How has being on the other side of submissions affected your own submission and editing process?

I’ve found editorial experience to be absolutely essential to my development as a poet. It makes the emotional element of the submissions process so much more manageable. When I began sending work out to literary journals back in 2019 or so, I took rejection very personally, and would over-edit my work in response to that. Being on the other side of things, you really understand just how arbitrary it is. From the perspective of the editor, there’s a certain threshold of poetic skill (as in, there’s a tangible security and confidence in the writer’s voice, and demonstrates consideration for form, language, and line breaks), that, once accessed, poets should rest fairly assured that they’ve made the longlist for publication. Which, in my experience, is just about every poet dedicated to their craft (and who reads other poets, extensively!). At that point, the pieces that make the cut for publication in any one issue, are chosen purely based on which pieces happen to connect with which editors on whichever day, how pieces speak to other work already selected for the issue, and of course, if there’s a theme, which poems speak best (based on editorial interpretation) to that theme. I once made the case for the inclusion of a poem which didn’t necessarily speak to any of the other editors at the time, but meant a lot to me, because I’d recently read a book which had given me the scientific background to impose a reading on the poem through the lens of that recently acquired knowledge. Had I not just read this book, I might not have recognized that in the poem, and as such, probably would have ended up rejecting it when making final selections. It really is that random sometimes, but it doesn’t mean the piece doesn’t have merit. Sometimes it’s just not reaching the right reader at the right time. This is all a long way of saying poetry is this mutable, ephemeral, bleating thing, and every writer seeking to place work in a literary journal really needs to just keep sending out the radar pulses of submission packets until one of them hits an editor who is ready for it. I have poems which were accepted on first submission, and a poem which took 65+ tries until it surprised me by landing in an absolute dream journal. I see the submission process as a sort of meticulous science at this point, and don’t attach much emotion to it. It’s an administrative task I dedicate a few hours a week to. Approaching it as such helps so that the rejection doesn’t phase me, and the acceptances feel all the more significant.

On the editing side of things, dedicating time to editorial work for literary journals has also given me much more security in my own voice as a writer, and as such, I don’t edit my own work as hastily as I did in my early days of sending work out. When you’re reading through a Submittable queue of thousands of poems, you experience a broad range of work, much of which is wildly inventive and not necessarily the sort of writing you see published all that often. I’m absolutely wowed by that sort of writing and I find it encouraging – it’s made me more excited to experiment with poetry on the page, and feel confident in how those experiments are operating in the poems. In the past I’d be inclined to edit out those experiments to make the poems more palatable for a public audience. These days, I’m more interested in displaying those acts of experimentation and play, and if a publication doesn’t want them, then I still have the creative exercise documented for my own record, and I’m happy with that.

Any advice for emerging poets who are still finding their voice?

Surround yourself with other creatives who are engaged in play and experimentation. Be weird. Lift each other up in community. Make silly publications and throw launch parties for these – even if only your friends show up. Proximity to other writers confident in their unique brand of poetry engenders confidence in your unique brand of poetry. That’s how whole schools of poetics happen. And finally, read!

Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a poet and writer from Virginia, currently based in Scotland, where she earned an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Meredith’s has poems in Propel Magazine, Cream City Review, Frozen Sea, and elsewhere, and serves as senior editor for Arboreal Literary Magazine.

1 November 2024

Nancy Bell

TOMORROWLAND

You are looking into the old photo, leaning across me gruffly and peering down into my lap where I cradle it. Your body has the stillness it gets when you are trying to understand or decipher. I peek at your profile, the outrageous lashes, the angry wound of a fresh piercing from which a nasal hoop sprouts. I’m calmly appalled at this violence. You smell like bread dough.

You grab it from me and fling yourself back on the couch, pressing your thumbs into it and getting a closer look. I tsk at you. I don’t want you to wrinkle it. So rough, always so rough with the things of the world, trusting that anything can be replaced. But I submit to your will. It’s yours. Everything is yours. You are alarming and terrific in your breath and heat and volume. Home again, you seem to rearrange the molecules in the apartment. They buzz like sunshine. You are still somehow a daughter of the golden west, like I said you always would be when we moved to still Ohio. But you barely remember California. Your accent is different than mine.

I’m hoping you will say something when you are done looking—that it was wonderful, that we were wonderful. That it all turned out so well. That it turned out at all. That there is such a thing as turning out. That there is a moment from which one can look back and understand. I’m happy, Mama, I’m well. I’m safe and it’s all because of you. You did it.

*

You break from your stare and toss it aside.  I retrieve it as you return to your phone. I tuck it back in the drawer. Why did we open the drawer in the first place, I wonder.

“I told him I’d spend the night at his house before I go back.”

“Oh, good. That’s good. He misses you.”

“It’s just that I’ve stayed here most of the break.”

“Of course. It’s good. I’m glad.”

You pick up your bowl and scrape the last bit out, saying, “Mmmmm. Cimmanim.”

It’s a consolation prize. You know I can’t resist it. There was a time when you got words wrong and I didn’t correct you because it made things seems new, as they were.  Cimmanim (on oatmeal.) Aminal (at the zoo.) A day would come, and you were thrilled to share with me the correction: “Did you know that it’s actually cinnamon?” Proud of your expertise, teaching me the right way of things. You held your small index finger to your thumb as you enunciated for me in your motherese: “It’s AN-I-MAL.”

Last day (yesterday.) Next day (tomorrow.)

You take your bowl to the kitchen. Alone on the couch, the photo swims in my consciousness, an afterimage. The Southern California night was soft on our bare arms and legs. The place was just beginning to illuminate into the nighttime version of itself. There was only room for two in the miniature convertibles, which jerked their way to us as we waited, dismissing their former drivers in a line. What color would we get? Which one would you choose?

When we sat down, it was perfect. You drove. Your steering was a charming fiction. You jerked the wheel right and left as the car followed the curving track obediently, but it was real enough for you. It only lasted ten minutes. We could not have covered very much ground. But it was so cleverly arranged, concealing and revealing its scaled and varied vistas. Here, even, was a miniature approximation of a freeway, with a little onramp and then an exit. A tidy journey, entire and optimized.

For my part, I had slipped into a vision I had been carrying without knowing it: how I had assumed adult life would feel. The world would be perfected by science and enriched with the wisdom that adults carried, which would be my wisdom, too. Now here I was, the interpreter of all things. Now, at last, I was a fluent god. And all for you.

The picture is taken from one car back. Must be your father took it, from back there where he rode alone—a third wheel. Or maybe he rode with someone else, a Disneyland straggler or someone’s extra sibling. Your small, black head is set seriously forward, intent on the difficult drive. But my arm lays along the back of the seat and my chin is tilted up into twilight, to the trees parading by and the marble sky.

Nancy Bell is a theatre artist and writer living in St. Louis. She is Associate Professor of Theatre at St. Louis University and works as a director, an actor and and a playwright. Her other work has been published in New Plains Review and The Disappointed Housewife. You can learn more about her work at www.NancyEllenBell.com.

25 October 2024

John E. Brady's reading of

Embryogenesis

Written by Amy S. Lerman

John E. Brady oversees both the narrated pieces for every issue of Passengers Journal, as well as produces each audiobook for Passengers Press. He has been performing for close to four decades all over the world including on Broadway and National Tours, in Film and TV, in industrials, in regional theaters, on cruise ships, in arenas, in amphitheaters, on cruise ships, and as an improvisor. He has been seen and heard in over 100 radio and TV commercials and won several audiobook awards. Favorite role? Dad. Find out more about his work at https://johnebrady.wixsite.com/mysite. He can be reached at audio.passengers@gmail.com.

18 October 2024

Philippe Halaburda

Dahmenn Suenno

Born in 1972 in France, Philippe Halaburda is a self-taught abstract painter based in Newburgh, NY, USA. While he holds a degree in Graphic Design from the Academy of Graphic Design and Visual Arts, EDTA SORNAS in Paris, France, his artistic journey transcends traditional education. Inspired by the Bauhaus teaching and elements of the Constructivist technique, Philippe explores the interplay between urban and natural landscapes, delving into their profound impact on human emotions through vibrant and geometric map compositions. ​ Since 2010, Philippe's artwork has adorned numerous European exhibitions, gaining recognition and finding a place in private and public collections. His pivotal solo representation by the Peyton Wright Gallery in 2013 marked his entry into the American art scene, showcasing his readiness to expand his creative footprint. During a four-year stint in New York starting in 2015, Philippe's artistic vision flourished, mainly influenced by the intricate grid of Manhattan. The LionHeart Gallery and Artmora Gallery hosted solo exhibitions in 2016, solidifying his presence in the contemporary art scene. Since 2018, Philippe has collaborated with various European and American galleries and curators, participating in collective exhibitions that have enriched the discourse around his art. In 2021, he ventured into colorful art installations, exploring a new dimension of his work that delves into human psychology. These installations have graced prominent art spaces such as the Hudson Valley MOCA in NY, the Garner Art Center in NY, and Terrain Biennial Newburgh, offering viewers an immersive experience of his evolving artistic exploration.

11 October 2024

Prairie Moon Dalton

Carolina In January

If you get hungry enough you’ll eat a rabbit,
but we never did.         Instead, she found us

a cold cottonmouth,                    asked nicely
for its wasted skin.             She said we could

split it.                        Diamond bracelets for both
of us.            When Carolina pierced my ears,

she sang.             Held a cotton ball to catch
the needle              and a pinch of first snow

to numb me.                               Like a magic trick,
I could not see her                   hands when she slid

these gems                       into my head. She is part
of me.                    Which part? She took her eyes

and left me                             nothing but her keys
on the table and that day, frozen as this one.

An interview with Prairie Moon Dalton on Appalachia and being a poet of place

How long have you been writing? What projects are you currently working on?

I've loved writing since I was old enough to hold a pencil, but I never took any clear direction. I received some recognition for my poems during high school but didn’t take myself seriously as a writer until later. During my first year of college, I needed a way to work through my homesickness and culture shock. I got off the class waitlist for a poetry workshop and quickly knew it was where I was meant to land. Since then, I’ve had a string of encouraging mentors and peers who ignited and kept the poetry fire burning under me, and I really can’t credit them enough.

Right now, I'm drafting and revising a couple of series that I hope find their way into a first book. One focuses on the historic drowned towns of North Carolina — places purposefully flooded for the creation of reservoirs and dams. The other is a set of poems called "Notices" that use legal jargon to explore the illocutionary silencing of the working poor.

Your bio mentions being an Appalachian poet. This poem feels subtly grounded in that place, particularly with the presence of the cottonmouth. Can you speak to how geography and heritage have influenced your work?

I understand myself as a poet of place, and I seek to illuminate that. I was born and raised in the NC mountains, and I feel lucky to live in this state. North Carolina’s range of nature and culture is incredible. But you can’t talk about the scenery without also talking about the exploitation and consequences that generations upon generations of people have faced. Ivy Brashear puts it well in her essay from Appalachian Reckoning:

“From salt to timber to coal to gas, absentee companies have stripped Appalachia of every resource from which they could make a buck, and left very little wealth behind... Appalachian people have been left to clean up the various economic, social, public health, and environmental messes extraction companies have dumped upon us, leaving very few internal or external resources from which to build.”

Too often are Southern Appalachians misrepresented or neglected in broader cultural narratives, and that drives me to write what I know. When companies leave behind economic and environmental devastation, art is a force of cultural wealth.

“Carolina in January,” a poem about ear piercing and loss, feels almost like a coming-of-age tale. What inspired this poem? Tell us a bit about your writing process.

Hardly do I ever write with one fixed story in mind. Everything I’ve learned, absorbed, and experienced so far in this life curls up inside me and brushes up against itself in surprising ways that I end up writing about. “Carolina in January” in particular arises from one snowy winter, Girl Scout camps, and that annual strange numbness and restlessness of New Year’s Day.

Being a thoughtful observer, listener, and reader is as necessary as writing. I naturally fall into a rhythm of dreaming and active drafting, and I think it's important to take the process as it comes.

You have two poems in this issue, “Carolina in January” and “Flood Event,” a very short piece. Do you envision these poems in conversation with each other? Are there themes which frequently appear and reappear in your work?

There’s a lingering presence left behind by both of these poems. I think the speakers are haunted by similar things - the expectations of their bodies and livelihoods - and they’re both looking for blame or explanation, or both.

What are you reading right now (poetry or otherwise) that you love, or that inspires you?

While we’re on the topic of writers of place, Laura van den Berg is phenomenal. I aspire to her sense of surreality. She renders her home state of Florida in such dazzling ways. I’m reading her new book State of Paradise and I highly recommend her short story collection I Hold A Wolf by The Ears. As for poetry, I’ve been enjoying the wit and wisdom of I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes. I return to that sonnet crown all the time.

Prairie Moon Dalton is an Appalachian poet from Western North Carolina. A 2020 Bucknell fellow and Neil Postman award winner, her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Rattle, Sprung Formal, The Allegheny Review, and elsewhere. Prairie Moon is currently pursuing her MFA at North Carolina State University.

4 October 2024

Munroe Forbes Shearer

The Five Pillars of Intimacy Direction

Intimacy Directors and Coordinators is an international organization that provides guidelines for the ways in which scenes of intimate relationships or intimate violence (sex, sexual assault, sexual touch, etc.) are conducted in live performance. They frame them in five pillars, listed on a handout that fell out of my journal and onto the adjacent Amtrak seat on my return trip to Boston from New York. I read them quietly to myself. 

1. Context:

Before any choreography can be considered, there must first be an understanding of the story and the given circumstances surrounding a scene of intimacy. All parties must be aware of how the scene of intimacy meets the needs of the story and must also understand the story within the intimacy itself. This not only creates a sense of safety, but also eliminates the unexpected and ensures that the intimacy is always in service of the story.

Before I left for New York, Dan and I had only been on four dates. On the first, we met at a bar and he showed me his Grindr nudes folder right there in seat 3A. I tried to cover it with my hand as he shrugged and laughingly told them to enjoy the show. He was wearing a leather harness underneath a plain white t-shirt (He had planned to go to a fetish night if I flaked, which he says that boys in college always seem to.) He has a well-kept beard and a swath of chest hair bursting over the top of his shirt. Despite a gruff exterior, his hands are doll-soft; his voice sensuous and light. He has a series of tattoos of woodland creatures that run up one arm, starting with water creatures (an otter) before moving to ground animals (a chipmunk, a shrew, a bumblebee on a thistle) and ending with a soaring heron at his shoulder. He makes that intense and disquieting eye contact that only bearded blue-eyed psychiatrists in their early thirties seem to be able to, where they stare directly through your head into your innermost thoughts about how badly you want them to rail you in the bathroom at this dive bar. We talked about his psychiatric practice. His interests, his passions, his wife. 

He asked about my writing, and my theatre work. My previous relationships. I told him about Sully. I tried to make it seem like it had been longer since we had broken up because I didn’t want it to seem like I was on a rebound (I absolutely was). He told me he was sorry. I found that odd. He didn’t have to be sorry. I didn’t want to be sorry about it, I wouldn’t let myself. We kissed greedily in the parking lot before he paid for my Uber home. 

On our second date he came to my house. It was the first time I had a boy over since I left Sully. I dragged him past my squawking housemates and into my closet bedroom at the back of the house where we fucked. Hard. He spanked me until I was on the verge of tears, then slapped me in the face and spit on me (sorry, Mom) before finishing on my chest, cleaning me up with a warm towel, and wrapping me in the warmest and most hospitable grip I could’ve imagined. One hand over my back, sliding tenderly along my bare stomach while the other played music in each tight black curl on my head. He’s not much bigger than I am, and maybe an inch or two shorter, but I never noticed. He makes me feel small, but not diminished. Held, but not squeezed. Pushed, but not used. I made him watch a silly horror movie and he broke one of my wine glasses (which he cleaned up, apologizing the whole time). He had to leave when his wife called, she had locked herself out of their house. I wondered if he texted her to make up an excuse for him to leave. He insists that he didn’t. [MA1] 

On our third date we discussed our personal traumas over Cambodian food and had sex in his Honda Pilot.

On our fourth date we canoodled in a corner at an expensive restaurant in Cambridge where we made friends with our waitress. That date was memorable because he came over and we didn’t have sex. The more dating app dates I go on, the more I realize the bizarre rarity of that scenario. We fooled around a little, don’t get me wrong, but he just held me. Long and tender. The intimacy is indescribable. To be held and felt by hands seemingly made for holding and feeling is a pleasure and a pain that’s almost beyond reason. Pleasurable because you feel so safe in that moment, so seen, so removed from the painful choices you’ve made to get there, and finally able to bask in the glow of your freedom. Painful, because after you doze off nose to nose, drunk on each other’s smell, his alarm rings and he has to go home. One of his wife’s boundaries: no sleepovers. That’s reserved for her. The curse of the ethical slut is, after all, ethics. The transition of waking up wrapped in Sully each morning to sitting alone in my underwear with my sheets smelling of Dan’s cologne was painful in a way I didn’t expect. I left Sully the month before to see other people. So why did it hurt so goddamn much? 

Then Dan got COVID, so I didn’t see him for a week, and then he had to leave for a psychiatry conference in New York: Tuesday to Sunday. He offered to pay for me to take a train down for the weekend, and I don’t remember anything between that and my butt being in the seat. I knew it probably would hurt. I almost wanted it to. The sexual freedom of non-monogamy requires some masochism—knowing that no matter how much love I felt in his bed, he would send me home with a slap on the ass and a promise to text that he may or may not keep.

2. Communication

There must be open and continuous communication between the intimacy director and the actors. The communication includes but is not limited to: discussion of the scene, understanding of the choreography, continued discussion throughout the rehearsal period, frequent check-ins during the run and an openness to dissent any actions in the process. Avenues for reporting harassment must be made available to the entire ensemble.

On our first night in New York, over a gluten free pizza, he was quiet. I offered a penny for his thoughts. He returned a dollar. He bucked up some courage and asked me how I was feeling about the problematic and tenebrous us. I offered a heavy sigh and shifted back in my seat. Let’s examine my options:

“I think I’m falling in love with you, I hope your wife doesn’t mind.”

“It feels like a knife in the gut every time I look over and see you scrolling on Grindr, even though that’s the reason I’m sitting here as well, and I understand that the established rules of engagement in our connection means that you, in no way, owe me chastity outside of our situationship”

“I really like hanging out with you and want to keep seeing you, but am actively conscious of my inexperience with non-monogamous relationships and what I need out of our connection as a result.”

I settled for the third. 

He’s a therapist by trade, so our conversation was almost annoyingly productive. I guided him along some of the walls I was putting up and let him run his fingers over their coarse texture. I told him I was protecting my heart from the pain of occupying the #2 spot in your #1’s life. He said he understood. He asked if I wanted the connection that he and his wife had. I said no. Because I don’t. I’m not ready to be a husband nor a wife, and have no intention of becoming ready anytime soon. It’s why I left Sully. I left Sully to be like Dan, and to be with people like Dan. Right?

I volleyed the question back to him, as is the duty of any good snarky bottom. If I have to express vulnerability at the dinner table the least you can do is offer me a sullen “good?” before changing the subject and footing the bill. Instead, he teared up. He said that he was scared of the idea of me moving away, which I had mentioned earlier. That he could see our connection continuing and blossoming, an ongoing journey of intimacy until I moved on, or he moved on, or both, or neither. I didn’t know what to say to that. I think that I blubbered something about not knowing whether or not he would ever be my boyfriend. In his convoluted answer that I block out most of, he quoted a Hippo Campus song back to me: “I don’t care what we are, it just has to work.” I don’t think men I like should be allowed to listen to music, let alone quote devastating song lyrics back at me. The song is called Understand, which is funny because I don’t. I think that I did care what we were, more than I want to believe.[MA2] 

I think I want to be a boyfriend (a wretched word that I deeply and irresponsibly adore), as inane and selfish as that sounds. I left a boyfriend who unreasonably loved every fucking inch of me because I felt like I would explode if I was a boyfriend for another second. Only to sit across the table from Dan and want nothing more in the world than to have him softly kiss me on the head and tell me that he loves me every night before going to bed. And then he did, that night. We left the gluten free pizza restaurant and returned to his hotel, where he pounded my brains out and I dozed off on his chest. Just like I used to do on Sully’s. Every night of our trip he’d kiss me on the head and say “goodnight beautiful boy” before he fell asleep with one arm looped over my ribs. I wish he’d told me that he loved me. He told his wife he loved her every time he hung up the phone. His wife didn’t know I was there. I listened to the phone calls quietly and tried to infer what was going on in her day. Sully used to tell me that he loved me when he hung up the phone.

3. Choreography

Each scene of intimacy must be choreographed, and that choreography will be adhered to for the entire production. Any changes to the choreography must first be approved by the intimacy choreographer.  

We spent most of our time in the hotel bed. Not (always) fucking, just existing. In our underwear or naked, always intimately. Touching, kissing, holding, maybe just my feet over his legs or his head sprawled over my lap. Sometimes, if we were deep in conversation, we’d both put our feet up on the wall next to each other like children trying to stay awake at a sleepover and talk about the ways in which people do and don’t exist. Or the ways we wished they did. He’s smart, and knows that I’m smart. [MA3] We have a lot of interests in common, and I would ask him to explain his psychoanalysis to me and he did. It’s kind of easy, in a strange way (at least, when he says it). We get a lot of the same references about culture and society, and true crime. He listens to me when I talk, and I keep up with him when he does. I ask him questions that he answers.

I make him laugh a lot. He told me that he was thinking about shaving his chest and I told him that that would be my own personal Hindenburg disaster. He laughed so hard that he started to cry again, like he did over the gluten free pizza. [MA4] “Oh, the humanity”, indeed.

I like sleeping next to him. He snores a little bit, like Sully used to do. Not a lot, just enough to remind me that he’s there. I slept really well the first night, partially because we split two bottles of Soju at the Korean restaurant he took me to (where they didn’t have any gluten-free options even though he said he checked online, a fact that deeply embarrassed him ((I told him that it was okay, which it was. It takes practice. (((Sully used to call every restaurant to ask about their gluten free options and how serious they were about cross contamination. ((((Just saying))))). The second night I slept less well, but it was okay. I laid there and watched him sleep for a little bit. His beard rustles when he breathes too hard, like a wave ebbing and flowing off a beach. He has a little outcrop of gray hair at the front of his forehead and a few gray drops in his beard. I think he’s insecure about it. I think it’s sexy. He certainly fears getting older (as men in their early thirties do). Sully used to talk about how much he was looking forward to going just a little bit gray, a silver fox-y type of gray. They each have a preoccupation with fixing their hair every time that they look in a mirror. 

I can’t help but think of the similarities between them sometimes. Hairy scientists, thirty-ish year old bisexuals, gentle men with sweet pets and gray streaks in their hair. They have hands smaller than you might expect, but both soft and strong. They both like paying for dinner and calling me beautiful.

There are differences, too. Sully’s cat is the love of his life, Dan likes dogs. Dan is kinkier than Sully; Sully was softer to cuddle with. Dan likes soft rock; Sully likes EDM (I like folk.) Dan revels in his non-monogamy; Sully couldn’t handle ours. Dan is married; Sully wanted to be. To me. Dan doesn’t tell me that he loves me, while Sully did on every breath. I know he meant it, too.

4. Consent

Before any scene of intimacy can be addressed, consent must be established between the actors. Permission may be given by a director, script, or choreographer; however, consent can only be given from the person receiving the action. Starting choreography from a place of understanding consent ensures that all parties are clear about to which actions they are consenting, and it provides actors with the agency to remove consent at any time.

Before I continue, I have to get something out of the way: I’m a survivor of sexual assault. I was 17 and he was 21. I stayed with him for two more years. It’s hard but it’s true, and now an inevitable story to get out of the way when engaging in new sexual relationships. It’s important context, I promise. I told Dan at the Korean restaurant, when we returned for his credit card (see: two bottles of soju). I told it in the context of another story so I could[MA5]  move on immediately, but he touched me differently after that. He was less grabby and less pushy (not that I had was opposed to the grabby and the pushy, mind you. It looked good on him.) He kissed me before and after he did anything, and asked me softly if it was okay when he wanted to get rough with me. When my mouth was otherwise occupied (we’re all adults here) he put his wrist in my hand and told me to squeeze him if I needed to stop. And I did, and he did. And then he’d kiss me again. Simple, baseline expectations, but I was still overwhelmed by the sundering power of delicate handling to peel back layers and layers of trauma-informed armor and make it possible to feel utterly and radically safe in your body, even if just for a moment. 

He can be mean. Never to me, but to others. He’ll make comments about his patients or people walking slowly in the train stations. He’ll say mean things about men we see on Grindr or men that he’s fucked back in Boston. He was rude to a woman working at H&M. It makes me wonder if he’d be mean about me someday, say that I was naive or foolish. If he’d say I didn’t know what I wanted or how to cut my feelings into a shape that fit his. On our first night in New York, he mentioned a guy he used to see and how relieved he was that they never wanted to “buy each other fucking rings,” that they could just have fun and let their relationship be what they wanted it to be in a kind of kaleidoscope, something new on each day. I understand what he meant, it’s what I had signed up for. Though I couldn’t help but feel the presence of a burdensome image of wearing a ring someday, one that he gave to me on one knee. Knowing that he could disparage me with his next conquest for feeling that way puts a knot in my stomach. He’d never admit it, though. Not to me, at least.

On our last night, over a bottle of Montepulciano that I chose and tasted, he asked me to give him the “big feelings” about our relationship like my own therapist used to: what made me happy, what made me sad, what made me scared, and what made me angry. 

I told him that the intimacy made me happy, in fact it made me deeply fucking joyous. The tiny kisses in the morning and the ravenous way that he buries his face into me. The conversations about life and death, psychology and responsible artmaking. The way I learn from him and his thoughtful listening to me. We speak the same language about the world, I find. 

I told him I was sad that he couldn’t sleep over, that it was hard to feel like our relationship was dictated by his ability to work around his existing relationship and not what we wanted for our lives and our connection. It was sad that the prospect of a life together didn’t exist, even though it was ridiculous to imagine one after knowing each other for barely a month. 

I hesitated before I got to scared, but it spilled out of my mouth before I could stop it. I said I was scared that I would fall in love with him. And that he wouldn’t fall in love with me. And that I’d spend my life being bitter that he didn’t, wondering what I could have changed. He asked what would happen if I fell in love with someone else, so that we could revel in our non-monogamous debauchery and indescribable intimacy before going home to other people that love us completely. I know that it’s possible, but it’s hard to accept when that person isn’t around right now. I left that person, remember? 

I couldn’t think of something that made me angry. Now I wonder if I’m angry at myself for feeling that way.

5. Closure

At the end of every rehearsal or scene of intimacy, actors are encouraged to develop a closing moment between them to signify the ending of the work. This small moment or simple ritual can be used between takes or runs of the scene, and/or upon the close of rehearsal. We encourage this as a moment to leave our characters, relationships, and actions from the work behind, and walk back into our lives. Likewise, we suggest all parties (including outside eyes) exercise proper self-care during and after the run or filming of intimate projects.

I’m on my way home now, on the 3:00 Amtrak from New York to Boston, train number 88. I managed to find a seat alone near the end of the train. Dan walked me to Penn station, but left me in line. He was quieter than he had been at breakfast, and we sat with my bag between us waiting for my train's gate to be announced. He kissed me before he left, and told me that he was excited to see me back in Boston. He walked away, back out into the sunlight. It was warmer today than it has been the last two, and we went for a long walk in the morning. He checked out of his hotel and his flight doesn’t leave until later tonight, so I think he might go hook up with another guy. I understand. It’s fun. His openness about his sexcapades bothers me less than it did at the beginning of the weekend, knowing that I’m more to him than just another one. I think, at least.

Soon I’ll be back in Boston, where I’ll climb into my unmade double bed and make myself some mac and cheese, do my homework for tomorrow and consider what I want from my life. It’s easy, in some ways: I want to love and be loved with everything I can muster. I want to be agile, to be unburdened, to be unstoppable. To be kind, and have others be kind to me. To have a cat named Pyewacket and for him to fall asleep in my lap. To understand myself, and others. I want to be as thoughtful as I can muster. It’s hard in others, too, though.

If closure is a ritual, consider this mine. Dan can do his on his own time.

Munroe (He/Any) is a queer playwright and essayist from Essex Junction, Vermont, now based in Providence, Rhode Island. His work often centers his rural New England heritage and love of history to explore introspective themes of regret, family, and loss while uncovering intimate truths about human communion. Munroe was the winner of the Rod Parker Playwriting Fellowship Award and the Betsy Carpenter Award for Playwriting at Emerson College, and was a runner-up for the 2023 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. During the day, he serves as the fellow for the HowlRound Theatre Commons in Boston, Massachusetts. munroefshearer.com

27 September 2024

Katie Bausler's reading of

La Gardienne des Sources/The Keeper of the Sources

Written by Kelli Russel Agodon

Katie Bausler is a writer and podcaster. Published written work includes columns, poems and essays in literary magazines, journals and articles in publications including the Alaska Dispatch, Edible Alaska, Stoneboat, Tidal Echoes, Cape, Cirque, and Insider. She also hosts and produces the 49 Writers Active Voice podcast with writers and artists on these pivotal times, writes a newsletter focused on alpine skiing, and is a volunteer public radio DJ and host. She worked as a public media host, reporter and producer and then in marketing specializing in radio spots.  Her first work as a professional voiceover artist put her through college in San Francisco. She is working on a collection of essays and poems, working title: Live Like You’re Dying. Katie and her husband Karl live near their children and grandchildren on Douglas Island along a saltwater alpine fjord in Juneau, Alaska’s capital

13 September 2024

Mubanga Kalimamukwento

my mother’s favourite food

but first
my father’s favourite
was fish & chips
a taste acquired in the 2 years he called

Cardiff, home/
fattening his engineering degree.
the potatoes had to be sliced into circles
crisped using my mother’s four step process

/soak the starch out/
/parboil/
/pat dry/
/double fry/

he liked it for breakfast
recovering from those nights he came home angry/
his fists greeting
my mother’s body

he liked it sprinkled
red with crushed chilis
red where his hands had left lacerations
where my mother leaked like a heavy cloud.

eating the sun with her skin/
singing into the fire
my mother recreated this favourite
best at fighting the grog in his voice

the morning after
we bury
my mother
he wakes up ravenous

/he takes his seat/
/unfolds his fists/
/cradles his face/
weeps.

& I never knew my mother’s favourite food

An interview with Mubanga Kalimamukwento on memory, genres, and inspiration

How long have you been writing poetry? What advice would you give to emerging poets?

I am pretty new to poetry. I’ve only been writing it since 2021ish and even then, the push was being in a required poetry class for my MFA, so I am still quite pleasantly surprised by magazine acceptances and consider myself an emerging poet. So some advice to me based on my experience in other genres is that writing is like practising your handwriting: the more you do it, the better you get, and with that, the valley times are shortened and the peaks longer, more frequent––or, hang in there.

Tell us a bit about your work within the literary community. You founded a journal and work with a prison writing workshop. What have those experiences been like?

It all stems from my early experiences as a writer. When I started writing my first novel, the experience was like being inside a drum, talking to myself. My community was with other readers like myself, but it took much longer for me to find my way to other writers. The journal is me trying to make a landing a little softer for other Zambian writers; beyond publishing them, we work very hard to help them build community through our social media engagement, mentorship opportunities and masterclasses. We are only 2 (almost three issues in), but the feedback has been incredible, and working with first-time authors is such a rewarding, necessary experience for me. Being part of the African literary ecosystem for me is about looking around at the tables where are sit and making space for others like me, or others who are at earlier stages in their career, the way I might have wanted a few years ago. I have been very fortunate with literary friends, I have a lot of people who hold me up, and I try to do the same for others. My absolute favourite thing is when writers I teach, mentor or publish win outside of the spaces I curate.

As for my work with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, that’s more of a marriage between my legal and writing careers. The additional pleasant surprise has been that I have found teaching writing really enjoyable––to be witness to their growth as artists is an honour.

“My Mother’s Favorite Food” is a heartbreaking exploration of the relationships between father, mother, and daughter. Can you speak a bit on the theme of family, and how it appears in your work?

When you lose your parents young, like I did, most of the time you spend with your parents is in memories, and those can shift and change shape over time. In engaging with the memories of my father, over time, I have grown softer in my perception of those times and of him. But a few months ago, I was making fries for dinner and ended up sharing how I came to this recipe- which was, like with most of my recipes, through observation and quite suddenly, I realised that in all that time I had spent with my mother in the kitchen, we had been making things my father loved and not things she loved, and that broke my heart a little and birthed this poem. What’s happened to me is what happens to many daughters. As your reflection changes, as you see more of your mother in your own face, you gleam a new understanding of things you had never considered before. For me, it was just a pause. I talk so much about my mother, but how much did she reveal? How much of her magic was drowned in the mundane? What would she want me to remember?

You are also a novelist and short story writer. Can you tell us a bit about how the different genres you write in inform each other? What is your creative process like?

In novels, I know going into a project that I have a mountain ahead, and because of that, a lot of the early creation process is really just putting one step in front of the next. With each novel, I have to remind myself that my job in that first draft is just to take the next step–meaning, not looking too far ahead and not turning back. It’s more of a long-term relationship. I know there will be revisions, the necessary culling of darlings, conversations with early readers, editors, my agent, and more writing. But maybe because my entry into creative writing was through the novel, it doesn’t seem daunting.

Short stories pose a greater challenge. I often feel like I am in vertigo, absolutely no idea what is going on until some unpredictable moment when the heart of the story, the voice, the container–all of it, reveal themselves to me. That’s much more taxing on my mind than the novel.

Between those two is poetry, which is a welcome exhale. I write poems only when the image is clear, so it is the most accessible form for me for that reason. Some poems have fought me on this, where it was perfect in my mind and gets convoluted on the page, but My Mother’s Favorite Food wasn’t one of those, it appears now precisely as it came to me while I made dinner.

The greatest gift that writing across genres gifts me is that they bleed into each other; my prose is strengthened by my poetry, and my nonfiction learns everything from my fiction.

What are you reading right now (poetry or otherwise) that you love, or that inspires you?

My life involves a lot of studying right now, so I am absorbing much of my poetry through literary magazines. I loved Adedayo Agarau’s, fine boy writes a poem about anxiety. Every few months, I marvel at Drowning Manifesto by Tala Abu Rahmeh, and I am still reeling from Blessings Over the Bodies of My Father’s Murderers by Rachel Rothenberg. My softest spot is for African writers. I remember how excited my editorial assistant and I were to receive and read Sihle Ntuli’s Kasala (for a first-born twin), which straddles between English and the author’s mother tongue. In my first poems, I decided that I was going to frame poems within Zambian proverbs because my earliest recollections of storytelling at school involved proverbs; as I started writing, I quickly realised that some words did not want to and could not be translated without killing them on the way and so the poem became about those words, those phrases and the different meanings they took in my mind as a polyglot. I always love multilingual poetry. Inspiration-wise, I love singular words. Sometimes the sound of them, sometimes the shape. Recently, I have been working with the word Muzungu- which means white person ( in one sense) but can also sometimes be used to mean someone who has foreign sensibilities. I saw this TikTok video where a creator was pointing out similarities between the word Muzungu (meaning wanderer) and Bantu words for aimless wandering or dizziness. So, words, words inspire me.

Mubanga Kalimamukwento was born in Lusaka, Zambia. She is the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2024), selected by Angie Cruz; the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest (2022), selected by Carmen Giménez; the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award (2019) & Kalemba Short Story Prize (2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, adda, Overland, Menelique, on Netflix, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Young African Leadership Initiative, the Hubert H. Humphrey (Fulbright) Fellowship, the Hawkinson Scholarship for Peace and Justice, the Africa Institute and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her editorial work can be found in Safundi, Doek! Literary Magazine, Shenandoah and The Water~Stone Review. She founded Ubwali Literary Magazine and co-founded the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop. When she isn’t writing or editing, she mentors at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Mubanga is a current Miles Morland Scholar and PhD student in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota (Twin-Cities), where she is also an Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) Scholar. Her debut collection of stories, Obligations to the Wounded, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

23 August 2024

John E. Brady's reading of

Ode to Ms. Pac-Man

Written by Candice Kelsey

John oversees both the narrated pieces for every issue of Passengers Journal, as well as produces each audiobook for Passengers Press. He has been performing for close to four decades all over the world including on Broadway and National Tours, in Film and TV, in industrials, in regional theaters, on cruise ships, in arenas, in amphitheaters, on cruise ships, and as an improvisor. He has been seen and heard in over 100 radio and TV commercials and won several audiobook awards. Favorite role? Dad. Find out more about his work at https://johnebrady.wixsite.com/mysite. He can be reached at audio.passengers@gmail.com.

16 August 2024

Ulysses Hill

Tired Man on Grass BW

Ulysses Hill, a dynamic nineteen-year-old born in Los Angeles and raised in Pasadena, is making waves as a writer and photographer while studying at Dartmouth. His unique blend of Black and Mexican heritage infuses his work with a rich cultural perspective. Ulysses seamlessly navigates diverse literary genres, from crafting romantic short stories to thought-provoking essays, drawing inspiration from Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Baldwin. A YoungArts finalist in creative nonfiction, his piece "The Threat of The Black Boy" is featured in the 2023 YoungArts anthology and Active Voice Magazine, alongside contributions to Cathartic Lit and Afritondo. Ulysses Hill's storytelling prowess and versatile approach promise an exciting future in the worlds of literature and photography.

9 August 2024

Melissa Tuckey

After the Clinic Bombing

Cincinnati, Ohio

I remember the keys in my hand
turning the bolt in the heavy glass door
flipping the lights on quickly
to scan every woken room
checking garbage cans for bombs
inspecting windows
and doors jambs, sill
and frame, listening for what moves beyond
the sound of my breath
the bass notes in my chest—
Flipping on the camera at the front gate,
signing in patients, many
carrying children tugging holding
cajoling—
their faces weighted
as they held the elevator open—
one to another
third floor, the waiting room
to your left
I studied for a math exam—
keeping an eye on the front gate
worried
the wrong someone would slip in –
sign my book—
take the elevator...

Meanwhile Anita Hill
was grilled
by the senate judiciary committee—
9 white men, all of them
older than dirt—

Are you a scorned woman, Ms. Thomas?

An interview with Melissa Tuckey on the role of personal experience in poetry and on being both an activist and a poet

Tell us a bit about your poetic journey. How long have you been writing? What projects are you working on? 

I started writing poetry in 8th grade. I had a teacher who encouraged me and fed me poetry books. My plan was to go to college and become a writer, but the path to do that wasn’t clear to me. And I had some mistaken notions, I didn’t want to be influenced by other poets. My ego was fragile, and I wasn’t ready for criticism. After college, I found work as a writer and environmental activist in the military toxics movement working for safe disposal of chemical weapons and after some years of intense work, I found my way back to school for an MA in literature, and then for an MFA, and I’ve been committed to poetry ever since.  

My first book Tenuous Chapel came out in 2013, selected by Charles Simic for ABZ Press’s First Book Contest. Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, which I edited, came out in 2018. I’m currently working on & sending out my second book of poems, War Edition. 

Can you tell us a bit about the events that inspired After the Clinic Bombing? What drew you to this story?

When I was in college in the 1990s, I worked at Planned Parenthood in Cincinnati at the security desk. This was during a time when Operation Rescue was attacking local clinics, trying to shut them down. A few years earlier, the far right had blown up the building. The Clarence Thomas hearings were around the same time. It was a hard time to be female—to realize what little regard the all-white male senators had for Anita Hill, and to see our local clinics under physical attack. The police were on the side of the anti-abortion protesters. The Sheriff personally delivered box lunches to the anti-abortion protesters and thanked them for their service. This poem came to me with the realization of how surreal it was to be a young woman holding that job—I really did have to check for bombs every morning—and of course, current events spark these memories. 

This poem broke our hearts because it feels both historical and timeless. When writing about current events, how do you strike this balance? 

I wish it weren’t timeless...but I know what you mean. How do I write about something political without it being flat. I think the key for this poem was that I wasn’t writing directly about current events, but about something I had experienced. Having some distance from the events in the poem helped me shape a narrative. Underneath it, I had an urge to say—hey look—this is how we defended ourselves. We have always fought for these rights and we will continue. 

Your bios frequently list you as both a poet and activist. Can you speak a bit about the role of poetry in activism, or activism in poetry? 

I’ve been an activist most of my life. For me, poetry and activism are inseparable. We become activists out of necessity. We organize readings and build communities and we create journals and poetry presses. Poets are makers of not only poems but communities. We do these things with the few resources we have to keep our arts vital in the world. As Audre Lorde reminds us “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.” 

As a poet, lived experience as activist shapes how I view the world. After ten years of working in the environmental movement, I returned to school to study and write poetry. At the time, there was a strong push back against political poetry. Meanwhile, people would say—write about what you know. But what if what you know is that the world and our experience of it is political? 

I was in graduate school when the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began and when Sam Hamill put out his famous call for anti-war poems that crashed his web site. Dozens and dozens of readings in opposition to those wars were held across the country. It was an uprising of poetry. 

While living in DC, I met Sarah Browning who asked me to serve as coordinator of DC Poets Against the War because she wanted to organize a national poetry festival (which became Split This Rock).We participated in activist events, organized poetry readings, and led poetry contingents at national marches. At one point we had 100 poets marching with poetry on our signs. A strong sense of community came from this work. From there we founded Split This Rock as a national poetry organization lifting socially engaged poetry and poetry of provocation and witness. The call to build this organization was resonant.  

Editing Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology was a similar effort. It was the first poetry anthology to look at connections between social justice and environmental crisis. Of course, having a new book requires all kinds of activism to get it out into the public realm. Among my favorite actions, Kathy Engel, Mark Reed and I collaborated to create an installation with art and poems from the book at street level in the windows of the Tisch Building at NYU.   

Keeping poetry alive in our communities requires a kind of activism. Serving as Poet Laureate is a kind of activism. Lately, I’ve been participating in and organizing Poetry for Palestine events.  

Poetry and the arts are vital for activist movements. Poetry gives us access to human complexity and imagination. It crosses borders and connects us across cultures; it reclaims language from the marketing executives and politicos, it speaks deeper truths, and it’s not yet been ruined by money or religion. These are all necessary tools for surviving current moment and shifting our culture toward something more life supporting.  

What are you reading right now (poetry or otherwise) that you love, or that inspires you?

I recently had the opportunity to hear a conversation between Tracy K. Smith and Roger Reeves that sent me back to their work, I love the complexity and generosity of each of these poets. I’ve also been reading Palestinian poets, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassam Zaqtan, and Tawfiq Zayyad. 

Any advice for emerging poets who are still finding their voice? 

Study the craft. Read widely. Be adventurous in your writing and reading. Attend poetry readings. Find your community. Support other poets. Take your own work seriously even when no one else does. Disconnect from social media. Be in the world fully & stay out of debt. 

Melissa Tuckey is a poet, editor, and teaching artist who lives in Ithaca, New York. She is author of Tenuous Chapel, which won the first book award at ABZ Press and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology published by University of Georgia  Press. Her poems have been published at Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Witness, and elsewhere.  She teaches an online mixed level poetry workshop.

2 August 2024

Lisa Hentschke

Fatherland

Finn picks up the hitchhiker despite my protests. He thinks I’m too cautious. ‘You think everything in the world is out to get you,’ he says. ‘It’s just a young girl,’ he says. ‘It’s cold out,’ he says. He pulls over.

The girl in question has dark hair and dark eyes and a thankful smile. Finn rolls my window down but spares me the burden of having to talk to her, yelling ‘Get in!’ past my face. I hear the door behind me open and a small voice thanking us. The girl scoots over to sit behind Finn. I glance over my shoulder and catch her eye briefly. 

I think of movies like The Hitcher and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I imagine a pocket knife tucked into her jeans, underneath her shirt. I imagine her caressing it, almost subconsciously, before striking us with it. I’m always waiting for the knife to come out. 

‘Where are you headed?’ Finn asks. 

‘Just up north,’ the girl says. 

‘Ah. Lucky. So are we.’

‘I thought so.’ There’s no hint of a smile in her voice. 

‘What’s your name?’

‘Sarah.’

‘I’m Finn.’ He points at me. ‘That’s Conor.’

‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Nice to meet you, too.’

Finn smiles. I try to exchange a look with him but he ignores me. He turns his attention back to the road and I lean my head against the window. 

The first snowflakes of the year are falling.

In the corner of my vision I see Finn’s hand move towards the radio. Surely not to turn it on; he always claims he can’t focus on driving with music on. That’s the rule. He drives, no music. I drive, music. Except I never drive. 

Finn turns on the radio. 

‘I love this song,’ the girl says from the backseat. Finn hums in agreement. I don’t hear a song playing at all. 

The roads are unmaintained, full of holes, and my head bangs against the glass painfully, at one point so hard it might bruise. Let it. Finn looks in my direction but now I ignore him. The snow outside sticks to the ground. It doesn’t melt. It lingers. 

‘Are you two brothers?’ The girl asks. 

I glance at Finn. He’s suppressing a smile. Of course he is; he doesn’t worry about anything, ever. ‘Do we look like brothers?’ he asks.

We don’t. He’s got pale skin and a sharp jaw and red hair, I’m dark and circular. The girl and I could be siblings, though. We’d pass well. 

‘Conor’s my boyfriend,’ Finn says. 

‘Oh! Oh, God, I’m so sorry.’ 

‘We get this constantly. Don’t worry.’

‘Oh my god. Still.’ She laughs awkwardly. ‘If it helps, I’ve made this mistake more often. Asking couples if they’re siblings.’

‘I’ve done it the other way around,’ Finn says. 

‘You’ve never told me this!’ I exclaim. 

‘Ah! He speaks,’ Finn says, turning to me. I hate when he does that. He doesn’t realize how condescending it is. ‘So, I assumed these siblings were a couple. Met up with them a few times and only, like, the fifth time did I find out they were just brother and sister. They had to correct me. I asked about their anniversary.’

‘Hah!’

‘It was awful.’ Finn is grinning, as always, and he mouths something to me that I can’t quite make out. I think it might be I think this is fun, do you? or something but when he sees my confusion and does it again, it looks more like I am going to kill you.

‘It’s snowing,’ the girl then says, her voice filled with almost childlike wonder. It breaks my heart. 

‘It is,’ I say. 

‘Beautiful.’

‘As the driver, can’t say I agree,’ Finn says.

For a moment we’re all silent, watching the snow. 

‘Sorry, what was your name again?’ Finn asks the girl. I can’t believe he doesn’t remember. He’s usually very good with names. 

‘Sasha.’

‘Ah.’

Was it? 

 
*

Finn was born on an old farm in the middle of nowhere. Growing up, his friends were the sheep, pigs, and chickens. Elementary school was his first real contact with non-family members and even then he wasn’t too interested. He’d refuse invites to playdates and birthday parties in favour of going home and reading books. Poetry, even. How he turned out to be such an extrovert is a mystery. 

I’m paraphrasing. His mother told me all this when I first met Finn’s parents about a year ago. A year. Feels long, doesn’t it? And somehow short, too. Too short. We’ve been together for a little over a year now and it doesn’t represent our relationship well. It feels like we’ve known each other for decades. 

Sometimes I think about how we would have been if we’d met and gotten together as teenagers. How would we have changed each other in those developmental years? Would he have been able to get me out of my shell? Would I have experienced all those things everyone always tells you to experience when you’re young? Would I have gone to parties, started drinking alcohol, cheated on him? Or would I have motivated him to continue his studies? I fantasize about all the different people we would have become. Me, the wildcard. Finn, the genius. Me, ending up in rehab. Finn, stuck in a miserable job. Us, breaking up before we’re thirty, before we were even supposed to meet. 

The day I met his parents was unplanned. We’d driven all the way over to his childhood home, yes, but his parents were supposed to be away for the weekend. He wanted to pick up some old stuff. I just wanted to see the place. 

It wasn’t uncomfortable. It wasn’t. I shook their hands, made the eye-contact, did the talking. It was they who barely knew how to keep up a conversation. And Finn kept correcting them, thinking I wouldn’t be able to understand them unless they spoke perfect English. It was all a bit…well. It went alright.

At one point his mother found me alone in the kitchen. I was feeling awkward and doing their dishes because what else could I do, and she told me she had a miscarriage about eighteen years ago. Finn doesn’t know about it and I’m not supposed to tell. I don’t know why she told me. Maybe because she didn’t know me. Maybe she doesn’t have too many people in her life. It doesn’t seem like she does. If Finn and I had been together since we were teenagers, she wouldn’t have told me. 

I wouldn’t have been with Finn as a teenager.

I like to fantasize about the impossible. I know I wouldn’t have liked him enough to get to know him, let alone become friends—all in love—with him back then. I would’ve found him annoying, boring, pretentious yet dumb, and all those things he might have been able to turn me into are the things I hate. I would never have allowed him to turn me into anything other than what I already was, back then. Sometimes I wonder why I’ve allowed it now. 

And him…I couldn’t have improved him, either. You can’t soften the edges of a boy who grew up on a farm. You just can’t. 

I do love farms, though. I love all animals except birds. I’d hoped to see the sheep and pigs and maybe even cows when I went there, but instead I got a pair of old people and the sight of a group of black birds circling the stalls. ‘A murder,’ Finn told me. ‘A group of crows is called a murder.’ I stayed far away from them.

On the way back Finn told me his parents liked me. I’m not sure what made him think so. I told him I liked them, too. 

*

‘You can still go back home,’ Sasha says from the backseat. I turn around. 

‘Sorry?’

‘What?’

‘I—you said something.’

Sasha looks at me, frowning. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Are you sure?’ 

‘Yeah. Sorry?’

‘No, no, okay.’ I turn back. I can’t go home, anyway. Not now. 

The world looks pure and unbothered—especially out here, on these secluded roads Finn always insists on taking. The only other sign of life is a crow rising from the snow. I think Sasha should be more scared of us. I think she should be more careful. I don’t know how to say this to her without sounding threatening. I think of a knife tucked into someone's pants, someone’s pockets, hidden behind layers of clothing. 

‘What are you going to do, up north?’ I ask. It’s a neutral question; she can answer it however she wants. I don’t want to be invasive. 

‘Join the circus.’

‘Oh, wow, that’s—ambitious.’ 

Finn laughs. ‘She’s joking, Conor.’

‘I—Really?’

Sasha ducks her head and smiles. ‘Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun.’

‘Don’t worry, Sasha. He’s a bit slow.’ Seriously. He doesn’t notice he’s doing it. 

‘Sam,’ she corrects Finn. 

‘Oh, fuck, sorry. I’m bad with names.’

‘What are you doing up north? Anything fun?’

‘Not really,’ Finn says. I think about our destination: a dying childhood home, a place now surely filled with tears, a murder of crows. Not really, indeed. 

‘Ah.’

I look back at her one more time. Sam. She’s an older woman with intelligent eyes. She looks like me. Maybe I’ve seen her before, I don’t know. 

The road stretches out before us until it disappears into the white of the world. The snow has covered everything by now; all is hidden. You can’t even see where the sky ends and the ground begins; the falling flakes blur the lines between matters. They’re from the clouds, from the sky, from the ground, they’re everywhere, all the time. It makes me uncomfortable. The world should have its boundaries.

‘Conor, look,’ Finn says, softly, not trying to get Sam’s attention. He’s gesturing towards the window. ‘Do you see the old house to the left?’ 

I don’t see anything. ‘Yes,’ I say. 

‘I used to go there almost every day.’

‘What for?’

‘Just…because. The guy that lived there would offer me odd jobs, sometimes.’ 

‘We have an hour left to go. You didn’t live here, did you?’

‘No, I did. For a while.’          

He doesn’t elaborate. I don’t ask. 

Sam—or was her name Sandra?—asks us to stop at a gas station because she wants to use the bathroom. ‘God,’ Finn says as we watch her enter the shop. ‘I should have offered. Who knows how long she’s been without a bathroom?’

‘What do you think her deal is?’ I ask him. 

‘Her deal?’

‘Yeah. What’s happened to her?’ 

‘Life, probably.’ 

I look at her one more time. Her hair, though completely gray, looks full and thick. Her wrinkled face demands respect. She could have been my grandmother, but my grandmother never had that kind of spirit. 

She doesn’t come back. We wait for twenty minutes before Finn gets worried enough to go ask about her in the store. 

‘They said no woman like her had come in to use the bathroom,’ he says when he sits back down behind the wheel. 

‘What?’

‘They said—’ 

‘Yeah, I heard.’

‘They probably weren’t paying attention. We saw her go in.’ 

Did we? It’s already escaping my memory. What did she look like again? When I think back to turning towards the backseat, I see myself sitting there. 

‘Let’s just wait a few more minutes,’ Finn says. ‘Should I turn the radio off?’

‘Is it even on?’

‘Can’t you hear the music?’

‘Turn it up.’

He does. It sounds like static at first, but then I hear it: there’s a voice in there. Soft. Not quite masculine, not quite feminine; not quite singing; not quite speaking. ‘Are you satisfied? If there’s something you could ask for, what would it be? Between safety and freedom, what would you choose? You’re choosing safety, I can see. You’re a safety kind of guy. If you had the balls to do what was necessary you wouldn’t be sitting here, clutching that—’

‘She’s not coming out,’ Finn says. ‘She must have left.’

‘Probably went back home,’ I say. I turn the radio off. 

*

When I lie in bed at night, I dream of a monstrous black bird entering through the window of the bedroom and landing at the foot of my—our—bed. If I were to close the window, the bird would just break through. 

First, I notice it by the dipping of the mattress near my feet. A threatening weight. If I look at it, I’ll see it stare, head cocked, black eyes glistening in the dark. It will lean closer and expand its wings a little. But I don’t have to look. I know it’s there. In the last few dreams I’ve found it easier not to look. I just lie there, frigid, sweating, feeling the painful beating of my heart. Waiting for the knife to come out. I know where this is going. 

 Second, I feel it picking at my feet. Slowly, softly, almost gently, like a parent cleaning its baby. It does not feel comfortable. I tried kicking it the first time, but that did not end well for me. So I lie still, allow it to caress my fragile skin, to place its beak wherever it wants, and it will move up my body. It takes its time getting to my legs, my hands, my arms, my neck, and, finally, my face. 

Third, the pain. I can’t help but scream every time. There’s so much blood—always—even if it doesn’t stain the sheets. This isn’t about the sheets. It snaps at my mouth and tears my lips right off of my face. It eats the skin off my nose. It digs into my sockets until it can take a whole eyeball out. It tears at my cheeks. I think it might be trying to get at my brain, but I’m always gone before I can see if it succeeds. 

When I wake up, I vividly remember the pain. 

 ‘You should get this checked out, Con,’ Finn has said to me more than once. I told him how I sometimes debate whether to wake him up in those nightmares—even though I know, even within the dream I know, I would only be waking a fake Finn up. A figment of Finn. Random parts of Finn my brain’s glued together that will pretend to be a person. Dream-Finn always sleeps through my screaming.

 Sometimes Finn lies with his back to me while I am awake. I’m either afraid to fall asleep or afraid to wake up the next morning, and imagine if I were to lean over him, I’d see his stomach cut open and all his guts spread out over the mattress and the floor. Sometimes I look at him and his space in the bed looks empty in the dark.  

*

‘Do you want to stop for lunch?’ Finn asks. I’m happy Sandra is gone, but it’s been silent for a while and it’s a relief to have Finn breaking the tension. I’ve been unable to do it. 

‘Do you want to? I’m fine.’

 ‘I’m fine, too.’

 ‘Okay.’

‘Is that a hitchhiker?’ Finn asks after a moment.

‘What? Where?’

‘Ahead, in the distance. A silhouette.’ Finn nods his head once. 

‘We’re not picking up anybody else.’

‘Okay.’

‘Just don’t hit them.’

‘I won’t.’

Now I see her: a young girl with dark hair and round shapes. She’s holding out her right hand, thumb up. In her other hand is an unfolded pocket knife, the blade reflecting the sun. She looks me right in the eyes. We drive past her. 

‘I didn’t think we’d made her feel unsafe,’ Finn says. 

‘Who?’

‘Sophie.’

‘Who?’

 ‘Sophie. The girl we’d picked up.’

‘I’m sure that’s not why she left,’ I say. But what I’m thinking is, I’d get the fuck out of here, too, if I were her. I would’ve never gotten in. 

‘She reminded me of you, you know?’

‘She did? How?’

‘She seemed like the kind of person who could make me laugh.’

Where did he get that impression? ‘I could use a laugh,’ I say. ‘Been feeling awful all day.’

‘I know. I can see it on you.’

‘Grumpiness?’

‘Dissatisfaction.’

I wonder what dissatisfaction looks like. On me, it might just look like a regular day. I think it looks like old mattresses and scratches on the wall and freezing phone screens. I sent Finn’s mum a dick pic once, just to see what would happen. I don’t know why I’m thinking of this now. I got a response a full week later. ‘Interesting,’ she wrote. 

‘I wrote a poem for tomorrow, you know.’

I look up. ‘You did?’

‘Yeah. Didn’t I tell you?’

‘No. And if you thought I knew, you wouldn’t have felt the need to remind me.’

‘Good point. Do you wanna hear it?’

‘You know it by heart?’

‘Of course. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it, though, once I’m standing there. It might be too much.’

‘Recite it to me. It might help.’

‘It’s called Fatherland. Okay. Here goes.’ He clears his throat, then clears it again. ‘Fatherland. / Another word for home. / Another word for a piece of land. / Another word for wanting. / I don’t count the ground I have been born on to / be the ground I shall die on, / because I have been an unloyal son. / I have wanted to destroy borders, / to set the childhood home on fire, / to leave behind nothing short of a goodbye. Do you want me to continue?’ I nod. ‘Okay. Respect for the Fatherland is just a reluctant acceptance of what you can’t change. / Love for the Fatherland is nothing but an illness for the short-minded. / Pray for those who aren’t faking it. / I can’t cut off my roots but I can bury them, / I can bury them in the Fatherland. / I can bury you, Fatherland, / and I can forget about you. / I can forget about you.’ A beat. ‘That’s it. The poem.’

I say it before I can help it. ‘I don’t think you should recite that tomorrow.’

‘What?’ Finn turns his head towards me and I can see he’s upset. ‘You don’t think it’s—I mean, it doesn’t even have to be good, I’m not a poet, but—why not?’

‘I just—I don’t know if it’s appropriate. Do you think it’s appropriate?’

‘Of course I think it’s appropriate. I wrote it for the funeral.’ 

‘Oh. I mean, you can do it, of course. I won’t stop you.’

‘Wow. Thanks for the support.’

 
*

Finn has never really liked his father. He was lucky to be able to get his own place when he did. They used to go on fishing trips every single Monday morning—very early, hours before Finn’s school would start—from the moment Finn turned fourteen until he moved out. He hated those. He’s complained about them to me. About how they’d sit in silence for hours, about how unbelievably tired Finn would be, about how his classmates would pity him for his lack of sleep, about how his father had never felt farther away than during those mornings when he sat on the cold, wet dirt beside Finn. 

I never liked Mr. O’Shara either. It’s not that he wasn’t nice to me—he was. It’s just that whenever he looked at me I got the odd feeling that he saw something else. It’s a stare Finn inherited but doesn’t use as often. I also heard Mr. O’Shara yell at his wife for telling me about the miscarriage.

What else to say about Mr. O’Shara? He’s a dominant man. If you’re sitting at the table, you wait until he takes the first bite. You have to expect the salt to be passed to him first. You have to treat him like he invented the stuff. 

‘There’s a—I don’t know, some sort of bakery near,’ Finn says. ‘I love that one. I would love for you to see it.’

‘A bakery? Near the highway?’

‘It’s only a few minutes ahead.’

‘Okay.’ I lean my head against the window but immediately snap back. ‘Is that a hitchhiker?’

‘Where?’

I squint. It’s not. There’s no one there. I’m getting paranoid. 

Finn takes an exit, a few turns, and stops in front of a building. It’s got its own parking lot, completely deserted. Finn parks in the middle. 

‘I’m so excited to be here again,’ Finn says. He rubs his hands together in an animated way and I smile. ‘They make a really good hot chocolate.’

‘You never drink hot chocolate.’

‘I do when I’m here!’

‘I love this side of you,’ I say. Finn grins and hops out of the car. I follow. The way to the front door seems endless, even though it’s right there. We slowly make our way through the snow, which is thicker than I think it should be, and my jeans get wet and cold. 

‘Wait,’ I call out, but Finn is in front of me and the wind carries my words the other way. 

There’s something wrong here. The door is too dark, the windows are too reflective. I falter but Finn doesn’t seem to notice. When he reaches the door he stops and all I see for a while is the back of his jacket, bright pink. 

‘It’s closed,’ he says when I reach him. I can barely make out the setting of the ‘bakery’ as I look through the glass door into its darkness. It doesn’t look like a bakery. 

‘Shit,’ I say. 

‘Shit,’ Finn says. I look at his fallen face and this is the closest I’ve felt to him all day.  

‘Maybe there’s another one further down the road—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Finn says, turning away. ‘I wanted to go to this one.’ 

‘Can I do anything—?’

‘No, it’s fine. Mum will have food.’

*

My mother was a strong woman. She worked, raised me, did all the household chores, and never, not once, complained. She was strict, firm, and yet kind. I think my father needed to die to bring that side out of her. Maybe a man has to die before a woman can flourish. Often I think I’m doing my part in just letting women be, by not putting myself into their bodies, their minds, their lives. There is no woman in the world who regularly thinks about me and I’m keeping it that way. I’m doing my part. I know I shouldn’t congratulate myself for sucking dick instead, but I can’t help it. 

I didn’t mean to get so crude there.

I wrote a poem about her, once. My mother. It went something like, ‘When the fatherland is empty and deserted there are other lands to flee to… / You never grew up in the fatherland because you did not have to. / The fatherland is cold and barren, / it’s been defeated in war, / bombed to the ground, / spit on, and you’re not sure it didn’t deserve to be. / The fatherland—’ 

I don’t remember all of it. 

Mum changed later on. Life had been chipping away at her until there wasn’t much left. When I turned fifteen she started bringing new men around every week. Sometimes she would leave for days and have them check up on me. I hated that. I barely knew them. 

Mrs. O’Shara seems like the kind of woman who was a good mother despite all circumstances. I wonder how Finn and I would have been if our childhoods were switched. Sometimes I think Mrs. O’Shara likes me more than Finn does. I don’t know exactly where this feeling comes from. Maybe because she told me about the miscarriage—maybe that made me feel special.

*

We park clumsily in the driveway of Mrs. O’Shara’s house. Finn will have to readjust the parking job tomorrow before the others arrive, but for now it doesn’t matter. Finn hugs his mother when he comes in and she has tears in her eyes. I turn away from them. 

‘He’s in the living room,’ she says, voice thick. Finn immediately puts his hand on the knob, but he hesitates. I don’t want to follow. I really don’t. I ask anyway. ‘Do you want me with you?’ 

I’m genuinely surprised when he nods. Why does he want the last time he sees his father to be with me? What if I dump him? The memory would be tainted forever. Maybe that’s the point; maybe it’s one last middle finger to Mr. O’Shara. And maybe he’s telling me we’re breaking up soon. Finn makes me go in first.

When I reach the coffin it takes all my strength not to stumble backward. 

It’s not Mr. O’Shara in there. It’s not. It’s a girl. A dark-haired girl, with a round face, hands clutching something sharp I can’t quite make out. It’s the hitchhiker we picked up this morning.

I can’t get myself to say anything. I stare, wide-eyed, until Finn joins me. I need him to speak. I need him to freak out. I can’t do everything for him. But when he opens his mouth, out comes, ‘hey, Dad,’ and then he’s sniffling. I look at him in disbelief. It’s all an act. It has to be. Mrs. O’Shara is playing a cruel joke and Finn plays along because it’s not on him, it’s on me. 

I stare at her. I can’t help it. She’s pretty, haunted, hands clasped around the closet thing she could find to help her protect herself from the world. 

Finn knows about my mother, he’s seen old pictures, he listened compassionately when I told him how traumatic that open-casket funeral was for me, how I saw death in a way I never had before. I look at the girl in the casket and for a moment, I’m terrified. 

Calm down. Don’t cry. That’s not mum, not me. Calm down. Look away.

This must have been Finn’s idea. He found a girl that looks like me and had her come in and lie in a casket just to see what I’d do. Just to laugh at me. I imagine Mrs. O’Shara chuckling in the hallway, imagine Finn suppressing his laughter next to me, and I breathe: in, out. I won’t give them the satisfaction, even if they’re vulnerable, even if they’re grieving and desperately in need of a laugh. I put my hand on Finn’s shoulder and squeeze hard. I wait for him to stop the act. He doesn’t. Instead, he asks me to leave the room after a while. Fine. 

The evening and the next morning fly by. I make Finn and Mrs. O’Shara tea, I go to the grocery store to give them some time together, I come back and make dinner, I go to bed early. I’m not awake when Finn comes to bed, but in my dream he is already there, his back to me, Schrödinger’s guts in or out of his stomach. The morning is much of the same. I get dressed, I fry some eggs, I arrange the snacks, I reverse the car, and I suffer through the small talk. Finn denies we ever picked up a hitchhiker at all. 

They’ve replaced the girl in the coffin with the actual Mr. O’Shara, dead as can be, and they’re all pretending nothing happened, so I am, too. I’m not letting them get to me that easily.  

*

He does end up reciting his poem. 

‘I, uh, I wrote a poem, for today,’ Finn says into a microphone placed next to the coffin. The room goes silent and I go tense. ‘Okay. So. Yeah. I’m going to recite it. The poem is called Fatherland.’ He takes a sip of his water. ‘Fatherland. / How—how impossible to have just one word… for this infinite seeming field, / for a land bigger than comprehension, / for a symbol rather than a place. / A land has a thousand meanings.’ He waits a second before continuing. ‘Dad, you were a man like a land. / There was history to you. / You had a thousand stories to tell, / a thousand laws for me to follow, / a thousand ways to make me feel at home, / a million ways to make me feel safe. / Fatherland. Thank you. That’s it.’ And then his family, because they’re his family, applaud and cheer. I do the same. 

This is not the poem he recited for me at all. 

‘I love my father,’ Finn goes on. For a moment his eyes look pitch black, like a bird’s.  ‘I… I loved, I suppose I have to say, but I can’t. I love him. I love my father.’ He chokes up a little. ‘He’s the reason I’m the man I am today. From when I was very little, he’s always told me, “Finn, if there’s ever anything you want to tell me, you come to me. There is nothing you cannot come to me for.” And I did. He’s—he was the first to know everything. I told him I was gay first. I told him I had a boyfriend first. I told him I’d crashed his car first.’ There’s a bit of laughter from the crowd. ‘My father was a proud man. He was a hardworking man. By all means, he should have been an intimidating man, but he wasn’t. He was the kind of man who would hug me first and yell at me later.’ More laughter. I can’t bring it up. In the few times I’ve been here, I’ve experienced lots of yelling and remarkably few hugs. 

Finn looks me straight in the eye before he continues, and suddenly, I know. I get it.

‘Dad always took me on these fishing trips on Monday mornings,’ Finn says. ‘I hated it at first. I mean, what kid wouldn’t? But now…When I look back, those have been some of the best mornings of my life. Not every kid gets to experience that much time with their dad, especially not alone. I think it is one of the most special things he’s ever given me. And I hope he knows that. I think he knows that. But I just—’ God, now he’s crying. Finn’s crying. I’m not falling for it.

His eyes find mine again. I look back, my mouth nothing but a straight line. I know now. He’s doing this, all of this, to humiliate me. To contradict everything I think I know about Finn and his father and to make me feel paranoid. It’s an elaborate break-up. I’m waiting for him to grow wings. I’m waiting for the knife to come out. 

I look away from Finn, into the crowd next to me, and see the girl that was in our car and then in the coffin and I want to kill her. I touch the outline of the pocket knife tucked into my pants underneath my dress shirt to calm myself down. She looks at me and smiles sadly because she knows my relationship is over. Her face looks so much like mine; maybe Finn’s cheating on me with her. I should’ve cut his stomach open last night. 

‘I hope he knows how grateful I am. For everything,’ Finn finally says, and it’s the end. Thank god it’s the end. I want to go to the bathroom and puke my guts out. I want to open the blade of the pocket knife, put it back into my pants, and have it cut into my stomach while I move. I want to bleed all over the living room. 

‘But before I go,’ Finn says, ‘I would appreciate it if you, um—’ he’s looking at me, fuck, ‘Conor, could you say something about dad? For me?’ 

He’s doing this to torture me. He thinks just because his dad died I will say yes to anything, anytime. Maybe he killed his dad himself, for this reason alone. Maybe he killed his own father just to break up with me. 

I get up despite knowing it’s a trap. I force my stiff body upright and force my feet towards the front of the room, next to the coffin, where Finn hands me the cheap microphone he’s been using. He mouths something I can’t make out and turns his back, returning to his seat. He goes to sit on mine instead of his. A hundred eyes, all squished together in Mr. O’Shara’s living room, turn to me. They all look black. 

This feels like a game show. It feels like a trial. Finn, the prosecutor; me, the defendant; the audience, the judge. Their tears and sobs and smiles will determine my fate. There are no lawyers. Outside in the snow sits a black crow, looking in. 

But I have one thing Finn doesn’t know about. A secret. A hidden weapon. I raise the microphone to my lips. 

‘Mr. O’Shara always blamed Mrs. O’Shara for her miscarriage,’ I begin.

Lisa Hentschke is a 21 year old student from The Netherlands. She completed her bachelor's in Philosophy in The Netherlands and is currently studying the MA Creative Writing in Dublin, Ireland. Her childhood mostly consisted of daydreaming, reading, writing, and avoiding contact with peers her age. Lisa has always considered the real world to be too overwhelming and used fiction as an escape, but this later evolved into a passion and a way to understand the world rather than to flee from it. These traits, and much more serious struggles, could later be explained by an unexpected diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Lisa started watching and reading horror when she was around thirteen years old and has loved it ever since. The ability to feel fear and other intense emotions in a safe environment as well as the exploration of serious and interesting themes through the lens of terror is what drew - and continues to draw - her to this particular genre. Other than writing, reading, and being in a state of fear, Lisa enjoys drawing, crafts, walking, and cuddling with her dog.

26 July 2024

Muraya Ranieri's reading of

1001 Nights

Written by Katherine Riegel

Muraya Ranieri is a vocalist, actress, artist, dancer with a long career in tech sales and marketing from the San Francisco, Bay Area, CA. Mother of 5 other musicians and actors as well as married to one, being creative is like breathing in her family. She has always been the chosen one to read out loud in front of the class since elementary school. She has used her voice for DJing on radio, children’s stories, short stories, and animated film in addition to acting live in off-broadway productions and independent short films. As a teen of the 80’s, and lead singer for rock bands since the age of 12, she carries a wealth of pop and music culture knowledge and carries it with her in every performance she does. Forever youthful inside and out, hobbies are teaching Zumba, working out, playing the drums, healthy cooking, traveling, and getting lost in her VR games You can find her on IG @muraya5 and on Facebook under Muraya Mamanta Ranieri.

19 July 2024

Hiokit Lao

Human Nature

Hiokit Lao is a 29-year-old self-taught artist from NYC. Through surreal, abstract, and vibrant pieces, she aims to create meaningful art that instills hope and positivity.

Her art is a kaleidoscope of surrealism and abstract expression, a vibrant fusion echoing the various cultures that have shaped her worldview. Inspired by her diverse upbringing and a deep fascination with the world, her work resonates with the colors, traditions, and social causes around the globe. Each piece is a homage to cultural diversity, intertwining social narratives and her own artistic vision. 

Employing different techniques, she creates pieces that offer dual perspectives, presenting dichotomous yet harmonious narratives based on the viewer’s orientation. When the canvas is inverted, a different narrative surfaces — a testament to the multifaceted nature of culture and perception.

12 July 2024

Jonathan Everitt

The Little Room

The coast is clear, so it’s up the stairs and to the right. To this, the forbidden country. My sisters’
twin beds. Twin dormers. White and yellow painted dressers. First perfumes and powders precious
as Fruity Pebbles. My boyhood heart gulps the alien air of such sweet things. And there! Beyond the
bedroom’s dainty trim, a louvered door leaks buttery light within. The Little Room, they call it.
Holiest of Holies. Window-lit closet stacked to the eaves. Here, dolls hide away with their synthetic
silk locks, lace frocks, gaping baby blues and perky pink cupid’s bows curled in compliant grins.
Hands and arms ready to be posed for hugs. I cradle them and twirl their tresses, straighten their
dresses, then slip out from my discovery undetected—a secret I’ll keep of a secret kept from me.

what should and should not
be loved is a lesson too
often taught with shame

An interview with Jonathan Everitt on prose in poetry, reading one’s own work, and sources of inspiration

Could you tell me a little bit about the original inspiration for your haibun, “The Little Room,” which was published in Passengers’s latest summer issue?

Sure. It came from a setting. In my childhood, we lived in the country, deep in the woods, in a house with a second floor where my sisters’ bedroom was. They're several years older, so they were already school-age when I was born, and they were in school for a few years while I was home with my mother. There were times when I would wander around the house and snoop, get into things as children do. Their room had sort of a walk-in closet. It was bigger than that, but it had this louver door that you would walk into. It was used as a kind of storage room, and it had a window so it was lit with natural light and filled with their things, including a lot of toys. The poem takes that scene and examines it from the perspective of a boy who is not yet aware that he is gay, but will ultimately spend years in his own closet and then come out. There will be moments throughout his life, growing up, when—as is often the case—a child is drawn to the things that they have been taught they shouldn't be drawn to, like dolls; little boys are told they’re not supposed to play with dolls or be interested in things that are frilly or pretty or dainty or pink. A lot of that has to do with people's anxiety and desire to model behavior that is going to prepare kids to move through the world as “normal” and accepted. And it's often to their detriment.

I've been really interested in how old the protagonist of this poem is. I've asked several people on our reading team, and they’ve given me different answers. For me, this is a child on the cusp of that developmental stage when we become individuals separate from family, that moment when we awaken. 

Close to 5 or 6, I think. Old enough to get into a little trouble and be curious, just about to begin school. The oldest you can be and still be home and not be, I would say, influenced or corrupted by the outside world.

You’ve touched on the meaning of the title. Could you tell us a little bit more about its significance?

Jonathan: The title is exactly what the family called that space. The farther I get away from that moment, that time of my life, the more it resonates. Why did they call it the little room? It wasn't a closet. It had light within it, and it wasn't dark. It contained things my sisters loved. It was a special place connected to their bedroom, a place of secrets; it was forbidden. It, the little room, had sort of a sense of preciousness to it, and it felt a little fragile. I think they named that space perfectly for the house, and as we all grew up people would mention that room when we would talk about the years that we lived in the house. We left that house after I started kindergarten, but people continued to mention the little room. It was a quirk of the house that was charming. So make of that what you will.

When I read the poem, I was really struck by how you used the haibun to reflect the tension between the childhood wonder in the prose. There’s this island of a haiku, this isolated moment of shame imposed by society. It feels like the shame and those expectations that you mentioned are almost physically separated in the poem from the purity of the childhood memory. Did you set out to write this poem as a haibun or did that separation between the sections come during the writing process?

It came afterwards. It began as a prose poem. And there have been several times when, in the course of writing a prose poem, I've found, based on feedback from peers, that that piece is well-suited to the haibun form because it’s examining something and it has something to say. That break at the end is a simple commentary that reflects to the reader what they've just been presented with. It is a beautiful way of bringing it home to people.

I'm glad you brought up your prose poems. You've written and published a few prose poems about childhood. What makes you so drawn to the form, and what do you think it is about prose poetry, and haibun, that lends itself to nostalgia and to reminiscence, to evoking memories?

For me, the prose poem reflects what it looks like inside my brain when I'm thinking and reflecting and remembering; it's a train of thought. It doesn't have line breaks. It's not broken up or into a form. It's not a stack of words, the way verse can be. It's just a steady feed. While I'm a poet, I'm also a visual artist. Some people have said of my work that it's embroidered. I like that word. I love to create scenes and draw people into them. In some cases, they're imagined scenes, and in some cases, they’re memories where I want someone to know, to see what I've seen. I've always been fascinated by reading screenplays of the movies I've seen because I'm interested to see what it looked like before a director brought it to life. Most screenplays have a very regimented format, and they often have a block of text at the top of a scene that describes what's happening before they get into the dialogue. If you think about those little blocks of text at the top of a scene in a screenplay, that's similar to a prose poem for me, in that it's painting a picture, and has the opportunity to remark about a scene in a way that pulls the reader out of it because it's set in a different format. It gently grabs the shoulders and says, “Here's what I'm trying to tell you.” Now, in terms of what is timely, the reason I'm drawn to haibun and prose poems these days is that I've had a lot of time to reflect on my life journey. A lot of that has to do with reconciliation after some treacherous territory with coming out, finding peace and understanding with loved ones. That takes time when you've been concealing a part of yourself from people. I also think it has to do with the life stage of my parents: getting older, they reflect more on their lives. My father passed away in 2021, and I've had a lot of conversations with my mother since then. The haibun is a beautiful form for reflecting on scenes from a life: it's like a picture album that has poignant captions, which are the haiku.

That's such a beautiful description. For me, there's something very peaceful about the poem, despite the anger and the emotions contained within the haiku at the end. The last line of the poem is so very heartbreaking, so laden with history, repression and anguish, but it's also somehow full of hope. The way the word ‘shame’ lingers right at the end brings to mind its antonym, pride. When I read more of your work, I was struck by the fact that you seem to end poems with a lot of care. How do you decide a poem is finished? How do you settle on that last line on that last word?

Oh, it's different every time. Sometimes it's immediate, and sometimes it happens in revision. There are times when a piece just comes to you and, you know how and where you want to land. And then there are times when there's something you wanna get out on the page, and you're not sure why. You’re not even sure where you're going when you begin, which I think is one of the most exciting things and is important. I have to learn that lesson every single time I write a poem; I have to learn again and again that it's okay to have no idea where you're going. My natural tendency is to have everything mapped out when I write a poem. One thing that I've learned from other poets is not to go into it with a sense of determination about where you're going. There are a lot of times when I know it's finished because I've been discovering the poem as it unfolds in front of me and I get to a point where I think, “This is what I've been trying to say in my heart.”

There's a line, “First perfumes and powders precious as Fruity Pebbles,” which goes right to the heart of childhood. It looks at what is precious to a child, as opposed to what would seem precious to an adult. I also love the use of almost religious iconography here, which is balanced with the child language peppered throughout the poem. Could you tell me more about all the sacred imagery you use in the poem—whether that is religious or memory imagery—and how you balanced it with this very pure child-like language in the first section? 

I love the way you asked that. It shows you picked up on a lot, and accurately. This was the subject of my graduate lecture. I wrote about the use of religious language. And then slang and scripture and its lyricism from the perspective of a poet who grew up in a very strongly religious household. My dad was a Baptist minister. Faith was a very important part of my family, and there were conflicts for me personally because of the historical issues between community and conservative Christian churches. I grew up with the influence of religion in my life through school, through home and through church. And so, scripture and tradition and theology, philosophical questions of worldview and culture, and the language of the evangelical community are all ingrained. I felt for a time that those things represented a form of indoctrination, that to speak of them, to use that language, was to reflect that I wasn't really being myself, that I was reflecting the influence of others. When I came around to studying poets whose work reflects their own religious influences, I realized that all of those things—the hymns you learn, the scripture you memorize, the stories, their traditions—are all part of your toolbox. That's part of my palette, and I can use that however I see fit to tell my story. When you see fragments of scripture or references to religious iconography pop up in my work, it's because I've chosen to reclaim that language for myself. 

Reading your work, your poems are so often so satisfying to read out loud; they're so full of alliteration and consonance and combinations of words that seem to trip off the tongue.  Yesterday, I was reading a few of your poems to myself, and they have almost a mouth feel to them. You can bite into them the way you would bite into an apple. When I first read “The Little Room”, I immediately wondered if you were a performance poet, but now it’s clear there’s also the influence of the church liturgy. You co-founded, I believe, a long-running poetry open mic night. I wonder if, for you, there’s a link between church, the writing community and spoken word. What influence has spoken word and regularly performing your work had on your poetry?

Oh, I love that question. There are two aspects to it, in terms of my reading my own work. I think that one of the best things a poet can do is read their work aloud to an audience in any setting, even if it's informal, like an open mic. I've always loved open mic, always loved hearing poetry spoken, not necessarily performed, but at least read aloud. I think what it does is it gives the poem life. It lets you see it alive in the world and see, or sense, the response from people, and test it. It's always important to read your work aloud even when you're sitting alone at your desk, I think, but something changes when you share with people in a room. It's instructive. You can come away saying that felt clunky, that didn't sound right, or I stumbled over this, or this is too long. It gives you a lot of feedback if you're revising; the auditory aspect of it shows up in your work. The other thing that occurred to me, just in the last couple of years, is that there's some symmetry between what I do and what my father did. I host an open mic, which I've done with a friend of mine here in Rochester for the past 10 years at a coffee house every month. My father was a preacher, and he would get up in front of a congregation, an audience, and he would speak, and the congregation would respond in different ways throughout the service—through the reading of scripture and through singing, through call and response—but the centerpiece of a church service is the sermon or homily, or whatever you might call it depending on your denomination. That is what a sermon is: one person, speaking to everyone else, sharing their view of the world through the lens of their religion; sending people away with a call to action of whatever sort. In my case. I've inverted that. I invite the world to the microphone, to stand before the congregation and share what they see, what they think and what they've experienced in their lives. I see a kind of symmetry to it that is interesting. Not to diminish preachers, it's just that I wonder if there's some commonality between me and my father and being drawn to having a room full of people who commune in some way. I don't know.

I love that idea of spoken word and spoken-word nights being a form of secular worship. Anyone who's been to spoken word events would know there can be moments of devotion, moments when collective truth comes out, moments that point the microphone at the human rather than at the divine. I'm going to an open mic next week and I’m sure I will think of this analogy between religious services and poetry as I sit there. You talked about poetry bringing you closer to your father, or at least seeing echoes of your relationship in the craft. “The Little Room” is a poem about childhood and, in a way, about childhood dreams and aspirations, about inventing yourself as a child and reinventing yourself as an adult. I love the way you introduce yourself on your website. In it you mention, and I’m going to quote you here, wanting to be a “scientist, farmer, magician, cartoonist, movie star, secret agent, my aspirations were all over the map.” I think we should all introduce ourselves as adults using our childhood dreams. Interestingly, I noticed that writer is not on that list. When did you know you wanted to be a writer more than say a magician or a scientist? Although I'd argue that writers are magicians and scientists too.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, in a sense, a writer can be all of those things, right? Writer is intentionally absent from the list. I knew I was a writer before I knew I was a writer. I always took to books, to language, to script. I loved learning how to write cursive. I don't even know if it's taught in school anymore. For me, it was the difference between carving individual letters out onto a page and actually writing language because your pencil barely needs to be lifted from the paper. I always loved writing. I also always loved art. I loved to draw and paint, but I always came back to language. I started writing in early childhood, memorizing poetry. I had some really great school teachers who introduced poetry to us early and [taught us] how to memorize it. My mother loves poetry so it was in the house. 

One last question. I love asking other writers about their writing day, and about the minutiae of their writing process. You mentioned that you read your work aloud to yourself and that it helps you edit. Could you walk us through what a typical writing session looks like for you, if you have a typical writing session?

Jonathan: I don’t have just one. There's one that's probably most prevalent because it is the most convenient, which is late at night when the rest of the world is asleep, and I'm at my desk, and no one needs me for anything, and I can lose myself, and lose track of time. I need to lose track of time a little as an artist. It's that state that we all found ourselves in as children where you're completely absorbed in what you're doing, and you can do it with reckless abandon. There's no disruption, there are no intrusive thoughts. You're just lost in your world. That is the place, the state of mind, I like to be in when I write. It can last half an hour, it can be an hour or two. depending on how much coffee I have left in my mug. There are other places where the setting is conducive to writing: usually, it has to be quiet—although I love coffee houses, I always have; I love the energy of sitting at a small table with a little bit of a murmur going on and cappuccino machines hissing and that kind of thing. I don't usually write poetry, but I will bring my journal and just sit at a table and be amongst civilization and just sort of write what's on my mind. I love the rhythm of that sort of background cacophony. 

Jonathan Everitt’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Laurel Review, Stone Canoe, Superpresent, BlazeVox, Scarlet Leaf Review, Small Orange, Impossible Archetype, Ghost City Press, and the Moving Images poetry anthology, among others. His poem “Calling Hours” was the basis for the 2015 short film Say When. He has also led a workshop for LGBTQ poets and co-founded the long-running monthly open mic, New Ground Poetry Night, in Rochester, N.Y. Jonathan earned his MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. He lives in Rochester with his partner, David Sullivan.

5 July 2024

Alida Winternheimer

A Vague Association Between Self and Object

We do not make sense, even to ourselves, without our chronologies. The past and the present become one, and there is only today. But when the “I” is confused, which day is today? Which “I” is present? The “I” dissolves in time without order like a drop of ink in a lake, the edges spreading, diffusing. And the spot of ink at the essential core, the lake of time will eat it, too.  

There are signs throughout the house, printed in fat, chisel-edged permanent marker, that instruct, “To Poo. Lift seat, lower pants, sit on toilet. Go poo, wipe, flush, pull up pants, wash.” The signs have evolved in both their simplicity and directness as my dad’s dementia has progressed. The first signs said things like, “Do not throw anything away.” My dad liked to ransack my mother’s piles of mail; bills, paperwork, and essential bits of paper kept going missing. The toilet instructions have been on the walls for a while, but today I discovered new signs upstairs, single words, critical markers, “Bathroom” and “Toilet.” His confusion has surpassed multi-step instructions and now necessitates the straightforward task of identifying the room, the critical fixture. My mom said, “If he starts wandering around, ask him if he needs to go to the bathroom.” I am reminded of puppies and toddlers.

My dad has Lewy body dementia, which includes Parkinson’s-like symptoms, drooping facial muscles, shuffling gait, trembling hands, and hallucinations. The house has become crowded with my dad’s imaginary friends.

A little boy, white blond, sun-kissed-gold. He plays in his front yard on a street lined with palms. It is 1950, he is in his imagination, a play land where cowboys and Indians ride horseback over a dusty landscape. Darryl is a cowboy, red felt hat stitched in white, a six-shooter strapped to his hip, paper caps that snap-bang!, while inside the pink Las Vegas rambler, his mother, a school teacher, cuts his sandwich into triangles.

 

My dad carries a small scar at the corner of his eye from the time his little brother shot an arrow at him. Nana, my grandmother, told me how he came running into the house, crying, his hand over his face, and in that panicked moment she thought he had lost an eye. Today, the television plays old Westerns, the worst kind of shoot-em-ups, full of stereotypes, swaggering ranchmen, saloon girls, and tumbleweeds. I cringe at the Mexican gunman named Amigo and the doe-eyed squaw in her buckskin fringe. When I was growing up, my dad went through the resurgence of Westerns enthusiastically with the rest of America. He bought a copy of Dances with Wolves and became a fan of Clint Eastwood’s mature work. We have no idea why the intolerable Western channel plays today, every day, all day. We loiter in the kitchen away from the clatter of hoofbeats and pop of Winchesters and Colts. Maybe these films, in all their outright badness, take him back to his own childhood landscape of dusty flats, jagged peaks in the near distance, water a commodity. Maybe that world, in its black-and-white simplicity, makes sense to him now or maybe it’s just familiar. Maybe it is marking how far away from us he has gone.

When we received his diagnosis, my dad liked to tell people he was dying. “They told me I have dementia.” He’d cast his gaze away and mutter, “Whatever that is.” Then back to his audience, “So, I’m dying now.” Mom and I assured him it did not mean he was dying, but we could not explain what it meant. We did not yet know ourselves.

The doctor who gave us this somber news sat behind his desk, Mom, Dad, and I across from him. He said, “A person with dementia does not remember who he was, so he doesn’t miss what he’s lost.” While that sunk in, the doctor addressed Dad. “How do you feel? Do you feel any different today than you did a month ago?”

“I feel good.” Dad’s tone left no doubt as to the conviction of his statement. “In fact, I don’t really know what all this is about. If the doctor says I have dementia, then I guess I’ve got it.”

“You see?” the doctor said to us. “In a lot of ways, it’s a blessing they don’t know what they’ve lost.”

I imagine it is better to not know who you were yesterday, so you cannot regret all that is seeping away from you. Your personality. Your personhood. And yet, just the idea of it sets me to grieving my own, so far, imaginary losses.

Dad couldn’t understand why he had to stop driving, though the clearest and most dangerous early indicators of dementia manifested behind the wheel. We could not order him—it’s not how the world works—so my mom explained to the doctor. The doctor in his white coat delivered the edict. Mom continued to hide the car keys, but whenever Dad griped, we had a new refrain. “Because the doctor says so.”

A young man, blond hair turning sandy, dresses for a date in a short-sleeved, woven, button-up shirt. He splashes on some cologne and considers adding a tie. Why not? His date is young, bubbling over with excitement. He’s not her boyfriend, but her chaperone. As a favor to his best friend, Darryl escorts Larry’s little sister to a concert at the Convention Center, a concert he can’t even enjoy for all the girlish screams drowning out the band. It is 1964. Some twenty years later, his daughter will be impressed that he saw The Beatles live. Then, as now, he will shrug and say, “It wasn’t a big deal.” 

Knowing my parents as a unit, Momandad, it was hard to imagine them as individuals, even harder to imagine them young, carefree. There is a photo of my dad with a group of young men, five or six. They wear matching t-shirts with extremely wide black and white horizontal stripes. Their hair is crewcut. They hold bottles of Budweiser and smile the smiles of youth, of mischief, of good times. This photo has always intrigued me, because there is a story behind it, a story I will never know. I am left with scraps of remembrances—things mentioned over the years, images from the past, his habits and manners I grew up with—that I stitch together, hungry for the stories I did not bother to gather.

Today, I come in and he watches me, mutters something like a greeting. Then, a flash of light animates his eyes, his smile, “Hi, honey.” I know he knows me, it is in the familiar look, the upward inflection in his voice. And then it is gone, a flicker only. 

For long stretches between these signs of life, he sits, his face hanging in a jowly approximation of my dad. He is stooped and shuffling, seldom lucid. He hallucinates. We catch one-sided conversations, like being privy to an ongoing phone call, some incoherent, some incomprehensible, some flashes of his past. Sometimes, he speaks so loud and clear I can hear him in the other room, in conversation. The curtain drops all too fast on this theatre of the past. I’d rather have the play than the bare stage, empty house, lights down.

I wonder where he is, and I appreciate the hallucinations. They place him somewhere, whether past or imaginary. The emptiness terrifies me. I would rather leave this existence than become nobody in nowhere. His mother, my Nana, had ALS. Her mind remained whole and present while her body became, slowly, over a surprising number of years, her prison. Mind. Body. Which would you rather lose? When would you be ready to exit the stage? Before Dad. Before Nana. But…if Dad’s consciousness is journeying on other planes of existence, as some people suggest, then maybe black-and-white Westerns are only a placeholder. Maybe the rare flicker of recognition is Dad popping back in to let me know he loves me, even if he is mostly gone elsewhere on business possibly important. It is a nice thought.

Darryl comments on the shape his right arm is taking while flexing the biceps. It is the arm that swings the hammer. And lifts the beer can, he jokes. He is tan, wearing swim trunks, a man in, or perhaps slightly past, his prime. He calls his mother-in-law Ma—the only person who can get away with it—and repairs her deck (or whatever she needs), hence the hammer. He drinks beer and jokes with his brothers-in-law while the children run and swim. These are sunny days on the lake, surrounded by a big family. Good times he will always enjoy, always remember. Even Orel, the reticent, cranky father-in-law, likes Darryl. Everyone likes Darryl; he is good humored and handy. In a family like this, every year there is a birth, a graduation, a wedding. Eventually, the funerals will start and the siblings will be counting down from ten, twenty with spouses, ticking off lives, ending an era. But now, he is living the era, and it may be the happiest era of his life.  

Today, my dad sits slumped in his recliner, a Nobody Home sign slung casually across his face. The vacancy is a stark contrast to the man he was: loving and funny, humorously sarcastic, occasionally biting. Dad liked taking care of his family. Whenever I needed his help, like when my last car died, stranding me on the highway, he came right away and was there through my first solo car-buying experience. Just like that. It is a dad’s prerogative to do for his children. Whether or not I still exist in his world, it is now my prerogative to do for him. It is not enough, what I do, but I offer it up. Daughter.

When my partner and I took care of Dad for five days, Mom instructed us. “His lunch. White bread only. Lightly toast it. He likes mayo on one slice, then the cheese. Microwave it for fifteen seconds to soften the cheese. Then put on the lunch meat. He likes a lot. On the other slice of bread, the mustard, Dijon, but he likes yellow on hot dogs.” I took fast notes, my hand already cramping, and we laughed at the uncompromising specificity of his demands, which if unmet would result in the grouchy old man version of a tantrum. “Cut his pills into thirds and hide them in the dressing.” Ah, if I fail the sandwich, a day’s medication could be lost. The night meds go in his ice cream. I kept thinking, Puppies and toddlers.

I assured Mom we would be fine, all of us. Go, have a good time, and our phones were silent. That was all we wanted, for Mom to be off-duty.

For the duration of our stay, I banned the Western channel. The alternative, HGTV, ran in the background every hour of the day Dad was awake, and soon the remodelers blurred together with the flippers and realtors and hopeful buyers. Before each branch in the remodel decision tree came a commercial break longer than the segment, hypnotizing us into disease: every green-meadow-smiling-couple-bicycles-happy-woman-playing-children also warns in fine print, with a deeply authoritative voice suddenly rushing the text, “may cause death.”

Everything, it seems, may cause death, and yet how slowly it comes.

When I did not sit in an HGTV-fueled stupor, mentally trapped between arthritis-diabetes-MS-asthma-erectile-disfunction, I thought about causes. Pointless, I know, for the horse has long since bolted. Big Ag, PFAS, glyphosate on everything—my dad buttered his cookies. I do not mention these thoughts to my mom; what would be the point of sharing them now, now that dementia is being called Type 3 Diabetes? Some day we will look at the Baby Boomer’s epidemic of neurological decline and shake our heads. Our lament, “If only we had known.” 

My best friend has a pact with her husband. It goes, “If I lose my mind, stick me in a (reasonably nice) home and get on with your life.” It is a good plan. So many of my friends say things like, “I’ll hike into the woods and let the elements do me in.” One said he wanted to be left on a mountain top. I said, “Sure, but who’s going to drag your old ass up the mountain?” And added, for clarity, “Not me.” I might proclaim that I, too, would end my days in the wild, suicide by nature, if I knew I could manage it myself. But I have no such delusions. Whatever infirmity would lead me to this decision would equally preclude me from acting on it. My friends’ pact is a sound one. 

Memory care costs begin around $10,000 per month. A household of two can live comfortably on less than $4,000 per month; in fact, the state calculates that figure to be 150% of the Federal Poverty Level, which in 2023 was about $3,700 per month. With one person entering a home, the same couple’s financial needs will triple, from $3-4,000 per month to around $13,000 per month. Just like that. My parents are not millionaires and do not have long term care insurance. The math puts my parents and millions of Americans like them into a quandary: how to take care of the one while preserving the other? It is a financial question, but it is also an emotional and spiritual question. The harder the caretaker works to provide a positive quality of life for the spouse, the further into the red her own quality of life slips, until that negative balance seems impossible to recover. I hope that when we finally manage to settle my dad in a home, he is as happy as it is possible for him to be. And I hope that my mom can recover her health, her peace, her identity as other than my dad’s keeper.

Today, I arrive at my parents’ house, bearing dinner and cake for Mom’s birthday. Dad shuffles through the hallway, muttering to himself. I say, “Hi Dad,” in a near shout. We don’t bother with his hearing aids. My dog passes him, heading for the kitchen to snuffle along the edge of the cabinets for crumbs. He utters a sound of surprise, smiles, waggles his fingers in her direction, and goes shuffling down the hall. I announce myself again, loud and bright, but nothing. My dog has passed through his world, but I cannot penetrate it. 

“He’s been that way all day,” Mom says. “It took an hour and a half to get him downstairs.” 

Puppies and toddlers are easier. Pick them up and get on with it.

Moving Dad requires coaxing, encouraging, and cajoling. It requires step-by-excruciatingly-slow-step instructions. The day I showered Dad, he had been agreeable to the idea of bathing, and I managed to maneuver him from his chair in front of the television across the house, up the stairs, down the hallway, and into the bathroom, which went surprisingly well and only took about twenty minutes. With that kind of progress, I expected to have him in the tub in no time, sudsing his thinning hair. 

Something short-circuited when we got to the boxers. I might be tempted to think it modesty. But being there with him, suggesting repeatedly that he drop his drawers, I can tell you it was not modesty. Maybe I was his daughter, but I suspect I was only some nice lady looking after him. I belonged there, but how I fit in felt all fuzzy around the edges. His inability to remove his boxers had nothing to do with me, but with his fragile mind, where something crackled, wires crossed or disconnected, and suddenly sense could not be made. He put his hands on the waistband, said, “What? These?” And I replied, “Yes, Dad. Pull your boxers down.” But before the words were out, he was elsewhere, where as mysterious as how to retrieve him. He did finally get into the tub, still in his boxers, stepping over the side surprisingly well. I showed him a shower chair I had bought for him. Like the boxers, it did not register. He patted it, but could not sit. One of the mysteries of dementia is the lost connections where you least expect them, like “chair” and “sit.” 

I read that difficulty telling time is one of the first signs of dementia. At first this seemed strange, since telling time, right up there with tying shoelaces, is among the earliest life skills we learn. But think about what strange things clocks are. Sixty seconds in one minute. Sixty minutes in one hour. Twenty-four hours in one day. Twelve hours on a clock face. Two hands, one long and one short. The long one moves every sixty seconds, the short one every sixty minutes, ticking off one numeral for every turn the long hand takes around the face. Don’t even get started on the second hand, that skinny devil racing round, lapping the other hands over and over and over. It makes perfect sense, then, that clocks would be one of the first connections to unplug, and with them time. 

One of Dad’s prized possessions is his Rolex, an anniversary gift from Puritan, a menswear company he worked for as a sales rep. I did not know how important it was to him until he developed dementia. He wore it daily, fretted when it wound down and stopped telling a time he could no longer read. My mom wasn’t sure how to set the delicate mechanism, and I became the only person who could bring the Rolex back to life. Whenever I saw my parents, I set the watch, while Dad urged me on. My dad’s days, spent before the television, no longer provided enough movement for the self-winding watch. Our minds, like the Rolex, are self-winding, and if we stop moving, they wind down, losing minutes, then hours, then so many precious days.

My mom has lost countless precious days, too, caring for him, captive to his needs. His confusion eats away her days. His incontinence ruins her nights. She has not had a good night of sleep for years; she accomplishes next to nothing in a week of minding her husband. She has reached the end of her ability to care for Dad. He was diagnosed in 2018, though his decline is traceable to 2015. I saw this day coming from way back there, knew she would not be ready to find her husband a new home until she had spent herself in his care. About a year ago, out of the blue, Dad told her, “I don’t want to go to a home. Don’t put me in a home.” It was a rare moment, not only for the lucidity, but the clear intent of his statement, the awareness of his circumstances. How could my mother think of herself after that? She told me only recently, finally, “I am done.”

I have found a (reasonably nice) home for Dad, comfortable and staffed with good people. I wonder how many of the people in these homes receive dwindling visits or none at all. Their position in the lives of their families slips away, a progressive demotion from dad to acquaintance. I do not want my dad to experience this, but will I have the stamina to maintain a routine of visits when I myself have gone through dementia’s demotion process?

We laugh when my mom recounts some of the things my dad says. He asks if they are married. He asks where she is when standing right beside him. He asks about his other wife. This after fifty-seven years of marriage. I would not mind if he had another wife. Imagine how much relief it would be to halve my mom’s burden. In the end, dementia makes strangers of us, the beloved.

Today, I watch Dad put the dish towel in the junk drawer. He folds it, places it, and manages to mostly close the drawer, then walks away with his slow, stooped shuffle. This constant misplacing of items is the least of things that wears on my mom, like having a slow, benign poltergeist in the house. When Dad is settled, I imagine birds will sing again, rainbows arc through the sky, and she won’t know what to do without the bang and clatter of the Wild West, the ghost of her husband roaming the halls of their life together. 

The sea is up, four-foot waves splash over the yacht’s side, cold Lake Superior water. Twenty-plus knot winds stretch her sails taut. She holds a sharp heel, toe rail skimming the lake. Darryl stands at the helm, feet planted, body angled to counter the slant of the boat, keep head and shoulders level with the horizon, squinting in the wind and spray. His wife and two children sit on the high side of the cockpit, all of them in foul weather gear and harnesses clipped to the safety cables. When he calls, “Ready about,” it is both notification and command. They shout, “Ready!” Him again, “Hardalee!” They work together, family, team, crew, releasing the main and the loaded jib, port; hauling in the sheet, cranking the winch, starboard. The boom swings across the cabin and the sail changes, luffing as it shifts, catching the wind again. She comes about, changes heel. It is exhilarating, all of it, and he is here, with his family. Alive, so alive! 

I never sit in my dad’s leather chair, as though it radiates the aura of him, as though to sit in it would be to sit, somehow, in him. When he has last vacated this chair, I think I will try it and see what I can feel of his imprint, if the old warmth of his former self is somehow retained in the favorite cushions. Or if it is a void no longer to be filled, like so much of him. 

Today, he sits there in his long, red, wool coat with the wood toggle buttons and coarse braided loops. It is showing wear, but remains a beautiful coat, classic, a stand-out in the world of nylon parkas. My dad has always worn it well, being a fashionable man, a clothier. The vibrant red contrasts my dad’s pallor, the white of his beard. I will remember him this way, in the upright red coat.

Memory care is a sweet euphemistic term for a residential facility where people need their names sewn into their clothing, where, we were told, they freely and without conflict, “shop” each other’s wardrobes. Only a few weeks ago, the idea made me smile: my dad collecting his fellows’ clothing and laying it out on a bed or dining table to assemble outfits. This is what he did his entire adult life, as a young man working in a clothing store, then as a sales rep for various clothing lines, finally as the proprietor of his own shop. My dad showed his customers possibilities in knits, wovens, woolens. He had a strong aesthetic and found lines that belonged in a specialty shop for their detailing and workmanship—pants came unhemmed, were pinned in the store, and sent to a tailor, who turned impeccable cuffs. Dad made his customers feel good and dressed them for the season in style. I imagined him, only a few weeks ago, enacting that scene in his retail store, while in reality he laid out whatever garments were at hand, various names printed on their bands. Already, that comforting image has been taken from me by the passing of too little time, the unpredictable downward spiral of dementia that robs and robs and robs again. 

It seems we discover what is at the core of a person’s identity by watching everything else fall away. The core, I now know, is not people, not relationships. As my dad has lost his hold on us, his loved ones, he has retained three things: clothing, sailing, and his hot rod. Clothing, because he was really good at it, and it was his creative outlet and how he made his place in the world. 

Sailing, because he loved it. When I was young, my parents decided to buy a sailboat, certainly my dad drove the pursuit. My mother and brother went to an evening class to learn to sail, but I don’t actually know how my dad became a sailor. Never much of a student and not a reader, maybe my mom’s learning transferred to him by osmosis while they slept. Our first sailboat, a trailerable 26’ Chrysler, named Whimsey, came stripped down. My dad built the galley. My mother sewed cushions for berths and curtains for portholes. As my dad and brother carried the wooden galley up a ladder to the boat, set on a trailer in the driveway, it slipped. The boat’s kitchen shattered on the pavement below. Dad would later shrug it off, claiming the second galley was much better than the first. We sailed her on a reservoir, called Rathbun Lake, in Iowa. Our second, a 30’ Ericson, sailed the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. Our only family vacations, stretching for weeks between my dad’s business travel, were a joy that ignited my own passion. If not for them, I am not sure how or when I would have discovered the Great Lake, my need to be on her waters, which I now accomplish in a sea kayak. My brother joined the Navy and is a merchant marine. Dad’s love of a sailboat shaped our lives. 

And the hot rod, because after sailing became a thing of the past, my dad bought himself a custom 1938 Chevy Sedan Delivery. He had his store’s logo painted on the side panels. Weather permitting, he drove it into Wayzata and parked in front of the store, Lake Country Outfitters, where the town’s main street overlooked a Lake Minnetonka bay. It was impossible not to admire the gleaming black hood, the custom paint job, the pleasure he took in it. 

Dad has busied himself collecting old photographs from web-coated corners of the basement, some of his clothing store, some of the sailboat, some of the hot rod. He will show them to you, “Look at this.” For a time, he would tell you about the picture, but he has lost that—we have lost that. Now, he points to his past, creasing and spilling on these treasures or trinkets, and the wires remain confused. He seems to recognize their importance, but no longer knows why; meaning is devoured by this disease. Recently, he found copies of a flyer for the sale of Whimsey II. Above the boat’s photo, the flyer reads, “For Sail or Trade.” I appreciate the pun; do I get that from him? He carries the flyer around, crumpling it, pointing to it, but saying nothing or nothing pertinent. Today, he picks one off the counter and blows his nose into it. Mom and I laugh at such things, because to not laugh is too, too heartbreaking. 

I wonder, what would I carry around if struck dumb by dementia? If I had to make a list of my essential core, and relationships were out, my ability to tell stories were out, I think I would shuffle about with pictures of animals, my pets but also nature generally, and books. I would be content to be placed in a library where I could roam the stacks, tilting spines off the shelves into my weathered hands, and sorting volumes, without logic, long after I could no longer register a single word. 

In the end, we are reduced to some vague association between self and object, so if dementia eats my mind, fill my room with books and pencils. That is all I will need. Leave me there in my contentment.

Alida Winternheimer is an award-winning writer, developmental editor/writing coach, and podcaster whose works have appeared in Under the Sun, Water~Stone Review, Midwestern Gothic, Confluence and others. Winner of the 2023 Page Turner Writing Award and Best Historical, she is listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2022, and has thrice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has taught fiction classes to incarcerated writers through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and hosts the Story Works Round Table podcast with over 290 episodes. Alida has published two craft books, The Story Works Guide to Writing Character and The Story Works Guide to Writing Point of View. When she is not writing, reading, or teaching writing, you can find Alida kayaking, cycling, or being walked by her golden retriever around Minneapolis, Minnesota. Find Alida at A Room Full of Books & Pencils at booksandpencils.substack.com where she writes about life, writing, and the writing life.

21 June 2024

Michelle McElroy

Stop Sign Painting

Michelle McElroy is a native New Englander drawn to the subtleties of life, capturing quiet moments illuminated by the interplay of light and shadow. Whether inspired by the serenity of early morning runs, the intimacy of midnight snacks in the kitchen, or the beauty found in ordinary observations, her paintings reflect the extraordinary within the mundane. Through art, she strives to initiate a dialogue that transcends the canvas. Each play of light becomes an invitation for the viewer to recognize the simple moments that often go unnoticed. Her work is a celebration of the everyday, a reminder that even the most commonplace scenes can possess the power to stir souls and create lasting connections.

14 June 2024

Mara Adamitz Scrupe

absolute reality:

as vestigial/ as the uttermost process
of growing in pure biological
unfolding
changing gradually
from simple to labyrinthine

                                 as the mulch of larval mites feeding
on my skin release irritation-inducing
chemicals form a tiny straw for drinking
my dermis — a stylostome — to kill my cells
(as honest a piece of equipment as any
& always useful in conditions
of unconditional materiality)

                                 as brass tacks
scratching                a high priority in the moment        
& anything/ everything
else literally immaterial      & still when all’s said & done

                                 as much fact as fiction
this lie of flat earth I can’t see -– those countless
microscopic creatures from separate corners
rendezvousing
at my navel — the Delphian center where my panty line
firmly meets my waist
as stranger still how quickly
almost anything/ everything becomes
run-of-the-mill

                                 as the eyes at the back
of the thorax —— large & false for frightening predators ——
(I saw one for the first time this morning
the Eastern Click Beetle
—— that peculiar-looking thing
made me think of forever a comforting form
of Stockholm Syndrome) & never believe there’s anything
much more to attraction
to an insect’s inclination
than heat at the point of elastic pressure at my bra line

                                 as this solitary tramp
through a chigger-infested field
as the insides of my thighs & the hollow between
my breasts — these pimpling scabs that in the end melt
away & leave no trace — as anything
         everything
hot & thirsty            burns to scratch       a raw itch

An interview with Mara Adamitz Scrupe on the intersection of poetry with other mediums and the influence of illness and the body on art

Tell us a bit about your poetic journey. How long have you been writing? What projects are you working on?

One way or another, I’ve been writing since early childhood. In elementary and high school, I was regularly awarded prizes for my poetry and essays. Because writing came to me fairly easily, I suppose I didn’t consider it a particular talent, and chose not to pursue it at college/ university. Instead, I became fascinated with the visual arts, particularly as a ceramist, and I followed that path for some years after earning an undergraduate degree in French and Francophone Studies (I didn’t stray too far from words and language, after all). Still, as it happens. I’ve always needed to work with my hands – my family are all farmers, machinists, seamstresses and tailors, people who make things. And, unsurprisingly, I pick up most manual skills very quickly. Ceramics – with its focus on wheel throwing, hand building and glazing – seemed like a natural process for a person whose hands long for work, as mine did and still do. That said, it wasn’t long before the limitations of the clay medium – in terms of sculptural intention – became apparent. I moved toward more permanent, stronger, and yet more flexible materials and skills, chief among them working with welding and cutting steel and general metals fabrication. Ultimately this gave way to large scale installations for universities and international museums and sculpture parks.

Around the time that my environmental installations were finding a presence in the international art world, I was stricken with a painfully debilitating, chronic, and rare rheumatoid condition that attacks the large peripheral joints, thus severely limiting my mobility, and the facility with which I could continue to pursue physically demanding commissions of outdoor environmental projects. I tried hiring studio assistants and commercial fabricators, but soon realized that certain aspects of the process that I found most rewarding were chiefly those involving process, the hands-on, manual labor required for construction. I was frustrated, fearful, and frankly pretty unhappy with where I found myself. But I was also determined to continue my creative work in any way that seemed possible, and that I found productive and gratifying. Since I was then in a wheelchair, my next pathway needed to be something that I could do sitting down. At that time, coincidentally, I was asked to write an art essay; it was very positively received, and ultimately appeared in a well-regarded public art journal. From there, I proceeded to write essays and reviews for a variety of visual arts magazines, and finally found my way back to poetry. I was well into my career as a visual artist before I began publishing my writing – so I suppose the moral of the story is that there is, indeed, a second act. 

These days, because my medical condition is controlled but continues to periodically flare, I’ve turned my attention to writing essays and poetry, alongside the composition and fabrication of what I call “poetry picture books”, hybrid handmade artist books incorporating my creative writing, photographs, and mixed media drawings. I find it very satisfying to combine my literary pursuits with the making of one-of-a-kind art objects that are intended to be handled as well as read. What’s more, in the process of creating my poetry picture books, I’ve taught myself a raft of new techniques including book binding, gold leaf gilding, and leather tooling, alongside returning to skills I learned as a child (and that are often considered archaic “women’s work”): embroidery, tatting, and other forms of needlework. My poetry picture books have been acquired by university libraries for their Rare Books & Manuscripts Collections, as well as by museums and individual artist book collectors. 

I’m currently busy with a manuscript that addresses my family’s late 19th century immigrant journey from Silesian Poland to America, eventually settling in north-central Minnesota. Shard or Drift or Husk (the title refers to the Polish meaning of my original family surname, Skoruppa) is a hybrid multi-generational memoir, and social and environmental history, set in the cultural and natural landscapes of the Polish communities of northern Minnesota, and in the villages and among the rolling hills and verdant plains of southwest and south-central Poland, the places from which my ancestors emigrated. My book explores the haunting presence of ghosts of “Polonia”, or Polish Diaspora – among the most sustained human migrations in recorded history. Polish Diaspora provides the foundation for this story of my own clan’s immigration, assimilation, and aspirations, explored through extensive family letters, photographs, and scrapbooks collected and preserved for well over a century by my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

As far as poetry is concerned, in the past two years, while serving consecutively as University of Kansas Resident Artist in the Arts & Sciences, and most recently as University of Minnesota Morris Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Liberal Arts, I’ve written two new collections of poems informed by re-experiencing the Greats Plains and prairie biomes of my childhood and growing up years. My “nature” poems are almost always contextualized from a personal perspective. In the process of reacquainting myself with these lands and landscapes, I also spent time with my family, all of whom still live in the upper Midwest. Thus, these collections of poems place natural and social histories in an intimate context, influenced by physical, spatial, and familial memories. The poems also engage distant histories of geological formations of the land, and of the people who’ve lived on it and from it for the past 30,000 years – long before immigrant Europeans, like my own family, arrived. For instance, I find it compelling to imagine and try to describe the Sea of Agassiz as it may have been experienced by distant ancestors of Original people. Or to write pictures of glaciers as they moved across Minnesota, profoundly scouring and scribing the land, and leaving behind an abundance of gigantic sand or granite bottomed lakes for which the region is so famous today.

Where did the title of this poem come from? Is it a reference to Shirley Jackson?

While I would like to claim inspiration from the wonderful writer Shirley Jackson, in fact my poem’s title, “absolute reality:” is entirely based on my medical condition, which is, for me, an absolute (and unchangeable, incurable) reality. Living with this condition for almost three decades has taught me quite a lot about acceptance, as well as about tenacity and hopefulness in the face of challenges that seem overwhelming, and yes, perhaps hopeless. My absolute reality administers sometimes confining parameters for living, and yet it has also turned out to be an excellent teacher. Through it, I’ve learned that one never knows one’s own capabilities until required, even forced, to find ways to deal with very difficult challenges and obstacles. I’ve learned to dig deep & locate within myself the will to continue to be a positive and productive person, and to make myself available to help others do the same. And I’ve come to understand that when a person experiences debilitating circumstances over a long period of time, there are really only two choices: give in and give up, or look around for those in far greater need whose situations are even harder, and determine to give as generously as possible to help improve their lives, and in general to contribute something good to the world despite the harshness life metes out to all of us. 

The imagery in this poem is such an exquisite balance of erotic and gross. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired it?

You’ve just described life, right? We humans are animals, and our presence (some might say overabundance) on the planet is primarily due to our species’ insatiable desire for sex, and our resulting capacity to procreate. And when you think about it in meaty detail, in its most physical essences, both sex and procreation can be rather gross. I find that interplay fascinating. And you know, there’s a very fine line between what we might think of as erotic, and those human proclivities in the sexual arena that, at any kind of distance, might seem downright distasteful. Hence, for instance, we have heated discussions around pornography. And we are now reading studies that seem to suggest that children and young adults who watch it regularly on their personal devices are unable to understand love in the sexual act and begin to see sex as a sort of punishment, or exertion of power. It’s a very complicated stew, this discussion of human sexuality, and the way, as the poem suggests:

  everything 

hot & thirsty burns to scratch a raw itch 

Your other poem in this issue, “Nostrum,” also references skin and illness. Is this a recurring theme in your work? As a prolific poet, what are some of the themes and images you find yourself returning to?

All appearances to the contrary, I’ve found it difficult to write about illness, despite my ongoing experience of it for the past thirty years. I’m repelled by the idea that I am a victim of my condition, or a victim of anything, really. Despite many challenges in my life – and all of us have had our share, no doubt – I cannot subscribe to the notion that I am defined in any way by my illness. Informed by it, perhaps, but certainly not delineated nor construed by it. So, I suppose what I’ve done in my writing is find ways, as Susan Sontag famously suggested, to use illness as metaphor. Rarely in my poems do I specifically describe myself with respect to illness or disability. Rather, in a larger sense, I try to connect the dots between, say, maladies and disorders, and those experiences, like sexuality, that are endemic to the human condition. 

As we all know, skin is the largest organ of the human body. It is both container and exemplifier – when we look at another person we are looking primarily at skin. Our skin protects our internal organs, and yet it is so very fragile. I’m drawn to this contrariety, and this is at least one reason I often write about it. I am also a vain person, and insecure about my appearance. Therefore, the way that my skin container is always changing, and usually not for the better, troubles me, and makes me feel vulnerable. We’re all constantly aging, after all, and though getting older may confer wisdom, it’s not particularly pretty or easy from a physical standpoint. And yet, at the same time, and despite my illness, I look for ways to stress my body: in between flares, I’m a dedicated distance runner; I’ve run four marathons. So, again, contrarieties appeal to me, and I’m attracted to situations that explore them, like my encounter with chiggers in the poem “absolute reality:” or the reference in “Nostrum”: 

some might distinguish between the outer & inner self: the same remedy
applied to the skin/ rubbed on the affected part
or mixed as elixir a swallowed panacea warding off disease 

Besides tangential references to disease and illness, sexuality, and all things physical, my work tends to be very visual – I think in terms of pictures, colors, textures. Themes in my work that recur reflect my fascination with the palpable world of plants, animals, weather systems and patterns, geology, and environmental history. My writing is thoroughly informed by my experiences of place and the natural environment.

You are also a visual artist and filmmaker. How do these mediums inform or intersect with your poetry?

I consider the making of creative work to be an essentially idea-based process, from which the artist chooses the proper tools and media to complete the job. I enjoy the creative process more than the product, and I consider materials and tools interchangeable. How I choose to express an idea depends upon locating the appropriate medium with which to do so. I’ve worked in a broad range of disciplines, and all of them inform each other. When I write a poem, it is because I’ve determined that poetry is the best form for the expression of the thoughts, emotions, experiences I have in mind to explore. It’s really that simple. When I make a drawing, it’s because I can think of no better way to voice a particular intention than with pastels, conte, oil stick, charcoal, or pen & ink on paper. In my artist books I often combine media and disciplines, with the aim of encouraging my drawings, photographs, or poetry to interact with one another, sometimes illustrating or reinforcing a clear idea, and sometimes, in the combining, creating a new layer of meaning. With documentary film, it’s the opportunity to get others to talk about their lives. I can imagine no better way to grasp others’ concerns, perspectives, life challenges, than to offer the opportunity to them to speak for themselves. Though it is true that documentary film can provide a forum for people to express themselves first-hand, still, these days, with the internet and social media in play, the fact that any image or dialogue can be taken and manipulated by anyone, is frightening. I’m moved by the trust in me that has been demonstrated by those who’ve chosen to be a part of my films. And so again, it’s a question of the right tools to do the job.

Any advice for emerging poets who are still finding their voice?

Contrary to advice sometimes given to emerging writers, I might suggest spending somewhat less time reading the work of other writers and more time at the desk simply writing your own work. This is not to suggest that becoming conversant with many authorial voices and styles is not important. While I agree that it is crucial for any artist to be well versed in the contemporary output of their field(s), it is at least equally important that emerging poets write a great deal, experiment with language and form, and explore and develop many and various approaches to expressing their authentic voice. And then, one must have the courage and confidence to ask trusted, kind, insightful, knowledgeable, and truthful readers to comment on the writing that comes. Likewise, I encourage emerging writers to submit their work as much as possible to journals and magazines, and keep track of where it finds favor, and where it meets with rejection. It’s helpful to bear in mind that one’s writing might be brilliant, but not every editor or journal will cotton to it. It’s that simple. Here’s what I say to students in my university courses, and participants in my workshops: Believe in your own work. Don’t be discouraged if it isn’t readily accepted – think instead that you might be so talented and inventive and forward of current trends in poetry that it will take some time for the world to catch up! Finally, for now, I don’t believe in having writing heroes – certainly there are many whose writing I very much admire. But perhaps – given the hard life that comes with choosing a career in any art form – we might be wise to make of ourselves the heroes of our own hard-won creative lives. And remember, as writers we control what we think of our own output. Don’t allow anyone else’s judgement to lead you to believe that you’ve failed, or that your work is unworthy. Keep going – to some extent we must all find meaning and value for ourselves in our creative practice.

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a poet and writer, visual artist, and documentary filmmaker. Her publications include five full poetry collections: Lamentations of the Tattoo Queen (2024, Finishing Line Press, Winner, Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Book Competition), REAP a flora (2023, Shipwreckt Books), in the bare bones house of was (2020, Brighthorse Books Prize in Poetry), Eat The Marrow (2019, erbacce-press Poetry Book Prize/ UK; shortlisted 2020 Rubery Book Award/ UK), and BEAST (2014, Stevens Manuscript Publication Prize, National Federation of State Poetry Societies/ U.S). She has selections in generational anthologies by Southword/ Munster Literature, Aesthetica, Stony Thursday, and 64 Best Poets/ Black Mountain Press, and poems in key UK and US journals including Radar, Rhino, Tupelo, Cincinnati Review, The London Magazine, Mslexia, Magma, Abridged, and The Poetry Business/ Smith Doorstop. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, she has won or been shortlisted for significant literary awards including Arts University Bournemouth International Poetry Prize, Magma Pamphlet Publication Award, Gregory O’Donohugh International Poetry Prize, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize and National Poetry Society UK. Mara is a MacDowell Fellow and a fellow of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and she serves concurrently as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Morris, and Dean and Professor Emerita, School of Art, University of the Arts Philadelphia. She resides with her husband on their farm in the Blue Ridge Piedmont countryside of Virginia.

7 June 2024

Emma Grey Rose

Angels Who Fly

She did not prepare me before I entered the room. She, the doctor. We sat in the waiting room.  

He had a heart attack, she said. He fell off an electric bike.  

Can I bring my child in? I asked.  

It’s best not to, she replied.  

Then she clasped her hands.  

But why not? I asked. How bad is it? 

Why don’t you go in first? she suggested. First room on your left.

Intensive Care, Neurology. 

There were tubes, everywhere. Your face was swollen, hands cut, a black eye, broken nose, dried blood, fractured ankle, monitors beeping, a camera above the monitors, and there was a nurse. The nurse said, I’m Becky.

What happened? I asked.

The doctor will talk with you more, she said. There’s some brain damage.

She was a small woman with long black hair, and she moved toward me as she spoke. I went to the bed.  

Are you the daughter? she asked.

Yes, I said.  

I touched your hand. Your finger flicked. Your eyes did not move. Your head was turned to the side. There was an open gash on your hand, where a wound had stopped bleeding. 

Come back to the room, Becky said. The doctor will explain.

What room? I asked.

The waiting room. I’ll take you there, she said.

We went back to the room. The one where you wait.  

Do you want some water? she asked.

Okay, I said.

I sat down. She brought back water. I stared at the cup. There were six chairs in the room. There was a painting of a field. The doctor knocked, twice, then opened the door.

She took a seat. She had blonde hair. There was a blue cap over it.  

She said, He came in as a John Doe.  

Where was he found? I asked.

Downtown, she said. He was admitted at 6:30 last night.

I nodded. I asked, What happened?

She did not start at the beginning. She started in the middle.  

She said, Well. The brain can only go so long without air before it starts to die. We don’t know how long he was without air.  

Then she paused.

She said, There was a bleed in the brain. The bleed happened first, the heart attack second. That is our theory, she concluded. 

A bleed?  I asked.

Yes, a stroke, she said.

She explained, With this type of stroke there is no paralysis. These bleeds are hard to detect. Someone can seem fine while they happen. But they can cause confusion, disorientation, and imbalance.

I stare off. You had called me just a few hours before.  

You’d said, I’m going home. I love you.

The theory of your accident was this: you were downtown. You were somewhere where you normally would not have been. Nobody knows why you were there. I don’t think you knew why either. The confusion, that was part of the problem. You were on the bike, and it was getting late. You were trying to get home. You had said, to everyone, that you were going home. But you were nowhere near it. 

You were alone, also.

The bleed had already started and by this time, it had progressed. That is some of the theory. The effect of this bleed, the imbalance, is what caused your crash.  

When you crashed, you suffered a blow.  

The helmet didn’t stop it. The doctors say, they think, you hit so hard you lost consciousness. That was key. That was the issue of all issues. Because what happened is that, when you landed, you landed in a way that cut off your airway.

And because you were not conscious, you did not move.

Then, your heart became stressed. Without the air. And that is what caused your heart attack. 

And that is what caused your brain damage.

And that is what caused your body to vomit.

And then someone came along.

I do not know who they were, and the doctors said they did not either. I do not know what they saw. I only know a few things. The blood and vomit did not stop them. They performed the CPR anyways. They called 911. They stayed with you, until the ambulance arrived. But they could not revive your heart. So, the medics took over. They checked your pulse. 

They could not find one.

They cut your clothes. Then used a defibrillator. Your ribs broke. Your heart restarted.  Then you were loaded up, in this ambulance, and taken into the ER.

In ER, you went into cardiac arrest again. For a second time.

They used a defibrillator. Your ribs were already broken. They restarted your heart. You were in a coma.  

I nodded. The doctor asked, Do you have any questions?

No, I said. 

DNR? she asked. Is he DNR? 

 She was cold. There was something about her that was robotic, strange.

Then she asked, Who is next of kin?

When she left, I hit the chair. I was angry. At whom? God? The doctor? The doctors who act like God? All of them.

In my head, I screamed.

The waiting room, I thought. What a special place.

You wait for good news, you wait for bad news. But just know, you are waiting. You wait for doctors, for scans, for results. They offer you water. As if you want water.  

No, I’d like a cigarette, I think. Fuck the water.

It is a room where people cry. Nobody is happy there, nobody is joyful. It is a room of sadness, waiting, more sadness. Hysterics, antics. The beginnings of depression. The room of death, that is what it is.

I made a phone call. I walked outside.

Later, I came back into the room. I came with someone you knew. We met downstairs first, in the cafeteria.  

To get to the room was an ordeal.  

A “visitor” had to walk through the front doors, allow a guard to search their bag, get in line (if it was busy), wait in line, walk to the front desk, tell the front desk which room they wanted to visit, wait for the receptionist to call the nurse and wait for the nurse to say it was fine to come up, walk to the elevator, wait some more, get in the elevator, wait again, and then finally, walk down a long, empty hallway.

That was how a “visitor” got into the ICU you were at.  

By waiting.

When we got there, Becky was doing what she called “neurology tests.” They were performed every hour. One test involved a flashlight. When the flashlight was used, the eyelid was lifted, the light was beamed on the pupil, and the pupil reacted.  

There was a new doctor in the room. He was young. He had brown hair. He leaned over you and said, We’re just waiting for him to wake up.

That sounds hopeful, I thought.  

I held your hand. I said, I love you, Dad.  

You squeezed. I said, I’ll be back.

You squeezed again.

I left then, at 6:00 pm. It was nearly on the dot and for some reason, I remember this fact clearly. Time became an important thing, suddenly.  

I called at 8:00 pm. I asked, How is he doing?

The nurse said, He’s okay.

She said, But he’s not responding to some of tests.

What does that mean? I asked.

His pupil is not reacting at all now. That’s what she said.  

*

I cleaned your house. Even though it was already clean. Your sister flew into town the next day. She was already flying in for a visit she had planned a few months before. She changed her flight and left early. Other family arrived. I put away your laundry. You had folded it and left it aside in a duffle bag on your bed. There was not much to do besides this.  

Roxy had died a month before. Roxy, the dog. It had devastated you, I know.  

She was put down on a sunny day. Later I dropped by. You were in your bedroom, folding a shirt. I asked, How are you doing?

Fine, you said.  

You seemed fine. But you always seemed that way. I knew you weren’t. Then you said something else. You placed the shirt on the bed.  

You said, It’s a season of death.

*

Your sister hugged me when she got to your house. We talked. I made us coffee. I drank a lot of coffee. That was to compensate for the lack of sleep.  

We went to the hospital. The doctor asked to see me. I did not see you first, I saw her. We went to the waiting room, again. She said, DNR. We need to talk about DNR.

What are the chances of recovery? I asked.

She would not give a clear answer. She never did. She would talk in circles. The circle always ended with this: DNR.

DNR, for you, was not just a do-not-resuscitate. It was to remove you from life support. Because you were relying on life support.   

I said, I’ll get back to you when I have an answer.  

She became frustrated. She started to talk in medical lingo.  

Then she said, Well. He may never be the same. He already is not the same. The dad you knew. He’s not there anymore.

I waited. She went on. She said, The stress of him just being here might be too much.

She thought—out loud, really—that maybe it would have been best if you had been left for dead. She said she wasn’t sure if it was right that the medics revived you. Because, her reasoning was, nobody knew how long you were without air. Now look. Look at what’s happening.

She said, I don’t know if it was morally right to do it.  

Then asked, Do you want to remove the life support?

It’s not just my decision, I said. I’ll let you know.

Can I see the MRI? I asked.

Ludicrous, I thought. To ask me to DNR you without even offering up the MRI. Her with her medical lingo. Her with her opinions. 

I didn’t get to see the MRI right away. So I went to see you instead. There you laid. The same position as before. But your face had more swelling. You were being pumped with all sorts of fluids and medications and the monitor had a bell on it that would ring every time one of those medications or fluids ran out.  

The nurse said, He is breathing on his own.

But that you were over breathing the vent.

And that if you could breathe on your own for long enough, the vent would be removed.  You were still responding to touch. Your reflexes, I mean.

I sat down in a chair. I ran my finger along yours. This time, it flicked. But not like before. There was no strength behind it. Just a flicker.

*

The next time I came in there was a new nurse. That nurse was chatty. He was the only nurse who liked to chat. He was also the only nurse who said, The last nurse didn’t perform any neurology tests.

He said, I’ll take care of this. 

With who? I don’t know. What I do know is that I liked him.

I looked at the monitors. I looked at you. I asked the nurse, Why aren’t his pupils responding to the light anymore?

He said, Because of the bleed.

What is happening, he explained, Is the bleed has spread. When it spreads, other areas of the brain begin to die.

He went on, I used to work in the ER. We see this all the time in the ER. People come in just fine. They’re talking. They’re moving. Within hours, they’re like this.

How terrible, I thought. Really terrible. 

I stayed with you for a while. As long as I could. It was hard to look at you from the right side of the bed. That was because the swelling in and around your eyes was bad. It caused your eyelids not to close all the way. I had a hard time on that side of the bed. It was harder for me to talk as if everything is fine.

So I sat on the other side.  

And I talked to you like nothing had happened. I did this for a multitude of reasons. One of which being this: I didn’t know if you could hear me but if you could, I wanted you to know I was there.

I said things like, It’ll be okay, Dad.

I told you how my day went. I updated you on the people you knew and how they were doing. I let you know that I handled things at work for you. I did not let everything go to shit. I talked about the weather. I lamented on your diet. 

I said, I bet it’s bad. A liquid diet. I imagine it’s bad. 

I talked with you as if you are going to come home, for certain. That’s because I did not want to freak out. And I did not want you to freak out either. 

*

The MRI was provided. Once again, in the waiting room. I had come to think of this as a Hell room. It was a place of torture. Under a painting of a field. And with this doctor who incessantly asked whether or not she could remove your life support. The only thing missing from this room was Satan.

The doctor rolled in a computer. She clicked around on the screen. She did not explain the MRI, she only showed it. I stared at the monitor. There was your MRI.  

She said, He came in as a level three coma.

I said, But I was told he was a level four.

Level four? she asked. Who said that?

One of the nurses, I said.  

That’s wrong, she said. He’s a level three.

Is he a three or a four? [MA2] I wondered. Who do I trust?  

She asked, What’s the name of the nurse?

I don’t know, I said.  

But I provided a description. I felt sorry for that nurse. To be at the mercy of this woman. She sounded angry. Her face was red, again. She said, I’ll talk to him.

Your sister asked, What does a normal MRI look like?

The doctor smiled as she talked. She pointed to the fuzzy outline of your brain. She said, That’s the damage.  

Then she started to search for normal MRIs on the web. She stuttered. Nerves, maybe. Or maybe she just didn’t know what she was talking about.

I asked, Will you do another MRI?

No, she said. This is it. You can get a second opinion if you want. But I’ve already talked to that team. They’ll tell you the same thing I said.

What is the point then? I wondered. Of having a second team?

She droned on. Then asked, If your father goes into cardiac arrest again, do you want us to attempt to resuscitate? I need this for the records.

*

There was a woman who talked with me after, in your room. She needed me to fill out paperwork. The paperwork was related to medical insurance. Then she made comments. She asked, Does he have a will?

I didn’t answer. Was it her business? I asked myself. I filled out the papers. There was one paper that asked where you would be transferred if you needed to be transferred. I put down the VA. She took the paperwork. She asked, He’s a veteran?

Yes, I said. He is.

She asked, And he doesn’t have a will? My husband is a veteran. They think they’re so big and tough until something happens to them.  

I stopped listening to her after that. I looked over at you, in the state you were in. I looked back at her. 

How dare she? I thought.  

That evening the doctor called me on the phone. It had only been a few hours. She asked again, Are you ready to remove life support?  

I said, I don’t have an answer for you yet. No agreement has been made.

She pushed back. She said, I’ll call you again.

She was God, clearly. There was no time to pray. There was no time for discussion. There was no time to come to agreements. There was only time to pull plugs. She was a happy plug puller. She may as well of ridden her medical high horse through the entire ICU ward with her doctor’s coat flapping behind her, yanking out plugs. Smiling the whole way through.

I said to her, No. I’ll call you.

Then the line went dead.  

Sacrilegious bitch, I thought.

*

I went to the bar you were at before the accident. I smoked a lot outside on the patio. I watched the cars go by and took a phone call. The bar was busy. The cars drove fast. I wondered about the people driving in them. I wondered how their days were going. I did not smile at the people who walked by. I looked away.  

I lit more cigarettes. I thought of you.

I sat down inside. I asked someone what you normally ordered. Everyone knew you there. Someone answered me. I stared at the menu until my eyes fell on it.

Then I started to cry. This was not a normal type of cry. It was a painful one. There was nothing in me that could stop it and so I excused myself.

I went into the restroom. I opened a stall. Then closed the door.   

I’m not sure how long I was in there. Your sister came to check on me. I said I was okay. I came out of the stall.  

I returned to the bar, and I did not order what you liked. Instead, someone ordered for me. Because I said I wasn’t having anything. They paid for it, also. It was a kind gesture. When the food came out, I didn’t eat it.

*

I read medical journals. I read about comas and heart attacks and heart attacks that weren’t stopped fast enough. My head was filled with statistics. Coma statistics, heart attack statistics, stroke statistics. I read that most people who suffer heart attacks that aren’t treated immediately go into a coma. That is everyone who has a heart attack and is alone and cannot dial 911. That is a lot of people. I read that those who go into a coma are usually taken off life support quickly. There is not much literature on the rates of survival. Because most people aren’t given the chance to survive. But there are a few cases of people who do and some of them make a full recovery.  

One lady who did called herself a miracle.

Flowers were sent. Flowers were left at your doorstep. I cleaned your house again. I picked up some cake at the suggestion of your sister. This would make us feel better. I lit your candles. You had a collection of candles and I suppose that when I lit them, it felt like you were home.

I paced around your house. At my house, I paced just the same.

I dreamed about you. I could not sleep at night. I was told that my face was breaking out. I did not care. The day of your accident replayed over and over in my mind. I thought of the phone call.

When I could, I came to see you. I chain smoked cigarettes all day long. Sometimes I stopped at the cafeteria, bought a meal, sat down at the table, and threw it away. I drank caffeine constantly. My conversations with you became less lighthearted. When I had nothing positive to talk about, I just sat. I held your hand. When I came alone, I cried. That was only when the room was empty, when I was the only visitor. Which was not often. There were always visitors. There was a nurse who saw me crying. She was not your nurse, but she was an ICU nurse. 

She came into the room, wrapped her hands around the back of my shoulders, and asked, Why are you here by yourself?

Her touch was uncanny. It was unexpected. I did not turn to face her and so she leaned her face in next to mine. I felt her hair fall against my cheek.

Because someone had to watch my kid, I thought. Because I am divorced. Because I’m not seeing anyone. Because I have no other real family. Because I am here, in San Diego, alone now. What was it to her? Who was she?

I did not like her questioning me. I did not want her pity. All I wanted was to sit with you, alone. The only visitor.  

We had a moment to ourselves, I thought. And she’s ruined it.  

She let go, eventually. Then went on with her shift.

I asked, Dad. Do you remember our plans? We had a lot of plans. 

To me—the thought of you dying—could not happen. My mother had already died. That was only three years ago. You were not supposed to die anytime soon. You were not old. You were not sick. If you were, you had to get better. We had to stick things out together.  

Me and you.

I thought about things at your bedside. There were things that had happened. Right before you died. Things that did not make sense. Things that medicine and science could not explain[MA3] . I rolled it over in my head. I held your hand some more. I cried again. A nurse told me that some tape had been placed over your eyelids. To try to keep them closed.    

A premonition, I thought. You had a premonition of your death.

*

There was one phone call that stuck out to me over all other phone calls. It was the one I made at midnight. I called the ICU. I asked for your room. The nurse picked up. I asked, How is he doing?

Well, she said. His blood pressure has dropped.

 I saw you that morning. You were put on a medication to raise your blood pressure. Over the next few days, things would go downhill. Your heart would beat abnormally. I saw the rhythm changes on a long sheet of paper. The nurse pointed out where you had a normal heartbeat. Then she pointed out where you didn’t.

There were breathing tests. During these tests, the life support vent was shut off. For a while, you were doing okay. You would breathe on your own. You did not breathe great, but you were doing it.  

But around the time that your blood pressure dropped, you stopped breathing on your own.  

The doctor with the brown hair came into the room that day. He said, We need to test his brain function.

He left the room. The nurse took over. She explained that what she would do is place some water in your ears. If you did not shake your head or move it in response to the feeling of water, then another MRI would be done.

I waited around the hospital. I went outside. The test was given. I sat back down at the bedside. The doctor entered. He said, He passed the test.

That’s good, I thought.

Your sister was there. We both said to one another, That’s good.

She held your hand. About an hour later, the doctor reappeared. He said, I’m sorry.  There was some confusion.  

 Then he said you failed the test.

 So my gut sank. So the MRI was performed.

*

Your coma lasted for exactly one week. That is not a calculation by the hour, only by the days. You went into a coma on a Sunday. Your coma ended on a Sunday.

The way your coma ended was because of the MRI result.  

Your sister and I sat in the room. The same doctor with the brown hair sat down with us. He said he would show us the MRI.

This time, there was no waiting. He pulled it up on the computer that the nurses used. The monitors beeped. They were always beeping.

He pointed to the brain scan. Then he began to talk.  

He said, Do you see how there’s no gray area here in the brain?

He pointed again. The scan showed the outline of your brain and inside the area of the brain, everything was white.

At first, I thought this was okay. At first, I did not understand.

I could not remember what your last MRI looked like. And so I asked, What does it mean? Is his brain functioning?

He shook his head. He said, No. I’m sorry.

He said, He’s brain dead.

And then I covered my face. And I said, But he’s my best friend.

And I cried in a way that was violent.  

*

The way it was explained to me was that in the State of California, brain death meant that you have legally died. And in California, someone who has suffered brain death cannot be kept alive.  

So arrangements were started. I was asked, When do you want to remove life support?

A time was set for later that day.

I drove from the hospital to your house. I was sick of the hospital. I was sick of the parking garage. I found it unbelievable that everyone had to pay to use the garage. Just to visit someone. A sick person. You had to pay. Despicable, I thought. The greed.

The parking passes began to accumulate inside my car. They were orange reminders that you were not well. That this was all happening. I hated the parking passes. I drove home and thought about how much I hated all of it.

You lived across from the beach. Because I lived near you, I was often at that beach. So I was familiar with the street across from your house. I walked across that street and smoked. I answered my phone.  

The woman asked, Can I speak with Emma?

I said, Yes. This is her.

Great, she said. I’m Rochelle.

She was with a company in San Diego. She was calling about your organs. Because, she said, You were on the organ donor list.

I said, But he isn’t.

No, she said. He is.

It was warm outside. There were people out. I looked down at my feet and started to pace the sidewalk. I asked, What list? I’m sure there’s a mistake.

The DMV list, she said.

Are you sure? I asked.

Yes, she said. I’m sure.

I said, He just died. Why do you call with this right after he’s died? 

She said, I’m sorry. I didn’t know he just died. The doctor didn’t tell me that.

I said, His organs. You want his organs. So you call right after he’s died.

The doctor should have told me this, she said. She blamed the doctor.

You couldn’t wait? I asked. You couldn’t wait for even a day?

I’m really sorry, she said. I didn’t know he just died.

So I said, He’s not on a list. I know he’s not on a list and you’re not getting his fucking organs.

Then I hung up.

*

There were two people in the room that day when your life support was set to be removed. Myself and your sister.  

What happened was this: the whole thing was stopped.

The nurse was nervous. I could tell by the way she talked. She was the one with the long hair. She said, There’s a problem. Your father is an organ donor.

I said, He’s not. I know him. He’s not on the list.

Then things escalated.  

They escalated because of what was called “hospital policy.” Because of this, a different doctor came into the room. He was higher up than any of the other doctors. He said, I’m really sorry you’re going through this.  

That was the first thing he said.  

He had gray hair and a blue cap over his head. He sat down. He started to talk about your condition. He said, If your father hadn’t landed the way he did, he would be fine right now. It was a minor bleed.

He took a piece of paper and a pen off the nurse’s desk.  

He drew a brain and a stem. He placed the pen down and marked a spot on the paper.  

He said, This was where the bleed was. It was nothing serious.  

He went on to talk about hospital policy.  

He said, Because there’s a discrepancy between what you are saying and the information we have about his donor status, there will be a twenty-four review.  

A review? I asked.

Yes, he said. Until it’s straightened out, we can’t do anything for twenty-four hours.  

He explained further. He said that if someone was on a donor list, they are not removed from life support until after their organs have been harvested.  

That can include anything, really. Their eyes, heart, lungs. They are cut open in a room by themselves. Someone dissects them. Nobody is allowed to see this person after the dissection takes place.

Because it may be gruesome, I thought. To see someone after they have been cut apart and fileted like a fish.  

There is only one person who sees them and that is whoever dissects them. When it is finished, the plug is withdrawn.

And they die alone.

*

I saw you again that night. You were brain dead. I still went. I started to wonder about your soul. I started to think about the body and the soul.  

The nurse had changed. It was night shift.

She had another nurse with her. They were busy on the computer. The fluids were still being pumped into you. She told me they were “matching you.” Which meant, they were matching bits and pieces of you to someone else. Because you were a donor.  

I didn’t say anything.  I just stayed with you.

Was your soul trapped? I wondered. Had it already left?

It couldn’t have, I thought. Because although your brain had died, your body had not.  The longer you were kept this way, alive but unable to think, the longer your soul would be stuck. The longer it would take for you to go home. The longer you would suffer.

Making him suffer, I thought. All for his organs. Money, organs.  

I called later. Just to check on you. It was the night nurse again. Before we got off the phone, she said one thing.  

She said, You’re going against your father’s wishes.

I didn’t argue with her. I said, Mhm. Have a good night.

*

I got a voicemail the next morning from the doctor who drew the brain map.  

He said, You are correct. Your father was on a donor list but removed himself. 

Then he said that nature had taken its course. He said that no DNR decisions had to be made.  

He said, You can remove him from life support when you’re ready.  But if you change your mind, you can still make him a donor.

They just don’t stop, I thought. First, they say I’m going against your wishes. They go out of their way to make this clear. Berate me, even. Even though I know better. Because I know you better than they do. I know you better than they think I do. But then they ask if I want to go against your wishes now. Because it’s not what they wanted. Because they wanted your organs.

The hypocrisy of it. I thought about that.

Your sister was due to fly out that evening. I called the nurse.  

She said, You can come right now.

We went back to the hospital. I took your Bible with me. I parked the car. Then paid the parking. The walk to the front doors did not feel good. It felt long. There was a line to get up to the rooms. We waited in line. More waiting.  

I was agitated. A new doctor was there. She had a soft voice. She apologized for what had happened.

I asked, Does the hospital check what that company says?  

She said, I know. We are looking into this. Trust me, we are looking into it.

I nodded. I thought, how many people are carted off? People who had removed themselves from the list.  

The doctor said, I’m going to tell you what will happen. 

She said all the tubes would be removed. And a pain medication would be given. If that was okay with us.

She said, We don’t want him to feel like he’s drowning. That’s what the medication is for. It prevents that.

I asked, Do you know if he can feel? Even though he’s brain dead.

She said, We don’t know. We don’t know what he can feel.

There was a nurse I had never seen before. And the nurse with the long black hair was also there. That nurse asked if we wanted anything to drink. She offered to bring us lunch.  

I said, Okay.  

The doctor said, Some people choose to be in the room when the tubes are removed. But you don’t have to be.

I asked, Is there a reason not to be?

It can be upsetting, she said. To watch.

Graphic, I thought. It must be graphic.

I’ll leave the room, I said.

There was a waiting period, where the hospital staff gets ready to do this. In that period, the lunch trays were brought up. I remember the food. There were juice cups and big cardboard cases of coffee and tea. Cups, sandwiches. I took a bite of a sandwich.

I felt guilt. What a terrible time to eat, I thought. I shouldn’t eat.

Then the process started.  

We were taken outside the room and the curtain was closed. We waited in the hall. The tape was removed from your eyes. They took the tubes from your throat. They shut the machines off.

The nurse with the long hair left the room. So did the doctor. There was one nurse left and it was the one I’d never seen before. She came out and said, You can come in.

We did.  

Your sister played a song. It was a gospel. I opened the Bible and sat beside you. I did not plan out what I would read. Instead, I chose a page at random. I read from it.  

The nurse said, That’s a beautiful song.

Briefly, I hugged you. I pulled away only because I became aware of your heartbeat. I could hear it. I did not want to hear it stop. So I sat back down. Instead, I took your hand. The swelling disappeared from your face. That was because the fluids had been stopped. I saw the way your eyes opened. I saw the way they stayed open.  

That will never leave me. That tore me apart.

I prayed for you. Your sister put her arms out above you and prayed also.  

I prayed that God forgive your sins. Whatever they were. I prayed that He take your soul. I thought of the drowning sensation.  

I stroked your arm. You had freckles that went up the arm. I saw your chest move, just a little. I worried that you weren’t really brain dead. I wondered if you knew what was happening. As we held hands, you squeezed.

You did so hard. I had to let go because your hand contracted so tightly. Your fingers bent in, and the knuckles turned red. They stayed that way and I turned to the nurse. I asked, Is this normal?

She got up. She said, Yes. It’s a reflex.

But I thought you couldn’t move. I thought you had no reflexes left. That’s what I was told. The nurse took your fingers in her hand, and she pulled them out. They relaxed.

I lost track of time.  

Until the doctor came back. The one with the soft voice. She put her stethoscope to your chest. Then she said, He’s passed.

And I stood up then. I touched your hand. I said, I love you.

Even though you were already gone.

Emma Grey Rose is a writer based in San Diego, California. Her poetry has been published in deLuge Literary and Arts Journal, Pinky Thinker Press, the San Diego Poetry Annual, Bear Paw Arts Journal, and Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature.

31 May 2024

Becca Downs

Having a Cry in the Sports Drinks Aisle of the Grocery Store: Polyamory Edition

I’ve never dared ask for breakfast in bed–

to hold both this coffee burning my tongue and 
the cerulean down comforter pulled up to

one lover’s dining table, with the room temperature
Pinot Noir I poured them, full glass

brown eyes flecked with the kind of gratitude that couldn’t just be love, my blind

ness and a patience I yearn for. But one delivers. hope and all that bullshit I thought I’d grown out of.
Stopped longing for

an embrace and a clutch of red roses

habits of this one’s past, everything they cannot and
never promised to give.

when I am sad and ask for nothing, sometimes. I remind myself we only ever say we’ll make each
other laugh, and even that is

an imbalance. A course-correct every time one of us
is unreasonable. I change my mind, ask for a kitchen
table party

not a promise. I change my mind, ask them to make
me laugh and to cry

for every warm thing I cup in my hands–tea and
toddies and love that remains

out of my reach on thirsty days when I’m trying to
keep them in my palms
as a mug filled to the brim 
until someone changes their mind. Now I’m tired
from a late-night fight because I want my tears to be
recognized as nectar

we could sip forever. I’m walking down the aisle
in the name of love, overwhelmed by yellow price
tags and neon liquid in plastic bottles

and I realize loving two people sometimes means
being

in my own way, drowning, and if I’m doubly loved or
loving doubly–I risk

doubly heartbroken. Desperate

flailing for two hands to save me only to feel one

from my own undercurrent, for the spine to reach for
many beating hearts

or maybe nothing at all

Becca Downs (she/they) is a Denver based writer, editor, educator, and poet. She earned her MFA from the Mile High MFA program at Regis University, focusing on poetry and  scriptwriting. Her poem “Burning  Age” has been nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize, and her poems have been published with Twenty Bellows, Beyond the Veil Press, Flying Island Literary Journal, and more. In their spare time, they lead weekly creative writing workshops at a local brewery and read poetry submissions for The Rumpus. You can find  them on Instagram at @beccad___.

24 May 2024

Kara Pernicano's reading of

self-portrait as a minivan on fire

Written by nat raum

Kara Laurene Pernicano is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, and poet-critic. Her multimedia work characterizes auto-fictional stories upon moving to NYC by plane with a tangle of memories. Venturing from a closet-like space, she captures resonances in the porous mind to awaken an interpersonal approach to trauma, grief, healing, and mental health. She revels in the power of art assemblage and musical texture. Through embodied rehearsal, the activation of text and image inspires new signs of movement and patterns of breath. She has an MFA from Queens College CUNY and a MA from the University of Cincinnati. Kara’s writing has been published by Snapdragon, Waccamaw, Rabbit, The Humanities in Transition, Full Stop, the winnow magazine, and ang(st). Her visual art has been on view in the Whitney Staff Art Show and LIC Artists’ Plaxall Gallery. She has performed for New York Theatre Workshop, Poetic Theater Productions, and the Poetry Society of New York. She teaches writing at CUNY. Find out more about her work on her website: http://kara-pernicano.squarespace.com/.

17 May 2024

Benjamin Erlandson

We Are All Addicted to Plastic

Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is a perpetual skeptic, longitudinal thinker, brewer, gardener, photographer, learning systems designer, and writer of fiction and nonfiction.  Combinations of his efforts often manifest as technology, visual media, and printable narrative.  He spends quite a bit of time in the mountains and rivers...mostly on foot, sometimes in a boat.

With several narrative projects in the works, Dr. Erlandson switches gears between fiction, nonfiction, and photography to keep his mind limber.  He's been shooting for more than twenty-five years and writing creatively for more than thirty.

Recently, he launched The Upper New Review with support from the North Carolina Arts Council.  Check out: uppernew.org

His photography has been featured in solo and juried shows such as the Spanish Peaks Arts Council, Photocentric Gallery, R Gallery, Valdosta State University, Spiva Center for the Arts, Hilliard Gallery, San Fernando Valley Arts & Cultural Center, Yeiser Art Center, Wilson Arts Center, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, and Decode Gallery—and has been published in journals such as Burningword Literary, The Esthetic Apostle, Camas, Humana Obscura, Reservoir Road Literary Review, and Reed Magazine.  In 2020, one of his photos was selected as the inaugural Conservation Award winner by the Appalachian Mountain Club.

Born and raised in Elkin, North Carolina, Ben has degrees from UNC-Asheville, Emerson College, and Arizona State University.  He currently resides in Glade Valley, North Carolina.

10 May 2024

Rebecca Anderson

The World is Burning & I’m Writing Sex Poems

The gray-yellow cloud with its hand on Maine is Canada burning,
gesturing across hardwood forests to meet us, this promise that

we’ll all die someday; everything we love will be gone, but
I ignore it, close the windows & my eyes & picture you in bed,

white sheet over your body, lying on your back, awake, good morning,
as though your existence means I can still taste good on my lips,

as though your eyes whet me enough to cloister me from flames.
Did you hear my hand pause on the knob, unsure if I should

walk in, though you said: Come in, anytime you need? Today,
I’d redefine need, what I require while flames consume the Earth.

During the night, did your hands become poetry, the same way mine
rubbed visceral fictions on my clit? Unlocked door between us,

I imagined the adjectives you’d pick to describe yielding to apocalypse.
The world is burning & I’m writing sex poems.

The world is burning & I know this chapter well.
The world is in flames & I want to feel you before we’re all ash.

An interview with Rebecca Anderson on community, sex poems, and survival

How long have you been writing poetry? What advice would you give to emerging poets?

A little over three years. I’ve been writing fiction and creative nonfiction my entire life, but didn’t get into poetry until I started my MFA in creative writing at age 40.  My first semester in the program, I took a poetry class (just for fun) and was hooked. I’m now in the editing stage of a full-length poetry collection that will serve as my thesis.

Let go of ideas about what you think poetry should be about, look like, or sound like. Have fun and approach the page with a spirit of creativity and exploration. Don’t worry about whether something is “publishable” or whether anyone will want to read it. Express yourself authentically, be open to revising (and then revising some more), exercise patience, and things will fall into place. 

The poem creates a beautiful contrast between danger and desire, and ultimately feels very hopeful. Can you speak a bit about the function of sex poems in a difficult World?

This poem started out as a journal entry for my eyes only. I scribbled down: “The world is burning and I’m writing sex poems” because it felt wrong to be focused on love, lust, and the “normal” human experience when the world was literally in the middle of life-threatening chaos. After reflecting, I realized it was the most natural thing in the world for life to continue and to want to write, create, and foster normalcy in a time that is anything but typical. I think poetry is a form of survival.

In the poem, you write “Today, I’d redefine need, what I require while flames consume the Earth.” What do you turn to for hope when the world is burning?

I go back to the simple things: Spending time on my farm with my animals. Writing. Cooking. Sewing. Sitting by the water. When the world is burning, I crave the opposite of complicated.

Your website mentions writing retreats & poetry programs for prisons. Tell us a bit about the community work you do. How does the literary community inform your poetry?

I’m a firm believer that we cannot write in a vacuum. Most of my career has focused on writing with others--as a mental health therapist, teacher, facilitator, and nonprofit administrator--and the stories I hear along the way have become a part of me and by extension, a part of my writing. While some of my poetry is autobiographical, a lot is inspired by stories I’ve collected or universal emotions and experiences I’ve bore witness to.

What are you reading right now (poetry or otherwise) that you love, or that inspires you?

Eugenia Leigh’s 2023 poetry collection Bianca is one of my favorites of the past year. Dianne Seuss’s new collection, American Poetry is also becoming a new favorite.  I recently got around to reading Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dreamhouse after having it on my reading stack for a couple years and, wow, I’m sorry I waited so long. I finished it in one sitting. 

Rebecca Anderson is a writer, visual artist, and mental health clinician who works and writes from a small farm in central Maine. She is an MFA candidate at Mississippi University for Women's low-residency creative writing program where she is a poetry editor for Ponder Review. She was nominated for Best American Short Stories 2019 and has had recent work featured in Waxing & Waning, Bacopa Literary Review, and Jokes Review.

3 May 2024

Julie Nelson

Whelking

The beach is empty this early in the morning. Flocks of brown and grey pelicans skim over the rowdy water, flying low, making dramatic plunging dives, plucking fish from the sea. They fly in unison. When one rises, they all do.

Freya is alone. She walks barefoot on the chilly sand of late September, her arms swinging by her side. A thick sweater blocks the wind, a sweater Wyatt knitted and gave her as a thank you. A thank you for coming out to care for him now he is too sick to do it alone. The sweater is a good weight and keeps her warm. She thinks of him holding knitting needles in his frail hands. At the breakwater, she stops and watches as waves, frothy from an overnight storm, crash against the pilings with a rushing sound that gives her peace but comes with an ache. For the first time since she got here, she lets herself sob.

Kaposi's sarcoma. Hard to spell and hard to say. What Wyatt had. Has. Has been diagnosed as having. At this moment, the virus is sailing past the threshold of potentiality, moving swiftly downstream to being full blown what it is, a powerful current shaping its own course inside his body. Arriving at the destination they have been dreading, what will be the last part of the journey. AIDS. What will kill Wyatt before the year is out. 

Wyatt seems to think he will not succumb. But this is 1984. There is no cure. Many people have already deserted him. Their father, Wayne, says Wyatt is dead to him already, and he does not help, does not visit. Does not tell people his son has been diagnosed with AIDS. What none of them can know is how nearly forty years later, Wayne will die in another pandemic in 2021, lying on his stomach on a ventilator in a hospital with no one around him. For now, Wayne’s absence is breaking Wyatt’s heart.

They came here as kids, Freya remembers. She and Wyatt. To the shore. Dad wanted to be here to have family time in summer. They came and looked for whelks. Freya is looking for them now, not realizing how automatic searching for them is, from the old days. She longs to find and hold one in her hand, breathe in the briny smell, let her fingers trace the swirling, tapered exterior, and look with one eye to see if a chubby snail is curled inside. She might find one, she thinks, at low tide. Something to give Wyatt later on, when she gets back to the beach house where they are staying, and will stay, until the end, the place where he wants to die.

Yesterday Wyatt said, as a statement not a question, Am I a person. Freya cannot stop thinking how her brother said it aloud. The doctor was careful to say to Wyatt, You are a person who has been diagnosed with HIV and AIDSinstead of I am HIV. Positive. When the doctor explained how language would matter when talking with others, all Wyatt responded was, Am I a person. That he even asked that way bothers Freya. Freya can still feel Wyatt’s damp hand in her own as the doctor told him he is entering the end stages. Wyatt could not stop shaking. With blurry eyes, delirious and feverish, Wyatt calls out for his partner, Mack, who himself succumbed to the virus about a year and a half ago. Now, Wyatt’s body is covered in brownish, purplish spots up and down his legs which are now pressing on his intestines causing him to suffer from diarrhea. Like a snail in a shell, his legs swell and cause him pain so he can hardly stand. He spends the day under a mountain of heavy blankets, drifting in and out of consciousness. The doctor explained what to expect. But Wyatt cannot hear what the doctor says, and neither can Freya. Wisps of words. More medicines to keep track of. She knows she will have to go back this week and ask for the doctor to write everything down so she can remember.

A conch rolls up from the sea and lands at her feet. It is empty inside. The hollowed center holds the sounds of the waves as Freya holds it to her ear. Wasn’t it that the air trapped inside the shell's shape vibrated in such a way it seemed like ocean sounds or waves? It sounds eternal to her, wherever it comes from, as she watches the pink-grey sky brighten with the rising sun. It occurs to her the rich eternal sound comes from having empty space to create an inner music. Sandpipers skitter back and forth with the rolling water. Freya realizes whatever happens, she is here now for Wyatt when no one else was, and because she is here, Wyatt will not die alone. And a feeling of hope comes over her as she makes a discovery about herself. 

She is the kind of person who will never be lonely.

Julie Nelson is an educator, counselor, and creative writer. She has hiked in the Green Mountains of Vermont, swum in two oceans, advised undergraduates at four universities, lived in five states, and published stories and poems in literary journals. “Whelking” grew out of a previously published short story, “Plotting,” with Freya as the central character. Julie is currently writing a novel about Freya, a 40-year-old mother of five, who, in the 1980s, becomes the care giver for her brother who is dying from AIDS.

26 April 2024

Judy Malloy's reading of

Dollhouse

Written by Sophie Hall

Judy is committed to bringing healing to this world. As an actress, author, singer, and massage therapist, she believes that gently listening to one’s own story and paying close enough attention to truly hear the stories of others, even if they are only whispered, is the greatest privilege we share as humans on the journey together.

19 April 2024

Tanya L. Young

Epigraph

Tanya L. Young is a BIPOC writer and visual artist. Her work has been featured in publications such as Stonecoast Review, New York Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal and others. She is currently a staff reader for TriQuarterly and The Maine Review. 

12 April 2024

nat raum

self-portrait as a minivan on fire

not like bruce springsteen, not like
the controlled chaos of bonfire

in my parents’ backyard, but churlish,
recalcitrant as a child sans sucker. i could

devour the whole of a honda odyssey’s
engine without flinching, so i do,

& i am no longer on fire; i am the blaze,
wiry frame inextricable from the melee.

i am the heat tumbling through air in tornados
like an apocalypse b-movie, scorching

the surface of the world that bore me. i am
this specific kind of ruinous & ravaging—

the type to burn before a what was that?
could even pass my lips. yes, i am

the inferno which bricks cars & razes cities
like a plow through autumn wheat. impulsive

flame sizzles in the sunset & i end in ash, seared
husk of a gold minivan on the highway.

An interview with nat raum on recurring images, the significance of editorial work, and finding your voice

Tell us a bit about your poetic journey. How long have you been writing? What projects are you working on?

I often refer to myself as an accidental poet. I’ve been writing for a really long time, but I really only count the last 4 years or so. I started writing again in 2020 after not writing for a while, and it basically exploded from there. I self-published my first chapbook, preparatory school for the end of the world, in 2021—at the time, I had just finished a stint in intensive outpatient psychiatric care, and was processing a lot related to childhood trauma, gender, and grief. From there, my writing practice really took off, and I wrote and published pretty prolifically from then on.

Currently, I am sitting on a manuscript about queer coming of age in Baltimore. I’m also about to publish my MFA thesis collection, camera indomita—I’m in a unique program that also has a focus on Publishing Arts, so we design and publish a small edition of our thesis manuscripts as part of our capstone project. The latter has kept me fairly busy, but I definitely also have some ideas in mind for what’s next.

The central image of the burning Honda Odyssey is so vivid—was this inspired by a real image or incident? Tell us a bit about the process of writing this poem.

Oh, I am so glad you asked this question. There was a day this past September where it was so disgustingly hot in Baltimore, like way hotter than it usually gets, even in the dog days of summer. I was driving south to Annapolis for something and saw this gold minivan with the front end absolutely engulfed in flames. I wrote the image down to come back to later. Once I was finished up in Annapolis, I rushed to class after my appointment, then immediately started writing this poem while I was waiting for class to start. Apparently my classmate came in and asked how I was doing and I was like “I saw a minivan on fire. Gotta write a poem about it.”

You’ve published several chapbooks, including one titled “nat raum burns in hell!” Is fire a theme that frequently occurs in your work? As you write more prolifically, what are some of the themes you find yourself returning to?

Fire is huge. I lost a childhood friend to a housefire in sixth grade, so I’ve always viewed fire as this force that is frankly, terrifying. I guess I associate it a lot with a lack of control, which also comes up a lot when I write about emotional control and borderline personality disorder. In terms of other themes that come up often, I have a similar fascination with drowning, mostly based on a recurring nightmare I have surrounding the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I also have recently started incorporating more pop culture into my work, including references to video games and reality TV.

You work on the staff of several literary journals as well. Can you tell us a bit about the journals and the kind of work you look for? How does literary community influence your art?

I love my community and am so motivated by my peers. I definitely feel like the support my work gets from my peers is a big part of how I’ve been able to remain so prolific. Everything is easier with community.

In terms of editorial work, I think that also really informs my writing—being an editor means reading a lot, and reading definitely makes better writing in my experience. For fifth wheel press, we’re always interested in work that tackles our anthology themes through a queer lens. We define queer experience as anything experienced by a queer person, so we really celebrate a variety of perspectives and practices. As for Plork Press, our annual magazine is centered around the intersection of work and play (plork), so we’re always looking for work that pushes language and form, as well as embodying a certain playfulness.

Any advice for young queer poets who are still finding their voice?

Experiment as much as possible. As I was growing into my current poetic voice, I wrote some really wild stuff that I’m still really proud of. If it feels right, follow it—you have a lifetime to study craft, so I say go for it first and learn the “rules” as you go. And while it’s great to be inspired by other poets, finding your voice is definitely about finding out what unique qualities your poetry brings to the table. You’ll start to see patterns emerge in your work, and those are usually a great place to start looking for those qualities.

nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist and writer based on unceded Piscataway land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of you stupid slut, the abyss is staring back, random access memory, and several others. Find them online: natraum.com/links

5 April 2024

Stephen J. Price

Tip Jar

An autumn snowstorm fell as the alien rang the buzzer to my apartment. It was mid-September, 7:30 in the evening and dark. A deluge of flakes the size of ice cubes had been descending to earth since my arrival home a few hours earlier. They were wet and heavy and glowed in the lights of the city. From my fourteenth-floor balcony I watched them fuse into thick, even masses on fences and cars and trees. Laden branches hung to the ground. Loud cracks could be heard as limbs, not yet sturdy for winter, succumbed to the stress and broke off from their trunks. 

I was in a time of contemplation and mused how so much snow could gather just one flake at a time. By morning destruction would prevail across the city because of a collection of things that are virtually weightless on their own.

As a rule, I do not answer my buzzer if I am not expecting someone or the delivery of a package, but I was in a period of transition. I would be leaving the apartment at the end of the month and thought it might be time to welcome the unexpected. I tapped the app on my phone that hooks up to the building’s security system, and saw the man I used to know as Peter, a barista from the coffee shop in the lobby of my building. He made my morning coffee almost every day. At most, we spoke a few words to each other.

“Yes?” I said.

“Hi,” he said.

“Peter,” I answered, “what can I do for you?”

“My name’s not Peter,” he told me. His glasses were dripping from the snow and he stared into the camera placidly.

“Ok,” I said. “What is your name?”

He shrugged and said, “Where I come from we’re not really into naming things. That’s a uniquely human thing to do. Everything needs a name. Babies. Streets. Colours. Oh my god, have you ever looked at paint chips? There’s like an infinite amount of shades and each one has its own nutso name. When I arrived here, I used to find it interesting to read the names of paint chips. Icy Lemon Curd. Crystal Invasion. I read one once called Castaway. Do you really think a castaway cares what colour the walls are?”

“Probably not.”

“I doubt it would be a priority,” he said, a hint of anger slipping into his voice.

“Peter, what is this about?” I asked. I barely knew him. I wanted to disconnect, but felt the need to maintain a level of civility, since I conversed with him most mornings. And I didn’t want to abandon him in case he was in some sort of distress, having a mental breakdown or a psychotic episode. 

“I was hoping you could come down here,” he said.

“It’s snowing.”

“Yes,” he said. “Wear boots and a hat.”

“Is there someone I can call for you?”

“No, there’s something I have to show you,” he said and added, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

 On the way down the elevator, adjusting my toque, I considered what a bad idea this was. Peter was as close to being a stranger in my life as a person could be without actually being a stranger. Common sense dictated that I should not leave the apartment, letting no one know where I was going because someone I had next to no relationship with rang my buzzer requesting I meet with him in person. I did not know if he was alone. I did not know if he was violent. Apparently, I did not even know his real name nor that he was not actually a member of my species. This had so many ways of ending badly.

 The man formerly known as Peter stood in the shelter of the doorway. He did not try to force his way in when I opened the security door and even if he did, he would not have been much of a challenge. He stood 5’7” with his boots on and had the physique of a twelve-year-old. Although he had instructed me to wear a toque and boots, he was dressed only in a pea jacket and sneakers. I stand close to 6’4”. I towered over him. It was like a lamppost looking down on a mailbox. A home invasion was unlikely.

“You’ll be glad you came,” he said.

We stared at each other for a bit. I did not know how to respond. “Ok,” I said and added, “So you’re not human?”

“No,” he said. “It’s kind of obvious when you think about it.”

He had a point. Although he shared our physical attributes, they were out of sync, like someone had chosen them from a list of options and selected ones he liked rather than if they worked together. He was a sort of human Mr. Potato Head. Socially, he did not seem to integrate with the other employees of the coffee shop, not giving off an I’m-only-working-here-until-my-art-sells vibe. Also, I told anyone who would listen that Peter’s talents behind the espresso machine were otherworldly.

“And your name’s not Peter?”

“Nope.”

“What should I call you?”

“Peter will be fine. Like I said, where I come from we don’t feel the need to name things.”

“Right,” I said. 

A pause hung between us as thick as the wet snow that clung to his hair.

“Peter,” I started. “Is everything all right?”

“I know it’s easier to believe that I’m crazy than to believe that I am not human,” he said. “It’s just really important that you follow me and listen to what I have to tell you.”

“Ok,” I said. 

He turned and left the shelter of the doorway into the falling snow. My concern for his safety overpowered my reluctance and I caught up to him with a few quick steps. A loud crack from another branch that broke off its trunk startled me and caused my head to snap around, suddenly thinking I was being attacked from behind. Peter did not seem to notice. He kept up a steady pace while I walked less assuredly, concerned of slipping. We rounded the corner at the end of my street before either of us spoke. The occasional car shunted through the slush piling up on the roads.

“If you’re not human,” I asked, “what are you are?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Are you from Earth?”

“Do you know anything on Earth that’s not human but can take on a human form?”

“No.”

“Bingo.”

Even though it was snowing, with no signs of letting up, the weather was not cold. I started to sweat from the clip we were maintaining and unzipped my jacket halfway. As soon as I did so, the wet snow began to soak my neck. We wove our way through the apartment complexes and reached a t-intersection. We crossed to a wooded common that was dissected by a winding brook and started along a walking path that hemmed it. It was treacherous going. I could hear a cacophony of branches breaking in the thickets, and it made me think of ice cubes cracking when a drink is poured over them.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Not too far from here,” Peter said. “A couple light years.”

“That’s not too far?”

“Not when you know what you’re doing,” he said.

His tone was patronizing and I was about to ask him the name of where he was from when he stopped and turned to me.

“Look,” he continued, glowering up. “You’re now about to ask me the name of where I am from which is a pointless question because it doesn’t have a name and even if it did you would have never heard of it.”

My expression must have betrayed my shock at his sudden change in demeanor. He lowered his gaze and I looked down on the top of his scalp. 

“I’m sorry,” he muttered and turned to keep walking. “I’m not myself.”

We continued walking in silence because I was afraid to ask him any more questions and upset him. At this point I was still skeptical. The alien in my midst seemed like something out of The Twilight Zone, but his reluctance to talk about himself made me consider the genuineness of his story. It seemed a bit antithetical that someone who wanted to convince me they were from another world would not provide me with an enormous amount of detail in an attempt to persuade me. In fact, he did not seem to care whether or not I believed him. 

About halfway through the common, I broke our silence again and asked, “Why did you come to Earth?”

“I’ve been doing a cost-benefit analysis,” he said. 

“You’re a project manager?”

“I guess,” he said. “Does that surprise you? You sound surprised.”

“Twenty minutes ago, I thought you were just a barista.”

“Just?”

“Well …”

“Someday you should try making a hundred coffees to order in one shift and then see if you think I’m ‘just’ a barista.”

“I’m sure,” I said, feeling ambushed. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Your species has to categorize all the time. Everything has to be put into a group and then ranked,” he continued. “It’s so annoying.”

He made an abrupt turn into an open field and we trudged through the thick, wet snow until we reached a copse of poplar trees, their leafy branches weighed down. Peter weaved his way and I followed. It was dark and occasionally a payload of slush dropped on us as if from aerial bombers. We broke into a clearing and there we stopped. The snow was still falling. We stood side by side and Peter offered no explanation.

I finally asked, “What are we doing here?”

“This is where I’m supposed to get picked up.”

“By who?”

“These guys I paid to meet me here,” he said and made a half-hearted glance into the sky but there was nothing that wasn’t there when we arrived. “The same guys who dropped me off five years ago. They were supposed to be here last week.”

“Guys?” I said. “You mean like space guys.”

“I guess that’s as good a name as any. They don’t live in space. They just work there.”

“Are they from the same place as you?”

“No. We contract out all our space travel. It’s a lot cheaper that way,” Peter explained. “It’s a bit like Uber.”

“Maybe they got lost,” I offered. “The universe is a big place.”

Peter scoffed. “They’ve been here before,” he said. “They’ve been here plenty of times. More likely they know there’s nothing I can do. I can’t call someone else so they’ve taken on too many contracts and are just making me wait.”

 “Why have they been here so often?” I asked.

“Dropping off other project managers.”

“There’s more than you?”

“Of course there’s more than me,” he said and I started to feel like I was an employee of his that he found exasperating. “Do you think I could do this whole planet by myself?”

“Do what?”

“A cost-benefit analysis,” he repeated. 

Silence fell between us again and it was becoming clear that Peter was not the sort of individual who provided details easily. “Why am I here?” I finally asked.

“When they get here,” he said, “I was wondering if you wanted to go instead of me.”

“Into space?”

“That’s right,” he said. 

“In a space ship?”

Peter rolled his eyes. “Sure,” he said. “A space ship.”

A half hour earlier, when I had decided to answer the buzzer and welcome the unexpected this was beyond what I could have imagined. 

“Instead of you? You’re not going?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I’ve decided to go down with the ship.”

“Down with the ship?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“We’re eliminating your planet,” Peter said as casually as if he had told me my coffee was ready.

“Eliminate?” I said. “You mean like destroy.”

“I find that word negative, but, yes that’s what we’re doing.”

“Why?”

He shrugged and said, “There’s not really anything here we can use.”

“Use?”

“That’s what we do. We go to places and see if there are any resources we can extract.”

“You colonize?”

“That’s right.”

“And you can’t find any reason to colonize Earth?”

“That’s right.”

“So you’re going to blow us up?”

“No,” he said, emphatically, insulted. “We’re not savages. We seed your atmosphere and everything that is alive just falls asleep and dies and then your atmosphere dissolves and that’s that.”

Stunned, I stammered a bit as I tried to formulate a response. Nothing intelligible was forthcoming so he continued.

“We used to blow up planets,” he said, “but the debris is so hard to control. We could never tell if we accounted for it all. This is much more efficient.”

“But why kill us at all?” I finally managed to blurt out.

“I told you,” Peter said. “There’s nothing here that is of much use to us.”

“Then why not just leave. Why destroy us?”

“So others don’t come here and find a use for you,” he explained. “It’s very competitive out there.”

The snow had started to let up. The flakes were still large but had started to diminish. I looked about at the clearing and could see the lights of the apartment complexes we had walked through poking out above the trees.

“There is really nothing on Earth that any of you saw as valuable?” I eventually asked. 

“Sex,” he said. “We all thought that was pretty interesting.”

“You’ve had sex.”

“Lots of it.”

I was taken aback by the notion that a being from another world had taken on a nerdy human form and was having more sex than I was.

“We talked about marketing that,” he said. “I think a lot of travelers would come here for the sex.”

“You were going to turn Earth into a brothel?”

“We discussed it, but after some closer analysis, it just wasn’t worth it. Humans are hard to manage and have so many hang ups about sex. It would have been a constant headache.”

I fell silent again.

“Dogs are cool, too. We all like dogs,” Peter said. “But there isn’t really much use for them.”

“Their sense of smell is like a superpower.”

He shrugged. “Impressive,” he said, “but not of much use. It’s a lot like juggling. Exceptional but ultimately – so what?”

The snow stopped. I could hear the sound of vehicles sluicing through the roads. The snow glowed and everything seemed really peaceful.

“What does it look like?” I asked.

“What?”

“The spaceship.”

“It’s not really a spaceship,” he said. “It’s not like Battlestar Gallactica or Star Wars or shit like that.”

“What is it, then?”

“It’s hard to describe,” he said and shrugged again. “It’s not really a thing as much as – an impact.”

“I don’t get it.”

“That’s because you’re human,” he said. “You don’t see it as much as you see the effect it has on everything around it. Just keep your mind open. Don’t be afraid of it.”

I gazed up at the sky and tried to imagine what a celestial Uber would look like. It was a cloudy night. No moon or stars. I wondered if it was hard for them to see where they were going and that’s why they were late.

“Why me?” I asked.

He shivered and said, “You’re a good tipper.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Peter pushed his elbows a little more into his sides and dug his hands deeper into his pockets. He shivered again and said, “When I started working at the shop, you used to always come in with this woman. She was a head shorter than you with long brown hair and was always dressed really nicely. The two of you stood close and often leaned your heads into each other to talk. You laughed a lot. She was very polite and always thanked us and you always put more than you had to in the tip jar. On Saturday mornings you used to have your coffee delivered. Remember the shop used to do that to the apartments in the building but was asked to stop for security reasons? It would be almost noon and you answered the door in your pyjamas and you always had a good tip. We used to fight for your delivery. As time went on, the two of you stood further apart and talked less. Then it was like you weren’t together. You both looked off in different directions and one day she stopped coming in. I never saw her again. And through that whole time, whatever shit you were going through, you never forgot to put something in the tip jar.”

Somewhere in the darkness, another branch snapped free. The cold and wet had seeped through my toque and was beginning to soak the back of my neck. 

“You know what tipping says?” Peter asked.

“What?”

“Tipping says, ‘I see value in you. I know nothing about you, I don’t know what kind of day you’re having but I value you as a person.’ Tipping is one of the few things your species got right. Everything would have gone better if people saw the importance of tipping.”

I was chosen to be Earth’s lone survivor because I tipped well.

“Do you know Sheila at the shop?” Peter asked.

“Goth Sheila. Sure.”

“There you go again with your categories.”

“No,” I said. “That’s how she dresses. She wants to be seen as a goth. She has categorized herself. It’s intentional.”

“She dresses like that because people don’t accept her any other way. It gives a sense of belonging that she can’t get anywhere else. Your species constructs categories and forces people to feel like they have to be part of something in order to be accepted, but the groups are very exclusive. Sheila’s a goth because they didn’t judge her.”

Goth Sheila had inky black hair that hung to her shoulders and bangs that covered her eyebrows. She carried a lot of extra weight and wore tight shorts over fishnet stockings. A white t-shirt drooped loosely at her neck, revealing a menagerie of tattoos. There were hints of barbed wire and roses and dragon wings. She wore black lipstick and silver eyeshadow. Her service could generously be described as surly. If a smile ever passed across her face it would die of loneliness.

“She is the most beautiful thing this universe has ever created,” Peter said and his voice cracked.

“That’s a very human thing to say.”

“Tell me about it,” he responded. 

“What do you find appealing about her?” I asked, delicately, wondering how anyone could be attracted to Goth Sheila. 

“Her anguish,” Peter answered. “Even though she does not speak much, I have come to know her quite well. She does not reveal herself easily, but I managed to get her to tell me about herself.”

History is cluttered with people who fell for someone who can only drag them down rather than lift them up. Peter took on a human form and fell in love. I suppose that could be defined as one of the hazards of being an interstellar project manager.

“I told her everything about me,” he continued. “I wanted to save her. I convinced her that I could take her away from all this. She was open to me. She trusted me. We waited on this spot every night for a week. They never came, those sons of bitches. Two nights ago she stormed off and called me a loser.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“She hasn’t spoken to me since.”

“That’s rough,” I said. “Yeah, they know how to make it hurt.”

“I’m a failure. That’s new to me. I’ve never felt this way before.”

“So you’re staying here because of a girl?” I said. “Because things didn’t work out you’ve decided to stay here and die with everyone else?”

“With her.”

“Peter, it’s a broken heart,” I pointed out. “It will pass.”

“I know. I get that,” he said. “But getting over it won’t mean I’ll forget it. When I think of travelling around, checking out other places, I know I will not be able to stop thinking about how I failed her. I gave her so much hope and ended up disappointing her. I let her down lower than anyone ever had before and, trust me, she has known some devastating relationships. I saw more value in her than anyone ever had and I failed her. I am worse than those who rejected her because she doesn’t fit their ideals.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” I told him.

“I cannot live with myself knowing what I did to her,” he said. He took a couple of steps away and turned to face me. “Hang out here as long as you want. Keep coming back. I can’t guarantee anything.”

“How will I know it’s here?”

Peter started to walk away. “You’ll know,” he said over his shoulder.

He was eventually enveloped by the blackness and the sound of his footsteps in slush faded away. I never saw him again.

I stayed for a little longer but eventually went home. The next morning, when I went to buy my coffee at the shop, I waited to have Sheila serve me. I tried to start a conversation with her, but the scowl did not leave her face. She would not look at me. I thanked her when she handed over my order and I put $5.00 in the tip jar.

This evening, while packing to leave the apartment,  I started to wonder if I had listened to Peter because I wanted it to be true. I took a break, made myself some tea and stood out on the balcony. The snow of that freak, early storm has melted, but the destruction is still around. Trees have lost many limbs.

There was something about the sky. If I had not had that conversation with Peter, I doubt I would have noticed. Everything was the same, but it looked different. He was right. I did know it when I saw it.

I have two options. I can run over to the clearing and explain that Peter is not coming, but he gave me his seat. Or I could call it a night and get some sleep.

Stephen Price writes and teaches writing on Turtle Island, which he grew up calling Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is particularly interested in helping late bloomers, those who have taken up writing late in life after they have finished their careers. He was a classroom teacher for thirty years. When he retired in 2019, his students, who he often wrote stories for, encouraged him to continue writing. He has been published in The Militant Grammarian, 10x10 Flash, and The Downtime Review. The editors of The Downtime Review have nominated his story for a Pushcart Prize.

29 March 2024

Ivana Mestrovic

shelling peas

holding the full pod
damp between my thumbs
I curl my fingers into the ridge
and split the slick walls apart
popping out bitter peas

we were sticky and sweet
maybe that was enough

I don’t think he ever loved me

Ivana Mestrovic holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale University. She has worked in arts management for sculptor Mark di Suvero for over thirty years and runs his Spacetime Studio. Her work has been accepted for publication by Brief Wilderness, Cider Press Review, Doubly Mad, Euphony Journal, Evening Street Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Night Picnic Press, The Opiate, Oxidant Engine, Plainsongs, Slant and Visitant Lit.

22 March 2024

Hannah Newman's reading of

September Fireflies

Written by Olga Maslova

Hannah Newman is an Atlanta-based writer with a master’s in Professional Writing. She likes to write about dark or bittersweet things (big surprise) all in the shapes of short stories, flash fiction, or poetry. Her work can be found in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Nuance Magazine, and The Loch Raven Review. In her free time, she’s probably recording a podcast episode with her sister or staring out of windows.

15 March 2024

Mizuki Nishiyama

Kami

Mizuki Nishiyama is a London-based, mixed-Japanese artist who creates raw and confrontational artworks spanning paintings, sculptures, tapestries, poetry, and performances that explore the fragile human condition. Nishiyama notably conducts dialogues and critiques the socio-politics of the female experience by incorporating the artist's Japanese paternal soil, which has buried her military ancestors since the 1400s, into her works, where she reevaluates ancestry, patriarchy, and time.

Exploring ideas of purity, femininity, Shintoism, and trauma; the artist utilises the elements of the world, and responds to what it means to be a woman today. The premise of the work begins with soil that the artist excavated from her paternal land in Japan; which dates back to the 1400s where her military ancestors (including members who committed Seppuku ritual suicides), and members that shaped Shintoism (Yoshida family; constructing the foundation of purification within the religion).

In the tapestries, Nishiyama is inspired by the concept of Kami; translating to "God", which holds no visual representation in Shintoism - only through Shide (white folded pieces of paper). White organic fabrics were first sourced, then burned (fire) to commence God and patriarchy to death, the fabrics were then buried in the ancestral soil (earth) for months, new life was given as they were pulled back out to be soaked in Japanese immune boosting teas (water), naturally weathered in London's (air), and finally treated with traditional Japanese distressing and sewing techniques; Sashiko and Boro; to construct and respond to past, present, and future narratives of existence, and the female narrative of the East and West.

In the paintings, Nishiyama incorporates the same soil as well as a deliberate knife cutting technique to slice through viscous oil pigments on canvas to depict violence and tranquility. Embracing deeply personal experiences to craft each artwork, the artist’s ongoing relationship with reproductive health and trauma has greatly influenced her practice and fueled her to confront vulnerability, fragility and the human condition. Creating is a chaotic yet meditative process for Nishiyama that allows her to make sense of the more tempestuous periods in life as well as continue to merge interdisciplinary thoughts and mediums to visualize the contemporary experience.

As a mixed-Japanese artist, Nishiyama draws inspiration from the East and West. Bridging her Hong Kong, Japanese and Italian cultural heritages. Nishiyama holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Central Saint Martins and a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from Parsons School of Design. Her solo exhibitions include Shunga (2020) at Whitestone Gallery Hong Kong, An Exploration of Human Fragility: Love & Lust (2020) at the Tenri Cultural Institute of New York, and 脆い Moroi: An Exploration of Human Fragility (2019) at Greenpoint Gallery New York.

8 March 2024

Mina Khan

해녀 (“diving women”)

how tiring it is to be
without use             there are mothers
of Jeju who have gone     obsolete   age, industry
but they are still honored    with statues, newspaper articles, they are
women over eighty with the widest lungs    skin with the heft to endure
the most frigid waters in just     a cotton jumper    hands
to sealife’s liquid bodies     how deeply we yearn
for touch     when I stand at the shore     clams huddle 
towards the warmth of a recent footstep
then are taken back       where salt crashes over
the shell       is not a casket         the shell
is repurposed    as dust      repurposes my bedroom  
when I was young       I thought the way 
to die was one’s own hand     the daughters
of diving women     tire   of training not to drown   
I wish I wanted   more    
from you

An interview with Mina Khan on the Jeju’s women, her new project, and communal experience

Tell us a bit about your poetry. How long have you been writing? What projects are you working on?

When I was very little, poetry was where I could privately process what was often a chaotic domestic environment. I love poetry. I love that it’s a confined space, where you can motion toward so many threads–not just through text, but through rhythm, which turns into physicality, which turns into something almost like memory in the reader. Sound quality and enjambment—those sudden turns—are where my writing feels most alive. 

The project I’m working on now is concerned with cyclicality and the communal experience of living. My writing practice draws from the Korean possessive, "oori," meaning “our”. When referring to one’s own, the individual possessive is replaced with "oori." Meaning, rather than my home, it is “our” home, "our” mother. I write into collective experience. And the shared symptoms of the everyday: mourning, violence, tenderness, resilience, and delight in deceptive places. 

“I” is a landing point through which to make gestures toward universal feeling. This project follows the speaker and her family exploring a precarious line to power and relevance. My specific obsession right now is women—the mother, the daughter, and where the role of the woman becomes obsolete.

Can you tell us, in your own words, a bit about the history of the diving women? How did you come upon their story, and what drew you to them?

The 해녀, or haenyeo, or diving women, are the foundation of what was Jeju’s matriarchal society. Jeju is an island off of Korea. For generations, women would dive into waters to collect sea life for eating and selling—an inherited practice that has lost its use. These women would train their lungs to withstand almost 100 feet of depth, and remain under for several minutes. This practice started before equipment, when women–even pregnant women and elders–would dive in just their undergarment, regardless of season.

I was drawn to this topic, because how could I not be? The human body! And a real life example of a matriarchal society. Now, the remaining haenyeo are over 80 years old. This makes sense, because recent generations are moving to cities and taking on more contemporary forms of employment. But it’s also tragic that this industry, this history, is ending. 

Both of your poems in this issue examine the relationship between mother and daughter. Can you speak a bit on the theme of family, and how it appears in your work?

This is a good question. And a tough one. Family is central to my work, and its role has evolved over time. A lot of my content deals with ethnicity, history and power—meaning states, men, or abusive family dynamics. Admittedly, my younger writing is very self involved, noting mostly how the world has affected me. I find that as I’m getting older, I am relating more to my mother. This has opened a doorway for me to relate to the world at large. Now in my work, when I describe my own experiences, it is to make broader statements on systems of power and subjugation. Of the universal, often simultaneous experience of being both the inflictor and the inflicted upon.

Do you write poetry in multiple languages? If so, can you speak a bit about that process?

Like many first-gen Americans, English is the only language I’m proficient in. But a phrase in Korean or Urdu will sneak into my work from time to time. I think a lot about whether or not to romanize these words. Where I’ve settled for now is that although I’m intentional with sound quality, the English-speaking reader would likely not be able to follow the rhythm of a foreign word. So, what’s the point? I may as well keep the phrase in its original text. And while I worry about alienating an audience, I do feel some joy at the little nod that 해녀, for example, provides to Korean readers. A bit of intimacy within the public. 

What are you reading right now (poetry or otherwise) that you love, or that inspires you?

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata! It’s a book of short stories translated from Japanese. The language is extremely sparse—and I’m always inspired by works that can get across complex topics in a simple manner. 

What strikes me most about the text is her severely strange, fantastical snapshots of everyday life. She tilts the world. Like, in one of her stories, she writes fondly, and unironically, of a stranger’s hot breath on a crowded train. The speaker is giddy to be in such proximity to another life. What a concept! My favorite works are ones that bring the reader into the details and joys of being alive.

Mina Khan is an award-winning poet from New York, currently based in Chicago. Her work discusses her Korean-Pakistani heritage, violence, tenderness, and the everyday. She was awarded an honorary mention by the American Academy of Poets and authored the chapbook MON-monuments, monarchs & monsters (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2020.) She holds an MFA from Columbia University, and has been featured in Pigeon Pages, The Margins, Epiphany Magazine, and more.

1 March 2024

Lauren Crawford	

Good the Girls Have Given Me

A dandelion crown, woven by the nimble fingers of a messy girl. 

*

A lake's worth of horse sweat to hose off each dusk. 

*

An apple; to be delivered as a bribe to a scout's favorite horse, Oakley. This gift came with instructions: I was to wait until no one was in the barn but me and the sound of the cat sighing. I was to sit at Oakley's stall and offer the apple by the halves, skin side down so he could smell the fragrant meat. As soon as he showed interest, I was told to sing to him about a memory; the happiest memory I had. When I give him my voice, fruit in hand, I sing to him my deepest sorrow so that he knows what to look for in a scout when she needs him. I have no home, I tremble into his curried grey fur. No home, I tell him, but you and this barn. The silent beast paws at the dirt in the stall we share while he snacks on his treat and when I get up, I leave my heart at the door. 

*

Enough power to fuel a freight train that never stops or runs out of track. It is a great and powerful thing to hold the attention of two hundred screaming scouts under one pavilion before dinner; to corral them, to glimmer in their gaze. They lay it on me like a blessing and it feels as though I am the maker of air, like I brewed the sunset hanging low in the sky. They look at me like they expect me to lift that sun myself every morning and, at times, I feel like I do. 

*

Shelter; not just from the rain and the thunder here, but from the gales that form out of myself. The one thing the scouts and leaders do not know about me is my aptitude for storm and the rip currents I have been told I steep. It must be me, I tell myself, over and over into the night. It must be because of me I have no family who wants me near. 

*

Sticks, stones, mud and hay bales. All the things I use to teach the scouts about survival in the wilds. When they ask me if they can build a mud-bale palace as big as their real homes, I tell them there is no structure like the words you whisper to your teshka, which is our made-up camp word for "loved-one". No place like the one you build from your breath. The very breaths I would die for when spilled from the right mouth. 

*

Safety. It's always the same thing we tell the scouts when they say they fear falling off the horse. It’s only dirt, we say. Dirt in the cabin where you dream you are free, dirt in your hair when you tango with the trees, dirt on your tongue when you call for me. And I am always there to hear your names flicker in the dark, so I can later stitch each letter into the heavens, and feel you laughing down the light. 

*

The gift of flight. Yes, I can say with absolute certainty that I have flown and I have made my girls fly. I have shown them when it's best to dive and for whom they should do it. I have anointed them in brightness, dappled them in dew. I have shown them the lightest thing in the world is joy, the hardest thing in the world is the ground, and the deathiest death is that of a horse. I have shown them how to walk foolishly up a creek and tasted their songs no one else has cared to listen to. I ring them dry with play; their blissful, summery dalliances as skylarks. And I remember the look on their faces when they smelled their own freedom for what seemed to be the first time; like falling into a brook that was never there, like a throat-full of water after feeding on nothing but dust.

Lauren Crawford holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale where she served as an associate editor for Crab Orchard Review. A native of Houston, Texas, she is the second place winner of the 2020 Louisiana State Poetry Society Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, The Appalachian Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Midwest Quarterly, The Worcester Review, The Spectacle and elsewhere. Lauren currently teaches writing at the University of New Haven with her husband and is a reader for Palette Poetry.

23 February 2024

Sue Brady's reading of

Wolf-Rayet 140

Written by Tia Cowger

Sue is an actress and producer. Throughout her long career, she has performed in numerous shows in NYC, including the Off-Broadway hits ALL IN THE TIMING and TIME FLIES. In addition, she has appeared all over the country in countless regional theaters including The Cincinnati Playhouse, The Shakespeare Theater of NJ, and The Delaware Theater Company (to name a few). She was the co-creator and Creative Director for The No Frills Company, a theater company for women over forty, which produced many interesting and diverse theater pieces including the successful Off-Broadway production of VITA & VIRGINIA. However, she considers her greatest production to be her son, Donovan.

16 February 2024

Richelle Mechem

Silver Trilobite

Richelle Mechem was born amidst the enchanting desert and mountainous landscapes of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and her artwork typically draws inspiration from the terrains of the American Southwest. Mechem's abstract work is new and experimental. She creates three-dimensional sculptural, mixed-media paintings inspired by geology and astronomy. Her tactile textures inspired by the natural world offer viewers a tangible experience of terrestrial and cosmic spectacles.

Mechem's subject matters reflect her deep reverence for Earth and the Universe while emphasizing a sustainability narrative. Her portfolio includes works inspired by plate tectonics, fossils, celestial phenomena, and oceanic activity. She builds her wood panels with a tapestry of traditional and non-traditional materials. Her palette is eclectic, from crystals and rocks to seashells and sand. For example, the artwork "Silver Trilobite" blends hues and textures to evoke the timeless narratives embedded within Earth's layers.

Educated with a double Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Italian from the University of Kansas and further trained in Art Education at Avila University, Mechem has been creating and teaching since 2011. Richelle Mechem is an emerging artist with exhibitions at prominent spaces in Grand Junction, Colorado like the Avalon Theatre and Uncanny Valley Gallery. She is a storyteller who uses mixed media to recount tales of the universe, challenge conventions, and reinvigorate our perceptions of the world.

9 February 2024

Brian Duncan

HeLa

—For Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta, is this really still you?
Your immortal cells double every twenty-four hours,
ever since the rest of you died, way back in 1951.
You’re all over the world now, being reborn
at your steady pace, doing your part for science.
You’ve lived outside your body
longer than you lived inside it. Your cells
would add up to 50 million tons today, a hundred
Empire State Buildings (that you never got to see),
and end to end, would circle the globe three times.

So twice each week I take a petri dish of you,
check under the microscope that you still look fine,
add the EDTA and a few drops of trypsin, scrape
you off the dish, spin you down to a pellet
in the centrifuge, resuspend you in fresh medium,
and put you on 10 new dishes. In a couple of days
I’ll hand you off to the scientists to do their work.
Lest we forget, I’ve placed a photo of you, looking sassy
in your finery, on the door of the incubator where you live,
cozy and eternal, in your stainless steel crypt.

An interview with Brian Duncan on his writing story, the inspiration for this poem, and what he’s reading

How long have you been writing poetry? Tell us a bit about what your writing and editing process looks like.

I wrote poems in the 1980s and 1990s, when my wife, Margie Duncan, and I took continuing ed classes at our local high school. Later we attended a few college workshops, where we met some excellent poets, including Thomas Lux and Stephen Dobyns, who encouraged us. I had my copy of Poet’s Market and made notes on places that looked like they might like my stuff, but the whole process of submitting seemed daunting. One of my uncles, Graham Duncan, was a prolific poet, and he had his system of mailing out batches of poems, waiting for the acceptance or rejection, and then mailing them out to the next place.  I ended up never submitting any of my poems for publication. It just seemed too hard, and life (and my more-than-full-time job in the lab!) got in the way.

I didn’t really write anything for the next 20 years. Serendipitously, a couple of years ago, just as I was about to retire (my boss was retiring, and together we closed the lab), two very good poet friends took Margie and me under their wings and guided us through the modern-day process of submitting poems to literary journals. They introduced us to Submittable and Duotrope, and with my new free time, I started submitting. I’ll be forever grateful to them for the kickstart they gave us and for their continuing friendship and mentorship.

My writing process is usually motivated by a deadline of some sort though, once in a while, something will inspire me, and I’ll start a poem without a deadline. I also find that writing from prompts is very helpful. I’ve written several poems inspired by the prompts in The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft, edited by Diane Lockward. As for editing, Margie and I belong to a small workshop group that meets weekly (by Zoom, since we all live in different parts of the country). They help me see what works and doesn’t work in my poems. I try to fix what I can, though sometimes I stubbornly go with my original idea if I feel it better serves the poem’s intention. I also show my poems to my 99-year-old aunt, Evelyn Duncan, who is also a published poet (and a fierce defender of the English language) and she weighs in. No extraneous word survives her sharp eye!

The poem HeLa is written for Henrietta Lacks.  Can you tell us her story in your words, and a bit about what drew you to her?

Henrietta Lacks is an African-American woman who was treated for a fatal cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. Researchers were always looking for interesting cell lines to study, so her biopsied cells were cultured and found to be immortal, which means that they continue growing indefinitely as long as they are given fresh growth media and room to grow. Her cells are considered to be the first example of an immortal cell line. The cell line was named HeLa, based on her name, and her cells are used in research labs all over the world. When I first joined the lab (where I worked for 37 years) one of my tasks was to “passage” the cells twice a week, which means to take one plate of cells and divide the cells into 10 fresh plates with new growth media. The scientists in the lab (postdocs, grad students, and undergrads) used the cells to grow the viruses we studied, with the ultimate goal of understanding various disease processes. Early on, I learned the history behind the cells and was deeply impressed by how Henrietta’s suffering translated into so much progress in treating and curing diseases. At the time it was not publicly recognized or acknowledged by the scientific community that her cells were taken and used without her permission or that of her family (this was common practice at the time). I was so moved by her story that I felt the need to acknowledge her contribution, so I printed a photo of Henrietta and posted it on the incubator where the lab members would come to pick up their plates of cells. 

Your bio mentions working in a virology laboratory.  How does your scientific background inform your poetry? Is it often a source of inspiration?

 It was only after writing this poem that I realized that I could potentially use my science background in my poetry. I haven’t written any other poems so far with a science theme, but I would like to try in the future. A lab is pretty much like any other workplace in many ways, except for the radiation, toxic chemicals, biohazards, exploding ultracentrifuges, and open flames from Bunsen burners. There are some funny/scary stories I can still tell.

What are you reading right now (poetry or otherwise) that you love, or that inspires you?

My early poems were inspired by my aunt’s and uncle’s poetry. Their poetry was immersed in their experiences growing up during the Depression and World War II (my uncle was an anti-tank gunner in Patton’s Third Army and witnessed the liberation of the Buchenwald death camp). They would send us their newly published poems, and we would often meet them in NYC when they gave readings back in the 1990s. Honestly, my reading of poetry is far less than I’d like it to be. Right now I’m reading a lot of “Best of” books from recent years to see what current poets are writing. I get a couple of “poem-a-day” poems by email, which often inspire me, and I’ve just discovered Michael McGriff’s poetry, which I’ll be exploring more. As far as nonpoetry, I’ve been reading a lot of Scottish history lately, especially the sad story of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Battle of Culloden. I enjoy books about nature and about World War II, especially the 15th Air Force in Italy (my uncle Ken was a tail gunner in a B-24 bomber there and suffered from PTSD, then known as “battle fatigue”). I’m currently reading a book about the strange history of Seattle. Stories of the old days up in the Adirondacks, where a branch of my family is from, are also a great source of inspiration for my poetry.

Any advice for emerging poets who are still finding their voice?

I don’t feel qualified to give much advice to emerging poets, since I’m so new at it myself.  What seems to work for me is to write about my experiences. I recommend letting your memories flow.  Leave yourself open to new experiences and always observe the world around you.  You can mine all of these things for poems.  Remember that you’re the expert at your own memories, observations, and feelings.  Readers recognize -- and connect with -- real experiences and emotions.  When you decide on a subject for a poem, write down everything about it that you can think of, and then work on whittling it down to its essence. Specifics and details are important.  Work on the mechanics of poetry: remember that so much can be conveyed with punctuation and line enjambment, and by eliminating unnecessary words.  People are hungry for connections, and to be transported, if only briefly, to the world you’ve created.

Brian Duncan lives in Kendall Park, New Jersey with his wife, Margie, and two cats. He worked in a virology laboratory at Princeton University for many years and is now happily retired. He enjoys devoting his time to poetry, gardening, and hiking. He has poems out this year in ONE ART and Thimble, and in a forthcoming issue of Whale Road Review.

2 February 2024

Hillary Gordon

I Named My Fibroid Mary

The bathroom floor of the hotel was spotted red with blood. I was lying in the fetal position on the cold tile, rocking back and forth. I thought back to the last time I was at this hotel. It was on Beverly Drive, just upstairs from the famed Swingers diner in Hollywood. My sister and I had stayed there six months prior, and we’d been irritated when they’d closed the hotel pool for filming. Later we were thrilled when we recognized the kitschy lawn chairs and flower power paintings on the pool floor in a Netflix series we loved. In my twenties I had lived just a few blocks from the diner and would spend many late nights and early mornings sobering up with coffee and runny eggs, sitting in the red booths with my friends, looking for C list actors who doubled as wait staff. I wished so badly it was then, any time but now.

 It was December. My pants were soaked through, thick and sticky, despite special ordering of extra ultra-tampons online to the tune of 25 dollars. “Prepare to feel like you’re losing your virginity again,” one reviewer had written about the ultra-wide tampons.

“Period day?” my sister had asked when I picked her up from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles earlier that afternoon, the giant Christmas tree looking an unnatural green against the gray sky.

“How did you know?”

“I can see it on your face. Of course, you had to get it today, of course.”

She came into the bathroom without knocking. The tile was cold on my cheek. I tried to concentrate on that and not the cramping that burned in my mid-section, which traveled deep down into my legs, into my knees, into my back. That had me pretzeled on the ground in hopes of any ease, any let up.

“You don’t have to go,” she said, sitting on the bathroom counter. “Not if you don’t want to.”

“But I do want to,” I said, through clenched teeth. “We’ve been planning this forever and it’s your birthday. It’s Love Actually Live!” I tried to say with some enthusiasm. “I can try some Tylenol again. I think it might be easing up.” I took a deep breath, feeling the cold air creep through the open bathroom window, into my lungs, into my chest, willing it into the parts of me that ached.

“You’re pale,” my sister said, putting on her rhinestone menorah earrings.

“It’s the blood loss, I think. I hope I don’t bleed in the theater. God, this is embarrassing.”

I let out an involuntary grunt, guttural, from somewhere deep inside me. “Fuck. fuck fuck fuck fuck. It’s a bad one. Yeah, it’s a big one.”

My sister looked at me through the mirror with a frown. I sat up, slightly dizzy from the sudden motion and grasped my mid-section. It throbbed. “What does it feel like, exactly?” she asked me.

“Like someone cut me open with a dull knife and took a red-hot screwdriver and is driving it into my flesh. Like a demon is doing a hot lava river dance in my body. Like the way you used to pinch me when we were little, remember how much I hated that? It’s like that but the pinching and pressure are inside my internal organs, and it goes on for hours and hours. It feels like I want to fucking die.”

“Please go to the doctor again,” she said.

I first felt the twinge of pain when I was 11 years old, the day I got my first period. I was playing as a halfback on the AYSO soccer field. I knew it was coming, my mom had prepared me with “the talk” a few months before. What I wasn’t prepared for was the wrenching throes of pain, the violence inside my body. One minute I was a kid doing cartwheels on the soccer field during halftime, the next I was an adult, experiencing the acute pain of womanhood. The next day, in a place I would come to know well throughout my life, I found myself lying on the bathroom floor, in the fetal position. My mom had given me an overnight pad that I bled through in an hour, and I lay near the toilet so I could throw up when the pain became too much. I rested my cheek on the green carpet fibers as I held my knees and imagined myself on the Oprah Winfrey show one day. “You’re telling me you bleed through a pad in an hour?!?!?!” Oprah would ask me in her astonished tone. The audience would look at me with sympathy, hands over their hearts.

“Yes,” I’d say. “Yes, it’s true.” Oprah would gasp. The crowd would cry out in unison.      

“Tell us your story dear. Your brave, brave story.” Oprah would say, placing a kind hand on my shoulder. 

In reality, my sister was playing with her toy horses in our adjoining bedroom and my mom was on the cordless phone, talking to her gynecologist in the kitchen. After she hung up the phone she joined me in the bathroom, placed a soft hand on my back, “it’s normal honey. The doctor says pain is just part of getting your period. I’ll get you some more Motrin.”

Thirty years later I would be lying on a bed, in the same hospital I was born in, begging a nurse for something a little stronger than Motrin. “What’s your pain level?” the nurse asked me. I adjusted my eyes, took a breath, and said, “nine, it’s a nine.” A dozen staples pierced my skin, bonding together a 12-inch incision that had cut through layers of skin, muscle, and organ. I felt like I had been cut in half, and in a way I had been.

“My mouth is dry. Can I get some ice? Just a small piece?” I asked the nurse.

“I’ll ask the doctor,” she said, and disappeared.

*

It takes the average woman 10 years to be diagnosed with fairly common gynecological issues. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis and fibroids being some of the most common. Endometriosis occurs in 11 percent of women; quite a significant chunk of the female population. It happens when tissue meant to grow inside the uterus instead grows outside. On a good day it is painful, on a normal day it’s absolute agony, and can only be diagnosed with surgery, so as one might guess, is not diagnosed often. Many times, women are given total hysterectomies to counter the pain, but that doesn't always ensure a pain free existence. Endometriosis can stick to and grow on other organs in the body. My friend and former coworker Sara had been diagnosed with endometriosis when she was 18. Tougher than stale beef jerky, when her appendix had ruptured inside her body, I watched her wait until the workday was over at 5pm before she drove herself to the ER. The pain was so bad, by lunch she couldn’t walk. When I urged her to go to the doctor at 3:00, she said, “I still have so many emails to send.”

I had watched her more than once double over in pain when she got her period. “My mom and grandma both also suffer from endometriosis,” she told me one day over lunch at her house in the woods. When her period made a surprise appearance, we had to cancel our lunch plans so she could grab tampons from her bathroom. Wondering if I had endometriosis myself, I asked her about her pain level, “It’s changed over the years. I’ve kind of grown into pain. The inconvenience, the not knowing when it’s coming, it interferes with my life a ton. That’s the worst part.”

“What did your doctor tell you to do when you were diagnosed?” I asked her.

“The doctor said it wouldn’t be anything to worry about, but I’d have some different symptoms than my friends. I wasn’t offered any treatment—they told me to take Tylenol and Ibuprofen and they told me I needed to be on birth control.”

By the time I was 24, the pain I had first experienced as an 11-year-old was getting worse and becoming more frequent. I sat on my living room couch canceling plans with my fun, hippie friend Jenny, who never had pain with her period. I wondered if it was because she did yoga. “I’m just not feeling well,” I told her as she sipped her vodka martini out of a red coffee mug.

“It’s the wind,” she said. “It’s making everyone feel off.” I looked out my window to see a palm tree swaying back and forth in my front yard.

“Let’s hope,” I thought.

I went to the doctor the next morning. I laid on your standard beige, gynecological exam bed. Feet cold in the stirrups, uncomfortable and self-conscious in nothing but a scratchy paper gown, all the parts of my body I work to hide, exposed. “I’m just going to insert this,” a young, Swedish X-Ray tech said, as she applied a condom to an ultrasound wand.

“Ok,” I said, embarrassed, but trying not to be. She had me look at the screen, pointed to my insides on display.

“Ovaries look normal,” she said, pointing to a blob on a screen. “It’s probably cysts, you probably have rupturing cysts and that’s what’s causing the pain. I imagine they’ve dissolved. It’s called PCOS. Since you’re already on the pill, there’s not a lot we can do about it. Sorry.”

I thought back to being in middle school. Third period. PE class. A group of eighth grade girls, all braces and backpacks walked to the girl’s gym (the outdated, older, smaller of the two at my school) and taped to the locker room door was the dreaded gold, sparkly sign reading MILE DAY! We would sigh and we would grunt and groan in annoyance. I was not an athlete, and have never been one, but at my school, the richer and the more athletic you were, the more popular you were. I tended to keep the company of the music-loving, poetry-writing crowd who would walk the mile as slowly as they damn well felt like, thank you. What my snail-paced friends didn’t know was that I had been practicing my long-distance running after school. I thought it would make me healthier, skinnier, a touch more popular. After many months of training, running until I was exhausted, I had improved my mile time by 2.5 minutes. I was still running a ten-minute mile—no great athletic feat—but I was proud. On this mile day though, this dreaded mile day, I had gotten my period. My insides raged. They burned. They fought and screamed. I discreetly slipped into my PE clothes, not wanting anyone to see the triple pads I was wearing, and I began to run. I focused on my breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, focused on my feet hitting the track, the dust rising from the dirt, as girl after girl passed me. The pain wasn’t easing up, in fact it was getting worse. Defeated, I slowed down, started to walk. “Come on girls! Move! Move!” Mrs. Blakey, our short-haired, red-nailed PE teacher yelled at us. In that moment, I gripped my mid-section, fell to the ground, and vomited all over the track. Mrs. Blakey ran over to me, the whistle around her neck bobbing up and down. “Honey, why didn’t you tell me you were sick?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to get a good mile time for once.”

Mrs. Blakey helped me up and walked with me back to the locker room. “It’s ok to get sick sometimes, you just have to tell me.” I was mortified then to see I had bled through my pads and stained my gym shorts. I rolled them up, stuck them in the bottom of my backpack and threw them in the wash when I got home that night.

The number one reason girls miss school is because of their periods. I tried my best to never use my period as an excuse to call out of school, or as I grew older, out of work. I thought the pain was just the penance I had to pay for being born a woman. I thought that I had to be a good girl, to not complain or disrupt, to quietly grin and bear it. “When I was younger, I would miss sports because I was in so much pain,” Sara told me as she sipped her Dr. Pepper out of the can with a straw. “I would just stay in the fetal position in bed.” When I asked her if she ever misses work at her new job because of her endometriosis pain, she said, “A week before my period I get sick. I get feverish. I’m always sick. I’m nauseous, dizzy, and I have a headache. Fluish kind of thing. I’ve gotten used to it. It makes me wanna call in, but I just work from home. When I was younger, I definitely missed some school, but my responsibility level is different now.”

When I was thirty-three the pain was constant. Not just the day before my period like when I was a teenager. Not just a week of pain like when I was in my twenties. Now it was daily. Ibuprofen had stopped working years ago. When my period would come, my skin would turn red and blotchy, hot to the touch. My heart raced so fast I thought my coworkers could hear it—things that always accompanied my unwelcomed cycles. I’d sometimes use my skin tone to measure my own pain. To make sure I wasn’t making it up or exaggerating it. I had sometimes been asked by friends if I “just had a low pain tolerance.” One friend, thin as a rice cracker, had said to me after I cancelled dinner plans, “I just don’t let my period affect my life the way you do.” Was I exaggerating it, I sometimes wondered? Was I faking it for attention? I couldn’t be 100 percent sure. But, if there were physical symptoms, sweat and blotchy red skin, it had to be real pain, right?

At work, I’d pull my knees up to my chest in my office chair, or cross and uncross my legs, and try to hold normal conversations with my coworkers. I’d sometimes lie on my office floor. I’d wear heating pads that stuck to my belly during the workday. I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on pain relief. Heating pads, pain killers, teas, electrotherapy machines, tampons dipped in CBD oil and while they would ease the pain a touch, it was never, actually gone. So, I went back to the doctor. “I was told I have PCOS,” I told her. “And I think that’s causing the pain, ruptured cysts.”

She looked at me. “You don’t look like you have PCOS.” The typical symptoms, though the disorder manifests itself in many ways, are weight gain in the mid-section, thinning head hair, and more body hair than normal. The rupturing of the cysts causes the ovaries to produce extra testosterone, which in turn creates male features in women. One in ten women suffer from PCOS, yet there is no cure and doctors have no idea why women get it. The doctor took my blood and called me a week later, “All looks normal. No heightened testosterone or androgens. All good. Want me to write a prescription for birth control?”

Many years later, I would find Cory Ruth on the internet and ask her why birth control is so often prescribed for so many gynecological conditions. She’s a registered dietician who has a Master of Science degree and specializes in women’s issues, namely PCOS. She’d long had a strong hunch something wasn’t right with her own reproductive health. Diagnosed with PCOS at 27 she was put on birth control and told she wouldn’t be able to conceive. Two kids later she said to me, “Doctors aren’t trained in lifestyle changes, so birth control is the go-to.” When I asked her what her main piece of advice would be to young women suffering from period pain she said, “Listen to your body. If something feels off or abnormal, seek medical help and don’t believe everything you see on the internet.”

By the time I was forty the pain was so intense, I began to buy drugs from friends and sometimes strangers. Norco, Percocet, Hydrocodone—whatever I could get my hands on. Like a squirrel hiding precious nuts, I’d stash the pills all over the house and only allow myself to take them when I was on the verge of passing out. More than once, on my way to or from work, I’d have to pull over to the side of the road and wait for the pain to pass, as I breathed heavily, dizzy, sweaty, blurry, in and out of consciousness—not trusting myself to stay conscious behind the wheel,  I would bleed through my clothes despite the giant tampons. On the days I would call out of work, I would lay towels down on the floor, or sit in a hot bath and let the pain consume me, take over my whole body for the six or seven or sometimes twelve hours it was going to. There was no fighting her. She was relentless.

My mom, after seeing me go through this for a year or so, begged me to go to the doctor.

“I’ve been a million times,” I said. “It’s PCOS, there’s no cure.”

“As a birthday gift to me,” she said, “please just go one more time. I can see the pain in your face. You don’t deserve this.”

I had never thought of it that way. I thought I DID deserve this pain. Because I’m a woman. Because I’m short and round and not athletic and not a yogi. Because I was born with a body that hurt. That’s just what she did. I told my mom I’d go to the doctor again.

I was nervous. Nervous they’d find something or nervous they wouldn’t. I got a call one week after my appointment. My doctor, young, kind, with her hair pulled back in a blonde pony, asked if I could get on a zoom call with her. “It’s not cancer,” was the first thing she said. I sighed, relieved. “It’s a fibroid. A pretty significant fibroid. It’s about the size of an orange, and that’s what’s probably causing your pain.” I wanted to cry. It was such a relief to know the pain was real, to know it may be cured. To know what was wrong with me all these years. It wasn’t a moral failing, it wasn’t an inability to deal with pain. It wasn’t the price of womanhood. It was pain. Real pain.

I named the fibroid Mary. After Queen Mary Tudor. Henry VIII’s first daughter, I always felt a sort of kinship with her. She married later in life, and just like her father, desperately wanted an heir to secure the throne. She suffered from incredibly painful periods, and in a time before painkillers, would spend her most painful period days taking long walks in the forest. At 42, she finally thought she was pregnant as her belly swelled and her cycles stopped. Turned out she was suffering from some sort of gynecological cancer that would kill her shortly. Also, she was famously known as Bloody Mary. I wondered how 600 years had passed, but when it came to women’s health, little seemed to have evolved.

 I began my research on uterine fibroids. They are common. As a matter of fact, 80 percent of women will have at least one during their childbearing years. They’re non-cancerous tumors that often don’t cause symptoms, but when they do, “they’re no joke,” as my doctor had told me. Once I had been diagnosed, I called my friend Shannon and asked if she wanted to go to dinner. She’d had a partial hysterectomy years before, because of large uterine fibroids. “On a scale from 1-10, the pain was 11,” she told me over chicken plicata. “It was debilitating. I had trouble walking, driving, and sleeping. I tried every pain relief under the sun.” I nodded, knowing just how she felt. “I started to plan my life around my cycle. I always carried extra clothes, sanitary products and had to special order Ultra tampons and special pads. I was super unhealthy and anemic.” When I asked her why it had taken her so long to be diagnosed, she said, “Male doctors were the worst and had discounted my symptoms. Once I found a competent doctor, it took 2 appointments to be diagnosed.”

It's unknown exactly why women get fibroids, but if they’re big, or there are multiples, they can cause heavy bleeding, pressure, bloating and severe pain in the pelvis, back and legs, and like so many other gynecological issues, infertility.

“You want kids?” My doctor asked me when I visited her in the office.

“I don’t know. Maybe? But I’m 41, so really what are the odds?”

 “You’d be surprised,” she said. “If there is even one tiny fraction of a percent that thinks you may want kids one day, we’re not doing a hysterectomy. We’re doing a myomectomy. I’ll cut into your uterus to remove the fibroid.  I’ll warn you, it’s not without risks, and it’s pretty painful. So, it’s up to you if it’s worth a major surgery with a pretty major incision and a long recovery.”

“Get it out of me,” I said, with no hesitation.

A few months later, Fibroid Mary was dead. I didn’t know it quite yet, but the bulk of my pain had died with her. I asked my surgeon to leave me a picture of the fibroid after it was removed. I wanted to see Bloody Mary, the mass that had been tormenting me most of my life. She was just as ugly as you’d imagine. Big, fatty, fleshy, bloody and mean. The size of a large fist. I wondered how I wasn’t able to feel the lump of it as it grew inside me.  As I lay in the hospital bed, bleeding through my sheets, unable to sit up, unable to use the bathroom without a nurse’s assistance, I took some small comfort in the thought of Fibroid Mary burning in a fire of medical waste.

I hate that it took thirty years for me to finally get a real diagnosis and finally get some relief. I hate that I was in my forties by the time I stopped living in fear of my body. Anticipating my period, waiting for it, was sometimes worse than the pain itself. I felt, as I imagine many women do, much shame around my period growing up. I was used to hiding tampons up my sleeve or in my purse on my way to the bathroom in order to not make anyone uncomfortable. I was accustomed to hearing my male family members, and classmates and coworkers crack menstrual jokes. I've been accused more than once of “being on her period” if I was upset. I’ve hidden my pain, blamed the vomiting on bad food or a flu, so no one would have to think about a woman menstruating. So, I wouldn't be made fun of for this body and how she functions.

As women, we are taught to be ashamed of our flesh and our blood. We are to be ashamed for existing in the bodies we are born into. The correct womanly body will always be just out of reach, for us all. The correct female body aches but only in silence. The correct body bleeds, but in secret. She hides her tampons. She complains of a headache when asking for painkillers to ease her cramps. She doesn’t talk about blood. She doesn’t acknowledge pain. She menstruates, but no one would know it. In fact, lawmakers are currently considering banning any discussion of menstruation before 6th grade in Florida schools. The perfect female doesn’t talk about her period.

I sometimes wonder if I had been more vocal about my pain, my heavy bleeding, if I hadn’t been self-conscious, so timid, if maybe Fibroid Mary would have been evicted sooner. I think of all the life I’ve missed: holidays, vacations, parties, work, school. Because even if physically I was there, mentally I was fighting a war with my body. When I was in that pain, only a fraction of me could ever really be present. I did end up going to see Love Actually Live with my sister. All I remember from that night was the pain I was in. The positions I would fold myself into to try to ease the pain, even slightly. The defiant spot of blood that stained the chair in the theatre, despite all my efforts.

More than anything, this makes me hope that we teach our girls not to be afraid of their own bodies, to listen to them, and to fight for them. To remind them there is no shame in their existence. While period pain is common, it’s not normal. There is almost always an underlying reason.  I often think of the physical and mental anguish this simple fact could have relieved me of- in so many stages of my life. Our girls need to know, in a way I didn’t know, that it’s not just ok, but necessary to discuss female bodies and female pain. No need to grin and bear it like I did, like my generation did, like our mothers and their mothers did. And if no one listens, I want our girls to scream about it, until they are heard. Let everyone know exactly where it hurts, when it hurts so we can figure out why it hurts. My hope is that all girls understand that just because they are born in female form, they are not destined to a life of polite, invisible suffering.

Hillary Gordon lives part time in Ojai, California and part time in Los Angeles where she is completing her MFA in creative writing. Her work has been published in Seventeen Magazine, Self Magazine, The Rush, The Harbinger and more. She currently works full time at a Los Angeles radio station.

26 February 2024

Nina M. Chung's reading of

Pickling

Written by Elise Triplett

Nina’s exploration of voice started on stage, while singing in London’s West End revival of "The King & I" in 2000. This was followed by brief TV work in Seoul and cliché auditions in Los Angeles—until her professional interests started shifting toward public relations. Her publications include a high school poem about teenage promiscuity ("Coquette") and a dissertation on corporate apologies ("Capitalism in Other Words"). Nina is currently based in Brooklyn, NY where she works in communications, practices yoga, writes haikus on walks, and occasionally posts @ninanotabene.

19 January 2024

Rachel Ehlin-Smith

Hand Broom Cleaning House

Rachel Ehlin-Smith's woven sculptures are a collaboration of intricate craftsmanship and natural inspiration. Incorporating cotton, horsetail, alpaca fibers from her alpaca Poppy, and locally foraged plants. Her pieces are dyed with plant-based pigments and crystallized using alum or copper. Meticulously woven on a floor loom, Ehlin-Smith's sculptures evoke a romantic, ethereal feeling, reflecting their Southern California roots and the artists' connection with nature.

12 January 2024

Catherine Weiss

Ekphrasis of "BOWLING ALLEY GANGBANG - Bukaki [sic] Ending"

The back room is depressing, its low ceiling just beams
and fiberglass insulation the color of brains.
Machinery. Harsh lighting.
Then, a barrage of average dicks—unrelenting swarms
like Hitchcock’s The Birds.
The woman seems to be having a nice time, thank god.
Some of the men wear masks.
I watch pornography twice a week
but I am more haunted by BOWLING ALLEY GANGBANG
than by that two-headed calf poem,
goosebumps beyond Good Bones.
You could make this bowling alley beautiful.
What does it mean to watch? I don’t want to
want to. I’m fascinated by what art could be
and isn’t. If we meet in a frenzy of desire,
take it seriously. Bowling is in decline.
There are still twelve thousand bowling alleys in the world.
I always wanted to be useful, too.

An interview with Catherine Weiss on art, shame, and making poet friends

Tell us a bit about your poetic journey. How long have you been writing? What projects are you working on?

My poetic journey started with a bang. Way back when I was a freshman in high school, I wrote an ill-advised, profanity-filled satiric poem insulting my classmates, teachers, and school. It was ten pages long and I foolishly brought it in to show off my witty doggerel verse. I got in so much trouble. I was pulled out of class, suspended for a week. When I came back to school, it was on the condition I apologize in person to everyone I mentioned; dozens and dozens of people. I was so impacted by the experience that I didn't write another poem for over a decade. I came back to poetry in 2012 when I was suffering with a severe depression and I needed an outlet. I'd just moved to a new town; I didn't know anybody. But I started going to this poetry-only open mic and I realized there was a whole community of people where I could belong. Open mic and slam gave me a reason to keep writing, to keep living. I started publishing poems in journals shortly thereafter, and making self-published chapbooks. I'm a big fan of chapbooks. I'm currently putting finishing touches on my third full-length book of poems called Big Money Porno Mommy, which is set to come out from Game Over Books in 2025.

I love this concept of writing an ekphrastic poem from an atypical subject - in this case, a porno. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired this poem?

Well, I was browsing a porn site for recreational purposes and I saw this title for a real movie that exists: Bowling Alley Gangbang - Bukaki Ending. It was clear from the thumbnail it wasn't like a clean, high-tech bowling alley. This was a rickety, old-as-hell bowling alley. And I was like, is this going to be the saddest setting for a porn film ever made? I watched it out of curiosity more than titillation, and then I had this really strong, unexpected reaction to the experience of watching. Usually watching porn is a somewhat dissociative act for me, but this was the opposite. What I do when something is this jarring and affecting is ask "am I the right person to write a poem about this?" What really made me take the leap was how sometimes a poem will have a long evocative title and include "...ending with a line from [other writer]" and "Bukaki Ending" was leaning into that trope already and I was just like, this is a poem.

 
The poem states “I’m fascinated by what art could be and isn’t.” I was delighted to learn that one of your other works is a golden shovel of a Smash Mouth song. What does your process look like when drawing from unusual sources of inspiration?

I'm kind of a contrarian sometimes, as I think are many creatives. It's probably annoying to other people, but I feel like I'm always going "why is X profound but Y isn't?" I imagine I'm more in conversation with the 90s song Blue (Da Ba Dee) by Eiffel 65 than I am in conversation with Mozart. Plus it's funny to take a silly pop song and try to find something serious to say about it. That part especially gives me joy - the discovery of a truth in something I used to dismiss. I suppose the first step is noticing when you're dismissing a piece of media or a topic, and asking, what would happen if I took this seriously? Writing about porn is less light-hearted of a project, but hopefully similarly jarring, in a good way.

Your other poem in this issue, Inheritance, also deals with porn; the speaker finds a DVD belonging to their grandmother. Your work examines porn as a source of desire, humor, connection, and even inspiration. Can you speak about how these themes resonate, and how this work fits into our often sex-negative culture?

I don't consider myself an expert on porn since I haven't studied it nor am I myself in the industry. As a poet, I'm working from my own experience as a consumer. The messaging I received around watching porn growing up a girl was, this is a part of your life that's going to have to be secret, or you will be shunned. For me it's very much related to growing up feeling / being fat and socially undesirable, but still feeling desire and not knowing what to do with that. When I started writing poetry, I began to learn what happens when a poet talks about something in their work that they've been taught to hide because of shame. Shame is so isolating. It's a cycle. Sharing is a way to talk back to the shame. You hit the nail on the head; connection for me is the whole point. More than once I've been part of an audience and had this hugely profound experience of finding out something I thought I experienced alone was reflected in the experience shared by the poet on stage. That is life-changing.

Any advice for emerging poets who are still finding their voice?

I used to feel like I was getting left behind because I didn't have what I pictured everybody else had - these robust relationships with long-term mentors. I wanted someone to take me under their wing and teach me how to be a better poet. But what has become clear to me is that these more established poets are BUSY. They are teachers or struggling to make ends meet as artists or raising families or writing blurbs - basically who did I think I was that merited their time and attention for free? My advice to new poets is this: you don't want a mentor. You want a poet friends. A cohort of people who are learning skills together, who have the bandwidth to celebrate your successes and soften the blows of failure as a collective. Workshop with them. Go to open mics with them. Write with them. Sit around tables and read poems together as often as you can. And yes, take workshops from your poet heroes and have interesting conversations, but don't feel bad if you don't become a mentee in the traditional sense. 

Catherine Weiss is a poet and artist living in Deer Isle, Maine. Their poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Up the Staircase, Fugue, Birdcoat, Bodega, Counterclock, HAD, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. They are the author of chapbook-length poem FERVOR (Ginger Bug Press, 2021), full-length poetry collections WOLF GIRLS VS. HORSE GIRLS (Game Over Books, 2021), and GRIEFCAKE (Game Over Books, 2023). Their third full-length collection, BIG MONEY PORNO MOMMY, is forthcoming from Game Over Books in 2025. More at catherineweiss.com.

5 January 2023

Hayden Casey

Headache

There’s a gift shop a few blocks west of my apartment in Wallingford, on the other side of the web of the I-5. I pass the storefront on my daily walks around the city—painted forest green, with a giant white sign, and a display propped at the edge of the curb with an arrow pointed inside. Today, I decide to pop in, before I catch the bus up to my family’s house in Lynnwood. It is just beginning to mist, and a layer of condensation has formed on my rain jacket. A bell sounds as I pass through the open double doors, and a woman watches me wander through the offerings. She peers at me confused, as if I’d wandered into the wrong store. She smiles, seems invested in my search. “Anything I can help you with?” she says as she approaches from her corner.

“No,” I say. “Just my brother’s birthday today.”

“Last minute, eh?” she says with a smile, before clearing her throat, realizing she may have caused offense. Her voice carries a Canadian lilt. She hasn’t yet figured out the polite-but-distant way of this city. She tries again: “Looking for anything in particular?”

I glance around—at the wood shelves with mugs and chocolates and boxes of dried salmon, the walls lined with Washington maps and T-shirts and decorative towels, the counters crowded with water bottles and candles—and realize, with heat flushing at my neck, that I don’t have the first clue what Thomas would want in here, what he’d be drawn to, what he’d revile. He’s turning seventeen—what business could he want, I realize foolishly, from a gift shop in the state he’s always lived in?

“No,” I say, “just thought I’d pop in and look around. And”—I pull my phone from my pocket, check the time—“I actually have to go. Thank you, though.” I keep my eyes at the ground, run my hand along my buzzcut as I walk out of the shop, hear the bell ding.

“Sure,” she calls out behind me, unsurprised a guy in his late teens wants nothing from her shop.

On the way back to the apartment, I consider how slow business must be this time of year, and wish I would’ve bought something small, think about turning and going back. Think about showing up at the house empty-handed, wish I’d started looking for a gift earlier.

But I keep walking. Back at the apartment, I throw some of my things into an overnight bag, and walk outside to the covered bus stop a few minutes before the scheduled stop.

The ride home to Lynnwood is long—the mist has thickened to rain, and it drips down the windows as I climb on and take a seat. I should read my textbook for astronomy—my “easy” elective, with a surprisingly heavy work load—but I start thinking about Thomas. About how, the last time I was at home for the winter holidays, he didn’t leave the house the entire time, hadn’t left it for a month and a half beforehand, hadn’t even gone out to the yard. Mom delivered this news to me offhand, tried to brush by it and continue on to something else, but I stopped her, brought her back. He played video games, snuggled with the cat, ate meals at the table, but otherwise stayed cooped in his room. I took it all in, tried to reconcile it with the conception of Thomas I’d carried up to that point. He was an interesting guy, sure, and he loved video games, and he loved our mother, but he’d also loved his friends, loved the outdoors. I couldn’t see him trapped up in his room and entirely happy.

But when I’d gotten up there, to his childhood bedroom, which shared a wall with mine, and seen it flooded with chip bags and cracker boxes, dirty T-shirts and strewn single socks, half-read books and used tissues, he beamed at me like I’d just given him a thousand dollars, tried to pull me in for a hug as if nothing was different, and I lost my shit. By this point, I’d been living away from home for a year and a half, first in a dorm, then in an off-campus apartment with a couple of my best friends. I’d gotten used to taking care of myself, taking care of spaces, keeping them in check. To see Thomas clinging so tightly to someone else’s care enraged me. I wasn’t nice—I said my piece, stormed back downstairs, left my bags untouched at the top of the stairs, went to sit on the back porch. He knew me well enough by that point, I thought, knew I had to wander off and stew for a while, knew I’d be back to myself within the hour. My high school girlfriend, Lena, made fun of my star placements, my double Aries, and Thomas laughed along. In Thomas’s room, I’d been livid, but later, listening as the rain plopped into puddles, I was worried I’d hurt him. I gathered a handful of pebbles from one of the planters and tossed them, one by one, at his window, at the back corner of the house. After a few of them made contact, tapped at the glass like tiny fingernails, his face appeared, sullen, stormy. I waved him outside, but he shook his head. I tried again, more vigorously, and again he shook no.

Mom joined me outside, on the other side of the stretch of porch covered by the awning, and said, “Things have gotten worse for him since you left. As you can tell.” She paused, soaked in the humidity, then rushed to say, “Not that I’m saying it’s your fault—it’s not. It’s just . . . you didn’t know.”

I didn’t. When I left Lynnwood, went to my life further in the city, I shrugged off the house, the responsibilities of checking in. I felt a sort of shame, coming home and playing catch-up—it was like skipping a season of a TV show and listening to a friend shoddily explain it. But I couldn’t figure out how to do things differently.

He’d entered into a fog after that first night, and didn’t quite leave it till I went back into the city for a new term of school. On Christmas morning, the three of us exchanged gifts on his bedroom floor—tidied, now, in the time since I’d gone off on him. He and I had gotten each other socks, as was our tradition, and he was bashful as he handed my gift to me—I removed the wrapping paper and found that all the pairs he’d gotten me were science-themed, animated with molecules and telescopes and beakers and lab goggles, a reference to my failed biochem major. He’d bought them as a joke, but the air was knocked out of him now. I handed his to him—plain black, as he preferred—and wished I’d thought to make a joke with them. Felt the socks as I sat there on his floor, squeezed the pairs like stress balls. 

*

It’s a two-mile walk to the house from the Lynnwood stop, and normally I trek it, but today Mom offered to pick me up at the transit center. When I step off the bus, her red Civic is parked in the lot, waiting. I throw my bag into the trunk, and as I sink into the car, she pulls me in to her shoulder—“Hi, Matt,” she says. She strokes the bags under my eyes with her thumbs, asks if I’ve been getting enough sleep. She, too, seems slow, tired—her eyes heavy, words soft—but I don’t ask about it.

“How’s Tommy?” I ask. A pet name he can’t stand—I never call him by it to his face, only say it to Mom, when he isn’t around.

I watch her weigh things, watch her settle on “He’s OK.” She shifts into reverse, pulls out of the spot. “He’s excited to see you.”

I think of his tenor the last time I left, and wonder what things will be like this time. Wonder how his room will be—if he’ll have cleaned it, in anticipation of another explosion. If things are bad today, I will try to contain myself. Easier said than done, but I can at least try.

“I made him a cake this morning,” she says, slowing to a crawl before a stop sign. “Lemon buttermilk—you know he loves lemon. Did you get him anything?”

My neck goes red. I think of the gift shop, the rows and rows. Think of the other shops I could have gone to, the other things I could have looked for, if I’d started earlier. But I still don’t know what he would want. “I didn’t really have time,” I say.

“Ah,” she says, falsely bright, trying to shine over her disappointment. A traffic light turns red—she slows, stops at the edge of the crosswalk. We sit in silence punctuated every few seconds by the windshield wipers.

As we pass the strip mall by our house, the one we went to growing up, with the grocery store and the McDonald’s, she asks if I want to stop in and get Thomas something, somewhere. She seems strange, tense—I appreciate her offer, but I feel already like I’ve failed, like it’s too late to make it up now. “Let’s just go home,” I say, frustrated at nothing, frustrated at myself.

She asks about classes, and I rant about them as we pass by the last few blocks, till we’re parked in the driveway at the house, and the engine has clicked off. I see Nub’s head in the front window, his little ears perked up. Thomas is in the living room behind him, seated on the arm of the recliner, hair wet from a shower. He hugs me with reserve when I enter the house and drop my bag at the door—something seems to be weighing on him. I take off my shoes at the door, reveal my socks with microscopes on them, but he doesn’t notice. It’s only been three months, but he seems older, gaunter in the face, more hairs pricking at his lip. Still the same eyes he’s always had, the same ones as mine.

“How have you been?” I ask. Mom has locked the car and come into the house; she digs through drawers, pulls out clanging kitchen tools.

“I’ve been OK,” he says. He does a thing similar to what Mom did earlier, when I asked how he was: watches a film flash over his eyes of his recent experiences, weighs them against each other. I don’t push him, but perhaps he can tell I don’t believe him. “I’ve been thinking about the headache again,” he says.

My stomach drops: when Mom had suggested his worsening state, I was hoping it wasn’t this flaring up again. “I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t know.” Shuffles his toes around in the carpet, looks at his hands, folded in his lap. “I just don’t know. And I can’t stop thinking about it. Oh: that reminds me.” He walks over to the base of the steps, ascends them, skips every other stair. Pops into his room at the top, rummages around for something. I grab my bag to take it upstairs. Climb the steps, skip every other, as Thomas had.

*

Our great-grandfather died by way of headache, in 1945. He was at work on the ENIAC, in Philadelphia: The Giant Brain, they called it in the media. The first digital computer, capable of calculating artillery trajectories at a rate 2,400 times faster than a human. He was programming the machine, and then he keeled over, moaned, reported a pain in his head like it was being squeezed in a giant metal fist. Then he was dead.

At thirteen, Thomas became obsessed with this fact. When I got home from a high school basketball game and found him sobbing on the couch, he explained it to me this way: “It happened to our great-granddad, and I just know it’s going to happen to me. It was passed down. My head’s just a ticking time bomb.”

His theory was further solidified empirically when a year later, our father—who had started losing track of himself, drifting off in confusion, startling himself awake in the middle of the day, and experiencing headaches—went to the doctor and came home diagnosed with brain cancer. We buried him in the fall of my junior year. Thomas screamed in the graveyard, fell to his knees, felt responsible. He said he’d summoned it, by thinking about the headache, said it was only a matter of time before he fell prey to it too. His problem was he didn’t know how to shove a thing down, to smother it.

For a while the thought devoured him—he didn’t want to put pressure on his body, drink coffee or exert himself physically or stay up too late, lest a headache come on and put an end to him. He was worried when I applied to the computer science major, afraid I’d go the same route as our forefathers. I was hoping, when he stopped talking about it, he left it behind him, that it was the end of things. But now it seems they’re back, now it seems the thoughts are roaring in his head once again.

*

Halfway up the stairs, Mom stops me, pulls me into the kitchen. She’s making Tommy’s birthday dinner, frying chicken sausages on the stove, boiling water for tortellini. The pasta package is slit down the middle; she dumps its contents into the water. “I don’t know why I didn’t mention this in the car,” she says, “but his friends . . . he hasn’t really been seeing his friends.”

“Why?” I ask. The sausages sizzle and spit—she nudges them with closed tongs.

“He says they’ve been making fun of him,” she says. She turns the sausages, allows the pale halves to brown. “Teasing him for the . . . headache stuff.”

“God,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Her eyes fall to the sausages; she pulls the cover over them, nudges the pan, stirs the tortellini. She doesn’t look at me—her mouth is a tight line. Her hesitance comes through clearly: why would she tell me? When I leave the house, I drop off the earth. She probably has tried to tell me, and I haven’t answered her call.

“All I’m trying to say is,” she continues, “he could probably use your company right now.”

“You don’t have to guilt-trip me,” I say. The starchy foam atop the boiling pasta is rising aggressively; she stirs it with her spoon, turns the heat down. “He’s my brother. I get it.”

“I’m not trying to guilt you,” she says. “Just—letting you know.” 

“Great,” I say. I leave the kitchen, walk out to the living room. Nub stands in the windowsill, still—I approach him, pat his head. “Hi, Nubby,” I say. He looks particularly gray today—somedays his gray shines through more, others his orange. He nestles his face into my hand. I rub his face once more, run my fingers down his back, then pick up my bag and head upstairs.

I set it on my desk chair, look around my room. Most of my things came with me to my apartment, but some furniture remains—the room now is an odd mix of the personal and the unfamiliar. My bed is still in its spot along the left wall, dressed in sheets I’ve never seen. The old desk and its chair are still by the door, lit by a new lamp.

Thomas meets me at the door with a box in his hands. “Don’t want to forget this,” he says.

“What is it?”

“It’s for you.” His eyes are pointed at the floor, but he wears a gentle smile. “Early birthday gift.”

My birthday’s not for another month, deeper in the spring, though I guess he’s not certain when I’ll be back. My hands suddenly feel so empty, my bag so light. “You didn’t have to do that,” I say, feel regret churning in my stomach. He hands it over, and I run a finger along its gentle wrapping. “I got you something, too,” I say quickly, “but I left it at home.” I slip a finger under the wrapping, peel a corner of the tape upward. “Remembered as soon as I got on the bus.”

“It’s OK,” he says. He won’t make a fuss about it, I know he won’t.

I peel the wrapping off, and inside is a square cardboard box; I pop its tab out, pull back the lid. Peer at it, pull it out, turn the brass contraption over in my hands. “It’s a sextant,” he says, “or a replica of one. ‘Cause you said you were taking an astronomy class. It reminded me of you. Apparently sailors used to use these to navigate, measuring the stars or something.”

He’s always known to go for funny gifts, and I should laugh—the astronomy teacher sucks, and this will be a funny memory—but I feel, weirdly, like crying. Try to choke down whatever the thing is that has formed in my throat.

“I don’t know if it actually works,” he says, “but you could, like, put it on a shelf or something. It’s cool-looking.”

I look up at him. His eyes are wavering in the light—he’s afraid I don’t like it. I hope he can’t see the uncontrolled emotion in mine. “Thanks, dude,” I say around the lump. “Thanks. It’s great.”

“Oh, good,” he says.

“I need to—one sec, be right back,” I say. A horrid swelling has started in my chest; I step into the bathroom, sit at the edge of the tub, set my head in my hands. Breathe faster and faster, try to slow it down. It’s a ball in my ribs that is swelling outward, making everything feel tight—it’s spreading to my limbs, a hot kind of panic. It hurts to come home, to face my brother’s goodness, his kindness, to see it contorted, twisted, in myself.

I splash cold water on my face, then let the faucet run hot. Wash my hands in the scalding stream. Dry everything, open the bathroom door again, step into the light of the hall. When I get back to my room, he’s gone—from his room down the hall, I hear his TV, the 8-bit music of a video game loading screen.

*

When I was home for winter break, on one of the last nights, Thomas met me at the threshold of the dining room. Trying to repair, I think, though I didn’t see it at the time for what it was—my weeks at home were sullied by my initial rage-storm. I still hadn’t apologized for what I’d said to him—I’d thought about it, recognized there was regret underneath the rage, but hadn’t bitten. He’d shut down, in the days afterward, and I decided that was where he was, where he’d stay, and didn’t look for reasons otherwise. Another thing I didn’t understand then: that people changed their minds, or wanted to change them. That their emotional states could allow for anything other than a strict upholding of whatever anger-fueled decision had been made. I was stubborn in my convictions, and thus everyone else was stubborn in theirs.

I was seated at the kitchen table, old math books spread all around me, tutoring websites pulled up in different tabs on my computer, graphing calculator uncovered and blinking. I took one of my earbuds out, paused the lecture video I was watching. “Do you wanna play Smash Bros?” he asked, looking at the mess of open books around me, the chicken-scratch notes across my journal page. In the upcoming term I was taking Calculus III, and it had been a year since Calc II, even longer since Calc I: all the information had been sliding out of my brain in a steady stream since. I was grasping, I needed to get it back.

“Not right now,” I told Thomas. I was stressed, I was myopic; I didn’t notice that he’d needed me then, needed my company, since Mom had gone to a friend’s house for the evening. “Maybe later.” I put my earbud back in, resumed the video, tried to follow along with the tutor’s leaps in logic.

I remembered an hour later, too, that Mom had asked me to feed Nub: a treat, one of the cans in the pantry, scooped out into his bowl atop the last few cereal-shapes of his morning kibble. The tab on top of the lid broke off when I tried to peel it back, and I couldn’t find the can opener; I went up to Thomas’s room to ask him if he knew where it was. It wasn’t in the drawer by the sink, but maybe that’s where it was at my apartment: everything was falling from me now.

When I reached his door, I looked in his room and didn’t see him. The video game screen was still on, the remote set on his chair, but he wasn’t anywhere. I almost turned to check his bathroom, but heard a noise from further inside, beyond his bed, a series of noises, of quick breaths. I pushed through his door, past his video-game station, to the other side of his bed, the square space between the head of the bed and the corner of the room, where he sat, his spine curled against the wall, his head between his knees, his hands clasped at the back of his head. “Thomas?” I said, lowering myself to his level, seating myself on his floor.

“It’s happening,” he said through his panting, each syllable punctuated by a hyperventilated breath. “The headache, it’s happening.”

“Stop it,” I said, “no it’s not. You’re fine. Hey—look at me. Look up. You’re fine.” I didn’t really know what to say, didn’t have the words to do anything other than bring him down to this moment, bring him back here. His 8-bit video game music still blipped by in the background, replaying its same riff. His scraggly carpet beneath our feet, his dim lamplight. The fact that there was nothing more than this. “Everything’s fine. You’re fine. Your head is fine. It’s good. Nothing’s happening.”

He calmed, gradually—breath by breath, minute by minute. He was fine, his psychosomatic headache was going away, he was back in his chair, with the Nintendo remote in his hand, and then he was ushering me away, out of the room, back downstairs. “I’m fine,” he said, “you don’t have to deal with me anymore, I’m fine.”

I should’ve thought more about it—should’ve told him it wasn’t dealing with him, he wasn’t something to deal with. He was my brother. But I didn’t think about it; the crisis was over, things were fine. I asked him where the can opener was, and he directed me, of course, to the drawer across from the sink, buried beneath some other tools. I hadn’t looked closely enough the first time. I went downstairs, fed the cat, listened to his spiky little tongue lap at the pile of wet food, went back to my math.

*

I think about staying in my room, reading my astronomy textbook and doing the reading quiz, but I pad up to Thomas’s door instead. He notices my socks this time—smiles, brightens, though I can tell he’s still slightly heavy, the thing is still on his mind. “Wanna play Smash?” I ask.

He beams, for a moment, then his expression falls. “You don’t have to,” he says. Like I think he’s a charity case, like my question is a ruse.

“I know,” I say. He doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything further, so I push past him, turn the system on, pull the controllers off the shelf. I sit at the edge of his bed, leave the chair for him. He takes it, lifts the remote.

We play a few rounds, and I beast him, as is the usual. Every now and again, I hear him start to breathe quicker, start to fidget and overheat, and I say “Hey, it’s OK.” Bring him down, pull him back to the moment, as I had over Christmas break. I think of Mom, having done this for months now, while I’ve been gone. Think of the way I’ve ignored their calls, left my phone on Do Not Disturb, in the name of making a new life for myself. The way I thought of my familial relationships as obligatory. Think of how much damage I have done, how much damage I have left to undo. He turns to smack my knee when I beat him, again, after going easy for a few seconds. His head angles back toward the screen—from here, the bump at the top of his nose is pronounced, the bump he and I share, inherited from our dad. I think of when I fractured mine in high school, on the trampoline, and he brought me ice all afternoon, till Mom got home. He stood by me in the hospital, when the doctor had to set it back in place, and he didn’t look away, he wanted to watch.

I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling, but I know how to be here. I know how to try. I had to warm the muscles back up, remind them of their functions.

Mom calls up the stairs that dinner is almost ready. “Wanna play some Kart now?” Thomas asks—he knows he’s actually got a chance at that one.

“Sure,” I say. “But I’ll be right back.” I leave my remote at the edge of the bed, slip out into the hall, and he gets up to swap game cartridges. I hover at the top of the stairs, think of Mom helping him while I haven’t been here, think of her talking him down from his escalations, cooking for him, sitting across the table from him, watching him struggle to maintain his grip on the world. Downstairs, she’s gotten the chicken sausages sliced, I’m sure, mixed in with the tortellini. She’s got the cake stand set at the edge of the counter, the lemon-yellow gleaming under the plastic dome. She raised us to be helpful, but it didn’t work for me, I didn’t latch on. I’d always let other people help, always ridden behind. But tonight I’ll set the table, the plates and forks, the glasses. I’ll ask Mom and Thomas what they want to drink. When we’ve eaten, and the cake is shining at the edge of the counter, I’ll bring it down to the table, pull the cover off, let Thomas choose his slice. Watch him take the first bite, watch his face scrunch with sweet-sour. Watch him smile.

Hayden Casey is a writer and musician. He earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Washington and an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University. His fiction has appeared in Witness, West Branch, Bridge Eight, Bat City Review, Allium, and Yalobusha Review, and has been shortlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. Find him at haydencasey.co.

29 December 2023

Gregg Emery

Love & Fresh Air

The works and the world of Gregg Emery are inherently imperfect: purposefully paradoxical marriages between simplicity and complexity, clarity and confusion. Through his powerful color selections and movements, Emery awakens something vital within his viewers. His own inspirations combine western mystical experiences with his Quaker grandmother and growing up in a remote rural community along the borders of Canada and the Mohawk nation of Akwesasne.

Over the past few years, Emery has received critical acclaim for his exhibits around the globe. From Brussels to Beijing and back again. In 2017, Emery was commissioned and completed an 8,000 sq ft mural around a pool on Roosevelt Island that was featured in Time Out NY, the Gothamist, and the New York Post.  He was selected to exhibit in the 10th Annual Governors Island Art Fair, dubbed by the New York Times as the Art Fair of the 99%. From there it was off to Brussels and the Cube Art Fair, where Emery’s paintings could be viewed alongside the work of Chuck Close and other American greats. His paintings were featured during Art Basel in 2019 and 2021 and were also shown in Art New York at Pier 94. They appeared prominently in the widely acclaimed TV Show The Last O.G. Recently Emery’s work appeared on a billboard in Times Square, was featured in galleries in Chicago, New York, Miami, and Connecticut and, over the summer, a series of 7 paintings was created exclusively for Bergdorf Goodman in New York and he will be showed these paintings as part of Miami Art Basel art week in December 2023.

Emery received his BA in Painting from Hartwick College and his MFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art.  He is also the official painter of the Poetry Brothel of New York.

22 December 2023

Muraya Ranieri's reading of

Hank and His Children

Written by Nancy Barnes

Muraya Ranieri is a vocalist, actress, artist, dancer with a long career in tech sales and marketing from the San Francisco, Bay Area, CA. Mother of 5 other musicians and actors as well as married to one, being creative is like breathing in her family. She has always been the chosen one to read out loud in front of the class since elementary school. She has used her voice for DJing on radio, children’s stories, short stories, and animated film in addition to acting live in off-broadway productions and independent short films. As a teen of the 80’s, and lead singer for rock bands since the age of 12, she carries a wealth of pop and music culture knowledge and carries it with her in every performance she does. Forever youthful inside and out, hobbies are teaching Zumba, working out, playing the drums, healthy cooking, traveling, and getting lost in her VR games You can find her on IG @muraya5 and on Facebook under Muraya Mamanta Ranieri.

15 December 2023

Teresa Pham-Carsillo

Vivisections

1.

On TV, the blue-blooded horseshoe crab
reveals its underbelly, a tessellation
of horror and vulnerability.
We fix our eyes to the screen
after another all-night argument, fingertips
kissing like pinned butterflies
brought together by some mad scientist.

2.

I tell the phlebotomist I have trypophobia
as she bores a hole into the crook of my arm.
She asks me what that is and I say
it’s an irrational fear of small holes
and we both laugh at my silliness
as my blood pours into a glass tube.

Later, I wake sweating to nightmares
of venomous creatures and the pockmarked
expansion of ravenous contagion.
 

3.

I imagine my body in many forms:

a fungus, mindless and waterlogged
a bird, soaring with pneumatized bones
a cat, matching shadows step for step
an ancient tortoise, content to observe
 

or better yet, a smooth worry stone:
         all edges of my anxiety rubbed away.

4.

If we were hermit crabs
I’d leave my lonesome shell
and you’d leave yours.

We’d rub the soft spirals of our bellies together,
trading secrets in a rusted soup can big enough for two

Yearning for Connection: An Interview with Teresa Pham-Carsillo on yearning for connections and her poem “Vivisections”

Interview by Dilys Wyndham Thomas, Assistant Poetry Editor

“Vivisections” is a singular and complex poem. It has an almost dream-like quality, which touches on themes of illness, sexuality, metamorphosis, and body horror. What was the first inspiration behind this piece? 

Thank you so much for that wonderful description. 

Many of my poems have a narrower focus, but “Vivisections” felt more expansive from the very beginning. The poem came to me as a reflection on living inside a body that is made up of many other living parts. As our bodies replace billions of cells every day, what happens to the idea of a fixed truth or self? And if we are always shifting, unknowable to even ourselves, what does it mean to bare it all—to reveal “the soft spirals of our bellies”—to another person? 

“Later, I wake sweating to nightmares
of venomous creatures and the pockmarked
expansion of ravenous contagion.” 

These are perhaps my favorite lines in “Vivisections”. I know you have written pandemic poems, including “Haruspex”, which was published in Poetry Magazine a couple of years ago. Am I right to think that “Vivisections” is, for lack of a better term, a hidden pandemic poem, a meditation on isolation, vaccinations, and the COVID lockdowns?

I didn’t consciously write “Vivisections” as a pandemic poem, but it is a poem about the body, sickness, isolation, and the yearning for connection, so I can certainly see how it could be read through that framing. The pandemic experience is something I feel we’re all still metabolizing as a society, so there are elements of it—the isolation, uncertainty, anxiety, and sense of being frozen in time—that seep into much of my writing. 

This poem felt closer to my experience as a childhood cancer survivor, in which some of my earliest memories were defined by both intense relief for my recovery and the terror that my body could turn on me again at any moment. When I was very young, I also had a recurring nightmare that stemmed from my parents’ and grandparents’ stories of smallpox outbreaks in Vietnam. This was the image that inspired those lines—they represent a child’s atavistic fear of a disfiguring, deadly virus. 

Titles can make or break a poem. Our reading team was intrigued by the title of this poem, as the word “Vivisections” has several meanings. Could you tell us more about your choice of title, and how you generally come up with titles for your work?

I believe that titles serve as an opportunity to add layers of meaning to a poem. For example, I love the title of Ocean Vuong’s poem “Prayer for the Newly Damned,” and how it sets up a question of paradox, of how a prayer can be bestowed upon a damned soul. 

“Vivisections” appealed to me as a title because it worked on several levels. Because the poem intimately explores the body—in all its glorious sensuality and grotesqueness—I wanted to call to mind a literal vivisection, a surgical experiment performed on a living body. But I also see the poem as a parsing or dissection of itself, both the self-as-narrator and the self-as-poem. In the poem, the narrator imagines and questions the meaning of identity; at the same time, the poem itself builds section upon section—unraveling and questioning itself all the while—until it reaches a satisfactory conclusion. 

The way the poem is split into short sections is striking. It reminds me almost of 19th-century scientific illustrations. The sections build upon each other until we finally return to the image of the crabs, which here seem to become symbols of vulnerability.  How did you decide upon this structure? Was the poem always designed to be broken into sections, or were they originally different poems?

Most of my poems start as floating lines scribbled down in notebooks or on receipts. Sometimes, these snippets serve as a starting point for a single poem; sometimes, I can cobble together related scribbles into the same piece.

In the case of “Vivisections,” I started with the image of the crabs sharing a tin can, which is now the last section of the piece. I was struck by the idea of creatures that need a hardened, defensive exterior because of the extent of their tenderness. Once I had the first few lines written, I knew that this would become a poem in vignettes. 

Once I had that image in mind and the first few lines, I knew that this would be a poem that existed in vignettes. We start at a place of common human isolation—watching television after an argument with a partner—and spiral outward and inward from there, through tangential human and animal experiences, to reach a final truth: the yearning for vulnerability and acceptance. 

I was particularly drawn to the way you play with very precise scientific language. Was this linguistic precision present in the first draft, or was this something that you honed during the editing process? 

Some people love writing first drafts; I love editing. Oftentimes, sitting down to edit a draft is the point where I really start to see the shape of a piece. Especially when it comes to poetry, the first draft (for me) is usually a collection of big feelings and striking images thrown onto a page. However, I find that even in first drafts, I tend to be precise with imagery and crafting a cohesive sensory thread—what I see as the beating heart of a poem. 

When I sit down to edit, I focus on structure and cadence. I spend most of my time in this phase reading the poem aloud to see how words sound next to each other, to understand when lines should slow down or speed up. Every poem has its own natural rhythm. You just have to listen to find it. 

Passengers published one of your short stories, “Outgrowth” (volume 2, issue 8) in 2021. How do you balance writing both prose and poetry? Do you think that writing short stories has an impact on your poetry?

Creatively, I have always straddled the line between poetry and prose. When I was younger, I felt more pressure to identify as either a poet or a fiction writer. I had this sense that if I didn’t focus my education and efforts on one form, I would never master either. 

I’ve come to see writing—and life in general—as a journey to becoming whole. This has allowed me to embrace both forms fully, and in doing so, to more easily find words that capture a specific feeling or experience. Writing always feels like a search for truth, and I find that I need both poetry and prose to get closer to my truth. 

I am always curious to find out about other writers’ writing processes. Where and when do you like to write, and what does a typical writing session look like for you? 

I am so envious of writers with disciplined practices. I once met a writer who explained that they woke up early every morning and wrote from 5-6 without fail. I will never be that kind of person. Creative writing is a more seasonal endeavour for me. It ebbs and flows. As someone who is constantly trying to balance a full-time job, day-to-day obligations, creative output, and rest, I find it impossible to land on a strict formula or schedule.

I am fortunate to be able to work from home, so a lot of my writing happens when I have a free hour or two before the workday starts or at lunchtime. Because I do corporate writing and editing in my day job, my home office can sometimes feel creatively stifling. These days, I write much of my poetry and prose at local coffee shops. I am especially fond of posting up at my local independent bookstore, Napa Bookmine, where I’ve spent many a contented morning noodling away on new ideas while surrounded by books. 

A writing community is also crucial to my process, as I often need other writers to help me work through my stuck points on a project. I am in two writing groups that started meeting on Zoom in March 2020. In many ways, the pandemic was an isolating time, but I am forever grateful for the brilliant, generous writers who have become both trusted first readers and dear friends. 

You have published in a wide variety of journals, including Poetry Magazine and The New York Times, as well as reputed indie publications. What do you look for in a journal, and how do you decide which pieces to submit to a publication?

Publishing a piece of poetry or prose is akin to finding it a home. My priority when submitting my work is making sure it ends up in the right home, which for me means a publication where the editors and readers share my curiosity about examining the human experience from every angle. That said, choosing where to submit any given piece boils down to an intuition about whether it will resonate with a particular journal’s ethos. 

Finally, please tell us a little bit about your current projects and any upcoming events.

I am working on a full-length poetry collection that is rooted in the language of diaspora, intergenerational trauma, and the longing to return to the soil and water that once held my ancestors. The poems in the collection channel multiple voices: the voices of those I love, who have endured unimaginable horrors to reach a foreign shore; the voices within myself, at once conflicted, tender, and torn between disparate cultures; and the death knell voices of the natural world, of a planet that has been plundered and set ablaze by colonialism and conquest. It’s a project I’m very excited to work on when I attend the In Cahoots Residency in 2024. As I mentioned earlier, I struggle to set aside dedicated time for my writing practice, so having the focused time that a residency affords will be an incredible gift. 

I’m also circling around some ideas and snippets that will eventually become a short story. Earlier this year, I attended a talk by Lan Samantha Chang where she discussed her short story, “Painting of Hannah,” which was published in Harper’s this year but took her over a decade to complete. I have also written pieces—both poetry and prose—that gestated for years before they found their final form. But I am hoping to get faster! 

Teresa Pham-Carsillo (she/her) is a Vietnamese-American writer who lives in Napa, CA. Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, The Southern Review, and Black Warrior Review. Teresa can be found online at teresaphamcarsillo.com.

8 December 2023

Coriander Focus

Into the Dark Water We Fall

Coriander Focus is a full time creator, working most in the mediums of photography and written word. Coriander creates between four and eight thousand photos per year and shares her art with her community alongside poetry, short stories, and other creative exploration. Coriander spent her youth deep in the mountains of rural Appalachia where her love of wild places was cultivated. She has since captured that love using fine art photography for more than a decade. She has worked as an artist and has had her work displayed nationally across galleries and shows since 2010. Notable highlights of Coriander Focus’ recent career have been Sarasvati Creative Space Residency (2022), Exhibition in Motion hosted by the Society of North American Goldsmiths (2018) and Transformation, hosted by RE:ARTISTIE New York NY.(2017)

1 December 2023

Caleb Michael Sarvis

Father Coyote

The Coyotes move into the house across the street. The garage had been left open by the previous tenant and the whole pack, all four of them, slink inside to escape the rain. I watch them from my guest bedroom window. The father isn’t much bigger than our dog Aurora and the mother has a surprisingly dark coat compared to the rest of them. They have two pups and when I take the trash out that night, the whole family follows me with their yellow, slack-jawed gaze until the garage door shuts them in.

Lee and I are finally pregnant and we’ve made it further along than last time. Next week, we have an appointment with the OB-whatever to get a good look at the baby. Lee’s not sure she wants to know the sex, but I’m tired of calling the baby the baby. I want to call the baby Wolfgang or Cubby, which is moot because Lee’s already vetoed both of them, but the point is I want to call the baby something and there’s a chance we can start soon.

When I tell Lee about the Coyotes she suggests we bring over a basket of muffins as a gesture of kindness. But they’re animals, I say, to which Lee tells me not to speak of them that way. I dip my eyes and study my toes.

* 

Now that the pregnancy seems to be sticking, I feel comfortable running again. Everything was too fragile before, so leaving the house felt like a risk I couldn’t afford to take. But the other night, Lee was too hot to share the bed with me, so I put a movie on in the living room, one about a meteor headed straight toward Earth, and learned a valuable lesson in letting go.

There was a moment towards the end, when the meteor filled the sky, that Aurora trotted out of her bed and onto the couch with me. She plopped her head onto my lap and pawed at my hand to pet her. I scratched the soft spot between her eyes and remembered that she chose us, and that I might just prefer when things are outside of my control. Doom barrels around blindly. It sweeps us all eventually.

As I twist and stretch in the driveway, the garage across the street opens and reveals one of the pups sitting alone. He rolls onto his back and yawns. He paws at what might be a spider or nothing at all. The pup is young enough that he falls often, but old enough that he doesn’t whine for his mother. His paws are too big for his small legs and I find myself imagining what the pups looked like in the womb. Did they have a shrimp stage? A Gummi Bear stage? How many weeks in did the pups start to look like pups? The little guy in the garage is now sniffing an exposed outlet. I consider running over until I notice Father Coyote trotting around the loop of our neighborhood. He wears a neon yellow bandana around his neck. When I finally take off on my run, we pass each other and share a nod in the way that only runners do.

There was a time in my life when I thought I might run a marathon, but those days are gone and I barely make it a mile before I turn around and jog home. There’s a weight on my back that didn’t used to be there and a new kind of tension in my knees. Everything feels swollen even if it looks fine. Lee has resorted to calling me Dada when speaking to her womb, and I briefly blame her for my poor performance, for bestowing this middle-aged shape upon me. But I quickly remember my buddy Dakari, who recently had a stroke in a swimming pool. He hit his head on the wall and fractured a vertebrae. Now he can’t feel his legs.

Dakari’s sister was the one who called. She spoke so softly I thought she might be hiding in a closet somewhere. That maybe I wasn’t supposed to know this information. This was two weeks ago and I’ve yet to visit him. I tell myself the anxiety of the pregnancy has held me in place. But here I am, engaging in motion. Here I am, making decisions.

I finish the run with greater urgency. When I return home, the Coyotes are out of sight and I’m soon blinded by sweat.

*

Lee’s looking at herself in the mirror, searching for a bump at different angles. It’s frustrating Aurora, who is desperate to lie on the floor with her head on Lee’s feet. I’m playing with a light switch because the new bulb I put in the back isn’t working. It’s a motion sensor thing I installed after the incident with the tall woman, and it doesn’t seem to work. No matter how much waving I do, the light never seems to click on, and when it does, the hue is off. The coil resembles something closer to the dying ember of a campfire and does little to reveal the motion it has sensed.

When do you think I’ll show? Lee says.

Soon. The first is supposed to be slower, I think.

Lee purses her lips at this and I realize I’ve misspoken. So I leave the light alone and drop to my knees so that my face is level with her stomach. I love you, I say and hope all is forgiven.

I made a pie for the neighbors.

 Neighbors?

Will you bring it over to them?

I’m going to go see Dakari.

On your way then.

I grab my keys and find a shepherd’s pie sitting on the kitchen counter. It’s warm in my palms and smells like the pub we used to frequent before home became our life. When I’m outside, I remember it’s once again trash night, and I consider dropping the thing in the can before walking across the street and tip-toeing up the Coyotes’ driveway. There are no lights on inside and because the garage is closed it’s difficult to tell if anyone is home. I think coyotes are the type to howl, but other than that, I don’t know what kind of sound to look for. When I reach the entryway, I place the pie outside the front door and place my finger over the doorbell. After a moment I hang my fist in front of the door. I return to the doorbell. Knock or ring. Knock or ring.

I’m frozen, so I study the front lawn, which appears to be freshly mowed. Edged even. There is a set of freshly planted hydrangeas along the walkway, though when I look closer I see that the leaves have been gently chewed. My imagination can only take me so far and when the confusion settles in I have to take a seat so I don’t pass out. I see tiny paw prints in the soil, but nothing else offers a reasoning I can settle with.

I take a hydrangea leaf into my hand and caress it with my thumb until there’s a smack against the narrow window pane by the door. One of the pups is on their hinds legs, watching me, leaving tongue smears on the glass. I wave hello, until the mother appears from the dark behind. In the streetlight, she appears to be made of fire. She growls, bares her teeth, and I run.

*

Dakari’s house wallows in weak light. I park along the curb and sit in the front seat, telling myself I want this podcast to finish before I turn the ignition off. Procrastination bites me as it does anyone else, but this feels different. This feels like fear.

I only exit the car because my imagination is always worse than reality. That’s why Shakespeare kept his murders off stage. My mind is a malleable phase of matter, capable of reshaping itself to fit any container, and doom is a mold I find too much comfort in.

Dakari’s sister answers, a fuzzy orange glow behind her. Thanks for coming, she says. He’s in the lounger. The last time I saw him, he’d gained a lot of weight, a consequence of a new but manageable drinking habit. When we met, he didn’t drink at all. Now, he is all about the malty notes of some German ale I’ve never heard of.

The house smells like dog, which always surprises me because my house does not smell like dog. I have a theory, about the houses that smell like dog, and I think it has something to do with blankets. Lee washes our linens and such every third week or so, which comes to about seventeen times a year. My guess is the homes that smell like dog are filled with unwashed blankets. I turn the corner into the living room, spy Dakari in the lounger, and count four different blankets atop his body.

Either his weight has grown worse or the brace around his neck squeezes the fat up like the end of a toothpaste bottle. There are purple bags under his eyes, just barely visible on his dark skin, and he’s propped his feet up so that they are level with his chest. Dakari’s feet appear to be wrapped in multiple pairs of socks. His sister collects the mug from his end table and I see he is looking at me.

Hey, he coughs out.

You look cozy, I say.

I’m frozen. Nothing seems to help.

The heater is on in the house and my feet are starting to sweat. I take a seat on the couch next to the recliner and drum my knees. Lee and I are pregnant again, I say. Seems to be sticking. I reel at my own phrasing. It reminds me of darts, but the words continue to fumble out of my mouth. It’s becoming a rehearsed thing, this conversation. Better not to think too hard about it. Better to repeat what’s been said since it seems to keep everything moving.

Boy? Girl?

Just baby for now.

Any names? Dakari no longer looks my way. He can’t turn his neck and it’s a pill to hold his eyes in one place. The neck brace is thick and rigid. I recently rebuilt our vacuum cleaner after Aurora’s hair did a number on it. The brace reminds me of a piece I fumbled with for too long.

No names. Not yet. Got new neighbors though.

 Hmm, Dakari says. Then he smacks his lips and drifts to sleep.

The two of us became quick friends a decade prior when we washed dishes for an old sports bar down the road. He controlled the boom box in the back, changing CDs every twenty minutes or so, playing the same tracks from each. Dakari had a clear playlist in his head, but no equipment to work with. One night, I borrowed his stack, burned the CDs to my home computer and returned to work with a mix for him. We didn’t become inseparable then, no. But we became the kind of friends that last.

I sit, waiting for Dakari to wake or his sister to appear, but neither happens. I’m alone within this dog-smell. On one hand, I am relieved, because I don’t have anything to say. On the other, I feel trapped. If I’m still for too long, I can feel the weight of Dakari’s blankets pressing against my chest. The smell gets worse. It’s suffocating me.

I stand to leave and Dakari shivers, from his chest and arms to his legs. I wonder if the paralysis is fading. Maybe this chill is a hack for his body, something of a shortcut to jumpstart the rest of his limbs. I remove the blankets one at a time, watching his legs closely, hoping I don’t wake him. But by the time he’s uncovered, only his shoulders shake, and so I cover him again and leave.

 *

I fear Lee will hold my quick return against me. She’ll believe I didn’t give it a real go. So I take a detour towards that old pub of ours on the way home. It’s one of those places that plays Irish music a little too loud even when it’s empty. When I step inside, I’m briefly taken back to the days before we wanted to be parents, when our bartender Kit served us picklebacks after hours.

But Kit doesn’t sit behind the bar. Instead, there’s a younger version of him, some kid with more than two decades of catching up to do. He’s got the same shaggy surfer cut with more color and fewer wrinkles above the brow. This younger Kit wears the same small hoops in his ears, but the tattoos are incomplete and less visible to the patrons.

Welcome to our pub, he says. Been here before?

Once upon a time.

Hmm.

This was where I’d taken Lee on our third date, after realizing I should’ve taken her here on our first date. It’s a wonder she agreed to see me again after that steakhouse, where the table was larger than my reach and the air-conditioning so strong Lee borrowed my napkins to cover her shoulders. I’ve never been one to look someone in the eye for too long, and I haven’t sat across the table from Lee since.

Killing time is a skill no one wields properly. When you want time dead, it only fights back. I wonder how long I have to sit here to convince Lee I made an earnest visit to Dakari. My guess is an hour, which feels impossible.

What’ll you have?

Just a Jameson neat.

Young Kit gives me a generous poor and I notice a dog bowl on the bar. It’s scuffed along the rim and spotted with cartoonish paw prints. Young Kit hands me my drink, places the bowl under the tap, and fills it with something dark and flat. Once it’s about half full, he carries the bowl to the opposite side of the bar that opens to the patio. Young Kit moves on to his next customer and Father Coyote leaps into the stool by the bowl.

His mouth hangs open and his tongue falls about. Straight forward, unlike Aurora. I sip from my glass. He laps from his bowl. I wipe my beard out of habit. He paws at his snout. I raise my glass in his direction, we catch eyes, and Father Coyote does one of those warm up barks that dogs do. He drops from his stool and trots around the bar. I pull a stool out and he leaps into it. He paws at the bar and Young Kit grabs the dog bowl for him.

How you likin’ the neighborhood? I say.

Father Coyote scratches at his ear, as if to say there isn’t anything to say.

We continue to drink and lap in silence. The Jameson goes down like water. Young Kit gives me another and says, Now that I think about it, you do seem familiar. He fills Father Coyote’s bowl and the bar fills with more guests.

Do you know anything about the guy who lived in the house before you? I say. I’m not sure if you worked with a realtor or not, or if they’d even tell you, of if they’d even know, but the previous tenant killed himself.

Father Coyote tilts his head side to side.

It was a day. Lee—that’s my wife—and I woke up to the red-and-blue lights flashing through our front windows. When we stepped outside, a handful of officers had surrounded the house. I caught one leaping the fence to get to the back. We couldn’t hear anything and when I stepped outside one of the officers commanded me to go back in. It was unreal.

Father Coyote watches me. I see in his eyes the same bit of concern I’ve carried these last ten weeks. That bit of helpless acquiescence. He’s engaged with my story, expecting the worst not because I spoiled it, but because expecting the worst tricks us into thinking it won’t hurt.

It turns out, this guy had sent a bomb threat over the internet—do you know what that is?—to his old elementary school in Delaware. Something about harboring criminals in a basement, one that didn’t even exist. Anyway, the police tracked the threat pretty easily, and he shot himself before they could force their way in.

Father Coyote laps more from his bowl.

Do animals—sorry, coyotes—believe in ghosts? He doesn’t seem to understand the question. The stools around us fill and we have to lean our heads together to keep the conversation alive. None of my friends have kids. Don’t want them, either. You’re the first parent I’ve spoken to since Lee and I started trying. Any advice?

Father Coyote rests his head on the bar, thinking. Then he’s got it. He sits up straight and bares his teeth. When I don’t react, he bumps my elbow with his snout. So I sit up straight and bare my teeth. He howls softly, as if singing a song older than death itself, and I howl, too. I understand and I feel ready. Then he’s out the door and headed home.

*

At my home, I see the shepherd’s pie has been removed from the Coyotes’ front porch. When I climb into bed, Lee wants to know what she smells, and I tell her Dakari’s house reeks of dog. That no one there washes the throw blankets. She asks me how he’s doing, and I tell her he’s restless.

 *

It’s two weeks later and I’m walking Aurora around the neighborhood before we head to our baby appointment. We haven’t decided yet if we want to know the sex, but they are going to ask us and I’m afraid if I don’t say something that the baby will be born sexless. Not because I wouldn’t love the baby either way, but because I’m plenty afraid of parenthood as it is. I know Lee and I will overcome every obstacle ahead, it’s what you do, but I’m growing tired of obstacles.

Our walk turns into a trot and we complete laps around our small neighborhood. Aurora has always been poor on the leash. She is adamant about leading, of moving continuously, even as the leash squeezes her throat shut. However, now that we are jogging, the leash is slack between us. She remains ahead but doesn’t pull. A black cat darts across the street and she doesn’t chase. Just as we reach home again, the Coyotes’ garage opens up, and I see the pups have already doubled in size.

Lee’s excited to show me the progress of her bump. She flips through weekly photos on her phone so I can tell the difference and I do. They say the baby is the size of an avocado, big enough to feel real and impossible to imagine. To hold a baby in the palm of my hand, it gives me vertigo.

Have you heard from Dakari?

No.

Have you reached out?

Just once. A lie. I spent the time on the text, but never sent it. It felt too abrupt to ask: How are you feeling? I couldn’t settle on an opening. I typed Hey and Yo and Hey yo and resolved to give him space. The kind of thing that gives me permission to give myself space.

Let’s swing by after the appointment. We’ll surprise him with pictures of the baby.

Okay, I say, though I think it’s a bad idea.

*

We pull up to Dakari’s house and find the driveway empty. I look down the street and don’t find Dakari’s car anywhere. Instead, I find a For Sale sign that has been blown flat by a recent storm.

We knock and press our eyes against the glass of his door, but the house looks empty inside. Not deserted, but empty. I ring the doorbell and no one enters the foyer. When I dial Dakari’s number, it goes straight to voicemail. If he could drive, I figure I would already know, and I’m beginning to feel like I’ve killed too much time lately. That moments are dead and gone and out of reach. I’m too late for something.

We’re having a girl. We found out by accident. Dakari would have enjoyed the story. Perhaps I’ll save it for him. He and I will go out to the pub, reminisce about the old nights there, and find ourselves untethered by the prospects of parenthood. He’ll say, Remember that time we got pulled over after leaving this place? I’ll nod because I don’t want to talk about it. You asked the cop where to get your speedometer calibrated because you didn’t believe you were speeding. We were so drunk, man. What were you thinking? And maybe I’ll apologize, because I’d never seen Dakari so scared in my life, and my own recklessness put him in a danger I’ll never know. Or maybe I’ll tell the story about finding out we’re having a girl to change the subject.

Come on, I say to Lee, because what else is there to do?

*

It’s almost midnight and I’m running to shake something loose in me. The baby kicked my cheek today and a tremor has taken me hostage. I wasn’t prepared to feel something. My bones have been rattling for hours and if it doesn’t quit soon, I worry I may curl into myself like a dead insect.

I’m following a ten-mile loop near my home even though I know I won’t make it. Around two miles in, the homes turn from college fun houses to wood-framed carcasses because renters have been priced out and owners are too stubborn to sell high. Sweat slips into my eyes, fertilizing spots on my contact lenses that grow into blinders. It’s fine though. I’ve never been able to see much in the dark.

It’s been a month since I’ve seen or heard from Dakari. I’ve tried his phone only once more, again getting his voicemail, and when I finally sent a text the delivery never went through. A few years ago, he used to run a hot sauce review blog. It’s still up and so I used the contact form to reach out. Nothing’s come back.

Around the fourth mile mark that is a fallen street light there is an abandoned golf course that will soon become a strip mall. Mounds of dirt rise to the moon and at the top of one I see a wheel chair, its silhouette like a set of nostrils. I veer from my loop and up the dirt. The spots in my contacts grow and the only thing guiding me is the swelling moon. The hill isn’t very high, but it is steep, and my quads feel like they are tearing with each step. When I reach the top, I find the wheel chair upright on one wheel, balanced and fragile. Beautifully disorienting, like a still frame of a hummingbird. Panting, I quickly hold my breath, reach to touch the wheel chair, and change my mind. If I sneeze, it will fall, and everything around me will collapse.

I rub the sweat out of my eyes, but the spots grow worse. They congeal together and now I can’t differentiate between the sweat and the moon. I take a step back. My foot lands on nothing and I fall to one knee.

Stumbling.

Tumbling.

Dreaming.

* 

Long before my father died, he spent half a year at some retreat I know nothing about. Before the divorce, my mother would tell me the president needed my dad for a special project. After the divorce, she would say he suffered from a weak spirit that I was in danger of inheriting. I’ll never know the truth—retreat is a term he used by accident—but when my father did return, he’d shaved away all his hair and his shoulders were covered in bandages I later learned were tattoos. For years he wouldn’t take his shirt off in front of me, not until they’d been lasered off. At the pool, I stared at the warped skin, the scarred patches that made me think him a mutant. I wanted my own, to be like him, to be that strong, but I’ve yet to get my own ink. I’m too afraid to risk that kind of mistake. Had there been a deathbed, I would’ve asked him about the tattoos, because when I asked my mother, she threatened to never speak to me again.

*

I’m awoken by a tongue on my face and a gentle nip at my ear. My blindness is irrelevant because it’s nearly impossible to open my eyes. My head feels as if I drowned the thing in a handle and my tongue feels caked in dirt. There are questions to answer, but I’ve got to find the questions first.

Something in my shoulder burns from the inside and I’ve sobered up from my dread. There’s a part of me that will always succumb to this, that will be too weak to resist bouts of shadowy whimsy. But I have to try a little harder. Baby steps.

When I do shake the grime from my sight, the moon has swallowed the violet horizon. All I see are orange craters and impossible footsteps. There’s dirt in my socks, rocks in my ears, and the wheel chair is gone. My cheek throbs from the baby’s kick. I rise to my feet, wipe the dirt from my skin, and make my way home.

*

Aurora is going nuts by the back door. Whining and scratching at the glass. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep. Hours. Days. When I step into the living room I see the light in the back has popped on. Motion has been detected.

I don’t want to let Aurora out because if it’s a possum, she’ll pick a fight and lose. So we stand inside, snouts pressed against the glass, searching. The light illuminates all of my porch, but it shrouds everything beyond its reach in darkness. Lee calls from the back, Do you hear that?

I hold my breath and listen. Aurora cocks her head in that uncertain way. I trade my snout for my ear and after a moment I hear it, too. A high pitched whine. Something infantile. The light clicks off again and in the dark I see him. Round, yellow droplets, heavy with fear. Aurora’s desire to escape worsens, but I know I can’t free her, so I crack the door, suck in my gut, and slip out alone.

The light clicks on again with my arrival, hiding the pup, but his shape materializes a few steps into the grass. His whines grow louder and when he shies away from me, I notice he drags himself forward, unable to use his back paws. Even closer and he lets out a soft howl and I’m afraid Father Coyote is going to interpret villainy from my concern.

The pup reaches the corner of my fence with nowhere to go. He bares his teeth now, gives me a soft growl, but I resign myself to be bitten. My hands curl under his stomach and he throws his body this way and that. His claws scratch at my skin, but instead of holding him at arm’s length, I pull him into my chest so his face can rest in the pit of my elbow. He continues to fight as I carry him past my gate and around the corner of my house. I can hear his parents before I reach the front.

*

The Coyotes argue in their driveway. The yapping seems to have awoken a handful of us. The teenager down the road has her blind monster baby in a chest carrier. Our retired neighbors have their hoses at the ready. Mother Coyote is pacing up and down the pavement as Father Coyote barks at her, pointing his snout this way and that. The pup no longer fights but now shakes in my arms and buries his face deeper into my shirt. It must be a little after one in the morning. Someone will likely call the police soon.

I stand on the curb between my lawn and the street and the Coyotes ignore me. Mother Coyote’s fur stands up on her back. She growls at Father Coyote and he responds by trotting to the garden and digging up the hydrangeas. He takes one in his jaws and shakes the soil out before dropping the thing at her feet. She nips at his ear and I can hear sirens miles away.  They go nose-to-nose with one another and engage in a staring contest.

The pup wriggles in my arms and in the streetlight I can see his back paws are missing patches of fur. The blood is dry. They twitch with movement. I scratch behind his ears and shush him the way I do when Aurora’s dreams turn violent. Neighbors return to their homes in fear and the sirens grow louder. Father and Mother continue their standoff until my phone rings loudly in my pocket. Each turns their attention to me, their pup in my arms, and my phone continues to ring.

The Coyotes sniff the air as I cross the street. It’s okay, I tell each of them. He’s a little hurt but it’s okay. A police cruiser has entered the neighborhood. The siren is off but the lights continue to whirl, bathing all of us in intermittent red and blue. He needs you, I say, and carry him past the Coyotes and into their garage. Father and Mother trot next to me. The three whine in unison and my phone rings once more. We’re all inside, safe from the light, and as soon as I set the pup down on the floor, they begin to lick their wounds.

Caleb Michael Sarvis is the author of the story collection Dead Aquarium. His work can be found in BULL, Hobart, Joyland, storySouth, and others. His story "An Unfaded Black" was named one of the “Other Distinguished Stories of 2017” in Best American Short Stories 2018. You can learn more at calebmsarvis.com

24 of November 2023

Diana Angelo's reading of

touchpoints

Written by Iris Newell

Diana Angelo has always been interested in how the use and evolution of language influence thought and behavior. She's a writer, editor, teacher, and now an audio narrator who enjoys crossing genres and forms in her writing; she believes there oughtn’t be borders. In language and literature, she has taught English to speakers of other languages in the food and hospitality industry in the New York City metro area, edited and written for The 12th Street Journal published by The New School’s Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy, and edited and written for Jersey City Writers 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

17 November 2023

Sean Gallagher

3

Sean Gallagher lives in Charleston, South Carolina. His artwork has appeared or is forthcoming in Allegory Ridge, Liminal Spaces, Vineyard Literary, Beaver Magazine, Fauxmoir Literary Magazine, Quarter Press, and High Shelf Press. His work has earned several awards and he has recently been highlighted as one of the lowcountry’s top emerging artists by Charleston Magazine. You can follow him on Instagram @the_ridden_word or explore his portfolio at skgcreative.com. 

10 November 2023

Gideon Huan-Lang

Starting from Oppenheimer & Ending in My Arms

after Kim Addonizio

Mellow Prometheus, you were born to a painter and studied
French literature at boarding school, learning how to burn villages
through paragraphs of a chemistry textbook and learning how to ravage
a body through Van Gogh and the chainsmoking of your youth buried
by oversized tweed, yet you declare yourself as death—weak
monotone and avoiding my gaze,  I ask why you are so insistent
on your strength, you tell me that you know you’re not strong
enough for greatness, that you’re only aware of your danger
as a destroyer pouring blood over chalkboard equations, daydreaming
of mushroom clouds at Los Alamos—it is not this body where I feel
brutality, your flesh is warm like all flesh, you are not listening
to the radio and about static suffering because you were in awe
of the physics encoded in your nightfall (and you will return to poetry
after the war, reading T. S. Eliot and learning Sanskrit), the uranium is green
and a distant glow, and I am forgetting that all bodies are tender
in the split second before their destruction, I am looking at shadows
left at the doorstep of a steeple forever in the state of going, the unfinished
utterance of a prayer—I have nothing but a prayer of a body and its desire
to find fleeting warmth against an apartment with a faulty radiator, a war
between my slow decay and the half-life of a brutal Northern winter muted
by the entering and exiting of an IKEA comforter by strangers searching
for an ending to an MFA memoir, the door handle is becoming more polished,
people are always leaving, the weekly physics homework remains empty on my desk,
I’m losing muscle due to microwaveable dinners but I still cause so much wreckage,
all I have are bodies who leave me, gray, this door only the scene of departure,
and the heating is forever broken, and my arms are wrapped around myself now,
aware of the dangers of a body.

An interview with Gideon Huan-Lang on observation, destruction, and humanization

How long have you been writing poetry? What advice would you give to emerging poets?

I think this is my 6th year since starting poetry. But the timeline isn’t super well-defined. I’ve had an on and off relationship with poetry at times, and I have been writing in other genres for longer. In many ways, I would still consider myself an emerging poet. 

Some of the best advice I’ve gotten as I found my footholds in the world of writing is to observe and be curious. Granted, I think this advice sounds a bit passive at first. But observation itself is an intentional act. Why does the poet place the line-break after this word? How exactly do I describe the way octopi swim? Can my refrigerator be a metaphor for falling in love? I would say asking questions—and becoming aware of the intentionality behind authorial choices—bridges the gap between being a reader and a writer.

What brought you to the subject of Oppenheimer? Was it the recent film? If so, we would love to hear your thoughts on it. 

A lot of my recent poetry explores the brutality that can stem from science. 

I’ve sourced a lot of my recent inspiration from history—Alan Turing, space race cosmonauts, Laika the Space Dog, company towns. Oppenheimer was another addition to that list, as I sort of see him as a figure that epitomizes scientific destruction. In particular, I was fascinated by his perceived removal from his creation. He was a scientist, typically seen as a man in a lab coat, far away from the rubble and shrapnel. I wanted to explore and characterize destruction beyond scenes of conventional violence.

Re: The Movie. Though I haven’t seen it, I’m glad to have my poem published after the movie’s release. Given that Oppenheimer is now part of the cultural moment and has a place in our collective consciousness, I feel my poem has less explaining to do. 

Starting from Oppenheimer & Ending in My Arms is one single, flowing sentence. It feels like a stream of consciousness, but where did the poem itself start? Tell us a bit about your writing process. 

The single sentence structure allows me to create a Venn Diagram from two biographies. Though Oppenheimer and the speaker have two distinct backgrounds, their emotions and memories blur into one another. As a result, I did not want this poem to feel like two halves or two poems where each part focuses on one individual. I wanted the poem to feel like a fever dream grounded in real parts of Oppenheimer’s life. My writing process therefore began with researching Oppenheimer’s life and any relevant historical context. I learned new information, such as his lifelong interest in literature, reputation as a chainsmoker, and desire to learn Sanskrit. Even though I had a general understanding of who Oppenheimer was, delving deeper into history allowed me to further humanize the perceived weakness capable of destruction.

The poem is credited as “after Kim Addonizio.” Is there a particular work by Addonizio that you took inspiration from? What is your process like when seeking to write in the style of another poet? 

Addonizio’s poem “Beginning With His Body And Ending In A Small Town” influenced my piece’s form and pacing. I was fascinated by how the piece unravels itself from the intimacy of the body into the loneliness of a nondescript bar. I was inspired to invert the piece’s progression; the semi-biographical address of Oppenheimer serves as a means to unravel a portrait of a body. My poem—and by extension, a lot of my recent work—reframes major historical events and scientific breakthroughs into small moments of the body and its vulnerability, uncertainty, greed, and hurt.

What else are you reading right now that inspires you?

A very disjointed but varied list: Look (Solmaz Sharif), “Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents” (Wikipedia), Frankenstein, Cyberpunk 2077 Worldbuilding, Franz Kafka, Dunce (Mary Ruefle), computer science textbooks, T. S. Eliot, Dream of the Divided Field (Yanyi), ChatGPT finding answers to my niche questions, Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, Superintelligence (Nick Bostrom), whatever other small tidbits of information I can get my hands on.

Gideon Huan-Lang (郎健) is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. He is nineteen and studies the digital humanities.

3 November 2023

Steve Mitchell

R E G I M E N T

I realized others questioned my sexuality before I even considered it on my own. It surfaced first in adults—men—who wanted to ask me about sports while I wanted to talk about space and science fiction, who asked about girlfriends before I’d ever thought of one, who wanted to know if I was going out for the team. I was small, asthmatic. I’d liked playing football and baseball with the kids in the neighborhood until it became aggressive and tinged with rage. Now, I read.

I didn’t comprehend sexuality at all when I was asked for affirmations and assurances; I was 10. I was 12. It took time to understand the nature of their interrogation, but my understanding didn’t alleviate their confusion. I knew I was soft. I knew I was weak. My body was always lying in wait to kill me. There were days I could ride my bike and run with the other kids, and days when my lungs constricted and I watched from the window struggling for the next breath. I was under no illusion I was a perfect physical specimen of boyhood.

Still, the questions about sexuality, when they came, struck me as a demand for loyalty to a force I couldn’t identify. There was a decision to be made it seemed, or at the least, a declaration. A flag must be planted somewhere. Sexuality was a part of it, but there was a deeper question about masculinity. Was I going out for the team?

*

No actor uses their body as fully and completely as Denis Lavant. Watching others, we focus on expression or gesture but with Lavant, it’s his body that holds the revelation. His face is an extension of that body. As revealing and distinctive as it is, his face is only ever a small part of the larger whole.

He doesn’t move like a dancer. Dancers who worked in film—Fred Astaire, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gregory Hines—float as if on a cushion of air, as if their feet dangle just above the floor. Lavant is more grounded; there’s weight to him. Where dancers seem to defy gravity, Lavant leverages it.  He appears taut but never tense; his limbs slide as if operating independently yet always in concert.

You wouldn’t mistake him for an athlete, either. He moves like a new creature, discovering his body and its limits in fits of quiet abandon. His body is expressive in the way a flower is expressive, in its clear elaboration of form; a being only and completely itself.

In Mauvais Sang (1986) he’s fallen in love with Anna (Juliette Binoche), the girlfriend of his mobster boss. Glancing at her in rapture, he resembles nothing so much as an elf. Narrow face, large ears, dark deep-set eyes. He’s 25, but he could be 16. 

On the street, outside her apartment, he smokes while she lies in existential torpor on a bed upstairs. A French song plays on the radio. I love the slight turn and the lean toward the stairs when he thinks of her, the soft steps to the window. His body is loose; there’s nothing to prepare us for the transformation that occurs when the radio shifts to David Bowie’s Modern Love. 

Bursting into a run once the beat is established, he propels himself flat-out nearly stumbling like a five-year-old racing downhill. He’s an engine building speed and we, watching, expect him to take flight, to burn past his restrictive orbit. He runs to feel his muscles, his bones, to feel the air rush by on the darkened street. He becomes a blur, running for the sake of running then skidding to a stop suddenly as if he’s remembered something important.

Returning to the apartment, he’s a different man. On the bed he picks up a note. Folding his arm behind him as he lies down around the space where Anna has lain, his hand remains open around the paper, completely relaxed. The world, it seems, has taken on a new delicacy.

*

I grew up with an alcoholic dad and a family in which the disease was never addressed—as if it didn’t exist, as if it were a misperception. I developed a fundamental belief that adults were lying to me, if not directly then by omission but more than that, I believed they were actively trying to obscure or block the truth. Books, film, TV, seemed a way of discovering something more true about the world than I could discern from those around me. Words and books swept me into my own imagination. Images resonated differently; in films and TV I could see a different world. And, seeing is believing.

The men I saw there weren’t always beautiful or ready with their fists. They were nondescript and smart, like Columbo, they were aloof and smart like Spock, they were funny and smart like Johnny Carson, while the men in my family were quiet, never revealing themselves. It was the sixties; that’s what was expected of them.  Nearly all their conversations I remember revolved around markers of masculinity. I couldn’t imagine Columbo or Spock would have much to say. Sometimes, I pretended to be engaged, smiling along the hard edge of the conversation. Sometimes, I simply remained quiet, my face set to a neutral expression.

At family gatherings, I gravitated toward the women; I liked their voices and their stories. Something in these stories seemed to touch on a truth I believed I was missing. They alluded to invisible entanglements and secret histories. I didn’t want to be a woman, but I couldn’t say I wanted to be a man—not the kind I saw around me, not the kind I thought I was expected to be.

When I was 13 or so, after the divorce and my dad’s time living with his parents upon his release from the state hospital, he finally acquired his own apartment in an old house near downtown in an area of the city yet to be gentrified. 

This is the period I remember being closest to him—not that we spoke much, or that he had much money to spend in entertaining me and my sisters. He’d been sober for a while, he’d been hired as a Substance Abuse counselor; he was no longer building fences or loading trucks. There was something open about him that was new to me.

Years before, in what I imagine now to be a suicide attempt, my dad drove his VW beetle into and under the back of a moving freight truck. Among other things, the accident crushed his face. The doctors asked my mother to bring a photograph to the hospital so they could attempt to reconstruct it. When he finally returned home, he looked as close to something from a horror film as anything I’d ever seen. 

The sutures crawled over his face. There was a metal brace around his neck and head, his jaw was wired shut. He spoke through gritted teeth and ate through a straw. Of course, he never looked the same as before. He’d created his own mask. I only knew he was my father with certainty when he began to drink again.

Now that he was sober and on his own, my sisters and I stayed over one weekend a month, amusing ourselves in whatever way we could. Sometimes we’d all go to a movie; often we were bored. Sometimes we’d listen to records on dad’s small box turntable. He only had two I remember: Janis Joplin’s Pearl and Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. 

We’d sit in his living room while the music churned from the record player: raucous, loud, full of pain and longing. He’d drink coffee and smoke. That’s what people in AA did. I knew this because I’d gone to the occasional meeting with him in the damp basement of a dark church.

Still, sitting with him in the aura of the music was a happy surprise. In those moments I felt I could almost bring to clarity—like every truth which eluded me—something real. Something unstated but clear, if only I could find the correct lens through which to view it.

*

In Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), a film loosely based on Melville’s Billy Budd, Denis Lavant plays Galoup, an officer of a French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti. Galoup finds himself openly ambivalent toward a new recruit, Sentain (Grégoire Colin), and eventually seeks to cause his death. Throughout, Lavant performs a ballet of repression; however, to call it a ballet makes it sound stylized and artificial. There’s nothing of that in the performance; he never looks less than completely natural. His struggle with this ambivalence gives the film its insinuating tension.

Galoup pictures himself the perfect Legionnaire, in love with his commanding officer—maybe romantically, perhaps more in the way a child loves a father. What he loves most, however, is the Legion itself. Its arms close around him on all sides. He knows who he is and what he should do. The uniform makes the man and Galoup is made until Sentain arrives and he’s thrown off-center. Is it because he’s sexually attracted to him, or fears he’ll be replaced in the eyes of the commandant? Or is it simply that everyone seems to like him? We never know for certain.

The Legion is an elite arm of the French military. Until the 1990’s, a Foreign Legion recruit was required to sign up under a ‘declared name’—a new name—as a symbol of a life starting over. This has its parallel in the doctrine of the Christian name, the name originally given at baptism as a signifier of rebirth in the Catholic Church. Re-naming provides a clear dividing line, a before and an after, and a definitive break with the past. Recruits are given a second chance.

In Beau Travail (Good Work), Claire Denis focuses on the rituals of training—the push-ups, marches, obstacle courses, the grunting, sweating physical prowess of the soldiers. They are never seen in a combat situation and their artifice—setting up camp surrounded by barbed wire with armed sentry points—is counterposed to shots of a few Djibouti women and children watching them laconically from the other side of the wire.

The emphasis here is on bodies—how they move, thump against each other, how they are trained: as instruments of force and fear and protection, as instruments of isolation and community.

The soldiers swim together, shout and dance around a campfire, shower together. Galoup is always slightly outside their group, lodged in a position between the men and the commandant. The soldiers go drinking as a group in town; Galoup drinks alone. Maybe something is different in the camaraderie of the group since Sentain arrived; maybe they are not so desperate. Galoup would see this as softness, as a loss of focus.

The mythology of masculinity in movies really can’t be entered—it holds us outside as a golden projection, one part wish fulfillment, one part nostalgia for a time that never existed. In this world, women are always the vulnerability, there to be held hostage or murdered in retribution. So, you can see how my loyalties were divided.

In movies, women—and a family—leave you weak. They are the wound every villain exploits. That exploitation itself is a violation of the code of men, but they are, after all, villains. What can we expect? Harry Callahan, Rambo, James Bond: they don’t have wives—they are men—not husbands, not fathers—men. In film, men are fathers only in as much as they ‘protect their family.’ Their lack of attachment is an integral part of their uniform.

This uniform brings each male body into harmony with the other. The legionnaire loses himself within the sharp creases of his trousers. Like the declared name, the uniform draws a line in the sand and lets everyone know who is folded within the group, who is the other. The ultimate other is always women.

Lavant as Galoup watches his men with a cat-like drill of attention. He’s never still around them, sliding up to the group then falling away, circling, attentive. In scenes where he is alone, he’s often motionless. He’s a man who is completely and only his job, in that way men are supposed to be. (Shown with his lover—a beautiful local woman—he most often stands apart, watching.) 

Accepting recruits not only from all levels of French society but from around the world, the Legion’s rigorous training is structured to build a heightened sense of camaraderie among recruits. It is the only branch of the French military that doesn’t swear allegiance to France; legionnaires swear allegiance only to each other. To the Legion. 

“You can disappear in the Legion,” Claire Denis says, in an interview about the film. Galoup is a man who has vanished within his uniform.

*

My dad was a casualty in the resistance to the uniform. Something in manhood, or fatherhood, or both, broke him. Wounded early, it took him a long time to die from his injuries; he lived his life incapacitated.

He’d been a high school basketball star in the mid-1950’s with a scholarship to college. He’d married his high-school sweetheart, the chief cheerleader. He went to school in Business because that’s what you did. He had his first child at 21 because that’s what you did. He started drinking early. Though I don’t remember him ever talking much, my mom assured me he’d been witty and smart. And everyone liked him.

It was while dad lived in this apartment—I was 12 or 13—that I began playing golf. My uncle, his younger brother, played and showed me how to set my grip, gave me rudimentary lessons then a small set of used clubs. My friends and I chipped and putted in our backyard. It was something we could do when there weren’t enough kids around to form teams. Golf was also less likely to trigger an asthma attack. 

My uncle had coerced my grandfather into playing, then my dad. At one point, all the men were playing, and family conversations began to center on the sport. I thought this might be a language I could learn, unlocking the passwords needed to enter the private club or secret society.

That summer, my mom dropped me off at the public courses in town and I’d play 18 holes by myself. Badly. I don’t remember ever thinking I was very good, but part of this exercise was performance: I was practicing how I looked on the course, how I looked in my swing. I was acting as if I were a person who enjoyed sports. I could do it alone there. I could feel I was learning the role.

That was the first year I remember my dad buying Christmas presents for us himself. When he was recovering from the state hospital, living with his parents who could not hide their disgust for him, dosed nearly unconscious on Haldol, they bought presents for us and put his name on them. Placed under the tree, the tags were written in my grandmother’s rounded cursive—To: Steve, From: Charles.

Dad put up his own small tree in a corner of his living room, strung with large colored bulbs, and we—my sisters and I—each had presents there. One of mine, wrapped in red Santa paper was long, thin, and heavy. I was certain it was a new putter, the kind with the curving goose-neck that looked vaguely sci-fi, a putter Captain Kirk might use when golfing in the Covidan System. 

I imagined swinging it lightly above the hardwood floor on Christmas morning, putting the dimpled ball along the floor into dad’s automatic machine which rolled the ball back to you once you made the shot. 

Playing golf had brought me to the edges of the male conversations but, instead of alleviating a pressure it intensified instead, because I was circling, because I was so close to what I believed was acceptance I came to believe it wasn’t exactly my sexuality that was being questioned, more my relationship to manhood, a manhood completely distinct from sexual preference. The language around this was garbled—well, there wasn’t a language. The language was set only in as much as there was a question. I was supposed to already know something I didn’t yet know. Was I going out for the team? Would I make the team?

In the previous year, dad had begun to dress like a professional, a casual professional. He wore Izod shirts and khaki chinos. He shaved every day and smelled of aftershave. He had his own car and his own apartment, and I was old enough to know this was an accomplishment but not old enough to know how much of one. Finally, he looked more like a dad—those in my neighborhood and those on TV. Something in me relaxed just a little.

My sisters and I anxiously awaited Christmas and its frenzy of excitement. We always had Christmas Eve at home, so Santa could come in the morning, then dad’s place later that day. I don’t remember the other presents of that Christmas, only the anticipation of the afternoon at my dad’s.

Once there, I lay the present along my lap, waiting as my sisters opened their dolls and makeup kits, feeling the weight of it on my thighs. When it was my turn, I tore at the paper on the thin end first, confused by the bare metal, ripping the paper across my lap until it fell open on my knees. It was a rifle.

*

Beau Travail is the story of Galoup, vanished into the brotherhood, happy in the vanishing, until Sentain like the snake in Eden brings a discord he can’t accept or define. In truth, he’s not interested in definition; he wants a return to the grace of the uniform.

The film intercuts Galoup, exiled in Belgium, with his service in the Legion. It is nearly wordless, except for the occasional voiceover—Galoup writing in his journal, trying to make sense of what has happened. There’s no inkling of who Galoup was before he joined the Legion. Within its impressionistic rhythm it’s not always immediately clear shot to shot where we are in time. This is Claire Denis’ style: elliptical, associative, less interested in narrative drive than mood and memory. 

We don’t always know where we are in time unless we pay attention to Lavant’s body. In Djibouti, he knows who he is, he’s fully present; in Belgium there’s something straying about him, diffuse. He makes coffee, he smokes. He tries to write his story in a journal. He sits alone on the train, in a bar.

Galoup sends Sentain on a pointless suicide mission. The Commandant discovers this, and he is court-martialed then expelled from the Legion. Stripped of his uniform, he seems smaller, older. Outside the brotherhood, how does he know he is a man?

He remembers. He’s swamped by images of the rituals of manhood: bare-chested young men crawling under wire, scaling walls, drinking beer, breaking rocks, digging holes. Sweating, muscular men, shaven and sleek, together, and he is there with them. Always a step or two distant but with them, nonetheless. Denis lingers on these images, set against the monochromatic East African landscape, her camera tracking low at shoulder height as the group do pushups, or tilted upward so each recruit leaps into frame as they scale the wall.

In the Legion, you pledge allegiance only to each other. As men.

I never wanted a gun. Not in a million years. Dad came over to me, where it lay revealed in the white paper, and began to explain how to use it. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I have no doubt this was a gift he’d been refused as a child and that the giving had a meaning for him so distant from me as to be incomprehensible. 

He lifted it from my thighs, hefted it in his hand, pleased with its weight. My arms extended to receive it from him. I choked down the communion, partly because I was stunned, partly because it was a transubstantiation he wanted. I returned it to the corner, where it had been resting for weeks.

*

Over the years, the evolution in the way Tom Cruise runs in his films has become so noticeable that there are Youtube videos dedicated to it.  Tom Cruise runs a lot in his movies; there’s a lot of material there. Devoting himself almost exclusively to tentpole Mission Impossible films for the last decade, he has no character to play other than Ethan Hunt and Ethan Hunt is a machine; the flesh has vanished from inside the shell of the character and the shell—the uniform—has become seamless armor. You can almost see it, scene to scene and film to film; Cruise’s body closes in around him like a shield.

There’s probably a clear demarcation line that marks when Tom Cruise’s eyes become dead as an actor, but I’ll leave that research to someone else. The way he runs in, say MI:5, is the same run the Terminator (Robert Patrick) affects in Terminator 2: eyes unwaveringly forward, jaw clenched, hands stiff and blade-like, slicing the air rhythmically before him. This is not the image of the body as an instrument; it’s the body as a prison. 

Denis Lavant’s sprint in Mauvais Sang is an expression of emotion bursting forth into velocity and release.  If I had seen the film when I was 12 or 13, I would have imagined that was how I would like to move in the world. Lavant’s run is the image of someone pushing, defying, their own boundaries. When Cruise runs, he looks like a Maserati: shiny, sleek, and soulless. What Cruise believes reads as confidence and singleness of purpose reads instead as the clockwork churning of a brute mechanism. 

My dad married again soon after that Christmas and had a child with his new wife. They moved to another town, set up a nice house, acquired a dog. They bought furniture, and cooked trendy meals, and their marriage was over in a couple of years. He left, and eventually gave up parental rights to his son so he wouldn’t have to pay child support. He never paid my mother child support for the three of us.

Now, I like to imagine that maybe my dad felt a sense of freedom when he played basketball in high school. He was short and wiry then. He played guard. I like to imagine he dribbled low along the court, pivoting to elude his cover and for the instant he drove toward the shot he felt light, timeless. It’s something I never actually saw, but it’s an image I hold of him, of a time before the armor closed and nothing remained but glinting metal and hard edges.

I see this in the gray, shifting focus of history, a history passed on as fuzzy photographs and incomplete sentences; pieced together from hearsay, myth, and the occasional tale told with conviction. Something destroyed, then built again from the vestiges of memory. 

As he aged, my dad grew into his new face to such an extent that you might never know about his accident. He continued to wear Izod polos and khaki chinos; he continued to shave and smell nice. When I had my first child, he wanted to talk to me about insurance and retirement plans. Money had joined sports as the markers of manhood. Was I part of the team? 

He never wanted to talk to me about much else and I didn’t want to talk to him. I had lost interest in understanding him. This is not a story with an epiphany.

When I come to understand my sexuality, it isn’t that complicated, and it has nothing to do with guns or golf. I wasn’t part of the team and I never would be. Like so many of us who didn’t or couldn’t join, I made my friends elsewhere, one at a time, struggling toward some definition of what it meant to be in this body, to carry this uniform. This is not a story with an epiphany.

I have no idea what my dad might have wanted to do with his life. Once he became a counselor, he was eventually hired for the in-house program at a large utility company and worked there until he could no longer. A mask wasn’t enough for him. He needed a uniform, and eventually that wasn’t enough; he needed more protection. 

*

Court-martialed due to his transgression, removed from the Legion and exiled to Marseilles, Galoup has lost everything. In the penultimate scene, he spends time making his narrow bed, removing every crease, straightening each line. Stripped of his uniform, he finds it hadn’t given him an identity, only a shell.

Claire Denis knows she doesn’t need to show Lavant’s face in this scene, his body is enough. He lies down on his bed, bare-chested, holding a pistol at his waist. The camera lingers on his taut body and the gun, finally resting on a pulsing artery in his bicep, the rhythm matched by the rising beat of an ecstatic disco anthem, Corona’s Rhythm of the Night.

The dance at the end of Beau Travail comes out of nowhere; it comes after we have watched Galoup hold everything in for the entirety of the film. It’s a coda, set in the disco in Djibouti—only no one is there. No one we can see, at least. It’s a solitary dance and it wasn’t choreographed for the film. Denis gave Lavant a simple direction: to treat it as ‘a dance between life and death.’ He performed it in two takes.

Wearing perfectly ironed black shirt and trousers, he stands for a moment, smoking, then begins to turn so slightly it takes an instant to register. Mirrored tiles provide the backdrop, reflect the colored, blinking lights of the club. The music pulses and soars.

He glances off screen now and then; it’s a lupine gaze which might be a threat, or a come-on, or both. He might be looking at someone else or studying himself in an unseen mirror. He swings around a bit, preening and smoking, as if circling something. His arms burst forth and he spins, comes back to the sway. Then, he explodes into motion.

The dance is a cataclysm. It is not a smooth demonstration of poise and agility though it contains them. It comes in spurts and spasms, Lavant returning to a casual posture now and then, only to have his body spring forward again.

It’s tempting to say that his body expresses emotion, but it’s more direct than that. Lavant’s isn’t so much an instrument as expression itself. There seems to be no filter, no distance. His body constantly elaborates who it is with an elemental elegance usually reserved for animals, even when he’s doesn’t appear elegant.

His freedom is not graceful; it barrels forth in all directions at once. It’s not joy, not release. It’s sheer expression. It doesn’t have to have a meaning, or a point. It simply exists. I imagine this dance changes his molecular structure. It could be a form of rebirth. He’s still dancing when the film fades.

Maybe all men recognize this dance. It’s not a war dance, it’s not a mating dance. It’s the way you dance when no one is watching, when you’re not trying to be Mick Jagger or Pierce Brosnan or John Travolta, when you want to feel your body move in a way it never has before. You don’t tell your body what to do, you let it happen. You lose all sense of watching and all sense of performance. There’s something naked and feral, even frightening, in the abandon. 

I want to believe that once—just once—in the many years that came after high school, my dad danced like Denis Lavant.

Steve Mitchell has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies. His fiction and nonfiction have been published widely in journals and magazines. His novel is Cloud Diary (C&R Press). His short story collection is The Naming of Ghosts (Press 53). He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books and Editor at Scuppernong Editions. Find him at clouddiary.org

27 October 2023

Hannah Newman’s reading of 

He Came to Me Again Last Night

Written by Grant Chemidlin

Hannah Newman is an Atlanta-based writer with a master’s in Professional Writing. She likes to write about dark or bittersweet things (big surprise) all in the shapes of short stories, flash fiction, or poetry. Her work can be found in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Nuance Magazine, and The Loch Raven Review. In her free time, she’s probably recording a podcast episode with her sister or staring out of windows.

20 October 2023

Michael Alejandro De La Rosa

Hercules Finds the Nemean Lion

Michael Alejandro De La Rosa is a Venezuelan-American artist based in Kent, Ohio. After receiving his BFA at Hunter College, he pursued his MFA at Kent State University where he currently teaches painting and drawing. Find him on Instagram @mike.a.delarosa.

13 October 2023

Eben Bein

T(he)y

Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) is tolerant of slope and shade; monoecious; pendant female seed cones (1-2 cm) and male pollen cones (0.5 cm) both borne on 2nd year branchlets.

Mom, if you would hike up Tumbledown
Mountain with me again, up
through the hemlocks
after our two-year tumble, up
through all the trees with their incomprehensible
chromosomes, up 
to this X you drew on my map
just off the Ridge trail
to mark the blueberries, Vaccinium
angustifolium, if you would hike up in July, 
when the anthers and bells have fallen off 
the swollen ovaries, skin taut
around their embryos—I won’t forget
the Tupperware this time,
we can toss them in tuptuptup until the sound
is soft and full—I would do that, but
you can’t pretend you know anything about
how an X and a Y should walk
that dotted line. We are more than a pair
of legs. Between,
a root network holds
the mountain up. Mom,
it’s just a word. The trees say it clearly
and never forget.

An interview with Eben Bein about revision and growth, tackling the hard poems, and finding community in times of isolation

How long have you been writing poetry? Can you share for us a little bit about your writing process?

I first fell for poetry while considering poems with my mom for a ninth-grade English project; she handed me “The Man-moth” by Elizabeth Bishop and I gave her “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman. We talked about them for hours and it felt like discovering a mysterious door in our house I had never noticed before. 

Though I dabbled in writing, I as mostly a poetry appreciator until the COVID-19 pandemic. I turned to writing, workshopping, and community-building to fill the void of intimacy. Now, I’m obsessed. It has become my main artform for this phase of life and fills the late nights, weekends, and whenever else I can get time off or a poem comes knocking and stops me in my tracks.

Can you also discuss your editing process? What sorts of revisions does your work undergo and what shapes your inspiration to edit?

I love growing with poems and have sometimes traveled with a poem for years through 20+ drafts. I sometimes imagine the poem calling to me and I’m trying to become a better listener—is it trying to say this or this? 

Workshopping is also central to my writing process. Not only do I love taking classes, I also work with an intimate group of poets near me on Pawtucket Land (Boston) called The Chickadee Collective. We build community around appreciating poetic craft and honestly celebrating and critiquing each other’s work. In our workshops, we often ask questions like:

• What are the joys of this poem? 

• What is the poem itself trying to say?

• Do you want to hear more or less? 

• Where does the poem actually start? End? 

I rarely finish a poem without at least one Chickadee taking a peck at it. “T(he)y” was no exception.

You were also published in our Pride issue in 2021. How has your work evolved since then? What remains the same?

Passengers Journal has a special place in my heart because my poem “Half-Built House” in that issue was the first poem I ever published. It is about judgment, loss, and appreciation in a failed queer relationship—a theme around which I eventually built a my first chapbook Character Flaws which is out this year with Fauxmoir Press. If you like my poems please consider getting the chapbook here. DM me on socials if the price is an obstacle or you’d like to explore sharing art on the gift economy.  

As I revisit the original Passengers version of Half-Built House, I also find smile for my younger poet self creeping across my face. It is filled with both the things I love and the things I would now say differently. In fact, when I republished the poem in the chapbook, I did end up restructuring it, asking the question “Where does the poem actually end?”, and challenging myself to trust image more.

Here’s the last two stanzas of the version in the chapbook: 

This is where the construction stopped,
where we lay down our tools,
where we lay down our bodies
to cry and wonder
on a foundation that had required
all we could muster.

I did love that layout.
It would have put the children’s bedroom
right about there,
hovering above my head
like a soap bubble by the pin
oak’s pointing finger.

This poem opens with facts about the Eastern Hemlock. How does your background in biology and climate justice inform your work?

My love for and our deep interconnectedness with the natural world is unending. My poems follow a long tradition of ecopoetics, to which my art and I are deeply endebted. 

When I studied and taught biology, I felt a similar magic learning about living things that I do when I read poetry. Today, in my organizing work, I am often taught to turn to the natural world for lessons on how to build beautiful and sustainable movements. That is true on the big movement scale and also on small personal scale. 

For example, I’m a nonbinary queer person who has lived most of their life cis-presenting and doesn’t often experience debilitating dysphoria. The medical/psychological ways that many queer people use to orient to their identity and find gender euphoria have not always spoken to me. But turning to nature, in this case Eastern Hemlock, has helped me see my nonbinaryness clearly—as quiet and slow, tolerant of slope and shade. When I do experience dysphoria (often when others assume things about me) hemlocks have become a little talisman for rerooting myself in the long arc of life on earth.

“Mom, it’s just a word” is such a powerful moment in the poem. Any advice for young queer poets who are still finding their voice, or struggling to write about personal topics?

First, I just want to honor the difficulty of finding voice and writing about the personal. This can be hard for anyone and is not safe and accessible to all people at all times. It is okay for it to be hard. The hardness doesn’t mean that something is wrong with you. Sometimes, it can even be powerful to write directly from that very raw place. 

However, I find it can often be harmful to me, to others, and to the integrity of the piece of art, if I don’t pair the creative process with other forms of self-work, be it therapy, affinity groups, reconnecting with the land or natural world, or meditating. Growing as a person is critical to growing as an artist. 

Sometimes, I even see it as making myself strong enough to fully receive a piece of art. When I first drafted “T(he)y”, I wasn’t strong enough to say “Mom, it’s just a word.” That line appeared on the 5th of nine drafts after I was emotionally settled enough with the content to look at craft. One of my Chickadees told me they found a part of the poem preachy and pushed me to talk outloud and generate more ways to say the same thing. Not that poems should never preach, but I am really glad I tried that out, because the result is a powerfully vulnerable line. “It’s just a word” is addressed to the mother figure, but can also be read toward queer people—as if to say pronouns are small things against the backdrop of life on earth. 

Of course, I believe that pronouns matter in many ways, but this poem has helped teach me that gender and sex extend far beyond what our puny human brains can say with language. Doing my own emotional work helped me be willing to surrender to that vulnerability, which is part of what makes that line sing. 

What are you reading right now that you love, or that inspires you?

I want to give a shoutout here to one of my muses, Sharon Olds. Lots of people love Olds and there are so many reasons to love her, but one for me is this relentless baring of herself and making herself vulnerable. Her book Stag’s Leap is a touchstone for me as I prepare the manuscript in which “T(he)y” appears. 

More recently, some collections that have captured me include my teacher and friend Chen Chen’s recent book “Your Emergency Contact is Experiencing and Emergency” and his amazing new poem have you eaten yet. Just yesterday, my bestie just recited it outloud on the phone to remind me to eat lunch! 

I’ve also enjoyed Lee Upton’s The Day Every Day Is  and Han Vanderhart’s What Pecan Light. I’m in the midst of reading the work of several poets I heard read recently—Matthew E. Henry, Enzo Silo Surin, and Nickole Brown—and have loved what I’ve read so far by all of them. 

Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook Character Flaws (Fauxmoir lit, 2023) is out and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection From the top of the sky about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.

6 October 2023

Eddie Hall

Nocturne

Eddie Hall is an abstract artist in Berlin, Connecticut creating works using recycled windows which exhibit vibrant colors and geometric patterns. These works largely draw inspiration from architectural and design themes. Hall is self taught as an artist, an active member of the Kehler Liddell Gallery, an exhibiting member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, New Haven Paint & Clay Club and Rowayton Arts Center and his works have been featured and won awards in shows far and wide, including at the Greenwich Arts Society, Mattatuck Museum, Scope Miami, Stamford Art Association, Ursa Gallery, Viridian Artists and West Hartford Art League. His work is in numerous private collections. You can find his work on www.eddiehallart.com and follow him at @eddiehallart on Instagram.

29 September 2023

Sadie Wade-Stein

Unclaimed Bodies

The party’s over. The ground outside has gathered almost a foot of snow, and Jude has the window cracked, letting in a bitter wind. Jude is reflective when he drinks too much, and overheats quickly. I’m close to sober and now cold, too, but I don’t tell him to close the window. I feel far away from him. 

Hours ago, Jude made each of our friends a whiskey sour as they filed into our undecorated living room. This is the first place we’ve lived together, and we have very little. Jude and I don’t try to fill space. My mother doesn’t approve of this, or of Jude, but he has been easy to build a life with, cold and unadorned though it may be.

“Are you going to be able to drive?” Jude asks. He is not looking at me.

“I haven’t had a drink in hours.”

“It’s snowing like hell out there.”

For more than a month, we’ve been caring for a house a few miles outside of town. It used to be a farm, but now is only peeling wood and wild grass. There is nothing for us to do there. We’ve been splitting bottles of wine and seeing each other differently, and tonight had been an attempt at reinhabiting our old lives. 

“We could just stay,” I say.

“We don’t live here anymore.” He tries to laugh, but it gets caught wet in his throat. He finally closes the window and turns to me. “We should make sure the pipes haven’t burst.”

*

Jude wears my favorite of his jackets. It’s dusty blue canvas, lined with thick wool and what he was wearing when we met. He pulls the hood up with his left hand and locks the door with his right. It feels obscene to be able to watch him like this, with both of my hands empty.

The remnant whiskey makes me warm and lucid and when we step outside, the world has sharpened at its edges, our street narrowing into a perfect perspective point and looming above us, the shadows of black mountains. The snow comes to our shins. We take exaggerated steps toward the car. I think distantly about the dream that I’ve been having almost every night in the farmhouse, where we are moving slowly, as though through molasses, impossibly graceless and forced to take our time.

I clear only the windshield of snow and we idle for a long time in darkness, the wipers making a sound like pages turning as they wash back and forth. Jude rolls his window down an inch and watches the snow collapse inside followed by scraps of moonlight. He pulls his cigarettes from his pocket and his face glows golden brown as he lights. My hands are too cold to use the lighter.

“Here, baby,” Jude says, taking the cigarette from my mouth. He lights it off the end of his and hands it back to me. “We should go.”

The headlights flood unrelenting snow. With each gray instant that passes, I feel newly like I have awoken to find myself in the driver’s seat staring at unfamiliar hands on the wheel. I cannot be sure that we are moving or that it was me who hours ago, held Jude’s hand at a table replete with the people who know us best. I cannot conjure anyone’s face but Jude’s and what must have been my own, briefly, in the bathroom mirror, flushed with alcohol, all my features unfamiliar.

The wind screams through Jude’s cracked window. He lights another cigarette and gestures toward the inches that are illuminated in front of us.

“There’s nowhere to go,” he says.

“What?”

“There’s nowhere to go to get out of the snow.”

We must be halfway down the main road by now, passing what I know to be the post office, though I cannot see it through the frost. It’s almost three in the morning.

“We’ll get there,” I say.

“Not us.”

“What?”

“I didn’t mean us. The snow’s going to kill people who don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Oh.” 

The way I’m driving, it could be June, an evening unmuffled, the car steady in the dirt.

“Yeah,” Jude says. “Oh.” 

I can hardly see him in the shadows, but I know his face is scarily still. I take my right hand off the wheel and rest it on his thigh. 

I recognize it. My hand. My hand on my Jude. I’m awake again.

“The city buries them, did you know that?”

“Who?” 

“The unclaimed bodies.”

“Unclaimed bodies,” I repeat. These are not Jude’s words. I take my hand from his leg and run my fingers over my lips. The skin there is dead and peeling.

“I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

I know he means that there is nothing we can do. I’m aware, suddenly, of how fast I’m going. I let up on the accelerator.

“I missed you tonight,” Jude says. He pulls my fingers away from my lips and brings them to his own, kissing each of my knuckles. The snow on the rear window sloughs off, all at once, to reveal deepening darkness.

“I was right next to you.”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

I have never known myself to be like I am at the farmhouse. I spend hours staring at the shifting fields and let my hands rest in frothing dish water. I am aware of myself and Jude, in neighboring rooms, drawn here only by each other. I do not pray for the days to be over.

“I missed you, too,” I say.

“Let’s take a bath when we get home.”

“Not tonight. In the morning.” At the farmhouse, we never wake tired.

“I want to hold you.” Jude stretches across the stick shift to brush his nose against my neck. 

The moonlight comes brighter through the snow. We’ve made it out of town.

“I’m right here.”

“You’re not close enough.” He moves his hand beneath my jacket. “I want to be here.”

“Jude, I’m driving.”

He doesn’t pull back, but whispers, “I sometimes want to swallow you whole.”

I turn my head to meet his eyes, opalescent against his shadowed face. He opens his mouth wide, as though considering it, and then snaps his teeth shut. 

I look back at the road. I have thought of myself like this before–a stone in Jude’s stomach. 

“What would you want with me like that?” I ask.

“We shouldn’t have to be separate things.” He leans in again and presses his nose to my pulse point.

“I wouldn’t be able to talk to you,” I say.

I will have to make a turn soon, toward the farmhouse. I don’t know how I’ll see the street sign.

“But you’d be there.”

I feel hollow hearing him say it. I bring my hand to my chest and tap one finger hard on my breastbone. The sound echoes through the car. 

“No. It would be just like it was tonight.”

Jude sits back and rubs the bridge of his nose, clenches his jaw. He is silent for a moment, and then says, “How come I’ve spent so much time missing you?”

He has been trying to ask me this for weeks. I can’t stand him acting this way, as though I would do anything to hurt him. 

“That’s not fair.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” He knocks his forearm against the window, then stares at his sleeve, exhaling a laugh that sounds like a sigh. “I don’t know why I thought that would clear the snow.”

I squint at the road in front of me, looking for the intersection.

Jude isn't finished. “It’s like for years I’ve been in love with your silhouette and I can finally see your face.”

“I wasn’t keeping it from you.” I think he is being unreasonable, lamenting our time like this–the days and days that must have amounted to an entire life without my notice. “Think of me,” I say. “I’ve been a shadow.”

“Don’t you wish you could have it all back? With me?”

“Fuck, Jude. I’m just happy to be here at all.”

The last of the snow slides off my window. The storm has stopped. We are nearing the intersection. The sky is once again distinct from the fields on either side of us and ripples like purple satin behind the stars.

“Is it the farm?” Jude asks. He’s not looking at me, flipping his lighter over and over in his hands.

“We’re close,” I tell him, though I know it isn’t what he meant. “We’re not there yet.” 

I turn onto the county road, surprised that my wheels take direction on the ice. I have only one more turn to make, down the farmhouse’s drive.

“I’m not mad at you,” Jude starts. “I just… drank too much.”

“I know you’re not.”

He opens the glove compartment and starts shuffling through the papers inside.

“Anything good in there?” I ask.

“I thought I put the instructions in here, for taking care of the house.”

I smile. “Don’t we know what to do by now?”

The snow is deeper as I turn up the driveway. I lean heavy on the accelerator, impatient as the car drags through the drifts. Our bedroom light burns distantly. I imagine us silhouetted in its golden frame, bending toward each other.

When he finally looks at me, there are tears collecting in the corners of Jude’s eyes. 

I move, instinctively, to touch his face. “Are you alright?”

He doesn’t answer, still staring at the paper in his hands. 

“Jude?” 

The farmhouse grows closer, its pallid clapboard siding rising from the snow.

His voice sounds strangely soft and unlike himself. “I thought there might be instructions on how to leave.”

“Oh, Jude,” I say.

We reach the porch and I turn off the engine. The cold comes quick into the stillness.

Jude pulls away from my hand. “Let’s go inside,” he says.

Sadie Wade-Stein grew up in Colorado, and now lives and writes in New York City.

22 September 2023

Tiffany Troy

Crocodile State

There always lived a crocodile in the swamp, coveting, hungry. That’s where I met her eye, as I
turned mine away from the bag of urine that had trickled out of my master. In my two-day
absence, he didn’t use the restroom. I felt my jaw itching to drag him down to show him the
animal I had become. That hunger was my love turned wrong.

How lovely a Wendy’s Asiago combo after two back-to-back tomato mozzarella paninis from
Starbucks. Hilton’s breakfast waffle soaked with syrup wasn’t all that much in the Crocodile
State. I kept remembering that all that money wasn’t mine but his, cash gratuitous like the tall
London Fog tea with no vanilla extract, as I savored the all-Americaness of me in its suavity and
intensity. I swallowed to not be swallowed.

Then I came back home to that bag of urine. Instead of pity, I felt anger. Anger at performing the
stereotype of an extraordinary girl who came back a crocodile that ate her master with his clear
bag of urine. It was the only way out of the swamp of never-ending work, the only way she could
rest her jaw, so sleepy from all that chewing.

An interview with Tiffany Troy about voice, ambivalence, and believing your day will come

How long have you been writing poetry and what drives you to it?

I was always fascinated by literature and dabbled in poetry. In high school, I got a pikachu for having my alter ego slay her loved one (and hence placed in one of Dante’s circles of the inferno), but that’s about the end of it. It wasn’t until college that I began to read and write poetry in the earnest. Poetry has since become a huge part of my life.

Why? Poetry is my girl crush, the light that makes me into my best self. It’s the Carrie Mae Weems poster featuring a photograph of people holding hands with the line: “Don’t Worry, We’ll Hold Hands Again.” It’s the late night listening to Mai Der Vang alumni poetry reading from what became Yellow Rain at the Mahoney Library and sheepishly asking her question, the curiosity palpable in our voices. As my mentor Dorothea Lasky says, Poetry is a party into the unknown and through that unknown we can better understand the arc that is our life. It is relational: I am always raised up by the greats before me and my peers writing alongside me, each of us writing toward a place where our dreams and darkest nightmares might be fulfilled. 

Crocodile State has a very distinct fairy-tale air, built upon by both the use of language and symbolism. Did you make a deliberate choice to use this voice or did the poem come to you with its own voice?

I love this question, in large part because you have been so instrumental to the construction of the voice: the variation within the poem, of the staccato rhythm versus the longer lines, and the prose poem form. Both help tell the story of the metamorphosis of this girl in the crocodile state, which of course is a physical space (a state known for its crocodiles) as well as a temporal one. 

The construction of the voice came with the mood swing of the poem, and by that I mean how the seemingly dispassionate tone morphs into an almost-biting one at the end. I was inspired by Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl,” where a metamorphosis occurs through the contact between the human and the animal, as the human becomes the animal and the psyche melds into one, and interested in how the animal teaches us something about the restrictions created and enforced by human world.

I personally enjoy the twist on this fairy-tale-like narrative because it allows the speaker of the poem to tap into both cultural stereotypes and personal history, but in a very subtle way that doesn’t feel forced or moralizing. How much of an influence would you say your cultural background has on your writing? 

Wow, thank you so much for this compliment! It means so much to me because certainly I was exploring the exoticization and flattening of Asian-ness (through the Asiago combo and the perfect nerd stereotype). I had that juxtaposed with the transformation of the girl-as-crocodile/ crocodile-as-girl. How do societal  pressures act like the aquarium of the axolotls to fold our selfhood into a type? The girl sees in her Master’s urine what “yellow”-ness means, and she’s upset because she feels pity though she doesn’t want to. How does ambivalence burden the girl and drive the plot and the stakes of the poem? These are questions I pondered as the poem progressed.

You just had a new book come out. Tell us a bit about it. What are some of the themes it touches upon and where can our readers get their hands on a copy?

Absolutely! Dominus is my debut poetry collection from BlazeVOX [books]. You can get a copy here: https://wp.blazevox.org/product/dominus-by-tiffany-troy/

For Passengers readers, I would say Dominus touches upon some of the themes that are explored in “Crocodile State”: the tension between the role the speaker has been assigned to perform versus who the speaker is; obsession over junk food as a vehicle of belonging; eating in its literal and metaphorical iterations in a zero-sum world; hopelessness before the swamp of never-ending work; and a desire to sleep and be good.

Any advice for poets who are still finding their voice, or shy about sharing their work?

Don’t give up! Take good care of yourself, and believe with your heart that your day will come if you keep at it. Be part of the community of poets and share their light. It’s a party, a party into the unknown, and lots of fun in large part because you’ll be with people with whom you’ve spoken soul to soul. I would never have imagined that I would be publishing a book, or reading for that same series that I have so admired. For me, it’s a passion that gives life color, and you can commit to it by reading other poets and always searching within the unknown chambers of your heart, as you continue to trek on your life journey.

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press), as well as co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Tiffany is a finalist of the Changing Light Award from Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama. Tiffany’s literary criticism, translation, and creative writing are published or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, EcoTheo Review, Hong Kong Review of Books, Latin American Literature Today, The Laurel Review, The Los Angeles Review, Matter, New World Writing, Rain Taxi, and Tupelo Quarterly, where Tiffany is Managing Editor.

15 September 2023

Andreea Ceplinschi's and Charles Fleming's reading of

MAN EXITING A MIGHTY FORTRESS

Written by Cyrus Cassells

Poetry Editor Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian-American writer, currently living on Cape Cod, MA. Being multi-lingual, she’s interested in the role etymology can play in creative expression, and how intentional vocabulary choices can help a writer find clarity for their voice and message. With her free time, she looks to burn down capitalist patriarchy, but indiscriminately loves humans, dogs, socialism, and walks on the beach. Her work has been featured online in Passengers Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Into the Void, Prometheus Dreaming, Solstice Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, and in print in the 2019 Prometheus Unbound finalist issue. Her fiction has appeared online in On the Run and her CNF was awarded an honorable mention in the Women on Writing Q2 2021 Creative Non-Fiction Essay Competition. Her work explores dysfunctional childhood family dynamics, various aspects of immigration, and trauma responses linked to abandonment issues and outsider syndrome. As part of the literary art community at large, she strives to create and maintain a safe space for writers who make use of creative expression as a means for survival. You can learn more about Andreea at www.poetryandbookdesign.com. She can be reached at poetry.passengers@gmail.com.

After spending a decade in corporate retail, Charles returned to academia in search of a more fulfilling career. He now holds a BA with Honors in English Education and an MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University. In his spare time, Charles agonizes over line breaks and collects rejections in his Submittable account. He also enjoys watching trashy horror movies with his wife and screaming at his TV while playing video games. For work, he teaches English at local colleges and runs the occasional poetry workshop. He can be reached at passengersliterary@gmail.com and followed @CharFlem37.

8 September 2023

Sara Tack

Women Work

Sara Tack is a multi-media artist and educator whose work creates social commentary about contemporary American culture. Working in any number of mediums she’ll move fluidly between video, 
 2-D animation, digital prints, photography, painting, artist books, visual poetry, and installation. Most of her artistic practice has addressed topics related to women navigating through a patriarchal culture; motherhood, female lineage, career, women aging, women’s health, body and self-worth.
Grounded in narrative, the work has extensively used typographic form to explore socio-economic and political topics. Experimenting with the materiality of language and communication she is consciously molding a simultaneously verbal-visual expression. Sara quotes Johanna Drucker who stated “the most potent aspect of Typography’s form is its refusal to resolve into either a visual or verbal mode”. It is in this space that much of Sara's work resides; a middle space between the written and spoken word.

Sara has exhibited nationally and worldwide, having her work shown at ISEA (Alberta, Canada), the Museum of Art at the Dick Institute (Scotland), Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary), Vancouver Video Poem Festival, Centro De La Imagen (Mexico City), The Kitchen (NYC), Site:Brooklyn, Schweinfurth Art Center, Virginia Film Festival, Art Center of the Capital Region, Albany Center Gallery, The Schick Gallery at Skidmore College, Robert C. Moore Gallery at the University of North Georgia, Bard College, Bennington College, and is in the permanent collection of The Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University. Tack is on the faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Department of Communication and Media, where she teaches design and visual communication.

1 September 2023

Nardine Taleb

body of a whale

I admit that I’m sorry for not acknowledging you at the grocery store, Omar. 
You stand at the same cash register, your accent 
an incision in the Midwestern chatter. We don’t greet each other. 
We don’t say hello or even salam, silence a testimony 
that I am closer to you just by way of how we got here. 
I see my father in you — in your skin, quick hands, foreignness, knock-
off white Adidas shoes. My mother, is there 
in your polite smile, your lowered gaze, your in-
ability to fully twist into the syntax of this country. 
Your gaze, avoiding, I 
set The New Yorker on your counter, the hair products 
to dampen the curls. This is how I twisted: I couldn’t find 
the fava beans my mother wanted to make an Egyptian breakfast, or perhaps 
I chose not to look for fear I would also have to get the kumin.  
You say, straight face, Want bag?
Omar, I am a white man in the body of an Arab girl.
I am a white girl in the body of an Arab girl. 
I am an Arab girl in the body of a white man in the body
of a white girl in the body of america, america with the body
of a whale, america with the body of a refugee, america with the body of
an Arab girl, stepping into a room full of wide eyes and blackholes. It is hard
to see the world without america in my body. I want a day 
where I’m not written off by curious eyes. 
Now you give me a receipt and so simply you’re tugging on history.
I promise I’ll tell you right, yes, I’ll take a bag,
I’ll take this whale headed nowhere, nowhere 
still being somewhere to belong to, still ahead of us, some kind of ocean.

Nardine Taleb is an Egyptian-American writer, speech therapist, and Prose Editor of the online literary journal Gordon Square Review based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Yes Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Knight’s Library Magazine, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Emerging Literary Journal, and others. She was a Brooklyn Poets fellow in the Fall of 2020. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @nardineta. Her debut chapbook flower is out now from Passengers Press.

25 August 2023

Angelica Allen's reading of

what a mother

Written by Jennifer Garland

Angelica Allen is a lifelong bookworm who dedicates her days to storytelling across multiple mediums. A writer, musician, actress, and educator, Angelica hails from California, where she currently resides with her rescue cat, Quentin (although they both love to travel as much as possible). She graduated summa cum laude from UC Berkeley with a BA in Peace & Conflict Studies and English Literature, studied Creative Writing and International Affairs at the University of Cambridge, completed her MPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford, and spent a decade researching and writing about sexual violence in conflict zones. She’s also taught classrooms full of high school students, UC Berkeley undergrads, and inmates at San Quentin State Prison. Angelica’s photography has garnered multiple IPPAWARDS Honorable Mentions, and she’s currently writing a book based on her grandmother’s life. Classically trained in piano and voice, Angelica taught herself guitar in college and has been songwriting ever since—stay tuned for her forthcoming EP. Although Angelica worked in the West Wing of the Obama White House for two years, she’s perhaps most proud of playing Beatrice in her high school English class production of Much Ado About Nothing. When Angelica later taught 10th grade English, one of her students admitted she had “the best poetry reading voice [she’d] ever heard,” inspiring her to become a narrator. Follow her on Instagram (@quigglescrumpets) if you enjoy scrolling through thousands of cat photos (Quentin is really, really, ridiculously good looking).

18 August 2023

Christina McPhee

Bristlecone

Christina McPhee is a visual and media artist based in California. Her most recent solo show was at KinoSaito Art Center, in the Hudson Valley, New York, in 2022. Forthcoming her collaboration with Pamela Z, Carbon Song Cycle, will be performed at the San Francisco Exploratorium in fall 2023. www.christinamcphee.com

11 August 2023

Jennifer McKeen Rodrigues

LATCHKEY

Latchkey kids have kids who are latchkey
& now the world is on fire.

 
Take me foraging through your
fluorescent food wasteland.

 
Feed me your fried spam.

 
Show me the pacifier necklace you wore in
seventh grade. We were still kids,
God,
but thought we were full grown.

 
Look at the scar on my wrist
I’ll tell you it was from a slap bracelet
  It’s a Lie.
See my left forearm
I put it through a window.

 
You don’t see scars
from pills & vodka.

    
Bags of black clothes show up in her bedroom.
Doing homework to Nine Inch Nails.
Double down on Pop Rocks & soda
see if that will abort the fetus.

 
Codeine-fueled recess singing 
in a bathroom stall.
Daily trips to the front office to go home
because we’d swallowed enough
cotton balls called Life.

 
Stare into everyone’s eyes to find
a warm, beating heart.

                                                       
Throw up, throw up, throw up                                                                        
  tomorrow & all at once

 
Going to bed at 5:30 on a Friday night
waking up on Sunday.

Jennifer currently lives on the sacred Powhatan land of Fairfax, VA. She is trained as a certified yoga therapist & trauma informed yoga teacher, is a military spouse, & mom. She has been published in The Muleskinner Journal, tiny frights, Amethyst Review, The Martello Journal, & Bluepepper as either poet or photographer. She would like to thank Celeste Oster & Not the Rodeo Poets for their undying support and love.

4 August 2023

Julie Nelson

Story & Clark

Brock is busy dying, but I am thinking of Reggie this morning and the way he played piano.

He played and played all winter. First, scales. Hours on end. Taught himself, tentative at first. He played with an index finger, long and slender, reaching down and pressing with a light and hesitant touch. Tender, like. Soft, as is his nature. He rested his whole hand on the ivory, measured the length of his fingers by the black keys. Learned the sound of the notes. Natural, like that, he was—feeling the basic sounds as if in his bones, trying out different rhythms and octaves. Relating to sound. As if sound was a person.

I said, used to be a stack of sheet music around here. Reggie went looking. Found some in the shed, boxed up long ago by Aunt Lilian whose piano it was Reggie now was playing. Story & Clark. Upright and stiff-backed like Lilian, that piano. Been here for generations, but Lilian was the only one could play. After she died of cancer, silence. The piano sat in the front room by the window. Dust felting the keys. Until my boy Reggie picked up where Lilian left off.

Reggie is like Lilian. Music hums in his bones. Never expected him to learn how to play much less read sheet music, but he did. He has troubles reading schoolbooks. But music, now. That’s something else.

“Play some,” Brock said on a day he was feeling better.

“Don’t know anything,” Reggie said.

“Naw, you’re fine,” Brock said. “Won’t matter if you play with one finger.”

I thought, or play out of tune. Needed tuning.

Reggie nodded. His eight-year-old legs hardly brushed the pedals, but he knew just how to enrich the sound with his feet, expand his range beyond the keyboard, create a bold tone. He turned to a hymn, vintage Lilian. Tapped out “Nearer My God to Thee” with his index fingers up top, his feet on the pedals below. Played without hitches.

“That’s right,” Brock said, dozing off.

Brock is no more religious than I am. But listening to Reggie, Brock thought of Lilian. Ten years older than Brock. Her face was like a lake with a storm sweeping in, churning and changeable, moods brewing on her furrowed brow. Never could tell how deep her waters ran. Reggie’s like that but without the tempest.

*

By July Brock had a major downturn. 

Cancer. Chemo, not working. Vomiting. Sat by the open window. Found comfort in fresh air, so we killed the A/C and sweltered. Let him drift away in his La-Z-Boy, the curtain fluttering atop his bald head. Ninety-nine in the shade, but Brock was freezing with the chemo flowing through his veins like an icy cold river, him sat there with fuzzy socks and a sweater, shivering. Chemo. Blood infusions. Caught the MRSA super bug for his troubles. Everything got worse.

Reggie sat by him. Swung his legs under the folding chair, looking down at his hands. My boy is quiet. Not like me, not talky. Gentle. Calm. Thoughtful.

“Reggie, play,” Brock’d say.

Reggie played and played. Lullabies. “Turkey in the Straw.” “Greensleeves.” He stopped when he got to the Mozart concertos, all those black notes crammed up, tangled together. Not able to, and me not able to afford lessons. Not able to find a job. 

Reggie sat there on the round, swirling piano stool, varnishing the Story & Clark with his shirtsleeves until it gleamed. Until he could see his reflection in the warm, brown wood.

*

Summer went by. 

With September, a choice: go to hospice or have hospice come to him. He wanted to be home. 

Reggie dragged a hospital bed into the front room. Cut flowers from the garden. Set them on top the piano. Found a cot to sleep in the hallway, near Brock. Planned on giving round-the-clock care. 

I knew better. I remembered Lilian. Blood came out of her ears and nose. She lost consciousness. I saw the strain on Brock when he tried doing home care. Meals. Linens.

One day I collapsed.

“I need help,” I said. “Cannot go on like this.”

Thought Brock didn’t hear me. 

Reggie said, “I’ll do the sheets, mom.”

“We need hospice, now, honey,” I said. “Nursing care.”

But everything costs money. Said so aloud.

Brock said, from his day bed, “We don’t have it.” Money. No insurance, no work.

“Home Hospice has a sliding scale,” I said.

Even though we all knew we were at this point, saying hospice out loud made everyone quiet.

“How much?” Brock said.

“Like $150 per day,” I said.

“Maya, where you getting that from?” Brock said.

Hurt my heart to hear him talk of money in that state. Wit’s end, I was.

“We could sell the piano,” Reggie said. 

All along he was just sitting there, listening. Sat there, hanging his head. So tranquil I forgot he was in the room.

Brock moaned. “Anything but that.” He begged us not to.

*

Reggie and me, we knew we had to. Sell the piano. Cash money to live on. Hospice, yes; also, food. Money for bills. Something to live on until I found work.

Rudy’s Piano Haul Away came. Set a ramp on the porch. Reggie left while they covered the piano in tarp and glided it down the ramp on rolling casters. Workers secured it with ropes before clicking the metal sliding door in place.

Got $15,000. Lilian’s restoration had increased the value, we found out. Mint condition, Rudy’s agent told us. No Steinway, the man said. But, worth something these days.

Still.

Silence took over the house. I let Reggie be. Brock turned away. Faced the wall.

Died three months later. 

At the wake, Reggie’s cousin Charlotte asked, what happened to the piano?

Reggie shook his head. “Sold it.”

“How much?” Charlotte said. Hardheaded to the core.

“Enough,” Reggie said, tapping his fingers on the table, his feet on the ground. All that music inside him.

Julie Nelson has been a freelance writer, academic advisor, teacher, and published author. She has hiked in the Green Mountains of Vermont, swam in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, lived in five states, and trained as a counselor. She and her partner live in southeastern Michigan with their two dogs.

28 July 2023

John E. Brady's and Allison Semmes's reading of

Curses Circle the World

Written by Allen Kesten

John E. Brady oversees both the narrated pieces for every issue of Passengers Journal, as well as produces each audiobook for Passengers Press. He has been performing for close to four decades all over the world including on Broadway and National Tours, in Film and TV, in industrials, in regional theaters, on cruise ships, in arenas, in amphitheaters, on cruise ships, and as an improvisor. He has been seen and heard in over 100 radio and TV commercials and won several audiobook awards. Favorite role? Dad. Find out more about his work at https://johnebrady.wixsite.com/mysite. He can be reached at audio.passengers@gmail.com.

Allison Semmes is a Broadway, Jazz, R&B/Pop, Classical Singer & Holistic Vocal Coach. Find out more on her site: https://www.allisonsemmes.com/

21 July 2023

Sean Riley

Big Sun

Sean Riley lives in Washington, DC and in central Italy’s Turano Valley. The imagery in his current drawings and paintings reflect the dramatic landscape of the Turano Valley with heightened colors and grand forms. Riley received a BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1999 and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Northeast including; Danese/Corey in New York City, TSA NY in Brooklyn, NY, Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA, Lamont Gallery in Exeter, NH, Arthur Ross Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, The Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY, and several others. He has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Riley has been an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center. More of his work can be seen at seanrileystudio.com and @studioseanriley

14 July 2023

David Wheeler

Rash

In the dull winter light of Seattle's early dusk, Lloyd would brush the new infection’s fiery valence. He stood at the window of a hotel room that wasn’t his own, observing straight couples link arms against the cold, in the queue for the Ferris wheel on Pier 57. Below him, they solved the slow rope labyrinth before boarding the festively lit cycle, which would let them off exactly where they got on, wandering souls compelled by small, circuitous thrills. He could not decide if they inspired his envy or his pity, before the married man, who belonged in this room, reemerged from the bathroom. Leaning over Lloyd’s shoulder, tucking his chin against Lloyd’s neck, arms tight around his waist, nestling the half-hard pouch of a jockstrap into the seat of Lloyd’s trousers, the man asked, “What are you looking at?” 

“Nothing,” Lloyd replied. Their rendezvous had come after rapidly laying out everything but their names on the app before he arrived. Their seduction was easy. They’d negotiated frankly about their desires and expectations. They’d exchanged information about testing history and decolonizing hygiene. So that now, picking up once again with flattery and dirty talk they’d said to others and heard again and again, the words, as before, weren’t there for their novelty. They were a tuning fork.

Striking harmony, they found their way to the bed. It must have been an hour before they stopped to catch their breath, legs entwined. Body hair tickled between them as Lloyd’s mind rode its own cycle of desire. With his chest pressed into the back of the man he knew only as M., he studied the imperfections, moles, and vitiligo flecked across broad shoulders. The skin had lost most of its youthful elasticity from age, alcohol and sun exposure. His own showed years in much the same way, a development he now took collagen supplements to combat. He started buying them in January, on his standing lunch date with his friend Darly, when the two refilled their HIV prescriptions. Upon seeing the supplements with their bright labels in Lloyd’s basket, Darly had waved a hand over them and then at Lloyd. “You’re sixty-three,” he remarked, “a supplement isn’t going to undo all that.” But they weren’t a vain grab for youthful looks. Just like the capsaicin rub he applied twice daily, they were supposed to help his rheumy joints—both methods which Darly referred to as “anti-science homeopathic snake oil.” But Lloyd hadn’t said a word when Darly cleared out the store’s inventory of chlorhexidine that day. 

M.’s hips shifted against Lloyd’s, and Lloyd nibbled M’s shoulder, salty with sweat. This much closeness would also provoke an impatient flick of Darly’s wrist. Public health officials had decided that skin-to-skin contact should be minimal to keep individuals from becoming colonized, and they encouraged everyone to wash with a topical disinfectant regularly, naming chlorhexidine specifically, to contain bacterial spread. Lloyd didn’t know what to make of the new conscientiousness that had sprung up in recent weeks, but there would be plenty of time to shower fastidiously after leaving M.’s. For now, he was content in this roost of physical intimacy, using the tender skin of his wrist to caress M.’s thigh, to graze M’s tired but not entirely soft cock. How lucky this man’s wife, back in Chicago, was to have him, Lloyd thought. How lucky for him that they were open. Or at least that’s what M. said. Hotels were only the half-truth of anyone’s life, and Lloyd didn’t want more than fragments. From these he could conjure an idyll, connecting and reconnecting every so often, as lovers for a night or two, watching the rain blow over the Olympic Mountains as they nested in a warm comfortable room, before departing again separately. All of the desire with none of the complications. The thought sent a warm pulse to his cock, which stirred in the cleft of M.’s ass. 

“The fuck?” Every muscle tensed and M. was suddenly on his feet. He brushed both legs with alarming vigor, continuing to curse before he fixed a furious gaze at Lloyd.

“What’s wrong?”

In the bathroom, the hiss of the shower head pierced a thickening silence as M. slathered the skin of his inner thighs, knees, calves, in antiseptic.

“What happened?” Lloyd asked again. M.’s face red, eyes wild, peered around the door.

“You have it, don’t you.” His skin was burning, he said. With a wince, he indicated the pink heat blossoming furiously on his brown thighs.

“No, I don’t have anything!” Lloyd’s appeals floundered in a volley of accusations. “I was just tested. You’re the first since.” Perhaps the man’s pinching and squeezing had brought his blood to ruddy the surface of his skin. Couldn’t this burning be a phantom pang of dread about a new health scare? 

Then Lloyd realized something about the area M. was fussing over. “Capsaicin!” he blurted. “It’s capsaicin ointment, for my knees. I have osteoarthritis and it helps with the pain.” His doctor recommended rubbing his aching joints with the fiery salve twice a day, a small mind-game to play on one’s body. Teach the brain to ignore low-grade pain in those areas and reduce the discomfort of the original ailment. It was also the reason Lloyd remained so diligent with a fitness plan, despite the difficulty in finding an open gym since the outbreak. 

Leaning over the tub, Lloyd tried to help M. scrub away the oily residue, now mixed with lube and sweat, but the combination of soap and water intensified M.’s reaction. He cursed. He was allergic to chili peppers, he said, and Lloyd’s knee gave out. He slipped until his bare ass settled against the cold tile. 

The day had started out okay, unlike the mornings he woke up stiff, barely able to shuffle himself into a hot shower, where he’d piss down the drain to save himself the trouble of an extra three feet to the toilet. No, today the grind progressed slowly into an ache that penetrated muscle. He’d lifted weights and tried to outpace it on the stationary bike, wearing gloves, careful to wipe machines and benches twice before and afterward, in accordance with the posted advisory at The Fit Nest, which included no sharing equipment and no exposed skin below the collar. Steadily, and with moderate weight, he focused on breath as he mentally journeyed to the center of his pain, to commune with it. He’d applied capsaicin ointment when he got back to his apartment on Capitol Hill, then changed into soft pants, and fiddled with his phone, lazily searching to commune with pleasure. 

Feebly offering support now in a losing battle, Lloyd could only apologize to the sensitive pits of M’s radiating knees. He explained how he hadn’t thought twice about the flush of heat he felt when he arrived. “I walk fast when I’m horny.”

“Stop,” M. said finally. “I can manage without you.” He turned off the shower and stood there dripping, a sorry but stern look on his face. It was the expression of broken trust, the indelible furrow of a suspicious mind. They had built this evening on an illusion of transparency afforded by an app, a luxury, a prophylactic in these uncertain times. But the connection was now lost, with no way to refresh this moment of tension into relief, a sigh and laughter over a near miss. It might have been different if they were both single, but this man had someone to protect, a partner who generously allowed him to pursue pleasure despite the looming risks. Someone like that must be shielded from recklessness, a flaw M. seemed to locate near Lloyd’s hip as he grew sullen and silent again. “There doesn’t seem to be any swelling—yet. So you should go.”

Lloyd couldn’t make eye contact either, and looked up from the floor to find the open chlorhexidine bottle left dangerously close to the counter’s edge in haste. Beyond it he saw the tidy caps of a small infantry of toothpaste, moisturizer, deodorant, beard oil, contact lens solution, pomade, and cologne, each in sizes complying with air travel guidelines. M., if truly the fifty-two he claimed, seemed to have no need of remedies for osteoarthritis, or their unsightly cousin of varicose veins, like Lloyd, who was now an inconvenience. He couldn’t find it in himself to defend his dignity. He’d tried to be honest. He’d tried to be smart. But now the shadow of a threat was enough to unravel whatever their fucking had sewn up. His need for release, and to fall freely into another’s embrace, which seemed continuously to purr beneath his ribs, pressed through that burst seam and wandered directly into the new infection's incinerator. Nothing he said could salvage tonight, so he lifted himself gingerly to his feet, dressed quickly, apologizing again, and left.

*

“I’m thinking about celibacy,” Lloyd told Darly during their next lunch date, a pho restaurant across the street from their drug store. April wind whipped misty air across Third Ave.

Darly, an interior designer, pinched a slice of fresh jalapeño with his chopsticks and dropped it in his soup, completing a culinary presentation that deserved to be photographed, to replace the sun-bleached menu in the window. “That’s a sensible choice.”

Boils manifested first in patients already hospitalized with other concerns, their cause being a drug resistant strain of Staphylococcus that developed greater virulence with each new antibiotic treatment. Then they began appearing on people who hadn’t been hospitalized prior to discovering the lesions. These community–acquired cases were a more contagious form of the bacteria, although they didn’t have nearly the resistance of the hospital–acquired strains. Until the two breeds converged: the combined virulence and transmissability only increased from there, and a going concern proceeded into a full-on panic.

“I hate it. Sex was supposed to be about connection, but it’s become impossible.” Lloyd tore three basil leaves and added them to his bowl, then swirled concentric circles of hoisin over them. In the bullseye he squeezed a dollop of Sriracha. 

Surviving the eighties and nineties had been brutal, losing lovers, friends, chosen family, acquaintances, in a long agonizing funeral procession. He tested positive on May 21, 1996, a year and five months after Darly, who comforted him as he sobbed into the cushions of a couch. His friend insisted they were lucky, because the protease inhibitors were here now and seemed to be working. Yet, living with HIV limited his sense of connection within a 21st-century gay community which slid, over the next generation or two, from the solidarity of Chicken Soup Brigades to neg-only wariness again. Weathering late middle age, too, made things worse. The wrinkles and the sagging, yes, but also the arthritis that restricted his movement; a back injury which threatened excruciating spasms after vigorous nights and made erections difficult to achieve as well as maintain without a cock ring; not to mention the varicose veins that were both ugly and painful. As the new epidemic escalated, the threshold for sexual pleasure was approaching an insurmountable summit for him. 

“Connection sounds lovely,” Darly blew on a spoonful of broth, “if idealistic, considering the sex you’re talking about.”

“Meaning?” 

“Meaning that it’s easy to mistake chemistry for connection and get carried away with yourself. Showing up for a moment is a lot easier than connecting day in and out.” 

“Maybe all we need is a moment.” Lloyd wrapped a slice of beef around a jalapeño. “In a continuing series of moments.”

“Serial Mom—” Darly said with coy self-satisfaction “—ments”

“Not that it matters now,” Lloyd blustered on. “People would rather masturbate to webcams and shut you off when they’re finished. Everyone’s too afraid.”

“You say that like you aren’t afraid of anything.” Darly lifted his spoon with a curiously ominous toast. “May going to the gym and setting your skin on fire—may fighting pain with more pain—give you the high-minded balance you once sought in meaningless sex.”

“I didn’t say any of that. I’m afraid of things.”

“But you’re afraid of the right things, right? Conservatives. Big Pharma.” 

Lloyd studied Darly’s smiling brown eyes. There were more things on that list but Darly wouldn’t mention them here, not in this restaurant, not in the light of day. While most people were afraid of letting unwanted things in, Lloyd was more worried about unwanted things getting pushed out. They didn’t bring up addiction anymore, not since they both got clean. Not since opioids took the mutual friends that other, older nightmares hadn’t.

“This fear you’re talking about won’t last. Once medicine catches up to this infection, we’ll come out of hiding.” Darly slurped, then dabbed his beard with his napkin, before adding, “It’s happened before.” 

“But that could be years. Assuming anyone still looks for cures anymore. We’re how many years into HIV? And our best solution is complete dependence on an outrageously expensive pill we have to take daily or we die.”

“It’s better than the alternative. And if that’s all we can do for this new thing, too, you can catch me first in line for that treatment as well.”

“Meanwhile, we will baptize ourselves in chlorhexidine and swear the oaths of monks.” He nodded at the paper sack on the floor beside him. “Thank you for that, by the way. You’re not very sneaky.”

Darly flourished his hands before his face, like Kira realizing she’s alive in Xanadu. For the first time that day,Lloyd smiled. It wasn’t the first time Darly had slipped one of his bottles into Lloyd’s bag. “Maybe robes will be the new kink!”

“You know what I mean.” Lloyd talked around a mouthful of noodles. “Plenty of guys have already serosorted and chronosorted us out of the picture.”

“Even though we’re more experienced in every way,” Darly summoned from memory.

“Even though it’s been proven we can’t transmit the virus when treated. The risk is so low it’s non-existent, and yet, poof! Ghosted. Because once upon a time people like us were a known risk. This new infection, though, it’s an unknown. A known unknown. And people fear what they know they don’t know even more.”

“Listen to you, ‘known unknown.’” Darly waved his chopsticks in the air, but his expression softened as he brought them back to his bowl. In addition to a wealth of camp, he had a relentless wit that could tangle anyone up in their own words, and it won him a legion of loyal followers on for-pay social media platforms he used to drum up extra spending money. But when he made his voice level and firm, as he did now, the tone pricked Lloyd like hypodermic. “I’m not going to apologize for where I stand. Like you, HIV fucked with my life and my mind in a lot of ways. So, hear me when I say, I survived that and I plan to survive this, too.”

“I hear you. It’s just,” Lloyd had trouble admitting that an epidemic had ripped his sexuality from him in his younger years, and he was afraid to let another one wipe out his final ones. “I need to feel some kind of agency here.”

“I know, dear. I’m just not convinced it’s connection that you’re looking for.”

“Okay, Mr. Solo Sex. What is it I’m looking for?”

“You tell me.” Darly shrugged away what momentarily appeared to be embarrassment about his online life spilling into his real life. “Casual sex has always been about convenience over connection.”

“Oh yes.” Lloyd twirled more noodles. A part of him, buried deep, suspected that Darly had never forgiven him for contracting the virus, too. “I forgot how convenient it was to be tear-gassed by police in a public toilet.”

Darly laughed suddenly. “You weren’t even there for that!” He was a classic but obnoxious style of handsome, mercurial but gentle. He had built his personal brand online as your dream daddy.

“I could have been!” Lloyd felt foolish for how defensive he got.

“We were, what, high schoolers in the mid-seventies?”

Lloyd turned up his nose. “I started cruising very young.”

“So, then you know that the restrooms at Broadway Playfield were a helluva lot more convenient than your neighbors or landlord or your parents catching you sneaking in strange men. You just come and go. Disappear into the night, no strings attached.”

“There are always strings—”

“You just don’t want someone tugging on yours.” 

“—sometimes syphilis or handcuffs. But sometimes it’s hope and satisfaction, too. You can’t get that through a screen.”

Darly regarded his friend through narrowed eyes. “Antibiotics actually did something back then, and a lot has changed since. We have to calculate the risks of the times, not weigh them against a few memories of the past, or some idealization of the future we hoped for back then.” 

Lloyd peered into his soup. “It may be casual, but it isn’t meaningless,” he said finally. “Not to me. I care about the men I fuck. Even if I never see them again, I want them to be happy and satisfied.” He paused. “And healthy.”

Darly chewed a piece of meat. “This is about that asshole from Chicago, isn’t it.”

Lloyd regretted mentioning M.’s string of texts to Darly, who took them oddly personal. The abscess had appeared after about two weeks. M. sent pictures. Gruesome, painful close-ups of a hot, angry boil. The messages woven between the photos were equally livid. It could have started with an ingrown hair, a pimple. It could start anywhere, on skin previously colonized, just waiting for an innocent cut. But the intimate location was incriminating. That Lloyd had no abscess himself proved nothing, only that bacteria hadn’t yet slipped under his vulnerable surface. Nobody knew how long colonies survived on the epidermis alone. What everyone did know was that a boil needed to be lanced within five days of appearing or affected limbs might need amputation; it wasn’t worth risking the infection entering the bloodstream. The drained abscess, then, required close care and an ordnance of antibiotics to stem further flesh decay, which meant regular outpatient visits to a wound care specialist and weeks of diarrhea. The last images Lloyd saw before M. blocked him focused on a putrid divot the width of a quarter and the depth of a thimble. A gangrenous mucous clung to one wall, and an oily black spill sluiced over top another. M.’s boil had been lanced after two days, and the prognosis suggested that recovery might take four months.

“I fully support your interest in celibacy, Lloyd, but not if you’re motivated out of some vague misplaced guilt, because you’ll just brood the whole time and I won’t put up with that. It wasn’t your fault. We both know it, and so does he. It’s bullshit of him to make you the scapegoat when he could have picked up that bug anywhere. Did he visit a bathhouse? Did he sanitize the toilet seat of his damn hotel room?”

“It was the Four Seasons, not some roadside dump.”

Darly leaned forward. “I read this article on Epsom about immigrant housekeeping staff at high-end hotels around the country, who are purposely leaving surfaces unsanitized, so that the rich clientele is more likely to become infected.”

“Now listen to you! That website is bullshit. You know that, right?”

Darly tilted his voice upward, as if offering a flower. “I thought you’d like that.”

“You’re talking about a bioterrorist conspiracy cooked up by a bunch of third-rate journalists who use leftist language to spew what is actually some pretty xenophobic nonsense. Now, drop it.” There was something urgent in his voice, as if he suddenly needed to feed the meter, despite not owning a car. “Listen to all the fear–mongering about this thing nobody understands yet, if you want. Hole up at home, put on your cam shows, but don’t come to me looking for a shoulder to cry on when I’m the only person left who’s willing to meet you in real life.”

Darly smiled. “I wouldn’t dream of crying on you.” He crunched into the jalapeño he’d saved for last. He let it burn for a moment before taking a sip of water and wiping the beaded sweat from his bald head with a napkin. “I love you too much. I want us both to be here for the cure.” As they pulled on their peacoats to leave, Darly, as he always did, gripped Lloyd’s shoulders and kissed the air three inches away from each cheek. “Maybe celibacy is the answer. Or maybe all you need is a closed circuit.” Then, recalling Lloyd’s last throuple, Darly added, “One with less drama.”

*

He’d typically appreciated Darly’s ornery analysis of Lloyd’s break up with Dan and Trent since it happened last December, even if his friend mostly just saw them as decent housing for a wild tomcat. He had needs, but where could he take them now? This new infection was cause for concern. The easy route would be to log off unceremoniously, but he couldn’t just disappear either, could he? He valued those relationships, having shared so much of themselves. A hospitality of bodies.

For the next year, then, he tried to commit himself to abstinence. He continued meeting Darly for lunch and drugs, and he’d cross town to The Fit Nest four times a week, because working out was one of the only times he felt right in his body. He performed calisthenics at home when he didn’t get to the gym, because he noticed a small dissociation fell upon him on sedentary days. He blamed osteoarthritis, cursing the glitchy delay between his brain and his body as he rubbed on another layer of ointment. Soon he thought it might be his mind freezing up, mimicking the grinding of his joints. A few dozen push-ups and sit-ups later, endorphins smoothed things out a little. He masturbated, too, but what began as a daily habit slacked off to weekly, then monthly. He lost interest in what the Internet could show him. It all looked the same, sounded the same; his hands always felt the same. 

He logged hours for corporate from home, video chatted with family and a few friends, and altogether settled into a sexless routine. He watched television less and read more, accumulating five or ten books at a time from the library, classics he had never read but thought he should, by E.M. Forster, Sarah Waters, Virginia Woolf, Glenway Wescott. 

When he first received the symphony’s summer promotional mailing, offering four performances for one hundred dollars, he nearly recycled it, as he usually did with glossy flyers addressed to Current Resident. He was no cultural devotee. But something about its quiet desperation, a full seventy-five percent off the ticket price if bought in a bundle, made him stop. By then it had been weeks since he’d been downtown. Darly had canceled a coffee date on account of how busy he’d become with design clients. Lloyd remembered his comment about being the only person to return his friend’s texts. He could afford two bundles, but buying them would admit that he needed Darly more than Darly needed him. True as it may be, he wasn’t ready to use a promotional mailing to say so. He selected several performances by composers he knew and one he’d never heard of, to remind himself he could still be spontaneous.

The symphony actually felt decadent after so much solitude. The first event, a sweet night in August when the sun was still smoldering on the horizon outside the magnificent windows of Benaroya Hall’s crowded lobby, was Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F. Familiar though Lloyd was with the music, the crispness of its jazz movements and its aching crescendos when performed by a live orchestra lured him someplace new. It made him imagine a romantic life as a post-Prohibition barkeeper at Second Avenue and Washington, running a tavern for the rowdy denizens below the Deadline, staving off police raids by plying one strong-jawed vice detective with back-alley trysts or blowjobs in the sex arcades up on First. Threads of a story he’d overheard from an old queen the first night he snuck into Shelly’s Leg as a teen, woven into a life Sarah Waters might have given him, if he were a lesbian, and if she wrote about Seattle, decadent days transpiring between dusk and dawn on the old mudflats. The music moved him, and Lloyd would not have noticed brushing his arm against his neighbor’s, except for the short hiss the other man inhaled. 

It must have been a reflex, because he gave Lloyd an apologetic look after remembering the shirtsleeves protecting the skin of their arms. Cute in the eyes but rugged everywhere else, the man wore paisley and had a gray horseshoe mustache. He also appeared to be attending alone. Lloyd hoped they’d have a chance for small talk during intermission, but the man slipped out during the applause and didn’t return for the second performance. It didn’t matter, because as the conductor returned to the stage, Lloyd noticed his ex-boyfriend Dan sitting in the section across the aisle, with Trent and another man. The horseshoe mustache slipped from his mind. Dan’s head turned slightly in his direction but looked right through him. In the weeks to come, Lloyd would pull up Gershwin as background music while he worked, and try to reenter the fantasy it first conjured, but his lustful vice detective in paisley would invariably transform into an expressionless Dan, then a disapproving Darly.

He hoped he would see the man again in September, for Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Subscribers tend to stick to the same seats. But that early autumn night, sun setting at intermission this time, Lloyd sat next to a ginger-bearded man accompanied by a bespectacled boyfriend. They hardly replied to his hello as he settled in, consumed with their own conversation about their latest friends who’d decided to get married, the announcement glowing on their phones. “So regressive,” one called it, while the other argued, “It’s sweet.” They were young and probably didn’t think much yet about getting older, getting lonely, losing people to death and progress. He wouldn’t interject his perspective that they should be lucky to have each other as company late into life, when others might drift away, because he knew that kind of bond didn’t require marriage. And because he knew an overly familiar rejoinder like that would read as eavesdropping, at best, and a come-on at worst. He was not interested in these boys, just hungry for light conversation in the warm acoustics of this massive concert hall, where he was surrounded by people and yet still alone. He had a triad once, and they had dispatched him. He now wanted to cultivate a rich interior life; some people vowed silence to achieve it. They were called monks and were, like him, celibate, he reminded himself.

The conductor emerged to applause and, after bowing, indicated a male soloist about Lloyd’s age who held a microphone, unusual for an orchestral piece. A bassist thrummed a line, and the soloist spoke softly, If while reading the menu, you have the feeling that you’ve read it before, the best thing to do is not to order anything. His warm cadence eased into the bassline like a sigh into a sofa. Several phrases in, violinists began to pluck along with his more staccato syllables. Even as the spoken observations remained mundane, the music rose around the voice to induce a potency that resonated against Lloyd’s diaphragm. He quietly leafed through the Encore program he was handed at the door. This performance was uncommon, even by the standards set by introductory pieces at the symphony, which were often premieres of less familiar and sometimes experimental composers. The piece was called “An Open Cage,” composed by Florent Ghys using the text of John Cage’s diary, one the iconic composer kept for years and years, and eventually published as How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). The title was a sentiment that made Lloyd sigh with recognition before a familiar purr fluttered suddenly inside his ribs. He read on to learn that Cage met the dancer Merce Cunningham, who would become his longtime partner and muse, here at the Cornish College of the Arts in the ‘30s, when the composer was still married to a woman. 

Soon the orchestra swelled into a crashing wave of music that overpowered the single voice, then receded to reveal a chorus of others chanting along with the final lines: As a New York senior citizen, I get public transportation half-price, except during rush hours…. If I take the subway, I must buy two trips at once in opposite directions, round-trip. With the bus, I am free to go wherever I wish. When Lloyd looked up, a blur of blue light caught his eye. The young couple beside him still poked at their phones. He gave a standing ovation and didn’t glance their way again once the horns section heralded the beginning of “Promenade I.”

*

“A closed circuit” is what Trent and Dan had called it, what they wanted. He met them at a sex and spirituality retreat, during a session on intimacy, nearly a year before the bacterial outbreak changed everything and made all-nude events untenable. Participants led one another through a series of exercises, alternating which one of them was blindfolded. The room was bright and spacious, with tall windows, hardwood floors and exposed brick walls, making their quiet instructions to one another echo. While the meditation guide swirled a Tibetan singing bowl, blindfolded lovers had to listen carefully to hear their partners amid the swirl of voices. The couple’s warm welcome to work together evolved into a substantial bond for the rest of the weekend, then shifted into a more serious entanglement. The promise of sensuous touch and erotic enlightenment had brought Lloyd there to reconnect with the body he felt increasingly at odds with; nobody had planned this. There was no prior interest in polyamory for any of them, yet they clicked into sync. 

And with little warning, they clicked right back out. “The worrisome thing—” Trent explained after ten months of a passionate but lopsided arrangement, as the final argument slouched toward denouement. “And I mean this about any relationship—is that you become so comfortable around someone else that you treat them as thoughtlessly as you treat yourself.” Dan had a penile discharge, and they were still waiting for test results, but it magnified a distrust already fraying the group. The couple assumed Lloyd was a promiscuousness pore in the barrier method of their sex life. To Lloyd, they would always be two against one. That the tests came back as non-gonococcal urethritis was beside the point. There could be no path forward if Lloyd turned scapegoat every time Dan neglected to piss after topping. 

The next week Lloyd had his quarterly check-up—bloodwork, throat and rectal swabs, urine sample—to which his doctor added a cursory swab of both arms, the tender undersides most likely to contact other skin in an embrace. “We’re starting to test for bacterial colonies present on the skin,” Dr. Cassara explained, sealing this third swab in a designated plastic tube. “The skin is our bodies’ largest organ, and we hope to develop a more thorough testing strategy in time, without being overbearing about it. But for now, it’s at least something. Easy as that.” A month later, Lloyd met a married man from Chicago.

Trent had a point, though. Love brought another person deep into your personal gravity, to the point that he’d become collateral in your good and bad habits alike. Lloyd was never comfortable with that level of intimacy, where someone he cared about bore the immediate consequences of his actions. It was why he only barebacked when he was single. He fucked boyfriends—back when he took boyfriends—with a condom. When they begged him not to, he could rarely stay hard enough, in spite of his cock ring.

Darly made an issue out of how Trent and Dan ended things. “You weren’t the promiscuity problem in that mix, if you ask me. I’ve seen how he gloms onto twinks at Pony.” It was an uncharitable thing for him to say, having practiced a similarly stringent barrier method of sexual health since 1995—and because it wasn’t exactly true in the way he meant it. Dan maintained friendships with a lot of the young drag performers and gogo boys on Capitol Hill, but in Lloyd’s estimation, Dan acted more like their mother than their Daddy.

Still, he felt a twist of bitterness after the final ovation for Pictures at an Exhibition, as he watched Dan usher his two partners through the crowded foyer. His fluttery sense of vague self-confidence, which had returned so briefly during the concert, faltered. Dan’s glasses, a striking pair of white athletic frames that wrapped around his stylish gray buzzcut, looked ridiculous outside a squash court. But his sturdy hips and broad shoulders from years of weightlifting had never moved more fluidly than they did in his provocative black mesh shirt and rayon skirt with a slit up the left side, showing off his bulky high-heel boots and chiseled calf muscle. When Dan stopped to let an elderly straight couple proceed out of the building before them, Trent, in a smart brown corduroy suit, held the door, and a young queer in a trim blue sport coat and white heels—whom Lloyd almost didn’t recognize as Lavender Scare out of drag—wrapped her arm through Dan’s. Her white-blonde hair tufted in front, a downy cloud on which Dan rested his scruffy cheek lovingly before they proceeded out to Third Avenue.

Lloyd left them nine months ago, and they already had a boy.

*

“I know it makes me sound like a prick,” Darly said, “but work’s been an onslaught lately and the cam shows—well I’ve been on a hot streak.” Lloyd only saw Darly at the drugstore that winter. It was rare he had time for lunch beforehand. This time he was running late to his next appointment.

“Or maybe it’s the weather,” Lloyd said, aiming for shade but shooting in the dark. A howling wet January was rolling over Seattle and it seemed like years since the sun had broken through his dull gray mood. The weather and fear of colonization made limited social contact de rigueur, so why wouldn’t everyone stay home and masturbate? “No,” he corrected himself, determined to shake off the torpor. “You’re good at what you do.”

Darly looked surprised. “You’ve watched?”

“I was curious.” Lloyd lowered his voice. The line at the pharmacy counter wound through toothpastes, where they stood, all the way back to laxatives. Most people wore gloves. Several wore surgical masks. He could tell Darly was trying to figure out his screen name.

“Did you tip?”

“What I thought was fair.”

They stepped forward.

Lloyd resisted telling Darly that the last four times he’d come were while watching Darly’s show. Not because he was embarrassed, but because he would feel obligated to explain that he wasn’t looking for more from their friendship. He told himself he was just curious. They’d been naked together at beaches, but until several weeks ago, Lloyd had never seen Darly act particularly sexual. He was charismatic and outgoing, but in a measured way, compared to Lloyd, who understood himself best through the lens of sexual habits. Sure, Darly made occasional allusions to hookups before the outbreak, but he rarely elaborated and always seemed above the animal nature of it. That he regularly performed solo sex acts for tips online seemed wildly out of character, and Lloyd told himself that his voyeuristic curiosity to see that side of Darly was the only thing he found erotic about the shows. To witness how someone he knew so well otherwise did something he’d recently lost touch with himself.

Maybe he was just worried. He remembered the days when anyone you knew might disappear. “Moved back home,” someone might say if they were tired of words like dead. But the words never really mattered because their face always said it first. It was worse still to watch someone wither away before your eyes. So, when Lloyd felt lonely, at home, and even several sets of push-ups and body squats couldn’t snap him back into place; when skin felt like fire but he couldn’t find the center; when he’d gone days with messages to Darly on read, he logged on and watched. He tipped a substantial amount every time.

At the counter, they received refills for their HIV treatments. Lloyd bought capsaicin and collagen, and Darly bought his allotted two bottles of chlorhexidine. He stuffed one in Lloyd’s bag.

The topical antiseptic was a runny gel that wouldn’t lather. It was the only way known thus far to limit the spread of the superbug. After parting ways with Darly on the sidewalk, Lloyd transferred the smuggled bottle into his gym bag to use after his workout, although it hardly made him feel clean, more like sterile. Skin dry, smelling astringent. It was difficult to know how much to use, how fast acting its chemicals were, where to concentrate application, when to rinse. The public health advisory suggested washing with it daily, but there weren’t enough rations to go around if that was the case. So, Lloyd kept it to the shower caddy in his gym bag, next to the aerosol disinfectant intended for the stall itself, and used it four times a week, when he believed he was most likely to be exposed.

He kept thinking about Darly offline compared to Darly online during his workout, a full body circuit of controlled movements mindful of today’s moderate pain. There were other men in the weight room, but nobody looked to find anymore, just to avoid. Lloyd was so lost in thought he nearly missed the lingering gaze of a young, fit South Asian man below the pull-up bar. He hesitated for a second and a split-second after that: direct eye contact that means you’ve seen and been seen in a way certain men have recognized for decades.

Twenty-five minutes later, that humid empty locker room grew fidgety under a stream of clean water after Lloyd and his nameless companion moved like muscle memory to the last shower stall. Lloyd hardly had time to sanitize it before the other turned on the nozzle. From their first touch, he had no difficulty achieving or maintaining his erection. When had he last felt this aggressive warmth, this tender hunger? The man’s dark skin pressed against Lloyd’s pale flesh, a danger to one another that went ignored for the several minutes it took to entwine their tongues and grip each other’s cocks, rubbing with the furtive madness of men as eager to indulge as they are afraid of getting caught. Bacteria were a merciless informant, and shower curtains, a known breeding ground, had been removed long ago. But there they were, renegades of their day.

The residue semen leaves after contact with hot water can be difficult to remove. In Lloyd’s opinion, it’s better to let it dry and brush it away with a towel. But he rarely minded when it glued his body hair into knots, pinching and pulling as a reminder of pleasure, transgression, connection, release. It was proof of life. So when they came, they pressed their bodies together as if to trap the endorphins radiating between them, squeezing their shared cum into intimate crevices and thatches of leg and pubic hair. Out of breath, the other man patted Lloyd’s ass and without a word slipped into another stall. Lloyd soaped up, but failed to undo one tangle of semen near his hip. He knew what Darly would say if the tight smudge on his hip turned iridescent and putrid next week. 

As they dressed afterward, the man looked smaller somehow. He was sinewy but narrow as he pulled on scrubby clothes. His black hair and brown skin were impeccably kept, fingernails filed, thick eyebrows groomed, face closely shaved. Yet, acid–washed jeans swallowed his firm round ass and clung to his waist with scrunchy elastic. Not a modern throwback but a holdover from an outdated wardrobe. Perhaps this man didn’t live much of his life in street clothes, a businessman or medical professional on an off-day. And maybe with his smooth dark complexion he wasn’t as young as Lloyd first thought. The dissonance between finely tuned figure and ill-fitted clothing made him smile with sadness. When else could he appreciate a beautiful body firsthand? 

Darly, like most realists, would consider them reckless. Now was not the time for rash behavior. Lloyd wouldn’t deny that. He knew himself, better now after much solitude, better at hearing the harmonies sung by risk and security, pain and paradise. When he left, the man held Lloyd’s gaze as he had in the weight room. What they shared might never be more than a quickie in a dank shower stall. Any more and they would be obliged to one another: names, numbers, talk of any kind meant a follow-up if bad news surfaced. Bad news Lloyd would keep from Darly, until it became impossible to hide, because he loved him.

Dave Wheeler is an associate editor for the book industry news source Shelf Awareness, and he is the author of Contingency Plans: Poems. He has written for Fatal Flaw, The Seattle Times, Catapult, The Stranger, and INTO. Find more of his work at www.daviewheeler.com

30 June 2023

Elizabeth Genovise

Excerpt from Lighthouse Dreams

He thumbs a cold lump of amethyst — good for soothing the mind — in his other pocket, but it has no effect, so he tries a different trick, turning to study the cicatrix of old tattoos across his arms. Usually this calms and orients him the way a well-worn map does. When this too fails, he does some deep breathing, dragging out the exhalations. He doesn't know where he'll find the energy to do the rain dance he means to perform tonight (always he feels he must find some new and dramatic way to convince them that his life is as romantic as he says it is, though they certainly don't ask for proof, and more often than not will just sit there smirking like a pair of bored crows). Per usual, after just a few hours he's already had his fill of them his mother who half the time was so desperate for praise, she was more golden retriever than woman, but otherwise had such a short fuse you'd have thought his father had left them last week instead of twenty-five years ago . .. and his sister who behaved as though she'd recently murdered someone in cold blood and was now trying to convince herself that somebody else had done it.

Let it go already, he wants to shout at them. Relax for once in your lives.

"Why did I even agree to this," he mumbles. But he knows why. It's not boredom, which is what typically makes him amenable to visiting his family; he's been living in the Ozarks with this newest group for just three months. He's here in Michigan because he learned two weeks ago that he has a daughter. His erstwhile lover wrote him care of the colony, then trailed her own letter there so that she materialized like an apparition a mere twelve hours after he'd read it. He'd nearly forgotten what she looked like. "Yes, she's yours," she said before he could speak. "Because no, I'm not like you. There was no one else."

He asked her what exactly she expected him to do (silently thanking the gods that she’d left the baby with her parents, sparing him the sight of it), and she responded, "Make a home." He was too staggered to laugh. When she would not let up, when her large hazel eyes filled and when he realized he'd deliberately let his memory of her dissolve after their brief romance because she’d tapped some chord in him he'd thought unassailable, he panicked. He told her to give him a few minutes to find his keys and then he'd meet her out front. They'd go for a drive, talk about this reasonably. Instead, he circled around back, threw his duffel and camping gear into his van, and gunned it for the interstate. He camped in grimy roadside parks in southern Illinois and Michigan, stalling, until two days ago when he met the family here for his mother's stupid lighthouse reservation.

His stomach roiled the whole two weeks he was on the road. He was starting to feel like he was tie-dyed from the inside, bile-bright and slovenly. For some reason he kept having flashes of other women he'd slept with, recalling the stories he'd told and the gestures he'd made over late-night bonfires. A wanderer's tales had the same effect as a well-played guitar, ensnaring women in sap so thick that they'd stay locked in place for months. But eventually, maddeningly, they always broke through. Once, a girl lying in his arms under a star-streaked Montana sky stiffened suddenly and said, "So wait. You left that farm in California when the fires hit, and you left those people in Washington when their kid got busted for drugs, and you left Wyoming when they started battening down the hatches for the snow. Is that your talent or something? Getting out of dodge?"

He ended the relationship immediately, the way he always did when a woman's adulation went dead. Protean as a reptile, he’d just begin again, holding forth for the next pretty face that turned up to his like a hungry sunflower. The first flush of each crush was just like the first six months at each new farm or camp: he felt so charged with possibility that it seemed he could become almost anything in this world.

Elizabeth Genovise’s newest short story collection, Lighthouse Dreams, is out now from Passengers Press. Elizabeth earned her MFA in fiction at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She has been the recipient of an O. Henry prize among other honors, and has published four previous collections of short stories, the most recent being Palindrome from the Texas Review Press. Her novella, The Numismatist, is forthcoming from Wipf & Stock Publishers, and her first novel, Third Class Relics, is due out from the Texas Review Press in late 2024.

23 June 2023

J A Hansen's reading of her poem

you’ve been so quiet

Judith A Hansen is a poet and theatre artist living in San Diego, CA. Her chapbook You Must Remember This was published by Gooch! Books. Her poems have appeared in Writing for our Lives and the anthologies A Year In Ink and Songs on the Wind (Editor’s Choice Award). Judith received her MFA in Drama from the University of Southern California, and she has performed in numerous plays throughout the United States. Her play The Voice Lesson was a finalist for Ensemble Studio Theatre’s One Act Festival in New York City. She is a workshop facilitator and writing partner for PoeticJustice.org, an organization that offers poetry and creative writing to women who are incarcerated.

16 June 2023

Dominique Elliott

The Last Embers

Born in Brussels Belgium, Dominique Elliott is a multimedia artist and professor. Her work begins in reverse: with a title. Her interests in the interplays of words and image, in transpositions, translations, phenomenology, epistolary works, reverse ekphrasis, have crept into her artistic practice through documentaries, painting, and mixed media. Her work has been published in Passengers Journal, Liminal Spaces, Fauxmoir, Touchstone Literary Magazine, The AutoEthnographer, Kithe, Red Noise Collective and L=Y=R=A.

9 June 2023

Craig Finlay

Before Anyone Sees

Rivers clean the world.  Rivers only help. It is 
November, 1888. A girl floats through Paris, and when 
fishermen pull her from the water she’ll be 
remembered. A pathologist will be so taken with her 
that he’ll make a plaster cast of her face.  They’ll call 
her L’Inconnue de la Seine, and copies of the mask will 
adorn the walls of every fashionable Parisian 
apartment for the rest of the century. Artists and poets 
will wait impatiently for guests to ask about her, eager 
to explain the beauty they can find in endings.  The girl 
didn’t intend this, but once art is out in the world it no 
longer belongs to the artist.  Still, Paris glides by her, 
and so too the gaslights and the singing from the cafes 
along the quay. The girl floats peacefully.  It has been 
hours since she slid into the chill, glassy waters of the 
Seine at Pont Neuf. A sharp intake of breath at the chill, 
and then the earth letting her go. Gravity looking in the 
other direction.  Hours, and she has traveled 
miles.  And the river is trying. Trying to get her out of 
town. Quietly, before anyone sees.

Craig Finlay is a most-of-the-time librarian and some-of-the-time poet currently on his Omaha leg of a lifelong tour of the Midwest. His first collection, The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island, was released in 2021 by Urban Farmhouse Press. He also published a poem in the very first issue of Passengers, when he was in Oklahoma for a while, when the pandemic had just started, when it still seemed like we might all band together to get through this.

2 June 2023

Matthew Bauman

Ossify

During the first trimester, my wife would stand sideways in front of me and slouch along the S of her spine. “Look at this,” she’d say, as if the small bump in her belly was showing more than it was. But really she wanted me to look with my imagination, to see what the pictures show us in the book about the pregnant body. The changes happening inside, invisible to the naked eye—clusters of cells forming into spine, brain, heart, organs; thoughts and dreams electrifying to life. At week sixteen, she said, “The bones have started to ossify.” I understood the word in context: hardening, bone becoming bone, becoming what it is, what it will be.

At the previous ultrasound, we witnessed our developing fetus punching and kicking against the walls of my wife’s uterus, not that she could feel it, this little leap of imagination from her belly to the overhead monitor, almost ghost-like as the form appeared and disappeared under the roving wand. And then the watery heartbeat started pulsing through the speakers: wow-wow-wow-wow, one hundred-sixty beats per minute. The heart’s drum—firm, rhythmic, becoming convinced of itself.

My wife and I married late in life and were in our early forties when we began to discuss having a child and the health risks of what the doctors called a geriatric pregnancy. I had had doubts about having a child in the first place—largely ambivalent but leaning toward not—though I knew my wife wanted to be a mother. My biggest fear was what kind of world our child would inhabit: rising oceans, megastorms, heat waves, wildfires, drought, food insecurity, water shortages, the sixth extinction. What kind of person would I be to bring someone into a world so bleak, so desperate, even horrendous.

But to look at only the last hundred years, people bore children during the grisly first world war, through the hardscrabble Great Depression, into another heinous war, on the brink of nuclear annihilation, into the rise of international terrorism, and now with global climate change. The future has looked grim for generations, yet people kept having children. We’re all proof of it. So rather than surrender to the inevitability of climate change and live the rest of my years in the yoke of despair, I acquiesced to my wife’s wishes with the prospect that our child doesn’t have to be a passive victim of circumstances—a future statistic of the burgeoning climate crisis—but instead, with the right upbringing, can grow and develop into someone who cares for the planet and defends the environment. In the second month of trying, we took a test. I had wanted a girl even before I saw the two pink lines. 

Our daughter will begin life in the Black Hills in western South Dakota, a place held sacred by Native Americans across the Great Plains. Before she can even crawl, I’ll take her hiking in the woods, dip her ankles in the mountain creeks, and lay her down to rake the dirt and grass between her fingers. Among the blanket of pines and the granite spires, I want her to learn love and respect and humility, pebble by pebble, tree by tree, until one day her heart and mind might be big enough to see the world as one interconnected body.

As our daughter’s bones ossified, when our hearts and minds were still soft and numb at the magic of cells and bones and organs, my wife and I arose early one morning to the news that environmental activist Greta Thunberg would be marching for the climate later that day in nearby Rapid City. Just two weeks before, the sixteen-year-old girl led millions of people across the globe in the largest environmental march in history. What was she doing in South Dakota, we wondered. Nothing made sense. Maybe the universe sent her for me, for my daughter, for all of us in need of a livable future.

We arrived early with large, colorful signs we had made that morning. People shifted in the public park, nodding at each other’s painted messages. Polite smiles and tender glances quietly acknowledged one another as brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and elders in the fight for climate action. Enough blue sky broke through the clouds to take the bite off the October air.

Several hundred people soon packed close to the stage. My wife and I stood in the middle, three bodies from the front. Local Indigenous leaders sang prayers of thanks and goodwill, followed by a drum circle to synchronize our beating hearts. And after an hour of song, prayer, dance, and unity, Thunberg appeared at the back of the bandshell. From the podium at the World Economic Forum in Davos to the assembly hall at the United Nations in Brussels to a small stage in a public park in the Black Hills, she stood like a hazy dream twenty feet in front of me, tight-lipped, stoic, eyes roving toward an uncertain future. The crowd murmured and floated to their toes. Apparition-like, she had been an idea, an inspiration I knew only from digital screens. And here she was before me, even more real than the girl developing in the womb next to me.

Thunberg stood short, narrow in the shoulders, and entirely unassuming. She wore her hair pulled back into a single braid and was dressed in gray sweatpants and a loose-fitting royal blue hoody that matched her similarly second-hand sneakers. Thunberg spoke only briefly, her voice and passion already known across the world, notably from her excoriating “How Dare You” speech given just a month prior at the 2019 UN Climate Summit in New York. Next to her stood another sixteen-year-old, Tokata Iron Eyes, a Lakota girl of the Oceti Sakowin. The two of them rallied the crowd in defense of clean water, indigenous rights, and a future free from climate catastrophe. They decried political inaction, the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, and the fossil fuel economy. 

Under that perfect bluebird sky, two sixteen-year-old girls renewed my hope for the future, for the potential multiplying within the sixteen-week-old fetus beside me. I see the conviction of cells becoming bodies becoming girls becoming leaders. The future is indeed female. And I must have hope—blind audacious hope against any and all odds—because if I didn’t, I’d break into pieces for bringing my daughter into the world at all.

I turned around to see the myriad faces glowing in righteousness. Fanning out in a wide arc behind us, people lifted their handmade signs: “There is no Planet B,” “I Stand with Science,” “Water is Life,” “Protect Mother Earth,” and on and on. And on the edge of this sacred land, on the edge of life itself, hearing the pulse of the drums, feeling the rhythm of our marching feet, our daughter lay in utero and continued to punch and kick and ossify and become.

Matthew Bauman grew up a free-range, forest-traipsing kind of kid. Now in midlife, he still loves hiking, biking, camping, skiing, and generally being outside, where, in nature, he finds solace and inspiration. He’s grateful for his wife and daughter, who have filled his life with tremendous hope and love and creativity. His work has previously been published in North Dakota Quarterly, Briar Cliff Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Black Hills State University in South Dakota.

27 May 2023

John Salimbene's reading of his poem

The Economy of Boyhood

John Salimbene is a writer and MFA student based in New Jersey. He studies creative writing and holds an assistantship at William Paterson University. He's been a finalist for the Tom Benediktsson Award for Poetry and currently serves as the poetry editor for Tint Journal. His poems can be found or are forthcoming in giallo, Bodega, Small Orange, Voicemail Poems, queerbook (a 2020 anthology), and elsewhere.

19 May 2023

David Birozy

Woody

David Birozy left the urban life of southern California in 2014 for the peace, quiet, and open spaces of Wyoming. Here he found a slower paced life in a beautiful piece of the nation where anything outdoors is on the top of the list for just about everybody. He is married, with two teenage and three adult children children spread across California, Wyoming, Washington, Nevada, and Texas. Mr. Birozy has spent thirty-two years working in the public sector, for both state and municipal governments in California and Wyoming. He has been a supervisor, manager, department head, and leader for twenty-one of those years. Mr. Birozy has both a Bachelors and Juris Doctor degree.

12 May 2023

Emily Lake Hansen

WOMEN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

after Eavan Boland

These days I’m a poem in a person costume. I mean nothing
romantic: flies buzz fragments of memory, frogs chirrup

over an empty lake. I come from a long line of women
without a country. From Ukraine to Canada to Jersey

how did my mother end up in Orange Beach burning a
home onto her body with baby oil?  How did I come

to this Americana: red & white checkered tablecloths,
a flag of spongy white cake. There is so little

of a home inside me. You’re America, my mother sang
Amazing Grace, the National Anthem, crying at the reach

of her own notes. No one is alive to tell me when
this hunger & madness started, the binge & purge

of our womanhood. By the fourth grade, my mother
wore a size 9 shoe, had to choose between high heels

or work boots. At age 9, my favorite animal
was the sea. I thought I’d live in California forever.

I wish I could say I’m different now, but that would be
a lie no more or less than this one. Of the 8 living women

descended from my grandmother, 8 out of 8
are crazy. We bake rolls of beer on our breath, rolls

of history in our bellies. If memory isn’t an accurate
mirror, I am sorry. To heal is not to say it didn’t happen,

but to make something from what remains.

An interview with Emily Lake Hansen on audience, meaning, and the inherent value of your voice

How long have you been writing poetry and what inspires to keep going in your writing practice?

I started writing poetry seriously in college (15 years ago – my millennial is showing!), and while my productivity and passion have ebbed and flowed over the years, poetry has been a hugely important part of my life since. I’ve recently been writing more nonfiction but I’m a poet in some deep-down part of me I can’t ignore – it’s how I process and make sense of the world and my experiences. 

This poem seems to draw a lot of inspiration from family history and background, without letting specific family dynamics take center stage. How central is your personal background to your writing? Do you ground your work in personal experience or rather try to write away from it?

I am always writing from personal experience in some way; in fact, sometimes I think I’m just writing the same poem over and over. What changes rather than the themes are the lenses I use to capture the experience, how close or far away I set the zoom. In this poem in particular, I was starting from more of a “head” space than a “heart” space. I was in the middle of studying for my comprehensive exams for my doctoral program and had been reading Eavan Boland’s collection Women Without a Country; it made me think about the ideas of both poetic and family lineage and so the lens was zoomed out to allow for that kind of associative thinking and to account for the leaps between generations. 

One of the most striking sentences in this poem that speaks to the corrosive loneliness of outside syndrome is “There is so little of a home inside me.” As an immigrant having spent half my life on American and half on European land, this one hit hard. Do you ever write knowing exactly which audience you’ll reach best? In fact, do you ever write with any kind of an audience in mind?

I’m so glad that line resonated with you! Though I am two generations removed from my family’s immigration experiences, I can still feel that displacement and loss of belonging. And as a military brat who spent her childhood roaming from coast to coast, I feel that loss acutely and personally too, like in some way the generational patterns of displacement continued. I try not to think of audience when I’m in the process of writing because my inner critic is very loud, but I do think of much of my writing as being for people who also struggle with the questions of “where is home?” and “where do I belong?” And I write too, as I think many writers do unconsciously, for folks who share my identities: folks who are fat, who are queer, who live with invisible disabilities or have experienced significant trauma.

To me, the theme of the piece shifts, sometimes uncomfortably, between resigned understanding of the circumstances that created the opportunity for generational trauma and a mild criticism of the immigrant’s eagerness to be assimilated into their chosen environment. In the end, the piece doesn’t tip the scales in favor of either, leaving the reader with a lack of resolution as resolution. As someone who often writes on similar themes, I’m curious as to how you arrived to this ending. Did it come clearly and easily, or did you originally have something else in mind?

I actually had a completely different ending initially. It looped back to the meta with a reference to writing the poem, but ultimately that felt too on the nose. I did want that idea to come through in some way though – that the poem itself was making something from the remains of displacement and generational trauma – and so I ended up with the simpler declaration of the same idea. I think because the poem got its inspiration from studying poetry, it ended up being in some way not just about generational trauma but also about how I use poetry as a way to “make something” out of my experiences. 

To expand on the previous question, what is your general editing process? Do you leave a poem alone for a while, or do you work on it until you have a sense that it’s finished? And how do you know when it’s ready to be sent out?

My process varies from poem to poem. Sometimes I get lucky and a poem comes out close to done, like it arrived on the page with the help of some mythical disembodied muse or ancestor. When I feel like that about a poem, I usually only wait a day or two to come back to it and adjust lines or shape. This poem was one like that, but other poems are much more torturous and end up looking completely different. I’ve been working on a series of Garden of Eden poems for example, which started as like ten separate pieces and is now just one poem in three sections and I’m still not sure it’s working. I usually send pieces out when I feel excited about them or when the current version makes me tear up when I read it aloud – that’s usually a clue that I’ve done what I wanted with a poem and that’s when I’m willing to risk sending it out. 

Any advice for poets who are still finding their voice, or shy about sharing their work?

One of the best rejection letters I’ve ever received – and it might have been a form letter, who knows! – said “Your voice and your work are valuable, and we wish you success with your writing in the future.” I’ve tried to adopt that as my mantra: that my voice and work are valuable and therefore worth the pain of rejection or fear of exposure. I’ve had the incredible honor to teach creative writing the last couple years at my undergraduate alma mater Agnes Scott, where I first really started writing poetry myself, and that’s what I tell my students too: that honing and polishing your craft is important, but your voice and work are already inherently valuable. 

I also encourage them to read and read and read and to find poets who are doing the kind of work they dream of doing. The poetry that resonates with you personally can teach you so much about how to approach craft. And I tell them to have patience (this is the space where I have the most work to do myself!). Writing and publishing are not a matter of now or never. My first publication came a year after my first rejection – both from the same journal! Easier said than done but try to trust your own unique timing.

Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, bisexual, and invisibly disabled poet and memoirist and the author of the poetry collection Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as two chapbooks: The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press) and Pharaoh's Daughter Keeps a Diary (forthcoming from Kissing Dynamite Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, OxMag, Pleiades, Up the Staircase Quarterly, So to Speak, and Atticus Review among others. A PhD candidate at Georgia State University, Emily lives in Atlanta where she serves as the creative nonfiction editor for New South and teaches first-year writing and poetry at Agnes Scott College.

5 May 2023

Marlene Olin

The Squirrel On The Driveway

When your eight-year-old daughter finds the squirrel on the driveway, she doesn't scream or shout. Instead her mouth looks like she's sucked in a bullet. Her face is white, her fists clenched. Mom, she says. Come look.

You see the mail truck swing by your neighbor's house and spot the telltale tire tracks on the street. Then you inch closer. The squirrel is a pulp of blood and fur. Its eyes are open and glassy. It looks like someone already stuffed it and stuck it on a shelf.

First, you blink. Then you taste vomit and feel woozy. You curse your husband for being at the office and wish you were anyone and anyplace else. Turning your head, you see the sun setting. Your footprints on the asphalt loom ten feet in the shadows. This is your job and yours alone.

Hurry, Mommy. Please.

You mutter to yourself as you go inside the house.  Crap. Crap. Crap. You grab a shoebox and a pair of yellow latex gloves. Then you return outdoors where your daughter's keeping vigil. You take a deep breath and with your index finger nudge the squirrel onto the cardboard. You're almost there...you're practically there... when the two hind legs flinch.

Jesus! you scream. You stumble backwards and the world tilts. Then a memory from eighth grade Biology surfaces. The picture's in black and white like a 50's sitcom. Your teacher is wearing a mullet and a frog's on a table. Even the dead have reflexes, the teacher tells you. The frog, to your shock, jumps when you cut it. Meanwhile your lab partner looks greener than the frog.

It's alive, says Rachel. I told you. It's still alive!

Your daughter is now inches from the squirrel. She's leaning in like she's going to start mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Thoughts of rabies and the bubonic plague race through your head. Don't move, you hear yourself pleading. Don't move an inch.

Your internal GPS repositions and sets a new course. You go back inside the house, retrieve a shovel from the garage, an old towel from the laundry room, a bigger box, and thicker gloves. Then you scoop up the squirrel, cover it with the towel, and over your daughter's objections place it in the trunk of your car.

The vet, a person you should keep on retainer, is located fifteen minutes away. While you race there, your daughter starts praying. Please God, let our squirrel live. Please God. Don't let it die.

You park the car in a space that says Don't Park Here You Will Be Towed because there's no other place to park. Then you and your daughter walk into the office. When you're carrying a box of squirrel guts, people tend to cut you a wide swath. The doctor sees you at once. Then she takes one look and shakes her head.

You guys did your best. But I'm afraid it's too late to save this squirrel.

Your daughter glares at you like her life is over. Then she stifles one last sob. Can I keep it? She asks. I want to take it home and bury it with my other pets.

The room moves in and out. Beyond your patio, lying in the shade of an olive tree, is the family pet cemetery. A host of corpses wrapped in newspapers lie in a shallow grave. Saltwater fish. Freshwater fish. Turtles. Gerbils. Guinea pigs. Hamsters. Sweat pours down your face. Then you find a chair and drop like a stone. Somewhere in the distance, the vet speaks. You hear her through the fog.

I think I can give it the perfect burial right here, Rachel. Let me take care of this one. Then she turns towards you and winks.

Hand in hand, you and your daughter head back to the parking lot. You find yourself strangely surprised that your car is still there. It could have been towed but it wasn't. Your car ride home is uneventful. You could have been rear-ended by a drunk driver or slammed by a truck but all is well and you weren't.  Your daughter grabs a granola bar from the kitchen, slides onto the couch and turns on the TV. Finally, there's a lull in the chaos. You take a deep breath and scorecard your day.  Compared to other days, it could have been worse.

Then you turn to tomorrow. As usual you list the known unknowns.  You could slip on a sidewalk. You could trip on a pothole. You could find a lump on a smooth stretch of skin. You think of all the misfortunes and all the missteps that await you. And while there's a good chance none of them may happen, chances are some of them will.

Marlene Olin was born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and educated at the University of Michigan. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of The Net, Best Small Fictions, and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Her twitter handle is: writestuffmiami.

28 April 2023

Tomas Baiza's reading of

Moon Rabbit

Written by Kenneth Johnson

Tomás Baiza is originally from San José, California, and now lives in Boise, Idaho, where writes and has served as a staff editor for The Idaho Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies, and has appeared in various print and online anthologies and journals.

Tomas's first novel, Delivery: A Pocho's Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery, and his short-fiction collection, A Purpose to Our Savagery, are forthcoming in 2023 on Running Wild/RIZE Press.

21 April 2023

Carve Stone

Hold On Tight

Carve Stone is an award-winning sculptor, exhibiting and published internationally. A Bostonian, working from a studio in Florida, carving into mined rock, using both traditional hand tools and modern electrical tools, Stone works in the abstract, leaving much room for exploration of the quarried rock. Carve is most interested in portraying our ever changing environment as well as how humans interact culturally and socially.

21 April 2023

Ellen June Wright

Time’s Traveler

(for Angela, enslaved, Jamestown, Virginia 1619)

If I could sail on currents / of minutes, hours, days and years in reverse / and find myself upon the eastern shore / by the old settlement / and watch the man-of-war lower anchor / watch the light and dark passengers / climb into the dinghy and descend / row towards the sand / if I could be there to watch the 20 plus ‘Ngolans / groggy from months at sea / eyes full of wonder at this strangeness/ place their feet upon land / then collapse / I would fill my arms with each and every one / like a Charles White woman or great mother holding her children / and I would wipe their faces / each one with a warm cloth / remove the blood and the briny seawater / the way a midwife welcomes a babe / just from the womb / even as she knows what the world is. 

Let me whisper even as I hear
a dirge of jazz clarinet and saxophone,
playing for you.

This is not Gilead.
There is no balm here.

You will have to salve
your own wounds.

You will have to be your heart’s
own Promised Land.

An interview with Ellen June Wright on imagination, history, the people of the past, and the form of poetry

How long have you been writing poetry and what drove you to it?

I’ve been writing poetry since my creative writing class in the ninth grade. My creative writing teacher, Mrs. Eva Barron, was a wonderful woman who made me feel like I had some talent. I’ve been teaching and writing poetry off and on throughout my adult life. Now that I am retired, I get to write full-time. I even sponsor a small workshop for African-American poets; it’s a safe space to bring their poems. I am also assembling manuscripts that hopefully one day will be published. “Time’s Traveler” is from my first completed collection, currently called Angela.

“Time’s Traveler” is a powerful poem that weaves together race, history, and tenderness. Tell us a bit about the poem’s dedication, about 1619 Angela and how you came across her. In other words, what was the inspiration behind this piece?

Early in the pandemic, I began to think about the NY Times’ 1619 Project and found some of the related videos on YouTube. I watched them intently and in one video heard a name I had never heard before, Angela also known as Angelo. Her name was recorded as part of 20 an odd Negroes purchased who had been traded for provisions after being captured from their original ship by privateers. (See: 1619 and the Making of America from the Library of Congress.) I wanted to know more about this person. I was under the impression that slave names were not recorded at that time, but I was wrong, and to have a name was such a gift. It made the woman all the more real to me, and I had an insatiable desire to know more about her. It turns out that there isn’t a lot in the historical record, so I began to imagine who she might have been.

There are a lot of varying approaches to poetry about historical moments and oftentimes poets choose distance through third person narration, making it difficult for readers to connect emotionally. This poem is quite different, in that the speaker fully immerses herself in the past, but not as part of history. She keeps her present-day knowledge and identity, taking those elements back in time with her. For me, as the reader, this infuses the poem with a deep tenderness, connecting me with the historical characters, and even more so with the speaker’s feelings towards those characters. It’s an impressive feat, seamless and skillfully done. What is your secret to this poetic empathy? Do you write about history or current events often enough that it’s become second nature?

Well, I’ve been thinking and writing about Angela for close to three years which gave me the poem’s title, “Time’s Traveler.” I’ve had to use my imagination to take me back some 400 years and really sit with what it might have been to be enslaved, not during the height of American slavery, but at its inception in the colonies. I had to think every day what it might have been to be a woman separated from familiar surroundings, vulnerable to the men around me, under the required regime of a plantation in a relatively new colony. I made myself think about her hands, her feet, her back, her homesickness, her grief at losing her family and all the emotions that I would have felt if I’d been in her place. I even thought about Lupita Nyong’o’s portrayal of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, beaten because she wanted some soap to wash herself. That moment was one of the most memorable events in the film. It made me want to explore the tender emotional moments Angela might have experienced.

As for poetic empathy, I’m an empathetic person by nature, but this is the first time that I’ve spent an extended period thinking about a historical character. It’s been a great experience. Once I’d written close to 70 poems about Angela, the early objectivity fell away and a connection grew. “Time’s Traveler” was one of the late poems in the series. I couldn’t have written it at the beginning. It was built on top of a lot of emotional excavation.

One of the highlights of this poem for me is the mention of artist Charles White. This is a seemingly simple act, but it not only suggests an entire visual world, it also brings to mind White’s unwavering belief that “art must be an integral part of the struggle.” Tell us a bit about how White inspires you. What does the mention of his name do for the speaker of this poem as she becomes “a Charles White woman”?

One of my favorite contemporary artist, Kerry James Marshall, speaks highly of Charles White and the impact the artist had on him as a young man. So, Charles White had been in the back of my mind. The more I studied Marshall’s art, the more Charles White moved to the forefront. When I thought of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to North America, I wished there could’ve been a monumental Charles White mother figure there to embrace those Angolans after their long and grueling journey, even if she couldn’t promise them they had come to a better world.

You’ve chosen to arrange this poem in two distinct sections, form-wise. The second half of the piece is not only arranged in stanzas/couplets with line breaks, but it also notes a shift in tone, a lessening of the urgency the first section leads with. What was your intent with the sharp shift in form and tone?

I was really trying to stretch my wings as a writer and take on new forms. I was studying the haibun and thought I might give it a try. This poem is not a perfect haibun. It’s haibun gone rogue, but I thought it ended up saying what I wanted it to say, and the form allowed me to create two distinct emotional sections within one poem. In poetry it’s okay to make up your own rules, your own forms.

“Time’s Traveler” leaves me feeling helpless between sadness and anger. I know we all read poetry differently, but what feeling do you hope your readers are left with at the end of this piece?

Although you experienced sadness, I’m glad that you had an emotional response to the speaker and content of the poem. When I was growing up, we learned about slavery but we learned about it without making an emotional connection to those who were enslaved.

Many of the poems in my Angela manuscript are about making a connection to the first Africans enslaved in North America by allowing my speaker to express a range of emotions from anger to sadness to grief. And that’s okay. What’s not okay would be to simply think of those who lived 400 years ago as somehow less human than we are, less terrified by the prospect of being captives in an unfamiliar land. We are helpless to change the past, but we must seek to understand it so we will be better fit for this future in which we live.

Any words of advice for emerging poets, particularly poets of color, who are still finding their voice, or unsure about sharing their work?

1. Set up a regular writing practice. A momentum begins when you write on a regular basis. First you write about the obvious things at the front of your brain, and then as those topics get exhausted, you begin to dig a little deeper or find projects of special interest. For me, it was my discovery of Angela.

In the summer of 2020, when I first heard her name, I felt a jolt of electricity. I was intrigued about this woman who was not anonymous. She had a name. In fact, she had both a masculine and feminine name, and I began to wonder about her—what her life was like and what her background was. I began to read online, watch videos and listen to lectures about the arrival of the Angolans and the Jamestown settlement. Then I began to write, and I’ve been writing for close to three years about Angela’s possible life, and she’s become a friend. Well, I’ve written almost 70 poems about her and without a regular writing practice, I don’t think I would’ve been able to delve so deeply.

2. Read as much poetry as you can—all different kinds of poetry.

3. Take classes or workshops to improve your craft. There are free workshops through the New York Writers Coalition. There are low-priced workshops and affordable workshops through the Hudson Valley Writers Center, in-person and online, where I also study. Because of Zoom and other platforms you can take workshops from all over the country or the world.

4. Study poetic forms and structures, but remember that your voice is unique, and you don’t need to sanitize it particularly if you are BIPOC. You need to learn how to harness its power.

5. Network with other poets that you trust to give you honest feedback, people who will challenge you to do your best and not simply pat you on the back and say, that was a good poem. If you can’t find a good writers’ group, start one. It only takes yourself and one other poet to begin a workshop.

Ellen June Wright was born in England and currently lives in Northern New Jersey. She is a retired English teacher who consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week in June 2021. She is a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and received 2021 and 2022 Pushcart Prize nominations.

7 April 2023

Debbie Feit

Thirteen Days

You sit bedside playing her favorite music on an old boom box you didn’t know your parents still had and probably thought they should have gotten rid of long ago but here you are placing a Helen Reddy cassette, yes a cassette, in the damn thing. Helen fills the room and your eyes fill with tears because for thirteen days you sit at the table beside the hospital bed that’s been delivered to your parents’ home. The bed where your mother will spend her remaining days while you sleep in the bed in the guestroom, not that you’re a guest, you’ve landed a front row seat to the horror show and have quickly been promoted from ticket holder to director. You sit at the table beside the hospital bed and eat tuna sandwiches that your aunt makes and you think it strange that she adds garlic powder and pepper but you enjoy the taste and you realize that it’s the combination of garlic and pepper and tuna that you find more surprising than the fact that your mother is non-responsive and lying in a hospital bed in the living room but you’ve never had tuna prepared that way before and your mother in a vegetative state, that has been going on for months, that is something you’ve become accustomed to and it’s the garlic and pepper and tuna combo that is far more novel. You eat pizza. You eat deli. You eat Chinese food. You eat all this and more because it takes thirteen days for your mother to die. Thirteen days of three squares and grocery shopping and buying rain boots at the mall. Expensive Hunter boots that your sister insists you both purchase, using your parents’ credit card, because that’s what your mother would have wanted. Your mother who found so much joy in shopping for you, cute blouses with pretty embroidery, battery powered candles, a washer and dryer more than thirty years ago when you moved into your first apartment, wouldn’t have found it inappropriate that you and your sister drove out to the mall to shop for yourselves in between waiting for her to die. You’re spending thirteen days overseeing homework long distance because your kids are in Michigan and you’re in New York and you exist in the in-between just as your mother does.  You’re spending thirteen days paying bills and making phone calls but you’re no longer doing any research because you’ve already spent fifty-seven days on that, trying to understand what went wrong, how the doctor fucked up, you’re contacting anyone who will listen, anyone who might be able to advise, including the physician who treated former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who, like your mother, also ended up in a coma, and it doesn’t occur to you for a moment not to contact the former Israeli Prime Minister’s doctor because it can’t hurt to ask and because you’re desperate to save your mother’s life and she’s your mother so she rates way higher in importance than the former Israeli Prime Minister or even the current Israeli Prime Minister as far as you’re concerned and you’re ecstatic when the doctor agrees to review your mother’s medical records but that is short lived because he cannot offer anything new to try and he doesn’t understand any more than you do how a simple knee replacement resulted in your mother never complaining about her knee, never complaining about anything else, ever again, and it’s crazy to realize that the surgery was actually successful, it actually got your mother back on her feet momentarily, even from the brief shuffle from her bed to the bathroom you could see that she would be able to walk more easily, walk with less pain but that was before she walked to the other side, before she walked you and your dad over to the funeral home to select her casket. You’re spending thirteen days paying bills and making phone calls, phone calls, phone calls and playing so many games of backgammon with your niece who has no idea that she is giving you a gift by playing the game almost every evening. She has no idea that playing backgammon with her means you get to think about your next move on the board and not the next step you need to take with the doctors or the hospital or the rehab centers and that is truly a gift. The hospital gives you a list of rehab centers to contact, which you do and you quickly learn that every place on the list is basically a parking lot for people like your mom and you have to find a place that offers rehab for brain injury on your own, which you do. You find a place that will take her and it takes them two weeks to evaluate her and report back to you and offer, for the first time in almost two months, an accurate description of what her quality of life might be with treatment and after that meeting you and your sister and your dad and your aunt go to lunch to talk it over and cry over your sandwiches and it doesn’t take long to conclude that it’s finally time to let your mother go and that’s when she and the hospital bed arrive back home where she’ll spend thirteen days while you spend each of those days watching crime procedurals on TV where the serial killers and pedophiles and rapists are a welcome reprieve. And you wonder when your mother will finally have her reprieve from the in-between, when you and your sister and your father will have your reprieve and when you will finally consider the small glass bottle in the fridge that arrived with the hospice nurse, you consider it for many days, you consider it with your therapist by phone because like your husband and children she is also in Michigan while you are in New York and you’re not sure what to do even though you very clearly know your mother would not have wanted this, would not have wanted the feeding tube and the months in the hospital and you very clearly hear her voice saying that if anything were to happen to her that you should pull the plug, but still, she’s your mother and you want to do what’s right, do what she wants, but part of you is struggling so you talk with your therapist and she reframes the situation for you, she explains that the glass bottle will make your mother more comfortable, it will ease her breathing but this conversation is leaving you breathless because you can’t stop sobbing, you’re sobbing as you listen to her give you assurances that it’s OK to make this decision, she serves you up assurances just as calmly as you serve your mother the drops. And then you wait. You wait to see how much longer it will take, how much longer until you reach the end of this nightmare, you sit bedside with your father as he tells your mother that it’s OK for her to go, and more days go by and you can’t spend all of them sitting with her so you go upstairs and take refuge with your serial killers, pedophiles and rapists, you watch them on the TV in your parents’ bedroom, you sit on your mother’s side of the bed, knowing that you will never again watch TV with her, she will never again scratch your back, the two of you will never again laugh as she calls you a bitch and that’s when you hear your father screaming your name and you run downstairs and you learn she is gone. You learn it took thirteen days on hospice for your mother to die, plus the fifty-seven days in the hospital and rehab before that, you have lost your mother, you have lost entire concepts like loyalty and love and complete unadulterated acceptance, you’ve lost comfort and stability and history, you’ve lost the ground beneath your feet, your mother has left this world and you are left to navigate it without her, to redefine your family now that it has been reduced, but that doesn’t have to happen today, today you can mourn your loss and be with your loved ones, eat fried chicken brought over by your mother’s best friend and wonder how the hell you will ever write her eulogy, how you will ever be able to pour your insides onto the page and then share them with a room full of people, but for now, you just need to eat a drumstick (and you wonder how you’ll do that too) and there’s only one thing you no longer have to wonder about and that’s how long it will take your mother to die because you learned that today. It takes thirteen days.

Debbie Feit is an accidental mental health advocate, unrelenting Jewish mother and author of The Parent’s Guide to Speech and Language Problems (McGraw-Hill) in addition to numerous texts to her children that often go unanswered. Her work has appeared in SheKnows, Insider, Kveller, Emerge Literary Journal, The Aurora Journal and Words & Whispers, as well as on her mother’s bulletin board, with forthcoming pieces in Five Minutes. She is at work on a novel whose completion she fears may also be fictitious. You can read about her thoughts on mental health issues, her life as a writer and her husband’s inability to see crumbs on the kitchen counter on Instagram @debbiefeit or at debbiefeit.com

31 April 2023

Salvador Espriu translated by Cyrus Cassells

Song of Triumphant Night

Where the gold slowly ends,
flags, unfurling night.

Listen to the roar
of countless waters
and a wind opposing you:
unbridled horses.

When you hear the hunter’s horn,
its bold blast,
you’ll be summoned forever
to surrender to dusk’s kingdom.

An ancient, deep-rooted pain
that has never known dawn!

After the Trees

When I can no longer lose myself
in lush snow, an acolyte
of lights and the clashing horizons
looming above
my country’s imperiled trees,
I’ll know the wanderer’s bone-deep weariness
for the bonanza
of a home-place and fountain,
exhilarating smells of earth
and sliced bread set on the table.
Then, unchained at last
from fear and hope,
I’ll lull myself to sleep forever,
listening to the slow
sound of hoes in broad fields,
the rustle of dusk
among the vine-tendrils.

Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) was Catalan Spain’s most venerated 20th century man of letters and its main contender for the Nobel Prize. After a sickly childhood in which Espriu was seriously ill for two years, he began publishing short stories and novels during the early 1930’s. During that same period he studied history and law, and was on the verge of taking a degree in classical languages when the Spanish Civil War erupted. He was then drafted into the army and served until 1939. Espriu’s first book of poetry, Sinera Cemetery, was published in an underground edition in 1946. Like many of his stories, it depicts the small village of Arenys de Mar (Sinera), his parents’ hometown in the Costa del Maresme, a little north of Barcelona, where the poet had spent a fair amount of his youth. Espriu’s poetry wed political critique and denunciation with a brand of austere lyricism and often brooding, death-obsessed imagery, as the flame-keeping poet prevailed, despite Franco’s long, truculent ban against the public use of Catalan. He fashioned a series of parallels between Jews and Catalans, whom Espriu felt were exiled from their collective identity even while they remained in their own land. 2013, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, was declared “The Year of Espriu” throughout Catalonia.

Cyrus Cassells, the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas, is the author of nine books of poetry, including Soul Make a Path through Shouting, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, and The World That The Shooter Left Us, (Four Way Books: 2022). He is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, which garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2019 Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. His honors include a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the National Poetry Series, an NAACP Image Award nomination, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a tenured Professor of English at Texas State University.

24 March 2023

John E. Brady and Andreea Ceplinschi's reading of 

Aerodynamic Lift

Written by Candice Kelsey

John E. Brady oversees both the narrated pieces for every issue of Passengers Journal, as well as produces each audiobook for Passengers Press. He has been performing for close to four decades all over the world including on Broadway and National Tours, in Film and TV, in industrials, in regional theaters, on cruise ships, in arenas, in amphitheaters, on cruise ships, and as an improvisor. He has been seen and heard in over 100 radio and TV commercials and won several audiobook awards. Favorite role? Dad. Find out more about his work at https://johnebrady.wixsite.com/mysite. He can be reached at audio.passengers@gmail.com.

Poetry Editor Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian-American writer, currently living on Cape Cod, MA. Being multi-lingual, she’s interested in the role etymology can play in creative expression, and how intentional vocabulary choices can help a writer find clarity for their voice and message. With her free time, she looks to burn down capitalist patriarchy, but indiscriminately loves humans, dogs, socialism, and walks on the beach. Her work has been featured online in Passengers Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Into the Void, Prometheus Dreaming, Solstice Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, and in print in the 2019 Prometheus Unbound finalist issue. Her fiction has appeared online in On the Run and her CNF was awarded an honorable mention in the Women on Writing Q2 2021 Creative Non-Fiction Essay Competition. Her work explores dysfunctional childhood family dynamics, various aspects of immigration, and trauma responses linked to abandonment issues and outsider syndrome. As part of the literary art community at large, she strives to create and maintain a safe space for writers who make use of creative expression as a means for survival. You can learn more about Andreea at www.poetryandbookdesign.com. She can be reached at poetry.passengers@gmail.com.

17 March 2022

Rachel Berkowitz

Ember Storm

Rachel Berkowitz lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Born in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in London, Rachel Berkowitz graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the UCLA School of Art and Architecture in 2016. Rachel is currently showcasing paintings for a solo exhibition February - May 2023 , called “Biophilic Harmonies”. Previously, she has exhibited in solo painting and photography shows, group Fine Art shows and at global artist events in Los Angeles, London and Japan. Her artist residencies range from the La Napoule Artist Foundation in France, to the Slade School of Art London Summer Intensive in England to the Volcanoes of Lassen Volcanic National Park, in California. 

Rachel has been awarded first place in various International Fine Art competitions and has received numerous private and public commissions from staging paintings for Palm Springs Modernism Week, to painting a mural for Bill Nye, The Science Guy’s new videos filmed at The Planetary Society in Pasadena. She is currently the resident artist at Zensai, an Art and Fashion streetwear store in Beverly Hills, where she customizes clothing that features her own artwork. Rachel has self-published three complete Fine Art photography books. One of her most popular series titled “Fairfax Royalty” was displayed at a booth for Gallery 1202 in The LA Art Show, 2020. 

10 March 2023

Elizabeth Sylvia

On Learning that Kim Kardashian Exceeded her Water Allowance by 232,000 Gallons in June

The guide pauses to tell her group
that when Marie Antoinette
walked these paths
Versailles swallowed
as much water
in one day
as Paris
used in a month.
A likeness of the sun god
rises in the gardens’
central pool,
barely harnessing
his frenzied horses
of the dawn.

L.A. glistens
with elsewhere’s water.
Snow off the Sierras
misting the carpets of lawn,
collecting on the leaves
of imported citrus, every fruit
a globe bursting with juice.

At Versailles, too,
oranges were grown.

An interview with Elizabeth Sylvia on her poetic process, Marie Antoinette, and Shakespeare’s plays

Conducted by Molly Zhu

How did you find yourself writing poetry, and do you write in any other genres?

I only write poetry. I think it became my modality because between being a parent and having a job, who could possibly write a novel? I also enjoy the immersive and unique experience of being inside a poem. Even when a novel is immersive, it doesn’t feel the same to me. A novel is like a pool you wade into, and a poem is a lake you just jump right in. I think having a limited amount of time and the intense emotional compression of poetry reflects the temporal compression of modern life.

Are you saying that the way a poem unfolds is more of how we experience our emotions?

Yeah. The emotional ride of a poem, most of the time, takes place pretty immediately and we do experience emotion that way. But we also really experience time that way because most of us are busy so when we’re actually present, either in the creative space or in the intense emotional space, it is the kind of immediacy that poetry reflects the best. 

What in your life sparks that sort of inspiration for you to pick up your pen and start writing?

The thing that interests me is, how am I implicated in systems that I want to reject but don’t? Meaning, how do we navigate the world when you see things you want to change, but also you are served by those same things? And I’m a public-school teacher, so a lot of the times I see more of the spectrum of society than other people of my class because I interact with a lot of kids who have a lot of different life experiences than I have. So, I constantly see how systems can perpetuate these terrible things and I don’t want to participate in them, but of course I am. That’s a huge part of what I’m interested in, is what is my responsibility to the greater world?

I like your take on the tension between the benefit from, and rejection of, these systems. I feel like I struggle with this concept as it relates to art. Art serves to inspire others to push forward the sort of change we want to see, but it is not the change itself – that’s an interesting tension too, I think.

So, the philosopher Peter Singer is such a pure example of someone who is willing to push that discussion as far it can be pushed and I could be more like Peter Singer and I could take all of the money I spend submitting to magazines and ordering them and going to poetry workshops, and I could make direct payments to people who really need it, and I’m not doing that. And sometimes that feels really terrible, too. 

I like this point! But also, the Singer principle can be a little too utilitarian. Art for art’s sake is just as valuable, I suppose. It’s not just the change we’re making but the fact that we’re writing about this moment in this overall fabric that we share and questioning what it means to be human, and what it means to care about humanity? Maybe that’s the purpose art serves.

Yes, and sometimes when I start to feel bad about it, I do take a lot of solace in the idea that every single human culture produces art. No matter what the circumstances, art is fundamental to humanity and is as universal as language. So therefore, if we stopped creating art, we’d be losing something essential to our humanity. 

What are you currently working on? I saw that these Marie Antoinette themed poems are part of your next collection.

So that collection reflects a lot of the things we’ve been talking about in terms of, what is essential to life and particularly how, during the pandemic, I was a little bit weirded out by the media perpetuating self-care catered to the privileged few. I had been thinking about Marie Antoinette anyway because the daughter of a friend of mine made a comment: we were picking blueberries and her mom said, “Oh this is so nice”, and she said, “Yeah, but also like Marie Antoinette’s fake farm.” And this made me laugh because there’s this “pursuit of the Instagrammable-authentic” of which Marie Antoinette is a godmother. This connected me to this idea of excess and how the overconsumption of the French kings led to revolution in a way that parallels how the overconsumption in modern life is leading to the climate disaster. I read that the average American has more energy available to them than Louis the Fourteenth had in manpower at Versailles. Then I started reading a bunch of biographies of Marie Antoinette and I really wanted her to be this vapid, white-privileged friend. But then when I started reading about her life, I started to feel really sympathetic towards her!

For example, she was engaged to be married when she was thirteen and when she had just turned fourteen, she was sent to France from Austria and she never saw her mother again. She didn’t speak French very well, she couldn’t rely on anyone, everyone at the court hated her. When you read about her, you come to see how limited and powerless she was within her own power. And that to me reflects how we persist in systems that in some ways damage us, but also hold us up. 

Also, the quote from the beginning of the poem comes directly from a tour guide at Versailles. France had a horrible drought this summer. In certain places, sunken Nazi ships were reappearing, like relics that people hadn’t seen in hundreds of years were reappearing because the water table had gotten so low.

I’d love to hear about your writing process. How does a poem come to existence to you, how much editing do you do versus simply spitting out a poem from your head?

Well, normally I’m a big editor. Sometimes I will go back and rewrite entire poems, but with this poem, I made almost no edits and it came out all in one piece. I think I had that detail about how much water Versailles used sitting in my head since the summer, and then I read an article on NPR about celebrities’ water usage. By the way I should say, Kim Kardashian was not the worst offender, she was just the best choice for the poem.

How long have you been writing poetry?

I have been writing poetry intermittently since I was a teenager. I ramped up with writing when my daughters were little and felt like I needed some identity that existed outside of being a parent and a worker. Then about six years ago, I was invited to join a local writing group and that shifted so much for me because I finally had people to be consistent with, and who were thoughtful about my writing, and they were the ones who pushed me to start publishing. And my first poem was published four years ago.

How has your writing changed throughout the years?

You know when I first started writing, I often struggled to find subjects to write about. And I would write things and I knew that they didn’t have a sense of urgency, even though they might’ve been mechanically skilled. There are so many things I want to write about now! It could be that I’m older now and closer to death. If you think about Keats, everything he wrote after he found out he was going to die was a banger! 

I’m always interested in the relationship between the self and the social world. So, my first book that came out last summer I wrote when I was reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. I started to write poems about the plays, but it’s really a book about being perceived as a woman, which is different than being a woman. Kind of like, the social consequences of being interpreted in a particular way. 

I think one thing about writing poetry more and paying attention to the things that you pay attention to, is the ability to identify your emotional state. When I started writing poetry, I also had no idea what to write about. I was always grasping for subject matter whereas now I find so many things that inspire me, and being open to receiving that inspiration is a muscle that I have gained from writing more.

That’s a beautiful way to put it. It’s almost like the more you collect, the more your filter gathers things wherever you go, consciously or unconsciously. And a little snippet of what someone says when you’re walking by can trigger this whole flowering thought that has really nothing to do with how it started.

Back to your book, how did this Shakespearean theme come to fruition and was it hard to write poems within this narrow theme?

Well, it wasn’t hard to write inside the theme because I committed to the idea of reading all of Shakespeare’s plays without having any intention of writing about them. I wanted to be a person who could say, “Well I’ve read all of Shakespeare’s plays” I also have to say, sometimes I feel badly about myself if I’m reading for personal gain all the time, which is hard to resist as a poet.

Oh, are you saying when you’re reading poetry, it’s hard to turn off the urge to take notes and pick up snippets to improve your own writing? 

Yes. I want to be able to read for a text’s own beauty. With the Shakespeare, I was reading it because I was interested in the way early modern English can influence more contemporary language in interesting ways. I would now say to any poet, that to spend a year reading Shakespeare’s plays is such a sonically enriching experience that it really moved my own writing in interesting ways in terms of the sound because I was so immersed in Shakespeare’s language and rhythms and the way he was organizing language and words. It’s the same thing as the filter we were talking about, it shifts your brain to recognize things in a different way. 

I don’t think I was limited thematically because whatever triggered my interest in a particular play was just a jumping off point. For example, one of the poems starts by talking about Viola, a character who dresses as a man though she is a woman, and ends by recounting an experience I had in Paris where I almost got into a fight with three 20-year-old boys who tried to take my turnstile. I was so peeved by the idea that they thought that I would step aside for them! It’s the sense of being perceived as a woman that triggered this memory for me.

So, which is your favorite Shakespeare play?

My favorite Shakespeare play, which has not many female characters in it at all, is Coriolanus. It’s about a Roman general at the end of the wars and he’s pushed to go into politics. The play explores the shift from a marshal society to a diplomatic one, and what happens to a person who is honorable under one system but who can’t adapt to the new system. I guess this fits my general theme of the relationship between the self and the world, like, what happens when the world goes on without you? How do you reconcile that?

So, what kind of poetry do you like to read and what draws you to these works?

I like poetry that intersects the self and the world and thinks about the way that the self is complicated, in an external way. Sort of, how are we navigating the complexities of modernity? For example, Linda Gregerson is my absolute favorite poet because I think she is exceptional at that. I also love Kevin Prufer, as a poet who is always thinking about social and political manifestation and how they intersect with the self and how our personal relationships are shaped by things outside of our control. 

My last question for you: What is the best part about writing poetry?

Well, the best part of poetry is the sense of flow. I feel like athletes talk about this a lot. When I’m really deep into working on something, I feel that sense of flow, like, there’s a falling away of all other types of thoughts. The constant multiple programs running at once versus when I’m focused on writing – that feeling is so good. That doesn’t have much to do with the product, more of the process.

Originally from Martha’s Vineyard, Elizabeth Sylvia (she/her) lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she teaches high school English. Since her first publication in 2019, Elizabeth has been featured in a range of magazines. None But Witches (2022), her first book, won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Book Prize. A series of reflections on female experiences through Shakespeare’s women, it began with a New Year’s Resolution to read all of Shakespeare’s plays in a year. She is currently working on poems exploring Marie Antoinette and the end of the world. You can learn more at Elizabethsylviapoet.net

3 March 2023

Charisse Baldoria

Elements

In August, billows of green rise from the mountains with tufts of rust and gold. We’re headed to the town park but encounter the river instead, where mountains and trees grow from hazy, inverted versions of themselves, a vision that stretches left and right as we march like converts toward the bank. 

It is 2012. My husband Dave and I have just moved to Bloomsburg, a small Pennsylvania town in the Ridge and Valley Appalachians, where I accepted a one-year position to teach piano at the university. We’ve never lived in the countryside before and I feel more at ease getting lost in a foreign city than in a forest which I imagine will swallow me whole. 

A tree clings to land’s edge but curves down toward the mirror, crowding the frame. It doesn’t look like water; it’s not blue, unlike the seas surrounding the island where I was born. Or maybe it’s blue in parts, depending on where you look. As we get closer to the bank, the sky reveals its waterborne self, a stealthy sea.

Our one-year stay will turn into more than ten. A decade later, I will tell my friends that when I die, I want my ashes spread in three places: the Susquehanna River here in Bloomsburg, the woods behind our garden not too far away, and the coral reefs in Anilao, Philippines just sixty miles from where I was born and where I used to scuba-dive. Bloomsburg scores two out of three: an accomplishment for an adopted home.

But at this moment, there are no thoughts of death, no commitments to a place, no fears of getting lost. 

No screaming in my veins as when an old man seated on a bench facing the river will yell “Charlie!” to Dave years later, and Dave, a Filipino like me but born in America, will explain that it’s a derogatory term for an Asian person: short for “Victor Charlie” or “Viet Cong.” I’m not about to rush to confront the man, and Dave will not hold me back to say we should keep our heads down.

We haven’t yet lain down on a mat looking up to treetops and the sky or slept in a hammock we tied to trees by the water, oblivious of the world. We haven’t seen concerts at the park with friends who will leave, or paddled down the river feeling like we’ve entered the mouth of God.

Now, we stand on the cusp between river and land, restlessness and arrival. The mountains, the sky, and their shadow selves glimmer in the evening sun transmuting our bronze skin into copper. We breathe, take it in, and release.

Simply, we vow to return.

*

In its several-hundred-million-year life, I’m not the only one the Susquehanna River has enthralled. I imagine the giant-armed tyrannosaurs, colossal duck-billed dinosaurs, and armored nodosaurs feeding along the rivers of Cretaceous Appalachia whose mountains had, by then, eroded to almost a plain from their Himalayan heights a hundred million years back. And after the earth’s secret motions uplifted the sloping fields over the millions of years that followed, after ice sheets marched and melted, the first peoples roamed and settled along the rejuvenated river for millennia before white colonists took over its banks and established their towns.

I haven’t found many Filipino settlers here though I’ve recently discovered some: a woman from Manila who came in the 60s when her white husband became a professor; a woman from Pangasinan who, at sixteen, married a serviceman in a U.S. base and moved here in the 70s to his parents’ home; a couple from Iloilo who relocated from New York in the 80s to work and raise a family; and more recently, a woman from Nevada who married my husband’s co-worker and now lives in their countryside compound. Some have worked at the university or hospital though I don’t know how many of them stay.

I don’t know all their languages. The Philippines, with its 7,600 islands, has at least 130 languages, forty of which are dying. I speak only the national language (Tagalog) and write in a colonial one (English). My husband, one-hundred percent Filipino by blood, speaks and writes only in English. He was born in Connecticut to an Ibanag mother and Pangasinense father who speak Tagalog to each other because they don’t know each other’s languages, even if they’re from the same large island. They wanted Dave and his brother to fit in so they spoke only English to them.

English may very well be the language that unites us all. Though our brown bodies were not born in this valley or descended from its original peoples or its colonists, though we did not grow up in the farmlands or coal country and our forebears didn’t fight in the American Revolution or Civil War, it is a place where we have begun, where we begin again, this meeting place of mountain and river older than the supercontinent of Pangea.

*

In Tagalog mythology, it is said that a Charon-like figure ferries the soul of the dead across a river to the other shore, where the sun drowns every evening. But where does the river go? From where does it originate? 

I imagine the river as an artist: how it shapes the earth, cuts into ancient bedrock, deepens faults and folds, sculpts edges, and splits mountains as it strives to find the sea. It even takes the sky and transfigures it. 

Equipped with an inflatable kayak and buoyant spirits, we go on the Susquehanna’s voyage in microscale: a forty-five-minute leisurely paddle from one park to the next. We pump up the tandem kayak in seven minutes; at the end, we deflate it, roll it up, and throw it in the back of our car, then pick up our other car at the start point. On the water, we sometimes imagine we’re Viking conquerors or Amazon adventurers surrounded by piranhas. Real-life bald eagles and blue herons occasionally make an appearance but on a typical day, we listen to birdsong and row with a family of geese. 

One late summer evening, not ready to break our post-dinner ritual, we set ourselves on the river on a race against the vanishing sun when swirls and eddies of strawberry, orange, lemon, and lavender spill like a sunset under out boat. We glide as if on glass, fling ripples on a mirror that never breaks. Like fingers, our paddles caress a sky of silk; they rise and fall with the river’s breath. There are no other boats in sight, no other breaths. Is the river dreaming and are we in its thoughts? Or is this what it looks like after death?

We have stumbled upon a secret; no one was supposed to know. Above us is a watercolor haze but with us is the sun-spilled sky, bright and clear.

*

This improvised song will never be heard again though there will be more sunsets, more singing, more nights. It is dark by the time we end our journey at the town park, a stone’s throw from the site of eighteenth-century Lenape settlements and of Fort McClure built by colonists during the Indian War. The Lenape, and perhaps, the Susquehannocks and other peoples before them, must have paddled in canoes of hollowed trees, must have glided past these walls of woods and mountains softened by the river’s face. How many meetings have taken place on these banks? How many wars?

On weekends, when we start in the morning, we have a picnic at the end of our ride then lay on a mat facing the sky. Sometimes I go alone when Dave is at work. I lean against a tree and I read and write. I am drawn into the water, the words “perfect” and “content” pooling inside, penetrating the rocks of my bones. When I’m on or by the river, I want nothing else.

It may not be a coincidence then: my Tagalog ancestors were riverine. Tagalog likely originates from taga-ilog, people of the river. Towns in the ancient Tagalog kingdom were built along the Pasig River: Maynila, Sapa, Tondo. After Spain conquered Maynila in 1571, they built a fort where the kingdom’s fort already stood, along the river’s mouth that opened to a bay. 

The walled city—and the rest of the archipelago—would be “owned” by Spain until 1898, when Filipinos declared independence after two years of revolution. But America promptly occupied it and raised its flag there, then bought the Philippines from Spain for $20 million.

Wars and dirty deals for a perch along a river are not unusual, I learn; neither are meetings, migrations, and flights. In times of peace, a river can mean hope. It can even mean homecoming or a pleasant escape.

One Labor Day weekend, as we needed to take a break from our drive, we stop at a rest area a few miles down from the confluence of the Susquehanna’s north and western branches and find a picnic spot overlooking McKee’s Half Falls. We sit by the river, the sound of the rapids reminding me of the sea. Then two buses of Mennonites empty out and flood the scene: they lay down packs of food and drink on the tables, mount a volleyball net, and spike the ball in dresses and suspenders. We try to not look too curious. Amish or Mennonite? We couldn’t tell at first.

We catch them looking at us; perhaps they too were trying to make us out. A few women walk past our table toward the bank. One was carrying a baby, another a cellphone. I get up the nerve to converse and learn that they’re Mennonites who had chartered a bus from upstate New York just for this riverside picnic. The young woman with the cellphone says their ancestors were from Pennsylvania. 

Since the seventeenth century, when William Penn solicited settlers for his new colony, members of a radical, pacifist wing of the Christian Reformation—the Mennonites—had been fleeing Germany and Switzerland to escape persecution. They built their new lives by Pennsylvania’s rivers and some settled along the Susquehanna, near Lancaster. Then some left to establish farms in New York; their descendants come to visit now and again. 

The young woman stands on a rock several feet from the rapids, clutching her cellphone while her other hand balances with grace. She laughs and her floral green dress flashes like a portent of spring, even at summer’s end. We all laugh and speak, a provisional circle of women in pastels over the tug of the wind and the roaring waves. We are the river’s daughters come home yet far away.

*

I grew up in Quezon City, Philippines, in a tropical valley near Manila, just west of a fault line and a river. It’s like a Pennsylvanian summer year-round, only hotter and stickier. We have two seasons: rainy and dry. In the dry season, it doesn’t rain as much.

The fault by my childhood home is locked, bound. Its last release was in 1771, while Pennsylvania was fighting for an independent America and the Philippines was a captive of Spain. Its confinement has forced it to store stress—until it no longer can. One day it will break. One day, the apocalypse will come home.

I am shocked to discover that there are two fault lines around Bloomsburg. When Africa collided with North America around three-hundred million years ago, the crust crumpled into the Appalachian Mountains and these faults likely formed. But as the continents spread, their restive temperaments were stilled. Now, their presence is merely inferred through sheets of sediment that are “out of order,” through exposed layers of tightly folded rocks. Will they reawaken, like the return of the dark lord to an unsuspecting Middle-earth? We might have to wait several hundred million years to find out.

Our first Bloomsburg home was on a mountain. On the western slope of Turkey Hill, near Bloomsburg’s highest point, our apartment lay against a slope of sandstone and shale: remnants of Appalachia’s oceanic past when it was submerged under a shallow sea. From our balcony and windows, we could see the fiery curves of ridges during sunrise and the crown of old conifers at sunset. The Catawissa Mountain always dominates the scene, framed by another curving tree bowing to the sky. It’s a view I never tired of. When composing, I used to turn sideways from the piano as if to take dictation from outdoors. It gave me a crick in the neck.

Mountain and river are my twin fixations, I soon discover; I found myself captive to both in New Zealand’s South Island where much of Lord of the Rings was filmed. After my alpine adventures in Middle-earth, Bloomsburg was simply the Shire and the magnificent Catawissa Mountain no more than a mound.

But the Shire has a charm all its own, even if our area’s inhabitants look more like giants than hobbits. After hiking around the waterfalls at Ricketts Glen up on the Appalachian plateau where leaves have just started to turn, we drive valleyward past a big sign that says “Pig roast today.” 

Filipinos love pig roasts. One of my earliest memories was of a whole pig spread out across the dining table with an apple in its mouth. Dead and roasted, of course, its now-chestnut skin glowing with crisp perfection. I am starved. 

Dave makes a U-turn. Following the signs, we park in front of a barn. Dave’s old Toyota Camry stands out from the trucks, bales of hay, and cowboy hats. It looks like a private party, not a festival as we’d assumed. “I feel awkward,” I tell Dave who starts to back up. “Wait! All the more I want to stay!”

A smiling man walks up and welcomes us to the fold. It’s a fund-raising party for his twelve-year-old girl who as she goes to an Olympic wrestling camp in Puerto Rico. “It’s five dollars and you can eat as much as you want!”

We pay the fee, help ourselves to the buffet, and go for the prize. Instead of a pig on a spit, we find one all neatly chopped up—it would have to do. We amble toward a picnic table, saying hi to everyone we pass. An old man with a friendly drawl and NRA cap sits with us with his wife. We chat to the twang of Willie Nelson who the DJ plays all afternoon. While we munch on succulent pig meat and skin that remind us of lechon, he regales us with tales of his dog GW (the former President is to blame) and the black child they recently adopted (“He’s very polite,” he points out).

A young man sidles up to talk about guns. The host, gregarious like a town mayor, comes up to chat. The man with the NRA cap is his father and the “mayor” has eight children, four of whom we get to meet, wrestler included. 

Five dollars seems a small price to pay for this experience so we walk over to the auction and splurge twenty. I notice cows roaming in the distance, the fields and mountains locked in a loose embrace. I am warmed by the openness, enjoy the spark that comes when different lives and landscapes meet and touch, even if spurred by the shared appreciation of roasted swine. We’d come back if invited—they were so welcoming and friendly—but after Trump’s election three years later, there’d be no way we’d ever crash a pig roast again.

*

Two soldiers who fought in the Philippine-American War, which resulted in 775,000 Filipino deaths, died of dysentery before their scheduled return to Bloomsburg in 1900. A Protestant missionary, who attempted to convert Muslims in southern Philippines and teach them to read and write their own language, was featured in the New York Times after his death and his diaries are now in our university library. A friend who spent a few years in the Philippines as a child fondly remembers her Filipino nanny. These are the area folks I’ve discovered who had connections to the Philippines other than a spouse.

*

“Our home needs to have a mountain view,” I assert. My one-year-position was converted to tenure-track, and eventually, I earned tenure. But the move away from our mountainside apartment we call “The Highlands” would be eight years in the making as we battled fears of job loss and our own fussiness. “Our new house must agree with Feng Shui principles, meaning no cul-de-sacs, no entry doors that open to stairs, no L-shaped houses…” And so on. The classical elements must be in balance at home; ch’i must move freely and energize the space. We needed all the help we can get.

We decide to build, thinking no existing house could possibly meet all our “needs.” Fascinated by what is old yet fond of the new, I design a colonial-style house, a wannabe architect attempting to incorporate into Anglo-American tradition new technologies and principles of Feng Shui. We didn’t want to be far from the town or river but it shouldn’t be too close to the river either due to flooding. Though the country lots had beautiful views, they frightened me: not only would I have to give up my sporty sedan so I could go to work in winter; I feared that racist folks would attack us and we’d be all alone.

Perhaps the fears were unfounded but they were nevertheless there. In Spring 2020, while the world was in a pandemic lockdown, we stumble upon a listing for an in-town Colonial Revival with hardwood floors, molding, an interesting history, and a lush garden looking out to a forest of tall, sturdy trees. Though it no longer had a mountain view (the trees and the neighbor’s house took care of that) and laundry was in the basement, it had enough to enchant us, good ch’i included. And we’d have neighbors.

Neighbors who’d welcome us with flowers, fruits, gardening tools, plants, and pumpkins. Who’d share their homemade jams. Who’d water our plants and shovel snow off our driveway while we were away. Who had “Hate Has No Home Here” signs on their front lawn. Considering that Pennsylvania would have the highest level of white supremacist propaganda in 2021, I take these as huge wins.

Throwing my painfully thought-out house plans aside, we decide to buy this home and deepen our Pennsylvania roots. 

On our first spring, though a germaphobe, I cup the earth with my bare hands; my fingers caress the rich, riverine soil. I add leaf compost onto the planting bed, surprised I’m playing with dirt. This is where my tomatoes and basil will grow, where dahlias will explode with flowers year after year. 

On this land where branches arch and spread like dancers’ arms, I study light, dappled light, and shade, noting their movements through the seasons when trees are robed in green or ring rust-gold, haunt in sepia or bewitch in white, break into buds or lapse into leaves. The black walnut and Norway maple take the lead but oaks, maples, sycamores, dogwoods, redbuds, and more fill the stage. They take me to the tropics in the rush of summer rains, transport me to holiday heaven as they wrap their arms with snow.

These woods are now my mountains; my music takes on their curves and hues. They woo like lovers and watch like sentinels. I whisper thanks.

*

A Bloomsburg-born Filipina artist carves delicate lines on wood. Ridges and valleys form petals, thorax, wings. She rolls ink onto the ridges and presses them into being like a sky coming down onto nubile earth. The sky-sheets are tattooed with earthly shapes that live on walls, frames, cards, the stage where I will perform music inspired by birds. Nature is our mutual inspiration, it seems. I will attempt to write music about a Tagalog legendary bird and she will try to accommodate.

*

Dave and I renew our vows in front of the Japanese maple as summer greens morph into scarlet. Our neighbor officiates. We celebrate not just our love but that of our friends with whom we spent the pandemic: the Zoom happy hours, the outdoor gatherings even in winter, the social-distanced indoor thanksgiving dinner with windows open and the heat cranked up. The woods watch and wonder. Again, we say I do.

We haven’t kayaked much in the two years since we moved. But we go back to the river like pilgrims of the seasons and admire the ways the mountains and trees rise from their other selves. A double-vision. Two selves co-exist, like the Tagalog’s two souls: one tied to the body, the other free and unbound. Or is it one life that’s mirrored, or magnified, or split?

Perhaps we, too, are the river. Inside us are fragments of a braided past—land, language, heritage, home—and we wash them away, fossils found further downstream, minerals deposited onto some forgotten terrace. 

The river inside: ever-ancient, ever-new. It will move and carve, sculpt and split. It will gather and let go. It will cut and it will double. It will bring me the sky in a dream. It will be forded to reach another shore.

I will flow along. 

Pennsylvania: the basin that holds both worlds—perhaps all my worlds. Sky and river as one, rocked and cradled by the earth, the mountains touching all. Mountain, river, earth, and sky: the dwellings of sacred spirits, according to my ancestors, they, too, are my Pennsylvania elements. Irreducible, primary, primal.

Let the river wash me away. Let the forest swallow my remains. Let the ocean not let me rest.

Charisse Baldoria is a classical pianist, composer, and educator who loves the written word. Born in the Philippines, she came to the United States for graduate school in music as a Fulbright scholar. Now a music professor in Pennsylvania, she has performed on five continents and loves to travel. She writes about her attempts to find equilibrium in displacement and a home in music. Drawing upon Philippine history and culture, she investigates questions of heritage, home, and identity. Her prose and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Windmill: The Hofstra Journal of Art & Literature, The Good Life Review, The Asian/Pacific American Women's Journal, 3 Cup Morning, and Northern Stars.

24 February 2023

Charles Fleming's reading of

A List of New Gods

Written by Adam McOmber

After spending a decade in corporate retail, Charles returned to academia in search of a more fulfilling career. He now holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English Education from North Carolina State University. He is currently continuing his studies at NC State as an MFA candidate in poetry. He won Honorable Mention in the 2020 NC State Poetry Contest and has been published in a couple of anthologies that no one bought. In his spare time, Charles agonizes over line breaks and collects rejections in his Submittable account. He also enjoys watching trashy horror movies with his wife and screaming at his TV while playing video games. He can be reached at passengersliterary@gmail.com and followed @CharFlem37.

17 February 2023

Piotr Szulkowski

Boxing 

Piotr Szulkowski was born in 1971. He graduated from the Faculty of Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2000 and obtained a master's degree in the Graphic Design Studio run by professor Mieczysław Wasilewski. During his studies, he started working as a teacher. In 1997, he took the position of a trainee assistant in the Sculpture Studio at the Faculty of Graphics with professor Bohdan Chmielewski. Since 1998 he has worked as an assistant to professor Jan Jaromir Aleksiun, and since 2009 (for fifteen years) he was an assistant in the Sculpture Studio of professor Adam Myjak. In the same year he obtained a doctoral degree. Currently, he co-runs the Open Sculpture Studio with professor Jakub Łęcki. He deals with graphics. He has participated in many individual and collective exhibitions in Poland and abroad.

10 February 2023

Brenda Miller

Sacrum

They say it’s the last
bone to decompose—
and so it becomes holy—
such longevity. Imagine

 
this scrap underground, surrounded
by what cannot persist—flesh, ligament,
every last nerve, remnant of blood.
Or into the fire

 
glowing red
hot, a devil’s platter
for ash. They say, when the time
is right, this bone will allow

 
your body to grow whole again,
pelvis a starting point, a seed
for full-on urban renewal.
Think of starfish, who regenerate

 
a lost leg, and lizards
who drop a tail at first tug
of danger then grow it back again—
no sweat. But, you know, it’s always

 
been the case, our bodies
sloughing off cells every seven
years so you no longer hold
even a microcosm of that past

 
self. It’s happening even now,
while you’re reading
this poem, or taking a sip
of tea, a resurrection, whether

 
you’ve prayed for it or not.
Reach around yourself—
feel how your palm flattens
just so against this stubborn bone—

 
fits there, solid casement
for vertebrae that sway in every wind.

An Interview with Brenda Miller on what’s beyond the physical

Conducted by Dilys Wyndham Thomas

Can you share with us a little bit about your writing process? Do you have a ritual, or do you take quick notes when inspiration strikes?

My writing process shifts and changes over the years, depending on what else is going on in my life. These days, I find I respond best to “challenges,” such as writing a poem-a-day for National Poetry Writing Month (every April) or a personal challenge from a writing friend. And I almost always do these challenges in community, either writing together with others or knowing that others are writing with me from wherever they are. 

It's best if I can get into a routine of quiet mornings, reading first, then writing, but life doesn’t always shake out that way. As a teacher, I get a lot of writing done with my students in class. 

I distinctly remember getting a little flutter of excitement when I first read it on Submittable. It’s one of those poems that leaps off the page and demands attention but also grows more complex with every subsequent reading. What was the inspiration for this poem? 

I’m pretty sure this poem came out of a “poem-a-day” challenge. When you’re writing that much, you get practiced at just taking a word and going with it. I’d written about the sacrum before in prose, a long time ago, as part of my story of being a massage therapist, how each part of the body holds so much beyond the physical. After my father died in 2016—after an exhausting six months of caregiving—I found I couldn’t write sentences for a while but instead wrote these poems that explore nuances of random words. 

I love a title that does a lot of heavy lifting. The title here is deceptively simple but introduces all the themes of the poem. How do you decide on titles for your work? 

In this series of poems, the titles are the instigating word that spurred the meditation. This series is part of my poetry manuscript that has two sections: “As In,” where the poems explore the meanings of words; and “As Is,” where the poems delve into grief of many kinds. 

The sacrum used to be known as the holy bone and gets its name from a contraction of the Latin for sacred bone. Could you tell us more about the interplay of biological and religious or spiritual imagery in your poem? 

I mentioned I used to work as a massage therapist, so I think that sensibility still infuses my writing in many ways, being attuned to what the body has to say. My first book of essays, Season of the Body, includes essays that often turn to parts of the body—like the heart—both literally and figuratively. 

“Reach around yourself— 
feel how your palm flattens
just so against this stubborn bone—” 

One of the surprises of  “Sacrum” is the switch to, or reveal of, the second person in the fourth stanza. The reader is then asked to become more and more involved in the poem through the use of the imperative tense. When I was reading “Sacrum” for the first time,  I was not quite prepared to be given such intimate directions but found myself complying and reaching back to feel my pelvis. Was it important to you to use the second person and address the reader in this particular poem? Many emerging writers I talk to are wary of the second person. Do you have any advice on how to use it in a contemporary way? 

When I’m writing poetry, I often think of myself in conversation—either with an unknown reader or with a part of myself I’m trying to reach. This is true in prose as well, but in poetry, there seems to be more intensity to it, this urgency to understand or be understood in a new way. I don’t consciously think I’m going to use the second person; it has to emerge naturally in the momentum of the poem. 

You mentioned in an earlier interview that your poetic self comes through in your prose, particularly your lyric essays. Do you think the opposite is also true, and your prose writing also influences your poetry? 

Yes, I think so. I tend to write little scenes inside my poems, and the use of the second-person conversational voice might also be said to stem from my essayist background. 

You are the author of an essay collection on writing and form, A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form (University of Michigan Press), so it's no surprise that our team loved the form of this poem. We were particularly impressed by how much the poem looks and works almost like a human spine. The quatrains are connected by fluid enjambments, which create transitions of sameness and difference, almost like the transitions in the body described in the poem. Our team wondered if these parallels were intuitive or by design, and how much you think about the link between form and content when you write. Were the enjambments present in the first draft, or were they added in at a later stage? 

Ha, I didn’t even notice that! So, yes, that’s the kind of thing that happens organically once you trust yourself to just write without an “agenda” or outcome in mind. Just following the images, the sounds, the rhythms of the poem. When revising, I do pay quite a bit of attention to line breaks and stanza breaks, working to both create patterns and disrupt patterns for a particular effect. 

For example, in “Sacrum,” I included a couplet at the end to “anchor” the poem, the way the sacrum anchors the spine, but the editor suggested we cut that closing couplet. This might be a question for you then: what was it about the disruption of the pattern that led to this suggestion? I was happy to revise in this way, but it does change the grounding effect at the end. 

Thank you for that question. Our poetry team discusses accepted submissions in depth every month, and we regularly reach out to poets with questions or suggestions. Editing is a collaborative process, a conversation between author and editor. We’re often won over by an author’s original intent, as was the case here. To answer your question, I’ll quote our poetry editor, Andreea, who wrote, “We felt that the piece did such a great job at guiding the reader into a grounding, meditative ritual that we wondered if it needed to leave the intimate inner-body space”. However, knowing the couplet was meant to act as a metaphorical sacrum made it clear why the poem needed those final lines. We ended up loving the way the couplet anchored down the spine of the poem, the idea of the quatrains being somehow vulnerable without it. 

On the subject of collaboration and editing, you regularly co-write work, including Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, which you co-authored with Julie Marie Wade. Do you have a particular collaborative writing process or advice for writers thinking about co-writing for the first time? 

Collaboration is so much fun! It provides a reason to write and someone expecting you to write, for one thing, and also spurs you to write work you never would have done otherwise. With Julie (who is a former student of mine), we were just having a casual conversation about memories of telephones in our lives when we both remarked that this would make a great essay. We traded memories back and forth, instituting a form that resembled the game of “Telephone” we played as children: the last line of a section would become the first line of the next section but garbled a bit. We had so much fun with that, we just kept going with other objects of words, like “Camera” or “Heat” or “Exercise.” Sometimes we kept that back-and-forth pattern; other times, we rearranged into forms like an alphabetical index or catalog.  We wanted to keep our own names out of it so that the voice of the essays became a communal voice. (Sometimes we can’t even remember who wrote what!) It takes the ego out of it.  We’re still writing new collaborative essays. 

With another friend, Lee Gulyas, we write collaboratively to photographs: we send photos to each other and then write whatever is spurred by those images. Sometimes we write at the same time, or one person will send a paragraph to the other first, and then the other writes to that paragraph. The resultant work is always a surprise and a delight. 

You need to write with someone you trust, who is willing to let go and play. Sometimes the collaboration doesn’t work, and that’s okay too; you can “take back” what you’ve written and use it for your own purposes. I’ve done that several times. 

Finally, we always try to promote writers’ work. Please tell us a little bit about any of your current projects or any upcoming events. 

I’m currently revising and sending out my poetry book, As Is, and I have a new collection of essays in the works called “Chorus: Essays of Witness” that deals with the deaths of my parents and my work as a hospice volunteer. I’m also preparing to retire next year from my work as a university professor, and I’m eager to develop my own writing workshops, both in-person and online. I love guiding writers at all levels to help find their authentic voices and stories. 

Brenda Miller is the author of six essay collections, most recently A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form. Her collaborative collection with Julie Marie Wade, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, was the winner of the 2020 Cleveland State University Press Nonfiction Book Award She received the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award for her poetry book The Daughters of Elderly Women and the Washington State Book Award for her memoir An Earlier Life. She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction with Suzanne Paola and The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World with Holly Hughes. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes.

3 February 2023

Joan Halperin

Night Moves

He comes into my life and lights up a tunnel. His name is Eugene. I repeat it. I whisper it. I say it normally. If no one is home, I shout it. He brings a male smell with him. He brings charm.  He asks me how I feel, what I hate, what I love.  No one has ever asked me these kinds of questions. I copy his tastes, his habits. I begin to eat Camembert on crackers.  He puts the Trout Quintet on our phonograph. I play it over and over.  He wears sunglasses no matter what the time of day or the season. I wear sunglasses as well, tortoise shell frames and dark shades.  I wear them in the apartment and to school, parties. 

He had no place else to live and he’s a cousin just discharged from the army. During World War II, he was an obstetrician and gynecologist.  Now he needs an apartment.  My mother, a young widow, insists it’s up to me. Obviously he’ll have to occupy my room since he’s a doctor.  I agree and move to the dining room that holds a sleep sofa.

My friend Elaine asks why I wear them, the sunglasses.  It’s my secret. What’s the danger in having a secret love? 

Now that he has occupied my bedroom, I move into the living room.  I remember the front door opening and his entering my new quarters.  I feel superior to my mother. I must be more beautiful even though I don’t think of myself that way.

“Hello,” he says using that special soft laugh.

And so begin nights of longing, secretiveness and guilt when my cousin Eugene comes home from wherever he has been.  I am fourteen years old.  I dream we’ll marry.  I’ll wear a white dress and throw a corsage to Elaine. 

He pulls my blankets down toward the end of the bed. The dining room window faces a courtyard. A cat howls in the alley. Every sound stirs me into longing. Suddenly afraid, I push him away but he slaps my hand. I see a light go on in a window across the way. Then it goes out.  Someone coughs.  He runs his fingers over my breasts and traces a line past my naval and down to my vagina. He takes my hand and guides it toward himself. After a while he rises, kisses my forehead, and tip toes out. 

Darkness and a sudden emptiness.   I think of jumping out the window. I push my head into my pillow.  I smell my hand. It smells of him, a metallic scent mixed with powder. Then I spread my fingers out and place them over my eyes, my nose, and my mouth.   I howl inside of myself:  howls that grow louder and louder until they emerge as whimpers.

He will cling to me my whole life, long after he dies in a car accident. He will haunt me after I marry and have children, after I am widowed and begin to age. 

The way it happened? He and his fiancé crashed on an icy road, his body flung into a ditch, his sunglasses half buried in fresh fallen snow.

Joan Halperin lives at Orchard Cove a continuing care residence in Canton , Massachusetts. Here she writes, teaches, and participates in short story and book discussion groups, swims, exercises, writes and keeps in touch with three grandchildren. She's been published in Rosebud, New York Quarterly, Persimmon Tree, Leap Years, Light Years and others . She has sent out a newsletter , The Daily Touch, since the pandemic that features poems, contests, phantom trips. She can be reached at Jhalp1929@gmail.com

27 January 2023

 Andreea Ceplinschi's reading of

rebellion

Winner of the Passengers Ekphrastic Poetry Contest. Written by Shlagha Borah.

Poetry Editor Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian-American writer, currently living on Cape Cod, MA. Being multi-lingual, she’s interested in the role etymology can play in creative expression, and how intentional vocabulary choices can help a writer find clarity for their voice and message. With her free time, she looks to burn down capitalist patriarchy, but indiscriminately loves humans, dogs, socialism, and walks on the beach. Her work has been featured online in Passengers Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Into the Void, Prometheus Dreaming, Solstice Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, and in print in the 2019 Prometheus Unbound finalist issue. Her fiction has appeared online in On the Run and her CNF was awarded an honorable mention in the Women on Writing Q2 2021 Creative Non-Fiction Essay Competition. Her work explores dysfunctional childhood family dynamics, various aspects of immigration, and trauma responses linked to abandonment issues and outsider syndrome. As part of the literary art community at large, she strives to create and maintain a safe space for writers who make use of creative expression as a means for survival. She can be reached at poetry.passengers@gmail.com.

20 January 2023

Suha AlAttas

Untitled

Suha AlAttas is an award-winning interdisciplinary Saudi artist. She earned her Bachelor's Degree in Fine Art with an emphasis in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Suha’s multicultural and multidisciplinary background inspires her to explore the barriers that limit human, animal, and environmental potential. Her work focuses on transforming the complex and intangible into simplified and universally understood forms. Suha accomplishes this by humanizing data and imbuing scientific research with narrative and emotional expression. Find her on Instagram and Twitter: @suhalattas

13 January 2023

Dana Booher

Pearls of June

you could go a little farther
in the safety of the afternoon,
the grass like fur, the brush to either side
of the runway high enough to comb,
fine enough to look straight through,
the delicate necks of unfurling stems,
so new that they lean on each other to stand,
and the luxury, just up ahead,
where earthy smells emerge from shade like 
startled ghosts– astonished to death that 
they have been noticed– there is a sense of 
things unseen, a sweeping whole hinted by a 
shimmer of prickles across the skin, the 
weightless glimmer gliding
though an unobstructed beam–
you could go a little farther,
toward the feeling that you are alone
with the front of your mind
pouring into the unknown, and the rest of it
counting steps back. the insects
hum in the thousands, dead branches write
in the language of cracks. with the light of 
midday on your shoulders,
as if it had already passed, you could
believe that you are the only audience,
the last and lonely witness,
you could forget there is somewhere
else to be, nose to the shiny symmetry of 
slick black bodies, stamped in half and
curled to sleep, and the simple fact of
tragedy, that a dragons flight on wings of glass
will split in the heat and melt in the damp. you
could go a little farther,
down dark ribbons of bare ground,
forget to remember to retrace your steps,
freak through the tendrils of invisible webs,
think of your thoughts as resistable
violence. You could wait for nothing,
then look away when it arrives, while the sun
turns the light into thin strips of fire,
you could go a little farther, imagine a waltz
of your tracks left behind, toward the feeling
that somewhere, unnoticed in silence,
the door has swung open– the last stall on the left,
in the pit of your mind– you could clutch
shame like an idol, and beg for a sign, halt
with the breeze for a spooked owl flying,
then go back to breathing after the sighing.
there is a half-buried cord, something woven
in the heat to the rhythm of lightning,
something rippling with the pulse of what 
you’ve been denying– you cannot help but
lift the thing, and look at what is hiding.

An interview with Dana Booher on visual art, atmosphere, and editing in poetry

How long have you been writing poetry? What made you start writing?

I started writing poetry about 5 years ago during my sophomore year of college. At this point, writing had already been a daily practice in my life for quite some time— I’ve kept a journal since I was 14, and throughout my years of journaling my style had naturally become condensed and poetic as I began to understand my own tastes as a reader and writer. My first writing professor in college turned me onto Emily Dickinson, and I was instantly hooked on her accurate but minimalist use of language— it was so brief and bold, and the concept felt like everything I had been striving for in my prose writing. Dickinson was my initial inspiration to attempt poetry, and has since become a kind of poetic fairy godmother to me.

You are a visual artist and visual imagery seems to be a strong suit for you in poetry as well. How does being a visual artist influence your writing?

Creating visual art is a process that pulls from the same reserves as writing poetry. Because I’m an abstract painter, I wouldn’t say that my paintings seek the same true-to-life visual accuracy that “Pearls of June” strives for. However, abstract painting does rely on a kind of intuitive accuracy that feels akin to capturing poetic ideas with language. In my practice as an abstract artist, I feel that I am always chasing something that doesn’t exist— trying to build it with color and texture and mood— and in this way the act of painting feels very similar to writing. Both mediums exist in my life as an homage to the moments and moods of my life, and an act of rebellion against the void of unrealized ideas.

I love that this is a predominantly atmospheric piece, what our colleague David Banach called “a whitmanesque romp.” But while the atmosphere builds, it also leaves the reader in a state of emotional ambiguity. And now for a chicken or egg question: did you start this piece from the imagery/atmosphere perspective, or did you deliberately seek to tailor the atmosphere to a sense of unknown, anxiety-inducing inner darkness?

‘Pearls of June’ definitely began with that feeling of an elusive epiphany— I tried to let the idea permeate into as many aspects of the setting as possible to create a snowball effect of visuals and anticipation. My hope is that by the end of the poem, the two parts would merge together or at least feel deeply evocative of one another, and that the visuals would do the heavy lifting for the concept. An experiment in ‘show, dont tell’.

What is your editing process? When do you feel like a poem is in its final form?

My editing process is a bit chaotic. I find it nearly impossible to stick the landing of a poem until every line leading up to the ending is working exactly how I want it to, so most of my editing process happens as I write a poem, instead of after. By the time I get to the last moments of a poem, the lines prior have been reworked, rewritten, and rearranged on a micro level dozens of times (and many poems have been lost in that up-in-the-air construction phase). So once I consider a poem ‘finished’, I don’t like to disturb it much. Picture a house of cards. As far as when I feel a poem is complete, I typically begin a project with a clear idea of where it’s going, so I have a strong instinct about whether I’ve accomplished that idea or not.

What are the writers or visual artists that inspire you at the moment?

I’ve been revisiting Virginia Woolf, Ocean Vuong, Louise Gluck, and Mary Oliver this winter, and recently did a dive into the collected works of Jim Morrison. I’ve also been admiring the visual works of Charles Burchfield and Emma Larsson.

Dana Booher doesn’t believe the rumors about what life is supposed to be. She is a 24-year-old visual artist and poet living in Bozeman, Montana, and a recent graduate of Montana State University. The themes of her work include family, grief, nature, and human relationships. Find her on Instagram @danatbooher

6 January 2022

Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Survival Instinct

The smell of the bamboo jungle is from the light, clean rain that licks into the fibers of the stalks. And in the air is a sweet fibrous smell, one you catch and let go to catch again. It’s from the hard green tube of sugar cane I broke open, broke open by blasting it against a peacock tail tree, the tree’s soft so soft leaf petals fall in rounds of little velvet fans. When my family had rabbits we used to feed them these, plucking off the stems. How the red-eyed white rabbit, when sprinkled with her food, looked baptized by little tongues of blood. We didn’t have rabbits long; the dogs would get them. This is a dreamscape I recreate. Location: Chiang Klang, Nan province, Thailand. Long ago Siam. Longer ago the northern Lanna Kingdom. I lived in this place from the age of eight to the age of fourteen with my father, a medical doctor, my mother, a nurse, and my younger sister, a brat.   

Katie had to shit in the woods. We were on a star trek, an away mission, mucking our way through the slimy grasses into the tunnel canopies of fat bamboo. Four of us had beamed down, two pairs of sisters: Haley and Sarah, twins, and me and Katie. We were gathering immense amounts of data on our cardboard tricorders. No sign of the Borg, or snakes. But our ten-year-old science officer was in a predicament, as usual. Katie was always ruining games, as I saw it. Impulsive, impatient, prone to random injury. I have watched my father operate on her foot to retrieve a branch of a splinter; she’s woken from bed with a five-inch scorpion on her chest. Her round face reddens with fever when she battles an ear infection. In this memory she is sporting a headgear contraption to correct an overbite. Its adjustable plastic bands squeeze into the pudge of her cheeks and, because of the way she put it on this morning, bunch her choppy blonde hair in fountainous directions. Her hair is choppy because she likes to cut it herself.

Now, deep in the misty, alien woods, Katie needs to go—number two, she clarifies. As captain I cannot compromise the mission. The transporters perennially offline, the commbadge communicators affected by a dampening field, there is no way to contact the ship. “You can hide behind the bamboo and bushes over there,” points Sarah, first officer, helpfully. “Yeah, you just dig a hole and, like, go in it,” adds Haley, chief engineer. Haley wipes a bead of sweat from her pointy, freckled nose. I slap a mosquito buzzing close to my elbow. “Better hurry,” I ordered. And, with difficulty I prefer not to go into, Katie eventually managed and the mission went on.

Why this scene comes back to me, I don’t know. I want to talk about the twins, I think. Or I want to talk about the woods. So much growth. Everything here is giant. You could stick a seed in the ground and it would do the rest. The bamboo, hard bars, thicken into walls, curve into spiral tunnels we could not help but explore. We thought we were going where no one had gone before.

In season 6 episode 2 of Star Trek Voyager, “Survival Instinct,” which aired September 29th, 1999, a Borg sphere crash lands on a moon, and the drones aboard are severed from the collective hive mind. The four surviving Borg drones, the armor-plated, cybernetic bad guys of the galaxy, who plunder the biological and technological advances of other species, find themselves helpless, growing more and more human on the wild moon jungle, their thoughts their own. They start to remember their names. Around a campfire, eating the corpse of a dead comrade, they recount their assimilation, begin to feel that “survival is insufficient.” One of the four drones, my sister’s favorite character of the series, is Seven of Nine. Seven of Nine does not remember her human name.

Childhood is dramatic, the memories sear. The hates root deep and the loves bruise. All of these jumble into the expansive vat of the past. I don’t know the cause and effect. On that away mission, the one where Katie had to squat behind the brushes of bamboo, I don’t know what it meant when she found bones back there. “Look,” she told us. Haley and Sarah were giddy, we were all giddy with the dark secret unearthed. “Did somebody die?” said Katie. “I think it’s a dog. I saw a dog skull once when we lived in Georgia” said Haley or Sarah, “when we used to go rabbit hunting, when we caught that magic one, remember? It was white and had a red eye and we still have the foot. We’ll show you. You can wish on it and things come true.” “A dog?” I asked, trying to rerail the investigation. “Is this where they buried Esther?” asks Katie. But it wasn’t. Katie’s dead puppy Esther was closer to the house. On this mission we had crossed barbed wire fences, we were off the property of the missionary clinic compound. We were in the deep woods, where things stay or decay. A macabre decision maybe, but we took the skulls and half skulls home, dirtying our arms.

I remember the day my mother broke the news to me, how she came in that slow, deliberate way parents come to tell you your pet has died. But no one was dead, not in a way I could name. The twins were only moving away, to a different town in the north of Thailand, a different mission team. “I know already,” I said, grieving tonelessly on a mound of grassy dirt a hundred yards from the house, playing hooky on my homeschool lessons. My mother, on break from the clinic, had had to make a trip to the hill in the boiling sun to interrupt my madness. Katie probably tattled to our cook Pa Jan that I was sun-bathing, and Pa Jan probably called the clinic phone. “I’m just tanning, Mom,” I stretched her title into two long syllables. “I know this is hard,” she said, sounding strange, “but Danny and your dad just couldn’t work things out. Are you wearing sunscreen? In all this UV, you’re going to burn, and there’s cancer in our family.” Danny was Haley and Sarah’s strict dad. He didn’t get along with anyone on the missionary team, thought he knew best how to evangelize a people whose language he didn’t even know.

In the Star Trek Voyager episode, on the leafy alien moon, surrounded by the mangled wreckage of their Borg space ship, Seven of Nine panics at the insubordination, the mutiny of Two of Nine, Three of Nine, and Four of Nine, who do not want to repair the communication beacon and send a distress call to the collective. Seven of Nine, assimilated at such a young age that she has only the memory of fear and chaos before the Borg, cannot lose her only family. She hunts them through the woods, and one by one, pierces their necks with her assimilation tubules, fills them with nanoprobes, reprograms them.

Looking back, I think my mother felt guilty. Whatever had happened between the team of missionary adults, I couldn’t fully understand. I sense that my mom didn’t want me to blame her or my dad for this, the removal of my best friends, a request they must have made to the mission board. We were so isolated in the rural area. I think now that she must have felt she wronged me. I don’t know who I blamed for the breakup of my crew and our endless collective imagination. After trying to toast myself in the sun, I set out for the bamboo caves, breaking everything I could along the way, spending myself on the thrashing of a sugar cane stalk, breathing the sweet mist of its defeat against the peacock tree. The tree that rained red petals. 

I wonder what I said to Katie. It would have been me who told her about the twins leaving. I was always this thread in the chain of command. Did she cry? I don’t remember this episode, but another I do. I remember telling her when the puppy died. Mom didn’t relay this one. I saw it happen with my own eyes. Esther, our white German shepherd, Katie’s favorite, bit an electrical cord on our back porch, convulsed with blue wires, exactly like in the movies. I remember a collective scream—me, my mom, and Pa Jan—Mom and Pa Jan grabbing me, shouting so loudly in two languages, “Don’t touch her! DON’T TOUCH her!” The dog thrashed until she died, her jaws slacked. Pa Jan called the gardener. He bagged the dog, dug a hole, and put her in the ground behind our house. Katie hadn’t been there. That afternoon I walked the stairs to her room and told her. She cried so hard. I have never seen her cry so hard.  

I had a dream some years ago, quiet and safe in a room in my parents’ house in Texas. I dreamed a dark, miasmic danger. I was in Chiang Klang again and there were leaves, teak leaves falling big and veined as elephant ears around the red-flecked peacock tree. And the tree’s long pods, curved scabbards, were rattling savagely in the wind. Something was burning. There were fires. Something I had done or not done for Katie. Guilt. Then the brightness of headlights splashed into my eyes, woke me, and, for a second, I was barred by the striped shadow of the window blinds. No ash in my hair. Katie was spending the college break with friends in Missouri. She doesn’t come home to visit as often as I do.

The Voyager episode flashes forward to years later, after Seven of Nine and the drones are reassimilated by the Borg collective from the jungle moon. Seven of Nine, in a separate incident, has been severed permanently from the collective and is now a member of the starship Voyager’s crew. At first she resists this new, forced individuality, but eventually she comes to terms with being an “I” and not a “we.” She accepts this as what it means to be human. She renounces the cruelty of the Borg collective she was once a part of. She grows golden hair. She even remembers her first name.

One day, out of the vastness of space, Two, Three, and Four of Nine, having themselves escaped from the Collective, hunt down Seven. It so happened that on that alien moon, when Seven of Nine pumped them full of her programmed nanoprobes, she had followed no protocol. She had, in fact, fused the minds of her siblings into a recursive collective of three, bound forever to torture each other with their thoughts, privacy and individuality impossible. The procedure is irreversible. To separate they have to die.

When people are going through a tough time in their lives, some like to say they’re still in the woods, the dark maze of losing one’s way, the thickness of trouble. This is perhaps a collective metaphor. Think Luke Skywalker on the planet Dagobah, Jedi training with Yoda. Remember the muck of his X-wing spacecraft suspended over the swamp. The temptation, the shadowy vision of Darth Vader in the forest. Or Simba, wayward heir in The Lion King, tunneling after Rafiki through brambles and branches to the still pool and his father’s starry reflection. Years past our childhoods, across the world in America, Sarah, half of her twinned self, sat, dabbing and cooling her father Danny’s forehead after his chemo. She was alone and unalone, the little fetus inside her a Borg drone in its green maturation chamber, jungle of rib and vertebrae. 

Bones, so many of them, piercing the ground, grinding back to dust, molecules shooting through stems, feeding us, growing the bones of our children. On October 13th, 2016, his majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the longest reigning monarch in the world, died. The world for about seventy million people shook out of phase. His body lay at the Thai grand palace for a full year and thirteen days before a five-day cremation ceremony. During that interval, thousands, every day, clad all in black, waited hours upon hours to see the man, the god, no one could remember beyond. He had been the king of everyone’s lifetime, beloved, gentle father of the country, calmer of political coups. There’s a famous picture of him cupping the clasped hands of an old beggar woman. Her hair a shock of white, his bespectacled, boyish face bends to hers. When I visited the grand palace in the summer of 2017, there were still numberless throngs in black, voiding the hot white concrete, a dark cloud pouring out of cabs and trains from the skyscraper jungle of Bangkok.

All of everything, far back enough, was star, it is said. Particles, antimatter, neutrinos, subspace. The poetry of the void, the final frontier. I wonder which way they remember it, my crew. Is it a coincidence that Haley collects skulls, paints designs on bones, duplicates marks of her Cherokee ancestors? That Sarah saves every year for a new tattoo, that some of those permanent marks are in Thai language? Did, by chance, I just happen to like backpacking through forests, taking the same readings over and over again? Did Katie, science officer, all on her own, study the body, become a nurse? 

I saw a program, a few years back, or perhaps it was a piece of journalism shared on Facebook, about the illegal dog meat industry in Thailand, and scenes came back to me. Around the corner from the clinic, down a narrow dirt street I explored on my bike, a meat stand open to the air. This was not, in itself, odd. I was used to seeing pigs’ heads and hooves cleaved, the innards grayly slicking the tile of fresh market stalls. The woman behind such a counter, blood to her elbows, would hand you back change, a green bill with the smooth, bespectacled face of the king stamped red with her thumbprint. But this was a different blood money. Hung from the hooks of the street stall were dog heads, black dogs, tongues dangling stiff, eyes only a mirror. I am only remembering this now, after the online video. At first, when Two, Three, and Four of Nine confronted her, Seven of Nine did not remember what she had done to them on the alien jungle moon. They had to reactivate their neural link for the whole history to come roaring back. What else of the past did my brain elide? 

After the bamboo cave away mission, we four sisters hosed the skulls. They were packed with dirt. We watered them white, toweled them dry. Pa Jan, the woman who cooked for us and cared for us when my parents were away at work, whose name means Sun or Monday, shed light on the situation. In her clipped, northern dialect she told me, and I translated for the twins, that we should throw away the skulls. They were from dogs the neighbors were killing and illegally selling. I don’t know what we did with the bones then. I don’t even remember how we took the news. But I think, going back into the cave we would, knowing even now what we know, touch the bones, caress the skulls, paint them with stars and symbols.

When their father Danny passed, I sent Haley and Sarah a poem I wrote for them, and, curious, looked back at some of our old Facebook messages. We had not talked much, we mainly commented on pictures publicly here and there. There was, however, a long string of messages Sarah and I had back in 2010. She’d wanted to get a tattoo of a scripture verse wrapped around her forearm. She wanted it in a Thai Bible translation. Knowing that I can read the language, she asked if I would help her find and parse the verse, help her learn it before injecting it into her skin. Her verse was the first half of Isaiah 26:9. 

My soul yearns for you in the night; 

in the morning my spirit longs for you.

I looked it up in a Thai translation, first in the traditional, kingly one which seeks to match the language used for God with the language used for Thai royalty. Then, I settled on a beautiful translation in a lower, down to earth register:

jit jai khong kha pra ong yak dai phra ong nai klang kheurn

jit winyan phai nai kha phra ong sawang ha phra ong yang rohn ron

Google handles the translation back to English well:

My soul wants you in the night.

The soul within me is seeking Him earnestly.

I handle the Thai words this way:

My heart wants to have you in the night.

The spirit inside me searches for you hotly still.

So many ways to see the metaphors at work. The heart and the spirit, the heat of the searching. Thai does not conjugate verbs for tense, so time is malleable, inferred. In Thai we don’t have to wait for the morning, we can start the search in the thick of the darkness. This plaintive desire is marked on her now, but we share the scar.

After Danny’s passing, my mom visited Haley and Sarah in Georgia, dropped news about my new, extensively tattooed American-Vietnamese boyfriend. Sarah messaged me right away, inhaled my details and photos. “Hey, you can tell a lot about a person by the quality of their tattoos,” she assured me.

Time expressed itself, warped. Haley and Sarah’s babies are crawling now. My hair, in the place I used to pull it, is going white from either age or trauma, I can’t tell. I’m not going to lose my head over it. Katie, I notice from posted photos, is getting the same lines about the mouth that I am. My boyfriend is working through season 6 of Star Trek Voyager. He likes the Borg, interprets Seven of Nine’s transition to human as a loss. Since he and I met online, hardly a day has gone by in which we haven’t talked or messaged. Only one day, perhaps, when I was in the Georgia woods this June, on the one day I couldn’t find a bar of cell phone signal.

At the end of “Survival Instinct,” Two, Three, and Four of Nine, fall into a coma. They’d accessed the buried memory of what Seven had done to them on the jungle moon, learned the truth. Their neural lock prevents them from being revived. There are two solutions: they have to be severed from each other, only to irreparably damage their brains and die within a few days, or they have to be assimilated again by the Borg in order to live out full lives as drones in the Collective. The ship’s doctor asks Seven of Nine what should be done. “Survival is insufficient,” Seven says, opting to break her siblings’ link, to kill them, to give them the taste of a few free days. Only she, similarly scarred, could ever have known that this is what they would have wanted.

As a child in Thailand, I often thought how capable Haley and Sarah were, how in sync, finishing each other’s sentences in their own invented language. Katie and I didn’t even look like sisters. No strangers at summer camp ever thought we were. Though we could easily tell the twins apart because Haley was a little shorter and thinner in the face, the same light brown hair draped their delicate, feminine features like a seamless waterfall. My hair, which I secretly tried to tear out at the roots when nervous and alone, was always a frizzy mass that blurred me into the humid air. No one I knew had my hair. Then there were the dreams the twins had. They had the longest, most fantastical dreams of anyone. Suspiciously detailed dreams that placed us all as characters in the story. I envied their lies, how easily the fabrications came. Their telling was some kind of elegant control. In the glow of the past light, in the emerald canopies and golden harvest fields of our youth, I often forget our fights, bitter and sometimes violent. Sarah shoving Katie in the back, my defending Katie instinctively as I had never done before and have never done since. How in that moment I knew, though she were the bane of my existence, that I would never trade my sister for anyone’s. 

A few weeks ago, when Katie and her husband visited over Thanksgiving, I showed her a draft of this story about us. She read it on her phone silently, curtains of long, golden hair hiding her eyes. On a walk that afternoon, for the first time in a long time, I saw her cry. The guilt hit me. What had I done by bringing back Esther and imaginary games with the twins? By telling the world about Katie’s headgear, her shitting in the woods? “We were violent, us and Haley and Sarah sometimes, weren’t we?” she said finally. We walked on, holding each other around the waist, almost but not quite the same height.

Separation is good. It’s healthy, we are told. I have my doubts. Why else do I keep time traveling, retranslating. Why is it when I close my eyes I can almost feel the shade, hear the creaky moans of the green and gold pipes of bamboo. A colloquial phrase comes to me in Thai—translates to “I’m off to shoot a rabbit.” It means, “I’m going to use the bathroom.” You might use it especially when you are going to go somewhere outdoors, to signal a need for privacy. When my sister defecated outside, when Haley, Sarah, and I ordered her to do it behind the bamboo, that became our unforgettable day in the woods, a flashpoint, a memory in which I see everything now about the way we were—so practical, so powerful, so full of that violent fuse of imagination. My sisters. My collective. My heart wants to have them, my spirit is still looking, hotly, moving through the woods to that still pool of fathers, the mirror of a dog’s eye, that ink, the angry break of bone and cane into a hollow deep, that space in which we love each other. 

Kimberly Gibson-Tran is an educator and college prep advisor who lives with her husband and cats in Plano, Texas. She has studied linguistics and creative writing at Baylor University and the University of North Texas.

30 December 2022

Jason Masino – excerpts from Sinner’s Prayer

Confession

I half/way atone for my sins

burned the village down
& started from the center

a Tasmanian-deviled spin
into the china shop

a parasitic seduction

a mocha stain on
your three-piece suit

Hypnotize pt. 2

Sweet peaches move on two sticks, one by one

Let me lick the donut hole/
Glazed or plain/
Driving me to insanity and then…
sane

Eyes wide, I’ve finished/
Backing up, I want more/
but for now, it’s my turn
Connect the mic, plug it in
Make me sing, baby, make me sing

Slender man with slender hands
Can you do the can-can?
I’ll join your band if you make me dance

Slather that heavenly breath all over me,
as you slide up and down my persona
Whispering in my ear about how
you’re so proud of me

I forget all of my sources of tension/
Snort a few snorts, puff a few puffs

Ready, set, position!
Down on all fours or up on all three
I’m flexible, but only at the joints
Bend me into the shape
of your favorite color
and I’ll happily oblige

Make me purr like a fucking kitty
Let me vocals fry as I moan, groan,
atone

But I’m not forgiven/
and neither are you/
So back to work, boo

My allure –
what would you describe it as?
And I ask you and your projections specifically because / as you say:

I’m just a catalyst.

A landmine
A distraction
A nuisance
A leech
A hobby
A meal & a snack, plus dessert
A nosebleed
A shot of whiskey
Or, just a friend,
just “someone you know”

Goodnight, Cheshire Cat!

The night’s been wasted
Our bodies tasted
And smiles cast
on our wondrous faces

Jason Masino is an artist and writer. Originally from California, he received his BA in Dramatic Art from the University of California, Davis, and his MFA in Poetry from Regis University. His work has been published in Cultural Daily, Inverted Syntax, Rigorous, South Florida Poetry Journal, fifth wheel press, and others. In his free time, he likes to spend his hard-earned wage labor money on shiny things, food, and shoes. He currently lives in Denver, Colorado. Sinners’s Prayer, his debut collection, is now available from Passengers Press.

23 December 2022

John E. Brady's reading of

Love Letters from (Ok)Cupid

John oversees both the narrated pieces for every issue of Passengers Journal, as well as produces each audiobook for Passengers Press. He has been performing for close to four decades all over the world including on Broadway and National Tours, in Film and TV, in industrials, in regional theaters, on cruise ships, in arenas, in amphitheaters, on cruise ships, and as an improvisor. He has been seen and heard in over 100 radio and TV commercials and won several audiobook awards. Favorite role? Dad. Find out more about his work at https://johnebrady.wixsite.com/mysite. He can be reached at audio.passengers@gmail.com.

16 December 2022

Yari Ostovany

The Third Script

Born in Iran in 1962, Yari Ostovany moved to the United States at the age of 16 and pursued his studies in Art first at the University of Nevada - Reno and then at the San Francisco Art institute where he received his MFA in 1995. He has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally, and is the recipient of Center For Cultural Innovation, Sierra Arts Endowment, Craig Sheppard Memorial and Sierra Nevada Arts Foundation Grants. Recent solo exhibitions include The Yard: Columbus Circle in New York, Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, Joyce Gordon Gallery in Oakland, Rebecca Molayem Gallery in Los Angeles and Lansing Street Gallery in Mendocino. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, Connecticut), Pasargad Bank Museum (Tehran, Iran), Chateau d'Orquevaux (Champagne-Ardenne, France), Permanent Collection of the University of Nevada - Reno Art Department and is represented by Foundation Behram Bakhtiar in France, Ideel Art and Noon Powell Fine Art in London UK. Yari Ostovany currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

9 December 2022

Sharon Charde

why

didn’t you call me my husband said when I told 
him. I would have come for you. And he would 
have but another man had already offered to save 
me. OK I said maybe he was different didn’t 
just want what the others had wanted, their hands 
under my sweater or tee shirt or dress and then 
the next place. And I thought I was brave to stay 
where I was. He followed me to the beach lunch 
and dinner and then to my small cabin that had no 
lock and he said please and I said no and no again 
maybe not loud enough and then I was on the floor 
not rape really was it

An interview with Sharon Charde on revision, reading, and writing

How long have you been writing poetry?

I was an English major in college and spent two years in a creative writing program, in which I wrote many bad poems—I was young, in love, and did not have much to write about except that, and the love was too new to have much depth. But I married that love and had two children; I did not write any poems at all until the second child died 35 years ago and I knew I had to write to honor him and the huge grief I was experiencing and still am. His death and its aftermath have inspired much of my work and infuse a great deal of the poetry in my seven collections.

This poem deals with two difficult topics – rape and gaslighting. What stood out to our reading team was the interior monologue of the speaker building from exterior factors that teach women to doubt their own experience to internalizing those factors into self-gaslighting. However, the piece is so skillfully crafted that the monologue feels natural and relatable. Did you have trouble putting these topics into your piece or did you feel confident in approaching these two themes?

Re: ”why.” It was written in a burst of memory, and no, I had no trouble with the material. The experience was so imbedded in me that it came out whole. As in all my work, I write from feeling and memory, personal material, not thought.

What our editorial team also found striking is how the two words ending are so impactful on the reader. They’re at once an internalization of doubt and an admonishment to the patriarchal society that fuels that doubt. They feel mocking, but reverently chilling at the same time. I sometimes personally struggle with ending poems, trying to wrap them up too neatly in a bow, whereas this piece just ends in a brutally honest way. How did you come to this ending?

I absolutely love your feedback on the poem, it is so accurate. As I said in my last answer, the poem came out whole, including the last two lines. And they are totally authentic to my experience and reflection on it, so no—it ended when it was supposed to end.

The form is also well-suited for this piece, an almost elegant block of text, with that stand-out two-word ending given its own meaningful space at the end. What is your editing process? And how do you know when a poem is ready to be sent out?

It felt right to have this poem in the block form you reference, as it was breathless in its conception and that form was organic to that breathlessness, as well as the anguish, confusion, inchoateness, and ambivalence of the experience. As I said before, I don’t think about the endings of poems, if I’m in “the zone” they just appear, usually as a surprise to me. And therefore, a surprise to the reader. I don’t believe this poem got any editing by me, it was one of those that felt complete after I’d written it. However, many of my other poems are subject to much “re-visioning” I often put a draft away and look at it in a month or so, then it is much easier to see what needs to stay, what needs to leave, how lines interact with each other. I’ve come to see it as very enjoyable work When I’m at a residency, I have much creative time in which to reflect and allow new ways of seeing my material come up, which is so helpful—so in that place, I’ll work and work on a poem because I have time and space. But I often find if I have to work too hard on something it loses any energy it had, and I discard it. The poem feels right when I feel a sense of relief—ah, I’ve got it. I don’t always know if a poem is ready to be sent out, but I send it out anyway!

Any advice for poets who are still finding their voice, or shy about sharing their work?

Advice: keep writing, read LOTS of poetry, especially that which resonate with your voice, sign up for Ellen Bass’s excellent craft talks, go to good poetry workshops like Squaw Valley or Omega if Sharon Olds is still teaching there –I got so much from her. Be very careful who you show your work to, the wrong people can destroy your confidence. Find a poet mentor (not easy) to share your work with and expect to pay for feedback. Keep writing and don’t be afraid to write from deep and painful places—the best poems often come from there.

What are you reading right now that you love, or that inspires you?

Ada Limon is a great inspiration, I adore her work. Marie Howe. Ellen Bass. I just got a book by Donika Kelly that looks great. Dorianne Laux. Sharon Olds. Eileen Myles. I read lots of fiction and memoir but nothing recently fits into the inspiring category. 

Sharon Charde practiced family therapy for twenty-five years as a licensed professional counselor, and has led writing groups for women since 1992. She has won numerous poetry awards, has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart award. The BBC adapted her work for an hour-long radio broadcast in June 2012, and she has seven published collections of poetry, the latest in September 2021, The Glass is Already Broken, from Blue Light Press. From 1999 to 2016, she volunteered at a residential treatment facility teaching poetry to adjudicated young women, creating a collaborative group with a local private school for eleven of those years, and her memoir about that work, “I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” was published by Mango in 2020. Charde has been awarded fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation and The Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Lakeville, Connecticut with her husband John.

2 December 2022

Tomas Baiza

Mexican Teeth

“Are you Indian?” the dental instructor said.

José pried his eyes from the snow falling outside the window and peered upward, into the harsh glare of the exam light. Around him hummed the purposeful drone of a large university school of dentistry—drills, sprayers, buffers, rotating drivers, suction tubes, and the occasional yelp from fellow patients who had subjected themselves to the earnest efforts of young dentists-in-training. 

The practicum clinic occupied the entire third floor of the dental school. José had scanned the broad space on the way to his chair in the far corner, closest to the windows. The floor was laid out in a utilitarian cube-farm grid, each examination chair surrounded by shoulder-high partitions covered in grayish-tan cloth the shade of a sick mouse. José’s nostrils flared at the competing odors of disinfectant, cherry mouthwash, and the burnt essence of teeth undergoing any number of invasive procedures. Beyond the windows, the snow fell and fell—a pummeling reminder of just how far he was from California.

José didn’t think it was possible to feel even worse about himself until he had come to Michigan for graduate school.

The instructor’s face was obscured by a surgical mask and plastic safety goggles. José  thought maybe she was Asian. Behind her, several eager dental students looked on in fascination, their heads floating in his peripheral like anxious, debt-ridden spirits.

“I mean, not South-Asian-Indian,” the instructor said, “but native? Native American?”

José stretched his jaw wider as her fingers explored his mouth. The sour tang of latex spread across his tongue. “Definitely American,” he would have liked to say, but he knew the words would sound as though he were gargling marbles. He settled on a shrug.

The dentist smirked as she slipped a hissing plastic tube into his mouth. “Close, please.”

José pressed his lips around the tube. A gurgling rush of saliva and blood fled from his mouth. 

The dentist nodded at him again.

“So, you’re not sure if you’re Native American?” she said, returning the suction wand to its mount. 

José smacked on the coppery essence of blood and tongued the raw edges of gum where the future-dentists had probed him with examination tools that resembled miniature pirate hooks. One student—a clean-cut young man with a clipped accent that José had come to associate with the upper-Midwest—had been more aggressive than the rest, pulling the curved pick beneath his gums in harsh swipes that made his toes curl in his shoes. José had forced himself to not cry out, instead focusing on the white-hot anger that blossomed in his chest.

“Nunca dejes que vean cuánto te duele,” his mother had once told him, when he was little. Never let them see how much it hurts. She was talking about José’s alcoholic father and not dentists, but here in the exam chair, he took his mother’s advice to heart, bit down on the pain, and embraced a smoldering resentment for the dental student. His breathing slowed as the anger allowed him to focus. 

“Mexican,” José said to the instructor, knowing it was a lie—or a half-lie. He wasn’t born in Mexico. Neither was his mother. And he knew not to say “Chicano.” That wouldn’t mean shit to anyone here in Ann Arbor, he thought.

Behind her goggles, the dentist’s eyes widened in acknowledgement. “That makes sense.”

José blinked. This was new. No one had ever said that him being Mexican “made sense.” On the contrary, they would inspect his pale, freckled, half-white face—some subtly and with grace, others unabashedly obvious—and come up confused. Occasionally, someone would dance awkwardly around his subtle accent, or how he pronounced his name. Some would ask where he was from. It never helped to tell them, “California.” 

“No, before that,” they would say.

José squinted at the instructor in an exaggerated huh? as the gaggle of dental students waited breathlessly for an explanation from the woman whose power over them approached Old Testament, Yahweh-level dimensions. 

The dentist clicked her stainless steel pick against José’s front tooth. Instinctively, he opened wide. 

“See here,” she said to her students, angling a small mirror into his mouth. 

The clean-cut student leaned in, close enough for José to breathe in his smothering cologne. “Sinodonty,” the young man said with an air of innate authority.

There was something about the student’s blue eyes that José found unnerving. 

He breathed through his mouth and studied the young man’s face, half-covered by his mask. White, wealthy, and unquestionably entitled to all good things were what came to José’s mind. The future-dentist was maybe a couple of years younger than him, but far more confident in his academic surroundings. He reminded José of the preeminent members of his own graduate cohort, the early-stage intellectuals who associated so easily with their History professors, who knew without being told to bring Toblerone chocolates for the group when it was their turn to lead seminar discussions, who could recite all of the latest historiographical theories that they’d absorbed from their elite undergraduate institutions, and who knew which campus cafés made the best espressos. 

They were the ones who never felt like imposters who had managed to trick the masters of the Academy into giving them a seat at the table. 

This guy was bred for this, José thought. He realized his hands were balled into fists. The dental student smiled down on him from behind his mask and José knew, from his vulnerable position on the examination chair, that this was just one more person who belonged at this university more than he did. 

“Correct, Colby.” The dental instructor glanced at the students who pressed in around her. “Note the upper incisors,” she said, pushing José’s tongue back with the mirror. “The deep, shovel-shaped groove behind the teeth is common among East Asian populations, or people of Asian ancestry. My own teeth exhibit the same characteristics.”

One of the students—a diminutive woman with large, watery eyes—raised her hand. “But, Dr. Chen, the patient just said—”

“That he’s Mexican, yes. But what is a Mexican?”

José looked up quizzically at the dentist.

“As Colby clearly remembers from my lecture, ‘Diversity and Dentistry,’ Native Americans are descended from Asiatic people. One of the signature ethno-specific features of Asian teeth is sinodonty,” she said with a nod to Colby, “—as seen by these deeply concave pockets behind the upper incisors.” The dentist flipped her tool and nudged the mirrored end against the roof of José’s mouth, pulling his head upward. “Native Americans share this characteristic. Mexicans and other Latin Americans have native roots, and many of them have maintained this physiological trait.”

José’s body tensed as the masked dental students took turns peering into the mirror angled behind his front teeth. One of the students had almond-shaped, coffee-brown eyes. José hoped he was Latino, but behind the mask he could have just as easily been Persian, Turkish, or Italian. The student leaned in especially close—close enough to inspect the details of his beginner ear gauges. 

José listened to Ear Gauge’s soft breathing behind his mask. Those brown eyes glanced upward from his open mouth and José felt a fizz of adrenaline that made him glad he was wearing a shirt that stretched past his beltline. 

As he fidgeted in the exam chair, José wondered whether Ear Gauge was out, and what his dentistry professors thought of this young man’s personal adornment choices. Did they view him with suspicion? Amusement? Pity? Did they gossip in faculty meetings about how this boldly counterculture dentist would struggle to start a respectable practice and probably find himself providing under-resourced care in a government-subsidized clinic in Detroit or some reservation in South Dakota? 

José wondered—for the hundredth time—what his own professors thought about him. Despite his good grades, he pictured them laughing gently as they read his literature reviews, puzzling over how he got himself admitted to one of the best History programs in the country, if not the world. José imagined the dental students leaning in so close that they entered his mouth and slithered down his throat, inspecting everything about him along the way. He wondered whether they would see from the inside out what his professors almost surely did: That this was all a big fucking joke. A sham. One of those fish-out-of-water stories where, instead of eventually learning how to blend in, the alienation would grow until the uncomfortable truth could no longer be denied: That the kid who attended his local state commuter university and had paid for his undergraduate tuition from his welding and pizza delivery jobs had no business taking up space in a selective graduate program.

Colby fingered José’s tongue to the side and slid the mirror behind his incisors. “This mouth is a mess,” he mumbled, just loud enough for the closest dental students to hear. Watery Eyes let slip a gasp.

“Dude…” Ear Gauge whispered, shaking his head at his classmate.

José fought the urge to grab the cocksure Colby by the throat and growl in his thickest homeboy brogue, “The fuck that supposed to mean, bro?” But strangling a cocky, kiss-ass dental student would definitely not help him escape the dull pain that had kept him up at nights, pacing his underlit apartment, reminded him that the childhood deformities he had hoped were resolved would keep sniffing at his heels if he didn’t suck it up and do something about them.

José concentrated on his breathing. Nunca dejes que vean cuánto te duele.

“Alright, Colby,” said Dr. Chen. Her tone was flat and even. “Let the others get a look.” Colby and José locked eyes for a moment before the dental student backed away for the rest of the cohort to get their turn.

As the students ducked down to inspect his Mexican teeth, José asked himself whether the fact that his graduate fellowship covered treatment at the university dental school was worth being essentialized by pedantic faculty and poked at by zealous students with woefully underdeveloped people skills. He cursed yet again his decision to leave California, where half-Mexican Chicanos like him were a dime a dozen, but in Ann Arbor were only slightly less exotic and welcome than Asian carp or kudzu. Why didn’t I just take that fellowship from Berkeley? he fumed as one dental student’s gaze alternated with pointed skepticism between his face and his shovel-shaped incisors. I’d have mostly blended in there. But no, I had to go and “find myself” by leaving everyone and everything that had ever told me who and what I was—to a place that half my family couldn’t find on a fucking map, to the Midwest where the human landscape is simpler, where if you’re not white, then you’re Black, and if you’re neither, you’re a curiosity at best and an inconvenience at worst. 

Out of the corner of his eye, José watched the ice flakes slap against the clinic windows.

And where it fucking snows. 

•

José had seen snow exactly once before in his life. The weekend trip to the Sierras happened when he was five, a year before his father left for good. His mother had been skeptical about the outing, but José’s father argued that it would help the boy. “The kid’s just so sensitive,” his father had complained. “A couple days in the mountains washing in rivers will put some hair on his sunken little chest.”

The rare July storm crept in slowly, whispering its arrival with a few stray snowflakes. Little José looked into the gray sky with wonder and tracked the falling snow against the dark green pine trees. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. But by the end of the first day, seven miles from the trailhead, the weather front billowed over the surrounding mountains and shed large, thumb-sized flakes that turned his father’s mood foul. In the late-afternoon darkness of the storm, they unrolled their sleeping bags beneath a broad, hanging rock and stared into the coming night as the drifts accumulated. José sat quietly while his father drank from a flask and glowered into the curtain of sideways-falling snow.

The boy awoke in near-total blackness, panting and covered in sweat despite the cold. Where once had been the opening to their rock shelter was now a wall of white powder. The enclosed space smelled of dry pine needles and alcohol. Next to him lay his father, snoring.

Pain lanced through José’s bladder. “Daddy!” 

His father answered with a grunt.

“Daddy, I have to pee.”

The man rolled over in his sleeping bag and began to snore louder. 

José reached out and nudged him. “I have to go!”

A hand clamped down on José’s wrist like a vice. In the darkness, he felt his father’s sour-sweet breath on his face. 

“Then get the fuck out there and go take a piss,” the man said, his voice slurred.

José opened his mouth in a rush of instinct that he had never felt before. Escape sparked through his brain like a lightning strike. Before his teeth could reach their target, the hand released him. 

“Go on,” his father belched. “Do what you need to do.”

It took José several minutes to dig through the snow that had all but entombed them both. The boy rolled down the drift and had barely unzipped his jeans before the piss burst from him. He watched as the yellow stream bore a hole into the snow in a puff of steam. His face stung and his teeth chattered in the cold, teeth that filled his mouth in strange and exotic formations and made his cheeks bulge as though he’d been struck with a baseball bat. His mother had tried to convince him that his teeth were a sign that he was special, but even at five years old, he knew that what was happening in his mouth was deeply wrong. As his bladder emptied, José shivered and reflected on what he had almost done with those misshapen teeth.

Would he have really bitten his father?

•

Dr. Chen gestured at an x-ray that hung from a portable light board across from the examination chair. “The extraction of your upper wisdom tooth will be textbook,” she said. “It’s mostly erupted and should pop out fairly easily.”

“You mean teeth, right?” José said. “My wisdom teeth.” He ran his tongue over the exposed third molar that had been causing him discomfort the past few months. He repeated the action on the opposite side where, instead of a tooth, a mound of tissue pushed out from the back of his mouth. 

“I can feel the other one on the other side, right here.”

The instructor shook her head. “Everyone look at this,” she said, drawing her students’ attention back to the x-ray image. “Here is the upper-left wisdom tooth—well developed, exposed, and ready for extraction.” Slowly, she slid her gloved finger to the opposite corner. “Here, however, you’ll see something interesting.”

With the solemnity of undertakers, the students leaned toward the ghostly representation of José’s mouth.

Ear Gauge rubbed his chin with the back of his gloved hand. “Where are his premolars?”

“He doesn’t have any. Anyone else notice that he has only twenty-four teeth? Far short of the usual thirty to thirty-two.” The instructor returned to José and pulled his mouth open with her thumb. “This patient has had extensive orthodontia. Were you treated for supernumerary teeth as a child?” she said to José.

“Huh?”

“Extra teeth.”

“Yeah, my family called them ‘alligator teeth.’” José frowned at the dentistry students who looked on in morbid curiosity, as if the exchange between dentist and patient were a murder mystery playing out before them. “My permanent teeth didn’t push out my baby teeth, so they all had to get pulled out. A bunch of my adult teeth, too.” 

“El Cocodrilo” is what his abuelita and tías called him as a child. Alligator—for the double-row of teeth that bristled from his gums, so many that it seemed like they came in sideways. 

José had refused to smile for school photos until middle school, after he had endured several rounds of dental surgery. Before he’d gotten his braces, his classmates teased that you could put a Pee-Chee folder in the gaps between his teeth and still have room for a couple of fried tortilla chips. 

The worst of the abuse came from Kiko Guzmán, a skinny kid whose narrow eyes searched constantly for chinks in José’s quiet-boy armor. He and José shared a desk in the fifth grade, at the new school José was forced to attend after his mother had kicked his father out for good and they had to move into a cheaper apartment in a different school district. José noted the differences immediately. Before, he could eat lunch in relative peace and fights among the students were rare. At his new school, however, unaffiliated boys like José wandered the playground at recess, their heads on a swivel and waiting for something to happen. On any given day, some boy—or even girl—might decide that José would make a good foil for their dreams of grandeur within the cutthroat grade-school ecosystem. Kiko was especially ambitious.

José hated Kiko the moment they met. Although José was by far the taller of the two, the small, dark Kiko sensed with that venomous brilliance of all bullies that his deskmate was shy and could not count on the other Mexican kids to back him up in a fight.

For several weeks the tension between them festered, with Kiko mocking José for any physical shortcoming—his height, his freckles, his light skin. It was inevitable that the little shit would zero in on José’s cartoonish teeth. As their teacher wrote on the board, Kiko would hold up surprisingly good sketches of a narrow face marred by crooked fangs bursting from a gash of a mouth. 

“Check it out,” Kiko said once as he passed around his latest rendition of José. “Fool kid’s like a werewolf that didn’t change all the way!”

The others would snigger at the drawings while José fantasized about sliding beneath his desk and disappearing into nothing. The dam holding back his anger and shame groaned with every new image.

The dam finally burst in the cafeteria lunch line.

“Hey, Wolf Man,” Kiko said, loud enough for everyone else to hear, “alguién me dijo que you gotta use a toilet scrubber to brush those scraggly-ass chompers.”

The other kids laughed as they stood in line with their aluminum lunch trays, enveloped in the odor of elementary school gravy that smelled like burnt car wax. José looked to the lunch ladies for help, but the women, blank-faced and hunched beneath their droopy hair nets, slopped food onto trays with robotic precision before motioning the kids onward.

Kiko grinned, reveling in the laughter. “You gotta get that shit taken care of, ¿tú sabes?” He reached up and squeezed José’s cheeks between his forefinger and thumb. “Show us your horsey teeth,” he said as his fingers edged toward José’s mouth.

One of the lunch ladies paused to stare at the boys, her ladle of rubbery mashed potatoes frozen in mid-air. 

José tried to push away Kiko’s hand, but the boy’s grip was too strong.

“Oye, mocoso,” the lunch lady said. “Déjalo en paz.” Hey, brat. Leave him alone.

“C’mon, fool. Let’s see ‘em.” Kiko’s voice was now barely a whispered growl as his squirming fingers pushed past José’s lips. “¡No mames, puto! How you gonna suck dick with all those gnarly fangs getting in the way?”

Deep inside José, something broke. He relaxed his jaw and opened. Kiko squeaked as his fingers slipped past waiting teeth. José closed his eyes and thought that it couldn’t be much worse than biting into one of the thin, gray cafeteria hamburger patties…

Kiko’s scream had barely reached its crescendo before the lunch lady pulled the fire alarm.

*

Beeping from the next examination cubicle caused José to jump in his chair. A bead of sweat rolled past his temple as Dr. Chen looked on with concern. “Are you alright?”

“Y-yeah.” José blinked into the overhead light and wondered what the dentist and her students would do if he simply stood up and left. “I’m okay,” he said. “I think I’m just having trouble keeping my mouth open.”

Dr. Chen nodded. “Not surprised. A small-mouthed patient, pedagogically useful pathology, and curious dental students all add up to jaw fatigue.”

“I’ll get the gag,” Kiss-Ass announced.

“Prop, Colby.” Dr. Chen’s eyes bored into her student. “In the presence of the patient, we call it a ‘prop’.” 

From his prone position, José watched instructor and student measure one another for several tense seconds before Kiss-Ass stalked to a supply cabinet. While he searched the shelves, Ear Gauge positioned himself next to the exam chair and subtly rested a hand on José’s knee. Long fingers gently squeezed.

“You’re doing great, José.”

“Thank you.”

José liked that Ear Gauge said his name correctly. He wondered if the student’s gesture was standard patient-care procedure now, a new protocol sweeping through the nation’s dental programs. He decided it was unlikely and that a far more reasonable interpretation of this development was that the dental student had boundary issues and was super into him. He asked himself what he should do and decided that Ear Gauge’s horniness just barely edged out Kiss-Ass Colby’s closeted sadism and piercing blue eyes. Inappropriate behavior or not, José had to admit that he much preferred the soft brown of Ear Gauge’s eyes that drank him in from behind his oversized safety goggles.

Controlling for Kiss-Ass’s cologne, José was fairly certain that he would be able to feel the difference between his and Ear Gauge’s fingers exploring his mouth if his eyes were closed. 

The beeping in the next cubicle abruptly ended. With the new silence, the swirling echoes of Kiko’s wailing and the cafeteria fire alarm faded into the humming busyness of the dental clinic. José decided that, creepy or not, Ear Gauge at least gave a shit about him—even if it was just to secretly cop a feel. 

Kiss-Ass, on the other hand, triggered him in an entirely different way. 

José managed a smile and reflected on his principal’s words to his mother following the school district’s investigation of what would later be known as the César Chávez Middle School Lunchroom Incident.

“We have concerns, Ms. Bernal,” the principal said, her stubby fingers bunched together on the desktop. “The other boy’s behavior was clearly unacceptable, but José’s response…it can only be called…disproportionate.”

José’s mother fought back tears. “He needs to be in school, Ms. Okoye.”

“He will,” the principal said, her tone conciliatory. “But Ms. Bernal, you must understand the situation. We can’t have them in the same classroom, what with all the uncertainty.” The principal pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. “Kiko’s mother says that the reattachment isn’t looking good.”

Seated next to his mother, José stared quietly at the floor. He pushed his tongue against his front teeth, still loose from the trauma of liberating Kiko’s finger from his hand. 

Let’s see you try to draw me with no thumb, fuckface.

José had stood motionless as Kiko writhed on the linoleum cafeteria floor. The boy clutched his mutilated hand to his chest and gazed up at José, terrified. As classmates and lunch ladies looked on in shock, José rolled Kiko’s thumb around his mouth, like a soggy chicharrón. It tasted a little like pencil lead and a lot like blood and felt larger than it really was. José bent his neck and let Kiko’s finger plop onto his lunch tray. 

The fire alarm blared. One of the lunch ladies fainted behind the counter.

A week after his meeting with the principal, José found himself in a small classroom attached to the district offices with other “gifted” children—kids whose learning differences and particular needs demanded a much smaller student-to-teacher ratio. For as much as it embarrassed him to be removed from his new school, José marveled how quickly he had modified his circumstances and, with one bite, succeeded in extracting himself from an unpleasant and untenable situation.

*

“Here’s the gag,” Kiss-Ass said, “—I mean, the prop.” He handed the instructor a small rubber wedge wrapped in plastic.

Dr. Chen dropped the package into the front pocket of her smock. “Not sure it’s time for this,” she said, “but we’ll see where things go. Has everyone had a chance to examine the patient? Please note the opportunistic placement of the remaining teeth. Your orthodontic surgeons really earned their pay, José.”

As the rest of the cohort toured his mouth, José fought the memory of arriving at his grandmother’s house one afternoon with his mother, still distraught over the cost of his coming surgeries.

“Es tu culpa,” his abuelita had said as she stirred a large pot of menudo on the stove. The steam rising from the battered pot curled around her head of thick gray hair like a spell from a fairy tale.

José’s mother sat up straight at the kitchen table. “How the hell is it my fault?”

“Porque, tonta, el pobrecito tiene los dientes mejicanos en una mandíbula gringa.”

Because, fool, the poor thing has Mexican teeth in a whiteboy jaw.

José winced at the memory of his mother collapsing into tears as his grandmother shook her head with a grim heaviness that he had always associated with being Mexican, but had taken years to understand was more to do with being a Mexican woman. José’s mother had sacrificed her financial security not because he was entitled to straight teeth, but because she felt it was her duty to him as his mother.

José prayed the dental students wouldn’t notice when his nose began to sting. 

“I’d like for you all to answer a question for me,” said Dr. Chen. “Why are we only talking about removing one upper wisdom tooth and not two?”

The students huddled around the x-ray image again. 

“He had the other one removed,” Kiss-Ass Colby said.

Dr. Chen smirked. “Is my student correct, José?”

José shook his head.

“No, you did not,” she said and turned to her students. “Look more closely this time.”

Ear Gauge pointed at a blurry spot on the x-ray where José’s upper-right wisdom tooth should have been. “What’s that?”

“Odontoma!” Kiss-Ass blurted out, barely containing the triumph in his voice.

The instructor gave a tired nod. “Correct again, Colby. We are privileged to have a patient with a classic presentation of a complex odontoma. Does anyone remember the difference between a compound and complex odon—”

“Yes. A com—”

“Not you, Colby.”

“But it’s—”

“Someone else?” said Dr. Chen, her eyes passing over the other students.

The tiny young woman with the wet, shining eyes raised her hand. “Um…compound odontoma tend to appear between teeth, whereas complex odontoma—”

“Occur in the posterior jaw in the form of a tumor!” said Kiss-Ass.

Dr. Chen breathed a long sigh behind her mask that fogged her safety goggles. “Thank you both,” she said, opening José’s mouth again. “There is only one wisdom tooth on the upper-left to remove because what we have on the upper-right is not a normal tooth, but this.” 

Yet again, José held his mouth open as the students filed past, staring with wonder into his mouth and poking at the mound of flesh that he had never given much attention. Watery Eyes hovered long enough to catch a glimpse of José’s oral deformity before skittering away, while Ear Gauge lingered just a little longer than the last time, his breathing low and relaxed. 

By the time Kiss-Ass finished his perfunctory and frustrated inspection, José’s jaw had started to cramp. He rubbed his cheek when the students concluded their review.

“José,” the instructor said, “has anyone ever pointed out this anomaly to you?”

“No, I just thought I was lucky that my wisdom tooth never came out on that side.”

“Technically, that’s correct. A tooth never erupted from that space back there, but we’re not talking about just one tooth. Beneath the surface are at least a dozen teeth.” Dr. Chen paused for the significance of her words to descend upon her students. “What was originally a primordial bud that was supposed to develop into a single tooth, instead, split into multiple buds, each one an abandoned possibility, a part of you that would never be able to grow.”

“Apparently, this can happen in horses and canids, too,” Kiss-Ass said from over her shoulder. José was certain the dental student shot him a nasty look from behind his surgical mask.

Dr. Chen took a steadying breath. “This is not veterinary dentistry, Colby.”

“Does it have anything to do with my Mexican teeth?” José said, his head swimming with images of his mother crying in his grandmother’s kitchen.

The dentist laughed. “No, odontoma are not associated with any particular human population or ethnophysiological trait. It can happen to anyone—in any mammal, for that matter,” she added with a quick glance at Kiss-Ass, “—but it is intrinsically interesting. Particularly so in a teaching environment.” 

“Shall I get the surgical tray?” Ear Gauge said, examining José’s x-ray. “It looks like they should just pop out. Easy peasy.”

“Yes and no,” she replied. “The area is easily accessible, the simple incision would expose the entire growth, and the odontoma does not appear to be rooted in bone.”

Kiss-Ass cocked his head and shrugged. “Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem, Colby, is that a more thorough inspection of the x-ray image and the patient’s physiology would show you that the tumor borders his nasal cavity.” 

“A nasal ectopic odontoma!” Watery Eyes said, her voice tinged with awe.

The smile behind Dr. Chen’s mask made the corners of her eyes crinkle. “Not quite—it hasn’t broken through and it appears to be stable. And for that reason, we are going to do nothing.”

Kiss-Ass’s shoulders slumped. “No surgical intervention?”

“Sorry, Colby, not this time,” Dr. Chen said. “Removing the growth might perforate the nasal wall. Then we’d be looking at an immediate transport to the university medical center for reconstructive surgery.”

Ear Gauge quietly placed himself next to the examination chair. José felt the dental student’s hand on his knee again. Any casual observer would have ignored it—an innocent gesture intended to comfort the patient—but José felt the fingers squeeze tight, and then again.

¡No mames, puto! How you gonna suck dick with all those gnarly chompers getting in the way?

“Best to leave well enough alone,” Dr. Chen said. “Those secret little teeth don’t impede normal activities and will never see the light of day.”

Ear Gauge’s fingers slid higher a couple of inches. José placed his hands protectively on his lap. 

Nunca dejes que vean cuánto te duele…

Conflicting waves of relief and disappointment washed over José. Behind closed eyes, he half-listened to the doctor and her students discuss the peculiarities of his case. Their voices faded into the ambient murmur of the dental clinic, the purposeful buzz of a learning space filled with eager students and time-worn teachers, all doing their best to make sense of the problems presented to them. José reminded himself that he could never afford any of this if it weren’t for his graduate fellowship. Second-tier care, he reflected. Like the welfare doctors after his father left, the barber college bowl cuts, the mis-matched crutches from his myriad boyhood injuries. He thought of all that his mother had done to provide him the things he needed, but that always felt a little…off.

Listening to the gentle white noise of the clinic, José cursed his lack of gratitude. 

“Gracias, ‘Amá,” he whispered.

“Beg pardon?” said Dr. Chen.

José opened his eyes. “Is that it? Can I go now?”

Dr. Chen stared in surprise. “Not unless you want to leave in that exposed wisdom tooth that’s been bothering you. Also,” she added, “my students would benefit from performing this procedure. Extractions are fairly routine for them, but not adult wisdom teeth.” Dr. Chen tilted her head at José. “My students and I would really appreciate it if you stayed.”

José glanced to his left where the ice continued to slap against the windows and accumulate against the sills, the line of snow inching higher. 

Where would I go if I just got up and left?

He imagined trudging through muddy snow to his apartment, a mile from campus where the rents were cheaper. He would stand out front of the rundown complex, the ice flakes nipping at his cheeks. He would flip off the building and then start walking. The thought of walking all the way home to California made him smile. No more pretentious seminar discussions. No more literature reviews. No more thin, tasteless tortillas from Meijers Superstore. 

What would his mother say when he appeared on her porch? Would she throw her arms around him, or stand in the doorway, hands on hips, and give him a long I-told-you-so lecture in Spanglish?

It had taken José almost a month to screw up the courage to tell his mother about the acceptance letter.

“M’ijo, ¿por qué querrías irte?” José’s mother pleaded from the kitchen table. “To Michigan of all places? It’s so far.”

“Because it’s a good school, Mom. And they offered me a scholarship—a fellowship, I mean.”

She read the acceptance letter again. José watched as her fingertips worried the raised university seal meant to give the document an aura of significance. “Graduate Minority Fellowship,” she hissed. “M’ijo, I think the only reason they gave you that is because you checked the box.”

The acceptance letter tore halfway through when José snatched it from his mother’s hands. “Maybe they think I’m worth it, Mom. Maybe they looked at my grades and personal statement and recommendations and thought that I’d be an actual asset to the program.”

“A lo mejor,” his mother said. Maybe so. “Sometimes they do things more for themselves than for us, m’ijo. Pero one thing I do know is that you’re better off here. What would I do with you gone?”

José sat across from his mother and raised his hands in exasperation. “What you always do? Act like I’m fine, like everything’s okay and that there’s nothing to discuss.”

“There is nothing to discuss!”

José had flinched at the sound of his mother’s open palm slapping the kitchen table. 

“There’s nothing wrong with you!” she yelled. “You’re just a late bloomer, that’s all.”

José let the torn acceptance letter fall to the kitchen floor and buried his face in his hands. “Oh my God, Mom, why is it always about me needing a girlfriend?”

“M’ijo, moving away won’t make you any less different.”

“So you do think that I’m different?”

“I meant special.” His mother drew a deep breath and held it for a long time. “José,” she said, her voice shaking, “m’ijito, the stuff inside us can change. You got past all the…biting things. You can get past these other things, too. You don’t have to go away to be yourself.”

*

José gazed out the third-floor window at the falling snow and wondered whether freezing to death would feel worse than facing either his mother or seminar professors.

“So what do you say?” said Dr. Chen. “Help us out by letting us treat you?”

José’s eyes passed over the dentist and students who crowded around him. “Alright,” he said. “Why not?”

Dr. Chen smiled behind her surgical mask. “Excellent. Anna, would you kindly ready the topical?” Watery Eyes turned to the exam table and began unwrapping two cotton swabs with long blue stems. “Emilio,” she said to Ear Gauge, “please prepare the infiltration anesthetic, 1-mil four percent articaine, buccal and lingual.”

“Needle size?” Ear Gauge asked. 

“Thirty.”

Kiss-Ass stepped forward. “What about me?”

Dr. Chen closed her eyes and then opened them slowly in a show of practiced moderation. “Patience, Colby.”

Colby’s nostrils flared as he stared at José, who despite his vulnerable position on the exam chair, dared to meet the dental student’s slate-blue eyes. Again, their color stirred a deep uneasiness within him.

Watery Eyes leaned over José and rubbed the area around his wisdom tooth with anesthetic. As she worked, José wondered why Colby was such an asshole. It was easier, he knew, to simply despise this arrogant, egotistical, dismissive prick, but natural curiosity forced him to consider the genesis of the future-dentist’s douchebaggery. Has he always been like this? Did he learn it along the way? Is this a nature-nurture thing? What did Kiss-Ass get out of always being first—or at least striving to be so? 

Gradually, José came to an uncomfortable conclusion: that maybe he and Kiss-Ass Colby shared a need for validation. As Watery Eyes finished swabbing his gums, José looked closely at Colby and wondered whether, beneath the officious facade, there might exist a decent person who could someday find a kinder way to get what he needed. Is that what that little shit Kiko had wanted, too? Did he just want to know that people loved him? Did Kiko ever find a way other than cruelty to feel worthy?

José opened his tingling mouth to say something—what?—to Kiss-Ass when the dental student’s eyes narrowed. 

“Alright, topical’s done,” Kiss-Ass said. “Any time now, Emilio.” 

The contempt in the dental student’s voice made José’s scalp prickle. In his head swirled the echoes of grade-school classmates mocking his own name. Hoe-ZAY, Kiko and the others would call him, laughing at how someone who looked so white could have such a name. José felt a distinct ringing in his ears as the anger returned and the last wisps of empathy toward Kiss-Ass dissipated in the clinic’s stifling, overheated air.

Ear Gauge—Emilio—pulled a rolling stool beside the exam chair. In his hand was a polished steel dental syringe, the kind with the two flared finger rings that José always thought looked unnecessarily steampunk. 

Ear Gauge smiled down on him. “I hope that you’re not nervous about needles,” he said to José. “Some guys can get squicked out just before insertion.” 

Watery Eyes’ brows arched high across her forehead.

“I’m good,” said José.

Ear Gauge patted José’s forearm before angling the gleaming syringe into his gaping mouth. The needle scraped across large incisors before finding a suitable spot. Despite the numbing agent that Watery Eyes had applied, José’s eyes stung as the articaine sizzled through his gum.

“¿Todo bien?” Ear Gauge said in sympathy. José thought his accent sounded vaguely Cuban or Puerto Rican, he couldn’t tell. “Solo un par de inyecciones más.” Just a couple more shots…

With each injection, José imagined his teeth—the ones that had caused him so much pain over the years—waking from their slumber and opening themselves up to the as-yet undetermined possibilities of the moment.

Over Ear Gauge’s shoulder, Kiss-Ass frowned and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Are you two amigos about done?”

“Relájate, bocón,” Ear Gauge muttered with a wink at José. Chill out, big mouth. José felt an unexpected gratitude that Ear Gauge would gift him with snippets of Spanish as the student rose from the stool and turned to his colleague. “He’s all yours now.”

“Colby,” said Dr. Chen, “it’s your turn to make the incision. Prepare the blade, please. A number ten should do.” Kiss-Ass reached quickly for the tray containing the scalpels. José’s stomach lurched at the thought of the blue-eyed student’s fingers in his mouth again. 

No sooner had Ear Gauge removed the gleaming syringe than Kiss-Ass nudged him aside with his elbow. In one hand was the scalpel, in the other, between his gloved thumb and index finger, a rubber wedge. “Open wide,” he said.

“Not yet.” Dr. Chen placed a hand on Colby’s shoulder. “We don’t employ props until absolutely necessary. Despite his small mouth, the patient has done admirably well providing us with enough space to do our work. Can you hold on just a little longer, José?”

“Mmm-hmm” José said, trying not to gag on the anesthetic that ran down the back of his throat.

Kiss-Ass huffed behind his mask and let the dental prop fall with a clang onto the exam tray, opting instead for a wad of cotton gauze. He spun on his stool, leaned over José, and began to shove gauze into the corners of his mouth. The dental student’s eyes widened. José watched, paralyzed, as dilated black pupils expanded within blue irises in anticipation of what was to come. 

As fingers jammed cotton into the dark recesses of his already crowded mouth, José realized with a start why Kiss-Ass’s gaze was so unsettling: the hateful twat’s eyes were the same color as his father’s.   

M’ijito, the stuff inside us can change. You got past all the…biting things. You can get past the other things, too.

Kiss-Ass raised his scalpel, the light glinting off its stainless steel blade. José squeezed his eyes shut and felt his jaws involuntarily resist the student’s probing fingers. The cotton gauze tasted like stale, dusty bread.

“C’mon, let’s do this,” said Kiss-Ass.

*

José lifted his head from the floor. His cheek throbbed from the backhand his father had delivered moments before.

“Look what the little animal did to me!” his father shouted, his blue eyes round with shock. He stood near the front door, a hand pressed tightly over his forearm. The air was sour with the stench of cheap beer and cigarettes. José watched as blood flowed down his father’s pale arm, along trembling, splayed fingers, and fell in droplets onto the old parquet floor.

José’s mother ran to him and placed a hand on his reddened cheek. She pushed her forehead into his, giving him a close-up of her swollen, black eyes. 

“The fuck you expect him to do?” his mother said. “You should be proud of him for protecting me.” She pulled José off of the floor and hugged him again. “Discúlpame, m’ijito,” she sobbed. Forgive me. 

“How many times do I need to tell you—speak goddamn English!” yelled José’s father, his words thick with rage. He raised his forearm to eye-level. Blood ran freely from two jagged wounds on the meatiest part of the muscle, just below the crook of the arm. Each half-moon gash consisted of multiple tooth marks. One more second and José would have succeeded in removing a large chunk of forearm.  

His father cursed and took a step forward.

José’s mother stood between them. “Touch either one of us again and I swear to God I will cut everything between your legs clean off, from your belly button to your fucking taint. Maybe not tonight, or next week, but the next time you’re passed out drunk it’ll happen, and when it does that bite will be the least of your worries, you pinche dickless coward.” 

The man swayed in front of the door, blue eyes searching for an explanation to his woman’s sudden ferocity. “But look at this,” he said, almost whining, as blood flowed down his arm. “He fucking bit me!”

Silence stretched on for what felt like a lifetime before José’s father gave him a long look with those ghostly eyes and turned away.

José and his mother stood holding one another as the front door slammed shut. He pressed his face against her hip and breathed heavily as his cheek expanded and throbbed from the blow. After several minutes, she patted him on the back and shuffled into the kitchen to fill a plastic bucket with warm water and bleach. She kneeled onto the parquet floor and dragged an old dish towel across the smear of darkening blood.

“¿Te ayudo, Mommy?” Can I help?

His mother looked up to the ceiling, her eyes sparkling with tears. “No, m’ijito,” she gasped. “Está bien. Go to bed. I’ll take the day off tomorrow and we can just hang out. How’s that sound?”

José lay awake in bed, listening to his mother cry while she scrubbed the floor. The swelling in his cheek pressed against the riot of teeth that had so worried her lately—teeth that came in sideways, in front, and behind his baby teeth. Teeth that made his gums angry and red and bled when he ate.

Teeth that had made his father leave.

*

José concentrated on the red glow of the exam light through his eyelids as Colby’s fingertips pushed at his lips.

From far away, he heard Dr. Chen’s smooth, even voice. “Is everything alright, José?”

Kiss-Ass pushed again, harder this time—and José felt his mouth open, as if acting under its own will. Latexed fingers filled his mouth. A knuckle brushed deeply concave incisors causing José’s jaw muscles to quiver. The dizzying odor of overcooked cafeteria food filled his brain as the snow fell outside. Through slitted eyes, José glanced at the window. At least three inches of snow had accumulated on the lower sill since the examination had begun.  

“Wider, please,” Kiss-Ass said. 

José thought he heard a faint hint of annoyance. Fingers snaked through his mouth and shoved across his palate. 

“C’mon now, let’s get in there—”

Trembling jaw muscles failed, and José heard more than felt his Mexican teeth splintering as they met bone. 

Tomás Baiza is originally from San José, California, and now lives in Boise, Idaho, where writes and has served as a staff editor for The Idaho Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies, and has appeared in various print and online anthologies and journals.

Tomas's first novel, Delivery: A Pocho's Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery, and his short-fiction collection, A Purpose to Our Savagery, are forthcoming in 2023 on Running Wild/RIZE Press.

25 November 2022

Eric Bean Jr.'s reading of

TRYING TO LINE UP MY HAIR WITH A SHATTERED MIRROR

Written by David Guiden

Originally from the island of Bermuda, Eric Bean Jr received his formal training at University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA). Graduating with distinction and a degree in Dance Education & Choreography, he joined the world-renowned Koresh Dance Company where he served as a soloist and principal dancer for six seasons. Now a resident of Las Vegas he has become a sought-after performer, choreographer, and artistic director with credits that include Don Arden's Jubilee, Cirque du Soleil, Viking Cruise lines, & the touring cast of Disney's The Lion King.

11 November 2022

GJ Gillespie

Bad Case of Loving You

GJ Gillespie is a collage artist living in a 1928 Tudor Revival farmhouse overlooking Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island (north of Seattle). In addition to natural beauty, he is inspired by art history -- especially mid century abstract expressionism. The “Northwest Mystics” who produced haunting images from this region 60 years ago are favorites. Winner of 19 awards, his art has appeared in 56 shows and numerous publications. When he is not making art, he runs his sketchbook company Leda Art Supply. Find him on Instagram: @garygillespie7 Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/garjog/ Twitter: @gj_gillespie Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NorthWhidbyArtist Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gj-gillespie-4587447/ or on his website: https://www.gjgillespieartistic.com/

11 November 2022

Patrick Wilcox

Someone Could Get Hurt

There is a poem                I can’t write
because the story inside the poem
doesn’t belong to me. As a kid I would take

 
matchbooks          that didn’t belong to me
and tell my sister, when accused,
I was innocent. To give the poem

 
I can’t write words          would make the story
inside the poem real and I’m afraid
 making the story real would kill

 
my sister. I don’t           want to kill
my sister. I don’t want to kill
   my brother. I don’t know why

 
I care more          about fire than the warning words
my sister gave me. The space
between not knowing and knowing

 
is as wide         as a match. My brother
is seared into that space. As a kid
I would light a match and let it burn

 
until I could no longer          hold it. I am holding
this poem in my mind
   soaked in kerosene. I don’t want

 
to kill my sister. Don’t          make me kill
my brother. As I die I’ll give this poem
   words without wanting to

 
and the story          inside the poem
will exit my body like innocence
   from a blackening match head.

An Interview with Patrick Wilcox on reading, writing, and revising

How long have you been writing poetry and what drives you to keep doing it?

I’ve been writing poetry for about 14 years. In my introductory creative writing class at Central Missouri I was so intimidated by the workshop model I actually didn’t turn in the first several assignments. Fortunately, my professors provided all the patience, support, and encouragement I needed to eventually dive in and share my work.

At first, my intention was to write fiction, but poetry quickly took hold. I didn’t have a great deal of exposure to modern, free-verse poetry in high school so hearing it read aloud in my workshops was like stepping from the shade into sunlight and I loved it. When I graduated and started teaching, poetry took a backseat to the needs of my students which, over time, put me in a bad headspace.

Since the pandemic, I’ve been able to strike a healthy balance between teaching and writing and couldn’t be happier.

What themes do you gravitate towards in your writing? Do you deliberately set off to explore certain topics or do they find you?

I don’t think I’m super original with the themes my work explores. Death, happiness, guilt, hope, and a few of the other usual suspects color the landscape of my poems, usually through the lens of multigenerational trauma.

As far as how I approach themes in my work, I’d definitely say the latter. I have terrible luck writing anything decent when I try to tackle a big idea and work my way in. Often, I find more success -- and have more fun -- starting from something small like a strong image or even a single word, and working my way out. My process usually begins with a word map. I type out a few dozen words I’ve been obsessing over due to their music, their meaning, or both, and take off from there. I figure the weightier stuff will bubble to the surface one way or another.

What I find compelling about this poem is the idea that personal poetry can sometimes reveal too much in the search for closure. What was your emotional journey with this piece? How did it become necessary for this poem to come into existence?

I wrote this poem because it lived for a long time in the back of my head and wouldn’t shut up. Once I started writing, the rough draft spilled out pretty quickly. I even had an earlier version I submitted to one magazine, but within a day withdrew it because I felt the back end needed more revision.

This poem rooted itself in a few different patches in my life. On more than one occasion, I’ve had people, each of whom I care for deeply, hurt each other, and navigating those situations always felt like trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The more I tried to help, the farther away from a solution I felt.

The speaker is struggling to separate his trauma from the trauma of others as was I while writing and revising.

Another compelling thing that struck me was how perfectly balanced the narrative is with the speaker’s emotional reactions to the narrative. The poem becomes, in essence, a story about not telling a story, and the speaker reconciling with almost-closure. How did you arrive at this balance? What is your editing process?

As I mentioned earlier, the rough draft had no problem making its way onto the page. Some of the words I remember obsessing over when I wrote this were blackening, sear, accuse, and kill. I was fascinated by this image of a child stealing matchbooks and striking them one by one. I decided to thread this image with the story of the siblings because it felt natural, especially when coupled with the cautionary title.

The place where this poem got dicey was the ending. I had written at least three different closing lines, but didn’t feel confident with any of them. It wasn’t until Passengers Journal suggested I cut the final line altogether and end with the image of the matchhead that I realized the poem was finished. For that, I am very grateful!

Any advice for emerging poets who are still finding their voice and still writing close to their personal experience?

The only advice I have concerning writing close to personal experience is to remember that there is creative security in the space between author and speaker. It’s okay to use that security whenever you need to.

As writers we’re entitled to our own perspectives, but we also have to respect that our perspective is only one of many. Nothing I’ve ever written is purely biographical nor is it purely fictitious, lived or lived vicariously. It’s a bit of both. Take comfort knowing that whether or not something happened in or around your life is peripheral. The important thing is that it happens and deserves a voice.

What are you reading right now that our readers should also get into?

Yes! It’s kind of weird, but I tend to stash books in different places and read them all simultaneously for a month. Currently, on my nightstand is Atomizer by Elizabeth A. I. Powell. In my living room, I’m reading meta meta make-belief by Marc McKee. And behind my desk I have The Shadow of Sirius by W. S. Merwin to keep me company. One book I have to recommend is a collection of craft essays titled The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo. I first read it in college, but I’ve bought it a dozen times as gifts for students and I return to its essays for guidance at least a couple of times a year.

Patrick Wilcox is from Independence, Missouri, a large suburb just outside Kansas City. He studied English and Creative writing at the University of Central Missouri where he also was an Assistant Editor for Pleiades and Editor-in-Chief of Arcade. He is a three-time recipient of the David Baker Award for Poetry and 2020 honorable mention of Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Quarter After Eight, Bangalore, and MacGuffin. He currently teaches English Language Arts at William Chrisman High School.

4 November 2022

Roger Vaillancourt

Underneaths

I loved his hands so much before I hated his hands. They had character just sitting on the table in front of him, the deep veins and the creases of wear and the scars from chisel tips and scrapes. Yet they could also be so gentle and sweet. It was the two things together that I loved so much, and that they were mine, that I could inspire them to do what they did. 

If I could have had them by themselves, unattached to the rest of him, that would have been perfect. This is how I dreamed of them once, just the hands, and I have never quite forgotten, or recovered from, that dream.

But I came to hate them because they never stopped. They never stopped grabbing at me and after we bought this house they never stopped puttering at it and between the two I could get no rest from them. 

I suppose that's why I started to dig. To go to ground.

But let me go back. The house. He had loved every thing about the house from the moment he saw it there just off route 9. Though it sat right off a busy road, it was set far enough back and behind a tall enough fence that it felt private. The fact that it backed up to the reservoir made it seem even more quiet. He loved the shape of it, the size of it, its little rooms, its big windows, the roofline, the traditional color, the coziness within it. He put a mark on every room with paint and mouldings and curtains and furniture and paintings and sculpture. 

The house opened up a part of him I had not fully appreciated before. When it is said that a person "blossoms" it can mean a change like this, I realized. The change in form from bud to blossom involves more alteration than one might think. It's not just a graceful unfolding, it is an expansion, it is the encroachment into and habitation of space that had previously been free, open, available to any. Two cannot blossom in the same space where the two first budded. His hands and tastes and opinions spread over the whole place. I would have been happy for him if I hadn't also needed to live there myself.

The only thing he didn't love was the basement. He hated basements and dampness and darkness. So it became mine, I claimed the basement. I have always like basements. When I was little, I would escape the heat of the day or the boredom of adults by retreating to the basement where my Grandfather would be building his tiny world hung off of the O-gauge rails. His bench there in the corner was so cozy, with its tiny drawers of tools and parts, with the bright light on the articulating arm, hovering over his head like a crown, while he stared at a tiny tree or person or car in his hand, through those weird square magnifying glasses. He painted so gently, so slowly and carefully, that he seemed like a process of nature, like water wearing away a stone or grass growing. 

So to me a basement is a place of quiet and peace and focus and gentle progress and I would love to have it, thank you. While he vined and whorled and expanded and transformed the house above my head I could be insulated down here. Of course, I didn't have any obvious reason to be down here long term. At first it was to clean it up, to organize it. Sure. But that could only last so long. As I swept and scrubbed in the first days, I also cast about in my mind for what would keep me down here, what hobby I would select that might allow me to remain. While I loved my Grandfather, I did not inherit his love of model trains. Nor would I be doing carpentry or woodworking, because that was my love's domain. He would glom onto it and it would cease to be mine and cease to be an escape. 

I finally settled at the end of strange distracted paths, on geology. This was new, but I think had always been there. What did I really know of it? Not much. Probably less than you. I had never taken any courses on it in school, I had never received a children's set of mineral samples, I had never had a relative who was interested in it, there was no reason I should have been drawn to it. Save for one: that I'd had a seed of aesthetic interest planted recently. 

A year or two ago, we had gone with a couple who are friends of ours to the Harvard museum sort of on a whim. One of our friends had recalled it from her youth and wanted to revisit it and her partner wanted company on this excursion and we were game. For the most part it struck me as a showcase of decay, with rooms full of stuffed trophy animals. It was a museum in the old sense, that of a rich man's collection of personal belongings shown for "educational purposes," but more truthfully shown to brag and stroke the ego. It was kind of interesting while also more than a little sickening. 

But the one thing there which had interested me deeply was the geology gallery. It was a vast room with glass-paneled cases standing in rows across it, each case filled with miraculous things: deep-flecked opals like tiny abstract dioramas and massive selenite crystals and fine white-threaded mesolite like an explosion captured in a photograph and ink-black schorl that somehow gave no light while still shining and striped jasper that seemed patterned by hand somehow, and soft fuzzy green asbestiform tremolite I want to pet like a kitten and beautiful rich red cinnabar which also will destroy. I loved the sight of them and I loved them more when they were toxic or radioactive, when their beauty was balanced by threat. I felt a strange recognition as I thought about how all these things were found beneath the ground in various ways, while mining for gold or gypsum or salt or other things, or while stripping off a mountaintop for coal or while exploring caves for no reason other than their being there. Deep or shallow, underneath our feet, underneath all the long generations of humans living their lives in miracle and mundanity, were things of ravishing beauty and danger, waiting for someone to dig down to them and be entranced by them or poisoned by them or both. Things being born in unimaginable slowness, drip by drip of slow accretion across millennia. It was a bizarre notion. It made the world larger than I had thought it to be just before. 

Recalling those long cases with those strange fantasies set within them, I decided it would be geology that I studied in the basement. Like any avocation, getting into it is a frictionless fall into details and more details. All a new hobby requires is curiosity and as much money as you can throw at it. The boxes arrived on the doorstep, one after the other, a steady accumulation. 

He didn't mind. He teased me about it sometimes, but I think he also appreciated the freedom it gave him. It kept me from rolling my eyes at him as he painted a room for the third time or swapped curtains between the bedrooms. It was more freedom for both of us, and I could afford it, and it was "investment." He knew I had bought the broad table to use as a work surface, and he saw me choose the shelves of display drawers, and when I asked him to come downstairs to wire in the overhead light for me - I don't do electrical work - he had to admit that I'd made a very nice workplace for myself down there before he hustled back up the stairs as if he had been holding his breath the entire time. 

The boxes came and I opened them and added them and my collection and my knowledge both grew in parallel. Upstairs he continued to wreak design and I watched over the weeks as strange objects - like hand-turned wooden bowls of raffia balls or distressed ceramic planters with tufts of tall dried grasses - arrived and then moved from place to place and then often disappeared. I resisted the urge to purchase demonic beauties of my own. 

Efflorescence appeared on the back wall of the basement, on the side facing the reservoir, not far from my workbench. I let it evolve in its gradual way, and it was not lost on me that it was being born by processes similar to its compatriots in the collection. Time phantomed past in the way it does, where it seems it can't be but yet it's suddenly time to buy milk again, where the dust has somehow gathered thick enough on the bureau that it needs wiping again though it seems like I had just done it. My efflorescent child grew with no effort on my part. But after some time it seemed that perhaps it had grown to maturity and was ready to join the collection. With great silly joy I designed the display card for it which described it just like the rest of the items in the collection, with the sourcing showing our current address. 

It would not be possible to scrape it off and have it retain any form at all. I flinched to imagine doing that, because it would destroy it. I had to cut it out of the concrete wall of the basement. This would be a challenge, but it could be done. Scraping is the start of it, defining the shape of the piece to be removed. The scraping needed to go deep enough that I could get behind the sample and cut through that way. I had effective tools for the job, carbide and diamond coated tools, which required only patience and steadiness in my actions. This needed to be done slowly. There are psychological mechanisms that can be used to inspire patience. Changing the scale of what I'm doing, thinking down to the microscopic and seeing the four inch square as a vast, holy plot of land around which I needed to meticulously dig a moat. Thinking of it as sculpture, just like my love would do in his work, slowly working my way towards the final shape buried within it, buried within the same material. It took many days, over weeks. I did not rush. I pursued it like a pilgrimage.

You would be surprised how large a hole I needed to make in the wall to extract the efflorescence. To be able to get the correct angle to dig shallowly behind it meant that the whole thing needed to be a couple of feet across. Just as I was getting down behind it to what felt like the center of the backside, my tool encountered a sharp change in resistance. For several long seconds I thought I had encountered some kind of void in the concrete, and only quite late did I realize that I'd breached the wall entirely. The material I was bringing back was not some strange rotten composite in a concrete void, but rather packed dirt from the exterior of the house. I'd cut all the way through the foundation. 

I continued the work and eventually removed a nice clean plinth of concrete with my little efflorescence intact on its front side. I had been holding the shape with my hand for days and days, expecting each scrape or tap would be the one when it fell to my grip. When it finally did, when its weight arrived to my palm, I flushed with happiness and felt briefly dizzy. Its funny placard was ready, and it joined the others in a logical way, adjacent to the rest of the accretives. It brought me great joy and satisfaction to see it there. I did not mention it to my beloved, because I sensed that doing so seemed likely to ruin it somehow.

The hole that remained in the wall became a quiet partner to me. In the same way an owl in a tree outside your window will become companionate simply by being there, by looking around its environment at the same things you looked at, by swiveling its head to your motion, by choosing your shared silence and presence, so too did the hole become a friend of sorts. A comfort. The basement had only ever had one exit, up the stairs into the kitchen; there was no bulkhead to the outdoors. The hole changed this. There was now another way. It felt like a window that had long been painted shut had been opened to fresh air and release. It was a sort of promise. For weeks it was just a friend that way, something to which I would turn and see and then smile. It took a long time for it to become more.

His hands never really stopped during all this time. It's hard to understand unless I spell it out. 

I would come upstairs in the evening and he would want to show me what he'd been working on. He would take my hand, he would put his arm around my shoulder, he would pat my ass as we walked to the room he'd worked on. When we would watch TV, he would put his hand on my leg, he would put his arm around me, knead my shoulders. In bed, he would spoon around me, I would wake with his arm draped around me. I would wake up sometimes with his one hand or both of them rooting around underneath me, pushed into my t-shirt or pants, stroking me or squeezing me or probing me or in a million other ways hungrily consuming parts of my body with his unstillable paws. I think he thought I liked this. I probably said something to that effect once, way back at the beginning. I probably had liked it that one time. But now it had grown to feel different. He never asked again if I liked it or wanted it, he assumed whatever I said the first time was how it would always be. 

For a time, I got the notion to try to own the thing, for me to touch him more, thinking that if he felt touch from me he would be less all over me. Maybe he was just skin-hungry, I thought, maybe I could choose the time and place and in this way pre-empt his cling. But that was a disaster of a different kind. He loved it and would start telling me what to do, how to touch him, and he could never get enough, it went on endlessly. Even when I went all the way along with it and brought him through to a squeaking cum, he'd still want to snuggle afterwards and I ended up feeling like I'd been consumed anyway, like a Jonah being crushed in his throbbing gut. It took my getting a bad cold where I was feverish and vomiting for three days for me to finally break out of that cycle and allow me back to my preferred distance. I lay in bed most of those three days, looking out the sliding door to the balcony, when I was not retching, onto the dark glassy reservoir just beyond the embankment. The water looked so close and so high up, like I could step out onto the balcony and then down into it like a swimming pool. From the windows of the first floor, you couldn't see the water, you could only look out onto the wall of the embankment, from there it sat looking like an innocent grassy hill.

*

It was during that time when I was trying to control the touching that I also started to expand the hole. I didn't have as much time in my space downstairs, and for some reason the labeling and sorting and cleaning and polishing of the collection was not as compelling to me then, it was all about the hole. 

First I took it down to the floor, which was not as hard as you'd think with a hammer and chisel and patience. I used one of his chisels stolen from his workcase and knew I was dulling and misusing it and this made me happy in my task. I knew while I was doing it that once the doorway was done, I would put the chisel out in the dirt somewhere as I dug outwards. I imagined how it would feel as I slid its sharp end into the receiving soil and then pushed with my bodyweight until it disappeared down past the top of the handle and then I'd smooth it over with the lightest effort of one finger, like polishing a spot. With these dreams in my head I cut out the whole little doorway, like a hobbit's door, until I met the wall of fresh dirt and clay just beyond. Then the quality of the work changed and got much more compelling to me. 

While he was out at some store fingering fabrics or getting tiny pots of sample paints, I carried out all the concrete pieces and threw them one by one as far as I could fling them into the reservoir. Bait the dragon. Then I worked out a little system whereby I could put the dirt I excavated from the tunnel out into one of the cellar window wells behind the rhododendron and then later rake it out along that side of the house and it wouldn't really be noticeable, like they did in "The Great Escape." The pallets I picked up I would put out on that side of the house, just into the woods. Pallets are perfect for shoring up a small tunnel, just cut the planking and timbers into consistent lengths and there you go. Pallets are free, right there at the side of the road, in the back of the industrial park, free. It was written on them in spray paint "FREE" and "TAKE ME". Okay, yes, I will take you, you little minxes. I will part you out and free you.

It's always the same temperature underground. It's never too warm, it's never freezing. If you're working, if you're exerting yourself, it can be quite comfortable. Add in a work light which brings its own warmth, like a tiny little hearth, and it can be immensely inviting. It's idyllic, the directional light showing a delicate dusting of rich soil on the bare wood. Brush the dirt away with the back of your hand. There, the clean wood, the smell of earth and freshly cut pine board. Doesn't it remind you of Nordic cabins and holiday places and handcraft? And with it the pleasure of the long task ahead, there is always more soil in the bare end of the tunnel, more timbering to set up, more face to pull down, more stone elbows jutting into the course to work the wood around, more to be done. 

Don't ask me where I was going. It wasn't a matter of "going" anywhere. It was a thing unto itself. It was the creation of a place and the discovery of the work that called me to do it. 

The work continued for a long time; it spanned weeks and months and seasons. That's how I know it's always the same temperature. I had started it in the spring, and I was there in the summer where it was a cool relief, and then through the fall and into the winter when there was snow up on the surface above me, and back around to spring again, suddenly. It was a place unaffected by seasons or whatever he was doing up there to the rest of the house, or the annoyances of the rest of life, like birthdays and Christmas and socializing and cookouts. We had one, a Labor day cookout, and I was particularly sensitive to the quality of my shoring just before it, I actually knocked in a couple of extra supports the day before just to be certain that all the sandaled and sneakered feet treading above wouldn't collapse my work. All went well. I was expecting there to be perhaps some fresh soil flaked into the tunnel afterwards, but I found none. My tunnel was as solid as if it had always been meant to be. 

Over time, the quality of the naked face changed. From the start, it had been mostly the same kind of clayish soil, not true clay, but not loose worm castings either. It had always held in a clod when I closed my fist around it. Later, as I got much further out, as the opening began to hide behind the elbows and knees of the tunnel's course when I viewed it from the working end, I began to encounter more gravel embedded in the soil. I even encountered a couple of breadbox sized stones which I could not avoid, but had to extract and pull out entirely through my plank road. The clatter when I'd loosen a packet of gravel out of the face onto the floor of the tunnel is a sound I found unexpectedly delightful. 

Around that time, the other thing started with stuffed animals on the bed in the spare room. Then he had, during and just after the holidays, started talking about "growing our family." There was no way to know exactly where this came from. I hadn't encouraged it. I had never expressed a desire for children at all, ever; though I had also never clearly expressed a desire not to have children. I had been silent on the topic which I suppose left my position open to interpretation. Just after Christmas, in the fraught pause between the holiday madness and the return to work and normalcy in January, he had started showing me things on his computer, information about adoption and application forms and articulation of how the process would work. When he did this, I thought about the tunnel and happily dissociated, nodding enough to make it seem that I had remained present while I was in my mind working the naked face, and moving deeper away. He was dreaming on about a toddler crawling on the living room rug while I was dreaming of crawling down the tunnel, back to my love and my work. 

There was always a simple and unconfrontational way to dodge the next step. It's easy to use inertia if you know how. Huge life changes require huge efforts and all it takes is half of the team not quite lifting their corner to prevent things from happening. When asked to complete the forms, I would grow frustrated and angry. The angrier I grew, the less frequently he would ask me about them. It was not about the process, I maintained in my tight, raised voice, it was the forms, my god I hated the forms so much, their endless parade of questions each requiring so much effort to recall or worse to look up in some file stuffed away in a box somewhere. When had I left that job? Had I actually gotten all the credits for the degree, or was I still 5 short? What was my brother's address now? Who would be the best third character reference after the two obvious ones? Once I even slapped a cup of pens to the floor in my anger. 

At the same time, I let him touch me more during this. I did this because I didn't want an obvious break, I didn't want the adoption bureaucracy and the physical overwhelm he caused in me to make him decide anything. No, I don't know why, but it was important that I would not hear him say "I don't think this is working," or "I'm not sure we want the same things," or any of the other things that are said by normal people to set the wedge. I needed to hold that off from happening. Not because it wouldn't be true, but because it was the wrong way. It would have been the wrong ending. We deserved better than a pedestrian ending, better than a basic Hallmark movie plot turn, the mild ending of the relationship that came before, and which in its dying allowed, the central passion of the film. No, I couldn't tell you exactly why. His happiness to paw at me more, and my unbelievable feigned enjoyment was more than enough to distract him, to make the situation feel more confusing and conflicted than it actually was. It was more than enough to keep him in place. 

And when it was uncomfortable to me, I always knew I would be back to the truth in the tunnel. There was no need to tell lies there, no need to elide or pretend. And it was coming closer, it wouldn't be long. The soil was becoming more damp, the gravel more tightly packed. 

I have heard that people in major life events, like winning an Oscar or having a baby or delivering a triumphant speech, don't remember the climax at all, but rather have flashbulb impressions from just around it, remembering the bottled water in the pocket of the limo's door as it was opened for them to step onto the red carpet, or the pattern of the buttons in the hospital elevator, or the way the wires snaked backstage as they waited for their name to be spoken to call them to the podium. For me it is the sound and feel of my trowel ticking on the gravel face and then the crumble of the face and the water like a garden hose turned on from somewhere else. It started as a trickle, but in only moments, just a few seconds, turned to a gush and then I knew I was there, and I crawled back out as my knees got chilled from the flow which ran ahead of me like a happy puppy and fell across me as I got back through the door and pulled the plug for the worklight out of the wall. I moved to the stairs, and watched the flow grow stronger from the tunnel, I watched the basement window flap as the water gusted the air out of the basement and made room for the water which would come and keep coming and fill up past the rafters and up through the floor above and would maybe float the house off the sills and I thought about how, once it was high enough, once it was a done thing and impossible to undo, unrecoverable, I would run up the last few stairs and throw the door open and call to him with joy and deliver our ending with perfect drama, the largest gift he would ever receive from anyone ever in his life.

Roger Vaillancourt is a professional explicator and maker of soothing sounds. He also writes fiction which explains nothing and is only inconsistently soothing. His previous work has been published in Paragraph Magazine, Blue Moon Review and New World Writing. His debut novel, Un-ruined, is forthcoming from Malarkey Books in November 2022. Find him on Twitter or Instagram: @rogerjva

28 October 2022

Diana Angelo's reading of

Tell Me What You Know About Dismemberment

Written by D. Dina Friedman

Diana Angelo has always been interested in how the use and evolution of language influence thought and behavior. She's a writer, editor, teacher, and now an audio narrator who enjoys crossing genres and forms in her writing; she believes there oughtn’t be borders. In language and literature, she has taught English to speakers of other languages in the food and hospitality industry in the New York City metro area, edited and written for The 12th Street Journal published by The New School’s Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy, and edited and written for Jersey City Writers 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

21 October 2022

Dominique Elliott

Drifting Eastward

Dominique Elliott is a documentary filmmaker, poet, and multimedia artist. She holds an MFA in visual design from UMass, Dartmouth. Her work has been showcased internationally and her documentary “Flying the Beam” is included in the Eisenhower Presidential Library collection. Her poetry has been featured on the Apple podcast Words In The Air and the Ekphrastic Review. She lives on a daylily farm in Georgia with her husband and their four cats. Find her on Twitter: @ElliottDominou or Instagram: plexipuspitstop

14 October 2022

Chiagoziem Jideofor

Made of

the year is ’97 and we are home
living too closely
borrowing sweetness 
and sounds from neighbours
effusive groundnut soup on Tuesdays. 
Papa Aje on Sundays recycling 
the billion years of the cool stars. the All Stars. the Archibogs. the Blue Spots. 
the soundmakers. the Cubanos. the Guinea Mambo Orchestra. freedom high-life. 
while we took turns to nail our gbam gbam and denge poses
inside, my mother’s loud exorcism of Rev. Patty’s voice stays 
within, we all hold memories of dancing to one lovable song—
below, go go below
following the voice of a masked singer
arching our full backs for the sweetest of tunes. 

█████simple narratives 
memories ███ 
███ living and building █████
a compound of families ███████idle eyes  
and wolfish uncles ███young ████sad music 
██████danger 
██████intentions 
█ baring all ██
babies in a bath███ 
███mothers██ knew ████
█████████understood harm 
█████pelting █████ girls 
the different music it saves for when things go wrong.  

██████continues 
for grown ███craving ██████
thriving as angels and faceless miracles 
music ██████
stirring ██beliefs █████
and remain made of████ 
 

[insert a lovable memory of dancing to a favourite song]

An Interview with Chiagoziem Confidence Jideofor on music, identity, and memory

I was impressed by the fact that you are an illustrator, as well as a poet. What influence, if any, does your visual art have on your writing, and vice versa? 

At this point, I’d say very little. That is sad news but also the truth. I think my background and where I come from played a huge role in my early understanding of creativity. Growing up, I only knew creativity that was both traditional and highly specialized. An artist was only an artist, and a writer only a writer, nothing more. And I had trouble adjusting to this mindset. I wanted to do so many things, and it didn’t help that I was good at those things. 

But I’d say that I have been working towards an idea of creativity that is both collaborative and boundary-pushing, as well as working on a poetic mindset that isn’t always bent on meaning embedded in language. I love the act of creating; I love words and colors, and I’m now realizing that I do not have to love these things separately. I believe the greatest problem has been reconciling these parts of myself, and to have fun while at it.

How do you usually approach the editing process? Do you immediately edit or rework poems, or do you wait a while before you start editing? How do you decide when a poem is ready to be performed or submitted? 

I overthink things, a horrible trait of mine. I sort of approach editing that way, and I constantly have to remind myself to stop tinkering with my poems. It is so bad that when I send out works to journals or presses, the work usually goes through two or more editing sessions even before I get a response. At least that is how it was for a while. But there are poems I do not touch. Ever. Mostly because I think they came perfect, or just how attached I am to them. There are also those that I get frustrated with and just abandon. 

Side note: I am very spontaneous and impatient. I chug that down to being a Bad Aries. 

Now, I take my time to come back to a piece and see how it reads. I think this ‘cool down’ technique has benefited my writing more. In addition, I have stopped myself from thinking that finishing up a poem means it is ready to be sent out. I haven’t been submitting much lately and I have a bunch of poems I would consider finished. 

At Passengers, we occasionally work with poets to help them polish their poems. I know you worked with our poetry editor, Andreea Ceplinschi. How did the two of you approach revisions, and how did you find the revision process?

Yes, I did! Andreea was very nice. And the process went well. I was kind of surprised. I have heard stories of editors who wanted you to change your poems to look the way they want or present revising as some sort of ultimatum. Like you either do this or we do not publish you. But Andreea wasn’t like that. She offered suggestive edits and was interested in the ideas I had. She also allowed me to do it on my own and it never felt like my creative instincts were compromised. 

And one thing I hate about opening my writing to others is feeling powerless. Like I have no power in deciding how things should go, and I am sure most writers feel this way too. As a child, I didn’t like being told what to do or even being in a space where I feel like my input isn’t regarded, and this got me into a lot of trouble. I had a hard time with revisions the first time I started workshopping my poems, which was last year, but I think I have grown a lot since then. 

Our editorial team was particularly impressed by your deft use of language in “Made of”, which anchors us so clearly in both time and place. What was the inspiration behind the poem? 

The inspiration was music. I love music a lot, especially AfroBeats. And I grew up with music. We had this shelf back home that had a lot of vinyl records in their hard paper pockets. I would go through the pile and just glance at the inscriptions and pictures on the pockets. The names of the bands always amused me. LOL. 

So, I was writing a chapbook inspired by a list of songs I have always loved since I can remember. Even songs my mother would usually play on Sundays. Also, it didn’t help that at the time I was seriously missing home and these memories connected to home would flood my mind occasionally. I would go back to listen to these songs, even play them while I write and “Made Of” was one of the poems I wrote. For the poem, I sought to reflect on these memories from childhood and how almost all the kidsI knew back then were connected by their parents’ taste in music. It was strange and at the same time exciting. 

I love Lagbaja, especially his “Konko Below” track, and I remember being scolded for dancing ‘inappropriately’ to the song. I did not understand this inappropriateness because the boys too danced the same way, but the girls were usually the ones scolded for ‘going below’. 

We were also intrigued by the title of this poem, and wondered what inspired it. Titles can make or break a poem, and you seem to have a knack for coming up with good ones. How do you generally decide on titles for your work? 

I have to tell my friends you said something this nice about my titles. 

I’ve always believed my titles were horrible, and it feels good having someone tell me otherwise. So, thank you!

Most of my titles come after the poems, but “Made Of” came at the same time as the lines of the poem. Like I wrote everything at once, if that’s easy to believe. And the title felt very appropriate for what I was trying to say in the poem. 

Music and memory seem central to this poem, from the almost drumming rhythm of the poem itself to the many references to favourite and memorable songs, dancing, instruments and various bands, including in your memorable last line. Could you tell us more about the use of music and rhythm in this poem, and if you had a particular song or songs in mind when writing?

I love music. I love drums, they do things to my head. 

Sincerely, making the poem have so much music in it wasn’t my first intention. I just wanted to write a poem inspired by some of my childhood memories around music and found myself using music and rhythm. 

I feel we are all connected by music, by rhythm, and all have this memory of listening to a song we really like, and that was why I added the last line. I thought about deleting it, but I’m glad I left it. 

While writing “Made Of”, I was listening to “Alaeze” by Rev Patty Obasi. It was a song my mom would play on the record player every Sunday. She played it so much that the lyrics got imprinted in my head. 

This poem, like much of your work that I have had the pleasure to read, seems to touch on identity and memory.  In a previous interview, you mentioned that “being an African poet is an identity you think you have until you leave the continent.” Do you think moving to the United States has influenced your writing or your sense of yourself as an African poet? 

I would say it has, greatly. It feels overwhelming being seen as so many things at once. Back home, I was simply Igbo, but here the waters to swim are a lot. Being African was something I never thought about too much, but totally became a headache when I moved here. I wasn’t sure what kind of African I wanted to be, and through whose gaze. 

First workshop I ever took, I was worried people wouldn’t understand my poems and so would write about general things. Even tried using language in the way some people in my cohort did. But the whole thing felt so stupid, and I stopped. Thankfully, that phase has passed (I hope). Not minding, being here has influenced my craft positively, and I am sort of starting to nurture a philosophy of creative autonomy and deliberateness. I am definitely not bothered about being one of those poets, as identity and memory is something that always be part of me and my writing.

Chiagoziem Confidence Jideofor is queer, artsy and Nigerian. She is currently a first year MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at The University of Alabama. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Reunion: The Dallas Review, the Minnesota Review, Rigorous, Versification, Ghost Heart, and so on. Also a self-taught illustrator, she has worked on several book covers and is currently an in-house digital artist at Arts Lounge Literary Magazine and Cooking Pot Publishing.

7 October 2022

Meagan Lucas

And Then the Forest Will Burn Down

One of the hazards of the job, they say, is bruising around your eyes, from the binoculars. Another, is going crazy, but the trainers spent more time on the binocular techniques - how to balance them without letting your face carry the weight, how to lean on your elbows, or rest them on the glass – than how to preserve one’s sanity. Maybe there wasn’t anything anyone could do about that. I felt lucky, having some experience with binoculars, being raised by avid birders, but less lucky in that my sanity was in short supply even before arrival.

 "You might not care what you look like, " he said. "Hell, you might not even know. Not all the cabs have mirrors. But soon your face will hurt. That tender skin under your eyes will ache, and then you're not going to want to use the binoculars or you'll be distracted by pain when you do. And then you'll miss something and then the forest will burn down." 

“And then the forest will burn down” was his favorite phrase. Right before "spot and call." The latter was to encourage reporting of every little thing, "no plume too small!" But the former with its visceral image of acres of trees, flattened to blackened ash desolation, established the stakes. I woke to nightmares of woodland animals running through burning tree branches, their eyes wild with terror and their fur smoking; the scent of burning hair stuck in my throat.

“Pay attention,” he said. “Watch.” Every minute could mean acres, lives and livelihoods. It only takes one spark, one stupid camper, one careless hiker, one stray coal. This wasn't a joke, wasn't easy. Wasn't time to goof off. “Don't get distracted and don’t fucking smoke,” he said, stubby index finger jabbing the air. I had to hide the snort that escaped when he said that behind a pretend cough. Who did he think I was? How many 40-something women took fire lookout jobs to goof off. To run away from their problems? Yes. Fool around? Not so much.

So, I'd spent the majority of the last month looking out. When I wasn’t sleeping, or in the bathroom, I was on the watch deck high above the forest, with my abdomen pressed against the metal rails, my elbows balancing the weight of the binoculars, scanning. Reading my territory like my favorite book. I memorized, learned. I knew those tiny trees, the rock out-croppings, the dead falls, and the streams better than the topography of my own hand. And when a snake of smoke slithered out, I used the Osborne to map it, and called it in. The voice on the other end of the line, cool and calm. It helped the first time, when my heart beat out of my chest, and I nearly dropped the heavy receiver from my sweaty palm. But eventually, that robotic voice at the other end was just another reminder that I was alone. Yes, my call would set an operation in motion, but I wasn't there. I couldn't see, couldn't pat anyone on the back and say "nice job!" Or "good work back there." No, the best I could hope for was the smoke to just disappear.

Above everything, I watched, and I waited, separate. I knew what I was getting myself into, it was my intention when I applied. When the interviewer asked if I would be okay with long stretches of solitude, when the trainer told me that I wouldn't talk to anyone, not really, for months, I was excited.

I'd wanted the quiet.

*

 The jeweler on the corner was piping instrumental Christmas songs out onto the sidewalk and the fudge shop smelled of vanilla and burnt sugar. There was a pleasant crisp in the air, just enough to make it feel festive.       

“I wish you hadn’t worn those heels,” he said, dragging her down the sidewalk by the tender inside of her arm. 

“I thought you loved these, how they make my legs look.”

“In bed. I like them in bed.” He looked at his watch. Her heels tapped a rhythm that matched the second hand.

“I don’t think they are too sexy for this party. Your boss hardly had any clothes on last year. I saw her nipple twice.” Her heel slid into a crack in the uneven pavement and tipped her ankle, and then her body sideways. He gripped harder. 

“You can hardly walk. You look drunk. Maybe you’re just too clumsy for them?”

 “If you would just slow down. What’s the rush? The drinks are bottomless. We won’t miss the awards, just the soggy mini quiche and the rubber chicken wings.”

 He didn’t answer, just pulled harder. She tried to keep up. By the time they walked through the doors she had sweat at her hairline and on her upper lip.

“Excuse me,” she said, breaking away to go to the restroom to check her face. She thought he rolled his eyes as he waved her off, already deep in conversation with a coworker she didn’t know. In the bathroom she pressed toilet paper to her face, and ran her wrists under cool water. A young woman emerged from a stall and she suddenly felt ridiculous for trying so hard.

 “Hot dress,” the girl said, fixing her lipstick that looked almost black in the dim party lighting. 

“Thank you,” she said smoothing the sequins over her round hips, “Yours, too.”

“Damn straight. Gonna get me some,” the girl said and left.

She fixed a smudge on her eyeliner. “Stop stalling,” she said to the mirror.

She grabbed two drinks on the way back to meet him, pinching her bag under her arm. “Hiding from me,” she said when she finally found him in the corner talking to some guy she thought she’d met before. She tried to hand her husband a drink but he shook his head and pointed at the one in his hand. She looked down at the two she was carrying, and around to see if there was anywhere to put one. There wasn’t. So, she drank the first drink fast and then nested the cups while the two men talked around her. 

 “So, Lisa,” the other man said finally turning toward her. That wasn’t her name but he was clearly speaking to her. “What do you do?”

 “She’s a teacher,” her husband said.

“What do you teach?” said the man.

“English,” her husband said. 

“That was my worst subject! Nearly got held back in third grade cause I couldn’t read. Have you ever had to do that? Hold one of your students back?”

She looked over to see what her husband would say to that. He was all of a sudden very interested in finishing his drink.

“I have had to fail a student before,” she said. “But no one gets into graduate school without being able to read.”

His eyebrows rose and he looked over at her husband with confusion. “Fuck, Chris,” he said. “I didn’t know you were the dumb one at your house. Ho wonder you like hanging around with us knuckleheads.” The man turned to her and said, “It was a pleasure to see you again Mrs—”

“Doctor,” she said.

He smirked. “Doctor,” he said and left.

When she turned to Chris he’d already joined another group and refused to make eye contact with her. She made small talk with his coworkers while he seethed. When it was time to go, she took her shoes off on the sidewalk. Barefoot, downtown Asheville was better than breaking her ankle trying to run in heels, but still he walked ahead of her.

When she caught up at a stoplight, he said: “I wish you would cut it out with the doctor bullshit. No one cares. They think you’re a snob or a bitch.”

 “It’s my name. You used to be proud of me.”

 “It’s just a little much. You’re a lot to deal with you know. A lot,” he said, and waved his hands in her direction. 

*

Occasionally, when the wind blew the right way, my cell worked and, messages from my mother would arrive.

 I assume you're all right up there.

We miss you. All of us. Even him (I can tell.)

I know you’d tell me if you weren't okay.

Chris dropped off your stuff I put it in the basement.

I turned my phone off and stuck it at the bottom of my duffle with the pack of smokes that I told myself were only for an emergency. I didn't need the distraction of wondering if anyone missed me. If anyone was reaching out. If he was calling? It was better not to know either way.

Silence.

Trees.

Sky.

 I watched the horizon obsessively so that I didn’t have time to look inside. To pull back my anger and find what lurked behind.

Sometimes birds would land on the rail. I started leaving them some crumbs, but the wind always stole my offerings first. At night in my bunk, I'd press my hands to my cheeks. To my biceps, and belly and thighs just to make sure that I was there. I’d pull my hair gently. I’d explore my teeth with my tongue. I’d listen to the wind whip around my cab, and be grateful. To be here, to be lonely with purpose was better than to be home in bed with him and feeling the same way. My sadness congealed into a stone, a weight that settled into my stomach. It was okay that way though. Easier to carry condensed like that than spread all over my skin. 

 On the afternoon of the sixty-seventh day, a flag of smoke appeared on the far western ridge of my territory. I went to work. I used the fire finder to map the coordinates, and had just picked up the phone to call it in, when a crackle came over the radio.

I jumped at the sound. It had never done that before. I didn't know it could.

A soft baritone was suddenly in my space. I was instantly aware that I wasn't wearing a bra, and I couldn't remember brushing my teeth. 

 He introduced himself. Lee. A lookout neighbor, of course, my cheeks went hot. We compared notes, coordinates. He said he would call it in if I wanted. He said he was pleased to meet me before the radio went quiet in my hand.

I'd been alone for sixty-seven days, but the sudden silence of the radio felt like a blow to my belly. I hadn’t thought much about other people for the last two months, about how they sound, or smell. What they feel like, or taste like, hadn’t crossed my mind. But now I couldn’t stop thinking about how far away the closest body was. How far would I have to go to smell the sweat of another person, to feel the warmth of their skin? If I fell from the tower, if I just didn’t wake up tomorrow, how long would it take for someone to notice?

The sun rose and set behind the tops of the trees. I'd never see the bottoms of them. The trunks and roots visible only to those who were willing to spend days trekking, pooping outside, sleeping in the pine needles. The same dry underbrush that would feed a fire would cushion their sleep. For me, the trees really could be anything, at this distance they looked like grass, or aquarium plants, perhaps the edge of a snow globe just waiting to be shaken. I imagined giant hands coming out of the sky and shaking the shit out of me. I wondered where I’d land. 

 I gave up trying to write.

I climbed up and down the stairs between my living quarters and the watch deck, noticing the tones the metal made depended on the temperature of the day and my footwear choice.

I practiced holding my breath.

I tried to remember songs I learned in grade school, and shocked myself with how many I could eventually remember all of the words to.

I baked cookies.

I baked bread.

I read the books I brought, and then the books that someone else had left, and then all the manuals for equipment I couldn’t even find, and then cereal boxes and shampoo bottles.

I whittled.

I tried to replicate poses from that one yoga class I went to in college.

I made myself spot something that started with each letter of the alphabet: ant, barred owl, cedar, duck, earwig… and got so mad at x that I nearly threw my binoculars over the edge.

Silence.

 I spotted three separate smoke wisps and called them in, hoping each time they’d tell me to radio Lee. But they didn't. I thought of a million excuses to use to call him. But didn't use them. They all sounded stupid when I practiced them out loud, my sweaty fingers wrapped around the radio.

What if he thought I was annoying?

What if he didn't answer?

What if I just imagined the whole thing and there was no one else out there? 

*

She could tell by the sound of Chris’s breathing he was awake. The green number projected on the ceiling said it was after two am and she was just slipping into bed. He didn’t roll over to say hi. He wanted her to think he was sleeping. He didn’t want to hear about her night. She knew that already. She wasn’t allowed to have fun without him. It didn’t matter that he hated poets, and worse still, spoken word. He couldn’t imagine how she could have fun without him, and she couldn’t explain it without hurting his feelings. But still she wanted him to roll over and pull her body tight against his. She wanted to wiggle her ass against his groin and feel the awakening when he put his hand on her hip and discovered she wasn’t wearing her pjs, that she wasn’t wearing anything. 

Instead, she pressed her front to his back. Wrapped her arm around his waist and pulled him tight to her. Kissed the nape of his neck. Then licked.

 “What’s got you all worked up? Someone read a dirty poem?”

“Maybe.” She whispered hooking her bare thigh over his hip and sliding her palm down his stomach. “Take your pants off.”

“This isn’t for me. Who got you all worked up?”

“It is for you.” She licked and bit his shoulder. “I missed you.”

“If you missed me, you wouldn’t leave me by myself all night.” He pulled himself into a tighter and tighter ball.

She rolled onto her back and pulled the blankets up to her neck.

“Sometimes I need to do something that’s just for me. Surely you understand that.”

“I don’t. I don’t feel the need to do that. I don’t leave you all by yourself.”

She sighed, “No, you do your thing with me here, and you make me do it too.”

“What’s that? What’s MY THING?”

“Television. You love television. You watch it constantly and you expect me to watch it with you. To you, it means together time.”

“But it doesn’t to you?” He rolled over so he was facing her now. 

She could feel his anger through the dark. “I don’t enjoy TV, so it doesn’t feel like enjoyable together time. It feels like something I do for you.” She winced as she said it, knowing what it would do. 

“I’m sorry I’m not as cultured as you.”

“That’s not it, I just don’t—”

He put his pillow over her face. She wrestled it off.

“I’m not finished.” He took a deep breath. “But you’re not the only one who does stuff they don’t like to do in order to make their spouse happy.”

“What don’t you like to do?”

“Plenty.”

“Like what?”

 “Too many things to name. I don’t want to be up all night.”

She didn’t know what to think. She had a feeling that he was lying, that he was just trying to one up her. That he was still trying to make her feel bad because she’d come home so late. But there was an underlying horror. What if he was doing something for her that he hated as much as she hated watching television? What if he hated it more? She was cold under the blankets. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she whispered.

“I didn’t want to make you angry. You’re a very angry person and I was afraid of your reaction.”

Tears slid out of the corner of her eyes and down her temples. This was not the first time he’d said that. 

*

 The night was close. Damp. Charged. A storm was coming. I was filled with both relief and fear. It had been so dry, the forest was a tinderbox, it was desperate for water. I’d watched everything growing yellow, toasting in the sun for the last two months. I could feel the ground changing, opening itself like a sponge, like a lover, ready for the moisture. But a storm meant lightning, too. One strike in these conditions could be a catastrophe. 

My thumb circled the call button. The edge a blade to the soft pad of my flesh. My heart thumped a drumbeat in the silence, as I set the radio down gently and stepped outside, scanning but finding my eyes wandering in the direction I thought he might be. Imagining the far edge of my bubble touching the far edge of his.

The night was black except for occasional lightning illuminating the edges of the clouds in the far distance, not my territory, not his. But the black of the night with no moon, no stars, and the soft feel of the damp air against my skin shrank the vastness, and allowed, for once in so many nights, for me to feel just a little less alone.  I knew I should go down to my cabin to get supplies for the night. I would need to stay here to watch for strikes and flares tonight. But I didn’t want to leave this feeling. A snap of bright white lit the room, as a strike landed just to the west, followed by a boom of thunder that shook the tower. I was too surprised to move to the fire finder to track it. A sizzle of static came over the radio.

“Did you see that?” he said.

“Yes! Wow,” I said.

“Where did it strike?” 

“Oh, I don't know.”

 “I thought you said?... Never mind... Just be on the lookout for more? There will be more,” he said.

“I hope so.”

I heard air escape through his nose. My cheeks burned at the thought of him laughing.

“I know it gets boring,” he said. 

“I don't mind boring. I don't mind quiet, or being alone.”

“You don't miss people? Conversation? Touching?”

“There's just all this build up. All this tension about what can happen. But it doesn't. Hasn't. Makes me feel like I'm up here for nothing.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this out loud. Surely he thought I had completely lost it. “Maybe I want to believe that something big can happen and I can be a part of it.”

“I think you might miss people more than you know.”

The hairs on my arms rose and the palms of my hands tingled as a crack of lightning screamed past, the air sizzled and tasted metallic. It snapped like a whip as it landed between us, and I gripped the handrail watching for a flame as the boom of thunder shook the tower and threatened to knock me off my feet. It was there. Right on top of me. Hope rose in my throat.

“Anything?” The radio fizzled.

 I watched. Willing a flicker. Praying for a flame. “No.” The breeze was picking up. It blew my hair across my face. The air felt fresher, lighter. I frowned.

Another crack. Further away. Less intense in every way. Disappointment swelled as I counted the seconds before the boom. It was out of my territory now. My radio was silent. I waited until the night was quiet and still before I climbed down the stairs, stripped off my clothes, and fell into bed. 

Laying in the dark I thought about the way he said touching. I pressed the palms of my hands to my bare stomach, I thought about how his tongue would have tapped and caressed his teeth and lips as the word formed itself in the warm cave of his mouth. I slid my hands up to my breasts and brushed them gently with the meat of my palm and the tip of my pinky finger. Goosebumps rose on my legs. I thought about whether his eyes would be open or closed and what he would be doing with his hands. I imagined strong hands, with long fingers, stretching across my rib cage and moving up to pinch my nipples, to squeeze my breasts until they ached with a deep fulfilling throb. I imagined a beard, itas soft scratch on my throat, my chest, my belly, and thighs. Big hands gripping my hips, pulling. My palms stroked and fingers slipped over the plains and valleys, the forests of my anatomy. I felt the tension of the last ten weeks, and the years at home before that, build beneath my skin, the bubbles fizzing to the surface, and the heat of my anger roiling it to a boil.

*

The oven timer said she had five minutes before she needed to take the cookies out. Too short to leave the kitchen, too long to do nothing. She looked around for a chore she’d been putting off, spied the mountain of unopened mail and sighed. She flipped through the pile.

“Do we need any of these?” she asked Chris who was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper.

“I don’t know what THESE are.”

“I dunno, bank statements? I think they email those to me. Something from the HOA. Looks like maybe our yearly investment statement.”

“If you don’t know, they should at least be opened. You threw away our new proof of insurance last month and I had to go through the hassle of requesting a new one. It’s not the end of the world to have some extra paper around.”

 She hated clutter. It itched her skin. She threw away the bank and HOA stuff unopened, but to make him happy opened the investment report. There was way more money in their account than she expected. Like ten times more.

“I think there’s a mistake in our investments.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a good one, but, it can’t be right. Shit…” she pulled her hands through her hair. “It would be amazing if it was though.”

 He sighed heavily, “Can you please just tell me what you’re talking about. I’m trying to do something here.”

“We have way, way more money in our investment account than I thought.”

“Oh, that.” He turned back to the paper.

“You knew?”

“I did it.”

“How?” She couldn’t imagine how he could have possibly put more money in their account when she hadn’t noticed it coming out of their bank account. She knew that she wasn’t the best at keeping track of their finances, but she would have noticed this.

“I moved our nest egg to something higher risk to make a quicker yield. You’ve been talking about how you want a house before a child, and at the rate we were saving we would never have enough. Not unless you got a better job.”

“This is about my job? You risked all our savings because I have a shitty job?”

“Well, you have been talking about quitting, about taking a few years off to write. This makes it so you can. I thought you’d be happy.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well cause I knew you’d do this.”

“This? THIS? You mean ask questions about where my money was and how you were using it? How you were putting our future in danger? THIS?”

“Screaming, yes.”

*

It didn’t help. It didn’t calm me. It didn’t fill the void in my chest. It didn’t soothe the heat from my skin or the roar from my ears. I needed to take more than just my body in my hands. The blankets felt heavy, the cab airless. I climbed the steps to the look out and scanned the horizon.  How many nights had I laid in bed at home, with Chris’ weight on the mattress, his breath in my nose, waiting? I was tired of waiting. Tired of hoping. I was going to end this standoff. I dumped the duffle on the floor to find my phone buried at the bottom. I pressed the picture of his face and hoped the wind was blowing in the right direction for a signal. It rang and rang. I looked at the time. I hung up and called again.

“Are you okay?” he cleared his throat and answered.

“Yes,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, it’s three AM!”

There was a murmur. Not Chris. He covered the mouthpiece with something. Muffled conversation seeped through. The pillow, I thought. 

“It’s three AM,” he said. “Call back in the morning,” and hung up.

 I threw the phone into the pitch black of the night. Seemingly ages later I heard it hit something, branches, and then a quiet thud. Dirt. I gripped the rail. I was the one that left. I wasn’t allowed to have any expectations. 

I needed a drink, but everything was in the cab and I didn’t feel like climbing all the way down. I grabbed the cigarettes laying on the floor with the rest of my stuff, and a dirty mug to ash into. Smoking was a big no; I’d have to be careful with my butts. I lit up, laid down on the grated floor of the watch deck, and watched the smoke swirl into the night. I let my mind follow it. The smoke mingling with the damp breeze and flying off to new adventures. Maybe that was what I needed. Something to set my heart racing – surfing, maybe, rock-climbing. Intentional adrenaline, instead of this purposeless boredom I’d created. I needed to create my own heat to combat the creeping chill of my failing marriage.

 I lit another cigarette. And another. Heart racing, hands shaking, I watched the flame born at the end of my lighter catch and die, catch and die. I’d been so cold for so long. Numb. How exciting it had felt, when I’d let the anger take me.

Yes, I thought. Yes.

And then I rolled over, and dropped the lit cigarette through the floor grate, watched its descent through the night to land on the pine needles below, and waited, the tender flesh of my face pressed hard to the metal, focused despite the pain, for something to happen. 

I watched. Deep breaths filling my lungs, filling my belly. In and out.

And there it was, a tiny ember, a miniature orange sun glowing beneath me. It gathered energy from the surrounding dry needles and twigs. Growing from a small ember to a flame. I scrambled down the tower stairs, my footsteps pounding through the night, afraid and excited about what my fire might be when I got to it. Praying that it didn’t put itself out. Praying it had more strength than I did.

It was still small when I knelt beside it. Even after I blew on it. Even after I threw handfuls of fuel on it. But it wasn’t when I called it in, when I relayed the coordinates and heard the catch in the voice on the other end. 

Meagan Lucas is the author of the award-winning novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs, and the forthcoming collection, Here in the Dark. Her short work can be seen in Still: The Journal, Cowboy Jamboree, Bull Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and others. She is the Roger Gillan Visiting Writer at Robert Morris University. Meagan teaches Creative Writing at AB-Technical Community College and is the EIC of Reckon Review. She lives in Western North Carolina.

30 September 2022

Marshall Moore

The Departure Board

Seattle, WA.

My lawyer’s talking about blowjobs. I found him via an ad in Seattle’s gay weekly. To an extent, I welcome the blue-tinged banter. Although he has issues with boundaries, at least I don’t have to worry about homophobia. I’m breaking messily up with a man. I’ve been supporting him. This is complicated and it is unpleasant. The tech crash after 9/11 cut my income in half, I was a shattered empty vessel after an earlier breakup with someone I was supposed to get old with, and this rebound I met in the East Village at The Cock the night before flying to Amsterdam for reasons that are murky now moved from Brooklyn to Oakland to live with me after four months and is prone to fits of screaming. Not all surprises are good. Now I’ve come to some semblance of… perhaps not sanity, exactly, but stasis. The lawyer—we’ll call him Greg—is here to help with the disentanglement. I scheduled half an hour for the appointment but I’ve been here almost twice that. All my paperwork’s in order, but the story about some guy whose cock he sucked has gone on much longer than the act itself did. But if I go home, there will be ranting and shouting. Given the choice between my attorney’s naked escapades and my partner’s mostly fictional but very loud indignities, the vicarious sword-swallowing is a great deal less tiresome. 

I have never liked being a captive audience. In childhood, I often was. Some quality makes me attractive to people who rant. My mother did, in the car, driving, often relentlessly. I was there to be a sympathetic spittoon for her sorrows. Overflowing, I became obsessed with faking my own death. You had to be careful with that kind of thing, though. No one wants to wake up halfway through their own autopsy. Characters in the novels I read would go to City Hall, find a birth certificate for a baby born around the same time as themselves but which then died in infancy, steal the certificate, and use it to set up a new identity in some other city. With just that piece of ID, you could then open a bank account, get a driver’s license, anything you needed. You could vanish. Provided you moved to some distant part of the country, no one would know. No one would find you. It would take more money than I had, though, and more time. Besides, I wasn’t sure where to start. I set the thought aside and ground my teeth for better days. 

I’ve been having those thoughts again.

Portland, OR.

We’ve been here a month. After the endless clogged freeways and sky-piercing cost of living in the Bay Area, I love this place. I remember being excited to leave California. I couldn’t afford to buy a house; there were earthquakes; it was crowded. Portland has a cozy charm that reminds me of North Carolina, albeit rainier. Yes, it’s self-aware here. Yes, the facial-hair topiary and the whiskey speakeasies do get a bit redundant. The nerds who made money in tech and could afford to upcycle themselves as the Cool Kids have moved here and now sneer at everyone less shellacked and shabby-chic than themselves. The transit system’s good but the closest station is kind of a hike. I like the trains but it’s faster to drive. My partner—the aforementioned rebound, let’s call him Terry—has just found a job: part-time, retail, at a Body Shop knockoff. Shower gels, lotions, bath scrubs, that kind of thing. It is, of course, my fault that he gave up full-time employment as a receptionist at an upscale Manhattan salon and flew across the country to live with me. He reminds me of this at least daily.

This morning, the ranting turns to a dark aria. Whatever’s gotten into him, it started last night: I picked him up from work, drove him home, and the raving commenced: “I hate this place! I can’t make any money! How is it that you work with deaf people and some of them are on benefits, and they have more money than I do! I want to get on disability too! I’m going to go to the top of a tall building, jump off, and break both of my legs. That would be easier than this.”

Now, in the car, more of same. I don’t know what has set him off. It doesn’t matter. I pull over. When he sees that I’m crying, he abruptly stops mid-tirade: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” 

Seattle, WA.

We’re homeless. Technically. According to the official definition of the term. Although we’re not on the street, I planned for that. We came close, too. The ASL interpreter-referral agency I worked for in Portland was lying about its finances, not paying my colleagues and me in full and on time when we invoiced. When you freelance, some fluctuation is part of the deal. But I’d submit an invoice for $1500 and get a third of that if I was lucky. Nobody warned me, either. They were afraid to. The classes I interpreted at the local community college and the occasional jobs I got from another agency were all that kept us fed and kept the lights on. But summer was coming; the Northwest still hadn’t recovered from the tech slump; the work would dry up until fall. 

“Get a job at Starbucks,” my father kept insisting. When I told him my hourly rate as an interpreter was so much higher than what I’d make as a barista that I’d make less in full-time work slinging coffee than scraping by on ten hours a week in my real job, he refused to believe it. This was not a new pattern with him, however. He’s hard of hearing. As a kid, I thought his obduracy was about his hearing loss. In adulthood, my experiences with the deaf community taught me a lot about the difference between hearing and listening.

But looking ahead and having no work on my schedule, nor the prospect of much, and my savings depleted from the move up from California, my credit cards maxed, and my regrettably audible partner to support, I could connect the dots. The arc pointed down. I started looking for a storage unit and a place to park the car while we lived out of it.

What saved us: Terry’s cousin in Seattle had a spare bedroom in her condo, and offered it to us. A family emergency was metastasizing, so it made sense for us to be closer anyway. Besides, Seattle is Terry’s hometown; he moved up here a few weeks ahead of me. The cousin already had a futon set up. It was that or my Honda. With the last of my money, we rented a storage unit, schlepped as much of our stuff up I-5 as we could fit in my Civic, and I’ve made weekly trips for the last month.

Now when I wake up and get ready for work, I open the door and come face-to-face with last night’s adventures. Still neck-deep in her nightlife phase, the cousin likes cocaine and Black men twice her size. It’s not unusual in the morning to find some guy crashed out on the sofa and a pile of blow on the coffee table. These visitors rarely come to fully dressed. If I’m honest, I don’t mind: I’m not into coke but I applaud her taste in men. She won’t struggle back to consciousness for a few more hours. I make coffee, offer this morning’s guest a cup. Looking sheepish and a bit the worse for wear, he declines, puts his shirt on, and leaves. I don’t catch his name.

Portland, OR.

 It’s my last full day in Portland. Terry’s already in Seattle, and I’ll be on the road soon enough.

The couple who own the interpreting agency are a pair of thieves. We’ll call him James and her Melinda. James, or so the story goes, has pancreatic cancer. He’s also gay, and she’s a lesbian, but they’re married. Or something. It’s very confusing and modern. I don’t care about that part today. They owe me almost three thousand dollars. I’ve come to collect it.

 When the starving, scared interpreters who work for them ask for the money they’re owed, the stock response is, “We can’t pay you yet because the client hasn’t paid us.” No other agency does this. We all know it’s a lie. But these two almost monopolize interpreting assignments in Portland. They’re not the only game in town but they’re the biggest. Piss them off and they’ll cut you off, and good luck with that. 

To those who press, Excuse Two is deployed: “Oh, it’s so terrible. You know James has cancer, right? We’re really struggling right now. Can you be patient with us?”

Today, I’m insistent: “My partner’s mother up in Seattle is actually dying of pancreatic cancer. Since I know you understand what that’s like first-hand, you’ll understand why I’m going to sit on your sofa until you pay me. After that, I’m getting on I-5 and driving up there. For good. The sooner you write me a check, the sooner I can get on the road.”

These are things I know: 

James is the apple-cheeked picture of zaftig, besequined good health. Terry’s mother is a talking skeleton wrapped in a layer of skin as thin and translucent as a spring-roll wrapper. The end will come for her soon. She misses dancing. James and Melinda bought another company and are hemorrhaging money. Their scheme of not paying Portland’s interpreters is all that’s propping them up. If James really has cancer, I have green hair, one eye, and three dicks. I’m going to break up with Terry. But I need my own place to live first. Which is why I’m not leaving this place without a check in hand.

Melinda keeps me waiting four and a half hours. 

At long last, she flounces into the lobby with the grace of something manufactured by John Deere. “Good news! I checked our books, and the clients have paid us. Not every bit of it, you understand, but enough that you should be happy.” She’s smiling and her eyes are telling me to go fuck myself. The check is a few hundred dollars short, but it will do. We both know it’s rush hour now: by stalling, she’s doubled the length of my drive to Seattle. I’ll be lucky to get there by ten. I thank her and leave.

Washington, DC.

 I’ve just bought the car. It’s a ‘97 Honda Civic sedan, black, quiet, comfortable. First car I’ve ever bought new. When you buy a new car, you have to drive it carefully for the first few thousand miles. Break the engine in gently. Don’t accelerate too hard, don’t stomp on the brakes, don’t drive like you’re at the Nürburgring. 

My muscle memory still has muscle memory of finding the Honda’s predecessor stolen. From in front of a church in central Baltimore, of all places. A friend from work was getting married. She asked me to be one of the interpreters. For the reception, everyone was meant to drive over to some waterfront restaurant. Except when I went outside after the ceremony, my car wasn’t there. 

Not possible, I remember thinking before an unsettling belief settled in. Who’d steal a green manual-transmission Toyota Tercel?

Someone did. 

Now I’m on my way up Wisconsin Avenue to the Maryland suburbs. There’s a cluster of federal agencies in Bethesda: Walter Reed, the National Institutes of Health. I have an appointment at the latter: a meeting that should last about an hour. It’ll be boring but I like the deaf guy.

For drivers, DC is confusing until you get used to it. The traffic and the buses are the same as you’d find in any large city, and the roads are wide, on a grid, and named alphabetically. Like French grammar, the problem with L’Enfant’s urban blueprint is the exceptions: the traffic circles, the tunnels, the parkways that begin in unexpected places and swoop through the city with minimal signage. They’re useful but you have to know where they go or else there’s no telling where you’ll end up.

Just up ahead and to my right, a woman on the sidewalk screams and drops her parcels. She is Asian. Shoulder-length hair. Wearing a purple jacket. Looks like she’s just been shopping at Mazza Gallerie or Nieman-Marcus. She’s looking at the maroon Ford Taurus sedan that’s just come to a stop on a side street. There’s something under the Ford. It’s light blue. A tarpaulin, I think. 

Then it hits me: It’s a woman. I stomp on the brakes, new-car admonitions be damned. Outside, around me, people are screaming. I realize what’s under the Ford at the very same moment its driver does. He tries to reverse. I guess he’s in a panic and thinks this will free the person beneath his car. It doesn’t work. I’m close enough now to see one of the tires crush the woman’s chest when the car backs up.

There’s nothing I can do, so in the interest of not blocking traffic, I find the closest parking lot, pull in, and… call my office to let them know I’m going to be late for my assignment.

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” I ask this question out loud, disconnect the call before someone answers, and call 911 to report the emergency. I’m not the first, says the voice on the other end of the line. Help is on the way. I then call my office back, tell them what happened, and proceed home too shaken—not just by what I’ve seen but by my own reaction—to even consider driving up to NIH. 

The agency schedules me to interpret a memorial service a few days later. Open casket. Someone kindly asks if I’m afraid of the remains. I’m not. I’m appalled, not afraid. When I get home afterward, I spend the rest of the night researching San Francisco: looking for apartments, interpreting agencies, information about utilities, and so on. Up till now, I’ve never seriously thought about moving to Northern California, nor even randomly thought about it. Nor have I even been there. The decision comes to me complete, already made, a found object. I’m sure bigger moves to more distant places have been decided upon based on less.

Seattle, WA.

There’s an ice dome in the refrigerator. Manufactured around the time Jimmy Carter left office, the fridge creaks when you open the doors. The reek of decades of leftovers pours out: pots of sauce gone sour in the remote back corners, vegetables rotted down to olive-black mush in the crisper, doggie bags and takeout boxes stacked up and wedged in. Frost from the freezer melts and (I guess) trickles down through a crack between the compartments. Hence the dome. It’s a terrible stalactite, a big frozen chode. It presses against the top shelf. It’s getting bigger. Things are frozen into it: packages of luncheon meat, a container of kimchi. The ice is yellowish grey. I try not to touch it

I’m past caring how Terry feels about things. His cousin has moved out, rented a place in the city center. She commutes down to Tacoma for work. Better to be closer to the station and the clubs. When the time comes to retrieve our furniture from Portland, Terry melts down on the train. On repeat: Why do we have to spend hours going down there. Why didn’t we rent a U-Haul in Seattle and drive it down instead of taking the train. It’s too much trouble. We should just leave it all in the storage unit and buy new stuff.

“With what?” I ask him.

We’re at that stage of a breakup where one partner goes cold and the other one panics. Terry’s angry all the time. He’s back to square one, looking for a job again, no car, tired of taking the bus, and his mom’s dying. Okay, he’s allowed to be a disaster. But he is also a mistake I don’t need to keep making.

When the end comes, it’s horrendous: more for him than for me. His family decides that since I have a job and he doesn’t, I should stay in the condo. They all know I’ve been supporting him. He moves in with his cousin downtown. The landlady—his auntie—has replaced the disgusting refrigerator too. Like the apartment now that I’m finally alone, the new fridge is blessedly clean and silent.

And in that echoing silence, my own ice dome finally cracks. Apart from a couple of friends—the kind you like but aren’t close to and will run out of things to talk about with inside of an hour—I don’t know anyone else in Seattle. There’s a park across the street and a convenience store two blocks away; otherwise, nothing within walking distance. I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been in my life, yet more relieved as well. I lose so much weight so fast that my trousers fall down in Whole Foods one night, but there’s a certain chilly clarity: this doesn’t have to be my life. I’m going to get as far away from all this as I can.

Osan, South Korea.

My American colleague and I are chatting with the head of the English Department. The academic year is wrapping up; our performance reviews have been very good. She is happy with us. Talk turns to holiday plans. The colleague wants to go home to the US; I’m in a long-distance thing with a man in Hong Kong, and we’re talking about meeting up in Taipei or Shanghai. Buying plane tickets is troublesome, though.  

“Why is that?”

I can’t buy them online because I no longer have an American bank account. I did, but on my last trip to Shanghai, someone stole my card details and used it to buy plane tickets, Persian rugs, and all manner of other shit before I finally convinced Washington Mutual to close the account. Between the purchases and the overdraft charges, the damage came to about $9000. I’ve been reimbursed for most of it, but the bank’s policy of referring overdrawn accounts to collections means I’ve been getting voicemail messages from agents. I delete them without listening. So: my credit is shot, no fault of my own. So: no US card, and our Korean debit cards don’t work for online purchases.

“That’s… preposterous! Can’t you use credit cards?”

“The banks won’t issue them to us because we’re foreigners.”

Professor K. turns several shades of purple, then picks up the phone. I understand Korean well enough to know she’s called the campus branch of Korea Exchange Bank. I feel sorry for the person on the other end of the line. This goes on for a few minutes. After the department head hangs up, she tells my colleague and me to stop by the bank tomorrow. It’s been sorted out.

I take Daesung, one of my students, a friendly guy who spent years in Canada, along to interpret. The teller asks for both of the cards attached to my account: the ATM card, which is only used for cash withdrawals; and the Visa debit card that should work for online shopping but doesn’t. She then hands me two new ones.

“This debit card is for ATMs and buying things here in Korea,” Daesung explains, pointing to it. “It’s like the two old cards put together. And the credit card: it’ll work online, and you can use it in other countries.”

Having understood some of this, the teller chimes in with a few more details. I wait for Daesung.

“But she wants to remind you that your ATM card—this new one—will not work outside of Korea.”

A rime of frost coats the walls. I ask, “It won’t work? So the old card would let me withdraw money anywhere and the new one won’t?”

Daesung looks embarrassed. “It’s because you’re a foreigner.”

“What if I need cash?”

He asks the teller this question, waits for the answer, then interprets it: “Take a lot with you?”

I need a couple of seconds. Then: “How is that safe?”

In the last few months, I’ve been followed down the street late at night and called a 씨발외국인 (fucking foreigner). An editor I do some work for at the Korea Herald has been stabbed. No taxi would take him to the hospital because he was white. I’ve had to break into my own building because the university put it up for sale and decided I didn’t need a key to the front door. Late the same night, I glued the locks open so I wouldn’t have to climb up the wall like a burglar again.

In the coming weeks, I will find that this policy has been quietly rolled out across the country. Some banks have stopped issuing cards that will work overseas for new accounts only. Others have cut off that functionality on existing accounts… without first warning the customers. Online, I read horror stories of foreign residents of Korea being stranded abroad, unable to access their own funds. One guy and his family got stuck in Phuket. Another, Vladivostok. And those are just the ones I hear about first.

“Thank you,” I say after some consideration. “I think I’m done.”

Daesung’s face falls. “I understand,” he says. “I’ve left before, too.”

Hong Kong.

Week after week, the violence cascades into more violence. My husband S. and I have participated in most of the huge marches, but now we’re talking about avoiding them. It’s getting too dangerous. Besides, I’m a white American. My presence there could be used to feed narratives. Friends closer to the epicenter have suggested I take a step back.

“What has to happen for us to go to the airport?” I ask S. one night over dinner.

On the news, tonight’s awfulness is unfolding. One highrise housing estate looks much like the next when it’s fogged in with tear gas. I ask what district this is. S. doesn’t know either. We’ve lost track. It’s hard to watch but we can’t look away. Oh look, they’ve brought the water cannon out. Oh great, it’s the sound cannon that gives you brain damage and makes you shit yourself. I need more wine.

“I don’t know,” he muses. “They’ve already killed people. Maybe if they declare a curfew? Put the city under martial law?”

Things get worse. Friends in various states begin offering houses. My sister does too, the difference being that she wants to charge us for it. Our (gay) cousin in Delaware has just bought a big townhouse and sends his address and a message to just text him if we’re on our way. Get out of there, people keep telling us.

The airport discussion evolves. When the government begins shutting down individual MTR stations, then entire lines, then the whole rail network, we’re effectively under a curfew. You can still get around if you drive or take a taxi, but you never know when the roads will be blocked and on fire. Besides, the cops might shoot tear-gas canisters at your windows. Some of the bus lines are running, but that’s unpredictable too. Scuffles and clashes flare up all over the city. And two or three places along the tram’s route across Hong Kong Island are regular flashpoints. For all intents and purposes, we’re trapped in our neighborhood.

We have the cat chipped. He objects, but the vet wins that argument.

“What has to happen for us to grab him and run to the airport?” I ask again when we get home afterward.

We’re effectively under martial law. There are black-clad stormtroopers at the entrances to most MTR stations. They grab young people off sidewalks and in shopping malls. Wrong place, wrong time, off to jail or worse.

“I don’t know, tanks down Nathan Road?”

Tanks are a sore spot with Hong Kongers. According to local lore, the authorities behind the Tiananmen Square Massacre back in ‘89 deployed them to crush dead and dying protestors’ bodies down to an unidentifiable substance called pie (not the exact word, but that’s how it translates, roughly) which could then be scraped off the pavement and disposed of. There were acid baths too, and immolations. Nathan Road is Kowloon’s main north-south corridor, and although it isn’t a straight shot down from Shenzhen, it’s the kind of street an occupying force would use to make a point. We don’t get tanks down Nathan Road, but we get other kinds of military transport vehicles. And yet, somehow we stay.

We keep having the same conversation, though: When do we leave? What will it take? When does it finally become too much?

As one violent nightmare week crashes into the next, we keep asking ourselves that. The answer always seems to be just a little worse, just a little worse, just a little bit worse.

Thessaloniki, Greece.

Alone again in a crowded room. Or a crowded departure hall, that is. As with many airports designed before the advent of low-cost airlines, Thessaloniki’s lacks adequate seating and the layout makes no sense. After security, there’s nothing but a grim convenience store, a ransacked deli, and a queue for the washrooms. I wish someone had warned me.

I’ve been in Greece for a conference. I gave one of the keynotes, in fact. The university’s based up in Florina, a town near the border with North Macedonia. It’s quiet and hilly; it bakes under the late-summer Mediterranean sun. Olive groves shimmer in the distance. Due to its elevation, it isn’t quite as hot as other parts of the country. It reminds me of the San Francisco Bay Area: same topography, similar climate. Florina, I’m told, is the only place in Greece where it snows. Okay, that’s one difference. Honestly, there’s not much on offer—you can see the whole place in a day and no tourists visit—but the food’s delicious and the people are great. When they learn where I live, the reaction is consistent: concerned, erudite horror. 

Even here, Hong Kong is big news, but no one knows the extent of it. The protest at the airport shocked the world. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get out for there. Now I’m not sure I’ll be able to get back. If it comes to that, I have a multiple-entry visa for China and can fly into Guangzhou or Shenzhen and make my way home by train. The trains will keep running even if the airport shuts down. I think. My Mandarin’s not great, but I’ll manage. There have been some 1300 arrests so far. Cops forcing prisoners to burn their own eyeballs with laser pointers. Beating prisoners they’ve already subdued. Stomping on their hands to break the bones. Dragging bleeding patients out of hospitals to arrest them. Shooting tear gas and pepper balls at journalists. And, more recently, a couple of weeks before this trip, attacking passengers in an MTR station and on the train and going on such a rampage that several are rumored to have been killed. The question is less about whether I can get back than it is about what conditions will be like when I finally do.

Most of the conference attendees teach at universities. Some are grad students. They all understand the hitch in my throat when I talk about my students who have gone missing. I’ve become friends with one of the conference delegates from Thessaloniki. She was kind enough to drop me off at the airport on her way home. In the car, somewhere in the middle of northern Greece, I check Twitter for news from Hong Kong. Two 13-year-olds have just been arrested during one of the protests. I can’t tell if they were participants or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Knowing what has been happening to people who get arrested there, I come unglued, crying in the car of this woman I just met.

This terrible waiting area contains about three times as many passengers as it was designed for. Lacking seats, people perch on their suitcases or just sit on the floor. I don’t want dust on my ass, so I pace, watching the departure board for updates, praying my flight to Istanbul won’t be delayed, praying that it will.

Seattle, WA.

What saved me: Several friends knew what was happening. One of them paid off the loan on my car. Two others sent funds to keep me (us) fed until my first paycheck from the new agency arrived. No point in asking my family for help. They won’t. I’ve tried. They treat me like I’m still the high school student who got in trouble back in the day, an endless and largely undiscussed narrative of punishment and contempt, and seem to wonder why I live on the other side of the country and have mostly stopped talking to them.

“I’m literally homeless.”

It’s your own fault. Get a job at Starbucks.

“I’m living with a guy who loses his shit and screams at me.”

It’s your own fault. Gay men are like moths that fly into candle flames.

I’m bored, burnt out, and in constant grinding pain from repetitive strain injuries. Nothing about my life then or now is sustainable. Now that I’m in Seattle, drowning in rainfall and silence, there’s enough time to think and little else to do. Years ago, a high school friend chucked everything and moved to Japan to teach English. Made some money there. Met his wife. I do some research. Seems it’s really a thing. Best of all, you can live below your means. In the online forums I stay up until 3am reading night after night, people talk about how much they save each month, how much they’ve got in the bank. You can do pretty well in Japan, even better in Korea. Your employer pays your airfare and your rent. The cost of living is cheap. It will give me time. Freelancing is an endless scramble for work, and there’s never a sense that my time is actually free. Agency positions aren’t much better. In Asia, I’ll have travel opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise get. Professional ones too, I expect. And with the money I imagine I’ll save, I can finally think about grad school. It’ll be a big move to a distant place, but there’s justification and I’m great at departures. Besides, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what I’m leaving behind. Probably much safer, too.

Cornwall, UK.

It would be vulgar to contemplate faking one’s death with a pandemic raging. I no longer do. For two years now, we have lived with this. Lived through this. First in Hong Kong (I think I had Covid before the public knew what it was), then here. Two years of grim terror and lockdowns. A second layer of terror waiting for my work visa to be approved. Everything about this past year in Cornwall has been a reflection of my time in Seattle. Throbbing, viral silence. Throat-shredding sobs with no one to hear them. Waking up in a panic at 3am feeling as if the blankets are strangling me like the tentacles of a kraken, dragging me down into depths from which I’ll never resurface. Sit up gasping, startle the cat. Drink some water from the bottle I keep by the bed. Do I put on some clothes and go out for a walk, just for fresh breaths of clean air? It’s pouring outside but so what? There will be oxygen. Or do I just get up and go to the bathroom, then come back to bed and hope for the best? Perhaps I’m already dead. It would explain a lot.

There’s a departures committee observing my comings and goings, counting down until it’s time to drive me forth into the world again. Britain ought to be scared or relieved. I’ve lived in more places than most people, and left every one. Or escaped, really. After multiple rounds of that, I don’t know what it’s like to be present. But with Covid surging and England drunk-walking in and out of lockdowns, there are lessons if I’m willing to receive them. This is my life now. This is going to be my life for some time to come, and I think I’m okay with that, inasmuch as I have any say in the matter. I’d prefer to remain. Now to figure out how.

Marshall Moore is an American author, publisher, and academic based in Cornwall, England. He has written several novels and collections of short fiction, the most recent being Inhospitable (Camphor Press, 2018). He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University, and he teaches creative writing and publishing at Falmouth University. His next books are a memoir titled I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing (Rebel Satori Press, 2022) and a co-edited academic collection on the subject of creative practice. For more information, please visit www.marshallmoore.com, or follow him on Twitter at @iridiumgobbler.

23 September 2022

Joshua Dickson's reading of

Someone Could Get Hurt

Written by Patrick Wilcox

Joshua Dickson is an egg who gained sentience in February of 2021 after a heavily botched attempt at making Tiramisu. Since then, he has gone on to lead a war against the existence of potato salad, claiming it to be "of nefarious origin". No one is certain of Joshua's goals, but we are sure of one thing: he is very egg-centric.

16 September 2022

Nazanin Karbalaei

Withdrawal

Nazanin Karbalaei is an Iranian architect and illustrator born in 1996, Tehran. For her, literature and music blends with illustration in order to create artworks that while retelling her experiences and her culture, goes further than the geographical limits and builds a bridge between her world and everything beyond.

9 September 2022

Matthew Lippman

Twinkies

I watched a video of a black bear
fall 49 feet out of a tree.
Earlier, I thought about becoming a criminal.
Not a bad one,
just a guy who stole Matchbox Cars from toy stores.
The text on the screen said that the animal control people
had not expected the tranquilizer to kick in so fast
and that is why they neglected to put a net
or mattress
or ocean below the bear
to break its fall.
I knew that was bullshit,
those men in their green vests and beards and guns.
Everything is a gun in this country
even your cellphone. Mine too.
We hold it up to the world and shoot.
It’s bad stuff like when the bear hit the concrete sidewalk bad stuff.
When I saw this, I felt my own bones break.
All of them
and I wanted to beat those men up,
with baseball bats and barbed wire--
that kind of assault and battery criminal. 
But this whole thing of black bears falling out of trees is my fault, your fault,
everyone’s fault.
He wouldn’t have been stuck up there in the first place
if not for our power plants and greasy Chevrolets and the toxic shit they put in Twinkies.
Remember Twinkies?
I miss Twinkies.
I want to be a Twinkie thief,
walk into a bodega, grab a handful of 2-packs
then go store them in my basement
so when the animal control people come with their nuclear bombs
to bomb the bears out of the trees
at least the Twinkies will have been stockpiled
and I’ll be able to feed the furry beasts
who might have gotten trapped in dumpsters
while running from the radiation.

An Interview with Matthew Lippman on politics and process

Tell us a bit about your writing process: what sparked the love for it and what’s driving it at the moment?

I write quick, usually in the morning, but not exclusive to the morning. Mostly in the morning, though. The writing process is a soft process. It provides me a space to quiet down my body and my mind. It’s also quite fun. I think, a long time ago, it became a place for me to engage with something that felt good to me as being all mine. I love creating and I love solitude. Poetry is the perfect union of those two states of being—the mixture of my internal forces and how they intersect with what is going on in the world. 

Your general body of work involves a lot of activism, exploring topics that, in your own words, “your mother taught you not to bring up at the dinner table.” Could you share your take on what part poetry plays in today’s socio-political environment?

The poems that I generate are just reflections, missives, explorations of what is immediate, what seems and feels relevant. I don’t know if they are socio-political at all. I don’t know if they comment on any part in the culture. What I do hope is that when someone reads one of my poems they enjoy it, that it makes them feel something, anything, about life, politics, culture, music, art, and, especially, love. 

A surface read of “Twinkies” had our team engaging in a lively debate on the expression of righteous anger in violent imagery is often a symptom of male fragility. However, we’ve also come to the conclusion that the voice of the piece is being skillfully used to support what is in fact an activist eco-poem. Tell us a bit about how this poem came to be and the intent behind it.

This is a heavy question. I saw a video of this bear falling out of a tree. It disturbed me. It made me think about how the human species is exponentially infringing on natural spaces, habitats, and how the animals that live their natural domains have to adapt because we kick them out in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘expansion.’ It’s wrong and upsets me. It is violent. The human condition is violent, way too violent. I don’t think it has anything to do with male fragility, the poem, but more, the fragility of eco-systems and how we, as a species, don’t respect other species. I suppose, in retrospect those animal control people with their guns and uniforms are also the highly testosterone driven segment of this society that I feel dangerous to me—men in power, white supremacists, etc. So, yes, there is that piece but more, the ecological theme is the driving force behind the poem—the bear, the whale, the owl. Honestly, I don’t know how I got to Twinkies at the end. This is one of the great beauties of writing poems, the element of surprise that I experience as a writer, not knowing where the poem will take me and then, boom, it’s there. 

For our overseas readers, and perhaps not only them, would you mind unpacking the meaning of the title a bit? 

Twinkies is a cake-like dessert food entity. It was discontinued a few years back but people made an uproar and the company brought it back. It’s synthetic and the myth is that if the world experienced a nuclear war the two things that would survive that war would be the cockroaches and Twinkies. For me Twinkies symbolize the end of the world both on a macro and a micro level. They are also disgustingly delicious. 

What is your editing process? How do you know when a poem is ready to be sent out?

Editing time is quick. I write a lot and so the next poem is the edit of the one I just wrote. That’s not to say that I don’t edit what I’ve just written. I would say, on average, I will spend half an hour editing and then the poem is ‘done.’ It might not ‘done’ but I will have lost interest. This might be a product of my undiagnosed ADD or, as I would like to believe, I just need to feel the surprise of making something new and editing is not that, new. 

Any projects you’re currently working on that you would like to share with our readership?

I am working on a manuscript called The Pathology of Currency. The poems in this book deal, loosely, with the notion of currency as something that infiltrates our everyday way of being, our daily existence—politics, the environment, love, art, food, careers, just to name a few ‘currencies.’ I am also finalizing a collection that is coming out 2024 called We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, which will be published by Four Way Books. Finally, I have started to make what some might call Vlogs. I see them as little video poems. What interests me is that when I make one of these little movies I have the same feeling as when making a poem. The only difference is that I can focus more and this feeling—one of getting lost in the act of making something—lasts a lot longer. 

Matthew Lippman’s collection Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. His next collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, will be published by Four Way Books in 2024.

2 September 2022

Hayden McGough

Silhouettes

Ephraim and I spend the afternoon fishing at the pond we claimed for ourselves over time. Across the old truss bridge, hidden, kept from the wind and ornamented with cedars and shining aster, it is a place he and I know to always find each other. We share a couple of smokes and return to the water everything we catch, a cardinal rule of his. When he walks me home in the evening, the soles of our shoes are heavy with clay.

He and I go uphill through town. The houses gleam with orange light in their rooms and on their porches, but the parish church where my mother attends mass remains dark. Its windows are occupied with figures of saints and martyrs, all of them lithe, obscure, and converging into a storm the higher I look. The church raised funds for a hearing aid for me when I was a boy. I imagined the saints coming at night to deliver my mother the paper check themselves, shutting it tight inside our mailbox with dim, perforated hands. I told her we should use the money to buy a beautiful black dog.

We did not get a dog. I was fitted for a hearing aid I do not wear anymore.

I continue to the street corner, but Ephraim halts at the church steps, slouches, and opens his fly as if to take a piss. He looks at me over his shoulder with a grin too wide for his face. I mutter formless curses as I retrieve him and drag him away by his arm. He crows loud enough for me to hear, and maybe God, too.

When we come beneath the large mulberry tree at the edge of my yard, Ephraim tells me something, but with his shoulders backed against the sky, he is a shadow that I cannot lipread. He signs instead, with hands first bending toward himself, then one falling from his chin, and at last both coming to a low rest, one folded on top of the other as if it was broken or an offering to me: Have a good night.

I nod and sign, Good night, and step up onto the curb, but he grabs my shirt and pulls me back to the street with a sharp jerk. I topple into him and then right myself, not knowing if I want to laugh or headbutt him. Ephraim leans down to me, our faces meet. He puts his lips to mine, anxiously, alignments askew, our noses and chins crashing.

And then he really kisses me.

His breath, flavored with smoke, pours down the front of me, into my shirt, scalds me. I kiss him back and he binds me to his chest in the bend of his arm. We try to find and ride a rhythm, but our bodies alchemize, become like the saints in stained glass, blurring together in the dark as we climb. His tongue licks wordlessly over mine, my hands spin unknowable signs around his head, and I feel his erection between us, heavy in his slacks like a hammer.

The beams of an approaching car untangle us. In its light, Ephraim’s unshaven cheeks and throat are scarlet, about to burn through the collar of his shirt. I retreat to an innocent distance from him, stumbling, hobbled by the heartbeat in my shorts. He shakes his head, a chuckle dissolving his worried look. The car passes. Dusk covers us again.

Ephraim comes to me and assumes the same configuration, bowing, heavy while holding me. I sink into him and feel relief. Rightness. Air after submersion. Reunion of a joint and its limb. “I’m going to hell,” I say. He unfolds himself from me, smiles without a wry twist this time. Same, his hand rocking like a cradle. We kiss again, and as he leaves, he motions, Good night, Thomas, signing my name the way I taught him, close to his chest.

When I first told him my name, I spoke it.

It was at the coffee shop in town, a place with sooty windows and brick floors. I slipped inside to wait out a rainstorm and noticed Ephraim right away: dark untidy hair, severe-looking, hazy from the smoke on his clothes, his bare feet resting on the table in front of him. I approached the store counter and he said something to me that only reached me as vibrations. We questioned each other in a dizzying loop before I finally understood: “Doyouhavealight?” He held up a cigarette.

I blushed. Vermilion, then crimson. He put his feet to the floor and fully turned to me, immense and frightening. I braced myself for injury, invisibility, for him to ridicule me about my voice and deafness, or maybe worse: unsee and forget me.

“Areyoudeaf?” he asked gently, clearly. A question I never hoped for and commonly endured, its answer inviting pity, pain, and endless other interrogations. This time was different, though. A cool-toned mercy in his eyes disarmed me just a little.

I sighed. “Are you always this observant?”

His laughter coiled him into a knot and I laughed with him. When our eyes met again, he asked, “Whatsyourname?”

The day after, I discovered him hunched over the same table in an ocher sweater, hands babbling half-signs in his lap while he read books about sign language. I asked him if he borrowed them from the library. He nodded with his fist and signed with funny, lingering pauses between words: All they had.

Ephraim disappears from view.

I withdraw to the mulberry tree, where consequences for what I have done come to mind. Visits from faceless angels. Plagues and woes. Burning sulfur. Heaven is not as potent at night, though. Somehow not as essential. I taste Ephraim’s breath on my tongue, in my nose, a lemony balm smoothed across my mouth and chin. I muse for a little while what I would surrender for him. The list is long.

A shadow roosting in the front window of my house startles me. My mother. Her gaze leaves me colorless, whitens the mulberries above me. The clamor of different, more material consequences crowds my head while she summons me silently, signlessly. I carry myself to the door and meet her in the sitting room. She resembles the grim virgins in the parish paintings; sunken, somber, her pale hair parted around her face. A lamp behind her chair phantomizes her and casts spears of darkness onto both of us. I stare at her mouth, as much to lipread her as to avoid her eyes.

“Isawyouwithhim,” she says.

No. I pinch the air in my fingers. Sign with me. I have little allowance for demands, but she seems off-center, weakened by some mortal wound beneath her gown.

Expressionless, she signs: I know you understand what you have done. Her hands never touch her face or each other, words bound in emptiness.

I don’t know what you mean. I keep my two fingers in my palm, hold them there to check for a pulse.

Lies, she signs, slashed past her face. Do you have any shame?

I’m going to bed. I turn to escape upstairs.

My mother stomps her foot, gouges the hardwood with her shoe. The house shivers. Teeth clenched, she starts again, aims an accusing motion at the window: That boy —

Stop, my hands crash together. You don’t know him.

“Iknowenough,” she says.

No speech. Please. I scrub an ultimatum into my chest.

She continues, sound spills from her: “Youwillnot — againnotever.”

I can’t understand you.

“Iraisedyoutobe — nothing — youwouldchoose —”

Stop talking. Fury wobbles up my spine in a current, surges in my arms and fists.

“You — tooyoungtoodumb —  toofar — gonegodless —” her lips contort into scribbled shapes. 

Stop. Please. Stop.

Every particle between us vibrates with the her voice: “Areyou — failedyou — howcouldyou — unquestionableunnatural —”

An electrostatic cry makes its jump, flashes up my throat and arcs out from me, white, deafening: “Pick up your hands!” The bolt ripples through her. Her eyes brighten. Words move me before I know them and I reach for her. I want you to understand! Let me help —

My mother rises from her chair and seizes my wrist in one hand and my elbow in the other. Her grip shackles me. Signs, unfinished, fall from my fingers in pieces, clatter to the floor, and roll into the corners of the room, vanishing. Through tears, I read her face. She knows she has cut too much. Severed the last ligaments. She clutches me tighter. “Thomasthomasthomas,” she murmurs, and I see how much she means for it to be my name, but it will never be again. Its wings are clipped whenever it is spoken. Her diamond ring, turned inward, carves a long wound down the length of my arm as I pull free from her.

For a splinter of time, I sink through the floor, into the earth below the house, and then I am in darkness. Displaced. Dethroned.

Purgatory.

Ephraim’s bedroom window comes to me in space. I peer within, see him and me collapsed on the carpet of his room among dirty socks, sodapop cans, malt liquor bottles, and pages of notes, questions, answers, messages, and manifestos written to each other when sign language and lipreading are not enough or too much. We lie drunk and dangerously close under the blue-green haze of the television, as we have done many nights, pretending that the careful touches, grazes, glances of limbs, hands, and feet are accidental, hoping that every next touch will be the one that conjures words. Signs. Wonders.

Paradise.

I relive it and all of its variations in flickers, milliseconds of memory, and they inflame me with each pass. The lure to remain here, to indulge in counterfeits I can never lose, to waste myself adoring a shadow of him, is so much greater than gravity. But I know I have to leave it. A window in the dark is not a way out.

I am alone when I return to the little room in oblivion, every chair empty. On the fireplace mantel sits a framed photograph of my father, gone from us. His only lasting influence is that he named me after the disciple of doubt, the one who denied the resurrection until Christ let him touch the holes in his hands. I have no hope those hands could convince me now, save me, let alone sign with me. The words would run right through and be lost.

My mother materializes in the hall at the telephone table. She raises the black handset to her jaw and splits open the phonebook. Trembling, I watch her and slink toward the stairs. The telephone was never a friend to me before, but under her touch, it is an instrument of misery, ready to send her voice on a wire to invite more pain upon me.

Or worse.

Ephraim.

A revelation propels me through the front door. I dart over the yard, into the street, down the hill, leaving my breath, hope, and ghost beneath the mulberry tree. The telephone poles plot my flight through town as I chase a transmission between them, a call for crucifixion that seethes in the sky above me. I tear past the parish church on its corner and do not stop to see the saints sneering, scattering from their perches to pursue me, wings spread. Vultures.

No time.

I keep running. Cut through gardens of lily of the valley and rose of sharon. Pass two women walking. A man in a car. A boy and his dog. All just negative space, dark matter. On either side of me, the lights of night spill in neon strokes across the road, and I charge through them. They strip me of totality, every yellow ray rendering half of me a shadow at a different angle. Ephraim will receive me in quarters at his doorstep. If I make it.

No fucking time.

Sprinting. Holes burned into my shoes, I collapse. The gravel walkway in front of his house rips the skin from my knees and palms. Gasping, panting, “Ephraim!” I call, unsure of my tongue, and rise.

Apocalypse greets me.

Ephraim’s bedroom lies ransacked, displaced and disassembled around the yard. A temple in ruins. His belongings choke my path to the porch: t-shirts, underwear, socks strewn beneath a catapulted drawer; a guitar, the body bashed in; books, slain, loose pages trampled into the earth. I find his golden knit sweater pooled near the mailbox. I collect and hold it against my ribs.

“Ephraim!” I cry.

The front door peels open like a bitter rind. Ephraim’s father appears, who clutches a sharp and wide leather belt. He is closely followed by Ephraim’s mother, swallowed by a wool blanket, arms tightly crossed in front of her. At the end of the stoop, wrapped in shadow, they become indistinguishable.

I ask, “Where is Ephraim?”

“Heisnthere,” one of them says, I cannot tell which.

“Hewont — hereagain —”

“Please, please, let me explain,” I croak from a cavity beyond my lungs where breath will not reach.

“Yourmother — allthatneededsaid —  done.” Their slick eyes and teeth gleam with light from the street. I step towards them, cowering, as one approaches animals.

“Where did he go?”

“— findhimyourself.”

“Please.” 

His father cracks the belt against the porch post: “— fuckaway — myhouse!”

I leave and their starlike stares pepper me with puncture wounds until I am gone. I wonder if Ephraim’s departure was similar to mine, or if he was steady as he left, a stoic St. Sebastian pierced with arrows. The roads lose their shape in the dark, become serpentine, pulled and lengthened by the wind. I do not wander, though. I am not lost. I go to the girder bridge, which has nearly vanished into night, and I cross it. Through the maples, and then the cedars, our pond is a plate of bruise-colored glass. I crawl into Ephraim’s sweater and hide myself at its edge.

Ephraim heard my name when I spoke it to him.

He did not know my name until I signed it to him.

In midsummer, he took me here to swim with him, and we were both deaf for as long as we were submerged. The water splashed green onto the clay bank that met our hands and knees when we climbed out, and then he showed me his palm. A fish hook was curled into it deeply. One of mine, discarded from a bluegill I caught the day before. Ephraim reclined against a dry slant of stone and laid his hand in my lap. His nearness and heat melted me, the smell of him, moss, frankincense, drowned me. I pulled the hook loose after a few twists and he never winced, just watched me patiently as he bled, the noon sun coloring his hairy belly and chest amber.

He was more deserving of worship than any other martyr.

Withdrawing his hand from mine, he signed with a grin, Nice catch, fisherman.

Sorry, I motioned reflexively. How is it feeling?

Better, his smile unmoved by his good palm swiped across his chin.

Your signing is improving, I offered.

Agreed. My signing is good and your fishing is not good.

An easy laugh became words: “Fuck you.” I shook my head and signed, You have a lot to learn.

“Okayokay —” Ephraim rose into a sitting pose, his legs and feet folded between us, his shoulders rolling as he signed, Teach me something. The corners of his mouth contemplated another grin.

What do you want to know? My signs were small, held close to me so I could keep myself from touching him, resist spilling into his lap. 

How do you sign your name? he asked, his hands cupping the first sign and breaking it like bread. Name signs are sacred, sometimes secret, given to deaf people from deaf people. Mine had been given by my friends Shell, Bev, and Frances from school, and I had given them theirs. The signs became truer names to us than the ones uttered into air.

I only ever shared my name sign with people I loved.

I signed it once for Ephraim, a heartbeat glowing on my palms, and let it pass from me to him like slow light. He gathered it to himself, mirrored it devoutly near his collarbone. I nodded, breathless, and he signed it again, and as he turned it in his hands, it turned something else in him, and in me. A key spun right, a latch released from its strike.

I wander toward sleep, waiting for him, and nightmares come instead. Ephraim appears to me in semidarkness, the only thing made of any color. He kisses me beneath the mulberry tree and signs, Why are you crying? Kisses me again and signs, Who are you looking for? with his thumb on his chin, forefinger like a hook. We are not alone. The saints are a hundred silhouettes with lightning-white eyes, circling us, gathering in the air and in the windows of my house with my mother, all of them anxious to cut us into pieces with their belts and diamonds.

I startle into a green gloom, everything undefined, the trees and clouds and stones still emerging from their own dreams. I uncrumple myself carefully from the hollows my shoulders and hips left in the earth. Standing, then straightening, my bones whimper into place. I go to the path, step into and follow Ephraim’s old footprints with the ease of instinct, and amble up through the cedars, led by something similar to faith.

The steel beams of the bridge seem more precious to me than before, more tenuous, like the slow spin of the sky toward morning could be enough to break them. I plant myself where the bridge’s wooden deck meets the dirt road. What is there to return to across the way? Houses, coffee and bottle shops, a parish church — places too small and lightless to keep me. So I stay and wait. I wait while the dark slinks back to shelter, while robins and waxwings come and go on the cool air, and dew sinks into my shoes.

I wait and wait for him to come.

And he does.

Ephraim takes shape on the far side of the bridge, dim and swaying, breath pouring from him like fog. He staggers to a halt and steadies himself on one of the low and leaning beams. “Hey,” I say to him, but the distance swallows my voice, and he remains at the end of all things, not hearing me.

I laugh and call louder. “Hey!”

He jolts as if waking, sees me, and begins to cross. A howl from him reaches me first and it rocks me, levels the hills, breaks every window, deafens God and all of heaven. His run broadens into leaps, feet glancing the bridge in swift strokes, and he approaches as a warm shadow, one becoming more and more real.

Hayden McGough grew up deaf and gay in the middle of nowhere. He studied Literature and Disability Studies at Purdue University, works as a teacher, and lives with his scientist husband in Indiana. Find him at haydenmcgough.com or on Instagram/Twitter: @haymcgough

26 August 2022

TyNia René Brandon's reading of

Between

Written by CB Anderson

TyNia René Brandon is an NYC-based performance artist. A Charlotte, NC native whose performance experience has taken her across the world with Disney, to the Broadway stage, and most recently voice acting. Represented by Clear Talent Group, TyNia enjoys collaborating with artists of all types to bring their work to life. IG: @thetybrand.

19 August 2022

Robert Palmer

Arbor

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” —Vincent Van Gogh

Robert Palmer’s recent subject matter revolves around landscape. There are many opportunities when creating a landscape painting. He enjoys viewing varying color throughout the day. A landscape can look different with each passing minute and might not look the same as light changes. It’s about capturing a moment in time. Roberts portfolio consists of balancing subject matter between two ideas; large open spaces and small concentrated spaces, both in landscape. Small spaces can be representational of a scene vague but recognizable at the same time. Imagery can be close up cropped reflections of a lake or stream. He is capturing large open spaces too. Both seem to take on similar representational compositions when looking at the wide open sky or reflections in water. He is drawn to the familiar landscape. Roberts painting something that feels familiar. This will be a focus for future paintings as well. He feels there are unlimited opportunities to capture these scenes on canvas.

When creating a piece, Robert methodically consider the composition, shapes, light, color, line, value, texture, and shadow in my art. Roberts paintings are thought out and planned. Some works are inspired by places Robert visited, while others are inspired from places he imagined. Occasionally he uses photographs as a guide for paintings. Robert has also been known to use multiple imagery from different locations in one composition. Some paintings start out with a series of sketches and watercolors. Paintings are thought out, and start from general forms to specific. Each brush stroke is carefully thought out. Some marks are stylized to strengthen the composition in texture, color and form.

Some works are inspired by old masters and modern artists like Cezanne, Van Gogh, Monet, Renior, De Kooning, Joan Mitchell and John Singer Sargent. Some contemporary artists that have influenced my work are Wayne Thiebaud, Chuck Close, and Gerhard Richter.

Robert Palmer graduated Summa Cum Laude from ASU with a degree in Fine Art, Painting in 2003. Roberts choice of medium is typically oil paint and water color. Some work has contributed to organizations for charity. He has been shown in several shows throughout Utah and Arizona including 2022 Tempe Gammage Auditorium in June.

12 August 2022

Clayton Walker

triptych

conversations

i carry my father in a hunting rifle

his mouth is a loaded chamber 
  his tongue is a trigger

once a week i raise him to my shoulder 
  and peer down his sights

intimacy

sweat on my tongue, i am a doe

baited to the hunter’s salt-lick.
  nourishment is an arrow

feathered through rib to lung.

assisted delivery while quartering a deer

i found god                             in the stomach 
                   of a doe
and raised him                        as my own

An Interview with Clayton Walker

How long have you been writing poetry?

I began writing poetry my junior year of college. Looking for an elective credit I enrolled in a poetry workshop taught by Eduardo C. Corral. That class changed my life. Not only did his guidance challenge me, it nurtured me. 

What is your writing process? What inspires you?

My writing process is very blue collar: clock in at the desk, write for an hour, clock out. I like to pretend that I’m getting paid. 

I am inspired by the writers of the American South: Gustav Hasford, Larry Brown, Edward Anderson. Those guys are my heroes. 

This poem triptych explores family background and heritage through hunting imagery and animal symbolism. What is the inspiration behind these pieces?

These poems began as excerpts from a dream journal kept while my father took me deer hunting in North Carolina. I found God on that trip. 

What our editorial team found quite striking about these poems is that they communicate on several levels of depth in very few lines. The pieces explore ancestry and nature vs. nurture in quite a minimalistic way. What is your editing process? How did you come to this pared-down, yet impactful form?

Thank you. Because these poems began as dream journals, the first-drafts were unpunctuated paragraphs of run-on prose. I took a weed-whacker to them: cut them down, then cut them some more. I challenged myself to cut out every word that does not contribute to the poems. It was fun. 

What are you reading right now that you love, or that inspires you?

Every six months or so I re-read The Short Timers by Gustav Hasford. Interestingly enough, he did hard time in prison for stealing library books! 

Any advice for emerging writers or poets still struggling to find their voice?

Keep your head up and your horns higher!

Clayton Walker holds an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University where he was awarded the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize and an honorable mention for the 2021 James Hurst Prize in fiction. His work appears in Smut Butt Magazine Presents: Contemporary Biker Fiction Vol 4.

5 August 2022

Orlantae Duncan

The Forgotten Fruit

The sun is a runny yolk, dripping heavy globes of yellow that stain the living room. The furniture, the little not dressed in plastic, is old and frayed at the arms with Papa Foster, dead three years, still present in the form of an ass-print here, a cigar burn there. I stand and count my breaths, a shin resting against a sharp corner of the coffee table, wondering how Alice slaved away in this stuffy, tiny house after seven children and a husband who, upon return from service in Korea, was almost no better than an eighth. Alice, small brown face the color of baked pie crust, with dark Cherokee hair the length of her entire back, streaked with starlight. Alice, the mother of my mother’s mother. Dying in the room next door. 

Everyone behaves today like actors in a play, breaking into choruses throughout the house, jostling from room to room at the rush of an invisible stagehand passing them at the end of a scene or act: aunts and uncles with Alice in her closed room, older cousins whispering in the kitchen over steaming teacups taken from Alice’s locked cabinet, their younger siblings out by Papa’s work shed grieving through red eyes and charred lungs, and me, alone in this sun-soaked room.  

The lace curtains flutter from the start of the air conditioner, tattooing shadows in the shapes of petals and stems across my arms, and I turn away from the window. Being the smallest room in the house, the living room is made larger through Alice’s domestic witchcraft. The armchairs and couches pushed to the outer boundaries of the room, the center feels larger and open, sunlight resting in a pool like a big sleeping cat. The wood-paneled walls, smooth and sleek, all barren, save for one off-colored panel three shades darker than the rest, and the only space decorated with photos. It was an anomaly of the house before they bought it, and the single peculiarity that sold Alice on committing to the property. 

Superstitious, Alice claimed the off-colored panel as a sign, something holy. The one sliver in a house occupied by seven kids and a military veteran that she could call her own. And so, as years stacked like plates and grandchildren bloomed like fruit, she made that sacred space into a shrine of the Foster legacy. I begin to hear movement and what sounds like the murmured endings of a prayer next door, and I move closer to the wall with the rogue panel in anticipation of the stagehand. 

“…and Father,” Uncle Jay or Grant continues, the voice echoed by a choir of “mmhmm” and “Yes, Lord” gathering like smoke behind the door while I pretend to study the photos on the wall, “we pray that you prepare us, Lord…” 

A picture of the twins, waiting in line at the community pool concession stand, arms linked, the white of the sun hitting the water at such an angle as to obliterate all other color, save for the black of their small bodies. 

“Use your servants, Lord. Guide our hearts with strength, Lord. With wisdom…” 

Aunt Beth, the runt of Alice’s litter, in her cap and gown, beaming at the head of the table in a dimly lit restaurant, only the whites of her eyes and the deep purple wine stain on her lips illuminated by a cupcake with a candle. 

“We question not your purpose, Lord. You made Mumma from the dust, Lord, and shall take…” 

Tiffany, months before the accident, seventeen and doe-eyed behind the wheel, her hair a halo of gold curls, her mouth a clean oval in imitation of the song on the radio, or a statement made to the body behind the camera of her excitement to start college. 

“This we ask, Father. Reunite Mumma with Daddy in your arms ‘til our time comes to heed your call, Lord. And the church said Amen.” 

Peter, eyes sunken and glassy, smiling over a plate of catfish in New Orleans. 

“Amen.” 

Aunt Theresa and her second ex-husband with Cousin Lee, huddled in the parking lot of Disney World, the ears from their Mickey Mouse hats casting large, planetary shadows on the cars behind them. 

“Amen.” 

None of me. 

“Amen.” 

There is a shuffling of bodies followed by a chain of weak coughs, but I pretend to continue analyzing the panel, solving an equation with an unsatisfied lack of shown work. I focus on the space between the frames, believing what lacks can be of equal value to what is taken up. That emptiness is not criminal, but instead something overlooked. One of the forgotten fruits of the spirit, Alice called it, as she did of all personal preferences that were not exactly biblical (i.e. table etiquette, polite laughter, silence during storms). 

“Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-Control—God told Paul to share these fruits with men, Lonnie,” she told me years ago, my small mouth full of sandwich at the kitchen table, “but men forget things all the time, even God’s chosen, but ain’t no way the Lord stopped at nine…now boy, finish your plate; Paul forgot to include wastelessness!” 

I laugh recalling this memory, and as the door opens and people begin to leave Alice’s room for the next act, I tell myself, “Yes. Even emptiness can be holy.”

Orlantae Duncan is a writer based in Richmond, Virginia with a BA in English Literature from the University of Mary Washington. His work has previously appeared in Homology Lit, Cartridge Lit, Wig-Wag Mag, and Allegory Ridge’s poetry anthology Aurora Vol. 1. He has also served on the editorial staff of The Rappahannock Review. He can be contacted via email at: orlantaeduncan@gmail.com.

29 July 2022

Mee-Ok

Buried Alive in Cymru

In the land of crop circles, the logic of time spirals out, spinning like the globe itself. Everywhere is geometry. Here, in the quarries in the Preseli Mountains, dotted with ancient settlements of the long departed, Stonehenge’s igneous rocks were sourced. And here, where the Welsh coastline meets the civil parish of Nevern, Pembrokeshire, stands Pentre Ifan, a portalled Dolmen, a megalithic mystery. Composed of seven Neolithic pillars, it stands erect, like the abandoned remains of a sister-Stonehenge—with a flat stone ceiling.

The view from its frame: a volcano sleeping in the westward distance, so deep in its slumber it is mistaken by visitors for dead. Its peak emerges majestic along the skyline like a grace note. Thought to be a burial chamber for centuries, there is curiously no sign of the perished. But make a wish under the shade of its 16-ton capstone, and you might wonder if you have died and gone to Pentre Ifan.

On a nearby hilltop sits an archaeological site spotted with Celtic huts currently under reconstruction, all shaped like volcanoes. Built in the Iron Age they are closer in time to us than they are to Pentre Ifan, the Neolithic Age being ancient history to the world of metallic savagery. The bare, circular bases of the huts stand like henges made of wood, with dung, clay, and oak fleshing out their walls and straw crowning their conical roofs. These structures, dark as a chimney swift borne out of pillars of smoke, breathe like volcanoes brought back to life by a fire in their hearth-stoned bellies. And outside they are surrounded by the lush countryside. This island waxes amphibious, its waves of leaves floating in the breeze, reminding us that the plant-life here evolved underwater.

When we go back far enough to the time of long ago, there is only one place. It is all flour and rice mills, tepees and yurts, open fires, bent wood, antlers, coracles, oracles, and wool wool wool. There are gods, the same gods, borrowed from neighbors like a cup of sugar and renamed—Horus, Shiva, Dionysus. Everyone playing Adam in the world-Eden of our forgotten yesterday. These same taper-roofed huts can be found seven time-zones east on Jeju Island in Korea, a country with its own volcanic islands and oppressed indigenous peoples. Where they bury their ancestors in the mountains, haunting the land and seascape.

But at Pentre Ifan the volcano has itself been buried by the invention of time, now hidden under stones masked by lichens and a carpet of wild Welsh vegetation. It is almost as though this cratered mountain, in its geologic prescience and Victorian redolence, agreed to be buried alive, its body springing forth life as quickly as it entered the throes of death. And today from the plains surrounding Pentre Ifan, we sense that, soon, this slumberous volcano may wake.

*Cymru is the endonym for Wales

Mee-ok is the winner of the 2019 Construction Literary Magazine Contest for Nonfiction and was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She has also been featured in the LA Times, Boston Globe Magazine, American Journal of Poetry, Passengers Journal, Korean Quarterly, and Michael Pollan’s anthology for Medium, where her piece was named Editor’s Pick. She is the recipient of the 2021 Voices of Color Fellowship at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and has been a visiting lecturer and Writer in Residence at the Frank Lloyd Wright estate, Taliesin. More at mee-ok.com.