Featured Work Archive
19 April 2024
Tanya L. YoungEpigraph
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 raumself-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. PriceTip 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 Mestrovicshelling 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.
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 NishiyamaKami
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 Khan해녀 (“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.
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 MechemSilver 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 DuncanHeLa
—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 GordonI 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.
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-SmithHand 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 WeissEkphrasis 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 CaseyHeadache
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 EmeryLove & 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.
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-CarsilloVivisections
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 FocusInto 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 SarvisFather 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
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 Gallagher3
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-LangStarting 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 MitchellR 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
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 RosaHercules 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 BeinT(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 HallNocturne
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-SteinUnclaimed 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 TroyCrocodile 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 ofMAN 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 TackWomen 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 Talebbody 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.
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 McPheeBristlecone
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 RodriguesLATCHKEY
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 NelsonStory & 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.
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 RileyBig 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 WheelerRash
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 GenoviseExcerpt 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.
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 ElliottThe 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 FinlayBefore 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 BaumanOssify
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.
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 BirozyWoody
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 HansenWOMEN 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 OlinThe 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.
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 StoneHold 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 WrightTime’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 FeitThirteen 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 CassellsSong 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 BerkowitzEmber 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 SylviaOn 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 BaldoriaElements
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.
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 SzulkowskiBoxing
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 MillerSacrum
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 HalperinNight 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
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 AlAttasUntitled
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 BooherPearls 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-TranSurvival 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 PrayerConfession
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.
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 OstovanyThe 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 Chardewhy
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 BaizaMexican 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 ofTRYING 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 GillespieBad 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 WilcoxSomeone 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 VaillancourtUnderneaths
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 ofTell 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 ElliottDrifting 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 JideoforMade 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 LucasAnd 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 MooreThe 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.
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 KarbalaeiWithdrawal
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 LippmanTwinkies
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 McGoughSilhouettes
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
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 PalmerArbor
“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 Walkertriptych
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 DuncanThe 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-OkBuried 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.
22 July 2022
Diana Angelo's reading of Ghost Stories to Tell Around the Flames
by Mary Rose Manspeaker
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.
15 July 2022
Amanda M. Julienin the moment
Amanda M Julien is a published author of poetry (The Muse and The Writers and Readers’ Magazine) and photographer (Months to Years and Prospectus), residing on the east coast of Nova Scotia with her partner, children and fur babies. Her hobbies include reading, photography and walks along the rocky shores of the only place she has ever called home. Her work has previously been published in both print and digital format. Find her on Instagram: @ajulienphotography
8 July 2022
Katherine GaffneyGH: Family Tree
See the changes nature makes between drawing
and trudging. Your love will be there to fill in the aged,
blank paper, to see how you would accomplish
this work of successive genealogy. He will be there, not
behind the bulky camcorder in which your father
kept replacing with new cassettes as your mother never
dilated, as she and the doctor prepared for an epidural.
The distance of experience through a lens. As you allowed
the distance of the shift from coop to table to dodge
the imminence of life in an egg, brewing lives in the doe’s
womb. The doe, the female rabbit, your grandfather
never meant to kill, the womb filled with kits not done
stewing. All the potential shots your grandfather
wouldn’t fire. The brief fire in the shot down your mother’s
spine, her only hope of extracting the one life
she carried this far. He took over the kits’ extraction
from the now still life womb. His garage was a still
life, of hanging pelts and knives and skulls dried clean
and milky. Unlived lives of this womb stopped, mid
cycle, not unlike the lives ranging from bloody mess to fleshy
nut that fell from your mother over a toilet or pulled
from her on a table as your grandfather pulls the nutty kits
from the doe. Remember your love, the one who shares
your bed will be there as your father wasn’t when the waxy
blue paper wafted over your mother’s belly,
as the doctors sunk their scalpels past her muscles
to the womb that had no escape and pulled you,
red, weighted as the rabbit you learned to skin.
An interview with Katherine Gaffney on process and subject
Katherine, how long have you been writing poetry? What is your process? What themes are you usually drawn to?
I was very lucky to have a high school English teacher who helped foster my writing, which wandered toward poetry around age 15 or 16. There have definitely been periods of dormancy, but I guess, to reveal my age, I have been writing about 15 years.
My process varies a lot. Currently I am working from a lot of archival documents and family stories, which is a separate, but perhaps similar project as the Good Housekeeping project that “GH: Family Tree” is a part of. My Good Housekeeping (what GH stands for in the poem title) project uses the kinds of articles that were included in Good Housekeeping, the magazine, but it also borrows from texts like Amy Vanderbilt’s and Emily Post’s etiquette books. The goal of the project is interrogate and subvert expectations regarding gender roles in domestic spaces, in families, and beyond.
But sometimes my process merely involves a snatch of language or a game of Bananagrams if I am really stuck. With the words I create from the tiles I braid the language together to form the start of a poem. I also find I begin to compose while I am kneading dough or mowing the lawn—something about the repetition, the tactility of these tasks helps me think.
It’s a tough question regarding what subjects or themes I am drawn to as I don’t want to limit or pigeonhole myself, but I suppose on the whole I would say I am drawn to themes of gender identity, intimate relationships (whether familial or romantic), and historical (whether personally historical or more publicly historical) themes?
What was the inspiration behind GH: Family Tree?
As I briefly mentioned, this poem is part of a manuscript that was born from what was originally a single multi-part poem. That poem has since grown into a full-length chapbook all with poems entitle GH: [insert title of poem here] that weaves in some of my own family dynamics with imagined marriage and parenthood.
Toward the end of my MFA, I wrote a lot about motherhood or imagined motherhood as I am not a parent to any humans. Though I do have two dogs and a cat and, in all honesty, becoming a parent to animals sparked this ideation about motherhood, projecting and experimenting with what it would be like to inhabit that role.
Family is also a complicated and fascinating subject for me as my parents were older than most, 40 years old when they had me, and were often mistaken for my grandparents. My mother also had a very difficult pregnancy with me, so, as a result, they adopted my little brother shortly after he was born when my parents were about 45 years old. So, our family endured obstacles to even become a family whether through difficult pregnancies and miscarriages or the very involved process of adoption.
As a result, our family is not strictly biologically related, not traditionally aged, and just all around unique! Plus, due to some life circumstances I had a more maternal relationship with my brother, which I explore in other poems, but certainly influences my impulse toward understanding parenthood/motherhood and exploring it in my poetry. So, in part this poem is inspired by the crafted nature of family and particularly the crafted nature of my own family.
Genealogy is also dear to my heart and my family—my paternal grandmother, long before Ancestry and all the other genealogy websites, was a genealogist, so in some ways I think the title “Family Tree” is a nod to her.
What I find quite striking is that in the wake of the recent SCOTUS ruling regarding Roe v. Wade, this poem reads as a metaphor for women as prey, the doe a symbol for reproductive abilities being dehumanized at the hands of the hunter. Was this meaning at all on your radar, or do you think this reading is an expression of the female collective consciousness?
I can’t say how meaningful it is for this poem, my poem, to contribute to the conversation surrounding the rights for people with uteruses in the United States. It’s a decision that has devastated me and perhaps the fears surrounding the fragility of rights for people with uteruses, including women, bubble under this poem’s surface. Though, I will clarify, this poem was written a few years ago so is not directly a response to the decision.
However, in spite of the poem’s timeline in relation to Roe, it’s interesting that this poem is one that is coming up in conversation with the aftermath of Roe being overturned. I recently talked with my mother who in some capacity, is the mother on the delivery table in this poem, about Roe. In that conversation, she revealed to me that despite my parents’ extreme efforts to get pregnant—which included five miscarriages before I was born and two more after me—that as older parents, they were prepared to abort the pregnancy should they have discovered something medically, negatively life-altering with the fetus during an amniocentesis. Their concern did not lie with disability, but with their ability to care for the child given their age and further fears over finding care for the child should one them have left this earth prematurely. The logic here is a bit of a rabbit hole as they were the youngest (or close to the youngest) of their siblings, which complicated the ability to find care in the event of an unexpected death. But I want to emphasize this family dynamic as disability is not something my parents are phobic of—this fact and facet of the conversation I had with my mother is particularly important to me as some of graduate research involves disability studies. So obliquely, this poem does not only just deal metaphorically with women as prey, but with the realities of abortion as part of medical care for pregnant people and for the fetus.
To speak to women as prey, I am not certain I see the grandfather as a menacing figure here—though hunting can certainly read as a menacing act and is not something I deem worthy of a hobby. But there is something tragic in his act, of the accidental kill, of not knowing what he had done until he had done it, but also informative in the way it impacts this poem’s “you.” Through this death, the you witnesses life in process, but not whole just yet. This witnessing clearly mirrors the various stages of pregnancy or loss of pregnancy that can occur for people with uteruses, whether intentional or unintentional—both equally legitimate in this conversation.
What I also find interesting is the use of the second person. There is a sense of detachment/dissociation created with this second person speaker as the narrative journeys through a lineage and parallel of motherhood and arrested motherhood. Why the second person for this poem?
Perhaps that distance you feel is from the visceral nature of the poem’s images, the out-of-body experience at play in the poem in relation to time, and, in places, fictionalization of images from my childhood and the figure of my grandfather—for example he was a hunter with beagles as his hunting companions, but not while I was alive as my parents were older and as a result, my grandparents were older than most of my contemporaries. So, for example, the scene in the garage is not one I experienced first-hand. But I think too, the second person allows for the apparition-like presence outside of time and space, in the hospital room during delivery, in the garage as a child, and then projected into the future at the speaker contemplates the you’s projected delivery of their own child.
Tell us a bit about the title. The relationships in this poem, through specifically named (mother, grandfather) seem separate and removed from each-other. For instance, there is no mention of the grandfather interacting with the mother (presumably his own daughter). How does this removal tie in to the title of the poem?
So, biographically, the grandfather in this poem is actually modeled after my paternal grandfather and so that might be some of the sense of disconnect you’re feeling between the grandfather and the mother. However, in life they weren’t as disconnected as they may seem in this poem. I think the poem is interested too in different spaces at different ages for this second-person addressee, so the poem is further compartmentalized in that respect.
But circling back to my interests and my family’s interests, through my paternal grandmother, in genealogy, which I’ve already briefly mentioned—the title echos that childhood exposure to how family trees operate, to the ease with which a family tree’s growth can stunt or can exponentially grow with more children and the way my mother fought for the growth of her branch of the family tree and then continued to grow it via adoption.
What are you reading right now that you love, or that inspires you? Any advice for emerging women poets who are still on a journey to find their voice?
I am currently in a PhD program so reading for pleasure has not been a luxury I’ve been able to indulge in. But I am hoping to read new books I’ve purchased lately, including Shangyang Fang’s Burying the Mountain, Corey Van Landingham’s Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, Olivia Clare Friedman’s Here Lies, and Kent Quaney’s One Breath from Drowning. In terms of what I have been reading, I took a summer course for my PhD where I revisited Marianne Moore, who is a particular favorite of mine, and H.D. Then for a paper I’m working on, I’ve been spending time with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The letters are beautifully strange and also do wonderful work to transport you to these Nordic landscapes while also moving beyond the travelogue to deal politically with women, their power dynamics, and relations to domestic spaces in 18 th century England (as compared to these Nordic countries).
To speak to advice, I think my best advice is to believe in your voice and don’t hesitate or be afraid to write about whatever it is you are compelled to write about, including your body or your relationship to gender (and all its spectral manifestations and constructed nature) but only if that’s what you feel compelled to write about. Don’t feel obligated to write through any of that or on any subject others presume you would be interested in writing about. You don’t owe your readers a single thing except what you want to give them on the page—fight for what you feel you need to pour onto the page.
Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press.
1 July 2022
Mackenzie SandersThe Girl in the Well
She still wanders the Modern Languages building. She has dark hair that she pins up, and she wears a long flowing shawl with a floor length, high collar dress. If you’re standing outside the building, you can see her staring out the windows at the palm trees and the statue of the naked woman outside the library. We don’t think she knows how to get out. But when we try to talk to her, she turns and runs away.
They killed her right where the Modern Languages building is now. It happened in the early 1900s. It’s never been confirmed by the university, but we know it's true. They assaulted her, then killed her and threw her in the open water well that the Spanish left when they colonized the state in the 1700s. Her body was floating in the well when the groundskeepers found her in the morning. They just left her there.
The school filled in the well and constructed the Modern Languages building on top of it in 1965. Rumor has it the construction workers found her bones and gave them to a fraternity on campus. None of the construction workers lived past fifty, and most of them died in unfavorable circumstances. It’s never been confirmed by the university, but we know it’s true. We don’t know what the fraternity did with her bones for those two years. They probably kept them as a souvenir, they were probably the ones who raped her, but after mysterious things kept happening to the fraternity, they reburied her one night in 1967. That didn’t seem to help. By 1974 the fraternity had its charter revoked and its building seized. Every year since then, a small group of alumni meet at midnight, right where they reburied her, and ask for forgiveness for what their brothers did. But we think the only reason they do so is because they’ve all had bad luck since. They’re welcome to keep trying.
I didn’t believe in ghosts, which was a weird thought to have when being sexually assaulted. But that’s what I was thinking about when it happened. I was thinking about the girl in the Modern Languages building and how I had thought that the whole thing was just a myth until right then. But then he flipped me over and I knew, with absolute certainty, that everything I’d heard was true. And the next day I saw her.
I had a late class on Wednesday, and then I stayed after to ask my advisor about an elective requirement. And by then the building was nearly empty, and the sky outside was faded pink, and there she was. It’s messed up now that I think about it, that I didn’t believe she was real until it happened. “Believe survivors” and all that jazz. But you should believe the dead ones too, maybe even more so. And her being left at the bottom of a colonial well in what’s now the second largest university in the state of Arizona shouldn’t be brushed aside simply because the idea of ghosts being real is still up for debate.
So I believe in her. And after I saw her, it didn’t feel right having my classes in that building anymore. Studying Moby Dick while there’s an undead woman who was gang-raped waltzing around must carry some kind of irony. And studying Nathanial Hawthorne seemed too on the nose. My professor was infatuated with Hester Prynne. He thought she was the pinnacle of rebellion, and he would always talk about how she was “thumbing her nose at all of the Puritans” because she was unashamed of her child and her long black hair and her beautiful dresses. But there is a difference between being unashamed and having no other choice but to accept one’s lot in life, and I wondered if he was aware of her, if he’d seen her in the hallways himself, and what kind of connotation that carried for him.
But I learned from the rest of us that he hadn’t seen her, he couldn’t see her. You could only see her if it happened to you.
I should have tried to talk to her. But when I saw her all I could think about was the previous night in his tiny frat room with the awful fluorescent lights and the “Don’t Tread On Me” poster. I think he was worried I would tell, but nothing would happen if I did. They only shut down the fraternities if one of us is roofied and taken to the hospital, or if one of the brothers tries to jump from the roof during a party and dies. And I was just drunk. And I’m not dead. So I’m fresh out of luck.
What’s weird is that I didn’t feel that different after it happened, which made me feel guilty. They painted this big image in our heads about it, about how awful it is and how it ruins people’s lives, but I just felt a little bit unclean, which made me feel like I was betraying her. How fucked up is that?
My friend Jane came in and stopped it before things got to the worst part. She and Eva pounded on the door and screamed until he opened it, and then they carried me to the car. But we went back to the same fraternity the next weekend to tailgate like nothing happened. It wasn’t just any game day, it was part of the Territorial Cup, which was a big deal. We were tied with ASU and football was an iffy sport for both of us, so this game would determine who got the cup that season. Some people called it the “Duel in the Desert” series, but I always thought that was stupid. Sometimes it felt like we overemphasized the fact that we were a cowboy state so that we could get away with being rougher with each other.
So after it happened, nothing really changed, except for her. After it happened, I saw her everyday. It was like an initiation, but I couldn’t tell you what for. If it happened to you, you could see her. And we all see her. It happened to Jane her second year at the university. It happened to Eva when she was twelve, so she’s seen her since she started here. It happened to our Caribbean literature professor (we know because of the way she hurries through the Modern Languages hallways, and the way she pauses and turns around when she reaches the end). And it happened to Hailee from Delta Gamma and Annabeth from Spanish class.
We have club meetings, mostly where we sit around outside the cafeteria and pretend we don’t know each other. Sometimes Hailee laughs to break the silence, but then Jane tells her to shut up and Annabeth starts crying. Sometimes we talk about the alumni meetings and see if we can catch them chanting over her burial site, but we know we’ll never have it in us to go that far.
It all seems so backwards. We have laws that protect the native plants here, mostly the cacti. If you’re caught digging one up, you get fined. Saguaros carry the worst punishment. They take a century to grow, and they hardly grow anywhere else, so people face jail time. But they covered her up, then dug her out so many times and nobody said a word.
By senior year, almost every girl in our program could see her, and she gained traction with the university. People thought it was some sort of game. Hailee told some of her sisters about her, and the girls started drugging themselves and then walking into bars and frat houses to initiate themselves. Some girls woke up the next day and couldn’t remember a thing, others couldn’t walk, one girl dropped out afterwards. You don’t know what hand you’re going to get dealt. She is the only constant.
Now the Modern Languages hallways are filled with hollowed out women sitting on the grimy linoleum, pretending to study, waiting for her to show up. She appears at the end of the hallway and turns to look at us before she walks up the stairs. I’m not sure how receptive she is to our presence, but then again, if we wanted an involved figurehead we would have picked a live one.
We like to think her name was Maria, and she rode horses and wrote poetry, and she had three sisters who missed her very much, but we’re romanticizing. Damn you Melville and Hawthorne. What we do know is that she’s trapped in an old brick building with ugly yellow tiles in the bathrooms, where the lights flicker around five p.m. for no reason, and she can never leave. We want to help her leave.
We’re standing outside the Modern Languages building at sunset and the sky is faded pink, like when I first saw her, only this time it's been raining, so the concrete is slick and the sky is reflecting off of it and making everything look like sherbert. It's the best thing about this place.
And there she is, on the fourth floor in the stairwell, staring at the sculpture of the naked lady in front of the library. The naked lady is releasing birds into the sky. I’m sure it's supposed to symbolize freedom or peace or something else shallow like that.
We look at her. She unpins her hair and presses a hand, fingers outstretched, to the glass. We put our hands, fingers outstretched, into the air so she knows we’re there with her. We want to go in, but we’re worried we’ll lose her. Her hair is long and dark, and glows a soft purple against the sunset like the Santa Catalina mountains behind her.
Maybe she doesn’t want to leave. Maybe she prefers to stay.
I use my books to prop the door open, just in case she changes her mind.
Mackenzie Sanders is a writer from Arizona who currently resides in New York. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Arizona in 2020 and is currently a creative writing MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. Email her at mack.sanderst@gmail.com.
Joe Cusimano has done a little bit of everything. Hailing from a steel town in Pennsylvania, he has been a baristo, a computer salesman, an IT specialist, and a lumberjack (to name just a few). However, he is very excited to be in front of a microphone again, having been a morning DJ for many years at many different FM stations. Now living in Florida, his favorite pastime is hanging out with his kids and grandkids. He also stays busy recording and being an Assistant Audio Editor for Passengers Journal.
17 June 2022
Joe Dulin-DidonatoThe Agony of Mary Magdalene
Columbus artist, Joe Dulin-Didonato (aka “the Outside Artist”) is best known for his dynamic range of color and texture. Contrast and color play a huge part in the design of each unique piece. From abstract to Impressionism, to realism- Columbus’ “Outside Artist” is best known for his creative use of acrylic on canvas but is no stranger to woodwork and graphic design.
What makes Joe an “Outside artist” is his way of working “outside” of the normal confines of the art world. Passion and pride exhume itself from the canvas as it jumps into the arms of the individual examining his work. Joe works hard to add life into each stroke of the brush and movement of the hand. Joe’s art breathes and moves on the canvas the same way dancers take to the floor. Each piece has its own life and world. Immerse yourself in the experience of his art and it will speak to you. Instagram: @the_outside_artist Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/joe.dulindidonato
10 June 2022
Devon BrockChickens
Down at Willy’s Fill ‘n Go,
it takes a trunkload of chickens
to top the tank—a fair rate
of exchange. Willy’s.
Two birds a gallon.
For me it’s fifty sacks of feed,
forty spools of wire,
wood for the coop, nails—
one box of five hundred: 16D.
And straw, always straw.
Sometimes late at night,
I hear a fox siphoning
while the dogs are asleep.
Everything’s hungry.
In the morning I’ll scratch
in the dirt, count the loss
in grubs, fry up a wing or two.
Then I’ll run on fumes
to the pumps and beg Willy
for a bargain—pillows,
clean white pillows
I’ve stuffed with straw
and bloody red down.
Devon Brock is a line cook and poet living in South Dakota with his wife and dog. In this disrupted time he relies heavily on poetry, both the production and consumption of it, as a means of connection with the world and time. He is currently working on a dreamscape of epic length and several collections of published and unpublished work. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, The 2River View, and SPANK to CARP among others.
3 June 2022
Suzanne RichardsonAll The Things My Boyfriend Calls to Tell me When on a Bender
I need one more drink, just one more drink.
He’s in a bodega buying more beer even though he is already shit-wasted and been kicked out of one of the Irish pubs in Inwood. The bottles clank together sounding through the phone. He always buys the 40s or 22s, sometimes Presidente, or Old English. Sometimes he drops them on the pavement outside the shop, because he’s too drunk to hold them, the sound like a blunt, wet, jewel shattering on the ground. Whenever this happens, he buys another and tries again.
I’m worthless.
He sobs this, his voice cracking, slamming, through the phone like a snake through a rabbit hole.
Help me.
This abducts me. Alien blood-thumping. Hours after we hang up I sit up in bed, concrete in my lungs. Maybe I don’t know how to help, maybe I am always trying to help, maybe I know, he knows, no matter how much he asks for it, I can’t help him though I want to.
I’m so sad.
When your lover tells you they feel alone all the time, even when they’re in bed with you, even when they’re fucking you, you’re dating a grenade. I list all the things he has to be happy about; I always list myself as one of these things. Later in our relationship, I know the circular darkness he speaks of, the tunnel without light, watching the sun come up, and feeling like you’re being buried alive. The strange phantom hand that appears around your throat for days, while you’re riding the subway, typing at work, drinking a Coke on a stool in a sandwich shop, the one that threatens to squeeze if you admit your life is a lie, possibly a series of motions that don’t mean very much.
I’m at the hospital.
I answer the phone at my desk. I try to keep my voice low in the secretarial bullpen. So drunk he ends up face-down on Dykman Street, put in an ambulance, and brought to the hospital where they put him in diapers as he sobers up. I am in a suit, clicking my high heels under my desk. The room drains into technicolor. I think about Dorothy her quest for Kansas. Home is where the addict and the codependent are. Click-click-click. I try to switch my brain off, but I keep imagining. I wonder if the symbolism of the diaper is real? If he is actually becoming a child again then I am becoming so old-sad and bitter-tired and shriveled up at twenty-two a house might just fall on me.
I’m not coming home.
He says before ending up in a hospital or going missing. Sometimes he wakes up in other people’s apartments. He comes home with other people’s coats on. With my fat round face I, am a lonely cherub in the window, on the stairs, at the corner of Isham, looking, for him, never seeing myself, the way I wait, the way I give him permission to be absent because I am so very careful to be present. The way I wrap each story, each phrase in a deadly web to protect myself and catch everyone else before they suspect something isn’t right, that this isn’t true love. I make myself into a spider, closed, solitary, efficient, so good at weaving and lying and secrets and poisoning, it scares you, you just want to reach down and squash it.
Suzanne Richardson earned her M.F.A. in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Binghamton, New York where she's a Ph.D. student in creative writing at SUNY Binghamton. She is working on a memoir, Throw it Up, and a full poetry collection, The Want Monster. She is the writer of Three Things @nocontactmag, and more about Suzanne and her writing can be found here: https://www-suzannerichardsonwrites.tumblr.com/ and @oozannsay on Twitter and @oozansay on Instagram.
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.
20 May 2022
Marie Julie LafranceSpeak with your hands
Bilingual, Multidisciplinary artist, MarieJulie Lafrance won two art scholarships while studying for her DEC in Arts in letters. She obtained her DEC in 2012. Since 2014, as an illustrator-freelancer MarieJulie uses pencils, brushes, digital software, and fabrics as tools to express her creativity. Diagnosed as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), MJ is highly attuned to details, giving her the ability to bring a textured but flowy elegance to her work. Find out more on her website: mariejuliestudio.wordpress.com
13 May 2022
Candace WalshChristians and Poets
Dear Mrs. Gunderson,
Please forgive the tardiness of my reply to your letter sent twenty-three years ago. I re-encountered it while going through my mother’s bedside table drawer. I emptied her walk-in closet in under an hour. The women’s shelter volunteer comes tomorrow to pick up six big black garbage bag sachets wafting tea rose and Comet.
Leave it to a little wicker drawer of ephemera to slow my progress. Birthday cards from her mother. My sparse stack of letters from college. And then an envelope you once asked her to give me: a scalloped leaf of stationery folded over photocopied poems framed by dark toner, cleft down the middle by the gutter’s shadow. I remember reading the note, skimming the poems, and leaving the mess on her kitchen counter.
*
You were my first and second grade teacher, and I loved you so much the thought of summer recess[1] made me recoil. When I told my mother, she said I wanted to be your pet, a term that pricked warm at my spine. She didn’t seem to worry about what it meant that I’d imprinted on a short-haired woman who parted seas of children with a no-nonsense stride.
You had an office off the classroom with a glossy wooden paddle on the wall, Bible verse posters, shelves of books, and a Mason jar of dried chickpeas. When I’d turn the jar, they’d tumble, rattle. They looked like little butts. I knew better than to point that out as I helped you staple handouts.
In class, you’d sometimes talk about your sons Ernest and Lawrence with a deep fondness that made me sad. I fantasized about being Ernest or Lawrence, I didn’t care which. I wanted to be your child, even if it meant being a boy.
Do you remember that day in second grade when I came up to you, hand outstretched with the cluster of flowers I’d picked for you during recess? Their milk dribbled out of the downy stems and into my palms.
You told me dandelions were weeds and I should throw them out. My belly felt like the freshly-emptied trash in which I dropped the scraggly blooms. Were you also meaning to discourage me from wooing you with flowers? Back at my desk, the dandelion milk on my palms dried as brown splotches. Proof of my cumbersome sun-shot fealty.
[1] 1. the action of receding; 2. a hidden, secret, or secluded place or part; 3. an indentation, cleft; 4. a suspension of business or procedure often for rest or relaxation (Merriam-Webster)
*
My mother finally brought you to my door when I was eighteen, my ardor for you an odd and faded scuff on my heart. I had imagined a lot of possible ways I might become your child when I was small, but I’d never predicted my mother would marry a man who tried to kill me[2]. He failed, but also succeeded, because afterward I was the one kicked out, not him.
Why did she ask you? I think she was ashamed. You were not connected to her web of current friendships, to her persona as a Christian lady with her life sorted. She knew I had loved you as a little girl. But now I was a high school senior.
On that smeared day when my mother showed up with me like a package of drugs she needed to stash for a while, you led us to your kitchen table. There my mom and I battled for the right to define what had just happened.
Before he wrapped his fingers around my neck, I’d yelled[3] the word asshole. I yelled asshole because he barged into my bedroom to turn down the radio while I was naked. If I hadn’t turned the radio on. If he’d been out getting the mail.
I could never go back home, because now I knew anything could make him snap. And when he did, my mother would find a way to side with him and make me wrong.
I watched you weave our strands into a braid that made sense to you, then coil it into a bun. You looked at my mother and then both of you looked at me. That’s when I knew, although you said I could stay, that you thought had I brought it upon myself.
We had always moved around a lot, but you still lived in the same hushed ranch home on its plot of immaculate sod, studded with isles of factory blooms. No one really sat in your living room, decorated with blown-glass vases and pea soup carpeting. Instead, we watched PBS mystery shows in your finished basement.
My banishment from home—no longer in charge of vacuuming our dog’s black clots of hair from the beige carpet, no longer able to count on opening the pantry to find a box of Frookies[4] to snack on while doing my homework—branded me in ways I still notice, but your thoughtfulness soothed. You settled me in Lawrence’s old room.
I had left a shouty, volatile house for this no-nonsense respite. I could become a new me. You and I and your husband would read the Bible and pray together, and I said all the right words, even though they felt starchy in my mouth.
One afternoon at your kitchen table, you showed me how to embroider a pillow using a method I’ve not encountered since. The front face of the pillow was composed of two layers: a translucent piece of fabric over a piece of plain cotton. I pinned felt cutouts between the two layers: a yellow hair shape, a peach oval face shape, a white gown, little semicircles of feet, and a pale blue cumulus cloud. Next I sewed through the layers to fix the shapes into a girl angel, using the thread as both an anchor and an outline. I was way too old for that baby stuff but I went along with it.
I kept the pillow for years. It came with me to college. It sat on the bed in my first apartment, getting knocked off by my asshole cats and the (mostly) inadvisable (mostly) men I brought home. The angel looked trapped and blurry between the layers. Its homely wholesomeness didn’t go with my brittle East Village persona, but when my fingertips traced the fixed girl, I felt less like flotsam.
When I told you I wanted to enter a poetry contest, your husband brought up an old electric typewriter from the basement, spooled in a fresh ribbon, and set it on a TV tray in my room. It was the Yale Younger Poets contest. I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. But you congratulated me for revising and typing forty poems and mailing the packet, with a self-addressed stamped envelope, before the deadline. The address was yours but it was also a little bit mine.
I helped cook dinner, roasts and chops, a starch, a boiled vegetable, and I did the dishes. I dusted the blown-glass vases. I ate liver and acted like I liked it.
[2] A necklace of fingertip bruises around my neck. A different kind of sore throat. My clothes hanging from the tree outside my bedroom, as branches snagged some when he threw them out the window.
[3] Or, you know, bellowed.
[4] A short-lived fruit juice-sweetened line of cookies; I preferred the green apple flavor.
*
The last day of second grade sang with the dread that I’d have a new teacher come fall, Miss Prinkle. She was younger, prettier, drove a Trans Am, was not as smart. I liked learning Roman numerals and listening to her read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe each day after lunch (although I quickly checked the book out of the library and devoured it inside of a week). Maybe she was smart in a different way. There was no paddle in sight, and once Ralph and Jamie (the class punks) brought her to tears. Our mothers whispered about her being too soft, but something bloomed in me that had stayed tightly budded in your class.
One day as Miss Prinkle led our class upstairs, Ralph poked me in the back.
“Stop,” I said.
His fingers vised into my waist. I twisted away. As I rushed up the last few steps, I felt his sneaker push against my bottom.
“Stop it!” I shouted.
You came rushing out of your office, eyes shiny and hard. My champion.
You’d tell him. I waited.
And then you reamed us both out.
“He was hurting me!” I explained.
“But you bellowed,” you said, nostrils flaring so wide I saw trimmed hairs. “A young lady should never bellow.”
Ralph never even bothered to wipe the smirk off his face, even as you handed down punishments for both of us.
All day Saturday I wrote, “I will not bellow” as penance. “A thousand times!” you’d said, pointer finger stabbing the air near my face.
Ink shadowed the side of my hand like a storm cloud. Neighbor kids’ voices rose and fell as they swung from the branches of trees as I wrote that stupid sentence over and over. Though I fumed with the injustice, my anger flamed beside my love for you, burned it in.
Ralph lived on your block with his checked-out parents and hulking older brothers. You’d paved the way for him to go to school with us, saw him as needing rescue. Was I not? Or only up to a certain point? Boys and men can always be redeemed, but by the time girls need to be rescued they are already lost.
*
Ernie[5] was shy around me at first, until I won him over by talking to him as if we were both eighteen and cool. I had a hunch no one had ever talked to him that way when he was eighteen, because the way he moved through the house had a halting quality, a sense of constantly asking permission to be.
That year Larry would marry your pastor’s daughter, a young woman with lustrous dark curls and doll-lovely features. Together they pulsed with a Camelot vibe that made me ache with envy, all the more because I would have loved to marry Lawrence. I had calculated that when I turned twenty-one, he would still be under thirty. I could have been part of your family.
Ernie’s bedroom was across the hall from Larry’s old room. My clothes, some recovered from tree branches, were in Larry’s boy-plain bureau, on unfamiliar hangers in the cedar-smelling closet. I made my bed almost every day, as if I always had.
One night, while I was on the phone with a friend, Ernie knocked on the door close to ask if I was warm enough. It was close to midnight. My friend panicked on my behalf, but I never sensed menace from Ernie. I wasn’t attracted to him, but I liked him. He was gentle and had your nose. Would I have married him to join your family? I didn’t let myself think about it.
Did you notice it too, the way he looked at me? I hope you didn’t blame him for his little crush. He was a quiet scientist. I was pretty, and clever in ways that amused him, though I wasn’t as much of a catch as Lawrence’s intended.
I used to get a certain feeling when any man liked me, and it’s hard to describe but I’ll try: like a tightrope balance on the fine line between excitement and anxiety. Like being in an express elevator going down. Like proof for which I was forever hungry. It was a wonderment at the power I didn’t choose to have, and the wish to explore dark caves beyond the reach of sunlight, caves that wouldn’t have called to me had I not felt the charge of the story a man was telling himself, a story made plush by the wishes of his blood.
[5] Ernest was older than Lawrence, but Lawrence was about to get married. I could see why. Lawrence, like the handsomest young suburban men, is probably bald and pot-bellied now, but back then he was a strapping, golden-blonde man with a sunny personality. Ernest was slight, with black, silky hair cut like his dad’s, a matching mustache, and quiet round eyes like a seal.
*
One day after lunch, your husband insisted on doing the dishes. I thought it was a gallant gesture but it turned out to be calculated.
You sat me down and told me you and your husband were getting ready to head down to your second house in Florida for a while. Next week.
“Is Ernie going too?” I asked.
“No, but you can’t live alone in our house with our unmarried son,” you told me, as if that’s what I had been asking. Maybe I was, in a thoughtless way, like grasping at a tree branch in midair.
You didn’t have any pressing reason to go to Florida. You hadn’t said, when my mother was trying to leave me with you, “She can stay until we have to leave for Florida in a few weeks.” I don’t even know if you actually went.
I packed up my things and moved in with my father, who had been wanting me to. When Ernie hugged me goodbye, our two griefs met and melded.
My dad and I had always had a strained relationship, and he was living in a studio apartment with his girlfriend and her ferrets. But he was my father, my actual kin. I’d spent most of my life wanting to be part of your family, but that wish fully drained away the first night I fell asleep on the air mattress my dad inflated with a foot pedal. Whenever I turned over, I felt the floor rise up to meet my hip and shoulder. I got by and then I got out.
My poetry manuscript must have come back to you months later. Reproaching, or just discomfiting, like a piece of gristle lodged between two molars. You didn’t give it to my mother—perhaps thinking it was not for her eyes. You didn’t ask for my college address and send it to me. Perhaps Ernie intercepted it. I’d like to think you kept it for sentimental reasons but your intolerance for the the odd and misshapen in your home makes that unlikely.
*
I was 26 when my mother bumped into you. I had just gotten a full ride to an MFA program.[6] (My application contained a poem inspired by you containing the lines, “I never loved someone so much/who took for granted my impossibility.”)
I’m guessing she told you about how I’d left the church, wasn’t a Christian anymore, had no interest. She probably said I thought I was too cool for Christ, hanging around with all these homosexual poets who smoked clove cigarettes and smirked at earnestness.
When Mom handed me the envelope, I recognized your handwriting: Palmer method with a bird track scritch to the angles. In your note you betrayed the misunderstanding that I thought I couldn’t be a poet and a Christian. Scorn and guilt further scuffed the remnants of my love.
Yet. You looked for religious poems, perhaps from books shelved in your pea soup carpet living room. You decided which ones to photocopy. You signed your note not Mrs. Gunderson but Grace.
When my mom bumped into you she probably used the word “backslidden,” reserved for people who opt out of the religion they were raised with. It’s a shitty word, though, Grace, because I didn’t slide and I didn’t go backward. I didn’t fall the way I fell out of my family and then yours. Gravity had nothing to do with it, nor did being accident-prone or off-balance. I decided to leave the house of the Lord before I was asked to.
But first I tried. For most of my teen years, I filled floral fabric-wrapped journals with prayers. I fantasized about going to one of the Christian colleges advertised in Campus Crusade magazine. At 17, I taught Vacation Bible School for one week with a fresh-scrubbed housewife in her thirties. We had such great teaching chemistry, Mrs. Gunderson. The little ones loved us. We loved them back. The students were like mushrooms—some stout-stalked and pancake-topped, others spindly-stemmed with thimble domes that sprang up overnight; they would vanish from our lives after just a few days.
And when they did, my co-teacher and I hugged each other tightly. My chest began to heave with sobs; it rose with hers. We fused, dampening each other’s shoulders, taken over by something entire and unknown. Afterward we pulled apart and looked into each other’s eyes surprised and overcome. The borders of our mouths were swollen, flushed.
I chalked it up to the passion of sharing the word of God.
Later, at a Campus Crusade conference in a sea of people whose fervor made my soul feel like a gutted clamshell, I realized that teaching and women were my passions. (No wonder I had such a thing for you.) Religion had just been the delivery system.
I stopped knowing what was waiting for me after death. I stepped off the path leading to pearly gates, constant, ecstatic happiness and streets paved with gold. I began to invent my own faith and its commandments, too.[7] We each have to choose which ways we want to be limited in order to be free.
I used to think airplane turbulence was the hardest time to believe there was no God protecting me, but Mom’s death has loosed termites that have been gnawing through the bark of my agnosticism. I want to believe she’s in heaven, her heavenly body be made whole, neck unbroken, bruise necklace removed as if by the click of a magical clasp.
My mom kept asking you to rescue me, but I’m doing fine and she’s dead. I’m not even sure why I’m writing this…ten-page letter to someone who’s probably dead of old age. My mind resists doing the math. Losing my mom is enough for now. I need you ever alive, sailing into class, demeanor so stilling we hear the smart swish of your polyester pantsuit, smiling a rare smile like sun on ice, right eye crinkling more than the left. Flipping phonics chart placards with a liquid rhythm, metal rings tinkling like bells. Thinking fondly, not resignedly, of me.
Grace, I have to empty this last drawer, strip the bed, and update the realtor. But first:
I don’t know what will happen when I die. I hope to be buried in the back yard of a house my wife and I own and leave to my children. Buried quickly in a burlap sack. Maybe what will happen to me after death will be more about what happens to the richness of the soil and the vibrance of the flowers that spring from that particular patch of earth.
I hope some of them will be dandelions.
Your poems, my dandelions—two gifts discarded without grace. For all I know, there’s a Hopkins or Rossetti amid this smudged folio of hummable poem-hymns. I’ll look.
Yours truly,
Jenn
[6] The program was headed by a poet who first became famous for his poem “Howl.” So close to “Bellow.”
[7] Thou shalt righteously bellow without censure. Thou shalt love thy same-sex neighbor up, down, and sideways, shouldst thou both feel like it.
Candace Walsh is a third-year PhD student in creative writing (fiction) at Ohio University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Recent publication credits include Hobart After Dark and The Lovers Literary Review (poetry); Leon Literary Review, Entropy, Complete Sentence, and Akashic Books' Santa Fe Noir (fiction); and New Limestone Review and Pigeon Pages (creative nonfiction). Her craft essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in Brevity, descant, New Mexico Magazine, and Fiction Writers Review. She co-edits Quarter After Eight literary journal. A passage from her novel in progress made the longlist of the 2018 First Pages Prize. Connect with her on Instagram and Twitter @candacewalsh.
6 May 2022
Danielle E. CarrAn excerpt from her book
Aching for the Amen: A Long Poem
published by Passengers Press
finger skin
thick, rough over
me, i’ll take it—
crusted layers
separate from
what used to be
youth, subsumed
under cracked purlicue
stripping eponychia
need oil for relief, but
i’ll take it, lord knows
the thick
unpeeled, flaking skin
cannot be shed
peel it, peel yourself cut it,
cut yourself
leave it or bite it
thick
nothing to do
except oil and prayer
what is transgression?
wrist thick with flesh
veins, muscle, nerves
tendons pierced
rust
the punisher’s sweat
the space between pulse
and ever, pierced
sometimes i forget the way
sickness is supposed to be
Danielle E. Carr is a Jamaican-American poet and writer who enjoys writing about grief, faith, loneliness, and ordinary frustrations. Dannielle has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles and an M.A. in Theology and Ministry with an emphasis in Worship, Theology and the Arts from Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena.
29 April 2022
Stephen M. FeldmanAbortion Provokes
Abortion provokes, but Professor Frenchy Shaw never expected this.
“Let’s try again, Mr. Vogler. What do you think of the Court’s reasoning in Roe v. Wade?” Frenchy gazed from the lectern up and across the amphitheater, eight rows of tiered seats. The walls were white, the carpet brown. The bearded Vogler sat in the last row on the left.
“I already said I pass.” Vogler peered out from under a green John Deere baseball cap.
“Everyone in here knows I don’t allow passing in Constitutional Law.”
Vogler whispered to the student sitting to his right, Mr. Jones, who snickered.
A clunk vibrated from the ceiling, and the air conditioning switched on, blowing cool air at Frenchy’s back. She inched her blue blazer higher on her neck. “I’m wondering about the right of privacy the Court found in the Fourteenth Amendment.” She clicked the Power Point remote, and a slide displayed the constitutional provision. “Does that right encompass a woman’s interest in choosing whether to have an abortion?”
“You mean that Fourteenth Amendment?” Vogler pointed to the nearest overhead screen. A few students chuckled.
“That’s the one.”
“Reading the text,” he said, “there’s the Equal Protection clause. And a Due Process clause. But no, I don’t see any right of privacy mentioned in it.”
“Interesting point, Mr. Vogler.” She slipped her shoulder-length black hair, thick and frizzy, behind her ear. It popped back out. “So you’re a textualist when it comes to constitutional interpretation?”
“I read the text of the Constitution, if that’s what you mean.”
Jones, on Vogler’s right, snickered again, as did the other three men in their clique. They sat together in the back row and acted like high schoolers, whispering and laughing. Frenchy wouldn’t be surprised if one were to shoot a spit ball.
Vogler wanted to challenge Frenchy, as had many other students—usually men. She didn’t enjoy these classroom conflicts. She preferred to think of herself and the students as colleagues working together to understand the materials.
Frenchy stepped back, away from the lectern, while starting to cross her arms. But she stopped, not wanting to appear weak or closed to student input—however ridiculous or disrespectful. She returned to the lectern and grasped its edges as if behind a steering wheel, relaxed and in control, rounding a fat, lazy curve. “Can anybody respond to Mr. Vogler’s argument? Look again at the Fourteenth Amendment language.”
None of the ninety-five students responded.
“Is there no constitutional right of privacy because it isn’t explicitly delineated in the Fourteenth Amendment?” Two women raised their hands to half-mast. “Ms. Warren?” Frenchy nodded at the woman in the middle of the front row.
“I’m not positive, Professor. But I think the Court found the right implied in the Due Process clause.”
“Thank you.” Frenchy looked back to her left and up to the top row. “What do you think, Mr. Vogler? An implied rather than an express right.”
He sat up straighter. “If a pregnant mother has an implied constitutional right of privacy, then her unborn child does too.”
Frenchy lifted her water bottle from the lectern, flipped open its spout, and sipped. Icy cold. “Let’s suppose a world-famous virtuoso violinist is suffering from a life-threatening blood disease.” She looked up and left. “Are you with me, Mr. Vogler?”
He squinted at Frenchy.
“Good,” Frenchy said, taking another sip and snapping the bottle closed. “This violinist has a rare blood type, and just your luck, you’re one of the few individuals with the same type. In fact, only your blood can save the life of our virtuoso. The problem is that you must remain tethered to him for the next nine months, having your blood slowly but constantly pumped into his veins. For at least the first couple of months, you’ll feel sick. Over the nine months, you’ll gain around thirty-five pounds. And you might never return to your prior body weight and shape.”
Vogler hunched his shoulders and pulled his cap lower.
“Should you have a legal duty to sacrifice your blood for the violinist?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Does the law ever force a man to give a blood transfusion for the sake of another’s well-being?”
Vogler didn’t respond. The air conditioner clunked off, the air stopped blowing, and a disquieting silence settled on the room.
Jones, Vogler’s clean-shaven neighbor, shook his head and said, “This is ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yes, Mr. Jones?” Frenchy said. “Please explain.”
“You can try to dress this up with hypothetical fantasies any way you want.” Jones pushed his wire-rimmed glasses higher on his nose. “But we all know what you’re talking about.”
I’d be thrilled if you understood what I’m talking about, Frenchy thought. But she forced a smile. Her job was to teach, not use Socratic questioning as a weapon. “What’s that, Mr. Jones?”
“Murder.” Several students groaned while others nodded in agreement. “Abortion is murder—”
“Thank you, Mr. Jones. That’s—”
“It’s murder of the grossest and cruelest kind!”
“I said that’s enough.”
Frenchy pressed her eyes closed, then opened them. Other students were yelling at Jones, some encouraging and some rebuking him. He raged on, “The innocent babies are either dismembered inside the mother’s womb or torn to shreds by vacuum suction.”
“Oh, gross,” a woman called.
Frenchy, her face hot, marched up the aisle toward the back row. The farther she advanced, the quieter the room grew, except for Jones. “The babies are then thrown into a dumpster. Their souls—”
“Mr. Jones! Either you stop, or you leave.” Frenchy halted at the penultimate row. Jones stared at her. The room silent. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.” He turned toward Vogler, who grinned and fist-bumped him.
Frenchy’s body trembled as she returned to the front of the room. She grasped the lectern to steady herself. “All constitutional cases,” she said, “are partly political.”
Jones snorted loudly.
“We can express our politics,” Frenchy continued, “but within the language of the law. As the justices themselves do.”
She glared in Jones’s direction, then looked around the room. “There’s a difference between partisan posturing and politics expressed through legal arguments. Does everybody understand?”
Nobody said a word.
“Mr. Jones, do you understand?”
He nodded.
“What’s that?” she demanded. “I expect you to apologize to the class.”
“You’re joking, right?”
Frenchy cemented her face into a scowl. “Do I look like I’m joking?”
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“What?”
“I’m sorry.”
Frenchy checked the clock. Class should have ended two minutes earlier. “Okay,” she said, “that’s it for today.”
The class erupted into a cacophony of books slamming, notebook computers clacking closed, and students standing and talking.
Frenchy looked down. Had she been unfair to demand Jones’s apology? If she allowed students to proselytize, class would devolve into a face-off between Fox News and MSNBC. She needed to take a stand, but what was the point of humiliating him?
Frenchy gathered up her materials while berating herself for losing control of the classroom. Cradling her papers and tome-sized book in her arms, she hooked a finger through her water bottle, then turned to leave. Ms. Warren, the woman in the front row, stopped her but didn’t speak.
Frenchy smiled. “Ms. Warren, that was a good answer you gave today.”
“Thank you, Professor.” Warren looked past Frenchy’s shoulder, toward the blank blackboard.
“Do you have a question?” Frenchy asked.
“Sorry. I just wanted to say I appreciated how you stood up to Mr. Vogler.”
Stephen M. Feldman is the Housel/Arnold Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Wyoming (sfeldman@uwyo.edu). He has been an NEH Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. Professor Feldman has published a short story in the J.J. Outre Review as well as non-fiction books with Oxford, Palgrave-Macmillan, Chicago, and NYU presses. The idea for the protagonist’s classroom hypothetical involving abortion and the violinist is derived from Judith Jarvis Thomson, A Defense of Abortion, 1 Philosophy & Public Affairs 47 (1971). Professor Feldman is currently working on a novel, The Family Law, and a nonfiction book on court-packing.
22 April 2022
Joshua Dickson's reading ofNothing Echoes, Nothing Crystalizes
written by Alexander Duringer
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.
15 April 2022
Caroline LoftusFlos Carnis
Caroline Loftus. The sun is my enlarger, and plants are my muse. My creative process heavily involves gathering inspiration from my surrounding natural environment. Silver gelatin photographic paper is my canvas on which objects are placed, and an unrepeatable image is exposed under the sun. Working in a cameraless photographic process brings a lot of unknowns. With lumens, what normally is controlled through aperture, exposure, and chemistry, is unpredictable. The process of creating each lumen is meditative. I focus on my hands; how they feel, what they look like, the way they move. What I feel and think determines my creative freedom. I am not my body, and neither are you. Every day I challenge myself to think innovatively about the work I create. I push through the boundaries of photographic paper by using anything containing pigment; from Hawaiian Punch to Chaga, and most recently, RIT Dye. The addition of these pigments permanently stains the photographic paper, preserving the colors that were once lost to the chemistry that makes it light safe. Focusing on the process instead of the outcome of my work is liberating. I am grateful for each quiet moment that I am allowed a deeper breath, where time slows, and I connect with myself on a level far greater than physical. In each of these moments, I spend time observing my natural surroundings, picking plants most would discard or leave unnoticed. I want to thank the earth through my work; creating an image manipulated by nature.
8 April 2022
Jeffrey ThompsonHabeas Corpus
The first thing you do is
dig up the state court record.
The transcript will have the stale paper smell
of old comics in a footlocker.
It will be the 90s, or 80s, or 70s.
There will be human remains
scattered across a desert wash
or at the bottom of an abandoned mine.
There will be a lucrative printing business,
crooked cops, and hitmen from Chicago,
double-crossed drug dealers,
a woman alone in a small town library,
a girl riding her bike.
There will be a trial
inadequate for every purpose but its own,
the cosmic wound already stitched over
by time and process, questions and answers
numbed by repetition, witnesses captured
mid-action by disaster, grasping their scraps of story.
There will be a verdict, nothing more
than check-marked forms and sets of initials.
There will be the unloved prequel,
foreshortened plot and stock villains.
There will be a sentence,
a page or two read from the bench.
Blank spaces will begin to crowd out the lines,
a few last comments on remaining formalities,
as the bound volumes thin, then vanish
under the accumulating years.
What is saved is reviewed
elsewhere, off site and with the greater care
forensics requires. But there will be denials,
crude as “The End.”
The case will be closed:
sealed banker’s boxes, softened pages,
faded blue ink, and waiting bodies.
An interview with Jeffrey Thompson on process and inspiration
Jeffrey, thank you for submitting your work to Passengers. Our poetry team was very much drawn to this piece from the first reading. Your poetic voice comes across as determined, yet casual, and somehow effortless. How long have you been writing poetry and honing this skill?
Thank you very much for featuring my work and for these questions. I started writing as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa. I’d fallen in love with poetry after picking up a little paperback called The Contemporary American Poets, and reading poems like “Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand and “The Bear” by Galway Kinnell.” It seemed like there could be nothing more important, or cooler, than writing poems. At the time I had some luck submitting work to small journals.
During law school and in the almost three decades since, while I continued to read poetry, I wrote only sporadically and didn’t share my work. Last year, however, while stuck in the seemingly endless pandemic, I felt the need for the creative outlet writing provided. I began writing new poems and reworking some old ones. It’s been one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.
Can you share for us a little bit about your writing process? When do you find time in the day to do it? Do you have a ritual, or do you take quick notes on your phone or scraps of paper when inspiration strikes?
I go for walks a couple times a day and that is frequently when ideas come for a new poem or, more helpfully, for an actual line or lines for a poem I have already begun. (Unfortunately I’m better at coming up with vague ideas for poems and, especially, titles for poems, than I am at seeing a poem all the way through.) If a poem gets enough traction in my mind I am likely to start thinking about it at any time so I do take notes on my phone or in a notebook while everything is still fresh.
Sometimes a poem will generate its own momentum and seem almost to compose itself; the necessary information is close to the surface. “Habeas Corpus” was different, because the goal from the beginning was to present a particular, real world, subject as accurately and meaningfully as possible. It took many long walks to come close to getting it right.
In your day-to-day you practice public interest law. This piece in particular seems to have been heavily inspired by your work. Would you mind talking to us a bit about that? How often does your work influence your creative poetic space?
You are correct that “Habeas Corpus” was directly influenced by my job. I work as an attorney for a federal district court. My office handles capital habeas cases; our task is to review each case to determine whether the prisoner’s constitutional rights were vindicated in state court. The facts alluded in the second stanza are from cases I have worked on and the form of the poem is intended to reflect the course such a case takes as it proceeds through the courts.
Aside from certain habits of mind, such as withholding judgment until you have the whole picture, or as much of the picture as is available, and (hopefully) clear thinking, the thing my job has taught me is how vulnerable we all are and how fortunate we are for whatever spaces of happiness and fulfillment exist in our own lives.
What stood out to our editorial team was your use of language and the passive voice. The language carefully toes the line between poetic and clinical, without using too many technical terms, while the passive voice creates a distance between the speaker of the poem and the subject matter. Did you make deliberate decisions around these elements, or did this happen as a natural result of your legal work background?
The passive voice was there from the beginning—I didn’t really have to choose it—and you are correct about its purpose. By the time a case reaches our office many years, sometimes decades, have passed since the crime and the trial. Part of what I wanted the poem to convey was that the extent of that distance, which is more than just chronological. A winnowing occurs that leaves in place, at the end, only a set of legal issues. The voice seemed the right one to contemplate the contrast between what remains and what was left behind.
I did make a deliberate choice to avoid using too much legal jargon. There is a lot of it in my line of work, and I considered whether using some more legalese would have contributed to the poem’s detached, “clinical” tone. Ultimately I concluded it would do more to obscure than advance the poem’s message.
So after inspiration kicks in and you get things on paper, how do you approach your 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?
If I am able to get far enough into a poem, I usually can’t set it aside until I get some version of a finished draft. At that point I can start editing, which is a process I enjoy. Of course there is a good chance the draft becomes a completely different poem, or maybe two poems. Eventually I get a sense that the poem is complete and ready to send in. This lasts until I press “submit,” at which point all confidence in the work vanishes.
Any advice for poets who are still finding their voice, or shy about sharing their work?
My only advice is to stay engaged by reading and writing poetry. I understand shyness about sharing one’s work but my experience is that it is worthwhile to try to overcome that shyness by sending one’s work out into the world. There really is nothing to lose.
Jeffrey Thompson was raised in Fargo, North Dakota. He was educated at the University of Iowa, where he studied English and Philosophy, and Cornell Law School. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he practices public interest law. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Neologism Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, and The Main Street Rag.
1 April 2022
Maureen O'LearyThe Ghosts of the Bees Weigh In On the Dishwasher Argument
The Man
The man bows his head with the dirty plate in his hand and thinks about how he doesn’t like the way the woman smells anymore. She’s been avoiding carbs so her sweat smells like metal these days when before all he would need to get hard was to bury his nose into the honeyed space behind her ear. This morning he senses metal under her perfume. Ozone. The scent of a machine working efficiently and releasing almost no emissions recognizable to the human olfactory system. She smells like a factory.
The Woman
The woman wants the man to put the plate in the sink and leave so that she can wash away his egg yolk. She wants to reorganize the dishwasher so that pre-rinsed plates stack together like pages in a book, so that knives go with knives and forks with forks and spoons with spoons. She doesn’t want him to watch her and she feels vaguely ashamed as if she has the urge to masturbate or eat chocolate ice cream right out of the carton with a spoon meant for serving rice. The shame pops and rolls in her throat and turns to rage.
The Author
Back off, the woman says and the man’s face falls so that for one tick of the second hand on the kitchen clock he looks like a little boy who was only trying to help and whose mother has snapped at him for no reason. His lower lip trembles. His cheekbones recede and his face fattens into round cheeks. His hard fingers become soft, the knuckles pudgy. His hands are blind as starfish and innocent that way, as if they could never mean any harm to anyone.
The Man
I didn’t mean any harm, I want to say, but I don’t. The dishwasher is meant to wash dishes, I say, every word burning acid in my throat. It was me who made the money to buy the dishwasher, let’s be honest. I work much harder than she does. Half the time when I leave in the morning she is still sleeping after staying up late “doing her work,” she says, but what she means is writing stories nobody ever wants to read or certainly pay for. I smash the plate in the sink and not the floor where the shards might cut her bare feet.
The Mother Spider
The mother spider knows that none of what you are saying matters because the spider has no voice box. She weaves her crunchy haphazard web above your heads. The flies from your compost bowl are all she needs and she sucks them dry. She is afraid of you but she judges you too because who gives a shit about the dishwasher? Your kitchen is a mess. Empty your compost before you snipe at one another over the dishwasher, but then again don’t. The flies are good for the mother spider. She needs to keep her strength up after laying so many beautiful eggs.
The House
My walls are spongy and near collapse as they fight over nothing. A flock of bees lived between the drywall and the frame once and I still hold the papery honeycomb in the secret dark parts of me. I smell like honey inside if you press your nose close to the space below the window. Do you get the sweetness? The musk? The memory of a time when everything was buzzing and flowing and we concerned ourselves only with what was working and how we lived together for the thrill of where their legs touched and where their tiny hairs collided?
The Ghosts of the Bees
Those were the days when we lived for each other. We made honey that was so thick it pooled at the base of the wall for days before oozing through the chalky drywall. The sweetness of our work filled the house on warm days like incense, the buzzing of our wings the smoke that bore the honey on the air. Those were the days of longing for the queen, of bristling in ecstasy, of getting so lost in one another nothing else mattered but what we could make from love.
We remember the heady excitement of being alive but when we try to catch the scent in the kitchen, it isn’t there. We don’t believe the house that memory is enough to make feeling. We don’t believe that papery artifacts of when we were better together work to give us joy. What, we’re arguing about dishwasher now? We’re arguing about a machine? We used to taste, we used to writhe. We used to destroy the walls with our honey.
The Baby Spiders
Look up at the ceiling corners and in the cracks. We writhe in quivering bulging spider egg sacs. We curl together in bundles silky and white. We listen to the man and the woman as they fight. We loosen our bonds and push from the fibrous locks. The woman cries and the second hand tocks. We fall from above like legged rain. Our jaws are open and ready to cause pain. The ghosts of the bees blow on our silken threads. We have landed on the couple’s heads.
Maureen O'Leary lives in California where she did once find a dead beehive in her kitchen wall. Her most recent work appears in Coffin Bell Journal, The Horror Zine, Archive of the Odd, DeComp Journal, Ariadne Magazine, Bandit Fiction, Hush Lit, Live Nude Poems, Esopus Reader, Black Spot Books' women in horror anthology Under Her Skin, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine. She is a graduate of Ashland MFA. Find her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Maureenow or Insta: https://www.instagram.com/maureenow/
25 March 2022
Nina M. Chung's reading ofWhat Happens When I Give You Everything
written by Erin Cecilia Thomas
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.
18 March 2022
Alice TeepleFull Disclosure 3
Alice Teeple is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. She is currently working on a solo exhibit about energetic transmutation and time travel, to be shown this spring in New York City. She lives there, too. Find her on her website: www.aliceteeple.com or Instagram: aliceteeple or Twitter: @creeple
11 March 2022
Pamela WaxElegy for the Lady on Liberty Island
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
— Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”
Curse that raised torch, quivering lips, the broken chain
and shackles as good as whole at her feet, girding
her womb. She wears the blue patina of sorrow, pregnant
with dreams of home across the sea, parlez-vous?,
and nowhere to go but a back alley in Queens, women
crossing borders from Ohio and Missouri, frenzied escape
from a fate that biology conferred. Hope scrambles
for a foothold on slippery benches of high courts,
while she extends her arm to the sky. Damn the pedestal
on which she stands—ironic welcome to foreigners
who come now by foot or air, rarely by sea, and a virgin/
whore two-punch to those who hold up half the sky. Damn
the sonnet that Emma wrote that raised the funds
that raised that pedestal on which she stands, branding
her Mother. She would suckle all comers who want to breathe
free, but instead coughs and gasps, herself bound by symbolic
satire. Let’s raise cain and eyebrows, unplucked,
bushy, link arms, chant: This is what it looks like,
kindle the torch until we are hoarse, until she is no lady.
An interview with Pamela Wax on craft, elegy, and symbolism
Passengers Journal: Pamela, I would love to start this conversation by asking you to tell us a bit about yourself. When did your love for poetry begin? What inspires you? Do you have a writing ritual?
Pamela Wax: I began writing poetry in the mid-1980’s when I was in my mid-20’s and lived in Santa Cruz, CA. I was a member of an intimate writing group with some wonderful poets. I fortuitously won a poetry award at a local community college and used the money to attend the Napa Valley writing conference where I got to study with Carolyn Forché, Sharon Doubiago, and Robert Pinsky. I was a bit over my head and intimidated there, but I later read poetry alongside Adrienne Rich and Ellen Bass at a Jewish women’s cultural event in Santa Cruz in 1986, which was, until 2 years ago, the last time I had read my poetry publicly. I stopped writing poetry for many years, focusing on memoir instead, and only returned to poetry about 4 years ago after my brother’s death by suicide. The poetry really grounded me and helped me find voice and meaning after his death.
PJ: This sounds like such a spiritual reconnection with the craft. Also, according to your bio, you’re a rabbi. How does this aspect of your work inform or reflect in your poetry?
PW: As a rabbi, I am steeped in paying close attention to words, since every Hebrew word—even each letter—in the Torah is understood to have both evident as well as deeper mystical meaning. The rabbinic commentaries on that biblical text are equally engaged in wordplay and often fantastical re-interpretations of the original text. I therefore find writing poetry to be a very Jewish and rabbinic endeavor, even when my work is not explicitly Jewish.
PJ: This piece we published skillfully weaves through themes of patriarchal perceptions of womanhood and immigration, with a focus on immigrant women and their status in a “civilized,” Western society. I love the final lines of the poem where the speaker urges a feminist uprising to liberate Lady Liberty. What was the inspiration behind this poem and how did you want your audience to receive it?
PW: There are a lot of layers to this question for me but let me say first off that I find your reading of the poem refreshing, because for me, it was primarily about bodily autonomy and reproductive choice with immigration in the background. Therefore, my inspiration comes from three formative sources. First, family lore has it that my paternal grandmother learned about birth control from Margaret Sanger and therefore “only” had four children. Secondly, my father’s hardware store was located next door to an abortion clinic, and I grew up seeing protestors there on clinic days and debating the pros and cons of abortion with an anti-choice uncle (my father’s business partner). Thirdly, I worked as an abortion counselor in the 80s in Santa Cruz (where there were also always protestors). All of these experiences led to my deep engagement in reproductive rights work ever since. That’s what I consider “my lane” when I don’t have the time or energy to engage in all of the social justice ills that deserve attention in our time. I’m proud to have sat in the New York State Senate in Albany to witness the passage of the Reproductive Health Act in 2019, something I, and so many others, had lobbied long and hard for. Of course, this is an angry poem, with good reason, as we see what has happened in State Legislatures all over the country and what is coming down the pike in the U.S. Supreme Court.
With that as background as to my interest in the topic, the actual prompt, came from an exercise in my poetry class through The Writers’ Studio inspired by Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Elegy for Thelonious.” The very specific assignment was to write an elegy, only hinting at the first-person narrator. Like his poem, I also integrated a “Let’s” near the poem’s end as well as the repetition of “damn.” I primarily intended it to be a eulogy/elegy for women’s reproductive choice in the U.S. as well as an elegy/eulogy for the religious freedoms upon which the U.S. was founded.
PJ: I love that you mention religious freedom, as well as the symbolism that your rabbinic background allows you to access by looking at words both in a literal and a mystical sense. And while I'm not a fan of revealing too much of the meaning in a poem to the reader (I'd rather they do that on their own), I would like you to talk a bit about my favorite construction in your piece "let's raise cain and eyebrows." The word play here is wonderful and I love how "raise" forks off in several directions, depending on the direct object assigned to it. Would you mind unpacking a few of the meanings here for our readers?
PW: The word “raise” gets repeated in a few ways in this poem: raising the torch, raising money, raising the pedestal, then that defiant line “Let’s raise Cain and eyebrows…” The plain meaning of "raise Cain" is to make trouble. The darker side of this phrase, of course, is biblical in nature -- to raise Cain is to raise a murderer, or to bring evil into the world. In a future revision, I might make that idea of "raising children" even stronger, since one of the themes of the poem is reproductive freedom, and the choice to be a mother -- or not.
PJ: Since this poem feels slightly political and activist in a sense, I’d like to ask you if you ever draw inspiration from current events. Given the current international conflicts, do you feel like this piece takes on a new meaning?
PW: “Slightly?” I hope it feels overtly political and activist! I happen to love topical, political poems. The hard part is making them poetic and not polemical or preachy. I have been writing a number of climate crisis poems of late, and I had written a protest poem after George Floyd’s murder, entitled “A Psalm of Protest in Memory of George Floyd”. I feel it is essential for poetry to address topical, real-world issues.
PJ: I'm thrilled about your reaction to my "slightly political and activist" remark! I often bring a lot of myself into reading poems and then worry that maybe I brought too much personal background and misunderstood the author's original intent. So I'm happy it wasn't the case here. To me your poem hit political notes in the context of the Russian attacks on the Ukraine, which I know was not the context in which you wrote it. But it made me think about how war creates forced immigrants out of women and children in particular. How often does it happen to you that you come back to a piece you've written and find new meaning as the present-day context changes?
PW: Here it is that I now have an experience of re-reading my work with new eyes because of uncovering a deeper meaning of "raising Cain" and it circling back to motherhood--and to evil in the world. That can happen, but the real eye-openers are the unexpected interpretations that readers bring to my work. The fact that you read this poem with the specter of Ukrainian refugees in the background speaks to the essence of art. Again, as a rabbi, I try to embrace the idea that God is working through me when I write — it’s humbling to step back and take only some of the credit for what ends up on the page. And that inevitably means that my intention is not necessarily the point -- art is ever a Rorschach test revealing the heart and soul of the witness.
PJ: It is true that poetry is an ever-changing Rorschach test, always open to different interpretations, including different takes from the author themselves even. What is your editing process? How do you know when a piece is finished and ready to be sent out into the world?
PW: In addition to poetry classes, in which I receive prompts and share new work, I also meet monthly with a few friends to share and workshop poems, but most importantly, I've worked privately for the past two years with a poetry cheerleader/teacher/editor extraordinaire with whom I meet bi-weekly. When he finally says a poem is “ready” (a process that can, for some poems, take months of back-and-forth), that’s when I trust it’s ready. I have learned a lot about humility as I’ve worked with him. Even when I initially resist his suggestions, with enough distance, I find he’s usually right.
PJ: As a final note, do you have any advice for poets who are still finding their voice, or shy about sharing their work?
PW: Find trusted readers, be willing to accept constructive criticism, and keep practicing!
Pamela Wax’s poems have received honorable mentions in the Paterson Literary Review Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize, and the Oberon Poetry Prize and have appeared (or are forthcoming) in journals including Pensive, Heron Tree, Green Ink Poetry, Sheila-Na-Gig, Pedestal, Pangyrus, The Dewdrop, Naugatuck River Review, Oberon, Sixfold, Solstice, Mudfish, The Cape Rock, and Persimmon Tree. Pam’s first volume of poetry, Walking the Labyrinth is available for pre-order from Main Street Rag Publishing. Pam is a rabbi who walks labyrinths in the Bronx, NY and the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts and can be found online at www.pamelawax.com
4 March 2022
Corley LongmireIndelicacies
Sometimes, it’s like this: I wake easy, with nothing to do but fix coffee and feed the cats. Joy claims I’m the reason the cats stay around; this doesn’t stop her from offering them our son’s leftovers. Sometimes, I sleep through Joy leaving because I no longer need to be out the door before she’s even fully dressed. Sometimes, I wake before her alarm and listen to her breathing, that grizzled puppy snore she’s got, then go to Jack’s room. Rarely does he sleep with us anymore, but he’s all over the bed when he does and never gentle. In his toddler bed, he sleeps as if dead; I’ll watch him breathe before going to take the trash out.
Then sometimes, Joy shakes me awake in that apologetic way I’ve come to dread, the one that means I’ve pissed myself again. Last night’s muscle relaxer knocked out the leg spasms but also my bladder control. I apologize like it’s the first time this has happened.
Joy flicks my nose before kissing me. She’s never embarrassed by my body’s failures. We’re married now, she’ll say. Did the vows and everything. And that was after I knew what I was getting into. Still, I wait to see whether she’ll look at the bunched-up blankets covering my crotch before kissing her back. She touches the scar near my hairline and kisses it too. “How about you hit the shower? I’ve got this.”
I push up on my elbows and begin the process of maneuvering useless, sleep-heavy limbs. When I can’t straighten completely, I lock my hands around the headboard’s spindle rails and pull myself into a sitting position. The wood strains in my grip; one day, the rails will crack loose. Joy doesn’t offer to help knead my legs like she usually does. Sometimes the help’s needed and sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it can be fun, but not on a day when my boxers rub damp against my thighs. I scrub my legs until the tingling sets in and my palms go hot. Peeling out of my skin would probably be less agonizing. I don’t push past the burn of nerves spitting out pain signals and try to stand though: no way am I steady enough.
Already, Joy’s stripping the bed on her side and unstuffing pillows from their cases. She’s finally realized it’s easier for me to do this when she’s not watching. Sweat pops above my upper lip anyway, pools in my armpits and groin. Most of the time, I’m not so badly off that I can’t get around without some mobility aid, but going without the forearm crutch seems impossible. Getting fully vertical takes a good minute; nearly another before I’m ready to move. I hobble to the bathroom, determined to clean quickly so that I don’t need the shower chair.
Barely two minutes in, thighs twitching and knuckles popping white where I cling one-handed to the bar above the soap dish, I let myself sit and wish doing so weren’t so easy.
I’ll come out and find the mattress bare, my mess to be bleached away in hot water, Joy putting bread in the toaster so I have something to take my medicine with. She’ll suggest I let Jack sleep in. That I work only half the day: another reminder to be forgiving of myself. If I take a longer than normal shower, I can pretend it’s because of my sluggish body and not because I’m hiding from her saying this yet again.
*
Almost everything’s difficult during a relapse. Dressing takes longer. Bathing, cooking, picking up those socks that fall during transfer from the washing machine to the dryer. At least the laundry’s not in the basement. Whenever I stand, I can’t walk without allowing my legs time to adjust. Joy’s talked about buying a wheelchair. I agreed to the crutch. In the two years since my MS diagnosis, I’ve learned to manage. Stretches and strength training, prednisone along with my normal medicine, cut out salt to combat fluid retention.
It might be bearable if I felt like a stranger inside my body.
Now I’m trying to breathe from my belly as I lie in Corpse Pose. Joy looked into trying yoga after the last relapse, and I actually don’t dislike it, even if I can’t do all the positions. Head to knee. Bridge Pose. Cat Pose. Legs up the wall. Downward-facing dog. Child’s Pose nearly snapped my spine before I became flexible enough; now, the muscles around my knees gradually unclench, one less charley horse to deal with. My ankles pop as I flex my feet in small circles. It takes effort not to rush through my morning routine knowing I have a video conference in an hour and need to dry the bedding and feed Jack.
Wearing an oversized T-shirt and Batman underwear, Jack has spent the last fifteen minutes alternating between imitating yoga positions and snatching pillows for his half-forgotten fort. He’ll be hungry soon. We’re in a phase where he only eats red foods: cherry tomatoes and bell peppers, strawberries. Steak, if I can convince him it counts because it starts out red. I’m not above putting food coloring in oatmeal.
He’s taken to doing tumbles, loose-limbed and graceless, by the time I sit up. I squirm to find a more comfortable position on the carpet, but my ass is already complaining. “Where’d you learn that?” I ask him.
“Mrs. Kristy,” Jack says, momentarily upside down before gravity pulls him forward. There’s no hesitation as he flips himself around the living room, nearly colliding with the fireplace. Tumbling is new to me but not Jack: his daycare teacher taught him this, but he hasn’t been to daycare since I started working from home three months ago. Did he show us his new trick, or did I just miss it? He tips sideways, lands like it hurts but it must not because he giggles when I shout “Timber!”
Jack bounces off the coffee table on his way to me. Kid bruises easily: I can imagine the thumbprint-size swell we’ll find at bath time. He may have Joy’s burnt toffee coloring, but he’s like me in ways. Delicate, my mom would say. She’s always called me that: because medicine on an empty stomach makes me nauseous, because I can deal with blood so long as it’s not mine. I promised I’d never call anyone delicate. Not Joy—there’s nothing sentimental about her—and certainly not my child.
Jack sits between my legs and leans back gently. Barely five, and he knows to be careful with me. That’s one of Joy’s biggest worries: that Jack might hurt me and not the other way around.
I touch his curling hair, the spot where the bones in his skull have fused together. He snuffles and pulls my arm around him, his hand unbearably tiny, soft bones and fish scale fingernails. I don’t carry him anymore. Not because my arms are that affected, but out of fear that I’ll lose my balance and crush him. Delicate isn’t a word I will ever call my son, even if I can’t help but think it.
*
I might hate my job. Which is ironic, considering I’m supposed to convince physicians to invest in medicines that’ll help their patients live longer, live better. Applying for disability put things in perspective since I’m unable to drive for hours to hospitals and conferences anymore, but also because of my relationship with pharmaceuticals as a drug rep and a person who can’t get by without a ridiculous number of pills. During the video call with a doctor I used to visit, I go over the benefits of a new drug for autoimmune disorders: the positive results of clinical trials and how patients report less-severe flare-ups. Not that some have experienced hand tremors. The potential for birth defects, infertility. Prescriptions can treat one thing while ravaging a different part of the body. Either you have constipation from your illness or diarrhea from your medicine, vertigo or insomnia, muscle cramping or high blood pressure. The act of keeping yourself alive is exhausting.
My medicines do help, along with stints of physical therapy: I’m stronger than I was earlier this year. Occasionally there’s a close call, but not anything like that fall in February when I was at a clinic for work and my leg crumpled on the ways downstairs. Nothing broken, just a little more blood than I was comfortable with and seven stitches. There’s a pearled scar spanning my temple that Joy brushes her thumb over when she thinks I’m sleeping.
Joy wasn’t hysterical when I called after the fall. Held it together more than I did—I saw the
blood on the floor, my face, and nearly hit the ground again. It did scare her into getting married.
“I’m sick of being treated like a leper because I call you my partner,” she explained. Jack lay between us, his head in my armpit. He’d said my stitches looked like train tracks and asked me to draw some on his cheek with magic marker. “I know it’s never been a thing with us, but the bank’s not letting me take off anymore.” Joy traced the skin around my stitches without touching them, her eyebrows puckered in the same way Jack’s do when he’s frustrated or exceptionally sleepy.
“So let’s get those stupid marriage benefits and show ’em,” I said.
Our next day off, we signed the license at the courthouse and took Jack for ice cream.
I’m still a decent salesman, but my ability to chitchat is practically nonexistent since I’m no longer regularly networking and spend most days trailing after Jack. The doctor babbles about turkey hunting and LSU football before signing off. “Take care of yourself, Matthew,” he says last minute, “you’re looking fit.”
I’m bloated and gross, but thanks.
Jack’s already in the doorway of the guest room-turned office when I swivel around, his mouth stained red from the Lucky Charms balloon marshmallows. “Mat-thew,” Jack says, mimicking how the doctor enunciated both syllables as he hands me a fistful of sticky hearts and horseshoes. “That’s your other name.”
“Yup,” I say, crunching on marshmallows that don’t taste like much of anything. “I’m Matthew and Daddy, just like you’re Jack and kiddo.”
“Mama calls me Jackie.”
“Jack and kiddo and Jackie.”
“And baby.”
“And baby.”
“I got lots of names.”
“You’ve got the most names.”
Jack squirms until I hoist him onto my lap. His hair’s silky slick but stiff in places with…glue? I left him snacking on dry cereal and watching Babe, how’d he get glue? Feet swinging, he asks if he can help feed the kittens—Joy and I both forgot this morning—and my lower back’s starting to ache from sitting too long, and I have emails to send, but things could be worse. Things have been worse.
Before we go outside, Jack grabs my crutch where it’s propped against the wall. I thank him and put it down once he’s left the room. My kid’s too young to be this considerate. It’s something I’m proud of him for, and a little heartbroken by.
*
Jack Junior is missing. Because I don’t want to worry Jack, I say his favorite kitten is probably under the house. Never mind that the others are on the patio. He huffs and continues pouring cat food into a disposable pie dish. The mother swerves around him, ears back, but this doesn’t bother Jack like it did before the kittens were old enough to tame.
Once full, the kittens chase each other and run across his bare feet. Jack checks to see whether I’m watching; believing he’s safe, he pulls a petal off one of Joy’s marigolds, puts it on the calico kitten’s head, and lifts her up Lion King-style.
But Jack Junior is missing. And if he is under the house, I can’t get him.
I call Joy.
“I tried the back yard and looked into the crawl space but didn’t see anything,” I tell her, not using the kitten’s name. I lift my dragging left foot enough that it won’t catch on the threshold and start searching for a flashlight. Jack lingers at the storm door to watch the cats tussle themselves into tiredness.
“If that Harris brat took him, she’s dead.”
“She’s a kid, babe, you can’t kill her.”
“Daddy.” Jack tugs my shirt.
“Not right now, okay?” Everything you can imagine in the junk drawer—rubber bands, chip bag clips, corroded batteries, a screwdriver, some mystery pill or breath mint—but no flashlight. I ease down to check the cabinet beneath and try not to make any sort of humiliating sound when my thigh quivers. “I thought we kept the flashlight in the junk drawer.”
“The flashlight’s not junk. It should be in the tool drawer.”
“Screwdriver’s a tool, what’s it doing in here?”
“You probably used it last and put it there.”
Jack pulls on my shirt again, more insistent, and when I don’t give him my full attention, he puffs his cheeks out. If Joy were here, she’d spider-walk her fingers across his ribs or belly until he gave in and laughed. “I wanna feed the kittens a snack,” he says and points to the cat treats we keep on a shelf near the front door. “Jack Junior will come out if I do!”
“Just a minute, I’m talking to Mama.”
“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Joy says over Jack’s stomping feet. Rather than tantrum, he merely slinks back to the door, dramatically forlorn. I snap a picture to send Joy.
“Poor thing. Like a wife waiting for her husband to come home from sea.” Joy trails off,
probably still staring at the photo of Jack. Then: “How are things?”
I tip my head forward until it taps the counter, the junk drawer’s handle digging a groove
into my forehead. She means nothing by it. I know that. But it’s the same every time one of us calls—we can’t just have a quick conversation. I try not to let anything seep into my voice. “Fine.”
“That wasn’t very enthusiastic.”
“I’m fine, Jack’s fine, everything’s fine. Just like every day.”
Joy doesn’t sound resentful. She never does, even when I deserve it. Especially when I deserve it. “You’re aggravated that you had a bad night. And if you need to take that anger out on
me, sure, it’s okay.”
“You know it’s not.”
Then why do it? she could ask. I imagine her at her desk, the way she’s tilting her face away from the handset and swallowing down a sigh or something worse. “Yeah, it’s not okay. But being angry is.”
“I’m not angry because of last night,” I say. We both know that’s a lie. “I just wish you’d stop coddling me. I’m crippled, not stupid.” Crouched on one knee, knowing I shouldn’t have gotten this far onto the floor without a chair nearby to grab, I feel both. I hope Joy will snap at me. When she’s as frustrated as I am, it’s easier not to feel like such a dick. Anger’s easier to face than patience and much easier than pity.
Joy does sigh this time. “Why do you have to call yourself that?”
Whatever horrible thing I might hurl back is forgotten when I catch a blur in my periphery. There’s a second to wonder at it, then a meaty thud vibrates through the floor, and there’s Jack sprawled out a couple feet away. All it takes is seeing the bag of treats near his hand to realize he tried climbing onto the counter to grab it.
Jack’s quiet, until he’s not. All that throbbing anger inside me shrinks beneath the wave of panic crashing against my chest at the first wail he lets out. I mutter a call you back to Joy and disconnect, hoping she didn’t catch much of him crying, and start to jump up. My thigh buckles before I even think about needing something to hold to, pain splintering across my kneecap when I stumble, the spasming the worst it’s been since I took my meds this morning, and my kid’s screaming. My kid’s screaming, and I can’t run to him. Get to Jack, just get to him, go go go do it. Nothing else can exist as I’m half-crawling to where he lies prone on the floor.
“What hurts, where’s the hurt?” I ask, even as I take in the blood staining his mouth. Every terrible scenario comes to mind: he bit through his tongue, his lip, he busted his teeth. Jack’s mouth is redder than red, but he’s not crying so hard now that I’ve scooped him up. He licks the puncture marks beading his bottom lip—must have hit the counter when he fell. Eyes swimming, he asks, “Am I gonna die?”
I’d laugh if he weren’t so damned earnest. “No, it’s okay, it’s not bad.” Jack goes stiff as I touch the corner of his mouth to get a better look. I’ll need ice, and a washcloth for his face. He wraps himself around me when I try to stand, the added weight nearly tipping me backward. Standing wouldn’t be a problem if I’d brought the crutch—I’d slide my arm into the cuff and trust it in a way I can’t myself anymore. The frustration I feel toward my body, my limitations, is enough to choke on. Irrationally, I think: this would never happen if Joy were watching him.
Once I’ve shushed and rocked him enough, I’m allowed to set Jack aside and get to my feet. Arms dimpled with baby fat latch onto me, his face tucked into my neck, and my skin there is slick with snot and blood and spit, and it’s gross, but I woke up covered in my own pee. I keep a hand on the wall and take one deliberate step after the other.
A bitten lip isn’t the end of the world. In Jack’s world, this will pass within a week. I’m grateful he’s young enough where all he’ll carry is a scar and not the memory of that fear, of a body outside his control.
*
Despite their bendable bones and how we fuss over them, kids are resilient. I forget this often enough that it amazes me how quickly Jack recovers. All it takes is the “If I Had Words” scene from Babe and some cuddles to make everything better. Today’s fall only crosses his mind if I say something he doesn’t agree with: make sure you pick up your colors and you’ve got to wash your hands first and no, you can’t help with the stir fry. “But I’m hurt,” he’ll say and point to his pitiful bottom lip.
Smart kid.
We’re working on dinner when the front door rattles. Jack hops off his step stool, the chile
powder I let him sprinkle the chicken with forgotten as he trots over to meet Joy. The effortless way she picks him up, the confidence that she won’t drop him, would churn my gut I let it. Joy fawns over him as he shows her where he bit his lip, acting surprised even though I texted her the first chance I got. The mark’s already scabbed over and doesn’t look too bad now that the blood’s gone, any swelling brought down by ice. Might not even scar.
There are other ways, I suppose, of being useful.
I scrape some chile powder from the chicken before putting the bottle in the spice rack with all the seasonings we regularly use. It’s only once Jack squeals that I notice Joy’s carrying something else. “Where’d you find that?”
“That is a him,” she says, handing the wriggling kitten to Jack, “and he decided to go off catting to the Harris’s. Their girl had him.”
“And she gave him back?”
Joy’s shoulders jump in a shrug. Despite the relaxed motion, tension pulls the corners of her mouth into a near-pout, one that normally only makes me think of how much Jack favors her. I wait for her to say something, but then Jack’s wiggling forces her to put him down. I hook my foot through the step stool and move it before Jack or I can trip over it, and to give myself room to put the chicken in the oven. When I look at Joy again, any indecision’s gone: she slides the stool back where it was so that, when she stands on it, she towers over me. Perfume lingers on her shirt collar, the skin behind her ear. I rest my weight against her and let my head fall heavy to her collarbone.
Jack’s cooing at Jack Junior, three pounds of lanky kitten for him to potato-pack through the house. Excited as he is, he’s got one hand cupped around the kitten’s head like he’d hold a baby, too thoughtful for a kid who’ll be starting kindergarten this autumn. Joy slides a palm up my back—not checking in, just to feel. She pinches my hip and ducks down enough that I can kiss her hair, the same chaotic curls Jack has. Neither of us apologizes except through these small touches. Jack fetches his Little Tikes shopping cart and begins pushing the kitten around, talking to it like we do him whenever we get groceries. “You have to sit still! If you’re not good, you don’t get a treat.” He runs over my toes and doesn’t say sorry. It hurts. It feels like a small victory.
Corley Longmire graduated with her MA from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her fiction can be found in Brink, West Trade Review, Stoneboat, Barely South Review, and is forthcoming in The Westchester Review. She works on the editorial team at University Press of Mississippi. You can find her on Twitter @Corley_Longmire.
Kara Laurene Pernicano (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and poet-critic, routinely working in erasure, collage, comics, improv dictation and poetic monologue. Through art, she seeks to awaken an interpersonal approach to trauma, grief, talk therapy and mental wellness. Kara has a MFA from Queens College and a MA from the University of Cincinnati. She has performed for New York Theatre Workshop, Poetic Theater Productions and the Poetry Society of New York. Her work has been included in various literary magazines and gallery exhibitions, including Snapdragon, Waccamaw, Full Stop, the winnow magazine, ang(st), Passengers Journal, the Whitney Staff Art Show and LIC Artists’ Plaxall Gallery. She teaches at CUNY and curates a creative series Why Open Pandora’s Box. When not writing or drawing, Kara serves as a Voice Actor for Passengers Journal and Experimental Editor for Patchwork Lit Mag.
18 February 2022
Emma FergusonA Drinking Poem
I drink you drink my father definitely drinks too much
my mother well you know her mother too
These are not the loud night’s drinking songs
these are cold damp shoulders
/ a coded switch vulnerable voice invalid / volar volver
cut the vowels rounder, a portal to a tongue
I’ll teach you a dirty word:
I drink alone speaking Spanish to the walls practicing syllables in my chair
Don’t let this be a show of hands
Oma said: don't marry beneath you
her wigs of short curls the clink of vodka tumblers
she’d drink most nights and maybe days alone
We spread her ashes at Cascade Pass same as Opa’s ashes
generations of hard feminine hands scooped her from clear plastic
letting wind take her over blueberries and heather
She’d lean heavy on her cane spilling over her edges and sharp regrets
she’d instruct us correct our posture point out our flaws
never admitting the weight
of the bottles in the bag
Summer again unraveling the year’s knotted verbs to their root
I still swap silbar with soplar you can laugh without knowing
but they both move air like my lips move liquid
Today I walked alone through sun-splashed ferns
and soft lichen floss to where glitter and rays
dance on leaves stones and river
the bottom buried under hard light at the surface
a salmon flickers the air hums with wet blackberries no voice in my throat
I’ll stand on the bank and drink it all until the light drops down—
the quench before I go home to see what is beneath,
and what is above the flick of tilted glass
Emma Ferguson writes poetry, translations, and teaches Spanish in Seattle. She has been a scholarship recipient at Bread Loaf Translators' Conference and a recent participant in AWP's mentorship program. Her original poems have appeared at The Bookends Review, River Heron Review, and are forthcoming from Rock & Sling. Her translated poetry has appeared at Columbia Journal, The Los Angeles Review, The Offing, and is forthcoming from The Common. She is a former professional flamenco dancer and an obsessive front yard vegetable farmer.
Read “A Drinking Poem” and more in the first Passengers Journal print anthology The First Words.
11 February 2022
Kicca TommasiThe Year I Wasn’t There 04
Kicca Tommasi holds a degree in Graphic Design from the Instituto Europeo di Design, Rome and a BA in Photography from the University of Westminster, London. In London she spent most of her professional life freelancing as a Photographer and Art Director for the publishing world. Among other assignments, she was Creative Director for Conde Nast UK for one year. In 2008 she relocated to the fabulous city of Buenos Aires fascinated by its lively creative scene and incredible light. From 2014 till 2017 she was a partner of FotoRuta, a company offering photography tutoring and photographic expeditions. Since 2018 she is spreading her time between Buenos Aires and Italy and dedicate most of her practice to Fine Art and Portraiture photography.
More of her work can be see here: www.kiccatommasiphotography.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kiccatommasi/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KiccaTommasiPhotography
4 February 2022
Jedah MayberryBEND
Willful Intent –
The outside world seeks to bombard us with endless platitudes. Be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you. Look after my needs and I’ll look after yours. Only thing, you go first.
*
We arrived at the next bend in the roadway. The crinkles forming across our teacher’s brow instructed us to remain still. Though the itch creeping along restless feet prompted us to crush to one side of the school bus, our palms spread wide as we pressed our foreheads tightly against the glass.
A scene straight out of a horror movie came glaring back at us: the rear end of a deer poking out the front end of a Jeep Cherokee, the deer’s massive splay of antlers ensnared in the Jeep’s slotted grill. The collision sent the driver careening through the windshield, momentum carrying his torso opposite the trajectory the deer had taken. Left resting on the Jeep’s hood, each played trophy to the other’s successful kill.
“That thing dead?” Bo Jensen asked, pointing toward the deer’s hind legs, its hooves poised to buck like it had gone head-first after the front-end of that Jeep.
“That dude in the plaid lumber jacket is for sure dead,” Marcus Gladwell replied. The man’s head sat crumpled in on one side, like an overripe melon, his face pock-marked with splinters of glass from the smashed windshield. He lay prone, his arms outstretched like he had accepted the deer’s challenge head-on.
In our meager nine, ten years, we had come to recognize a deer could be killed by a moving vehicle, a rain slicked roadway having spelled the end for untold wildlife over the course of our lifetimes. We hadn’t considered the prospect that a deer could kill a man, the stark realization confronting us on the bus ride home from a fieldtrip to Watchung Reservation.
It was early November if memory serves, the height of fall in Central Jersey. It had been sprinkling off and on the entire afternoon through a sky bright with sunlight – the devil beating his wife after all. The deer must have hesitated, its hooves sent scattering along the roadside in search of grip. The driver would have jammed on the brakes sending the vehicle into a skid, the asphalt carpeted with a heavy covering of wet leaves. Had he reacted more swiftly, had the deer been surer footed with its sprint, the incident might have been averted granting our bus safe passage, winding the remaining way down the hill then across Rte. 22 on the way back to Plainfield. A group of impressionable fifth graders would have been left to go another day, spared firsthand knowledge of the destruction one being might inflict on another, neither having set out to do the other any harm.
The trauma of it would not soon leave our heads despite Ms. Thompson’s repeated insistence we come away from the windows and retake our seats. “Who can recall what species of bird nests along the forest trail?” Ordinarily her prompting would elicit from us calls of ‘American Woodcock’ chanted in bored unison. That afternoon, her question fell on deaf ears, our attention locked into the need to process what we’d seen, a proper understanding not bound to take hold for years to come.
Give Me Water –
This was to be our last year at Frederic W Cook Elementary School. A trip to Watchung Reservation to wind down the fall semester followed by a visit the following spring to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City then it was on to middle school.
A decade and a half later, I have been entrusted with the care for six class periods of budding teenagers, only a handful of years older than we were on that fateful bus ride home. I accepted a job teaching math at Eisenhower Middle School down in Freehold at the start of the 2019-2020 school year. None of us could have predicted even half of what this year has heaped on us.
I had always been proficient in math. Not a math whiz. But, with sufficient hard work, I could make a go of most anything thrown my way. This was not expected of me, a little black boy in a school of mostly black and brown faces was not meant to shine in the statewide assessment exams. But only in math. I earned passable grades everyplace else. But math became my thing, my shtick as my father was known to say, beaming at his only son.
Mrs. Hopkins, my high school guidance counselor, lamented upon reviewing my SAT results that a small boost in my Evidence-Based Reading and Writing score might have warranted an application to Seton Hall or Princeton maybe – if we’re being totally kooky. But she knew of a program that might suit me just as well. Two years at Kean College followed by a transfer to Montclair State netted this little black boy a BS in Mathematics plus a minor in Educational Leadership. Maybe I’ll work to become a school principal, at an institute offering mathematics exclusively, one that caters to black and brown kids like me. I beam at the prospect, a conceivable progression in mind for my little math shtick.
Or Leave Me Dry –
In early February, the school district began issuing warnings regarding the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Within the coming weeks, we went from wait and see, to plan and prepare, to full shutdown. By mid-March, all classes had been moved online. As one of the younger teachers on staff, I wasn’t spooked by the tech aspects associated with the move to online schooling. I was instead completely unnerved by how to teach remotely when I had scarcely gotten a handle on how to navigate a classroom full of disillusioned kids face-to-face. I held out hope the parents would be of some assistance. Nearly the opposite has proven to be the case.
Harold Baines approached me in the teachers’ lounge midway into the fall semester, my face apparently stricken with bewilderment. Harold teaches history. As the reigning senior staff member, he had undoubtedly encountered this look countless times.
“You’re not on stage,” he muttered at me, bits of blueberry muffin spilling beneath his heavy mustache. “You don’t need to perform for these kids. You’re here to impart knowledge. It’s their job to pick it up or not,” he said, stirring some dried powder meant to pass for cream into his mug of coffee, nearly filled to the point of overflowing.
“Your job is to show up every day, to be present in the classroom. See what they see. How the material is sitting with them,” he said before taking a generous gulp, sending the slosh of coffee in his mug safely below the rim. “And keep your ears peeled. Not much will get past you if you pay attention to the whispers, an excess of foot shuffling while you’re at the whiteboard, your back turned to them.”
Online instruction has its advantages. Most notably, never is my back turned to them. I stare at the tiny squares housing a classroom full of anxious faces bobbing in the Zoom window. Peer inside their living spaces to see whether Mom or Dad is standing nearby to make sure I’m delivering it straight. To offer the assist in the event their particular tadpole is not catching on at the rate needed to keep pace with the rest of the class. I wonder what trauma these kids have seen, whether this is the worst experience they’ve endured.
9/11 stands hazy in my memory. I was five years old, a snot-nosed kindergartener, when those planes struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon. Things stopped for a time, the world on standstill working to make sense of the trauma we as a collective had experienced. COVID-19 feels different. 9/11 affected international relations, stymied US economic development with long-felt, lingering effects trickling to the rest of the world. COVID-19 has people on lockdown the world over, not a soul spared the trauma.
We had crested the semester’s midway point shortly ahead of the lockdown. Now well into May, the end of the school year looms ahead of us, summer break finally, mercifully in sight. Another benefit of online schooling: no snow days. No place for anybody to have to be, us teachers included. Though, come to think of it, the past winter barely delivered any meaningful snowfall. Maybe Mother Nature herself has contracted Coronavirus.
I celebrate the coming end to our ordeal silently inside my head: ‘June 18th and we’re outta this piece,’ I say reverting to a familiar slang I slip into anytime I get to catch up with some of my Plainfield crew.
As instructors, we are not meant to pick favorites. But I have grown to look forward to seventh period. It spells the slow march toward the end of the day. Plus, there’s a lone black boy in my seventh period class – cat whiskers in a bowl of fresh milk. Dahvoo Simpkins reminds me of me. A Melvin Jenkins 2.0 – similar skin-tone, an affinity for formulas and equations, an innate grasp of basic geometry. He’s that and then some. Seems more alert, more with it than the rest of the kids in the class. More with it than I imagine I was at his age.
“Dahvoo, would you care to explain for the class the meaning of the Pythagorean Theorem?” I ask. I expect him to regurgitate a canned formula. He instead goes straight for the physical interpretation.
“Take three squares, lengths A, B and C on a side. Place squares A and B at a right angle in a stairstep pattern, a diagonal aligning the squares, one corner to the other. Lean square C against the lip of the tread formed by square A to the lip marking the edge of square B.” Dahvoo shares his screen, begins drawing freehand in the Zoom window. “Call the line marking one side of square C as it extends from the edge of square A to the edge of square B the hypotenuse,” he continues. “The length of the hypotenuse shares a relationship with the lengths of squares A and B, one that won’t change provided A and B maintain a right angle, C extending from the tips of the treads formed by their stairstep arrangement.”
I scan the Zoom window. Blank stares across the board. The teen attention span is hard to hold. With the school year coming to a close, hope of widespread participation is all but futile. If only the world were populated with more kids like Dahvoo. A timer pops up in the Zoom window and begins counting down: 00:59, 00:58, 00:57… Less than a minute to go and this day is done.
A long weekend lies ahead of us – Memorial Day. Let the Zoom universe rejoice. “Enjoy the break,” I say to the panel of evenly spaced squares. “And Dahvoo, thank you for such a thorough explanation. Good work.” I end the Zoom session then immediately begin panicking that I’d been beaming at him. Please tell me I wasn’t beaming. You can’t beam at a kid in your middle school math class, even a kid who reminds you of you – a Melvin Jenkins 2.0.
Pythagoras’s Dread –
Everyone seems especially sluggish in my Tuesday morning sessions – typical aftermath of a three-day weekend, everybody afflicted by a school-wide hangover of some sort. By seventh period, everyone is especially fidgety, their hands lost in their laps working to keep the commotion on their phones offscreen, behind my back technologically speaking.
Even Dahvoo appears distracted. “What gives?” I ask.
Naturally, he’s first to respond. “Take three peace officers,” he says. “Place Cops A and B at a right angle to one another. Have Cop C take a knee, pin a cuffed, unarmed subject face-down on the pavement. What do you get?”
“A hypotenuse?” I presume, struggling to grasp his meaning.
“Just a noose,” he replies, holding his phone up to the Zoom camera. “You get a modern-day lynching. Another black man snared in a proverbial hangman’s noose.”
I reach for my phone, pull up Google news. And there it is: cellphone footage of George Floyd pinned down by three police officers, a fourth officer preventing a small gathering of civilian bystanders from intervening despite repeated pleas to render aid. To check the man’s condition.
Officers A, B and C hold the man down for eight minutes and 46 seconds, until he is asphyxiated. Until George Floyd is dead.
I send the kids off in search of a parent, close the Zoom session. Class is excused for the day.
The next morning, I receive a note from Principal Allyn. She wants to arrange a private videoconference with me. ‘What can this be about?’ I think. Ending class forty minutes early? Given the circumstance, I feel it was the right move.
She begins slowly, her words carefully measured, as is her custom to do. “Mr. Jenkins, I want to commend you for your quick thinking. Not every member on staff was as nimble. Attempted to muddle through, if not oblivious to what the kids had pulled up on their phones, what they were seeing.”
I thank her for the vote of confidence, for the responsibility she has entrusted me with. Still, I hesitate. There’s got to be something more.
We stare across Zoom-land at one another an uncomfortably long while. One of the school counselors eventually joins the conference. Peggy something or other. Haven’t had much interaction with her. “One of the students asked if he might speak with you, he and his father,” Principal Allyn announces. “I’ll leave you and Peggy to it. She’ll observe on the school’s behalf.”
Dahvoo and his father appear on the screen. Melvin 2.0, I think to myself. I must have messed up royally. His father thanks me for taking the time to meet with them then turns to Dahvoo. Nods. “Go ahead, son.”
Dahvoo begins, methodically doling out the words as is his custom. “Mr. Jenkins, I wanted to ask someone who I believe will give it to me straight, someone who sees the world like I do. Rooted in logic. Only filled with things that don’t always go how we expect.” I had sprinkled a little calculus in on them the other week, just to see how they might react. It did not go how any of us expected.
“Go on,” I say hoping to give him the confidence to proceed, my Education Leadership skills being put to the test.
“Officer B?” he asks me.
“The other white guy,” I say, eyeing Counselor Peggy’s Zoom square. Her expression remains unchanged suggesting she hasn’t been agitated by my choice of words.
“Yeah. That’s the one,” Dahvoo confirms. “His name, Thomas Lane. Been on the force four days.”
“That’s what I hear,” I say, my jaw tightening.
“What do you think he hoped to become when he was a kid?” Dahvoo asks.
“A cop, I suppose.”
“For four days?” he asks, his forehead crinkled. I look away, fidget in my chair.
“I imagine not how he expected things to go,” I respond, turning my attention back to the screen.
Dahvoo nods in agreement. “Are you a religious man, Mr. Jenkins?” he asks. I know from the bit of juggling we needed to do to get him into my seventh period class that Dahvoo and his family are devout Muslims. Sixth period is for my advanced class which would better suit his abilities, did it not overlap midday prayer time. I suppose some concessions must be made, even at the expense of advanced mathematics.
“I believe a force bigger than ourselves exists,” I reply. It’s an answer I’d begun handing my grandmother whenever she asked why I no longer accompany her to church. I was nine or ten when I stopped going, around the time the deer and the man driving that Jeep wound up killing one another.
“In honor of my religion, I pray several times a day,” Dahvoo explains. “Some of my prayers are more pointed than others. Have a more direct aim in mind.”
“Yes,” I reply to convey he has my full attention. “What do you pray?” I ask.
“That in the morning I will not be afraid.”
“What do you fear?”
“I fear there are people in this world who pray the opposite before they go to bed each night,” he says. “Who ask in their prayers that I live the rest of my days in fear. Who see it as just that a person who looks like you and me is free to be hunted.”
“That is not how things are meant to go,” I reply. It is the only response I can muster.
Jedah Mayberry was raised in southeastern CT, the backdrop for his fiction debut. The Unheralded King of Preston Plains Middle won Grand Prize in Red City Review’s 2015 Book Awards and was named 1st in Multi-Cultural Fiction for 2014 by the Texas Association of Authors. In 2018, he completed a Hurston-Wright Foundation Workshop in Fiction, used in part to revise the manuscript that resulted in a second book, Sun Is Sky, due from Jacaranda Books. His work has appeared at Linden Avenue, Brittle Paper, Black Elephant, Akashic Fri-SciFi Series, Solstice, Permission to Write, and A Gathering Together among others. Jedah resides with his wife and daughters in Austin, TX.
Jonah A. Blander is an emerging storyteller and narrator from Montréal, Québec who works with different artistic mediums. He has created pieces that fall within the confines of playwriting, oral storytelling, screenwriting, poetry, prose, and non-fiction. He has honed his skills in the Theatre and Creative Writing departments at Toronto's Glendon College and York University. Over the course of four years, he has worked as a writer, performer, and workshop creator for Theatre Glendon's production arm: Lionheart Productions. Find him on LinkedIn.
21 January 2022
Virginia LaurieCollege Town
Remember the time we raised the dead in the back of the pizza shop? My fingers still black from
the wood-fire oven as I scattered the ashes, you lit something, and we all mumbled prayers in
different languages. Behind the Coke machine and the card punch, we installed our altar, the core
of our magic. Offerings: a straw wrapper tied into a bow, the piece of translucent sea glass
still floating in your pocket, the ticket stub to Book of Mormon. That one was better than chicken
bone. We locked eyes, nodded then proceeded to give our limbs to the pile. I placed my pinky
next to her leg and your arm, limp and cold there. Dispassionately, we wrapped our wounds and
watched the one we made in the fabric of things. Like heat waves, everything around it
shimmered. It was all guesswork and coaxing our fear into a gas, something with which to fill
the room, perfume it. Our disregard for safety was its very own incense, and it lured strangers to
us. The strangers became part of the fabric, and we tore them to shreds. Our hands were smoking
by the time the sun came up, and the light did not want us anymore. We stayed there all day
beside the pit. Those who disturbed our vigil became tinder. We turned onlookers into stags then
shot them with our eyes. Anything that did not bow, we broke. Anything that could not burn was
useless to us. Anything that broke the steady death of the sun became worth our Friday Night.
An Interview with Virginia Laurie
How long have you been writing poetry?
In fourth grade, our homeroom class did a unit on poetry, and I wrote a long poem about Cades Cove, TN, one of my family’s favorite vacation spots. I was really happy with how it turned out, and I’ve been writing poems in my free time ever since, trying to capture more moments where I take pride in my work and feel I’ve successfully distilled some aspect of my emotional experience.
Can you share for us a little bit about your writing process? Is there anything that helps you write: a place, a time of day, a ritual?
I definitely write in bursts of inspiration, so whenever a thought or line strikes me, I’ll jot it down in a journal, or the notes app, or a Google doc. I used to be a puritan about using paper, but now I prefer typing since I can keep up with the pace of my thoughts better. I always try to have at least one Google doc “running” that acts as a catchall for things I know I’ll want to develop later, kind of like a sourdough starter for writing. I am a night owl, so a lot of things get thrown in there during the wee hours of the morning then fixed up the next day.
What was the inspiration for College Town? The poem is full of such wonderfully disturbing imagery.
“College Town” was actually inspired by my college town, if a bit loosely. I’m a senior now, but my friends and I have all spent the last four years living in Lexington, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley, a landscape I’ve always perceived as otherworldly and powerful. I love Maggie Stiefvater’s fantasy YA series, “The Raven Cycle,” which takes place in the area, and I agree that if ley lines are real, we’re definitely sitting on one.
Living in a small town has made me extra fascinated with looking for the remarkable in the mundane, and I love the way people, especially young people, have to make their own magic when they’re here. There’s not a lot to do as a young person, no night life to speak of, which is frustrating but valuable since you stop taking things for granted. To survive, you have to learn how to “make a night of” certain things you wouldn’t consider as special anywhere else, like walking to the gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes, or going for a late-night joy ride, or going to the same house parties and bonfires over and over. And when you frequent the same places over and over again, the local pizza place for instance, your patronage takes on a ritualistic overtone and the places themselves feel imbued with power. I guess that’s why they’re called “haunts.”
So the idea that my friends and I were making magic out of nothing and acting like The Magician in Tarot became my starting point, and the rest developed organically. I’ve always been drawn to the macabre, gothic and occult, so it sometimes rears its head in my writing without me planning on it. But I usually let it in, and I like the way the darker images, references to necromancy, human sacrifice, witchcraft, etc. add an edge to this poem, which I see as a celebration of youth in all its bored, haughty and defiant glory.
This poem is in a paragraph format, so it reads almost like prose. When you’re writing, how do you decide on a format for your poems?
I always just begin writing the words themselves, then add line breaks intuitively. Rarely, I do go into something with a specific form in mind, like when I first learned what a Haibun was in a creative writing workshop and thought “Oh, I have to try making one of those!” But, for the most part, it’s random. For this poem and other prose poems, which I do really love, I indulge my desire to write run-on sentences and lean into their meandering, but emphatic nature. When I talk, I can ramble, and I think of a prose poem like a ramble, where there’s not as much space and breath built in because the speaker is more desperate to get their message across quickly. For me, a dense format like this lends itself to a buildup of emotion, which leads to a more cathartic climax. I think it’s really beautiful when people read more space into prose poems and take their time, but I also love the sense of being rushed, like you can’t catch your breath until the very end. Like you’re running out of time and space. It makes things that much more delightfully intense.
What is your 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?
I don’t edit nearly as much as I should since I know it’s the best way to become a great writer, but with poetry, I give myself liberty to stop writing or tinkering whenever it, again, just “feels right.” I write until I feel relief, and the minute I feel like I can stop holding my breath, I know the poem is probably finished. When I feel like it’s finished, I like to send it out ASAP before I get cold feet. If I sit on a poem too long, I’ll start to overthink its merits, so I like to ride the high of creative inspiration and confidence boost it provides.
Your portfolio mentions that you’re a visual artist as well. What other types of art do you do? How do you think your art and poetry influence each other?
Yes! I love fine art, particularly drawing and painting. I also enjoy embroidery, printmaking and collage. I really can’t overstate how intertwined art and poetry are in my mind, and I probably gravitate towards poetry for its imagistic potential. In elementary school, I usually made an illustration to go with each of my poems, so I’ve always placed them, quite literally, side by side. Even when they stand on their own, I see a good painting as its own kind of poem, and a good poem as art painted with words. My art and writing come from the same impulse and often cover the same topics. There are so many times a day when I stop to take a candid picture of a nice moment, often with friends and family, because I think “This could make a great composition for a painting,” and, “This moment is perfect, if I can replicate even half of its feeling, I’ll have made good art.” Then, just as often, I’ll end up writing about the same moment I tried to paint. There’s so much crossover in inspiration that trying to untangle them is pointless. They’re both equally wonderful modes of illustrating feeling, and it would be the challenge of my life to try to rank one over the other.
What are you reading right now that you love, or that inspires you?
I’ve recently started reading “Doctoring the Devil: Notebooks of an Appalachian Conjure Man” by Jake Richard, which actually touches really nicely on the sense of magic, root work, conjuring, etc. that surfaced in “College Town.” I wanted to understand my Appalachian roots a bit more, and I’ve already had an instance where a detail from the book, an old home remedy for a fever, worked its way into a poem I was writing. Also extremely relevant is “Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry.” My friend gifted me the collection for Christmas since he said, “I saw ‘poetry’ and ‘spell,’ so I thought of you.” My friends often call me a witch, so I think it’s fitting that I enjoy reading and writing so many “spell-poems.”
Virginia Laurie is an English major at Washington and Lee University whose work has been published/is forthcoming in Apricity, LandLocked, Phantom Kangaroo, Cathexis Northwest Press and more. https://virginialaurie.com/
14 January 2022
Rilind ModiglianiOrfidian
Rilind Modigliani is an Albanian Tosk, born in ex-Yugoslavia in the small village of Prespa in the eastern part of North Macedonia. At the age of seven, following his father’s passing, he was cast from his home as custom dictated at his mother’s new betrothal. Between the ages of seven and sixteen he lived a nomadic life, visiting different extended families along eastern North Macedonia and the northern cities of Albania, at times spending weeks asleep out in the wild, or working as a shepherd, field hand, farmer, blacksmith and shoe maker until the age of sixteen when an uncle from his father’s side adopted him into his own family, living in New Zealand. On arrival he was put to work in the family’s businesses and given secondary and tertiary education.
The familial environment was emotionally toxic, a burden he bore until his twenty second year when he finished his Bachelors in Arts at the University of Auckland, picked up the few possessions he had, with his last savings paid of his student debt and ran away, spending the next three years doing odd jobs between towns, traveling to Australia for a year working along the Eastern coastline, as a waiter, musician, chef, ballroom dancer and, for a few months, as a bouncer at a strip club. With the intention of continuing his travels, he moved to Argentina but quickly fell in love with Buenos Aires and settled there, where he continues to live to this day. Throughout his whole life he had enjoyed the discipline of writing, fiction and prose, and settling down, he began dedicating his time to the study of the nature of human beingness, its visual representation through the medium of photography and written dictation through the fictive form.
Find him on Instagram: @rilindmodigliani or visit his website: www.rilindmodigliani.com
7 January 2022
Max DeGenovaVesuvio
Alonzo checks his watch only to find that the battery has died, and that the sun is going down, and that soon he’ll have to go back, but the water looks so nice.
The last time he was in this spot, he was seven. He can remember the photo where he posed with his arms above his head, the Mediterranean up to his knees, Vesuvius smoldering in the background, but he can’t remember the rest of that trip, much less so what it felt like to be that young and that hopeful and that naïve. Maybe if he stands in the same spot it’ll all come rushing back to him. Maybe he’ll remember what it was like to still have homework, to still have scabby knees, to still have acne, to still have a father. Maybe Vesuvius will erupt and he’ll be preserved for thousands of years.
Enough melancholy now. The sun is too lush for melancholy.
He takes off his shoes and climbs onto a boulder. There’s moss under his toes, viscous and fishy. There are families on boats drinking negroni sbagliati, laughing into the evening. He hops onto another rock, then another, and the waves lap against them like bath water. He thinks about bath water. About two large hands rinsing shampoo from his head. About crying if it got in his eyes.
He closes his eyes.
There is salt, algae, and branzino in the air. There is a mandolin in the piazza. There are twenty people in a room filled with flowers, wondering where Alonzo went. He realizes that he’s standing on a rock in a black suit, staring at a volcano with his hands above his head. No one seems to care. Nearby there are at least five couples kissing, sipping limoncello, waiting to settle into a bed with each other. These people here live their lives knowing that the next day could bring sudden, molten death. Shouldn’t we all be so lucky, he thinks. To not have to think about tomorrow.
He steps down and finds the bar.
Due limoncelli, per favore.
He drinks them both and feels their warmth. He sits at a table and watches the sea slip into nighttime, lulling these lovers into a slumber that won’t break until the pescatori set off for their catch and the world comes back. The sun is almost gone. If he can see the moment that it crosses the horizon, will he know how to say goodbye? Should he have said goodbye sooner? Should he have come back sooner? Should he have taught his sons Italian? Should he have ever left? Should he have done more, anything more?
The light disappears and he starts back. The nighttime here is so peaceful. Back in San Diego the Pacific ceaselessly roars, eating everything, sucking up the unfortunate. Here, the Mediterranean is a lullaby. As he walks he thinks about all those bodies that are still suspended in volcanic ash. He wonders if they’re having nice dreams.
Max DeGenova is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, and musician. He practices art so that he might better understand himself and others. He lives and works in Chicago, IL, and can be found on Instagram @mtdegenova.
31 December 2021
Kolbe Rineythe neurotypicals tell me I’m cold but have you ever considered that you’re actually the cold ones?
this night, she fevers / hot enough for me to take a belonging / bag, fill it with ice, / lay it flush against her sun-split chest. / constantly, she threatens running / just a little too high to function, / proteins curdling, skin / reddening to a throat ripper / scream. / don’t know why / the fevers call to me, / why I think panic / under the ice. / If I were to ask for something else, / when they spoke I’d stop feeling / the weight of their belonging / on my chest. / I’d say, open your mouth. / open it. / tear my gown / and let me slice bare / and pale as the crescent / moon in the linens. / douse my body / in something cold and quick / drying, / that I may find myself / in the electric spring / storms once more, / a little girl / on the precipice / of a wild death. / or just after all / let the heat feast my brain; / for every time I open my mouth / it is gasping / a slow-choke death / under the freeze. / I am always / pressing my lips / to the floe / like a seal staring / up from a mirror. / breaking under the weight of it, / the way a the glacier calves white / births to the salt. / trying to tell you how / I’m holding a flint / of ice in my hand / and I can’t put down. / I can’t put it down. / I can’t put it down,
Kolbe Riney is a queer poet and registered nurse from Tucson, Arizona. They hold a B.S. in Nursing from Northern Arizona University and work in critical care. They are a Best of the Net Nominee and were short listed for the 2021 Sexton Prize with their manuscript, “mythic”. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Watershed Review, the Chestnut Review, TinderBox, Passages North, and others. Find them at kolberiney.wixsite.com/website
24 December 2021
Chiara Bertrand's reading ofAnd the Pearly Gates are Made of Teeth
written by Jessica L. Walsh
Chiara Bertrand (alias Berta) is a versatile queer artist whose educational training includes acting, music, and writing. A deep regard for the voice, perceived by the UK-based creator as an inner instrument of expression, enlightens her freelance career. She is currently seeking talent representation while giving birth to her first novel, A Gap. You can follow her on Facebook and Instagram @bertamusician.
17 December 2021
Ivan TkachTime
Ivan Tkach is an artist. He is 48 years old and He lives in Russia. He started creating relatively recently, after he was 40. Ivan feels a great desire to work hard and create. He is learning a lot and hope to reach a decent standard in art. Ivan is an owner of several awards, including “Russian Art Week” Contest-Exhibition 2020 and 2021. It`s very important for him to be evaluated and this way to prove to himself that he is moving in the right direction. At this stage he is interested in working with colour, making expression and “movement” in pictures. It motivates him to create. Besides, Ivan believes that a picture should contain a thought, which has never been said before, a symbol that is self-explanatory. That is the point for him – to say your own word to the world. Each time he seeks to see a thing or a phenomenon from another angle. Canvas, as any other work of art, must make a person think and contemplate. From another point of view the artist is responsible to the world for all he has created. He considers humanism as the main moving force behind the art. Ivan heartily thanks his family, wife Elena, kids and mother for the great opportunity to create. Find him on Instagram: https://instagram.com/intkach_art?utm_medium=copy_link or by email: intkach@inbox.ru
10 December 2021
Mark HelmKaddish
—For Stephen Dunn
My father asks me what I’m writing.
His voice is threadbare, careful air
hands placid in pajama sleeves.
It’s a fairy tale, I whisper
about a craftsman who makes
tiny birds from scavenged tin.
Satisfied, he roams the borderlands.
He does not want to miss his death.
The sparrow perched upon his shoulder
appears to be building her nest
in his hair. It’s the least ridiculous
thing that’s happening here by far
even though my brother in his grief
is pacing up and down the hall outside
the door with a ukulele. He is singing
Marty Robbins' My Isle of Golden Dreams.
It is our father’s favorite
song. Half-way through
the sparrow starts to sing
along, and when the song is done
it is so quiet in our house
I can hear the waves break
on the shore half a mile away.
I open up a window, let in the night
and smell the salt-air breeze. A memory
of taffy. Atlantic City. Hey, Pop
I say, just not loud enough to wake him
Remember that crazy diving horse?
He is silent, but I can see
the makings of a grin blossoming
across his weathered mug. He sees
it now: a girl astride an Appaloosa
flying off a platform, a fast forty
feet down into a shallow pool.
Good Lord, that water’s dark.
My father coughs, the sparrow chirps.
My brother wears the carpet bare.
He refuses to come in and sit.
He knows it won’t be too much longer
now. I go back to writing. My tinsmith’s
working on a silver starling no bigger
than a thimble. He shapes its wings
with care, then tests them, tossing
his creation high into the evening.
It flies out of my father’s mouth.
Mark Helm narrated their own work and was then gracious enough to chat with our editorial staff about this poem and their process. Read the transcript of the conversation below:
Passengers Journal: Mark, let’s dive right in and ask you to share with us a bit about your journey in poetry. We know you’ve taken a hiatus from writing and submitting for a while; can you tell us a bit about that?
Ouch. So, you’re starting there, are you?! I don’t object, it’s a just a tough one to answer. My last significant publication appeared in the 1990 Winter-Spring volume of Poetry Northwest, a journal I greatly admire. But, yeah--I know… quite the gap. The short answer to your question is that I’d just embarked on a full-time music career. It took ten years, but I finally got signed to a fantastic indie label (am I allowed to plug my record here? It can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube by searching “mark helm everything’s ok”). The record sold well, and I started on another one. Then the label tanked. I would have been heartbroken, but I’d started a family. Looking back, I think I poured all my creative energy into helping raise my two amazing children, Cooper Lee and Lane. I made up stories for them every night we were together, little poems here and there, snatches of songs. They made me feel like I was creating something new every day in the act of loving them, hands on. Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that as soon as they both packed off for college, I published something.
Passengers Journal: Your poem Kaddish is incredibly moving, of an almost surreal tenderness around loss of a loved one. We know this piece is very special to you, and you’ve dedicated it to your mentor, Stephen Dunn. How does it feel to have it published?
You captured it: Surreal, tender, lovely. I’ve known Stephen since I was seventeen, over three lifetimes ago. I saw him read at a local library near my family home just south of Atlantic City, New Jersey and I was hooked (for folks curious about the diving horse that makes an appearance in the poem, visit https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/11/the-diving-horses-of-atlantic-city.html). When I turned 18, I followed him to nearby Stockton State College where he led the creative writing program and studied with him for five years. After that, we became friends. Stephen was a lion of a man. He was tough, and I needed that in a mentor. But he could be fantastically tender, too… and I needed that in a father figure. I loved him dearly. We last spent time together before the pandemic hit and it’s pained me greatly that I didn’t get to see him again. Both he and my father were taken by Parkinson’s disease and it’s a terrible, terrible thing. The poem was initially inspired by the weeks my younger brother Scott and I looked after my father in his final days as Parkinson’s pinned him to his bed. About half-way through my editing process, I realized that I’d been thinking about Stephen, too. I showed him the poem early on and he gave me some notes, but we lost him just before I got word you guys were interested in publishing it. It seemed fitting that Stephen be in there literally, just as his spirit inhabits the poem figuratively.
Passengers Journal: For this piece, you’ve worked with one of our poetry team members, Dilys. How did you find the revision process? And how did you decide that this piece was ready for the world?
Dilys is magic. Serious magic. And she has this trick where she makes you feel incredibly confident while she’s challenging you to become better than you actually are. And damned if I didn’t get better as we edited. She actually caught that the main body of the poem is 22 lines, 2 each for the 11 verses of the mourner’s Kaddish. My father’s family wasn’t Jewish, but my mother’s was and it occasionally bleeds into the work. I’ve always felt deeply connected to my Jewish roots, and Dilys encouraged me to lean into that, among other things. Anyway, I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years: editors, fellow writers, other songwriters. But no one’s ever made me feel nearly so empowered. This poem would not be what it is were it not for Dilys’ prowess as an editor.
Passengers Journal: Our journal makes a concerted effort to release fully voiced issues for better accessibility and inclusiveness. You’re also a musician and had the opportunity to record your own piece for this issue, how was that experience for you?
To be honest, it was a much-needed kick in the pants. See, last year I purchased some recording gear for a home studio now that the kids’ room is unoccupied for large chunks of the year. But it just sat there gathering dust. Maybe I didn’t want to admit that the hands-on parenting part of my life I mentioned earlier was over… I don’t know (we’ll leave that for my crack team of shrinks to puzzle over). So your invitation to record the piece myself inspired me to set everything up and start actually recording again.
Passengers Journal: Any advice for poets who are still finding their voice, or shy about sharing their work?
Yes, absolutely. First, read voraciously. Dine out on words every day. I want to start by saying that my menu is far from comprehensive, and your gut could bust just reading people I forgot to mention but start with the classic greats and work your way up: Shakespeare, Coleridge, Whitman, Dickenson, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Hughes, Hayden, Brooks... (the list obviously goes on). Then, find some brilliant post-1950’s writers who speak to you. For me, it was Stephen Dunn, Anne Sexton, Mary Oliver, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Dick Wilbur, Ai, Henry Taylor, Billy Collins, Rita Dove. After that, work at discovering new writers who excite and inspire you. I’ll save that list for your final question (sorry—I peeked!). Once your head is exploding with words, write. Write every day, everywhere. I’m constantly jotting down ideas on the Notes ap on my phone. Never drive behind me, cause I’m always suddenly pulling over so I don’t crash my car when an idea strikes. But it’s also important to keep a weekly editing schedule. For me, creativity comes in flashes or—if I’m lucky--in waves. But I’ve come to believe the poet’s real work comes with the editing (maybe that’s why it takes me so long to finish anything. I’m maybe good for 5 or 6 decent poems a year… so maybe don’t take advice from me if you want to get a book out before you turn 30!).
Passengers Journal: What are you reading right now that you love, or that inspires you?
First and last, Stephen Dunn. I’m re-reading every poem, from his first book, Looking for Holes in the Ceiling until his last, Pagan Virtues and becoming re-inspired along the way. It’s also a way to keep his beautiful voice alive in my head. One of the last things he told me was that it was slipping away, and I think I knew what that meant. If your readers want to hear what it sounded like the year I first heard Stephen read, they should check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_-Z9dnQ-nE. I’m also devouring every poem of Dilys’ I can find. I love the dreamlike quality in her work I’m always chasing. And I’ve been reading a lot of Danez Smith lately. As someone whose identity has been gradually drifting towards the non-binary (thanks to the loving tutelage of my children), their work really speaks to me. Let’s see, who else? Marcus Wicker’s great. He’s a bit like Gwendolyn Brooks meets Kendrick Lamar (his book, Silencer, will take the top of your head off). And Steve Kistulentz, absolutely. His latest collection is called Mating Calls of the Dead, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. The guy’s craft is ridiculous… it floats unseen behind the work on the first or second pass. Then you catch it. And it’s so good, it’s frightening (at least it is for me, because I realize I’ll never be able to match it. But I keep trying). And I can’t leave here without recommending Stephen’s Degrees of Fidelity: Essays on Poetry and Latitudes of the Personal. His piece, “Little Craft Manifesto” should be required reading for anyone who wants to write poems of great beauty and discipline.
Mark Helm teaches English and creative writing at a community college in Nashville, Tennessee. In their spare time, they play and repair steel guitars—you know, like the kind you hear in Hank Williams songs. It’s been a while, but their poems have popped up in various places, including Poetry Northwest and the old New Virginia Review. Their translations of the renowned (and, sadly, late) Israeli poet Moshe Dor appear in his selected poems in English, Crossing the River. Mark Helm received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the American University and an M.A. in English from Drew University. They like to explore territories like addiction, animal cruelty, family, and gender--although the shape and sound of language is often paramount in their work.
3 December 2021
Teresa Pham-Carsillo
Outgrowth
One Tuesday morning in late August, Eleanor woke up with an aching lower back and a foreign pulsating heat nestled between her breasts. Panic coursed through her bloodstream so that her first moments of consciousness were spiked with sharp surreality.
She tore off her silk pajama top (purchased at a Black Friday sale the previous year) and scoured her skin until she found the culprit: a translucent bean-shaped growth. Despite the discomfort, she reasoned that it was nothing too alarming.
Still, to be on the safe side, Eleanor called her mother. She always did this; in the decade since she had gained employee-sponsored health benefits, she had never been to the doctor. Underneath her tasteful wardrobe of mix-and-match neutrals, Eleanor was still the girl raised in a hippie-dippy Californian family, still heavily reliant on pungent oils and homemade poultices. She could not shake her natural suspicion for sterile hospitals and doctors shilling for Big Pharma.
“Have Nana look at it, just in case,” her mother advised. “She’s good with skin ailments. Remember when Rachel had that horrible rash?”
Nana, the family matriarch, lived in a shabby house in the San Rafael hills that was now certainly worth several million dollars. This, despite the fact that the kitchen hadn’t been updated since the 1950’s. She and Eleanor’s grandfather (a man who died too soon, remembered by his descendants only through dog-eared photo albums and secondhand stories) purchased their home in the halcyon days when young Bay Area couples could reasonably expect to someday own property. Now Nana lived alone, boxed in on all sides by tech millionaires, precariously navigating her ancient station wagon around Teslas whenever she drove the winding road into town.
Eleanor decided to wait until the weekend to visit. It didn’t make any sense to sit in rush hour traffic for two hours after work, not for such a minor complaint. She would wake up early on Saturday and splurge on pour-over coffee from the fancy cafe down the street. Then she’d pick up a gift for her Nana before heading out. With luck she’d make it up the coast in less than an hour.
*
Everyone in Eleanor’s family had a story that was repeated over and over again, the story that would be remembered by grandchildren and great-nieces when they were long gone. Eleanor’s story was decided early in life, on the day of her first birthday.
It went something like this:
On every child’s first birthday, Nana (and her mother before her, and her grandmother before that) laid out a carefully curated assortment of objects on a worn red and purple rug. These objects were a cornucopia of both highly valuable and mundane temptations—strings of pearls and worn toothbrushes, silver serving dishes beside a formless lump of clay.
The birthday child would choose one of the offerings on display, and that choice foretold his or her life path. Eleanor’s cousin Rachel, the one with the rash, had closed her fist around the handle of a mirror. She now worked as a beautician to the stars, doing make-up for red carpet galas and awards shows. Eleanor’s uncle Greg had picked a lump of rock candy, and he turned out to have the most cavities of anyone in family history.
On Eleanor’s first birthday, the entire extended family—dozens and dozens of great-aunts and second cousins and children who belonged to someone or another—gathered together at Nana’s house. There were never enough chairs at these occasions, so people sat cross-legged on the floor or perched on a splintery windowsill. Nana unrolled the rug and pulled each individual object out of a velvet bag. When she was done, she motioned for Eleanor’s mother to put her down.
And Eleanor chose… nothing.
At first, this wasn’t a cause for concern. There were chuckles of amusement around the room as the baby guest of honor sat in one place, blinking her wide brown eyes and slapping her hands against her pudgy thighs.
“She’s a slow thinker.”
“No, she’s clever. Going through the options. I bet she’ll take the pearls!”
“Nah, my money’s on the biscuit. Have you seen the rolls on her thighs?”
But ten minutes passed, then another, then another still. People grew restless and uncomfortable. A young cousin inched forward and pinched Eleanor on the upper arm. Even Eleanor’s mother shifted from foot to foot before leaning down to whisper in her daughter’s ear.
“Don’t you want any of the nice things, sweetie? Go on. Take whatever you want.”
But Eleanor remained unmoved. The party guests approached the rug, each picking up a different object to dangle in front of the baby. Here was a shiny spade! What about a ceramic pie dish? Didn’t she want this toy puppy on a string?
The unspoken rules forbade anyone from placing an item directly into Eleanor’s hands. She looked upon each offering with a bland, disinterested smile as a dribble of drool glistened down her neck and into the collar of her petal pink dress. Nana was the only person in the family who did not tempt the one-year-old Eleanor with anything; she sat in the dark wood rocking chair that was her throne and simply watched the child. Whenever someone came too close to Eleanor, Nana coughed a warning that made them take three steps back.
“What are we supposed to do if she doesn’t pick anything? Has this ever happened before?”
The shadows grew long as the atmosphere in the house turned from celebratory to uneasy. By the time the clock struck midnight, most of the other children had passed out from too much sugar and sunshine. The adults, on the other hand, sat stock still in the dimly lit drawing room and stared at Eleanor.
When the final chime sounded, Nana stood up and addressed the room.
“The day is done,” she said. “The child has chosen.”
And so Eleanor grew up without having given her family a single clue about what was to come. Her mother despaired at this whenever a complex issue arose, wondering how she was supposed to discipline or reward her child in the right way? Why did all of her siblings get an instruction manual for their brood?
Eleanor’s story was told again and again at family birthday parties. Nana always gave her that half-wondering, half-amused smile whenever she greeted her.
“You are the only one here who I can’t figure out,” Nana had whispered to Eleanor on more than one occasion, breath raising the transparent hairs on Eleanor’s cheek. “And that’s why you’re so special to me.”
*
Being special to Nana came with its downsides. Eleanor always felt like an exotic bug that the older woman wanted to study underneath the hot lens of a magnifying glass. When she arrived at Nana’s house on Saturday morning bearing blueberry muffins, she felt the force of Nana’s attention straight away.
“Hello, Eleanor,” said Nana. “I had a feeling you were going to stop by. Here, give me those. You didn’t have to bring anything. I still have half a pound cake in the freezer.”
Once they moved past the pleasantries and Eleanor was seated in the living room, she told Nana about the growth on her chest.
“Let me see,” Nana commanded. Her eyes skimmed the square of white gauze that peeked from the neckline of Eleanor’s navy cardigan. She made a disapproving noise. “You shouldn’t have put rubbing alcohol on it, dear. And you know those wart removal treatments don’t do a thing! You wasted your money.”
Nana’s uncanny ability to know more than she should always unnerved Eleanor. She wondered if the old woman did it on purpose, to inspire fear in her children and grandchildren. Strange things happened to the people close to Nana. A drunk uncle had gone missing on the same day that a fat orange koi appeared in Nana’s backyard pond. Eleanor’s own mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer over a decade ago, and the cancer had vanished on scans after Nana gave her a rose and star anise scented cream to slather onto her chest.
Nana was the family fixer; she solved tough problems through inexplicable and often shadowy means. Eleanor had to admit that Nana’s remedies worked well. For the past year, Eleanor had gotten into the habit of drinking a lovely tea (one with lavender and honeysuckle and something mysteriously earthy) that kept her in a velvet-lined, dreamless sleep. She applied a cold cream made with ground seeds and flower petals that made her skin glow.
Nana came closer and poked at the growth on Eleanor’s chest. She did not appear disgusted or even surprised.
“This doesn’t hurt, does it?”
“Not really.” Eleanor frowned. “I suppose it aches, like that time I broke my arm and I was waiting for it to heal.”
“Hmm, so maybe you shouldn’t worry so much. Maybe this is a productive pain, like going through puberty.”
Eleanor stepped away from her Nana. She didn’t want to be touched and prodded anymore.
“This isn’t exactly a growth spurt, Nana. It’s abnormal!”
She regretted raising her voice but Nana wasn’t offended. Instead, the old woman laughed.
“Who would have imagined that you, the child who sat all day in perfect contentment, would become so impatient?” she said. “Oh my dear. Just wait. I promise that this little addition will come off in due time.”
In the meantime, Nana sent Eleanor home with a packet of strange smelling herbs to place underneath her pillow at night. They were meant to speed along the process. Nana’s lips ghosted over Eleanor’s cheeks as they parted ways, as dry and delicate as rice paper.
*
Eleanor was good at her job. Not phenomenal—she didn’t have the sort of passion, drive, or ambition that made for professional greatness. But she was responsible and her boss, a middle-aged man with four children, was complimentary on her annual performance reviews. Eleanor is dependable and hard-working. Eleanor works hard to form relationships with her clients. He hinted that if she kept up the good work, she could expect a promotion to Senior Account Manager for the Southeast Territory.
So when Eleanor arrived late the following Monday (having spent over an hour in front of the mirror trying on different outfits that she hoped would camouflage her unsightly growth) she felt guilty to find her boss waiting with crossed arms and a sour expression.
She had missed a client meeting for the first time ever.
“Allen,” she said, gingerly setting down her shoulder bag onto the floor beside her desk. “I’m so sorry I’m late. I was stuck in traffic.”
She wore an empire waist dress with a long cardigan, and the outfit made her feel dowdy and unprofessional. It couldn’t be helped; to her horror, the growth on her chest quadrupled in size overnight and was now shot thorough with an intricate lacework of blue veins. She was starting to feel as though the growth was a separate entity from her body, something alive and in possession of its own atavistic intelligence.
“You missed a meeting with Matt Parcell,” Allen said. “I had to cover for you. If you want a shot at the big leagues, Ellie, you’re going to need to step up your game. You can’t let these little mistakes add up.”
What other mistakes have I made? Eleanor clenched her teeth to keep herself from saying that she hated being called “Ellie.”
“I’m really sorry,” Eleanor said, the apology bitter on her tongue. Beneath her cardigan, the thing on her chest rippled. “It won’t happen again.”
*
As the lump grew, its pulsations became stronger and its veins turned the deep purple of a bruise. It was almost beautiful, Eleanor mused as she undressed and slipped into the steaming shower. She rubbed the growth tenderly with rosehip oil and slept with Nana’s sachet underneath her pillow. She visualized the thing growing and growing until it one day fell off like a ripe peach from a branch.
Eleanor was reminded of a bedtime story her mother once told her, about a childless old woman who found an oversized peach floating down the river one day as she did her washing. The woman used a piece of clothesline to snag the fruit and carried it into the hut she shared with her husband. The couple was about to slice into the peach when it split open at the seam, revealing a plump and squalling baby boy, a child born of a bitter pit and nectar.
She couldn’t remember the rest of the story. Had the boy grown into the perfect son, the child the couple had always wished for? Or had he ruined them with the strength of his need, with his demands for the food they did not have and the energy that they no longer possessed?
“Mom, I don’t know if Nana’s right about this,” she confided in her mother. “It’s only getting bigger.”
“Well, did she tell you that it would shrink?”
“No. She said something about it coming off like a scab.”
“There you go. Give it time, sweetheart. When has Nana ever been wrong?”
Eleanor didn’t say anything. It was easy for her mother, who had selected a wooden horse on her own first birthday and grown up to be a respected equestrian and horse trainer, to believe in Nana’s firm hand. She had always felt the most at home at the stables; she had conceived Eleanor during a torrid affair with a married man but hadn’t put up a fight when he returned to his wife and family. She did not need him. She had her horses.
Eleanor was not so certain that Nana was infallible. Over the years, Nana had steered Eleanor in many directions. She gave her piano lessons, sent her to an intensive culinary summer camp, dropped her off at silent retreats, and even signed her up for speed dating events. Though Eleanor humored Nana and graciously took the prepaid classes and went on the tepid blind dates, she never showed any real interest or aptitude.
“You must want something,” Nana insisted. “Everyone wants something.”
Eleanor didn’t want much, though. She wanted a job that kept her financially comfortable and mentally untaxed. She wanted quiet, but not the sort of quiet resulting from a vow of silence. No, what Eleanor wanted was long weekends spent lounging in her one-bedroom apartment with the television on low and no roommates. She wanted to wander through her spotless apartment and marvel at how little mess she accumulated. She wanted to knit booties and sweaters for other peoples’ babies and to fly somewhere tropical every other summer so that she could sink her toes in warm sand.
And she wanted the growth on her body to go. Yes, she knew that she wanted it out of her life for good.
*
Finally, Eleanor went to the doctor’s office. The growth had reached the size and shape of a small decorative gourd. She had trouble finding clothes that fit and obscured it. Her back ached from the added weight. And she was always tired, as though the thing on her chest was sapping her of all vitality.
She didn’t tell her mother or Nana about the appointment. They would never approve.
On a Friday when Eleanor knew that Allen would be working from home, she drove to the doctor’s office in a bland, beige colored business park. Over the past few weeks, Allen had obviously begun to view her in a new, less favorable light. She was constantly mixing up meetings on her schedule, forgetting minor deadlines, and failing to compliment Allen when he came in wearing a new tie. It was as though her mind had unraveled like the sleeve of a worn-out sweater.
After waiting for fifteen minutes, Eleanor was called into the exam room. She unbuttoned her sweater and sat on the crinkly paper that covered the table, waiting expectantly for the grey-haired doctor (a woman with a kind, competent face) to remark on the revolting growth. She didn’t have much experience with real life doctors but had watched enough television medical dramas to guess at what would happen next. Perhaps the doctor would snap on a pair of latex gloves and call for backup, stat. Maybe she would order Eleanor to lie down on a gurney and wheel her into emergency surgery.
But instead, the doctor barely looked at Eleanor’s exposed chest. She smiled and said, “So tell me a little bit about why you’re here today.”
Eleanor gestured at her lump.
“It’s this… thing on my chest. It keeps growing. I don’t know what to do.”
“At first glance, I don’t see anything alarming,” the doctor said. Her placating tone made Eleanor feel hysterical. “Do you mean that you’ve felt a lump in one of your breasts? Let’s perform a physical exam to see if we can pinpoint the problem.”
Eleanor stared at the other woman in dismay. Was this a joke? But the doctor seemed utterly bemused by the situation. She had no idea what Eleanor was talking about. Eleanor’s thoughts flashed back to the days she spent hunched over at her desk, taking pains to hide the growth. No one had ever commented. No one had ever noticed.
Was it possible that her colleagues and this doctor couldn’t see the large, unmistakable growth that was planted just above Eleanor’s breasts?
“Here,” Eleanor tried again. “Do you see that?”
The doctor came closer and squinted at Eleanor’s chest. She brushed a gloved fingertip over the growth and Eleanor’s entire body shuddered in response. Nothing happened when Eleanor poked and prodded it, but at a stranger’s touch the thing seemed to recoil, to curl in on itself. But what most alarmed Eleanor was the placidity on the doctor’s face, as though she was not looking at anything strange at all.
“I suppose there’s some dryness here,” the doctor said. “Do you have a history of eczema? An over-the-counter hydrocortisone ointment should be fine, but I can also prescribe a stronger corticosteroid. Of course these medications are meant for short term, as-needed use only. If the dryness and irritation persists, we might want to look into allergy shots.”
Eleanor looked down at her chest.
“You’re sure?” Eleanor said, her voice quavering. “You don’t see a big lump there?”
The doctor’s eyebrows knit together and Eleanor heard Nana’s voice in her head saying: doctors are taught science but not compassion. Do you know how many women have suffered at the hands of these so-called medical professionals? We’re better off healing our own.
“You know what, never mind,” Eleanor said. “A prescription would be great. Thank you.”
*
The tiny tube of petroleum-based ointment ran out in two weeks, the growth continued to expand at its usual rate, and Eleanor never refilled her prescription.
Eleanor tried cutting off the growth, using a serrated kitchen knife that was usually reserved for crusty baguettes and dense wedges of cheese. But the moment the edge of the blade pressed against her chest, Eleanor felt a spasm go up her spine and through her entire body, exploding in a burst of pain behind the eyes. She panted and dropped the knife to the ground, using a hand to steady herself against the kitchen counter.
When her vision cleared, she looked down at the growth. The place where the tip of the knife had pierced through skin was not a wound, but an unmistakable soft pink mouth. It opened and closed, wet lips forming an O like a collapsed rubber band. It let out a wheezing exhale and Eleanor fought against a tide of nausea.
She fell into an uneasy sleep that night with her robe wrapped tightly around her torso. The mouth was still there in the morning. From then on, Eleanor did not try to harm the growth on her chest. She worried that anything she did could unleash other horrors. What if the growth developed a hundred eyes, like some kind of avenging Old Testament angel? What if rows of sharp teeth appeared?
One small mercy was this: since the doctor’s appointment, Eleanor no longer fretted about hiding the growth in public. She could see it, her mother could see it, and Nana could see it. The one time Eleanor had lunch with her cousin, Rachel had grimaced and asked if she needed a cosmetic surgery hook-up. A family trait, then. When she took her morning walks around the neighborhood, no one stared at the breathing, sometimes mewling thing that spilled out of the top of her v-neck shirt. Her coworkers never remarked on the way her sweaters puffed in and out rhythmically, as though there was a fan attached to her bra.
Several weeks later, the fall chill arrived. Eleanor found herself dozing in front of the television with the early sunsets, her body heavy with exhaustion. One day after work, she fell asleep with her clothes still on. She woke up in the middle of the night to a wet warmth pressing against her, the lump squirming visibly through the silk of her work blouse. She unbuttoned her shirt.
Before, the growth had been a lumpy, formless shape. Now it had gained definition and was a squalling bundle of translucent skin and wispy hair the texture of cotton candy. Arms and legs tucked in like a diver’s. A face—pale and terrible—stuck fast to Eleanor’s breastbone. The thing blinked open one amber eye and Eleanor saw that its pupil was huge and dark as a wolf’s.
It was, for lack of a better term, a baby.
In a daze, Eleanor drove to Nana’s house, the growth on her chest held in place with a scarf fashioned into a makeshift sling. The thing was still attached to Eleanor by the paper-thin skin on the right side of its body, melding with her from its cheek to its curling toes. Eleanor was afraid that if she did not support its weight, it would simply shear from her body when she stood up.
“Nana, please!” she screamed, pounding on the door. It was still dark out. None of the neighbors’ lights were on. “Let me in. I need your help.”
The door opened and Nana stood before her in a long flannel robe, her silver hair haloed around her head. She did not seem surprised. Instead, her lined face was split wide with a delighted, triumphant grin.
“No,” Eleanor said as realization sank in. “You didn’t. How could you do it?”
She thought of the sachet she’d trustingly placed underneath her pillow every night before bed, of the certainty in her Nana’s voice when she said on the phone, everything will work out exactly as it should, my dearest. She thought of her mother imploring her to be patient with her Nana, to go to all the boring workshops and take the ballet lessons. To be a woman in this world, even one with a family where mothers were feared over fathers, meant having a body that could be molded against her will.
Nana didn’t say anything, only stepped aside so that Eleanor could come inside. She wanted to shove the older woman away when her fingers reached for the scarf, but a lifetime’s deference couldn’t be undone in a single moment.
“Oh, she’s a beauty,” Nana breathed when she saw the fully-formed baby attached to Eleanor’s chest. “She looks just like you did when you were a little one.”
“I don’t want this, Nana. You need to get it off of me,” Eleanor said. “You need to take it away. I’ll never forgive you for this.”
The thing let out a pathetic cry and Nana clucked.
“She’s hungry, the poor lamb. She looks nearly ready to cleave. Let’s get you settled down and we’ll begin. I’ll call your mother first. She’ll want to be here for this.”
A wave of weariness swept over Eleanor. She stumbled to the velvet couch in the corner of the living room and lay down. Even with her eyes closed, she felt the thing squirming, straining that membrane of skin that held them together.
“It’ll be over soon,” she whispered dully, patting it on the back.
Nana came back into the darkened room and held a bottle filled with caramel-colored liquid up to the thing’s searching mouth. It drank greedily, suckling and mewling in pleasure. Eleanor found its noises repulsive, though her body regained some of its strength as the thing had its fill. When the bottle was empty, the thing settled against Eleanor’s breastbone and let out a soft sigh before closing its eyes. Eleanor looked at the shadows of those strange, dark pupils moving underneath delicately veined, almost translucent skin.
The doorbell rang and Eleanor’s mother came into the house with her hands clasped over her heart. If Eleanor had questioned her mother’s complicity in this scheme before, all doubt was now gone. Her mother and Nana both radiated joy and satisfaction. Eleanor felt nothing but hollow betrayal.
“She’s beautiful,” her mother said once she’d had a good look at the thing. “What will you call her? How about Katherine, after your great-aunt? Or maybe Matilda?”
Before Eleanor could respond, the thing opened its eyes and smiled up at her. She was momentarily charmed; a normal newborn could never do that. Then she felt a searing, but not altogether tearing sensation at her chest. Both Nana and her mother crowded closer, their hands coming to rest on her body, on the thing’s body, until she could not tell where she began and where they ended.
She squeezed her eyes shut and bore through the discomfort, focusing on her own breathing and the sound of her family’s calming voices. Then there was a sudden lightness and a warm rush of what could only be blood, and Eleanor felt free. She opened her eyes just as Nana pulled the thing away from her body and wrapped it on a worn bath towel.
It let out an almighty wail that made Eleanor’s teeth chatter. She had hoped that no longer being physically tethered to it would bring relief. Instead, she felt a tug of excruciating pain. Except pain was an insufficient word—this was deeper, extending beyond the bounds of her own body. She watched as Nana retreated with her bundle and walked into the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” Eleanor demanded and tried to sit up. “What are you doing with her?”
Her mother held a wet towel to Eleanor’s chest. “It’s alright. Nana’s cleaning up the baby. She’ll bring her back soon.”
A few minutes later, Nana came back into the room and turned on a lamp. By the dim glow, Eleanor saw that the thing was now clean and swaddled in a pastel receiving blanket. She wondered if Nana had knitted it in preparation for tonight. Nana handed the thing into Eleanor’s arms and she examined it up close. It appeared helpless and almost pitiful, with its scrunched up face and balled fists.
Holding it brought on an unexpected sense of relief and contentment. Eleanor closed her eyes and felt its body relax against her. She breathed in its familiar earthy scent that was now mixed with a hint of sourness, like newly curdled milk.
Together, they fell into a dreamless sleep.
*
Eleanor’s act of rebellion was refusing to give a real name to the thing that had come from her body. She didn’t like to call it a baby. Real babies didn’t start their lives as red angry boils. They didn’t grow adult teeth in their first two weeks, so that their tiny mouths were crowded with bright white stones. But she had to call it something, and so she settled on “Lump.”
At nights, during the brief spurts of sleep afforded to her, Eleanor dreamed of her life before Lump. Nothing very special—just the sweet mundanity of drinking her coffee in silence every morning or enjoying a leisurely dinner with friends. She ached to go to the movies alone, which had been her favorite indulgence. But she always woke up to Lump’s piercing cries and had to drag herself out of bed to perform one of many repetitive tasks: warming a bottle, humming a lullaby, or simply standing watch until the thing dozed off.
She had terrible thoughts, of placing a pillow over Lump’s slack mouth and applying steady, unrelenting pressure. She considered dropping Lump off at the nearest fire station and peeling off like a getaway driver in a heist film. She even contemplated driving to Nana’s house and leaving Lump on her porch. Let the meddling old bitch take care of the abomination she’d created.
But Eleanor knew that these were only fantasies. Every time she was away from the thing, her whole body hurt. When Lump was hungry, Eleanor’s gut twisted. When Lump was sad, Eleanor’s eyes stung with unshed tears.
But when Lump was happy (like when the song from Frozen played on the radio, or when Eleanor made boxed mac and cheese, or when a colorful bird landed on the windowsill), Eleanor was overwhelmed by the pure joy that coursed through her veins.
It was a narcotic, sweet enough to make her forget about everything else.
*
Eleanor became less and less interested in work. Eventually, she quit without having anything lined up. She had lived frugally for years and amassed substantial savings. Her apartment was paid for by Nana—a generous twenty-first birthday gift. She had something in her life that needed her. Maybe when Lump was older, Eleanor could figure out something else.
She and Lump spent all of their time together. Eleanor had never experienced this much physical closeness in any of her relationships—not with her mother, whose legs always twitched to be with her horses, and not with any of her lovers, who had respected her desire for space and boundaries. But she found Lump’s neediness oddly comforting. She needed to burrow into Eleanor’s body, to grip Eleanor’s fingers with her tiny hands.
She was unlike other infants in some ways: that strange mouth crowded with too many adult teeth, those dark and clever eyes. But Lump was also small and helpless. She was a repository of regenerating needs, just like any other child.
*
On Lump’s first birthday, Eleanor woke early and dressed her in a frilly pink dress with a matching headband. For once, Lump didn’t howl or squirm when Eleanor ran a brush through her hair. She sat still and obedient, staring at her own reflection in the mirror. Eleanor leaned over and sniffed the top of Lump’s head. It was the most comforting scent in the world.
All the way to Nana’s house, Eleanor gripped the steering wheel and thought about turning the car around and driving in the opposite direction. They could go south, taking Highway 101 all the way down through a hundred seaside towns, passing through the haze of Los Angeles and the Spanish-style mansions of San Diego until they crossed the border.
But then what would they do? With despair on her mind, Eleanor drove on auto-pilot until she found herself taking the narrow, winding road into Nana’s neighborhood.
There were at least a dozen cars parked illegally in front of the house, blocking neighbors’ driveways and crowding the recycling bins. The neighbors wouldn’t complain though. For reasons they probably couldn’t articulate or understand, they too feared Nana.
Eleanor helped Lump through the open door and into the crowded living room where they were greeted with hellos and hugs. With family, Lump wasn’t a secret. She belonged to them all. She was one of them.
When one of the great aunts reached out to pat Lump on the head and the child shied away, Eleanor picked her up. She felt Lump’s cheek resting against her chest, drawn to the very place where their bodies were once joined.
They reached the rug, which was covered in a familiar array of incongruous objects. Eleanor ignored both her mother and Nana. She focused on Lump, who still clung to her with wide round eyes.
Maybe Lump would wrap her chubby fingers around the slender neck of a violin, or pick up a gleaming jeweler’s loupe. Maybe she would be unable to resist the scent of fresh bread. Or maybe she would be drawn to one of the more menacing options: a pearl-handled pistol or the sheath of a hunting knife.
The particulars didn’t matter to Eleanor, so long as Lump made the choice for herself.
“I’ll be right here with you,” she whispered into Lump’s hair. “You have nothing to fear.”
Then she set her daughter down on the rug and waited.
Teresa Pham-Carsillo is a Vietnamese American writer who was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. After graduating with a BA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, she became an office-bound marketer, stealing time in the early and late hours of the day to write short stories and poems. Teresa's fiction and poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in various publications, including: Poetry Magazine, Salt Hill Journal, The Minnesota Review, Passengers Journal, The Penn Review, and St
Lori Dorfman has worked for the last 20 years to build a dynamic and powerful career as an artist. She is a musician, poet, and actor. Recently, her poetry was published in Griffel Literary Magazine, Luna Arcana Arts & Culture Magazine, and has a forthcoming publication in Direct Object. Her Self Portrait photography was published in The Evocations Review. As an actor, she has worked with Sebastian Lelio, Aaron Sorkin, Paul Thomas Anderson, and so many more. Lori was recently featured in VoyageLA’s ‘Shoutout LA’ series, and will be featured in Silver Gun Record’s, The Silver Review. @loridorfman www.loridorfmanpresents.com.
19 November 2021
Yarden TsfoniIn the Town of Diners and Pomegranates
Yarden Tsfoni is an Israeli painter and archaeologist from the town of Modi’in. Her artwork focuses on the built world and the humans who occupy these spaces in relation to lived dailiness. Her deep understanding of material culture and its reflection of the human experience, expression, and emotion finds its way to the canvas as it does to the history page. Reach her by email : Yarden.j.tsfoni@gmail.com or on Instagram: @Yarten._
12 November 2021
An Interview with Adam Biggs
A conversation about the lyrical content of Rivers of Nihil’s newest heavy metal album, The Work.
Rivers of Nihil is a Pennsylvania-based progressive death metal band, currently signed to Metal Blade Records. The band is made up of Jake Dieffenbach (vocals), Brody Uttley (guitar), Jon Topore (guitar), Adam Biggs (bass, vocals), Jared Klein (drums, vocals).
The band has released four albums since 2013: The Conscious Seed of Light, Monarchy, Where Owls Know My Name, and most recently, The Work, which premiered in September 2021.
Founding member, bass player, and vocalist Adam Biggs was the sole lyricist for The Work. This allowed us, as listeners, to take a comprehensive look at the lyrical content and view it as both the foundation for this striking progressive metal album and a poetic journey through the concept of The Work, which Adam was happy to elaborate on for Passengers Journal with founder Zac Furlough and poetry editor Andreea Ceplinschi.
You can find a full transcript of The Work lyrics here, and find below links to the band’s official website and merch.
https://www.riversofnihil.com/
https://www.indiemerch.com/riversofnihil
https://www.metalblade.com/riversofnihil/
All musical copyright belongs to Rivers of Nihil and Metal Blade Records, to whom we are grateful for allowing us to use and discuss songs from the new record.